Talk about a 'higher consciousness' superior to reason naturally comforts persons who find mental exertion painful, and notions about transcendental powers naturally console persons who do not have the courage or stamina to confront the realities of a universe that was not made for man. These ideas, in the form in which they are peddled by Uspenski and Orage, are derived from the early Hindu mystics of the Vedas and Upanishads. They did reach a state of exalted consciousness -- by the use of what they called soma, which, as R. G. Weston has shown, was simply the Amanita muscaria, a mushroom that has been for millennia a prime source of religiosity.

Our idealists must own that their velleity to abolish all suffering is most fully expressed in the Fifth Wisdom of Lamaism, the doctrine that teaches that 'no …

The struggle for existence in a universe we did not choose, and the burden of being a member of the only race which values objective, verifiable truth as an en…

In the sixth century B.C., Gautama, an Aryan princeling on the northern frontier of India, formulated a bleakly pessimistic philosophy that markedly resembles …

Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and mo…

I sat reading in these chairs and felt somehow, in an abstract rather than a religious way, that suffering shapes you. Not only my own religious thought, but t…

'Most of the failings of Objectivism all pertain directly or indirectly to issues of psychology.'[1]