Dirty Jobs for a Clean Mind

The host of "Dirty Jobs", Mike Rowe, writes:

What does surprise me is the fact that everybody I've met on this gig [...] seems to be having a ball.

It's true. People with dirty jobs are in on some sort of a joke. Maggot farmers are ecstatic. Leech wranglers are exultant. I've personally witnessed lumberjacks and roadkill picker-uppers whistling while they work. And don't even get me started on the crab-fishermen, spider-venom collectors and chicken-sexers--they're having such a blast they've sworn off vacation. So why are people with dirty jobs having more fun than the rest of us?

The answer (aside from the fact that they're still employed) is because they are blissfully sheltered from the worst advice in the world. I refer, of course, to those preposterous platitudes lining the hallways of corporate America, extolling virtues like "Teamwork," "Determination" and "Efficiency." You've seen them--saccharine-sweet pieces of schmaltzy sentiment, oozing down from snow capped mountains, crashing waterfalls and impossible rainbows. In particular, I'm thinking of a specific piece of nonsense that implores in earnest italics, to always, always ... Follow Your Passion!

In the long history of inspirational pabulum, "follow your passion" has got to be the worst. Even if this drivel were confined to the borders of the cheap plastic frames that typically surround it, I'd condemn the whole sentiment as dangerous, not because it's cliché, but because so many people believe it. Over and over, people love to talk about the passion that guided them to happiness. When I left high school--confused and unsure of everything--my guidance counselor assured me that it would all work out, if I could just muster the courage to follow my dreams. My Scoutmaster said to trust my gut. And my pastor advised me to listen to my heart. What a crock.

Why do we do this? Why do we tell our kids--and ourselves--that following some form of desire is the key to job satisfaction? If I've learned anything from this show, it's the folly of looking for a job that completely satisfies a "true purpose." In fact, the happiest people I've met over the last few years have not followed their passion at all--they have instead brought it with them.

I could give you pages of examples; here are a few. Bob, the pig farmer in Las Vegas who collects the uneaten food from casino buffets and feeds it to his swine, which now grow faster and more profitably than any other pigs on the planet; Matt, the dairy farmer in Connecticut who realized his cows were producing more shit than milk and launched a successful line of biodegradable "flower-pots" made from pure poo; Or John and Andy, a couple of entrepreneurs down in Florida who retrieve wayward golf balls from alligator infested water-hazards and resell them on the Internet for big bucks.

These guys are passionate about what they do, but none of them aspired to the careers they now enjoy. None of them were guided by a burning desire to do a particular thing. What they did was step back from the crowd and watch carefully to see where everyone else was going. Then, they simply went the other way. They followed the available opportunities--not their passion--and built a balanced life around the willingness to do a job that nobody else wanted to.

Read the whole article at Forbes.

Science Tackles Life After Death

You’re having a near-death experience (NDE). They happen all the time. They may happen to everybody, however they die. Remarkably similar experiences have been reported throughout history in all cultures. Obviously, most are lost to us, because being near death is usually the immediate prelude to being dead. But precisely because high-tech hospital resuscitations are so effective — around 15% of cardiac-arrest victims are revived — we can now regularly hear news apparently from beyond the grave. And it sounds like very good news indeed. You don’t really die and you feel great. What could be nicer?

NDEs are so common, so vivid and so life-transforming — survivors frequently become more compassionate, religious and serene as a result of what they experience — that scientists, philosophers, priests, psychologists and cultists all want a piece of the action. Their problem is that the human mind is unreachable. We can’t see what’s going on in there. Even if we could rush cardiac-arrest patients into an MRI scanner, we’d only see lights in the brain. We wouldn’t know what they meant. But now NDEs are to be scientifically investigated in a US and UK study involving 25 hospitals. This is co-ordinated by Dr Sam Parnia at Southampton University and is designed to find 1,500 survivors of cardiac arrests — “clinical death” — who tell such stories.

There are thousands of reports of OBEs but the two most famous cases are Pam Reynolds and Maria’s Tennis Shoe. Reynolds, an American singer, watched and later reported on with remarkable accuracy the top of her own skull being removed by surgeons before she moved into a bright glowing realm. But it was Reynolds’s account of the surgical implements used and the words spoken in the theatre that make the case so intriguing.

Maria, meanwhile, underwent cardiac arrest in 1977. She floated out of her body, drifted round the hospital and noticed a tennis shoe on a window sill. It was later found to be exactly where she said it was. The shoe was said to be invisible from the ground and not in any location where Maria could have seen it. Such stories suggest that OBEs should be scientifically verifiable.

Read the rest via the UK Times Online.

Four philosophical questions to make your brain hurt

Interesting article from the BBC. I think it's always good to examine your answers to questions like this, so you can learn more about yourself.

1. SHOULD WE KILL HEALTHY PEOPLE FOR THEIR ORGANS?

Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be ok painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?

2. ARE YOU THE SAME PERSON WHO STARTED READING THIS ARTICLE?

Consider a photo of someone you think is you eight years ago. What makes that person you? You might say he she was composed of the same cells as you now. But most of your cells are replaced every seven years. You might instead say you're an organism, a particular human being, and that organisms can survive cell replacement - this oak being the same tree as the sapling I planted last year.

3. IS THAT REALLY A COMPUTER SCREEN IN FRONT OF YOU?

4. DID YOU REALLY CHOOSE TO READ THIS ARTICLE?

Suppose that Fred existed shortly after the Big Bang. He had unlimited intelligence and memory, and knew all the scientific laws governing the universe and all the properties of every particle that then existed. Thus equipped, billions of years ago, he could have worked out that, eventually, planet Earth would come to exist, that you would too, and that right now you would be reading this article.

IN CONCLUSION

As TS Eliot once wrote:

"…the end of our exploring,

Will be to arrive where we started,

And know the place for the first time."

Religion Trump Cards

Some funnies for today...

More cards at the New Humanist

Choice Blindness

Often, especially in issues regarding religion or politics. It seems people make choices with conviction and will even kill or die for it. However, is it really a choice out of conviction? What if our choice becomes our conviction, and we essentially "rewrite the past" to fit our choice? Read on for a fascinating experiment on this subject.

The procedure for this experiment was very simple. The experimenter showed willing participants (about half men, half women) pairs of female faces on playing-card-sized photos, one in each hand. Participants pointed to whichever of the two faces they found most attractive. The experimenter then passed the card to the participants and asked them to describe exactly why they found that face attractive.

But wait, this is a psychology experiment, so there's a twist in the tail.

Sometimes, when the experimenter passed the card to participants, there was a little sleight of hand involved. This resulted in the participant staring at the female face they didn't choose.

So, now some people were being asked to justify a decision that, in reality, they hadn't made. Or most of them were - 13% spotted the trick and their data wasn't analysed as their heightened suspicion might have affected their reports.

Before you read the results, have a think about what you might expect. Surely if we were handed the photo with a face we didn't choose, and didn't notice it wasn't the same face, our enthusiasm would at least be dampened.

Perhaps the information would be processed unconsciously leading to a subtle difference in how we report our inner thoughts. For example, we might be more uncertain or more vague about why we preferred this face. After all we didn't prefer this face!

Results

Analysing participants' reports, they couldn't find any difference between the two groups. Both the participants looking at the photo they chose and those looking at the one they didn't both seemed sure of their reasons, used equal specificity, and equal emotionality. It seemed there was no clue in participants' verbal reports of the old switcheroo.

Petter Johansson and colleagues give this phenomena a snappy new name: choice blindness. This, then, is the idea that under certain circumstances we are actually oblivious to the choice we have made.

This 'blindness' was also seen in participants' actual reports of why they preferred one face over the other. Sometimes there was a bleed-through from one face to the other. For example one person said they preferred the woman because she was smiling. In fact it was their original choice, and not the one they were holding who had a slight smile on her face.

Other times participants appeared to have made up the reason why they preferred one over the other. One person said they preferred a woman wearing earrings. In fact only the woman they were shown was wearing earrings, not the original woman they chose.

A little philosophy of science

For a scientist, this experiment leaves a slightly bad taste in the mouth. This is because it relies on drawing a conclusion from an absence; an absence of a difference between the two groups. Scientists frown on this sort of thing because showing that something exists is possible, but showing it doesn't is impossible. Hence, the endless debates over psychic phenomena.

So we have to be cautious about this experiment. Just because there is no difference in the verbal reports between the two groups, a difference could still exist at either an unconscious or even a conscious level.

Nevertheless, I think this experiment does speak to a pervasive human experience. That is, the inability to describe what is attractive about another person. That's probably why we end up using such vague words like 'energy', 'magnetism' or 'electricity'. Perhaps we genuinely don't know.

Read it all from PsyBlog: Choice Blindess

Great Article on President Elect Obama's Faith

I'm a big believer in tolerance. I think that religion at it's best comes with a big dose of doubt. I'm suspicious of too much certainty in the pursuit of understanding just because I think people are limited in their understanding.

I think that, particularly as somebody who's now in the public realm and is a student of what brings people together and what drives them apart, there's an enormous amount of damage done around the world in the name of religion and certainty.

It's interesting particularly now after this election, comes with it a lot of celebrity. And I always think of politics as having two sides. There's a vanity aspect to politics, and then there's a substantive part of politics. Now you need some sizzle with the steak to be effective, but I think it's easy to get swept up in the vanity side of it, the desire to be liked and recognized and important. It's important for me throughout the day to measure and to take stock and to say, now, am I doing this because I think it's advantageous to me politically, or because I think it's the right thing to do? Am I doing this to get my name in the papers or am I doing this because it's necessary to accomplish my motives.
...
When I'm talking to a group and I'm saying something truthful, I can feel a power that comes out of those statements that is different than when I'm just being glib or clever.

FALSANI:
What's that power? Is it the holy spirit? God?

OBAMA:
Well, I think it's the power of the recognition of God, or the recognition of a larger truth that is being shared between me and an audience.

That's something you learn watching ministers, quite a bit. What they call the Holy Spirit. They want the Holy Spirit to come down before they're preaching, right? Not to try to intellectualize it but what I see is there are moments that happen within a sermon where the minister gets out of his ego and is speaking from a deeper source. And it's powerful.

There are also times when you can see the ego getting in the way. Where the minister is performing and clearly straining for applause or an Amen. And those are distinct moments. I think those former moments are sacred.
...
As I said before, in my own public policy, I'm very suspicious of religious certainty expressing itself in politics.

Now, that's different form a belief that values have to inform our public policy. I think it's perfectly consistent to say that I want my government to be operating for all faiths and all peoples, including atheists and agnostics, while also insisting that there are values tha tinform my politics that are appropriate to talk about.

A standard line in my stump speech during this campaign is that my politics are informed by a belief that we're all connected. That if there's a child on the South Side of Chicago that can't read, that makes a difference in my life even if it's not my own child. If there's a senior citizen in downstate Illinois that's struggling to pay for their medicine and having to chose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer even if it's not my grandparent. And if there's an Arab American family that's being rounded up by John Ashcroft without the benefit of due process, that threatens my civil liberties.

I can give religious expression to that. I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper, we are all children of God. Or I can express it in secular terms. But the basic premise remains the same. I think sometimes Democrats have made the mistake of shying away from a conversation about values for fear that they sacrifice the important value of tolerance. And I don't think those two things are mutually exclusive.
...
This is something that I'm sure I'd have serious debates with my fellow Christians about. I think that the difficult thing about any religion, including Christianity, is that at some level there is a call to evangelize and prostelytize. There's the belief, certainly in some quarters, that people haven't embraced Jesus Christ as their personal savior that they're going to hell.

FALSANI:
You don't believe that?

OBAMA:
I find it hard to believe that my God would consign four-fifths of the world to hell.

I can't imagine that my God would allow some little Hindu kid in India who never interacts with the Christian faith to somehow burn for all eternity.

That's just not part of my religious makeup.

It is truly wonderful that this man was elected president.

Read at BeliefNet.

Stepping Outside the Moral Matrix: Moral Psychology

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt studies the five moral values that form the basis of our political choices, whether we're left, right or center. In this eye-opening talk, he pinpoints the moral values that liberals and conservatives tend to honor most. And he challenges all of us to step outside of our moral Matrix and pledge to work toward a more civil, productive political process. (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 18:42.)

Jesus the Doctor

Jesus decided to come back to earth and incarnate as a medical doctor at an inner city overcrowded public hospital.

The first patient complained about going blind, Jesus put his hands on his eyes and commanded "Now go and see!" and, lo and behold, he was cured.

Another patient came in a wheelchair, Jesus put his hands on his head and commanded "Get up and walk!" The guy left pushing his own wheelchair.

Later patients in the line were asking about the new doctor, someone says "Meh... He's just like all the others... He won't even examine you properly and tells you to go away!"

Some people are too busy complaining to realize miracles may already be happening around them...

What Makes People Vote Republican?

Here's a follow up to the last post, an article by Jonathan Haidt.

JONATHAN HAIDT is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, where he does research on morality and emotion and how they vary across cultures. He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.

What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany's best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.

Diagnosis is a pleasure. It is a thrill to solve a mystery from scattered clues, and it is empowering to know what makes others tick. In the psychological community, where almost all of us are politically liberal, our diagnosis of conservatism gives us the additional pleasure of shared righteous anger. We can explain how Republicans exploit frames, phrases, and fears to trick Americans into supporting policies (such as the "war on terror" and repeal of the "death tax") that damage the national interest for partisan advantage.

But with pleasure comes seduction, and with righteous pleasure comes seduction wearing a halo. Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats. To see what Democrats have been missing, it helps to take off the halo, step back for a moment, and think about what morality really is.

I began to study morality and culture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987. A then-prevalent definition of the moral domain, from the Berkeley psychologist Elliot Turiel, said that morality refers to "prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other." But if morality is about how we treat each other, then why did so many ancient texts devote so much space to rules about menstruation, who can eat what, and who can have sex with whom? There is no rational or health-related way to explain these laws. (Why are grasshoppers kosher but most locusts are not?) The emotion of disgust seemed to me like a more promising explanatory principle. The book of Leviticus makes a lot more sense when you think of ancient lawgivers first sorting everything into two categories: "disgusts me" (gay male sex, menstruation, pigs, swarming insects) and "disgusts me less" (gay female sex, urination, cows, grasshoppers ).

For my dissertation research, I made up stories about people who did things that were disgusting or disrespectful yet perfectly harmless. For example, what do you think about a woman who can't find any rags in her house so she cuts up an old American flag and uses the pieces to clean her toilet, in private? Or how about a family whose dog is killed by a car, so they dismember the body and cook it for dinner? I read these stories to 180 young adults and 180 eleven-year-old children, half from higher social classes and half from lower, in the USA and in Brazil. I found that most of the people I interviewed said that the actions in these stories were morally wrong, even when nobody was harmed. Only one group—college students at Penn—consistently exemplified Turiel's definition of morality and overrode their own feelings of disgust to say that harmless acts were not wrong. (A few even praised the efficiency of recycling the flag and the dog).

This research led me to two conclusions. First, when gut feelings are present, dispassionate reasoning is rare. In fact, many people struggled to fabricate harmful consequences that could justify their gut-based condemnation. I often had to correct people when they said things like "it's wrong because… um…eating dog meat would make you sick" or "it's wrong to use the flag because… um… the rags might clog the toilet." These obviously post-hoc rationalizations illustrate the philosopher David Hume's dictum that reason is "the slave of the passions, and can pretend to no other office than to serve and obey them." This is the first rule of moral psychology: feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete. If people want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so. The Democrats have historically failed to grasp this rule, choosing uninspiring and aloof candidates who thought that policy arguments were forms of persuasion.

The second conclusion was that the moral domain varies across cultures. Turiel's description of morality as being about justice, rights, and human welfare worked perfectly for the college students I interviewed at Penn, but it simply did not capture the moral concerns of the less elite groups—the working-class people in both countries who were more likely to justify their judgments with talk about respect, duty, and family roles. ("Your dog is family, and you just don't eat family.") From this study I concluded that the anthropologist Richard Shweder was probably right in a 1987 critique of Turiel in which he claimed that the moral domain (not just specific rules) varies by culture. Drawing on Shweder's ideas, I would say that the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way.

When Republicans say that Democrats "just don't get it," this is the "it" to which they refer. Conservative positions on gays, guns, god, and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these positions using pop psychology they err, they alienate, and they earn the label "elitist." But how can Democrats learn to see—let alone respect—a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and dumb?

...

If Democrats want to understand what makes people vote Republican, they must first understand the full spectrum of American moral concerns. They should then consider whether they can use more of that spectrum themselves. The Democrats would lose their souls if they ever abandoned their commitment to social justice, but social justice is about getting fair relationships among the parts of the nation. This often divisive struggle among the parts must be balanced by a clear and oft-repeated commitment to guarding the precious coherence of the whole. America lacks the long history, small size, ethnic homogeneity, and soccer mania that holds many other nations together, so our flag, our founding fathers, our military, and our common language take on a moral importance that many liberals find hard to fathom.

Unity is not the great need of the hour, it is the eternal struggle of our immigrant nation. The three Durkheimian foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity are powerful tools in that struggle. Until Democrats understand this point, they will be vulnerable to the seductive but false belief that Americans vote for Republicans primarily because they have been duped into doing so.

Read the full text from Edge.org

Also, you can take a Morality Test here and see how you rate.

Regressivism: How Politics Are Being Affected by BS Religions

From Spiritus Temporis:

Regressivism (sometimes called reactionism) is a term used to critically denote policies, ideologies or philosophies that are characterized as advocating a reversal to ones long abandoned or deprecated. At the most fundamental level, what regressivism reacts against is modernity itself.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Regressivism is in the same spectrum of political terms as progressivism and conservatism, and is used to distinguish between ideologies that advocate slow changes to those advocating a reversal. Obviously, regressivism is to the right of conservatism. Many social debates involve some degree of regressivism, where conflicts arise between new scientific issues and their interpreted moral ramifications.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The term "regressive" is a relatively recent one in political discourse. The reason it is coming into increasing use is that the old distinction liberal/conservative appears to have outlived its usefulness. When those two terms were introduced, in the historically optimistic time know as the Enlightenment, there was no question that society progresses over time, and that political institutions must adapt to these changes. The only question was whether this adaptation should be planned, with a systematic ideology to guide it, as is held by liberals, or gradual and "organic", as held by conservatives. Today however there exist influential groups calling themselves conservatives which hold not that we must adapt more gradually to change, but that we must abandon various achievements of modernity: the governance of international relations by international law; the regulation of the economy by the democratic state; science as an autonomous activity not subject to control by the state (it is claimed that there is no such thing as disinterested science, so that all science is "political"); the recognition that religion is a human activity, and so something that must be made rational by being subjected to critique. Since such groups are not conservative by definition, but radical, the introduction of the new political term "regressive" was required.

Somehow today's politics have been taken over by a mix of politics and religion. Unfortunately, the most vocal group seems to be of the Regressive kind, thinly disguised as conservatives.

There seems to be a yearning below the surface for war and the end of times, for an abandonment of one's self not by conscience but by ignorance. These people seem to care much more to impose their beliefs on others than to really know what their own beliefs mean or where they come from. They want to abandon themselves to a cause without being themselves conscious of what the cause really is, because they have "faith".

Unfortunately, spiritual advancement is a nuanced and hard to describe matter. How do you explain the difference between being conscious/ knowing/ experiencing and faith/ convincing yourself of something/ imagining? It's a fine line, and words ultimately fail at expressing it.

UPDATE: I don't mean to imply that I necessarily know more than anyone, but I think I do understand, from personal experience, where people like this are coming from, and I don't think it's a good place. People are entitled to their religious freedom, but I'll fight anyone that tries to impose their religious views on me, even if it's views I agree with.

As an illustration...

Man guilty of making boys flog themselves with blades in Muslim rite

A Muslim man was found guilty of child cruelty today in a British legal first after forcing two boys to beat themselves during a centuries-old Shia religious ceremony.

The jury at Manchester crown court found Syed Mustafa Zaidi, 44, guilty of two counts of child cruelty.

The boys, aged 13 and 15, were forced to beat themselves with a zanjeer zani, a wooden implement with chains and blades attached, during a ceremony to commemorate the death and martyrdom of a seventh-century Shia Muslim leader.

Zaidi, of Station Road, Eccles, Salford, also flogged himself during the ceremony at a community centre in Levenshulme, Manchester, on January 19.

Some countries have banned self-flagellation with the zanjeer zani. It has been substituted by men beating their bare chests. In Indonesia and some other countries, young children are formally encouraged to use a smaller version of the implement.

A 14-year-old boy, who was 13 at the time, said Zaidi told them both: "Start doing it, start doing it".

The boy told the jury: "We said 'We don't want to do it'."

"He kept pressuring him, make him do the knife thing, pulling him, trying to get his T-shirt off, pulling and pushing him. He was saying 'just do it, just do it'."

The boys had multiple lacerations to their backs, mainly superficial, with several deeper cuts.

Zaidi is to be sentenced on September 24.

From the Guardian

I'd say if the adult wants to flog himself (pun intended), go ahead. But he can't expect another country to abide by such radical rites.

I call this self-flagellation BS part of religion, but forcing others to do it... much worse.

Arpie

Mark Twain on Religion

“In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.” —- Mark Twain

A religion that comes of thought, and study, and deliberate conviction, sticks best. The revitalized convert who is scared in the direction of heaven because he sees hell yawn suddenly behind him, not only regains confidence when his scare is over, but is ashamed of himself for being scared, and often becomes more hopelessly and malignantly wicked than he was before.—- Mark Twain

We blindly follow our beliefs because we fear the consequences as preached by religious leaders . We are brainwashed in a way that limits our ability to think, study and form a deliberate conviction based on our ideals. Some form of religion and religious beliefs are vital for our own personal growth and character building, but we should never allow dumbfounded reasoning or scare tactics to guide our religious beliefs or to form a stereotypical view of others who don’t conform to our own. A religion should show us the pathway to happiness by practicing moral values and compassion for all Mankind.

We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our principles. —- Mark Twain

When our actions are not congruent with our own beliefs, we take refuge under the hood of our principles to justify our act of cowardice. If we avoid expressing our views of fairness and justice for any just cause that we feel deeply about, if we ignore our own inner voice to bring about the change that can transform our world for the better — we are doomed to forever fail to do what’s right . We use this word ‘principle’ at work and at home to avoid engaging ourselves in those actions that jeopardize our imaginary sense of security.

All of us have formed a stonewall of theories to justify our mental views of other people. When we don’t like something and when we struggle to rationalize our dislike, we wrap ourselves in the comfortable, secure blanket called ‘our principles‘. How can we grow ourselves if we are not truthful to our own inner-self? How can we make our world a better place to live if we wrap our views in a colorful yet fake stereotype formed on baseless reasoning? Try to abandon those fake theories that you have formed and embrace awareness by witnessing every thought that guides your every action. You’ll be amazed at the power of clarity that you will feel when you devote your life to bring about a profound change.

You cannot have a theory without principles. Principles is another name for prejudices. —— Mark Twain

All of us have formed a stonewall of theories to justify our mental views of other people. When we don’t like something and when we struggle to rationalize our dislike, we wrap ourselves in the comfortable, secure blanket called ‘our principles‘. How can we grow ourselves if we are not truthful to our own inner-self? How can we make our world a better place to live if we wrap our views in a colorful yet fake stereotype formed on baseless reasoning? Try to abandon those fake theories that you have formed and embrace awareness by witnessing every thought that guides your every action. You’ll be amazed at the power of clarity that you will feel when you devote your life to bring about a profound change.

Happy is he who forgets (ignores?) what cannot be changed. —- Mark Twain

The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people. —- Mark Twain

Happiness is a Swedish sunset–it is there for all, but most of us look the other way and lose it. —- Mark Twain

Gotta love good ole' Sam Clemens. Read more at SuccessSoul

Zen and Relationships

"If he comes we welcome,

If he goes we do not pursue"

Zen saying

We all want love. We are all searching for some lasting relationship. Yet it always seems as if relationships are difficult, difficult to find, to keep and to enjoy. Though many do all they can, problems, complications and disappointment arise.

But from the Zen point of view, struggling to find and keep love is the opposite of what is needed. First we must learn 'do nothing'. We must learn how to let go of control.

Rena started Zen practice after losing two important relationships. Devastated, she was convinced she could never hold onto love.

She told the Zen Master, "I can't bear losing even one more person."

"You will lose many," the Zen Master said.

Rena gasped.

"Inevitable."

"What can I do about it?" Rena shot back.

"Do nothing,: the Zen Master said.

This 'do nothing' is active and vital, the very opposite of passivity. In order to understand this, we must take a step back.

We are born wanting to control our world and the people in it. We scream to get food from mother, smile to receive the attention we crave and, when our needs aren't met kick up a great fuss. As infants we feel that others are here simply to care for us and keep us content. This kind of attitude can be very hard to outgrow. In fact, it can be said that 99% of our precious life energy goes into controlling others so that our desires can be fulfilled.

What we call love in relationships is often no more than having someone who makes us feel good.

The Zen way is the opposite. We do not try to use others, control events, or demand that life fulfill our dreams. Instead, we grow aware of and accepting of all that is given, and learn to take care of the world we live in. As we do this, an odd thing happens, we become more and more fulfilled. As we grow in compassion and simplicity, all we truly need then comes naturally.

Doing Nothing

The only real miracle is to stand still. -Henry Miller

Unfortunately, the idea of 'doing nothing' has been greatly misunderstood. It does not mean be passive. Just the opposite. Do nothing is the most challenging, demanding, revolutionary instruction that can be given. It means, when faced with life's challenges - let go of control.
...
When you are faced with a difficult knot in a relationship, or when you are trying to find someone new to love - don't squirm and wrestle, don't enter into a struggle. "Do nothing" give up control. Stay centered and immovable in the middle of the storm and see what the life is truly bringing to you. Keep clear and compassionate. Let the situation unfold as it will. Don't get picked up and whirled around like a leaf in the wind.

Read more at ezine articles.

Interesting Dreams

I've had some interesting dreams lately.

In one of them, I was on an operating room and about to undergo some surgery. As someone approached my thigh and started to inject anesthetics, I felt a little of the pain but noticed I couldn't feel my fingers tapping on my leg. This caused everything to go dark and it was as if I had reached a cusp. I had to make a decision: was that real or was that not real. I rationally decided it was better to not be undergoing surgery, which caused me to wake up and notice my hand was not on my thigh, that's why I couldn't feel it. The interesting point here was the volitional decision: what reality would I choose?

Another interesting one was pretty convoluted, including me owning a hotel, there was some sore of parking garage confusion... presidential candidates (McCain was there with his family and a black security guard and I was wondering if it was appropriate to go and ask to take a picture -- and I don't even like the guy)... my dad was there... anyhow, at some point things started to look cartoonish (the whole environment and people), I started flying, and the sky/ world turned into a (black and white?) pattern accompanied by an orchestral music that I was humming along to. I felt like I was laughing, and even wondering if my girlfriend could hear me actually humming (so I guess I was to some extent conscious of being in a dream)...

Interesting dreams, not sure what it means, but writing is a way to not forget it. :-)

Arpie

Salvia Divinorum

A friend recently told me about this little herb, Salvia Divinorum.

Its primary psychoactive constituent is ... salvinorin A.. unique in that it is the only naturally occurring substance known to induce a visionary state this way. Salvia divinorum can be chewed, smoked, or taken as a tincture to produce experiences ranging from uncontrollable laughter to much more intense and profoundly altered states. The duration is much shorter than for some other more well known psychedelics; the effects of smoked salvia typically last for only a few minutes. The most commonly reported after-effects include an increased feeling of insight and improved mood, and a sense of calmness and increased sense of connection with nature—though much less often it may also cause dysphoria (unpleasant or uncomfortable mood).[10] Salvia divinorum is not generally understood to be toxic or addictive. As a κ-opioid agonist, it may have potential as an analgesic and as therapy for drug addictions.

I'm not usually inclined to like or encourage any sort of drug or psychotropic, as I think they hinder more than help. However, they can be a useful tool for some people. (If you've read all Carlos Castaneda books, this may ring a bell.)

The point is, this is, as far as I can tell, a pretty harmless, non-addictive little plant and possibly beneficial to some people. It's not a party drug.

However, idiotic use (mainly by young air-heads) combined with hysterical media, parents and politicians are causing it to be outlawed. What will this cause? Create a black market, make it more likely for youngsters to want to experiment (and view it as a "party drug", regardless of its real effect and potential), send more people to jail for non-violent crimes... It just seems way worse than just leaving it alone.

If you think your spiritual path requires drugs, you should probably re-examine your life, but if you think it's necessary to outlaw every single mind-expanding substance or method, you should examine your head.

Arpie

First Post

Here's a quick description of what I hope this blog becomes:
- A place for musings in terms of spirituality, personal/ human evolution, etc.
- A collection of rantings about some of the B.S. that is often associated with spiritual journeys
- A repository of interesting anecdotes or experiences
- A record of diverging opinions, we should welcome other opinions as a tool to help us grow!

See ya!
Arpie