Category: Personal thoughts
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My last post, concerning the effects of the hallucinogenic drug Salvia divinorum and its possible role as a portal to a different plane of reality, seems to lead logically to a larger question: What kind of existence do we inhabit? Salvia, after all, can cause terrifying descents into a nightmare world. Is this the true…
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Recently there’s been some hype in the media about how the idea of the universe as a computer simulation has been disproved. I was skeptical that such a sweeping hypothesis could be definitively falsified, and according to the good folks at Popular Mechanics, I was right. The researchers cited by news articles were not actually looking…
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Why is there so much suffering in this life? The question has plagued human beings for millennia, and no worldview can call itself complete without offering an answer. Unfortunately, it's hard to find an answer that's really satisfying. Historically, four major answers have been proposed. God is punishing us. There are many variations on this…
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I haven't been posting much lately, in part because I had computer problems that finally obliged me to get a new MacBook. But the other reason is that I find myself increasingly less interested in the endless back-and-forth of the survival debate. It seems that the same arguments are endlessly rehearsed, with Skeptics propounding some…
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As a companion piece to my post on Richard Carlson's work, here's an old post from October 11, 2008, covering a related approach pioneered by David Burns. Incidentally, there's now an app for this — in fact, there's more than one. For iOS, the iCouch CBT app works pretty well. For Android, the Cognitive Diary…
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The Next Big Thing appears to be virtual reality. Suddenly, VR headsets are being written up everywhere. I was sufficiently intrigued to spend $15 on Google Cardboard, a VR viewer made of — yes — cardboard, which holds your smartphone in a snug little Velcro-tabbed flap and allows you to watch VR videos through two built-in lenses. The quality…
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Years ago I posted a couple of essays on my author site called "Unusual Occurrences" and "More Unusual Occurrences." They were collections of mostly trivial and anecdotal synchronicities, coincidences, and premonitions from my personal life I still keep a record of such things in a journal. Yes, I'm aware that they can be "explained" by the ever-helpful…
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Let's continue our exploration of the relationship between the incarnate self (the ego) and the higher self. We begin by taking a step back to look at the overall picture of human mentality. First, there is the conscious ego of the incarnate personality. Then there is the subliminal self (as F.W.H. Myers called it), which includes…
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A miscellany of mystifying musings from me. Do You See What I See? is a children's book from medium Katrina-Jane, written and illustrated in a deliberately childlike style. Its purpose is to comfort small children who see apparitional visions. Book description: Having gone through a childhood with no help or instruction as to what she was…
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An interesting article appears in the latest issue of The Atlantic, arguing that the trend toward hypersensitivity on college campuses reflects an unhealthy and counterproductive set of coping mechanisms. Called "The Coddling of the American Mind," it points to a series of cognitive distortions that are associated with neurosis and shows how each of these…