NASA’s multi-year project of finding life on Mars is fine for a country that has the luxury of putting out billions of dollars for it. We don’t, what with all the social problems we have, especially now with the arrival of Covid-19. China, however, can afford it since they have solved most of their social […]
Legend has it that originally the world consisted of two people who cooperated in the challenges they faced to survive. Then came a third, and the two asked him to cooperate. He realized that the two would compete for his help. So it came about that competition replaced cooperation. Thousands of years later China and […]
Camus writes at the end of The Stranger, “And I, too, [referring to his mother] felt ready to start life all over again.” To me that rings hollow. Surely life is mostly suffering, as Buddhism holds, and even as Camus admits, for example, in speaking of the worst time of day being when he wakes […]
As an undergraduate I often felt such a strong identity with authors I read—Plato in particular—that I would say to myself, “That’s precisely what I think; that’s me.” From the standpoint of consciousness that is correct; my thought was his thought; we are the same consciousness. But from the physical standpoint, of course, it is […]
Philosophy professors don’t have an interest in trying to understand the the growing knowledge of existence provided by science, but fortunately found a way out, a way to identify their traditional concerns with “science.” The date, of course, was 1913—the publication of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, which showed that logic (Aristotle) as identical to […]
When I talk to someone I am functioning in the mode of “Mind.” When I read an article in Nature or Science I am functioning in the mode of “Matter.” They are like the duck/rabbit or vase/profile gestalts: you can’t see both at once. And yet Neutral Monism requires it, and I think it can […]
In this country we are constantly harping about human rights. But I have a right to be left alone—it’s one of the two human rights as I wrote in Classical Dialogues: the right to the necessities of life and the right to live life as I choose. I am not being left alone if I […]
When consciousness appears it is better to snuff it out as the Buddha sought to do in the state of Nirvana. “Think back to what it was like before you were born” Nisargatta Maharaj would say on the mezzanine of his house on Ketwahdi street in Bombay in the afternoon sessions I attended—gesturing, toothless mouth […]
This evening on PBS Shields and Brooks said this has been the worst week since the COVID-19 pandemic began last December. “What needs to be done?” they ask. Everyone is asking the same question. What needs to be done is to decide when a democracy becomes so large that cooperation turns into competition, and then […]
It is interesting that Buddhist scriptures never mention the word craving—they go straight from “Suffering Has a Cure,” (the Fourth Noble Truth)” to “The Eight-fold Path.” They only refer to suffering. It’s hard to explain. All the Hindu Vedas and Upanishads celebrate soma, a plant which seems to have had no bad side effects like […]