Posted inMeaning of life Personal/Stories Spiritual practice/meditation

Ending the spiritual search

It's a bit difficult for me to tell when my spiritual searching began. Was it when I tried to figure out in high school the deeper meaning of Bob Dylan's enigmatic song lyrics? Was it when I devoured Sartre, Camus, and other existentialists during my early college years?  Maybe. But for sure it started when, in 1969, my wife-to-be and I began learning hatha yoga and meditation from a crazed Greek guy who melded Christianity and Eastern philosophy in a decidedly weird fashion.  Ever since, I've pursued some sort of spirituality.  For several decades I spent about two hours a…
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Posted inOpen Threads

Open Thread 37 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread. Remember, off-topic comments should go in an Open Thread.  If you don't see a recent comment, or comments, posted, it's because you've failed to follow the above rule. Keep to the subject of a blog post if you leave a comment on it. And if you want to use this blog as a "chat room," do that in an open thread. As noted before, it's good to have comments in a regular blog post related to its subject, and it's also good to have a place where almost anything goes in regard to sharing ideas, feelings, experiences, and such. That place is…
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Posted inMiracles Science

How animals navigate would be a “miracle” if people did it

After thirty-five years of believing in weird mystical stuff, I've become a naturalist. I'm still open to the possibility that there's more to reality than what's evident in the natural world, but lacking solid evidence of that possibility, my bet is that it doesn't exist. Yet in no way do I feel a diminishment of cosmic awe. There's plenty to be amazed at without imagining a realm beyond the physical. A story by Kathryn Schulz in the April 5, 2021 issue of The New Yorker provides a good example of this. My mind was blown by "Where the Wild Things…
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Posted inPolitics Religions

QAnon, like religion, doesn’t care about truth

Last night my wife and I finished watching the sixth and last episode of HBO's "QAnon: Into the Storm."  I've written two previous posts about how QAnon bears a lot of resemblance to religion. (See here and here.)  QAnon devotees are like religious believers. Neither cares about actual truth, while both pretend that they understand reality in a deep sense that eludes ordinary people. I found the HBO series fascinating. It shows us the people behind QAnon -- the computer geeks who administer the sites where Q posted his "drops," often enigmatic and usually totally wrong observations about politics and…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

A message from someone who woke up to RSSB deception

Getting a message like this one makes me feel like all the work I put into this Church of the Churchless blog is worthwhile.  RS stands for Radha Soami. RSSB stands for Radha Soami Satsang Beas, the India-based religious group I belonged to for 35 years. Gurinder Singh Dhillon is the current RSSB guru.         Dear Brian I pondered upon your website quite a few years ago, and I thought this guy has lost it. He has lost the 1 valuable thing in life, the guru...   Fast forward to now.  I have been RS follower and initiate…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Behold… my uncluttered office. Miracles do happen!

I wish I'd taken a "before" photo of my office before I was forced to move everything out so it could be painted after wallpaper was removed. Just believe me when I say that while some people might consider that I have too much stuff in it now, the post-painting makeover is an astounding de-clutterization. Which makes my wife happy. You can marvel at the New Look via a post on my HinesSight blog, "My office looks more Zen after painting forced it on me."
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Posted inMystics Reality

Truth is all-important, in mysticism and everywhere else

Sometimes a comment is left on one of my blog posts that leaves me with a WTF (what the fuck) feeling. Meaning, I can't begin to understand where the commenter is coming from. Here's a recent example that starts off with a quote from a post of mine. >>If mystics claim to find a new reality, they need to prove it<< WHY? WHY do they need to prove it? No mystic owes anything to anybody. Wow. The answer to that all caps Why is one-word obvious. Truth. Truth is why a mystic needs to back up their claim of finding…
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Posted inMystics Reality

If mystics claim to find a new reality, they need to prove it

I've been enjoying the recent comment conversations between some of the Church of the Churchless regulars. Meaning, frequent visitors to this blog. Having featured a comment from "Appreciative Reader" in a blog post a few days ago, I generally find myself agreeing with this person's perspective. Which I'm not going to attempt to summarize, since that perspective is nuanced. Instead, here's my take on a theme that features in the above-mentioned comment conversations: how someone can tell the difference between genuine and spurious mystical experiences. My first assumption -- which seems inarguable to me -- is that while mystics and…
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Posted inComments Mystics Science

Narratives and cognitive structures aren’t “traps”

What never fails to amaze me is how religious believers and mystical enthusiasts will use the power of their human mind to criticize other people who use their human mind to criticize religion and mysticism. The plain fact is that there's no way to communicate with other people except through mental capabilities such as language, reason, and such. So unless someone wants to remain in their own private internal world -- and everyone who comments on this blog has indicated this isn't what they want to do -- narratives and cognitive structures are the only way to interact with others.…
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Posted inDelusions Politics Religions

QAnon is the religion of right-wing crazies

My wife and I have watched the first two episodes of HBO's "Q: Into the Storm" because we find QAnon both ridiculous and dangerous. Ridiculous, because QAnon faithful believe in absolutely crazy stuff -- such as Hillary Clinton and other Democrats operating a pedophile ring out of the basement of a Washington D.C. pizza restaurant. Dangerous, because so many followers of Trump in this country accept the QAnon insanity, including that mass arrests of Democrats will take place and the Orange One (Trump) will become president again. I can't recommend the HBO series because it is much more boring than…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Buddhism can help silence your inner critic

I enjoy reading movie reviews. The people who write them are called critics. When they criticize a movie, or streaming show, that I was considering watching, often I'll decide to see something else instead. So critics can be wonderful. However, there's also a critic who is uncomfortably close to me. In fact, it is me. Or at least, a part of me who isn't shy about pointing out my screw-ups, mistakes, and such -- often in a caustic manner that leaves me feeling bad about myself. I don't mind getting feedback about things I could have done better, whether from…
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Posted inBuddhism Consciousness

Motive of a mass murderer wrongly assumes conscious will

One of the things that comes through loud and clear in the many modern neuroscience and psychology books I've read is that we humans are lousy at knowing why we act a certain way. Experiments on split-brain patients, for example, where the connection between the two brain hemispheres has been severed, shows that even when the left side of the brain (which controls language) is unaware of the reason the right side did something, the patient will make up a "why" story that has no basis in fact. We don't like to admit that we don't know. So the brain…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism Delusions

There are no essences, just interpretations

We humans want to make more of reality than is actually there. We believe that things have more substance, more independence, and more of an unchanging essence than is justified. This is the message of my previous post about the relative nature of the quantum world. And as I noted in that post, it fits with a core tenet of Buddhism -- emptiness. Buddhism emptiness doesn't mean a void, or nothingness.  It refers to the fact that nothing has inherent existence. Nothing has an unchanging essence. Nothing stands alone, complete in and by itself. In the book I've been writing…
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Posted inReality Science

Why quantum is relative, as Buddhism surmises

For many years I've had a strong interest in quantum physics -- from the perspective of someone who knows next to nothing about its mathematics, but is fascinated by the philosophical side of it. There's a "shut up and calculate" position that most quantum physicists embrace.  The theory works. Spectacularly. If it didn't, our technological modern world would be much different. So lots of scientists don't worry about the philosophical foundation of quantum physics. They're just interested in applying the mathematical underpinning to practical problems and applications.  Then there are physicists like Carlo Rovelli. He wrote a fascinating piece in…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism

Not having an illusory self has some real benefits

I'm continuing to enjoy my re-reading of Robert Wright's "Why Buddhism is True," a book that I neglected to write about after I first read it several years ago. My first post about it is here. In his The Alleged Nonexistence of the Self chapter, Wright offers some advice. Continue to entertain the proposition you've probably been entertaining your whole life, that somewhere within you there's something that deserves the name I. And don't feel like you're committing a felony-level violation of Buddhist dogma just because you think of yourself as being a self. But be open to the radical…
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Posted inReality Religions

Religions are sort of like conspiracy theories

Conspiracy theories always have been around. But they've proliferated, in the United States, at least, in recent years. Donald Trump deserves much of the credit, better termed blame.  Trump never saw a fact that he didn't like to denigrate, calling every media story which irritated him "fake news."  Of course, almost always there wasn't anything fake about the news. However, Trump's devotees came to feel like they were in a special club of People in the Know. Meaning, people who think they know what is really going on in the world. Which is much different from actually knowing. At the…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

It’s our 31st anniversary today. Here’s some wedding photos.

Easy to remember our anniversary when it is St. Patrick's Day. I shared some photos of our 1990 wedding and my ghastly-botched attempt at a marriage proposal in a HinesSight blog post, "Been married for 31 years today. But I'm not great at proposing." From the photos you'll see how much marriage has aged me. Or...wait, maybe it is aging that has aged me. 
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Posted inBooks Buddhism Reality

Buddhism can free us from evolution’s delusion

It happened again this morning, a sign from the non-God.  I'd tried to continue reading a couple of Buddhist books that appealed to me, aside from occasional mentions of supposed supernatural phenomena, which had been bothering me. Today the bothering overcame my liking of the books.  In the course of returning them to the Buddhism section of my bookcase, my eye hit upon a book by Robert Wright, "Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment." Highlighting indicated that I'd read the entire book. But so far as I can tell, I never wrote a blog…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism

“Nothing special” explains a lot about human nature

A few days ago I'd woken up in the middle of the night. In the course of lying in bed, waiting to get back to sleep, the thought of "nothing special" suddenly came to mind. I then pondered the fact that I'm nothing special; that all of humanity is nothing special given the vastness of the cosmos; that, nonetheless, religions try to make their followers feel very special by supposedly enjoying a special relationship with God; that if people could somehow have a sense that they're nothing special, along with everybody else, the world would be a better place. Since,…
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Posted inBooks Free will Science

“Unique” — fascinating book about the science of human individuality

I love science. So I love scientific books. Since I'm also fascinated by what makes us into the person that we are, David Linden's "Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality" hits the sweet spot for me of reading pleasure.  Linden is a professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute. Impressive credentials. Plus, Linden is an excellent writer with a sense of humor.  Here's some excerpts from the three-fourths of the book that I've read so far. These will give you a flavor of the fascinating facts that Linden shares…
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