In all its anodyne, mawkish brilliance, it reflects the essential, mind-numbing boredom of Christmas Day with a veracity that the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl simply can't match.
Descartes rightly viewed the metaphysical nature of man to be an essential mind-body union.
He will say the ālaya-vijñāna, devoid of subject-object bifurcation, provides the essential mind-stuff for defilement (=saṃsāra) and carries seeds for purification (=nirvāṇa) in a Yogācāra system that is fundamentally wrong, and at odds with the way things actually are.
His story tells us that we can learn life skills, like the ones I discovered are so essential in Mind in the Making, from "harsh street life education" as well as from great schools and loving parents.
Texts carry with them essential marks of mind, and indeed in understanding a text we see at least partway into the mind(s) involved.
With this essential methodology in mind, we would want to analyze the SPECT-scan experiment done on the Tibetan Buddhist at the moment he feels united with the universe and relinquishes his sense of self.
"Feelings represent an essential link between mind and body or, to put it another way, the link between our intellect and the physical world," he says in "Earth in the Balance".
The most critical missing piece, Randolph explained as we sat in his office last fall, is character — those essential traits of mind and habit that were drilled into him at boarding school in England and that also have deep roots in American history.
The problem is that the essential unlikeness of mind and body in the Cartesian view makes it difficult to conceive how they can interact i.e., how unextended mental ideas can push the body around and how bodily bumpings can yield ideas.
We kicked off with a New York Times Magazine article by Paul Tough, "What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?", about "essential traits of mind and habit" that can collectively be referred to as "character," which some schools have begun to try to foster in their students.
All of the affects proper derive from what is essential to the mind, its conatus, or drive toward self-preservation.
