vipassana – Beguine Again

Jan122017 by jrcowlesNo Comments

Shave Ice And The Numinous

awareness, Buddhism, contemplation, Creativity, Enlightenment, Food, Hawaii, Imagination, Intentional Living, meditation, Numinous, reflection, spiritual practices, Uncategorized, vipassana

You take your Sacraments wherever you can find them! Or perhaps more appropriately for what follows, you take your kensho moments – your bo-tree experiences, your timeless instants of Damascene insight – wherever you can find them. My latest such was my discovery of shave ice as a kind of Sacrament or moment of enlightenment – the terminology is not important – on Diane’s and my recent visit to my in-law family in her hometown of Hilo on the Big Island of Hawaii. Once again, as with my experience at my father-in-law’s memorial service back in 2008, I was reminded that the moment is all. In fact, not only is the moment all, the moment is all there is – all there could be. Not to be excessively prescriptive, but … my intent in the following is to “pay it forward” by drawing on my e...

Taking the Vows of a "None"

"Life" Issues, Atheism, autonomy, awareness, Buddhism, C. S. Lewis, Change, critical judgment, culture, Ecumenism, faith, faithfulness, Healing, Holy Mystery, Human Condition, Ideology, journey, meditation, monotheism, Mystery, paradox, peace, Religion, Renewal, Spirituality, Tolerance, vipassana, wonder

I keep reading and hearing about the results of polls like the ones from Gallup and Berkeley to the effect that the fastest-growing group of "religious" people are people who respond "None" on surveys of religious attitudes. At first, I was encouraged by this. I figured any development that indicates people are coming to believe that this life and rationality are sufficient to imbue human existence with purpose, meaning, and value, and that consequently people are increasingly open to discovering other sources, alternate sources, non-theistic sources, of what we might generically call "Transcendence", would be an overall benefit to the human species. All I ask is that ample allowance be made for people who wish to remain conventionally, monotheistically religious – which, at this point, se...

Waiting for God(ot)

Advent, Atheism, awareness, Christianity, Christmas, contemplation, Four Quartets, Godot, Human Condition, inclusive, meditation, mindfulness, monotheism, Poetry, Samuel Beckett, Skeptic, spiritual practice, Spirituality, T. S. Eliot, Theology, Tolerance, vipassana

Given that we are moving into the Christian Holidays that cluster around Advent and Christmas, I wanted to do a blog post on what it means for a skeptic to wait. Advent is basically a Season of waiting – Israel waiting for the birth of the Messiah, Mary waiting for the birth of Jesus, the Church singing “O Come Emmanuel!” as it celebrates the First Advent and waits for the Second, etc., etc. – and celebrating it raises some unique, arguably insuperable, questions and issues for people like me: skeptics, atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, anti-theists, etc., etc., etc. Waiting is such an “archetypal” activity that I am loath to say that folks like us do not wait, period. Saying that we do not wait would be like saying we do not breathe or love or age or question or die … or visit our l...