Reality

Thanks to the always-interesting Pharyngula, this morning I spent an enjoyable ten minutes listening (and reading, because the poor audio requires a video'ized transcription) to Tim Minchin's marvelous "Storm."[Update: there's now a replacement "video" with clear audio and no transcription, which I've embedded below.]Here's the You Tube video description:Tim Minchin's stunning performance of his beat poem 'Storm' Eloquently and wittily honouring reason, science and life appreciation and debunking homeopathy, psychics, alternative medicine, religion etc. Live performance at the 9 carols for a Godless Christmas Show, 21st December 2008, Hammersmith Apollo. I related to Minchin's relating of his encounter with an…

I ponder death a lot. The notion of me not existing any more isn't appealing, to say the least. It isn't my body that I'm afraid of losing. It's my awareness, or consciousness. I'd be cool with living on as a disembodied soul, so long as I was aware of it.But ...being extinguished completely ...forever ...not a trace of consciousness left. Yikes! Some say that it isn't possible for us to contemplate death, not in a realistic fashion. We know what life is like because it's being experienced as we envision death. Yet non-existence obviously can't be imagined, since imagining…

I've got mixed feelings about Ken Wilber. Sometimes he strikes me as a self-absorbed guy who's fervently marketing his Integral Philosophy as the answer to every question, even though it strikes me as a conceptual exercise without much reality meat behind it. Then I read something Wilber has written and resonate with it. (A sampling of my divided opinions toward Wilber is here, here, and here.) I wasn't planning to renew my subscription to "What Is Enlightenment?" when the magazine changed it's question mark spots and became EnlightenNext, an even more brazen vanity massager for Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen…

Pretty obviously, I'm entering the simple phase of my philosophical trajectory. In my life I've thought a lot of complex thoughts. I've written some complex books. I've followed a complex spiritual path (Sant Mat, which has lots of rules and posits a dazzlingly involved cosmology). I've embraced the teachings of a guru, Charan Singh, who had advice on countless subjects associated with the inner and outer life of his disciples. Now, all this strikes me as way too much. As do the intricacies of every religion. Most scientists suspect that simplicity lies at the heart of reality, notwithstanding the seeming…

Most people don't like to be put in boxes. Meaning, categories. Hey, I'm an individual, unlike anyone else! we like to believe. Fair enough. But I see nothing wrong with putting how we believe into boxes. So I've done just that -- stimulated into belief-categorizing action by a question that's been running through my mind recently: Why do some people's proclamations irritate or please me more than other proclamations? I'm speaking generally here, about all sorts of utterances. Verbal sayings. Blog posts and comments. Books. Magazine articles. Any way that someone communicates a belief from their brain into mine. Sometimes…

Sometimes you hear people say, "He's off in his own private world." Now, this may not be such a bad thing. But few of us would want to be in a totally closed off fragment of reality, because that would be exceedingly lonely. Comments on a recent post got me thinking about shared (or "intersubjective," as one person put it) realities, versus private realities. In my experience, the most satisfying moments in life are when I feel connected with other people. Or with nature. Or with some other animate or inaminate entity, such as our dog -- or my newly…

It's baffling why people feel the need to fantasize about God and the supernatural when here-and-now reality is so full of bedazzlement. This is one of the reasons why I liked Julia Sweeney's "Letting Go of God" so much. I resonated with her embracing science after discarding traditional religions and New Agey speculation. My morning meditation corner usually has a selection of books near at hand. I bounce back and forth between mystical/spiritual and scientific themes, because I find just as much inspiration in a down to earth discussion of material reality as in a soaring paean to soulful wonders.…

OK. Before getting into the meat (or tofu) of this Moses-like blog post, let's break down the title. Ten. Just seems the right number. The Ten Commandments should be cast aside in favor of my revelation. Plus, I haven't come up with my truths yet, but intuitively I'm pretty sure that, given the amount of red wine I just poured and my sipping speed, I can come up with ten before the glass is empty. Undeniable. Yeah, I wish. None of the brilliant stuff I write on this blog has received the unquestioning acceptance that it deserves, so I've got…

God is all there is. Nature is all there is.God is infinite. Nature is infinite.God works in mysterious ways. Nature works in mysterious ways.God is omnipresent. Nature is omnipresent. You get the idea. And that's the simple essence of Richard Carrier's "Sense and Goodness Without God," though he takes 424 pages to explicate it. I've read a bit over half of Carrier's book, which I was drawn to buy after reading (and writing about) his From Taoist to Infidel essay. I'm enjoying it. A lot. Probably because Carrier thinks much like me, aside from the fact that he's much more…

I keep thinking about John Shanley's lines from my previous post. Each of us is like a planet. There's the crust, which seems eternal. We are confident about who we are. If you ask, we can readily describe our current state…Your answers are your current topography, seemingly permanent, but deceptively so. Doubt is a recognition that personal earthquakes happen. Magma can erupt at any moment. Continents shift. Fast, not requiring eons to reshuffle the contours of our existence. Yet each of us erects belief structures upon this unstable ground. We're drawn to do so by the same natural forces that…

Passion. Religious believers consider that they're the only ones with it. For example, they have "The Passion of the Christ." It fills Christians with energy, conviction, determination, zeal. Well, there's also "The Passion of Reality." It fills me with exactly the same feelings. Just as fundamentalists are driven to rid the world of Satanic influences (including pagans like me), when I come across nonsensical dogmatic blathering my reality-loving blood begins to boil. I get fired up to defend the ramparts of truth against the neo-barbarian hordes who want to substitute superstition for science (and a scientifically founded spirituality). This morning,…

Ooh! It feels so good to have my view of life confirmed. Today someone sent me a link to "On Being Certain," which talks about a book with the same name by Robert Burton, M.D. It's subtitle is believing you are right even when you're not. Nice! Not that it applies to me. Because I know I'm right about uncertainty. Why, I've read marvelous blog posts about this subject, each of which, I'm pleased to say, was written by me (see here, here, here, and here). And now I learn from a description of Burton's book that science shows I've…

I'm surprised to find myself saying yes! so enthusiastically to a book by Ken Wilber. Though I'm just four chapters into "Integral Spirituality," it's producing more positivity in me than irritation – a big change. If you aren't familiar with Ken Wilber, his life work is to figure out how everything fits together. And I do mean everything. His personal and institute web sites point to a dazzling intellectual and philosophical production. The guy is undeniably brilliant and creative. Also, provocative and full of himself. I've read quite a few of Wilber's previous books. I've written an article, "What Wilber…

It's so easy to fire skeptical bullets at deluded religious believers. Because they aren't me. It's a lot tougher to turn my big guns around and point them at myself. Yet that's what we all need to do – especially those who call themselves "churchless." The way I see it, we often fail to recognize that while we've demolished the most obvious walls of blind faith that kept us confined within dogmatic bounds, often we've just retreated to a smaller and less obvious belief structure. We've shrunk our religiosity from a grand cathedral to something much more humble. However, it's…

It was one of those moments when the universe seemed to be sending me a wake up! call. I have them fairly frequently. I'd probably be aware of more if I wasn't asleep so much of the time. Not literally, though napping is one of the things I'm best at; what I mean is sleepwalking through life – absorbed in something other than what is really going on. A few days ago I was walking up our driveway to get the morning newspapers. We live in rural Oregon countryside, so when I talk to myself on a cold dry December…

Unchurched, nonbeliever, atheist. Those prefixes – un, non, a – imply an undeserved negativity. Consider "atheist." That simply means, not a theist. To most people this is something bad. If you don't believe in an unknown, unseen god, there's something wrong with you. But there's no term for those who don't believe in unicorns or the Tooth Fairy. Except, "those who don't believe in unicorns or the Tooth Fairy." A commitment to understanding reality as it really is usually is viewed as a good thing. But not when it comes to belief in god. Then those who want their reality…

When we feel like somebody is putting us on, "Get real!" is an appropriate response. But what the heck is real? Most of us think we know. However, are we really right about reality? I'm a sucker for big questions like this. So when I see a chapter called "Consciousness and Reality" in a book, my philosophical spine starts to tingle. That chapter is in Eugene d'Aquili and Andrew Newberg's The Mystical Mind, which I praised in my previous post. It reduces a whole lot of scientific, philosophical, and religious speculation, thousands of years of it, down to a single…

Given how philosophical I've been for so many years, it's sort of surprising to me that I'm losing interest in pondering the meaning of life. More and more, living life is meaningful enough. Adding something called meaning seems like decorating a cake that's already nicely frosted. It can be done, but what's the point? How many layers does life need? I do keep reading about the meaning of life, though. This morning it was the final chapter in Nicholas Fearn's book about the latest answers to the oldest questions: "The Meaning of Life and Death." I liked this passage: A…

That's a great title: "What is Reality?" It gets right down to the nitty-gritty of what life is all about. Being real. Whether we live only once, or have an opportunity to live another physical or metaphysical existence, making the most of these precious human moments means really living them. So I leapt to open an issue of New Scientist magazine that had "The Big Questions" emblazoned on the cover. "What is Reality?" is the biggest of the big in my opinion. And seemingly that of the magazine's editors also, since they featured Roger Penrose's essay on this subject in…

Some people look at things so bizarrely. Like Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, authors of the hugely popular "Left Behind" series of books that takes a fictional view of events surrounding the Second Coming of Jesus—which for LaHaye and Jenkins won't be fiction when the Big Day comes. Yesterday I heard them interviewed on a right-wing Portland talk show. The host asked them how they were faring on their book tour to the least-churched state in the nation. (Whenever I hear that fact, I always feel like cheering, Yay, Oregon! We're #1!) LaHaye and Jenkins said, "Just fine. We've got…