Posted inFree will

Why not believing in free will is so wonderful

I've written a lot about free will on this blog. More accurately, my posts on this subject have been about the near certainty that we humans lack free will. At least, as it is normally considered to exist. Meaning, almost everybody who believes in free will considers that it means we're able to choose one thing instead of another without any causal influence affecting that choice. Tonight I pondered whether to have leftover spaghetti for dinner, or to make tempe with rice. I decided on the tempe and rice. I had some reasons for that decision. This means that my…
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Posted inOpen Threads

Open Thread 44 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread. Remember, off-topic comments should go in an Open Thread. I'll copy in some examples of off-topic comments that I unpublished recently and included in this new Open Thread. If you don't see a recent comment, or comments, posted, it might be because you've failed to follow the above rule. Keep to the subject of a blog post if you leave a comment on it. And if you want to use this blog as a "chat room," do that in an open thread. As noted before, it's good to have comments in a regular blog post related to its subject, and it's…
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Posted inFree will

Free will is the missing ingredient in self-improvement

I've almost finished reading Lisa Feldman Barrett's How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, a book I've been writing about lately.  I have few criticisms of it. But after I read the "Emotion and the Law" chapter, I realized what was missing from Barrett's book: a discussion of free will. Meaning, the lack thereof. Most of that chapter made sense to me. I'll explain the part that didn't. This passage struck me as fine. The third type of responsibility relates to the content within your conceptual system, separately from how your brain uses that system to predict when breaking…
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Posted inUniverse

The universe has a plan for me. It’s what’s happening right now.

Religious people often say, "God has a plan for me." People who fall into the spiritual-but-not-religious camp often say, "The universe has a plan for me." Deepak Chopra assures us this is the case. Some Googling revealed lots of examples of the second variety of planning. I looked at a few.  In The Universe Always Has A Plan, I read:  You aren’t sad because you are an unhappy person. You are experiencing sadness as part of your healing journey, to create space for more light to be embodied. You will receive everything you desire at exactly the moment in time…
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Posted inNeuroscience

We need to try not to overdraw our body budget

Recently I've been writing about a book that I'm enjoying a lot more than I thought I would, Lisa Feldman Barrett's How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. It's dawned on me that in the course of sharing ideas from various chapters I found compelling, I've largely neglected to make clear the importance of a key concept in the book: that of our body budget. This was a new notion to me, and I don't claim to fully understand it even after reading Barrett's description of it. But here's some quotes from her book that give a good…
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Posted inBuddhism Neuroscience

The self, like emotions, is constructed by the brain

I'm continuing to make progress on reading Lisa Feldman Barrett's book, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.  As noted in a previous post about the book, I'm glad that I decided to read it straight through, even though some chapters seemed more appealing than others. Barrett is a good writer. She organized her book well, with interesting topics in every chapter. Before I get to how she views the self, which is pretty much how I also see it, as something constructed, not a given, I want to briefly mention her wise words about jumping to…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth

Imagining one’s death is impossible, but a crucial part of living

Some things are impossible to imagine, because we have no experience of anything akin to that thing. This is why, as I noted in a recent blog post, we can't imagine what the cosmos would be like without consciousness existing within it, because our attempt at imagining takes place within our consciousness.  It's also why, no matter how hard I or anyone else may try, we can't imagine what things will be like after we're dead, because our attempt at imagining takes place while we're alive. So our living consciousness is an inescapable barrier to knowing what, if anything, lies…
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Posted inConsciousness God Reality

God, like money, is real only because of the human mind

As I noted in a previous post about Lisa Feldman Barrett's book, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, I'm enjoying the book more now that I'm past the introductory chapters. One reason is that Barrett doesn't just describe how emotions are made. She embeds that description in larger issues. For example, her "Emotions As Social Reality" chapter starts off with the classic question, If a tree falls in the forest and no one is present to hear it, does it make a sound? Even though I should know better, when I ponder this question my first…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas

The “magic” in magical moments comes from our own mind

After including a quote in a previous blog post about how we construct the environment in which we live, thanks to how the human brain functions, I got to thinking about the implications for magical moments. We all have them, though it's difficult to say whether there's much agreement between people as to what constitutes a magical moment. Here's some examples from my life, using my own intuitive definition. Birth of my daughterCatching big waves on Maui with my boogie boardMarrying my wifeSeeing Janis Joplin perform in person Taking mescaline with a friend in the Sierra Nevada mountainsSpending two weeks in…
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Posted inNeuroscience Science

Feelings are an unreliable guide to reality

Thanks to a Church of the Churchless commenter who mentioned Lisa Feldman Barrett's book about how emotions are uniquely fashioned out of our experiences and environment, rather than appearing ready-made the same way in every human brain, I've been reading How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain with increasing enjoyment now that I'm past the initial introductory chapters. Barrett, a psychologist and neuroscientist, makes a strong case for her admittedly out-of-the-mainstream view of what emotions are and how they come to be. She cites lots of research, both her own and that of others, as she systematically…
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Posted inMeaning of life

“Soul,” the animated movie, has good lessons for living

Tonight my wife and I watched "Soul" while we ate our usual vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner: Trader Joe's Breaded Turkey-Less Stuffed Roast With Gravy, mashed potatoes, salad, homemade apple pie with wholewheat crust. That's a soulful meal for us. No animals were harmed in its making. Well, our dog begged while we were eating, and she didn't get anything, so I guess we hurt Mooka's feelings. She'll recover. Soul had arrived as a DVD from Netflix months ago. We rarely watch DVDs now that we've escaped the clutches of oh-so-slow CenturyLink DSL and embraced Space X's Starlink satellite internet. But it…
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Posted inHope

Hope is the forward-looking side of thankfulness

Tomorrow is the Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States. So I feel like I should write something about being thankful. Problem is, I've got doubts about the value of that. After all, for everything I can feel thankful for, there's a seemingly equally large bunch of things that I'm not thankful for.  Yet we don't celebrate a Notthankful holiday, though maybe we should for the yin-yang balance. Rather than thankfulness, I was leaning toward fashioning a blog post on the theme of hope -- which strikes me as being the forward-looking side of thankfulness.  Meaning, we're thankful for good…
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Posted inReality

Ultimate reality doesn’t exist, says physicist Carlo Rovelli

When I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based religious organization, for quite a few years I gave frequent talks to the RSSB faithful. One of my favorite topics was ultimate reality. I loved those two words. Putting ultimate before the familiar reality produced a wonderful feeling of transcendent potential wisdom in me. Not that I really knew what ultimate reality was. It was an aspiration, a goal to be pursued through daily meditation and the other aspects of the RSSB teachings. Now, I hardly ever think about ultimate reality. Except when it comes up in a book…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Shabnam Dhillon’s “usual address” belonged to RSSB insiders

Someone just sent me information regarding the house in England shown on Shabnam Dhillon's death certificate as her "usual address."  She was the wife of the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), Gurinder Singh Dhillon. Since RSSB headquarters are in India, it was a surprise to me to see that an English house was shown as Shabnam's usual address.  The person also sent along a Google description of when an inquest is performed after someone dies, which happened in this case. A coroner must hold an inquest if: the cause of death is still unknown the person might have…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus Politics

Christian Nationalism defeated in Pennsylvania, but still scary

Politics is divisive and arouses strong emotions. Religions are divisive and arouse strong emotions. Mix politics with religion, and not surprisingly the worst qualities of each can combine in a toxic combination. Such is evident in countries around the world where dogmatic religion fuses with narrow-minded nationalism. Iran. India. Saudi Arabia. Israel. There are others, including the United States. This was personified in the recent midterm election here in the United States by Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania.  Fortunately, Mastriano lost to Democrat Josh Shapiro by a large margin: 56% to 42%. But in the runup…
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Posted inMindfulness

Mindfulness made simple, by my own mind

I like mindfulness a lot. It's become my favorite approach to meditation. But given how many books I've read about mindfulness, I'm struck by how overly complicated this activity can be described. Which I think says more about the economics of the book business than about mindfulness. After all, few people want to buy a book that's just a few pages long. So authors who write about this subject have to say a lot about something that appears to me to be quite simple. Thus here's my exceedingly brief summary of how I've come to view mindfulness. Naturally others likely…
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Posted inAwareness

Once again, pure awareness strikes me as a meaningless notion

I don't expect people to be perfect. Everybody is flawed. To be human is to be imperfect. And since people write books, I don't expect the books I read to be perfect. I just hope for them to make sense. Having finished The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness, I can say that this is a very good book about both mindfulness and meditation.  But I came across a few things that made me go, Huh, that doesn't make sense. Notably, some mentions of pure awareness, since I don't see how such can exist, as noted in…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Here’s Shabnam Dhillon’s death certificate (wife of RSSB guru)

Having been an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) for about 35 years, I follow goings-on with RSSB when they come to my attention. That includes news involving the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon. On November 26, 2019 I wrote a blog post, "Shabnam Dhillon, wife of RSSB guru, has died." I included a Business Today story about her death which said in part: Shabnam Dhillon, wife of Radha Soami Satsang Beas head Gurinder Singh Dhillion, has passed away in London. She was 57 years old. According to a statement before Delhi High Court, Shabnam went to…
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Posted inPolitics

How the media and Republicans got the election so wrong

Being a political junkie -- someone who has loved to follow politics since my childhood -- I feel like my immersion in the United States midterm election that happened last Tuesday, and whose votes are still being counted, should enable me to draw some philosophical conclusions from what happened. Well, at least I'll give that a try.  The gist of what happened, for those who don't live in the United States and/or don't follow American politics closely, is that the widely predicted Republican "Red Wave" turned out to be a Red Ripple, if even that. Both the mainstream media and…
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Posted inMindfulness

Feel more with the body, less with the mind

When someone asks "How are you feeling?" that familiar question contains within it a lot of profundity. Because how we answer it reveals quite a bit about ourselves. Mostly I take a few moments to think about what I've been doing recently. You know, how well or poorly my day is going. Or week for a longer time span. I'd remember what's been bothering me and what's been pleasing me, then try to describe the net effect of my joys and sorrows. There's nothing wrong with this. But reading "The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness" has…
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