Good Blogging

One of my favorite blogs is the Church of the Churchless.

Where else can you find a reflection on Philip K Dick’s maginficent, endlessly rich observation “reality is that which , when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

Or, extensively quotes the Sea of Faith theo-philosopher Don Cuppit? “You may well be skeptical about the severely reconstructed notion of religion that I am putting forward. It seems to be religion without metaphysics, religion without creed, religion no longer focused around a power center outside ourselves, religion without a structure of authority, and religion without a gathered community of people who are very conscious of a clear line between themselves, the elect, and the rest of humanity.

“In place of all that, I am offering only religion as a toolkit, a small set of attitudes and techniques, by practicing which we can grow in self-knowledge (the Eye of God), learn to accept the transience and insubstantiality of ourselves and everything else (the Blissful Void), and learn to say a whole-hearted yes to life (Solar Living). Another item is yet to be added: it is the Poetical Theology, which is (briefly) a license to make whatever new use we can of the surviving scraps of vocabulary, ritual, and symbolism that are available to us.”

Or, provides a wonderful tidbit on paying attention from Krishnamurti as part of a diatribe on less than useful spiritual practices. “The attention which is generally advocated, practiced or indulged in is a narrowing-down of the mind to a point, which is a process of exclusion. When you make an effort to pay attention, you are really resisting something – the desire to look out of the window, to see who is coming in, and so on. Part of your energy has already gone in resistance.

“You build a wall around your mind to make it concentrate completely on a particular thing, and you call this the disciplining of the mind to pay attention. You try to exclude from the mind every thought but the one on which you want it to be wholly concentrated. That is what most people mean by paying attention.

“But I think there is a different kind of attention, a state of mind which is not exclusive, which does not shut out anything; and because there is no resistance, the mind is capable of much greater attention. But attention without resistance does not mean the attention of absorption.
The kind of attention which I would like to discuss is entirely different from what we usually mean by attention, and it has immense possibilities because it is not exclusive.

“When you concentrate on a subject, on a talk, on a conversation, consciously or unconsciously you build a wall of resistance against the intrusion of other thoughts, and so your mind is not wholly there; it is only partially there, however much attention you pay because part of your mind is resisting any intrusion, any deviation or distraction.

“Let us begin the other way around. Do you know what distraction is? You want to pay attention to what you are reading, but your mind is distracted by some noise outside and you look out of the window. When you want to concentrate on something and your mind wanders off, the wandering off is called distraction; then part of your mind resists the so-called distraction and there is a waste of energy in that resistance.

“Whereas, if you are aware of every moment of the mind from moment to moment then there is no such thing as distraction at any time and the energy of the mind is not wasted in resisting something. So it is important to find out what attention really is.”

Check it out…