Posted inBuddhism Mystics Spiritual practice/meditation

Mystical experiences prove nothing

Whatever I say in this post -- and as a blogger I never know what that is until I say it -- it won't be anywhere near as good as what David Chapman has said in his "Are Mystical Experiences Metaphysical Evidence?" So the best thing you could do is stop reading what I've written, and read Chapman now. The second best thing would be to click on the links I've given after you peruse this post. But if you've ever believed that a mystical experience means something beyond the obvious, that someone has had some sort of experience, I…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

What boxing up Rumi says about Me

For several decades I've had a series of literary infatuations. I'd fall in love with a mystical/spiritual author or genre and read everything I could on that subject. I had my Meister Eckhart phase. Along with a Christian mystic phase: St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Pseudo-Dionysius, whoever wrote The Cloud of Unknowing. I devoured writings by and about Plotinus. I was deep into Fritjof Schuon and other Perennialists for a while. And I never stopped being attracted to Buddhist and Taoist books no matter whatever other writings turned me on. But my biggest love affair was with…
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Posted inScience Spiritual practice/meditation

Religious Naturalism: sound science with a topping of awe

Thanks to a comment by Alex on a recent post about the wonders of the universe, I learned about Religious Naturalism -- which I wasn't very familiar with before. (Alex is with the Unitarian Universalists Hong Kong, UUHK.) May I introduce the philosophical/religious position which explores the religious depth (feelings of wonder, awe, inspiration, reverence, and humility; and contemplation of life and death) of the Universe as understood by science: Religious Naturalism More information: http://faculty.uml.edu/rinnis/2000_stone_2_1.pdf http://www.religiousnaturalism.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_naturalism In my opinion, your article is a wonderful exposition of Religious Naturalism (if you don't mind being so described). No, Alex, I don't…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

“Spiritual bypassing” is an inhuman religious affliction

Whether you've belonged to a Western or Eastern variety of religion -- Christianity or Buddhism, say -- almost certainly you know the sort of person Robert Masters is talking about in his book "Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters." When I'd come across one of them, I'd think, "Good god, just act like a normal human being instead of a pseudo-saint!" They'd be irritatingly self-righteous, emotionally detached, and uncaring about how they treated other people. Masters says: Signs of spiritual bypassing at work are perhaps most commonly seen in the minimizing, superficializing, or outright negation of…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Cutting through Buddhist and other mystical crap

OK, the title of this blog post is blunter than David Chapman's "Effing the ineffable," but what I said is pretty much the point of his well-written and entertaining essay. A few months ago I talked about discovering Chapman's web sites, which offer a pleasingly dizzying perspective on matters philosophical, scientific, spiritual, and mystical. His take on ineffability, plus related subjects, was equally interesting reading. Chapman said stuff that I've vaguely understood in a roughly similar fashion, but hadn't been able to pin down so clearly. Here's some excerpts from his piece, which deserves to be read in its entirety.…
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Posted inScience Spiritual practice/meditation

Pure awareness: beyond subjective and objective?

This morning I picked up "The Mystical Mind," a book I've read several times. With every re-reading I get something more out of it. It's a terrific blend of neuroscience, philosophy, and mysticism. I was planning to write something new about stimulating ideas I came across in the Consciousness and Reality chapter. Then I decided to check blog posts about the book that I'd shared back in 2007. (See here, here, here, here, and here.) Reading them over, I saw that just about everything I was planning to say, I'd already said. So if you're looking for some non-religious "spiritual"…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Just because religion works for you, doesn’t mean it’s for me

Every time someone leaves a comment on one of my blog posts about how their religious practice, meditation approach, or whatever, is just absolutely wonderful, how it's benefited them so much, and that I'm a fool for not jumping into the spiritual pool they they find marvelously refreshing, I think... OK. It's great that you enjoy what you're doing. But what does this have to do with me? Or anyone else? Some people really like to drink whiskey. Others, wine. Still others, beer. Then there's teetotalers who won't touch a drop of anything alcoholic. Each person could eloquently praise the…
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Posted inReality Spiritual practice/meditation

Get loopy! Feel better fast with feedback loops

Old religious habits can take a long time to die. As churchless as I am these days, sometimes I long for a "revival." The faith to which I previously subscribed was Eastern rather than Western, so my notion of a revival was to attend a weekend meeting where speakers (maybe even the guru himself) would urge devotees to apply themselves to meditation and other spiritual practices/vows more assiduously. I enjoyed feeling that I had a clear-cut spiritual goal, and that if I did this-and-that, such-and-such results could be expected. Maybe not soon; maybe not even in this lifetime; but someday…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Touching is sacred, in an ungodly sense

Religious believers often are distrustful of getting too touchie-feelie. Ooh, bodies meeting, melding, melting into each other! That's so, um, bodily. God is all ethereal, otherworldly, spiritual. Bodies, bad. God, good. That's a thoroughly dualistic attitude, of course. Which is more than a little strange, since most religions spout stuff like "God is one," "All is God," and "God is everywhere." I've known true believers who said they couldn't wait to be rid of their body. They imagined that life in a heavenly realm would be so much better than existence in this crude physical world. Even when I was deep…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Go on a belief diet. You’ll feel lighter and happier.

Most of us are concerned about putting on a few (or many) physical pounds. We correctly recognize that carrying around extra unnecessary weight is unhealthy, unattractive, and unpleasant. But when it comes to psychological excess baggage, such as unneeded religious, spiritual, philosophical, mystical, or New Age'y beliefs, we aren't as worried about how all that "fat" is affecting us. Well, it does. So I'm recommending a belief diet -- paring down our craving for what Michael Shermer terms "patternicity" and "agenticity," two strong appetites in every human brain. The brain is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through…
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Posted inScience Spiritual practice/meditation

How to be happy without a soul

I'm pretty much convinced that I don't have a soul. If it shows up one day like a lost puppy that managed to find its way home, I'll be pleasantly surprised. (At least, if it wags its tail and licks my face.) Quite a while ago I gave up the search for my self, impelled in part by a source of great spiritual wisdom, The Onion, which told the tale of another guy who did the same thing. As neuroscience learns more and more about how the brain functions, my decision appears increasingly wise to me. Of course, what else…
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Posted inHumor Spiritual practice/meditation

Roseanne Barr’s meditation approach sounds good to me

In a Newsweek story, "Roseanne Mouths Off (Again)," Roseanne Barr's rather untraditional Judaic approach to meditation is described. Barr’s hair has gone gray and she has feather hair extensions—she looks like a hippie (check), grandma (check), stoner (check: every Friday night for Shabbat from sundown until 2 a.m., she gets high, drinks red wine, and does a meditation Rav Berg taught her). Nice. My only question is what proportion of time each activity takes from sundown until 2 am. I could follow this form of Kabbalah if, say, sundown was at 8 pm and the pot-smoking/wine-drinking lasts until 1:40 am,…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Blind faith takes many forms

Having started this churchless blog way back (in Internet time) in 2004, I've been able to follow a lot of interesting comment conversations about many subjects related to God, soul, spirit, consciousness, life after death, and such. Naturally I've also been able to follow the continuing progress of my own irreligious evolution. In both cases -- looking at how other people regard supernaturalism, and how I do -- I'm struck by how difficult it is for us humans to let go of blind faith. Religious true believers who come to embrace agnosticism or atheism find it fairly easy to discard…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Meditating without any technique feels natural now

I've meditated for most of my life. I started when I was twenty, having gotten enthused about hatha/raja yoga my junior year in college. So for more than forty years I've been getting up in the morning and meditating in some fashion. "In some fashion" implies a technique. Indeed, such has been the case. In fact, until now I've never believed that meditation was possible without a technique. Mostly I've done some form of mantra meditation -- repeating a word, or words, to keep thoughts minimal and attention focused. I'm aware that there are many other forms of meditation. What…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation Taoism/Tai Chi

Meditation should be pleasant, not a chore

This morning my pre-meditation reading was a chapter on Wu-Wei (non-action) in Alan Watt's "Tao: The Watercourse Way." The passage below reminded me of how different my meditation period is now that I've become churchless, unreligious, and dogma shunning. In a footnote to a preceding paragraph, Watts says that he is a "deplorable heretic" to those Zen practitioners who favor the "aching legs" brand of Buddhism, since to them long periods of meditation are considered to be key to enlightenment. On the other hand, those who understand the Tao delight, like cats, in just sitting and watching without any goal…
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Posted inReality Spiritual practice/meditation

Yes, us churchless folks are searching for truth

Ooh, I love good questions. Here's four. Nice! Marina offered them up in a comment to a recent blog post. Is there anyone here on this blog who is looking to realise the truth or are we more interested in realising how right we are, how wrong others are?Are we into defending our beliefs and condemning others for theirs?Are we more interested in getting 'facts' about others then finding out 'facts' about ourselves?Are we so much enjoying the 'dramas' that we don't care about the truth, the real truth about ourselves and realising that?Just wondering........ I found these thoughts fascinating,…
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Posted inGod Spiritual practice/meditation

Worship should be of something real (which leaves out God)

Yesterday I finished listening to a Philosophy Talk podcast on "Worship." As always, I enjoyed the intelligent insights of the discussants, hosts John Taylor and Ken Perry of Stanford University, plus guest Daniel Speak of Loyola Marymount. This Philosophy Talk program had a different feel, though. Usually religion takes a backseat to secular humanism on the show, as befits the emphasis on philosophy (literally, from the Greek, "love of wisdom"). In this case, while Speak didn't broadcast his Christianity at full volume it was an obvious murmur that could be heard to some degree in just about every statement that…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation Vedanta/Advaita

“The Ultimate Twist” — honest, creative, appealingly unconvincing

Suzanne Foxton, author of "The Ultimate Twist," is an occasional commenter on this blog. She has her own nonduality-oriented blog, Nothing Exists, Despite Appearances. (Tagline: "All there is, is this, exactly as it is") That last sentiment sums up how I felt about her book after I finished reading it. I liked Suzanne's honesty and creativity. Yet my attitude toward nonduality was unchanged by her 116 well-written pages. Knowing that she'd written a novella based on her own life, I was eager to learn about Suzanne's struggle with addiction and other problems that come with being human. However, I also…
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Posted inReality Spiritual practice/meditation

The profundity — or not — of “it is what it is”

An Urban Dictionary entry for it is what it is shows that this phrase is deeply irritating to some people. A trite, overused and infuriatingly meaningless cliche that is utilized by provincials who think they are adding some deep, meaningful insight during a discussion when all they are offering is senseless, unwarranted repetitiveness to what would otherwise be a far better conversation had they not shown the shallowness of the gene pool they spawned from by using this asininely useless and redundant phrase to begin with. An interesting conversation is being had, when quite suddenly: Robin: My house burned down…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

Jiddu Krishnamurti leaves me lukewarm

Some books leave me cold -- turned off, bored, irritated. Other books get me hot -- excited, enthused, pleasured. Then there's books I find lukewarm, like Jiddu Krishnamurti's "Freedom from the Known." I thought I'd like it more than I did, knowing that J. Krishnamurti was a spiritual iconoclast who decried all forms of organized religiosity. The Amazon reviews of this short 124 page book were almost all positive. One reader's endorsement got me to click the "buy" button. I've read (and re-read) about 15 of K's books. This is the single best, most concise, most thorough of the them…
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