Public, Communal and Familial Spirit

To me there is little doubt that the best way to live our lives is to attempt to do so in the service of others. A hedonistic, self-serving and selfish way of life is thankfully something that does not give us much lasting fulfilment; thankfully so since if we attempt to help others, and others …

Some Thoughts on Goals

With a new year just having started, it is high season for goal setting. I myself had no intention before the turn of the year to make any specific effort to set or revise goals. However, ever since the date switched over to 1/1/2021, it is like some dark gravity pulls me towards wanting to …

Finding Purpose

For most of human history, we shared a strong belief in the supernatural. This anchored our spiritual life and helped us answer some of lives most painful questions; such as what is the purpose of my life and what awaits me after I die. Nowadays we have lost this belief and there is no point …

The Merits of Slack

There are two meanings we generally assign to the word slack. First, we can understand it as a form of laziness or being negligent. If we say a company has slack safety procedures, we express that these are insufficient and that not enough attention and effort is dedicated to these. There are few merits in …

Wholesome Goals for Every Day

I've discussed a number of practices that may aid in the path to enlightenment. Each of these, I believe is valuable and worthwhile to pursue; however, in their sum, they are quite an undertaking to accomplish, and it is very difficult to practice each of them daily. I, for once, fail at that miserably. Thus …

Questions

We would often find that having many questions and few answers is an undesirable state. This is good since it drives us to find answers but also bad since it encourages us to ask less questions to have a smaller problem to begin with... In my opinion, we are far better off if we acknowledge …

Truth

It is easy to say and it feels right to say that we should seek truth. Truth is one of the key tenants of the Enlightenment movement. Rather than following superstitions and other socially constructed concepts, the early scientists of the enlightenment sought out truth which may be obtained by measurement, experiment and by application …

Immortality

The less time you know you have, the richer the experience of living becomes. And your whole perspective changes. All of the little, petty things fall away and you realize how truly wonderful it is to be alive, even if just for a moment. The way I see it — life is all the more …

Touch Heaven

By objective standards, our lives are rather drab and pointless. We are biological machines forged by billions of years of natural selection, programmed with the purpose to ensure the propagation of our genes. On a cosmic scale, our lives are insignificant and extremely short. There is little doubt that, in a few thousand years, we …

Identity, Habits and Enlightenment

I recently read the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. One of the interesting ideas presented in this book was that in order to bring about personal change, we need to start with our identity, then change our practices and processes and thus achieve better outcomes; as in, I am a health conscious person, therefore …