Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Be a centaur, not a horseman and horse

"The Supreme Doctrine" by Hubert Benoit is a book that I keep re-reading, because every time I pick it up, fresh insights pop out of the pages. I've highlighted so much of it, in several different colors, that now the words mostly are shaded in yellow and green. This morning I re-perused The Horseman and the Horse chapter. The basic notion is that we usually consider that "I" am a horseman (thoughts, will, mind, soul, spirit) who needs to keep control of my horse (body, desires, actions, lower self, emotions). The belief in this biparite composition expresses itself in all…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Spiritual practice/meditation

Dance, and live, like nobody (even God) is watching

Last night my wife and I went dancing. It was a Salem Big Band night at Mission Mill Museum, a beautifully restored woolen mill dating from the late 1800's. When we walked in, about half an hour after the festivities had started, I could tell that my thoroughly intermediate dancing skills were going to be stretched. The piece being played was energetically cool, but I couldn't place it in my stylistic repertoire. Foxtrot? No. Waltz? Definitely no. Latin style? Absolutely not. Swing? Sort of, but not really. Yet couples (and some uninhibited child singles) were dancing away with abandon, clearly…
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Posted inReality Spiritual practice/meditation

Get real: give up religious and mystical concepts

Religious believers who make a pilgrimage to this blog often amuse me. They'll say, "Brian, you live in your head; you need to give up your concepts about reality and embrace God's truth." Ha ha ha. What a joke. These guys and gals are deluded. They've got things completely backward. I just rode my Burgman 650 maxi-scooter to a coffeehouse in downtown Salem. It's 45 degrees here in Oregon. I was cold, but comfortably not freezing, thanks to warm gloves/gear and a large cozy windscreen. I didn't think about anything supernatural once on my 25 minute drive. Here and now…
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Posted inScience Spiritual practice/meditation

How is it that “I” have a “self”?

I've never met the other person who seemingly inhabits my head along with me. Have you? Yet everyday language, the way we talk to ourselves (there he is again!) and others, appears to point to the existence of someone other than "I" within our psyches. I dragged myself out of bed.I held myself back from hitting him.I was beside myself.You should take a good look at yourself.He's at war with himself over who to marry.Stop being so mean to yourself.I like myself.I need to be a better friend to myself.I was debating with myself whether to leave.I'm disappointed in myself.He's…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Mindfulness is better than “spiritual” meditation

I used to believe that through meditation, I could realize ultimate reality/God. Now, having lowered my unrealistic expectations, I'd be happy if I could go through the rest of my life without losing another glove. A much-beloved glove, insofar as apparel can be loved. LIghtweight, waterproof, comfortable, thin. I'd been wearing it on rainy day dog walks here in Oregon (so I wore them a lot). Headed to the recycling center on a cold, wet, windy afternoon, I decided to take the gloves along. I walked to the car, tossed them on the front seat, and drove into town with…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Hallucinogens induce profound mystical experiences

Want a mystical experience? Got no time or inclination for meditation, austerities, guru-worship, or rituals? A shortcut is available: hallucinogens, such as psilocybin. This is no surprise to baby boomers like me who experimented with LSD, mescaline, and "magic mushrooms" back in the 60's. I was searching for the Meaning Of It All, so I was part of the flower children subset who looked upon hallucinogens not only as a good time, but as a doorway to higher consciousness. I figured that these trippy drugs had pretty much gone out of fashion. However, an article in the December 2010 issue…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Pay attention to the world, not thoughts

I don't know why I didn't realize this a long time ago: The outside world is a lot more interesting than my thoughts about it. Well, I suppose I had realized it, since I find actually lying on a warm, sunny beach much more appealing than merely thinking about that prospect. Ditto with the pleasure of actually drinking coffee compared to pondering the notion of brewing a cup. But I've failed to pay attention to what I know. And that's a problem most of us have: paying attention in a proper way. The meaning of "proper," naturally, can be debated…
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Posted inReality Spiritual practice/meditation

Enlightenment made simple: it’s reality

Back in my true-believing religious days I looked upon enlightenment as something special, difficult to achieve, and rare. Now, I see it pretty much opposite: not unique, easy to attain, and commonplace. When you read descriptions of enlightenment in the world's spiritual, mystical, and philosophical literature -- and I've read lots of them -- some commonalities start to become apparent beneath all of the bewildering idiosyncratic descriptions. The basic one is this: loss or lessening of self-hood, egotism, sense of separateness. Supposedly enlightened people, such as the Buddha, talk about how "I-ness" isn't truly real. We humans aren't ego-encapsulated entities…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Focus… focus… focus… Happy!

Happiness, it seems, lies on the other side of a wandering mind. To enjoy life it doesn't matter so much what we do, as how focused we are on whatever we're doing. This is one of the conclusions of research I blogged about yesterday in a HinesSight post, "When mind wanders, happiness departs." A New York Times story said: Whatever people were doing, whether it was having sex or reading or shopping, they tended to be happier if they focused on the activity instead of thinking about something else. In fact, whether and where their minds wandered was a better…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Is it possible to meditate and “go inside”?

For about thirty-five years I belonged to a spiritual group whose core teachings included the importance of "going inside." Not a house, or any other building, but one's self. When I was trying to do this by meditating several hours a day, I never gave much thought to what "going inside" really meant, or if it was possible. I simply accepted the notion on faith. Which entailed the belief that another realm of consciousness exists in addition to what we're already aware of. Supposedly a person could focus his or her attention solely on internal processes of the psyche and…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Meditation makes your cells healthier

Good news for us long-time meditators: a study shows that meditation is linked to psychological well-being, which in turn is related to higher telomerase -- an enzyme that makes cells healthy. The study participants had one-third more teomerase in their white blood cells than controls. However, this was only after they spent three months in an intensive meditation workshop that entailed six hours of personal meditation a day plus a couple of group sessions. I have a feeling that this would drive me nuts, rather than healthy, but I could be wrong. Regardless, I'm hoping that my current 20-30 minutes…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

I’ve stopped having spiritual experiences

I can't remember the last time I had a spiritual experience. Well, more accurately, the last time I had an experience that I called "spiritual." I used to have lots of them. I've been to India twice, each time spending several weeks at the Radha Soami Satsang Beas headquarters in the Punjab. Seeing the guru, who is considered to be God in human form, seemed deeply spiritual to me. Ditto with having a feeling that I should take I-205 rather than I-5 just before crossing the Columbia River into Oregon -- I was driving home after seeing the guru give…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Raptitude is an inspiring Buddhist’ish blog

When I scanned through the Twitter tweets put up by the people I follow, a few days ago I saw a link to "9 Mind-Bending Epiphanies That Turned My World Upside-Down." Great title. I had to see what that piece said. Reading it on the Raptitude site, I was introduced to some excellent writing by David Cain. Here he describes how Raptitude came to be. I am a regular guy who has beat up his biggest demon. To make a long story short, I used to find life very difficult and now I don’t. For a while I was having…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Sam Harris doesn’t really believe in God

Wow, that was scary for a moment. I open up Newsweek and find an article with the headline, "Sam Harris Believes in God." My churchless brain started to scream, Noooooooo! Sam, how could you become a believer?! After all, Harris wrote a couple of great anti-religious books, "The End of Faith" and "Letter to a Christian Nation." It would have been disappointing for me to find that he had gone over to the dark side of blind belief. Fortunately, the very first paragraph of the story started to relieve my anxiety. Sam Harris, a member of the tribe known as…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Mental “avalanche” can cascade you to a better place

If we're on the slope of a steep snowy mountain, it makes sense to be afraid of an avalanche. Bodies usually don't fare well by suddenly being ripped from their moorings in a violent manner. But minds/brains, they're different. Having our psyche turned upside down, twisted around, mixed up topsy-turvy... this can be marvelously interesting, productive, creative, truthful -- maybe even enlightening. A New Scientist article, "Disorderly Genius," describes how the brain operates on the edge of chaos. Have you ever experienced that eerie feeling of a thought popping into your head as if from nowhere, with no clue as…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

Religion doesn’t add anything to human experience

Here's a big misunderstanding that most religious people make: when they feel good, they attribute those positive feelings to their religiosity -- not realizing that if they didn't have faith in God, Guru, Brahman, Allah, or whatever, they'd feel just about the same. I say this because I used to be such a person. For the thirty-five or so years I was an active member of an India-based religious organization I was almost always in a positive frame of mind. I was energetic, confident, productive, and happy. But this also describes how I was before and after my immersion in…
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Posted inBuddhism Radha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

Vastness might be us, not a separate self

Somebody in my house picked up Suzanne Segal's book, "Collision With the Infinite, " this morning. Outwardly, it seemed to be me. But inwardly, it didn't feel that way. Even though I've got a bunch of books in my meditation area that were ripe for reading, I was drawn to move into an adjoining bedroom and look over the contents of a couple of bookcases. My right hand followed my eyes after I spotted the book. Holding it, I didn't have a sense either that I'd made a decision, or that a decision had made me. Something simply had happened.…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

How to hold on when religious belief lets go

Today I got an email from someone who reminds me of me, just a lot younger. He speaks of losing confidence that the religious organization I was a member of for over thirty years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, is what he once considered it to be. But this loss of a belief hasn't yet been balanced by a gain of...what? I've come to the conclusion that the RSSB movement in general doesn't have what it takes to be called a 'Science' (as they call it.) It does not stand up to rigorous questioning, and is not wiling to share experiences,…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

The A,B,C’s of getting along with life

Sometimes I wake up in the morning, get out of bed, and immediately feel something is wrong. Actually, this isn't true. Nothing is happening in the world outside of my head that shouldn't be. But I've fast-forwarded my life beyond the present moment. Looking ahead to making coffee, taking the dog out with me to get the newspaper, eating breakfast, and then starting on the daily chores that come with living in a non-easy-care home, my psyche gets disconnected from here-and-now reality. This produces that sense of wrongness, which most people feel in one way or another. We Homo sapiens…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

Wonder — the sole essential of spirituality

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. There's nothing more divine (in the sense of "tasty," as in "that chocolate cake was divine") than this sense of all-encompassing wonder. It isn't a wonder caused…
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