Nature of Belief: Escaping Cultural Confinement
[Exploring Life] Culture may be viewed as a universal tendency for people within stable geographic populations to create sets of beliefs, values and expectations that serve to create a sense of social coherence. It may be that culture is an offspring of the innate human need to belong. Perhaps culture originated as groups of people [...]
Nature of Belief: The Realm of Evidence
We interpret our experiences in life through a complex and often hidden network of beliefs. The human brain is a belief engine; beliefs are the apparatus and raw materials of the mind. They lie at the core of our emotions, determine our subsequent behaviour, and shape the course of our lives. In a basic sense, [...]
Ecopsychology: Release from Spiritual Confinement
[Exploring Life] Ecopsychology embraces three vital concepts, relationship, interaction, and belonging. Psychology has had an incestuous history, one in which it constantly looked for solutions to the problems it was responsible for creating in the first place. In this sense, psychology created its own market by infecting people with false assumptions about behaviour, emotions, and [...]
Time: Dreaming Time
[Exploring Life] Defining time is an immensely difficult task. We superimpose clocks and calendars as a means to orient ourselves to the natural cycles of the earth. Both clocks and calendars are ideas that serve to create presuppositions about how we relate to the movement and flow of our lives. A “new year” is a [...]
Aging: Younger Next Year
[Exploring Life] Culture can not only be confining, it can be physically, emotionally, and mentally unhealthy. We live inside a set of cultural assumptions that often remain invisible to us. Sometimes, these subconscious assumptions can cause us to live in extreme circumstances. Revealing and exposing underlying assumptions and providing advice and methods to escape from [...]
Effects of Media: Writing – The Shifting Style of Elements
[Exploring Life] The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice in response to the release of the commemorative edition of Strunk and White’s famous The Elements of Style.[1] The article condemns Strunk and White’s advice as being detrimental to the correct use of language as well as the development of [...]
Food: What is Food?
[Exploring Life] Most of what we buy in a grocery store is not food. Manufactured, processed, or modified products are not real food, they are food imitations or edible food-like substances. Food imitations might begin in nature but are then modified through the addition of additives in manufacturing and processing facilities before becoming available to [...]