Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

Feeling religiously special can be enjoyable, but it’s dangerous

Before I criticize a comment on a recent blog post by Spence Tepper, a frequenter commenter on this blog, I want to start off on a warmer note. I've never met Tepper in person, but I like him through his words. He's intelligent, a good writer, and often makes a good case for his beliefs -- which are more sympathetic toward the supernatural and mystical experience than my own, but since I used to believe in much the same way he does, I understand where he is coming from. It's good to have a mixture of religious believers and religious…
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Posted inNeuroscience

How the brain makes predictions come true

Before discussing the subject that's the title of this post - how the brain makes predictions come true -- I'll shoehorn in a related personal story about my check ordering saga. Recently Columbia Bank, which my wife and I use for a checking account, was bought by Umpqua Bank. For many years I've ordered checks for our Columbia Bank account when the supply ran low. Last month was the first time I'd ordered checks with Umpqua Bank on them. Balancing our checkbook about a week ago, I noticed that we'd been charged on May 17 for the cost of mailing…
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Posted inNeuroscience

Here’s a fresh way of looking upon attention

I'm continuing to read and enjoy Andy Clark's The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality. It's one of the best books about modern neuroscience that I've ever read, and believe me, I've read a lot of them. My first post about the book laid a foundation for these subsequent posts, as I get deeper into The Experience Machine. This is a one sentence summary of the Big Idea discussed in the book -- which makes a heck of a lot of sense. Predictions and prediction errors are increasingly recognized as the core currency of the human brain,…
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Posted inBooks Neuroscience

Our brains don’t see reality as it is, but as it’s predicted to be

My new favorite book talks about a fascinating subject that I've read about before, but never so clearly and in so much depth as Andy Clark's The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality. Now, before New Age types get all excited about how the human mind creates its own reality, this definitely isn't what Clark, a professor of cognitive philosophy, is describing. But it is true that each of us fashions our view of reality to some extent in accord with our previous experiences. Clark starts off by relating a story of how he woke up to…
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Posted inReality

This is my favorite Rumi quotation

For several years, a few decades ago, I became obsessed with the great Sufi poet, Rumi. I devoured every English translation of his writings I could find, also buying books that weren't literal translations, but were written in the spirit of Rumi. Eventually I donated most of my Rumi books when my obsession abated. But I kept a few, including William C. Chittick's translation of Rumi, The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi. One reason I held on to that book was that it contained my favorite Rumi quotation, from his Masnavi.  Fear the existence in which…
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Posted inAwareness Buddhism Mindfulness

What if religions are wrong and there’s nothing to find?

In my experience, the most difficult part of writing is the first sentence and the last sentence. With one, there's nothing that comes before. With the other, there's nothing that comes after. So those sentences are unique. I struggled with the first sentence in my book, Return to the One. Until finally, a sentence popped into my head that seemed just right to me. If something has been lost and you're not sure where to look for it, there's good reason to start searching right where you are rather than far afield. Then I spoke about the familiar situation (familiar…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Here’s a great Tina Turner song

I saw Tina Turner perform with her jerk husband Ike at either Winterland or Fillmore in San Francisco during my college days in 1968 or 1969. (Hey, like they say, if you can clearly remember the 60's, you weren't really there.) I was high on something, naturally. Being close to the stage, absorbing her amazing energy -- that was an experience I'll never forget. So sorry that she died. Here's a song of hers that sends chills up my spine.
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Posted inComments

How we talk online is much different from how we talk in person

Next year I'll celebrate the 20th anniversary from when I started this blog in 2004. But, hey, I figure that  I might as well spread out the festivities by making some observations from time to time about this here Church of the Churchless. Like, right now. The most important thing I want to say is gratitude. Over the years I've learned a great deal from the people who visit this blog and leave comments. Typepad, my blogging service, says there have been 70,198 comments on 3,390 posts.  So that's about 21 comments, on average, per post that I've written. I…
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Posted inOpen Threads

Open Thread 46 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread. Remember, off-topic comments should go in an Open Thread.  If you don't see a recent comment, or comments, posted, it might be because you've failed to follow the above rule. Keep to the subject of a blog post if you leave a comment on it. And if you want to use this blog as a "chat room," do that in an open thread. As noted before, it's good to have comments in a regular blog post related to its subject, and it's also good to have a place where almost anything goes in regard to sharing ideas, feelings, experiences, and such.…
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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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