Creatively Advancing into Novelty
Originally posted on Toy Adams‘ Imagine Jesus Advent blog. … Empathy is a good thing, right? I’d say most people tend to think so. Things like mirror neurons, morality, doing the right thing, understanding, sharing peoples feelings, and other good stuff like that all come to mind at the utterance of the word “empathy.” I…
At the center of the new philosophy of nature that emerged victorious in the 17th century was a mechanistic doctrine of nature. This position was, in fact, often referred to as the “new mechanical philosophy.” This view of nature had two fundamental dimensions, both of which exemplified the demand that all “occult” qualities and powers…
Pete Holmes: That’s interesting because I think most of my comedian friends, specifically, are often worried that if they go to therapy–or if they work on themselves, or if they meditate, or if they have a spiritual practice or a discipline or something–that they’ll be less funny. A lot of them want to smoke cigarettes…
Preempt the time spent on television and organized activities and have them spend it instead on claiming their imaginations. For in the end, that is all we have. If a thing cannot be imagined first — a cake, a relationship, a cure for AIDS — it cannot be. Life is bound by what we can…
“This permanence is the result of a process that researchers call ‘chunking’: a person using drugs or alcohol experiences a burst of the activating neurotransmitter, dopamine, encoding memories and stimuli associated with that high in the brain. As substance use turns chronic, those same networks in the brain are increasingly engaged, and eventually the habit…
We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth. –Carl Gustav Jung I like listening to podcasts. One show in particular that I like is called “Get Up On This,” hosted by Jensen Karp and Matthew Robinson. In the show, Jensen…
The self or ego has always been a stumbling-block for Western philosophy because of its resistance to accommodation within its favored framework of substance-ontology. The idea that ‘the self’ is a thing (substance), and that whatever takes place in ‘my mind’ and ‘my thoughts’ is a matter of the activity of a thing of a…