Category Archives: Science

“A Stanford scientist says a simple psychological shift can make you more successful”

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A Stanford scientist says a simple psychological shift can make you more successful

The headline left me skeptical. A scientist tells about success?

The article proves to be all about self-love, and backs up everything I’ve said about that subject. It also speaks to the issues I face at this moment in dealing with my feelings and the way I treat myself.

I urge you to read it.

Related:
Chaos overwhelms the poor
A short route to agony
Life in the outer darkness
Self-comfort
Why racism no longer matters to me

Originally posted 2016-01-30.

Headlines about race

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Beginning as of the earliest link below, I have, and plan to continue to, attempted in good faith to copy every single headline that appears in my Yahoo! News feed pertinent attitudes toward race.

My hypothesis was that, overwhelmingly, it is only the attitudes of white people towards race, that are studied and reported.  The data here below speak for themselves.

Continue reading Headlines about race →

“Seeing red” is real. But how does it happen?

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The scientific reason your world brightens up when you do

This study affirms some common observations about color perceptions and emotional states. When one is enraged, the color red appears more vivid in one’s perceptions; when depressed, the color blue. When one feels elated, all colors appear brighter, and in times of severe depression color perception can all but disappear; the world looks black and white.  Or, perhaps, bleak and white.

The study attempts, and IMO fails, to attribute these things to the activity of neurotransmitters such as dopamine.  But there is no finding of direct action by such neurotransmitters on the color-perceiving apparatus of the visual cortex.

Continue reading “Seeing red” is real. But how does it happen? →

7. Mooring oneself in What Is

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THE WAY OF PEACE

← 6. Sales pitch Home  8. Heart and soul →

Hold to God’s unchanging hand.

When not at sea, a boat is normally tied, or moored, to a dock.  The waves rise and fall, the winds blow this way and that, but the boat is stable and secured because it is moored.

The storms of life buffet us this way and that, and one can lose oneself in the chaos and confusion.  Managing, coping, requires that one have some mooring somewhere.  Some folk moor themselves in a concept, a dogma, such as Biblical inerrancy or the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church.  Others moor themselves in the dogmas of an ideology, such as Progressivism or identity politics; or a cause, such as environmentalism; or even a romance (a particularly bad choice).  I propose instead mooring oneself merely in What Is.

Everything else is subject to change or question or dispute.  There is no disputing What Is.  And the underlying principles, the principles that underlie existence itself, never change. Continue reading 7. Mooring oneself in What Is →

— Life with OCD

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Everyone’s this way a little bit.
It’s adaptative to check the door two or three times to be sure it’s locked.
It’s not adaptative to check it fifty times.

I have Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

I talked some about its physiological basis, and treatment, in a previous chapter.

I will tell more, and about my own experience, now. Continue reading — Life with OCD →

8. Heart and soul

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THE WAY OF PEACE

← 7. Mooring oneself in What Is Home  10. Strategies →
“Purity of heart is to will one thing.”
— Soren Kierkegaard

This post has been on tap for years; I’ve come to feel the time to write it is now.  On the one hand, however, I hardly feel I know what I’m talking about.  I can see the goal, I can point to it, I can admire it, but I hardly have any idea how to get there.  On the other hand, there are multiple directions from which to approach the subject, which fact doesn’t lend itself to the linear-sequential proneness of written words.

So, this may not be the best presentation.

In question is a dynamic that has profound pertinence to the effectiveness of one’s desires, the effectiveness of one’s prayers, the effectiveness of one’s life. Continue reading 8. Heart and soul →