if the next generation is to face the future with zest and self-confidence, we must educate them to be original as well as competent.

quality time” that counts, but after a certain point quantity has a bearing on quality.

Music is usually resorted to as a form of self-therapy when you?re not involved enough in what you?re doing so that part of your mind needs to be distracted from what otherwise would become boring.

Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain...

Studying creativity is not an elite distraction, but provides one of the most exciting models for living.

But shortcuts are dangerous; we cannot delude ourselves that our knowledge is further along than it actually is.

Whether we like it or not, each of us is constrained by limits on what we can do and feel. To ignore these limits leads to denial and eventually to failure. To achieve excellence, we...

How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depend directly on how to the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the...

When someday I die, Please tell those whom I know That I ebbed with the Flow

Currently spirituality is at an ebb in the more advanced technological societies. This in part because memes that validate spiritual order tend to lose their credibility with time, and need to be recast in new...

Alternatives to Materialism. I lived my life in an ivory tower, and business was to be held at an arm’s length.

On the job people feel skillful and challenged, and therefore feel more happy, strong, creative, and satisfied. In their free time people feel that there is generally not much to do and their skills are...

By nature, however, we are born ignorant. Therefore should we not try to learn? Some people produce more than the usual amount of androgens and therefore become excessively aggressive. Does that mean they should freely...

If one has failed to develop curiosity and interest in the early years, it is a good idea to acquire them now, before it is too late to improve the quality of life. To do...

The key to flow is to pursue an activity for its own sake, not for the rewards it brings.”–(psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on the state of being he calls “flow”)

Control of consciousness determines the quality of life.

All our contemporaries…had some big ideology to live for. Everybody thought he had to either fight in Spain or die for something else, and most of us had to be in prison for one reason...

These examples suggest what one needs to learn to control attention. In principle any skill or discipline one can master on one’s own will serve: meditation and prayer if one is so inclined; exercise, aerobics,...

In other words, if Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy showed more than their fair share of pathology it was due less to the requirements of their creative work than to the personal sufferings caused by the unhealthy...

..Such practices and beliefs, which interfere with happiness, are neither inevitable nor necessary; they evolved by chance, as a result of random responses to accidental conditions. But once they become part of the norms and...