CxD📚'23 #16: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Living Skillfully + Request of CxD readers

Have you grown impatient with all the consecutive four-star reviews and my inability to play somewhere else on the immaculate ⭐️star⭐️ scale? It’s your lucky day! Here’s the second majestic ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ read of the year!

I am heavily biased in favor of this book since Professor Dale Wright’s writings have been supremely generous guides for me over the last decade in my attempt at being less of a selfish, meandering dick and we are currently working together on a newsletter project that brings Zen and Nietzsche into close proximity — Fire Philosophy🔥 : Nietzsche, Zen, and How to Live! — so my capacity to read and rate this book objectively is exactly zero.

Request: would you please write me the quickest of replies letting me know if you’d like to be added to the initial list of folks who would like to get the Fire Philosophy newsletter once we start publishing? Professor Wright and I are currently tweaking our approach and would love to get some initial pioneers on the wagon before going public to a much vaster audience of humans.

Back to Living Skillfully the book: in keeping with its own spirit of extraordinary precision, clarity, conciseness and profundity, I’ll step aside and let just two of its passages speak for themselves as invitations to inquiry about your own skillset by which you live and by which you will die.

As individuals, we are not responsible for the outcome of human history, the evolution of life, or the course of the larger cosmos. But we are responsible for our small share of the whole. That’s our task, and that task can either be carried out skillfully or not. In that domain, we are fully accountable. And in that domain, the development of skill makes all the difference. It is vital to understand both perspectives and to put them into mental alignment. First, that we each have an individual life to lead, one that extends out into larger contexts. That’s our primary task, our responsibility. And second, that ultimately it just isn’t about what we do or don’t do—reality encompasses us, overwhelms and embraces us. On the first of these we buckle down and get to work. On the second we let it all go, accepting whatever comes as a gift with wide-open gratitude and a mind elevated in awe and wonder.

Throughout the sutra Vimalakirti challenges us to forgo the priority of comfort, to be “fearless,” “not to be intimidated,” and never to settle for “inferior aspirations” because, as the bodhisattva of widsom explained, “without going out onto the great ocean it is impossible to find precious, priceless pearls.”

For those of you unfamiliar with Vimalakiriti and his wisdom-tradition legend, watch this:

So: Are you too busy to read a potently clear-eyed manual to living your one and only life in its full magnificence?

Do yourself the favor and buy a copy at Bookshop or Amazon.