HinesSight

Why biking and other risky activities are dangerous, but not fearful

Thank you, Tim Krieder, for writing such a marvelous New York Times essay, "Cycle of Fear." You wonderfully described why I love riding my maxi-scooter (a Suzuki Burgman 650) so much. Also, why I like boogie boarding on the biggest waves I can find on a Hawaii vacation so much.

Krieder talks about riding his bicycle in New York City. But his explanation of why risky activities are so enjoyable applies to lots of pursuits: motorcycling, downhill skiing, rock climbing, skateboarding, horse riding, many others.

After speaking about our modern-day hypervigilance to mostly imaginary threats, the worries and anxieties of everyday life that obsess our waking brains (and even our dreams), Krieder says:

Which is why it’s such a relief, an exhilarating joy, to break the clammy paralysis of worry and place yourself at last in real physical danger. Even though it’s the time when I am at most immediate risk, riding my bike in Manhattan traffic is also one of the only times when I am never anxious or afraid — not even when a cab door swings open right in front of me, some bluetoothed doofus strides into my path, or a dump truck’s fender drifts within an inch of my leg.

At those moments fear is a low neurological priority that would only interfere with my reaction time, like a panicky manager shoved aside by competent, grim-faced engineers in a crisis. I doubt that the victims of sudden violent accidents die terrified; they’re probably extremely alert, brains gone pretty much blank while their galvanized bodies try to figure out what to do. I don’t think our minds are designed to accept that there’s no way out. Based on my own close calls, I suspect that if I am killed while biking, the state of mind in which I am likeliest to die is extreme annoyance. And at least it won’t be by drowning.

Exactly. I'm never scared while riding my powerful scooter.

(I usually put some sort of macho adjective before "scooter" when I write about my passion, to differentiate a Suzuki Burgman 650 from weenie scooters like teeny Vespas; nothing wrong with them, where I live it just seems like they're almost always ridden by young women wearing pink helmets, a demographic I don't identify with.)

As Krieder says, there's too much that needs concentrating on while engaged in a risky activity for fear to be present in one's mind. Even when riskiness raises its dangerous head, dealing with the situation occupies the brain cells which otherwise might scream Scary!

When I’m balanced on two thin wheels at 30 miles an hour, gauging distance, adjusting course, making hundreds of unconscious calculations every second, that idiot chatterbox in my head is kept too busy to get a word in. I’ve heard people say the same thing about rock-climbing: how it shrinks your universe to the half-inch of rock surface immediately in front of you, this crevice, that toehold.

Biking is split-second fast and rock-climbing painstakingly slow, but both practices silence the noise of the mind and render self-consciousness blissfully impossible. You become the anonymous hero of that old story, Man versus the Universe. Your brain’s glad to finally have areal job to do, instead of all that trivial busywork. You are all action, no deliberation. You are forced, under pain of death, to quit all that silly ideation and pay attention. It’s meditation at gunpoint.

Right now my stomach muscles are sore.

This morning the waves were running nicely high in Maui's Napili Bay. However, they weren't breaking super-cleanly, gradually from side to side. More like crashing down vertically in a single curvaceous whump, then whitewatering onwards.

It took a while to figure out where to position me and my boogie board for optimum wave-catching. I decided to venture past a small reef, rather than wait for a wave in front of it. This was a good decision. But for a split second, I had some doubt.

Not a fearful doubt. Just a calm, albeit highly focused, feeling of Whoa...look at this.

What I was looking at was nothing. Nothing, that is, between me and the ocean some four feet or so below, as the breaking wave had caught me in the curl and presented me with a great view of empty air between me and the ocean (also, somewhere, rocks). 

I managed to hold onto the sides of my boogie board and land halfway gracefully on the wave after falling what seemed like miles. The landing hurt, but any discomfort was quickly erased from my mind as I enjoyed my best wave run of the day, almost all the way into the beach.

So, yes, I know what Krieder is talking about. And heartily agree with it.

I’m convinced these are the conditions in which we evolved to thrive: under moderate threat of death at all times, brain and body fully integrated, senses on high alert, completely engaged with our environment. It is, if not how we’re happiest — we’re probably happiest in a hot tub with a martini and a very good naked friend — how we are most fully and electrically alive. Of course we can’t sustain this state of mind for too long.

People who go through their whole lives operating on impulse tend to end up in jail. We are no longer purely animals, living only in the moment; we are the creatures who live in time, as salamanders live in fire, prisoners of memory and imagination, tortured with dread and regret. That other, extra-temporal perspective is not the whole reality of our condition. It’s more like the view from the top of the Empire State Building, of people as infinitesimal dots circulating ceaselessly through a grid.

Eventually we have to descend back to street level, rejoin the milling mass and take up our lives; you lock up your bike and become hostage to the hours again. But it’s at those moments that I become briefly conscious of what I actually am — a fleeting entity stripped of ego and history in an evanescent present, like a man running in frames of celluloid, his consciousness flickering from one instant to the next.

Plant magic mushrooms on your grave for loved ones to enjoy

I haven't spent much time envisioning how I'd like my dead body to be disposed of. But after listening to an episode of Philosophy Talk today, "Is Nothing Sacred Anymore?," I've got an interesting psychedelic option to consider.

Here's what a member of the audience said:

Hello, my name is Jay Monk. I'm from Willamette University. And first I'll apologize for the asking of this question about a taboo, but I really want to know what your thoughts are. If hypothetically, for my burial, I'd like to be buried in a plot of land that has been inoculated with psychedelic mushrooms, and then afterwards, in six months or however long, my friends and family take these as a celebration of my life in a wake ceremony, is that sacrilege?

Responses of the philosophers (the ones I could make out among the ensuing laughter):

What a good question! Leave it to the young to think of new ways to break... Wait a minute, these are edible mushrooms? Yes, yes, they have to ingest them to get high. Seems like a cool idea. This could be a celebration of somebody's life. One does have knowledge of rituals in which human beings are eaten as a way of passing on their powers to the people who eat them. And a kind of ritual, eating of the mushrooms that have grown on a person's grave is a mode of connection to that person's life, actually. It shows a kind of seriousness... Have you patented that, uh...

Great idea, Jay. It's terrific that a guy going to college right here in Salem, Oregon, my home town, had such a philosophically inspiring notion.

I had some personal acquaintance with psilocibin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, back in the 1960's. My memory of the experience is dim, but I'm confident that if any friends or family of a deceased person were still grieving after six months, a magic mushroom experience, courtesy of the grave site, would knock them into another state of consciousness. 

Graveyard soils apparently are conducive to mushroom growing. And Oregon is fertile ground for magic mushrooms. So I hope you will indeed patent your idea, Jay. Don't let a minor detail like the illegality of magic mushrooms stop you.

My question for Humane Society of U.S. leader

This was my big chance.

Would I ever get another opportunity to ask the President and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), Wayne Pacelle, a question about animal consciousness?

Almost certainly not.

So I stuck my hand in the air tonight when Wayne said that he'd welcome a few questions from the passionate band of local animal activists who'd assembled at Ted and Beverly Paul's beautiful home in the south Salem hills to meet Pacelle.

As soon as we arrived, I plunked down $27 to buy a copy of his book, "The Bond: Our Kinship with Animals, Our Call to Defend Them." Thumbing through the Contents, I could tell that Pacelle melded science and ethics in his book.

His remarks, spoken without notes while standing in the Paul's living room, confirmed for me that -- not surprisingly -- this leader of the national Humane Society had a good command of both facts about animal welfare and the morality of mistreating them.

I toyed with the idea of asking a direct question about vegetarianism: whether a root cause of cruelty to animals is the disconnect between (1) the enthusiasm people have for eating animals (most of whom are raised in nasty conditions on factory farms), and (2) the disgust people feel when an individual identifiable animal is mistreated.

But I didn't want to risk antagonizing the kind-hearted meat-eaters with whom I'd shared an excellent meal, wonderfully catered by Willaby's, which featured no animal carcasses other than a salmon dish.

So here's what I basically said to Pacelle:

A comment and a related question. It seems to me that a central problem here is that people forget that we are animals. There aren't humans, and also animals. We also are animals.

Which gets to the question of consciousness.

I'm amazed to read in neuroscience books that some people question whether animals are conscious. Anybody who has a dog or a cat is certain that their pet thinks, has feelings, and so on. Our dog spends much of her day plotting how to get her way with me, and she does a damn good job of it.

Do you think that as neuroscience advances, as more and more animals are studied in brain scanning machines, and it becomes increasingly obvious that animals have a roughtly similar sort of conscious life as humans do, this will make a difference in how people view their fellow animals?

Pacelle responded with a thoughtful answer, most of the details of which I can't remember. He said that just as science has debunked the pseudo-science of phrenology, along with the notion that the white race is superior to other races, so will research continue to demonstrate that animals are a lot like us.

When Pacelle signed the book I'd bought, I mentioned to him that I'd recently listened to a Philosophy Talk podcast about evil. A psychologist who has done research in this area said that he doesn't believe something called "evil" exists.

Rather, people who act cruelly suffer from an empathy deficit. And of all the animals, empathy is most highly developed in us Homo sapiens. So I told Pacelle that what he said in his remarks tonight made a lot of sense:

Yes, humans are animals. But we are special animals who are capable of feeling a lot of empathy for both other members of our own species, and members of other species -- like chickens, cows, pigs, cougars, wolves, salmon, and so on.

Sometimes people defend cruelty toward animals (such as raising chickens in tiny cages where they can barely move, and can't raise their wings) by saying, "Animals in the wild kill other animals for food, so why can't we?"

Well, other animals aren't as highly evolved as us human animals. They don't have as much capacity for empathy, though elephants have been observed to engage in what sure looks like grieving behavior when one of the herd dies.

We should aspire to be the most moral animal species on the planet, not just another species "bloody in tooth and claw."

In a final chapter in his book, Pacelle lists "Fifty Ways to Help Animals." Here's the first one:

Follow the 3 R's of eating: reducing your consumption of meat and other animal-based foods, refining your diet by avoiding animal products derived from factory farming, and replacing meat and other animal-based foods with vegetarian foods as you are comfortable doing so.

Why men and women talk in different party clusters

First, let's deal with that word "why" in the title of this post.

I haven't bothered to research what other people have to say about my subject -- the phenomenon of men and women gravitating into separate groups at parties, where male and female conversations often head off in drastically different directions.

Hey, I'm a man.

So I'm going to act in accord with what I told a woman last night who wanted to join five guys (of whom I was one) having an interesting talk about world affairs. She sidled up next to me and said, "It looks like this is a male club. Can I fit in?" I told her...

Absolutely. Just make sure that you pretend you know everything about any subject, even if you don't.

I could tell she wasn't sure whether she should take me seriously. But I meant what I said. Sort of. Unless I was joking.

This is one reason men like to talk with each other at parties. They know what the rules of the conversation game are when they're bullshitting with other guys. When women are part of the group, it's sort of like if one team was on a field with a football playing by one set of rules, and another team was trying to compete in accord with soccer rules.

When men talk, most of the time they aren't trying to either reveal, or gain access to, inner feelings. My wife and I used to get another with another couple. The other guy and I would converse in one corner of our living room, while the wives huddled on the couch.

Our male conversation always focused on Grand Cosmic Subjects, like whether the laws of nature are actually "out there," or whether they're a manifestation of the human mind. We'd learn a lot about each other in this fashion.

Just not the same things the women would learn about.

After the other couple left, my wife would say something like, "How is Michael handling the death of his father?" I'd say, "He never mentioned anything about it. I didn't even know his father died."

This would astound Laurel. It seemed perfectly natural to me.

I used to play competitive doubles tennis several times a week with three other guys. It took until about six months after one of them was divorced before I learned the news. And then the full extent of the conversation about this major life event was along the lines of "Hey, hope you're doing OK. Now whose serve is it?"

Men like games. Men like sports.

I'm not saying that manly conversations always are like a game, or a sport, but much or most of the time they are. This can confound women who have the weird idea that people are supposed to share intimate emotions truthfully when they get together.

Last night, shortly after the aforementioned woman pulled up a chair close to the male conversational circle, the other guys got up and headed for the snack table. I was the last to get up. The woman looked at me and said, "Hey, it looks like I broke up the man-party."

I told her, "Guess you should head into the kitchen and do some woman-stuff."

When I later told my wife about this conversation, she was shocked. "You didn't actually say that, did you?" "Sure I did," I told her. "The woman should have known that I was kidding."

Should have. Hopefully she did.

This is another problem with men and women talking together. Guys are used to playing games with each other. They'll tease each other. They'll throw obscenities at each other. They'll insult each other. Usually they don't take this seriously. They know how the game is played.

I think a man finds it easier to chat with a group of women, than the reverse, because men are better at game-playing. Guys can act like they really care about a woman's deep, sensitive, inner feelings more easily than a woman can act like she's having fun in a profanity-filled, joking male bullshitting group.

The reason? To a man, acting all sensitive and caring can be just another game. To a woman, usually it is serious stuff.

Here's the way I generally feel when I'm talking with some other guys: we're throwing out conversation nuggets onto a playing surface, where they can be toyed with, accepted, rejected, thrown back into someone's face, bashed into another form, assembled into interesting shapes.

It's mostly got an external tone to it. Getting into another guy's head is frowned upon. That's his space. If he wants to open himself up, fine. But it's not my business to do that.

When I'm with a group of women, I feel a different vibe. They may seem to be just as crude, comedic, or crass, but there's an undertone (or overtone) of concern and commitment to how the conversation is affecting each woman's feelings.

Recently I was standing next to three women and overheard part of what they were saying. One of them related a lighthearted story. Another said, "I can't handle what you're saying. It's too close to what I've been going through."

My male mind expected her companions to respond with something like, "Well, fuck, dude! Deal with it!" Instead, the woman who told the story said, "Sorry, let's talk about something else."

I'm not saying that men and women can't have great conversations in mixed company. Just that there's good reasons why the sexes often gravitate to different corners of a party space.

Rory McIlroy, thanks for a flowing Father's Day

I'm a big-time golf fan. Meaning, I only watch the final round of big-time major tournaments like the Master's, British Open, and United States Open.

And even then I'll record the last eighteen holes so I can fast forward my way through the hours and hours of slow-moving golf (same way I watch soccer). That's what I did yesterday also. But thanks to the amazing Rory McIlroy, I was able to watch the final round in record time.

Plus, be wonderfully inspired by the sight of a 22-year old from Northern Ireland blowing away his fellow U.S. Open golfers in record-breaking fashion.

McIlroy was so many strokes ahead at the beginning of the round, I decided to only watch his shots. So I kept clicking the 30-second advance on my DirecTV DVR until I saw McIlroy standing over his ball. Then I'd watch him take another step on the almost flawless journey to his first major championship win.

What mesmerized me the most was McIlroy's demeanor. His 2011 U.S. Open peformance was an archetypal demonstration of what "flow" is all about.

Golf is a precision game where, at the professional level, players are so skilled and so well matched that often just one bad shot is the difference between winning and losing. A putt that misses the hole by a quarter inch can decide who the champion is.

A few months ago McIlroy famously blew a four stroke lead at the start of the final round of the Master's tournament. He shot an 80, the worst round ever for a pro golfer leading after 54 holes.

Obviously yesterday was a different McIlroy. The announcers said that he was playing like a machine. Well, I can understand why they used those words, but I saw McIlroy as being decidedly non-mechanical.

He was marvelously human. He flowed with the moment, with his emotions, with the crowd of photographers capturing every shot, with the pressure of knowing that even his large lead could evaporate after a double bogey or two.

Machines react predictably. They are programmed to do this in response to that.

I didn't get that sort of feeling from watching McIlroy play his final round. I saw a young guy (he looks like a high schooler to me) responding to ever-changing circumstances with remarkable aplomb, focus, and flexibility. McIlroy wasn't unduly bothered by his few mistakes, or thrown off balance with excessive glee after his many great shots.

Those eighteen holes were a great Father's Day gift. Not just to McIlroy's own father, but to all of us father-types watching him flow so well through the final round of the U.S. Open.

Some people -- I'm thinking of my wife -- find watching sports horribly boring. All they see are guys and gals doing something inherently meaningless, like trying to get a little white ball into a small cup several hundred yards away.

For me, though, sports can open up a window onto a view of human nature that is difficult to discern in any other way.

Yesterday Rory McIlroy showed the world what is possible when someone does what they're capable of doing without being limited by the mental bumps, glitches, flow restrictors, and other crap that causes our psyche to screw up some activity.

Saturday I got back to staining a couple of wood rocking chairs that I'm going to add to the decor of a recently-built tree house.

I was having a pretty good time, brushing the first coat onto the considerable number of pieces that comprised the chair. I was flowing along slowly but steadily until a voice inside my head started talking.

"Man, this is taking longer than expected... there's other things I'd rather be doing right now... once I do the front, I'll have to turn the chair over and do the underside... it's going to take at least two coats, and maybe three... I've got quite a bit more to do."

I felt myself mentally cramping up. Suddenly I just wanted to be done with the staining. I started to get sloppy, putting too much stain here while missing spots there. Then I took a deep breath, relaxed, and got myself back into the present moment.

Just do one piece of wood at a time. Enjoy the process. Don't look ahead to a final outcome. Realize that enjoyment of the chair starts now, not later. There's no such thing as "later," just other "nows."

What I did wasn't all that different from how Rory McIlroy won the U.S. Open yesterday. He modeled how to perform an activity excellently via one shot, or one brushstroke, or one whatever.

After that, do another one. And then the next. Respond to what is right in front of you, not some unduly imagined version of it. Enjoy this moment. Relax; flow with what's happening, not pushing the river yet also not letting it passively wash over you.

You're a champion, Rory McIlroy. Not just of the 2011 U.S. Open -- of how to live life, judging by how you performed in this golf tournament.

Sea turtles teach me a mindfulness lesson

Boogie boarding on the left side of Maui's Napili Bay, while waiting for waves I watched a bunch of large sea turtles feeding in the shallows of a reef that I also was interested in -- to avoid running into, as the turtles have hard shells and can handle waves that break over shallow rocks, while I can't.

When their heads popped up I imagined they were looking at me curiously. "What kind of fish is that, gray headed with a big flat blue fin that keeps it on top of the water?" But given how many other boogie boarders they must have seen, I doubt they considered me as anything special.

Back on the beach, I told my wife about the sea turtles.

She walked to the end of the bay to get as close to their feeding area as possible. I followed her, camera in hand. I stood as near to the reef rocks as the foam tossed up by breaking waves allowed, not wanting to have my beloved Sony camera doused.

It didn't take me long to learn that sea turtles are difficult to photograph from above the water. Their heads and shells are only visible briefly; by the time I was ready to take a photo of one it'd be back under the water again.

I was determined, though.

A voice inside my head kept saying, "It'd be great to be able to show other people what Laurel and I saw on our last day on Maui." So I kept snapping still shots, mostly of an ocean devoid of sea turtles. Eventually the fruitlessness of this hit home. I decided to switch my camera to movie-mode.

Not much better.

I still had a lot of trouble locating the turtles in the viewfinder. Getting a close-up shot was nearly impossible. But I would have kept on with my efforts to capture the moment if my camera hadn't suddenly presented me with a "X" across a battery symbol, after which the lens retracted and the camera shut off.

Instantly I felt relieved. The spell was broken. I realized that I'd been missing some great moments in order to capture them. Yet how could I bring home a moment as a photo or video if I'd never really experienced it?

What I'd have would be a recollection of what it was like for me to stare through a viewfinder while my mind was getting frustrated with how difficult it was to locate those shifty sea turtles. I'd have some photons recorded on a camera card, but I wouldn't have captured a genuinely meaningful moment.

Because the effort to capture it was preventing me from experiencing it. I'd been focused on how nice it'd be to show other people the sea turtles, losing sight of the fact that they were right freaking there in front of me and I wasn't really seeing them myself.

When my camera shut off an intuition popped into awareness. Laid out into words, it was something like this:

"No problem. I'm still equipped with an amazing multi-media recording device. It captures sights, sounds, smells, tactile sensations, emotions, thoughts -- everything that I'm experiencing right now. This amazing device is called My Brain. Start using it, you fool! It's a hell of a lot better at capturing meaningful moments than that Sony camera is."

For sure.

Watching the sea turtles in the waves mindfully in the moment was hugely different from observing them with a future-memory focus. I may not be able to show you the turtles, but what they were like is part of my experience store now.

This is a problem with social networking: Facebook, Twitter, blogs, instant messaging and all that lead us to think "How will I describe this moment later?" while we're in the midst of experiencing it. Splitting our attention isn't conducive to being truly attentive to what's going on.

In a February 2011 New Yorker article, "The Information," Adam Gopnik came up with a great one-liner:

Yet surely having something wrapped right around your mind is different from having your mind wrapped tightly around something.

The Internet and it's social networking tools have a tendency to wrap around our minds. But when we're intensely mindful, aware, and into a moment, that's when our minds are wrapped around experiences.

Think about it. Not too much, though.

I'm outraged about outrage -- let's calm down

Aren't you getting tired of people being outraged about, well, everything? I sure am.

And this means I'm getting tired of myself, because I've got a hair-trigger Outrage Gun that doesn't go a day without firing self-righteous bullets of condemnation.

Driving around today, channel surfing among various satellite radio news/talk channels, plenty of topics pushed my outrage button.

I can't stand Republican grandstanding on how Obama is handling the Libya situation. Right-wing talk show host Lars Larson said "The only good cougar is a dead cougar." Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is going ahead with his union-busting bill even though a judge said "Stop." Global warming deniers are holding up efforts needed to move us toward a cleaner, greener world.

Outrageous! I thought about writing a blog post rant on several of these topics. Then it hit me...

What I was really outraged about was all this outrage. It never ends.

Wherever you turn these days -- web sites, radio, TV, Facebook, Twitter, newspapers -- it seems like someone is extremely upset at what someone else is doing. Worse, the outraged individual feels like his or her emotional uproar is absolutely justified.

This is crazy. Way out of the ordinary.

I've lived through some pretty insane times during my sixty-two years; the Vietnam War brought out hugely intense fights between people with opposing views of the conflict. But this is different -- a pervasive societal polarization where Right and Wrong are seen as opposite shores with no bridge between them.

Choose your side. You've got to be on one bank or the other. No straddling permitted. Everyone who isn't 100% with you is fair game to be targeted by an outrage blast.

(Note to Lars Larson: most cougars should be left alone, though some may need to be killed. It depends on the situation. Wildlife management, like almost all significant social problems, takes a lot of careful study in order to figure out the best course of action. Simplistic platitudes like "the only good cougar is a dead cougar" are useless.)

Today our mail was supposed to be delivered after I'd had it held while my wife and I were away on a three-day trip. The woman who handles our rural route must have failed to notice the resume date I put on the "hold mail" form.

This has happened before. When I peeked in our empty mail box at 5 pm, I knew that it'd happened again. I started to feel an almost pleasurable sense of outrage well up in my easily-offended psyche.

"Geez! Now I'll have to stand in line at the post office tomorrow to pick up our mail! Why, that will take several minutes out of my day! I should complain to..."

Fortunately, the side of me that's been getting outraged about outrage kicked in. I realized that our mail deliverer almost surely is overworked and underpaid. She's under a lot of pressure every day. It's easy to miss a resume delivery date on one of the many mailboxes she's responsible for. Mostly she does a good job.

No big deal, I said to myself.

It isn't the end of the world if we have to wait another day to find out how many solicitations from animal rights organizations and political causes we got over the weekend (that's 90% of our mail, now that nobody writes snail mail letters any more).

I'm not going to go on a complete outrage fast. Getting upset with injustices and wrongdoings is natural. That's how things change for the better -- when enough people say "enough is enough!"

But I want to be more like the Britishers I hear debating on the BBC when I occasionally tune my car's satellite radio in an overseas direction.

They rarely raise their voices. They don't interrupt each other. They make their points clearly and calmly, then listen to what their opponent has to say. Outrage isn't in evidence.

Now, I'm sure people in Britain get excited, scream at each other, hurl insults, spout epithets. I doubt, though, that outrage comes to a boil at the same low temperature as in the United States.

I'm hoping that more and more Americans start to feel the way I do: outraged about our propensity for outrage. Somehow we've got to learn how to communicate reasonably with each other more, and shout angrily at each other less.

When mind wanders, happiness departs

I used to work with a highly creative and socially conscious guy who told me once that he was always thinking about something.

Driving his car, brushing his teeth, eating his dinner -- most of the time his mind was occupied in pondering how to make the world better while his body was doing something else.

This probably made him more productive, but not more happy. Such is the conclusion of research I came across today in the New York Times: "When the Mind Wanders, Happiness Also Strays."

Whatever people were doing, whether it was having sex or reading or shopping, they tended to be happier if they focused on the activity instead of thinking about something else. In fact, whether and where their minds wandered was a better predictor of happiness than what they were doing.

Well, this is pretty much what the Buddha taught several thousand years ago, along with countless other more modern yogis, sages, gurus, and meditation teachers. Indeed, a Boston reporter says her yoga instructor was right on top of this research, mentioning it in class.

If you want to be part of this ongoing study, and have an iPhone, head over to TrackYourHappiness.org and sign up to get an email or text message at random moments that asks you to report your happiness at the moment.

The NY Times story says:

When asked to rate their feelings on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being “very good,” the people having sex gave an average rating of 90. That was a good 15 points higher than the next-best activity, exercising, which was followed closely by conversation, listening to music, taking a walk, eating, praying and meditating, cooking, shopping, taking care of one’s children and reading. Near the bottom of the list were personal grooming, commuting and working.

I suspect, though, that one of the activities wasn't "being bothered by my iPhone when I'm having sex or otherwise happily engaged." But hey, advancing science comes with some costs.

Like most people, my mind is notoriously prone to wandering. I suppose it shouldn't, since I've meditated almost every day since I was twenty years old (I'm now much older and not much wiser at sixty-two).

I do find that concentrating on a mantra or my breath for 20-30 minutes starts off my morning in a focused manner. I enjoy not thinking much, or at all, about other stuff while I'm doing a single thing.

When I get going on my other activities of the day, I often backslide into what is called "monkey mind," internal chattering from lots of psychological tree tops that isn't related to what I'm actually doing.

This afternoon, though, inspired by the wandering mind = less happy research, I did better while grocery shopping. I consciously focused on each step I took from the parking lot into the south Salem Fred Meyer store.

Then I had a sense of slowing down, selecting one item at a time, being mindful of the details of choosing bananas, checking the expiration date on organic lettuce mix, finding an unfamiliar brand of hair conditioner that my wife had put on the list.

I really did feel happier shopping in this fashion. It struck me that external reality is considerably more interesting, by and large, than my thoughts -- which tend to be repetitive.

After loading the groceries into the back of our Hybrid Highlander and starting to drive off to the next shopping stop, I got another lesson in the value of mindfulness.

Still engaged in focusing on external reality, rather than my own mind, I saw a gorgeous young woman -- willowy, shapely, graceful -- walking through the parking lot. If I'd been zeroed in on what my psyche was chattering about, instead of what was sensuously present in the outside world, I could have missed her.

The research findings seem pretty obvious. But often we miss the obvious in our searching for happiness.

"Unlike other animals, human beings spend a lot of time thinking about what is not going on around them, contemplating events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or will never happen at all," the authors of the study, Harvard doctoral student Matthew Killingsworth and psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, write in the new paper. And that unique ability, they found, does not make for a happier species.

A few years ago I wrote a blog post with one of my favorite titles: "Chipmunk stalking, Kentucky TV, and Benzedrine." The theme was focus -- whether canine, fire-watching, or drug-aided. I ended with some thoughts that are echoed by the recent research.

Focus. Concentration. Being in the moment, no matter how much or how little is happening.

Why is this so easy for dogs and chipmunks? And for people in altered states of consciousness, like when they're sitting around a fire on a warm summer night? Or hosing cannery pulp into drains under the influence of a post-midnight Benzedrine?

Those little white amphetamine-filled pills were what got me through an otherwise shitty job at a San Jose cannery during one of my college summers.

My night shift was cleanly divided into two halves: unhappy and happy, the demarcation being when, after a "lunch" break at 3 am or so, I'd pop a bennie into my mouth.

Ah, what a difference some amphetamine would make! Sometimes my job would be to put on a rain suit, stand under the conveyor belts on which fruit pulp was dripping, and use a high pressure hose to direct the pulp into drains.

I hated the job pre-Benzedrine. Afterwards, I loved it. It was endlessly fascinating to train the water just so, artfully directing the spray to maximum pulp-washing effect. (Others, like W.H. Auden, have applied Benzedrine toward more creative pursuits.)

I'd also use Benzedrine as a study aid for sleep-inducing classes like Statistics. I remember preparing for a test where I could have read about T-tests all night, the normal curve and levels of significance being so astoundingly interesting.

Just like inching your way toward a chipmunk for almost an hour and a half can be, if you're a prey-obsessed canine. Or like watching an outdoor fire can be, if you're with pleasant company (which can be only yourself), the air is warm, and the stars are bright.

Simple pleasures, drug aided or not, often are the most satisfying. Frequently we forget this in our quest for the next exciting thing, as we're multi-entertaining our way through the day and night.

Learning the Hustle offers lesson in living

For me, learning how to dance means a lot more than just gaining some skills in moving around the hardwood to music. After all, life is a dance. And dancing is part of life.

Last night Laurel and I had a private Hustle lesson with Lora at Salem's RJ Dance Studio. Lora has an impressive background in dance and music. At this stage in our dancing lessons, her central critique of me -- which is entirely accurate -- is that often I don't follow the beat or rhythm of a dance.

I'm pretty good at getting steps down, though. With all the katas/forms I've learned in twenty years or so of martial arts training, I can visualize patterns pretty well, and hook them together fairly smoothly and spontaneously.

My downfall is rhythm, because unlike Lora, I'm musically handicapped. Early on in our lesson Lora pointed out how I wasn't making each of the two "quick" steps in Hustle dancing twice as fast as the two "slow" steps.

She said that this is the most important thing in dancing: respecting the character of a particular dance. A waltz and a foxtrot share many of the same patterns, but the rhythm is different. They shouldn't look the same (though when I dance them, sometimes they do).

It got a little irritating when Lora agreed with Laurel's suggestion: "I should count out the rhythm aloud until Brian gets it." So for quite a while I had to listen to sloooow, sloooow, quick, quick, sloooow, sloooow, quick, quick.

(Obviously it doesn't work to just say "slow, slow, quick, quick" if each of those words is uttered at the same speed, which is another problem I'm prone to.)

Here's a connection between dance and life as a whole: Lora told us that if you keep to the rhythm of a song, it doesn't matter a whole lot what steps you take. I notice this on "Dancing With the Stars" and "So You Think You Can Dance."

Sometimes a Cha-Cha, or whatever, will hardly have any moves that are traditional in the dance. At least, I don't see ones I'm familiar with. But the performers are so skilled, they make the dance look great by sticking with the rhythm while doing some wild and crazy (to a traditionalist) steps.

On the dance floor, I get focused on steps, just as in life, I get focused on the activities that I'm doing. I often lose my focus on simply moving to the rhythm -- of a song, or of my inner drummer, as Thoreau put it.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Sure, sticking to patterns is important. Movement with either a dance partner or what life requires of us each day would be difficult, if not impossible, without habits, repeated steps, familiar routines.

But what makes dancing, and living, genuinely pleasurable isn't what we're doing, but how we're doing it. Once Laurel and I took a dance lesson from a woman who looked like she was dancing even when she walked "normally."

Actually, the way she walked wasn't normal at all, in the sense of average. Every step she took was with a dancer's style. Assured, confident, balanced, sensuous. Just walking across the floor at the start of the class screamed Dancer!!

She didn't need to introduce herself as the instructor. One look at one step of hers told me, "This woman knows how to move."

We all can do this, just as Thoreau said, by stepping to the music that we hear. Even, or especially, if it is different from what everyone around us is moving to. Now, this may seem at odds with what I said before about sticking to the rhythm of a dance. But it really isn't.

Lora had me fill in a blank last night. She said, "The reason it is really important for the man to keep the rhythm of a dance is because..."? I knew the answer: "He's the leader!"

"Right," she told me. "So, do it."

When you're moving with another person on the dance floor, or in life, there has to be common ground between you.

Harmony. Mutually acceptable patterns. When I raise Laurel's hand, that's a signal for her to turn. I know that; she knows that. We move to the beat of the same music, following steps familiar to both of us.

However, in life as a whole there is much more opportunity for individualism. Writing this blog post while drinking a glass of red wine, I'm dancing with myself, with my own thoughts. My wife is in another room, doing her own thing.

I never really know what I'm going to write when I start writing, just as I don't really know what I'm going to do when I start on my day's to-do list.

What matters -- or rather, should matter -- is how well I'm able to flow from one moment to another, maintaining at least a semblance of the harmony, energy, passion, and centeredness I saw in every step the aforementioned dance instructor took.

By the end of last night's lesson I was feeling much more comfortable with the Hustle than when I walked in the door of the RJ Dance Studio. I'd only learned a few new moves, but my improved ability to move to the disco'ish music was what made our dancing more fun.

I drove home listening to Generation Disco 2, an inexpensive iTunes album that I'd downloaded to my iPhone for Hustle practicing. It was happy music, and I was in a happy mood.

Sticking to the beat will do that -- bring happiness. Listen to the music, whether it is playing through speakers or your own mind. Focus on the essential rhythm and don't worry too much about what specific steps you're taking.

Just dance. The steps will take care of themselves.

A vegetarian kills a squirrel. And cries.

I haven't eaten a bite of meat in over forty years. Yet today I killed an innocent animal.

A gray squirrel, which I mistook for a not-innocent California ground squirrel -- who are continuing to drive us nutty (their newest trick is chewing voraciously on the bark of several much beloved trees in our yard, which could kill them if they're girdled.)

When my air gun arrived last year, I talked about how bad I felt when, as a pellet gun toting kid, I shot a songbird.

Today was no different when I found that the smallish squirrel that had been eating seeds on our lawn was a young gray squirrel -- I couldn't see the white patch on its belly, and its fur wasn't as darkly distinctive as that belonging to mature members of its species.

After I shot the squirrel, it struggled for life until I finished it off. Burying it in the brush, I kept saying "I'm sorry, I'm sorry" while tears flowed. I don't cry often. But the anguish of causing pain to an animal who didn't deserve it overwhelmed my emotional circuitry.

Animal suffering is a central theme of Jonathan Safran Foer's "Eating Animals," a book that I downloaded onto my laptop and read as a Kindle for the Mac test. (Verdict: pretty unsatisfying experience; but that's another subject.)

Foer says, "On average, Americans eat the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime." Since I only ate animals up to the age of 20, one quarter of a normal life expectancy, I've got about 15,000 unslaughtered animals on the plus side of my karmic account.

So maybe I shouldn't feel so awful about slipping up on the gray squirrel kill -- especially since it met its end in a much more humane manner than chickens, pigs, turkeys, and other animals raised on factory farms do.

If you're a meat-eater, I dare you to read "Eating Animals." After all, If you're going to be responsible for killing 21,000 animals during your lifetime, you should know how they're raised and slaughtered.

Here's an excerpt from a review of Foer's book:

As in Dante, Eating Animals’s most powerful moments come in hell: Foer’s depiction of the factory-farming system is brutal and thorough—strong enough, I imagine, to win some converts.

He describes genetically freakish animals, some of whom can’t walk or mate, living in tiny cages in windowless sheds, suffering ritual mutilation and sloppy slaughtering (many of them end up getting boiled or skinned alive).

Unprofitable babies are immediately disposed of: electrocuted, thrown into a chipper, bashed headfirst into a concrete floor, or (in the case of irrelevant male dairy calves) sold to veal farmers. Slaughterhouse workers go crazy with sadism; toxic lakes of manure poison the environment.

None of this is new, but, as Foer puts it, “we have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness.”

The sheer brutality of the system seems to have pushed our centuries-long stalemate to a tipping point: Factory farming has become its own most powerful counterargument. And that transcends all cutesiness.

As Foer’s guide at the turkey farm tells him, “The truth is so powerful in this case it doesn’t even matter what your angle is.”

No time or inclination to read "Eating Animals"? OK, then take just a few minutes and read Elizabeth Kolbert's review in The New Yorker. It might make you pause at the meat counter before throwing your usual package of animal into the grocery cart.

Americans love animals. Forty-six million families in the United States own at least one dog, and thirty-eight million keep cats. Thirteen million maintain freshwater aquariums in which swim a total of more than a hundred and seventy million fish. Collectively, these creatures cost Americans some forty billion dollars annually.

...Americans also love to eat animals. This year, they will cook roughly twenty-seven billion pounds of beef, sliced from some thirty-five million cows. Additionally, they will consume roughly twenty-three billion pounds of pork, or the bodies of more than a hundred and fifteen million pigs, and thirty-eight billion pounds of poultry, some nine billion birds.

Most of these creatures have been raised under conditions that are, as Americans know—or, at least, by this point have no excuse not to know—barbaric.

Dog and cat videos show humans how to live

We humans are animals. That's a fact. Biologically, we're members of the Kingdom Animalia. Dogs and cats are our kissing cousins (in a sense).

Today I came across two You Tube videos featuring a dog and a cat that made me realize how much other animals have to teach us.

Since for most of my life I've shared a home with dogs and/or cats, I already knew this. But these videos had a special message for me -- maybe because I'm becoming increasingly attracted to wordless wisdom, the lingua franca of pets and us.

Last night my wife said she'd read about "street dogs" in Greece who had taken part in the demonstrations that are commonplace in that country. Firing up Google this morning, I found this video of "The Legendary Athens Greece Riot Dog."

What struck me was how this "dumb" animal seemed so much smarter than the angry groups opposing each other. Frequently the dog is shown standing between the riot police and the demonstrators, looking doggishly detached, pleased to simply be part of things.

In short, a Taoist sage.

This is the way of life of the sage who has reached a higher point of view, a perspective from which the relativity and polar relationship of all opposites are clearly perceived. These opposites include, first and foremost, the concepts of good and bad which are interrelated in the same way as yin and yang. Recognizing the relativity of good and bad, and thus of all moral standards, the Taoist sage does not strive for the good but rather tries to maintain a dynamic balance between good and bad.

The dog does a great job at that. He wags his tail at police and protesters alike. I only wish I could be as accepting of disparate points of view.

Then, a perusal of my Twitter feeds led me to one of those million-plus-viewed viral videos. The Tweet said that this video of a cat attending to an injured fellow feline had made the person cry. 

No kidding. There's more emotion in the first thirty seconds than I could comfortably handle. But I managed to watch the whole thing.

This is life. Human life. Cat life. Every sort of life. It begins, and it ends. When death approaches, it usually hurts. Sometimes a lot.

I can't know what the cat is feeling. But I know what I felt watching the cat attend to it's injured companion. I can't put that into words -- yet I'm sure you understand what the feeling is, because we've all lost someone deeply cared for.

The cat is in Turkey. Some Googling led me to a web page about the cat story that I couldn't read, not being particularly fluent in Turkish. Thanks to Google Translator, I sort of could.

And learned that the injured female cat didn't survive. Sad. But that's life as it often is: sad. We try to paper over the hurt with trite greeting card sentimentality, reassuring religious platitudes, and other means.

I think the cat expressed what life is about more honestly.

Stepping from hard pavement onto soft earth

Every day the dog and I take a evening walk. Sometimes it's a two-mile loop on paved roads in our rural neighborhood. Other times we head off on paths on our property that lead to a trail around a lake.

I'm always struck by how different it feels to take even a single step on hard asphalt or concrete, compared to walking on much softer dirt or grass. I'm jarred by the one, relaxed by the other.

Nature is, well, natural.

So rather paradoxically, the relaxation I'm talking about is marked by an acute alertness, just as the jarring I feel as I walk on a hard artificial surface is marked by a certain somnolence.

Meaning, I can't assume that I know what's coming up on a dirt or grass path. Roots obtrude. Rocks obstruct. Vegetation entangles. Slopes can be slippery. On the road, I can daydream my way along, confident that the step I just took will be like the one coming up.

Which is, of course, not the way life goes.

We humans like to construct structures -- both outside in the world, and inside our minds -- that attempt to tame nature's wildness, smooth the cosmos' rough edges, straighten what is excessively crooked to us. 

It's sad to think that in our age of urbanization, not everybody has the chance to walk on an uneven natural path that I do. It's the best (and cheapest) therapy that I know. Unfailingly, I'm reminded that what supports me at every moment can change at any moment.

Asphalt roads are a deception. So are concrete sidewalks. Though physically real, they offer up a psychological illusion: that humankind can make life's journeying smooth, predictable, and relatively bump-free.

Browsing through the April 2010 issue of Scientific American today, I came across an article that started off with, "Early humans living about one million years ago were extremely close to extinction."

Analysis of ancient DNA shows that there may have been only a maximum of 55,000 proto-people alive back then. Another study points to only 2,000 humans being alive 70,000 years ago, likely because of massive droughts.

So, yeah, life is a bumpy path -- whether looked at from the big long-term picture or our own small individual viewpoint.

I enjoy being reminded of that whenever dog and I set off down a rough trail. I have to keep myself aware of where my feet are stepping next. I can't take for granted that I know how secure the next place I plant a foot will be.

Yesterday I was blogging away in my favorite wi-fi'd coffeehouse when I felt a tap on my shoulder and heard a "Hi, Brian."

There was an acquaintance, who I can easily call a friend -- someone I got to know when we took some classes together, but hadn't seen for quite a while. We'd had some philosophical conversations. So we easily bypassed chit-chat and jumped into Meaning of Life stuff.

"When you knew me before I was a devout Christian," he said. "I've been going through some changes. Now I feel comfortable with not being certain. It's a big weight off my shoulders."

Amen to that, brother, I thought. I was in the midst of writing a post for my other blog called "Atheists and agnostics are open-minded." So our conversation was right along the wavelength I already was on.

It's tempting to imagine that life can be along a well-defined line on solid ground from here to there. Roads and sidewalks promise this. So do religions of all sorts, not just the monotheistic varieties. (Buddhism, for example, claims to have a Way to nirvana or enlightenment.)

Well, maybe.

But every time I feel my foot sinking into a cushion of pine needles, sliding on some pebbles, or bumping into a tree root, I have a sense that this is the way life really is under the thin artificial surfaces we humans plaster over the natural world.

Uncertain. Continually changing. Out of our control.

And also:

Beautiful. Harmonious. Wonderfully walkable.

Doing nothing, do everything: Taoism is cool!

I'm a big fan of doing nothing.

My wife can testify to that, especially when she feels its time to attend to some household chores and I've got something less vigorous on my day's to-do list.

Like napping.

So I couldn't pass up going to a talk by Qiguang Zhao at Salem's Willamette University yesterday. I heard about it from a fellow Tai Chi student, who emailed me that Qiguang was going to speak about "Do Nothing and Do Everything."

From a Taoist perspective. Ah, nice.

I figured the talk would offer me more ammunition to fire at anyone who dared to consider that my seeming laziness was anything but a profound philosophical and spiritual stance.

Qiguang is the Chair of Asian Languages & Literature at Carleton College. He's written a book with the same name as his talk, contributing both the words and the illustrations.

I enjoyed the style and substance of Qiguang's talk. Taoism is about flowing with life, rather than fighting what's happening. A skilled Tai Chi practitioner, several times Qiguang used wordless movements to point to what can't be expressed in words.

I've written a lot about Taoism on my other blog, but I'm still trying to grasp the ungraspable nature of this profound,yet simple, philosophy. Here's my recollection of Qiguang's essential message -- an expansion of notes I took on my laptop.

In Tai Chi we trust the body, just as in Taoism we trust nature, which has its own rules. Often we needlessly worry in the present while fearing the future and regretting the past.

People think they are God, that events should happen as they desire. This creates guilt when the inevitable disconnect between what we intended and what happened occurs. We are part of the universe. We cannot control the world.

Recognizing that we are not separated from the cosmos, that our actions are part and parcel of everything and everyone in existence, we do nothing and do everything at the same time.

Meaning, action becomes relatively effortless when we surrender the notion that we are in charge ("relatively," because there are no absolutes; change is the only unchanging fact of life; movement in one direction inevitably ends, or takes a U-turn).

The Taoist religion evolved from Taoist philosophy. Religious Taoists believe it is possible to live forever and to fly. But we moderns have our own ways of living longer and of flying which aren't magical.

Confucianism is about details. Taoism is about the big picture. Both philosophies have co-existed in China for a long time, complementing each other. With so much increased stress in China now, many people are turning to Taoist practices such as Tai Chi for relaxation.

The Olympics motto is "faster, higher, stronger," reflecting Greek/Western philosophy. In Tai Chi, core movements are slower, shorter, and weaker, just the opposite. This fits with the Taoist emphasis on wu wei, effortless doing: yielding like water while being as strong as a crashing wave.

The most beautiful places are where two phenomena meet, like at the beach (land and sea). Also, when two cultures meet, such as when the modern meets the ancient, or East meets West.

Live afloat, like a boat loose from its moorings. Eat your fill and do what you will. Feel small, and your problems will be small. Take care (a Confucian sentiment) and do not tip the boat. Take it easy (a Taoist sentiment) and enjoy the scenery.

After Qiguang ended his talk, I asked him a question. I was curious about his extolling of imagination, since it seems that nature -- which Taoists emulate -- isn't at all imaginary.

In nature, something either is, or it isn't. There's no in-between. By contrast, I said, religions are full of imagination. People believe in an imaginary God. They imagine that Jesus saved them from sin and will take them to heaven after they die.

Since philosophical Taoism isn't a religion, why the emphasis on imagination?

Qiguang's answer was appealingly subtle. He agreed that nature is real. However, we can't know the essence of its reality, which is called "Tao." The Tao is wordless, beyond human conception.

So imagination fills the gap between the nameless and our propensity to name. We use our imagination in an attempt to understand what can't be understood, to gesture in the direction of the Tao -- even though there is nothing that can be pointed to.

What today taught me about life

Some days I feel like I've haven't learned anything about life. Other days, like today, I sense some sort of semi-coherent message in disparate events -- with some sort of being a pointer toward my basic cluelessness.

Which, of course, won't stop me from attempting to describe what today taught me. (If bloggers only wrote about what they were sure of, the blogosphere would become a word-vacuum.)

This morning I picked up a book I'd read a while back, "The Untethered Soul." Thumbing through the pages, I came across some highlighted passages that elicited a yes in my psyche.

Billions of things could happen that you haven't even thought of yet. The question is not whether they will happen. Things are going to happen. The real question is whether you want to be happy regardless of what happens. The purpose of your life is to enjoy and learn from your experiences. You were not put on Earth to suffer. You're not helping anyone by being miserable. Regardless of your philosophical beliefs, the fact remains that you were born and you are going to die. During the time in between, you get to choose whether or not you want to enjoy the experience.

And...

Learn to live as though you are facing death at all times, and you'll become bolder and more open. If you live life fully, you won't have any last wishes. You will have lived them every moment. Only then will you have fully experienced life and released the part of you that is afraid of living. There is no reason to be afraid of life.

And...

You have to understand that it is your attempt to get special experiences from life that makes you miss the actual experience of life. Life is not something you get; it's something you experience. Life exists with or without you. It has been going on for billions of years. You simply get the honor of seeing a tiny slice of it. If you're busy trying to get something, you will miss the slice you're actually experiencing.

Later, I headed for my MacBook laptop to check out what was happening in the big wonderful world of the Internet. Google Reader showed me the latest post of Rain, another Oregon blogger.

She wrote about energy, openness, being aware. And shared an image with some adapted lines of a Mary Oliver poem, "The Summer Day." 

The poem actually ends with...

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Well, that was an easy question to answer. It was 60 degrees. No rain in sight. I had to mail some letters, give 2009 tax info to our CPA, go to downtown Salem for my Tai Chi class.

The plan for my one wild and precious life was obvious: Scooter ride!

Some people (otherwise known as "my wife") call my purchase of the world's largest scooter, a Suzuki Burgman 650, a manifestation of a mid-life crisis. I only wish. Since I'm close to becoming eligible for Social Security, I see it more as an end-of-life crisis.

Regardless, mundane errands turn into fun on two motorized wheels.

As soon as I put on my gear, fired up the Burgman, and turned onto the two lane country road that, after six miles, would get me to the Salem city limits, I felt much more alive.

Like Mary Oliver said, I do know how to pay attention.

We all do. We just often lose sight of what life has placed right in front of us. The mind wanders. Perceptions get split between all our multi-taskings.

On a scooter or motorcycle, attention comes front and center -- because the rider knows that if his or her awareness isn't mindful of all the cars and other possible dangers (deer, dogs, potholes, oily spots, etc. etc.), the fall down Oliver speaks of won't be pleasantly voluntary.

I parked on Court Street. Backed my scooter into a diagonal space in front of a beauty school.

Three female students were shooting the breeze, and blowing cigarette smoke, on a bench a few feet away from where I was stowing my helmet and jacket under the seat, replacing the backpack that I carry my Tai Chi shoes in.

One of the girls looked at me after my jacket was off. "Hey, I've got that exact same shirt! It's cool. I love the design, the trees." "Me too," I said. "My wife got it for me." "Must have been Fred Meyer," the girl told me.

We agreed that we both had excellent clothing taste: long-sleeved black 100% cotton, made in India, semi-Goth (in a New Age'y way) gray nature design.

I shared a thought, though: "Since young people mostly wear this sort of shirt, I've worried a bit that some kid who has one will see me, an old guy, with it on and decide that he can never wear his again."

But then I added, "Old is just a frame of mind, though. We're as old as we feel, right?" The girl agreed, saying, "Yeah, I'm thirty. Physically I'm more like thirty-four. Inside, however, I feel seventeen. So I'm never going to die!"

My logical male mind quickly ran through some responses. Hmmmm. If she felt mentally half as old as she felt physically, then if she lived to be 100, she'd feel 50. Or did she mean that she'd always feel like she was seventeen?

I settled on, "Well, at least you won't die mentally. Physically, I wouldn't count on that." Eyeing my longish hair, the girl asked if I was headed for a beauty school haircut. "No, sorry. I've got to get to my Tai Chi class."

She said she'd watch my "bike" for me. It was nice to make a connection with someone a lot unlike me, and also a lot like me. I also feel seventeen much of the time. Hope I always will.

In Tai Chi one of the themes was staying centered. Which doesn't mean fixed in place.

Just the opposite. When you have your center, you can move in any direction. Tai Chi speaks of "eight directions," N, S, E, W and the four directions in between those quadrants.

But really there's a limitless number of directions.

In Tai Chi, as in dance, as in life, we can move so many ways. It all depends on circumstances and what we want to do. Physically, perhaps we are constrained by a bad hip, arthritis, or some other impediment.

Mentally, any limitation largely is of our own making. We're free to plan what we want to do with our one wild and precious life. And then, to do it. Question is: what "it"?

The older I get, the longer I've lived, the less important this rather than that seems. I mean, I used to feel that living life fully meant doing something big, grand, earthshaking, monumental. I wanted to change the world, or at least Oregon, or at least my neighborhood.

Mary Oliver wrote a poem about holding a grasshopper.

This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

That's life too. Feeding a grasshopper sugar out of one's hand. With attention. With awareness.

I love how I feel the bumps in the road while riding my scooter. How smells enter my helmet in ways unknown to car drivers. How coming to a stop isn't merely a matter of braking with one foot, but involves both hands and feet, four appendages working together to bring me to a balanced state of centered rest, after which a twist of the throttle means I now can go -- any way.

Scootering home today, coming over the last large hill on Liberty Road, I saw two lights close together approaching. A motorcycle. We were the only vehicles on the road. He extended his hand in the motorcycle wave as we passed, as did I. 

For some reason (there's that clueless some sort of again) I felt deeply moved at our gestures. Two helmeted strangers passing each other at fifty miles an hour on a beautiful rural Oregon road, a brief extension of our left hands bridging the gap between us in some fashion I can't describe.

As did Mary Oliver's poem. And Rain's blog post. And the smoking beauty parlor student's comment on the shirt we had in common. And my Tai Chi teacher's thoughts on centering.

I don't know what's going on. I don't know what life is all about. But I learned something today. I just don't know what it is.

Life lessons from Michael Jackson's "This Is It"

Whether or not someone has a philosophical bone in their body, he or she likely will enjoy "This Is It" -- a documentary featuring rehearsal footage of Michael Jackson preparing for a monumental concert tour.

I do have philosophical bones. And they loved this well-reviewed movie as much as the non-pondering side of me.

Over on my other blog I opined that "This Is It" is a great movie. Also, a terrific philosophy. We're always waiting for It to arrive in the future, or wondering what happened to It in the past.

Meanwhile, life -- It -- keeps yelling "Here I am! Here! Now!" in the present moment. But often we don't have ears to hear it.

This is the main message that I got from the movie. Your results may differ. Side effects may vary.

Regardless, I heartily recommend going to see "This Is It" while it's still playing in a theater with a big screen and Dolby sound (it won't be the same on your TV, believe me). If nothing else, you'll get an impression of Michael Jackson that will be different from whatever you had before.

My wife and I left the theater feeling that Jackson was a genuinely nice guy. Previously I'd put him in my mental box of "weird tortured artists" with strange peccadilloes, like young boys.

This sort of typecasting doesn't reflect the rich complexity of people.

I don't like it when right-wingers sum up our president with one word: he's a socialist. Nor did I like it when my fellow progressives said about George Bush: he's an idiot. (I'd point out that he got a MBA from the Harvard Business School, which idiots can't do.)

I've been surprised at some highly negative comments about Michael Jackson in response to my other blog post about the movie. One guy said that he was selfish. However, it's estimated that Jackson gave over $500 million to charitable causes.

"Selfish," or any other term, can't come close to summing up a human being. Each of us is unsummable. There's no way to add up any set of qualities and arrive at a total that equals Me. Or You. Or Anybody.

Sure, Histories 'R Us to a large extent. We're creatures of our past.

In the movie Michael Jackson carried the record of his plastic surgeries on his face. And reflected his astounding musical career with every note he sang and step he danced. But what really grabbed me as I watched "This Is It" was...

It. The moment. The here-and-now of Jackson captured on film. Which produced a corresponding feeling of It in me.

Michael Jackson had sung the songs -- "Billy Jean," "Beat It," "Black and White," and so on -- that were to be in the show countless times. But the rehearsal footage showed how Jackson was able to seemingly sing them for the first time, every time.

This unscripted documentary showed me a side of Jackson that hadn't been very apparent to me in all the other times I'd seen him perform onscreen: how his music was him, and he was his music.

Now. Always now.

At one point he tells the musicians and other performers that they'll need to wait for his cue before moving to a certain part of a song. Because he was feeling the music say pause -- it's marvelous how Jackson moves between movement and stillness -- and only he knew how to listen to the saying.

I had the sense that if Michael Jackson hadn't died, and "This Is It" had gone on its 50-date tour, almost every performance of a song would have been subtly different.

He was a highly creative artist. Jackson was creating life at each and every moment. We can quibble with his choices, his creations, his art work. But the movie is a reminder that for each of us, no matter what we do or who we are...

This

Is

It.

(Richard Corliss of TIME has an interesting review of the movie. So does Roger Ebert.)

What makes something "fun"?

Some would say that nothing is less fun than pondering the question, "What is fun?" However, I'm the sort of person who enjoys ponders, and fun is about enjoyment, so I'll press on.

I got to thinking about fun recently by -- no big surprise -- having fun!

This year Laurel and I broke our usual no Halloween costume habit. Salem's RJ Dance Studio invited people to costume-up at a Friday night open dance. So, we did.

  Laurel was a creative vision in blue, accessorizing with a feather boa and over the top makeup.

I took a more minimalist approach, my costume shopping having been limited to picking up a black mullet wig at WalMart for $8. After adding a hunting cap, shades, and Harley t-shirt I told anyone who asked, plus some who didn't, that I was a rural Oregon meth lab operator.

At any rate, we had fun with our get-ups, notwithstanding the fact that we were the only people at the dance in costumes. I felt like we danced better than usual, having a lot of fun (that word again!), but that might just be the meth contact high speaking.

Then, today sun and semi-warm temperature (50's) led me to fire up my Suzuki Burgman 650 maxi-scooter and two-wheel around for several enjoyable hours. It'd been a week or so since I'd ridden my scooter.

As soon as I hit the main road and opened up the throttle, my mind screamed Wow, this is so much fun!

Putting on a Halloween costume. Ballroom dancing. Scootering. What's the fun-connection that ties them all together? I've got some answers, but they come with a caveat:

I'm just talking about me. At my ripe age of 61 (I hope I never have to say "rotting"), one bit of wisdom I've learned is that fun, like happiness, is almost entirely idiosyncratic.

In the 60's -- the decade, not my age -- we were fond of saying, "If it feels good, do it." That's still excellent advice, so long as some practicalities are taken into consideration. If what feels good is your boss's spouse, and you want to keep your job, some other sort of fun should be contemplated.

I've read several books about the nature of happiness and how to be happier. None made much of an impression on me. I'm especially skeptical of the oft-heard adage that real happiness is more like calm bliss than passionate fun.

Who says?

If having fun makes me happy, assuming there is any difference between "fun" and "happy," then I need to have more fun. I used to believe that sitting cross-legged in meditation would make me happy. Now I've taken to meditating less and dancing more.

I feel happier. Because dancing is fun. As is scootering and dressing up as a different persona. I come back to why? For me, and maybe only me...

Flowing is fun. Thinking too much makes me feel jagged, rough, jumpy, uncertain. Just doing it without excessive ratiocination, no matter what the "it" is, fills me with energy, confidence, smoothness, connectivity.

For a few moments Friday night I wondered whether my costume was too stupid to wear to the dance. Then I felt, who cares, I want to do it. And proceeded to do it. 

Ditto with taking the lead in ballroom dancing. In our several years of lessons I've learned that hesitancy is the kiss of dance death for the leader (usually, a man). It's better to make a wrong move than no move at all.

Plus, it's a lot more fun to take decisive charge of your partner than to waffle around wondering what to do next.

Same applies on a scooter or motorcycle, even more so. If your mind wanders on two non-air-bagged wheels, uncertain whether to move this way or that way when a dangerous situation demands instant action, your next move could be sliding along the pavement.

Focusing is fun. Flowing and focusing might seem at odds, but they aren't for me. When my mind is divided, pulled in several directions at once, I feel neither in the flow nor focused.

In this regard, and going back to the 60's, Benzedrine and Preludin taught me a lot (now, strong coffee is my stimulant of choice). Namely, that just about anything is fun when you're zeroed in on just that thing.

I didn't enjoy the statistics course I had to take for my psychology major. But after popping a "bennie," I remember being utterly fascinated by t-tests and the normal distribution. It was just me and my statistics book for several concentrated fun hours of studying -- no monkey mind jumping around with distracting "this is boring!" chatter.

Ballroom dancing, I've got to attend to the music, to the dance style, to my partner, to other couples. Scootering, I've got to watch out (more so than when driving a car) for other vehicles, imperfections in the pavement, angle and lean of curves.

It's fun to just be in the moment. Not remembering or worrying about the past or future. Simply doing this, now. Then, that. Now.

Buddhists call this mindfulness, I think. But I don't want to over-think flowing and focusing. This blog post has flowed along quite smoothly, my focus aided by -- what else? -- a strong cup of coffee.

In my book about the Greek philosopher Plotinus, I started off the "Happiness is Here" chapter with a sentence that popped out of my mind in a flash, but which I didn't really understand.

Or even entirely agree with. But I left it in the book, because it seemed so true.

In the present moment, you and I are as happy as we will ever be.

So have fun. Now, the only time it will be possible.

Ageless consciousness or perpetual immaturity?

I don't feel my age (60). But when I ponder my inner sense of self, it seems that I don't feel any age.

That said, often I'll admit to having an adolescent personality. But since I'm a man, this pretty much is taken for granted. (Witness my instant infatuation with iFart.)

Plus, it's obvious that if we're going to feel like we're a different age than what we are, it's going to be a younger age, since we have no experience with being older. So when people say "I don't feel my age," I suspect they're referring to what I said above:

Consciousness doesn't have an age, though the body does.

This explains the strange disconnect that shimmered through my psyche this afternoon. I was chatting with Troy, the guy who is drilling a new well for us, during a noise-free break to grease some machinery.

In the course of talking about this country's screwed up health care system I mentioned that in less than five years I'd be eligible for Medicare.

As soon as those words left my mouth I thought, "Who the hell are you talking about? It can't be me. Medicare? Me???!!!"

The weird thing, of course, is that "I," "you," and "me" were all the same person -- the guy who is writing this blog post. But like all of us, I come in various guises, which accounts for the feeling that there's more than one of me hanging around.

Social Security thinks that I'm sixty years old. So do I, sometimes. Such as when I look at the age spots on my hands. Or my gray beard.

But ordinarily I don't feel any particular age.

If I shut my eyes, ignoring my hands and the rest of my body (aside from a basic internal sensation of being embodied), I can't discern any difference between how I remember feeling at sixteen and my current sixty'ishness.

Along this line, there are indeed disgusting lecherous "dirty old men." However, if consciousness is ageless, old is a chronological rather than psychological phenomenon.

Meaning, men (and women also) don't have a feeling of being a certain age. So when a older guy acts toward a sweet young thing as if he were part of her generation, at that moment he might very well feel that he is.

On a more elevated note, likely this ageless consciousness sensation helps explain the widespread belief in an immortal soul.

Since my internal feeling of "I" doesn't seem to grow older, it's easy to see why people would jump to the conclusion that the essential me continues on unchanged after death. 

As this "Non-aging consciousness" essay believes: 

Consciousness does not age, ever. You may not appreciate this statement until one day you realize that you ‘still feel young’, which of course tells you that your body has aged. The ‘still feeling young’ is consciousness reminding you that no matter how old you are consciousness is ageless. You always feel the same age regardless of how old your body is.

From your first day upon this planet to your last, consciousness remains perpetually constant: another indication of your spirit reality. Consciousness is the only constant you have, everything else is in continuous change. The material or physical is that constant change; it is in unceasing alteration, never remaining consistent. This is the world of the physical and it ages. The world of spirit on the other hand is ageless. It is complete in itself. Consciousness never alters; everything alters around or within it.

Well, maybe. Seems that way now, but after death we might simply be nothing -- neither ageless nor aged.

Lusting our way into older age

It's starting to happen. That moment I've been fearing for the latter part of my 59 years. Which happened today at Salem's LifeSource Natural Foods.

Though spoken softly by the clerk, I could hear him clearly. Even with my aging ears."Would you like the discount?" I ignored the guy. Kept on with swiping my VISA card.

I thought, Dude! The sign at every register says "Ask for our senior discount: 62 years and older." For one, am I asking??!! For two, do I look anywhere near 62? Come on!"

Well, I guess I do. But I've got no intention of sliding gently into older age. I don't feel a day over 29, most of the time. It's my graying visage that gives me away, not my decidedly immature psyche.

To my (still sharp) mind, that's how it should be. Our lust for life will take on different forms as the years pass. But there's no reason why it can't remain as strong as ever.

With summer here in Oregon, motorcycles have emerged from their rainy-day cocoons. The unmistakable sound of Harleys fills the air around the downtown Starbucks, where black clad weekend road warriors park their bikes and sip lattes at the outdoor tables.

I'm feeling the two-wheel open-air spirit myself. Memories of my exciting Yamaha Seca II days, quite a few years ago, flood back into my present mundane Toyota Prius'ized driving awareness.

But I'm not a Harley guy. No longer even a motorcycle guy, probably. I find myself Googling high-powered scooters, like the cool Suzuki Burgman 650 Executive. Shiftless, anti lock brakes, adjustable windscreen! Ahhhh….

A neighbor came by a few days ago to show off his newly purchased 2001 Miata. I got to drive it. Cool. After market exhaust pipes. Engine modifications. Shiny silver roll bar to match the car's color. Frank said that buying it can't be the mark of a mid-life crisis, because he's too old for that.

Plus, he said that his wife told him, "If a sports car isn't red, it's not a mid-life crisis." I added, "Also, if the person sitting in the car's passenger seat isn't a cute blonde less than half your age (and not your daughter)."

Along that line, today a guy friend – not quite as old as me, but getting there – remarked that he likes the age he's at because more women look attractive to him. I said, "That makes sense, because when you were young most women were older than you; now, they're younger, because you're approaching geezer status, like me."

We agreed that becoming a dirty old man was something to look forward to, even though it'll mean being entitled to a senior discount at LifeSource.

Then there's the unexpected lusts arising out of the blue, drawing me to visit sites on the Internet that I'd never thought would attract me. Like, this one (mature eyes only, please).

I learned about this central Oregon retirement community via a comment left on one of my blog posts, "Why can't Salem be more like Bend?" I couldn't resist finding its online presence and poking around for a while.

Not that we're close to leaving our non-easy care ten rural acres. Still, I used to think, "They'll have to pry my DR Field and Brush Mower from my cold dead hands." And now Laurel and I find ourselves at least envisioning the day when dealing with all the complexities of small acreage country life gets to be too much for us.

I liked how Touchmark at Mt. Bachelor Village markets itself as a resort retirement community – a place where mountain biking is going to have more appeal for many (or most) than playing bingo.

For the outdoor enthusiast, Touchmark offers unlimited activities. You will enjoy easy River Trail access, walking and bicycling paths, fishing, and snowshoeing—right outside your door. You are a half-hour's drive from Mt. Bachelor ski resort, one of the finest in the country, and a shorter drive to area golf courses. The much-touted Athletic Club of Bend is close by as is the renowned Drake Park and wonderful indoor/outdoor shopping experiences in downtown Bend.

Yeah, I can see us being into all that stuff. Someday. For now, we're too youthful to be part of the crowd shown in this Touchmark photo. But we're getting there.

I just want it to be as slowly as possible. Graduating from a San Francisco bay area college in 1971, right after the Flower Power era, I remember feeling anxious that I'd lose touch with happening youth and become the sort of "straight" person that I was rebelling against.

To some extent, that's happened. As is natural. Fifty-nine isn't twenty-two, no matter how much we baby boomers want to keep alive the magic of the sixties (the decade, not the age).

Yet here I am, cruising onto YouTube, searching for "Suzuki Burgman 650 Executive," and being enthralled by a video of a guy on a powerful scooter driving way too fast, and way too recklessly, on some way narrow and way crowded European streets.

He gets pulled over at the end. Like we all will, by the halting hand of death. But until then…let's not lose our lust for life and willingness to push the edges.

Atheism isn’t a religion, Thom Hartmann

Usually I agree with Portland's Thom Hartmann, Air America's progressive talk show host. But this morning he kept saying that atheism is a religion – that not believing in God is a belief system.

That's ridiculous. It shows that no matter how smart and articulate Hartmann is, he's got some blind spots. Those logic-obscurers likely stem from his Christianity.

Not being a regular listener of Hartmann, I didn't know before today that he's a Christian. But he told a caller that he prays every day. And not to some universal being, but to a personal God.

This probably explains why Hartmann has fallen prey to one of the myths about atheism: that it is a religion. Over on my Church of the Churchless blog I regularly argue with commenters who claim that not believing in God is as much a belief as believing in God.

Huh? I point out that there is a huge difference between (1) not believing, and (2) believing, in the existence of something.

To assert otherwise is to engage in a form of sophistry where words don't mean anything. Sure, you can say that for many people "golf is a religion" or "watching Lost is a religion."

But this just means that they regularly engage in those activities. Like atheists frequently thinking, "I don't believe in God."

By that token, everything that humans do is a religion, rendering the word meaningless. This is one of the points of an excellent piece, "If atheism is religion, 'albino' is a suntan."

The author does a terrific job debunking the notion that atheism is a religion.

If someone asked you about unicorns, would you say "I believe there are no unicorns", or would it be more honest to say "I do not believe in unicorns"? These are two different answers. Nobody disbelieves in unicorns purely as a matter of personal faith.

Again, apply the same reasoning to the Gods of other religions. Example : if you are a Christian, do you believe the Hindu God Ganesh does not exist? Or do you not believe in Ganesh?

If you believe that unicorns do not exist, then may I say that you are a member of the "No unicorns" religion? Is it a matter of faith that unicorns do not exist? Can I come along to your non-unicorn church with you tomorrow?

If you are a Christian, do you believe Ganesh does not exist? Why, then you must be a devout follower of the "No Ganesh" faith!

Do you see where this is going? [ Sarcasm may be the lowest form of wit, but it's excellent for getting a point across. 8-) ]

If me not believing in your God is a faith, then you not believing in other Gods is an equal faith. How many Christians do you know who would say they do not believe in other Gods as a matter of faith?

If my atheism with respect to your deity is a religion, then your atheism with respect to other deities is also a religion.

Thom Hartmann, are you listening?

Atheists should be revered, not discriminated against

O' Oregon, I love you because you're (relatively) godless. And now here we have the Brookings Elks Lodge banning a sweet eighty year old woman from the premises because she's an atheist.

This smacks of the Bible Belt, not the Live Green and Mainline Lattes Belt. Deeply disturbing.

Today Oregonian columnist Margie Boulé had a follow-up. In "Atheists run up against 'last bias'" she points out that Americans say they'll vote for all sorts of presidential candidates, but not someone who fails to profess a belief in God.

A recent poll conducted by USA Today/Gallup found that Americans are overwhelmingly willing to vote for a presidential candidate who is an African American, a woman, a Catholic or a Latino. A solid majority would vote for a candidate who is Mormon, who is a homosexual, who has been married three times or who is 72 years old. The only category that did not break 50 percent? Atheists.

As I said in my "Leave God out of the Super Bowl" post, the United States is way behind more enlightened European countries in this regard.

I have some friends who visit Europe regularly. They tell me that there it would be almost inconceivable for a politician to make his or her belief in God a campaign issue. It just doesn't come up. But here, an admitted unbeliever probably couldn't be elected to a major office. This isn't something the United States should be proud of. It's a defect, not a virtue.

The Elks are a good example of how religion contributes to hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness, not morality. The Elks web site claims that they stand for "the principles of Charity, Justice, Brotherly Love and Fidelity." But their charity and brotherly love stops if an elderly woman says she doesn't believe in God.

Crazy. Apparently Billie Sieg would have been acceptable to the Elks if she'd lied and told them that she was a believer. But she was honest. Boulé writes:

Oh, it's not like she stands on street corners, trying to persuade others that God does not exist. She's a quiet atheist. "In today's world a belief in God can take a lot of forms. I happen to be an unbeliever in supernatural deities, but I do believe in Mother Nature" and the holiness of "the world around us."

Sieg sounds like a Buddhist or Taoist to me. I suspect that if she'd responded to the Elks interviewer, "I believe in the god of Buddhism," she'd be enjoying the social activities in the lodge now.

Religious discrimination, after all, is a no-no in American culture. Unless someone doesn't believe in a traditional religion at all. Then it's fine to discriminate against them.

Someday, and that day can't come soon enough for me, this attitude will be seen as the pre-scientific relic of mythology that it is. A-theists are just people who don't see any evidence for a demonstrably unseen God.

Unicorns also are unseen. So a-unicornists are ubiquitous. As are a-fairyists and a-Big Footists.

However, Elks Lodges don't bar the door to people who say they don't believe in unicorns, fairies, and Big Foot – because these entities aren't revered by the majority of Americans.

God also likely is non-existent. At least, there's no proof of God's existence, which puts the supreme deity in the same epistemological class as fairies. Something which makes people feel good, but lacks standing in objective reality.

So we all should bow down to the courageous believers in truth like Billie Sieg and Sylvia Benner who refuse to accept religious absurdities just because they're the majority opinion.

Majorities often are wrong. At one time almost everyone used to believe that the Earth was flat, slavery was justified, and women were second-class citizens.

Before too long students will read in history books about the not-so-good old days when citizens of the United States were discriminated against because they didn't believe in God. And they'll think, How could this ever have happened? What were they thinking?

Not much, sadly. Not down in the Brookings Elks Lodge, in 2008.

How to make time slow down

Time speeds up as you get older. Almost everyone I know says this is true. I sure do. And it's damn unfair.

Why should children, who have their whole lives ahead of them, experience time moving more slowly than semi-geezers like me (I'm 59), who don't have anywhere near as long to live?

I frequently feel like screaming, Hey life! Flip things around! Those kids should be the ones who sense time flying by, while older people get to string out the days they have left.

One of my best friends from elementary and high school died recently. He was, obviously, my age. I was sad to learn about his death from cancer. And I was jerked into a realization that what happened to him could happen to me.

Dying anytime. You never know how long you've got. So slowing down time to make my remaining moments seem like they're lasting longer strikes me as an excellent proposition.

So today I ventured onto Google, figuring that it would be easy to take my first step: learning why time speeds up the older we get.

Once I knew that, I'd be closer to understanding how to slow time down. But I was surprised by the dearth of solid information Google's results brought me.

I found quite a few references to the obvious notion that when we're three years old, another year adds a third to our life experience, so it seems like a long time. But by the time we're fifty, a year is just 2% of the life we've already lived, so it isn't noticed to nearly the same degree – flitting by as a mere 1/50^th would.

However, even though there likely is some truth to this, there's nothing that can be done about it. I can't change how long I've lived. So I Googled on.

And came to a promising-sounding book title: "Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past."

You'd think that the author would have an answer to the "why." But another review of the book by a physician said:

So why does life appear to speed up as we get older? This is a perception that most of us who are older than 50 regularly experience—particularly at anniversaries of varying sorts such as birthdays, holidays, weddings, and residency graduations. The author acknowledges that this question, which involves two highly complex and ephemeral concepts—memory and time—cannot be answered with certainty.

Oh, great. Even an expert on time can't tell me why my life is speeding by faster and faster. Disappointing, but I didn't give up on Google.

I was rewarded with a blog post by someone who, like me, had made the rounds of Internet theories concerning this question. "The Speed of Time" ended with a suggestion that mindfulness – being here now in the present – is a way to make time slow down.

Makes sense. As did the best writing I found on this subject, Steve Taylor's "The Speed of Life: Why Time Seems to Speed Up and How to Slow it Down."

When you've got time, read it. Taylor is a good writer. I liked his take on the "proportional theory" that I mentioned above (as we grow older, every additional period of time is a smaller proportion of our life).

There is some sense to this theory – it does offer an explanation for why the speed of time seems to increase so gradually and evenly, with almost mathematical consistency. One problem with it, however, is that it tries to explain present time purely in terms of past time. The assumption behind it is that we continually experience our lives as a whole, and perceive each day, week, month or year becoming more insignificant in relation to the whole. But we don't live our lives like this. We live in terms of much smaller periods of time, from hour to hour and day to day, dealing with each time period on its own merits, independently of all that has gone before.

Seems true. As does Taylor's preferred explanation for why time speeds up with advancing years:

In my view, the speeding up of time we experience is mainly related to our perception of the world around us and of our experiences, and how this perception changes as we grow older. The speed of time seems to be largely determined by how much information our minds absorb and process – the more information there is, the slower time goes.

He says that things around us come to seem more and more familiar the longer we live. We travel the same streets, go to the same places, talk to the same people, engage in the same activities.

With all this sameness, we begin to ignore perceptions that used to be oh so fascinating. Familiarity breeds disinterest, if not contempt.

One way of increasing the flow of information into our psyches is to do new things. Travel to a different location; take up a fresh hobby; shake up old habits. Good ideas, but the way I see it, this runs the risk of making us a slave to time.

We end up dashing from newness to newness, addicted to the rush of unfamiliar perceptions. Look, the Louvre! I know how to waltz! Golf is fun!

I prefer Taylor's mindfulness approach:

A second way in which we can slow down time is by making a conscious effort to be 'mindful' of our experience… Poets and artists often have this kind of 'child-like' vision – in fact it's this that usually provides the inspiration for their work. They often have a sense of strangeness and wonder about things which most of us take for granted, and feel a need to capture and frame their more intense perceptions.

Read the end of his piece for more on mindfulness. Good stuff. As more perceptions, more information from the outside world, courses into consciousness, time slows down.

I hear the crisp clicking of my ThinkPad's keys. I feel my hands resting on the palm rest. The sound of the heat pump going on outside our kitchen window enters my awareness as I watch these letters appear on my laptop's screen.

Life is always happening all around us, and within us. To pay close attention to it, here and now, that's key to slowing time down.

Mindfulness means stopping thinking and starting to be aware, to live in the here and now of your experience instead of the 'there and then' of your thoughts. It stretches time in exactly the same way that new experience does: because we give more attention to our experience, we take in more information from it.

In other words, to some extent we can control time. It doesn't have to speed up as [we] get older. Some of us try to extend our lives by keeping fit and eating healthy food, which is completely sensible. But it's also possible for us to expand time from the inside, by changing the way we experience the moment to moment reality of our lives. We can live for longer not just in terms of years, but also in terms of perception.

The Tao of napping

It's nice to see that napping is getting the scientific respectability that it deserves. Napping has proven health benefits:

Naps can restore alertness, enhance performance, and reduce mistakes and accidents. A study at NASA on sleepy military pilots and astronauts found that a 40-minute nap improved performance by 34% and alertness 100%.

* Naps can increase alertness in the period directly following the nap and may extend alertness a few hours later in the day.

* Scheduled napping has also been prescribed for those who are affected by narcolepsy.

* Napping has psychological benefits. A nap can be a pleasant luxury, a mini-vacation. It can provide an easy way to get some relaxation and rejuvenation.

For quite a few years I've been doing my part to advance understanding in this area. Most days I retire to my napping sanctum sanctorum to worship at the altar of unabashed hedonism.

For that's the purest form of the Platonic Nap – the nap as it exists in itself, not seeking justification through some sort of cost-benefit analysis.

OK, so you can get 34% more performance from a 40-minute nap. If that's your reason for taking a short doze, you haven't grasped the Tao of napping.

As I said in a 2004 post, "My afternoon delight":

I am the devotee of a pure form of Napping Philosophy, formulated over many, many years of diligent unconscious study. To wit, naps are not a means to an end; they are the end: self-indulgence, hedonism, unadulterated unproductiveness.

Thus I find it disturbing that naps are being recommended as a tool for accomplishing more. This is absurd.

It's akin to watching the Playboy Channel in order to better understand the cultural role of women in post-modern Western society. Anyone who takes a nap with a productive motivation in mind is a faux napper.

I beg of you: Please, don't sully the purity of this noble nonactivity. Have a cup of coffee instead.

After almost three additional years of napping experience, I can say that my Taoist perspective on this subject has only gotten stronger. In fact, I even came across a reference to naps in a Taoism-related book I was reading recently.

The gist of the author's point, which fits with my own attitude, is that the very notion of a "nap" is unnatural. Hence, out of tune with the naturalistic philosophy of Taoism (which is closely related to Zen).

"When I'm sleepy, I sleep. When I'm hungry, I eat."

If a nap is viewed as simply sleeping when sleepy, it fits comfortably into an unadorned Taoist approach to life. However, if an unscheduled sleep is called a "nap," and an extra meal is called a "snack," we've fallen into excessive formalism.

It may well be that sleeping at various times throughout the day, not just in one big chunk at night, is part of the natural sleep pattern of humans. For 85% of mammals, this is the case.

So nap on, my fellow Homo sapiens.

It's not only true for us that "I think, therefore I am." Napping leads us to experience a yin-truth to that yang: "When I don't think, I also am."

The Tao of Tajuan Porter

It's confirmed: University of Oregon basketball star Tajuan Porter is a Taoist sage. I'd suspected as much while watching the Ducks beat UNLV yesterday.

Freshman Porter, who's only 5' 6", beautifully manifested wu-wei—effortless doing. A master of wu-wei is said to have "soft and invisible power" over things.

Indeed. St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Bryan Burwell said that Porter was "a blur, a wisp and a vapor."

I decided to confirm Porter's Taoist eminence through his own words. Here's what I found. My comments on #12's simple, yet profound, statements are in italics.

On playing in the expansive Edward Jones Dome:
"A shooter is a shooter. You can't worry about the environment. It's two rims and a ball."
a finger pointing directly to the moon

Why the Dome won't distract him:
"Nah, can't worry about that. If you worry about it, you're going to be concentrating too much."
relaxed empty mind imbibes fullness of Tao

After a Pac-10 tournament win over California:
"It's a great birthday present for me. I'm happy we won. And 'Happy birthday' to myself."
in the small pool of self is reflected the grand ocean of reality

Before the Ducks' first NCAA tournament game:
"In this tournament anybody can win. Anybody can get upset. We just have to stay level-headed."
"There's no need to be nervous. (Playing basketball) is something I love to do so I'm not going to be nervous."
water flows where it will; bamboo bends before strong winds

After a key win over Washington State:
"There's always room for someone to step up, and I just did what I could with my opportunities tonight."
nothing special about chopping wood and carrying water

Regarding his Pac-10 leading free throw shooting:
"I don't know how many I've made, but I know I've missed five."
Tao exalts the lowly

Concerning his skills:
"I think I'm a terrible shooter. No, I'm an OK shooter. I still feel like I can shoot better than what I'm shooting now. Every shot I take, I think I should make it."
archer being humbly one with the Way, arrow finds the target by itself

After making the All Pac-10 freshman team:
"That's individual attention. I really don't care about individual attention. I'm just trying to win."
yin

Asked to reconcile that statement with fruitlessly tossing up three-point shots in an attempt to break the freshman record:
"That was just to break the record."
and yang

About his size:
"It can be a disadvantage if you make it one. But you have to find it within yourself to play and not make it seem like you're a liability."
content with Tao's benevolence, eating plain rice

Asked about who would win a three-point contest with Oregon women's team freshman phenom Taylor Lilley (who has a higher made percentage than Porter):
"I would say me because I'm confident in myself. But I would let her win just to keep her confidence up."
yin

Expanding on a Lilley shoot-out:
"I got pride. I ain't gonna let no girl beat me."
and yang

His approach to making shots:
"My teammates find me and I knock them down."
life is as simple as we make it

Next day update: Opening up the sports section, I find more Taoist Tajuan wisdom.
When asked about his impression of Oregon's basketball program before he arrived:
"Didn't even know Oregon was a state until Malik (Hairston) came here."
ah, the sage words of the Tao Te Ching come to mind...

Give up learning, and put an end to your troubles
...I am a fool. Oh, yes! I am confused.
Other men are clear and bright,
But I alone am dim and weak.
Other men are sharp and clever,
But I alone am dull and stupid.
...I am different.
I am nourished by the great mother.

An agnostic Taoist on Christmas Eve

Well, with just three hours to go on the west coast it looks like Christmas has survived the war against it. Which, of course, pretty much existed only in the addled outlook of Fox News and Bill O’Reilly.

Speaking from the agnostic Taoist perspective, I look forward to celebrating the birth of Jesus by enjoying a vegetarian buffet at Salem's Marco Polo restaurant and opening a few presents that I bought for myself that are being wrapped by my wife at this very moment.

As I did earlier today for a few gifts that she bought for herself. This year we decided to downplay Christmas even more than we usually do. Before New Year’s we’ll sit down with our checkbook and VISA card to make donations to some favorite charities. It’s nice, I guess, to have an extra reason to give.

Otherwise, for me the Christmas season has more negatives than pluses. I’ve had to expend some extra calories each time I turned my head to studiously ignore a Salvation Army bell ringer. Trying to tune out annoying holiday music in the stores required an extra expenditure of psychic energy.

Since the War on Christmas inciters make a big deal out of saying “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays,” I’ve had to pay special attention to how I respond to well-wishers. I didn’t want to seem on the side of O’Reilly, so usually replied “you too” to whatever greeting a store employee gave me. (My wife went with “Happy Holidays.”)

It’ll be good to get back to “have a nice day.”

My main message this evening is to say Amen to the column by Charles Haynes that appeared in newspapers today. He says:

Religious life in America has never been more robust, visible and free than it is today…If you want to see what a real war on Christians looks like, just look around the globe.

Imagine being a Christian in Saudi Arabia. Imagine being part of a minute minority in a nation where another set of beliefs is actively supported and promulgated by the government. Imagine being marginalized, ridiculed, and put down when you express your own faith.

Imagine that, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of why both Christians and non-Christians should be concerned about where our country has been heading. I read in a recent Newsweek issue that “46% of Americans believe that the U.S. government ‘should advocate Christian values.’”

It should be close to zero percent. I’m a non-Christian. My daughter is a non-Christian. And I’m willing to bet that with such sterling grandfatherly and motherly influences, my soon to be born granddaughter will choose to be a non-Christian.

Still, I don’t want her brainwashed by a Christianist government, just as Christians living in Saudi Arabia would resent having Islam pressed upon their children. Remember: Do unto others…

So let’s all heed Haynes’ Christmas Eve message:

What really bothers some Christian evangelicals is not the lack of freedom—it’s the loss of monopoly. Many of the conflicts in the so-called “war on Christians” appear to be about restoring the “good old days” when Protestant Christianity was semi-established as the national religion.

But pushing for a Christian Nation will not advance Christianity, it will kill it. From China to Turkey to Europe, state involvement in religion is the root of persecution, dissention, and division.

How ironic. At a time when some Christian leaders in America are decrying “separation of church and state,” millions of Christians around the world are praying for it.

What’s God got to do with lost climbers?

Hope I don’t sound heartless when I say to the relatives of the climbers lost on Mt. Hood, “Please, keep God out of your news conferences. Don’t use this tragedy as a platform for your religious faith.”

Today Frank James, brother of climber Kelly James, said on Fox News:

We are waiting and praying. Certainly there is a lot of praying. There are from time to time, tears. From time to time there is laughter…Our faith is strong. Our faith is three-fold. We have faith in Kelly, and Brian, and Nikko. We have faith in the rescuers. And we have faith in God.

There is little doubt that our faith is being refined these days. We understand how serious these weather conditions are. But our faith remains strong. It’s amazing. When you’re in these kinds of circumstances you might think that people would turn away from God. Precisely the opposite has happened. We’ve all turned to God in deeper and more profound ways.

Well, that’s nice, Frank. I just have to be honest. As a devoted agnostic, I share your humanness, because I’m human. But I don’t share your religiosity, because I’m not religious.

I listen to you empathetically when you speak of tears and laughter. However, when I hear you giving a mini-sermon to the reporters gathered on Mt. Hood, it turns me off. Didn’t Jesus advise praying in secret?

This is one of Irregular Times’ Secrets of the Bible.

It seems that these folks are so busy making a show about their Christianity that they've forgotten what their own Bible says about being Christian: that Christian prayer should always be a private matter, conducted without fanfare and without an audience. The words are right there in bold print for any literate Christian to read, but Jesus' teaching about the hypocrisy of public prayer remains a true secret of the Bible.

I hope the climbers are found alive. Yet I don’t believe prayer is going to make any difference in whether this happens. I understand why the families of the lost men pray together. This is a natural human inclination, whether or not it does any good.

Earlier this year I wrote on my other blog that the West Virginia mine disaster shows the absurdity of prayer. The best prayer, one that even my Taoist soul can embrace, is “Thy will be done.” (“Thy” can mean anything: God, Allah, Tao, Buddha-nature, fate, the laws of nature.)

So if God needs to be brought into the public face of a tragedy, anyone can do this in a simple, humble, and universal manner. Just say, “We’re hoping for the best. But what will be, will be.”

My radio interview about the changing face of faith

Last night I channeled myself on a radio interview with two mediums. Marcel and Lenny had me back for another chat about churchless faith on their Achieve Radio program, “In Good Spirit.”

Who knew that in the past few months I was fated to have so much contact with a couple of mediums, after a lifetime of psychic skepticism?

Well, maybe Marcel and Lenny. But I don’t know, since I’m still skeptical.

Which brings to mind my favorite part about the interview: I didn’t say “you know” nearly as much as last time. Before the phone rang to connect me with these guys I gave myself an affirmation: “You will catch yourself before you reflexively say you know.”

It worked. Pretty much. I didn’t mind listening to the archive of the show this morning (click on DEC-6-06-at-9:00PM---In Good Spirit). I made a few inane or incomprehensible comments, but that’s par for the conversational course.

Marcel started off by asking me what I thought about the ascendancy of aggressive atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Julia Sweeney. Their books (in Sweeney’s case, a play and CD) have titles like “The God Delusion” and “Letting Go of God.”

What’s going on here?

I said that I thought this was a healthy reaction to excessive religiosity. Fundamentalists have urged us to get on our knees. Now we’re hearing from the get off your knees crowd. That’s balance. The Tao abhors tilting too far one way or the other.

The most genuine faith is simply openness. A wide-eyed innocent embrace of reality, whatever it may consist of. The fact is, we don’t know. Science recognizes that there is a lot more truth to be found under the thin layer of knowledge that humankind has revealed so far.

It doesn’t make sense to rule out the possibility that reality extends beyond the domain of the physical. But it also is nonsensical to blindly accept on faith that earthly existence is only the ground floor of a grander metaphysical structure.

As I frequently say on my Church of the Churchless blog, I’ll believe it when I see it. Not before.

Yesterday I wrote that for me the changing face of faith “means moving away from looking at life through spread mental fingers, believing in this but not in that, refusing to consider the possibility of X while embracing the hypothesis of Y.”

Listen to the interview for more along these lines. I’m on for about eighteen and a half minutes. I know this because I wanted to check out how much I talked, compared to Marcel and Lenny.

Near the end of the interview Marcel commented that agnostics sure have a lot to say, as he couldn’t get a word in for the last five minutes. Well, this morning I found the archive and I whipped out two digital watches with timers on them.

I talked for nine minutes and fifty seconds. That’s 53 percent of the time, Marcel! A nicely balanced use of the available minutes. About half for the interviewers, half for the interviewee.

Tao is pleased.

Bush administration disrespects Wiccans

What’s the deal, President Bush? Your administration touts the importance of religion, yet the Department of Veteran Affairs refuses to put a religious symbol on the memorial for a decorated soldier killed in Afghanistan.

A Wiccan symbol. Sgt. Patrick Stewart of the Nevada National Guard is the first Wiccan killed in combat. But 1,800 Wiccans are on active duty in the armed forces. And applications for the use of the pentacle on grave markers have been pending for nine years.

I hope the several hundred thousand Wiccans in this country bring down upon Bush whatever karmic consequences he deserves for disrespecting this exemplary nature-based religion.

I’ve got a fondness for Wicca. The Belief-O-Matic test, which suggests what religion a person should consider practicing, ranks “Neo-Pagan” second on my list—right after “Unitarian Universalism.” So I guess I’m an Emersonian sort of Wiccan.

Make sure that five-pointed star within a circle is approved soon, President Bush. We pagans are reluctant to bring out the big guns, but we’ll call on the Big Man Upstairs if we have to.

I’m learning to Tango with life

I got sent to remedial Tango class last Monday night. The guest instructor, Carlos Rojas, observed me dancing with my wife for a while. Then he walked over and said, “You’re not letting her finish her steps. You’re going to dance with Jodi now. Every time you interrupt her moves, she’s going to stop.”

Jodi is Carlos’ tall, slim, charming, attractive, and highly skilled dance partner. With a teacher like that, I didn’t mind getting some remedial instruction. We started dancing. Then she stopped. We started again. We stopped again.

Eventually I began to understand what I was doing wrong. Basically, I’d gotten the idea in my head that leading meant doing what I had in mind. Continually.

After leading a step, my mental focus was immediately shifting to the next anticipated step. I’d lost touch with what my partner was doing. I wasn’t aware of what position she was in when I tried to lead another move. Jodi's frequent stops were telling me that she hadn’t completed her own following step, yet I had already started to lead a new move.

I love how Tango is a reflection of life. My friend Bill, a fellow dance student, has been writing about his own Tango life lessons here and here (read them; his essays are great). I’ve done the same, most recently musing about “The Romance of Tango.”

The fresh insight that I got from Carlos and Jodi is that however I dance with a partner is a reflection of how I dance with myself. Whatever problems I have dancing Tango are intimately related to the difficulties I have partnering with me.

This morning I started to butter a piece of bread. While my knife was still spreading dabs of heart-healthy Take Control, I realized that I’d already begun to think about taking the newspaper upstairs and reading it while I watched some cable news. I was several steps ahead of myself and the day had barely begun.

Yeah, it’s a cliché: “Be here now.” But clichés often contain a lot of wisdom. That’s why they’re repeated so frequently.

You can’t dance Tango properly if you aren’t aware of what’s happening at every moment. As it is happening. Not as you think it is about to happen, or as it just happened. You and your partner are dancing in the moment, not in the future or past. If you lose touch with the moment, you lose touch with your partner.

And yourself. Carlos told us that Tango is the Ph.D. of social dancing because it is so spontaneous. There are no set patterns. Tango flows from the music, the man, the woman, the setting, the mood. It is infinitely creative, ever-changing, unrepeatable.

Just like life.

I have my daily habits. Toast, newspaper, cable news. Then cereal, checking the Internet, emailing. But every day is different. I’m not the same; my wife and dog are not the same; the world is not the same. The daily dance never repeats itself.

So I’m making a resolve to Tango more attentively with the multitudinous partners I encounter every 24 hours. Laurel, Serena, store clerks, birds, sun and sky, blogging, the toilet, food, my car. The list is endless.

One thing at a time. Allow my partner to do his/her/its own thing, as I am doing mine. Don’t rush a move—either my own or someone else’s. Lead, follow, lead, follow. Allow yin and yang to alternate. Do, relax, do, relax. Move to life’s natural harmony, not to the beat of my own self-centered intention.

Carlos said that if your partner doesn’t do what you anticipated, you don’t stop in your tracks and think “What the #&!@?” Rather, her move becomes the next step. And you Tango on.

Just like life.

On Easter, we worshipped at the altar of remodeling

We didn’t have to leave our house to have a holy experience this Easter. Laurel and I spend the morning tidying up the newly tiled “Dog Room.” Some people would call such an area the “Family Room,” but as we revealed in one of our Christmas letters, our life revolves around the original Wonder Pet.

At night Serena sleeps in her dog crate. Or on the futon. Her choice. Now, if she has to urgently pee or poop the mess will be on tile rather than carpet. That actually was a prime consideration in our plan for remodeling the Dog Room. Like I said, we know where the center of our existence lies.

It isn’t in church or an organized religion. Not on Easter. Not ever. Today many people heard, “He is risen.” To us those are three meaningless words. No one knows if they were ever true. Belief is fine, but believing is far distant from knowing.

Our Dog Room rose to life today. That was real. We experienced it. From an empty room, devoid of furniture, we returned it to fullness. I made peace with the mitre box that had been devilishly confusing me (molding and me hadn’t had much of a relationship until this home improvement project brought us together).

Why does religion have to be about far-off times and places? Why is an intermediary necessary to bridge the gap between us and the divine? Why can’t holiness be found in the most mundane activities of daily life. Putting in molding. Carrying furniture. Sealing grout.

As the saying goes, chop wood, carry water. Is there anything else to do?

Over on my Church of the Churchless blog I can sound like a curmudgeon about religion. Most recently, I wrote that “I’m arming for the War on Easter.” (But I’m shooting blanks compared to real anti-religious battlers like PZ Myers; his “Easter mourning” rips Christianity a new one.)

At heart I’ve got no problem with religious belief. Myself, I’ve been there and done that, so I understand the appeal of unfounded faith. What I do have a problem with, a major problem, is when people take their private belief and try to make it public policy. We’re heading toward an American Theocracy, and that scares the shit both out of me and Kevin Phillips, who wrote the book with that name.

Today my wife and I created something concrete instead of sitting in a room with true believers, listening to strange abstract notions about what God might be like. We acted positively this morning.

All too often, religions don’t. The religious impulse gets misdirected into destructive channels. Witness the upcoming GOP agenda intended to mollify the religious right. Constitutional amendment against gay marriage. Limits against abortion. Restricting embryonic stem cell research.

Negative to the core. Life-denying. Irrational. Ridiculous. This is the unholy side of religion. It should be sliced off and sent into oblivion. Superstition, prejudice, and fear of science belong in the Dark Ages, not the 21st century.

What really needs to be remodeled are the minds of the fundamentalists who want to make the United States into a Christian Taliban nation. We’ve got to keep an eagle eye on that un-American agenda.

Zen and the Final Four

Zen moments. That’s what I like the best about sports events. How they marvelously capture some of the deepest truths of life in living, breathing motion right there on my television screen.

Consider the men’s NCAA basketball tournament. Images from a couple of last week’s games are as fresh in my mind as if they had just happened. Take Gonzaga vs. UCLA in the “Sweet Sixteen” round. Final score: Gonzaga 71, UCLA 73.

A heartbreaker. I wanted Gonzaga to win. Badly. Mostly because UCLA already has won too damn many national championships.

Also, I couldn’t help but root for Gonzaga when their star player, Adam Morrison, has such a perfect back-to-the-70’s look (plus, appealing intensity; when I saw him bang the basketball three times against his head, hard, before he went to the free throw line I knew he was my kind of player.)

But at the end of the UCLA game Morrison was flat on his stomach on the floor, crying. And all because of a Zen moment in the final seconds.

Gonzaga had gotten possession back, trying, as I remember it, to protect a slim lead. One of their players had been passed the ball. A tall guy, he was holding it over his head. A teammate was right in front of him. He looked at him. He continued to hold the ball. He seemed frozen.

Then a UCLA player sneaked behind him and knocked the ball loose. UCLA scored. And that turned out to be the game. It hinged on one moment. A moment when I and just about every other Gonzaga fan in the country were screaming, “Get rid of the ball. Pass it!”

Easy enough to say when you’re not on the court. As I wasn’t either in the Washington vs. Connecticut Sweet 16 game. Final score: Washington 92, UConn 98. The game was closer than that. It was a squeaker until the very end.

Here the Zen moment came when a Washington guard stole the ball in the final minute. He had a clear path to the basket. He looked at the basket. And then he passed the ball. Right into the hands of a UConn player. Who dashed down the court and scored. Game over, for all practical purposes. The TV announcers said, “He should have gone to the rim.”

Yes, that moment of indecision was costly. Watching a basketball game from the serenity of my couch, it’s easy to recognize those Zen moments when excess cogitation leads to a bad outcome. I can see that if a player had just acted naturally, doing what he knows so well to do—get rid of the ball when you’re being double-teamed, head for the rim when the lane is open—his team likely would have won, rather than lost.

But who am I to judge? I, like most people, am equally prone to over-analysis. How often in my life have I intuitively known what must be done, and failed to do it? Lots. Basketball games are merely a highly public stage on which familiar everyday dramas are played out.

A moment comes. And then it goes. In the instant of that coming and going, opportunity. Seize it, and it’s yours. Hesitate, and it’s gone forever. In a basketball game there may just be a few of those memorable moments. Zen says that in life at large, every moment is memorable.

Yesterday in the sports section I read about Glen “Big Baby” Davis’ decisive 3-point shot in overtime that sent LSU to the Final Four. He said:

It’s called thinking without thinking. The opportunity was there to make the shot. Most of the time when I’m shooting 3s, I’m thinking about it too much. I was just in rhythm. I felt it was a great shot and I made it.

Thinking without thinking. Seems with “Big Baby” we’ve got a Zen master in the making here.

On not knowing what we don’t know

It’s not often that I think along the same lines as Donald Rumsfeld. But after a mildly embarrassing experience I’ve been pondering the words of our Secretary of Defense that won him the 2003 Foot in Mouth Award:

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don't know we don't know.

My wife, Laurel, has phased down her psychotherapy practice to bare bones. She’s given up her office and, as of yesterday, had her practice phone number forwarded to our home line.

She’d told me to expect some work calls. I forgot about that expectation when the phone rang as I was walking out the door. I rushed inside and answered the call.

“Hello.”
“Hi, this is Sam Jones [not real name, obviously]. Could I speak with Laurel.”

Here’s where my not-knowing started to take off. As soon as I heard “Sam Jones,” my mind associated the caller with an old boyfriend of Laurel’s whose first name was indeed “Sam,” but whose last name was nowhere close to “Jones.”

However, small details like facts don’t mean anything when your mind leaps in a not-knowing direction. A few weeks ago, through a mutual acquaintance Laurel had heard some news about old boyfriend Sam that she’d shared with me. So it seems that when I heard someone ask for Laurel and say that he was “Sam,” it didn’t matter that the last names were different. My mind instantly and confidently concluded that the caller was the old boyfriend.

No doubt about it.

“Why, hi, Sam. Good to hear from you. Laurel is in Eugene right now and won’t be back for a few hours.”

At this point the caller must have begun to wonder if he really was talking to a professional counselor’s equally professional answering service. What was up with this chatty “good to hear from you” stuff?

“OK, um, could you tell me who I'm talking to, please?”

“Why, its Brian,” I reply enthusiastically, wanting to let Sam know that Laurel is still married to the guy whose wedding Sam attended fifteen years ago. “Can I take a message?”

Since my tone of voice had implied that the caller was a doofus for not realizing that the person who he was talking to was Brian, the husband of still-married-only-once Laurel, he understandably spoke with even more confused hesitation now—undoubtedly wondering “What the hell kind of weird answering service is Ms. Hines using now?”

I, of course, assumed that his faltering words were those of an old boyfriend who wanted to speak with an old girlfriend, and had ended up talking with her husband instead. Not an unusual situation, yet still a bit awkward.

“Just tell her that Sam Jones called. My number is ________.”

“Will do, Sam. I know she’ll enjoy talking with you after all this time.”

On this mystifying note (given that the caller had been having recent counseling sessions with Laurel), our conversation ended. I scribbled out his name and phone number for Laurel and laid it on the rug near the front door, our usual message-leaving location.

Since Sam had left a Salem number, my mind then began to multiply further fictions on top of its primal error. How long will Sam be in town…he’ll probably want to have dinner with Laurel to catch up on what’s been going on in their lives…We were thinking of going to Portland tomorrow…Maybe we’ll have to change our plans…Wonder why Sam is calling now after so many years…

When Laurel got home I mentioned that an old boyfriend had phoned. She looked at the message and said, “Jones isn’t Sam’s last name. His name is ____.” Which I knew. Now.

And also then. I mean, my brain knew that old boyfriend Sam’s last name was ____, and that the caller’s last name of Jones was entirely different. But I didn’t know that my mind wasn’t aware that it didn’t know what it should have known. Now I knew what I didn’t know that I didn’t know before, and I was embarrassed.

When Laurel returned the call to her client she explained what happened. Thankfully, he told her that I was so friendly, he didn’t think much about the strange aspects of our telephonic interaction.

Myself, I keep thinking about this whole business of not knowing what you don’t know. What else am I blissfully confident that I’m right about, when actually I’m dead wrong? As Rumsfeld correctly observed, it’s bad enough to know that you don’t know something. But not-knowing rises into another dimension when you are ignorant of your ignorance.

Humility. Uncertainty. Openness. Yesterday’s experience helped me realize that these are virtues we all need to venerate, because we never know when what we think we know isn’t true.

“We” includes the Bush administration. Especially the Bush administration.

With a poetic philosopher like Donald Rumsfeld on the payroll, you’d think that Bush and his cronies would be wary of embracing certitudes that they shouldn’t be nearly as certain about.

Weapons of mass destruction. Deficit-reducing benefits of tax cuts. Evils of gay marriage. Fiction of global warming. The list is endless of things the Bush administration has been, and are, sure about that they almost certainly are wrong about.

Yet we have a President who is extremely unwilling to admit that he ever is wrong. His ability to not know that he doesn’t know puts mine to shame.

Where is the Christian outrage?

Good Christians, where is your outrage? Are you so meek and mild that you’re willing to tolerate the intolerance being committed in Jesus’ name? Will you continue to allow the most extreme right-wing fundamentalist sharks among you to flourish in the ocean of mainstream Christianity?

I’m not a Christian, but I’m outraged by attempts to subvert both science and common sense in the name of theology that nowhere appears in the Bible. This is obvious manmade dogma. If I can speak out against these travesties, why can’t you, good Christians?

Putting creationism in the classroom. The effort to get intelligent design (which is thinly disguised creationism) recognized as an alternative theory to evolution takes us back to the bad old days of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. I thought that we had evolved beyond such specious attacks on science, but the Dover Area School District lawsuit proves otherwise.

Christians want intelligent design/creationism enshrined in the classroom even though there is zero—repeat, zero—scientific evidence in favor of this utterly unproven hypothesis. There is equal reason to believe that the universe is being guided by a Flying Spaghetti Monster as by a willful conscious metaphysical force.

Stifling of Plan B morning-after pill. Last night ABC’s Nightline featured a devastating critique of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) outrageous decision to overrule the advice of its own advisory committee and professional staff. The FDA commissioner, Lester Crawford (who has since resigned), delayed a decision on whether the Plan B pill should be available without a prescription.

Susan Wood, director of the Office of Women’s Health, resigned over the decision. She told Ted Koppel that “science was being overruled by the FDA.” The advisory committee vote was 23 to 4 in favor of approval. One of the four dissenters was David Hager, a Christian ob-gyn doctor from Kentucky.

Hager filed a minority report urging that this utterly safe drug which prevents unwanted pregnancies (and, hence, abortions) not be approved because it might lead to more teenagers having sex. Here’s what he said to an audience at a Christian college five months later:

I argued it from a scientific perspective. And God took that information. And He used it through this minority report to influence the decision. You don’t have to wave your Bible to have an effect as a Christian in the public arena.

Denying global warming. Evangelical Christians are cool on global warming, says Andy Crouch in a Christianity Today essay called “Environmental Wager.” On the face of it there shouldn’t be any reason why Christians would be opposed to protecting the environment. One would think that God’s creation is worthy of respect, since it supposedly was created with a divine purpose in mind.

However, Crouch says that Christians are so ticked off at science because of the theory of evolution, this irritation spills over into over other areas such as global warming: “Thanks to the creation-evolution debate, mistrust between scientists and conservative Christians runs deep. But those scarred by battles with evolutionists might still consider heeding the scientists who are warning us about climate change.”

Opposing gay rights. In my state Basic Rights Oregon is challenging the legality of an initiative (Measure 36) voters approved last year that says only a marriage between one man and one woman is valid. Christian groups led the fight for Measure 36, somehow believing that denying rights to gays will glorify God.

I find Robert Buchanan’s perspective a lot more appealing. And a lot more Christian. He says that Christians limit God’s love when they assume that only certain sorts of people are deserving of it:

Many people have a very limited view of the scope of God’s love. They have allowed their prejudice to replace God’s intention and the message of Christianity. They think that God only came for those who are in a patriarchal nuclear family with a male, female, and children or single celibate people. Sometimes people limit God to those who are of their own gender, color, race, and among their own social status.

As a non-Christian, I do what I can to encourage open-mindedness, tolerance, and respect for scientific facts about reality. It’s discouraging to me that so many Christians aren’t doing the same.

I realize that, according to yesterday’s Oregonian, “a Gallup Poll last fall found that 45% of Americans say God created people pretty much in their present form in the past 10,000 years—a timeline asserted by Christian literalists.”

But that leaves a majority of Americans believing otherwise, most of whom are Christian. Where are their voices? They should be pounding the pulpit and telling the right-wing fundamentalists, “You don’t speak for me!”

I don’t hear this happening. The Christian silence is deafening.

I hope this doesn’t mean that unscientific gay haters are going to inherit the earth. If the meek Christians don’t begin to speak up, that’s a definite possibility.

Fundamentalism and racism, two peas in a pod

If you believe that your religion is superior to every other, it’s easy to believe that your race is superior to every other. Blind faith immune to facts is the foundation of every erroneous belief. So faith is the root of both fundamentalism and racism.

Such is the unoriginal thesis of my Church of the Churchless “Fundamentalism is religious racism” post. I cite research supporting the contention that closed-minded prejudice is a single force that manifests in many forms.

So faith isn’t a good thing. It’s a bad thing. Faith is the pod that allows the peas of fundamentalism and racism to grow.

If you’re faithless, be proud. Faithlessness is the only road out of the dead end of insane “isms” that are tearing this country in particular and the world in general apart.

Science and reason are faithless, having faith only in the tenet that, as the X-Files put it, “The Truth is Out There.” But you have to get outside of the walls of your false prejudices and dogmas to find it.

Faithless Universist group started in Salem

Christians are going too far when they start banning good-hearted atheists, agnostics, and other questioners from coffee houses. That’s outrageous. Why, you’ll have to pry my grande latte from my cold dead hand—and my copy of the Bhagavad Gita from my other one.

When I heard about this discrimination against the faithless via a Universist email, I was inspired to sign up today as a Salem (Oregon) sponsor of a Universism discussion group.

So far I’m the only member. But I just started the group this afternoon and I’m pretty sure I can talk my wife into joining, which will instantly double our size. Plus, Christianity started off slow too. In my grandiosity I’ve started to think of myself as a secular anti-Paul, helping to spread the good news about anti-religion.

The Salem Universists aren’t meeting yet, unless you count Laurel and me sitting down together every evening to worship at the feet of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show. If you live in the Salem area, consider becoming a member so we can eventually have real meetings--sign up here.

There are just 1,685 Universist Meet-Up members and 67 groups worldwide, so you’ll be getting in on the ground floor of a much-needed movement. Here in Oregon there are fledgling groups in Eugene and Portland also.

As I’ve written before, I consider Universism to be a wonderfully kindred unfaith to my Church of the Churchless leanings. What the world needs now, more than ever, is less religion.

When the president of the United States calls for intelligent design, which is thinly disguised creationism, to be taught in schools, the need for countervailing forces like Universism is obvious.

We’re all jihadists

Over on the Church of the Churchless today I wrote about how “We all believe in jihad.” I had intended to rant here about how outrageous it is that Karen Minnis and the Oregon House Republicans are hijacking the political process by not allowing important bills like SB 1000 to come up for a vote.

I guess I did a bit of that just now: ranting. But just a bit. For when I looked into my Karen Minnis-hating heart and realized how, in my darker moments, my fantasies about what should happen to right-wing ideologues were growing uncomfortably jihadish, I decided to switch gears and consider how we’re all jihadists.

Meaning, we all strive; we all desire; we all believe that something desperately needs to be changed in the world out there. The difference between us and the suicide bombers is one of degree, not of kind. For more along these lines, you can read my post.

Secret of the Universe, Clue #2

It’s all starting to come together for me now. Oh yes, it surely is. For last night I had a second revelation to go along with Secret of the Universe Clue #1. Now, I just need to figure out what the “it” is that’s coming together.

Whenever we come to our cabin in Camp Sherman I take along my media box, a plastic container that I fill with videotapes, DVDs, serious non-fiction books, unserious mystery paperbacks, and every unread magazine lying around the house.

I never get around to perusing half the stuff in the box, but it relieves my anxiety to know that if there’s a nuclear war while we’re at the cabin, I’ll have enough entertainment on hand to distract me while the radiation does its lethal work. (I worry about strange things).

Anyway, last night I pulled out a stack of magazines from the bottom of the box, settled into a comfy chair, put my feet up on the ottoman, and started to read an issue of TIME. I learned that the insurgency in Iraq was growing stronger and movie studios were hoping for some summer blockbusters. Ho-hum. Familiar news. I glanced at the headlines and kept turning the pages.

I came to a story about Kerry’s campaign. Kerry’s campaign? Something suddenly seemed out of place in the space/time continuum. I took a closer look at the cover. I saw that the issue was from June 2004. It had sat unread in the box for an entire year. And the strange thing was, the national and world news themes were so similar to what is happening now, I didn’t notice that I was a year behind until the Kerry campaign story jumped out at me.

Then I heard that increasingly familiar Here’s-a-Secret-of-the-Universe voice speak to me inside my head: Each “will happen” you’re reading about has become a “has happened.” What will be, in 2004, is what was, in 2005. And next year will be the same.

In other words, right now I’m anxious about will happen during the next year. What right-wing judicial zealot will be appointed to the Supreme Court vacancy? Will there be a meltdown in the LA housing market just after my daughter and her husband buy their first house? Is Al Qaeda going to make good on its promise to strike the United States again? Will Measure 37 claims in Oregon make our rural neighborhood into a Salem suburb?

As soon as I heard the voice inside my head, I realized: “What I’m really worried about are possibilities, not actualities. Dire predictions of upcoming events in the June 2004 issue of TIME don’t concern me now, because I know what has actually happened.” Like Bush being re-elected. I don’t worry about that event happening because it has happened. Now I worry about will happen after his re-election. Like what sort of extremist he will try to get on the Supreme Court.

And so it goes. Every “will be” becomes a “what was,” transformed by the inexorable passage of time. If I could jump ahead and see myself sitting in the same Camp Sherman cabin chair a year from now, July 2006, everything that I’m concerned about happening will have happened. Or not. Whichever, the future will have become past. Frettings about unwelcome possibilities will have become mere memories of unchangeable actualities.

I wondered, “Then why worry? About anything.” I wondered about what I had just wondered about for a little bit more. Then I tossed the old news magazines away and started reading some current issues.

I thought about putting them back in the box and waiting to read them a year from now. But that seemed like cheating. So I read. And, once in a while, worried.

And so it goes.

My satori is near at hand

Clearly my final enlightenment—satori!—is near at hand, for I have bought a book that will lead me there: D.T. Suzuki’s “The Zen Koan as a means of Attaining Enlightenment.”

The clerk at Salem’s Book Bin was suitably impressed with my purchase, telling me “We hope you’ll come back after your enlightenment and share your realization.” I said, “Absolutely. I plan to charge $8 for this dispensation of wisdom, which will enable me to realize a 50 cent profit from buying this $7.50 book.”

Obviously my spiritual motives are pure. So pure that a humble part of me continually whispers, “Brian, you are already enlightened.” I like that voice. I want to trust it. But I don’t want to take any chances with my satori. Though I may already have become one with Buddha nature, I figure it won’t hurt to add to my oneness.

Hence, my purchase of the book. Now, I don’t have a Zen Master, nor do I want one. My Zen transcends spiritual discipline and organized practice, which makes it so easy for me to follow. And also easy for me to confirm my satori, since I don’t have to go through the unappealing process of getting my enlightenment confirmed by someone else.

I’ll decide when my Buddha nature is fully Buddhaized, thank you. And I don’t need a Zen Master to give me a koan either. I’ve got plenty of koans lying right around the house that should work fine to top off my satori tank. Here are some examples of homey koans that defy rational explication.

If our dog has Buddha nature, then why does she always ask to go out just when I have settled down comfortably on the couch?

When my wife’s closet is filled to capacity, how is it possible that she can keep shopping and coming home with more clothes?

After a man has washed the cutting board and returned it to its place still wet, so the board can drip-dry onto the counter, if he does not hear the sound of a woman chastising him, is he still wrong?

And lastly, my favorite koan of all:

If a sentient being already has acquired countless books describing a myriad of spiritual practices, only a few of which are shown here, and each claims in its own unique fashion to convey the truth about ultimate reality, what are the chances of another book making any difference?

Sweating and crying through the National Spelling Bee

There was quite a bit of sweating and crying going on during the National Spelling Bee finals today. Not so much among the contestants—they mostly were calm and composed. I was the one with jangling nerves and teary eyes during the competition.

I’d never watched the National Spelling Bee before. I needed some mindless TV entertainment to pay bills by, so I channel-surfed my way to ESPN. It took me a long time to write the checks once I got hooked on the highly mindful spelling competition. I couldn’t take my eyes off of the children who strode one by one up to the front of the stage and confidently tackled words that I had never even heard of, much less spelled.

You need to know your Latin, Greek, and French roots to be a champion speller, that’s for sure. Otherwise, the finalists had diverse spelling styles. Some would scribble out the word on a placard hanging around their neck before saying their final answer. Others would simply look into the distance and spell a word letter by letter, visualizing it mentally rather than physically.

The top three spellers apparently were all ethnic Indians, at least in part: Anurag Kashyap spelled “appoggiatura” correctly to become the champion (it means “an embellishing note or tone”). Samir Sudhir Patel missed a letter in “roscian” (“skilled in acting”) and earned second place. A girl, Aliya Robin Deri, flamed out on “trouvaille” (“a lucky find”), one of the few champion-level words that I actually knew how to spell myself.

The CNN article above has a “test your spelling skills” link where you can get a mild taste for the competition. Mild, because you’re presented with four alternative spellings for a word that you’re given the phonetic pronunciation and definition for, and merely have to choose the correct one. I got nine out of ten correct, uttering a coarse expletive when I missed #10 and my chance to “rule the hive.”

By contrast, Anurag, Samir, and Aliya were perfectly courteous whether in victory or defeat. These are three hugely impressive children, as were the rest of the contestants. And again, all Indian.

I mention their ethnicity not because it has anything to do with being a champion speller (though perhaps it does), but to contrast what I saw on the stage of the National Spelling Bee with the America that I earlier saw William Simon (a conservative who ran for governor of California in 2002) expounding on C-Span.

Simon was giving some sort of Heritage Foundation talk, judging by the banner hanging behind his podium. He was blathering on, as is his wont, about how the United States is a Christian nation, with 90% of our citizens believing in Jesus. Simon said that religion (Christianity, obviously) should be taught in schools because it is so obviously part of our culture.

A Pakistani audience member rose and told Simon that he couldn’t believe in Christ, but that the Koran contained many references to Jesus and Mary. He wondered what sort of place he had in America, given Simon’s remarks.

It was interesting to see how William Simon changed his tune when faced with a real live non-Christian standing before him, rather than with merely his own abstract political/theological notions. Here he was, having to answer an obviously intelligent, concerned, caring person who didn’t believe how he did.

Simon said that everybody had a right to their own faith or lack of faith, but that 90% of Americans believed in a higher power. A few minutes before it was “in Jesus;” now it was “in a higher power.” Such is the slipperiness of politicians confronted with their own bigotry and desiring to appear more broad-minded than they really are.

I didn’t see any religion displayed on the stage of the National Spelling Bee. Why would I? It didn’t have any place there. Nor does it in our public schools, except in an educational sense. Children should learn about religions in the classroom; but they shouldn’t practice religion in the classroom.

About 74% of the people of India are Hindu; 12% are Muslim; 6% are Christian. Probably the breakdown of Indians living in the United States is around the same, which means that it is highly unlikely that the three spelling champions I watched on ESPN today all believe in Jesus. Yet William Simon and other Christian-right zealots want to have Christianity become the state religion and be practiced openly in the classroom.

Observing the intelligence, poise, and character of Anurag, Samir, and Aliya today, what I want taught in the classroom is what they have learned. It doesn’t have anything to do with religion; it has everything to do with realizing the full potential of being human.

William Simon has much to learn in this regard. Those three children could teach him a lot.

God must be a Buddhist

Laurel and I are finding it difficult to practice Christian compassion. First problem: we’re not Christians. Second problem: it’s hard to be compassionate toward Christians when so many of them act like fools. Case in point, our nation’s Christian-in-Chief, President Bush.

He is threatening to veto legislation that would loosen restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Bush calls himself pro-life, but he doesn’t want to promote research that promises cures for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other degenerative brain and nerve diseases.

Bush’s own Christian compassion is constrained inside the tiny box of Christian fundamentalism, where crazy ideas are free to flower without any inconvenient pruning by facts. The legislation he wants to veto lets government-funded researchers work with embryonic stem cells left over from fertility treatments. These excess embryos either will be discarded, or they will be used in research.

It’s a no-brainer: use them for stem-cell research. But unfortunately Christian right voters do have brains, albeit malfunctioning ones.

Bush is afraid that he’ll lose the political support of fundamentalists who somehow have discovered in the Bible a theological foundation for banning therapeutic cloning, which the Bible never mentions. These, of course, are the same people who criticize the Supreme Court for finding support in the Constitution for allowing abortions, which the Constitution never mentions. Go figure.

My personal theological conclusion is that God must be a Buddhist, notwithstanding the fact that Buddhism doesn’t believe in a personal God (if the Christian right can make outrageous leaps of religious logic, so can I). For evidently God has blessed the predominantly Buddhist nation of South Korea with the leading world expert on cloning human embryos to treat and study disease, Hwang Woo-suk of Seoul National University.

“I want to give humans a gift of healing knowledge,” I picture God saying to herself (my anti-patriarchy wife reads this weblog). “But the United States is filled with too many closed-minded Christians to make wise use of it. So I’ll send a breakthrough in therapeutic cloning to a Buddhist country instead. I love those Buddhists; they don’t try to confine my will within imaginary bounds of their own making.”

More and more it looks like the United States will be getting health care advances from South Korea, consumer items from China, and information technology from India. It kind of makes you want to convert to Buddhism, Taoism, or Hinduism, since fundamentalist Christianity is becoming a foe of modern progress, just like fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Judaism.

Those big three Western monotheistic religions have an inbred aversion to seeing reality as it is. By comparison, the big three Eastern pluralistic religions don’t. Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism find it easy to absorb scientific facts into their flexible worldviews. This is one reason the United States is heading downhill, socially and scientifically, while South Korea, China, and India are on the upswing.

I’m pessimistic that things are going to get better in this country so long as Christian groups like the Center for Reclaiming America have so much support among the citizenry. I heard the Center’s founder, D. James Kennedy, interviewed on PBS radio recently. He’s scary. Really scary.

Kennedy believes that this country has to be governed on the basis of Christianity. He sounds just like Islamic fundamentalists who want Koranic law in Muslim countries. Except his Koran is the Bible. Otherwise, you could plunk Kennedy down in Iran or Saudi Arabia and he’d feel right at home.

The Center for Reclaiming America presents the untruth that our nation’s founders intended the United States to reflect Christian principles. Given this false premise, it is possible for the Center to make intolerance of non-fundamentalist Christian views into a virtue. A United Nations declaration, “Tolerance…involves the rejection of dogmatism and absolutism,” is ridiculed.

There’s no room for tolerance in right-wing Christianity. For example, it is obvious that creationism is true and evolution false. Why? Because the Bible tells Kennedy so, and there’s no need to consider inconvenient facts—such as the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence in support of evolution.

Naturally the Center also finds support in scripture for “ending judicial tyranny,” by which Kennedy means that judges should make decisions based on their Christian faith rather than the nation’s laws. Yes, I heard him say this in the PBS interview. He likened judges who rule in support of a woman’s right to have an abortion as being akin to judges in Nazi Germany who supported anti-Jewish German laws.

Again, he’s scary. Really scary.

As is George W. Bush. And everyone else who is trying to make the United States into a Christian nation. The way I see it, what is at risk here is nothing less than reality. Christian fundamentalists want us to close our eyes to truths. Truths about therapeutic cloning. Truths about evolution. Truths about persistent vegetative states. Truths about the big bang. Truths about the genetic basis of homosexuality. All kinds of truths.

Carl Sagan warned some time ago that the demons are beginning to stir. He was right. Now the demons are becoming more active. They have to be defeated. Take a stand: don’t go to church tomorrow. Read a copy of Scientific American instead.

“I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us—then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.

The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.” [Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark]

Me and the Milky Way

I’m trying to put my problems into perspective. New Scientist magazine is helping me out. The current issue has a great article on the Milky Way galaxy. This is where I live. You too.

When I consider the big picture, really big, of what surrounds us, earthly aggravations look a lot less immense. In my saner moments, I’m able to juxtapose what gripes me with the galactic point of view. Then I see how miniscule are the mole hills that I’ve been regarding as mountains. [All quotes are from the New Scientist article.]

I’m going to be fifty-seven this year. I’m ancient!
“The galaxy’s oldest stars are roughly 13 billion years old, suggesting they formed less than a billion years after the universe began life in a giant explosion 13.7 billion years ago.”

The earth is overpopulated. I feel cramped.
“The Milky Way is a dense disc of stars, gas and dust some 100,000 light years wide.”

If my book doesn’t sell well, I’m a failure, a nothing!
“In total, the Milky Way contains at least 250 billion stars, possibly as many as a trillion.”

It’s crazy that people disagree with how I view the cosmos, since I know so much and I’m so obviously right.
“Compress the whole of human history into just one year, and you will find that it is only in the last four hours that we gleaned the faintest inkling of the geography of the galaxy we inhabit. It was in the 1920s that astronomers realized that our sun and the stars surrounding it form a cosmic island, just one of countless similar islands dotted across the universe.”

I’m afraid my bald spot is getting larger.
“At the heart of the Milky Way lies a monster…a supermassive black hole—a colossal nugget 3 million times as massive as the sun. It is so immense that its gravity prevents anything, including light, escaping from inside a radius of about 7.7 million kilometers, or about twice the distance from Earth to the moon.”

If the Senate eliminates the filibuster rule this week, the United States is doomed.
“The Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy are racing towards each other at a relative speed of 500,000 kilometers every hour, and in 3 billion years’ time, the two giants will run into each other in a catastrophic encounter that will change them both beyond recognition.”

Damn! I’ve gained two pounds.
“Ponder this one next time you make a cup of coffee. If you swapped your teaspoon of sugar for a teaspoon of neutron star innards, it would weigh about a million tonnes.”

We’re wrecking our planet; it’s the only one we have.
“In the Milky Way galaxy as a whole there must be an enormous number of planets…There are billions of planets in our galaxy.”

Sometimes I’m bored with my life. Everything I do seems so familiar.
“Most of the Milky Way is invisible, which has made it all the more difficult to figure out its structure. The motions of stars appear to be influenced by the gravity of vast amounts of mysterious ‘dark matter’ in a giant ball enclosing the galactic disk and bulge.”

My fellow humans, the indisputable fact is that we are small. Very small. And the universe is large. Very large.

If you need more convincing, remember that the Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light years wide.

Now, let’s further broaden our horizons. Here’s a look at our neighborhood within a billion light years. THis is still just a small part of the entire universe, however. Those clumps aren’t galaxies, or even clusters of galaxies, but clusters of clusters of galaxies—superclusters. It’s estimated there are 3 million large galaxies like the Milky Way within a billion light years.

I feel even smaller.

But attaining a realization of complete cosmic insignificance requires Douglas Adams’ Total Perspective Vortex.

Be warned, though. As Adams says, “if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot have is a sense of proportion.”

Poor us

Yesterday Laurel and I felt sorry for ourselves. You probably won’t feel sorry for us. But then, you’re not us. If you were us, pretty obviously you’d feel like just us. And even though you’re you and we are ourselves, I bet you’ve engaged in some similar feeling-sorryness that appears ridiculous to anyone else but you.

Here’s the deal: wanting knows no bounds. I realize this philosophically. The Buddha clearly explained how desire leads to suffering, and I’ve read my share of Buddhist books. But it isn’t until I’m face to face with a concrete example of how my wanting expands to fit the space available to it (which seemingly is infinite) that I really grasp what a trap I’m in. Laurel too. All of us, except the few with Buddha nature.

This is the view from the deck of the Camp Sherman cabin that we just came back from. We share ownership of the cabin with three other families. It sits on leased national forest service land on the banks of the Metolius River.

In 1997 we were fortunate to learn about a ¼ share of the cabin being put up for sale. At the time a Coldwell Banker realtor in Sisters told us that in the seven years he had been with the firm only one forest service cabin had been listed publicly, and he had never seen a partial share made available. These Metolius River cabins generally are passed down from generation to generation in a family, treasured assets that they are.

Laurel and I love the cabin. We love Camp Sherman. We love the Metolius River. And yet, we feel sorry for ourselves because we don’t have a direct view of the river like lots of other cabins do.

Whenever we walk to the cabin at the very end of the Metolius River trail, nearest to the head of the Metolius (which issues full-blown from a large spring), we envy the view those owners have from their deck. “They’re so lucky to have a view of the river,” we say. “We just look at trees. Poor us.”

I know, I know. This sounds ridiculous. It is ridiculous. But that’s how the human mind works: it always wants more, even when it has a lot.

Here’s a Calcutta street scene. I’m pretty sure most of the people who live in Calcutta wouldn't feel sorry for us if they knew that we have to look at just trees from inside the cabin rather than trees and the river. And yet, I’m willing to bet that if a Calcutta slum dweller were to be transplanted to our Camp Sherman cabin, within a few years he or she would be walking the river trail thinking just like us: “Oh, how nice it would be to have a better view.”

Well, I meditate every morning, as does Laurel. We await our enlightenments, the end of our never-ending wantings. For now, we make do with who we are.

I’ve taken to carrying a lounge chair the 100 feet or so from our cabin to the river, naturally feeling sorry for myself the whole way as I try to balance a chair and cushions in one hand, and a glass of juice, magazines, paperback book, and highlighter in the other. It’s a tough life.

I stagger with my load to the bank of the Metolius and settle in. Looking around, it’s a nice view. I can’t see it from our cabin—boo-hoo!—but they say that suffering is good for the soul.

I vow to endure, somehow, as I sip my cranberry juice and listen to the rushing water. Somewhere in Calcutta a street urchin is searching for food in a pile of trash. And I'm feeling sorry for myself.

We all are Terri Schiavo

I’d like to write about something other than Terri Schiavo. But I can’t stop thinking about her. Why? Because I am Terri Schiavo. And you are Terri Schiavo. We all are Terri Schiavo.

By which I mean: whoever Terri Schiavo is—body, soul, matter, spirit—each and every person is. This is the root reason why her situation is so compelling and produces so much passion. Whatever will happen to her when she dies is what will happen to you and me when we die.

If Terri is merely a material body, then when her body dies she is gone forever. Since her brain is dead, and the brain is the locus of a person’s consciousness, then Terri may already be gone forever if matter is all she is.

However, if Terri is something more than her body, then that “something”—call it soul—will survive the death of its bodily shell.

As Terri goes, so you and I go. Thus even though the impassioned debate over the removal of her feeding tube is couched in political and religious terms, I believe the fuel that is feeding the fire of this controversy is much more deeply personal. To put it bluntly, it’s that death scares us shitless.

Many people won’t admit that they are scared of dying. I will. I don’t know what’s going to happen when I die. I wish I did. I’d like to be sure that my soul will live on after my body is dead. But I don’t know that this will happen. I just hope that it will.

Most Americans, whether they are conventionally religious or unconventionally spiritual, hope like me that there is more to life than bodily existence. The operative word though is “hope.” It is a fact that every person will die. What occurs after death is in the realm of belief.

At least for now. When you and I take our last breaths, the reality of what lies beyond will be right before us. Or not, if we are not.

Laurel and I have strong feelings about how Terri Schiavo’s situation is being handled by the courts, Congress, and her family. So do lots of others.

When Peggy Noonan rails against the morals of the “pull the plug” people in a Wall Street Journal editorial, my blood starts to boil (metaphorically, thankfully.) When I wrote about religious zealots running amok in this case, a man commented that I was driven by hate for anyone who didn’t share my “secular humanist agenda.”

I’m sorry he felt that way. I don’t hate him. And I don’t hate Peggy Noonan. What I hate, really, is death. Not death per se, but the mystery of what happens after death. This uncertainty creates anxiety in all of us. It is part of the human condition.

People deal with this angst in different ways. Some do their best to not think about death. Others do their best to have faith that God, Jesus, Allah, Buddha-nature, Jehovah, the Tao, something or someone, will take care of them after death. Still others do their best to accept the finality of death as the end of their existence.

Yet irrespective of these best efforts, death will come. When it does, thoughts, beliefs, and acceptances will be swept away in the instant of our passing. To be replaced by: reality. Whatever it is. Afterlife. No life. Semi-life. Meta-life. Whatever, we all are united by that moment which comes to every man and woman: the last earthly moment.

When I watch CNN and see the “Save Terri” crowds standing vigil outside her hospice, I see part of myself. The part that wants to cling to life at any cost, that recognizes how precious is the sense of “me” now inhabiting the body known as Brian.

When I watch Fox News and see Michael Schiavo pleading that his wife be permitted to die with dignity, I also see part of myself. The part that wants to soar as soul above the crude confines of materiality, that recognizes how marvelous is the expanse of the cosmos that lies beyond the little knowledge of reality that I have now.

And when I watch the videos of Terri Schiavo, I see myself most of all. Not part of myself, all of myself. I wonder what I would be—no, will be—when my brain becomes mush, worm food. Will “I” still be there? And where is “there”?

Whatever I will be or won’t be, wherever I will be or won’t be, I feel that Terri Schiavo and I are the same. As are you and me. As are we all. Terri’s enduring gift is that she has brought us closer together. That may not seem to be the case at this moment given all the divisiveness surrounding her bedside.

But I believe, or at least hope, that this will be Terri’s lasting legacy: a greater recognition that we are all Terri Schiavo. That whatever our religious beliefs or lack of beliefs, whatever our political inclinations or lack of inclinations, we are all human beings.

Who will die. One by one, yet also as One.

“I Heart Huckabees”

I loved the philosophy in this DVD movie. I didn’t like much else about it, especially the lame title, which features a heart as in “I [heart] New York.” Even Prince has given up on the unpronounceable symbol shtick. The producers of “I Heart Huckabees” should have chosen a title more befitting to the movie.

I don’t know, maybe “The Existential Detectives.” For Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin are the centerpieces here. They are two Existential Detectives hired by an environmentalist who is trying to figure out the Meaning Of It All. “All” includes his efforts to save open spaces and his relationship with a spokesman (Jude Law) for Huckabees, a chain of stores which, as Ebert says in the above-linked review, “doesn’t care about the environment, but cares deeply about seeming to care.”

The storyline, acting, and characters in “I Heart Huckabees” didn’t do much for me. However, I got through the 105 movie minutes enjoyably thanks to the philosophical snippets that popped up regularly and roused my interest. I would have enjoyed the movie considerably more if the plot had been dropped completely.

The ideas underlying the plot are compelling. A “My Dinner With Andre”-like conversation about whether the cosmos is (1) a meaningful unity or (2) meaningless chaos awaits another filmmaker. Here Existential Detective Hoffman champions the “all is one” perspective while his nemesis, a French woman played by Isabelle Huppert, puts forth the “all is crap” position.

The phrase “All is crap” doesn’t do justice to the philosophies of Sartre, Camus, and the other existentialists I avidly read during my early college years’ embrace of meaninglessness. But, if I remember correctly, in three words it pretty well sums up thousands of pages of their writings.

Hoffman believes that everything is connected; Huppert believes that everything just is. Where Hoffman enthusiastically sees a reflection of loving cosmic oneness, Huppert (metaphorically) sips her expresso, takes a puff on her unfiltered cigarette, and blows out a smoke-ring with a cynical, “That’s bullshit.”

There are powerful arguments on both sides. That’s what made “I Heart Huckabees” so compelling for me. I wasn’t much interested in how the storyline turned out; I was eager to learn the outcome of the philosophical mano-a-womano. In my opinion, it was a draw. Laurel came away feeling that All is One was the winner.

It could well be that both sides are right: life is meaningless and life is meaningful. Which is true at a given moment just depends on… . Well, if I could replace those three dots with some words, I’d be a happy philosophical camper. I’m still searching for the trail that leads to the campground, so have a long way to go before I’m able to settle into a tent of truth. Sometimes I feel that I’m getting some glimpses of the path ahead, though.

The beginning of “I Heart Huckabees” features some coincidences. Wanting to figure out what those coincidences mean drives the environmentalist to hire the Existential Detectives. They follow him around, observing every detail of his life, on the assumption that if everything is connected, following any single thread of an event could reveal the entire fabric of the cosmos.

After I watched “I Heart Huckabees” I experienced a mild existential coincidence of my own. In the movie a character observes that only 5% of the matter/energy in the universe is recognizable. This is true. Physicists estimate that 70% of the stuff that makes up the universe is dark energy, 20% is dark matter, and just 5% is ordinary matter (“dark” is scientific shorthand for “we don’t know what it is”).

So there I was in my post-movie moment, brushing my teeth before going to bed, reading the February 28, 2005 issue of U.S. News and World Report that I had opened up next to the sink. And in an article called “Mysteries of the Mind” there it was! The 5% solution!

According to cognitive neuroscientists, we are conscious of only about 5 percent of our cognitive activity, so most of our decisions, actions, emotions, and behavior depends on the 95 percent of brain activity that goes beyond our conscious awareness.

Beautiful. The human mind that only knows about 5% of the stuff in the universe is only aware of 5% of what goes on in itself. Let’s see: 5% times 5% is a quarter of a percent. That seems about right—after ten thousand years or so of civilization Homo sapiens is clued in to about 1/400th of what the cosmos is all about, 0.25%.

No wonder life seems so meaningless so much of the time.

But then…there’s the other 99.75%.

Get a grip on that, even some of that, and I suspect life looks much different.

Bring it on.

Taoism talk flows

Yesterday I gave my first-ever talk about Taoism to a Chemeketa Community College class. As befits the subject matter, it flowed pretty well. I rationalized my minimal preparation by saying to myself, “That’s how a Taoist sage would do it—speak from the heart, not from notes.”

Of course, one problem with this approach was that I’m not a Taoist sage. And the heart from which I tried to speak from is filled with all kinds of crap. Some wisdom too, I hope, but largely crap. Which reminds me that somehow I missed sharing with the class a favorite quotation from The Book of Chuang Tzu. Now that it comes to mind, I feel better about what’s in my heart:

Master Tung Kuo asked Chuang Tzu, “That which is called the Tao, where is it?”
Chuang Tzu replied, “There is nowhere where it is not.”
“But give me a specific example.”
“In this ant,” said Chuang Tzu.
“Is that its lowest point?”
“In this panic grass,” said Chuang Tzu.
“Can you give me a lower example?”
“In this common earthenware tile,” said Chuang Tzu.
“This must be its lowest point!”
“It’s in shit and piss too,” said Chuang Tzu.
Master Tung Kuo had no answer to this.

Almost as soon as I walked into the Judson Middle School classroom for the second half of the three hour class I got a question from an earnest student: “What does the te mean in Tao Te Ching?” “Oh, no,” I thought. “Am I expected to actually know something about Taoism?” I started to lose confidence in my whole lesson plan, which basically consisted of reading some mystifying anecdotes from The Book of Chuang Tzu and commenting confusedly on them.

If nobody had any idea what I was talking about, that was OK. After all, Chuang Tzu is known as the “genius of the absurd.” If the mojo (or should I say “ch’i”?) in the class started to flag, I had a copy of my “The Tao of Paris Hilton” and "I become a Taoist" posts ready to roll. One thing I wasn’t ready for was a serious question about the meaning of a Taoist term. Fortunately, the class was on a break and I could wriggle away with a “Good question, I’ll try to get to the meaning of te during my talk.”

But I didn’t try very hard. I think te means “life force,” which seems real similar to “ch’i.” And isn’t ch’i part and parcel of the Tao? Whatever. That’s the beauty of Taoism. Words count for nothing. No matter what you say about Taoism, you’re wrong.

I was pleased that everyone in the class appeared to stay awake right up to 9:00 pm. That was my main goal: not put anyone to sleep. To achieve that end I used several of my tried and true public speaking techniques: (1) when interest seems to flag, tell an embarrassing story about yourself, and (2) if that doesn’t perk up the room, tell an embarrassing story about someone else. Such as Laurel. Well, it wasn’t so much embarrassing as revealing. I observed that Laurel will spend all afternoon tending to the trees she’s planted on our property, then come in and say, “Look at my desk! I’ve got so much paperwork! I should have been inside working on it!”

But if she had done that, I can almost guarantee that come dusk she would be saying, “Look at how nice the day was! I’ve got so much gardening to do! I should have been outside working!” We don’t trust our instincts, was my conclusion. If we feel the urge to do something, and then do it, second-guessing often sets in after the first-impulsing. Taoism discourages such mental musings: “Maybe it would have been better if….”

Chuang Tzu says, “That which one does because it is impossible to do other, that is the Tao of the sage.” Easy to say. Also easy to do. It only is possible to do one thing at a time, so why not simply do that one thing fully, completely, passionately, unreservedly, happily?

Figuring that if I ended my talk on a mysteriously enigmatic note I’d be less likely to get any additional quasi-scholarly questions that I couldn’t answer, I turned to “The Shores of the Dark Waters” chapter. Here’s how it begins. If I took Chuang Tzu’s message seriously, I’d welcome tough questions about Taoism. And answer just as Words-of-Actionless-Action did.

Speed up the Second Coming

Laurel and I found the “Christ Is Coming Very Soon!” advertisement in today’s Salem Statesman-Journal newspaper most interesting. We read it carefully, especially the eight compelling reasons why the Second Coming is right around the corner.

It struck me that all of us, Christian and non-Christian alike, should be doing what we can to hasten Jesus’ return. For the faithful, this will mark the fulfillment of prophecy. For the unfaithful, it will be pretty darn interesting, to say the least—the adventure of a lifetime, if not eternity.

Practically speaking, there isn’t much that most of us can do to pump up four of the eight reasons for Jesus’ coming back to Earth. Israel’s rebirth has happened. Famines, violence, and wars aren’t easy to control, though with Bush's re-election at least one of the three is primed for Second Coming success.

Increasing earthquakes—not possible with present-day technology. Increase in both apostasy and faith: whatever your religious or non-religious conviction, it appears you’re helping out in this area.

So it seems that our focus should be on the other four reasons. These are areas where everybody can do something, big or small, to help assure that the Second Coming will really come.

There’s no substitute for individual initiative when it comes to good works, so the links below are simply some suggestions to get us pointed in the right direction. Which means…

(1) Keep morality plummeting. It’s difficult to pin down immorality, but sex, drugs, and rock & roll are some fine traditional places to look for immoral inspiration.

(2) Keep the explosion of travel and education happening. Plan a trip. Educate yourself. According to the ad “two key conditions…for the Second Coming are that ‘travel and education shall be vastly increased’ (Daniel 12:4).”

(3) Help cults and the occult to prosper. I’d have to get a free report to learn exactly what a cult or the occult is, but I’m pretty sure my Church of the Churchless weblog qualifies as “counterfeit spirituality.” Visit it and speed Jesus’ return.

(4) Help support the New World Order. The ad says that “increased centralization of world financial and political power is a prelude to the soon-coming world power system in the hands of ‘Antichrist.’” Since you can’t have Christ without the Antichrist, please do what you can to support the New World Order.

Thanks for your assistance with encouraging the Second Coming. If it really happens, maybe I can point to this posting as proof of my good intentions and get a little respite from the Last Judgment.

The mystery of suffering

Why do we suffer? There’s no better question to ask, because a search for the answer leads into the deepest mysteries of life, death, God, existence, body, soul, meaning, purposelessness—the whole shebang that philosophers ponder, mystics meditate on, scientists study, and preachers pontificate about.

Bill Long’s recently-published book, “A Hard-Fought Hope: Journeying with Job through Mystery,” examines suffering through a biblical lens, the book of Job. Yet Bill, a Salem resident and friend of mine, doesn’t take a traditional religious approach to understanding Job. He starts by laying out a legal complaint against God, Ruler of the Universe on behalf of Job, an individual.

The charges? Breach of contract, negligence, loss of consortium, intentional infliction of emotional distress. The prayed-for remedy? What we all want, relief. Since Bill is both an attorney and a religious scholar, his discussion of the book of Job is systematic and logical while also compassionate and devotional. Committed Jews and Christians who read “A Hard-Fought Hope” will find that Bill speaks their language.

I’m neither a Jew nor a Christian, yet I enjoyed learning about a perspective on suffering that was unfamiliar to me. I might have read the book of Job sometime in my life, but it hadn’t registered with me. So I appreciated how Bill breaks down Job’s response to God’s testing of his faith into well-defined “stages of grief,” so to speak, that comprise his book’s central chapters: “A Torrent of Emotions,” “The Grace of Job’s Anger,” “The Music of Job’s Grief,” “The Power of a Question,” “The Turning Point,” “Wisdom Seeking,” “Listening Differently,” “Living Differently.”

The problem I had with “A Hard-Fought Hope” didn’t have to do with Bill’s writing, which is highly readable, nor with the book’s subject of suffering, which is of intense interest to me—particularly when life doesn’t go the way I think it should (in other words, I’m interested almost all of the time). No, what gave me pause throughout my reading of the 160 pages was this: I couldn’t stop thinking, “Is all this dialogue in the book of Job between a suffering man and the God who makes him suffer anything more than literary fantasy?”

Lots of novelists have written about suffering. Why isn’t their message taken as seriously as the words in the Old Testament that Bill interprets for us? It must be because so many people consider that the book of Job really is a true description of how God sent suffering to a man, and how that man responded to the divine test. Otherwise, Job is just a fictional description of a guy with delusions that a unseen malevolent metaphysical force is out to get him: “He has torn me in his wrath, and hated me; he has gnashed his teeth at me; my adversary sharpens his eyes against me.” (16:9) “I was at ease, and he broke me in two; he seized me by the neck and dashed me to pieces.” (16:12)

Personally, I think the book of Job is fiction. There really isn’t a God who gnashes his teeth, seizes people by the neck, and breaks them in two. But many believers think there is, which to me is the most interesting question about Job in particular and the Bible in general: Why does the notion of an external, supernatural source of suffering hold so much appeal? A short possible answer: Because a God who gives suffering can take away suffering, which lifts the responsibility for eliminating suffering off of my shoulders and puts it in God’s hands.

Near the end of his book, Bill writes: “If only Job could have believed in a God who did not intervene in human life, that would have solved all his difficulties.” Yes, in a sense it would have. Job still would be afflicted by all that he was suffering from, but he wouldn’t have the significant added burden of suffering from a belief that the God he loved so much had singled him out for special nasty treatment.

I know lots of people who believe that many, if not most, of the things that happen to them are for a reason. This isn’t a peculiarly Christian/Jewish doctrine. Some think that angelic beings or spiritual guides are directing the course of their life. Others, an ascended (or descended) guru, master, avatar, yogi, or other entity with a power to alter events. I can’t say for sure that they are wrong. Still, almost all the evidence of both science and common sense points toward natural, universal, and impersonal causes of life’s happenings.

My bet is that the only cure for suffering is what we prescribe ourselves. This is the basic Buddhist perspective, echoed in a little book by Paramhansa Yogananda that I re-read recently: “The Science of Religion.” I don’t agree with everything Yogananda says, but I find persuasive his essential psychological premises: “Desire, or the increase of conditions of excitations of the mind, is the source of pain or misery….Every human being is seeking to attain Bliss by fulfilling desire, but he mistakenly stops at pleasure; so his desires never end, and he is swept away into the whirlpool of pain.”

This may sound rather New Agey. Still, when I consider Yogananda’s well-reasoned arguments, which are more sophisticated than my two sentence summary here, they resonate with me more persuasively than does the book of Job. For Yogananda, Buddhism, and Eastern philosophy in general (plus the mystic neo-Platonism of Plotinus) locate the source of suffering in the human psyche, not God’s will. This means that we should look inward to our own self for answers to why life is so painful, not outward to a being in the heavens.

Still, what do I really know about all this? Not much. What I’ve just said is only one of many options on this interesting and amusing “Why Do We Suffer?” quiz.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any answers at the end of the quiz. Just more questions. Maybe that is the best answer.

Wisdom from a boy with AIDS

"Do all you can with what you have, in the time you have, in the place you are." These are the words of Nkosi Johnson, a South African boy born with AIDS who died at the age of twelve with more wisdom than most of us accumulate in a much longer lifetime.

I heard Jim Wooten recite Nkosi’s mantra as I was driving home tonight. Wooten has written a book about Nkosi and the South African AIDS crisis, “We Are All the Same.” The title is how Nkosi ended his speech to an international AIDS conference.

I don’t know much about Nkosi Johnson. And I’m not one to get teary-eyed over emotional stories like those Wooten was relating on Oregon Public Broadcasting a few hours ago.

But when Wooten said that he wanted to end an interview with Nkosi because he thought the boy was tired, and Nkosi said, “No, you can’t. You haven’t asked me about dying yet”—that moved me.

As I’ve noted before, I don’t like to think about my own death. So I much admire the determination of young Nkosi, who knew that he was about to die, to tell those of us who would continue to live, how to live. Wooten said that Nkosi spoke about death for three or four minutes and advised…

"Do all you can with what you have, in the time you have, in the place you are."

There’s so much I want to say about these words, but I’m afraid that whatever I try to add to what Nkosi said will only detract from his simple wisdom.

So I’ll stop writing and go cook some tacos. Fully. Attentively. With meatless “meat,” lettuce, tomato, cheese, avocado, tortillas, oil. Should take about fifteen minutes. In the kitchen.

Thank you, Nkosi, for reminding me how to live each moment. For however many I have left.

Church of the Churchless opens its doors

I’m pleased to announce that the Church of the Churchless has opened its doors. This is a spin-off HinesSight weblog devoted to preaching the gospel of spiritual independence.

Until today I’d been plugging away on making the Church of the Churchless a regular website. But frustrations with the website creation software I had been using, coupled with a wave of fondness for the simplicity and power of weblogging, led me to recast all of the content into its present form.

Which, naturally, will evolve. If you want to explore the current Church offerings, entirely logically I suggest you start with the "Welcome" page. This provides an overview of what the Church of the Churchless is all about. Then the posts listed in the "Basics of our faithless faith" portal can be explored.

The world has plenty of religions and spiritual faiths. The last thing I want to do is add to the confusion. That’s why this is a church for the churchless, which naturally includes me. People who don’t belong need a place to belong. That place is inside us, not outside. But we need to be reminded of this. So this weblog is a way for me to remind myself of what I already know, but forget all the time.

Right now I’m reading a book about Skeptics and True Believers. Each group has a strong support system. For Skeptics it is science; for True Believers it is religion. However, what about people like me who are Skeptical Believers? We believe that there is more to reality and the cosmos than what science knows (or can ever know), yet are skeptical that the path of organized religion leads to these higher truths.

Laurel and I keep thinking about forming a group here in Salem that would be a support for the spiritually independent who yearn for a dash more of togetherness to mix in with their otherwise tasty independence. We haven’t quite figured out whether, or how, to do this. So the Church of the Churchless is a way for me to share ideas in cyberspace that might someday also be communicated face-to-face.

HinesSight will continue to be my main creative weblogging outlet. I’ll use the Church of the Churchless as a venue to express most of my mystical/spiritual/metaphysical ponderings, a.k.a. to some, “weirdness.” The thought of which—weirdness—just stimulated the seeds of a Church sermon: “Which is weirder: reality or religion?”

Why, I think I’m going to enjoy being the unpastor of my own unchurch.

Gnat, or not?

I passed by a window on my way to meditating this morning. Outside, a barely visible swirl barely caught my eye. Gnats, merrily gnatting in a swarm above and around the rhododendrons. Newly born, I assume. Exploring a cold new world where their life likely is measured in days, maybe hours.

Each little gnat was flying around doing what it knew how to do: not much. Each little gnat was experiencing what it was able to experience: not much. And there I was looking through the window at them, doing what I knew how to do and experiencing what I was able to experience: how much? This was the gnawing gnat-inspired question that kept me standing there.

I couldn’t stop looking at the gnats (or whatever they were in entomological reality; “gnats” captures their poetic essence). They were in their world. I was in mine. How much difference was there between us?

I was on my way to the cherished unused tiled shower that I have made into my meditation den. There I would read one of my books about the probable nature of the physical universe, or the less probable nature of the spiritual universe, before trying to dive into the depths of my mind and get to the bottom of all this. Seemingly, I am so much more than a gnat! I can read; I can think; I can ponder who I am and what surrounds me.

I pondered that, for sure, there are some two hundred billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy. For sure, there are some one hundred billion galaxies in the known universe. Likely, many more galaxies, many more universes. I am one person on one planet orbiting one star. I looked out the window at the gnats. I felt like a gnat.

I pondered that I live in a universe some fourteen billion years old. It probably will exist for hundreds of billions of years more. It may be eternal. Almost certainly existence is, or there wouldn’t be any place for a universe to come into existence. The utmost reality of time and space is on a scale beyond my comprehension. I am 56 years old. I felt like a gnat.

It was a good feeling, once I started to settle into my gnatness. The gnats looked carefree. They were busy, busy, busy, flying around in what looked like circles, but might well have had some gnat-purpose in their gnat-consciousnesses. They didn’t know what the heck everything was all about. I didn’t either. No matter. We were all part of a cosmos so inconceivable, it was a privilege just to be a part inconceiving of it.

I went on to meditate. Yet I knew that I already had.

Mini-secret of universe revealed

Back in the late 1960’s, illicit pharmacology brought me regularly to marvelous “Aha!” insights into the ultimate nature of the universe. The reason I currently neither have a Nobel prize in physics, nor am I recognized as a great spiritual sage, is that the insights were only insightful while in my artificially altered state of consciousness.

They could be shared, though, which lent them more validity than they probably deserved. One moonless night in 1968 a friend and I were rolling rocks off the edge of a ravine in the Santa Cruz mountains, marveling at how long they took to noisily reach the bottom. Moving on to deeper questions, we then stood in the darkness, trying to grok with our mescaline-fueled minds what everything was all about.

We could feel it so clearly. But what was it that we were feeling? We struggled for words to express the plenitude of this psychedelic experience. “The universe is…” I’d say. “Yes, the universe is…” my companion would respond. We almost had it! One more try! “The universe is…” I said again. And then—I swear to god this is true—we simultaneously proclaimed: “a paper bag turned inside out!”

It was so right, so true, so perfect. What a relief! Finally, all the searching was over. No more pouring over the Tibetan Book of the Dead for clues to what lies beyond this veil of maya. It is the other side of this paper bag of a universe! In the morning, none of this made a whit of sense to either of us. Oh well, that’s cool.

Now, thirty-six years later, my cosmic insights aren’t as powerful or as bizarre, but they keep on coming. Mini-secrets of the universe get revealed without any help from chemistry, other than what is bubbling away naturally in my brain. Last night I had one of those flashes while reading an Oregonian article about the effects of Measure 37.

I was immersed in the usual funk I get into when I think about how Oregon’s pioneering land use laws run the risk of being trashed by this ill-conceived measure. For it allows owners to be exempted from a law passed after they acquired their property if it reduces the value of their land. The other option is for government to pay them for this reduction in value, but nobody expects cash-strapped Oregon to be able to come up with the money to do this. Instead, land use laws simply will be waived.

I was moodily visualizing convenience stores popping up in the middle of residential neighborhoods, and gravel pits being dug next to state parks, when a crystal-clear realization broke into my meandering thoughts.

Whatever is going to happen is what has to happen! All right, I realize that this sounds as meaningless as a paper bag turned inside out! But the difference is that my clear-headed 2004 insight still rings true to me, even the day after. What came home to me is that the 60% of people who voted for Measure 37, as for the 51% who voted for Bush, are going to experience what has to happen as a result of their choice.

The universe is going to work things out perfectly. What goes around, comes around. Whatever you sow, you reap. Garbage in, garbage out. Pick your cliché, the meaning is the same: the changes caused by Measure 37 are going to result in exactly the right effects. “Good,” “bad,” these aren’t what I mean by “right.” “Right” means that the universe always keeps itself in perfect balance, and I don’t have to worry my little liberal Green head that anything unjust is going to happen—with Measure 37, Bush’s second term, or anything else.

I felt like a big weight was lifted from my psyche. It isn’t up to me to right supposed wrongs. The cosmos takes care of that.

Soon, Laurel and I hope, a lead petitioner of Measure 37 will find that someone is going to build a ghastly environmental and aesthetic disaster next to his or her home after taking advantage of the Measure’s lifting of a land use law. When I read about this in the Oregonian, I’ll smile.

Everything is going to be all right. I’ll remember that the universe told me that on November 14, 2004. Now, I’ve just got to figure out how this connects to the whole paper-bag-inside-out thing. A Nobel prize could still be in the cards, in my own mind at least.