Yesterday I came across this review of this book: The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. I bought the Kindle edition and read the introduction, before putting it aside to finish Schild’s Ladder.

From the Introduction:

In this book I will try to convince you that there is no such thing as a self. Contrary to what most people believe, nobody has ever been or had a self.

Check. Buddha said that 3k years ago. Anatman; no-soul or no-self.

And this, from the net page, sounds exactly like many zen koans:

Who is the feeler of your feelings and the dreamer of your dreams? Who is the agent doing the doing and what is the entity thinking your thoughts?

About the Ego Tunnel:

This is why it is a tunnel. What we see and hear, or what we feel and smell and taste, is only a small fraction of what actually exists out there. Our conscious model of reality is a low-dimensional projection of the inconceivably richer physical reality surrounding and sustaining us.

Check. But perhaps physical and reality are both not the best word choices. If we are indeed, and for me there is no doubt that this is so, “contructing” our own reality by picking and chosing elements our mind approves of, elements that can sustain our construct of the world… or we might call it the throttled experiential stream… why call the “un-throttled” steam “reality” or even “physical”? For all we know we could live in an Escher-world, a throttled construct inside a fuller construct inside an even fuller construct. Turtles all the way up and down.

And then I find this quote in the Upaya newsletter:

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow:
Our life is the creation of our mind.
– Buddha

A few links:

I don’t agree with anything they write abour Santa Fe, except for Mellow Velo. But I am keeping my knowledge to myself, as do most Santa Feans.

Hamster Soul (YouTube)

Space Elevator – The Royal Institution Christmas Lecture 2010 on BBC. (YouTube)

CNN:

Arkansas officials are investigating the death of an estimated 100,000 fish in the state’s northwest, but suspect disease was to blame, a state spokesman said Sunday.

and this:

Arkansas game officials hope testing scheduled to begin Monday will solve the mystery of why up to 5,000 birds fell from the sky just before midnight New Year’s Eve.

Hm, both happened in Arkansas around the same time. Do those birds eat fish perchance?