I've been a Buddhist hitch-hiker since the age of 21 and have learned what I can from a variety of different traditions over the years but I'm still not enlightened. So I think I'll cancel my regular contribution to Nirvana.com, which promised eventual enlightenment as long as I paid. I think I'll look elsewhere for inspiriration.
Just recently, I've been re-reading Michel de Montaigne's Essays, which I came across a decade ago, and I have to say that I think he is up there with the great and the good. I like the fact that in his Essays he just uses the happenings in his ordinary, everyday life to reflect on bigger things - very Zimmer Zen! I used to think that spiritual truth had nothing to do with ordinary life like eating, sleeping, shitting, etc. but Montaigne has helped me to realise that we need to ground ourselves in our ordinariness before we take on the more high-powered spiritual stuff. And he was no stranger to suffering either - he often experienced the agony of kidney stones and wrote about this in his book - so unlike some modern western Buddhist writers he does know what he's talking about I feel.
Wisdom is not geographical - sometimes it's on our own doorstep and we just don't realise it.
