Posted inBooks Philosophy

The substance of emptiness

I’ve got a Buddhist book called the “The Emptiness of Emptiness.” I bought it mainly because I liked the title. Unfortunately, the title continued to be the best thing I liked about the book, even after I read it. The idea that an idea of emptiness fills up, and thus negates, the emptiness is cool. Buddhism 101. But a whole book on the subject? The title suffices. So I’m running the danger of doing the same thing by even going on as long as I have. But without saying something about emptiness, we’d be stuck in our own isolated islands…
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Posted inPhilosophy Recreation

Zen lesson-lite

In my never-ending quest to find a deep meaning in the most trivial of circumstances, so that I may believe that the trivialities which surround me, and in fact, are me, have their roots in some unseen depths of existence, I am trying to attach some sort of Zen significance to the welter of mosquito bites on my arms and legs. “When hiking in the mountains, of what use is mosquito repellant left in the cabin?” This is a koan-lite worthy of much pondering, and, in fact, I have done just that most of today, when I wasn’t busy scratching…
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Posted inBooks Philosophy

Sustained by Drunkenness

I read the Tao Te Ching again over the weekend, looking, as always, for some inspiration and answers to life’s big questions. Of course, right off the bat the first line of chapter one demolishes this ridiculous expectation: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.” Damn! I should be able to learn the secrets of the universe from a book! Except…wasn’t the universe around for, oh, some twelve billion years before there were books? Hmmmm. Maybe what made it possible for books to eventually be written is something far different from what is in books—words, concepts,…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Philosophy

Pit of Vipers

That’s an uplifting image, isn’t it? I can barely watch the previews for Fear Factor, where they show contestants lying down in a box, covered with a mass of creepy-crawly snakes slithering every which way over them. I’d last, oh, about one second before I screamed, “get me out of here!” I’ve been thinking about a pit of vipers ever since my martial arts instructor, Warren, spoke about this concept last week. With the war in Iraq taking the turns it has, the Saddam statue falling today being a dramatic capstone to a pretty darn successful week for the Anglo-American…
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Posted inPhilosophy

The Power of Don’t-Know

Laurel has started attending a “Power of Now” group here in Salem, which discusses, and tries to put into practice, Eckhart Tolle’s philosophy. In his book, "The Power of Now," Tolle speaks of the wisdom of living in the present moment, which, really, is the only moment in which we can live anyway. Unarguably, most of life’s anxieties, fears, and problems vanish when we either forget about those that have already occurred in the past, or stop ruminating about those that might occur in the future. Laurel likes the people who participate in the Power of Now sessions, and I’m…
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Posted inPhilosophy Science

Near-death experience and nothingness

Recently an acquaintance forwarded me an email message about a particularly amazing near-death experience. All near-death experiences are amazing, of course, because death is such: amazing, the mother of all mysteries. I've always been interesed in NDE's since I have a bit of a personal interest, as do we all, in what happens after we take our last breath. Death has a way of capturing your attention, thats for sure. But most NDE's bear a distressingly close resemblance to the nature of the person having the experience. Christians tend to see Jesus, New Agers a soul guide, and so on.…
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Posted inPhilosophy

Life and death

What it all comes down to, doesn't it, life and death? Isn't this at the root of the human condition, and our most basic fears, longings, fantasies, desires, dreams, beliefs, everything? I went in to renew a permit this morning that had, um, expired a mere four years ago, and in the process of trying to butter up the clerk who had to decide whether this lapse deserved some sort of bureaucratic slap on the hand, we ended up having a great mini-conversation about the meaning of it all. Noting that my age, 54, was similar to hers, 53, she…
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Posted inHome life Philosophy

Positive postscript to hard drive hell

As mentioned in the post below, I'm desperately trying to derive some meaning from last week's attempted hard drive transfer horrors. What good is frustration? Usually we avoid it at all costs. I certainly would have sacrificed almost anything to the Great Computer in the Sky last Thursday if she could have blessed me with a benediction: "Go, Dell Inspiron 8200, and crash no more." But, what would life be like if we never ran up against seemingly insurmountable obstacles? Would we just contentedly sit on our butt, not being driven to try to crash through the barrier that divides…
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Posted inPhilosophy Science

Soulful science

For an interesting, if dense, scientific consideration of soul, consciousness, and Platonic truth, read "Morality at the Planck Scale," a chat with Stuart Hameroff. Reading this Metanexus posting, I recalled that Hameroff is the anesthesiologist whose work Roger Penrose cites in his equally dense (and much longer, being a book) "Shadows of the Mind." The basic notion of these brilliant guys is that teeny-tiny microtubules in the brain's nerve cells are small enough to involve quantum effects at the teeniest-tiniest level of physical reality, which is the Planck scale. This means that there is a connection between us, our brain,…
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Posted inPhilosophy Plotinus Writing/Weblogs

Trusting truth

Here's a question: if we had a choice between knowing the absolute 100% truth about existence, or remaining with our current beliefs, what would we do? I posed this question during a talk I gave in Seattle last year, and I remember being met with a lot of quizzical faces (which isn't unusual for me when I speak, but I don't necessarily consider this to be a bad thing; if an audience is looking quizzical, at least they aren't asleep). It's a good question, though. Most of us believe in God, somehow or other. And most of us believe in…
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