Posted inBooks Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Guru Gurinder Singh is sounding a lot like Alan Watts

Since there are quite a few devotees of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) who use the comment sections of my blog posts as sort of a Sant Mat discussion venue, I wanted to revisit the question of how the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh, has been altering Sant Mat teachings to a surprising degree. A blog post of mine from 2011, "Has Gurinder Singh revised Sant Mat to v. 3.0?" summarized these changes. Five years ago I wrote a post about "Sant Mat, version 2.0." This is how I summarized the changes that Gurinder Singh apparently has made to the…
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Posted inBooks Mystics Radha Soami Satsang Beas

I respond to criticism of my book that I no longer fully believe in

As noted in a post three weeks ago, I've gotten God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder back in print, even though I no longer believe in much of the mystical/spiritual aspect of the book.  Spencer Tepper, a frequent commenter on this blog, bought a copy of the book, which I appreciate. I also appreciate a comment he left where he critiqued some of what I said in the first part of God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder. It's a bit strange that I feel the need to defend a book that I don't totally believe in, but Tepper focused on a topic that I…
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Posted inBuddhism Death/Rebirth

Zen’s tiger and strawberry story is about dealing with death

The older I get -- I'm 69 -- the more I resonate with the Zen story of a man who had a bad day when he was chased by a tiger. Which turned into a much worse day when another tiger and a couple of mice showed up.  A man was walking across a field when he saw a tiger. Fearing for his life, the man fled, but the tiger gave chase. The man reached the edge of a cliff, and just as he thought the tiger would get him, he spotted a vine growing over the edge of the…
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Posted inBooks Taoism/Tai Chi

The Book of Chuang Tzu praises uselessness

There's religious, spiritual, philosophical, and mystical writings. Then there's The Book of Chuang Tzu.  It stands apart, because there's nothing else like it. This Taoist classic is humorous, crazy, confusing, paradoxical, entertaining, wise, weird, and so much else besides.  I've read it several times, in various translations. It's one of my favorite books, in large part because there's no way to pin down exactly what's being taught in the collection of, as the back cover says, "the stories, tales, jokes and anecdotes that have gathered around the figure of Chuang Tzu." Since I'm feeling increasingly useless, the older I get,…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

“Burner on!” episode shows danger in trusting our intuition

Many religiously-minded people put a lot of stock in feelings. Meaning, those intuitions that appear full-blown in the mind, seemingly from out of nowhere, that just seem So Absolutely True, they demand to be believed.  Like, God is love, Jesus is watching over me, and such. Well, last weekend I had an experience that calls into question the veracity of intuitions like that. It started with my Sunday morning habit of making pancakes for breakfast.  More accurately, one large pancake. Which I cook in a correspondingly large pan, that's heated by a large burner on our electric cooktop.  After eating…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth

Being religious won’t save you from suicide

Just came across this piece by Jesse Bering in Skeptic, "No, Being Religious Will Not Save You From Suicide." Well worth reading. Makes some great points. Here's an excerpt. Among the more obnoxious things I’ve read in the wake of Anthony Bourdain’s death is that if only he had been a man of faith, he wouldn’t have taken his own life. Consider the almost sneering commentary offered by Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, in a syndicated piece written less than a day after the rogue chef’s body was found hanging by the belt…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Mindfulness has become my meditation

Back in my true-believing religious days, when I embraced an Eastern form of mysticism that espoused several hours of daily eyes-closed meditation, I thought that the ultimate aim of life was to experience higher realms of reality beyond the physical. Of course, I had a job to go to, a wife and daughter, worldly activities I enjoyed. But I viewed these as mostly distinct from my spiritual goal of god-realization -- those things were part of my karma; important, yet not what my life's highest purpose was all about. I'm grateful that my eyes have been opened to the flaws…
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Posted inHappiness

Happiness lies in ordinary things

Am I happier since I gave up the fantasy of religion? Probably. It's a big relief to not have a cosmic weight on my back -- the expectation that I need to do this and that, plus that and this, in order to be worthy of being admitted to God's heavenly realm.  That's a lot of pressure, believing that the fate of my supposedly immortal soul rests on whether I've been fortunate enough to find a path that leads to God-realization, and, having hopefully found the right path, on whether my efforts to follow it will meet with success. In…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth

Death of 14-year-old boy shows appeal of religion

Death sucks. But death is inevitable. It happens to everybody. There's no exceptions. Yet for senior citizens  like me -- I'm 69 -- we've had many years of living that make our eventual demise seem, if not appealing, at least part of the natural course of things. A child's death, though... that's a whole different thing. Today I read a story in our local newspaper, the Salem Statesman Journal, about the death of a 14-year-old boy from a rare form of bone cancer.  It was heartbreaking.  Jack Schumacher lived for baseball. He was good at math, loved LEGOs and loved…
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Posted inBooks Personal/Stories

“God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder” is back in print, shorter and simplified

Big news! Also, kind of weird news.  Now-atheist me has gotten a second edition of the book written by previous-religious-believer me back in print. It took me many years to do this after the initial publisher went of business, but I finally got around to it. (Note: the paperback version was available May 8 on Amazon, but it took this long for a Kindle version to be prepared, then linked to the paperback listing on Amazon.) Yes, Amazon has "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder: Echoes of Spiritual Reality in the New Physics" available for $13 in paperback and $3.99 for the…
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