Spirituality « The Ramblings of An Eternal Student of Life

Friday, September 4, 2015

◊ To Everything There Is A Season . . . And Eternity?

Religion ... Spirituality ... Zen ...

It’s time once again to think about the Big Question: what should you ultimately believe about YOURSELF (and about the world around you)? About where you are heading, why are you here . . .

In the Zen tradition, there is no self, no eternity, no personal transcendence of death (although through karma, something of one’s behavior does achieve transcendent manifestation). Time is a mental abstraction, a product of the mind. As such, it is discouraged from any use other than making sure that you get to the dentist on time, and other such quotidian things. The ultimate psychological emphasis should be on the present, on the now, on living in the moment. The future, the eternal . . . that is all just “mind stuff”.

In a lot of ways, the Bible’s Old Testament isn’t all that far removed from Zen; at least the early stages of it (i.e., the core “Torah” books). There is little philosophy in it, little struggling with the nature of God and the Universe and the meaning of one’s existence. There is a creation story along with some stories of tribal deliverance, but after that, the Torah has little worry for the future. With all its codes and social edicts, the Torah is mostly about getting by in the present — and about getting along with God. No promises of eternal paradise, just » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 6:53 am Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Friday, July 31, 2015

◊ Losing My Religion By NDE

Religion ... Science ... Spirituality ...

The Atlantic published an article not too long ago about near death experiences, and the latest edition (July-August, 2015) published a few reader responses to it. The author of the article, Gideon Lichfield, replied to these letters, and said something very interesting here. To quote:

It’s worth noting that some religious NDErs move away from their religion after the experience, because it can lead them to develop spiritual beliefs that conflict with their credos.

Whoa, now there’s a twist. You believe in God and follow a religion in order to live in accordance with that belief. Then one day, you get a message from God — or at least you imagine that you do, I’m going to stay agnostic here as to whether NDE’s are real or not — and you decide that your old religion just doesn’t cut it anymore; that there’s more to spirituality than what you were used to.

But hey, why not? If there is anything “substantial” about near death experiences, if not empirically “real”, it should convey a deeper and more mature understanding of the holy. I did a quick search to find some stories about nominally religious people who have NDE’s and then learn to put their traditions into context and thus find bigger and more universal concepts of divinity. There ain’t much out there; however, it turns out that Kevin Williams, a born-again Christian and NDE enthusiast / author who runs what is acclaimed to be the most comprehensive web site about NDEs, has accumulated of few similar stories. Interestingly for someone who himself seems to be “very religious”, Mr. Williams » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:26 am Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Sunday, July 12, 2015

◊ Obamacare rising? And Meditation deflating . . .

Public Policy ... Spirituality ...

Back in November, 2014, I was discussion Obamacare, and I cited a then-recent poll indicating that public support for Obamacare was improving, closing the excess of disapprovals over approvals down to 6%. Shortly thereafter, new polls came in showing that this poll was a fluke, and the overall disapproval margin was hovering around 10%. Well, don’t look now, but it appears that some better results are finally coming in for the Affordable Care Act of 2010. A recent Gallup Poll showed the disapproval margin down to 1 measly percentage point, and a CBS / NY Times poll actually showed a 3 point favorability margin — the first positive poll since early 2013. This is a very recent trend — two polls in May showed disapproval margins of 12 and 15 percentage points.

If the recent trend continues, however, then perhaps Obamacare is here with us to stay, no matter how the big 2016 election goes. I personally wish that the GOP would just stop being so pigheaded in its opposition to the ACA, and get down to proposing ways to implement more market-driven mechanisms and fewer government-managed aspects of a national health insurance system. That probably won’t happen, however, unless they win the White House in 2016. They will then propose to replace Obamacare, but in the end, when the dust settles, it will be Obamacare with a few more market-based features and a few less government control mechanisms and oversight boards. That is, if the public popularity trend continues. Stay tuned.

Oh, while I’m here — one more odd topic, having nothing to do with health care. I was reading an article on the Atlantic website about one of those recent neuroscience studies regarding the brains of Buddhist meditators, and all the wondrous things that lots of mediation » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:01 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Monday, June 8, 2015

◊ Those Godless Millennials

Religion ... Society ... Spirituality ...

There’s a new study of the Millenial generation on the PLOS web site which says that Millenials are significantly less religious (much less likely to participate in religious services or identify themselves with a major religious tradition) than Baby Boomers and Generation X’ers did when they were the same young age. Well, I guess that’s not a big surprise. Millenials were mostly raised by Baby Boomers, whose parenting style avoided confrontation and directives and tried to emphasize reasoning in the young mind (i.e., the mind that’s not yet fully set up for reasoning). My parents basically told me at some point (maybe around age 7) that I was going to church on Sunday and that was that, no further discussion. I really didn’t want to go to church, there were plenty of other fun things to do with a Sunday morning.

If my parents had tried to reason with me at age 8 about how going to church would make me a better person, I would have reasoned right back at them that the weekend was short, and come Monday morning I’d be back spending the week doing things that I don’t want to do (namely, going to school). Eating up even more of one’s precious play time just to watch a bunch of adults pray and sing would not seem reasonable to a 7 or 9 year old. I suspect that many Baby Boomer parents just accepted this and moved on to other more immediate issues (such as putting clothes away or taking out the garbage or putting away the smartphone at the dinner table).

So now we have a young generation for which church and its moral teachings are unfamiliar. Of course, many Baby Boomers and Generation X people gave up on regular church attendance in their adult years, but they still largely retained an interest in prayer and “spirituality”. The new study indicates that the Millenials aren’t » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:21 am Read Comments (3) / Leave a Comment

Saturday, March 28, 2015

◊ On Our Knees: The Grand Design of Humankind

Health / Nutrition ... History ... Spirituality ...

The human body is a wonderful thing, from an engineering perspective. It is amazingly designed, as proven by how much it can do and how adaptable it is to a wide variety of operating conditions. The body is an extremely complicated machine that can perform a whole lot of different functions, and for the most part it does them very well. The brain of course is the crowning peak of complexity, but the rest of the body is pretty incredible too; everything below the eyebrow is still more complex and well-engineered than say the Space Shuttle or an aircraft carrier.

I’m not going to get into the whole thing about whether or to what degree such design reflects an intentional theological authorship. I accept the existence of a natural process of biological evolution, along with the concept that it is driven by random variation and environmental feedback loops stemming from DNA inheritance and natural selection. I further accept that given the right conditions and enough time, such a process can “blindly” author a masterpiece like the human brain and body system. I don’t believe that any sort of divine transcendent power had a pre-packaged blueprint for the human race, and somehow impressed such an “intelligent design” mandate upon the Earth’s biosphere This is not to say that a beneficent deity does not exist; nor that a conceivable deity would have nothing at all to do with the dynamics that allowed our universe and the world we know to come into existence. But I don’t look at such a deity as a master designer with huge rolls of blueprints in arms, specifying every detail of the human body.

Because if you did imagine that, you might have to conclude that this deity isn’t so smart and perfect after all; the human body has some significant flaws in its design. In various ways, you can see that it is a “work in process”, which makes sense » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:08 am Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

◊ Takuan Soho, Interesting Zen Master

Spirituality ... Zen ...

Although I belong to a local Zen sangha and attend their zazen meditation service every week, I don’t really consider myself to be fully involved with and devoted to the Zen tradition. I don’t have a guiding teacher whom I meet with regularly, I don’t take time off for weekend or full-week retreats, I’m not studying the Buddhist precepts with a group or sewing together a prayer bib . . . basically I’m doing my own spiritual thing (which I’ve always done).

Still, I have good feelings about the overall Zen establishment and I appreciate the tolerance of the local group in allowing me, something of a Zen non-believer, to rub elbows with the devotees. Even if I don’t consider myself bound to Zen, I am still quite interested in it. And when I’m interested in something, I try to learn more about it, eternal student that I am. So over the past month or two, I’ve been pecking occasionally through a big old book about the history of Zen in Japan, picking up a few random details about a particular setting or group or figure who played a significant role in Zen’s thousand years or so of existence.

I thus took something of an interest not long ago in a Zen master from the late 1500 / early 1600’s named Takuan Soho. Soho is intriguing to me in that he was actually a rather scholarly and worldly figure, unlike the classic Zen luminaries who devote all of their energies to Zen practice, monastic life, and the temple rituals. Many of these roshi’s also » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 12:24 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

◊ God 2.0

Philosophy ... Religion ... Spirituality ...

I’ve talked here before about the “New Atheism” movement, a rather interesting social development over the past decade or so. Citing progress in particle physics and cosmology in crafting a “theory of everything” (based on vacuum energy, superstring/M-theory, inflationary cosmology, and the resultant multi-verse process), along with continuing scientific and philosophical work on the deep nature of human consciousness, a handful of philosophers and scientists have propounded a new synthesis by which science explains it all; there is no further need to appeal to ideas about “God” or any other mysterious phenomenon or force in the universe. Perhaps the most famous proponents of this movement are philosopher Daniel Dennett and biologist Richard Dawkins. But many people say there are “four horsemen” of this new view: Dennett, Dawkins, the now deceased writer Christopher Hitchens, and neuroscientist Sam Harris. Their overall synthesis boils down to a mix of 1.) physical monist philosophy, in which all things are either known or will eventually be known through empirical science and rational analysis; and 2.) secular humanism, the notion that human beings are capable of being ethical and moral without religion or a God.

I just put the New Atheism’s ideas in a positive fashion, i.e. emphasizing what they appear to be arguing FOR. But they are probably better defined by what they argue AGAINST: i.e., classical theistic, God-based religions. According to Wikipedia, the New Atheists believe that religion should not simply be tolerated as an alternate if inferior point of view, but should be aggressively countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises. The famous biologist E.O. Wilson recently said that “the best thing we could possibly do would be to diminish, to the point of eliminating, religious faiths.”

The New Atheism thus takes the secular humanist agenda to the next level, by asserting that humanity will achieve the highest levels of humanism and » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 2:45 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Friday, September 5, 2014

◊ Atheists and Quantum Agnostics

Religion ... Spirituality ...

One of the most frequent argument I read or hear from the “New Atheism Movement” is that the universe does not need a supernatural cause of origin, because science now understands how something can come from nothing; and thus how something so unlikely as our universe, with its fine tuning and hotspots where complex life evolves and manifests itself in even more complex conscious and self-conscious forms, could happen. They are referring to modern theories regarding the inflaton field, chaotic inflation, multiverses, the near endless variants of superstring theory, etc.

But as impressive as all of that is, it does not truly amount to “something from nothing”. The anti-theological boffins ultimately assume the existence of some level of energy and information, even if that form of energy is very different from the things and events that we encounter in our human lives. The BIG question – i.e. why is there something and not nothing – does not go away quite as easily as the atheist cosmologists would like when they refer to “vacuum effects”. By “nothing”, the theologians mean no superstrings, no fields, no quantum mechanics — just plain and total nothing.

The only way to honestly dodge that question (aside from trying to dismiss it as irrelevant, in that no one has » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:32 am Read Comments (8) / Leave a Comment

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

◊ Those Dreadful Atheists

Religion ... Society ... Spirituality ...

There’s a recent article on the Science20 web site about atheists. The basic premise of the article is that pure atheists may not exist — because deep down in the subconscious, there exists a pre-programmed bias towards the notion that something in the universe is looking over us, something more than what we know thru our normal senses and our logical minds. The author summarized the article quite well up front, saying that “Cognitive scientists are becoming increasingly aware that a metaphysical outlook may be so deeply ingrained in human thought processes that it cannot be expunged.”

Atheism is generally a product of the thinking, rational part of the mind. Yes, the part that gave us science and the Enlightenment, mathematics and the French Revolution, antibiotics and the atom bomb, etc. This is strong stuff, and many people really go head over heels for the atheistic / positivist-rationalist point of view. Still, this point of view may never completely overcome something deep inside the mind and brain. According to the article, an atheist scientist, Graham Lawton, was quoted in New Scientist as saying “atheism is psychologically impossible because of the way humans think . . . even people who claim to be committed atheists tacitly hold religious beliefs, such as the existence of an immortal soul.

So, given that scientists themselves have found atheism to ultimately be psychologically impossible, are they about to give up on it? » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:39 pm Read Comments (3) / Leave a Comment

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

◊ Richard Rohr, Homeboy

Psychology ... Society ... Spirituality ...

I recently finished reading Franciscan friar Richard Rohr’s book “Falling Upward”. I’m not exactly within the Roman Catholic fold these days, not even at heart. I still see Jesus in a different way than even the most liberal Catholics try to see him. But nonetheless, having grown up in the Roman tradition and recognizing that is has been a force for much good in the world despite all the bad that it is also responsible for, I still feel some affinity to “groovy Catholic writers” like Rohr. His book tries to cheer up those of us who know that we are “over the hill” and are approaching the final phases of our life here on earth. He tries to say that if we can let go of the things that obsessed us in the early days of youth and young adulthood, and learn about the deeper things, our final years might be the best of all, despite all the decay and inevitable discouragement as we see our bodies fall apart.

But to be honest, much of what Rohr writes doesn’t stick with me. It’s sort of like cotton candy writing. Still, here and there Rohr makes a point that hits home with me. One of those points was about the idea of what “home” means to us. Turns out that “home” means a lot more than the particular place where we usually take shelter for the night. Home is a much bigger idea, and it has inspired various social bromides such as “a house is not a home” and “home is where the heart is”.

So Rohr includes a chapter on home and homesickness in Falling Upward. He claims that the “home idea” is » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 4:59 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

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