Emotions are contagious. If you’ve ever been to a theatre to watch a comedian perform his schtick and found yourself guffawing along with the rest of the crowd, you’ve experienced the power of psychological mirroring. People are social animals, and elements of our behavior -... Continue

Life appears purposeful and growth to be an imperative of life itself. Even a single-celled amoeba must grow large enough before it divides in two. Solar energy constantly bathes our planet, stimulating an over-abundance of growth and what often seems to us as great excess:... Continue

Without doubt, the state of Arizona features some of the most spectacular landscapes in America, mind-boggling sandstone canyons sculpted by millions of years of wind and water and vast moonscape-like deserts which challenge life entirely. My wife and I are currently traversing such areas, and... Continue

“If the strong person exercises all his rights to oppress and pillage the weak, he is only doing the most natural thing in the world.” — Friedrich Nietzsche When we observe the imperatives of nature, it might appear that might makes right. With relatively few... Continue

Humanity’s place in nature is terrifying. Fires, floods, landslides, predatory animals, starvation, poisoned water, infection, plague; the list of depredations goes on. Were it not for each other we’d have never survived; alone we are weak and vulnerable. Some animals are solitary, but human beings... Continue

Looking ahead to the future has never been easy. One transformational wave after another has swamped humanity in its wake. The control of fire was perhaps the first such event, followed by flint arrowheads, bows, metallurgy, the wheel, gunpowder and the internal combustion engine. One... Continue

A central Buddhist teaching is that being human means living in the realms of desire, and that desire and what flows from it - attachment, craving, grasping, defending, protecting - produces suffering. Sounds reasonable, and from what I can tell, is largely inescapable. As rock... Continue

Animals are alive; it’s so obvious as to be a tautology. Not all animals, however, are aware of being alive. As far as we can tell, human beings are the only ones. Opinion about awareness, and even more precisely reason, has varied. The designation of... Continue

Our present human condition embodies an antagonism towards nature, one that explains the heights of our creative intelligence, the depths of our self-destructiveness, and how they have become one. Although of nature, humanity relentlessly seeks to master it, and in doing so prompts its own... Continue