dekay.org

WTF? Ghosts now at twine?

"It is hard to pick up meditation from just reading an article, but I would like to share a few basic pointers about what meditation involves. No matter what form of meditation you follow, the basic shared principle is to quieten your thoughts and mind. We can sit in a chair for many hours, but, if thoughts continually pass through our mind then our meditation will be ineffective. Ultimately the aim is to have a mind free of thoughts. It is in this inner silence that we can experience a consciousness of real peace. At first glance, people may find the concept of stopping thoughts very difficult. If you try sitting silent for a while, you will probably be inundated with thoughts. When giving meditation classes, the difficulty of controlling the thoughts is a common experience. However, if you sincerely try, you can learn to reduce the power of thoughts over yourself. These are some tips I suggest for controlling your thoughts:"

"This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism. If you survey the literature (and I’d recommend books by Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and Marc D. Hauser if you want to get up to speed), you can see that certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion. First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is."

"Topic maps originated in work on the merging of electronic indexes and so are very much a subject-based classification technique. In fact, topic maps are organized around topics, and each topic is used to represent some real-world thing. In the terminology we used above, topics represent concepts, the same way terms in an indexing language refer to concepts. In topic maps the concepts are called subjects, and the standard emphatically states that a subject can be "anything whatsoever". We will return to the consequences of this later on."