Aug 18
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 …
Aug 16
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 …
Aug 15
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 …
Aug 11
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 …
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 …
