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101 Zen Stories

i love english literature The Experience and Perception of Time What is ‘the perception of time’? The very expression ‘the perception of time’ invites objection. Insofar as time is something different from events, we do not perceive time as such, but changes or events in time. Kinds of temporal experience There are a number of what Ernst Pöppel (1978) calls ‘elementary time experiences’, or fundamental aspects of our experience of time. Duration One of the earliest, and most famous, discussions of the nature and experience of time occurs in the autobiographical Confessions of St Augustine. Augustine's answer to this riddle is that what we are measuring, when we measure the duration of an event or interval of time, is in the memory. Whatever the process in question is, it seems likely that it is intimately connected with what William Friedman (1990) calls ‘time memory’: that is, memory of when some particular event occurred. The specious present The term ‘specious present’ was first introduced by the psychologist E.R. Here is one attempt to do so. Φ-β-κ

100 best first lines from novels Following is a list of the 100 best first lines from novels, as decided by the American Book Review, a nonprofit journal published at the Unit for Contemporary Literature at Illinois State University: 1. Call me Ishmael. - Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851) 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. - James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939) 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 124 was spiteful. - Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987) 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

The Improbability of God The Improbability of God by Richard Dawkins from Free Inquiry, Volume 18, Number 3. Much of what people do is done in the name of God. Irishmen blow each other up in his name. Arabs blow themselves up in his name. Imams and ayatollahs oppress women in his name. Celibate popes and priests mess up people's sex lives in his name. Why do people believe in God? So ran Paley's argument, and it is an argument that nearly all thoughtful and sensitive people discover for themselves at some stage in their childhood. What do all objects that look as if they must have had a designer have in common? This is not a circular argument, by the way. Of all the trillions of different ways of putting together the atoms of a telescope, only a minority would actually work in some useful way. We can safely conclude that living bodies are billions of times too complicated -- too statistically improbable -- to have come into being by sheer chance. Eyes and wings cannot spring into existence in a single step.

We come from the future. @djscruffy: And that's why you're a heathen and should be burned at the stake. @djscruffy: In defense of public schools, I would suggest that the reason many of these books are challenged so often is that they're frequently included in school curriculums and libraries. I grew up in a state that, according to these links, engaged in book-burning less than a decade before my birth. That makes me shudder. But I'm also the child of a public school teacher and am familiar with my mother's and many of her peers' views on children's reading materials. Despite the generally conservative views in my community, my elementary school encouraged me to read A Wrinkle in Time and The Giver and Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret. I suppose I've wandered a bit. @djscruffy: To be fair, it's not usually the schools that want to ban the books, but the few overprotective parents who make wild assumptions about the books we try to teach.

Some Moral Dilemmas The Trolley Problem, not in Grassian. Suggested by Philippa Foot (1920-2010), daughter of Esther, the daughter of President Grover Cleveland, but of British birth because of her father, William Sidney Bence Bosanquet. A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are five people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. This is a classic "right vs. good" dilemma. The Costly Underwater Tunnel Compare: 112 men were killed during the construction of Hoover Dam on the Nevada-Arizona border (the "official" number was 98, but others had died from causes more difficult to identify -- or easier to ignore -- like by carbon monoxide poisoning): The first to die was a surveyor, J.G. with a return to a completely unfamiliar Earth, against what seems to be genuine love for Preston, with a life in what actually are rather comfortable circumstances in the spaceship.

Maslow Self Actualization "Self Actualization is the intrinsic growth of what is already in the organism, or more accurately, of what the organism is." Abraham Maslow Maslow studied healthy people, most psychologists study sick people. The characteristics listed here are the results of 20 years of study of people who had the "full use and exploitation of talents, capacities, potentialities, etc.." Self-actualization implies the attainment of the basic needs of physiological, safety/security, love/belongingness, and self-esteem. Maslow's Basic Principles: The normal personality is characterized by unity, integration, consistency, and coherence. Realistic Realistically oriented, SA persons have a more efficient perception of reality, they have comfortable relations with it. Acceptance Accept themselves, others and the natural world the way they are. Spontaneity, Simplicity, Naturalness Spontaneous in their inner life, thoughts and impulses, they are unhampered by convention. Problem Centering Peak experiences Creativity

Top 10 Thinking Traps Exposed Our minds set up many traps for us. Unless we’re aware of them, these traps can seriously hinder our ability to think rationally, leading us to bad reasoning and making stupid decisions. Features of our minds that are meant to help us may, eventually, get us into trouble. Here are the first 5 of the most harmful of these traps and how to avoid each one of them. 1. “Is the population of Turkey greater than 35 million? Lesson: Your starting point can heavily bias your thinking: initial impressions, ideas, estimates or data “anchor” subsequent thoughts. This trap is particularly dangerous as it’s deliberately used in many occasions, such as by experienced salesmen, who will show you a higher-priced item first, “anchoring” that price in your mind, for example. What can you do about it? Always view a problem from different perspectives. 2. In one experiment a group of people were randomly given one of two gifts — half received a decorated mug, the other half a large Swiss chocolate bar. 3. 4.

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