Twenty five hundred years ago, Gautama Siddhartha, the historical Buddha, had some deep insights and created powerful techniques that would allow major reductions of human suffering. Traditionally the Buddha is said to found a total end to all suffering. Perhaps that’s true, perhaps it’s not. I don’t know, but certainly Buddhist meditation techniques and related [...]
Continue reading about Meditation, Monasticism, Buddhism, Materialism – Preliminary Thoughts
A colleague of mine was inspired hearing about the Brian Green show (Nova: The Fabric of the Cosmos) this week on the universe, especially the parts about “dark matter” and “dark energy.” He tended to see it as validating religion. I’m all for validating or reinforcing the best aspects of religion and spirituality – after [...]
Continue reading about Do Mysteries in Science Point Us to God?
Lately I’m finding it useful to think of myself (and others) as “intention fields,” intermeshed sets of intentions, some reinforcing, some contradictory, that certainly control the way my mind functions, including the way I perceive reality and perhaps, to some extent, the very functioning of external reality itself. I was recently stimulated to try to [...]
Continue reading about Assumptions, Intentions, Experiments, Bias
Several of you have pointed out that a person doesn’t have to have “spiritual” reasons for being nice to others, and that’s true. [I'm putting quotes around “spiritual” to remind us it's a tricky word, we'll have to try to make clearer one of these days] So let me stir the pot a little as [...]