Observations

The Tradeoff

♦ Introduction ♦ We have all heard some version of the old saying, ‘Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it’. More to the point, I’d say, ‘Those who lack a sense of the past are doomed to be blindsided by affairs of the present’. For me, comprehending how our species got to […]

Buddha’s Truths Pertain To All Life

Buddha’s Truths apply to all Earth’s creatures, although only humans need to have truth stipulated. For me, this suggests that our need for “Truth” is a symptom of something we feel missing. For that reason, considering the widest possible scope of these truths gives helpful context for their application – ‘profound sameness’, as chapter 56 […]

Trump and the Mandate of Heaven

To better comprehend the Trump phenomenon, I need to examine it from a symptoms point of view (1). After all, judging circumstances at face value easily perpetuates ignorance and exasperates things. First off, I see Donald Trump as mostly symptomatic of the devolution of the cooperative politics essential to maintain a stable civilization. Secondly, cooperation […]

Refreshing Redundancy

This research, That familiar feeling comes from deep in the brain, sheds light on a cognitive problem for anyone who wants to remember their life priorities. “The research suggests that novelty and familiarity are two sides of the same brain cells. Turn them down, and even the new is boring and old. Turn them up […]

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, the sand flies and the seagulls around me. Today I got to thinking how small and insignificant we — they and me — are. Then […]

Who are you? (Part V)

It’s about time I wrap up this “Who are you?” series. This time I’ll use a few observations from Lorna Marshall‘s research of hunter-gatherers to demonstrate what I’m really driving at. In my last post, Who are you? (Part IV), I pointed out how our ancestral old way just happens to mirror the core “spiritual” […]

Who are you? (Part IV)

The social qualities integral to our ancestral hunter-gatherer old way (1) just happen to mirror 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 […]

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 ancestral one. Common sense, personal experience, and timely mid 20th century ethnographic research clarify this. See The Harmless People and The old way: a story of the […]

Who are you? (Part II)

I tried to point out in Who are you? (part I) how civilization plays a major role in ‘educating’ its citizens who they are and who they should be. This contrasts sharply with the natural intuitive way our ancestors previously acquired a secure sense of self. Religious stories have been central to every civilization’s agenda. […]

Who are you?

Civilization ‘helps’ answer the question, “Who am I”? The cultural story we hear from infancy drums into us 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 the story is essentially arbitrary, we spend our lives striving to […]

Skip links

Observations