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Why I’m Here
by Jacqueline Berger

 

Because my mother was on a date

with a man in the band, and my father,

thinking she was alone, asked her to dance.

And because, years earlier, my father

dug a foxhole but his buddy

sick with the flu, asked him for it, so he dug

another for himself. In the night

the first hole was shelled.

I’m here because my mother was twenty-seven

and …

 

It’s right to praise the random,

the tiny god of probability that brought us here,

to praise not meaning, but feeling, the still-warm

sky at dusk, the light that lingers and the night

that when it comes is gentle.

 

“Why I’m Here” by Jacqueline Berger, from The Gift That Arrives Broken. © Autumn House Press, 2010. (buy now)

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The research suggests that the brain has more control over its own perception of passing time than people may know. For example, many people have the defeated sense that it was just yesterday that they made last year’s resolutions; the year snapped shut, and they didn’t start writing that novel or attend even one Pilates class. But it is precisely because they didn’t act on their plan that the time seemed to have flown away.

By contrast, the new research suggests, focusing instead on goals or challenges that were in fact engaged during the year — whether or not they were labeled as “resolutions” — gives the brain the opportunity to fill out the past year with memories, and perceived time.

Finally, the mind is perfectly capable of interpreting a fast-forward year, or decade, as something other than a frittering away of opportunities for self-improvement. In another series of experiments published in Psychological Science, psychologists found that when people were tricked into believing that more time had passed than was really the case, they assumed they must have been having more fun. The perception heightened their enjoyment of music and eased their annoyance at doing menial tasks.

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The mind is a wonderful sense-making device: it takes ambiguous or confusing information and simplifies it according to rules of thumb.

–Aaron M. Sackett
Psychologist
University of St. Thomas
How the Brain Perceives Time
New York Times

Learn how to set goals: click here.

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Meaningless! Meaningless!
says the Teacher.
Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.

–Qoheleth in
Ecclesiastes 1:2

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…life (and everything) is senseless. In light of this conclusion, Qoheleth advises his audience to make the most of life, to Read the rest of this entry »

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The Mind’s I
by Douglas R. Hofstadter, Ph.D.
& Daniel C. Dennett, Ph.D.

Capsule Review: A fascinating tour of fundamental issues too often ignored or finessed.

Philosopher scientists Hofstadtler and Dennett offer an anthology of probing essays along with their own running commentary on the topics of identity, consciousness, and reductionism vs. holism. More compelling and less of a challenge to read than Hofstadtler’s more famous book, Goëdel, Escher and Bach, it nonetheless guides the reader to reconsider many of his assumptions about what he is and where he fits in the world.

The book, unfortunately, was written just as complexity theory was Read the rest of this entry »

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Is it more astonishing that a God created all that exists in six days, or that the natural processes of the creative universe have yielded galaxies, chemistry, life, agency, meaning, value, consciousness, culture without a Creator. In my mind and heart, the overwhelming answer is that the truth as best we know it, that all arose with no Creator agent, all on its wondrous own, is so awesome and stunning that it is God enough for me and I hope much of humankind.

Thus, beyond the new science that glimmers a new world view, we have a new view of God, not as transcendent, not as an agent, but as the very creativity of the universe itself. This God brings with it a sense of oneness, unity, with all of life, and our planet – it expands our consciousness and naturally seems to lead to an enhanced potential global ethic of wonder, awe, responsibility within the bounded limits of our capacity, for all of life and its home, the Earth, and beyond as we explore the Solar System.

Stuart A. Kauffman, PhD. in
BEYOND REDUCTIONISM:
Reinventing The Sacred

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Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something.

The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into Read the rest of this entry »

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