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Love, Life, Meaning, Zen, and Science, by Norm Bearrentine

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Response to Sam Harris’ Podcast with Robert Sapolsky

August 16, 2017 by Norm Bearrentine Leave a Comment

There are black people who hate white people, there are white people who hate black people, and both got their hatred through the same mechanisms: biology and culture—no one has free will. No one is ultimately to blame for … [Read more...]

Filed Under: 2017 Tagged With: emotions, free will, happiness, hatred, meditation, rationality, Robert Sapolsky, Sam Harris

Review of Sam Harris’s Waking Up

September 12, 2014 by Norm Bearrentine Leave a Comment

Sam did a great job of dealing with the complexities of free will in his book by that name, but in Waking Up he is writing about consciousness and the self, which are altogether more difficult subjects, and he flounders. Like … [Read more...]

Filed Under: 2014 Tagged With: brain, Buddhism, consciousness, Eckhart Tolle, free will, Jean Klein, Sam Harris, self, the present moment

Review of Sam Harris’s “Waking Up,” Chapter 1

August 25, 2014 by Norm Bearrentine Leave a Comment

To put Sam’s intentions in my terms, he wants people to learn to access experiences most people’s brains are capable of, but that aren’t widely promoted in western culture. He thinks this will be good for them, and for anyone … [Read more...]

Filed Under: 2014 Tagged With: consciousness, Dogen, Lao Tsu, LSD, MDMA, meditation, mystical, religion, Sam Harris, spiritual, Zen

What This Site Is About

When I realized that the idea of god was a joke, I thought that was the end of the story. Later I found that Christianity had shaped my values, and while some were worth keeping, many had lost their foundation—the meaning of life, for example. Something similar happened when I realized that the idea of free will was a joke, and I’ve spent the decades since both those realizations discovering and editing what Julia Galef calls the “orphan beliefs” they left behind. It’s a tricky business, and this blog has been a chronicle of my efforts to puzzle it all out, including reviews of related books. I hope you find it helpful.

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