Imagine this yellow circle is a young man named Jack. Jack is friends with a young blue circle man named Jim. Being friends, Jack and Jim regularly share in each other’s company and engage in behaviors typical of friendship, such as discussing matters of mutual interest, jointly participating in recreational activities, requesting assistance of one…
Certain resources can be exploited without lessening their quantity. The idea is to mine with your eyes, to reap with your nondisruptive presence. What might one of these resources be? The forest comes to mind. No matter the number of times one stands at the edge of a neatly groomed crop field, stealing glimpses through…
Last year, while loitering in an apartment to which I’d just been granted admittance, I noticed affixed to a closet door a thin, glossy sheet of paper–a page from a magazine, removed neatly and elevated in status to an artifact more deserving of one’s attention than the other pages left behind. On the page was…
People without progeny have difficulty conceiving of what it would be like to have a child. This is wildly unexpected. It seems their prediction effort should yield something more veracious, more definitive than an ever-receding mirage of uncertainty, especially since the future they’re trying to imagine is, in many ways, simply a reciprocal of the…
In spite of the facetiously cynical opinion, bolstered by empirical truth, that concludes last week’s post, I think most people would prefer to understand what it is they believe than to opt for the ignorant alternative. Besides the contentment afforded those who answer their internal inquiries, introspective individuals are also well-equipped to defend their beliefs…
It’s clear that the capacity of a guest speaker to influence their audience depends not singly on their message but also on their delivery. More opaque is the extent of what this could mean. Acknowledging the existence of a matter little understood–an important step, I’ll not deny–is far from offering understanding, yet the inanity of…
Depending on the duration and intensity of what one had involved oneself in, emergence from an Immersive Experience will be accompanied by a Cognitive Transformation Period, lasting hours, days, perhaps weeks. To be clear, the associated neural reconfiguration should be thought of as occurring in addition to rather than instead of the ever-present ebbs and…
The concept of opposites is described to children as representing the maximum dissimilarity possible between two things that share a relation—hot and cold are opposites sharing a relation in temperature, approaching and receding are opposites sharing a relation in proximity over time, etc. So when some of these children become adults and find themselves contemplating…
Provided Eastern ideas of unity are temporarily dismissed, we can adopt an individualistic perspective and imagine there to be a distinct, if porous, division between our internal world and the world that exists outside us—wondrously, the latter is as unique to each person as is the former. We can then speak of an event’s origin…
We postpone taking actions that facilitate our comfort in cases where immediately obliging the desire would result in others’ discomfort. This is polite behavior. For example, you won’t see a sober passenger take a piss on the subway. What’s happening implicitly in many of these cases, including the example above, is the establishment of a…
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