If you’ve ever spent five minutes around Advaita (translation ‘non-duality’, from Advaita Vedanta, a school of Hindu philosophy dating from the 5th century http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondualism), you’ll have heard people say that your true nature is awareness or consciousness. What do Advaitans really mean when they talk about “awareness” and “consciousness”? Those words typically refer to something that happens inside the […]
Once upon a time, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a long, long way from the shore, on a very still day, while the sun was shining with all its might, there appeared a wave. Why did the wave appear right then and there? Well I don’t know, to be honest. I’m not an […]
I am grateful to Árni Sigurðsson for introducing me to the conversations between Romain Rolland and Sigmund Freud. Rolland was a French dramatist, novelist, essayist, art historian and mystic who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915. He was also strongly influenced by the Vedanta philosophy of India, primarily through the works of Swami Vivekananda, and he […]
I was wondering today about the connection between the words “happy” and “happen”. It turns out that both derive from the old Norse word “happ” which means “good luck, chance”. A few hundred years ago, the word “happy” was used mostly as an adjective meaning lucky, as in “a happy coincidence”. If someone was “hapless”, […]
“I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.” – John Lennon, I Am The Walrus. When discussing the nature of what each and everyone of us is – i.e. the undivided, eternal, infinite universe – people sometimes ask me “but what happened before the Big Bang?” It’s […]
I’m currently reading Stephen Hawking’s most recent book (co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow) “The Grand Design” and was pleased to find the following paragraphs about free will. “Do people have free will? If we have free will, where in the evolutionary tree did it develop? Do blue-green algae or bacteria have free will, or is their […]
My mum is visiting from Bundaberg today and we got talking about philosophy this morning over coffee (as you do). I mentioned that the universe is eternal and infinite (because it incorporates all of space and time) and she pointed out that when she was growing up, that was how the Catholic nuns described God. […]
The latest edition of New Scientist has a fascinating article titled “Quantum shadows: The mystery of matter deepens” by Anil Ananthaswamy (requires free registration to read). It discusses recent experiments conducted to try (yet again) to determine why photons sometimes appear as particles and sometimes appear as waves (the famous “double slit” experiment). In this […]
Chrissy and I were sitting around a campfire near Noosa last night, talking about dreams. Most people have no problem with the idea that the world that exists inside their dreams, including themselves, their friends, family, inanimate objects, etc, are merely thoughts, brain spasms over which they have no control. They would have no problem […]
Inspired by a question from James Bryden, this video is about cognitive dissonance.