Posted inReality Religions

Are humans capable of fully comprehending the cosmos?

It's a marvelous quest, our oh-so-human desire to fully understand the mysteries of the cosmos. Dogs don't do this. Chimpanzees don't do this. Dolphins don't do this. (So far as we know.) Science and religion are alike in this regard: each seeks knowledge, as much as possible. Scientists aspire to the discovery of a Theory of Everything which encompasses the core laws of nature. Prophets, mystics, gurus, yogis, and other spiritual seekers hope to know the "mind of God," perhaps even becoming it via enlightenment. Yet there's an egotistical, anthropomorphic, humancentric undercurrent to these attempts to reveal ultimate reality. We…
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Posted inReality Spiritual practice/meditation

Allow cosmic mystery to live, not killing it with religion

"Uh-oh." This is a common feeling for me these churchless days, as I'm reading along in a book that's been enjoyably non-religious, yet suddenly manifests a scent of unjustified dogmatism. An "uh-oh" followed by a string of highlighted question marks in the margins... this is a sign that even stronger Religiosity alert! Religiosity alert! warning bells are going off in my brain. Such happened today, when I got to the "Where is Awareness?" chapter in Tim Freke's The Mystery Experience (blogged about previously here and here). I was flowing along just fine with Freke's seemingly unarguable assertion that everything arises in…
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Posted inReality Spiritual practice/meditation

Your spiritual experience means nothing to me

Experience. A wonderful word. So important. It's all that we have, really. Experience. Without it, we're nothing. Dead. Unconscious.  So saith the Merriam-Webster dictionary. 1 a : direct observation of or participation in events as a basis of knowledge    b : the fact or state of having been affected by or gained knowledge through direct observation or participation 2 a : practical knowledge, skill, or practice derived from direct observation of or participation in events or in a particular activity    b : the length of such participation <has 10 years'experience in the job> 3 a : the conscious events that make up an individual life    b : the events that make up the conscious…
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Posted inReality Science Universe

Physics knows more about “nothing” than theology or philosophy

It's amazing, how much can be said about nothing. Nothing always has been a favorite topic of theologians and philosophers. Now physicists are getting into the Nothing Game, big time (see here and here). There's a basic dispute between fact-focused scientists on one side, and concept-obsessed thinkers on the other: is "nothing" a something that can be investigated, or an absolute absence of anything? (including "absence") I've read a bunch of books and articles that argue both sides of this question, which is central to the classic Why is there something rather than nothing? question. More and more I favor…
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Posted inReality Science Taoism/Tai Chi

How humans perceive the cosmos isn’t how it really is

Really. A great word. It can be used, or said, so many ways.  Put a question mark on the end; add a note of sarcasm; and you've got an ironic Really? Or... Finish with an exclamation mark; make your tone confident; and you've got a declarative Really! I find it easy to swing both ways. To me, the scientific method is our best way of defending a Really! However, this only applies what can really be known by us humans. And what we can know is determined/limited by how we know -- using the human brain and sense organs. So when…
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Posted inReality Science

Self-consciousness comes and goes. Like the self.

Everybody has had this sort of experience: Walking into the house after driving home, I'm carrying the car keys in my hand. A few minutes later I'm wandering around the living room, kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom, muttering Where the hell are my damn car keys?! I was conscious the entire time after I came in the front door. I didn't black out. I didn't suffer amnesia. At every moment I was aware of where I was. Yet at some point I became divided into a "me" who had put down the keys somewhere, and a "me" who had no idea…
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Posted inReality

Everything is appearance in mind

"Tucson" is a frequent commenter on this blog. I like his style. Which doesn't mean that I always understand what he is saying.  That might mean that I do understand it. Because if I understand anything about Tucson's way of looking at the world, it's that every attempt to divide reality into (1) an understander, and (2) what is understood, results in a human conception of the cosmos which misses (3) what's really going on. Not that (3) ever can be known. There's actually no knower and nothing to be known. And now I've probably demonstrated that I don't know anything…
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Posted inReality Science

Einstein was right. Neutrinos don’t travel faster than light.

Love it. Another triumph of the scientific method. Which does so much better at revealing the secrets of reality than religions do. An experiment to repeat a test of the speed of subatomic particles known as neutrinos has found that they do not travel faster than light. Results announced in September suggested that neutrinos can exceed light speed, but were met with scepticism as that would upend Einstein's theory of relativity. A test run by a different group at the same laboratory has now clocked them travelling at precisely light speed. Now, this doesn't conclusively settle the question of whether…
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Posted inReality Science Universe

Universe may not be eternal, but existence is

Believers in God who follow modern science will be heartened by a recent article in New Scientist, "Why physicists can't avoid a creation event."  While many of us may be OK with the idea of the big bang simply starting everything, physicists, including Hawking, tend to shy away from cosmic genesis. "A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God," Hawking told the meeting, at the University of Cambridge, in a pre-recorded speech. For a while it looked like it might be possible to dodge this problem, by…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Reality

Why isn’t a movie as appealing in HD?

Last night I took advantage of my wife being out of town to stream, through Amazon, an action movie that I've wanted to see for a long time: The Bourne Identity (2002). My wife isn't big on action flicks and wouldn't have appreciated the way-cool Mini chase through the streets, alleys, and walkways of Paris nearly as much as I did. But what irritated me through the entire two-hour movie experience was watching it on our television in HD (high definition). I paid an extra dollar to get the HD version. Then, almost as soon as I started watching amnesiac Matt…
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Posted inReality Spiritual practice/meditation

Mindfulness 101: separate your senses from your stories

Oh, the stories I tell myself. As do you. As does everybody. We wouldn't be human if we weren't story tellers.  I wake up in the morning. Almost immediately I recollect the basic narrative of my life. I live in Oregon. I'm married to the woman in bed next to me. I need to get up, raise the thermostat to 69 degrees, and let our dog out of the downstairs room where she spends the night. Then... make coffee, take the dog outside, get the newspapers. If I simply was aware of what my senses were telling me, I'd be…
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Posted inReality

Have a wonder-filled 2012!

Wonder. It's well, wonderful. What else could wonder be? Actually, quite a bit. That's a big part of the reason why wonder is wonderful, and why I'm wishing that for you, and for me, next year will be filled with it. I was inspired to strike this theme in my final blog post of 2012 by reading Paolo Costa's essay, "A Secular Wonder," in the book that I've blogged about previously: The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now. I love that Now in the sub-title. It's all that we have, even if we're engrossed in mulling over…
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Posted inMiracles Reality

Don’t believe in miracles. Reality is better.

Late last night, while changing channels on our TV, I happened across a midnight mass that was being broadcast on ABC. After watching for a few minutes my wife and I were struck by how really weird the church service was.  Understand: it wasn't any weirder than any other religious form of worship. I'll give the Catholic priest credit for talking calmly and quietly, unlike more fervent evangelical preachers.  But what he was talking about seemed exceedingly strange to our rational, reasonable, evidence-loving psyches. Which was recognized by the priest (bishop, actually, if I recall correctly), because he spoke about…
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Posted inPlotinus Reality

Why materiality? What’s the point?

One of the reasons I love my blogging gig, even though I get paid precisely nothing, and even have to pay for the privilege of doing what I do, is getting email messages like this: I'm in the process of reading Return to the One which led me to your website and blogs.  Your writings have made me question, think, and laugh.  Thanks! I have spent many a year searching for something to satisfy this deep longing within.  I've known for sometime that I wasn't going to find "it" in the material world and have read zillions of books and tried various…
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Posted inReality

Science: a minimalist “get real” walk through life

Most people like to be insulated from reality. After all, it hurts sometimes. So everybody puts on physical and mental coverings of one sort or another. Clothes, shoes, gloves, beliefs, hopes, imaginings.  I used to do this much more than I do now. My inward churchlessness has been matched by an outward "get real" approach to how I dress and get around. For example, I enjoy a healthy dose of minimalism in my footwear. Currently these are my favorite shoes, Teva's Zilch and Nilch. I Zilch in warm weather; I Nilch in cold weather (with wool blend socks). They're wonderfully…
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Posted inReality Science

“Atheist’s Guide to Reality” answers life’s biggest questions

Here's a gift idea for the atheists and agnostics on your Christmas shopping list: Alex Rosenberg's The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions. I'm enjoying it a lot, having bought it at Powell's Books in Portland (best bookstore in the world!) a few weeks ago. Rosenberg, chair of the Philosophy Department at Duke University, is a powerful writer. He is utterly fearless in proclaiming his atheistic thesis. Here it is in a nutshell, on pages 2-3 of his new book where he confidently answers life's biggest questions in a few words: Is there a God? No. What is…
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Posted inReality

Professor challenges students’ faith-based beliefs

Peter Boghossian, a Portland State University philosophy professor, is my type of teacher. He doesn't believe in letting faith-based beliefs go unchallenged in his classroom. If you spout religious ridiculousness, like "I know it's true because the BIble says so," Boghossian will do his best to cure your cognitive sickness. So saith a story in the Portland Oregonian about an upcoming public lecture: Peter Boghossian will argue that faith-based beliefs are a "cognitive sickness" that have been turned into a moral virtue and that -- like racist beliefs -- they should be given no countenance in the classroom. "I believe our…
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Posted inReality

Get wise about life and death in 56 seconds

I liked these newly-released videos from the Neural Surfer, a.k.a. David Lane. Check out the first two in what apparently will be a series of two hundred wisdom in 56 seconds offerings -- "The Limits of Science" and "Radiance Without an Edge."     For those who prefer to read their wisdom, here's an excerpt from the first video: And herein is the great human dilemma: the limits of our skull are the limits of our understanding. Plus an excerpt from the second: Hence, what we should really fear about death is not the extinction of being, but the awareness of…
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Posted inReality

With life, there’s no possible comparison

A few days ago, during a dog walk, when insights often spring into my psyche, I was contemplating the fall colors and how the number of years I'll be able to enjoy changing seasons is falling with every passing birthday. I had a brief relapse into a sort of semi-faithfulness, visualizing how nice it would be if life could be everlasting, eternal, without end. But almost instantly a compared to what? echoed in my consciousness, drowning out the anti-death wish fulfillment chatter. Yes, indeed: when we complain about life, not its particulars, but life itself, there's no basis for comparison.…
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Posted inReality Spiritual practice/meditation

Do you want life to be experience, or memory?

Psychologist, Nobel laureate (in economics), and happiness researcher Daniel Kahneman describes a interesting thought experiment in his fascinating TED video, "The riddle of experience vs. memory."  It seems to point to something really important about life, spirituality, meaning, well-being, and all that. I just can't quite figure out what it is -- which probably is a result of me being immersed in the riddle of experience vs. memory, as all of us are. That is, I got an intuitive flash when I heard Kahneman talk about the thought experiment, but when I reflect upon it, as I am now, I'm focusing…
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