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.
On this basis, he goes on to formulate the definition of ren (humanity, humaneness) for the subsequent tradition: "the essential character of mind" and "the essential pattern of love".
With both the practical and theoretical importance of the identification of essential genes in mind, we set out to construct an effective classifier of essential genes which exploited various genomic descriptors that could be generated directly form sequence data.
Tsongkhapa makes it abundantly clear that in his view not only is the intellectual act itself utterly devoid of any essential reality, even the sense-faculties (the complex eye, ear and so on) also lack any essential reality, never mind the sense data they convey to the knowing individual.
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.
