One of the best “hacks” for being mindful and present is to set intentions before starting any task. This includes tasks like planning and concentrated thinking. You just “let your brain know” that this is what it needs to be doing now and it can return to other tasks afte . . . Read more

“Be Here Now,” the classic book by Ram Dass, is supposed to encapsulate the project of meditation. The more I struggle with meditation, the more I realize how central this principle is to the practice. My brain is constantly future-looking, sometimes in small ways - I might be . . . Read more

We’re still struggling to figure out exactly what Consciousness is. One theory that I kinda like (although I have no sense of how correct it is) is that consciousness is a way of approximating the base reality. There is too much data coming in through our senses, and it is impossible for ev . . . Read more

“Do not try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.” – Dalai Lama Mental Health This is the most obvio . . . Read more

I’m quite sold on Meditation and do it pretty regularly. In a separate post, I’ll write about what about Meditation interests me. Here, I want to collect all the things about the cult of Meditation that offend me in some way. I’m mostly doing this for my own clarification so tha . . . Read more

I encountered a radical idea in Robert Wrights’s Why Buddhism is True. Our last big phase of evolution happened during the hunter-gatherer phase and we haven’t yet evolved to adapt to the modern world (this is n . . . Read more