Posted inGod

Jet crash “miracle” shows absurdity of religion

Last night my wife and I couldn't believe what we heard while watching the evening news. "It's a miracle," several people said, referring to the Navy jet that crashed into Virginia Beach apartment buildings without killing anybody. A U.S. Navy admiral said Saturday that the fiery crash of a fighter jet into apartment buildings in the military community of Virginia Beach matches his definition of a miracle. No one was killed and everyone was accounted for one day after the accident. "I don't speak for anybody's religious beliefs, but the mayor and I both agreed that if you want to…
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Posted inReality Science

Self-consciousness comes and goes. Like the self.

Everybody has had this sort of experience: Walking into the house after driving home, I'm carrying the car keys in my hand. A few minutes later I'm wandering around the living room, kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom, muttering Where the hell are my damn car keys?! I was conscious the entire time after I came in the front door. I didn't black out. I didn't suffer amnesia. At every moment I was aware of where I was. Yet at some point I became divided into a "me" who had put down the keys somewhere, and a "me" who had no idea…
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Posted inReality

Everything is appearance in mind

"Tucson" is a frequent commenter on this blog. I like his style. Which doesn't mean that I always understand what he is saying.  That might mean that I do understand it. Because if I understand anything about Tucson's way of looking at the world, it's that every attempt to divide reality into (1) an understander, and (2) what is understood, results in a human conception of the cosmos which misses (3) what's really going on. Not that (3) ever can be known. There's actually no knower and nothing to be known. And now I've probably demonstrated that I don't know anything…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Spiritual practice/meditation

Catholic woman is offended by McDonald’s

Recently our local newspaper here in Salem, Oregon had a column by Carol McAlice Currie that resonated with my long-time experience of being a vegetarian.  Download Fast food offends religious woman  Since I've shunned meat and fish since 1970, and raised a daughter born in 1972 as a vegetarian, I know what it's like to ask servers in a restaurant to substitute something animal'ish for something vegetable'ish.  Many times I walked into a McDonald's with my daughter and said to the person behind the counter, "Could you make us a Big Mac without the hamburger?" Or at Taco Bell, "We'd…
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Posted inScience

What science says will make you happy

I'm a bit suspicious of "top ten" lists. Seems to be too much of a coincidence that the number of fingers we humans have is the same number of important things. Why aren't there more "top eight" or "top twelve" lists? Regardless... Yes magazine's "10 Things Science Says Will Make You Happy" seems eminently believable, by and large. I note there's no mention of God or religion. My favorite is numero uno: Savor Everyday Moments Pause now and then to smell a rose or watch children at play. Study participants who took time to “savor” ordinary events that they normally…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas

How I deprogrammed fundamentalism out of my brain

I got some great questions in an email today, boldfaced below. Brian, out of curiosity.... I was wondering after you left RS [Radha Soami Satsang Beas]... How did you deprogram all the fundamentalism out of your brain? The whole "The world is a bad place, don't get "involved" in worldly things....  and pursuing things in the world to find happiness is bad... How did you start to finally pursue your own happiness, without the fundamental programming snake coming in and poisoning your progress? I told the person who wrote me I'd reply via a blog post tonight, adding that I'd been planning to write…
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Posted inScience

Nibiru/Planet X won’t destroy Earth in 2012

Today I learned that I'm out of the loop of wacko conspiracy theories about the End of the World in 2012. I listened to a podcast featuring astrobiologist David Morrison, who answers questions submitted to NASA's "Ask an Astrobiologist." I'd heard about the supposed Mayan prediction that Earth ends this year (Morrison says that's news to the ancestors of ancient Mayans still living in Mexico), but didn't know that lots of people are freaked out about a large planetary object -- Nibiru/Planet X -- that they believe is on a collision course with Earth. Of course, that isn't true. Just…
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Posted inTaoism/Tai Chi Wu Project

Zhuangzi’s (Chuang Tzu’s) delicious weightlessness

I like the idea of floating free, weightless, able to move here, there, in any direction, with little or no effort, unbound. Even better... for this not to be an idea, but experience. Which helps explain, as I blogged about before, why Daoism/Taoism resonates with me. There's a freedom, a playfulness, a whatever in Daoist philosophy that mirrors the difference between relaxed Tai Chi and the hard-edged traditional Shotokan karate I spent nine years training in before I switched to what can be called Daoism-in-motion. Daoism is difficult to put a conceptual finger on. I've been reading and re-reading various…
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Posted inTaoism/Tai Chi

Taoism isn’t mystical. It is natural.

Life is a mystery. Such, for me, is a given. Don't try to argue me out of it. Hopeless task. For about forty years I believed this meant the cosmos must have mystical underpinnings, some transcendental Absoluteness which, though hidden from everyday experience, held clues -- if not the answer -- to what life, the cosmos, birth and death, heck, everything, was all about. Now, I'm not into that belief very much. In fact, very little. Mysticism has come to strike me as just another way of saying "life is a mystery."  Question is: can the mystery be unraveled, understood,…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

A fresh look at Seth Shiv Dayal Singh (Soami Ji)

Those who are interested in the history of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a contemporary Sant Mat movement headquartered in India, will want to read the following message I received from "SM Dass" (a pseudonym). Others won't understand much about what is being talked about, yet will be able to follow the gist of the arguments. Since I was a member of RSSB for over thirty years, I told SM Dass that his analysis was intriguing and I'd like to share it on my blog. I've added a few explanatory terms in [brackets], and some links. By "intriguing" I don't mean that…
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Posted inMorality Radha Soami Satsang Beas Religions

Religion is wrong, but it feels right to believers

So how is it that religious beliefs are almost certainly wrong, yet the vast majority of people in the world accept them? What makes religiosity so attractive?  A central theme of my previous post, New Scientist looks at the science of religion, is that belief in the supernatural comes naturally to humans. Early on in childhood development we understand that "agents" with desires, intentions, and a consciousness like our own exist even though we can't perceive these beings. It isn't much of a jump to divine unseen agents, gods and other entities. But after listening to a Point of Inquiry…
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Posted inReligions Science

New Scientist looks at the science of religion

Why do so many people believe in God or in other sorts of supernatural beings? Most religious folks would have no trouble answering that question. "Because God is real," they'd say.  Well, that's highly debatable. And I'm being generous to religion. That's ridiculous is closer to how I really feel. The most recent issue of New Scientist dives into these "Why believe?" waters. An editorial does a good job of summarizing core themes in the following articles. It ends with: Secularists would also do well to recognise the distinction between the "popular religion" that comes easily to people's minds and…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Nine essential qualities of mindfulness

Here's a good overview of what mindfulness is all about. Nine qualities are listed in the Psychology Today piece by psychologist Melanie Greenberg. Great advice for living. Read the whole article to feast on the full mindfulness meal. Focus on the Present Moment—When your thoughts get lost in thinking about the past or worrying about the future, you bring them back to what you are experiencing right now. Being Fully Present—You are spaciously aware of whatever you are experiencing in the present moment as you go through your daily life.  Openness to Experience—Rather than dreading and shutting out your own…
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Posted inBuddhism Mystics Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Mystical experiences. What’s the big deal with them?

Mystical experiences were on my mind today, after someone left a comment on a blog post inquiring about whether I'd gone inside while meditating or heard sacred sounds.   I replied. But then I thought, "What's the big deal with supposed mystical experiences?" Most religions, forms of spirituality, and philosophical systems don't pay much attention to them. Most Christians or Buddhists aren't out to see fantastical scenes of the astral plane, or bliss out on a supernatural light and sound show. Their goals are to become better people; to learn what reality is all about; to be of service to humanity;…
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Posted inReality Science

Einstein was right. Neutrinos don’t travel faster than light.

Love it. Another triumph of the scientific method. Which does so much better at revealing the secrets of reality than religions do. An experiment to repeat a test of the speed of subatomic particles known as neutrinos has found that they do not travel faster than light. Results announced in September suggested that neutrinos can exceed light speed, but were met with scepticism as that would upend Einstein's theory of relativity. A test run by a different group at the same laboratory has now clocked them travelling at precisely light speed. Now, this doesn't conclusively settle the question of whether…
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Posted inBuddhism

Update on my enlightenment (in brief: going great!)

About seven years ago I bloggishly announced, "My satori is near at hand." I seems time for an update on how my enlightenment is going, even though it should be obvious to anyone who regularly reads my Church of the Churchless musings. Great!  Thanks for reading. On to next subject... Ha-ha. Just kidding. Not about my enlightenment. About great! being all I have to say concerning it. What's the point of being enlightened if its kept secret? If I were a world-class pianist, would I be content with only playing by myself at home? In line with the Buddha's own…
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Posted inBuddhism

Being mindful of mindfulness: Zen crap, or enlightened wisdom?

Through the magic of my Twitter feed, where occasionally pearls can be found amidst the social media junk, I came across a "Thich Naht Hahn is wrong" post on Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen blog. I was attracted to the title because I've tried to read some of Hahn's writings, but they end up seeming too Buddhist'y preachy to my increasingly churchless mind. (Yeah, I'm becoming so turned off to religion, even godless Buddhism seems too doctrinaire to me.) At first, Warner's piece struck me as making some good points about mindfulness. Basically he doesn't agree with the notion that something…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Scientific news flash: People are different!

OK, this isn't a surprising discovery -- that "people differ so widely in their emotional responses to the ups and downs of life." So say psychologist Richard Davidson and science writer Sharon Begley in their recently published book, "The Emotional Life of Your Brain." But in the opening lines of their One Brain Does Not Fit All chapter, Davidson points out how there's a common assumption that people are predictable. If you believe most self-help books, pop-psychology articles, and television therapists, then you probably assume that how people respond to significant life events is pretty predictable.  Most of us, according…
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Posted inFree will Morality Science

Free will is a limiting, destructive belief

Free will. Who could be against this seemingly wonderful notion? The opposite idea seems to be a depressing downer: Unfree determinism.  After I'd read the first part of Sam Harris' new book, "Free Will," I shared my enthusiasm with my wife about giving up the belief that I can freely decide what I think, feel, or do. She wasn't nearly as enthused, perhaps because of her lengthy experience as a psychotherapist. "But wouldn't people then use I've got no free will as an excuse for doing whatever they want? And wouldn't this take away people's motivation to change, to improve…
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