To drive a small scooter, one must have a driver’s license. But to raise children or rule a country, one need have nothing! Seen from the vantage point of a future observer living in the twenty-fifth century, our contemporary twenty-first century soc …
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Vara Blanca, Costa Rica, 2005 In my country it is called “Thermitron.” Here, they call it “Termo.” It is an electric showerhead that instantly heats running cold water to provide a hot shower in remote places where the installation of elaborate wate …
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West Africa, 2010 In these parts of the world, where “restaurants” are dirty shacks and they serve your food on cracked plates with dusty hands, my emergency food has become my regular one. It is condensed, nutritious, easy to prepare, and of course, …
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We have ceased to communicate, for we speak in sound bites. We have ceased to be ourselves, for we exist for the others’ gaze. We have ceased to be original for we conform to the multitude’s demands. Yet none is a more serious predicament than that.. …
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Nothing holds greater power in our life than the Unknown. The Unknown pulls us towards new life experiences, new knowledge, new human relationships – a renewed and revitalized life. The Unknown always calls us, and we can respond either by ignoring o …
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My “three angels” ended up being three devils! And Jose Antonio, the most sleazy and cunning crook. For four weeks in 2006, I stayed in a hotel in Santiago while recuperating from my travels in Latin America that had lasted for a year. The three seem …
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Time is this grand, unfathomable, overwhelming entity we can never truly grasp. Mysterious and all-encompassing, it forever eludes our attempts to understand it. Even when we think we are near to grasping a part of its nature, we usually find it atta …
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“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their children than the unlived life of the parent.” – Carl Jung “I remember so well the agony of being torn between my love and joy for my child, and my desperation to hang onto a sense of my self …
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“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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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[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 links to some o …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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,” …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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© 2017 Nicos Hadjicostis