Church of the Churchless

Anxiety stretches between real and unreal

This morning I came across some great passages in Charlotte Joko Beck's "Nothing Special -- Living Zen."

Anxiety is always a gap between the way things are and the way we think they ought to be. Anxiety is something that stretches between the real and unreal. Our human desire is to avoid what's real and instead to be with our ideas about the world: 

"I'm terrible." "You're terrible." "You're wonderful." The idea is separated from reality and anxiety is the gap between the idea and the reality that things are just as they are.

When we cease to believe in the object that we've created -- which is off to one side of reality, so to speak -- things snap back to the center. That's what being centered means. The anxiety then fades out.

Beautiful. Anxiety is something that stretches between the real and unreal. That's the best one-sentence summation of anxiety I've ever come across. It has a ring of truth.

I'm alive. But one day I'm going to die.

Shit! Damn it! Yikes! I don't want to stop living! I should be able to live forever. Give me my goddman eternal life. Now! Well, that isn't possible because I'm still living my impermanent human life. But still... it makes me anxious to envision my everlasting non-existence. What a bummer that will be, leaving aside the minor detail that I won't be around to be bummed out if I'm non-existent.

I think Beck is right. A good way to cut through crap like that is by eliminating thoughts of the unreal, which deprives anxiety of an anchor point. Then there's no way anxiety can stretch between the real and unreal. 

It might bubble up, but since it lacks a hub of unreality to stick to, anxiety soon dissolves. Nothing like here and now to erase worries of there and then.

Here's another passage that I liked a lot, an interchange between Beck and one of her students.

STUDENT: Maybe I don't understand what you mean by being "one with."

JOKO: "One with" is an absence of anything that divides.

STUDENT: But I just don't feel like a table.

JOKO: You don't have to feel like a table. By "being one with the table," I mean that there's no sense of opposition between you and the table. It's not a question of some special feeling, it's a lack or an absence of feeling separated in an emotional way. Tables usually do not arouse emotion. That's why we don't have any trouble with them.

Charlotte Joko Beck died in 2011 at the age of 94. Here's a nice eulogy of this Zen pioneer.

Joko was the author of two very important books that are frequently recommended by interviewees at Sweeping Zen— Everyday Zen (1989) and Nothing Special (1993). Her first book,  Everyday Zen, is a book in which she described what meditation is and, more importantly, what it is not. Author Ruthann Russo writes, “…she says it is not about producing psychological change, achieving some blissful state, cultivating special powers or personal power, or having nice or happy feelings. She does say that meditation practice is simple, and it’s about ourselves. To practice effectively, we need to remove ourselves from all external stimuli. Then we experience reality, which is challenging for most of us.”

Her second book, Nothing Special, is, as Maezumi himself once remarked, very special. In it Joko expresses what is the original essence of Zen—unencumbered by some of the formal practices and activities we’ve come to associate with Zen practice over the years. For Joko, Zen is simply being right here in the moment, with nothing extra. Zen practice will yield us nothing other than this moment. In the book she answers her students questions and helps highlight, again, what Zen practice is really about. She says, “Practice has to be a process of endless disappointment. We have to see that everything we demand (and even get) eventually disappoints us. This discovery is our teacher.”

...[I]t is not too much to say that Joko Beck transformed the nature of Zen in America. At a time when a focus on kensho experiences and becoming enlightened after the manner in which we imagined our Japanese masters led to a dismissive attitude to problems that were “merely” psychological, Joko restored a sense of emotional reality to a scene increasingly plagued by scandal and misconduct by our allegedly enlightened role models.

She had the courage to say that her own teacher’s training had done little to curb his own alcoholism or deal with his character problems. Furthermore, his wasn’t merely an unfortunate exception but that it pointed to a deeply ingrained tendency to enshrine emotional bypassing into the very heart of traditional Zen training. She put dealing with anger, anxiety, pride and the self centered sexual exploitation of students into the center of what we must deal with in practice.

Radha Soami Satsang Beas men reportedly attack journalists

Interesting story in the Global Sikh News: Beas Dera Radha Swami men attacks journalists -- no action as yet. (Thanks for the links, Robert.)

Senior Journalist H. S. Bawa, editor of YesPunjab.Com has release a news report providing extensive information regarding attack on Sangat TV (UK) crew members by Radha Swami Dera men.

The men of Radha Soami Dera at Beas, which preaches non-violence, attacked the crew of Sangat TV at village Jodhe near Beas in the district of Amritsar. However, both the members of the crew were lucky enough to escape the attack.

The crew members – Baljeet Singh, a correspondent and the camera man Monu – had to virtually run to save their lives as both of them were attacked by Dera men on Saturday.

What happened to "love your neighbor" and "turn the other cheek"? Oh, right. These followers of Radha Soami Satsang Beas aren't Christians, so I guess it's OK for them to hate their neighbors and hit the other guys.

Now, the Global Sikh News may not be dispassionate in reporting this story, as there are tensions between Sikhs and the religiously divergent Radha Soami organization -- sort of like the tensions between Catholics and Protestants, though both are Christian.

Here's an example: Dera Radha Swami illegally occupies panchayat land and destroys Sikh Gurudwara. God supposedly is all lovey-dovey and oneness'y. However we humans are anything but, especially when religion divides us.

Make the mind cat-like (and win a gold medal)

I don't really believe in sychronicity or the universe has a message for me, but in the past 24 hours three pieces of information have combined to produce a feeling of, well, synchronous messaging going on.

Last night I was reading TIME's summer olympics special issue. Lolo Jones, the American hurdler, describes what happened during her disastrous run for a gold medal in the 2008 Olympics. In the midst of the race...

And then there was a point after that where I was like, Wow, these hurdles are coming up really, really fast. You have to make sure you don't get sloppy in your technique. I was telling myself to make sure my legs were snapping out. So I overtried. I tightened up a bit too much. That's when I hit the hurdle. Honestly, I should have relaxed a little bit and just run. Instead, I was just so paranoid because they were coming up so fast, I snapped it down too fast.

A few paragraphs on, there's a discussion of what "choking" is all about in athletic endeavors.

Beilock and other scientists who study choking -- there are more of them than you might think -- suspect that athletes under stress choke when too many thoughts flood the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that houses informational memory. Worry, and the brain becomes too busy. It's a misallocation of resources. The motor cortex, which controls the planning and execution of movements, should be doing most of the work for experienced athletes.

...Jocks should be dumb and not think too much. Jones' recall of her Beijing race suggests that her working memory, rather than her muscle memory, was too engaged. She talks about technique. Notice that she was "telling myself to make sure my legs were snapping out" rather than just letting her motor cortex do it.

Then, this morning I got an email from Nick, who sent me a link to a post on a discussion forum that has something to do with self-realization and all that stuff. (I didn't think about the web site; I just read the post in a dumb way.)

The cat is looking at you, but he can't hold your gaze because that's not his game. He has no interest in what you think. What goes on in your mind means nothing to the cat. Even when you fail to feed him and he's reminding you of your failure, it isn't your mind he's appealing to - it's your behavior.

Behavior is all the cat knows, and he's a master of behavior because he does what he can't imagine, reflect upon, or second-guess. Behavior is all the cat knows, which means he can't know this. What the cat knows, he can't think about, and what the cat thinks, he can't know. This works well for the cat, and it works well for what enjoys the cat's behavior. The cat reminds the self-conscious mind of what it is, and why.

Finally, as I was starting to write this post my wife asked me if I remembered the part in David Eagleman's "Incognito" book where he talks about Japanese chicken sexers. She's listening to an audio version of the book; I read a dead-tree version.

Yes, I did remember. Here's a description of what the chicken sexers can do, in an Eagleman article titled "Your Brain Knows a Lot More Than You Realize."

When chicken hatchlings are born, large commercial hatcheries usually set about dividing them into males and females, and the practice of distinguishing gender is known as chick sexing. Sexing is necessary because the two genders receive different feeding programs: one for the females, which will eventually produce eggs, and another for the males, which are typically destined to be disposed of because of their uselessness in the commerce of producing eggs; only a few males are kept and fattened for meat.

So the job of the chick sexer is to pick up each hatchling and quickly determine its sex in order to choose the correct bin to put it in. The problem is that the task is famously difficult: male and female chicks look exactly alike.

Well, almost exactly. The Japanese invented a method of sexing chicks known as vent sexing, by which experts could rapidly ascertain the sex of one-day-old hatchlings. Beginning in the 1930s, poultry breeders from around the world traveled to the Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School in Japan to learn the technique.

The mystery was that no one could explain exactly how it was done. It was somehow based on very subtle visual cues, but the professional sexers could not say what those cues were. They would look at the chick’s rear (where the vent is) and simply seem to know the correct bin to throw it in.

And this is how the professionals taught the student sexers. The master would stand over the apprentice and watch. The student would pick up a chick, examine its rear, and toss it into one bin or the other. The master would give feedback: yes or no. After weeks on end of this activity, the student’s brain was trained to a masterful—albeit unconscious—level.

So there we have it. Three bits of information. Which add up to... I don't know. 

Ah! That could mean I do know. I just don't know that I know it, often the best sort of knowing. If you want to win a gold medal. Or be a cat. Or a chicken sexer.

Beautiful video of Earth from space station

Who needs unproven supernatural mysticism when the natural world is so magical?

This is an amazing time-lapse video of Earth from the international space station, showing all sorts of phenomena: northern lights, thunderstorms, illuminated cities, and more.

 

Kumare: a true movie about a fake guru (but aren't they all?)

I'd seen a Stephen Colbert interview with the director and star of Kumare, Vikram Ghandi, a movie about an Indian guy who pretends to be a guru. Not surprisingly, he fools a bunch of Americans.

But I hadn't watched the intriguing two-minute trailer, until someone emailed me a link. (Thanks, Tej.) Have a look.

 

Kumare is on my Netflix list. Or maybe it'll come to our local independent movie house. I loved the Borat movies, but now Sasha Baron Cohen is too well-known to be able to pull off his impersonation stuff. 

Vikram Ghandi, though, succeeded. Heck, I bet some people still want to be a follower of him, even after he admitted his fake guru-ness. The urge to believe is so strong, gurus always will have adoring audiences.

How is eating fast food chicken godly?

Having been a vegetarian for over forty years, and being familiar with how many (most?) Buddhists and Hindus consider killing animals for food to be sinfully bad karma, I'm struck by the bizarreness of Christian Mike Huckabee saying that the godly thing to do on August 1 is head to Chick-fil-A, a fast food chain, and eat a bunch of chicken.

Dana Milbank explains. 

“The goal is simple,” he announced this week, calling on Americans to help those who honor “the Godly values we espouse by simply showing up and eating at Chick-fil-A on Wednesday, August 1.”

As of lunchtime Tuesday, Huckabee’s Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day already had 100,000 RSVPs. If each of those people buys the Deluxe Chicken Sandwich meal (1,080 calories) and tops that off with a brownie sundae (590 calories), the weight gain associated with Huckabee’s effort could be about 50,000 pounds.

Well done, governor. An obese nation thanks you.

The president of Chick-fil-A has announced that he and his restaurant chain are opposed to homosexuals and gay marriage, so this has led to protests. Huckabee wants the Christian faithful to counter-protest and show their love for God by buying Chick-fil-A chicken. 

Just what Jesus would want, I'm sure.

Isn't it Christian to support the raising of chickens in factory farms under horrible conditions? And isn't it Christian to hate people with a sexual orientation different from yours, denying them rights everybody else has?.

This is why I'm proudly not Christian. I'm too moral to be religious.

"Liars for Jesus." I like the title.

Haven't perused this web site other than a brief look. (Thanks for the link, Robert.) But I sure like the theme: Liars for Jesus: the Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History.

The book can be downloaded here.

More thoughts on Jim Holt's "Why Does the World Exist?"

Via an email (thanks, Nick) I learned about a Slate article that's based on a chapter in "Why Does the World Exist?" by Jim Holt, a book I blogged about recently.

Updike on the Universe describes Holt's interview from John Updike, a noted novelist who has mused about the mystery of existence in his writing. It's worth a read. Here's a sample:

“When you think about it,” he continued, “we rationalists—and we’re all, to an extent, rationalist—we accept propositions about the early universe which boggle the mind more than any of the biblical miracles do. Your mind can intuitively grasp the notion of a dead man coming back again to life, as people in deep comas do, and as we do when we wake up every morning out of a sound sleep. But to believe that the universe, immeasurably vast as it appears to be, was once compressed into a tiny space—into a tiny point—is in truth very hard to believe. I’m not saying I can disprove the equations that back it up. I’m just saying that it’s as much a matter of faith to accept that.”

Here I was moved to demur. The theories that imply this picture of the early universe—general relativity, the standard model of particle physics, and so forth—work beautifully at predicting our present-day observations. Even the theory of cosmic inflation, which admittedly is a bit conjectural, has been confirmed by the shape of the cosmic background radiation, as measured by the Hubble space telescope. If these theories are so good at accounting for the evidence we see at present, why shouldn’t we trust them as we extrapolate backward in time toward the beginning of the universe?

“I’m just saying I can’t trust them,” Updike replied. “My reptile brain won’t let me. It’s impossible to imagine that even the Earth was once compressed to the size of a pea, let alone the whole universe.”

l resonate with Updike. It is impossible to imagine.

But lots of modern science is exceedingly difficult to understand using the tools of everyday experience: common sense, perceptions, emotions, observable causes and effects.

So I don't have a problem with modern cosmologies which tell us that the entire universe, a hundred billion galaxies, each containing on average a hundred billion stars, once was as large as a grain of sand (or smaller).

However, the question remains: what's up with that "grain of sand"?

It isn't nothing. It's almost nothing. So someone who believes that an explanation is needed for the existence of the universe won't be content with an answer that says it arose from nearly nothing.

The big debate is between science's view of nothing and religion's/philosophy's view of nothing. (I wrote about this earlier in the year.) I've become comfortable with how most scientists basically look upon nothing: as the least amount of something we know about.

Thus the quantum vacuum counts as nothing. Empty space counts as nothing. Yes, a vacuum and empty space are minimal something's. But nobody has ever experienced absolute nothing, and no one ever will, because an experiencer obviously is something.

Another Slate article discusses this nothing vs. nothing debate. Check out "Has the Meaning of Nothing Changed?" by Ron Rosenbaum if you're a fan of the mystery of existence. 

In the past couple of decades, quantum cosmologists claim to have pulled a rabbit out of a hat and explained "how something came from nothing" with quantum theories of the origins of the universe. But is the nothing these theorists claim to be describing true nothing, capital-N Nothing, the Really Big O, the Ultimate Zero?

Or are the quantum cosmologists peddling a nothing that comes encumbered with more than few somethings: space, time, even the entire conceptual edifice of quantum theory invisibly calling the shots?

Why should you care about nothing? Well, I know what I care most about is the purity of the nothing invoked in this maddening question. Pure nothingness: It’s the last unspoiled, uncluttered concept in the cosmos. I don't believe in God, but I do believe in Nothing, in the sense I want to believe in mysteries beyond the reach of the mind. It makes life more interesting if existence can't yet be reduced to a series of equations.

Unreligious "Nones" are growing fast in United States

Great news. The Nones are on the march in the United States.

Don't be scared. They aren't zombies, or soulless creatures from the underground (though religious believers might think so). 

Unbelief is on the uptick. People who check "None" for their religious affiliation are now nearly one in five Americans (19%), the highest ever documented, according to the Pew Center for the People and the Press.

The rapid rise of Nones — including atheists, agnostics and those who say they believe "nothing in particular" — defies the usually glacial rate of change in spiritual identity.

Barry Kosmin, co-author of three American Religious Identification Surveys, theorizes why None has become the "default category." He says, "Young people are resistant to the authority of institutional religion, older people are turned off by the politicization of religion, and people are simply less into theology than ever before."

Mystery of existence is near and far -- not in between

Why is there something rather than nothing? Or more positively (my preference): There is something rather than nothing!

A great question. And a great exclamation.

I hugely enjoy pondering both, especially the latter. But the mystery of existence is much more than a pondering to me. It's an immediate, um, existential experience that always is lurking not far from the surface of my consciousness.

I'm easily drawn into the depths of WOW! by ducking my everyday conscious mind just a little ways below the surface of the perceptions, thoughts, sensations, emotions and what-not which normally are the focus of my attention.

(I've blogged quite a bit about the mystery of existence. Google knows. Here's a fairly recent offering.)

So when I learned about Jim Holt's book, "Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story," I raced into Amazon's always-eagerly-embracing arms as fast as my laptop-typing fingers would take me. I haven't been disappointed.

Highly recommended, though I'm only a bit over halfway through the book. Holt is a terrific writer, a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, New York Times, and other esteemed publications. 

He describes an all-encompassing search for what Deep Thinkers about the mystery of existence have to say about it. Philosophers, scientists, religious types, novelists. Holt's interviews are fascinating. Even when highly technical theories or esoteric logic is being discussed, I remain engrossed in the conversation. 

The guy I agree with the most so far (no gals have been interviewed in the chapters I've read; maybe pondering the mystery of existence is a guy thing) is Adolf Grünbaum, a noted philosopher of science. His attitude is almost exactly the same as mine, though he can explain his viewpoint in a much more sophisticated way than I can.

...Grünbaum finds the existence of the world utterly unastonishing. And he is utterly convinced that it is rational for him to be unastonished.

Consider again the basic mystery as originally stated by Leibniz: why is there something rather than nothing? Grünbaum dubs this, with appropriate grandeur (and perhaps a bit of irony), the Primordial Existential Question. But what makes it legitimate?

Like any other why question, he observes, it rests on hidden presuppositions. Not only does it presuppose that there must be some explanation for the existence of the world. It also takes for granted that the world needs an explanation -- that, in the absence of some overriding cause or reason, nothingness would be expected to prevail.

Now you might be wondering how I could agree so much with Grünbaum given that I feel WOW! when I grok the mystery of existence, while he finds the mystery utterly unastonishing. 

Well, Grünbaum's unastonishment is rooted in his dislike for the question, why is there something rather than nothing? I too am uninterested in the "why?," though I used to believe there could be an answer to it.

As noted above, it's there is something rather than nothing which truly amazes me. I get a chill up my psyche's spine when I lie in bed at night and visualize something being something for infinity, ever and ever, something without beginning or end. 

This has no connection with God. There's no need for God in the mystery of existence. The cosmos is. For me (and Grünbaum) that's the end of the story. And the beginning of it. 

My mind gets boggled when I try to envision existence existing eternally, outside of time. This is the far side of the mystery of existence. Endlessness. Eternity. Being without becoming. Effect absent cause. Yet I'm equally boggled by the near side of the mystery of existence.

This present moment. What's right here, right now. The fact that I'm experiencing what I am, given how much is'ness there is in the cosmos. Mystery doesn't only lie beyond the horizon of my consciousness. Mystery is immediately before me. 

In fact, is me. Because I exist, and no one knows why anything exists, nor if "why?" is even a valid question when asked of the entirety of existence.

Inbetween the near and far sides of the mystery of existence, knowledge can be known. Science guides us. Explorations of causes and effects can steadily enlighten the darkness of what it is possible to know, yet presently isn't. This illuminating has no end.

Except at the near side and far side of the mystery of existence.

Here, I believe, all we can do is WOW! And that one word is, for me, all the religion, spirituality, and mysticism I need in my current churchlessness.

Another inspiring RSSB "why I left" story

I love religious deconversion stories. They're more inspiring to me than conversion stories, because I've come to realize that a meaningful life is far distant from religiosity. 

So someone is making progress when he or she is able to get further away from rigid dogmas. Below is a story from one such "someone."

After sending me an email, I encouraged this person to write a blog-sharable version of why a decision was made to leave the formalities of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based spiritual group organized around the teachings of a line of gurus who are considered to be God in Human Form.

This morning I read a passage in one of my favorite books, Raymond Smullyan's "The Tao is Silent," which is a good introduction to the following deconversion story.

I would make the statement "everyone has the right to do what he wants" only to people who I feel are overly moralistic.

...All I am really trying to say to them is, "I wish you would let yourself alone and stop beating yourself on the head; I believe you would be better off." That's all I really mean by "Everybody has the right to do whatever he wants." 

Perhaps a still better way of conveying my real message is to say that if one believes he has the right to do what he wants, then he is more likely to want to do what is right.

Here's the story:
---------------------------------

Brian, 

Thanks for offering to let me have an opportunity to share my experience with your readers.  I have always enjoyed reading your blog; you are quite prolific and thought provoking.  

Since I was a very young child I have felt deeply that someone or something was always with me.  Perhaps it’s just my own ego or personality, but I have never felt as if I were entirely alone.  When I first started thinking about having a guru, I imagined “this must be who has been with me all this time!”  This sense of companionship has always felt like a living presence.  This is in contrast to my feelings about Jesus who in my childhood I tended to only see in black velvet paintings or nailed to a cross. 

I was raised a southern Baptist and briefly attended Catholic Mass along with a boyfriend during the late 1970’s.  [I didn’t know until later that because I wasn’t an official Catholic I am likely doomed to hell for drinking the wine and chewing the wafer following transubstantiation. I was never confirmed.] 

A few years later I was initiated into RSSB.  And somewhat like you, I quit after nearly 30 years.

During the intervening years I had officially converted from Christianity to Judaism, as my husband was Jewish, and we had a huge “religiously recognized” wedding.  It was the first gay wedding at our reform synagogue--one of the oldest in the United States.   

During my active involvement, I was pretty much a closeted Satsangi. As you know, the RSSB books contain much of the typical fundamentalist preaching on the subject that I had heard from the Baptist church (which I abandoned) and a sort of “gay-hate lite” that I heard from the Catholic Church.  Frankly, I had been so numbed to what religion had to say on the subject that I pretty much ignored it.  I never in my life felt that God didn’t love me because I was gay. I knew that I loved our creator, whatever entity that may be, and that was enough for me.  

As far as I know I was the only openly gay Satsang speaker.  There may have been others but having lived in the Baptist closet my entire childhood I just avoided discussing it.

Our local center has always been really great. People were nice and we didn’t have any weird group dynamics that we always heard rumblings of happening across the country.  Over the years I was even nominated for secretary.

This last time I was nominated, the local secretary was apparently asked to pry into my personal life with weird questions that I am sure they would never ask a straight person. Anyway, I was fine with it all but relieved that I didn’t get the “honor” of all the extra work.

This spring I finally accepted the fact that the RSSB rose had started dying on the vine for me some time ago.  It started several years earlier on a trip I took to Petaluma. It was during a Q&A session when someone asked Baba Ji a question about how they could be sure he was real and he said, "Sister, how do you know I am not a fraud?" And I can’t explain it, but his answer made me completely sick in the pit of my stomach.  It felt like a sign from God… and not like mere indigestion from an Amy’s burrito or the work of the devil. 

The entire audience laughed when he said that. I tried to put it out of my mind. Still, it would came back to haunt me occasionally. It had been 25 years for me; and I thought shit, WHAT IF THE JOKE’S ON US?

I liked the fact that in RSSB we weren’t pushed to give money. This was a huge change from all the years I spent among the evangelicals, although it felt much more up front in India during my visits there.

One day recently I was just sitting in the car when a feeling flooded over me like a giant wave.  “This is making you unhappy.  Why don’t you stop it?” 

And so I did, I tuned in to my inner self and dropped out.  I decided to stop beating myself up for being gay. I decided that God probably doesn’t care if there is a particle of an egg in a muffin or gelatin in a marshmallow.  I decided that it doesn’t make any sense to raise a ruckus with insurance companies over whether a prescription pill is available in a form other than a gel tab, and I don’t give a flying flea whether there is rennet in my cheese.  If this is what is required of perfection, we simply cannot attain it and we will always be unworthy.

It’s sad to think of the number of times I refused or threw away food, sending it back to the kitchen and somehow feeling I was the victim in the situation.

Because it was also frowned upon to feed carnivorous pets meat products, I also had tried to feed my cats vegetarian kibble and related products over the years. One of my cats, with the personality of an angel from heaven, has all kinds of allergies. One of the things she is allergic to is yeast, which it turns out is in everything vegetarian.  The poor dear ended up licking herself bare in numerous quarter-sized spots of her fur while I was trying to force her to eat vegetarian cat food. I wondered: did God really want me to have a hairless kitty?

Sant Mat also somehow makes you feel superior every time you eat with someone and they apologize for eating meat in front of you. We might say, "No, go ahead and eat meat I don't care—really!" but in the back of your mind you think "God, you're just poisoning yourself with that stuff!" Sant Mat makes you feel special, more valued.  And then you feel guilty for feeling chosen, and then you feel sorry for the people who are less special because “they will just have to live another lifetime to be as special as you.“

I had even less to fear however, since in my case, having converted to Judaism in 2000, I am in fact, covered by a perfect soul-saving trifecta! 

• Although I had forsaken Jesus when I became Jewish, it seems safe to say that if I turn out to be wrong, he’ll be there to greet and forgive me
• If my Guru is there to greet me when I die, no doubt he will forgive me for leaving RSSB as well. And then I’ll probably come back for another life.
• If neither Jesus nor the Guru is there, at least I will still be a part of the original chosen people.  

Brian, while I may not be an official member of RSSB any longer [although you can never actually leave since the guru never leaves you -- just like with Jesus!], the benefits of meditation are clear according to various scientific studies.  

Now however, instead of beating myself up for not meditating two and a half hours every day, I want to be able to feel great about myself if I meditate for even an hour! Hooray! Ten minutes? Hooray! Hooray!

What a different world I will be living in now… one where I can talk positively to myself instead of thinking that people who don’t follow the path “like me” are missing the boat, and where I can be grateful for whatever moments of the day I am able to focus on living in the moment instead of worrying about the past, the future, or whether my guru approves of what I’m feeding my cats. 

The bottom line is this: Sant Mat has requirements of people that are virtually impossible to attain, and because you can never attain them, you are never perfect enough for god-realization. So you have only yourself to blame for not going within.  

After 30 years I am going to believe the opposite: each of us is already perfect because we were created in God’s image. To me that means that together with God we are evolving. And just by being who we are, we are always automatically becoming our future higher selves.

Why have faith in a God who fucks things up?

Today a gunman killed at least 12 people and wounded 59 in a Colorado movie theatre. My wife watched news coverage of the disaster this evening. She told me that a man was interviewed who praised God for saving his life.

Maybe it was this guy, Zach Golditch, a football player in an adjoining theatre who was shot when a bullet went through a wall.

And then at 8:57 a.m., he tweeted, "Thank you God for the gift of life! i promise it will not go to waste."

Don't take this too personally, Zach, but I think you're an idiot. It's understandable that you're happy to be alive. Thanking God for keeping you alive when the Holy Fuck-Up in Heaven just caused a dozen people to die is absurd, though. 

You can't have it both ways, Zach (or any religious believer).

If God is omnipotent, omniscient, and all that shit, this means he/she/it is in complete control of everything that happens in the cosmos. Mass murder? God is responsible. 

But if God is a detached CEO who doesn't get involved in minor details of creation, like 12 people being killed in a movie theatre, then God is worse than useless. What's the point of a divine being who looks down from on high and allows all sorts of fuck-ups to happen?

When tragedies like the Colorado shooting happen, the ridiculousness of believing in a personal God becomes even more apparent. Invariably God is praised for saving the lives of some people. God never is cursed for killing those who perished.

Yet if God saves, God also kills.

This is the God of the Bible's Old Testament. It's a nasty, vengeful, all-too-human God. But at least the Old Testament God makes some sense. Like all of us, sometimes he gets destructively angry; and sometimes he gets all lovey-dovey.

The God of confused modern day Christian theologians, though, is unbelievable. When people do bad things, it's due to the free will God gave to us. However, when good things happen, God is responsible. 

Such is the attitude of an Olympics distance runner who thinks God is his coach. Somehow he manages to believe that God is the reason for his successes, yet blameless for his failures.

Ryan Hall is the fastest American distance runner competing in the London Olympics and he says he owes it all to his omnipresent coach who has been there with him every step of the way.

“I’ll just be straight forward, my coach is God,” the 29-year-old Hall told CNN.

...For Hall, running is more about the experience of peace and joy he gets from training. At times he says he does feel down and in said in the past he blamed God  for not doing his best in a race, but now he said that has changed.

“I don’t think God causes me to fail in races," he said.

Why not, Ryan?

Why do you limit God's ability to fuck you up, as well as pick you up? If you're going to believe in God, believe in a goddamn macho GOD who does whatever the hell he wants, bad, good, or indifferent, not a wimpy divinity who only involves himself in human affairs when things are all orderly and nice.

George Zimmerman says it was "God's plan" that he shot and killed Trayvon Martin.

That's ridiculous, but not as ridiculous as believing that God only is reponsible for the good stuff that happens in life. At least Zimmerman has a consistent Old Testament view of God: someone who murders, rapes, and pillages, then flips into a loving, caring, nurturing father-figure.

I'd rather leave God out of the "why stuff happens" equation entirely.

Having faith in a God who fucks things up so often makes no sense to me. Us humans are perfectly capable of screwing things up on our own, no God required. And also... making things better. On our own.

Irritating putdowns of pseudo-spiritual wannabes

Even when I was a religious true believer, Eastern mysticism variety, I tried to avoid being irritatingly sanctimonious. People who consider themselves holier-than-thou are difficult to be around. And I necessarily associated with quite a few people who didn't believe in what I did.

Such as my first wife, who early on deconverted from the India-based Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) faith that I held on to for about thirty-five years. And my second wife, who always has been an "infidel" from the standpoint of RSSB.

When I gave talks at RSSB meetings, I often used her as an example, saying that it makes no sense for any devotee of a particular spiritual belief system to view themselves as being superior to others.  After all, isn't spirituality supposed to have something to do with humility, love, compassion, acceptance?

Having run this churchless blog for almost eight years, I'm familiar with the putdowns of pseudo-spiritual wannabes -- because so many of those putdowns are directed at me in comments and emails. Here's some of the techniques I find most irritatingly amusing, because they are so nonsensical.

After I share those, I'll end with a suggestion about how to really put me, or another religious skeptic, down. 

"Brian, you haven't had [such and such] experience. You're a spiritual loser." 

This is an exceedingly lame argument.

No, I haven't experienced the blazing love of Jesus. No, I haven't had a peyote-fueled vision of the divine. No, I haven't felt the cosmic compassion of Buddha by repeating Namu Amida Butsu. No, I haven't astral traveled through inner regions of reality.

Who has experienced everything that religions, spiritual faiths, and mystical practices say is possible to experience?

And who can prove that any of these experiences are more than subjectively personal? I've had countless experiences that nobody else has. In fact, all of my experiences are unique to me, because no one can ever know someone else's conscious experience.

So this putdown is so weak as to be meaningless.

"Brian, you would have had [such and such] experience if you'd stuck with [such and such] longer. You're a quitter."

This is how I usually respond to this attempted putdown: Have you ever changed your mind, done something different, gone in a different direction, discarded one thing and picked up another? 

Nobody -- repeat, nobody -- keeps on the same track forever. I can't understand how it is that many religious believers convert to a particular faith, then view any subsequent conversion to another viewpoint as a ghastly sin.

If they'd always felt that way, they would have stuck with what they originally believed. Or their lack of belief. We all learn from our experiences. We all discover what we like and don't like. We evolve in our understanding of what makes life meaningful for us.

Yet even though change is the only constant from birth until death, somehow religious fundamentalists imagine that once a believer in X, always a believer in X. If Y comes to look more true and desirable, the devil must have worked his wily ways.

Ridiculous. Please, come up with a better putdown.

"Brian, you do [such and such] and say [such and such]. You're an immoral egotist." 

So what if I am? And how is it that supposedly you can judge me without being an immoral egotist, but when I criticize somebody or something, I'm all wrong?

Everybody has different standards of right and wrong. We all do what we feel we should. We're all trying to journey down the road of life in the best way possible. Still, I often disagree with what someone else is doing.

Politics is one of my passions. Every day I read the news and think, "Geez, what the Republicans are doing is so obviously wrong." But I realize that to them, us progressives are wrong. I try to avoid making absolutist moral judgments.

Which reminds me of some passages I read today in one of my favorite books, Raymond Smullyan's "The Tao is Silent." He describes four people. Smullyan likes the fourth a lot. The first, not at all.

The fourth says, "Why do I act as I do? To tell you the truth, I have absolutely no idea why. It is simply my nature to act as I act, and that's all I can say." ...The last one delights me utterly!... He is the one who is completely natural, spontaneous, and unself-consciously helpful.

...The first says, "I regard it as my duty and moral obligation to help my fellow man." ...But the first man! Good heavens, what a monstrosity!... People like the first man are so often pompous, vain, ego-assertive, puritanical, inhuman, self-centered, dominating, and unsympathetic. They are the people who act out of "principles." In a way, they are even worse than people who don't help others at all!

l don't know if I'm egotistical. I just do what I feel like doing.

Sure seems like that also is what people who criticize me for being an egotist are doing. Difference is, I don't feel superior to other people when I do what I feel like doing -- which makes me less egotistical! 

Anyway, this gets me to how someone could really put me down for what I'm doing here on the Church of the Churchless: provide some super-good evidence that I'm wrong to be skeptical about god, soul, spirit, supernatural powers, and all that.

Ooh! That would show me!

I'd have to admit that what I've been saying in so many blog posts is wrong, wrong, wrong. I'd have to bow down before the truth: God is real; the soul survives bodily death; spirit is the ultimate reality; some people have supernatural abilities.

Actually, I'd be happy to do that: admit I was wrong. It'd be nice to know that there's more to life, existence, and the cosmos than what appears to be. More is better, for sure. Especially if it really is better. 

Problem is, for the putdown to be effective, you need to bring your best stuff.

Facts, demonstrable evidence, proof. No one ever has been able to do this throughout all of recorded human history, so I doubt anyone is going to submit a blog post comment or send me an email with truly convincing arguments for some sort of divinity.

That's why I'm pretty sure those unconvincing putdowns will continue. Those who don't know, but believe they do, are spiritual wannabes who can't stand people like me who look at them and say, "Oh, really?"

Free will doesn't exist. Compatibilism makes no sense.

I don't believe in free will. I've got good neuroscientific company, which includes Sam Harris, author of "Free Will." (See here and here for my previous blogging about the book.)

Reading a New York Times review of "Free Will," I was reminded of how the have-it-both-ways notion of compatibilism doesn't make sense to me. Compatibilism claims that free will and determinism are compatible.

Huh? is my reaction. Harris' also, according to the review.

For quite a while now, philosophers and public intellectuals, including Harris’s friend Dennett, have tried to rescue something like the common notion of free will from the jaws of science and logic by embracing a position called compatibilism. Compatibilists believe that “a person is free as long as he is free from any outer or inner compulsions,” Harris writes, and they “have produced a vast literature in an effort” to salvage free will. “More than in any other area of academic philosophy, the result resembles theology,” he continues, consigning it to what one assumes is, for him, the intellectual subbasement.

For some reason unrelated to my non-existent free will, I've never even been able to understand how compatibilists justify their position, much less agree with it.

I started to make my way through a lengthy philosophical examination of the subject, but couldn't handle the intellectual exertion of reading it all.

After all, it's summertime, and thinking is easy (when I do any of it). It just seems to me that if determinism rules the brain, and there's essential zero scientific evidence to the contrary, then the only way to save a belief in free will is to redefine the term.

This is what compatibilists do. They accept brain-based determinism, but somehow argue that if I can act on my fully determined motives without interference (mostly from other people, I assume), I'm free. 

However, if I'm not free to choose what to do, what kind of freedom is that? To me, and Harris, free will is being able to do something different, even though the status of every neuron in the doer's brain is exactly the same as before.

This, of course, requires that a mysterious "will" be something supernatural, since if "will" is an altered brain state, determinism still rules: my will is the result of some cause, which itself is the result of some other cause, and so on -- all the way back to the big bang.

Since there is no evidence of a non-material entity (soul, spirit, whatever) which acts upon the physical brain, genuine free will appears to be an impossibility. 

Here's an excerpt from the above-linked Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on compatibilism. Makes good sense. Of course, what else could I say? I don't believe in free will, so naturally I agreed with this:

Despite the classical compatibilists' ingenuity, their analysis of could have done otherwise failed decisively. The classical compatibilists wanted to show their incompatibilist interlocutors that when one asserted that a freely willing agent had alternatives available to her—that is, when it was asserted that she could have done otherwise—that assertion could be analyzed as a conditional statement, a statement that is perspicuously compatible with determinism.

But as it turned out, the analysis was refuted when it was shown that the conditional statements sometimes yielded the improper result that a person was able to do otherwise even though it was clear that at the time the person acted, she had no such alternative and therefore was not able to do otherwise in the pertinent sense (Chisholm, 1964, in Watson, ed., 1982, pp.26–7; or van Inwagen, 1983, pp.114–9). Here is such an example:

Suppose that Danielle is psychologically incapable of wanting to touch a blond haired dog. Imagine that, on her sixteenth birthday, unaware of her condition, her father brings her two puppies to choose between, one being a blond haired Lab, the other a black haired Lab. He tells Danielle just to pick up whichever of the two she pleases and that he will return the other puppy to the pet store. Danielle happily, and unencumbered, does what she wants and picks up the black Lab.

When Danielle picked up the black Lab, was she able to pick up the blond Lab? It seems not. Picking up the blond Lab was an alternative that was not available to her. In this respect, she could not have done otherwise. Given her psychological condition, she cannot even form a want to touch a blond Lab, hence she could not pick one up. But notice that, if she wanted to pick up the blond Lab, then she would have done so.

Of course, if she wanted to pick up the blond Lab, then she would not suffer from the very psychological disorder that causes her to be unable to pick up blond haired doggies. The classical compatibilist analysis of ‘could have done otherwise’ fails. According to the analysis, when Danielle picked up the black Lab, she was able to pick up the blonde Lab, even though, due to her psychological condition, she was not able to do so in the relevant respect. Hence, the analysis yields the wrong result.

The classical compatibilist attempt to answer the incompatibilist objection failed. Even if an unencumbered agent does what she wants, if she is determined, at least as the incompatibilist maintains, she could not have done otherwise. Since, as the objection goes, freedom of will requires freedom involving alternative possibilities, classical compatibilist freedom falls.

I'm not bitter toward religion -- just fed up with false claims

Fairly frequently true believers leave comments on this blog saying, "Brian, you're so bitter toward religion." This surprises me. 

I don't feel bitter toward any religion or spiritual organization, including Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the India-based group I was an active member of for about thirty-five years. Rather, I'm disappointed about the false claims RSSB promotes in its teachings.

If I buy a car, or a computer, I expect it will function as advertised. If it doesn't, I don't feel bitterness. Just irritation, disappointment, let-down.

Now, how do I know that RSSB, or any religion, makes false claims? I can't know with 100% certainty. This isn't how knowledge works. Even scientists who study the material world never say "I'm absolutely sure X is true." 

Truth always is provisional, subject to change via new observations, facts, evidence, research. So are claims of falsehood. 

Every morning before I meditate, I say "If there's a god or other supernatural power aware of me, pay a visit; surprise me; show me something of yourself." I'm entirely open to having an experience that makes me cry out Praise Jesus! Praise guru! Praise Allah! Praise Buddha! Praise alien beings! Or praise whoever/whatever.

But I've never had such an experience.

And in my three decades-plus of communicating with many, many other RSSB devotees, before I started this blog and afterward, I've never come across anyone else who had the sort of transcendent, mystical, ultimate-reality knowing, astral traveling, soul-body separating experience the RSSB literature promises.

Most other religions or spiritual practices aren't nearly as specific as RSSB is regarding expectations. Nor, as certain. I bet from the Pope on down, no Christian alive today could say with complete certainty that they know what happens after death, and what the nature of God is.

But Eastern religions such as RSSB are quite different.

They assert that it's possible to become god-realized while in the flesh, to achieve a perfected form of consciousness, to be a "god in human form." The GIHF guru supposedly takes root in each disciple, guiding them both in life and after death, eventually revealing his non-physical nature: spirit ("shabd" in Indian parlance).

So this puts a different slant on what can be expected. Christian ministers don't claim to be god-realized beings. They admit to being seekers of Jesus/God, just as every other Christian is. But certain gurus, such as RSSB's Gurinder Singh, are held up as being God. 

Is this possible? Sure. Is it likely? No, not at all.

Stupendous claims require stupendous evidence to be believed.

After more than forty years of examining evidence for and against the claim that some humans have become more than human, possessing powers of omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, and such normally attributed only to God, I've concluded that the evidence (or lack thereof) strongly points toward the RSSB gurus, and others making similar claims, being pretenders.

I can understand the reasons for this, which seem to be rooted in Eastern culture and tradition. (See "Who is the guru?" and "A guru should know if he is God."

But I can't understand why someone would make claims about himself, and the spiritiual teachings which he represents, that almost certainly aren't true. After all, every religion -- and there are thousands of them -- makes certain assertions about the nature of a supernatural reality.

Which are contradictory.

They can't all be true, unless we give up the notion of "truth" as referring to anything objective, universal, demonstrable. So the likelihood that any particular religion or spiritual teaching, such as RSSB, is the One True Knowledge of God... that's so small as to be almost non-existent. 

I've learned a lot over the past forty years. For that, I'm grateful.

Every experience I've had, including experiences of disappointment, have made me who I am today. But just as I look back with irritation on cars and computers I've bought which didn't perform as advertised, so do I view religions which make false claims.

 

Morality has nothing to do with scientific truth

Einstein revealed some amazing truths about the cosmos through his theory of relativity and other research. Einstein also spent time with six girlfriends while he was married. 

Is there any connection between these two facts? Should we question the validity of the theory of relativity because Einstein engaged in behavior that would seem morally questionable to many people? 

No, of course not. 

Universal scientific truths have no connection with individual, or even societal, moral norms. The cosmos doesn't care what we do with our bodies and minds. Laws of nature aren't dependent on human thou shalt's and thou shalt not's.

So why do religions put so much emphasis on adhering to moral codes and commandments? (Which markedly differ from each other, but every religion has them.) 

Imagine that Jesus had a "significant other," which, of course, could have been the case -- given that so much of Jesus' life is shrouded in myth and mystery. He could have been gay, but I'll assume his bed partner was a woman.

Imagine further that a previously unknown gospel is discovered in a newly unearthed middle eastern cave. Scholars affirm it is as historically valid as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Roughly translated, the gospel contains this passage:

While Jesus loved his wife, he also enjoyed hot sex with six girlfriends.

Would this throw Christian theology into a tailspin? Would the Christian faithful question whether Jesus truly was the son of God who died on the cross to atone for mankind's sins if, prior to his atonement, he'd happily fucked six women along with his wife? 

(When climaxing, I picture Jesus throwing his head back and screaming "Oh my god! Oh my god!")

The truths Einstein discovered are independent of his personal lifestyle choices. They are part and parcel of a universal reality far removed from human notions of morality.

Yes, some philosophers, such as Derek Parfit, assert that moral reasoning is more objective than is commonly believed. This is a controversial position, though, by no means proven in anywhere near the same sense that the theory of relativity has been.

Yet most believers in the validity of a divine reality continue to associate truth-revealing and morality.

Prophets, mystics, gurus, masters, sages, yogis, popes, preachers, and such generally aren't trusted if their personal lives aren't in accord with a particular moral code esteemed by believers in a certain religion, spiritual teaching, or mystical practice.

I used to belong to an India-based organization which taught that god-realization wasn't possible without being a vegetarian, abstaining from alcohol and illicit drugs, and not having sex outside of marriage.

Having briefly been a Catholic in my childhood years, I sometimes thought about the wine-soaked wafer I was given at holy communion. Most Christians certainly would disagree that alcohol consumption is a barrier to knowing God. And many cultures use psychedelics (such as "magic mushrooms") to commune with divinity.

It now seems to me that the reason morality is so intimately connected with spiritual truths, but not scientific ones, is this: those supposed spiritual truths are lies. 

People may subjectively believe in them. However, they have no objective reality. Light and gravity really do behave in accord with the theory of relativity. There is no similar demonstrable evidence to support the assertions of believers in supernatural laws of nature.

Thus religions are left with subjective moral injunctions rather than objective truths. People cling to these commandments for many reasons, some of which may make sense. But only to us humans.

The cosmos rolls on, oblivious to our notions of right and wrong, good and bad. Science understands this; religions don't.

What Zen practice is... so simple...

I've been reading Zen books since my college days, forty-four years. I go hot and cold with Zen. Never have heated up enough to study it formally. Never have cooled off enough to lose interest in it entirely.

When an author throws too much Buddhism into the mix of Zen + Buddhism, I get turned off. I like my Zen to be as non-religious as possible. 

Which explains why Charlotte Joko Beck's "Nothing Special" appeals to me so much. I learned about the book from an interesting blog post by David Chapman with the same name. 

I took the title of this page from Charlotte Joko Beck’s wonderful book Nothing Special. Writing from a Zen perspective, she suggests that letting go of spiritual fantasies is a prerequisite to effective Buddhist practice.

"Nothing is really solved until we understand that there is no solution. We’re falling, and there’s no answer to that. We can’t control it. We’re spending our life trying to stop the falling; yet it never stops. There is no solution, no wonderful person who can make it stop. No success, no dream, no anything can make it stop. Our body is just going down."

Joko Beck taught in the Sanbo Kyodan (Harada-Yasutani) lineage of Zen. I’ve been sharply critical of Sanbo Kyodan elsewhere, for its fetishizing and mythologizing kensho, for its claim that enlightenment consists of discovering your True Self, and for a lot of half-witted talk about God.

At the same time, there is much in Sanbo Kyodan I admire and agree with: its emphasis on non-monastic practice, on everyday life as the path, and on extensive formless meditation; and for dropping many aspects of traditional Japanese Buddhism that no longer function.

l'm about a third of the way through Beck's book. Here's some quotes I've come across so far where she describes what Zen practice is all about. These thoughts apply to any sort of spiritual practice, in my opinion.

(Spoiler alert: it's just living life.)

When we discover Zen practice, we may hold out a hope that it is going to solve our problems and make our life perfect. But Zen practice simply returns us to life as it is. Being our lives more and more is what Zen practice is about. 

Our lives are simply what they are, and Zen helps us to recognize that fact. The thought "If I do this practice patiently enough, everything will be different" is simply another belief system, another version of the promise that is never kept.

...There's a practice of maintaining awareness; in that sense, Zen practice exists. But so long as we're alive, there's the question of awareness. We can't avoid it. In that sense, there's no way to avoid practice, or even to do it. It's just being alive.

Though there are certain formal activities that assist us in waking up (which we can call Zen practice if we want), real "Zen practice" is just being here right now and not adding anything to this.

...In a sense, Zen is a religious practice. Religion really means to rejoin that which seems to be separate. Zen practice helps us to do that. But it's not a religion in the sense that there's something outside of ourselves that's going to take care of us.

...In the end there is no practice except what we're doing each second.

...Practice is not about having experiences, not about having giant realizations, not about getting somewhere or becoming something. We are perfect as we are. By "perfect" I mean simply that this is it. Practice is simply maintaining awareness -- of our activities and also of our thoughts that separate us from our activities.

As we hammer nails or sit, we simply hammer nails or sit. Since our senses are open, we hear and feel other things as well: sounds, smells, and so on. When thoughts arise, we notice them, and return to our direct experience.

Awareness is our true self; it's what we are. So we don't have to try to develop awareness; we simply need to notice how we block awareness, with our thoughts, our fantasies, our opinions, and our judgments. We're either in awareness, which is our natural state, or we're doing something else.

The mark of mature students is that most of the time, they don't do something else. They're just here, living their life. Nothing special.

...Good practice is simply doing what we're doing and noticing when we drift off. 

...Focusing on something called "Zen practice" is not necessary. If from morning to night we just took care of one thing after another, thoroughly and completely and without accompanying thoughts, such as "I'm a good person for doing this" or "Isn't it wonderful that I can take care of everything?," then that would be sufficient. 

Discovery of "God particle" has nothing to do with God

Bravo, CERN scientists! It looks like you've found evidence of the Higgs boson, a particle produced by knocking a tiny chunk out of space-time with a high-energy particle accelerator.

This discovery could answer the question, "Where does mass come from?" That is, why is there something we can point to and say there!, rather than everything being formless pure energy?

According to the Standard Model, the Higgs boson is the only manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass. Particles wading through the field gain heft the way a bill going through Congress attracts riders and amendments, becoming ever more ponderous.

Without the Higgs field, as it is known, or something like it, all elementary forms of matter would zoom around at the speed of light, flowing through our hands like moonlight. There would be neither atoms nor life.

Apparently Peter Higgs, who theorized the particle/field existed, didn't like the nickname given to it. "God particle" is an attention-getter, for sure. However, now that the Higgs boson seems to have been found, we're no closer to understanding what God is, or isn't.

Scientists were the ones who extended our understanding of the universe, not God. The Higgs boson likely is the reason stuff with mass exists, but we don't know why/how the Higgs boson exists (assuming why/how has any meaning when we're getting down to the root of material existence itself). 

Perhaps most importantly, the meaning of it all has little or nothing to do with knowing that the Higgs boson is more than just a theory that sprang from the mind of Peter Higgs.

LIkely even the physicists who were so excited to learn that traces of the HIggs boson have been found consider that their personal view of the cosmos is much different post-discovery. Yes, knowing the nature of reality as understood by science provides a good foundation for a meaningful philosophy of life.

But as David Horsey says, "Higgs boson binds the universe, but humans give it meaning."

The news about the "God particle" is one of those challenging bits of information that can make everything else feel terrifyingly insignificant. It is a reminder that each of us is merely a tiny, carbon-based organism existing for a brief moment on a small planet that, by the scale of the universe, is no more singular than a grain of sand on a beach. We are dust in the wind, utterly inconsequential in the dark expanse of time and space.

At least that's one way to look at it. Another way to see it is that, in all that vastness, only we are aware of the awesome complexity. Only we strive to know and understand. All the rest is mere physical phenomena. What we do in our brief lives on this small planet may be the only thing that matters.

Thus, it behooves us to use our sliver of time well. We can waste it watching "Dancing With The Stars" or we can reach for the stars. We can squander it being petty, cruel, selfish or destructive, or we can be creative, compassionate, kind and just. The Higgs boson may glue this universe together, but we are the ones who give it meaning. 

The "God particle" has a big job to do in the infinity of the universe, but on Earth, as John F. Kennedy said, "God’s work must truly be our own."

Nice thoughts.

I agree with them, except for the notion that watching "Dancing With the Stars" is a waste of time. I've spent quite a few hours watching this show. They don't seem wasted to me. Anyway, if meaning is made by each person, each of us has to decide for him- or herself what is meaningful, and what isn't.

And this likely will change. Growth, evolution, learning, wisdom, maturity -- these aren't things, but processes. They're works in progress, not finished pieces.

I liked how the New York Times story ends.

“This could be the first in a ring of discoveries,” said Guido Tonelli of CERN.

In an e-mail, Maria Spiropulu, a professor at the California Institute of Technology who works with the CMS team of physicists, said: “I personally do not want it to be standard model anything — I don’t want it to be simple or symmetric or as predicted. I want us all to have been dealt a complex hand that will send me (and all of us) in a (good) loop for a long time.”

Nima Arkani-Hamed, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, said: “It’s a triumphant day for fundamental physics. Now some fun begins.”

This is a big difference between science and religion: open-mindedness versus know-it-all-ness. Truthfully feeling like you're on a never-ending voyage of discovery versus falsely believing that ultimate truth is within one's grasp.

Does God want me to be a senior citizen skateboarder?

There's got to be a deep meaning behind my strangely strong desire to become a skateboarder, longboarding style, at the age of 63. 

After all, don't the world's Western religions tell us that God/Allah is in control of our lives? And don't the world's Eastern religions tell us that Karma/Tao guides our decisions? 

Thus I have to assume that if I follow through on my lust for longboarding, I will have taken another step toward my salvation, enlightenment, god-realization, satori, and overall Major Dude'ness. 

(For some background on my divine mission, see here and here.)

Now, so far I haven't actually set foot on a skateboard. I don't think I've even ever touched one. But the Big Dude Upstairs works in mysterious ways, the most mysterious being that the Big Dude Upstairs doesn't exist.

I simply feel like longboarding is the next step in my spiritual, philosophical, and mystical evolution. Which surprises me, since I have no idea what that path looks like, or if it leads anywhere. 

Details...details.

Skateboarders don't worry about such niceties.

As noted in this post, I emailed the dudes at Salem's Exit Real World skateboard/snowboard shop (great name), asking if I was crazy to be considering jumping into skateboarding at my social-security-eligible age.

What makes me think skateboarding is for me is part of the reply I got:

I've been in the skateboard industry for the past 10 years and have seen all shapes, sizes, and ages skateboarding. That's the good part, there aren't any rules for skateboarding. I think that plays a big part in the popularity of skateboarding.

No rules. Excellent! Quoting myself, a favorite activity:

It comes down to my basic rule for living: there are no rules. Including that one. Life is a mystery. Dive into it however, wherever, whenever you feel like it; swim around; explore; it'll still be a mystery.

I don't know if I'll end up getting a longboard. But if I do, my dream is to dance on it with a semblance of the style below. Isn't this how the road of life should be travelled on?

 

Religion and politics: where lies triumph over facts

Fascinating. Reading Leonards Pitts' column in today's Oregonian opinion page, it almost seemed as if he was talking about religion in "When lies triumph over facts, we're done."

All I had to do was mentally substitute a few words in key passages. Which I've done non-mentally below.

Not long ago, if you told a whopper like Palin’s a holy book's and it was as thoroughly debunked as hers it's was, that would have ended the discussion. These days, it is barely even part of the discussion. These days, facts seem overmatched by falsehood, too slow to catch them, too weak to stop them.

Indeed, falsehoods are harder to kill than a Hollywood zombie. Run them through with fact, and still they shamble forward, fueled by echo chamber media preachers, ideological tribalism, cognitive dissonance, a certain imperviousness to shame, and an understanding that a lie repeated long enough, loudly enough, becomes, in the minds of those who need to believe it, truth.

...It seems that not only are facts no longer important, but they are not even the point.

Rather, the point is the construction and maintenance of an alternate narrative designed to enhance and exploit the receiver’s fears, his or her sense of prerogatives, entitlement, propriety and morality under siege from outside forces.

...This is the state of American political religious discourse, particularly on the political fundamentalist right, where a sense of dislocation, disaffection and general been-done-wrongness has become sine qua non, coin of the realm, lingua franca of the true believers — and of their true belief in the desperate need to turn back the unrighteous Other and his unwelcome change.

...The result of which is that Americans increasingly occupy two realities, one based on the conviction that facts matter, the other on the notion that facts are only what you need them to be in a given moment. That ought to give all of us pause because it leads somewhere we should not want to go. When two realities divide one people, the outcome seems obvious.

They cannot remain one people. 

There are some politics vs. religion discordancies in my edited version. Pitts is correct that lies in politics used to be much less acceptable than they are now. In the old days, if a politician was caught in a lie, this was a big deal.

It just elicits a shrug now. People don't expect policians to tell the truth, I guess.

In contrast, religions always have gotten away with falsehoods, in large part because there's no way to definitively say whether a claim like "God loves us" is true. All us skeptics can say is "evidence is lacking." 

Still, Pitts has a good point when he writes "a lie repeated long enough, loudly enough, becomes, in the minds of those who need to believe it, truth." With religions, instead of "lie" it probably is better to use a word like "unfounded belief" (though sometimes lie is exactly what's being promulgated).

As I often say in my blog posts, I'm not bothered by people believing whatever they want to -- so long as they don't expect other people to accept those beliefs if they lack demonstrable evidence of their truthfulness.

Unfortunately, the same phenomenon Pitts notes among unfactual politicians is apparent among unfactual religious believers: they feel offended and disrespected when reasonable questions are raised by people unwilling to accept their bullshit. 

"How do you know God exists?" "Even if God exists, how do you know God loves us?" "Isn't it more likely that God hates us, given how much pain, misery, and suffering exists in the world?"

Pitts seems to have a dream of people united by a shared vision of reality. Sounds great. But it's not going to happen anytime soon, especially in the realm of religion. It's tough enough to get people on the same truthful wavelength when it comes to scientifically demonstrable realities like human-caused global warming and evolution via natural selection.

Much more difficult is getting people to realize that cherished religious beliefs are just that: beliefs, with no factual substance behind them. Some day, perhaps. Someday. Religious people have their dreams, and so do I. 

Such as, a world where humans know the difference between truths and falsehoods, reality and unreality, objective and subjective viewpoints.