Philosophy

Try this on for size: In all the world, there are only two motivations for action: Love Fear 
 Whatever other motivation you can come up with, at its root, can be distilled to one of those. To create something beautiful, you have to believe in something beautiful. (and when you do that, you harness the power of love and make great thing happen) Our beliefs become our thoughts. Our thoughts become our words. Our words become things. Not just things, but our whole reality, in fact. (If your thoughts and beliefs are negative, unfortunately, what you create is disaster.) I hear people committing crimes of negativity and fear against themselves and each other constantly. Their conversations are full of self-deprecation and "I can't this" and "I don't like that." If you really can't this and you really don't like that, then fine. Don't talk about them. Stop focussing on those things and start talking about I CAN and I LOVE. (And please, stop issuing di...

The next time you are in a situation that feels impossible, pull out this photo full of keys. Just think of all those lives lived. People carried those keys around and entered doors and locked chests... and lost their keys, too! And had troubles and worries and joys and friends that helped them out of tough spots and miracles happen by the intervention of a stranger. If you've been trying, and trying, and trying to get through a situation, and it's not working, then maybe you've got the wrong key. Here are a whole bunch more. Take yourself somewhere really quiet and dark, and think of trading the key or solution that you've been using, in for something else. Usually when people say they "can't," they mean they don't want to, or they don't feel like making the changes needed to make it happen, or they don't know how . But there's usually a way. Here are a bunch of keys that have worked for people in the past. Why n...

Is what you see, always what you see? Actually, it hardly ever is (kind of like the photo attached to this article -- what do you see?). There's a great story here. There was a farmer and he had a horse. The horse ran away. "How terrible!" said the townspeople. But the horse came back, and it brought a herd of other horses with it. The farmer's wealth multiplied.  "How wonderful!" said the townspeople. But the farmer's son was rounding up the horses, and broke his leg, rendering him useless to the farmer for weeks on end. "How terrible!" said the townspeople. The king's men came through the village, recruiting all the able-bodied men and carrying them off to fight the king's war, but the son was not able to go due to his temporarily broken leg. "How wonderful!" said the townspeople. ... you get the gist of it. We never really know where the twists and turns and roller-coaster ...

With all the focus on how "false news" might be affecting lives (news flash -- it always has anyway!), I thought some of these old thoughts about the good effects of the internet might be welcome. (1) Socrates was famous for teaching by asking questions, and the internet teaches the same way. The internet is like a giant forum, just like where Socrates taught his lessons to groups of students. On the internet, people ask each other questions, answer questions, and form new ideas through discus-sion, just as they did in Socrates' time. In a way, the internet has made our world back into a village. (2) As Martin Luther King said once, "Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal." In other words, he believed that the more people actually think through issues, the better they will get at unde...

There are problems... ... with doing yoga on the beach. You get sand on your clothes, of course. You might have more spectators than you would truly like to have while upside down with your bum in the air. The sand keeps on shifting and moving beneath your feet and hands, unlike the firm steadiness of a nice wood yoga studio floor, so you have to keep moving left or right in your downward dog, away from the holes you’ve dug in the sand while you were doing sun salutations. You can get a sunburn if you’re not careful, or even sunstroke, which is serious. Conversely, it could be too windy or start to rain, and make a mess of your schedule. As once happened to me in Costa Rica, the tide can come in and cover your nice sandy yoga spot. And then, of course, as happened to me this morning, your pets can come and start getting in the way, meaning you can’t put your feet or your hands where you were intending to, because you have a cat underneath you. And while you’re stepping around the cat y...

In the Cornish countryside, you get used to passing buildings like the one on the left: hundreds of years of love and maintenance and life and laughter and sorrows and warmth have gone into them, and young families and old folks are still delighted to move into them and make good lives. Today I happened across the building on the right, so much younger and shorter-lived than most buildings around here, and thought about how so many people are chasing transient, ephemeral money, creating so much misery, to build things like that blight on the landscape. So many men and families lived miserable lives to feed that monster (it's a tin processing plant). And yet more people have lived sustainable and happier lives by, say, farming. Using permaculture methods to create a continually better soil, a continually more valuable and beautiful property instead of just plundering it of all its nutrients. Happier, healthier lives were lived in history without tearing up the land and feeding i...