Muslims Serve Christmas Eve Dinner to 300

Here is a good example of non-attachment to the ego identities that separate and divide. It is nice to see positive religious news for a change.
Source: The Montreal Gazette

Sadaf Kotwal of the Islamic Community Centre of Brossard helps serve dinner at the Old Brewery Mission on Christmas Eve.

Photograph by: PIERRE OBENDRAUF, THE GAZETTE, The Gazette
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It was in a spirit of giving that members of a South Shore mosque contributed $2,000 to sponsor the Christmas Eve supper at the Old Brewery Mission and spent two hours serving it to more than 300 people.

This is double the minimum $1,000 contribution the mission seeks from those who sponsor a supper.

It was believed to be the first time an Islamic community group has volunteered to sponsor and serve an evening meal at the mission, officials said.

Following afternoon prayers at the mission on Clark St., about 20 members of the Islamic Community Centre of Brossard set the tables and passed plates of chicken, rice and steamed carrots to the first shift of diners.

Ismail Mohammed of Greenfield Park, a retired CBC accountant, said he had suggested sponsoring the meal to fellow mosque members.

"We don't celebrate Christmas, but serving humanity is serving God. That is what our teaching says," he observed.

"We want to work with people from all religions," he added. "We came for peace in this country and we want to establish peace," said Mohammed, a native of India who grew up in Pakistan.

Monique Khan of Brossard said serving others is the perfect holiday activity: "I feel happy when I make other people happy. It's a time for sharing and we give what we can"

Her husband, Irfan Khan, a building technician, said feeding the needy is about immigrants contributing to their country.

"When we came here, we didn't have anything. We worked hard and we did well. This society has given us so much, and now we have to give back."

Said Suleman, who came to Canada as a refugee from Eritrea, said many fellow Muslims are successful and highly educated and "it's time to step in and do our share."

"We have to think of others, of feeding our neighbours, to really participate."

Sabiha Sheikh of Brossard, a part-time bookkeeper, said she often helps serve food to people in other mission-type settings.

"It's time for us to contribute to the city we live in. We want to show that we are caring people -we are generous and want to share."

iblock@montrealgazette.com

© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/life/Muslims+serve+Christmas+dinner+Brewery+Mission/4026100/story.html#ixzz19P0QguHq

What is Atheist Spirituality?

After a year and a half of writing on this seemingly oxymoronic subject, this question continuously arises. Although many past posts have attempted to clarify this concept, there has been constant development in my understanding.

How can there be an ‘atheist spirituality’? An answer can be developed through looking at the preconceptions we may have about the word ‘spirituality’. The word ‘spirituality’ is strongly, and unnecessarily, bound to ideas of religion, dualistic philosophies of transcendence, and dogmas demanding faith. In the modern era, spiritual practices have been largely institutionalized into formal faith categorizations. Spirituality has become the prime commodity of the religious institution. This association between religion an spirituality has become intensely entrenched in most modern cultures.

What about people claiming they are ‘spiritual but not religious’? Aside from increasing fundamentalism, there is a widespread lack of trust in religious institutions. The world is becoming more dichotomous; as fundamentalists become increasingly rebellious when faced with modern ideals. This influences modern individuals who are loosely religious to become sceptical of these institutions since they increasingly seen as being harmful. While continuing to practice spirituality on a personal level, many are disassociating themselves from religions which are developing a poor reputation. This personal belief or practice may still be entrenched in the dualisms of religion; therefore, it does not answer the question of an atheist spirituality.

What makes an atheist spirituality different? An atheist spirituality departs from the mainstream paradigm. It goes beyond ‘spiritual but not religious’ by rebelling against religious constructions. The philosophical shift from dualism to materialism can be illustrated by following historical ideas about the ‘soul’. Socrates can be noted as arriving at the necessity of the soul through questioning what is the user vs. the used. We may use a pen to write; therefore, the pen is the object (used) and the person is the subject (user). Socrates continues by asking: but isn't the hand used as well? and what about the eyes? Eventually, we may realize that everything on our body can be used – even our brains may be used to contemplate the process. This is where Socrates concludes that the user must be an immaterial soul. Fast forwarding, we can look at Cartesian dualism associating the soul with the ‘mind’. Descartes thinking-being of mind is the subject who acts on the objects of the profane bodies and earth. Fast forwarding again, we can see imminent conceptions of ‘God’ in the materialist philosophy of Spinoza. See his Ethics for extensive elaboration on this philosophical position. Deleuze, the most contemporary and my personal favourite, has written extensively on materialist philosophies of life; click ‘here’ to see a former post on Deleuze.

What does the materialist paradigm mean for ‘spiritual’ practice? This shift revolutionizes the dominate western conceptions of spirituality by changing all former definitions. The definition of ‘God’ is transformed into a pantheistic ‘God’ which Rickard Dawkins claims to be a “sexed up atheism”. Sin is no longer bound to transcendental judgment, but rather, becomes an individually autonomous ethics. Spiritual experiences of awe and wonder are no longer attributed to the presence of a divine entity, but rather, can be experienced through the glory of nature, evolution, and contemplating ones part in an infinitely unthinkable unfolding of life. Mystery of ‘God’ becomes the mystery of nature – a mystery which may infinitely extent its reach past our momentary understanding. Ritual becomes more than mere compliance for the sake of salvation, but a practice of affecting the mind-body (regarded as one) for the sake of happiness. Spirit is no longer the magic entity hovering somewhere in or around us, but rather, it is the human spirit: the spirit of love, joy, happiness, and peace. Although these virtues resemble those of Christianity, they are not seen as given by a God as a reward for good behaviour; rather, they are seen as virtues which come from within and can only be achieved in the present moment, not requiring a specific set of predetermined beliefs or rituals. Beliefs may be held, but are held loosely and not bound with one’s identity. Specific practices may be used, but their use is regarded as a way of changing one’s mental state. Mental states are also regarded as material since they rely on complex material interactions. An atheistic spiritual life is one of nomadic being, not clinging to fixed identity templates.

With all this said, openness to discovery may lead spiritual atheists in a multitude of directions. Since the joy is in the journey, future posts clarifying ‘atheist spirituality’ may differ from this one. Openness to experience is the way to ‘salvation’ in this search for spiritual complexity and life-fulfilling atheism.

Merry Christmas Atheists

First of all, I’d like to say Merry Christmas to all. Atheists can’t enjoy Christmas? Is this an oxymoron? This is not at all the case. Atheists can fully savour the holiday without appealing to alternate identity-phrases, political correctness, or altogether avoidance. Although It is often thought that atheists are opposed to saying “Merry Christmas”, this could not be further from reality for the vast majority of atheists. The problem of saying “Christmas” vs. saying “holiday” is not an atheist battle, but rather, an inter-faith battle. It is one that media discourse has moulded into a problem concerning the every-increasing public ‘threat’ of atheism –  most viciously seen every year by Fox’s ‘Culture Warriors’.  Atheists have become the scapegoat; they have become the ‘outsiders’ whom which it is politically correct to blame for the ‘demise of Christmas’. These inter-faith disputes over political correctness do not concern the atheist – aside from being sucked into an insecure and anxious national dialogue as the scapegoat. The reasonable atheist is too busy living the day to its fullest – since, of course, our days are finite – it is a waste of valuable time to be bothered by such holiday identity politics. Of course there will be the odd asshole-atheists who are too busy building ego identities to get past the awkward avoidances, futile debates, and creative alternate constructions of the phrase ‘Merry Christmas’.

Getting past the Grinch mentality is not easy and inner-battles are plenty. Although the concern of religious harm is the main priority of the atheists, identity politics often creep in and complicate this simple concern. Saying ‘Merry Christmas’ may be taken as an expression of ones personal faith affiliation. This can be an embarrassing affiliation since atheists do not want to appear as part of the religious ‘herd mentality’ that is often associated with docility of the mind. Freethinking, in this sense, not only acts as a personal liberation, but pulls social identification toward a category of negative identity. This is an identity characterized by a sort of liberation mentality directly juxtaposed to the resented mentality of another group. For atheists, using Christian terms and traditions may act as an embarrassment since it goes directly against what they stand for. The issue here is that what an atheist may ‘stand for’ creates an identity in itself; therefore, when confronted by threatening identities the atheist may build walls, stock-pile extra ammunition, and map out the target into narrow categorical boxes. This is what leads to the Bah-Humbug-mentality of the outsider, the rational truth-holder, and ultimate alienation from the spirit of Christmas.

What do I mean by ‘Christmas spirit’? By this I do not mean a religious affiliation. Although there are some people may go overboard with the dogma aspect, most people practicing the tradition of Christmas carry loose religious affiliation or no religious affiliation at all. The holiday is about much more than the fundamental dogmas; the holiday is about a certain collective experience. This collective experience that is central to many religions’ does not need to be bound up with harmful mentalities. Being a freethinker does not mean trading in all emotional potential for a cold slab of rationality. The best dinners are those with a variety of flavours; therefore, the atheist must not only chop ham carefully, but be able to season it with a variety of spices. The sensual experience of seasoned flavour is not a rational engagement. Although it is functionally useful to cut the food properly, atheists must rise above the Fox news constructions of straw-man identities and find the spice that makes tradition worth while. Nobody wants a cold slab of bah-humbug-ham when they can have the full feast. Enjoy the food, the drinks, and the family… and again, Merry Christmas.

Scientific Spiritual Language of Richard Dawkins

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.
-​Carl Sagan

Like Christopher Hitchens (in this post), Richard Dawkins also uses the poetic language of spirituality; of course, he is not referring to religious definitions of these words. This type of language is very evident in his earlier book unweaving the rainbow, where he addresses the misperception that science and art are at odds. Art is the proper task of life – as Nietzsche has proclaimed – Richard Dawkins can be seen as a bridge between art and science. Nietzsche also said, “the spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it represents a great triumph over Christianity (Twilight of the Idols). With a sensuality concerning the mechanism of life, perhaps the endeavor of Richard Dawkins may be in line with Carl Sagan’s assertion that making science and spirituality mutually exclusive would do a disservice to both.

Clip From a BBC Horizon Science Documentary:

The Son of the Self-Aware Universe | Myspace Video

Hitchens Hijacking the Language of Spirituality

It’s time we realized that traditional religion is far from the only source of meaning, values, and a sense of the transcendent. – Julian Baggini in Psychologies

There seems to be a popular belief among atheists that ‘spiritual’ words are unnecessary, obscuring, and should be avoided at all costs. I beg to differ for two reasons. First, the use of ‘spiritual’ language in science will further make the statement that ‘spiritual’ contemplation should not be limited to the fenced in realm of spiritual leaders who claim to be the masters of morals. Secondly, scientific language does not go far enough to convey the emotional affect science can evoke. With these two points in mind (the hijacking and the enriching), I propose that science should be viewed by as a poetics of life. As Richard Dawkins says; “Science is the poetry of reality”. Christopher Hitchens illustrates ‘spiritual’ contemplation of the natural world in an interview with retired Unitarian minister (and self-professed “liberal Christian”) Marilyn Sewell. Hitchens hijacks the word ‘numinous’ when referring to a sense of awe:

It’s innate in us to be overawed by certain moments, say, at evening on a mountaintop or sunset on the boundaries of the ocean. Or, in my case, looking through the Hubble telescope at those extraordinary pictures. We have a sense of awe and wonder at something beyond ourselves, and so we should, because our own lives are very transient and insignificant. That’s the numinous, and there’s enough wonder in the natural world without any resort to the supernatural being required.

Hitchens goes on to describe his classification of ‘soul’ in referring to affective literature:

It’s what you might call “the x-factor”—I don’t have a satisfactory term for it—it’s what I mean by the element of us that isn’t entirely materialistic: the numinous, the transcendent, the innocence of children (even though we know from Freud that childhood isn’t as innocent as all that), the existence of love (which is, likewise, unquantifiable but that anyone would be a fool who said it wasn’t a powerful force), and so forth. I don’t think the soul is immortal, or at least not immortal in individuals, but it may be immortal as an aspect of the human personality because when I talk about what literature nourishes, it would be silly of me or reductionist to say that it nourishes the brain.

Referring to the ‘transcendent’ does not necessarily require a dualistic framework. Referring to the transcendent as an experience – rather than an existing magical reality –  is completely possible within an imminent philosophy. Hijacking the topics and language of spiritualists should not be resisted, but rather, it should be used carefully to enrich the scientific discourses.

Symphony of Science - 'We Are All Connected'

Featuring Sagan, Feynman, deGrasse Tyson & Bill Nye, this auto tuned mash up will not disappoint. It is a delightful piece of scientific poetry.

Book Review: Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life – Gilles Deleuze

This is a book review by Ellen E. Berry from the online ‘Reconstruction Journal’ on the astonishingly deep philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze in his book Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life.

Three brief essays make up Pure Immanence -- one on Hume, one on Nietzsche, and one -- "Immanence: A Life" -- that functions as a Deleuzian last testament of sorts, written as it was "in a strange interval [immediately] before his death" (20) as John Rajchman informs us in his very useful introduction to the volume. In this essay, which appears first in the book, Deleuze defines what he calls a "transcendental empiricism," an a-subjective, impersonal, wild and powerful state, existing "in contrast to everything that makes up the world of the subject and the object" (25).

Unlike a notion of the transcendent, the plane of the transcendental is an absolute immanence, complete in itself, neither "in something" nor belonging to someone (say some notion of a universal subject). "It is only when immanence is no longer immanence to anything other than itself that we can speak of a plane of immanence" (27). Pure or absolute immanence is what Deleuze calls "A LIFE," defined as a paradoxical experience/duration in which individuality fades and becomes "a singular essence," an empty time of singularities or virtualities existing in between what we take to be the defining moments of an individual's life. A LIFE unfolds according to a different logic than the life of an individual. It can never be grasped fully; it is always yet "in the making," in potentia, and flashes into conscious existence only occasionally. Deleuze gives two striking examples to illustrate this enigmatic state/space/time, the first from Dickens's Our Mutual Friend:

A disreputable man, a rogue, held in contempt by everyone, is found as he lies dying. Suddenly, those taking care of him manifest an eagerness, respect, even love, for his slightest sign of life. Everybody bustles about to save him, to the point where, in his deepest coma, this wicked man himself senses something soft and sweet penetrating him. But to the degree that he comes back to life, his saviors turn colder, and he becomes once again mean and crude. Between his life and his death, there is a moment that is only that of a life playing with death (28).

In another example, Deleuze calls attention to very small children, as yet unformed as individuals, who all tend to resemble one another except in their singularities -- a smile, a gesture. "Through all their sufferings and weakness, [they] are infused with an immanent life that is pure power and even bliss" (30).

As Rajchman points out, one would need a new conception of society in order to understand Deleuze's notion of a life. It would be one in which we recognize that what we share is our singularities and not our individualities, that "what is common is impersonal and what is impersonal is common" (14). From this perspective, society is viewed not as a social contract between individuals but as an experiment with what in life precedes both individuals and collectivities. Relations with others would be based not in identification or recognition but in encounter and new compositions formed by saying "yes" to what is singular yet impersonal in living.

This all too brief summary cannot do justice to what is a complex set of musings. While Pure Immanence is not the place to start if one is unfamiliar with Deleuze's thought, it is a rich, rewarding, and not inaccessible read.

Here is a hyperlink to this book online: ‘Scribd’
Here is a hyperlink to buy a hardcopy on Amazon for $12.89: ‘Pure Imminence: Essays on A Life’

Jill Bolte: My Stroke of Insight

Slavoj Zizek: Materialism and Theology (Series)

Daniel Dennett on Secular Spirituality

How to Find Secular Spirituality

Meditation: Beyond Mere Relaxation

Einstein Quotes on Religion

 The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness. ( Albert Einstein - The Merging of Spirit and Science)

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism. (Albert Einstein)

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. (Albert Einstein, 1954) From Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press

Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of Nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a Supernatural Being. (Albert Einstein, 1936) Responding to a child who wrote and asked if scientists pray. Source: Albert Einstein: The Human Side, Edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffmann

A man's ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death. (Albert Einstein, Religion and Science, New York Times Magazine, 9 November 1930

I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature. (Albert Einstein, The World as I See It)

Reproduced from http://www.spaceandmotion.com/Albert-Einstein-Quotes.htm

Atheists Get Top Score on Religious Knowledge Survey

                    
The Pew Forum recently released their U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey results concerning religious knowledge based on religious affiliation. The poll image and the following quote are taken from from: http://pewforum.org/Other-Beliefs-and-Practices/U-S-Religious-Knowledge-Survey.aspx

Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.

On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7. Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for differing levels of education.

           How do you match up? Their sample quiz is available Here

Carl Sagan: The 4th Dimension

Carl Sagan helps us think about something that is imposable to imagine in this fascinating clip.

BBC: Postmodernist Position on Religion

Click here to view original publication from the BBC website. The following article outlines a theoretical lens through which this blog views God and Religion.

Postmodernism

Postmodernism does away with many of the things that religious people regard as essential.

For postmodernists every society is in a state of constant change; there are no absolute values, only relative ones; nor are there any absolute truths.

This promotes the value of individual religious impulses, but weakens the strength of 'religions' which claim to deal with truths that are presented from 'outside', and given as objective realities.

In a postmodern world there are no universal religious or ethical laws, everything is shaped by the cultural context of a particular time and place and community.

In a postmodern world individuals work with their religious impulses, by selecting the bits of various spiritualities that 'speak to them' and create their own internal spiritual world. The 'theology of the pub' becomes as valid as that of the priest.

The inevitable conclusion is that religion is an entirely human-made phenomenon.

Precedents

This is not a very new development. In Japan, many people have adopted both Shinto and Buddhist ideas in their religious life for some time. In parts of India, Buddhism co-exists with local tribal religions. Hinduism, too, is able to incorporate many different ideas.

Ways to God

In a world where there is no objectively existing God "out there", and where the elaborate sociological and psychological theories of religion don't seem to ring true, the idea of regarding religion as the totality of religious experiences has some appeal.

Religion in this theory is created, altered, renewed in various formal interactions between human beings.

Images and ideas of God are manufactured in human activity, and used to give specialness ('holiness'?) to particular relationships or policies which are valued by a particular group.

There is no one 'right' or 'wrong' religion - or sanctifying theory. There are as many as there are groups and interactions, and they merge and join, divide and separate over and over again. Some are grouped together under the brand names of major faiths, and they cohere with varying degrees of consistency. Others, although clearly religious in their particular way, would reject any such label.

Some examples

Some of these interactions are labeled 'religious': rites of passage like weddings and funerals, regular worship services, prayer meetings, meditation sessions, retreats.

Some of these are just the rituals of everyday life. These include cooking and cleaning, and working. (Many established religions had that insight a long time ago - although they required the actions to be carried out with a particular attitude of mind to count as religious.)

Yet others are group actions designed to "bring about the Kingdom of God" on earth. These are often initiatives for social change, or charity work, or fighting for individual human rights.

These dramas remove religion from the exclusive narratives of scriptures, or the lifestyle rules of various faith communities, and bring religion into everyday life.

They enable people from different faiths, or none, to work together in religious acts when they engage in social action - they are working to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth, and they don't worry about who God is, or whether God is.

Sam Harris: The Problem With Atheism

Sam Harris states a great deal of my thoughts on atheism and spirituality in this two part video. Here he makes the key distinction between iron age mythic belief and spirituality as a contemplative practice. These categories  resemble the dichotomy William James makes in his descriptions of religion of the 'sick soul', and religion of the 'healthy minded'.

Sam Harris makes the following key points in the video:
- There is more to life than momentary pleasures
- We have an inability to break from discursive modes of thought
- We must first spend time building up our spiritual practice in order to fairly judge contemplative claims
- Atheists must not simply dismiss all spiritual experience as bad science or bad philosophy
- Atheism seems have a disinterest in such available experiences or equate them with banal pleasures
- Atheists may appear less wise than the religious opponents for their sloppy judgment of such experiences
- The universe is stranger than atheists tend to advocate
- We must convince a myth infatuated world that love and curiosity are sufficient

A World Without Religion?

Would the world be better off without any sort of religious or mystical practice? Many early enlightenment thinkers saw a world without religion as a rationalists utopia. At a point in my early times of agnosticism I shared this Utopian view of the ideal society. I have fraught the existential battle between rationality and mysticism for quite some time now and have come to my current thinking that religion and mysticism do have a valuable social purpose. Although religion has an extremely bloody past that has arguably caused more harm than good, the past does not need to be considered when considering its present social value. This idea of history bearing no weight on the present value of a system comes largely from the interdisciplinary thinker William James.

William James in The varieties of religious experience looked at people who described themselves as having transcendent experiences. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states the following about James's conclusions on the usefulness of religion:

James sets out a central distinction of the book in early chapters on “The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness” and “The Sick Soul.” The healthy-minded religious person — Walt Whitman is one of James's main examples — has a deep sense of “the goodness of life,” (V, 79) and a soul of “sky-blue tint” (V, 80). Healthy-mindedness can be involuntary, just natural to someone, but often comes in more willful forms. Liberal Christianity, for example, represents the triumph of a resolute devotion to healthy-mindedness over a morbid “old hell-fire theology” (V, 91).

James makes the distinction between a religion of harm and a religion of 'healthy-mindedness'. Looking at the 'healthy minded' views of Walt Whitman, one will find him to have accepted and adopted all religious texts, myths, and theories, while believing in none. He was a deist who believed the sole is imminent, transcendent (interestingly paradoxical), and immortal. His skeptical open-mindedness tended to the human spirit without belief in a specific theistic religious figure. William James asserted that all religious experience was the same at its core level. This illuminates the fact that it is not religion we should concern ourselves with, but with the core spiritual aspects that are universally shared amongst them.

I see great value in the way certain individuals view spirituality. It is too easy to cast out the idea of spirituality as a whole and dismiss it as irrational fluffy thinking; although, I agree that most religious practice (especially in highly conservative areas) it is just that. Instead, We must look closer at the positive aspects of spirituality found amongst the worlds religions. The great enlightenment value of pure rationality must be taken off the high and mighty throne to make room for other important aspects of human experience. We are thinking-beings just as much as we are feeling-beings. Cultivating rational thinkers is very important, although, this can and should be done alongside the cultivation of passion.

The Purpose of Spiritual Practice

I recently came back from a weekend fitness conference where I had my first official experience in the practice of yoga meditation. Being the open minded skeptic I am, I went into the experience open to new possibilities with my stubborn malarkey detector on high gear constantly brining me back to reality. I found myself constantly struggling between the idea that this practice was just fluffy thinking, and the idea that this practice can actually allow you to live with a heightened sense of well-being.

After completing a surprisingly deep meditation I was convinced that this was real, only to find myself becoming the skeptic a few minutes after I left the workshop. I turned to a person who was in the workshop and asked, "I seem to really feel the effects of the energy in meditation, but I realize I'm probably just deluding myself into feeling something thats not really there..."  the person responded to me with a piece of insight that has stuck with me ever since: "Isn't that the point of religion?"

Ever since that workshop I have realized we can live with both spiritual practice and skepticism. Meditating on a certain type of energy, repeating mantras, praying the rosary, and singing hymns all have a certain healing power that is often overlooked: the power of the mind. The theory behind these practices may not be scientifically valid, but that is not the point. The point is that these practices are powerful tools that allow one to achieve alternate states of mind conducive to living well.

Spirituality as an Atheist

Does Mysticism Give Insight?

Russell, Bernard. (1961). Mysticism. Religion and Science. Oxford university press. Copyright © 2005 Scepsis.ru

In order to see how we could test the assertion that yoga [and other forms of mysticism] gives insight, let us artificially simplify this assertion. Let us suppose that a number of people assure us that if, for a certain time, we breathe in a certain way, we shall become convinced that time is unreal. Let us go further, and suppose that, having tried their recipe, we have ourselves experienced a state of mind such as they describe. Bu t now, having returned to our normal mode of respiration, we are not quite sure whether the vision was to be believed. How shall we investigate this question?

First of all, what can be meant by saying that time is unreal? If we really meant what we say, we must mean that such statements as "this is before that" are mere empty noise, like "twas brillig." If we suppose anything less than this - as, for example, that there is a relation between events which puts them in the same order s the relation of earlier and later, but that it is a different relation - we shall not have made any assertion that makes any real change in our outlook. It will be merely like supposing that the Iliad was not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name. We have to suppose that there are no "events" at all; there must be only the one vast whole of the universe, embracing whatever is real in the misleading appearance of a temporal procession. There must be nothing in reality corresponding to the apparent distinction between earlier and later events. To say that we are born, and then grow, and then die, must be just as false as to say that we die, then grow small, and finally are born. The truth of what seems an individual life is merely the illusory isolation of one element in the timeless and indivisible being of the universe. There is no distinction between improvement and deterioration, no difference between sorrows that end in happiness and happiness that ends in sorrow. If you find a corpse with a dagger in it, it makes no difference whether the man died of the wound or the dagger was plunged in after death. Such a view, if true, puts an end, not only to science, but to prudence, hope, and effort; it is incompatible with worldly wisdom, and - what is more important to religion - with morality.

Most mystics, of course, do not accept these conclusions in their entirety, but they urge doctrines from which these conclusions inevitably follow. Thus Dean Inge rejects the kind of religion that appeals to evolution, because it lays too much stress upon a temporal process. "There is no law of progress, and there is no universal progress," he says. And again: "The doctrine of automatic and universal progress, the lay religion of many Victorians, labours under the disadvantage of being almost the only philosophical theory which can be definitely disproved." On this matter, which I shall discuss at a later stage, I find myself in agreement with the Dean, for whom, on many grounds, I have a very high respect. But he naturally does not draw from his premisses all the inferences which seem to me to be warranted.

It is important not to caricature the doctrine of mysticism, in which there is, I think, a core of wisdom. Let us see how it seeks to avoid the extreme consequences which seem to follow from the denial of time.

The philosophy based on mysticism has a great tradition, from Parmenides to Hegel. Parmenides says: "What is, is uncreated and indestructible; for it is complete, immovable, and without end. Nor was it ever, nor will it be; for now it is, all at once, a continuous one."[2] He introduced into metaphysics the distinction between reality and appearance, or the way of truth and the way of opinion, as he calls them. It is clear that whoever denies the reality of time must introduce some such distinction, since obviously the world appears to be in time. It is also clear that, if everyday experience is not to be wholly illusory, there must be some relation between appearance and the reality behind it. It is at this point, however, that the greatest difficulties arise: if the relation between appearance and reality is made too intimate, all the unpleasant features of appearance will have their unpleasant counterparts in reality, while if the relation is made too remote, we shall be unable to make inferences from the character of appearance to that of reality, and reality will be left a vague Unknowable, as with Herbert Spencer. For Christians, there is the related difficulty of avoiding pantheism: if the world is only apparent, God created nothing, and the reality corresponding to the world is a part of God; but if the world is in any degree real and distinct from God, we abandon the wholeness of everything, which is an essential doctrine of mysticism, and we are compelled to suppose that, in so far as the world is real, the evil which it contains is also real. Such difficulties make thorough-going mysticism very difficult for an orthodox Christian. As the Bishop of Birmingham says: "All forms of pantheism … as it seems to me, must be rejected because, if man is actually a part of God, the evil in man is also in God."

All this time, I have been supposing that we are a jury, listening to the testimony of the mystics, and trying to decide whether to accept or reject it. If, when they deny the reality of the world of sense, we took them to mean "reality" in the ordinary sense of law-courts, we should have no hesitation in rejecting what they say, since we would find that it runs counter to all other testimony, and even to their own in their mundane moments. We must therefore look for some other sense. I believe that, when the mystics contrast "reality" with "appearance," the word "reality" has not a logical, but an emotional, significance: it means what is, in some sense, important. When it is said that time is "unreal," what should be said is that, in some sense and on some occasions, it is important to conceive the universe as a whole, as the Creator, if He existed, must have conceived it in deciding to create it. When so conceived, all process is within one completed whole; past, present, and future, all exist, in some sense, together, and the present does not have that pre-eminent reality which it has to our usual ways of apprehending the world. It this interpretation is accepted, mysticism expresses an emotion, not a fact; it does not assert anything, and therefore can be neither confirmed nor contradicted by science. The fact that mystics do make assertions is owing to their inability to separate emotional importance from scientific validity. It is, of course, not to be expected that they will accept this view, but it is the only one, so far as I can see, which, while admitting something of their claim, is not repugnant to the scientific intelligence.

The certainty and partial unanimity of mystics is no conclusive reason for accepting their testimony on a matter of fact. The man of science, when he wishes others to see what he has seen, arranges his microscope or telescope; that is to say, he makes changes in the external world, but demands of the observer only normal eyesight. The mystic, on the other hand, demands changes in the observer, by fasting, by breathing exercises, and by a careful abstention from external observation. (Some object to such discipline, and think that the mystic illumination cannot be artificially achieved; from a scientific point of view, this makes their case more difficult to test than that of those who rely on yoga. But nearly all agree that fasting and an ascetic life are helpful.) We all know that opium, hashish, and alcohol produce certain effects on the observer, but as we do not think these effects admirable we take no account of them in our theory of the universe. They may even, sometimes, reveal fragments of truth; but we do not regard them as sources of general wisdom. The drunkard who sees snakes does not imagine, afterwards, that he has had a revelation of a reality hidden from others, though some not wholly dissimilar belief must have given rise to the worship of Bacchus. In our own day, as William James related,[3] there have been people who considered that the intoxication produced by laughing-gas revealed truths which are hidden at normal times. From a scientific point of view, we can make no distinction between the man who eats little and sees heaven and the man who drinks much and sees snakes. Each is in an abnormal physical condition, and therefore has abnormal perceptions. Normal perceptions, since they have to be useful in the struggle for life, must have some correspondence with fact; but in abnormal perceptions there is no reason to expect such correspondence, and their testimony, therefore, cannot outweigh that of normal perception.

The mystic emotion, if it is freed from unwarranted beliefs, and not so overwhelming as to remove a man wholly from the ordinary business of life, may give something of very great value - the same kind of thing, though in a heightened form, that is given by contemplation. Breadth and calm and profundity may all have their source in this emotion, in which, for the moment, all self-centred desire is dead, and the mind becomes a mirror for the vastness of the universe. Those who have had this experience, and believe it to be bound up unavoidably with assertions about the nature of the universe, naturally cling to these assertions. I believe myself that the assertions are inessential, and that there is no reason to believe them true. I cannot admit any method of arriving at truth except that of science, but in the realm of the emotions I do not deny the value of the experiences which have given rise to religion. Through association with false beliefs, they have led to much evil as well as good; freed from this association, it may be hoped that the good alone will remain.

Full Article &Source: http://scepsis.ru/eng/articles/id_4.php

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2. Quoted from Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, p. 199.

3. See his Varieties of Religious Experience.

The Liberating Death of Hope in a God-forsaken City

We're the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. – Fight Club

… What is our place and purpose in the universe? How did we arrive at something rather than nothing? Where are we heading? These are questions that lay at the center of every spiritual tradition. Since the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, Copernicus’s heliocentric model has shifted the way we think about our spatial orientation in the universe. Our feelings of centeredness and self importance have been pulled out from under us; only to leave the cold concrete floor of Modernity. Lyotard’s (1979) description of a postmodern era is partly characterized by skepticism toward meta-narratives. This skepticism toward all-encompassing narrative knowledge shifts our view of the universe away from a sense of centeredness, yet again. The egocentric perception of ourselves is threatened when we realize grand theories of a benevolent omnipotent creator fail to recognize the disorder and chaos within a vast universe. Our sense of feeling lost increases with the realization that the ‘True’ teleological value of the universe may never be uncovered. It is in this era, the wayward wanderer, lost in this eternal moment, must fight the great spiritual war. Constructed mental purgatories of dualistic thinking must be dissolved by letting go of hope and replacing it with will, replacing transcendence with imminence, and replacing nostalgia and salvation with presence. Without this shift in consciousness the great depression of our lives will prevail.

The Modern era of the West can be characterized by the centeredness of the individual and preoccupation with reason in a world made for the purposes of humans (Taylor, 1984). The idea of a sovereign God has been replaced with the sovereign self. This dualistic Master Slave relationship between the sacred and the profane has not been subverted, but rather inverted (Taylor, 1984). In this way, we remain slaves to our limited consciousness which continually tries to acquire a self through the acquisition of objects, while putting up walls of segregation from those who pose a threat to the ‘self’. Rampant capitalism reflects this shift toward the centered subject. Weber’s (1959) Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, illustrates the shift in religious discourse toward individualization, personal autonomy, the use of material gain as the source of salvation in what he describes as the “protestant ethic”. Many people now find themselves seeking refuge from this hurricane of economic preoccupation. The problem occurs when one realizes there is no place to turn in this illusion of a society, where the sacredness of the church itself is under threat. Before the rise of modernism the crucifix on top the church steeple was the highest point in the city and therefore representing the power of the divine (Levitch, 2002). Compare this to the high-modernist sky-scraper which towers above the grid plan representing the power of capital. Miller (1991) begs the question:

And where is there room for God in the city? Though it is impossible to tell whether the great cities have been built because God has disappeared, in any case the two go together. Life in the city is the way in which men have experienced directly what it means to live without God in the world.

The classic notion of “centeredness” is turned upside-down when the former center, God, is replaced with humanity (Taylor, 1984). Many world religions once considered direct experiences of the divine most sacred. This often consisted of orgiastic drug induced states of ecstasy (Weber, 1920). Rationalist influenced Christianity broke connection to these direct experiences, and maintained social stratification through its focus on hierarchy and sacrament. (Weber, 1920). This function of the church mirrors the economic sphere since it strives to maximize capital. Spiritual capital becomes the copyright commodity of the church: violators are prosecuted. The church capitalizes on this sense of lack: lack of purity, lack of wholeness, and ultimately the lack of God in the everyday experience of the city.

With the transition from Medieval symbolism of analogical participation, toward modern poetic symbolism of reference at a distance, the image of God had largely shifted from imminence toward distant transcendence by the 18^th century (Miller, 1991). The modern symbols binding humans to God leaves humanity disconnected, isolated, and separate from God and the world itself. Miller (1991) calls this disconnect “spiritual poverty”. This alienation of spirit mirrors Marx’s (1964) notion the alienation in the workplace. This impoverished subject is left with a void that must be filled by consumption and through acquisition of objects (Taylor, 1984). This filling of the hole is an attempt to make the subject whole in order to produce a temporary measure of euphoria. This preoccupation with the commodity, the modern version of orgiastic ritual, takes the place of the divine. The commodity becomes a fetish and takes on a transcendent quality in the minds of the consumer (Marx, 1990). Furthermore, the commodity works within the modern economic system not only to keep the subject alienated from itself and the producer, but also works to keep the religious institutions full of longing followers seeking grace.

The idea of finite linear history, in the Christian sense, keeps the subject nostalgic for what has been, and looking forward to what has yet to come. Beginning... middle… end… between the ‘tick’ of Genesis and the ‘tock’ of the apocalypse, the history of the west runs its course” (Taylor, 1964). This anticipatory nostalgic state can be called the “unhappy consciousness” (Taylor, 1984). Satisfaction in this state is constantly delayed since the past and the future can never be the present. Comte-Sponville (2007) describes this same phenomenon as “cheerful despair”. He explains this state of despair as the following:

“You can hope only for what you do not have. Thus, to hope for happiness is to lack it. When you have it, on the other hand, what remains to be hoped for? For it to last? That would mean fearing its cessation, and as soon as you do that, you start feeling it dissolve into anxiety… with or without God – the hope for tomorrows happiness prevents you from experiencing today’s. (Comte-Sponville, 2007).

The unhappy subject becomes immersed in the anxiety laden consciousness of the perceived imperfection of what is, against the idealized, what ought to be. (Taylor, 1984). The lack of fulfillment leads to a sense of guilt and desire to revolt against the self. This existential dilemma is the inability of the I to live with the self. This is often expressed by the subject uttering, “I can’t live with myself”. Viewing this dilemma in light of Sartre’s (1943) concept of “bad faith”, the relationship of the I to the self can be imaginary and self-deceiving. The ‘sinner’ must realize that deceiving oneself with this identity results in unnecessary self-inflicted guilt. In this sense, hell is merely a self inflicted state of mind constructed by the Church and internalized by the individual. Rather than hoping for better days, the individual must actively participate in the eternal moment through the use of one’s will. Hope is the passive version of will, since willing something to occur requires one to take action (Comte-Sponville, 2007).

The Modern era can also be characterized by the rise of humanistic atheism. For the humanistic atheist, traditional values are turned upside in the attempt to convert “lovers of god” into “lovers of man”. This worship of reason is not sufficient since it does not question the function of truth, and the value of value (Taylor, 1943). The same insufficient ontological proof which is used in reference to the existence of God, is insufficient in proving that truth is the product of reason. This kind of proof is the atheistic humanist inverse of nothing more than an empty tautology (Marx, 1975). With the death of God, comes the death of the self. For the modern humanistic atheist, nihilism becomes the crucifixion of selfhood (Taylor, 1943). For this reason, one must look beyond both types of rhetoric.

“Since there is no transcendental signified to anchor the activity of signification, freely floating signs cannot be tied down to any single meaning” (Taylor, 1943). The realization that God has been born of, and died as a result of humanity, calls into question the legitimacy of religious authority as a whole. There are various reactions to the death of God ranging from those who are disinterested, those who are troubled by the implications of modernism and postmodernism on theology, in addition to those who take the illegitimacy of traditional authority with great enthusiasm. For instance, “like servants released from bondage to a harsh master or children unbound from the rule of a domineering father, such individuals feel free to become themselves (Taylor, 1984)”. It is the space between the belief and unbelief that the wanderer makes its way. This wanderer finds itself like Kafka’s character K:

“…haunted by the feeling the he is losing himself or wandering into a strange country, farther than ever man had wandered before, a country so strange that not even the air had anything in common with his native air, where one might die of strangeness (Harman, 1988).

Levitch (2002) expresses that, “to be completely lost in ones consciousness is to know precisely ones place in the universe. We are vagabonds in the eternal. Language is but a process of signification that will always fall short of representing the real; since it is the world of words that creates the world of things in which the signifier can never fully grasp the true essence of the signified (Lacan, 1957). In this way, language is always imperfect; therefore, capturing the absolute in language is absurd. The absurdity of the absolute and the loss of our spatial orientation in history do not necessarily mean one must throw spirituality by the way-side. Rather, “the aimlessness of serpentine wandering liberates the drifter from obsessive preoccupation with the past and future” (Taylor, 1984). Such liberation provides the key to spiritual practice that is based on the universe rather than God, the world rather than the Church, and experience rather than faith. In this way, traditional Christian theology is largely challenged by this conception of a postmodern shift in consciousness. As well, the sovereignty of reason has shown its limitation. Lawlessness is the new grace that only arrives when God and self are dead and history is over (Taylor 1984).

The dilemma of existential meaning can now go beyond the binary codes of language that have plagued modern Christian theology. The death of dualism allows the absolute to be conceptualized as Epicurus's pan, Lucetius's summa summarum, and Spinoza's nature: necessarily all conditions, relationships, and points of view (Comte-Sponville 2007).

Kafka’s The Castle can be interpreted as a modern depiction of alienation within bureaucracy, and the futile quest for an unavailable God. This is motif of an unsuccessful explorer as opposed to a stray wanderer. The explorer with a goal feels incomplete if the goal is not met, while the wanderer accepts the absurdity of the search and feels at home in all locations. This is the death of hope and the acceptance of what is. Taylor (1984) illustrates this in the act of sauntering:

To saunter is to wander or travel about aimlessly and unprofitably. The wanderer moves to and fro, hither and thither, with neither fixed course nor certain end…having forsaken the straight and narrow and given up all thought of return, the wanderer appears to be a vagrant, a renegade, a pervert – an outcast who is irredeemable by law… erring is serpentine wandering that comes, if at all, by grace – grace that is mazing.

The very fact of mere existence as opposed to non-existence is why-less. In asking why a flower blooms, we are confronted with a host of contingencies that take us into eternity. Interdependence in this web-like why-less absurd universe is the mystery that cannot be put into words or explained away by any kind narrative. Comte-Sponville (2007) claims that in the face of reality, silence of sensation and attention are more appropriate than attempting to dispel the mystery. He relates this to the silence of prayer and meditation without an object. In Beckett’s (1952) Waiting for Godot,Vladimir and Estragen have the following conversation which illustrates the absurdity of their endeavors:

Vladimir: I’m curious to hear what he [Godot] has to offer. Then we’ll take it or leave it.

Estragon: What exactly did we ask him for?

Vladimir: Were you not there?

Estragon: I can’t have been listening.

Vladimir: Oh… nothing very definite.

Estragon: A kind of prayer.

Vladimir: Precisely.

Estragon: A vague supplication.

Vladimir: Exactly.

Estragon: And what did he reply?

Vladimir: That he’d see.

Estragon: That he couldn’t promise anything.

Vladimir: That he’d have to think it over.

They are not only waiting for something that never comes, but the waiting itself is damnation: “Waiting is the final loosing game” (Cavell, 1969). Suspended in history, waiting for salvation or damnation is damnation in itself. The void must be used for one’s own purpose, rather than be void of purpose (Carvell, 1969). Beckett’s (1952) Waiting for Godot is not a play demonstrating the meaninglessness of life, but rather that emptiness is not a state, it is an infinite task which calls one not to protest against the emptiness, but rather, to see what one is filled with (Carvell, 1969). Becoming must appear justified at every moment, without requiring reference to the past or the future (Taylor, 1984). The experience of being is above and beyond the banality of what is – it is beyond explanation and out of empirical reach (Comte-Sponville, 2007).

Lucky’s speech in Beckets (1952) Waiting for Godot gives insight into the shrinking nature of humanity as we discover our extreme insignificance within the vast universe:

…but time will tell |to shrink and dwindle / fades away| I resume Fulham Clapham in a word the dead loss per |caput / head| since the death of Bishop Berkeley being to the tune of one inch four ounce per |caput / head| approximately by and large more or less to the nearest decimal good measure round figures stark naked in the stockinged feet in Connemara in a word for reasons unknown no matter what matter the facts are there…

Beckett references Bishop Berkley, the idealist whose views on immaterialism consist of God as being the cosmic all-perceiver (Kroll, 1995). Beckett explores whether the cosmic observer is neglecting to pay attention to his creation. This metaphysical question, for Beckett, is the inverse of Bishop Berkeley's belief that God is benevolent and attentively omnipresent (Kroll, 1995). Opposed to Berkley’s beautiful and harmonious view of the universe, Beckett sets the scene with Vladimir and Estragon in a universe plagued by disjunctions which suggests that God's detachment has become so noticeable that it seems as if God is virtually powerless (Kroll, 1995). Lucky’s references of ‘shrinking’ and ‘dwindling’ may represent the shrinking of humanity’s significance as the world is imagined within an infinity of space. Not only is the shrinking of humanity seen, but the shrinking of Gods role in the minds and everyday experience of people. Comte-Sponville (2007) takes a materialist view of this shrinking phenomenon when he describes it as the following:

“We are in the universe, part of the All or of nature. And the contemplation of the immanency that contains us makes us all the more aware of how puny we are. This may be wounding to our ego, but it also enlarges our soul, because our ego has been put in its place at long last. It has stopped taking up all the room.

Spirituality in the materialist sense consists of living and experiencing as opposed to seeking supernatural transcendence. God is not in nature like water to a sponge, but rather is nature; therefore, instead of using the word 'God', the word 'nature' is sufficient. Spirituality of immanence cannot be given, attained, or bought. It is not magic or God given, but rather, an inner experience. The Jewish tradition calls it 'the breath of life', the Christian tradition calls it being 'filled with spirit', and the Buddhist tradition calls it 'being awake' (Comte-Sponville, 2007). The spiritual life must lead followers down the path of intimacy and connectedness with the richness of being, rather than alienating individuals from themselves and from other religious traditions. It is through this breaking down of dualistic and religious barriers that our sense of at-one-ness with all that exists may emerge. Freud (1929) used this term “Oceanic Feeling” in Civilization and its discontents when referring to limitlessness, eternity, and feeling of wholeness which is experienced when the boundary between ego and object is lost, blurred, or distorted. Although this experience is not intrinsically equated with religion, it is often described with religious language. Dr Jill Bolte Taylor (2009) in her book My Stroke of Insight illustrates the oceanic feeling in her description of having a stroke which temporarily impaired the functioning of her left brain hemisphere:

I felt as if I was trapped inside the perception of a meditation that I could neither stop nor escape… As the language centers in my left hemisphere grew increasingly silent and I became detached from the memories of my life, I was comforted by an expanding sense of grace… In this void of higher cognition and details pertaining to my normal life, my consciousness soared into an all-knowingness, a 'being at one' with the universe... I no longer perceived myself as a whole object separate from everything. Instead, I now blended in with the space and flow around me.

The body is characterized by the natural flow of “eating, drinking, pissing, shitting, and fucking” (Taylor, 1984). Without these bodily flows of substance in, substance out, our body would be lifeless like a deserted city sitting like a set of bare bones on a dusty plain. The eyes of a proper ‘straight’ world have been averted from such bodily flows of life which are seen as vulgar to the city. The modern city’s grid-plan is a monument to the ideals of progress, efficiency, and linear thought which are on display for the corporate executive looking out onto this skilled attempt to become ‘civilized’. Even within this machine, the human spirit will not be caged. One may easily wander through the city, flabbergasted to be in the presence of such life. Wandering by foot is the chosen method of the saunter to lose one’s self amongst the cities flow: life’s flow. “Time and space of graceful erring are opened by the death of God, the loss of self, and the end of history. In uncertain, insecure, and vertiginous postmodern worlds, wanderers repeatedly ask: ‘Whither are we moving?’…” (Taylor, 1984).

When the dominoes of theological deconstruction fall into an eternal abyss, the question of what is the role of religion still stands. If religion will survive under the scrutiny of the postmodernist gaze it will need to re-open the book. The sacred book of Christianity has been left far behind by the wanderer in the infinite mirror maze of the library. The modern humanistic atheist may claim the library is not infinite, but is mistaken because they have merely stepped in front of the mirror and can only see a reflection of themselves. Stepping aside, one will realize the infinite reflection of signifiers which shows the library can never be complete.

Many people enjoy the fun house [or mirror maze] so long as they are convinced that there is an exit. Such people believe the book prescribes a cure. The nausea that vertiginous uncertainty creates is settled by the promise of certainty… [but] the only thing more disconcerting than uncertainty is certainty. A world in which every person has a number on his or her forehead is not a world in which there is no fun; it is a world plagued by oppressive despair. (Taylor, 1984).

As a result of lacking an absolute transcendent signifier, language and the book are open into the eternity in which meaning is ambiguous: appearing and disappearing at the threshold of interrelated perspectives (Taylor, 1984). In this way the words of the pages will never fully capture the essence of what is signified. This imperfection can perhaps act not only as a metaphor to the human condition, but as a metaphor to the condition of the chaotic universe(s) as a whole. Letting go of hope to allow for acceptance may be the only way for the wanderer to obtain a temporary measure of grace in a time where God is dead…

___________________
References:

Beckett. S, (1952). Waiting for Godot. 1st English edition. Grove Press.

Cavell, S. (1969) Must we mean what we say?. Cambridge University Press. United Kingdom.

Comte-Sponville, A.(2007). The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality. Viking. New York.

Freud , S.(1929). Civilization and its Discontents. London: Penguin, 2002

Harman, M. (1998) The Castle, Schocken Books, New York, New York,

Kroll, N. (1995). Berkeley inside out: existence and destiny in 'Waiting for Godot'. The Journal …………of English and Germanic Philology.

Lacan, J., The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis in Écrits (1957)

Levitch, T. (2002). Speedology: Speed on New York on Speed. Context Books. 2002

Marx, K. (1990) Capital, Volume I. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1990.

Marx, K. (1975). Marx/Engels Collected Works. International Publishers. Vol 1, pg 683-685.

Marx, K. (1964) Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, New York City, International …………Publishers.

Miller, J. (1991). The disappearance of God: five nineteenth-century writers. The University of …………Illinois Press.

Sartre, J (1943). Being and Nothingness.Washington Square Press edition

Taylor, J. (2008). My stroke of insight. Plume; 1 edition. 2009

Taylor, M. (1984). A Postmodern A/theology. University of Chicago Press. 1984.

Weber, (1959). Weber, Max The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism. Dover …………Publications. 2003.

Weber, M. (1920). Sociology of World Religions. http://www.ne.jp. April 18^th 2010

Living a Life of Passion

You know the saying ‘live every day as if it’s your last’? We have all heard it but forget soon after and go about our daily business. I’ve realized that we can’t be certain about life after death; this impending nothingness, a the world continuing on without me in it, the impending eternal black empowers me to live each day with passion. Here is a poem I wrote conveying my feelings on the mysteries that confront us.

Eternity went by without me knowing,
I did not feel, I did not see,
More nothing than black
Time limitless and unfelt
A thing of a world I do not yet belong to
But where was I?
The vary things now my body are scattered
Consciousness yet to be uncovered
Then like a spark from a flint it exists
But why in this speck of history?
Why in this space?
Only to be put out by time, unstoppable as the wind
Going on into eternity just as it has come from
What happens to my consciousness than?
A nothing that is less than black just as before?
No sight, no sense, no memory
From stardust, to earth-dust, back to stardust
This fate of body unavoidable
The fate of soul unknowable
But what is the origin of this soul?
Did it only exist as humans existed?
What was the threshold in evolution that sparked the soul?
The unanswerable ‘why is everything’ gives hope
For why would everything be anything if not for something?
The destiny of the body is clear, while the destiny of our consciousness is not
Will the recognition of an I fade with the body?
The I that I know does not know enough to know the answer.

          The moment is forever fleeting, eternal and real. As stated in the movie ‘Waking Life’; Life is not a dream; many of us are sleep walking in out waking state and wake walking in our dreams (either way won’t do us any good). As Speed Levich states in this same film: The world may very well be an exam to see whether we can rise to our direct experiences. Our ‘eyesight’ for us to see beyond, ‘matter’ for our curiosity, ‘doubt’ a test of our vitality.

          One of Richard Dawkins’s finest lines conveys a sense of his passion very beautifully:

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?

          Co-authoring this thing we call life, we must choose to write passionately. That is why life and all its mysteries are my passion.

          Time must not be wasted.

Technorati Tags: Life,Existance,Soul,Spirituality

Parkour: Godless Spiritual Experience

   
Recently I have been practicing a lot of parkour (free-running) and have realized its potential as a spiritual experience. Atkinson (2009) describes his experience of free-runners as the following:

We took turns shepherding one another through the city, practicing speed and stealth in our movement at times as we made our way across the rolling and varied architectural terrain. The movement, and our underlying orientation in the session, encouraged me to let go of all conscious thought and simply be present with my breath, movement, and the physical environment. Lines separating roads, buildings, cultures, selves, and bodies disappeared. I had never experienced the city, or running for that matter, in this way. And even though I felt exhausted at the end of the session, a strange peace descended upon me.

Parkour can be a liberating spiritual experience standing in stark contrast to a sterile structured landscape in which it is practiced. The capitalist influenced modern urban space suffocates the human spirit while liberating those who transcend it. Rather than a sport focusing on strategies, goals, or outcomes, parkour focuses the mind like a lazar beam onto the present moment in order to transcend built structure with grace and precision. During a session the traceur holistically connects with the environment, yet transcends it altogether; the body and the mind merge and become 'one' beyond the grips of sterilizing dualisms casting the physical world as unholy. This 'one' may be Nietzsche's 'superman'. In the modern era, Nietzsche writes about the autonomous subject and the death of God. I like to think of this subject as a person unbound by the idea of a traditional catholic deity; a person who refuses to be disciplined by the heavy hand of sovereignty.     Along side high-modernist concrete structures within an urban environment, parkour can serve as a powerful form of meditation that liberates the spirit. 

Here is a secular 'parkour prayer' I have to privilege to share thanks to Amos (a reader and parkour blogger):

Let us rewire our muscle memory in accordance to the way of nature; let us have communion with God. Let us transcend mundane sidewalks, make a jungle of this oppressive urban architecture. No longer will we clumsily stumble through our existence, we will embrace obstacles as challenges and tools for rewriting our natural reactions. In a safe environment, we will force ourselves into the uncommon and unnatural, forcing ourselves to fall. Now, when hit with the ripples of events outside of our control, our natural reaction will be an adaptation, from the second of falling to the moment we’re safely back on our feet, it will have been as if we didn’t miss a step walking

________ 
Atkinson, m. (2009). Parkour, Anarcho-Environmentalism, and Poiesis. Journal of Sport and Social Issues. Volume, 33. Number, 2. 169 – 194

Technorati Tags: Parkour,Free-Running,Spirituality,Urban

Carl Sagan: Pale Blue Dot

       This moving speech by Carl Sagan provides us with a cosmic perspective of ourselves within the vastness of the universe.

Accepting the Absurd

       Who knows the mind of God?
We often see religious individuals acting based on what they consider the word of God. This ‘word’ is interpreted very differently based on the group one is associated with.  Acting based on what one considers the word of God is a very powerful role to take on and it allows for tremendous good as well as harm. I believe that the virtues of love, compassion, and charity are found at the core of most religions but I do not see how these virtues are ordered from a transcendent entity and therefore divinely true. I take them as worldly truths but see no need to attribute them to godly truths unless used metaphorically. 
      
        I believe the topic of the divine is too subjective and transcendental to know which ideals are God given. Humanism does very well in advocating for moral action without God. Faith is an inner guidance that can lead to good in the world, as well as great harm. The difference between the two are the reference groups of religious socialization. I am an advocate for keeping the good religion and ditching the bad. Justification for what is the 'good' or 'bad' cannot be transcendent since it it non-falsifiable. My justification for what is 'good' is purely the down to earth nature of what promotes human suffering and what relieves it.  
       
        I view the existence of God as unknowable as well as the meaning of life. Human action should not be based on divine meaning since such meaning can not be acquired. I turn the the philosophy of Absurdism which states we can not know an ultimate meaning, therefore we should stop believing we can find one and start living our lives based on personal meanings.

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”  Albert Camus 

      Even if unknowable, personally find meaning in the spiritual search and therefore I have the motivation to contemplate and write about it. I believe there are great benefits in spiritual and contemplative practices, but one must always beware not to become the donkey chasing the carrot. Accept that the carrot is unreachable and focus on the here and now.

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