Posted inScience

Believing comes first, reasons and evidence follow

Most of us like to believe that our beliefs are well-founded. It's the other guy who isn't looking at the evidence, is drawing false conclusions, has his or her head in the sand while we're staring straight at reality. Well, that's an unfounded belief. Each of us, everyone on Earth, is prone to making wrong conclusions. Michael Shermer explains why in his new book, "The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and God to Politics and Conspiracies -- How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths." The brain is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses the…
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Posted inScience Spiritual practice/meditation

How to be happy without a soul

I'm pretty much convinced that I don't have a soul. If it shows up one day like a lost puppy that managed to find its way home, I'll be pleasantly surprised. (At least, if it wags its tail and licks my face.) Quite a while ago I gave up the search for my self, impelled in part by a source of great spiritual wisdom, The Onion, which told the tale of another guy who did the same thing. As neuroscience learns more and more about how the brain functions, my decision appears increasingly wise to me. Of course, what else…
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Posted inHumor Spiritual practice/meditation

Roseanne Barr’s meditation approach sounds good to me

In a Newsweek story, "Roseanne Mouths Off (Again)," Roseanne Barr's rather untraditional Judaic approach to meditation is described. Barr’s hair has gone gray and she has feather hair extensions—she looks like a hippie (check), grandma (check), stoner (check: every Friday night for Shabbat from sundown until 2 a.m., she gets high, drinks red wine, and does a meditation Rav Berg taught her). Nice. My only question is what proportion of time each activity takes from sundown until 2 am. I could follow this form of Kabbalah if, say, sundown was at 8 pm and the pot-smoking/wine-drinking lasts until 1:40 am,…
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Posted inBuddhism Morality

Shun extremes. Usually. (Be moderate in shunning also.)

The past few days I've made my way through all of David Chapman's "Meaningness" online book, which I first blogged about here. Since I'm a habitual highlighter of print books, it's been an interesting change of pace to page through screen after screen on my laptop without making any important!, I like!, or hmmmmm... marks. All of the markings have been in my mind. So I'll consult my memory and share what has struck me the most about what Chapman says in his scientifically Buddhist'y fashion: Life is best lived between extremes. But let's not make that adage into something…
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Posted inBuddhism

David Chapman’s dizzying writings on Meaningness and Buddhism

I don't often use the word "dizzying." Especially in the title of a blog post. Here, I mean it as a compliment, in the sense of... giddy, bewildering. Those are good things when it comes to writings that attempt to get at What Life is All About. Because if we think we understand what life is all about, we don't. Today someone sent me an email. Wanted to make sure you've seen this one:http://meaningness.wordpress.comas he is a wonderful writer *and* touches on subjects that seem to be dear to your heart. Instead of reading a book during my pre-meditation time…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Blind faith takes many forms

Having started this churchless blog way back (in Internet time) in 2004, I've been able to follow a lot of interesting comment conversations about many subjects related to God, soul, spirit, consciousness, life after death, and such. Naturally I've also been able to follow the continuing progress of my own irreligious evolution. In both cases -- looking at how other people regard supernaturalism, and how I do -- I'm struck by how difficult it is for us humans to let go of blind faith. Religious true believers who come to embrace agnosticism or atheism find it fairly easy to discard…
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Posted inBooks Science

“The Ego Trick” — selves exist, but not as we believe

Who are we? Is there an essential "me"? Am I an unchanging self? I'm fascinated by these sorts of questions. Ever since I started practicing yoga and meditation more than forty years ago, I've been trying to understand who or what I am. For much of that time I believed in the adage, "self-realization before God-realization." Yet as I said in a blog post, Religions are wrong about self-realization: But the fact remains that whatever our "self" may be, it isn't something simple, obvious, supernatural, or transparently evident to awareness. So this makes traditional religious/spiritual notions of self-realization laughably out…
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Posted inReality Taoism/Tai Chi

Independence is impossible

So here we are in the United States, celebrating Independence Day this July 4, and my philosophical mind is thinking independence is impossible. And who would want it, anyway? But lest my fellow citizens accuse me of wishing that the colonies had never broken away from Britain (ugh! what a horrible idea; I'd have to watch boring soccer rather than exciting football), I'm talking about a much more cosmic level of reality than political. Religions are big on independence, though the concept almost always is expressed using different terms, such as salvation and liberation. Whether Eastern or Western, dualistic sorts…
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Posted inReligions Science

Religion, like fast food, makes you unnaturally large

Since I've given up religion, I've become a lot more content with my smallness. As noted before, I'm no longer obsessed with expanding my consciousness, enlarging my connection with God, or growing my spiritual understanding. Small things please me now much more than they did before. I guess you could say I've lost a lot of ego-weight after discarding a religious belief system that had grandiose goals and taught that human beings could attain perfection. This morning I forgot to put the canned dog food back in the refrigerator. There goes my claim to perfection. To which I say, good…
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Posted inReligions

My response to religion: “So what?”

The way I feel about religion now is similar to how I feel about my ex-wife. Not much. Meaning, most of the time I don't think about religion, or her. I've got some pleasant memories of each, along with some unpleasant memories. But neither occupies much space in my brain these days. This wasn't the case soon after my marital and spiritual divorces. Splitting up after a lengthy attachment, it takes some time to get the other party out of your mind. For twenty-one years I've been married to another woman. However, I've had no inclination to get married to…
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Posted inReligions Science

Religious believers are acting in accord with evolution

Having arrived at a churchless view of reality, I'm amused when true believers accuse me of taking the easy way out by being a skeptic about God and other things divine'ish. They see religious belief as a courageous stand against rampant secularism -- a bold independent search for ultimate reality that transcends materialistic boundaries. Actually, the truth is far different. Religious belief is the default human condition. What takes courage, effort, and determination is going against the religious current that sweeps the vast majority of people into a faith-based ocean. Interestingly, the evidence for this is scientific. Evolutionary psychology has…
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Posted inReality

Objective reality isn’t for us to unravel

I only want to devote a half hour or so to writing a blog post tonight, so I'll tackle a simple subject: what is reality? I'm not being facetious. It actually is easier to talk about the Big Questions of life rather than the small ones. I feel like I've got a pretty good understanding of the basic elements of reality. But how my computer's operating system works behind the scenes... that's a huge mystery to me. What are those elements? Subjectivity and objectivity. Meaning, basically: my subjective experience is mine alone. As is yours. As is our dog's. Nobody…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Entertaining email from an ex-satsangi

It's nice to inspect my email inbox when I get up in the morning and find a message like this one. Witty. Intelligent. Humorous. Why, this guy reminds me of me. For 17 years he followed the Radha Soami Satsang Beas party line until... he didn't. Brian,I am also an initiate of Charan Singh's (1975).   Since 1993, I am also no longer following the teachings.  I really enjoyed my time in India, my mostly western US Satsangi friends and I have great respect those who are seekers.An old former Kirpal Singh devotee friend recently teasingly emailed me about how RS…
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Posted inHumor

Obedient Wives Club makes me want to convert to Islam

It looks like I've been too harsh on Islam, because Indonesia's Obedient Wives Club has made me realize how this religion can come up with some really great ideas. A new club in Indonesia that encourages women to be totally obedient to their husbands and focus on keeping them sexually satisfied has generated an outcry from some activists. The Indonesian branch of the Obedient Wives Club, launched early this month in Malaysia, claims to have about 300 members in several cities. Group leader Gina Puspita said the club would offer its members a package of teachings including how to treat…
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Posted inScience

“I Am” movie: emotionally satisfying, scientifically annoying

Everything is interconnected. Modern society puts too much emphasis on money. Yogurt is conscious. Random number generators around the world respond to major events like 9/11. These are some of the things that the "I Am" movie taught me. (Click on that link to watch the trailer, which captures the essence of "I Am" nicely.) OK, I have no problem with the first two messages. Interconnectedness is indeed how reality operates. And film creator Tom Shadyac uses his own life experience to persuasively argue that buying lots of stuff doesn't buy meaning or satisfaction (Shadyac made Jim Carrey a star…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Meditating without any technique feels natural now

I've meditated for most of my life. I started when I was twenty, having gotten enthused about hatha/raja yoga my junior year in college. So for more than forty years I've been getting up in the morning and meditating in some fashion. "In some fashion" implies a technique. Indeed, such has been the case. In fact, until now I've never believed that meditation was possible without a technique. Mostly I've done some form of mantra meditation -- repeating a word, or words, to keep thoughts minimal and attention focused. I'm aware that there are many other forms of meditation. What…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Taoism/Tai Chi

I dreamed within a dream. Felt a lot like reality.

Usually I don't pay much attention to my dreams. They seem to be the brain's way of processing waking life events, albeit in a often disconnected and bizarre fashion. But last night I experienced a dream that was coherent enough to be philosophically quite interesting. I suspect some of the content had to do with my going through some old files yesterday, keeping some folders and discarding others. I also drove my Mini Cooper to town and back, taking turns on our rural road the way I usually do: vigorously. My dream started out with me driving on what seemed…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation Taoism/Tai Chi

Meditation should be pleasant, not a chore

This morning my pre-meditation reading was a chapter on Wu-Wei (non-action) in Alan Watt's "Tao: The Watercourse Way." The passage below reminded me of how different my meditation period is now that I've become churchless, unreligious, and dogma shunning. In a footnote to a preceding paragraph, Watts says that he is a "deplorable heretic" to those Zen practitioners who favor the "aching legs" brand of Buddhism, since to them long periods of meditation are considered to be key to enlightenment. On the other hand, those who understand the Tao delight, like cats, in just sitting and watching without any goal…
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Posted inReality Science

We are to the brain as the cosmos is to us

What's our biggest problem in life? Us. Ourselves. If there wasn't any me, I wouldn't be dissatisfied, unhappy, or feeling that a situation should be different from how it is. Of course, I also wouldn't exist. For most people, not being anything isn't an attractive solution to the irritating somethings that are part and parcel of our daily existence. But perhaps there is an in between, a middle ground which comfortably avoids the extremes of too little me (personal non-existence) and too much me (ego-encapsulated anxiety). This is the promise of many forms of spirituality, philosophy, psychotherapy, mysticism, meditation, religion,…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth

Why we can’t imagine the moment of our death

Thumbing through a recent issue of The New Yorker last night, I came across a thought-provoking paragraph about mortality in a personal history piece, "The Aquarium," by Aleksandar Hemon. There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment…
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