Psychology
-
Personal Auras Strong as Coffee, Complex as Cajun
I think we forget how strong is the aura of a person. That is all, thanks. I’ll be philosophizing here all week. Seriously, what I mean is that we spend our whole lives practicing how we present ourselves to others. We want to attract relationships of some kinds and not others. We forget that this practice creates a strong “giving off” of “vibes” whenever we are around someone. Some of us are sensitive to others’ treatment of us, especially those close to us. If someone doesn’t want to be around us, sometimes it hurts, even if only a little. But we should remember just how powerful of an experience it…
-
Is ‘being emotional’ irrational?
Cue Mariah Carey’s Emotions On the one hand, emotions are often present when irrationality is, too. Children get angry and hit their siblings or peers. That rarely, if ever, accomplishes what they really should have wanted–paradigmatic irrationality. Anger and irrationality correlated. We feel lonely and seek the company of our exes, even though we’re fairly confident that we cannot have a healthy long term relationship with them, thus investing time in something we know will not return much for the investment. But was our irrationality caused by the emotion or something else? All kinds of examples of coupled emotion and irrationality abound. But that does not mean that the emotions…
-
A quick tip on meditating
Positivity of the kind used in meditation and perhaps Indian philosophy¹ is not just a pragmatic psychology but is grounded in a very powerful ontological position. I will briefly describe that position before sharing a tip on meditating. That position, nearly espoused by Hegel, and at times by Spinoza, is that only positive assertions can be true. More precisely “some things exist,” or “some sentences are true.” That is, more or less, a solution to the problem of nonexistence–for the most part, a problem that arises when we wonder what nonexistence is, what it is “not to be,” what existed before the universe if anything, or even theories of ontological…
