How you conduct that relationship will affect the quality of your lived experience more than almost anything else.

The best thing to do, they explain, when faced with a complex real-life, multidimensional problem,

our mainstream culture’s self-congratulatory obsession with humaniqueness blinds us to the vast amount of animate intelligence we share with our fellow creatures.

te in the title of the Tao Te Ching (pronounced duh) referred to that natural condition.

Ultimately, the direction of history is determined by the dominant culture’s worldview.

When neuroscientists talk about the PFC’s functions, they use phrases like ‘forming goals and objectives, then devising plans of action to attain them’ – highly valuable processes that are a requisite for navigating our civilization.

The self may be constantly changing, but its needs are usually fairly simple, even primal. Just like an infant, it generally wants to feel secure, comfortable, loved. When it’s hungry, it wants food. When it’s tired, it wants to rest.14 The ‘I’, on the other hand, develops an orientation toward more complex needs, many of which it absorbs from the

many diseases are caused by bacteria, we’ve learned to become fearful of them, even to the point of washing with antibacterial soap that we’re told will eliminate 99.9 percent of them. But in fact most bacteria, which comprise the majority of single-celled organisms, are harmless to humans and thrive virtually everywhere on Earth. Tiny as they are,

focuses on spatial patterns between things. It readily accepts an ambiguous or incomplete situation without trying to impose coherent meaning on it. It savors fluid, indeterminate and vague conditions. It’s also more closely connected with internal bodily experience, making its perception of the world more vibrant, filled with smell, sound and