"The whole human memory can be, and probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every individual... It need not be concentrated in any one single place. It need not be vulnerable as a human head or a human heart is vulnerable. It can be reproduced exactly and fully, in Peru, China, Iceland, Central Africa, or wherever else.. It can have at once, the concentration of a craniate animal and the diffused vitality of an amoeba." H.G. Wells, 1937, "World Brain"
The World Health Organization defines health as, “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
“The suffering itself is not so bad, it’s the resentment against suffering that is the real pain.” -Alan Ginsberg
“A Tibetan scholar once complained to me of Zen’s severe reductionism. The scholar was right. Zen is so reductive by nature that it actually self-destructs. The longer I practice Zen the less I have of anything, including Zen itself.”—Lin Jensen; More.
Paul Broks reviews Nicholas Humphrey’s take on consciousness: “One day I’ll be dead. It’s an oddly exhilarating thought. Something unimaginable—nothingness—awaits us all. I have a hunch that getting an imaginative purchase on mental nothingness would help us also grasp the “somethingness” of sentience. What else was conscious in that summer’s evening scene? The tree? No. The bugs? I doubt it. The cat? Who knows? I had an intuition that it felt like something to be the cat, that the animal had some awareness of the cacophony of the cicadas’ mating calls, an awareness to which I would ascribe the sensory quality sound. As it stretched and rolled, I imagined it experienced a bodily sensation, which might be labelled pleasure. And I am pretty sure that if I had walked over and stamped on its tail, then it would have experienced pain. But it was just an intuition. An intuition, yes, but one I could surely back up with neurology.”
“The biggest obstacle [today for contemplative practitioners] is that Western 21st century culture provides very little support for spiritual practice and in fact its major thrust (consumerism) runs counter to spiritual growth.” More.
Computer-based therapy for such things as depression should be available to all patients in England from April, says the government.
“The reason we experience disgust today is that the response protected our ancestors,” said Dan Fessler, associate professor of anthropology and director of UCLA’s Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture. “The emotion allowed our ancestors to survive long enough to produce offspring, who in turn passed the same sensitivities on to us.”
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