A series of emails that were written weekly to my subscribers.

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Letters to my readers

 email. Thanks for being interested in what I have to say.

1. Attended two talks by Sakya Trizin Rinpoche, who is highly regarded in Tibetan Buddhism

, the legendary scientist and conservationist live at her "Rewind the Future" tour

3. Been reading Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate

This week I had the fortune to attend two talks by the 42nd 

He is the leader of Sakya school, which is one of the four main schools of Tibetan Buddhism. Despite being held in high regard, he presented himself in a very mild-mannered, ordinary way.

All phenomena are said to be connected by a web of cause and effect. Everything that arises are the result of conditions that have arisen in the past, and is in turn a condition for phenomena in the future to arise.

We are helplessly shaped by the past — in both nature and nurture — and in turn are helpless but to shape the future.

But what's the point of understanding this?

If we see the causes for phenomena as they are, the reasons behind our anger, hatred and various negative emotions dissolve.

"Although it is the stick that hurt me,
I am angry with the ones that wield them,
striking me."

When we blame someone for our suffering, we focus on a single link in the causal chain that led to it.

A person may have caused a stick to hit you, but their anger caused them to hit you with the stick and events in their past have caused their anger. 

He was adamant that our anger was not only arbitrary in this way, but ultimately meaningless.

He gave the analogy of two people that both knew they would be dead in a few hours. How pointless would it be for them to waste what little time they had left by starting a fight?

This is precisely the situation we are in, albeit with more people and hopefully more time...

Basically he was saying that we need to realise that other people are just like us. We are all in the same existential condition with needs, wants, hopes and desires. By realising that others yearn for the same things as us we can develop compassion towards them and cease to view them as hostile. We all share the same goal.

He also spoke passionately about the importance of refraining from getting angry at those we live with. He argued that to get angry at them is much worse than an acquaintance.

His reason was that if we are angry at people we see everyday, then our anger will arise more frequently and develop into a habit pattern that will be much harder to get rid of.

So I bought last minute tickets to see Jane Goodall that I saw on a twitter ad. I'm not one normally to buy at such late notice, but I thought it would be a precious opportunity to see her in my lifetime.

For those unfamiliar with her, she is the foremost expert on chimpanzees in the world. She's spent years living in the amazon among them observing their behaviour.

It was her that first discovered the use of tools in animals. Once upon a time we believed we were unique in the animal kingdom in this regard. When she witnessed a chimpanzee using a stick to lure termites from their mound, this all changed.

Please, take the pleasure of watching her TED talk if you haven't.

The talk started with the story of her life, in the first half she had the fortune to study chimpanzees in the wild and receive a PhD in Ethnology (animal behaviour). In the second half, she has focused on activism and the conservation of our rainforests.

I've also been reading The Blank Slate by 

. It's an excellent read and I feel it has summed up the essence of disagreements in the political spectrum precisely. 

A lot of our political views stem from how we view human nature...

It seems I've already written a fair bit, so I will end now. I would like to expand on this later though.

 reply to this email by the way. In fact, I'd be delighted to hear from you.

Sakya Trizin Rinpoche and Jane Goodall 
— 12/5/2019

Very first letter sent out to my mailing list, dated 12/5/2019