For those of you who don't know... I have a YouTube channel!!! Here's the latest video!!! https://youtu.be/5GoolMx2l_s And here are the passages I quoted in it: ¶47 While Wang Hui-chih was living in Shan-yin (Chekiang), one night there was a heavy fall of snow. Waking from sleep, he opened the panels of his room, and, …
Author: dsleon
Writer. Former Google employee; now the Librarian at the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies.
The Cosmos Within – 2021 in Review
A life update of the second half of 2021.
Where to start
Welcome to my website! Here are some quick links to get started.
- Full Table of Contents.
- Check my About page for a short bio; or, for a far better picture, my Testimonials.
- Excerpts from my reading.
- My YouTube channel!!!
- A podcast I co-host.
Short pieces to get a taste of the style and themes I've been writing about recently:
- A brief explanation of God
- Human Interaction: Blossoms and Thorns
- Conversation with my Inner Child
- An Honest Guide out of Depression
Introductions to book-length sequences of blog posts:
- Autobiographical sequence - Confessions of a Modern Mystic:
- Summation of Spinoza's philosophy
The Great Paralysis
[3000 words] Autobiographical sequence [1 – Earliest Memories][2 – The Birth of Venus][3 – Playground Dynamics][4 – The Long, Long Walk Back Home][5 – The Great Paralysis][6 – My Teacher] By 1964, a couple of years longer than it should have taken, [the famed mathematician John] Conway finished his PhD thesis, which explored a modest byway of set theory. …
The long, long walk back home
[1700 words] Autobiographical sequence [1 - Earliest Memories][2 - The Birth of Venus][3 - Playground Dynamics][4 - The Long, Long Walk Back Home][5 - The Great Paralysis][6 - My Teacher] If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boy and his dog and his friends. And a summer that never ends. And if you …
Playground dynamics
[1500 words] [Part 3 of the Autobiographical Sequence] [1 - Earliest Memories][2 - Birth of Venus][3 - Playground Dynamics] Scene 1 I am in the southern playground of Hawthorne Elementary school -- an open, cement-paved square. There's a group of kids playing together by the monkey bars. I'm off to one side. My thoughts swing …
The Birth of Venus: A Eulogy to Youth
[5500 words] Autobiographical sequence [1 - Earliest Memories][2 - The Birth of Venus - A Eulogy to Youth][3 - Playground Dynamics] Said the demi-divinity Disenchantment to the boy Bao-yu: "The reason I like you so much is because you are full of lust. You are the most lustful person I have ever known in the …
A brief explanation of God
[2000 words] So... I've read a lot about it. And this is how I'd sum it up. Insofar as the world was created, God is that which created it.This takes, as its basic metaphor, the act of a person setting out to construct something specific, like a painting or a pot. Insofar as the world …
…OK, so — what do now?
[900 words] Fundamentally, to be honest... I have no idea. Until further notice: if anyone has any concrete suggestions for what I can do with myself, and it's something I can just do, then there's a better than 50% chance I'll just do that. I wrote the Spinoza thing partly cus I'd been toying with …
Spinoza’s Ethics: Book V – Of Human Freedom
[10,000 words] Introduction -- Book I -- Book II -- Book III -- Book IV We've finally arrived at the climax of the book! I won't keep you waiting any longer -- let's get right to it. Preface I pass, finally, to the remaining part of the Ethics, which concerns the means, or way, leading …
Continue reading Spinoza’s Ethics: Book V – Of Human Freedom
David Leon 