Spiritual practice/meditation

Like I said in my last post, I enjoy reading the regional Radha Soami Satsang Beas newsletter because it reminds me of what I like and dislike about what used to be my chosen faith: Sant Mat. The current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh, is notoriously adverse to having his talks recorded or transcribed. Plus, he rarely writes anything for public consumption. So the only way of learning about his pronouncements, aside from seeing him in person, is second hand. In the September 2007 newsletter, Vince Savarese offers up an interesting snippet: We turn now to the words of the Masters…

Reading about Mother Teresa's crisis of faith in TIME magazine left me with a (slim) hope that sainthood could be in the works for me someday. Why not? I was baptized Catholic. I help the poor. (Once in a while, at least, when it isn't too much trouble.) And I've got lots of doubts about God, like Teresa did. Until I read the article I didn't know that someone who felt divorced from God could be on the road to sainthood. But this was Mother Teresa's condition for nearly the entire last fifty years of her life. In previously unpublished…

I'm an expert wanter. I want, want, want. All day long, I want. Much of the night too, because my dreams are filled with wanting. When I'm hungry I want food. When I'm horny I want sex. When I'm sad I want happiness. When I'm scared I want safety. And so it goes, one wanting after another. Right now I want to write a blog post about wanting. After I finish, there will be something else to want. Dessert. Television watching. Dog patting. I've heard so many spiritual talks and read so many religious books about how important it is…

Today Tucson Bob left a comment that got me thinking about my own evolving attitude toward mantra meditation. He said, in part: I will say that Sant Mat meditation, at least the basic technique of simran (mantra repetition), seems to me to have a dulling, dumbing-down effect that seems to interfere with intuitive perception. Imagine you are in a wilderness at night. It is pitch black and you know there is a predator out there. All your being, all your senses are fully in the moment listening for some sound or movement to indicate where that predator is. You are…

Fill in the dots, those wonderful empty ellipses… One or two words, that's all it takes. For me, it's bullshit. For you, it could be anything. Including bullshit. "God's revelation." "Delusional." "Our salvation." "Worthless." The point is, each of us has an intuitive understanding of religion – which I take to include all sorts of spiritual, mystical, and meditational practices. You could say, we grok it. I've just starting reading Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink." Subtitle: "The Power of Thinking Without Thinking." Appropriately, I'm going to intuit the message of the whole book after perusing just 40 pages. It's fascinating. Consider the…

This morning I came across an intriguing quotation in the final chapter of Christopher Hitchens' "God is Not Great." I've always thought how terrific it'd be to know the truth about life, the universe, God or unGod—in short, everything. But Gotthold Lessing, an 18th century German writer and philosopher, says that even if you could possess truth, you'd be better off perpetually seeking it. The true value of a man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to the Truth. It is not possession of the Truth, but…

It's about fly-fishing. And life. And spiritual practice. And just about anything and everything. Like I wrote about yesterday on my other blog, David James Duncan's marvelous three page essay, "In Praise of No Guide," hooked me on buying his entire book: My Story As Told By Water. Reading Duncan makes me want to believe in reincarnation so I can come back and be able to write like him. He's got, well, a way with words. Not to mention fishing. He was born in Portland and grew up here in Oregon. There are lots of other fly fishing maniacs in…

I'm a long-time meditator. Been on the cushion daily for about thirty-eight years. I'm still trying to figure out what meditation is all about. Concentration? Relaxation? Getting in touch with myself? With God? All of the above? Something else entirely? My practice has consisted mainly of repeating a mantra—trying to stop many complex thoughts by holding onto a single simple thought. I'd also attempted to do nothing except be aware of what remained in my consciousness when I wasn't doing anything. Except trying to do nothing. Which is still something. And there's the rub. I've been of the mind that…

My statistics instructor in graduate school cited this Emerson quote frequently, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds..." He stimulated me to look up the essay on Self-Reliance and read what comes next: …adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though you contradict every thing you said today. Yesterday I ran into an old friend at the…

I've been paying a lot of attention to waves recently. That's par for the course on Maui, especially if someone is an avid boogie boarder, like I am. The first few days after we arrived, there were some decent—though not exceptional—waves breaking on the left side of Napili Bay. I had some stimulating rides. Nothing like my "washing machine" experience back in 2004, however (which is good). Today, like yesterday, the surf has been boogie board unfriendly. Fairly large, but not breaking cleanly. So I've been working on catching waves from the beach—thought waves, which can be done anywhere, really.…

When you realize you're going the wrong way, what do you do? Reverse course. Make a U-turn. I do it all the time, especially now that my wife and I both have some difficulty reading street signs. (Typical scenario: "We're looking for Acacia Boulevard. Let me know when you spot it." drive…drive…drive "There it is!" "Where?" "Back a few blocks. I couldn't make out the sign until you were past it." grumble…U-turn …drive…drive…drive.) Bruce Grierson wrote about "The Age of U-turns" in a recent issue of TIME magazine. It was a nice counterpoint to the oft-heard assumption that flip-flopping is…

More and more, I'm trying to make my meditation time as meaningless as possible. That's a change. I've been meditating, daily, for more than thirty-seven years. After being initiated in 1971 by an Indian guru, Charan Singh, I dutifully followed the meditative practice enjoined by Radha Soami Satsang Beas. While this supposedly was aimed at emptying the mind so divine sound and light, plus the guru's grace, could flow in, actually there's an awful lot of meaningful content in the meditative method I followed for so long. A mantra composed of "five holy names," each of which points to a…

Okay, so nobody knows what consciousness is. Doesn’t really matter, so long as we use the consciousness that we have—whatever the heck it is—wisely. Which includes training the brain. In TIME’s “How the Brain Rewires Itself,” Sharon Begley presents some encouraging research that overthrows the depressing notion that “the adult human brain is essentially immutable, hardwired, fixed in form and function, so that by the time we reach adulthood we are pretty much stuck with what we are.” She goes on to say: But research in the past few years has overthrown the dogma. In its place has come the…

I was prepared to scoff at M. Scott Peck’s levels of spiritual development . But when I scanned the four stages and saw that I’m definitely a “three” and probably a “four,” I became an instant believer. Somehow I’ve managed to never read any of Peck’s many books, he of “The Road Less Traveled” fame. He converted to Christianity after dalliances with Christian and Islamic mysticism, but I don’t hold that against him. Well, maybe a little. I did enjoy reading an abridged version of Peck’s analysis of the stages of spiritual growth after Bob, a Church of the Churchless…

Let’s turn Dante on his head. Hope isn’t abandoned at the entrance to hell, but at the entrance to paradise. I’m temped to say that I hope to convince you of this. Don’t want to descend into hell, though. Hope has been much on my mind lately. Two climbers are still missing on Mt. Hood, fairly near to where I live. Today on cable news I heard more expressions of hope that they’ll be found alive, even though it’s increasingly likely that they won’t. I’ve been trying to understand what grates on me every time somebody intones the platitude, “We’ve…