joshcarr
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 overpowering, unpredictable, and dangerous heroes. How? In “Eating the shadow,” I suggested five phases:…
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 overpowering, unpredictable, and dangerous heroes. How? In “Eating the shadow,” I suggested five…
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 overpowering, unpredictable, and dangerous heroes. How? In 2010, I wrote a series of essays that tried…
“ ‘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 brother was—and their village seemed too small forthem. Their father pleaded with them not to go, for…
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 fascinates me. Understanding the origins of a cultural system often helps make sense what it has…
Intuition and logic; chaos and pattern – how do these words relate to romance? What significance do they have to ‘falling in love’? How do these word-pairs reflect the dance of relationship between men and women? The energy of these word pairs permeates every aspect of our lives: randomness and…
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 to eleven . Tantra has a similar approach. It is not the polite Middle Way between extremes. It is…
Almost every culture, religion, ideology, or world-view holdssome things as sacred, pure, holy, or unquestionably true—and others asprofane, unclean, or taboo. Among the few exceptions are Zen and Dzogchen. They holdthat there is nothing that is inherently sacred. (This ought to be an…
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 tense energy in your office just before job cuts are announced The chaotic energy of waves in a…
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 interpreting the world in a particular way. There are technical methods for developing this “divine…
“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 dozen pages, I’ll explain that attitude, with its applications and implications. But here, even before…
What we want from religion is guarantees. The mundane world is chaotic, risky, arbitrary and confusing. Efforts that should work fail. The good suffer and wrong-doers prosper. Life does not make sense. What we want is an assurance that all this is an illusion. We want to hear that the real world,…
Is tantra different? Everything I have said so far may sound familiar. It may sound like common sense. It may sound just like other brands of Buddhism you know. So what’s the big deal? The short answer is that passionate, active connection was rejected by most traditional Buddhisms. However, it’s so…
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 happy!” But that is not believable; and it is not the attitude of tantra. There are problems, and…
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 wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations,…
number eight: emptiness Buddhist Tantra begins where Sutrayana ends: at emptiness. Tantra concerns the realms beyond emptiness , about which mainstream Buddhism (Sutrayana) has nothing to say. Few Buddhist systems go beyond emptiness . This post is a humorous sketch of the differences among three:…
are based on collections of simple : fundamental attitudes toward . Some stances (addressing different of meaningness) work together well; others clash. Most systems align with one of three common combinations. These combinations are: : everything is given a definite meaning by something separate…
Party at Eric’s House Last Weekend, or Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. A year ago I was in the audience at a gathering of designers in San Francisco. There were four designers on stage, and two of them worked for me. I was there to support them. The topic of design responsibility…
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 Kohlberg’s related model of moral development. He pointed out a series of increasingly sophisticated…
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 systematically, so participants are forced to act in the communal mode, as if in the pre-modern world.…
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 accumulation of experiences, causes and conditions which are always shifting and changing forms. After all,…
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 and Ned Johnson focus on the ways that children today are being denied a sense of controlling their own lives—doing what they find…
Le Guin says she is “not just trying to get into other minds but other beings.” Illustration by Essy May Subscriber? Create a login. Sign in. Politics has been obsessing a lot of people lately, and Ursula K. Le Guin is far from immune to bouts of political anger. In an e-mail to me last winter, she…
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 any science fiction since they were twelve. They were comfortable with a judgment that allowed them…
Fantasy Rereading In A Wizard of Earthsea, published in 1968, Ursula K Le Guin created one of literature’s most fully formed fantasy worlds. The author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks recalls how he fell under its spell David Mitchell Last modified on Wed 29 Nov 2017 06.17 EST Illustration by…
Lorrie Moore, ca. 2014. Photograph by Zane Williams 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 (“Alas, I am virtually incoherent speaking in…
“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 pay for with a dull, expensive dinner. Hungry, meandering, you happen upon one of those iPads that…
The Estonian government is so eager to take on big problems that many ambitious techies leave the private sector to join it. Illustration by Eiko Ojala Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone. Up the Estonian coast, a five-lane highway bends…
When the generation-defining writer David Foster Wallace took his own life in 2008, he left behind an unfinished novel, The Pale King , that will either serve to round out his transcendent body of writing or place a haunting question mark at the end of his career. John Jeremiah Sullivan holes up…
by Michelle Dean There’s really no delicate way to put this: at this year’s New Yorker Festival, Jonathan Franzen said that David Foster Wallace fabricated at least part of — and potentially a large part of — his nonfiction pieces. I wasn’t there, but after reading Eric Alterman’s summary Friday,…
L ong before it became an archaic, filthy, profligate symbol of everything wrong with our broken cities, New York’s subway was a marvel — a mad feat of engineering and an audacious gamble on a preposterously ambitious vision. “The effect it is to have on the city of New York is something larger than…
Terry Teachout 2017-12-14 60 Shares Facebook Twitter Email A ‘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?” Her question was a good one. Anyone who…
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 be dropped and broken, as often as not by me, before the next one arrived. Although my father…
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 tails of dust into the air behind them, their bikes scudding over the dirt and slamming hard into…
“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—has brought him fame. But it is his diaries that have brought him celebrity. The first of them, The…
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 up with Snoke? (Well, three questions if you include speculation about which characters would hook…
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 National Magazine Award winner, “So John…are you the next David Foster Wallace?” The exchange is…
Iconic California surf filmmaker passes away Published: December 11, 2017 Views: 126,115 Iconic California surf filmmaker passes away. Bruce Brown's 'Endless Summer' is arguably the most iconic surf film of all time. Bruce and Mike Hynson, on the road, 1963. At the time, the idea of global surf…
With the City Series , TIDAL investigates the local music scenes of U.S. cities. Enlisting the expertise of a locally-based music writer, we explore the past, present and future of music in each town. In the last installment of Portland, OR, Travis Leipzig talks to local legends and punk royalty,…
In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people — the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts…
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