Church of the Churchless

Great meditation advice: relax, do less, let go

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

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

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

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

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

What can you do about it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another RSSB follower sees the light and leaves

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

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

I've taken out some personal identifying information.

Hi Brian,

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

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

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

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

Thank you again Brian.

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

Zen Studies Podcast is a great Buddhist resource

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My meditation evolves to an exalted state of doing nothing

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

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

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

Absolutely nothing. 

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Today, though, something shifted in my psyche. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christof Koch presents a good analysis of near-death experiences

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

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

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

I accept the reality of these intensely felt experiences.

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

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

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

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

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

Psychedelic experiences bear a resemblance to NDEs.

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

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

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

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

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

This is how Koch concludes his piece.

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

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

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

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

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

Cats have no need of philosophy or religion

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

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

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

Gray says about cats:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Religions are attempts to make an inhuman universe humanly habitable.

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

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

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

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

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

Philosophy testifies to the frailty of the human mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My podcast interview with Marie D'Elephant was enjoyable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I never was, so I always will be

Profound? Obvious? Confusing? Meaningless? 

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

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

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

Let's examine why I say this.

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

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

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

I never was that sort of being.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well stated criticism of RSSB guru and satsangi behavior

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr Bassi also adores young woman especially rich Sindhi girls!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wake up, and Make your own minds up!

Gurinder Singh Dhillon, guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Humans create God, not the other way around

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's an excerpt from the post.

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

Not in all ways. In some ways.

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

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

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

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

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

Political and religious delusions have a lot in common

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Religion is anti-life when an afterlife is fantasized

I want to get some facts straight.

(1) Every living entity dies.
(2) This includes humans.
(3) So you, I, and everybody else will die.
(4) There is no solid evidence of life after death.
(5) Yet religions claim there's an afterlife.

It's difficult to see how anybody could disagree with 1-3 and 5. Plus, 4 is almost indisputable, since any evidence of life after death is extremely tenuous, unscientific, and open to dispute.

Given these facts, I can't understand why so many Americans look upon our current COVID-19 death count, of 266,000, Washington Post screenshot shown above, and shrug off the astounding number.

This shrugging is obvious by the actions of those who refuse to wear a mask even though this saves lives, and by politicians who refuse to promote public health measures needed to slow the spread of the pandemic.

The United States has 4% of the world's population and 19% of the COVID-19 deaths. Something is different in this country. Something is wrong with this country. 

One possibility is our individualism. Americans don't like to be told that they need to do something for the common good. Another possibility is that we have deeply polarized politics, with soon-to-be ex-president Trump a notorious liar about everything, including how to combat the coronavirus.

But there's something else to think about. The United States is one of the most religious wealthy countries. 

In fact, Americans pray more often, are more likely to attend weekly religious services and ascribe higher importance to faith in their lives than adults in other wealthy, Western democracies, such as Canada, Australia and most European states, according to a recent Pew Research Center study.

For instance, more than half of American adults (55%) say they pray daily, compared with 25% in Canada, 18% in Australia and 6% in Great Britain. (The average European country stands at 22%.) Actually, when it comes to their prayer habits, Americans are more like people in many poorer, developing nations – including South Africa (52%), Bangladesh (57%) and Bolivia (56%) – than people in richer countries.

I suspect that religiosity is a reason lots of Americans are so uncaring of 266,000 fellow citizens dying from COVID-19. A belief in an afterlife cheapens the value of this current life. 

Often religious believers say of someone who has died, "Now they're in a better place." Of course, they don't know that. They have no reason for saying that other than blind faith. Yet the fantasy of an afterlife is exceedingly common.

It's debatable, though, how many religious people truly believe they will live again after they die. If they genuinely felt death would leave them in a better place, why wouldn't religious believers kill themselves, along with their loved ones?

In a science fiction book I read a long time ago about a planet, Riverworld, one of the characters learned that after he was killed, he'd pop up again at a different place on the massive river that dominated the planet. So he sought death, since that was how he was going to be able to get closer to the headwaters of the river.

This fictional man had direct evidence of life after death. Religious believers don't, which explains why they're reluctant to die prematurely.

Yet because they want to believe in an afterlife, religious believers act in contradictory ways. They cling to their own life, yet often are uncaring when it comes to the death of others -- like the 266,000 who have died from COVID-19. 

They apparently consider that because eternity in heaven (or hell) is so, well, long, it hardly matters whether someone's life is cut short by a disease.

So millions of supposedly "pro-life" Americans refuse to wear a mask, physically distance, or give up a Thanksgiving dinner with a bunch of people sitting around a table, potentially spreading the coronavirus at the same time they're saying "pass the mashed potatoes."

Meanwhile, scientifically-minded atheists like me are doing everything possible to keep ourselves safe, along with keeping other people safe by following public health orders.

Looks like atheism is pro-life, while religious belief is anti-life.

What God might say, according to Spinoza

The following post turned up in my Facebook feed yesterday. Based on my understanding of Spinoza, I have some doubts that this really reflects his perspective on God, but it might. 

Regardless, I liked what Jillenne Moore shared in her post. (I'm assuming that Moore wrote it.)

When Einstein gave lectures at U.S. universities, the question students asked him most was: Do you believe in God? And he always answered: I believe in the God of Spinoza.

Baruch de Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher considered one of the great rationalists of 17th century philosophy, along with Descartes.

According to Spinoza, God would say: “Stop praying. I want you to go out into the world and enjoy your life. I want you to sing, have fun and enjoy everything I've made for you.

“Stop going into those dark, cold temples that you built yourself and saying they are my house. My house is in the mountains, in the woods, rivers, lakes, beaches. That's where I live and there I express my love for you.

“Stop blaming me for your miserable life; I never told you there was anything wrong with you or that you were a sinner, or that your sexuality was a bad thing. Sex is a gift I have given you and with which you can express your love, your ecstasy, your joy. So don't blame me for everything that others made you believe.

“Stop reading alleged sacred scriptures that have nothing to do with me. If you can't read me in a sunrise, in a landscape, in the look of your friends, in your son's eyes—you will find me in no book!

“Stop asking me, ‘Will you tell me how to do my job?’ Stop being so scared of me. I do not judge you or criticize you, nor get angry or bothered. I am pure love.

“Stop asking for forgiveness, there's nothing to forgive. If I made you, I filled you with passions, limitations, pleasures, feelings, needs, inconsistencies, and best of all, free will. Why would I blame you if you respond to something I put in you? How could I punish you for being the way you are, if I'm the one who made you? Do you think I could create a place to burn all my children who behave badly for the rest of eternity? What kind of god would do that?

“Respect your peers, and don't give what you don't want for yourself. All I ask is that you pay attention in your life—alertness is your guide.

“My beloved, this life is not a test, not a step on the way, not a rehearsal, not a prelude to paradise. This life is the only thing here and now—and it is all you need.

“I have set you absolutely free, no prizes or punishments, no sins or virtues, no one carries a marker, no one keeps a record. You are absolutely free to create in your life. It’s you who creates heaven or hell.

“Live as if there is nothing beyond this life, as if this is your only chance to enjoy, to love, to exist. Then you will have enjoyed the opportunity I gave you. And if there is an afterlife, rest assured that I won't ask if you behaved right or wrong, I'll ask, ‘Did you like it? Did you have fun? What did you enjoy the most? What did you learn?’

“Stop believing in me; believing is assuming, guessing, imagining. I don't want you to believe in me, I want you to believe in you. I want you to feel me in you when you kiss your beloved, when you tuck in your little girl, when you caress your dog, when you bathe in the sea.

“Stop praising me. What kind of egomaniac God do you think I am? I'm bored with being praised. I'm tired of being thanked. Feeling grateful? Prove it by taking care of yourself, your health, your relationships, the world. Express your joy! That's the way to praise me.

“Stop complicating things and repeating as a parrot what you've been taught about me. Why do you need more miracles? So many explanations?

“The only thing for sure is that you are here, that you are alive, that this world is full of wonders.”

Humans are animals. Religions should accept this fact.

Frans de Waal has written a fascinating book about animal intelligence, "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?"

I'm only a little ways into the book, but what I've read so far has gotten me to thinking about how religions view humans -- as animals, or as a non-animal species?

Here's a passage from the prologue that makes clear how de Waal looks upon this question.

In all this, we love to compare and contrast animal and human intelligence, taking ourselves as the touchstone. It is good to realize, though, that this is an outdated way of putting it.

The comparison is not between humans and animals but between one animal species -- ours -- and a vast array of others. Even though most of the time I will adopt the "animal" shorthand for the latter it is undeniable that humans are animals. 

We're not comparing two separate categories of intelligence, therefore, but rather are considering variation within a single one. I look at human cognition as a variety of animal cognition. 

Naturally this is true. Humans are indeed animals of the primate variety. We're close relatives to chimpanzees, with whom we shared a common ancestor about six million years ago. 

Genetically, we share more than 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees and bonobos. From this perspective, chimpanzees are mostly human and vice versa. But, in genetics, some changes matter more than others. That 1-plus percent of DNA that differs between our species has obviously led to some fairly significant changes.

Yet religions usually look upon humans as separate and distinct from other animals. Supposedly we are made in God's image, while chimps aren't, even though scientifically-minded religious believers have to grapple with the notion that God created chimps with 98% of our DNA.

As de Waal says in the passage above, there isn't human intelligence and animal intelligence. There is just intelligence, which comes in lots of different forms depending on what a species needs to know in order to survive and prosper. Here's another passage from the book. 

But why stop at the primates when we are considering cognition? Every species deals flexibly with the environment and develops solutions to the problems it poses. Each one does it differently.

We had better use the plural to refer to their capacities, therefore, and speak of intelligences and cognitions. 

This will help us avoid comparing cognition on a single scale modeled after Aristotle's scala naturae, which runs from God, then angels, and humans at the top, downward to other mammals, birds, fish, insects, and mollusks at the bottom. 

Comparisons up and down this vast ladder have been a popular pastime of cognitive science, but I cannot think of a single profound insight it has yielded. All it has done is make us measure animals by human standards, thus ignoring the immense variation in organisms' Umwelten [worldview].

It seems highly unfair to ask if a squirrel can count to ten if counting is not really what a squirrel's life is about. The squirrel is very good at retrieving hidden nuts, though, and some birds are absolute experts.

The Clark's nutcracker, in the fall, stores more than twenty thousand pine nuts, in hundreds of different locations distributed over many square miles; then in winter and spring it manages to recover the majority of them.

That we can't compete with squirrels and nutcrackers on this task -- I even forget where I parked my car -- is irrelevant, since our species does not need this kind of memory for survival the way forest animals braving a freezing winter do.

So we need to stop looking at animals as being inferior to humans. They are different from us, not inferior. This is one reason we shouldn't eat them.

I've been a vegetarian for over fifty years, with my last bite of another animal species coming when I looked at a prawn on my plate while I was in college and  realized, "That used to be swimming around in the ocean, enjoying its prawn life, until it was killed so I could eat it." 

At that moment I felt a kinship with my fellow animals that caused me to vow never to eat fish or meat again. Which, I haven't. 

Your soul can't be found because it doesn't exist

I'm enjoying my re-reading, or re-re-reading, given the highlighting I've done to this book, of Guy Newland's "Introduction to Emptiness: Tsong-Kha-Pa's Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path." It's a brilliant discussion of a core Buddhist notion, defined as the sheer nonexistence of intrinsic nature.

In other words, nothing is intrinsically itself. Everything depends on other things for its existence, us naturally included. Nothing stands on its own, an island unto itself. Interconnectedness and interdependency is how the cosmos works.

So Buddhism is unique among the world's major religions in not positing an eternal soul. (Because it isn't really a religion, though many Buddhists wrongly ascribe religious qualities to their faith.)

Here's two passages from Introduction to Emptiness regarding the imaginary nature of "an eternal and essential self."

Sorry to break it to you, but you don't have one. You, me, everybody -- we all have come into being through causes and conditions that don't last forever, as is obvious from the human aging process.

The language will be a bit unfamiliar, though it is certainly clear. Newland says that no one has ever perceived an intrinsic self, or soul, that is different from the mind and body. That non-existent entity is an imaginary religious concept. Give it up and you'll be closer to grasping the nature of reality.

As noted in the second passage, don't be afraid to give up a belief in an imaginary thing. Grasping after illusion is what keeps us trapped. Let go of fantasy and you'll breathe a big sigh of relief, because the pressure will be off to view yourself as anything other than what you truly are.

A transitory blip of existence, just like everything else in the cosmos. We aren't separate from what surrounds us, but an intimate aspect of it.

Tsong-kha-pa notes that non-Buddhist philosophies about an eternal and essential self arise when their proponents realize that the essential self really cannot be identical to the flux of mental and physical aggregates.

Reaching the wrong inference, they then teach about the existence of a metaphysical self that is essentially different from the mind and body.

However, their own ordinary and conventionally valid consciousnesses never perceive any essence or intrinsic self that is different from the mind and body. This is simply an imaginary construct. 

Instead of assuming that there must be a permanent self and then locating it as an essence distinct from the mind and body, they should realize that since an intrinsically existing self can be found neither as one with nor as different from the mind and body, it simply does not exist.

...The Buddha points out the painful and sad futility of our clinging to objects, people, ideas, experiences, and identities that simply cannot be held, no matter how tightly they are grasped. 

Because they have no ability to set themselves up and exist on their own, we and the things around us are in flux, changing as conditions change. With no essential nature, neither our own selves nor the things around us have any inner handle by which we can grab and hold them. 

We are afraid to face this lack, this emptiness. 

Our fear arises from and feeds our grasping, and in this way we build a prison for ourselves, moment by moment. Yet by bravely facing the reality of emptiness, we can let go of our fear, anger, and greed.

We can be free.

New development in Singh brothers/RSSB guru scandal may not mean much

Today someone sent me a link to a November 12, 2o20 story in the Economic Times, "Sebi disposes of proceedings against 16 entities in Religare Finvest fund diversion case."

That person wondered if this meant that Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, had been cleared of wrongdoing in the complex financial scandal involving the Dhillon family and their relatives, Malvinder and Shivinder Singh, along with associates of the guru such as Sunil Godhwani.

I've copied in the Economic Times story below. It's difficult to know what to make of it. As far as I can tell, no other publication in India has written about this development. So my suspicion is that this doesn't clear Dhillon.

Here's my reasoning.

Based on previous reporting in the Indian financial press, the 16 entities named in the story appear to be mostly, and maybe completely, shell companies. Meaning, they weren't actually doing business, but rather served as pass-throughs for other purposes, legal or illegal. 

This Business Today graphic, which I've shared before, shows the reputed scheme in broad-brush strokes. Money siphoned from companies once controlled by the Singh brothers flowed into the shell companies, then into the pockets of the RSSB guru and his family.

So it makes sense that currently the shell companies would have few, if any, assets. After all, the SEBI (Securities and Exchange Board of India) allegation was that the shell companies were used to move money around, not that the fraud consisted of transferring money into the shell companies and leaving it there.

Further, my understanding is that the management (directors) of the shell companies has changed since the purported fraudulent transactions took place. This also could explain why the 16 entities no longer are part of the SEBI proceedings. 

Currently there is nothing to investigate at the shell companies. Rather, the questions are: (1) Who ended up with the money that flowed through the shell companies? and (2) Who orchestrated these transfers of money?

Again, I'm just expressing my opinion here, since the story below is vague about what the SEBI action means in the context of the accusations against Malvinder Singh and Dhillon, who has been accused by Malvinder of masterminding the diversion of money. 

Note that the story doesn't say that SEBI has given up on recovering the diverted money from every entity (which I assume includes individuals) involved in this case -- just from the 16 entities, largely or entirely shell companies, mentioned in the story. 

So I doubt that this is the end of the scandal. Perhaps we'll learn more on November 26 when a bail hearing for Malvinder in regard to the money laundering case has been rescheduled. Malvinder and his attorney keep saying that Gurinder Singh Dhillon is the real culprit, not Malvinder.

Here's the Economic Times story.

Sebi disposes of proceedings against 16 entities in Religare Finvest fund diversion case

Among the 16 entities, the names of two entities have already been removed from the list by the regulator.

Markets regulator Sebi on Thursday disposed of adjudication proceedings against 16 entities for their alleged involvement in Religare Finvest's fund diversion matter.
The entities were alleged to have been involved in diversion of funds amounting to Rs 2,315.09 crore from the books of Religare Finvest Ltd (RFL), a subsidiary of Religare Enterprises Ltd (REL), for the utilisation of promoters and promoter group entities of REL.

Shivinder and Malvinder Singh were promoters of REL.

Further, 14 names have been removed from the list of entities from whom REL and RFL were directed to recover the loan amount, Sebi said in an order.

Among the 16 entities, the names of two entities have already been removed from the list by the regulator.

Sebi, through an interim order in March 2019, had directed REL and RFL to initiate steps to recall all the loans, amounting to Rs 2,315.09 crore, extended directly or indirectly to certain entities -- including the 16 entities -- along with due interest, within three months.

The entities were also directed not to dispose of any of their assets or divert any funds, except for meeting expenses of day-to-day business operations, without the prior permission of Sebi, pending completion of the investigation and till further orders.

Subsequently, Sebi had confirmed the directions through an order passed in September 2019. However, the directions issued against two entities -- OSPL Infradeal Pvt Ltd and Bharat Road Network Ltd NSE 0.33 % -- were revoked.

Further, the names of OSPL Infradeal and Bharat Road Network were removed from the list of entities from whom REL and RFL were directed to recover the loan amount.

Pursuant to completion of investigation in the matter, Sebi, in an order on Thursday, revoked the directions issued through the interim as well as confirmatory orders against the 14 entities. The watchdog also disposed of the ongoing proceedings against all the 16 entities.

The other 14 entities are Platinum Infrastructure, Ad Advertising, Artifice Properties, Best Health Management, Devera Developers, Vitoba Realtors, Fern Healthcare, Modland Wears, Rosestar Marketing, Star Artworks, Tripoli Investment, Volga Management and Consultancy, Zolton Properties and Ranchem Private Ltd.

Through a separate order, the regulator has disposed of ongoing proceedings against three entities -- Best Healthcare, Fern Healthcare and Modland Wears -- in the Fortis Healthcare case.

It was alleged that the entities were involved in diversion of funds amounting to Rs 403 crore from the books of Fortis Hospitals Ltd, a subsidiary of Fortis Healthcare Ltd NSE -1.59 % (FHL) for the utilisation of promoters and promoter group entities of FHL.

The issue pertains to the affairs of FHL, which were being managed by the erstwhile promoters -- the Singh brothers. It was alleged that the Singh brothers had siphoned off the funds of FHL to promoter-related entities through layers of companies which were controlled by them.

Sebi, in October 2018, had directed FHL to recover Rs 403 crore, along with interest, from nine entities. The regulator had also directed the entities to jointly and severally repay the amount to Fortis Hospitals and FHL.

Besides, the entities were restrained from disposing of the assets pending investigation. The nine entities included Best Healthcare, Fern Healthcare and Modland Wears.

In its latest order, Sebi said it "revokes the directions issued vide the interim order read with confirmatory order against the... 3 noticees (viz. Best Healthcare Pvt Ltd, Fern Healthcare Pvt Ltd and Modland Wears Pvt Ltd ) and also dispose of the ongoing proceedings... against them".

Behold my use of "Wittgenstein" in this blog post title

I've been hanging onto my copy of the October 19 issue of The New Yorker because it contains a book review ("Losing Propositions") about the state of philosophy in Europe after the First World War.

The review has numerous mentions of Ludwig Wittgenstein, "perhaps the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century." So this gives me the opportunity to use Wittgenstein in the title of this post -- which in my utterly subjective opinion, elevates the profundity of this blog to an even higher level.

What I liked most  about the book review were the parts dealing with language that seems to say something about reality, but which actually says nothing. 

This is the problem I have with religious, spiritual, mystical, and metaphysical writings that I used to enjoy, yet now strike me as saying a lot about not much at all. 

"God" "Soul" "Spirit" "Heaven" These sorts of words have meaning only in the sense that people use them in sentences that sound meaningful, but actually lack any substance grounded in reality.

"God is in heaven" is a proper English sentence, yet there is no way to tell whether what it says is true. On the other hand, "Joe Biden soon will live in the White House" is a statement that can be tested as of January 20, 2021. 

Read on for some excerpts from The New Yorker piece that, if nothing else, will enable you to throw some mentions of Wittgenstein into your own conversations and communications.

For Wittgenstein, the renovation of philosophy had to begin with language. Since the Greeks, Western thinkers had tried to understand the world using terms such as "being" and "becoming," "substance" and "essence," "real" and "ideal." 

But these abstractions gave rise to complicated arguments that went around and around, never reaching any definite conclusion. Now, in the early twentieth century, relativity and quantum theory were redrawing the map of reality in ways that could be verified by experiment and given precise mathematical expression.

In an age of triumphant physics, did philosophy still need to bother with metaphysics?

By declaring the answer to be no, Wittgenstein set modern thought on a new course. For the analytic philosophy he helped inspire, many of the discipline's traditional problems are actually just misunderstandings, based on an erroneous use of language. 

What philosophers need isn't profundity but clarity: as Wittgenstein says in the "Tractatus," "Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly."

...In most cases, determining whether a statement is empirically true or false is fairly straightforward. If someone says that the moon is made of green cheese, there are various ways to check: you could look at the moon through a telescope, or examine a moon rock, or calculate how a moon-size ball of green cheese would behave in outer space.

Even if false, "The moon is made of green cheese" is still a meaningful proposition, because it makes an assertion about the world that can be tested. 

Some statements, however, can't be proved true or false, because they are constructed in a way that violates the rules of language. Carnap labelled these "pseudo-statements" -- "a sequence of words [that] looks like a statement at first glance," but whose syntax or vocabulary renders it meaningless. 

He gave as an example "Caesar is and": if someone said this to you, you wouldn't say that she was right or wrong, just that she didn't know English syntax. 

For the Vienna Circle, the best hunting ground for pseudo-statements was metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that deals with fundamental concepts like being and essence, time and space.

...The problem with metaphysical statements is that they are generally unverifiable, which to the logical empiricists meant they are meaningless. 

In Carnap's 1932 essay "The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language," he asks us to imagine a man who invents a new adjective, "teavy," and who, when we ask him how to tell whether or not something is teavy, replies that "there are no empirical signs of teaviness." In that csse, Carnap says, "we would deny the legitimacy of using this word."

The same principle, he argues, should apply to metaphysical terms, from Plato's "Idea" to Kant's "thing-in-itself." Such impressive words may provoke "associated images and feelings," Carnap writes, but they have no actual meaning, so any explanation that relies on them is saying nothing at all.

Clear thinking is a big part of Buddhist spirituality

I've never understood why some people are so down on thinking as an avenue to spiritual growth -- using "spiritual" in a non-supernatural sense, basically an exploration of what it means to be a caring, compassionate person who is grounded in reality.

Naturally those thinking skeptics express their view in, no big surprise, thoughts. So they cast doubt on the value of thought while thinking thoughts. 

One reason I enjoy reading Buddhist books (non-religious variety) is that Buddhism is fine with thinking. Also, with not thinking. That's an example of the middle way favored by Buddhists.

Thinking and not thinking both have their place. Which we do depends on the situation, on what makes sense at the time. 

A favorite Buddhist book of mine is Guy Newland's "Introduction to Emptiness: Tsong-kha-pa's Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path." I've read it several times. The highlighted passages in different colors produced at different times in my life remind me of the book's core idea.

Nothing is permanent. Everything changes. Nothing has inherent existence, being able to exist purely as itself. Everything is dependent on causes and conditions in never-ending processes of this giving way to that. 

That's what emptiness is all about. The emptiness of inherent existence. Which includes emptiness itself. 

All Madhyamaka philosophers agree that there is nothing that can withstand ultimate analysis. By this they mean that there is nothing anywhere that ultimately exists -- including, of course, the Buddha and the teachings of Buddhism. 

Even emptiness is itself empty; that is, when one searches for the ultimate essence of emptiness, it too is unfindable. One finds only the emptiness of emptiness.

This distinguishes Buddhism from Indian philosophy (along with the philosophy of other religions, including Christianity), which rest on a belief that there is something unchangeable and eternal -- such as the soul/atman and God/Brahman. 

Buddhists don't believe in either, the soul or God. As to realizing your true self, Buddhism replies, "Give up that notion. You neither have nor are an enduring self."

In his book Newland describes why clear thinking is so important to Buddhist practice of the Tibetan variety espoused by Tsong-kha-pa. 

You can't sit down and thoughtlessly meditate your way into an understanding of emptiness. That will leave you in the same state of delusion you were in before.

Sure, meditation feels good. It's relaxing. It calms the mind. It fosters concentration. That's why I've meditated every day for fifty years.

But by itself meditation doesn't lead to a firm grasp of the most important characteristic of the cosmos: that the cosmos has no enduring characteristic. And since humans are a part of the cosmos, neither do we.

As the suffering world has no independent, objective reality but is only an empty convention, we might suppose that stopping conventional thought in a meditative state would be the most liberating move.

The Chinese Buddhist master Ha-shang Mahayana, Tsong-kha-pa reports, regarded any sort of conceptualization whatsoever to be a distorting reification. Throughout the Great Treatise, Ha-shang functions as a stock character representing the perspective that we should dispense with all thought and meditate on reality by not bringing anything to mind.

Tsong-kha-pa argues repeatedly and passionately that meditative thoughtlessness is never going to get us any closer to freedom. Understanding born of careful analysis is at the very heart of what is distinctive about the Buddhist path. This is the third training, the training in wisdom.

Other religions share with Buddhism profound ethics as well as techniques for accessing amazing non-conceptual states. But Buddhism claims as its distinction a penetrating, thoughtful analysis of exactly how the world exists.

Only by engaging in this analysis, thinking it through and taking it to heart, do we begin to create the basis for real liberation from unnecessary misery.

Here's a rough analogy to what Newland just said. Imagine that you are thoughtlessly watching the sun set, your entire attention being focused on the beauty of the colors in the sky as the sun disappears below the horizon. 

That could be a wonderful experience. But it doesn't bring you closer to understanding that actually the sun is standing still, while the Earth rotates on its axis, creating an appearance that the sun is what is moving.

Or, imagine that you are meditating thoughtlessly with eyes closed, your entire attention being focused on a single internal subject of awareness. You could have a feeling of pure consciousness, that the real you is beyond time and space, an eternal I-ness. 

But that experience doesn't bring you closer to understanding that actually there is nothing permanent or independent about you. Your meditative concentration may be pleasant, yet fails to reveal your genuine nature -- emptiness.

"Dependent arising" is how Buddhism treads the middle way between nihilism and eternalism. Things actually exist, but they don't exist as themselves only. They have no inherent existence, but only come into being as a result of causes and conditions, a never-ending complex chain of causes and effects.

This present moment, whatever it might be like for you or me, has been produced by past causes and conditions extending back to the big bang (and perhaps beyond, if big bangs happen over and over). So the ephemeral instant of now is a snapshot of what actually is a very long-running movie of cosmic proportions.

In the next instant, things have changed both within and without us. This may not be obvious, but it is undeniably true.

So wisdom, or spiritual growth, doesn't reside in finding something unchangeable in us or the world, but in grasping that everything, us naturally included, is interconnected with everything else in a seamless web of ever-changing causes and conditions without end.

Speak out! About politics, religion, everything.

Over on my Salem Political Snark blog, yesterday I wrote "Speak out about Trump's attempt to steal the election." 

Almost certainly Trump won't succeed in this. His defeat was so large, extending over five states that he won in 2016 and lost in 2020 (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia), there's no way lawsuits and recounts are going to overturn Biden's win.

Still, it's important for everyone who cares about democracy to speak out against this attempt to thwart the will of voters, even if it has little chance of coming to pass. I shared some excerpts from a September 2020 piece by Marc Elias, "What Did You Do When Democracy Was at Stake?" 

This is what Elias had to say about speaking out.

To combat this threat to our democracy, it is not enough for us to file lawsuits. It is not enough for the media to report the news. And it is not enough for citizens to shake their heads at the damage he is doing.

We must display civic courage and speak out.

Justice Scalia wrote that “requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed.”

We must all commit to civic courage where it is the least comfortable—in the town square, in front of our neighbors and families, in our workplaces and in our daily lives.  We must each, as individuals, stand up and speak out about the importance of our democratic institutions and fundamental rights.

Absolutely. 

If someone says, "The only reason Biden won was Democratic voter fraud," it's important to say to them, "You're wrong. No voter fraud has been found in any state. Biden won a free and fair election."

Probably you won't change their mind. But you might. 

What's certain is that you have stood up for the truth by speaking out about a falsehood. And this is as important to do in areas other than politics. If someone says, "Human-caused greenhouse gas emissions aren't causing global warming," the proper response is, "You're wrong. Global warming is happening because of carbon pollution by humanity."

There are many values worth honoring. Truth is one of the most important, because without truth, it is difficult to truly love, help others, be courageous, or do the other things that make life worth living. 

I started this blog in 2004 in large part because I wanted to speak out against religious untruths. I'd call them "lies," but since some people sincerely believe the falsehoods promulgated by religions, often it makes sense to say That isn't true rather than You're lying.

If someone says, "I know that God exists," ask "How can you be sure?" Press for details. See if they can point to demonstrable evidence that God is real. Don't be content with bland statements like "I feel Him with me." 

I'm not saying that you should go out of your way to puncture someone's religious belief bubble. People have all kinds of reasons for believing in God or some other supernatural entity. If they keep their faith private, no problem. Each to their own.

But when claims about the nature of reality are made, truth claims, then lovers of truth have to speak out in defense of their beloved. Untruths need to be called out. If a religious believer simply says, "I believe in God because this makes me feel good," great. There's nothing wrong and a lot that is right about feeling good. 

That's akin to a Trump supporter saying, "I don't want to accept that Biden won because this hurts." OK. That's honest. We all turn a blind eye to some things that are unwelcome or uncomfortable to us. And many aspects of life lie outside of the bounds of objective truth. 

Art, music, philosophy, friendship, charity, the list goes on and on.

The way I see it, this makes defending truth, where it exists, even more important -- since the comparative rarity of objective truth points to its preciousness. Biden has defeated Trump. That's the truth. Trump doesn't want to admit this. 

Yet almost all leading Republicans are afraid to speak the truth to Trump. They fear his tweetful wrath. They fear for their own re-election if they go against Trump's fantasies. So they stay silent, or tell reporters, "I acknowledge that Biden won, but I can't say this openly on the record."

That's cowardice. Truth is more important than any person. Sure, we have to use common sense. To cite a common example, if you were hiding Jews in your house in Nazi Germany, speaking the truth if the Gestapo knock on your door isn't the thing to do.

But usually, speaking out about the truth is the thing to do. The sooner Trump comes to grips with the fact that he has lost, the better our country will be. Every Republican who stays silent about the election outcome is hurting our democracy.

Fact-denying Republicans are like fact-denying religious people

Like lots of other Americans, I'm really happy about Joe Biden defeating Donald Trump in our presidential election. To learn how happy, check out three posts I've written on my other blogs -- here, here, and here.

It's virtually 100% certain that Biden won a free and fair election and will be sworn in as president next January.

He's on track to win 306 electoral votes, the same number Trump won in 2016, which Trump has never stopped bragging about. The popular vote is hugely in Biden's favor, with additional tallies in New York and California adding to that impressive total. 

Three mid-West battleground states were won by Biden that Clinton narrowly lost in 2016. I came across this information in a tweet today.

Late-innings scorecard: President Trump won Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by less than 80,000 votes in 2016. Today, Joe Biden is ahead in those states by more than 210,000 votes.

So the presidential election isn't close. In 2000 George W. Bush defeated Al Gore by virtue of a highly controversial Supreme Court decision that awarded Bush Florida by a razor-thin margin of less than 600 votes. 

Now Biden is ahead by many tens of thousands of votes in a variety of states. There's no evidence of any substantial voter fraud, just unproven allegations of a few problems that have no bearing on the election outcome in states where they supposedly occurred.

Yet only a few Republican leaders have acknowledged that Biden won the election. Trump himself is refusing to concede. The Trump administration is putting up roadblocks to Biden beginning the important process of transitioning the federal government to a new president. 

In short, Republicans are denying reality. The election facts are clear, yet they refuse to embrace them. They have a fantasy that somehow Trump will be able to steal the election from Biden.

Thus they're acting very much like religious people.

Republicans have blind faith in Trump. Religious people have blind faith in God. Republicans ignore the lack of demonstrable evidence that fraud took place in the election. Religious people ignore the lack of demonstrable evidence that a supernatural being exists. Republicans believe that evil Democrats somehow manipulated election results in favor of Biden. Religious people believe that an evil Devil or some other negative power somehow leads humans away from God.

The common denominator between Republicans and religious people is their rigid dogmatism.

Rather than learning what reality has to teach them, they deny reality. They elevate their subjective personal beliefs over objective truth. If facts don't fit with their world view, they ignore the facts instead of changing their viewpoint.

In the post I wrote yesterday, I included a tweet from election law expert Marc Elias.

What Elias is getting at is that Republican lawyers are starting with what they want to have happen -- the results of the election being overturned so Trump ends up the winner. They they try to conjure up some reasons why this should occur. This is akin to religious people starting with a belief in God, then making up reasons why God exists.

Which is backwards. Election law requires that evidence of fraud come first, with a lawsuit following based on that evidence. Likewise, a belief in God should come after evidence for God, not before.

It doesn't bother me that so many Americans believe strongly in Trump. That's their right. But it's deeply concerning that these Trump fans are willing to ignore the results of the election and trash our democracy in an effort to keep Trump in office. This also is my problem with religion. A private belief in God is fine. It's when religious people try to force their personal beliefs onto others that my atheist anger fires up.

As the saying goes, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. (The original had "his," which I've changed to "their.")

Am I happy about Trump's defeat? Hell, yes!

Tonight I wrote another post on my Salem Political Snark blog about Donald Trump's ever-so-pleasing defeat to Joe Biden, the next President of the United States. 

I called it, "Trump may never concede, but Biden has whipped his ass." Here's what I said, along with the tweets that I included in the post.

Last Tuesday was tough for progressives like me.

Sure, I knew that mail-in ballots, largely from Democrats, were going to take a while to count, and in-person voting on election day would be dominated by Republicans. But knowing is one thing. Emotions are a whole other thing. 

I worried that somehow Trump would pull out another close victory like he did in 2016. Wednesday I felt better as Trump's lead in battleground states began to shrink. Thursday, even better. 

And today, Friday, I'm feeling damn fine! 

Now starts the fun part -- basking in the warm glow of Biden's almost certain victory, while shivering with delight at Trump becoming increasingly frantic to deny the truth of his loss.

It looks like Biden will get 306 electoral votes, the same number Trump got in 2016 that he's been bragging about as a massive victory ever since. Probably Biden won't rub that fact in Trump's face, but I sure will.

You're a big fat loser, Donald. You've gotten your sorry ass kicked. You'll go down in history as a one-term president who was impeached, had very low approval ratings, and will be known as the worst president in modern times. Maybe in all times.

It's going to be ever so satisfying to watch Trump flail around in the coming days and weeks, desperately trying to con his way into a victory that was denied him by rough, tough, kick-ass Joe Biden. Trump is acting like the cowardly wimp that he is.

His insults, lying, and bravado thinly disguise his deep insecurity and lack of confidence. Trump has surrounded himself with fawning admirers who don't question his incompetence, lack of morality, and inability to act like a normal human being.

Trump always has been able to cheat, lie, or buy his way out of problems. It's hugely delicious to now see him confronted by the undeniable reality of a massive election defeat. Votes can't be bull-shitted away.

They are what they are, the expression of how badly Americans wanted to see Trump drummed out of the White House.

Trump is going to lose two red states, Arizona and Georgia, that helped propel him to victory in 2016. And the Blue Wall of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania is back up again, much stronger and more impressive than Trump's mythical "Mexico is going to pay for it" wall.

It's fitting that Trump began his failed presidency with a bizarre conspiracy theory -- that Barack Obama was born in Kenya -- and he's ending his failed presidency with an equally bizarre conspiracy theory -- that the election was stolen from him. 

I'm so looking forward to watching Trump's fragile ego disintegrate as day by day, week by week, the reality that he has lost the election big-time sinks into his feeble brain.

Fortunately, there's plenty of space in his mostly empty cranium for other facts to sink in: he faces serious legal problems without the protection of the presidency; his hotels and resorts are going to suffer under the weight of his unpopularity; nobody but his most rabid supporters is going to care about what he says or tweets about once Biden is inaugurated.

Here's some tweets I came across today that appealed to me.

Wabi sabi: imperfection is the natural state of everything

Perfection is a concept of something that doesn't exist. Nonetheless, we humans cause ourselves grief as we try to attain this non-existent notion. 

Too often, our goal is to have a perfect mate, a perfect body, perfect children, a perfect job, a perfect religion, a perfect home decor. Sure, we know that it really isn't possible to achieve the goal of perfection. But it is something to aim for.

However, not to those who embrace the subtle Japanese idea, or feeling, of Wabi sabi. Last year I wrote a blog post on this subject after starting to read Beth Kempton's book, "Wabi Sabi: Japanese Wisdom for a Perfectly Imperfect Life." I started the post by saying:

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.

Recently I've been re-reading the book, which I'd put aside and didn't finish -- totally in line with the wabi sabi embrace of incompleteness. Here's some passages from Kempton's book regarding what wabi sabi is all about.

The wabi sabi secret

In slowly peeling back the layers of mystery, this is what I have come to understand: the true beauty of wabi sabi 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 our lives.

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. Its 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. They give us tools for escaping the chaos and material pressures of modern life, so we can be content with less. And they remind us to look for beauty in the everyday, allowing ourselves to be moved by it and, in doing so, feeling gratitude for life itself.

...The life lessons wabi sabi can teach us, and that we will explore in this book, are rooted in the following ideas:

-- The world looks very different when you learn to see and experience it from your heart.
-- All things, including life itself, are impermanent, incomplete, and imperfect. Therefore, perfection is impossible, and imperfection is the natural state of everything, including ourselves.
-- There is great beauty, value, and comfort to be found in simplicity.

...Wabi sabi represents a precious cache of wisdom that values tranquility, harmony, beauty, and imperfection, and can strengthen our resilience in the face of modern ills.

More important, accepting imperfection doesn't mean having to lower standards or drop out of life. It means not judging yourself for being who you are: perfectly imperfect -- at once uniquely you and just like the rest of us. 

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.

...At its essence, the experience of wabi sabi is an intuitive response to beauty that reflects the true nature of things as they are. That is, a beauty that reminds us that everything is impermanent, imperfect, and incomplete.

This experience of wabi sabi is often felt in the presence of natural materials, which is why spending time in nature can be such a powerful experience. It reminds us that we are part of something miraculous. By momentarily lifting us out of the fog of to-do lists, chores, and overwhelming tasks, wabi sabi holds up a mirror to life's magnificence -- and in that mirror, we get a glimpse of ourselves.

The forest does not care what your hair looks like. The mountains don't move for any job title. The rivers keep running, regardless of your social-media following, your salary, or your popularity. The flowers keep on blooming, whether or not you make mistakes. Nature just is, and welcomes you, just as you are.

Our capacity to experience wabi sabi reconnects us to these truths, which allow us to feel, in the moment, unconditionally accepted.

Life makes more sense without any kind of god

Here's a guest blog post from someone I regularly communicate with via email. This recent message from the person resonated with me, because it echoes thoughts I frequently have about the absurdity of believing that life has a purpose imposed from outside of us. 

Like, from a god. Enjoy...

Hey Brian, how are you and yours doing?

My family and I are doing well. Lots of folks around us have COVID, but so far, we’ve managed to avoid it.

I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s interesting what hangs around in my head from religion. One thing that rears its ugly head on a fairly regular basis is the idea of purpose. The idea that my life has some specific purpose and I need to figure it out. Wow. Just typing that out feels like 200 lbs has been added to my shoulders. That’s a fucking heavy thing to carry around!

Of course, life purpose implies someone or something that gives purpose. Most feel it is “god” that does this. Well, now that I’m an atheist, that’s a problem!

You’ve written about this and I’m sure I’ve emailed you regarding this topic before. But it still amazes, and frustrates me, that I still struggle with this.

It seems to me that the idea of some specific purpose in life in more of a western culture idea and only if you have more than a little to a lot of money. You don’t have to go to India or Africa to find starving children, there are plenty here in the US. What is their purpose in life? I can’t imagine that they think about it much. Their main purpose is to get food!

Did early humans worry about some kind of ultimate purpose for their lives? I doubt it. They were just like any other mammal on the planet. Eat, sleep, reproduce. That was likely their main “purpose.”

I know all this, but it’s still hard to shake the idea of some kind of purpose that was so strongly instilled (brain washed) into me. “God has a specific plan for your life! You have to find out what it is and do it!”

I heard that message in one form or another for probably 20 years. I asked god about it on a regular basis. I prayed and prayed and cried and pleaded. You know what he said? Nothing! Ugh! It was so frustrating. Just thinking about all that makes me tense and irritable.

I think it’s funny that the memories of hearing about divine purpose come back to me when my job gets difficult, or life is unpleasant for whatever reason, etc. But it’s not surprising that this happens. After all, religion as a whole is kind of an escape from reality. Or at least the attempt at escaping reality.

You wrote a post right at 3 years ago that I found called No need to have a "calling." Just live your life. I read it before sending this email, and I’ll probably read it again. It pulls me back into reality and helps me relax.

I think it’s interesting that at one point, I would have said that without god, life doesn’t make sense. Now, the way I see it, is that without any kind of god, life seems to make more sense. It just is what it is.

Oh, and your last several posts have been very insightful and helpful to me. All your posts are good, but these last 5 or 6 have been very timely. Thanks again for sharing your ideas, insights, and things that you have been reading.

Talk to you again soon.

Open Thread 35 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread.

Remember, off-topic comments should go in an Open Thread. 

If you don't see a recent comment, or comments, posted, it's because you've failed to follow the above rule. Keep to the subject of a blog post if you leave a comment on it. And if you want to use this blog as a "chat room," do that in an open thread.

As noted before, it's good to have comments in a regular blog post related to its subject, and it's also good to have a place where almost anything goes in regard to sharing ideas, feelings, experiences, and such. That place is an Open Thread.

Leave a comment on this post about anything you want to talk about. Remember that I'm moderating comments, so it could take a while for your comment to be published. Almost every comment submitted to an Open Thread will be approved. Personal attacks on someone are an exception, as is hate speech. Argue with ideas, not insults.

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.

Stephen Bachelor has a beautiful take on Buddhist emptiness

In my shelf of Buddhist books, there's one called something like The Emptiness of Emptiness. I bought it for the title. The description of emptiness in the book left me confused.

Not so with the chapter on Emptiness in Stephen Bachelor's Buddhism Without Beliefs. 

Below are some extensive quotes from the chapter. Hope you enjoy them as much as I do. 

After reading, or rather re-reading, the final passage, I was reminded of an experience I had in college while stoned on mescaline. I related it in a 2007 post, Loosening the bounds of "I am..."

Might as well copy it in, since it relates quite well to what Bachelor says about our fluid self. 

I was with a group of fellow "stoners" who'd headed off to a San Jose-area park to be high with nature. The path we were on led around a hill.

I felt energetic and forged on ahead by myself. My feet were flying through the northern California landscape. Until I rounded a corner and saw a different sort of group on the left side of the trail a short ways ahead of me.

Bikers. Drinking beer. Next to their choppers. With their equally tough-looking old ladies. At the time San Jose was a headquarters for the Gypsy Jokers motorcycle gang, which had a reputation rivaling the Hells Angels.

I didn't know anything about the bikers I was walking toward. But my first reaction was that I was an isolated peaceful hippie dude stoned on mescaline with long hair, glasses, and a corduroy coat, and they were cultural near-opposites in almost every way. Not good.

However, something snapped in me the very next moment. As I walked nearer to them I didn't feel like there was any difference between us. I could see them looking at me. I looked at them. More, I became them.

"What's happening, man?" someone called out. "Hell if I know," I said with a smile. They laughed. I laughed. I felt like I could sit down with them, have a beer, and fit right in.

My fear vanished as soon as I stopped thinking "I am…" and "They are…" Sure, it was partly (or mostly) the mescaline talking, but I suddenly felt that I was them and they were me, and we were all in this park getting high together.

Not exactly akin to the Buddha's enlightened experience of selflessness under the Bodhi Tree. But, hey, I'll take a speck of understanding any way I can get it.

Passing the biker group I realized that "I am…" can be flexible and boundless, not rigid and restricted.

Some things we always are; some things we always aren't; but there's a huge store of being-possibilities available to us moment to moment.

Here's the quotes from Bachelor about emptiness. 

In everyday experience, one thing leads to the next. I become irritated by something S said to me and end up wanting to hit him. I imagine I see a snake in the pottery shed and freeze in terror. Everything that happens emerges out of what preceded it. Everything we do now becomes a condition for what is possible later.

We may speak of conditions and consequences as though they were things, but if we look more closely they turn out to be processes with no independent reality. 

The harshness of a barbed remark that haunts us for days is no more than a brief instance isolated from a torrent of events. Yet it stands out in the mind's eye as something intrinsically real and apart. This habit of isolating things leads us to inhabit a world in which the gaps between them become absolute.

The snake in the shed is really there, as sharply differentiated from the frightened person who beholds it as from the shards of discarded pottery on which it is coiled.

Clutching at ourselves and the world in this way is a precondition for anguish. 

By regarding things as absolutely separate and as desirable or fearful in themselves, we set ourselves the task of possessing something we can never have or of eradicating something that was never there in the first place. Noticing how things emerge from and fade back into an unbroken flow of conditions begins to free us a little.

We recognize how things are relatively, not absolutely, desirable or fearful. They interconnect and interact, each contingent on the others, no one of them intrinsically separate from the rest.

Whatever emerges in this way is devoid of an intrinsic identity: in other words, things are empty. They are not as opaque and solid as they seem: they are transparent and fluid. They are not as singular and straightforward as they seem: they are complex and ambiguous.

...The same is true for each one of us. Just as a potter forms a pot on the wheel, so I configure my personality from the spinning clay of my existence. The pot does not exist in its own right: it emerges from the interactions of the potter, the wheel, the clay, its shape, its function (each of which in turn emerges from the interactions of its causes and components ad infinitum).

...As a human being I am more complex than a pot or a daffodil, but I have also emerged from causes and am composed of diverse, changing features and traits. There is no essential me that exists apart from this unique configuration of biological and cultural processes.

...To know emptiness is not just to understand the concept. It is more like stumbling into a clearing in the forest, where suddenly you can move freely and see clearly. To experience emptiness is to experience the shocking absence of what normally determines the sense of who you are and the kind of reality you inhabit.

It may last only for a moment before the habits of a lifetime reassert themselves and close in once more. But for that moment, we witness ourselves and the world as open and vulnerable. This calm, free, open, and sensitive space is the very center of dharma practice

..."Emptiness" is a confusing term. Although used as an abstract noun, it does not in any way denote an abstract thing or state. It is not something we "realize" in a moment of mystical insight that "breaks through" to a transcendent reality concealed behind yet mysteriously underpinning the empirical world.

Nor do things "arise" from emptiness and "dissolve" back into it as though it were some kind of formless, cosmic stuff. These are just some of the ways emptiness has been appropriated as a metaphor of metaphysical and religious consolation.

...Emptiness is as devoid of intrinsic being as a pot, a banana, or a daffodil. And if there were no pots, bananas, or daffodils, there would be no emptiness either.

Emptiness does not deny that such things exist; it merely describes how they are devoid of an intrinsic, separate being. Emptiness is not apart from the world of everyday experience; it only makes sense in the context of making pots, eating bananas, and growing daffodils. 

A life centered in awareness of emptiness is simply an appropriate way of being in this changing, shocking, painful, joyous, frustrating, awesome, stubborn, and ambiguous reality.

Emptiness is the central path that leads not beyond this reality but right into its heart. It is the track on which the centered person moves. 

And we too are impressions left by something that used to be here. We have been created, molded, formed by a bewildering matrix of contingencies that have preceded us. 

From the patterning of the DNA derived from our parents to the firing of the hundred billion neurons in our brains to the cultural and historical conditioning of the twentieth century to the education and upbringing given us to all the experiences we have ever had and choices we have ever made: these have conspired to configure the unique trajectory that culminates in this present moment.

What is here now is the unrepeatable impression left by all of this, which we call "me." Yet so vivid and startling is this image that we confuse what is a mere impression for something that exists independently of what formed it.

So what are we but the story we keep repeating, editing, censoring, and embellishing in our heads? 

The self is not like the hero of a B-movie, who remains unaffected by the storms of passion and intrigue that swirl around him from the opening credits to the end. The self is more akin to the complex and ambiguous characters who emerge, develop, and suffer across the pages of a novel.

There is nothing thinglike about me at all. I am more like an unfolding narrative.

As we become aware of this, we can begin to assume greater responsibility for the course of our lives. Instead of clinging to habitual behavior and routines as a means to secure this sense of self, we realize the freedom to create who we are. Instead of being bewitched by impressions, we start to create them.

Instead of taking ourselves so seriously, we discover the playful irony of a story that has never been told in quite this way before.

Pre-scientific religious dogma shouldn't be trusted

As I said in my previous post (My #1 problem with Steve Hagen's 'The Grand Delusion"), the teachings of a ninth-century Zen master, Huang Po, shouldn't be given more credence than modern neuroscience.

After all, Huang Po, along with everybody else in those pre-scientific times, had no understanding of how the brain works. Naturally people knew how their mind seemed to work, but seeming is a long way from actuality. 

This is why Huang Po could claim that conception is totally different from perception. Now it is known that both conception and perception are founded on complex goings-on in the brain and are anything but simple. 

But those processes are hidden from view, so it seems that perception is akin to a mirror accurately reflecting what is before it. Actually, perception involves predictions by the brain based on past experiences and sometimes can't be trusted -- mirages and illusions being examples of this.

That said, I like how Buddhism is so non-religious, arguably it isn't even a religion. Sure, many Buddhists view it that way, as Stephen Bachelor writes in his appealing book, "Buddhism Without Beliefs."

If you go to Asia and visit a wat (Thailand) or gompa (Tibet), you will enter something that looks very much like an abbey, a church, or cathedral, being run by people who look like monks or priests, displaying objects that look like icons, which are enshrined in alcoves that look like chapels and revered by people who look like worshippers.

If you talk to one of the people who look like monks, you will learn that he has a view of the world that seems very much like a belief system, revealed a long time ago by someone else who is revered like a god, after whose death saintly individuals have interpreted the revelations in ways like theology. There have been schisms and reforms, and these have given rise to institutions that are just like churches.

Buddhism, it would seem, is a religion. 

Or, is it?

Well, it depends. Keep all that Bachelor describes above and you have a religion. Discard it, and you have a philosophy of life aimed at reducing anguish, which Bachelor prefers to the usual English word, suffering. 

I like how Buddhism is in line with modern neuroscience in how it denies the existence of an enduring self or soul. I also like how Buddhism reflects modern science in its notions of interdependency and ceaseless change, referred to by the potentially misleading term of emptiness. 

The way I see it, Buddhism, along with any other philosophy or approach to living, must continually evolve as fresh ideas and new facts about the world are known.

There's a parallel here between the view of the United States Constitution as a living document, or as a writing that should be interpreted through the views of those who wrote the Constitution in the late 1700s, otherwise known as originalism. An essay in the Atlantic on this subject concludes with a great line.

The Constitution should be the sturdy vessel of our ideals and aspirations, not a derelict sailing ship locked in the ice of a world far from our own.

This is how I feel about Buddhism revering outmoded views of pre-scientific Buddhists. It makes no sense to have the philosophy of Buddhism "locked in the ice of a world far from our own." Stephen Bachelor writes:

An agnostic Buddhist would not regard the dharma as a source of "answers" to questions of where we came from, where we are going, what happens after death. He would seek such knowledge in the appropriate domains: astrophysics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, etc. 

An agnostic Buddhist is not a "believer" with claims to revealed information about supernatural or paranormal phenomena, and in this sense is not "religious."

...The extent to which dharma practice has been institutionalized as a religion can be gauged by the number of consolatory elements that have crept in: for example, assurances of a better afterlife if you perform virtuous deeds or recite mantras or chant the name of a Buddha.

My #1 problem with Steve Hagen's "The Grand Delusion"

I'm a big fan of Steve Hagen's books about non-religious Buddhism. "Buddhism Plain and Simple" and "Buddhism is Not What You Think" really resonated with me. 

But his new book, "The Grand Delusion: What We Know But Don't Believe" elicited a lot of question marks in the margins. 

One problem I had with the book is that while Hagen's other books were marked by humility, this one has a heavy dose of grandiosity. Hagen sets out to solve every issue perplexing humanity, or more accurately, scientists. 

Consciousness. Quantum theory. Free will. Existence of God. All these topics, and more, supposedly are subject to The Grand Delusion -- a belief in substantiality, that things actually exist. 

OK, emptiness is a core Buddhist notion that I'm fine with. Nothing has inherent existence. Interdependency rules the cosmic roost.

Anything we can point to, like a coffee cup, doesn't stand by itself but is the result of countless interactions involving countless entities extending all the way back to the big bang and the creation of our universe.

While Hagen respects the conceptual thinking of scientists, and everybody else, he views concepts as a poor guide to what is genuinely real. Which supposedly is known by perception, not conception. 

I part company with Hagen on this assertion. He often quotes Huang Po, a ninth-century Zen Buddhist. In John Blofeld's translation, Huang Po says "The ignorant eschew phenomena but not thought; the wise eschew thought but not phenomena."

So Hagen speaks over and over of simply seeing. That's what reality is, what is perceived with no effort in everyday life. Sure, this is a Zen notion in line with chop wood and carry water. Just live a normal natural life and you're in touch with big "R" Reality.

Problem is, Huang Po had no idea of how the human mind and brain really work (the mind is the brain in action, though as we'll see, Hagen disputes this). I don't think we should rely on the pre-scientific assertions of Huang Po over modern neuroscience. 

Hagen is familiar with a lot of modern science. However, he fails to speak about neuroscience in nearly as much detail as he does physics, probably because he can use physics as an example of how science is confused about reality, whereas the findings of neuroscience point to Hagen's confusion about how perception works.

There is no such thing as "simply seeing." Seeing isn't simple. It requires much learning. What is learned essentially are perceptual concepts: shapes, colors, shadows, perspective, etc. Huang Po may have thought that seeing, or perception in general, is like a mirror reflecting an image. 

But this is wrong. Hagen even has an example of this in his book. 

He relates a story told by Oliver Sacks about a man who had been blind for forty-five years, "having had little more than an infant's visual experience, and this long forgotten." The man had his sight surgically restored in middle age. While he could see, it was "all mixed up, all meaningless, a blur." The man never could see normally.

This shows how important experience is to seeing. Somehow Hagen misses the point of his own example, saying, bizarrely, "Simply put, conception, as useful as it might be, is no substitute for perception." 

Huh? Conception makes it possible to see usefully. It enables infants to move from perceptual confusion to normal seeing, where that shape of color and light is Mommy, not just a blob. Who would want to trade normal seeing for mixed up, meaningless seeing? Not even Hagen, I suspect.

I have an even bigger problem with how Hagen looks upon consciousness and the brain in "The Grand Delusion," because his take on this is decidedly at odds with his frequent admonition to just see. I suspect he falls prey to Buddhist orthodoxy here, which is disappointing. 

What I see, what I know from direct experience, is that when I've been given anesthesia in several colonoscopies that I've had, I lose consciousness almost instantly. I then wake up with no memory of what happened during the procedure. So it seems clear that a chemical administered by the anesthesiologist impacts my brain, which becomes unconscious.

Same thing happens when a football player, or whoever, has a strong impact to the head. Unconsciousness results. There are countless (almost) examples of how changing the brain changes consciousness. This isn't a matter of abstract conception. It is a matter of seeing what happens. 

Yet here's some quotes from Hagen's book about the brain and consciousness. My comments are in red. 

People have noticed since the middle of the nineteenth century that there appears to be a correlation between conscious experience and brain activity. Unfortunately, serious study of that correlation over many decades has brought us no closer to understanding mind or consciousness. In fact, the more we investigate this apparent correlation, the more elusive a genuine understanding has become.

Absolutely false. Hagen needs to do more reading in modern neuroscience. A lot of progress is being made in correlating brain activity with consciousness. For example, it is now possible to predict quite accurately whether a patient is in a vegetative state from that activity.

Physical processes in the brain have never been demonstrated to give rise to subjective experience. We only assume that they do -- because there seems to be a correlation. 

Well, I assume Hagen would be fine with having his brain removed, since he is skeptical that physical processes in his brain cause his subjective experience. More seriously, Hagen doesn't put forward any other explanation for subjective experience. Because there are mysteries waiting to be revealed about how consciousness functions, Hagen denies all that science does know about the brain and consciousness.

The fact is, we have no evidence that consciousness even has an origin, let alone that it originates in matter... Consciousness will always remain a mystery for those who continue in their attempts to construct it from matter.

These baseless assertions show how Hagen has gone all-in on religious dogmatism when it comes to consciousness and the brain. There is lots of evidence that consciousness arises from the brain. There is zero demonstrable evidence of consciousness existing apart from a brain. Again, this is obvious from simply seeing how consciousness is altered or lost by physical changes to the brain. Hagen should try LSD, or just a strong cup of coffee, if he doubts this. 

Consciousness is not a thing and nothing produces it. 

Again, this is anti-scientific dogmatism. It would be honest if Hagen would say that while consciousness appears to be produced by the brain, there is a lot to learn about how this happens. Instead, Hagen veers off into his version of Buddhist orthodoxy, which places Mind as separate and distance from Matter. (I'd say that this isn't at all what Buddhism teaches, just how Hagen views Buddhism.)

How the RSSB guru was involved with Ranbaxy

If you want to know the truth about Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (an Indian religious organization), a great place to look is my compendium of comments left on this blog by "Tara" between 2010 and 2014. 

In 2018 I compiled the 27,000 words worth of comments into a post, "Devastating criticism of Gurinder Singh Dhillon by a RSSB insider."

The comments, though not entirely negative in regard to Dhillon, paint a different picture of the guru than devotees see when he sits on a stage and talks about spiritual subjects.

In a recent comment on this blog, someone raised the question of who orchestrated the sale of Ranbaxy, a pharmaceutical company controlled at the time by Malvinder Singh, a relative of the RSSB guru. 

I shared one of the comments by "Tara" that said it was Dhillon who advised on the sale. That got me to thinking it would be interesting to see what other mentions of Ranbaxy were in other comments by Tara.

I've shared all of those mentions below. They make for interesting reading, especially if the reader is concerned about how a guru supposedly focused on God-realization became so enmeshed in gigantic business deals and making he and his family hugely rich to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Enjoy... the comments are in reverse chronological order, so the most recent ones by "Tara" appear first.

Catherine, a few corrections : Parminder Singh died in Delhi in 1999 following a prolonged battle with cancer. His sons, Shivinder Mohan Singh and Malvinder Mohan Singh ( now known as the Singh Brothers ) succeeded him. Ranbaxy was always a professionally managed company in the days of Dr. Singh, but following his passing, many differences between the board and the promoters crept in.

 

Gurinder is said to have played his part. Malvinder Singh sought to muscle in after an eruption of disagreements with the professional CEO — D.S Brar, one of the oldest employees of Ranbaxy who was instrumental along with Dr. Singh in shaping the vision for Ranbaxy. Brar resigned in 2004 and it was all downhill for Ranbaxy from there. Malvinder Singh re-shuffled the board and took control. By the end of it — price wars, reduced profitability, debt and expiring patents got the better of Ranbaxy.

 

In mid 2008, the Singh Brothers decided to sell the family's 64% stake to Daiichi Sankyo in a deal that was too overwhelmingly overvalued to decline. In just months after their takeover, the Japanese realized that they were stung in the backside, and Malvinder Singh was politely told to leave. Read : http://business.rediff.com/column/2009/jun/05/malvinder-singhs-ranbaxy-report-card.htm

 

Please note that there was always some confusion about Dr. Singh's name : Parminder or Parvinder, you'll find half the articles on one name and the other half on the other. A short biography of Dr. Singh can be found here... Read : http://www.sikh-history.com/sikhhist/personalities/parvinder.html Gurinder affair with the Singh Brother's had already begun in 2006 with the inception of Religare, the financial services company that he mentored.

 

The sale of Ranbaxy gave Religare the shot of capital that it needed. Whatever transpired between them, it is quite clear that Gurinder's wealth was created by the opportunity that he found or was given to him — by the Singh Brothers. But, it is also important to note that Gurinder may have made a number of important and correct decisions for the Singh Brothers after Dr. Singh's demise.

 

Of course, selling the golden goose for ten thousand golden eggs is debatable, but with the valuation that Ranbaxy got, it would have taken an extremely conservative and competent man to say no and walk the company back to a second term of success. But then again, Gurinder's role as the family's Guru and business advisor, coupled with his own personal business agenda, was a bit too entwined to do any differently.

 

IMO, I think RSSB should seriously consider updating Gurinder's wikipedia information to include Religare. Unless of course, like everything else, he wants to keep 'em guessing !

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Okay... Charan was a different man. He was not interested in Ranbaxy and the politics, and often told Parminder to manage his professional journey outside Beas. He was clear about his role as the head of RSSB and did not mix that with a side-business. His own son is working for Fortis today. Had Charan taken advantage of his proximity to Parminder, his sons would have been shareholders, three decades ago !

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Nietzsche. Great ! You've made the effort to backtrack into Gurinder's current financial status and what you've stated sums up the facts very well. I'm relieved that what I've been harping about on the COTC ( that makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist in the process ) has some validation from an independent fellow blogger... :)

 

My additional thoughts are : Gurinder ordered the Ranbaxy sell-out, and as a faith policy, Shivinder and Malvinder do not over-rule anything HE decides. The final " go ahead boys " was given by Gurinder. I know this because the celebratory cheers resounded with a boisterous " Baba-ji does not make any mistakes ! " that came from none other than Sunil Godhwani, Baba-ji's right-hand man.

 

Before the news hit the press, everyone knew that a chunk of that booty would be pumped into Religare. Of course, Ranbaxy's health was generously inflated, but the sell-out was the best possible move from a financial standpoint — considering that the Singh Brothers made quite a mess of the succession when they inherited the company, which subsequently reflected in the company's performance over the years.

 

There was a joke in the corporates circles here that Parminder Singh was in a big shock in heaven when he learnt that Gurinder had advised his sons to sell Ranbaxy. His reaction was : " What ? Who the f*** is he ? " ( LOL ) This entire Religare affair that Gurinder's having with the Singh Brothers is in direct conflict with his role as a Guru, whether he's teaching 1.0 or 3.0. His insatiable appetite for wealth is sick, specially when there is no charitable initiative for the poorer sections of the Sangat that make up for ninety-five percent of his following.

 

IMO, Gurinder wants them to remain hungry and foolish otherwise they will not be interested in the salvation promise, which is why I think that Sant Mat 3.0 will never be introduced to the langar. You are absolutely right about the Mc-Donald's style of operations at Fortis. Also, the services they provide are the Micky-D's equivalent of fries and nuggets. It is all about the money, with little regard for ethical practice and human life.

 

But, it is interesting to note that post Ranbaxy, none of the Singh Brothers' businesses have been particularly profitable. It is too early to call, but Fortis is struggling. And, going forward, the competition will intensify. Religare is hemorrhaging under the acumen-devoid leadership of Sunil Godhwani and is showing no signs of recovering. Religare continually gets mini bail-outs from the huge cash reserves that the Singh Brothers are currently sitting on, but the well could dry-up in less than a decade if their current run continues.

 

It is also possible that Gurinder could make some bad ( not-so-GIHF ) decisions. Our comments here are forming a valuable archive for those who will seek to find out more, specially after the radical shift in the Sant Mat teachings. I like the Japanese quote, it applies to all of us.

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Nietzsche. No ! No ! Lets get this straight. Analjit Singh has not become rich on the backs of his nephews — the Singh Brothers. He was Bhai Mohan Singh's youngest son and Parminder Singh's youngest brother. Following a family division in 1989, the pharma business ( Ranbaxy ) went to his older brother ( Parminder ) and he got the smaller Max India. Has since built it into $1 billion ( sales ) Max Group with interests in healthcare, insurance, clinical research and packaging.

 

Currently, his healthcare business ( Max Hospitals ) is the biggest competitor of Fortis Healthcare, which is the healthcare business of the Singh Brothers. They are business rivals and the two families have never had any commercial alliance with each other after they parted ways in the Charan Singh days. Of course, they have often dragged each other to court over petty disputes ( a small property or some section of Bhai Mohan Singh's will ) but it was Analjit who got the raw deal when his father preferentially gave Ranbaxy to his oldest son.

 

For more on Analjit, this article sums it up well : http://business.in.com/article/boardroom/analjit-singhs-futureproof-strategy/24072/1 Gurinder's two sons, Gurpreet Singh Dhillon and Gurkirat Singh Dhillon can be found on the Indian Billionaires Club on the website here : http://www.indiastudychannel.com/resources/87721-Billionaire-Club-Ranking.aspx

 

Okay friend, stop looking for Gurinder on that list ! He's way smarter than that. The legitimate money is in his sons' names who live in London. It is highly likely that the larger ill-legit amounts are off-shored safely in the private banks of Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

 

His sons lead a rather discreet life in London. Most of their friends do not even know who their father is ! I can't find the latest rankings where they are at 355 / 356, but this rating ranks them at 360 / 361 respectively. ( I'll tell someone to search it out and I'll post it later ! )

 

Another correction — Ranbaxy was not sold last year, it was in the June of 2008. Immediately after that ( in July ) the Singh Brothers formally changed the name of Fortis Financial Ltd. to Religare Enterprises Ltd. The name " Religare " was chosen / approved by Gurinder. ( The etymology of the word « religion » in latin : Religare, means to bind. )

 

What else ? Hmmm... Yeah, there is a ton of stuff on Ranbaxy's dubious business practices. They were quite infamous for their animal testing methods, that is fine, but the promoters followed a rigid spiritual path that did not permit mayo. Oops ! Gurinder is the only " relative " who is a business partner and has made big money with the Singh Brothers. The rest of them are high paid employees, like Charan's son Cuckoo who works for Fortis Hospitals.
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Familial Ties / Religare: Gurinder is Charan's nephew (his sister's son) and back in the day, Charan had nothing to do with Dr. Parminder Singh's (his son-in-law) fortunes. Nimmie (Charan's daughter) had a rather turbulent relationship with her husband (Dr. Parminder Singh) and Charan was often involved in resolving their marital issues. Towards the end Nimmie and Parminder were living separately.

In Charan's guru-days, Gurinder was just another member of the extended family. The Grewal's (Charan's family) and the Dhillon's (Gurinder's family) were not very close, nor were Gurinder and Nimmie (cousins). But, Charan was always very fond of Gurinder, who was (at that time) a simple man from a modest financial background, dedicated to his Guru Uncle.

Gurinder was working at the Hyatt Regency, New Delhi (as an Assistant Food & Beverage Manager there) and his career wasn't exactly going places. It was Charan who lined up a job for him with the Bilani's in Spain and Gurinder would scour China / HK and other Asian countries for watch parts. From a job in a hotel to a billionaire businessman? Like they say, you've come a long way baby... :)

Dr. Parminder Singh was an industry captain and a visionary exemplar. A lot changed after his demise in 1999. His sons (Malvinder and Shivinder) were very young and inexperienced at the time, and Ranbaxy was being run by a group of professionals headed by D.S Brar (then MD & CEO, a non-family member) who was instrumental (along with Dr. Singh) in transforming Ranbaxy from a small Indian pharmaceutical company into a research-based global pharmaceutical major.

The disagreements over Ranbaxy's international expansion strategy between Brar and the family surfaced in 2002 and Brar exited before the end of his term, leaving what happened behind the boardroom doors a mystery. An analyst, commenting on the Ranbaxy succession planning issue, said - "The question, however, uppermost in most people's mind is: (that) does the decision reflect a tussle between the promoter and professional management in which the promoter eventually had his way." Initially,

Gurinder was just playing an advisory role to the Singh Brothers. Soon, that "advisory role" turned into a full-time consultancy of sorts and it was soon heard that Malvinder & Shivinder "don't make a move" without HIS advise.

That "HIS" was Gurinder - a backstage operator in Ranbaxy's succession that led to Malvinder quickly taking up the post of MD & CEO in what was once a professionally run company. In the months that followed, Gurinder and the Singh Brothers became inseparable when it came to taking business decisions. Then in December 2005, Gurinder announced to his family and close friends that he will not be giving business advise to any one after the turn of the year!

 

Who knows, maybe the Singh brother's thought of "including" him in some way and it was around that time Fortis was launched as a financial services company, which was then re-named Religare... (I can bet this name was Gurinder's pick, the definition of Religare is mentioned somewhere on the RSSB website in an essay with reference to religion and spirituality.)

 

Gurinder is very shrewd, it would take a very smart person to do what he is doing. Keeping everyone's faith while making a great deal of money is not something that all of us can pull off. Of course, he has an added advantage of playing "God" so he gets away unquestioned and unscrutinized. I doubt if Dr. Parminder Singh would have approved of any of this.

 

Charan Singh (Parminder's father-in-law) was not his business advisor! It is common knowledge that Ranbaxy and RSSB were separate entities during Charan's tenure - one was into the pharma business while the other was into the God business... In fact, Charan had his hands full with the politics within the Dera and wholly discouraged any kind of business association with himself or RSSB trust.

If you take a look into the Ranbaxy archives, there is no trace of Gurinder or any of his immediate family members being associated to Ranbaxy or to Dr. Parminder Singh and Nimmie Singh in any way - through employment, through shareholding, through inheritance.

The fact that one of Charan's two sons is working in Fortis today (you can confirm this on the Fortis website, his name is Jasbir Grewal aka Cuckoo) and has no shareholding in either Religare or Fortis clearly shows that Charan did not take advantage of his familial relationships, else shouldn't his son be richer than his nephew ( Gurinder ) today? I would also like to add here that Gurinder and his sons are the only family members who are shareholders in the Singh brothers' businesses. It is not like there is a consortium of familial relations managing these companies.

Relatives are employed, but share-holding has been reserved only for the Guru and his sons. I can tell you for certain that no uncle or aunt of Gurinder had gifted him the initial capital (millions of dollars) to invest in Religare. Gurinder comes from a humble past, and for those who think that he has hectares "farmland" it may be good to know a fact - Gurinder and his immediate family are not agricultural industrialists of Punjab. A few acres of wheat and mustard produce cannot buy pre-issued shares in a global financial services company!

If you read the Religare prospectus, the shares were transferred to his sons at a pre-issue price of INR 10 before the IPO was launched. Like I said in my earlier comment, I see no reason for the Singh Brothers to part with the shareholding if there wasn't something in it for them.

 

That is why, IMO, the RSSB trust-funds cross-holdings with Religare is not such a smokin' conspiracy theory after all. I do not think that Gurinder and his family are directly siphoning out money from the RSSB trust. However, there is an institution in place (Religare) which manages the RSSB trust-funds, and in turn helps the Guru and his family profiteer from it. It is a legal v/s moral issue and if you look at this from a pure " Sant Mat " perspective, all of it looks terribly wrong!

This is not your average Wall Street banker we're discussing, this is GIHF - the Perfect Living Master, the Param Sant Sat Guru of Kalyug. The plethora of RS teachings now looks like a bigger pile of BS ! What ever happened to " Honest Living " I wonder... Gurinder's younger son - Gurkirat Singh Dhillon is the youngest billionaire on the Indian Billionaires List. The children of other billionaires are the inheritors of business legacies or are first-generation entrepreneurs - their success stories are a Google search away.

 

Gurinder's older son lives in a posh apartment in Mayfair, London. Has he earned it, or is it a by-product of having a Guru-dad ? My concern is for the poor villager who takes out his INR 10 to put into the RSSB money-box. That INR 10 could also buy him another meal. Something to think about - specially when salvation does not seem to be happening.

 

Well, I don't think we'll find Gurinder absconding one day, my guess is that he may head out in an autonomous direction (the signs are already there) and may even renunciate his leadership and Guru-status in the years to come. This may be a long shot, but like all things RSSB - it will be well orchestrated and the Sangat will be satisfied.
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SKat, Please read http://business.in.com/printcontent/932 and that should put the real facts in line. If Ranbaxy was all that cash rich, why did they sell out ? So, they sold the golden goose for ten thousand golden eggs ? Really ? Was it the current trend of intensifying generic competition and increased government regulation that got to them ?

It is common knowledge that Ranbaxy became debt-free after the deal and got $1 billion in cash to pursue inorganic growth opportunities more aggressively. It is also common knowledge that Parminder Singh would have wholly disapproved of Malvinder's business approach. Back in the day, Ranbaxy had one of the renowned R&D departments in the pharmaceutical sector. Many patents on drugs were about to expire industry wide, which would have allowed other pharma companies to innovate and produce products at lower costs.

The Daiichi-Ranbaxy deal was valued at 4.3 times sales and 21 times EBITDA on historical earnings. Malvinder wouldn't have got a better catch than Daiichi. He got the Japanese - hook, line and sinker ! And, the Parkway Hospital in-and-out deal was the only option as a bidding war with Khazanah would have bled them. Nothing wrong with a " good deal " though Corporate India did expect the Singh brothers to resist ! Instead, Malvinder came back with all bags packed and a neat pile of money.

From your comment it seems likely that you probably know that RSSB trust funds were ( and continue to be diverted ) to Religare. Do you see another reason for the Guru's two sons being shareholders ? What was Gurinder's financial status prior to becoming the Guru ? Of course, you don't have to answer this, but I'm sure that if you know the Head of Treasury and Head of Finance at Religare, you know the truth.

 

And, in this case, they more than hint about the Guru's involvement. It is all very risky, and you probably also know that that if this is publicly proved, it may spell disaster for the RSSB cult. By the way ( as tAo well noted ) we at the Church of the Churchless had nothing to do with the near-collapse of the global banking system ! Gurinder is a bigger fraud than all those bankers combined and he hails from our land. Besides, how different are the business practices of Mukesh Ambani, Malvinder Singh and co. in this country for you to be pulling out a fair-play card ?
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( The Singh brothers cannot be considered " family " in this regard as they " got into business " with Gurinder only in 2006, prior to which Gurinder had nothing to do with Ranbaxy and had no business of his own. ) B. There is no road-map to indicate how the Guru and his sons became ( now the largest ) shareholders of a two billion dollar company... ( ?? ) C. Why were shares transferred at a pre-issue price to Gurpreet and Gurkirat only ? Why is Gurpreet nowhere to be seen on the Religare India website ? Why is he tucked away in London ? Why has he never been interviewed ?

Here's what meditation is and isn't, from a Buddhist perspective

People have a lot of different views about what meditation is and isn't. I've changed my mind on this subject considerably. 

For thirty-five years I viewed meditation as a way to access a supernatural realm of reality, have mystical experiences, and realize God. But that's a narrow perspective, something I realize now.

Currently I embrace a form of meditation that is vaguely Buddhist, even though I don't consider myself a devotee of Buddhism. I enjoy being as fully aware as possible of what is happening both inside and outside me, within my mind and without in the world. 

Which, I suppose, could be called mindfulness. 

This morning I started reading a book by Steve Hagen, "Meditation Now or Never." I thought I'd read all of Hagen's books, but somehow I'd missed this one until recently.

It's good. Short, simple, direct. In all of his writings Hagen takes religion out of Buddhism, which leaves the Buddha's original teachings, insofar as it is possible to discern what they were.

Below are excerpts from a right-on chapter, Things Mistaken for Meditation. It turns out that almost everything I thought was meditation for those thirty-five years actually isn't. At least, not from a Buddhist viewpoint. 

Let's start, though, with what Hagen says meditation is. 

Meditation is, finally, just to be here. Not over there, in some other place called peace or freedom or enlightenment. Not longing for something else. Not trying to be, or to acquire, something new or different. Not seeking benefit. 

We need to understand that the wanting mind is the antithesis of the mind of meditation. The mind of meditation is a mind not driven by desires and fears and longings.

Indeed, a mind that seeks to rid itself of these painful mental qualities is already the dissatisfied and confused mind from which we seek to free ourselves. 

When we desire the desirelessness, we remain trapped in desire. When we want the wantlessness, we bind ourselves with yet another chain.

And here's the excerpts regarding what Hagen says meditation isn't. 

Relaxation. If your goal is to temporarily calm down, a simple relaxation technique is helpful. If, however, you want to experience a mind that is present and collected, this is the mind of meditation. Meditation, in other words, is not a quick fix. It's long-term -- that is, it's a lifelong approach to peace of mind, tranquility, and stability.

Visualization. With visualization, you actively conjure up images in your mind. In meditation, however, there's no deliberate effort to conjure up anything, or to create any mental phenomena. Plenty of them will bubble up anyway, and in meditation, we don't try to hold on to them or drive them out. Contrary to visualization, in meditation we allow our mental images to freely come and go.

Trance. In most trance meditations, you turn inward and tune out awareness of your surroundings, your body, and your mind. Your attention becomes filed down to a very narrow, still point, which can feel temporarily blissful. But every trance is itself temporary. When you come out of it, you're back to all of the problems and confusion that were there when you went into it. There's no transformation.

Supernatural powers. But meditation is not about acquiring anything. In fact, it's about getting rid of the clutter of our mental lives. It's an act of mental housecleaning... Meditation is not about acquiring supernatural powers. It's about being present and living life completely... If you think about what you're getting from this moment, you're not in this moment. 

Going beyond. Another misunderstanding about meditation is that it's a bodily form of philosophical inquiry, a method for breaking through some cosmic mystery to a transcendent reality beyond our everyday world. Meditation is not about any "beyond." Truth and Reality are right here, in plain view. They are not vague or far away... In meditation, we see that there is no cosmic mystery to break through.

Enlightenment. You can't become enlightened. It's not possible. You can't become enlightened for the same reason that you can't come into contact with Truth: you're already here, immersed in it. It's like trying to become human, or searching high and low for air. When we search for enlightenment, we're like a fish searching for water or a bird seeking the sky.

Escaping from reality. Sometimes people get the idea that meditation is about escaping from our lives, or our painful feelings, or even Reality itself. In fact, meditation is just the opposite It's about settling down and facing Reality. In meditation we investigate our own mind openly and honestly, without denying anything. We see how we tell ourselves stories about ourselves, about others, and about the world.

Bliss. Many people come to meditation hoping to experience bliss, euphoria, ecstasy, or some superconscious state of mind. Many spiritual practices and exercises aim at inducing such states. But so can any number of things, both good and not so good -- a gorgeous sunrise, rapturous music, sex, street drugs, or even a double expresso. Meditation is not about creating any particular feeling. Meditation is about awareness, about waking up to Reality.

Spiritual thoughts. Occasionally, people use meditation to try to experience lofty or highly spiritual thoughts. These thoughts are just more distractions, more forms of delusion. In meditation, whether our thoughts are lofty or low, mundane or spiritual, we view them in the same way. We allow them, and whatever else comes up, to appear and to pass away.

Quick cure. Lastly, meditation is not a quick cure for anything. It won't magically heal your illness or fix your depression or get rid of your loneliness. It won't provide comfort or solace or nurturing, at least not the kind we typically look for to try to temporarily ease our pain. Instead, the practice of meditation involves transformation. 

...Through our effort of coming back again and again to this moment, where all of us live, we learn how to live in this world with sanity, intelligence, and true compassion.

 

What is versus what might be -- a rationale for atheism

There are several reasons why I'm a proud atheist. For example, atheism is firmly grounded in reality, since there is no demonstrable evidence that a god exists. Hence the "a" before theism. 

Atheism also is humble. I'm not saying that all atheists are humble, just that not believing in a god is inherently humble, since there is no way to feel that you're part of a god's chosen people if you don't believe in a god.

Here's another reason. 

Atheism is focused on what is, not what might be. In contrast, religions have the opposite focus, on what might be rather than what is. Now, obviously this is closely tied to the first reason above, the grounding of atheism in reality.

Mostly I hang out with other atheists. This isn't a conscious choice. It is just a natural outcome of the sort of friends and family I have. They're mostly people who embrace science and facts, in addition to the many other possible things people embrace, like art and politics. 

In our conversations, obviously there is zero talk of what happens after death or an afterlife. Religious believers, though, love to talk about heaven, reincarnation, spending eternity with God, and so on. 

The fact that there's no good reason to believe in this stuff doesn't bother them. Hey, it might be true, and that's good enough for people who value fantasy and wishful thinking over what is -- indisputable reality.

Of course, us atheists, along with everybody else, have to strike a balance between attending to what is versus what might be. Planning for the future is as much a part of being human as living in the now is. They're both essential for a fulfilling life.

To offer up an example from my life, a few days ago I wrote a post on one of my other blogs, "My geeky search for the perfect winter tire." As I said in the post, the first question I faced was whether I should get winter tires for the 2020 Subaru Crosstrek that I bought last February. 

That was easy for me to answer.

My wife and I live in a part of Oregon where it can be snowy or icy in late fall, winter, and maybe even early spring. We don't get a lot of snow and ice, none at all the last two years, but when it happens, it's tough to drive around. We live in the south Salem hills, so some roads, along with our driveway, are steep.

And often the temperature is close to freezing when snow or ice hits. That makes roads more slippery than the dry snow common in the mid-West, which also is quite flat. 

So based on my experience of what has been, a close cousin of what is, I decided to order a set of winter tires yesterday -- a new Michelin model, the X-Ice Snow. I recalled how we haven't been able to get up our driveway in the snow with an all-wheel-drive car that had all-season tires, whereas a front-wheel drive car with winter tires did just fine. So an all-wheel drive car with winter tires will be super-fine.

But it would be crazy for someone to buy winter tires if they lived on a place near the equator where it never has snowed or been icy. In this case the odds of needing winter tires to drive around is close to zero. Possible, but extremely unlikely.

That's comparable to religious people planning for an afterlife when it is extremely unlikely that they'll have one.

There's a cost to religiosity, to acting on the basis of a very low probability of might be. Whereas the cost of winter tires is monetary, the cost of religious belief is using one's limited lifetime for activities that aren't based on clear and present reality.

I'm going to feel good when the winter tires are put on my Crosstrek, because I have a solid factual basis for believing there might be snow or ice in our area in the next four or five months. However, no one has a solid factual basis for believing there might be an afterlife, because those facts don't exist.

They might exist someday, though.

Just as if global warming continues to increase, there could come a time when winter tires are needed in Western Oregon just as much as they're needed now at the equator -- never. Keeping an open mind to new facts enables us to preserve a healthy relationship between what is and what might be.

Here's a passage from a recent issue of New Scientist that bears on this.

One of the special things about science is its inbuilt system of self-correction. There is no such thing as scientific truth, just a set of provisional truths that are subject to revision or rejection when new information comes in. That process isn't always quick or peaceful, but it usually gets an answer in the end. The result is scientific progress.

Adyashanti book confirms my commitment to secular spirituality

Recently someone who asked if I'd like to be a guest on her podcast (I would!) responded to an email I sent her which said, in part, "I’m sort of in the spiritual-but-not-religious camp. However, I’m not sure if 'spiritual' has any meaning for an atheist."

She replied, saying, "The intersection I think we may intersect is this kind of secular spirituality pursuit. Would you say that's a phrase you kind of resonate with? That's the sense I get from your writings."

Sure. Typically secular means not-religious, not-spiritual, not-sacred. But I like the idea of mixing two seemingly contradictory ideas into the notion of secular spirituality. 

That preserves the useful notion of spirituality as a quest to lay bare the deeper meaning of life, to dig deeper into what it means to be human. And it makes clear that this quest has nothing to do with supernatural B.S. or mystical mumbo-jumbo.

Which goes a long way toward explaining why I quickly decided to stop reading a book by Adyashanti, "Emptiness Dancing." 

I ordered it from Amazon after listening to ten minutes of an interview Sam Harris did with Adyashanti on Harris' Waking Up iPhone app. It had been a while since I'd gotten a new book about Zen Buddhism, and I found Adyashanti making quite a bit of sense in the interview.

In retrospect, I should have paid more attention to the fact that the guy didn't have his original name of Stephen Gray.

By and large, I find that books written by people with assumed "spiritual" names don't appeal to me, because this shows that the author has bought into some sort of dogma where giving up your birth name is seen as desirable for some mysterious reason.

Still, I enjoy Zen Buddhism when it is stripped of religious crap. It didn't take more than a few pages of reading Emptiness Dancing before I realized that this book wasn't for me, since alarm bells began ringing in my mind when I came to these passages. The italicized part is my thought when I read them.

p.2  "Let go of all ideas and images in your mind, they come and go and aren't even generated by you." Oh, yeah? That's news to me. Where else would stuff in my mind come from if not from me -- both the unconscious and conscious mind of me?

p.3 "What arose was an image of what seemed like an infinite number of past incarnations, as if heads were lined up one behind another as far back as I could see." Ugh. A Zen Buddhist who believes in reincarnation, a thoroughly religious concept. 

p. 7 "We realize our own pure awareness and see that what we are is pure spirit with no form. We recognize that formless spirit is the essence, the animating presence of everything." One pure in a sentence is bad enough, two is insufferable. Any resemblance to genuine Zen is purely coincidental in Adyashanti.

Adding to my irritation with Adyashanti's book was how he spun his supposed enlightenment experience. One moment he was his ordinary self. The next moment he'd achieved... something or other. He says that suddenly "Everything was a reflection of that One thing. Everything was divine."

OK, that's cool. But everybody has amazing experiences. Few people, though, set themselves up as teachers where they try to get other people to have the same experience they had. Tellingly, Adyashanti says he had the thought, "Oops. I just woke up out of Zen!"

No kidding. I've never read a Zen book that speaks of heaven, but Adyashanti does. Apparently he's calling his own personal philosophy "Zen" even though it bears little resemblance to Zen Buddhism. 

After I put "Emptiness Dancing" aside with a feeling of relief, I picked up a book of Sam Harris's interviews with fascinating scientists, mostly. I read about the promise and pitfall of artificial intelligence, machines that soon will surpass human intelligence. It was refreshing to focus on something real rather than Adyashanti's forays into whatever his Oneness consists of.

Understand: I'll all for meditation. That's why I've meditated every day for over fifty years. I believe in mental exercises, just as I believe in physical exercises.

I also agree with Adyashanti and Sam Harris that it is possible, and beneficial, to come to a realization that our feeling of being an enduring"self" is an illusion. I just don't believe that an organized spiritual practice is needed to get in touch with what each of us already is -- a being without a lasting self.

I snapped this photo in early September of the view through the window of the room where I do my morning reading and meditating. I was struck by how my view of the curving metal dragon sculpture stuck in the ground next to a large fern was so nicely situated between two bonsai "trees" in a planter in front of the window.

Today I was struck by something different -- the absence of the sculpture.

At first I thought it had gotten hidden behind some fern fronds. But as I looked more closely, I saw that the dragon was still there. High winds yesterday had turned it sideways, so all that was visible was the thin edge of the dragon sculpture. You can see that edge in the "V" above the bottom of a bridge that's part of the bonsai planter.

This seemed like an apt metaphor. When we face the world head on, making a big deal of ourselves, considering that how we view things is the way everybody should, our sense of self is magnified.

But when we make a subtle change, turning sideways to the world, feeling how small we are compared to the vast cosmos, accepting that everyone has their own view of how things should be, our sense of self is diminished.

I bounce back and forth between these perspectives, as most of us do. And that's fine.

Some days I feel like facing the world head on. Other days I feel like turning aside and letting the world slide by me. I don't think it is possible to do anything else, though Adyashanti apparently believes he has become One With Everything.

Maybe. I doubt it, though.

"A good traveller has no fixed plans," says Lao Tzu

The Eastern religion that I was an active member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), liked to talk of being on "the path." (One of the RSSB books is called "The Path of the Masters.")

Well, my attitude toward religious or spiritual paths has changed a lot. And it keeps changing. 

More and more, I'm convinced that not only is there no evidence that any path leads to God or some supernatural reality, it isn't even wise for someone to consider that they're on a life path in this physical world. 

At least, that's how I see it. Naturally others are free to disagree. 

Below you'll find some passages I liked in the final chapter of "The Antidote" by Oliver Burkeman. They talk about the desirability of not craving certainty, of not feeling you are on a path that must lead to a certain destination. 

This isn't the way life works for most of us. Heck, maybe all of us. I got to thinking about this as I was exercising this afternoon in my covid crisis fashion.

Since my wife and I don't feel comfortable with going to our athletic club, I've been exercising at home. I've bought several pieces of home exercise equipment, including the Nucleus Central Core Pro, a simple device that I'm enjoying. 

After exercising a certain way for quite a few years, now I'm doing things differently. And that's been the case my whole life.

From high school into my 30s, I played a lot of competitive tennis. I also jogged. Then I took up karate in my early 40s. For the past sixteen years I've been a student of Tai Chi. So my physical exercise habits keep on changing. 

Same with my mental exercise habits.

I've meditated every day for over fifty years, starting in 1969. But I've experimented with different meditation approaches over the years. Mindfulness and following the breath appeal to me now, whereas for a long time I enjoyed mantra meditation, silently repeating a word or words.

Being frozen in place isn't really living. Life is fluid, always changing. That's one of the messages of Burkeman's book, as reflected in these passages.

Sometimes the most valuable of all talents is to be able not to seek resolution; to notice the craving for completeness or certainty or comfort, and not to feel compelled to follow where it leads.

...More loosely defined, 'negative capability' is really just another term for living in accordance with the 'backwards law' -- and it might be a good label to describe the chief talent I kept discovering among the people I encountered in the course of researching this book. 

What they all shared was this same turn of mind, which I came to visualise as a sort of graceful mental dance step: a willingness to adopt an oblique stance toward one's own inner life; to pause and take a step back; to turn to face what others might flee from; and to realise that the shortest apparent route to a positive mood is rarely a sure path to a more profound kind of happiness.

The phrase 'negative capability' also helps to clarify a subtle double meaning in the word 'negative'. It refers both to a set of skills that involve 'not-doing', as opposed to doing -- a negative kind of capability -- as well as to the fact that this skill involves confronting negative (as in 'unpleasant') thoughts, emotions, and situations.

The point here is not that negative capability is always superior to the positive kind. Optimism is wonderful; goals can sometimes be useful; even positive thinking and positive visualisation have their benefits.

The problem is that we have developed the habit of chronically overvaluing positivity and the skills of 'doing' in how we think about happiness, and we chronically undervalue negativity and the 'not-doing' skills, such as resting in uncertainty or getting friendly towards failure.

To use an old cliche of therapy, we spend too much of our lives seeking 'closure'.

...For the Stoics, the realisation that we can often choose not to be distressed by events, even if we can't choose events themselves, is the foundation of tranquility. For the Buddhists, a willingness to observe the 'inner weather' of your thoughts and emotions is the key to understanding that they need not dictate your actions.

Each of these is a different way of resisting the 'irritable reaching' after better circumstances or better thoughts and feelings. But negative capability need not involve embracing an ancient philosophy or religious tradition.

It is also the skill you're exhibiting when you move forward with a project -- or with life -- in the absence of sharply defined goals; when you dare to inspect your failures; when you stop trying to eliminate feelings of insecurity; or when you put aside 'motivational' techniques in favour of actually getting something done.

...And the end result of all this? The chief benefit of 'openture', Paul Pearsall claimed, is not certitude or even calm or comfort as we normally think of them, but rather the 'strange, excited comfort [of] being presented with, and grappling with, the tremendous mysteries life offers'.

Ultimately, what defines the 'cult of optimism' and the culture of positive thinking -- even in its most mystically tinged, New Age forms -- is that it abhors a mystery. It seems to make things certain, to make happiness permanent and final. And yet this kind of happiness -- even if you do manage to achieve it -- is shallow and unsatisfying.

The greatest benefit of negative capability -- the true power of negative thinking -- is that it lets the mystery back in.

...The aforementioned Paul Pearsall, inventor of 'openture', spent a large part of his life waging a lonely battle of which John Keats would surely have approved: to get the concept of 'awe' accepted by the psychological establishment as one of the primary human emotions, alongside such standards as love, joy, anger, fear, and sadness.

'Unlike all the other emotions,' he argued, awe 'is all of our feelings rolled up into one intense one. You can't peg it as just happy, sad, afraid, angry, or hopeful Instead, it's a matter of experiencing all these feelings and yet, paradoxically, experiencing no clearly identifiable, or at least any easily describable emotion.'

Awe, he writes, 'is like trying to assemble a complex jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing. There's never any closure in an awe-inspired life, only constant acceptance of the mysteries of life. We've never allowed to know when this dramatic voyage might end... but that's part of the life-disorienting chaos that makes this choice so thrillingly difficult.'

...The negative path to happiness, then, is a different kind of path. But it is also a path to a different kind of destination. Or maybe it makes more sense to say that the path is the destination?

These things are excruciatingly hard to put into words, and the spirt of negative capability surely dictates that we do not struggle too hard to do so. 'A good traveller has no fixed plans,' says the Chinese sage Lao Tzu, 'and is not intent upon arriving.'

There could be no better way to make the journey.

"Right view" of Buddhism is of the whole dynamic world

Here's another passage from Steve Hagen's book, "Buddhism Plain and Simple," that I liked a lot. It helps explain what Hagen means by seeing, the key notion in his book. 

The way I interpret what Hagen says below isn't that we can't have views, opinions, biases. I'm a progressive who wants Kamala Harris to beat Mike Pence's butt in tonight's vice-presidential debate. 

Supporters of Pence have a different view. That's fine. 

What isn't fine is believing that our view is 100% correct, faultless, impossible to be argued with. As I often say on this blog, nothing is completely certain. Even science recognizes that the most proven scientific theories are open to falsification, even though the chance of this is low.

So Hagen says we shouldn't be caught by our views. We shouldn't hold on to them so tightly we can't make room in our mind for considering alternative views.

I also like what Hagen says about a view of the Whole.

I'm not sure how practical or easy it is to have a view of the Whole, though. I suspect that what Hagen means by this is that our overall view of reality should be based on the core Buddhist tenet that everything changes, nothing is fixed in place forever.

Read on...

The first aspect of the eightfold path is right view. According to the Buddha, to hold onto any particular view is to freeze Reality, to try to encapsulate the world into thought. To take a view is like taking a snapshot -- you've frozen the scene right there.

Once we hold a view, it's not long before our view will buck up against other views. After that, the people holding the various views will file off into separate camps. And then we start to go after each other.

What the Buddha meant by right view isn't like this at all. The view of a Buddha isn't an ordinary, frozen view.

There are those who argue that the Buddha didn't have any view whatsoever, but this is not correct. What the Buddha meant by right view is not being caught by a particular view. It's not being caught by ideas, concepts, beliefs, or opinions.

The view of a buddha is of how things actually are -- which in light of the constant flux and flow of the world, is no one way in particular. 

After all, how can things be a particular way if they are in constant motion? How can a hard-and-fast view of a world that is never hard or fast possibly be accurate?

It's not the particulars of the world that provide us with right view, but the world itself, as an ever-dynamic Whole. Right view is Wholesome -- that is, it's of the Whole. It's all inclusive. It leaves nothing out.

Such a view, by definition, does not go to war with any other view. In fact, it cannot. Since it's already of the dynamic world as a Whole, we can't conceive of anything that opposes it.

Seeing that there is no see'er inside our head is clear sight

I've been re-reading one of my favorite spiritual books, Steve Hagen's "Buddhism Plain and Simple."

I love how Hagen strips out Buddhism's religious and supernatural aspects, leaving the genuine teachings of the Buddha.

Hagen's key idea in the book is seeing. Here's a passage I read today that illustrates what he means by this.

Breaking the grip of ignorance and craving comes with just seeing, not with doing something particular about it. Once you see, your course of action will naturally follow. 

The problem in dealing with craving is that when we try to squelch it, we only step it up somewhere else. It comes bursting out more intensely than ever. For example, suppose you notice, "I'm craving a pizza now."

That's fine. Just notice it.

But we usually don't stop there. Rather than just seeing, we act upon what we notice instead. "I shouldn't be wanting pizza. I must stop this desire for pizza."

This very reaction is already more craving. We're desiring an end to desire. We're doing the usual thing again -- reaching for, insisting, grabbing. This is bondage, not freedom.

This is a subtle but crucial point. There's no bandage to use on this problem that will not itself be the same problem all over again.

The only way to eradicate this problem is to see it and thereby no longer feed it.

This is not a call to complacency or inaction. To act or not to act is never the question. You can't help but act. The question is whether or not you see. The entire issue rests on this.

Recently I experienced something along these lines. 

Laurel, my wife, is a vacuum fancier. She has several vacuums, a large corded one, a smaller battery powered one, an even smaller hand-held one.

A few days ago Laurel came up to me while I was in the kitchen. "I've been working on this for half an hour," she said. "I can't figure out how to get the vacuum filter back in the plastic case." 

She'd only removed the round filter once before, since the vacuum had a clever way of cleaning the filter that didn't require removing it. She showed me the instructions. They just said to replace the filter after cleaning it.

But the plastic cover wouldn't snap into place after the filter was inserted.

I tried myself for about 15 minutes, rotating the filter assembly every possible way, observing that, as Laurel had said, it seemed there was only one way to put in the filter.

I was doing a lot of trying, without success. 

Then I decided to stop what Laurel and I had been trying, because it clearly wasn't working. I focused instead on what simple thing I was missing, because it seemed that no vacuum designer would make replacing the filter so difficult. 

Ah... instead of inserting the filter into the top of the plastic case, I inserted it into the bottom of the case. Two seconds later the lid clicked shut without a problem.

Laurel hadn't noticed which way the filter had come out, so we both were fixated on an assumption that turned out to be false -- that the filter went in the top of the case.

So this is one way to look upon the seeing that Hagen speaks of. Seeing reality clearly, rather than through the fog of erroneous thoughts and assumptions about reality. 

Another way, a more profound way, is repeated by Sam Harris in just about every guided meditation in his smart phone Waking Up app. 

Harris will ask the listener to either look at the outside world with eyes open, or at the space behind the eyes with eyes shut. In either case, Harris asks, "Are you aware of someone who is seeing within your head, a see'er, or is there simply seeing?"

In my experience, the latter. Simply seeing. I've never come across a see'er who is separate and distinct from the act of seeing.

Which, of course, is a core Buddhist notion. There is no self, no soul, no enduring entity anywhere within us. Things simply arise and pass away. 

Thoughts. Emotions. Perceptions. Cravings. And so on.

Thus when Hagen urges us to simply see, arguably the most important sight to see is that there is no see'er doing the seeing.

Looking for our true self, eventually we grasp that there is no self to be seen -- in somewhat the same way as I came to realize that there is no way the filter could fit in the manner I was trying to insert it.

Looking in a different fashion made all the difference.

Reality -- a horrible thing to waste (but Trump does)

Yesterday I wrote about Trump's COVID-19 diagnosis over on my Salem Political Snark blog in "Reality is the big winner in Trump's COVID-19 infection." Here's the most philosophical part of the post.

Being as deeply philosophical as I am deeply political, I now want to broaden my take on the meaning of Trump coming down with COVID-19. It's a big win for reality!

Not that reality needs any help. Reality always comes out on top in the end, because, well, reality is the only thing that is truly real. 

A short blog post isn't the place to discuss what I mean by "truly" and "real." So here's my brief take on those words. Everything that exists is real, or it wouldn't exist. Thus dreams are real, as are hallucinations. Fantasies are real, as are lies. Those things exist, but not truly.

To exist truly, something has to posses a certain substance and objective nature. As I said in "The best one-sentence metaphysics ever written," I love Phillip K. Dick's definition of reality.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

Donald Trump didn't believe in the seriousness of the coronavirus. He thought it would go away when the United States had just 15 cases. He thought it would go away in warmer weather. He thought this country had turned the corner on the pandemic. Those beliefs, and many more, were spectacularly wrong. 

No matter. Whatever Trump or anyone else believes about COVID-19 has no bearing on the coronavirus. It just keeps on doing what viruses are so good at: spreading. We humans have learned a lot about how to slow or stop that spread. Those measures work whether or not anyone believes in them.

Trump and others in his administration have a strong bias against reality. They believe that if a lie is repeated often enough and strongly enough, many people will believe it. Sadly, this is true. But I'm optimistic that most people won't.

Presidential election polling bears this out.

More Americans favor Biden than Trump. Biden has a vastly stronger truthfulness rating on PolitiFact than Trump does. Biden accepts the science of global warming; Trump doesn't. And Biden has been following public health guidelines in his campaigning, including wearing a mask, while Trump hasn't. 

Now Trump has COVID-19. He's been admitted to the Walter Reed Medical Center. He faces a potentially lengthy recovery period, though there is a chance that even at the age of 74 and with underlying conditions such as obesity, Trump will get well fairly quickly. Time will tell. 

What won't change with time is the primacy of reality. It always wins out in the end. Always. 

So it's fitting that in the month before the election where, hopefully, Trump is tossed out of office by voters, the Liar-in-Chief is suffering from the disease that he has been downplaying for many months. To adapt a familiar phrase, the wheels of reality turn slowly but grind exceedingly fine. 

Religions also have a shaky relationship with reality.

They love to talk about things for which there is no demonstrable proof of their existence. God. Heaven. Soul. Spirit. Devil. Afterlife. Angels. Etc. Etc. And they are reluctant to talk about things that clearly exist, such as evolution and the Big Bang.

In my morning reading today I came across some mentions of reality. I'll share those also. Here's passages from Steve Hagen's, "Buddhism Plain and Simple," one of my favorite books. 

The buddha-dharma is grounded in Reality. It is not pie in the sky, or wishful thinking, or a denial of what human life is. There's no attempt to cover up, to gloss over, to reinterpret the facts.

...You are already in reality, whether you see it or not. Reality is what's here, now. Thus you're here now, too. You know all this already, from direct experience. You're not separated from Reality. It's not "out there" somewhere, but right here.

And here's a passage from Sam Harris' fascinating book, "Making Sense: Conversations on Consciousness, Morality, and the Future of Humanity." Harris says:

One difference between religious dogmatism and scientific curiosity is the boundedness of the worldview that results and one's consequent tolerance of ambiguity and complexity. 

For a dogmatist, the final answers are already given. Reality can't be more complex than what's spelled out in his favorite book. 

But for a scientist, or for any truly curious person, the investigation of reality is open-ended. Who knows what we will learn in the future, and who knows how it may supersede our current understanding?

It feels good to be getting back into yoga

When I was about 20 or 21, I was a yoga dude. My college girlfriend and I had been studying yoga and meditation with (in retrospect) a crazed Greek teacher who managed to cobble together a blend of Eastern religion, yoga, and Christianity.

We used to drive around with him in a VW van with Christananda Ashram on the side. Yeah, it was weird, but this was 1969 and 1970, when weirdness permeated the San Francisco Bay Area, where we attended San Jose State College. 

Here's a photo of me from my yoga days. I got pretty damn good at Hatha Yoga postures. Meditation, maybe not so much. But I became one of Yogiraj's lead students, until the weirdness went over the top in a dramatic health food store confrontation.

At any rate, I never forgot some of the many yoga postures that I learned back then. For many years I practiced a short yoga routine that I did at our athletic club after doing aerobic stuff, lifting weights, and some Tai Chi.

But in February of 2020 I developed a pretty serious sciatica problem in my right leg. An X-ray showed that my lower back just showed normal wear and tear for a 71-year-old. So the cause of the leg pain remains a mystery. 

l'm much better now, thankfully. I've been doing physical therapy exercises every day, walking two miles up and down hills every day, and using home exercise equipment for strength building every day. Still...

When I realized a few weeks ago that I hadn't done my yoga routine for a long time, I got out my mat and gave it a try. Wow. I wasn't nearly as flexible as I was six months ago. Not a huge surprise, but it still shocked me -- since I'd been exercising so much and doing other kinds of stretches.

So I started doing my yoga routine every day also.

I'm already seeing some improvement, flexibility-wise. And it feels good to be doing the yoga moves. Wanting to broaden my repertoire, I downloaded several yoga apps for the iPhone. They were OK. I can see how many people would benefit from them. However, I concluded that I'd rather get back into yoga on my own, choosing my own postures, and doing them at my own speed.

That led me to buy the Yoga Bible.

It's got over 1,200 mostly positive reviews on Amazon. I took the advice of many reviews and had the book spiral bound at the FedEx copy center in Salem. That allows the pages to fold flat, making it much easier to follow directions while laying on my mat or standing up (the book stands up nicely also, after being spiral bound).

There's a nice overview of what yoga is all about in an introductory section. Here's some excerpts. I hadn't thought before that the body always is in the present moment, but this does make sense. 

Yoga is actually a state of mind. Achieving the goal of stilling the mind is a tall order, so practices have been developed that allow you to move toward this state. Quieting the mind is a rather intangible goal.

In contrast, the progress made on accomplishing a yoga posture can be evaluated by alignment, length of stretch, and the length of time it can be held. It's much easier for you to relate to something tangible -- the body -- and then move on to something intangible -- the stillness of the mind.

During yoga practice, you begin somewhere known and, using your body and breath, you move toward an unknown. As you open your body and mind with yoga postures and breathing, you become receptive to the delightful and profound experience of inner stillness.

While the human mind tends to drift off into thoughts of the past or future, the human body exists only in the present moment. Hatha yoga, a type of yoga that emphasizes strenuous and persistent effort, encourages awareness of the body.

Coming back to your body draws your mind back to the present. Then, worries drop away and there are no more "shoulds" or "musts." One of the reasons yoga is so refreshing is that, even if only for an instant, there is only the reality of the present moment. Each time you come to the present moment, you drop a certain amount of baggage.

You may pick it up again shortly thereafter, but the point is that you have practiced letting it go. Eventually you will be able to reduce the stress more often and for longer periods of time. 

In this respect, yoga is like life training. Its practice is a fabulous tool for transformation. 

...However, yoga may be anything that gives you a sense of unity, helps you better connect with yourself, and helps you remember who you are. It might be a walk along the beach, a luxurious yawn, or simply taking a single conscious breath.

Any practice that helps you center yourself is important. When you operate from a space that is close to your center, it is easier to be calmer and more focused. Being off balance is a huge source of stress.

When things go wrong when you are already off balance, it is like swimming against a strong tide. The farther out you are, the harder it is to swim to shore. 

Yet, distractions and sensory stimulation often cause you to look outward rather than gazing inward. The real challenge in life is to manage to stay "with" yourself while at the same time interacting with others; to respond appropriately to people and events while maintaining a sense of connection to yourself.

What is the problem religions are trying to solve?

One of the reasons I'm now an atheist after having embraced an Eastern form of religion for 35 years is that it eventually dawned on me that religions are trying to solve problems that don't really exist. 

This isn't the case with other cultural institutions. 

For example, health care agencies try to solve the problem of people getting sick. Environmental groups try to solve the problem of pollution. Educational advocates try to solve the problem of helping children learn.

It's possible to disagree with how these problems are being addressed, but not with the fact that these are real problems. By contrast, Christianity, along with other religions, sees a big problem with sin. Which raises the question, what are they talking about?

"Sin" is a concept. It isn't something real in the same way sickness, pollution, and a lack of learning are. It's an idea that sprang from the minds of humans. "God" is another concept that doesn't refer to anything real. It's another idea that sprang from the minds of humans.

Put those two concepts together, "sin" and "God," and you've got the makings of a religion -- Christianity. 

Most religious people, though, fail to realize how thoroughly they've bought into the concepts of their faith. So thoroughly, they never question the reality of those concepts. 

Notions like God, heaven, sin, karma, soul, spirit, and such are discussed as if they possessed the same reality as trees, air, sunlight, water, dogs, and other entities that clearly exist.

So my advice to religious believers is this.

Think clearly about what problem, or problems, your chosen faith is trying to solve. If all you can come with is a self-referential statement like "The Bible says humans have original sin that only Jesus can forgive," then you've embraced a bunch of concepts that have no grounding in reality.

An exception is Buddhism, which is why Buddhism often isn't considered a religion, but a way of living. 

Buddhism says that life is suffering. That's appealingly concrete. We know that life exists. We also know that suffering exists. Finding a way to deal with the problem of suffering is the foundation of Buddhism.

Somewhat similarly, my take on Taoism is that the problem it addresses is how to live in a flowing fashion, not being bound by rigid rules or attitudes.

"Flow" is a bit more conceptual than "suffering," but having been an avid student of Tai Chi for sixteen years -- Tai Chi being a physical expression of Taoist principles -- I can confidently say that flow is something that can be observed by others and felt by oneself.

Contrast that with the central concept of the Eastern religion that I belonged to for three and half decades: God-realization under the guidance of a Perfect Living Master. There's no evidence that God exists, so no evidence that God-realization exists.

Likewise, there's no evidence that a Perfect Living Master (or guru) exists. As I've observed before, if you stuck a supposed Perfect Living Master in with a bunch of other people and asked someone to pick out the perfect master/guru, there would be no way they could do this, because there is no concrete reality underlying the abstract concept of "perfect living master."

A recent issue of New Scientist has a column by Graham Lawton called "The war against reality." It deals with the thoroughly absurd notions promulgated by those who embrace QAnon. As Lawton writes:

To cut a long story short, QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory that contends the world is run by satan-worshipping paedophiles who traffic children for sex and for a life-extending compound that is extracted from their adrenal glands. 

It is named after a shady character called Q, who posts "inside information" on internet message boards. While it is all total and utter nonsense, two US presidents loom large in the QAnon narrative: Obama as one of the controlling elites and Trump as Q himself or the leader of the fight against the elites and the "deep state", a shadowy organisation that really runs the US.

Totally crazy, right? There's no evidence of what QAnon believes in. Yet a disturbingly large number of people think QAnon speaks the truth. Likewise, there's no evidence of what religions believe in, yet billions of people are religious.

Here'a another quote from Lawton's column that is a great summary of what turns me off about religion.

On a good day, I think of QAnon as a fascinating case study of human psychology and behaviour, laying bare how far from reality our minds can stray, how social forces can drag people into parallel universes and how we can sustain beliefs in the face of what is irrefutable evidence to the contrary.

Get off the satisfaction treadmill where you always want more

I've got several stacks of books in my office that I've read, found interesting, but haven't yet written a blog post about. So I'm going to make a start on them by picking the one on top, "A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy" by William B. Irvine. 

Well, I decided to check and see whether I'd written about Irvine's book and it turns out that I had last June, in Past and present are outside our control. So here's my second post about the book.

Irvine, a philosophy professor, wants to make Stoicism relevant to us in the 21st century. He succeeds in that, offering up a bunch of tips about how to live life in a Stoic fashion.

Which definitely doesn't mean unhappily, or with a suck-it-up attitude -- the usual way "Stoic" is viewed by people who know just a little about Stoicism. That's why Irvine made his subtitle The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. Stoics don't want to be, well, stoic. At least not in the usual sense of that term. They want to be happy, to be joyful. 

Here's some passages that illustrate the Stoic approach to happiness.

We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires.

The psychologists Shane Frederick and George Lowenstein have studied this phenomenon and given it a name: hedonic adaptation. To illustrate the adaptation process, they point to studies of lottery winners. Winning a lottery typically allows someone to live the life of his dreams.

It turns out, though, that after an initial period of exhilaration, lottery winners end up about as happy as they previously were. They start taking their new Ferrari and mansion for granted, the way they previously took their rusted-out pickup and cramped apartment for granted..

...As a result of the adaptation process, people find themselves on a satisfaction treadmill. 

They are unhappy when they detect an unfulfilled desire within them. They work hard to fulfill this desire, in the belief that on fulfilling it, they will gain satisfaction. The problem, though, is that once they fulfill a desire for something, they adapt to its presence in their life and as a results stop desiring it -- or at any rate, don't find it as desirable as they once did.

They end up just as dissatisfied as they were before fulfilling the desire.

One key to happiness, then, is to forestall the adaptation process. We need to take steps to prevent ourselves from taking for granted, once we get them, the things we worked so hard to get. 

And because we have probably failed to take such steps in the past, there are doubtless many things in our life to which we have adapted, things that we once dreamed of having but that we now take for granted, including, perhaps, our spouse, our children, our house, our car, and our job. 

This means that besides finding a way to forestall the adaptation process, we need to find a way to reverse it.

In other words, we need a technique for creating in ourselves a desire for the things we already have. Around the world and throughout the millennia, those who have thought carefully about the workings of desire have recognized this -- that the easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.

This advice is easy to state and is doubtless true; the trick is in putting it into practice in our life. How, after all, can we convince ourselves to want the things we already have?

The Stoics thought they had an answer to this question.

They recommended that we spend time imagining that we have lost the things we value -- that our wife has left us, our car was stolen, or we lost our job. Doing this, the Stoics thought, will make us value our wife, our car, and our job more than we otherwise would. This technique -- let us refer to it as negative visualization -- was employed by the Stoics at least as far back as Chrysippus. 

It is, I think the single most valuable technique in the Stoics' psychological tool kit.

...But what about those individuals who clearly aren't living the dream? What about a homeless person, for example? The important thing to realize is that Stoicism is by no means a rich person's philosophy.

...Consider the person who has been reduced to possession of only a loincloth. His circumstances could be worse: He could lose the loincloth. He would do well, say the Stoics, to reflect on this possibility. Suppose, then, he loses the loincloth. As long as he retains his health, his circumstances could again be worse -- a point worth considering.

And if his health deteriorates? He can be thankful that he is still alive.

It is hard to imagine a person who could not somehow be worse off. It is therefore hard to imagine a person who could not benefit from the practice of negative visualization. The claim is not that practicing it will make life as enjoyable for those who have nothing as it is for those who have much. 

The claim is merely that the practice of negative visualization -- and more generally the adoption of Stoicism -- can take some of the sting out of having nothing and thereby make those who have nothing less miserable than they would otherwise be.

This fits with the many stories I've seen on our local TV news about people who lost their homes in the recent devastating wildfires here in Oregon. When interviewed, typically they say how sad it was to have their beloved house destroyed. However, they usually add something like, "But we're alive. We have each other. And the help we've gotten from total strangers has been so wonderful."

So they envisioned an even worse thing than having their house burnt down -- having a loved one die, or themselves die. That took some of the sting out of their tragedy. 

On a smaller scale, I felt something similar in the days after we lost power during the high winds that caused the wildfires to spread so rapidly. Living out in the country, surrounded by large firs and oaks, along with a lot of brush, I was happy that our neighborhood didn't have a fire. 

A few days ago I got up on our roof and removed leaves and other debris from our gutters with a backpack blower. It isn't a fun job, being somewhat dangerous. But I enjoyed it more than usual because I'd spent so much time wondering  if our house might burn down, as hundreds did throughout Oregon.

Negative visualization does seem to work.

An ordinary life is all I need. Being religiously special, no thanks.

There are various reasons why I'm happier after ditching religion some fifteen years ago. Feeling ordinary is one reason. I get a lot of satisfaction from no longer believing that I'm on a special path that leads back to God.

Of course, virtually every religion believes that same thing. 

So religious people are like the children in Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon. Everybody is above average. Or at least that's what those who embrace religion think.

Supposedly they've been singled out for special treatment by God, Jesus, a guru, good karma, whatever. So the pressure is on to live up to a belief that they're destined to enjoy a life, and/or an afterlife, in a fashion denied to ordinary people.

This leads to constant questioning by the Chosen Ones.

Am I falling short from what is expected of me by the divinity I believe in? Is there more I can do to live up to the moral standards, or commandments, of my faith? What worldly desires stand between me and the exalted spirituality I aspire to?

By contrast, us ordinary people are content with living an ordinary life in ordinary ways. 

We don't agonize about whether we're doing God's will because we don't believe in God. We don't worry about what will happen to us after we die because we don't believe in an afterlife. We don't worry about meeting a divine moral standard because we don't believe in divinity.

Sometimes I'm struck by an overwhelming sensation of gratitude for having found the freedom to simply be who I am, where I am, how I am.

I feel deeply happy to have been deconverted from religious fantasies. No longer do I consider that there is a gap between what I should become and the reality of my present state of being.

Sure, I still have goals. I still worry about this and that. (Such as whether Biden will defeat Trump this November.) My mood goes up and down. 

But all of this takes place against a backdrop of an ordinary life. I feel a stronger kinship with other people, because I no longer identify with a religion that taught its devotees to feel special, being on a path to God-realization denied to others. 

I understand the appeal of feeling special. All I'm suggesting is that feeling ordinary is a wiser way to live.

 

There is nothing but now -- no past, no future

"Live in the now."

That is an utterly meaningless statement. It's akin to saying, "Exist in existence." Well, yeah. As if we had a choice. There's no place to exist but in existence. 

Where else are I supposed to exist? Non-existence? That'd be impossible.

Equally impossible is for anything, naturally including we humans, to exist anywhere but in the present -- now. So save your money on books that claim to teach you how to live in the now.

You're already expert at this. There's no place to be except now.

But what about thoughts of the past and future? Those are taking place now. Do you really believe that you can time travel into the past or future? I hope not. There is no evidence that this is possible. 

So if you consider that you can exist in the past or future, you're deluded. 

Ah, but what about the Theory of Relativity? People or clocks traveling at different speeds experience time differently. And light doesn't experience time at all.

(Leaving aside the fact that almost certainly, light lacks the ability to experience anything.)

Doesn't matter. Someone traveling at a speed that approaches 186,000 miles per second, light-speed, still would be having that experience now, not in the past or future. 

Yes, conscious beings in the space-time continuum can disagree about the order in which things happen. Past can be future, or the future can be past, depending on one's perspective according to the Theory of Relativity.

Still, my argument is that these perspectives are still occurring now, in the present moment experience of each observer.

Given my affection for mindfulness practices, I do consider that generally speaking it is good for us to be attending to what is physically present now, as opposed to thoughts of the past or future that are occurring now.

It's all now. We have no choice about that. But we can choose whether to be present to the world outside of us now, or present to the world within us now. 

True, in one sense everything is within us, since conscious awareness resides in the brain, and the brain is inside our head.

What I'm talking about is what the focus of our consciousness is -- the present moment of the physical reality that surrounds us, or the present moment of our thoughts, emotions, and such.

So enjoy the fact that you already possess the power of now, the title of an Eckhart Tolle book. And you didn't have to pay any money to Amazon, or another bookstore, to enjoy this power.

Failure can be fabulous. Perfectionism can be pitiful.

Most of us have experienced a lot of failures. Probably we feel bad about those. Most of us have some sort of perfectionist tendency. Probably we feel this is a good thing, since it spurs us toward success. 

But maybe we should look upon ourselves differently, viewing failure more positively than perfectionism.

Here's excerpts from Oliver Burkeman's book, "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking." Dome is a reference to the failed Millennium Dome, built as a monument to the dawn of the year 2000.

There is an openness and honesty in failure, a down-to-earth confrontation with reality that is lacking at the higher altitudes of success. 

To achieve something impressive -- as might have happened had the dome ever become, as Tony Blair predicted, 'a beacon to the world' -- is necessarily to erect a kind of barrier between yourself and everyone else. To be impressed by something, meanwhile, implies feeling yourself to be in the presence of something different from, and better than, yourself. 

Failure, by contrast, collapses these boundaries, demonstrating the fallibility of those who might otherwise try to present themselves as immune to defeat. It cuts people down to human size. The vulnerability revealed by failure can nurture empathy and communality.

...Still it can be exceptionally hard to adopt this attitude towards your own failures. As Christopher Kayes' notion of 'goalodicy' suggests, we too often make our goals into parts of our identities, so that failure becomes an attack on how we are.

Or, as Albert Ellis understood, we alight upon some desired outcome -- being happily married, for example, or finding fulfilling work -- and elevate it into one we feel we must attain, so that failing at it becomes not just sad but catastrophic. To use the Buddhist language of attachment and non-attachment, we become attached to success.

All these counterproductive ways of thinking about failure manifest themselves most acutely in the phenomenon of perfectionism. 

This is one of those traits that many people seem secretly, or not so secretly, proud to possess, since it hardly seems like a character flaw -- yet perfectionism, at bottom, is a fear-driven striving to avoid the experience of failure at all costs. At its extremes, it is an exhausting and permanently stressful way to live. 

(There is a greater correlation between perfectionism and suicide, research suggests, than between feelings of hopelessness and suicide.)

To fully embrace the experience of failure, not merely to tolerate it as a stepping-stone to success, is to abandon this constant straining never to put a foot wrong. It is to relax.

'Downfall', writes the American Zen Buddhist Natalie Goldberg, 'brings us to the ground, facing the nitty-gritty, things as they are with no glitter. Success cannot last forever. Everyone's time runs out.' She goes on: 'Achievement solidifies us. Believing we are invincible, we want more and more.'

To see and feel things as they really are, 'we have to crash. Only then can we drop through to a more authentic self. Zen transmits its legacy from this deeper place. It is a different kind of failure: the Great Failure, a boundless surrender. Nothing to hold on to, and nothing to lose.'

...Her [J.K. Rowling] words chime with many of the insights of the Stoics, the Buddhists, and others into the benefits of negativity, and they are worth quoting at length:

I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale.

An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless. 

The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure that I knew. 

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea there was going to be what the press has since represented as a fairytale resolution. 

I had no idea how far the tunnel extended... so why do I talk about the benefits of failure?

Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

... I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive. [Failure] gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations.

...Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.

RSSB guru agrees to submit "sealed" tax returns to Delhi High Court

More news on the financial fraud scandal involving the Singh brothers and their relative, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

After the story I'll comment on something that I neglected to mention in a previous post on this subject -- how the guru has admitted to "round trip" financial transactions that appear to be illegal. Below is the Live Mint story.

Note: from what I can tell, a sealed court document means that only the court and parties directly involved in a court case can see it. The general public doesn't have access to it, which makes sense if the document contains sensitive information.

New Delhi: Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the spiritual head of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas and his family on Tuesday informed the Delhi high court that they are willing to file their income tax returns in a sealed cover before the registrar of the court.

The copies of the document will also be given to the decree holder --Daiichi Sankyo-- and the concerned judgment debtors, subject to their filing an undertaking to maintain confidentiality in the matter.

Dhillon had filed an exemption application against the court order citing “severe prejudice" to them.

The court has disposed off the application now.

The legible documents related to bank statements have to be filed within two weeks.

The court had deferred its order last week as the counsel for the applicant had prayed that final orders in the application be deferred to enable him to obtain instructions on whether the garnishees are willing to file their income tax returns in a sealed cover.

Former Fortis Healthcare promoter Malvinder Singh had filed an affidavit last month in the Delhi high court alleging that Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family owe him ₹1,473 crore, lent to them over a 10-year period till 2016.

In the affidavit filed on 13 August, Singh alleged that over 2007-12, the Dhillon family took loans totalling ₹578 crore from RHC Holding Pvt. Ltd and Today's Holdings, both funded by him and his brother Shivinder Singh.

In 2016, a Singapore tribunal asked the Singh brothers to pay ₹2,600 crore to Daiichi Sankyo in a case involving Ranbaxy Laboratories’ regulatory issues. The dues have now ballooned to ₹3,500 crore, including interest.

In a previous post about the Dhillon family tax returns, an Economic Times story was shared that said in part:

In an affidavit filed before the Delhi High court on November 12 last year, Dhillon had disclosed about the financial transactions between RHC holdings Ltd and his family members dating back to 2006. In fact he has also tried to establish that his sons Gurpreet and Gurkirat Singh Dhillon were young at that time, Gurkirat being minor and both his sons did not manage their financial affairs personally.

He had also revealed that RHC devised such a mechanism that transactions essentially involved transferring money from one subsidiary to a bank account of Dhillons and then transferring the same money either on the same day or shortly thereafter to another subsidiary of the group or usually to RHC holdings Ltd.

That second paragraph describes what's been called "round trip" financial transactions. These caught the eye of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), which called them fraudulent. The SEBI report contains a diagram of one day's circular, or round trip, transactions. 

So it seems significant that the RSSB guru has admitted to getting money put into his account through this sort of complex round trip transaction. The Economic Times story calls the entities other than FHL and RHC subsidiaries, but a better term seems to be shell companies.

There have been reports that at one time those shell companies were controlled by the Dhillons and their associates. Thus it appears very unlikely that loaned money could appear to the Dhillon family bank accounts without their knowing how it got there.

This is how I summarized things in a 2019 post, "Why the RSSB guru is responsible for financial fraud."

Some core facts are clear:

(1) The Securities and Exchange Board of India has determined that funds were fraudulently siphoned out of a public company into shell companies. 

(2) Those illegal money transfers involved "round trip" transactions that required the collusion of conspirators at both the public company and the shell companies.

(3) The RSSB guru, his family, and close associates controlled the shell companies that received the fraudulent funds. 

(4) The Dhillon family and their close associates used the fraudulently-obtained money, in large part or entirely, to buy real estate and the High Court of Delhi has ordered that this money be recovered from the RSSB guru, his family, and other entities.

At any rate, this saga has more twists and turns ahead, almost certainly. I'll share them as I learn about them. 

RSSB guru has to submit tax returns to Delhi High Court

There's another development in the lengthy saga of the Singh brothers' financial scandal that involves the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB0, Gurinder Singh Dhillon. 

The Delhi High Court says that the Dhillon family has to submit income tax returns and other documents to the court. Here's the Economic Times story.

The Delhi High court has dismissed an application filed by the head of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) Gurinder Singh Dhillon seeking exemption on filing income tax returns and other financial documents.

“In my view, these documents are essential to enable the learned Joint Registrar/Court to determine the merit in the stand of the garnishees who are disputing their liability qua the JDs,” said the court in its order dated September 11. ET has seen a copy of the order.

The court said that it sees no reason to exempt the applicants from filing copies of their income tax returns, bank statements and the balance-sheets.

Dhillon had sought exemption from filing Income Tax returns (ITR) in the Delhi High Court, citing that it contains “personal information” and it was not an “appropriate stage” to produce such documents.

The court had earlier asked Dhillon along with his family members to file ITRs after he denied of any liability towards RHC holdings Ltd, promoted by Malvinder and Shivinder Singh.

In an affidavit filed before the court, Dhillon has said that being individuals, the Dhillons do not “maintain balance sheet” and filing ITR would cause “severe prejudice” to them.

Dhillon had earlier admitted of his financial dealings with the Singh brothers by annexing copies of bank statements. However, he had denied of any liability to RHC holding, to which the court had asked those of who were disputing their liability to file their ITR, bank statements and balance sheets.

In an affidavit filed on January 30, Dhillon had sought an exemption from filing ITRs for himself, his wife, Shabnam Dhillon, his sons-Gupreet and Gurkirat and his daughter-in-law Nayantara Dhillon.

“In this regard it is submitted that the applicants have already placed on record in this court their relevant bank statements. Further, the applicants being individuals do not maintain balance sheets and hence the direction to that extent is not application to them,” read the 14-page affidavit.

In an affidavit filed before the Delhi High court on November 12 last year, Dhillon had disclosed about the financial transactions between RHC holdings Ltd and his family members dating back to 2006. In fact he has also tried to establish that his sons Gurpreet and Gurkirat Singh Dhillon were young at that time, Gurkirat being minor and both his sons did not manage their financial affairs personally.

He had also revealed that RHC devised such a mechanism that transactions essentially involved transferring money from one subsidiary to a bank account of Dhillons and then transferring the same money either on the same day or shortly thereafter to another subsidiary of the group or usually to RHC holdings Ltd.

He had also claimed that over the course of 2011-2015, out of the surplus of Rs 103.5 crores with RHC he and his family drew only Rs29.38 crores, leaving the balance surplus of Rs 74.12 crores. “Thus an amount of Rs 74.12 crores continued to be due from RHC holdings Ltd”.

Life is best lived by embracing insecurity

One of the things I talked about in my first book, a shorter and simpler version of which I published a few years ago, is that happenings in the world can be deterministic while also being unpredictable.

This is what chaos theory is all about. Complex systems are made up of causes and effects, yet in such a fashion that it is virtually (and maybe totally) impossible to know what they are going to do next. 

An example I cited in my book is tossing a cork into a stream above some rapids.

Every movement of the cork is determined by the laws of physics, yet there is no way to predict exactly where the cork will end up a few hundred yards downstream, because a slight movement at any point in its journey can lead to big changes in its final destination.

Such is one reason why our longing for security, for predictability, for being assured that what we want to have happen actually will happen, is doomed to failure. 

Another way of looking at security and insecurity is wonderfully discussed by Alan Watts in his book, "The Wisdom of Insecurity." I've written many posts about this book over the years, since it is one of my favorites. You can find those posts by using the Google search box in the right sidebar.

I'm making my way through Oliver Burkeman's book, "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking." This morning I finished a chapter called The Safety Catch. 

It contains a nice summary of how Alan Watts looks upon our quest for security. Here's how the chapter ends.

To understand the final flourish that Watts has in store, think back to the end of the previous chapter and the challenge it presented to our assumptions about the nature of the self. 

There we confronted the fact that there seems to be no straightforward place at which to draw the line between 'self' and 'other' -- and that the boundary itself, even if we settle on somewhere to draw it, is more of a meeting point than a dividing line. 'Self' and 'other' rely on each other for their very existence.

If that's true, it follows that 'security' is a mistake -- because it implies a notion of separate selfhood that doesn't make much sense. What does it even mean to separate yourself from an ecosystem that is, in fact, what constitutes you? 

The point is not to 'confront' insecurity, but to appreciate that you are it. Watts writes:

To understand that there is no security is far more than to agree with the theory that all things change, more even than to observe the transitoriness of life. 

The notion of security is based on the feeling that there is something within us which is permanent, something which endures through all the days and changes of life. We are struggling to make sure of the permanence, continuity, and safety of this enduring core, this center and soul of our being, which we call 'I'.

For this we think to be the real man -- the thinker of our thoughts, the feeler of our feelings, the knower of our knowledge. We do not actually understand that there is no security until we realize that this 'I' does not exist.

This extraordinary passage, once you grasp the point -- and it took me a while -- explains in the most complete sense why our efforts to find happiness are so frequently sabotaged by 'ironic' effects, delivering the exact opposite of what we set out to gain.

All positive thinking, all goalsetting and visualising and looking on the bright side, all trying to make things go our way, as opposed to some other way, is rooted in an assumption about the separateness of 'us' and those 'things'. But on closer inspection, this assumption collapses.

Trying to flee from insecurity to security, from uncertainty to certainty, is an attempt to find an exit from the very system that makes us who we are in the first place.

We can influence the system of which we are a part, certainly. But if we are motivated by this misunderstanding about who we are and what security is, we'll always risk going to too far, trying too hard, in self-defeating ways. Watts concludes:

The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the 'I' out of the experience.

...Sanity, wholeness and integration lie in the realization that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate 'I' or mind can be found.

...[Life] is a dance, and when you are dancing, you are not intent on getting somewhere. The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.

This, then, is the deep truth about insecurity: it is another word for life. That doesn't mean it's not wise to protect yourself, as far as you can, from certain specific dangers. But it does mean that feeling secure and really living life are, in some ultimate sense, opposites.

And that you can no more succeed in achieving perfect security than a wave could succeed in leaving the ocean.

Oregon wildfires reflect the uncertain nature of reality

Religions are prone to all sorts of ridiculous errors, but one of the worst is believing that reality can be tamed. Meaning, eliminating uncertainty, chance, randomness, unpredictability.

It's a psychological truism that we humans are uncomfortable with uncertainty. So we make up stories to fill the gap between what is known and what we have questions about where answers are lacking.

How did existence come to be? Nobody knows. Science is content with leaving this question as a mystery. Religions, though, make up a tale about how God created the cosmos -- ignoring the obvious problem of how God came to be.

(If it is assumed that God always has existed, then it also can be assumed that the cosmos always has existed.)

Here in Oregon, and also in our neighboring states of Washington and California, massive wildfires are burning. Today I saw a tweet by a reporter that said, "Since 1900, Oregon has never had more than 2 mega fires (100K acres or more) in a single year, said Jim Gersbach from ‪@ORDeptForestry‬. Now depending on how you count them we have 3 or 4 all burning at once."

Earlier in the summer it seemed that Oregon would have a mild wildfire season. There were some fires, but they weren't creating  big problems.

Then an unexpected combination of circumstances combined to create a Perfect Storm for wildfires.

Oregon has been in a long-standing drought. Very little rain has fallen for many months. And a rare September snow storm in the Rockies was followed by high pressure in that region that created strong east winds in the Pacific Northwest.

The National Weather Service realized the danger. They designated much of Oregon as being at high risk for wildfires. That turned out to be an accurate prediction. Yesterday I took this photo at 9 am while standing in our almost pitch black driveway. 

Smoke from what now is called the Santiam Fire was so thick, blown by the east winds in the direction of Salem, where I live, that the sun was completely obscured. All that could be seen in the sky was an eerie red glow. Later in the day it was still strangely dark, which made me think darkness at noon.

Thousands of people living in the Santiam Canyon east of Salem had to evacuate in the early morning hours on Tuesday. A small fire in the mountains that seemed to be posing little danger grew astoundingly rapidly, pushed by the strong east winds. This map shows the current size of the fire from satellite imagery.

(Yellow is satellite fire detections 24-48 hours ago. Orange is 12-24 hours. Red is 0-12 hours. So the red dots show where a fire has moved most recently. Note: on a slow Internet connection like what I have, the dots take a while to load.)

So far two people are known to have died in the Santiam Fire, a grandmother and her grandchild, who were in a car trying to escape the flames. Many homes and businesses have been destroyed. And this fire is just one of many ravaging Oregon.

Bad things happen.

This isn't news to anybody. It's the way the world is. If bad things could be predicted with certainty, we could stop them from happening. But usually we can't do that. Sure, meteorologists knew that the strong east winds could fan dangerous wildfires. 

Yet whether this actually would come to pass wasn't known until the winds arrived. And yes, now Oregon is suffering through the worst wildfires in the state's history.

My Tai Chi instructor and his wife have had to evacuate their home. They live near the road that links Silverton and Molalla in the map I shared above. They got out safely, along with their dogs, horses, and goats. That's good news, though better news would be if their house ends up being untouched by fire.

I can hope for that. Yet I can't know that. Life is uncertain. That's for sure. Which is why I started to work on an evacuation checklist yesterday, just in case.

"Mystical" experiences aren't what meditation is about

Today someone asked me and someone else some questions about the meditation I did during the 35 years I was an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a religious organization headquartered in India. 

Here's what Tony Wims said in a comment.

Hey Brian or Osho. Just curious: Did either of you ever see the light or hear the sound during meditation?

If you did, what stopped you from developing your perception further?
If you didn't, I'm actually really surprised that you didn't and you were initiated.

Were you following the precepts? ( If you didn't see/hear).
Did you not start by placing your attention at the 3rd eye center?

I know I shouldn't be, because anything is possible, but I'm very surprised to hear of initiates who left the path. Especially if they had even a brief glimpse of the light or a snippet of the sound.

Thank you in advance for your answer. Forgive me for asking if you don't feel like it.

Hey, I have no problem with questions about my meditation experience. But before I get to the answers, I'll share some observations about the assumptions underlying Tony's comment.

The main assumption is that there's such a thing as supernatural light and sound emanating from higher spiritual regions of reality. I used to believe this was true, but beliefs are different from what actually is the case.

There's no demonstrable evidence of anything supernatural, much less mystical light and sound. So the burden of proof rests on those who claim that there is, not skeptics like me who doubt the existence of realms beyond the physical.

Another assumption is that meditation is aimed at anything other than being fully in touch with what appears in one's consciousness. Yes, I realize that Tony is talking about a very special form of meditation, Surat Shabd Yoga, or uniting one's soul with a divine sound current. 

Again, this is a religious belief, not a proven reality.

In fact, a comment Sonia left today appears to accurately describe how the current guru of RSSB, Gurinder Singh Dhillon (GSD), looks upon meditation. What Sonia says fits with the notion that Dhillon has moved RSSB to what's been termed v. 2.0 and v. 3.0. 

@Tony Most people don’t recognize the light or sound.

GSD just said some people go to the doctor thinking they have tinnitus when really it’s the “sound”. He also said if you want to see lights go to a disco. He’s made it abundantly clear that seeing the light or hearing sound is not what meditation is about. Many people won’t recognize it. He said just do your meditation.

The reason he says all of this is because satsangis complain over and over and over again to him about not hearing the sound or seeing light during meditation.

And the only reason I’m sharing this with you is so that you will understand that your Master never promised you a rose garden—he never promises you’ll see light and sound and most of your fellow satsangis don’t have that experience.

That was my clear impression also from the three-plus decades I spent talking with countless (more or less) RSSB initiates, or satsangis. i used to do a lot of speaking on behalf of RSSB, where one of my favorite lines was "The easiest vow to uphold is the one against talking about your mystical experiences, because no one is having any."

The line always got a laugh.

And no one ever came up to me afterwards and said I was wrong. As Sonia said, most RSSB devotees aren't focused on experiencing inner lights and sounds. They're focused on other things: the guru, going to RSSB meetings, being a vegetarian, socializing with RSSB friends, and such.

Getting back to Tony's questions, in 2014 I wrote a blog post called "I'm asked about my RSSB meditation experience." These lengthy excerpts address the more recent questions from Tony.

In "Why I'm justified in complaining about Sant Mat" I wrote:

I was initiated in the spring of 1971. For over thirty years—until 2002 or so—I was damn near a model satsangi (disciple).

I never missed a day of meditation. Mostly it was for the full proscribed two and a half hours. Sometimes less. One and a half hours was a minimum, such as when my daughter needed after-work attention and I was working full time. I followed the other vows perfectly, aside from having a single drink at my ten year high school reunion, which was just too freaking weird to endure without a dose of alcohol.

So don't tell me that I can't complain about Sant Mat and Radha Soami Satsang Beas. I'm totally justified in doing so. Because I know more about this philosophy and this organization than most initiates. Not just book knowledge—direct experience also.

Or, lack of experience, when it comes to meditation. I'm typical in this regard. Over those three decades I talked with hundreds, maybe thousands, of RSSB meditators. Very few, perhaps none, had experienced what they were told to expect. Those flights to inner mystical regions and the meeting with their guru's radiant astral form.

With me, it wasn't for lack of effort. Again, I did everything right. And the results were wrong. Now, many of the faithful would say, "Brian, you expected too much, too soon." Give me a break.

Thirty years isn't too soon. A glimpse of the promised spiritual land isn't too much.

In "Q and A about me and Sant Mat" I wrote this in response to another question that I'd gotten:

(2) Why do you think you never had a spiritual experience despite 30 years of devoted meditation?

Like I've been saying in several posts lately, including here, I'm not sure what "spiritual" means anymore. I had plenty of experiences in meditation.

What I didn't have was the sort of out-of-body, astral projecting, soul-flying, blasts of cosmic light and sound experiences that the Radha Soami Satsang Beas version of Sant Mat tells disciples to expect in meditation.

A few days after I was initiated I heard loud bell sounds inside my head while I was meditating. These never came back. I've had other glimpses of inner light and hearings of inner sound, but these could be (and probably are) produced by the brain, not immaterial soul or spirit.

Over more than three decades I've talked with lots of fellow RSSB initiates about their experiences in meditation. More accurately, their lack thereof.

When these people spoke honestly and openly (which usually isn't done in the formal satsangs, or talks), I learned that my lack of mind-blowing meditation experiences was par for the course in Sant Mat.

So there you have it.

Naturally I had lots of experiences in meditation. It was impossible not to have them, since I was awake and aware for most of the 1.5 to 2.5 hours of meditation I did each day for over thirty years. (Yeah, I'd fall asleep occasionally.)

I feel like I gained a lot from all that meditating.

It was a mix of "mantra meditation" (repeating a word or words to concentrate the mind) and "open awareness" meditation (trying to be still, mentally and physically, and being aware of what passes through consciousness).

Thus even though Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) views its meditation technique as something special, actually it is very much in the meditation mainstream. Mantras and open awareness are used in many other meditative practices.

The RSSB meditation did focus on "going within," though, to a much greater extent than mindfulness practices do. That is, the initiate was supposed to direct his/her attention to the third eye, or eye center, which supposedly was a gateway to higher realms of consciousness.

Now my daily meditation usually involves more of a balanced approach.

I like to follow my breathing for part of the time, either counting breaths or simply being aware of my breathing body doing its thing. I also enjoy mantra meditation. Usually I choose different words than the Five Holy Names taught by RSSB, but for old time's sake I'll occasionally return to the mantra I repeated for so many years.

It's difficult for me to describe what I experienced during my RSSB meditation years. As noted before, I've sat for tens of thousands of hours in meditation. How is it possible to sum that up in a few words? 

I laughed; I cried; I was joyful; I was sad; I was peaceful; I was restless; I felt at one with the cosmos; I felt alone. And so much more.

One of the key things I learned was the difference between what my conscious mind does, and what the rest of my mind does. Well, let me rephrase that, because I no longer believe there are two entities inside my head: me, and my mind. 

There is just one: brain/mind, or whatever you want to call it.

I used to enjoy, and still do, the sensation of either repeating a mantra, or doing nothing, and being aware of what happens inside my head when the brain/mind aspect called "I" isn't trying to direct the show of consciousness.

As anyone who meditates knows (or anyone who is alive knows)... a lot happens.

The brain/mind, like an iceberg, consists of a whole lot more than our conscious awareness, will, intention, and such. Dualistic forms of meditation, which see a distinction between soul and mind, or pure consciousness and impure consciousness, consider those unintended goings-on to be a distraction. Non-dual forms of meditation, such as mindfulness and Zen, don't.

To them, as to me these days, what happens in the brain/mind is what is happening. To deny it is to deny reality. Thoughts come and go. So do emotions, perceptions, intuitions, and much else. 

Thus whereas I used to believe that God and the guru were responsible for what happened within my consciousness when I wasn't trying to make anything happen, now I realize that the part of brain/mind outside of conscious awareness is responsible.

I still feel that I'm part of something much larger than myself. I just don't call it God, or divine. It is me. And the world, which really isn't different from me. 

Comic strip wisdom about combatting stupidity

Here's some excellent advice from the Pearls Before Swine comic strip.

RSSB guru's finances investigated by Delhi Police

Here's a September 3 story in The Economic Times about an investigation by the Economic Offences Wing of the Delhi Police into financial transactions involving Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), and other members of the Dhillon family.

lt's good to see that allegations made by Malvinder Singh, a relative of the guru, are being looked into. A RSSB book is titled "Honest Living." The Dhillon family tax returns and other documents requested by the Delhi Police will cast light on how honestly the guru has been living.

Radha Soami Satsang Beas chief summoned by EoW of the Delhi Police

Businessman Malvinder Singh had earlier filed a complaint against the spiritual guru Gurinder Singh Dhillon, and his family members, with EOW for allegedly siphoning off proceeds from the sale of Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd.

Teena Thacker

The Economic Offences Wing (EoW) of the Delhi Police has sought details from the head of Radha Soami Satsang Beas Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family members regarding the multi crore scam.

Businessman Malvinder Singh had earlier filed a complaint against the spiritual guru Gurinder Singh Dhillon, and his family members, with EOW for allegedly siphoning off proceeds from the sale of Ranbaxy Laboratories NSE 5.63 % Ltd.

He had also filed an affidavit last month in the court detailing transaction history of the loans transferred to the Dhillon family from 2006 onwards, along with the supporting Bank Statement showing such transactions.
The summons were issued by the EoW basis a FIR filed by the Religare Finvest.

The EoW in its summons dated Aug 26 has asked Dhillon to explain why the amount was transferred to him and his wife’s personal account from various entities. Dhillon has been asked to provide documents to show how these transactions in his income tax returns. “It was a loan transaction or otherwise,” the notice said.

“For the purposes of investigation, you are requested to provide documents,” it further said. Information has been sought regarding over Rs 26 crore which were transferred to him and his wife Shabnam Dhillon. Dhillons have been told to furnish details by September 7. An email sent to Dhillon did not elicit any response till the press time.

The Dhillons are among 55 individuals and entities ordered by the court to pay over Rs 6000 crore owed to RHC holding in connection with the settlement of a dispute to Daiichi Sankyo’s acquisition of Ranbaxy laboratories.

Earlier in the High Court, Dhillon had said that in 2010, RHC holdings Ltd through Singh brothers had approached him to assist them in subscribing for the rights issue, suggesting that they would finance Dhillons to subscribe to the rights issue. Dhillon has said that it was agreed that he and his family members would not be made liable to repay any amount or interest. “It was also agreed that upon the shares being sold or disposed of if the price realised was below the subscribed price, then the entire amount would be shared 50:50 between RHC and Dhillons family who had subscribed to the shares”.

He had further said that on the basis of “verbal agreement” in February 2010, RHC transferred Rs 219 crore each to his sons, which was then used to subscribe to the rights issue, resulting in an allotment of 61,83,013 shares of REL to each of his sons.

In a separate notice to his sons Gurpreet and Gurkirat Dhillon, the EoW has now asked both Gurpreet and Gurkirat to clarify how the transaction “was reflected in their income tax returns, whether the amount is loan from the RHC holding pvt Ltd or otherwise and what is the present status of these shares,” it said. ET has seen the copy of the notices.

The EoW has also asked the Dhillon brothers to explain the reason for transferring the money from their personal account to RHC holding. Both brothers have been asked to appear in person and file the reply by September 7.

In an affidavit filed in the Delhi High court last week, Singh had submitted that Dhillon and his family members owed Rs 1472.72 crores along with interest which is still outstanding.

He has further said that over the period of 2006-2010, a sum of over Rs 500 crores was directly transferred from his accounts to Dhillon and his family members.

In addition, between 2011-2016 approximately Rs 488.83 crores were advanced as loans to Dhillon and his family members from the companies of Best group, which at the time of advancement of loans were not subsidiaries of Singh. The Best group comprised of Best healthcare Pvt Ltd, Modland wears private Ltd, Fern healthcare private Ltd, Devera developers private Ltd, greenline buildwell Private Ltd and Adept Lifespace pvt Ltd.

“The monies received from the Best group was camouflaged by Dhillon and his family members to appear as if they were clearing their debt towards answering respondent and its subsidiaries with a view to window dress and attempt to show that there is no amount receivable from Dhillon and members of his family to the answering respondent,” the affidavit has said. ET has seen the copy of the affidavit.