Image courtesy graysnork We can embrace our monstrosity while cultivating our human nobility. We can allow each to transform the other, so we become cheerful, kind, useful monsters who are also overpo

Image courtesy Inextremiss We can embrace our monstrosity while cultivating our human nobility. We can allow each to transform the other, so we become cheerful, kind, useful monsters who are also over

Image courtesy TeaBeforeWar We can embrace our monstrosity while cultivating our human nobility. We can allow each to transform the other, so we become cheerful, kind, useful monsters who are also ove

Image courtesy Inextremiss We can embrace our monstrosity while cultivating our human nobility. We can allow each to transform the other, so we become cheerful, kind, useful monsters who are also over

“ ‘One day when they were of age, the two remaining brothersdetermined to set out on a Quest, to seek their fortune in the wideworld. For they were brave and handsome and clever—or at leastthe older b

Dakinis were fearsome witches who ate human flesh. They were also the enlightened goddesses who made tantric Buddhism available to humankind. “Where did Buddhist Tantra come from?” is a question that

The method of intensification Nigel Tufnel, guitarist in the decreasingly-fictional heavy metal band Spinal Tap , explained that they could play louder than anyone else because their amplifiers went t

I mean “energy” in an everyday, non-spiritual sense. I mean “energy” in the way you speak of: Having a low-energy day because you’re tired or bored The electric energy of a club on Saturday night The

Everyone you meet is a Buddha. All the world is a sacred paradise. That is the tantric practice of “pure vision.” Like charnel ground , it is a “practice of view,” which means developing the habit of

“You know what we need, Hobbes? We need an attitude .” —Calvin & Hobbes What I find most valuable in Buddhist tantra is an attitude . It’s the attitude I’ll call “spacious passion.” Over the next seve

Human beings naturally care passionately about the specifics of our situations. The tantric attitude is that there are no wrong emotions . A whole person has a full 360-degree spectrum of passions, re

Nothing is fundamentally wrong with the world. That is tantra’s main claim about the nature of reality. Maybe it sounds like good news: “Cool, man! Everything is great! No problem! Don’t worry, be hap

Thangtong Gyalpo’s bridge over the Tsangpo A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a w

number eight: emptiness Vajrayana Buddhism begins where Sutrayana ends: at emptiness. Vajrayana concerns the realms beyond emptiness , about which mainstream Buddhism (Sutrayana) has nothing to say. F

Complex ideologies are based on collections of simple stances : fundamental attitudes toward meaningness . Some stances (addressing different of meaningness) work together well; others clash. Most sys

Party at Eric’s House Last Weekend, or Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. 17 min read · Feb 19, 2018 -- A year ago I was in the audience at a gathering of designers in San Francisco. Ther

Robert Kegan’s model of adult development has profoundly influenced my understanding of ethics, relationships, society, and thought. This page summarizes his theory. Earlier, I’ve mentioned Lawrence K

TL;DR: Much of my time for the past year has been spent navigating the medical maze on behalf of my mother, who has dementia. I observe that American health care organizations can no longer operate sy

In traditional meditative practices, "letting go" (also called non-attachment ) means coming to terms with the fact that both good things and bad things are a constant in our lives. Life is an accumul

Credit: Penguin Random House We are raising the anxious generation, and the conversation about the causes, and the potential cures, has just begun. In The Self-Driven Child , authors William Stixrud a

Le Guin says she is “not just trying to get into other minds but other beings.” Illustration by Essy May Politics has been obsessing a lot of people lately, and Ursula K. Le Guin is far from immune to

Illustration by Jacob Escobedo For a long time, critics and English professors declared that science fiction wasn’t literature. Most of them spoke from the modernist-realist basis of never having read

F our principal wizards inhabited my childhood. These were, in order of discovery, TH White’s Merlin, JRR Tolkien ’s Gandalf, Susan Cooper’s Merriman Lyon and Ursula K Le Guin ’s Ged, more commonly kn

When The Paris Review approached Lorrie Moore about doing a Writers at Work interview, she responded with a warning (“My life is impossible to make interesting—others have tried before”) and a lament

“Anything you want. Anyone you want. Anywhere you want. Anyway! Anyway!” —Priests, “Pink White House” (2017) Imagine you are in an airport, and you have forgotten to eat lunch. It’s a mistake you will

Up the Estonian coast, a five-lane highway bends with the path of the sea, then breaks inland, leaving cars to follow a thin road toward the houses at the water’s edge. There is a gated community here

One of the few detectable lies in David Foster Wallace's books occurs in his essay on the obscure '90s-era American tennis prodigy Michael Joyce, included in Wallace's first nonfiction anthology, A Su

The 4 line in the Bronx. Credit... Damon Winter/The New York Times Feature The Case for the Subway It built the city. Now, no matter the cost — at least $100 billion — the city must rebuild it to surv

‘S o what’s the scoop on this conductor guy?” a friend once asked after I took her to an orchestral concert, the first one she had ever seen. “Do they really need him, or is he just there for show?” H

IN THE MONTH OF MAY M y only real awareness of the Kentucky Derby, growing up across the river from Louisville, lay in noticing the new commemorative glass that appeared in the cupboard each May, to b

Your hunting party of repurposed, cobbled together and barely-repaired pre-Collapse electric vehicles sweeps across the alkaline rich dust flats of old farm land. The outriders are kicking up rooster

“I am a composer,” Ned Rorem once said, “who also writes, not a writer who also composes.” His music—hundreds of ravishing art songs and instrumental scores, one of which won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize—h

Warning : This story contains significant spoilers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. In the lead up to The Last Jedi , Star Wars fandom was obsessed with two questions : Who are Rey’s parents, and what’s

Longreads | December 2017 | 32 minutes (8,200 words) At a hip Manhattan book launch for John Jeremiah Sullivan ’s 2011 essay collection Pulphead , David Rees , the event’s emcee, asked the two-time Na

Bruce Brown, longtime surf filmmaker and director of the seminal “Endless Summer” just passed at 80 years old. Drew Kampion wrote the following for our Surfing A-Z entry on Brown: Bruce Brown’s ‘Endle