Church of the Churchless

Churchless potpourri

I've got some interesting links floating around my email inbox, thanks to blog visitors who wanted to share some churchless info. Also have a few other cyberspace-inspired thoughts floating around my psyche.

Might as well toss them all into a potpourri post...

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Wow! How did the United States ever come out victorious in World War II without having "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance?

Makes me wonder why every president now finds it necessary to say May God bless the United States of America at the end of his State of the Union speech. (Thanks for sending the You Tube link, Robert.)

 

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An India-based spiritual/mystical organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, has an outpost at an estate in Haynes Park, England. The RSSB guru is supposed to be God in  human form. Yet lightning struck the Haynes Park center last summer. Could this be a sign from the real God? (Thanks for the link, Amrat.)

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Great... I thought my biggest problem was trying to lose a couple of pounds that I've gained recently. Now, thanks to an email from Bob, I've learned: "Prayer Warriors and Palin Organizing Spiritual Warfare to Take Over America."

Imagine a religious movement that makes geographic maps of where demons reside and claims among its adherents the Republican Party's most recent vice presidential nominee and whose leaders have presided over prayer sessions (one aimed at putting the kibosh on health-care reform) with a host of leading GOP figures.

...NAR's [New Apostolic Reformation] videos, according to researcher Rachel Tabachnick, "demonstrate the taking control of communities and nations through large networks of 'prayer warriors' whose spiritual warfare is used to expel and destroy the demons that cause societal ills. Once the territorial demons, witches, and generational curses are removed, the 'born-again' Christians in the videos take control of society."

Well, Oregon has so many churchless heathens, demons, and witches, I'm probably low on the list of Prayer Warrior targets. But it's cool to imagine my house being on a map of "where demons reside."

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On the positive side, vampire writer Anne Rice has rejected organized Christianity (note: so far as I know, she isn't a vampire, but merely writes about them).

The author Anne Rice, best known for her vampire novels, made waves last week when she declared on her Facebook page that she had “quit being a Christian.” Twelve years after her return to Catholicism, Rice said she still believed in God, but that, “In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life.”

Uh-oh. I think I know a well-known author who has just gotten herself on the Prayer Warrior radar.

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This is a moving mini-movie about a meteor who comes to grips with his/her inevitable fall to earth. We're all going to meet the same end: fallen. I liked how Mr./Ms. Meteor handles the journey.

Fallen from Sascha Geddert on Vimeo.

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The Center for Inquiry announced the winner in its Campaign for Free Expression Video Contest. Nicely done. Blasphemy must be protected along with religiosity.

 

Possibly I'm becoming more of a "possibilian"

My first bloggish foray into possibilianism had a pretty mild title, "Nothing wrong with being a churchless 'possibilian'." After reading more about this meaning-of-life stance in the most recent issue of New Scientist, I find myself increasingly enthusiastic about David Eagleman's attitude toward uncertainty.

His piece is called Beyond God and atheism: why I am a possibilian. It's a nice blend of creative openmindedness and scientific where's-the-evidence?

I have devoted my life to scientific pursuit. After all, if we want to crack the mysteries of our existence, there may be no better approach than to directly study the blueprints. And science over the past 400 years has been tremendously successful. We have reached the moon, eradicated smallpox, built the internet, tripled lifespans, and increasingly tapped into those mind-blowing truths around us. We've found them to be deeper and more beautiful than anyone could have guessed.

But when we reach the end of the pier of everything we know, we find that it only takes us part of the way. Beyond that all we see is uncharted water. Past the end of the pier lies all the mystery about our deeply strange existence: the equivalence of mass and energy, dark matter, multiple spatial dimensions, how to build consciousness, and the big questions of meaning and existence.

...This situation calls for an openness in approaching the big questions of our existence. When there is a lack of meaningful data to weigh in on a problem, good scientists are comfortable holding many possibilities at once, rather than committing to a particular story over others. In light of this, I have found myself surprised by the amount of certainty out there.

...This is why I call myself a "possibilian". Possibilianism emphasises the active exploration of new, unconsidered notions. A possibilian is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind and is not driven by the idea of fighting for a single, particular story. The key emphasis of possibilianism is to shine a flashlight around the possibility space. It is a plea not simply for open-mindedness, but for an active exploration of new ideas.

Is possibilianism compatible with a scientific career? Indeed, it represents the heart of science. Real science operates by holding limitless possibilities in mind and working to see which one is most supported by the data. Sometimes it is difficult or impossible to gather data that weighs in - and in those cases we simply retain the possibilities. We don't commit to a particular version of the story when there is no reason to.

Possibilianism does not suggest free rein to believe whatever strikes one's fancy. It is not tantamount to "anything goes". We know a great deal, not only about the cosmos and molecules, but also about human yearning, fallibilities, poor memories and our extraordinary ability to fabricate any variety of fantastic but utterly untrue stories. Within the realm of what is addressable, we profitably apply logic to further knowledge. Possibilianism is "anything goes at first" - but we then use science to rule out parts of the possibility space, and often to rule in new parts.

Eagleman has written a book called Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlife. Each tale is 2-3 pages of his wondering... about possibilities... no dogmatism... just a bunch of "what if's?"

When I checked out "Sum" on Amazon last night, intrigued after reading a mention of the book in the New Scientist article, at first I thought that I'd take a pass at what seemed to be blue-sky hypothesizing by someone who, obviously, doesn't know any more about the afterlife, or lack thereof, than anybody else.

Then I read some reviews of "Sum," both from pros and from ordinary readers. Here's the first two paragraphs from the initial reader review:

Occasionally a book comes along of such originality that it stops you in your tracks, of such sharpness that it makes you think again about so many things and of such warmth that it makes you want to share it with everyone you meet. David Eagleman's Sum is just such a book.

Ostensibly a book about what happens after we die, ironically Sum is really an examination of what it means to live. After all the divide is perhaps not as great as we think and as John Keats once wrote, "Life is but a Waking Dream."

After perusing quite a few other paeans to the book, I pushed One Click Order.

I realized that I'm no longer so much into searching for meaning of life and ultimate reality answers. Rather, I'm passionate about pursuing the questions in the most satisfying fashion.

What is life all about, after all, but possibilities? Certainties are dead, rigid, barren, and -- seemingly paradoxically -- unreal. Uncertainty is the way of science. Also, the way of every human being.

As Eagleman says:

A scientist may tend to favour one story over the others, but will always be careful to concede uncertainty and maintain a willingness to change the balance with new, incoming information. As an example, there are two very different interpretations about the reality underlying quantum physics. It is possible that there will be no way to ever know which is correct, or if instead some entirely new theory is correct. And that ambiguity is accepted as part of the enormity of the mysteries we face, and the terms of the agreement we have with nature.

I liked how Eagleman reminds us that between traditional views of God and no-holds-barred atheism are all kinds of possibilities concerning the ultimate nature of the cosmos, which includes the option that "ultimate" is a meaningless concept when applied to reality as a whole.

Personally, and all musings about Big Questions are just that, personal, I'm attracted to the possibility of our universe being a simulation of some astoundingly advanced civilization.

This could explain why scientists are making so little progress toward a so-called "theory of everything," which would require resolving the contradictions between relativity and quantum theory.

Maybe the creator of the simulation built-in a super-tough level that would be extremely tough, if not completely impossible, for the self-aware entities who would eventually evolve in the game to crack. We're not supposed to figure out that the universe isn't what it appears to be, since this would (literally) give the game away, a la The Matrix.

This morning I had fun projecting "I know what you're up to" during my meditation period. I enjoyed visualizing the simulation's creator getting an alert that one of the billions of conscious entities in the game has made a feeble start at seeing through the illusion of the cosmos.

I also found it interesting to contemplate how my life would change (to put it mildly) if I came to realize that everything I thought was true and real, actually wasn't. What would happen if a single building block that supports my conception of reality was pulled out, and the whole structure came crashing down, leaving.... what?

Is this death, life, enlightenment, insanity, wisdom, idiocy, everything, nothing at all, all of the above, none of the above?

I was left with possibilities.

No answers. Just intriguing questions.
No preferred direction. Just interesting paths to explore.

"God" is the absence of "me"

I don't believe in God, not as this word is commonly understood. I don't see any sign of a personal divinity who created and oversees the universe, nor any indication of an omniscient and omnipresent universal consciousness.

Here's the newest news about proof of God's existence: there isn't any.

Isn't it more than a little strange that precisely zero progress has been made in the thousands of years of recorded human history toward conclusively resolving The Big Question: "Is there a God?"

Yet I'm akin to Mike, a regular Church of the Churchless visitor, who has commented, "I'm a diehard atheist desperately in search of God."

Nicely said.

Similarly, Andrew Newberg, one of the authors of "How God Changes Your Brain," says in the book:

I like to think of God as a metaphor for each person's search for ultimate meaning and truth. Financial and relationship stability may be a major goal for most people, but I believe that within each of us there is a primal drive to reach for something higher.

We want to understand why we're here and what our purpose should be. We want to understand where we came from, and where we will eventually go. And we want to understand what reality actually is. With that understanding, we are then compelled to act in a more intuitively rational way.

Here's some reality to consider: not only is there no sign of a God up in the heavens, there is no sign of a soul down here on Earth. David Weisman says...

There is a common idea: because the mind seems unified, it really is. Many go only a bit further and call that unified mind a “soul.” This step, from self to soul, is an ancient assumption which now forms a bedrock in many religions: a basis for life after death, for religious morality, and a little god within us, a support for a bigger God outside us.

For the believers in the soul, let’s call them soulists, the soul assumption appears to be only the smallest of steps from the existence of a unified mind. Yet the soul is a claim for which there isn’t any evidence. Today, there isn’t even evidence for that place soulists step off from, the unified mind.

Neurology and neuroscience, working unseen over the past century, have eroded these ideas, the soul and the unified mind, down to nothing. Experiences certainly do feel unified, but to accept these feelings as reality is a mistake.  Often, the way things feel has nothing to do with how they are.

I'd prefer that I had, or was, a soul, because I prefer the idea of existing after I die to the prospect of fading away into nothingness. However, reality is notorious for not caring about my preferences -- or anyone's preferences.

Here's some good news, though.

Not in the Christian "good news" sense of a religious fantasy, but rather findings founded in some solid science that cast a different light on the whole God-Soul-Salvation thing.

Since neuroscience isn't finding evidence of a unified mind capable of remaining unchanged through transformations of the physical brain (death being a big change), it seems increasingly clear that "Me" doesn't really exist.

At least not in the way we think it does. Researchers are finding that our sense of self seems to be created through the idling processes of the brain's "default mode."

As neuroscientists study the idle brain, some believe they are exploring a central mystery in human psychology: where and how our concept of "self" is created, maintained, altered and renewed.

...research on the default mode network and mind-wandering has helped focus neuroscientists' attention to our rich inner world and raises the prospect that our sense of self, our existence as a separate being, can be observed, measured and discussed with rigor.

...That's in sharp contrast to the pattern struck by the brain when hard at work: In this mode, introspection is suppressed while we attend to pressing business — we "lose ourselves" in work. As we do so, scientists see the default mode network go quiet and other networks come alive.

So basically the Me inside my head (as well as yours, naturally) fades away when I'm focused on something, like writing this blog post. Which fits with my experience.

I only feel like I'm writing when I'm not. Meaning, when I'm searching for what to say, I'm in more of a default mode mind-wandering state. I'm aware of a Me that is trying to get my brain and fingers to type out something coherent on my laptop's screen.

However, when I'm in the flow and focus of writing, the words just come -- just as when someone is in the flow of dancing, the steps just come. "Things go better without Me" is a truism for most activities.

Religions seek union with God. But almost certainly there's no God; at least, not the sort theologies proclaim: a divine being or entity separate from physical existence.

We can, though, experience union with a different "God." Reality. Which is here and now. All that is required is the absence of Me. And this isn't tough to do, since we do it much of the time.

In fact, it could be argued: all of the time, because there is no evidence of a Me separate and distinct from the universe.

Our sense of self appears to be an appearance, a conjuring trick cleverly performed by the marvelously complex human brain. Remembering the past and anticipating the future, our brain fashions an "I'ness" out of neurological flashes of chemical/electrical energy.

If I never was, then I shall never cease to be. Which brings the Me that I'm not pretty damn close to being God. My absence is an Almighty Creator, since it brings the unity we can call "God" into existence.

The Indian sage Nisargadatta seemed to say pretty much the same thing, rather poetically:

What is religion? A cloud in the sky. I live in the sky, not in the clouds, which are so many words held together. Remove the verbiage and what remains? Truth remains.

How to hold on when religious belief lets go

Today I got an email from someone who reminds me of me, just a lot younger.

He speaks of losing confidence that the religious organization I was a member of for over thirty years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, is what he once considered it to be. But this loss of a belief hasn't yet been balanced by a gain of...what?

I've come to the conclusion that the RSSB movement in general doesn't have what it takes to be called a 'Science' (as they call it.) It does not stand up to rigorous questioning, and is not wiling to share experiences, nor listen to others who might have gone wrong somewhere during their experiment.

It seems people are just satisfied with that association with RSSB, and they belive that this association gives them a certification of being an honest and morally upright individual, all of which I feel is total bullshit.

I don't know why, maybe its my upbringing, I feel scared that I'm losing something here... maybe my beliefs...and moving towards the agnostic category...which eventually leads to being an atheist.

Now I'm just a student, and I do not have extensive reading in these areas, so I do not have anything else to fall back to apart from science and technology. Sometimes I feel I should just take a plunge into this philosophy, maybe it will work. Maybe I'm one of a tiny bit of those on the end of the bell curve.

Please help me out. I need something to hold on to.

Absolutely. Agreed. We all need something to hold on to.

What that something is will be different for everybody. All I can do is share some thoughts about how I've handled the initially disorienting feeling of letting go of a long-cherished belief system that used to root me in some seemingly solid meaning-of-life ground.

These ideas rambled around my psyche while I was riding my Burgman 650 maxi-scooter to a blogging-friendly coffee house in downtown Salem, where I am now. So I'll go with the two-wheeled flow and use that as a jumping-off point for my response to the email message.

Aloneness. There's a difference between being alone and feeling lonely. I never feel lonely on my scooter, even though I always ride by myself. That's what life is, really: a one-person ride. We share our living with others, but they aren't living our life, nor are we living theirs.

On a scooter or motorcycle it's evident that there aren't many others like you on the road. Most people ride around in cars, enclosed in what biker types call "cages." This is akin to religiosity, since the vast majority of humans cling to some sort of organized religious belief.

So it's important to feel comfortable being yourself, of not conforming with the crowd, of doing what seems right to you even if it means being part of a distinct churchless minority. Motorcycle and scooter riders in the U.S. often exchange a "biker wave" when passing to show solidarity.

In effect that's what we're doing now on this blog -- sharing thoughts about how to move through life outside of a religious cage. We're alone, yet not lonely.

Connection. I don't feel lonely on my scooter because I'm so closely connected to reality. When I'm not hemmed in by the sides, floor, and roof of a car, the world is much more with me. I feel the actual temperature of the air, not what a heater or air conditioner has made it to be. I feel the bumps in the road, and put my feet on the ground when I come to a stop.

Similarly, discarding a dogmatic belief system allows the world to be experienced much more directly. We aren't continually filtering events through a conceptual structure. "This is God's will." "That must have been my karma." "How sinful!" "Ah, a miracle!" Things and events are what they are (albeit as interpreted by our mind/brain, which is unavoidable), not as what a certain theology proclaims them to be.

I find that what I lose by not feeling connected to an unseen imaginary divinity is vastly more made up by the increased connection I now feel to the natural world and other people. Not feeling special any more, no longer part of a group with a supposedly favored relationship to God, I can go anywhere and do anything simply as a human being living a simple human life.

Risk. When I drive my car, I feel safer than when I ride my scooter. Because I am. Air bags, seat belt, four wheel stability, a bunch of metal between me and a collision. Out in the open on two wheels, I'm constantly aware that what stands between me and a serious accident, or even death, is... nothing.

And that, of course, is exactly the case when I'm driving my car. Or sitting in a coffeehouse. Or lying in bed. Or doing anything. No one gets out of life alive. Death happens -- that's a 100% guarantee. So I enjoy the reminder of mortality that reaches me every time I put on my helmet, turn the key, and start my scooter up.

In monetary investing, usually risk and return are considered to be complementary. Meaning, the more risk you're willing to take on, the greater a return you can potentially receive. People typically don't get rich by putting all of their money in a savings account and watching the (currently) pitiful interest accrue.

Ditto with enjoying a rich life, full of meaning. Religions offer safety in the form of a guarantee -- yes, a fraudulent guarantee, but most people in the world fall for it. They claim that if someone accepts certain beliefs and carries out certain actions, he or she will enjoy eternal bliss in the company of God or some other form of divinity.

That promise makes this life seem like a passing shadow, compared to the Sun of Ultimate Reality. Only problem is, there's no sign of that Sun. It's existence has to be taken on faith.

However, true believers mistake an idea of reality for the really real thing. They're so eager to obtain a risk-free return on their meaning-of-life investment, they forget that a guaranteed deal is almost always going to be either: (1) not what it seems to be, or (2) paltry in comparison to what can be gained by taking on more risk.

I get hugely more pleasure out of riding my scooter than in driving my car. Risk and reward typically go hand in hand. Surfing a twenty foot wave is going to have more fun-value than coasting in a one-foot breaker. Also, more risk.

It takes courage to forsake religion. In the beginning it will feel risky to head out on the road of life without all the safety equipment promised by theological dogma. "You're saved from hellfire (or bad karma) if you only do such and such, and believe in this and that." Questioning the sales pitch leaves you to your own devices.

Having fun. Exploring new roads. Seeing unexplored territory. Being willing to take on some existential risk in exchange for living life a lot more fully.

Uncertainty. I'll end on a related note, because uncertainty is a close relative of risk. Life is risky, and life is uncertain. So is any afterlife, if such exists. We just don't know. We don't know what will happen in the next moment, much less what will occur up until the end of our life and, potentially, beyond.

People who are comfortable with uncertainty are in accord with a basic premise of the scientific method: nothing is 100% certain. Even the best-proven theory or law of nature always can be disproved. Knowledge continually marches on. It doesn't come to a stop at a brick wall of certainty. Only religions claim, "Thus saith the Lord. End of story."

I wrote about this recently in "Keep open a crack in your belief system."

So living in touch with reality requires that we remain open to the possibility that whatever we fervently believe to be true, isn't. Otherwise truth could smack us in the face and we'd pretend that we didn't feel a thing.

If you're absolutely sure that God exists, erase the absolutely in your mind. Ditto if you're absolutely sure that God doesn't exist. Double ditto for any other belief that you don't see yourself ever letting go of, or modifying.

Loosen your hold. Lighten your dogmatism. Lessen your certainty.

Riding a motorcycle or scooter requires an unfocused sort of focus. Meaning, you don't know where or when something unexpected (and unwanted) could come from. Ahead of you. Behind you. From a side street. Bushes along the road. Even from the sky (I've had some pretty big birds swoop down as I was riding along, which definitely produced a startle response).

When I was driving our Toyota Prius a few years ago, a deer ran out of a field along Liberty Road, not far from our home, and banged head on into the right side of the car. There's still a small dent in the door panel. Now, when I ride my scooter along Liberty I tend to focus on the right side of the road when I get to that field.

But it's equally likely that a deer could jump out from the field on the left side. My prior experience has conditioned me to believe in a falsity, that what happened once is likely to happen again. Knowing this, I make a conscious effort to remain open to what is actually there, not what I believe might be there.

This is the best way to move along a highway, whether on two or four wheels. And it also is the best way to move through life: remaining uncertain about what will pop up next, while being confident that whatever it is, you can deal with it appropriately.

We're alone, yet also connected. Life is risky and uncertain, yet this is what makes life so fulfilling, interesting, and meaningful.

The A,B,C's of getting along with life

Sometimes I wake up in the morning, get out of bed, and immediately feel something is wrong. Actually, this isn't true. Nothing is happening in the world outside of my head that shouldn't be.

But I've fast-forwarded my life beyond the present moment.

Looking ahead to making coffee, taking the dog out with me to get the newspaper, eating breakfast, and then starting on the daily chores that come with living in a non-easy-care home, my psyche gets disconnected from here-and-now reality.

This produces that sense of wrongness, which most people feel in one way or another. We Homo sapiens are fortunate to be so sapient, but with self-awareness comes problems other species seemingly don't have.

Our dog appears to experience various emotions and sensations during the day. Boredom. Enthusiasm. Lassitude. Hunger. Thirst. To name a few.

However, I never sense that one of the things going on inside her canine brain is a feeling of this shouldn't be happening. She may not like what's happening -- vet visit, stay in the kennel -- but I don't see any sign that she expects something else should be occurring instead.

To me, this is one of the foundations of religiosity: the peculiar ability of the human mind to visualize or imagine a state of affairs that is markedly different from what is actually happening.

Usually, or at least often, this is a good thing. We wouldn't be human without this capacity for constructing an alternative view of reality. We think "this could be" while contemplating what is.

Religions, though, take this too far. Way too far.

All the way to heaven, nirvana, paradise, astral realms, and other fantasized states of being where the ups and downs of everyday life are transformed into Eternal Perfection.

The normal sense of something is wrong which flows from our ability to compare "what is" with "what should be" is amplified by religious dogma into an all-encompassing desire to end Wrongness forever.

God, enlightenment, or some other divine goal is seen as the final solution to all of life's nagging irritations.

Which leads to a strange paradox: usually all the little wrongness'es we have to deal with make us feel like life is a little bit wrong; but religions typically say that human life is really wrong, because we're sinfully fallen, karmically trapped, or otherwise separated from Life As It Is Meant To Be Lived -- which, of course, can only be experienced if we do what a holy book or holy person says will lead to union with Ultimate Rightness.

So now religious believers have a super-sense that something is wrong with life. In fact, it isn't just "something," but "everything," since their goal now is to escape from this crappy, illusory, deceptive, sinful physical world entirely, not just tidy up life's rough edges.

This is crazy.

Here's one of my favorite Meister Eckhart quotes (he was a medieval Christian mystic who was considered a heretic by the Catholic church, so I like the guy).

Now I hear you ask, 'How do I know that it is God's will?' My answer is that if it were not God's will even for a moment, then it would not exist. Whatever is must be his will. If God's will is pleasing to you, then whatever happens to you, or does not happen to you, will be heaven. Those who desire something other than God's will get their just reward, for they are always in trouble and misery.

Very Buddhist-like.

I suspect that Eckhart would have been totally comfortable with leaving "God" out of his answer, but in the 13th and 14th centuries that wasn't a cool thing for a German preacher to do.

Basically he's saying, "What is, is, and what isn't, isn't. Deal with it. Don't deny it." However, lots of religious types do deny the aspects of life that they wish were different from what they are.

This includes their own thoughts, their own feelings, their own desires, their own supposed failings. Often this manifests as a rigid rejection of life as it is, because it doesn't match up with what some holy scripture or teaching says is how life should be.

Again, this is a crazy and unproductive way to live.

Much better is to follow a martial arts adage: A, B, C. Accept, blend, control. This is more of an "internal" martial arts approach (tai chi, aikido, jui-jitsu, and such) than an "external" (karate, boxing, and such) approach, but applies to some degree in all styles.

First we have to accept the reality of whatever is coming at us, whether this be a physical punch thrown by someone else or a mental worry produced by our own psyche. Mindfulness, awareness, attention -- that's the key. Seeing what is actually happening as clearly as possible.

Then we blend with this reality. Almost always, forceful rejection isn't the best way to go. Getting to know the situation, understanding it, embracing what's happening in all of it's perceived goodness and badness -- this is how we connect with a seeming problem closely enough to be able to deal with it.

Which brings us to control. If someone or something is attacking us, whether that entity be inside or outside of our own head, it behooves us to do something. That might be "nothing," of course, but choosing to do nothing is something. Here's where mindful living parts company with mindless religion.

Religions typically want us as helpless as possible.

Promoting faith, grace, surrender, and obedience are how they keep people enslaved. Religions wouldn't survive if people felt they could handle life's problems on their own, and that dealing with a sense of wrongness didn't require fervent devotion to an invisible God.

Life is pretty damn simple, the way I see it.

What's happening is... what's happening. If we don't like what's happening, we can either try to change it, or we can decide to accept it -- thereby eliminating the difference between "what is" and "what should be."

Introducing God, the supernatural, and/or unprovable dogmas such as destiny, fate, karma, sin, and such doesn't contribute to our ability to deal with life. Take life as it is, unless you want it to be otherwise.

Don't deny what is actually happening. Accept it. Blend with it. Control it. Most important of all, smile with it as much as possible.

Wonder -- the sole essential of spirituality

It's been a steady substitution. The less I've filled myself with organized religion, the more I've felt a ever-increasing sense of wonder.

I guess I needed to empty myself of theological beliefs, faith-based concepts, and imaginary anticipations of a promised divinity around the corner in order to become much more aware of the Wow! that is right here, right now.

Existence. Life. Consciousness. The amazing fact that we are, that the cosmos is.

There's nothing more divine (in the sense of "tasty," as in "that chocolate cake was divine") than this sense of all-encompassing wonder. It isn't a wonder caused by this or that -- the Grand Canyon, a gorgeous woman, moonlight on a still lake -- but the simple stark realization that this, that, and everything exists.

My favorite Wonder Book is, not surprisingly, "The Way of Wonder" by Jack Haas. When I feel the need for an increased dose of wonder, I'll pick up this (sorry...) wonderful book.

A few years ago I shared some quotes from "The Way of Wonder" on the theme of how the churchless have more faith than true believers. Here's some passages that I re-read this morning from Part I of Haas' book.

All is magnificent. All is marvelous. All is mysterious.

We live in a world of impossibility, implausibility, and awe. We look, we see, we wonder. We experience the sudden opening to the inexplicable vastness, the weirdness, the overwhelming profundity, the utter miracle and magic of life, of ourselves, and of all that is.

...'Wonder' is the open freedom of the pure mind -- the first and last pillar upon which the castle of the Spirit is built. It is the beginning and the end, the home and the journey there.

...'Wonder,' then is the moment when the answerless questions of the universe become not only fully obvious, but electrifying; it is the point where the individual is released from the limiting possibility that life is knowable, and the mind is cut free from the cognitive fetters which enclose it.

...I am not here suggesting that we revert to a world community of idle idiots; it is not that we must give up the mind, as such, but only the assumption of 'understanding' what we are, what life is, and how we must therefore live it. For true living asks only one thing of us -- to live. And we cannot do this in the boxes of mind: neither in the physical, nor in the metaphysical worlds.

...Interpretation, then, is a covering over the great bewildering immensity; a shell the turtle constructs around itself, to hide and blind itself within; a blanket, pulled between the child and darkness, blocking out the ubiquitous unknown.

...The calm depths cannot be attained on the tempestuous surface. Without words, without labels, the world becomes naked and bare of the veil obscuring its authenticity, and though this effect is discomforting to the mind which requires things in little boxes, to the individual who has come to appreciate the value of 'innocent looking,' so to speak, he or she finds that the world comes to make more sense ...because it makes less sense.

...The more we look into ourselves with sedulous, blank honesty, the more we lose the words we were given to describe ourselves; and the more we step out of our everyday habits and perceptions, the more we realize we have no clue about ourselves, except that we suddenly become a greater and greater mystery continually, at every moment. That is when we begin to see ourselves truly.

...I am pointing to the natural outcome of honest perception, which leads to the realization of incomprehension, which leads to awe, which leads to life. Wonderment is simply the initial gust, the shock that occurs when all the lenses are cleared -- the inaugural, flabbergasting startlement that 'what is' IS!

...And so the essential re-cognition is that there is nothing to solve, because ...there is no problem; the problem is the search for a solution. For if we use the mind as a way out, we shall be 'way out' but we shall have escaped nothing but ourselves. We must simply acknowledge that there is nowhere to go, there is nothing to do, and there is no knowledge to know. We need only just 'be', and revel intimately in the eternal now mystery of being.

No need for God in Stephen Hawking's universe

Stephen Hawking, noted theoretical physicist and cosmologist, is one of the smartest guys in the world. He's also an astute marketer, as shown by the title of his newest book, "The Grand Design" (which I finished reading this morning).

Hawking and his co-author, physicist Leonard Mlodinow, are going to sell quite a few copies to clueless religious folks who see "design" on the cover and think, Ooh, great, some scientific proof for intelligent design!

They'll be disappointed when they get to the final chapter and read:

Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing in the manner described in Chapter 6. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue torch paper and set the universe going.

Well, I'll offer a godless Amen to that.

It's nice to have someone who understands the nature of the universe so well speak so clearly and boldly about the utter vacuity of a God hypothesis. That said -- because it's true -- I do have to take issue with the contention that Hawking has explained why there is something rather than nothing.

Actually, the cutting edge M-theory which forms the conceptual centerpiece of "The Grand Design" only explains why there is the something called Our Universe, not why existence exists at all.

That second question seemingly is unanswerable, so this probably is why Hawking assumes that "why something rather than nothing?" pertains to the universe, not to the cosmos (taking "cosmos" to mean everything that exists).

In the book Hawking says that God has been used by religions to explain how the universe came to be. But this simply pushes the why? question back a level, leaving it unanswered, since we now have to ask "How did God come to be?"

So if something always has existed, it makes more sense to presume that this is the cosmos, of which our universe is a part, rather than some unseen, unprovable, and unknown mystery called "God."

"The Grand Design" doesn't break much new ground that I hadn't already trod in my reading of other books about the current state of scientific cosmology.

But Hawking has a knack for saying things simply and clearly. Since he has to speak through a voice synthesizer after laboriously typing out his thoughts, it's to be expected that he would have developed a taste for crisp conciseness.

The Big Idea in this book is the notion of a multiverse. It's what makes the supposed fine-tuning of the laws of nature a non-miracle. Sure, it's amazing how our universe is so well-suited for the appearance of living beings like us.

Hawking describes how neither the universe as a whole, nor the conditions necessary for carbon-based life, would exist if certain constants in nature's laws were just a little bit different from what they are.

Religious types see this as a Creator's intelligent design. Hawking, through M-theory, views the situation much differently.

If there is an infinity, or near-infinity, of "bubble" universes in the cosmos, then anything can and will happen -- including a universe with the laws of nature that we observe. Obviously we live in such a universe, or it wouldn't be possible for me to write, and for you to read, a statement on a blog post saying "obviously we live in such a universe."

The same reasoning applies to why we find ourselves inhabiting a planet, Earth, that orbits a star, the Sun, in a fashion that is Goldilocks-like. For example, we aren't so close to the Sun that we'd boil, or so far away that we'd freeze.

The temperature here, by and large, is just right. But of course it has to be, or we humans wouldn't be here, able to ponder why we're here.

There's a lot more in "The Grand Design" than the multiverse theory, lots of it utterly fascinating. At less than 200 pages, this is an excellent overview of modern scientific cosmology.

Here's some excerpts that talk about why an all-encompassing Theory of Everything probably isn't in the cards.

Hundreds of years ago people thought the earth was unique, and situated at the center of the universe. Today we know there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, a large percentage of them with planetary systems, and hundreds of billions of galaxies.

The results described in this chapter indicate that our universe itself also is one of many, and that its apparent laws are not uniquely determined. This must be disappointing for those who hoped that an ultimate theory, a theory of everything, would predict the nature of everyday physics.

...We seem to be at a critical point in the history of science, in which we must alter our conception of goals and of what makes a physical theory acceptable. It appears that the fundamental numbers, and even the form, of the apparent laws of nature are not demanded by logic or physical principle.

The parameters are free to take on many values and the laws to take on any form that leads to a self-consistent mathematical theory, and they do take on different values and different forms in different universes. That may not satisfy our human desire to be special or to discover a neat package to contain all the laws of physics, but it does seem to be the way of nature.

(There are many thoughtful reviews of "The Grand Design." Some that I came across and read via a Google search are here, here, here, and here.)

Secrets of universe revealed...sort of

That's a rather humble title for a blog post. If it was on the cover of a book, a mediocre-seller would be almost guaranteed.

But since I pay good money for the privilege of sharing my views, I figure that truth in blog post advertising is the right policy. I'm a firm believer in "sort of's," as contradictory as that might seem (I'm also into contradictions, except when I'm not.)

The older I get, the more often I've been having aha! moments where a curtain lifts on... something I'm not sure about, and I get a strong insight into... something I'm not sure about.

I guess this is what happens when well-organized religiosity fades and who knows? takes its place. Knowings formed upon a foundation of unknowing are going to be slipperishly formless.

Last night I had my first dream ever about a Gila monster. I don't know if they really have teeth. The one in my dream did. I'm sure of that, because its mouth was clamped onto the skin of my stomach.

I was afraid to try to vigorously pull the Gila monster off, since I figured that a large chunk of my skin would come with it. So I kept poking it in various places on its head and throat, hoping that would make it release its grip.

Nothing worked. I was starting to get panicked. Then I decided to smother it with a pillow, reasoning that if the Gila monster couldn't breathe, it would have to open its mouth.

As soon as I thought of that option, I woke up. Instantly I was back in my "real" world where a Gila monster wasn't biting onto my stomach with sharp teeth. A massive feeling of relief swept over me.

Solving my problem was so simple. All I had to do was wake up from the dream. But while I was dreaming, the notion of waking up wasn't in my repertoire. The waking had seemingly occurred on its own, even though I was the one who'd woken up.

On a related note... sort of.

At the beginning of today's Tai Chi class I found myself making more mistakes than usual. I'd start to throw in a move from a different form than the one we were doing, or I'd be a bit out of sync with my fellow classmates.

Not coincidentally, I realized that my mind also was throwing out more thoughts than usual. My body was doing Tai Chi, or a semblance thereof, while my psyche was off doing something else -- like thinking about what I needed to do after the class was over.

This got tiresome, so I tried to better center myself in the here and now, rather than the there and then.

Standing still, listening to the instructor talk about some Tai Chi'ish point, suddenly I had a pleasing sense of "me" fading away. Like a light dimmer switch being slid in a certain direction, it felt like my subjectivity had been reduced and objectivity turned up.

I wasn't thinking much, or at all, about what was going on in the room. I was simply aware of what was happening. The Tai Chi instructor talking. Other students listening. A street light turning on in the alley outside the window. Cars going by on Court Street.

It was refreshing to have less "Me" inside my head, and more "It." Meaning, I felt an ease in just being conscious of what was present. The pressure had lifted of commenting on it, judging it, dealing with it, analyzing it.

When we returned to doing Tai Chi forms, I found that I was moving better. There wasn't a noticeable split any longer between my body and my mind. I wasn't so much aware of myself doing Tai Chi, as I was simply aware of doing Tai Chi.

Driving home, I thought, "A big part of life's problems is making the objective subjective, and the subjective objective."

Well, hey, it made sense to me at the time. And it still does, no matter how nonsensical that sentence sounds. But only sort of. That's what I'm into now: secrets of the universe that are sort of's.

Science shows how humans create reality

It's a New Age cliche: "we create our own reality."

Almost always people who claim this are talking non-sensical gibberish. If this were true, there'd be a racing green Mini-Cooper S in my driveway instead of a silver Prius (see here and here for my long-running attempts to manifest a more exciting ride).

However, there is much more than a grain of scientific truth in those words, when understood correctly. As noted in my previous post about quantum theory, in the realm of the very small how an observation is made determines what is observed.

In accord with wave-particle duality, an experimenter can find that photons of light manifest wave-like or particle-like behavior depending on how his/her apparatus is set up.

But this is a far cry from demonstrating that someone can magically bring photons into existence through awareness or consciousness alone. What we look for may be what we get, but what we get seemingly is a product of impersonal laws of nature, not individual choice.

As I was reading a speculative book about the meaning of quantum theory, "Biocentrism," I found that I could follow the trail of "we create our own reality" up to a point. However, I encountered a wall of skepticism and incredulity quite a ways before the authors did.

Because this is a big subject -- reality -- in this post I'll focus on where I could go along with Robert Lanza's and Bob Berman's biocentric arguments, saving a discussion of where I had to jump off their philosophical ship for another blogging moment.

Here's some excerpts from "Biocentrism" that elicited a right-on from me. They point to a seemingly unarguable fact: our human conception of reality is just that, human. The universe appears the way it does to us because our brains are fashioned to produce that appearance.

Most people, in and out of the sciences, imagine the external world to exist on its own, with an appearance that more or less resembles what we ourselves see. Human or animal eyes, according to this view, are mere windows that accurately let in the world.

...Absent the act of seeing, thinking, hearing -- in short, awareness in its myriad aspects -- what have we got?

We can believe and aver that there's a universe out there even if all living creatures were non-existent, but this idea is merely a thought and a thought requires a living organism. Without any organism, what if anything is really there?

Now, I had to struggle a bit to find some quotations that didn't edge overly much into the "we create reality" position which is the core of "Biocentrism" (and which I take issue with).

But I've got no problem with "we create our perception of reality." This strikes me as an eminently defensible position that hardly needs saying, since it is so obvious. Yet as Lanza and Berman point out, we humans intuitively imagine that the cosmos is a certain way -- our way.

We don't see the universe as it is. We see the universe as it appears to us through the filter of a Homo sapiens consciousness.

Bats, snakes, monkeys, salmon, dogs, and every other sort of sentient creature see things differently, as does, in a non-conscious sense, a radio telescope and other devices that enable us to perceive aspects of the cosmos beyond our natural capacity.

However, since no one has ever had a non-human experience of reality, both our individual and collective view of How Things Really Are is inextricably biased toward anthropomorphism.

We need to scratch the "Really" in both science and spirituality.

All we can say is, "this is how things are" -- knowing that whatever we believe we know, it is a statement limited to the experience of a single species on a single planet in a single star system in a single galaxy out of an unimaginably vast cosmos that likely includes forms of consciousness far different from ours.

Which, or who, would see things in their own way.

In Stephen Hawking's new book, "The Grand Design," he talks about a goldfish bowl.

A few years ago the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved goldfish bowls. The measure's sponsor explained the measure in part by saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality.

But how do we know that we have the true, undistorted picture of reality? Might not we ourselves be inside some big goldfish bowl and have our vision distorted by an enormous lens? The goldfish's picture of reality is different from ours, but can we be sure it is less real?

The goldfish view is not the same as our own, but goldfish could still formulate scientific laws governing the motion of the objects they observe outside the bowl... Their laws would be more complicated than the laws in our frame, but simplicity is a matter of taste. If a goldfish formulated such a theory, we would have to admit the goldfish's view as a valid picture of reality.

Note, though, that Hawking speaks of goldfish coming up with "scientific laws" -- not spiritual, religious, or mystical nonsense. Later in the chapter he lists criteria for a good model of reality:

1. Is elegant
2. Contains few arbitrary or adjustable elements
3. Agrees with and explains all existing observations
4. Makes detailed predictions about future observations that can disprove or falsify the model if they are not borne out.

If goldfish could come up with a theory of How Things Really Are that met these criteria, that'd be an acceptable viewpoint. For goldfish. From inside a goldfish bowl.

Likewise, we have a human perspective of the universe. We've created an understanding of reality through the human brain/mind/consciousness. This is different, though, from creating reality itself -- which is a tenet of Biocentrism that I can't accept.

(Reasons to be given in a forthcoming post.)

 

Quantum physics and consciousness: an enigma

These days a lot of people try to marry their weird spiritual or mystical beliefs with quantum physics, one of the best examples being the pseudo-science expressed in the movie What the bleep do we know? (see here and here for some critiques)

I've done considerable reading in the new physics and quantum theory, much of it when I was researching my first book, "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder: Echoes of Ultimate Reality in the New Physics."

However, I'll admit that my book can be criticized on the same grounds I didn't like What the bleep do we know? It was published in 1995, when I was still a true believer in an Eastern form of meditational, mystical religion.

I've maintained an interest in quantum physics and no longer am attracted to discussions of this subject that aren't founded in solid science. Recently I've read two books that explore the meaning of quantum theory, "Quantum Enigma" and "Biocentrism."

In this post I'll highlight what I found most interesting in "Quantum Enigma." It's on more solid scientific ground that "Biocentrism," which goes considerably farther out on a theoretical limb in its discussion of how consciousness not only reveals reality, but creates it.

The authors of "Quantum Enigma," Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner are physicists at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Their book was published by Oxford University Press. So they've got some solid credentials. Here's an excerpt from the back cover:

In trying to understand the atom, physicists built quantum mechanics and found, to their embarrassment, that their theory intimately connects consciousness with the physical world. Quantum Enigma explores what that implies and why some founders of the theory became the foremost objectors to it.

Authors Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner explain all of this in non-technical terms with help from some fanciful stories and anecdotes about the theory's developers. They present the quantum mystery honestly, with an emphasis on what is and what is not speculation. Quantum Enigma 's description of the experimental quantum facts, and the quantum theory explaining them, is undisputed.

Interpreting what it all means, however, is controversial. Every interpretation of quantum physics encounters consciousness. Rosenblum and Kuttner therefore turn to exploring consciousness itself--and encounter quantum physics. Free will and anthropic principles become crucial issues, and the connection of consciousness with the cosmos suggested by some leading quantum cosmologists is mind-blowing.

Readers are brought to a boundary where the particular expertise of physicists is no longer a sure guide. They will find, instead, the facts and hints provided by quantum mechanics and the ability to speculate for themselves.

"Quantum Enigma" is a wonderfully clear explanation of how consciousness intersects with quantum physics. The authors teach an undergraduate course on this subject to liberal arts majors, so they're skilled in presenting complex science in a simple way.

Often they bring quantum theory out of the realm of the very small -- where it is usually applied -- by providing examples of how things would work in the everyday world if they acted like quantum "objects."

Those quotation marks are necessary, because in quantum theory an atom, subatomic particle, or whatever doesn't exist until it is observed. Until then, a wavefunction is all there is. And nobody knows whether a wavefunction is really real, or just an abstract bit of mathematics.

We've been using the idea all along that the waviness in a region (technically, the absolute square of the wavefunction) is the probability that the object will be found in that region.

...Probability in quantum mechanics implies something far more profound than randomness.

Classical probability in the shell game, say, is the subjective probability (for you) of where the pea is. But there is also a real pea under one shell or the other. Quantum probability is not the probability of where the atom is.

It's the objective probability of where you (or anyone) will find it. The atom wasn't in that box until it was observed to be there.

Quantum theory has no atom in addition to the wavefunction of the atom. Since the atom's wavefunction occupies both boxes, the atom itself is simultaneously in both boxes until its observation in a single box causes it to be wholly in the box.

This is amazing. Rosenblum and Kuttner say it's akin to visitors entering a strange village where large objects obey the rules of quantum theory. They're shown two huts, with a man and a woman, holding hands, standing between the huts.

Then a hood is put over the head of a visitor. When the hood is removed she's told to ask, "In which hut is the couple, and which hut is empty?" Every time she does this, a door to one of the huts is opened and there the couple is, arm in arm.

Not surprising.

Nor is her experience when the experiment is repeated with her being told to ask, "In which hut is the man and in which hut is the woman?" Every time she does this, the doors to both huts are opened and the man is in one hut, with the woman in the other.

But now we come to the quantum enigma. The visitor is told that she will experience the final version of the experiments that is the crucial one. She puts on the hood, then is told to remove it and ask her question.

Visitor: "Which question should I ask?"
Villager: "Ah, my friend, you are now experienced with both questions. You may ask either of them. You may choose either experiment."

Here the weirdness kicks in.

If she asks in which hut is the couple, a man and woman are found to be in one or the other of the huts. If she asks in which hut is the man, and in which hut is the woman, the man and woman are found to be in separate huts.

The visitor is perplexed. She assumes that the man and woman had to be either together or separated immediately before she asked her question. However, the villager replies:

I see what disturbs you. In spite of your training as a physicist, and your experience with quantum mechanics in the laboratory, you are still imbued with the notion that a physical reality exists independent of your conscious observation of it. Apparently physicists find it hard to fully comprehend the great truth they have so recently gleaned.

Indeed, there seems to be little doubt that consciousness somehow is involved with quantum phenomena changing from a potential to an actual state of being. There are ways around this conclusion, but they strike me as unsatisfactory.

One is the many worlds hypothesis in which all quantum possibilities are actualized, so in one world the couple is together in a hut, while in another world they are in separate huts. This would mean that anything that could happen does happen, but we're only aware of one tiny twig of the astoundingly vast branching worlds.

Another possibility is that free will is an illusion, so the visitor necessarily asked the question associated with the "destiny" of the couple being either together or apart. This is more plausible to me than the many worlds hypothesis, but still seemingly highly unlikely.

Pleasingly, the book's authors leave the enigma of quantum theory and consciousness as it is: a mystery. Here are their parting thoughts in the final chapter:

We have presented the quantum enigma that arises from the brute facts displayed in undisputed quantum experiments. We have not presumed to resolve the quantum enigma. The questions the enigma raises are more profound than any answers we could seriously propose.

The quantum theory works perfectly: no prediction of the theory has ever been shown in error. It is the theory basic to all physics, and thus to all science. One-third of our economy depends on products developed with it. For all practical purposes, we can be completely satisfied with it. But if you take quantum theory seriously beyond practical purposes, it has baffling implications.

Quantum theory tells us that physics' encounter with consciousness, as is demonstrated for the small, applies, in principle, to everything. And that "everything" can include the entire universe. Copernicus dethroned humanity from the cosmic center. Does quantum theory suggest that, in some mysterious way, we are a cosmic center?

The encounter of physics with consciousness has troubled physicists since the inception of the theory eight decades ago. Many, no doubt most, physicists dismiss the creation of reality by observation as having little significance beyond the limited domain of the physics of microscopic entities. Others argue that Nature is telling us something, and we should listen. Our own feelings accord with Schrodinger's:

The urge to find a way out of this impasse ought not to be dampened by the fear of incurring the wise rationalists' mockery.

When experts disagree, you may choose your expert. Since the quantum enigma arises in the simplest quantum experiment, its essence can be fully comprehended with little technical background. Non-experts can therefore come to their own conclusions. We hope yours, like ours, are tentative.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
    --Shakespeare, Hamlet

What's wrong with burning a religious book?

I've written several books. They're deeply meaningful to me, because I put so much work into them. But if I heard that someone was planning to burn hundreds of copies of a book I wrote, it wouldn't freak me out so much that I'd riot, pillage, or kill.

(In fact, I'd be happy that so many books had been bought in order to be burned. Yay, more royalties!)

Yet when Christian pastor Terry Jones laid out his plans to burn a bunch of Korans (a.k.a. Qur'ans) tomorrow, 9/11, the proverbial shit hit the proverbial fan. He got calls from the Secretary of Defense and the President of the United States asking him to hold off.

Why?

It was agreed that the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects free speech, and book burning falls under this general rubric. Yet burning the Koran was viewed as a really bad thing to do, because it would inflame the religious passions of many Muslims:

President Barack Obama on Friday appealed to Americans to respect the "inalienable" right of religious freedom and expressed hope a Florida Christian preacher would abandon a plan to burn the Koran that could deeply hurt the United States abroad.

News of the plan has already outraged many Muslims around the world and triggered violent protests in Afghanistan in which one protester was shot dead.

"This is a way of endangering our troops, our sons and daughters ... you don't play games with that," Obama told a Washington news conference in which he included an earnest appeal for religious tolerance in the United States to preserve multi-faith harmony.

Well, I'm all for multi-faith harmony. Up to a point.

If "harmony" means never offending the feelings of someone who holds a certain religious belief, then giving up freedom of expression is too high a price to pay for a superficial level of getting-along.

I'm not endorsing the burning of religious books. Or any books. However, we can't allow the craziest, wacked-out fringe of religious believers to control how everybody else behaves.

Lots of U.S. citizens feel that our country's flag is quasi-sacred. Yet when America-haters in other countries burn it, you don't see Americans taking to the streets in violent protests.

Ditto when an artist exhibited Piss Christ, a photograph of a plastic crucifix immersed in the guy's urine. That was offensive to many Christians, but so far as I know the artist was never threatened with bodily harm (though some people tried to destroy the photograph).

Pastor Jones looks like a irritatingly fundamentalist Christian extremist to me. Whenever I see him on TV, I think, "That guy is a jerk."

So it bothers me that Jones got so much attention out of his Koran-burning stunt. The only reason he did, seemingly, is that there are so many equally irritating Muslim fundamentalist extremists who would go crazy if a bunch of their holy books were turned into ashes.

They didn't like "Draw Mohammed Day" either. How far are we supposed to go in trying to not offend members of the many different sorts of religions on Earth? 

My basic attitude is, deal with it. You're free to practice your own religion, but you're not free to prevent other people from ridiculing, demeaning, criticizing, or making fun of your religion.

If they do, and they aren't directly attacking you, deal with it -- by getting on with your religious practice, and ignoring the disparaging.

Here's how blogger P.Z. Myers puts it in his "Setting the Koran on fire, vs. setting personal liberties on fire."

The United States does have an obligation to protect the basic and fundamental rights of all Americans, and that includes allowing them to burn their own property, in addition to allowing them to practice the religion of their choice.

Here's a hint for appropriate responses. When someone tells you it's an outrage to burn a bible or a Koran, shrug your shoulders and say, "So what? It's their own book." When someone announces that they are going to riot and murder because they are offended, look at them like they're insane, and explain that offending someone is not a capital crime.

The problem isn't a few books being burned; that's not a crime, and it doesn't diminish anyone else's personal freedoms. The problem is a whole fleet of deranged wackaloons, including the president of the USA in addition to raving fundamentalist fanatics, who think open, public criticism and disagreement ought to be forbidden, somehow.

I can understand why so many people were concerned about the negative effects on America's image, and the danger to American troops, from Pastor Jones' plan to burn Korans.

Practically speaking, it was a stupid thing to do -- just as practically speaking, it wouldn't be wise for me to park my Suzuki Burgman maxi-scooter at a biker bar, walk in, and start bad-mouthing Harley Davidson motorcycles while sitting next to "Tiny" (who would be the opposite of his nickname).

But this is a different thing from talking about the pros and cons of Japanese scooters versus American bikes, and poking fun at Harley riders. Which I've done on my blog.

Free speech comes in various flavors. I don't want us to surrender our right to disparage or make fun of some religion just because some true believers will get offended.

Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York, got it right in talking about Pastor Jones:

In a strange way, I'm here to defend his right to do that. I happen to think that it is distasteful. I don't think he would like it if somebody burnt a book that in his religion he thinks is holy. I think Gen. Petraeus pointed out that this perhaps puts our young men and women overseas and America itself in greater danger than it was already.

But the First Amendment protects everybody, and you can't say that we're going to apply the First Amendment to only those cases where we are in agreement. If you want to be able to say what you want to say when the time comes that you want to say it, you have to defend others, no matter how, how much you disagree with them.

Great two sentence take on oneness

There's a lot to say about the pros and cons of a metaphysical belief in cosmic oneness, but it's hard to put it much better than the Duh Master does.

We're all connected, like one big organism.
So, no, I would not say that "I" still have "your" lawnmower.

"Jaded old men," identify yourselves!

OK, I'm demanding that you guys out yourself. No more hiding in the closet.

Paul, who left this comment today on a previous post about Radha Soami Satsang Beas, has discovered that this blog is full of "jaded old men" who have forgotten the wonder of life.

All I have to say is that I read Brian's writings as I have always found his thinking to be well thought out. I have read his books and his thinking inspired me.

Well my opinion of this blog has changed. It has become a pathetic playground for people to bash other peoples beliefs.

Feel free to assert your beliefs but I really feel it unnecessary to attack RSSB or any other organisation. Surely there are points of spirituality you could rather discuss.

You are all sounding like a bunch of jaded old men who have forgotten the wonder of life.

That too is my humble opinion......

I am saddened and disappointed.

Doubt I'll bother coming back either....

Paul, you're not going to like this, but after I read your comment I decided to do some more belief-bashing: yours. Ooh, it felt so good!

And hey, isn't it better for me to enjoy the feel of bashing a belief in the morning, than to get off on the smell of napalm? This shows that at least I'm more spiritually evolved than the ethos of "Apocalypse Now."

Here's how I replied to Paul:

Paul, you are so utterly wrong, I had to put my morning coffee down and correct you before taking another sip. I resonate much more with the wonder of life now that I've forsaken religious fantasies.

Much more. Hugely more. Wonderfully more.

You mistake bloggish conversation about the nature of spirituality, reality, and life with the Real Thing: direct experience. Words aren't reality. You have no idea of what I'm experiencing at the moment, just as I have no idea of what you are.

Yet I am pretty sure that our sense of being conscious, alive, and aware (probably using three words for the same thing) is very similar, if not exactly the same.

That is the wonder -- THAT.

The mystery of consciousness, that we are alive, right here and right now, experiencing all there is to experience. Not imagining some future state of salvation, enlightenment, or god-realization. Not entangled in dogmatic theological concepts.

Being. Here and now. Experiencing. Aware. Enthralled.

Yes, some commenters here, along with me, can get pretty intense and direct when we criticize religiosity -- including that practiced by Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

But the motive is to express and share an alternative to the spiritual deadness that each of us felt to one degree or another when we were true believers in some religious ideas.

Ideas aren't reality. Or rather, they only are part of reality. Beyond ideas is the mystery of life itself, of existence itself.

And, hey, we aren't all "jaded old men." There are young and old women here also. Who like the men, aren't jaded. Rather, filled with life and energy. Because there's nothing more exciting than living with no boundaries, having broken out of fenced-in religion.

That said, and I think I said it pretty damn well considering that I hadn't finished my coffee yet, I wanted to check and make sure there really aren't a bunch of jaded old men hanging out on this blog in their pajamas, drool dripping down their toothless lips, reading the criticisms of dogmatic religiosity on this blog and feeling -- yes! -- just a touch of life in their otherwise passionless loins, until that faint spark passes and they fall into another listless day of prowling the Internet for blog posts that make them think to themselves, "Yeah! Bash those mother-fucking religious bastards!" -- until it's time for the nursing home aide to give them their medication and send them to bed.

Switching gears...

Riding my bike this morning, not feeling jaded at all (for photographic evidence of another non-jaded ride, check out this post on my other blog), for some reason, as if I need one, I got to thinking about Jiti Khanna, who was a long-time representative of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) for western Canada and the northwest United States.

I shared an interesting story about Dr. Khanna in a "From Sant Mat to Buddhism" post. The last time I saw him was in the early 1990's, during a tour the RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh, made to Vancouver, British Columbia, where he stayed at Khanna's home.

So Dr. Khanna obviously had a lot of face time with the recently appointed guru, who took over after the guru who initiated me, Charan Singh, died. Yet shortly after meeting Gurinder Singh, Khanna stopped his involvement with RSSB and reportedly became a Buddhist.

Hmmmm. Draw your own conclusions.

Here's another Jiti Khanna anecdote.

Paul, an old friend, told me once that he was in a car with Dr. Khanna, who was doing the driving. I've never forgotten Paul's description of how Khanna steered around corners -- smoothly, mindfully, harmoniously, totally in the steering moment.

This was before Dr. Khanna apparently became an out-and-out Buddhist. Yet Paul saw his here-and-now'ness reflected in his driving, just as I saw his marvelous humbleness reflected in the story mentioned above.

My point, assuming I have one, is that Paul's assumption that forsaking spiritual dogmatism, criticizing closed-minded religiosity, and embracing what is directly experienced rather than what is conceptually expected doesn't lead to a jaded lifelessness.

Rather, it brings freshness to living. We no longer divide ourselves into "spiritual" and "physical" aspects, leaving us open to embracing reality however it appears to us, not foreclosing any possibilities or avenues of growth.

Of course, Paul will hear this as just a jaded old man talking.

Keep on believing what you want to believe, Paul. Just don't forget to live life in as lively a fashion as possible while you're still alive.

"Awakening to the Dream" shows religious side of Advaita

I've got a love-hate relationship thing going with neo-advaita/non-dual teachings -- which is what Leo Hartong's book, "Awakening to the Dream," is all about.

(Note: I'm pretty sure "Awakening to the Dream" should go in the neo-advaita, rather than traditional advaita, literary category. Advaita-philes like to argue about the distinctions between the two -- see here and here -- which strikes me as sort of strange given their emphasis on oneness and non-duality.)

I'm not certain how I learned about this book. I think Amazon sucked me into buying it through one of those "readers who bought X also bought Y" lures. Anyway, as soon as it arrived I found myself reading it avidly.

Up to a point.

Then I started skimming it, because I'd reached the end of what I could like about "Awakening to the Dream" and started to focus on what I dislike about some forms of Advaita and Nondualism.

[Update: just ran across a great humorous post by Jeff Foster that beautifully captures the irritating nature of many nondual/advaita types. Read "The Advaita Trap" and laugh.]

Namely, their faith-based religious aspects, which are plainly evident in Hartong's book. His emphasis is on Pure Awareness, which I have some problems with. (See my post, Brain's "dark energy" casts doubt on pure awareness.)

Supposedly the essence of human consciousness is Pure Awareness, which is completely separate from the awareness of all the stuff that we're usually aware of. How anyone, including Hartong, could know this isn't talked about. It's just something to be taken on faith.

It [Awakeness] will shine when it shines, and it will shift the attention from the content of Awareness to Pure Awareness itself. This Pure Awareness is what you really are. When you think you're not it, this thought is part of the temporal content of Awareness and has no bearing on Awareness itself.

Just let yourself be. Give yourself permission to be up, down, pissed or delirious. Observe the process and don't get caught in the content. Know yourself as the limitless field of Pure Awareness in which the drama of life merely arises.

Well, why should I believe this is true?

The notion that worldly existence is maya, illusion, a dream, unreal, a reflection of higher realities, shadows cast by a divine sun -- this is a core tenet of Hinduism, Platonism, and other religions/philosophies which urge us to discount the reality of everyday experience.

Hartong, echoing various systems of Indian thought, says that the Self is all there is. This is the same as Pure Awareness, so far as I can understand. You know, Atman is Brahman; Pure Awareness is the Self; Self-Realization is God-Realization.

What irks me about all this "Self" talk is that this concept sounds exactly like "God." Something transcendent, mysterious, invisible, unknowable, yet to be taken as the Most Real Thing.

Now consider the possibility that the Self dreams up this manifestation in a similar way. Like the dreamer appearing in his own dream, we can say that the Creator appears in his manifestation while, at the same time, the manifestation appears in the Creator. Dreamlike, He manifests the whole cosmic drama out of Himself...The substance of this dreamed up 'reality' is Pure Awareness -- the dream that stuff is made of.

OK, I'll consider the possibility. Just as I'll consider the possibility that Jesus died for our sins, Allah revealed the truth to Mohammad in the Koran, and lots of other religious propositions.

But I won't believe or accept possibilities unless they make good sense, or have demonstrable evidence supporting them.

I starting reading "Awakening from the Dream" avidly because I resonate with several themes that Hartong focused on in his opening chapters: (1) there is no such thing as a "self" or "soul" residing within the human psyche, and (2) genuine enlightenment is realizing there's no such thing as enlightenment, because there's no individual self to be enlightened.

Maybe later I'll write a what I like post about this book, because there indeed is a lot to like in "Awakening from the Dream." At the moment, though, having finished the book this afternoon, I'm zeroed in on the discrepancy between Hartong's certainty about the Self and Pure Awareness with passages he wrote like these:

Whatever we say about it is as true or untrue as its opposite...Take for example a simple sentence like 'Pure Awareness is beyond all concepts.' Labeling Pure Awareness as being beyond concepts objectifies it as a new concept.

...No matter how we try, by talking or thinking about this we cannot escape the limitation of making it into a concept, and so it forever escapes each and every attempt to define it. It remains forever a paradoxical and intimate mystery, an ongoing open question, and a constant answer.

Absolutely.

I like these thoughts. The idea that we humans can comprehend the essence of the cosmos seems astonishingly anthropomorphic, grandiose, and unproven to me. Yet somehow Hartong manages to claim that the Self is eternal, since it will remain when time runs out and the manifested universe dissolves.

Sounds just like God. Something to be taken on faith. (Also, how does Hartong know time will run out and the universe will dissolve? This is a Hindu belief without any proof behind it.)

When I ordered "Awakening to the Dream" on Amazon, I noticed that 34 of the 35 reader reviews were 4 or 5 star, highly positive. Today I read the single 1-star review, which was quite interesting and well written.

Have a read. It's a better critique of the book and neo-advaita than I'm capable of. Plus, the guy (or gal) offers up a bunch of suggestions for spiritual/philosophical reading that he or she finds more credible than "Awakening to the Dream."

I'll copy in the 1-star reader review as an extension to this post.

ChristWire: an all-too-true satire of religion

Yesterday the New York Times "outed" ChristWire, a web site whose banner reads "Conservative Values for an Unsaved World." It's hilarious. And also kind of disturbing, in the sense of The Onion.

Because it's sort of scary when ridiculous stories can be taken seriously by lots of people. How can the United States, or the world, manage its affairs properly when a near-majority of so-called Homo sapiens are more validly called village idiots?

The New York Times story is called "A Niche of the Unreal in a World of Credulity."

ChristWire has lately reached new levels of popularity, in part thanks to an Aug. 14 column, “Is My Husband Gay?” Written by Stephenson Billings, the piece is a 15-point checklist to help wives detect possibly closeted husbands. “Gym membership but no interest in sports” is one warning sign. So is “Sassy, sarcastic and ironic around his friends” and “Love of pop culture.”

“Is My Husband Gay?” was picked up on The Huffington Post and mentioned by Ryan Seacrest on his radio show; so far it has been viewed 8.3 million times.

Oh, by the way: ChristWire is all one big joke.

Not the readership — which hit a high of 27 million page views in August — but the content, the opinions and the fake authors who write the stuff. (There is no “Stephenson Billings.”) Neither of the two founders is a conservative Christian. They are just like-minded 28-year-olds who met on the Internet, have never seen each other in person, and until this week had never given their real identities to a reporter.

True to form, the ChristWire folks reacted vehemently to Mark Oppenheimer, who wrote the Times piece.

I cannot begin to understand what lies behind the minds of men like Bryan Butvidas, Kirwin Watson and Mark Oppenheimer. If maybe one of them had contacted me or any of the other representatives of Christwire, we would have set them straight. Maybe they hoped to profit by strong-arming their way into this site. Maybe they hatched some illicit advertising scheme and wanted to cash in. Maybe they are addicted to publicity, like the dimwitted and lonely men who confess to crimes they did not commit. Could this whole blowup be the result of a pharmaceutical insufficiency or a pharmaceutical overindulgence? Looking at the photographs of these two online does make one wonder about mental health. There is also a chance that they are nothing more than highly-placed atheists seeking to discredit established Christian moralism.

I had a great time browsing around ChristWire after I learned about the site today. So far my favorite post is "Gays Invent New Wii Sex Toy, So Blacks Can Have Virtual Sex With White Women."

Two forces have come together to take their sexual lifestyle’s to a whole new level. One side likes inserting their satan scepters into other men’s sewer holes and the other likes to brainwash young white youth with 8-bit music and turn your lady home makers into “ho” makers. The two have combined forces to virtual sneak into your house and violate your American wife while you are hard at work trying to get by while Obama steals you health care plan.

I present to you the WiiRape toy by Nintendo! Now I know you’re asking yourself “Mr. Bowers, why would these two groups need to join forces to create this? I know the African American community is not fond of gays.” well I have a easy answer. The Afro-Saxon community is not very good at building electronics or handling money, so they asked the homo gay agenda to develop the product for them. Also, gays have a lot of money saved up because they work as bar tenders or florists and collect gay welfare at the same time. In return, the Afro-Saxon’s would make sure that each item that is sold, would come with a list of children in the buyers neighborhood.  Now what Ellen marriage believer wouldn’t want that? A whole list of fresh meat to pray on?

So now that this product is in “A Store Near You!” Rappers can use the hipped hopped music they play on Bravo or TLC to brainwash your wifes and tell them to goto the nearest Circuit City and purchase the new Wii “Toy” with of course your hard earned cash. The item comes with a free game disgusted as a Opera CD, so that for sure a real male would never bother checking it out. What it really is, is a dating game that displays images of large black twiddle rompus’. Your wife can browse through categories like “Balla”, “Big Playa”, “Deez Nutz” and other hipped hopped lyrical terms. Once she picks what type she wishes to “play” with a video screen appears where your wife can be swindled by satan like sexy speak. Once your wife has been put into a trance, she will be asked to plug in the new Wiimote and on the other end the predator will be able to control the speed and has electric tips so the womens fish cave can be shocked.  I think this is what is refereed to as “The Shocker.”

Now, you may ask “Where is little Billy, while mom is playing sin games?” Well, he is alone and looking for attention, which is what a homopedo predator looks for in a victim, before he plays twinkie stick rape games.

Nintendo should be ashamed for such vile inventions. What is next? The Lesbian Lick controller? or the Rainbow Butt Heckler attachment? I say we call for a recall on all Nintendo products before your wife and children are victims of hate crimes. Oh and guess who is a backer and fan of this product?

Well isn’t that a surprise?

You also should take a look at "Jezebel.com Claims There Is No Such Things As Pandagators, Pandadogs." The post features a You Tube video that indeed shows proof of China's intent to build animal hybrids that they'll unleash upon our shores.

And there's some difficult-to-argue-with (unless you're a woman, but since you don't have a Y chromosome, your logical arguing faculties are handicapped, so don't bother) theological truths in the post.

Let us also remember that the Bible orders all women to remain in silence and observe. Do not forget that breaking the order from the Bible is a sure-fire way to have Satan order you up with a side of marinated sin, to digest for all times in the lowest belly bowels of hell.

Is Radha Soami Satsang Beas a scam?

If I believed in God, which I don't, I'd call what happened to me today a message from God. Instead, let's just call it a message and leave it at that.

During my morning reading/meditation period I had some ideas for the post I planned to write later on. Right now I'm looking at what I jotted down on some note paper:

"Buyer beware" Penguin Windows
Religion as false advertising
Knowledge of falseness
Christianity? No
RSSB? Yes

A few hours later I got an email notification that another comment had been submitted to this blog. It was from regular Church of the Churchless visitor Tucson. He'd written these thoughts about Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a spiritual organization that we both had belonged to at one time:

Many criminals and con-artists take advantage of people's good intentions and humanity in order to victimize them. People pose as representatives of fake charities for disaster victims to extract funds from sympathetic people who want to help out.

A few years back there was a man who would pretend to be having car trouble and when someone would stop to help he would murder them and steal their car.

RSSB poses as a legitimate spiritual path with a master that has the supernatural powers to spiritually liberate individuals from the cycle of rebirths and install them in Sach Khand (heaven).

This path steals your faith and trust, falsely giving hope for salvation and a blissfull afterlife. This is injurious because once RSSB is recognized for what it is some followers are left disillusioned, without hope and in despair...their beloved guru is a fake and their path to god is obliterated.

RSSB is a criminal organization which under the guise of a legitimate path to salvation it uses the free work and donations (seva) of its followers to expand its wealth and scope of operations and power.

Just saying it like it is, imho.

They're a bunch of crooks, you know, bad guys. And the guru is the leader of the gang. He is the worst of the worst because he knows what he isn't. Apparently he has no shame or conscience in perpetuating this sham, this scam, this rip-off.

Wow. Mind meld. We were on a similar wavelength. I can show how by explaining the rather cryptic jottings that I shared above.

In my other blogging life, I write about all kinds of stuff, which includes rants about ripoff artists I've come across. Notably, a Corporation Compliance Recorder scam (I've saved people tens of thousands of dollars by alerting them to this, judging from the many "thank you" comments), and sleazy sales practices by Penguin Windows.

I called the latter post, "Buyer beware with Penguin Windows."

Lots of commenters agree with me. Some don't. That's fine, but this year the Washington state Attorney General got Penguin Windows to stop making false sales claims, so it looks like I correctly identified the company as ethics-impaired.

The Attorney General’s office accused the Mukilteo-based company, Statewide Inc., which does business as Penguin, of “misrepresenting its products, making false claims about the energy savings customers would achieve, and misleading consumers.”

As Tucson noted in his comment, con-artists of various stripes abound. "Buyer beware" is good advice to live by -- in both the material and spiritual spheres (assuming there is a difference between them).

Problem is, there's no Attorney General or Consumer Reports assessing the validity of religious, spiritual, and mystical claims. That's impossible to do, given how other-worldly those promises usually are.

Religiosity involves a lot of faith.

Salvation, life after death, entering the seventh heaven, meeting God -- almost always these sorts of goodies are supposed to be bestowed upon true believers in a future which never comes. So in this sense religions are indeed scams, because they don't deliver what was promised.

However, there are scams and then there are SCAMS. Christianity strikes me as a religion where everybody is getting scammed, because Jesus and God are supposed to deliver the divine goods, and they're nowhere in sight.

So the Pope, or whoever, can be absolutely sincere in his or her belief that becoming a Christian is the way to a wonderful afterlife. Preachers can fervently promise salvation with full knowledge that they're not the ones responsible for sealing the deal.

But like tucson says at the end of his comment:

"They're a bunch of crooks, you know, bad guys. And the guru is the leader of the gang. He is the worst of the worst because he knows what he isn't. Apparently he has no shame or conscience in perpetuating this sham, this scam, this rip-off."

The Radha Soami Satsang Beas guru is considered to be God in human form. If he is, the guru himself would know it. And if he isn't, then he also would know it.

Evidence, or rather the lack thereof, points strongly to the latter possibility as being much more likely. I meditated diligently for thirty-five years and never saw any sign of the guru's divinity that the RSSB teachings describe. And I've never heard of any demonstrable or convincing evidence that anyone else has either.

Millions of disciples. No one getting the promised divine goods. What's going on here?

Sometimes people accuse me of being unfairly critical of Radha Soami Satsang Beas. Well, that would be a more valid criticism of my criticalness if RSSB were akin to Christianity -- if the religion's leaders weren't responsible for bringing followers back to the lap of God.

The RSSB guru is supposed to do just that: accompany each and every disciple through higher planes of consciousness back to God. If nobody is experiencing this, then the guru isn't who he claims to be.

And since he knows who he is, that would make RSSB a scam. I'm not absolutely certain that it is. Heck, I'm not absolutely certain of anything. I'm just saying, buyer beware.

Free food is a Sikh thing, not a RSSB thing

For those interested in Sikhism and a related Northern India religious faith -- that of Radha Soami Satsang Beas -- take a look at a short New York Times video about the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar (thanks to my friend Randy for letting me know about it).

I wasn't aware that the practice of giving out free food via a "langar" is a traditional Sikh custom. This is done on a large scale at the Radha Soami Satsang Beas headquarters in Beas, Punjab.

But apparently the Golden Temple is an even bigger langar purveyor. This just goes to show that charity is universal, common among believers and unbelievers alike.

When I was an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas I used to think that the free kitchens were something unique. Now I know they aren't.