Conventional wisdom often thinks of “response” as superior to “reaction.” That idea is not without merit, as quite often reactions are just shoot from the hip, spur of the moment, fly off the handle, while response is a considered course of action. Sometimes we don’t have the time to ponder before taking action. While pausing to consider what to do, the opportunity to be of help may be lost. Letting the first thing that enters our heads to be said or acted upon without a filter may cause harm, which is something we don’t want to do. We even see this on a national and international level, we see it in politics, we see it in the streets, and at the dinner table.

…The Practice is perpetual revolution, because as reality is changing changing changing, we need to pay attention and not be afraid to suffer the recriminations of the Stalinist autocrats we may have in our midst. It’s not easy to tilt at windmills, but tilt we must, or the practice turns into just so many dead words and rituals, and no sentient beings are “saved.”

November 11, 1918, and 11:11 AM, the war that was supposed to end all wars ended. In a way, anyway, and not quite immediately. It was the Great War, and then everything else, although in theory it was supposed to be nothing els…

I may consider myself a physicist because I’ve read a few books on physics. But I may have some totally off-base misunderstandings that would prove I’m not one. I’d have to rely on others that understand more than I do to point that out.

“We wouldn’t start a cult of personality around a mother for doing what a mother does, and it’s unlikely that the Buddha would have wanted one just for doing what a Buddha does.”