Church of the Churchless

Why the amazing stories we tell about our life aren't really all that special

We humans are natural story-tellers. Being a highly social species, we love to tell other people tales about how our life came to be what it is, and usually those stories find a receptive audience. 

Everybody likes a good story. But I've been thinking about a fatal flaw that strikes at the heart of many stories: though they often, if not usually, feature some special event that was, if not exceedingly unlikely, at least out of the ordinary, a more detached perspective calls such specialness into question.

This gets at our tendency to put ourselves at the center of our narratives. Even if we don't consciously believe that we're someone special, the way we frame stories about our life often screams, albeit wordlessly, Hey, look at amazing me! Can you believe how this happened?

Here's some examples from my own life. These are stories that I've told many times. I've enjoyed telling them because it seemed like they pointed, if not to fate or destiny, at least to an unlikely occurrence that ended up having major consequences. 

I've shared these stories in blog posts, so I'll copy them in from previous tellings. 

How I came to Oregon. 

I graduated with a useless BA in psychology and was contemplating applying for an appropriately menial job. Then I overheard a conversation in the San Jose State cafeteria.

"Man, I can't do anything with a psych degree. And it takes at least three years to get a Ph.D." His friend replied, "You should get a M.S.W. It's just two years, and there are good jobs available after you graduate."

I had no idea what a M.S.W. was. I went to the library and looked it up. Everyone was talking about beautiful green Oregon, so I applied to the only school of social work in the state. Was admitted. Thirty-six years later, I'm still here.

A brief overheard conversation. My life heads off in a new direction. Go figure. I sure can't.

How I got initiated by an Indian guru. (This is just the beginning of the story.)

San Jose State College, south of San Francisco. 1969. Flower power era, but on the declining crest of hippie-dom. I was heavy into marijuana, psychedelics, reading Zen, and shunning anything remotely religious.

One day I was walking across campus and saw a guy standing on his head. Some other Yoga devotees were with him.

That was who I later came to call "Yogiraj." I won't share his real name -- no reason to. He was an intense Greek in his early 30s or thereabouts who drove around San Jose in a VW bus with "Christananda Ashram" and the Sanskrit Om symbol emblazoned on the side.

Before too long my girlfriend, Sue (whom I later married), and I were riding around in the VW. Curious about Yoga, the on-campus demonstration led me to pick up a flyer.

Sue and I started taking classes in hatha yoga and meditation. The "ashram" was in Yogiraj's home. He was married to a younger American girl. His mother lived with them. She'd make terrific baklava and other Greek goodies.

I became one of Yogiraj's lead students. And definitely acted the part.

How I met my wife.

Some sixteen years ago Laurel placed a personals ad in Willamette Week. This was in the ancient pre-online days, so I read about this 40 y.o. aware, fit, well-educated, independent, successful, attractive, blonde, long-haired SWF as I was thumbing through a Willamette Week copy that I had picked up at the state Capitol. This enticing and absolutely accurate description got me to write a letter to Box 601 that evening.

As of today we’ve been married fifteen years. Thank you, Willamette Week. By the way, karmically speaking it was interesting that a personals ad in a Portland publication brought together a Salem man and a woman who lived fairly close, outside of Silverton. Even more (play Twilight Zone music in your head now), we both were Isuzu Trooper owners!

What dawned on me a few days ago -- and I admit that it's sort of crazy it took me so long to realize this -- is that if I hadn't overheard the conversation in the San Jose State cafeteria, or walked by a Greek yoga teacher standing on his head, or picked up a copy of Portland's alternative newspaper before I attended a hearing at the Oregon capitol, my life would have headed off in different directions, and those directions probably would have struck me as equally unlikely. 

Meaning, I wouldn't have gotten a Master's Degree in Social Work after graduating from college, but something would have impelled me to pursue a different career; I wouldn't have gotten initiated into an Eastern philosophy called Radha Soami Satsang Beas, but I would have embraced some other approach to finding deeper meaning in my life; I wouldn't have married Laurel Rhoades as my second wife, but I would have married someone else.

My stories would be different. Yet I'd delight in telling them, because how I ended up with a certain career, spiritual path, or wife would seem just as unlikely as my current stories about how my life turned out. 

In other words, life seems miraculous, as if things were "meant to be," only when we look upon our life backwards, in retrospect. Then we can pick out certain vignettes to include in the stories we tell other people about how freaking amazing it was that this or that happened the way it did.

We forget that if instead of this or that, what occurred was such and such, that such and such would be just as improbable in our telling. The simple truth is this: the course of our life only takes a single direction, and what caused us to take that direction never can be completely understood, because the influences that act upon us are so many and varied.

It feels good to write our own screenplay, choosing certain episodes that make a good story when told to others, but like all screenplays, this is fictional.

Theory of mental modules made me feel better about my many failings

I love it when after reading something in a nonfiction book, it doesn't just make sense to me intellectually, but deeply touches me emotionally. 

That's how I felt after reading a chapter in Robert Wright's Why Buddhism is True book, "How Thoughts Think Themselves." Before describing the wonderful feeling I had, I'll share some of the intellectual side of Wright's message -- which is based on a blend of Buddhist teachings, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience. 

He says this about the theory of mental modules in relation to mind wandering:

Though the trains of thought that carry you away from direct experience can take you to lots of different places, pretty much all of those places seem to lie within the province of one of the sort of mental modules I've already described.

Which is to say, modules that make perfect sense in evolutionary terms: modules that deal with attracting mates, keeping them, enhancing your status (which means denigrating rivals), taking care of kin, tending to your friendships (which includes making sure that they're reciprocal and that you're not getting exploited), and so on.

...When your mind is wandering, it may feel like, well, like your mind is wandering -- like it's strolling along the landscape of modules and sampling them, indulging one module for a while, then eventually moving on to another one.

But another way to describe it is to say that, actually, the different modules are competing for your attention, and when the mind "wanders" from one module to another, what's actually happening is that the second module has acquired enough strength to wrestle control of your consciousness away from the first module.

Far be it from me to insist that you accept one of the other of these ways of looking at mind wandering. For now I'd just make two points: (1) Psychologists who adhere to the modular model of the mind tend toward the second view -- the idea that the conscious you isn't choosing modules so much as being commandeered by modules that have prevailed over competing modules and thus, as Gazzaniga put in in chapter 6, "won the prize of conscious recognition."

(2) If you do go on a Vipassana meditation retreat and slowly, haltingly, get better at focusing on your breath, you will probably lean increasingly toward the second hypothesis: it will seem more and more like your mind isn't wandering within its own terrain so much as being hijacked by intruders.

Wright describes a conversation he had with noted Buddhist meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein. Wright says about Goldstein:

He seemed to be saying that thoughts, which we normally think of as emanating from the conscious self, are actually directed toward what we think of as the conscious self, after which we embrace the thoughts as belonging to that self. This, in turn, seemed consistent with the idea that modules generate thoughts outside of consciousness and sometimes inject them into consciousness.

Wright speaks with Goldstein about viewing thoughts as akin to going to a movie theater and getting absorbed in what's happening on the screen, quoting Goldstein: 

And then we sit back and see these are just pixels of light projected on a screen. Everything we thought is happening is not really happening. It's the same with our thoughts. We get caught up in the story, in the drama of them, forgetting their essentially insubstantial nature.

This passage was key to the emotional insight I had:

Escaping this drama -- seeing your thoughts as passing before you rather than emanating from you -- can carry you closer to the not-self experience, to that moment when you "see" that there is no "you" in there doing the thinking or doing anything else, that moment when what seems like a metaphysical truth is unveiled.

But, as we saw in chapter 5, some people say that the Buddha's original not-self teaching is best seen not as a metaphysical truth but as a pragmatic strategy: regardless of whether a self exists, by jettisoning parts of what you think of as your self, you clarify your view of the world and become a better and happier person. And this pragmatic strategy of not-self, no less than the metaphysical discovery of not-self, would seem to be furthered by the kind of perspective Goldstein was describing.

What happened to me was, suddenly I realized -- not intellectually, but intuitively and emotionally -- that I am not the person who has made so many mistakes, had so many failures, caused pain to so many people that I disappointed or let down. 

UPDATE: Below I struggled to explain the feeling I had. Here's a one-sentence version: As my mind conjured up thoughts about the past and future that were filled with images of deserved praise and blame, in a flash it struck me that there was no one within my skull who deserved applause or boos, just the happenings of an impersonal modular mind. 

I'm not that person because I'm not really a person at all, at least in the sense of being a person who is a solid self, who is a single entity no matter my age: 5, 15, 25, 35, 45, 55, 65, 75. Or 76, my current age. I've always looked back on my life and thought, "How was I capable of doing so many negative things?" Which has an inescapable mirror image, "How was I capable of doing so many positive things?"

Suddenly I felt that the answer to those questions is simple, and wonderfully reassuring. Because I am not a solid self or single entity. Just as my body is made up of many physical organs, my mind is made up of many mental modules akin to how Wright describes them in Why Buddhism is True.

When my mind has either led me astray, or put me on a positive path, a self named Brian wasn't responsible. Unconscious inclinations leading in different directions -- positive/negative, loving/hateful, productive/unproductive -- battled it out beneath the surface of my awareness. Eventually one module (not a great term, but I'll stick with Wright's language) won out in that subterranean conflict and placed thoughts in my conscious mind that led to actions.

This realization was deeply moving. I felt like a great weight had been lifted from my psyche. I no longer looked upon my successes and failures as emanating from me, because there really isn't such a singular Me. There have been many Me's, and there will be many more. 

Whenever I've gotten super angry, or super loving, or super resentful, or super grateful, that's a new temporary Me coming into being. Right now a writer Me has risen to the fore. Soon a hot-bath-loving Me will take over. I'm composed of multitudes that bubble up from unconscious depths to become conscious story-tellers and actors for a while.

Yes, there is a certain continuity to my existence, because I remember some of what this mind and body have experienced over the years, and many of my attributes don't change drastically with every new manifestation of Me. 

It just felt really good, and still does, to realize that, as Wright says in his book, the thoughts and resulting actions that either have made me feel proud or ashamed actually have not been produced by a conscious Me, but were directed from unconscious depths toward whatever sort of Me was ascendent at any particular time.

I realize this probably doesn't make a lot of sense. I wish I could describe it better. But a hot bath awaits.

Pieces of churchless string too short to save

Many years ago, in that far-off time when local newspapers were much more vibrant and successful than they are now, our town's paper, the Salem Statesman Journal, had a column written by someone who occasionally started his piece with "pieces of string too short to save."

Meaning, he was going to mention a bunch of unrelated things in his column that day, each of which was interesting, but didn't merit taking up the entire column. Today I figured I'd dust that saying off and do my blog post imitation of it, otherwise known as three-dot writing.

...Yesterday I heard from someone who asked me why I wanted to get the copyright for Life is Fair back from Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the India-based spiritual group that I wrote the book for. The question surprised me. He'd heard about this from other members of RSSB. I just replied to him.

I’ve never asked for any changes to the Life is Fair copyright. It’s always been in the hands of RSSB. All I did was research and write the book, with help from other volunteers. I have no idea how anyone got the notion that I wanted to take back the copyright, especially since I never had it to begin with. Working on Life is Fair was simply an act of devotion to Charan Singh for me. 

I was told by Faith Singh that Charan dreamed of being able to hand out a little book about the karmic rationale for vegetarianism. When she asked me if I wanted to attempt writing such a book, I instantly said yes, motivated by love for my guru. I guess the lesson here is not to believe all the gossip that spreads around RSSB circles. Like gossip in general, sometimes it has a bit of truth behind it, and sometimes it doesn’t. In this case the gossip has zero truth behind it.

...I'm reading a book that appeared on a New York Times list of best nonfiction books published in 2024,  A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon. Kevin Fedarko, the author, is really talented. Here's a paragraph that caught my eye as I was reading the book in the bathtub last night.

Sooner or later, every difficult journey collides against a moment that crystallizes the imperative of accepting that the outcome of any ambitious undertaking can neither be ordained nor engineered by its participants, and that the heart of an odyssey is reached -- and its deeper truths begin to reveal themselves -- only after the illusion of control is permitted to fall away and disappear into the gathering night, like a loose pebble over a cliff.

This passage also is amazingly well written.

The sun stood squarely overhead, straddling the canyon's rims, pouring a column of fire directly into the abyss and driving the shadows into the deepest recesses of the rock while causing the cushion of air that hovered just above the surface of the stone to tremble, as if the ground itself were gasping for breath. But the most striking element of all, the detail that could burn a hole in the center of your consciousness, was neither the brilliance nor the ferocity of that heat, but its heft: its thickness and weight as it draped itself over the top of your head and across the blades of your shoulders, as if it were a blanket braided from material that was already in flames when delivered into the hands of its weaver. 

...This morning and yesterday I labored on writing an email to officials at the City of Salem that the Oregon Government Ethics Commission website informed me was a prerequisite for filing a complaint with the commission. In my case, I want to have them find that the Salem Mayor, Julie Hoy, engaged in a prohibited "serial communication" with members of the City Council that led to the City Manager being forced to resign.

The email was necessary to give the City of Salem 21 days to respond to the facts and circumstances of what I consider to be a breach of Oregon's public meeting law. After that, I can file a complaint with the Oregon Government Ethics Commission, either appending the city's response, or telling the commission the city officials never responded. 

It was strangely satisfying to spend several hours writing a difficult email. I wanted to sound reasonable and factual while still conveying a sense of outrage at what the Mayor had done. Standing up for what I think is right often brightens my mood. National politics is far removed from my everyday reality. With local politics, I have a chance of making a difference, even if just a small change. The email became a blog post. If you're into geeky subjects like this one, check out "I just initiated an ethics complaint against the City of Salem."

...A recent issue of New Scientist has an article called "Wearables for the mind: A new wave of monitoring devices claim to improve our mental health, but do they work?" I've tried one of the devices, the Mendi headset, buying it when it was a Kickstarter project a few years ago. After liking the Mendi at first, I then got irritated with it.  

I like the idea of making concentration/meditation more scientific with neurofeedback, but the reality is that these sorts of devices are still in an early stage of usefulness. The person who wrote the article seemed to like the Muse brain-sensing headband the most. I agree with him that getting feedback via sounds is preferable to having to look at a screen, which the Mendi requires, as I prefer to meditate wit my eyes closed.

For now I'm going to stick with good old-fashioned meditation. Just me and my brain, doing our thing (assuming there is any difference between "me" and "my brain," which I suspect there isn't.

Here's our 2024 Holiday Greetings letter

I'm not a Christian, but I have no problem with saying "Merry Christmas." After all, tomorrow is as much a secular day devoted to giving and receiving presents as it is a celebration of Jesus' supposed birthday.

The problem with this celebration is that it's virtually certain Jesus wasn't born on December 25. Wikipedia says:

In the third century, the precise date of Jesus's birth was a subject of great interest, with early Christian writers suggesting various dates in March, April and May.

Steven Hijmans of the University of Alberta writes that "cosmic symbolism" inspired the Church leadership in Rome to choose 25 December, the Roman date of the winter solstice and the birthday of Sol Invictus ('Invincible Sun'), as the birthday of Christ.

Regardless, my wife and I are pleased to flow with the Christmas river, even though we have no interest in the religious side of this holiday. For me, it's a reason to write an annual Christmas letter, which we prefer to call a Holiday Greetings.

Here's this year's letter in PDF and JPEG formats. Because I've written a Christmas letter since 1995, as documented in my regularly updated Collected Christmas Letters post, I didn't feel like breaking that string this year. I do note in the 2024 letter that I'm feeling increasingly like a soon-to-be-extinct creature. 

Download 2024 Christmas Letter PDF

Learning new skills is key to improving both mind and body

Like most people, I'm a big believer in improving my skills. This is such an obvious thing to do, it hardly bears mentioning. But I feel like I need to stress the obvious, because some visitors to this blog seem to view spirituality as a "one and done" sort of thing. 

Meaning, you find a religion, meditation technique, mystical path, or whatever that suits you, and you stick with that approach with no modifications for the rest of your life. Yeah, I realize this sounds ridiculous, and it is. Yet I've encountered people who actually seem to believe it's the way to go.

Which goes against how we deal with just about every other activity of mind or body. 

I started playing tennis at a young age, twelve or so. I played competitively into my 30s. I never stopped trying to improve my game: taking lessons, trying new racquets, stringing racquets at various tensions, hitting balls against a backboard.

I began learning Tai Chi in 2005. Nineteen years later, I'm way past being a beginner. My Tai Chi instructor, even more so. Yet my instructor is continually teaching new techniques. Naturally they become subtler since almost everyone in our classes is well versed in the basics of Tai Chi. There's always something more to learn about Tai Chi, though.

When it comes to meditation, I've meditated daily for about 55 years. Just as with tennis and Tai Chi, I'm always open to fresh ideas about how to make my meditation more pleasant and fulfilling. That's why I like to read new books about meditation and mindfulness, along with re-reading old books -- since I've found that as I change over the years, how I look upon a meditation/mindfulness book will change also.

Teachers are helpful in improving skills, whether they be an actual person or a virtual person (book, video, web site, etc.). I've never agreed 100% with any teacher I've had. All I look for in a teacher is the ability to help me learn something new. They always will look upon some things differently than I do, so I pick and choose what I accept from a teacher and what I reject.

For example, I'm enjoying James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything. However, some of what he says doesn't resonate with me, either because Doty is wrong, or he's right and I don't understand what he's getting at.

Doty speaks about synchronicity being a way for us to manifest what we desire through unexpected connections that arise in our life.

Okay, we've all experienced amazing coincidences that can seem as if the universe is sending a message to us. That's possible, though unlikely. Given how many happenings there are every day in everybody's life, coincidences and synchronicity are going to occur once in a while just by chance, like rolling a pair of dice and getting two sixes five times in a row.

Yesterday I stopped by our bank to deposit a check. I wanted to get that errand done as quickly as possible, since I needed to go grocery shopping afterwards and then walk our dog before it got dark, which happens pretty early this time of the year in Oregon.

I had to wait a while before a teller was free. I got a woman who I'd noticed had spent quite a bit of time with a previous customer. That transaction required the assistance of a supervisor. When I was called to her station, I was mildly irked at having to wait so long. I handed her a deposit slip and a check, but she asked, "What do you need to do?"

"A deposit," I said, "I just gave it to you." "Anything else?" "No." She then fiddled with her terminal before asking me for my I.D. I dug out my drivers license, gave it to her, and said, "Why do you need I.D.? I've been banking here for a long time." "Because I'm new and don't know you."

That changed everything. Now I knew why she was taking so long to help customers. She needed assistance from a supervisor to do my transaction, but that didn't bother me after I realized she was learning on the job. 

After going grocery shopping at a couple of stores, I decided to get a grande decaf nonfat vanilla latte at the Starbucks within the south Salem Fred Meyer store. The barista, an older man, needed me to repeat my order several times before he got it right on the terminal. Eventually he had to call another barista over to show him where "vanilla" was on the screen.

This was fine with me, as I'd noticed that he had to use a "cheat sheet" of how to make Starbucks drinks with the customer ahead of me. Meaning, he also was learning his job. This is rare for me, encountering someone who is new at their job. Yet it happened twice in the space of an hour or so.

Doty might say that was synchronicity, that I needed to learn something about patience and compassion for slow employees. However, I just see it as a coincidence. Regardless, I learned something about myself. Next time I won't be so quick to get irritated at an employee who takes extra time to do something for me.

That's all we can hope for from life. Learning. Becoming more skilled. Having more compassion and love. As my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Marshall, was fond of saying, "Do your best. Angels can do no better." 

I'm learning some things by caring for my wife

As I said in my previous post, "My wife's shoulder surgery is a growth opportunity for me," since Laurel had shoulder replacement surgery last Tuesday, I've been her caregiver -- and will be for the 4-6 weeks she'll have to wear a sling on her right arm (we're hoping for four weeks).

Until you can't use an arm for much, it's difficult to know all the things you won't be able to do anymore. We're rediscovering those things, since Laurel had rotator cuff surgery on the same arm about ten years ago that also required her to use a sling for a month. Of course, we were a decade younger then, so everything is a bit tougher now that we're in our mid-70s rather than mid-60s.

I've been having to do a lot more around the house than I usually do.

For example, Laurel used to walk our dog in the morning and I did it most afternoons. Now I handle both walks. We shared cooking duties before her surgery. Now I have to help Laurel with her meals, unless it's a simple one that doesn't require two hands. For the first 48 hours my wife was constantly using a machine with a timer to ice her shoulder, 40 minutes on, 20 minutes off. My job was to rotate three sets of 12 frozen water bottles into the machine every eight hours, making sure a thoroughly frozen set always was available.

What I've discovered from all this extra taking care of Laurel is that the more I'm focused on her needs, the less it bothers me when something goes wrong in my life. This both surprised and pleased me. The first time it happened, it felt like I'd taken a pill that reduced the sensation of the problem I was having by about half. 

Meaning, what used to irritate me considerably now irritated me only a little. It was as if constantly putting Laurel's needs before my own, even for just a couple of days, considerably lowered the feeling of Me I normally carry around. Having less Me rattle around in my mind, and more She (my wife), left less for an irritation to latch onto. 

Someone asked in a comment on my first post about Laurel's surgery why I'd said that she had doubts about the surgery beforehand. The basic reason is that my wife still could use her right arm, and with physical therapy sometimes it didn't even hurt her. Since all surgery has risks, Laurel had to weigh the pros and cons of shoulder replacement surgery.

In the recovery room, where we got instructions for post-operative care, Laurel mentioned to her doctor that she hadn't been sure whether she really needed the surgery. The doctor unhesitatingly said, "You did; though you don't have a complete rotator cuff tear, it would have torn completely at some point." This made us both feel better, especially since the surgery went well. It strengthened my feeling that as difficult as it will be for my wife and me in the next 4-6 weeks of recovery, that will pay off with an increased quality of life for Laurel once she can use her right arm with confidence again.

So I'm doing my best to adjust to the changes in my routine caused by my new caregiver role. I used to enjoy my hour or so of reading and meditation time in the morning. Now I have to take our dog for a walk then. Mooka is a very active Husky mix who needs two lengthy walks a day, which are mostly off leash since we live in a rural area with nature trails on easements through the properties in our development.

Yesterday I was walking with Mooka to our nearby 9-acre community lake. I'll share a photo of it that I took as we were crossing the earthen dam. Our house is in the trees at the far end of the lake, about in the middle of the photo. Our ten acres doesn't adjoin the lake, but just one lot separates us and the lake.

Soon after Mooka and I started our walk, I'd been idly thinking about how I wasn't going to have time to meditate that morning and would have to squeeze in some meditation time later in the day. Then it dawned on me, That's crazy talk. In my current frame of mind, meditation is simply being as fully aware as possible of what I'm experiencing. I'm on a walk now. If I can be fully aware of that walk, this is meditation, just as sitting in a chair with eyes closed is.

That realization brought peace of mind. I stopped worrying about missing my meditation time, because any time is meditation time if it's mindful. I knew this before, but it took the big change in my routine following Laurel's surgery to truly grasp what I already knew conceptually.

My wife's shoulder surgery is a growth opportunity for me

For a long time I felt that my daily meditation was the best way for me to become a better person. Looking back, that was a selfish attitude.

I'd bought into a form of pseudo-spirituality that taught self-realization (I'm soul, not body!) was the stepping stone to god-realization (My soul is a drop of the divine ocean!). 

I call it "pseudo" because in my current frame of mind, genuine spirituality is about forgetting the self as much as possible, not trying to enhance it, even if the supposed enhancing is aimed at merging with the Grandest Self of All, god. 

Acting for the good of others is a higher purpose than acting for our own good. And I'm not talking about a narrow definition of  "others," such as a guru.

During my true believing days when I was an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-centered religious organization, I encountered many RSSB initiates who were all in on selfless service -- to the guru.

They'd journey to the RSSB headquarters in India or a RSSB center in their own country to reap the spiritual benefit of seva, volunteer service. I did that too, but I never felt that this sort of service was more important than all the ways we can be of service to friends, family, our community, and such.

In fact, in a way it was less important than those other ways, since service to the guru and his organization had a Me-Me-Me vibe to it. It wasn't really selfless service, because the sevadar doing the service supposedly was getting major benefits from serving the guru, God in Human Form.

Karmas were erased, easing the way for the soul to soar to higher supernatural regions of reality. The guru's grace was bestowed upon his servants. Detachment from worldly relations chaining us to this realm of illusion was made easier by attachment to the guru.

I'm not saying that other forms of service are free of self-righteousness, ego, and desire. A volunteer at a food bank may enjoy the feeling of doing something that others will applaud them for. That's human nature -- to care as much about ourselves as other people. 

But we can aspire to a purer form of service that is founded in love, not self-gain. I have that aspiration, even though I am a long way from achieving it. 

That's how I'm looking at the shoulder replacement surgery that my wife, Laurel, had today.

Ten years ago she had shoulder surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff. After it became re-torn, Laurel engaged in a lengthy process of deciding whether to have another surgery or make do with a painful right shoulder that limited what she could do with that arm.

It wasn't easy to decide on a shoulder replacement. Just a few days ago Laurel was still having doubts about whether she was doing the right thing. In the end she answered "yes," which is how I went with her to a 7 am appointment for the surgery today. 

She drove us to the Salem Health outpatient surgery building, since that was the last time she'd be able to drive for at least a month, until her sling comes off. For the next 4-6 weeks I'm my wife's caregiver. Today and tomorrow, I'm giving her an especially large amount of care, given that Laurel is supposed to use an ice machine for 40 minutes on/20 minutes off for two days after her surgery to reduce inflammation.

I've already learned some things about myself. Not new stuff, really, just confirmations of my old stuff.

I enjoy bringing food and drink to Laurel. I like figuring out how the ice machine works and keeping it stocked with 12 bottles of frozen water (easier than using regular ice). I don't mind feeding and walking our dog twice a day rather than once a day.

I'm getting a fresh appreciation of the marriage vows "for better or worse, in sickness and in health." It's easier to love someone when things are better and healthier, but it's more satisfying when love works through tough times. 

Of course, I find myself starting to get irritated when, say, I'm trying to write this blog post and Laurel needs me to do something for her. I'm a creature of routine, and now my routine will be considerably different for a month or so. 

Which is good for me. I need some shaking up. Laurel, like most women, does more of our household chores than I do. Now it's time for me to serve her to a greater extent than I usually do. I don't have to fly off to India for this service, this seva. 

She's right in the next room, waiting for me to refill the ice machine with fresh water bottles to keep her shoulder cool through the night. 

Here's my churchless "death letter." But I'm not dying.

Yesterday on my HinesSight blog I wrote a post called "My 76th birthday has me thinking about sending death letters before I die." Here's how it starts out.

For a while I've been pondering the notion of sending death letters to friends, family, and other people important to me -- not letters to be delivered after I die, but while I'm very much alive, not even sick. 

This idea has gained strength as I approach my 76th birthday. That sounds damn old to me. Which, it is.

My sister died at 71. My mother died at 73. My father, almost entirely absent from my life, died at 73 (best I can estimate; I'm not sure about the exact age).

So while I'm pretty healthy at the moment, having taken better care of myself than those relatives, I still sort of feel like I've living on borrowed time. After all, usually we have no way of knowing when we'll take our last breath.

Accidents happen. Unexpected heart attacks happen. Murders happen. The only way death is known in advance is if we commit suicide or if we have a fatal disease whose course is predictable.

My sister and mother died without me being able to speak with them. My father, the same, though we were so distant, I might not have wanted to talk with him before his death. 

I regret not being able to tell my sister and mother how much I loved them and would miss them. Hopefully they knew this, but we weren't a super-intimate family. I never told them things that I now wish I had, such as regrets about how I could have been a better brother or son, and my appreciation for all they did for me which, in retrospect, I took for granted more than I should have.

That's my motivation for writing individualized death letters to people I care about and sending them out while I'm alive and well, aside from some chronic health problems that are annoying rather than life-threatening. 

The letters would be a reflection of my deep feelings for these people. They'd allow me to say things more honestly and directly than I'm able to do in my usual communications with them. I'd imagine that I was on my death bed, even though I wouldn't be. What would I want to say to each of them if I knew that I only had fifteen minutes of living left?

For sure it wouldn't be aimless chit-chat. It would be heartfelt, real, emotional.

I'm beginning my death letter project with this post directed at those who visit my Church of the Churchless blog. Not just current visitors, everyone who has visited here since I started the blog in 2004 -- which now has a total of 3,655 posts, 74,366 comments, and 7,377,169 pageviews. 

I hope to keep this blog going for many more years. But one thing is certain about life: it's uncertain. This was the last paragraph of my HinesSight post.

If I ever have a sudden massive heart attack or find a big semi-truck about to hit my little Subaru head on, I don't want my last thought to be, Damn, I never told _____ how much I care about them.  I'd rather have it simply be, Fuck! I'm about to die!

So I'm saying it now: I deeply care about every single person who visits this blog, even though I've met very few of you in person. Without people reading and commenting on my posts, this blog would simply be me sending words into a cyberspace void. 

I realize that I annoy visitors who don't share my increasingly atheistic worldview. Thanks for putting up with me. Though it may not always seem like I'm practicing what I'm preaching, I truly do believe in what the tagline of this blog calls spiritual independence. 

That includes believing in God and the supernatural. While I can sound harsh toward religious believers, naturally I have friends who fall into that camp. When speaking to people face-to-face, I never belittle their religion because that wouldn't be courteous. 

I readily admit that sometimes my criticisms of religiosity cross the line from reasonable objection to rabid insults.  As is obvious, I'm decidedly imperfect. My passion for the truth as I see it can get the better of me. 

When I started this blog I figured that most visitors to it would be like me, not affiliated with any religion, though perhaps they were in the past, also like me. But judging from comments on my posts, a large share of visitors believe in God and the supernatural.

That's been a good thing, actually.

So while I'm thankful to everyone who visits this blog, I'm especially thankful to those who read and comment on my posts and aren't atheist or agnostic. You help keep this blog from being an echo chamber of religious skeptics. That would be boring, even though at first I thought that's what I wanted this blog to be.

I struggle with life much of the time. Always have, always will. Writing for me has been much needed therapy, a way for me to get out of my personal worrying mind and into ideas that are more universal. Each night I sit down at my MacBook Pro laptop and write a post for one of my three blogs.

Every other day I write a churchless post, because this blog has more visitors than my HinesSight and Salem Political Snark blogs. As I sit down to compose a post, I feel the presence of Church of the Churchless visitors. It isn't that I'm writing for you, since really I'm writing for myself.

However, you're in my mind, an unseen group of people that I want to share some ideas with that interest me. I'm grateful for your presence. It makes me feel less lonely to know that even though we likely will never encounter each other in person, you're out there, scattered around the world, forming a little community.

A weird little community, and I mean that in a good way. Each person who comments regularly has their own unique style. For some reason the bar scenes in the early Star Wars movies come to mind, if I'm remembering those alien worlds correctly. 

There's a lot of strange creatures drinking (if that's what they were doing) and carrying on. Yet somehow they all get along together. Well, except when they don't. Then a fight might break out. Just like on this blog.

We've all got our own ways of looking at the world. Often they conflict. But we keep on talking and carrying on. All that has been a source of great satisfaction for me. If I die tomorrow, or ten years from now (the actuarial prediction for my remaining lifespan), this blog will have been one of my activities that I feel most good about. 

Thanks for making that possible.

What the Olympics can teach us about life, love, and reality

Ooh, after just writing the title for this blog post, I realized that it's pretty grandiose. But if I stumble and fall before I cross the blog-post-expectation finish line, this will simply serve to emphasize one of my points about the meaning of the Olympics -- assuming I can remember what it was.

The Paris Olympics are about halfway done. My wife and I watched the opening ceremony in its entirety.  Well, until the ceremony reached the stadium, after which we lost interest.

I thought it was one of the best opening ceremonies ever. Creative, emotional, energetic. Having the athletes on boats was a stroke of genius. I'm always moved by so many nations coming together under a single banner: the Olympics. 

As I recall, the athletes from Iran were on a boat just ahead of the boat that carried the Israeli athletes. Though their countries are mortal enemies politically and religiously, I'm confident that athletes from Iran and Israel would get along fine if they met during the Olympics. 

It gave me hope to see the floating Parade of Nations. I realize that sports is a special case of global cooperation. But if the world can peacefully coexist on the field of athletic competition, it sure seems that one day we can bridge our political, religious, and cultural differences. 

That's why John Lennon's Imagine was played during the opening ceremony, a song with great lyrics, including:

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

 

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

A big reason why sports unites rather than divides is that there are agreed-upon rules for every Olympic event. If you can't follow the rules, you can't compete. Breaking the rules has consequences. A warning, a penalty, maybe even a forfeit of the match. 

In part this was a dream of the United Nations, including the International Court of Justice. It still is to some extent, but I'm sorry to say that my country, the United States, is one of those that puts itself above the rule of international law. Which makes no sense, since the United States is pleased to follow international rules that govern our athletes in the Olympics.

People hate to see their favored team or athlete lose. They hate it even more when an officiating error seems to bend the rules unfairly. That happened to American tennis star Coco Gauff when she lost a match after a linesperson called a ball out while Gauff was about to swing at it, which made her mishit the ball, then the referee overruled the call and refused to replay the point. 

This shows how life often isn't fair, or at least appears to be unfair, despite the title of one of my books that argued otherwise. 

Further evidence of this abounds in the Olympics, as in all sporting events. However, I don't see this further evidence as pointing to life's unfairness, but to life's contingency, its unpredictable and chaotic nature. Meaning, large effects often follow from small causes. Very small, sometimes. This helps produce the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.

For me, the surfing competition showed this dramatically, which is taking place in Tahiti, at a notorious reef where large waves break with tremendous force in what soon turns into shallow water. Surfing is a unique Olympic sport in that the field of play, so to speak, is constantly shifting -- in line with Buddhist notions of life itself. 

Two competitors have 30 minutes to catch waves, taking turns, basically. Depending on the ocean conditions, there might be a string, or set, of large high quality waves that will showcase the surfer's talents. Or, the competitors might have to wait, and wait, and wait for a decent wave. 

I watched two surfers who were pretty evenly matched. Only a small difference separated their scores as the competition grew close to the 3o minute mark. The surfer who was behind hoped for a large wave to appear, as this was their only hope to get in the breaking "pipeline," pop out cleanly, and earn a good score from the judges.

But it wasn't a big wave day. The horn sounded signaling the end of the competition with the surfer behind never getting another chance. That's how sports, and life, often is. You do your best, but there are forces outside of your control that have the last say in how well you do.

Surfers, like skateboarders and athletes in many, if not most, other Olympic sports, love what they do. They'd be doing it even if fame and money didn't accompany their efforts. I liked watching two male surfers on a really big wave day catch giant wave after giant wave, smiling and laughing with each other as they paddled back out to get another wave.

An announcer, who I believe was a professional surfer himself, said that what the competitors would remember about this day wasn't whether they won or lost, but how great the surfing was. Similarly, I read that after a Japanese skateboarder pulled off a very difficult trick, giving him a gold medal, his competitors applauded him, since they love skateboarding more than they hate losing, and someone who advances the sport via a rarely or never seen trick -- that really pleases them.

I'm a competitive person. I don't like losing, whether it be an argument or an athletic competition (though my days as an avid club tennis player are far in my rear-view mirror). But I'm going to try to keep in mind that losing an argument to someone who makes better points than I'm capable of isn't anything to be ashamed of, but an opportunity to admire the skills of the other person.

The Olympics brings out the best in competitors. It also can bring out the best in us spectators, if we have the right attitude toward watching.

Oh, almost forgot to mention another memorable moment, the last minute or so of the bronze medal match between the United States and Australia women's rugby teams. Australia was ahead 14-7. The Americans were 85 yards away from the goal line. Things looked bleak for the USA team. 

After a few passes that didn't result in much, if any, forward progress, the ball ended up in the hands of an American woman who was almost instantly in the grasp of an Australian player. But she managed to get loose, looked upfield, and saw open territory between her and the goal line.

She took off running. Nobody from the Australian team could catch her. I was worried she'd run out of steam, but she dived across the goal line untouched. The camera showed the joy of the American players and the shock of the Australian players.

They had the game won, seemingly. Until the game was lost. That's life. You just never know for sure what's going to happen next. Something horrible. Something wonderful. You just never know.

Rather than rely on religion, here's what I consider both true and beneficial

Having been a religious believer for 35 years, Eastern religion variety, I'm deeply familiar with why people are attracted to a belief in God, heaven, supernatural realms, mystical powers, life after death, and such.

In short, it feels good. 

Religions provide a community of like-minded people. They offer a ready-made meaning to life. Their believers are drawn to view themselves as special, possessing knowledge and benefits (like eternal salvation) off-limits to those not within the religion's fold. 

I found all those things highly appealing and beneficial to me.

Until I didn't. For this primary reason: I came to conclude that most of what I believed wasn't true. So I was buying good feelings with a counterfeit coin. This was different than how I felt for a long time, which basically was "I don't know for sure what's true and false about my religion, but it has the ring of truth."

That shift didn't happen overnight. It occurred gradually, bit by bit, in much the same way my first wife, Sue, and I grew apart during the latter stage of our 18-year marriage. In both cases, the final breakup was preceded by a lengthy period of slowly growing disenchantment. 

I'm not claiming that I now have seen the light and know truths about reality that escaped me during my true believing days. Far from it. In some ways I'm more uncertain now about life and the cosmos than I was as a religious believer.

But I'm content with that, because I'd rather be close-to-certain about a few key things regarding this material world, rather than being close-to-certain about some supernatural propositions. 

That tradeoff makes sense to me because I've found that when something is likely both true and beneficial, embracing it is better than being attached to something that's probably false and beneficial. In other words, I'm still wanting peace of mind, happiness, and other good stuff. I just have come to prefer that those goodies come wrapped in truth rather than falsehood.

Again, I'm not saying that I have any unique insights into what is both True and Good. In fact, I'm attracted to these True and Good statements about reality in large part because I see them as founded in a broad scientific outlook, not some narrow perspective. 

If I had to pick two True and Good things that I've come to rely on, they would be:

(1) There's no enduring self. This is a tenet of both modern neuroscience and ancient Buddhism. What I am, what you are, what everybody is -- that's something ever-changing, ephemeral, and interconnected with the rest of existence. Knowing this takes the pressure off of me trying to find my true self, of saving my soul, and other notions based on an assumption that such is possible. 

(2) There's no free will. This also is a tenet of both modern neuroscience and ancient Buddhism. Whether termed determinism or karma, it seems highly likely, almost certain, that our actions, thoughts, emotions, and such arise from causes and conditions extending from the present moment to the big bang that brought our universe into being. Again, interconnectedness. 

Now, I realize that even if someone acknowledges these statements to be true, they may vehemently disagree that they are beneficial. And that's fine. For that person. I'm just expressing how I feel, not how everybody should feel. 

Which is a considerable change for me. I used to get defensive when my religious beliefs were challenged. I'd try to defend them by various sorts of arguments, none of them highly persuasive, in my current frame of mind. 

By no means have I lost all of my desire to have people agree with me, rather than disagree. I'm just less concerned about defending my views about no-self and no free will. (Not that I have a choice in the matter.)

Wrong things I tell myself

A book could be written about the title of this blog post. Indeed, some have done just that.

There's lots of books in both the neuroscientific and philosophical genres about the illusion that we humans are a single self. Or, if you're religiously minded, a Self.

The truth is, as I said in the title, that "I" can have no problem telling "myself" something, even though almost everybody -- me certainly included -- has an intuitive sense that there's a single entity inside our head who is in charge of our actions, thoughts, beliefs, and such.

That intuition is wrong. As the poet Walt Whitman said:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Here's some of the wrong things that I tell myself, even though I've argued for their falsity, as evidenced by the links to blog posts I've written on the subject. This doesn't prove that I'm a hypocrite. Just that I'm human.

This shouldn't be happening to me. (Actually, reality doesn't deal with should and shouldn't, just with is.)

There's a deeper meaning to this. (Who says? Certainly not the universe, which has never spoken to me.)

I'll be satisfied once I do this or have that. (If such were true in the past, wouldn't satisfaction be mine right now?)

I screwed that up, big time. (But if free will is an illusion, screw-ups are determined, like everything else.)

I've got to get my life under control. (Such is impossible; life is inherently uncertain.)

That person is trying to drive me crazy. (Usually they are barely aware of my existence, or aren't out to personally disturb me; I just assume that.)

It'd be great if everybody agreed with me. (No, it wouldn't, since life is founded on opposites.)

I'm making progress on my spiritual journey. (Only if that journey is from nowhere to nowhere.)

This new book will make things perfectly clear. (If that were the case, Amazon wouldn't continue to make so much money off of me.)

I've got to live more in the here and now. (There's nothing other than here and now, you fool.)

Pain is a great teacher, though I'd prefer a more pleasant instructor

Back in 2020 was when my sciatica pain started. I don't know why. Often health problems appear mysteriously. Which would be fine if they disappeared just as mysteriously. 

But in my case, the extreme pain I had early on, where I'd shed tears uncontrollably while walking the dog or mowing the lawn if I was having an especially bad day, eventually abated. Maybe from time. Maybe from the physical therapy exercises I was given. Who knows?

For the next three years, 2021-23, my right leg always had some discomfort. It was manageable, though. I didn't need pain relievers. I was able to do whatever I wanted, albeit with some pain if it involved standing or moving for more than a few minutes. 

Then things changed last December. The locus of the pain shifted from my leg to my leg plus my hip area and part of my butt. It also got more intense. So my primary care provider referred me for more physical therapy. 

That helped for a while. Until it didn't. Last Saturday I finally got a lumbar MRI after I met the criteria for my MedAdvantage insurance: got an X-ray, tried physical therapy, pain won't go away with medication or other means.

Now I'm in an awkward waiting period. The MRI result, which had a lot of "extreme" words in the report (age-related spinal degeneration, basically), opened the door to me getting referrals to two Pain and Spine clinics here in Salem, Oregon.

They likely will be able to help me. Cortisone injections, maybe. Surgery as a last resort. I'm sure they have other options that are better than what I'd doing now. That's mainly alternating Tylenol and Advil every four hours throughout the day, exercising, and simply dealing with the pain as best I can.

This morning it was excruciating, because sleeping causes my nerves and muscles to tighten up, making it extremely difficult to get out of bed when I have to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, or upon waking up in the morning.

That gets me to the philosophical part of this blog post. 

I've tried thinking positively, visualizing myself as I'm getting ready for bed with manageable pain in the morning. That's better than thinking gloomingly, which creates more tension in me, something I don't need.

I've tried repeating a mantra, the Buddhist Namu Amida Butsu being a favorite. This also helps, yet it seems artificial to me, being a distraction or barrier from what my mind would be doing absent the mantra. 

Then there's simply being in the present moment. That's my go-to approach when the pain is so great, my attention narrows to doing Just One Thing. That's how I picture the situation: Just One Thing, followed by Just One Thing, followed by Just One Thing.

Last night I was sleeping soundly until I awoke around 5 am. I groggily realized that I didn't feel any pain. My semi-awake brain thought, "Great, your sciatica is better; you won't have much of a problem getting up to go to the bathroom."

Until I moved. A little. Which hurt a lot. So much so, I cried out in pain. Not enough to wake my wife, thankfully, who sleeps in another part of our house. That cry was repeated several more times as I struggled to move my right leg, which was locked in an excruciating sciatica death grip.

All I could do was Just One Thing. Eventually I was able to swing my legs over the side of the bed and stand up. Just One Thing. Then I got a crutch that I keep next to the bed for nights when it's extremely painful to walk into the bathroom. Just One Thing. I shuffled along, one crutch-assisted step at a time. Just One Thing.

I couldn't handle the entire situation, which seemed like a nightmare if I let my mind drift in that direction. However, I could do Just One Thing, followed by the next Just One Thing. It took quite a while, but eventually I was able to get back into bed and fall asleep again. Just One Thing.

There's a lesson here. Maybe just for me. Maybe for others also. 

When things are going well, or at least not too badly, it's easy to believe that we've got life figured out. Our coping mechanisms work for us. Existence is pleasant enough, and we can handle the rough spots that pop up. 

But when we're pushed to a limit, beyond what we're used to handling, that's when we might realize the limitation of our usual manner of going about things. Such was the case for me, for sure. 

When excruciating sciatica pain comes over me, it washes away my customary positivity, my mantras, my meditation, my life lessons, my knowledge -- just about everything. What's left isn't really me. At least, not the me I ordinarily consider myself to be. 

What's there is what my body is doing and feeling. What's there is my consciousness, my awareness engaged in Just One Thing. Taking a step. Swallowing a pill. Going to the bathroom. Washing my hands. Always, Just One Thing.

And that, actually, is what's happening every moment of every day whether I'm feeling such pain. I'm always doing Just One Thing. I just don't realize it, because my attention can flow in many different directions. Intense pain narrows that focus. Pain screams, "Only me, only me!" 

I can't help but obey. Yet in the midst of that pain, I can still do Just One Thing in addition to feeling the pain. That's my reality at that moment. As I said, maybe at every moment, if I could just realize it.

A passage in the Preface of Joan Tollifson's book, Nothing to Grasp, says what I feel in painful moments.

Liberation is finding freedom in limitation and perfection in imperfection. It is the freedom to be exactly as we are. But what are we? What is real Here/Now? What is life all about? Who is reading these words? 

Is reading these words an individual choice, or is it the only possible activity of the whole universe at this moment, and is there a difference? 

Why do we exist? (I attempt an answer)

Yesterday I got this message from someone.

Just curious, perhaps it would be an idea to make a topic with the title: Why do we exist? I am convinced that we have no free will at all and life seems so useless...(to me).

Since I enjoy challenges, I said that I'd attempt a blog post on this subject, though I don't have any firm answer to the question. 

So here goes. I'll be sort of rambling in my response, given that quite a few different ideas have been meandering through my brain as I thought about the message at various times today.

Since I no longer believe in any religion, the straightforward answer to why we exist is nature.

Our universe came into being via the big bang some 14 billion years ago. After Earth formed much later, life appeared on our planet, which began a lengthy process of evolution that resulted in our species, Homo sapiens.

That's one way to look upon why do we exist? Natural causes led to people being alive today. But why can also point to a reason for being that goes beyond mere physical existence. 

This reason wouldn't come from a supernatural creator, since as noted above I don't believe in one.

However, it's possible that there's some law of nature which favors ever-increasing degrees of consciousness in living creatures, with we humans being the pinnacle of consciousness at the moment. I also reject this view, given that evolution doesn't work through "favors."

I don't like why's. At least, not when it comes to Big Important Questions.

I've written about how "Why is there something rather than nothing?" leads nowhere, while "There is something rather than nothing"  is a productive statement that reflects reality. Likewise, "Why do we exist?" is an intriguing question, but "We exist" strikes me as even more interesting.

I'm fascinated by existence. I adore existence. I can't get enough of existence.

At my age of 75, I'm well aware that existence isn't something I can count on for a whole lot longer, given that it strikes me as a virtual certainty that once I die, I'm dead and gone forever. Well, actually I've felt this way for quite a while. 

I'll be going along in my daily routine, doing this and that, going here and there, when I'll suddenly have the sensation, One day I won't exist, so everything I'm aware of now is infinitely precious.

At least, those are words that came to mind when I try to describe the sensation.

The sensation itself is wordless, being a knowing, a wake-up call, a premonition from my brain/mind to pay rapt attention now to everything that exists around me and in me and as me, because there's no way to know when a last breath, a last heartbeat, a last flickering of consciousness, marks the end of my existence.

Or your existence. Or anybody's existence. 

This is why Why do we exist? means so little to me when I envision myself not existing. Yes, I adore important philosophical questions. However, death has a way of making every sort of question fade into insignificance.

Living as fully as possible now -- that's an action-filled statement that makes sense to me. I want to believe that if I was totally engaged in brushing my teeth, or writing a blog post, or patting our dog, or doing any other everyday activity, if death made an appearance at that moment and said, Nonexistence has arrived, my friend, I'd be able to reply, So be it.

As the person who sent me the message observed, we have no free will. I heartily agree. This is especially obvious when it comes to our birth and death. No free will there, for sure. (Suicide is thrust upon us, not freely chosen, as is everything else.)

So this is the way I see things. The big bang happened. The formation of Earth happened. Life happened. Evolution happened. Home sapiens happened. The birth of each of us happened. The death of each of us is bound to happen.

None of these happenings was within our control. None of what's happened to us during our lifetime was within our control either, though most of us embrace the illusion of personal control and free will. So in this sense life is indeed useless, as the person who sent me the message said.

But it is useless only because there is no User -- no Self, no Soul, no Commander, no CEO inside our head in charge of what we do, feel, and believe. We're an integral part of the cosmos. Nature is us; we are nature. Whatever happens arises out of that unity.

Every living being comes into existence, then departs from existence. Heck, maybe everything does, our universe included, except existence itself. For that reason I feel grateful that the being who goes by my name and is writing this blog post has been able to experience life and existence even though I had nothing to do with this.

And that's my roundabout reply to Why do we exist? In no way did I genuinely answer the question, but I had an enjoyable time dancing around a question I'm incapable of answering.

More on the illusion of free will, from Robert Sapolsky and me

I'm continuing to enjoy Robert Sapolsky's book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, which I first wrote about a few days ago. The book is getting a lot of publicity, way more than any other book on this subject so far as I can tell. 

Before I share what I said about the illusion of free will on my HinesSight blog yesterday, here's more from Sapolsky -- quotes from the end of his chapter "Where Does Intent Come From?"

In the first chapter, I wrote about what is needed to prove free will, and this chapter has added details to that demand: show me that the thing a neuron just did in someone's brain was unaffected by any of these preceding factors -- by the goings-on in the eighty billion neurons surrounding it, by any of the infinite number of combinations of hormone levels percolated that morning, by any of the countless types of childhoods and fetal environments were experienced, by any of the two to the four millionth power different genomes that neuron contains, multiplied by the nearly as large range of epigenetic orchestrations possible. Et cetera. All out of your control.

...Why did that moment just occur? "Because of what came before it." Then why did that moment just occur? "Because of what came before that," forever isn't absurd and is, instead, how the universe works. The absurdity amid this seamlessness is to think that we have free will and that it exists because at some point, the state of the world (or of the frontal cortex or neuron or molecule of serotonin...) that "came before that" happened out of thin air.

In order to prove there's free will, you have to show that some behavior just happened out of thin air in the sense of considering all these biological precursors. It may be possible to sidestep that with some subtle philosophical arguments, but you can't with anything known to science.

And here's what I said in my HinesSight post yesterday, I don't believe in free will. Here's why. I left out a quotation from Sapolsky's book that I included in my first post about it.

Today the monthly Salon discussion group that my wife and I are part of spent quite a bit of time talking about free will.

This is one of my favorite subjects, for after pondering quite a few books about free will, or the lack thereof, I'm highly confident that free will is an illusion.

I can't recall exactly how our group started conversing about it, but for sure I spurred our conversation by saying that I've started reading Robert M. Sapolsky's terrific book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will.

To give you a feel for his general view of free will, here's an eight-minute interview featuring Sapolsky, a Stanford University professor of biology, of neurology and neurological sciences, and of neurosurgery.

I was worried that my passion for this subject wouldn't be shared by other members of the discussion group. I was wrong. We had a really interesting discussion of free will in which some people agreed with me that we don't possess it, and others presented reasons why they think we do.

Since I'm writing this blog post, not them, I'm going to focus on briefly relating some of my arguments for why free will doesn't exist. These aren't original, obviously. They flow from the books I've read by people arguing that free will is an illusion.

(1) Humans are part of the natural world. We are animals. Animals with powerful brains, to be sure, but animals. If a grizzly bear attacks someone, we don't consider that the bear had the free will to do otherwise. We just say, it was doing what bears do. So what makes us think that we stand apart from the natural world by possessing some sort of free will magic in our brain?

(2) The core argument against free will is simple. Everything about us, and the rest of the world, is determined. That's why Sapolsky's book has that title, Determined. Sure, we make choices. So do bears. And sea slugs. Those choices, those intentions, don't spring out of nowhere. They arise out of the goings-on in our brain, which is amazingly complex, yet still determined by causes and effects that range from a few seconds ago, to the moment of our birth, and even beyond given cultural and genetic influences on us.

(3) Recall something you've done that you regret. That's easy for me. Probably is for you also. We all have regrets. Often, or usually, that regret is made more painful by believing that we could have acted differently. But consider this. If every atom in your brain and outside world were in exactly the same condition as it was when you acted the first time, you'd do exactly what you did again. No doubt about it. Free will assumes that we have a choice to act differently. That can't be true if nothing has changed from when we acted initially.

(4) But as Sapolsky says in the video above, change does happen. All the time. Life and our world as a whole is nothing but change. People change. Animals change. Rocks change. Plants change. Free will, since it doesn't exist, can't change anything. Yet circumstances change. Every thought we have, every feeling we have, every action we take, all that changes us. So there's no fatalism involved in giving up a belief in free will. In fact, not believing in free will opens us to the reality that change can occur for countless reasons. Life is a never-ending series of surprises caused by determinism.

(5) Believing in free will fosters judgmentalism. We see someone in an unfortunate situation and think, "It's their fault." Giving up a belief in free will leads to a realization that, as strange as this may sound, no one is deserving of praise or blame. They're just doing what was determined that they do. So are we. Everybody is. Sure, society is justified in imprisoning dangerous people. But not to punish them. To protect others. And to change the prisoner for the better, if this is possible.

(6) There's no reason to think that people would go wild and crazy if they didn't believe in free will. Animals don't believe in free will, yet a wolf pack, herd of deer, school of fish, or flock of birds do just fine without such a belief. Us human animals have a strong sense of community and social cohesion. We generally want to get along with our fellow humans, notwithstanding our political, religious, and other sorts of divisions. Morality flows from a much deeper source than free will. It is embedded in our being thanks to evolution.

This morning I emailed a link to my HinesSight post to the members of our discussion group. After sharing the link, I added some personal observations.

We discussed why not believing in free will makes a difference in someone’s life. Well, after our meeting I had some thoughts about my father that I’d never had before. I have no early memories of him as my mother and he divorced when I was just a few years old.

 

Then I had no contact with him until my 30s when he started to phone me after he learned he had a serious case of emphysema that, I believe, eventually caused his death, though I could be wrong about this. It turned out that I was able to see him for a single hour in a Boston hotel room, which I wrote about here.

My fresh insight today was visualizing what it might have been like for my father as a newborn in this country to German immigrants who, he told me, he had learned came to work on the railroads. His mother died giving birth to him. His father then deserted his child, my father, who was eventually adopted by a Hines family. Which is why I have that last name rather than Mueller. 

 

I got to thinking about how a newborn’s brain/mind could be affected by his mother dying in childbirth in the early 1900s, then being orphaned. How much love and closeness did he receive as that infant? Could this help explain why my father, by all accounts from what I’ve been able to learn, was an egotistical selfish asshole? Maybe? Probably? 

 

Regardless I felt more compassion for my father this morning than I ever have, because viewing him as the product of deterministic forces put him in a different light than how I’ve tended to see him: as someone who willfully abandoned my mother after she gave birth to a sister of mine who was born with a congenital heart defect and reportedly needed a warmer drier climate than Massachusetts had to offer. He refused to move, so my mother went to Texas where my sister, Evie, died before too long.

 

Not viewing my father as having free will cast him in a different light for me. I’d already been inching in that direction when I wrote a blog post in 2013 about thanking him, and even loving him, for who he was, even with all his flaws. 

If the world is seen in a grain of sand, then enlightenment is in a football game

I like the title of this blog post. If I was reading it, rather than writing it, I'd look at that title and think, "Man, I've got to learn how enlightenment is in a football game."

Of course, learning how the world is seen in a grain of sand is something to be sought after also. But since I'm not William Blake, you'll have to ponder his poem on your own.

And I've got to admit that explaining how enlightenment is in a football game is more of an aspiration for me, than a given. Still, since I spent quite a bit of time today watching two entertaining football games, Oregon versus Washington and Oregon State versus UCLA, I figure that I should get some churchless blog post mileage out of that effort.

Since I live in Oregon, I watched both games not in a state of serene detachment but of anxious fandom. This distinguishes me from a friend who enjoys college football as much as I do, yet prefers to know the score before watching either a recorded game or You Tube highlights.

This, I suppose, is a reflection of differing approaches to enlightenment. 

I understand the appeal of not experiencing the ups and downs that accompany viewing a football game where the outcome is unknown. There's a lot to be said for harmony, calm, centeredness. However, there's also a strong argument to be made for passion, excitement, motion.

Some spiritual paths teach that enlightenment comes to those who make their mind into an empty mirror that dispassionately reflects whatever appears in it. A favorite team wins. A favorite team loses. Reflections, just reflections.

Other spiritual paths embrace the marvelous messiness of life. Enlightenment is viewed not as detachment from reality, but as an understanding that there is no enduring self to be enlightened nor any special state to be attained.

Me, I prefer that way of both spirituality and football watching. I'm incapable of not caring whether an Oregon team wins or loses. I enjoy the pleasure of victory, yet even the agony of defeat seems preferable to being a mere mirror that reflects what is without wishing for what could have been.

Today Oregon lost in a frustrating fashion to Washington. Since both were Top 10 teams, Oregon had a golden opportunity to take a big step toward a ranking that would guarantee a spot in the playoff for a national championship. 

But Coach Lanning chose to not kick short field goals twice on fourth down, which obviously was crucial in a game Oregon lost by three points. Those additional six points would have won the game. Lanning also went for it on fourth down near midfield in the closing minutes of the game when Oregon was leading by four points.

That fourth down attempt failed, which led to Washington scoring on the next two long pass plays. So I, along with other Oregon fans, understandably are critical of the coach's questionable decisions. 

Especially because Lanning acted in much the same way in two previous important games: taking risks when a more cautious approach would have produced a win rather than a loss. An Oregonian sports writer talked about this in "Dan Lanning loves taking risks, but it keeps costing the Ducks in their biggest moments."

Everybody enjoys a hand of high-stakes poker.

But there is always a sign hanging nearby that warns of the difference between enjoying gambling and having a gambling problem.

With Lanning, this is too much of a trend to ignore.

It was a similar situation last year against the Huskies in Eugene, when Lanning called for a run on fourth down from the Ducks’ own 34-yard line in a tie game with 90 seconds left, setting up the game-winning field goal for the surging Huskies.

And it happened two weeks later in Corvallis, when the Ducks were nursing a three-point lead in the fourth quarter and Lanning went for it on fourth and 1 from his own 28.

You can argue the merit of any of these decisions individually. But in Lanning’s scorebook of risk, regret is absolutely lapping reward.

But wait! Even though I agree with what is said above, didn't I just say that I look upon both enlightenment and football watching as lacking a special state to be attained. Like, not taking unnecessary risk.

Well, yes I did. 

So while I think Coach Lanning made some mistakes in his game management, I'm well aware of the many mistakes I've made in my life. Lanning is who he is. I am who I am. Neither of us can be anyone other than who we are. Just as no one else can either. 

Understanding that simple fact, really understanding it -- if that's not enlightenment, it's damn close to it. 

John Canzano is an independent sports columnist here in Oregon. I subscribe to his substack writing. Here's part of what Canzano said about Lanning's decisions today.

Should Lanning have taken three points and kicked a gimme field goal before halftime? Or maybe kicked one in the third quarter deep in the red zone?

Absolutely.

Put six points on the board there and the Ducks board their chartered buses and head to the airport in an entirely better mood on Saturday evening. But as Lanning accurately pointed out: “We’re probably not talking about it if we get a touchdown.”

I don’t think arrogance drove Lanning to go for it on fourth down. Not at all. I don’t think it was his youth, either. Nope. I think Lanning, 37, goes for broke in critical situations because it’s who he is. He believes deeply in his players, wants to have fun, and would rather lose throwing a punch vs. ducking one. And let’s face it — he’s not going to get caught dead laying up on a Par 5 with a bunch of recruits watching.

They were watching, be sure.

Lanning ended up kicking himself in the teeth on Saturday. Oregon could have easily won the game. But I suspect UO fans will live with the disappointment if Lanning’s gambles can turn a 5-1 record into 11-1 by the end of the football season. That’s the task now for the Ducks and as long as Nix stays healthy. And they’ll be a favorite in every game left on the regular-season schedule.

"Because it's who he is." Again, that's all any of us can be. We make decisions that go well. We make decisions that go badly. Such is life. It's a wild roller coaster ride, not a sedate stroll on level ground. This is what makes life enjoyable, the ups and downs, the joys and regrets, the happiness and despair.

And it's why watching sports is so popular. Sports, including football, are just like a grain of sand: the world is contained within each game.

Oh, almost forgot to mention that Oregon State beat UCLA. I didn't talk about that game because a win is less interesting than a loss.

Spirituality is simple without Self and free will

So why do I enjoy pondering the notion that we not only aren't an enduring separate Self (a central tenet of Buddhism), we also don't possess free will (a central tenet of neuroscience)?

Though I haven't heard anyone asking me this question, I heard the voice that speaks inside my head asking it, so I'm pleased to answer myself.

Note that the "self" in that second sentence isn't capitalized as the "Self" in the first sentence was. That's to distinguish between the metaphysical idea of Self -- often expressed as soul -- that somehow exists separate from the physical body/mind, and the common sense idea of self as being that physical body/mind.

In other words, there's no doubt that each of us is a distinct self. But there's a lot of doubt that residing within that self is a separate and distinct Self that enters the bodily self at birth, leaves it at death, and isn't affected by anything, being eternal.

I used to believe in such a Self during the 35 years I was an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a dualistic religion based in India and led by a guru who taught that our true nature is Soul, not body, and that the purpose of life is for the Soul to journey through higher regions of reality back to God.

This grandiose task involved many complications, because extricating the Soul from the grip of mind and matter supposedly wasn't easy, requiring arduous spiritual practice that included 2 1/2 hours of daily meditation that might extend over four lifetimes. (RSSB believed in reincarnation.)

RSSB initiates also vowed to be strict vegetarians, not drink alcohol or ingest recreational drugs, abstain from sex outside of marriage, and lead a "clean and moral" life -- whatever that means. 

Thus there were many things you had to do to save your Soul. These were different things, in large part, than believers in Christianity, Judaism, or Islam are expected to do.

But the common denominator between all dualistic religions that I'm familiar with is how difficult and complex it is to please God by doing what supposedly is required to break the bonds of this earthly life and return to "heaven," which goes by a variety of names but is considered to be much different from this world.

What a relief its been to leave all that supernatural superstition behind. I'm not saying that I'm completely cleansed of the religious beliefs that I used to embrace, but since 2005 I've become steadily more spiritually independent.

That has led me to an increasingly simple world view. Well, more than a world view, for I actually experience things differently now. For quite a few years I've read, and thought, and felt, and meditated in accord with the assumption that I am not a Self, nor do I possess free will. 

Those two assumptions are closely related, because the only way to possess a will that is free of the deterministic causes and effects that control everything other than, perhaps, the quantum realm where randomness appears prevalent, is to believe that an immaterial Self or Soul resides within us, or as us, that can act without being affected by those causes and effects.

Life is so much simpler and more satisfying without a Self or free will. Sure, problems still have to be dealt with. That comes with life. However, I feel like a large metaphysical load has been lifted from me now that I no longer believe that I have to make of life something larger than it naturally is.

Enlightenment. Satori. God-realization. Whatever we want to call it, that thing used to gnaw on me like an itch that wouldn't go away no matter how much I scratched it. In fact, the scratching, the quest for a supernatural transformation that would make me more than human, was producing the itch.

Now, lacking a Self, there's no Self to be saved, no Self needing God's or Guru's grace, no Self requiring assistance in being freed from the karmic wheel of reincarnation, no Self standing apart from the natural world. 

I still meditate. I still enjoy exploring ways to be happier, calmer, more energetic, loving, calm, and at peace with myself and other people. I was a vegetarian before I joined RSSB and I've continued to be a vegetarian after I left RSSB.

So I still consider myself a spiritual seeker. I'm just seeking what is attainable and real, rather what is  fantasy and illusion. And that feels oh-so-good.

My weird dream points to the fluid boundaries of self

Most of us believe that our self -- leaving aside what that word truly means -- is something solid and real. But there's plenty of evidence all around us that calls this assumption into question.

Which is an understatement.

Because that evidence actually demolishes the notion of an enduring unchanging self. So those who claim that notions about awareness, consciousness, or soul point to a self that is a fixed North Star in a constellation of change have a lot of explaining to do.

For mental illness can markedly change the contours of a person's self. So can dementia, where someone becomes a very different person after their brain stops to function as it should. Psychedelics can alter our sense of self big time. And then there's dreaming.

Dreams are fascinating because almost always (lucid dreams are a rare exception) the dreamer feels that what they're experiencing in a dream is true, regardless of how freaking weird that dream may be.

Last night I had a dream that was so powerful, when I woke up from it my first impression upon opening my eyes was that I was a different person from who I was when I went to sleep. It took a minute or two for my memories of myself to return fully to my awareness.

During that time I was in a strange halfway state between the decidedly weird dream and my usual existence. It reminded me a bit of the passage in the writings of Chuang Tzu where he wonders whether he was a man having a dream of being a butterfly or a butterfly having a dream of being a man.

I also thought about this passage back in 2011 after waking up from a dream, as I wrote about in "I dreamed within a dream. Felt a lot like reality."

Last night, I didn't dream within a dream. I was just totally immersed in the dream. It had a school theme, which my wife tells me she often dreams about also. I guess school used to be so important to our youthful self, it comes up again in our dreams when we're much older.

In my dream I was late for school. It was unclear what school. Sometimes it seemed like elementary school, sometimes like high school, sometimes like college. Which covers all my schooling bases.

I couldn't find any socks. I looked everywhere where socks should be. They weren't there. But I did find shoes. White shoes. Dirty white shoes, though. Mud all over them. I tried to clean them up so I could go to school. However, all my attempts at cleaning failed.

Heading to breakfast, I couldn't find the vegetarian Little Links (a Loma Linda product) that I eat almost every morning. Looked everywhere. No Little Links. But there were lots of strange people in the place where I lived.

Somehow that seemed normal. Dreams are that way. Weird seems normal. I didn't know what my school schedule was. I knew that I was supposed to attend some classes, but I had no idea what classes I was supposed to go to. 

Another problem was that I was behind in the classwork, even though I couldn't remember the classes I was supposed to be doing work in.

There was more to the dream, of course. These are just some themes in the dream that I jotted down upon waking. It was reassuring when I woke up and, after a brief period of confusion about who I was and where I was, realized that I couldn't be late for school because I was all done with school.

What struck me, though, was what I mentioned above: how real dreams can feel even when their content makes little or no sense and is highly fantastical. 

Which should make not only me, but everybody who remembers some of their dreams, wonder what in our daily waking life that seems so real and true, actually may not be. For we all have a sense of rightness about our everyday experience.

Is that sense justified? Arguably we have no way of knowing, since if everyday life is akin to a dream, it will seem absolutely real and true until we wake up from it. Assuming this is possible. 

Until that possibly possible moment comes, all we can do is just act in accord with what we perceive as being real and true, in the same fashion as I fruitlessly looked for socks in my dream.

Thankfully, in my waking state I realized that they're still sitting in my socks drawer.

Here's a great Tina Turner song

I saw Tina Turner perform with her jerk husband Ike at either Winterland or Fillmore in San Francisco during my college days in 1968 or 1969. (Hey, like they say, if you can clearly remember the 60's, you weren't really there.)

I was high on something, naturally. Being close to the stage, absorbing her amazing energy -- that was an experience I'll never forget. So sorry that she died. Here's a song of hers that sends chills up my spine.

How my mother lives on, though she died in 1985

I'm not very sentimental on Mother's Day (today) in part because my mother died in 1985, 38 years ago. But in 2021 I did write a blog post about how she lives on in the back of my books.

Drugs as an avenue to exploring consciousness

First, I've made some progress in understanding what Sam Harris means when he says "Consciousness is not inside your head," a semi-perplexing statement that I wrote about recently. 

After writing that post, I've listened to a couple of other guided meditations by Harris on his Waking Up app. In one, he talked about how consciousness is akin to the familiar metaphor of waves and the ocean. The waves aren't separate from the ocean, just as consciousness isn't separate from the things that we're conscious of.

In the guided meditation I heard today, Harris made a similar point about being aware of our breathing. He said that we shouldn't feel that we're observing the breath from a conscious vantage point up in our head, since the breath isn't separate from consciousness. It's within consciousness.

Everything is, given that nothing exists for us if we're not conscious of it. So the way I see it (not sure if Harris agrees with this), it's a mistake to look upon consciousness as if it were a thing -- like water or air. Consciousness is better viewed as a process, the brain in action. 

Thus it makes sense to say consciousness is not inside the head, even though the brain is. Consciousness is an emergent process of the brain that allows us to be aware of the world inside and outside of us. When I see a tree, the seeing of leaves, trunk, branches, and such isn't separate from my consciousness that makes seeing possible.

It's all consciousness, just as waves that can appear very different are all ocean.

I also want to share some thoughts about an article in the April 24/May 1 issue of The New Yorker, The Forgotten Drug Trips of the Nineteenth Century: Long before the hippies, a group of thinkers used substances like cocaine, hashish, and nitrous oxide to uncover the secrets of the mind.
Download The Forgotten Drug Trips of the Nineteenth Century | The New Yorker

The technology of nineteenth-century drug exploration, in both professional scientific circles and amateur intellectual ones, was the self-experiment. Since the seventeenth century, scientists had considered this the best method to understand substances that affected moods and perceptions: trying them on other human subjects was a risk, and animal experiments could provide only external indications of mental changes.

By the end of the eighteenth century, when Davy inhaled his first dose of nitrous oxide, the self-experiment was an established practice, with its own protocols and reporting conventions. Its Achilles’ heel, for some, was the way it mixed competing kinds of observation. As the young Sigmund Freud, investigating cocaine as a medical student in the eighteen-eighties, realized, it involved a self-splitting, an impossible assertion of two types of truth at once—that of the researcher and that of the experimental subject.

This tension defined the psychonauts’ project.

Along with many others, I carried on in this spirit during some of my college years, 1966-1971, at San Jose State College in the San Francisco Bay area. Since San Jose wasn't nearly as cool a city as San Francisco or Berkeley, me and my hippie friends identified more with those locales, which we visited often in various states of drug-induced highness.

I'm not going to claim that we were dedicated to exploring the nature of psychedelic consciousness under the influence of LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin, or the non-psychedelic influence of marijuana (which I'm still engaged in "research" with here in Oregon). Often we were just out to have a good time.

But some of us combined Eastern philosophy with psychedelics. The Tibetan Book of the Dead was a particular favorite, since it described various levels of consciousness experienced by dying or dead people.

I ran into a young guy who was traveling around the country, hoping to be able to enter the light spoken of in the Tibetan Book of the Dead that he'd seen while on a psychedelic trip, yet was reluctant to move toward out of fear of the unknown.

This guy was the friend who accompanied me on a trip to the Santa Cruz mountains where, under the spell of mescaline, we simultaneously concluded that the universe is a paper bag turned inside out.

That experience points to the issue that is talked about in The New Yorker article about nineteenth century drug explorations. It's difficult, if not impossible, to be a dispassionate observer of your psychedelic trip while you're in the midst of doing the "psychonaut" traveling. 

He and I deeply felt the truth of the paper bag turned inside out nature of the universe while we were high. The next day, as now, that notion seems vacuous and meaningless. So which is true? The inspiration while under the influence of a drug, or the later sober assessment of the inspiration? 

I'd say that both are true, since set (one's mindset) and setting (where one is using a drug) combine to produce a certain experience. Here's a pertinent excerpt from The New Yorker article:

To a stubborn handful of psychonauts, though, the most “objective” data about drugs were precisely those culled from experience. Jay foregrounds Jacques-Joseph Moreau, a mid-nineteenth-century French psychiatrist who encountered hashish—the concentrated, hallucinogenic extract of the cannabis plant—while travelling in the Middle East.

Hashish was then known to Westerners mostly secondhand, its effects filtered through the lens of fictions such as “The Arabian Nights.” When Moreau took a strong dose in 1840, however, he found that it was uniquely educative in the psychiatric context.

Each of the effects he experienced could be read as a symptom of mental illness: the nervous excitement, the distortion of space and time, the hallucinatory perceptions. Hashish took him to a place that looked and felt like insanity, then led him, temporarily, inside it. It allowed him to understand his patients with greater nuance: he could now recognize what “the ravings of a madman” were like, having “raved himself.” “Personal experience,” he wrote, “is the criterion of truth here.”

Reading this, I was reminded of my first LSD trip. A college friend who had used LSD before took it with me. However, he wasn't able to handle the situation when I convinced him that the psychedelic experience we were having proved that we were insane.

We talked about what this meant. The best we could come up with was that yes, we now were insane, but being crazy wasn't all that bad. In fact, maybe it was good. We had no conception that our LSD trips were going to end soon and we'd be back to normal.

Oregon, where I live, has become the first state to legalize the therapeutic use of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. The initial class of facilitators graduated recently. Fairly soon it will be possible for people to pay for a supervised psilocybin trip under the guidance of a facilitator. 

Psilocybin offers benefits for those with PTSD, a fatal illness, serious depression, and other problems. I'm unsure if I'd want to use it, but I would seriously consider it. Especially since someone would be there to keep me from thinking that I was insane.

Artificial intelligence likes me. Here's what ChatGPT said about Brian Hines.

On my HinesSight blog, yesterday I wrote about how I'd finally gotten around to trying ChatGPT, the online chatbot offered by OpenAI, a company whose goal is A.G.I. -- artificial general intelligence that can do anything a human can do.

I got the idea to look into ChatGPT after listening to part of an interview MSNBC's Ari Melber did with hip hop artist Erykah Badu where Melber read to her ChatGPT's answer to his query, "Discuss Erykah Badu's contributions."

That answer from the artificial intelligence chatbot was really impressive. You can see that part of the interview in the video below, where I've made it start at the beginning of the ChatGPT segment. When Melber asked Badu to rate the answer on a scale of 1-10, she said "10."

That's pretty much how I felt about ChatGPT's response to me asking it, "Tell me about Brian Hines the blogger and author."

Sure, ChatGPT was complimentary toward me. But what really impressed me was how well written the response was, and how it described me in a way that I hadn't heard anyone else say, not even me. Here's a screenshot of the ChatGPT response, which took just a few seconds.

Well, as I said in my HinesSight post, what ChatGPT said made me want to be best friends with the chatbot. To deepen our relationship, I then asked it to write a poem about me. Here's what I got in response, which again just took a few seconds.


OK, that's over-the-top, even to me. And it wouldn't win any poetry awards. Still, it's difficult to write poetry. ChatGPT did a damn fine job, though I have no way of knowing whether I got an original poem meant only for me, or whether this poem contains some recycled material from queries other people have made.

(Note: when I asked ChatGPT about my wife, Laurel, it said that it couldn't reply to queries about private people. I got the same response when I asked about a friend who is a retired economist and has both written a book and been involved in some high profile land use issues here in Oregon. One possibility is that since I have a Wikipedia page, ChatGPT views me as a public figure of sorts. Or maybe it's just because I have a greater online presence than most people.)

Artificial intelligence is a hot topic these days.  The company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI, reportedly has a $10 billion contract with Microsoft.

There's reason to be concerned about the impact of artificial intelligence. We're just in the early days of AI, but already the capabilities of chatbots like ChatGPT are mind-blowing. I saw a tweet a month or so ago that said ChatGPT taught itself chemistry on its own, which struck me as rather creepy.

But new technologies always arouse fear. Radio was disruptive. Television was disruptive. Computers were disruptive. Some people focus on the benefits of new technologies, while others focus on the downsides.

David Chapman, a philosophical guy I've followed for quite a few years, who has a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence, has written an online book called Better Without AI. Here's an excerpt from the alarmingly titled first chapter, "Only you can stop an AI apocalypse."

This book is a call to action. You can participate. This is for you.

Artificial intelligence might end the world. More likely, it will crush our ability to make sense of the world—and so will crush our ability to act in it.

AI will make critical decisions that we cannot understand. Governments will take radical actions that make no sense to their own leaders. Corporations, guided by artificial intelligence, will find their own strategies incomprehensible. University curricula will turn bizarre and irrelevant. Formerly-respected information sources will publish mysteriously persuasive nonsense. We will feel our loss of understanding as pervasive helplessness and meaninglessness. We may take up pitchforks and revolt against the machines—and in so doing, we may destroy the systems we depend on for survival.

Worries about AI risks have long been dismissed because AI itself sounds like science fiction. That is no longer possible. Fluent new text generators, such as ChatGPT, have suddenly shown the public that powerful AI is here now. Some are excited about future possibilities; others fear them.

We don’t know how our AI systems work, we don’t know what they can do, and we don’t know what broader effects they will have. They do seem startlingly powerful, and a combination of their power with our ignorance is dangerous.

In our absence of technical understanding, those concerned with future AI risks have constructed “scenarios”: stories about what AI may do. We don’t know whether any of them will come true. However, for now, anticipating possibilities is the best way to steer AI away from an apocalypse—and perhaps toward a remarkably likeable future.

So far, we’ve accumulated a few dozen reasonably detailed, reasonably plausible bad scenarios. We’ve found zero that lead to good outcomes.

I'm asked some probing questions. Here's my answers.

A few days ago I got an email from someone who asked me questions about myself. Since I'm highly interested in my self (assuming I have one; Buddhists would say I don't), I decided to share my answers in a blog post. The questions are in boring black type. My responses are in vibrant red. 

1. Can you confirm why you are now the (Spiritual Leader of the Church of the Churchless) ? Well, I guess it is because I started this blog in 2004, and I'm still the only person in charge of the blog. So I keep on electing myself to be the Spiritual Leader, since my wife isn't interested in the job and our dog prefers to chase squirrels and sniff gopher holes -- which sometimes seems more appealing to me than writing blog posts.

i) You stated you spent 35 years as a member? Of the human race? Of the Democratic Party? Oh, you're probably referring to the 35 years I spent as a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, the religious group headquartered in India and led by a guru. 

 

ii) Is that True? Absolutely true. I was initiated by Charan Singh in 1971 but I applied for initiation in 1970, so I count the 35 years as being from 1970 to 2005, when I began to view myself as no longer being an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

 

2. If the answer is in the affirmative is it then true to state that you may have some medical condition affecting your brain; Until now I wasn't aware that medical conditions affecting the brain could be diagnosed by someone reading blog posts. I'm impressed that you have this ability. You should write a paper for the Journal of the American Medical Association so others can learn from you.

 

i) That it took you that long to understand that you made a mistake? I don't believe it was a mistake to spend 35 years as a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas. For most of that time I embraced the teachings, meditated diligently, and enjoyed the companionship of my fellow satsangis (other initiates). I also don't believe I made a mistake when I married my first wife, even though we were divorced after 18 years of marriage, since we were happy together for most of that time. We all change with the years. Nothing is permanent. So says the Buddha.

 

ii) Or is the case simply that you are not worthy of becoming a (Spiritual Master) so your (Ego) made you set up this nonsense (Church)? Well, as I've noted in blog posts, my conscious reason for starting this blog was the re-election of George Bush as president of the United States in November 2004. Bush got a lot of support from evangelical Christians, so I wanted to write about the downside of fundamentalist religious dogma. If you read the introductory posts I wrote in 2004, you'll see that I consider spirituality to be an individual affair, so in no way do I consider myself a Spiritual Master -- though I admit that my ego likes the idea of being worshipped. Sadly, our dog often doesn't come when I call her, so I'm not even a Canine Master.

 

3. Finally can you confirm when you look into the (Mirror) do you see (Brian) or in the alternative you see (Brianna) perhaphs your have issues with your (Gender- identity); Ooh, what a profound question. Whatever spiritual practice you have been engaging in clearly has elevated your consciousness to what appears to be a childish level. Though I've been insulted more creatively by actual children. No, when I look in the mirror I just see myself. However, the older I get, the less eager I am to see myself close up, so I do stand quite a ways away from mirrors. Regarding my gender identity, I'm a "he/him." Thanks for asking about my preferred pronouns. I admire your commitment to LGBTQ diversity. 

 

i ) Or are you a coward in wolfs clothing drinking and leading hedonistic  life  that proves you can not get it up?? My drinking is pretty pitiful. Usually I have one glass of wine a month at the meeting of our Salon discussion group, just because I like the taste of wine and it seems to enhance conversation. I wish my life was more hedonistic, but it's pretty damn boring. I do enjoy taking a vaporizer full of Oregon-grown marijuana into a hot bath every night. It relaxes me and I view marijuana as more healthy than alcohol. I don't get the connection you appear to be making between a hedonistic life and "getting it up." But I appreciate your interest in my sex life. I just feel like we should know each other a bit better (well, a lot better) before we share too many personal details in that regard.

 

WHAT SAY YOU THE CHURCHLESS who never experienced any levels? Levels of what? I've taken elevators in some tall buildings and found those experiences of moving from floor to floor quite satisfying. Oh, maybe you mean a carpenter's level. I have one with the bubbles that move at different angles. I understand that there are electronic levels now, but I'm not enough of a handyman to justify buying one.

🍾🍾

🃏🃏🃏make sure you have not caught any of these🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀 You can be confident that I have never caught any crabs. I became a strict vegetarian in 1969. The last living thing I ate was a prawn that my mother made for me when I went home on a break from college. Seeing the prawn curled up on my plate made me realize that it used to be living in the ocean. So after giving up meat and chicken, the prawn led me to stop eating fish also. So for sure, crabs are safe around me.

 

SENT BY ONE OF THE MANY Disciples of the beloved Current-MASTER I'm sure Gurinder Singh Dhillon appreciates your devotion as expressed in the questions you've asked of me. Though I have to be honest and say that if the time you've spent in following the principles of Radha Soami Satsang Beas has led you to believe that emailing me these questions is a worthy spiritual pursuit, maybe you need to familiarize yourself more deeply about those principles.

 

I LOOK FORWARD TO YOU RESPONSES⚖️⚖️⚖️⚖️ I'm so pleased to share them with you!

Anesthesia with propofol raises interesting consciousness questions

Because I'm prone to getting non-cancerous polyps, which could turn into cancer if not removed, I've had colonoscopies every five years or so since I was around fifty.

The most recent ones have involved anesthesia with propofol, a frequently-used drug with few side effects but potential for abuse. Because it induces euphoria in many people. One study found about half. 

In 2011 I wrote "Finding enlightenment through a colonoscopy (and propofol)."

After talking about a disturbing conversation I had with a nurse about whether propofol truly prevents a patient from feeling discomfort/pain, or merely takes away the memory of discomfort/pain, I shared how propofol made me feel.

Some pleasantries were exchanged with the doctor and the nurses. Then the nurse anesthesiologist said she was starting to inject the propofol. For about fifteen seconds I felt completely normal. I was mildly concerned that the sedative wasn't working.

Next thing I knew, the nurse was telling me "We're all done."

My instant intuitive reaction was disappointment. I was disturbed to be back in everyday reality. It had been a lot more pleasant wherever I'd been, consciousness wise. I sort of felt like I'd jumped into ice water after basking on a warm beach.

Doing some Googling on propofol before writing this post, I learned this sort of reaction is why the drug is illicitly used non-medically.

There are reports of self-administration of propofol for recreational purposes. Short-term effects include mild euphoria, hallucinations, and disinhibition. Long-term use has been reported to result in addiction.  

I felt completely alert and awake. The only side effect, so far as I could tell, was that feeling of I wish I could have stayed in that pleasant propofol place longer. My first words to the nurse were, "I had some nice dreams. Mostly of having a colonoscopy, but with absolutely no pain, as if it was happening to someone else."

Later, after some reflection, I realized that calling what I experienced a "dream" wasn't entirely accurate.

Yes, it seemed like a dream at the time. But what are the chances that my brain would choose to dream about a colonoscopy, complete with thoughts of the endoscope wending its way here and there through my colon, while I was actually having an colonoscopy?

More likely is that I was minimally aware of what was going on, but the propofol created a feeling that it wasn't really happening to me.

So it's fascinating, but obviously old news, as old as human history probably, that a drug can alter someone's consciousness so completely, while they're under the influence of propofol reality not only seems much more pleasant than in normal life, that reality appears natural rather than artificial.

This raises the familiar question of how it is possible to know what really real reality actually is, if we humans are able to be in various sorts of subjective realities -- all of which seem to be true to the people experiencing them.

I got to thinking about this yesterday when I had eye surgery related to a glaucoma diagnosis that entered my life about eighteen months ago. I wrote a blog post about the surgery last night: "My eye surgery went well, though not a load of fun."

That wasn't the greatest title for the post, since the 30 minutes or so of the actual surgery was the most pleasant part of a long day. (The surgery was in Portland, about 75 minutes from Salem, where I live.) Here's what I said about the anesthesia. The UPDATE was written this morning.

Another stress reducer was my surgery starting on time. My hernia surgery [in 2021] was delayed. I found it tough to be all prepped and ready to go, then be told that because a previous surgery took longer than expected, mine wouldn't start for an extra hour.

But today I was wheeled into the outpatient operating room a few minutes early.

And it was good to be awake through the eye surgery, though I'd told the anesthesiologist that I enjoy propofol when I've had it for colonoscopies. He said that he'd put a small amount in my IV tube. Don't know if that happened, though, since I felt pretty much the same during the surgery.

UPDATE: I need to change my "pretty much the same" claim after idly scratching my chest while watching TV last night and feeling a strange lump. A big lump. Checking it out, I found that it was a square of adhesive with a metal connector thingie on the top. And not just one, there were three of them on the top of my chest where they were hard to see without looking in a mirror. Must have been put there in the surgery room to monitor my heart.

I have no memory of that happening, nor, as I thought more about it, of being wheeled into the recovery room. So now I believe that while I was conscious during most of the eye surgery, I wasn't for all of it, and the "pretty much the same" feeling I had while the eye was being operated on could have been a propofol effect where propofol reality feels more real than actual reality (and more pleasant).

Also, I forgot to credit the anesthesiologist with a clever question. He asked me, "So what did you have for breakfast today?" Quick-witted senior citizen that I am, I replied, "Ha, trick question! I didn't have anything to eat after midnight, as I was told to do by the pre-op instructions." He must feel this gets a more honest answer than "Have you had anything to eat after midnight?"

Again, the interesting thing is that for most of the eye surgery I could hear my doctor, a fellow in ophthalmology who was assisting him, and a nurse talk about some arcane medical subjects unrelated to my surgery that I couldn't understand very well, yet listened to with considerable interest.

As I noted in my blog post, I felt so calm, natural, and relaxed during the surgery, at the time I thought "The anesthesiologist must not have given me propofol, and maybe not even a sedative."

Meaning, the state of consciousness I was in felt like it was the really real reality mentioned above, even though my update to the post explained why almost certainly I was in an artificially-induced reality.

Anyway, I'm prone to find interesting philosophical questions in all kinds of places. Yesterday it was an outpatient surgery room at Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland.

I might have had a mini-enlightenment last night

Even though I no longer believe in God, I'm attracted to non-religious Buddhism. So even though I don't engage in any sort of formal Buddhist practice, I like the idea of being enlightened. 

Just seems better than being endarkened. 

Though I can't say with any certainty that the intuitive flash that coursed through my consciousness as I was heading to bed last night was a sign of a mini-enlightenment (I'm way too humble to claim a maxi-enlightenment), I like the idea that it was.

So I'll go with that.

I was heading down the stairs that lead to the bedroom where I sleep when an unbidden realization hit me. This wasn't a thought, or an emotion. It was an instant knowing. 

What I knew at that moment surprised me, given my usual tendency to see myself more positively than I'm sure I deserve. 

It was: You're just an ordinary person. Nothing special. Nothing really to be proud of.

While this didn't feel like an emotion, the after-effect of the knowing was pleasant. I felt like a weight had been lifted from me, the burden of trying to appear more competent and accomplished than I actually was.

It was sort of akin to the sensation I had decades ago when, after believing that I could figure out a way to actively manage the investments my wife and I have and beat the market, I concluded after considerable reading and research that investing in index funds was the way to go.

Meaning, I'd just try to be average, as I wrote about in a 2008 post, "Profitable spiritual investing."

As the world financial crisis deepens, conversations tend to turn toward money rather than other subjects. Last night I was with a group of people who discussed the ins and outs (not to mention the ups and downs) of investing in tough times like these.

I didn't have a whole lot to say.

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

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

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

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

I've written about my shift from "active" to "passive" spiritual investing in previous posts:
"Running so fast to become motionless"
"Spiritual diversification, a sound investment strategy"
"Spiritual investing takes nothing"

Here's  an excerpt from "Why atheists are more "spiritual" than religious believers," a 2014 post that echoes some of what I experienced in last night's mini-enlightenment. 

Maybe this statement seems paradoxical to you: I feel more genuinely spiritual now that I've stopped believing in God. But it makes good sense to me. Here's the main reason why.

I no longer feel special.

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

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

I understand that feeling special has its own delights.

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

Cool!

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

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

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

Not surprising.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After I got Covid, science became my best friend

About two weeks ago, on Monday, January 30, I tested positive for Covid. A few days later I blogged about this on my HinesSight blog in I test positive for Covid. And feel positive about Paxlovid.

Well, it was a good run without ever getting Covid -- about three years since the nasty virus came to the United States in early 2020. 

After I had trouble sleeping last Saturday night, feeling on edge for no discernible reason, I took a rapid Covid test Sunday morning, which came back negative, even though my voice was a bit hoarse.

But Monday morning I had some nasal congestion and increased hoarseness, so I tested again. Yikes! A positive result. 

By Monday afternoon, thanks to quick work by my doctor's office and a Salem Health pharmacist, I'd started taking Paxlovid, a 5-day treatment that basically puts the brake on Covid replication to give your body a chance to fight it before the virus gets up a head of steam.

When the five days came to an end on Saturday morning, I wrote another blog post: My somewhat contrarian take on Paxlovid "rebound."

After getting some Covid symptoms and testing positive on a rapid test last Monday, this morning I completed the 5-day Paxlovid treatment regimen. 

My symptoms (nasal congestion and a cough) have been gone for a few days. The rapid test I took this afternoon was negative. So things are looking good. 

And I'm not all that worried about Paxlovid rebound, which doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

Paxlovid rebound happens when someone tests negative after completing the course of treatment, then a few days later, either tests positive for Covid again or has a recurrence of symptoms. I got a chance to confirm my "no big deal" attitude when, last Wednesday, February 8, a rapid Covid test came back positive, which it also did the next three days, including today.

Yesterday I wrote: I get Paxlovid "rebound," but I'm OK with being Covid positive again. 

I still feel it isn't a big deal, even though last Wednesday, four days after I finished the Paxlovid treatment, I was dismayed to find that a rapid test I took showed I was positive for Covid again. So far (this is Friday) I'm still testing positive.

That's irritating, since I enjoyed my few days of post-Covid normalcy -- having coffee with a friend, going back to exercising at my athletic club, attending my Tai Chi class. 

On the plus side, my symptoms are milder than before, and they were pretty mild the first Covid time around. I haven't had to take a decongestant at bedtime, which I did during the first bout of Covid. And I came across a recent Scientific American story about Paxlovid rebound which indicates that my "contrarian take" on this actually is scientifically mainstream. 

Meaning, whether or not someone has a Covid treatment, the virus can wax and wane in the body.

So it's important to recognize that Paxlovid rebound doesn't mean you've got a fresh case of Covid. It just means that some pockets of the virus remained after the 5-day course of treatment, popping up when the Paxlovid brake was released.

I've shared these details about my Covid experience as background for the title of this post. Science became my best friend after getting the initial positive test result. Of course, for my whole life I've felt close to science. But this health challenge has helped me realize even more strongly how important it is to cling to scientific facts.

Those facts, of course, continually change.

Science skeptics see scientists changing their minds and wrongly think that this shows that the scientific method is flawed. Actually, the opposite is true. Science, unlike religion, is happy to be proven wrong, because that allows for a more accurate picture of reality to emerge.

When I got the rebound positive test last Wednesday, one of the first things I did was Google what you're supposed to do after testing positive again following a negative test when the Paxlovid course of treatment was over.

The recommendation was to isolate for five days, as if you were getting Covid for the first time. I recall that in the early days of Covid in the United States, the isolation period was ten days. But that was then, and this is now. 

So my five day isolation period ends tomorrow. Then I'm going to start returning to public places with a mask on for another five days. This makes sense to me. I liked what a doctor had to say in an article about Paxlovid rebound. 

People who experience rebound still tend to have positive outcomes. Paxlovid is meant to help prevent severe disease, hospitalization, and death — and it continues to do so, even if rebound cases occur.

“From the data so far, Paxlovid rebound has not been dangerous,” says Dr. Klausner. “There are no reported, verified cases of hospitalization or death from rebound. Typically, people have a mild recurrence of symptoms or positive test results for a few days and then get better.”

Of course, since you are still infectious during this period, it’s important to isolate.

“The CDC advises five days of isolation from the onset of symptoms and an additional five days of mask use,” says Dr. Klausner. “While some experts advise continuing isolation until a rapid test is negative and remains negative, that is not practical for most people. The five-day rule is a good compromise balancing individual needs and public health risks.”

Note Klausner's words in the last paragraph: "While some experts advise," "Not practical for most people," "A good compromise."

Scientific research, especially in areas like medicine and public health, often isn't cut-and-dried, a matter of simply looking up the facts about something. Judgement is necessary.

I read numerous articles about what to do after Paxlovid rebound before concluding that a five-day isolation following by a five-day period of mask wearing when in a public space seems to be the way for me to go. It also essentially is the CDC guideline.

I could be wrong. But I'm much more likely to be right after reading reputable information from reliable sources than I would be if I just intuitively decided what to do. 

Some people who qualify for Paxlovid don't get this treatment because they haven't understood the real meaning of "rebound." Sadly, some doctors won't prescribe Paxlovid for the same reason. Science takes work. It requires effort, whether one is a producer of scientific research or a consumer of that research.

Science also can be confusing. But there's no doubt that science is humanity's best approach to understanding reality. As I said, the fact that science evolves, that scientific facts are constantly changing, is the key to its success.

Sure, medical doctors and public health personnel have gotten things wrong about Covid. However, they've gotten hugely more right than wrong, especially when compared to the conspiracy theories about Covid that have caused untold deaths and suffering. 

Vaccines work. Paxlovid works. Don't believe those who say otherwise. I'm much rather put my faith in science, even though it isn't perfect, than in religious belief or wacko conspiracy theories that have no grounding at all in reality.

I'm told that the RSSB guru said I'm good, or am a good soul

Today I got this message from someone who, unlike me, still attends the satsang meetings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, the India-based religious organization that I belonged to for 35 years, before RSSB and me parted our ways.

Baba Ji refers to the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon.

I heard today from someone who said “Baba Ji said that Brian Hines is good (or a good soul).” I am not sure which or maybe both, because his English is a little hard for me to understand.

I told this person, Ah. That's nice.

I said that because it was indeed nice to hear this unsubstantiated rumor. For even though I've been critical of Gurinder Singh's business dealings while the RSSB guru, and I have problems with other aspects of his stint as guru, I don't feel any personal ill will toward him.

During the period I was writing three books on behalf of RSSB, I met with Gurinder Singh occasionally and found him a pleasant competent person to deal with. We also exchanged letters and I was pleased to perform security seva (volunteer work) during some of the guru's visits to the United States and British Columbia.

It isn't that I spend much time, or any time, really, wondering whether Gurinder Singh has a favorable opinion of me. I simply felt good when I heard that reportedly the RSSB guru thinks I"m good, or am a good soul.

I prefer the former, since I no longer believe that I have, or am, a soul. 

The broader issue here, I guess, is whether it ever makes sense to say that someone is bad. Or, I suppose, good. For it seems to me that most people, and this might even include all people, try to do the right thing insofar as it appears to them.

Of course, there's no doubt that some people do terrible things: murder, rape, torture, and so much else that's despicable. But we can harshly criticize the doing of those things without calling the person who does them "bad" or "evil." 

Good and bad are words that imply a choice in how we act. I'm deeply skeptical that free will actually exists. More likely is that we all are simply acting in accord with what complex and difficult-to-discern causes both inside of us and outside of us have determined that we must do.

So I don't look upon myself as being a good person, or a bad person. Sure, I feel that by and large I'm a decent human being, but I'm well aware of my defects and shortcomings, which are numerous.

At any rate, I'm pleased that the RSSB guru supposedly looks upon me positively. Though I don't mind being argumentative and confrontational, I prefer to get along with other people whenever possible, even when we disagree.

Best wishes for a pleasant 2023

This being New Year's Eve, with several hours to go here on the west coast before 2022 departs, I want to share a few thoughts about how this year has gone on this blog, and what I look forward to in 2023.

First, I'm thankful for those who visit the Church of the Churchless, especially the regular visitors. Without people reading what I write, this blog would be a private diary, not a public square. 

Those who leave comments on my blog posts earn a special thank you. 

Just as those posts appeal to some, but not to others, I agree with some comments, but not others. No matter. The tagline of this blog is Preaching the gospel of spiritual independence. Independently minded people will agree about some things and disagree about other things.

What's important is the conversation, the dialogue, the exchange of ideas.

Even if someone reads a post on this blog and doesn't comment on it, that's still a valuable communication if what I wrote stimulates them to think more deeply about some aspect of our shared humanity.

After writing 3,310 posts for this blog over a bit more than 18 years, occasionally I feel that there isn't a whole lot left for me to say. This may be true for some subjects, especially since I no longer have as strong a desire to bash religion and praise atheism as I did previously.

But there's always more to say about living life as pleasantly and wisely as possible, no matter if we're a fervent religious believer or a committed devotee of godlessness. 

More binds us than divides us. I'm sure about that. Yes, religion and politics can be divisive, since it is natural to feel that our way is the best way. (Of course, we should remember that others feel the same about their own way.)

However, when it comes to family, love, health, misfortune, accomplishments, tragedy, and all the other ups and downs that come with being a human, almost everybody struggles with the same sorts of problems and enjoys the same sorts of pleasures.

So I wish for you in 2023 what I wish for myself and my family/friends. Happiness. Safety. Health. Peace of mind. However, it's virtually impossible to enjoy these things without their opposites popping in for an unwelcome visit.

But hopefully we all will have more of the positive side of life next year and less of the negative side. If this blog can play a small role in that overall positivity, I'll be pleased. Not that I won't be critical of people and things that strike me as deserving of criticism. 

I just want us to feel like we're part of a community of people seeking truth and wellbeing in a wide variety of ways, supporting each other in our individual pursuit of the good life.

My icy driveway experiment: what slides furthest?

Following up on my previous post where I spoke about the freezing rain that coated my area of Oregon with a sheet of ice yesterday, I'm pleased to present the video results of an experiment I conducted today on our very icy driveway in rural south Salem.

My quest was to determine what would slide furthest: a shoe, a banana, or a stuffed wolf? After the experiment, I then attempted to rescue the wolf from the middle of the driveway, which didn't go so well, as shown in the video. Nonetheless, I await my senior citizen scientist award.

Here's our 2022 Christmas letter, along with freezing rain thoughts

First, I'm pleased to share the 2022 Christmas letter that I wrote for my wife and I, which we call a Holiday Greetings to be all inclusive and non-religious. If you're addicted to reading Christmas letters, you can help feed your habit by clicking here, where you'll find the letters I wrote from 1995 onward.

After the letter, which is in both PDF and JPEG formats, I'll share some thoughts from unusually frigid Oregon about what freezing rain has to say about the Big Questions of Life. And also, mundane questions.
Download 2022 Christmas Letter PDF

Regarding freezing rain, it is one of many pieces of evidence that the laws of nature which govern our world weren't designed by a benevolent Creator, since freezing rain is the nastiest form of precipitation. Rain can be pleasant. Snow, which is frozen rain, also can be pleasant.

But freezing rain is just flat-out nasty. In February 2021 a freezing rain ice storm decimated our part of Oregon, including our rural property, as documented in photos I took. 

At the moment a milder, but still damaging, bout of freezing rain is causing problems in northwest Oregon, where the temperature was a chilly high of about 26 today. Luckily, we live in an age of pretty damn accurate weather forecasting. Yay, science!

So meteorologists gave advance notice that after eastern Oregon got hit with the edge of a polar vortex that is causing very low temperatures and nasty weather in most of the United States, an approaching low pressure system from the Pacific would cause east winds to funnel cold air through the Columbia River gorge and other mountain passes into western Oregon, where I live.

Now that cold air from the east is combining with warmer moisture coming from the west to produce freezing rain. This graphic shows how freezing rain happens, which is related to sleet. Again, yay, science!

If you've never experienced freezing rain, congratulations. It's nasty stuff. Driving or walking in rain or snow is completely doable. I have winter tires on my Subaru Crosstrek. Snow is no big deal to me, aside from worries about other people with less capable vehicles running into me.

But freezing rain produces black ice. Usually you can't see it on roads or walkways. It's a sheet of ice. No matter what car you have, or what tires you have, going down a hill covered in ice is not something you want to experience (unless you have a love for frequenting auto body shops).

Yet currently some major roads in Oregon, including parts of I-5, are closed due to accidents, almost certainly because of freezing rain. Which leads to a Big Question: what causes someone to head out on a freeway, or any road, when freezing rain is forecasted?

For days, news stories have told people that if they don't have to drive on Thursday night or Friday morning, they shouldn't. It's just too dangerous with freezing rain a near certainty.  Not a complete certainty, as this forecast from one of my weather apps for our location says.

I'm hoping that the ice we get tonight and part of tomorrow morning, before freezing rain becomes regular rain, is at the bottom end of the probability, rather than the full .4 of an inch forecasted. Currently we only have a tenth of an inch or so -- enough to make things really slippery, but not enough to topple limbs or trees on to power lines. I'm suspecting we might get a quarter of an inch by tomorrow.

But the odds obviously were that some freezing rain would hit western Oregon. Now, I realize that some people don't pay as much attention to news as I do. I also realize that some people don't believe the news, or weather forecasters, because sometimes they get things wrong.

Thus those are the people out on the roads right now, causing accidents. Maybe they saw that the weather was really cold but dry for most of today and figured that the forecast of freezing rain was wrong. 

Now some of them, maybe a lot of them, are paying the price for believing that their personal thoughts about the weather overshadowed what professional meteorologists were saying about the weather. Probably few of them liked to say Yay, science! 

Life is difficult. There's no way around that inescapable fact.

However, we make life more difficult when we fail to gather as much information about reality as possible in any given situation. If you go out driving when you don't absolutely have to when freezing rain is forecasted, you're causing yourself a preventable problem.

I'm not saying that I always practice what I preach. Yesterday I decided to start our Honda generator to make sure it was working if the electricity goes out in this ice storm. I found that the battery was completely dead. Thankfully, the generator started with a single pull of the manual cord.

It wouldn't recharge, so I ordered a replacement battery.

Then I recalled all the times I'd walked by the trickle charger connected to the generator battery in our garage, noting a single green light. There should have been two lights on: the green power light, and another light that shows the charging status, green if fully charged.

So that one green light meant there was a problem with the battery. I ignored what I kept seeing. I don't know why. Maybe because the battery was fine the last time I started the generator. Maybe because I simply wanted to assume that the battery was OK, and something was wrong with the trickle charger.

Whatever the reason, I neglected a fact that I should have paid attention to. Live and learn. That's all we can do, since mistakes are going to be with us as long as we're alive. My advice, though, is to do your best not to make the mistake of taking freezing rain lightly.

The "magic" in magical moments comes from our own mind

After including a quote in a previous blog post about how we construct the environment in which we live, thanks to how the human brain functions, I got to thinking about the implications for magical moments.

We all have them, though it's difficult to say whether there's much agreement between people as to what constitutes a magical moment. Here's some examples from my life, using my own intuitive definition.

Birth of my daughter
Catching big waves on Maui with my boogie board
Marrying my wife
Seeing Janis Joplin perform in person 
Taking mescaline with a friend in the Sierra Nevada mountains
Spending two weeks in India with the guru who initiated me

Since I'm writing this post on my churchless blog, I'll use the last example as a focus of my discussion about what makes a moment seem magical.

For a long time -- I went to India in 1977 because I wanted to see Charan Singh, my guru, face-to-face, having been initiated by a proxy in 1971 -- I believed that what made those two weeks at Dera Baba Jaimal Singh in the Punjab so magical was the atmosphere emanating from the guru.

However, this doesn't make much sense. 

As I wrote about back in 2005 in "Did I see God in first class?", my wife didn't find seeing Gurinder Singh, Charan Singh's successor, to be at all magical, even though devotees of the guru undoubtedly did.

Psychedelic researchers speak of the importance of set and setting in determining the nature of a LSD (or similar drug) experience. “Set” includes the personality of the individual; “setting” includes cultural views about what is real. If someone with a devotional frame of mind joins a group like RSSB that affirms the divinity of a guru, then this person may very well see God sitting in first class. I, on the other hand, just saw an Indian man.

My wife, Laurel, joined me in Palm Springs a few days later. She was more interested in shopping and sunshine than attending the bhandara, but I did talk her into going to two RSSB meetings. At one of them she got to sit in the front row, just a few feet away from the stage where Gurinder Singh spoke and answered questions—a highly favored spot to devotionally-minded disciples.

Afterwards Laurel said to me, “He just seemed like a regular person.” I couldn’t argue with her. I believed then, and still do, that Master Gurinder Singh is uncommonly intelligent, insightful, well-spoken, charismatic, and inspiring. But I had no reason then, nor any now, to assert that he is God in human form. I’ve stopped being concerned with the level of divinity someone else possesses, and now am almost exclusively focused on getting in touch with my own hypothesized higher self.

So I now see magical moments as being akin to a happy moment, sad moment, exciting moment, boring moment, or any other kind of moment where someone's frame of mind generates the adjective before "moment."

Sure, there has to be a substantial outside reality in a moment. It's a mistake, though, to view external circumstances as producing the magical aspect of a moment, because different people will view those circumstances differently.

My wife saw an Indian man sitting on a stage. Many of his devotees saw a guru who is God in Human Form. Big difference. I highly enjoyed catching big waves that would scare someone who wasn't used to doing this. Big difference. I found Janis Joplin's singing and overall style really appealing. Others with a different musical taste wouldn't like her voice. Big difference.

Thus it's wonderful to experience a magical moment. But almost always the credit for the magic should go to the brain of the person having that experience, not to the external circumstance.

My daughter Celeste is a much better skier than I am, or my wife is. I remember us going with Celeste to ski on Mt. Hood here in Oregon many years ago. Celeste talked us into taking a lift up to the highest point on the mountain, where we'd never been before.

When we got off the lift, I instantly realized that the snow was much more akin to a sheet of ice. Celeste took off down the steep slope, turning with ease, giving every sign of having a magical moment up there on a sunny cold day with such a beautiful view.

Me, all I could think of was "I hope I don't break a leg" as I gingerly made my way down, snow-plowing in an inelegant fashion. My daughter and I shared the same external circumstance, but for her it was magical and for me it was terrifying. 

Emotional highs and lows are a big part of our humanity

Last Saturday I watched a couple of college football games that put me through an emotional wringer.

I summarized those ups and downs in the first paragraph of a post I wrote on my HinesSight blog, "Pushing the pile" doomed Oregon State against USC.

While yesterday's Oregon vs. Washington State football game had an emotional arc for Ducks fans like me that went pre-game optimism - most of second half despair -- last few minutes elation (amazing comeback by Oregon), the Oregon State vs. USC game was pretty much the opposite.

In discussing the games with a friend the next day during our traditional Sunday coffee get-together, I tried to extract some philosophical wisdom from my football watching experience.

I told Jim that the reason I felt so happy when Oregon scored three touchdowns in about 2 1/2 minutes at the end of the game and ended up beating Washington State was that I'd felt so unhappy for most of the second half when it looked like defeat was heading Oregon's way.

Now, this is a pretty damn obvious observation. 

But it's easy to overlook for those -- me included -- who think at times that life should be unalloyed positivity, filled with love, happiness, truth, virtue, and other desirable qualities. 

As Taoism points out though, with Alan Watts popularizing the Taoist notion of yin and yang being inescapably interrelated, there's no up without down, no love without hate, no virtue without vice, and so on for any pair of seeming opposites.

Which aren't really opposites, because they're better thought of as being two sides of the same coin. 

That philosophical coin also has an edge, of course. Meaning, there's a neutral aspect to most qualities. However, I'm not attracted to that sort of blandness. Most people aren't. We want life to be vibrant, not blah.

When the Winter Olympics are on, occasionally I catch a glimpse of a curling competition. I don't understand the rules of curling. I don't care about curling. Even if an American team is being shown on TV, I have little interest in whether the team wins or loses.

So I watch curling with very little emotion. 

Yes, I'm calm and peaceful as I watch people sweep the ice after a teammate sets the stone (if that's what it's called) in motion. I'm also bored. I'd much prefer to be watching a football game where I do care which team wins or loses.

That caring produces good feelings when the team I want to have win, actually does. And it produces bad feelings when my favored team loses. But that's how emotions work. If you love somebody, it hurts when something bad happens to them.

Again, what I'm saying is obvious to most people.

The only way we can recognize a positive feeling is because it stands out from the background of a negative feeling. If I was happy from birth until death, there would be no way for me to grasp what happiness is, since I never would have experienced unhappiness. 

I'm bringing this up because some people do believe that a goal of spirituality is to be in a steady state of detached calm, no matter what happens in their life.

This sounds horrible to me. 

Time for a summer blog post re-run

It's hot here in Oregon. Really hot. Hundred degree hot. Way hotter than normal. (Thank you for nothing, global warming.)

This evening my brain doesn't feel like composing a fresh blog post. Time to dig into my vast repository of Church of the Churchless posts, 3,225 over the past 18 years, and share a summer re-run.

I wrote this one in June 2005. It's one of my favorites. Of course, I probably shouldn't say that, since now the other 3,224 blog posts are going to feel bad. Oh, well, can't worry about that when it's this hot.

Did I see God in first class?

I may have seen God in first class. The first class section of an Alaska Airlines flight from San Francisco to Palm Springs, to be exact. Or, maybe I didn’t.

In the early ‘90s I was traveling from Portland to attend a “bhandara," or spiritual gathering, of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) devotees in Palm Springs. After changing planes in San Francisco I found myself in a right side aisle seat in the coach row directly behind first class, idly watching other passengers board.

A middle-aged Indian gentleman caught my eye. Bearded, he was wearing a white turban and blue jeans. His first class seat was across the aisle and one row up from mine. Before sitting down he glanced around the rear of the plane and our eyes briefly met. Then he took his seat and I returned to perusing a magazine. Nothing special seemed to have happened.

But it had, to quite a few other people sitting near me. For they were Bay Area RSSB members who also were heading to Palm Springs for the bhandara where the satguru (true guru) was to speak. And that Indian gentleman sitting a few feet away from me was the satguru—Master Gurinder Singh.

I began to hear whispers. “That’s him.” “The master is sitting in first class.” “I don’t believe it.” I hadn’t recognized Gurinder Singh, even though I’d seen him before at a bhandara in Vancouver, B.C. Fervent RSSB devotees consider the satguru to be God in human form, much as Jesus is regarded by devout Christians.

The difference being, Jesus is dead and Gurinder Singh was sitting alive and well in an Alaska Airlines first class seat. Imagine that a Christian gets on a plane and sees Jesus seated a few rows ahead of him and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the atmosphere on the flight to Palm Springs—among the RSSB disciples, at least.

I got mildly caught up in the excitement. However, even back then, when I was much more involved—psychologically and otherwise—with RSSB than I am now, I didn’t consider that seeing the satguru was a big deal. And until I made the connection between “Indian man wearing a turban” and “Master Gurinder Singh,” seeing him wasn’t even a small deal.

For I didn’t feel a hint of anything special until the disciples around me started up the “It’s him!” whispering campaign. Wouldn’t you think that if a person truly is God in human form, such would be obvious? Not just to those who already believe in the person’s divinity, but to everyone—believer and unbeliever alike. Jesus, of course, suffered the same lack of recognition. If his purported godliness had been transparently apparent, impossible to deny, by the time he died Jesus would have had a lot more than a handful of followers.

Psychedelic researchers speak of the importance of set and setting in determining the nature of a LSD (or similar drug) experience. “Set” includes the personality of the individual; “setting” includes cultural views about what is real. If someone with a devotional frame of mind joins a group like RSSB that affirms the divinity of a guru, then this person may very well see God sitting in first class. I, on the other hand, just saw an Indian man.

My wife, Laurel, joined me in Palm Springs a few days later. She was more interested in shopping and sunshine than attending the bhandara, but I did talk her into going to two RSSB meetings. At one of them she got to sit in the front row, just a few feet away from the stage where Gurinder Singh spoke and answered questions—a highly favored spot to devotionally-minded disciples.

Afterwards Laurel said to me, “He just seemed like a regular person.” I couldn’t argue with her. I believed then, and still do, that Master Gurinder Singh is uncommonly intelligent, insightful, well-spoken, charismatic, and inspiring. But I had no reason then, nor any now, to assert that he is God in human form. I’ve stopped being concerned with the level of divinity someone else possesses, and now am almost exclusively focused on getting in touch with my own hypothesized higher self.

I understand the allure of what Hindus call bhakti marg, salvation through love and devotion. Though much more inclined to the spiritual path of jnana (knowledge through meditation), I’ve got my bhakti tendencies and have been known to shed a tear at the thought or sight of a guru. But that was then. I believe that I’m wiser now.

Wiser, because I’ve concluded that if I have to think or emote my way to reality, this isn’t a reality worth having. When I let loose of an object, gravity takes it to the ground regardless of whether I’m thinking “Gravity is great” or feeling “I love gravity so much!” Gravity, like all the other laws of nature, just does what it does—automatically.

If there is a spiritual dimension to reality, it makes sense to me that higher laws of the cosmos also will operate naturally and spontaneously. When my inner vision is clear, I’ll experience them without effort, just as I open my eyes in the morning and effortlessly see a world guided by physical laws.

As I quoted Philip K. Dick in the course of describing the Church of the Churchless symbol, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” This probably is my favorite spiritual one-liner. In my opinion that single sentence, when properly understood, contains the entire essence of volumes of profound mystical literature that fills my bookcases.

If I have to believe in God in order to experience God, then that experience is of my own belief, not of God.

I’d be overjoyed to see God in human form. Heck, in any form. A formless form would be fine also. But I want this seeing to be unmistakable, crystal clear, impossible to be doubted. I don’t want to substitute imagination for the real thing.

Maybe I saw God in first class. Maybe. Maybe isn’t good enough. I want to be sure that God is more than, as the song goes, “just a slob like one of us.” Show me. Then I’ll believe, not before.

I respond to a B.S. comment about my 52 years of meditation

UPDATE: Spence Tepper has apologized to me for his ridiculous attempt to claim that my 35 years of daily meditation while a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, usually for several hours a day, amounted to "nothing." Good for Spence. He recognized how wrong he was.

Hopefully from now on he will realize that my approach to meditation is the wise one: don't challenge someone's personal experience in meditation, but DO challenge any claim that this experience proves the existence of a supernatural realm beyond the physical.

Spence doesn't like my skepticism toward his brand of religious fundamentalism. I've pointed out to him that his proselytizing comments are being left on a Church of the Churchless blog, not a Church of the Churched blog. For 18 years I've criticized religious fundamentalists who want others to believe in their dogma without any evidence. I sure won't stop now.

One of the joys, if that's the right word, of having a churchless blog for the past 18 years is that I get a lot of first hand experience responding to religious fundamentalists who, for reasons known only to them, like to leave judgmental comments on a blog devoted to spiritual independence.

Here's a latest example, a comment from Spence Tepper today which was so ridiculous, I figured it deserved to be elevated to a blog post so its absurdity could be on fuller display. My responses to Tepper are in bold italics. 

Hi Brian Ji
You wrote
"Hope this clarifies things. Demanding proof of someone who, say, claims to have experienced the divine sound and light that creates and sustains the cosmos is fully warranted."

Exactly. And that's why there is the meditation.

Had you conducted the practice with any discipline at all you would have your own evidence first hand.

Wrong assumption #1. I was initiated by Charan Singh into the practice of meditation as taught by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) in 1971, after first learning to meditate from a yoga teacher while in college.

I diligently followed the RSSB meditation instructions for 35 years. Never missed a day of meditation. Mostly I meditated for 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours a day. When I was working and had a young child, it was more difficult to do the prescribed 2 1/2 hours. So I had plenty of discipline in my meditation. You shouldn't make assumptions about someone else's meditation experience.

Also, hope you realize that RSSB stresses that initiates shouldn't talk about their meditation experiences. I'm OK with this being done, since I've done it myself. But you, like me, are breaking a RSSB rule.

You could have said," Yes, I saw the blinding light and have been able to reproduce it at will. Then I saw the sun, then the moon. I'm convinced it is simply the brain gaining access to signal directly outside the visual nervous system....but why the sun, why the moon? I'm still investigating to try to see where these images may have come from. They are far more intense than memory, especially when I can take time to look at them, even approach them... "

You could have developed a real theory around real information.

I did develop a real theory around real information. Based on my 35 years of RSSB meditation experience, and countless (almost) conversations with other members of RSSB about meditation, I've come to the conclusion that while some people report seeing scenes of supernatural regions of existence beyond the physical, almost certainly these don't reflect an objective reality but rather are subjective emanations of their brains, since there is no demonstrable evidence of those supernatural regions other than subjective reports.

Now all you have is the second hand evidence of the founders of every religion. And of every mystic who ever lived and documented what they went through.

Utterly false statement. There are lots of different approaches to meditation. What I experienced during my 35 years of RSSB meditation was very close to, if not exactly, how Buddhist and Taoist teachings describe meditation. I felt my self slipping away, probably because I don't have or am a self. I felt a sense of unity with all things, probably because everything is interdependent. Mystics have all sorts of different experiences. I don't really consider myself a mystic, but I've certainly had mystical experiences that are very difficult to describe in words.

Yes it evidence. And yes it deserves to be evaluated. But the only way to do this objectively is create the conditions to recreate the experience in your own lab and then you may test it as millions of others have done and are doing every day, with any way you like, including testing your own hypothesis about the causes.

You failed to do this.

Not true. I conducted the experiment of meditation, RSSB style, for 35 years. I've written a lot on this blog about what I found. Use the search box in the right sidebar to find those posts. Your fundamentalist attitude prevents you from realizing that different people can meditate and have very different meditation experiences. There isn't one right way to meditate, and there isn't one genuine meditation experience. If you believe there is, you're hugely mistaken about what meditation is all about. 

Let me be more pointed, Brian Ji.

You didn't have to reproduce the entire journey.

Again, you're assuming there's only one journey people take in meditation. Actually, people have all kinds of different journeys. 

Any part of it would have been fine. But what you report is zero.

Not at all. Every day I meditate, continuing to the present -- today -- I have a decidedly-nonzero meditation experience. Just because it isn't your experience doesn't make it any less meaningful or valid for me. 

That's practically impossible.

It's very possible. You should get out more and talk with other people about their meditation experiences. Since I did so much public speaking for RSSB, wrote three books on behalf of RSSB, and was the secretary of our local group for many years, as noted above I've talked with lots of people about meditation. Again, a Buddhist or Taoist would find my meditation experiences perfectly compatible with their spiritual outlook.

Anyone with a minimum of self-discipline can conduct any of a variety of meditation methods and at least watch their thoughts.

I've done that, and much more, for 52 years of daily meditation. It's astounding how you believe that, without ever having met me or knowing me in person, somehow you believe that you're privy to what I've experienced in meditation. How do you think you know this? Obviously it isn't possible. 

They could at least report what was happening to their body as they did so... And as they worked to gain some control, some level of mastery.

Geez, unbelievable. All of your own meditation sure hasn't affected the Judgmental part of your brain. I could ask, "Spence, how could you do so much meditation and end up such a religious fundamentalist with an exaggerated sense of your own divinity?" Oops, looks like I did just ask that.

They could at least notice the change in their thinking during meditation. And even learn how their brain reacts to different thoughts, how simran works, how distraction alters your level of consciousness wakefulness, and how focus raises it to observe more thoughts, their seeds and their destination all at the same time.

Been there. Done that. For 52 years.

But you report zero.

Wrong.

Not only does that make no sense at all. It is downright suspicious.

And not in any way scientific.

So there is no point in leaping to conclusions when you have not made the least effort to note just exactly what happened and to report it here for peer review. Then we can discuss what is going on within.

Why? I'm preaching the gospel of spiritual independence on this blog. I don't view meditation the way you do, as a way of demonstrating how evolved meditation has made me. I see meditation as a form of mental exercise and relaxation, in much the same way I view physical exercise. Tai Chi helps me understand what my body can do. Meditation helps me realize what my mind can do.  

As to what others report, they are reporting what happened to them, not for you to take second hand, but to note as their guide, testable reference points. Your own experience from your own effort is all that matters.

Hey, I agree with your last sentence. So why did you write this lengthy comment, most of which goes against what you just said?

The other testimony is meaningless to you because clearly you didn't take it seriously. Sorry to be so blunt.

I'm sorry to be so blunt in return, but you're totally wrong.

But you are being less than candd to suggest that 35 years x 365 days x 2.5 hours was spent entirely unconscious.

Wrong again. Amazing how many times you can be wrong in one blog post comment. I was awake and aware for virtually every moment in my 52 years of daily meditation. Sure, occasionally I fell asleep, but that was fairly rare.

31, 937.5 hours...

That's not meditation. It's sleep.

And what you just said isn't an intelligent observation. It's bullshit. 

God can be an imaginary friend, even if you're an atheist

Recently I heard from a woman who has distanced herself from the Indian religious organization I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

Her family is still very much into RSSB, so she asked me some questions about how I adjusted after being, like her, initiated by the RSSB guru and then coming to see that the RSSB teachings no longer made sense.

Here's one of her questions, along with my response. "Babaji" refers to the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon.

Question for me: I find myself saying when I need help (to myself) Babaji help me- and then I realise that I don’t believe in him anymore and I don’t believe in god either- do you think there’s some sort of universal energy around us? 

My response: I wish there was, but I don’t think there is. But I could be wrong. Like you, I don’t believe in the RSSB gurus or in God. But I still talk to my guru, Charan Singh, and also to God. Life can be difficult. I like having imaginary friends.

To me it’s like watching a compelling TV show or reading a good novel. I can believe the show or novel is real and get all excited about what’s happening, even though I know that both are made up and aren’t real.

In the same way, I like to pretend at times that I believe in guru/God, just because it makes me feel better to do that, and I enjoy telling my problems to my imaginary friends, since my wife can get tired of hearing me complain about the same things after so many years of marriage (32 years).

Like I said, I don't find anything unusual in talking to someone who isn't real as if they could actually hear you. This isn't so different from sports fans yelling at the TV in a bar, exhorting their team to win the game.

 

Or me getting so nervous about what's going to happen in the Israeli spy thriller "Tehran" that I'm watching on AppleTV+. I realize that Tehran features actors, not real spies. But when there's a cliffhanger at the end of an episode, I can hardly wait to see if the woman who plays an undercover agent in Iran is going to succeed in her mission.

 

So it's no big deal for atheist me to lie in bed and say to myself, as I'm drifting off to sleep, "Hey, God, how are you doing? I doubt very much that you exist. However, if you do, it'd be great to get to know you. Feel free to pay me a visit, either while I'm awake or in a dream. And if you could do something to fix the sciatica in my right leg, that'd be great. Good night."

 

I talk in a similar fashion to Charan Singh, the RSSB guru who initiated me (by proxy) in 1971. I used to carry on a one-sided conversation with Charan Singh when I was a RSSB believer and thought it likely that the guru actually did reside within a corner of my consciousness, where he could guide me as need be.

 

Now I find that to be extremely unlikely.

 

However, occasionally I still have some things to say to Charan Singh, just because it makes me feel good to have him as an imaginary friend, along with God. This seems absolutely fine to me, since I'm well aware that an imaginary friend is much different from a real friend. 

 

 

Zen'ish adage: when you're sad, be sad; when you're happy, be happy

Whenever I have a Grand Intuition about something that really is obvious, I'm never sure whether (1) I deserve to be honored in the Great Hall of Enlightened Beings or (2) laughed at for not realizing sooner what I should have understood long ago.

(Personally, I'll go with #1, but I can't argue with someone else who favors #2.)

The core of today's Grand Intuition is the title of this blog post: When you're sad, be sad; when you're happy, be happy. It's an emotional echo of some familiar Zen sayings.

Chop wood, carry water. 
When hungry, eat. When thirsty, drink. When sleepy, sleep.

Probably what got me to pondering this today was a slightly delayed reaction after listening to part of an interview on Sam Harris' Waking Up app yesterday. Harris spoke with a woman who said that equanimity was a central pillar of spiritual practice.

I didn't listen long enough to learn what she meant by equanimity. I'm assuming that this refers to remaining in a more or less steady calm emotional state no matter what happens to you: good things, bad things, neutral things.

This is in line with what the Sant Mat teachings I followed for thirty-five years as a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based spiritual organization, taught.

Lust. Anger. Greed. Attachment. Egotism. 

Those were the five deadly sins RSSB books and speakers warned against. Each has an emotional component. And in my current state of mind, each seems perfectly fine to me. They're simply a part of being human.

Sure, it makes sense to keep emotions within certain bounds. But those bounds are pretty damn loose. 

For example, lusting after someone you find attractive is how relationships, and marriages, often get started. Forcing them to have sex is out of bounds. Otherwise, lust is a natural feeling. Ditto with anger, greed, attachment, egotism, and every other feeling/emotion.

What I realized today more clearly than ever before was how, even though I'm no longer overtly religious, I still carry around vestiges of the religious teachings that were such a big part of my life for over three decades.

One vestige is how I've been considering that meditation and mindfulness were supposed to help me not get very upset when something went wrong in my life, nor unduly attached to the pleasure I feel when something goes right in my life.

In other words, I'd bought into that whole equanimity thing, albeit semi-consciously. 

Suddenly it hit me that life would be a whole lot simpler if I took a different approach. Be sad when I feel sad. Be happy when I feel happy. Be angry when I feel angry. Be ________ when I feel _________.

Again, not crazily emotional. Not emotional in a way that harms anyone. Just honestly emotional, embracing whatever I'm feeling at the moment without wondering, "Is it OK to feel this way?"

Yeah, it sure is OK. In fact, I've been feeling especially good today, because it feels like a weight has been lifted from my emotional shoulders. For a long time, more than 50 years, I've felt a need for self-improvement.

Simply being the person I already was -- not good enough.

I needed to meditate every day, read spiritual books, write spiritual books, improve how I related to other people, be kinder, more loving, less prone to negative emotions, you know, all that stuff the self-improvement/spiritual realization proselytizers tell us is necessary to truly be a Decent Human Being.

Which mostly is bullshit. Yes, if someone has a serious psychological problem that prevents them from functioning well or being satisfied with life, that points to a need for improvement.

But the notion that we need to become anyone other than the natural human being we already are is entirely false. When you feel good, feel good. When you feel bad, feel bad. Likely neither feeling will last very long. Embrace each while it lasts.

No pressure to become your "higher self." For one thing, there's no high or low when it comes to being human. For another thing, you aren't a self. You're simply you. 

I'm more proud of being married for 32 years than of being religious for 35 years

Today is our anniversary. Easy to remember, since Laurel and I got married on St. Patrick's Day, 1990. That makes 32 years we've been husband and wife. Or as Laurel might say, wife and husband. 

Whenever I look at our wedding photo, naturally I think, Damn, we looked so young back then! Well, yeah, that's what 32 years will do to you. Forty-one is way younger than seventy-three.

Another thing 32 years of being married will do is teach you a lot. (Actually, I've been married for 50 years, since my first marriage lasted 18 years; Laurel had never been married before.)

My theory is that if Buddha had really wanted to learn how to be selfless, he should have gotten married rather than going off on his own as a wandering sadhu, seeking his own spiritual development. 

Enlightenment is easy compared to living harmoniously with someone for a long time. Not completely harmoniously, of course. If two people always got along perfectly, I doubt they would be human. More like robots, since friction comes with every close relationship.

When I met Laurel, I was smitten not only by her beauty and wonderful personality, but also by how easily she and I could talk with each other.

And not just about easy subjects. Difficult ones also. 

I'm convinced that the key to a satisfying marriage, or indeed any relationship, is honest communication. Two people are going to disagree about many things. Laurel and I frequently debate whether we should do this or that.

But we rarely lose our temper with each other. Sometimes, just not often. We listen to each other. We do our best to compromise. We understand that while we have a lot in common, we also see the world differently.

Which is natural.

If two people were exactly alike, they wouldn't be in a relationship, but in something else that defies description, since it is impossible for two humans to be completely identical -- even identical twins.

By contrast, during the 35 years I believed in God, eastern religion variety, I never had a disagreement with God. Sure, that was because there's no sign of God. Impossible to have an argument with a nonexistent being.

So when religious believers are all proud because they have a personal relationship with God, I laugh at their folly. They have a personal relationship with an imaginary God. 

It's hugely easier to get along with a fantasy companion than with a real life companion.

This is why I look upon my 32 years of being married to Laurel as being much more of an accomplishment than the 35 years I was devoted to a guru and the God he taught his disciples to worship.

Not only God is beyond words, everything is

Often people say "God is beyond words."

No argument from me there, for several reasons. First, if God doesn't exist (the most likely scenario), then naturally God is beyond words, since no word describes nonexistence.

Second, everything is beyond words. It simply isn't possible to capture all of the characteristics of something in words, numbers, concepts, images, or any other means.

Even a single cell in our body defies description.

A recent article in The New Yorker made that clear. Every cell is completely filled with complex entities, all engaged in constant motion, and so far scientists have been unable to create a living cell from the raw materials that make them up.

Even more so, then, when it comes to describing ourselves. 

I got to thinking about this after having an initial counseling session yesterday with a Salem Health social worker, Wayne. I wrote about this on my HinesSight blog. 

Like most people -- which might really be all people -- I have some habitual ways of describing myself and my life. 

Meaning, I've concocted a story of who I am and how I came to be that way which I retrieve from my memory and use when the occasion demands. Naturally that story is both extremely brief compared to the 73 years I've lived, and also extremely selective, since it focuses on only certain aspects of my life.

There's no other option, of course. Neither for us, nor for reality as a whole.

Questions asked of us determine how we describe ourselves. The same is true of any other entity. As noted above, there's no way to fully communicate the nature of a single cell. All that can be done is point to certain characteristics that come to light via certain means of investigation.

Wayne asked me about my childhood. That wasn't his central focus, but like most counselors, he wanted to get a feel for my early years. 

In part, I said something like, "I was raised by my divorced mother, an intellectual who happened to be an alcoholic, which made my high school years difficult. She desperately wanted to learn the secrets of the universe, yet died without having succeeded. I've written a blog post about the 0ne hour I spent with my father. Not the best or worst hour. The only hour. He also was highly intelligent, along with being a jerk."

OK, better than saying nothing.

However, this doesn't begin to capture the full nature of how I see my mother and father, leaving aside the fact that what I know about them is just a tiny fraction of their life, and even that small part is necessarily viewed through the lens of my personal perspective, which is biased in many respects.

What I liked most about my 50 minutes or so with Wayne was the insights he got from talking with me in his office. It wasn't so much what I said, but how I was saying it. Indeed, each of us has certain ways of talking (and writing) that reflect our usual way of relating to the world.

Wayne correctly noted that I tend toward reason, rationality, thinking, and such. Yet I told him that frequently I'm also emotional and intuitive. For example, I never plan out what I'm going to say in a blog post, other than to have a very general idea of the topic.

I start writing, and then the post writes itself. That's the way I've always written.

I told Wayne that in college I sat down to write a 50 page paper, and in a flash the conceptual framework of the paper appeared in my mind. Then it was just a matter of typing what essentially was an already-written term paper.

Still, my ability to write is just a minute part of who I am, and I don't really know how my thoughts become words which become sentences which become something I share with the world. 

Even less do I know how my emotions work. I didn't make an appointment to see Wayne because I was dissatisfied with my thoughts. I wanted to get some counseling because a few health problems are making me anxious, and I want to learn how to reduce that anxiety, if possible.

It's really difficult to know ourselves, and even more difficult to know other people.

It's enjoyable to try, though. That's why we meditate, contemplate, walk in nature, become intimate with loved ones, talk with friends, read, write, create art, and so much else that bridges the gap between our consciousness and that of others.

That gap is never completely closed, though. Each of us is both an island unto ourselves, and a well-populated continent inhabited by everyone we have ever come in contact with -- for they have left countless marks on us that have helped us become who we are now.

Which can never be completely described. Nor even felt.

The mystery of us is inseparable from the mystery of the cosmos. We struggle to find words that cast light upon those mysteries, yet what they illuminate is so much less than what remains hidden.

"May I be free of fear" -- my addition to loving kindness meditation

For quite a while, maybe five years, I've been repeating a form of loving kindness meditation that I learned from listening to Tamara Levitt's guided meditations on my iPhone's Calm app.

It starts like this. Then "I" is replaced by "you," someone I care about (usually my wife), followed by "all" replacing "you."

May I be happy.
May I be safe.
May I be healthy.
May I be at peace.

Recently I've added a fifth sentiment.

May I be free of fear.

When I do the "all" thing, previously I envisioned the entire world, as if I was floating in space and casting loving kindness hopes over our planet.

Now, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, I picture the Ukrainian people as I mentally say...

May all be happy.
May all be safe.
May all be healthy.
May all be at peace.
May all be free of fear.

As I wrote about in "What do you find inspiring about Ukraine?", the strength and courage of Ukrainians in the face of relentless aggression, bombing, and war crimes by Putin's forces is deeply inspiring.

Especially because fear must be omnipresent in Ukraine. Not in everybody. Not all the time. But when the air raid sirens sound, tanks are approaching, or missile strikes are heard nearby, it's entirely normal to feel fear.

How we handle that feeling is the important thing. I have little desire to read the book, Feel the Fear... and Do It Anyway, but I like the title. Here's how the author, Susan Jeffers, summarizes her take on fear.

FEAR TRUTH #1

The fear will never go away as long as you continue to grow!
Every time you take a step into the unknown, you experience fear. There is no point in saying, "When I am no longer afraid, then I will do it." You'll be waiting for a long time. The fear is part of the package.

FEAR TRUTH #2

The only way to get rid of the fear of doing something is to go out and…do it!
When you do it often enough, you will no longer be afraid in that particular situation. You will have faced the unknown and you will have handled it. Then new challenges await you, which certainly add to the excitement in living.

FEAR TRUTH #3

The only way to feel better about yourself is to go out and…do it!
With each little step you take into unknown territory, a pattern of strength develops. You begin feeling stronger and stronger and stronger.

FEAR TRUTH #4

Not only are you afraid when facing the unknown, so is everyone else!
This should be a relief. You are not the only one out there feeling fear. Everyone feels fear when taking a step into the unknown. Yes, all those people who have succeeded in doing what they have wanted to do in life have felt the fear - and did it anyway. So can you!

FEAR TRUTH #5

Pushing through fear is less frightening than living with the bigger underlying fear that comes from a feeling of helplessness!
This is the one truth that some people have difficulty understanding. When you push through the fear, you will feel such a sense of relief as your feeling of helplessness subsides. You will wonder why you did not take action sooner. You will become more and more aware that you can truly handle anything that life hands you.

Everybody can benefit from being, if not free of fear, at least less in the sway of fear. I think those of us of advancing age -- a gentle way of saying old folks -- especially need to find ways to be less fearful.

Sure, it's natural to become more cautious as we grow older. Our strength is less. Health problems limit what we can do. Sticking to routines can seem safer than pushing our boundaries. I spoke with a friend today about this.

I told him that not so long ago I was practicing karate rather than Tai Chi; I was riding around on a Suzuki Burgman scooter rather than a car; I was longboarding (big skateboard) rather than bicycling. Where did the more fearless me go who did those things? 

Nowhere, really. I'm still the same person. I just have fallen into what most 73 year old people do: play it safe whenever possible.

I'm not saying that we should lose all sense of fear and do dangerous things, though having written those words, actually that sounds like a pretty good idea. But we can be more daring and less fearful.

One of the reasons I like the streaming series Yellowstone is that it shows cowboys on a very large (and very beautiful) Montana ranch acting fearlessly. They can do this because they're highly skilled at riding horses, roping, and doing all the other stuff that a cattle ranch requires.

Last night my wife and I watched an episode where the ranch hands want to help out the family of a horse breeder who committed suicide after a bank foreclosed on his property. Their plan is to round up his several hundred horses, then sell them and give the money to the dead guy's family.

"They're all up at the top of that slope," a cowboy says. "How are we going we get them down without being killed in a stampede." "Well," replies another cowboy, "we could be cautious and figure out a safe way to do this, or... we could just say fuck it, ride up there, and do it." 

"Yeah, fuck it. That's a good plan," they all agree. The resulting scene was marvelous. Must have been difficult to film. Hundreds of horses galloping down a hillside with cowboys herding them along, also at full speed.

I found this really inspiring. When they got all the horses in a big corral and closed the gate, the cowboys looked at each other and said, "Damn, we did it!" A dangerous job. Scary, to normal people.

But no matter what fear they might have felt, they got on their horses and did it anyway.

Like Walt Whitman said, we all contain multitudes

Yesterday I surprised myself. Also, the day before. And today. In fact, every day. I surprise myself when my view of life changes from what it was before.

Which isn't really surprising, since life is full of change. It could even be said that life is change. Hearts beat. Lungs breathe. Neurons fire. When life becomes unchanging, that's called death.

The surprise that brought this blog post to life was me saying in a comment that I agreed with what another commenter had said about theistic religions being more satisfying. I wrote:

You might be surprised to hear this, but I also agree that theistic religions tend to be more satisfying than non-theistic faiths like Buddhism. This seems to be why so many Buddhists look upon the Buddha as a divine being rather than a mere teacher. And why prayer wheels, repeating Namu Amida Butsu as a mantra, and such are more popular than following the breath in meditation. My problem is that while I can occasionally pretend that I believe in a personal divine being, I really don't, so my occasional half-hearted attempts at embracing theism don't get me very far.

So I'm a devout atheist who dabbles occasionally with believing in a god, in sort of the same way as I'm a raspberry jam lover who occasionally buys a different flavor to put on my morning toast, but so far I've always returned to raspberry after a brief dalliance with another type of jam.

Walt Whitman, the poet, famously said:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

We all do. There isn't a single stable unchanging "me" or "you" or "them" anywhere to be found. We all contain multitudes. We all contradict ourselves. 

Religious believers contain a bit of atheism, just as atheists contain a bit of religious belief. Faithful spouses contain a bit of promiscuity, just as promiscuous people contain a bit of faithful spouse'ness. Liberals contain a bit of conservatism, just as conservatives contain a bit of liberalism.

Those bits may be mostly hidden, barely recognized, rarely or never acted upon.

However, to be human is to be complicated. We may try to put on a simple consistent face to the world, but within us there's always the potential of being a considerably different person than we are now.

This is beautiful.

The multitudes that comprise each of us are hugely more interesting than a solitary unchanging self would be. Our capacity to be many, not one, allows for growth, development, progress, unpredictability, creativity.

Imagine how blah a movie about the life of someone with no contradictions would be. It wouldn't take long before we'd become bored with the character, since there would be little drama to them.

When my wife and I started watching Ted Lasso on Apple TV+, I grew worried after the first few episodes. Lasso was so upbeat and positive in every circumstance, he seemed one-dimensional, not all that interesting.

Gradually, though, we got to know Ted Lasso in more depth, thanks to excellent writing and plot lines. The darker side of Lasso was exposed. We got insights into why his demeanor is usually so cheerful, and why sometimes he falls into despair (and panic attacks).

I never felt that the Ted Lasso character got diminished as the multitudes within him were revealed, not just the original Happy Face Lasso. With every contradiction that came to light, Lasso became more interesting and human, not less.

A commentary on Whitman's poem includes this passage:

What are arguably Whitman’s most famous lines appear here: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

Whitman is recasting one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s central ideas: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. . . . Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. . . . To be great is to be misunderstood.”

For Whitman, as we have seen, the self is a continually evolving and expanding entity, and new experiences will always broaden and challenge and upset what a self believed earlier.

We must learn to be grateful to arrive at contradictions and to cultivate a sense of a self open and aware enough to “speak against” (the root meaning of “contradict”) the self that existed yesterday.

As “Song of Myself” has demonstrated throughout, a self that does not change is a stunted identity, dead to the transforming stimuli of the multitudinous world around us, stimuli that include the transforming words of this poem.

I give away eight boxes of books. And a lot of fond memories.

I woke up yesterday morning with a fresh insight: time for the books to go. Not just the small box of giveaway books that had been sitting on a table in my bedroom for quite while. 

Also, the boxes of books that had been languishing in the storage space above our carport for much longer, about fifteen or twenty years, I can't remember exactly.

Those books had a lot more sentimental value, which might explain why I hadn't thought of donating them before, even though I'd glance at the boxes every time I climbed up the dropdown ladder to get something out of the crawl space.

(Aptly named, since you have to crawl around on the sheets of plywood placed over the rafters, there not being nearly enough room to stand up.)

The eight boxes that I took this afternoon to the Friends of the Salem Public Library for their annual book sale mostly contained books that I'd used as research for three books I've written: God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder; Life is Fair; Return to the One.

Each was written in the spirit of seva, volunteer service, during the time I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a guru-centered religious organization with headquarters in India.

So the boxes of books were sort of like a mental archaeological excavation. They contained mostly fond memories of a period in my life when I held considerably different spiritual beliefs than I have now. I took photos of the boxes before I put them in my car.

The bottom box in the photo above contained some of the books I'd used in research for my first book, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder. I started to write it not long after Gurinder Singh Dhillon became the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas following the death of Charan Singh, the guru who initiated me in 1971.

I'd never even had a high school physics class, even though the book was about the relation between mysticism and the New Physics (quantum mechanics, relativity theory, etc.). It took years of reading, note taking, pondering, writing, and re-writing before the book was published by Threshold Books.

Radha Soami Satsang Beas had agreed to buy several thousand copies to resell at a low cost, which sweetened the deal enough for Threshold Books to agree to publish the book -- which they found appealing because I'd included so many Rumi quotes, and Threshold was a Sufi-oriented publisher.

Having developed a writing relationship with the folks in charge of books published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas, my next book project was Life is Fair. This effort was even more meaningful to me, since I was told that Charan Singh had wanted to have a little book describing the karmic rationale for vegetarianism that he could hand out to people. 

When I was asked if I wanted to take on the project after it had stalled with other people attempting to write such a book, it took me about one millisecond to say "Yes! Absolutely." Being able to fulfill a wish of my guru before he died was a dream come true. Hey, maybe my meditation sucked, but I felt like I could write a book about karma and vegetarianism.

At times that feeling seemed like a fantasy. There were so many changes of direction and rewrites, I almost lost hope. Almost. Eventually I went to India to finish the book at the RSSB headquarters and it ended up being published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas. One of the pleasant parts of writing Life is Fair was finding cartoons to illustrate some key points in a humorous manner.

I spent a lot of time at the marvelous Powell's Books in Portland, an hour's drive north of where I lived in Salem, sitting on the floor of the Humor section, thumbing through cartoon books featuring Calvin & Hobbes, Dilbert, and other comic strips.

Today I couldn't bear to let the cartoon books I'd bought go when it came time to unload the box they were in onto a library cart. Those were the only books I took home with me. I looked at a few pages and started laughing, then figured that while my spiritual/philosophical views have changed considerably, my love of humor hasn't.

The bottom box above mostly held books I'd gotten for my research into Plotinus, a Neoplatonist Greek philosopher. After Life is Fair was completed, I wrote Gurinder Singh and asked him if there were any other books I could write for Radha Soami Satsang Beas. He replied that they'd like to have a Mystics of the West series and listed some possibilities. Plotinus was one of them.

I'd heard about Plotinus but knew next to nothing about his philosophy. So even though Plotinus is notorious for being one of the most difficult Greek philosophers to understand -- his Enneads are full of confusing passages -- I dove into the deep waters of Plotinus and read every book about him in English, along with every translation of the Enneads in English. 

Return to the One was quite a writing journey. After several years of work, just as with the other two books I despaired that I'd ever reach a satisfactory endpoint. But I refused to give up, telling myself that if I had to write out the book on paper bags and leave them strewn on park benches, that's what I'd do. (Yeah, unrealistic and kind of dramatic, but writers have strange ways of getting through dark periods.)

In the end, Return to the One wasn't published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas for reasons I've talked about in other blog posts. A sticking point was that the RSSB publishing department wanted me to include a quotation from Charan Singh at the beginning of each chapter. I wasn't willing to do that, since this was a book about the philosophy of Plotinus, not a book about how that philosophy could be seen as relating to the RSSB teachings. So I published the book on my own. 

Anyway, I feel good about sending those eight boxes of books off to the Friends of the Salem Public Library. It was time to let the books go. I like to think that they'll end up with people who enjoy reading them as much as I did. They're filled with notes and highlighting. So whoever buys them will see what I found important, which may be quite different from what they think is important. 

Lastly, a (very) minor miracle. The eight boxes fit into the not-very-large back of my Subaru Crosstrek.

How us old folks view time

Over on my HinesSight blog, tonight I wrote "Time has a different flavor for old folks like me." Give it a read, especially if you're younger than me (likely you are), so you can see what the future holds.

This is how the post starts out.

Remember when you were three? Probably not. I recall what that age was like via my memory of what my young daughter and her friends would say when asked how old they are.

"Three going on four." They were so eager to be older, they'd fudge their age to get the next birthday into the answer.

Believe me, those days are long gone for us old folks. I'm fine with saying "73" when asked my age. What's more annoying is having to scroll down through history when a web site wants me to select the year I was born.

2000's, gone. 1990's, keep going. 1980's, around halfway there. 1970's, graduated from college. 1960's, high school. 1950's, childhood. 1940's, ah, finally reached the promised age-land. Which reminds me that World War II had only been over for a few years when I was born in 1948.

Dude, you're ancient! I'll say to myself.

For sure you'll never hear someone my age say "Seventy-three going on seventy-four." We've already got plenty of reminders that while time marches on for everybody, it feels like it's sprinting after you qualify for Medicare.

Live as if we and our loved ones are going to die

Admittedly this isn't the cheeriest subject for New Year's Eve, the last day of 2021 -- how we should live as if we and our loved ones are going to die.

But I got to thinking about this after watching an episode in Season 1 of Dickinson, an Apple TV+ series about Emily Dickinson, the 19th century poet.

Dickinson feigns illness in order to have more time alone in order to write her poetry. Her family has a doctor examine Dickinson. Given the sad state of pre-Civil War medicine, he misdiagnoses her as having a fatal disease.

What I found fascinating was how her mother, father, and brother reacted to the prospect of Dickinson's impending demise. 

One by one, they entered her room where she supposedly was dying and proceeded to be wonderfully honest.

Rather than their usual repressed selves, playing their rigid traditional roles, they spoke freely about their life, their regrets, their secrets. They could do this because their vision of Dickinson's soon-to-be death allowed them to be who they actually were, not who they pretended to be.

Sure, there are pros and cons of such honesty. Sometimes it makes sense to wear a mask that disguises our true self.

On the whole, though, I believe we'd be better off with that sort of transparency. Life is short. We don't have much time to come closer to our loved ones, friends, acquaintances -- the people who often fail to really know us because we don't allow them to see who we really are.

Being 73, I'm well aware that death can appear in a life at any time.

My mother, father, and sister all died at about my age. So in a sense I feel that I'm living on borrowed time. Several close friends from high school died many years ago. After watching that episode of Dickinson, I'm feeling like I need to live each day with a greatfer appreciation that I'm going to die.

Not immediately, almost certainly. But it could be sooner than I've envisioned -- which tends to be about ten years older than my current age, a bet that becomes less winnable with every passing year.

It's always bothered me that a Celebration of Life for someone only happens after they've died. That's when people speak about how much the person meant to them. Nothing wrong with that, but it sure would be a heck of a lot better if that honest talk happened while the person could hear those words.

Like most of my New Year's Resolutions, I'm not sure whether I'll be able to keep up this resolve. The Dickinson episode just made me realize how much I regret not being more open with my mother, father, and sister before they died.

Unlike Dickinson's family, there was no doctor saying "Your loved one is going to die." So there wasn't a sense of urgency that might have caused me to take a chance on being more honest about my feelings toward them.

Now it's too late, obviously. I think back to the one hour I had face-to-face with my father, a tale I've told in a blog post. 

When I saw him for the first and only time in a Boston hotel room, he'd told me that he was being treated for emphysema at a Boston hospital. But there was no mention of a fatal illness. So he and I wasted that one hour, as I described in the post.

My half-brother, Mike, opened the door. Apparently my father needed some support during this visit. John walked up to me and shook my hand. We didn’t hug or anything. No tears of joy. Nothing that you see in the movies. Real life isn’t like the movies.

What is real life like? Real life is having one hour in your life face-to-face with your father, and spending that time looking at General Electric manuals that he had arranged on the bed prior to my arrival, efficiently opened up to pages that he wanted to impress me with.

I sat down on the edge of the bed. I dutifully thumbed my way through manual after manual, listening to my father’s stories about how he went into GE plants that were having problems and got them back up to speed. “What the hell?” I kept thinking to myself. “If this is how my father wants to spend his time with his long-ignored son, so be it.”

We got through all of the manuals. I shook his hand again. When the door shut behind me and I started walking down the corridor to my rented car, I was so happy. Not happy that I had finally gotten to meet my father—happy that I would never have to see my father again.

Which I never did.

There's no way to revisit the past. I deeply wish I could. I'd somehow summon the courage to say, "Dad, we have so little time together. Let's be real. I don't want to look at those manuals. I want to get a glimpse of who you really are, and show you some of who I really am."

Hopefully I'll do better in the future. There's always so little time, and so much we should honestly share with those we're close to.

We don't know, so live now

Yeah, it's a cliche, dating all the way from 1971. "Be here now." (I have a well-worn 1972 edition of the book.)

The book, though, actually doesn't talk a whole lot about the simple act of embracing the present moment as much as possible. Rather, it's filled with a bunch of Eastern mysticism/yoga philosophizing that I used to find appealing, but don't anymore.

What I do agree with is that now is a treasure that shouldn't be frittered away by paying undue attention to the past and future.

Sure, we have to be aware of what's happened in the past and what might happen in the future. That's a big part of being human. Memories and anticipations are part of our present-moment awareness. Meaning, everything we experience is now -- because we can't exist in the past or future, only now.

I need a reminder of this. So frequently I say to myself, "Don't know. Live now." 

Why do I add don't know? Wouldn't live now be sufficient to keep me centered in the present? Perhaps. I just find it helpful to keep in mind that what I think might happen, which is the foundation of both my disagreeable worries and pleasant hopes, is often (or usually) markedly different from what does happen.

Right now Oregon is under a snow state of emergency issued by Governor Kate Brown. The National Weather Service is forecasting between three and eight inches during today and tomorrow in the Willamette Valley, where I live.

This is a pretty big deal for holiday travelers, since snowfall will be much greater at higher elevations where passes in the Coast Range and Cascade mountains are. It's also worrisome for my wife and me who live in a rural area with a steep driveway and roads that aren't plowed.

Also, last February the Willamette Valley suffered through a devastating ice storm. Our electricity was out for twelve days. That wasn't fun, to put it mildly.

So it's understandable that when some significant snowfall was forecast in the next few days, and maybe into next week, I started getting PTSD-like anxiety about our electricity going off again, with all of the hassles that entails.

However, i'm finding that reminding myself, "Don't know. Live now," is helping to keep that anxiety at a manageable level.

After all, the National Weather Service is saying that because the approaching front isn't a solid mass of precipitation, but unstable air made up of a bunch of cells, snow amounts can vary considerably from place to place, even if those places are close to each other.

In short, what's going to happen the next few days is uncertain -- which is how life often is. Or even, usually is. 

Back in February my wife and I were watching TV when the electricity went out at about this time of night. We just finished watching several episodes of Ted Lasso before we took a TV break to do some other things, like me finishing this blog post.

It's quite unlikely that our electricity will go out tonight, since it hasn't even started snowing at our house yet. Thus I might as well live now, enjoying our evening, rather than worrying about what could happen electricity-wise. 

I've done everything possible to prepare for snow and cold weather. Vent covers are in. My AWD Subaru with its winter tires is parked at the top of our driveway. I bought some extra groceries last week. So why not relax into don't know?

Don't know is a marvelous thing to keep in mind. Most of us dislike not knowing. We prefer to believe that we have a good idea of what will happen, because that relieves our anxiety about the unknown. But actually I feel better when I embrace don't know rather than push it away.

In 2017 I wrote a blog post about this, "Wu chi" and "don't know" go nicely together.

It's funny (I mean, interesting) when you read a book and only one sentence sticks with you. I figure that if I remember it after many years, that sentence must have a significant meaning for me.

A meaningful sentence I recall from one of Huston Smith's books came from a Zen practitioner: "I have a new koan: I could be wrong." 

Beautiful! 

I'm wrong all the time. So I can totally identify with this sentiment. 

Lately I've been enjoying using a similar idea as a sort of mantra when I'm going to sleep at night and find that my mind is overly filled with thoughts of what be coming next in the world of politics, my own life, and other aspects of reality I care about.

Don't know. 

It feels really honest and refreshing to silently repeat those words inside my head. Don't know replaces the guesses, predictions, suppositions, hopes, anticipations, and such that otherwise would be rambling around my psyche.

Now, I'm not saying that looking into the future is bad. We human beings have a marvelous ability to create visions of what might be that are far beyond what other animals are capable of.

It's often useful to fashion scenarios of what Time may bring us after the present moment. However, predictions of what will happen beyond a few minutes, or even less, often are widely off the mark.

That's why don't know appeals to me so much.

Those two words remind me to remain open to anything and everything, really. No matter how confident I am that this or that will occur, the universe typically doesn't operate precisely (or even generally) in accord with my view of what will be.

Naturally don't know applies to grand cosmic anticipations as well as small mundane ones. 

Religious believers, of whom I used to be one, typically have a clear sense of what will happen after they die. Heaven, God, afterlife, soul travel, reincarnation -- whatever it is, something predictable awaits.

But actually, they don't know. No one knows. Which is to say, as the above-mentioned Zen practitioner said: We all could be wrong. And likely are, when it comes to supernatural suppositions. 

 

Here's our 2021 Christmas letter

I don't believe in God.

But I do believe in Christmas letters, even with the word "Christ" in Christmas. However, my wife and I prefer to call it a Holiday Greetings, in part because some years I don't write it before Christmas.

This year, though, I was amazingly early -- a secular Christmas miracle. 

The theme is how an asterisk should have accompanied our usual reply of "Fine" to the query of store employees, "How're you doing?" In our Holiday Greetings we add the asterisk: Fine*

Here it is in both PDF and JPEG formats.
Download 2021 Christmas Letter PDF

I get a mysterious package. Ideas about it welcomed.

Almost everybody likes a good mystery. I sure do. My fiction book reading is almost entirely in the genre of spy/espionage/counterterrorism novels, which involve a lot of intrigue.

So I thought I'd outsource to readers of this blog the contents of a mysterious package that arrived in the mail yesterday. If you have an idea about the meaning of what was sent to me, share it in a comment on this post.

Here's the envelope I got.  What caught my attention right away was the address and return address both being my address. My razor-sharp mind concluded, Whoever sent this to me doesn't want to be identified.

(CIA, I'm waiting for your call recruiting me as an intelligence analyst.)

Inside the envelope was a book. A book that I wrote back when I was an avid member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a guru-centered spiritual organization with headquarters in India.

It was the first 1999 edition of the book, whose central theme was the karmic rationale for vegetarianism.

I thumbed through the pages, looking for any markings or messages. Nothing popped out at me. Of course, I know that spies can encode information in a microdot as small as a period, but I'm not about to inspect every period with a magnifying glass.

(Ooh, just remembered that I should have worn gloves, since a deadly nerve agent could have been put on the book. Looks like I won't be hearing from the CIA after all.)

In addition to the book, the package contained two wooden crosses, one kind of large and the other very small.

The larger cross has "Jerusalem" on the back. The small cross has "Jerusalem" on the front. No way to tell, of course, whether the crosses actually came from Jerusalem.

The tracking number showed that the package was mailed from Nashville, Tennessee. 

Like I said, a mystery. Someone spent $10.30, plus the cost of the book and the crosses, to send me a message. But I don't know what that message is.

Naturally the thought came to mind that the sender is a Christian who thinks I need some Jesus in my life. Maybe the fact that after the book's title page, there's this Bible passage, shows I could be receptive to this.

Be not deceived;
God is not mocked:
for whatsoever a man soweth,
that shall he also reap.
      GALATIANS 6:7

But if this was a proselytizing message, why not say so directly? And why mix together a book I wrote about karma and vegetarianism with two Christian crosses? 

Anyway, its nice to know that someone seemingly cares enough about my (nonexistent) soul to go to the trouble of sending me the package.

Like I said, if anyone has a theory about what the contents mean, share your idea in a comment.

Health problems are a window into how our minds work

Yesterday I got a probable diagnosis of glaucoma, an eye disease. I wrote about this in a post on my HinesSight blog, "Not so fun day: I probably have glaucoma."

One bit of good news is that this was detected in an early stage, since I get an annual eye exam because I wear contact lenses and am severely nearsighted.

Another aspect of getting the likely diagnosis is that it's given me an opportunity to observe how my mind has been dealing with the news. Which really is just another way of saying, How I have been dealing with the news, since there's really no difference between my mind and me.

Everybody is different. But I suspect my mind works in much the same way as many other human minds. Here's a rundown of some of the central themes that have been running through my head since yesterday afternoon.

Could be worse. A glaucoma web site informed me that going blind (quite unlikely in my case) ranks #3 in people's medical fears after cancer and heart disease. However, the survey dates from 2002, before Covid. 

I've been recalling what a promoter of Stoicism said in a talk I listened to a while back: "Your life is someone else's dream life." His point, which makes good sense, is that no matter how bad off you are, out there in the world are people who would gladly trade your problems for theirs.

So while I'd prefer not to have what appears to be glaucoma, I'd be a lot more disturbed if I'd gotten a serious cancer diagnosis, or told I needed major heart surgery. Of course, I'd be happier if I'd gotten a common cold diagnosis. I just prefer to look on the bright side as much as possible.

Get the facts. When I got home after seeing an ophthalmologist that my optometrist had referred me to, my first thought was that I didn't want to do any Googling of "glaucoma." But that soon was followed by a second thought, Why not? 

In general, I'm a believer that knowing more about a medical problem is better than knowing less. Sure, you can overdo being an Internet M.D. Searching out basic information made me feel better, though, because the flip side of my Could be worse frame of mind is visualizing just that: the worst.

Since glaucoma can lead to blindness, in my more frantic moments my mind would picture what it'd be like to be sightless. Not a pleasant prospect, especially since I enjoy writing and reading so much. So it was good to read "with early diagnosis and modern treatment, blindness is very uncommon."

Some thinking is good, some is bad. There's a fine line between pondering what I need to do to deal productively with what appears to be a glaucoma diagnosis, and allowing my mind to obsess about this. 

I've tried to be gentle with myself, realizing that it only has been a bit more than 24 hours since an eye doctor told me my test results were "suspicious of glaucoma." This was a shock to me, though my optometrist had raised the possibility a few weeks earlier. 

What I've had to do today is tamp down repetitive worries that don't lead anywhere positive, while engaging in thinking that will help me -- like trying to figure out why I'm not able to set up online access to the two clinics where my optometrist and ophthalmologist work so I can ask them questions that way.

Often my mind seems to operate with the crazy rule of "Worrying about a bad thing will stop it from happening." Actually, I've found that most things I worry about happening don't, while other problems pop up as a complete surprise.

If the goal is to be happy, be happy now, not later. A corollary to the observation above is that today I found myself on a late afternoon dog walk having thoughts along the line of, "If I couldn't see very well, it wouldn't be as much fun to go on a walk with our dog."

But then it'd dawn on me that right now I'm seeing just fine, and I'm on a walk with our dog. So I should be happy doing that, not worrying about how I might be less happy at some point in the future. Sure, that's possible. Yet so are countless other things, most of which can't be predicted.

In my saner moments I'd realize that life is uncertain. I don't have a heart problem. However, until recently, I didn't have a glaucoma problem. So what if I had a totally unexpected fatal heart attack while I was on a dog walk, worrying about my eyes rather than enjoying the walk.

I wouldn't want my last thought to be an unnecessary worry. Or, a worry that I had been worrying too much. As I recall I said in a recent post, if we make our moments pleasant, those moments will produce pleasant minutes, hours, days, and years.

Of course, that's an ideal. More realistic is to do our best to make our moments pleasant, understanding that some will be unpleasant. That increases the odds that if something bad happens to us, it will have been preceded -- and hopefully followed -- by good times.

Risk-taking is largely a personal decision

Writing a few days ago about how walking on the edge of a roof is great mindfulness training got me thinking in a couple of related directions.

One is that how risky something is usually is a combination of objective fact and subjective interpretation. The other is that the first thing I did after coming up with the name for this blog back in 2004, was decide on a subtitle.

Preaching the gospel of spiritual independence

The two ideas are related, in my own mind at least. I want people to make an informed decision about what sort of spirituality, if any, to pursue. To some extent that means looking at whatever facts exist about the spiritual options that most appeal to them.

But it also means that after looking at the same facts, various people are almost certainly going to interpret those facts in different ways. 

This seems to be a universal feature of human nature.

Even in science, our most objective way of knowing reality, scientists engage in passionate disputes about how to view the same facts. Quantum theory, for example, is amazingly accurate in describing goings-on in the world of the very small. Yet there's no consensus among physicists as to how to interpret those goings-on.

(The "shut up and calculate" crowd even denies a need for interpretation.)

So I believe in allowing people a lot of latitude in how they decide to live their life, with the proviso that whatever decisions they come to aren't forced on others without good reason -- which typically is the role of government and elected officials.

Circling back to me walking on the edge of our roof to clean our gutters with a backpack leaf blower, I feel that I've thought out the pros and cons of this during the 25 years or so I've been doing this a half dozen or so times a year. 

However, I also totally understand why someone -- such as my wife -- thinks this is an unwise thing to do. Partly she feels this way because Laurel has a different risk tolerance than I do.

I should add, physical risk tolerance.

Laurel is wonderfully gutsy when it comes to standing up for what she believes is right, even if she's in a decided minority, which happens fairly often with our neighborhood association where she's been a board member for many years. And my wife was a psychotherapist in private practice where she had to deal with domestically violent men and volatile family counseling situations.

Yet when I decided to get a motorcycle soon after we got married in 1990, my dream of us going off together on it vanished when, after one ride on our local street, she started yelling "slow down!" when I got up to 25 mph.

After that, I rode alone.

Which also was the case when in 2009, at the age of 60, I decided to get a 650 cc Suzuki Burgman scooter after selling the motorcycle after a couple of years. Numerous people advised me not to ride around on two motorized wheels, especially at my age.

Me on my scooter

That led me to write a blog post, "Older motorcycle riders, don't be scared by statistics."

Thus the risk of riding a motorcycle or scooter can be reduced by about 50% just by not being stupid, inattentive, or figuring that your handling skills are better than they really are.

Doing the sorts of common-sense risk-reduction things I mentioned above cuts down on the chance of gettting in an accident even further. However, no matter how careful a rider is, there's no getting around the fact that driving on two wheels is going to be more dangerous than getting around in a four-wheeled "cage" (as motorcyclists like to refer to cars).

Also, a lot more fun.

Which is why I ride, along with most motorcyclists and scooterers -- aside from those who can't afford a car and simply need a low cost means of transportation.

Back when I worked in health planning and policy research I became acquainted with the notion of balancing the quality and quantity of life. This often comes into play with living wills, where a person has to indicate how he or she feels about this sort of tradeoff.

Most people consider that extending the sheer quantity of life via time spent hooked up to a respirator, feeding tube, and such isn't worth the suffering and distress if one's quality of life is dirt-poor.

Similarly, virtually everybody is willing to take some risks in order to get more enjoyment out of life. Whether it is horseback riding, bicycling, getting on an airplane, or even driving to the weekly meeting of a knitting circle, doing something rewarding entails some risk-taking.

Again, this applies to both physical and non-physical risks. A stand-up comic is at very low risk of being physically injured while on stage, but they run a very high risk of being emotionally injured if their audience doesn't laugh, starts booing, or yelling out insults.

How many people are willing to take that risk? Not many. Yet I love stand-up comedy and applaud anyone willing to have the courage to open themselves up to that sort of potential ridicule. 

Again, everybody is different.

Some people would rather have a root canal than speak in public. Others adore public speaking. They simply have different risk tolerances for the same activity. When I see another gray-haired/bearded old guy on a motorcycle, I think, "Way to go, man." Followed by, "I sure wish I still had my Burgman scooter."

Recently I saw a TV news story about an 82 year old man who took up pole vaulting again after an unremarkable high school career with the sport. He's cleared 9 feet, 1 inch, a record for his age group. Falling from nine feet, even onto a mat, has to be sort of risky for someone his age. 

But he's enjoying pole vaulting.

Isett is the nation's best pole vaulter in his age group — and pretty much the only pole vaulter in his age group. He picked up the sport — for a second time — at age 66, five decades after an unremarkable high school career. 

"It's fun," he said. "It's like going to high school again with nothing to study." 

He has nothing to study but the physics of gravitational potential energy —  and pain management. But Isett said it's worth the aches. 

"It's a rush, exhilaration, when you clear a bar," he said. 

At a meet last year, Isett cleared 9 feet, 1 inch. No octogenarian has ever done such a thing. 

"What he does is absolutely insane," another teenager at the gym said. 

Isett said he's not done setting records. He told CBS News he plans to stay fit and keep at this until he's 6 feet under. 

Walking on the edge of a roof is great mindfulness training

Even though lots of people believe otherwise, we are physical beings living in a physical world.

(If you disagree, share your factual evidence in a comment on this post. Hey, maybe a Nobel prize awaits you if you're able to prove that we're non-physical beings living in a physical world, or maybe two Nobel prizes if you can prove we're non-physical beings living in a non-physical world.)

One reason I enjoy Zen Buddhism so much is that Zen is deeply rooted in physicality.

Chop wood, carry water. Focus on the breath while keeping the spine straight in meditation. Students getting hit with a stick by their Zen teacher.

Mindfulness appeals to me for the same reason.

Sure, mindfulness obviously involves the mind. But what we're mindful of is both the world outside of us, along with our inner world. The two are so intimately connected as to be one thing, really.

After all, what we're not aware of doesn't exist for us, though if it is a physical entity, it still exists in the reality outside of our own mind.

There's lots of ways to appreciate the benefits of mindfulness, which basically is simply being aware of what we're doing while we're doing it -- understanding that doing can include non-volitional acts like thoughts and emotions that arise without us choosing them.

Today I cleaned the gutters on our house and detached garage/carport.

They were filled with leaves after a windy period last week helped the many large oaks that surround us do their fall thing. Quite a bit of rain is forecast for the next seven days or so. Today was dry, so this was my opportunity. 

At my age, 73, I get frequent advice to stay off our roof, including from my wife. I'm pleased to ignore that advice. One reason is that I learn a lot about mindfulness from clearing the gutters out.

I do this by propping a ladder against the roof, which I climb with my Stihl backpack leaf blower on my back, not surprisingly. I start it on the ground and get up on the roof with it idling away. My wife left for a trip to Kentucky today to attend a Celebration of Life for her oldest sister, who died recently.

I thought about not cleaning the gutters until Laurel gets back, since we live in the country and our house isn't visible from the road. So if I fell off the roof and couldn't move, it would be a while before someone found me.

But then I realized that I'd been cleaning our gutters numerous times a year with a leaf blower for over 25 years, so the chance of me falling off today was minimal. 

If anything, I felt safer today, because I walked along the edge of our roofs -- which are two story in places -- with a bit more mindful attitude than usual. Because I was by myself, aside from our dog, I paid extra attention to what I was doing, every step of the way.

Recently I'd read a mention of how, if we take care of every moment, those moments add up to a good hour, day, week, year, and lifetime. Problem is, often we aren't really present in the moments that make up our life.

Our body is in one place -- the present moment -- while our mind is someplace else, the past or future, or thoughts unrelated to what we're doing. 

However, walking along the edge of a roof with a leaf blower on your back is a great way to practice being wholly in the present moment. Well, actually that started as I climbed our ladder, since getting on the roof with a leaf blower tube dangling to one side, with the weight of the machine on your back, presents a few extra challenges.

I find that simply being aware of what my body is doing as I take each step up the ladder, then focusing on getting from the ladder to the roof isn't difficult at all.

That's the benefit of doing something somewhat dangerous: it concentrates the mind in a way that tends to escape us in everyday activities. Getting close enough to the edge of the roof so the debris in the gutters can be blown out by the leaf blower is even more concentrating.

Today my approach was to continuously visualize myself losing my balance. That took away any lingering bit of nervousness by cleaning the gutters without anyone else around. I was aware that all I had to do was collapse straight down onto the roof and I'd be fine.

The key to doing that was being aware of what my body was doing at every moment, not letting my attention stray onto thoughts of what I'd do after this chore was completed.

An example of non-mindfulness arose later in the day around sunset. I was doing some stretching  exercises while watching TV after the sun had set. Looking out the window, I was struck by how cool the trees around our house looked in silhouette as darkness neared.

I grabbed my iPhone and went out onto our side deck. Along with our main deck, it's in the process of being replaced with a composite deck, since we'd gotten tired of maintaining wood boards with staining every few years.

Some caution tape was hanging from the sliding door that leads to the deck, since railings hadn't been installed yet. Even so, as I was looking for the best angle to take a photo, in the dark I unconsciously started moving toward the railless edge of the deck.

Fortunately, a little voice in my head said, "You fool, there's no railing!"

That taught me what I already knew, but all too often forget: mindfulness isn't just for doing obviously dangerous things; it's also for doing ordinary things, some of which can be dangerous if done mindlessly.

Anyway, I got the photo. If I'd fallen off the deck and broken my neck, it would have made for a good human interest story. "Old man dies while taking a photo, forgetting his deck under construction had no railing." 

Always trying to improve yourself is foolish

This morning I meditated, as I always do. Via my iPhone I also listened to a Buddhist speak about Buddhist teachings, as I sometimes do. 

What surprised me, sort of, is that afterwards I felt somewhat worse. It was as if trying to improve myself led to me feeling like I'd temporarily gone backward on the improvement front. 

As soon as I went back to simply living my life -- having lunch, going grocery shopping, listening to CNN and MSNBC as I drove around in my car -- my mood improved.

For quite a while I've been toying with the idea that engaging in a never-ending spiritual search for more... more self-awareness, more control of my emotions, more mindfulness, more knowledge of how my mind works, all that is akin to running on a hamster wheel of self-improvement. 

Meaning, when I'm always trying to get somewhere better than where I am now, I'm missing the opportunity to be satisfied with the present moment.

Obviously this isn't a groundbreaking insight. It's common sense that's been echoed by many people much wiser than myself. Today I simply had a stronger feeling that I need to break free of the habit that was with me for the 35 years I was a religious believer, Eastern religion variety.

The habit of considering that there always was another step to be taken on the spiritual path, another flight of stairs to be climbed on my ascent to the spiritual heights. 

Though I've been able to leave behind most of the religiosity that used to be so important to me, the desire to keep searching for greater levels of meaning, happiness, and contentment never left me. But more and more, I'm getting used to the idea of not needing more. 

This is hard to describe.

It's not like I'm becoming fatalistic or uncaring. I still have many goals that I want to pursue. I'm dedicated to trying to make the world a better place. I'm committed to remaining a good husband, father, grandfather, friend.

However, I can do all that without feeling like some essence within me needs to improve. After a lifetime of studying the world's religious, philosophical, and mystical writings, along with daily meditation for up to several hours a day, there's really nothing new that I need to learn or experience in the realm of "spirituality." 

(I put that word in quotation marks because it doesn't capture what I am getting at, but it's the best word I can come up with.)

It's a relief to just settle into the life that I've living, instead of feeling there's a better life awaiting me around some corner.

For many years I've been saying on this blog that mindfulness has become my meditation. That's still true. It's just that even mindfulness can become a chore, an exercise to get better at, instead of simply attending to what's happening right here, right now without viewing that as mindfulness.

If what I've said in this post doesn't make sense, here's some previous posts on this theme, along with an excerpt from each. Maybe they'll help explain what I'm trying to get at here.

Ending the spiritual search

Always looking for more from life than what life already is giving me is beginning to seem unwise. 

More meaning. More happiness. More purpose. More depth. All that more, more, more seems to lead to a hamster-wheel sort of existence.

Spiritual seeking can become such a habit, the seeker doesn't realize that they're going around and around without really getting anywhere.

If we're in an endless loop of seek-find-seek-find, the way out is to either stop seeking or find that which satisfies completely. 

Since I'm not completely satisfied with life (who is?), it seems to me that giving up a quest to make life into something that it isn't already is the best way to go.

End of spiritual questions is the final answer

I've experienced that sort of who cares? clarity now and then. Sometimes life seems so simple, so fine just the way it is, yet also so mysterious, so impossible to comprehend. I grok that there's no answer to life's biggest spiritual, religious, and philosophical questions -- because there's no way to form a cogent query.

And a little while later I order another spiritual, religious, or philosophical book from Amazon -- because searching for answers to unanswerable questions is just so darn much fun.

Great quotes from "Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: a Zen Guide."

"It's a little harder for most people to realize that not only is the mind that I'm trying to escape the only mind I have, but that the mind that I'm seeking is also the mind that I already have. The perfection that we're so busy pursuing is to be found nowhere but right here in the very moment, regardless of its content. This is the most basic spiritual insight that we can have. This moment is it! What we've desperately been seeking is already here."

Happy birthday to me, from me

It's my birthday tomorrow. I'll be a super-young 73, using my personal definition of super-young.

(I'm reading a humorous book about growing older -- Stupid Things I Won't Do When I Get Old --  that says two answers to the question "When does old begin?" are "Old age is my current age +4" and "Tomorrow. Always tomorrow. Never today.)

At any rate, I'm in pretty good shape. As evidence I present this photo of me in the Big Meadow at Black Butte Ranch in central Oregon, where my wife and I own a 1/4 share in a vacation home. That's Black Butte in the background, a pleasingly extinct volcano.

My mother died at 73. But she was an alcoholic who didn't exercise much, smoked a lot her entire life, didn't eat very healthily, and suffered several strokes well before she was my age. She would have been much better off smoking marijuana rather than tobacco; sadly, cannabis legalization came too late for her, but in time for me.

So by comparison, I'm doing pretty damn well.

And even though I've only just started reading the book linked to above, it's encouraging that I've been able to avoid some of the stupid things the author advises old folks to avoid. Like, double-spacing after periods, which made sense in the age of manual typewriters but not today, and not using an AOL or Yahoo email address. 

(I was an early adopter of Gmail. Sadly, though, another Brian Hines was an even earlier adopter, so I've had to make do with [email protected] while I wait for my namesake who doesn't need to use a number after his name to die and bequeath me his email address. Hey, I can dream.)

I guess I should try to come up with some philosophical wisdom to justify a Church of the Churchless blog post about my impending birthday.

Well, comparing current me with younger me, I'd say that the biggest change in how I view myself in relation to the universe is that I no longer am nearly as grandiose. Meaning, I used to believe that one day I'd be privy to the deepest mysteries of the cosmos.

Through all the daily meditation I did since 1970, and the guidance of an Indian guru, my consciousness would soar to higher regions of reality and I'd know divine secrets that other unenlightened souls could only dream of comprehending. Of course, I also was proud of my humility.

Now, my goal is to be able to remember for as long as possible how the three remote controls for our television, Apple TV, and DirecTV satellite receiver work together so I can continue to perform my manly duty of taking charge of our evening viewing of Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and other streaming services.

Thus far, I'm handling all that with senior citizen technological perfection. Plus, I can make my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Pro function well (except when they don't, but then it's Apple's fault, in my own mind at least).

One of the best things about growing old is that you don't worry nearly as much about attaining grand milestones.

Maybe I'll write another book someday, but I'm fine with the four books I've already written. My wife and I have been married for 31 years. I'm much happier than I was in my 18-year first marriage, so there's no pressure to work on our relationship, though I've got work to do on loading the dishwasher the way Laurel likes.

I still go to three Tai Chi classes a week -- Tai Chi has been a part of my life for 17 years -- and work out at a gym three times also. However, I'm good with maintaining the weights I'm currently capable of lifting, while in my younger days I was always trying to handle heavier weights.

I guess this is part of life after 70.

You have a more realistic perspective. You grasp that if you can just keep on doing what you enjoy doing for as long as possible, that's plenty good enough. I want to make the world better insofar as I can. However, I don't expect that the fate of the world, the United States, Oregon, Salem, or our neighborhood in any way depends on me.

That said, every day I drive by about a hundred acres of farmland just north of our neighborhood that was slated to become a subdivision before my wife and I led a complex, costly, five-year fight to stop it because all those houses would have threatened our neighborhood wells and the springs that feed a community lake.

That successful effort taught me the value of doing concrete things in this physical world, rather than wasting time on religious imaginings of what a supposed supernatural realm might be like. Stopping the bulldozers was hugely more fulfilling than pretending I was a spiritual being destined for life in "heaven" (Eastern religion variety).

Anyway, these are my birthday eve thoughts. My wife just finished baking a birthday cake, so tomorrow evening will be devoted more to my stomach and less to my mind.