bodhi tree swaying

Metaphors can be traps. We can end up taking them too literally. The point of a metaphor is to help us see things more clearly (“time slips through our hands like sand” helps us connect something intangible and abstract, like time, to a physical experience, like sand trickling through our fingers). But sometimes metaphors mislead, [...]

This image from an EIZO medical imaging “pinup” calendar reminds me of an ancient Buddhist deconstructive technique that aims to remind us of impermanence and to lessen sexual craving.

Here’s a late example from Shantideva’s Bodhicaryavatara:

She … on embracing whom you experienced the highest bliss;
She is nothing but bones … why do you not willingly cuddle them and feel bliss?

This next one’s older. It’s by Rajadatta, who was a monk at the time of the Buddha. This is him describing how he became Enlightened:

I, a monk, gone to the charnel ground, saw a woman cast away, discarded there in the cemetery. Though some were disgusted, seeing her — dead, evil — lust appeared, as if I were blind to the oozings. In less time than it takes for rice to cook, I got out of that place. Mindful, alert, I sat down to one

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A key Buddhist teaching is a list of five reflections that the Buddha said everyone should contemplate daily. The reflections are:

1. I am subject to old age.
2. I am subject to sickness
3. I am subject to death.
4. I will be separated from all that is dear to me.
5 I am responsible for my own actions and destiny.

Basically it’s saying: life is short, make the most of it, take responsibility for yourself.

And I just came across a nice piece of research showing that your attitude to time affects your ability to fully appreciate the present moment.

This is from an article in Science Daily, last year:

Psychologist Jaime L. Kurtz from Pomona College investigated how our behavior and attitude towards an activity change when there is a limited amount of time remaining to engage in it. A group of college

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Thanks to William Harryman of Integral Options Cafe for bringing this to my attention:

One year in 40 seconds from Eirik Solheim on Vimeo.

I love this kind of presentation of reality and often find myself looking at the world (in my imagination, of course) in this way. The Six Element Practice, for example, is an insight meditation practice in which we reflect on impermanence and interconnectedness. We become aware of the body — not just those parts we can directly sense but the whole physical body as perceived in the imagination, right down to the internal organs and bone marrow — and sense each of the elements in turn: earth (solid matter), water (anything liquid), fire (the energy of metabolism), air (anything gaseous), space (the form that the …

There’s a fascinating article in the New York Times about people’s relationship to their frozen embryos. Because IVF treatment is so expensive and success is so hit-or-miss, couples generally create more embryos than they need. Those remaining after conception are stored in deep freezes. But couples become attached to those embryos — blastocysts, really — and can have trouble letting go of them.

The article gives an overview of different relationships with these embryos. Some people are willing to let them be used for research. Some are willing to donate them to other couples. But others are unwilling to have them donated, even though it would help another family get through the painful situation they themselves have experienced, because they regard these as “their” embryos and are unsure of what kind of life they wold have with a new family.

Some people are simply so …

Fascinating post on The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer’s site on neuroscience.

I’ve been writing about impermanence a lot recently, as part of a book project I have on the go. The topic of the book is the Six Elements, which is a Buddhist framework for reflecting on impermanence and mortality. It’s a given in Buddhist thinking that the ego is driven by a fear of its own destruction, but this is the first time I’ve seen experimental evidence to support that notion.

Over at Mind Matters, I’ve got an interview with Sheldon Solomon. We talk about fear, death, the fear of death, and politics. In this excerpt, Solomon describes an extremely clever experiment, in which he primed judges to think about death and then observed how this affected their judicial decisions:

LEHRER: How does this theory relate to mortality salience (MS)? And what’s an experimental example of mortality salience at

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The other day I found a small bird that was trying to get away from the neighbor’s cat. Unfortunately I got there too late to prevent the bird being harmed — its tail feathers had been ripped out, it had a nasty wound on the back of its neck, and it had a mangled left wing. It was terrified and desperately trying to get away from its attacker. The cat was obviously going to take its time dispatching the bird and I knew that I was going to end up performing euthanasia. I don’t even know what kind of bird it was. It was sparrow-sized and almost black.

I picked it up and it immediately seemed to calm down, as if it recognized that I was less of a threat than the cat was, and I felt fraudulent, given my intention. While wild …