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How to Practice Vipashyana (Insight Meditation)
In the previous post, we learnt about Shamatha or the calm meditation. As discussed, first we need to calm our mind, make it single-pointed and focused, and then use insight meditation to weed out all that has been causing discomfort in our bodies and mind. This will take some time, of course. By focusing on…
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How to Practice Shamatha (Calm Meditation)
Imagine a lake surrounded by hills and snow-capped mountains. It is a clear mountain lake which reflects the surrounding mountains so accurately that it can be difficult to tell which image is the mountains and which just the reflection of the mountains on the lake’s surface. But when this lake becomes agitated by the elements,…
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What’s New in News?
Nothing. If you’re a journalist, or an ardent consumer of news, you might disagree. New events are unfolding every single day, right in front of our eyes – you would say. Sure, there is truth in that, and yet, there is another way to look at News as Alain de Botton explains in his book…
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How to Focus in an Ever-Distracting World
In his book Deep Work, Cal Newport, an American author and professor, explains the value of focus in this ever-distracting world. Today, the ability to focus on a task is becoming increasingly rare, and at the same time, increasingly valuable. Most of us are aware that we are facing this challenge, given how much we…
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Was Ancient India Peaceful?
Was ancient India peaceful? Or was violence, political and social, prevalent in those times? Let’s find out with the help of Upinder Singh’s book on the subject.
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A Brief History of The Taliban
The popular narrative, especially in the western media, suggests that the Taliban movement emerged out of nowhere in 1990s and it conquered Afghanistan within no time. A closer look, however, tells a different story. What is this story? We explore it with the help of the books written by Ahmed Rashid and James Fergusson on…
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How Thinking-People Should Choose a Career
Why is a banker a banker? A lawyer, a lawyer? A doctor, a doctor? In other words, why do people do what they do? Most of us will give different answers to this question. Robert Louis Stevenson, a 19th-century Scottish writer, had an interesting point to make on the subject. He suggested that people do…
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What Universities Can Learn from Religion
There are two worlds out there: the world of facts and the world of values. The first is what we learn and explore, the second is what we act upon. In the modern, secular education settings, we learn a great deal about the former but rarely do we pay as much attention to the latter…
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