Love is not Attachment. When there is Attachment there is Fear.

You have collected so much, not only books, houses, the bank account, but inwardly: the memories of insults, the memories of flattery, the memories of your own particular experiences, neurotic achievements which give you a position.

A Celebration of the Brave Old World

'We must go back to freedom or forward to slavery'.

G.K. Chesterton

The British writer and idler, Tom Hodgkinson,  has a relaxed approach to life, enjoying it as it comes rather than toiling for an imagined better future. He is the editor of The Idler, which he established in 1993 with his friend Gavin Pretor-Pinney.

If you just take the thinking as a presumption, the mind will never be silent

If you just take the thinking as a presumption you don´t investigate further, yes, then the mind will never be silent, so that it can listen to the noise of its own battles and pains.

But both Stoics, Epicureans, Taoists and Buddhists, instead say: ”Be simple and don´t try to become something else than what you are, or to catch up some kind of experience”.

The simple life is a life, which our consumer-society will sneer of

Every exertion of the will (ambition, project, concentration) is in the meditative art of life inappropriate.

It´s therefore the wisdomtraditions always have recommended the simple life.

It is in connection with this, that you probably will meet the first big obstacle in your meditative quest.

The simple life is namely a life, which our consumer-society will sneer of.

In a consumer-society the ideal life is a constant growing consume-capacity, and therefore a life where you all the time have to be future-oriented and in progress with new projects.

So if you seriously want to go in depth with the meditative art of life, but don´t feel you have the time for it, that your life don´t allow you to relax your will and your projects, yes, then it is necessary that you take your life up to consideration.

Either you begin to simplify your life – which can imply big changes – or else you continue as always.