Posted inBooks Neuroscience Spiritual practice/meditation

Stoicism advises being happy with what we already have

A few weeks ago I wrote a philosophical post for my HinesSight blog: Stoic guide to happiness: want the things you already have. Here's an excerpt from the talk by William B. Irvine that I transcribed. The ancient Stoics came up with a way to get off the hedonic treadmill. The trick, they said, is to want the things you already have, to love the life you happen to be living.  To better understand this trick, let’s turn our attention back to the gap theory of happiness. The Stoics agreed that the presence of a gap between what you have…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism

Now is the key. Now, now, now.

Pema Chödrön is one of my favorite writers about Buddhism. She's an American Buddhist nun and one of the foremost students of Chogyam Trungpa, a renowned meditation master. Here's some excerpts from a wonderful little book by Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape.  I love how she describes meditation as simply attending to who we are right now, with no intent of improving ourselves. The book is a collection of talks she gave during a one-month practice period in 1989, which explains some repetition in what I've shared below, which come from the first eight of eighteen talks in the…
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Posted inBooks Reality Science

The “many worlds” of quantum mechanics arguably is a “single world”

Here's my second post about Heinrich Pas' book The One: How An Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics, the first post being here.  I realize that probably I'm more interested in quantum mechanics than most people visiting this blog, so I'll do my best to make my posts about the book as simple as possible. Which isn't easy, since quantum mechanics is confusing at best and totally mystifying at worst -- at least for those of us who aren't professional physicists, and even they readily admit that much about quantum mechanics is difficult to grasp. The so-called "measurement problem," for…
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Posted inBooks Reality Science

“The One” is a fresh look at the meaning of quantum mechanics

There's been two big problems with attempts to fathom the meaning of quantum mechanics (the commonly used term by scientists in that field, rather than quantum physics). New Age types, along with other mystically-inclined fans of quantum mechanics, make too much of what quantum mechanics means -- spouting indefensible notions of how we create our own reality, consciousness pervades the cosmos, and such. Physicists, along with others who work with the applications of quantum mechanics, typically make too little of what quantum mechanics means -- proclaiming that all that counts is the astoundingly precise mathematics underlying this field, often encapsulated…
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Posted inBooks Neuroscience

Our brains don’t see reality as it is, but as it’s predicted to be

My new favorite book talks about a fascinating subject that I've read about before, but never so clearly and in so much depth as Andy Clark's The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality. Now, before New Age types get all excited about how the human mind creates its own reality, this definitely isn't what Clark, a professor of cognitive philosophy, is describing. But it is true that each of us fashions our view of reality to some extent in accord with our previous experiences. Clark starts off by relating a story of how he woke up to…
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Posted inBooks Neuroscience Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Truth-Default Theory explains a lot about religious belief and disbelief

A friend gave me his unread copy of Malcom Gladwell's book, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know. Since I'd heard of some of Gladwell's other books, like Blink and The Tipping Point, but not this one, I started reading Talking to Strangers with fairly low expectations.  I was wrong. I ended up being fascinated by the book. It's full of examples of people being fooled by other people who were lying, even though there was considerable evidence about the deception being foisted on them. So Gladwell delves into the reasons why Neville Chamberlain…
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Posted inBooks Science Spiritual practice/meditation

How a physicist embraces both science and spirituality

I embrace science. I also embrace spirituality, so long as "spirit" isn't viewed as something supernatural, but as a word that points to a deep personal understanding of existence that is compatible with science. So when I heard about physicist Alan Lightman's book, The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science, I knew that I wanted to read it. (I included an excerpt in this post.) Now that I've finished the book, it met my expectations, though I didn't learn anything astoundingly new. Lightman does a good job of explaining how we can feel a sense of belonging to…
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Posted inBooks India

Purity vs. pollution is a bizarre aspect of caste

Since I'm reading, and enjoying, Isabel Wilkerson's great book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, I was especially interested to read a recent newspaper story about Seattle becoming the first city in the United States to ban caste discrimination. Caste, in Wilkerson's view, is at the heart of American racism, Nazi Germany's horrors against Jews, and naturally India's longstanding caste divisions. I noted in a previous post how Wilkerson discovered that even currently among Indian scholars studying caste, she was able to tell who was upper caste and who was lower caste by the way they carried themselves and how…
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Posted inAlan Watts Books

The profundity of “There are no black people in Africa”

As Alan Watts was fond of saying, echoing a basic tenet of Taoism, you can't have good without bad, virtue without vice, up without down -- or indeed any quality without its opposite.  Everything becomes what it is in relation to something that it isn't.  If everybody in the world had always believed in God, there would be no religious people. There would just be people. Ditto if everybody had always lived without any conception of God. Then there would be no atheists, just people. Before sentient creatures who can conceive of abstractions arrived on our planet, the natural world…
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Posted inBooks India

Caste is a powerful way of looking at prejudice in both India and America

Recently TIME magazine had a cover story about what's wrong with the United States (a big subject!) that featured a lengthy essay by Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize winning Black author and university instructor. I was blown away by her emphasis on caste being at the core of our nation's social problems, rather than the more familiar racism. Wilkerson talked about her 2020 book, "Caste: The Origin of our Discontents," which focuses on caste in the United States, India, and Nazi Germany. Somehow I hadn't heard about that book until now. But I made up for that oversight by immediately…
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Posted inBooks

Are you endurant or transient? Me, I feel like I’m a bit of both.

In Galen Strawson's book, "Things That Bother Me," he makes an interesting distinction between people who feel a sense of continuity about themselves during their lifetime (endurants) and people who feel that they're being constituted anew as their life unfolds (transients). There's a lot to say about this. For now, the hour is late, I've been working on getting new iPhone 14's up and running for my wife and I today/tonight, so I'm simply going to share how Strawson defines "endurants" and "transients." He says he's a strong transient, while most people are endurants. Me, I kind of split the…
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Posted inBooks Neuroscience

Mind-blowing idea to start 2023: thoughts aren’t about anything

Might as well make my first churchless blog post in 2023 about a subject that first caught my attention back in 2011, which was the first time I read Alex Rosenberg's book, The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions.  It's the notion that our thoughts aren't about anything at all. That link leads to a blog post where I did my best to describe why Rosenberg says this. I won't repeat most of what was said in that post, so I invite you to read it if you want to have your mind blown so early in the…
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Posted inBooks Neuroscience

Often we know, but don’t understand how we know

I used to be in love with mysticism, where hidden secrets of the cosmos supposedly are revealed in a mysterious fashion.  I'm still enthralled with hidden secrets being revealed in a mysterious way, but now I realize that there's no need to invoke gurus, meditation, god, inner visions, and all the stuff that mysticism evokes, because everybody has that capacity in everyday life. This is one of the fascinating messages of Blink, a 2005 book by Malcolm Gladwell that a friend gave me, along with two other books by Gladwell that I'd never read before.  Its subtitle is "The Power…
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Posted inBooks Mindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

Instead of trying to fix ourselves, it’s better to be just be ourselves

One of the joys of reading for me is finding connections between seemingly disparate books. As I wrote about a few days ago, I'm reading a book about depression and mindfulness. I've also started a book by a neuroscientist, "Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness." Patrick House, the author, says that he doesn't agree with all of those ways, but in brief creatively-written chapters he makes the case for each way in accord with how proponents argue for it. In his first of the nineteen ways, House puts us in the place of a sea creature. It needs fast reflexes…
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Posted inBooks Mindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

I’m reading a good book about depression and mindfulness

Given how disturbing it's been for me to endure four days of non-functionality from Typepad, my blogging service, following a failed data migration to new servers (shared that post on Blogger since Typepad is so screwed up at the moment), I guess it was good timing that I got a book from Amazon about depression and mindfulness.  Not that I'm actually clinically depressed, though I was at one point in my life, about five years ago. What attracted me to "The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness," was a reader review on Amazon that said this was one…
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Posted inBooks Mindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

I’m giving “The Way of Effortless Mindfulness” another read

This morning I felt like brushing up on mindfulness, one of my favorite subjects, since mindfulness has become my meditation.  Looking through my books about mindfulness, I decided to pick up Loch Kelly's The Way of Effortless Mindfulness. As I noted in a 2019 post, "Effortless mindfulness versus deliberate mindfulness," I liked the idea of putting in no effort. A book by Loch Kelly, "The Way of Effortless Mindfulness," came to my attention via an interview Sam Harris conducted with Kelly and shared on Harris' Waking Up iPhone app that I'm a fan of.  Any book about meditation that has…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism Religions

A philosopher’s take on fate, Buddhism, religions

Before the book I've been writing about recently -- Kieran Setiya's Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way -- is put away on a bookshelf where I'll have trouble finding it (my books aren't organized very well), I wanted to share some final observations from Setiya that I found interesting. No such thing as fate. I agree with Setiya that fate doesn't exist, at least not in the sense of events in our life being preordained. I'd say, though, that they're ordained, in that chains of causes and effects control everything in the cosmos outside of…
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Posted inBooks Meaning of life

Hope is the secular equivalent of religious faith

I've finished Kieran Setiya's book, Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. As might be expected, Setiya doesn't conclude that's there some magical bit of philosophy that can be sprinkled over his first six chapter titles -- Infirmity, Loneliness, Grief, Failure, Injustice, Absurdiy -- and renders those manifestations of life's hardness harmless, or at least bearable. The best Setiya can come up with is Hope, the title of his concluding chapter. He warms up to that topic in the Absurdity chapter. Thus the existentialists were wrong: reason may dictate a total reaction to the world, and that…
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Posted inBooks Meaning of life

Unconditional friendship explains a lot in politics and religion

I'm continuing to enjoy Kieran Setiya's book, "Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way." Every chapter offers up fresh insights into issues that only a skilled philosopher who is dedicated to making philosophy a practical guide for everyday life could come up with. In the Loneliness chapter, Setiya speaks about friendship. As he did in other chapters, Setiya starts with Aristotle, then picks apart Aristotle's perspective, showing where it is lacking. As you can read below, Setiya disagrees with Aristotle's contention that when a friend loses the qualities that make him or her lovable, the friend…
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Posted inBooks Meaning of life

Don’t protest that something should not be, or it is for the best

I've read a lot of books in my seven decades or so of avid reading. What I've learned is that sometimes a book is worth reading for a single memorable thought that sticks in the mind long after the rest of the book has been forgotten. I feel this happening with a sentence that keeps popping up in my psyche several days after I came across it in "Life is Hard," by Kieran Setiya, a philosopher who teaches at MIT. I've boldfaced the sentence below, placing it in the context of where it appears in Setiya's book. Here it is…
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