Philosophy

Many people, well, most people I'm sure, enjoy the Christmas season. Vacation. Gifts. Relatives. Eating. Drinking. Football. And for Christians, the birth of Jesus. But for others, and I'm largely in your camp, all of these festivities, well-wishing, and positivity grate on their nerves, because for reasons unique to each person, the Christmas season isn't a time for celebration. After all, as the Buddha pointed out, life is suffering. Or at least, full of disappointment. Sure, it's possible to put on a happy face and ignore this truth, but ignore it or not, that truth remains.  Many people are lonely.…

If you want to be happy -- and who doesn't? -- there are a huge number of ways people have advised how to accomplish this throughout the thousands of years of recorded history.  Whatever works for you, go for it. That's my attitude. I simply want to suggest an approach that resonates with me, the Stoic practice of negative visualization.  Or as William B. Irvine says in the transcript of a talk that I've shared below, want the things you already have, love the life you happen to be living. Yeah, I realize this sounds kind of obvious. But as…

It was kind of a strange place to resonate with a George Bernard Shaw quotation.  Last night my wife and I had just finished watching episode 7 of the HBO Max series, "Love Life." Following each episode, there's an interesting discussion of it between Anna Kendrick, who plays the main character with a love life, and three other people involved with putting on the series. One of them said something like, "As Shaw put it, All men mean well. Sinners, saints, everybody." Hearing those words, I paused Apple TV, got a pen and piece of paper, and wrote down the quote.…

Periodically my brain comes up with cosmic conclusions that feel ever so right to me. For example, on my Church of the Churchless blog I've written about how back in 1968 I had a convincing realization that the universe is a paper bag turned inside out.  If this doesn't make sense to you, I recommend ingesting a psychedelic, mescaline, since that substance was responsible for the paper bag turned inside out insight. Which, I readily admit, didn't last very long in my psyche. On the other hand, my current cosmic conclusion arose while I was in a normal state of…

My teeth-cleaning appointment started with a statement and ended in sadness. "Dr. Panet-Raymond isn't here today," I was told. "Friday his daughter died in a skiing accident on Mt. Bachelor."  That hit me hard. I've known Marc Panet-Raymond for a long time. We've talked a lot about philosophy and many other subjects during the time my mouth wasn't wide open for dental work.  A story in the Oregonian, "Woman who died on Mt. Bachelor 'lifted everyone who was around her,' father says," tells what happened. But no story can capture the feelings of Panet-Raymond, his wife, and son on the day…

You and I are alive. I know this to be true, because I'm writing what you're going to be reading, and writing/reading require being alive. The question is, how alive are we?  Pretty clearly, aliveness comes in degrees. At one extreme, someone in a coma is living, yet just barely alive. Maybe not at all.  Most of us would say that there's a point at which life isn't worth living. This is why so many people have a living will, durable power of attorney, do not resuscitate instructions, and such. But there's also the question of aliveness in what we…

I love watching fireflies do their bioluminescence thing. I've just spent several days in Indiana and Kentucky. Fireflies are common there. They don't exist in Oregon, so far as I know. At least, I've never seen a firefly in my home state. So when the sun began to set on the day my wife and I arrived at a family get-together in a small town near Bloomington, Indiana, I couldn't take my eyes off of the seemingly randomly blinking yellow flashes of light on a large grassy lawn.  Blink here. Then there. No way to predict where the next flash…