Somewhere between the ninth and eleventh centuries, in halls warmed by firelight and shadowed by war, a Norse skald set down one hundred and sixty four verses spoken in the voice of Odin himself. He called it the Hávamál, the Sayings of the High One. It was not a hymn and it was not a myth. It was survival counsel, the kind a father might give a son before sending him out into a hostile world: how to enter a stranger's hall without getting killed, how to spot a false friend before he ruins...

Every day your mind makes thousands of judgements before you are even aware a decision has been made. It decides who to trust in the first three seconds of a conversation, whether a plan is safe enough to try, and whether a nagging doubt about a colleague's motives deserves a second thought or should be dismissed outright. Most of us go through this process on autopilot, trusting the verdicts our minds hand down without ever asking how they were reached. Cultivating Metacognition: A Primer...

There is a version of strength that looks like nothing is happening at all. Strategic Non-Action is David Tuffley's guide to that strength, built from the ancient Chinese principle of Wu Wei and carried, chapter by chapter, into territory most readers of the Tao Te Ching never reach: the psychology of intuition, the nature of evil, and the hard practical discipline of the Buddhist eightfold path. Tuffley first encountered the Tao Te Ching in a Brisbane bookshop in the 1970s, and t...

What happens when I die? is the question every human being asks, usually in private, sometimes in the middle of the night, and almost always without receiving a satisfying answer. In this compact and startlingly direct book, David Tuffley PhD turns to one of the oldest and most sophisticated accounts of dying ever compiled, the Bardo Thodol, better known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and distils its wisdom into a guide a modern reader can actually use.Rather than tre...

This eBook allows you to grasp the basic principles of Buddhism in just a few minutes.Much has been written about Buddhism and how to practice it. Readers will have no difficulty finding hundreds of books on the topic. It simply focuses on the essence of Buddhism, as expressed in the Four Noble Truths and the Eight-fold Path. It is what the Buddha first talked about after he became enlightened – this is what makes it the essence.Reading this eBook should not conflict with y...

In a Brisbane bookshop sometime in the 1970s, a slim volume practically jumped off the shelf into David Tuffley's hands. It was the Tao Te Ching, and what he found inside changed the direction of his thinking for the next fifty years. Tao Te Ching: Lao Tzu's Timeless Classic for Today is the result of that lifelong engagement, a fresh rendering of the oldest book still in print anywhere in the world into language a twenty-first century reader can actually use.Written aroun...

There is a particular silence that follows a good koan. Not the silence of failing to understand, but the silence of a mind that has just met something it cannot out-argue. Ask a philosopher to define enlightenment and you will get paragraphs. Ask a Zen master and you might get a cup of tea poured until it overflows the saucer, or a single unanswerable question about the sound made by one hand. That is the territory David Tuffley PhD maps in this quietly disarming collection of a hundred c...

Most people who write reports for a living were never actually taught how. They learned to write at school and university, where the only reader who mattered was a lecturer obliged to read every word, and then walked straight into a workplace where nobody is obliged to read anything at all. David Tuffley's Guide to Effective Report Writing exists to close that gap, in a short, dense, entirely practical handbook built for people who need to write well at work, not for people who wa...

Thirty-seven Practices of a Bodhisattva is an ancient text written in the 14th Century BCE by Tokme Zangpo, a Buddhist monk and scholar who was born in Puljung, south west of the Sakya Monastery in Tibet.Thirty-seven Practices seeks to make clear the day-to-day behavior of a Bodhisattva (an enlightened being on their way to attaining full Buddhahood for the benefit of all sentient beings). It serves as a practical guide for those people seeking to travel the path of enlightenment. ...

Nearly nineteen hundred years ago, a former slave who became one of Rome's most respected philosophers dictated a short handbook on how to live well. It has never gone out of print. David Tuffley's Enchiridion of Epictetus brings that handbook into plain modern English, chapter by short chapter, with a commentary alongside each one that shows exactly how a piece of ancient Stoic advice applies to a life lived now.The Enchiridion, Greek for handbook, was compiled from Epict...

Since childhood, David Tuffley has felt that Nature is something more than scenery, something more than the backdrop against which human life plays out. In Communing with Nature, he sets down four decades of contemplative practice and academic enquiry into a slim, potent guide for anyone who has ever stood beneath a canopy of trees, or watched a wave break, or felt inexplicably calmed by dirt underfoot, and sensed that something larger was speaking. The book opens with Mother Tere...

True happiness, lasting happiness can be achieved through a process known as Self-Actualisation, or Self-Realisation. This is a natural state and within the reach of all human beings. It comes from having satisfied all of one's human needs.This is the kind of happiness that cannot be obtained through the acquisition of things. The fleeting gratification in receiving goods or services is not true happiness. That is an illusion created by our global consumer society. I am not suggest...