Posted inConsciousness Delusions

Mind isn’t separate from body, but we sure feel like it is

After being a dualist for about 35 years, when I was a member of an Eastern religion that believed we humans have a mind and soul that are separable from the body, I'm now a contented monist -- as it seems virtually certain that physical matter/energy is all that exists, the mind is just the brain in action, and soul doesn't exist. But I readily admit that this isn't the way how mind and body relate feels to me. Or to other people. For it seems that right now my bodily fingers are typing away on a keyboard, with the…
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Posted inDelusions Politics

Last night’s State of the Union address provided more evidence of the Cult of Trump

Unfortunately, Donald Trump has inflicted himself on the national landscape for enough years to allow me to write several posts about how he acts like a cult leader, and his followers show him the devotion given to cult leaders. See: Trump acts like a cult leader in his coronavirus briefings Inside the cult of Trump, his rallies are church and he is the Gospel Cult of Trump shows how delusion is linked to blind devotion Cults can be political as well as religious Last night I showed my dedication to studying the behavior of political cult leaders, along with the…
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Posted inDelusions Religions Universe

Our dog is more attuned to reality than religious believers are

I've become a big fan of Robert Saltzman. So much so, after reading his The Ten Thousand Things and The 21st Century Self, I ordered what must be his longest book, Depending on no-thing -- which is 607 pages long. But the 107 chapters are short, so I'm reading one a day. This morning I read "The Milky Way." Saltzman is interested in many of the same things I am, which made the chapter enjoyable. He started off with some mind-boggling about the size of the universe. Our solar system is about 25,000 light years from the center of our…
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Posted inDelusions

A death on Diamond Mountain shows the danger of religious fanaticism

A friend gave me Scott Carney's book, The Enlightenment Trap: Obsession, Madness and Death on Diamond Mountain. My previous posts about the book are here, here, here, and here. The book is interesting, but if it wasn't a gift, I probably wouldn't have read it. Once I'd started it, I wanted to see what the death on Diamond Mountain was all about, since that is described in a final chapter. Lama Christie McNally and Ian Thorson were heavily involved with Geshe Michael Roach, the supreme spiritual leader of Diamond Mountain University -- a strange blend of Tibetan Buddhism and Roach's…
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Posted inDelusions Spiritual practice/meditation

Becoming is a fallacy. Instead, simply be, without the coming.

In my thirty-five years of belonging to an Eastern religion headed up by a guru, I heard lots of statements like this. Some came from me. "I'm going to become enlightened." "I'm going to become a more devoted disciple." "I'm going to become a better meditator." "I'm going to become God-realized." "I"m going to become a knower of ultimate reality." There's nothing wrong with having aspirations, goals, intentions. However, there's a problem with becoming in the realm of spiritual practice. It can easily become the proverbial carrot in front of a donkey -- always just out of reach, no matter…
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Posted inDelusions Spiritual practice/meditation

Don’t let your spirituality be second-hand. Know truth by yourself, for yourself.

I've almost finished reading Robert Saltzman's book, The Ten Thousand Things. I highly recommend it to anybody who is open to embracing an approach to life that is both really simple, and also really radical -- if like me, you've spent much of your life exploring second-hand spirituality. By second-hand, I mean learning how other people have explored what life is all about. At various times I've had a great fondness for Rumi, medieval Christian mystics (especially Meister Eckhart, Alan Watts, modern Hindu sages, and many other people who have written about how they approached the Big Questions of what…
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Posted inDelusions Radha Soami Satsang Beas Religions

“The Enlightenment Trap” — a cautionary tale of spirituality gone bad

Today a friend gave me a book that he thought I'd like. He was right. We've known each other for a long time, so after he'd listened to the audio version of Scott Carney's The Enlightenment Trap: Obsession, Madness and Death on Diamond  Mountain, he correctly surmised that I'd find it interesting. I'm only up to page 32, but Carney's introductory "A Note for a New Edition" contains some strong hints of what the book's central themes are. Rather than thinking of this as a true-crime story that follows the downward spiral of a cultic community, this book is the…
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Posted inDelusions Spiritual practice/meditation Wu Project

Gurus take us into the realm of lost souls

After writing about Steven Harrison's book in my previous post, "Doing Nothing -- a book about ending the spiritual search," below are additional passages that appealed to me. Which doesn't mean that I resonate with everything in Doing Nothing. Some parts are a bit overly New Age'y for me, and I came across a mention of divinity that seems at odds with Harrison's message. But on the whole, I enjoy his blunt assessment of the problem with spiritual searching. Basically, it boils down to a simple assertion that is in line with both neuroscience and Zen: whenever we're seeking salvation,…
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Posted inDelusions Reality Spiritual practice/meditation

Doing Nothing — a book about ending the spiritual search

Back in 2013 I wrote a blog post about a book by Steven Harrison, Doing Nothing: Coming to the End of the Spiritual Search. I was pretty positive about the book in "Doing Nothing. Sounds like my kind of anti-religion," though I hadn't read it. Here's a tip for authors of books in the spirituality, religion, mysticism, and meditation genres: If you want readers to finish your book, don't include a mention of another title like "Doing Nothing: Coming to the End of the Spritual Search." I stopped reading during my pre-meditation quiet time when I came to that mention.…
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Posted inDelusions Mindfulness Reality

“The Surprising Allure of Ignorance,” an essay by Mark Lilla

My wife subscribes to the print edition of the Sunday New York Times. As I was taking the discarded December 8 edition to our recycling bin, I noticed an essay in the Opinion section, which was on top of the pile, that looked interesting: "The Surprising Allure of Ignorance," by Mark Lilla. (That's a gift link from my digital New York Times account, so it should be readable by everybody. But I've also copied in Lilla's essay in its entirety below, as it isn't all that long.) Lilla is a professor of humanities at Columbia University and the author of…
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Posted inDelusions God

Drone fever and prosperity gospel point to religious myth-making

A couple of news stories I came across today are examples of both the limitations of human reason, and how those limitations help to produce religious myths. The New York Times had a story about the drone sightings that have gotten lots of people in New Jersey and New York all excited. Everyone should be able to read "How Drone Fever Spread Across New Jersey and Beyond," because I'm a digital New York Times subscriber and am sharing the story as a gift link. Here's some excerpts: It was a dry and cool Wednesday evening outside the Army’s Picatinny Arsenal…
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Posted inDelusions

Sabrina Wallace’s (“Sheena”) connection to a far-out conspiracy theory

I'm sharing this information not because I believe in it, but for other reasons. (1) The person at the heart of the conspiracy theory is Sabrina Wallace. I've been told by someone who knows her that Sabrina is the "Sheena" who wrote a book about her spiritual experiences in India that included some unflattering references to Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas. (See here, here, here, and here.)  (2) The person who knows Sabrina said that she now is fine with being identified as "Sheena." Before, she wanted her real name kept confidential. The web page…
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Posted inDelusions Karma

Everything doesn’t happen for a reason. Often things just happen.

Having written a book about karma (specifically, the karmic rationale for vegetarianism) called "Life is Fair," I'm well acquainted with the idea that everything happens for a reason. For karma, when stripped of its supernatural notions of reincarnation and such, basically is just a law of cause and effect. You do this, you get that. Pretty damn simple. What complicates things is that while the effects are clear, in our life or the world at large, the causes are generally hidden to a large extent.  In Eastern philosophy this may be due to actions in previous lives bearing fruit in…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth Delusions

Belief in life after death precedes religious belief

Religious believers, of whom I used to be one, so I know what I'm talking about, like to view tenets of religiosity as being a higher form of knowledge than ordinary knowledge of this world.  But from my current more enlightened atheist perspective, it's much more likely that the actual situation is reversed: religions make use of how people view things before religion comes along, which helps explain the appeal of religiosity. It feels natural. Here's a good example. Death. Not the cheeriest topic, but a important one, since death arrives for everybody. The October 14, 2023 issue of New…
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Posted inDelusions Free will

Our belief that we’re freely acting agents causes pain and suffering

Want to feel better? Want to take steps toward genuine enlightenment? Want to embark on a journey toward truth and away from illusion? All those wants can be achieved by giving up a sensation of being an independent agent, or soul, or ego, that stands apart from the laws of nature that govern everything else in existence.  So argues Paul Breer in a persuasive fashion in his book, The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will. I'm enjoying the book a lot. Here's excerpts from the first chapter, "An Overview of the Agency Problem," that provide a good overview of…
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Posted inDelusions

Discard religious and mystical fantasies. Just live life as it is.

I've come to feel that the strangest thing about religion and mysticism is how these dogmas introduce a big dose of strangeness into life that makes living way more complicated than it needs to be. Here's another way of saying this: everybody's life is full of problems and challenges. But life itself isn't a problem or challenge. It's just life.  So when a religion or mystical path tells you that you need to be saved, or enlightened, or self-realized, or god-realized, or cleansed of sin, or any other bit of bullshit that holier-than-thou preachers, gurus, and such like to blab…
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Posted inDelusions Fundamentalism

A believer in Putin’s propaganda reminds me of religious dogmatism

Proving that I'm able to tolerate people who embrace absurd conspiracy theories, for several weeks I've been engaged in an exchange of emails with an acquaintance who also lives in Salem, Oregon. His name is Jack.  In the past Jack and I have corresponded about subjects we agreed on, both of us being on the left side of the political spectrum. But Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine revealed another side to Jack. He buys in almost 100% to Putin propaganda about the war. Jack's sources for this disinformation are web sites biased toward Russia, if not controlled by them. When…
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Posted inBooks Delusions

Bullshit: “What you dislike in others is what you dislike in yourself”

There's a lot of New Age absurdities that irritate me. One of them is the ridiculous notion that if I dislike something about someone else, it's because I actually dislike that something in myself. Oh, really? That's absurd. Sure, perhaps it is true in a few cases, but almost always we have a good reason for our dislikes. I dislike Donald Trump because he lies incessantly, has a monstrous ego, lacks any genuine sense of morality, and exhibits an almost total lack of self-awareness and self-criticism.  (Those are the dislikes that come most readily to mind. I could come up…
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Posted inDelusions

Believe in magic, so long as you don’t really believe in it

I'm an atheist who has two wooden Christian crosses sitting on his bedside table. Those are the crosses someone sent to me in a mysterious package, as I wrote about a few days ago. I've got no problem with religious symbols. Plenty of atheists love to visit beautiful holy places, admire religious art, and listen to religious music. Problems arise when people believe that those symbols possess supernatural power. Sure, I'm open to the possibility that Jesus truly is the Son of God and answers prayers addressed to him.  But I'm also open to the possibility of some other entity…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth Delusions God

Atheists more likely to believe in paranormal than religious people

Just in time for Halloween, a few days ago the New York Times had a story, "Many Americans Say They Believe in Ghosts. Do You?" No, I don't. I also don't believe in God. But lots of atheists do believe in paranormal phenomena, according to the story. There are a number of different ways to quantify belief among Americans in so-called paranormal phenomena. One way is to ask a selection of people representative of the population if they believe in ghosts. In a 2019 IPSOS poll, 46 percent of respondents said they did. Another is to ask what they fear.…
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