science

The Year Is 1915

This brief retrospective came across my screen recently. It can be profoundly sobering to see how much life has changed over the past 100 years. Such rapid change is unprecedented in human history, or almost any history that comes to mind.

Who are you? (Part II)

I tried to point out in my initial Who are you? post (p.504) 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 that our ancestors acquired a secure sense of self. Religious stories have been central to every […]

What Climate Catastrophy?

In the mid 1980’s science was pointing to a looming climate catastrophe. I stressed over this for a few years, but finally felt … Que Sera, Sera. Now, 30+ years later, it is happening just as science predicted. The scientist’s main concern was for how the destabilizing effects of the ensuing climate extremes would influence […]

Science Proves Buddha Right!

Google [CBS News When low expectations achieve big results] for research that reveals how we shoot ourselves in the foot with our expectations. This drives yet another nail into the coffin of faith-based wishful thinking. This is not to say expectations aren’t useful or natural. Indeed, considered from a Symptoms Point Of View, they help […]

Cultivating Character

I’ve found that some people in Taoist circles have passionate ideals about cultivating one’s character. Seen from a symptoms point of view, passion stems from the mother of need — fear. The visceral fear arising from feeling little control over life drives a need to do something… such as cultivate character. Chapter 54 has the […]

Ancient Signs Of Modern Behavior

The gravest existential issue that ancient man’s thinking confronted was death. Once symbolic thought evolved, humanity stepped out of the spontaneous conscious experience other animals likely benefit from. Once we acquired an objective sense of past and future, we could worry about death and other virtual losses beyond a moment to-moment experience. For worrywarts, that […]

Loving Your Eco-System

I assume that all of us, in our deepest moments of contemplation, wonder just who we are. Of course, we have our given name, our gender, our ideals, our likes and dislikes, which create and maintain our “illusion of self”, as Buddha pointed out in his 2nd Noble Truth. How tenacious we cleave to those […]

Where does the fault lie?

“The fault lies not in the stars but in ourselves”. That bit of Shakespeare speaks to our modern paradigm. By modern, I mean the epoch beginning with the Renaissance (14th century) that followed the fall of Rome, i.e., the so-called Dark Ages. Note how these labels bias the view of cultural progress right away in […]

Laws as Symptoms, not Solutions

Google [TED Is The Law Making Us Less Free] for a sobering account of yet another way we shoot ourselves in the foot. As the speaker, Philip Howard, says, “More laws now mean more chaos. What we have is a combination of anarchy and public paralysis. There’s this fetish with rules that has kind of […]

Mind Over Milkshake

I stopped smoking a few decades ago and soon gained 40 pounds. Not wishing to lug all that extra baggage around, I decided to eat less. Actually, I would have quit eating altogether if I could get away with it. The more I lost, the less I needed to eat to maintain whatever weight I […]

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