I review Buddha’s Four Noble Truths (p.604) during my yoga headstand every morning. Today, the fourth truth stood out, although not in a profound way, more in a “Well, duh” kind of way. First, though, here is the fourth truth: The Fourth Noble Truth is the Middle Path that leads to the cessation of suffering. […]
Continue reading…Observations
Breathe Into It
It helps me to regard language as the smoke that arises out of emotion’s fire. You could say words are the cognitive reflections of human emotions. As such, they’re more fantasy than reality. For example, you can understand a volcano with words metaphorically, symbolically, abstractly, but you cannot truly know it through words. You can […]
Continue reading…Tao of Government
Why does government function the way it does? One thing that often stands out is how the authorities in bureaucracies, both leaders and subordinates, easily over-react in silly irrational ways. From a symptom’s point of view, I immediately notice fear as the operative force behind this. To be sure, this applies to most, if not […]
Continue reading…Will-to-Live, Free or Otherwise
The drive to survive is shared by all living things from viruses on up. In some, if not all, forms of life, this plays out as a fear vs. need mediated survival instinct. Certainly, the survival instinct is a fundamental emotional drive in any animal I think of as having emotion. Naturally, there are those […]
Continue reading…The Why Of It
Probing into the why of it feels like jumping into a bottomless well of mystery. This is certainly the epitome of quixotic quests. However, there is the survival reward of seeing life as close to its actuality as humanly possible. Exploring the why of it promises a glimpse into nature’s secrets. This is one of […]
Continue reading…The Truth vs. The Middle
The Chinese language uses dual characters (1) as shown here (right). While searching for background on this, I stumbled onto this article… google [Culture, dialectics, and reasoning about contradiction (1999)]. This Abstract of the article succinctly portrays a noticeable difference in the way East and West view reality. Culture, dialectics, and reasoning about contradiction by […]
Continue reading…Dumbfounding
The Science News Science Stats left me dumbfounded, so I read it again… I’m still dumbfounded. Does it really say, “… calorie intake may be the bigger contributor to Western obesity”? What are they thinking? What else causes obesity? I have noticed over the years, a growing effort to find genetic causes for why some […]
Continue reading…A Taoist Creed
If Taoism had a creed(1), what would the specific cornerstone of such a creed be? For example, the Christians have “to love” as a cornerstone of their creed: to love thy God, to love thy neighbor, to love thy enemy, and so on. Before you read on, come up with a few of your own […]
Continue reading…Of Free Will, I Am
Free will and I have had a life-long journey together. For the first forty years, I “knew” I had free will. I could do anything I set my mind to. Such certainty is particularly strong in youth, and naturally so! Around age forty, I began to look for biological evidence of free will. Any clear […]
Continue reading…Discomfort and Pain
The Science News’ article Hurt Blocker got me thinking about pain and the ways we deal with it. While this research is really about physical pain, the principle applies to all pain. How we deal with discomfort and pain results in many unintended consequences. We could avoid these consequences if we knew at what point […]
Continue reading…Siren’s Song of Politics
The noblest purpose of politics is the pursuit of the “perfect” compromise which bitterly opposing factions can live with, if not heartily support. This is true for keeping the peace in any civilization. Put simply, the intimate social connection and mutual understanding common among our hunter-gather ancestors is not possible given civilizations’ hierarchical social system. […]
Continue reading…“It’s the Economy Stupid”
Do you remember that pithy campaign comment from James Carville, “It’s the economy stupid”? I wonder if he knew how deeply universal economics is. Indeed, why don’t educators put this at the top of their list of the necessary education every child should receive? Could it be they don’t know? Economics is survival for all […]
Continue reading…Networks of Networks of….
The Science News report, When Networks Network, is striking in its implications so you may want to read it first. Go to, Networks-of-Network.pdf. This research hints at humanity’s gradual cognitive evolution toward what I would call a small ‘t’ Taoist (p.154) point of view. Research like this, along with quantum theory, nudges secular common sense […]
Continue reading…Beware: the Blind Spot
I occasionally refer to the blind spot as our main impediment to understanding. What is the blind spot? Put simply, the blind spot = emotion + thought. The loudest emotions are need and fear (1). When those roar, they are all we can hear. In How the Hoodwink Hooks, (p.100) I first explain how desire […]
Continue reading…And Then There Was Fire
I’ve always found pondering the how’s and why’s of life and the world to be irresistible. The mountain of historical and scientific information available certainly makes this challenging. Happily, a lifetime of inquiry may be paying off. I can see outlines of the big picture now. The constant difficulty lies in how mountains of detail […]
Continue reading…Tao and Democracy
Having a largely ignorant electorate is both an advantage and a disadvantage in a democracy. Being unaware of shortsighted political narratives makes it harder to dupe people. However, ignorance of historical and scientific fact can easily lead to disastrous political choices. The Science News’ report, Uncommitted newbies can foil forceful few, explains why both democracy […]
Continue reading…What’s Not the Elephant?
My favorite Buddhist parable is the Blind Men And The Elephant. Several blind men each touch a different part of an elephant and proceed to describe and debate what they think an elephant is. The lesson here is how untrustworthy perception actually is. With only five main senses, we are all blind in the final […]
Continue reading…Upping the Ante
Have you noticed the ever-present urge to continue to up the ante? Not only that, but isn’t the sky often the limit? We can’t help but aim for the next step up, and when we reach it, that level becomes our new bottom line. Most of us are content for a while, but then we […]
Continue reading…A Word to the Wise?
“A word to the wise” is a good maxim, but flawed I’m afraid to say. I’ve always liked how D.C. Lau phrased the last characters of the first line of chapter 51: Circumstances bring them to maturity. It’s true, albeit not what the characters literally say. What is it about circumstances that bring us to […]
Continue reading…A Bee with Personality
Science has driven another nail into the coffin of human uniqueness. (Google [Bee genes may drive them to adventure].) This is yet another example of chapter 56’s, This is called profound sameness. Soon—in a thousand years more or less—we’ll be forced to admit that, while we see ourselves as unique, we are actually profoundly similar […]
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