Phil Nguyen

For humanistic psychology ... religious experience is a direct feeling, rather than the discovery of objective truths. The essential feeling is a oneness overcoming all inner and outer divisions.

However, [according to] the Dharma ... the ultimate religious experience, Awakening, is something else entirely. It is described, not in terms of feeling,

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When a word has two unrelated meanings, as with bank , linguists call them homonyms. When a word has two closely related meanings, as with magazine , linguists call it polysemy.

The best advice? Act normal, even if you don’t feel like it. Who knows if true love will indeed find you in the end, but it certainly boosts your chances if you can pull off functional optimism. It helps to remember that everyone hates themselves, at least a little bit, and the more you can refrain from projecting that hatred onto the world the les... See more

[Trump] cobbled together a coalition of the wacky and weird. But being weird in America is kind of normal. It’s a very weird place. A lot of Americans belong to cults or odd religious sects, practice alternative medicine, participate in strange fandoms, wild fads, and peculiar enthusiasms. And with the decline of mass culture and the fragmentation ... See more

If attachment theory were fake, how would we know? It’s not only the fact that most of attachment theory’s “knowledge community” are auto-didacts fervently reinforcing each others’ analyses that should trigger alarm bells. What are the odds that the vast majority of heterosexuals would sort so neatly into what look like gender-coded slots — the wom... See more

For some reason, the notion of others being happy seems to trigger a “tall poppy” syndrome among the unhappy, as if there were only so much happiness to go around. Even Zerfas, when he tried to explain his early experiences to friends, found that they were “either skeptical or concerned,” which made him not want to talk about it. I, too, avoided te... See more

You do not need to:

• fix your self


• improve your self


• get rid of your self


• see through the illusion of your self


• transcend your self


• transform your self


• analyze or understand your self

Tantra is about living here and now . Whatever self you do or don’t have—you are how you are , now. Waiting to get fixed before living is not helpful.

Peer pressure can work in positive directions, but so too is there downward pressure to not be happy, to not seek the insights, to continue mimicking the pleasure-chasing activities so as not to disturb the (lack of) peace. Just as not everyone eats well and exercises, despite knowing they ought to, not everyone wants to reflect on their life and r... See more

Ngakpa Chögyam’s full formulation is “spacious passion in passionate space.” That is an expression of the sexual dynamics of tantra, in which space is feminine and passion is masculine, but each reflects and contains the other. When one speaks of the union of passion and space producing electric energy, and of passion being in space, all double ent... See more