Posted inPolitics

“Ground zero” mosque dispute fanned by supernaturalism

When I read the facts about the Islamic mosque planned for a site a few blocks from "ground zero," a.k.a. the spot where the World Trade Center towers once stood, it's difficult to understand what all the fuss is about. There already is a mosque four blocks from ground zero. So what's the big deal with having one two blocks away? Plus, the proposed development actually is a cultural center, which will include a mosque. As a Washington post story says (registration may be required to read it): The plan is for a cultural center that would contain a mosque.…
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Posted inBuddhism Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Almost all spiritual paths lead up Mount Ego

For about thirty-five years, from age 20 to 55 (I'm now sixty-one), I meditated assiduously in accordance with the tenets of Radha Soami Satsang Beas -- an India-based guru-centered organization whose teachings claim to be able to unite the soul with God. However, what I learned from my immersion in the deep waters of organized religosity is applicable to almost every sort of spiritual path (to mix watery and earthy metaphors). True believers generally feel that they're becoming less selfish, egotistical, and me-centered through their devotion to...whatever or whoever. God, guru, Jesus, Buddha, Allah, Krishna, cosmic consciousness, Great Spirit, etc.…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Live in here and now. Also, there and then.

I've got a fondness for Buddhism, and it's sister faith, Taoism. I especially like how Buddhist and Taoist teachings emphasize the here and now, this present moment. For example, Buddhist "guiding teacher" Rodney Smith says in his book, Stepping Out of Self-Deception: Spiritual fulfillment can be defined as a complete abiding in the here and now. This is a refreshing philosophical antidote to sacred and secular then-and-there'ness. Both religious dogma and materialistic advertising promise that we'll be truly content only if we obtain something in the future and/or in another place. Jesus awaits in heaven. A guru awaits on some…
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Posted inReality Religions

Here’s the reason religions don’t agree

I used to be a proponent of the "perennial philosophy." This is the notion that there's a basic agreement about the nature of metaphysical reality. Aldous Huxley wrote a book by the same name, saying the perennial philosophy is: The metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent ground of all being; the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the…
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Posted inReality

A mountain is what it is. Just like life.

The trajectory of my once-spiritual life has been heading away from other worldliness for quite a few years now. If there's one thing I've come to know about religiosity, it's that there's almost certainly nothing to know. I don't believe in a Cosmic Jokester. But I'm a lot more inclined to worship this non-existent being than an imaginary God. After all, think how much power the Cosmic Jokester has (assuming she exists, which she almost certainly doesn't). This prankster is able to make billions of people believe there is more to life than what is apparent here and now on…
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Posted inGod Morality

Take the Battleground God test (I aced it!)

TPM (The Philosopher's Magazine) has an interesting online test called Battleground God. It shows how rationally consistent your beliefs about God are. Can your beliefs about religion make it across our intellectual battleground?In this activity you’ll be asked a series of 17 questions about God and religion. In each case, apart from Question 1, you need to answer True or False. The aim of the activity is not to judge whether these answers are correct or not. Our battleground is that of rational consistency. This means to get across without taking any hits, you’ll need to answer in a way…
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Posted inMorality Politics

Judge’s gay marriage ruling is putdown of religion

Out here on the left west coast people are pretty tolerant and open-minded, by and large. For example, in a few months Californians are going to vote on legalizing marijuana. Oregon probably will follow in 2012. So I was surprised when a ban on gay marriage passed in California a few years ago. Now that a federal judge, Vaughn Walker, has declared the ban unconsitutional, it's becoming more obvious why voters were taken in by the spurious arguments of Proposition 8. Religion is the main culprit. A front page story in yesterday's The Oregonian contained these telling quotes: Walker, in…
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Posted inBuddhism

What I love about Buddhist meditation

Reality is made up of yin and yang, seeming opposites that actually aren't. Atoms wouldn't exist without positive and negative charges, so neither would we. Thus when I wrote recently about my main gripe with Buddhist meditation, I knew that I wanted to balance that negativity with some positive props. After all, a bunch of Buddhism-themed books reside in my morning meditation area. I enjoy them a lot. Except when they get into my gripe zone, explicit or implicit claims that human consciousness somehow is able to enter into a state of pure observing -- either of the inner mind…
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Posted inBuddhism

My main gripe with Buddhist meditation

I've reached a point in my churchless evolution where most religious, spiritual, mystical, and metaphysical writings now irritate me more than they inspire. Even my big collection of Rumi books sit dustily on a shelf -- though I went through a period not long ago when I couldn't stop immersing myself in Rumi's enticing prose and poetry. Buddhism is a sometimes exception. Sometimes, because my attraction to Buddhist literature depends on how non-Buddhist it is. I like "Kill the Buddha" stuff, where the author urges us to throw away Buddhist dogma in favor of our own personal experience, even if…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Some thoughts on divine dying

I've been enjoying the spirited commenting on a recent post, "Attempt to kill the RSSB guru, Gurinder SIngh, fails." One interesting discussion topic is whether, if the guru indeed is GIHF (God in human form) as the Radha Soami Satsang Beas teachings proclaim, anyone could succeed in killing a divine being. Someone pointed out the obvious: that Jesus is viewed as the Son of God by Christians, yet his central reason for living was to die. Michael Parenti talks about this in his book, "God and His Demons" -- which takes a strongly skeptical look at religiosity. Nothing less than…
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Posted inReligions Spiritual practice/meditation

Wear religious and spiritual beliefs loosely

Ever eager to find profundity in anything connected with my dearly beloved iPhone 4, I took a look at a self-portrait I snapped yesterday -- using my phone's forward-facing camera held at arm's length -- and realized how much it had to say about my preferred approach to religiosity. My wife detests this shirt, which I recently bought from The Territory Ahead after they enticed me with a Sale! email. As soon as I opened the UPS package, Laurel said "you should return it." It wasn't her style. I usually trust my wife's taste in clothes, which almost always is…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Attempt to kill the RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh, fails

I just got an email message from a friend about an attempt in Vienna, Austria to assassinate Gurinder Singh, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), which is headquartered in the Punjab, India.I was an active member of RSSB for over thirty-five years and volunteered several times for security work at large meetings in the United States and Canada where Gurinder Singh gave talks.At a Honolulu session in the 1990s I remember getting the job of peering into trash receptacles and such to search for explosive devices. This seemed sort of unnecessary to me at the time. After reading…
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Posted inMorality

Free will is a fiction (and that’s fine)

Over the years I've had many deep, as well as shallow, discussions with friends and acquaintances about free will. It's a fascinating subject, in no small part because substance and process are intimately related.Meaning, if someone disagrees with me and argues, "I'm free to do what I want," I can always respond with "That's just what I expected you to say."Reading about all the philosophical hair-splitting in the area of free will can overheat the cerebral cortex quickly. That's why I like to focus on Albert Einstein's simple viewpoint (in part 1 of his credo): I do not believe in free…
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Posted inMorality

Striving for perfection is wildly imperfect

Religions would have us strive for perfection. But as this essay points out, that would mean a death of sorts: no progressing, no changing.None of us is perfect. The question is, why would we want to be? (And a more basic one, how could we ever know what perfection consists of?)I got to thinking about this after an intuitive Aha! popped into my consciousness recently. Some undone "to-do's" had been brought to my attention by my wife. She'd reminded me that I hadn't yet attended to some tasks that would benefit other people, yet I kept putting off.I started to…
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Posted inReality Science

Nothing wrong with being a churchless “possibilian”

Some time ago I came across the "Killing the Buddha" web site and blog. Naturally I liked the name of the place. And I copied some links to pages that appealed to me at the time.Such as, "Ways I Have Been a Bad Meditator." And, "The False Science" (concerning a book that I blogged about myself).Today I revisited Killing the Buddha and saw that "The Struggle for the (Possible) Soul of David Eagleman," by Robert Jensen, was featured. Interesting article. It starts off:There’s a struggle inside the brain of David Eagleman for the soul of David Eagleman.That is, there might…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

What if a “guru” is no different from us?

When I was a member of an India-based spiritual group, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the guru who led the organization frequently would say, "We need teachers in every aspect of life. Mysticism and spirituality are no different."Here's the problem with that statement: if I can't tell whether a person is more competent at something than I am, why should I accept him/her as a guide, teacher, consultant, handyman, or whatever?I got to thinking about this today after reading a response to a comment on a blog post about financial dealings of the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh. Tucson, a…
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Posted inScience

Embrace hard truth rather than reassuring faith

When I was an active member of an India-based religious/mystical group, a word that inspired me was sat. It means "truth," and was used in many ways: satsangi (follower of truth), satguru (conveyor of truth), satsang (speaking of truth), and so on.Eventually I realized that my allegiance really was to truth, not to a particular dogma, philosophy, or practice. If my involvement with the group wasn't leading me closer to truth, the goal I'd set for myself wasn't being realized.So I set off on a churchless path. I decided to genuinely commit myself to the tenets of the scientific method,…
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Posted inReligions Spiritual practice/meditation

Religions are wrong about self-realization

There's a lot of talk about self-realization in religious circles, mostly of the Eastern variety. The India-based spiritual group that I was a member of for many years promoted the idea, "self-realization before God-realization."In the West, self-realization has much more of a secular connotation. Regardless, many people have a simplistic notion of the "self" that supposedly is to be known via meditation, mystic practice, prayer, psychotherapy, or some other means.Modern neuroscience has demolished the fantasy that the essence of a human being is something open to view under the right circumstances, like a jewel wrapped in layers of cloth that…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Reality is a boat without oars

Yesterday a regular visitor to this blog, tucson, left a comment on a post that deserved more attention than it likely was going to get. (Irritatingly, TypePad, my blog service, doesn't take a click on a "recent comments" link directly to the comment, only to the post; tucson's comment was on an old post with hundreds of comments on multiple pages, so it was hard to find).Here's what tucson had to say in response to a previous comment by "Neitzsche" that talked about the guru of an Eastern religious organization (RSSB), Gurinder Singh. I thought tucson's advice to Neitzsche was…
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