075: Edward Slingerland

The One You Feed →

Edward Slingerland is a Professor of Asian Studies and Canada Research Chair in Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition at the University of British Columbia, and was educated at Princeton, Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley. His areas of specialty include Chinese thought, comparative religion, cognitive science, and the relationship between the sciences and the humanities. In addition to over twenty academic journal articles in a range of fields, he has written several scholarly books, including What Science Offers the Humanities and a translation of the Analects of Confucius. His first book for a popular audience is called Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science, and the Power of Spontaneity

In This Interview Ted and I Discuss…

• The One You Feed parable.

• Trying not to try.

• The tension of trying to relax.

• The conscious mind vs the unconscious mind.

• The ancient secrets of Wu Wei.

• What is De?

• The rider and the elephant.

• Down regulating our conscious system.

• The Confucian strategy to achieving Wu Wei.

• The Taoist strategy to achieving Wu Wei.

• Aristotle’s disanology of craft and virtue.

• Whether the Confucian approach creates poseurs?

• Whether we are born good or bad?

• Mencius and The Middle Way.

• Cultivating our sprouts of goodness.

• Using feeling and imagination to change our behaviors.

• Strengthening our moral intuitions.

• Taking baby steps on the way to compassion.

• The value of empathy.

• Which approach works best for spontaneity.

• Approaches to quieting the conscious mind.

• How what works for us today may not work tomorrow.

• Jonathan Richman, Pablo Picasso and Wu Wei.