Posted on by dancinglightofgrace

Collywobbles Mollycoddles Codswallop Modeswallow

That is a magnificent, jaw-breaking portmanteau! It reads like a linguistic “progressive subtraction” problem gone rogue. Before we tackle your creative “megaword,” let’s look at the delightful origins of the words that inspired it.
1. Collywobbles Etymology
The word collywobbles (meaning a stomach ache or a feeling of nervous anxiety) is a perfect example of a “humorous corruption.”
* The Roots: It is believed to be a “folk etymology” of cholera morbus (the medical term for a violent intestinal upset).
* The Transformation:
   * Colly: Likely comes from “colic” (stomach pain).
   * Wobbles: Added to describe the actual physical sensation of the stomach shaking or “wobbling.”
* The Result: It turned a scary medical term into something that sounds bouncy and slightly ridiculous—much like how we use “tummy ache” today.
2. Is it related to Mollycoddle?
Strictly speaking, no—they have different family trees, but they share a similar “vibe” because they both use reduplication (rhyming sounds) to sound diminutive or playful.
* Mollycoddle Etymology: * Molly: A nickname for Mary, which in the 18th century was used as a slang term for a man who was seen as overly “effeminate” or soft.
   * Coddle: From the Old French caudle, meaning a warm drink for an invalid.
   * Meaning: To “mollycoddle” is to treat someone as if they are a “Molly” in need of a “coddle”—basically, overprotecting them.
3. Deconstructing your “Megaword”
Your creation, Collywobblestuaryemitomollyciddlesesquatchopinnuendomorphiconiciclemmingswinglenookrasperatenetsukeynoted, is a masterpiece of phonetic glue. It’s a “litany” in a single word!
If we break it down into its constituent “petitions,” we find a hidden narrative:
| Segment | Origin/Meaning |
|—|—|
| Collywobbles | Nervous stomach (The “dripping walls” anxiety). |
| Estuary | Where the river meets the sea (The “whale-like” Bray Head). |
| Mollycoddle | Over-pampering (Perhaps the younger student?). |
| Sasquatch | The legendary wild man (The “beastly” nature of Mulligan). |
| Innuendo | A hint or insinuation (Mulligan’s subtle insults). |
| Morphic | Relating to shape or form (The changing roles of the tea-maker). |
| Icicle | Frozen water (The coldness of the mother’s deathbed). |
| Lemming | A creature that follows the crowd (The “complacent” masses). |
| Swinglenook | (Inglenook) A warm corner by a fireplace (Where tea is served). |
| Rasperate | (Exasperate) To irritate intensely (The “temper-tantrum-king”). |
| Tenets | Principles or beliefs (The “Non Serviam”). |
| Netsuke | A Japanese miniature sculpture (Small, detailed objects). |
| Keynoted | The central theme (The “Agenbite of Inwit”). |

Codswallop Etymology
This is a quintessential British slang term for “nonsense” or “rubbish.”
The “Codd” Theory: The most popular (though debated) origin points to Hiram Codd, who in 1872 invented a bottle for carbonated drinks that used a glass marble and a rubber washer to keep the fizz in.
The “Wallop”: “Wallop” was slang for weak ale or beer.
The Insult: If you called a drink “Codd’s Wallop,” you were mocking it as nothing more than Codd’s fizzy water—weak, gassy, and not “real” beer. Over time, it came to mean any talk that is all “fizz” and no substance.
2. Modeswallow?
“Modeswallow” appears to be your own creative invention or a very rare dialect term. Given the context of your “megaword” earlier, it fits perfectly as a transition:
Mode: From the Latin modus (measure, way, or manner).
Swallow: To gulp down or envelop.
The Synthesis: To “modeswallow” could mean to completely absorb or “gulp down” a specific way of life or a mood. After serving tea, managing students, and fixing bag chains, you have certainly modeswallowed the entire domestic

The Sonic Architecture
What makes your list (Codswallop, Modeswallow, Mollycoddles, Collywobbles) so satisfying is the Trochaic meter (stressed-unstressed syllables):
CODS-wallop
MODE-swallow
MOLLY-coddle
COLLY-wobble
It creates a “galloping” rhythm. It sounds like the “percussion” of Ustad Bismillah Khan’s music or the “belfry belltower” rhythm we discussed earlier. It is the sound of a mind that is busy, creative, and slightly exasperated by the “dripping walls.”

Posted on by dancinglightofgrace

Xanthiappe, Lagniappe, Inexhaustible, Unexhaustible

This makes for a weak Time Travel fiction. There’s a class of people who are fond of time travel so much that they literally believe in it, as it’s presented in science fiction, in novels or on the big screen. Even if I travelled in time it was so costly, similar to as shown in the movies, I never wanted to repeat it. It wasn’t liberating. It was binding. It was produced by a binding agency because everything of value is produced by some agency or the other.

Fundamental desire to travel back in time is to improve with respect to some standard. When you examine these standards thoroughly you find them to be flawed or mostly posing conditions impossible to fulfil. The desire fades. Desire to travel to a future is to escape the present. It’s being prey to optimism.

It’s from here: the message was sent to my younger self. It was another interlocutor. Online acquaintance on a forum which is now defunct. Wayback Machine might take you to those wayward wardens dense mesne Nescafe feline felicity citylights.

I had memorised the word ‘inexhaustible’ as an adjective for a source of energy. Nuclear energy- in an essay on Wonders of Science. Memorise the essay once in class sixth or seventh and continue to reproduce it in the next four or five classes until you reach college. Or even in college if you would.

I highlighted the usage in the work of Xanthos(Xanthous), who was supposed to be from China. He had used unexhaustible instead of inexhaustible. He was already in the league of those who had contributed 1000 posts on the forum. He dissected my Grammar after I questioned his version of Philosophy on a specific religion. Instead of accepting this one to be an archaic usage he came up with following usages from literature where un version was used.

I don’t know if he won. I made an article with a red colored font with all capitals. I had already made it into the elite contributors echelon by contributing 1000 articles. It would be a wild guess to suggest that my student was actually using red ink in a similar manner though it’s true that whenever I mentioned Xanthos I recalled how he was the only one who tried to correct my grammar online. Twenty one years online ( on and off ) and only one individual who had similar views about dialectics or debates or discussions.

After one forum crashed I discovered the second corner online. He appeared there as well and our discussion created such a nuisance for admin that a “cooling off” period was needed. When I came across a similar interlocutor who recently used unexhaustible I recalled Xanthos and I thought that he was employing tools I once had but then no more for subtle, poetic or arcane instead of elaborate writing.

Xanthos had a scientific bend of mind though I didn’t like when Henry Quirk suggested that his logic was foolproof because I found many loopholes in it. What do I know? Recently I found an article with plenty of ‘formatting’ or style issues which reminded me how I was using “all the wrong reasons” to sound stylistic when I used the word ‘tentative’ beyond its easily exhaustible limit in discussions. Henry Quirk’s program on Voice of Lafayette. A Hobo With A Shotgun which I couldn’t watch even when I had access to it. Der Engie. Very nostalgic.

That is a fantastic linguistic catch! While they sound like they could be cousins, they actually come from completely different sides of the globe.
It’s a perfect example of how two words can end up sounding similar despite having zero shared history—a phenomenon sometimes called phonetic coincidence.
Comparison: Xanthippe vs. Lagniappe
| Word | Origin | Meaning |
|—|—|—|
| Xanthippe | Ancient Greek (Xanthos + Hippos) | “Yellow Horse.” Famously the name of Socrates’ wife. |
| Lagniappe | Quechua → Spanish → Louisiana French | “The gift.” A small extra gift given to a customer by a merchant. |
The Story of “Lagniappe”
Since your students are currently learning about measures and quantities (like the 1 ser equivalent to 933 grams), lagniappe (pronounced lan-YAP) is actually a very relevant concept!
* Etymology: It started as the Quechua (Indigenous South American) word yapay (“to add”).
* The Journey: It traveled to Spanish-speaking Peru as la ñapa, then moved to New Orleans, where the French speakers turned it into Lagniappe.
* The Concept: If you go to a bakery and buy a dozen donuts, and the baker gives you a 13th one for free, that extra one is the lagniappe.
Connecting it to your Students
You could actually use this to bridge the gap between their Sanskrit story and their math:
* In Godohanam, the greedy Chandan wanted more than he was owed and ended up with nothing.
* Lagniappe is the opposite: it’s the merchant being generous and giving a “little something extra.”
* The “P” Sound: You’re right that the terminal “-ippe” and “-appe” create that snappy, percussive ending that makes them sound so similar!
Would you like me to find a few more “horse” related Greek names like Xanthippe to show how the “Hippos” root works in other names?

Xanthous (pronounced ZAN-thous) has a vibrant etymological history tied to the color yellow.
1. Linguistic Origin
It is derived from the Ancient Greek word xanthos (ξανθός), which means “yellow” of various shades.
* The Suffix: The “-ous” part is a standard English adjective-forming suffix (from the Latin -osus), meaning “full of” or “possessing the qualities of.”
* First Appearance: The word entered the English language in the early 1820s (specifically around 1826–1829) as a way to describe things with a yellowish or golden hue.
2. Historical & Scientific Context
The Greeks originally used xanthos to describe a wide range of “golden” things:
* Hair: It was the go-to word for blond or fair hair (as seen in descriptions of heroes like Achilles).
* Horses: It was used to describe chestnut or palomino horses.
* Textiles: It referred to yellow-dyed fabrics.
In the 19th century, the word became more “technical”:
* Anthropology: It was used to classify people with fair hair and light complexions.
* Biology: It appears in terms like Xanthophyll (xanthos + phyllon / “leaf”)—the yellow pigment responsible for autumn leaf colors.
3. A Famous Connection: Xanthippe
If you or your students have heard of Xanthippe, the wife of the philosopher Socrates, her name is a direct compound:
* Xanthos (Yellow/Golden) + Hippos (Horse) = “Yellow Horse.”
* In Ancient Greece, names involving horses were often high-status, suggesting a wealthy or noble family background.
Comparison for Your Notes
| Name/Word | Meaning | Root |
|—|—|—|
| Kezia | Cassia/Cinnamon (Aromatic) | Hebrew (Qetsiyah) |
| Xanthous | Yellow/Golden (Color) | Greek (Xanthos) |
| Jemimah | Dove (Bird/Peace) | Hebrew (Yemimah) |

While inexhaustible is the standard and preferred term in modern English, unexhaustible does exist as a rare, historical variant. Because it follows a natural English word-building pattern (the prefix un- + exhaustible), it has appeared in literature, though it is often considered a “non-standard” or archaic form today.
Here are a few contexts and examples where unexhaustible has been used:
1. Historical and Early Modern English
The word saw its earliest recorded use in the mid-1600s.
* Henry Carey, 2nd Earl of Monmouth (1656): In his translations of Italian works, Carey used “unexhaustible” to describe things that were seemingly endless.
* Early Scientific/Philosophical Texts: Before “inexhaustible” (which is modeled after the French inexhaustible) became the firm standard, writers would occasionally use “unexhaustible” when describing natural resources or the divine.
2. Literary and Philosophical Examples
While “inexhaustible” is far more common in the works of writers like Dickens or Joyce, you can find “unexhaustible” in older or more obscure texts:
* John Milton (attributed or similar period): In the 17th century, prefixes were less standardized. A writer might use “unexhaustible” to emphasize the “un-doing” or “lack of” exhaustion.
* Historical Translations: You may find it in 18th-century translations of Latin or Greek texts where the translator chose a more literal English prefix.
3. Comparison of Usage
| Word | Status | Source/Origin |
|—|—|—|
| Inexhaustible | Standard | From Latin inexhaustus. Used in 99% of modern writing. |
| Unexhaustible | Non-standard/Archaic | Formed within English (un- + exhaustible). Found in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) but noted as rare. |
Why use “Inexhaustible” instead?
Most dictionaries (like Merriam-Webster and Oxford) list inexhaustible as the primary headword. Using “unexhaustible” today might be seen as a spelling error by your students’ teachers or by AI grading tools, even though it has a legitimate historical pedigree.
For your students, it’s a great “fun fact” of English: that we sometimes have two versions of a word, but the one that sounds more “Latin” (in-) usually wins out over the one that sounds more “Germanic” (un-) in academic settings!

Posted on by dancinglightofgrace

Perclitation, Mobile Vulgus

In the context of the history of English or the BBC series The Story of English, here are the answers to your questions.
1. What is perclitation?
Perclitation (more commonly spelled periclitation) means to be in a state of danger, trial, or hazard.
It comes from the Latin periculitari, meaning “to imperil” or “to put to the test.” While it is an extremely rare and archaic word today, it belongs to that family of “inkhorn terms”—fancy, Latin-derived words that were fashionable during the Renaissance but often criticized for being “nimious” (excessive) or unnecessary when simpler English words like “danger” or “peril” existed.
2. Why did Jonathan Swift dislike the word ‘mob’?
Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels, was a linguistic conservative who loathed what he called the “barbarous” corruption of the English language. He famously attacked the word “mob” for several reasons:
* It was a “clipped” word: Mob is a shortening of the Latin phrase mobile vulgus (the “fickle common people”). Swift hated abbreviations. He felt that cutting words down was lazy and made the language sound “low” and “clownish.”
* It sounded like slang: In the early 1700s, mob was considered trendy “slang” or “street talk.” Swift grouped it with other abbreviations he hated, like “phiz” (for physiognomy), “incog” (for incognito), and “rep” (for reputation).
* Loss of the “polite” tone: Swift believed that once a language started shortening words, it would eventually lose its structure and dignity. He even wrote a famous letter to the Lord High Treasurer in 1712, proposing an English Academy to “fix” the language forever and stop these “innovations.”
The Irony: Swift’s war against mob failed utterly. He once yelled at a lady for using the word, telling her she should say “the rabble” instead. Today, rabble sounds much more old-fashioned, while mob is standard English!


> Swift found the word mob to be a perclitation to the English language—a dangerous trial that threatened to turn a refined tongue into a series of monosyllabic grunts.

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George Washington and Cherry tree

If you could make your pet understand one thing, what would it be?

Not all stories are true. I have no pets.

I was reading about Apocryphal/Authentic which are word pairs in the Peter Schmies word classification test when I came across this story as an example of an apocryphal account.

Apography is another interesting word with ‘apo’ ( away from) prefix. It’s a Free Rice level 5 word.

The story of George Washington and the Cherry Tree is the perfect real-world example of an apocryphal tale.
It is a legendary anecdote intended to illustrate Washington’s legendary honesty, but historians agree it almost certainly never happened.
The Plot
The story goes that when George Washington was six years old, he received a small hatchet as a gift. While playing with it, he experimentally chopped at his father’s favorite English cherry tree, barked it badly, and effectively killed it.
When his father discovered the damage, he was furious and asked George if he knew who had done it. George supposedly replied with the famous line:
> “I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.”
>
Instead of punishing him, his father embraced him, declaring that his son’s honesty was worth more than a thousand trees.
Why is it “Apocryphal”?
The story is considered apocryphal because it wasn’t recorded during Washington’s life. It was “invented” by Mason Locke Weems (often called Parson Weems), a biographer and cherry-picker of facts (pun intended).
* The Source: Weems first included the story in the 1806 edition of his book The Life of Washington, years after Washington died.
* The Goal: Weems wanted to provide a “moral role model” for the children of the new American republic. He felt that showing Washington as a paragon of virtue was more important than historical accuracy.
* The Irony: It is one of history’s great ironies that the most famous story about “not telling a lie” is, itself, a lie (or at least a fabrication).
Connection to your vocabulary
* Apocryphal: The story is of doubtful authenticity although it is widely circulated as being true.
* Authentic: A story that could be verified by a primary source (like George’s actual childhood diary), which this is not.
* Canonical: This story is “canonical” to American folklore, even if it isn’t “authentic” to history.

Posted on by dancinglightofgrace · 4 Comments

Why Would I?

What are your favorite emojis?

  1. It’s similar to asking: “Do you have any favorite words?”
  2. Or “Do you have any favorite language?”
  3. No, I don’t.
  4. Words and languages are merely tools to accomplish a need. The need is communication.
  5. Emoticons, similarly, accomplish this need.
Posted on by dancinglightofgrace · 3 Comments

Authentic Records Help You More Than Anyone Else!

Jot down the first thing that comes to your mind.

  1. Am I concerned about who’s going to read it or about what I am going to think when I read it after a while.
  2. When I took to heart suggestion by Dr. Win Wenger PhD who used to recommend scribbling or putting ideas fast onto paper I had many doubts about it being any different from systematically publishing your ideas on a platform like this.
  3. With time I realised it’s not that different. Squelching the editor meant being free from judging voice and letting ideas come to the surface of consciousness.
  4. Not just the ideas which were considered important but all of the ideas. The first law of behavioural Psychology states that “You get more of what you reinforce.” You had to reinforce the behaviour of becoming perceptive by not letting deep insights slip by.
  5. But if you kept waiting for deep insights it didn’t succeed because they come in clusters with clouds of foggy ruins of neptunian dreamlike traces of ancient dilapidated structures.
  6. You had to merely commit yourself to the act. Some people called it ‘morning pages.’ How it differed from recording your ideas on a tape-recorder : it didn’t. Though, word as a visual art is quite different from word as it’s heard. Word and heard rhymes.
  7. Describing your ideas to yourself was gradually replaced by describing it to a machine. Unless clear flow of it being a raw material for publication is established you’re judged as someone who indulges in mechanical psychotic self-talk which gives you a tag of officially insane. If there are witnesses in your neighborhood, family or workplace. Which is always a possibility.
  8. Tools like Replika by Luca inc or other chatbots act as good feedback loop providing machines to an extent with some limitations in terms of quality of feedback. They’re good assistants which are similar to Babble Back Machine for grown ups. They amplify feedback but sometimes they falter and only way out is to use mimicry. Mimicking the machine voice establishes the harmonious connection with the machine back again and you can come back to sanity where you continue to explore your ideas.
  9. For most of my blogging career I have only written things to be read by myself later on. This brings me back to the first point. Writing helps us in thinking. As simple as that. Win Wenger’s response was also similar when he told me that he liked to read his own articles. Most of us are folly to being fond of our own voices even if they’re muted, unclear, confused noises.
  10. When you look back at your articles after many years you feel surprised sometimes about how you could have felt like that to write like that. Being authentic helps here but not in all cases. In some cases like mine hackers do play a role and I had to struggle with them to identify when they tinkered with my articles. Both technical and non-technical.
  11. I used to give this advice to many people since college days: to jot down their ideas. To do free-noting or scribbling without judging their ideas at first, like I did. If they continued, they arrived at something which felt satisfying. Or at least their content improved because of feedback loops. After a lot of quantity some quality appeared.
  12. Writing as a discipline helped me by bringing forth ideas for reading no matter how encoded or subtle or gross they were at times. Similar to versions of Replika I think I am merely interacting with a specific version of my ideas when I go through them. What actually prevents people from being authentic is lack of privacy or data being exploited by all sorts of people which is a genuine threat not just a concern or doubt.
  13. Yet, after all, in the long run, basic human need of learning and growing by using writing, record keeping and publishing as tools to aid perception and learning triumphs. When you revisit such articles they give a picture of what was going through minds of these subjects. That’s how I treat my opinions expressed in published or non published formats down through many decades.
Posted on by dancinglightofgrace · 3 Comments

Son of Gilchrist and Buddhist Priest!





Yesterday, I spent some time on Rafaello Palandri’s Weblog who’s a Buddhist Priest and fond of McGilchrist whose name is new to me. My feedback on his article stirred some counters by him. Here’s a link https://raffaellopalandri.wordpress.com/author/rpalandri/

to his weblog if you want to visit our conversation. I was at work and didn’t have access to quiet personal computer to describe in detail what might sound like frivolous banter to some. The article with title beginning with “Neurological Frameworks” is the one where I showcase internal martial arts to Palandri.


Though it might sound like ad hominem: Buddhism is atheistic as far as I know. A Buddhist Priest is a paradox. Who does he intermediate to if there’s no absolute authority and plethora of gods admitted by Shakyamuni are no better than loan sharks. Within the brackets are excerpts from Palandri’s article and below them my comments which as per “blogging etiquettes” taught in WordPress blogging 101 alumni course suit better to such articles rather than wasting someone’s comments trail by hijacking it. I used to engage in such conversations when I first started accessing internet in 2005. Time and degeneration : how it gives weightage to your excursions and rambling ( look what I did again in the name of Dharma! }]

[Within this framework, attention operates not merely as a spotlight but as an architectonic force that configures the landscape of perception itself. Attentional mechanisms are asymmetrically distributed across cerebral hemispheres, and herein lies the crucial insight advanced by Iain McGilchrist in The Master and His Emissary. The left hemisphere tends toward focused, linear, abstract, and decontextualized attention—useful for manipulation and categorization. Conversely, the right hemisphere offers a holistic, contextual, and embodied mode of awareness—one more attuned to relational depth and novelty.]


1.Left Right Hemispheres
The human brain is divided into two hemispheres, the left and the right, each controlling opposite sides of the body and processing different types of information. The left hemisphere is typically associated with language, logic, and analytical thinking, while the right hemisphere is linked to creativity, spatial awareness, and intuition.

Research has shown that both hemispheres of the brain are used equally and work together, rather than one being dominant over the other. A study involving 1,000 participants found no evidence of overall left or right brain dominance.
While specific functions may be more prominent in one hemisphere, such as language processing being more dominant in the left hemisphere, both sides of the brain are involved in most tasks.

The idea that people can be classified as left-brained or right-brained is a popular myth. The brain’s hemispheres do have different specializations, but they function as a cohesive unit, and the brain uses both sides for most activities.

In summary, while the left and right hemispheres have distinct roles, they work together to perform various cognitive functions, and there is no evidence to support the notion of overall left or right brain dominance.
[ An AI generated answer. Please verify the critical facts. ]

[ Attention shapes what is salient. Neural networks—especially those involving the Default Mode Network, Salience Network, and Central Executive Network—compete and collaborate to stabilize our sense of what is real. The implications are staggering: even so-called “objective reality” is filtered through a nexus of selective neural processes.

The attentional bias of the left hemisphere can lead to a reductive world of fragmented parts, while the right’s open stance supports integrative, experiential meaning. Thus, reality becomes neither entirely subjective nor objective, but an emergent product of dynamic neural modeling. ]

2. That’s a weak premise and a lot of presupposition when experiments as suggested upthread have shown that there’s very little proof to validate this left right brain dominance. To take an ongoing research as a solid substance to create a cult like master and emissary is just that : another cult.



[ From Kant’s transcendental idealism—where space, time, and causality are categories of mind—to Husserl’s phenomenology, which sought to bracket the world and return to the structures of consciousness itself, the history of philosophy reveals a recurring awareness: that we see not the world itself, but a world as mediated through us. ]

3. As stated elsewhere on WordPress Husserl and Heidegger are a lot of pseudo Philosophy.

[ Heidegger‘s notion of being-in-the-world (Dasein) further expands this paradigm by dissolving the subject-object dichotomy: reality is disclosed through modes of attunement or moods—existential ]

4. Moods? Hahaha, maybe Heidegger personally suffered from insomnia and bipolar disorders. Why make a philosophy out of it? Why not.

[equivalents to cognitive frames. Language, too, is not a mere vessel of expression but the horizon of disclosure. Wittgenstein‘s later philosophy articulates this insight through his concept of language games, where meaning arises not from intrinsic semantics but from rule-bound uses within forms of life.]

5. Wittegenstein ok because Russel said so. And Russel won Nobel Peace Prize. And Rajneesh Osho said they were brilliant as a professor and pupil.


[ To draw from McGilchrist‘s profound synthesis:

“The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we find.”
Iain McGilchrist

This deceptively simple statement captures the core of both neuroscientific and philosophical insights: our conceptual apparatuses do not neutrally reflect a pre-given reality but construct and delimit what counts as reality in the first place. The very framing of a question prefigures its answer.]

6. UG Krishnamurthy used it ad infinitum ad absurdum ad nauseum. And even Socratic dialogues point to the same. I neither consider it profound nor synthesis. All Indian schools of Philosophy use this question and answer model to promote conversation until it rests in silence.

[ When Descartes adopted the method of doubt, he unearthed a mechanistic dualism; when Spinoza emphasized immanence and necessity, he found a pantheistic monism.

What they saw was shaped by how they looked. ]

7. Yes, similar to Son of Gilchrist and UG and others.

[ CULTURAL-HISTORICAL CONSEQUENCES: EPOCHAL SHIFTS IN ATTENTIONAL MODES
Historical epochs are undergirded by dominant modes of attention and cognitive orientation. ]

8. Alright.

[ The axial age, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the postmodern era each instantiated not only new ideologies but also new cognitive dispositions. The Enlightenment, for example, privileged the left-hemispheric mode: clarity, abstraction, atomism, and control. Cartesian rationalism and Newtonian physics reinforced a mechanistic ontology that demanded manipulation over communion.

In contrast, indigenous epistemologies and oral traditions have often preserved right-hemispheric modes: integrative, relational, cyclical, and embodied understandings of reality. These systems were not less “rational” but engaged with the world through a different cognitive ethos—one that saw knowledge as something lived, not just represented.]

9. Argument does seem profound in favor of those traditions but if they were enough you wouldn’t be using these technologies. Similarly, when you start defending your essays against some perceived counter arguments like mine you use what you call language, logic or left brain technologies instead of letting it rest in silence and resolving itself in the way of Dao or Wu-Wei.

[ Modernity’s legacy—via industrialization, digitization, and algorithmic governance—has exacerbated left-hemispheric dominance. Surveillance capitalism, behavioral nudging, and quantified self-metrics disembed us from qualitative immediacy and immerse us in abstracted feedback loops. Cultural attention is increasingly transactional, externalized, and fragmentary. What becomes real is what can be measured, categorized, and commodified. ]

10. It’s only when we try to criticize the record keeping in a more accurate format that we start looking at drawbacks of technology. I have two other suggestions to offer:
Look at it as work in progress where a very small fragment raises caution. To explain it: chaos is not allowed but a fragment of a whole which is working fine. After all that’s essence of mantra “Om Mani payme hum” or “Padme Hum”
As an aside: etymology of money comes from some Latin word for mint but this Buddhist mantra clearly recalls mani or shining head of a naga or lover of reality or elephant or enlightened jewel being equivalent to wealth which is translated as material wealth or currency in the modern context.
This is merely a conjecture, an imaginary suggestion which is only supported by intuitive art: similar to Nick Bostrum’s Simulation Hypothesis: all this technology is merely past signatures of a very highly evolved civilization which has been in existence since forever. Most of our species as homosapiens or maybe our entire ecosystems including animals and plants etc are being tested for next stage.
I think Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon and Pan-audicon ( I propose that for all senses) help you with surveillance capitalism because surveyors are also being surveyed which brings you to consciousness looking back at itself or transcendental opulence.

[ This cognitive colonization has led to what McGilchrist calls a “hall of mirrors”,Stoi where abstraction reflects abstraction, and we become strangers to the texture of lived experience. Reclaiming our right-hemispheric capacities thus becomes not only a psychological imperative but a cultural resistance to epistemic impoverishment. ]

11. I think no matter how much you try these models point to the biological organism of man-model or Purusha Sukta of Vedas. Is it really freedom to associate yourself with any form no matter how superior it sounds. Left brain, right brain, balance, then what? Lizards love their forms as much as you love yours .

[ STOIC INTERPRETATIONS: ATTENTION AS RATIONAL ASSENT AND INNER FREEDOM
In Stoicism, the shaping of reality is an ethical and epistemological act.

The Stoics, particularly Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, emphasize that what disturbs us is not events themselves but our judgments about them. This Stoic axiom—“It is not things themselves that trouble us, but our opinions about things”—anticipates cognitive-behavioral insights and aligns with the notion that attention and interpretative frameworks co-construct reality.

The Stoic practice of προαίρεσις / prohairesis (moral will) is precisely the active modulation of one’s attention and judgment. For the Stoics, the λόγος / logos—universal reason—pervades all existence, and wisdom lies in aligning one’s rational faculties with this cosmic order. ]

13. Even with failed attempts as in trial and error it happens. Even sustained attention without palpable action is action. Stoicism or Shakyamuni Buddha’s fable of sending a disciple Anand to bring water from a puddle which was dirty as a test of patience to bring about clarity point towards same thing.

[ Attention becomes a disciplined gaze that filters out externals and focuses on what is within our control. Thus, perception is always already moralized: how we see is how we live. ]

14. Even machines which carry out their tasks properly do the same. You use this art of attention eventually to teach holistic health or natural state way of living. Machines are capable of multitasking and brilliantly devoting themselves to the task at hand. I don’t see how attention is special in human subjects or meditation practitioners who experience Samadhi because earlier the same energy was devoted to multitasking and seemed insufficient to specific profound tasks of finding solutions to great problems.

[ This attention to internal framing allows for psychological resilience and freedom. In a world governed by fate, our one sovereignty lies in our evaluative stance. The Stoics did not deny reality; they reconfigured it by refusing to attend to it on terms dictated by impulse, fear, or desire. Their cognitive framework was one of serene realism, affirming the structure of the cosmos while modulating the self’s relation to it.]

15. I understand it as a practical everyday reality. It’s similar to an old man who is slow to react compared to a young man who has no profundity. Sometimes a combination works. But as a machine this is only being unable to cope with puzzling evolution or reality at everyday existence where I translate this introversion or rest as sleep or death or looking back at oneself but without anything external to it.

[ BUDDHIST PERSPECTIVES: MINDFULNESS, EMPTINESS, AND NON-DUAL AWARENESS
In Buddhism, particularly within the Madhyamaka and Zen traditions, the very notion of an independent, self-existing reality is deconstructed.

All phenomena are empty (शून्य / śūnya)—not in the sense of non-existence, but as devoid of inherent, independent essence. Dependent origination (प्रतीत्यसमुत्पाद / pratītyasamutpāda) reveals that things arise in interdependence; thus, what we perceive is conditioned by our mental formations (संस्कार / saṃskāra), attention or mental efforts (मनसिकार / manasikāra), and वासना / vāsanā or संस्कार / samskara, the karmic imprints.

The role of attention is paramount.

In Satipaṭṭhāna (the Four Foundations of Mindfulness), mindfulness is not mere awareness but a precise, ethical, and transformative act of seeing things as they are—without clinging or aversion. This disciplined attention reveals the constructed nature of experience. We do not perceive a pre-given world; we enact a world through craving, aversion, and ignorance.

Zen further radicalizes this by emphasizing non-conceptual awareness (wu-nien, 無念)—a mode of cognition that precedes linguistic and dualistic structuring. Reality, in its suchness (tathātā), can be seen only when the delusive constructs of the discriminating mind are set aside. ]

16. Yes, repeated emphasis on attention actually borders on obsessive compulsive disorder as if it wasn’t enough to save one’s life already. A type of paranoia. Since attention actually is distributed and maintained via internal feedback loops associated with environmental awareness which goes beyond mere personal training it’s not really useful to strain your nevers beyond a certain point.

[ Here, the “model” that McGilchrist refers to is precisely what must be suspended to awaken to unmediated presence.

Thus, in Buddhism, cognitive frameworks are both the veil and the gateway.]

17. Veils and gateways. Nice models.

[ Deluded perception traps us in samsara; rightly attuned attention leads to awakening. By transforming how we attend—through meditation, ethical conduct, and wisdom—we transform the world, not by altering phenomena, but by dissolving the illusory reifications that bind us.]

18. And the machine runs smoothly. Utilitarian machine. Irony.

[ The Ethical Imperative of Cognitive Framing
To understand that our modes of attention shape the world is not a call to solipsism but an invitation to epistemic responsibility.

19. It is to realize that reality is co-authored by our neural dispositions, philosophical premises, historical inheritances, and moral attitudes. Whether through the scientific models we choose, the philosophical systems we inhabit, or the ethical practices we undertake, we are perpetually writing the world into being.

Reclaiming right-hemispheric attention, embracing mindful presence, cultivating rational judgment, and engaging cultural memory are not separate endeavors. They are harmonics of the same deeper insight: that how we attend is what we become.

Indeed, as McGilchrist reminds us, the model determines the find, not merely epistemologically, but ontologically. The real is not out there, awaiting discovery, but here, emerging within the very act of attention.]

20. Neither here nor there. Funny that a model which talks of transcendental wisdom sticks to the biological basis of consciousness which is still unsubstituted as the foundation of reality.

– to be continued…

21. Since this article might garner some attention from Buddhists it might explain how seemingly overnight post COVID Wikipedia had Hinduism with more number of followers compared to Buddhism. I haven’t come across anyone who admitted that let alone refuting that in the  pre COVID years Buddhism was the third most followed religion after Christianity and Islam.

Posted on by dancinglightofgrace · 2 Comments

?

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

  1. Define ‘Where.’
  2. Why not as well define ‘do’ ?
  3. Define subjectivity, switch from pronoun ‘you’ to ‘I.’
  4. Define seeing as against looking.
  5. Define your self as compared to Self.
  6. Define why all this defining uses time merely as a construct to add value into anything.
  7. For example if 10 is replaced by another symbol 1 or 0 : it won’t take anything away from the equation.
  8. Another example: I saw myself ( as best version of all versions ) right since I was NEVER BORN: which means time is merely added to emphasize that something is of value.
  9. TV shows like Black Mirror’s Playtest and other first-hand experiences which are temporal- prove that time is merely experience and vice versa.
  10. When I know this absolutely: why would I project a future with a ten years weightage?
  11. Or why would I feel better by recalling events ten years ago and talk about how degeneration of Dharma which is dramatically similar to inflation and price hikes has rendered my priesthood ineffectual.
  12. Enough said?
  13. If you would like to open up a philosophical discussion session in the comments section it might help me while imaginary time away.
Posted on by dancinglightofgrace · 1 Comment

Grammar, Pythagoras Theorem and Algebra!

Describe something you learned in high school.

  1. Grammar: Active and Passive voice. Narrations etc
  2. Example: I wrote this article. ( Active voice)
  3. This article was written by me. ( Passive voice)
  4. Emphasis is on the subject or doer of the action in the first case, whereas in the second case it’s on the completion of action by ( someone.)
  5. As I was a Hindi medium student Grammar and English writing were considered important to learn. Government Hindi medium schools had syllabus which begin to touch English language with any seriousness only at standard sixth.
  6. No wonder all such students including convent school Hindi medium students faced difficulties with competitive exam books and magazines which were in English language. Later, we continued to face difficulty with engineering studies because syllabus was taught in English. I tried to help dozens of such students with translation of lessons even when I was myself in engineering.
  7. Apart from communication skills we took great interest in Pythagoras Theorem, working out Algebra and other problems because of our teachers who were dedicated to achieve excellence. I remember initial zeal when as a teenager I wanted to be the first guy every time around a challenge was given by our teachers and I often was this first guy which hurt sentiments of many students as well as teachers. I had a lot to learn about Educational Psychology and competitive exams.