Posted inBuddhism Morality Spiritual practice/meditation

Tonglen seems like a good practice, if it is more than mental

Today I read a talk in Pema Chödrön's book, The Wisdom of No Escape, where she explained to her Buddhist retreat students what the practice of tonglen is all about -- something I'd never heard about before. I found a web page where Chödrön describes tonglen in the same way as she did in her book. Check out "How to Practice Tonglen." Here's an excerpt. Tonglen practice, also known as “taking and sending,” reverses our usual logic of avoiding suffering and seeking pleasure. In tonglen practice, we visualize taking in the pain of others with every in-breath and sending out…
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Posted inFundamentalism Politics

Israel on verge of becoming a Jewish authoritarian nation

Fairly frequently religious people say that atheists like me overstate the danger of fundamentalism. The argument goes, "What's the harm in religion? Everybody should be free to believe in whatever they want to, whether it be God or whatever." Well, what's happening in Israel right now is a great example of why fundamentalism is so dangerous. Since Israel was founded after the horror of the Holocaust, there's no problem with the country being largely Jewish. But right-wing Jewish fundamentalists are determined to go much farther than that. They want to put the judicial system in Israel under the control of…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Stoic gods are useful even though they don’t exist

I enjoy believing in Gods that don't exist. You get the benefit of a higher power but without the drawback of taking a fantasy to be real. A few days ago I started reading a book about a modern approach to Stoicism, The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher's Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient by William B. Irvine.  Irvine begins his book by relating a tale of how, after several attempts to repair a plane's cargo door had failed, with an extended delay in taking off, a gate agent announced that the passengers would have to wait until morning…
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Posted inReality Science

I’ve finished “The One.” It ended up kind of ho-hum.

Well, some books end with a rousing crescendo. Others end with a deflating sense of ho-hum. I can't say that Heinrich Pas' The One: How an Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics was totally in the latter category for me, but it was close to it. I've been writing about the book because I'm fascinated by quantum mechanics and have read quite a few books that explore the possible meaning of this field, apart from the undeniable success of the mathematics of it -- which makes possible so much of our modern technology. Pas deserves a lot of praise…
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Posted inUncategorized

Evidence that RSSB is an uncaring organization

I was busy yesterday so forgot to check Typepad's spam folder for this blog. I just discovered a comment on my "Another strange use of force at a RSSB meeting" post that was in the spam folder. Wow. This shows for sure that Radha Soami Satsang Beas is an uncaring organization, based on how horribly a man was treated who simply wanted to ask a question of the RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon.  Since the guru allows crap like this to happen, it's obvious that the guru is uncaring also. Makes me so glad I left this so-called "spiritual" group.…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism

Now is the key. Now, now, now.

Pema Chödrön is one of my favorite writers about Buddhism. She's an American Buddhist nun and one of the foremost students of Chogyam Trungpa, a renowned meditation master. Here's some excerpts from a wonderful little book by Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape.  I love how she describes meditation as simply attending to who we are right now, with no intent of improving ourselves. The book is a collection of talks she gave during a one-month practice period in 1989, which explains some repetition in what I've shared below, which come from the first eight of eighteen talks in the…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Another strange use of force at a RSSB meeting

Below you can read a message I got a few days ago from someone who attended a Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) meeting in the United Kingdom where volunteers dragged out a questioner in the presence of the RSSB guru. I was asked what I thought about what happened, along with some more general questions, and to share the message and my response on this blog. Glad to oblige. My comments are in bold, interspersed with the message. Naturally I thought about another example in 2019 of heavy-handed RSSB sevadars/volunteers at a center in England that Osho Robbins described in…
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Posted inReality Science Universe

Religion hates mystery. Science loves mystery.

Recently there's been a comment conversation on this blog about the religious philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, a medieval Christian. I've never been interested in his theology, since like most avid religious believers, Aquinas wants to use philosophy to defend his faith, not to engage in a search for truth. Wikipedia has a cogent criticism of Aquinas by Bertrand Russell. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already…
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Posted inReality Science Universe

New Scientist story by Heinrich Päs about quantum oneness

I got excited when I saw the cover of the most recent issue of New Scientist that appeared in our mailbox a few days ago. Ooh! "A bold new way to think about how the universe fits together" Bring it on! When I turned to the cover story, which is called Reality Reconstructed in the print edition, I saw that the author was Heinrich Päs, the theoretical physicist who wrote The One: How An Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics, which I've written previous blog posts about here, here, and here.  As noted in the third post, Päs devotes…
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Posted inReality Religions Science

Einstein: “It is the theory which decides what can be observed”

Here's my third post about Heinrich Pas' book The One: How An Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics, the previous posts being here and here. In my reading I've reached a sort of interlude in-between the first and last parts of the book, each of which deal fairly directly with a monistic interpretation of quantum mechanics, which explains The One title. But two intervening chapters, "The Struggle for One" and "From One to Science and Beauty," focus on the historic struggle between monism and dualism in Western thought (there's very little mention of Eastern thought, which also has monistic and dualistic…
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Posted inBooks Reality Science

The “many worlds” of quantum mechanics arguably is a “single world”

Here's my second post about Heinrich Pas' book The One: How An Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics, the first post being here.  I realize that probably I'm more interested in quantum mechanics than most people visiting this blog, so I'll do my best to make my posts about the book as simple as possible. Which isn't easy, since quantum mechanics is confusing at best and totally mystifying at worst -- at least for those of us who aren't professional physicists, and even they readily admit that much about quantum mechanics is difficult to grasp. The so-called "measurement problem," for…
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Posted inBooks Reality Science

“The One” is a fresh look at the meaning of quantum mechanics

There's been two big problems with attempts to fathom the meaning of quantum mechanics (the commonly used term by scientists in that field, rather than quantum physics). New Age types, along with other mystically-inclined fans of quantum mechanics, make too much of what quantum mechanics means -- spouting indefensible notions of how we create our own reality, consciousness pervades the cosmos, and such. Physicists, along with others who work with the applications of quantum mechanics, typically make too little of what quantum mechanics means -- proclaiming that all that counts is the astoundingly precise mathematics underlying this field, often encapsulated…
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Posted inBuddhism Science

Buddhism and quantum physics both point toward One

I feel a duty to report on how the subject I've been writing about recently, Rob Burbea's book about Buddhist teachings, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising, ends. There wasn't a big surprise in the final pages. Burbea had been steadily building a case for emptiness being the foundation of both inner and outer reality, so it wasn't a shock when the final chapter concluded, in a thoroughly Buddhist fashion, that the world as it seems (distinct separate objects) and the world as it really is (empty of inherent existence) amount to the same thing. Burbea writes: We…
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Posted inBuddhism Radha Soami Satsang Beas Religions

Can your religion survive without supernaturalism? Buddhism can.

I'm pleased to present another comment from "Appreciative Reader," a regular commenter on this blog, that I liked a lot. (Not coincidentally, I agree with with what he says.) Appreciative Reader makes a point that, while it appears obvious now that I've read the comment, I hadn't thought of before. Or at least, not as clearly as he expressed it.  Namely, that some religions, mystical practices, and other forms of spirituality can function just fine without supernaturalism, while others require supernaturalism in order for their teachings to be coherent. By coherent, I don't mean that the religion or whatever makes…
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Posted inBuddhism

Spirituality comes in two flavors: “That” and “This”

As noted before, what I both like and dislike about Rob Burbea's book about Buddhist teachings, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising, is how marvelously detailed and deep Burbea dives into his subject.  In no way is this a popular Buddhist book, using "popular" to mean a book aimed at people who want to know more about Buddhism but aren't into the farthest reaches of classic Buddhist writings and practices. It's more like a manual for attaining both a full conceptual knowledge and intuitive experience of what Burbea considers the core of Buddhism: emptiness, along with the closely…
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Posted inBuddhism Neuroscience

Concepts can’t be avoided and are different from thoughts

I've continued to make my way through Rob Burbea's excellent book about Buddhist teachings, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising. As noted before, Burbea goes into considerable detail about his subject, sometimes more than I'm capable of appreciating -- since I'm a fan of Buddhism but don't consider myself a Buddhist. Then I come across some passages that truly do resonate with me. Here's a sampling.  This discussion of concepts impressed me because it fits so well with the modern neuroscientific theory of predictive processing by the brain. Basically this says that the brain is constantly making…
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