What brings true happiness? A healthy lifestyle; a positive attitude, outlook and philosophy; a simple life close to nature; meaningful work; time spent in solitude and stillness, reconnecting with yourself;…
Niccolo Machiavelli and Michel de Montaigne never met, nor could they have — Machiavelli died six years before Montaigne was born, and they lived about 1,200 km (800 miles) apart…
(Excellent talk on philosophy, metaphysics and human happiness is linked below.) When we let go of attachment, aversion and ego, our energy naturally rises, increases and expands, and our happiness,…
Pelagius: it’s a soft g, as in germane, not a hard g, as in gorilla, but otherwise the discussion here in this podcast below is good. Here are a few…
I’ve always liked reading “wisdom tales”; I still read and delight in those Zen Buddhist stories that Paul Reps recounted in his book, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, which I first…
Montaigne’s essay On Cannibals contributed at least some of the content and ideas in Shakespeare’s late play, The Tempest. A speech by the recently-shipwrecked counsellor Gonzalo in Act 2, Sc.1…
Many years ago, I had a lengthy correspondence with a friend in another part of Canada about what constitutes art. His basic argument was that art was not neutral or…
British philosopher John Gray thinks cats can “often teach us much more about living the good life than philosophy ever could.” As a lifetime cat owner, I can vouch for…
I Have A Dream: surely, and unquestionably, that great speech by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., is one of the most important, and most beautiful, uplifting, empowering, ennobling,…
OK, gangster punks, rebels and revolutionaries, free spirits and seekers of truth, hear this: People don’t understand the power of emptiness. With all my heart, I wish they did. And…
People everywhere are the same – people are people. We have far more in common than we have differences between us. And all the differences, or at least the great…
Yuval Harari is a shallow thinking dogmatic materialist who swallows whole and uncritically the dominant pseudo-scientific paradigm of mechanistic materialist dualism, which of course is an extremely bleak view of…
Master Sun was a wise man. So wise that his famous treatise, The Art of War (aka The Art of Warfare), has been read, written about, critiqued, and discussed for…
Nietzsche was either terribly misinterpreted, as my dearly departed scholar brother was adamant to say, or he was simply mad his entire life, and his philosophy was a philosophy of…
Stoicism is recently faddish and in vogue, but it is fashionable only to those who don’t understand it. It is not surprising that Stoicism is attractive to many people now,…
Here are thoughts on a short video linked below, but I would frankly assert that the thoughts presented here in this reflection or meditation are more interesting and more useful…
Such a delightfully warm and witty man, Robertson Davies seems most definitely to be. He looks so severe, when you first look at his face, but then he speaks, and…
Who are some of the guiding lights in terms of what must be done? I would suggest Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Emerson, Thoreau, Chomsky, Vandana Shiva, Bookchin, EF Schumacher,…
As Plato said, everyone has opinions, but few have knowledge. It is important that we keep that in the back of our minds, if not the fore. Two levels, there…
Who To Trust: The Short Answer
Who to trust? That is always a perennial question, and particularly now, when not only government, corporations, politicians and corporate and state media have repeatedly been shown to have lied,…