Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

I agree with Alan Watts. Except when I don’t.

Below is a quotation from Alan Watts that someone emailed to me, asking what I thought of it. I've shared my response after the quotation, but I want to add on a few additional thoughts that came to mind after re-reading what Watts said. I completely agree with Watts that there's a time and place for fully immersing ourselves in the lush sensuality of the world without putting on unnecessary coverings of thoughts, concepts, abstract ideas, and such. Likewise, a warm bath or hot sauna feels best when completely naked. But note my use of the word "unnecessary." Sometimes it…
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Posted inGod Religions Spiritual practice/meditation

Belonging is what we long for

I'm not religious now. But I used to be.  What turned me off about religions was how divisive they often are. Each religion has its own theology, its own rituals, its own moral codes.  I got tired of feeling special. I got tired of feeling different. My spiritual quest now is to find common ground, to come to grips with whatever universal human yearning leads people to seek solace in religions. Today I started reading a book about how psychedelic entheogens -- psilocybin, peyote, mescaline, LSD, and I'd add marijuana in a sense -- can produce a sense of divinity…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

Yes, I’ve changed my mind about spirituality. That’s a good thing.

Today a commenter on one of my blog posts said something astoundingly obvious -- that what I write about now is different from what I wrote about five or ten years ago. Well, duh... I'm constantly changing, as are we all. I learn, grow, evolve, change my mind, look upon things differently.  Since I've published a book that consists of Church of the Churchless posts from the early years of this blog, 2004 to 2006, I'm well aware of how my approach to spirituality has changed since then. If you read Break Free of Dogma, and naturally everybody should, you'll…
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Posted inBooks Science Spiritual practice/meditation

Mindfulness is calculus made spiritual

OK, I'm wading into some deep philosophical waters here, given the title of this blog post, because I only took one semester of calculus in graduate school, and then only because I was forced to by the powers-that-be in control of the Portland State University Systems Science Ph.D program. I found calculus to be difficult. By contrast, I've gotten back to reading an engaging book by Stephen Strogatz about calculus, Infinite Powers, which I blogged about back in August, noting that it had some spiritual aspects. This morning, reading a chapter on "The Vocabulary of Change" before I meditated, I…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

“Don’t know” is a great thing to keep in mind

All of us are prone to making mistakes with our minds. That comes with being human. Nobody sees reality as it is, because there's no way to tell what as it is means, since every conscious being views the world through their own set of perception filters. But there's ways to come closer to the truth about reality. Basically, we need to accept true things as being true. Like global warming, gravity, and the honking of geese. And we need to to accept false things as being false. Like Donald Trump's claim that he didn't want the Ukraine president to…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Stephen Batchelor on enlightenment and listening

Following up on my previous post about a charming little book by Stephen Batchelor and his wife Martine, which consists of talks they gave at a 2016 retreat in England based on the Korean Buddhist tradition (Son), here's some passages from What is this? that I resonated with in my pre-meditation reading this morning.  I liked this take on enlightenment, which is very much in line with Zen teachings. Son, which means "meditation," is the Korean equivalent of the Japanese "Chan" and Japanese "Zen." So once we let go of the idea that to be enlightened means to understand the nature…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

Don’t look within for inner peace. Look without.

This Pearls Before Swine comic humorously sums up my evolving approach to meditation. Which, as you can read below, also is the approach favored by my new favorite mindfulness teacher, Amit Sood, M.D. Now, actually I'm more of a blend of Rat and Pig. I still enjoy closed-eyed meditation, but I no longer am devoted to what the spiritual organization I belonged to for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, referred to as "going within." That notion was based on religious assumptions I've come to reject. Namely, that supernatural realms of reality exist, and it is possible to experience them…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Dalai Lama isn’t big on single-pointed attention

Here's some good news for everybody who has difficulty concentrating during meditation. The Dalai Lama does too! And he doesn't think that single-pointed attention is the best way to meditate. Analytical meditation is.  A few days ago, in a blog post I shared a lengthy passage from my new favorite book, Mindfulness Redesigned for the Twenty-First Century, by Amit Sood, M.D. That passage ended with Sood mentioning that it was the Dalai Lama who provided the final push that got Sood to break away from the traditional meditation approach he learned growing up in India, and to embrace a modern…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

Mindfulness Redesigned for the Twenty-First Century — my new favorite book

A quantum experience led me to a book that I'm loving a lot, Mindfulness Redesigned for the Twenty-First Century, by Amit Sood, M.D. More precisely, it was an absurd mention of "quantum" in another book that led me to Sood's creative re-imagining of what mindfulness is all about. There I was, semi-happily reading Loch Kelly's Effortless Mindfulness, which I wrote about in a recent blog post, when I came to a passage that caused me to give up on the book. Self-essence is an invisible source, prior to energy. In turn, Self-energy is both wave -- flowing, boundless dynamism with…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Effortless mindfulness versus deliberate mindfulness

Mindfulness has been my meditation for quite a few years. As I wrote about recently, being mindful of what actually exists here and now strikes me as way preferable to fantasizing about supernatural realms and mystical mumbo-jumbo. Thought I'm not 100% sure about anything -- the way of science -- I consider it highly probably that these premises are true. (1) The mind is the brain in action(2) There is no enduring, unchanging self or soul(3) Free will is an illusion(4) We humans see reality through a species-specific lens(5) Consciousness is created by the brain(6) All living beings exist in…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Mindfulness meditation is much better than mystical mumbo-jumbo

I've meditated every day for about fifty years, starting in 1970 when I was in college and began studying yoga with a crazed Greek guy whose Christananda Ashram blended Christian and Hindu philosophies in a decidedly weird fashion (for details, see here).  After giving up on the Greek yoga teacher, for the first 35 years of so I followed the meditation practice enjoined by the Indian religious organization I belonged to at the time, Radha Soami Satsang Beas. It had a strong mystical bent, being focused on concentrating one's attention totally within the mind/brain, with the aim of detaching consciousness…
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Posted inHappiness Spiritual practice/meditation

Do less, be happier

I believe it was in a comment by Amar on one of my blog posts that I learned about a great book by Mark Williams and Danny Penman, "Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World." I've been practicing mindfulness meditation for quite a while, as noted in Mindfulness has become my meditation and Mindfulness is meditation on reality, not supernatural illusion. The book by Williams and Penman is the best I've ever read on this subject. Very clear, well-written, and creative. A core theme is the difference between Doing and Being. Doing is fine, if what…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Spiritual practice/meditation

Stuff happens

Here's what I'd call a guest post, if I wasn't the guest, since I wrote it for my HinesSight blog a few days ago. There I called it, Stuff happens. Things fall apart. Such is life. But "Stuff Happens" is a fine title all by itself. Enjoy. Unless you don't. Which is fine, since stuff happens. Sometimes the most obvious things about life need to be talked about. It's easy to overlook them not in spite of their obviousness, but because the familiar tends to fade into the background, while new stuff grabs our attention. So here's a few obvious…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

A thirteen year old blog post that still rings true to me

About a month ago I started working on a book that will be a compilation of my favorite posts from the early years of this blog, 2004-2006.  Most days I try to find some time to re-read the blog posts that I've chosen, correcting typos, deleting links, and adding a brief introduction that describes how I feel about the post now. I just came across a post from January 2, 2006 that I still like a lot. Well, actually I still like all the posts I've written on this blog, but I like some more than others.  Here it is:---------------------------------…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Reading this blog post, know that you are reading this blog post

If you're not into mindfulness meditation, the title of this blog post may seem like nonsense to you. But like I wrote last year, "Mindfulness has become my meditation." A frequently-heard saying in the guided meditations I listen to via iPhone apps is Breathing in, know that you are breathing in. In other words, bring mind and body into a state of harmonious relatedness. Of course, you don't have to always be aware of your breathing. But if your goal in a particular meditation session is to be aware of your breathing, then obviously you need to know that you are…
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Posted inBuddhism Consciousness Spiritual practice/meditation

Sam Harris shows my meditation is on the right spiritual track

There's many forms of meditation. They all have strengths and weaknesses, pluses and minuses. But only a few forms of meditation lead to an increased knowledge of reality, since most are based on unfounded religious dogma. I'm confident that the meditation I've been practicing for about fifteen years -- after I wisely gave up a religiously-based form of meditation -- has me on the right spiritual track. I explained why in "Real spirituality is realizing you aren't a soul, or self." Here's how that 2014 post starts out. Just as predicted, I'm really enjoying reading Sam Harris' new book, "Waking…
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Posted inBuddhism Radha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

Vipassana vs. Surat Shabd Yoga meditation. I pick a winner.

Arguably it doesn't make sense to consider that meditation styles can be classed as winners or losers. But, hey, that's no fun! So in this post I'm going to choose a winner after considering a question I got in an email message recently: Do you have any opinion as to whether vipassana is more or less equal to RSSB's simran? Well, of course I have an opinion. I'm a blogger. Opinionating is what I love to do. I've got opinions on just about everything. Heck, on one of my other two blogs I rated the grocery carts at the three…
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Posted inReality Spiritual practice/meditation

We humans are stuck in The Matrix of our own brains

Most religions, mystical practices, and spiritual paths assume there's a truer reality than our everyday existence. Few people, though, think deeply about how it is possible to tell whether Reality X is more true than Reality Y -- assuming that both actually exist. Historian Yuval Noah Harari does think about this sort of stuff, though. Today I read the Science Fiction chapter in his newest book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.  Harari notes that movies like The Truman Show and The Matrix show people trapped in an illusory reality that they have to struggle to get out of. However, both…
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Posted inComments Radha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

Another RSSB defender attacks the messenger, me

This blog has been alive and well since 2004. That's 15 years of talking truth to religious power here at the Church of the Churchless. After over 4 million page views, 2,526 posts, and 42,239 comments, I'm well aware of the games religious believers play when their cherished faith comes in for criticism. One of their favorite ploys is to attack the messenger when the message being shared is so convincing, they have no effective response to my truth-telling. Recent case in point: commenter Chris. He's been doing his best to defend the Radha Soami Satsang Beas guru, Gurinder Singh…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Here’s a positive sign of my (mini) enlightenment

I was really proud of myself tonight. So proud, I'm thinking that what I did could be a tangible sign of my enlightenment, mini, or even micro, variety. After finding a parking spot a couple of blocks from my 6 pm Tai Chi class in downtown Salem, I walked away from my VW GTI without going back and checking if I'd locked the car via a button on the door handle. Now, this may not seem like something that distinguishes an enlightened being. It pales in comparison to what supposedly happened with the Buddha under the Bodhi Tree.  But given…
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