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This practice of meditation itself sharpens your mind and improves your memory, qualities that are certainly useful beyond spiritual practice, whether in business, engineering, raising a family, or being a teacher, doctor, or lawyer. This practice also helps on a daily basis with anger. When you get irritated, you can…
How could movements of deterritorialization and processes of reterri-torialization not be relative, always connected, caught up in one another? The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a…
Do not waste the remainder of thy life in thoughts about others, when thou dost not refer thy thoughts to some object of common utility. For thou losest the opportunity of doing something else when thou hast such thoughts as these, What is such a person doing, and why, and what is he saying, and what is he thinking…
2.8 Rarely is a person seen to be in a bad way because he has failed to attend to what is happening in someone else’s soul, but those who fail to pay careful attention to the motions of their own souls are bound to be in a wretched state. 2.11 Let your every action, word, and thought be those of one who could depart…
The question of what weight to give to human interests and to nonhuman animal interests is difficult.67 Humans are literally outweighed by farmed animals: land-based farmed animals have 70 percent more biomass than all humans.68 Land-based farmed animals also outnumber humans greatly, by a factor of three to one, with…
This is real. Your eyes reading this text, your hands, your breath, the time of day, the place where you are reading this—these things are real. I’m real too. I am not an avatar, a set of preferences, or some smooth cognitive force; I’m lumpy and porous, I’m an animal, I hurt sometimes, and I’m different one…
We were not originally made to be learned; we have become so perhaps by a sort of abuse of our organic faculties, and at the expense of the State, which nourishes a host of loafers whom vanity has adorned with the name of “philosophers.” Nature created us all solely to be happy—yes, all, from the crawling worm to the…
Colozza on Play Phenomena.—The psychology and pedagogy of play form the subjects of a recent volume by Professor G. A. Colozza, whose views may be thus summarised: Play is the superfluity of energy over and above the essential needs of life,—at once the equivalent of accumulated energy and the means of its…
How is entropy relevant to human affairs? Life and happiness depend on an infinitesimal sliver of orderly arrangements of matter amid the astronomical number of possibilities. Our bodies are improbable assemblies of molecules, and they maintain that order with the help of other improbabilities: the few substances that…
Let's focus on the skill of expanding sensitivity. Increased attention to music, nature, and animals can increase sensitivity. Once you identify these outlets, set up a series of exercises that use these focal points to draw out sensitivity. For example: Listening: Listen to a piece of beautiful music for 10 minutes…
These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes—non-selective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the "good" and the "bad," to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger…
To end on a more cheerful note, I think I have found a fallacy or two in some of the more spectacular arguments used by the Insect Age enthusiasts when they are hardest pressed. For one thing, the fact that insects as a class are 300,000,000 years old, if it is a fact, while we have been here only about 1,000,000…
"These remarkable creatures combine the characteristics of animals and plants and so I call them animal-plants. ..." "All right. Don't get angry. Just explain how your creatures avoid getting dried up like mummies." "That is simple. Their skin is covered with a glassy layer, thin and flexible but absolutely…
So, myth one is that humans are evolved to eat meat and that Palaeolithic peoples consumed large quantities of meat. Humans have no known anatomical, physiological, or genetic adaptations to meat consumption. Quite the opposite, we have many adaptations to plant consumption. Take, for example, vitamin C. Carnivores…
We are survival machines, but 'we' does not mean just people. It embraces all animals, plants, bacteria, and viruses. The total number of survival machines on earth is very difficult to count and even the total number of species is unknown. Taking just insects alone, the number of living species has been estimated at…
It is one of the most beautiful interests of that beautiful science, comparative anatomy, to trace the complex and wonderful adaptations of living things to the necessities of existence in air. All living things, plants and animals alike, are primarily water things. For example all the higher vertebrated animals above…
The active pursuit of uplift really took hold as a scientific field during the great flowering of transhuman culture, an era that also gave us the widespread settlement of space, extensive human genetic modification, nanotech, cognitive science, and the digital emulation of consciousness. It is in fact the convergence…
When air has been freshly and strongly tainted with putrefaction, so as to smell through the water, sprigs of mint have presently died, upon being put into it, their leaves turning black; but if they do not die presently, they thrive in a most surprizing manner. In no other circumstances have I ever seen vegetation so…
If a small animal and a lighted candle be placed in a closed flask, so that no air can enter, in a short time the candle will go out, nor will the animal long survive. ... The animal is not suffocated by the smoke of the candle. ... The reason why the animal can live some time after the candle has gone out seems to be…
But many of our imaginations and investigations of nature are futile, especially when we see little living animals and see their legs and must judge the same to be ten thousand times thinner than a hair of my beard, and when I see animals living that are more than a hundred times smaller and am unable to observe any…