Posted inBooks Buddhism

“No mind” in Zen doesn’t mean what most people think it does

Something led me this morning to take a look at a book I'd already read, James Austin's Meditating Selflessly: Practical Neural Zen. Austin is a clinical neurologist, researcher, and long-time Zen practitioner, so his background is right up my reading alley. And I enjoyed re-reading the first few pages of his book. But the Great God Google, whose presence I feature in a search box in the right sidebar of this blog, led me to a couple of posts I wrote in 2011, when I bought this book. Turns out that I didn't resonate all that much with it, according…
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Posted inMorality

Good friends of mine prove that morality doesn’t require religion

Last night my wife and I attended a 61st anniversary celebration of a couple we've known for a long time, Russ and Delana Beaton.  When I got home, I wrote a blog post about the evening. Excerpt: Laurel, my wife, and I have known the Beatons for a long time, over 25 years. If there's one word that describes them, its nice. If you want two words, nice and caring. Going for three, nice and caring and competent.  After a moving slide show of their married life narrated in a poetic rhyming fashion by their children, other people spoke about…
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Posted inScience Universe

Science says about dark energy: “So the mystery continues”

One of the most amazing scientific facts is how much of the universe is unknown to science. About 95%. As discussed in the NASA article below (I copied it from a NASA web site), currently about 68% of all the stuff in the universe is considered to be dark energy, and nobody knows what it is. Another 27% is dark matter, and nobody knows what it is. That leaves 5% normal matter, and we do know what that is.  Except the article says, Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn't be called "normal" matter at all, since it is…
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Posted inGod Politics

School board ditches pledge of allegiance due to “under God” language

Nice to see the Fargo, North Dakota school board did the right thing and stopped saying the Pledge of Allegiance at its meetings after a school board member made some great arguments about why this didn't fit with their policy of inclusion. After all, "under God" does indeed refer to the Judeo-Christian god. If the pledge said "under gods, or no god," that would be an accurate reflection of the wide variety of religious beliefs in the United States, which includes atheists and agnostics who don't believe in any god. To see a brief video of the persuasive argument used…
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Posted inUniverse

The universe is mind-blowingly huge

In my current atheist state of mind, I find thoughts about God thoroughly uninspiring. After all, how is it possible to be inspired or awestruck by an entity that almost certainly doesn't exist? Or at the very least, has no demonstrable evidence in support of its existence. But the universe... Ah, that's something which obviously exists, and science knows enough about it for awe to be an entirely reasonable reaction to the immensity that not only surrounds us, but is us. The July 30 issue of New Scientist features a cover story called Your Brief Guide to Everything Ever: An…
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Posted inBuddhism Morality

Treat yourself like you would a friend: gently, kindly, compassionately

Loving-kindness meditation as I've learned it typically starts off with an "I" statement, then moves on to "you" and "all." As in May I be happy... May you be happy... May all be happy. Sometimes this rubs me the wrong way, as it seems egotistical to start off with an intention for my happiness, and only then visualize someone close to me (usually my wife) and all of humanity being happy. But given the way most people treat themselves, it does seem like it makes sense to extend loving-kindness to our own self before extending it to others. Often we're…
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Posted inBooks Science

Chatter is our inner voice gone rogue

There's nothing wrong with the voice that speaks inside our head. It's a vital part of being human. But as Ethan Gross describes in his captivating book, Chatter, the conversations we have with ourselves can become as annoying as being trapped on a long plane flight with a person sitting next to us who talks about stupid stuff and just won't shut up. Chatter consists of the cyclical negative thoughts and emotions that turn our singular capacity for introspection into a curse rather than a blessing. It puts our performance, decision making, relationships, happiness, and health in jeopardy. We think…
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Posted inAlan Watts Taoism/Tai Chi

Alan Watts: live life like a cat falling out of a tree

Recently on Facebook I saw this quote from a book by Alan Watts, What is Tao? Makes a lot of sense to live life like a falling cat. Not too tense. Not too rigid. Just the right amount of relaxation. The same attitude of relaxed gentleness [practiced in judo] is most beautifully seen when you watch cats climbing trees. When a cat falls out of a tree, it lets go of itself. The cat becomes completely relaxed, and lands lightly on the ground. But if a cat were about to fall out of a tree and suddenly made up its mind…
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Posted inAwareness Science

The brain creates the mind, which is us

Today Ron E. left a comment on a recent churchless post that I like a lot and share below. I readily admit that my fondness for the comment, which extends to almost all of the comments Ron leaves on this blog, largely is based on the fact that he and I look at reality in much the same way. In a word, naturalistically. Meaning, we as human beings are not separate from the natural world, but are an integral aspect of nature. Nature is us, to put it in three words. But since we're Homo sapiens, not a rock, a…
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Posted inScience

Having a minimal sense of self isn’t a good thing

My problem with people who elevate the human "self" into something grandiose -- like an eternal soul -- is that they muddy the waters regarding what the self truly is. An article in the August 2022 issue of Scientific American, "Creating Our Sense of Self," goes a long way toward clearing things up.Download How Our Brain Preserves Our Sense of Self - Scientific American The first paragraphs lay out the basics of the self.  We are all time travelers. Every day we experience new things as we travel forward through time. As we do, the countless connections between the nerve…
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Posted inConsciousness

Our inner voice is linked to our various selves

Most of us have an inner voice speaking to us inside our mind. It can either be voluntary, as when I read "Most of us have an inner voice" and can hear those words silently echo within my brain. It can also be involuntary, as when I do something wrong and hear "You're an idiot" admonishing me without my consciously willing those words. This inner voice generally is taken for granted. It's just part of our mental background.  But a few years ago, when I was into vaping cartridges filled with concentrated cannabis oil (marijuana is legal here in Oregon),…
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Posted inAwareness Reality Science

Prior experiences and assumptions determine how we view reality

As I've noted previously on this blog, one of the spiritual phrases that now irritates me, yet used to make sense to me, is "as it is."  There's a mistaken notion that it's possible to see reality as it is, objectively. That notion gets elevated into various sorts of mumbo-jumbo where this or that meditation technique, or whatever, supposedly gives someone the ability to perceive what is actually there with no trace of illusion. Today I finished reading another chapter in David McRaney's book, How Minds Change. "Socks and Crocs" was super-fascinating. I'll try to do the chapter justice in…
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Posted inReality

There isn’t nature and humans. Nature is all there is, including us.

Recently a hugely important bill that, in part, contains hundreds of billions of dollars to fight global warming, passed the U.S. Senate with exactly zero support from Republicans.  This is so crazy, it makes people in mental hospitals seem positively sane.  There's no logical or empirical basis for the conservative claim of a need to balance human economic interests with environmental interests. Not when it comes to global warming, which threatens to upend human civilization if greenhouse gas emissions aren't cut dramatically, and soon. Nature isn't a nice thing to preserve. Nature is what we are.  It's absurd to consider…
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Posted inScience

Anecdotes no substitute for good arguments and evidence

Here's a cartoon from the Skeptical Science web site, which is skeptical about global warming skepticism. It makes a great point about the limitations of personal experience and isolated examples. Whenever someone claims to have experienced the presence of God or some other supernatural phenomena, a valid response is "So what?" People claim that all sorts of crazy stuff are true. A lot more than a claim is needed before anyone else takes them seriously.
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Science

Best way to change someone’s mind is to let them change it on their own

I've read another chapter in How Minds Change, by David McRaney. This one is called "Deep Canvassing," as opposed to the shallow sort of canvassing that I've done occasionally where you knock on the door of a person you want to encourage to vote in a certain way, have a brief chat with them, and hand them a brochure about your favored candidate. Deep Canvassing is the brainchild of a California group, the Leadership LAB (stands for Learn Act Build), which is the political action arm of the Los Angeles LGBT Center, the largest LGBTQ organization on earth. The LAB…
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Posted inBuddhism

Great Zen story about letting go

Recently I tried to tell someone about a story in the Zen Flesh, Zen Bones book that I've had since my college days, 1966-71.  (It's got a price of 95 cents on the cover. I see that Amazon has a copy of that 1961 edition listed for $81.53. But to me its priceless (almost), I've enjoyed the book so much over the years.) When I checked the book today, I found that while I'd gotten the gist of the story correct, but not the details. Regardless, I really like the story. Great advice about letting go, whether of the past…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus Fundamentalism

Leaving dogma behind is like discarding a confining diving suit

I've read a couple of chapters in David McRaney's book, "How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion."  One chapter I skipped ahead to read, because I was curious to learn how some people enmeshed in the hateful Westboro Baptist Church were able to leave this Christian cult.  (The book says Westboro members would do things like protesting the funeral of Matthew Shepard, "a young gay man who was beaten, tortured, and left for dead in a remote portion of Wyoming by two men who offered him a ride home from a bar. At his funeral, the…
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Posted inScience Universe

In science, intuition arises from facts, not facts from intuition

I found a column by Chandra Prescod-Weinstein in the July 9, 2022 issue of New Scientist interesting for several reasons.  This professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire has a take on the expanding universe that I hadn't come across before. As she says in the column, the simplest way to describe this is a familiar one: just as the distance between dots on a balloon that fills with air will increase as the balloon expands, so do galaxies within our universe. But this image is misleading, because a balloon exists in a larger reality, like…
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