Entry tags:
QotD: Tradition
Tradition is tending the flame, not worshipping the ashes.
--Composer Gustav Mahler
--Composer Gustav Mahler
QotD: Your Path
Your confusion is not pathology, it is path. It has something to show you that clarity could never reveal. The nature of chaos is wisdom, but you must provide a home for it to receive its mysteries.
Your feeling of disconnection is not neurotic, it is intelligent. It has something to show you that oneness could never reveal. If you will practice the yoga of non-abandonment and provide safe passage – it will disclose an unmet doorway.
Your loneliness, your shakiness, and your fear are not mistakes. They are not obstacles on your path. They *are* the path. The freedom you are longing for will never be found in the eradication of the unwanted, but only in the core of the love and information it carries.
There are surges of somatic activity that contain very important information for your journey. If you will offer safe passage for the unknown aliveness, you will meet the messengers of illumination. Nothing is missing, nothing is out of place, and nothing need be sent away.
Yes, you may burn until you are translucent, but it is by way of this burning that your wholeness will be revealed.
~ Matt Licata
Entry tags:
Poem OTD: Tiny Frightening Requests
SOMETIMES
Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest,
breathing
like the ones
in the old stories,
who could cross
a shimmering bed of leaves
without a sound,
you come
to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests,
conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.
Requests
to stop what
you are doing
right now,
and
to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,
questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,
questions
that have patiently
waited for you,
questions
that have no right
to go away.
~ David Whyte
Entry tags:
QotD: Not the Same River
No man ever steps in the same river twice,
for it is not the same river,
and he is not the same man.
-Heraclitus
for it is not the same river,
and he is not the same man.
-Heraclitus
Entry tags:
QotD: The Strongest Bias
The strongest bias in American politics is not a liberal bias or a conservative bias; it is a confirmation bias, or the urge to believe only things that confirm with what you already believe to be true. Not only do we tend to seek out and remember information that reaffirms what we already believe, but there is also a "backfire effect", which sees people doubling down on their beliefs after being presented with evidence that contradicts them. So, where do we go from here? The only way people will start rejecting falsehoods being fed to them is by confronting uncomfortable truths.
--Emma Roller
in NYTimes.com
Note to self: This bias may not be uniquely American. A 2016 study confirms that our political beliefs are the ones most resistant to change in spite of new information that refutes them. It's called Neural Correlates of maintaining one's political beliefs in the face of couterevidence.
--Emma Roller
in NYTimes.com
Note to self: This bias may not be uniquely American. A 2016 study confirms that our political beliefs are the ones most resistant to change in spite of new information that refutes them. It's called Neural Correlates of maintaining one's political beliefs in the face of couterevidence.
WHAT MAKES US RESISTANT TO NEW IDEAS 2016
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep39589
Neural correlates of maintaining one’s political beliefs in the face of counterevidence
Jonas T. Kaplan, Sarah I. Gimbel & Sam Harris
Scientific Reports 6, Article number: 39589 (2016)
doi:10.1038/srep39589
23 December 2016
Abstract
People often discount evidence that contradicts their firmly held beliefs. However, little is known about the neural mechanisms that govern this behavior. We used neuroimaging to investigate the neural systems involved in maintaining belief in the face of counterevidence, presenting 40 liberals with arguments that contradicted their strongly held political and non-political views. Challenges to political beliefs produced increased activity in the default mode network—a set of interconnected structures associated with self-representation and disengagement from the external world. Trials with greater belief resistance showed increased response in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and decreased activity in the orbitofrontal cortex. We also found that participants who changed their minds more showed less BOLD signal in the insula and the amygdala when evaluating counterevidence. These results highlight the role of emotion in belief-change resistance and offer insight into the neural systems involved in belief maintenance, motivated reasoning, and related phenomena.
Entry tags:
Poem: You Move
Willing to die,
You give up
Your will, keep still
Until, moved
By what moves
All else,
......you move.
--Wendell Berry
Entry tags:
QotD: Loss, Change, and Transformation
There is a great deal of difference
between loss, change, and transformation.
A loss is a step backward;
a change is an opportunity;
transformation is a step forward.
The common denominator in these three realities
is the fact that one must
give up something.
It is possible for both loss and change to lead to transformation,
but it is not possible for transformation to occur unless
something is lost and something is changed.
–Anthony Padovano
Entry tags:
QotD: Change
“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it,
move with it, and join the dance."
~Alan Watts
Entry tags:
- competence,
- creativity,
- flow,
- life,
- literacy,
- quiet,
- quotes,
- trains,
- transformation,
- travel,
- work,
- writing
QotD: A Suspension of Life
There’s a big difference between riding a coal train through Kansas and Nebraska and trying to write. Writing is a suspension of life. I believe that so-called writer’s block is something that any writer is going to experience every day, but in a minor way. You break through some kind of membrane, and then you go into another world.
--McPhee
--McPhee
QotD: Change into something Rich and Strange
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that does fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
--William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that does fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
--William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Entry tags:
QotD: on Defeat and Growth
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows:
by being defeated, decisively,
by greater and greater beings.
--Ranier Maria Wilke (1875-1926)
This is how he grows:
by being defeated, decisively,
by greater and greater beings.
--Ranier Maria Wilke (1875-1926)