A review of the psychological literature suggests that mindfulness in particular fosters many components of physical and mental health: It improves immune function, blood pressure, and cortisol levels; it reduces anxiety, depression, neuroticism, and emotional reactivity. It also leads to greater behavioral regulation and has shown promise in the treatment of addiction and eating disorders. Unsurprisingly, the practice is associated with increased subjective well-being.13.
Becoming a part of a movement doesn’t help anybody think clearly.
Speaking from personal experience, I think that losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics – by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck. Is.
The moment one begins thinking about morality in terms of well-being, it becomes remarkably easy to discern a moral hierarchy across human societies.
Meaning, values, morality, and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures – and, in our case, must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain. Rational, open-ended, honest inquiry has always been the true source of insight into such processes. Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident.
In fact, beginning meditators often think that they are able to concentrate on a single object, such as the breath, for minutes at a time, only to report after days or weeks of intensive practice that their attention is now carried away by thought every few seconds. This is actually progress. It takes a certain degree of concentration to even notice how distracted you are. Even if your life depended on it, you could not spend a full minute free of thought.
Faith is little more than the shadow cast by our hope for a better life.
Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next – a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please – your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this “decision” and believe that you are in the process of making it.
Where is the freedom in being perfectly satisfied with your thoughts, intentions, and subsequent actions when they are the product of prior events that you had absolutely no hand in creating?
We cannot live by reason alone.
Despite our perennial bad behavior, our moral progress seems to me unmistakable.
People have been cherry-picking the Bible for millennia to justify their every impulse, moral and otherwise.
Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now.
Secularism is simply a commitment to keeping religion out of politics and public policy.
But while having some choice is generally good, it seems that having too many options tends to undermine our feelings of satisfaction, no matter which option we choose.
Your principal concern appears to be that the creator of the universe will take offense at something people do while naked.
Sincerity, authenticity, integrity, mutual understanding – these and other sources of moral wealth are destroyed the moment we deliberately misrepresent our beliefs, whether or not our lies are ever discovered.
There will always be some delay between the first neuropsychological events that kindle my next conscious thought and the thought itself. And even if they weren’t – even if all mental states were truly coincident with their underlying brain states – I cannot decide what I will next think or intend until a thought or intention arises. What will my next mental state be? I do not know – it just happens. Where is the freedom in that?
Ceaseless change is an unreliable basis for lasting fulfillment.
Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is denial – at once full of hope and full of fear – of the vastitude of human ignorance.