Liberating our thoughts

Søren Kierkegaard was influenced by Socrates, who thought that his task was not to discover the truth and then communicate it to his students, but to open the question to the pupils and ensure they stay open.

The last thing you should do is turn to an authority to tell you what you should think. You have to do that for yourself.

Real experts are often confident in their claims, but in the private market, the opposite can be more common.

• Self-appointed experts want airtime and overstate their conclusions.
• Actual experts want to draw attention to their work. They may not have all the answers and may admit it.
• Consultants want future business. They have to try to pretend they have complete certainty about uncertain things.

Mixing the information of the pundit, scholar, and consultant creates information noise that makes it difficult for decision-makers to know what to do.

When communicating scientific knowledge to policymakers and the public, there are three levels of questions:

• Level-one questions: Anyone with even modest expertise or access to a search engine can answer these questions. For example, 'Will price controls cause shortages?'
• Level-two questions: Only the most qualified experts, within existing paradigms of scholarly knowledge, have something to say. For example, 'Can we design algorithms to assign medical residents to programmes in an effective way?'
• Level-three questions: Even the experts don't know the answers, such as what interest rates will be in two years.

For Zen practitioners, life is transitory and insubstantial. There is no security and thinking otherwise is a waste of time. 

They also don’t believe in an afterlife. Reincarnation can be more accurately thought of as a constant rebirth, of death throughout life, and the continual coming and going of universal energy before and after death.

The word 'Zen' means emptiness or void. This is the basis of Zen — that all that exists is based on a dynamic emptiness. Which is also what quantum science says.

In this view, there is no difference between matter and energy. Look at anything closely enough and you will see that it is an event, not a thing. Furthermore, there is not a ‘multiplicity of events’. There is just one event, with multiple aspects, unfolding.