Much of basic psychology today instructs us to beat down our negative emotions by " getting out of our minds and into our lives ." It is called acceptance and commitment therapy. Certainly such advice can be valuable to those of us who are living lives full of what psychologists call the "negative self-scripts", or influence emotions, that we generate from feelings of low self-esteem, guilt, self-consciousness, and feelings of inferiority. To overcome these negative self-scripts we are instructed to develop "self core skills" with mindful self-scripts based on affirmation, assertion, focusing, humanizing, and tension-sensing to rationalize and diminish the debilitating negative emotions we all live with. We are to use the polarity of our two basic kinds of emotions -- innate emotions and influence emotions -- to wage a war between our soul and our mind to keep us on the straight and narrow. There is something of "wild gnosis " in this kind of psy...

Long ago, when I was a parent of three grade-school aged children, IBM introduced an elementary level science textbook and workbook to our school district that included a section on the Big Bang Theory , and the outrage began from angry Christian parents who wanted the books removed from the science curriculum and banned from the library shelves because they flew in the face of the biblical version of creation by arguing that time, and not eternity, was the cosmological reality. The Roman Catholics had a theory of their own, developed, in part by a Roman Catholic priest, called the steady state theory . Our little gym was packed for a final hearing with the PTA and school board, I remember, and it seemed to me that the majority of those who were there were dead-set against the science course. Tempers flared and voices were raised. I spoke for those parents in favor of retaining the program, arguing that the theory was developed from Albert Einstein's basic Theory of Relativity, and...