thoughts on life

In his book, ”The Neanderthal’s Necklace,” Juan Luis Arsuaga, a paleo-anthropologist and professor at the University of Madrid, provides a cogent discussion of consciousness. Arsuaga poses a provocative question in…

It’s fitting that the end of the American Empire is marked on this feeble 4th of July by slinking out of the “graveyard of empires” with a whimper and a…

A friend and editor, knowing that I’ve been feeling that my insights through this column over the last 25 years haven’t made a difference, and that humankind continues to plunge…

Neuroscientists are discovering more and more how the human brain works, even as they understand less and less the Mind in meditation. For example, “aphantasia” refers to an apparently inherited…

For all those women and men whose mothers have died, for all the women who could not have children, and for all the children whose mothers didn’t want to have…

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, in his response to President Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress, uttered words that will go down in infamy: “Hear me clearly:…

The most difficult thing for humans to do is to be self-knowing. We all think we know ourselves, and that may be so, as far as self-knowledge goes. But self-knowledge…

Did you know that Neanderthals actually had bigger brains than we Homo saps? They clearly did not possess symbolic thought however, just “purely intuitive insight” as paleoanthropologists ambiguously put it.…