Posted inBuddhism Reality

Here’s what I wrote about Zen and naive realism when I was 20

Today I was planning to write a post about a central theme in a book I've been blogging about recently, Joan Tollifson's Nothing to Grasp. I was struck by how Tollifson has come around to viewing reality in simple terms, "as it is." Leaves falling. Birds flying. Pain happening. Dishes being washed. She came to this outlook after a lengthy period of seeking the Truth of It All via meditation, Zen Buddhism, nondual teachings, therapy, and other means. I wanted to write about how weird and wonderful it is to have sought reality in esoteric teachings, then realize that, hey,…
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Posted inReality Spiritual practice/meditation

Joan Tollifson’s Pathless Path to Here/Now

For thirty-five years I was a member of an organization, Eastern religion variety, that taught how to pursue a spiritual Path. That word was capitalized, because it was no ordinary path, but a Path from the illusion of the physical world to supernatural realms of existence.  It feels great to be free of that fantasy.  Here's passages from "The Pathless Path to Here/Now" chapter in Joan Tollifson's book, Nothing to Grasp. She beautifully captures the wisdom of giving up the notion of a Path in favor of experiencing the reality of what is what right before us at every moment.…
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Posted inBuddhism Reality Religions

Religious believers are in love with concepts, not reality

I find it amusing when religiously-minded people accuse atheist skeptics like me of thinking too much, of not being in touch with direct experience, of being in love with abstract concepts. This is a classic case of, as the saying goes, the pot calling the kettle black. Meaning, as that Wikipedia article points out, psychological projection has taken over, and the accuser claims that someone else has the attribute that actually they have.  For there's nothing more tied to thinking, indirect experience, and abstract concepts than religious belief. The reason is obvious: since there's no demonstrable evidence that the entities…
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Posted inBooks Reality

Kant is difficult to understand, but pleasingly irreligious

I haven't read much of Immanuel Kant directly. Basically, all I've known about this great philosopher is his distinction between noumenon, which can't be known, and phenomenon, which can be known. But since the book I'm reading now, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, contains a heavy dose of Kant, I'm gradually learning more about his worldview. Which is pleasingly irreligious. I had no idea that Kant was so down on religion and the supernatural. Here's some passages about his philosophy from what I read today. Like Kant's writing itself, they aren't the…
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Posted inBooks Reality Science

We can’t grasp reality as it is, only as we know it

My new favorite book, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, had such a provocative title, as soon as I saw it recommended in The New Yorker I knew that I'd have to buy it. Wow. It's a work of literary genius, based on my reading of the first part of it. The author, William Egginton, is a humanities professor, but he clearly has an excellent grasp of modern science also. The front cover has a one-sentence summary of what the book is about. A poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explored the greatest…
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Posted inMeaning of life Reality

Sam Harris praises reason as the only game in town for strangers to play

Near the end of Sam Harris' conversation with André Duqum, which I've written about here and here, Harris praised reason in a way that deeply resonated with me. One reason I liked the praise of reason is that it's a vitally important human capacity that too often is taken for granted. It's the foundation of every well-functioning society and organization, from the smallest to the largest. Yet too often we only notice the importance of reason when it's missing. As in religious dogma. As in political posturing. As in pronouncements of authoritarians. As in attempts to ban books and decry…
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Posted inReality Universe

Likely we don’t even know the questions to ask of the cosmos

We all have questions. About all kinds of stuff. What's wrong with my computer? Who will win the next presidential election? Is that lump on my chest anything to be concerned about? Almost always, our questions are presumed to have answers. Maybe not right now, but eventually. The winner of the 2024 presidential election will be known after the votes are counted, not before. Until then all we can do is wait. And hope. That's when I turn a bit religious, even though I'm an atheist: Dear God, please don't let Donald Trump win a second term! But the questions…
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Posted inBooks Reality

I enjoy reading Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. (Yeah, I’m weird.)

OK, I lied. Or more accurately, I changed my mind. After saying in my previous post about Sartre's Being and Nothingness that I didn't feel like re-reading (or re-re-reading) the 798 pages of dense philosophical prose, choosing to only read the 44 pages of the translator's introduction again, I've found myself plowing further into the book. Because I'm enjoying it.  I sort of figure that rather than attempting the New York Times crossword puzzle, I'd rather exercise my aging brain by reading passages that often simultaneously stretch my ability to comprehend them, while presenting me with fresh ways of looking…
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Posted inReality Science

I’ve finished “The One.” It ended up kind of ho-hum.

Well, some books end with a rousing crescendo. Others end with a deflating sense of ho-hum. I can't say that Heinrich Pas' The One: How an Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics was totally in the latter category for me, but it was close to it. I've been writing about the book because I'm fascinated by quantum mechanics and have read quite a few books that explore the possible meaning of this field, apart from the undeniable success of the mathematics of it -- which makes possible so much of our modern technology. Pas deserves a lot of praise…
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Posted inReality Science Universe

Religion hates mystery. Science loves mystery.

Recently there's been a comment conversation on this blog about the religious philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, a medieval Christian. I've never been interested in his theology, since like most avid religious believers, Aquinas wants to use philosophy to defend his faith, not to engage in a search for truth. Wikipedia has a cogent criticism of Aquinas by Bertrand Russell. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already…
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Posted inReality Science Universe

New Scientist story by Heinrich Päs about quantum oneness

I got excited when I saw the cover of the most recent issue of New Scientist that appeared in our mailbox a few days ago. Ooh! "A bold new way to think about how the universe fits together" Bring it on! When I turned to the cover story, which is called Reality Reconstructed in the print edition, I saw that the author was Heinrich Päs, the theoretical physicist who wrote The One: How An Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics, which I've written previous blog posts about here, here, and here.  As noted in the third post, Päs devotes…
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Posted inReality Religions Science

Einstein: “It is the theory which decides what can be observed”

Here's my third post about Heinrich Pas' book The One: How An Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics, the previous posts being here and here. In my reading I've reached a sort of interlude in-between the first and last parts of the book, each of which deal fairly directly with a monistic interpretation of quantum mechanics, which explains The One title. But two intervening chapters, "The Struggle for One" and "From One to Science and Beauty," focus on the historic struggle between monism and dualism in Western thought (there's very little mention of Eastern thought, which also has monistic and dualistic…
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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 inReality Vedanta/Advaita

Experience is all there is for us. Praise be to nonduality!

Once again proving my adage that I don't need to buy nearly as many new books as I used to, now that I've realized that every time I re-read a book, it's as a new person, I'm back to taking another look at David Loy's Nonduality.  (That's a newer edition; I have the 2010 version.) It was just about a year ago that I wrote about the book in my aptly titled post, "Nonduality" is a great book about a fascinating subject. In that post I shared links to three previous posts about the book, the first written in January…
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Posted inReality

This is my favorite Rumi quotation

For several years, a few decades ago, I became obsessed with the great Sufi poet, Rumi. I devoured every English translation of his writings I could find, also buying books that weren't literal translations, but were written in the spirit of Rumi. Eventually I donated most of my Rumi books when my obsession abated. But I kept a few, including William C. Chittick's translation of Rumi, The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi. One reason I held on to that book was that it contained my favorite Rumi quotation, from his Masnavi.  Fear the existence in which…
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Posted inReality Religions

Truth is beautiful. Which is why religion is ugly.

Truth was on my mind in various ways today. In the morning I listened to a Chris Hayes "Why Is This Happening?" podcast interview with Kate Crawford, an Artificial Intelligence expert. Then I read an essay in my Question Everything book about the limits of free speech. In the afternoon I made a video on our back deck where I performed the Water Boxing form that I learned in my Tai Chi classes. I'll start with the video. I wanted to show people what the Water Boxing form looks like, but I knew that since I'd never seen myself doing…
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Posted inGod Reality

Religions exist because we can’t grasp that the cosmos just is

For most of my life I marveled at the classic question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" But with advancing age, and maybe some advancing wisdom, I came to prefer "There is something rather than nothing." No why required. Just a factual statement.  Because that why takes us into the realm of religion, and I'm no longer religious. Most religions, with the notable exception of Buddhism, assume there was a creator of the cosmos.  So God is the answer to the why question. There's something rather than nothing due to God bringing the creation into being. Of course, we…
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Posted inMystics Reality Religions

Religion and mysticism are mostly conceptual

Reality can't be captured in concepts. After all, it's extremely unlikely that the human brain has evolved to be able to completely capture the nature of the reality that fashioned both the human brain and everything else in existence. But this doesn't take away the utility of concepts for making sense of the world. "Tree" is a useful way of describing the general nature of vegetative entities that vary tremendously in size, appearance, and such, yet share common characteristics. However, trees are part of the natural world. They are obviously real.  Concepts that refer to entities which can't be observed…
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Posted inReality

We are the only animal that can deny our animal nature

In some regards we humans have capabilities beyond those of other species with whom we share our planet. But in this regard we are inferior to those creatures: we are the only animal that can deny our animal nature. Not everybody does this, of course. I'm proudly animal, as is Maxim Loskutoff, who wrote "The Beast in Me" in The New York Times collection of philosophical essays published in the newspaper, Question Everything. As you can read below, Loskutoff vividly recognized his animalness when a grizzly bear stalked him and his partner during their hike in Glacier National Park. But…
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