Church of the Churchless

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the Introduction itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great meditation advice: relax, do less, let go

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

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

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

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

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

What can you do about it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another RSSB follower sees the light and leaves

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

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

I've taken out some personal identifying information.

Hi Brian,

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

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

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

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

Thank you again Brian.

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

Zen Studies Podcast is a great Buddhist resource

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My meditation evolves to an exalted state of doing nothing

I've got some amazing news to report about how I meditate.

I toyed with the idea of issuing a press release in case the New York Times and Washington Post want to cover this breaking news (CNN also, since everything is breaking news on CNN), but I decided that readers of this blog deserved to be clued in first.

Today, before I meditated, I decided that what I'm going to do from now on -- unless I change my mind -- is... drumroll, please... a little longer drumroll to let the anticipation build... 

Absolutely nothing. 

OK, take some deep breaths. Calm down. Let your heartbeat get back to normal. I realize that this meditation news could be as exciting for you as it was for me this morning, when I first heard about it from myself.

I've been edging toward this exalted approach to meditation for many years. I must be close to full enlightenment, since I heartily enjoyed the 20 minutes I spent today embracing what Zen calls Shikantaza. 

I like that word because it sounds much more profound than my "absolutely nothing," though that's pretty much what Shikantaza meditation is all about. Doing nothing. Or rather, doing nothing special.


For 35 years, 1970 to 2005, my approach to meditation was decidedly special. In my own mind, at least, which reflected the teachings of the Indian religious group I was a member of during that time, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

RSSB taught that through meditation it was possible to raise one's consciousness beyond awareness of physical reality into a spiritual domain that could loosely be called "heaven," even though that's a Christian term. 

So the goal of my meditation was to concentrate on what lay within my mind, ignoring sights, sounds, and other manifestations of what the world had to offer. I tried to meditate in a quiet dark place to avoid distractions.

After I realized the drawbacks of the RSSB teachings, I gradually shifted to a mindfulness sort of meditation practice. Mostly I focused on my breathing in accord with a common Buddhist meditative approach. But I still had goals in mind: remain aware of my in- and out-breaths; try to relax; don't think too much.

Today, though, something shifted in my psyche. 

I didn't want to keep on dividing reality into what I paid attention to in meditation, and everything else. That isn't what I did during the rest of my day. I just was aware of whatever I was experiencing at the moment.

So this morning I simply set my iPhone timer for 20 minutes, shut my eyes, and sat in my chair. I was aware of my breathing, because I was alive. I was aware of heat being blown through air ducts, because it was cold outside. I was aware of the dryer going in the nearby utility room, because my wife was doing laundry.

It was refreshing to feel that nothing could be a distraction, since I wasn't focusing on anything I could be distracted from. I was awake and aware, just without a preference on what my awareness settled on. I couldn't go wrong in my meditation, given that there was no standard of rightness.

There really isn't a whole lot to say about this kind of open awareness meditation. However, I've said something about it and so have other people. Here's some examples of writings about Shikantaza with an excerpt from each source.

Just Sitting, Going Nowhere
The practice of “just-awareness” is the essence of Zen meditation. The Japanese word for this, shikantaza, is usually translated as “just sitting,” but Dogen, the founder of the Soto school of Zen, specifically taught that zazen is “beyond sitting or lying down.” Shikantaza is more than the mere physical posture of sitting, although it certainly includes that. Fundamentally it is the practice of just being here, being present—except that we are not rocks or stones, but aware beings—so I think “just-awareness” more fully captures the essence of the term. But awareness of what? That is the first question.

Shikantaza: Having the Guts to Just Sit and Let Go of Doing Anything 
I’ve been sitting zazen for over 20 years, but only recently have I had the guts to really do shikantaza or “just sitting,” and it feels profoundly liberating. In this kind of zazen, you utterly let go of doing anything except just sitting there. Really. I discuss why beginners are usually taught to count or follow breaths instead of do shikantaza, and why I think this is unfortunate. I also discuss the surprising results of a practice in which you don’t try to control your experience in any way.

Shikantaza: The Methodless Method of Zazen
A few years ago I came across an unusual description of shikantaza, the objectless meditation at the heart of Soto Zen Buddhism. “Shikantaza,” said Hakuun Yasutani Roshi, “is like sitting in the center of a clearing in the forest, knowing that ultimate danger is about to strike but not knowing what form it will take or from what direction it will come.”

I’d found this quote in an essay by Flora Courtois, a long-time Zen practitioner who’d studied with Yasutani Roshi at the Zen Center of Los Angeles. Her account of her spiritual unfolding was so striking that I was riveted the moment I began reading. But it wasn’t until I arrived at her analysis of Yasutani’s metaphor for shikantaza that I realized I’d found in it a teaching I didn’t even know I’d been missing. And like any good teaching, it would challenge much of what I thought I knew about zazen.

Just Sitting: The Zen Practice of Shikantaza
Once or twice a day, I sit facing a wall in my home. I just sit. I sit for twenty minutes, a half-hour, sometimes more. But I just sit. I sit and think not thinking; I do that by non-thinking.

This is the Zen practice of shikantaza, or “just sitting.” You sit, cross-legged if you can, and let your mind alone. When you stop thinking, you reach a point of non-thinking. It’s one of the typical paradoxes of Zen that makes your brain try and twist around those words, “not,” “non-” and “thinking” to figure out what they mean.

Unlike other forms of meditation, shikantaza doesn’t involve concentrating on an object, such as your breath or a mantra. It is “objectless meditation,” where you focus on everything you experience – thoughts, sounds, feelings – without attaching to any of them. When you get there, you know what it is.

Christof Koch presents a good analysis of near-death experiences

Are near-death experiences purely physical, or do they provide a glimpse into a mystical realm beyond ordinary awareness? 

The June 2020 issue of Scientific American has an article by Christof Koch that delves into this question. "Tales of the Dying Brain" is well worth a read regardless of how you look upon near-death experiences.

Koch makes clear his basic stance on this subject, one that I heartily agree with.

I accept the reality of these intensely felt experiences.

They are as authentic as any other subjective feeling or perception. As a scientist, however, I operate under the hypothesis that all our thoughts, memories, percepts and experiences are an ineluctable consequence of the natural causal powers of our brain rather than of any supernatural ones.

That premise has served science and its handmaiden, technology, extremely well over the past few centuries. Unless there is extraordinary, compelling, objective evidence to the contrary, I see no reason to abandon this assumption.

Koch then acknowledges the power a near-death experience can have for the person who comes close to dying.

The challenge, then, is to explain NDEs within a natural framework.

As a long-time student of the mind-body problem, I care about NDEs because they constitute a rare variety of human consciousness and because of the remarkable fact that an event lasting well under an hour in objective time leaves a permanent transformation in its wake, a Pauline conversion on the road to Damascus — no more fear of death, a detachment from material possessions and an orientation toward the greater good. Or, as in the case of Hemingway, an obsession with risk and death.

Psychedelic experiences bear a resemblance to NDEs.

Similar mystical experiences are commonly reported when ingesting psychoactive substances from a class of hallucinogens linked to the neurotransmitter serotonin, including psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms), LSD, DMT (aka the Spirit Molecule), and 5-MeO-DMT (aka the God Molecule), consumed as part of religious, spiritual or recreational practices.

There's still a lot to learn about near-death experiences. However, Koch makes a case for how they should be viewed.

Modern death requires irreversible loss of brain function. When the brain is starved of blood flow (ischemia) and oxygen (anoxia), the patient faints in a fraction of a minute and his or her electroencephalogram, or EEG, becomes isoelectric — in other words, flat. This implies that large-scale, spatially distributed electrical activity within the cortex, the outermost layer of the brain, has broken down.

Like a town that loses power one neighborhood at a time, local regions of the brain go offline one after another. The mind, whose substrate is whichever neurons remain capable of generating electrical activity, does what it always does: it tells a story shaped by the person’s experience, memory and cultural expectations.

Given these power outages, this experience may produce the rather strange and idiosyncratic stories that make up the corpus of NDE reports. To the person undergoing it, an NDE is as real as anything the mind produces during normal waking. When the entire brain has shut down because of complete power loss, the mind is extinguished, along with consciousness. If and when oxygen and blood flow are restored, the brain boots up and the narrative flow of experience resumes.

This is how Koch concludes his piece.

More than 150 years later neurosurgeons are able to induce such ecstatic feelings by electrically stimulating part of the cortex called the insula in epileptic patients who have electrodes implanted in their brain. This procedure can help locate the origin of the seizures for possible surgical removal. Patients report bliss, enhanced well-being, and heightened self-awareness or perception of the external world.

Exciting the gray matter elsewhere can trigger out-of-body experiences or visual hallucinations. This brute link between abnormal activity patterns — whether induced by the spontaneous disease process or controlled by a surgeon’s electrode — and subjective experience provides support for a biological, not spiritual, origin. The same is likely to be true for NDEs.

Why the mind should experience the struggle to sustain its operations in the face of loss of blood flow and oxygen as positive and blissful rather than as panic-inducing remains mysterious.

It is intriguing, though, that the outer limit of the spectrum of human experience encompasses other occasions in which reduced oxygen causes pleasurable feelings of jauntiness, light-headedness and heightened arousal — deep-water diving, high-altitude climbing, flying, the choking or fainting game, and sexual asphyxiation.

Perhaps such ecstatic experiences are common to many forms of death as long as the mind remains lucid and is not dulled by opiates or other drugs given to alleviate pain. The mind, chained to a dying body, visits its own private version of heaven or hell before entering Hamlet’s “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.”

Cats have no need of philosophy or religion

John Gray is an author who is sometimes irritating (to me, at least) but always interesting. He provokes in intelligent, witty, well-reasoned ways.

My main gripe about Gray is that he often uses a sort of "straw man" argument where he selects the writings of one person to represent a much more diverse way of thinking. He did this in Seven Types of Atheism, which I thought I'd enjoy but instead found annoying for that reason.

But after seeing a mention of his new book in The New Yorker, I eagerly bought a copy of Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life. I've read the first two chapters of this short book and am thoroughly enjoying it.

Gray says about cats:

That cats acknowledge no leaders may be one reason they do not submit to humans. They neither obey nor revere the human beings with which so many of them cohabit.

Even as they rely on us, they remain independent of us. If they show affection for us, it is not just cupboard love. If they do not enjoy our company, they leave. If they stay, it is because they want to be with us. This too is a reason why many of us cherish them.

I really liked the following passage from Gray's first chapter, "Cats and Philosophy." It is indeed strange that we humans find the world to be such a threatening place, we have to fashion religions and philosophies to soothe ourselves.

No other animal does this, which shows that we have a lot to learn from cats and other wise non-human creatures. Gray writes:

Cats have no need of philosophy. Obeying their nature, they are content with the life it gives them. In humans, on the other hand, discontent with their nature seems to be natural.

With predictably tragic and farcical results, the human animal never ceases striving to be something that it is not. Cats make no such effort.

Much of human life is a struggle for happiness. Among cats, on the other hand, happiness is the state to which they default when practical threats to their well-being are removed. 

That may be the chief reason many of us love cats. They possess as their birthright a felicity humans regularly fail to attain.

The source of philosophy is anxiety, and cats do not suffer from anxiety unless they are threatened or find themselves in a strange place. For humans, the world itself is a threatening and strange place.

Religions are attempts to make an inhuman universe humanly habitable.

Philosophers have often dismissed these faiths as being far beneath their own metaphysical speculations, but religion and philosophy serve the same need. Both try to fend off the abiding disquiet that goes with being human.

Simple-minded folk will say the reason cats do not practice philosophy is that they lack the capacity for abstract thought. But one can imagine a feline species that had this ability while still retaining the ease with which they inhabit the world.

If these cats turned to philosophy, it would be as an amusing branch of fantastic fiction. Rather than looking to it as a remedy for anxiety, these feline philosophers would engage in it as a kind of play.

Instead of being a sign of their inferiority, the lack of abstract thinking among cats is a mark of their freedom of mind.

Thinking in generalities slides easily into a superstitious faith in language. Much of the history of philosophy consists of the worship of linguistic fictions. Relying on what they can touch, smell, and see, cats are not ruled by words.

Philosophy testifies to the frailty of the human mind.

Humans philosophize for the same reason they pray. They know the meaning in their lives is fragile and live in dread of its breaking down. Death is the ultimate breakdown in meaning, since it marks the end of any story they have told themselves.

So they imagine passing on to a life beyond the body in a world out of time, and the human story continuing in this other realm.

Throughout much of its history, philosophy has been a search for truths that are proof against mortality. Plato's doctrine of forms -- unchanging ideas that exist in an eternal realm -- was a mystical vision in which human values were secured against death. 

Thinking nothing of death -- while seeming to know well enough when it is time to die -- cats have no need of these figments. If they could understand it, philosophy would have nothing to teach them.

2020 sucked, but our Christmas letter finds some humor in Covid

This wasn't a great year, to put it mildly. 

At first I wondered if I should even write our usual Christmas letter, which Laurel, my wife, and I call a Holiday Letter since we don't believe in Christ or any other imaginary god/supernatural being. (I share it as a "Christmas letter" because that's how most people refer to these things.)

Laurel convinced me that finding some humor in tough times is a good thing. So after writing a serious first draft of the letter, I started over last night and composed a lighter version. 

Here it is, in PDF and JPEG formats.
Download 2020 Christmas Letter PDF

My podcast interview with Marie D'Elephant was enjoyable

Yesterday I spent 1 hour and 48 minutes talking with Marie D'Elephant for a podcast that's scheduled to be released on February 4 via her Everyone's Autonomous Podcast site. 

Here's the description of what D'Elephant is up to.

During the Everyone's Agnostic podcast from 2015-2019, we shared our stories of religious trauma and the pain of deconversion. 

When that podcast went on a hiatus, a beautiful child was born: Everyone's Autonomous by Marie D'Elephant. She picks up the discussion by talking with guests and subject matter experts about how we can begin to move forward after having processed our toxic religious upbringings. 

How do we regain autonomy over our minds and bodies, AND respect the autonomy of others? How do we rejoin the human race and participate in this chaotic experiment of existence?

Great questions. D'Elephant and I covered a lot of ground in our discussion. She's a skilled conversationalist, which made the almost two hours we talked fly by in a pleasant fashion.

Several times in the course of our talk I spoke about "First there is a mountain, then there isn't, then there is." 

Today I met with an old friend for our usual Sunday afternoon coffee get-together. (We bring our own chairs and table so we can sit outside the Urban Grange coffee house in West Salem, even though both indoor and outdoor dining are prohibited right now because of Covid restrictions.)

When I mentioned the mountain saying to Jim, he said, "That was a Donovan song." Which I'd forgotten. The way Donovan put it in his 1967 song was "First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is." So I had it almost exactly right. 

However, the originator of the idea appears to be Qingyuan Xingsi, an 8th century Buddhist monk. According to Wikipedia, he wrote: 

Before I had studied Chan (Zen) for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and rivers as rivers. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and rivers are not rivers. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it's just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and rivers once again as rivers.

The way I described the saying in my conversation with D'Elephant was that initially we take the world as it appears to be. Then some people -- which included me for about thirty-five years of religiosity -- consider that the world is illusory in some sense, with really real reality residing in another realm.

That's how Plato viewed things. This world is shadows on a cave wall, while the sun of reality is only seen by those who turn around and seek the source of that light.

I used to be a Platonist, Eastern religion variety. No longer, though. I'm now content with mountains being mountains and rivers being rivers, the endpoint of Zen Buddhism. 

Of course, I don't know how I came to this realization. I like to think that, like Qingyuan Xingsi, my thirty-plus years of meditation and other spiritual pursuits led me to pass through the then there is no mountain stage into the more refined then there is stage.

But another possibility is that I never really left the initial first there is a mountain stage, simply taking a lengthy side excursion through the land of perhaps there is something more without ever really viewing that territory as my home.

Regardless, I'm comfortable with there is a mountain, no matter how I got there.

After finishing up with D'Elephant and thinking about what we talked about, I realized that I forgot to mention one of my all-time favorite sayings. This is by poet David Ignatow.

I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment on my life.

I never was, so I always will be

Profound? Obvious? Confusing? Meaningless? 

No matter what you might think of this blog post title, I reply: Yes, Yes, Yes, and...Yes.

In other words, I agree with you. I take this stance because I like the one-sentence statement that popped into my head a week or so ago, stimulated, I suspect, by the Buddhist books I've been re-reading lately.

So it doesn't really matter how anyone else looks upon I never was, so I always will be. Those words resonate with me, because they seem absolutely true.

Let's examine why I say this.

I never was points to the absence of an enduring, unchanging self or soul. This holds not just for me, but for everybody. So says Buddhism. So says neuroscience. 

Thus I, and you, and everyone else are an ever-changing process, not a standalone entity. We are part of life, of nature, of the world, of the universe. 

Certainly, we exist. Yet we don't exist in the sense most people see themselves -- as a being continuous with the baby that was given our name, and with all of the ages we experience until we die.

I never was that sort of being.

What I've been, and what I am today, is a swirling eddy in the stream of life that maintains a certain shifting shape, a certain fluid substance, but isn't in any sense a life form of which it can be said, "I am _____."

There's nothing to fill that blank. You, me, everybody, we are only an ephemeral collection of qualities produced by the seamlessly interconnected web of nature that not only surrounds us, but is us.

That's why I always will be. Because I never was.

If I'd been something that exists all on its own, my death would mark the end of that thing. (Again, there is no evidence of an enduring self or soul, so death is the last word of life's final chapter, not the beginning of a new plot line.)

However, since I never have been that sort of something, an island unto itself, I always will be. Not as me, of course, since the entity with my name attached to it is finite.

Rather, I always will be in the sense of what I already am, as we all are: nature, the natural world, reality. 

I realize that this won't seem to be good news to those who believe in a form of life after death where human consciousness persists much as it is now. But I don't see I never was, so I always will be as either good news or bad news. 

It simply is what appears to me to be the way things actually are, truth. 

The only reason someone would be dismayed at the thought of not continuing to live after their body takes its last breath is if they feel they are something that can't die. And that's a fantasy, not reality.

The beauty of Buddhism, and also of modern neuroscience, is how doing away with the illusion of self/soul eliminates the sense of unfairness, or wrongness, that we humans will die one day. 

If we never were the independently existing beings that we wrongly take ourselves to be, then death isn't the loss of anything that ever was. Since we always are changing, with no fixed center to our being, dying is the final change among countless other changes.

After that, our atoms are recycled into other entities. The world goes on. And so do we, in the only way that is possible -- as all that preceded our birth, and as all that follows our death.

Well stated criticism of RSSB guru and satsangi behavior

Here at the Church of the Churchless we love it when someone speaks their truth about how followers of a religion, or a religious leader, are acting badly. 

So when I read a recent comment from "Miss Judy", I knew it deserved to be shared in a blog post. Which I've done. I've corrected a few typos.

"Babi ji" refers to Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a religious organization based in India. "Sindhis," according to Wikipedia, are a socio-ethnic group in India originating from Sindh, a province of modern-day Pakistan. "Satsangis" are members of RSSB.

I have observed baba ji since 1980s: initially following the flock ‘or simply going with the flow’ the system is designed not to make you question RSSB and your parents shut you up if you challenge things which you may not agree to.

I’m from the U.K. and I don’t see any spirituality or love in this place - Sadly all I see is are typical Indians with typical Indian traits which have not been washed away - Indians love money, they love to show-off and boast - this is what you see here ... rows and rows of BMWs and Mercedes Benz.

These so-called spiritual beings proclaim to be pious that they might be ‘devoutly religious’ but they are not kind in there hearts. These Indians U.K. especially have no humbleness or purity in there heart that they may show love to their fellow humans .. no instead they are tainted by typical Indian mindset completely flawed.

Drug dealers, criminals, liars, aggressors, instigators, false proclaimers, melodrama, bad attitude .. the list is endless people acting as though they are godly yet their culture and home-life is still connected to their traits and past dealings.

Take KAMAL for example.  They say no seva ‘work’ can be given without his permission’ .. yet he is clueless of his surroundings and disconnected to his administration so this Punjabi folk-tale is untrue.
- He is a liar and a former gangster ‘more a Punjabi Mere Mittal clumsy and uneducated with little intelligence.
- I aim to challenge this thug and hold him accountable someday Since I cannot rely on further Punjabi folk tales that Baba ‘is Jani Jaan’ is that he is the all knowing of everything if it was true he would have throttled KAMAL by the neck!

Baba has a bad habit of making Kamal famous at every attempt one day in Q&A he asks a woman do you want hug Kamal ... either that or Baba uses Kamal as an escape goat to change the topic.

Further Baba has a habit of making sexual innuendos and act all lively when young girls get up to ask him questions - I find it off-putting and question the path.

Mr Bassi also adores young woman especially rich Sindhi girls!

I must confess I have become disillusioned by what I see - I think of Jesus and many true saints that have walked this Earth and look at Baba residing in a 8,000 sq ft mansion in the grounds of Haynes Park ... this is not on par with U.K. houses people in U.K. live in a standard 1700 sq.ft house!

Re: Money and Wealth ‘what a joke!’ Baba and his teachings state over decades that ‘Money will be left here, you come with nothing you go with nothing the greatest wealth is NAAM and Seva (which includes do nothing you life-savings to RSSB).

Yet Baba is doing Fraud desk in Indians worth Billions making money left, right and centre and losing fortunes on failed property deals in 2007... read up on it yourself the Ranbaxy and two Sikh nephews or Gurinder Dhillon aka Baba...

Note how his sons live in Multi-Million pound homes in St Johns Wood London and the girls his sons married are wealthy families not your typical churaay or chamars from his sangat.

Note his RSSB has an appetite for rich Sindhis and giving them privileges unbeknown to the common folk that travel to Haynes park.

Haynes Park a unique development - humans advised to give up their time to do seva (free labour) to maintain the upkeep but most to add value to Haynes Park in exchange for free meals, snacks and cuppa teas... as the old adage goes ‘you give a worker a free meal he’ll work for free!’

All baba does is advise all the sangat to do seva (to generate his wealth) not once have I seen him sit down with all the lost souls to say let’s meditate together and get them to sachkand ... this is what these souls need is your true spiritual enlightenment and gospel not a Saturday night live treat to a some karioki Indian songs or get the entire senior members to do a panto...

It’s laughable and I see it as a joke ... I don’t go to seva to be entertained what the fuck does that do for my spirituality and well bring? I can go to the London Palladium if I want to be entertained not watch goonies acting like goons!

Let’s talk about the path these indian and satsangis .. they all Lie, they have Ego, they all have Pride, they all have Anger (Punjabi for heaven sake)... greed may be reduced but it’s still prevalent. Lust well that’s for the individual.

There was one isolated instance where I recall a female speakers son ‘Tara family’ had sex with another satsangi both vaginally and anally - to a satsangi ‘what the hell!’

There’s a lot more I complain about but overall having mixed with Christians from Church of England I see RSSB as a rip off of Christianity and Sikh faith with Hindus Karma to produce the path with all the proceeds going to the head.

I don’t like how RSSB steal Jesus quotes and twist it to mean baba is Jesus ... no he isn’t - Jesus died on the cross for man ... what has baba done?! It was a lie snd another Punjabi folk tale when the news came that Baba got throat cancer it was because he was taking on the sins of his satsangis .., can you see how it rips off Jesus by plagiarising... what’s good for the goose is good for the gander ... sadly not the case

Wake up, and Make your own minds up!

Gurinder Singh Dhillon, guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Humans create God, not the other way around

Since there is no demonstrable evidence that God exists, where does the concept of "God" come from? Obviously, from the minds of humans. We create the idea of God, which includes the fantasy that God created us.

The November 9, 2020 issue of The New Yorker has an interesting review of a book by a Stanford anthropologist, T.M. Luhrmann, "How God Becomes Real."

Basically, by people doing things that conjure up their imagined God, in somewhat the same way as the reader of a novel throws themself into the story line to such a degree, the fictional creation can seem real while the novel is being read.

This is the description of Luhrmann's book on Amazon.

How do gods and spirits come to feel vividly real to people―as if they were standing right next to them? Humans tend to see supernatural agents everywhere, as the cognitive science of religion has shown. But it isn’t easy to maintain a sense that there are invisible spirits who care about you. In How God Becomes Real, acclaimed anthropologist and scholar of religion T. M. Luhrmann argues that people must work incredibly hard to make gods real and that this effort―by changing the people who do it and giving them the benefits they seek from invisible others―helps to explain the enduring power of faith.

Drawing on ethnographic studies of evangelical Christians, pagans, magicians, Zoroastrians, Black Catholics, Santeria initiates, and newly orthodox Jews, Luhrmann notes that none of these people behave as if gods and spirits are simply there. Rather, these worshippers make strenuous efforts to create a world in which invisible others matter and can become intensely present and real. The faithful accomplish this through detailed stories, absorption, the cultivation of inner senses, belief in a porous mind, strong sensory experiences, prayer, and other practices. Along the way, Luhrmann shows why faith is harder than belief, why prayer is a metacognitive activity like therapy, why becoming religious is like getting engrossed in a book, and much more.

A fascinating account of why religious practices are more powerful than religious beliefs, How God Becomes Real suggests that faith is resilient not because it provides intuitions about gods and spirits―but because it changes the faithful in profound ways.

Here's an excerpt from the review by James Wood. 

Modern Christians in the West like to think of themselves as believers who have left behind any cultic relationship with a usable God. Doubtless not a few of them harbor a special disdain for American Evangelicalism, with its gaudy, prosperous instrumentalism. 

Certainly, if belief were plotted along a spectrum, at one end might lie the austere indescribability of the Jewish or Islamic God ("Silence is prayer to thee," Maimonides wrote) and at the other the noisy, all-too-knowable God of charismatic worship, happy to be chatted to and apparently happy to chat back.

But it is still a spectrum, and, indeed, any kind of petitionary prayer presumes a God onto whom one is projecting local human attributes. In this sense, you could say that Christianity is essentially a form of idolatry.

The difficult, unspeakable Jewish God becomes the incarnated Jesus, a God made flesh, who lived among us, who resembles us. Theodor Adorna and Max Horkheimer blamed Christian anti-Semitism on just this idolatry of the man-God: "Christ the incarnated spirit is the deified sorcerer." The called this "the spiritualization of magic."

Evangelicals are hardly the only Christian believers to draw this Jesus, the deified sorcerer, to them. I'm reminded of that whenever I see professional soccer players crossing themselves as they run onto the field, as if God really cared whether Arsenal beats Manchester United.

Luhrmann would say, with some justice, that in such cases we should focus more on the practice than on the beliefs. Crossing oneself is ritualistic, and she would probably add that the soccer player then performs on the field as if he and his team alone determined the outcome of the game, which is to say that -- in a sense -- he performs as if God didn't exist after all.

In "How God Becomes Real," Luhrmann calls this the art of possessing "flexible ontologies," because "people may talk as if the gods are straightforwardly real, but they don't act that way." A driver who prays that the car will stop without his using the brakes "would seem mad, not devout."

The real world, dependent on the laws of physics, runs easily alongside a highly elaborated and imagined belief-world, which shares several of he properties of fiction-making and fiction-reading. The Vineyard believers, Luhrmann discovers, learn how to "pretend that God is present and to make believe that he is talking back like the very best of buddies."

As with a fictional character, this God is at once absolutely real and not quite real. Luhrmann likens the capacity for imaginative absorption to being "engrossed in good magical fiction of the Harry Potter kind." 

...Her [Luhrmann's] major refuge is a kind of therapeutic pragmatism. She's fond of the verb "work." Prayer works, belief works, real-making works, she says, in the sense that, as far as these believers are concerned, God is made real; and these prayer practices therapeutically change the people who practice them. 

But does prayer "work" in the most important sense, of achieving what it proposes -- which is to communicate with an actually existing God? Luhrmann won't be drawn out, committed as she is to a kind of Feurbachian religious anthropology, in which God is merely the reality we conjure and create through our activities, imaginings, and yearnings.

I share a guest post from myself about loving the life you're with

Thank you, me, for giving permission to myself to share on this blog a post I wrote for my HinesSight blog on Thanksgiving Day. I truly am thankful that I am so generous with myself.

So check out "If you can't be with the life you love, love the life you're with." You get extra credit if you're able to identify the source of the saying that I adapted for the blog post title.

Here's an excerpt from the post.

Sure, it's wonderful to be thankful. However, life is difficult. And I hate to break this news to you younger folks, but life gets more difficult as we grow older. 

Not in all ways. In some ways.

Notably, when it comes to health and the pain that often accompanies our problems. Some pain is physical. Some is psychological, such as regret that one's life hasn't turned out as expected way back when.

So it's asking a lot to be thankful for things in your life that aren't welcome. I suppose my love the life you're with sounds similar, but I see some differences between thankfulness and love. Love of life is more inclusive than thankfulness for this and that. 

If our back is hurting so much we can't get out of bed, that isn't an aspect of life we want to have hang around. However, it's possible to view that pain as part of a larger life that we love. Which is sort of how we view our children when they're young.

They can be a pain to deal with, but we still love them for who they are, flaws included.

Acceptance of what is actually present in our life is a big step toward loving our life. Denial, which includes "this shouldn't be happening to me," isn't helpful, though it is temping to indulge in, since we would rather be with the life we love than the life we're with if the latter is lacking some things we value.

Political and religious delusions have a lot in common

Reality only comes in one flavor: real. But humans aren't in direct touch with reality, so we have to struggle to make sense of the world, the universe, the cosmos.

Thus the flavor of reality for us Homo sapiens has many varieties. Really, as many as there are people in the world, since everybody looks upon life in a unique way.

Science is our most powerful means of coming to a consensus on the nature of reality. By and large, scientists the world over agree on core scientific tenets -- which is far different from the widely divergent ways politicians and religious leaders look upon things.

Still, whoever looks upon reality with a reasoned, open, unbiased mind likely will agree with others who have the same approach to knowledge.

This is borne out by the fascinating after-election goings-on here in the United States. It's been obvious since a week or so after the November 3 election that Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the presidential race. And it's been equally obvious that Biden's win had nothing to do with fraud.

Recounts and experts in election security both point to this fact: fraud was virtually nonexistent. This was the most secure election in American history.

That's reality speaking. Unfortunately, there are other voices spouting off about how unfair and rigged the presidential election was. The loudest voice belongs to the Sore Loser-in-Chief, soon to be ex-president Trump. 

He's been complaining non-stop about fantasized fraud. There's zero evidence of this, but that doesn't stop millions of his supporters from believing Trump's lies. Which might be termed falsehoods, if Trump actually believed them.

However, news reports are saying that in private Trump knows he lost the election fairly, so this means he keeps pushing the election fraud delusion as a political ploy to discredit the validity of Biden's victory, and to establish a " I was victimized" theme for Trump's likely bid to run for president again in 2024.

Likewise, I've seen surveys of Christian ministers that reveal a surprising percentage don't really believe in God. They simply look upon being a minister as a job, and likely find other aspects of Christian life to be more appealing than theology.

To offer another example, a book I'm reading at the moment says that most Buddhists don't meditate, even though meditation is a central part of Buddhist teachings. Thus it is common for both politicians and religious people to outwardly profess one set of beliefs, while inwardly having other beliefs.

This is understandable, since we all put on one face in certain situations (like a meeting with our boss), and another face in other situations (like having a beer with friends after work). 

What's more difficult to understand is how otherwise intelligent people fall prey to obvious delusions.

There are many examples in the religious sphere, such as the existence of God, life after death, and other supernatural notions for which there is zero solid evidence. All I can figure is that when someone really wants to believe in something, their critical thinking faculty goes on vacation -- which I readily admit to doing during my 35 years as a religious believer.

I do, though, have more sympathy for those who believe in something important (like God) that's unseen, since there's a chance, albeit a slim one, that it exists even without demonstrable evidence.

Better observational methods can result in amazing discoveries. Other galaxies only were discovered in the twentieth century as telescopes became more powerful. Maybe some forms of human consciousness are capable of discerning God. Maybe.

What I have a lot more problem with is failing to recognize the existence of things that clearly do exist like evolution and human-caused global warming. It takes a really blind eye to not see that these things are part of the fabric of reality. This can be ascribed to ignorance, unless the facts are so well known to someone they are purposely deluding themselves.

Today I heard that a politician who is a fervent Trump supporter wants to know where the evidence is that election fraud doesn't exist. Wow, what a thinking error. That's similar to demanding proof that God doesn't exist. 

As I've noted many times before on this blog, it is up to those who claim something does exist to supply the proof. I can't prove that fairies aren't making the trees in our yard grow. There's just no evidence of fairies, nor is there evidence of election fraud.

It's solely in the minds of those who, for one reason or another, can't admit that Joe Biden won the presidency fairly. The evidence for a fair election is no  sign of fraud, which is clearly apparent to those with eyes willing to see.