Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation Taoism/Tai Chi

The journey between two steps

My Tai Chi class is a wonderful mix of Taoist movement and philosophy. I loved this phrase as soon as it left a fellow student’s lips: “the journey between two steps.” Thank you, Josette. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around what it means, but intuitively it strikes me as being the key to almost everything. We’re always on the way to somewhere, taking the next step on our life’s path. Even before we’ve fully settled into the place we’ve just reached, our intention is making plans for moving to another location—whether it be physical, mental, or spiritual. Goals,…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Meditation strengthens the brain

Here’s some good news for meditators from Massachusetts General Hospital researchers: meditation seems to thicken the brain and might slow down age-related atrophy. I’ve done a lot of meditation over the past thirty-six years. I can’t point to any conclusive evidence that all those hours spent trying to concentrate have brought me spiritual benefit, but it’s encouraging to learn that I might well be doing positive things to my physical brain. The subjects in the Mass General study were practitioners of Buddhist insight meditation. Their focus was “mindfulness,” following the breath, sensations, and mental states in a non-judgmental manner. I’ve…
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Posted inUniversism

Universism makes front page of LA Times

The faithless are rising! At least, they’ve risen to the front page of the Los Angeles Times, where “Doubt is Their Co-Pilot” raised the national profile of Universism, a national movement that I’m proud to be a part of. The founder of Universism (Ford Vox) told me that he’d given my phone number to the LA Times reporter but she never called. Sigh… However, the article does mention Salem, Ore as one of just a handful of Universist discussion groups in the United States, so I sort of made the front page of the Times. You just have to read…
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Posted inPlotinus

The Neoplatonic Church

A few days ago I heard from Eric Grainger about a recently formed Neoplatonic Church. It’s a great idea. The world needs more Neoplatonism and less fundamentalism, that’s for sure. Eric wanted to post my “Become One to know the One” essay about Plotinus’s spiritual teachings on the Church’s web site. I told him, sure. It’s now on the Meditation and Contemplation page. Plotinus’s Neoplatonism is a marvelously appealing blend of rationality and mysticism. Some philosophies and religions are highly rational; others are highly mystical. But if someone wants a spirituality that embraces both reason and mystery, nothing can beat…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Mantra meditation: it’s all about melting

All these words in my head forming such marvelous conceptual structures, thought turrets soaring into an abstract sky. How wonderful to feel them melting down, icy stuck ideas turning into smooth flowing mystery. For me, that’s what mantra meditation is all about: dissolving the mental temple where we worship our notions about God, not the real deal itself. I believe in being churchless. But it doesn’t do any good to stay away from physical religious institutions if we’ve got rigid beliefs firmly instituted in our own minds. As I’ve been writing about recently in my (now) three-part post series on…
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Posted inGod Spiritual practice/meditation

God, go to hell

Cursing God is my response to Pat Robertson’s warning to Pennsylvania voters of divine wrath after they ejected a school board that ordered creationism lessons. Being scientifically minded, I feel that an experiment is in order: if there’s a God who gets ticked off just by creationism/intelligent design supporters being voted out of office, then he, she, or it should really become peeved at my telling him, her, or it to go to hell. So either me or whoever will inherit this Church of the Churchless blog (should I fail to survive this test) will let you know if anything…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Mantra meditation: what’s in a word?

If I had a penny for every time I’ve repeated a mantra during the thirty-six years I’ve been meditating, I’d have something to show for all the words I’ve spoken in my head. But I don’t. So, what’s in a word? What’s the point of saying a mantra over and over, whether it be during a designated meditation period or at other times during the day? Christians use mantras. “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me” was endlessly repeated by the Russian whose tale is told in “The Way of a Pilgrim.” Buddhists use mantras. “Namu amida butsu” (I take…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Mantra meditation: does God make it better?

“Love, love, love.” “ God is love, God is love, God is love.” “I am love, I am love, I am love.” Three mantras that could be repeated in meditation. Which is better? This question was addressed in research reported in the September 3, 2005 issue of NewScientist. The conclusion was that “If meditation is good, God makes it better.” After randomly assigning students to three groups, researchers found that the spiritual meditation group (which concentrated on a phrase such as “God is love” or “God is peace”) showed greater reductions in anxiety and a higher pain tolerance than a…
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Posted inReligions Science

The Vatican gets it right (for once)

My thanks to Steve, a Church of the Churchless reader, for letting me know that the Vatican says the faithful should listen to science. Since it is likely that a majority of U.S. Supreme Court justices soon will be Catholics, maybe this will help spur the court to make a correct decision if an Evolution v. Intelligent Design case comes up. It was encouraging to hear that at least some Vatican functionaries have a decent understanding of what differentiates evolution and intelligent design/creationism: proof. Monsignor Gianfranco Basti, director of the Vatican project STOQ, or Science, Theology and Ontological Quest, reaffirmed…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas

How writing a book rewrote me

A few days ago I got around to looking through a bunch of unanswered emails. I came across a message in which someone asked me to elaborate on a quote from my July 14 post on “Filtering Reality.” An aside: it’s sort of ironic (or, some might say, karmic) how I began working on a book that ended up changing how I viewed Radha Soami Satsang Beas and, more generally, my whole approach to spirituality. Radha Soami Satsang Beas, or RSSB, is the India-headquartered spiritual group that I’ve been associated with for some thirty-five years. The “ironic” aspect of the…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Religions

Do you need to kill the Buddha?

Previously I’™ve written:

“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!” Buddhists are fond of saying. And not just Buddha: also Jesus, Mohammed, Moses, Lao Tzu, Guru Nanak, every spiritual teacher. And not just these people are to be killed: also the concepts that comprise the shell of their teachings. For only then can the kernel of truth be released.

But is this really the case? Below you can read an email message from a person in the United Kingdom who argues otherwise. He, like me, is an initiate of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, also known as “Sant Mat.” The “satsangs” mentioned in his message are meetings of this group.

These are special words, unfamiliar to most people. But the questions being explored here are universal. To what extent does an evolving skeptic or agnostic need to disassociate from a religious organization to which he or she currently belongs? Can you discern grains of truth anywhere you look and find a way to separate them from ritualistic, dogmatic, fundamentalist chaff?

If you’re a questioning Christian and want to relate this message to your own experience, you could substitute “church”€ for “€œsatsang,”€ “Christianity” for “Sant Mat,”€ “Christians” for “€œsatsangis,” and so on. For the issues discussed below are common to anyone who feels an urge to move beyond the boundaries of a well-defined faith.

In Zen master Seung Sahn’s book “Dropping Ashes on the Buddha” he tells a student:

Throw away teaching, throw away everything. If you say you are not attached to methods of practice, this is being attached to method. If you cut off your attachment, then your words (“€œthe real ‘˜I’ functions without thinking or talking”) are not necessary.

And also:

You say that you have no faith in your Buddha-nature. I too have no faith in my Buddha-nature. And I have no faith in Buddha or God or anything. If you have no faith, you must completely have no faith. You must not believe in anything at all…€But when you see red, there is red; when you see white, there is only white. You must let go of both faith and non-faith. Things are only as they are.

Seung Sahn is fond of saying things like “If you understand yourself, I will hit you thirty times. And if you don’t understand yourself, I will still hit you thirty times.” When asked “Why?”€ he will say, “It is very cold today.”€

Here’s a weather report from my British correspondent:

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Posted inReligions Spiritual practice/meditation

Being religious without a religion

Can you be religious and not belong to a religion? Of course. In fact, I believe this is the only way to be genuinely religious—to give up religion. This seems contradictory, but one non-religious “religion,” Buddhism, already has proven that it can be done. I’m referring to original Buddhism, that of the Buddha himself. After the Buddha died, it wasn’t long before his teachings were turned into a traditional religion. However, Huston Smith writes in “The World’s Religions” that few traces of six normal features of religion can be found in the Buddha’s message. These features are authority, ritual, speculation,…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Consistency is foolish

Today I got an email from a man who had finished reading my first book and wondered if I was “full of self-deluding crap." He asked me, “Would you presently like to make any ‘corrections’ or ‘retractions’ from what you wrote and published about ten years ago?” Why, of course I would. I entirely agree that I’m full of self-deluding crap now, but I like to believe that I was even fuller a decade previous. So this diminution in B.S., no matter how small it might be, has produced a corresponding change in how I view lots of things. The…
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Posted inGod Spiritual practice/meditation

Nirguna and saguna, two visions of God

It may be a simplification to say, “There are two kinds of people in the world,” but often this seems to be true. Certainly it is with men and woman (leaving aside a few hermaphrodites) and I’m coming to believe that such is the case concerning our conceptions about God. Some people are attracted to the idea that God is beyond being, formless, inconceivable, pure mystery, unfathomable through our usual organs of cognition and perception. nirguna, to use a Hindu term. Others find this vision of God too distant, too detached, too abstract. They are drawn to a saguna divinity…
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Posted inGod

If God is mysterious, so are we

Most people accept that the nature of God is a mystery. But these same people believe that they understand the nature of themselves, the being who confidently declares “The nature of God is a mystery.” Yet what evidence is there that we are any less mysterious than God? Do we know our essence? Can we identify from where our acts of creation emanate? Are we justified in saying anything definitive about ourselves other than, as God said to Moses, “I am who I am”? These questions are sensitively explored by Luther Askeland in his essay, “Final Duties, Old Bones,” which…
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Posted inMiscellaneous

A British churchless blogger

Check out “Off The Beaten Track,” the blog of a British man who has left the well-trodden path of Christianity and is heading toward the wide-open spaces of spirituality. It was nice to get an email from Paul, the OTBT’er, who has made the Church of the Churchless his blog of the week. I’m honored. Faithless hands meeting across the sea. In the Best of Off The Beaten Track section I found “Do Not Believe,” which features some great advice from the Buddha about following your own way. I also noted via the most recent OTBT post that Paul had…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Religions

What are the odds?

Beating exceedingly long odds (1 in 146 million), someone in Oregon just won $340 million in the Powerball lottery. This got me to thinking, what are the odds of someone winning the God lottery? That is, of choosing the right religion or spiritual practice and enjoying a really big prize: salvation, enlightenment, heaven, gnosis, god-realization. I’ve enjoyed reading the comments to my previous “I’ve been fired” post. Some I agree with, some I don’t. This statement by Robert Searle (mildly edited for clarity) got me pondering probabilities: I am coming to the conclusion that the much despised term "blind faith"…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

I’ve been fired

Well, my Meister Eckhart fantasy has been fulfilled. I’ve been fired from giving talks (known as “satsangs”) at meetings of my spiritual group because my Church of the Churchless writings have been too heretical. Yesterday our local secretary informed me that he had been told by a regional representative, Vince Savarese, that my blogging about Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) had caused a lot of people to be uncomfortable. In New York. In India. All around the RSSB world. Naturally I blurted out “Wow, that’s great! People are reading my blog!” It didn’t bother me to hear that I’ve been…
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Posted inBooks Personal/Stories

I’m becoming my favorite book

Standing in front of the Book Bin’s Eastern religion section today, I experienced a literary mini-satori: The only book I really want to buy is me. My exceedingly mild enlightenment descended upon me after a minute or so of browsing. I’d been thumbing through the only sections, Buddhism and Taoism, that are of any interest to me recently. The voluminous shelves of Christian books, ugh. Judaism, no interest. Islam and Sufism, too preachy. So I was reduced to pawing through a few square feet of Buddhist and Taoist writings, and even here I found myself replacing possible purchases almost as…
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Posted inUniversism

Our churchless discussion group

Last night we Salem Universists got together for our third meeting, this time at the Blue Pepper coffee house in downtown Salem. Once again our discussion covered a lot of ground: fear of death, reality of evil, contacts with departed souls, moving from fundamentalism to open-mindedism, among other subjects. I’d told my fellow Tai Chi students about the group and invited them to drop in on the meeting. Jill and Connie did. In the two hours that we spent together on the couches in the Blue Pepper loft I felt like I came to know them much better. As I…
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