Questions

Did you choose your path, or did you end up on it? Are you all alone on your journey, or do you have company? Have you ever befriended someone else along the way who later decided to leave you? Have you ever considered turning around and going back? Have you ever abandoned a travel companion? Do you trust your gut feelings? Do you trust someone else's gut feelings? Do you follow advice from a spiritual teacher or a life coach?

Are you a stranger to yourself? Are you an enemy of yourself? Are you sick and tired of yourself? Are you pleased with yourself? 

Why did the biological evolution come about? Why did the first prokaryotic cell evolve? What kind of force is driving the evolution?

Why is there something rather than nothing? Is the universe really a massive explosion? What was exploding, do you think? Nothing?

How can you be so damn sure that you picked the right way? Or the wrong way? Or that I picked the wrong way? Did you choose the way, or was it selected for you?

What do you expect to find at the end of your journey?

Dishonesty

It is not just politicians who lie; all people lie, and everyone pretends honesty is essential. Even priests and policemen lie. We hear about this almost daily. You know that people lie. This is not big news. Therefore, you shouldn't trust yourself either.

So, if all people lie to themselves and others, this must mean that lying is a natural human trait. But why are you then ashamed when you lie? And why do you get upset when other people are lying to you? What if the birds were sorry they could fly?

Robert Trivers thinks that self-deception has an evolutionary origin. He says that if you can convince yourself that you are better than you are, you can more easily deceive others. Your scam becomes more challenging to expose if you believe it yourself.

Here's another hypothesis I've come up with: Reality is too unpleasant to live in. It's like a winter's day in a biting wind and snow slush. You have to find some kind of mental escape.

It's nice to share a bottle of wine or two with a friend, but drinking a bottle or two every day can turn you into a drunkard. You can't always be sincere, but lying too much and too often can also turn you into an unpleasant jerk.

Choose sides

”No one can serve two masters: Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” Matthew 6:24

Regardless of what kind of Christian you are, you have to choose sides. (Prosperity theology is not a Christian faith.)

This also applies to other forms of spirituality. You can not be both a spiritual seeker and a social climber striving for money and power. You have to choose which path to take.

Even those not religiously or spiritually inclined have to make up their mind. Are you a careerist? Do you believe that competition is good? Do you think that all that counts is money? Does it not matter to you which mountain you climb as long as you become someone with other people to look down upon?

Telepathic waves

Not so few people have experienced synchronicities or telepathic phenomena. Does this mean that your mind is not confined to inside your skull?

Your eyes detect photons, and your ears detect waves in the air, but what part of you detects telepathic signals? And what is a telepathic signal?

Are we connected somehow, also without telephones or the Internet?

What if some of your thoughts and emotions are not created in your brain?

What if all of your thoughts and emotions are created somewhere outside of you? The brain may be some kind of receiver, some speculate.

Why do so many stupid, silly, and nasty thoughts arise in the brain? Have someone hacked our minds?

Evolution

What if God is a kind of scientist? Maybe he created a single cell in his laboratory some 3,5 billion years ago. He may have made a lot of cells, but only one of them survived and multiplied.

A billion years later, he mixed up cells that had evolved and managed to create an eukaryotic cell. Only one of these experiments was successful; only one of those cells survived.

Six hundred million years ago, he managed to create multicellular organisms from these eukaryotic cells. Multicellular organisms evolved, and biological robots with intelligence slowly emerged.

Some of these robots developed their own will, and God lost control of his creations, like the boffins of today who lose control of their organisms which escape their laboratories and create havoc.

The Placebo effect

Both the red pill and the blue are sugar pills.

Ordinary men

On the thirteenth of July 1942, the German Reserve Battalion 101 in Lublin executed 1,500 Jewish women, children and the elderly. The battalion leader, Wilhelm Trapp, was a wise man. He offered the men who did not want to participate in the mission to step aside and promised not to punish them. He understood that some of them would not be able to shoot children without making a fool of themselves. Twelve men out of five hundred accepted the offer. What do you think was decisive when these twelve men made their decisions? And what were the motivations that influenced the other 488 men? Was the genes making the decisions, or was it their worldview?

Ordinary Men Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland By Christopher R. Browning