“Living well does not mean avoiding suffering; it means suffering for the right reasons. Because if we are going to be forced to suffer, we might as well learn how to suffer well.” ~Mark Manson Badassery (n): behavior, characteristics, or actions regarded as formidably impressive. There’s a sense of audaciousness to being a badass, a kind of unapologetic insouciance and ruthless fierceness without concern for offending anyone. But badassery also has a prestige about it, a sha

“Of what use is a philosopher who doesn't hurt anybody's feelings?” ~Diogenes 1.) You are an animal: You are a naked ape. You are blood and bones with improbable apposable thumbs. You were born from the womb, and you will one day be food for worms. In your short life, you will piss and shit and bleed. You will rage and cry and sleep. You will go through all the profane motions of being a mortal mammal railing against an amoral universe. Embrace the humility. Prime the primal.

“A person is neither a thing nor a process but an opening through which the Absolute can manifest.” ~Martin Heidegger You are a multifaceted animal. All humans are. You contain millions of years of evolution inside you. Other animals can only instinctually feel this. You, on the other hand, can embody it. As a symbolic creature, you can subsume other animals through archetypes. Through animism, you can dare to don a wolf-mask, a whale-mask, or a crow-mask. All you need is you

“I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace.” ~Spinoza The job of the philosopher has always been to upset the settled mind, to upend the applecart of our appetites, to plant questions marks like landmines in the mind field. From Plato to Aristotle, Epicurus to Epictetus, Spinoza to Nietzsche, Kierkegaard to Camus, philosophers of all manner have been disturbers of the peace. And rightly so. For a peace which is not disturbed soon becomes

“The universe is made up of experiences that are designed to burn out your attachment, your clinging, to pleasure, to pain, to fear, to all of it. And as long as there is a place where you're vulnerable, the universe will find a way to confront you with it.” ~Ram Dass What happens when the shadow is not integrated soon enough? The longer the shadow is ignored, the more powerful it becomes. The festering darkness compounds and intensifies to the point that one is swallowed fro