Buddhism – Page 3 – Matthew Remski

January 1, 2015

Seeking the Gita

Today's reader is hurtling through the subway tunnels of a digital matrix with a paperback or an e-reader in her hand. Between chapters -- verses even -- she is overwhelmed with waves of data from across the globe. She is so saturated in neoliberal propaganda it has become invisible to her, but something hasn't felt right for a long time. She knows that climate change will be catastrophic. And the book she's holding -- which her YTT director assigned her to read without much explanation -- describes how a male Iron Age warrior talks with God in a chariot, and is eventually convinced of the necessity of war.

April 19, 2014

Changing, Fast and Slow /// notes on Sam Harris, meditation, spiritual impatience, and the rising sea

If Sam Harris wants to become the kind of spiritual guide he won’t be compelled to shred in a subsequent book, some tweaks may be in order.

November 4, 2013

Family Wakes Us Up — by Michael Stone and Matthew Remski (first published excerpt)

The following four letters open a new book I’m co-writing with Michael Stone about the spirituality of family life.

May 29, 2013

The Guru as Artist

If we recognized that what we are attracted to in the guru is the war they are waging on their own pain, we would just watch them with whatever degree of empathy we could scrounge, see what their rage drove them to see, wonder at the ways in which their language bends the typical arc of the mind, and feel their terror expand our hearts into a greater tolerance for uncertainty. But we would not do what they told us to do. Because we would know that they were on their path, and we were on our own. Because we would know that the directions they really really want to give us are meant primarily to fulfill their own needs.