Posted inBooks Personal/Stories

Pay attention to the small things of life, because they’re the important things

Walking back to our rural home after a dog walk, I was struck by how a leafless oak tree at the edge of our yard looked against the late afternoon sky. It was a lesson in fractals, those amazing shapes that repeat at many levels. Each twig was a reflection of each branch which was a reflection of the entire tree. Which got me to thinking about how the small things in life are a reflection of the big things in life. To put it another way, the meaning we get from small things is the same meaning we get…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Here’s my darkly humorous irreligious 2017 Christmas letter

Old habits die hard. I still write a Christmas letter for my wife and me. Except we call it "Holiday Greetings."  Below is  the 2017 letter that I wrote last night. Oh, as long as I'm blogging... I'm not a strong law-and-order guy, so I'm not going to strictly enforce the commenting rule that I talked about in my previous blog post. I simply am hoping that Church of the Churchless commenters will keep preachiness to a minimum, and use the Open Thread for drastically off-topic comment conversations. Our Christmas letter can be viewed two ways: PDF: 2017 Laurel and…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

“The Prize,” my ready-to-steal spiritual screenplay idea

I've never written a screenplay. I've only read one screenplay. But I know from watching TV and movies that pitches for screenplays often take the form of X meets Y. And I can do that much. The Da Vinci Code meets Contact. There... million dollar screenplay contract, please. Major movie studios can reach me at the email address in the right sidebar. But actually I'm fine with someone stealing my idea, which is a mixture of spiritual (a la The Da Vinci Code) and far-out scientific (a la Contact), since I'd love to see the movie that I'm unable to…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas

My current atheist view of a previous religious revelation

For over 30 years I was a devoted initiate of an Indian guru, Charan Singh. He was the leader of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a spiritual/religious organization headquartered in Beas, India.  The only time I saw Charan Singh in person was during two weeks in 1977.  I'd just begun a new job in state government in Salem, Oregon. I had a five year old daughter who was going to get her first bicycle from "Santa." My wife dearly wanted me to be home for Christmas.  I did too. However, I was even more desperate to see the guru in…
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Posted inGod Personal/Stories

My missing checkbook taught me a lesson about God

After getting a haircut a few days ago I reached into the pocket of my jacket where I'd put my checkbook. Problem was, no checkbook.  "I'll have to give you cash," I told Kim, my haircutter. "Cash is good," she said. "I like cash."  "Me too. But I also like my checkbook, and I'm pretty sure I stuck it in my jacket pocket before I left home."  The next stop of the day in my retired life was my Tai Chi class in downtown Salem (Oregon). After I'd gotten in my car, post-haircut, I looked through my backpack and the…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Spiritual practice/meditation

The joy of living in a meaningless world

The deeper I dive into atheism, the more blissful those warm waters of faithlessness seem. Which is a big change from my early non-believing years, when I often felt that something important was missing from my life. That something was a built-in, ready-made, out-there-to-be-discovered meaning of existence. A spiritual shoulder to lean on, a cosmic compass to guide my way, an uplifting understanding of dependable solid ground lying beneath the shifting sands of everyday experience. Even after I'd given up a belief in God or any other obviously supernatural entity, I had a lingering feeling that is difficult to put…
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Posted inHumor Personal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Secret of happiness revealed (but my wife disagrees)

In the course of de-cluttering my office yesterday, I came across a long-forgotten piece I'd written for RS Greetings, a spiritual magazine published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas, back in the days when I was a member of this India-based guru-led organization. As I said in a 2004 post about the article, "Sadly, ego-loss didn't arrive in the mail," I'd argued with the editor of the magazine about their policy of not including the author's name.  So I told the editor that their Anonymous policy prevented readers from offering valuable feedback, and from authors learning from those readers. That’s the…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Spiritual practice/meditation

“Anxious time” is mental. “Calm time” is physical.

Here's another chapter in my never-ending story of Observations About the Cosmos That Are Either Astoundingly Brilliant or Fucking Obvious. I've figured out where anxiety comes from! And how to cure it!  OK, let's make that my anxiety. Your results may vary. Consult a qualified professional rather than this blog post if you're really being driven crazy by uncontrollable worrying. The sort of anxiety I'm talking about manifests in me as a sort of negative mental background buzz. I'll be lying in bed before going to sleep at night, or my senior citizen afternoon nap, idly thinking about stuff in…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth Personal/Stories

Great candidate for my last word: “Yes”

The older I get -- which, sadly, seems to be happening continuously -- the more I ponder the not-so-cheery question, "What should my last word be?" Now, usually we hear talk of last words, not word. But since I'm such a wordy guy, in writing at least, I figure I should do something surprising and limit myself to a single Last Word. (An aside: I enjoyed reading the "ironical sense of words said before a disaster" in the Wikipedia Last words article. These are so great, they almost -- but not quite -- made me want to do the last…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Spiritual practice/meditation

Preparing for certain future events vs. being prepared for anything

This afternoon, during some part of my all-important senior citizen nap time, I had another of my Aha! moments where everything in the cosmos becomes crystal clear for a brief moment of intuitive comprehensibility. And this time, astoundingly, I wasn't even under the influence of a psycho-active substance. Aside from my brain, which now and then approaches a genuine psychologically "active" state of being. As I felt it did today. I was mulling over some of the things I needed to do in the realm of my retired-person civic activism. For example, I'm engaged in a fight against a wastefully…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Why I stayed with a religion for 35 years

Today I responded to a person from India who had some questions about my experience with Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the spiritual guru-based group I belonged to for about 35 years. Here's what I said: _____, sorry for the delay in replying. I’m not qualified to “guide you through it all,” but I can offer some thoughts in response to the questions you posed.  The way I see it, one reason people don’t see through religions is because they strongly want to believe in a happy fantasy. That was one reason why I stayed with RSSB so long. I…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Behold my humble web page devoted to… ME!

Let's see. There's got to be some way for me to publicize my totally revamped www.BrianHines.com web site and also make this blog post into something philosophical. Or pseudo-spiritual.  I'll give it a shot... When I sat down yesterday at my MacBook Pro laptop, determined to replace my hugely outdated old personal web site with an Adobe Spark page, I started with a blank Brian Hines slate.  Meaning, I had to decide what I wanted to say about myself.  Since I've got 67 years of living as raw material, obviously I had plenty of options to work with. An Adobe…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Rare Metolius River fog: my misty philosophical musings

Just when you think you've seen it all... A familiar saying. Yesterday I lived it. Big time.  I've walked along the banks of central Oregon's Metolius River many, many times. I've seen the Metolius in sunny, rainy, snowy, dry, stormy, calm, and all sorts of other meteorological conditions.  The Metolius is so beautiful, I'm always awed by it when we visit our cabin in Camp Sherman -- a two hour drive or so from our home in Salem.  After a cloudless 94 degree day suddenly turned into a 62 degree afternoon thunderstorm with heavy rain and hail, some sort of…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

The relief of no longer believing in religion

Amazingly, and not a little scarily for me, I've written 2,194 Church of the Churchless posts since I started this blog in 2004.  I've covered lots of subjects. But an important topic hasn't gotten much attention from me. It's difficult to write about, being elusive, slippery, exceedingly personal, difficult to describe. What it feels like to (obviously) be the same person I was when I embraced a religion, yet now being a person who doesn't believe in what once was so important to me. It was difficult to compose those italicized words. Elucidating what they mean... even tougher.  I guess…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Reality

The Cosmic Significance of how I get back to sleep

Here's how I ended my previous post, "When trying to get back to sleep: to think or not to think?" Now, does this insight have any Cosmic Significance regarding the Big Questions of Life? Damn, I sure hope so! But that's a subject for another blog post. I'm starting to feel sleepy... very sleepy... I don't want to leave the question of Cosmic Significance hanging out there. Sure, I might be the only person on Earth who cares about the answer. But since I'm pretty darn important to me (leaving aside the issue of whether there's any difference between us),…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

When trying to get back to sleep: to think or not to think?

Having reached the venerable age of 67, I'm familiar with the Yes! Aha! feeling I frequently have when I ponder questions in the What Life is All About category.  Those Yes's/Aha's mean something to me, obviously, or I wouldn't feel so positive about them. But whether my personal mini-revelation resonates with anyone else... who knows?  Well, I'll get some clues if anybody leaves a comment on this post. So here goes my attempt to explain why getting back to sleep has become so interesting to me. Sleeping is very personal. Here's how it typically goes in my case. I drop…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Religions

The joy of deconverting from religious belief

Given how easily religious believers can accept the existence of a god they've never directly experienced, I always find it surprising when they can't accept a much more believable hypothesis: Giving up religiosity brings more happiness and contentment, not less. This is what's happened to me, though I readily admit that comparing states of happiness at various times of one's life is very difficult to do. After all, it isn't as if we can lay them side by side and measure how much contentment they contain. I was happy as an atheist. I was happy as a religious believer. I'm…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Spiritual practice/meditation

Advice about marijuana “paranoia” from an ex-hippie pothead

In case you're wondering... sure, this post does indeed belong on this here Church of the Churchless. After all, I've written at some length about why "Marijuana is my secular sacrament." Excerpt: I’m grateful to Mother Nature for bringing forth a substance that elevates the spirit. There’s a reason we speak of getting high. Cannabis has a way of making my usual worries and anxieties appear much smaller, as if I were standing on top of a mountain, looking at them from a distance rather than close-up. At the same time, I don’t feel like I’ve lost touch with reality. Rather,…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Profound philosophical implications of our 2015 Christmas letter

Sure, it may look like just a Christmas letter, but our "2015 Holiday Greetings from Laurel and Brian" has a lot of deep philosophy beneath the surface. I'll share the Christmas letter below. A central theme is... Who knows? Who can tell? What's good or bad? How do we decide?  Well, at least I think that's a central theme. The Christmas letter I wrote is so profound beneath the obvious surface, that it defies even my attempts to comprehend the depths of its philosophical meaning. All I know is that when I read the final chapter in Jamie Holmes' book,…
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