Psychology
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Give It Up: You Can’t Improve Yourself!
I recently heard this line, “You can’t improve yourself,” in a talk by Alan Watts. It struck me in two ways. First, it was rather depressing to think that I couldn’t improve this…
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Our Lived Life
Should we base our life on abstract ideas, or should our “lived life” dictate those abstract ideas? Off the cuff, many of us say, of course, our lived life should dictate those ideas.…
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Four Features of a Mystical Experience
What is the role of consciousness in the study of the universe and our life here on earth? We take our everyday consciousness as our default setting, thinking it gives us the proper…
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Subjective and Objective Knowledge
In our modern scientific era, we don’t pay much attention to “subjective” knowledge; instead we prefer “objective” knowledge. That is knowledge that is fact based and empirically verifiable. If we can’t demonstrate a…
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Quantum Physics and Kierkegaard
I realize this is a strange combination: Quantum Physics and Danish existentialist philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), but I think Kierkegaard’s ideas in relation to proving God’s existence are relevant to how we interpret…
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Marx Embraced Capitalism
The above title may sound strange to some people. Didn’t Karl Marx hate capitalism and seek its overthrow? Yes, he did, but he also saw it as a needed step on the way…
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Do Christians Really Believe in Free Will?
Allan Watts asked the question, many of us do, “Are humans free beings or determined beings?” Christians maintain that human beings have free will, however corrupted and fallen we are. On the other…
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What Living in the Now Means
There are a lot of misconceptions about what “Being or Living in the Now” means. For one thing, a lot of people think Being in the Now means just acting on any whim…
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The Parable of the Blue Sky and the Clouds
It’s amazing to think that our real fear of death is really a fear of life. It is a fear of who we really are. Our fear of death is at bottom a…
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The Bardo of Dharmata (After-Death)
After we have officially died, meaning the journey of our physical body and the appearances of this life have ended, the journey of the mind continues into the Bardo of Dharmata. This is…
