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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Posted inFundamentalism

Hate mail about me going to hell. Oh, well.

Well, wish me luck in hell. That's where I'm going according to this email message. But at least my dog likes me! (When I give her chew sticks after her dinner, at least.) But seriously... if there's a hell, it's hate. I don't hate. I just disagree and express my honest opinion. So I feel like I'm far away from hell. HINES [PIG]I WENT THRU YUR BLOG COC AND I SEEN U HAVE WRITTEN ALL BULLSHIT ABOUT ALMIGHTY BABAJI WHO IS THE ALMIGHTY GOD IN HUMAN FORMU BLOODY PIECE OF SHIT U HAVE ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD TO…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Comments on Gurinder Singh’s “earthquake” letter to Japan

Since Gurinder Singh Dhillon is the guru of India's Radha Soami Satsang Beas, and is considered to be "God in human form" by devotees, perhaps it's presumptuous of me to comment on a letter he wrote to disciples in Japan following the disastrous earthquake and tsunami there. But what the heck! I'll gamble that if God exists, and if Gurinder Singh is God's representative here on Earth (two big "if's"), the Supreme Being enjoys commentary on his missives to humanity. The letter can be read in PDF form: Download Gurinder Singh message to Japan Copying and pasting the text into…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

Jiddu Krishnamurti leaves me lukewarm

Some books leave me cold -- turned off, bored, irritated. Other books get me hot -- excited, enthused, pleasured. Then there's books I find lukewarm, like Jiddu Krishnamurti's "Freedom from the Known." I thought I'd like it more than I did, knowing that J. Krishnamurti was a spiritual iconoclast who decried all forms of organized religiosity. The Amazon reviews of this short 124 page book were almost all positive. One reader's endorsement got me to click the "buy" button. I've read (and re-read) about 15 of K's books. This is the single best, most concise, most thorough of the them…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Life is plenty good without God

"This is good enough, plenty good enough." That's what went through my mind as I was digesting one of those magical experiences which many people attribute to God. Good enough meant no need to add anything divine to what nature has wrought. I was walking along Maui's Kapalua Coastal Trail late in the day. No one else was around as I moved off a paved path onto a dirt stretch of the trail that wound across a rocky volcanic headland. The sun was setting in front of me. The sea was calm. Until I saw a tell-tale spray of water.…
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Posted inReligions

Texas governor calls for prayer to end drought

Well, good luck Texas. Your governor, Rick Perry, has decided that the way to solve the state's exceptional drought is with three days of prayer for rain. Suggestion: it would have made a lot more sense for Governor Perry to call for three days (or better, three weeks) of study by Texas citizens into the nature of global climate change, which is causing climate extremes to become more common. Climate is defined not simply as average temperature and precipitation but also by the type, frequency and intensity of weather events. Human-induced climate change has the potential to alter the prevalence…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Science

Simple truth: our brains are us

Last night I had an all-too-familiar experience: Sitting back and listening to a discussion, pondering the deeper meaning of what was being said, jumping in with some comments that were So Absolutely Correct they deserve to be capitalized -- and then seeing looks of what the #$%! is Brian talking about?, after which the conversation went on its merry way, barely missing a step notwithstanding that my brilliant remarks should have made people pause to digest their awesomeness. Oh, well, often a prophet is recognized only inside his own head. But if he has a blog, this allows him to…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

My further descent (or ascent) into strangeness

My newest passion -- to Strange Up Salem (Oregon) -- nicely harmonizes with this here blog's churchless theme of spiritual independence. So you're invited to peruse the Strange Up blog post I wrote today. At the risk of sounding like a phone sex line... I know what you want. You’re hungry for it. You’re hot for it. You’ve gotten tantalizing glimpses of what you lust for, but it’s been frustratingly out of reach. Not God. Not religion. Not enlightenment. Strangeness. Along that line, during the past few days I've been amazed to see myself turning from Facebook-apathetic to a Facebook…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

What does “going inside” in meditation really mean?

I'm a long-time daily meditator. I did the closed-eyes introspecting thing almost every morning for over forty years. During that time my practice was focused on "going inside." Inside what? Good question, one which I never gave much thought to during my true-believing spiritual phase. The guru I followed used those words going inside a lot, so I assumed they meant something. Now it seems to me that reality doesn't have an inside and an outside. I've given up the goal of concentrating on the interior of my cranium, which many meditators believe leads to an experience of wholly other-worldly…
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Posted inFree will Science

Free will may be an illusion, but it feels real

Over the years, and decades, I've had lots of intense discussions with other people about free will. Partly this is because my first book about physics and mysticism had a chapter called "Laws of cause and effect govern lower levels of creation." Then my second book, "Life is Fair," argued in a different fashion that karma rules the universe, and karma is basically a spiritualized form of cause and effect. My view of reality is much different now. I don't agree with myself about a lot of stuff that used to make sense to me, but doesn't from my current…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus Death/Rebirth

Yes, certainly hell is dead. Along with heaven.

When the new issue of TIME magazine arrived a few days ago, my wife noted the cover story blurb -- "What if there's no Hell?" -- and said, I can't understand how anybody can believe in hell. My reply to her: I can't understand how anybody can believe in Christianity, yet lots of people do. Well, actually I do understand, because I've also believed weird spiritual stuff that now seems untrue to me. So I was speaking from my current churchless perspective. For many years I entertained a belief that the only way back to God was to become a…
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