religion

Buddha’s Truths Pertain To All Life

Buddha’s Truths apply to all Earth’s creatures, although only humans need to have truth stipulated. For me, this suggests that our need for “Truth” is a symptom of something we feel missing. For that reason, considering the widest possible scope of these truths gives helpful context for their application – ‘profound sameness’, as chapter 56 […]

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, the sand flies and the seagulls around me. Today I got to thinking how small and insignificant we — they and me — are. Then […]

Who are you? (Part IV)

The social qualities integral to our ancestral hunter-gatherer old way (1) just happen to mirror 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 […]

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 ancestral one. Common sense, personal experience, and timely mid 20th century ethnographic research clarify this. See The Harmless People and The old way: a story of the […]

Who are you? (Part II)

I tried to point out in Who are you? (part I) how civilization plays a major role in ‘educating’ its citizens who they are and who they should be. This contrasts sharply with the natural intuitive way our ancestors previously acquired a secure sense of self. Religious stories have been central to every civilization’s agenda. […]

The Word Trap

We are innately attracted to promises of solutions to problems, not to examining the underlying problems. In the wild, that is the healthiest approach because problems there share wilderness simplicity, and the solutions are straightforward. It was natural for us to evolve the inclination to opt for the simplest view of most any problem, and […]

Cultivating Ego

Science News’s, Rats Feel Regret, Experiment Finds, reported that when a rat realizes it made a mistake, its body and brain show signs of regret (1). This finding is yet another nail in the coffin of human ‘exceptionalism’. Sure, we are different from rats, but so are butterflies and cats. Research like this truly challenges […]

Civilized Insanity

Cults like ISIS and Nazis define true human insanity for me. However, the tribal instinct driving this is universal. It pops up in all of us to various degrees. What drives the fanatic ISIS or Nazi to go over the edge? And what is the best way to deal with this? What determines the degree?

Religion… an Opiate?

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. Doing this is as common as it is mistaken. Among other things, he […]

Counterbalancing I.Q.

The onion is an excellent metaphor for life’s reality. Each of us peel away layer after layer as our daily experiences steadily turn into a lifetime. With each decade, we see a little deeper and become a little more humble in the process. I always keep one eye on the past and the other eye […]

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religion