Liverpool FC’s meditation training to be featured on TV
Liverpool FC’s meditation training to be featured on TV |
- Liverpool FC’s meditation training to be featured on TV
- Moving on from religion is as normal as other life changes
- Slouching towards materialism
- Sam Harris explains how life is good without free will
| Liverpool FC’s meditation training to be featured on TV Posted: 10 Sep 2012 10:00 AM PDT DNA: A meditation and relaxation class to help Liverpool players "deal with the stresses of club football" is one of the new methods introduced under the tenure of Brendan Rodgers, a new fly-on-the-wall documentary capturing life behind the scenes at Anfield has revealed. The six-part series, due to be aired in the United States later this month (September), documents the arrival of Rodgers and sheds light on his methods. They include the manager talking about the importance of developing players as people as well as footballers. One of the methods is a meditation and relaxation class, which is taken by -'exercise physiologist' Molly … Read the original article » Read More @ Source
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| Moving on from religion is as normal as other life changes Posted: 10 Sep 2012 01:00 AM PDT Once in a while I hear from somebody who asks me when I'm going to write another blog post about the Indian religious organization that I belonged to for about thirty-five years. I usually reply in this fashion: "I used to write quite a bit about Radha Soami Satsang Beas, but now I don't think very much about RSSB any more. It's a lot like when I got divorced from my first wife. She often was on my mind right after we split up. Eventually, though, we each moved on to other relationships and that woman became the focus of my attention." Makes sense to me. Life happens. Here's some other changes for the better that have happened in my life (I call my divorce a change for the better, since both my ex-wife and I are happier now in a second marriage.) -- After starting out with an Apple II+ many years ago, I went over to the dark side and started using Windows computers for a long time. Then I switched back to Apple. I have no regrets about this, just almost 100% satisfaction with Apple technology. -- I spent nine years learning traditional Shotokan karate. Got stuck at the brown belt level. I wasn't being advanced by the Shotokan black belt testers, and I wasn't enjoying my training any more. I switched to a different style that suited me much better. Great decision. -- My wife and I bought an all-electric Nissan Leaf last year. I liked the car, by and large. My wife hated it. So we decided to sell it and lease a Chevy Volt. She's much happier now. So am I, both because I like the Volt more, and because my wife really likes it more. -- Three years ago I got a big Suzuki Burgman 650 scooter as part of my incessant mid-life/end-of-life crisis (may it never end, but I suspect it will... when I die). It was hugely fun to ride. A few months ago I sold it. Time seemed right. Now I have a longboard skateboard. It's also fun, in a different way. -- Since we started ballroom dancing, my wife and I have tried to learn many different styles. Waltz, foxtrot, salsa, tango, swing, and so on. We're not great in any. We finally realized that we liked some styles much more than others. Now we're focusing on West Coast Swing. Makes us feel good. Great reason. I could give more examples of changes in my life. For sure you have many of your own. That's what life is all about: changes. They only stop when we're dead. However, many true believers in some religion look upon someone changing from that religion as sinful, disappointing, a failure. But while deconversion is frowned upon, conversion to their religion is smiled upon, even though both conversions and deconversions involve giving up on a belief system. Logic isn't a strong point of true believers when it comes to their chosen faith. Here's the thing: falling into or out of love with a person, a computer, a martial art, a car, a scooter, a dance style, this is the same as falling into or out of love with a religious belief. It's subjective, a matter of taste, a feeling rather than a fact. So why is it that believers in a particular religion often get really disturbed when someone falls out of love with that religion, while believers in a particular computer, car, dance style, or whatever tend to say "each to his own; no big deal" when someone moves on in a different direction? Good question. I don't have a firm answer. Seems to have something to do with how important religious belief is to many people. Also, with how their faith is merely belief, unsupported by solid evidence or experience. Thus they are threatened when someone else comes to feel that it's time to leave behind that belief system. Which is more than a little strange, since every religious true believer goes through many changes in his or her own life, usually including the changing that brought him or her to the religion that's so important to them now. Like I said, change happens. Thankfully. Life would be lifeless without it. 
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| Posted: 09 Sep 2012 10:00 PM PDT Is Western Buddhism that is being disseminated to the public, otherwise called pop Buddhism, really disguised materialism? I would have to say that it is. Much of the emphasis on this kind of Buddhism revolves around conditionality.
But laying out conditionality is not the whole enchilada of Buddhism! Far from it. There is something more fundamental to Buddhism. It is unconditionality, that is, nirvana. This is the part of Buddhism, to be blunt, the Buddhist materialists hate. In every way possible, they try to get around the inconvenient truth of nirvana, for example, that nirvana is deathless, or if you prefer, it is immortality. Buddhism has had to deal with materialism for a long time. Materialism goes back a long ways in India. Some of the tenets of materialism in early India include disbelief in awakened persons, karma, rebirth, and the self or âtman. A materialist's only means of knowledge was by way of sensory evidence (pratyaksa). Materialists were sometimes called Lokâytikas whose knowledge was based on worldly (loka) empiricism. Important to Indian materialism, and to a large extent Western materialism the kind we see emerging in Buddhism, is the belief that we have only one life in which death is final. In other words, there is no reincarnation or rebirth. But more importantly, Indian materialism and Western materialism do not believe in transcendence. There are no higher worlds; there is no real enlightenment or awakening, either. In addition, the lifestyle of a typical materialist was live for the moment (Richard King, Indian Philosophy, 18) which is not unlike the lifestyle of a typical Western Buddhist who are trying to live in the now. My guess, it is only a matter of time before materialist Buddhism is driven out the temple of true Buddhism by good scholarship and dedicated Buddhists who scripturally challenge the tenets of Western Buddhism which is slouching towards materialism. 
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| Sam Harris explains how life is good without free will Posted: 09 Sep 2012 09:00 PM PDT Free will. Who needs it? Not me. Not you. Not Sam Harris. Not anybody. Which is a good thing. Because almost certainly free will doesn't exist. So it's good news, and unsurprising news, that something humans don't have isn't necessary to live a satisfying life. Harris is an excellent writer and thinker. Read his "Life Without Free Will." If you're under the illusion that you're free to do whatever you decide to do, his piece will reassure you that's it's fine to give up that unsubsantiated belief. I particularly liked this section of the essay. In my view, the reality of good and evil does not depend upon the existence of free will, because with or without free will, we can distinguish between suffering and happiness. With or without free will, a psychopath who enjoys killing children is different from a pediatric surgeon who enjoys saving them. Whatever the truth about free will, these distinctions are unmistakable and well worth caring about. Might free will somehow be required for goodness to be manifest? How, for instance, does one become a pediatric surgeon? Well, you must first be born, with an intact nervous system, and then provided with a proper education. No freedom there, I'm afraid. You must also have the physical talent for the job and avoid smashing your hands at rugby. Needless to say, it won't do to be someone who faints at the sight of blood. Chalk these achievements up to good luck as well. At some point you must decide to become a surgeon—a result, presumably, of first wanting to become one. Will you be the conscious source of this wanting? Will you be responsible for its prevailing over all the other things you want but that are incompatible with a career in medicine? No. If you succeed at becoming a surgeon, you will simply find yourself standing one day, scalpel in hand, at the confluence of all the genetic and environmental causes that led you to develop along this line. None of these events requires that you, the conscious subject, be the ultimate cause of your aspirations, abilities, and resulting behavior. And, needless to say, you can take no credit for the fact that you weren't born a psychopath. Of course, I'm not saying that you can become a surgeon by accident—you must do many things, deliberately and well, and in the appropriate sequence, year after year. Becoming a surgeon requires effort. But can you take credit for your disposition to make that effort? To turn the matter around, am I responsible for the fact that it has never once occurred to me that I might like to be a surgeon? Who gets the blame for my lack of inspiration? And what if the desire to become a surgeon suddenly arises tomorrow and becomes so intense that I jettison my other professional goals and enroll in medical school? Would I—that is, the part of me that is actually experiencing my life—be the true cause of these developments? Every moment of conscious effort—every thought, intention, and decision—will have been caused by events of which I am not conscious. Where is the freedom in this? Hard to argue with. But if you feel like disagreeing with Sam Harris because you believe in free will, go ahead. After all, you're powerless to do anything else. 
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