Category Archives: Philosophy
Bertrand Russell: Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)
This post is more about YouTube than Bertrand Russell, or Christianity for that matter. The lecture above was first delivered on March 6, 1927 to the National Secular Society, South London Branch, at Battersea Town Hall.
I’ve heard of Bertrand Russell most of my adult life but don’t think I knew more than he was a philosopher and mathematician. The Wikipedia entry above probably has as much information as I would have gotten in an undergraduate course. And the lecture above (36 minutes) was fascinating.
I’ve been posting videos to YouTube almost since the beginning (February 2005. I uploaded my first video in February of 2006). And, like most people, I’ve spent a fair amount of time watching videos there. More and more, it’s the first place I look for how to do something. And learn something. Yes, there’s no shortage of junk but the more YouTube (and Google) learn about my interests, the more interesting and useful videos fill my stream.
While network and cable news gives us endless talking heads and pundits in 3 to 5 minutes “packages,” YouTube has few constraints. For better or worse, it has become my primary source for news.
How large is the universe?
“We know nothing, so we must be open to anything.”
The Unconscious
“My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.”
— From a lecture titled The Concept of the Collective Unconscious delivered by Carl Jung on October 19, 1936, to the Abernethian Society at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London.
“Nothing You See is Real”
Wikipedia: “Donald David Hoffman is an American cognitive psychologist and popular science author. He is a professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, with joint appointments in the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, and the School of Computer Science. Hoffman studies consciousness, visual perception and evolutionary psychology using mathematical models and psychophysical experiments.”
Based on years of meditation and lots of reading on the subject of consciousness, I actually get this.
2,100 consecutive days
Stay Put
“The key to living during this environmental crisis is to STAY PUT. Focus on living and existing in your corner of the Earth, protect it. Travel and moving around all the time is so overrated. A lot of it is a waste of time. Create your own bliss where you are right now. Stop searching the world for it!”
“Truth exists; only lies are invented”
“Few people can say: I am here. They look for themselves in the past and see themselves in the future.” — Georges Braque (1882–1963)
The Philosophy of Solipsism
“Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one’s mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one’s own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind.” (Wikipedia)
The Other Side of Nothing
(Amazon) “In the West, Zen Buddhism has a reputation for paradoxes that defy logic. In particular, the Buddhist concept of nonduality — the realization that everything in the universe forms a single, integrated whole — is especially difficult to grasp. In The Other Side of Nothing, Zen teacher Brad Warner untangles the mystery and explains nonduality in plain English. To Warner, this is not just a philosophical problem: nonduality forms the bedrock of Zen ethics, and once we comprehend it, many of the perplexing aspects of Zen suddenly make sense.”
We are not individual beings but components of an infinite reality that is just one single entity.
Zen Buddhists are Buddhists whose main thing is meditation. […] A way to learn to clearly see what reality actually is, beyond all dogmas and beliefs.
In everything in the world there exists nothing besides illusions. […] We can’t see the true nature of reality, but we can discover it. […] No explanation can ever match the reality it’s trying to describe.
In one sense, God created us. In another sense we are continuously creating God.
“Our life and our surroundings are part of a single continuum.” […] “Action and the place in which it occurs are indivisible.” — Nishijima Roshi
Mind and matter are two aspects of the same thing.
When we stop wanting things to be different from how they actually are, we stop suffering.
The truest thing you can ever say is, “I don’t know.”
The body exists within awareness rather than awareness being something that occurs inside the body or even inside the mind. The body is inside me rather than me being inside the body. […] The body is a manifestation of consciousness or of mind.
“Zazen is good for nothing!” — Kodo Sawaki
Whatever the particular thing is that you think is the worst thing in the world, it is part of you. Continue reading