Meaning of life

Meaning of life Personal/Stories Spiritual practice/meditation

“The Web of Meaning” — great book about finding our place in the universe

I've finished The Web of Meaning, by Jeremy Lent, a book with the subtitle, "Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe." It's a lengthy book, 382 pages, that I enjoyed. My first post about it was "Marvelous mystery lies in the complexity of the world." Lent wrote a related previous book, The Patterning Instinct. Both books discuss Eastern and Western religions in a well-informed manner. In 2017 I talked about The Patterning Instinct in "Indian and Greek thought are both dualistic. Chinese thought isn't." In these passages Lent explains how ancient India embraced a form…

Brian Hines August 23, 202121

Books Buddhism Meaning of life

Marvelous mystery lies in the complexity of the world

Most of us want to believe in something greater than ourself. That's a worthy ambition. Problem is, religious believers head off in a misguided direction when they imagine that the something greater lies in a vertical direction. Meaning, they fantasize that a heaven awaits above; or that higher supernatural regions of reality exist; or that their consciousness needs to be elevated beyond worldly concerns. What these devotees of verticality fail to understand is this: the world right here and right now possesses all the majesty, mystery, and meaning that anyone could desire. It just takes eyes to see, which, sadly,…

Brian Hines August 1, 202113

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…

Brian Hines April 19, 202112

What we pay attention to depends on what demands attention

At the moment it's hard for me to write about anything other than the ice storm aftermath here in Oregon, the subject of my last churchless blog post, "Being without power for a week shows what's important." Well, it's now been nine days since our electricity went out. All of our neighbors are in the same power outage situation, along with 38,000 other Oregonians. Last night my wife and I hosted a Zoom meeting of our monthly Salon discussion group. Our generator powers a Starlink satellite internet connection, which worked great all through the 100 minute meeting. After the meeting I…

Brian Hines February 21, 20215

The good life is the life you already have

lt took me a few months, but today I finished reading John Gray's provocative little book, "Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life." (Other books took priority in my morning reading time; my first post about this book is here.) The final chapter contained some nice observations about our search for meaning, and what cats can teach us in this regard. Here's some excerpts. If cats could understand the human search for meaning they would purr with delight at its absurdity. Life as the cat they happen to be is meaning enough for them. Humans, on the other hand,…

Brian Hines February 8, 20217

Cats have no need of philosophy or religion

John Gray is an author who is sometimes irritating (to me, at least) but always interesting. He provokes in intelligent, witty, well-reasoned ways. My main gripe about Gray is that he often uses a sort of "straw man" argument where he selects the writings of one person to represent a much more diverse way of thinking. He did this in Seven Types of Atheism, which I thought I'd enjoy but instead found annoying for that reason. But after seeing a mention of his new book in The New Yorker, I eagerly bought a copy of Feline Philosophy: Cats and the…

Brian Hines December 17, 20206

I share a guest post from myself about loving the life you’re with

Thank you, me, for giving permission to myself to share on this blog a post I wrote for my HinesSight blog on Thanksgiving Day. I truly am thankful that I am so generous with myself. So check out "If you can't be with the life you love, love the life you're with." You get extra credit if you're able to identify the source of the saying that I adapted for the blog post title. Here's an excerpt from the post. Sure, it's wonderful to be thankful. However, life is difficult. And I hate to break this news to you younger…

Brian Hines December 5, 20205

Life makes more sense without any kind of god

Here's a guest blog post from someone I regularly communicate with via email. This recent message from the person resonated with me, because it echoes thoughts I frequently have about the absurdity of believing that life has a purpose imposed from outside of us. Like, from a god. Enjoy... Hey Brian, how are you and yours doing? My family and I are doing well. Lots of folks around us have COVID, but so far, we’ve managed to avoid it. I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s interesting what hangs around in my head from religion. One thing that rears its ugly…

Brian Hines October 31, 20202

An ordinary life is all I need. Being religiously special, no thanks.

There are various reasons why I'm happier after ditching religion some fifteen years ago. Feeling ordinary is one reason. I get a lot of satisfaction from no longer believing that I'm on a special path that leads back to God. Of course, virtually every religion believes that same thing. So religious people are like the children in Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon. Everybody is above average. Or at least that's what those who embrace religion think. Supposedly they've been singled out for special treatment by God, Jesus, a guru, good karma, whatever. So the pressure is on to live up to a…

Brian Hines September 22, 2020201

Life is best lived by embracing insecurity

One of the things I talked about in my first book, a shorter and simpler version of which I published a few years ago, is that happenings in the world can be deterministic while also being unpredictable. This is what chaos theory is all about. Complex systems are made up of causes and effects, yet in such a fashion that it is virtually (and maybe totally) impossible to know what they are going to do next. An example I cited in my book is tossing a cork into a stream above some rapids. Every movement of the cork is determined…

Brian Hines September 11, 20206

Oregon wildfires reflect the uncertain nature of reality

Religions are prone to all sorts of ridiculous errors, but one of the worst is believing that reality can be tamed. Meaning, eliminating uncertainty, chance, randomness, unpredictability. It's a psychological truism that we humans are uncomfortable with uncertainty. So we make up stories to fill the gap between what is known and what we have questions about where answers are lacking. How did existence come to be? Nobody knows. Science is content with leaving this question as a mystery. Religions, though, make up a tale about how God created the cosmos -- ignoring the obvious problem of how God came…

Brian Hines September 9, 20208

Books Meaning of life Science

“We must accept there is no grand design” — physicist Brian Greene

There's only good news in the final pages of physicist Brian Greene's new book, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe." (See here, here, and here for my previous posts about the book.) Yes, there's no evidence for a grand design to the cosmos. No god fashioned our universe. The laws of nature didn't spring out of a divine mind. They just are what they are. Which leads to another positive yes: So, yes, it is up to us to determine the meaning that we find in our otherwise meaningless universe.…

Brian Hines May 17, 202042

There’s no reason the world has to make sense

I've been reading a book by Steve Hagen that I thought I'd like, because the title was so intriguing: Why the World Doesn't Seem to Make Sense. Unfortunately, it is the book itself that doesn't make sense. When I'm not liking a book, I enjoy going back to the Amazon listing and clicking on the 1 and 2 star reviews, the worst ones. I heartily agree with what I found there just now. -- Drivel. I regret spending the money, and more importantly the time, to read this book.-- A horrible, tedious book purporting to be an inquiry but more…

Brian Hines April 17, 202029

We make our own meaning in an indifferent universe

Here's a great question that Lesley Hazleton asks at the start of the Making Meaning chapter in her book, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto. What do you do when someone tells you about a treasured experience that you know is in all probability untrue? True to that person that is, but not objectively true. Since people share all kinds of religious and mystical experiences in comments on my blog posts, I'm confronted with this question often. Usually I have the same answer Hazleton chose when a woman told her about orca whales lining up and singing to her as she stood…

Brian Hines March 3, 202036

Best wishes for an ordinary New Year

Here's my New Year's wish for visitors to this Church of the Churchless blog, myself, and indeed, everybody. Be ordinary. Do ordinary things. Feel happy in your ordinariness. I say this because now that I've reached the wise old age of 71, I've realized that overlooking the ordinary that's right at hand for some supposedly extraordinary thing that's around a corner has some serious drawbacks. One reason is what I talked about in a post last month, Why you should be happy today, right now, no matter what. Be happy today, right now, at this very moment and every following…

Brian Hines December 31, 20196

Lessons about thankfulness from our dog

Our oldest dog, ZuZu, died last month. I'm still grieving. So when I looked through my previous Thanksgiving Day blog posts (a holiday here in the United States), it seemed fitting to share a 2013 post, "Our 14 year old dog teaches me about thankfulness." That dog was Serena, shown above in her younger days on a bank of the Metolius River in central Oregon. Here's most of what I said in the blog post I wrote about her when Serena's health was fading. She doesn't look like she did in her younger days. But heck, who does? Surely not me. Being…

Brian Hines November 28, 20192

If this life is all there is, what should we do during it?

Poet Mary Oliver asked a great question in the last two lines of "The Summer Day." The poem ends with: I don't know exactly what a prayer is.I do know how to pay attention, how to fall downinto the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,which is what I have been doing all day.Tell me, what else should I have done?Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?Tell me, what is it you plan to dowith your one wild and precious life? Obviously the question isn't for others…

Brian Hines December 21, 201813