Listened to Start the Week on The Dark. Photographer Jasper Goodall was on…these photos, from his series, Into the Wild Night, are stunning.

Also listened to Ezra Klein on “what is this?” Stephen Batchelor.

While I don’t love that the NYT has more and more video content, I do appreciate that they continue to publish transcripts. Couple of passages here:

That nonreactivity is really, in classical Buddhist language, nirvana itself.

EK: What’s that like, man? [Laughs.]

SB [Laughs.] It sounds a bit grandiose, perhaps, but it’s something we already all know.

It’s odd — I find that people I know who have no interest in meditating have had experiences where all of their muddled and worried thoughts, for some reason, just die down. People might find this in doing sports, for example — running every day. They might find it by going for hikes in the countryside or just working in their gardens. There are all manner of activities we do that have nothing to do with meditation in a formal sense but are moments whereby, suddenly, we find we are at peace with ourselves. That, to me, is the nonreactive space.

I think it’s dangerous to present it as something exotic and spiritual. I feel nirvana in these moments of stopping, and in that stopping, suddenly feeling at peace with ourselves and in harmony with our world. It may only last a few seconds, maybe longer. But that’s nonreactivity. It’s not something we just get from meditation.

And sometimes they come upon us out of the blue: One day, you sit down on a park bench, and for some reason that you cannot explain, you find yourself still and quiet. The mind’s chatter has died down. And in that moment — and this is the other side of nonreactivity — the world reveals itself more luminously.