I have worked for many years on excellence of mind
Category Archives: Wisdom
Talking Is Great, But Writing Is Better
The older I get, the less impressed I am with talking, and especially with debate, for I observe that it is filled with error—with slips of the tongue and with faulty memory—with biases and with the hard-to-resist influence of common hearsay we so love to repeat as if we knew already it were true. For practically all of us, it seems to me, speech is in too big a hurry, and debate is not a search for the truth, but a contest between those vying for glory.
Continue reading Talking Is Great, But Writing Is Better“If That Were True, I Would See It”
Not every true thing is conveniently obvious. And even so, large numbers of people may well operate on the assumption that all true things are—or should be—obvious. It is a common overestimation of human capability, often based on the assumption that what can be detected should be detectable without effort—and more particularly, detectable by our natural human senses.
Here are a few ways it happens:
Continue reading “If That Were True, I Would See It”10 Freedoms America Will Never Have
The following are not matters of political opinion, but of the way reality itself seems to work—as observed over many thousands of years of human history. We can wish and pretend and even try to get around the reality—and it seems someone is always trying, or wishing at least—but we’ll never have the following freedoms, because this world simply doesn’t work that way, no matter one’s preferred political party.
The ten freedoms America will never have are these:
Continue reading 10 Freedoms America Will Never HaveThe Absolute Master of His Inner Domain—For Now
The living human is the absolute master
Of his inner domain—for now.
The Cart Before the Horse— When You’ve Got No Horse
Like so many other foolish kids,
He wanted to be the teacher before
He knew what he was talking about.
He had the cart before the horse, to be sure.
He Knows How to Have an Idea
He knows how to have an idea.
Indeed, that part’s quite easy
Because the way the brain works,
Ideas normally just pop into the mind.