religion

Buddha’s Truths Pertain To All Life

Buddha’s Truths apply to all Earth’s creatures, although only humans need to have truth verbalized. Our need to have truth put into words is symptomatic of something we feel missing. Considering which of these deep truths pertain to all life forms helps them feel more real and inclusive. The First Noble Truth is the existence […]

We All Know We Don’t Know

I enjoy doing yoga on the beach because I can easily pause to look seaward and skyward to soak in eternity, or glance closer in to bond with my friends, all the sand flies and seagulls around me. Today I got to thinking how small and insignificant we are—they and me. Then I thought, they […]

Who are you? (Part IV)

The social qualities present during our ancestral hunter-gatherer era (1) just happen to parallel the core spiritual qualities that the world’s religions promote. That’s no coincidence. Indeed, those innate qualities of harmony we now seek are the very ones we lost when we left the old way for the alluring material benefits and security civilization […]

Who are you? (Part III)

Recent posts, Who are you? and Who are you? (Part II), examine the losses of emotional security and comfort caused when our civilized way of life replaced our primal ancestral way. Common sense, personal experience, and timely mid 20th century ethnographic research verifies this. (See The Harmless People p.426) This post and the next cover […]

Who are you? (Part II)

I tried pointing out in Who are you? (p.504) how civilization plays a major role in educating its citizens as to who they are and who they should be. This contrasts sharply with the natural intuitive way that our ancestors acquired a secure sense of self. Religious stories, central to every civilization, are humanity’s attempt […]

The Word Trap

We are innately attracted to any promised solution to our problem rather than examining our problem’s underlying causes. That is the optimal approach in the wild because problems there share wilderness simplicity, which makes solutions straightforward. Thus, it was natural for us to evolve the inclination to opt for the simplest view of a problem, […]

Cultivating Ego

Google [Rats Experience Feelings of Regret] for research discovering that when a rat realizes it made a mistake, its body and brain show signs of regret (1). Research like this challenges the beliefs of human exceptionalism that we’ve been cultivating to support humanity’s “illusion of self” collective ego. Sure, we are different from rats, but […]

Civilized Insanity

Cults akin to ISIS and Nazism help define true human insanity. Nonetheless, the tribal instinct driving such insanity is curiously both sane and universal. This ironic blend inhabits everyone to a degree. So, what drives the ISIS or Nazi fanatic to become so obsessed? How can we remedy this? First, calling acts of insanity evil […]

Religion… an Opiate?

Karl Marx famously said, “Religion is the opium of the people”. He went on to identify “religious distress” as the symptom of a social “condition which needs illusions”.(1) Blaming cultural conditions for the dysfunction he saw is putting the cart before the horse—something we do frequently. To see it this way, he must have had […]

Counterbalancing I.Q.

The onion could be a metaphor for one’s lifetime. Each of us peel away layer after layer as daily experiences gradually turn into a lifetime. This maturing process helps to counterbalance any extreme characteristics we were born with. With each decade that passes, we see deeper and become more humble compared to our formative years. […]