Jnanavaca on Buddhism And Quantum Physics
April 30, 2010
I have since returned from my week long working retreat at the Bodhisattva Buddhist Centre in Brighton… And, having had a really fun and insightful time on the whole, I am also glad to add that “I” am now feeling more at ease with the world into which I have returned! Bonus…
Certainly there is a lot to be said for the Buddhist path. Forget the idea of an omnipotent and omnipresent “God” waving all of your natural desires in front of your face to lure/trick you into an eternal hell and/or damnation should you succumb to their temptation… Buddhism is a science of the mind which shows the practitioner how they make their own personalised living “hell” while they are alive here on Earth… And then it gives you the choice of doing something about it – via practices of meditation and mindfulness – should you want to! Neat, eh?
It’s a shame that we don’t all take a leaf out Buddhism’s book and learn more about the negative aspects of our own ‘self’, along with our negative modes of ‘being’ and any negative personality traits that we might have… All of which we use to shape and mould the way in which we perceive our problems within a social context of everyday “reality,” and even our night-time dreams. No doubt, while there, we will confront some shady aspects of our inner selves; aspects that we’d probably rather forget and suppress. But suppression is not the key to helping ourselves… Or even helping others… For these “dark” aspects will show us new perspectives on where the real key to unlocking any of our problems/sufferings that we might be presently experiencing lies.
Saying that, I’m well aware that faith is a highly personalised ideal which many, once they’ve settled on a particular Religious path, do not want to give up, despite the fact that one’s religious preference is predominantly dictated by nothing more than “memetic” exposure within familiar/cultural settings… Besides, I might even have “it” all completely wrong and be barking up the wrong tree totally. So don’t listen to me… Make up your own mind about what you think is right and do what you feel is good for yourself and others.
Unquestionably there are parallels between what science – mainly maths, psychology and physics – and Buddhism have understood about the universe and the human condition… And while I was a only just a little dismayed at the monks’ own lack of real understanding about the world of “mainstream” science fact i.e. if science did arise in a teaching or discussion then it was usually centred around ‘hear-say’ rather than current up to scratch notions and/or hard facts, I non-the-less began to understand why this was.
Buddhism is not about understanding how the world works or how to make technology from basic facts or discoveries. It not even concerned with why these scientific anomalies occur in the material world. What Buddhism is predominantly concerned with is how the human mind – something so intangible and vague in essence – perceives and relates to everyday phenomena. In fact, it is concerned with a “Wisdom” derived directly from experience. This “Wisdom” is not to be confused with the intellectual understanding of facts nor about measuring things and discovering why something happens i.e. like empirical observations about biological systems or atomic measurements for timing purposes, etc… Nor is it to be confused with the ability to make money or amass personal possessions AND/OR even accumulating a wealth of ideas and understandings, etc… The “Wisdom” derived from Buddhism is centred on understanding the “mind” and all the delusions that it presents to us, so that we may grasp the real nature of our reality and posit a happy repose from which to free ourselves from the sufferings that we natural propagate for ourselves… And in doing this, we can then develop a true compassion and understanding about suffering so that we might help others to attain this state of liberation too. What splendid ideal, eh?
In coming from this point of view many Buddhists have seen through a lot of the experiential illusions of self-grasping, religious dogma, herd mentalities, etc… and, thus, have reached a state of enlightenment. With these hindrances of self-driven tendencies out of the way, they began to see the world clearly and freely, placing all negativities out of mind and sight… And, from a deep sense of compassion drawn from this understanding, these enlightened beings have decided to charge for the heart of the human problem, and have taken it upon themselves to liberate all living beings in this way from Saṃsāra i.e. the general state of overt or subtle sufferings that we all experience in our day to day life. They believe that once enlightenment is obtained, then – and only then – can we begin to honestly and sincerely help one another to achieve this state of non-suffering… I feel that, once there, we will be able to live our lives with compassion for all living beings, balancing ourselves with nature and with each other naturally, mindfully and holistically. Ultimately the desire of these enlightened beings to free ALL living beings from Saṃsāra is so strong that they can only perceive the distractions of science and mainstream consumerism as hindrances to the path of enlightenment. And I must say that on many levels I agree with them on this.
I’d like to quote a piece that Robert Persig wrote in his book entitled “Zen and The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance” which I feel pertinently addresses why Buddhism has no current need for the systematic understandings that science has to offer…
“To speak of certain government and establishment institution as ‘the system’ is to speak correctly, since these organizations are founded upon the same structural conceptual relationships as a motorcycle. They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose. People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands that it be that way. There’s no villain, no ‘mean guy’ who wants them to live meaningless lives, it’s just the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless.
“But to tear down a factory or revolt against government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves (as all patterns do in a fractal universe) in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system… And so little understanding.”
So, bearing all this in mind, why would a Buddhist monk/nun need to understand what science is all about? Simple answer is that he/she wouldn’t. They’re here to help others achieve a liberation from modes of mind that give rise to suffering… And this liberation comes in the form of enlightenment. Many monks will do whatever it takes to help others achieve this liberation, even before they dream of helping themselves to achieve it. How “selfless” and “meritorious” is that? They’ve seen the issues that modern man has, and they’re not interested in being distracted, nor are they interested in taking pointless action that will not really remedy the situation we are all in… They’re aware that there is only one way… Which is to liberate us all from our own self-grasping… Our own self-cherishing.
But still… All that aside… I just can’t stop thinking about how similar realisations concerning the universe have been reached through wildly different disciplines… Surely we’re both looking at similar phenomena somewhere down the line, but perhaps just from different perspectives… Like we’re on alternate sides of the same coin? Maybe it’s much more simple than even that… Maybe it’s because we are all using the same biomechanical mechanisms with which to perceive our general experiences with i.e. our bodies? As Anaïs Nin once said, “We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.”
As science and Buddhism are positing a similar cognisance about the universal order of things… Well… Certainly it would seem that a compromise between what we perceive externally and what we understand internally is the key to unlocking our suffering here in Saṃsāra. No doubt if we are honest about what we observe, we will see with a clarity of understanding that becomes “enlightenment.” Strangely enough, the famous Taoist Chuang Tzu once wrote, “Only the true man can avoid both external and internal punishments.” Both paths – science and Buddhism – seem to be pointing towards very similar things i.e. that the observer and the external world are equally as important as each other to understand before we can realise any “reality.” But enlightenment obviously takes time and diligence to posit… And, until that awakening, the universe might seem like a pretty strange place… Even for those of us who are really, really, really clever… For our own misguided understandings will only, at best, vaguely fit the hand of reality like a misshapen glove might do upon the synaptic clefts of our brain’s experiential neural net.
To illustrate this point better, I would like to present a talk given by Jnanavaca, which pertinently addresses aspects of Buddhism and Quantum Physics to demonstrate how we, as observers, have the ability to “boggle” at the wonders of what science and Buddhism know, and how we can even inadvertently shape the universe around us in ways that we are not even aware of…
Jnanavaca’s fabulous take on Einstein, Schroedinger, double slits, and all that stuff you wished you understood about quantum physics but despaired of ever knowing so as to impress at parties… Well, now you can learn all about it — as well as how it relates to Dharma practice and the Buddha’s view of a truly luminous Reality. Very classy stuff from a great speaker with the most infectious laugh on the planet! We won’t give any more away here — settle back and enjoy a brain-expanding, soul questioning talk.
Talk given at the Western Buddhist Order Convention, 2005
To find out where I sourced this talk from, please click here…
And if you enjoyed the talk, please feel free to make a donation to the Free Buddhist Audio site by clicking here.
OR to find a transcription of Jnanavaca’s talk, please click here.
Dr Jonathan Balcombe Speaking On Animal Rights
April 18, 2010
Just the other day I was having a discussion with someone in a recording studio – they know who they are – about why I was a vegetarian. And during this Q & A session, which felt more like a grilling about why I didn’t eat meat anymore, I seemed to detect a general lack of any consideration towards animals in general, and whether they really had any of their own feelings – just as we do – and whether they were conscious, as sentient beings tend to be. After much debate, my “adversary” – for want of a better word – proclaimed that animals just “didn’t have feelings like we, as human beings, did.” The blatant proclamation of this apparent ‘fact‘ somewhat took me aback and left me pondering about what the great Taoist, Chaung Tzu, once wrote concerning the happiness of fish…
On The Happiness Of Fish
Zhuangzi and Huizi were strolling along the dam of the Hao Waterfall when Zhuangzi said, “See how the minnows come out and dart around where they please! That’s what fish really enjoy!”
Huizi said, “You’re not a fish — how do you know what fish enjoy?”
Zhuangzi said, “You’re not me, so how do you know I don’t know what fish enjoy?”
Huizi said, “I’m not you, so I certainly don’t know what you know. On the other hand, you’re certainly not a fish — so that still proves you don’t know what fish enjoy!”
Zhuangzi said, “Let’s go back to your original question, please. You asked me how I know what fish enjoy — so you already knew I knew it when you asked the question. I know it by standing here beside the Hao.”
After I asked the individual in question what exactly made them say this with such certainty – a certainty that was almost as though it had been experienced first hand on some direct level – they replied that it was obvious from the way in which animals reacted in general to everyday situations. It was at that point that I relayed my own experience with just how the bizarre and egocentric view that human beings have on the world can allow them to make errors beyond recourse, and how this usually arises from their general lack of ability to accurately place themselves in another sentient beings “hooves,” let alone another human’s shoes. In fact, I went so far as to give them a link to a website called “Choose Veg!” so that they could see some of the types of treatment/slaughter/culling that deprive the animals of their lives and gave mankind their much treasured meat for their plates.
While it’s certainly not a pleasant site/sight… And there is no doubt that a scare mongering of sorts is going on here… I still know that the images are not too far from the truth of the matter. Having seen this “rant” about animal cruelty, I felt obliged to write a comment upon the website that had directed me to this shrine for our malicious, greedy murder for flesh…
Thankfully the types of farms that treat animals this way are rarely found in the UK now, if at all. Big up the British Farming Standards! But still, there “might” be a few around… Especially when it comes to battery chickens. So you never really know.
Thus… If you’re concerned – and can’t give up meat – you can always choose to buy your meat from private farms that look after their animals a lot better i.e. they keep smaller numbers of animals and so can leave them “free-range”, as well as provide them with better, more humane care because they look after them on a more intimate “one on one” basis… Many of the animals on private also have names, like you might give to your pet cats, dogs, horses, gerbils, etc… Still the images within “Choose Veg!” speak volumes about mankind’s detached and cruel treatment of animals for the meat industry! Having worked in an abattoir myself for just under two weeks – back in 1994, in between leaving school and going off to uni – I got a taste for what murder was like. And boy did it freak me… I simply couldn’t dig the thought of working in the meat trade after seeing the way animals were slaughtered (not killed, but slaughtered) for our food. So i quit 10 days after starting, which meant I wouldn’t get paid a penny for the hours I’d worked, as you had to be there for a month at least in order to get your first pay cheque. But after what I saw, that didn’t bothered me in the slightest…
While I didn’t become a vegetarian immediately, it planted certain seeds of awareness into my mind about where the meat on my plate came from… Not to mention, it made me rethink completely about what I was putting into my body i.e. meat laced with adrenaline and other stress steroids… But it wasn’t until about a year and a half ago that I became a fully fledged vegetarian. Then, meat went right off my agenda. After all, you are what you eat! And I certainly wasn’t cruel…
Having said all that, if you can work in an abattoir and still eat meat – and there are many who can – then fair play to you. But please do be aware, death is still death. In old hunter gatherer times, people used to have a very different relationship with their food i.e. they used to hunt them and, thus, respected their prey’s cunning and stealth during the hunt. One was almost intimately entwined with their food, either growing it directly or hunting it in the forests and on the planes of mother Earth. Our ancestors treated their kill with respect and decency… In some ways, it was a fair game to play back then i.e. either catch/kill your food or it got away and you starved. But as we’ve lost contact with our ancestor’s ways, so we’ve forgotten what and who our food really is… And so we no longer see their alive, awakened bodies writhe with the taught sinews of their lives as we equal their own desire to live and exist while hunting them… And so what these animals means to us presently, as well as where they came from, beleaguers our own narrow “windows view” of the world through man’s own egocentricity. Many of us who understand our deep connection to these fenced in “creatures,” who are passive and so easily subdued in their fenced in fields, see them as nothing more than animals to fill our gut. But there are many, many more who don’t even connect the languidly grazing cows in a summer British pasture with the meat that goes on their plates, let alone the processes that kill them…
To be honest, I certainly can’t see that the methods being employed to kill animals in abattoirs getting any better in the near future, that’s one thing for sure i.e. a shot of morphine to knock them out before hand? Erm, not a chance!!! So if you’re going to carry on eating meat, then why not do so conscientiously, and at least ensure that the animals you’re eating have had as happy and healthy a Life as they can here on Earth i.e. they’re free to roam fields, they get some loving from the farmers to whom they belong (even the ability for a sentient being to belong to someone reminds me of the slave-trade that we abolished), they’re well looked after (they have easy access to animal health care i.e. a vet), they’re fed well and naturally i.e. not force fed like Foie gras OR Veal… RATHER than living in cramped, over crowded barns, with under nourished diets and a strong dose of drugs to get them up to weight… Again, this all too readily reminds me of the appalling conditions from the “concentration camps” that the persecuted had to endure before being killed during the second world war. Nobody dug those, i can tell you!!!
But if you’re the type of person who cannot speculate about the death of the animals you munch on for nourishment without feeling sick to your stomach… Or cannot talk about such cruelty without feeling repulsed and disgusted about the way your meat might have been treated… OR if you couldn’t kill, let alone catch, prey… Well… In my humble opinion then you probably shouldn’t really be eating their flesh now, should you… Food for thought, eh?
Despite what I’ve just written about… I’m a realist. I know there will be people who still will eat meat. So for the UK meat eaters reading this blog who might want to know more about how they can ensure that the flesh that they buy comes from “properly” – see above – treated animals, then please see below for some handy sites to visit. After all, if you choose to buy your meat ONLY from farms that look after their animals i.e. “farm assured produce”, then you’re effectively using your pound/dollar/euro to vote for better animal welfare. Now there’s a comforting thought, eh?
British Farming Standards info:
2) Red Tractor
3) Department For Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
4) What British Farm Standards Mean
However, if you’re already off meat and wondering what else you can do to stop animals from being exploited by their human “masters,” – chortle – then why not consider quitting all dairy products? There are plenty of milk alternatives, such as oat milk, rice milk, almond milk, or the common soya milk.
Either way… I don’t condone animal exploitation. For me, animals are sentient beings. They all have their own type of awareness and intelligence. Who are we to say whether they have feelings or not? We have already seen within the pages of these here blogs how “blinkered” our own points of view can sometimes be… AND just how prone we all are to optical, audible and other perceptive illusions. I mean, if we’re this prone to making errors about perceiving our own environment, then how certain can someone be about whether animals have feelings or not!? Surely if you find disturbing the idea of a highly advanced alien culture – who have levels of awareness that seem to stretch majestically beyond our own perceptive abilities – coming down from outer-space and milking humans for some nutrient in their blood, keeping them trapped in cages, riddled with wires and pacified like we do many animals… Justifying their cause on the simple fact that We – as humans – are apparently not sentient enough OR capable of the types of intelligence that our alien counterparts are… Well, then I would like to recommend that you should seriously reconsider the relationship you have with the meat that you eat.
I remember a rhyming verse I heard recently when someone was telling me about the Haitians and their current plight in Haiti after the earthquake:
“Human beings are part of a whole,
Of one essence and one soul
If one is afflicted with pain,
The others will be uneasy and feel the same,
If you have no sympathy for human pain,
Then the title ‘human’ you cannot claim.”
When I initially heard this I saw the deep truth behind its simple facade. And just recently, having read an article on mirror neurones that human beings have in their brains i.e. the areas for compassion and understanding one another’s emotions and actions, I wondered… Surely it would be equally as fit to replace the italicised word “human” for “animal?” This is lest we aim to truly become the autistic Life forms of evolution’s algorithm here on mother Earth…
But perhaps you see evolution as the driving force for life. Survival of the fittest, using the weak for their own needs and gain… Natural selection kills of the weak and leaves only the strong. And perhaps you feel that if advanced aliens did come down from outer-space to “milk” our human bodies of their nutrients… Well, this is again survival of the fittest and, so, is perfectly acceptable. But if this is all there is to Life i.e. use and enslave, then why do we as human beings hold the ideal of freedom above all others?
If you’re still somewhat having difficulty seeing how similar we are to other sentient beings… And thus are at a loss as to what I mean… And perhaps you feel that you want to know more on the subject… Then there is a gentleman who has thought long and hard about all of this. In fact he has written several deeply penetrating and insightful books on the subject, all of which I would highly recommend anyone and everyone reads at some point in their lives. His name is Dr Jonathan Balcombe.
Animal pain and stress, once controversial, are now acknowledged by legislation in many countries, but there is no formal recognition of animals’ ability to feel pleasure. Jonathan Balcombe — his books and his writings — debunk the popular perception that life for most is a continuous, grim struggle for survival and the avoidance of pain. Instead he suggests that creatures from birds to baboons feel good thanks to play, sex, touch, food, anticipation, comfort, aesthetics, and more.
Combining rigorous evidence, elegant argument and amusing anecdotes, leading animal behavior researcher Jonathan Balcombe proposes that the possibility of positive feelings in creatures other than humans has important ethical ramifications for both science and society.
Danger-junkie orangutans in Borneo climb dead trees and destabilize them until they begin to fall. They scream with excitement as they cling to the falling tree. Just before the tree hits the ground the orangs leap to another tree or vine, narrowly escaping death. Researchers call this peculiar behavior snag-riding and liken it to bungee jumping for monkeys. While no one can ask orangutans if they enjoy the same adrenaline rush as a person playing an extreme sport, one animal behaviorist sees this monkey fun as a bit of harmless thrill-seeking.
A growing number of scientists agree that animals are conscious and capable of experiencing basic emotions, such as happiness, sadness, boredom or depression. A few scientists even see the possibility for higher animal emotions like love, jealousy and spite.
Scientific literature, dating back to Charles Darwin, is dotted with examples of animals loving life, but rarely does the scientific community allow such musings. In fact, only one scientist is looking at the eat-or-be-eaten animal kingdom as a place where fun and mischief define the in-the-moment lifestyle of most animals.
To quote Dr Balcombe directly…
“I do feel very strongly that our current relationship with animals represents what the Hopi Indians would call koyaanisqatsi: life out of balance.”
And it is here that I would like to present an enlightened interview with Dr Jonathan Balcombe, which touches pertinently on animal rights, animal welfare and aspects of human consciousness and some of the various perceptive stances that We – as human beings – have about the world around us. I believe that once we can begin to see through our own deeply egocentric view of the Earth, We will be able to move forwards into new realms of behaviour that allow us to become “Shepherds” of the Earth, rather than plunderers and usurpers of this treasure that we call Life.
To find out more about Dr Jonathan Balcombe’s important work regarding animal rights, please visit his website by clicking here.
AND to find out where I sourced this interview from, please click here.
OR to find out more about Alex Tsakiris‘s Skeptiko web-radio show, please click here.
FOR more information about animal rights, please click here.
EVEN to read more about the ethics behind animal rights, please visit the BBC’s home page regarding animal welfare by clicking here.
PLUS… If you’d like to read about how science is trying to “grade” the facial expressions of mice while they are subjected to pain, in order to see if there is a common/universal language for mammalian expression, then please click here.
Who Was Buddha?
April 17, 2010
As I will be making my way down to Brighton tomorrow for a week long working visit at the Brighton Bodhisattva Centre, I felt it was a pertinent idea to recover old ground and look, once again, at who the Gautama Buddha was. While I have read most of “The Life Of The Buddha, According to the Pali Canon” I was somewhat put off by the over bearing flamboyant style to this text. In fact, it seemed to add such a floral, petal soft feel to the ‘story’ that I felt almost alienated from the words and parables within about the Buddha’s life. Saying that, the references within this book that back up these stories were rich with information that allowed me to look further into Buddha’s teachings… And thus, despite my general lack of enthusiasm about the style in which this book is written, I must heartily commend it to anyone who is interested in finding out more about Buddha’s life and teachings.
Prince Siddhartha Gautama, Musée Guimet, Paris
Saying that… If pouring over old religious texts is not your cuppa tea, then perhaps I might recommend that you start with this insightful BBC film about the life of Prince Siddhārtha Gautama, who became the Buddha.
To find out more about the Buddha and his teachings, please visit Geshe Kelsang Gyatso’s webpage by clicking .
OR to find out more about the BBC, please visit their website by clicking here.
Just the other day I sent a tweet on Twitter regarding 38 Degree’s proposed billboard action against the BBC cut backs, which seem to be threatening the wider ethnic community of broadcast programming here in the UK – you know, as you do – when one Tweet in particular from Peter Russell‘s steam jumped out at me… And lingered in my mind like the melody of catchy song does.
I had been meaning to check this out sooner rather than later… But, alas, due to my most busy schedule of late, I have had to postpone investigating the link… Until this morning, that is… And despite my initial apprehensions about listening to the first audio file I could find on the website, I have been thoroughly engrossed in the interesting talk that was given by Craig Hamilton about the evolution of consciousness and spirituality, which proposes ways about how we might go about letting go of our old memetic programming and replacing any “evolutionary aspirations” that we might have, to get past the little body mind consciousness in order to truly evolve into new ways of Being and Seeing the world and our relation to it. I must say, of late, what with a busy schedule surrounding work and training, I had almost placed the quest for developing a better understanding about our position within the universal dynamic on the back burner… But since having listened to this talk, I have found much inspiration and been exposed to some interesting ideas that have rekindled my aim to evolve my perceptive stand point beyond what so many of us take for granted in this everyday media driven world.
I have discussed the core aspect of this talk within previous pages of this blog a few times before, offering mainly a more scientific explanation for our present modes of Being and Understanding, so that we might observe a truth that is centered on empirical evidence – rather than vague and sketchy “hearsay” – with the main aim of demonstrating the natural patterns of mind that we are all subject to, no matter how different we perceive ourselves to be. And, in many ways, I am very glad to find others making bigger waves in getting this idea out there to reach thousands, if not millions, of people around the globe about this most important and pressing matter.
As many of you may no doubt be aware, it’s certainly not a new idea in itself, and has been discussed from many different angles by various luminaries, scientists, philosophers and even spiritual leaders alike i.e. Dr Albert Hofmann, Matthew Taylor, Noam Chomsky, Jeremy Rifkin, Luang Por Chah, Carl Jung, George Monbiot, David Bohm, Elizabeth Culotta, Spinoza, Beau Lotto, Edward R. Murrow, Toporek, Dr Bruce Lipton, Jill Bolte Taylor, Christopher deCharms, Peter Russell, Dennis Genpo Merzel, William Blake and even (but not surprisingly) His Holiness the Dalai Lama. But regardless of this recurrent theme, I feel this talk in particular provides a somewhat new dimension to the core idea facing humanity as a whole i.e. the idea of evolving and understanding Life, via a more centered mode of scientific enlightenment, that melds with modern day Life and society in way that may posit in future a very healthy human conduct.
Thus I would like to highly recommend this talk to anyone who has an interest in what enlightenment, evolution and spirituality mean.
Join Integral Enlightenment founder Craig Hamilton for an in-depth look at the core shifts that have the power to propel us beyond the confines of the separate ego and into a life of wholehearted engagement with the evolutionary process. Includes an overview of the Integral Enlightenment approach to transformation, and a description of the Integral Enlightenment 9-week Telecourse.
To find out more about Craig and his interesting story, please visit his website by clicking here.
OR to investigate some of the other audio posts from Craig’s “Integral Enlightenment” website, please click here.
Psychedelic Science in the 21st Century
April 11, 2010
“Putting the M.D. back into MDMA…”
Next week, the brightest lights of the psychedelic cognoscenti will gather in San Jose, California. Leaving swirls of tracer visions in their wakes, they will converge from around the world at an incongruously bland Holiday Inn, 50 miles south of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood that once served as the pulsing capital of Psychedelistan. There, several hundred turned-on and tuned-in doctors, psychologists, artists and laypeople will participate in the annual conference of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). For four days, they will explore — through workshops and lectures, nothing more — the widening gamut of clinical inquiry into the uses of the psychedelic experience, a global resurgence of which has led to hopeful talk of a “psychedelic revival.”
To find out more about the Psychedelic Science conference, please click here.
Can Science Answer Moral Questions?
April 10, 2010
What a great TED talk! Questions of good and evil, right and wrong are commonly thought unanswerable by science. But Sam Harris argues that science can — and should — be an authority on moral issues, shaping human values and setting out what constitutes a good life.
About Sam Harris:
Sam Harris has been identified as one of the “Four Horsemen of Atheism” — company he shares with Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett and Christopher Hitchens. An outspoken proponent of skepticism and science, his two books — The End of Faith and its follow-up Letter to a Christian Nation — have become best-sellers.
In The End of Faith, Harris showed “a harrowing glimpse of mankind’s willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs, even when these beliefs inspire the worst of human atrocities.” After receiving thousands of angry letters in response, he wrote Letter to a Christian Nation, which centered on religious controversies in the United States: stem cell research, “intelligent design,” and links between religion and violence.
Harris received a degree in philosophy from Stanford and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. He is the co-founder and CEO of Project Reason, a nonprofit devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society.
“Read Sam Harris and wake up.” Richard Dawkins
To find out more about Sam Harris, please visit his home page by clicking here.
OR to find out where I originally sourced this TED Talk from, please click here.
AND to find out more about “Project Reason” please click here.
The solar system is a busy place indeed… And I’m wondering why this article was published so late in the Scientific American. Whatever the reason, I’m sure you’re beginning to get the idea about just how fragile, uncertain and precarious our very existence here on Earth is.
As I’ve already discussed in “On The Formation Of Suns And Their Planets” and “Just How Did Life Seed Here On Earth???,” the debris from accretion is still flying around out there… And it’s only a matter of time until one bit comes smashing into Earth again, disrupting our delicate balance of Life into shards of disorder and renewal.
A freshly discovered asteroid, roughly as long as a tennis court, will zoom past Earth at about the distance of the moon Thursday, according to NASA. The space rock, called 2010 GA6, was first observed Monday by the Catalina Sky Survey, a telescope project in Arizona that seeks out near-Earth asteroids and comets. 2010 GA6 will make its closest approach to Earth, at a distance about 430,000 kilometers, at 10:06 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time.
The proximity of 2010 GA6′s approach is not unique; in 2010 three other asteroids have come as close or closer to Earth. But the newfound visitor is the brightest asteroid, and consequently among the largest, to draw so near in the past year. Its brightness indicates an approximate diameter of 20 to 40 meters; the next brightest to pass at or within lunar distance in that time span was 2009 JL2, an asteroid about 17 to 37 meters across, in May 2009.
It is not unusual that 2010 GA6 was discovered so soon before reaching Earth’s vicinity; asteroids that small are difficult to spot at great distances. No other approaches of lunar distance or closer are known to be imminent in the next year, despite the fact that they occur every month or so. In other words, plenty of asteroids are headed this way—they simply have not been spotted yet, and asteroid watchers are more focused on the larger objects that pose greater threats to life.
In 1998 Congress charged NASA with finding kilometer-size and larger asteroids that draw close to Earth. A good portion of that population has now been catalogued, and the scope of the survey has since expanded to include objects down to 140 meters in diameter, only a fraction of which have been found. Even smaller objects of the 2010 GA6 variety probably number in the millions, and they could still do significant local damage with an impact. There is a roughly 50 percent chance of a 30-meter-plus asteroid striking Earth each century, according to Clark Chapman, a space scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. Chapman told ScientificAmerican.com in 2009 that such an asteroid impact would cause a multimegaton atmospheric explosion over Earth’s surface, rather than impacting it. “It could be quite damaging (and even lethal) out to distances of 10 to 20 kilometers in all directions if it happened over a populated region with weak structures,” Chapman said.
by John Matson
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God On My Mind
April 7, 2010
In a very pertinent vein as to what is being discussed within this blog regarding religion and psychology… Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA, discovers what the latest scientific research can tell us about the human need for religion.
Part 1: Evolution
We are programmed by our genes to believe in supernatural powers and to obey moral codes. Is this because it gave our ancestors an evolutionary advantage? Iranians, Scandinavians, Papuans, chimpanzees, twins and wedding rings offer some startling answers.
Part 2: Neurology
Almost half the population claim to have felt the presence of a power beyond themselves. But what happens in the brain during religious experiences? If magnetism can produce visions, then what price mysticism and meditation? What’s the difference between sainthood and schizophrenia? And why are many believers convinced that God speaks to them in their dreams?
To find out more about Matthew Taylor, please visit his blog by clicking here.
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