I have traveled all over the world in the last few years, an unexpected side-benefit of my full-time meditation-occupation. A more expected side-effect of the global search for a permanent natural high? Jet-lag, or to list its lesser known names: ‘desynchronosis,’ ‘dysrhythmia’ and ‘dyschrony’. Let me add...
New stadiums, airports and trains—Beijing is fabricating Great Wall sized for this year’s Olympic games—but one part of the construction is several bricks short of full height: the signage. The hundreds of thousands of visitors—half a million expected in the Chinese capital officially—will find little relief...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KANI2dpXLw He’s been in the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the BBC and The Guardian, the pop star your Mum used to like now an internet phenomenon in the papers your Mum likes to read. Rick Astley, baby-faced British two-hit wonder from 1988 still baby-faced and...
Meet Conan, a male chihuahua from Naha, Japan, who’s renounced more traditional doggy pursuits for Dogen—a formative style of Zen from the 13th century that equates meditation and enlightenment as one and the same—chasing after the ever-spinning shiny wheel of rebirth before he’s even taken...
Mostly unheard of in Western culture, where the document most commonly associated with death is a will—a binding legal document descriptive of property but little poetry, jisei, or death poetry, is a poem completed near the time of death; a profound, personal epitaph for a...
Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) by Mike Nichols CIA Agent Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman): Listen, not for nothing, but do you know the story about the Zen master and the little boy? Representative Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks): Oh is this something from Nitsa the Greek witch of...
It seems meditation isn’t the only way to get up into the air, although one can’t rule out that these Buddhist monks aren’t actually—heavily disguised as fun park patrons—practicing their asanas: “The postures that a Buddhist deity assumes in a sculpture or painting are known as...
