The confusion arising from doing everything twice.

We’re all familiar with the frustrations of being caught in a feedback loop where everything is out of synch. We hear things twice. We respond, but then cannot verify that it registered so we do it again, hit a key, or repeat what we’re saying. This only sets off another cascade of rebounding echoes and

There’s no freeing the mind without respecting the limitations of the body.

“(Taoism) isn’t a process of learning more facts or greater skills. It is the unlearning of wrong habits and opinions.” — Alan Watts It’s not just the Singularity Boys who get this wrong…. What is unlearning?

Approaching Conscience?

Perhaps a way to shed light on where this track is heading is to introduce conscience. We think of conscience as the internal touchstone for an externally directed morality. There is a superstructure of Good & Evil and conscience is where this battle is joined inside each of us. This conception of conscience covers any

Sufficiency without number

Sufficiency is an attitude not a quantity. Chasing after desires we have lost any sense that happiness can be anything other than a list checked off. Pursuit. Nothing could be more destabilizing. Either for an individual or a culture. And, before we get caught up in some form of zealotry…. Yes, the desire to control

This is key

I just stumbled upon Donald D. Hoffman‘s work in The Atlantic Magazine. It was one of those exceedingly rare moments when a crucial new piece is added to the puzzle. He’s a cognitive scientist. He’s been studying the roots of perception and his research has led to his articulation of a key missing link if

On Form

There’s a connection and relationship between the way we internalize honesty/deception and how we relate to form. Form is the means by which error is recognized and the means by which correctness is recognized. There are, it seems, two Muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of

What is at the root of our crisis of leadership?

We expect a leader to “play the part.” Anyone caught-up in roles has nothing to offer us in our predicament. Facing our predicament requires that we embrace uncertainty and set-aside the doing-things-twice role playing forces upon us. Someone acting in this way just does not, “Look like a leader.”

Falling Awake

We say, we “fall asleep.” We imagine a vertiginous scene, leaning over a precipice. Just a moment’s loss of attention, and over we go. We see this as a kind of death. A conflation of self-consciousness with life? There is an expectation that attention and reflexive self-awareness are identical, or at least that we cannot

Stop Counting

In dreams we approach a form of knowing that we find difficult to access while awake. We tend to discount the sensation that there was “something to it.” Or, we displace our fascination within the dream in a vain attempt to narrate its dramatic particulars. As this fails to match our original wonder, as we

“Why Is It Important for You That History Have a Direction?”

This question is asked by John Michael Greer in a reply to a comment on his most recent post. He has been slogging through the log-jam of our cultural resistance to abandoning the bi-polar insistence that we are bound either to Heaven or Hell, Utopia or dystopia. That if we cannot have our heart’s desire

Process

process early 14c., “fact of being carried on” (e.g. in process), from O.Fr. proces “journey” (13c.), from L. processus “process, advance, progress,” from pp. stem of procedere “go forward” (see proceed). Meaning “course or method of action” is from mid-14c.; sense of “continuous… As with so many words, we rarely look at where they came

A Web of Obligations

We tie ourselves within a web of obligations, forgetting that while these so-called acts of responsibility are meant to help us fulfill our lives, they actually keep us from it. What struck me was the way we handle the mid-term. It’s not just in the short-term that we do everything twice. In the mid-term, in