Considered from a profound sameness point of view, truth must be singular. In other words, truth is not dipolar and thus rest in the stillness beyond words and names. To paraphrase chapter 1’s first two lines… The [truth] possible to think, runs counter to the constant [truth]. The [truth] possible to express runs counter to […]
Continue reading…A final word on profound sameness
Throughout time, we—and perhaps all life—have intuitively sensed a universal connection underlying the diversity of the world we experience. Granted, this sense of universal connection may actually originate in our innate empathy and egalitarian instincts. However, who is to say these instincts, in turn, don’t arise from a fundamental universal connection—a unitary reality, for lack […]
Continue reading…A final word on Buddha’s First Noble Truth
I review Buddha’s Four Noble Truth every day during the headstand. Doing this daily reminds me of the pitfalls I need to be mindful of… and occasionally deeper insight strikes. This morning I was pondering his First Truth, “Birth is sorrowful, growth is sorrowful, illness is sorrowful, and death is sorrowful. Sad it is to […]
Continue reading…A final word on the correlation’s process
We often use language to ‘have it both ways’. We unconsciously shift the meaning of particular words to the circumstances and emotions of our moment. This permits us to be comfortably, albeit unwittingly, self-dishonest and hypocritical. As chapter 18 suggests, When intelligence increases, there exists great falseness. Diligently working out correlations forces one’s thoughts to be […]
Continue reading…A final word on consciousness
Our imagination attaches itself to the objects of awareness, of consciousness. We pay little regard to the light that illuminates the objects of which we are aware. Of course, this stands to reason. Worldly objects are always changing, and we are biologically set up to notice this novelty in our environment. The light, on the […]
Continue reading…A final word on civilization
As I detailed in The Tradeoff (p.549), our transition from a hunter-gatherer old way of life to civilization resulted in an exponential increase in our ability to have a powerful ruling effect on nature. As chapter 55 notes, The powerful ruling the old is called not of the way. That which is not of the […]
Continue reading…A final word on free will
Temporal difference (TD) learning is a large part of what really goes on under the hood even as we think we are making ‘free choices’. Technically speaking, this is a way of learning by bootstrapping from the current estimate of the benefit-cost value of circumstances in progress. This process samples the environment and carries out […]
Continue reading…A final word on expectations
The will to survive incorporates a kind of natural sense of expectation or anticipation… a time-sensitive need. Although, a better word for this impulse may be survival ‘keenness’. It drives all living things to go forth, to hunt and gather. In a sense, this causes sorrow for all living things. (See Buddha’s Truths Pertain To […]
Continue reading…A final word on need
I can’t end without a final word on need, the offspring of fear. Fear is the mover and shaker behind all life’s doings. A solid understanding of this primal emotion will help make sense of the rest. If the previous A final word on fear section didn’t suffice, a few of these observations on fear […]
Continue reading…A final word on fear
Need stood out this morning as the driving force behind those birds, us, and every creature in between. If you’ve read this book, you know fear and need are the fundamental principles underlying many of my observations. In the case of Homo sapiens, need + thought = desire and fear + thought = worry. Those […]
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