Join 📚 Christian Champ's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Christian's read, .
Dukkha is a relentlessly recurring part of life as life is ordinarily lived. This fact is less evident if you translate dukkha as it’s conventionally translated—as “suffering” pure and simple—than if you translate it as involving a big component of “unsatisfactoriness.” Organisms, including humans, are designed by natural selection to react to their environments in ways that will make things “better” (in natural selection’s sense of the term). This means they are almost always, at some level, scanning the horizon for things to be unhappy about, uncomfortable with, unsatisfied with. And since being unsatisfied, by definition, involves at least a little suffering, thinking of dukkha as entailing unsatisfactoriness winds up lending credence to the idea that dukkha in the sense of suffering is a pervasive part of life. (See chapters 1 and 3.)
Why Buddhism Is True
Robert Wright
In 2013, I spoke at The Next Web’s main conference in Amsterdam, one of the biggest tech conferences in Europe. From that talk, I’ve landed 3-4 other international talks. Why? Event organizers come there to source speakers. Know which stages will lead to other stages and crush it.
How to Be a Public Speaker — Or, the Art of the Keynote Address
thoughtcatalog.com
Symbiosis can also sponsor a different kind of relationship that calls into question the bounds of self. We have a symbiotic relationship with various kinds of bacteria that reside within us and that in various ways influence our moods and thoughts. Scientists have found that by replacing the gut bacteria in shy, anxious mice with bacteria from gregarious mice, they can make the shy mice gregarious. For ethical reasons, this kind of experiment isn’t done on humans, but other evidence makes it clear that in our species, too, microbes influence the mind, in part by influencing neurotransmitters.
Why Buddhism Is True
Robert Wright
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise