Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness

Mindfulness: whatever happens is the curriculum of that moment

One of the things that I like about the Buddhist notion of emptiness, where change is omnipresent because nothing possesses an inherent existence, is how much money it saves me on books. For I've found that rather than buying a new book to get some fresh ideas, I can look over the books I already own and reread them. This gives me fresh ideas because I've changed from the last time I read the book, so much of it will seem new to me. Case in point: a few days ago I was looking at the mindfulness section in my…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

RSSB guru makes light of wife-beating and sexual assault

It amuses me, along with disturbing me, when devotees of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an organization with headquarters in India, excuse Dhillon's bad behavior by saying "At least he hasn't been convicted of a crime." Well, that's a pretty low bar for a guru who is considered by the RSSB teachings to be God in Human Form, possessing divine powers. One would expect that a guru who is supposedly so exalted would behave at least as well as a decent ordinary person would. But as you can read below in a comment on…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

If art is separate from an artist, is a guru separate from their message?

In a recent issue of TIME magazine (May 8/May 15, 2023) there was an interesting story by Stephanie Zacharek, "What Lies Beneath: Grappling with how to approach great works of art by bad men in the book Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma." It got me to thinking about a roughly parallel question in the realm of religion and spirituality. Can the message of a guru be separated from how they behave as a person? Before I describe how I see this question, here's how the TIME story starts out. You, me, and everyone we know: whether you're aware of it or…
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Posted inBuddhism Happiness

The appealing notion of “good enough”

Back in my religious-believing days, I would have viewed this as a sign from God. Now, I just see it as an interesting coincidence. But who knows? Maybe it is a sign from God! Last week I'd scribbled on a large post-it note some of what Sam Harris had said in a guided meditation of his Waking Up app, then stuck the note next to books that I read every morning before meditating. It quoted Harris as saying: The goal of meditation is to realize that consciousness as it is, is good enough. Not waiting for something to happen.  I…
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Posted inBasics of our faithless faith

Do you agree with my Churchless Creed?

On November 23, 2004 I published my first posts on this Church of the Churchless blog. Over the succeeding 18+ years those posts in the "Basics of our faithless faith" category still ring true to me, by and large. I guess this shows that skepticism about dogmatic religious belief and being positive about open-minded spiritual inquiry rests on some pretty damn solid ground. But that's just my opinion. So I thought it'd be interesting to share what I said in the Our Creedless Creed post and see if anyone has a good reason to challenge any of the points made…
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Posted inBuddhism

Emptiness is the key to understanding Buddha nature

A few days ago, in a blog post about Shunryu Suzuki's book, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, I said: If you're unsure what Buddha nature consists of, join the club, because I feel the same way. But I have some ideas gained from re-reading Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. I'll share them in an upcoming post. This is that post. Of course, before launching into what I consider Buddha nature is all about, it bears saying that like so many other subjects in Zen, Buddha nature supposedly is beyond words and concepts. OK, no argument there. But so is love, and we…
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Posted inBuddhism

Shunryu Suzuki is a Soto Zen balance to Rinzai’s D.T. Suzuki

Having written about D.T. Suzuki's take on Zen Buddhism in a couple of recent posts (here and here), I figured it would be good to balance my Zen scale by re-reading Shunryu Suzuki's wonderful little book, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.  (The book is based on talks by Suzuki. I've written a couple of other blog posts about it here and here.) They share a name, but D.T. Suzuki leaned strongly in the Rinzai Zen direction while Shunryu Suzuki belonged to the Soto Zen lineage. Rinzai believes in instant enlightenment through koan study or some other means, like hearing a sound…
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Posted inIndia

Caste survey in India makes me wonder why castes still exist

Here in the United States we have a lengthy history of discriminating against people based on the color of their skin: Blacks have fared much worse than Whites.  But this sort of discrimination is easy to understand. Genetics explains the discrimination.  I find it much more difficult to fathom why caste is still ever-present in India. I realize that caste is based on the Hindu religion. However, Buddhists, Muslims, Christians and other faiths are members of Indian castes. This seems bizarre to me. A story in the Washington Post got me thinking about this: "A caste survey in India could…
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Posted inBuddhism

A defense of D.T. Suzuki

I was planning to write about a subject other than Zen Buddhism today, but a comment by Appreciative Reader on one of my posts about D.T. Suzuki, a noted author and popularizer of Zen, stimulated me to compose this defense of Suzuki. Which isn't going to be in my words. I've read three of Suzuki's books, each several times. I consider that this gives me a good feel for both the man and his work. But that's just my opinion. Appreciative Reader has its own, though he admits that he isn't very familiar with Zen, nor with Suzuki.  What particularly…
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Posted inBuddhism

Zen is Buddhism stripped down to the spirit

I'm continuing to enjoy re-reading D.T. Suzuki's collection of writings in the 1956 edition of Zen Buddhism, a book that I've had for over 50 years (yeah, I'm old) and wrote about a few days ago in D.T. Suzuki on the Zen Doctrine of No-Mind.  Suzuki is a pleasingly clear author. He also doesn't mince words, as you'll see below where I share some passages about the difference he sees between Indian and Chinese ways of thinking. The chapter I'm writing about today is "Zen in Relation to Buddhism Generally." It helped me better understand why Zen considers itself to…
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Posted inBuddhism

D.T. Suzuki on the Zen Doctrine of No-Mind

I've had this book for a long time, probably since my college years (1966-71) when I first dived into the deep waters of Zen Buddhism. The copyright date is 1956. The cost is 95 cents. Ah, the days when paperback books with 294 pages cost under a dollar. I'm not sure what led me to pull the book out of a Buddhism shelf a few days ago. I guess I needed a hit of classic Zen, since D.T. Suzuki, the author, is described on the back cover as "Zen's chief exponent in English." Of course, since the book was published…
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Posted inConsciousness Personal/Stories

Drugs as an avenue to exploring consciousness

First, I've made some progress in understanding what Sam Harris means when he says "Consciousness is not inside your head," a semi-perplexing statement that I wrote about recently.  After writing that post, I've listened to a couple of other guided meditations by Harris on his Waking Up app. In one, he talked about how consciousness is akin to the familiar metaphor of waves and the ocean. The waves aren't separate from the ocean, just as consciousness isn't separate from the things that we're conscious of. In the guided meditation I heard today, Harris made a similar point about being aware…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

A RSSB initiate expresses some concerns

Below is a message I got yesterday from someone who is a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a religious organization with headquarters in India that's led by a guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, which this person refers to as Baba ji. Darshan refers to being in the presence of the guru. (I belonged to RSSB for thirty-five years, before I broke away from the group.) The message describes concerns this person has about RSSB and the guru. They end with a request that I share my thoughts about what they said, which I'll do after the message. They also…
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Posted inConsciousness

Sam Harris says “consciousness is not inside your head.” Huh?

Today I heard Sam Harris say on a guided meditation on his Waking Up app, "Consciousness is not inside your head. Everything is just appearing." I've heard Harris say this many times. I don't understand that notion.  The brain is inside the head. The brain generates consciousness. If you doubt that, have general anesthesia. Have someone hit you on the head with a baseball bat, hard. Have your brain surgically removed. No brain, no consciousness. But we can lose an arm, a leg, or some other non-essential organ and still be conscious.  If someone can make a good argument for…
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Posted inHappiness

It’s fine to be content with who you are: flawed and imperfect

There's nothing wrong with self-improvement. Unless you don't feel like improving your self. As this letter to the editor in the March 23, 2023 issue of New Scientist says, there's good reason to simply accept yourself as the imperfect person that you are (nobody's perfect, for sure), whose life is marked by some stupid decisions and screwups. Fed up with the desire to spin our lives in this way7 January, p 33From Caroline Deforche,Lichterveide, Belgium According to your guide to being your own hero, psychologists say we should spin our memories "into a well-told life narrative" to "help us achieve…
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Posted inNeuroscience Spiritual practice/meditation

Slow deep breathing and smiling — two ways to feel better fast

Recently I listened to a guided meditation by Tamara Levitt on my Calm iPhone app where she led listeners through an interesting exercise that taught me something new about breathing. First Levitt had me breathe for a minute, using my usual breathing. I recall that no counting was done with this first exercise. Then she asked listeners to breathe more slowly, and to count those breaths for a minute that she timed. I had six in and out breaths during that minute. Then Levitt said to breathe slowly again, but to extend the duration of each in breath by inhaling…
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Posted inReality Religions

Truth is beautiful. Which is why religion is ugly.

Truth was on my mind in various ways today. In the morning I listened to a Chris Hayes "Why Is This Happening?" podcast interview with Kate Crawford, an Artificial Intelligence expert. Then I read an essay in my Question Everything book about the limits of free speech. In the afternoon I made a video on our back deck where I performed the Water Boxing form that I learned in my Tai Chi classes. I'll start with the video. I wanted to show people what the Water Boxing form looks like, but I knew that since I'd never seen myself doing…
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Posted inFundamentalism God

The pitfall of believing someone’s testimony about God or the supernatural

Testimony. It's a common word in the law. But until I read an essay in the New York Times book collection from their Stone Reader series, Question Everything, I wasn't aware that it had a philosophical meaning. The essay was about Deep Fakes where someone makes a convincingly real video of someone. Contemporary philosophers rank different kinds of evidence according to their reliability. How much confidence, they ask, can we reasonably have in a belief when it is supported by such-and-such information? We ordinarily tend to think that perception -- the evidence of your eyes and ears -- provides pretty…
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Posted inBooks Neuroscience Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Truth-Default Theory explains a lot about religious belief and disbelief

A friend gave me his unread copy of Malcom Gladwell's book, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know. Since I'd heard of some of Gladwell's other books, like Blink and The Tipping Point, but not this one, I started reading Talking to Strangers with fairly low expectations.  I was wrong. I ended up being fascinated by the book. It's full of examples of people being fooled by other people who were lying, even though there was considerable evidence about the deception being foisted on them. So Gladwell delves into the reasons why Neville Chamberlain…
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