Category: Books

Just finished reading “The art of happiness” , a book I bought after reading Joi’s post about it. It’s a book written by psychiatrist( Howard C.Cutler) and Dalai Lama. I liked it a lot because it’s not only talking about happiness but also about ethics and how to live in harmony within this world. It’s also interesting how it contrasts and compares western thinking and Buddhist thinking.

Dalai Lama states that compassion and altruism are two of the main pillars where you can start building happiness. Humans are innately greedy, and those who doesn’t know how to control it are not really happy and their lives are full of suffering. Those who are better controlling their greedy instincts are happier. In order to achieve it, it’s necessary to develop your self-control and your compassion.

Dalai Lama says that he doesn’t have any enemies, even though China destroyed his culture and he had to live his homeland, he doesn’t blame China. Learning to how build compassion (instead of hatred) to those people, events or things that or causing you some kind of uneasy feeling is very important in order to keep happiness in your soul.

Another important thing to remember is that we don’t have to confuse pleasure with happiness. A crazy party, sex or eating a chocolate ice cream can give you some kind of “pleasure” in that moment, but those pleasures are not necessarily elements that are giving you “long term happiness”. Having friends you can trust, a job that you enjoy everyday and a family who loves you are elements that could be considered to increase your “happiness” even though they don’t give you any kind of “pleasure”. That’s why drinking too much alcohol, paying for sex or consuming drugs is not effective to deal with depressing feelings. “Pleasures” are not bad in general, but you have to know how to control yourself and learn when pleasures are gonna cause you more unhappiness than happiness in the long term.

Reading this book I also learned a lot about Dalai Lama, I found very interesting that even he is spiritual leader he doesn’t have absolute values and he is very open to listen to new ideas and accept them. Another interesting fact is that in the book they talk a lot about science, sometimes even more than religion. In fact, Dalai Lama loves reading non fiction books, and specially science books, one of his favorite books is Cosmos (Carl Sagan). It is also one of my favorite books 🙂

After reading “The art of happiness” I watched a documentary called 10 Questions for the Dalai Lama where it explains more about Dalai Lama’s life and how his people and culture was killed/destroyed by the Chinese. I recommend both, the book and the documentary.

Rampo Edogawa was a Japanese writer who liked to write mystery novels. He admired Edgar Allan Poe so much that he changed his real name “Hirai Taro” for “Rampo Edogawa”. “Rampo Edogawa” is the Japanese pronunciation for “Edgar Allan Poe”. If you have never read any of his books I recommend you this book with some of his best short stories.

One of his obsessions and recurrent themes in his novels and short stories are mirrors and optical effects. He loved the “reality distortion” and deformation power that mirrors have. One of his stories is called “Kagami jigoku” (鏡地獄), it could be translated as “the infernal mirror” or “the mirror hell”. In this story, there is an empty sphere with a mirror inside. What would you see if you are inside that mirror ball? That’s what some Japanese asked themselves.

In the next video, there is a guy who enters a “mirror ball”. What you see in the screen is what it is being recorded by the camera he is wearing in his head. At the bottom-left corner you can see a diagram with the guy’s position each moment. It’s difficult to understand but still interesting. The most interesting moment can be seen at 5:50 where a “virtual 3D wall” divides the ball in two parts, it looks like some kind of plasma!

Miyamoto Musashi (1584? – 1645), is one of the most well know samurai ever. We already known him from Heroes, but let’s see more in detail who he was.

He started his “career” as a samurai when he fought at Sekigahara’s Battle, one of the most important battles in Japanese history. Miyamoto’s people lost the battle but he managed to survive and start a life dedicated to the katana and the “bushido” (The way of the warrior). He wandered many years all around Japan, he fought many people, the legend says that he had more than 60 duels and he was never defeated. When he was old, he developed his own fighting style and he even wrote books about “the way of the warrior”, the most famous of them is called “The book of the five rings”.

There are many films about Miyamoto Musashi, the character Haohmaru from Samurai Shodown is based on Musashi, the games for PS and PS2 Brave Fencer Musashi and Musashi Samurai legend are based on Musashi’s life, the manga Vagabond also, etc.

But the best source I’ve ever found is the novel called Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa written 100 years ago. It’s a huge book (around 1.000 pages) about Musashi Miyamoto’s life, it’s fiction but there are many things based on real facts. Reading it you’ll learn not only about Musashi Miyamoto’s life but also about how Japanese people lived on those times, how philosophical an religious influences from China were affecting Japan and so on. I might seem difficult to read, but it isn’t! Here you can read the first pages. I consider this book a MUST!

Musashi from Eiji Yoshikawa