March 29th, 2007 §
Along with all and sundry, I’ve been tagged by Slade of Shift Your Spirits to talk about money — everybody’s favorite topic. Slade’s got a neat twist on it that’s worth exploring: an exercise he picked up from Morgana Rae. Since money is such an abstract concept — for many of us, it simply flows in and out of our lives, and we’re never sure exactly how much we have, or why — he suggests we personify money and establish a relationship with it. Give it a face, give it name, and think about the relationship you have with it. Is it a healthy relationship? Is there plenty of give-and-take? Is Money someone you’d want to take home and meet your mother?
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March 22nd, 2007 §
In 1997 I was in graduate school, and I was coming to that dreaded point where you have to decide on a dissertation topic. I enjoyed linguistics, and there were dozens of topics I could have chosen; but whenever I asked myself, “Is THIS what I want to study the rest of my life?”, I had a sinking feeling that I was a terrible fraud, and that I was in the wrong place entirely. I didn’t know what I should be doing, but graduate school just didn’t seem right anymore. What should I be doing? What was the purpose of my schooling? What was the purpose of my life?
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March 19th, 2007 §
Recently I decided to gather up a list of web articles on the Law of Attraction for my mother, who has no web access (by choice) and is in serious difficulty financially (not by choice — at least, not conscious choice). She is in an interesting position spiritually — she’s a Zen Buddhist, and so in theory she doesn’t care what her financial situation is; but, given that she can’t realistically wander the suburban streets of Greensboro, NC, with a begging bowl, she’s a bit stuck. She has been trying to use the Law of Attraction under various forms and names for years, to little avail.
Since I was gathering up the links anyway, I thought I’d post them here, in case anyone was interested. You’ll see there’s a whole pile of Steve Pavlina there, and some of Slade’s fantastic work, too. » Read the rest of this entry «
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March 14th, 2007 §
Everyone would agree that the languages people speak are good fit for the structure of the human mind. After all, they were invented by people, they are developed and maintained by people, they are used every day for hours on end by every single person on the planet, and their essentials can be mastered by children who don’t know how to tie their shoes. (Conversely, their essentials have not yet been mastered by any computer program, despite decades of earnest attempts, and the vast fortune that would belong to the creator of such a program.) They’re easy to use and in many ways reflect the way we think. Languages are the product of the human mind, and you can learn a lot about how the mind works by studying them.
It stands to reason, then, that if a system of belief can be shown to be similar to lingiustic structure, that that system of belief is a good fit for the human mind.
In this post I’ll look at the two fundamental architectural underpinnings of language — what I’ll call the Dictionary and the Rules — and show how Paganism has essentially the same underpinnings, while monotheism does not. In the sections below, I’ll present the linguistics first, and then the comparative religion.
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