Posted inUncategorized

Insecurity: the only safe place

I'll admit it: sometimes I start to lose faith in my faithlessness. I get this craving to believe. I'm not fully cured of my thirty-year addiction to dogma. I sniff some 80 proof belief and have a little fantasy about bellying up to the church bar again. Then the saner side of me whispers, Stay strong, Brian. WWWD? Ah, yes. WWWD. Others, of course, find inspiration in WWJD – but these are folks looking for security, and I've come to realize that this is the root of religious addiction. So a few days ago I renewed my commitment to sobriety…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Jesus is alive and well in India

Most Christians would be surprised to learn that right now, in 2008, millions of people believe that a man in India not only teaches the same spirituality as Jesus, but is the same godly being. Yes, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a branch of Sant Mat, holds that the path of the saints (a translation of "Sant Mat") is identical with the teachings of Jesus. One of the RSSB books, "Light on Saint John," says: Since most of you have a Christian background, I shall try to explain the teachings of all the Saints in the light of the Bible,…
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Posted inGod

Skepticism is genuine faith

Fairly frequently people question, Why this Church of the Churchless blog? I've got an email in my "to reply" file that asks just this. Why be critical of religion? Why discuss the believability of theological tenets, including those of the group to which I belonged for thirty years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas? Why place articles of faith under the looking glass of reality? Because truth is worthy of veneration. Now, some people consider that there is no such thing as objective truth, that reality is whatever we consider it to be. There's, well, some truth to this. But you see…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Playing fair with words

Yesterday I got some advice from a commenter on a post to "be silent." I responded right away, because this is one of my favorite subjects – playing fair with words. Zion, I always find it interesting when someone, like you, advises that silence is the best policy -- and posts a public comment using many words. If I should be silent, shouldn't you? Or do you know me better than I know myself? And does your advice only apply to me, or also to yourself? …I'm curious about this: how do you know that "those who know always keep…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

I’m an ignorant fool (happily)

For most of my life I'd get pissed off if someone told me, You're an ignorant fool! But now I've begun to say that to myself. And it makes me feel good. Today the words came to me before I began my habitual morning meditation. I'd drunk my strong cup of coffee. I'd read from my eclectic mix of books, a bit of science, a bit of philosophy. I'd settled onto my cushion, preparing to open myself to insights into the Meaning of It All. And the voice that speaks inside my head blurted out, You're an ignorant fool! My…
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Posted inPolitics

Irreligious questions for the presidential candidates

Oh, if only the press would have the balls to ask the twelve questions John Allen Paulos wants posed to our presidential candidates. A sampling: For Huckabee: Do you really believe, Mr. Huckabee, that the Earth is only a few thousand years old and that humans and dinosaurs cavorted together? For Romney: Do you not see an implicit religious test in your statement that "Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom"? Furthermore, are not, respectively, most of Europe and some Islamic countries obvious counterexamples to your statements? For others: Do any of you think God speaks to you, only…
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Posted inPlotinus Radha Soami Satsang Beas

My inside look at RSSB books

It's interesting that currently churchless me once was so involved in writing books for a decidedly churchy organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB). A couple of years ago I blogged about "How writing a book rewrote me." This was the third, and last, major RSSB book project that I was involved with. The end result was "Return to the One: Plotinus' Guide to God-Realization." But it wasn't published by RSSB, even though the plan all along was that this would be the first in a Mystics of the West series. I have to give credit to Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the…
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Posted inTaoism/Tai Chi

A wee bit of guidance on the Way

Over on my other blog, HinesSight, Joshua left a Taoism related comment on a DSL-themed post. Go figure, especially since some of the sentiments I expressed in the post were just a tad on the egocentric side. Many of my neighbors are deeply grateful that I've brought the potential of DSL to some 240 homes in our area. Quite a few are trying to run businesses out of their homes. That's tough to do with a dial-up connection, and satellite is expensive. I've been thinking that a bronze statue of me, commemorating my DSL triumph, would be a nice addition…
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Posted inMorality

“I’m right” vs. “I like” morality

It feels so good to be right. Or rather, to believe that we're right – which means that other people must be wrong. This is a big reason religion is so popular. It offers a pleasant sensation of self-righteousness. There's also a simpler way of feeling good. To just feel good. Janis Joplin sang it. You know feeling good was good enough for meGood enough for me and my Bobby McGee. We can just say "I like," rather than justifying our preference with an "I'm right." What a difference it would make if Christians said, "I like feeling that Jesus…
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Posted inPlotinus

Marcus Aurelius’ meditations move me

In my previous post about death and Stoicism, I didn't give my main Stoic man, Marcus Aurelius, the blog time that he deserves. So yesterday I found my well-thumbed copy of his Meditations, a hard to find 1964 translation by Maxwell Staniforth, and re-read some of Marcus' marvelous observations on living a good life. And dying a good death. I'm putting this post in my "Plotinus" category because both of these philosophers, one of whom I've written my own book about, shared a fundamental Stoic philosophy. Which moves me. Now, that's sort of a contradiction, because Stoicism holds (along with…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth

Embracing a Stoic view of death

Like I said at the end of my previous post about dealing with death, there isn't much to add to the philosophic options given to us by the ancient Greeks and Romans. After all, there are only so many different ways of looking at reality. The ancients ran though them all. Metaphysical. Natural. Atomistic. Holistic. Rational. Mystical. So when I found myself leaning toward a "nature knows what it's doing" attitude toward death, it didn't take me long to realize that I was walking on well-trod Stoic ground. I love Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. Aurelius was a Roman emperor who penned…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth

Death shines under a full moon

Walking the dog last night, I turned around when we got to the path that leads to Spring Lake. A full, or almost full, moon had risen above the tree tops. Clear and cold. No sounds. Moonshine on the fir trees. Beautiful. I spoke to whoever the heck it is I talk to on such occasions. "Thank you. For letting me be alive. To be aware of this moment, right here, right now." But my gratitude had a flip side. And it made an appearance almost immediately. Because I couldn't help going on to envision my death. No more dog…
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Posted inBuddhism

Meditation is useless

I like it when a practitioner says, "There's no point to what I'm doing." Especially when he's talking about a supposedly spiritual practice. For me, this is the dividing line between fake religiosity and genuine whatever. (I tried to think of a better word than whatever, but couldn't). You just do it to do it. Meditation. Prayer. Worship. Study. Whatever. Zen and Taoism appeal to me because they extol uselessness. In "The Tao of Paris Hilton" I said: And let us also learn to appreciate Paris more by studying this passage from "The Book of Chuang Tzu," where a long-lived,…
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Posted inBuddhism

From Sant Mat to Buddhism

I'm not a Buddhist. I don't know what I am, belief-wise. So I suppose that could make me a Buddhist. Buddhism isn't big on beliefs. Hakuin, an 18th century Zen master, extolled doubting in a fashion that is worlds apart from faith-based religions like Christianity. If you keep on doubting continuously, with a bold spirit and a feeling of shame urging you on, your effort will naturally become unified and solid, turning into a single mass of doubt throughout heaven and earth. The spirit will feel suffocated, the mind distressed, like a bird in a cage, like a rat that…
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Posted inBooks

There’s nothing wrong with me (or you)

Last Sunday a friend loaned me a copy of "There Is Nothing Wrong With You" by Cheri Huber. The title appealed to me instantly, since it's so obviously right. I mean, most of the time it's crystal clear to me that I'm absolutely fine. It's other people who are all screwed up, the way they don't behave like I want them to. Problem is, they feel the same. So the conventional wisdom is that the world is made up of six billion humans chanting a mantra of "I'm right and you're wrong." This certainly seems to be the foundation of…
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Posted inPolitics

Huckabee wants Constitution to be “God’s standards”

Only in America. And Iran. Few countries in the world would entertain the idea of founding their constitution on a religious standard. Sadly, I live in one. It's astounding. A leading contender for the presidency of the United States, Mike Huckabee, says: I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that's what we need to do -- to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to…
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Posted inScience

Skepticism isn’t “blind faith”

Religious believers like to say that agnosticism or atheism also is founded on faith – faith that there's no evidence for God. So skeptics are as filled with faith as the faithful. That's ridiculous. It's the sort of word play that led Donald Rumsfeld, the incompetent Secretary of Defense, to say "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence" in reference to Iraq's unfound weapons of mass destruction. Well, I see no evidence of a unicorn in our living room right now. There's just my wife and our dog, neither of whom looks like a horse with a horn coming out…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Let it go. So simple.

Most people think that being spiritual or religious means holding on to something or someone. That's what they think faith means: clinging to unproven beliefs or an unsubstantiated savior. "Jesus died for our sins." "Guru is God." "There is no God but Allah." There's no end to religious dogma. An amazing variety of thoughts and world-views are contained in the minds of true believers. If you can conceive of it, likely someone has faith in it at this moment. So how is it possible to choose which of these countless belief systems is worthy of acceptance, given that they contradict…
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Posted inMorality

Morality doesn’t need a middleman

Doing good. We all want to do it, aside from a small number of people with a highly me-centered worldview. For I see the essence of morality as act toward others as you'd want them to act toward you. When there's no sense of mutuality, of relationship, of reciprocal give and take, morality (such as it is) is reduced to act toward others however you want. It's all about me, me, me. So goodness, like Tango, takes two. Otherwise, it's selfishness. However, most religious believers want to complicate morality by adding in a middleman. God. Or a stand-in for God,…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

More evidence Sant Mat is a religion

Yesterday Jay Lou left a comment on one of my posts that started off, "I don't want to be rude to you. But if you can't say anything good about something then don't say it at all." I was surprised by that sentiment. I seem to recall an elementary school teacher saying something similar back in first or second grade, but adults rarely, if ever, speak that way. It struck me as remarkably unscientific. Yet it was pretty obvious that the commenter was a devotee of Sant Mat (likely the Radha Soami Satsang Beas branch), a spiritual path that I…
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