Parasite Recently saw Parasite—a brilliantly whacky and over-the-top satire on class relations. If you haven’t already, I’d say it’s worth checking out. The title of the film points to its primary theme and central ambiguity, expressed nicely here in one review: Who are the real parasites? The poor who attach themselves to the rich or the rich who suck the marrow of the poor? Or is the system …
[Read more...] about Practice Notes: Hasty Generalization, Parasite & The Australian Open
Sitting at a Dharma talk at Plum Village—in south-central France in the summer of 1996—I gazed for a few long seconds out of the large community tent, allowing Thich Nhat's Hanh's words to drift into the background of my attention. In the foreground now was a country road—maybe a football field's distance away—upon which passed a series of slow-driving cars. I thought: How sweetly poignant and …
In the previous post, I introduced a psychological model rooted in Vasubandhu’s Thirty Verses on Consciousness Only—which sheds light on how unconscious or subconscious habit-patterns condition our current experience. Neither Random Nor Rigidly Determined Just as important as understanding how such conditioning happens, is understanding how these causal influences can be modulated or dissolved. …
Fifty Verses For twenty-seven years I've carried around a stack of fifty-one 4×6" notecards, bound together with a small piece of white rope, tied off neatly in a shoe-lace style bow. The card on the top (now a bit tattered) reads "The Fifty Verses on the Manifestation of Consciousness, by Thich Nhat Hanh." And each of the remaining fifty cards hosts one of the fifty verses, carefully …
Just finished reading the 2001 edition of Gödel's Proof by Ernest Nagel and James Newman, edited by Douglas Hofstadter. This is an excellent introduction to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, written in mostly non-technical language—which means that you don't have to be a professional mathematician to (at least mostly) understand it. Though still a challenging read, I'd say it's well worth the …
What I most appreciate about Wild Wild Country -- the Netflix documentary about Osho's Oregon community -- is that it poses all variety of interesting questions (social, psychological, spiritual, legal, constitutional) while resisting the temptation to offer heavy-handed answers to any of them. It's a fascinating -- and in moments, quite mind-blowing -- story, with lines between the "good guys" …
