Best Of

There is something extraordinary in the ordinary - attribution unknown
Closest was Mark Haddon - "Find the extraordinary inside the ordinary."

@person said:
That second post is pretty intriguing. I can very much understand not wanting to go into details and don't think you should.

I wonder how connected the two are, looking for acceptance and your father's story. What I'm hearing is largely a lack of internal confidence. Have you looked into the work on self compassion? A lot of it is how to be kind and accepting to oneself even if you don't feel like you're the greatest. It helps learn how to treat yourself as a friend rather than turning the critic on yourself.

I'm always looking for acceptance, the book about my father's story is just something I learned recently about (I already knew about another book written about him). Without going into actual details, if you can believe it, my wife's father is also someone infamous with several books written about him and we had no idea when we've met, so we could say that winning the lottery is less likely than the two of us ending up together in such a small country. But to answer your question naturally, growing up with an absent or abusive father would shape anyone's inner critic and it certainly gives one something to work with in case they wish to silence it and find peace. I think of the inner child sometime, I read books that emphasize how important it is to be kind and accepting to oneself, but it's one thing to acknowledge that and another to feel it, especially when you spiral and feeling hurt blinds you. I am still searching for various ways to just let go of the emotional need of always saying what I want to and be valued for what I say, I'm sure in time I'll get there, but it doesn't hurt if I find some real eye-opener to read.

@RobinH

I’ve had similar reactions to the way some Buddhist texts talk about Hell, especially when the language is very absolute or very dramatic. What’s helped me over the years is shifting the frame from “places we go after death” to “realms we move through moment by moment.”

In the older Buddhist cosmology, the hell realms aren’t just locations — they’re descriptions of what the mind feels like when it’s overwhelmed by certain patterns. Anyone who has been caught in rage, shame, or self‑loathing already knows what a hell realm feels like. It’s not somewhere you go, it’s a state you enter, often many times a day, depending on where the mind lands.

From that perspective, the warnings in texts like The Way of the Bodhisattva stop sounding like threats and start sounding like psychological descriptions. “Falling into Hell” becomes “falling into a mental state where suffering becomes intense and self‑reinforcing.” And “walking the Dharma path” becomes “learning how to recognize those states early, soften them, and step out of them before they harden.”

For me, that makes the whole thing much more workable. Instead of imagining some cosmic judge sending people to eternal torment, I can look at my own experience: how anger creates a world where everything feels hostile, how fear creates a world where everything feels dangerous, how craving creates a world where nothing is ever enough. These are realms too — and they shift as quickly as attention shifts.

So when I read strict passages now, I take them as reminders of how dramatically the mind can change the world we seem to inhabit. Not as predictions about the afterlife, but as descriptions of the landscapes we walk through every day.

Yes, I heard about Hugging Face, and that they were basically bought out by NVidia to dissuade them from a lawsuit against the makers of the AI agents involved, which would have forced a legal opinion on whether companies creating AI agents are liable for the harm these agents might do.