Posted inBooks Mindfulness

In Zen, faith, doubt, and energy are all pleasingly natural, not supernatural

In my religious believing days, what happened during my morning reading time today would have struck me as a message from God. Or at least a message from the universe. Now, I simply view it as a coincidental message -- turning to three books and finding that continuing where I'd left off reading resulted in a similar point of view. Which, I suppose, isn't all that surprising, given that currently I only read books with a naturalistic perspective. I want to embrace reality as it is, not as someone imagines it to be. First I picked up James Ishmael Ford's,…
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Posted inBooks Happiness Meaning of life

Top ten list for a psychologically rich life

In his book, Life in Three Dimensions, psychologist Shigehiro Oishi lays out in a convincing manner why the customary divisions of a good life into happiness and meaning fail to capture an important additional area: psychological richness. (See my first two posts about the book, here and here.) This notion of psychological richness resonates with me. Most of us, certainly me included, can recall experiences that didn't make us happy, nor were they meaningful, but they were interesting and important nonetheless. They added depth to our life, exposing us to a side of life that we hadn't been aware of…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism

Zen and Jack Reacher have this in common

My wife and I just got back from a trip to Black Butte Ranch in central Oregon, where we spent several days with my daughter's (Celeste) family -- Patrick (husband) and Evelyn (my granddaughter). They live in southern California and came up for Evelyn's orientation at the University of Oregon, where she'll be a freshman this fall. Yesterday we made a trip into Sisters for lunch and to browse Paulina Springs Books, a wonderful small town bookstore where I always find something to buy. Two of the three books I purchased were Lee Child's Make Me and Hiking Zen by…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

I like how Henry Shukman views love

Well, I'm on Day 2 of an approximately year-long journey on what meditation teacher Henry Shukman calls The Way. Pleasingly, I don't have to journey to India or Tibet, nor go on lengthy meditation retreats. All I needed to do was install an app on my iPhone and pay $89.99 for a year's worth of daily talks and guided meditations that comprise The Way. One thing that I like about Shukman's approach is that The Way is unique, to my knowledge, among online meditation instruction with its "no choice" format. I've tried quite a few meditation apps. They all have…
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Posted inBooks Mindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

“The Mindful Geek” is a meditation guide for secular skeptics

Do I really need another book about meditation? No, I've got lots of them at the moment and have read many more over the 55 years I've been engaged in daily meditation. But do I want another book about meditation? Absolutely. That's why Amazon delivered The Mindful Geek by Michael W. Taft to me recently. I was in the mood for a meditation guide that was based on secular non-religious principles that were in accord with modern neuroscience. Taft has a strong background in various sorts of traditions. His first paragraph is: From Zen temples in Japan to yogi caves…
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Posted inBooks Neuroscience Universe

Doty’s book, Mind Magic, made sense to me. With one glaring exception.

Well, today I finished reading James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything. I started off liking the book more than how I ended up liking it.  The general thrust of Mind Magic is hard to argue with. The human mind is like an iceberg: the conscious tip, which we're aware of, is much smaller than the subconscious bulk, which we aren't aware of. Yet thoughts, emotions, perceptions, and such mostly bubble up from the subconscious rather than our conscious awareness. We all are familiar with thoughts that appear unbidden and depart without a…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism Mindfulness

Mindfulness is focused attention plus peripheral awareness

In December 2018, six years ago, I wrote what seems to be my first (and only) post about a book I'd just started reading, The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness. A few days ago something spurred me to pluck the book from a bookshelf where it had been languishing after I'd read about half of the 415 pages, then put it aside. I decided to re-read it, since the book methodically describes ten stages of Buddhist meditation and I wanted to start at the beginning rather than jump right into…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism

Enlightenment is not needing to die a good death

I'm a believer in the Five Minute University equivalent of book reading. If you're not familiar with Father Guido Sarducci's Five Minute University, congratulations. You're nowhere near as old as I am. Sarducci was a thing back in the ancient days of 1970's/80's comedy. His brilliant idea, which is hard to argue with, was to charge $20 for a diploma from his college, which only takes five minutes to graduate from, since five years after someone graduates from a regular college, all they can remember about what they learned could be regurgitated in five minutes. For more details, here's a…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

Rabbi Brian’s Highly Unorthodox Gospel

Recently I got an email with an offer to read and comment on a book by Rabbi Brian Zachary Mayer, Rabbi Brian's Highly Unorthodox Gospel. (It comes with stickers that you apply at various places in the book.) Naturally I said, "Absolutely!" to Rabbi Brian. Hey, we share a first name. Also, a state, since Rabbi Brian lives in Portland, the more with-it city some 50 miles north of where I live in sleepier Salem. And both of us don't like organized religion. Plus, we each have a beard, though Rabbi Brian's is way darker, since he's way younger. I've…
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Posted inBooks Reality Science

Reality, whatever the truth of it may be, is weird

I've got a fondness for weirdness. I won't try to explain why this is, since any explanation would go against a central tenet of weirdness: not making logical sense. I will though, offer as evidence this photo of a tangible commitment to weirdness: a book by Eric Schwitzgebel, The Weirdness of the World, that is sitting next to my laptop at this moment. The book cost $27.09 from Amazon, a pleasingly weird price. I would have been disappointed if it was $27.00, $27.10, or $27.99.  Here's the Amazon description. How all philosophical explanations of human consciousness and the fundamental structure…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism

Two books, a half century apart: old Zen, new Zen

I readily admit that I'm addicted to books. It's both a genetic and learned addiction. I blame, or credit, my mother. She was an avid reader and intellectual who, like me now, had books piled up around her home and made notes about them in blank ending pages. My addiction could help explain why I find myself attracted to books I've owned for a long time, in the example below, over a half century, even though my philosophical tastes have changed quite a bit over the years. Like a literary archaeologist, I can estimate when I first read a book…
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Posted inBooks Reality

Beautiful: the world is uncertain, unexplainable, and uncontrollable

This morning I finished reading Brian Klaas's book, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters. My impressions: well-written, highly original, thought-provoking, factually sound. His bio on the book's cover says he "grew up in Minneapolis, earned his DPhil at Oxford, and is now a professor of global politics at University College, London." No wonder his book seems so smart. This is a smart guy.  Below I've shared some passages that I especially liked in his final chapter, "Why Everything We Do Matters."  Our journey together, alas, nears its end. We have now glimpsed a world that is entirely…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism Meaning of life

Beautiful: how Joan Tollifson sees life, and us.

Having received Joan Tollifson's book, Nothing to Grasp, I wanted to share these passages from her opening chapter, "Life." The more I learn about how Toliffson views things, the more I like her perspective. How do we make sense of all this? What's it all about? Is there any way out of our suffering or the world suffering, or any way to live through it without falling into destructive mind-states like despair, anger, hatred, and self-pity? Like many others, I looked in different directions for answers to these questions. I tried alcohol and drugs, psychotherapy, political activism, meditation, satsang and…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

Ouspensky leaving Gurdjieff has lessons for spiritual independence

As noted in my previous post, "Between Gurdjieff and Zen, I much prefer Zen," after reading the first chapter in P.D. Ouspensky's book about his time with Gurdjieff, In Search of the Miraculous, I decided that I'd only read one additional chapter -- the last one where Ouspensky describes why he parted company with Gurdjieff. Having done that, here's the reason Ouspensky gives. In regard to my relations with G. I saw clearly at that time that I had been mistaken about many things that I had ascribed to G. and that by staying with him now I should not…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism Free will

Between Gurdjieff and Zen, I much prefer Zen

Wanting to read something different yesterday, I picked up my copy of P.D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous. Since that copy has a 1949 copyright date, it's a first edition of the book that was published after Ouspensky died in 1947. My mother, though not at all religious, was a fan of P.D. Ouspensky, who studied a form of Eastern mysticism (roughly speaking) taught by George Gurdjieff. I kept a few books of my mother's after she died. One was The Fourth Way by Ouspensky. I'm pretty sure In Search of the Miraculous also was her book, though it…
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Posted inBooks Reality

Kant is difficult to understand, but pleasingly irreligious

I haven't read much of Immanuel Kant directly. Basically, all I've known about this great philosopher is his distinction between noumenon, which can't be known, and phenomenon, which can be known. But since the book I'm reading now, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, contains a heavy dose of Kant, I'm gradually learning more about his worldview. Which is pleasingly irreligious. I had no idea that Kant was so down on religion and the supernatural. Here's some passages about his philosophy from what I read today. Like Kant's writing itself, they aren't the…
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Posted inBooks Reality Science

We can’t grasp reality as it is, only as we know it

My new favorite book, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, had such a provocative title, as soon as I saw it recommended in The New Yorker I knew that I'd have to buy it. Wow. It's a work of literary genius, based on my reading of the first part of it. The author, William Egginton, is a humanities professor, but he clearly has an excellent grasp of modern science also. The front cover has a one-sentence summary of what the book is about. A poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explored the greatest…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism Free will

Freedom is what bugs me about Sartre. I don’t believe in free will.

Message to those who visit this blog who aren't into Sartre's Being and Nothingness as much as I am (which includes almost everybody, I'm pretty sure): Today I reached a point in my re-reading of the book where it dawned on me what my central problem with Sartre's existentialist philosophy is -- freedom. It's a big enough problem that I likely will put Being and Nothingness back on the shelf where I picked it up recently. I enjoy trying to encapsulate complex philosophies and world views in a few words, as crazy as this would seem to an expert in…
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Posted inBooks Reality

I enjoy reading Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. (Yeah, I’m weird.)

OK, I lied. Or more accurately, I changed my mind. After saying in my previous post about Sartre's Being and Nothingness that I didn't feel like re-reading (or re-re-reading) the 798 pages of dense philosophical prose, choosing to only read the 44 pages of the translator's introduction again, I've found myself plowing further into the book. Because I'm enjoying it.  I sort of figure that rather than attempting the New York Times crossword puzzle, I'd rather exercise my aging brain by reading passages that often simultaneously stretch my ability to comprehend them, while presenting me with fresh ways of looking…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

I’m enjoying the Stoic test. Haven’t gotten an A or A+ yet.

As noted in my previous post about a modern approach to Stoicism, "Stoicism advises being happy with what we already have," the idea is to be content (or at least as content as possible) with what life brings us. That doesn't mean we don't try to deal with problems. But we'll be better able to deal with them if we're not in the grip of a strong negative emotion like anger, despair, self-pity, and such. And in accord with the Buddhist notion of two arrows, it's preferable to just have a single arrow strike us -- such as an illness…
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