Monthly Archives: April 2012

Who do you think I is? (3)

Link

PART III: THE ANTIDOTE
Go to Part 2 | Go to beginning

Many people set themselves up as self-help gurus and offer remedies for the children of democracy. They are sensitive to the characteristics of these children, whose governing sound is ‘freedom’ and have been described so well over 2500 years in Book VIII of Plato’s Republic. Here is how Democratic Man is spoken of:

“… He lives on, spending his money and labour and time on unnecessary pleasures as on necessary ones; but if he be fortunate, and is not too much disordered in his wits, when years have elapsed, and the heyday of passion is over… he balances his pleasures and lives in a sort of equilibrium, putting the government of himself into the hands of the one which comes first and wins the turn; and when he has had enough of that, then into the hands of another; he despises none of them but encourages them all equally…

“Neither does he receive or let pass into the fortress (of mind) any true word of advice; if anyone says that some pleasures are the satisfactions of good and noble desires, and others of evil desires, and that he ought to use and honour some and chastise and master the others – whenever this is repeated to him he shakes his head and says they are all alike, and that one is as good as another… Continue reading →

Dennis: Free Will (Part 4)

Posted on by

Go to Part 3

“The experience of willing an act arises from interpreting one’s thoughts as the cause of the act.” Daniel Wegner, quoted in the excellent book: Consciousness: an Introduction, Susan Blackmore, Oxford University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-19-515343-X. Buy from Amazon US or UK.

The scientific views that are often cited in respect of these discussions stem from experiments conducted by Benjamin Libet in the late 1970’s and by Daniel Wegner in the 1990’s. I described these in my books ‘How to Meet Yourself’ and ‘Back to the Truth’. Since very few people have actually read the former, I will quote at length from that: Continue reading →

Meaning of ‘Advaita’ (Q. 306)

Posted on by

Q: In Sanskrit, a word’s meaning is determined by the meaning of the dhatu at the heart of the word, modified by the meanings of prefixes and suffixes. So according to Monier-Williams:

  • a is a prefix having a negative or privative or contrary sense. This gives us NOT-<whatever follows>, but also indicates the absence of it, or the opposite of it.
  • dva means two or both. Continue reading →

A Question On Causality, Purpose And Suffering In Non-Duality

Posted on by

[As students of Non-duality, we often come aross situations that apparently seem to be at variance with the  Non-dual teachings. Here is such a Question raised by a friend of mine and felt that it would be interesting to share our exchange with a wider audience for possibe further discussion — ramesam.]

Questioner:  How could there be no cause and effect? How can things happen randomly with no purpose?  I just can’t accept that meeting you was random, or that I found nonduality, and fell in love with it. It seems to appear everywhere. Jesus said seek and ye shall find. There is no randomness in that. We set goals, work hard, then accomplish them. Some people live for fun, engage in risky behavior, then get in trouble, how could it be completely random that some people are in the wrong place at the wrong time, then others are in the right place at the right time. Then there are the people who seem to do everything “right”, then some horrible fate befalls them. Have you ever read anything by Malcolm Gladwell? He wrote The Tipping Point, Outliers, and some other books. His research into why some people are successful and others are not is fascinating.

Continue reading →