Entropy → fear → need → action (i.e., negentropy) → life meaning → “happiness” (Note: → = gives rise to, begets, causes,) This bottom-up chain-of-causation applies to all living things. Undoubtedly, this chain is easily misunderstood because of the imprecise ways words are interpreted. The synonym-like parallel meanings below help improve understanding.
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Quantum Superposition as the Driver of Insight
The short article by Donald D. Hoffman from the Edge book, This Will Change Everything, has for the first time given me a tangible explanation for an insight I experienced that was triggered by my brother’s death in 1964. I suspect that the idea he raises points to something very real and experienced by everyone, […]
Continue reading…Taoist Thought
∞ Who are you? ∞ Before you answer, consider the influences engulfing your entire life—facts and traditions, politics and religion — all the ins and outs of civilization. Deeper down come the personal needs and fears, desires and worries, friends and enemies, loves and hates… everything that is possible to name and remember! All these […]
Continue reading…The Tradeoff
∞ Introduction ∞ Jñāna yoga Many of us find life troubling at times. Knowing how humanity got to where it is today and what to do about it can put to rest many a puzzling and disturbing aspect of life. Jñāna yoga is a spiritual practice that pursues knowledge with questions such as “who am […]
Continue reading…Buddha’s Truths Pertain To All Life
Buddha’s Truths apply to all Earth’s creatures, although only humans need to have truth verbalized. Our need to have truth put into words is symptomatic of something we feel missing. Considering which of these deep truths pertain to all life forms helps them feel more real and inclusive. The First Noble Truth is the existence […]
Continue reading…Trump and the Mandate of Heaven
To better comprehend the Trump phenomenon, I need to examine it from a symptoms point of view (1). Simply judging circumstances at face value leaves out all the underlying causative forces at play, and this just perpetuates my ignorance. First, Trump is symptomatic of the deterioration of the cooperative politics essential for maintaining a stable […]
Continue reading…Refreshing Redundancy
Research reported in Science News, That familiar feeling comes from deep in the brain, sheds light on a problem affecting those who want to remember their life-priorities. This quote sums it up, “The research suggests that novelty and familiarity are two sides of the same brain cells. Turn them down, and even the new is […]
Continue reading…The Year Is 1915
This brief retrospective came across my screen recently. It can be profoundly sobering to see how much life has changed over the past 100 years. Such rapid change is unprecedented in human history, or almost any history that comes to mind.
Continue reading…Our Worry Gene
Have you noticed how there is always something wrong? No matter how ideal circumstances are, something will go awry shortly. All this may be obvious, I suppose. What is less obvious is how the perception and experience of good fortune and misfortune are complimentary. As chapter 58 puts it, Misfortune, yet of good fortune its […]
Continue reading…We All Know We Don’t Know
I enjoy doing yoga on the beach because I can easily pause to look seaward and skyward to soak in eternity, or glance closer in to bond with my friends, all the sand flies and seagulls around me. Today I got to thinking how small and insignificant we are—they and me. Then I thought, they […]
Continue reading…Who are you? (Part V)
It’s about time I wrap up this “Who are you?” series. This time I’ll pass on a few observations from Lorna Marshall’s research of hunter-gatherers that may help demonstrate what I’m driving at. In my last post, Who are you? (Part IV), I pointed out how our ancestral old way just happens to mirror the […]
Continue reading…Who are you? (Part IV)
The social qualities present during our ancestral hunter-gatherer era (1) just happen to parallel the core spiritual qualities that the world’s religions promote. That’s no coincidence. Indeed, those innate qualities of harmony we now seek are the very ones we lost when we left the old way for the alluring material benefits and security civilization […]
Continue reading…Who are you? (Part III)
Recent posts, Who are you? and Who are you? (Part II), examine the losses of emotional security and comfort caused when our civilized way of life replaced our primal ancestral way. Common sense, personal experience, and timely mid 20th century ethnographic research verifies this. (See The Harmless People p.426) This post and the next cover […]
Continue reading…Who are you? (Part II)
I tried pointing out in Who are you? (p.504) how civilization plays a major role in educating its citizens as to who they are and who they should be. This contrasts sharply with the natural intuitive way that our ancestors acquired a secure sense of self. Religious stories, central to every civilization, are humanity’s attempt […]
Continue reading…Who are you?
Civilization simultaneously asks and answers this question, “Who are you?” The cultural story we hear from infancy drums into us both who we are and who we should be. Essentially, this is a form of natural brainwashing — natural in that the brainwashers are themselves brainwashed. Because this cultural story is essentially arbitrary, we can […]
Continue reading…The Word Trap
We are innately attracted to any promised solution to our problem rather than examining our problem’s underlying causes. That is the optimal approach in the wild because problems there share wilderness simplicity, which makes solutions straightforward. Thus, it was natural for us to evolve the inclination to opt for the simplest view of a problem, […]
Continue reading…Stressors of Comfort and Security
Google [Chronic stress can wreak havoc on the body] for research that ties right into my last post, Right state of peaceful mind, p.494. Note how the lightening bolt (graphic right) hits the brain before traveling through the rest of the body. The article puts it this way: “The effect of stress starts in the […]
Continue reading…“Right state of peaceful mind”
While living in Thailand in the early 1960’s, I bought a book on Buddha published by the Buddhist Society of Ceylon, as I recall. Recently I wanted to find a copy. I finally found a translation by Paul Carus, The Gospel of Buddha Paperback, that matched my version of Buddha’s four noble truths word-for-word so […]
Continue reading…What Climate Catastrophy?
In the mid 1980’s science was pointing to a looming climate catastrophe. I stressed over this for a few years, but finally felt “Que Sera, Sera”. Now, 30+ years later, it is happening just as the science predicted. The scientist’s main concern was for how the destabilizing effects of the ensuing climate extremes would influence […]
Continue reading…Straight Poop on the Paleo Diet
Google [Neanderthals reveal their diet with oldest excrement] for dietary research that’s bound to catch your eye. The shifting and mixed opinions on diet in the late 70’s compelled me to dig into the fundamentals. I thought that nature must offer a more reliable clue as to the optimum diet for our species. I spent […]
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