The Comtemplative Life

I'm going to break from my chronological reposting of John J. Reilly's The Long View for a bit, because I read a fascinating book review on SlateStarCodex, BOOK REVIEW: MASTERING THE CORE TEACHINGS OF THE BUDDHA.

I noticed that Scott Alexander's review was oddly unsympathetic, insofar as the core of what the author of the book described as mystical experiences were mostly categorized as forms of mental illness. This is an interesting idea worth pursuing further. In order to do so, I wanted to repost John's review of St. Teresa of Avila's The Interior Castle. I thought I would just link to the Internet Archive, but today I found out that the robots.txt on johnreilly.info wouldn't let me.

Which is odd, since John has been dead for five years. I looked, and I found someone has bought the domain and setup a fake site, with some of John's content, and some random gibberish. Whoever bought the domain is using an WHOIS anonymizer, so it is a bit harder to see who it is.

Weird, but it gives me an excuse to post some really interesting stuff. More fun than rehashing old politics, other than I was just getting to Valerie Plame circa 2005, who just became internet famous again.