worry

Who are you? (Part IV)

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 […]

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 […]

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 Even a little progress is freedom from fear, p.30; Fear is the Bottom Line, p.139; Reward, Fear & Need, […]

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 […]

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). Research like this challenges the beliefs of human exceptionalism we’ve been cultivating to support our “illusion of self”— humanity’s collective ego, so to speak. Sure, we are different […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Placebo Effect

Google 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 people […]

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