“Err in the direction of kindness.” (Convocation speech)

“Kindness is the only non-delusional response to the human condition.”

• Meditation, intuition, writing fiction = ways of listening to the quieter voices in our head
• Fiction reminds us that you really can never generalize — our views on topics like assisted suicide, etc. always depend on who, at what time, under what conditions
• Buddhist story — how “taut” should you be while meditating? Well, how tight do you want your guitar string to be? Must be just right. We must always be “tuning” our dials to the circumstances, at every moment; harder than being able to default to one extreme and operate on autopilot.
• How to deal with the reality that we interact, are complicit with systems that cause so much suffering every day? (Climate change, animal agriculture, the whole Peter Singer child-in-a-lake article)
  • ==Moral perfectionism== → easy to get very cynical and bitter— we have an illusion of control
  • Maybe there’s not an answer, just another question: Can we learn to live in a world where there is a lot of that kind of evil going around, and at the same time, not make monsters of ourselves?
• Book recs: In Love With the World (a journey that teaches the fundamentals of Buddhism)