Posted inConsciousness Spiritual practice/meditation

“Theory contamination” is a big problem in spirituality

What is real? This is one of the toughest questions to answer, because to a large degree, reality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.  I'm mainly speaking about subjective realities here, the province of spirituality, religion, and mysticism. But to a lesser degree, objective realities, the province of science, also appear different to people with varying theoretical assumptions. A classic example is observations of the motions of the planets in the middle ages. For quite a while it was assumed that Earth was at the center of what we now call the solar system, with the Sun…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

Pure consciousness isn’t an experience. It’s the capacity to experience.

I've gotten back to reading Thomas Metzinger's new book, The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness. The title isn't entirely accurate, nor is it entirely inaccurate. I say this because one of Metzinger's chapters is called "It is Not an Experience." He writes: Here, what we are trying to approximate is that for some meditators, the phenomenal character of pure awareness also includes the self-evident fact that somehow, in a way that is very hard to express in words, what is occurring is not merely what philosophers call a "phenomenal experience" -- something that subjectively appears to…
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Posted inMiscellaneous Personal/Stories

What the Olympics can teach us about life, love, and reality

Ooh, after just writing the title for this blog post, I realized that it's pretty grandiose. But if I stumble and fall before I cross the blog-post-expectation finish line, this will simply serve to emphasize one of my points about the meaning of the Olympics -- assuming I can remember what it was. The Paris Olympics are about halfway done. My wife and I watched the opening ceremony in its entirety.  Well, until the ceremony reached the stadium, after which we lost interest. I thought it was one of the best opening ceremonies ever. Creative, emotional, energetic. Having the athletes…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Study finds that meditators are prone to “spiritual superiority”

I'm well acquainted with the notion of "spiritual superiority," since I fell prey to that myself back when I thought that being initiated by a guru who supposedly was God in Human Form meant that I was part of a relatively small group of chosen people who had a special relationship with God. (Sorry Jews, there's a lot of competition in the chosen people contest.) And it could be argued that I still feel spiritually superior now that I've become an atheist and consider that I'm aware of the drawbacks of being religious that religious believers are clueless about. Below…
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Posted inAtheism

Kate Cohen on why America needs more atheists

My wife, who is even more of an avid atheist than I am, gave me an article she'd torn out of American Atheist, the publication of (no big surprise) the American Atheists organization, which she belongs to.  The article, "Why I Call Myself an Atheist," was by Kate Cohen, who wrote We of Little Faith, a book I've blogged about here and here. I liked the article, but couldn't find it online, probably because American Atheists doesn't want people to be able to read stuff in their publication without joining the organization. But in searching for the article, I came…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Why Christians believe in the resurrection is why other people believe in gurus

Recently I got an email from Gary Mason, a former evangelical Christian turned religious skeptic, who shared with me a marvelous approach to arguing against anyone who believes there is solid evidence for Jesus' resurrection. The post is titled "Best Method to Defeat Evangelical Apologists: The Ghost Buster Counter-Apologetics Technique."  Since I've never believed in the resurrection, though I dabbled with believing in the historical Jesus briefly during my college days when I got involved with a crazed Greek yoga teacher who blended West and East in his Christananda ashram (the 1960s were weird), at first I thought Mason's post…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Anyone have opinions on the Soami Bagh line of gurus?

I've communicated via email with someone who had questions about Radha Soami Satsang Beas, the organization I was a member of for 35 years. Now this person is wondering if any visitors to this blog have an opinion about the Soami Bagh branch of Radha Soami. Below is part of what they said to me. Leave a comment on this post if you have some experience with Soami Bagh. I've become a Radha Soami skeptic, but for those who aren't, I just noticed that the Soami Bagh web site has some interesting books and other publications available online. Like, the…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience Spiritual practice/meditation

If you’re trying to control your mind, who is the “you” doing the trying?

English has some confusing ways of putting things when it comes to the mind, consciousness, attention, and all that.  For example, we may say, "I couldn't stop myself from eating a second piece of cake." Okay. But what's the difference between "I" and "myself"? Don't each of these words refer to the same entity? So isn't that sentence just a matter of grammar, not of reality?  In other words, maybe what the sentence really means is "I ate two pieces of cake, but now I wish I'd only eaten one." Now we just have "I" without the extraneous "myself."  This…
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Posted inConsciousness Free will Neuroscience

Our mental experience isn’t always in accord with the mental reality

Descartes famously wrote that even though we could be mistaken about everything else, since God could be a cosmic joker who hides the truth from us, the one thing we can't doubt is that we are a creature who doubts -- and thinks, and in general has conscious experiences.  You know, the "I think, therefore I am" thing. It's hard to argue with that. Sort of. Because we can imagine what Descartes could not, given when he lived: that, among other 21st century possibilities, we are creatures who are characters in a computer simulation crafted by an advanced alien civilization.…
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Posted inHappiness Neuroscience Politics

Negative emotions are just fine. I’ll be angry if you don’t agree.

Proving (sort of) that the cosmos agrees with the theme of this blog post, about an hour ago I finished episode 8 of the fourth season of The Handmaid's Tale on Hulu, which I belatedly started watching after seeing Elisabeth Moss in another streaming series and wanting to see more of her acting. The Handmaid's Tale, of course, is an adaptation of the dystopian book by the same name written by Margaret Atwood. Women are treated extremely badly in the nation of Gilead, which used to be the United States until religious zealots managed to take over the country, motivated…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience Spiritual practice/meditation

You can’t know your “true self,” but you can be it

I readily admit that Thomas Metzinger's new book, The Elephant and the Blind, often isn't easy to read. This detailed examination of pure awareness involves a lot of philosophy, a lot of neuroscience, and a lot of sophisticated arguments. All that is challenging. But every chapter rewards me with insights presented in simple language that make me pleased I bought this lengthy book -- which as I've noted before can be downloaded for free from the publisher, The MIT Press. (I prefer reading books on paper, not a screen.) Metzinger does a great job separating precepts of Buddhist, Advaita, and…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth

An atheist had a near-death experience that challenged his spiritual skepticism

Near-death experiences fascinate me. Maybe a bit less now than they used to, as the older I get, the more accepting I am of the undeniable reality that I'm not going to live forever.  But I used to devour books about near-death experiences with relish back when I really didn't like the thought of dying.  Recently I read a review in the Washington Post of a book that I would have loved to read in the days I was more afraid of death than I am now, "Sebastian Junger was a skeptic of the afterlife. Then he nearly died." That's…
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Posted inGod Politics

God didn’t save Trump from being killed. But Trump’s devotees think so.

On Saturday a 20 year old man, Thomas Matthew Crooks, a registered Republican, tried to assassinate Donald Trump with an AR-15 rifle for a reason that likely never will be known, since Crooks was killed by Secret Service counter-snipers and left no indication why he fired numerous shots from a rooftop near the rally where Trump was speaking. As I said in a post on my Salem Political Snark blog yesterday, "It's good Trump wasn't killed. Now let's defeat the S.O.B."  There's no one in recent American politics who has been more toxic than Trump. Trump never tires of attacking…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience Spiritual practice/meditation

Narrative self-deception is one way we fool ourselves

Each of us is the hero or villain in a story of our own making. That's admittedly a simplistic summary of a psychological principle, but it isn't far from the truth. I'm certainly aware of this in regard to myself. I have a way of looking upon my 75 years of living that, by and large, puts me in a positive light. Which isn't surprising, since I prefer praise to blame, so why would I choose to view the events of my life in a fashion that draws attention to my weaknesses instead of my strengths? Of course, some people…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

Feeling you know isn’t the same as knowing

One of the benefits of reading a book about pure awareness by a philosopher, instead of someone who identifies with a religion or spiritual practice, is that you get a more realistic perspective. A good example is that Thomas Metzinger, the author of The Elephant and the Blind, speaks in an early chapter about the difference between a feeling of knowing and actual knowing. This should be obvious to anyone, which really is everyone, who has confidently believed that something was true until they learned that it wasn't.  Metzinger calls this the E-fallacy. His glossary defines it this way: A…
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Posted inBuddhism Consciousness Taoism/Tai Chi

Consciousness is the cosmos awakening to itself

Though in the past I've dismissed sentiments such as the title of this blog post as being unduly New Age'y, today I changed my mind. I guess it depends on the context of sayings such as Consciousness is the cosmos awakening to itself.  So here's the context for my newfound positive feeling toward those words. A few days ago I saw a mention in the book I've been writing about recently, The Elephant and the Blind by Thomas Metzinger, of a book by David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry. Since I'm attracted both to Chinese philosophy…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

Nobody is watching the movie of your life, or mine, or anybody’s

Every morning I try to read one of the short chapters in Thomas Metzinger's fascinating book, The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness -- Philosophy, Science, and 500+ Experiential Reports. I particularly enjoy passages that intuitively appeal to me, yet rationally challenge my ability to comprehend exactly what Metzinger is saying. Below I'll share an example from the "Nonidentification" chapter.  First, though, this introductory mention in the chapter of the traditional movie theatre metaphor. One classic metaphor for this process [of de-identification], found in many places in the popular literature on meditation, is the image of being…
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Posted inIndia

Blind faith is dangerous: 120 devotees of India “godman” killed in stampede

India has a well-deserved reputation for being a hotbed of religious fervor. I'd call that fanaticism, but I'm trying to be fair to India, since that country also is responsible for some of the most sophisticated faiths in the world. But when I heard about an estimated 120 devotees dying in a stampede after a popular Hindu preacher, Narayan Sakar Hari, had finished his talk ("satsang"), it was the negative side of religiosity that struck my atheist sensibility. Sure, the story in our local newspaper said: About 250,000 people gathered for Tuesday’s event in the Hathras district of Uttar Pradesh…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Meditation is good, but non-meditation can be better

My previous post, "The Elephant and the Blind -- a provocative book about pure consciousness," was an introductory look at this book, which covers a lot of interesting ground in its 500 or so main pages. It won't appeal to everybody. But for those such as me, who like their spirituality founded in the natural world, common sense, and science (insofar as this is possible), Thomas Metzinger's discussion of how meditators in 57 countries look upon "pure awareness" is a breath of fresh air. I say this because it is refreshing to have someone discuss meditation from the standpoint of…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

The Elephant and the Blind — a provocative book about pure consciousness

Proving my dedication to the study of consciousness (or maybe my addiction to books), a few days ago my $80 copy of Thomas Metzinger's 600 page book, The Elephant and the Blind, arrived.  I had to buy the paperback version because I can't read a nonfiction book without a pen and highlighter in hand. But the book can be read for free via a download from the publisher, the MIT press. Just click on the Open Access tab. Metzinger is a philosopher who wrote a book about the mind, The Ego Tunnel, that I enjoyed. Here's some of the blog…
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