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The Mullah Nasrudin Nasrudin saw a man sitting at the side of a road looking utterly desolated. “What’s bothering you?” he asked. “My brother, there is nothing interesting in my life. I have enough money not to need to work, and I was traveling to see if there was anything curious in the world. But everyone I [...] A man wanted to know about mind, not in nature, but in his private, large ‘computer’. He asked it: “Do you compute that you will ever think like a human being?” The machine then set to work to analyse its own computational habit. Finally, the machine printed its answer on a piece of [...] Greg Hill made a really interesting post on his blog today in which he discusses the contention raised by the philosopher Galen Strawson that physicalism entails panpsychism, or the stance that all physical matter is conscious. Now I don’t propose to develop that specific argument, but in comments I have discussed the idea that it [...] Words dissemble plant them Jim Morrison, American Prayer It has been suggested in a forum I contribute too that words only have the power that we give them. This is an idea that I would like to explore on several levels. I’m not proposing a certitude either way, I’m [...] This is a very serious matter… that the way that human beings think, certainly the way that I think, is in terms of stories… Now what is a story? A story, if it so please you, is a metaphor… If you look at these two plants, you will see that they are essentially metaphors, one [...] A blogger who’s posts I admire wrote what he called “sketch for a short story” a while back. In this story, a credible construction from an indo-european perspective of the sort of things that may have been practiced and believed by the original druids, although in and of itself wholely a work of fiction, the [...] I promised you a story. Are you sitting comfortably? A little background colour first. I grew up in social housing in a small market town called Olney during the 70’s. Back then it had a population of about 2 and a half thousand, and was situated in the heart of rural North Bucks, some 11 miles [...] This is a slightly experimental post using Wordpress’s podcasting plug-in for the first time. The Tale of the Sands is a Sufi teaching tale which I retold some years ago for submission to an online competition. The voice tone has a trance-voice quality (intended) and the story explores age old themes of identity and impermanence from, [...] In a previous post I wrote about stories as triggers for spiritual growth, as catalysts. But what is it that allows a story to act as such a catalyst? By what virtue does a tale stimulate psycho-spiritual development? In the future, I shall want to explore all those things that enable a story to trigger such [...] “The shortest distance between truth and a human being, is a story.” Many cultures share a process of facilitating spiritual growth through story. Most of us are familiar with koans, stories from the Japanese Zen Buddhist tradition that require the listener to suspend the usual ability to process narrative, to confound rational [...] |
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