"I'm gonna owe God fifty bucks if I don't get enlightened soon."
I hate it when that happens.
More like this
Seasonal friday, and we ask the iPod - what is the meaning of the lone top quark discovery at Fermilab?
Whoosh goes the randomizer.
Whoosh.
The twenty-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Remote Central.
Mrs Deltoid wrote the following and told me that I had to post it on my blog. I'm not sure who it is directed at.
Trick question. T-Rex will not achieve enlightenment until he frees himself from the materialism attached to that $50.
It takes time. You're exercising your brain, after all, in ways it isn't accustomed to. Took Michael Jordan a lot of work to get good, too.
What I like about the Buddhist thing is that you have to do the work, you don't just sit and pray the magic words and get enlightenment granted to you by a deity.
Check out "Zen and the Brain" by James H. Austin (MIT Press) sometime. He's an 80-something year old neurologist, an emeritus professor in Colorado, I think, who started practicing zen in the late 60s in Japan, while there for some research. He looks at drug and brain lesion studies to find known things that cause phenomena similar to those experienced during meditation, and tries to come up with some scientific explanations for what happens. He includes some testable hypotheses, and is generally woo-free.
There never was a Gambling Rex,
Nor fifty bucks to bet.
Without these worldly artifacts,
God can't collect his debt.
Well, shit, Novak. That was downright Making Light-worthy!