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Action For Happiness Calendar - May 2025

Here you are Action for Happiness Calendar for May 2025. This month’s theme is being meaningful. As usual, I am sharing with you my take on this perspective. Happiness has been commodified, diluted into slogans and consumer products. But true happiness—deep, enduring, and transformative—is not found in transient pleasures or material gain. It arises from eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία)—a life aligned…

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Là Buidhe Bealltainn - Happy Beltane!

Today, let’s celebrate Beltane. Image found on Internet This cross-quarter day, marking the transition from spring to summer, embodies themes of fertility, renewal, and the liminality between the mundane and supernatural realms. Its historical roots in pastoral practices and fire festivals have evolved into a multifaceted celebration, incorporating Maypole dances, offerings to the Aos Sí, and a…

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Walpurga and Walpurgisnacht: A Tapestry of Myth, History, and Esoteric Resonance

This night will be Walpurgisnacht or Valborgsmässoafton, so Glad, Trevlig Valborg!! Image found on Internet The Hagiography of Saint Walpurga: From Wessex to the Germanic Lands Our exploration commences with the figure of Saint Walpurga (c. 710 – 777 or 779 CE), an English missionary whose historical existence underpins the later folkloric and calendrical significance of Walpurgisnacht. Born…

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Freedom Reconceived: Ontologies of Liberation Across Civilizations

The notion of freedom is perhaps one of the most valorised yet ill-defined concepts in global intellectual history. Photo by Benjamin Lehman on Pexels.com It pervades spiritual aspirations, political movements, ethical systems, metaphysical frameworks, and psychological models. And yet, despite its ubiquity, or perhaps because of it, it resists universalisation. What the Stoic calls autarkeia…

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Photography of the Day - Shapes

At the Train Station Shapes – Photography by Raffaello Palandri

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A Comparative Analysis Between Buddhist Nivṛtti (निवृत्ति) and Stoic Apatheia (ἀπάθεια) – Part 2

In the first part of this essay, we explored a revitalized interpretation of intellectual asceticism—not as a renunciation of thought itself, but as its disciplined, intentional, and ethically grounded refinement. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com Drawing from the foundational frameworks of Buddhist philosophy (notably the principle of nivṛtti — निवृत्ति, or “turning away”) and Stoic ethics…

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Intellectual autonomy

Intellectual autonomy is an indispensable tool for the cultivation of our cognitive resilience, ethical clarity, and authentic freedom. Be better, deeper, and truer to yourself.

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A Comparative Analysis Between Buddhist Nivṛtti (निवृत्ति) and Stoic Apatheia (ἀπάθεια) - Part 1

In a cultural epoch characterized by the hypertrophy of informational stimuli, an unprecedented phenomenon emerges: the simultaneous expansion and degradation of human cognitive life. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com The so-called “knowledge society“, ostensibly predicated upon the access, production, and dissemination of information, often obfuscates the deeper ethical imperative underlying…

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Photography of the Day - Dawn from my train

Commuting Dawn from the Train – Photography by Raffaello Palandri

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The Pursuit of Knowledge Without Wisdom or Virtue: An Intellectual Tragedy

Today’s topic is one of those that more often comes out during Sangha meetings or in lay discussions: knowledge, when isolated from wisdom (sophia / σοφία) and virtue (aretḗ / ἀρετή), is no longer a guarantor of human flourishing but may become a tool of hubris (hybris — ὕβρις) and ruin. Photo by Magda Ehlers on Pexels.com Knowledge (epistēmē / ἐπιστήμη) here must be distinguished from wisdom:…

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Knowledge

The pursuit of whatever kind of knowledge, when divorced from the cultivation of justice, wisdom, and virtue, risks becoming an instrument of vanity, domination, and self-destruction.

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World Tai Chi and Qigong Day

World Tai Chi and Qigong Day serves not merely as a calendar annotation but as a global synchronous event, a resonant node within the ever-expanding network of embodied contemplative and martial traditions. Its emergence on the global stage is a powerful testament to the enduring efficacy and cross-cultural permeability of practices rooted deeply in Chinese history and philosophy. Approaching…

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Desire Desire Beyond Lack: Deleuze and Guattari’s Ontology of Production and Its Cross-Philosophical ResonancesDesire

In their groundbreaking work Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari revolutionise the very concept of desire, severing it from its traditional association with lack and repositioning it as a force of positive production. This short post offers an in-depth exegesis of their pivotal assertion “Desire is not a lack, it is a plenitude, a positivity: desire…

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Book of the day - Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Today’s Book of the Day is Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, written by Gilles Deleuze with the contribution of Félix Guattari in 1972. I have read the 1983 English translation, published by the University of Minnesota Press. Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995), was renowned for his metaphysical inquiries into difference, repetition, and becoming. A student of Hegel, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and…

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When Freedom Becomes the Prey: Resistance Against Authoritarian Exploitation of Liberty

Liberty, when misunderstood as license without responsibility, becomes a stage upon which authoritarianism rehearses its ascent. The irony is piercing: the very freedoms that define libertarian societies—speech, association, dissent—can be exploited to dismantle those same liberties from within. This is not merely a theoretical paradox but a documented historical and contemporary pattern:…

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Photography of the Day - Forchheim

Forchheim Bahnhof Forchheim – Photography by Raffaello Palandri

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Cognition Enclosed: Agency, Attention, and the Architecture of Thought in the Age of Algorithmic Capture

We often think of our thoughts as ours. Photo by Google DeepMind on Pexels.com As private, sovereign, and untouched. But what if that’s no longer true? What if, without realising it, the architecture of our minds has been quietly reshaped by the apps we open first thing in the morning, the feeds that anticipate our desires, the notifications that punctuate our days? I wrote this piece not just…