Wednesday, December 9, 2020

# 227: Knowing the Mind, with Steven Laureys

1. “Meditation is training the mind to see past the illusions of self,“ according to Sam, but I think the opposite is true: “meditation is training the mind to believe the illusion of no self.”

2. “Bringing happiness and contentment into the marriage is the correct way to get it out of the marriage.” Sam’s wisdom is that your center of gravity in a relationship should be over your own two feet and not leaning into the other persons space.

3. Sam makes an admission which I found surprising, because it revealed that there is a lot less daylight between him and me on the question of consciousness. Previously, I had assumed he was deterministic. But in fact he admits that the nature of consciousness is so poorly understood that it would be an act of intellectual arrogance (and a leap of non-faith) to presume to know what happens when we die.