Xamuel.com

Just when I was really getting used to my own mortality, a new concept had to come along and change everything: Quantum Immortality. You’ve heard of the Schrodinger’s Cat experiment: seal a cat in a box and arrange so the cat will get gassed if a quantum waveform collapses in a certain way. [...]

Abraham Lincoln once remarked that a man isn’t well-read until he’s read the Bible; if Lincoln were born and raised in Muslim country, he would have said this about the Qu’ran instead. On the advice of this Arab-ham Lincoln, I’ve started reading through an English translation of the Qur’an. I bring a unique [...]

A Buddhist Koan is a short tale used to nudge people closer toward Zen enlightenment. Since I really appreciate and love these witty little verses, I decided I’d share some of my favorites here. At first, I thought I’d garnish them with some detailed commentary and analysis. Then I realized, the verses [...]

What happens when an unstoppable force hits an immovable object? The answer is, it depends whether you’re an orthodox objectolic or a born-again forcestant. Belief is the most powerful agent in the natural universe. It can out-move the unstoppable force and dislodge the immovable object. This is because of [...]

A common argument invoked by critics of an all-powerful deity is: “Why does God let bad things happen?” The idea is that if the universe were run by a super-god with infinite power, then surely He wouldn’t let kids starve to death in Africa. It’s very interesting and illuminating to look at [...]

One of my favorite poems is the Kubla Khan of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (the same poet who penned The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, previously featured on this site). In fact I like this passage so much that, back when I was in high school, I memorized the whole thing. So instead of [...]

When you look at the glass and say it’s half full, that’s an example of an Abundance Mentality. This is in contrast with the opposite, the Scarcity Mentality, through which lens one would call the glass half-empty. Optimism and pessimism. I was a pessimist for most of my childhood, and it did [...]

Genesis is the first book of the Old Testament. Chapter 1 tells the Judeo-Christian creation myth. Below is a modernized version. In my modernized version, the first book of the bible is written to appeal to a solipsistic viewpoint. Solipsism is the philosophical belief that you’re the only conscious being in [...]

Life seems to slip past, and the only real control we have is when we seize the moment and focus on the very present. All the pivotal, radical changes we make in our lives come in such times of present-moment lucidity. When we ask that very special someone that very special question, time [...]

What awaits us at the end of this mortal journey? Is death like a deep sleep, or is it the exact opposite, a waking-up from a deep sleep? There are many different ways of viewing death, and each has its own unique consequences to how we spend life.
Death is……
……A Deep Sleep. This [...]