Spiritual practice/meditation

I love metaphors. And I hate metaphors. Yes, a rose is a ruby reflection of ever-blossoming reality. And truer still, rose is a rose is a rose. When it comes to religion, just about all we're offered is metaphors. God is like… Fill in the dots. Our father, our mother, our lover. Heaven is like… Disneyland without the long lines. Everything good without the bad. More and more I want the real deal without the metaphorical wrappings. Either say it like it is, plain and simple, or admit that you're just a metaphor-monger. I still read a lot of philosophical,…

Thanks to my friend Randy, I got turned on to Tijn Touber's thoughtful piece, "D.I.Y. Guru." (For the acronym impaired, like me, D.I.Y. stands for "do it yourself"). I liked it. It fits with my understanding of how we should regard a guru – as someone begging to be fired. So it's time to fire our gurus (facts, truths, religious persuasions, principles, dogmas) so the guru in ourselves can emerge. It's time to become as great as the gurus we followed--just as authentic, unique and obstinate. This is not an act of aggression or disrespect. On the contrary, it is…

Who am I? Well, that depends. Yesterday I had an opinion piece published in our local newspaper. A few days ago an editorial page assistant phoned me and asked how I wanted to be described at the end of the piece. I said, "Retired writer, blogger, and land use activist would be fine." She must not have heard the "b" in "blogger" because I ended up as a "logger." Some readers must have wondered how an Oregon logger became such a strong supporter of an environment-friendly ballot measure. But what's in a name? I wasn't bothered. Heck, I have a…

Last night my wife and I saw "Into the Wild," a terrific movie that speaks to anyone (which means, almost everyone) who has harbored thoughts of chucking it all in and starting over – free of entanglements, material or mental. Fittingly, it was a pretty wild night for us. The movie started at 8:50 pm and it runs two and a half hours. Almost all of the people in line with us were young people for whom a Saturday night just starts to get going at midnight. For us, it's sleepy time. But with this being the "fall back" from…

I've read many of Ken Wilber's books. I've written an essay critiquing Wilber's misrepresentations of Plotinus' teachings. So I'm pretty familiar with his Integral philosophy. Intellectually, at least. I've pondered Wilber's quadrants until my head hurt. Which didn't take long. That's the problem I have with Wilber's hyper-analytical approach to making sense of the cosmos (oops, should have written Kosmos – Wilber's preferred spelling). It just seems like it reflects Wilber's mind a lot more than it reflects reality. I don't feel like I understand either the world or myself more when I read Wilber. I'm impressed with his breadth…

Back in my super-devoted Radha Soami Satsang Beas days, I used to love the Hindi word "sat." It means truth, with an additional connotation of perfection. In Sant Mat "sat" gets used a lot. Sant itself means "one who knows the truth," such as a saint. Then there's satguru (true and perfect guide), satsang (true company or association), sat nam (true name), and other sat-based terms. Sat, sat, sat. The sound of the word has a pleasing emphatic ring to it. It reminds me of the movie "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring." My bloggish review of it included: When the…

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…