Category: Life

  • Iain McGilchrist on love

    The following is from Nate Hagen’s interview with Iain McGilchrist on August 23, 2023. Nate Hagens: What do you care most about in the world, Iain? Iain McGilchrist: It’s a very difficult thing to say because I just care about the world, really. But I care about it under the aspect of love. I care…

  • Edward Frenkel on the first person perspective and computation

    The following is from Lex Fridman’s interview with Edward Frenkel on April 10, 2023. Edward Frenkel is a mathematician and author of the bestselling book Love and Math. I’m starting to question, why I am not giving as much credibility to my subjective understanding of the world…, the first person perpective… The observer is always…

  • Learning from Masanobu Fukuoka’s philosophy

    Masanobu Fukuoka (1913–2008) pioneered natural farming. I think we have much to learn from Masanobu Fukuoka’s philosophy. Masanobu Fukuoka’s approach to natural farming entailed minimal human interference with nature. He saw nature as interconnected and resisted the urge to impose structure. Instead of action, he experimented with inaction. Instead of adding work, he attempted to…

  • Richard Tarnas on listening to the voice of nature

    The following is from a session in the Mothership Earth Summit 2023 with Richard Tarnas on March 20, 2023. Richard says we seem to be living at the end of an era. He sees a striking resemblance between fundamental collective transformation and what takes place in individual initiatory rites of passage. Richard Tarnas talks about…

  • Doing little things with great love

    I started searching for life-giving ways of working in 2012. I think Daniel Wahl and Satish Kumar capture the essence of it in their conversation on Feb 1, 2023. It’s about doing little things with great love. The following statement by Daniel particularly caught my attention: 41:16 >>Daniel Wahl: The old medieval guilds … have…

  • Governance in harmony with Life

    Alfred Huang describes an ancient culture seeking harmony with Life, governance without coercion, in Understanding the I Ching. What they knew 3000 years ago, we need to relearn today. My emphasis in italics. The I Ching reveals an ancient culture that honors Heaven, esteems the Earth and expresses love for the people. It espouses a…

  • Bill Plotkin on Purpose

    The Journey of Soul Initiation by Bill Plotkin is a thorough description of the most essential things Plotkin has learned over the past 40 years about the journey to full maturity as a human being. Bill Plotkin has the following perspective to share on purpose (my emphasis in italics): Our Soul purpose is categorically different…

  • Bill Plotkin on Soul, Felt-sense, and Metaphor

    The Journey of Soul Initiation by Bill Plotkin is a thorough description of the most essential things Plotkin has learned over the past 40 years about the journey to full maturity as human beings. Bill Plotkin uses common words in uncommon ways. Soul is, for example, an ecological concept. Soul Bill Plotkin writes (my emphasis…

  • Craig Holdrege on Living Thinking

    I want to show that it is possible to move beyond object thinking and develop what I will call living thinking. Living thinking is a participatory way of knowing that transcends the dichotomies of man-nature, subject-object, or mind-matter, which are so ingrained in the Western mind and form the bedrock of object thinking. One of…

  • Classical physics is a limiting case of the physics of life

    Robert Rosen points out in his Essays on Life Itself that one of the striking features of Erwin Schrödinger’s essay What is Life? is his apologies, both for his physics, and for himself personally.1 While repeatedly proclaiming the ‘universality’ of contemporary physics, he equally repeatedly points out (quite rightly) the utter failure of its laws…