Religion – Stories From the Ground.

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.

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.

Are We Ruled by Thought or Emotion?

“… no sharp line divides thinking from feeling, nor does thinking inevitably precede feeling or vice versa (notwithstanding the century of debate within psychology over which comes first).”—Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works

“I’m hooked on a feeling; I’m high on believing.”—Mark James, popularised by Blue Swede

Deceptive Dichotomies

We interpret the world through perception, but our perceptions are limited and often exclude basic relations. For instance, we might think that inside and outside, up and down, or left and right are mutually exclusive, but they are also interdependent: the existence of an outside entails an inside, up only exists relative to down, and left delineates right. Our mental landscapes are peppered with such dichotomies, tricking us into thinking interrelated phenomena are separate. Continue reading “Are We Ruled by Thought or Emotion?”

Who’s in Control?

“The inner man has been created in the image of the outer.” – BF Skinner

“We live our lives, as it were, ‘inside out’, projecting the existence of an ‘I’ as separate from an external world which we try to manipulate to gain satisfaction.” – Namkhai Norbu

Introduction

Until better explanations became available, humans personified nature to explain its workings: gods with human looks and emotions have been invoked across cultures as causes behind natural processes, it was once believed that sperm housed little humans, and the mental faculty of foresight is often attributed to blind evolutionary processes that cannot anticipate future states. Fortunately, the scientific method has usurped much of the personified description of nature. Though we’ve realized personification’s inadequacy at explaining natural processes, the common understanding of our inner mental lives – themselves natural processes – hinges upon personification. We wrongly invoke personae (aka “selves”) as the causes behind human behaviour.[1] This oversimplification neglects the formative role of the environment on actions and mental states.