Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Get out of your own way. Good TEDx Talk by Judson Brewer.

Here's ten minutes of inspiration from Judson Brewer. This is an excerpt of the video description. Scroll down for the video. We have all experienced moments in our lives where everything just comes together in some almost magical way --whether playing music, participating in a sport, or just getting totally absorbed in a project. These moments are timeless, effortless, completely free of worry and delicious! As described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, this is "flow" and is often a hallmark of exemplary performance --whether it is Michael Jordan scoring 50 points in a basketball game, or someone rising to a challenge that…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Our dog teaches me about spirituality

Mooka, our Husky mix dog, has a lot of talents. One of them that struck me on our daily two-mile dog walk this afternoon reflected how I feel about religion and spirituality. In short, prove it.  Mooka does a lot of sniffing as we walk along. More accurately, she both sniffs as we walk, and also stops to sniff when I'd prefer to keep walking. Here she'd just sniff-inspected a small branch that had fallen from a large oak tree in-between our walk yesterday and today. I'm fine with her doing this because I recognize that a dog's sense of…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Anchor yourself by attending to here-and-now physical reality

I wanted to share a great image from a guided meditation I listened to this morning via my Insight Timer app. I clicked on a Ten Minute Pause by Judson Brewer called "Anchoring in The Present Moment." (Looks like you can listen to it for free by clicking on the above link.) Brewer's image was of an anchor in the ocean or in a flowing stream. That anchor can be any part of our body that we choose. Traditionally it is the breath, but it can be anything -- hands, feet, whatever works for you. The idea, which is simple,…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

Embrace uncertainty, doubt, and open-minded faith

I'm an ardent worshipper of Amazon, because it brings me so much inspiration. My current object of literary worship is a compelling little (204 pages) book by Lesley Hazleton, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto. Now, I don't see much difference between atheism and agnosticism, but Hazleton does, so I'm good with that. I'd still argue that at times she views atheism as excessively certain God doesn't exist, because every atheist I know (including myself) would be pleased to acknowledge the existence of God if there was good reason to do so.  Which, there isn't. But this is a minor quibble with…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Maybe it’s time to give up on hope

I'm conflicted about hope, the desire for something to happen. It certainly seems like a good thing, a shoulder to lean on in tough times, a positive compass heading when happenings in your life are going in the wrong direction. I've relied on hope a lot, as have we all, most likely. I've dreamed of better times, of bouncing back from a disappointment, of finding a way to accomplish something difficult. For most of us, it's difficult to imagine not living without hope.  If we get sick, we hope we'll soon be well. If a romantic relationship falls apart, we…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Spiritual practice/meditation

Calm clear consciousness — my new favorite “mantra”

OK, calm clear consciousness isn't really a mantra for me, notwithstanding the title of this blog post. Those are just three words that I've been saying to myself a few times a day, because they do a good job of summing up my current approach to meditation and spirituality. Here's some additional words that explain part of the meaning that I attribute to calm clear consciousness.  Consciousness. Everything we have experienced, are experiencing, and will experience is dependent on consciousness. No consciousness, no experience.  But there are degrees of consciousness. There's a big difference between someone comatose, in a dreamless…
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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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