A Cure for Anxiety - Part 4

In Stanley Kubrick's Cold War black comedy Dr. Stangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a character named General Jack D. Ripper goes crazy and launches a B-52 loaded with nukes in the direction of the USSR.

In one classic scene (located at 7:10 on this video clip from YouTube) Ripper explains to a British officer (played by Peter Sellers) the role that fluoridation of drinking water plays in the commie plot to take over the world.

Watch the video and . . .

Karma Happens to Everyone

A version of this article was published by Technorati on 28 February 2010.

At the risk of branding myself a contrarian, I feel compelled to render a reality check on Charles Robinson's Yahoo! Sports blog, Team Canada Ruins McKeever's Dream.

For every egoic force, there is a counter-force. This is called karma. This is what the Canadian cross-country skier Brian McKeever is going through right now. McKeever, who is legally blind, was bumped from today's 50 kilometer marathon, in favor of faster skiers.

This may sound like an odd situation, but here's how it went down. Canada is not normally strong in cross-country skiing. So they fielded a team giving the widest number of skiers the chance to participate. So their best skiers are not necessarily scheduled to ski in every race.

But hold on, over the course of the Vancouver games, Team Canada has posted now six top-ten finishes in cross-country events. New coach Inge Braten made the uncontroversial decision to change the line-up for today's marathon, fielding those he considers his best four skiers (the maximum allotment), thinking, Hey! We could medal here!

This bumped McKeever from the race.

"Magical Thinking" a Slur Against Enlightenment

Whenever you hear someone use the term "magical thinking," beware! You're dealing with an intolerant Aristotelian, a person who cannot conceive or concede that there may be a philosophical conception of the world (e.g. Platonism or even pre-Socratic philosophy, see The Philosophy of Success, elsewhere on this blog) other than his or her own (i.e. Aristotelianism).

This intolerance stems from their blind adherence to the law of causation, which makes it doubly important for the person of faith to develop an understanding of occasionalism (see The Law of Cause and Effect a Tenet of Faith elsewhere on this blog).

More commonly, people profess Aristotelianism but practice Platonism. For example, you never hear rich, famous, powerful people declaiming against visualization, which is a Platonic principle (see the Visualization of Success, elsewhere on this blog). This is because they couldn't have reached their lofty position without it--it cannot be otherwise.

Hannah Teter's Charity Set-Up for Long-Term Good

A version of this article appeared at Technorati on 25 February 2010.

Hannah Teter is a snowboarder. Hannah Teter is cool--man, is she cool. Hannah Teter is a force. Hannah Teter is a kid.

At just 23 years old, Teter has competed in two Olympics, winning gold in Torino and now silver in the women's halfpipe event at Vancouver.

Her charitable endeavors are extensive and well-publicized--she supports a town in Kenya and gives prize money to help Haitians.

The Pursuit of Greatness Can Be Costly

A version of this article was published by Technorati on 24 February 2010. To see all my Technorati articles, click Lifestyle in the Contents listing on the sidebar.

An object lesson in egoic behavior comes by way of a recently authenticated Van Gogh original.

Museum de Fundatie, a small museum in a small Dutch town 70 miles east of Amsterdam called Zwolle began showing what is now known to be Van Gogh's "Le Blute-Fin Mill" yesterday (pictured). It will remain on display through July 4th.

The painting and its former owner will remain forever linked by a checkered past.

"Le Blute-Fin Mill" was previously owned by an art collector and curator named Dirk Hannema, who bought it in 1975 from an unsuspecting Paris art dealer for the equivalent of $2,700. Hannema later insured the painting for around $43,000.

Let Your Better Self Shine

This article was originally published by Technorati on 12 February 2010. To see all my Technorati articles, click Lifestyle in the Contents listing on the sidebar.

I have a confession to make: I like Shine from Yahoo! I'm pretty sure it's for women, with fruity colors and Cosmo-esque content. But I like it.

I like it because from time to time they post articles like Brett Blumenthal's 6 Personality Traits to Admire and Acquire, articles that point us in the direction of our ideals.

The traits Blumenthal most admires (spoiler alert!) are Selflessness, Tolerance, Genuineness, Sensitivity, Integrity and Humility. She readily admits, however, that the list could be much longer.

This article's title invites the inevitable comparison to Dr. Stephen Covey's 1989 international bestseller The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. These are habits he recommends, not traits, but there is some overlap.

The Trouble with Spiritual Teachers

I've just finished a book called A Course in Miracles (the first edition is available online), and I have to say that I am no closer to working a miracle than before I started reading.

It seems to be mostly just one inane non-sequitur after another written in a kind of bible-ese, with a lot of "untos" and "wherefores" and "nors"--lots of "nors"--and awkward syntax that its authors (or as they prefer "scribes") Dr. Helen Schucman (below left) and Dr. William Thetford (below right), must have picked up from contact with the King James Version from somewhere at some point.

I shall select a passage at random to make my point. Let's try this one:

"It is through these strange and shadowy figures that the insane relate to their insane world. For they see only those who remind them of these images, and it is to them that they relate. Thus do they communicate with those who are not there, and it is they who answer them. And no one hears their answer save him who called upon them."

I'm not kidding! I picked that passage completely at random. It goes on like that, meaninglessly, for some 622 long, dense pages. It's gibberish and the intro to the book (also on the website) admits as much:

"The Text is largely theoretical, and sets forth the concepts on which the Course's thought system is based. Its ideas contain the foundation for the Workbook's lessons. Without the practical application the Workbook provides, the Text would remain largely a series of abstractions which would hardly suffice to bring about the thought reversal at which the Course aims."

Law of Cause and Effect a Tenet of Aristotelian Faith

I went to a religious college for my undergraduate degree. I remember a professor in the Philosophy department answering a question from a student in class, "What in philosophy gives you the most qualms as a man of faith?"

The professor, without hesitation, said, "Immanuel Kant." It would be many years before I would really understand this answer and be in a position to offer the professor a prescription for his troubled mind (though surely he has passed by now, God rest his soul).

His problem with Kant had to do with the latter's view on miracles. Basically, Kant believed that there is no such thing.

Wrote Kant: "If one asks: What is to be understood by the word miracle? it may be explained . . . by saying that they are events in the world the operating laws of whose causes are, and must remain, absolutely unknown to us." (Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Harper Torchbooks, p. 81, cite courtesy of Maverick Philosopher)

In other words, when you see something that appears miraculous, it's only nature functioning according to laws we don't yet understand.

But this view of Kant's is a natural progression from the law of causality (cause and effect), first stated with clarity within Kant's philosophical lineage by our arch nemesis Aristotle. (See The Philosophy of Success elsewhere on this blog). It's Aristotle with whom the professor should have picked his bone, not Kant. Kant's too far gone. He's too far down the line.

The Trouble with Televangelists

Ever wonder why Plato wrote his Dialogues the way he did? They're narratives; they read like stories, generally about dialogues that took place between Socrates and philosophers or students in and around Athens. They are timeless, as good a-reading today, if you are interested in the subject, as they ever were.

Compare them with Aristotle's Metaphysics and the vast majority of written matter on the subject of philosophy, which is completely cerebral and dry as the dust that coats them in libraries. No one reads them except academics, a condemnation not shared by Plato.

Apart for abounding good taste, why did Plato write like this? The answer may be found in one of his Dialogues called "Phaedrus." In it, Socrates has traveled to the countryside outside the walls of Athens, where he engages in his familiar verbal jousting (called "dialectic") with his young friend Phaedrus.

The storyline is generally about the benefits of rhetoric versus philosophy. But one of the lines of questioning concerns the benefit of writing. Socrates tells Phaedrus a myth about an Egyptian god, Theuth, who, according to the myth, was the inventor of writing.

Theuth brought his invention to King Thamus, hoping that all the Egyptians might make use of it, claiming, "This . . . will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories."

King Thamus told Theuth that he was mistaken. Writing would not benefit memory at all. Rather, it would weaken it.

Another Swing at Inner Peace

I have said that inner peace is a physical phenomenon. Start with the physical sensations inside your body and hold your focus there because that's literally what inner peace is (see The Pain-Body label for more articles). And that's good advice.

But we can also look at it another way. As our good friend Eckhart Tolle puts it in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose (Oprah's Book Club, Selection 61),"Being at peace and being who you are, that is, being yourself, are one." (p. 114-115)

What we are trying to get to is feeling like ourselves again, uncluttered by ego and pain-body and any kind of background unhappiness that is common to most of us."

A recent experience brought this home to me in a personal way. I received word that an old girlfriend of mine got married, and when I found out about it I could sense that it had ignited my pain-body.

The Anatomy of Success

Something really great was about to happen. Success at last!

It doesn't matter what it was. It could have been a new job, or a publisher agreed to print something I'd written, or I was about to move to the next level with someone special, or I was about to receive a patent on a new invention, or I was about to surpass the 1,000,000-visitor-barrier on my blog. Fill in the blank with anything you please.

At that moment, on the verge, on the eve, something inside told me I wasn't ready for this; I wasn't prepared. I had been well along the path of enlightenment for nearly three years, enjoying the awakening process, eyes opening. But the process wasn't complete. Thus, outward success felt premature.

And that's the important point, how it felt. It always comes down to how we feel these things in the physical body.It felt unstable. I felt myself leaning forward, into the future, into the following day when this indicium of success was scheduled to take place.

There's a name for this feeling. We call it hope. Its opposite is fear. We think of hope as positive and fear as negative, but they're actually flip sides of the same coin.

The Visualization of Success

What is Visualization?

Visualization is the process by and through which everything comes into being in our lives, both good and bad. Visualization is in our nature; it's simply a quality that all human beings possess. We are doing it all the time.

Therefore, we need not worry about the mechanics of visualization. They operate automatically. The more salient concern is the service to which this wonderful, creative faculty that we possess is put. On this question there are two options. We can either use this tool in service to our own egos or in service to The Good (see The Philosophy of Success for a discussion of this assumption).

Eckhart Tolle for Christians

Christianity--and probably most religions--can be broken down into two component parts. On the one side you have its mythos. This is the broad story on which it's based.

For Christianity, that's the story of redemption: how Jesus, before the world began was the Son of God, how He was born into the world, how He lead a blameless life and yet He was put to death, and how He rose again and ascended to heaven, and how one day He will return to judge the living and the dead. That's the mythos of Christianity.

Jesus and Aristotle

This is a section of a much larger article called The Philosophy of Success.

Aristotle lived about 300 years before Jesus, but Alexander the Great made sure they would meet by invading the area (called the Levant) in 332 B.C. He and his successors ruled until 63 B.C., when the Romans took over.

I've simplified the timeline a little. The Maccabean Revolt began around 167 B.C., ushering in a short quarter-decade of Jewish independence. The revolt was fought--and this is my point--contra deep and offensive Hellenization of Jewish religion and culture.

This included Aristotelian philosophy among the educated classes, which continued under the Romans, who became the torchbearers of Greek culture and philosophy.

Jesus was born into a thoroughly Hellenized Palestine, and nowhere was this more pervasive than in the priestly caste. This explains why Jesus' main antagonists in the Christian Gospels are the Pharisees and Sadducees. The earmarks of Aristotelian thought run throughout the Biblical accounts of Jesus' ministry.

Aristotle and Christianity

This is the final section of an article called The Philosophy of Success.

So Jesus had his say and then he was crucified--most of us know the story--and then another religion developed in his name. This is where the story really gets good.

So what do you think that religion did? Do you think they kept up the fight with Aristotelianism that Jesus had started? Far from it.

Christianity plugged along for several hundred years under the auspices of Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, a neo-Plantonist (i.e. pre-Aristotelian thinking; for more information see Radical Academy); along with the inspirational handbook, The Consolation of Philosophy: Revised Edition (Penguin Classics), by Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius, also a Platonist.