Posted inDeath/Rebirth Religions

Humans are naturally optimistic. Which helps explain religion.

Most people's brains are hard-wired to generate an optimistic outlook on life. Evolution, it seems, has favored an ability to look into the future and see good things happening. Such is the message of TIME magazine's cover story this week, "The Optimism Bias." It's a highly interesting article. Tali Sharot, the author, says that "optimism starts with what may be the most extraordinary of human talents: mental time travel, the ability to move back and forth through time and space in one's mind." This ability was naturally selected for in the course of Homo sapiens' evolution because it had so…
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Posted inMiscellaneous

One million pageviews. Thanks, blog visitors.

Kind of fitting. It's Memorial Day here in the United States. And today this blog passed a memorable milestone: one million pageviews.  Feels good. Thanks for the good feeling, blog visitors. There's something about a million that's, well, substantial. Not that my ego cares about this meaningless stuff, of course. My many years of meditation have brought me enlightenment and ego-loss. Also, delusions. 
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Posted inReality Spiritual practice/meditation

Yes, us churchless folks are searching for truth

Ooh, I love good questions. Here's four. Nice! Marina offered them up in a comment to a recent blog post. Is there anyone here on this blog who is looking to realise the truth or are we more interested in realising how right we are, how wrong others are?Are we into defending our beliefs and condemning others for theirs?Are we more interested in getting 'facts' about others then finding out 'facts' about ourselves?Are we so much enjoying the 'dramas' that we don't care about the truth, the real truth about ourselves and realising that?Just wondering........ I found these thoughts fascinating,…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus

Rapture did happen last week — spiritually, not physically

Well, I shouldn't have made fun of Harold Camping, Christian evangelical, after his prediction that the Rapture (basically, the second coming of Jesus) would happen a week ago, on May 21. It turns out that Camping was right about the Rapture. But it was an invisible judgment day, not physical. So says Harold Camping, a seemingly reliable source about all things Camping'ish. I have to believe him, in the same sense that I have to believe the Bible, because it says in the Bible "believe the Bible." Anyway, I'm not worried about the Rapture. I was baptized Catholic and had…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Indian guru manifests to a dead person

I got an email message from a friend recently. He keeps up on media reports of what's going on in the life of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, a.k.a. "Baba Ji," the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas in India. Devotees believe that the guru appears to his disciples at the time of their death. So I appreciated the clever one line message -- which included a link to a news story. Who says Baba ji doesn't appear when someone dies?
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Posted inGod Spiritual practice/meditation

Worship should be of something real (which leaves out God)

Yesterday I finished listening to a Philosophy Talk podcast on "Worship." As always, I enjoyed the intelligent insights of the discussants, hosts John Taylor and Ken Perry of Stanford University, plus guest Daniel Speak of Loyola Marymount. This Philosophy Talk program had a different feel, though. Usually religion takes a backseat to secular humanism on the show, as befits the emphasis on philosophy (literally, from the Greek, "love of wisdom"). In this case, while Speak didn't broadcast his Christianity at full volume it was an obvious murmur that could be heard to some degree in just about every statement that…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation Vedanta/Advaita

“The Ultimate Twist” — honest, creative, appealingly unconvincing

Suzanne Foxton, author of "The Ultimate Twist," is an occasional commenter on this blog. She has her own nonduality-oriented blog, Nothing Exists, Despite Appearances. (Tagline: "All there is, is this, exactly as it is") That last sentiment sums up how I felt about her book after I finished reading it. I liked Suzanne's honesty and creativity. Yet my attitude toward nonduality was unchanged by her 116 well-written pages. Knowing that she'd written a novella based on her own life, I was eager to learn about Suzanne's struggle with addiction and other problems that come with being human. However, I also…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

How Sant Mat is moving from duality to oneness

OshoRobbins has put up an interesting series of three videos that explain the difference between Sant Mat 1.0 and Sant Mat 2.0. I've blogged about this in "Sant Mat, version 2.0" and "Has Gurinder Singh revised to Sant Mat to v. 3.0?" Whatever the version number, these YouTube presentations do a good job of making clear how the Radha Soami Satsang Beas version of the Sant Mat philosophy has evolved to become a far different creature from the traditional teachings. More broadly, OshoRobbins points out how a dualistic view of God, heaven, soul, and such can't co-exist with a monistic…
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Posted inGod Religions Science

Religion is like a placebo with no active ingredient

So you don't believe in God, but you want the benefits that come with being religious: feeling special, not being afraid of dying, embraced by a loving divine power, and such. No problem. You can keep your atheism or agnosticism and have your Godly presence also. This is the message that I draw from a fascinating study about placebos, which found they can be medically effective even when people know they're getting a fake drug. Patients can benefit from being treated with sham drugs even if they are told they contain no active ingredient, scientists have found. The finding suggests…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus

Thank God — the excessively religious 2011 Survivor is over

My wife and I barely survived watching Survivor: Redemption Island. There was so much irritating God-talk from Matt Elrod and his fellow Christians, we felt like we were going to overdose on religious absurdity. Our greatest fear was that some "Praise God, it's all His will!" contestant would win this reality show. Thankfully, pleasingly duplicitous (and seemingly non-religious) Boston Rob came through, finally becoming the Sole Survivor after four tries. Not surprisingly, the Christian Post loved Matt. The guy kept saying that God was keeping him going during his extended stay on Redemption Island, where he had to win duel…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus

A poetic debate about hell

Some influential Christians are starting to say "Perhaps there is no hell." Others hold firm to a belief in heaven's antithesis. Recently I got together with a friend, Patricia Herron. She's both philosophically and artistically minded. During our chat she gave me a copy of a poem, introduced with some prose, that she wrote. It's a dialogue between a believer and nonbeliever in hell. The nonbeliever gets to say the most, probably because Patricia, like me, doesn't put much stock in all of this hell talk. Have a read. And then, add a comment if you like. As Patricia says…
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Posted inBuddhism Radha Soami Satsang Beas Science

The reasons we give for what we do: are they reasonable?

About a week ago Marina, a visitor to this blog, asked me to explain why I left the spiritual organization that I'd belonged to for about thirty-five years. She then reminded me that I hadn't answered her question, asking again: What made you leave RS [Radha Soami Satsang Beas] – a major thing or a nagging feeling over the years? I pointed her to a partial compendium of posts that I've written for this blog, quite a few of which addressed this question. But something kept nagging at me as I thought about her first three words. What made you...…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Someone asks about my failure to reach heaven

Today I got an email from someone who has a theory about why I've been occasionally critical of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) and the guru of this India-based organization, Gurinder Singh Dhillon. I could have responded to him privately, but I figured that I might as well make a blog post out of his message and my reply. (My responses are in plain type below; my correspondent's words are indented and italicized.) Sach Khand, which is mentioned in the message, is the Sikh religion's "heaven." As described here, Sach Khand is considered to be both a state of consciousness…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Amazing changes in Radha Soami Satsang Beas teachings

Imagine the Pope saying, "Jesus wasn't really the Son of God. There isn't any heaven. God is just a state of consciousness. No one divine will meet you when you die." It'd be more than a little shocking, to put it mildly. The head of a religion almost always defends the faith, preserving the core of traditional dogma while merely making small changes in other aspects of the teachings. But reports keep coming in that the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based mystical/spiritual organization with millions of initiates in many countries around the world, has been undermining…
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Posted inReality Spiritual practice/meditation

The profundity — or not — of “it is what it is”

An Urban Dictionary entry for it is what it is shows that this phrase is deeply irritating to some people. A trite, overused and infuriatingly meaningless cliche that is utilized by provincials who think they are adding some deep, meaningful insight during a discussion when all they are offering is senseless, unwarranted repetitiveness to what would otherwise be a far better conversation had they not shown the shallowness of the gene pool they spawned from by using this asininely useless and redundant phrase to begin with. An interesting conversation is being had, when quite suddenly: Robin: My house burned down…
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Posted inGod

How to lose God

Here's an indication of how iconoclastic my morning meditation has become since I evolved into my churchless phase. Today a powerful intuition suddenly popped into my mind. Lose God. It's the way to wisdom. For over thirty-five years I was dedicated -- maybe even obsessed -- with finding God. I dove deeply into mysticism and meditation, hoping to locate divinity at the core of my consciousness. No luck. So far as I can tell. Of course, since no one knows for sure if God exists, and, if so, how God would appear to humans like us, it's possible that divinity…
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Posted inReligions

Saints are imperfect

Here's something for believers in sainthood and heroic human perfection to reflect upon: Hampton Sides' "Shattered Faith" in Newsweek. On some level, we still subscribe to the myth of the man in the white hat. We yearn to believe not only in his good deeds but in his inherent goodness as a person. Perhaps it’s something rooted in our Puritan past, but we seem to have a monochromatic view of heroism. We have a hard time believing that the doer of a heroic deed could have serious defects or even be rotten to the core. Heroes are supposed to be…
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Posted inScience

Scientific reasons for why people don’t believe science

We all wear mental blinders. That's the nature of how the mind/brain works: we perceive reality through cultural, neurological, genetic, emotional, and other filters. Science is one of the best ways to see things more clearly. Individually we're prone to significant biases. Collectively, though, it's possible to systematically correct for blind spots and home in on a truthful perspective. I came across an interesting article by Chris Mooney in Mother Jones, "The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science." It starts off by describing a cult, the Seekers, who thought they were communicating with aliens, including an astral incarnation of…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Has Gurinder Singh revised Sant Mat to v. 3.0?

Sant Mat is an Indian mystical philosophy that can be translated as "path of truth." I was an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), one of the various Sant Mat branches, for about thirty-five years. Back in the old days, the RSSB guru taught that spiritual truth was unchanging. But with a new guru, we've got new truths. To me, that's refreshing. It's probably disconcerting to those who held a rigid fundamentalist view of Sant Mat, though. Five years ago I wrote a post about "Sant Mat, version 2.0." This is how I summarized the changes that Gurinder…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Life lessons I’ve learned boogie boarding

Here's another in my series of What I've learned about life by boogie boarding. (For previous posts, see here, here, and here. This guy could be me. Except I was holding the camera on the beach and my hair is gray. But a little while earlier I was catching some similarly middling-sized waves at this exact spot on Maui, enjoying myself hugely. I've done a lot of boogie boarding, a.k.a. bodyboarding. A few years ago I wrote some do's and don'ts, quasi-humbly noting that my style was "not bad." Since, I've improved my boogie boarding. Both on the physical and…
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