The Waking

  "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God"   John 1:1   The only parts of the following that were written by me were the questions I asked of an AI, in this case the free version of Grok. I wanted to write about this here, in part because I found it enjoyable to produce and the results very interesting.  I also thought that one or two people might also find it interesting to see that, with a short series of questions, you can go from first principles about the existence of the universe, to a daily schedule of activities that most closely reflects how you see your part in it all.  You might not resonate with the questioning route I took in producing this but, with a few tweaks, you could get interesting ideas and pointers that are relevant to your life.  Using AI can be part of a spiritual practice. How do you use it? What follows is quite long and heavy so I’ll cut the preamble and get started... I began with a questi...

    I titled the last blog ‘Are enlightened people always kind and ethical?’ I cited examples of people widely considered to be enlightened who apparently behaved unkindly and/or unethically towards other people.  In addition, given that most of us are not ‘widely considered to be enlightened’, I proposed that it is probably a good idea for those of us on a spiritual path to consider developing our understanding of the nature of kindness and ethical behaviour, and to work on developing them.  I ended that blog by saying that, in this blog, I would write about ways of developing greater kindness. I may well still do that in a future blog, but in the meantime, I felt inspired to put the case that those who have genuinely awakened or realised enlightenment cannot be anything but kind and compassionate towards others, and will always have their best interests at heart. So, my plan here is to mention a concept used by a famous psychologist, and that a Japanese philosopher...

  One of the useful things I got from spending several decades working in the social sciences was seeing the importance of holding onto theories very lightly and being prepared to let go of one theory in favour of a better one when the data supported it. Although this is a drastic simplification, the process went something like this:     • You study some aspect of the world that you want to understand better.     • If there is currently no adequate theory that helps in understanding that aspect of the world then you develop one.     • From that theory you derive one or more measurable, testable hypotheses.     • You do an experiment to gather data that indicates whether your hypothesis is correct and therefore whether your theory needs changing or can stay as it is, for now… So far this is a brief description of a fairly standard way of doing science, known as the hypothetico-deductive method as described by Karl Popper among others. However,...