Losing Ethically = Winning

Ivan Fernandez Anaya and Abel Mutai

On December 2, 2012, Spanish runner Ivan Fernandez Anaya was running second, well behind Abel Mutai of Kenya, the bronze medalist in the 3,000-meter steeplechase at the London Olympics. As they entered the final stretch, Anaya saw Mutai mistakenly pull up ten meters too early, thinking he had already crossed the finish line. Anaya quickly caught up with Mutai, but

Atheists Don’t Have No Songs

As a lifelong fan of Steve Martin (I joyfully attended one of his comedy concerts in the mid-70s), I got some laughs out of this performance on the Late Show with David Letterman. Steve and his band, Steep Canyon Rangers, performed

Philosophical Pablum

In his well-written, well-researched book, American Veda, which explores how India’s spiritual wisdom seeped into America’s cultural bloodstream, Philip Goldberg writes:

The St. Louis-born T. S. Eliot spent two years at Harvard studying Vedantic texts with America’s finest Indologists. Eliot, who learned Sanskrit and Pali (the language of the Buddha), once remarked that the subtleties of Indian sages “makes more of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys.”

I remember a spiritually awakened friend echoing the same sentiment. He told me that he had tried to read some famous philosophers of the last couple centuries and it was like reading nonsense written by children.

Thomas Moore

In Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore explained that the same dynamic holds true for psychology. In the Introduction, he wrote:

This book contains both psychological

What Are You Investing In?

In a talk at the annual Self-Realization Fellowship Convocation today, Brother Bhumananda spoke of the folly of investing so much time and attention in the care of the body.

He used the analogy of a banker telling a customer, “We don’t know when it will happen—it could be ten years, twenty years or forty years—but one day everything will