Posted inBooks

Finding my Way in the Bodhi Tree Bookstore

A few years ago I made my first pilgrimage to Hollywood's Bodhi Tree Bookstore, one of the wonders of the metaphysical book-selling world. I went again yesterday, leaving my month-old granddaughter and her mother (my daughter) cooling their heels in a neighboring restaurant. Wise place to wait. Slower the service, the better. When I enter the Bodhi Tree Bookstore, I'm not going to be emerging for quite a while. Wandering through the store's sections is a voyage of spiritual self-discovery. The patrons, me included, appear darn serious as they browse the shelves. After all, we're not looking for a book…
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Posted inMorality

When it isn’t good to do good

Before I put away the RSSB newsletter that was the focus of my last post, I wanted to address the curious case of when doing good isn't really a good thing. At least, if you've adopted a fundamentalist mind set. I'm familiar with that mental condition, because it was an integral aspect of my psyche for many years. What happens is that your religious faith becomes the lens through which life's experiences are filtered. Everything takes on the hue of the dogmatic teachings that you've assimilated. So in Sant Mat (my experience has been with the Radha Soami Satsang Beas…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Sant Mat doesn’t make much sense to me anymore

I used to enjoy reading the "Western USA Regional Newsletter," published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), because I wanted to have my spiritual beliefs confirmed. I still enjoy reading Vince Savarese's monthly message in the newsletter. For the same reason. Whereas before I focused on how much sense the RSSB teachings (also known as Sant Mat) made, leaving blurry all of the paradoxes, contradictions, and unanswered questions, now I zero in on the absurdities. They've always been there, of course. I just did a good job of ignoring them for some thirty years. In this regard I was like…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus

Christians admit their religion is based on hate

I'm pretty harsh on Christianity, along with every other faith-based religion that asks us to believe in things unseen and a god unknown. But it takes a Christian to really reveal the dark side of Christianity—a true believer whose world view is so blinded by an egocentric conviction that he's got all the answers, he doesn't see how deep is the moral morass into which he's sunk. Such a man is Rick Scarborough of Vision America, an organization that claims to be "restoring the original American vision." This supposedly includes the right to discriminate against, hate, and vilify people who…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Turn back, if you’re on the wrong road

My statistics instructor in graduate school cited this Emerson quote frequently, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds..." He stimulated me to look up the essay on Self-Reliance and read what comes next: …adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though you contradict every thing you said today. Yesterday I ran into an old friend at the…
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Posted inReligions

Viewing life through a narrow bandwidth of ideology

About time to leave Maui. Hawaiian shirts have been bought. Waves have been boogie-boarded. Some tropical photons have managed to make it through SPF 30 and gifted me a take-home tan. I'll let a Maui resident, James Miner, do much of the speaking today. He wrote an intriguing letter that was published in the Maui News last Saturday—a philosophical cut above the usual letter to the editor fare. It speaks to me on several levels. Over on my other blog I wrote a few days ago that Maui overdevelopment makes for sad sights. That's part of what Miner is getting…
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Posted inBuddhism

Rocks in the thought-stream are natural too

As so how often happens on this here Church of the Churchless blog, a comment to one of my posts diverts my stream of consciousness in a fresh direction. In this case, one that I'd already been meandering toward. Edward's response to my "Flowing with waves while sitting on the beach" made me think Oh, yeah, so true. His comment had a delightful Edwardian neo-Zen flavor to it that led me sit up even while I was lying down (on the sand). Lately, I have been having difficulty seeing some thoughts as unworthy, ("get out of my way,") and others…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Flowing with waves while sitting on the beach

I've been paying a lot of attention to waves recently. That's par for the course on Maui, especially if someone is an avid boogie boarder, like I am. The first few days after we arrived, there were some decent—though not exceptional—waves breaking on the left side of Napili Bay. I had some stimulating rides. Nothing like my "washing machine" experience back in 2004, however (which is good). Today, like yesterday, the surf has been boogie board unfriendly. Fairly large, but not breaking cleanly. So I've been working on catching waves from the beach—thought waves, which can be done anywhere, really.…
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Posted inWu Project

Soul is superfluous

Usually spirituality is associated with "soulfulness," whatever the heck that means. I used to believe that I knew something about soul. Now, I don't. Perhaps because soul is superfluous—it's an notion that is so much a part of most cultures, we take it for granted that a human being consists of something above and beyond the physical. Before leaving for Maui I bought Nicholas Fearn's "The Latest Answers to the Oldest Questions" at a Powell's Books outlet (one of the world's great bookstores; don't miss the main store if you visit Portland, Oregon). Interestingly, the first chapter I read on…
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Posted inBuddhism

Dalai Lama is on Maui too. Is compassion contagious?

At the moment the Dalai Lama and I are on opposite sides of Maui. He's on a two day speaking tour in Paia and Wailuku, and we're condo'ing it on Napili Bay. We're opposites in more ways than that, obviously. Yesterday the Dalai Lama spoke about compassion, saying "Compassion is the universal message of all traditions." I often come up short in the compassion department. Tuesday morning, a few hours before the Dalai Lama's free talk at Maui's War Memorial Stadium, my wife took me to task for being self-centered and (one of her favorite ex-psychotherapist terms) "having a sense…
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Posted inWu Project

If I’m not an “I,” what am I?

My admiration for Douglas Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop," the subject of my previous post, is evidenced by the fact that I just carted the 410 pages to Maui—adding the weight of this hardcover book to my 50 pound suitcase limit, every ounce of which I'm going to need on our return trip after our usual rampaging through Lahaina t-shirt shops. But I wanted to ponder my strange loopiness some more while on vacation. At the moment I'm listening to Napili Bay waves, rather than Oregon rain, but the same "I" seemingly is doing the listening though its body…
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Posted inWu Project

You’re a strange loop (and that’s OK)

Via Douglas Hofstadter, I've got some soul-shaking news to pass on to you. You're a strange loop. So am I. As is he. We all are. And it's not a bad thing, once you get used to the strangeness and loopiness of our rarely recognized condition. I'm most of the way through Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop." His new book is an elaboration of themes creatively discussed in "Gödel, Escher, Bach," which I read a long time ago—with difficulty. Hofstadter has come a long way, both personally and professionally (he's a professor of cognitive science at Indiana University). His…
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Posted inReligions

Virginia Tech killer compared himself to Jesus. Crazy?

Once again, the right-wing conspiracy theorists were wrong. I suspected as much. Tuesday the "Where's Your Brain" blog theorized that Cho Seung Hui, the Virginia Tech killer, was some sort of Muslim terrorist—because the words "Ismail Ax" were written on one of his arms. That sounded crazily unlikely to me. I left a comment on the blog post saying as much: Yeah, and you probably think there Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and supported Al Qaeda, right? I realize that facts are irrelevant to the right-wing brain (truthiness rules!), but this post is particularly ridiculous. Anything is possible, but…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

U-turns often lead to a better direction

When you realize you're going the wrong way, what do you do? Reverse course. Make a U-turn. I do it all the time, especially now that my wife and I both have some difficulty reading street signs. (Typical scenario: "We're looking for Acacia Boulevard. Let me know when you spot it." drive…drive…drive "There it is!" "Where?" "Back a few blocks. I couldn't make out the sign until you were past it." grumble…U-turn …drive…drive…drive.) Bruce Grierson wrote about "The Age of U-turns" in a recent issue of TIME magazine. It was a nice counterpoint to the oft-heard assumption that flip-flopping is…
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Posted inWu Project

Honoring the mystery that is me (and you)

In 1977 I spent two weeks in India with a guru, Charan Singh. At that time visitors could spend up to three months at Dera Baba Jaimal Singh in the Punjab, soaking up the mystico-spiritual vibes gratis. Flying off from the Amritsar airport to return home, via Delhi, I remember looking out of my window seat at the majestic Himalaya mountains, saying to myself, "I don't want my thoughts to be mine anymore, but yours." I was a devoted disciple back then. I still am. What's changed is the meaning I give to yours. Thirty years ago it meant the…
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Posted inWu Project

My quest for the meaninglessness of life

I've spent most of my 58 years looking for the meaning of life. That was easy. I've found lots of meanings in religion, family, friends, jobs, volunteer work, books, causes, charity, martial arts, television, nature, food, sex—you name it, I've probably found some sort of meaning in it. But as I said before, and before that, I'm now on a quest for meaninglessness. That's tough. Everywhere I turn, there's meanings staring me in the face. And on one level I want them. I'm addicted to meaningfulness. It's what makes life, well, meaningful. However, like James Park said in his intriguing,…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Meaningful meaningless meditation

More and more, I'm trying to make my meditation time as meaningless as possible. That's a change. I've been meditating, daily, for more than thirty-seven years. After being initiated in 1971 by an Indian guru, Charan Singh, I dutifully followed the meditative practice enjoined by Radha Soami Satsang Beas. While this supposedly was aimed at emptying the mind so divine sound and light, plus the guru's grace, could flow in, actually there's an awful lot of meaningful content in the meditative method I followed for so long. A mantra composed of "five holy names," each of which points to a…
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Posted inWu Project

Boundless existence—the backdrop to life’s meaning

Boundless existence. Can you sense it? Can you think about it? Can you relate to it? No, no, and no. So says Milton K. Munitz in his provocative book, "Does Life Have a Meaning?" I thoroughly enjoyed this short (114 page) exploration of one of the deepest questions we all struggle to answer. This was the last book Munitz, a distinguished emeritus professor of philosophy, wrote before he died. It's profoundly philosophical, but there's as much of Munitz, the man, between the covers as Munitz the academic philosopher. It's obvious that he wrestled with the mystery of existence throughout most…
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Posted inGod

Is God real?

It warmed my agnostic heart to see that this week's issue of Newsweek had "Is God Real?" on the cover. Usually news magazines run religion-friendly puff pieces around Easter and Christmas. Kudos to Newsweek for asking the tough question. Which, of course, can't be answered. However, this won't stop hundreds of millions of Christians from going to church tomorrow and glorying in the resurrection of someone who may or may not have actually existed, and is considered to be the son of a God who may or may not be real. That's too many "may's" for me to take the…
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Posted inReality

World picture puts a frame around reality

Some people look at things so bizarrely. Like Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, authors of the hugely popular "Left Behind" series of books that takes a fictional view of events surrounding the Second Coming of Jesus—which for LaHaye and Jenkins won't be fiction when the Big Day comes. Yesterday I heard them interviewed on a right-wing Portland talk show. The host asked them how they were faring on their book tour to the least-churched state in the nation. (Whenever I hear that fact, I always feel like cheering, Yay, Oregon! We're #1!) LaHaye and Jenkins said, "Just fine. We've got…
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