Spiritual practice/meditation

A Mark Morford piece, "Study: Live happy and healthy and die soon anyway," appeals to my basic cranky old man sense of WTF. Sure, I'm happy most of the time. Especially when I'm complaining about something. Which includes religion.  But I don't enjoy feeling that happiness is a must, that if I'm not happy bad things are going to happen to me. (Aside from being unhappy, of course.) This is, though, how in the past I've looked upon supposed scientific findings that a positive outlook is good for your health. And, if one believes in religiosity, for your soul. Thankfully, according…

First off, tonight I had another circular moment when I decided to search Google for "mantra meditation useless," the topic that I wanted to blog about. This has happened to me before when I've asked the Great God Google to enlighten me on some subject. I do a search, then find that some of my own Church of the Churchless posts are the top results.  So I turn out to be the answer to the question that I asked myself.  In this case, Google led me to my "Meditation is useless" and "Skeptical look at mantras and Transcendental Meditation" posts. …

I've meditated every day since 1970. So obviously I'm a big believer in meditation.  But the more meditating I've done, the less I believe it is the best way to feel better and deal effectively with life's problems.  Sure, it is one way. There just are so many others -- as Brené Brown implied in an answer to a question posed to her in the "8 Questions" feature on the last page of a recent issue of TIME magazine. You say one of the keys to all this is spirituality. Why is that?I really wrestled with that. The way I define spirituality is a deeply…

I'm a big fan of mindfulness and meditation. I resonate with a non-religious, secular, scientific approach to Buddhism.  But I'm also an avid reader of neuroscience books. My current fave is Antonio Damasio's "Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain."  Much of the book is filled with more details about brain anatomy and functioning than I really care about. The overall theme, though, is fascinating -- how our sense of self is built up from more primitive primordial feelings, along with a less primitive core self and a possibly uniquely human autobiographical self. Today I came across a section…

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…