mountains out of molehills

“Fixation on same, same”

Recently my friend Andy teased me about my fixation on “same, same”… my fondness for finding similarity between apparent opposites. This was in response to my comment, “Folks on the left use people on the right as scapegoats, just as folks on the right use those on the left. Each is consumed by the blind […]

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 […]

Placebo Effect

The Sixty Minutes segment, Treating Depression: Is there a placebo effect?, is interesting on several levels. I find all sorts of tangential connections. If I were a skilled writer, I could perhaps adequately express them all. On the other hand, being a skilled writer might limit my ability to see those tangential connections. Each advantage […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Balancing Difference With Similarity

Noticing differences greatly assists survival… up the point of diminishing returns, especially for a thinking animal like us. Blindly validating perceptions of difference ultimately leads to anxiety of some sort. Nevertheless, discerning differences would seldom become so worrisome for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Civilization, by taming the wilderness, removes the natural stresses that would otherwise counterbalance […]

The Worry Gene

I’ve noticed over the years there’s always something wrong no matter how right things seem at first. There is a seemingly 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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mountains out of molehills