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

Separation Anxiety

We’re expected to, “Get over it!” In a time with few acknowledged initiation rituals this traumatic breaking of unity is almost universally accepted as a rite-of-passage. Why does separation – let’s consider it in any and every form it can take. Why does it create anxiety? What does this say more generally about the violence,

Beyond Zombies and Vampires

Zombies & Vampires, Oh My! This post, an essay for Vinay Gupta’s The Future We Deserve, delineated the lay of the land today. We are hemmed in by these two types, both of behaviors and of ways of looking at those around us. But, in the end, is there anything to be gained by remaining

“The Greatest Illusion in the World is the Illusion of Separation”

The greatest benefit I’ve found from the internet is the way it functions as a tool for Serendipity. It is an electronic I Ching of sorts, though with many additional pitfalls one avoids by sticking to casting bones or sticks. The title of this post appeared as one of those FB images sent out to

Taking a breath…

After a week out of town and still recovering from a cold caught in that time away from my customary relative isolation, I’m still not ready to write anything substantive here. This post is just to let you know this blog is not down, only temporarily awaiting fresh energies. I actually welcome these times –

“Fishing in the Swamp,” a cross-post from Antonio Dias Fiction

This post, at The Living Notebook gave me the title and the impetus to write on this subject here. The line comes from Hemingway and TLN – I’m sorry, but the blog appears to be anonymous and I don’t have the writer’s name… – uses it to weave a connection between two approaches to writing.

Isaac Newton Wasn’t a Newtonian, Socrates wasn’t Plato…

Perhaps a little one, as insights go, the title of this post came to me last week. I’ve long railed at the power of a reductivist, Newtonian world view that has given those who see the world as a series of problems to be solved the tools, from ballistics to The Calculus, to run down

Resistance

Nothing exists solely to fulfill a single purpose or to take a singular role in a single process. How can I realize that the “answer” is not to remake the world in my image, that no singular image of what the world “should” be is either possible or beneficial? If these are true, then what

Wrestling with the World in Virtual Reality: a Reblog from Networkolgies

Originally posted on Networkologies:
Doing Battle with the World via "Virtual Reality": The Tibetan Jewel Tree, on the cover to Robert Thurman’s excellent translation/explication On the Difficulty of Understanding the Insights in Classical Buddhist Texts Classical Buddhist texts having something in common with Deleuze, or Networkological thought? I must admit, I’ve spent a lot of…

Jeppe Dyrendom Graugaard’s Conversation with Andrew Taggart

I’ve come across an opportunity to extend what goes on here by pointing you at another conversation. For me there is great Joy in being able to do this! It is a sign of the growth of community I’ve been experiencing lately after so many decades in the wilderness. Let me leave it at that

Drowning in Search of Security

There is a persistent delusion behind the fevered activities of the state. As our predicament deepens it acts as an accelerant as it focuses the attentions of the most powerful among us to act in increasingly destructive ways. Simply stated it is the expectation that exceptionalism can be maintained in any meaningful way as we

What’s to Come? Beyond Bohemia

Shoal Hope has been, among other things, an opportunity to look into the phenomena of Bohemia as it evolved in the early Twentieth Century, the way the concept of Bohemia began to lose its way; from Berger’s Moment of Cubism before World War I, to the aftermath of that war, and the corroding effects of