Recently I have launched a full-featured website (take a look). This blog will be gone soon.
Religious Spirit
July 22, 2011
I’ve always found a religious spirit to be exactly the opposite of how it is perceived by the majority of both experts and the public. For I see it as a spirit of exploration—not limited to a particular field, but permeating the whole of existence. Only a man endowed with such a spirit can be whole and truly alive.
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White Flag
June 2, 2011
Some ideas are in the wind (this one is literally). For several years I had a vision of a white flag, all colors washed out, as a symbol of overcoming the divisions. It is a symbol of no symbol, in a certain sense. Today I came across a project by Stefano Cagol:
The artist writes:
The white flag, white in which all colors of the flags of the different nations are at the same time united and cancelled. It is the sign against an absurdly conflicting society. It is a symbolic act, but at the same time totalizing in its essential purity.
Thinking Afresh
May 26, 2011
In the new issue of The Economist, they touch upon the fashionable topic of the Anthropocene:
It means more than rewriting some textbooks. It means thinking afresh about the relationship between people and their world and acting accordingly.
Without due attention to the process of thinking itself, it is bound to remain just words.
The Flow of Thought
January 18, 2011
Addressing this year’s Edge question, Sam Harris writes:
[O]ur habitual identification with the flow of thought—that is, our failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, as transient appearances in consciousness—is a primary source of human suffering and confusion.
He is clearly on the right track.
The Product of the Environment
January 8, 2011
Albeit not being a fan of The Huffington Post, I find this particular piece noteworthy.
Our brains are the product of the environment in which we are nurtured through the first two decades of life. […] Our experience during childhood and adolescence determines the wiring of our brain so powerfully that even processing of sensory information is determined by our childhood environment.
Dr. Douglas Fields is right, and that is precisely why it can be so hard to communicate with an adult. In the absence of proper education, experience, especially negative, is limiting and coarsening the mind.
A Majority Non-religious Nation
December 25, 2010
The Guardian reports:
Every year, researchers from the British Social Attitudes survey ask a representative sample of British people whether they regard themselves as belonging to any particular religion and, if so, to which one? […] In the latest 2010 BSA report, published earlier this month, only 42% said they were Christians while 51% now say they have no religion. […] This Christmas, for perhaps the first time ever, Britain is a majority non-religious nation.
We will see even more pronounced decline of sectarianism in the world in future. It is absolutely inescapable. And after true religious quality will become immanent in culture, the very word “religion” in the plural will sound anachronistic.
Some Decades
November 23, 2010
In his recent interview on MSNBC, Sam Harris notes:
[W]e have some decades, at best, […] to build a viable global civilization which is compatible with human well-being.
Exactly.
What Religion Is
October 22, 2010
When a child is born, it is a new instrument of extreme delicacy. If tuned right, it is capable of creative existence. But it can be easily rendered insensitive by the environment.
One should look after one’s mind. It is indispensable to preserve that sense of immediacy, which is really what religion is.
The Soul Assumption
September 23, 2010
A great article by David Weisman appeared in Seed.
For the believers in the soul, let’s call them soulists, the soul assumption appears to be only the smallest of steps from the existence of a unified mind. Yet the soul is a claim for which there isn’t any evidence. Today, there isn’t even evidence for that place soulists step off from, the unified mind. Neurology and neuroscience, working unseen over the past century, have eroded these ideas, the soul and the unified mind, down to nothing.
Then David proposes the term “asoulism,” which makes me wonder if he has ever heard of anattā. (Evidently he has. —March 9, 2011)