Happily, the benefits of training in meditation arrive long before mastery does.
Given the right experimental manipulations, people can be led to believe that they consciously intended an action when they neither chose it nor had control over their movements.
Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now.
By lying, we deny others a view of the world as it is. Our dishonesty not only influences the choices they make, it often determines the choices they can make—and in ways we cannot always predict. Eve...
Although the insights we can have in meditation tell us nothing about the origins of the universe, they do confirm some well-established truths about the human mind: Our conventional sense of self is...
A wasteland of embarrassment and social upheaval can be neatly avoided by following a single precept in life: Do not lie.
A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. The human embryos that are destroye...
You’re not from around here, are you? asked the room service girl.No, I replied. That’s why I’m staying at a hotel . . .
While missionaries do many noble things at great risk to themselves, their dogmatism still spreads ignorance and death.
What evidence could possibly be put forward to show that one could have acted differently in the past?
We live in a world of unimaginable surprises - from the fusion energy that lights the sun to the genetic and evolutionary consequences of this light’s dancing for eons upon the earth - and yet paradis...
We can either have a twenty-first-century conversation about morality and the human well-being - a conversation in which we avail ourselves of all scientific insights and philosophical arguments that...
This is not (as you have charged) to paint religion with a broad brush. I am very quick to distinguish gradations of bad ideas; some clearly have no consequences at all (or at least not yet); some put...
There is now little question that how one uses one’s attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes. Our minds—and lives—are largely shaped by how we use them.
The only angels we need invoke are those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only demons we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed, and , whic...
The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness—rather, it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it.
The experience was not of love growing but of its being no longer obscured.
The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy. Because each new generation of children is taught that religious pro...
Surely, if we could create the world anew, the practice of organizing our lives around untestable propositions found in ancient literature—to say nothing of killing and dying for them—would be impossi...
Religious moderation, insofar as it represents an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality, ethics, and th...