With BC in a state of emergency caused by record flooding and me sitting in the middle of it, I think it is at last time to roll up my sleeves and address the emergencies that confront all of us. Several times in my career I have found it useful to "collapse" a problem that looks like a time series (where you need data points over time and you want to predict what happens in the future) into a picture of what is going on now . The current situation contains the past and tells us what we need to know (all we can know) about the future. Throughout my essays on this subject, I hope you will actually consult my sources. What I tell you is built on what I learned from much smarter people who are, thanks to the miracle of the internet, available at your fingertips. This is important stuff. Far more important than all the stuff you forgot from High School. And my sources are far more entertaining than your High School teachers.  I will start with a great book, recommended by Bill ...

What is the "self"? Among proponents of mindfulness and Zen, it is common to say that the "self" is an illusion - that the "self" does not really exist. Such talk leads us immediately into paradox, but Zen loves paradox. Vast amounts of ink are spilled in discussions about how, if the self doesn't exist, who or what it is that knows it doesn't exist. The self seems to be a matter of daily experience. Saying it's an illusion is little more than an attention-getting opinion or a device to sell books. To me, the problem seems to be a shortcoming of language. I just read a treatment of this issue that purported to solve it all by claiming that the self is a verb not a noun . This poor individual was trying to tackle one of the hardest problems in the world using his tenuous grip on the grammar he learned in school. He dimly perceives that the "self" is not an ordinary "thing", so he concludes it must be the only other kind of g...