Posted inNeuroscience Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Mass hysteria isn’t all that different from religious groupthink

During the 35 years that I was a member of an India-based religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), one of the things that I liked most about that experience was how I felt like I was part of a giant family. A family not in the usual sense, but in the sense of a group of people who had much in common, who shared a similar view of reality, who trusted each other, who helped each other, who looked up to a father figure -- the RSSB guru, which made us sort of like brothers and sisters. All that…
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Posted inBuddhism Neuroscience

Placebos point to the amazing link between body and mind

After writing the title of this post, I just had a doubt about my use of the word "amazing." It made sense when I wrote Placebos point to the amazing link between body and mind. But as soon as I'd typed those words, my mind said, in effect, "Hey, dude, is it really so amazing that one part of the body affects another part of the body?" To which I replied to myself, "No, it isn't." So why are placebos looked upon as an indication of the surprising connection between what the human mind does and what the human body…
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Posted inReality

Evolution has led fitness to be valued over truth

Most of us claim to want to know the truth. I sure do. But there's reason to wonder the extent to which this is -- I have to say the word -- true.  A memory comes to mind. As a child, most summers my mother would take me from our home in California to see relatives back in Massachusetts, where I was born and my mother grew up. Once I remember my uncle (mother's brother) greeting her with, "My god, Carolyn, you've gained so much weight!"  That shocked me. Not because it wasn't true, because it was. Because that wasn't…
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Posted inMorality

Life is precious. So why do we humans value it so cheaply?

Us members of Homo sapiens like to consider that we're the peak of the evolutionary mountain. We're proud of our big brains, our unique ability to use language and abstract thought, our technological accomplishments, and, yes, our supposed evolved morality. Humanity has indeed made a lot of progress on the moral front. Slavery is condemned. So is racism. Women have equal rights in many, if not most countries. In democracies, everyone has an equal vote. Religious heresy doesn't lead to being burned at the stake. And yet, life still is not valued as much as it should be. There are…
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Posted inDelusions Karma

Everything doesn’t happen for a reason. Often things just happen.

Having written a book about karma (specifically, the karmic rationale for vegetarianism) called "Life is Fair," I'm well acquainted with the idea that everything happens for a reason. For karma, when stripped of its supernatural notions of reincarnation and such, basically is just a law of cause and effect. You do this, you get that. Pretty damn simple. What complicates things is that while the effects are clear, in our life or the world at large, the causes are generally hidden to a large extent.  In Eastern philosophy this may be due to actions in previous lives bearing fruit in…
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Posted inBuddhism Free will Meaning of life

Fluke: great book about chance, chaos, and how everything matters

I'd vowed not to buy any more books from Amazon until I'd finished reading the ones I'd already started. But then a review in New Scientist changed my mind. Which I'm glad it did. Because Fluke, by Brian Klaas, is a highly provocative book about how chance and chaos govern life to a much greater extent than we normally consider -- since most of us consider that we're able to steer our way through the twists and turns of life through reason, intuition, and our own good sense when it comes to decisions. I've only read the Introduction and the…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Religions

The real saints are ordinary people

"Saint" is a word that generally has religious overtones. For example, I used to belong to an organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), that was part of the Sant Mat movement, which means "teaching of saints." The RSSB saints were gurus who supposedly were God in Human Form, something I now deeply doubt. The Catholic church has a more expansive view of saints: The saints of the church are a diverse group of people with varied and interesting stories. Their ranks include martyrs, kings and queens, missionaries, widows, theologians, parents, nuns and priests, and “everyday people” who dedicated their lives…
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Posted inReality Science

Nature uses quantum mechanics. But we humans don’t understand how.

There's been a lot of scientific progress in the 10,000 or so years of human history, most of it in the past few centuries. But the natural world still has a lot of mysteries.  I find this highly appealing. It shows that if someone is attracted to the unknown, there's no need to embrace religiosity or the supernatural. Just look around at the world that surrounds us, and indeed is us. What you'll see are quantum phenomena. Not directly, because the quantum realm typically is well hidden, manifesting only in atomic and subatomic processes that are far beyond the ability…
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Posted inMindfulness

Mind-body dualism ignores the close connection between mental and physical

Most religions are dualistic. They assume that something ethereal exists within us, or as us, that is separate and distinct from the physical body: mind, soul, spirit, divine energy, and such. To which I say, maybe, since anything is possible. However, there's no convincing evidence that this ethereal something exists, with zero evidence that this something that can't be shown to exist has any observable effects. Today I finished reading Ellen Langer's book, Mindfulness. In a final chapter, this Harvard psychologist has quite a bit to say about mind-body dualism, though not in a religious sense. She starts off by…
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Posted inScience Universe

The big bang shows the limits of human intuition

Almost everybody has heard about the big bang. That marked the beginning of our universe some 13.8 billion years ago, which has been expanding ever since. But it is very difficult for most of us, me certainly included, to get a solid understanding of what the big bang really was. That's because our common sense intuitions of reality, which are founded in everyday experience, aren't of much help in domains of science such as quantum mechanics and big bang cosmology. Religions appeal to those intuitions by making the creation of the universe into something our minds can easily grasp. Like,…
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Posted inFundamentalism Mindfulness Politics

Beware of ideologies, even though most of us embrace them

I enjoyed this recent comment on a churchless blog post from "sant64." There's valuable wisdom here. The first paragraph comes from what I said in the post. "This makes sense in many situations. However, when it comes to solid facts, such as the reality of human-caused global warming, 'trying out different perspectives' isn't the right thing to do. In these sorts of cases, reality almost certainly is a certain way." The proper perspective that jibes with "reality" is what? Believing that we're in the end-times because there's little hope we can reverse GW, or believing that GW is manageable and…
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Posted inMindfulness

I prefer the Eastern, rather than Western, approach to mindfulness

Since I enjoyed psychologist Ellen Langer's most recent book so much (The Mindful Body), I figured that I'd also enjoy what may have been her first book, or at least an early book, Mindfulness.  Actually, not so much. As Langer says in a section called "Mindfulness East and West," she takes a decidedly Western approach to mindfulness. The definitions of mindfulness in this chapter, especially the process orientation just discussed, will remind many readers of various concepts of mindfulness found in Eastern religion... While there are many similarities, the differences in the historical and cultural background from which they are…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

My book made Shahid Kapoor into a vegetarian. Now he follows Radha Soami.

One of the people I follow on X, formerly known as Twitter, shared a post recently about Shahid Kapoor, a Bollywood actor in India, embracing the Radha Soami teachings that I followed for 35 years. Below is one of the similar stories about this. It comes from The Indian Express. This interested me because Kapoor and I have a connection: a book I wrote turned him into a vegetarian. I'll describe this after the story. In a chat with Quint Neon, Shahid was asked about an incident that shaped up his life, and he immediately spoke about the Radha Soami…
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Posted inGod

“God” is a concept with no substance behind it

There's several ways of believing in God. I suspect that most people who profess a belief in God really mean "I believe in believing about God." Meaning, they really are unsure that God exists, but for a variety of reasons they consider that it's a good idea to believe in God, so they do it. Some of those reasons could be: family pressure, cultural expectation, fear of death, benefit of being part of a religious community.  The reason I say this is that looking back at the 35 years I spent as a believer, Eastern religion variety, I'm pretty sure…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

Meditation isn’t about doing it right. It’s about trusting yourself.

TIME magazine rarely has stories about meditation. So it was a pleasure to turn a page of the February 12, 2024 issue and see a title: "The noises in my head at a silent retreat." I could relate to those words. For after starting to meditate every day in 1971, during the past fifty-three years my meditation has involved a lot of noises inside my own head.  Thoughts. Emotions. Cravings. Things to do. Cosmic conceptions. Crude desires. You know, everything that's going through my mind outside of meditation. It's just more obvious when I'm sitting still, usually with eyes closed,…
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Posted inMindfulness

Pain is a good example of how mind and body are united

I'm intimately familiar with pain. All of us are, of course, since everyone experiences pain -- aside from the unfortunate people who don't feel it at all, which isn't a good thing, because they usually suffer serious injuries or even death from not recognizing when something is dangerous, like a fire burning their skin. Often pain becomes a more familiar companion the older we get. That's true of me. I was mostly pain free until early in 2020 when, at the age of 71, I developed sciatica in my right leg.  Because this coincided with the beginning of the Covid…
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Posted inNeuroscience Religions

Religion and mysticism are nothing other than the placebo effect

We've all heard about placebos. You know, those inactive substances, such as sugar pills, that are used as controls in research designed to determine whether a genuine drug has positive bodily effects.  Most of us also are familiar with the frequent finding that placebos turn out to be as effective as genuine drugs, or even surgical procedures. This is perplexing if we assume that the mind and body are separate entities. But not at all perplexing given the obvious fact that the mind is the brain in action, and the brain is an organ of the body. So if someone…
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Posted inFree will

In Daniel Dennett vs. Robert Sapolsky debate, Sapolsky clearly won

Hey, it's been a while since I've written a post about free will, or rather, the lack thereof. Obviously the universe determined that I take a break from one of my favorite subjects. Not a complete break, though. For during my daily at-home exercise routine, I've been listening to a debate between Robert Sapolsky, who wrote the recent instant-classic book Determined that persuasively argues why free will is an illusion, and Daniel Dennett, a philosopher who is noted for his view that while determinism guides the world, free will still exists. Here's the You Tube video of their debate. To…
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Posted inGay rights Religions

Two examples of religious dogmatism from here in Oregon

Today the Portland Oregonian, our state's largest newspaper, had two stories side-by-side about Republican lawmakers acting like the Christian dogmatists that they are. It's amazing, speaking as an atheist, how religious believers can be so hateful and prejudiced toward people who aren't like them. I'd never say that Christians shouldn't serve in an elected office. I'd also never say that an entire group -- in this case the LGBTQ community -- supported child abuse and pedophilia. But that's exactly what the Republican lawmakers said.  That's shameful. Unfortunately, I strongly suspect that enough of their conservative constituencies will like what they…
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Posted inMindfulness

Great observations about life in “The Mindful Body”

It was kind of a strange way for me to learn about a book. I usually ignore emails from Strong Towns, an organization devoted to making cities and towns more livable, but this one featured messages from staff members about what they're finding interesting in books, film, and such. I saw that a woman spoke highly of Ellen Langer's book, The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. Since I'm big on mindfulness, and also liked the creative mention of "chronic health," I ordered the book after reading some laudatory reviews on Amazon. The cover copy says that Langer,…
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