Eldon Taylor's Blog, page 6

Certainty???

In this week’s spotlight, I’d like to address the nature of certainty. Stanislaus is credited with saying, “To believe with certainty we must begin by doubting.” “Doubt everything,” admonished Buddha. The Course In Miracles begins by imploring you to doubt even the floor upon which you stand, the walls of your home that protect you from the fury of nature—doubt even the suggestion that nature itself exists. Indeed, the exercises in the Course are designed to convince you that everything is an illusion, including the idea that you are somehow a separate being—for separation is itself the grandest illusion of ...

Is It a Matter of Being Less Bright?

In this week’s spotlight, I’d like to address the notion that people who believe in spiritual matters, including the so-called paranormal, are less bright than those who deny such things. A study I read this past week in Frontiers of Psychology suggests that this is due to the fact that believers rely on intuition instead of reason. Quoting for a moment, “Overall, the research found that atheists performed better overall than the religious participants even when demographic factors like age and education were taken into consideration. Agnostics mostly placed between atheists and believers on all tasks. While the strength of ...

The Unconscious: The Primary Process

We tend to think that we are in charge of our lives. We generally insist that we know why we do what we do—that is, we have reasons for everything. Most are aware that their unconscious minds, and I’ll use that term instead of the subconscious to refer to any and all non-conscious mental activity, participate to some extent in our choices and behavior. Still, the main of it comes down to our understanding that the conscious mind is in charge. Think of your mind for a moment. We generally assume at least a two-part system to our minds—that which ...

Reflection–the Gateway to a Better Life

Self-empowerment begins with self-reflection. The question, “what is humanness or what does it mean to be human?” is obviously a part of any serious self-reflection. For Sigmund Freud and others, humanness was simply a position on the evolutionary ladder. A position with more cortical matter and therefore more inhibitory ability. Mankind’s marvelous brain was not only more sophisticated in terms of its ability to reason, etc., but more powerful in terms of its ability to inhibit impulses. The latter is critical since according to Freud our unconscious was a seething cauldron of animalistic desires that had to be held in check. ...

Knowing Vs Doing

I’m puzzled. For years I have spoken to many people about changes they desired in their lives. Some desired to simply lose weight or stop smoking but most longed to enjoy happier and healthier lives. It seems there is also a drive to have more money among most. So why then, when you go back years later, has nothing changed? That is my puzzle. Cardiac Rehabilitation I recently interacted with a team of rehab professionals within a hospital. They administer both a health education and exercise program chiefly for cardiac patients. The exercise is monitored and structured well but the ...

Broken Minds Equals Broken People

It is interesting to see the social networking posts criticizing people who do not know how to think, or do not seem to have common sense, or who say the dumbest things, or carry out really stupid acts, and so forth. It is also intriguing to me to review the many complaints about criminality, mental health issues, politicians and the like. What do all of these things have in common? One might argue that there is some mental or moral deficiency or both. Perhaps that’s true, but does that mean these people have broken minds and/or are themselves broken? For ...

A Human First Principle

Not long ago the affairs of mankind were thought to be controlled by the gods. The idea of self-improvement/self-empowerment is relatively new and yet today it is a multi-billion-dollar business. The acceptance of modern theories in psychology together with advances in our definition of freedom has led to a mobile society such as no other time in history. We are upward mobile, mobile as to where we live, mobile in our expectations and truly believe that a member of our society can become almost anything they really desire to be. Now admittedly there are a few holdouts—those that believe the ...

Training the Unconscious

For more than three centuries the idea of an unconscious mind was ignored or denied by the larger community of science. Indeed, as Joel Weinberger and Valentina Stoycheva point out in their wonderful new book, The Unconscious, “. . . for most of the history of Western thinking, unconscious processes were ignored, minimized, or flat-out denied.” And while this is undeniably true, researchers and philosophers alike nevertheless discovered evidence of unconscious processes but chose to relegate them to material matters. For example, Mesmer credited magnetic fluids and refused to acknowledge alternative theories that hypothesized an unconscious or subconscious mind, something ...

Generational Disagreements

In this week’s spotlight, I wish to focus on a subject seldom discussed. If you’re an older member of our society, you probably never thought about blaming your parents for defective genes and you probably never considered demanding that your parents owed you everything because you never asked to be born. Many young people believe that the baby-boomers stole their future and ruined everything including the environment, and many adults argue that young people, Millennials, in particular, are Narcissists. These are but a few of the new demands made on us today. Why? Genetic Blame When my father had a ...

Balancing Life

In this week’s spotlight I would like to discuss the construct we call ‘balance.’ Webster defines balance this way, “An even distribution of weight enabling someone or something to remain upright and steady; a condition in which different elements are equal or in the correct proportions.” Think about those two definitions and try to assign the “correct proportions” of what it takes to have balance in your life. Juggling Balancing life is little more difficult than distributing weights equally and or using equal proportions of this and that in order to establish steadiness. Indeed, balancing life for most means a ...