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Keith Stanovich has written an interesting book titled What Intelligence Tests Miss . The book is about the fact that IQ tests are incomplete measures of cognitive functioning. There is, as studies have show, in fact only a low to medium correlation between rational thinking skills and IQ test performance. And because rational thinking skills and IQ are largely independent it is not surprising that intelligent people can easily behave irrationally and hold false and unsupported beliefs. Several things are really interesting about this book. One is the authors insight that we do not need to stretch to non-cognitive domains (to notions as emotional intelligence or social intelligence) to see the lacunae in IQ tests. Another is the very specific and research based analysis of the topic matter. The tripartite framework of cognitive functioning The author presents an elegant and rather comprehensive model of cognitive functioning in which three types of major thinking processes and thei...

After I wrote my previous article, ‘Holy indifference’ and the love to be self-attentive , a series of interesting comments have been posted on it discussing the use of japa (repetition) as an aid to the practice of self-attentiveness. In the most recent comment in this series Hans wrote: ... To me it is important to understand the connection between japa which is an object and “I am”. As I do experience, the “me” practicing japa vanishes and some silent apperception of being appears which I am unable to describe. I suppose this is still another subtle object, however I can’t proceed any further. May be Michael will clear up this state of affairs. ... Other than our pure and absolutely non-dual self-consciousness ‘I am’, everything that we experience is ‘still another subtle object’, as Hans rightly calls it. That is, so long as we experience ourself as an individual (a mind or separate consciousness) who is practising self-attentiveness (trying to know ‘who am I?’), we have not ye...

In reply to a friend who wrote to me asking for some advice concerning the psychological effects of some health problems that he was experiencing, I wrote as follows: Whatever we experience in our outward life as a body-bound mind or ego, we are destined to experience for a purpose, and the ultimate purpose behind all that we experience is for us to learn the essential lesson of detachment. Nothing that we experience — other than ‘I am’ — is real or lasting. It is all just a fleeting appearance, as are the body and mind that we mistake to be ourself. But so long as we attend to these fleeting appearances — that is, so long as we allow them to encroach in our consciousness — their seeming reality will be sustained and nourished. Therefore, if we wish to rest peacefully in and as our essential being, ‘I am’, we must learn to ignore all appearances, and we can ignore them only by being completely indifferent to them (‘holy indifference’, as the Christian mystics call it). That is, only wh...

Richard Dawkins' book The Greatest Show on Earth is currently high on bestseller lists in many countries. The book removes what was the missing link in Dawkins' oeuvre because in all his others books he started from the assumption that evolution was true. In this one he presents evidence. Let's walk through the book in some big steps. In Chapter 1, Dawkins introduces the word THEORUM as a replacement of the word 'theory' which in everyday use often just means hypothesis. The word 'theorum' (inspired by the word 'theorem' from mathematics) would do justice to the fact that evolution is massively supported by evidence and therefore by no means just a hypothesis. Chapter 2 describes how we can sculpt gene pools through artificial selection (for instance dog breeding), a practice which has been known to men, of course long, before Darwin to the scene. Chapter 3 explains differences between artificial, sexual, and natural selection. Chapter 4 shows we kn...