Laughter often follow up on smile and amplifies it. Yet all forms of smiles do not lend themselves to this transition and in some cases, laughter is not an appropriate extension of smiling. We can smile with sincere compassion to
Archive du blog pour April 2013
A geography of smile?
Some researchers have spoken of a ‟geography of the smile.” By examining photographs found on 2000 pages of social networks in Europe, they found that, on these photographs, 55% of the British smiled, against only 25% of Poles and Hungarians.
Eighteen kinds of smiles
According to Paul Ekman, ‟Smiles are much more complicated than most people realize. There are dozens of smiles, each differing in appearance and in the message expressed. There are many positive emotions signaled by smiling—enjoyment, physical or sensory pleasure, contentment,
A thousand smiles
The smile of the Buddha celebrates the peaceful victory over ignorance, hatred, craving, arrogance and jealousy. But there is also the smile of a loved one, the smile of one who loves, a mother’s smile and the smile of a
108 Smiles-1
‟A smile is a curve that sets everything straight.”
From ‟108 Smiles”, a photo book recently published in French under the name ‟108 sourires” at Editions La Martinière
Dealing with craving
Desire is a mainly a drive. You may desire to save the planet or to free all sentient beings from suffering. But when desires become entangled with craving and powerful attachments, our experience shows that they lead to suffering.
Desire
Dialogue with Jane Goodall — Part 3: The Endless Killing of Animals
Matthieu: Human intelligence can produce Gandhi and can also produce Hitler. But a superior intelligence does not give humans the right to slaughter at will billions and billions of animals every year. It seems that the value of an animal
Dialogue with Jane Goodall : Part 2 Becoming Aware of the Suffering behind Eating Meat
Matthieu: It seems also that slaughterhouses are guarded as if they were top-secret military facilities. You can’t see anything. But if it were shown even a little bit to people, they would find it intolerable.
Jane: There is a wonderful
Dialogue with Jane Goodall — Part1 How Animals are Treated.
Matthieu: There is an unbroken connection and continuity between the various animal species and humans. The reality of this continuum should make humans re-examine the way we treat other animals
Jane Goodall: There is of course no question that there
The tragic flaws of torture
Torture is still widely practice all over the world as a supposedly efficient way of extracting confessions from allegedly guilty people. Torture certainly works to obtain confessions, the problem being that such confessions have, more often than not, not much