Recently my friend Andy teased me about my “fixation on same same”, as he put it. My habit of drawing out similarities between apparent opposites bugs him a little. “Fixation on same same” was his response to my comment, “Folks on the left use folks on the right as scapegoats, and vice versa. The underlying […]
Continue reading…mountains out of molehills
What’s Not the Elephant?
One of my favorite Buddhist parables 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 moral here is that we can only perceive a sliver of the whole. With only 5 or 6 […]
Continue reading…Placebo Effect
Google search Treating Depression: Is there a placebo effect? – CBS News for an interview with Irving Kirsch, a scientist at the Placebo Studies Program at Harvard Medical School. Kirsch, who’s been studying placebos for 36 years, says “sugar pills” can work miracles. He has found that the drugs used to treat depression for most […]
Continue reading…A Brother is a Brother
I love how science is chipping away at our species-centric sense of superiority. This time it is the Science News report, He’s no rat, he’s my brother. This bit of research speaks for itself, so I won’t bore you or myself with reiterating the obvious. Of course, I can’t leave without saying how confounding it […]
Continue reading…See No Evil
While discussing life with a friend the other day the word evil came up. He sees America as an “evil empire” that commits acts of torture that surpass anything al-Qaeda has done. I think he was referring to all the bombs dropped over the last 100 years. In any case, this provided grist for my […]
Continue reading…Let Sleeping Dogs Lie
I’ve long touted the benefit of watching out for similarity. The more literal translation of chapter 56 puts it this way, Knowing doesn’t speak; Speaking doesn’t know. Subdue its sharpness, untie its tangles, Soften its brightness, be the same as dust, This is called profound sameness. Focusing on differences, while often stimulating, is just not […]
Continue reading…Balancing Difference With Similarity
Noticing differences greatly assists survival… up to the point of diminishing returns, especially for a thinking animal like us. Even so, the naïve acceptance of difference as a true portrayal of reality would seldom have been a problem for our hunter-gatherer ancestors, given their down to earth circumstances. Conversely, our naive acceptance of difference as […]
Continue reading…The Worry Gene
Have you noticed how something always seems to be wrong no matter how right things appear initially? There is an apparently endless supply of issues to fret over. After we resolve our pressing life and death issues, you’d think we could relax and appreciate that victory. Alas, no sooner is one problem solved than we […]
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