www.RogerWendell.com
Roger J. Wendell
Defending 3.8 Billion Years of Organic Evolution^SM

Spiritual Stuff

Despite my deep religious skepticism I do hold a respect and interest in a vareity of spiritual practices and traditions. Regardless our own belief it's important that we remain open to, or at least tolerant of, the beliefs of others...

There is no God, click Here for more info...

Click Here for info on proselytizing...

Clarification:

I want to make it clear that my pages aren't here to mock, make fun of, or demean religion, spirituality, or people of faith. Although I am an atheist, I recognize that most religions and sects have organized themselves in an effort to better their lives (and future prsopects!) and our world in general.* However, I take a very dim view (and work against) any religion that wants to entangle itself with government or anyone who wants to force their belief system on others. I also cast a wary eye towards proselytizing (including those who tout secular ideals as well!) but recognize shouting out our beliefs is a right, albeit an obnoxious one at times... Anyway, I'll admit here that I have found comfort, at times, in spiritual practices and religious gatherings - in the same way I find time alone in Nature or a beautiful concert inspiring - a religious or spiritual gathering can be calming and comforting. My experiences in this regard have included numerous (clockwise) prayer walks around Stupas, intense study and lecture sessions with the Seventh Day Adventists, a full weekend of meditation at a Zen center, years of study as a young boy in the Catholic church, praying with Shinto nuns in Japan, and lighting candles and spinning prayer wheels in Tibet. Again, the idea here being that it is important that we all remain respectful of other people's beliefs and recognize that there is good in everyone. Nevertheless, religions (and seculaists, too...) have done a lot of damage throughout history so it's equally important to remain vigilant and to speak out against the parts of other systems that are damaging, controlling of others, or destructive to our precious little planet and the other life that shares it with us. None of us are here very long so let's do what's right while we can... - Roger J. Wendell, Golden, Colorado   * Additionally, Judeo-Christian values are needed if society is to survive...

14th Dalai Lama

"Actually, I believe there is an important distinction to be made between religion and spirituality. Religion I take to be concerned with faith in the claims to salvation of one faith tradition or another, an aspect of which is acceptance of some form of metaphysical or supernatural reality, including perhaps an idea of heaven or nirvana. Connected with this are religious teachings or dogma, ritual, prayer, and so on. Spirituality I take to be concerned with those qualities of the human spirit - such as love and compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, a sense of responsibility, a sense of harmony - which bring happiness to both self and others. While ritual and prayer, along with the questions of nirvana and salvation, are directly connected to religious faith, these inner qualities need not be, however. There is thus no reason why the individual should not develop them, even to a high degree, without recourse to any religious or metaphysical belief system. That is why I sometimes say that religion is something we can perhaps do without. What we cannot do without are these basic spiritual qualities."

"I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us.
I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong."

- John Lennon

Video of a Prayer Wheel and Thur-dag mask:

(Click on any of this page's "thumbnail" images for a larger view)

Quotes:

Roger in India

"The WuLi Masters know that 'science' and 'religion' are only dances, and that those who follow them are dancers. The dancers may claim to follow 'truth' or claim to seek 'reality', but the WuLi Masters know better. They know that the true love of all dancers is dancing." - Gary Zukav The Dancing WuLi Masters, p. 111

"If it could be shown that Shakyamuni never lived, the myth of his life would be our guide. In fact it is better to acknowledge at the outset that myths and religious archetypes guide us, just as they do every religious person."

- Robert Aitken
Taking the Path of Zen, p. 7

"Zen Buddhism is one path among many. I have heard it said that all paths lead to the top of the same mountain. I doubt it. I think that one mountain may seem just a small hill from the top of another. Let one hundred mountains rise! Meanwhile you musts find your own path, and your own mountain. You may have an experience of some kind that points the direction clearly, or you may have to explore for a while. But eventually you will have to settle on a particular way, with a particular teacher."

- Robert Aitken
Taking the Path of Zen, p. 13

"We began by speaking of invisible connections; there is one connection that upholds all. The universal mind choreographs everything that is happening in billions of galaxies with elegant precision and unfaltering intelligence. Its intelligence is ultimate and supreme, permeating every fiber of existence from the smallest to the largest, from the atom to the cosmos. I am an impulse of the universe, at this particular moment in time, part of a collective wave of consciousness. After I'm gone, I'll have done what I came to do."

"And that's enough."

Spiritual Journey:

"And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home."   - Wendell Berry

The Crow Concept of Vision Quest

From The Heart Of The Crow Country (The crow Indians' Own Stories) by Joseph Medicine Crow, p. 80 "The quiet and mystic serenity of the Wolf Teeth Mountains has always provided the good and right setting for vision seeking. Some of the prominences in the mountains display physical evidence where clandestine and lonely worship took place, where man sought communion with his Maker and wished to receive the Baxbe, or Power." "The Absarokee, surrounded and besieged on all sides by hostile tribes, was by necessity a tribe of superb warriors physically, mentally, and spiritually. The Crow believed that by fasting he could obtain supernatural power through animal emissaries of the First Maker (or Great Spirit). He believed that this power would make him a better warrior, mores successful in performing war deeds, helping him to eventually become a chief with great wealth, high prestige, and a large following. "The crow called this spiritual experience 'Going Without Water.' It was basically a fasting supplication. Through suffering from exposure to the elements, from the pangs of thirst and hunger, and from the pain of blood sacrifice (cutting off a finger and bleeding into unconsciousness), the faster hoped to gain the pity of the animal spirits* (the Ones Without Fires). Thus to receive an early 'visit' by them and to be given instructional dreams and visions were the sure signs of 'receiving the Baxbe, the Sacred Power."

* "The Crows attributed to the horse, as to other animals, supernatural powers and regarded it as an emissary and agent of the Great Power. The Crow philosophy held that the Supreme Power had given all animals., the 'Ones Without Fires,' inherent supernatural powers that had not been given to human beings. Therefore man must obtain spiritual power through animal emissaries and revealers. Through a special dream or a vision or a fasting experience, an animal would come and prescribe to the supplicant the secret and sacred ways of using a particular gift - the power to heal certain sicknesses, to cure the wounded, to be invulnerable in battle, to prophesy, or to perform other mystical feats."
Ibid., pp. 102-103

Spirituality and the Brain

Caller - Jeff, from Mesa Arizona:
"How would you define rationality or just rational thinking? Because my personal view is just that nothing really seems rational I mean what's the basis for the direction one takes, or a nation takes, when you say we just need to be rational."

Sam Harris's response:

"Well it's a good question, it's actually a deep question when you talk about what rationality is at the level of the brain because we now know from a variety of functional neuroimaging experiments that rationality and emotions are not entirely separable. There are kinds of reasoning that require a certain emotional functionality and without that functionality, without being able to feel the difference between something being right and wrong, or true and false, you're unable to reason and you're unable to let your reason really inform your behavior."

"So it's actually quite a deep question scientifically. But, we all know what reason is at the level of common sense. We all know that when someone makes extravagant claims that that should be based on really extraordinarily compelling evidence and when it's not we immediately discount these claims in every other area of our lives. And, just to take a specific example. 'Cuz one thing I'm not discounting here is that the fact that people have spiritual experiences. I think spiritual experience is one of the most interesting parts of the human experience and it may be necessary but what I'm arguing is that we can't make extravagant and divisive metaphysical claims on the basis of our spiritual experiences.

"If you go into a cave and pray to Jesus for ten hours a day and feel more love than you've ever felt in your life and come out of that cave an extraordinarily good person, that's great. But, what you have to observe is that there are Buddhists who do that and they never think about Jesus. There are Hindus who do that who never think about Jesus. So, at the very least it is only rational to conclude that there is a deeper principal here, and the principal is not that Jesus is the son of God and that everyone who dies outside of his dispensation will spend eternity in Hell. That is not the reasonable thing to conclude from the evidence. And so, I'm just arguing that in our spiritual life, and in our ethical life, we have to make intellectually honest conclusions and engage in intellectually honest dialogue."

- Sam Harris interviewd by Michelle Martin on NPR's Talk of the Nation
about his new book, Letter to a Christian and keeping religion out of public policy.
Broadcast on Monday, October 02, 2006 and transcribed by Roger J. Wendell

Me:

My Journey to Ixtlan

Okay, although I was raised a Christian, I didn't turn out to be a spiritual or religous person. In fact, I'm probably about as skeptical as they come. Nevertheless, I've always held a deep appreciation for Native American traditions, Buddhism (I took a trip to Tibet once), Paganism and just about anything related to Nature. Also, I've always respected the good stuff that Christians, Muslims, Jains, Hindus and countless other religious folks attempt to do - there really are great people around the world with good intentions whether I happen to believe in their particular system or not. Anyway, this page is mostly for stuff that I find interesting, in a "spiritual" sense, with an occasional commentary about things that I think are in need of positive change! - Roger J. Wendell, Colorado

Quotes:

• "Women, once celebrated as an essential half of spiritual enlightenment, had been bansihed from the temples of the world. There were no female Orthodox rabbis, Catholic priests, nor Islamic clerics. The once hallowed act of Hieros Gamos - the natural sexual union between man and woman through which each became spiritually whole - had been recast as a shameful act. Holy men who had once required sexual union with their female counterparts to commune with God now feared their natural sexual urges as the work of the devil, colaborating with his favorite accomplice. . .  woman

  Not even the feminine association with the left-hand side could escape the Church's defamation. In France and Italy, the words for "left" - gauche and sinistra - came to have deeply negative overtones, while their right-hand counterparts rang of righteousness, dexterity, and correctness. To this day, radical thought was considered left wing, irrational thought was left brain, and anything evil, sinister."

  - Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, p. 125

   

• "If this is the truth about ultimate reality, the right metaphysical view, then the widespread hope for immortality is completely groundless and futile. All those persons who yearn for it are unfortunate indeed, for their deepest desires are completely out of sync with reality. They want something that reality strictly forbids. E.O. Wilson, a prominent contemporary thinker who holds the naturalist view, says this is humanity's big problem. He puts it like this: 'The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and disvoered another.' What he means is that a human beings evolved they came to believe in God, in life after death, and objective morality. But eventually, in modern times, they came to discover that God does not exist, that morality is something we created four our own purposes, that there is no meaning beyond this life. Thus, our hearts lead us in one direction, but our heads lead another way altogether. If naturaliism is ture, this is our dilemma: we either have to sacrifice the deepest desires of our hearts or sacrifice intellectual honesty and integrity."
  - Jerry L. Walls, Harry Potter and Philosophy
  edited by David Baggett and Shawn E. Klein, p. 67

 

• "Faith is the belief in a position without having to prove it with evidence, documentation, or proof.
  I don't believe in faith." - Captain Paul Watson, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society

 

• From Benjamin Franklin's essay, "Savages of North America:"

  "A Swedish minister having assembled the chiefs of the Susquehanna Indians, made a sermon to them, acquainting them with the principal historical facts on which our religion is founded, such as the fall of our first parents by eating an apple; the coming of Christ to repair the mischief; his miracles and sufferings, etc. When he had finished, an Indian orator stood up to thank him. 'What you have told us,' said he, 'is all very good. It is indeed bad to eat apples. It is better to make them all into cider. We are much obliged by your kindness in coming so far to tell us those things which you have heard from your mothers. In return, I will tell you some of those which we have heard from ours. In the beginning, our fathers had only the flesh of animals to subsist on; and if their hunting was unsuccessful, they were starving. Two of our young hunters having killed deer, made a fire in the woods to broil some parts of it. When they were about to satisfy their hunger, they beheld a beautiful young woman descend from the clouds, and seat herself on that hill which you see yonder among the blue mountains. They said to each other, it is a spirit that perhaps has smelt our broiled venison and wishes to eat of it; let us offer some to her. They presented her with the tongue; she was pleased with the taste of it, and said, 'Your kindness shall be rewarded. Come to this place after thirteen moons, and you shall find something that will be of a great benefit in nourishing you and your children to the latest generations.' They did so and, to their surprise, found plants they had never seen before; but which, from that ancient time, have been constantly cultivated among us to our great advantage. Where her right hand touched the ground they found maize; where her left hand touched it they found kidney- beans.' ... The good missionary, disgusted with this idle tale, said, 'What I delivered to you were sacred truths; but what you tell me is mere fable, fiction, and falsehood.' The Indian, offended, replied, 'My brother, it seems your friends have not done you justice in your education; they have not well instructed you in the rules of common civility. You saw that we, who understand and practice these rules, believed all your stories, why do you refuse to believe ours?'"

 

• In November, 2005 I found this on a plaque in Australia's Darwin Botanical Gardens (Northern Territory):

  '...alone in contemplation ...seeking the way is good. When only the surface is seen - what lies beneath is missed. Through play the spirit learns wisdom - by turning things over, and finding underneath the traces of the true among the false. Men and pines, waves and bamboo shadows - rain and the smell of flowers on the wind; these things awaken thought - but also the desire that all things should be thus - all of one measure - and that is not so... He that keeps a worldly measure, missing what is strange and new, seeking in peace for understanding loses the way.'

  ("The Drunken Buddha", translated from the Chinese by Ian Fairweather)

 

• "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."
  - Steven Weinberg, quoted in The New York Times, April 20, 1999

 

• "One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be appreciated in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while condemning scientists and other nonbelievers for their intellectual arrogance. There is, in fact, no worldview more reprehensible in its arrogance than that of a religious believer: the creator of the universe takes an interest in me, approves of me, loves me, and will reward me after death; my current beliefs, drawn from scripture, will remain the best statement of the truth until the end of the world; everyone who disagrees with me will spend eternity in hell. . . . An average Christian, in an average church, listening to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse - and there have been some extraordinarily arrogant scientists."
  - Sam Harris
  Letter to a Christian Nation, p. 74

Wabi Sabi Defined:

I found this on the Zack de la Rocha net:

"The concepts of wabi-sabi correlate with the concepts of Zen Buddhism, as the first Japanese involved with wabi-sabi were tea masters, priests, and monks who practiced Zen. Zen Buddhism originated in India, traveled to China in the 6th century, and was first introduced in Japan around the 12th century. Zen emphasizes "direct, intuitive insight into transcendental truth beyond all intellectual conception." At the core of wabi- sabi is the importance of transcending ways of looking and thinking about things/existence."

A little more on Buddhism: (I heard this in an Alan Watts broadcast called Buddhism & Hinduism, Japan 1965, The Journey from Inida)

"There is nothing you can hold onto, so man, let go..."

"Buddhism is different than Hinduism in that it has no god."

          - Alan Watts

Prayer:

• "Some people pray on their knees in the dark. They seek God in a church, cathedral, mosque, or temple. But in another kind of devotion, people walking uprightly face the created world, their eyes full of awe. Pretending to stand face-to-face with God, they pour out their appreciative hears. Victoria knew how to pray both ways. The first kind of prayer she did at home and in church. The second she did on the trail."

  - Scott C. Hammond, PhD, in his book Lessons of the Lost
  (Finding Hope and Resilence in Work, Life and the Wilderness) pp. 34-35

Meditation:

• "Meditation is the art of paying attention, of listening to your heart. Rather than withdrawing from the world, meditation can help you enjoy it more fully, more effectively, and more peacefully."

  - Dean Ornish, M.D.

Other Related Thoughts:

• A Short Dance published in the Fall, 1992 edition of the Garden Doctor and a number of other publications around that time period as well...
• "I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." - Stephen F Roberts
• Think of all the reasons you disbelieve in other gods and apply them to your own...

Links:

Back to Roger J. Wendell's Home Page...

Abbey | About | Blog | Contacting Me | Copyright | Disclaimer | Donate | Guest Book | Home | Links | Site Index | Solutions | Terms, Conditions and Fair Use | What's Changed or New?
Copyright © 1955 -