Reading the WSJ (Wall Street Journal) article about the game “Remission” was most enlightening. Maybe not for the reasons that most readers would have found.

Remission has been around since 2006. It is a serious game, aimed at players between 12 and 29 years old — that happen to be undergoing cancer treatment. It is a third-person shooter in which you guide a “nanobot” through your own body killing cancer cells.

The game (seven years later) still has good traction and is well accepted by the medical community as being of value. By what measure? How is it decided that the game is doing its job? Continue reading →

Let’s take it as written that sometime earlier today you discovered plausible evidence that you are a clone. What will it mean if it’s true?  What if I am a clone?

As a clone your cells will not be your own — at least you will not be the original owner of the sacred DNA that dictates the construction of the physical you. That DNA will be borrowed from the real you — “You version 1.0”.

And if you are one of those scifi “pop into consciousness as a fully mature adult” type of clones, then all of your memories will be borrowed or manufactured. Since you are fresh out of the vat, those memories of running over grassy hills with your dog Rover have been injected from some source other than experience. Continue reading →

When looking around the Grand Canyon with a gas station folded map in your hand it is plain to see that the map is not the territory. If the map is a good one, there will be scribbly-scrawly things indicating roads, mountains, canyons, rivers, and what not. But a little blue line wiggling across a cellulose sheet of paper is not the same thing as a river. The map will work for navigation purposes. But, for the real thing, you need to look to the territory.

Something that is not so obvious is the fact that as  you stand admiring the landscape you are also looking at a map — not the territory. Because of how our perceptions work, because of the mechanics of our brains, we are never looking at the territory. We are always looking at a map. Continue reading →

The world seems so big, and there seem to be so many excellent voices saying exactly what you would be saying — if only you were saying it. And, they seem to say it so much better than you imagine you would say it. That’s not actually how it is.

You may have noticed that not everyone is the same. People have different tastes, different likes and dislikes, different perspectives, different ways of being in the world. We don’t all experience the world in the same way. Continue reading →

“If you continue to do only what you are currently doing, then you will continue to see only from your current perspectives.”

The English walnut tree has a bumper crop of nuts this year. Yay! I was out and about the other day picking nuts from the lower limbs.

English walnuts on the tree are hidden away inside a green husk.  They look nice and big and round. The husks are sufficiently different from leaves that one would think it would be easy to distinguish a husk from a leave.

Something I quickly discovered was that in order to find all the nuts on the limb it was necessary to approach the limb from many different angles. Coming at the limb from different angles would reveal tons of nuts that were not visible from other views.

This simple walnut hide and seek served as a resounding reminder that no matter how apparently straightforward something is looking at it from different perspectives is sure to reveal previously missed aspects.

Glass or Water? That was the question.

In the analogy, a glass  represented the human biological machine and the water corresponds to the being or inner nature which transcends a single incarnation.

So which are you — the glass or the water?

Before you answer, let me apologize — that was a trick question. By the nature of the question it is implied that you can be only one or the other.

As water it is possible to be in many different glasses — one at a time.

Since my water nature exists apart from this particular glass in which I currently find myself, and since this water will exist long after the glass is turned to dust, then surely I am the water.

Okay, I am water. But, wait….. Continue reading →

Consider water in a glass.

A short glass, a straight glass, and a shapely glass.

Pour the water from glass to glass.

Whichever glass the water fills — fill it, it will.

Paint the glass, decorate, or mar — when the water leaves, such superficialities  are as if they never were.

Are you the water or are you the glass?

There is “now”.

When I fill “now” with attention, I experience “now”.

As I stay with “now” I also experience other nows poking through the pixels of the present.

Sometimes those other nows are faint, and sometimes they are not so faint.

Continue reading →