Aug 09
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. …
Aug 08
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 …
Aug 06
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 …
Aug 04
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 …
Aug 02
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 …
Aug 01
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 …
Jul 28
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 …
Jul 26
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 …
Jul 24
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] …
Jul 22
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 …
