Church of the Churchless

Atheists like me are by far the most disliked religious minority

Minorities tend to be misunderstood by majorities.

Whites don't really know what it is like to be African American. Heterosexuals don't really know what it is like to be homosexual, or more broadly, LGBTQ. And religious believers don't know what it is like to be atheist.

(Note: I was a religious believer for 35 years, Eastern mysticism variety, so I'm very familiar with both religious belief and atheism -- having deconverted from my previous belief about 14 years ago.)

So as an atheist, I haven't been surprised by the response of many to my also-atheist wife, Laurel, using the public comment period at a Salem (Oregon) City Council meeting to complain about the Mayor's 2019 State of the City address being preceded by a Christian pastor calling upon God/Jesus to bless the Mayor, and for everyone in attendance to pray.

I wrote about this a few days ago in "Praying shouldn't be part of public meetings." That blog post attracted the attention of KATU news in Portland, which interviewed my wife and Mayor Chuck Bennett as described in this KATU story and accompanying video. 

On Facebook I've seen numerous comments along the lines of, If you object to praying, just don't do it and You should leave religions alone to do their own thing. 

While these sorts of attitudes roughly reflect how my wife and I also feel, they miss a crucial point: Atheists in the United States aren't only bothered by religious beliefs that are unscientific, non-factual, and often appallingly political. We also object to a long history in this country of atheists being discriminated against, a prejudice that continues to this day.

Though  I don't believe in heaven or hell, I do think this familiar movie phrase applies to me, my wife, and many fellow atheists: "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

Meaning, since the founding of the United States atheists have been wrongly put down as immoral, un-American, and elitist. A book by two emeritus Cornell professors, R. Laurence Moore (history and American studies) and Issac Kramnick (government) explains this in great detail. 

Here's an overview of "Godless Citizens in a Godly Republic: Atheists in American Public Life" via a Publisher's Weekly review:

From the pages of state constitutions to the seats of Congress, Moore and Kramnick (The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness) search for places for the godless in American politics and find few.

Beginning with the country’s roots in England, with its official state church, the United States’ protection of religious liberties excludes one group: nontheists and their nonbelief in a religion or deity. The authors explain that 18th- and 19th-century Americans associated morality with religion, so eschewing one was considered a rejection of the other.

The tensions of the Cold War reinforced this historical bias, with rhetoric tying communism to atheism and implying a corresponding relationship between belief and patriotism. The concept of the dangerous, un-American—or worse, anti-American—atheist paved the way for the addition of “Under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 and “In God We Trust” to America’s currency in 1957, and constrained nontheists’ chances at public office and judicial seats.

Synopses of pivotal Supreme Court cases demonstrate how atheists, agnostics, humanists, secularists, and nontheists are frequently cast as an amoral minority. Through cautious and sensitive comparisons between nontheists and other marginalized groups, the authors present the marginalization of nontheists as an equal rights issue.

This accessible and sincere book usefully makes explicit often-unspoken currents in American political life.

The Pew Research Center says that 31% of people in Oregon, where I live, are unaffiliated religious "None's" -- 5% atheist, 8% agnostic, and 18% nothing in particular. However, that last category is made up of 12% for whom religion is unimportant and 6% for whom religion is important. 

Thus let's subtract those "nothing in particular" people who don't consider religion important.

That still leaves 25% of Oregon's population as decidedly non-religious. Is it possible that a quarter of the citizenry deserve these sorts of discriminatory attitudes, as described in the Godly Citizens in a Godly Republic book? (Boldfacing added for emphasis.)

-- "Of the respondents to a Pew Research Center survey question on attitudes to specified religious groups in 2009, 49 percent scored atheists negatively, while the unfavorable response to other groups was dramatically lower: Muslims, 32%; Mormons, 26%; Hindus, 21%; Buddhists, 20%; Evangelical Christians, 17%; Jews, 11%; Catholics, 11%.

-- "A 2011 Gallup poll that asked, 'If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be atheist would you vote for that person?' found that only 49% of Americans said yes. Responses for other similarly well-qualified nominees: black, 94%; women, 93%; Catholic, 92%; Jewish, 89%; and Mormon, 76%."

-- "An earlier iteration of the 'willingness to vote for your party's nominee' in 1999, which included homosexuals among the choices, ranked them at 59%, higher than atheists at 49%."

-- "When asked into what group they would least like their children to marry, nearly half of Americans list atheists first, significantly higher than Muslims, African Americans, and Jews." 

-- "So too, when asked to name 'the group that does not at all agree with my vision of American society,' 40% of Americans put atheists on top, followed by Muslims, 26%; homosexuals, 22%; conservative Christians, 13%; recent immigrants, 12%; Jews, 7%; African Americans, 5%."

The book's authors ascribe this distaste toward atheists as reflecting three foundational features of American sociocultural belief: (1) A conviction that one can't be a good person if one is not a believer; (2) one can't be a good American if one is not a believer; (3) American anti-intellectualism, since many see atheists as cultural elitists -- philosophers, scientists, and artists who threaten the beliefs of ordinary people.

Thus there's a lot going on beneath the surface of my wife's complaint about a Christian prayer being offered at a public meeting here in Salem.

Us atheists, along with the broader category of "None's," are tired of being viewed as second-class citizens. We're fed up with being put down and marginalized just because we don't believe in unbelievable supernaturalism. We no longer find it acceptable to stay silent while religious speech (mostly Christian) fills the airwaves.

Nationally 23% of Americans are religious None's. That's about four times more than the 6% of Americans who hold to non-Christian faiths. Here in Oregon, the ratio is even higher: 31% None's and 7% non-Christian.

Yet I'm willing to bet that an atheist, agnostic, or other non-believer has never been invited to give the invocation at the State of the City address in Salem, even though non-Christians such as Jews have.

This points to the disturbing falsehood that the authors of Godless Citizens in a Godly Republic emphasize: atheists are viewed by religious people as less moral and trustworthy, even though there is no evidence of this being true. It's just a discriminatory attitude that would be viewed as abhorrent if a racial or ethnic minority was being typecast in this fashion.

Meditation isn't mystical. It's about awareness of actual reality.

For about 35 years I had some deluded notions about meditation.

Back then I embraced a teaching that said meditation was about concentrating at the eye center (third eye, basically) so one's mind/soul could enter higher realms of mystical consciousness.

Now I realize that this wasn't what genuine meditation really is all about. A book that I've gotten back to reading, "Altered Traits:  Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body" has helped me understand this. 

I bought this book in September 2017, wrote a rather critical blog post about it in April 2018 ("Awareness is a process, not a thing") and recently read a couple of additional chapters that make me feel considerably more positive about the book.

Here's some highlights from those chapters, which describe what happened when the brains of some highly experienced meditators, both Buddhist monks and others, were examined through modern scientific devices: EEG and fMRI. The key theme here is Open Presence.

Researchers found that the brain waves of Mingyur Rinpoche, a Tibetan monk, were off the charts when it came to his ability to almost instantly enter a state of compassionate meditation. But those spikes diminished, yet didn't disappear, when he went into a rest period. Thus his brain had acquired a lasting trait, not just the ability to enter into temporary states of consciousness.

When another researcher tested whether Mingyur could generate an elaborate visual image or had extrasensory perception, he flunked both tests. Here's a passage from Altered Traits about this.

Mingyur, it turned out, had done no practice with visualization since the long-gone, early years of his practice. As time went on, his meditations evolved. His current method, ongoing open presence (which expressed itself as kindness in everyday life), encourages letting go of any and all thoughts rather than generating any specific visual images.

...As for "extrasensory perception," Mingyur had never claimed to have such supernormal powers. Indeed, the texts of his tradition made clear that any fascination with such abilities was a detour, a dead end on the path.

Which is exactly my experience, though I make no claim to being anywhere near as experienced with meditation as Mingyur is. What we're trying to do in meditation is experience reality as it is, not as religious fantasies make it out to be.

An eighteenth-century Tibetan text urges meditators to practice "on whatever harms come your way," adding, "When sick, practice on that sickness... When cold, practice on that coldness. By practicing in this way all situations will arise as meditation."

...Mingyur Rinpoche, likewise, encourages making all sensation, even pain, our "friend," using it as a basis for meditation. Since the essence of meditation is awareness, any sensation that anchors attention can be used as support -- and pain can be very effective in focusing.

...Each yogi (including Mingyur) was compared to a meditation-naive volunteer matched for age and gender. For a week before they came to be studied, the volunteers learned to generate an "open presence," an attentional stance of letting whatever life presents us come and go, without adding thoughts or emotional reactions. Our senses are fully aware, and we just stay aware of what happens without getting carried away by any downs or ups.

When the yogis and volunteers were tested to see how they reacted to a 10-second slight warming of a firey device, followed by a 10-second blast of hotness, the control groups' pain matrix in the brain reacted almost as strongly to the slight warming as it did when the high heat came on.

So their "anticipatory anxiety" caused them distress even before the real pain arrived. By contrast, the experienced meditators showed little change when the plate warmed just a little.

Interestingly, though:

But during the actual moments of intense heat the yogis had a surprising heightened response, mainly in the sensory areas that receive the genuine feel of a stimulus -- the tingling, pressure, high heat, and other raw sensations on the skin of the wrist where the hot plate rested. The emotional regions of the pain matrix activated a bit, but not as much as the sensory circuitry. 

This suggests a lessening of the psychological component -- like the worry we feel in anticipation of pain -- along with intensification of the pain sensations themselves. Right after the heat stopped, all the regions of the brain matrix rapidly returned down to their levels before the pain cue, far more quickly than was the case for the controls.

For the highly advanced meditators, the recovery from pain was almost as though nothing much had happened at all.

Pretty inspiring. This shows that the human brain/mind is capable of more than most people are able to express, or experience. Yet this capacity isn't supernatural, divine, or godly. Here's some final quotes from Altered Traits.

We can only make conjectures about what state of consciousness this reflects: yogis like Mingyur seem to experience an ongoing state of open, rich awareness during their daily lives, not just when they meditate. The yogis themselves have described it as a spaciousness and vastness in their experience, as if all their senses were wide open to the full rich panorama of experience. 

Or, as a fourteenth-century Tibetan text describes it,

...a state of bare, transparent awareness.

Effortless and brilliantly vivid, a state of relaxed, rootless wisdom;

Fixation free and crystal clear, a state without the slightest reference point;

Spacious empty clarity, a state-wide-open and unconfined; the senses unfettered...

Praying shouldn't be part of government meetings

My wife, Laurel, is an avid atheist -- even more so in some respects than I am. She started a MeetUp group here in Salem, Oregon: Freethinking Atheists of Salem. Here's the description of the group.

Are you too logical/rational to believe in religions, conspiracy theories, and beliefs not supported by modern science, yet miss the fellowship church-goers enjoy? Let's meet up monthly for coffee to converse with like-minded people who also share minority status as "nonbelievers" in a predominantly religious believing world.

Let's share what we learn about science, the challenges of being atheists, and support each other in what we know to be supported by reality. We ask for about a one dollar donation to cover the MeetUp cost, and that you support the IKE Box's hospitality by purchasing a drink or snack.

Last night Laurel used the public comment period at a Salem City Council meeting to talk about her concern that a minister called for prayer prior to Mayor Chuck Bennett giving the annual "State of the City" address. 

(You can see the invocation at about the 1:30 mark in this video.)

Yes, the Mayor's talk wasn't held in a government building, but it was part of his official mayoral duties. As Laurel says in the video below, church and state are supposed to be separated in the United States. Having a Christian minister issue a call for prayer elevates one religion above others.

And also, of course, above the 30% or so of people in Oregon who don't embrace any religion, or God. Yet the minister ends his invocation/prayer with "In Jesus' name." 

There's absolutely no reason why people who choose to attend a secular event should have to listen to religious talk.

I'm glad my wife made this point to the Mayor and City Council. Hopefully next year there won't be any religious invocation. Or if there is, that it feature a representative of a different faith than Christianity. 

 

Give up feeling special. You're not. Religions are lying.

People feel special for all sorts of reasons. For example...

Ego. "I'm especially good-looking/intelligent/talented/etc. etc."
Love of country. "I'm a citizen of the greatest nation in the world."
Luck. "I won the lottery and now I'm set for life."
Upbringing. "My parents always told me I was special."

But religions are one of the biggest purveyors of specialness. Which makes them especially dangerous. Why? Because feeling special sets us apart from all of those other non-special people who are so obviously inferior.

Of course, the weird thing is that most religions teach that their devotees have a special relationship with God or a higher power. I talked about this in "Why atheists are more 'spiritual' than religious believers."

Maybe this statement seems paradoxical to you: I feel more genuinely spiritual now that I've stopped believing in God. 

But it makes good sense to me. Here's the main reason why.

I no longer feel special.

Virtually every religion and spiritual path considers that its adherents have a special relationship with God or whatever other supernatural entity they believe in. 

There are so many chosen people on Earth, they vastly outnumber the unchosen, the non-special group I'm pleased to be a part of.

I understand that feeling special has its own delights.

In my case, I was a member of an India-based spiritual organization which taught that those approved for initiation by the guru had been "marked" to return to God/heaven after a karma-cleansing meditation process.

Cool!

For about 35 years I embraced the enjoyable belief that, out of all the billions of people on this planet, I was one of a relative few who were the special beloveds of the supreme being. 

Of course, devout Christians, Jews, and Muslims feel the same way, along with countless believers in other theological belief systems. 

Eventually I started to realize that all the talk I was hearing about being "humble servants of the Lord and the guru" was, to put it bluntly, a crock of shit. Genuine humility wasn't much to be seen among devotees of my spiritual organization.

Not surprising.

Since members of this group were told over and over that they've been singled out by a higher power to learn cosmic truths and experience realms of reality not available to other human beings, naturally a pervading sense of "tribal" pride was evident throughout the organization.

We were the cool kids in the spiritual lunch room. Other faiths were inferior, since they didn't have the direct connection to God we did. 

I'm happy that this form of egotism has been discarded.

Sure, I've still got lots of other self-centered tendencies rattling around in my psyche, as we all do. But to get rid of The Big One, a belief that God had chosen me to be his best buddy for eternity, whereas my infidel wife wasn't going to get the same afterlife prize -- this increased my humility quotient by a lot.

Now I don't expect that I'm going to have any different sort of afterlife anyone else does. Namely, I strongly suspect, none at all. 

If you want more motivation to discard a religiosity that is making you feel special, check out some other blog posts I've written on this subject:

Religions are wrong: in the cosmos, humans aren't special
The universe is indifferent to us. But religions believe we're special.
We humans think we're special. What makes us believe that?

Breaking news about God! (don't get excited, there isn't any)

If you listen to CNN for more than a few minutes, especially if Wolf Blitzer is the anchor, you're guaranteed to hear "Breaking news!" 

Of course, usually it isn't genuine breaking news that hasn't been reported before, but rather fairly fresh news that I'd heard before, though not a whole lot.

When was the last time, though, that you recall hearing breaking news about God? 

I'll provide the answer: never. Not once in my lifetime, all 70 years of it, has there been a credible story about some new divine revelation from the Big Guy/Gal upstairs in heaven. 

For some reason -- and I'm pretty sure I know what this is -- all of the breaking news about God stopped being broadcast many hundreds of years ago, if not thousands. 

Today I was walking down three flights of stairs after a meeting of the Salem City Club. A woman slightly ahead of me on the top landing stepped to the side and said, "Go on by. I'm as slow as Moses."

Showing that I'm pretty much clueless about the Bible, I said to the woman and her husband as I walked past them, "What makes Moses so slow?" They gave me a quick Old Testament lesson about how it took Moses forty years to get his people to the promised land, if I recall what they said semi-correctly.

That got me to thinking about the Ten Commandments and other godly subjects.

Why have messages from God dried up now that the Old and New Testaments have been written, along with the Koran and other holy books such as the Adi Granth Sahib, Bhagavad Gita, and so on?

It doesn't seem to be a coincidence that with the rise of science, there's been an almost total decline in miracles. Now that miraculous events can be critically questioned and examined through the microscope of logic, reason, and demonstrable evidence, they've dried up.

Which leads me to conclude that either God is afraid to have his communications tested for veracity, or God doesn't exist. I'm going with the latter theory, being the most believable.

So the next time you pick up a newspaper, listen to the radio, or turn on a TV, ponder the fact that there's no new news about God. Which is pretty damn strange, given that religious believers consider that God is the ultimate reality, the power behind creation, the source of all that is good.

A lengthy silence can be construed either as the absence of an entity capable of making noise, or as a willful desire to not communicate one's presence.

The first possibility points to atheism being true. The second possibility points to some form of deism where God chooses to absent himself/herself/itself from the world. Both are far removed from what most religious people believe. 

Yeah, I know. This truth is painful. But it must be told. There's no news about God because either God doesn't exist, or God doesn't care about us. So get on with your life and pay attention to all the other news about things that are real. 

 

 

Wabi Sabi shows us how to live a perfectly imperfect life

Chasing after perfection is a perfect way to drive yourself crazy. Or at least, to become deeply disappointed -- since perfection doesnt exist.

Not in people, for sure. And likely nowhere else, either. 

Yet religions hold up perfection as an attainable ideal. For example, they speak of having perfect faith, as if this was possible. And I'm well aware of Eastern religions that consider a perfect living guru is the next best thing to a perfect god.

So when I heard about a book that describes the wisdom of embracing imperfection, I immediately ordered it.

I'm just a short ways into "Wabi Sabi: Japanese Wisdom for a Perfectly Imperfect Life" by Beth Kempton. But I've read enough to know that I'm going to enjoy the book.

Here's some excerpts from the first chapters of Wabi Sabi. Almost certainly I'll have more to say about the book as I get further into it.

Almost without exception, conversations I have had with Japanese people on this topic have begun with: "Wabi Sabi? Hmmmm... It's very difficult to explain." And the truth is, most people have never tried to articulate it and don't see the need to do so. They have grown up with it. It's how they navigate the world and appreciate beauty. It is built into who they are.

...In slowly peeling back the layers of mystery, this is what I have come to understand: the true beauty of wabi wabi lies not in things but in the very nature of life itself. 

Wabi sabi is an intuitive response to beauty that reflects the true nature of life.

Wabi sabi is an acceptance and appreciation of the impermanent, imperfect, and incomplete nature of everything.

Wabi sabi is a recognition of the gifts of simple, slow, and natural living.

Wabi sabi is a state of the heart. It is a deep in-breath and a slow exhale. It is felt in a moment of real appreciation -- a perfect moment in an imperfect world. We can nurture it with our willingness to notice details and cultivate delight. And we experience it when we are living the most authentic, most inspired versions of ourselves.

It's about experiencing the world by truly being in it rather than judging it from the sidelines. It's about allowing strategy to give way to sensitivity. It's about taking the time to pay attention.

The principles that underlie wabi sabi can teach us life lessons about letting go of perfection and accepting ourselves just as we are. 

...Wabi sabi is a feeling, and it is intangible. One person's wabi sabi is not the same as another's, because each of us experiences the world in different ways. 

We feel wabi sabi when we come into contact with the essence of authentic beauty -- the kind that is unpretentious, imperfect, and all the better for that. This feeling is prompted by a natural beauty, that which is austere and unadorned. 

...Put simply, wabi sabi gives you permission to be yourself.

It encourages you to do your best but not make yourself ill in pursuit of an unattainable goal of perfection. It gently motions you to relax, slow down, and enjoy your life. And it shows you that beauty can be found in the most unlikely of places, making every day a doorway to delight.

Salem Women's March 2019 had some crazy religious counter-protestors

Last Saturday there was another Women's March here in Salem, Oregon. As I did with the 2017 and 2018 marches, I took a bunch of photos, then shared them in an Adobe Spark web page that you can peruse by clicking on the image below. 

There were some Christian fundamentalist counter-protestors at the event on the Capitol Mall.

I'll share a photo of their signs, along with my commentary on one of the signs below the Adobe Spark link. Or you can view the photo and my comment on it by clicking on the Women's March Salem 2019 link.

Caution: if you're an avid fan of President Trump, be prepared to see many photos of signs that vilify him. 

The "cover girl" (or cover woman) on the web page is my wife, Laurel. She's also an avid atheist who has organized a MeetUp group that convenes every Sunday to support people in the irreligiosity. 

Here's the photo of the fundamentalist Christians, along with my commentary. 

Here's a closeup of the Christian fundamentalist hate signs. Pleasingly, I'm guilty of all of the "sins" in the sign on the left: I accept abortion, multiple religions, marijuana, porn, alcohol, and same sex relationships. Also, how could these guys be against fornicators? Do they think they're the product of a virgin birth? Me, I'm fine with hell fire, since I'm a proud evolutionist.

More religious craziness, Hindu temple variety

Every religion has its own brand of craziness. None is exempt.

Why? Because the very notion of supernaturalism is crazy, since there is zero, repeat zero, demonstrable evidence that gods, angels, souls, heaven, hell, or any other supernatural entity exists.

When I was younger I used to believe that Hinduism was a bit more appealing than, say, Christianity, because it wasn't as dogmatic a religion. However, as I began reading about Hindu nationalism in India, I came to realize that many fundamentalist Hindus are just as crazy as their counterparts in other religions.

Case in point: a New York Times story, "Her Visit to a Men-Only Temple Went Smoothly. Then the Riots Started." Here's some excerpts that show how bizarre and dangerous Hinduism can be.

KOCHI, India — One morning this month, Bindu Ammini stood at the base of a steep, forested trail in southern India and looked up: She was a three-mile hike away from making history.

Two hours later, at 3:45 a.m., Ms. Ammini and a friend became the first women to enter the Sabarimala Temple, a centuries-old Hindu shrine, after India’s Supreme Court struck down a longstanding rule preventing women of menstruating age from visiting.

In the wake of that ruling, a dozen women tried in October to climb a slippery path leading to the temple. None of them made it, as men screamed in their faces and hurled coconuts.

Video of Ms. Ammini’s journey on Jan. 2 shows two women in long black gowns striding through a gilded archway. They maneuver past mostly placid men. “Our visit has been very smooth,” Ms. Ammini, 40, says to the camera.

A few hours later, the rest of India woke up. Pandemonium followed.

Protesters in the state of Kerala, where the shrine is, threw crude bombs at the police. Over 3,000 people were arrested. At least one person was killed. Dozens more were injured.

Within hours of the women’s trip, a priest had shut down the Sabarimala Temple to sprinkle water for a “purification ritual,” evidence to some that the ban was rooted in a belief that menstruating women were dirty.

Wow. This story makes Christianity look positively tame in comparison to Hinduism. Christians believe in a lot of unbelievable stuff, but at least they aren't prone to rioting when someone supposedly defiles a holy place.

And while the Biblical god can be nasty, at least that divinity doesn't discriminate against women of menstruating age.

Every year, millions of people wait for hours to climb the 18 gold-plated steps leading to the Sabarimala Temple, one of Hinduism’s holiest shrines. For centuries, however, pilgrims say they have observed a de facto bar against women between the ages of 10 and 50, thinking that to allow menstruating women inside would disturb the temple’s celibate deity, Lord Ayyappa.

I found the last part of the New York Times story inspiring. It takes a lot of courage to stand up against religious extremism. I admire the women in India who are doing this.

New challenges await the women. The Supreme Court plans to consider review petitions, though lawyers do not expect a reversal of the verdict. Earlier this week, after the women left a safe house, Ms. Kanakadurga’s mother-in-law beat her so badly with a piece of wood, she said, that she was hospitalized.

Ms. Ammini said she was realistic about her safety, fretting about a recent ominous “silence” in Kerala. But the way forward — “to serve the society, work with Dalits, women, for blacks” — had never been plainer or more urgent, she said.

“They may attack me, they may kill me, but I feel no fear,” she said. “I am struggling for existence.”

Mystical experiences aren't objective reality. They're experiences.

Following up on my previous post about John Dewey's marvelous little book, "A Common Faith," here's some of what Dewey has to say about mystical experiences. I've boldfaced some passages that particularly appeal to me.

Dewey's main point, which I totally agree with, is that by themselves, mystical experiences prove nothing about God or the supernatural.

The possible causes of those experiences must be carefully studied before any conclusions can be drawn about them, especially given the wide variety of mystical experiences, many or most of which have no commonality.

Dewey writes:

It is more to the point, however, to consider the region that is claimed by religionists as a special reserve. It is mystical experience. The difference, however, between mystic experience and the theory about it that is offered to us must be noted.

The experience is a fact to be inquired into. The theory, like any theory, is an interpretation of that fact.

The idea that by its very nature the experience is a veridical [truthful] realization of the direct presence of God does not rest so much upon examination of the facts as it does upon importing into their interpretation a conception that is formed outside them. 

In its dependence upon a prior conception of the supernatural, which is the thing to be proved, it begs the question.

History exhibits many types of mystic experience, and each of these types is contemporaneously explained by the concepts that prevail in the culture and the circle in which the phenomena occur.

There are mystic crises that arise, as among some North American Indian tribes, induced by fasting. They are accompanied by trances and semi-hysteria. Their purpose is to gain some special power, such perhaps as locating a person who is lost or finding objects that have been secreted.

There is the mysticism of Hindoo practice now enjoying some vogue in Western countries. There is the mystic ecstasy of Neoplatonism with its complete abrogation of the self and absorption into an impersonal whole of Being. 

There is the mysticism of intense aesthetic experience independent of any theological or metaphysical interpretation. There is the heretical mysticism of William Blake. There is the mysticism of sudden unreasoning fear in which the very foundations seem shaken beneath one -- to mention but a few of the types that may be found.

What common element is there between, say, the Neoplatonic conception of a super-divine Being wholly apart from human needs and conditions and the medieval theory of an immediate union that is fostered through attention to the sacraments or through concentration upon the heart of Jesus?

...There is no reason for denying the existence of experiences that are called mystical. On the contrary, there is every reason to suppose that, in some degree of intensity, they occur so frequently that they may be regarded as normal manifestations that take place at certain rhythmic points in the movement of experience.

The assumption that denial of a particular interpretation of their objective content proves that those who make the denial do not have the experience in question, so that if they had it they would be equally persuaded of its objective source in the presence of God, has no foundation in fact.

As with every empirical phenomenon, the occurrence of the state called mystical is simply an occasion for inquiry into its mode of causation. There is no more reason for converting the experience itself into an immediate knowledge of its cause than in the case of an experience of lightning or any other natural occurrence. 

Religions forget that we humans are animals

Calling someone animalistic isn't an insult. It is a fact.

We humans are animals. Just unusual ones, since members of no other animal species can write articles (or blog posts) about the fact that they're animals.

Thus our bodies do what other animal bodies do. 

Pee. Poop. Breathe. Have sex. Play. Feel. Sleep. Eat. Drink. And so on. 

Sure, we also think about all kinds of stuff. The structures we build are more impressive than a termite hill. Our social relationships are more complex than a wolf pack. 

Yet the fact remains, we are animals.

One reason I've come to reject religions is that almost all of them deny our animalistic nature. Religious moral codes are filled with ridiculous attempts to ignore the needs and urges of the human body.

Sex is supposed to only occur between a married man and woman. Not out of wedlock. Not between two people of the same gender. (And certainly not between more than two people, regardless of gender.) 

Alcohol is OK in certain religions, though not in others. Recreational drugs like marijuana or psychedelics rarely are. Why? Who knows. Probably because of bullshit like "the body is a temple that must be kept clean and holy."

Other animals enjoy being intoxicated. But only the human animal feels guilty about it, mostly thanks to ignorant religious dogmas. 

For 35 years I bought into some of that body-denying dogma, Eastern mysticism variety. 

I didn't drink alcohol. I didn't use marijuana or any other drugs. I kept my sexual urges within the confines of marriage. But after I got divorced in 1990 from my first wife, and then "divorced" from my religion in 2004, I loosened up.

I realized that life needs to be lived happily, not fearfully.

I stopped worrying about following commandments and rules that no longer made sense to me. I enjoyed sex with my eventual wife-to-be. I enjoyed a glass of wine. I enjoyed smoking (or vaping) marijuans.

Nothing bad happened to me. No thunderbolts rained down from the sky. The heavens didn't part to reveal a god proclaiming you are a sinner! I simply felt more relaxed, more human, more natural, and yes, more animalistic.

So if you're a religious believer who feels like you're being confined in a life-denying box, I highly recommend breaking out. Life is too short to live it anyway other than fully.

The oft-heard adage, among adherents of my previous religion, at least, is flat-out wrong. We aren't spiritual beings having a human experience. We are humans being deluded into pursuing dogmatic spiritual experiences.

Genuine spirituality gets contaminated by religiosity. There are no rules that can't be broken. Everyone who seeks the deeper meaning of life is an army of one. Once you allow yourself to follow in someone else's footsteps, you are unable to find your own way.

Spirituality isn't opposed to the body. It is part and parcel of it. Pleasure is holy. Denying our animalism is a sin against our true nature. 

Psilocybin points to the "snow globe" theory of shaken-up consciousness

When is it good to be shaken up? Not physically. Psychologically. 

It seems that being all shook up typically is viewed as something to be avoided, since it means "greatly disturbed or upset." As in, watching that scary movie left me all shook up (shaken is the proper word, with shook being slang).

But I've been reading Michael Pollan's new book about psychedelics, "How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Dying, Consciousness, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence."

In it he speaks of how sometimes our overly rigid psyche needs to be shaken up like a snow globe. 

Today I came across a Vox story, "The extraordinary therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs, explained." Here's how the snow globe analogy is discussed.

Yet it’s not entirely clear to the scientists what it is about these experiences that produce such profound changes in attitude, mood, and behavior.

Is it a sense of awe? Is it what the American philosopher William James called the “mystical experience,” something so overwhelming that it shatters the authority of everyday consciousness and alters our perception of the world? What’s clear in any case is that psychedelic trips are often beyond the bounds of language.

The best metaphor I’ve heard to describe what psychedelics does to the human mind comes from Robin Carhart-Harris, a psychedelic researcher at Imperial College in London. He said we should think of the mind as a ski slope. Every ski slope develops grooves as more and more people make their way down the hill. As those grooves deepen over time, it becomes harder to ski around them.

Like a ski slope, Carhart-Harris argues, our minds develop patterns as we navigate the world.

These patterns harden as you get older. After a while, you stop realizing how conditioned you’ve become — you’re just responding to stimuli in predictable ways. Eventually, your brain becomes what Michael Pollan has aptly called an “uncertainty-reducing machine,” obsessed with securing the ego and locked in uncontrollable loops that reinforce self-destructive habits.

Taking psychedelics is like shaking the snow globe, Carhart-Harris said.

It disrupts these patterns and explodes cognitive barriers. It also interacts with what’s called the default mode network (DMN), the part of the brain associated with mental chatter, self-absorption, memories, and emotions. Anytime you’re anxious about the future or fretting over the past, or engaged in compulsive self-reflection, this part of the brain lights up. When researchers looked at images of brains on psychedelics, they discovered that the DMN shuts down almost entirely.

Think of it this way: You spend your whole life in this body, and because you’re always at the center of your experience, you become trapped in your own drama, your own narrative.

But if you pay close attention, say, in a deep meditation practice, you’ll discover that the experience of self is an illusion. Yet the sensation that there’s a “you” separate and apart from the world is very hard to shake; it’s as though we’re wired to see the world this way.

The only time I’ve ever been able to cut through this ego structure is under the influence of psychedelics (in my case, ayahuasca).

I was able to see myself from outside my self, to see the world from the perspective of nowhere and everywhere all at once, and suddenly this horror show of self-regard stopped. And I believe I learned something about the world that I could not have learned any other way, something that altered how I think about, well, everything.

So as this passage shows, there's various ways to shake up the human mind.

Meditation is one way, an approach that I've followed since 1970, when I started my lifelong practice of meditating every day. Forty-eight years later I'm still at it, though I've switched from a mantra-based form of meditation to more of a mindfulness approach centered on following the breath while being aware of other sensations both within and without my mind.

Any other activity that demands or encourages present-moment attention also can lead to a lessening of our usual focus on ourselves, and how the self is being treated by the great big world that exists outside of our personal consciousness.

Sports, dancing, martial arts, Tai Chi, walking in nature -- I've found that these also are good means of lessening the feeling of being separate and distinct from the world.

But I agree with the author of the Vox story about psychedelics that substances such as psilocybin, LSD, and mescaline are especially powerful ways of shaking up the snow globe of our mind. Unlike other ways of doing this, all that's required is to ingest a small bit of a psychedelic substance and, voila, shaking happens!

I'm hoping that voters in Oregon, where I live, agree to legalize psilocybin in the 202o election. The Vox story mentions this. An Oregon Psilocybin Society Facebook post notes that the story isn't completely accurate about the legalization effort, and shared some clarifications.

Check out the Psilocybin Service Initiative of Oregon to learn more about the proposed ballot measure. The home page has a moving video of testimonials from people whose lives have been changed for the better by psilocybin.

Probably I'd be wary of trying psilocybin at my age (70), since I'm no longer the wild and crazy try-anything guy of my college years.

Plus, 1967-68, when I did most, if not all, of my experimenting with full-on psychedelics was a magical time, especially since I attended college in the San Francisco Bay area, hotbed of the Summer of Love, Haight-Asbury, and such.

However, even though cannabis isn't really a psychedelic, it can generate ego dissolution, or at least ego lessening.

And marijuana is both legal and plentiful here in Oregon, so I'll continue both with my daily morning meditation and daily evening vaping of some cannabis flower. Ego loss can be fun!

Sand mandalas are a symbol of impermanence, that nothing lasts

Today the Daily Calm guided meditation by Tamara Levitt on my iPhone app was about mandalas. I've transcribed the last portion of what Levitt said, because I found it inspiring. 

It's so true. Nothing lasts. Everything is impermanent. Our wanting to make the impermanent permanent isn't the only source of suffering, but it certainly contributes to our dissatisfaction with life. 

The image below came from a web page about sand mandalas. It describes the process used to create them in the Buddhist tradition. Here's the transcript:

Today we’ll be discussing the transient nature of all things.

In Buddhism there is a tradition of making beautiful mandalas out of vibrantly colored sand. A mandala is a geometric work of art created on a large flat surface and composed of thousands of tiny deposits of colored sand arranged in a stunningly intricate pattern of concentric lines, curls, and shapes. 

A mandala is meant to symbolize the complexity of the universe. And its creation is a meditation in itself. 

Traditionally sand mandalas are carefully created by a group of monks often working over a span of many hours, typically taking days to complete. There’s a remarkable attention to detail and striking beauty. Yet as soon as the artists complete the mandala, they destroy it. 

The stunning composition of brightly colored sand is ceremoniously brushed away and taken to a river to be carried off by the water. You might ask, why would the makers of a mandala exert such extraordinary effort into it, only to willfully destroy it.

Well, it is to remind themselves of the lesson of impermanence, that nothing lasts. 

This lesson is contrary to human nature. Our instinct is to resist change. We try to keep our kids from growing up too fast. We fight a natural aging process. And we hold on to romantic relationships long after we’ve realized it’s best for us to move on. 

But impermanence is an unavoidable law of nature. 

And the more we resist change, the more difficult we make our lives. As Thich Nhat Hanh stated, it is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.

So keep the sand ceremony mandala in mind as a reminder to embrace the transient nature of life.

Do your best not to cling to the things you want to last. Rather, experience them as fully as you can, as they happen, and gracefully let them go as they naturally come to an end. 

Completed mandala being brushed away

Life demands some judicious denial of reality

Today I stopped for lunch at Lifesource Natural Foods here in Salem, Oregon -- where a fairly healthy slice of pesto pizza captured my stomach's attention. 

There was only one table unoccupied in the eating area, so I grabbed it. Not long after, a woman appeared, lunch plate in hand, and asked if she could sit with me. Naturally I said, "sure."

At first both of us started to look at our phones, the usual way to pass time these days, since simply eating without any distraction would be too damn boring.

But then she glanced at my pizza slice and opened up a conversation.

"Their gluten free pizzas have a nice thin crust. I prefer it to the crust on regular pizzas." That caused me to start talking about one of my favorite subjects, how so many people nowadays believe they are gluten-intolerant, even though science-based stories I've read say that actual gluten intolerance is quite rare.

As conversations go, ours wound around in a varied fashion. Eventually we arrived at the subject of vegetarianism.

I told the woman about how, when my daughter was young, six or seven maybe, she'd invite friends for a sleepover at our house. When we ate lunch or dinner, sometimes the children would ask if they could have a hamburger. My wife and I would explain that we were vegetarians and didn't believe in killing cows.

"What?! Hamburgers come from cows?," I remember hearing. I also recall a concerned mother phoning us after a sleepover, saying that their child is refusing to eat hamburger now, and wondering what we told the kid.

At some point in our conversation I extended the topic of vegetarianism into adult attitudes, noting that people will go to great lengths to save a kitten or baby duck trapped in a storm drain. These same people, though, have no problem eating chickens raised cruelly in factory farms.

"This is hypocritical," I said, even though upon reflection probably that wasn't the best word.

What I was getting at was that meateaters have some contradictory attitudes -- happily eating animals killed for food, on the one hand, and loving animals that aren't destined for a dinner plate, on the other hand.

The woman had told me that she eats meat, so I had a sense that my hypocrisy talk wasn't going over all that well. So I broadened the topic to include myself. "Of course, we all deny reality to some extent, me certainly included. Sometimes life is just too harsh to get through with a clear-eyed view of what's going on."

For sure.

If a loved one is hit with a terminal cancer diagnosis, we still hold out hope that they'll survive against all odds. Even though we've failed at numerous weight loss efforts, we still imagine that a new approach will create a svelte new me. After decades of seeing politicians make promises that fail to be kept, we still vote for candidates who proclaim, "I'll make a difference."

And notably, most people believe in the promise of religions even though there is no demonstrable evidence of God or the supernatural. 

Why? In large part because almost all religions deny the reality of death. Instead of coming to grips with the finitude of human existence, this being our one and only life, religious believers embrace a fantasy of an eternity spent in heaven, enjoying the splendors of a supernatural realm.

It's hard for atheist me to argue against people doing this. Death is scary. It's natural for us humans to use our powerful brains to envision the possibility that dying is followed by another life, either here on Earth or in some divine realm. 

If this was the sole foundation of religiosity -- a wish that death wasn't the end, but a new beginning -- those of us who criticize religions wouldn't have much reason to do so. After all, everybody embraces wishes and hopes that almost certainly won't come true, but help us get through difficult periods in our life.

The problem is that religions aren't judicious deniers of reality, to cite the title of this blog post. They are fervent, dogmatic, passionate deniers of reality. In addition to generally believing in life after death, religions promulgate all sorts of other untruths about the world. 

Such as, to name an example I've been writing about on my Salem Political Snark blog, that same-sex marriage and same-sex sex are sins, being disapproved of by God (albeit without any evidence that God exists, or that God's likes and dislikes can be known).

So even though everybody fails to see reality precisely as it is, each of us having blind spots of some sort, there are degrees of reality-denying that need to be acknowledged. Religions often are so important to believers in them, those people come to see almost everything through a religious lens that seriously distorts the true nature of this world.

A little bit of religious fantasy is OK, however.

Today I couldn't help but notice that after the woman sat down at my table, she folded her hands and seemingly said a brief silent prayer before she started eating. Of course, for all I know she could have been Buddhist or Hindu, rather than Christian, since many faiths use folded hands as a sign of devotion. 

I wasn't bothered at all by this. Heck, sometimes I'll do the hands-folded thing myself when I'm feeling particularly Buddhist, just to see how it feels. I'm not really a Buddhist. I just enjoy play-acting as one now and then.

Each of us is much more than our religious beliefs (or lack thereof)

Many things amuse me when I peruse comments on this Church of the Churchless blog by religiously-minded people.

One class of comments that generates an especially large smile is Brian, you spend all of your time bashing religion, so you're obviously obsessed. 

When I see someone saying this, I know that just as they're prone to drawing inaccurate conclusions about the cosmos from biased beliefs, they also draw false conclusions about me from a very limited body of evidence -- my posts on this blog. 

Actually, almost everybody is a complex mix of varied interests that include much more than religiosity, or the lack thereof.

(I'd leave off the almost, but maybe cloistered monks or nuns, to offer up a Christian example, really do eat and breathe religion 24/7.)

Me, I spend almost all of my time occupied with non-religious aspects of life.

When it comes to blogging, I have three blogs, and I try to give roughly equal time to each of them, though this depends on whether a hot topic demands that more time be given to HinesSight (personal blog), Church of the Churchless (this blog), or Salem Political Snark (politics and such).

I got to thinking about how varied my interests are in the course of recently putting together a JournoPortfolio site to showcase my writing, plus some of the videos and photo essays I've created. 

Yesterday I wrote a post praising JournoPortfolio, "I'm loving JournoPortfolio. It's a writer's dream." In it I shared a link to the site I made -- which has some of my 5,839 blog posts (well, 5,840, counting this one), links to the books I've written, and the aforementioned videos and photo essays.

Here's a screenshot of the top of the home page. You can behold my JournoPortfolio creation at https://brianhines.journoportfolio.com

It was an interesting process, deciding which blog posts, videos, and photo essays I wanted to include on my JournoPortfolio site. Since I've been a prolific writer, obviously I had a lot of material to choose from. So what I had to do was ponder what I wanted to share as a sampling of my varied pursuits, passions, and such.

Of course, I realized that few people would actually visit the site.

So the question before me was really "Out of everything I could share, what comes closest to being how I'd like to be known?" Well, having written that last sentence, I realize it doesn't do a very good job of reflecting a feeling that is considerably more subtle than those words.

So here's another try.

Each of us, me included, has to decide how open and transparent we're going to be with other people and the Big Wide World outside of our cranium. We can't be a completely open book. We also can't be a completely hidden treasure. A balance has to be struck.

In choosing what to share on my JournoPortfolio site, I'd face choices such as... should I include my post about being seriously depressed? Or my mescaline use in college? Or my relationship with Conrad Hilton? 

Part of me would think, How might people view me if I share this or that? And another part would think, It doesn't matter how they view me, what matters if whether what I share reflects an important part of my life.

That latter part would win the debate, since like most people, I'm a believer in being as truthful as I can, within reasonable bounds, of course.

(When the checkout person at a grocery store asks me, "How's your day going?," I always say something like "Pretty good," regardless of whether this is true. With a friend at a coffeeshop, though, I'll answer differently.)

Facebook has its problems, but I like how every person who posts on Facebook is expected to use their genuine identity -- no false names allowed. This helps remind me that when someone expresses a strong opinion on some subject, they're a complex human being with a wide variety of interests and beliefs, only some of which conflict with my view of the world.

Likewise, I enjoy it when commenters on this blog use their real names. I wish every commenter did. Just as with Facebook, this would remind us that religiosity, or the lack thereof, is just a part of peoples' lives, often a small part.

As it should be.

Why John Dewey likes the notion of "religious," but not religions

Often finding books is akin to a secular miracle for me.

I'll be reading a book, then see a minor mention of another book in it, pass that mention by, then decide to flip back a few pages and revisit the mention again -- which sometimes leads me to a literary gem I never would have discovered on my own. 

Such was the case with John Dewey's "A Common Faith." It's  a short (80 pages, plus an introduction by someone else) sharing of lectures Dewey gave at Yale in 1934 on the subject of religion.

We tend to think of John Dewey as an educational reformer, but Wikipedia says "Although Dewey is known best for his publications about education, he also wrote about many other topics, including epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, art, logic, social theory, and ethics."

Well, his writing about religion was brilliant.

I'd like to share a bunch of quotes from his book, but what I want to do in this post is describe his basic message in A Common Faith with my own words. I finished the book this morning, so it is fairly fresh in my mind.

Dewey's core concept is distinguishing "religion" from "religious."

Religions almost always are founded on supernatural beliefs. This sets them apart from the rest of human experience and knowledge. Thus we need to recognize what is common both to religions and to everything else.

This is imagination. Not in the sense of wild-eyed fantasy, but in the sense of recognizing the difference between what is and what could be. 

Such is what Dewey calls "religious."

He admits that using this term in such an unusual manner is going to irritate both lovers and haters of religion. The lovers won't like his new meaning of religious because it eliminates what for them is the essence of religiosity: belief in supernatural phenomena, including God, heaven, miracles, and such.

And haters of religion will object to giving any ground to religions, including a term, religious, that has meant someone who believes in a religion. Dewey, though, seems to feel that because most people in the world follow a religion, redefining the meaning of religious is the way to go.

He wants to end the division of human experience into, broadly speaking, that of (1) religions and (2) everything else.

In his view, and I agree with Dewey, the appeal of religions is that they profess broadly held aspirations such as love, charity, peace, bliss, contentment, wisdom, and so on -- yet claim that these imagined goods already exist in a perfect form.

Not here on Earth. In a supernatural sense.

Dewey strongly objects to this theological trick. He considers that this saps the will of humans to make this world a better place, since their attention is focused on following the tenets of a religion that promises heavenly delights after death, not in this life. 

If the supernatural side of religions was done away with, this would free up a tremendous amount of energy to be religious -- pursuing the aforementioned exercise of imagination that envisions how progress can be made here on Earth. Like, alleviating poverty, ill health, lack of education, a dearth of artistry, community feeling. 

What if, Dewey asks, people pursued bettering the lives of our fellow humans with the same zeal they devote to their religions? What if being religious -- committing to reducing the gap between what is and what could be -- came to be more important than being a devotee of the rites and rituals associated with a particular religion?

Again, the problem with religions is that they wrongly assume could be already exists in a supernatural realm.

Aside from being intellectually dishonest, since there is no convincing evidence of a supernatural side to existence, much less that it is filled with everything we humans long for, being told that the what is of this world doesn't matter much, because a better world awaits, causes religiosity to be divorced from other aspects of life.

Hence the title of Dewey's book: A Common Faith. What he is after with his redefining of "religious" is a universality of human striving that doesn't divide experience into what religions deal with, and everything else. 

I guess I'll break my commitment to speak only in my own words and end with some passages from the book's final pages.

The community of causes and consequences in which we, together with those not born, are enmeshed is the widest and deepest symbol of the mysterious totality of being the imagination calls the universe.

It is the embodiment for sense and thought of that encompassing scope of existence the intellect cannot grasp. It is the matrix within which our ideal aspirations are born and bred. It is the source of the values that the moral imagination projects as directive criteria and as shaping purposes.

The continuing life of this comprehensive community of beings includes all the significant achievement of men in science and art and all the kindly offices of intercourse and communication. It holds within its content all the material that gives verifiable intellectual support to our ideal faiths. 

A "creed" founded on this material will change and grow, but it cannot be shaken. What it surrenders it gives up gladly because of new light and not as a reluctant concession. What it adds, it adds because new knowledge gives further insight into the conditions that bear upon the formation and execution of our life purposes.

..."Agnosticism" is a shadow cast by the eclipse of the supernatural. Of course, acknowledgement that we do not know what we do not know is a necessity of all intellectual integrity. But generalized agnosticism is only a halfway elimination of the supernatural. Its meaning departs when the intellectual outlook is directed wholly to the natural world.

When it is so directed, there are plenty of particular matters regarding which we must say we do not know; we only inquire and form hypotheses which future inquiry will confirm or reject. But such doubts are an incident of faith in the method of intelligence.

They are signs of faith, not of a pale and impotent skepticism. We doubt in order that we may find out, not because some inaccessible supernatural lurks behind whatever we can know. The substantial background of practical faith in ideal ends is positive and outreaching. 

...Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind. It remains to make it explicit and militant.

Sam Harris on not finding a center of consciousness

Some time ago, can't remember exactly when, I added guided meditations via Sam Harris' Waking Up iPhone app to my morning meditation routine. (I also enjoy listening to the daily guided meditations by Tamara Levitt on the Calm app.)

Sam Harris

Here's a transcript I made of part of one of Harris' guided meditations. It followed an exercise where Harris asked the listener to breathe in a vision of the world on an inbreath, and to breathe out themselves into the world on the outbreath. 

Well, the point of that exercise is to notice, once again, how much the sense of self, the sense of being, is located, is anchored in vision. You might find it useful to play with this as you meditate with open eyes and you look for the seat of attention. 

You might notice there’s a transition between breathing the world in, and breathing yourself out into it. And it’s that implied center of consciousness, that place where you seem to be, that point toward which you could inhale everything, and from which you could exhale yourself out into the world — it’s that point you are looking for.

And the moment you look, it’s not seen. And it’s in that awareness of there being no thing to see, that you should rest your mind. And if that’s confusing, rest assured it won’t always be. 

This is a common theme of Harris, how it isn't possible to find the see'er of what is being seen, the hear'er of what is being heard, the think'er of what is being thought, and so on. 

Which is a thoroughly Buddhist notion, of course: the reality of no-self.

This is very different from other meditation practices that try to withdraw attention from the world into some sort of "eye center" or "third eye," with the aim of realizing oneself as immaterial consciousness or soul.

Here's some other notes I've taken after listening to Harris' guided meditations. These aren't exact quotes, like the passage above is. But they're very close to Harris' own words.

-- Follow the breath back to the one who is breathing. Toward what? Who is the one that is seeing?

-- Breathe with yourself into the world. Look for the place between breathing in the world and breathing yourself out. Look and find there is nothing to be seen.

-- Is there a center to consciousness, a place from which you're being conscious. Look for it briefly, then rest your mind.

-- Everything that appears is a wave on the surface of consciousness.

-- Is there a hearer in addition to the fact of hearing?

-- Where is the self, if every sign of it is appearing in consciousness?

-- Don't lean forward to breathe. Lean back. Receive like a mirror would.

-- Drop back into the space into which thoughts and sensations are appearing.

-- Don't feel like attention is coming from some point. Rather, that feeling also is coming from the open space of consciousness.

-- Cover the breath. Just receive each new sensation. The point is not the breath. It's the quality of awareness you are paying attention to it.

-- A feeling of "I" is also an appearance in consciousness. It feels a certain way to feel you are directing attention. Drop back and be the space in which that feeling too is arising. Is there a center of consciousness?

Here's my 12 favorite churchless blog posts of 2018

Why, this is almost like the Twelve Days of Christmas -- aside from the Days and Christmas part. It's my Twelve Favorite Blog Posts of 2018 here on the Church of the Churchless. (Image below came from here.)

I picked one post from each month, because that was easier.

And I generally chose posts that I'd written mostly by myself, rather than posts where I quoted a lot from someone else. But since rules are made to be broken, a few posts don't contain mostly my own words.

So here they are, the decidedly non-sacred Twelve Favorite Blog Posts of 2018, with an excerpt from each.

January
"Free Will Explained" is a poor explanation of free will

I'm a free will junkie.

I find this subject fascinating. I've read most of the books that argue free will doesn't exist, even though we humans believe we possess it. So since the subtitle of Barker's book is How Science and Philosophy Converge to Create a Beautiful Illusion, I expected a rational, reasonable, factual explanation of not only why free will is an illusion, but the benefit of giving up a belief in it.

Well, even before I got through the introduction, I found myself writing more and more question marks in the margins, because what Barker was saying made so little sense.

February
Pay attention to the small things of life, because they're the important things

Walking back to our rural home after a dog walk, I was struck by how a leafless oak tree at the edge of our yard looked against the late afternoon sky. It was a lesson in fractals, those amazing shapes that repeat at many levels.

Each twig was a reflection of each branch which was a reflection of the entire tree.

Which got me to thinking about how the small things in life are a reflection of the big things in life. To put it another way, the meaning we get from small things is the same meaning we get from big things. 

March
My atheist interpretation of the Lord's Prayer

Sometimes I feel like praying, even though I don't believe in God. The only prayer that I remember from my brief time in Catholicism as a child is the Lord's Prayer.

So I enjoy interpreting the familiar words from a scientific atheist point of view. 

April
A quest for spiritual liberation can lead to new illusions

Some scientific findings contained in an article in the April 2 issue of The New Yorker, "Are We Already Living In Virtual Reality?" bear on the question of what meditation is all about, and the extent to which meditation liberates us from anything.

The article is about Thomas Metzinger, a philosophically-minded neuroscientist.

As you can read in the excerpt below, Metzinger speaks about our inability to recognize the unconscious mental models that determine how we experience reality.

May
Five reasons why I don't believe in God

Since 2004 I've written 2,365 posts on this here Church of the Churchless blog. That's a scarily large number, which testifies to my commitment to churchlessness after spending 35 years being firmly churched in an Indian guru-based form of religiosity.

During the past fourteen years I've talked a lot about why I no longer believe in God. I've put forth numerous reasons for my conversion to atheism. Here's a fairly brief description of five key reasons. 

June
Guru Gurinder Singh is sounding a lot like Alan Watts

Since there are quite a few devotees of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) who use the comment sections of my blog posts as sort of a Sant Mat discussion venue, I wanted to revisit the question of how the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh, has been altering Sant Mat teachings to a surprising degree.

...It struck me that the philosophy Gurinder Singh is now espousing bears a considerable resemblance to what Alan Watts talks about in his marvelous book, "The Wisdom of Insecurity." 

July
Devastating criticism of Guru Gurinder Singh by a RSSB insider

Gurinder Singh Dhillon is the current guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a spiritual organization headquartered in India that has a worldwide reach.

In this post I'm sharing 27,000 words worth of comments left on this blog by "Tara," a woman who had an up close and personal view of both Gurinder Singh (photo below) and the RSSB organization prior to her becoming disillusioned by what she saw, which led to her leaving the RSSB fold.

August
Bloomberg story shows Gurinder Singh Dhillon's shady business dealings

Today Bloomberg, a business publication, published a tell-all story about Gurinder Singh Dhillon's hugely complicated, and ethically dubious, financial dealings with Shivinder and Malvinder Singh, nephews of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas guru.

Ari Altstedter wrote the story, "The Billionaires and the Guru: How a Family Burned Through $2 billion." I spoke with Altstedter by phone about the 35 years I spent as a RSSB devotee, and was quoted in the piece.

September
Nasty criticisms of me from some "spiritual" RSSB defenders

I find it entertaining to see how supposedly "spiritual" followers of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, the Indian organization headed up by a guru that I was a member of for 35 years, can write such wonderfully insulting comments about me.

I'm sharing some recent comments below, along with my response in italics.

October
Join the godly, supernatural, mystical "I Don't Know For Sure" club

It gives me great pleasure to invite not only visitors to this blog, but everybody in the whole freaking world, to join a non-exclusive club I've just formed:

The I Don't Know For Sure club. 

Admission is free. There are no dues. Also, no meetings. Nor any sort of organization. This club exists only in the minds of those who answer "no" to a simple question.

Are you 100%, completely, absolutely, without-a-doubt confident that what you believe about god, the supernatural, and mystical experiences is objectively true?

November
We humans have selfhood without a self

Here's a big question, one of the biggest when it comes to understanding reality and how religions typically view what it means to be human:

Do we have a self? Or adding an (important) capital letter, Do we have a Self?

To kick off my discussion of these questions, here's some recent right-on comment observations from "JB."

December
Here's my foolproof guide to wise spiritual "investing"

The past couple of days have been ugly for investors in stock markets around the world, including here in the United States. But I've been pretty much unmoved and unworried by the downturn. 

Why? Because quite a few years ago I decided to embrace index investing, where you don't try to be smarter than all the other guys/gals who invest, you just have a goal of doing as well as the general investment climate.

A few years ago I wrote about this on one of my other blogs in "Index investing lets me relax in a stock market crash." And I've come to take the same approach to spirituality.

Great message from someone who doubts dogma about Gurinder Singh and RSSB

Getting an email like the one below makes me feel good about what I've been able to accomplish through this blog from its founding in 2004 to the present. 

Every person who comes to recognize the downside of religiosity -- whether this be in an Eastern or Western guise -- contributes to an upswing in the world's respect for truth. 

And truth-telling is in danger right now, as evidenced by TIME magazine choosing the 2018 Person of the Year to be journalists, guardians of the war on truth. But really, we all need to take on that job, guarding truth.

As you can read below, the young person who wrote to me about their doubts regarding Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based religious organization headed by a guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, is standing tall for truth even though this means going against the grain of his religiously-minded family.

Hopefully this person's story will inspire others to break free of dogmatism and enjoy the wide open spaces of the truth about reality. Enjoy...

Gurinder Singh Dhillon

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi Brian,

First of all, I would like to thank you for your work on your blog and the diligent reporting of the flaws present in Radha Soami Satsang Beas. You are one of the few objective sources of information about it, free from dogma.

 

Your work exposing the flaws behind this path has helped me tremendously.

 

I was born into a satsangi family and raised to believe in Gurinder Singh as a perfect master. I found your blog at least a decade ago, when I was in my teens, and you helped me to discover the truth and learn things about Gurinder Singh and RSSB that no satsangi would tell me. Your work is so important because you discuss things few others are willing to on the internet and are a source of true information for me.

 

I also want to thank you for your reporting on the recent financial scandal involving Gurinder Singh and his family.

 

Despite having found your blog around 10 years ago (more or less) and neither believing in Gurinder Singh nor considering myself a Radha Soami for about as long, I had kept my personal doubts and beliefs a secret from my very satsangi parents. Because of their expectations, I still felt the need to go to satsang and attend official visits even though I did not believe in it at all.

 

I was quite afraid to communicate to them my true thoughts about it because they are so dogmatic and I didn't think they would understand my point of view. As a young person, the feeling of not being understood by my satsangi family was very much a deterrent to me and pushed me to just go through the motions of attending satsang to avoid their disapproval.

 

In recent years, I have been going through some things which has pushed me to live more authentically and to stop pretending things for the benefit of other people. Perhaps, this is a part of my natural growing up process. Therefore, I totally stopped going to satsang, including official visits, 2 years ago but always danced around the issue as to why when asked or pressured by my family.

 

When you reported the financial scandal, when I saw this being published in a reputable news source like Bloomberg, and when I read Sheena's book, I felt like I finally had enough information to explain my point of view to my parents with backed up arguments that are hard to refute. I felt that a lot of people would finally see the flaws present in the RSSB organisation as it is hard to reconcile the image of a perfect master with financial crime.

 

It was very naive of me to believe that the Bloomberg story would be the catalyst for truth I hoped it would be.

 

I did express my views out in the open to my parents and explained very clearly why I neither follow Gurinder Singh nor support RSSB or have any intention to get initiated at any point in the future. The point of this long-winded email is to report to you what the general mood seems to be among satsangis after the news broke, as told from my personal viewpoint and with my personal opinions attached.

 

My parents seemed to experience a lot of cognitive dissonance between their beliefs versus the news. Several things came up in my discussion with them:

1. They believe Gurinder Singh to be totally unaware of the financial goings on and the victim of someone else's shady behaviour. 
2. The above is reinforced by the fact that my uncle, who is a regional head and has spoken to Gurinder Singh personally, says that Gurinder Singh feels and has said that "they are all blaming me". 
3. Apparently my uncle had a "vision" of Charan Singh telling him not to believe what he reads.
4. Regarding the private plane and it being inappropriate for a spiritual leader to own one in the first place when the funds could be used towards charity, my parents think that "times were different" when Charan Singh was master and now that we are living in "modern" times we need a "modern" master who does not need to live as "simply" as previous ones. 
5. My father claims that the Bloomberg article was sponsored and written with an anti-RSSB agenda in mind.

You might think to yourself, okay this is just one person's parents and not representative of the general population of satsangis, but actually the sentiment seems to be shared among most within the satsangi community where I live. 

 

I have spoken to friends who do believe in Gurinder Singh and what I was told was that when the news first broke it was a very "hot topic" in satsang for a few weeks until it died down. My friend speaks for the younger group of sevadars and what I am told came out of those discussions is that:

1. People have concluded that Gurinder Singh is an innocent victim who was totally unaware of all that occurred (as stated above).
2. Sheena is motivated by hatred of Gurinder Singh as her reason for publishing her book (not true! I read her book and felt her to be very genuine and compelling). Regarding Sheena, one person said that Gurinder only made comments about her supposedly sleeping with many men to "diminish her karma". I don't really know how that would work and there are so many problems with this statement I don't know where to begin.
3. Many in the group said they don't really know what is true and what is not but they don't really believe Bloomberg is telling the truth as regards what went on nor believe that Gurinder Singh could knowingly do such a thing.

It seems to me that the cognitive dissonance between what people want to believe versus the reported news is leading many to choose to believe either that the Singh family is totally innocent or that their actions are justified in some ways than to confront the possibility that the person they believe in is not what they believed him to be. 

 

It is now December, months have passed, and no one talks about it anymore. My parents went to Beas as normal this month and are raving about their visit as usual. I feel like people have concluded that the scandal "cannot possibly be true" and everything just returned to business as usual.

 

I am quite disappointed that more people did not use this opportunity to reexamine the nature of the organisation they support. I know that cognitive dissonance is a very well known phenomenon so I should not be surprised but I think it is a wasted opportunity but from my part, I feel glad to have finally found the courage to state my beliefs, or rather non-beliefs, even if others don't believe me or support my decision. 

 

I credit you, in part, for helping me find the courage to do so through your extremely valuable work. Please keep it up, we need you to be the voice of sanity in a sea of dogma. This is an important thing for young people especially who have grown up only hearing dogma about RSSB rather than objective facts.

 

I just wanted to share with you my experience as many may be wondering how satsangis are reacting to and processing the news. If you want to publish my words please keep me anonymous.

 

Kind Regards,

Here's our irreligious 2018 Hines Christmas letter

Trigger alert: if you're religious or conservative (i.e. a Donald Trump lover), or worse, religious and conservative, you may find the 2018 Christmas letter fashioned by my wife and me -- well, actually, just me -- to be not your cup of Holiday tea.

Anyway, here it is in all its semi-dark glory. Enjoy. 

And Merry Christmas to all, churchless of the world and religious believers of the world alike. Deep down, there's more that binds us than what divides us, even though this is difficult to discern if you spend a lot of time on Facebook, or watch cable news.
Download 2018 Christmas Letter PDF

 

Jesus without Christianity makes a lot of sense

Wow. Atheist me is sharing a USA Today opinion piece about Jesus. That's because the only problem I have with Jesus is his connection with Christianity. Take that away, and we're left with the teachings of a regular human being.

This assumes, of course, that Jesus actually existed, and the New Testament contains at least a somewhat accurate description of what Jesus said and did -- two debatable assumptions.

Nonetheless, I like the general thrust of this opinion piece. I've added some comments on it in red. 

Jesus doesn't need Christianity. His example is powerful without any religion at all.
Tom Krattenmaker, Opinion columnist

In the Christmas story being told in households and churches across the land, Jesus was born in a manger. Although romanticized in tales and hymns, the bed of hay and company of livestock do not constitute an ideal setting for birthing a baby. But Mary and Joseph had no choice. There was no room at the inn.

Will there be room at the inn for Jesus in our setting as we become more of a post-Christian society in the years and decades ahead?

We can hope so, whether we are Christian or not.

Not sure I agree, but the author does make a decent case for this.

Potent cultural forces are vying to crowd him out, of course. Chief among them is secularization, which has advanced to the point where roughly a quarter of Americans  — and upwards of 40 percent of younger Americans — belong to no church or any other kind of religious organization. Many who have left organized Christianity, or were never part of it to begin with, throw out the baby (Jesus) with the bathwater.

Yay! Churchlessness is on the march! The times they are a'changing. Less religion, the better. 

Along with that, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat sees paganism seeping into the vacuum left by the recession of traditional Christianity. In a recent column, Douthat, who is Catholic, notes that a kind of this-world spirituality is gaining ground as more people eschew the transcendent God of the Bible. Not atheistic, this spirituality seeks meaning and succor in nature, ritual, even in supernatural forces. Douthat predicts, gloomily, that this pagan “religion” might be on its way to becoming Christianity’s successor.

What's gloomy for Douthat sounds like cheerful news to me. I'd prefer paganism to shun supernatural forces, of course. But paganism is any form is way better than traditional Christianity. 

Jesus gets no mention in Douthat’s piece. That’s telling. Because in the traditional religious formulation, as in the secular one, Jesus plays little if any role in the world other than the Christianized one that frames him as the divine son of God, the savior in whom we must believe and whose divinity we must accept, if we’re to avoid hell and reach heaven’s gate.

I'm fine with embracing hell and rejecting heaven, since there's no evidence either exists. The Big Bad Wolf can't scare us if it is a fantasy. 

But is it really such an either/or? Can’t Jesus have a future beyond Christianity as we’ve known it?

He can. And should.

Law professor and blogger Bruce Ledewitz was quick to pick up on the omission of Jesus in Douthat’s column. Doubtful that paganism has much of a foothold or future, Ledewitz writes that there’s another possibility: the emergence of a “secularized” Christianity built around the values of Jesus.

Intriguing idea. 

The professor gets it right. Just as the person of Jesus came before Christianity, so might the figure of Jesus — philosopher, teacher, moral exemplar — outlast American Christendom. If secular people can focus on the values and teachings of Jesus without getting tripped up by the religious context — which comes naturally for some, not so easily for others — they might find a surprisingly relevant source of guidance and uplift.

OK. Like I said, I'm fine with Jesus. It's Christianity that I reject. 

Here is a figure who, with his unwavering commitment to honoring the dignity and humanity of all people, has much to say to the issues that roil society today: Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the arrival of traumatized immigrants at our border, and the despair in our bursting-at-the-scenes prisons and forgotten rural communities.

What would happen if our moral and policy evaluations were injected with the ethic of Jesus, who taught that the ultimate test of our character is how we treat those with the least power and status, those we can most easily get away with abusing and forgetting?

Jesus sounds like a progressive/Democrat/liberal -- just like me! Not an original observation, of course. Quite a few have pointed out that the Jesus loved by conservatives isn't the Jesus of the Bible. It's a made-up Jesus who hates gays, abortions, and other right-wing obsessions.

This is a figure who stands in stark contrast with the prevailing norms of a culture obsessed with the acquisition of status, wealth and consumer products. President Donald Trump promised that our “wins” would be so many under his leadership that we’d get sick of winning. No chance of that happening. Materialism’s hunger is never satisfied and its thirst is never slaked.

True. The United States is a supposedly "Christian nation" that acts in a very un-Jesus-like way.

How different would our society and lives be if we found real meaning and truth in a story that finds the protagonist racking up zero wins of the political or economic variety, but instead gets executed in the most humiliating way imaginable?

As Christians will quickly remind, the story does not end there. Resurrection anyone? But you will note that in the Bible telling, Jesus’ brief and ethereal appearances post-crucifixion continue to be other worldly. No thrones. No riches. No overturning of harsh Roman rule over Jesus’ people.

In this case as in many biblical stories, secular meaning is there for the taking, along with the religious significance. Can’t we take resurrection as a signifier that the story and values of Jesus endure and, indeed, trump the values of power and privilege?

Sure. This is a much more believable and appealing way of looking at Jesus than the whole fantastical Son of God thing.

Whether we celebrate it in churches or not, Christmas furnishes a prime opportunity to reflect on the meaning of this child whose family found no room at the inn. In his brief career, that child would go on to convey profound insights that remain as relevant today as they did 2,000 years ago: the value of philanthropic love, especially for those we find hardest to tolerate; the reality that we become truly strong only when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable; and the truth that we experience the fullness of life only when we stop living for ourselves.

Will there be room at the inn for Jesus in the years and decades to come? We really ought to make some.

Sounds good. But I doubt that most Christians will accept a secular view of Jesus anytime soon. Us atheists already do that. It just will take a while for fundamentalists to embrace our enlightened perspective on Jesus.

A member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors, Tom Krattenmaker is a writer specializing in religion in public life and author of "Confessions of a Secular Jesus Follower." Follow him on Twitter: @TKrattenmaker

If this life is all there is, what should we do during it?

Poet Mary Oliver asked a great question in the last two lines of "The Summer Day." The poem ends with:

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Obviously the question isn't for others to answer. Oliver addresses it to each of us, every reader of her poem. Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

I'm not sure why Oliver added the Tell me. The question remains the same without it. But I like that Tell me. It forges a bond between the poet and the reader. as does the previous Tell me, what else should I have done?

Frequently I have intimations of my mortality. This isn't just because I turned 70 a few months ago. Death always has been lurking around in my consciousness, sometimes scarily. Of course, death is impossible to ignore, given that everything which lives, dies. 

What I'm talking about, though, when I speak of intimations, is this: I'll be doing something utterly ordinary, when suddenly I'm struck by a vivid awareness of the fact that life is limited and one day I will die. 

I used to believe in life after death, but now I don't. However, that vivid awareness was just as strong -- maybe even stronger -- when I was a devotee of an Eastern form of mysticism that taught an immaterial soul survives physical death. Sure, I accepted that concept. 

But since no one knows for sure what happens after we take our last breath (my bet now is nothing, because we're dead and gone forever), even the most fervent religious believer still has to face the stark reality that this life could well be, as Oliver says, our "one wild and precious life."

Last night my wife and I were watching TV. In the midst of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert a thought unexpectedly popped into my mind: Brian, you're doing to die one day. Should you be spending these precious present moments watching Colbert make jokes about Donald Trump?

It only took my mind a few moments to come up with an answer to my mind's own question. (Weird how the brain engages in conversations with itself.)

Sure. What would be better to do than what I'm doing right now?

Sort of like Mary Oliver, minus her refined poetic sensibilities, I responded to myself with a question that nonetheless contained an answer. 

In my current churchless frame of mind it seems senseless to view any activity of life as lacking meaning. A few hours ago I walked our dog, ZuZu. When we got home, I grabbed a stick from a tree branch where I store our dog's favorite toy, high enough so she can't reach it. 

Like most pet owners, I talk to ZuZu as if she speaks English. "Let's play stick, little dog!" My preparing to throw the stick was all she needed to get excited, the words being superfluous.

We then spent ten minutes or so engaged in her favorite game: not bringing a stick back, reverse fetching. I throw the stick. ZuZu runs and gets it. Then she runs away from me when I say, "Bring it here!" We repeat this until ZuZu lies down, with the stick nearby, for her other favorite activity: being patted.

Is playing stick what I want to do with my one wild and precious life? Absolutely. In fact, I consider that everything I'm doing, including writing this blog post, is what I want to do, given that I am doing it. 

Circular reasoning? No. 

I just have reached a point in my life where I consider that the whole Bucket List thing has no attraction for me, because it assumes that some things are really important to do before we die, while other things are less important. 

In my opinion, and I'm really just speaking for myself, going down that way leads to, if not madness, dissatisfaction. When our doings are divided into less and more important, less and more meaningful, it seems to me that we're always questioning whether what we're engaged in is what we really should be doing.

I think Oliver's first question gets it just right: Tell me, what else should I have done?

Attention isn't what meditation is all about

I'm in book bliss.

Someone emailed me with a book recommendation, "The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness," and I'm loving what I've read so far -- the first couple of chapters.

Here's a few early thoughts about the book.

First, it confirms my belief, which isn't shared by some religious fundamentalists (Eastern mysticism variety) who've been frequent commenters on this blog, that there are many forms of useful meditation. 

In fact, the inward looking, world-denying, mantra-focused type of meditation favored by Sant Mat/Radha Soami Satsang Beas, which I embraced for 35 years, is much different from what is likely the most common form of meditation in the world: mindfulness based on Buddhist principles.

This is clear from the opening pages of The Mind Illuminated. The primary author, John Yates, lays out in summary form the ten stages of meditation practice discussed in the book. The final stage, Stage Ten, is described in this fashion:

When you have mastered Stage Ten, the many positive mental qualities you experience during meditation are strongly present even between meditation sessions, so your daily life is imbued with effortlessly stable attention, mindfulness, joy, tranquility, and equanimity.

Since Yates bases the ten stages on his study of ancient Buddhist writings, which often are largely incomprehensible to the modern reader, Stage Ten is firmly in line with Buddhist teachings. Yates writes:

The modern road map offered in this book combines experience, tradition, and science. It is a synthesis based on firsthand experience, and expanded on through the shared experiences of many other dedicated practitioners. To make sense of my own meditations and find guidance about where my practice should go next, I turned to my teachers, the Pali suttas, and the commentaries of several Buddhist traditions. 

Over and over, these traditional sources gave me the information I needed and provided an appropriate context to fit the pieces together. By integrating this information and my own experiences with the insights of psychology and cognitive neuroscience, I've "reverse engineered" traditional meditation instructions to create a contemporary map of meditation.

So there is no mention of God; no mention of supernatural entities; no mention of heavenly realms separate from this world.

Instead, Yates writes clearly about how the human mind works, and how meditation can help it function better. It's great how the book is based, as noted in the quote above, both on Buddhist tradition and current neuroscience. 

Second, in my reading this morning I was struck by the wisdom of clearly distinguishing attention from awareness. A Glossary in the back of the book defines these terms.

Attention: The cognitive ability to select and analyze specific information and ignore other information arising from a vast field of internal and external stimuli. Attention is one of two forms of conscious awareness. Peripheral awareness is the second: we pay attention to some things, while simultaneously being aware of, but not attending to, others. 

Awareness: As used in this book, awareness always has the same meaning as peripheral awareness. It never means attention, nor does it refer to covert or non-conscious awareness. 

Any meditation approach that doesn't combine the benefits of attention and awareness is like a bird trying to fly with one wing. Both are needed. When we drive a car, we can't focus all of our attention on staying in our lane and keeping a safe distance from the car ahead of us. 

We've got to have peripheral awareness also. What if a car unexpectedly runs a stop light at an intersection? What if a child chasing a ball runs into the road? There are so many things we need to be aware of, other than what our primary focus is.

This is why mantra meditation, where a word or words is repeated (usually soundlessly) as a focus of attention, is very limited. Repeating a mantra was emphasized by the RSSB teachings that I followed for so many years. And not only during the time of meditation, but as much as possible throughout the rest of the day.

I eventually realized that this had some major drawbacks.

I found that when I put too much attention on the mantra, I distanced myself from the reality of what was around me. Like, the person I was talking with, or nature, if I was out on a walk. I also observed that many RSSB devotees acted a lot like robots, lacking spontaneity, naturalness, social awareness. 

They were so focused on keeping their attention from scattering out into the world, they were clueless about what was happening in the world -- the exact opposite of mindfulness, which requires a wise balancing of attention and awareness. There's a time to be focused on one thing, and there's a time to be aware of the entirety of what surrounds us.

I'm sure I'll have more to say about The Mind Illuminated as I read more of it. For now, I simply can say that I highly recommend it to anyone who is meditating, or wants to meditate. 

The danger of religious abstractions

Here's an interesting letter in the October 6, 2018 issue of New Scientist:

From Steve Brewer,
St. Ives, Cornwall, UK

Sofia Deleniv describes self-awareness as an illusion, and on your cover you call it a "delusion" (8 September, p 28). What wasn't discussed was its power to turn the whole world as we view it into "illusions" by the process of forming abstract concepts and ideas about it.

By developing and interconnecting these abstractions, we have produced our various sciences. Through them we have achieved enormous power over ourselves and the natural world.

Self-awareness may yield this great power, but it also results in the broader illusion -- held by many -- that this world of abstractions is more real than the natural one. In this world of concepts, individuals have become just another concept and so are dehumanized.

Recognizing this as the most dangerous delusion may help defend our humanity.

It's impossible to know exactly what the letter writer is referring to when he speaks of the dehumanization of individuals via abstract concepts.

But, hey, I'll jump in and share my idea: it is religion. 

After all, what else has very little connection with the natural world, being almost wholly made up of abstract concepts? Religion is nothing but concepts. So is mysticism. So are all other forms of supernatural spirituality.

As I frequently point out on this blog, there is no way to discern whether a person standing in front of us has an intimate connection with God or some other supposed divinity. 

If they claim to be an athlete, we can ask to see their athletic prowess. If they claim to be a musician, we can ask them to play a song. If they claim to be a scientist, we can ask for their academic and professional credentials. 

When it comes to all things godly, though, words, concepts, and abstractions are all we're going to get. Sure, maybe the person appears to be a moral, upstanding, compassionate human being. And so are countless other people who don't claim any connection with God.

Further, religions often downplay the importance of this world, and of the human body, because they embrace concepts about some more perfect supernatural realm, often called "heaven." 

So as the letter writer says, individuals become just another concept. Instead of being who they are, in all of their human complexity, they become categorized as a sinner, a fallen soul, someone trapped in maya, a person needing redemption, a shadow of their true spiritual self.

Again, these are just a bunch of concepts.

Science, at least, engages in concepts about the real world. Religion engages in concepts about imaginary worlds, which is why religious dogma has no predictive power. That's why I much prefer science over religion. 

Christian weirdness: same-sex sex considered a sin

Following up on my previous post, "Churches shouldn't be able to discriminate against gays," yesterday I wrote another post on my Salem Political Snark blog about how a sermon given by the Salem Alliance Church lead pastor said in no uncertain terms that same-sex sex goes against the grain of God.

I transcribed part of a podcast of  a sermon given by Pastor Steve Fowler in 2016 sermon and shared it in the post (Boldfacing is mine, obviously.) This is how Fowler supported his conclusion about the sinfulness of same-sex sex.

When Adam and Eve have sex, it is not just union. It is a reunion. It is the image of God as represented by Adam. the image of God represented by Eve. And when these two opposite genders come together it is not just union, it is a reunion. It is a beautiful picture of what God is trying to get us to understand of relational intimacy that is represented in the Godhead.

And you will see a consistent sexual code from Genesis all the way to Revelation. In fact, in Revelation there is the marriage supper of the lamb. What is that? It’s reunion. It’s all the saints. It is everyone with Christ. And this physical oneness is a beautiful picture of that.

And you will never find in the scriptures any positive pictures of a same sex union. It just isn’t there. There’s this consistent sexual code. There’s this beautiful metaphor that’s presented in sexual oneness, as a picture of people of the opposite sex coming together. 

So we talk about running from sexual sin. Here’s what we’re saying. Any kind of sexual activity outside of a marriage with a male and a female, this is something we should not be engaged in. So if you’re married and you’re having sex with someone who is not your spouse, you don’t just need to resist, you just don’t need to fight it, you need to book it, you need to run.

And if you’re sexually active with someone you’re not married to, you need to run. If you’re engaged in porn or you’re going to strip clubs, you need to run. And on this topic, what God is saying is that if you’re engaged in same-sex sex, if you’re using a same-sex relationship in that way, you also need to run, you also need to book it.

And I just want to say to you, I don’t want you ever coming to Salem Alliance Church and walking out of here, and saying that guy never told us. This is exactly what it says. And we can work hard, and we can say we know better, or that’s the ice cream cone in the pocket, but friends, it’s what God’s word reveals.

It's easy to critique what Fowler said. He makes a series of unsupported assumptions.

(1) God exists.
(2) The God that exists is the God of the Bible, not some other God.
(3)  The words in the Bible are God's words, not human words. 

I've been enjoying bantering on Facebook with some Christians who don't like what I said in my second Salem Political Snark post about why a boycott of the Broadway Coffee House, which is run by the Salem Alliance Church, is justified.

Some people defend the Salem Alliance Church by saying this is a matter of religious liberty.

Well, sure, people are free in believe in whatever crazy thing they want to. But usually it isn't so obvious that the crazy people are running a business aimed at attracting the general public -- most of whom don't believe in the crazy ideas held by the crazy people.

The situation isn't all that different from the KKK operating a restaurant back in the days when the United States tolerated racial discrimination. If you disagreed with the KKK's views about African-Americans, you wouldn't feel good supporting the KKK's restaurant, right?

A somewhat milder analogy would be if Planned Parenthood operated a coffee house that didn't make clear to customers that all profits from the business go to support Planned Parenthood.

I'm pretty sure that anti-abortion Christians would urge people not to patronize the coffee house once they learned where the profit from a latte or muffin purchase goes -- to an organization whose values they disagree with.

Lastly, here's a blog post comment interchange I had with a Christian believer, Nate.

Brian, So for you to say theirs NO proof of God's existence, is like you have proof of the contrary. Let me assume, you believe something...all things come from nothing? So, you believe that a big bang happened and from chaos came order? Take a Rolex Brian, take this time piece and all its parts and pieces; shake it for a million, billion years. Will it become a perfect time piece? No Brian, it will not. Show me your demonstrable proof, your absolutes and I will show you mine.

-----------------------------

Nate, I've had an active Church of the Churchless blog for 14 years, so I've a lot of experience dealing with religious people who make thinking/reasoning errors. Which now includes you. You can check out my arguments for why you're wrong by going to this link and doing some searches about "existence God" or such by using the search box in the right sidebar.

https://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/

Briefly, in both science and everyday life it usually is impossible to prove a negative. It is up to the person making a positive claim to provide solid evidence for that claim. Let's say that I claim that it is invisible fairies who are making the flowers grow in our yard. Can you provide proof to me that the fairies don't exist? Remember, they are invisible and show no signs other than the flowers growing.

No, you couldn't. You''d just tell me, correctly, "Brian, you're crazy. There's no proof of the fairies, so they must be just in your mind." Which is exactly how us atheists view God: as a crazy idea that only exists in the minds of believers.

Regarding your watch analogy, this has been thoroughly disproven by modern knowledge of how evolution works. There's even a book, I believe the title is "The Blind Watchmaker," that discusses how evolution/natural selection produces the complexity of life from simple principles without the need of a designer God.

So try again, Nate. I know you can't provide demonstrable proof of God's existence, and that you believe on faith. Just accept this is the case. And understand that it is perfectly reasonable for people who don't support the Salem Alliance Church's teachings to boycott businesses of the church that funnel money into the church coffers.

Churches shouldn't be able to discriminate against gays

On one of my other blogs, Salem Political Snark, I wrote a post this afternoon that already is getting a lot of online attention here in semi-sleepy Salem, Oregon -- the state capital that often is referred to (especially by me) as the centerpoint of places in Oregon that people really want to go to: the coast, the Cascade mountains, Portland, and Eugene.

Check out "Two reports of how Broadway Coffee House/Commons discriminates against LGBT people." Excerpts:

Someone contacted me about a year ago about how the Broadway Coffee House here in Salem refuses to allow gay people to be employees, because the business is controlled by the Salem Alliance Church.

As you can read below, the pastor of the church believes this gives them a religious license to discriminate, sort of like how Agent 007 had a license to kill, even though under normal circumstances this is illegal. 

According to the Oregon State Bar, it is legal for religiously affiliated businesses to engage in discrimination against LGBT people. But this doesn't make it right.

Here's what the person who contacted me, who wanted to remain anonymous, said. I recall that this message came through Facebook after I'd written a blog post about how Hobby Lobby mixes religion with its business practices. 

I saw your post about hobby lobby, so I think I feel comfortable sharing more ...the "business" I am referring to is Broadway Coffee house. Turns out it is not an actual business and all proceeds go to pay church staff and support the church ministries of Salem Alliance Church .

Seems like something the public should be aware of, especially since I was told gay people would not be able to work there

Yes. I met with the head pastor a year ago to confirm that it was true . The pastor told me that the baristas are church staff and have to be employees of the church and follow church rules to work there . He also said that they do not need to follow non discrimination laws because they are an outreach ministry...not a licensed business. I think the general public should know this.

It feels very underhanded to keep that info from consumers. Myself and about 40 others who live around the coffee shop have been boycotting Broadway for over a year now . We just want them to put up a sign that says the coffee shop supports the ministry of the church and is not an equal opportunity employer. If they do that, we will end the boycott.

 

...I've never understood why our country tolerates discrimination in the name of religion when the same behavior is illegal for non-religious people to engage in.

What's next, allowing religious people to drive drunk if this is part of their belief system? Allowing anyone with a hateful belief system to discriminate? Why should a collective discriminatory belief system be treated differently than an individual discriminatory belief system?

The City of Salem has held a number of meetings at the Broadway Commons.

But recently public meeting for the Downtown Streetscape and Our Salem projects have been held elsewhere. It'd be good to know if this was because of the Broadway Commons' discrimination policy against LGBTQ members of the Salem community.

If so, great. Kudos to the City of Salem.

If not, then the City of Salem and other government agencies should make it a policy to never hold meetings at the Broadway Commons until the Salem Alliance Church starts acting in the name of love, not discrimination, like religious organizations are supposed to do.

        Broadway Commons

Want to be preachy? Head to this other blog, please.

Preachiness, fundamentalism, dogmatism... not welcome here. If you've got an overwhelming urge to leave a comment praising God, a guru, your spirit guide, or any other religious entity, do it on Atheist and Believer, a blog that welcomes proselytizing (within bounds). Comments may be moderated here, and won't be approved if off-topic or preachy. If not moderated, a comment may be removed if off-topic or preachy. Scroll down for the real posts. 

"Atheist and Believer" blog begins, so comments have returned here

My atheist "prayer" has been answered. Praise No-God! 

As noted in an earlier post today, I said that I'd bring back comments to this blog if someone would start a different blog where true believers in Sant Mat/RSSB could discuss their adoration for the guru and his teachings rather than cluttering up the Church of the Churchless with religious dogmatism -- where comments like that aren't welcome.

Spence Tepper, a frequent commenter on this blog, has started the Atheist and Believer blog. An initial Welcome post presents an appealing perspective.

To keep my end of the blog post bargain, I'm going to resume allowing comments on this blog, albeit with comment moderation where I approve comments before they're published. 

My expectation is that anyone who visits this blog and wants to share off-topic comments about how marvelous their religion, mystical experience, or spiritual beliefs are will head to Atheist and Believer where those sorts of comments are welcome.

Within bounds, though. You can read about those bounds on the Welcome post of Atheist and Believer. 

Look: I realize that the believers in Sant Mat/RSSB who have been using this blog as a message board aren't doing this to drive me crazy, but rather have needs for connection and communication with other believers that weren't being met in other ways. 

But now that Spence Tepper has started his blog with an open door policy (again, within certain bounds), I feel much better about not approving comments that are off-topic or excessively preachy. In the past my boundless Buddha-like compassion has made it tough for me to crack down on people who abuse the commenting privilege on this blog.

Now that those people can find a home on Atheist and Believer, my attitude will be "If this comment doesn't fit, it's going into the unpublished pit." (Couldn't resist the O.J. Simpson trial allusion.)

Comments could come back if someone sets up a RSSB/Sant Mat blog

I've gotten emails from several regular commenters on this blog who wish that comments on my posts would be allowed again. Here's what I said to one of these people.

It’d be great if someone, like you, would start a blog or message board — blogs are easier to set up and run, in my view — focused on discussions of Sant Mat and the RSSB teachings. Then I could publicize that blog/board as The New Place to share comments and messages on those subjects, including the RSSB gurus, both past and present. 

 

Yes, David Lane has been doing this. Assume he still is, because I haven’t visited his RSSB/Sant Mat discussion group in many years. And I’m sure this sort of thing exists elsewhere on the Internet. It may be a forlorn hope, but for quite a while I’ve been thinking, “I wish the religious crazies had another place to leave their comments and messages.”

 

As it is, those people are abusing my blog through their off-topic commenting. 

 

Over 14 years and many thousands of posts, I’ve built up a readership that is relatively small, but pretty steady. This isn’t easy to do. When I started, I was thrilled to have 20 page views a day. The Internet is so vast, as you know, that getting noticed in a gigantic cyberspace is tough to accomplish.

 

So it bothers me that my blog is being hijacked by people who are unwilling to start their own RSSB/Sant Mat blog, either because this is (or was) discouraged by the guru/Dera, or they don’t want to go through the trouble of what I’ve done for those 14 years — write (hopefully) interesting content regularly day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.

 

Anyway, give this some thought. 

 

It would be easy to set up such a blog. I like Typepad, which offers free blogs, I’m pretty sure, if some advertising is accepted. Otherwise the yearly cost is minimal. Blogger is free, I believe.

 

You are sort of a bridge between me and the crazies (I understand you may not view them that way, but I do). They would be interested in a Sant Mat/RSSB blog that you set up. Again, hopefully this would take comment pressure off of my blog, and I could go back to allowing comments, either moderated or non-moderated.

Basically, I'm willing to try allowing comments again, so long as the people who have been using my blog as a Sant Mat/RSBB discussion group do their religious thing someplace else. If someone sets up a Sant Mat/RSSB blog, I'd be pleased to publicize it.

I just Googled "Sant Mat RSSB blog." Not surprisingly, several of my posts turned up on the first page of Google results. But I don't see any site/blog that allows comments and has regular posts about Sant Mat/RSSB subjects. Interestingly, a RSSB Facebook page has guidelines that are much stricter than my commenting policies have been. 

Break-in attempt to my account

So, after turning off comments on this blog last night because religious crazies were spewing wildly off-topic comments on my posts to a greater degree than ever before, I wake up this morning to find from my email inbox that one of those crazies has been trying to break into my Typepad blogging account.

My laptop's screen couldn't show all of the attempts to reset my password. There were 126 in total. 

They failed, and I've notified Typepad of the break-in attempts. I've also asked Typepad, which is familiar with hacking, to do their best to identify the person who is trying to break into my account.

Whoever you are, and I suspect you're one of the regular religious crazy commenters on this blog, I want to let you know that you've strengthened my conviction that eliminating comments from this blog is a good thing.

There's no reasoning with religious dogmatism. Likely you think you're doing God's work by trying to break into my account. You feel superior and entitled, so you think it's perfectly fine to do something illegal and immoral. 

Instead of meditating, reading a holy book, or pondering the mysteries of the cosmos, you engaged in many efforts to reset my Typepad password. Wow. Very spiritual of you. So spiritual. 

You've made me feel even happier to be an atheist. Thanks for that, religious crazy.

Religious crazies cause no more comments on this blog

I'm done with comments here on the Church of the Churchless. Comment moderation means more work for me.

But when I allow unfettered comments, the religious crazies who have chosen to abuse this blog as a forum for them to blab about their chosen form of dogmatism litter their comments with abandon -- paying no attention to my oft-repeated request to keep comments on-topic with the subject of a post, and to limit their religiosity to Open Threads where I've allowed complete free speech.

So I've decided to do two things: (1) turn off comments on new posts, and (2) moderate comments on existing posts, because it doesn't seem to be possible for me to not allow comments on old posts.

Now it's going to be easy to moderate comments, because I'm also turning off email notifications of new comments, so they won't be cluttering up my inbox. 

Bottom line: I'm fed up with having this blog used to discuss Sant Mat and Radha Soami Satsang Beas dogmas, since this blog is called Church of the Churchless, not Church of the Churched. I've been exceedingly patient with comment abuse over the years, but my patience has run out.

You know who you are, religious crazies.

You have an astounding sense of entitlement and egocentricity. You've failed to appreciate the time and energy I've put into this blog over the past 14 years, instead using it to spew your fundamentalism, Eastern variety, in a daily flurry of comments.

I'd say "Good luck with finding another web site willing to embrace your religious nuttery," but that'd be a lie. I wish you no luck, except insofar as you follow the light of truth, reason, and demonstrable evidence toward reality rather than fantasy.

Woody Allen talks about the meaning of life, or lack thereof

Thanks to Jen for sharing this Woody Allen video in a comment. Allen says that artists, and I guess we're all artists of life, have to provide reasons for living in a universe that doesn't possess inherent meaning.

Meaning is provided by us humans, not by the cosmos. Allen also observes at the end of the video that everybody needs illusions to get us through the harsh realities of life. I agree. But our goal should be to embrace the wisest sorts of illusions.

(Defining "wise" in this context is what keeps this blog going, along with almost everything else in life -- philosophy, politics, hobbies, relationships, etc. etc. etc.)

 

No more comment moderation

I've decided to stop moderating (approving) comments, after a brief time doing otherwise. It's a burden on me, and an inconvenience to commenters, to have to do this. 

What I hope is that people will stay on-topic as much as possible with their comments, putting comments unrelated to a blog post in an Open Thread. I've just added a new Open Thread. Old ones can be found by clicking on that category in the right sidebar.

I believe in free speech. I also believe that speech should be founded on love, caring, and compassion to the degree us fallible human beings can do this. Life is tough. Life is short. Let's support each other, even when we disagree with each other.

The two are compatible. We should be able to say "I don't agree with you" while also feeling "I love that we have different views and still enjoy each other's company." (either in physical reality or cyberspace)

Open Thread 18 (free speech for comments)

Leave a comment on this post about anything you want to talk about. Though I haven't been doing too well on this, I'll try to remember to always have an Open Thread showing in the Recent Posts section in the right sidebar. If one isn't showing, I've added an Open Threads category in, naturally, the Categories section. You can always find an Open Thread that way.

So if you're a believer in some form of religion, mysticism, or spirituality, this is where you can put your "praise God," "praise Guru," or "praise _______" comments.

Singh brothers get into fight over loans to RSSB guru and his family

Well, it's been a while since Malvinder and Shivinder Singh, cousins of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas in India, have been in the news. 

(Being bad at genealogy, I used to think they were nephews; now I'm pretty sure they are cousins.)

But that changed yesterday. December 7 is remembered here in the United States as the day in 1941 when the Japanese attacked ships at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. 
Looks like the Singh brothers wanted to make that date memorable in India for their own brotherly fireworks. Check out a December 7 The Times of India story, "Brother attacked me: Malvinder; no, he hit me, claims Shivinder."

Shivinder Singh has been mentioned as a possible successor to Gurinder Singh Dhillon, a guru who is considered to be God in Human Form by his devotees. 

But the guru isn't so divine as to shun worldly wealth, since as I've been reporting on this blog, Dhillon and his family have amassed hundreds of millions of dollars during his reign as RSSB guru. 

 

As reported by Bloomberg and others, this money accumulation was funded in part by shady loans made to the Dhillon family by companies controlled by the Singh brothers at the time. The chart above shows the money trail. 

 

The Singh brothers' business empire has fallen apart, leaving them as destitute as billionaires can be. So the fight between them involved money, not surprisingly -- the loans associated with the guru's family shown on the right side of the chart. I believe 2,000 crore rupees equals $20 billion in U.S. dollars. TOI is Times of India.

Since Shivinder Singh had gone to the RSSB headquarters to do volunteer work, perhaps in anticipation of his becoming guru one day, he seems to be the most "spiritual" of the brothers. But not so spiritual as to avoid getting into a fight with his brother over the loans to Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family.

Just goes to show that religion does nothing to make people better human beings. In fact, religion often makes people worse, feeding their ego and sense of entitlement. "God is guiding me; God wants me to be wealthy."

Here's my foolproof guide to wise spiritual "investing"

The past couple of days have been ugly for investors in stock markets around the world, including here in the United States. But I've been pretty much unmoved and unworried by the downturn. 

Why? Because quite a few years ago I decided to embrace index investing, where you don't try to be smarter than all the other guys/gals who invest, you just have a goal of doing as well as the general investment climate.

A few years ago I wrote about this on one of my other blogs in "Index investing lets me relax in a stock market crash." And I've come to take the same approach to spirituality.

Here's links to posts I've written on this subject, along with an excerpt from each. They're listed in the order I wrote them.

Spiritual diversification, a sound salvation strategy (May 2005).
Wise financial professionals advise that if you want to save money for retirement, it’s best to invest in index funds. Increasingly, people do. But when it comes to saving their souls for eternity, most of those same people will put all of their spiritual nest egg into one basket—a single religion that they expect will support them both here and hereafter.

We here at the Church of the Churchless say, “that’s foolish.” Spiritual diversification makes as much sense as financial diversification. No, even more sense. For sometimes savvy (or lucky) investors do beat the market by buying stock in a single company. And they can prove it by having their CPAs work up a statement of net worth.

But no such proof exists in the sphere of spirituality. No religious figure can show you how his or her investment in a particular spiritual practice has paid off in terms of salvation. The claims made in supposedly holy scriptures such as the Bible, Koran, Talmud, Dhammapada, Adi Granth, Vedas, and so on are just that, claims. Unsubstantiated, unproven, unbelievable.

...In short, I’ve become spiritually diversified. I try not to set rigid boundaries around what I believe and what I do. I try to look for inspiration in lots of different places, people, and writings. I try to become aware of all that is real about both physical existence and whatever metaphysical realities exist beyond the world I know now. I try to be content with what the cosmos brings me rather than considering that I’m entitled to unique dispensations.

Here’s the interesting thing: my faith is stronger now. As I’ve lost faith in particular religious approaches, my faith in a universal spirituality has become stronger. Again, this is akin to how my financial philosophy has changed: I’ve lost faith in the value of choosing individual stocks and bonds, but I’ve gained faith in the wisdom of investing in the entire universe of equity and debt investment possibilities.

Spiritual investing takes nothing (May 2005)
There’s a difference between worldly and other-worldly markets that I neglected to address sufficiently before. When you buy a monetary index fund such as the Total U.S. Stock Market, you end up owning a piece of every single company stock in the United States. Thus diversification is accomplished in a manner that is easy to understand: own a little bit of everything.

But to invest one’s soul in the Total Cosmic Spirit Market means taking an exactly opposite approach: owning nothing. You diversify widely into the One by not clinging to any part of the Many—anything that can be demarcated by name or form.

“God,” after all, isn’t part of this world. Whatever or whoever God is, the unknown ultimate reality that is given this utterly meaningless name (which is why I like to put it in quotation marks) obviously isn’t something that we can point to and say, “There it is! And this is what it is like!” If knowing God were that easy, there wouldn’t be any divine mystery to unravel.

...Most religious believers like to think that the mystery of God is elusive except for the special revelation to which they, and they alone, are privy. Not true. There are no exceptions to maya. If you can give it a name or a form, nama or rupa, it’s part of maya. A revelation, by definition, is something revealed. That means you can point to it, describe it, define it, delineate it.

Thus the Bible is maya, illusion. All of it, New and Old Testament alike. Ditto the Talmud, Koran, Dhammapada, Tao Te Ching, Upanishads, Adi Granth, Course of Miracles, Conversations with God, and, naturally, the Church of the Churchless. Everything I’ve written on this weblog is part and parcel of maya, including that last sentence.

There’s only one way out of maya: nothing. You get out of an enclosure by finding the empty space—a door. The door is useful because it is empty. It isn’t composed of the same substance as the walls, floor, and ceiling. If it were, then it too would be part of the enclosure.

Something empty and hidden connects everything that can be sensed or conceived of. That something we don’t know is what we really want, not all the things and ideas we do know. It alone will satisfy, because only it is permanent, real, substantial. It goes by lots of names: Spirit, Tao, Buddha Nature, countless others.

Profitable spiritual investing (October 2008)

Last night I was with a group of people who discussed the ins and outs (not to mention the ups and downs) of investing in tough times like these.

I didn't have a whole lot to say.

Briefly I held forth on the Buddha-like nature of index fund investing, where you don't try to beat the market through some clever scheme but rather rest content with rising and falling in concert with the overall financial tide.

I told my friends, "If the world and national economy go to hell, so will our investments. If things improve, so will our portfolio. It's a humble way to invest, since you're happy to be average."

This is pretty much the same way I feel about my spiritual investing strategy now.

For many years I thought I could beat the system. That is, find a way to salvation, God-realization, enlightenment, or whatever, that would lead to a better result than others would enjoy who weren't privy to the inside knowledge I possessed.

...Mystics and theologians often speak of God as unspeakable. They urge us to think of God as being beyond thought. Rather than seek a divine light, embracing darkness is recommended – the via negativa.

I'm no longer so big on embracing Nothing. I still love the notion of emptiness, of becoming a receptive vessel that can be filled with truth, happiness, knowledge, and other good stuff (including money).

However, the notion that there's a Nothing on the other side of Everything – Christians would call this "God," Taoists "Wu Chi" – maybe this is just a meaningless concept lacking any foundation in reality. People who want to make money don't ask, "What is the ineffable source of wealth?"

They just invest. Not in nothing, but in something. Hoping to get more of it: something.

...The ultimate questions of life basically are answered (or ignored) by "Things are what they are; the universe is what it is." That's real spiritual index investing.

Why atheists are more "spiritual" than religious believers (November 2014)
Maybe this statement seems paradoxical to you: I feel more genuinely spiritual now that I've stopped believing in God. But it makes good sense to me. Here's the main reason why.

I no longer feel special.

Virtually every religion and spiritual path considers that its adherents have a special relationship with God or whatever other supernatural entity they believe in. 

There are so many chosen people on Earth, they vastly outnumber the unchosen, the non-special group I'm pleased to be a part of.

I understand that feeling special has its own delights.

In my case, I was a member of an India-based spiritual organization which taught that those approved for initiation by the guru had been "marked" to return to God/heaven after a karma-cleansing meditation process.

Cool!

For about 35 years I embraced the enjoyable belief that, out of all the billions of people on this planet, I was one of a relative few who were the special beloveds of the supreme being. 

Of course, devout Christians, Jews, and Muslims feel the same way, along with countless believers in other theological belief systems. 

Eventually I started to realize that all the talk I was hearing about being "humble servants of the Lord and the guru" was, to put it bluntly, a crock of shit. Genuine humility wasn't much to be seen among devotees of my spiritual organization.

Not surprising.

Since members of this group were told over and over that they've been singled out by a higher power to learn cosmic truths and experience realms of reality not available to other human beings, naturally a pervading sense of "tribal" pride was evident throughout the organization.

We were the cool kids in the spiritual lunch room. Other faiths were inferior, since they didn't have the direct connection to God we did. 

I'm happy that this form of egotism has been discarded.

Sure, I've still got lots of other self-centered tendencies rattling around in my psyche, as we all do. But to get rid of The Big One, a belief that God had chosen me to be his best buddy for eternity, whereas my infidel wife wasn't going to get the same afterlife prize -- this increased my humility quotient by a lot.

Now I don't expect that I'm going to have any different sort of afterlife anyone else does. Namely, I strongly suspect, none at all. 

I also don't expect that there is any power guiding my life which isn't also directing the lives of every other entity on Earth. 

Thus I've embraced a sort of "index fund" approach to spirituality.

Meaning, I don't try to beat the market. I don't assume that I have any special knowledge, any special talent, any special relationship with reality. Whatever laws of nature apply to everybody else, I'm content with.

Spiritual illusions are as deceptive as worldly illusions

I enthusiastically embraced spiritual illusions for 35 years.

I believed in God. I believed that God could be found by following the teachings of divine incarnations, God in human form. I believed I'd live on after my death. I believed in an eternal heaven beyond time and earthly tribulations. I believed spirituality required following certain commandments.

This sounds like I was a Christian, right? No, wrong. I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an Eastern form of religion known as Sant Mat. Its headquarters were in India, and the organization was led by a guru.

Eventually I came to realize that what I believed was real actually was an illusion. I simply wanted to believe so badly, it took three and a half decades for the truth to break through the dogmas that I held on to so tightly. 

Today I finished reading "No Self, No Problem," a Buddhist book by Anam Thubten that talks a lot about illusions. My first post about the book is here.

I liked the book a lot. I don't agree with everything Thubten says, such as the supposed ability to go beyond pain and suffering by realizing that the notion of a permanent self is an illusion. But I agree with him that our sense of being, or having, a self that's independent of the goings-on in our brain is the most important illusion to come to grips with.

Why? Because our exaggerated sense of ego is the cause of many of our problems. (Thubten might say all of them, but I wouldn't go that far.)

A key reason I deconverted from religiosity to atheism is what Thubten speaks about in his book. Just because someone is on a supposedly "spiritual" path doesn't mean anything. They can still be ignorant, self-centered, and full of themselves. All that changes is that now they believe it is OK to be that way, because God is on their side.

Below are some additional excerpts from the last chapters of "No Self, No Problem." Like I said, I think most of what Thubten says is true. Meditation for me now is exactly what he speaks of: doing as little as possible so I can be in contact with what is true to the greatest degree possible.

I'm no longer aiming at self-realization, because along with modern neuroscience and Buddhism, I no longer believe that my self exists (at least, not as a detached conscious observer separate from the physical brain). And I no longer aim at God-realization, because I no longer believe in God.

This makes me a semi-Buddhist, I guess. But since Buddha himself wasn't a Buddhist -- Buddhism came along long after his death -- I suppose I'm in good company. 

Here's the excerpts from Thubten's book.

When we come to the spiritual path we have to be very cautious. We have to be certain that we are not adding another illusion on top of the illusions we already have. When we look into our consciousness we see that we have many illusions.

Everything is an illusion, especially this notion of "I."

The story of my life is an illusion, my birth, my relationships, and so forth. They are all a story just like a movie. If something happens to my brain, much of this story will be immediately forgotten. Therefore in the ultimate sense it is not truly existent. It is illusion.

We have to be careful when we come to the spiritual world so that we do not fall into the trap of accumulating new illusions. Believe it or not there are very beautiful illusions along the path, the journey, and the practices. Sometimes celebrating illusions can be very entertaining but the problem is that sooner or later illusions collapse.

...Here in the West many people like Eastern illusions because they have already become disillusioned with American illusions. Now they are going around trying to buy Eastern illusions. These new illusions may work for a while because we don't have any heartache associated with them, no bad memories.

But ultimately we must dissolve every illusion: American illusions, Eastern illusions, European illusions, and finally our own illusions.

What is our main illusion? The illusion is that I am real. I am truly existent. This final illusion is the one we want to hold on to.

...We are all carrying this imaginary self around day and night. We are trying to secure it at any cost. Sometimes, the spiritual path that we are on might be just another way to enforce it.

Obviously people have been using the notion of God or eternal life as a way to solidify this illusion. Eternal life in heaven somewhere means that this "I" never has to die.

The idea of surrender itself can be very beautiful. It is the direct doorway to the truth. It is the powerful art of dropping the self right away. 

People often have the tendency to surrender to something or someone outside of themselves. Surrendering to the guru is not true surrender, because then you become the surrenderer, which is another version of self. For that very reason, Buddha discouraged people from surrendering to his personality. Of course, we always surrender to his wisdom. 

The problem is that when we surrender to his personality we don't surrender to his wisdom. He told devotees not to take even his words on blind faith. He said we should question them before accepting them as such. 

...So meditation ultimately stops everything. We stop pushing that rolling snowball and we stop pedaling the bicycle. We don't do anything because there is nothing we can do. From that moment on, we are no longer in charge. The truth is in charge, From that moment on truth is going to voluntarily destroy the foundation, the basis of all sorrow, all misery. 

Truth does that work for us. All we have to do is stop everything. That is what meditation is all about. 

In the ancient times, spiritual seekers used various methods to practice meditation, Yet, there is only one meditation. That is a state of nondoing. When we stop trying to get somewhere and let go of all of our inner exertions, surprisingly the ineffable truth reveals itself to us.

Then that's it. There is nothing else to be found.

...We have a egoic mind that is trained and habituated to do something, to construct this world of illusion. Ego is working very hard. Ego is always talking. Ego is making up stories for the sake of perpetuating all of the stories of the notion of "I." "I" am meditating. "I" am truly existent. "I" am truly meditating and now "I" am getting somewhere. "I" am chasing enlightenment. 

This very thought is just ego's way of perpetuating itself.  

Why do religious people go on atheist sites?

Here's a positive review of my new comment policy on this blog, where I now moderate (approve) comments before they're published. One day in, I'm enjoying the lack of off-topic crazy comments from dogmatic religious believers. 

I regularly exchange emails with the person who wrote what follows. John used to be religious, but now, like me, he's seen the atheist light. 

John makes some good points. I don't know any atheists, which includes me, who go to religious sites and try to convert believers to atheism. But this churchless blog gets many visits and comments from religious people.

Why? Well, like John says, I agree that believers in God get a lot more defensive when someone questions their religion, than atheists do when someone questions their lack of belief in God.

Which makes sense.

I don't get upset when someone questions why I don't like country music. Since I don't have any attachment to that type of music, it doesn't bother me if a country music lover thinks I'm a fool for not being a fan of that genre.

Plus, atheists are used to being put down by religious people, while this is much less common for believers -- given that the vast majority of people in the world believe in some form of supernatural divinity.

This is the message I got from John today.

Hey Brian, I saw where you are moderating comments again.  Good for you!  I think I’ve talked about this before, but I can’t understand why religious folks go on sites like yours and try to convert people, or “prove” that others are wrong, or whatever.  It seems very common. 

I wonder if atheists go on religious sites and rant and rave and such?  I would think there are some, but my suspicion is that it’s less common.

I kind of understand why the religious folks like to argue their points.  I was never really zealous in my religious days.  I was very serious about my faith, but I didn’t argue with many people who didn’t believe like I did.  But I think it’s more threatening to have a believer’s beliefs questioned than it is for a non-believer to have their non-beliefs questioned.  LOL  If you know what I mean?

There were a few times that I got into a discussion with an intelligent atheist or agnostic and they would ask me questions that I just didn’t have the answers to.  That was very unsettling!

I thought the cartoon that you posted was great, as well.  Oh man, how accurate is that?  I remember, in my early days of walking away from religion, I read a lot of Wayne Jacobsen’s material.  At that time, he talked a lot about how religion always seems to have a hook in it. 

“Invite your non-churched friends to the church picnic!”  Why?  Just so you can get to know that and bless them and see that they have a good afternoon getting to know some great people?  NO!  It’s so we can get them to come back, and eventually get them saved.  And then they will tithe, of course. 

And inevitably, if they get worked on long enough without getting saved, then they are normally discarded and the believers move on to someone else.  Often with the attitude from your cartoon.  I’ve heard many a church member say something along the lines of, “well, I’m glad they are going to hell”.  Really?!?!? WTF?  Ugh.

I have yet to hear of a blogger whose mind was changed by the religious comments on their blog.  And vice versa. 

In my experience, and in others that I’ve talked to, any time a person makes a big change in their beliefs, it’s usually because something happened to make them start thinking and seeking answers.  Now, in that seeking they may come across someone who says something that will help them down the road a bit. 

But the classic knocking on someone’s door out of the blue and converting them to your beliefs, or flooding someone’s comment section, usually doesn’t have the desired result.  Most of the time, it actually works in the opposite direction!  The person being preached to normally walks away just that much more sure of their own beliefs.

Thanks, as always, for the great posts.

Talk to you again soon.
John

Comments are back to being moderated. Religious craziness is the reason.

I just turned comment moderation back on for this blog. That felt good. My experiment is over with allowing people to post comments on their own, saying whatever they like (pretty much; I did have my limits).

The breaking point came today when I scrolled through a bunch of comments on my most recent post, "Buddhist wisdom: pay attention to the breath until the self dissolves." 

Those comments surpassed the usual level of religious dogmatism, inanity, incomprehensibility, and plain gibberish that I'm used to seeing from a group of core commenters who have been using this blog basically as a message board to reinforce among themselves their faith in an Eastern form of mysticism known as Sant Mat.

Um, I kept reminding them that the name of this blog is Church of the Churchless, not the Church of Sant Mat. And the tag line is "preaching the gospel of spiritual independence," not "bowing down at the holy feet of the guru."

But those warnings fell on deaf ears, because religious craziness is an addiction, and addicts can't break their habit easily. 

I'm sympathetic to those addicts. I used to be one myself, back in the days when I too believed in the teachings of Sant Mat. But I  was nowhere near as fanatic as the above-mentioned commenters. I liked to give reasons for my belief, and I didn't consider that what I believed was 100%, for-sure, absolutely true.

So from now on I'll be moderating comments to see if they relate to the subject of a post and aren't filled with religious preachiness. It's bothered for me for quite a while that this blog was being used to spread religious craziness via comments, but I managed to stifle my feelings about this.

No more.

I'd rather have one intelligent, reasonable, thoughtful comment on a post I write than a hundred incoherent comments about how wonderful holy sound and light are, and how lucky the commenters consider themselves to have found the One True Way. Which is complete bullshit that I don't want contaminating this blog any longer.

Further, I know that normal human beings who want to express their opinion about a post get turned off by the mass of comments that have nothing to do with what I wrote, and often insult anyone who expresses a view that challenges their dogmatic religious sensibilities.

My commitment is to seeking truth and encouraging respectful discussions about that quest. I've allowed that commitment to be diluted by being overly accepting of wacko comments. Again, no more. 

Understand: I still very much welcome comments on my blog posts. What's unwelcome are off-topic comments that contain religious dogmatism unrelated to the subject of the post. Geez, I write a post about Buddhist meditation and virtually all of the comments are about how awareness of breathing is the Devil's workshop.

Why? Because Sant Mat fundamentalism says so. Not good enough. Not even close. If you can't think for yourself, don't even think of leaving a comment on this blog, because it won't be published. Like I said, intelligent, reasonable, thoughtful comments will be approved, whether or not I believe in them.

But if you want to use this blog to spread religious craziness, start your own blog or message board. I'm done with allowing this blog to be used that way.

Buddhist wisdom: pay attention to the breath until the self dissolves

My spiritual evolution has been a lot like my marital arts evolution. I'll explain.

For about nine years I practiced traditional Shotokan karate. I got to the brown belt level, and did quite well in tournaments where I sparred against black belts with considerably more experience, and who were much younger than me. But when it came to testing, I was stuck. I wasn't being advanced from the initial brown belt level.

Eventually it dawned on me that I was learning martial arts skills.

But what I was learning wasn't what the Shotokan higher-ups wanted to see when it came to testing. So I switched to a more flexible style of karate. It was a big relief to realize that for those nine years, I'd been learning about martial arts. What I was learning just wasn't what traditional Shotokan karate expected me to learn.

Likewise, for about 35 years I practiced a form of meditation that involved devotion to a supposedly "perfect guru." The technique involved repetition of a mantra with a focus on the center of the forehead, drawing attention away from the body and external world. The goal was to "go within" and experience realms of existence beyond the physical.

I learned a lot during those years of meditating from one to two-and-a-half hours a day.

Eventually, though, it dawned on me that what I was learning wasn't what this particular spiritual path of Radha Soami Satsang Beas wanted me to learn. So for quite a few years I've shifted to a Buddhist style of meditation centered on awareness of the breath -- along with whatever else is happening within me and without me.

There are various forms of Buddhism, of course. I don't have much use for the more religious forms. But I very much enjoy the forms that are either wholly secular, or keep the supernatural side of Buddhism to a minimum (such as rebirth).

I'm about halfway through a book that I saw mentioned in a comment on this blog, "No Self, No Problem," by Anam Thubten. I agree with the positive Amazon reviews. Even though Thubten appears to believe in rebirth, he puts very little emphasis on this. Rather, Thubten has an engaging, honest, direct way of speaking about spirituality and meditation.

What I most like about this book is that it reassures me that the meditation path I'm on is the path taught by the Buddha. Not that I revere the Buddha, since I don't know the guy, and one of my favorite Buddhist adages is "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!" 

Not literally, of course. But in the sense of not being led astray by theological or religious concepts, or bowing down to an external authority, trusting instead in your own experience.

Here's excerpts from the first half of "No Self, No Problem" where Thubten talks about how a true spiritual path doesn't involve devotion to dogmas, concepts, complex belief systems. Rather, the Buddhist approach is to observe the breath, and everything else in this world, in a wonderfully simple fashion until the illusion of the self dissolves.

This opening, this receptivity, is basically related to our ability to resist arming the ego with concepts and ideas. A true spiritual path transcends all concepts and belief systems. It is not about reinforcing the mind's illusion of self as an identity. It is not about being a Buddhist, a saint, or a better person. It is really about deconstructing all of our illusions without any mercy.

...Sometimes our ego convinces us that we are realizing this sense of no fixed self at the same time we are holding on to another concept like trying to be sacred or spiritual. Holding on to conceptions such as "sacred" or "spiritual" while we are working toward transcending self-attachment is very subtle.

...Often we discover that we have been chasing illusions. Sometimes they are beautiful illusions like the illusion of enlightenment and spiritual transformation. Nevertheless, as long as we allow our mind to chase such illusions, there is no true liberation.

...On the spiritual path people sometimes get attached to all kinds of sacred and bizarre concepts to make sense out of their place in this giant mysterious universe. 

...Nirvana is not some kind of beautiful, celestial garden filled with peaches and mangoes, a place where everyone is walking around with beautiful halos... It's not a place, a destination we are going to travel to. It's not even a transcendent state of mind that we are going to achieve. It is not a beautiful, ecstatic, trancelike state of mind we can cherish. That's not really nirvana. Rather, nirvana is a great cessation of the separation between us and the truth. It is the mere acknowledgement of what has been the case all along. It is like waking up from a nightmare. It's a great relief to discover that nothing has to be done.

...Sometimes the spiritual search itself prevents us from seeing the truth that is always with us. We have to know when to stop the search. 

...When we meditate, when we sit and simply pay attention to our breath, we begin to see that there is an "I, a self, who is searching for enlightenment and liberation from suffering. But if we keep paying attention to our breath and body sensations, then eventually all of those ideas, concepts, and illusions begin to dissipate one after another and truth reveals itself.

...Nobody is there. "I" is completely nonexistent in that place. There is no separation between samsara, bad circumstances, and nirvana, good circumstances, and there is nobody pursuing the path or chasing after enlightenment. In that moment we realize the essence of the Buddha's teaching.

...Believe it or not, we often use the spiritual or religious path to construct ego identity, even when this is not conscious at the time.

...Sometimes the very self that is fighting ego is actually ego and that's even trickier. But sometimes we can just look directly into our consciousness and ask, "Who is fighting against ego?" Often everything collapses right there. Therefore the path of bliss is really not about declaring war on the ego in order to get rid of anything we see as a stumbling block on the road to our imagined final destination. Rather, it is about allowing the self to dissolve spontaneously by giving up nothing and going nowhere.

...Ego is trying to seduce us into chasing some beautiful exotic illusion. But if we just surrender and remain in that present awareness, paying attention to our breath, amazingly the self dies. There is no longer a self who says, "I don't like what is going on. I don't like this ordinary moment. I don't like just sitting here paying attention to breath." The "I" who doesn't like what is unfolding is completely gone and that is all that matters in the ultimate sense.

...When self dissolves, everything is already awakened. 

...The hindrances to inner awakening can be so subtle they are almost unperceivable, and usually they sneak in through the back door. Many spiritual traditions teach us that we cannot be free in this lifetime. But even if they teach us that it is possible, they make it sound like it is some kind of a super attainment unlikely for us to reach. Some even go to the extreme of saying that it can only be achieved by surrendering to an outer authority. As long as we believe those rumors, we're not going anywhere but in circles. Our practice won't amount to anything more than a dog chasing its tail.

...Therefore, the essence of all spiritual paths is about dissolving everything here and now without waiting. And again, how do we dissolve that self ecstatically? We are just present, paying attention to the breath, and then the self begins to dissolve. This sounds so simple.

...As long as we are building defense mechanisms, transformation will be exiled to the realm of improbability. And these defense mechanisms, wearing a spiritual mask now, comprise layers of denial, each one more subtle than the other. It is like finding a new cradle where we can be infantile again and have no responsibility for ourselves. Mommy and Daddy are projected onto an omnipotent god or guru who will take care of us eternally.

...True meditation is nothing but the art of abiding, without effort, where you don't try to get rid of anything. If you leave your mind as it is, you will see that nothing can bind you. 

...So whatever arises in your consciousness, bad thoughts, good thoughts, don't try to catch them. Watch them. It's like watching the waves on the surface of the ocean. They arise and they always go back. In the same way observe your mind without any effort. Remember that this is called the method of effortlessness. Don't try to alter or change the natural state of mind.

My "spiritual" Theory of Everything is coming along nicely

Once in a while I get a glimpse of how things really are, or ideally are, spiritually speaking.

Now, I put "spiritual" in quotation marks in the title of this post, because the way I use the word, it has nothing to do with God or the supernatural -- which in my view don't exist.

Rather, when I speak of spirituality, I mean a quest to understand how best to live life. The ancient Greeks called this philosophy, literally "love of wisdom." However, these days philosophy usually is considered to be not a way of life, but an academic discipline.

So for me spiritual points to an attempt to live life fully, happily, wisely, compassionately. And since I'm a lover of science, I enjoy thinking of my personal form of spirituality as a Theory of Everything that applies to me -- yet might have some appeal to others as well.

This post is just a first attempt at laying out an outline of how I'm seeing things. The pieces I'm trying to fit together include:

-- Reactivity
-- No-self
-- Responding to a totality of circumstances
-- Objectivism within subjectivity
-- Detachment
-- Nirvana

It probably is obvious (to some, at least) that my inspiration is a blend of Buddhism and Taoism, two philosophies that I have a lot of fondness for when they're stripped of supernatural mumbo-jumbo.

Rather than describe how those six notions listed above relate, which I'll try to do in another post, for now I'll simply describe an everyday event that's a broad-brush illustration of my personal Theory of Everything.

I'm driving along on the two-lane, curvy, hilly road that leads from our home in rural south Salem to the city limits about five miles away. The speed limit is 55 mph. I come up behind a car that's traveling much more slowly than I am, 35 mph.

There's no doubt about the objective reality here. My VW GTI is following another car. We're both going 35 mph, which is about 20 mph slower than what my car was traveling at before I caught up to the other car. However, my subjective reality could take several turns at this point.

One way it could go would be to get irritated at the person driving the car ahead of me. I'm late for my Tai Chi class, per usual, and I don't need a slow driver making me later. Irritation would be a form of reactivity that wouldn't change the objective situation, just my subjective feeling.

I could, though, simply observe, "That car is going quite slow."

I also could realize that the amount of time I'd save by driving a few miles at 55 mph rather than 35 mph is minimal. Coming to a bunch of red lights when I got to town, or not being able to find a parking space close to my Tai Chi class, would affect my arrival time much more.

Thus I could detach from a view that following a slow car is a bad thing.

Instead, it is just a thing, a happening, an event tossed up by a wide variety of circumstances that together, resulted in me ending up behind the car in front of me at this particular time, in this particular place. I wouldn't see this event as having any special significance.

This person driving the car ahead of me isn't trying to slow me down. They may not even be aware of me, if they fail to check their rear-view mirror. They're likely just driving as they typically do, slower than I like to drive. 

I could even try to imagine that I'm experiencing the vehicular version of a Taoist tale about a man rowing across a lake who becomes angry when he sees another boat coming right at him, as if he wasn't even there, forcing him to take evasive action to avoid a collision.

Then he sees that no one is in the other boat. It's drifting on its own. His anger subsides.

So I could envision that I and the driver of the other car are powerless to do anything than what we are actually doing. The universe has conjured up chains of causes and effects that have led each of us to be driving in a certain fashion on the stretch of road that leads to town.

Thus those six notions I listed above can lead me to a calm acceptance of the situation, rather than an irritated response. This may not seem like nirvana, but actually it is quite close to how Buddhists view this state of non-reactivity. 

Anyway, naturally there's more to say about my personal Theory of Everything. Being a wordy person, I'll probably be doing that saying before too long.

(By the way, even given what I said above, I could still calmly pass the slow-moving car when it was safe to do so. Which I do frequently, since my VW GTI is a joy to drive on hilly, twisty roads. And everywhere else, really.)

Christian missionary killed by remote tribe shows idiocy of religion

So, here's a quiz for you.

Someone learns about an island inhabited by about 50-100 members of a tribe that has had very little contact with civilization. The nation that the island is a part of has decreed that no outsiders are to set foot on the island. One reason is that the tribe members lack immunity to many diseases common in the outside world, so they could be decimated by contact with outsiders.

Should this person:
(A) Give up any idea of visiting the island. 
(B) Sneak onto the island with the intention of changing the tribe over to their way of thinking.

If you're a normal, rational, caring human being, almost certainly you will choose (A). But if you're an evangelical Christian, or another sort of religious believer committed to converting unbelievers, you'll be tempted to choose (B).

Which is just what Christian fanatic John Chau did. And he paid for that idiotic decision by losing his life after the tribe members shot arrows at him.

I rarely think he/she got what they deserved after learning of an untimely death. With Chau's death, though, I've got to admit that this thought has settled firmly in my mind.

Chau believed he was on a mission from God.

Of course, God doesn't exist, so that belief emanated from his own religiously-deluded mind. We know what transpired in that Jesus-soaked brain prior to his death, because he gave his diary to the fishermen who smuggled him onto the island. Several stories, here and here, describe some of his entries. 

"You guys [his family] might think I'm crazy in all this, but I think it's worth it to declare Jesus to these people."

"This is not a pointless thing. The eternal lives of this tribe is at hand."

"I love you all and I pray none of you love anything in this world more than Jesus Christ."

“Lord, is this island Satan’s last stronghold where none have heard or even had the chance to hear your name?”

This shows the danger of religion. It makes people do stupid things. Sure, people do stupid things without religion, but when you add supernatural fantasies into the mix, a person's Stupid Quotient soars to new heights.

Chau didn't speak the tribe's language. So far as I know, no one else does either, given how difficult it has been to study the tribe. So Chau couldn't tell them about Jesus, since they couldn't understand him.

I'm tempted to say, what was this guy thinking?

But that question is answered by Chau's diary entries. He wasn't thinking about what was best for the tribe on the isolated island. He was only thinking about his Christian delusion that it was up to him to save the tribe from an imaginary Satan who he fantasized was keeping the tribe from knowing his imaginary God.

There's one good thing that came from Chau's death, though. It makes atheism look really good in comparison to religious zealotry. 

Science touches reality. Religion only touches the human mind.

"We've got to get out of our own heads." I really liked this observation by Michael Shermer near the beginning of a podcast interview featuring him and Philip Goff.

Shermer was speaking about how Eben Alexander claimed he went to heaven while in a coma, but actually there's solid evidence that he didn't. Heaven was just a place he made up in his head.

Also, Shermer notes that Sam Harris, the noted atheist neuroscientist, writes in one of his books about taking MDMA (ecstasy) that led to a rather similar mystical experience. Except, Harris never claimed to have experienced a reality outside of his own head, which shows he's much more honest than Alexander.

What I love about science is that it is dedicated to understanding reality as it exists outside of our heads. Yes, science also studies what goes on inside the human brain, but almost always this occurs largely, or entirely, as an effort to comprehend reality as it is, not merely as the human mind considers it to be.

Religion and mysticism, on the other hand, are thoroughly mental pursuits.

Believers in religion or mysticism never get outside of their own heads. They live in a world of concepts, imagination, and other forms of subjective experience. They're never able to demonstrate that they've contacted a reality which isn't the world in which we all live, yet they claim that such exists.

Which gets me to a passage from my new favorite book (until Amazon delivers another book I like even better).

"The Order of Time" by theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli is both marvelously written and scientifically fascinating. I started reading it this morning and didn't want to put it down -- but had to so I could go to coffee with a friend, where, not surprisingly, I brought the book and talked about it with him.

Rovelli is an expert on time, which is one of the most mysterious subjects in science.

I'll write more blog posts about the book when I'm further into it. Rovelli does a better job of explaining relativity theory in a way that I can understand and remember than any other book I've read that addresses this subject. And I've read a lot of them.

Anyway, below is a passage from one of the first chapters that I liked a lot.

Rovelli speaks about how scientists often start by coming to an understanding of reality that can't yet be confirmed by observation. In other words -- Einstein is a great example of this -- an understanding begins within the scientist's own head, yet eventually is confirmed by objective reality.

He also observes how things that seem self-evident often are overturned by science. When was the last time, or heck, a first time, religion has done this? Answer: never.

Reading Rovelli's book this morning, I felt embraced by the warm glow of reality, a feeling that wasn't all due to the coffee I was drinking. I find it tough to read books about religion or mysticism these churchless days because they just seem so insubstantial. Like I said, they're all about ideas, concepts, fantasies, imagination. 

I love science because I love reality.

Science gets me out of my own head into the world that exists whether or not I do. Sure, I still meditate after I read for a while, and I enjoy the sense of exploring the nooks and crannies of my psyche. But science books like "The Order of Time" are where I find the most inspiration, mystery, and wonder -- not in so-called spiritual books.

Here's the Rovelli quotation: 

The ability to understand something before it's observed is at the heart of scientific thinking.

In antiquity, Anaximander understood that the sky continues beneath our feet long before ships had circumnavigated the Earth. At the beginning of the modern era, Copernicus understood that the Earth turns long before astronauts had seen it do so from the moon.

In a similar way, Einstein understood that time does not pass uniformly everywhere before the development of clocks accurate enough to measure the different speeds at which it passes.

In the course of making such strides, we learn that the things that seemed self-evident to us were really no more than prejudices.

It seemed obvious that the sky was above us and not below; otherwise, the Earth would fall down. It seemed self-evident that the Earth did not move; otherwise it would cause everything to crash. That time passed at the same speed everywhere seemed equally obvious to us... Children grow up and discover that the world is not as it seemed from within the four walls of their homes.

Humankind as a whole does the same.

Don't let illusory scarcity scare you into religion

I rarely read self-help books, but I saw a story in TIME magazine about Brene Brown and decided to get one of her books. After reading some Amazon reviews, I settled on "Daring Greatly." 

It's mainly about the courage to be vulnerable, to take chances even when the odds are against us, to reveal ourselves honestly without a guarantee that other people will like what they see.

Brown brings up scarcity in an introductory chapter.

Given the topics I study, I know I'm onto something when folks look away, quickly cover their faces with their hands, or respond with "ouch, "shut up," or "get out of my head." The last is normally how people respond when they hear or see the phrase: Never ___________ enough. It only takes a few seconds before people fill in the blanks with their own tapes:

-- Never good enough
-- Never perfect enough
-- Never thin enough
-- Never powerful enough
-- Never successful enough
-- Never smart enough
-- Never safe enough
-- Never extraordinary enough

...The counterapproach to living in scarcity is not about abundance. In fact, I think abundance and scarcity are two sides of the same coin. The opposite of "never enough" isn't "abundance" or "more than you could ever imagine." The opposite of scarcity is enough, or what I call Wholeheartedness.

As I explained in the Introduction, there are many tenets of Wholeheartedness, but at its very core is vulnerability and worthiness: facing uncertainty, exposure, and emotional risks, and knowing that I am enough.

Today is the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. Many holidays are rather strange -- Christmas features Santa Claus, and Easter the Easter Bunny -- but Thanksgiving projects its own strong scent of strangeness.

This morning one of the two newspapers we get, the Salem and Portland papers, had to be put in our mailbox because each of the newspapers was super-thick, being filled with a large number of advertisements for post-Thanksgiving "Black Friday" sales. 

So while Thanksgiving Day itself is billed as a time to get together with friends and relatives over a tasty turkey dinner (being vegetarians, my wife and I get a meatless roast), with at least some of the talk being about what people are thankful for, the next day starts off a pre-Christmas shopping season in which buy, buy, buy and more, more more drowns out the we're thankful for what we've already got vibe of Thanksgiving.

Our consumer-driven economy is fed by more, not by enough. 

Now, I'm not saying that wanting more is a bad thing. It is very much a good thing when a lack prevents someone from being able to enjoy life.

We need more food when we're frequently hungry. We need more money when we're always broke. We need more friends when we're feeling lonely. We need more purpose when life seems meaningless. We need more health care when we're sick and can't get medical treatment.

The list goes on, and on, and on of important human needs that require more to make them right. However, as Brown observes, there's also many times when we feel that something is lacking in our life -- a scarcity -- though actually it is difficult, if not impossible, to point to a genuine lack.

The lack really isn't in ourselves, but in our response to a cultural or societal expectation. 

This is how, as an atheist who deconverted from religiosity after 35 years of believing that I lacked God (Eastern mystical variety), I've come to look upon religion. There are genuine human needs that religions fulfill. Yet there also are needs founded in a spurious sense of scarcity that require skepticism.

Here's some examples of what I consider to be spurious needs: requiring salvation; forgiveness of sins; protection from the Devil; having an afterlife in heaven rather than hell; feeling part of a "chosen people," being told what morality consists of; learning about the nature of reality from a holy book rather than science; having the Big Questions of Life answered by a religious authority figure rather than by ourselves.

On the positive side, and I'm basing what I say on those 35 years of mostly feel-good moments as a religious person, here's some examples of genuine needs that a religion can fulfill: feeling part of a caring community; celebrating together via rituals, ceremonies, and group meetings; opening ourselves up to the majestic mystery of existence; asking the Big Questions, even if persuasive answers are lacking.

I realize that many people are going to disagree with my take on spurious versus genuine reasons for being religious.

If someone considers that God is unquestionably an objective fact, rather than a subjective belief or unproven hypothesis, then they're going to look upon what I just said with decidedly skeptical eyes. I'm just speaking about how I see things, which is all any of us can do.

Thank God you know God doesn't exist

Here's some thoughts about Thanksgiving (holiday today in the United States) from "JB," a regular commenter on this blog. Can't disagree with anything he said. If God is in charge of this world, He/She/It would have to be a sadistic, uncaring psychopath. 

Much more likely alternative: God doesn't exist. Here's JB's comment on a recent post:

On this day of thanks, I also want to thank the precious lord God for all of his selfless care. I want to thank him for all of the children that are dying of cancer and all of the parents that spend every moment with that pain, telling their child that "it will be ok" when they know everything isn't ok.

I also want to thank him for all of the children that have been slaughtered in one of the many genocides that are happening right now. Hell, throw in those born with birth defects and strange syndromes. This person I know with spina bifida thanks God everyday that he made him in such a special way. God loves his special babies.

I want to thank God for watching over all of the families that got burned alive in this year's wildfires just as he has done on the last. Ditto for watching over the hurricane victims. I want to thank him for the 2004 tsunami and the 230,000 people that got wiped off the face of the earth in one fell swoop.

That just shows how much God values life. That was a good job. High-five buddy! Thank you for this sacred world, full of sacred agony. So, I want to thank God that I have the wherewithal to know that God doesn't exist.

 

Nirvana: the moment reactivity stops

I'm attracted to Buddhism, along with Taoism, because these are forms of spirituality that can be viewed without a lens of fantastical supernaturalism.

Sure, many Buddhists and Taoists do embrace mystical mumbo-jumbo, but it is entirely possible to be a Buddhist or Taoist who considers that this earthly existence is the one and only life each of us will ever live, and that's just fine.

Stephen Bachelor is a pleasingly secular Buddhist who has written several books from the standpoint of Buddhism as a practical way of living, not as a religion that demands belief in unbelievable stuff -- such as reincarnation and the survival of consciousness after death.

In his book "After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age," Bachelor has some interesting observations about nirvana. Prior to saying that nirvana can be understood in one of two ways, as either the ceasing of reactivity or as freedom and independence from reactivity, he gave this view of reactivity:

We tend to regard the appearance of such a fearful world as a projection of our mental state.

But this reading of the situation is based on the cultural habit of interpreting experience psychologically. No matter how much we tell ourselves that the fearfulness of the world is just a projection, such reassurance does not significantly alter either how the world appears to us or how we feel about it.

From the perspective of a dharma practitioner, the task of "letting go of what arises" entails releasing one's grip on the whole picture: angry-me-facing-hostile-situation. 

Letting go is not simply a question of breathing deeply to calm my rattled mind; I need to cleanse the doors of my perception. This requires suspending the default habit of seeing the world as being hostile, desirable, or boring. One of the most effective ways of suspending that habit is to train yourself to comprehend the world as an infinitely suffering world.

Now, I don't claim to fully understand what Bachelor means.

However, I have at least an indistinct grasp of what he's getting at, and that's good enough for me. The way I see it, Bachelor doesn't view life as ever being free of suffering. But it is possible to lessen the impact of suffering.

Channeling my inner Alan Watts, we don't have to find suffering insufferable; we don't have to be anxious about our anxieties; we don't have to worry about being worried; we don't have to be happy about our happiness. We can simply suffer, be anxious, worry, and be happy.

(To name but a few possible states of mind.)

In other words, we still react to what life brings us. But we understand the nature of this reactivity. Like everything else in life, it is changeable, ephemeral, something to be experienced before another experience comes along. Even if suffering always is with us, the form of that suffering changes shape continuously.

This seems to be in line with the second sort of nirvana Bachelor speaks of above: as freedom and independence from reactivity, as opposed to the ceasing of reactivity. Here's some additional quotes from his book.

The first sense of nirvana is traditionally understood as a quasi-mystical experience in which an accomplished meditator achieves sufficient calm and insight to bring his reactivity to a complete stop. But this interpretation makes nirvana accessible only to trained meditators, thus conflicting with the account of it as "immediate, clearly visible, inviting, uplifting, and personally sensed by the wise."

...For the second sense of nirvana as freedom from reactivity, we again need to turn to the dialogues with Mara. Here, one becomes aware of nirvana whenever one understands reactivity for what it is and thereby gains freedom from its control. In this case, the experience of nirvana becomes possible even while in the throes of reactivity itself. 

Along this line, I'm up to Day Forty Four in Sam Harris' fifty-day guided meditations in his Waking Up course that I listen to on my iPhone. So I'm damn close to graduating! 

So far I've been getting some fresh insights from Harris, even though most of what he says is familiar to me from other mindfulness exercises. However, Harris has some ways of putting things that are unique to his take on the mind, consciousness, and meditation.

Of late, he's been directing my attention to noticing whether there really is anybody paying attention within my mind. This is nicely Zen, of course. Who is the thinker of my thoughts? Who is the feeler of my feelings? Who is reacting to my reactivity? 

Answer: no one, since an unchanging self who sits in my cranium and observes what's going on in my consciousness doesn't exist. And naturally the same is true of you and everybody else.

Here's some notes that I've taken after listening to Harris' guided meditations.

-- Recognize that the sense of subject and object, that too is an appearance in consciousness.

-- Simply look for the subject. See if there is something to be found.

-- Look for the one who is seeing. Then rest your mind wide open.

-- Every goal, every regret, is nothing but this: consciousness and its content.

-- Look for the thinker of a thought. Is there anyone the thought is occurring to or coming from?

-- Contents of consciousness appear and disappear on their own; you can't choose them.

-- The self's struggle to control is itself an appearance in consciousness.

-- There's no inside or outside of consciousness; things are just appearing. 

-- Is there a hearer in addition to the fact of hearing?

-- Feeling there is a subject, a self, observing the screen of consciousness is just another experience on the screen.

-- Anything you can notice is not what consciousness is, since consciousness is doing the noticing.

These observations fit nicely with the Buddhist notion that while we continue to react to what we're experiencing, it is possible to diminish the sense that someone inside our head is responsible for those reactions.

This allows us to gain a wiser perspective on reactivity.  It isn't something to be done away with, but rather something to be accepted as simply as possible by lessening our reactions to our reactivity.

Nirvana! Without the pressure to achieve it.

 

The absurdity of believing there is Sach Khand (heaven)

Here's a guest post from the always-interesting Osho Robbins. Plus, a video Robbins made to accompany what follows. It has a "69" joke, so that alone leads me to recommend it.

Robbins has an intriguing take on the Sant Mat version of spirituality. Since I wrote a book called Return to the One, I'm sympathetic to the notion of oneness. 

However, I'm also sympathetic to the notion of non-oneness, since as Robbins observes, if everything was really One, there wouldn't be anybody who could stand outside of the oneness and say, "This One is absolutely wonderful!" (or we might say, onederful)

Anyway, here's Robbins' thoughts on the absurdity of believing in Sach Khand. But when I Googled this term, I found that you can take a train there -- along with luggage. Cool. Who knew heaven was so close at hand?

How absurd! The absurdity of believing there is a Sach Khand

Many religions believe that the ‘soul’ (or some equivalent) goes to a certain ‘place’ after death; either a heaven or a hell. They also believe in the concept of a ‘being’ that is in charge of that place (God or the Devil, respectively).

However, they cannot see the absurdity of all this, until an actual example is put before them – then they will laugh and say something like, “Oh, it’s not a place and God is not a person.”

Oh, okay – so it’s in a non-place and the God and Devil are ‘non-persons’?  Now that makes sense? The God and devil are depicted as actual beings in the relevant holy books. Some examples are: 

Sar Bachan:  One hair on his body has the light of a thousand suns.

(that means you would get instantly blinded if you look at him, but of course, the soul has super-eyes that cannot be blinded)

The Bible: “Then God said….”  “And God was a jealous God.”

(so apparently God is just like us, made in OUR image: he speaks, he gets jealous, he gets angry and brings a flood to destroy his own creation, which incidentally means he also makes mistakes, he even tells lies when he told Adam not to eat of the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil because ‘you will surely die’ but it was a lie because he did not die, instead God cursed him).

The point I am making is that God appears to be like a human. He talks, he thinks, he has emotions. He makes decisions. So he must be a ‘noun’ (an entity that has a shape and a form). He cannot both have a shape and be formless, just as you cannot have a “Square Circle”.

So the video I have created goes into the belief of a Sach Khand and a Sat Purush (or Anami Purush) who apparently resides there. 

This belief is held by all followers of Radha Soami and Sant Mat; although they will say “But they are spiritual regions and not physical” but this is just a nonsensical get-out clause. “Spiritual” is just another concept to explain what you cannot explain. 

Non-Duality is different.

In non-duality you cannot have a God or a Devil and they cannot interact with you – there cannot be any transaction or communication. In fact there cannot be a YOU separate from the ONEness (non-duality) as that is no longer ONENESS. 

I remember having discussions with “Jim Sutherland” telling him to avoid meeting Anami, because the moment he meets him, he will merge him into himself and that will be the end of Jim!

Jim, like many followers of religions, don’t like the idea of non-existence. They want to know that they will continue to exist after death and also when they get to heaven or Sach Khand. Non-existence doesn’t seem to be a viable goal. 

After all, it seems absurd doesn’t it? 

Imagine the conversation:

“So why exactly are you meditating 2 hours a day?”

“Oh, so I can merge into the supreme being and stop existing.”

“You mean you just want to disappear into nothing?”

“No, I will still be there, just different from the way I am now.”

It’s fantasy land. You cannot become the ONE and remain separate. There cannot be more than one ONE!

Anyway – here’s the video:

The absurdity of the scenario in the video makes it obvious that it’s all nonsense; but then, the follower has to ask “If this is absurd, then what is the truth? What will actually happen when I get to the non-place called Sach Khand?”

 

Three comments show absurdity of "karmic blaming"

Karma can be a dangerous concept. It's harmless enough if we simply think of it as the laws of cause and effect that guide our universe. 

But when people extend this concept to include supernatural fantasies, such as that our actions in past lives have determined what happens to us in this life, then the notion of karma needs to be criticized harshly. The not-nice canine in the Dilbert comic strip, Dogbert, captured the essence of this nicely.

And it doesn't matter whether someone uses the term "karma" or some other word. It's the idea of karmic blaming that has to be fought.

Wikipedia describes Jewish deicide, the idea that because Jews were responsible for Jesus' death, they deserve horrible things being done to them. 

Jewish deicide is a historic belief among some in Christianity that Jewish people as a whole were responsible for the death of Jesus. The antisemitic slur "Christ-killer" was used by mobs to incite violence against Jews and contributed to many centuries of pogroms, the murder of Jews during the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust.

Even more directly, India's highly discriminatory caste system, which persists to this day, is based on religious ideas about karma and reincarnation. 

There is a vital link between Karma theory and the caste system. Karma theory is based on Law of Karma, where an act or deed done by a human being, good or bad, accompany the dead soul and determine the soul’s destiny in its future births. A soul will get reincarnated as human being or animal or insect, according to the accumulated good deeds or bad deeds done in the previous lives.

The position a soul occupies in the hierarchy of the caste system closely correlates to the accumulated deeds of the past. A person of good deeds will be reborn in the higher caste, for eg., as a Brahmin, and a person of bad deeds, as a dog or a Chandala (a lower caste). Please refer to Kaushitaki Upanishad or Chandogya upanishad to get more information on this.

So today I was eager to squash the ravings of frequent commenter "777" to the illogical bits that they deserve when he strongly implied, if not outright said, that Steven Hawking's ALS disease was the result of bad karmas -- and that suffering people need to learn from their mistakes in past lives.

I found this so insulting to Hawking and other people who suffer that, as you can read below, I called out "777" on his lack of compassion and deluded religiosity. I forgot to add that if he's so convinced that he's right, he should be using his real name in comments rather than hiding behind a pseudonym.

Here's our comment exchange, plus a right-on comment from JB who further demolished the rantings of "777."

 

Stephen Hawking asks "Is there a God?" (Spoiler alert: No.)

Being a big fan of both science and Stephen Hawking, naturally I had to buy his last and most recent book, "Brief Answers to the Big Questions," which was published after he died this year.


So far I've only read up through the first two questions, "Is there a God?" and "How did it all begin?" Since Hawking was an atheist, you can predict what the answers are. But I'll save the details for later in this post.

First, I want to acknowledge Hawking's amazing courage and commitment to truth. He talks about the progression of his ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), which eventually left him only able to control his cheek movements -- but through technology he still was able to communicate via this means. 

I found this paragraph deeply moving.

My illness seemed to progress rapidly. Understandably, I became depressed and couldn't see the point of continuing to research my PhD, because I didn't know if I would live long enough to finish it. But then the progression slowed down and I had a renewed enthusiasm for my work. After my expectations had been reduced to zero, every new day became a bonus, and I began to appreciate everything I did have. While there's life, there is hope.

And in case you're wondering, yes, Hawking was an atheist until the moment he died. Apparently there are rumors to the contrary, but those are false. Like so many other atheists, Hawking found meaning in life without the fantasy of God. 

“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist,” Hawking said of the meaning of life. “Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.”

Here's how Hawking starts off the chapter in his book that addresses the Is there a God? question. 

Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion. Religion was an early attempt to answer the questions we all ask: why are we here, where did we come from? Long ago, the answer was almost always the same: gods made everything.

The world was a scary place, so even people as tough as the Vikings believed in supernatural beings to make sense of natural phenomena like lightning, storms or eclipses. Nowadays, science provides better and more consistent answers, but people will always cling to religion, because it gives comfort, and they do not trust or understand science.

Hawking then makes clear what his overall attitude toward God is.

I do not want to give the impression that my work is about proving or disproving the existence of God. My work is about finding a rational framework to understand the universe around us. For centuries, it was believed that disabled people like me were living under a curse that was inflicted by God. Well, I suppose it's possible that I've upset someone up there, but I prefer to think that everything can be explained another way, by the laws of nature.

This is key.

The laws of nature are universal. So far, it appears that they operate the same way in every corner of the universe. Further, even though many religious people believe in miracles that supposedly defy the laws of nature, there is no demonstrable evidence that miracles exist, either now or in the past.

Thus where is the need for God, if the laws of nature are sufficient to understand the universe? (This understanding is incomplete, and likely always will be; however, science is by far our best means of comprehending the cosmos, since religion does a terrible job with this.)

Hawking then discusses scientific theories about the origin of the universe, as the Beginning of Everything appears to be the only area where religion might have something to say, since the laws of nature do a good job of explaining the current state of the universe.

He writes:

At the moment of the Big Bang, an entire universe came into existence, and with it space. It all inflated, just like a balloon being blown up. So where did all this energy and space come from? How did an entire universe full of energy, the awesome vastness of space and everything in it simply appear out of nothing?

Interestingly, because this was an idea that either I hadn't come across before, or failed to understand properly, Hawking describes how right now the universe is still "nothing" in terms of matter/energy. So nothing became another form of nothing via the Big Bang.

This is an easy to grasp metaphor.

Imagine a man wants to build a hill on a flat piece of land. The hill will represent the universe. To make this hill he digs a hole in the ground and uses that soil to dig his hill. But of course he's not just making a hill -- he's also making a hole, in effect a negative version of the hill. The stuff that was in the hole has now become the hill, so it all perfectly balances out.

That negative energy now is in space. The positive energy is in mass and energy that comprises stars, galaxies, us. Again, nothing has become nothing in a different form. Hawking says the only question is "What could cause the spontaneous appearance of a universe?"

Here's his answer, which is based on the laws of quantum mechanics and relativity theory.

The laws of nature tell us that not only could the universe have popped into existence without any assistance, like a proton, and have required nothing in terms of energy, but also that it is possible that nothing caused the Big Bang. Nothing.

The explanation lies back with the theories of Einstein, and his insights into how space and time in the universe are fundamentally intertwined. Something very wonderful happened to time at the instant of the Big Bang. Time itself began.

Hawking concludes his Is there a God? chapter with this:

When people ask me if a God created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn't exist before the Big Bang so there is no time for God to make the universe in. It's like asking for directions to the edge of the Earth -- the Earth is a sphere that doesn't have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise.

Do I have faith? We are each free to believe what we want, and it's my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate.

This leads me to a profound realisation: there is probably no heaven and afterlife either. I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking. There is no reliable evidence for it, and it flies in the face of everything we know in science. I think that when we die we return to dust.

But there's a sense in which we live on, in our influence, and in our genes that we pass on to our children. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that I am extremely grateful.

Now, to my knowledge Hawking doesn't address a question that I love to ponder, but which I admit may be an artifact of the limited human mind: Why is there something rather than nothing?

As we've seen, Hawking says that actually there is still nothing, even though our universe sure appears to be something, since the positive mass/energy is balanced out by the negative energy of space.

However, seemingly there had to be laws of nature within this nothing to allow that balancing to occur. And laws of nature aren't nothing at all, but something within nothing.

I suspect that Hawking looked upon Why is there something rather than nothing? as an uninteresting philosophical question, since there doesn't appear to be any way to answer it, even in theory. The question boggles the mind, but this probably is because our human minds are used to causes and effects happening within time.

If the cosmos always has existed, this takes us outside of time. And also seemingly outside of eternity. We're into a realm of "is'ness" beyond our capacity to envision. As I've noted many times before on this blog, it appears that something must have always existed. 

Religious people typically term this something God. Scientific people typically term this something the laws of nature that allow things to come from nothing. Either way, we're left with mystery, awe, the grand design of the universe which was Stephen Hawking's life work.

"Seven Types of Atheism" is intellectually dishonest

Last month I shared a critical Amazon reader review of John Gray's book, Seven Types of Atheism, in a blog post: "Great review of 'Seven Types of Atheism' by someone who hasn't read the book."

I said in the post that I wasn't going to buy the book. Then I changed my mind. Not sure why. Maybe I wanted to see if the book was as bad as I thought it would be.

Now that I've read Seven Types of Atheism, I'm glad I did. Here's my own review.

The most glaring irritating thing I found in the book was that Gray defines atheism on page 2, then forgets his own definition on the following pages. Here's the early-on definition.

A provisional definition of atheism might still be useful, if only to indicate the drift of the book that follows. So I suggest that an atheist is anyone with no use for the idea of a divine mind that has fashioned the world. In this sense atheism does not amount to very much. It is simply the absence of the idea of a creator god.

OK, as an atheist I generally agree with this. There could be other types of gods than a creator god, but the major world religions -- Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism -- all teach that the world was created by a divine mind, or being.

So I figured that in the rest of his book, Gray would view atheism as how he defined it: the absence of the idea of a creator god. This fits with how I view my atheism. It also fits with how every atheist I know views atheism. Again, as the absence of a belief in god.

But in many places in Seven Types of Atheism, Gray speaks of a "religion of humanity," a "self-deifying humanity," "secular religion," and such. How could this be if atheism is the absence of the idea of a creator god? Wouldn't religion then be the presence of the idea of a creator god?

No, not according to Gray's twisted logic. 

Because on page 3 of his book, Gray offers up a decidedly strange definition of religion. It isn't a belief in god, creator-variety or otherwise. Nor is it an attempt to understand reality in terms of supernatural or divine phenomena. Rather, Gray says:

A provisional definition of religion may also be useful... Religion is an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe.

Wow. What a weird definition of religion. The Amazon reviewer who hadn't read the book nailed Gray on this, since he'd heard Gray speak in the same fashion in an interview. Here's part of what that reviewer said.

Gray said: If you asked an anthropologist or a sociologist or even a cultural historian about religion, not one of them nowadays, or very few of them, would think of religion as bodies of theories or beliefs or propositions which try to explain the world.

For starters, if we're talking about the three Abrahamic religions, they absolutely assert theories, beliefs and propositions for the purpose of explaining the world.

In a feeble attempt to support this claim, Gray uses a straw man. He says, "The myth about Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden was never meant as an early theory of how life came about on this planet." Even if that is true, it doesn't change the fact that the Abrahamic religions assert that God had a hand (direct or indirect) in the creation of the universe, which ultimately led to the creation of humans, with whom God has a special relationship.

Moreover, the Abrahamic religions assert that God has a hand in laying down morals. Clearly, these assertions are intended as theories, beliefs and propositions.

Thus what Gray does at the beginning of his book is intellectually dishonest. He defines atheism as the absence of the idea of a creator god. But he doesn't define religion as the presence of the idea of a creator god. Rather, Gray defines religion extremely broadly as "an attempt to find meaning in events."

Again, wow.

The day I got married was deeply meaningful to me. So apparently I make a religion out of marriage. The results of last Tuesday's midterm elections were deeply meaningful to me. So apparently I make a religion out of politics. 

But obviously every attempt by us humans to find meaning in events isn't religious in nature. But this obviousness isn't apparent to John Gray, because the bulk of his book is an attempt to paint atheism with the brush of religion, since atheists find meaning in events, history, humanity, and other non-godly entities.

Wait! Aren't atheists defined by Gray as lacking a belief in a creator god? Yes, but Gray says atheists are religious because they find meaning in events. Thus every person on Earth who finds meaning in events is religious by Gray's absurd logic. 

Here's some passages from Seven Types of Atheism that reflect this absurdity.

But it was Saint-Simon who first presented the religion of humanity in systematic form. In future, scientists would replace priests as the spiritual leaders of society. Government would be an easy matter of 'the administration of things.' Religion would become the self-worship of humankind.

...Having renounced the idea of any divine power outside the human world, human beings could not avoid claiming divine powers for themselves.

...A free-thinking atheist would begin by questioning the prevailing faith in humanity. But there is little prospect of contemporary atheists giving up their reverence for this phantom.

...Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means. Hence the unending succession of God-surrogates, such as humanity and science, technology, and the all-too-human visions of transhumanism.

Gray doesn't believe that "humanity" exists. Only individual humans do.

Fine, he's entitled to that belief. I don't agree with him, because our species, Homo sapiens, does have common characteristics, and the modern world has erased many of the borders that used to separate humans by geography, culture, and such. 

John Gray doesn't believe that our species advances. This is highly debatable. Witness how slavery, the subjugation of women, and world wars have faded away (though still existent, or possible) in the past several hundred years. 

But since Gray holds that belief, and he wanted to bash atheism in his book, he needed to define religion in such a way that anyone who finds meaning in human events or history is "religious." Hence, humanists are religious, and any atheist who finds meaning in a hope that humanity is progressing is also "religious."

I'm an atheist. I'm a progressive. I'm not religious. I don't believe in a creator god.

So Gray ignored the reality that the vast majority of atheists simply don't believe in god. But this fact doesn't fit with Gray's desire to make atheism into a secular "religion," so he ignored it.

We humans have selfhood without a self

Here's a big question, one of the biggest when it comes to understanding reality and how religions typically view what it means to be human:

Do we have a self? Or adding an (important) capital letter, Do we have a Self?

To kick off my discussion of these questions, here's some recent right-on comment observations from "JB."

Brian: "there is nobody having an experience. There is just experience, which usually includes an experience of being, or having, a self." Rather than no-body having an experience, I would argue that there is a body having an experience. More precisely, I would argue that the conscious brain is having the experience. That also seems obvious and rational.

Harding: "All you are is consciousness and its contents." Brian: "his insight also can be framed as a realization that there is no self..." If I am consciousness, then consciousness certainly seems like a good candidate for the self. Proclaiming no-self would be tantamount to proclaim no-consciousness, or no-conscious-being.

l agree with JB. And I also still hold that we don't have a self as it is commonly understood. It all comes down to what is meant by self. 

JB correctly observes that conscious beings have experiences. These experiences occur within a body. That could be a human body, a dog body, a whale body, a bird body, a bat body. 

Most neuroscientists and philosophers interested in consciousness say that the borderline between a conscious and unconscious being is that there is something like to be a conscious being. Thomas Nagel kicked off this train of thought with his famous, "What is it like to be a bat?" question. 

It sure seems like there is some answer to that question. It also seems like we will never know what the answer is, because only a bat can be a bat. Further, only a particular bat can know what it is like to be that particular bat. 

Maybe all bats have the same sort of conscious experience. But I doubt it. I'm virtually 100% certain that dogs have different conscious experiences, having been close friends with several of them. And I'm even more certain, basically 100%, that we human have different conscious experiences.

And when it comes to myself, I know for a fact that moment by moment, minute by minute, day by day, year by year, I have different conscious experiences. Sometimes -- as in deep sleep or under anesthesia -- I don't have any conscious experiences at all.

So it seems clear that if consciousness produces, or is, what we mean by "self," this self is changeable. It isn't anything constant, unchanging, imperturbable. That's why I suggested in the title of this post that we call it "selfhood," which has a more flexible and dynamic connotation than "self."

Yet, many, if not most, people have a very different idea of what "self" means. 

We often hear statements like, "I'm trying to find my true self," which implies that the self is like a buried treasure lurking somewhere under the obvious surface of consciousness. And religions look upon soul as being the spiritual or supernatural equivalent of a true self.

Meaning, soul is viewed as our eternal essence, while the body is viewed as temporary. (Christianity is ambiguous on this point, since bodily resurrection is part of Christian teaching; but ordinary Christians speak all of the time about soul and seem to believe that the soul survives bodily death.)

This certainly is the teaching of Hinduism and other Eastern forms of religion such as Sant Mat, since the soul (Atma) is supposed to be able to merge with God (Parmatma).

However, there is no evidence of a soul or Self -- with a capital "S" to indicate it's supposedly divine nature.

Further, there isn't even any evidence of an ordinary self, if "self" is construed to mean a permanent essence of ourselves that doesn't change. As JB indicated, the closest thing to something permanent in our psyche is consciousness, but this isn't what is generally considered to be a self.

The main reason we consider ourselves to be an enduring entity deserving of the title, "self," is memory. We have memories going back to early childhood. So when we think about ourselves, those memories are triggered, leading us to say things such as "It wasn't like me to have done something like that."

But if we had no memory of what we'd done in the past, we wouldn't be surprised at anything we did in the present, since that would simply be what we're doing now. 

So along with JB, I do believe that each of us is a self. (Note: is, not has.) Again, though, I think selfhood might be a better term, since this means individuality. Every person is undeniably unique. We just lack a permanent self, or Self/Soul.