The Futility of Possession

A recent study by Cornell University concludes:

... people get more enduring happiness from their experiences than their possessions ...

Possessions have value only to the degree that we consider them "ours" but nothing belongs to us forever. Possessions will deteriorate, loosing their novelty and value over time. Still, we work so hard to acquire, retain and protect them. Those efforts are ultimately futile, hence the inherent dissatisfaction with possessions.

I'd like to emphasize the experience of letting go as exemplified by the chorus of The Streets' Everything Is Borrowed:

I came to this world with nothing
And I leave with nothing but love
Everything else is just borrowed

Why Ask Why?

In The Real Secret of Thoroughly Excellent Companies, Peter Bregman writes about the process of asking questions:

During his meeting with the front desk staff, [Michael Newcombe] learned they were slower than usual in checking in guests because rooms weren't available. Then, in his meeting with housekeeping staff, someone asked if the hotel was running low on king size sheets. Most CEOs wouldn't be interested in that question, but Michael asked why. Well, the maid answered, it's taking us longer to turn over rooms because we have to wait for the sheets. So he kept asking questions to different employee groups until he discovered that one of the dryers was broken and waiting for a custom part. That reduced the number of available sheets. Which slowed down housekeeping. Which reduced room availability. Which delayed guests from checking in.

He fixed the problem in 24 hours. A problem he never would have known about without open communication with all his employees.

The process of inquiry (vicara) driven by desire for truth and communal benefit is very powerful. We often become content with superficial explanations and avoid deeper reasoning. The example above demonstrates the effectiveness of such a process. It is comparable, if not identical to, the dialectical (Socratic) methods in philosophy.

Consciousness is to Nuerons as Water is to H2O

Ray Tallis makes some interesting statements in his article, You won't find consciousness in the brain:

... my argument is not about technical ... limitations. It is about the deep philosophical confusion embedded in the assumption that if you can correlate neural activity with consciousness, then you have demonstrated they are one and the same thing, and that a physical science such as neurophysiology is able to show what consciousness truly is.

Many neurosceptics have argued that neural activity is nothing like experience, and that the least one might expect if A and B are the same is that they be indistinguishable from each other. Countering that objection by claiming that, say, activity in the occipital cortex and the sensation of light are two aspects of the same thing does not hold up because the existence of "aspects" depends on the prior existence of consciousness and cannot be used to explain the relationship between neural activity and consciousness.

This disposes of the famous claim by John Searle, Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley: that neural activity and conscious experience stand in the same relationship as molecules of H2O to water, with its properties of wetness, coldness, shininess and so on. The analogy fails as the level at which water can be seen as molecules, on the one hand, and as wet, shiny, cold stuff on the other, are intended to correspond to different "levels" at which we are conscious of it. But the existence of levels of experience or of description presupposes consciousness. Water does not intrinsically have these levels.

Via Harmonist.

Surviving Without Money

From style.com:

"The answer lay, in part, in the Christianity of his childhood. In Suelo's nascent philosophy, following Jesus meant adopting the hard life prescribed in the Sermon on the Mount. 'Giving up possessions, living beyond credit and debt,' Suelo explains on his blog, 'freely giving and freely taking, forgiving all debts, owing nobody a thing, living and walking without guilt . . . grudge [or] judgment.' If grace was the goal, Suelo told himself, then it had to be grace in the classical sense, from the Latin gratia, meaning favor—and also, free.

"By 1999, he was living in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand—he had saved just enough money for the flight. From there, he made his way to India, where he found himself in good company among the sadhus, the revered ascetics who go penniless for their gods. Numbering as many as 5 million, the sadhus can be found wandering roads and forests across the subcontinent, seeking enlightenment in self-abnegation. 'I wanted to be a sadhu,' Suelo says. 'But what good would it do for me to be a sadhu in India? A true test of faith would be to return to one of the most materialistic, money-worshipping nations on earth and be a sadhu there. To be a vagabond in America, a bum, and make an art of it—the idea enchanted me.'"

Suelo also has a blog.

How do we know that we reason without reasoning about reason?

The text below is a comment I posted in response to Hope for the Future: Balancing Scientific Temper and Spiritual Wisdom:

Many of the scientists and mathematicians that established the foundations of our modern world also contemplated the nature of consciousness and the Absolute. This is a fact worth emphasizing to those with and without faith.

The scientific community's conscious decision to solely consider the observable, measurable and reasonable has led to significant advances, but for what purpose?

Human reasoning has limits, especially when the major premise of such reasoning is restricted to a self-conception based upon observable phenomena. But what is the nature of the observer (consciousness) apart from the observed phenomena? In other words, how do we know that we reason without reasoning about reason?

Science will have to address such questions through synthesis, as you have suggested. Thankfully, there is a developing trend entitled “contemplative science” which draws upon the introspective methods long established by monastic traditions, including Hinduism and Buddhism.

If the contemplative method of inquiry is pursued sincerely, science may finally consider an alternate premise: Absolute truth does not concede to our limited experience—it is at least as conscious as we are. Being so conscious the Divine must have will and must will to joy. If the Divine wills to joy, then all purpose must be centered upon participating. Therefore, knowledge of how to participate must necessarily descend from the Divine himself. And above all, permission to participate in the joyful play of the Divine must be granted, never assumed.

At the end of reasoning lies a humble petition to the very knowledge we seek to grasp: an appeal to be possessed by that knowledge itself.

Calvin and Hobbes: Math is a Religion

This reminds me of Gödel's incompleteness theorems:

Any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. In particular, for any consistent, effectively generated formal theory that proves certain basic arithmetic truths, there is an arithmetical statement that is true, but not provable in the theory.

For any formal effectively generated theory T including basic arithmetical truths and also certain truths about formal provability, T includes a statement of its own consistency if and only if T is inconsistent.

Sri Venkateswara is coming to Cary, NC!

I've wanted to visit the temple of Sri Venkateswara for a very long time. The original temple is located in Tirumala, Andhra Pradesh, India, and there are several outside of India.

But now a temple is opening right down the road in Cary, NC! I'm so excited!

The South Asian magazine Saathee has an article and detailed schedule of the opening, which will last an entire week.