Stories From the Ground.

What’s the Point of Consciousness?

“If a general theory of reality has no place for consciousness, then that theory cannot be true.” – Philip Goff, Galileo’s Error

“Consciousness is also nature.” – Guy Armstrong, Emptiness

Two Views of Mind

Science has shown, time and again, that the workings of our world are rarely intuitive. We inhabit a universe with no centre, where time passes relative to motion, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and half the cells in our bodies aren’t even human. At the frontiers of knowledge, common sense holds no sway.

The Logic of Rebirth and Karma

“Offered to us as the irreplaceable means of deliverance, the Dhamma does not seek mere intellectual assent, but commands a response that is bound to be fully religious.” – Bhikkhu Bodhi, Two Faces of the Dhamma

“Why, if experience continues anyway, is it so terribly important that it continue within this set of personal characteristics, memories, and body?” – Tom Clark, Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity

Strange Relics

When I started meditating, ten-odd years ago, I didn’t think much of Buddhism. Whenever neuroscientists wrote about the absence of a solid self, I was intrigued. When Alan Watts waxed lyrical about the ideological assumptions underpinning materialism, I was enthralled. But when Buddhists spoke of the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, or the Three Characteristics, I glazed over. Even though Buddhism was the primary source of my newfound interest in spirituality, it often read like a painfully detailed way of stating the obvious in dry, arcane terminology.

How to Have a Good Meditation Retreat: In Theory and Practice

“If you practice for a result, then it becomes a hindrance.” – Dipa Ma (common advice to students)

“What is important is not the experiences we have but how we get transformed by them.” – Sayadaw U Jagara (recounted by Joseph Goldstein in Reflections on Nibbana)

Thwarted Desires

In Buddhism, there’s a saying that the path is “good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end.” Upon starting a meditation practice, many of us notice surprising benefits. Encouraged by these benefits, we may then seek to take the practice further, setting aside days, weeks, or months to retreat from the world, dedicate ourselves to meditation, and reap the fruits of deep stillness.

Reason’s Emotional Roots

“Do we not perhaps feel thought, and do we not feel ourselves in the act of knowing and willing?” – Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts

“Nature appears to have built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation, but also from it and with it.” – Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error

Critical of Critical Thinking

Rationality has always faced an uphill battle. It stirs few passions and obeys no creed, meaning that when it challenges ethnic, religious, or political loyalties, it can typically be subdued with a simple appeal to the human heart. Some people ignore reason more eagerly than others but we are all, to some extent, averse to rationality.

Delusion and the Useful Futility of Defining Meditation

“Our lives are lived in two realms – the physical and the narrative.” – Will Storr, The Unpersuadables

Misled by Nature

It’s easy to feel high and mighty about our place in the animal kingdom. Despite the physical prowess and surprising ingenuity of our animal cousins, we can’t help but regard them with some degree of pity. Sure, it’s impressive that leafcutter ants farm fungi (and have done so for millions of years), that some birds can fly over 10,000km without stopping, and that male emperor penguins incubate eggs for two months in frigid darkness, but isn’t it also a bit … meaningless?

Why Things Don’t Exist (or A Very Western Interpretation of Emptiness)

“It is not clear that the universe is a thing, and if it is defined as a set of things it runs the risk of paradox.” – Paul Davies, God and the New Physics

“The thought of your mother is not your mother.” – Joseph Goldstein (restating words spoken by his teacher, Anagarika Munindra)

Holding Reality In Mind

Until Pythagoras and Parmenides, we believed the Earth was flat. Until Copernicus and Kepler, we believed we were at the centre of the universe. Until Darwin and Wallace, we believed that humans were perfectly crafted divine creations. Throughout human existence, we’ve consistently believed in models of reality that have been proven wrong. How is this possible?

Four Arguments for the Nonexistence of Free Will

[A tip for those in a rush: If you want to cut straight to the point, skip the intro paragraphs and start at “What Do You Mean, Free?”]

“The only reason, for example, that you are not a rattlesnake is that your mother and father weren’t rattlesnakes. You deserve very little credit for being what you are—and remember, the people who come to you irritated, bigoted, unreasoning, deserve very little discredit for being what they are.” — Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

Steeped in Intuition

Knowledge comes through many channels. It can be gained through deliberate study, absorbed through exposure to contexts and cultures, or emerge unbidden in flashes of insight from the subconscious. It can even develop over aeons of natural selection, shaping dispositions suited for survival in an unforgiving world. Yet despite these diverse ways of knowing, all knowledge shares a common root: a dependence on intuition.

How Does Hypnosis Work?

“And as to the people you want to help, they are in their respective worlds for the sake of their desires; there is no way of helping them except through their desires.”—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That

High School Hypnosis

Hypnotists cast a captivating spell. It is a curious sight to see people apparently stripped of autonomy and persuaded to act against their will—so curious, in fact, that few can watch hypnosis without being intrigued by what, exactly, is happening.

Vipassana with SN Goenka: Pros & Cons

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“Do not meditate to get the right attitude—get the right attitude, then you’re meditating.” – Tuck Loon, Cambodian meditation teacher

“Meditate to understand, not ‘because of gong’.” – paraphrasing Sayadaw U Tejaniya, Burmese monk

My First Retreat

In 2015 I attended my first meditation retreat, at a small centre on the prairies of eastern Alberta. Going in, I knew what to expect: ten days of total silence, physical pain, and little to eat. In this sense I was more prepared than some of my fellow meditators. Basil, a University of Alberta medical student, was shocked to learn that he’d just signed up for ten dinner-free nights. Hino, an Eritrean immigrant living in Fort McMurray, didn’t know that we would have to give up our phones. Hearing Basil ask others whether they knew about the no-dinner policy, and watching Hino flaccidly protest the removal of his phone privileges, I felt a bit smug. The retreat hadn’t even begun and people were already suffering. Continue reading “Vipassana with SN Goenka: Pros & Cons”

Why Does Time Pass More Slowly in Youth?

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“Oh, when I look back now that summer seemed to last forever.”—Bryan Adams, Summer of ‘69

“Now nothing seems as strange as when the leaves began to change or how we thought those days would never end.”—Kid Rock, All Summer Long

Time in Hindsight

In another essay, I explained why time seems to accelerate with age—and why the usual explanations are incomplete.

To recap:

As we grow older, we form more memories.
With more memories to choose from, we revisit any single memory less often.
Therefore, more time passes between our recollections of specific events.
This gap gives adults more opportunities to be surprised by the passage of time.

Continue reading “Why Does Time Pass More Slowly in Youth?”