wise abbot decided to teach his students about the nature of light and darkness.  He brought them to a desolate cave and sealed the door.  It was completely dark.  “Find a way to dispel the darkness,” he told them. One monk found a large stick. “I will beat the darkness,” he said.  That will fix it.” The second monk found a broom and said, “I will sweep the darkness away.” The third monk pulled out a shovel, saying “I will dig a deep hole and the darkness will escape.” Nothing worked.  The darkness persisted. Then a fourth monk found a candle. He lit the candle and revealed other candles stash... posted on Oct 27 2018 (8,552 reads)

Veh reading letters and comments from DailyGood readers and KarmaTube viewers to her 96-year-old kindergarten teacher Betty Peck In 2012 not long after ServiceSpace founder Nipun Mehta gave his viral commencement speech, Paths are Made by Walking, ServiceSpace received the following email: Dear Keepers of Servicespace,  I thoroughly enjoy your work. Just today I forwarded your graduation speech to my old class...Meanwhile I want to alert you to a remarkable woman, Betty Peck, who at 90+ exemplifies so many of the qualities you write about in your columns. She happens to be my mother. I highly recommend coming to tea at her home and meeting her.  Wi... posted on Sep 29 2018 (10,096 reads)

dedicated this Doodle on their homepage in India and several other countries to Dr. V's centennial, October 1st 2018.  When a crippling disease shattered his lifelong ambition Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy chose an impossible new dream: to eliminate needless blindness. There are 37 million blind people in our world, and 80% of this blindness is needless -- meaning a simple operation can restore sight. By 1976 Dr. V (as he came to be known) had performed over 100,000 sight restoring surgeries. That same year, he retired from government service at the age of 58, and founded Aravind, an 11-bed eye clinic in south India. No money. No business plan. No safety net. Over t... posted on Oct 1 2018 (9,946 reads)

The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan by Andy Couturier, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2017 by Andy Couturier. Reprinted by permission of publisher. Introduction to the 2017 Edition Much of what you will read in this book was originally published in 2010 under the title A Different Kind of Luxury. This revised version with its new format and many new photographs has been updated at the end of each person’s profile with how their lives have changed in the intervening years. Given the book’s setting in Japan, and the environmental activism of the people in it, I felt it important to write about how they have understood and... posted on Nov 28 2018 (9,077 reads)

get to meet a lot of amazing, powerful leaders in our work here at Conscious Company — and yet some people stand out even more from that rarified group. Lynne Twist is one of those standouts. She’s a rare combination of driven and playful; flexible, yet clear. She brings a laser-sharp focus to living her values. She’s relentless in her pursuit of changing the dream of modern society, and it’s not all talk — she’s authentic about living it day to day. She sees the core worth of every person she’s with, whether they’re a billionaire or a poor orphan (and she’s spent plenty of time with each). If you’re with her, she... posted on Dec 7 2018 (10,826 reads)

TE LAND TRUST AND PLANTING JUSTICE Corrina Gould co-founded the Sogorea Te Land Trust to reclaim Ohlone land in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the San Francisco Bay Area, demand for land seems endless. Property values are sky-high, rents are backbreaking, and people just keep coming. Over 2 million more are expected to settle here by 2040. Bulldozers and backhoes reshape neighborhoods. Cranes dominate the horizon. Land, with a home or high-rise plopped atop, can build a fortune for its owner. Today’s land rush is nothing new. For more than 200 years, there has been a run on Bay Area real estate — a relentless wave of colonization, the... posted on Dec 18 2018 (5,561 reads)

1997 year, Diana Chapman was a stay-at-home mom teaching scrapbooking in Ann Arbor, MI — “as mainstream a life as they come,” she says. Then her brother-in-law, the CEO of Monsanto at the time, gave her a gift that would transform her life: $5,000 to use as she pleased. She had always been interested in personal development and human consciousness, so when he made the suggestion that she use the money to learn from the best coaches he knew, psychologists Gay and Katie Hendricks, she jumped on the opportunity. After studying with the Hendrickses for a decade and taking their work into a business context, Chapman is now one of the world’s foremost experts on ... posted on Feb 13 2019 (8,561 reads)

a hike in the woods because it has a similar feel to me. You feel at home there. Exactly. And if you believe in evolution, it is our home. I’m a firm believer that genetically these are our places. And when we shut ourselves off from these places. I just don’t think it’s healthy. We need to get back out into these places and remember that that’s what feels good. And it feels good for a reason. There was some interesting research recently about people looking at images of cities and looking at images of nature and how the brain responds with a certain level of agitation to cityscapes but that it doesn’t respond to nature in the same way. It’s just... posted on Feb 18 2019 (6,703 reads)

interviewed Fred Rogers, creator and host of television’s Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, by telephone a few years before he died. The occasion was the publication of his new book. Mister Rogers arrived on television after I grew up but I’d watched his show with our young daughter. She and I both preferred the often frantic Sesame Street, finding the Neighborhood a bit slow, sometimes a bit boring. Yet we kept watching it because we sensed something real and true behind the words and deeds of Fred Rogers and his friends and puppets on the show. Still, when I picked up the handset to call the man, I didn’t know what to expect. What would he b... posted on Mar 17 2019 (9,521 reads)

us a different ground on which to stand as we make ethical determinations. I think there's a connection between a sense of aesthetics and a new understanding of what biology is telling us about the nature of networks in life. Those two things are connected, and beauty forms a bridge between an understanding of the world that is rooted mostly in scientific analysis and one that can connect to questions of ethics and to finding the good in life. Pavi: Your work in the forest brings up images of greenery, the wind going through your hair, and tuning in, and yet you were bitten, stung, scratched, and scorched! Can you speak a little bit about the roles of those polarities? David: ... posted on Mar 22 2019 (5,055 reads)

process with the doctor as an assisting guide and midwife. A doctor who insists on retaining his or her protected role as “healthy healer” remains separate, defending him or herself against the ultimate helplessness that lurks, phantom-like, in all of our lives. Cut off from his or her own feelings, such a doctor will not be able to join with the sufferer. Missing will be the crucial collaboration in containing, processing and integrating the patient’s horrible sensations, images and emotions. The sufferer will remain starkly alone, holding the very horrors that have overwhelmed him and broken down his capacity to self-regulate and grow. In a common therapy resulting... posted on Feb 20 2019 (10,616 reads)

“My mother and father aren’t present in the home, so I’m the one who cooks dinner for my younger siblings. I help them with their homework. I’m the healer in my family.” If they had been, as Parker Palmer said, identified by their roles, there’s no way that conversation would have unfolded. But they were connecting based upon the gifts of their souls, which provide an entryway into conversation. We also utilize artwork, with hundreds of provocative images placed upon the wall. We invite people in groups of two or three to move around the room and engage in small conversations with strangers about three questions: Who do you see when you look ... posted on May 20 2019 (6,371 reads)

rare individuals quietly reaching down to us from another level of understanding, calling us to search—with their help—for our own real mind and heart? Could all this be actually true of ourselves now and here, and not merely an “ancient” or “academic” question? Or perhaps the text is the Bhagavad Gita, the most widely revered scripture of India. From its very first pages, the students find themselves plunged into a strange and sublime ocean of ideas and images, by turns stormy and divinely serene. Here they are offered visions of the cosmos transcending everything that modern science gives us to believe about a heartless universe in which humanity an... posted on Mar 25 2019 (9,483 reads)

a world it could no longer fly toward or away from. My friend’s husband would make his request casually, as if he were merely curious, and then, after a few minutes, he would suggest she switch back to the original program. The truth, she told me, was that the sight of those helpless animals made him so sad he couldn’t bear to look at them. This man felt that he himself was being assailed when the TV network forced him to consider wildlife being tortured to death by oil. Those images opened in him a reserve of sorrow and pity that threatened to release a flood of something overwhelming if he didn’t move quickly to contain it. Because, really, what could a person do? V... posted on Apr 1 2019 (6,550 reads)

following piece is based on an August 2nd, 2014 Awakin Call interview with Kazu Haga. You can listen to the full recording of the interview here. Kazu Haga’s dream is that one day, children in every school in the United States will not only learn traditional subjects like math and history but also how to practice nonviolence. As they grow up in our society and confront conflicts that will inevitably arise, they will know how to relate to each other as human beings instead of enemies. Kazu is the founder of the East Point Peace Academy, an organization that is dedicated to bringing about a culture of peace. Just close your eyes for 20 seconds and imagine what a culture of... posted on Apr 8 2019 (6,594 reads)

the place. I spent one week in Bangkok acclimating to the weather and food and making arrangements with the Catholic Office for Emergency Relief and Refugees for my assignment. Then I rode twelve hours north-by-northeast on a train to the village of Nong Khai, the location of the refugee camp where I began teaching English. During the ensuing months, as I worked side-by-side with the La refugees who lived within the barbed-wire enclosure of that dusty forgotten corner of the Earth, those images of myself as Super-nun wilted completely. The Vietnam War had ended six years earlier, but its proxy war in neighboring Laos was still simmering. Organized resistance to the Communist g... posted on Apr 24 2019 (8,155 reads)

will be forever grateful to Coleman Barks for many things, but there is no doubt that his greatest gift to me was introducing me to his friend, my hero, the poet Mary Oliver. As the first raw days since her death have stretched into two months, I am learning that it is nearly impossible to name my love for her, nor my awe for how she lived her life and what she accomplished with it. So since I can’t quite name the grief nor the wonder, nor my sadness for the honey locust tree, the grasshopper, the red fox and the sun in the morning, now that she is no longer here to celebrate their beauty—what I’ll do is tell you a little about the Mary Oliver who was my friend. Mary w... posted on May 26 2019 (32,108 reads)

thought” for any object? Answer: move it around. And therein lies a problem with the “place system,” that old technique of artificial mem­ory in which an image is committed to memory (committed!—as if to prison) by fixing it in a specific location. The whole apparatus freezes meaning, solidifies it, produces durable, fixed ideas, useful in the short term, to be sure, but what happens to those ideas when they are in need of change? Just to take the Virtues and Vices images that Giotto painted in the Arena Chapel in Padua: What if, as the centuries unfold, it turns out that the sword by which Fortitude is figured has outlived its usefulness? What if ques... posted on Jun 27 2019 (5,284 reads)

the Era of Princes, Abyssinia had no king. It had an emperor in name alone, locked in his fortress to the north. He wore a crown of gold and bore the blood of King Solomon, but he did not rule. Instead, he was ruled by his regent, who in turn tried to rule over the warring princes spread across the land. Abyssinia knew no peace. One of those princes lost his title when he lost his father. He fled his homeland, known as “the taste of honey,” for school where he learned poetry, history, and the art of war. But his new home fell under the rule of another prince and he ran once more, lest he lose his head like he lost his crown. With the cunning he had learned, the prince... posted on Aug 29 2019 (4,781 reads)

fuel those kinds of tragic incidents  are in us. We've been schooled in them as well. I believe that we can stop these types of incidents, these Fergusons from happening, by looking within and being willing to change ourselves.  So I have a call to action for you. There are three things that I want to offer us today to think about as ways to stop Ferguson from happening again; three things that I think will help us reform our images of young black men; three things that I'm hoping will not only protect them but will open the world so that they can thrive. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine our co... posted on Dec 13 2019 (10,230 reads)