Posted inAwareness Spiritual practice/meditation

Hey, turns out I’m enlightened! Just not all the time.

Enlightenment is a word that gets thrown around a lot in spiritual circles, even though it's rare that anyone can clearly say what makes someone enlightened, or how it's possible to tell a person is in this supposedly exalted state. Often enlightenment is viewed as something ineffable that only another enlightened being can recognize. You know, an exclusive club where the members know each other but us ordinary people can only do our best to peek through the curtained windows in a vain attempt to see what's going on inside. Another problem with the notion of enlightenment is that even…
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Posted inConsciousness Religions Science

“Facts and the law” applies to religiosity as well as the justice system

I don't know much about how the justice system works in other countries, but here in the United States one of the most frequently heard phrases is "facts and the law."  Those words were used a lot by commentators on the criminal trial of Donald Trump, which ended last Thursday with a 12 person jury deciding unanimously, as is required in criminal trials, that Trump was guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in order to disguise the fact that a $130,000 payment to a porn star was to keep her quiet just before the 2016 presidential election…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness

Joan Tollifson on the groundlessness of reality

Tai Chi, which I've practiced for nineteen years, speaks about being rooted. Not in the sense of a plant being attached to the earth, but something similar. Being connected to the floor, or ground, in a way that is stable, secure, capable of being the foundation of productive movement (especially important in a martial or self-defense application). But this root isn't a static thing, because we humans aren't oak trees. It's dynamic, ever-changing, adjusting to circumstances.  Which fits with a recent essay by Joan Tollifson that arrived in my email inbox yesterday. I've shared the first part of it below,…
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Posted inPsychedelics

Here’s manjit’s informative, passionate comment in praise of psychedelics

Yesterday manjit left a marvelous comment on my post, "Psilocybin could be in my future, thanks to Oregon's legalization." It deserved more attention than most comments get, so I've copied it in below. There's a lot to appreciate in the comment. For now I'll simply note that manjit correctly draws connections between mystical experiences arising from meditation (often or usually) and psychedelic experiences arising from ingestion of a substance such as psilocybin, LSD, DMT, or mescaline. This is not at all a crackpot idea. The June 2024 issue of Scientific American has an article called "Beyond the Veil: What near-death…
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Posted inFree will Meaning of life Reality

What if reality was much better than it seems to be? (Good news, it is!)

I've had a "what if?" blog post on my mind for quite a while. Might as well try to get it off my mind and into written form, though if this was easy for me to do, I'd have done it sooner. Anyway, here goes... Most of us, me certainly included, are looking for ways to make reality more pleasant. This quest goes in many different directions: family life, career, health, friendships, religion, hobbies, athletic pursuits, spirituality, art, romance, and all the other areas where we wish there wasn't such a large gap between what is and what we'd like…
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Posted inPsychedelics

The fallacy of believing psychedelics aren’t “natural”

Just as I hoped, my previous blog post, "Psilocybin could be in my future, thanks to Oregon's legalization," elicited some thought-provoking comments.  (Note: by legalization I meant that psilocybin is available through licensed service centers, where it has to be consumed. So it isn't legal in the same sense that marijuana is legal in Oregon, capable of being bought in licensed stores and then taken home to be used however you want.) One commenter's point is easily dismissed. They said that because I was initiated by a Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) guru in 1971, 53 years ago, I should…
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Posted inPsychedelics

Psilocybin could be in my future, thanks to Oregon’s legalization

Psychedelics were a big part of my college life for a few years, 1968-69. I took quite a few trips via the travel agents of LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin (magic mushrooms). So naturally in 2020 I voted to make psilocybin legal here in Oregon, under the auspices of licensed growers and providers of supervised psilocybin experiences. As I wrote about on my HinesSight blog a few days ago, "The Psilocybin Center is open in Salem for psychedelic transformation." It's taken several years to get psilocybin centers up and running because rules and regulations had to be developed after the 2020…
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Posted inMeaning of life Religions Spiritual practice/meditation

If you become a religion of one, your worship will be effortless

Whenever I'm reading a spiritual or philosophical book and am generally enjoying its message, then come across a passage that I heartily disagree with, I remind myself of one of my early blog posts from 2005, "Become a religion of one."  (I'll copy it in below, I like it so much.) For the way I've come to view spirituality is as an intensely independent pursuit. After all, our search for meaning and purpose in life necessarily is personal, not collective. There's zero chance that any other person in the world is going to have exactly the same goals, values, and…
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Posted inPolitics Religions

Jewish religious nationalism is behind Israel’s horrible treatment of Palestinians

Anyone who wrongly believes that religiosity is a private affair of personal faith needs to educate themselves about the danger religious nationalism poses in many places around the world, including Israel. I wrote a post about this yesterday for my Salem Political Snark blog, "Two well-researched stories show how badly Israel is treating Palestinians."  One of those stories was a lengthy piece in the New York Times Magazine, with the title shown above. Since I'm a subscriber to the online New York Times and gifted that link, you should be able to click on it and read this disturbing investigative…
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Posted inScience

Religion should learn from science about overturning worldviews

After almost 20 years of regularly posting on this Church of the Churchless blog, I've learned a lot about how believers in the supernatural look at things. Which isn't a major surprise, since I used to be much more of a believer in supernatural stuff myself that I am now. But I always had a healthy dose of uncertainty about this. I thought that a supernatural realm was a reasonable hypothesis. Or if not reasonable, at least a hypothesis that appealed to me, given that I really liked the notion that one day I could learn the secrets of the…
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Posted inConsciousness

The mystery of consciousness actually isn’t so mysterious

The history of science shows us that many inexplicable phenomena, which often were considered to have supernatural causes (Thor makes thunder!) actually have natural causes.  I strongly suspect that the same will prove to be true of consciousness. While most scientists view consciousness to be a product of the brain, some, especially those with a philosophical bent, have a dualistic perspective where mind and body are separate entities. This, of course, was how Descartes saw things way back in the 1600s, believing that the mind was nonphysical. Most religions share that opinion, though soul sometimes is substituted for mind, or…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

“Perfect” never applies to a guru or other religious leader

In everyday life, I've never heard of anyone described as being perfect. Makes sense. For one thing, how could "perfect" even be defined as regards a person? For another, assuming it could be defined, how would a person's perfection be assessed?  In sports, perfect applies to something measurable. If a pitcher has a perfect game, no batter from the opposing team reached a base. A perfect game in bowling is 300 points, strikes in each of the first nine frames plus three in the tenth. Otherwise, typically perfect means high quality. If a waiter asks a patron how they enjoyed…
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Posted inFree will Neuroscience Personal/Stories

Rather than rely on religion, here’s what I consider both true and beneficial

Having been a religious believer for 35 years, Eastern religion variety, I'm deeply familiar with why people are attracted to a belief in God, heaven, supernatural realms, mystical powers, life after death, and such. In short, it feels good.  Religions provide a community of like-minded people. They offer a ready-made meaning to life. Their believers are drawn to view themselves as special, possessing knowledge and benefits (like eternal salvation) off-limits to those not within the religion's fold.  I found all those things highly appealing and beneficial to me. Until I didn't. For this primary reason: I came to conclude that…
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Posted inConsciousness Spiritual practice/meditation

The delusion of believing in gurus and other gems from Joan Tollifson

In my daily morning reading, I bounce back and forth between books about science and books about spirituality/philosophy, because consuming too much of either is less pleasant for me than a balanced diet. I've been enjoying several of Joan Tollifson's books for my spiritual/philosophical reading. She's become my favorite contemporary writer on Zen, Buddhism, nonduality, meditation, and such. I don't agree with everything she says. Which isn't surprising, since I don't agree with everything I say.  For example, Tollifson considers awareness to be the Key Thing. (The quotes in this post are from Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Science

Science says we are all vibrations in the same invisible oceans

For 35 years I was a member of an India-based religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), that taught the essence of reality was shabd, all-pervading conscious energy, which could be heard as divine sound and seen as divine light. In the early 1990s I wrote a book for RSSB, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder, that described my take on the links between the new physics and ancient mysticism, focusing on how the "all-pervading" and "energy" aspects of shabd were recognized by quantum mechanics, but not the "conscious" part. That's still true, of course. Naturally there have been advances in quantum…
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Posted inReality

Take this survey to learn if you have a hierarchical or interconnected worldview

A short article in the June 2023 issue of Scientific American (I'm behind in my magazine reading) had a fascinating title that applies to religiosity just as much as to politics, in my view. If that link doesn't work for you, here's a PDF file of the article.Download Many Differences between Liberals and Conservatives May Boil Down to One Belief | Scientific America The article gives examples in the political realm. In most of our studies, we also asked people to share their political party preference and to rate how liberal or conservative they consider themselves. In an early study…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

Becoming confused about illusionism, I shift to the simpler topic of many selves

So, I was happily reading along in Eric Schwitzgebel's book, The Weirdness of the World, getting to the last few pages of a chapter where he tries to define consciousness in a defensible fashion, when my attention was captured by a passage about illusionism -- though that term wasn't used by Schwitzgebel. Some philosophers have argued that consciousness, or phenomenal consciousness, does not exist. Keith Frankish is the most visible recent advocate, but others include Paul Feyerabend, Jay Garfield, Francois Kammerer, and maybe early Patricia Churchland. The argument is always a version of the following:  The ordinary concept of (phenomenal)…
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Posted inAwareness Reality

We and the world are plenty strange as is, no need to look afar for strangeness

I've got solid evidence for my affinity for strangeness: 49 Strange Up Salem columns that I wrote for our alternative newspaper, Salem Weekly, in 2013-2015. Here's how my second column, "Strange is Life," started out. Life is strange. From birth until death, mysteries abound. No one -- not scientists, not religious leaders, nobody -- knows everything about anything. This is a good thing. Certainty is for machines that act robotically. For four billion years or so, life has evolved in unpredictable, though natural, ways. So let’s invert my words: Strange is life. At the core of each of us beats…
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Posted inGod

Rabbi Brian speaks about God in his Highly Unorthodox Gospel book

If you read my previous post about Rabbi Brian's Highly Unorthodox Gospel and have been lying awake at night wondering what was said about God in the book, here's some passages that should help you sleep better (especially if you are fine with unorthodoxy). "Dr. Zola, I have a question: Why didn't anyone ask me about my beliefs in God?" [during his interview for admission into rabbinical school] "Well, this might be something your nun friend didn't know: Judaism doesn't require anyone to believe in God." I didn't know that. And thank God. Beta readers of this book indicated that…
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