Hybrid Teaching Quotes

You are the hybrids of golden worlds and ages splendidly conceived.

Those ignorant "masters of our destinies" who regard humans as animals or as monstrous hybrids of natural and supernatural must be dethroned by scientific education. Humans can be literally poisoned by false ideas and false teachings. Many people have a just horror at the thought of putting poison into tea or coffee, but seem unable to realize that, when they teach false ideas and false doctrines, they are poisoning the time-binding capacity of their fellow men and women. One has to stop and think!

My current way of teaching mindfulness is, in part, informed by this early Shingon training. I have people observe self in terms of inner mental images, mental talk, and emotional body sensation, the three sensory elements used in the Vajrayana deity yoga practice. I’ve created a hybrid approach. What I have people observe is derived from the Japanese Vajrayana paradigm: self = mental image + mental talk + body. But how I have people observe is derived from mindfulness, which has its origin in Southeast Asian Theravada practice.

Climate change demands that we consume less, but being consumers is all we know. Climate change is not a problem that can be solved simply by changing what we buy---a hybrid instead of an SUV, some carbon offsets when we get on a plane. At it's core, it is a crisis born of overconsumption by the comparatively wealthy, which means the world's most manic consumers are going to have to consume less so that others can have enough to life. The problem is not "human nature," as we are so often told. We weren't born having to shop this much, and we have, in our recent past, been just as happy (in many cases happier) consuming significantly less. The problem is the inflated role that consumption has come to play in our particular era. Late capitalism teaches us to create ourselves through our consumer choices: shopping is how we form our identities, find community, and express ourselves. Thus, telling people they can't shop as much as they want to because the planet's support systems are overburdened can be understood as a personal attack, asking to telling them they cannot truly be themselves. This is likely why, of environmentalism's original "three Rs" (reduce, reuse, recycle), only the third one has ever gotten any traction, since it allows us to keep on shopping as long as we put the refuse in the right box. The other two, which require that we consume less, were pretty much dead on arrival.

Take a step back to recall the story that this book tells, and consider how it might come to a very unhappy ending. Imagine the history our disappointed descendants might write. For centuries, the moral teachings of a civilization held self—interest and self-trust to be the sins of frail and deluded humanity. These traditional teachings denied that societies could discern distinct and viable principles of order and design their own institutions accordingly. The denounced such efforts as doomed hubris. Then, in an unprecedented experiment, some people rejected the old wisdom. They took the heart’s desire and the body’s appetite as compass points and rededicated human ingenuity to serving them. They created new forms of order to house these inverted values. For a time, the experiment succeeded, changing life so dramatically that the utopian visions of one century became the pedestrian common sense of the next. Then, suddenly and drastically, the experiment failed. Self-interest and self-trust proved to be formulas for devastating the world. Democratic polities, the other moral center of the great experiment, could not stop runaway self-destruction and turned out to abet it instead. Faced with overwhelming evidence that they were on an unsustainable course, the freedom-loving peoples of the twenty-first century wrung their hands, congratulated themselves on their hybrid cars and locally grown food, and changed little, because it never made sense for anyone or any country to do so.

Hybrid warfare particularly appeals to China and Russia, since they are much more able to control the information their populaces receive than are their Western adversaries. A 1999 book, Unrestricted Warfare, written by two People’s Liberation Army colonels suggests that militarily, technologically and economically weaker states can use unorthodox forms of warfare to defeat a materially superior enemy – and clearly they had the United States and NATO in mind. Rather than focusing on direct military confrontation, the weaker state might succeed against the dominant opponent by shifting the arena of conflict into economic, terrorist and even legal avenues as leverage to be used to undercut more traditional means of warfare. The subtitle of their book, Two Air Force Senior Colonels on Scenarios for War and the Operational Art in an Era of Globalization, notes a core truth of the early twenty-first century: an increasingly globalized world deepens reliance upon, and the interdependence of, nations, which in turn can be used as leverage to exploit, undermine and sabotage a dominant power. The two colonels might not be happy with the lesson their book teaches Westerners, which is that no superpower can afford to be isolationist. One way to keep America great, therefore, is to stay firmly plugged into – and leading – the international system, as it has generally done impressively in leading the Western world’s response to the invasion of Ukraine. The siren voices of American isolationism inevitably lead to a weaker United States.

Every classroom discussion, every digital interaction, is an opportunity to help children take their first steps into the global community, to see and define how, why and when technology can be a vehicle of change.

This increased interconnectivity sets the stage for students to develop deep compassion for one another and be upstanders in their community and world. This is empowerment at its very core.

In families, triggers and projections enmesh, and the jumbled wires of habitual perception often become nearly impossible to disentangle. Something happens within a family, a kind of karmic claustrophobia, a hybrid of true love and tangled irritation. Sometimes it’s even hard for mindfulness to operate in the realm of family, much less for compassion to swoop in and save the day. Mindfulness is based on a simple but difficult premise: that you can directly witness what is arising in your own mind. Mindfulness presupposes that, upon reflection, you can note your reactivity to a sense perception or impulse, either during its immediate arising or after the fact.

As you can see, with long runs at niko niko pace, you teach your body to use fat as fuel. That means that in marathons, even if you do run out of glycogen, your body will smoothly switch to fat-fueling like a hybrid car.