I began taking yoga deadly serious in the early 70’s after seeing an old man on the street shuffling along with a walker. The image was visceral and complete, and I never forgot it. That was going to be me, unless I took steps to alter that future. Whatever I did from that point forward […]
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Fear and Yoga
Ancestral humans didn’t need practices like yoga. Their daily life was “yoga” — squatting, climbing, carrying, reaching. Every joint moved through its full range continuously because survival demanded it. Muscle was maintained the same way, not by discipline but by the simple fact that living required its use. Civilization has systematically dismantled both. The chair, […]
Continue reading…A Cup Half Empty and Life in the Universe
This is a back and forth conversation with AI to see what AI really knows. Can it think outside the box? The answer to the first question I asked it is telling. It couldn’t, and simply gave me a normal and predictable answer. Then the conversation wandered off to unexpected and interesting areas. I felt […]
Continue reading…Quantum Superposition as the Driver of Insight
A Moment of This-ness In 1964 I was living in Bangkok, riding to work each day on the bus. I was twenty-two. Word came that my eighteen-year-old younger brother had died. What I felt, more than anything, was an unrelenting profound curiosity. I felt the utter black-and-white starkness of life on one side and an […]
Continue reading…Buddhism and the Thermodynamic Chain
Introduction: A Paradox at the Heart of Buddhism Buddhism presents us with an apparent contradiction. In the Second Noble Truth, Buddha tells us that “the illusion of self originates and manifests itself in a cleaving to things.” Yet in the Third Truth, he says that by “conquering self, the flames of desire will be extinguished.” […]
Continue reading…Life’s Chain of Causation
Entropy → Fear → Need → Action → Life Meaning → “Happiness” (→ = gives rise to, begets, causes) This chain of causation is offered not as scientific proof but as a pointer, something to test against your own experience. As Buddha insisted: take nothing on faith. Verify it yourself, or discard it. Two Separate […]
Continue reading…Taoist Thought: Returning to Original Self
∞ 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 elements make […]
Continue reading…The Tradeoff
Note: Finding the original version too compressed for many readers, I enlisted AI to help open it up, working through it paragraph by paragraph to produce the 7-part this version below. I’ve placed the original at the end of this newer version, in case you’re interested. Introduction Jnāna yoga is a spiritual practice that pursues […]
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, […]
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