Swart Donkey

How do you tolerate intolerance? One of the idea-tools I find useful from Yogic philosophy is Ishwara. It roughly translates as “God underst...

Merit is only one factor in wealth creation. Like risk and return, it is also not something you can simply reduce to a number for comparison...

Yoga is the stilling of the mind. There are various ways to do that. Vedantic Philosophy talks of four paths. Through knowledge, devotion, ...

' We very often reason from, rather than to, our convictions ' ( Hume ). This is why we need to think twice about our intent when ...

I have approached approaches in one of two ways. Growing up, I was deeply involved in the Church.  I believed deeply that there was only o...

Advaita means 'Not Two'. Advaita Vedanta is a philosophical form of Hinduism. The Sanskrit word for the soul is Atman, and for God ...

I love stories. They breath life into objects, facts and things by creating a way for us to relate to them. Through comparison and contrast...

Things change from where they are. Having a vision of where we want things to be is a key part of being human. We dream. We can close our e...

It is deeply empowering to accept that the world owes you nothing. Stoically assuming the very worst. Face, and accept, anything that could...

It’s a sad truth of life that when we grow older, we tend to become less spontaneous and less creative as we acquire more social anxie...

There are many forms of anxiety, but paradoxical anxiety is my favourite. This is the (highly ironic) anxiety that results from fear of be...

The old cliché of meditation is that it’s a blissful state of relaxation. Unfortunately, meditation is not always blissful. It’s a lot mor...

Matthieu Ricard While self-help and psychedelics may be dismissed as snake oil, the benefits of meditation are increasing well docum...

Ayahuasca In moments of weakness, many of us have sneaked a peak at the self-help section in the bookshop. But, while these books mi...

Before we start our trip down the trail of self-discovery, a word from the skeptics. There are so many problems in this world, they say. H...

Socrates To paraphrase a few online dictionaries, ‘self-awareness’ means that you are conscious of your own independent existence, i...

Rich Erasmus and I have had a series of guest conversations ( Part 1 ; Part 2 ) of a more personal nature than I normally deal with. This ...

I am trying to understand some of the anger flying around in world politics. I don't think we make a lot of effort to genuinely articul...

We think in focused contrast. Vedanta, the yogic philosophy, argues that we are only able to have one thought in mind at a time. The issue...

In saying ' I think, therefore I am ', Descartes lifted our identity into the world of our heads. If you cut off your hand, are you...