INTEGRAL WORLD MAILING LIST 
http://www.integralworld.net

Newsletter Nr. 613
Amsterdam, April 21th, 2016


PHILOSOPHY'S COLD SHOULDER - An Analysis of Seeing Things As They Are by John Searle - ANDREA DIEM-LANE

From our experiences, philosophy seems to have gotten a bad rap from the general public. And this is indeed unfortunate, as this area of study offers so much to the inquiring mind. Our curriculum includes many engrossing topics, such as religion (atheism, agnosticism and theism), science (evolution, quantum physics, cosmology, and neuroscience), politics (socialism, communism, and democracy), the future (artificial intelligence and biotechnology), ethics (from animal rights to stem cell research), etc. The subject matter of philosophy is the human being, as the philosopher Donald Palmer succinctly put, and so anything related to us (our beliefs, our ethics, our biology, our planet, the multiverse) are part of the philosophical conversation. How can this be anything but truly fascinating?

Read more:
http://www.integralworld.net/diem-lane27.html


THE SWORD OF ZEN - Meditation/Brain Training for Functional Combat Cognition - BARCLAY POWERS

One of the most interesting aspects of the martial arts philosophy of Rory Miller is the way that it expresses the essence of the sword of Zen within a 21st century context. An enlightened understanding of the Art of War has been an essential aspect of East Asian civilization, which often considered the highest level of martial arts to be the actual completion stage of meditation—the rediscovery of the Original Mind. Perhaps the most well known saying of Zen is, “See the original face/true self and become a living Buddha.” The word Buddha it should be remembered means “awake”. From the perspective of the Zen sword it means instantaneously killing your opponent with one movement completely without thought. As Takuan Soho said in the 17th century, “The term ignorance means the absence of enlightenment, which is to say, delusion.”

Read more:
http://www.integralworld.net/powers22.html