Dharma Exchange

I am obviously in fine company with lots of much brighter minds and spirits that would like to have answers to questions that sound like this: What is Consciousness? Where does it come from? And how does it relate to matter? There are many angles to this question. Let's take the materialist view point: Matter is first, the universe is composed of atoms and sub-nuclear particles, etc and does actually materially exist in its own right. Matter matters. If there were no intelligent or conscious being around, there would still be matter. In fact, Consciousness is simply a side effect of matter, of chemical processes in our brain. In essence, it is an illusion, a fantasy, like watching a material movie that will happen anyways. Under this set of assumptions, Consciousness can actually arise if a system is sufficiently complex in its organization. Computers will evolve to this level and become artificially intelligent and conscious. They will develop feelings such as love, hate, they wil

I am really bad at pondering time. While I am fairly punctual and grasp that kind of time, I struggle with every movie or book that involves time travel or advanced notion of relative time. The more time I spend with the topic, the less it unravels. And I wonder how this integrates into a spiritual practice... In general, there is psychological or individually felt time. And then there is physical, maybe even universal time. Let's look at them. Psychological time is my felt sense of how quickly something moves from being object of expectation (future) to being an object of awareness (presence) to being an object of memory (past) [see Ricard/Thuan]. This seems very intuitive. Meditation is all about steadying your mind in the presence or the Now, therefore cutting out all the niftly little stories that your ego has authored about the past (all the unjust badness that has happened to you) or the future (all the evil that will most certainly come your way soon). In the presence, there

After having read several intruiging books about quantum physics and pondering the philosophical and spiritual implications of it all, I feel none the wiser. This seems about right given the topic as most folks don't grasp any of it after studying it for decades. Still, there are some aspects that I could use some reflections on by other folks. The technicalities of quantum mechanics are out of my reach anyways, but doubts are raised on the "fabric of reality" as we perceive it. I am not so keen on debating the Copenhagen interpretation , but to look at the spiritual meaning of it all. This invites the big topic Consciousness into the room. Let's start to ponder... The double slit experiment : Ok, everyone knows this one. Wave-particle duality. The observer collapses the wave function. So I, the observer, determine the actual reality as it is chosen out of the probability wave. If I don't look, no outcome for the quantum has been determined. Cool, I am pretty impo

Blogging live from retreat... For quite a while I have been struggling with the concept of free will and all its euro-philosophical connotations. The basic idea seems to be that man is superior to all other things since man can set his (free) will to do anything he or she wants. This level of control puts ego / mind above all and into the driver seat. Cogito, ergo sum. For me this works OK when you are asked if you want vanilla or chocolate ice cream. One can decide freely and pick whichever one prefers. Or can one? If freedom of choice is truly enacted by the mind, why is it that I cannot decide during meditation to hold my mind steady on the breath for more than 10 seconds? Invariably it wonders off to play monkey mind. The level of continuous attention I can place on an object is short. If I had free will, I should be able to do it as long as I chose. So is "free" will not a thing of the mind? Does my mind want to focus on the breath and run after random thoughts at the sa

Both Sufism and Buddhism put emphasis on reducing egoic or karmic thoughts, speech or actions. By diligently watching over your ego, you can be aware of any behavior that is born form the small, egoic self. Both wisdom traditions see everything that arises in our awareness as a perfect expression of the Infinite. Everything that is not "me" is also the Creation of the Divine, and so to blame others for what they do veils us from seeing the world as an Action of the Divine. So there is really no good and bad. Or is there? Granted good and bad entail a judgment which can only be a subjective judgment born from ego. But isn't there something truly good, as in Good. Or truly bad, as in Bad? I cannot how see an appropriate response to the mutilation of civilians in Sierra Leone? How can chopping off limbs to strike terror be Divine? How can a man in Belgium walk into a daycare and kill innocent children with a knife? Where is God in that? These examples stir up such strong emo

"God has no religion." - Mahatma Gandhi