Posted inScience Spiritual practice/meditation

Make the mind cat-like (and win a gold medal)

I don't really believe in sychronicity or the universe has a message for me, but in the past 24 hours three pieces of information have combined to produce a feeling of, well, synchronous messaging going on. Last night I was reading TIME's summer olympics special issue. Lolo Jones, the American hurdler, describes what happened during her disastrous run for a gold medal in the 2008 Olympics. In the midst of the race... And then there was a point after that where I was like, Wow, these hurdles are coming up really, really fast. You have to make sure you don't…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation Universe

Mystery of existence is near and far — not in between

Why is there something rather than nothing? Or more positively (my preference): There is something rather than nothing! A great question. And a great exclamation. I hugely enjoy pondering both, especially the latter. But the mystery of existence is much more than a pondering to me. It's an immediate, um, existential experience that always is lurking not far from the surface of my consciousness. I'm easily drawn into the depths of WOW! by ducking my everyday conscious mind just a little ways below the surface of the perceptions, thoughts, sensations, emotions and what-not which normally are the focus of my attention.…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

What Zen practice is… so simple…

I've been reading Zen books since my college days, forty-four years. I go hot and cold with Zen. Never have heated up enough to study it formally. Never have cooled off enough to lose interest in it entirely. When an author throws too much Buddhism into the mix of Zen + Buddhism, I get turned off. I like my Zen to be as non-religious as possible.  Which explains why Charlotte Joko Beck's "Nothing Special" appeals to me so much. I learned about the book from an interesting blog post by David Chapman with the same name.  I took the title…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

You wanted old answers, not new questions

It makes sense... to try to make sense out of what makes sense. But if something is senseless, trying to make sense out of it is... (drumroll, please) senseless.  Such is the mystery of life. Such is the mystery of the cosmos. Such is the mystery of ourselves. To be wondered, not made sense of.  Jack Haas is a guy who loves wonder, mystery, senselessness. So do I. I've blogged about Haas and his stimulating books here and here. And... here I go again.  Recently I got Haas' book, The Dream of Being -- aphorisms, ideograms, and aislings. (An aisling is a…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

How to move between horizontal and vertical time

Memories are strange. I've forgotten so much about the past, yet some memories have stuck with me in a surprising fashion. Fairly early in my meditating years (I've meditated daily since 1970), I'd attend talks by Gordon Limbrick, a Canadian. He habitually offered three pieces of advice: "Keep your back straight; smile inwardly; visualize a trap door opening in the ceiling of your mind." I liked all three tips back then. I still think of them now. With some variations. Such as visualizing myself opening a trap door on the ground floor of my body also. This reflects my Tai Chi…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

“We each belong to the energy of the moment” — Jack Haas

Jack Haas wrote one of my favorite books about the meaning of life, and the lack thereof: "The Way of Wonder." Like I said in a blog post stimulated by the book: It's been a steady substitution. The less I've filled myself with organized religion, the more I've felt a ever-increasing sense of wonder. I guess I needed to empty myself of theological beliefs, faith-based concepts, and imaginary anticipations of a promised divinity around the corner in order to become much more aware of the Wow! that is right here, right now. Existence. Life. Consciousness. The amazing fact that we are, that the cosmos is.…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation Universe

My Amazon review of “The Mystery Experience”

Killing two birds with one stone (or rather, slicing two pieces of tofu with one knife, since I'm an animal-loving vegetarian), I'm going to talk about my overall impression of Tim Freke's The Mystery Experience in the form of an Amazon reader review. I read a lot more Amazon reviews than I write. This will help make up for that imbalance. Usually I'm only drawn to submit a review on books that I liked a lot. Such is true with The Mystery Experience, which I've blogged about before here, here, here, and here. But "liking" isn't the same as "agreeing with."…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

Spiritual perfection is an illusion. Simply be human.

A few posts ago, in "Allow cosmic mystery to live, not killing it with religion," I talked about what I didn't like about Tim Freke's book, The Mystery Experience. Now I want to share some passages that made me think right on when I read them. Yes, I had a few quibbles with what Freke said, but in general I agreed wholeheartedly with him. After embracing forms of spirituality that emphasized detaching from the world to reach a state of transcendent perfected enlightenment, Freke has seen the light. Not a heavenly radiance, but the illumination that comes from embracing what…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation Universe

First sermon from the Church of What the Fuck

I'm glad I named this blog Church of the Churchless when I started it up back in 2004. But since I no longer adhere to any religious dogma, I'm free to experiment with my churchlessness. So here's a mini-sermon from the Church of What the Fuck. The name came to me yesterday as I was thinking some more about why I started to disagree with what Tim Freke was saying in his book, "The Mystery Experience."  (Reasons described in my previous blog post, "Allow cosmic mystery to live, not killing it with religion.") As I read deeper into Freke's book…
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Posted inReality Spiritual practice/meditation

Allow cosmic mystery to live, not killing it with religion

"Uh-oh." This is a common feeling for me these churchless days, as I'm reading along in a book that's been enjoyably non-religious, yet suddenly manifests a scent of unjustified dogmatism. An "uh-oh" followed by a string of highlighted question marks in the margins... this is a sign that even stronger Religiosity alert! Religiosity alert! warning bells are going off in my brain. Such happened today, when I got to the "Where is Awareness?" chapter in Tim Freke's The Mystery Experience (blogged about previously here and here). I was flowing along just fine with Freke's seemingly unarguable assertion that everything arises in…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

Truly “living in the moment” would be horrible

Live in the moment. Oft-heard advice. Seems to make sense. Why worry about the past or obsess about the future? Be here now. Anyway, what choice do we have? Isn't everything happening to us now? Yes, that's pretty much what neuroscientist Sam Harris says in an interesting You Tube'd talk, "Death and the Present Moment." (Watch from the 20 minute mark to the 30-35 minute mark, if you don't have time to see it all.)   But no normal person truly lives in the present moment. Meaning, our experience of the present is conditioned by experiences of the past. Memories,…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

Life is a mystery… and the stories we tell about it

I'm glad that I ignored my qualms about buying TIm Freke's "The Mystery Experience." Ninety pages in, I'm liking the book a lot.  Not surprising. What's not to like about mystery? And Freke has a pleasing way of talking about what we don't know about life, existence, the cosmos, and other Big Questions. The mystery of life is so enormous it takes my breath away and leaves me speechless. It's not some riddle I will one day unravel, but real magic to be marvelled at. It's not a darkness my intellect can illuminate, but a dazzling radiance so splendid that…
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Posted inBuddhism Science Spiritual practice/meditation

Key to self-knowledge: knowing you don’t have a “self”

I love the idea that "I" don't exist. Life sure seems like it'd be a lot simpler without a "me" around. Most of my problems aren't physical, but psychological. So if my body is real, but my self isn't, potentially that removes a large source of difficulties. Fortunately for the "me" who I don't want to be, modern neuroscience has come to a pretty firm conclusion that, indeed, the self is an illusion.  Such is the central theme of a book by Bruce Hood I've started to read, "The Self Illusion." I blogged about an interview Sam Harris did with…
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Posted inGod Radha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

Surrender to a lower power. Or equal. Not higher.

I used to believe in surrendering to a higher power. And not only to my wife -- but also to a spiritual, supernatural, metaphysical higher power. No more. Don't see any reason to. Now I'm much more comfortable with surrendering to lower and equal powers. Which, I suspect, actually are the only varieties powers come in. In fact, we could be talking singular here. Power. Not powers. There's no higher or lower. Just varying manifestations of One Energy, One Nature, One Cosmos, One Reality. But religions, spiritual systems, mystical philosophies, and other advocates of surrendering to a higher power would…
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Posted inBuddhism Radha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

Skeptical look at mantras and Transcendental Meditation

I've never practiced Transcendental Meditation (TM). But for over forty years I've meditated daily, mostly using a mantra (a word or words repeated over and over) just as TM does. So I resonated with a "Mantras" post on the TM-Free blog, which describes itself as: Insider information about the Transcendental Meditation™ techniques, the TM movement and its late founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Our bloggers take independent, skeptical and critical views of TM claims and research. We report allegations of deception by TM organizations and reports that some individuals experience harm from involvement. For most of those forty years I used a…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

High-resolution perception brings mindful clarity

I've finished Chade-Meng Tan's "Search Inside Yourself," after calling the book compassionate, scientific, businesslike in my first post about it -- written after I'd only read a few chapters. The book turned out to be more Buddhist'y than I'd expected, but since the author is a Buddhist (as well as an engineer who was one of the first Google employees), that shouldn't have been a big surprise.  Still, Chade-Meng has a pleasingly non-religious, non-metaphysical, non-mystical approach to mindfulness. Which also isn't a big surprise, given that mindfulness is about paying attention to what is here and now, not there and then.…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

12 Symptoms of a Spiritual Awakening

This morning I came across 12 Symptoms of a Spiritual Awakening on a friend's Facebook feed. I liked them, even though I noticed that they came from a recovery web site. No mention of a higher power or God in the twelve, thankfully.  1. An increased tendency to let things happen rather than make them happen. 2. Frequent attacks of smiling. 3. Feelings of being connected with others and nature. 4. Frequent overwhelming episodes of appreciation. 5. A tendency to think and act spontaneously rather than from fears based on past experience. 6. An unmistakable ability to enjoy each moment.…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

“Buddha in Blue Jeans.” Kindle cost: $0.00. Worth much more.

If you've got a Kindle, or a Kindle reader, you'll definitely get your money's worth out of a 26 page e-book, Buddha in Blue Jeans: An Extremely Short Zen Guide to Sitting Quietly and Being Buddha. The cost is zero, nothing. $0.00, nada, zilch.  The message is valuable: sit quietly every day. I've been doing that for 43 years. Can't say that I'm a Buddha, but hey, maybe I am. Regardless, my morning meditation seems to have helped keep me from becoming any crazier than I already am. Maybe even a little saner. (Alternative equally valid rendering: My morning meditation…
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Posted inReality Spiritual practice/meditation

Your spiritual experience means nothing to me

Experience. A wonderful word. So important. It's all that we have, really. Experience. Without it, we're nothing. Dead. Unconscious.  So saith the Merriam-Webster dictionary. 1 a : direct observation of or participation in events as a basis of knowledge    b : the fact or state of having been affected by or gained knowledge through direct observation or participation 2 a : practical knowledge, skill, or practice derived from direct observation of or participation in events or in a particular activity    b : the length of such participation <has 10 years'experience in the job> 3 a : the conscious events that make up an individual life    b : the events that make up the conscious…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

“Search Inside Yourself” — compassionate, scientific, businesslike

I've got a new favorite book: Chade-Meng Tan's Search Inside Yourself -- the unexpected path to achieving success, happiness (and world peace). It didn't take much searching inside myself to realize that I liked Tan's approach to mindfulness, meditation, and all that stuff. Just reading the forewords by Daniel Goldman and Jon Kabat-Zinn, along with Tan's first two chapters, had my inner self saying "Yes, yes, yes" this morning. Here's one Yes passage: In learning and teaching meditation, the good news is that mindfulness is embarassingly easy. It is easy because we already know what it's like, and it's something…
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