Mind over Matter

Sometimes science comes up with stuff that's weirder than religion. It seems we can influence our DNA in order to teach our offspring what we have learned, as if we're able to reprogram our genes by will-power. Like magic.


The essay has been moved to my personal website:

Mind over Matter 

 

War Is Not About Aggression

I saw a TV documentary about the origin of war: is it inherent in our species or did it come with civilization? There's no consensus within the sciences, so I allow myself to speculate.


The essay has been moved to my personal website:

War Is Not About Aggression

The Great Misfortune of Society: It's Ruled by Freeloaders

Society is far from perfect, in spite of its thousands of years of evolution. Most of the suffering it causes or at least readily allows, is due to injustice. Some few are privileged at the expense of the vast majority.


The essay has been moved to my personal website:

The Great Misfortune of Society: It's Ruled by Freeloaders

The Individualism of Communism

Seeing a documentary about Mao Zedong's China I was reminded of the anomaly of communism: Why are these ideologies of the collective given names of individuals? That should be enough to dismiss them.


The essay has been moved to my personal website:

The Individualism of Communism

Patterns of Creation Myths

I made a new website, devoted to creation myths, their stories, structures, and patterns of thought. There is much to discover about the human mind in what kinds of ideas about the world beginning have been imagined way back in the dawn of civilization. We haven't changed that much since, nor has the essence of our perception of the world.

To begin with, the material on my new website, creationmyths.org, is mostly stuff I earlier had on my stenudd.com website. But there it was hidden beneath layer of layer of other stuff. So, I thought I'd better make a new domain explicitly for my writing on creation myths.

And it got me adding a new text, about Rig Veda 10:129, an Indian hymn contemplating in a drastic way what might have been before the world was created. It's an old favorite of mine among cosmological writings of the past.

I've studied creation myths for years and years, mainly but not only within the history of ideas, where I'm still supposed to complete a dissertation on the subject. I don't know about that, but surely there will be a book of some kind, eventually. In the meantime, I will keep adding to my new website. Please have a look at it:

creationmyths.org

God Is Retreating

It's getting increasingly difficult to be religious – not that it stops lots of people from persisting – as the progress of science forces God to retreat step by step. In  the world and how we learn it works, God is becoming redundant.


The essay has been moved to my personal website:

God Is Retreating

Driven by Pleasure

In an episode of Through the Wormhole dealing with evil and psychopathy, a neuroscientist explained how normal people and psychopaths drive their cars. He did so while driving his car. It struck me: Oh, what if he's a psychopath? It turned out he is.


The essay has been moved to my personal website:

Driven by Pleasure

That Damned Why

Continuing to watch episodes of Through the Wormhole, I sense a pattern. The science described mainly speculates about the how, rarely about the why. That might be increasingly insufficient as we get closer to the inner workings of the universe.


The essay has been moved to my personal website:

That Damned Why

Pseudoscience and Pseudoskepticism

Yet an episode of Through the Wormhole, this time about the sixth sense and some similar parapsychological concepts. Some quite spectacular claims were made in the episode, so I had to check out the sources. Not that solid.


The essay has been moved to my personal website:

Pseudoscience and Pseudoskepticism

Time Is But a Measure of Change

I saw another episode of the thought provoking TV-series Through the Wormhole, and here I go again: this time about time. I doubt that it exists as an entity of its own. It's just a convention we choose in order to note and measure change. That's all there is: change.


The essay has been moved to my personal website:

Time Is But a Measure of Change

We See the Aliens When They Cease to Be Alien

SETI is a worldwide science project searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. They listen for radio signals, but that's jumping to conclusions. Radio communication is a recent thing on earth, applied for no more than a hundred years or so. Who says we'll even stick to it ourselves, much longer?


The essay has been moved to my personal website:

We See the Aliens When They Cease to Be Alien

To Be Aware of Being

I'm watching episodes of Through the Wormhole, reminding me of the cosmological speculations that have been a kind of background radiation in my brain since I was a tiny kid. I'm sure we all have them. This time, the subject is life and its origin.


The essay has been moved to my personal website:

To Be Aware of Being

Big Bang Is No Answer

Big Bang is presented as a theory about the origin of the universe, but it has no answer to that question. It may explain the emergence of the world, but not from where it came and what was before it. So, we still have no clue.


The essay has been moved to my personal website:

Big Bang Is No Answer

The Imaginative Imagery of the Tarot

I just published a book about Tarot card divination, which has been practiced for around 500 years. So, there are many historical aspects to it. Also, the Tarot imagery is full of intriguing allegories and symbols, saying a lot about our culture and its past.

Therefore, the subject is fascinating to many more people than those who want to try the tarot for divination. But you should all try it, at least once.

Here's my preface to the book:

I was introduced to the Tarot cards in my early twenties, by a friend who was quite learned about all kinds of divination methods. It was love at first sight. The charming illustrations on each of the cards, full of symbolism and intriguing mystery, were a feast for my eyes and got my imagination roaming behind them.

The Tarot works by images, as do we humans to a great extent. Words make us wonder, numbers puzzle us, but images make immediate impressions on our minds, at lightning speed. They dance with our dreams, play with our memories, and blend with our perception of the world we live in. We are creatures of imagination. As the word suggests, that’s mainly done by images, swirling in our minds.

So, reading the Tarot cards is processing the images in our imagination. We get it to the extent we allow ourselves to think in pictures, and that comes naturally to us all.

The Fool card,
from the Tarot Major Arcana.

That’s why I dared to choose the ambiguous subtitle for this book. “Imaginative reading” suggests mere fantasy. Maybe so. Lots of people would claim that’s all it is. But fantasy is no trifle. It’s how we relate to the world and its many enigmas. It gives us ideas by which we are able to discover the secrets of the universe. It unfolds reality.

I can’t think of any other human capacity that takes us farther than fantasy has done through the past thousands of years, and continues to do. It’s the fuel of creativity, and what surpasses the ability to create?

Therefore, whether we put trust in the divinations or not, reading the Tarot cards through our imagination inspires us to reconsider what we are, where we are, and the constantly elusive answer to the question why. Perhaps the wondrous way our mind relates to what is called reality will present some dazzling revelations along the way – or at the very least some thought provoking surprises.

Although I’ve played with the Tarot on numerous occasions through the years, I never thought of writing a book about it. Going from pictures to letters seems like retreating. But then it hit me that this was exactly what I felt like talking about: Reading the Tarot is taking in the images and letting them show themselves, unbound by words and reason. Our imagination will do the rest, and the result has its very own profundity. A picture is worth a thousand words.

So, in the following I will try to tickle the imagination of the reader into going on the spiritual quest induced by imagery. See the Tarot pictures come alive and make other pictures emerge from your mind to meet and transform them. It’s like going to the movies. It’s what we do.

If you haven’t indulged in it before, you may find that the world will never look the same again.

Click here to see the book at Amazon.

To Boldly Go...

The space probe Voyager 1 has traveled since 1977, soon reaching the end of our solar system and entering outer space. That's not a void, but a constant storm of cosmic rays, from which the sun's magnetic field protects us. Whatever it really is, space is not empty.


The essay has been moved to my personal website:

To Boldly Go...

What's With the Beard?

Soon, Santa Claus will sneak down the chimney with presents to all good children, with a jolly “Ho, ho, ho!” That's all fine. But what's with that big white beard?


The essay has been moved to my personal website:

What's With the Beard?

Big Bang and God Are the Same

Creationists sneer at the Big Bang theory. Astrophysicists exclude God from their equation. But it's all the same, meeting the same paradox. They differ only in names. None answers the question.


The essay has been moved to my personal website:

Big Bang and God Are the Same

My Table Confirms Plato

I found an old table that I couldn't resist buying, although I don't have much room for it. This table illustrates Plato's theory about innate knowledge and the eternal soul. Not bad for a piece of furniture.

In the dialogue Meno Socrates helps a slave boy find out how to double the area of a square, by making its diagonal the side of the bigger square. Although the slave boy has no previous knowledge of geometry, he soon succeeds.

To Socrates, this proves that the boy must have had this knowledge from the beginning, even before he was born. This, Socrates argues, must be true for all knowledge and all men. We only have to recollect it. He continues:

“And if the truth of all things always existed in the soul, then the soul is immortal. Wherefore be of good cheer, and try to recollect what you do not know, or rather what you do not remember.”

Not everyone would agree with his conclusions, but Plato has a point: knowledge would be impossible without the ability to reach it, and that's human nature. It might not be eternal, but its seed precedes the birth of the body. Plato linked this prior ability to the soul, whereas modern science houses it in the gene.

My table makes no statement about either genetics or the imortality of the soul, but it joins the slave boy's struggle with the squares, as can be seen on the animation above. It transforms from one square to another with twice the area. Plato would approve.

But would he equip the table with an eternal soul?

Religion Has Always Been Doubted

I've just published a new edition of my book about the Greek philosophers and what they thought about religion, their gods, and the myths about them: Cosmos of the Ancients. I was curious about how much they actually believed in their gods. Not much at all, I found.

Generally, we tend to take for granted that in ancient times, doubts about religious matters were almost unfathomable. We expect that the further back in time we go, the less people were able to see through the religious concepts or question them at all. The gods were as real to them as the sky, the sun, and the moon.

I was not so sure of it, considering the nature of the human mind, which has been about the same – as far as we know – for hundreds of thousands of years. That's how long the human brain size has been about the same. This big thing must have been put to use in all kinds of matters, especially those that appeared from inside of it.

We are unable to scrutinize human though in any detail, way back to the stone age, but there are lots of thoughts preserved from Ancient Greece. That's at least some 2,400 years back, in a time where gods were worshipped and myths about them were common knowledge. So, I decided to investigate what the Greek philosophers revealed about their thoughts on religious matters.

They were the finest minds of the time, no doubt, so what they concluded might not have been the views of the common man. But if they were at all able to question the existence of the gods and the accuracy of the myths about them, then all the people of that time would at least have had the ability to do the same. It could not have been beyond their mental capacity.

Indeed, most of the philosophers expressed some kind of disbelief regarding religious views. Several of them were outright atheists, others regarded the gods as symbols of sorts, or imagined supernatural powers of other kinds. Actually, philosophers with a belief in the common myhtology were hard to find.

This might very well be true for any time and any culture. The religious beliefs are not embraced by all, at least not entirely. There has always been doubt and alternative ideas about it all. This needs to be considered wherever religion is studied. We can't take blind belief for granted, even when we go far back or examine a culture where religion seemed to rule the world view. Its rule was probably never absolute.

People's minds wander. They've always done so. The one thing that is the hardest to find, upon closer examination, is consensus. That's probably how we progress at all.

Here's my book about the Greek philosophers and their religious views on Amazon.
It's also a Kindle ebook.
And here is more information about the book on my website.

What Makes Me Tick

Here I go with a blog in English. I've had one in Swedish for a couple of years, with just about a thousand posts so far. But in my writing, I focus more and more on English books, so I thought it's time to do the same in blogging.

Changing language for my blogging, I might as well try to change its themes. To my surprise, I have found myself writing quite a lot about politics in the Swedish blog. Also a number of critical observations about journalism and the Swedish press.

Beforehand, I thought that I would mainly be writing about culture and art, which are at the core of my own activities. Certainly, there's been a number of such blogs, too, but not nearly to the extent that I had guessed in advance.

What caught me was the temptation to be current. That sort of automatically leads to politics and the news media. That's all fine, and sometimes quite exciting, but here I wish to return to my initial aspirations – even if it will be at the cost of becoming less current.
It doesn't worry me much. All the truly essential stuff is timeless.

This is my very first English blog, so later on we will see how I manage. If I'm again attracted to politics and current affairs, like the moth to the light bulb, then alas, that has got to be my destiny. In any case, I'll make an effort to emphasize the timeless, even when talking about things with a lifetime expectancy barely exceeding that of the moth mentioned above.

What brings color to life
So, I'll start off with blogs about the things nearest to my own activities and interests. That's a bundle.

First and foremost: I write books. That's the red thread going through my life since I was about ten years old, or something like that, when I hacked on my mothers travel typewriter (a big mechanical thing made in the 1950's). In my early twenties I started for real, having my first novel published in 1979, when I was 25. It even won a prize, but made me neither rich nor famous. That still hasn't happened to any mind blowing extent, although several books have followed.

Success is not the decisive factor when it comes to writing. There is an inner urge of dreaming, thinking, and telling about it, which drags the author through the pages. By time there's also a skill of turning ideas and subjects into books, fiction as well as non-fiction. In my case, also the non-fiction is rather fictional at times. I need room to speculate, so I choose subjects that allow for it.

Also since childhood, I've been occupied by art. If I didn't manage reasonably writing books, that's probably what I would do professionally, even though it's even more difficult to earn a living that way. I love oil painting. I made my first “serious” one at the age of 13 – a still life having just about nothing to do with my life at the time.

Painting takes time. I need at least a couple of days just getting into it, so there's not been much of it since I started writing in a concentrated manner. But I keep longing to the day when I can grab the brushes again. Instead I've done some drawings and some more photography. Instant imaging. It's a breeze with the digital camera.

My books and some of my art can be found on my website.

Writers often venture into journalism, in order to get a steady income. So have I, but just in Swedish, which is why I won't dwell much on it here. I started as a literary critic for the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet in the early 1980's, then I was a rock critic at the Stockholm newspaper Dagens Nyheter, where I also wrote theater reviews. When I moved to Malmö, in the south of Sweden, I became the secret restaurant critic for Sydsvenskan, the major newspaper in that region.

So, in my journalistic work I've mainly been a critic. That's no surprise, since I got my first jobs there because I was an author, and not from an ambition to muckrake and expose cheaters in high office. Many critics are novelists or poets, because that means they are equipped with integrity, an opinion of their own, and a rich language by which to express it.

My academic career is a never ending story, within the history of ideas at Lund University, where I study the thought patterns to be found in creation myths. There should be a dissertation sometime, but don't hold your breath. There will surely be a book about it, one of these days, though not necessarily in the form of a dissertation. Anyway, the history of ideas has enriched me both by what I've learned about it and what it teaches about knowledge per se.

Finally, I've practiced the peaceful Japanese martial art aikido since I was a teenager. Except for writing, nothing else has stayed with me that long. I am easily bored, but not by aikido. It combines mental and physical training into one, bringing insights that could not be achieved otherwise. Also, I should be thankful for this pursuit making me move my body from the keyboard occasionally.

Since a number of years I teach aikido, and that brings another dimension to it. Learning and teaching are intertwined. The one can't travel that far without the company of the other. Again, this is particularly true because aikido combines mind and body.
Philosophy should be like that.

Well, in a verbal nutshell, the above is what my life is all about. So, that's the source from which my blog will be nourished. And then some.