freewill

The Proof is in the Pudding

Buddha felt that we needed to rely on our personal experience to verify his Four Noble Truths, and presumably any other alleged truth. There’s no ‘take my word for it’ hoodwinking here. Nowadays, modern science is steadily helping us discern fact from myth. Still, personal experience must always be the final arbiter. Keep this in […]

Natural Happiness

‘To like what I do rather than do what I like’ is a straightforward path to happiness. This motto helps prevent my expectations from dictating my life’s direction. No doubt, scripture (Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, Biblical, etc.) first got me considering life this way, and life experience has since verified its truth (1). The previous post, […]

I Look, But Do I See?

In Matthew 7:7-8, Jesus says, “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened”. While true, I suspect this may often misinterpreted. For example, […]

Ponder Between the Lines

First, google this short video, [ABC’s George Stephanopoulos interviewing NBA star Dennis Rodman] about Rodman’s visit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. As you can see, George and Dennis exemplify two profoundly different ways of seeing the world. Each is representing an extreme, which helps highlight polar archetypes… yin vs. yang, as it were. […]

Will-to-Live, Free or Otherwise

The drive to survive is shared by all living things from viruses on up. In some, if not all, forms of life, this plays out as a fear vs. need mediated survival instinct. Certainly, the survival instinct is a fundamental emotional drive in any animal I think of as having emotion. Naturally, there are those […]

Dumbfounding

The Science News Science Stats left me dumbfounded, so I read it again… I’m still dumbfounded. Does it really say, “… calorie intake may be the bigger contributor to Western obesity”? What are they thinking? What else causes obesity? I have noticed over the years, a growing effort to find genetic causes for why some […]

Of Free Will, I Am

Free will and I have had a life-long journey together. For the first forty years, I “knew” I had free will. I could do anything I set my mind to. Such certainty is particularly strong in youth, and naturally so! Around age forty, I began to look for biological evidence of free will. Any clear […]

Discomfort and Pain

The Science News’ article Hurt Blocker got me thinking about pain and the ways we deal with it. While this research is really about physical pain, the principle applies to all pain. How we deal with discomfort and pain results in many unintended consequences. We could avoid these consequences if we knew at what point […]

Undecided? You bet!

Up until today, I have remained undecided whom to vote for President. Searching for a photo to accompany this post, I came across this one. It highlights the chorus of ridicule I’ve heard aimed lately at the undecided ‘wishywashers’ among us. Slinging ridicule back is tempting; however examining this from a symptomatic point of view […]

Upping the Ante

Have you noticed the ever-present urge to continue to up the ante? Not only that, but isn’t the sky often the limit? We can’t help but aim for the next step up, and when we reach it, that level becomes our new bottom line. Most of us are content for a while, but then we […]