Posted inBooks India

Purity vs. pollution is a bizarre aspect of caste

Since I'm reading, and enjoying, Isabel Wilkerson's great book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, I was especially interested to read a recent newspaper story about Seattle becoming the first city in the United States to ban caste discrimination. Caste, in Wilkerson's view, is at the heart of American racism, Nazi Germany's horrors against Jews, and naturally India's longstanding caste divisions. I noted in a previous post how Wilkerson discovered that even currently among Indian scholars studying caste, she was able to tell who was upper caste and who was lower caste by the way they carried themselves and how…
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Posted inMindfulness

Mindfulness helps bring body and mind into the same place

Inspiration can be found anywhere. When I started to read the current issue of TIME magazine, I was pleasantly surprised to turn a page and find "5 ways to be mindful without meditating." (The online version of the story has 8 ways.) I liked what Angela Haupt had to say about how our body can be in one place while our mind is in a far distant place -- often not just geographically, but also in time, since almost everybody is prone to thoughts of the past and future even as our body is firmly in the present. After reading…
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Posted inBuddhism Vedanta/Advaita

Why I prefer Buddhism to Advaita Vedanta

On Sam Harris' Waking Up app, I noticed there was a lengthy (1 hr 37 m) discussion between Harris and Swami Sarvapriyananda, a Hindu monk and Minister of the Vedanta Society of New York. So for the past few days I'd listen to 10-15 minutes or so of the discussion every morning. Today I finished listening to the whole exchange as I was driving around in my car. It was really interesting. Both Harris and Sarvapriyananda are highly knowledgeable about both Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. Of course, Harris embraces Buddhism and Sarvapriyananda Vedanta, so each of them is more expert…
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Posted inAlan Watts Books

The profundity of “There are no black people in Africa”

As Alan Watts was fond of saying, echoing a basic tenet of Taoism, you can't have good without bad, virtue without vice, up without down -- or indeed any quality without its opposite.  Everything becomes what it is in relation to something that it isn't.  If everybody in the world had always believed in God, there would be no religious people. There would just be people. Ditto if everybody had always lived without any conception of God. Then there would be no atheists, just people. Before sentient creatures who can conceive of abstractions arrived on our planet, the natural world…
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Posted inBooks India

Caste is a powerful way of looking at prejudice in both India and America

Recently TIME magazine had a cover story about what's wrong with the United States (a big subject!) that featured a lengthy essay by Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize winning Black author and university instructor. I was blown away by her emphasis on caste being at the core of our nation's social problems, rather than the more familiar racism. Wilkerson talked about her 2020 book, "Caste: The Origin of our Discontents," which focuses on caste in the United States, India, and Nazi Germany. Somehow I hadn't heard about that book until now. But I made up for that oversight by immediately…
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Posted inMystics Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Why a guru shouldn’t be worshipped

Recently someone sent me a link to "The Guru Has No Turban" by Greg Leveille. It's well worth reading if you've ever believed that a guru should be worshipped as a divine being. Or worshipped for any other reason, like their supposed perfection. The article is centered on the Sant Mat teachings that I followed for thirty-five years. Leveille appears to believe in a basic truth of those teachings -- that it is possible to know a formless Celestial Awareness -- but rejects the Sant Mat notion that the guru is greater than God, because God isn't available to help…
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Posted inCoronavirus Personal/Stories

After I got Covid, science became my best friend

About two weeks ago, on Monday, January 30, I tested positive for Covid. A few days later I blogged about this on my HinesSight blog in I test positive for Covid. And feel positive about Paxlovid. Well, it was a good run without ever getting Covid -- about three years since the nasty virus came to the United States in early 2020.  After I had trouble sleeping last Saturday night, feeling on edge for no discernible reason, I took a rapid Covid test Sunday morning, which came back negative, even though my voice was a bit hoarse. But Monday morning…
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Posted inMeaning of life

We make our own purpose, not God, not the universe

Without a purpose, life is barely worth living. That's one sign of depression: when nothing seems to matter and our existence seems meaningless. But where does purpose come from? Religious people typically say "God." They believe that God has a plan for us and we just need to let it unfold, trusting in the Almighty. People who strongly embrace a particular culture or nationality may feel that their purpose is to live in accord with the tenets of their society. And as Joseph Carter says in an essay I read today in Question Everything: Essays from the New York Times…
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Posted inNeuroscience

Gut-directed hypnotherapy: example of the mind-body connection

In one way, the whole idea of the mind-body connection doesn't make sense. After all, it isn't as if the mind is one thing and the body is a different thing. The mind basically is the brain in action. The brain is part of the body. So obviously there's a connection between the mind and body, since they're different aspects of the same entity.  But most people, me included, do view the mind as something more ethereal than the cruder body. Our thoughts and emotions seem to be distinct from the flesh, blood, and bone of the body. Even though…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas

I’m told that the RSSB guru said I’m good, or am a good soul

Today I got this message from someone who, unlike me, still attends the satsang meetings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, the India-based religious organization that I belonged to for 35 years, before RSSB and me parted our ways. Baba Ji refers to the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon. I heard today from someone who said “Baba Ji said that Brian Hines is good (or a good soul).” I am not sure which or maybe both, because his English is a little hard for me to understand. I told this person, Ah. That's nice. I said that because it was…
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Posted inReality Wu Project

Beyond awe, beyond mystery, there’s ultimate not-knowing

There's many levels lying on the other side of ordinary knowing. I've been pondering this after writing the recent post, What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine? I hasten to point out that while I'd love to lay claim to such a marvelous title, it belongs to David Wolpert, who wrote an engrossing monograph about the limits of not only human knowledge, but the knowledge of any other species. Wolpert lays out the foundation of his complex and subtle arguments in a single paragraph. This question does not concern limitations on what we can know about…
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Posted inReality Science

What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine?

I love the question that's the title of this blog post. The question didn't come from me, but from David Wolpert. I learned about a paper he wrote when it was mentioned in a recent issue of New Scientist. But there is a deeper question here: can we be sure that logic, even a reformed kind, is enough to understand the universe in all its fullness? It is a question that David Wolpert at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico has been thinking about for decades. In a recent monograph, he spelled out his argument that it is more…
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Posted inConsciousness

Experience is part of physical reality

Sometimes -- well, actually, quite a lot of times -- I find people arguing on this blog, and in other places, that science doesn't know how to deal with personal experience. Further, that because experience seems to be something ineffable, as is consciousness (likely there's no difference between experience and consciousness), this means that the most intimate part of our being is outside the domain of science, which deals with physical reality. Galen Strawson, a philosopher, disagrees. I wrote about his take on consciousness in "The hard problem isn't the nature of consciousness, but of matter."  Many make the same…
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Posted inIndia Religions

India’s 1947 partition shows destructiveness of religion

My previous blog post was about Indian Prime Minister Modi's involvement in the Gujarat massacre of 2002, where about 1,000 people (mostly Muslims, I assume) were killed by Hindu nationalists. But that death toll is nothing compared to what happened after the British partitioned India into a Muslim territory and non-Muslim territory in 1947.  I don't know a lot about the Indian Partition. However, I learned something about it in an article in the January 2 & 9 issue of The New Yorker. The magazine article is called "Blood Lines: Seventy-five years after Indian Partition, have we learned how to…
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Posted inIndia Politics

India’s Modi doesn’t want people to see BBC documentary critical of him

Politicians are much the same the world over. They hate criticism. But in countries with robust freedom of speech and a free press, like the United States, politicians find it difficult to shut down criticism of them. Not so in India, where Prime Minister Modi and his allies are working hard to keep people from seeing a BBC documentary, "India: the Modi Question." TWITTER AND YOUTUBE censored a report critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in coordination with the government of India, according to a top Indian official. Officials called for the Big Tech companies to take action against…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

More on why mindfulness is better than mantra meditation

It goes without saying, but I'll say it regardless, that my Church of the Churchless blog posts reflect what I find interesting and what makes sense to me.  If you disagree with a post, naturally that's wonderful. You're you. I'm me. We're different people, so we're going to look at some things differently. Maybe a lot of things differently.  All I can do is explain myself as best I can, while all you can do is explain yourself as best you can in comments on my blog posts -- should you choose to do that. So here's another try at…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Mantra versus mindfulness — which is better?

Paying $24.95 for a Learn to Meditate course based on a mantra, that is roughly akin to the Transcendental Meditation approach, had at least one immediate benefit for me. It got me to pondering the pros and cons of using a mantra, versus pursuing mindfulness. This is going to be a fairly short blog post, because after a couple of days where I experimented with repeating the one-word mantra that I chose for the course -- "peace" -- it dawned on me why I gave up on using a mantra and made mindfulness my meditation.  Yes, I still play around…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

I pay $24.95 for a Learn to Meditate course

As I was reading Galen Strawson's book, "Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, The Self, Etc.", I read a mention by Stawson that he'd tried out psychologist Patricia Carrington's approach to meditation, liked it, but didn't stick with it for very long. Curious, I headed to Carrington's web site, which has sort of an old-fashioned internet vibe to it. I poked around the site for a while, focusing on what she has to say about meditation, and liked her emphasis on meditation being as effortless as possible. Since I'm a firm believer in spiritual laziness, I decided to fork over…
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Posted inFree will

Believing in free will isolates us

Before I head off into other directions in my blog posts, I want to share some additional thoughts about free will, and the lack thereof -- a subject that has been a theme of mine recently. (And also non-recently, since I've written a lot about free will over the years.) The main reason I don't believe in free will is that there doesn't seem to be any good reason to believe in it. By and large I prefer truth over falsehood, reality over illusion. Especially when it comes to science. Movies, novels, and TV shows -- I'm fine with falsehoods…
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Posted inFree will

Another good reason to not believe in free will

I'm addicted. To many things. One of them is reading about why free will makes no sense. I ingest books and essays on this subject with delight. Until another one comes along. Then I eagerly imbibe it also. This morning I got my No Free Will fix courtesy of a chapter in Galen Strawson's book, Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, The Self, Etc. The chapter, "Luck Swallows Everything," started off in a familiar fashion. Strawson, a philosopher, picked apart the easily pickable argument that free will exists in the form of compatibilism, an incoherent argument that we humans have…
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