Spiritual practice/meditation

I enjoy hearing deconversion stories -- how people changed from being religious believers into atheists or agnostics. But "conversion" and "deconversion" are two sides of the same coin. Everybody who is converted to a faith, such as Christianity, was simultaneously deconverted from some other philosophy, belief system, religion, or point of view.Our lives are ever-changing. When change stops, we're dead. So it's natural to convert, deconvert, convert, deconvert... for as long as we're alive. I converted to mueslix for a while, then deconverted to granola. Now I've converted to raisin bran. (Leaving out many other earlier cereal choices, such as…

Since I've become churchless -- a convert to no-religion -- one of the more ridiculous things I hear from true believers is: So you've given up on finding the truth.No! That's entirely untrue. I've simply realized that the most fundamental questions about life, reality, and what, if anything, lies beyond the physical can't be answered via blind faith, dogma, preconceived ideas, or rigid ritualistic practices.Here's some questions that I find fascinating:What is the essence of consciousness?Does a "soul" exist separate, or separable, from the body?Are humans part of a larger whole, or just a part?Is our usual view of reality…

Religion isn't all bad. That was the not-so-surprising consensus at the monthly meeting of the Salon discussion group that my wife and I helped start up here in Salem about seventeen years ago.The members are almost all godless Prius-driving, expresso-sipping, organic food-eating progressives like us. Religiosity comes in for regular bashing, but since we're into open-mindedness and diversity, believers are embraced so long as they don't try to press their faith onto others.Last night a woman talked about how much she liked taking some Christian children out to lunch at a fast food restaurant. She'd just met them. When they…

I started to practice yoga and meditation when I was 20 years old. Forty-one years later, I'm still at it: trying to find the real me and the truth at the heart of the cosmos.Along the way, in 1990, I married a woman who has taught me as much, or more, about reality than meditation has. Laurel is a psychotherapist (now retired). She helped me understand that attempting to transcend this world is crazy if you haven't first come to grips with yourself and how you relate to other people.This is a central theme of John Welwood's essay, "Double Vision:…

When I used to give talks (a.k.a. satsangs) at gatherings of the India-based spiritual group that I was a long time member of, one of my stock lines was "The easiest vow for most of us to follow is the injunction not to disclose our inner experiences."Ha-ha. Laughter would follow. Because people knew that I was speaking the truth: meditation resulted in almost precisely zilch, nada, zero enlightenment or ensoundenment experiences (the practices of this organization were intended to bring about contact with divine light and sound).So when the guru enjoined his disciples not to speak about their grand mystical…

My Indisputable Churchless Truths have been holding up pretty well, judging from the comments on them so far. So I've been pondering their implications for how I, and others, react to peoples' descriptions of what they find meaningful in life.One of the truths is:Each individual must determine, or choose, his or her own meaning of life, because life's meaning isn't a given like gravity or electromagnetism.Religions consider otherwise, of course. A true believer finds the meaning of life in the Bible, Koran, Vedas, Guru Granth Sahib, or the words of some revered spiritual teacher. Yet this still is a choice…

What can fair-going teach us about churchlessness? Glad I asked. I'll answer my own question...Thursday I went to the Marion County Fair here in Salem to relieve my wife of crushing boredom -- a four hour shift on a slow day womaning a booth sponsored by an earth-friendly organization she belongs to. I chatted with her for a while, then explored the fair. At the other end of the exhibit hall I came across some sort of senior citizen "athletic" event, the quotation marks being justified by this bean bag toss nature of the activity. Apparently senior centers were competing…

"Faith." We use this word so often. Yet most of us haven't given much thought to what it means. I enjoyed browsing through a bunch of definitions of faith submitted by commenters to a New York Times online piece.This is the first submission.The suspension of reason and rationality for a dream.This is the second submission.Faith is knowing something should be true, being certain it is, and having no insight into one’s collisions with reality.Reality is wrong. Other people are wrong. Why can’t they see what I see? It’s all about failures to re-interpret one’s original misinterpretation of experience. Faith is…

More and more, I'm wondering if the biggest problem with life is believing that life is a problem. Personally, I just don't see how there could be anything wrong with Life as a whole, capital "L" version.Yet religions tell us that there is. Christianity speaks of original sin, and of a fall from God's good graces. Similar teachings are found in Islam and Judaism. Buddhism informs us that life is suffering. In Hinduism, the everyday world is maya, illusion, not the place a psyche wants to be. The root of "religion" is relegare, which denotes a binding back to God.…

Sex and spirit start (in English) with the same sinuous letter. But otherwise most people feel that they aren't, well, bedfellows. Spirituality usually is considered to have something to do with rising above, or beyond, carnal desires, while sexuality is all about down and dirty bodily goings on (and pumpings out). But the current issue of EnlightenNext magazine focused on the relationship between sex and spirituality. Per usual, the articles came to a predictable conclusion that nonduality is the key to understanding (the magazine is a sometimes annoying mouthpiece for Ken Wilber's philosophy).I enjoyed learning what's happening in the world…

How do we know the difference between dreaming and waking life? Dreams seem real while we're immersed in them. So does everyday existence. When we wake up from a dream, how do we know this isn't still part of the dream? I love Thomas Metzinger's telling of a twice-waking tale in his book, "The Ego Tunnel," which I blogged about before.But before getting to that... a tale of my own.Yesterday I sat down in Salem's Court Street Starbucks with a grande Pike Place in one hand and my laptop knapsack in the other. I fired up my MacBook and checked…