“Life is given to us; every moment is given. The only appropriate response therefore is gratefulness.”– Brother David Steindl-Rast, from The Music of Silence “This world appears to us rather as a world of suffering than as a world of the delight of e …
Read more ▸
Enough with the settled life! There is no settled life – do not fool yourselves. Restlessness is the default state of Man. When I was younger, I used to divide people into two categories: the settled and the restless. I put myself in the second categ …
Read more ▸
Every human connection we make remains with us forever. We cannot annul it. We cannot go back in time and make it vanish. We cannot put it aside, pretend it is not there, or even delete it from our memory. We may attempt to do any of these, but we wi …
Read more ▸
The biggest attraction of China is … me! At least while I’m here and moving around. Wherever I go (outside of the main tourist destinations), I instantly become the center of attention. Being a strange looking long-nosed, huge-eyed, hairy-cheeked ali …
Read more ▸
The most important thing in life is Death. Yet he seems to come from some other domain, another dimension. He is the strangest visitor in this “world of the living.” Although he seems to be a part of life, his mere appearance extinguishes it. He is b …
Read more ▸
Truly, we do not think, will or act but thought occurs in us, will occurs in us, impulse and act occur in us; our ego-sense gathers around itself, refers to itself all this flow of natural activities. It is cosmic Force, it is Nature that forms the t …
Read more ▸
We live in a world of parallel universes. The universes of politics, cooking, fashion, music, parrots! Many years ago, I decided to buy a macaw parrot. A few weeks later, I found myself immersed in the “world of birds.” I began to discover this alrea …
Read more ▸
A chicken-bus quartet in 5 movements On board a minibus in Guatemala, from the town of Coban to the village of Uspantan in 2005, I had a wide range of experiences that led to many inspirations. Later I would write a number of essays under the general …
Read more ▸
Infinity is almost always associated with vast entities. We think of the universe as being situated in infinite Space; of Time as extending infinitely along a line backward (the past) and forward (the future); we imagine two parallel straight lines m …
Read more ▸
The following essay is multi-layered – although it deals with one specific subject, it somehow radiates outward to encompass six months of writing. I bring to light the interconnectedness of my various ideas by providing the relevant colored links to …
Read more ▸
Last month, I was honored to participate in the annual Airbnb Open festival in Los Angeles. This weekend-long festival was a true celebration of hospitality, openness, and wanderlust. The fascinating program included the announcement of Airbnb’s new …
Read more ▸
As a child of the 1970s, I was fascinated by the nascent exploration of space. I spent a good part of my teenage years in bookshops searching for books that explained the American and Soviet space-programs or had amazing colour photos of the Apollo m …
Read more ▸
While I was traveling around the world, one of the things that never ceased to amaze me was just how many events seemed to converge at specific times and places so as to uniquely enrich my travel experiences. Sometimes the “coincidences” were so extr …
Read more ▸
It is supposed to be the phrase that vanquishes all opposition: “But everybody does it!” Or its corollary: “But nobody does it!” Your elaborate argument, your opinion and carefully expressed points, amount to nothing. Whatever you have just said or a …
Read more ▸
We live in the era of sound bites. The overwhelming majority of our communication has been reduced to posts, tweets, text messages, and one-liners. Attention spans have dwindled, and argumentative reasoning has been reduced to “the final statement,” …
Read more ▸
I may assume that there is a world out there in which, embedded, I move, act, and travel. But I may also take another stance, reverse my perspective, and consider myself as being stationary and immobile, around which the world itself “travels”: I do …
Read more ▸
It is not histories I am writing, but lives; and in the most glorious deeds there is not always an indication of virtue or vice, indeed a small thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of a character than battles where thousands …
Read more ▸
The gaze of others defines us. So long as we are alone, we do not possess an outside vision of ourselves to which our acts can be referred; we exist within our inner being, which has no identity and no characteristics. But when others enter the pictu …
Read more ▸
When visiting remote areas of the planet I oftentimes felt like a celebrity. In places such as Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, rural Tibet or Iran, in remote parts of India, Ethiopia, Western Africa, even in less touristy places of Latin Ameri …
Read more ▸
When we learn to drive a car, we are anxious, struggle, sometimes even suffer. Most importantly, we are continuously conscious. Learning is a process in and through consciousness. When learning ends, its final reward is unconsciousness: We can drive …
Read more ▸
Dedicated to Brother David Steindl-Rast who turns 90 years young this very day. Sometimes people get the mistaken notion that spirituality is a separate department of life, the penthouse of our existence. But rightly understood, it is a vital awaren …
Read more ▸
We are blinded by “name and form.” We are hooked to our understanding that is limited by our limiting definitions. We are appalled by the brutality, bestiality, inhumanness of humans; say a serial killer, with no ethical constraints whatsoever. “How …
Read more ▸
Every separation is a rehearsal for death. When you part with someone whom in all likelihood you will never see again, this is almost the same as him dying for you. You will never see him again and some day he will die – before or after you, it does …
Read more ▸
For what the Spirit sees, creates a Truth, and what the soul imagines is made a World – Sri Aurobindo Cancun, Mexico My itinerary said: “20th of October – Travel to Cancun via Chichen Itza.” Cancun: the latest tourist capital of Mexico. Chiche …
Read more ▸
Look at an animal – a cat, a cockroach, a fish in the ocean. All have everything they need. All are already everything they need to be. Animals are born complete. There is nothing to be added to a fish or a cockroach from the moment it is born until …
Read more ▸
© 2017 Nicos Hadjicostis