Nature is a term for that which was born

I’ve studied the meaning of “nature” for forty odd years. I took a class on it in 1972, when there were few such courses. I’ve been as confused over what it could possibly mean as anyone, caught between all the assumptions that have stuck to the term. Then in the first week of this year,

The Nature of Conditioning

Without this insight there can be much confusion between any action we might contemplate or take and striving. This confusion can lead either to paralysis or frustration. By linking striving to the attempt to outrun conditionality connects the futility of an approach to life that sees only division and seeks to find answers to self generated problems with the deepest manifestation of that impulse in the desire to transcend our conditioned natures.

“The truth for me…”

“The Truth for me must be what I need it to be.” David Bohm describing the justifications of Ego. Whenever we allow our language to atrophy – as we do when we rely on labels to stand-in for complexities – we arrive at a paradox: We feel the need to be concise. We fear no

The Space We Need

Art school was where I learned that success was a trap. How limited my teachers were. Experts. Hemmed in by reduction. It would take thirty-five years for this to sink in. Not surprising if you consider the trajectory of the intervening decades, beginning with the height of their positions at the time. The accumulated authority

The fantasy of control

So long as we keep expecting that what funnels through public discourse are choices that lead to results we are stuck in the nightmare fantasy of control. Brexit. Trump versus Clinton. All of the day’s public questions are mired in manipulations. We remain complicit so long as we feel we must make the choice our

This Means War!

Rufus T. Firefly scuttling center stage to make his pronouncement…. There’s always a hidden glee behind the crowd’s reaction. “Before, I had to hold it together. Now? I can let go. A free pass. No resort is too extreme. We’re at war.” The next stage is the rush to, “Get in the fight!” After all,

Questions of Identity

Schools fail us by teaching students how to work with knowledge rather than how to deal with ignorance, not be a sucker with the unknown. Nassim Taleb This neither begins nor ends with schools. In a time when the most popular public stance is to celebrate our fears and idolize those who act on them

Aphasia

“There’s no money in it!” So long as we look to an extractive model to determine how we shape and define our perceptions of value we are condemned to suffering and implicated in its proliferation. We interpret the deep and profound roots of our predicament as an inevitability. We call this human nature. This conflation

The Limits of Intervention

Carol Dunn ‏@caroldn Why does history always seem to repeat itself: because perceived threat makes it easy to adopt behavior loops that leads to same behaviors Carol works in disaster relief/prevention in the Pacific Northwest. I follow the Burma-Shave-like series of Tweets she sends out each day that unfold into a narrative, somewhere between stream-of-consciousness

A Monopoly on Violence

This is the term of art used to describe and justify government’s control of military and police functions. There is an obviousness, an inevitability to the rationale behind it that leads from, “There are bad-guys.” to “We need to defend ourselves against evil-doers.” to “Stop! Or I’ll shoot!” And, then we accept the entire package,

Intelligence

Tossing the Die One thing coming into view is that intelligence is not…. I began to write in earnest when I discovered – not that what I had to say was hard to say – but that I needed to work at…. For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the

Why?

…transformation …entails …that problems of knowledge …be seen in connection with the wider questions pertaining to human life. …why are we inquiring in the first place? As Midgley (2004) points out: “thinking out how to live is a more basic and urgent use of the human intellect than the discovery of any fact whatsoever, …the