Xamuel.com

Casa Blanca was a boring movie without a lot of action, but Star Wars, man did that have some great light saber fights. I’m speaking here, of course, as a kid: to see how children understand language, you need look no further than your own memory, specifically, your memory of movies and video games from [...]

Suppose you want to make a thousand dollars quickly. Somewhere, there’s a person who would give you a thousand dollars, just for asking over the phone. All you need to do is dial the right number and ask. Making a thousand dollars only takes a few minutes, if you have perfect knowledge and pursue the [...]

I’m as guilty of this as anyone: living by self-imposed rules. Life is absolutely full of freedom, but we constrain ourselves by a thousand little personal traditions and requirements. We make ourselves jump through hoops which nobody else even cares about. Part of becoming a more effective, enlightened person, is the identification and acknowledgment of [...]

Time is… …A river. We navigate it in our boats, having some minor ability to resist the currents but ultimately bound ever forward by the waves. Perhaps the river leads to a tranquil sea, or perhaps a violent waterfall– we’ll never know ’til we reach the end. One of the features of the river is [...]

A Buddhist Koan is a short tale used to nudge people closer toward Zen enlightenment. Since I really appreciate and love these witty little verses, I decided I’d share some of my favorites here. At first, I thought I’d garnish them with some detailed commentary and analysis. Then I realized, the verses are like works [...]

Life seems to slip past, and the only real control we have is when we seize the moment and focus on the very present. All the pivotal, radical changes we make in our lives come in such times of present-moment lucidity. When we ask that very special someone that very special question, time seems to [...]

There is a great schism dividing the personal-development movement. On the one hand there are gurus like Anthony Robbins who take a more mentalist approach, advocating all sorts of thought-based techniques like positive affirmations. On the other, there are people like Eckhart Tolle who tell us we should minimize our thoughts as much as possible, [...]

It has been said that our entire lives are just preparation for the few brief moments that really matter. Aside from those precious fleeting moments, the rest is autopilot. Days slip through our fingers like grains of sand while we act out scripts. Nor are these the scripts of an exciting play; it would be [...]

One of the authors who influenced me very greatly was Eckhart Tolle, writer of the sensational hit, The Power Of Now. In this book, Tolle dishes out insight and wisdom in such heaping quantities, it’ll shatter your reality. One thing in particular which really makes a lot of sense is his notion of The Pain [...]

How open are you? How many people really know the real you? Do your closest friends know the real you? Do you have a romantic interest who knows you deep inside? What about your family? Imagine if you had a slavemaster who forced you to go out and find friends for him. This taskmaster might [...]