Who is doing the better yoga?
Compare this photo of son Kyle and I doing a forward bend. My bend is Continue reading ‘Always be a beginner’
Monthly Archive for December, 2008
Hecate, the ancient Greek goddess of magic
I am always amazed at how magical magic is. The slight of hand a good magician employs is amazing. How does he do it? Distraction they say, but it is hard to believe a person (me) can be so easily hoodwinked. Nevertheless, I am.
An ‘untrained’ observer’s eye will follow where the magician’s hand leads it, subconsciously and involuntarily. Now then, how is this any different from the innate hoodwink biology pulls on us throughout life? It’s not I say!
That said, I’ve found there is a way to deal with this. Just as an initially untrained observer (like a newbie magician) can learn to see how the hoodwink works, each person can learn to see how their biology hoodwinks them. Of course, it takes some perseverance in examining life’s promises to see on which ones it actually delivers. The difficulty here is that we often prefer to bask in the glow of the promise rather than face a more indistinct and shadowy reality.
The short answer is, we can’t. The long answer: we only see what we wish to see, so it depends a lot on the extent of the wish. The more we wish, the less we know. Unless all we wish to know is only what we wish. That doesn’t seem to happen naturally though. We are biologically primed to assume that what we see ‘out there’ is truly how it is, and that wishes can come true. In other words, we seldom feel content with just wishing (i.e., feeling the desire); we also desire that our wishes come true. Continue reading ‘How do we know what is true?’
There exists a fine line between bored and content which I often stagger back and forth across as I ‘blow zen’ each day. We came up with a motto during the years we held our weekly Taoist meeting… “be bored again” (a taoist version of ‘be born again’). No wonder attendance was always meager!
The curious thing about boredom is that we are often tempted to blame the ‘outside’ for causing the boredom we feel within. One major step toward self understanding took place when I realized the boredom I felt was my fault. That helped me contend less (’what was’ versus ‘what I want’). Ironically, accepting fault (responsibility) neutralizes fault. Continue reading ‘Am I Bored or Just Content?’
Absolutely… not! Just the other way around has been my observation. Good people make good Christians. Not only that, good people also make good Muslims, Buddhist, and perhaps even good Taoist depending on your definition of ‘good‘.
Living in S.E. Asia (esp. Malaya and Indonesia), Middle East and North Africa made this glaringly obvious. All three regions are Muslim, yet the life styles of each region (esp. S.E. Asia compared to the other two) are strikingly different. If religion makes the people, then the people of each region (in this case Muslim) should have been much more alike. Continue reading ‘Do Good Christians Make Good People?’
As I wrote the last post, The Decider, I struggled to make it read as simple as I saw it. I doubt that I succeeded, so here is what I see, ‘in other words’. The following excerpt from the article ‘The Decider’ is my launch pad. Here I go again… Continue reading ‘PS’
A short article, The Decider (the reality of ‘free will’), in this month’s Science News digs into one of my favorite subjects. The following excerpt lays down some pithy groundwork:
“Perhaps,” write neuroscientists Alireza Soltani and Xiao-Jing Wang, “we are entering a new period of consilience between the science of the brain and the science of the mind.” Such consilience would certify the death of Cartesian dualism, the mind-body distinction articulated by the French philosopher René Descartes in the 17th century. In modern neuroscience, that division dissolves—the mind is simply a reflection of different states of the brain. And brain states dictate the behaviors that masquerade as free choices. Continue reading ‘The Decider’
We are born with a bio-illusion(1) which goes like this: Through hunting, “I” can gather fillers to satiate (fill) the hole. Primal emotions of need (e.g., desire, lust, want, wish, crave, etc.) and fear (e.g., insecurity, anxiety, doubt, apprehension) drive this illusion forward. This illusion originates in the hunter gatherer instinct to find food to fill the empty belly. The illusion lies in the fact that it promises happy-ever-after contentment once the hole is filled. Alas, that promise is broken the moment the next need arises, which is often literally within the next few moments. Continue reading ‘Peeking in on Nature’s Hoodwink’
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