What does it feel like to be a person whose daily life is dominated by performance art?  It's possible to be the world's greatest car salesman (certainly a performance), yet feel that "this isn't me". Perhaps the money has coaxed him away from who he really is or should be. This is touched upon by Buddha's eight-fold path, which is: Right Understanding,  Right Thought,  Right Speech,  Right Action,  Right Livelihood,  Right Effort,  Right Mindfulness, and  Right Concentration Buddhism is the grandfather of what we now call "mindfulness", which I think of as Buddhism without the hocus pocus. Our hypothetical car salesman is ignoring rule 5 - Right Livelihood. He is also breaking virtually all the other rules by his focus on selling cars rather than doing something truly important (to him). He is an excellent car salesman - a job that requires a wide and deep understanding of human nature and a performance that is fine-tuned to every customer in ev...

 It is not possible to understand the 21st century without seeing the overwhelming influence of "performance art". To be sure, this insight is not new: All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players - Shakespear But in the time of Shakespeare, no ordinary person could acquire a million "fans" by offering online makeup advice. Nobody could step into a public shouting match while sitting with a laptop at the kitchen table. We've always had opinions, but these days we have the feel the compulsion, even the obligation, to express our ideas through public performance. My father's decision to join the Canadian Army and go off to war was almost casual. It was a job and a way to see the world. He didn't know much about world affairs, let alone the noble cause behind the war. There was little of the passion that millions of us seem to feel when we take to the street to publicly "demonstrate" -- feeling that, by doing this, we infl...

Today I had the unexpected pleasure of a long, detailed conversation with Ambre Singh, a brilliant and creative Second Life citizen. It related to her new (to me) installation at  http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Commune%20Utopia/9/248/27 (You need to be logged in to second life to use this link) I really can't come close to describing all the ideas we touched upon. Only the ideas that grew out of it.  We talked about the limitations of language. How we must never lose sight of the fact that "reality" or "experience of reality" is primary. Language is merely "about" reality. It is totally inadequate when we wish to share an experience that is unique to us. There is much to unpack here. I'm thinking of two of Bertrand Russel's colleagues at Cambridge: Wittgenstein and Kauffman. Russel himself attempted to describe the human language (or at least the interesting subset that mathematicians use) in formal terms - almost like a computer languag...

 The GOP's has consistently attacked voting rights and irrationally rejected election results they don't like. This has lead many to lament the passing of democracy in the US. It' certainly under attack in many other places around the world. Let's look a little deeper into this question. It seems plain that authoritarianism is the opposite of democracy, which we take as rule of the people, by the people, for the people. Trump's spectacular pardon of his convicted criminal friends on the way out gives a clear idea of who was running the US and who benefitted. It's a much bigger problem than Trump - as we have seen in the days since he has run away to sulk in Florida. We can see that "populism" played a role in the rise of Trump. Paradoxically, populism (giving the people what they want or at least promising to do so) should be a force for democracy. In practice, it never is. It's a device to make the dictator seem like a "man of the people...