May 23
A short selection from Essay Ten in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. Look again at that dot … every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there—on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam … In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come …
May 21
A short selection from Essay Nine in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. This I of which you speak, no matter whether it be the great I or small I, is only a pure concept which does not correspond to any reality. That is what Buddha meant. —Thich Nhat Hanh [1] (Italic and regular fonts …
May 17
A short selection from Essay Eight in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. Primordial Awareness [the Way] is perfect and all-pervading. How could it be dependent upon practice and realization? The movement of Reality does not need us to give it a push. Do I need to say that it is free from delusion? The …
May 16
A short selection from Essay Seven in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. Personally, I (as a thinking mind) prefer the reflecting pool simile given in Two Buddhas, Part-5 over the other more discrete conceptions of consciousness listed there; for if similes, metaphors, and analogies are also incomplete, they are honestly so. Certainly this one …
May 14
A short selection from Essay Six in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. (So let’s step beyond our inner nerd now, and follow our Buddhas.) “What is the Way?” Ordinary mind is the Way. “Should I turn toward it or not?” If you turn toward it you turn away from it. “How can I know the …
May 10
Now let us suppose that … a being, who can see the individual molecules, opens and closes the hole, so as to allow only the swifter molecules to pass from A to B, and only the slower molecules to pass from B to A. He will thus, without expenditure of work, raise the temperature of …
May 04
OK, here (again) is Essay Four from Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice, the physical prequel for what might appear to non-practitioners as my metaphysical ramblings on Humans and Nature (the Two Buddhas). Our Platonic heritage prompts us to view means and medians as the hard ‘realities,’ and the variation that permits their calculation as …
May 03
A short selection from Essay Three in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. However a phenotype develops, however genetic algorithms conspire with environment to produce, maintain, and alter an organism over its lifetime, or perhaps even pass on some of these epigenetic alterations in the womb, such short term adjustments, like learning itself, are incommensurable …
May 02
A short selection from Essay Two in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. Organisms consist of germ cells that transmit heritable information and somatic cells that carry out ordinary functions. Germ cells are not altered by environment, learning, or the morphological changes of a lifetime. This information is lost after each generation. —Weismann’s germ plasm …
Apr 25
A short selection from Essay One in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. Philosophy is the unusually persistent effort to think things through. —William James [1] I have no reason to believe that the human intellect is able to weave a system of physics out of its own resources without experimental labour. Whenever the attempt …
