Posted inChristianity/Jesus Religions

Blaming Jews for the death of Jesus shows the craziness of religiosity

I'm a huge fan of Daniel Silva's series of books about Gabriel Allon, a fascinating character who is both a highly skilled Israeli intelligence agent/spy and a renowned art restorer with an ability to paint outstanding original works. I limit myself to reading just four pages from one of the books in this series in bed before I turn off the light and go to sleep, because without that limit I'd be tempted to keep on reading. Silva is an amazing author who has written the best thriller books I've ever come across. And I've read a lot of them.…
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Posted inConsciousness Mindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

My thoughts often seem like inner speech. But many people think in a different fashion.

In my "Our inner voice is linked to our various selves" blog post (August 2022), I described the decidedly strange experience I had after imbibing an excess of marijuana. Most of us have an inner voice speaking to us inside our mind. It can either be voluntary, as when I read "Most of us have an inner voice" and can hear those words silently echo within my brain. It can also be involuntary, as when I do something wrong and hear "You're an idiot" admonishing me without my consciously willing those words. This inner voice generally is taken for granted.…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

RSSB hoover tactics

Below is another guest blog post from Anon, an ex-RSSB initiate. RSSB stands for Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru that I belonged to for 35 years, which explains my interest in sharing criticisms of the faith that I also found lacking. This is a follow-up to Anon's previous guest blog post, "Life after RSSB." If you're interested in the linguistic history of "hoovering," check out this link. Anon uses a few terms that won't be familiar to everybody. Satsang is a spiritual meeting. Seva is volunteering. Sevadar is a volunteer. Satsangis are…
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Posted inArtificial intelligence Consciousness

AI models threaten the view of human consciousness as something special

Often when  science presents us with a markedly improved understanding of reality, the place we humans occupy in the universe diminishes in importance. This happened when the Copernican Revolution displaced Earth as the center of the known universe in favor of the Sun. It happened when Darwin demonstrated that our species didn't appear fully formed at the behest of God but evolved over an immense span of time, as did all life on our planet. And recently I've argued that "We need a philosophical and spiritual Copernican Revolution." Which is why I believe we need a philosophical and spiritual Copernican…
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Posted inMeaning of life Reality

“Good enough” can be a wiser choice than “absolute best”

When is good enough, well, good enough? As compared to the absolute best. Quite often. If not usually. Because holding out for the absolute best brings with it some definite problems. Such as, all the effort it takes to evaluate the merits of every possible option available to us. And the difficulty of arriving at criteria that would allow us to decide which of those options is #1, the best choice of all. Today The Atlantic, which I subscribe to online, had an interesting article, The Secret to Success is 'Monotasking,'  In other words, focusing on one thing at a…
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Posted inBuddhism Free will Reality

“Each moment is the universe” — a great way of viewing time

For much of my life I've been consumed by a sense that I needed to use my time carefully. Partly this arose from a 35 year dedication to an Eastern philosophy that taught the purposes of human life were, first, self-realization, which led to the ultimate purpose, god-realization. Meaning, after realizing ourself as immaterial soul, we then could make a supernatural journey to eternal existence with God. Whew! I feel kind of exhausted just describing what used to be how I viewed the purpose of my life. Serious stuff. The course of my life after death depended on how well…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Life after RSSB

Below is another guest blog post from Anon, an ex-RSSB initiate. RSSB stands for Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru that I belonged to for 35 years, which explains my interest in sharing criticisms of the faith that I also found lacking. Anon makes some great points about what life after leaving a religion someone has been deeply involved with can be like. To me, this bears a lot of resemblance to a divorce after a long-term marriage. I experienced this in 1989 when my first wife and I divorced after 18 years…
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Posted inConsciousness Reality

Imagining the impossible is a cool feature of human minds, but it creates philosophical enigmas

I'm enjoying Michael Pollan's new book, A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness. My first post about it came after I'd finished the Introduction, also called The Wager. Now I've read the first chapter, Sentience. After that comes Feeling, Thought, Self, and The Cave. While I don't expect Pollan to clear up the mysteries surrounding consciousness in his book, going along with him on his journey will be enjoyable. He's got a knack for making complex ideas understandable, and for describing fresh takes on old problems. That's what I'm going to focus on in this post, a fresh take on…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Just 10 minutes of meditation results in significant benefits

For 35 years I belonged to an Eastern religion whose teachings required 2 1/2 hours of meditation a day. The reason for that length of time wasn't made very clear. Typically the religion's guru would say that we should "tithe" one-tenth of the day to God-realization, or 2.4 hours. Rounded off, 2.5 hours. For many years I put in that time. Eventually, though, I came to feel that quality was as important as quantity in meditation. Then I typically meditated for about an hour every day, usually in the morning. However, I was aware that the guru who initiated me…
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Posted inConsciousness Reality

All knowledge is a product of human consciousness, not reality itself

Having just written quite a few blog posts about In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment by Jo Marchant, a fascinating book that delves into how physics, neuroscience, and philosophy look upon our sense of time, and indeed reality itself, I'm equally enthused about diving into consciousness -- the subject of Michael Pollan's new book, A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness. I enjoy books by skilled science writers who take a broader look at some subject than a specialist in that field would. For one thing, science writers usually are more adept at making a subject…
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Posted inBuddhism Neuroscience Reality

We need a philosophical and spiritual Copernican revolution

The Copernican Revolution in astronomy corrected the mistaken belief that our Earth was the center of the solar system. Instead, the Sun took its rightful place there in the minds of humans. That was one step in understanding our correct place in the cosmos. Another came when astronomers realized that what seemed to be objects within our Milky Way galaxy actually were other galaxies, each containing tens or hundreds of billions of stars. Now we know there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. All that should make us feel very small in the grand scheme of things.…
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Posted inReality Science Universe

QBism is the most mind-blowing scientific view of reality I’ve ever encountered

What is reality? This is a really important question. Maybe the most important question of all. It's also a really difficult question to answer. Humans have been attempting this throughout recorded history. And probably long before, extending to the first time one of our prehistoric ancestors looked upon the world and thought something like, What's this all about? Most of us, me certainly included, either consciously or unconsciously view reality as being comprised of two main branches: objective and subjective. This was a focus of the first book I wrote, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder, where I attempted to relate principles…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness

Flow — the marvelous blend of body and mind, exemplified in an amazing video

There's words about flow. And there's the experience of flow. Both help us understand what flow is all about. But a video I learned about in the "Surfing the Moment" chapter of In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment by Jo Marchant provides an unforgettable vision of flow. Here's how Marchant describes the video. In a seven-minute online film called 'The Ridge', Scottish trials cyclist Danny MacAskill rows across a remote loch on the Isle of Skye before hauling his mountain bike out of the boat onto the windswept beach. Once in the saddle, he wheels away…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness Neuroscience

Epilepsy and meditation: two paths to “everything is as it should be”

So, I was reading along in In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment by Jo Marchant, which I've been blogging about recently, and came to a passage that reminded me of a post I wrote a few weeks ago, "What if everything is okay just as it is?" I described the feeling: There are moments when we look upon life not as a series of problems to be solved, but as a complete answer lacking even the need for a question. Sex, drugs, rock and roll. These can lead to such moments. So can meditation, nature, exercise,…
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Posted inAtheism God Religions

Though no gods would be ideal, many gods are preferable to one god

As I wrote about on my HinesSight blog yesterday, the Artemis II voyage around the moon that ended with a splashdown in the Pacific yesterday showed the inspiring best of science and technology, while the Iran war negotiations are a disturbing reflection of the worst of humanity. It was beautiful to see the photographs of Earth from space, which naturally showed no dividing lines between nations. Astronaut Victor Glover said during the voyage to the moon: “Trust us, you look amazing, you look beautiful. And from up here, you also look like one thing. Homo sapiens, all of us, no…
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Posted inAwareness Mindfulness Neuroscience

Past and future are optional concepts, since some cultures lack them

Most of us worry a lot about both our past and future, even though the past is gone and the future has yet to occur. We do our best to live in Now, the present moment, but often the past and future occupy such a big part of our mental real estate, the present gets squeezed into a relatively small corner. One reason I'm liking In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment by Jo Marchant so much (the subject of several recent blog posts) is that the book points to some provocative ideas about our usual sense…
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Posted inNeuroscience Spiritual practice/meditation

Everyday awareness isn’t optimal. Psychedelics are one way to improve things.

Continuing with my posts about In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment by Jo Marchant, my reading of the book brought me to a subject that was dear to my heart back in my college days: how psychedelics like LSD and mescaline can open the mind to an expanded view of reality. Marchant had been describing how what seems to be the present moment actually is infused by the brain with both our past experiences and predictions of the future. I shared some passages about this in my previous post about In Search of Now. She then…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus Politics Religions

Easter means nothing to me, but like hockey, I’m fine with others enjoying it

I almost forgot what today is, Easter Sunday. The main reason I was reminded of it came when the long-time friend I have coffee with every Sunday at 1 pm texted me this morning, saying our local coffee shop probably would be closed. Which it was. So we went to pleasingly secular Starbucks. On the way there, I saw that a church had its usual large sign up on the side of the building: "He Is Risen." When I mentioned this to my friend, he said, "Like sourdough bread." Clever. I was going to steal that line, but decided to…
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Posted inNeuroscience Reality Uncategorized

Reality is different from how we humans perceive reality

In my previous post about In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment by Jo Marchant, I focused on her totally scientific observation that according to Einstein's extremely well proven relativity theory, the past, present, and future are all the same -- in the sense that each is part of a single "block universe" in which every event, from the motion of a single particle to the movement of a gigantic galaxy, is captured in a four dimensional space-time continuum that simply is. Of course, this perspective is utterly unlike how the world, and our life, appears to…
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Posted inBooks Free will Reality

According to Einstein, past, present, and future are all the same

After reading the Introduction and first three chapters of In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment by Jo Marchant, I'm hugely enjoying this book that pushes all of my nonfiction literary buttons: scientific, personal, well-written, provocative. I have a hint of where Marchant is going to end up in her book from reading her New Scientist article that I wrote about in "Intriguing idea: reality is stitched together from interlocking perspectives and experiences." But what I'm looking forward to is how Marchant builds a case for what she admits is a decidedly minority scientific view of the…
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