Male

I believe that life is filled with concomitant perplexities, meaning that sources of bafflement are occuring on multiple levels at the same time. I find solace in the ineffability of existence, but also in the kaleidoscope of ontologies that humans have constructed. So I take and interdisciplinary approach to engaging with the world, hoping that in this way I'll be able to do some justice to marvel that is life.

"What is the meaning of democracy, freedom, human dignity, standard of living, self-realisation, fulfillment? Is it a matter of goods, or of people? Of course it is a matter of people. But people can be themselves only in small comprehensible groups. Therefore we must learn to think in terms of an articulated structure that can cope with the multiplicity of small-scale units. If economic thinking cannot grasp this it is useless. If it cannot go beyond its vast abstractions, the national income, the rate of growth, capital/output ratio, input-output analysis, labour mobility, capital acuumulation; if it cannot get beyond all this and make contact with the human realities of poverty, frustration, alienation, despair, breakdown, crime, escapism, stress, congestion, ugliness, and spiritual death, then let us scrap economics and start afresh.
Are there not indeed enough "signs of the times" to indicate that a new start is needed?"

-E.F. Schumacher "Small is Beautiful"


We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
which holds whatever we want.

We use to build a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.

Being is what we work with,
Non-being is what we use.

~Tao Te Ching (Translated by Thomas Cleary)

"But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
--William Butler Yeats

“Walking the spiritual path properly is a very subtle process; it is not something to jump into naively. There are numerous sidetracks which leades to a distorted, ego-centered version of spirituality; we can deceive ourselves into thinking we are developing spiritually when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques. This fundamental distortion may be referred to as spiritual materialism”
--Chogyam Trungpa (Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism)

"The mind can pursue sensations, desires, but it cannot pursue love. Love must come to the mind. And, once love is there, it has no division as sensuous and divine: it is love. That is the extraordinary thing about love: it is the only quality that brings a total comprehension of the whole of existence."
-- J. Krishnamurti (Think on These Things)

"There is a danger in the reiteration of eternal verities and ultimate spiritualities. Our sense of the actual is dulled, and we are led to think that in dwelling upon ideal goals we have somehow transcended existing evils. Ideals experess possibilities; but they are genuine ideals only in so far as they are possibilities of what is now moving. Imagination can set them free from their encumbrances and project them as a guide in attention of what now exists. But, save as they are related to actualities, they are pictures in a dream."
-- John Dewey (Individualism Old and New)

"To stop with mere emotional rejection and moral condemnation of industry and trade as materialistic is to leave them in the inhuman region where they operate as the instruments of those who employ them for private ends. Exclusion of this sort is an accomplice of the forces that keep things in the saddle. There is a subterranean partnership between those who employ the existing economic order for selfish pecuniary gain and those who turn their back upon it in the interest of personal complacency, private dignity, and irresponsibility."
-- John Dewey (Individualism Old and New)

"Religion is not so much a root of unity as it is its flower or fruit...The sense of wholeness which is urged as the essence of religion can be built up and sustained only through membership in a society which has attained a degree of unity. The attempt to cultivate it first in individuals and then extend it to form an organically unified society is fantasy."
-- John Dewey (Individualism Old and New)

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved with the same level of thinking used when we created them"
-- Albert Einstein