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emotion

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 […]

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Nov 20, 2015 by Carl Abbott
Filed Under: Who Are You Series Tagged With: balance, civilization, ego, Electric Revolution, emotion, enlightenment, evolution, hunter gatherer, instinct, knowing, mysterious sameness, placebo, religion, symptoms point of view, thinking

Loss Aversion Management

Recent research reveals how we can’t help but shoot ourselves in the foot. When I look around, I see our aversion to loss influencing just about everything we do, albeit often in very subtle ways. The innate emotional aversion to loss, when reinforced by thought, traps us even more. I’m going to explore this issue […]

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Apr 29, 2014 by Carl Abbott
Filed Under: Observations Tagged With: balance, belief, civilization, emotion, fairness instinct, fear, freewill, loss aversion, need, sentience, stress, thinking, wilderness

Instinctive Free Will

We easily acknowledge that animals and young children don’t choose their nature; they are born with it. Consequently, society doesn’t regard them as being responsible. With the onset of adulthood, that suddenly changes, and society then holds us responsible for our actions. As adults, we somehow miraculously acquire the power to choose “right” from “wrong” […]

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Dec 15, 2013 by Carl Abbott
Filed Under: Observations Tagged With: emotion, fear, free will instinct, freewill, instinct, limbic system, Mr. or Ms. ego, need, reptilian brain, thinking, Triune brain

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 […]

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Jan 12, 2013 by Carl Abbott
Filed Under: Observations Tagged With: emergent property, emotion, fairness instinct, freedom, freewill, imagination, survival instinct, will to live

John Cleese, a ‘Taoist’?

John Cleese has given some very witty talks on creativity in which he comes off as a de facto Taoist, or as I like to say, a small ‘t’ taoist. Well, I suppose anyone with contrarian views is potentially a de facto ‘t’aoist. To get the most from this post, google this short video [youtube […]

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Dec 2, 2010 by Carl Abbott
Filed Under: Observations Tagged With: Buddha, desire, emotion, fear, need, thinking, understanding

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