Posted inScience Spiritual practice/meditation

“Spiritual” and “Science” — two words that belong together

Carl Sagan didn't see any conflict between spirituality and science. Neither do I. They get along very nicely, so long as we remember that "spirit" has nothing to do with God, divinity, or the supernatural. It's just a word that points to how we look upon reality, rather than focusing on the what of existence. As in, for example, "With what sort of spirit are you going to view the situation?" Over on my other blog, HinesSight, I put up a post yesterday -- A secular Easter thought: "spiritual" isn't supernatural or religious. Give it a read. The post is…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

How to talk about spiritual experiences

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…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Does religious belief dilute our enjoyment of life?

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…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Step out of the separate self, and you’re spiritual

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…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Meditation comes in two forms: “focused attention” and “open monitoring”

It's easy to be distracted by the seemingly many forms of meditative practices. Wikipedia offers a pretty good rundown of them.  Naturally, devotees of the various practices almost always believe that theirs is the best. I fell into this delusion during the 35 years or so when I meditated every day for one to two-and-a-half hours. After all, my meditation practice was based on a secret mantra -- the Five Holy Names! Which, actually, weren't so secret. But no matter. The power of the mantra supposedly came from the divine energy of the guru who initiated me. So even if some…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation Wu Project

Who do you want to be? Someone, Anyone, or Nobody?

The existential alternatives in the title of this post were named by brain researcher Susan Greenfield. I came across a mention of them in Julian Baggini's intriguing book, "The Ego Trick: What Does It Mean to be You?" Here's how Baggini describes the alternatives, based on an interview he did with Greenfield at the 2009 Bristol Festival of Ideas. After sharing these excerpts from his book, I'll add some observations of my own. Where Greenfield gets a little more speculative is when she imagines the variations in types of selves which might emerge if different types of connections become dominant.…
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Posted inReligions Spiritual practice/meditation

Why atheists are more “spiritual” than religious believers

Maybe this statement seems paradoxical to you: I feel more genuinely spiritual now that I've stopped believing in God.  But it makes good sense to me. Here's the main reason why. I no longer feel special. Virtually every religion and spiritual path considers that its adherents have a special relationship with God or whatever other supernatural entity they believe in.  There are so many chosen people on Earth, they vastly outnumber the unchosen, the non-special group I'm pleased to be a part of. I understand that feeling special has its own delights. In my case, I was a member of…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation Taoism/Tai Chi

Are you a spiritual wanderer, or traveler?

As I become more and more churchless, the notion of wandering seems more appealing than traveling. So I guess I could be called a spiritual wanderer, though I don't like the word "spiritual" any more. So even though I put it in the title of this post, let's drop it. I'm a wanderer, not a traveler.  Meaning, I used to believe in paths. For over thirty-five years I considered myself to be on a spiritual path. For most of that time I also thought I was on a career path. Ditto with a marriage and family path.  I liked the…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation Taoism/Tai Chi

Without religion, no need to try to transcend the natural world

As I've observed before, for me churchlessness isn't an event but a process. Meaning, it isn't a sudden jump from being religious to being non-religious. It is a lengthy path with many twists and turns. I keep recognizing shadows of my former religiosity where, at first glance, I thought there was only secular light now. For example, I still have a tendency to believe in some transcendent truth. Not God. Not divinity. But a power or presence that stands apart from the natural world. This may sound religious, yet really it isn't. After all, Platonism and its philosophical offshoots consider…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Sam Harris talks about mindfulness without religion

One great thing about being churchless is that you don't have to sit through long boring sermons. You can pick and choose your sources of inspiration and information.  Here's a recommendation. Watch a new 7-minute talk by Sam Harris, atheist author of "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion." (See my posts about this book, here, here, and here.)   Harris makes some great points about mindfulness and meditation. He says that religiosity, whether Buddhist or any other kind, shouldn't be mixed up with understanding how the mind works. Just as there is no Christian physics, just physics, neither…
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Posted inScience Spiritual practice/meditation

Non-duality is simply this: observer and observed are one

There's a lot of stuff written and said about non-duality. I've both partaken of it and spewed out my own in various blog posts. For example, see here, here, here, and here. After reading a bunch of neuroscience books, Sam Harris' "Waking Up," and several books by Moller De La Rouviere, the simple truth of non-duality is finally sinking into my non-dual mind. Which, like yours, also has been, is now, and forever will be non-dual. Meaning, undivided into an observer and what is observed. Or awareness and objects of awareness. Or consciousness and contents of consciousness.  In short, there…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

I’ve finished Sam Harris’ “Waking Up.” Guess I have, sort of.

Well, Sam Harris' new book "Waking Up," a guide to spirituality without religion, was about what I expected. Interesting. Inspiring. Well written. Not hugely enlightening.  I've already blogged about some key themes in the book here and here. Like I said in the second post, there are subtleties in Harris' message that require some pondering -- as would be expected for such ponderable subjects as the nature of consciousness and the self. Having read a bunch of neuroscience books, I wasn't surprised by reading this. Once one recognizes the selflessness of consciousness, the practice of meditation becomes just a means…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

Questions I had in Sam Harris’ “Waking Up” meditation chapter

Oh, Sam, you almost deeply disappointed me. But after a closer reading of the Meditation chapter in your new book, "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion," I'm feeling better about your approach to understanding consciousness without mixing in religious crap. After writing two positive blog posts about the book, here and here, I was looking forward to reading the chapter on meditation this morning. Before I meditated, something I've been doing every day for about 45 years. As noted in my "Real spirituality is realizing you aren't a soul, or self," this is an appealing notion -- or…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Real spirituality is realizing you aren’t a soul, or self

Just as predicted, I'm really enjoying reading Sam Harris' new book, "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion." I'm about a third of the way through. Which is far enough to have discovered the central theme. Harris writes: My goal in this chapter and the next is to convince you that the conventional sense of self is an illusion -- and that spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment. ...Most of us feel that our experience of the world refers back to a self -- not to our bodies precisely but to a center of consciousness that…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

Sam Harris’ “Waking Up” arrives tomorrow. Here’s a preview.

Oh, yeah, I'm ready for it! Bring it on, USPS or UPS, whichever Amazon has selected to deliver Sam Harris' new book, "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion."  Delivery day is tomorrow. Within a week I expect to be all woken up. Unless it takes longer, like ten days.  But seriously... I'm looking forward to this book, notwithstanding my previous doubting that I will indeed wake up as a result of sending $15.85 to Amazon. Even if I don't achieve a secular enlightened state (perhaps because I already am!), reading an interview with Harris in the New York…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Spiritually speaking, do I think too much? Like, right now.

Thinking isn't viewed very highly by lots of spiritual (or pseudo-spiritual) folks. Especially those on the Eastern side of the religious divide: Buddhists, Advaitists, Neo-advaitists, Non-dualists, Taoists, and such. Of course, a lot of thoughts pass through their minds when they criticize thinking. (See here and here.) Likewise, I always smile when someone leaves a comment on one of my blog posts that says something like, "Brian, you've got to go beyond words," or "Brian, you need to love more and criticize less." Oh, I think, like you're not doing yourself, dude. Scientifically-minded guy that I am, I find it…
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Posted inBooks Religions Spiritual practice/meditation

Religion’s false story about the “Great Other”

So here we are in this world, surrounded by the universe and an even greater cosmos beyond the limit of what can be observed in our corner of the space-time continuum. Understanding this is a life's work. Well, many lives. From the dawn of recorded history, and certainly well before that, humans have been extending the boundary of what is known. Of course, as physicist John Wheeler said, "As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance." However, for various reasons religions, philosophies, spiritual belief systems, and mystical practices aren't willing to accept the mystery of…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation Taoism/Tai Chi

Watts: wanting to clean up the messiness of life IS the mess

I don't believe life is a problem. Sure, there are problems in life, lots of them. Each of us is continually dealing with differences between the way we want something to be, and the way it is. But this is much different from considering that there is something wrong with life itself or with ourselves as a whole.  I've talked about this before.Believing in problems may be our only problemIs there anything wrong with life?When did humans start making life itself into a problem?A few days ago I discovered an Alan Watts book sitting on a shelf that, shock!, I…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Scattered thoughts about mindfulness

These thoughts are powered by (1) a 16 ounce can of Mike's Harder Margarita, which I've never tried before, but surely will again, and (2) a 16 ounce serving of the Sisters blend from the Sisters Coffee Company in central Oregon.   This blend of alcohol and caffeine is guaranteed to produce a magnificently coherent amalgamation of scattered thoughts about this evening's chosen blog topic: mindfulness. In my own mind at least, the only mind I really give a shit about, being clueless about all others. Regarding mindfulness, I started meditating in 1969, so I've got 45 years of daily…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Spiritual practice/meditation

I’m asked a great question. Hope my answer is as good.

Below is an email message from a Church of the Churchless reader. My replies are indented further, in italics. Interesting questions and observations from this person. I tried to make my responses in kind. ----------------------------- Brian, just a few quick lines to let you know how much I (continue to) enjoy reading your blog. Hey, back at you. I enjoy reading your messages and comments. You write very clearly and make a lot of sense. In short, you remind me of me! I’m slowly, very slowly making my way through your archives, as well as reading your more current articles…
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