Posted inPersonal/Stories Science

Simple truth: our brains are us

Last night I had an all-too-familiar experience: Sitting back and listening to a discussion, pondering the deeper meaning of what was being said, jumping in with some comments that were So Absolutely Correct they deserve to be capitalized -- and then seeing looks of what the #$%! is Brian talking about?, after which the conversation went on its merry way, barely missing a step notwithstanding that my brilliant remarks should have made people pause to digest their awesomeness. Oh, well, often a prophet is recognized only inside his own head. But if he has a blog, this allows him to…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

My further descent (or ascent) into strangeness

My newest passion -- to Strange Up Salem (Oregon) -- nicely harmonizes with this here blog's churchless theme of spiritual independence. So you're invited to peruse the Strange Up blog post I wrote today. At the risk of sounding like a phone sex line... I know what you want. You’re hungry for it. You’re hot for it. You’ve gotten tantalizing glimpses of what you lust for, but it’s been frustratingly out of reach. Not God. Not religion. Not enlightenment. Strangeness. Along that line, during the past few days I've been amazed to see myself turning from Facebook-apathetic to a Facebook…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

What does “going inside” in meditation really mean?

I'm a long-time daily meditator. I did the closed-eyes introspecting thing almost every morning for over forty years. During that time my practice was focused on "going inside." Inside what? Good question, one which I never gave much thought to during my true-believing spiritual phase. The guru I followed used those words going inside a lot, so I assumed they meant something. Now it seems to me that reality doesn't have an inside and an outside. I've given up the goal of concentrating on the interior of my cranium, which many meditators believe leads to an experience of wholly other-worldly…
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Posted inFree will Science

Free will may be an illusion, but it feels real

Over the years, and decades, I've had lots of intense discussions with other people about free will. Partly this is because my first book about physics and mysticism had a chapter called "Laws of cause and effect govern lower levels of creation." Then my second book, "Life is Fair," argued in a different fashion that karma rules the universe, and karma is basically a spiritualized form of cause and effect. My view of reality is much different now. I don't agree with myself about a lot of stuff that used to make sense to me, but doesn't from my current…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus Death/Rebirth

Yes, certainly hell is dead. Along with heaven.

When the new issue of TIME magazine arrived a few days ago, my wife noted the cover story blurb -- "What if there's no Hell?" -- and said, I can't understand how anybody can believe in hell. My reply to her: I can't understand how anybody can believe in Christianity, yet lots of people do. Well, actually I do understand, because I've also believed weird spiritual stuff that now seems untrue to me. So I was speaking from my current churchless perspective. For many years I entertained a belief that the only way back to God was to become a…
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Posted inReality Science

If we’re an alien computer simulation, could we ever know this?

Religions turn me off. Science turns me on. And in the science books I read, the notion that we could be living as artificial intelligences within a computer simulation keeps popping up. I'm fascinated by this possibility (see previous blog posts here and here). I've finished physicist Brian Greene's new book, "The Hidden Reality." He talks about simulated universes in a Universes, Computers, and Mathematical Reality chapter. My interest here is in those who would be drawn by the purity of electrical impulses to program simulated environments populated by simulated beings that would exist within a computer's hardware; instead of…
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Posted inHumor Religions

Religion is a joke which some take seriously

If you've followed my musings on this blog since I started it in November 2004 -- and shame on you, you churchless sinner, if you haven't! -- I can see why you might think that I've mellowed out, anti-religion wise. Indeed, it's true that my most rabid rants against religiosity were written in the early Church of the Churchless years. Now I'm more inclined to ignore dogmas than to foam at the mouth about how ridiculous they are. In short, I don't take religions as seriously as I used to. What irritates me the most are the effects of fundamentalism…
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Posted inScience

Life lessons from a neuroscience discussion

As noted in my previous post about two of my favorite books on neuroscience, a few nights ago my wife and I had four other people over for an interesting discussion about what modern brain research has to say about the human condition. Each of us took a turn summarizing what we'd read (book or article) about a neuroscientific topic. Then questions were asked and topics debated. Here's some recollections and impressions from the evening. The brain is a bunch of meat. That's obvious, but we humans often fail to grasp that our feelings, perceptions, memories, thoughts, dreams, intuitions, and…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism Science

What we are: a strange loop in an ego tunnel

If there's one thing I know after 62 years of living, it's I don't know who or what I am. (Of course, I could be wrong about that also -- but I'd still be right about not knowing whether I was or wasn't.) Now, this isn't so different from what I used to believe in my religious days. When I embraced a mystical meditation system known as Sant Mat, I assumed that some sort of maya/illusion stood between me and reality. So I couldn't know myself or the cosmos as it really is until the veils were removed. However, the…
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Posted inUncategorized

This is the truth about life: it will end

It will end. That's the truest thing I can say about life. It will end. Everybody has a unique perspective. Each person finds a special meaning. This is mine. I feel it deeply in my gut, in my mind, in every cell of my body, in each neuron of my brain. Sometimes -- like now, I guess -- I want to scream out this truth that seems so freaking obvious, yet is ignored by most of us who aren't on death's doorstep. Whether or not we're religious, we have a sense of personal immortality. Life seems like it will go…
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Posted inBooks Taoism/Tai Chi

Wisdom from Alan Watts’ “Nature, Man and Woman”

I love Alan Watts. Browsing through the Taoism section of my book collection this morning, I noticed an early edition of his "Nature, Man, and Woman" that I got way back in my college days but hadn't looked at for a long time. During today's pre-meditation reading I made it through the Introduction. Just reading this one chapter reminded me what a creative, insightful writer and thinker Watts was. I don't agree with everything he says, but Watts has a knack for taking familiar subjects and looking at them in a fresh fashion. Here's some quotations that I resonated with:…
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Posted inGod Religions

Koran burners and murdering Muslim protesters: two of a kind

It's tough for me to decide which brand of fundamentalist religious craziness is most appalling: (1) Christian pastor Terry Jones holding a mock trial of the Koran, then burning it, or (2) Islamic Afghan protesters of the Koran incineration who have killed 24 people in the past few days. What I do know is that believing in some unseen supernatural being who supposedly commands devotees to fight affronts to its honor is just about the stupidest thing humans do. Scarily, billions of people subscribe to Christianity, Islam, and Judaism -- the main monotheistic religions. Each religion considers that God/Allah/Jehovah is…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

What, I’m not the center of the universe??!!

Copernicus may have demoted us humans from an objectively real position at the center of the cosmos, but most people continue to believe that everything revolves around them. Why else would we get so upset when life doesn't give us what we feel we deserve, even though much of the time what doesn't come to me benefits someone else? (Like the guy who darts ahead of my car and takes a choice parking space that I'd been lusting after.) The crazy thing is, being the center of the universe really isn't much fun. It's exhausting trying to keep reality revolving…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation Taoism/Tai Chi

Letting go — the essence of Zen

Ah, I love the title of this blog post. It sounds so assured, so confident, so Zen-master'ish. Yet I'm not sure if what I wrote is accurate. No big deal. Because if Zen actually isn't about letting go, we can let go of that notion. And if it is about letting go, then I've hit the Zen nail on the head. As should be obvious, I'm a big admirer of Zen who doesn't want to put in any serious work toward satori, enlightenment, or whatever it is Zen students aspire to. This makes me a Zen dilettante -- proudly so,…
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Posted inReality Science

Know when reality should look fuzzy or sharp

People are strange, and I certainly include moi in this overarching statement. Here's one of the weird things that we do: Trying our best to make inherently fuzzy aspects of reality all crisp, clear, and coherent, while blurring up inherently sharp facts about the way things are. Now, I realize that what I've just said is open to challenge. And I'll agree that "What's up with this inherently business?" is an entirely appropriate question. Am I justified in viewing reality in such a black and white (or rather, fuzzy and sharp) manner? Sure, I answer. It seems obvious that we…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

If everything is perfect as it is, so is feeling it isn’t

I learned about Vincent Horn, "Buddhist Geek," via one of those marvelous Twitter tweets from someone you follow for a reason long forgotten. Yet you're happy you do, because now and then they share a link that clues you in to a interesting perspective. Such as Horn's "The Place of Practice: Integrating Perspectives and Clinging to Nothing." He addresses a question that has often come to my mind as I've pondered non-dual philosophies which claim that everything is absolutely as it should be, just as it is. (Obviously there's a lot more to nondualism. But if things aren't two --…
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Posted inBuddhism Death/Rebirth

Overcoming the fear of non-existence

So far I've written 1,228 posts for this blog. Like a proud parent, I'm tempted to say that I don't have a favorite, that I love all of my writings equally. But that wouldn't be true. Some posts resonate with me more than others, because they spring from a deeper meaning-place. Notably, "Death and the primal fear of non-existence." The day I wrote it, back in 2006, I didn't have much time for blogging. For me, that post was unusually short and to the point. Which was how it had to be. There isn't anything complex or subtle about the…
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Posted inGod Religions

Leonard Pitts is wrong about atheism being “fundamentalist”

Glancing at the title of a Leonard Pitts column in our local newspaper yesterday, I had a feeling that my emotional blood pressure soon would be surging. My premonition was correct. Parts of "Belief in what cannot be proved requires humility" (originally called "Atheists, I believe in God because I do") irritated me mightily -- because Pitts failed to grasp some basic facts about religious belief and atheism that get harped on regularly here at the Church of the Churchless. Fact one: Not believing in God isn't a fundamentalist belief system, just as not believing in Santa Claus isn't. Atheism…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Thinking and meditation go hand in hand

For a long time I thought that I shouldn't think during my meditation time. I'd been taught to either (1) repeat a mantra, thereby keeping thoughts away, or (2) rest in a thoughtless state where the meditator gazes into inner darkness and listens to inner silence, waiting for divine light/sound to appear. Now, though, I've expanded my meditative horizons, questioning assumptions that I used to accept, well, unquestioningly. Such as, whether it's really desirable to stop thinking while meditating. Here's my pithy current answer: no. But it's up to the meditator. That's my answer, nobody else's. I think (there I…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth

Last thought before death — what it says about us

A few nights ago, as I was going to sleep, an idea popped into my mind: "There'll be a moment when I have my last thought before I die. What would I want it to be?" Intuitively, this struck me as an important question. That last thought would be infinitely precious, in a way. It'd reflect what I considered to be most important to focus on an instant before earthly existence and I parted company. (Note: I don't believe in an unearthly existence. And I realize that probably I won't know when my last thought is happening. But there's a…
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