Spiritual practice/meditation

Ooh, ooh! I wrote a Zen koan blog post title. And I don't even practice Zen.  How does one control the mind? By letting the mind do whatever it wants. This could be the key to... everything! Or maybe... nothing. Which could be the same thing. Whatever, it's one of the main things I've learned since I signed up for Headspace, the trendy meditation app/approach that I started trying out a few months ago and wrote about here and here. Since, I've done Andy Puddicombe's guided meditation thing every morning. I've worked my way into Day 28 of the Self-Esteem…

Recently I had an essay rejected by the Spiritual Naturalist Society because the powers-that-be there, where I've become a regular contributor (for now...), didn't think that being politically active, in the sense of being involved in public policy debates, was a "spiritual" practice. (See my post, Naturalism needs to rule public policy debates.) This got me to thinking, again, about what that problematic word, spiritual, means. Most people, along with the dictionary, consider that it mostly refers to something supernatural, other-worldly, divine.  But how does a naturalist, someone who only considers the material world to be real, differentiate between what…

Driving around today, satellite channel surfing, I clicked on NPR (National Public Radio) and came across On Being. On Being is a Peabody Award-winning public radio conversation and podcast, a Webby Award-winning website and online exploration, a publisher and public event convener.  On Being opens up the animating questions at the center of human life: What does it mean to be human, and how do we want to live? We explore these questions in their richness and complexity in 21st-century lives and endeavors. We pursue wisdom and moral imagination as much as knowledge; we esteem nuance and poetry as much as fact. …

I came across the Spiritual Naturalism web site a few years ago, then blogged about it in "Spiritual Naturalism appeals to my churchless non-soul." Their definitions of "naturalism" and "spirituality" rang true to me. Naturalism is a view of the world that includes those things which we can observe or directly conclude from observations. Naturalists’ conception of reality consists of the natural world as outlined by the latest scientific understanding.  As for claims for which we have no evidence, we do not hold any beliefs in these and do not make any other claims about them. It is quite possible, even…

It's always a pleasure to see a "guru" revealed as a flawed human being. This has finally happened to Andrew Cohen, who for a long time played pretend-guru along with Ken Wilber.  David Lane has written an interesting piece about Cohen's much-deserved downfall, "The Liberation of Andrew Cohen: How Devoted Disciples Can Enlighten Their Guru." (By enlighten, Lane means "bringing to light," as noted in a comment.) Andrew Cohen didn’t resign on his own terms, nor did he come to the realization that he was a lousy master who created more harm than good. More remarkably, it was Cohen’s devoted…

It's rare to view hope as something to be discarded rather than embraced. Don't we need hope? Isn't hope what keeps us going through tough times, with its power to present a vision of a better future? Maybe not. I found Derrick Jensen's Orion column, "Beyond Hope," to be beautifully written and quite persuasive.  Though his main focus is on the benefits of environmental activists giving up hope in favor of action, his piece has considerable general relevance. For example, most religions put a lot of emphasis on hope, which is almost synonymous with faith. Supposedly we should trust that…

Talking is good. Face to face, or otherwise. One of those other ways is through what I like to call "comment conversations."  These frequently happen on this blog -- where people exchange a series of comments on some blog post subject. A recent post, "Modern mystics, why should anyone believe your 'vision'?", elicited some comments from me and others that got me thinking. Also a good thing.  Below I'll share my comment that is a less organized form of what follows in this post. Which is, a schema that describes how I've come to view the more desirable and less…

To answer my own blog title question: Yes, I do believe that religiosity tends to dilute people's enjoyment of life. Having been religiously-minded for about 35 years, and churchless now, I consider myself well qualified to address this question. Even though I was a member of an India-based spiritual organization, my experience seems to be applicable to devotees of Western religions also -- including Christianity. I used to believe in life after death, God, and "heaven." I put that word in quotation marks to indicate the difference between an Eastern/mystical conception of an ultimate divine reality, and how heaven is…

Thanks to a regular Church of the Churchless visitor, I was turned on to a short interesting piece in The Guardian, "Spiritual but not religious? You're not alone." Oliver Burkeman wrote the piece. Though he has mixed feelings about Sam Harris (I do also), he approvingly observes: What Harris means by spirituality stems from the realisation that the feeling of being a distinct self – “the sense of being perched somewhere behind your eyes, looking out at a world that is separate from you” – is an illusion, and can be altered, even extinguished. Meditation and magic mushrooms are among the ways…