Essays, in the order they were written. Where a living writer's or speaker's lens is used, he is named at the point of use. Where a sentence is Frankl's, it was checked against the page it came from.
Cain and Abel, Abraham, Jacob's Ladder, the Bronze Serpent, Elijah and Jonah — six of the oldest stories ever written, read for what they teach about aiming a life somewhere good, alongside Frankl's three paths to a meaning. With a question under each one.
Read →A Kadampa monk on a podcast arrives, without ever meeting him, at four things Frankl put in Man's Search for Meaning — and his sister, at a family gathering, discovers the technique a Stanford experiment tested in 2014. On the question what is the point?, and why asking it is not a symptom.
Read →The Buddha named five trades a lay follower should not undertake. I have worked in three of them. What honesty looks like when a tradition you respect condemns what you did — and the one freedom all three traditions agree a man never loses.
Read →A letter to the Galatians, a parable about a sower and the Dhammapada all teach that you reap what you sow — and each one, in its own words, says that some of what you reap you never planted. The farmer in the hail, the Sīvaka Sutta, Ecclesiastes and the man born blind, and the two columns a man needs before he asks why me?
Read →Moses turns aside for a bush that burns and is not consumed. The Buddha tells a thousand fire-worshippers that everything is burning and the point is to let it go out. Thomas Aquinas, a film about him, a cattle business that was a burning bush until it wasn't, and the only test that tells the two fires apart: not the heat, but what is left.
Read →Next: the interview with my wife on why we give — the one page in this project that cannot be sourced from a library.