Spiritual practice/meditation

Behold: my "Four Recipes for Instant Strangeness." This is my most recent Strange Up Salem column in our town's alternative paper, Salem Weekly. It's got some churchless aspects to it, for sure. Strangeness is what we want, even if this isn't obvious. No need to look for it in some esoteric, unbelievable, supernatural religion. Embrace it close at home, wherever you are. Here's my tips. Four recipes for instant strangeness It’s summer. Living is easy. Who wants to work hard at making Salem stranger? Instead of laboring to cook up a stew of strangeness, here’s four ways of making our…

I first heard about Barbara Brown Taylor's "Learning to Walk in the Dark" in a TIME magazine piece. Part of it is here. She used to be a minister, but gave that up -- partly because the church put too much emphasis on being all bright and light rather than dim and dark. Like Taylor, I've become much more appreciative of darkness. Physical. Mental. Spiritual. (Though I really don't know what spiritual means; it's an empty word to me; however, since so many people use it, I sort of feel like I have to also.) I'm fine with not-knowing. Like,…

I have a regular column in my town's bi-weekly alternative newspaper, the peculiarly named Salem Weekly, whose web site is called WillametteLive for some peculiar reason.  (Hey, it's an alternative paper; my column is called Strange Up Salem; peculiar is good.) In the issue that hit the streets today I wrote about yes, yes, yes. The column is philosophical enough to merit sharing in this here Church of the Churchless.  Plus, a bit of Googling of my own websites (you can do it yourself via the search box in the right sidebar) turned up a 2007 post on a similar…

I've meditated almost every day for thirty-four years. I like to think that those many, many hours of meditation (one to two hours a day for most of the time) have made me a better person. Maybe. But lots of stuff in my mind falls into the "I like to think..." category. This is true of everybody. We humans have a marvelous capacity for wishful thinking, rationalization, selective use of data, and confirmation bias. A rigorous review of research on the effectiveness of meditation casts doubt on the buoyant claims of meditation advocates that it is good for just about…

I don't believe in God anymore. Yet once in a while, just before I go to sleep at night, if my wife hasn't come into our bedroom yet, I'll get down on my knees, put my elbows on our mattress, fold my hands, and recite the Lord's Prayer. I did this when I was a child. I'm pretty sure my mother, who raised me, didn't believe in God any more than I do now. But she thought it would be good for me to learn some religious rituals, such as praying.  Sure, I remember some as being rather creepy. Like…

For today's spiritual uplift, there is no better way for you to spend 16 minutes than by watching "Slomo."  I loved this documentary about a 69 year old guy, John Kitchin, who gives up his life as a neurologist and becomes a full-time inline skater -- in slow motion, sort of -- on the San Diego boardwalk. The filmmaker says:  I’ve long been fascinated by people who make seismic changes late in life. It goes against the mainstream narrative: Grow up, pick a career, stick it out, retire. I was also curious about Slomo’s concept of “the zone,” a realm…

It’s sort of a chicken-and-egg question: which is primary, experiences or explanations?  Each of us is actively engaged in both realms. We directly experience reality; we also seek explanations of what is being experienced. Sometimes to an excessive degree.  I have reached explanatory overload with the current incessant speculating about what happened to a Malaysia Airlines plane that disappeared on a flight to China. Radio and television news outlets are barely talking about anything else. [Update: Today NBC's Chuck Todd criticized CNN for relentlessly characterizing finding NOTHING as being "breaking news" about the plane's disappearance. This reminds me of the…