Having published nearly 100 blogs, I thought it might be fun to share a fresh voice on this blog from time to time. My first guest blogger is an amazingly talented young woman I have recently been in touch with – Cass Lane. There’s something about the sparkle and vitality of her work which I...
Author: David Michie (David Michie)
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The unexpected joy of writing The Dalai Lama’s Cat series
After publishing Buddhism for Busy People in 2004 and subsequent non-fiction books, I sometimes found myself talking to people who were voracious readers, and had a keen interest in the subjects I wrote about. They hadn’t read my books – and they didn’t plan to. The reason wasn’t personal, and was quite simple: they didn’t...
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Shiny eyes: Join me on the next Mindful Safari
When was the last time you got shiny eyes? When you felt so excited by what just happened that you couldn’t wait to share it with others? When you felt gloriously lucky to be alive? It seems to me that as we get older, the less we experience moments of genuine wonderment. But one place...
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Mourning our pets: when grief turns destructive
Many of us have loved and lost an animal companion. It is truly one of life’s most harrowing ordeals. When we have especially close relationships with our pets, they are members of our family, often as loved as human members. Their passing creates a void we know can never be filled. Immediately after the passing...
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The power of words on Mindful Safari
Most of us can remember a few words that were spoken to us at a pivotal moment in our life which had a powerful impact. The person saying the words may – or may not – have been important to us. But whatever they communicated struck us with such compelling clarity that it made us...
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How West and East have converged in understanding the mind
Having moved from the Renaissance idea of mind as soul, through the materialist notion of mind as brain, Western scientists are now deepening their understanding of mind as a flow of energy, capable of consciousness and cognition. This explanation shares certain elements of the previous paradigms, while dealing with their more evident flaws. Like Descartes’s...
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Why a visit to Africa feels like coming home
When we visit Africa, we feel like we’ve come home. The feeling may strike us in a myriad different ways. And not everyone experiences it as strongly. But over the years I’ve watched even the most sophisticated urbanites melt after a few days absorbing the unique energy of Africa. Africa is a whole continent,...
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Are ‘mind’ and ‘brain’ the same?
The most obvious problem with claiming that mind and brain are the same is the lack of an explanation as to how consciousness can arise from matter. In the past, some scientists adopted the denial strategy, saying that mind and consciousness didn’t actually exist. The American behaviourist B.F. Skinner went as far as to say...
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A problem with: “I think therefore I am.”
René Descartes, sometimes referred to as the father of modern philosophy, summed up his famous views on how mind and body are separate in his book Discourse on the Method, published in 1637. In it, he explained the reasoning behind his seminal dictum ‘I think therefore I am’: “From this I knew I was a...
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Read the first chapter of ‘Enlightenment to Go’ here!
I wrote ‘Enlightenment to Go’ to help share the wisdom of Shantideva, an amazing Buddhist sage who composed the world’s first self-help book, back in the eighth century. If you really want to understand the essence of Tibetan Buddhism, there is no better source than Shantideva – who the Dalai Lama, and many other Tibetan...
