Clear Light Mind

The Dalai Lama says that the goal of Buddhism is to achieve the state he calls, "Clear Light Mind." If you can do this then you will be free of suffering. It therefore seems important to understand what is Clear Light Mind if you are interested in relieving yourself of suffering and you think the Dalai Lama someone who might know what he is talking about.

I will get to some ideas on Clear Light Mind, but I first want to start by asking you to imagine what you think Clear Light Mind might be?

I am guessing that you are thinking about it being a higher level of experience. A soaring, brilliant, blissful state. Something that you construct through practice until you have a new ability to see the world in a different way. If so, this is because you are a western person.

The Dalai Lama says that Clear Light Mind is the fundamental nature of the mind, and exists independently of material existence. This means that (and he expressly says so) those mental actions that require the brain are not part of Clear Light Mind, in fact he calls them gross or course aspects of the mind. This includes all of our senses, all of our thoughts, all of our memories, all of our emotions.

The Dalai Lama also says that although he is certain that amoebae have Clear Light Mind, he is unsure about whether plants have it or not. So, the proximate goal of Buddhism, according to the Dalai Lama is to achieve the same state of mind as an amoeba, and this takes a vast amount of practice. If you can readily do this it will release you from suffering.

I find this fascinating. The "highest", "best" goal of one of the most stringently applied, longest lasting philosophies in the world is to remove all of what the west thinks of as the "highest" and "best" from ones mind in order to remove suffering. The counterpoint in the west to this concept is probably Stoicism in which happiness is achieved by the moral and intellectual perfection which removes the errors that lead to emotions.

If you think about this for a bit you realize that from a western perspective what Buddhism is about is mental suicide, explicitly the destruction of the ego, what is considered to be "I". Once there is no you, there is no suffering. Buddhism posits a Universe whereby this Clear Light Mind is eternal, being reborn in body after body until a perfect realization of its own state is achieved, and then Nirvana, release, extinction.

This fundamental goal is the reason why I am not a Buddhist. I spent several years in sporadic meditation until I found myself at one point in a traffic jam coming home from work. I was totally at peace, without thought, without emotion while around me was frustration and anger. I realized that I hadn't been frustrated or angry in weeks. Then I realized I hadn't been ecstatic, or sad, or wildly happy in weeks either. I realized that if I kept doing what I was doing it would become a permanent state. A state without much emotion, a state without suffering but also without passion. I decided I would take the suffering if it meant I got the passion too.

As an aside, I don't claim to have been a great Buddhist. It may be that I am missing a great swathe of Buddhist teachings and understanding that leads to a greater richness of life in addition to the removal of suffering. I also want to say that from my experience Buddhism really, really works. It probably saved my life in that it has stopped me from becoming deeply, deeply depressed since I started using it. Even at the dark times in my last job, when I would get to the point of weeping frequently in public, I wasn't in the darkest depths of despair because I was suffering in sympathy for others. It was compassion that led to the trauma of my last job, not depression. I still meditate infrequently to this day when I feel the Darkness coming on. I still concentrate on Mindfulness, which I believe to be the greatest gift you can give someone.

I think an important thing to think about when looking at any philosophy or religion is to place it into the circumstances in which it was produced. Buddhism was produced in India 2500 years ago. I have talked about the paradigm of the ancient world before, in which life was short, death was everywhere, inexplicable and sudden. There was no concept of rights or freedom, justice simply meant that you did what the powerful told you or they killed you. Under these circumstances the First Noble Truth, Suffering Exists (or life means suffering, or etc.) makes nothing but sense. In the modern western world I think an objective, reasoned look around would show that life really is mostly not suffering, but rather wonderful.

I bring up this matter in the main because I think it interesting. I also think it useful for people to think about the way they think by introducing concepts so foreign to our basic understanding that at first glance they seem incomprehensible. I also bring up this idea as a possible tool for people to use - sincerely think that anybody who has heard of Buddhism and not spent two weeks, fifteen minutes a day, trying it to see what it is about is a fool.

On the other hand I am greatly wary of those who say that something is the highest truth, the only way, the best view of things. We are all different, in different situations. The great wisdom of the ancients applies differently to all of us. As advised by the Buddha, you should examine all of the teachings that are given to you, try them, and if they don't work for you, reject them.

Admission, Acceptance.

Just before Christmas we told everyone we were getting them a present. That present was going to be a donation to Video Volunteers. Because we are human part of the reason for telling everyone was to get some credit for thinking of others, and of course for being nice charitable types. Well, we haven't donated any money to them.

Here is the sequence of events. We had a house warranty that expired in early December which cost $400 to renew. Our plan was that in order to make sure we could make the donation we wished to make we would wait on renewing this warranty for a month or so. The our furnace broke down in the only cold portion of the year down here. Then the galvanized steel pipes in our attic (yes, they put the hot water heater in the attic down here and they used galvanized steel pipes in new construction) started failing, one after the other. Right now a very nice young man is replacing our third separate leaking pipe of the last few weeks.

I still think that the plan was a sensible plan. The chances of this happening were really low, a furnace and three leaks in a month is just unlucky. We still intend on making the donation to the worthy cause, but we are just not intending on going into credit card debt in order to do so. That is the admission.

Acceptance is how I feel about this whole process. This is nothing but unfortunate. There is no silver lining. Things broke and we have spent a very large amount of money trying to make things as they were before. In the past I would have felt angry, upset, depressed, moody at a situation where bad things happened for which I am not responsible. In the past I would have been upset because this isn't fair.

Well, life isn't fair, as can be seen by the fact that I am rich, rich, rich compared with most people (and so are you). I have the money to fix these problems (just about), and I have managed through experience to understand that fixing problems is the main reason to have money, it isn't to get nice things, it's to get through. I'm not angry. I don't feel cursed. I have accepted some of the things that I cannot change.

Critical Thinking, Reason, and Logic.

In my ongoing exploration of people's brains I have recently become interested in the differences between the three ways of thinking in the title, Critical Thinking, Reason and Logic, and the problems that confusing them cause. I'll start with giving them my own definitions, and then the problems caused by the confusion between them. I hope to end by looking up the actual definitions to see if perhaps the problem is my own perception.

Reason is a type of thinking. It isn't the only type of thinking but it is the type of thinking that people usually consider to be thinking. Reason is answering questions by using a systematic approach, looking for cause and effect, working out probabilities, weighing evidence. An example of reason would be if your car stops running, you think of the probabilities and make an assumption that the most likely thing is that the car has a mechanical failure. You then think of what you wish to happen to give you the greatest gratification, decide that this would be to have the car fixed. You then from experience work out roughly how much money it costs to fix cars. You find a mechanic, because they know how to fix cars, and you will tend to choose a mechanic with a good reputation if you can find one, and so on.

As I have said before, we hugely exaggerate how much we use this type of thinking. Most of the time a situation occurs and we feel emotionally about it in some way and then react to that emotion. Reason comes in later to explain to ourselves that it the decision was sensible.

Critical thinking is a portion of reason, it is the portion whereby we examine what our thoughts, or the thoughts of others, are and subject them to analysis to see if these thoughts are in fact reasonable. We can examine the path with the broken car and see whether having a functional car did actually make us happy, whether mechanics actually can fix cars, whether the reputation of the mechanic actually has anything to do with how happy the process makes you. it is an evidence weighing process, assigning value to pieces of evidence and comparing different thoughts or concepts through the value of that evidence.

Logic is also a part of reason, but it is an abstract part of reason. In logic all the terms in a position must be completely defined, the definition of those terms means that certain conclusions must, and I repeat that must, be true or false.

The problem comes when these different processes become intermixed without it being known. A great example of this for me is Lewis' trilemma about Jesus.

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God."

So, here we have an attempt to prove Jesus was the Son of God through logic. You can tell that it is an attempt at a logical proof because it uses the word, "must" so often. It means that the conclusion must follow from the assumptions in the premise by the nature of those assumptions. Well, let us take what the assumptions are,

1. What is reported that Jesus said, he said.
2. There are only three sort of people who could have said what Jesus said, a lunatic, a devil, or the Son of God.
3. From what he said he cannot be a lunatic or a devil.

This leaves you with the logical proof that since only the Son of God could have said what Jesus said he must be the Son of God. I hope you can see that as a logical proof this leaves a lot to be desired. That is that the assumption is the conclusion, a tautology. If we accept the assumption that only the Son of God could have said what Jesus said we must conclude that he is the Son of God since he said what he said.

What actually is going on here is reasoning in the guise of a logical proof. What is actually happening is that the assumptions are not iron clad facts, but rather they are good guesses. There is a determination that there is a high chance that what Jesus is purported to say he actually said. You can make your own determination on the probability that this is true. For the sake of argument I will set all these probabilities to 90%. Then let us go to the next step, let us say that there is a 90% chance that there are only three sorts of people who could say such stuff. let us say that from those three there's a 90% chance a lunatic wouldn't say what Jesus said, and the same with a devil.

Once you have assigned probabilities you can make the calculation as to what is the probability that Jesus was the Son of God. 90%x90%x90%x90%=about 66%.

This leaves us with two different positions. On the one hand the assertion that you must, 100%, say that Jesus is the Son of God, and on the other is a two thirds chance that it is so. The difference between certainty and probability is at the root of many of our problems. Barak Hussein Obama having a foreign name, and him being a Democrat, therefore he must be a Muslim being a wonderful example. Another is that you get ahead by working hard and trusting in Jesus therefore anyone on the dole is a lazy heretic. Another is that because someone is a conservative, believes in the superiority of the free market and has been elected that they must be operating for their billionaire cronies rather than trying to make the world a better place for everyone.

The trilemma of Lewis' is still one of the most widely used "proofs" used to convince people that Jesus was the Son of God. I have repeatedly seen the faults in the proof demonstrated clearly to others and still have them accept it as a good proof. I have seen the three examples above given, and then seen them resist any movement based on the explanation of other evidence or the idea of probabilities. Why do people confuse reason and logic?

The reason why logic and reason are confused is a three part process. The first is that all of us do logical thinking by feel most of the time. Given three girls of different relative heights we can all put them in the right order as in the classic word problem, but I think most of us would have extreme difficulty in explaining in a clear way how we know the answer must be true, but we know it must be true.

Anne, is taller than Jill. Mary is taller than Jill. Mary is shorter than Anne. Who is the tallest? How do you know that? I bet the first answer that comes to your head is that it just must be. It takes a little while before you start talking about the assumed characteristics of the relationships defined as "taller" or "shorter" that are unspoken in your logical proof. Over time we became adept enough with logic that we do it largely by autopilot.

The second portion is that in order for us to think through enough steps our brains cannot manage to keep multiple possibilities going at the same time. So we say, "for the sake of argument let us assume that X is true" and then we solve the problem logically. We are putting aside complications in order to get at what the consequences of something might be. However, often this simplification is simply forgotten in order to get a useful answer, and this is quite sensible because in real life you need to act as if the thing that is most likely is going to happen most of the time.

The third part is that people don't critically think about their conclusions. People run the information through the assumptions they have, and through the reasoning process they use (usually unconsciously) and arrive at a "right" answer. What scientists do at this point is then let everyone else try to show that their answer is wrong. What most people do is defend their opinions to the point of anger, frustration and contempt. Clearly the scientific method comes up with better right answers. However, the protection of one's idea comes up with higher self-esteem, a better social ranking, and a comfort with ones own place in the world.

So, people make giant errors about how things are while simultaneously being sure they are correct. They do this by confusing the assumptions in a logical argument for real fact (a lunatic cannot give good moral advice), they then unconsciously come to conclusions based on these assumptions which to them feels like how they do logic, and then they do not put those conclusions through a process to look for errors (quite the reverse).

This is why so often you come across people who think they know something for a fact because it's clearly logically true when actually it is idiocy. These people will get very angry at you if you try to point out the errors, usually calling you an idiot.

Lewis' trilemma is so effective because at each step it seems reasonable. It seems reasonable to think that Jesus pretty much said what we have recorded. It seems reasonable that what he said was largely great moral teachings. It seems reasonable to think that calling yourself God is the act of a lunatic (just don't tell any Hindus that). it seems reasonable to think that Jesus wasn't lying. It seems reasonable that lunatics don't provide a lot of great moral truth (although I think this to be far less true than most). Given enough reasonable assumptions it is easy to see that a conclusion from these would be thought to be reasonable. But the error margins of reasonable add up and multiply with each other, which in the real world makes a certain conclusion very difficult to make from a set of reasonable assumptions.

Looking up definitions. I have confused the term logic with a portion of logic known as deductive reasoning. Logicians have had a very difficult time in defining the term logic, to the extent that my definition of reason and the various definitions of logic come quite close. My definition of critical thinking, that of criticizing thinking by passing judgment on the merits of that thinking, is actually now just a very small portion of the dictionary definition of critical thinking.

It would seem to me that the consequences of the confusion of these three types of thinking have reached the stage where the meaning of the very words themselves are confused. While these are three types of thinking, in general parlance logic, reasoning and critical thinking are synonyms. No wonder the confusion.

The Ground of Being and Models.

I, and almost everybody else, believe that there is an actual reality. There is an existing thing that has a number of qualities.

I, and almost everybody else, believe that we are human beings with physical structures that perceive things about what is around us and think about that world.

I, and almost everybody else, believe that the physical structures that enable us to sense and think about our surroundings are not infinitely powerful. They have limitations in what we can sense, and what sense we can make of those senses.

As a result what human beings have is a limited experience of reality and a limited ability to think of reality. What human beings do, what we must do to make sense of things and what are bodies have evolved to do, is make models of the world around us. We have a series of models for different situations, and without them we cannot function.

We have many models for people, the most obvious and ubiquitous model we have for people is that they are essentially us in different bodies. When we want to predict or understand the actions of others we try to imagine ourselves in that position. Built upon this model are essentially stereotypes, alterations to the standard model based on the categorization of people. For example, we can alter what we predict will be the reaction to watching the Lawrence Welk show according to whether the viewer is a sixteen year old girl or a seventy year old man without any other information at all.

We have models about the Universe around us. There are scientific models that apply to specific regions of experience, but break down at the edges of those regions. There are mythical models for the Universe, involving meaning, intention, fabulous beings and so on. Underlying these models are more basic components, the concepts upon which models are built. But these concepts are models, a god, an atom, a tree are all conceptual models upon which to build other models.

What led me to these thoughts are the relatively recent discovery that Dark Matter and Dark Energy make up 99% of the energy and mass in the Universe. These are the mass and energy of vacuums. These forms of mass and energy pretty much only interact with gravity, and I think a good way to think of gravity is simply as the shape of space+time. What we are dealing with here is the Ground of Being upon which all the manifestations of form and matter are placed. This is the Tao. It is the deep ocean upon which what we experience as "real stuff" are merely the ripples.

This last metaphor, ripples upon the water, was emphasized to me by seeing The Face of Evil wag his sopping wet tail over a smooth piece of water. A perfect arc of droplets landed one after the other on the surface of the water. Each was unruffled, a perfect circle until it met the expanding circle of another droplet.

I though of the water as the Ground of Being, reality. The surface of the water was our consciousness of this Ground of Being. Each droplet was a model we have for experiencing, defining, and explaining reality. Within each expanding circle is a model for understanding reality. While the circle is small it is perfect. Newton's Laws perfectly describe the motion of the planets in the skies. The Thunder God's fury at our sins perfectly explains to a small tribe why the rules should be obeyed and why there is thunder and lightning. For those living in a liberal enclave those who would vote for Mike Huckerbee are ignorant rednecks.

When the circles expand enough they touch each other, and then the circles become troubled and complicated. The models of Free Will, Original Sin, Neurology, Newtonian Physics, Justice all wash over each other and complicate things, as it is quite possible to believe in free will, original sin, that neurologists are good at finding out about the brain, that Newton's Laws work and that criminals should be punished all at the same time. However, these models are incompatible with each other. Neurology and Newtonian physics suggest that while people make decisions, they can only make one decision. If people can only make one decision how can they be held responsible for crimes? Original sin means we have to be forgiven, but if time works in both directions it makes as much sense to say that our lives cause original sin through redemption or the lack thereof as it does to say original sin means we must be forgiven.

This doesn't cause much trouble if you retain understanding that all of your understandings are just models, systematic concepts which attempt to describe portions of our experiences. Newtonian Physics can't explain the actions of quarks, but that doesn't bother scientists too much because they just use the appropriate theory in the appropriate place. The possible absence of free will doesn't bother judges and lawyers too much, the most effective model for a criminal justice system is free will. However, many people, perhaps most people, mistake their models for reality. Someone may have a political model, such that those with differing opinions are stupid, hateful and ignorant and this may be held as reality beyond the ability of other influences to change.

This confusion between models and reality is at the heart of Eastern religion/philosophy. Time and time again Eastern religion talks about the illusion of our ideas, of the calming of our mental models and an appreciation of how things are as they are, without concepts. This is usually considered to be a "higher" level of understanding. The truth is that it is impossible to be entirely free of models and concepts. The idea of Enlightenment is of a unity of consciousness of everything, a feeling of light and compassion, of peace. These are all concepts that make up a model of the Universe. It still isn't the Universe, just a different model.

The final problem I want to address is the concept that if there is no complete, perfect truth that humans can understand that there is therefore no right or wrong answer, or that all cultures, ideas and ways of dealing with the world are equally justified. The thing is that there really is a reality that has qualities that can be determined and measured. That an anemometer cannot measure the color of an apple doesn't mean that you can't say whether the apple is red or green with a high level of certainty. In trying to determine whether a child should receive prayer or medical treatment for meningitis it is possible to make a sensible determination, and it isn't based on how fervently a person holds their belief.

You do not experience reality, and you can never truly experience all that there is in reality. Anyone who tells you differently is wrong. You cannot understand in a complete way any complete and ultimate truth. Everything that you think, feel, or experience is based on models of reality. Models are imperfect, and this means that even if you are equipped with the latest and best models about things, you are still certainly wrong about some things. Our understanding of things improves when we understand how we understand things.

Moments and Memories.

I think the essential structure of life is that of a series of moments. There isn't a set amount of time for a moment, nor much of a structure. What a moment is, for my definition, is something that the mind constructs as a thing, a continual structure. So a tree is a tree because we think of it as a complete entity with boundaries.

A moment can be very short, such as the moment in the Alps of Italy were I went off the side of the ski slope and fell through the air, to what I was certain was my death. I landed in several feet of powder perhaps a second later, but that was the moment in which I understood my reaction to death.

A moment can be much longer such as the afternoon I spent with my wife on the beach at Jalapa in Mexico. We sat on deckchairs on the beach sipping beer and watching the beautiful day go by while doing and thinking very little.

Moments make up a large part of our memories, they are what we think of when we think of memories. However, think how many moments you can remember, is it an hundred? A thousand? It's a tricky question, because for a start that's not how memory works. Memory works by association, rather than being a filing cabinet full of memories. However, the amount of moments we remember is much smaller than the amount of life we have lived. We think of our lives as a continual event, but our memory of moments is sporadic and finite. What fills in the gaps?

The gaps between moments in our memories are filled with mood. If you think back to a particular time in your life there will be a flash of a few moments. Times with particular people and places. But overall will be a mood, an emotional summary of that time. I think this is really the core of what people are, and how they make their decisions. This deep-down emotional review of how we are feeling happens usually below our conscious thoughts, but is really how we feel about a place, a time or a person.

I think many people spend an unfortunately enormous amount of time between moments, wafting along on a rather uniform sea of mood. People think of moments as things in the future, goals to achieve, pre-planned memories of moments. Moments can happen at any time, this morning for me the moment was birds singing loudly in the trees in voices foreign to my childhood, an exotic sound which awoke me to how fascinating it is to be where I am. A moment can happen at any time by simply taking the time to notice whether you are in a moment or not.

A life well lived is a series of shining moments adrift on a sea of joy.

The following poem was read at our wedding by Mary-Alice, and she was kind enough to send us a framed copy of the poem as a wedding present.

Look to this day:

For it is life, the very life of life.

In its brief course

Lie all the verities and realities of your existence.

The bliss of growth,

The glory of action,

The splendour of achievement

Are but experiences of time.

For yesterday is but a dream

And tomorrow is only a vision;

And today well-lived, makes

Yesterday a dream of happiness

And every tomorrow a vision of hope.

Look well therefore to this day;

Such is the salutation to the ever-new dawn!

- Kalidasa

How to Write an Irish Song

Up until I was past thirty years old I had never written a song. My first song, which I unfortunately cannot presently remember, was a Valentine's Day song for my present wife strummed on the cheapest electric guitar in the world and mumbled incoherently. This is actually not true, but is near enough true that the improvement over the original story is worth claiming that it is true. This is the first lesson in how to write an Irish song, it should be written and sung and believed to be absolute truth, regardless of how the pedantic might feel.

The Irish song tradition is without doubt a romantic tradition. The subject matter should be love, or pride of place or country, or tragedy. The lyrics should be written in a poem with rhyme and meter, a poem in the traditions of the great romantic poets of Tennyson, Shelley, Byron and Yeats. All poetic tricks of alliteration, repetition, foreshadowing, metaphor should be used with freedom. An archaic phrasing has great effect.

Irish song is attached to the land, the people and the tales of Ireland. When searching for inspiration you should walk in the blustering wind, feel dark, rich earth beneath your feet, sit beside a fire, drink of stout and poiteen, and be surrounded by the rich green of vegetation and never the lurid kelly green of faux Ireland.

As an example of the method I shall use what I consider one of the greatest Irish songs, Raglan Road by Patrick Kavanagh.

An Irish song starts with a time and place, specificity adds authenticity. A time and place produces a framework for the listener to build their image of the scene. In this case, "On Raglan Road of an autumn day," notice the archaic use of "of" (which I may have inserted myself, I think it improves it). This beginning with a time and place is nearly ubiquitous, from "On the fourth of July 1806 and we set sale from the sweet cove of Cork" in the Irish Rover, to "As I was going over the far famed Kerry mountains" of Whiskey in the Jar, to the modern Shane MacGowan's A Pair of Brown Eyes, "One summer evening drunk to Hell I sat there nearly lifeless. An old man in the corner sang where the water lilies grow."

Once a time and place has been established the next step is to paint the foundational image upon which the rest of the song can be built. In this case "That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might someday rue." The image is of long, dark hair. The feeling is of attraction and danger. The line has a very precise meter, and repeated rhymes, one within the line and the other at the end of a rhyming couplet. This sets a pattern for the rest of the poem, and patterns of this sort are vital within Irish music. Irish music is peasant music, it should be immediately accessible without surprises, the opposite of Jazz. In each verse try to return to the imagery of this first image.

At this point we have a time (Autumn), a place (a Dublin street), an image (tangling dark hair), and a feeling (doomed attraction) for the rest of the song. We have a pattern of rhyming couplets with as many rhymes within a half line as possible.

What happens next is that you take this grounding in real time and space and move slowly into the realms of fantasy. In this case Grafton Street is given a deep ravine. In the Irish Rover at a similar point the ship in question starts having seven masts and a million barrels of bones. In The Galway Shawl the fantasy portion starts when the beautiful maiden invites the itinerant minstrel into her home to meet her father. Part of the Irish tradition is a excitement and a fear of fantasy and magic. The little people, the faeries, and so on are beautiful and tempting, living just within a hill or a wood and so within reach of the everyday, but they are unpredictable and dangerous.

The song then comes to a conclusion, in this case the loss of the Angel, with The Irish Rover the sinking of the ship, with The Galway Shawl the minstrel leaves unrequited, in A Pair of Brown Eyes the protagonist stumbles away from the pub towards the loved sounds of long ago.

Now, you may be thinking, he's talked about a poem but nothing to do with the music, how can this be? Well, that's because the music portion is so simple. There are two methods of making Irish songs, one is simply to set the poetry you have written to an ancient Irish tune. In this case Patrick Kavanagh set his poetry to an 18th century air named The Dawning of the Day. Your poem should have a meter to it, when spoken out loud you will be able to tell the rhythm of the music that will go to it, where the beat goes. The alternative method is to simply put the poem into a major key, begin and end with the major chord, put a seventh chord before that final chord and make sure there's a minor chord in there as well. Fiddle with these chords and you'll get something that fits (which will probably already be an Irish tune.

In On Raglan Road the chords are two lines that go in a poetic order of ABBA:

DGDGD
GDBmDA
GDBmDA
DGDGD

There are no key changes, no bridge, no chorus and only two lines simply repeated. The key with the music of Irish music is not to get innovative, to keep it simple, to follow very basic rules. If the basis is good then good musicians can innovate, improvise, enhance and experiment over the top of this structure.

If you get stuck go for a walk in nature, sleep on it and then sometime in the next few days you will discover that you have solved your conundrum without trying.

The most important part is that if you feel a little guilty that you seem to have stolen all the parts of your song from elsewhere and simply slapped them together you are doing it exactly right.

The Illusion of Rational Control

We human beings, particularly those brought up under the cultural influence of the Abrahamic religions (which means pretty much everyone in Europe, the Americas and the Middle East) generally think that the way we do things is by thinking about what we are going to do and them making a decision. This underpins our whole idea of self, of what we think about other people, how we respect some people and hold others in contempt.

This is an illusion.

Actually what happens is that most of our decisions happen unconsciously. Most of our actions occur without conscious thought. Most of what we think about people is completed before we have started to think about them.

The power of the illusion is so strong that most people you tell this to simply don't believe it. I believe it and yet I don't feel convinced by it, which is an odd feeling to have (I feel the same about free will in that I think the evidence convincingly shows we don't have free will, and I believe the evidence, but it really feels like people have free will).

Today I have had the wonderful opportunity to demonstrate to myself how true this really is. a pipe has a leak in our attic, and so our water is turned off. This hasn't stopped me from needing to use the bathroom, but it does mean that I should not flush the toilet afterwards. I have, however, flushed the toilet more times in this scenario than I have managed not to. When do I notice? At the sound of the water flushing, not at the touch of the handle.

If you are interested in how much of your brain is under rational control it is easy to do an experiment on yourself. There are things that you do everyday in a particular manner that could be done in a different method. You probably button up your clothing starting at the top or bottom, or you probably put on shirts before trousers (or the other way round). Try a week of attempting to remember to do it the other way round. Or, when buying coffee see if you can realize when you decided what you would order.