habituation
… we are born with particular mental tendencies … and over time, certain tendencies are repeatedly reinforced, creating ever-deeper tracks for our minds to follow. When the Buddha taught about the human mind, he put forth an idea that has been developed independently by psychologists and neuroscientists in more recent years: that we mainly interpret [...]
To what extent am I an astronomer? In The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, George Kubler* suggests that time is conveyed in signals... whose message is based on the past, like old light seen by astronomers. The signal energies, similar to karma, transmit impulses from the past.... Like the ancient light of the stars, karma has been accumulating from time immemorial. [...]
My last post on Late-Capitalist Youth looked at Nietzsche’s call to control our passions, in order to gain a sense of freedom and new direction for our lives—but the Buddha looked at self-overcoming as well. To move towards a new patterning for our desires, we need to have some space for the conditioned systems of [...]
We visited Taiwan for several weeks and witnessed the marked ascendency of Asian economic dynamism grounded on a functional culture and rational economic policies. There is a good balance between free-market capitalism, functional social values and pragmatic public expenditures. The speed of economic growth and social optimism during the last 20 years is in marked [...]