In this book I’ll argue that the complexity, unpredictability, and pace of events in our world, and the severity of global environmental stress, are soaring. If our societies are to manage their affairs and improve their well-being they will need more ingenuity—that is, more ideas for solving their technical and social problems. But societies, whether rich or poor, can’t always supply the ingenuity they need at the right times and places.
The above quote--published in 2020--is even more astute now than when it was first published. We ignore this question at our peril.
This flip-flopping—breathing all-out, then not at all, getting really cold and then hot again—is the key to Tummo’s magic. It forces the body into high stress one minute, a state of extreme relaxation the next. Carbon dioxide levels in the blood crash, then they build back up. Tissues become oxygen deficient and then flooded again. The body becomes more adaptable and flexible and learns that all these physiological responses can come under our control. Conscious heavy breathing, McGee told me, allows us to bend so that we don’t get broken.
A wonderfully interesting and informative book. My review here.
Freud recognized the first circuit as the oral stage, the second as the anal stage and the fourth as the genital stage. He did not notice the third, semantic circuit — perhaps because as an obsessive Rationalist he was so absorbed in verbal and conceptual programs that they were invisible to him, as water may be to fishes.
This book is "out there" and delightful for it.
Montaigne’s most famous saying was, after a lifetime of learning, que sçaisje? The saying that ‘the more you know, the more you know that you don’t know’ is attributed both to the Buddha and to Socrates. St. Paul wrote: ‘And if any man think that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know’ (1 Corinthians 8: 2).
This is a reminder that natural selection didn’t design your mind to see the world clearly; it designed your mind to have perceptions and beliefs that would help take care of your genes.
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