My wife and I are finally having to face up to the fact that we really haven’t done such a great job of handling our money over the last 10 years.

When we started out, we were just poor graduate students. We were fortunate in that we didn’t have much debt, but on the other hand, our incomes weren’t anything to brag of either. After we left school, and entered the “real” world, our income rose quickly, but unfortunately, for one reason and another, our debt rose as well. Now our income is well above the national average, but the six of us live in a cramped little apartment because of our debt.

Why did this happen? There are two ways to answer the question. From a material-world, proximate-cause standpoint, we made some uninformed decisions and some bad bets. Specifically, we bought a house that was too expensive for us, spent too much money trying to fix it up, took too long to sell it, and lost money on the sale. But, to be honest, I don’t think that’s the whole story. For a long time now, we’ve had a very good income, but simply have not been able to make ends meet. To me, this indicates a deeper problem with money, a subconscious problem that manifests as an inability to spend or save appropriately.

Last week I did a meditation to try to find what the root of the problem was, and see if I could dig it out.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Deep Questions about Religion.

In this post I’d like to start exploring religion from a different perspective, using language as a metaphor. I’ve been pulling together my thoughts on this for a couple of months now, and I’ve found that looking at religion in this way resolves the fundamental issues I talked about in my last post on this topic, The Search for Truth, and explains a number of other puzzles about religion such as:

• What is the purpose of religion?
• Does it make sense to ask whether a religion is “true”?
• Are some religions “better” than others?
• Is it possible to predict the future development of a religion — whether it will grow, change, or wither away?
• How is the development of a religion changed by contact with other religions?
• In what ways can religions vary? Are they infinitely variable, or are there limits?
• Why are the older religions of humanity (shamanism, paganism, etc.) quite similar all over the world, while the newer religions (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, scientific theories) so different from one another?
• Why is it that children seem to be natural born pagans?
• And of course: how do you go about choosing a religion that is best for yourself?

Read the rest of this entry »

This is the first of a series of posts on how human consciousness is structured. There are dozens of hypotheses from all over the world about how consciousness can be raised, lowered, changed, and so forth. In this series, I’d like to present some of my favorites: mythological archetypes, the Leary eight-circuit model, western astrology, the chakra system, Rudolf Steiner’s ideas, David Hawkins’s 12 levels of consciousness, and the Tarot. I’m going to describe them briefly and try to integrate them into a single model. (Then I’m going to try to run a 1.5-minute mile, fly to the moon, and cure cancer. Then I’ll have breakfast.) This is going to be challenging, but fun.

In this first post, I’ll describe Jungian archetypes and the Wilson/Leary eight-circuit model, and show how they may be describing (at least partly) the same thing.

Read the rest of this entry »