Reading Archives (Author)
Discipline Of Tao
D. T. Suzuki
A master called Yuan came to Tai-chu Hui-hai and asked: 'When disciplining oneself in the Tao, is there any special way of doing it?" Hui-hai: 'Yes, there is." Yuan: 'What ...
An Awe Walk
Dacher Keltner
What gives you a sense of awe? That word, awe—the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world—is often associated with the ...
The Power Paradox
Dacher Keltner
Life is made up of patterns. And one pattern kept appearing in scientific studies I've conducted over the past twenty years. It's called the power paradox: we rise in power and make a dif...
Do we Use Thought, or Does Thought Use us?
Dada
Have you ever looked meditatively into the cause-and-effect of thought, into the birth and death of thought, the cycle that creates fear and conflict with resultant sorrow? Every expression of thou...
Seeds of Real Action
Dada
Why is it that the mind cannot be in the present? The mind moves on and on because it just cannot be quiet. We do not really need anything else in order to be peaceful and free in the present, but ...
Creativity of Silence
Dada
We can discover a new beauty of life in silence. When once you see that beauty, you will not be interested in the agitated cravings of the mind. You will see the limitations of your desires and wishf...
Artistic Way of Living
Dada
\"Even when you look at a beautiful flower, you just talk about it; your mind interprets it. You note the color, form, texture and scent, but you never quite experience the whole beauty as it is. To e...
Riding the Crest of the Unknown
Dada
You know little about yourself -– the hidden motives and blind spots, where thought actually takes its shape, where desire is subtly formed. You are not aware of the origin of thought. You recognize...
Without A Yardstick
Dainin Katagiri
When you just sit down, real peace immediately appears. Before any object called "peace" appears, peace appears. So there is no room to even discuss peace. If you truly want peace, be peace, right ...
Compassion
Dalai Lama
Compassion can be roughly defined in terms of a state of mind that is nonviolent, nonharming, and nonaggressive. It is a mental attitude based on the wish for others to be free of their suffering an...
Causes Of Happiness
Dalai Lama
The purpose of life is to strive for happiness. Every sentient being has the right to survive; this means having a desire for happiness or comfort: that’s why sentient beings strive to surviv...
Mental Immunity
Dalai Lama
Everyone knows that physical pain is bad and tries to avoid it. We do this not only by curing diseases, but also by trying to prevent them and by trying to keep our physical immunity strong. Mental pa...
Tell Me Your Story
Dan Gottlieb
It came to me in the middle of the night a couple of weeks ago, four words that could change the world: Tell me your story. These four words could have an impact on everything from global confli...
To Transcend: Observe Cause and Effect
Dan Millman
Self-mastery involves recognizing what we are not responsible for -- the thoughts that enter our mind and flow out, and the emotions that pass like the weather -- and what we are responsible for, whic...
Developing Mindsight
Dan Siegel
Oftentimes people hear the word mindfulness and think “religion,” but the reality is that focusing our attention in this way is a biological process that promotes health – as a form ...
Social Intelligence
Daniel Goleman
One day, late for a meeting in midtown Manhattan, I was looking for a shortcut. So I walked into an indoor atrium on the ground floor of a skyscraper, planning to use an exit door I had spotted on the...
Attunement: an Agendaless Presence
Daniel Goleman
Attunement is attention that goes beyond momentary empathy to a full sustained presence that facilitates rapport. We offer a person our total attention and listen fully. We seek to understand the ot...
Those Who Float
Daniel Gottlieb
Young as you are, I know you already know something about faith. You have faith in your mother's arms. That's a good start. But later on, you'll find it gets more complicated. Not l...
Letter to My Grandson
Daniel Gottlieb
Change is difficult for all of us. The older we get, the more change we face. All change involves loss, and whenever we lose something, we ache to have it back. Everything I have los...
Three Millimeters of the Universe
Daniel Gottlieb
Dear Sam, One night in the hospital, a friend came to visit me. I told her I didn't think I could go on anymore. What I was feeling went beyond despair. It was a loss of hope — of everyth...
Kazoo Player And The Symphony
Daniel Ingram
Imagine there is a great symphony orchestra in a great concert hall and in front of it, like an absurd comedy act, sits a clearly nervous kazoo player with no music score in front of him. The orchestr...
Small Kindnesses
Danusha Laméris
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a lefto...
Eulogy Versus Resume Virtues
David Brooks
About once a month I run across a person who radiates an inner light. These people can be in any walk of life. They seem deeply good. They listen well. They make you feel funny and valued. You often c...
I-It and I-Thou
David Brooks
(Reflections on "I-Thou" by Martin Buber) I-It relationships come in two varieties. Some are strictly utilitarian. You’re exchanging information in order to do some practical thi...
Help Comes From the Strangest Places
David Brooks
Help comes from the strangest places. We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few decades, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, an...
The Two Beliefs of Successful People
David Brooks
All day long, you are affected by large forces. Genes influence your intelligence and willingness to take risks. Social dynamics unconsciously shape your choices...
Yodeling Above Freedom
David Bullon
There is a thrushing light alive - dancing and whirling; concealed by midlife shadows in my antsy eyes. My snow-shining mountainous essence beams luminously through that shade, but somehow its rest...
Kindness, Plain and Simple
David Copperfield
I believe in kindness. But it's hard to be kind. We're not trained for it. Kindness is for sissies; we learn that early. "Nice guys finish last." If they even get invited to the race. Kindness is t...
The Most Precious Freedom
David Foster Wallace
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the...
Song Of The Birds
David G. Haskell
For millennia, the language of birds has called us to cross divides. In the Qur’an, Solomon received a bounty and blessing when he was given the language of birds. Job exhorts us to hear the wis...
Look Around In Wonder
David Griswold
Look around, look around, Look around in wonder, Trace the thunderous cloud above That feeds the river under. Look above and look below And look at last within, You'll see a river running th...
Wonder Increases As Speed Decreases
David Haskell
Indulge me for a moment: let’s do a short thought experiment. We’ll compare two different mornings. On one, you’ll fly coast-to-coast, a five hour journey. Imagine yourself in the hi...
Flow of Money
David Korten
In a modern society in which most everything essential to a secure and happy life seems to depend on money, the flow of money takes on great significance. Where money flows there are jobs; where it do...
Turning Ourselves Toward Stability And Hospitality
David Mckee
The Benedictine-Camaldolese monk, Bruno Barnhart says it very well: “We humans prefer a manageable complexity to an unmanageable simplicity.” A complex instability is our typical ...
The Humility in True Genius
David R. Hawkins
A universal characteristic of genius is humility; after all, those in whom we recognize genius commonly disclaim it, as they’ve always attributed their insights to some higher influence. [...
Meaning: Where Monk and Child Meet
David Steindl-Rast
The monk in us is very closely related to the child in us or, if you want, to the mystic in us — and we are all meant to be mystics. We do a great disservice to mystics by putting them up on a pede...
When Vanishing Vanishes
David Steindl-Rast
There\'s something to love and faithfulness, beauty and goodness, something that is not subject to time. For me, it is enormously consoling and reassuring that there is only a limited amount of time t...
The Great Tragedy of Speed
David Whyte
Speed in work has compensations. Speed gets noticed. Speed is praised by others. Speed is self-important. Speed absolves us. Speed means we don't really belong to any particular thing or person...
Time is a Season
David Whyte
Most traditional human cultures have seen the hours of the days in the same way as they have encountered the seasons of the year: not as clear lines drawn across our experience, but as an advancing qu...
Everything Is Waiting For You
David Whyte
Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel aban...
What to Remember When Waking
David Whyte
In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake, coming back to this life from the other more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world where everything began, there is a small opening...
The World Also Has a Soul
David Whyte
"There is a core delusion at the center of our struggles in all organizations. A core delusion that narrows our sense of self and ignores the greater world beyond the organization. It is a world ...
We Are What We Choose to Be
Dawna Markova
On rare and precious moments, someone will tell me about when he used to play the saxophone or when she used to dream about opening a halfway house for abused women or when he thought he could mentor ...
I Will Not Die an Unlived Life
Dawna Markova
I will not die an unlived life I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire. I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible, to loose...
Letting Someone Know They're Not Alone Is No Small Thing
Deborah Hawkins
Months ago, I decided to explore volunteering for a hospice organization. My initial curiosity came up when I contemplated wanting to use my talents for listening and putting things into words. I e...
Compelling Authenticity
Dee Hock
At one time I got interested in trying to understand how great leaders created enormous social change -- take Christ, take Muhammad, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Joan of Arc, Martin Luther King, Jr. When y...
A True Leader
Dee Hock
Leader presumes follower. Follower presumes choice. One who is coerced to the purposes, objectives, or preferences of another is not a follower in any true sense of the word, but an object of manipula...
Law of Least Effort
Deepak Chopra
If you observe nature at work, you will see that least effort is expended. Grass doesn't try to grow, it just grows. Fish don't try to swim, they just swim. Flowers don't try to bloom, they bloom. Bir...
You Become What You See
Deepak Chopra
What you see you become. What you see is a selective act of attention and interpretation. Although you are inundated by billions of bits of sensory impulses every moment, you selectively filter out t...
The Seven Traits of Creative People
Deepak Chopra
The deepest reality you are aware of is the one from which you draw your power. For someone who is conscious only of the material world, power is limited to material forces; but at a more profound lev...
Residing in the Space Between
Deepak Chopra
Everything that we call form and phenomena, that we call observer and observed, is all coming from the same place, including our own thoughts. The world is a discontinuity, and every experience arises...
Pursuit of money
Deion Sanders
Below are excerpts from the Associated Press article, "Deion Sanders Reflects on Troubled Past", published on Sep 27, 1998: Dallas Cowboys cornerback Deion Sanders described how he ...
The Difficulty In Listening
Delshad Karanjia
Nasruddin was at the teahouse one afternoon when Arif the hakim walked in. “How are you, Mullah? I hope you and your family are well,” Arif asked politely. “I’m fine, tha...
Evolution's Gold Standard
Diane Ackerman
Feeling low? According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, when people feel bad, their sense of touch quickens and they instinctively want to hug something or someone. Tykes cling to a...
Thoughts Are Just Thoughts
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
What we normally call the mind is the deluded mind, a turbulent vortex of thoughts whipped up by attachment, anger, and ignorance. This mind, unlike enlightened awareness, is always being carried away...
Science of the Heart
Doc Childre
"If you change your perception, you change the experience of your body and your world." Your perceptions underlie how you think and feel about the person or issue that you are dealing with. The res...
Genjo Koan
Dogen Zenji
Enlightenment is like the moon reflected in the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wid...
Being Nice Isn't The Same As Being Kind
Donna Cameron
Kind people go beyond what's expected of them. They go beyond the easy response to offer the best of who they are. They do it without expectation of something in return. They do it because of who ...
The Mystery of Silence
Dorothy Hunt
Silence cannot really be described. It is not the absence of sound. It makes it possible to notice sound. It is still, but its stillness is constantly moving. It is nothing, but a nothing filled with ...
Listening As An Act Of Transformation
Doug Lipman
Two villagers came to a rabbi with a dispute. When the rabbi invited them to sit down and talk about it, they glowered at each other as though to say, “If you sit down at this table, then I won&...
What Can You Trust?
Doug Powers
In young people’s minds right now, the main issue is what they can trust in their own experience. In the 50s and 60s, we trusted ideologies, religions, universities, and economists. There wer...
End Of The World
Dougald Hine
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world ... it is also the end of a way of knowing the world. "When a world ends, its systems and stories come apart, even the largest of th...
Our Early Experiences
Dr. Gabor Maté
My mother had muscular dystrophy, which is a degenerative disease of the muscles. It’s hereditary, runs in our family. And so, she could no longer walk, get out of bed, even feed herself very we...
Subsconcious Blueprint
Dr. Joseph Murphy
If you were building a new home for yourself, you know that you would be intensely interested in regard to the blueprint for your home; you would see to it that the builders conformed to the bluep...
Presence Of Things Beyond Flesh
Drew Lanham
Lecturing has always come easily to me. Backed by the technical, the theoretical, a few supporting slides, and a captive audience of college students or peers, I've given hundreds of presentations...
The Nature of Knowing That We Know
Duane Elgin
The word "consciousness" literally means "that with which we know." It has also been termed the "knowing faculty". To live more consciously means to be more consc...
Make Death Your Ally
Duane Elgin
Death is an important ally for appreciating life. I am not referring to a morbid preoccupation with death. Rather, I mean the felt awareness of our finitude as physical beings -- an honest recognition...
Voluntary Simplicity
Duane Elgin
There is no special virtue to the phrase "voluntary simplicity"--it is merely a label and a somewhat awkward label at that. Still, it does acknowledge explicitly that simpler living integrates both i...
Conscious Simplicity
Duane Elgin
Here are three major ways that I see the idea of simplicity presented in today’s popular media: 1) Crude or Regressive Simplicity: The mainstream media often shows simplicity as a path o...
The Shambhala Warriors' Weapons
Dugu Choegyal
There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger. Great barbarian powers have arisen. Although these powers spend their wealth in preparations to annihilate one another, they have much in com...
Spiritual Materialism
Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
What first comes to mind to speak about is my own spiritual materialism. I find that as I'm reading or reflecting upon the teachings and something becomes clear to me, I immediately want to rush o...
Living With a Rebel Within
Dzogchen Ponlop
Your true mind is a mind of joy, free from all suffering. That is who you really are. That is the true nature of your mind and the mind of everyone. But your mind doesn't just sit there being perfect,...