By You-Sheng Li (September 2008, written for The Jaynesian Newsletter; edited 15/02/2009) Abstract: That the man-made secondary society is foreign to humans is once more illustrated by the phenomenon of bicameral minds, first described by Julian Jaynes. According to Jaynes, people with bicameral minds followed auditory hallucination, the divine voice, in response to an enlarged community from 9000 to 1000 BC, and subjective consciousness appeared around 1000 BC. Unlike the Mediterranean civilizations on which Jaynes’ theory is based, Chinese civilization started with genetically coded primary society and therefore, went through a different pathway in the evolution of human minds to …

By You-Sheng Li 20/03/09 What began as a reversal of the real estate market in the United States has spun out of control and ended as a full blown global crisis that humans have never faced before. There is almost a meltdown of the world’s financial and banking systems; trillions of dollars worth of assets have evaporated. Even some governments have collapsed, investors are devastated, and consumers terrified. According to the World Bank’s estimation, 53 million people will be pushed back into poverty, joining up to 155 million who now live on less than US$2 a day. There are three …

By You-Sheng Li (May 2014) When I was reading the article ¡°Toronto Confucius Institute spurs moral debate¡± by Karen Howlett and Colin Freeze in The Globe and Mail, May. 22 2014, I felt that we are further away from Confucius and his thought but it reminds the impassable cultural gap between the Chinese and the West. When all human societies are divided into the genetically coded primary society and the man-made secondary society, Chinese civilization started as a super state of primary societies while the West started with city states of typical secondary societies. There is an impassable gap between …

By You-Sheng Li (From the book: The Ancient Chinese Super State of Primary societies: Taoist Philosophy for the 21st Century) (1) The Life My Mother Lived At the supper table, my Mother suddenly collapsed in her seat and lost consciousness. She died three days later her ninety third birthday, September 26, 2007. Autumn drought occasionally hits this rural area of China which hinders sowing winter wheat. Peasants had been worried that this year seemed to be one of those rare years. Miraculously heavy rain poured down almost the same time my Mother passed away, and it made farm work in …

BY You-Sheng Li, (9 November 2012) The grave seemed too narrow for what it was to contain, and the human world is too small to contain itself. When I was sitting in front of my living room window, I often observed squirrels in the park beside my house. There are dozens of them, and they all are in a great shape, neither fat nor thin but healthy. Do they all live a healthy lifestyle? They spend a minor part of their life looking for food but the rest, idling around nonstop. If we call the former their working hours and …

(1) Introduction We now lived a multiple-leveled and multiple-dimensioned world. During the two world wars and the subsequent Cold War Era (1945-1991), those dimensions were forced to form two worlds fighting each other with people at all levels drawn into the fighting. At the bottom, housewives were making military uniforms day and night while their children playing beside with toy guns. When I divided all human societies into the genetically coded primary and man-made secondary societies, I found the former has an aesthetic order based on our born nature, the emotional and psychological social bond felt at the bottom of …

You-Sheng Li, 28/10/2011 Occupy Wall Street is an ongoing series of demonstrations that started on September 17, 2011 in New York based in Zuccotti Park in the Wall Street area but now it has become an international protest. Various “Occupiers” and supporters have modeled themselves after Occupy Wall Street in over 900 cities worldwide. People are amazed by their wide spreading influence but few know the similarity between those protestors and Taoism. A Taoist website asked me to write a hundred word comments to explore this unusual link. I wrote: Lao Tzu says, “Heaven and earth unite to rain down …

By You-Sheng Li 11/2/2000, and edited 23/10/2010 A few months ago I attended a discussion at the central library of the city I live in. The topic was, “Live Alone, and Enjoy it.” About 10 people participated, and men and women were about equal in number. As you can imagine, all participants were middle-aged, and had lived alone for quite a while. What struck me was that all women talked about the hardship and loneliness of their spinster life even with tears and sobs, and their eyes fixed on the ground as if they were preparing to go to hell …

Written by: You-Sheng Li (2003, rewritten May 2010) Now it becomes crystal clear that the driving force behind human evolution is gene mutation. What is gene mutation? You can find a precise definition in any genetics textbook. But such a definition is only professional jargon which doesn’t make any sense to ordinary people who have a much broader view. Gene mutation is really the decay of our genetic material, DNA. It decays like a deserted city which eventually becomes ruined, not distinguishable from its natural surroundings. Gene mutation is part of the universal process, a process from order to chaos. …

By You-Sheng Li, 23/4/10 When I was a child, my father was a family physician. Occasionally he talked about dreams with his patients or neighbouring peasants. Having overheard their chat, I joined in one day, saying, “I dreamed of walking on the street but I was aware that I was dreaming. So I was looking for some kind of bed to go back to sleeping. It was a frustrating experience trying to find a bed in the streets of a village. I finally came to a large dark stone with a smoothly polished flat surface. I fell asleep or out …