Category: Uncategorized

  • Tuesday Tuneup #3 – Just breathe

    Sometimes, all you can do is take a breath. But if you give yourself that moment, that breath… other things become possible. Like remembering the name of your website.

  • Is This You?

    All through school, you were good at things. You got better at them, you graduated, and eventually you found a job that you were (also) good at. And because you were good at things, you got some promotions, and some of the trappings of life came along, and maybe a relationship and some kids, or maybe a…

  • Identity: Math and Myth

    What does it mean to have an identity? If you don’t look too closely, you might think that you can simply adopt a set of labels, slap them on yourself, and go forth into the world as a sequence of nouns. But that’s not how it works in practice. And socially constructed reality is all about…

  • Problems of Translation

    Physicists speak math. When they want to communicate clearly with one another, it looks a lot like this: It’s tight. It’s clear. It’s unambiguous (as long as you know how to read the symbols). It’s also completely unlike how most people communicate. Much of the coursework in physics education programs involves simply learning to read…

  • Local “Reality”

    Socially constructed reality has a physical existence in the world, but it is self-referential, and does not necessarily reflect any deeper reality. That is to say, it can be internally consistent (coherent) without making reference to the observed larger world in which it resides (correspondence). Yet it also creates the conditions which agents must navigate…

  • The Cat and Carnegie Hall

    The Cat and Carnegie Hall

    It started with the cat. I was sitting on my couch, petting the cat (who had gracelessly and possessively slid down the back of the couch into my lap). I was enjoying it so much, and I somehow realized that, in this moment, petting this cat, the fact that many other people also enjoy petting…

  • My Most Radical Claim

    My Most Radical Claim

    Magic is real. It is not a matter of bending reality to your will; it is a process of aligning your will with reality. The first step in making magic is to find your way down into awareness, the still point at the centre that knows exactly “where you are”. In the same way that…

  • The Conditioned Self and Enlightenment

    What we experience as our “self” (the talking blah-blah identity part) is a bundle of beliefs and stories we have learned about the world. Some of those are verbal and we can articulate them, although they tend to be sweeping generalizations (1)… But they are also stored in our bodies, in the reactivity of our…

  • Meaning is Not a Luxury

    I feel silly even pointing out that one of the major debates in higher education is the employment skills vs. liberal studies question. But it is best to introduce your topic clearly, so let us be clear: this is what I’m referring to when I say that meaning is not a luxury. As I have…

  • Primacy of Reason, Primacy of Text

    We have lived for generations with a particular idea of an educated human being as the highest ideal, with a particular type of education being exemplary. The “best” meaning is that which has been most thought through, and the most clearly articulated in writing. To be human is to think, to think is to reason,…

  • A Question of Scale

    “You live at the boundary between the past and the future, surfing on the accumulated experience of a billion billion sentient beings.” You are somewhere in this universe. This should be obvious, but it cannot be overemphasized. You are somewhere. What is more, you are some size, and you will live for some period of…

  • Violence Diminishes Us

    This is written on the wall of my office. “Violence diminishes us.” It is a hammer where a scalpel is required. Or a suture. Or a feather. It is almost never what is called for. There is a pull to violence in us. Our egos offer this command on a regular basis: “This world is…