Mary Martin

Individuals can exert influence over the future but they exist in larger fields that condition their choices: epistemological, ontological, economic and cultural or class, gender, varna, civilization type, dynasty, cultural personality or ways of knowing the real. Futurists, in general, tend to focus on the individual’s ability to create the future... See more

Intensive meditation, even after only one day, can also affect gene regulation in your brain through similar mechanisms. Attending a monthlong meditation retreat reduces the expression of genes that affect inflammation, and experienced meditators can reduce inflammatory genes after just one day of intensive mediation.

The more you build your self-conception

on memory, which is notoriously unreliable, and the more you try to give yourself an identity

by constructing a narrative of your life, the less likely you are to understand who and what

you really are.

we tell ourselves that humans do something clever or tactical because our brains have simulated that this course of action will produce favourable outcomes, but when we learn that ants do the same thing by enacting preprogrammed responses to pheromones, surely that doesn’t count.

our preoccupation with facts – the information that links us to each other – perhaps causes us to disregard other ways of understanding meaning in our relationships, such as touch, intuition and facial expressions.

Telling stories is a process of mattering. Who matters? When we tell stories, we make ethical choices about who to bring in and who to leave out. We cannot bring in all of the voices. The voices themselves only come to exist once we recognize them. The in-between power increases the probability that we notice the voices, listen to the voices and... See more

Patient Perceptions of In Vivo Versus Virtual Reality Exposures f

the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?... The time will come when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes... "

Jeremy Bentham (1748 - 1832)