HinesSight

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 t