Anthony Tshering
A Guide To Spirituality: Being versus Doing

I read a wonderful piece in Tricycle magazine today about what a spiritual life looks like. The timing for me to read it was perfect. It’s something I’ve been trying to make sense of recently.

We are very much a doing world. Even the language of therapy is often about doing. Everyone seems to come in and say to me, “I need to work on myself,” or “I need to work on my relationships.” The sentiment is understandable. We are a self-improvement culture. Our lives are viewed linearly, our lives a constant striving for self-improvement with a beginning, middle, and end. There is much usefulness in seeing the world this way. It is goal-orientated and results-focused first and foremost. It has helped create the world around us, including the computer I type on now or the smartphone I use to answer my emails and check social media. A lot of us internalize this productive voice and hear it in the daily chatter of our thinking self and assume this is who we are.

A Guide To Spirituality: Being versus Doing
Meaning, Spirituality
Anthony Tshering
Reflections on God, Death, Meaning and ...

“Do you pray?” I once asked a patient.

“No, I’ve never been able to for some reason” she paused. “Do you?”

“No,” I said. “Because I don’t know if anyone is listening.”

It has always struck me as inconceivable that someone is listening to prayer. How can people be sure of some divine force in their lives? Even such Christian luminaries such as Martin Luther King and Mother Theresa experienced their doubts about God. I am no different. God does not speak to me in tongues or voices. All I hear are silent ellipses where I sense holiness in the mundane, the awe-inspiring in the ordinary. God has always seemed like an inelegant, hollow solution to the problem of meaning and death.

Reflections on God, Death, Meaning and Spirituality
Anthony Tshering
Everything's Amazing And Nobody's Happy: The ...

Everything's amazing and nobody's happy- Louis C.K.

“To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.” 
― Ernest Becker

A few years ago, a patient of mine wondered out loud why he was unhappy. After all he was a successful lawyer, involved in a loving relationship with a partner, lived in one of the nicer neighborhoods in Brooklyn and had a group of close friends whom he saw socially. So what was wrong? "Something just doesn't feel right. I have the gnawing feeling that something should be different," he said. 

Everything's Amazing And Nobody's Happy: The First Step Toward Emotional Change

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Why Does Goldman Sachs's Have a Diversity Program? The Hidden Problems of Diversity

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Why Does Goldman Sachs's Have a Diversity Program? The Hidden Problems of Diversity

I found this website yesterday as I scoured the internet. It's a link to Goldman Sachs diversity program. I think most people unquestionably will think this is a good thing. There was a time when I thought it was a good thing as well.

But I see a problem here. It's not even that subtle a problem, but I think we as a society have been trained to look past it. Let me put it this way. Let's say Goldman Sachs achieves a perfect amount of diversity that aligns correctly with the U.S. Population. This means that 14% of their employees are black, just as 14% of the U.S. Population is black. And 50% of their employees are women, just a 50% of the U.S. Population are women. And so on and so on. 

I imagine that many of you would rejoice at this news. It would show you that America had started to achieve true equality through diversity. It would be proof that we had started to take the right steps forward in this country, that we were fulfilling the words of our constitution. 

Does The Moral Arc of The Universe Actually Bend Toward Justice?

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"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

"The biggest story of the last fifteen years, both nationally and globally, is the growing likelihood that a cyclical model of history will be a better predictor than a model of ongoing progress." -Tyler Cowen

Just a quick little blog post before I start work...

That MLK quote above is much quoted. The words are often used to lend optimism to a troubling time, such as the current situation in the United States. I used to believe it wholeheartedly myself. After all look at the gains made by the civil rights movement that King help start? Look at LGBTQ rights? History is only going one way, and that is toward justice, I thought perhaps naively. 

I'm starting to think that is wrong. I just finished Tyler Cowen's "The Complacent Class," which the above quote is from, and he makes a very convincing argument that history is cyclical and any progress made often gets erased by the whims of time. 

Take the rise of fascism of in places like Hungary, Greece, and Italy. Or even the United States. Or how the gains in school segregation have been completely erased. Or how inequality is at its largest gap since the Gilded Age. These aren't old problems. They are just recycled from an earlier era and given new names like "neoliberalism" or "neofascism." 

It is quite possible after the end of Vietnam, the Civil Rights era and the fall of the Soviet Union, we were in an odd time of relative peace throughout the world. Yes, there was plenty of injustice still, but wars and violence have decreased drastically for the bulk of humanity in that time. But perhaps that time is over. Climate change is coming. Fascism is on the rise. Inequality is everywhere. Those factors are bubbling right at the surface. It is only a matter of time before it explodes.