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 Who are you? (part I) 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 our ancestors previously acquired a secure sense of self. Religious stories have been central to every civilization’s agenda. […]

What Climate Catastrophy?

In the mid 80’s much in science was pointing to a looming climate catastrophe. I stressed over this for a few years and then felt… Que Sera, Sera. I see now, 30 years later, that it is going down just like the computer models indicated. These models were not warning of climate warming per se. […]

Science Proves Buddha Right!

Another nail has been driven into the coffin of faith-based thinking. Watch this short video, Low Expectations = Happiness, that outlines how we shoot ourselves in the foot through expectations born of wishful thinking. This is not to say expectations aren’t useful or natural. Indeed, considered from a symptoms point of view, I realize they […]

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, I see passion overall as arising from the mother of need — fear. In this case, they fear lack of control over life, which drives their desire to control life… to cultivate character. […]

Ancient Signs Of Modern Behavior

Modern behavior and an ability to think and have knowledge are two sides of the same coin. Recent discoveries show this goes way back, even before Adam and Eve ;-). Our existential difficulties are a consequence of the unique ability we have for thinking and knowing… and for thinking we know. As chapter 71 says, […]

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. ‘Modern’ began with the Renaissance that followed the so-called Dark Ages. Note how these labels bias the view of cultural progress right away in favor of the modern. I see such progress as a two-step forward, […]

Laws as Symptoms, not Solutions

This short NPR/TED talk, Is The Law Making Us Less Free, is 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 […]

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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