What’s So Critical About Critical Thinking?

It’s a vaccine against lies, disinformation and conspiracy theories. My grandson, Ethan Miller, and I face off in a heady game of checkers. In an era when untruths have been proliferating across platforms in the form of disinformation, misinformation, fake news, lies and conspiracy theories, it’s refreshing and hope-inducing to know that there’s a vaccine […]

2020 — What Went Right

Within every social and global tragedy, the light of love, compassion, goodwill and truth shines through the darkness. Acknowledging it and appreciating its appearance demonstrates that virtue lives in the hearts of many people. It gives us hope for the future and a reason to persist in right thinking and socially constructive behavior. Seeing others […]

What To Do When Your House Is On Fire

Responding appropriately to climate change First—Be Aware Of What’s Happening And Take Action Immediately From a whole-systems perspective, the key to managing complex living systems is to manage the parts in right functional relationship to each other. When this happens, the whole takes care of itself. With regard to climate, Earth is the whole and individual […]

Nature’s Wisdom

We can learn it the easy way or the hard way Ecoliteracy involves an understanding of the basic principles of ecology. Understanding is the relatively easy part. The challenging part is living accordingly. Due to the specificity and complexity of this topic, I draw heavily upon The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision by […]

A “Divine” Sandwich

One of my favorite fast-food sandwiches is the Burger King Wopper. (Shown here as I ordered it). I hadn’t had one since before the pandemic, so when I drove through to get one recently I couldn’t help but express my gratitude, which turned into a contemplation where I traced each of its parts back to […]

Kenōsis: Recipe For Inner Abundance

In 2018, when His Holiness The Dalai Lama requested the Mind and Life Institute to organize a weeklong dialogue with top scientists and scholars to discuss the ecological situation and offer ways to move forward constructively, one of the participants was Sallie McFague, a Distinguished Theologian at the Vancouver School of Theology in British Columbia, […]

A “Divine” Sandwich

One of my favorite fast-food sandwiches is the Burger King Wopper. (Shown here as I ordered it). I hadn’t had one since before the pandemic, so when I drove through to get one recently I couldn’t help but express my gratitude, which turned into a contemplation where I traced each of the parts back to […]

Crisis / Transformation

All being, inanimate and living, without exception, follows the cycle of life. What comes into existence sustains for a time then succumbs to entropy. Knowing this and that the important factor for human beings is time, we can look within the process of change to find opportunities to slow the process of entropy as much […]

Coherence

In whole-systems parlance, ordering specifies the arrangement of parts. Coherence is the adhering property of those parts, the quality that forms a unified whole. In mechanical systems, their design creates functional relationships that unify the parts. In living systems, the “glue” holding their members together is the desire or intention to connect, to unite. When […]

Kenōsis: Recipe For Inner Abundance

In 2018, when His Holiness The Dalai Lama requested the Mind and Life Institute to organize a weeklong dialogue with top scientists and scholars to discuss our ecological situation and offer ways to move forward constructively, one of the participants was Sallie McFague, a Distinguished Theologian at the Vancouver School of Theology in British Columbia, […]