Fantasy's "Unreality" Makes It Safer for Exploring Cultur...

Fantasy is a useful sub-set through which to explore popular culture not only because of its prominent position at the present historical moment,but because its inherently non-mimetic nature creates a space which is at least nominally not “the real world” and is therefore safer for cultural work around fraught issues such as – although by no means limited to – race. This is not to suggest that the imagined worlds of Fantasy are separate from reality, but rather that the inclusion of a...

 Riddles Present New Ways of Looking at Things

The riddle can accomplish certain things by inviting the riddlee to awaken to a new vision of the world. It is not a form well suited to all sorts of discourse, however. According to Cohen (1996), It is clear that the riddle is not the best way of communicating about unknown things. If we want to learn from another person about something that he knows and we do not, a genuine question would serve us better than any riddle. On the other hand, if we want to communicate our experiences and our...

 Regard All Phenomena as Dreams

This slogan is another contemplation on absolute bodhichitta, our innate, ongoing wakeful state that is an expression of emptiness—the central Buddhist doctrine that reveals the phenomenal world as having no tangible, self-existing, or substantial nature. This world is said to be like a dream, a mirage, a magical illusion, an echo, or a reflection on water. That same world, when purified of our obscurations, is seen to be an ornament of our natural awareness. For when we awaken to ever-pres...

 Observation Provides Data on Problems, but Cannot Solve Them

A good illustration of the scientific method, in which observations are made for the purpose of identifying difficulties and analyzing situations, is the procedure followed by a physician when he makes a diagnosis. A doctor does not write a prescription solely on the basis of what his patient tells him; he uses instruments to take the patient’s temperature to examine his feces, and to analyze his urine. It is only after he has made these examinations that he writes his prescription; without...

 Cartesian Methodology Applied to Personal Intellectual Gr...

...Cartesian methodology calls for intellectual individualism; it emphasizes reason as the common possession of all men. The reason that people disagree is that their reason has been perverted by the wrong kind of education, or poisoned by superstition, or vitiated by preoccupation. Descartes held that all men had equal and natural ability to make sound judgments, and to distinguish the true from the false, until and unless these abilities were crippled or stunted by improper education or by ...

 How Descartes Broke With Classical Thinking

Classical thinking had assigned different natures to different things—minerals had one nature, stars another, plants another. But Descartes discarded these distinctions and looked upon all things as being equal in nature. The mystical distinction among the natures of things thus disappeared. For example, respiration in the human body and the circulation of blood were no longer inexplicable, or virtually magic phenomena; both could now be treated in terms of extension and motion. The circula...

 How Media-Metaphors Change Thought

But our media-metaphors are not so explicit or so vivid as these, and they are far more complex. In understanding their metaphorical function, we must take into account the symbolic forms of their information, the source of their information, the quantity and speed of their information; the context in which their information is experienced. Thus, it takes some digging to get at them, to grasp, for example, that a clock recreates time as an independent, mathematically precise sequence; that wr...

 Metaphors Bind Concepts Together in Our Minds

We are told in school, quite correctly. that a metaphor suggests what a thing is like by comparing it to something else. And by the power of its suggestion. it so fixes a conception in our minds that we cannot imagine the one thing without the other: Light is a wave; language, a tree; God, a wise and venerable man; the mind, a dark cavern illuminated by knowledge. And if these metaphors no longer serve us, we must, in the nature of the matter, find others that will. Light is a particle; langu...

 Symbols as Abstractions and Zen

Men feel themselves to be victims or puppets of their experience because they separate "themselves" from their minds, thinking that the nature of the mind-body is something involuntarily thrust upon "them." They think that they did not ask to be born, did not ask to be "given" a sensitive organism to be frustrated by alternating pleasure and pain. But Zen asks us to find out "who" it is that '1las" this mind, and "who" it was that did not ask to be born before father and mother conceived us. ...

 Contaminated with Purity

Hui-neng's position was that a man with an empty consciousness was no better than "a block of wood or a lump of stone." He insisted that the whole idea of purifying the mind was irrelevant and confusing, because "our own nature is fundamentally clear and pure." In other words, there is no analogy between consciousness or mind and a mirror that can be wiped. The true mind is "no-mind" ( wu-hsin ), which is to say that it is not to be regarded as an object of thought or action, as if it were a ...