Posted inReality Science

Thinking about life isn’t the same as experiencing life

About half an hour ago I was walking around a nearby lake with our two dogs. Then I was directly experiencing what it was like to be outdoors in late afternoon on a pleasingly sunny and warm Oregon day. I can share a photo I took, but what you see isn't what I experienced. In fact, even if you had been standing right beside me when I got my iPhone out, how you looked upon the lake wouldn't have been the same as my experience of it. That's the thing about experience: it's subjective, personal, ineffable, ever-changing, impossible to pin…
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Posted inHumor Religions

Fake celebrity video shows how gurus scam devotees

Watch this You Tube video. In four and a half minutes you'll have a much better understanding of how gurus, prophets, masters, and other "spiritual" celebrities get so many people to believe in them. Fascinating, how easy it is to delude us humans. Our tendency is to follow others like sheep. (Thanks to a blog visitor for sending me a link to this video. It's got over 4 million You Tube views, but I hadn't heard of it before.)   
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Enlightenment explained in 47 words

Just got this email from a Church of the Churchless visitor. Nicely said from someone about my age who looks on enlightenment pretty much the same way I do now. I never knew what to believe until my early twenties when I came to believe in enlightenment. Now, at the age of sixty-four, having found that I can’t explain clearly what enlightenment could possibly be, I can’t believe in it anymore, and I find this inability enlightening.      
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Posted inBooks Science

Certainty is how the brain’s left hemisphere deludes itself

Are you certain? For sure? No doubts at all? 100%? Your faith in what you know is absolute? Congratulations. The left hemisphere of your brain is firmly in control of you -- recognizing that almost certainly (notice that almost? my brain's right hemisphere is working) there's no difference between "you" and "your brain." This is my second post about Iain McGilchrist's fascinating book, "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World." See here for the first. I'm hugely enjoying learning about how the left and right hemispheres function.  After all, how the world appears…
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