Posted inNeuroscience Spiritual practice/meditation

Why repeating a mantra during daily activities doesn’t make much sense

Recently I got to thinking about the many years (about thirty-five) that I did my best to mentally repeat a mantra not only during my morning meditation, but also as much as possible during the rest of my daily activities. UPDATE: I meandered quite a bit in coming to the conclusion expressed in this post's title. Here's the short version: The world is always changing. Unexpected challenges, surprises, problems, opportunities, and such continually pop up. Our minds should be similarly flexible to deal with these happenings in the world and our life. Rigidity should be avoided. But some meditation practices…
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Posted inNeuroscience Spiritual practice/meditation

Rationality has a lot to do with spirituality

For the thirty-five years I was an active member of an Eastern religion, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), one of my favorite Indian words was sat, truth.  For example, there was the satguru, the true guru, and satsang, association with truth. Eventually I came to feel that truth was the most important thing. When I concluded that for me, truth was best pursued outside the bounds of RSSB, there was only one thing I could do: leave RSSB. When I came to the epilogue of Thomas Metzinger's book, The Elephant and the Blind, an examination of pure awareness, his thoughts…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

“Right Concentration” is a good book about meditation and the jhanas

As I like to say, it isn't wise to judge a book by its cover, but I've found that it usually makes sense to judge a book by the first twenty pages. For that's enough reading to get a good feel for the author's style and personality, at least as how it's expressed in writing. This morning I got that far in Leigh Brasington's Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhanas. Brasington clearly has a lot of experience with meditation, Buddhist variety, which is pretty much how I've been meditating for around fifteen years, maybe longer.  I don't consider…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

Why teachers are needed, but not gurus

Back in my true believing days, the 35 years that I was an active member of a guru-centered religious organization (Radha Soami Satsang Beas, or RSSB), I accepted the RSSB adage that a guru was needed because we require teachers throughout our life, and finding God or our true self, pretty much the same thing according to RSSB, really required a teacher, being so difficult on our own. That made sense at the time, but not now. For in my present way of looking at reality, there's a big difference between needing a teacher (who can be really valuable) and…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Jhanas are the current meditation craze, says TIME magazine

I've got to get me some jhanas. That was my thought, admittedly not thoroughly spiritual, that came to mind this morning after I read a story in the August 26, 2024 issue of TIME magazine: "The Pursuit of Happiness." It was written by Nina Bajekal, who combined her reporting about a company, Jhourney, that offers training in how to experience jhanas through meditation, with her personal experience of going on a week-long Jhourney retreat. The online version of her story is called "My Week at the Buzzy Meditation Retreat That Promises Bliss on Demand." In case you aren't able to…
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Posted inAwareness Buddhism Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Look without, not within, is the best spiritual advice

For thirty-five years I belonged to a guru-centered religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), whose teachings centered around a meditation approach aimed at "going within."  Through the repetition of a mantra, visualization of the guru, and observation by one's inner senses of theorized divine sound and light, the promise was that realms of reality beyond the physical would be experienced on the road to God-realization. Nice idea. Never happened to me. Nor did it happen to anyone else associated with RSSB who I talked with over those thirty-five years. And believe me, I talked with lots of RSSB initiates.…
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Posted inConsciousness Spiritual practice/meditation

“Theory contamination” is a big problem in spirituality

What is real? This is one of the toughest questions to answer, because to a large degree, reality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.  I'm mainly speaking about subjective realities here, the province of spirituality, religion, and mysticism. But to a lesser degree, objective realities, the province of science, also appear different to people with varying theoretical assumptions. A classic example is observations of the motions of the planets in the middle ages. For quite a while it was assumed that Earth was at the center of what we now call the solar system, with the Sun…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Study finds that meditators are prone to “spiritual superiority”

I'm well acquainted with the notion of "spiritual superiority," since I fell prey to that myself back when I thought that being initiated by a guru who supposedly was God in Human Form meant that I was part of a relatively small group of chosen people who had a special relationship with God. (Sorry Jews, there's a lot of competition in the chosen people contest.) And it could be argued that I still feel spiritually superior now that I've become an atheist and consider that I'm aware of the drawbacks of being religious that religious believers are clueless about. Below…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience Spiritual practice/meditation

If you’re trying to control your mind, who is the “you” doing the trying?

English has some confusing ways of putting things when it comes to the mind, consciousness, attention, and all that.  For example, we may say, "I couldn't stop myself from eating a second piece of cake." Okay. But what's the difference between "I" and "myself"? Don't each of these words refer to the same entity? So isn't that sentence just a matter of grammar, not of reality?  In other words, maybe what the sentence really means is "I ate two pieces of cake, but now I wish I'd only eaten one." Now we just have "I" without the extraneous "myself."  This…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience Spiritual practice/meditation

You can’t know your “true self,” but you can be it

I readily admit that Thomas Metzinger's new book, The Elephant and the Blind, often isn't easy to read. This detailed examination of pure awareness involves a lot of philosophy, a lot of neuroscience, and a lot of sophisticated arguments. All that is challenging. But every chapter rewards me with insights presented in simple language that make me pleased I bought this lengthy book -- which as I've noted before can be downloaded for free from the publisher, The MIT Press. (I prefer reading books on paper, not a screen.) Metzinger does a great job separating precepts of Buddhist, Advaita, and…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience Spiritual practice/meditation

Narrative self-deception is one way we fool ourselves

Each of us is the hero or villain in a story of our own making. That's admittedly a simplistic summary of a psychological principle, but it isn't far from the truth. I'm certainly aware of this in regard to myself. I have a way of looking upon my 75 years of living that, by and large, puts me in a positive light. Which isn't surprising, since I prefer praise to blame, so why would I choose to view the events of my life in a fashion that draws attention to my weaknesses instead of my strengths? Of course, some people…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Meditation is good, but non-meditation can be better

My previous post, "The Elephant and the Blind -- a provocative book about pure consciousness," was an introductory look at this book, which covers a lot of interesting ground in its 500 or so main pages. It won't appeal to everybody. But for those such as me, who like their spirituality founded in the natural world, common sense, and science (insofar as this is possible), Thomas Metzinger's discussion of how meditators in 57 countries look upon "pure awareness" is a breath of fresh air. I say this because it is refreshing to have someone discuss meditation from the standpoint of…
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Posted inPsychedelics Reality Spiritual practice/meditation

Letting go is key in both meditation and psychedelics. Here’s why.

I decided to buy a book about magic mushrooms in anticipation of my mild/moderate 1 gram (totally legal) psilocybin experience this coming Thursday. It was a good choice, as I've enjoyed reading Michelle Janikian's Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion: An Informative Easy-to-Use Guide to Understanding Magic Mushrooms. Well-written, practical, nicely researched. Today I got to a chapter where Janikian talks about the relation between meditating and tripping on magic mushrooms. Since I've meditated every day for about 55 years, and used psychedelics (LSD, mescaline, psilocybin) quite a bit in college, I was struck by how "letting go" is a central aspect…
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Posted inAwareness Spiritual practice/meditation

Hey, turns out I’m enlightened! Just not all the time.

Enlightenment is a word that gets thrown around a lot in spiritual circles, even though it's rare that anyone can clearly say what makes someone enlightened, or how it's possible to tell a person is in this supposedly exalted state. Often enlightenment is viewed as something ineffable that only another enlightened being can recognize. You know, an exclusive club where the members know each other but us ordinary people can only do our best to peek through the curtained windows in a vain attempt to see what's going on inside. Another problem with the notion of enlightenment is that even…
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Posted inMeaning of life Religions Spiritual practice/meditation

If you become a religion of one, your worship will be effortless

Whenever I'm reading a spiritual or philosophical book and am generally enjoying its message, then come across a passage that I heartily disagree with, I remind myself of one of my early blog posts from 2005, "Become a religion of one."  (I'll copy it in below, I like it so much.) For the way I've come to view spirituality is as an intensely independent pursuit. After all, our search for meaning and purpose in life necessarily is personal, not collective. There's zero chance that any other person in the world is going to have exactly the same goals, values, and…
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Posted inConsciousness Spiritual practice/meditation

The delusion of believing in gurus and other gems from Joan Tollifson

In my daily morning reading, I bounce back and forth between books about science and books about spirituality/philosophy, because consuming too much of either is less pleasant for me than a balanced diet. I've been enjoying several of Joan Tollifson's books for my spiritual/philosophical reading. She's become my favorite contemporary writer on Zen, Buddhism, nonduality, meditation, and such. I don't agree with everything she says. Which isn't surprising, since I don't agree with everything I say.  For example, Tollifson considers awareness to be the Key Thing. (The quotes in this post are from Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

Rabbi Brian’s Highly Unorthodox Gospel

Recently I got an email with an offer to read and comment on a book by Rabbi Brian Zachary Mayer, Rabbi Brian's Highly Unorthodox Gospel. (It comes with stickers that you apply at various places in the book.) Naturally I said, "Absolutely!" to Rabbi Brian. Hey, we share a first name. Also, a state, since Rabbi Brian lives in Portland, the more with-it city some 50 miles north of where I live in sleepier Salem. And both of us don't like organized religion. Plus, we each have a beard, though Rabbi Brian's is way darker, since he's way younger. I've…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

The endpoint of spirituality is breaking the addiction to spirituality

For a long time, including at this very moment, I've had a feeling that both disturbs and elates me: almost everything that I once thought was true about spirituality actually isn't, which means that what remains when my addiction to spiritual seeking has run its course is what I'm truly looking for. This is sort of akin to the Zen'ish adage, first there is a mountain, then there isn't, then there is. I alluded to this in a 2015 post, "I don't really know what 'spiritual' means anymore." Since I don’t see anything other than naturalistic reality as being, well,…
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Posted inNeuroscience Spiritual practice/meditation

Believing that the mind’s resources are non-limited allows more mental effort

Beliefs are powerful. We need to use them wisely. Not by believing crazy stuff wildly out of touch with reality, but by believing in possibilities firmly within our potential to achieve.  The placebo effect is a good example of this. Taking a sugar pill that is believed to be efficacious isn't going to cure a Stage 4 cancer. However, it can have other positive effects, such as reducing pain.  Reading David Robson's book this morning, The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change the World, I came across an interesting example of the power of belief in his "Limitless Willpower"…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

Meditation isn’t about doing it right. It’s about trusting yourself.

TIME magazine rarely has stories about meditation. So it was a pleasure to turn a page of the February 12, 2024 issue and see a title: "The noises in my head at a silent retreat." I could relate to those words. For after starting to meditate every day in 1971, during the past fifty-three years my meditation has involved a lot of noises inside my own head.  Thoughts. Emotions. Cravings. Things to do. Cosmic conceptions. Crude desires. You know, everything that's going through my mind outside of meditation. It's just more obvious when I'm sitting still, usually with eyes closed,…
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