Posted inBuddhism

“Dot, an ordinary life” shows limits of Zen — and meditation

Yesterday my wife and I watched "Dot" at the Salem Film Festival. It's a documentary about an extraordinary 82 year old woman from Ashland, Oregon who believably claims that her life is ordinary. From the film's web site: Dot Fisher-Smith is a mystical masterful artist, a war resister, an environmental activist, a community presence, a jailbird. As a great-grandmother, she chained her neck to a log truck to protest salvage logging of old-growth forest. Yet she calls herself a mistaken Buddha and her own life ordinary. This moving documentary is an intimate portrait of life and death through the eyes of 82-year-old…
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Posted inScience Spiritual practice/meditation

My meditation: learning how unfree I am

Even though I no longer follow an organized system of meditation (for over thirty years I was a member of an India-based group, Radha Soami Satsang Beas), I still enjoy meditating every day. Sometimes I follow my breath. Sometimes I repeat a simple mantra of one or two syllables. Since I practice Tai Chi and resonate with Taoism, the words "wu chi" appeal to me. It's the readiness posture in Tai Chi, an embrace of empty fullness. And it's the core of the Wu Project that I've been blogging about. I also like to listen to a mantra in my…
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Posted inReligions

God is too good to believe in Him/Her/It

One big reason I don't believe in God is that descriptions of the Supreme Being almost always are unbelievably perfect.  Show me a flawed, clueless, unknowing, emotionally infantile God and I'd be a lot more inclined to sign up as a true believer. But then I'd wonder "What's the point in being devoted to a supposedly divine being who actually is no better than us humans are?" It's deeply suspicious that virtually every religion posits a super-good God. Sure, the Old Testament God and similar gods exhibit some nasty character flaws -- jealousy, cruelty, egotism, to name a few --…
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Posted inReligions Science

Mlodinow beat Chopra in “War of the Worldviews”

I've only read four of the nineteen debates between New Age "guru" Deepak Chopra and top-notch physicist Leonard Mlodinow in their fascinating book, War of the Worldviews: Science vs. Spirituality.  But I'm ready to declare a clear winner: Mlodinow. Highlighter in hand, I'm filling the pages Chopra authored with marginal question marks. By contrast, so far I haven't found anything obviously questionable in what Mlodinow wrote. That's because science sticks with facts, by and large, while spirituality is prone to fluttering all over the place with ethereal unproven pronouncements. You should make up your own mind, though. That's the best thing…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Steve Jobs warns against dogma

Early in the 1980's I got my first Apple computer, a II Plus. I remember taking it into work (Oregon's state health planning agency) and wowing my fellow employees with how VisiCalc could automate a spreadsheet, showing results on a small green screen. Since, I've owned and enjoyed many other Apple products. So I felt sad, along with countless other people, when I heard that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had died. Watching tributes to him on TV, I was exposed to Jobs' philosophy of life. Until now I hadn't realized how appealing his outlook on life and death was. I…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Embrace the ordinary (because it’s special)

This morning I found myself wondering what the day would bring as I walked up our long driveway to get the newspapers. I had a feeling, hopefully there will be more... What came after the ellipsis was left unsaid in my mind. I wasn't sure what more I wanted, just that whatever it was, it should be more than what I was doing at the moment: walking up our long driveway to get the newspapers. I've been doing this sort of thing for most of my sixty-two years. Looking for something extra, the frosting on life's bare cake, the final…
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Posted inReality Science

Physicists may have discovered extra dimensions

Note the word "may" in this blog post title. That's the most important thought in the potentially super-exciting story of how CERN researchers may have discovered that neutrinos travel slightly faster than the speed of light. If this is true, the implications would be astronomical. Literally. Because a leading explanation for the Einstein-defying neutrinos (his theory of relativity makes the speed of light an absolute speed limit) is that the nearly massless particles are taking a short cut through extra dimensions of reality on their way from CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, to a particle detector near L'Aquila, Italy. An article…
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Posted inBuddhism Science

Unmediated experience doesn’t exist

A comment conversation between me and "cc" on a recent blog post got me to thinking about whether any human experience can be unmediated. Meaning: not communicated or transformed by an intervening agency In a comment I said: But sometimes people do need to be talked out of an erroneous belief system. That was the job of my wife, when she worked at a state mental hospital, and then also (to a different degree) as a private psychotherapist. Just because someone feels like they are one with the cosmos doesn't mean this feeling has any basis in reality. People also…
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Posted inReligions

Oregon jury finds faith-healers guilty of manslaughter

Justice was served. It was good to read today that some fundamentalist Christians got what they deserved from an Oregon jury: a second degree manslaughter conviction for letting their newborn son die without seeking medical attention because they believed in faith-healing. Previously I wrote about how the church midwife in attendance at the birth considered that the baby's death was "God's will." Today's newspaper story told more about the parents' theological belief system. The church witnesses exhibited "a fatalistic attitude all the way," Fleming said. Prosecutors said David Hickman's fate was sealed when he took his first breath. The boy…
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Posted inReligions Spiritual practice/meditation

If spirituality is a science, “saints” are irrelevant

Most people take it for granted that religious, mystical, or spiritual discussions usually center around Who Said What. For example... What did Jesus mean in such-and-such Bible passage?When Ramana talks about "I-I," how is this to be interpreted?Can we trust Deepak Chopra's view of the cosmos? This emphasis on personal sources of wisdom is more than a little strange, when you think about it. After all, what difference does it make if Joe rather than Jane claims that something is true? If it's true, it's true. If it isn't, it isn't. Spirituality often is considered to be a science of…
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Posted inTaoism/Tai Chi

Taoism wisdom: life is change, so flow with it

Today my Tai Chi instructor talked about change. That's what life -- and Tai Chi -- is all about. When we stop changing, that's called death. The yin/yang symbol beautifully embodies this truth. White (yang) flows into black (yin). There's yang in yin, and yin in yang. To exist, lightness and darkness need each other. Where one ends, the other begins. Taoist philosophy finds a concrete expression in the physical movements of Tai Chi. My instructor likes to emphasize how transitions are central in Tai Chi, as in life. How you move between movements is as important as the movements…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus Religions

Church midwife in Oregon believes in letting babies die

I'm glad I don't have high blood pressure, because some days reading the newspaper makes me feel like my head (or my heart?) is going to explode. Today's outrage is nicely encapsulated by the Portland Oregonian headline that caught my eye at the top of the Metro section: "Midwife calls death God's will." The death was that of David Hickman, who was born two months early and lived a unduly short life of nine hours because his parents were wacko Oregon City Christians who believe in faith healing. (I've written about previous child sacrifice deaths committed by Followers of Christ…
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Posted inPolitics

Religion makes Arab-Israeli conflict much tougher to solve

Tonight, during a wine tasting event, I chatted with a guy about the dismal state of national and international politics. Opposing positions have gotten absurdly extreme. Republicans have almost nothing in common with Democrats. Israelis have almost nothing in common with Palestinians. With such little common ground, there's no room for two parties at odds with each other to negotiate a mutually acceptable deal. We talked about how both Jewish Israelis and Muslim Palestinians have an absurd belief that the territory Israel occupied in the 1967 war is "holy" or a "promised land." Absurd, because these religious claims are based…
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Posted inReality Science

A mind-blowing fact about infinity

What can you say about infinity? Well, the word has a pretty lengthy Wikipedia page, so clearly the answer is "a lot." Which makes sense, since if there's one thing we know about infinity, it's this: infinity is freaking big. Or at least, limitless. I suppose something could be infinitely small -- getting smaller and smaller without limit. But this would mean that it's a freaking big bit of small. God supposedly is infinite. Infinitely loving, infinitely knowing, infinitely powerful. Heck, God probably has an infinite number of positive qualities, being so infinite. This is assuming that God exists. We…
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Posted inBuddhism Mystics Spiritual practice/meditation

Mystical experiences prove nothing

Whatever I say in this post -- and as a blogger I never know what that is until I say it -- it won't be anywhere near as good as what David Chapman has said in his "Are Mystical Experiences Metaphysical Evidence?" So the best thing you could do is stop reading what I've written, and read Chapman now. The second best thing would be to click on the links I've given after you peruse this post. But if you've ever believed that a mystical experience means something beyond the obvious, that someone has had some sort of experience, I…
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Posted inReligions

Atheism challenges personal spiritual experiences

Here's some good news about the newest form of the "new atheism." It isn't just content to challenge theological propositions and supernatural world views, but also says prove it when religious believers cite personal experience as their reason for having faith in whatever they believe. At least, this is one of the conclusions I got from an interesting New York Times essay by Gary Gutting, "Beyond 'New Atheism.'" For atheists like Dawkins, belief in God is an intellectual mistake, and honest thinkers need simply to recognize this and move on from the silliness and abuses associated with religion. Most believers,…
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Posted inReality Religions

Conspiracy theories — another form of blind faith

One person believes that Jesus was resurrected after dying on the cross. Another person believes that the Bush administration was behind the 9/11 attacks. Each belief lacks a foundation of demonstrable evidence. Each belief almost certainly is untrue. Each belief has many adherents who vehemently hold to it, despite how bizarre their blind faith is. I'm a religious skeptic. I'm also a conspiracy theory skeptic. What seems strange to me is how people who decry fundamentalist religion often cling to fundamentalist conspiracy theories. But after reading Michael Shermer's new book, "The Believing Brain," I'm better able to see the connections…
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Posted inMystics Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Mysticism is as real as fundamentalist religion

Yesterday David Lane left this comment on a recent blog post: Yes, good point you make here about the epistemology of "knowing" in fundamentalist religion versus mysticism. Here is a link to something I wrote that dovetails with your point: https://sites.google.com/site/msacmagazinesparttwo/home/POLITICSOFMYSTICISM.pdf?attredirects=0&d=1 Because I always enjoy what David has to say, I clicked away and found an interesting six page PDF-file essay, "The Politics of Mysticism." Download Politics of Mysticism Here's some excerpts -- the formatting is a bit screwed up, since I copied text from the PDF file. No big deal, since you really should read the whole thing. Perhaps…
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Posted inMystics Science

“The Beginning of Infinity” — inspiring science

I don't know whether physicist David Deutsch's optimism expressed in his new book, "The 'Beginning of Infinity," is justified. I'm only about a quarter of the way through it, so maybe his later chapters imply more of a downer that what I've read so far. His basic thesis, though, is both inspiring and believable. There are no limits to knowledge. Human life -- individual or collective -- is a never-ending journey on the path to more. Whenever there has been progress, there have been influential thinkers who denied that it was genuine, that it was desirable, or even that the…
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Posted inMorality

Without God, there’s no morality (and that’s good)

Religious fundamentalists often say, "If you don't believe in God, you have no basis for morality." This irritates non-believers like me. Hey! I'm moral! I know the difference between right and wrong. My morality just isn't based on supernatural dogmas. But what if those fundamentalists are correct? What if there's no such thing as atheist morality? And -- most importantly -- what if this is no big deal, because morality is as unnecessary to live a good life as believing in God is? Such is the basic thesis of Joel Marks' "Confessions of an Ex-Moralist." Marks is a philosophy professor,…
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