Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

“Perfect” never applies to a guru or other religious leader

In everyday life, I've never heard of anyone described as being perfect. Makes sense. For one thing, how could "perfect" even be defined as regards a person? For another, assuming it could be defined, how would a person's perfection be assessed?  In sports, perfect applies to something measurable. If a pitcher has a perfect game, no batter from the opposing team reached a base. A perfect game in bowling is 300 points, strikes in each of the first nine frames plus three in the tenth. Otherwise, typically perfect means high quality. If a waiter asks a patron how they enjoyed…
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Posted inFree will Neuroscience Personal/Stories

Rather than rely on religion, here’s what I consider both true and beneficial

Having been a religious believer for 35 years, Eastern religion variety, I'm deeply familiar with why people are attracted to a belief in God, heaven, supernatural realms, mystical powers, life after death, and such. In short, it feels good.  Religions provide a community of like-minded people. They offer a ready-made meaning to life. Their believers are drawn to view themselves as special, possessing knowledge and benefits (like eternal salvation) off-limits to those not within the religion's fold.  I found all those things highly appealing and beneficial to me. Until I didn't. For this primary reason: I came to conclude that…
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Posted inConsciousness Spiritual practice/meditation

The delusion of believing in gurus and other gems from Joan Tollifson

In my daily morning reading, I bounce back and forth between books about science and books about spirituality/philosophy, because consuming too much of either is less pleasant for me than a balanced diet. I've been enjoying several of Joan Tollifson's books for my spiritual/philosophical reading. She's become my favorite contemporary writer on Zen, Buddhism, nonduality, meditation, and such. I don't agree with everything she says. Which isn't surprising, since I don't agree with everything I say.  For example, Tollifson considers awareness to be the Key Thing. (The quotes in this post are from Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Science

Science says we are all vibrations in the same invisible oceans

For 35 years I was a member of an India-based religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), that taught the essence of reality was shabd, all-pervading conscious energy, which could be heard as divine sound and seen as divine light. In the early 1990s I wrote a book for RSSB, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder, that described my take on the links between the new physics and ancient mysticism, focusing on how the "all-pervading" and "energy" aspects of shabd were recognized by quantum mechanics, but not the "conscious" part. That's still true, of course. Naturally there have been advances in quantum…
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Posted inReality

Take this survey to learn if you have a hierarchical or interconnected worldview

A short article in the June 2023 issue of Scientific American (I'm behind in my magazine reading) had a fascinating title that applies to religiosity just as much as to politics, in my view. If that link doesn't work for you, here's a PDF file of the article.Download Many Differences between Liberals and Conservatives May Boil Down to One Belief | Scientific America The article gives examples in the political realm. In most of our studies, we also asked people to share their political party preference and to rate how liberal or conservative they consider themselves. In an early study…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

Becoming confused about illusionism, I shift to the simpler topic of many selves

So, I was happily reading along in Eric Schwitzgebel's book, The Weirdness of the World, getting to the last few pages of a chapter where he tries to define consciousness in a defensible fashion, when my attention was captured by a passage about illusionism -- though that term wasn't used by Schwitzgebel. Some philosophers have argued that consciousness, or phenomenal consciousness, does not exist. Keith Frankish is the most visible recent advocate, but others include Paul Feyerabend, Jay Garfield, Francois Kammerer, and maybe early Patricia Churchland. The argument is always a version of the following:  The ordinary concept of (phenomenal)…
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Posted inAwareness Reality

We and the world are plenty strange as is, no need to look afar for strangeness

I've got solid evidence for my affinity for strangeness: 49 Strange Up Salem columns that I wrote for our alternative newspaper, Salem Weekly, in 2013-2015. Here's how my second column, "Strange is Life," started out. Life is strange. From birth until death, mysteries abound. No one -- not scientists, not religious leaders, nobody -- knows everything about anything. This is a good thing. Certainty is for machines that act robotically. For four billion years or so, life has evolved in unpredictable, though natural, ways. So let’s invert my words: Strange is life. At the core of each of us beats…
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Posted inGod

Rabbi Brian speaks about God in his Highly Unorthodox Gospel book

If you read my previous post about Rabbi Brian's Highly Unorthodox Gospel and have been lying awake at night wondering what was said about God in the book, here's some passages that should help you sleep better (especially if you are fine with unorthodoxy). "Dr. Zola, I have a question: Why didn't anyone ask me about my beliefs in God?" [during his interview for admission into rabbinical school] "Well, this might be something your nun friend didn't know: Judaism doesn't require anyone to believe in God." I didn't know that. And thank God. Beta readers of this book indicated that…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

Rabbi Brian’s Highly Unorthodox Gospel

Recently I got an email with an offer to read and comment on a book by Rabbi Brian Zachary Mayer, Rabbi Brian's Highly Unorthodox Gospel. (It comes with stickers that you apply at various places in the book.) Naturally I said, "Absolutely!" to Rabbi Brian. Hey, we share a first name. Also, a state, since Rabbi Brian lives in Portland, the more with-it city some 50 miles north of where I live in sleepier Salem. And both of us don't like organized religion. Plus, we each have a beard, though Rabbi Brian's is way darker, since he's way younger. I've…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Wrong things I tell myself

A book could be written about the title of this blog post. Indeed, some have done just that. There's lots of books in both the neuroscientific and philosophical genres about the illusion that we humans are a single self. Or, if you're religiously minded, a Self. The truth is, as I said in the title, that "I" can have no problem telling "myself" something, even though almost everybody -- me certainly included -- has an intuitive sense that there's a single entity inside our head who is in charge of our actions, thoughts, beliefs, and such. That intuition is wrong.…
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Posted inConsciousness Universe

Common sense doesn’t lead very far when it comes to Big Questions

What is the ultimate nature of physical reality?How do relativity theory and quantum mechanics relate?Is our universe unique or one of many?Do we live in a computer simulation?What produces consciousness? How rare is consciousness in the cosmos?Do humans possess free will? These are Big Questions. Some bigger than others, but all are substantial when compared to lesser questions more amenable to being answered, if not now, at least in the not-so-distant future. You'll note that I didn't include any questions about God, spirit, soul, heaven, and such. That's because while there's a non-zero chance supernatural entities exist, it's much more likely…
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Posted inBuddhism Vedanta/Advaita

Here’s some thoughts about thinking (and nonduality) from Joan Tollifson

I've become a big fan of Joan Tollifson. I can't get enough of her take on Zen, Buddhism in general, Advaita, nonduality, and a bunch of other subjects that she talks about in her writings and speaks about in her talks. I sort of feel like a Grateful Dead groupie back in the days when people would travel around the country attending their performances wherever they played. Except, I don't need to go anywhere to get my Tollifson fix.  Her books are delivered to me by Amazon. Her web site has a vast amount of material in the Outpourings section.…
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Posted inBooks Reality Science

Reality, whatever the truth of it may be, is weird

I've got a fondness for weirdness. I won't try to explain why this is, since any explanation would go against a central tenet of weirdness: not making logical sense. I will though, offer as evidence this photo of a tangible commitment to weirdness: a book by Eric Schwitzgebel, The Weirdness of the World, that is sitting next to my laptop at this moment. The book cost $27.09 from Amazon, a pleasingly weird price. I would have been disappointed if it was $27.00, $27.10, or $27.99.  Here's the Amazon description. How all philosophical explanations of human consciousness and the fundamental structure…
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Posted inReality

Mission (almost) Impossible: embrace the reality of no self and no free will

Two of my favorite subjects on this blog are the unreality of us humans possessing a self, and the unreality of us humans possessing free will.  Those subjects could be collapsed into one, since there's a close connection, if not a sameness, between failing to be an independent self and failing to be an independent willer. Because I enjoy this failure (others find it scary or implausible) I like to tell myself: No self, no free will, no problem It isn't all that difficult to grasp the basis for this pithy summary of the human condition. Buddhism provides that basis…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

The endpoint of spirituality is breaking the addiction to spirituality

For a long time, including at this very moment, I've had a feeling that both disturbs and elates me: almost everything that I once thought was true about spirituality actually isn't, which means that what remains when my addiction to spiritual seeking has run its course is what I'm truly looking for. This is sort of akin to the Zen'ish adage, first there is a mountain, then there isn't, then there is. I alluded to this in a 2015 post, "I don't really know what 'spiritual' means anymore." Since I don’t see anything other than naturalistic reality as being, well,…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism

Two books, a half century apart: old Zen, new Zen

I readily admit that I'm addicted to books. It's both a genetic and learned addiction. I blame, or credit, my mother. She was an avid reader and intellectual who, like me now, had books piled up around her home and made notes about them in blank ending pages. My addiction could help explain why I find myself attracted to books I've owned for a long time, in the example below, over a half century, even though my philosophical tastes have changed quite a bit over the years. Like a literary archaeologist, I can estimate when I first read a book…
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Posted inPolitics Science

No, you religious fool, a total eclipse isn’t a sign to repent

Yesterday there was a total eclipse in part of the United States. This follows on a total eclipse in 2017 whose path went right through where I live, Salem, Oregon. It was a cool experience. But certainly not a religious one. After all, eclipses are 100% predictable by modern astronomers. Even not-so-modern astronomers had learned how to predict them. I'm no expert on how this is done, but obviously it entails calculating the positions of the sun, moon, and earth -- since a total eclipse is when the moon, which amazingly is just the right size in the sky to…
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Posted inBuddhism

Zen is largely psychological rather than supernatural, a big plus

Since Zen Buddhism tends to deny that reality can be captured in words or concepts, I guess it isn't surprising that I have difficulty explaining, either to myself or to others, why I've been so enamored of Zen since my college days. That's when I kept the only book I've failed to return to a library (I'm pretty sure I paid the San Jose Public Library for the replacement cost), Hubert Benoit's The Supreme Doctrine: Psychological Studies in Zen Thought. I wrote about this back in 2005: "'The Supreme Doctrine', thirty-six years overdue"  Whenever I need another dose of Zen,…
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Posted inNeuroscience Spiritual practice/meditation

Believing that the mind’s resources are non-limited allows more mental effort

Beliefs are powerful. We need to use them wisely. Not by believing crazy stuff wildly out of touch with reality, but by believing in possibilities firmly within our potential to achieve.  The placebo effect is a good example of this. Taking a sugar pill that is believed to be efficacious isn't going to cure a Stage 4 cancer. However, it can have other positive effects, such as reducing pain.  Reading David Robson's book this morning, The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change the World, I came across an interesting example of the power of belief in his "Limitless Willpower"…
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