Atheist Turned Believer

I have developed a taste for my 30 minutes of prayer and mediation with my morning coffee, have moved beyond forcing myself to do it to looking forward to the exercise.  I now bounce out of bed and rush to get through my toilette, starting the coffee and getting the animals fed so that I can quickly find my cushion and spend my half-hour with God before the rest of the family starts rousing. And then the day begins, and the prayer and mediation is all but forgotten in the busyness that is my normal day.  Occasionally, a quick "flash prayer" will zip through my mind as I encounter a homeless person or witness an auto collision, but that peace and assurance of the morning dedication are left back on the cushion, not to be experienced again until tomorrow.  This hardly seems to be "prayer without ceasing." Here are a few tricks I've started using to move my morning dedication through the rest of the day: 1. My bride helped me with this one: we took the beaded chain...

I've probably got two most posts in me including this one.  Recently I have been chronicling my meditation progress over the last few months.  With these next two, I will have brought myself up to today. Let us begin by wrapping up everything we've looked up so far.  Find your cushion, take your seat.  Get your posture right.  Breathe.  Count breaths.  When you reach 10, start over.  When you can count to 10 a few times, take a mental inventory of your body.  Start with the top of the head and work your way to your toes. Listen.  Hear the ventilation fan, the TV in the next room, the traffic on the road; note whatever sounds you hear.  As other thoughts enter your mind, just say "thinking" and move on.  Touch and go.  Always come back to counting breaths. When you're ready, ponder the implications of impermanence.  The concept carries a great number of implications.  Consider as many as you can think of.  Me...

 This morning I was meditating on yesterday's sermon, the subject of which was a Bible verse I've recently quoted in this blog: "Love your neighbor as yourself." (Mark 12:31)  My argumentative mind said, "well, piety is all well and good, but it can be taken too far." This made me wonder "how far is too far?  How, exactly, do I love myself?"  In response, I began creating what I considered a rather humorous metaphor. Let's say I've gone to a doctor and been diagnosed with heart disease.  I'm given a strict diet, an exercise regime, pills to take and am told to monitor my blood pressure.  All goes well for a while, but in reasonably short order my muscles begin to rebel.  "Good grief!  All this exercise!  Can we take just this one day off?"  The tongue chimes in, "No kidding!  Look, carrots and broccoli are fine, but, really, pizza!  I'm just saying!"  The stomach pipes up next. "What are you complaining abou...

 This morning I was having coffee with friends.  I was telling them about the last few posts that I have made on this blog.  A couple of them objected my use of the terms "soul" and "spirit," claiming that I sounded rather mystic in my descriptions.  I replied that, should they object to those words, they could look over my statements again and substitute the word "imagination" for the more objectionable "soul" and "spirit."  The meaning will stay the same.  No sooner had the words escaped my lips but that I gained two insights that explained my friends' objections. In Western society, we are taught from an early age that our imaginations are of limited value, that the "imaginary" is less important than the "real."  I find now in my journey that I disagree.  Not only do I think this is wrong, I don't even think it's a little wrong but is, in fact, a 180-degree departure from the truth.  The imaginary is m...

 Of the three immutable facts under consideration, Emptiness is the one which has caused me the greatest difficulty.  I am, in fact, struggling with it even now as I type this treatise, so, as promised, we have now caught up with my own knowledge level. The concept of emptiness is both difficult to grasp and difficult to describe.  First, it is completely contrary to Western ideology.  Second, if not understood clearly, it can appear to draw us into that mysticism that I have repeatedly rejected.  I will do my best in the coming paragraphs. At its most basic, emptiness has to do with the notion of selflessness, but to a level more extreme than most Westerners are comfortable.  The fundamental tenet behind emptiness is that the Self simply does not exist at all in as far as autonomy goes.  This is not meant to be any sort of grim void or empty nihilism, but an expression of freedom from the myth of individuality. In our examination of suffering, we ment...

 Now that we've spent some time pondering Impermanence, we have undoubtedly brushed occasionally on the second of our immutable facts, that of Suffering.  Before we begin to consider this fact, we must make one important distinction. Here we are not talking about pain.  Pain is real.  Pain happens.  Pain may take the form of a headache, the grief of losing a loved one, even the empathetic pain we feel when we recognize the plight of the world.  That pain cannot be made to go away.  In fact, we don't even want it to.  Pain can be a great motivator.  It can lead us to the aspirin bottle, to loving our remaining relatives a bit more or turning to God for guidance as we endeavor to make our own little corners of the world a better place for those around us.  Pain can teach us things that pleasure cannot, to wit: patience, humility and our utter dependence on God.  As C.S. Lewis put it "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our ...

 Now that we have created a few good meditation habits, let us begin to take some control of our minds so that we might reach that state of peace and enlightenment for which we started all this in the first place.  Remember that we exist as three entities - our bodies, our minds and our spirits.  Until now, the mind has controlled the body and suppressed the spirit.  We're hoping to change our priorities a bit and give our spirits a chance to come out and play.  Remember, too, that we're not talking about self-hypnosis, mysticism, or any other "weirdness."  Poets, artists and musicians do this all the time.  By the nature of their occupations they are constantly in touch with their spirits.  We're just trying to remind ourselves of what they've never forgotten. To discipline our unruly minds, it's very helpful to spend time pondering three immutable facts.  I list them here in no particular order other than the level of difficulty my own mind...

Let me reiterate before I begin that I am very much a layman in the matters under discussion.  Many authors have written on the subject at hand over the last 2500 years, many of whom had decades of experience before putting quill to parchment.  I've been at this for just over 2 months.  That should be all the warning any potential reader may need. Okay, I've spent the last several posts discussing why we need to pray and meditate.  Let us move on to weightier matters; to wit, what prayer and meditation is (and is not) and how one should go about it. Prayer, as I have previously defined it, means "talking to God."  Meditation, then, becomes "listening to God."  One of my first realizations upon finding the correct path was that I was spending way too much time in prayer and not nearly enough in meditation.  I would sit down to prayer time, read a short little daily devotional, then start 'praying,' by which I mean dominating the conversation and barel...