Posted inVedanta/Advaita

How far down the rabbit hole can an unbeliever go?

I know something about rabbit holes. I've been down quite a few -- of the psychedelic variety and otherwise.  Graduating from high school in 1966, I headed to college in the San Francisco Bay area just at the time Grace Slick of the Jefferson Airplane wrote "White Rabbit." I still get a chill up my spine (tiny LSD flashback?) when I watch a video of her singing it. Speaking as a proud Flower Child babyboomer, Man, they don't make music like this anymore. Suffer through the brief ad at the start. Two and a half minutes of Jefferson Airplane are…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Beliefs are not a substitute for seeing

Reading today's Sunday Oregonian, I came across a nice Q & A in an interview with poet Mary Szybist. What do you believe about the world? I like what Flannery O'Connor has to say about beliefs. She advises writers: "Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing." I am wary of fixed beliefs because they can and sometimes do become "substitute[s] for seeing." I'm also wary of cynicism. Perhaps a belief can be a "light by which you see." I begin "Incarnadine"…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth

When you die, that’s it: no heaven, hell, or rebirth

I love to get straight-talking churchless email. Here's a message that recently zoomed in from cyberspace. Thanks, Nancy, for letting me share it. Hi Brian, Came across your website "Church Of The Churchless" and I give it 2 thumbs up! Yes, religion is all man-made bullshit trying to give meaning and purpose to human existence. I have delved into Hinduism and meditation and honestly, Hindus are way offtrack with such nonsense as reincarnation. No person comes back as another human to work out past karmas nor are they sent to planet earth to suffer in the next life. This I…
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Posted inReality Religions Science

Beyond humanism and absolutism… mystery

What is real? Great question. Just the sort of question to tackle in a blog post. Such is the hubris of bloggers.  Hubris is a word that's used a lot in David E. Cooper's "The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility, and Mystery." Wikipedia clues us in to the meaning of hubris. Not a good quality to have if you seek to know the nature of reality. Hubris (pron.: /ˈhjuːbrɪs/), also hybris, from ancient Greek ὕβρις, means extreme pride or arrogance. Hubris often indicates a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one's own competence or capabilities, especially when the person exhibiting it is in a position of…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

Experience is all we are — no “experiencer” inside our head

Showing my age, I'm digging a re-reading of Alan Watts' "The Wisdom of Insecurity." I'm on a blogging triple-play with the book, previous posts being here and here. What Watts did masterfully, way back in 1951, was bring a sort of core spirituality down to earth, shorn of superfluous lofty religious, mystical, and supernatural abstractions. It's a purified philosophy of living -- ageless wisdom trimmed of dogmatic theologies. So simple. So, so simple. What we're looking for has always been right before our eyes. Also, our nose, mouth, ears, hands, and every other part of us.  Here's how I'd encapsulate…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Alan Watts on “I” versus “Me” — a crazy battle

Sometimes -- well, more often than that -- I wonder whether our dogs are considerably more enlightened than I am.  After all, I never catch them wondering whether they're doing, thinking, or feeling the right thing. But I question myself a lot. Our dogs don't. Whatever they're up to, they seem to experience it unhesitatingly. Even if that "it" is hesitating before an open door, wondering whether they should go out on an upstairs deck on a cold, rainy night. They don't worry about indecision; they just stand there, thoroughly indecisive. Like I said in my previous post, I'm a…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

I love Alan Watts’ “The Wisdom of Insecurity.” Here’s my love notes.

Some books I read once, and never look at again. Others become frequent companions, picked up whenever I need a, well, pick-me-up (non-liquid variety).  Alan Watts' wonderful "The Wisdom of Insecurity" is one of those books. It's my favorite Watts writing. Every time I read it, the book speaks something fresh to me. Not because the words between the covers have changed. Because I have.  Which is the central message of the book. Life is nothing but change. Scary! We don't know what's going to happen! Things could spiral out of control! Death... disease... disability... despair. And that's just some of…
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Posted inReligions

Believers in God, others believe like you do. Just not in God.

Everybody has that wonderful feeling of "I'm certain this is true." Everybody. I blogged about this neuroscientific fact in I know I'm right about uncertainty. I included an Amazon summary of "On Being Certain: Believing You are Right Even When You're Not." You recognize when you know something for certain, right? You "know" the sky is blue, or that the traffic light had turned green, or where you were on the morning of September 11, 2001--you know these things, well, because you just do. In On Being Certain, neurologist Robert Burton challenges the notions of how we think about what we…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Here’s something to be afraid of: fear

Fear is good. In certain situations. Like if you come upon a poisonous snake, coiled and ready to strike. Fear makes you jump back in a flash, much quicker than the reasonable, rational, thoughtful side of your brain would. But most people today aren't faced with frequent fearful physical threats. Yet we're still afraid. Of making mistakes. Being made fun of. Of failing. Of something bad happening to us in the future. Of saying or doing something outside the acceptable norm.  Religions make use of our propensity to fear what isn't actually there, yet can be imagined. Hellfire. Damnation. Bad…
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Posted inMiscellaneous Spiritual practice/meditation

“Beasts of the Southern Wild” — what the movie means to me

Watching the last scenes of "Beasts of the Southern Wild" last night via a rented DVD, I was almost moved to tears. When the closing credits came on I turned to my wife and said, "Wow. That was one of the best movies I've ever seen. So inspiring. So meaningful." She replied, "I didn't like it very much. Depressing. A downer." Each to his or her own. Me, I'm recommending the movie highly. See it. Decide for yourself how this amazing tale of a wise six year old, Hushpuppy, in a bayou town called The Bathtub speaks to you. Here's…
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Posted inMystics Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Charan Singh was a loyal guru

It's a reasonable theory: that a guru who supposedly is "god in human form" isn't a liar, lunatic, the Lord, or a legend. He or she is a loyalist, someone who carries out the role of a divine person because he or she is loyal to the person/organization who elevated them to their gurudom. This was what I argued in "Who is the guru?" Is there another L-word that better fills the bill? One springs to mind: loyalist. Perhaps when a successor is appointed to fill the shoes of a highly-regarded guru, loyalty both to his predecessor and to the…
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Posted inReality Science

Cosmos could be beyond human knowing

Listening to a Philosophy Talk podcast on "Has Science Replaced Philosophy?" while exercising today, I heard a discussion of how science seeks empirical knowledge while philosophy is after logical knowledge. Or something like that. I've got the basic notion correct, if not the precise philosophy talk language.  Anyway, it's an interesting idea. Often religious people disparage science, and scientists, arguing that the mysteries of the universe can't be fully understood by reason and logic. True enough. However, science isn't always reasonable or logical. Quantum theory, for example. At the quantum level of reality (which some say is all of reality),…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Mindfulness is meditation on reality, not supernatural illusion

After more than forty years of daily meditation I've realized that mindfulness is the way I want to meditate. I'm no longer interested in withdrawing from the world via repeating a mantra, or focusing on some spiritual "eye center" that supposedly is the gateway to supernatural realms of reality. That used to appeal to me. No longer. Because reality is a horrible thing to waste. Sure, what's inside my head, my brain, that's real. But mental cognizing, no matter how refined or ethereal, is a different order of reality from what mindfulness focuses on. What is present, right here, right…
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Posted inReligions Science

Science progresses. Religion doesn’t.

Science knows a lot about reality. Even more impressive, science steadily knows more and more about reality. I subscribe to several science magazines, New Scientist and Scientific American. In every issue I learn about advances in the scientific understanding of the cosmos. But when was the last time religions told us something factually new about how the world works? In fact, so far as I know there hasn't been a first time. Or an anytime. Meaning, even though prophets, mystics, sages, gurus, enlightened masters, and such supposedly have had access to beyond-normal ways of knowing, none of them ever have…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Reality

Reality is more than the human mind

Roger asked some good questions in his comment on a recent blog post. He started off by agreeing with my oh-so-agreeable statement about the ineffable can't-know'ness of someone else's subjective experiences. Correct, "Everybody has their own subjective experiences. It isn't possible to know what those subjective experiences are like, unless you're the person having the experiences." ---However, what is a RSSB [Radha Soami Satsang Beas] meditation experience? Why is there a need for RSSB initation into a meditation process? Is the RSSB meditations nothing more than one's subjective personal experiences? ---So, these RSSB meditation experiences of the various astral planes or regions are…
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Posted inMiscellaneous

Manti Te’o hoax: a deep desire to believe

Worth reading, even if you don't follow American football: "Behind Manti Te'o hoax about girlfriend lies a deep desire to believe." Quite a few parallels to religiosity here. At its root, this was a story about the deep need to believe. What complicates that is that it’s not clear whether Manti Te’o wanted to believe in a beautiful, fake girlfriend or whether we wanted to believe in him. The impulse obviously isn’t unique to the Internet — the rundown of never-was frauds sweeps back decades, including “Tony Godby Johnson,” whose middle-aged creator hoodwinked legions into believing she was an AIDS-stricken little boy. But…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

Why be reluctant to share spiritual experiences?

One of the (few) things I like about Christianity is how open Christians are to talking about their visions of Jesus, heaven, angels, and other aspects of the divine. If a Christian has a spiritual experience, he or she usually feels that this is something to be shared, not kept secret. By contrast, there's a rather cult'ish tendency in Eastern religions, meditative practices, and mystical paths to -- shush! -- keep quiet about "inner" supposed supernatural experiences. I've always been suspicious of this, because it strikes me as a means of control. For example, I'm quite familiar with the injunction…
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Posted inReligions

Atheism: natural, moral, open-minded

I suppose I'm an atheist. After all, I don't believe in God. There's no demonstrable evidence of God. I want to spend what likely is my one and only life as close to reality as possible. Imagination is fine and fun, but it should be a supplement to living, not the main course. I used to shy away from the term, "atheist." It's got a negative vibe in the United States' highly religious culture. Reading Julian Baggini's wonderful little book, Atheism: A Very Short Introduction, has made me more comfortable with saying, yeah, I'm an atheist.  Here's some reasons I've…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas Religions

Weird religious stuff I’ve believed or done

A couple of weeks into the New Year, I still haven't completely broken a half-hearted resolution: be more understanding and less in-your-face toward people I disagree with.  Such as on matters of religion or politics. Which are the main areas in life where I can get frothy at the mouth with indignation at how incredibly stupid some people can be who aren't like wise me. I've been trying to remember that over my 64 years of living, my own religious and political views have changed a lot. I've believed and done things in the past that my present self would…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Spiritual practice/meditation

Andrew Cohen is a tyrant, not a guru

It's always a pleasure to get an email message from someone who is thoughtful, churchless, a good writer, skeptical of gurus, and honestly blunt. In short, someone who reminds me of me!  Here's what Scott Little had to say about his conversion to reality from religion. It's nicely said. HIs observations about the tyranny of Andrew Cohen apply to other supposed "gurus" who manipulate devotees through emotional charisma. Thanks for letting me share your thoughts on this blog, Scott. Hello Brian, I found your Church of the Churchless blog today.  Thank you for your work there. I am a former Christian…
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