The Aztec method for developing good habits—what we would call virtues—relies on progressive exposure paired with reflection. Great courage is built through small, everyday acts, just as prudence, temperance, and other virtues are.

The art of living well consists neither in cultivating inward peace exclusively nor in learning the practices of war, but in growing deep roots.

Although teotl is all of reality, that basic energy self-expresses in more concrete form through doubling. Conceptually, reality can be thought of as a series of logical doubles: Here implies not over there, up implies not down, outside implies not inside, and so on.

The Aztecs thought of these relational pairs as the basic features of our world as

In the Aztec view, our psyche is not like a rider on a horse, as Sigmund Freud suggested, or even a rider on an elephant, as the contemporary psychologist Jonathan Haidt has put it. Ideally, it is a fluidly coordinated jazz ensemble, where each player improvises in their own way, none of whom is distinctly responsible for their coordination. In

There is no way, strictly, to ask Quine's question in Nahuatl. The language lacks a term for "is." The language similarly lacks what we English speakers call "words."

As mentioned in the previous chapter, instead of words, the Aztecs had nuclear clauses—meaning that each basic component of a sentence could be its own sentence. As a result of this

Thought thus "blooms" as it works its way up from local concerns (that joint pain in my bad wrist) to conscious awareness (that I need to move my hand) to vocalization ("ouch!") to dialogue with others who can help me to better understand the pain. This model of thinking, beginning with a seed incident that blooms into progressively more involved

To bridge Aztec and ancient Greek ways of thinking, you could say that the basic sources for a lack of harmonic balance derive from: (1) metaphysical reasons, (2) observations about the complexity of the human psyche, and (3) observations about the role of moral luck. Even if we discard the Aztecs' view on metaphysical cosmology, the latter two

Fluid synchrony refers to the seamless coordination of actions between individuals without the need for explicit discussion. It is similar to the way professional dancers move in perfect harmony on stage. In the task where the children were required to chart the shortest course through a model grocery store, they had to navigate obstacles as

The Aztecs would argue that luck plays a much larger role in our successes and failures, even in our moral successes, than most of us in the "West” generally recognize. The world is simply too complex and too unpredictable for luck not to play a significant role. We come into life "unbalanced," unprepared to avoid falling. It is for this reason