Author: brian

Perhaps you’ve encountered this headline in some of your recent World Weird Web wanderings: Scientists find that consciousness continues after death. If not, click, read, and make of it what you will (or won’t). I have no particular conclusion to draw from that research; first, because it’s founded on the same flawed probability theories that I’ve criticized…

 April 19, 2014  Alan Watts taught that our consciousness — thoughts, memories, feelings, actions — do not survive our physical deaths. Yet he also taught that something does; the aspect of ourselves that Lao Tzu called “the nameless essence,” the inviolable connection and identity with the All. Therefore, to die well requires the same inner action as…

 February 4, 2014  I have some respect for corporate America, based mainly on the utter honesty of much of its language. For example, if you would like to teach something in a corporate environment, you won’t get very far if you tell management that you’d like to teach, and what. No: what you must say…

 June 4, 2015  I look far above, into the mask-faces of these old lies — the mandate of pain, the sentence of death, the shoreless ocean of blame and guilt that salts their wounds — and I ask the dark woman beside me to collapse their plastic towers and burn their bodies as they fall. The…

 January 25, 2014  Hawking has changed his mind again about black holes (or more specifically, event horizons). He is an example of a great scientist: a probing, inquiring, restless, and ceaselessly open mind. Pure scientists are also seekers — not seekers of government grants or Nobel gold, but of a clearer and deeper understanding. Great teachers of self-realization…

 March 11, 2014  Last year’s povertywas not real poverty.This year’s povertyis poverty indeed.(an old Zen poem) I’d like you to stay with this talk (below) by Alan Watts through to the end and try to address his questions within yourself. It is about business, so no matter how you make your living — and even…

 May 10, 2013  I could make a very strong argument, based purely on philosophical reasoning, about the urgency for a new conception of spirituality. Briefly put, it is about making religion promulgate sanity rather than salvation; transforming its mission from saving the soul to healing the psyche. If I am healthy in this life, I…

 July 13, 2014  There are lessons, teachings, all around and within us. They are present continually, the flow never stops. It only appears to dry up when we tune it out. But whenever we are open to it, our bodies and our lives carry messages in virtually every moment. One choice we have to make…

 February 19, 2013  The mind of ambition inhibits genuine growth. To obsess on gaining the heights not only impairs but actually precludes the self-awareness essential to growth. The incessant climb makes us dizzy, and finally blind. Consider for a moment the spiritual geography of the Judeo-Christian religion: would not Satan have a better and clearer…

 March 7, 2013  So, who’s the cute little teddy-robot, and how did he lose his head? Well, if you follow APOD, then you know that this is an electron micrograph of a tardigrade, or water bear — that is, a living creature on this living Earth. This one was observed on a piece of moss. The…