Posted inConsciousness God Reality

God, like money, is real only because of the human mind

As I noted in a previous post about Lisa Feldman Barrett's book, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, I'm enjoying the book more now that I'm past the introductory chapters. One reason is that Barrett doesn't just describe how emotions are made. She embeds that description in larger issues. For example, her "Emotions As Social Reality" chapter starts off with the classic question, If a tree falls in the forest and no one is present to hear it, does it make a sound? Even though I should know better, when I ponder this question my first…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas

The “magic” in magical moments comes from our own mind

After including a quote in a previous blog post about how we construct the environment in which we live, thanks to how the human brain functions, I got to thinking about the implications for magical moments. We all have them, though it's difficult to say whether there's much agreement between people as to what constitutes a magical moment. Here's some examples from my life, using my own intuitive definition. Birth of my daughterCatching big waves on Maui with my boogie boardMarrying my wifeSeeing Janis Joplin perform in person Taking mescaline with a friend in the Sierra Nevada mountainsSpending two weeks in…
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Posted inNeuroscience Science

Feelings are an unreliable guide to reality

Thanks to a Church of the Churchless commenter who mentioned Lisa Feldman Barrett's book about how emotions are uniquely fashioned out of our experiences and environment, rather than appearing ready-made the same way in every human brain, I've been reading How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain with increasing enjoyment now that I'm past the initial introductory chapters. Barrett, a psychologist and neuroscientist, makes a strong case for her admittedly out-of-the-mainstream view of what emotions are and how they come to be. She cites lots of research, both her own and that of others, as she systematically…
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Posted inMeaning of life

“Soul,” the animated movie, has good lessons for living

Tonight my wife and I watched "Soul" while we ate our usual vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner: Trader Joe's Breaded Turkey-Less Stuffed Roast With Gravy, mashed potatoes, salad, homemade apple pie with wholewheat crust. That's a soulful meal for us. No animals were harmed in its making. Well, our dog begged while we were eating, and she didn't get anything, so I guess we hurt Mooka's feelings. She'll recover. Soul had arrived as a DVD from Netflix months ago. We rarely watch DVDs now that we've escaped the clutches of oh-so-slow CenturyLink DSL and embraced Space X's Starlink satellite internet. But it…
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Posted inHope

Hope is the forward-looking side of thankfulness

Tomorrow is the Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States. So I feel like I should write something about being thankful. Problem is, I've got doubts about the value of that. After all, for everything I can feel thankful for, there's a seemingly equally large bunch of things that I'm not thankful for.  Yet we don't celebrate a Notthankful holiday, though maybe we should for the yin-yang balance. Rather than thankfulness, I was leaning toward fashioning a blog post on the theme of hope -- which strikes me as being the forward-looking side of thankfulness.  Meaning, we're thankful for good…
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Posted inReality

Ultimate reality doesn’t exist, says physicist Carlo Rovelli

When I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based religious organization, for quite a few years I gave frequent talks to the RSSB faithful. One of my favorite topics was ultimate reality. I loved those two words. Putting ultimate before the familiar reality produced a wonderful feeling of transcendent potential wisdom in me. Not that I really knew what ultimate reality was. It was an aspiration, a goal to be pursued through daily meditation and the other aspects of the RSSB teachings. Now, I hardly ever think about ultimate reality. Except when it comes up in a book…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Shabnam Dhillon’s “usual address” belonged to RSSB insiders

Someone just sent me information regarding the house in England shown on Shabnam Dhillon's death certificate as her "usual address."  She was the wife of the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), Gurinder Singh Dhillon. Since RSSB headquarters are in India, it was a surprise to me to see that an English house was shown as Shabnam's usual address.  The person also sent along a Google description of when an inquest is performed after someone dies, which happened in this case. A coroner must hold an inquest if: the cause of death is still unknown the person might have…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus Politics

Christian Nationalism defeated in Pennsylvania, but still scary

Politics is divisive and arouses strong emotions. Religions are divisive and arouse strong emotions. Mix politics with religion, and not surprisingly the worst qualities of each can combine in a toxic combination. Such is evident in countries around the world where dogmatic religion fuses with narrow-minded nationalism. Iran. India. Saudi Arabia. Israel. There are others, including the United States. This was personified in the recent midterm election here in the United States by Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania.  Fortunately, Mastriano lost to Democrat Josh Shapiro by a large margin: 56% to 42%. But in the runup…
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Posted inMindfulness

Mindfulness made simple, by my own mind

I like mindfulness a lot. It's become my favorite approach to meditation. But given how many books I've read about mindfulness, I'm struck by how overly complicated this activity can be described. Which I think says more about the economics of the book business than about mindfulness. After all, few people want to buy a book that's just a few pages long. So authors who write about this subject have to say a lot about something that appears to me to be quite simple. Thus here's my exceedingly brief summary of how I've come to view mindfulness. Naturally others likely…
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Posted inAwareness

Once again, pure awareness strikes me as a meaningless notion

I don't expect people to be perfect. Everybody is flawed. To be human is to be imperfect. And since people write books, I don't expect the books I read to be perfect. I just hope for them to make sense. Having finished The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness, I can say that this is a very good book about both mindfulness and meditation.  But I came across a few things that made me go, Huh, that doesn't make sense. Notably, some mentions of pure awareness, since I don't see how such can exist, as noted in…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Here’s Shabnam Dhillon’s death certificate (wife of RSSB guru)

Having been an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) for about 35 years, I follow goings-on with RSSB when they come to my attention. That includes news involving the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon. On November 26, 2019 I wrote a blog post, "Shabnam Dhillon, wife of RSSB guru, has died." I included a Business Today story about her death which said in part: Shabnam Dhillon, wife of Radha Soami Satsang Beas head Gurinder Singh Dhillion, has passed away in London. She was 57 years old. According to a statement before Delhi High Court, Shabnam went to…
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Posted inPolitics

How the media and Republicans got the election so wrong

Being a political junkie -- someone who has loved to follow politics since my childhood -- I feel like my immersion in the United States midterm election that happened last Tuesday, and whose votes are still being counted, should enable me to draw some philosophical conclusions from what happened. Well, at least I'll give that a try.  The gist of what happened, for those who don't live in the United States and/or don't follow American politics closely, is that the widely predicted Republican "Red Wave" turned out to be a Red Ripple, if even that. Both the mainstream media and…
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Posted inMindfulness

Feel more with the body, less with the mind

When someone asks "How are you feeling?" that familiar question contains within it a lot of profundity. Because how we answer it reveals quite a bit about ourselves. Mostly I take a few moments to think about what I've been doing recently. You know, how well or poorly my day is going. Or week for a longer time span. I'd remember what's been bothering me and what's been pleasing me, then try to describe the net effect of my joys and sorrows. There's nothing wrong with this. But reading "The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness" has…
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Posted inPolitics

Why unhappiness with tomorrow’s election will be universal

With today being midterm election day here in the United States, I may be too obsessed with following election results on TV tonight to write a post for this blog. But a post I wrote yesterday for my political blog, "Everyone will be unhappy with tomorrow's election," has some philosophical undertones. Maybe even overtones.  It ends with: So soon I'll be looking on the bright side. And also on the dark side. Such is life. And politics.
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Posted inMindfulness Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Why I find mindfulness so appealing after 35 years of religion

Having given up on organized religion, an Eastern/Indian variety, after 35 years of embracing the lure of returning to God by traversing supernatural realms, I've become enamored of mindfulness. (See here and here for some previous blog posts explaining why.) Before making another attempt at this, this is how a book I'm reading, and enjoying, "The Mindful Way Through Depression," describes mindfulness. As we said toward the end of the preceding chapter, mindfulness is the awareness that arises from paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally, to things as they are. It's a way of shifting from doing…
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Posted inBooks Mindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

Instead of trying to fix ourselves, it’s better to be just be ourselves

One of the joys of reading for me is finding connections between seemingly disparate books. As I wrote about a few days ago, I'm reading a book about depression and mindfulness. I've also started a book by a neuroscientist, "Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness." Patrick House, the author, says that he doesn't agree with all of those ways, but in brief creatively-written chapters he makes the case for each way in accord with how proponents argue for it. In his first of the nineteen ways, House puts us in the place of a sea creature. It needs fast reflexes…
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Posted inBooks Mindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

I’m reading a good book about depression and mindfulness

Given how disturbing it's been for me to endure four days of non-functionality from Typepad, my blogging service, following a failed data migration to new servers (shared that post on Blogger since Typepad is so screwed up at the moment), I guess it was good timing that I got a book from Amazon about depression and mindfulness.  Not that I'm actually clinically depressed, though I was at one point in my life, about five years ago. What attracted me to "The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness," was a reader review on Amazon that said this was one…
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