The social qualities integral to our ancestral hunter-gatherer old way (1) just happen to mirror the core “spiritual” qualities that the world’s religions promote. That’s no coincidence. Indeed, those innate qualities of harmony we now seek are the very ones we lost when we left the old way for the alluring material benefits and security […]
Continue reading…worry
What Climate Catastrophy?
In the mid 1980’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. […]
Continue reading…Fear & Need Born in Nothing
Fear and need are the underlying principles for most of my observations. I know this rationale often raises more questions than it answers, so more clarification is in order. Not that I haven’t tried before… see Fear is the Bottom Line and One who speaks does not know? Well, third time’s a charm, right? On […]
Continue reading…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 […]
Continue reading…Cultivating Ego
Google: Rats Experience Feelings of Regret, for research discovering that when a rat realizes it made a mistake, its body and brain show signs of regret (1). This finding is yet another nail in the coffin of human ‘exceptionalism’. Sure, we are different from rats, but so are butterflies and cats. Research like this truly […]
Continue reading…Of Mountains, Molehills and the Supernatural
I’ve noticed how our species appears to have a universal sense of the supernatural. Now, I know science types and atheists will probably dispute that, at least as far as ‘universal’ applies to them. They’ll claim they don’t believe in the supernatural. Fair enough, so let me rephrase this… Supernatural essentially amounts to our mind’s […]
Continue reading…Stupidly Intelligent
The Science News review, Our Final Invention, about the impending dangers of Artificial Intelligence caught my eye. (Google: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era.) Consider this quote, “Computer systems advanced enough to act with human-level intelligence will likely be unpredictable and inscrutable all of the time.” He is worried that, “we could […]
Continue reading…Feeding the Worry Gene
Have you noticed how there is always something ‘wrong’? No matter how ideal circumstances are, something will shortly go awry. All this may be obvious, I suppose. What is less obvious is how the perception and experience of good fortune and misfortune are complimentary. As chapter 58 puts it, Misfortune, yet of good fortune its […]
Continue reading…Breathe Into It
It helps to regard language as the smoke that arises out of emotion’s fire. You could say words are cognitive reflections of human emotions. As such, they’re more fantasy than reality. For example, you can understand a volcano with words metaphorically, symbolically, abstractly, but you cannot truly know it through words. You can only know […]
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 […]
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