Church of the Churchless

Stillness can make action more effective

I'm continuing to enjoy Domyo Sater Burk's Idiot's Guide to Mindfulness. 

Today I read her take on getting comfortable with stillness and silence. This appealed to me, not only because I've been meditating every day for over 50 years, so I understand how difficult it can be to keep the mind and body more or less still and silent.

This also is espoused in Tai Chi, which I've practiced for the past 16 years. Of course, you can't be perfectly still in Tai Chi, which I like to call "Taoism in motion." 

But listening skills are a big part of the effectiveness of Tai Chi as a martial art, a quality that applies to other martial arts such as karate. Tai Chi, though, promotes a certain quietude and stillness in sensing what an opponent is intending that is uncommon in more active forms of self-defense. 

The idea is to sensitively sense the energy of a punch, kick, or whatever without initially interfering much with it, if it is interfered with at all. Only then can the attack can dealt with effectively, because you haven't allowed a premature urge to respond to interfere with learning what it is that needs to be dealt with. 

Here's some excerpts from the " Comfort with Stillness and Silence" chapter I read this morning.

To cultivate the receptive attitude required for mindfulness, you temporarily stop trying to influence your circumstances and just open the doors of perception. You try to let go of activity, judgement, and trying to figure things out using your ordinary level of thinking.

You momentarily set aside commenting on things and explaining your point of view to others.

Your body-mind may generate thoughts and feelings all on its own, but you simply observe them as being part of your overall experience of the moment. You're just watching, listening, sensing, and perceiving,

The subjective experience of this purely receptive mode is stillness or silence. The absence of activity or noise may be internal, external, or both. It can be very uncomfortable if you're not used to it.

Fortunately, you can increase your ability to let go of activity and be still. You might even end up liking the experience! The more familiar you get with this simple mode of being, the easier mindfulness will get. 

...Stillness is simply letting go of all activity. The activity you let go of may be working to obtain something you want, trying to avoid or get rid of something you don't want, or escaping something you find neutral or boring. It can be obvious or subtle.

...When you're able to rest in stillness, you become much more receptive to what's going on in your life. It's as if your mental and physical activity create a whole lot of noise. When you let go of that activity, it's like turning off the noise.

Suddenly you can hear. You're able to perceive what's going on around you.

In addition, when you turn off your volitional actions and thoughts, you dramatically increase your ability to see, touch, smell, taste, and objectively perceive the feelings and thoughts that are present in your body-mind in spite of "you" (that is, the conscious, willful part of you).

It isn't necessary -- or advisable -- to choose stillness and then do nothing. Mindfulness isn't about becoming passive. What you're trying to do is see your life clearly so you can take better care of it.

At some point action is necessary and wise, but you're unlikely to be able to know the best time to act or the best thing to do unless you take some time to rest in stillness first. This turns down the noise in your body-mind and opens up the doors of perception.

It's important to realize that stillness is not ultimately useless; it's only apparently useless at the moment. 

As you rest in stillness, your body-mind is still present and operating; it's just not being guided or censored by the part of you responsible for ordinary discriminatory thinking and judging. The information that you receive while mindfully aware goes into your body-mind and affects you. You're just temporarily suspending judgment and action.

This actually gives you a chance to process things in a more holistic and deep way than you habitually do. Ironically, resting in stillness can help you make better decisions and be more effective in your life.

Cult of Trump shows how delusion is linked to blind devotion

Cults come in various forms. Sure, religious cults are what first come to mind, but any form of blind devotion to an authority figure can result in cultish behavior and attitudes.

On January 6 I wrote a post for my Salem Political Snark blog, "Insurrection at Capitol today caused by the Cult of Trump."

This is what happens when people fall under the spell of an authoritarian cult leader.

A woman died today in the Capitol building after a mob incited by Trump stormed the building in an insurrection aimed at stopping Biden from being declared president-elect by Congress.

...The only good news out of today's disaster is that maybe, just maybe, it will cause those who have joined the Cult of Trump to find the guts to abandon the worst president in our nation's history.

It's astounding that so many people in the United States can be devoted to such a horrible person after Trump's many failings have been on prominent display for well over four years.

Somehow they've been sucked in to the black hole of Trump's ego, narcissism, lying, and inability to come to grips with reality, either choosing to stay in that dark place willingly or not having the capacity to break free of all the nasty stuff that Trump stands for.

A New York Times story, "'Our President Wants Us Here': The Mob That Stormed the Capitol," has this subtitle -- They came from around the country with different affiliations — QAnon, Proud Boys, elected officials, everyday Americans — united by one allegiance. To Donald Trump.

They traveled from various corners of resentment in 21st-century America. Whether motivated by a sense of economic disenfranchisement or distrust of government, by bigotry, or conspiracy or a belief that Mr. Trump is God’s way of preparing for the Rapture, they shared a fealty to the president.

In the rally that preceded the march to the Capitol (photo above), Trump told the crowd that he would be marching with them. That was a lie. Trump went back to the White House and watched the mob break in to the Capitol on TV, coward that he is. 

Now many of the Cult of Trump members who did what their beloved leader asked them to do are facing criminal charges. Serves them right. This wasn't a joke. A woman was killed during the storming of the Capitol, along with a policeman who died after being struck in the head by a fire extinguisher. 

It appears that Trump will be impeached again for inciting this murderous riot. Nonetheless, most of Trump's devotees will stick with him, because they have lost the ability to see him as he is, only as they imagine him to be. 

Here's a tweet that shows the quasi-religious fervor of Trump supporters.

And here's another tweet that shows how delusional the Cult of Trump can be. This Republican official actually believes that Trump will be president for another four years, even though Biden's electoral college victory was affirmed by Congress on January 6. 

Again, political delusions and religious delusions differ only in their subject matter, not in the warped state of mind that produces them. Likely this same official also believes that Jesus rose from the dead and redeems the sins of those who believe in him. Hey, that beats Trump! 

Be scientific in your life. Demand evidence of your beliefs.

A few days ago I wrote about the iron rule of science, the subject of a book by Michael Strevens, "The Knowledge Machine." I decided to order the book after reading a review of it.

Today I finished the Introduction. So I've just scratched the surface of what Strevens has to say about the iron rule. Here's how he describes it in the part I read today.

How can a rule so scant in content and so limited in scope account for science's powers of discovery? It may dictate what gets called evidence, but it makes no attempt to forge agreement among scientists as to what the evidence says. 

It simply lays down the rule that all arguments must be carried out with reference to empirical evidence and then steps back, relinquishing control. Scientists are free to think about anything they like about the connection between evidence and theory. 

But if they are to participate in the scientific enterprise, they must uncover or generate new evidence to argue with. And so they do, with unfettered enthusiasm.

I absolutely love this emphasis on evidence. So much so, I wanted to share my ideas about what it means to me even before I've gotten past page 10 of the book. 

My ideas might change as I learn more about how Strevens views the iron rule. That's the nature of scientific progress. He'll present his evidence in the form of the rest of the book, and I'll consider what it means for my theory of how life should be lived. 

All I know at the moment is that I felt really good after pondering the iron rule of empirical evidence more fully today. Evidence cuts through all kinds of worries, anxieties, uncertainties. It grounds us in the expansiveness of reality rather than the confines of our own minds. 

Here's a concrete example from my own life.

Since last February, about eleven months, I've been dealing with sciatica pain in my right leg. I don't have back pain. An X-ray of my lower back showed normal wear (or degeneration) for someone my age, 72. I don't know what the cause of the sciatica is. 

It's much better now, but it still bothers me -- particularly in the morning. I've been wondering if some of the exercises and stretches I do every day are making the sciatica worse, rather than better. 

This isn't a new idea; it just hit me more strongly after reading the Introduction this morning.

What I need to do is eliminate certain exercises that appear to be the most likely culprits for exacerbating my sciatica, stretches where I bend at the waist, either standing or sitting, while keeping my knees locked and trying to touch my toes. Doing those stretches the past few months has increased my flexibility.

The question is, have those stretches also slowed down my sciatica recovery? Well, the best way to tell is to collect evidence via an experiment. I've stopped doing those stretches and will see how this affects my sciatica. 

If it gets better, great. I'll then start doing the stretches again and see if the sciatica worsens. 

Now, I realize this sounds like common sense. But until today I hadn't realized how much sense doing this is. Instead of worrying about whether I'm doing the right thing, exercise-wise, I now have a pretty dependable way of finding out. That made me feel relieved, like evidence had replaced my competing beliefs about doing those sorts of stretches.

Are they good for my sciatica, or bad for my sciatica? 

Thinking about that question, about those alternatives, wasn't getting me anywhere. Based on what I've read about sciatica, I could find arguments for either good or bad. 

This seems to be what Strevens is getting at in the subtitle of his book, How Irrationality Created Modern Science. 

Evidence isn't rational. So I guess we could call it irrational. Rationality is me trying to find reasons for why stretching by bending at the waist could make my sciatica better or worse. Irrationality is me collecting evidence to see what happens when I stop doing the stretches, then when I start doing them again.

Sure, I need to use reason to interpret the meaning of the evidence I collect, which is very simple evidence compared to what is collected in a genuine scientific inquiry. 

But the evidence speaks for itself, in a sense.

Not in a logical way. In a way that is separate from how I think about the evidence. How I interpret the evidence of my possibly altered sciatica pain is akin to the arguing Strevens mentions in the quote above. I need to make sure that the evidence forms the basis for my conclusion about the value of stretching at the waist in my daily exercise routine.

I'll have more to say about the iron rule of empirical evidence after I get further into "The Knowledge Machine." That word, empirical, is key to how evidence is used in various areas of inquiry: scientific, personal, spiritual, ethical, and such.

Basically, empirical evidence makes it possible to find truth that is greater than the truth available to any person based on their own individual experience. I know for a fact that I enjoy the taste of raspberries more than the taste of blueberries. However, this isn't an objective fact. It's a subjective fact.

If we want to know whether humanity as a whole likes raspberries or blueberries more, we'd have to collect empirical evidence in the form of taste tests involving a large number of people. Yet me liking raspberries more is a genuine fact. For me. 

Religious believers need to understand the difference between objective and subjective evidence. But that discussion will wait for another blog post.

I'll end with an example of how I sometimes (well, often) don't use empirical evidence in my life. A few weeks ago my wireless color laser printer, which I keep in my office, said a software update was available. I clicked on "update" without much thought, even though the printer had been working fine.

A few days later I wanted to print something from my laptop upstairs. But nothing happened. The printer wasn't available. I tried turning the printer off, then on again, which often resolves a wi-fi connection problem. Not this time.

I had the printer do a wireless connection test. That came out fine. But no matter what I did, I couldn't get my laptop to connect with the printer.

I got frustrated. I told my wife, "I never should have done the printer update. It's screwed things up." My mind was convinced that the update was the problem, because I'd had no problem printing before the update was installed.

Then, in the course of checking the printer wi-fi settings one more time, it hit me.

A few hours before, our always slow DSL "broadband" (if you can call it that) had slowed even more, to the degree I could hardly do anything on my laptop. I'd decided to switch the wi-fi connection from the Google Nest that we'd been using for quite a while back to the original CenturyLink router's wi-fi network.

Oops. I'd completely forgotten that my laptop was on one wi-fi network, and the printer was on the Nest wi-fi network. As soon as I switched my laptop back to the Nest wi-fi, the printer worked fine, unsurprisingly.

My point in sharing this tale is to show that the beliefs we hold -- in this case, why my printer wasn't working -- are only as good as the evidence the beliefs are based on. I'd fashioned a totally believable story in my mind about how the printer update had messed things up, whereas actually it was me changing the wi-fi network that had caused the problem.

If I'd taken some deep breaths, settled back, and thought about any possible changes I'd made to my laptop, rather than focusing on the change to the printer, I would have saved myself a lot of time and trouble. No amount of reasoning about why the printer wasn't working would have solved the problem, because I wasn't aware of the crucial bit of evidence -- the changed wi-fi network.

But it can be tough to recognize when we're going down the wrong belief path, if we've convinced ourselves that we're on the right path. Evidence can get us back on track, if we're wise enough to collect it, or recognize it.

More churchless do's and don'ts from commenters

In my recent post, "Here's some churchless do's and don'ts for the new year," I invited blog visitors to leave their own do's and don'ts in a comment. So far, five people have done that. 

Here's what they said. Nicely done, guys.

Osho Robbins

DON'T seek God because He ain't seeking you
DO live your life as an ordinary person
DON'T seek enlightenment because it's already there
DO simply BE YOURSELF
DON'T try to be anything other than what you are
DO simply BE YOURSELF
DON'T complain about your life
DO simply accept what you have in life
DON'T think you NEED anything to be happy
DO be happy regardless of circumstances
DON'T seek perfection as it does not exist
DO embrace all aspects of who you are
DON'T be fake and a hypocrite
DO be authentic and true to yourself and others
DON'T connect your self worth to what you do or achieve
DO understand there is NO SELF
DO understand that if there is no SELF there is no SELF WORTH either
DO understand that the SELF you experience is not YOU
DO understand that there IS NO YOU
DON'T SEEK heaven, God, Self or Nirvana - they don't exist
DO live each moment of your life
DON'T take anything for granted
DO realise that you cannot take anything with you because there is nowhere to go
DO simply live and LET GO in each moment
DON'T hold on to anything as all is false
DO enjoy each moment and let it go
finally....
DON'T try to be anyone special or above the rest
instead
DO be ordinary and be happy with what life gives you each moment
and when death comes - embrace that as you embraced life

Spence Tepper

 

Don't worry about Do's and Don'ts.
Be yourself. Be willing to learn more about that... Or not.
Try to be a better person if you can....
Or just be whatever you are.... But try to be nice.
If you can hurt yourself and others less, and help yourself and others more, that's always a good thing.
If you choose to believe in anything and have faith, there is power in that.
If you choose to tear down walls, that's nice too.
But there is great power all around and within you, and it is accessible when you put your daily thinking and logic aside to see, to feel, to hear, to witness.

The engines of the creation are on all the time and you have connections to them.

Whether it is within yourself or this world. It is all inside you. There is nothing outside you that you can sense.

But in all events, be gentle. Everything that is and that we are, including our choices, comes from things we don't fully understand.

And our actions have results we can never fully predict. Results affecting others.
So be gentle. Seek to be awake more than in control.

manoj

DON'T waste your precious life following a debilitating Cult (Radha Soami)

DO realize we are already, what we are looking for

DON'T bother with Fake Babas too (GSD)

DO look for inspiration from within

DON'T look back, that's not where you're going

DO realize the impossible is always possible

DO it all, while you have the time...

Uchit

DONT fall for a sheep in wolves clothing , GSD being a perfect example

DO do your independant research before you trust someone

DONT listen to a man that thinks he knows it all on a stage

DO listen to your own gut instinct

DONT Become a RSSB agent, a servant of satan, thinking it is seva.

DO look after your self and loved ones

DONT be a sheep and blindly follow the crowd

Dragonslayer

Do - enjoy your life and your dreams
Don't - waste your life in cults like RSSB
Do - keep your own power
Don't - give your power to fake clowns
Do - learn from your mistakes
Don't - stay in places you don't progress
Do - wake your brothers and sisters from the RSSB hell hole
Don't - Give up
Do- enjoy your freedom

The iron rule of science is empirical evidence

For thirty-five years I belonged to a religious organization that called itself, among other names, the "science of the soul." I liked this name at first, but eventually I began to wonder if the organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), really understood what science was all about.

After breaking away from RSSB in 2005, I kept asking on this blog if religious believers could provide demonstrable evidence of God, spirit, soul, heaven,  higher realms of reality, or any other supernatural entity.

So far, I've gotten no such evidence. 

Which isn't surprising, because if there was solid evidence of anything supernatural, this would be amazing news. Everyone would be talking about it. Arguments about the validity of religious experience would have an empirical foundation.

Since this hasn't happened, I've become highly dubious of claims that it is possible to have a scientifically-based religion. A book review by Joshua Rothman in the October 5, 2020 issue of The New Yorker, The Rules of the Game: How Does Science Really Work?, helped confirm this attitude of mine.

The book discussed in the review is "The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science" by Michael Strevens. The author is a philosopher of science at New York University. He makes the case that the core of science is something he calls the iron rule.

Here's passages from the review that explain what the iron rule is.

The allocation of vast human resources to the measurement of possibly inconsequential minutiae is what makes science truly unprecedented in history. Why do scientists agree to this scheme?

...Strevens thinks that they do it because they have no choice. They are constrained by a central regulation that governs science, which he calls the "iron rule of explanation." 

The rule is simple: it tells scientists that, "if they are to participate in the scientific enterprise, they must uncover or generate new evidence to argue with"; from there, they must "conduct all disputes with reference to empirical evidence alone."

Compared with the theories proposed by Popper and Kuhn, Strevens's rule can feel obvious and underpowered. That's because it isn't intellectual but procedural.

"The iron rule is focused not on what scientists think," he writes," but on what arguments they can make in their official communications." Still, he maintains, it is "the key to science's success," because it "channels hope, anger, envy, ambition, resentment -- all the fires fuming in the human heart -- to one end: the production of empirical evidence."

Makes sense. Before modern science, Rothman says, thinkers like the ancient Greeks and more recently, Descartes, for example, tried to come up with all-encompassing views of the cosmos that were founded in logic (roughly speaking) rather than evidence. 

Religions always have done this sort of thing, of course. They come up with interesting stories, then package them in holy books like the Bible, Koran, and such. There's a certain internal logic to the stories, but no way to test their truthfulness. 

Thus the value of philosophies, like religions, can be debated without end, because they lack the empirical evidence of modern science. I'm well aware of this, since I've gotten over 61,000 comments on this blog during the 16 years of its existence.

Religiously-minded commenters have been saying the same things for all of those years.

Which is fine. I like philosophical debates as much as anyone, even if there is no end to them. However, I'm also a lover of science -- because science makes progress in finding truths about the world due to its requirement that anyone who makes a truth claim has to provide evidence to back up the claim.

Now, I realize that religious people say that an experience of God or some other supernatural entity can't be proven, since it takes place within the psyche, not anywhere outside. 

OK. But that means a supposed supernatural experience is akin to a dream. It is available only to the person having the experience, and there's no way to tell whether the experience points to a reality outside of the consciousness of that person. 

So religious believers need to stop claiming that what they experience has any sort of objective truth. Like a dream, the reality is in the consciousness of the beholder, not anywhere else.

Here's some churchless do's and don'ts for the new year

I don't believe in New Year's resolutions. They are easy to say and difficult to do. I figure that if there was something I should change about my life, it would have been obvious before the arbitrary date of January 1, 2021.

But I do believe in taking stock of, well, what I believe. 

So here's a run-down of some of my personal do's and don'ts for the coming year -- which aren't different from what I did in 2020. I'm sharing them because others might find them useful. Or entertaining. Or useless. 

If you have your own do's and don'ts, feel free to share them in a comment. I'd be interested in seeing them, and likely others would also.

(1) Don't waste time trying to discover your true innermost self. You don't have a self, nor are you a self. Problem solved!

(2) Do focus your attention on the outside world. Engage your senses of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touch as fully as possible.

(3) Do keep your mind and body in sync. That way you won't forget where you put your car keys.

(4) Don't let a problem ruin your entire day, unless it's a really big problem. Be like the zebra who, after being chased by a lion, goes back to grazing on grass.

(5) Do keep an eye out for lion'ish problems. But if they aren't visible, relax. Until they rear their head.

(6) Don't imagine that you can be sure what is going to happen in your life. Be open to surprises, since they are inevitable.

(7) Do tell that most special person "I love you" every day. Or as often as possible.

(8) Do something to benefit others whenever you feel like your life lacks meaning. Meaning comes mostly from giving, not getting.

(9) Don't strive for perfection. Rejoice in your vices, so long as they aren't overly illegal or excessively dangerous.

(10) Do pat a dog, cat, or other furry creature as often as possible. Furless creatures are fine also, just less soft.

(11) Do meditate every day, if only for a few minutes. Just don't expect any benefits. Meditation is its own reward.

(12) Do get out in nature regularly. Just remember what the poet David Ignatow said: "I should be content to look at a mountain for what it is and not as a comment on my life."

(13) Don't expect that the world will ahower you with praise. You aren't that deserving. But a dog may lick your face!

(14) Do live as if every day could be your last. One day you'll be correct about this, you just don't know when.

(15) Don't assume you'll have another chance at life after you die. Place all your bets on the life you're living now.

(16) Do know that darkness is greatest just before dawn. Also, when you have all the curtains tightly closed.

(17) Don't expect much from religious leaders and politicians, then you won't be disappointed.

(18) Do try doing nothing while in line at the grocery checkout. Those text messages can wait a few minutes.

(19) Don't be afraid to say "I don't know." Unless your spouse just asked, "Are you glad you married me?"

(20) Do laugh at yourself. Others are doing that behind your back, so you might as well join them.

(21) Do remember that while marijuana won't solve your problems, it will make you feel a whole lot better about them.

(22) Don't forget that the physical world is always in the present moment, unlike our minds, which like to ponder the past and forecast the future.

Mindfulness isn't a fad. It's awareness of present experience.

After discovering the great writing of Domyo Burk on her Zen Studies Podcast episodes, I was eager to buy the Idiot's Guide to Zen Living that she wrote. But that book is out of print, with only expensive used copies available, other than the Kindle version (I like my books on paper, not a screen).

However, I found another book by Burk, the Idiot's Guide to Mindfulness.  It arrived yesterday, and I already can tell that I'm going to enjoy it a lot.

Below is the Introduction, which is a great short summary of what mindfulness is all about. In it there's a mention of stimulus-independent thought. Since this isn't a familiar term to most people -- it sure wasn't to me -- here's a description from a section that follows the Introduction.

Researchers have recently made a very interesting discovery: when you're not otherwise occupied, you're usually engaged in very active self-referential thinking. It's like your mind takes advantage of any down time by analyzing, planning, and evaluating all the stuff in your life so you can be better prepared for it.

This thinking is what researchers call "stimulus-independent thought," because it is all in your head -- it generally has little or nothing to do with what is going on around you at the moment. This stimulus-independent, self-referential processing is called the brain's default mode.

This is the Introduction itself.

Over the last 25 years, the practice of mindfulness has been shown to be very beneficial to all kinds of people, for all kinds of reasons. It's really quite amazing. 

Mindfulness has been shown to improve cardiovascular health, increase rates of healing, decrease reported pain levels, and improve immune response. There is evidence it can decrease anxiety and stress, provide a way to cope with depression. increase levels of satisfaction with relationships and work situations, and help people change problematic behaviors.

It has been effective with populations that other methods have not reliably been able to benefit, including at-risk youth, prison inmates, and people suffering from certain kinds of intense and complicated mental illnesses.

Is mindfulness a fad? Is it a quick, easy answer to things we'll later discover has a serious downside? Ten or twenty years from now, are we going to look back and laugh, saying, "Remember when mindfulness was all the rage?"

I don't think so. Mindfulness isn't a special technique you add to your life. It's about learning to use your body and mind more effectively. It's a simple process of cultivating receptive awareness of your present experience, no matter what it is.

To do this, you have to learn to let go of your stimulus-independent thinking, such as ruminating on the past, planning, analyzing, evaluating, judging, fantasizing, and daydreaming.

What's remarkable is that such a simple practice makes such a big difference.

Science will undoubtedly be able to explain why this is the case someday, but in the meantime we have to rely on our subjective experience of mindfulness to understand it. Essentially, it means that human intelligence, while very advantageous in many ways, also causes you problems.

You come to rely too heavily on the abstract world that only exists in your own mind. You spend more time thinking about things that aren't actually going on around you than you do paying attention to your present experience. 

You perceive things through the filter of your ideas and judgments, and fail to notice cause-and-effect relationships because you're so preoccupied with your thoughts. You believe your feelings, concepts, judgments, and emotions reflect reality, and therefore you're compelled to defend or act on them.

Simply and repeatedly turning your attention back to the present moment counteracts the effects of spending so much time stuck in your head.

It isn't easy to make mindfulness a stronger habit than dwelling on stimulus-independent thinking, but each time you become aware of your actual experience here and now, it helps you gain perspective on your life.

For a moment, you notice what's in our own mind versus what's actually going on. This moment opens up many possibilities for different ways of thinking and behaving.

The greatest thing about mindfulness is that it's very simple to do, and anyone can do it. The necessary tools are accessible to anyone, they cost nothing, and they have no negative side effects! 

It may sound too good to be true, so I'll let you know what the catch is: mindfulness takes work. This book will tell you what that work entails so you can make mindfulness a part of your life, no matter what kind of life you lead.

Great meditation advice: relax, do less, let go

After writing a few days ago about what a great resource the Zen Studies Podcast is, every morning I've been reading one of the 131 episodes in the order they were published. 

Today I tried to also read a book I have about Shikantaza, the Zen approach to meditation that involves not doing anything special. I did my best to absorb a chapter consisting of the words of an 8th or 9th century Zen teacher, but they didn't make much sense to me. Too poetic, too meandering, too unclear.

So I closed that book and happily read another podcast by Domyo Burk, the Zen Studies Podcast creator. Here's excerpts from her Part 2 regarding what zazen (meditation) is all about, which includes a discussion of what to do if you find that you're thinking too much.

In short, nothing. Which makes perfect sense. What follows is some of the best advice about meditation that I've ever come across. And believe me, I'm familiar with a lot of that advice, since I've been meditating every day for about fifty years.

If you’ve tried zazen (or any other kind of meditation), you’ll know that even if you really want to meditate, and you fully intend to be present without an agenda for the whole period of meditation, you’re still liable to get caught up in thinking – usually many, many times over the course of a meditation period.

What can you do about it?

In zazen, when we realize we’ve been caught up in thinking, we try not to react at all. We just return to wholeheartedly sitting. A classic analogy for this is trying to hold a bowl of water very still. If you shake, or the wind blows, the water will be disturbed, but there’s nothing you can actively do to make the water calm again. Any motion you make, like patting the surface of the water, will only make things worse; the only thing you can do is hold still.

Stimulus-independent thinking is like the turbulence in the water, and absorbing yourself in just sitting is like holding the bowl still. Patting the surface of the water is analogous to evaluating your meditation and mulling over how to improve it, feeling frustrated with your mind or with yourself, judging thinking as being bad, or even trying to hold your mind on something in a rigid way in order to brace yourself against stimulus-independent thinking.

...The second you realize you’ve been caught up in thinking, that’s great – you’re no longer caught up! You’ve woken up to what’s happening in the present!

Even if you had totally forgotten you were even meditating, even if you spent 15 minutes planning an elaborate meal you want to cook next week, simply be grateful that you remembered your intention to meditate and let go of the past as quickly as possible. Forget about your previous mind-wandering as if it doesn’t matter at all, and throw your energy into just sitting.

It may seem like it will help to strain harder, feel regret, or try to figure out what’s wrong with your zazen, but those things just make it worse.

This “forget about it and keep sitting” approach may seem foolhardy – as if you’re working on a practice but forbidden how to learn how to get better at it. But zazen isn’t ordinary effort; it’s more about not doing than doing. When you realize you’ve been doing (thinking, striving) all you can do is not do. More doing (such as thinking about how to meditate better) isn’t going to help at all.

...Zazen is difficult, but not for the reasons we think. We think it’s difficult because we’re not trying hard enough, or we’re haven’t figured out the right way to do it yet. But it’s difficult precisely because in zazen we’re aiming to return to a natural state of simple, open awareness.

Issho Fujita sensei (see the show notes for a link to his writings on zazen) offers this analogy: Imagine you’re holding a bamboo stick by the ends and then applying pressure so the stick bends. If you want to allow the stick to return to its natural state, all you have to do is release the pressure you’re applying.

This bent state is our ordinary way of operating; we think it’s the way we have to be, the way things need to be, but it isn’t true. Our conscious efforts, self-interest, and discriminative thinking are extra things we add to our experience, like bending the bamboo stick. In order to allow our minds to return to a natural state of awareness, all we need to do is relax the extra effort we’re making.

But we all know it’s not so easy to “relax” or “be natural!” Habits are strong.

For example, what happens when someone tells you to breathe naturally? It becomes more difficult to breathe naturally! So relaxing into our natural state of open awareness is not so easy for us. This is why zazen is difficult and requires almost Herculean effort – but not our usual kind of effort. If we strive harder, if we try to make something happen (or not happen), we are just applying more pressure to the bamboo stick.

A significant part of our Herculean effort is becoming more and more subtly attuned to our experience so we can begin to recognize the extra things we are adding to our experience, and learn to let them go.

Another RSSB follower sees the light and leaves

I love getting deconversion stories from people who feel that this blog helped them in breaking free of religious dogmatism. Here's a message I got recently from someone who belonged to the organization I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

Maharaji refers to the previous RSSB guru, Charan Singh. Gurinder refers to the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, who is enmeshed in a financial scandal. Sant Mat refers to the teachings of RSSB. Satsangs are RSSB meetings where the teachings are discussed.

I've taken out some personal identifying information.

Hi Brian,

I wish to thank you for finally giving me the support with your church of the churchless site. To break with the cult of the Gurinder gangster clan. Originally a follower of Maharaji initiated in 84. Ten years of desperately trying to follow the present gangster. Wondering what was wrong with me for not being able to love him or even understand his take on santmat.

I then drifted for a further 20 or so years. Now as I say a very painful severance for me. Keeping a weekly watch on your site, about 3 years ago I stopped going to the Satsangs and functions or even wanting to see him on his visits to _______. All the things that were recently brought to the front by the young lady in her recent posting and more had over the years disgusted me. Finally making me leave.

Leaving at first was a rather traumatic experience. But over the first year I realised I had not only left santmat but any belief in any deity behind. Not the liberation of my mythical soul that I had signed on for. But undoubtedly a sense of being a liberated human being .

I see all around me how people are being tricked into some cult or other whether a political ideology, a religious one or any scam at all.  And daily I just avoid it with a silent laugh at all the rubbish that is peddled around this planet. In the name of some god or ideology.  

Thank you again Brian.

I am ________ of ________ and happily proclaim I am out of and free of the Cult of Santmat.

Zen Studies Podcast is a great Buddhist resource

A few days ago I wrote a post about me embracing Shikantaza, the Zen Buddhist approach to meditation where you let go and do nothing other than remain aware of what's present without you doing anything.

The next day I checked out a post on the Zen Studies Podcast that I'd linked to, Shikantaza: Having the Guts to Just Sit and Let Go of Doing Anything  First I listened to Domyo Burk, who narrates the podcasts.

Then I read the transcript of the podcast -- a great feature for those of us who like a choice of the written word or spoken speech.

I was blown away by how clear, coherent, informative, and entertaining Domyo's talk was. I tried to send her a thank you via a Contact page, but kept getting an error message. 

Eventually I learned where Domyo does her Zen teaching and was able to send Domyo an email through that route. Interestingly, it is just a hour's drive from Salem, where I live: Bright Way Zen in Portland, Oregon.

I haven't listened, or read, any of the other podcasts. I've looked at a list of the 131 podcasts in the order they were made, and they look like an amazingly valuable resource for anyone interested in Zen or Buddhism in general. I'll be reading many of them, for sure.

Here's part of the Shikantaza podcast. I've chosen passages I really liked from the beginning and end of the podcast. Domyo clearly has a sensitive understanding of how the mind works in meditation, and also outside of it. Zazen simply means meditation, Zen variety.

It’s like we can’t fully trust ourselves, let alone beginners, to just sit. We’re afraid that if we give up trying to control our minds, they’ll do nothing but wander all over the place and waste our time. We’ll sit there on the meditation seat planning and rehashing memories and thinking random stupid thoughts unless the “executive I” exerts some discipline, or at the very least makes a wiser choice when the opportunity presents itself.

If we just sit there, we’ll never improve or attain anything. Nothing will happen. Those lovely moments when the thinking subsides – when we’re intimately “present for our lives” and everything seems to fall into place – will evade us or become very rare. Just sit? Are you crazy? We can’t just let ourselves sit!

In our doubt, we cling to overt or subtle meditative techniques to minimize the amount of time we spend caught up thoughts while sitting zazen. Our natural preferences morph into judgments, even if parts of us resist those judgments: Silence = good, internal verbiage = bad. Awareness of the present = good, thinking about past or future = bad. Calm = good, agitation = bad. A sense of transcendence = good, a sense of being trapped in a small self = bad. Self-consciousness = good, forgetting we’re even meditating because we’re lost in thoughts = bad.

We may learn to refrain from judging our meditation, but sometimes this is more about accepting we’re mediocre meditators (why make ourselves miserable about it?) than it is about entirely transcending judgment of our meditative experience.

Why is it so hard for us to wholeheartedly dedicate ourselves to just sitting? Because it doesn’t make any sense, and it’s scary because we don’t trust ourselves. We’re identified with our sense of “executive I,” which we perceive as guiding us safely through this world. To set aside or ignore the “executive I” seems like laziness at best and madness at worst.

But Zen says the “executive I” is an illusion, and therefore it’s an illusion it’s in charge of your meditation to begin with. Shikantaza challenges you to physically enact nonduality and no-self. When you let go of the struggle to control your experience and find out everything flows along perfectly fine anyway, this brings the Buddhist teachings home in the most profound and transformative way possible.

...I’ve already talked about how obvious stimulus-independent thinking is doing, but there are an infinite number of ways we’re exerting effort every moment without even realizing it. We maintain views that help us make sense of the world and our place in it. We hold assumptions about the nature of self and reality, and subtly avoid or deny certain facts or experiences.

We anticipate what’s going to happen next, and what our lives are probably going to be like from here on out. We gloss over our direct experience, categorizing it as something we’ve seen before, or something not worth our attention. In a strange way, we believe we’re holding reality together with our minds.

In zazen we can make energetic efforts to relax all of these efforts. Of course, this is not the usual kind of effort. It’s more like what you need to do if a massage therapist tells you your shoulder muscles are really tense and asks you to relax them. Or what you need to do if you’re feeling insecure in the water and someone tells you to relax and float. Or what you need to do to make friends with a standoffish cat.

Direct, willful effort isn’t going to work, but you need to put a lot of effort into paying attention, being sensitive and aware, letting go of what isn’t helping, and trusting the process. You also need to take a leap of faith that something beyond your sense of “executive I” – your body, the water, the cat, the universe – will respond and support you.

Gradually, zazen teaches us we don’t have to hold reality together with our minds. In fact, we realize reality is perfectly fine on its own, and the world we’ve constructed in our minds is only a pale reflection of it.

I’m guessing other meditative approaches, as well as the spiritual practices of other religious traditions such as prayer, can eventually get you to the same place. I certainly resonate with the descriptions of the divine and transcendent from mystics from all traditions, so clearly zazen isn’t the only way.

What’s consistent in all peak spiritual experiences of human beings, however, is a transcendence of the sense of self. I believe zazen is an elegantly simple and direct practice that very cleverly asks you to leave behind the “executive I” from the outset, so you don’t have to struggle to shed it later after it’s appeared to lead you to all kinds of great spiritual rewards.