In a previous post (Isms), I mentioned in passing that I’ve evolved my own beliefs about the meaning/purpose of life in the meta sense, but did not elaborate upon what they were.
Here’s what I think is going on, to the best of my scrawny human brain’s capacity to understand such things. Continue reading
Browsing through old drafts, I came across this unfinished post from 2016. I present it here as a prequel to my May post, Isms. More at the end…
I found this book in my neighbor’s little lawn library, but did not notice the subtitle until I got it home. Buddhists again. What is up with that? Everywhere I look there seem to be Buddhists, or Buddhist practices. Am I resisting some inner calling or something?
I ponder that question. I am not a huge fan of organized (or even disorganized) religions. With the best of intentions, religions try to institutionalize direct experience, at which point it is no longer direct. Thus, self-contradiction is built into their foundations from day one.
I see spirituality as primarily a private, internal experience. Certainly spiritual inspiration can come from many sources, but overall, looking outside to better know yourself seems to me like a step in the opposite direction from where you are trying to get. (Of course, that perspective may be colored by the fact that I’m an introvert).
I think it’s just that Buddhists and I are often interested in the same things. Continue reading
Just a quick post (am I really capable of such a thing? We shall see) to update followers on the issues I was wrastling with in February. I quit the Yale “Science of Well-Being” course after a few weeks, as it was targeted primarily towards those who had bought into competitive materialism all of their lives, which has never been me. Also it was a little too mechanistic in its attitude toward brain science. Research is good, but not everything can be measured. Identity, for example. But hey, go Elis. Really, go. You will probably be much happier away from Yale and its ilk.
Building on the theory that procrastination was a manifestation of crippling yet unconscious anxiety Continue reading
sensitive type 