How to Use Humanizing Habits of Mind to Create a Spiritual Consciousness More men become good through practice than by nature. —Democritus Background A basic principle of the quadrune mind model of spiritual consciousness is that people are not born either spiritually enlightened or spiritually fallen. Also, being spiritually conscious does not mean having a holier-than-thou attitude […]
Tag: reduce suffering
Introduction If you were to ask a human being and a bat, “What is it like to have a mind?,” you would expect to get unimaginably different answers. What is less expected is that if you asked four different people the same question, you could receive four unimaginably different answers. In 1974, philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked […]
Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped,and the insight to know the one from the other.—Reinhold Niebuhr, 1937 Introduction In the quadrune mind model of spiritual consciousness, we state that the purpose of a Human life is to reduce suffering and increase healing, but what does that […]
(Or, What the Sackler family and the Haitian refugees have in common) What do the Sackler family and the Haitian refugees have in common? They are both using every resource they have to survive. The Sackler family has armies of highly-paid lawyers and tax specialists, unenlightened elitist judges, ubiquitous myth-manufacturing media, money-oriented medical professionals, and lobbied subservient politicians to […]
The Reptilian Mind For the infant, disruption of its biological homeostatic balance needed to sustain life is “felt” at a physiological level as life-threatening, which it is. Similarly, for the infantile reptilian-minded “adult,” anything experienced as a threat to the status quo can also be “felt” as life-threatening, as much as asphyxiation would be for […]
Creationism is a dramatic story. The Supreme God commands the universe into existence, touching the earth to make humanity. But I think a more powerful story is the extraordinary evolutionary force that brings a universe into existence and gives rise to stars, life, and human consciousness. Every atom in our bodies was once stardust. Biblically, angels […]
Quadrune mind is a brain-based model of spiritual consciousness that says the human brain can produce four different kinds of minds, or levels of consciousness. Each mind is identified by our behaviors. The three types of minds we have inherited from our evolutionary past are a behavioral reptilian-like mind, an emotional old mammalian-like mind, and an intellectual new mammalian-like […]
It looks like the world is having a nervous breakdown. It had seemed quite anxious for a while. What can the quadrune mind model of spirituality have to say about that? Does it matter if we continue our quest for spiritual awakening in such dismal times? Don’t we have enough to do just to survive? […]