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Topic Review
Lojong
Lojong (Tib. བློ་སྦྱོང་,Wylie: blo sbyong) is a mind training practice in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition based on a set of aphorisms formulated in Tibet in the 12th century by Chekawa Yeshe Dorje. The practice involves refining and purifying one's motivations and attitudes. The fifty-nine or so slogans that form the root text of the mind training practice are designed as a set of antidotes to undesired mental habits that cause suffering. They contain both methods to expand one's viewpoint towards absolute bodhicitta, such as "Find the consciousness you had before you were born" and "Treat everything you perceive as a dream", and methods for relating to the world in a more constructive way with relative bodhicitta, such as "Be grateful to everyone" and "When everything goes wrong, treat disaster as a way to wake up." Prominent teachers who have popularized this practice in the West include Pema Chödrön, Ken McLeod, Alan Wallace, Chögyam Trungpa, Sogyal Rinpoche, Kelsang Gyatso, Norman Fischer and the 14th Dalai Lama.
  • 595
  • 28 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Individuation
The principle of individuation, or principium individuationis, describes the manner in which a thing is identified as distinguished from other things. The concept appears in numerous fields and is encountered in works of Carl Gustav Jung, Gilbert Simondon, Alan Watts, Bernard Stiegler, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, David Bohm, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Manuel De Landa.
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  • 28 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Marrano
Marranos were Jews living in the Iberian Peninsula who converted or were forced to convert to Christianity during the Middle Ages, yet continued to practice Judaism in secret. The term specifically refers to the charge of Crypto-Judaism, whereas the term converso was used for the wider population of Jewish converts to Catholicism, whether or not they secretly still practised Jewish rites. Converts from either Judaism or Islam were referred to by the broader term of "New Christians". The term "marrano" came into later use in 1492 with the Castilian Alhambra Decree; it prohibited the practice of Judaism in Spain and required all remaining Jews to convert or leave. By then, the large majority of Jews in Spain had converted to Catholicism, and conversos numbered hundreds of thousands. They were closely monitored by the Spanish Inquisition and subject to suspicions by Catholics of the secret practice of Judaism, also known as "Marranism". In modern use "marrano" is sometimes, but not always, considered offensive; and "crypto-Jew" is occasionally preferred in scholarly works.
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  • 28 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Project Alpha
Project Alpha was an effort by magician James Randi to test the quality of scientific rigor of a well-known test of paranormal phenomena. In the late 1970s, Randi contacted the newly established McDonnell Laboratory for Psychical Research ("MacLab") with suggestions on how to conduct tests for paranormal phenomena. At the same time, two teenage boys (Steve Shaw, later known as Banachek, and Mike Edwards) independently contacted the McDonnell Laboratory and volenteered as subjects for such tests from 1979 to 1982. They quickly proved to exhibit a range of paranormal abilities far and away better than the other subjects of the experiment. The lab began leaking reports of the pair's capabilities, which were in fact simple magic tricks. When rumors of the test subjects' connection to Randi reached Peter Phillips, head of the MacLab, he instituted tighter protocols for the experiments; the two subjects' results declined sharply. In 1983, Randi held a press conference to expose the deception In the wake of Project Alpha, there were a number of controversies about the ethics of interference in scientific research and the validity of paranormal research as it then existed. It remains a watershed event in the field of parapsychology.
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  • 28 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Taoist Music
Taoist music is the ceremonial music of Taoism. The importance of music in Taoist ceremony is demonstrated by revealing how central beliefs are reflected through elements of music such as instrumentation and rhythm. Expression of spiritual beliefs through music enables followers of Taoism to enhance their path to enlightenment.
  • 960
  • 25 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Reformist Left
The Reformist Left is a political term coined by Richard Rorty in his 1998 book Achieving Our Country, in reference to the mainstream Left in the United States (though the term may be applied elsewhere) in the first two thirds of the 20th century: I propose to use the term reformist Left to cover all those Americans who, between 1900 and 1964, struggled within the framework of constitutional democracy to protect the weak from the strong. … I think that the Left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy. This was the business the American Left was in during the first two-thirds of the century. … Emphasizing the continuity between Herbert Croly and Lyndon Johnson, between John Dewey and Martin Luther King, between Eugene Debs and Walter Reuther, would help us to recall a reformist Left which deserves not only respect but imitation—the best model available for the American Left in the coming century.
  • 617
  • 25 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Ynglism
Ynglism (Russian: Инглии́зм, also spelled "Yngliism" or "Inglyism"), institutionally the Ancient Russian Ynglistic Church of the Orthodox Old Believers—Ynglings (Древнерусская Инглиистическая Церковь Православных Староверов—Инглингов, Drevnerusskaya Ingliisticheskaya Tserkov' Pravoslavnykh Staroverov—Inglingov) is a direction of the Slavic Native Faith movement registered with the Ministry of justice of the Russian Federation in the early 1990s by Aleksandr Khinevich from Omsk, in Siberia.({{{1}}}, {{{2}}}) Adepts call themselves "Old Believers-Ynglings", seldom simply "Ynglings". The church is described by scholar Kaarina Aitamurto as having a well-defined doctrine, an authoritative leadership, and focusing on esoteric teachings.({{{1}}}, {{{2}}}) Ynglings regard themselves as perserving the true, orthodox (i.e. in accordance with the universal order), religious tradition of the Russians and of all the Slavs. Rodnover groups in Russia are strongly critical of Ynglism; the international veche (assembly) of Rodnover organisations even declared it a false religion. In the early 2000s the church faced judicial prosecutions for ethnic hatred, and Khinevich himself was imprisoned from 2009 to 2011. The central writings of Ynglism are the four Slavic-Aryan Vedas.
  • 2.2K
  • 25 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Global Intellectual History
Global intellectual history is the history of thought in the world across the span of human history, often understood from the invention of writing to the present. The discipline is part of the field of intellectual history, also known as history of ideas, and can also be termed global history of ideas. In recent years, historians such as C. A. Bayly have been calling for a global intellectual history to be written. They stress that to understand the history of ideas across time and space, it is necessary to study from a cosmopolitan or global point of view the connections and the parallels in intellectual development across the world. Yet these separate histories and their convergence in the modern period have yet to be brought together into a single historical narrative. Nonetheless, some global histories, like Bayly's own Birth of the Modern World or David Armitage's The Declaration of Independence: A Global History offer contributions to the huge and necessarily collaborative project of writing the history of thought in a comparative and especially connective way. Other examples of transnational intellectual histories include Albert Hourani's Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age. In 2013, Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori published the anthology Global Intellectual History. In 2016, the Routledge journal Global Intellectual History (ed. Richard Whatmore) was established. In January 2019 the historian J. G. A. Pocock stated in that journal: "The beginnings of the ‘global’ critique are well known and may as well be accepted as common ground. They reduce to the assertion that ‘Cambridge’ scholarship in this field is ‘Eurocentric’; that is, that it has dealt exclusively with the ‘political thought’ generated in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean, transmitted to medieval and modern Europe, and taken up in the Euro-colonized Americas and a world (or ‘globe’) subjected to European or ‘western’ domination. This is obviously true, and calls for reformation." It has been argued that the historians of ideas Arthur O. Lovejoy and Hajime Nakamura should be read as modern founders of the discipline global intellectual history. Other recent contributors are Siep Stuurman, Sanjay Subrahamnyam, and Martin Mulsow. The origins of human intellectual history arguably began before the invention of writing, but historians are by definition only concerned with the eras in which writing was present. In the spirit of a historiographic project that is relevant to all human beings and that has yet to be completed, the sections that follow briefly review currents of thought in pre-modern and modern history of the world, and are organized by geographic area (and within each section, chronologically).
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Topic Review
Portraits of the Historical Jesus
Portraits of the historical Jesus refers to the various biographies of Jesus that have been constructed in the three separate scholarly quests for the historical Jesus that have taken place in the past two centuries, each with distinct characteristics and developing new and different research criteria. The portraits of Jesus that have been constructed in these processes have often differed from each other, and from the dogmatic image portrayed in the gospel accounts. These portraits include that of Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, charismatic healer, Cynic philosopher, Jewish Messiah and prophet of social change, but there is little scholarly agreement on a single portrait, or the methods needed to construct it. There are, however, overlapping attributes among the various portraits, and scholars who differ on some attributes may agree on others. By the 21st century scholars began to focus on what is historically probable and plausible about Jesus.
  • 1.7K
  • 25 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Demonic Possession
Demonic possession is the belief that a person's actions are controlled by an alien spirit, demon, or entity. Symptoms of demonic possession commonly claimed by victims include missing memories, perceptual distortions, loss of a sense of control, and hyper-suggestibility. Erika Bourguignon found in a study of 488 societies worldwide, seventy-four percent believe in possession by spirits, with the highest numbers of beliefs in Pacific cultures and the lowest incidence among Native Americans of both North and South America.
  • 8.4K
  • 25 Nov 2022
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