Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

It is impossible for the brain to always “be here now”

I'm a big fan of mindfulness and meditation. I resonate with a non-religious, secular, scientific approach to Buddhism.  But I'm also an avid reader of neuroscience books. My current fave is Antonio Damasio's "Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain."  Much of the book is filled with more details about brain anatomy and functioning than I really care about. The overall theme, though, is fascinating -- how our sense of self is built up from more primitive primordial feelings, along with a less primitive core self and a possibly uniquely human autobiographical self. Today I came across a section…
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Posted inFundamentalism

Hindu fundamentalists are killing freethinkers in India

Well, a story in the New York Times, "India's Attack on Free Speech," makes me feel better about religious craziness in the United States. We have lots of fanatic Christian fundamentalists in this country. But we also have the First Amendment and a healthy respect for free speech. Our Christian nationalists don't kill anti-religion bloggers. (Good news for me!) In India, though, people are being killed for speaking their faithless minds. I'd thought that India was making progress on becoming a liberal democracy akin to ours ("liberal" means something different in this context from the usual liberal/conservative distinction). But apparently…
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Posted inGod

“Pascal’s Wager 2.0” — an interesting read

Most people are familiar with Pascals' Wager. (If you aren't, I've written about it here and here.) Pascal's basic idea was that it makes sense to believe in God, because if you're right the benefits are eternal and unlimited, while if you're wrong you lose nothing. (Or very little. Such as listening to a bunch of boring sermons and not eating meat on Fridays.) Over on the New York Times web site, there's an interesting piece by a philosophy professor, Gary Gutting. In "Pascal's Wager 2.0" he argues that doubting God is a better bet than denying God. The wager…
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Posted inMorality

Traditional Buddhist morality is worse than modern secular morality

Buddhism often is embraced by people who reject other forms of religion. It's sort of like a spiritual security blanket for those who no longer feel comfortable taking shelter under theistic theologies like Christianity. Something to hold on if it is just too scary to let go of religion entirely. I've used Buddhism in this way, being attracted to its non-supernatural aspects while rejecting rebirth, karma extending over multiple lives, and such. I don't see anything wrong with this. But there's a decent argument to be made that when the unappealing side of Buddhism is discarded, what's left isn't really…
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Posted inReality Spiritual practice/meditation

Wow. My wife convinces me she’s enlightened.

If you think I'm churchless and irreligious, you haven't met my wife, Laurel -- who is now surpassing me in skepticism about all things godly.  She's even enlightening me about enlightenment.  Driving home from central Oregon this afternoon, with plenty of time to converse during the two hour trip, Laurel said: Why are so many people concerned about being enlightened? It's just about embracing reality. Which is right here, right now. So understanding there's no such thing as enlightenment, just reality, is true enlightenment.  I couldn't add much to this bit of wisdom. Mostly I just marveled at Laurel's evident…
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Posted inReality

John Gray’s “The Soul of the Marionette” — perplexing and persuasive

I enjoy books that present familiar ideas in a fresh way. I also enjoy books that, when I read the last page, leave me with as many questions as answers. John Gray's "The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry Into Human Freedom" is such a book.  I finished it last night, having read the 168 pages in just a day and a half. Once I started Gray's book, I found it so fascinating, I felt compelled to get to the end as soon as possible -- so I could grasp its conclusions. Problem was (if it is a problem,…
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Posted inMystics Religions

Tough talk about Rajinder Singh from a disillusioned ex-disciple

Recently I got an email from someone who was initiated by an Indian Sant Mat guru, Rajinder Singh, and now realizes that this supposed divine being isn't really what he claims to be. This person gave me permission to share the message, which I've done below with some mild editing in line with the person's wish to remain anonymous. I'm always pleased to hear about someone's disillusioned experience with a religion or religious teacher. This is a wonderful thing, waking up from an illusion.  Feel free to share your thoughts about what this person says in a comment, as my…
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Posted inReality Religions

Why religious Personal Beliefs are usually Personal Delusions

A few days ago astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted out something so-true: If your Personal Beliefs deny what's objectively true about the world, then they're more accurately called Personal Delusions. Beautifully said.  This makes most religious dogma delusional. In fact, I probably should have said all religious dogma, since if something is objectively true it belongs in the realm of science and other forms of generally accepted knowledge, not the realm of religion. Now, in a reply to someone who commented on this tweet, Tyson clarified what he meant. He was asked, "What if your personal delusions don't deny what's…
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Posted inReality Science

The weird interwoven world of general relativity

Let's get this straight right away: I don't really understand general relativity.  I've read a lot of explanations about it. Briefly I'll feel like I grasp what general relativity is all about in a non-mathematical sense.  A few days later, or even sooner, that understanding has slipped away and I'm basically as clueless as I was before. Which is strange, because usually I can conceptually grasp scientific truths much more fully.  So there's something weird for me about general relativity. Which probably is best explained by the fact that almost everybody feels the same way.  Spend two minutes watching this…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

David Lane explains why he meditates

Here's a link to a fascinating essay by David Lane, "Why I Meditate." It starts off with: Recently there was an intense discussion on spiritual matters on Brian Hines’ widely read blog, The Church of the Churchless, and an Indian gentleman wrote to me via email providing a link to it, primarily because there was a question about why I still meditate given my skeptical outlook on most things religious. He too was curious and wanted to know more about my daily practice and my reasoning behind it. The following is my response. At this point I don't really want to…
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Posted inScience

“I don’t believe in conscious decisions”

Here's a brilliant letter to the editor in a recent issue of New Scientist. I've read Castaldo's letter several times. Don't claim to understand it fully. But I love this sentence, particularly:  I believe that what we call a conscious decision is just an awareness that our myriad subconscious systems have collectively resolved a course of action or state of belief.This makes a lot of sense.  Like... yesterday I noticed that my wife had left a page in our local newspaper open to a Best Buy ad. A Labor Day sale was on for televisions. We'd talked a bit about…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Letting the mind be free is a good way to control it

Ooh, ooh! I wrote a Zen koan blog post title. And I don't even practice Zen.  How does one control the mind? By letting the mind do whatever it wants. This could be the key to... everything! Or maybe... nothing. Which could be the same thing. Whatever, it's one of the main things I've learned since I signed up for Headspace, the trendy meditation app/approach that I started trying out a few months ago and wrote about here and here. Since, I've done Andy Puddicombe's guided meditation thing every morning. I've worked my way into Day 28 of the Self-Esteem…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Taoism/Tai Chi

What is seva in the RSSB organization?

Here's a provocative piece by Osho Robbins, a frequent commenter on this blog who emailed it to me. He writes about a recent experience where volunteers ("sevadars") acted in a high-handed manner at a large gathering of RSSB (Radha Soami Satsang Beas) followers -- an India-based group that I was a member of for many years. What is seva? What is selfless service? Great questions. What is seva in RSSB? by Osho Robbins This is an interesting question for an RSSB follower to contemplate. It is just (a) following orders given from those above you? Or is it (b) using your…
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Posted inGod Religions

A must read for the churchless: “Faith No More”

Short. Sweet. Persuasive. There's a lot to like about a piece in the Milwaukee Magazine, "Faith No More," by Mario Quadracci. Download Faith No More PDF (in case the piece ever disappears from the magazine's web site) Quadracci nails a theme that I like to harp on also. It isn't up to atheists to prove that god and supernaturalism don't exist; it is up to theists to prove that god and supernaturalism do exist. He writes: I could try to convince you that we reside in a purely naturalistic universe. I could attempt to demonstrate the human authorship of all of…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

I don’t really know what “spiritual” means anymore

Recently I had an essay rejected by the Spiritual Naturalist Society because the powers-that-be there, where I've become a regular contributor (for now...), didn't think that being politically active, in the sense of being involved in public policy debates, was a "spiritual" practice. (See my post, Naturalism needs to rule public policy debates.) This got me to thinking, again, about what that problematic word, spiritual, means. Most people, along with the dictionary, consider that it mostly refers to something supernatural, other-worldly, divine.  But how does a naturalist, someone who only considers the material world to be real, differentiate between what…
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Posted inPolitics Reality

Naturalism needs to rule public policy debates

Below is an essay that I wrote for the Spiritual Naturalist Society (I'm a contributing writer), but which struck them as too political for their tastes -- politics and policy-making apparently not being part of what they consider to be a "spiritual practice."  So, boo-hoo, it was rejected for their site. I'm going to present some arguments to the Spiritual Naturalist Society folks about why no bounds should be placed around a naturalistic worldview. If there is no supernatural realm, it doesn't make sense to me to consider some aspects of a naturalistic person's life to be spiritual, and some…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus Politics

More quotations from “Nature’s God,” a marvelously insightful book

I can't describe how much I enjoyed reading Matthew Stewart's book, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. It isn't the easiest book I've ever read, to put it mildly.  Stewart dives deep into historical and philosophical waters in the book's 435 pages. At times I wondered why he was paying so much attention to a certain subject. But by the end of "Nature's God" I understood, pretty much, how each chapter contributed to his literary goal. Which, basically, was to dispel the myth of the United States being founded as a Christian nation. Or more broadly, as a religious nation.…
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Posted inPolitics

America’s founders reasoned their way to a secular republic

How did the United States come to be the secular constitutional republic -- arguably also termed a democracy -- that it is now? Why aren't we ruled by a king or queen? Why aren't we a theocracy? I've vaguely been interested in these sorts of questions, but I'm not a big history buff. So reading Matthew Stewart's book, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic, is pretty much my first serious venture into learning about my country's revolutionary origins. In my last post I shared a bunch of quotations from the book. Here I want to take a stab at relating…
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Posted inBooks Morality

Quotations from “Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic”

l am loving Matthew Stewart's brilliantly written book, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. It demolishes the absurd oft-heard claims that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. Yet it is difficult to summarize Stewart's arguments why this is untrue. "Nature's God," which I'm about 2/3 through, is a complex blend of history and philosophy. It isn't enough to simply say that this country was founded by deists, not theists.  Yes, this is true. But to understand the book's subtitle, "The Heretical Origins of the American Republic," not surprisingly requires Stewart to journey through a…
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Posted inBuddhism Radha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

30-plus days into Headspace meditation, I’m liking it a lot

A bit over a month ago I discovered Headspace, which was founded by Andy Puddicombe, a British guy who trained as a Buddhist monk before starting this online meditation site. My first free trial experience on July 7 led me to write "Yikes! I actually like a guided Headspace meditation." I'm not a big fan of guided meditations. Usually they irk more than relax me. I get annoyed with the (usually) New Age'y tone of the person doing the guiding. Hey, if anybody is going to annoy me while I meditate, I'm perfectly capable of filling that role myself. After about…
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