3/08/2010
Religion Without Mysticism?
3/05/2010
3/04/2010
New Discoveries About the Experience of Anger
Know someone with a hair trigger temper? Do those bulging veins at his temples during his raging meltdown have any other consequences, besides making you want to run for cover? What are the potential problems of daily fits?
New discoveries about anger explain why the majority of our elderly population are of good nature, sweet and happy people....read on for information from wikipedia, Science Daily and webMD
In modern society, anger is viewed as an immature or uncivilized response... conditioning can cause inappropriate expressions of anger such as uncontrolled violent outbursts, misdirected anger ...more from wikipedia
Anger and hostility are significantly associated with both a higher risk for coronary heart disease (CHD) in healthy individuals and poorer outcomes in patients with existing heart disease, according to the first quantitative review and meta-analysis of related studies, which appears in the March 17, 2009, issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology......more from Science Daily
Younger people, those with children and less-educated individuals are more likely to experience anger, according to new UofT research. Professor Scott Schieman from the Sociology Department at the University of Toronto has published new findings about the experience of anger. In a chapter in the forthcoming International Handbook of Anger, to be released in January 2010, Schieman documents the basic social patterns and contexts of anger....more from Science Daily
Scientists speculate that anger may produce direct biological effects on the heart and arteries. Negative emotions, such as anger, quickly activate the "fight-or-flight response." They also trigger the "stress axis," Kubzansky says. "That's a slightly slower response, but it activates a cascade of neurochemicals that are all geared toward helping you in the short run if you're facing a crisis."....Anger may also disrupt the electrical impulses of the heart and provoke dangerous heart rhythm disturbances.
Other research suggests that stress hormones may lead to higher levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), a substance linked to atherosclerosis and future heart disease risk. In 2004, Duke University scientists who studied 127 healthy men and women found that those prone to anger, hostility, and depression had two to three times higher CRP levels than their more placid peers.
3/03/2010
Alan Watts, What is Scholarship?
"Do you know what Scholarship means? What a school means? The original meaning of a scholar?
Leisure.
Scholarship is to study everything that’s unimportant. Not necessary for survival. All the charming irrelevancies of life.
But you see the thing is this. If you don’t have a room in your life for the playful, life’s not worth living. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. But if the only reason for which Jack plays is that he can work better afterwards, he’s not really playing. He’s playing because it’s good for him. He’s not playing at all!
To be a true scholar you have to cultivate an attitude to life where you’re not trying to get anything out of it. You pick up a pebble on the beach and look at it. It’s beautiful. Don’t try to get a sermon out of it. Sermons and Stones and God and everything be damned. Just enjoy it.
Don’t feel that you’ve got to salve your conscience by saying that this is for the advancement of your aesthetic understanding. Enjoy the pebble. If you do that you’ll become healthy. You become able to be a loving helpful human being. But if you can’t do that, if you can only do things because somehow you're going to get something out of it, you’re a vulture."