Posted inPersonal/Stories

Best wishes for a pleasant 2023

This being New Year's Eve, with several hours to go here on the west coast before 2022 departs, I want to share a few thoughts about how this year has gone on this blog, and what I look forward to in 2023. First, I'm thankful for those who visit the Church of the Churchless, especially the regular visitors. Without people reading what I write, this blog would be a private diary, not a public square.  Those who leave comments on my blog posts earn a special thank you.  Just as those posts appeal to some, but not to others, I…
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Posted inHumor Personal/Stories

My icy driveway experiment: what slides furthest?

Following up on my previous post where I spoke about the freezing rain that coated my area of Oregon with a sheet of ice yesterday, I'm pleased to present the video results of an experiment I conducted today on our very icy driveway in rural south Salem. My quest was to determine what would slide furthest: a shoe, a banana, or a stuffed wolf? After the experiment, I then attempted to rescue the wolf from the middle of the driveway, which didn't go so well, as shown in the video. Nonetheless, I await my senior citizen scientist award.
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Here’s our 2022 Christmas letter, along with freezing rain thoughts

First, I'm pleased to share the 2022 Christmas letter that I wrote for my wife and I, which we call a Holiday Greetings to be all inclusive and non-religious. If you're addicted to reading Christmas letters, you can help feed your habit by clicking here, where you'll find the letters I wrote from 1995 onward. After the letter, which is in both PDF and JPEG formats, I'll share some thoughts from unusually frigid Oregon about what freezing rain has to say about the Big Questions of Life. And also, mundane questions.Download 2022 Christmas Letter PDF Regarding freezing rain, it is one…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas

The “magic” in magical moments comes from our own mind

After including a quote in a previous blog post about how we construct the environment in which we live, thanks to how the human brain functions, I got to thinking about the implications for magical moments. We all have them, though it's difficult to say whether there's much agreement between people as to what constitutes a magical moment. Here's some examples from my life, using my own intuitive definition. Birth of my daughterCatching big waves on Maui with my boogie boardMarrying my wifeSeeing Janis Joplin perform in person Taking mescaline with a friend in the Sierra Nevada mountainsSpending two weeks in…
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Posted inHappiness Personal/Stories

Emotional highs and lows are a big part of our humanity

Last Saturday I watched a couple of college football games that put me through an emotional wringer. I summarized those ups and downs in the first paragraph of a post I wrote on my HinesSight blog, "Pushing the pile" doomed Oregon State against USC. While yesterday's Oregon vs. Washington State football game had an emotional arc for Ducks fans like me that went pre-game optimism - most of second half despair -- last few minutes elation (amazing comeback by Oregon), the Oregon State vs. USC game was pretty much the opposite. In discussing the games with a friend the next day…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Time for a summer blog post re-run

It's hot here in Oregon. Really hot. Hundred degree hot. Way hotter than normal. (Thank you for nothing, global warming.) This evening my brain doesn't feel like composing a fresh blog post. Time to dig into my vast repository of Church of the Churchless posts, 3,225 over the past 18 years, and share a summer re-run. I wrote this one in June 2005. It's one of my favorites. Of course, I probably shouldn't say that, since now the other 3,224 blog posts are going to feel bad. Oh, well, can't worry about that when it's this hot. Did I see…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

I respond to a B.S. comment about my 52 years of meditation

UPDATE: Spence Tepper has apologized to me for his ridiculous attempt to claim that my 35 years of daily meditation while a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, usually for several hours a day, amounted to "nothing." Good for Spence. He recognized how wrong he was. Hopefully from now on he will realize that my approach to meditation is the wise one: don't challenge someone's personal experience in meditation, but DO challenge any claim that this experience proves the existence of a supernatural realm beyond the physical. Spence doesn't like my skepticism toward his brand of religious fundamentalism. I've pointed out…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas

God can be an imaginary friend, even if you’re an atheist

Recently I heard from a woman who has distanced herself from the Indian religious organization I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB). Her family is still very much into RSSB, so she asked me some questions about how I adjusted after being, like her, initiated by the RSSB guru and then coming to see that the RSSB teachings no longer made sense. Here's one of her questions, along with my response. "Babaji" refers to the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon. Question for me: I find myself saying when I need help (to myself)…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

Zen’ish adage: when you’re sad, be sad; when you’re happy, be happy

Whenever I have a Grand Intuition about something that really is obvious, I'm never sure whether (1) I deserve to be honored in the Great Hall of Enlightened Beings or (2) laughed at for not realizing sooner what I should have understood long ago. (Personally, I'll go with #1, but I can't argue with someone else who favors #2.) The core of today's Grand Intuition is the title of this blog post: When you're sad, be sad; when you're happy, be happy. It's an emotional echo of some familiar Zen sayings. Chop wood, carry water. When hungry, eat. When thirsty, drink.…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

I’m more proud of being married for 32 years than of being religious for 35 years

Today is our anniversary. Easy to remember, since Laurel and I got married on St. Patrick's Day, 1990. That makes 32 years we've been husband and wife. Or as Laurel might say, wife and husband.  Whenever I look at our wedding photo, naturally I think, Damn, we looked so young back then! Well, yeah, that's what 32 years will do to you. Forty-one is way younger than seventy-three. Another thing 32 years of being married will do is teach you a lot. (Actually, I've been married for 50 years, since my first marriage lasted 18 years; Laurel had never been married…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Not only God is beyond words, everything is

Often people say "God is beyond words." No argument from me there, for several reasons. First, if God doesn't exist (the most likely scenario), then naturally God is beyond words, since no word describes nonexistence. Second, everything is beyond words. It simply isn't possible to capture all of the characteristics of something in words, numbers, concepts, images, or any other means. Even a single cell in our body defies description. A recent article in The New Yorker made that clear. Every cell is completely filled with complex entities, all engaged in constant motion, and so far scientists have been unable…
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Posted inMeaning of life Personal/Stories

“May I be free of fear” — my addition to loving kindness meditation

For quite a while, maybe five years, I've been repeating a form of loving kindness meditation that I learned from listening to Tamara Levitt's guided meditations on my iPhone's Calm app. It starts like this. Then "I" is replaced by "you," someone I care about (usually my wife), followed by "all" replacing "you." May I be happy.May I be safe.May I be healthy.May I be at peace. Recently I've added a fifth sentiment. May I be free of fear. When I do the "all" thing, previously I envisioned the entire world, as if I was floating in space and casting…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Like Walt Whitman said, we all contain multitudes

Yesterday I surprised myself. Also, the day before. And today. In fact, every day. I surprise myself when my view of life changes from what it was before. Which isn't really surprising, since life is full of change. It could even be said that life is change. Hearts beat. Lungs breathe. Neurons fire. When life becomes unchanging, that's called death. The surprise that brought this blog post to life was me saying in a comment that I agreed with what another commenter had said about theistic religions being more satisfying. I wrote: You might be surprised to hear this, but…
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Posted inBooks Personal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas

I give away eight boxes of books. And a lot of fond memories.

I woke up yesterday morning with a fresh insight: time for the books to go. Not just the small box of giveaway books that had been sitting on a table in my bedroom for quite while.  Also, the boxes of books that had been languishing in the storage space above our carport for much longer, about fifteen or twenty years, I can't remember exactly. Those books had a lot more sentimental value, which might explain why I hadn't thought of donating them before, even though I'd glance at the boxes every time I climbed up the dropdown ladder to get…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

How us old folks view time

Over on my HinesSight blog, tonight I wrote "Time has a different flavor for old folks like me." Give it a read, especially if you're younger than me (likely you are), so you can see what the future holds. This is how the post starts out. Remember when you were three? Probably not. I recall what that age was like via my memory of what my young daughter and her friends would say when asked how old they are. "Three going on four." They were so eager to be older, they'd fudge their age to get the next birthday into…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Live as if we and our loved ones are going to die

Admittedly this isn't the cheeriest subject for New Year's Eve, the last day of 2021 -- how we should live as if we and our loved ones are going to die. But I got to thinking about this after watching an episode in Season 1 of Dickinson, an Apple TV+ series about Emily Dickinson, the 19th century poet. Dickinson feigns illness in order to have more time alone in order to write her poetry. Her family has a doctor examine Dickinson. Given the sad state of pre-Civil War medicine, he misdiagnoses her as having a fatal disease. What I found…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Wu Project

We don’t know, so live now

Yeah, it's a cliche, dating all the way from 1971. "Be here now." (I have a well-worn 1972 edition of the book.) The book, though, actually doesn't talk a whole lot about the simple act of embracing the present moment as much as possible. Rather, it's filled with a bunch of Eastern mysticism/yoga philosophizing that I used to find appealing, but don't anymore. What I do agree with is that now is a treasure that shouldn't be frittered away by paying undue attention to the past and future. Sure, we have to be aware of what's happened in the past…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Here’s our 2021 Christmas letter

I don't believe in God. But I do believe in Christmas letters, even with the word "Christ" in Christmas. However, my wife and I prefer to call it a Holiday Greetings, in part because some years I don't write it before Christmas. This year, though, I was amazingly early -- a secular Christmas miracle.  The theme is how an asterisk should have accompanied our usual reply of "Fine" to the query of store employees, "How're you doing?" In our Holiday Greetings we add the asterisk: Fine* Here it is in both PDF and JPEG formats.Download 2021 Christmas Letter PDF
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus Personal/Stories

I get a mysterious package. Ideas about it welcomed.

Almost everybody likes a good mystery. I sure do. My fiction book reading is almost entirely in the genre of spy/espionage/counterterrorism novels, which involve a lot of intrigue. So I thought I'd outsource to readers of this blog the contents of a mysterious package that arrived in the mail yesterday. If you have an idea about the meaning of what was sent to me, share it in a comment on this post. Here's the envelope I got.  What caught my attention right away was the address and return address both being my address. My razor-sharp mind concluded, Whoever sent this…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Health problems are a window into how our minds work

Yesterday I got a probable diagnosis of glaucoma, an eye disease. I wrote about this in a post on my HinesSight blog, "Not so fun day: I probably have glaucoma." One bit of good news is that this was detected in an early stage, since I get an annual eye exam because I wear contact lenses and am severely nearsighted. Another aspect of getting the likely diagnosis is that it's given me an opportunity to observe how my mind has been dealing with the news. Which really is just another way of saying, How I have been dealing with the…
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