Emerson's Wisdom, Bare-Bones Buddhism, World Language Statistics
Three Point Thursday
Happy Three Point Thursday.
This week’s edition features a classic excerpt from one of my favorite writers, the wise basics of Buddhism, and some thought-provoking statistics about languages on Earth.
Don’t be afraid to change your mind.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today. `Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
Behold the Four Noble Truths.
There are certain aspects of Buddhism that involve supernatural claims. However, what I like about what I call Bare-Bones Buddhism is that you don’t have to believe anything, you just need to consider the psychological claims made in the Four Noble Truths:
Life involves suffering and dissatisfaction.
The cause of suffering and dissatisfaction is desire and attachment.
Suffering can be ended through controlling or relinquishing desire and attachment.
With this knowledge the path to ending suffering is open to us.
Books that have helped me deepen my understanding of Buddhism are The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson, Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright, The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts, Waking Up by Sam Harris, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, as well as The Dhammapada, which is traditionally regarded as the words of the historical Buddha. The ideas in these books have had an incredible positive impact on the nature of my mind. Of course, the nuance here is the important question: “do you really want to live without desire?” To which my answer is, “Hell no.” Desires are what drive you to pursue excellence and seek out fun, pleasurable, and meaningful experiences. But the awareness that fundamentally they are the source of all suffering is a super helpful realization.
0.3% of the world’s languages account for almost half of the world’s population.
There are 7,159 languages in use in the world today. But around 44% of these are endangered, meaning they often have fewer than 1,000 speakers. Additionally, the world’s 20 most spoken tongues are the native language of approximately 3.7 billion people (source).