A short selection from the Introduction to Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. In essence, the pivotal ‘two trees’ theme is this: A celebration of Nature, and Man, as two sovereign and mutually revealing (phylogenic and techno-genic) ‘evolutions’. . . . I don’t promise, of course, that the book is an easy read if you …
Another short selection from the Introduction to Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. 95 I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody too? Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell! They’d banish us, you know. How dreary to be a somebody! How public, like a frog, To tell your name the livelong day To an …
The first section of Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice begins. PART I —Trouble with GAIA Gaia … 1 (also Gaea …) Gk Myth the Earth personified as a goddess, daughter of Chaos. She was born the mother and wife of Uranus (Heaven); their offspring included the Titans and the Cyclops. 2 the earth viewed as a …
A short selection from Essay Two in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. Organisms consist of germ cells that transmit heritable information and somatic cells that carry out ordinary functions. Germ cells are not altered by environment, learning, or the morphological changes of a lifetime. This information is lost after each generation. —Weismann’s germ plasm …
A short selection from Essay Three in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. [YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS ON A FIRST READING OF THE TWO BUDDHAS SEQUENCE] However a phenotype develops, however genetic algorithms conspire with environment to produce, maintain, and alter an organism over its lifetime, or perhaps even pass on some of …
A short selection from Essay Four from Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice, the physical prequel for my metaphysical ramblings on Humans and Nature (the Two Buddhas). Our Platonic heritage prompts us to view means and medians as the hard ‘realities,’ and the variation that permits their calculation as a set of transient and imperfect …
A short selection from Essay Five in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. (The sequel to the “prequel” in Part Four.) [YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS ON A FIRST READING OF THE TWO BUDDHAS SEQUENCE] Now let us suppose that … a being, who can see the individual molecules, opens and closes the hole, …
A short selection from Essay Six in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. (So let’s step beyond our inner nerd now, and follow our Buddhas.) “What is the Way?” Ordinary mind is the Way. “Should I turn toward it or not?” If you turn toward it you turn away from it. “How can I know the …
A short selection from Essay Seven in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. [YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS ON A FIRST READING OF THE TWO BUDDHAS SEQUENCE] Personally, I (as a thinking mind) prefer the reflecting pool simile given in Two Buddhas, Part-5 over the other more discrete conceptions of consciousness listed there; for …
A short selection from Essay Eight in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. [YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS ON A FIRST READING OF THE TWO BUDDHAS SEQUENCE] Primordial Awareness [the Way] is perfect and all-pervading. How could it be dependent upon practice and realization? The movement of Reality does not need us to give …
The second section of Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice begins. PART II —Darwin and the Tree of Life … as a result of competition two similar species scarcely ever occupy similar niches —Georgii Frantsevich Gause [1] I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection, …
A short selection from Essay Ten in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. Look again at that dot … every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there—on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam … In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come …
A short selection from Essay Eleven in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile. [YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS ON A FIRST READING OF THE TWO BUDDHAS SEQUENCE] If, wherever you are, you take the role of the host, then whatever spot you stand in will be a true one. Then whatever circumstances surround you, they …
A short selection from Essay Twelve in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice The heavy is the root of the light. The unmoved is the source of all movement. Thus the master travels all day without leaving home. However splendid the views, she stays serenely in herself. Why should the lord of the country flit …
All of Essay Thirteen in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. … the result is not death to the unsuccessful competitor, but few or no offspring. Sexual selection is, therefore, less rigorous than natural selection. —Charles Darwin [1] From the ecological standpoint, a species is a population of organisms that can’t breed beyond itself without …
A short selection from Essay Fourteen in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice According to modern ecological theory, high diversity at any trophic level of a community is possible only under the influence of cropping. —Steven M. Stanley, 1973 [1] The wolf makes the deer strong. —Oji-Cree stone-age wisdom Though the young of a species …
A short selection from Essay Fifteen in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. A bird might marry a fish, but where would they live? —Tevye character, in Fiddler on the Roof For the need of a niche, or for the good of a ‘race’, sexual traits intensify the cut of new species, just as they …
A short selection from Essay Sixteen in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. [YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS ON A FIRST READING OF THE TWO BUDDHAS SEQUENCE] … novel behavior, (including the verbal and conceptual behaviors we call “ideas”) is the result of an orderly and dynamic competition among previously established behaviors, during which old …
The Whole of Essay Seventeen in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice: The story of Old Buddha ends (for the moment) and the story of Young Buddha begins. I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. —Friedrich Nietzsche [1] The final lesson to take from our …
In recent years a promising scientific approach to comparative mythology has emerged in which researchers apply conceptual tools that biologists use to decipher the evolution of living species. In the hands of those who analyze myths, the method, known as phylogenetic analysis, consists of connecting successive versions of a mythological story and constructing a family …
The Whole of Essay Nineteen in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer. —William of Ockham [1] The flexible behaviour of higher animals can’t be trusted to maintain resource partitions; only innate structure can. Thus ecological stability requires not only that inapposite curiosity …
A short selection from Essay Twenty in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. The man pulling radishes pointed the way with a radish —Haiku by Issa The wolf is tied by subtle threads to the woods he moves through. —Barry Lopez [1] Our inner cave-man can clearly see his world has changed, but despite the …
A short selection from Essay Twenty-One in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. —like one that on a lonesome road doth walk in fear and dread, and having once turned round walks on, and turns no more his head; because he knows, a frightful fiend doth close behind him tread. —Samuel Taylor Coleridge [1] Let’s …
A very short selection from Essay Twenty-Two in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. He moved very, very slowly and carefully. With the most slight and gentle movements, trying to catch at the sound he moved his head round what seemed like a billionth part of a billionth part of a degree, slipped behind a …
A short selection from Essay Twenty-Three in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. [YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS ON A FIRST READING OF THE TWO BUDDHAS SEQUENCE] I now want to show that there is ‘plenty’ of room [at the bottom] … The biological example of writing information on a small scale has inspired …
A short selection from Essay Twenty-Four in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. [YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS ON A FIRST READING OF THE TWO BUDDHAS SEQUENCE] [Phenomenological reduction] is a piece of pure self-reflection, exhibiting the most original evident facts; moreover, if it brings into view in them the outlines of idealism … …
By admin in Humanity’s Future A short selection from Essay Twenty-Five in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. [YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS ON A FIRST READING OF THE TWO BUDDHAS SEQUENCE] What would it be like to settle into your own body, into a sense of just being alive, even for a few moments … You …
A short selection from Essay Twenty-Six in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. [YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS ON A FIRST READING OF THE TWO BUDDHAS SEQUENCE] It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is …
A short selection from Essay Twenty-Seven in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. [YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS ON A FIRST READING OF THE TWO BUDDHAS SEQUENCE] “If your cart doesn’t move,” [Dogen] asks, “is it better to prod the cart or to prod the horse (sic)” …everyone knows you should prod the horse …
A short selection from Essay Twenty-Eight in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. [YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS ON A FIRST READING OF THE TWO BUDDHAS SEQUENCE] … to understand religion and to affirm it are not the same but almost exactly the opposite. —Merleau-Ponty (as interpreted by Remy C. Kwant) [1] Objectivity is …
The fourth section of Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice begins. PART IV —Pandora’s Box Give me a lever, a fulcrum, and a place to stand, and I will move the Earth. —Archimedes Prometheus … Gk Myth a demi-god … worshiped by craftsmen. When Zeus hid fire away from man [author’s note: according to Bullfinch’s Mythology, fire …
A short selection from Essay Thirty in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. … and one day she slipped off the cover and looked in. Forthwith there escaped a multitude of plagues for hapless man—such as gout, rheumatism, and colic for his body, and envy, spite, and revenge for his mind —Bullfinch’s Mythology With the …
A short selection from Essay Thirty-one in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. [YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS ON A FIRST READING OF THE TWO BUDDHAS SEQUENCE] It may very well be that in our conscious inner lives the interplay among the senses is what constitutes the sense of touch. Perhaps touch is not …
A short selection from Essay Thirty-two in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. Therefore, since the truth seems to be like the proverbial door, which no one can fail to hit, in this respect it must be easy, but the fact that we can have a whole truth and not the particular part we aim …
A short selection from Essay Thirty-three in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. [YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS ON A FIRST READING OF THE TWO BUDDHAS SEQUENCE] … though commoners have no method of ‘beating the cart’ … on the way of the Buddha … this is the very eye of study … it …
A short selection from Essay Thirty-four in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay. —Stephen Jay Gould [1] …
Sorry, this little essay is a “mouthful” yes. But that’s the point, you see. Please read to the bottom. All of Essay Thirty-five in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. When we claim to describe what’s Really going on by our words, no matter how beautiful, such words are already in error. Truth simply cannot …
My contribution to this essay is actually quite short, but the quote by Kassewitz, which works in counterpoint to my propositions on original human nature, doubles the length. All of Essay Thirty-Six in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. [YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS ON A FIRST READING OF THE TWO BUDDHAS SEQUENCE] The …
A short selection from Essay Thirty-seven in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. Unlike monkeys, humans also use mirror neurons to directly imitate actions and understand their meanings. … Gallese and Rizzolatti found that when people listened to sentences describing actions, the same mirror neurons fired as would have had the subjects performed the actions …
A short selection from Essay Thirty-eight in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. What I cannot create, I do not understand. (Written on Richard Feynman’s blackboard at the time of his death.) There is one consequence of a supercharged mirror neuron system (See last two Essays, 36 and 37) with the ability to impersonate inanimate …
A short selection from Essay Thirty-nine in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. [YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS ON A FIRST READING OF THE TWO BUDDHAS SEQUENCE] We are between stories. —Thomas Berry [1] Our stories aren’t real. But we know this only in that ‘dumb’ part of the brain that’s been left out …
The last section of Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice begins. PART V —The Extremophile Choice The rewilding of the tortoise in its ancient habitat represents not only the species’ slow drift away from extinction, but an overall movement toward a more plentiful world. What the bolson tortoise reminds us is that it is ultimately …
A selection (not so short) from Essay Forty-one in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet, believing what we don’t believe does not exhilarate. —Emily Dickinson [1] So with the stage thus set, we are now finally ready to examine the benefits that flow …
A short selection from Essay Forty-two in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. Miss Sullivan touched my forehead and spelled with decided emphasis, “Think.” In a flash I knew that the word was the name of the process that was going on in my head. This was my first conscious perception of an abstract idea. …
A short selection from Essay Forty-three in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. [YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS ON A FIRST READING OF THE TWO BUDDHAS SEQUENCE] Direct your eye inward, and you will find a thousand regions in your mind yet undiscovered. Travel them and be expert in home-cosmography. —Thoreau [1] From personal …
A short selection from Essay Forty-four in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. [YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS ON A FIRST READING OF THE TWO BUDDHAS SEQUENCE] The subtle source is clear and bright; the branching streams flow in the dark. To attach to things is primordial illusion; to encounter the absolute is not …
A short selection from Essay Forty-five in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. Do not depart from deceptions and errors; for they of themselves are the nature of True Reality. When all things are illumined by wisdom and there is neither grasping nor throwing away, then you can see into your own nature and gain …
A short selection from Essay Forty-six in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. [YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS ON A FIRST READING OF THE TWO BUDDHAS SEQUENCE] 9 … God caused to spring up … the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the middle of the …
A short selection from Essay Forty-seven in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. When you see forms or hear sounds fully engaging body-and-mind, you intuit dharmas intimately. Unlike things and their reflections in the mirror, and unlike the moon and its reflection in the water, when one side is illuminated, the other side is dark. …
A short selection from Essay Forty-eight — one of the longer essays, and third from the end — in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice Everyone has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of a dry leaf of an old table …
A short selection from Essay Forty-nine — one of the longer essays, and the second last — in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice There is something in this [experimental path] which reminds us of the obstinate adherence of Columbus to his notion of the necessary existence of the New World; and … may serve to teach us reliance on those …
A short selection from Essay Fifty — one of the longer essays, and THE LAST — in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice The Great Way is not difficult; just avoid picking and choosing. —from the Hsin Hsin Ming [1] A Buddhist monk commits to pay attention to whatever “arises” in his or her daily life and, when it’s clearly helpful, …
A short selection from the Introduction to Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. In essence, the pivotal ‘two trees’ theme is this: A celebration of Nature, and Man, as two sovereign and mutually revealing (phylogenic and techno-genic) ‘evolutions’. . . . I don’t promise, of course, that the book is an easy read if you …
Another short selection from the Introduction to Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. 95 I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody too? Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell! They’d banish us, you know. How dreary to be a somebody! How public, like a frog, To tell your name the livelong day To an …
The first section of Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice begins. PART I —Trouble with GAIA Gaia … 1 (also Gaea …) Gk Myth the Earth personified as a goddess, daughter of Chaos. She was born the mother and wife of Uranus (Heaven); their offspring included the Titans and the Cyclops. 2 the earth viewed as a …
A short selection from Essay Two in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. Organisms consist of germ cells that transmit heritable information and somatic cells that carry out ordinary functions. Germ cells are not altered by environment, learning, or the morphological changes of a lifetime. This information is lost after each generation. —Weismann’s germ plasm …
A short selection from Essay Six in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. (So let’s step beyond our inner nerd now, and follow our Buddhas.) “What is the Way?” Ordinary mind is the Way. “Should I turn toward it or not?” If you turn toward it you turn away from it. “How can I know the …
The second section of Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice begins. PART II —Darwin and the Tree of Life … as a result of competition two similar species scarcely ever occupy similar niches —Georgii Frantsevich Gause [1] I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection, …
A short selection from Essay Ten in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. Look again at that dot … every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there—on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam … In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come …
All of Essay Thirteen in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. … the result is not death to the unsuccessful competitor, but few or no offspring. Sexual selection is, therefore, less rigorous than natural selection. —Charles Darwin [1] From the ecological standpoint, a species is a population of organisms that can’t breed beyond itself without …
The Whole of Essay Seventeen in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice: The story of Old Buddha ends (for the moment) and the story of Young Buddha begins. I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. —Friedrich Nietzsche [1] The final lesson to take from our …
In recent years a promising scientific approach to comparative mythology has emerged in which researchers apply conceptual tools that biologists use to decipher the evolution of living species. In the hands of those who analyze myths, the method, known as phylogenetic analysis, consists of connecting successive versions of a mythological story and constructing a family …
A short selection from Essay Twenty in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. The man pulling radishes pointed the way with a radish —Haiku by Issa The wolf is tied by subtle threads to the woods he moves through. —Barry Lopez [1] Our inner cave-man can clearly see his world has changed, but despite the …
A short selection from Essay Twenty-Four in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. [YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS ON A FIRST READING OF THE TWO BUDDHAS SEQUENCE] [Phenomenological reduction] is a piece of pure self-reflection, exhibiting the most original evident facts; moreover, if it brings into view in them the outlines of idealism … …
A short selection from Essay Twenty-Seven in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. [YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS ON A FIRST READING OF THE TWO BUDDHAS SEQUENCE] “If your cart doesn’t move,” [Dogen] asks, “is it better to prod the cart or to prod the horse (sic)” …everyone knows you should prod the horse …
A short selection from Essay Thirty-four in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay. —Stephen Jay Gould [1] …
The last section of Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice begins. PART V —The Extremophile Choice The rewilding of the tortoise in its ancient habitat represents not only the species’ slow drift away from extinction, but an overall movement toward a more plentiful world. What the bolson tortoise reminds us is that it is ultimately …
A short selection from Essay Forty-five in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. Do not depart from deceptions and errors; for they of themselves are the nature of True Reality. When all things are illumined by wisdom and there is neither grasping nor throwing away, then you can see into your own nature and gain …
A short selection from Essay Forty-eight — one of the longer essays, and third from the end — in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice Everyone has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of a dry leaf of an old table …
