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No more reincarnation… intermediate scope motivation in Mahayana Buddhism

The Path to Enlightenment, the Lam Rim in Tibetan Buddhism, is divided in three ‘stages’ or three motivations. I started out my explaining the Beginners Motivation. It is, as Lodro Rinzler says in his upcoming ‘The Buddha Walks into a Bar: A Guide to Life for a New Generation‘: a process of getting your act [...]

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Living in language? On the limitations of words…

I’ve been reading up on Western philosophy lately and one of the things philosophers of the last century have been concerned with is language: it’s limitations, how conversations are constrained by language, that language is the main foundation of culture. Whenever I used to hear people say that we think in language, that we can [...]

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Sticking to one spiritual path, vs New Age shopping…

Spiritual teachers have traditionally advised people to stick to whatever spiritual tradition it is they grew up in. In Zen Buddhism this is true to the point where one teacher who became the head of a tradition not his own was seen as not quite at his ease. (source) It’s true of course: switching traditions [...]

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Free will, freedom and philosophy series

Over the past month or so I’ve written about freedom and free will. It has turned out to be a difficult subject to discuss. Here are the posts in the order I wrote them: Free will, culture and responsibility There is a consistent stream in our culture that everything is determined by circumstance: genes, conditioning, [...]

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Free will, karma and reincarnation

It’s an often asked question: how much free will do we have, if karma rules our lives? I usually answer: Karma rules our circumstances, our potential, our habits. Karma does not rule what we do with all that today. What we do today: thoughts, emotions, insights, words and deeds creates new karma. Let’s back up [...]

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Free will: mind or emotion?

We’ve been discussing free will, and whether we have freedom or not, for a while now. The discussion has, as I’ve noted before, not been very clear. Either the topic is just plain difficult, or the right approach has not been found yet. Perhaps the following may help: When philosophers discussed free will in the [...]

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The freedom of the experience of our lives

The ultimate freedom philosophers talk about, especially existential philosophers, is not so much the world, but our experience of the world. In the words of psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom: Nothing in the world has significance except by virtue of one’s own creation. There are no rules, no ethical systems, no values; there is no external [...]

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How hard is it to discuss free will?

I have loads of notes waiting to be turned into blogposts on the topic of free will, which is why I decided to write a series of posts about the topic. But first I want to note an observation about the comments to my first post in the series last week. First off: neither the [...]

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Man the Measure of All Things, Sri Krishna Prem and Sri Madhava Ashish

I’ve just discovered an old classic whose title I have heard and read mentioned time and again. It’s a classic for a reason. There’s hardly a sentence that doesn’t add insight or new perspective. I’m talking about Man The Measure of All Things, by Sri Krishna Prem and Sri Madhava Ashish. I suspect this book [...]

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Limits to quantum mechanics and spiritual freedom

I’ve been reading Creative Evolution: A Physicist’s Resolution Between Darwinism and Intelligent Design, by Amit Goswami. I’m impressed, the chemist in me (I was taught some quantum physics in college) doesn’t find fault. Nor does the biologist or the philosopher (I took biology and philosophy of religion classes in college too). But I do have [...]

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