“Let’s be realistic!”

We feel the weight of this admonition upon us everywhere we turn. It stands like a wall between us and it echoes in our minds. We take it as a warning. In fact it is our prison.

Imagine we had a compass…

This thought experiment came to me while out sailing with a friend. What if we discovered that our boat has a compass? What if we had no idea what it was, or how it worked? There it sat. And, at times we would notice certain apparent coincidences. Certain alignments with other things we were familiar

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?

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

Cause & Effect

The greatest difficulty when we turn our attention on something like Cause & Effect comes from the astounding inertia of conditioned assumptions. To make a case that Cause & Effect is an illusion is to put one frail voice up against thousands of years of common sense. This is why it’s so important to sort

Plasticity Takes Time

Our neural systems are not just like roots: growing, dying back, seeking nourishment, and succumbing to obstacles, poisons, pathogens. They are roots. They deal in connections, finding and bridging phenomena. How do we increase clarity and coherence?

It’s a crime, part II

Must we be pure? Whenever we confront the depths of our corruption we hear this whining plea. Ego deflates us, How can I meet such a standard? A false question. We are what we are. We will do what we feel we must do. What is in question is what do these questions mean? Who

New Stories to counter the Thaumaturgy of Destruction

…every malign spell has a lie at the heart of it, and if you can expose the lie in a way that the person under the spell can see and understand, the lie dissolves and takes the spell with it. It’s like the old claim that a demon can never change itself wholly out of

Beyond Judgments and Opinions…

We all have opinions. We all make judgments. None of us is satisfied…. What if these are connected? I’ve long felt a hankering for getting beyond opinions. It’s easy to see this as a form of striving after certainty. We see opinion, as it relates to truth, as a negotiation with authority. Whoever has authority

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

Startling Sleepwalkers, On the Prospects of Waking Them from Their Nightmares.

The New York Times article on Paul Kingsnorth and Dark Mountain. I’m left with a feeling that – if my response were to be reported in The New York Times – the headline would read, “Petulant Doomer Disappointed at Being Misunderstood!” As calm as this story is, its passive aggressive antibodies hidden from view by