Losing a belief in free will has not made me fatalistic—in fact, it has increased my feelings of freedom. My hopes, fears, and neuroses seem less personal and indelible. There is no telling how much I might change in the future. Just as one wouldn�...
It looked as though you did not act in a certain way because you thought in a certain way, but rather that you thought in a certain way because you were made in a certain way. Truth had nothing to do with it. There was no such thing as truth. Each ma...
Because travel was an area of my life where I felt most vital, I wanted to continue to invest in that, too. I had quit a full time job, drained my retirement account to invest in a long-held dream, and used the realization of that dream to enter a vo...
Reason is up to these demands because it is an open-ended combinatorial system, an engine for generating an unlimited number of new ideas. Once it is programmed with a basic self-interest and an ability to communicate with others, its own logic will ...
Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and superclusters, wheeling through ...
Rich Indians typically tried to work around a dysfunctional government. Private security was hired, city water was filtered, private school tuitions were paid. Such choices had evolved over the years into a principle: The best government is the one t...
If you taught me to read and provided for me the same computer system as someone has provided for Stephen Hawking, I, too, would write great books. And yet you don't teach me to read, and you don't give me a computer stick I can push around with my n...
In 1987 Senator Jesse Helms, stated "it is no secret that the international bankers profiteer form sovereign state debt. The New York banks have found important profit centers in lending to countries plunged into debt by Socialist regimes. Under Soci...
Both of these students- both high school seniors both old enough to vote in the upcoming election- thought 'Al' Qaeda was a person. At that time the United States had been at war for five and a half years and here were two students two young adults l...
If you read a story that really involves you, your body will tell you that you are living through the experience. You will recognize feelings that have physical signs - increased heart rate, sweaty palms, or calm, relaxed breathing and so on, dependi...
On Earth one of the things that a large proportion of the locals is most proud of is this wonderful economic system which, with a sureness and certainty so comprehensive one could almost imagine the process bears some relation to their limited and li...
[About Uluru] I'm suggesting nothing here, but I will say that if you were an intergalactic traveler who had broken down in our solar system, the obvious directions to rescuers would be: "Go to the third planet and fly around till you see the big red...
In every Magical, or similar system, it is invariably the first condition which the Aspirant must fulfill: he must once and for all and for ever put his family outside his magical circle. Even the Gospels insist clearly and weightily on this. Christ ...
From the beginning, man could look up at a vast universe dotted by innumerable stars to find every evidence that he was nothing. This evidence has only grown stronger as science and technology record an expanse of galaxies filled with planetary solar...
Arguably the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, a primary function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in...
Just as we have created a society in which it would be unthinkable to light up a cigarette in the Kennedy Center lobby, we can create a society where it is unthinkable that a child suffers abuse, fails in school, becomes delinquent, or faces teasing ...
Seeing modern health care from the other side, I can say that it is clearly not set up for the patient. It is frequently a poor arrangement for doctors as well, but that does not mitigate how little the system accounts for the patient's best interest...
We can always create enough of our own local money to handle all the trades and exchanges we wish to make. While national currency basically drives, and is driven by profit, local money supports people with other values: people who believe in local d...
You don't know when you're twenty-three. You don't know what it really means to crawl into someone else's life and stay there. You can't see all the ways you're going to get tangled, how you're going to bond skin to skin. How the idea of separating w...
In Chapter 5 we consider swindles and defalcations. It happens that crashes and panics often are precipitated by the revelation of some misfeasance, malfeasance, or malversation (the corruption of officials) engendered during the mania. It seems clea...
You're doubtless well aware that most of the great hypnotic patients wind up referring to themselves in the third person, like little children. They see themselves from outside their own organisms, outside their own sensory systems. In order to get f...
