Spiritual practice/meditation

"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…

Once when we were on Maui, walking along Lahaina's charming Front Street, I saw a Proust quote on a board outside an art gallery. Since we were vacationing on a tropical island, far from home, it made me think.There are several versions of the translation. Here's one close to what I read that night:The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.Proust seems to have hit upon a central existential choice. In pursuing personal growth, do we focus on doing different things, or on looking upon things differently? Some friends and I…

People talk about "spiritual experiences" all the time. I've done my fair share of that myself. Yet frequent mentions of these words in a comment conversation on this post got me thinking about what they mean.Conclusion: by themselves, nothing. Which fits with an earlier notion, that "spirituality" is a meaningless word. A blog visitor asked me recently if I believed that people have had spiritual experiences. I replied, yes, people consider that they've had them. But before we can judge what this means, we need to define "spiritual."And that's difficult to do, since there are so many definitions of "spirit."…

Thanks again to Shin for sharing his or her doubts about Radha Soami Satsang Beas, which formed a recent post. I've enjoyed the comments also.These thoughts have, not surprisingly, gotten me thinking ... about my own evolution from a fervent RSSB true believer to who I am now. It's sort of tough to encapsulate my current state in a few words, like I used to be able to do with "RSSB initiate" or "RSSB disciple." This is progress. Before, my spiritual focus was narrow. Even though I read widely in other traditions -- Sufism, mystical Christianity, Greek philosophy -- I…

For most of my sixty years I've seriously pondered the Big Question, "What is the meaning of life?" So much so, I've assumed that anyone who doesn't engage in similar pondering is shallow, clueless, frivolous, unaware.After all, Socrates said: "The unexamined life is not worth living." But there's intriguing evidence in Phil Zuckerman's "Society Without God" that most people in Denmark and Sweden simply live life, without questioning its meaning. And the citizens of these nations are among the happiest in the world, according to comparative surveys.So what gives? Zuckerman lived in Scandinavia for fourteen months, interviewing about 150 Danes…

After trying to lead a spiritual life for most of my 60 years, I feel eminently qualified to make what may seem to be a radical suggestion: Let's do away with spirituality.Not so much the actions people associate with being spiritual, but how the word is usually used -- and the divisiveness that comes with splitting reality into "spritual" and "material" spheres.Actually, the problem with spirituality isn't that the word is meaningless. Rather, it has so many meanings, most of them aren't recognized by someone using the term in a particular sense.Check them out."Spirit" and "soul" are closely connected. So…

How to deal with change? As David vanWyngaarden says below, this is a big philosophical and existential question. Heck, maybe the only question.Because if change didn't exist, neither would life. So we wouldn't be around to wonder about life. Or change. David emailed his thoughts to me and said it'd be fine to share them if I wanted. Which, I do. When I read David's mention of "flow" in competitive karate, I wrote back and told him that I'd had similar intuitions during my nine years of Shotokan training -- which continued with my migration to mixed style martial arts,…

Having finished U.G. Krishnamurit's "Mind is a Myth," I haven't changed my initial impression of this anti-guru. As I said in my first post about U.G., he's intriguing, irritating, and inspirational.U.G. urges people to make up their own minds. He sees humanity as being bound by conditioning and an excessive preoccupation with thoughts. We trust what others have said in the past even if it conflicts with our own immediate knowing.I like his emphasis on uniqueness.I submit that nature is attempting to create a unique individual every time something is created. ... By using the model of Jesus, Buddha, or…

What's the meaning of life? For many people, me included, this is a vitally important question. Finding the answer to it is a big part of what gives life meaning.But wait...something is wrong here.If what gives life meaning for me is a search for the meaning of life, I've got a couple of problems.(1) If I ever find the answer, then life won't have meaning for me any longer, because the meaning was in my searching, not my finding. (2) Maybe I won't ever find the answer, in which case my life has been meaningless, though the time I spent…

"Losing your self." "Ego-loss." "Becoming one with the cosmos." These words sound good, but do they really mean anything? And even if they do, is that thing desirable?For a long time I was an active member of a religio-mystical organization (Radha Soami Satsang Beas) that put a lot of emphasis on soul drops merging into God's ocean. Again, a superficially pleasing image -- brings to mind a super orgasm of consciousness, a final busting loose of boundaries into a cosmic Ahhhhhhhh...But here's the thing: if nobody is around to merge, or bust loose, or have a soulful orgasm, what's the…

I'm always looking for shortcuts to enlightenment, bliss, nirvana -- whatever you want to call it. For a long time I was on a spiritual path. Paths take time to travel. I'm too old for paths. I want to see the promised land right goddamn now! Not after death. Not after years of meditation practice. Now! So my attention perked up when I got an email today from an occasional Church of the Churchless visitor who said, in part:A guy by the name of Michael Langford, (who I recently ran across) says that he had followed Sri Ramana's 'self inquiry'…

"Living life to the fullest" is an adage that used to mean much more to me than it does now. In my true believing days I'd be anxious that I was missing out on the purpose of earthly existence. Which I took to be: pursuing a spiritual path that would lead me out of the illusion of earthly existence. So, in accord with the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (an Indian organization led by a guru), I diligently meditated for several hours a day and did my best to not get attached to worldly entanglements. I failed, of course.…

Losing the ego... what's up with that? In most religions, particularly Eastern ones, this is supposed to be a supreme goal of spirituality. Yet no one has ever seen an "ego," much less the absence of one. I've come to feel that "losing the ego" is one of those phrases that sounds like it means something -- and gets repeated in sermons, satsangs, and such as if it did -- but actually points to an absurdity. How would a person without an ego, a sense of "I," personal desire, look? How would he or she be different from other people?…

I'm fond of encapsulating the meaning of life in a pithy phrase. Only problem is, I keep coming up with different capsules. Back in my psychedelic-fueled youth, it was "the universe is a paper bag turned inside out." Recently, I realized that it was folly to "overlay the actuality of my day with an idealized version of it." Today, it's "make life more of a silent movie." This thought came to me, and it seemed so enormously profound I instantly knew it must be the key to understanding everything. I only wish I understood what I said to myself. But,…

Is an atheist or agnostic spirituality possible? Sure. And I've read a book that proves it: Andre Comte-Sponville's "The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality." This morning I browsed through the final chapter again, liking it even more the second time through. My first post about the book was on the theme of desiring God isn't proof of God. That's true, but sort of negative. Comte-Sponville ends his book with a positive flourish, arguing that not only is an atheist spirituality possible, but really it is the only authentic way to establish a loving, truthful connection with the cosmos. First, what…

It isn't often that I get inspired by a bank ad. More accurately, it's been never. Until last Sunday, when I noticed the big bold print in an Umpqua Bank advertisement in the Salem newspaper. If you make your own path, you can't lose your way. Ooh! So Zen. As was one of the questions in last night's presidential debate between Obama and McCain. What don't you know and how will you learn it? Terrific question. The answers were just OK, something about expecting the unexpected. Which fits with the Umpqua Bank philosophy. Many spiritual and religious faiths stress the…

If you were cast away on a mental desert island and could only bring one spiritual sentence along, what would it be? Tough choice. I like words. I read a lot. I write a lot. I enjoy pondering what lies beyond the ponderable. My shelves are filled with many favorite books, each containing favorite lines. In the end, though, I'd have to stick with what I've called the best one-sentence metaphysics ever written (by Philip K. Dick): Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. Now, I'm not saying that I believe this sentence. What…