Can blind people play table tennis? “Yes we can” says Brendan Wright who gradually lost his vision until becoming completely blind over 20 years ago. Brendan is a huge sports fan and a multi-sport athlete who participates whenever he can. He is an accomplished four stroke swimmer, having won numerous medals at the Special Olympics, and plays “Beep Baseball” with his blind friends in the Los Angeles area. Still not fully satisfied with those limits, he wanted to try table tennis to explore whether it might be possible to play that sport without being able to see the ball. And it’s worked! Although the rules of the game differ, Brendan is now an accomplished ping pong player. Check out the video above to see how he can do that.

Like others who live their lives with what we call a “dis-ability,” Brendan has learned to live a fruitful, active, and basically happy life without the benefit of vision. His abilities are astonishing. Compensating for the absence of sight, Brendan’s ability to feel and to understand the contours of his environment is astonishing. And his hearing capacity is so much greater than mine that you might as well call me “deaf.” He hears the world with astonishing precision and tells me what I’m missing.

Based on research over the past half century, we now realize that many animals have ways of registering the world that are very different from human ways. And in many cases, more accurately attuned, more perceptive. In other words, all living beings have “blind spots” that go along with their specific ways of encountering the world. Beyond perceptual blind spots, we all stumble through the world with a wide variety of mental blind spots, cognitive leaps and gaps that shape how we perceive and understand the world in which we live.

People who realize this—and cultivate the ability to notice—are able to recognize the strengths, weaknesses, and differences between a wide range of people.

Picture those with a poetic sense for the world, with an artistic sense, with an acute connection to the natural world, with the capacity to understand animals in some intuitive way, with a musical ear, with a natural inclination to be quiet and listen or to be articulate, vocal, and humorous, with a chef’s ability to differentiate between tastes, with a natural ability to learn many languages, and on and on and on. People live incredibly interesting lives with different kinds of perception that support very different skills, and although we label some differences as disabilities, that label often blinds us to other people’s natural gifts. When the power goes off and the city is pitch dark, Brendan can navigate his environment as though nothing has changed. When I can’t hear subtle sounds in my environment, Brendan teaches me what I’m missing.

The career that I stumbled into for very contingent reasons—a professor of Religious Studies and Asian Studies— forced me to acquire some level of sensitivity to human differences. I found myself exploring different cultures, different spiritual sensitivities, different philosophical takes on who people are or could be. Looking back, I can see how fortunate I was to spend my life learning to understand and to appreciate these differences. Other people—all of you—spend their lives with other occupations, other pursuits and as a result develop different sensitivities, different skills and ways of living. Human diversity is the engine of our collective creativity and a posture of open generosity to others is what sustains peaceful, productive living.

For all the reasons above and more, I spend considerable time and some money to help support blind athletes—men and women who participate in the Special Olympics or who play “Beep Baseball.” For anyone interested, I invite you to join me in this endeavor by making a donation to support the Beep Baseball team featured below. Although, having spent my career as a teacher there are serious limits to my capacity as a donor, I am happy to offer to match all donations up to a limit of $2000. Here is a brief video on how blind men and women play baseball and a link for donations to help this team afford to rent a field for practices, purchase equipment, and travel to Beep Baseball tournaments around the USA:

➡️ https://www.socalbeepbaseball.org/donate/

Krzysztof here: Dale, who some of you may know is the author of The Six Perfections: Buddhism and the Cultivation of Character, wrote about the cultivation of generosity as the first important step on the path of seeing beyond the limits of one’s world . It’s a bit squeamish for Dale to talk about his own writing, especially in the context of encouraging donations to his son’s Beep Baseball team. So I’m going rogue here by adding this commentary and a pithy reminder from that book: We can only give to the extent that we are truly free, and are not possessed by our possessions, or our money, or ourselves.

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Consider supporting Fire Philosophy if our conversations with Steven Heine, Agnes Callard, Stephen Batchelor, Joanna Klink, Karen King, and now Michelle Huneven have brought value and insight into your life’s journey.

➡️ You can find Bug Hollow here.

Dale is also a huge fan of Michelle’s book Blame:

To understand the full context of the quotations below, we highly encourage you to listen to our whole conversation with Michelle Huneven in the video above.

You just have to keep going. You need to buy clothes. You need to buy a cage for your bird. You need to buy a fishbowl for the two fish you rescued from the debris soaked pond.

And I think that one of the problems is, I think the body gives you a grace period. And then when you're ready, you can start to feel stuff. And what happens is that you go to make a dish and you think, oh, I need some sumac, I've got sumac. And, no, I don't have sumac. It burnt. Or you think, oh, I had that nice little shovel. No, I don't have that shovel. It burnt.

I see a homeless man, I tear up, I see a dog with three legs I tear up. But I don't mind that; I like being so tender to the world or so raw to the world.

Their suddenly being gone and so sudden like you're the change in your life. I think that's a definition of grief. I think my experience of grief is that you have to think everything you possibly can about that person or that place before grief is done with you.

It's like grief has you by the scruff of the neck and it's you lost this, you lost that. This is gone. That's gone. And I'm not sure it ever completely, lets go. I'm still grieving people that died many years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, more.

So it's not even, how do you be a good person in this world? It's how do you just live in this world? But I think that the more comfortable you are with this difficult world is how spiritual you are in a way. How do you find a way to live? And I think that every single one of my characters grapples with it.

I wondered how do you know if you're a good person or if you're claimed by darkness? And I think that's something that I've always been interested in. How do you know if you're a good person?

What I learned was that I'm full of characters. I've got a river of themes and interests and characters up there that I just need to tap in a kind of free associative way but it established that relationship that wasn't there. I went from having no ideas to having a lot of ideas.

But another huge difference that I finally came to discover is that the difference between thinking that your life is just in this channel and it's just happening and realizing that imagination can really extend those boundaries and send you off in directions that you might not otherwise have realized were possible.

It matters to you what kind of shovel you're using in the garden, and for most people, they couldn't care less. But for you, the way you do everything, what you read and eat and cook and tend your garden and take care of your chickens and travel and write, all of these are made to be beautiful, and aesthetically real in your life.

I've always seen style as the way you finess your limitations. You butt-up against your limitations, and then you have to finesse it. Look at Leonard Cohen, somebody one time said he mastered the notes of A and B, he does not have great singing range. And yet, he's a total genius. People might disagree with me, but I think that he's fantastic, but he does have limitations. And yet how he finesse them is his style, is his signature style.

And I think as a writer, you're writing always just up against your own limitations. You're writing at the edge of your vision, and you think as you get to be a better writer, that you have more access. But that just keeps going. You're always out of reach of what, at least I am, of what I can actually do.

If you believe in God, God is creating God's self. That's standard process theology in a way, I think, I really do believe that every act of living is creative and that probably results in what you’re calling style. In a funny way, I resist it because you make me sound like a yuppie who just lives the beautiful life and buys the most beautiful things.

And now that you, say it that way, I realize all of my life I've been a rebel against style, very careful not to be stylish, but that of course is a style that's very particular of somebody who's always revolting on the edges. But in Nietzsche's sense I think it means very much how you described it, and that was really wonderful.

That you are out on the edges of your limitations and you're out on the edges of your imagination. You've got these choices to make, and there they are. Why not make them? And why not carve something unique?

To make my character Sybil, the mother, a complex a character I had to eliminate a hundred other complexities in a way. I tried to fit them all in, but you really have to simplify in order to get them on the page because they contain multitudes.

I've always felt like fiction will answer those questions that you'd rather not live. For example, what happens when you live next door to a bad boyfriend that you broke up with in the worst possible way? Then you get Wuthering Heights.

I was raised on books, which is probably why I write books. My question, how do people live in this world was a question that I posed every time I opened a book. More or less unconsciously, but I was trying to figure out how to be a human being.

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Stephen Batchelor is a writer, teacher, and former Buddhist monk known for his contemporary, secular approach to the Buddhist teachings. A longtime critic of traditional metaphysics in religion and philosophy, Batchelor reimagines Buddhism as a philosophy of life grounded in finite human lives of uncertainty and creative freedom. His widely influential books—including Buddhism Without Beliefs and The Art of Solitude—suggest contemporary ways of living grounded in personal autonomy and the acceptance of inevitable human uncertainty. In today’s conversation we explore his latest book Buddha, Socrates, and Us and how ancient wisdom from both India and Greece might open insights for our 21st century lives.

We offer the vast majority of our work on Fire Philosophy for free. If you find it of value, please share it with your friends and consider practicing the art of generosity and supporting our work with a paid subscription. 🙏

Conversation Highlights

How did the ancient Greeks address the question of suffering, which is arguably the preeminent starting point for the whole Buddhist endeavor? And yet Plato doesn't talk about suffering at all, only once I think it's mentioned.  It occurred to me then that if I had been an Indian and a student of the Buddha in the early years of his teaching, and if for some reason I then found myself all the way over in the west, in the city of Athens, how would I have understood how this community, which clearly had very deep philosophical inquiry going on, would have addressed the issue of suffering?

 So you have these two figures both alive at the same time. They clearly didn't know about each other and yet I found increasingly resonances between them. Of course this depends on how you read the Buddha… But I think my real thesis isn’t derived from a historical comparison, which is frankly, not really my forte. I'm not a historian. But really what I wanted to keep asking myself was: What do these two men who, especially the ideas they hold in common, what do they have to say to us now?

 Both Socrates and the Buddha put metaphysics to one side very clearly, although the later traditions of course, revived it all. But the fact is they quite clearly had no real time for these kind of abstract philosophical questions. They were interested exclusively in how to live well. For the Buddha this manifests most explicitly in his four tasks, the last of which is to cultivate a way of life that incorporates the totality of our humanity.  And for Socrates, his questions were primarily about what does it mean to live a good life? What does justice mean? What does courage mean? What does piety mean?

 We want things to be organized. We want certainty, we want clarity. We want reason. And anything that somehow threatens that gets marginalized and put to one side. We don't want quirky human beings. We want saints, we want quasi perfect individuals who somehow embody all the virtues that they speak of. I hope in our contemporary world, [with] our much greater focus on being somehow truthful and realistic, that we might be able to overcome that tendency.

 I think that [lack of explicit thinking about war] leaves the Buddhist community largely powerless in engaging effectively with conflicts such as those that we're experiencing in our world today. And that's troubled me to some extent. Whereas Socrates is able to uphold the same basic virtues—he's applying the same kind of rigorous critique to other forms of thinking; he's clearly a man of enormous integrity. And yet he also recognizes that he has a duty as a member of his society to defend it if it comes under threat. And Buddhists do the same, but they have no real theory or view that somehow makes that behavior in accord with the needs of the society at that time.

 Probably in both cases these men were seen as troublemakers and both died shortly after they were denounced at Democratic assemblies— the Buddha, probably a year or so after the denunciation and Socrates about a month after his trial. And that suggests to me that neither of these men were people who made other people feel comfortable. I think they were both disquieting and I think you get that very much in Buddhism: its critique of the self and its emphasis on impermanence and contingency and change. So many of those core teachings are effectively dismantling the notion that there is any hope of a kind of final certainty as to what you should do and how you should live.

 I would encourage young people to always think for themselves; to become freethinking, rational, autonomous, ethical beings. And that is the message I hope to get through in what I've written in this book. Autonomy is absolutely central. And I do think the great threat of social media is that it compromises our autonomy. We become so dazed and dazzled by these media that we really lose the capacity to really think for ourselves. Everything's moving so fast, we don't have the time to think for ourselves. And yet that I think is catastrophic. And probably that is what most young people of that age now are suffering from.

 The challenge is how do we refine our understanding in which we take account and are inspired by different traditions but are able to find a way of integrating those traditions and values in a way that is manageable and we're not just confused by the super fluidity information. And I guess that's what my work has been about. From the beginning is to try to trace a course from my very limited perspective on how that might play itself out. I see myself as a Guinea pig actually. I've let myself have the life I've had instead of chickening out and going to university and getting a degree and becoming a academic or something. No offense meant of course.

 Obviously people read the Buddha’s first discourse hundreds and hundreds of times, thousands. Everybody reads it, but nobody, I think, gets it. And that I think is where the imagination has to interrupt the purely rational investigation, which is often embedded in an interpretative scheme or an orthodoxy of some kind.

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It had been two decades since, as a college sophomore, I, Krzysztof, was in Professor Farred’s class “Richard Wright to Toni Morrison” when I came across Slavoj Žižek’s allusion to Prof. Farred’s short book:

I read it and was delighted by the way my old professor was thinking about what thinking (and living by means of thinking) means, and how to do it beyond our normal understanding of what thinking usually, unthinkingly, entails. Professor Farred writes:

“Thinking cannot be divided into ‘native’ and ‘foreign,’ indigenous or imported, proper or improper (sign and signified), Self and Other, white and black; thinking is indefatigably, resolutely, mischievously, indivisible— it leaves out nothing.”

And later:

“The joke is on the Nazi philosopher, because it is his insistence on thinking that enables the black man to rebut the white woman. Heidegger, the anti-Semite who invokes the “Senegalese negro” as a pedagogical prop, puts me, the black man from Southern Africa, in a position to counter a racist question. What could be more paradoxical than that?”

Dr. Farred was beyond generous to record a conversation with Dale and his former lowly B+ student. Here it is for your enjoyment— nay, for your encouragement to think about thinking.

Quotes from our conversation:

 It seems to me that the remarkable thing about being a teacher is that one has the opportunity to expose one student, not only to what they don't know, but what the teacher does not know.

 But what I realized in retrospect is that having written myself into a corner, I was now free to liberate myself from that corner.

 We do not know when we are thinking, so I'm not sure when I'm thinking, but I always have to guard against not thinking, which means that as a teacher, I have to be thinking as somebody who is trying to write as I do frequently on an almost daily basis, I have to be thinking about whether or not I'm thinking…  What else is there to do? Or in more explicitly philosophical terms, if I'm not thinking, how am I in the world?

Our work is not to affirm our students, our task, the responsibility imposed upon us, is that we have to allow them to come into thinking. We have to help them to come into thinking. We have to continue to think about thinking by ourselves. And most importantly, we have to ask them this question again and again: How are you to be in the world?

 Morrison, as you point out, is a truly remarkable thinker on race. But Morrison's strength, I would argue, derives from the ways in which it is never an explicit object.

 I refuse to be circumscribed in my cannons….  So I don't have to make a choice between Morrison or Baldwin on the one hand and Heidegger on the other. There is too little time to do work to be insisting on those distinctions.

 But what he wants from us is thinking is an openness toward the world. And that's why… the answers are, as you say, not calculative or prescriptive or preordained. They're unknowable in advance.

I wonder if we haven't, as a profession, lost the joy of not knowing and we're so called upon to be experts all the time, and we're so interested in being, God knows, what's this ugly term? Public. A public intellectual… How about the self, the act of self confrontation?

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Special guest, Zen scholar Steven Heine joins the Fire Philosophers Dale, Malek, and Krzysztof to explore the multifaceted genius of Bob Dylan through the lens of freedom, detachment, and artistic authenticity. You can find Professor Heine’s book about Dylan here.

Our fiery discussion is sparked by the film A Complete Unknown, delving into Dylan's remarkable ability to dance between worlds — from folk prophet to electric rebel, from Zen-like detachment to prophetic engagement, from his Jewish heritage to a universal, a-political storyteller.

Just as Dylan himself once transformed from Robert Zimmerman into the voice of a generation, our conversation reveals how his songs serve as mirrors reflecting both the times they were written in and our own inner landscapes. Throughout it all, Dylan emerges as a figure who, like Nietzsche's tightrope walker, maintains perfect balance while dancing above the abyss of conventional thinking, helping us to see the extraordinary hiding within the ordinary.

And just like one of Dylan's longer narrative songs, we reflect in our own meandering ways on personal connections to specific songs that have left indelible marks on our lives. From the surreal humor of "Highlands" to the raw emotion of "I Threw It All Away," each song discussion opens new windows into Dylan's artistic soul. If you’re curious about how Dylan's work transcends mere entertainment to become a form of American philosophy set to music — one that challenges, consoles, and occasionally confounds its listeners in equal measure— take a listen.

We’re experimenting at Fire Philosophy with a new arrangement that would establish two levels of engagement with what we’re doing.

Up until now almost all Fire Philosophy content has been offered to everyone free of charge, with a very small segment preserved for those who have voluntarily offered financial support for what we’re doing.

But going forward, we’d like to see how many of you would like to gather into a smaller online community interested in a greater level of involvement, receiving more in depth posts and more opportunity for active engagement. So, with this post today, we are reducing the subscription cost from $9 to $6 in the hopes of gathering some of you into a community of engaged participants.

While some Fire Philosophy content will still be free of charge, from now on, more of our deep posts, events and workshops, book-club offerings, interviews and conversations with poets, philosophers, Zen teachers, and scholars will be reserved for the active community who take this additional step closer to what we are doing.

We hope you enjoy this conversation!

Today, a couple of weeks after our dramatic election, Krzysztof and Dale take up the question from Sam Mowe that we addressed briefly just before the election—what are the grounds for pessimism and/or optimism in the world today and how can we navigate the cycles of intense feeling that politics engender?

We invite you to overcome the passive my-voice-doesn’t-matter-seduction and send us your thoughts, critiques, and questions on these matters!

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Dale and Krzysztof welcome Sam Mowe, a writer and producer at Tricyle Magazine: The Buddhist Review, to discuss a timely and timeless topic: the balance between optimism and pessimism when facing an uncertain future.

Prompted by Sam’s questions about his own anxieties, especially given current environmental and political challenges, the conversation explores how pessimism and optimism shape our perspectives and actions.

Krzysztof introduces the idea of “negative capability,” inspired by the Romantic poet John Keats, suggesting the importance of staying with discomfort rather than rushing to resolve it. This idea resonates with Buddhist philosophy, where facing life’s difficulties head-on is viewed as integral to growth.

Dale expands on this idea by distinguishing between personal and global optimism or pessimism, noting how our inherited negativity bias—stemming from human evolution—often drives us to focus on challenges. The conversation then turns to the potential of “learned optimism,” a psychological technique for reshaping our mindset, which, as Dale explains, can help align our perceptions more accurately with reality.

The discussion also weaves perspectives from literature, philosophy, and evolutionary psychology. Krzysztof and Sam share how practices like jiu-jitsu and long-distance running provide a tangible way to embrace discomfort, pushing past limitations to foster resilience. This approach reflects Nietzsche’s idea of strength through adversity, a recurring theme in the conversation.

Politically, the upcoming election looms large, sparking dialogue on how deeply-held values can lead to fears about the future. While Krzysztof, Dale and Sam acknowledges the need for hope, they emphasize that optimism must be rooted in clear-eyed realism. Krzysztof reminds listeners that transformative societal shifts often occur unexpectedly, reinforcing the notion that history’s trajectory remains open.

In closing, the hosts agree to revisit these reflections post-election, allowing time to assess how the results shape their perspectives on optimism, pessimism, and the way forward. This episode is a profound look at how to relate to an uncertain future—embracing both hope and grounded awareness.

Know anybody else who is tangled up in election day blues? Consider sending them this conversation should you see any value in it.

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Esteemed Fire Philosophers,

You’ve now received all the versions of Dale’s Nietzsche vs. Nagarjuna tale and we promise to not overwhelm you with more. Instead, here’s one more trick (or treat) in which we discuss Dale’s approach to writing this, his first work of fiction.

In the conversation, I (Krzysztof) mention the origins of Nietzsche’s choice to use Zoroaster, the ancient Persian prophet as the model for his Zarathustra.

According to Nietzsche, from Ecce Homo “Why I am a Destiny” section 3:

“Zarathustra was the first to see in the fight between good and evil the essential wheel in the working of things: the transposition of morality into metaphysics as force, cause, end in itself, is his work. But the very question itself of the value of existence had to be reached by a morality of denial; that is to say, the instinct of decadence had to be developed to the point of becoming the will to nothingness (the notion of ‘truth’ as a denial of everything false, as a negative judgment regarding the real). Zarathustra created this most fateful of errors, morality: consequently, he must also be the first to recognize it.”

Below are two choice quotations from our conversation above:

Dale Wright: It's clear to me, and not always to my readers, that I'm not just a Buddhist scholar or a Zen scholar. Because, probably, half or even more than half of my learning and reading has been in Western philosophy, and Buddhism and Asian traditions like Taoism and others are the other side. And these are always in juxtaposition, and each one is showing me something about the other.

So when I have Nagarjuna be able to see things in Nietzsche's Zarathustra that he might not be able to see, that Nietzsche himself might not be able to see, and push him a little bit and give a little bit of a criticism. The same goes the other way.

It's easy for me to see, as an avid reader of Nietzsche all these years, Nietzsche and other Western thinkers have certain perspectives on Buddhism that Buddhists don't have and can add to and extend. And so it's been my position all along that cross cultural thinking is the most lucrative place to position oneself in the world today.

I mean, just think about it. For the first time in world history now, starting only at half a century ago, 50 years ago, we have access to traditions of the entire world. Nobody before us did. Nietzsche didn't. They had the faintest glimmer of what Buddhism might be about. Now we have access to really well translated texts from everywhere. And so why should we confine ourselves to some tradition we just happen to be born into?

Dale: Nietzsche's other critique, and which is a good critique of Buddhism, is that historical consciousness needs to be added to the repertoire.

That Buddhists are great about impermanence, everything's changing, everything depends on other things. I mean, that's what history means. But the historical turn that happened in Western philosophy is only now happening in Buddhism and under the influence of Western thought, even though they have the tools.

And so Nietzsche says, well, you know, there are times when x is what you need and there are times when y is what you need. And if you're always doing x and y in balance, you're missing the time. So timing is essential, historical timing.

As we continue to deepen into our explorations of How to Live, and our community of Fire Philosophers continues to expand and settle in, please consider sending us feedback on previous offerings and questions/ideas/real-world-conundrums you’d like us to wrestle with in upcoming conversations and explorations. 🙏

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Esteemed Fire Philosophers,

We recently published Dale’s fictional essay about an encounter between Nietzsche and the Buddhist logician Nagarjuna.

And while we all love Zarathustra’s dense and archaic language, I thought the essay could be made more relatable — less imposingly and potentially overwhelmingly prophetic — with a few aides to help visualize the encounter. I garner much of this intuition based on what my own students tell me, they of the youtube generation who have learned to think and read with multiple modalities and find “mere” text daunting. So in some ways, this is a purely rhetorical problem I’m sensitive to. Dale, meanwhile, is summoning all his Grace and forbearance by allowing me to share the video enhanced version of his essay; he’s skeptical as to whether the visuals will aide or distract from the serious issues the three characters discuss. Therefore please consider the video above as an experiment in form. This is my — Krzysztof’s — first effort at making a video-essay like this, so please also forgive all the stupendously clunky mistakes you will see and hear — I promise I’ll get better in future video-essay iterations (should there be any demand for them). Therefore feedback from you would be immensely valuable — both on the narrative itself and the new accompanying visuals. Was this experiment a failure or should I continue to try to develop my video-essay chops? Among the three versions — text only, audio, audio-visual — which of the three was most accessible and clear to you?

And who among the three characters makes the best argument? With whom do you most relate? That’s what we most want to hear about!

Thank you for your continued support as we continue to probe the question How to Live from inside the belly of the beast.

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Friedrich Nietzsche’s most famous work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is a fictional account of a spiritual quest by his protagonist, Zarathustra, who after ten years of meditative retreat in the wilderness, descends from the mountains to teach what he has learned to awaken the spirit of humanity. Written in archaic, scripture-style language, Nietzsche considered this creative narrative his most important statement on the possibility of human enlightenment and on the reactionary human resistance to higher evolutionary forms of life.

The story below, written by Dale Wright and narrated by Krzysztof Piekarski, follows Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in both archaic style and its focus on spiritual awakening but brings a fictional Buddhist named Nagarjuna into dialogue with Nietzsche’s spiritual pilgrim. In the same sense that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is not the same as the ancient Persian Zoroastrian by that name, our fictional Nagarjuna is not to be identified with the famous second century Buddhist logician of that name, even though the two share Buddhist perspectives and concerns. In our story, Zarathustra, Nagarjuna and the mayor of a local village debate each other on what might be at stake in waking up to the realities of life. All quotations are from one section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a section called “the Three Evil Things.”

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