Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Enlightenment explained in 47 words

Just got this email from a Church of the Churchless visitor. Nicely said from someone about my age who looks on enlightenment pretty much the same way I do now. I never knew what to believe until my early twenties when I came to believe in enlightenment. Now, at the age of sixty-four, having found that I can’t explain clearly what enlightenment could possibly be, I can’t believe in it anymore, and I find this inability enlightening.      
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Posted inBooks Science

Certainty is how the brain’s left hemisphere deludes itself

Are you certain? For sure? No doubts at all? 100%? Your faith in what you know is absolute? Congratulations. The left hemisphere of your brain is firmly in control of you -- recognizing that almost certainly (notice that almost? my brain's right hemisphere is working) there's no difference between "you" and "your brain." This is my second post about Iain McGilchrist's fascinating book, "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World." See here for the first. I'm hugely enjoying learning about how the left and right hemispheres function.  After all, how the world appears…
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Posted inReality Science

Divided brain is root of our divided self

I'm fascinated by the human brain. It's a mini-universe. A mini-universe that is me. So what I'm fascinated by is the same entity that is doing the fascinating, which is to say...me. Go figure. I can't. There's no way I can get outside of my brain and look upon it objectively. Nobody can, not even supposedly elevated mystics and meditators. Show me someone without a working brain and you're showing me someone dead. However, neuroscientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and other scientifically-minded students of the human brain know a lot about its structure and functions. I've read quite a few books about…
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Posted inReality Spiritual practice/meditation

“Oneness” is an abstraction. “Manyness” is reality.

I like the idea of oneness. But I'd hate the reality of it, oneness plain and simple. Well, more accurately I couldn't hate absolute oneness if it existed, because there wouldn't be any me to feel hate. Or anything else, since there's no room for two in One. Thus it's impossible for anyone to experience oneness. "Anyone" and "oneness" are two separate entities. So whenever someone talks about how the cosmos is One, they're referring to an abstraction, not reality. Nothing wrong with this. Abstractions can be fun to intellectually play around with. That's a big part of what philosophizing…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Everything will be OK when you are OK with everything

The title of this post isn't my own thought. It's from Michael Singer, author of "The Untethered Soul," a book I've been re-reading. Or re-re-reading (can't remember which). That's how much I like the book. Which is sort of strange, because I don't believe we humans have, or are, a soul. And I also don't believe in the sort of pure awareness that Singer talks about in much the same way Ramana and other Advaita'ish teachers do. Yet this is precisely one of Singer's main points: we can't make everything in life conform to our notions of how things should…
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Posted inScience Spiritual practice/meditation

The human brain is a mini-universe. Trust it. Explore it.

I had a thought today... Which came out of my brain... The thought was about my brain... My brain was thinking about itself, which is... So cool! The outer world entrances us. We spend most of our time and energy focused on what lies beyond the contents of our cranium. Yet the brain is indeed the most complex object in the universe.  Aside from the universe itself. The human brain is truly awesome. A typical, healthy one houses some 200 billion nerve cells, which are connected to one another via hundreds of trillions of synapses. Each synapse functions like a…
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Posted inHumor Personal/Stories

Photos of my not-so-sacred meditation chamber

I figure it's time to prepare for my hoped-for veneration, exaltation, and worship as an enlightened godly being. True, I don't believe in enlightenment or in God. But why should this stop me from being worshipped? I founded this here Church of the Churchless. I preach about stuff all the time. I'm venerated in my own mind. Maybe the exaltation I feel toward myself will spread someday. So in case someone ever builds a shrine to me, here's photos of the meditation chamber where my perfection becomes more perfect every morning. I hereby give permission for it to be recreated…
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Posted inVedanta/Advaita

Bart Marshall talks non-duality absurdity

I can't remember how I came across an interview with Bart Marshall in non-duality magazine. I'm glad that I did, though, because the questions and answers encapsulate why the supposed state of enlightened "non-duality" strikes me as being almost as absurd as traditional religions are. Now, I'm sure Bart Marshall is a nice guy. I'd probably like him if I met him. But reading about his purported enlightenment, realization of pure awareness, and identity with God made me think, "There's as much evidence for Christianity or any other religion being true as there is for non-duality being true." Meaning, none.…
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Posted inGod Reality

Sam Harris: “atheist” makes as much sense as “aunicornist”

Sam Harris, author of "The End of Faith," is a famous atheist. But he isn't fond of having that word describe him. After all, people who don't believe in unicorns aren't called "aunicornists." They're just people who recognize that evidence is lacking for the existence of a mythical creature that resembles a horse, but has a single twisting horn on its forehead. Likewise, what need is there for "atheist"? Why not simply call people who believe in God, "theists," while having no special word for those who don't? So says Harris in a well-written and well-argued essay, The Problem With…
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Posted inMorality Spiritual practice/meditation

Open up to life, fearlessly, not leaning on religion

Openness. Could this be the key that unlocks the happiness door? And keeps it (no big surprise)... open!  So says Michael Singer in his intriguing book, "The Untethered Soul," which I've blogged about here and here. I re-read the chapter on transcending the tendency to close this morning. Liked it the second time as much as the first. Singer says that us humans used to mostly worry about physical danger. With saber-toothed tigers safely extinct, psychological threats are our biggest concern now. As a result, the protective energies have adapted toward defending the individual psychologically. rather than physiologically. We now experience…
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Posted inGod Spiritual practice/meditation

Babbling about God like a baby: what else can we do?

Recently a comment conversation on one of this blog's posts brought up "babbling." Someone used the word to describe another commenter who was describing how God, spirituality, and such seemed to her. She didn't like being called a babbler. But I don't see this as an insult, at least not when what's being babbled about, such as God or the supernatural, is purely personal -- subjective, intuitive, emotional, experiential, non-symbolic.  Babies babble. Babbling is the first sign of human language. These vocalizations do not generally contain meaning or refer to anything specific. People who have had an ineffable experience of something…
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Posted inReality

Does an objective non-symbolic world exist?

It's mid-August. It's hot. I'm in a living is easy frame of mind. I haven't had a caffeine fix for quite a few hours. Not the best time to address the question I set out in the title of this post. "Does an objective non-symbolic world exist?" But philosophizing can't wait. This subject has popped up in some blog post comments. Here's a sampling of what's been said (with a few spelling errors corrected). Janya: I know, it is hard to digest, because after all its all personal experience, and what objectivity does ANY purely personal experience hold? We have…
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Posted inMiscellaneous

Open Thread 10

It's been a while, but Open Thread has been resurrected. I've been getting comments that didn't fit with an existing post, so further off-topic comments should go in this post. So here's another Open Thread (previous OTs are still open, of course). Leave a comment about anything you want to talk about. I've put some recent off-topic comments here, to start it off, instead of the posts they were left on. Comments on other posts need to be related to the subject of the post, or they will be candidates for deletion. So an Open Thread is the place for…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Pay attention to your life as if you had to testify about it

It's strange how some things stick with me, and so many don't. I've forgotten so much about what happened to me during my childhood, while remembering surprising details. LIke my mother, an avid reader, telling me about what a noted novelist of the times (can't remember his name) said he did when he heard something unexpected late at night. He'd glance at his watch to see what time it was. He'd listen for other sounds. He'd focus on anything else that seemed out of the ordinary. The novelist wanted to be prepared in case what he heard was connected with…
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Posted inGod Religions

Arguments for God aren’t convincing. So is “I feel Him.”

Resurrected! Glory be!  That's how my churchless self reacted when I opened a drawer full of forgotten books and re-discovered "Irreligion" by John Allen Paulos. I'd read this short book before, as evidenced by my highlighting, but decided to read it again after flipping through a few pages and thinking Oh, my God! So true! Paulos, a mathematics professor, demolishes the most common arguments for God. His logic is impeccable, so far as I can tell. And his writing is entertaining, often simultaneously amusing and thought-provoking. For example: To the question "What will any of my concerns matter in one…
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Posted inPolitics Religions

Linking religious faith and Romney’s tax returns

Ever since I started following the controversy over Harry Reid's claim that Mitt Romney didn't pay any taxes for ten years, I've had a feeling that deep philosophical issues relating to the validity of religious faith are involved. Here's my attempt to explain why.  It's fascinating, really. Reid and Romney are both Mormons, which is a weird variety of Christianity. Or to some, Mormonism is an independently weird religion. Regardless, Christians and Mormons believe in the Bible. The New Testament gospels were written by guys -- Matthew, Mark, Luke, John -- with no direct knowledge of Jesus. So what they said about Jesus' life…
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Posted inReality Religions

Respect reality, not religion, if you love the Ultimate

I'm no longer religious. But I still embrace the notion of Ultimate Reality. I love those words, "ultimate reality." They point toward... something. Or perhaps... someone. (I think it's much more likely that something rather than someone resides at the root of reality, but since I wrote a book called Return to the One, and continue to believe in much of Plotinus' philosophy, I'm very much open to the possibility of some sort of universal impersonal consciousness that could be called One.) Ultimate doesn't mean far off, even though religions, spiritual teachings, and mystical practices often assume that Really Real Reality is…
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Posted inBuddhism Personal/Stories

Extreme is good. Be spacious in your extremeness.

Often we're advised to embrace moderation. Don't be extreme. Stick to the safe middle ground. Edges are dangerous; cliffs await.  Most religions, forms of spirituality, mystic practices -- they like boxiness. Commandments keep devotees' actions within certain bounds. Rituals are well-defined and repetititve. Prayers, meditative practices, worship... stay in control, sit in your seats, listen and don't talk back. For God's sake, don't yell, scream, object, or in any other way do your own unfettered thing. Here's some countervailing thoughts about going to extremes. Two personal stories, one link to a Tantra-related blog post. I'd almost forgotten about the Groupon…
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Posted inBuddhism Universe

There’s no answer to “Why does the world exist?”

Here's the sort of spoiler alert that irritates me when it pops up in a movie review -- a warning about a giving away of the key plot element that's so close to the spoiler itself, I can't help but see what I'm not supposed to see if I want to keep the movie's meaning a surprise. Ha-ha! If you read the title of this blog post, it's too late. You know. There's no answer to "Why does the world exist?" Hope this doesn't ruin your day. Probably it will, if you're a religious devotee, because likely you think that…
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