Two Japanese archers take aim at a target, circa 1897. Notes Aims Focus Perceptions Your hypothalamus sets your basic aims. This focuses your perceptions. If you are hungry and you walk out of your office and into the kitchen, the world is going to set it self up around your aim. This sheds light on the relationship between ethics and perception. If you are hungry, what you tend to see are all those things relevant to you acquiring ...

Bacchus (Dionysus), god of wine, emerges with his followers. Falling in love with Ariadne on first sight, he leaps from his chariot, drawn by two cheetahs, towards her. Ariadne had been abandoned on the Greek island of Naxos by Theseus, whose ship is shown in the distance. The picture shows her initial fear of Bacchus, but he raised her to heaven and turned her into a constellation, represented by the stars above her head. Notes Taki...

Notes Pay attention, or else Mythologies as Compression Algorithms The materialistic view cannot tell us anything about consciousness. Plato proposed that all knowledge was remembering. We do not believe that today because we believe that we gather knowledge as consequence of contact in with world. But there are some things that are predicated on this idea remembering since it strikes such a deep cord. Models of the world that includ...

Notes Origins for Redemption The question we ask ourselves is why are we here? We are here to search for meaning. Why is this something that drives human beings? Other animals do not seem to have this level of questioning. So what is it about humans? It has been associated with the word redemption. People have the need for redemption. Having a need for redemption is a profound idea. People talk about positive psychology and happiness...

Notes Themes: * Material reality versus the nature of being. * Carl Jung and John Boyd regarding information, reality, orientation, and never having the ability to explain a system by looking into it because the nature of learning about the system changes your orientation. * Seeking truth versus the other thing that is explained. * Ideas have people versus people having ideas (from Carl Jung) * Fractal localism and why the little act...

Notes Virtue encompasses and extends beyond moral and religious contexts. The ideas transcend reality through compelling stories. The necessity of virtue is both for the individual and for society. The Origins of Virtue You cannot understand what makes a virtue until you modulate what constitutes being. Modern people are fundamentally materialistic. And there is some utility in that. We are masters of material transformation. And th...

Apollo and Diana Attacking the Children of Niobe by Jacques-Louis David (1772). Niobe, the queen of Thebes, shelters her youngest daughter from Apollo and Diana‘s arrows. The queen’s thirteen other children lie wounded or dead in the painting’s foreground. This violent scene, drawn from a 1st-century Roman poem, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, illustrates Niobe’s punishment for boasting of her own power and fertility and for refusing to pay ho...