Church of the Churchless

"The Evolution of God" falls flat at the end

My prophesy turned out to be correct: I didn't agree with the final chapters of Robert Wright's "The Evolution of God," just as I anticipated.

But there wasn't anything miraculous in my ability to see into the future, just as a transcendent divinity isn't needed to explain how religions change over the course of history -- embracing, by and large, a more inclusive, tolerant, and universal moral code.

Mostly, this is what Wright says in his book.

This book’s account of the moral direction of history has been a materialist account. We’ve explained the expansion of the moral imagination as an outgrowth of expanding social organization, which is itself an outgrowth of technological evolution, which itself grows naturally out of the human brain, which itself grew naturally out of the primordial ooze via biological evolution. There’s no mystical force that has to enter the system to explain this, and there’s no need to look for one.

However, in some final observations that seem to be designed to make the book more appealing to religious believers (since they conflict with what Wright says above), "God" comes across as an intelligent designer who fashioned evolution to arrive at a moral endpoint.

Maybe the growth of "God" signifies the existence of God. That is: if history naturally pushes people toward moral improvement, toward moral truth, and their God, as they conceive their God, grows accordingly, becoming morally richer, than maybe this growth is evidence of some higher purpose, and maybe--conceivably--the source of that purpose is worthy of the name divinity.

Jerry Coyne, a professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, blasted all these "maybe's" in a largely critical review: "Creationism for Liberals."

Wright wants to give true believers a reason to keep on believing in God despite all the reasons not to. So he ends up arguing -- weakly -- that just as scientists haven't seen electrons, but know they exist by their effects, "God" can be viewed as the source of religions' moral evolution even though divinity isn't apparent.

Huh?

Particle physics is extremely precise in its predictions. So is quantum mechanics. Yet physicists recognize that any sort of description of electrons in terms of everyday existence (such as "tiny planets orbiting the nucleus") is decidedly inaccurate.

Religions operate entirely oppositely.

Their dogmas are unable to form any reliable explanations of the natural world beyond those known to science, but the source of these supposed truths, God, is described in considerable detail.

Coyne, appropriately, bashes Wright on his attempt to equate electrons and God.

Does Wright really not grasp that science, unlike religion, posits testable explanations for the world, explanations that are discarded if they fail to comport with the facts? Is he unaware that, unlike religious explanations, scientific explanations are validated by public agreement among people from every faith and culture?

On one hand we have Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and the whole panoply of faiths with their irresolvably conflicting claims, and on the other hand we have science, and only one brand of science. Independent scientific observers can decide whether electrons are real, but there is no way to decide whether Jesus was the Son of God or Muhammad was the Prophet.

In a response to Coyne's criticisms on "The Evolution of God" website, Wright claims that when the supposed misrepresentations of his book are corrected, Coyne's critique collapses.

Well, not completely.

Wright does point out some passages that clarify his position on certain issues. But he still bears responsibility for leading the reader in the direction that Coyne criticizes. I also finished the final chapters feeling that Wright sees a directionality or design in human evolution that supports the notion of a monotheistic God.

I enjoyed "The Evolution of God," which -- on the whole -- is pleasingly churchless. However, Wright's puzzling change of tone in his final chapters left me with an unpleasant literary aftertaste.

I like Coyne's ending of his review more than Wright's conclusion to his book.

Except for his claim that theology is malleable to social forces, which is hardly novel but never mind, there is nothing in Wright's argument that withstands close inspection--nothing in his understanding of theology, of morality and its history, of evolution, of science. There is absolutely no evidence, beyond wishful thinking, that God, if there is a God, had anything to do with setting up biological evolution or directing its operation, much less driving history toward goodness.

God offers up whatever religions think will sell

God is a human invention. Notions about God evolve with the times, changing with cultural and societal circumstances.

These are some central themes of Robert Wright's "The Evolution of God," a fascinating book that I've about two-thirds through. He further illuminates a lot of misgivings I've had about religion.

Like, how religious leaders -- whether of East or West, a guru or the Pope -- basically are selling salvation. Not for money, usually, but in exchange for buying into a belief system.

For example, in his section on Christianity Wright talks about how the earliest descriptions of Jesus' teachings didn't say anything about Christians going to heaven.

The idea of followers of Jesus getting to join him in heaven upon dying probably didn't take shape until about a half century after he died. To be sure, his followers believed from early on that the faithful would be admitted to the "kingdom of heaven," as the New Testament calls it. But "kingdom of heaven" is just Matthew's term for what Mark had called the "kingdom of God" -- and, as we've seen, the kingdom of God was going to be on earth.

Problem was, years and decades passed with no earthly kingdom of God in evidence. What to do? Christianity was starting to look like a bait-and-switch con job. Jesus supposedly said that the kingdom of God was "at hand," but it never showed up.

So heaven had to wait.

People still wanted salvation. Happiness, bliss, eternal life -- all that good stuff. It wasn't appearing the way Christians orginally thought. No problem. Just change the thinking.

As the decades rolled by and the kingdom of God failed to materialize, there was growing concern among Jesus's followers over the state of the not-yet-resurrected dead....But by the time of Luke, more than a decade after Paul's death, that expectation was no longer operative.

Now the attentive Christian was concerned not just about whether dead friends and relatives would eventually be resurrected but about what death would feel like until resurrection, since it increasingly looked as if the Christian in question would join his or her friends and relatives in that state before Christ returned.

...Now the payoff from salvation wouldn't be expected within a person's lifetime, but it could come right after death -- the next best thing. Had Christian doctrine not made this turn, it would have lost credibility as the kingdom of God failed to show up on earth -- as generations and generations of Christians were seen to have died without getting their reward.

But now, with the kingdom of God relocated from earth to heaven, generations of Christians had presumably gotten their reward, and you could, too, if you accepted Christ as your savior.

It's no wonder religions are so successful at recruiting members. They've got the advantage of a sales pitch for salvation that would be illegal (or at least highly unethical) if used to market any other product.

Buy now and you'll see great results after you die! Guaranteed!

Of course, actually there's no guarantee, since the dead can't return and provide evidence that they didn't really die and are now happily hanging around with Jesus.

No matter. Since death is scary, gullible people will buy into a belief system that promises eternal life. Tell folks what they want to hear, and not surprisingly what you say will appeal to them.

"The Untethered Soul" gets a 3/4 churchless thumbs up

Let's start mildly negative with this book review so I can end up strongly positive. I can understand why the author, Michael A. Singer, wanted this blurb prominently displayed on the cover, but I was turned off by it:

"Read this book carefully and you will get more than a glimpse of eternity."
     --Deepak Chopra

I haven't been impressed by Chopra's own writings, though some of what he says resonates with me. So I was afraid that "The Untethered Soul" was going to be as New Age'y as Chopra's blurb implied.

More than a glimpse of eternity? Gag me with a skeptical spoon.

However, once I started reading the book I didn't find a whole lot else to complain about. Singer stays down to earth for the most part. My first marginal question mark wasn't highlighted in until page 50, after I read:

The heart controls the energy flow by opening and closing.

Singer speaks quite a bit about chakras and subtle energies. He also uses "soul" a lot, which I find equally unnecessary.

HIs book would make just as much sense, but probably appeal to a less extensive readership, if he'd stuck with "mind," "brain," "mental patterns," "thoughts," and such. Singer's central message seems almost unarguable to me, and it doesn't require any non-scientific or metaphysical assumptions.

Our minds chatter away like crazed monkeys. That mostly mindless inner talk screws up our happiness, big time. Singer says:

There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind -- you are the one who hears it. If you don't understand this, you will try to figure out which of the many things the voice says is really you. People go through so many changes in the name of "trying to find myself." They want to discover which of these voices, which of these aspects of their personality, is who they really are. The answer is simple: none of them.

If you watch it objectively, you will come to see that much of what the voice says is meaningless. Most of the talking is just a waste of time and energy. The truth is that most of life will unfold in accordance with forces far outside your control, regardless of what your mind says about it.

It's like sitting down at night and deciding whether you want the sun to come up in the morning. The bottom line is that the sun will come up and the sun will go down. Billions of things are going on in this world. You can think about it all you want, but life is still going to keep on happening.

So for Singer, "spirituality" (another unnecessary word, in my opinion) basically is about shutting down the chatter. Or at least not letting the mind-talk, where, strangely, we're speaking to ourselves inside our own head, upset our psyche's balance.

Makes sense.

This brings spirituality, or self-development, right into the here and now -- not a there and then of some fantasized Shangri-La where everything will be perfect, all the time.

On the book's website, there's an excerpt from the chapter on unconditional happiness. This isn't dependent on external conditions, such as rising into some heavenly realm or plopping down on the lap of God, but of realizing that no matter what happens in our life, we're free to be happy.

The key to staying happy is really very simple. Begin by understanding your inner energies. If you look inside, you will see that when you're happy, your heart feels open and the energy rushes up inside of you. When you aren't happy, your heart feels closed and no energy comes up inside. So to stay happy, just don't close your heart. No matter what happens, even if your wife leaves you or your husband dies, you don't close.

...The key is to learn to keep your mind disciplined enough so that it doesn't trick you into thinking that this time it's worth closing. If you slip, get back up. The minute you slip, the minute you open your mouth, the minute you start to close and defend yourself, get back up. Just pick what happens.

Affirm that all you want is to be at peace and to appreciate life. You don't want your happiness to be conditional upon the behavior of other people. It's bad enough that your happiness is conditional upon your own behavior. When you start making it conditional upon other people's behavior, you're in serious trouble.

Today I went to a feed store to get some bales of hay. My goal is to become a fearsome ground squirrel killer. But first I need to become a better shot with my new air rifle. Hence, the bales of hay are going to be a backstop for some practice targets.

I stuck some plastic in the car to cover the upholstery when I laid down the rear seat of our SUV. The not-so-minor flaws in my plan, however, revolved around several aspects of my hay-buying ignorance (this being the first time in my life I'd ever tried to bring home some bales).

(1) A bale of hay is bigger than I thought. Three bales of hay are even bigger than that. They just barely fit, and had to be crammed up against both the front seat and the top of the car.

(2) Bales of hay are tied together with cord. But "tied together" gives a false impression of firm connectivity. There's a reason farmers and ranchers carry bales of hay in pickups rather than the back compartment of their SUV: hay is freaking messy.

I realized this as soon as the feed store hay-loading guy had shoved the bales into our Toyota Highlander and said to me, "Sorry. You're going to need a vacuum."

For sure.

But having just read the chapter on unconditional happiness this morning before I meditated, while driving home I tried to clear my mind of unnecessary self-talk ("Why didn't you bring a large tarp, you idiot?") and focus on the simple reality of the situation.

I had successfully bought three bales of hay. They smelled good. To passers-by I looked like a hybrid-driving gentleman farmer. I'd learned a lot about hay. Such as, bales are messy. Live and learn. That's what life is all about.

However, just as Singer alluded to above, controlling one's own mental chatter is one thing. Backing your SUV down your driveway, dragging the bales out, and having your wife stare at a whole lot of wheat straw remaining in the car is a whole other thing.

Laurel wasn't as enthusiastic about this being a hay bale-buying learning experience as I was. Her comments were more along the lines of the unnecessary critical self-talk that I'd pretty much managed to stop in my own mind, but in no way could stop coming out of my wife's mouth.

I didn't do a great job on maintaining my unconditional happiness. I got irritated. Mostly at myself, because after Laurel fetched our vacuum, it took quite a while to de-wheat straw the luggage compartment.

(Realization #3: hay bales, when pushed against a car's ceiling or floor liner, embed small pieces of straw in the soft fabric that can't be vacuumed out, because they've worked their way in between threads.)

And also at my wife, because I wanted her to be perfectly accepting of what I'd done, and "perfect" isn't a word that fits a marriage relationship, or any other aspect of life. Singer says:

If you mistreat an animal, it becomes afraid. This is what has happened to your psyche. You have mistreated it by giving it a responsibility that is incomprehensible. Just stop for a moment and see what you have given your mind to do.

You said to your mind, "I want everybody to like me. I don't want anyone to speak badly of me. I want everything I say and do to be acceptable and pleasing to everyone. I don't want anyone to hurt me. I don't want anything to happen that I don't like. And I want everything to happen that I do like."

Then you said, "Now, mind, figure out how to make every one of these things a reality, even if you have to think about it day and night." And of course your mind said, "I'm on the job. I will work on it constantly."

Religious believers expect that eventually they'll enter some sort of paradise where good things happen to good people (namely, them) all of the time. Or if they're in eternity, all of no-time.

Non-religious people expect the same, says Singer, since they also consider that the flow of events in life can be controlled so that only what they want to have happen, will happen.

And of all the things that can happen in life, that, we can be certain, won't happen.

"The Untethered Soul" concludes with a paean to a Taoist view of reality that emphasizes letting go of rigid belief structures and expectations. I'll share more about this in another post.

Without God, how can religion be divine?

I thought I'd just thrown twenty bucks down a non-fiction hole.

A few scant hours after buying Robert Wright's "The Evolution of God" (at 25% off!) my wife, who was reading the Sunday Oregonian, said: "You're not going to like this review of the book you just got." 

She was right. Thumbing through the first few pages of the book while considering whether to buy it, I'd focused on Wright's first hand.

On the one hand, I think gods arose as illusions, and the subsequent history of the idea of god is, in some sense, the evolution of an illusion.

That elicited a right on from my churchless non-soul. So I paid less attention to Wright's other literary appendage.

On the other hand: (1) the story of this evolution itself points to the existence of something you can meaningfully call divinity; and (2) the "illusion," in the course of evolving, has gotten streamlined in a way that moved it closer to plausibility. In both of these senses, the illusion has gotten less and less illusory.

I've only read a few chapters so far. I'm liking "The Evolution of God."

But I'm preparing myself to discount the validity of Wright's other hand, which, according to the critical review, lends an air of implausibility to the final chapter.

His assiduous labors into the origins of the idea of God have erected a colossal edifice. In the last 50 pages or so, Wright tosses an undersized and feeble theory over its parapets to justify all this effort. Though it's sure to stimulate a lot of discussion, this is a thoroughly wrongheaded book.

Here's a summary of the theory Wright offers. Human beings, he writes, "are 'designed' by natural selection to be good out of obligations to others, for fear of the disapproval of others, in pursuit of the esteem of others." Cultural evolution -- the passage of human groups from small bands of hunter-gatherers to chiefdoms and then on to states and empires -- builds on the ingredients of this "design" to create a moral economy, which leads to the discovery of "moral truths," which are sanctioned in religious organizations as the orders of gods, or, ultimately, of God, the all-knowing, law-giving, all-powerful Being.

"If history naturally pushes people toward moral improvement, toward moral truth, and their God, as they conceive their God, grows accordingly, becoming morally richer, then maybe the growth is evidence of some higher purpose, and maybe -- conceivably -- the source of that purpose is worthy of the name divinity."

There are a lot of assumptions in that sentence, but the most powerful one for Wright's argument is the assertion that "history naturally pushes people toward moral improvement." Is this the moral improvement that after 5,000 or so years of Western religion gave us Nazism? Wright's arguments are silent on this question, because they have already asserted the answer -- that as a species we're somehow morally superior now to our ancestors wandering out of Africa. How do we know? Because we have found the idea of God. This is tautology, not proof.

Makes sense. But, hey, I'll keep an open mind as I read the book, though I suspect that I'll have the same reaction of the reviewer when I get to the end of it.

Here's another skeptical perspective on Wright's "morality is divinity" thesis. Like most biologists, this guy doesn't see evidence of purpose in evolution.

Check out the comments to that "Morality doesn't equal God" post. They're pretty high quality. And numerous. I enjoyed the pithy one-sentence wisdom of #8.

Morality doesn't prove gods for much the same reason that Christmas presents don't prove Santa.

Floating in a boundless sea

Before Jed McKenna's "Spiritual Enlightenment" is put away on a shelf, I wanted to add some positivity to my previous mostly negative post about the book -- which I finished today.

I still don't like how McKenna fictionalizes what is presented as reality: that he is an enlightened teacher who presides over a fawning group of non-dual truth seekers at his quasi-ashram in rural Iowa.

And I still doubt both that enlightenment exists, at least in the fashion McKenna describes it to be, or that he has achieved the state of all-knowing clarity which McKenna annoyingly claims on page after page of this paen to himself.

That said...

"Spiritual Enlightenment" is well written. Fiction or not, it presents a compelling, consistent philosophy, plus a believable portrait of a guy whose brand of enlightenment is considerably different from what most spiritual seekers consider self-realization to be.

I like McKenna's iconoclastic vibe. I just wish he had turned more of his iconoclasm back onto himself, rather than directing almost all of it toward the deluded fools who follow other belief systems.

Here's some quotes from his book that rang generally true to me. I only wish more of the book did.

The supposed mega-bliss of spiritual awakening is a carrot dangling from a stick no less than love or wealth or power.
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We're all afloat in a boundless sea, and the way we cope is by massing together in groups and pretending in unison that the situation is other than it is.
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Fear of the unknown is what keeps everyone busily treading water. All fear is fear of the unknown. If someone in such a group of water-treaders betrays the group by speaking the truth of their situation, that person is called a heretic and society reserves its most awful punishments for heretics. If someone decides to stop struggling and just sink or float away, every possible effort is made to stop him, not for the benefit of the individual, but for the benefit of the group. To deny at all costs the truth of the situation.
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The truth of the situation is that eventually, there's nothing. Infinity. Eternity. The void. The abyss. Eventually, every water-treader has to deal with the fact that it's just him, the infinite ocean and nothing in-between.
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Allegiance to any spiritual teaching or teacher, any outside authority, is the most treacherous beast in the jungle. The first thing we want to do when we begin our journey is find the companionship and validity that comes with an established group, and in so doing we effectively end the journey before it begins.
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The power of our devotion to teachers and teachings is not a reflection of their value, but of ego's will to survive. It's ego, the false self, that exalts the guru and declares the teachings sacred, but nothing is exalted or sacred, only true or not true.
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Think for yourself. That's the golden rule. Think for yourself. Make it your mantra. Tattoo it on the inside of your eyelids.

"Cosmic Connection" review: a fresh take on channeling

I'm not a believer in mediums or channeling. But I'm open to the possibility of tapping into some sort of cosmic consciousness that is way beyond the bounds of everyday human awareness.

So when a publicist for Carole Lynne, who wrote "Cosmic Connection: Messages for a Better World," asked me in an email if I'd be willing to read the book and write a review, I replied "sure."

Free books attract me. Plus, an overview of Cosmic Connection said that Lynne felt that she was tapping into an impersonal consciousness, not the psyches of departed souls.

That makes more sense to me than the typical claims of mediums.

I've been to one medium, an experience I blogged about here. I came away with some insights, particularly about how I deal with the genetic and psychological influences of my father's strong "dark side" (a.k.a. Darth Vader'dom).  But I didn't end up believing that any dead relatives had been communicating with me.

I enjoyed Cosmic Connection, though my skeptical side kept wondering, as I read transcripts of Lynne's channeling sessions, "What evidence is there that this is true?"

A big plus for me, though, is that Lynne repeatedly asks the same question. In her introduction she says:

The spiritual experiences I write about in this book are personal, and there is no way to verify them. ... As a teacher of spirituality and spirit communication, I make it very clear to my students that no matter what I say at any given moment, I may change my mind in the future.

The doubts and questions that I have about my spiritual experiences are the same feelings that my students and many readers may have.

Nice. I also liked:

We have been brainwashed to disbelieve our spiritual experiences. We have been taught that the only way to have spiritual experiences is through the guidance of a religious authority figure, such as a minister, priest, or guru.

My wife, an eminently sensible and grounded person, believes in the possibility of channeling disembodied souls. She is a member of Ron Scolastico's study group. Scolastico goes into a receptive state, is asked questions, and then answers as a higher consciousness -- all of which is shared with members via CDs.

Lynne's book mostly is a description of similar sessions. At first she calls the source of what comes through her, My Guidance.

Eventually it manifested to her in a form that made her change the name to My Energy. Here's some of what it said to her/through her.

We are an energy. We are a stream of light. We are a speck of energy that then explodes and becomes many more. We are not people. We are not creatures. We are energy, vibration. To use the word we does not really work. 

...We are not just with her [Lynne]. We are everywhere. We are creative energy; we are sustained imagination and creativity.

...We are not spirit guides in the way that you think of it.

...If you can try not to personify the Energy, you will be closer to what it is.

...There are many great spiritual leaders that have lived that were people who survive in spirit. But that is not who we are. We are not Jesus. We are not Mohammad. We are not any of those spiritual leaders because we have never lived a human life. And yet you know that we are there when you open to the presence.

The Energy gave Lynne and her channeling associates some lessons in grammar and proper word usage: no pronouns!

So before we can really proceed, the idea of a "you," of a "we," of an "I," of a "me," as any kind of personified being has to be let go of as it is very difficult for us to converse.

...If this energy flows through the channel, she has to put into her own words because we do not even speak in words. We do not speak; we are not "we."

I give Carole Lynne a big thumbs-up for her ability and willingness to examine her mediumship through fresh eyes. Summing up a session with The Energy, she writes:

But it was extremely disconcerting for all of us attending the session to hear that sometimes when we feel we are communicating with individual guides, we are actually creating their images with our imagination. Those of us in the room were faced with a deep fear that we had had for many years: "Are we imagining our guides?"

Having written a couple of books that fall into the narrow non-best-selling category of "too scholarly to be popular, and too popular to be scholarly," I resonate with Lynne's Cosmic Connection -- which struck me as too questioning to be loved by true believers in channeling, yet also reflects a strong belief in channeling that won't be loved by questioning types.

Well, it's better to be honest than to sell lots of books (best of all, of course, is to do both).

If someone is open to the possibility of connecting with a wordless cosmic consciousness that speaks (imprecisely) through people, he or she likely will enjoy this book.

There's no doubt in my mind that Carole Lynne is a sincere, open, generous seeker of truth. That comes through on every page of her book. And, her You Tube video.

Her main message: find your own truth. I heartily endorse that advice.

While many equally useful spiritual paths have teachers who give initiations to their students, not every soul on earth is meant to join a spiritual organization or follow a guru. Some souls are in need of another kind of path.

...On the Path of Direct Initiation there is no authority figure to make decisions about when the student is ready to receive an initiation and take the next step on the spiritual path. The student has to develop an inner knowing and a relationship with the Divine Consciousness that allows him or her to know when a direct initiation has occurred.

In fact, the student may not even call this spiritual event an initiation. No label is necessary. The student will just know that he or she has walked through another spiritual door and is closer to Divine Consciousness than before.

Alan Watts tells me who I am: Everything

At the age of sixty, I seem to be coming full circle -- back to one of my favorite 60's personalities, Alan Watts.

I've been reading or re-reading quite a few of his books lately. Most recently, "The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are."

For a long time I thought of Watts as a philosophical light-weight, a popularizer of Eastern wisdom who possessed more wit than substance. But now he seems to me to get things almost exactly right, which shows how I've changed.

I saw Watts once in person. He gave a talk at San Jose State College my freshman or sophomore year, probably 1966 or 1967.

I was sitting in the front row of the meeting hall, where the doors were open to the warm California air. Watts had started speaking from the lectern. A dog ran in, stopped, looked up at Watts, and began to bark like crazy.

Watts glanced down at it. Almost instantly, in one smooth flowing motion, he picked up his water glass and threw the contents at the dog. Watts had a good aim.

The dog shook his head, trying to get dry, and trotted out the door. Watts kept on speaking, barely missing a beat.

I learned more about Zen and Taoism from that non-verbal episode than from everything else he said that night, all of which I've forgotten.

So...who is Alan Watts? Who am I? Who are you? It just takes a few pages before The Book points to an answer.

This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.

As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the entire universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals.

Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin.

I like how Watts rarely cites religious or mystical literature in support of his arguments. He just lays out how he sees things, using common sense, science, and everyday experience to make his case.

Even though The Book was first published in 1966, scientifically it has held up well. If anything, modern neuroscience supports more strongly now Watts' contention that we aren't passive imbibers of reality, but rather its creator (in a very real sense).

Apart from your brain, or some brain, the world is devoid of light, heat, weight, solidity, motion, space, time, or any other imaginable feature. All these phenomena are interactions, or transactions, of vibrations with a certain arrangement of neurons.

Thus vibrations of light and heat from the sun do not actually become light or heat until they interact with a living organism, just as no light-beams are visible in space unless reflected by particles of atmosphere or dust. In other words, it "takes two" to make anything happen.

So we aren't the passive recipient of God's creation. Dualistic notions such as creator/creation, spirit/soul, mind/body, good/evil, universal/individual, and the like are a limited view of how things truly are.

Which is...who knows? There's no way to say, because sayings concern objects and the Whole Shebang ("how things truly are") can't be an object since it is everything. 

Watts honors it with capital letters: IT.

The problem is that IT is so much more myself than I thought I was, so central and so basic to my existence, that I cannot make it an object. There is no way to stand outside IT, and, in fact, no way to do so. For so long as I am trying to grasp IT, I am implying that IT is not really myself.

If it were possible, I am losing the sense of it by attempting to find it. This is why those who really know that they are IT invariably say they do not understand it, for IT understands understanding, not the other way about. One cannot, and need not, go deeper than deep!

Religion, then, is useless. It's a quest for what hasn't been lost. A pointless exercise. So is every other form of spiritual pursuit, unless carried on in a spirit of play.

It's fine to engage in spiritual practices, Watts says, just as it's fine to dance or play the piano. There aren't really reasons for doing these things (or anything, for that matter). You just do it.

Or, do IT.

I like Watts' final sentences. Not because I understand them. Because I don't.

To come on like IT -- to play at being God -- is to play the Self as a role, which is just what it isn't. When IT plays, it plays at being everything else.

"Pushing Ultimates" inspires, then disappoints

After I got an email pitch for a book that demolishes religion but promotes a free-ranging scientific and mystical inquiry into the "wild wonder of it all" I soon found myself handing over $13.47 for a copy of Lew Paz's "Pushing Ultimates: Fundamentals of Authentic Self-Knowledge."

It's a self-published book, which I have absolutely no problem with -- having done the same with my own examination of ultimacy, "Return to the One."

Paz is well-informed and positively disposed toward science. He's also well-read in an impressive number of other subjects: mysticism, philosophy, politics, psychology, history, anthropology, to name a few.

You can read some excerpts from "Pushing Ultimates" here, and a review here.

I enjoyed the book, but finished the final chapter feeling disappointed.

Somehow I never got a feel for what Paz was promoting, except, perhaps, his own approach to coming to grips with the meaning of existence.

This last observation isn't a putdown. It's almost unavoidable in the spirituality and mysticism genres. People, including me, write about their own search for truth and what they've learned along the way.

I've got no problem with that, so long as it's recognized that "my way" isn't taken to be the only Ultimate Reality Highway.

Paz's life has been footloose and fancy free. He's traveled a lot. He's sampled sundry psychedelic substances. He's spent countless hours in libraries delving into the wisdom of the world. He's explored various systems of meditation and consciousness raising.

That's great.

Yet every time Paz asserted that a similar sort of quest is how the highest understanding of truth is attained, I couldn't help but think "This was your way, but is it everybody's way?"

Here's another problem I had with the book: either something can be said about the Ultimate, or it's a mystery.

If you know what the Ultimate is like, please tell me. Or at least give me some specific guidance about how to learn what you know. ("Keep on searching" doesn't cut it.)

If you're clueless about ultimate reality, then admit it. As a similarly clueless reader, this makes me feel bonded to an author in honest who-the-hell-knows? perplexity.

Paz, though, bounces back and forth between these stances. Obviously he wouldn't write 375 pages unless he felt he had something important to convey. Yet I ended the book not being sure what this was.

In the final chapter, "Concept of God," I hoped to find a wrap-up that would encapsulate Paz's philosophy of life. Early in the chapter I resonated with this:

It should be quite clear that depth of commitment in probing for the flaws and truths of your own religious concepts is essential if you seek to become more than an acculturated puppet, free to live an authentic existence, free of self-deceit.

...Almost everything in the universe has a multi-dimensional aspect to it, and there isn't anything that can be entirely grasped from a single, thus limited, viewpoint.

OK. Agreed. A few pages farther on I also gave a hearty churchless thumbs-up to these thoughts.

But, once again, what the nature of this "something other" is, we have no idea. The ways and means of the Absolute Infinite -- whether you call it God or not -- will forever remain beyond the grasp of human comprehension, despite all the theological volumes which claim otherwise.

That an individual can, through persistent spiritual discipline, personally have epiphanic contact with emanations of the Absolute Infinite, does not imply comprehension.

Right on. I also liked this forthright bit of self-revealing.

When I contemplate such things, the urge comes over me, (as it has on several occasions over the many months I have worked on this manuscript), to just grab my backpack, jump in my van and head fifty miles to the city, to my favorite funky little bar to drink pale ale, smoke a joint and wait for the band to start. When I reach a fine existential buzz, I pay no heed to the younger folk wondering about the old guy doing a weird tai-chi boogie in the strobe light dazzle, and just lose myself in the brilliant flickering.

I hear you, Lew. However, as I neared the end of the chapter I started to use my highlighter to put question marks next to some questionable passages. Such as:

Though this whole area of angels, allies and higher masters of a meta-spiritual sort, is rife with theosophical and religious distortion, and prone to delusion, hallucination, and egoic aggrandizement, something definitely wondrous and spiritual is going on

The skeptic humanist is going to start hyper-ventilating here, and justifiably so, considering all the simple-minded crap about angels that has flourished in both the New Age and traditional Christian ambits, not to mention Hollywood's contribution of the past decades.

And yet, by now, the reader should know no doors can be slammed shut when it comes to paranormal-spiritual realities. Let us recall that the universe and the numinous dimensions of the human mind are not only as strange as we have seen, they are most likely stranger than we are capable of seeing.

Well, Paz was right.

I did start mentally hyper-ventilating when I read those words, because they undermined what I'd enjoyed about the book up to that point: it's emphasis on open-minded not-knowing what the cosmos is all about.

Then I got to the next page and found...

Though the appearance of angels and gods of higher spiritual frequencies are anthropomorphically shaped by the mind when entering the human ambit of existence, they are not just subjective creations. As Aurobindo clarifies, such beings existed within their dimensions long before human consciousness arose, and are beyond all labels.

Hmmmm. So now we have a firm statement about objective reality: angels and gods exist.

And supposedly we know (or rather, Paz knows) that they existed before human consciousness did -- though I have no idea how a human consciousness could know that.

Maybe.

But there are so many "maybe's" if, as Paz said above, we don't close any doors "when it comes to paranormal-spiritual realities."

Maybe Jesus saves. Maybe Allah judges. Maybe gurus enlighten. Maybe angels guide. Maybe departed souls communicate. Maybe space aliens visit.

I don't know. Maybe some or all of these "maybe's" are true. All I know is that I don't know. And if someone else claims they do, I want more than a trust me from them.

End of the spiritual search

Given how many mystical, spiritual, and philosophical books I buy from Amazon, my favorite online book store should be cautious about carrying this title:

"Beyond Awakening: The End of the Spiritual Search," by Jeff Foster

Indeed, since I read this slim book (141 pages, whose message could be encapsulated on one or two) I haven't bought anything in the What's It All About genre.

But give me time. I doubt that I'm really at the end of my spiritual search. Could be, though.

I like a lot of what Foster has to say, which is supremely simple. He ends the book with...

Yes, at last, here's the secret: this moment is life's only meaning.

New Age'y? Yes. Non-dual teaching cliche? Yes. Something I've heard jillions of times before? Yes.

However, this doesn't take away from the fact that, while I was reading the book, I'd frequently feel "Yes! That's how I see things too!"

For example, during the thirty plus years I was in my true believing phase my generally faithful psyche still would wonder about such things as:

-- if a guru supposedly has lost the drop of his ego in the ocean of God, why does he allow himself to be set up high on a pedestal (both literally and figuratively) by followers who lavishly worship his personality?

-- if a disciple is bent on pursuing a path that leads to loss of self, how is it that so much attention needs to be paid to what this person does and doesn't do, given that supposedly that "self" is an illusion?

-- if a spiritual seeker is supposed to devote himself wholeheartedly to traveling the road that leads to God or ultimate reality, what guarantee is there that the traveling ever will end, since this is the point of being on a path?

Here's some quotes from Foster's book. See how they strike you.

This is the only miracle: that you are here (however or whatever you are) and it is now.

This is not about following a path; there is no path, although there may be the idea of "a path."

This is certainly not about "putting an end to the I." Only an "I" would want that.

Oh, the mind loves that story: "If I could just see the fiction as a fiction, I would be in liberation!" And the search for liberation goes on, and the mind has saved itself again.

The spiritual search can only ever end in frustration, because what is sought is identical with that which is doing the seeking.

"My past and my future" are thoughts arising now. What you take to be yourself has no more reality than that.

Here's what to do with your life: do what you do. That is all.

So yes, this message is really about living in the moment! This moment is all there is. It's all we have! This is your last moment!

Oh sure, make plans, of course! But they're just assumptions! We never know what's going to happen... We just don't know.

Whatever happens, happens. But the mind will not accept that. The mind wants to know, wants to choose, wants to plan! It wants to be in control. It wants to think it's in control, wants to play God.

You cannot have what you want, ever... What we really want is an end to our wanting, but even the wanting of an end to wanting is another want, perhaps the biggest want of them all.

How to point to the absolute miracle of existence, the awesome gift that is each and every single moment?

There is only ever this -- what is presently happening. And stories about awakening and liberation and enlightenment may arise in this, but they are only ever stories, and have no deeper reality.

Tonight I walked by myself for a few blocks through downtown Salem. After a rainy spell, now we're enjoying crisp clear November air.

A low-lying full moon hung not far above the city. Streetlights partially illuminated mostly deserted sidewalks. Trees were still full of fall color.

I looked through my sixty year-old eyes and thought (or, more accurately, felt) "This is all there is. This is all there needs to be. This is all there will ever be."

Like Foster said, life is mind-blowing amazing at every moment -- just because it is. Someday it won't be for me. And for all of us. The "is" won't be an "isn't." Most likely it'll be...nothing.

Except, not even that.  Because nothing is a lot more of a something than death promises to be.

So I had the urge -- the necessity -- to suck in life in all its downtown Salem glory, right then and there, knowing that there won't ever be any other knowing than what was going on in that moment.

Which is this moment. And this one ... and this one ...

“Letting go of God” – great churchless inspiration

After learning about Julia Sweeney's "Letting Go of God" monologue several years ago, I wrote a post about her evolution from Christian believer to scientific skeptic – without having heard her entire take on the God thing.

"Letting Go of God" has been sitting on my iPod, but until yesterday I'd hadn't gotten around to listening to all of it. A long car trip to central Oregon and back was the perfect opportunity to fill my questioning psyche with Sweeney's words.

Which, it turned out, described a spiritual journey that bore considerable resemblance to mine. And, I'm sure, that of many other people.

Sweeney talks about her up and down relationship with faith. She'd discard one conception of God, then latch on to another.

This is the part of her monologue that I enjoyed the most. The first section about her childhood, viewable on You Tube, was entertaining but not particularly interesting to me.

But when she gets into how Buddhism seemed so right, and then so wrong (along with New Age thinking and Deepak Chopra), I loved Sweeney's honesty.

She's a truth seeker, along with being an actress and comedian. She has a talent for pithy one-liners. Such as (to my recollection), "it turns out that the invisible and the non-existent have a lot in common."

I particularly liked her judgment of Deepak Chopra's pop science after Sweeney took a class in quantum physics: "He's full of shit!" Absolutely true. I've read a lot about quantum physics myself, and what Chopra promulgates in his books and talks is quantum B.S.

Sweeney ends up engrossed by science, finding as much mystery in the physical cosmos as religion attributes to God. She deals with death not by fantasizing this reality away via religious fantasies, but by facing the prospect of her eternal non-existence head-on.

You can peruse a list of the Top Ten Things Julia Sweeney learned from letting go of god. And listen to the 2006 NPR interview that introduced me to her.

There's no substitute for her entire monologue, though. You can get the CDs from Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.

Single gesture, whole of reality

What's in a word, a movement, an expression? Everything. Potentially, at least. This is the intriguing premise of "The Beauty of Gesture: The Invisible Keyboard of Piano and Tai Chi," by Catherine David.

To be present in every step means that the forward motion of one's foot, if experienced fully, embodies the whole of reality at a given time.

Being a Tai Chi practitioner myself, I understand what David is saying. The key word here is "fully."

When I'm moving through a Tai Chi form, often my mind is only partially engaged in what I'm doing. So my reality is split between the here and now and the there and then that's the subject of my mental meanderings. This is half-assed Tai Chi.

In Asian traditions, it sometimes takes an entire lifetime to reach that state of consciousness which opens the way to a genuine act. Turning a handle, soldering a joint, cleaning the house – each gesture contains the entire being of the person who performs it.

It's also half-assed anything, as David points out.

Part of the problem is that we don't fully embrace our self as we are at every moment, continually changing in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

How to be sure we are not half-kissing, mechanically stroking, laughing too loudly, simulating emotions? How not to doubt my own sincerity when I smile, when I flirt? How can I fill my gestures, make them real, harmonious, efficient? How can I give the present moment – the only reality – the attention it deserves?

Another problem is imitation. Though proverbially it's the finest form of flattery, and necessary to learn Tai Chi or almost any other skill, at some point it becomes a barrier to future progress.

Accurate aiming is no artifice: it is his own self the archer sends into the center of the target. If the archer is absent from the bow and arrow, the success of his shot becomes a failure, a parody. True accomplishment goes beyond skill and frees itself from the rules, providing the rules have been previously mastered. From up there, they say, the view is unobstructed all around.

My Tai Chi instructor encourages every student to find his or her own unique expression of this art. And everyone does. There's no way around it, because each person has a unique body, a unique mind, a unique spirit, a unique energy.

Metaphysical awe is converted into research. Reflexive consciousness merges into action. The why retreats behind the how. Anxiety is lifted by creating a technique. The question, How can I really be myself? is instantly followed by, What can I do about it?

Behind the question how, calling for immediate practical answers and lifelong reflection, the ontological vertigo begins to fade. I don't know who I am; we'll look into that later. But for the time being, how shall I manage to truly live my life, be who I am, eat what I eat, walk when I walk, hear what I listen to, see what I see, savor my feelings, my sensations, enjoy the world's and art's creatures, make them mine?

Is there, by any chance, a task more important than to live one's own life?

Gestures…

Charan Singh, the Radha Soami Satsang Beas guru back when I joined the organization in 1971, habitually used certain gestures when he gave talks. They were graceful, part of his unique demeanor.

When he'd speak about concentrating during meditation at the "eye center," his right hand would trace a smooth arc up to the spot between his eyebrows, an index finger pointing at the purported spiritual centering point. Other gestures were used when discussing additional meditative techniques.

Charan Singh's gestures were his own, part and parcel of him. But I remember listening to a disciple give a talk who, obviously, wasn't the guru.

This guy did his best to copy Charan Singh's mannerisms, gestures, and speaking style. It was ghastly. I'm sure he thought this was how one honored the guru: by imitating him and setting aside the speaker's own personality.

How it came across, though, was as fakery. Authenticity was absent from the talk. I lost interest in what he was saying almost from the first word. He was like a puppet, the strings being pulled by a misguided sense of what reducing the ego means.

How can I unite the expression of my feelings with their inner truth? Is it possible to overcome that instinctive cheating which causes us to act other than what we really are, makes us foreign to our gestures as if they were someone else's, prompts us to look for truth in its caricature?

The way I see it, to honor whatever has made us who we are – call this God, Nature, Cosmos, Tao, Ultimate Reality, Laws of Nature, anything else you like – is to be just who we are, honestly, truthfully, sincerely, fully.

In the smallest things as well as the largest. In a single step as well as the longest journey.

Nothing has prepared us for the concept that everyday gestures might be philosophical exercises. No one has advised us to pay attention to them, to stop viewing them as chores, to start loving them and perfecting them.

I abandon all hope in my book shelves

It's the only line from Dante's Divine Comedy that I know: "Abandon all hope, you who enter here." (one of various translations of what's inscribed on the gate of hell)

For me, it's what I feel nowadays when I peruse the spiritual, mystical, metaphysical, and religious volumes in my book collection.

I used to read these books voraciously, devouring them for insights into the Meaning of It All. I went through phases where I'd study a single subject for weeks or months.

Sant Mat. Rumi. Meister Eckhart. Other medieval Christian mystics. The "desert fathers." Zen. Taoism. Plotinus. Emerson. To name a few.

This morning I looked for an inspirational book to read before I meditated. My eyes ran up and down the shelves. I didn't feel inspired by any of them. At least, not in the way I used to be.

I feel this is a positive sign. Of what, I don't know. Let's just call it a positive sign that doesn't point in any particular direction.

Which is why I see it as positive. Every spiritual/religious book I've ever read, including the three that I've written myself, contains ideas that I don't agree with.

These discordances are like off-key musical notes, or stumbles in a dance. I used to be able to ignore them and enjoy the quasi-harmony of the rest of the composition. But now I look at a title and remember, "There's some ridiculous stuff in there."

Of course, what's ridiculous to me might strike you as perfectly reasonable. But I'm not you. All I can be is me.

Who, like you, is someone unique – when it comes to seeking an understanding of what life is about. This uniqueness makes it impossible to find a suit of spiritual clothes that will fit anyone perfectly. Each of us needs to do at least some mixing and matching, and maybe even sewing from scratch.

An example: I find Buddhism appealing, by and large. However, lurking in almost every Buddhist book are dogmas that turn me off.

Such as the need for a guru or master. It always surprises me when I'm reading along, enjoying a Buddhist discussion of how truth can only be found within through direct experience, and then the author adds that this can only happen if you submit yourself to another person.

Daisetz Teitaro (D.T.) Suzuki in "The Zen Koan as a Means of Attaining Enlightenment."

That the Zen experience takes place at all as such, and is formulated finally as a system of Zen intuitions, is principally due to the master's guiding, however enigmatical it may seem; for without it the experience itself is impossible.

Julia Lawless and Judith Allan in "Beyond Words: Dzogchen Made Simple."

The teacher is considered more important than the Buddha, Dharma, or Sangha, for without the teacher there would be no Buddha or access to the lineage of Buddhas, no Dharma, no teachings, and no Sangha, or community of practitioners, for these cannot exist in isolation without the master. The teacher in fact is the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha and the gateway to realization.

Clang! Stumble! Disharmonies. These words just don't ring true to me anymore.

I'll never find a perfect book. Or a perfect teacher, guru, or master. And this realization feels perfectly fine to me.

A critique of Ken Wilber and “Integral Spirituality”

I've got to keep my churchless credibility intact. I don't want to sound like I've become a Ken Wilber groupie after speaking favorably about his "Integral Spirituality" in some recent posts – here, here, and here.

So now that I've finished the book, and visited (or re-visited) some web sites that criticize Wilber's Integral "theory of everything," I'll share what I don't like about Wilber's take on reality.

Main objection: his complex theories about how everything in existence fits together strike me as much more reflective of the inside of Ken Wilber's head than of how the universe really works.

That might explain why too much Wilberian reading leaves me with a metaphorical headache. I find his writings hugely interesting and provocative, but taken as a whole they seem disconnected from the living, breathing world.

Given that the Integral Approach purports to have discovered the links between subjective and objective reality, spirituality and science, metaphysics and physics, and other seeming opposites, the discordant feeling I get from his writings is an intuitive clue that something is wrong in Wilberland.

Last night I gave a presentation on Taoism to a community college Comparative Religion class. I read some excerpts from the introduction to Eva Wong's "Lieh-Tzu" (a great book).

She talks about the three main traditional Taoist writings in a fashion that I could never apply to Wilber's prose.

Thus, while the Lao-tzu is the voice of serious wisdom and the Chuang-tzu is the voice of crazy wisdom, the Lieh-tzu is the voice of humorous wisdom.

The philosophy in the Lao-tzu comes from above us; we can admire it and hope to follow it, but it is hard to reach. The philosophy in the Chuang-tzu comes from a world that is very different from our own; we may try to grasp it, but it is too elusive to catch. The philosophy in the Lieh-tzu comes from where we are. It speaks to us at our level and talks about experiences we can relate to and understand.

When I read Wilber, I don't feel like his writing is serious, crazy, or humorous. Nor does it reflect a lofty, elusive, or everyday perspective.

It's abstract, conceptual, intellectual. Even though Wilber tries to mix in attempts at poetic mysticism, inevitably it comes off sounding fake to me. Here's a long-winded example from the final chapter.

Throw the circle as wide as you can, find a view from 50,000 feet, be inclusive using an integral pluralism and not just a pluralism (which soon fractures, fragments, and falls apart, leaving only the ego to rule), extend your compassionate embrace to the men and women doing the extraordinarily wonderful work in all of those fields and disciplines (covered by the 8 methodologies), reach out and bring their phenomenal worlds into the map of your own world, stretch your mind until it touches infinity and begins to radiate with the brilliance of the overmind, expand the beating of your heart to unleash its inherent desire to love every single thing and person and event in the entire Kosmos, so that you love all the way to infinity and all the way back, smiling when you actually, finally, amazingly see the radiant Face of God in the 2^nd –person (or the ultimate Thou as infinite love, arising then as the ultimate We), even as your own Original Face is God in the 1^st -person (or the ultimate I-I as this moment's pure nondual Witnessing-Emptiness), knowing too that the entire manifest universe – the Great Holarchy of beings all the way up, all the way down – is God in the 3^rd –Person (or the ultimate It as the entire Kosmos): I and Thou and We and It, all brought together in the radiant contours of the simple Suchness of this and every moment, as you feel into the texture of the Kosmos and find your very Self in every warp and woof of a universe now arising as the radiance of the Spirit that can never be denied, any more than you can deny the awareness of this page, knowing, too, that Spirit and the awareness of this page are one and the same, and certainly not-two, so that you realize – with the great sages East and West, Lao Tzu to Asanga to Shankara to Paul to Augustine to Parmenides to Plotinus to Descartes to Schelling to Teresa and Lady Tsogyal – the ultimate secret of the spiritual world, namely, that fully enlightened and ever-present divine awareness is not hard to attain but impossible to avoid.

Whew. Wilber's editor should be ashamed of letting that single sentence into the book. Stream of consciousness writing is a poor substitute for a genuinely elevated vision.

Or at least, a vision that sounds elevated to me. Such as Lao Tzu's considerably briefer description of ultimate reality.

Know That which is beyond all beginnings
and you will know everything here and now

Know everything in this moment
and you will know the Eternal Tao

I think this is what Wilber is trying to say. But Lao Tzu shows you can say it simply, not complexly.

There's a lot not to like in Wilber's Integral Vision, as summarized in the run-on sentence above. I've written an essay about what he gets wrong about Plotinus, one of the "sages" he cites as supporting his integral philosophy.

Actually, Plotinus doesn't. Nor does Lao Tzu, in my opinion. Or Teresa, Augustine, Descartes, Parmenides , or almost all of the other people he mentions.

Wilber has a notoriously shallow understanding of the sources he cites in his books.

He implies to the reader that scholars share his take on a certain domain of human knowledge, but this frequently isn't true. So how is it possible to integrate the world's wisdom in many different areas when you don't really understand those separate domains of knowledge?

Again, what rubbed me most the wrong way in "Integral Spirituality" is that Wilber's description of the ideal spiritual practitioner sounds remarkably like…prepare for no big surprise…Ken Wilber.

Often people say that Wilber wants to be a guru, with all that this entails (fawning followers, unquestioning loyalty, and so on). I don't know if that's true, but his book does nothing to dispel that impression.

It's filled with mentions of his other writings, his Integral Institute, his efforts to show how other spiritual leaders/authors lack the all-encompassing vision of How-Things-Really-Are that Wilber possesses.

Now, part of me – maybe all of me – wishes that Ken Wilber possesses the keys to the universe that he believes he has. Because he and I are similar in many ways: long-time meditators, with an intellectual bent. I like his thesis that thinking about the cosmos (or Kosmos) is a significant aspect of spiritual practice, since I do a lot of that.

Indeed, perusing his Integral Life Practice Matrix, it sure seems like I should be enlightened by now. I'm doing a bunch of the core things that Wilber says lead to integral understanding.

Weightlifting. T'ai Chi. Qi Gong. Yoga. Reading & Study. Taking Multiple Perspectives. Centering Prayer. Therapy (well, I'm married to a psychotherapist, so maybe that counts).

But you know, somehow I suspect that I can keep on doing these things for the rest of my life, including studying more Ken Wilber books, and I'm still going to be clueless about the nature of the cosmos.

Though Lao Tzu offers me a bit of hope.

To rule the state, have a known plan
To win a battle, have an unknown plan
To gain the universe, have no plan at all

I enjoyed "Integral Spirituality." There's a lot of food for thought in the 300 or so pages. However, I liked various pieces of the book much more than the whole Integral Vision. That leaves me lukewarm, if not cold.

In this month's issue of Scientific American there's an article about how the accelerating universe is wiping out traces of its own origins. Eventually the big bang is going to be a mystery to future civilizations. The article ends with:

Most important, although we are certainly fortunate to live at a time when the observational pillars of the big bang are all detectable, we can easily envisage that other fundamental aspects of the universe are unobservable today.

What have we already lost? Rather than being self-satisfied, we should feel humble. Perhaps someday we will find that our current careful and apparently complete understanding of the universe is seriously wanting.

Ken Wilber, are you listening?

Here's some Wilber-critiquing web sites that I found today. Some of the ideas in this post were stimulated by the generally thoughtful writings available on these links.

"Ken Wilber is losing it," Michel Bauwens
Integral World (home page)
"Telling the Story As If It Were True," Frank Visser
"The Wild West Wilber Report," Frank Visser
"Critique of Ken Wilber," David Christopher Lane
"Critiques of Ken Wilber"
"The Age of Wilberius," Geoffrey Falk
"Norman Einstein: The Dis-Integration of Ken Wilber," Geoffrey Falk
"A Critique of Ken Wilber's Integral Method," M. Alan Kazlev
" Bald Ambition," Jeff Meyerhoff
"The Intersubjective Meditator," Andrew P. Smith

(Just noticed that all of the critiquers, and Wilber himself, are men. Is believing that you've uncovered the secrets of the spiritual universe, or that you're capable of criticizing the uncoverer, a male thing? Seemingly.)

There’s nothing wrong with me (or you)

Last Sunday a friend loaned me a copy of "There Is Nothing Wrong With You" by Cheri Huber. The title appealed to me instantly, since it's so obviously right.

I mean, most of the time it's crystal clear to me that I'm absolutely fine. It's other people who are all screwed up, the way they don't behave like I want them to.

Problem is, they feel the same. So the conventional wisdom is that the world is made up of six billion humans chanting a mantra of "I'm right and you're wrong."

This certainly seems to be the foundation of religion (and politics). But Huber, a Zen practitioner who melds Buddhist and self-help philosophy, has a different slant on rightness and wrongness.

Her book's subtitle, in the new edition, is "going beyond self-hate." She sees self-hate as the root of the sense of wrongness that permeates most people's everyday lives.

Trying to STOP, FIX, or CHANGE is part of the self-hating process. Just stay with the experience and REALLY GET IT. That this is sad, it's not wrong, it's just hard, it's hard to be a being. How can we not feel compassion?

Of course, ego will jump right in there and say, "Enough of this sadness. Let's DO something about it." That DO-ality will flip us right back into the bottom of the pot. I imagine a big stew pot of self-hate, and you just about crawl up to the top of the pot when you run into something that flips you right back in.

Usually this "something" is: trying to change what you are experiencing. Criticizing yourself, judging somebody else, thinking you need to change something, fix something, DO something—

And you are right back in the bottom of the pot of self hate. Again…

(My edition of "There Is Nothing Wrong With You" is typeset in a handwritten fashion, with an informal style. Usually I'm not a big fan of CAPS and cutesy layouts, but it works in this book – though the format looks a bit strange when quoted as I did above.)

There's a lot of simple wisdom in the easy-to-read pages that I whipped through in a couple of morning pre-meditation reading sessions. Such as:

I am not here to become an acceptable person. I am here to accept the person I am.

It may be true that you make sacrifices, but that doesn't make you good; it just means that you make sacrifices.

It may be true that you are accepting, but that doesn't make you good; it just means you are accepting.

It may be true that you are responsible, but that doesn't make you good; it just means you are responsible.

It may be true that you meditate, but that doesn't make you good; it just means that you meditate.

We label these behaviors good and then continue to do them in order to support self-hate. Perhaps doing in order to be good is what keeps you from realizing that you are already good.

Insightful.

Those last two lines made me think about my motivations during a long period of true-believing religiosity. I really enjoyed feeling that I was on the right spiritual path, because left to my own devices obviously I'd wander off and get lost, screw-up that I am.

So, yes, self-hate (or at least self-mistrust) kept me reading the books, attending the services, sticking to the straight and narrow, fearing to question. Oh my god, what would happen if I followed my own instincts? Well, Huber says:

All of life's conflicts are between letting go or holding on. Opening into the present or clinging to the past. Expansion or contraction.

…Life is very short. We do not have time to be frightened. We do not have the luxury of allowing fear and hate to run our lives. THIS IS IT!

…We cling to our belief that there is something wrong because that's how we maintain our position at the center of the universe.

Suffering provides our identity. Identity is maintained in struggle, in dissatisfaction, in trying to fix what's wrong. So we are constantly looking for what is wrong, constantly creating new crises so we can rise to the occasion.

To ego, that's survival. It is very important that something be wrong so we can continue to survive it.

I'd think: Oh no! There was a smidgen of meat in the food that I ate! I've broken my vegetarian vow! I should have checked more carefully – interrogated the cook, inspected every bite before I swallowed it, something!

As the familiar Zen story goes, I was the monk who watched his colleague carry a beautiful woman across a stream (a no-no for these monastic guys) and stewed about it for miles afterward. Until he said, "Why did you pick her up? You know we're not supposed to touch women."

The response: "I left the woman back on the stream bank. You're still carrying her. Who is the biggest vow-breaker?"

My wife and I have been taking dance lessons for a couple of years. They've attuned me to the difference between moving to patterns, versus moving freely.

Not that the two are separate and distinct. They're related. Because I can be leading a series of moves, a pattern, that is clear in my own mind. I know what is supposed to happen.

But Laurel doesn't, either because I haven't led the move correctly (usually the case) or because she doesn't know how to follow the lead.

Either way, when I have the Oops sensation that things aren't going as planned, I've got choices.

I can either try to force my partner to do what she darn well should be doing because I intended it, which can lead to stopping the dance and having a discussion (or argument) on the ballroom floor, or I can adjust myself to her movement.

Change my plan in accord with reality – which almost always is the preferred option.

It isn't that I'm right and she's wrong, or the reverse. Something simply is going on, and we both need to flow with it. I like what Huber says here:

What would maintain egocentricity? How would you know who you are?

It is only the illusion of a separate self who could believe that it is possible to make mistakes. Because, in fact, there isn't anything going on other that what is.

It is only in some imaginary parallel universe where this could happen, or this could happen, that we get that kind of alternative: what happened – what should have happened

As far as I know, it is only when we hold the notion that something happened this way, but it should have happened that way that we can say, "Well, I had this experience, but that is the one I was supposed to have.

I don't think so.

…We have a choice.

We can live our lives trying to conform to some nebulous standard or we can live our lives seeing how everything works.

When we step back and look at it that way, it is obvious that the attitude of fascination is the only intelligent one to bring to anything.

First atheist author: Baron d’Holbach

Watching a recording of PBS' "A Brief History of Disbelief" last night, I learned a fact that could come in handy if you're ever on a high-stakes quiz show.

They ask: Who wrote the first atheist book? You say, Baron d'Holbach. (When you win the million dollars, be sure to remember with gratitude what blogger informed you of this.)

Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789) hosted a notable salon in Paris where free-thinkers gathered for serious conversation. My wife and I belong to a Salem, Oregon salon group, so we've got that in common.

Philosophically, the Baron and I also are on much the same wavelength. I like this excerpt from his writings:

Madmen may everywhere be seen, who, after meditating upon their terrible God, imagine that to please him they must inflict on themselves, the most exquisite torments. The gloomy ideas formed of the deity, far from consoling them, have every where disquieted their minds, and prejudiced follies destructive to happiness.

How could the human mind progress, while tormented with frightful phantoms, and guided by men, interested in perpetuating its ignorance and fears?

Man has been forced to vegetate in his primitive stupidity: he has been taught stories about invisible powers upon whom his happiness was supposed to depend. Occupied solely by his fears, and by unintelligible reveries, he has always been at the mercy of priests, who have reserved to themselves the right of thinking for him, and of directing his actions.

Videos of "A Brief History of Disbelief" can be viewed online. The three part series is a bit dry for my taste, but there's some enjoyable snippets. Like, the quotes from skeptics and unbelievers. Many of them can be read here, including some thoughts from the Baron.

If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods, that fancy enthusiasm or deceit adorned them, that weakness worships them, that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of men serve their own interests.

Unfortunately, more than 230 years after he wrote those words not much has changed. Hopefully the next quarter of a millennium will bring more enlightenment to the Earth.

Spiritual reading list -- new and improved

I'm an avid reader of spiritual books. Not the overly religious kind, but the edgy variety – mystical and meditational writings that stretch my psyche's understanding of what reality is all about.

Last year Ron Gardner sent me a marvelous recommended spiritual reading list that I shared in a blog post. Now Ron has emailed me a new and improved list, "improved" naturally being in the eye of the list-maker, as likes and dislikes in any literary arena are necessarily personal.

However, just as there are classics in other genres, so also in esoteric spiritual writings. No one will agree with the placement of all of Ron's "highly recommended" selections, but I'm hugely impressed with the thoughtful care that has gone into the making of his list.

Thank you, Ron, for this gift. For many years, if not a lifetime, it'll help keep UPS trucks coming to my home with offerings from Amazon.

If you like, comment away on the list. Additions are especially welcome. Click below to read Ron's recommendations.

“Wholly Spirit” searches for a plausible God

Kudos to Grey Austin. Not only has he written a thoughtful, readable book about his search for a universal ultimacy that makes more sense than the personalized Christian God, but he's evolved a terrific white beard.

I've been thinking of letting mine grow out a bit. Not to Austin's Father Christmas length, but he's inspired me. Both beardly and spiritually.

I'm a sucker for self-published books that are carefully written/edited and present a unique perspective. "Wholly Spirit" fills the bill on both counts. (So does mine, in my not-humble opinion.)

Austin's book has an unvarnished honest feel to it. He's shared musings about the nature of the universe, God, and what life is all about that were composed over a number of years. I enjoyed seeing how his thinking (and feeling) changed from a fairly traditional Christian perspective to a scientifically founded Taoist-friendly outlook.

Which is pretty darn close to how I see things too. Like Austin, I used to have a much more anthropomorphic conception of divinity than I do now. But unlike him, my "God" was mediated to me by a living guru rather than Jesus.

Nonetheless, Austin's transition in understanding from God as Person to God as Nature mirrors my own in many ways. He says:

Thinking about God has been a problem for me for some time. I grew up picturing God as a being – not necessarily an old man in a robe and beard, but an entity somehow separate and other than "His" Creation, which is to say, the universe and its inhabitants.

I gradually came to believe that God could not choose to act on some individual's or nation's behalf or at their behest if such action would disrupt the flow of natural events. Still, I had the lingering sense that "with God all things are possible."

If God were not a separate being, with what or whom could I have a relationship and to what or whom could I pray? And what did prayer mean if God could not reach down a finger and stir the pot for my benefit or respond to even my most altruistic requests?

As those in my church continued to use anthropomorphic terms for God, I began to translate all that I heard into more naturalistic terms; but that was wearisome and could almost make me feel that I didn't belong. I also didn't have the natural processes sorted out enough to make some of the connections between anthropomorphism and naturalism with any degree of confidence.

Now I see that I was empowering God to act in the physical world and at the same time doubting that God could. This wasn't God's problem; it was mine. Now I suggest that "God" is the expression of faith that we use to give meaning to the natural world rather than creator of or active agent in the world.

With respect to prayer, I have come to recognize that I can be grateful and express my gratitude without being grateful to a "Someone." I can express affirmation, aspiration, regret, and even awe without the necessity of addressing it to an Other.

Another excerpt from Austin's book can be read here. "Wholly Spirit" doesn't appear to be available from the usual online book sellers, but I got a copy quickly and easily from the book's distributor.

Austin ends up with a "theology" or cosmology of Cosmic Wholeness: "I found that all is one and I am one with all."

That sounds New Agey, yet Austin is anything but. He's committed to melding the best of rationality and science with the best of intuition and mysticism.

The process that is consistent throughout the physical, organic, human, and inner realms might be thought of as intelligent energy, communicating and facilitating healing and wholeness at all levels of reality. The classical example of this model is the Buddha for whom there was no God figure, who taught reliance on human qualities as a way of life, and who counseled accepting things just as they are.

Finding my Way in the Bodhi Tree Bookstore

A few years ago I made my first pilgrimage to Hollywood's Bodhi Tree Bookstore, one of the wonders of the metaphysical book-selling world. I went again yesterday, leaving my month-old granddaughter and her mother (my daughter) cooling their heels in a neighboring restaurant.

Wise place to wait. Slower the service, the better. When I enter the Bodhi Tree Bookstore, I'm not going to be emerging for quite a while.

Wandering through the store's sections is a voyage of spiritual self-discovery. The patrons, me included, appear darn serious as they browse the shelves. After all, we're not looking for a book on how to restore a '57 Chevy, or plant a raised bed garden.

No, the entire Bodhi Tree content, by and large, is Big Questions of Life stuff: the nature of reality, what happens when we die, whether God exists, and if so, in what fashion.

Sure, there are smiles in the aisles—I loved how a red-headed coolly-clad young woman at the checkout counter responded to a "love your tattoos" from a person behind her with a flirtatious toss of her head and a finger pointing behind her ear: "you probably missed this one; see, it matches!"

Hollywood. I love ya.

But mostly I encountered intense gazes as I brushed by fellow shoppers. What I found most interesting about my 45 minutes or so in the store was how my emotional reaction to various sections governed my steps.

I've got a somewhat deserved reputation as an intellectual. However, when it comes to spirituality, religion, and mysticism, gut reactions serve as my compass, not my thoughts. In this regard, I'm typical. Mostly we feel our way through life, then rationalize the direction we've taken with logical-sounding reasons.

In the Bodhi Tree Bookstore, I was guided by gut, not gray matter. My first stop always is the Martial Arts, Buddhism, and Taoism corner. That's where I feel most comfortable.

Even here, though, there are more friendly and less friendly shelves. I did my best to find a book to buy in the general Buddhism section. However, I'd already bought the titles that appealed to me—the ones with a skeptical "kill the Buddha" theme.

I'd flip through some pages of a potential purchase and see a bunch of Sanskrit terms and references to this or that sutra. Ooh, too religious my gut would tell me. Back on the shelf it'd go.

I had to turn back to the Zen section before finding a couple of books that screamed (or at least strongly murmured) take me home: "Opening the Hand of Thought," by Kosho Uchiyama and "No Beginning, No End," by Jakusho Kwong. (In finding these Amazon links, I see that every reader review of these books has been 5 stars; other people clearly like them as much as I expect I will).

Zen has a way of laughing at its own pretensions that resonates with me. General Buddhism is just too damn serious. Ditto with most of Indian philosophy, the section that adjoins the Buddhist and Taoist shelves. I used to spend a lot of time there, but my gut won't let me tarry long with Indian mystics now.

Taoist sages, though, are more appealing. I found a couple of Thomas Cleary translations of Chinese classics, "The Spirit of Tao" and "The Book of Balance and Harmony." (Again, two 5-star reviews; my Bodhi Tree purchases batted 1.000 with Amazon reader reviews—though one Cleary book was review less.)

There's no other way to buy a book but with the guidance of your gut. You read the title, glance at the front and back covers, peruse the table of contents, flip through a few sample pages. In a few seconds it either speaks to you, or it doesn't.

Same with the spiritual, philosophical, mystical, and religious paths that books are written about. They either give you a come-hither look or a "no way, Jose" brush off. We like to think that we choose our Way for solid reasons, but almost always that isn't the case.

Generally we follow one path rather than another simply because it appeals to us. Is falling in love with a person any different? We can give reasons for our attraction, but they aren't the real cause of our infatuation. That's a mystery, even to the lovers.

So I brought home four books. Many others were inspected and rejected. Countless others, not even considered.

It comes down to the gut. Trust it. When buying a book. When embracing a philosophy of life. Each of us knows a lot more than we're able to tell ourselves in thought-sounds.

And what we know will be ours, not anyone else's. It'll be our little (or big) secret. Significant to us, not truly sharable with others.

I stood beside red-haired tattoo girl as she asked for some items that were stored behind the Bodhi Tree Bookstore checkout counter.

"Give me three copies of The Secret DVD," she said. "No, make that two."

I felt like telling her, "If you'd like some advice, may I suggest making it zero? Because in my opinion you're about to spend $60 on a bunch of bullshit."

But I kept my mouth shut. Because what I wanted to say would have been just that: my opinion. Like Alice's Restaurant, you can get almost anything you want, philosophically, at the Bodhi Tree. As with life. Different gettings for different folks, that's how the menu works.

The clerk reached back and picked up the DVDs. "Great Mother's Day presents," he told red-haired tattoo girl. "They can change someone's life." "I hope so," she replied.

She glanced over at me with another big smile. Irresistible. I smiled back. The Secret wasn't my Bodhi Tree shopping choice. But I'm me. She's she. Maybe that's all I needed to learn from my visit to the bookstore.

I still bought the four books though.

Be your own book

It's hard enough to simply haul myself around some days. Yet I'm still spry enough to have little trouble managing these garage crawlspace stairs. (After all, I just took twenty years off of my life).

But pushing a heavy box of books up the stairs and through the narrow opening, that's an extra energetic load. I just repeated the job a dozen times, putting back stored books that had to be removed when our garage got some earthquake strengthening.

The light at the top of the stairs came to seem more than metaphorical. After a few trips up and down, I began to feel more than a little resentment toward my previously dearly beloved books, several hundred of which fell into the spiritual/religious/philosophical genres.

They were damn heavy, that's for sure. Yet what had I gained from reading all that poundage?

About a year and a half ago I wrote about becoming my favorite book. I've still been buying books, yet not with the same oh, yeah, this could be it! expectancy.

Like lots of other people, I've had the implicit expectation that reading or hearing certain words would unlock a treasure trove of understanding—the Open, Sesame fantasy. Indeed, sometimes it'd seem like the door would open a crack.

Before it'd shut again.

Words aren't reality. Echoing Magritte, I know this is not a blog post. Not really. Eight English letters don't begin to capture whatever the hell it is I'm doing at the moment.

At the same time, words are part and parcel of my current awareness. So words are reality. Just not as real to me as the thoughts that precede my keyboard tapping, or the intuitions that precede the thoughts.

More and more, I'm realizing that what I'm looking for in spiritual books I already have, just as what I write about I already know (but need to form into a sense that can be shared with others). Like I said before about my flash of insight in a bookstore:

Then the flash of insight hit me. What I was looking for was a spiritual book that exactly expressed everything that I already hold to be true. In short, I wanted to read about me. My beliefs, my approach to fathoming the meaning of life, my meditation practice, my God-philosophy.

I wasn't searching for fresh truth. I wanted a validation of what is already true for me. I wasn't trying to find answers to the big questions of life. I hoped to find that someone else had dealt with the questions in the same way as I am.

I still do this, but to a lesser extent. Most mornings now my pre-meditation reading starts off with the sports section. I don't try to fill my head with someone else's spiritual thoughts before I try to clear my head of my own.

I've been accused of thinking too much, often by me. In my defense, allow me to point out how many culprits contributed to my recent straining up the stairs.

Books published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas filled up several boxes. This supposedly is a path of love, not of thinking, but the RSSB gurus and disciples definitely love to talk about their thoughts about love.

Similarly, Buddhism advises that the dharma raft doesn't need to be carried after having crossed to the other shore. I have to assume that lots of Buddhists are still paddling. And writing about it. Voluminously.

Ditto with Sufis, mystical Christians, and everyone else who wrote the books now reposing in the crawl space.

Other books I'll probably always keep close at hand. These tend to be writings that pull the rug out from under themselves, urging me in one way or another not to read them. Like Emerson's essay on self-reliance.

Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.

Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

And also, in my case, with some huffing and puffing.

J.R. Puri commits plagiarism in a RSSB book

The tables have been turned. David Lane (a.k.a. the Neural Surfer) has documented how Paul Twitchell , the founder of Eckankar, massively plagiarized from books published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (notably Julian Johnson’s “Path of the Masters”).

But I've discovered that at least one Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) author is guilty of his own plagiarizing. A few days ago I was reading along in a book that I’d gotten myself for Christmas, “Meister Eckhart: Mystic as Theologian” by Robert K.C. Forman.

On page 102 I came to a quotation from W.T. Stace. It seemed awfully familiar.

Suppose that, after having got rid of all sensations, one should go on to exclude from consciousness all sensuous images, and then all abstract thoughts, reasoning processes, volitions, and other particular mental contents, what would there then be left of consciousness?

There would be no mental content whatever but rather a complete emptiness, vacuum, void. One would suppose a priori that consciousness would then entirely lapse and one would fall asleep or become unconscious.

But the introvertive mystics—thousands of them all over the world—unanimously assert that they have attained to this complete vacuum of particular mental contents, but that what then happens is quite different from a lapse into unconsciousness.

On the contrary, what emerges is a state of pure consciousness—“pure” in the sense that it is not the consciousness of any empirical content. It has no content except itself.

It was familiar because I’d quoted almost the exact same passage in my first book, “God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder.” I’d found it in J.R. Puri’s “Guru Nanak: His Mystic Teachings,” published by RSSB (page 59).

Having eliminated all sensations, the mystic next excludes from consciousness all sensuous images, and then all abstract thoughts, reasoning, processes, volitions, and particular mental contents. One may ask, what then would be left of consciousness?

In the absence of any mental content whatsoever, there would be a complete emptiness, a void, a vacuum. One would suppose a priori that consciousness would then entirely lapse and one would fall asleep or become unconscious.

But the introvertive mystics unanimously assert—and there are thousands of them all over the world—that they have attained to a complete vacuum of particular mental contents, and what then emerges is a state of pure consciousness.

It is pure in the sense that it is not the consciousness of any empirical content. It has no content except itself.

So, who is the plagiarizer? Obviously, J.R. Puri. W.T. Stace’s “Mysticism and Philosophy” was published in 1960. “Guru Nanak” was published in 1982. Shame on you, Mr. Puri!

Yet you couldn't even plagiarize competently, adding an extra comma between "reasoning" and "processes" that confused me every time I read the passage.

I can’t stand plagiarism. I’ve written three books and have gone to considerable lengths to give credit where credit is due, quotation wise. I’m not the most organized author. Sometimes I’d include a quote in a draft, then fail to footnote it on the spot because I figured I’d never forget the source.

But I would. Then I’d have to spend a lot of time searching through my library, looking for the quoted passage. My commitment to crediting quotes is so deep, I almost always mention the author’s name in association with a quotation, rather than simply including a numbered footnote.

What was Puri thinking? I try to imagine him working on his book. He’s a long-time disciple of a RSSB guru who emphasized “honest living.” Yet he copies almost verbatim from Stace’s book, giving Stace absolutely no credit for ideas that Puri implied were his own.

When I used to give talks on behalf of RSSB I’d occasionally cite the passage from Puri’s book. I liked it a lot. I still do, but now I know that whoever else Puri was, he was a plagiarist. Apparently he lacked sufficient mystical understanding of his own and needed to borrow from Stace.

I found much of W.T. Stace’s book online, courtesy of Dave Woodward. The material plagiarized by Puri is in the “Introvertive Mysticism” section (Puri also shamelessly copied that title, along with some other prefatory language).

Now I can’t help but wonder how much unattributed copying is present in other RSSB books. I’ve written one myself (“Life is Fair”) and can say that my book is clean. However, who knows about the many other titles published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas?

For a long time I thought that these books had more credibility than most other mystical literature. Increasingly I’m thinking differently, especially after coming across this plagiarism. Again, I find it difficult to understand how someone with so many years of meditation and spiritual devotion under his belt could so easily steal another writer’s words.

Yet at the same time I also find it easy to understand.

Organized religions like Radha Soami Satsang Beas emphasize outward rather than inward spirituality, notwithstanding the lip service paid to direct mystical experience. Most RSSB initiates simply go through the motions, like the vast majority of other religious believers.

Such as J.R. Puri. I don’t know if he is still alive. If he is, I’d like to learn how he explains his plagiarism. Which is, whatever the reason, inexcusable.

Astoundingly, the book jacket of “Guru Nanak” says about Puri:

The author has also lucidly brought forth the close relationship that exists between the mystic experience and ethics as well as religion, drawing on his rich background in Western philosophy. The mystic experience has been shown to be the cause as also the effect of ethical living.

It seems that plagiarism also is the effect of mystical experience. Or at least the ability to write about mysticism. Also astounding is the fact that Puri spent a lot of time in academia, which puts much emphasis on crediting your sources.

Prof. J.R. Puri was head of the Department of Philosophy, Punjabi University, Patiaia from 1969 to 1976. Earlier, he was head of the post-graduate Department of Philosophy, Mahendra College, Patiaia for more than a decade. After his retirement as a teacher of philosophy for more than thirty-five years, his present interest centers mainly on the study and practice of mysticism.

Well, when that was written I think Puri needed a lot more practice. Not at plagiarizing—he was already expert at that. But at the ethics that supposedly accompanies mystic experience.

[12/30 update: Here's a scan of the pages in question. Several commenters to this post have claimed that the mention of Stace on page 58 somehow absolves the plagiarism on page 59. That's ridiculous.

Puri mentions both Walter Stace and Rudolf Otto on page 58. And he gives no indication on page 59 that the third paragraph is cribbed directly from Stace's book. Puri simply changed a few words. Yet he gives no credit to Stace. As I noted in a comment of my own, according to the Indiana University Campus Writing Program, this is a textbook case of plagiarism.

Am I making too much of this? Maybe. But what I find as interesting as the plagiarism is the reaction of some Puri defenders. In my opinion, they aren't looking at the facts clearly. Which is precisely my objection to the True Believer mind: it sees things that aren't there, and it is blind to things that are there.]

Recommended spiritual reading lists

What books turn you on spiritually? I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours—your list. Heck, I’ll even expose myself first.

But before I do, I’ve got to thank Ron Gardner. He emailed me last month, saying:

I'm a long-time serious student of the Perennial Philosophy, and I want to commend you on "Return to the One." I derived both intellectual enjoyment and spiritual inspiration from reading it, and I plan on placing the book on the Recommended Spiritual Reading List that I'm in the process of putting together.

Well, that intrigued me. Both the praise of my book and Ron’s reading list. I asked him to send it to me when he was finished with it. Of course, a recommended reading list could never be finished by an avid reader, not until the final title was pried from his or her dead hands.

There’s always one more book.

So here’s Ron’s Recommended Spiritual Reading List as it stood in October.
Download spiritual_reading_list.doc

I came up with my own list by asking myself a simple question: what books do I frequently turn to for inspiration? Not for information. Or intellectual stimulation. Or entertainment.

Rather, for uplift when I feel down. For getting centered again when I’m off kilter. For that burst of “Oh, yeah! Right on!” when I hear in someone else’s words what I should be speaking to myself, but am too lazy or irresolute to attend to my own inner voice.

Here’s my list. Bowing to tradition, I came up with ten books. That’s how many fingers are about to type out the titles. Seems fitting. They’re in the order I thought of them.
[Next day update: Must have grown another finger overnight. Had to add a D.T. Suzuki book to the end of the list.]

The Supreme Doctrine, by Hubert Benoit
Open Mind, Open Heart, by Thomas Keating
The Cloud of Unknowing, by Anonymous
Meister Eckhart: Selected Writings, trans. by Oliver Davies
Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, by Erich Fromm, D.T. Suzuki, Richard DeMartino
Talks With Ramana Maharshi, by Ramana
The Wisdom of Insecurity, by Alan Watts
The Book of Chuang Tzu, trans. by Martin Palmer
Taoist Meditation, by Thomas Cleary
The Tao of Zen, by Ray Grigg
The Zen Koan as a Means of Attaining Enlightenment, by D.T. Suzuki

If anyone wants to share his or her own favorite spiritual books, comment away. I’m always eager to help keep Amazon afloat. And I know others would be interested in your recommendations also.

God vs. Science: guess who wins?

Science kicked ass in TIME magazine’s “God vs. Science” cover story debate. Atheist biologist Richard Dawkins pretty much blew Christian geneticist Francis Collins out of the theological water.

The article points out that Dawkins is riding the quest of an atheist/agnostic literary wave, each of which I’ve read, or am reading. And can heartily recommend. Cited are Sam Harris’ The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Dawkin’s The God Delusion, and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell.

Some other titles mentioned, each of which provides support to the religious skeptic, are Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds, Lewis Wolpert’s Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, and Victor Stenger’s God: The Failed Hypothesis.

Reading the debate between Dawkins and Collins, it’s easy to see why authors have no trouble poking religiosity full of holes. Whenever Collins was backed into a corner, all he could do was stammer out some platitude that had nothing behind it but blind faith. For example:

Many of us think these qualities [of altruism] may come from God—especially since justice and morality are two of the attributes we most readily identify with God.

Well, it’s nice that many of you think that way. Many of you also believe the Earth was created a few thousand years ago and that fossils were planted by the Devil to throw people off the scent of God.

It’s also nice to observe such a marvelous example of circular thinking. Believers posit a God who has some positive anthropomorphic moral qualities. Then when people manifest those human qualities, this is taken as evidence that they come from God.

Such faulty reasoning would be laughable if it weren’t practiced by billions of believers. Some of whom fly airplanes full of other people into buildings because of their deluded faith. That makes religious belief unfunny.

Another example of Collins’ empty arguments:

Faith is not the opposite of reason. Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation.

Good try, Dr. Collins. Problem is, once you add revelation to reason, you no longer have reason. Those who believe that the Bible or Koran is the revealed word of God shut off their rational faculties.

Dawkins tells the story of the American geologist Kurt Wise who earned two advanced degrees in geology and paleontology at Harvard. Then he found that he couldn’t stand the conflict between his religion and his science.

He took a bible and went right through it, literally cutting out every verse that would have to go if the scientific world-view were true.

There was little left. Wise decided that he would accept the Bible and throw out his dreams and hopes in science. Dawkins says that he finds this terribly sad. So do I. This statement by Wise is pathetic:

Although there are scientific reasons for accepting a young earth, I am a young-age creationist because that is my understanding of the Scripture. As I shared with my professors years ago when I was in college, if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. Here I must stand.

On exceedingly shaky ground, Dr. Wise. Along with Francis Collins and everyone else who elevates faith above facts.

Reality has a way of winning out in the end. Richard Dawkins won the TIME magazine debate, but religion will bounce back on other fronts.

Temporarily. A thousand years from now, I’m quite sure, our 21st century belief in imaginary gods will seem as quaint as the Greek’s embrace of their own divine pantheon. Zeus in various guises will remain alive and kicking until reality finally knocks him dead.

[Note: I originally said "Ten thousand years from now" above. Someone on a Yahoo discussion group said that I was 90% off on my time line estimate and I agree with them. Let's be optimistic and hope that religion as we know it will be dead and gone by 3006, not 13,006.]

When the gods stopped speaking to us

About three thousand years ago the divine voices shut up.

Until then, says Julian Jaynes, humans habitually heard messages from the gods. However, those communications merely were being transmitted from one side of the brain to the other and were mistakenly construed as coming from an outside source.

Religion as we know it arose as a reaction to the silence. After the breakdown of the bicameral mind, people became consciously aware of the interior mental space that previously was the province of the gods. A replacement was needed. Jaynes says:

This breakdown resulted in many practices we would now call religious which were efforts to return to the lost voices of the gods, e.g., prayer, religious worship, and particularly the many types of divination I have described, which are new ways of making decisions by supposedly returning to the directions of gods by simple analogy.

Jaynes’ book, “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,” isn’t the easiest reading—as you can surmise from the wonderfully elusive title. My dentist is a big fan of the book. He talked me into buying it during a one-sided dental chair conversation in which my end of the dialogue was necessarily guttural.

I’d started reading Origin but had given it up as being too mystifying for even my mystiferious mind until my previous post about our inner ventriloquists impelled me to pull it from the bookshelf again.

Now I was more motivated to dig into it, as I thought it might shed some light on the voices that I hear in my own head. Which, I know, come from me. But it didn’t seem to be much of a stretch to imagine what it would be like to sense that the thoughts that I speak to myself were coming from an external source.

This, Jaynes argues semi-convincingly, still occurs with schizophrenics. And also with normal people from time to time. I remember being awakened from a nap by a “Brian!” that sure sounded like it came from someone standing by the bed. Jaynes, a Princeton psychologist who died in 1997, gives many other examples of what he calls vestiges of the bicameral mind in the modern world.

Could be. His theory is controversial. It continues to be promulgated through the Julian Jaynes Society. They have links to many articles related to the theory by Jaynes and others (which only are available to society members, however).

What I like most about the book is how it reminds us that what we’re aware of is a small fraction of our mental landscape. (When Jaynes speaks of “consciousness” he usually seems to be referring to what I’d call “self-awareness.”)

Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it.

The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.

Absolutely. My afternoon started with two frustrating phone calls to IBM/Lenovo tech support. The new ThinkPad that I’d gotten to replace my wife’s out-of-date Emachines laptop wouldn’t display the correct resolution (1280 X 800) no matter what I did.

During my first all-too-conscious call I was instructed step by step in how to download and install proper video card and BIOS software that, for some inexplicable reason, was missing from the ThinkPad. Holding the phone in one hand, typing with one finger of the other, doing my best to not screw up the computer more than it was already—I was uncomfortably self-aware.

After engaging in additional recommended unsuccessful efforts to get the screen to look like it should, via a follow-up call I succeeded in getting IBM to send a technician out tomorrow morning to either fix the damn computer or give me a new one (my purchase of an extended service contract now looks like a wise decision).

I then was eager to embrace an alternative aspect of reality.

Cleaning the gutters. We’ve had a dry Oregon fall but several inches of rain are forecast over the coming week. I strapped on my Stihl backpack blower, clambered up a ladder, and proceeded to blow out half a year’s worth of oak leaves, pine needles, and other debris.

This involved getting as close as I could to the edge of the roof and directing the tip of the blower tube along the open gutter. It was fun. A lot more fun, at least, than talking to tech support. Even when I got to the two-story parts of our house.

Charlie, the voice that ventriloquismistically speaks inside my head much of the time, was pleasingly silent. My attention was focused on not falling off the roof and getting the gutters squeaky clean. Charlie was nowhere to be found. Nor, in a sense, was I.

I was simply doing what I was doing, not thinking “this is what I need to do” while I was doing it. That would have been duplicative. And distracting. Occasionally I caught myself ruminating about something or other. Like, how later I might write on this blog about not ruminating while cleaning the gutters.

Oops! That’s what I was just doing, I’d say to myself. Charlie was down, but not out.

Jaynes reminds us that those voices we hear inside our heads—who are us—aren’t necessary much (or most) of the time. They’re doppelgangers, extraneous hangers on. Just as the religious voices outside of our heads are. Which, if Jaynes’ theory holds water, are the same as the inner voices.

Here’s how Jaynes describes the condition of the ancients prior to the breakdown of the bicameral mind:

In driving a car, I am not sitting like a back-seat driver directing myself, but rather find myself committed and engaged with little consciousness. In fact my consciousness will usually be involved in something else, in a conversation with you if you happen to be my passenger, or in thinking about the origin of consciousness perhaps.

My hand, foot, and head behavior, however, are almost in a different world. In touching something, I am touched; in turning my head, the world turns to me; in seeing, I am related to a world I immediately obey in the sense of driving on the road and not on the sidewalk.

And I am not conscious of any of this. And certainly not logical about it. I am caught up, unconsciously enthralled, if you will, in a total interacting reciprocity of stimulation that may be constantly threatening or comforting, appealing or repelling, responding to the changes in traffic and particular aspects of it with trepidation or confidence, trust or distrust, while my consciousness is still off on other topics.

Now simply subtract that consciousness and you have what a bicameral man would be like. The world would happen to him and his action would be an inextricable part of that happening with no consciousness whatever.

And now let some brand-new situation occur, an accident up ahead, a blocked road, a flat tire, a stalled engine, and behold, our bicameral man would not do what you or I would do, that is, quickly and efficiently swivel our consciousness over to the matter and narratize out what to do.

He would have to wait for his bicameral voice which with the stored-up admonitory wisdom of his life would tell him nonconsciously what to do.

Interesting. The bicameral man sounds a lot like Lao Tzu’s Taoist sage.

A truly good man is not aware of his goodness,
And is therefore good.
A foolish man tries to be good,
And is therefore not good.

A truly good man does nothing,
Yet leaves nothing undone.
A foolish man is always doing,
Yet much remains to be done.

Taoism's Secret of the Golden Flower

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if what we were looking for in life is what we are? After we strip away what we are not, that is. This is the central message of “The Secret of the Golden Flower,” a delightfully simple book that could take a lifetime to grasp.

Thomas Cleary translated this classic Taoist guide to meditation. In his introduction he says:

The golden flower symbolizes the quintessence of the paths of Buddhism and Taoism. Gold stands for light, the light of the mind itself; the flower represents the blossoming, or opening up, of the light of the mind.

…This manual contains a number of helpful meditation techniques, but its central method is deeper than a form of meditation. Using neither idea nor image, it is a process of getting right to the root source of awareness itself. The aim of this exercise is to free the mind from arbitrary and unnecessary limitations imposed upon it by habitual fixation on its own contents.

…The essential practice of the golden flower requires no apparatus, no philosophical or religious dogma, no special paraphernalia or ritual. It is practiced in the course of daily life. It is near at hand, being in the mind itself, yet it involves no imagery or thought. It is remote only in the sense that it is a use of attention generally unfamiliar to the mind habituated by imagination and thinking.

Every religion is based on conjectures about the nature of God, soul, morality, salvation, heaven, and such. Yet the nature of the mind that is conjecturing about all this stuff rarely is given much thought.

Not that it is possible to understand that nature by thinking about thoughts. But at least this leads to the humble realization that we don’t really know where the contents of the mind come from, nor how much faith should be placed in them—especially when it comes to abstractions that have no evident connection to material reality.

The Secret of the Golden Flower suggests that before we start making bold pronouncements about God, we should give some attention to the mind that is prone to making bold pronouncements about things it doesn’t have a clue about.

Here are some passages from the book:

Naturalness is called the Way. The Way has no name or form; it is just the essence, just the primal spirit.

Turning the light around is not turning around the light of one body, but turning around the very energy of Creation.

If you can look back again and again into the source of mind, whatever you are doing, not sticking to any image of person or self at all, then this is “turning the light around wherever you are.” This is the finest practice.

Deliberate meditation is the light of consciousness; let go, and it is then the light of essence. A hairsbreadth’s difference is as that of a thousand miles, so discernment is necessary.

The Way is present before our eyes, yet what is before our eyes is hard to understand. People like the unusual and enjoy the new; they miss what is right in front of their eyes and do not know where the Way is. The Way is the immediate presence.

If you read “The Secret of the Golden Flower,” be sure not to skip Cleary’s extensive notes on virtually every passage. His deep knowledge of Zen and Taoism clarifies what would be murky to an average reader like me.

Cleary also offers an Afterword where he speaks about how he has applied golden flower principles in his own spiritual practice and further explicates the meaning of this profound churchless text.

This teaching calls itself a “special transmission outside of doctrine,” free from attachment to dogma and form, based on direct perception of the essence of mind and recovery of its inherent potential.

…For practical purposes, a distinction is made in the golden flower teaching between the “original spirit” and the “conscious spirit.” The original spirit is the formless essence of awareness; it is unconditioned and transcends culture and history. The conscious spirit is the mind-set of feelings, thoughts, and attitudes, conditioned by personal and cultural history, bound by habit to specific forms.

…Intuition belongs to the original spirit; intellect belongs to the conscious spirit. The essence of Taoism is to refine the conscious spirit to reunite it with the original spirit.

In doing so, you’ll be saying goodbye to religion, which can’t exist without dogma, theology, concepts, emotions, commandments, and other artificial creations of the human mind.

Trust your intuition. When the original spirit calls, put down your holy book and attend to its wordless message. You’ll never be able to tell anyone else what you heard. But the smile on your face will speak volumes.

Churchless books and sites to explore

One of my most enjoyable blogging benefits is learning what inspires Church of the Churchless visitors. Amazon benefits also, because I’ve bought quite a few books after hearing about them from an email or post comment.

Here are some titles that have come to my attention recently. I’ll also throw in several web sites that either are related to authors of those books, or stand alone as interesting sites to explore.

The Secret of the Golden Flower. Amazon delivered this Taoist/Buddhist meditation guide yesterday. I’m already about half way through this short book. I like it.

The Mind and the Way: Buddhist Reflections on Life. Looks interesting. But struck me as similar to other Buddhist books in my library. Will probably hold off on getting this title until my backlog of unfinished books clears up.

Collision With the Infinite: A Life Beyond the Personal Self. A lot of people clearly resonate with the author, Suzanne Segal. I’ve read Bernadette Roberts’ “no-self” books, so decided to pass on this one for the time being, as it struck me as Roberts-like.

Emptiness Dancing. The title alone drew me in. This book by Adyashanti is on its way to me from an Amazon-associated seller. I have a feeling I’m going to like it.

Spiritual Humanism. This web site describes Möller de la Rouvière’s philosophy and his book, “Spirituality Without God.” Yes, I’m reading his book too. My big spiritual bet is that when I die and reach the Pearly Gates, there will be a heaven entrance exam that covers material from my metaphysical and philosophical readings.

Christianity Meme. Any web site that calls Christianity “a mind virus that controls human behavior to facilitate its own survival” has to get a thumbs-up.

U.G. Krishnamurti. Not to be confused with J. Krishnamurti, this web site describes U.G. as a “spiritual terrorist” whose message is a “grenade in the brain.” Sounds good. Otherwise, I don’t know much about him yet.

Distributed unconsciousness. Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as “God,” “Tao,” or “Brahman,” but it seems to be billed as a modern way of describing the ultimate. Who knew? And who knew about WikiReason? I didn’t, until I was led to this site.

The Natural Taoist. Another WikiReason site that I found via the previous link. Based on a quick look, it appears worth a closer reading. I consider myself a Taoist. And natural.

“God Laughs and Plays” but doesn’t go to church

I figured that I’d enjoy a book subtitled “Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right.” And I did.

“God Laughs and Plays” is David James Duncan’s paean to fly-fishing rather than pew-sitting, to practicing Christian love rather than judgmental hatred, to finding inspiration in God’s natural creation rather than the artificial human dogma found in misnamed “holy” books.

A talented writer like Duncan best speaks for himself. So I’ll shut up and let him do the saying. Here’s some passages that I especially liked:

Intense spiritual feelings were frequent visitors during my boyhood, but they did not come from churchgoing or from bargaining with God through prayer. The connection I felt to the Creator came, unmediated, from Creation itself.

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Following intuition and love with all the sincerity and attentiveness I could muster, I consciously chose a life spent in the company of rivers, wilderness, Wisdom literature, like-minded friends, and quiet contemplation. And as it’s turned out, this life—though dirt-poor in church pews—has enriched me with a sense of the holy, and left me far more grateful than I can say.

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God is Unlimited. Thought and language are limited.

God is the fathomless but beautiful Mystery Who creates the universe and you and me, and sustains it and us every instant, and always shall. The instant we define this fathomless Mystery It is no longer fathomless. To define is to limit. The greater a person’s confidence in their definition of God, the more sure I feel that their worship of “Him” has become the worship of their own definition. I don’t point this out to insult the fundamentalists’ or anyone else’s God. I point it out to honor the fathomless Mystery.

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If you’ve got yourself a little faith community and feel some love and mercy bubbling up in it, why mess with that? Why “structure” it? Why “enchurch” it? Why not just live it and be thankful?

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To judge by the conservation voting records of those the Christian Right supports in Congress, however, the majority of fundamentalists see Mother Earth as a trampoline upon which we must stomp, the harder we stomp the more proud of us God will be, for Earth is fleeting, and only here to launch us toward heaven, so why not blow mountains up and dump them as rubble on top of streams, and why not support, from the pulpits of our so-called houses of God, so-called conservative candidates who conserve nothing but corporate profits reaped through our Armageddon-aimed Earth-stomping agenda?

We nonfundamentalist students of the Bible can think of many reasons not to practice such a “faith”—the words, example, and Person of Jesus chief among them.

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Needing church—which I have to admit I define as “two or less gathered in His Name”…

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A second thing that attracted me to Jesus at age seven: His father was allegedly God; and God had made the world and trees and rivers and stars and mountains and birds and clouds and sunlight and raspberries and animals and snowflakes and wildflowers and wilderness; and even though nobody could prove any of this like, scientifically, I loved the world God had allegedly made so much that it seemed like a good idea to love God, too.

Trouble was, I didn’t. Loving Creation made sense to me the same way that loving, say, Peanut M & M’s made sense. You tossed a handful of Peanut M & M’s in your mouth, crunched down, your tastebuds fired off, and without even trying, Yum! Love! Gratitude! Piece o’ cake. Loving the Invisible God Who’d created Creation, on the other hand, felt more like trying to love the unknown and invisible people who worked at the Peanut M & M’s factory.

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As for my having left institutional religion behind without bitterness: how in the Name of the Lover of field lilies, the poor, the prostituted, and His own murderers, could I be bitter about having traded self-righteousness, pharisaism, judgmentalism, and church pews for sunlit river banks and rising fish and moonrises over Rocky Mountain ridges and the path of intuition and salmon runs and great literature and world Wisdom traditions and abiding friendships and the incessant following of the sweet scent of love?

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I consider the infinite wilds to be the divine manuscript. I hold these wilds to be the only unbowdlerized copy we have of the Book that gives and sustains life.

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The word “mysticism” still means little to me as an experiencer, since everything I experience continues to simply be what it is. But as the beneficiary of certain inner experiences that have guided my life, and as a writer in love with a world in which much of what is visible is abused and much of what is life-giving is unseen, my respect for the word “mysticism” grows if only because, by definition, it shepherds us toward realms in which “what is” is much more than physical.

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If we are ever to rise to new levels of consciousness or to the Beauty that is Truth, we’ve got to describe our perceptions as consciousness truly perceives them. I therefore confess my lifelong love for a wilderness found outside myself, till once in a while I encounter it within.

It’s a wilderness entered, it seems, through agendaless alertness at work, rest, or play in the presence of language, rivers, mountains, music, plants, creatures, rocks, moon, sun, dust, pollen grains, dots, spheres, galaxies, grains of sand, stars, every sort of athletic ball, cells, DNA, molecules, atomic particles, and immaterial forces.

It’s a wilderness that occasionally “inside-outs” me, leading to a Teilhardinian burning and Leopoldian harmony that leave my mind wondrous happy but far, far behind. It’s a wilderness my trusty dog, Reason, will never succeed in sniffing out or chomping up, yet a wilderness I’ve been so long and grandly assailed by that I’ve lost all but comic interest in the dog’s endless hounding and suspect that even he begins to enjoy himself when the wilderness flips us inside itself.

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If I stake my life on one field, one wild force, one sentence issuing from Sinai it is this one: There is no goal beyond love.

One last quote. Concerning the title. From Meister Eckhart, the medieval mystic theologian whose teachings were so truthful he was accused of heresy by the Pope.

Truly! Truly! By God! By God! Be as sure of it as you are that God lives: at the least good deed done here in this world, the least bit of good will, the least good desire, all the saints in heaven and on earth rejoice, and together with the angels their joy is such that all the joy in this world can’t be compared. But the joy of them all together amounts to as little as a bean when compared to the joy of God over good deeds. For truly, God laughs and plays.

Who’s afraid of this big bad blog?

This Church of the Churchless weblog doesn’t strike me as scary. Not like a big bad wolf. Pretty much all I do is say it as I see it. My most frequent utterance is “I don’t know.” For variety I try to express this un-profundity in alternative ways, but they all end up pointing at my metaphysical cluelessness.

My musings wouldn’t be threatening if it weren’t for a secondary theme: “I don’t know, and there’s no proof that you do either.” It’s the sentiment after the comma that strikes at the heart of organized religious pretension.

I have to assume that this is what galls the ecclesiastical authorities who represent Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the mystico-spiritual organization that I’ve been associated with for over thirty years and which I have much fondness for.

So much fondness, that I regularly take some time and trouble to critique RSSB’s failures to live up to its claim that it preaches a “science of the soul.” If I didn’t care about the organization I’d give it as much attention as I do to goings on with the Southern Baptists.

Another reason RSSB pops up in my posts fairly frequently is that I still have some connections with this group. As I wrote about back in February, Matt (a New Zealand RSSB initiate) and I collaborated on publishing a German translation of my first book, “God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder.”

The translation was of a shorter and simpler version, but it contained almost all of the quotations from books written by RSSB gurus and disciples that were in the original version. When “God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder” was published in 1995, six thousand copies of my book were purchased by RSSB for resale through its own distribution channels.

What I tried to do was show that mysticism can be a spiritual science, just as physics is a material science. The book didn’t appeal to everyone in RSSB, for sure. But it struck a chord with those who looked upon meditation more as a method for knowing ultimate reality than as devotion to a personal god or guru.

I didn’t mention back in February why I got involved in publishing the German translation. Matt had contacted some RSSB powers-that-be and asked if his translation could be copied and made available to German speaking disciples. They said, “No.”

I couldn’t leave it at that. I felt bad that Matt had put so much work into his translation, only to have it rejected by the group that he had primarily performed this service for. So I emailed Matt and told him that one way or another, we’d get “Wenn Gott flüstert, donnert es in der Schöpfung” published.

And we did. I ended up publishing the book under my own imprint, Adrasteia Publishing. I paid for the book design and setup costs. It’s a print on demand title made available through Lightning Source and thence to online bookstores like Amazon-Germany.

I priced the book most reasonably. Likely I’ll never make back the money I put into publishing it. Not that I care. Like Matt, I considered this project to be a gift to German speaking readers. Our payback wouldn’t be in dollars (or euros). I feel like I’ve already been well-compensated.

After the book was published RSSB was contacted once more. Could the book be made available through their distribution channels? After all, six thousand copies of the English version were bought and resold at cost by RSSB. Why not do the same on a smaller scale for the German translation?

This time a reason for “No” was given. “It’s because of Brian Hines’ Church of the Churchless blog.”

How ridiculous.

There are good reasons for rejecting a non-fiction book. Untrue. Uninteresting. Uninspiring. Unintelligible. However, rejecting a book because the author has a weblog where he writes about what he wrote about in the book—that doesn’t make sense to me.

Admittedly, I write about other subjects too. Including the aforementioned criticisms of Radha Soami Satsang Beas. Yet I always think back to the words of Charan Singh, the guru who initiated me: “Our critics are our best friends.” In science that is true. In religion it isn’t.

So RSSB has helped make the point that I dwell on in some of my posts. When the focus is on the messenger rather than the message, you know you’re in the domain of religion rather than science. If a revered guru says something, by itself that doesn’t make it right. If a heretical disciple says something, by itself that doesn’t make it wrong.

I’m with the X-files: the truth is out there. There’s nothing to fear but our failure to find it. And maybe not even that.

How I wrote a holy book

Did you know that I wrote a holy book? Yes, indeed. Brian Hines, the unpastor of the Church of the Churchless, is the author of “Life is Fair.” It was published in India by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) in 1999 with a first printing of 25,000 copies.

When I first got a copy of the book I enjoyed looking at the back page. There was “Life is Fair” listed in the Books on Sant Mat in General category, right along with such classics as “The Path of the Masters” by Julian Johnson.

I wrote the book because I was asked to. One day the phone rang and I found myself talking to Faith Singh, the head of RSSB publications in India. She said that a book project aimed at explaining the karmic rationale for vegetarianism had stalled. Faith asked if I’d like to review the work that had been done so far and take it from there.

I said, “Sure.” The guru who initiated me, Charan Singh, reportedly had said that he’d like to be able to hand out a little book that would explain why it is wrong to eat meat. He died before such a book could be written. I was honored to be able to offer my guru a posthumous gift.

I got to thinking about “Life is Fair” while watching the first episode of PBS’s Bill Moyers on Faith and Reason last Friday. Salman Rushdie was his guest. Near the end of the program Rushdie was shown reading from “The Satanic Verses.” This was the supposedly blasphemous book that forced Rushdie to spend ten years underground, hiding from Islamic assassins.

A transcript of the Rushdie interview is well worth checking out. He’s a courageous guy who knows first-hand how dangerous true believers can be. He has no qualms about writing “The Satanic Verses.” I haven’t read the book, so was interested to hear the excerpt read by Rushdie.

It is about an educated scribe, who happens to be called Salman, and his experience taking down rules dictated by the prophet Mahound—who is channeling the Archangel Gibreel. Salman suspects that the revelations have much more to do with Mahound’s earthly ambitions than any godly purpose.

Salman began to notice how useful and well-timed the angel's revelations tend to be, so that when the faithful were disputing Mahound's views on any subject from the possibility of space travel to the permanence of hell, the angel would turn up with an answer, and he always supported Mahound.

So Salman starts to change Mahound’s recitations. Minor changes at first. Then, when Mahound doesn’t notice the alterations when his words are read back to him, bigger edits. For example, “He said Christian. I wrote down Jew.” Mahound still is clueless.

Here's the point. Mahound did not notice the alterations. So there I was actually writing the book or-- or rewriting anyway, polluting the word of God with my own profane language.

But good heavens if my poor words could not be distinguished from the revelation by God's own messenger, then what did that mean? What did that say about the quality of the divine poetry? Look, I swear, I was shaken to my soul. It's one thing to be a smart bastard and have half suspicions about funny business, but it's quite another thing to find out that you're right.

I can tell you for a fact that no angel helped me write “Life is Fair.” The book came right out of my own mind, then improved with some expert editing by Jean Rosenblatt, Faith Singh, and others. I have no idea whether the metaphysical side of what I wrote is true. I thought at the time that is was, but now I don’t know.

Karmic law may guide what happens to souls after death. Or it may not. Each of us will find out after we die.

“Life is Fair” contains intriguing spiritual hypotheses which will make a lot of sense, or seem like nonsense, depending on your perspective. In no way is it a divine revelation. Yet my book is read at meetings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas devotees as if it was. The same is true of the other books published by RSSB. It is assumed that if this religious organization puts its stamp of approval on a title, the words inside can be trusted.

Yet in the case of “Life is Fair” I know that they can’t be, since I wrote them most fallibly. I read other books about karma and vegetarianism. I delved into my own experience. I stared out the window, came up with ideas, and typed them into my word processor. Then I’d re-read what I wrote and change it. Sometimes I’d start a chapter over again from scratch.

I’m willing to bet that most (if not all) “holy books” have been written in much the same fashion. Human beings put down what they believe to be true. But they don’t know for sure. So a reader should give their words no more credence than he or she would give the content of any other book.

No book is holy, just as no flag is. Today, thankfully, the United States Senate failed to approve a constitutional amendment that would ban burning of the American flag. Proponents talk of “desecration,” as if a piece of cloth somehow could be divine.

Nothing earthly is. Not the American flag. And certainly not books written by all-too-human beings.

Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.

Take your dose of Daily Afflictions

You’ve got to love a self-help book that advises, “It’s not whether I arrive; it’s how I lose my way.” Along with, “My life is worthless, but it’s mine.” And, “The future is full of possibilities that I must shoot in the head.”

In this world of organic antioxidant green tea, Andrew Boyd’s Daily Afflictions is a refreshing blast of lukewarm stale coffee. With a cigarette butt on the bottom. The back cover warns what awaits the reader:

In Daily Afflictions, affirmational bromides become Boyd’s Trojan horse—for a Nietzschean text of dark truths and painfully hard-won wisdom. Attractively designed for desperate readers on the run, Boyd’s bitter pills are an unbeliever’s guide to the realm of Higher Truth. And they might even make you laugh along the way.

Yes, absolutely. This book is one of my churchless favorites. It is cynical, ironic, existential, mystical, and best of all, true. Most slim volumes filled with pithy wisdom that you find around bookstore cash registers make me want to barf. They’re too sickly sweet to keep down.

Daily Afflictions, on the other hand, urges me to puke. Hypocrisy, false hope, self-delusion, get it all out. That’s real. Boyd’s alter ego is Brother Void. His peak mystical experience wasn’t exactly that of being embraced by the light:

The fabric of the air gave way. An immense field of horror spread before him. And from within him a terrible emptiness rose to meet it, hemorrhaging through the room, into the night, to the zeniths of space and time. Now go, go, go. Don’t turn away. Go through it, follow it, sail right on into it. And he dove forward like a reckless cone of life, leaving behind all he had ever known or wished for.

Excerpts from the book can be found on the Daily Afflictions web site. I particularly like “Skeptical Mysticism.” Boyd hits it right on the bull’s-eye of unbelieving belief.

You often hear about believers who have a crisis of faith. But what of the skeptics among us who have a crisis of doubt?...I am One with a God I do not believe in.

(For another perspective on Daily Afflictions, this review in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s “Daily Cardinal” is worth a read.)

Losing faith in the fiction of Jesus

Christians sometimes say that there are just three options as to who Jesus was: a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord. Bart Ehrman adds a fourth option: legend. Ehrman is a Biblical scholar and author of “Misquoting Jesus.”

His book strikes at the heart of Christian faith. For the Bible is considered to be the inerrant Word of God. But the problem is, we don’t know what those words were. There is no original trustworthy Biblical text. All we have are copies of copies of texts that were changed countless times over the centuries, sometimes from simple clerical error, sometimes purposely.

Ehrman once was a devout evangelical. Now he is an agnostic. His scholarship caused him to realize that the words of the Bible can’t be trusted. There’s no proof that Jesus was divine, that he was resurrected from the dead, that he performed miracles, that belief in him results in salvation.

You can believe in Jesus if you like. You can also believe in the Easter Bunny. Or Santa Claus. Or leprechauns. If it makes you feel good to believe in a legend, do it. Just don’t expect that other people should take you seriously or respect your ill-founded faith. Ehrman writes:

Occasionally I see a bumper sticker that reads: “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.” My response is always, What if God didn’t say it? What if the book you take as giving you God’s words instead contains human words? What if the Bible doesn’t give a foolproof answer to the questions of the modern age—abortion, women’s rights, gay rights, religious supremacy, Western-style democracy, and the like?

What if we have to figure out how to believe on our own, without setting up the Bible as a false idol—or an oracle that gives us a direct line of communication with the Almighty?

Reading “Misquoting Jesus” was a real eye-opener for me. This is billed as the first book about modern Biblical textual criticism that is aimed at general readers, not scholars. I’d always been skeptical that the gospels bore much resemblance to what Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John actually said (leaving aside the bigger question as to whether what they said is true).

Now I know that my skepticism is well-founded. I suspect that most Christians think the Bible they read on Sunday was written soon after Jesus’ death and has come down to us unaltered. Nothing could be further from the truth. If their Christian faith rests on the words of the Bible, it is resting on slippery sand. Ehrman says this about Biblical texts:

Not only do we not have the originals, we don’t have the first copies of the originals. We don’t even have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later—much later…If one wants to insist that God inspired the very words of scripture, what would be the point if we don’t have the very words of scripture?...It’s a bit hard to know what the words of the Bible mean if we don’t even know what the words are!

There are several worthy candidates for the title of World’s Craziest Major Religion. I go back and forth trying to decide which faith deserves this dishonorable honor. Usually Christianity and Islam run neck and neck in my mind. I’ll give this to Islam, though: at least the modern day Koran is, to my understanding, unchanged from the days of Mohammed. Muslim beliefs may be weird, but at least they’re consistently weird.

Christianity, by contrast, is a mish-mash of dogma that has been cobbled together over the centuries. Little, if any, can be reliably traced to Jesus. There’s little doubt that if Jesus returned to earth today and took a look at the Christian faith he’d say, “What the hell is that all about?”

Ehrman has rejected a religion that no longer made sense to him. He talks a bit about his personal journey from faith to faithlessness in “Misquoting Jesus” but mostly keeps himself in the background. As a continuation to this post I’ll include a fascinating Washington Post review of his book that provides a fuller picture of Ehrman, the man.

German translation reflects my transformation

My first book, “God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder,” is back in print, albeit in another language. As I noted on my other blog yesterday, New Zealander Matthias Schneider-Marfels, a.k.a. Matt, translated my revision of the book into German.

We’ve managed to publish it through my own imprint, Adrasteia Publishing, and it’s now available on Amazon USA and Amazon Germany. Matt and I put a lot of work into the book. It’s satisfying to see it in print for several reasons, not least of which is that “Wenn Gott flüstert, donnert es in der Schöpfung” is a reflection of transformations I’ve been experiencing.

Compared to the original, this book is shorter, simpler, and less preachy. So am I now, which I’m glad about, though as I said in “Oh God, I’m shrinking!” I could do without the shorter bit.

A few years ago I decided to rewrite “God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder” because I could barely stand to read some parts of it. During the ten years since it was published by Threshold Books I’ve become more skeptical of the claim that some people have attained the status of being God in Human Form, or GIHF.

There may be GIHFs around. There may not. I don’t know. I do know that I’m not a GIHF, or it wouldn’t have taken me so long to find the Thai food leftovers in the refrigerator half an hour ago. And I’m not aware of any solid evidence that anyone else has a legitimate claim to the title of God in Human Form either.

So I took out all mention of “perfect masters” (or gurus). I put more emphasis on how the experiment of contemplative meditation can be used to test the hypothesis that the essence of us, consciousness, also is the essence of the cosmos. This makes scientific sense, since science theorizes that unity is a hallmark of ultimate reality. One Theory of Everything is being sought, not several.

Matt told me that he missed some of the material that I took out of the book. I’m sure other fans of the original will too if they read the revision (the English version of which I’m planning to publish fairly soon). I hewed pretty much to the Radha Soami Satsang Beas party line at the time I wrote “God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder” and that came through in some over-the-top preachiness.

I still firmly believe in the potential of meditation as a means of exploring whatever domains of consciousness may lie beyond our current everyday experience of waking, dreaming, and deep sleep. To my mind mysticism truly can be a spiritual science if it is purged of religious elements.

I’ve been similarly trying to purge my own spiritual practice of religious ritual, dogma, and blind faith. I hope that one day I’m able to fully practice what I preach (in a low-key scientific sense) in “Wenn Gott flüstert, donnert es in der Schöpfung.”

Be a spiritual rebel!

Here are some inspirational quotations about spiritual independence from Anthony de Mello, a Jesuit priest who was born in India and wonderfully melded the best of East and West.

In 1998, after his death, his writings were condemned by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the current Pope.

To me that’s a high recommendation of de Mello. If you’re condemned by the Catholic Church, you must be doing something right spiritually.

I have two of his books. The quotations below are from “The Way to Love.” This is an official-looking de Mello website. More excerpts from his writings can be read here and here.

I love the guy. He energizes my inner rebel.
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“But you have also been programmed not to suspect, not to doubt, just to trust the assumptions that have been put into you by your tradition, your culture, your society, your religion.

And if you are not happy, you have been trained to blame yourself, not your programming, not your cultural and inherited ideas and beliefs.”
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“First, realize that you are surrounded by prison walls, that your mind has gone to sleep. It does not even occur to most people to see this, so they live and die as prison inmates.

Most people end up being conformists; they adapt to prison life. A few become reformers; they fight for better living conditions in the prison, better lighting, better ventilation.

Hardly anyone becomes a rebel, a revolutionary who breaks down the prison walls. You can only be a revolutionary when you see the prison walls in the first place.”
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“Your ego is a great technician. It cannot be creative. It goes in for methods and techniques and produces so-called holy people who are rigid, consistent, mechanical, lifeless, as intolerant of others as they are of themselves—violent people the very opposite of holiness and love.”
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“You can get someone to teach you things mechanical or scientific or mathematical like algebra or English or riding a cycle or operating a computer.

But in the things that really matter, life, love, reality, God, no one can teach you a thing. All they can do is give you formulas. And as soon as you have a formula, you have reality filtered through the mind of someone else.

If you take those formulas you will be imprisoned. You will wither and when you come to die you will not have known what it means to see for yourself, to learn.”
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“So, what can teachers do? They can bring to your notice what is unreal, they cannot show you Reality; they can destroy your formulas, they cannot make you see what the formula is pointing to; they can indicate your error, they cannot put you in possession of the Truth.

They can, at the most, point in the direction of Reality, they cannot tell you what to see. You will have to walk out there all alone and discover for yourself.”
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“You have lost the freedom to make a fool of yourself, to be laughed at and to be ridiculed, to do and say whatever feels right to you rather than what fits in with the image others have of you.”
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“Contrary to what your culture and religion have taught you, nothing, but absolutely nothing can make you happy. The moment you see that, you will stop moving from one job to another, one friend to another, one place, one spiritual technique, one guru to another.

None of these things can give you a single minute of happiness. They can only offer you a temporary thrill, a pleasure that initially grows in intensity, then turns into pain if you lose them and into boredom if you keep them.”
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“If we are dissatisfied, not with anything in particular but with everything, then I think we shall find that our discontent brings clarity. When we don’t accept or follow, but question, investigate, penetrate, there is an insight out of which come creativity, joy.

…The day you are discontented not because you want more of something but without knowing what it is you want; when you are sick at heart of everything that you have been pursuing so far and you are sick of the pursuit itself, then your heart will attain a great clarity, an insight that will cause you mysteriously to delight in everything and in nothing.”

I’m becoming my favorite book

Standing in front of the Book Bin’s Eastern religion section today, I experienced a literary mini-satori: The only book I really want to buy is me.

My exceedingly mild enlightenment descended upon me after a minute or so of browsing. I’d been thumbing through the only sections, Buddhism and Taoism, that are of any interest to me recently.

The voluminous shelves of Christian books, ugh. Judaism, no interest. Islam and Sufism, too preachy. So I was reduced to pawing through a few square feet of Buddhist and Taoist writings, and even here I found myself replacing possible purchases almost as soon as I glanced at the front and back covers.

Dogmatic. Too personal. A rehash. Superficial. Overly intellectual.

Then the flash of insight hit me. What I was looking for was a spiritual book that exactly expressed everything that I already hold to be true. In short, I wanted to read about me. My beliefs, my approach to fathoming the meaning of life, my meditation practice, my God-philosophy.

I wasn’t searching for fresh truth. I wanted a validation of what is already true for me. I wasn’t trying to find answers to the big questions of life. I hoped to find that someone else had dealt with the questions in the same way as I am.

The obvious ridiculousness of my self-reflective quest almost made me walk out of the book store. Almost.

For I ended up buying “Dropping Ashes on the Buddha: The Teaching of Zen Master Seung Sahn.” Again, not so much because I’ll learn anything new from the book. I just liked the idea of dropping ashes on the Buddha. Or Jesus, God, Allah, Lao Tzu, Moses, Zoroaster, the Pope, a guru—anyone who is unduly reverenced for reasons that aren’t genuinely reverential.

Someday, perhaps, I’ll stop buying spiritual books that simply reflect my own vision of reality. I’ll have enough confidence in myself to trust me directly, instead of feeling drawn to highlight passages that I could have written and muttering, “Ah, well said.”

Whenever I go to Powell’s Books in Portland, one of the country’s largest bookstores, where the religious and metaphysical area seems to go on forever, I’m struck by how the browsers in each aisle so closely reflect the subject matter being browsed.

There in the Wiccan section will be a long-haired woman in a flowing purple dress wearing lots of jewelry. There in the Judaic section will be a serious-looking man with a skullcap. There in the Christian section will be a soberly-dressed teenager with a cross around her neck.

And there in the Eastern philosophy section will be a gray-haired man with a beard wearing a batik shirt. Me. Looking for a book that will affirm what I already know. Or rather, am pretty sure that I know. As are my fellow spiritual book-browsing comrades.

The wisdom we’re all looking for is us. We just aren't convinced of that yet.

Except, when I read what I just wrote, I have to ask, “Don’t I know that, since I said it?” Yes, I do.

But the question is, am I ready to hear my own answer?

Mystery is omnipresent

I’ve been pondering what I wrote about in my last post—that I’ve never had any mystical experiences. It’s true in one sense and completely false in another sense. For everything is mysterious. Hence, mystical.

Luther Askeland, author of the marvelous book “Ways in Mystery,” helped remind me of this. I’ve been re-reading several of his essays the past few days. “The Way of Unknowing” is a classic. Also “The God in the Moment.”

Heck, his entire book is a classic, one of my all-time favorites. Luther and I have traversed the same territory in our mystical/spiritual readings: Buddhism in general, Zen in particular, St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, other Christian mystics, a host of others.

But every time I read “Ways in Mystery”—and it’s been several times—I’m blown away by how Luther peels the onion skin of truth-seeking a level (or two) deeper than I’m able or willing to go myself.

He is utterly dedicated to the pursuit of what lies beyond appearances: mystery. He isn’t content with anything but the real deal, whatever it is. He has played all the spiritual games that I’ve played, yet is able to stand apart from the playing field and analyze the action in a fashion that I’m incapable of.

And yet…we’re brothers. As are we all. Brothers and sisters, in mystery. We pretend to ourselves that we know what’s going on, but we haven’t a clue. Not really. We form religions, philosophies, and sciences that purport to answer the big questions about existence, but they don’t. Not even close.

Where did the universe come from? What will be its end? Is there anything other than the four-dimensional world of time and space that we know now? Does eternity lie on the other side of time, boundlessness on the other side of space? To name but a few questions.

Luther points out that such ultimate queries are the province of the mystic. Scientists and rational philosophers correctly say that those questions can’t be answered with the mental and sensual tools available to us So they turn their attention to more practical investigations.

Alternatively, the average person is preoccupied with living life: raising a family, holding onto a job, pursuing hobbies, keeping fit, watching TV. If he or she considers ultimate questions at all, it is almost always in the context of a religion that provides ready-made answers.

And then, says Luther, there is the mystic:

The mystic is someone who recognizes that the central fact or datum—the existence of the world, of God, or of God and world—transcends our intellect. By way of asking why the world exists, the mystic has discovered that we are part of a reality that our intellect cannot grasp or even properly question. The world has revealed itself to be mystery, or God has been revealed as mystery. Hereafter the mystic’s attention will remain fixed on that mystery.

How one’s attention is fixed on mystery is the big question. Basically it comes down to unknowing, the negative way, via negativa. Luther takes eighty-one thoughtful pages to explore the way of unknowing. It’s hard to do justice to this subject in a few paragraphs. But here’s the kernel, in my own words:

Become the mystery you seek to unravel.

That’s a mysterious statement. I don’t claim to understand it myself. Which is as it should be.

Mystery isn’t something to be understood. It is to be bumped up against, felt, recognized, appreciated, grokked, respected, admired, embraced. Not as something separate and distinct from my own self, but as myself. For just as the “why” of the universe as a whole is mystery pure and simple, so is the “why” of me. And, of course, you.

We like to pretend that, while pondering the dizzying mysteries of the universe, we’re doing so from the solid foundation of a self that makes sense. Yet, in truth the mystery of us is as unfathomable as the mystery of the cosmos. Luther says:

And as my habitual explanations melt away, I begin to see that my acts and my life are not safely enclosed within a sheltering context of explanation and justification. Instead it begins to seem that each of my acts, that my life, is an event that is indescribable, inexplicable and unjustifiable, an act that is just given.

I wrote in Part I that the intellect, having asked, “Why does the world exist?” eventually runs up against the irreducible and impenetrable fact of being. Now, having arrived at the end of our fragile and invariably questionable self-explanations, the intellect finally halts before the inexplicable and irreducible fact of “my life,” and before the impenetrable givenness of each act.

Those are just words. And Luther would be the first to agree that words are just words, not reality. Yet words can point to reality. And to the mystery that lies on the other side of words.

At this moment. At every moment. In this act. In every act. When I’m awake and aware. When I’m asleep and unconscious. Everywhere, all the time: mystery, mystery, mystery.

So I’ve had innumerable mystical experiences, as many as I’ve had experiences of any sort during my fifty-seven years of living. Because mystery is me.

There’s no need to cultivate a sense of the miraculous. All we have to do is open our eyes and see. Every moment is a mystery. The problem with religions and philosophies is that they cover up the miraculous with words, dogmas, theologies, concepts, rituals, beliefs, commandments—all sorts of stuff.

True spirituality is nothing but clearing away all that junk. What’s left is, well, nothing. You can’t pass through the eye of the Mystery Needle until it is free of obstructions.

Which means, you have to be as empty as emptiness, becoming the mystery you seek to unravel. The vacant eye of the needle is threaded with nothing—a subject for another post.

Kung fu meditating

Bruce Lee was a master of kung fu (or gung fu). I just finished reading a collection of his writings that were edited into a book, “The Tao of Gung Fu.”

I’ve studied martial arts for thirteen years and meditation for thirty-six years. More and more I’m coming to glimpse Lee’s basic point: they aren’t two things; there’s just one thing. He says:

Gung fu is more than just an excellent physical exercise or a highly scientific method of self-defense. To the Chinese, gung fu is a Way of training the mind as well as a Way of life. The spiritual side of gung fu cannot be learned by fact-finding or instruction in facts. It has to grow spontaneously, like a flower, in a mind free from desires and emotions. The core of this principle of gung fu is Tao—the spontaneity of the universe.

Spontaneity. That’s what it’s all about. Without spontaneity everything—the martial arts, meditation, life itself—is just a mechanical caricature of the vital living, breathing cosmos.

I can’t improve upon Bruce Lee’s words, which can be contemplated here. So I’ll simply try to say what they mean to me. That’s the spirit Lee wanted us to take his teachings: adapting them to our own unique personality and essential nature.

He says there are three stages in the cultivation of gung fu: (1) Primitive Stage, (2) the Stage of Art, and (3) the Stage of Artlessness. Again, he’s not just talking about martial arts here. He’s speaking about the whole of life.

Learning starts with ignorance. You don’t have the faintest idea what you’re supposed to do. Then, you learn some technique. You begin to think, “Hey, I’ve got this down.” But you really haven’t. The techniques aren’t genuinely part of you; they have to be consciously controlled.

So the goal is to move from art to artlessness. This, Lee says, “is the stage of cultivated ignorance.” This is different from the uncultivated ignorance with which you began. Back then, you didn’t know anything. Now you do.

However, on the mental level you’ve forgotten what you know. This allows you to act spontaneously, intuitively, harmoniously, fluidly, not needing to stop and ponder what technique needs to be used in a given situation.

I used to love Jim Carrey’s karate instructor routine on the TV show “In Living Color” (this was before he became hugely famous). “I’ll show you how to defend against a knife attack,” he’d say to the audience. Then he’d turn to his training partner, who was standing a few feet away with a rubber knife in his hand: “OK, go ahead.”

The guy would lunge forward and you’d hear an “Aaaaaarrrgh!” from Carrey as he clutched his stomach. “No!” he’d yell. “Don’t attack with your left hand, use your right! And don’t lunge. Step with your rear leg. Now, let’s try it again.”

And so it would go, his training partner never quite doing just what Carrey wanted as he tried to demonstrate how to defend against a knife attack that, on the street, would come unexpectedly out of anywhere.

This is the pitfall of relying on the mechanical practice of techniques, whether they be martial arts moves or meditation practices. The proof of the pudding isn’t in the practice; it’s in the real world application.

If your spirituality isn’t making you a better person, what good is it? Not a better person in your place of worship or meditation chamber—that’s an artificial controlled environment.

You need to be a better person in the everyday activities of life, because life isn’t divisible. Our “worldly” life isn’t something separate from our “spiritual” life. There’s just one life.

Some people have left comments on my posts saying that my criticisms of the spiritual organization that I belong to, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) aren’t justified because this group’s teachings have to be separated from how well members of RSSB apply those teachings. I don’t understand this way of thinking.

If you spent time observing a gung fu school where no student was able to defend himself, would you be justified in concluding, “This school has a good approach; it’s just that nobody can apply the techniques”? A school where learning isn’t happening isn’t a good school.

Again, the proof lies in reality, not words. Bruce Lee’s wisdom is as applicable to spiritual practice as to martial arts practice:

To me, styles that cling to one partial aspect of combat are actually in bondage. You see, a choice method, however exacting, fixes its practitioners in an enclosed pattern…In reality, the way of combat is never based on personal choice and fancies, and one will soon find that his choice routines lack pliability and are incapable of adapting to the ever-changing swift movement of combat.

All of a sudden his opponent is alive and no longer a cooperative robot. On other words, once conditioned in a partialized style, its practitioner faces his opponent through a screen of resistance. In reality, he is merely performing his stylized blocks and listening to his own screams.

In the course of interacting with high-ranking people in the RSSB organization during the writing of my book, “Return to the One,” I observed that they were just as prone to human frailties such as egotism, rigidity, and a desire to dominate as I was. We were all in the same boat, even though I had thought that, because of the positions they held, they were closer to the Spiritual Shore than I was.

This made me think. It’s as if I was observing a karate school where the people wearing black belts had pretty much the same skills as the white belts. Shouldn’t more learning be going on among the long-time students?

I thought some more. I was one of those long-time students. What had I learned? Was it just technique? Could I really apply my lessons in the real world? Had I become a slave of methods that weren’t applicable in everyday life? In short, was I the spiritual equivalent of a Jim Carrey/Fire Marshall Bill martial arts poseur?

I’m no Bruce Lee, nowhere close. But I resonate with his advice about how to be a “gung fu man.”

So in order to realize his true self, a gung fu man lives without being dependent upon the opinion of others…As months and years go by, as his training acquires fuller maturity, his bodily attitude and his way of managing the technique move toward no-mindedness which resembles the state of mind he had at the very beginning of training when he knew nothing, when he was altogether ignorant of the art.

…When the highest stage is reached in the study of Taoist teaching, a gung fu man turns into a kind of simpleton who knows nothing of Tao, nothing of its teachings, and is devoid of all learning…One should be in harmony with, not rebellion against, the fundamental laws of the universe. This means that we should do nothing that is not natural or spontaneous. The important thing is not to strain in any way.

Kung fu fighting. Kung fu meditating. All the same. Like the song says…

Oh-oh-oh-oh
Oh-oh-oh-oh
Oh-oh-oh-oh
Keep on....keep on....keep on
Oh-oh-oh-oh....Yeah, yeah
Oh-oh-oh-oh...

Don’t believe, just have faith

Sunday I gave a talk to my spiritual group that inspired me. So before I lose touch with my self-induced inspiration, I figured that I should capture it in a weblog posting. That way hopefully I can re-inspire myself as needed.

However, I have to admit that this whole way of thinking is at odds with what I was talking about. Namely, the absurd split between “I” and “me.” More defensible are the splits between “belief” and “faith” or “religion” and “science.” Nonetheless, we humans love to divide up reality with concepts divorced from experience, then get anxious about feeling divorced from nature, other people, God, and ourselves.

Alan Watts says that the only way to cure anxiety is to honestly recognize what’s real about the human condition. Suffering, pain, death, disease, unhappiness—yes, shit happens. This is a cold, cruel world. And also, a warm, comforting world. It’s up to us how it seems. Any alteration in the seeming, though, has to begin and end honestly.

I cited the adage that paranoids have enemies too. In his wonderful book, “The Wisdom of Insecurity” that I’m reading now,Watts says it is wrong to make the presence or absence of neurosis the touchstone of truth, and to argue that if a man’s philosophy makes him neurotic, it must be wrong. (This book was published in 1951, when people still talked about neuroses.)

So he says that it’s absurd to reason that because most atheists and agnostics are neurotic, and most simple Catholics are happy and at peace with themselves, the views of the former are false and those of the latter are true.

I liked this passage:

It is as if to say, “You say there is a fire in the basement. You are upset about it. Because you are upset, there is obviously no fire.” The agnostic, the skeptic, is neurotic, but this does not imply a false philosophy; it implies the discovery of facts to which he does not know how to adapt himself.

Like, I’m going to die. That’s a fact. I don’t know what to do about it. I think about death frequently. I don’t like the idea of it at all, especially as it applies to me, myself, and I. As Woody Allen said (more or less), “I don’t want my works of art to live on after me. I want me to live on after me.” Amen, brother.

Everyone feels insecure about something or other. Usually, lots of things and lots of others. Watts says that religious belief is one of the main ways people try to deal with anxiety. The reality of uncertainty is replaced with a belief that such-and-such is going to happen for sure in the future.

Jesus saves. The second coming is coming. Allah welcomes the faithful into paradise. The guru takes on his disciples’ karma. All beings will one day realize Buddha nature.

Whatever the belief is, it concerns a future happening or distant state of affairs, not an immediate direct experience. Yet since the present is all there is, memories of the past and anticipations of the future being part of the here and now, religious belief can’t be genuinely fulfilling.

For the future is, obviously, always around the corner. The promise of God-realization remains the carrot out of reach that we keep expecting to get with the next plodding step. So we step, and step, and step, to the end of our days. Always wanting. Never getting. Yet, says, Watts, there really is a reality that, if we could just see it, would make us say, “This is what I’ve been yearning for!” He says:

The discovery of this reality is hindered rather than helped by belief, whether one believes in God or believes in atheism. We must make here a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be.

The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Recently someone emailed me a essay by a Professor Krishna of the Krishnamurti Foundation in India. I liked it a lot and quoted Krishna in my talk. It’s called “Science and Spirituality: Two Aspects of a Single Reality.” Here’s an excerpt on the subject of belief:

The other factor that has very seriously bogged down the religious quest is belief. What does belief mean to a person who is in quest of truth ? We have to regard it the same way as a scientist regards a theory. The theory is not the truth, the model is not reality. We have to do experiments to find out what is true. But when we have belief, we are merely accepting something without evidence, which has little value.

Experimentation. For me, that’s the core of spirituality. Otherwise we’re just stuck in a bog of competing religious beliefs, all of them possibly true, none of them definitively so. I don’t want to risk the fate of my eternal soul, assuming I have one, on flinging a dart blindly at the world’s board of alternative religions and pledging allegiance to whichever belief system I land on.

Currently I still align myself outwardly with the mystical tradition of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB). I’m the treasurer for our local group. I give a talk about once a month to my RSSB brothers and sisters. But last Sunday I told my audience that I’ve come to the point where I can no longer speak about belief. I can’t spout off the dogma about guru, God, karma, soul, initiation, spirit, heavenly regions, reincarnation, all that stuff.

Instead, I’m an enthusiastic cheerleader for conducting the experiment of meditation. Prof. Krishna says, “The scientific quest is to discover the order in the external world of space, time, energy and matter. The spiritual quest is to discover order in our consciousness.” That’s what meditation is for me: an attempt to find out what simple order, if any, is at the root of my chaotic, confused, complex, cacophonous consciousness.

I don’t know what that order is. I want to. That’s faith. I don’t need belief. Just faith. Borrowing a metaphor from Alan Watts, I said that faith is akin to opening up the roof of a house and putting a skylight in so you can see what’s above, while belief is akin to painting the skylight’s glass blue. It’s a little bit like reality, but not much.

After I finished my talk a friend came up and said, “You’re crazy.” I replied, “But don’t you agree with what I was saying?” “Yes,” he said, “But I’m crazy too.” Well, two’s company. What he meant, I think, is that my attitude toward spirituality and the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas sounds heretical to many believers. Crazy, even.

Strangely, I’ve never felt more sane. Is this madness? Maybe. But it strikes me as a fine madness.

My friend said that the present guru of RSSB, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, is the most heretical of all. I tend to agree with him, though it has been a while since I’ve heard Gurinder Singh speak.

In my talk I quoted an anecdote that Ron Morey told me about his trip to India earlier this year. He said that Gurinder Singh said something along the lines of, “If you come to me and say that you have 100% faith, I won’t believe you. But if you say that you have doubts, now we can have a conversation.”

The faith being spoken of here really is belief. Having doubts is what I call true faith. You’re open to truth, not closed-up inside walls of illusory understanding.

Less belief, more faith. That’s my recipe for spiritual growth.

The loving “I” of God

Here are two excerpts from Mikhail Naimy’s “The Book of Mirdad” that I enjoyed reading today. The first passage speaks about the Supreme Consciousness that many call “God,” but Naimy says is better called “I”—His only Word (pardon the masculine reference to God; it’s Naimy’s use, not mine).

The second comes from a chapter on prayer where Naimy, in the person of Mirdad, starts off with: “You pray in vain when you address yourselves to any other gods but your very selves.” He refers us back to the Creative Word, the Supreme Consciousness, “I.”

Meister Eckhart says that God’s “I” is the same as our “I.” Beautiful. The eye with which I see God is exactly the same eye with which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowledge and one love.

Here’s how Naimy puts it:

“Though each of you be centred in his I, yet are you all encentred in one I, even the single I of God.

God’s I, O monks, is God’s eternal, only word. In it is God—The Consciousness Supreme—made manifest. Without it He would be a silence absolute. By it is the Creator self-created. By it is the Formless One made to take on a multiplicity of forms through which the creatures shall pass again to formlessness.

To feel Himself; to think Himself; to speak Himself God need not utter more than I. Therefore is I His only word. Therefore is it THE WORD.”

And…

“Remember that the key to Life is the Creative Word. The key to the Creative Word is Love. The key to Love is Understanding. Fill up your hearts with these and spare your tongues the pain of many words, and save your minds the weight of many prayers, and free your hearts from bondage to all gods who would enslave you with a gift; who would caress you with one hand only to smite you with the other; who are content and kindly when you praise them, but wrathful and revengeful when reproached; who would not hear you save you call, and would not give you save you beg; and having given you, too oft regret the giving; whose incense is your tear; whose glory is your shame.

Aye, free your hearts of all those gods that you find in them the Only God who, having filled you with Himself, would have you ever full.”

I. That’s God. I. That’s me and you. Filled with “I,” we’re full of God.

The trick is, I think, being filled just with “I,” pure consciousness, and nothing else.

That’s why nothing is the way to God.

Centering in on “The Supreme Doctrine”

Today I finished re-reading Hubert Benoit’s classic book about Zen psychology, “The Supreme Doctrine.” I’ve been quoting from “The Supreme Doctrine” in earlier posts, here and here.

Now I want to take a stab at writing about this book entirely in my own words. I’d like to share what has stuck in my mind after making my way through this wonderfully insightful treatment of man’s spiritual psyche. Benoit probably wouldn’t like the word “spiritual” used to describe his book, but now I get to describe it the way I want to.

That’s just the approach Benoit took toward Zen. In a concluding chapter he says that he isn’t sure how the great Zen masters would look upon his work. But he believes that they would approve of his effort to maintain his own personal thoughts in the face of all that has been written about Zen by others.

Breaking the rule I just made for myself (firmly in the Zen spirit), I’ll quote Benoit: “One remembers that Zen master who, seeing one of his pupils pouring over a Sutra [Buddhist scripture], said to him: ‘Do not let yourself be upset by the Sutra, upset the Sutra yourself instead.’ For only thus can there be established between the pupil and the Sutra a real understanding.”

So here’s my take on four themes that stick in my mind after reading “The Supreme Doctrine.” They’ve stuck because Benoit’s analysis of the human condition and the spiritual pursuit rings so true to my own experience. The minds of Homo sapiens' work much the same, no matter in what bodies they function. Frequently I’d read a passage where Benoit describes an introspective experience and think, “Why, he's just like me!”

Self and not-self. At the root of every thought and action, says Benoit, is the primal distinction between self and not-self. This rings absolutely true for me. I’m constantly evaluating how the world is affecting me and how I’m affecting the world. There’s a constant give and take between what seems to be “out there” and what seems to be “in here.”

When the world affirms me, my spirit soars. When the world denies me, my spirit sinks. My self is constantly at risk of being annihilated by the not-self, which is ever so much bigger and more powerful than I am. I’m just a teeny-tiny speck compared to the vastness of even just planet Earth, not to mention the inconceivable expanse of the entire universe.

Now, if I was nothing and the world was everything, then obviously there would be no problem. My self couldn’t get anxious about the prospect of being obliterated if I didn’t exist. However, this isn’t an appealing solution to my chronic anxiety about how the relationship between my self and the not-self is going, because what I’m anxious about is not existing. If the prescribed treatment is becoming nothing, then the cure is worse than the disease.

So how about if I become everything? That sounds a lot more appealing. I get to preserve my individuality. Even better, I get to expand my self so it encompasses the entire world. My Brian ego finds it easy to smile at that prospect. The only problem is how to accomplish this ballooning out of me. Obviously it can’t be attained physically—it isn’t possible to devour the Earth—so the solution has to be psychic.

Compensations. Which gets us to a word with psychoanalytic connotations that Benoit uses a lot (no surprise, since he was a practicing psychoanalyst), and I don’t claim to fully understand: “compensation.” My understanding of this term is that the self has to somehow compensate for the tremendously greater power of the not-self.

I couldn’t function if my ego recognized how insignificant I am compared to the cosmos. I’d be overwhelmed, crushed, psychically smashed to smithereens. Thus I conjure up some defenses. My mind, like all human minds, finds ways to make itself the center of the universe around which all else revolves.

Since everyone else is doing the same thing, we end up with a crazy quilt of overlapping compensations that produces the ever-entertaining dynamics of interpersonal relationships and intrapersonal psychology. My main compensative mechanism is identifying myself with what is not me. I assuage my anxiety about what the not-self might do to me by psychically bonding with as much of not-me as I can. And so do we all.

Attachment to my marriage partner. Patriotic commitment to my country. Devotion to my religion. Adherence to my ethical values. Belief in my core philosophical concepts. Engagement with my community. Appreciation of my natural surroundings. Interaction with my friends, pets, acquaintances, strangers on the street. Scientific understanding of my world and universe.

All of these attempts to build bridges between little me and the infinitely larger not-me (the above-mentioned obviously are just a sampling) have the effect of maintaining the integrity of my existence in the face of what otherwise seemingly would be a cold, cruel world. When they function as they should, my compensations nicely compensate for the fact that, crudely but accurately put, the universe could wipe me off its butt and flush me down the cosmic toilet without losing a speck of anything valuable.

This indeed is what will happen when I die. And seemingly it would happen before I die if my compensations fail me. If I let down the barriers between my self and my not-self, why, it would be like opening up the hatch of a submerged submarine. I’d sink like a stone to the bottom of an existential abyss. Or so I believe.

Imaginative film. My compensations are beliefs. My anxieties are beliefs. My hopes and fears for the future are beliefs. My understandings of myself are beliefs. My dreams are beliefs. My conceptions of God, heaven, and hell are beliefs. Virtually everything that I do and am is a belief embedded on the film of my imagination. It is through this film that I perceive the world. Not as it is, but as I imagine it to be.

“Imagine” may seem like an excessively strong word to describe all my thinking and emoting. Indeed, thoughts and feelings appear to be closely connected with what I consider to be objective reality. I see a beautiful sunset and think, “Ah, what a beautiful sunset.” Our dog wags her tail when I enter her room in the morning and I feel a burst of affection for this beloved canine companion.

And yet. The sunset doesn’t have any genuine connection with my thoughts about it. Nor do my feelings about our dog truly reflect the nature of her. The contents of my imaginative film are vitally important to me, the Brian “in here,” but to the world “out there,” they make not a whit of difference. If I vanished, the sunset and our dog would still exist. Less dramatically, if my imaginations vanished, the same would hold true.

Indeed, Zen teaches that things outside in the world would be more real for me if my internal world wasn’t filled with so much that is purely of my own making. If I could simply sense what is actually there, without adding on to that “is” all the thoughts and feelings that I customarily plaster over reality via my mental imaginative film, then I’d be much closer to the truth. Satori. Enlightenment. Salvation. Wisdom. Whatever you want to call it, I’d be nearer to it.

Thus, Benoit says, it turns out that all my efforts to defend my self against the inroads of the not-self actually end up making me less safe. For what I should be fearing isn’t the world of not-me, but rather the continuance of an illusory ego that maintains the fiction of a distinct difference between the self and the not-self.

A difference there is, but it is more like an ever-shifting boundary line between two similar entities—such as a small inlet and a vast ocean. At high tide the distinctions are erased; at low tide each is separate. Waves and water are fluid, though. You can’t draw a firm line between a inlet and the ocean to which it is connected.

Well, you can. Yet it would be an imaginary line, existing only as a concept, not part of real reality. Similarly, if we want to know the cosmos as it is, in contrast to how we imagine it to be, the contents of the imaginative film that normally obscures our perceptions have to be set aside. Somehow we need to perceive our self in relation to the world as that relationship is naturally, before we added on all of the extraneous thoughts and feelings that, though undeniably a part of being human, prevent us from realizing our divinity.

Buddha nature. Original self. Soul. More words to describe the wordless. Those words, those descriptions, they don’t help us see clearly. Rather, they are part of the imaginative film that has to be scrubbed clean of concepts before consciousness can look through an open window onto what is really there—not what is imagined to be there.

Humility. People who aspire to being spiritual usually consider, correctly, that humility is central to their pursuit. However, Benoit cautions against any sort of forced effort to be anything other than what we truly are. Reality, he says, will produce in us the perfect proportion of humility, for when we understand truly how self relates to not-self, there isn’t much of us left to be excessively proud about.

Further, it is self-evident that the self is virtually powerless against the not-self. Even without the just-mentioned understanding, life lived as it is at every moment screams at us a message that cannot fail to be heard: “The individual is nothing compared to the all that is everything.” Whatever I do, whatever I think, whatever I feel—the world proceeds on its own way, heedless of my actions, thoughts, and emotions.

I will drive myself crazy if I continue to believe that I am separate and distinct, that I exist as a firmly defined bubble of Brian, bobbing on my own in the otherwise fluidly connected ocean of the cosmos. The walls within which I have enclosed myself are of my ego’s own making. When they fall, my existence won’t be obliterated, but my imagined life that has Me at the center of the universe will.

I can’t will that will, however, for such an effort would simply sustain my erroneous belief in a self that acts independently of the rest of the world. Benoit says that genuine self-realization or satori isn’t caused by all of my efforts to bring it about. Rather, it follows those efforts. Not casually, but sequentially.

The cause isn’t under my control. All I can do is prepare myself for the cause—what Benoit calls my Principle—to work its way within me. That’s a humbling thought.

And when the thought of the humbling goes, that’s when the real humility has a chance to appear.

"The Supreme Doctrine," thirty-six years overdue

“The Supreme Doctrine: Psychological Studies in Zen Thought” is one of my favorite books. When I checked it out from the San Jose Public Library while I was a San Jose State University student, I couldn’t bear to return it.

It’s now thirty-six years overdue. I’m pretty sure I paid the library the $1.65 replacement cost. That’s a heck of a lot cheaper than 5 cents a day, times 365 days, times 36 years, which is what I would have owed by now.

This is the only library book I’ve ever kept permanently. I brought it on our Maui vacation (where my wife and I are now) because I haven’t re-read it for a long time, and I was curious to see if what attracted me so strongly to “The Supreme Doctrine” when I was twenty-one still was a spiritual magnet for me at the age of fifty-six.

It is.

Hubert Benoit, the author, was a psychiatrist and practicing psychoanalyst. I saw “was,” because “The Supreme Doctrine” was first published in 1951 and I assume Dr. Benoit is dead by now. I was a psychology major when I came across the book. I also was reading a lot of Zen literature at the time. So Benoit’s ability to translate Zen insights into a psychological framework fascinated me back then.

It still does.

Zen, along with Taoism, are wonderfully non-religious spiritual pursuits. So they continue to be mainstays of my Church of the Churchless faithless faith. Benoit’s discussion of Zen involves a bit of abstract metaphysics, but mostly he speaks directly about the immediately obvious human condition—just as Taoists do.

Religion, by and large, leaves me cold. It is too detached from my conscious reality, the world inside my head where I live my daily life. So far I’ve only re-read the first four chapters of “The Supreme Doctrine,” yet already I’ve been reminded why this book speaks so truly to me. It is as if Benoit knows my mind. Of course, I would expect nothing less from a psychoanalyst.

He says that Zen teaches that all of the false efforts to deal with the evident reality of human misery don’t reach the root cause of our problems:

At the back of all that there is the following simple-minded reasoning: “Things are going badly with me in such and such a way; very well, from now on I am going to do exactly the opposite.” This way of regarding the problem, starting from a form that is judged to be bad, encloses the searcher within the limits of a domain that is formal, and as a result, deprives him of all possibility of re-establishing his consciousness beyond all form.

Maybe that passage sounds rather intellectual to you. It doesn’t to me. I know just what Benoit is talking about. For most of my life I’ve believed that in order to be spiritually free, it’s necessary for me to confine myself within the bounds of a spiritual system. That doesn’t make sense to me now. Confinement isn’t freedom. Confinement may be followed by freedom, but the two states can’t be present at the same time. Either you are confined or you are free.

Benoit says that we always are free. We just don’t realize it. We are dreaming a dream of confinement. Virtually everything we do to escape this illusion just keeps us more tightly encased within it.

All my apparent ‘trouble’ derives from the sleep of my faith in the perfect Reality; I have, awakened in me, nothing but ‘beliefs’ in what is communicated to me by my senses and my mind working on the dualistic plane (beliefs in the non-existence of a Perfect Reality that is One); and these beliefs are illusory formations, without reality, consequences of the sleep of my faith.

In short, everything appears to be wrong in me because the fundamental idea that everything is perfectly, eternally and totally positive, is asleep in the centre of my being, because it is not awakened, living and active therein.

So let’s say that we agree with Benoit that something within us—call it “soul,” perhaps—needs to be awakened, enlightened, saved. What then? He says that we aren’t out of the frying pan; we’ve just jumped into another hot spot of illusion in our desire for salvation.

All the determining, enslaving reality which man attributed to this or that ‘temporal’ enterprise becomes the most determining, the most enslaving that can be imagined. Since realization signified liberation one arrives at the absurd paradox that man is subjected to the coercive duty to be free. Man’s distress is concentrated then on this question of his salvation; he trembles at the thought that he may die before having attained his deliverance.

Most spiritual seekers submit themselves to an external authority in hopes that they can become liberated from pain, suffering, sin, illusion, maya—whatever you want to call the fallen state that most of us believe we are trapped in. Yet Zen says that this very belief in the reality of being trapped is the true trap.

Benoit says that my desire to be someone unique, one of a kind, a “me” unlike any other, is the root of all of my problems, both spiritual and worldly. Yet here I am, seeking personal salvation, when the egotistical belief that I am a special person who needs to be saved is what I need to be saved from.

I’m afraid of existing, Benoit argues. I believe that existence is a mere foundation for the really important thing: living. He writes, “ A man declares: ‘My life is insipid and monotonous; I do not call that living; at most it is existing….According to my fiction of personal divinity, to found my sense of life on my vegetative phenomena and the actions which serve them is absurd, while to found this sense on actions which tend to affirm me as separate is sensible. This view is profoundly rooted in the mind of man. It is evident to anyone who thinks about it impartially that it is this opinion which is absurd.”

Why? Because my emphasis on the importance of actions that only I can do places me at the center of the universe, whereas Benoit correctly says that only the First Cause (or what I’d call Ultimate Reality) can be that center. So according to Zen I would be much closer to the truth if I could tune into my pure and simple existence, my being, rather than all my doing.

I’ll probably share more from “The Supreme Doctrine” after I’ve re-read additional chapters. Apropos my current near-vegetative Maui beach life, here’s a nice Zen story from Benoit’s book that should make you feel better when you don’t feel like doing anything.

"Once upon a time there was a man standing on a high hill. Three travelers, passing in the distance, noticed him and began to argue about him. One said, ‘He has probably lost his favorite animal.’ Another said: ‘No, he is probably looking for his friend.’ The third said: “He is there only in order to enjoy the fresh air.’

The three travelers could not agree and continued to argue right up to the moment when they arrived at the top of the hill. One of them asked: ‘O friend, standing on this hill, have you not lost your favorite animal?’ ‘No, Sir, I have not lost him.’ The other asked: ‘Have you not lost your friend?’ ‘No, Sir, I have not lost my friend either.’ The third traveler asked: ‘Are you not here in order to enjoy the fresh air?’ ‘No, Sir.’

‘What then are you doing here, since you answer ‘No’ to all our questions.’ The man on the hill replied, ‘I am just standing.’”

Hell joke’s serious side

A friend recently emailed me the “Chemistry of hell” joke that has been circulating on the Internet for years, though I couldn’t recall having seen it before. The version that I got is in the continuation to this post. The joke seems to be evolving, as it now has a nice “Oh, my God!” paragraph at the end that earlier versions didn’t have.

As humorous as this story is, it has some deep philosophy in it. Notably, the idea that since most religions state that anyone who isn’t a member of that faith is going to hell, and few (if any) people belong to every religion in the world, then everyone is going to hell.

I thought of this joke as I was reading a message from a Muslim student who attended a lecture by Sam Harris. Harris wrote “The End of Faith,” a book that I praised on my other weblog after reading only 30 pages. After finishing the book, my initial favorable impression only grew stronger.

As the student writes, Harris boldly attacks all religions as being equally non-sensical and opposed to a truly spiritual view of the world, fellow human beings, and ourselves. What made me think about hell is her observation that bodyguards were present during Harris’ talk. Would a scientist who criticized an unfounded theory need protection from those who believed in it?

Hell isn’t a real place like Death Valley in the summertime. It is the manmade creation of religions. It is as real as the irrational untested beliefs of religious fundamentalists. Yet this illusion has its all-too-real effects: people who question religious dogma need bodyguards to protect them from believers in a loving God.

To me, this absurdity is what’s truly hellish.

“God’s Politics” a timely book

The author of “God’s Politics,” Jim Wallis, was on the Daily Show recently. I don’t often recommend a book before I’ve read it (or, in this case, even seen it), but I am now. Wallis struck me as intelligent, devout, caring, and open-minded. His cause is freeing religious involvement in politics from right-wing Republican confines.

Wallis called himself an evangelical Christian. He considers that the entire Bible, not just selected smatterings from here and there, should be the foundation for how a Christian melds religion and politics. He said that Jesus spoke about caring for the poor much more often than he did about condemning gay marriage or banning abortion (like, many times for the former versus zero for the latter.)

I’ve argued that religious values have no place in politics. But, the reality is that religion and politics are deeply intertwined in the United States. If this is to be, then broadening our conception of “religious values” is the best way of assuring that narrow fundamentalism doesn’t hijack political discourse and turn this land of the free into a theocracy.

I’m hopeful that Wallis will be able to make his book a springboard for a social movement, which, from comments he made on the Daily Show, seems to be his intent. Too many Christians believe that the Republican Party is the only political tent that will shelter their deeply-held religious beliefs. That’s hogwash.

Lying and deception isn’t a religious value. Turning your back on the poor and sick isn’t a religious value. Failing to be a wise steward of the natural world that God created isn’t a religious value. Needless killing isn’t a religious value.

Which political party is favored by God? I’m quite sure that “God’s Politics” answers, “neither” (I’ll let you know for sure after Amazon delivers a copy). This surely is a step in the right direction. Or rather, neither the right nor the left direction.

Plotinus: Vision

For more than eight years I’ve been a close friend of a long-dead Greek philosopher, Plotinus. Obviously I haven’t sat down and talked with him directly, but I feel like I have, so intensely and intimately have I studied his teachings in the course of writing a book: “Return to the One: Plotinus’s Guide to God-Realization.”

Plotinus is the last of five mystics that I’ve been writing about. Each is a worthy “patron saint” for the churchless, and each exhibits a special quality that I try to describe in a single word. For Plotinus it is vision.

I’ve read countless religious, philosophical, metaphysical, and mystical books. My bookshelves are full of attempts to make sense of the vast cosmos. Most writers don’t come close. They present compelling (or, not so compelling) descriptions of some particular aspect of the big picture, while ignoring what falls outside of their particular purviews.

What I love about Plotinus is that he doesn’t leave anything important out of his mystic philosophy. His focus is on the One, what many call “God,” the unity that underlies everything else. By definition, a thought of the One draws our attention to everything rather than this thing or that thing. Plotinus urges us to ponder what lies beyond the time and space with which we are familiar now.

This can be nothing less than really real reality. In “The Elegant Universe,” physicist Brian Greene describes cutting-edge research into string theory and the origins of our universe. Strings, amazingly small one-dimensional bits of vibrating energy, are theorized to be the rock-bottom foundation of physical reality.

But what does that foundation rest on? What is the resting place of strings before they produce a home for material entities, and themselves, to live in? Greene writes (p. 378):

“In the raw state, before the strings that make up the cosmic fabric engage in the orderly, coherent vibrational dance we are discussing, there is no realization of space or time….Imagining such a structureless, primal state of existence, one in which there is no notion of space or time as we know it, pushes most people’s powers of comprehension to the limit (it certainly pushes mine)….We run up against a clash of paradigms when we try to envision a universe that is, but that somehow does not invoke the concepts of space or time.”

About seventeen hundred years ago Plotinus presented just such a vision in his “Enneads.” He and his philosophical forebear, Plato, foreshadowed modern physics in conceiving of an unchanging spiritual realm that is the source of the material universe. This world, the World of Forms, is the immaterial original and our world is the physical reflection. Plotinus says, “All that is here below comes from there, and exists in greater beauty there. For here it is adulterated [by matter], but there it is pure.”

Plotinus’s vision of reality is wonderfully scientific. It isn’t founded on a personal God but on the universal consciousness of the One and spirit, termed “Nous” in Greek. Nous contains the Forms that comprise the blueprint of our reality. Even more, Nous or Spirit is those Forms.

Creation is seen as a continuous cascading flow of conscious energy. From the Source (the One) emanates Spirit (Nous); and from Spirit emanates Soul, which includes the particularized bits of consciousness that we know so well as “me,” “you,” and every other living thing. There are no gaps in Plotinus’s grand conception of the cosmos. All fits together in a compelling rational schema that I am barely hinting at (if you want the full philosophical meal deal, buy my book—I note that “Return to the One” is now selling at a nice discount on Amazon).

I could go on and on about Plotinus’s mystic teachings, but I’ve already done that to the tune of 338 pages. So I’ll content myself with sharing a few of my favorite Plotinus quotations. In these passages he cuts to the core of how to know the One, or God.

The One isn’t something separate from ourselves, for it is, obviously, One. If there was anything else in existence then we’d have the One and that other entity, which would make at least two. Science and mysticism each have a decided fondness for simplicity and unity. One it is, then. And we are part of it. More simply, we are it.

Plotinus advises: If you seek to know God, the most direct approach is to know the seeker.

I’ll end with a paragraph from my book that I wrote, followed by two wonderful quotations from Plotinus. There isn’t anything more than this to spirituality, when you eliminate everything that isn’t essential. Namely, not One.

“Plotinus tells us that the means by which we now know the creation must become the end that we seek. Like a snake that swallows its own tail, the sage turns his attention back upon the consciousness that usually attends to outer things and thoughts. Uniting within himself the knower and the known, the One is revealed as the ground of the sage’s own self.”

We must believe that we have seen him [the One] when, suddenly, the soul is filled with light, for this light comes from him and is identical with him….This is the real goal for the soul: to touch and behold this light itself, by means of itself. She does not wish to see it by means of some other light; what she wants to see is that light by means of which she is able to see. What she must behold is precisely that by which she was illuminated …..How, then, could this come about? Eliminate everything [that is not light]!

For this reason the vision is hard to put into words. For how could one announce that as another when he did not see, there where he had the vision, another, but one with himself?

The Cloud of Unknowing: Devotion

“The Cloud of Unknowing,” written in the fourteenth century by an anonymous English Christian, is the fourth of my Five Books to Support the Churchless that I’ve been writing about. I’m trying to sum up the essence of each book in a single word. For “The Cloud of Unknowing” it is devotion.

But this is a devotion utterly unlike that practiced by most Christians, and also unlike that practiced by almost everyone of any faith. For the author, whom I’ll call Anonymous, espouses an apophatic spirituality. As this web site explains, “apophasis” is a Greek word that means “without images.”

So in the course of providing advice about how to pursue a contemplative life, Anonymous relentlessly demolishes the usual notion that devotion to God consists of thinking about the scriptures, feeling love for Jesus, doing good works, or any of the usual outward manifestations of religiosity.

Engaging in these things is fine, he says, but they are decidedly lower forms of devotion: “There are two ways of life in Holy Church. One is the active, the other is the contemplative life. Active is the lower, contemplative the higher.” But what should be contemplated? I can contemplate my wife because she is right in front of me. I can’t contemplate God because he/she/it is nowhere to be seen. Or heard, touched, smelled, tasted.

Yet according to Anonymous I’ve just answered my own question. If God is nowhere to be seen, then nowhere is exactly the place where I have to go to practice my devotion. The passage below conveys the core of what “The Cloud of Unknowing” prescribes to Christians and, really, everyone who aspires to know what lies beyond appearances:

‘Well,’ you will say, ‘where are I am to be? Nowhere, according to you!’ And you will be quite right! ‘Nowhere’ is where I want you! Why, when you are ‘nowhere’ physically, you are ‘everywhere’ spiritually. Make it your business then to see that your spirit is tied to nothing physical, and you will find that wherever that thing is that you are giving your mind to, there you are too in spirit, just as surely as your body is where you are bodily!

And though your natural mind can now find ‘nothing’ to feed on, for it thinks you are doing no thing, go on doing this no thing, and do it for the love of God….Let go this ‘everywhere’ and this ‘everything’ in exchange for this ‘nowhere’ and this ‘nothing’….One can feel this nothing more easily than see it, for it is completely dark to those who have just begun to look at it.

Unfortunately, based on my thirty-five years of daily meditation and countless conversations with other students of contemplation, I can say that it also is completely dark to those who have been looking at the nowhere and nothing for a long time. Anonymous advises, though, that there is no better way to God than staying still and silent in the cloud of unknowing that stands between us and ultimate truth.

All this might sound rather abstract, but it isn’t. Close your eyes and there you are, staring straight into the dark cloud that Anonymous speaks of. How big is that space that each of us enters when we aren’t paying attention to the physical world? A first impression places it within our head, yet when you take a look around you can’t discern any boundaries to the blackness that extends in all directions.

Perhaps it is just the backside of my eyelids that I am looking at. Even so, the question then arises, “What is the true nature of the being who is doing the looking?” Whatever it is, says Anonymous, it isn’t anything physical: “You know well that God is a spirit, and that whoever would be made one with him must be in truth and in depth of spirit far removed from any misleading bodily thing.”

So this is why a cloud of forgetting has to be placed between the contemplator and everything physical, which means all of creation. For Anonymous reminds us that the Creator isn’t what has been created. When our devotion is directed toward a material thing or a mental thought, this is idolatry. It doesn’t matter if the thing is a holy icon or the thought a holy prayer: these obvious objects are far distant from the Mystery of God.

We are apt to think that we are very far from God because of this cloud of unknowing between us and him, but surely it would be more correct to say that we are much farther from him if there is no cloud of forgetting between us and the whole created world. Whenever I say “the whole created world” I always mean not only the individual creatures therein, but everything connected with them.

…Indeed, if we may so reverently, when we are engaged on this work it profits little or nothing to think even of God’s kindness or worth, or of our Lady, or of the saints and angels, or of the joys of heaven, if you think thereby by such meditation to strengthen your purpose. In this particular matter it will not help at all.

Then what will help? The work Anonymous speaks of is entering into the cloud of unknowing, for he just told us that God is farther away when we are aware either of perceptions of the created world or of our thoughts that are connected to some material entity. And this includes every thought, for since we have no experience of God’s immateriality, even supposedly divine thoughts are tied to our thoroughly anthropomorphic guesses about what God is like.

What Anonymous wants us to do is become, as nearly as possible, pure being, existence itself. This contemplative work is a striving not to be anything physical or personal, but simply to be: “For if you think about anything in particular except your own bare, blind existence—and this, remember, is God’s purpose and your own—then you are on the wrong track; you are back again at your speculating and guessing; and this distracts and separates you not only from God but from yourself as well.”

The highest form of Christian devotion, then, is expressed through a mantra, just as in Eastern traditions. A single word is to be repeated over and over again. If our attention is fully on this word, and our eyes are closed to the world, we will be able to enter the cloud of unknowing after putting the cloud of forgetting between us and everything we know now. It doesn’t really matter what this word is, says Anonymous. He simply advises that the shorter it is the better, “being more like the working of the Spirit.”

It could be a word like “God” or “love.” The choice doesn’t matter much, so long as it is one syllable (though Anonymous favors “God”). It would be best to have nothing at all standing between our consciousness and God, but if there is to be anything, it should be as small as possible: a single syllable.

What we have here in “The Cloud of Unknowing” is a pure Christian mystical practice that is virtually identical to Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim mystic practices. The ridiculous theological squabblings between adherents of different faiths disappear when the thoughts that produce all that dissention are stilled.

Call it centering prayer; call it mantra meditation. The practice is the same, and it brings mystics together under the sheltering tent of wordless reality. Well, there is still at least one word or sound, but that too fades away when the contemplator pierces through the cloud of unknowing and reaches the clear sky that contains no objects, no differences, no separateness.

One word. One practice. One truth. What could be simpler?

Fix this word fast to your heart, so that it is always there come what may. It will be your shield and spear in peace and war alike. With this word you will hammer the cloud and the darkness above you. With this word you will suppress all thought under the cloud of forgetting.

So much so that if you are tempted to think what it is you are seeking, this one word will be sufficient answer. And if you would go on to think learnedly about the significance and analysis of that same word, tell yourself that you will have it whole, and not in bits and pieces. If you hold fast, that thought will surely go.

I’ve read “The Cloud of Unknowing” so many times, on many pages the passages that I haven’t highlighted stand out from a mass of yellow or green emphasis. This is one of the best guides for meditation, and it likely was written by an English country parson—not an Indian yogi or Sufi sheikh.

I wish that all Christians could become as well acquainted as I am with their own mystic heritage, which extends far beyond “The Cloud of Unknowing.” Most Christians have little or no understanding of what great teachers in their own tradition—Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, Pseudo-Dionysus, Nicholas of Cusa, the “desert fathers,” and others—have taught: true devotion to God is expressed by stillness and silence.

One word. That’s all you need to know the One. A church isn't required to practice this devotion. You are your own church, and you can hold your own one-word service within your consciousness whenever you want.

[All of the excerpts in this post are from “The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works,” translated into modern English by Clifton Wolters, Penguin Books.]

Ramana: Simplicity

Ockham’s razor is a rule in science and philosophy that the simplest explanation is the best. Extending this principle to religion and spirituality, Ramana, a twentieth-century Indian mystic, shines.

Only recently did I began reading Ramana seriously. I wish I had done so earlier. I’d always thought that the Vedanta teachings which form the core of Ramana’s message were intellectual and complex. They can be, if a complex intellectual tries to communicate Vedanta.

But when the teachings are described by Ramana in the lively question and answer format of “Talks with Ramana Maharshi,” the highest form of Vedanta is revealed as marvelously simple and practical. This is Advaita, literally “not two.”

What could be simpler than one?

Advaita finds unity at the core of the cosmos. So does science. Or, at least this is what science expects to find. The quest of physicists is for the theory of everything that is the root explanation of the universe, not for the theories of everything.

Ramana’s teachings thus have an appealing scientific flavor. This is in contrast to most other spiritual paths and every religion, which expect you to believe in things that defy rational explanation or direct experience. Why? Because any faith founded on dualism necessarily posits a gap between the believer and what is believed.

If I believe in God, there obviously are two entities involved here: “I” and “God.” Given this situation, confirming my belief gets complex. Somehow I have to narrow the divide between me and divinity so what now is just a subjective idea or emotion for me becomes an undeniable objective fact.

So spiritual systems generally proscribe dogmas and theologies that amount to marching orders. Do this, don’t do that; follow this course, not that one. If the believer follows directions and treads the spiritual path in the correct manner, then the promise is that he or she someday will arrive at God’s doorstep (taking “God” to mean ultimate reality, not necessarily a personal being).

The more steps you’re asked to take, the more potential missteps there are. This is why I’m much attracted to Ramana’s simplicity. He says that all of Vedanta can be summed up in two Biblical passages: “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14) and “Be still, and know that I am God!” (Psalms 46:10).

Eckhart: Detachment

Today the birth of God’s son is celebrated. Most people think this child of the Father is Jesus. Meister Eckhart, the medieval Catholic mystic theologian, suggests another possibility: it is each of us.

I find this idea much more palatable and convincing than the traditional notion that Jesus somehow was born miraculously by a virgin woman so that he could die for our sins. Eckhart considers that “virgin” really means “someone who is free of all alien images, as free in fact as that person was before he or she existed.”

This conception points us toward a state of consciousness that everyone can achieve, not just Jesus. There are many problems with modern Christianity. One of the worst is its emphasis on stories of the past rather than transformations of the present.

As we note frequently here at the Church of the Churchless, most Christians feel that if they merely believe in the divinity of Christ, that’s enough: believe and you’re saved. The exact mechanism by which salvation takes place is a mystery. How could the death on a cross of someone over two thousand years ago alter the course of someone’s life (and afterlife) now? What connection is there between the soul of Jesus and the soul of you or me?

Eckhart asks “Where is he who is born King of the Jews?” He answers, “This birth takes place in the soul just as it takes place in eternity, no more and no less. For there is only one birth, and this takes place in the essence and ground of the soul.”

So the virgin birth of God’s son didn’t only happen to Mary in the manger. This is just a metaphor and not to be taken as a historical fact. A recent article in Newsweek, “The Birth of Jesus,” points out that the four gospels don’t tell a common story about Jesus’ birth. How could they? There is no real evidence that Jesus ever spoke of how and where he was born, and neither Mary nor Joseph is cited as a direct source. A court of law would say that the whole Christmas story is hearsay and not to be trusted.

Vivekananda: Strength

In my “Five Books to Support the Churchless” post, I said I’d share what I like most about the teachings of Vivekananda, Ramana, Eckhart, Plotinus, and the anonymous author of “The Cloud of Unknowing.” Each points toward the same spiritual goal, unity with the ultimate reality of God. Yet I find that each emphasizes a different quality needed to become one with the One.

For Vivekananda the quality is strength. In his presentation of the ancient, yet still new, Vedanta philosophy he continually urges us to realize that there is nothing to fear. Only in duality can fear exist. I am only afraid of things that are not me, whether they be immaterial or physical. An attacker who tries to steal my wallet isn’t me. A cancer that upsets my body’s health isn’t me. An obsessive thought that won’t leave my mind isn’t me.

Or so I believe. Maybe, says Vivekananda, all these things really are me. For if the cosmos truly is one, not many, then there is no “other” to fear. This is the highest teaching of Vedanta, unqualified monism.

A dualistic religious perspective that sees God as separate both from nature and the human soul has to grapple with the problem of evil. “How,” Vivekananda asks, “is it possible that under the rule of a just and merciful God, the repository of an infinite number of good qualities, there can be so many evils in this word?”

The Hindus, he answers, never put the blame on God or on a separate Satan. Instead, they hold the eminently scientific view that effects spring from causes in a never-ending chain. Vivekananda says, “Therefore no other person is needed to shape the destiny of mankind but man himself….’We reap what we sow.’”

So here is one source of strength, the fact that each of us creates our own destiny. If we don’t like the circumstances in which we find ourselves, we can do something about it. Fresh causes will led to fresh effects. It isn’t necessary to passively wait for God to save us from our suffering, for our own actions have created both our joys and our despairs. What we have created, we can change.

But Vedanta goes farther than this dualistic idea that the entity known as “me” can cause effects in “not-me” that will then alter my condition (for example, if I am nice to people they will be nicer to me, thereby making me happier).

Vivekananda says, “The real Vedanta philosophy begins with those known as qualified non-dualists. They make the statement that the effect is never different from the cause; the effect is but the cause reproduced in another form. If the universe is the effect and God the cause, it must be God Himself; it cannot be anything but that.”

This means that the universe is the body of God, just as the flesh and bones writing or reading these words is the body of me or you. As the soul is considered to be immanent in the human body, so is God immanent in the body of the entire universe. Bodies come and go, whether they be individual forms or entire universes (the Big Bang may culminate in a Big Crunch), while souls and God remain unchanged forever.

So this qualified non-dualist philosophy encourages even greater strength in you and me. At heart we are not weak, isolated, limited beings who are born, live for a brief spell, and then die. We have the capacity to realize our oneness with the All—God. Vivekananda says, “There is not a particle, not an atom in the universe, where He is not. Again, souls are all limited; they are not omnipresent. When their powers become expanded and they become perfect, there is no more birth and death for them; they live with God for ever.”

Yet Vedanta urges that even this exalted conception of the soul be expanded. This is non-dualistic Vedanta or Advaita, “not two.” Namely, one. According to Vivekananda this is where human thought finds its highest expression. “It is too abstruse, too elevated,” he says, “to be the religion of the masses…It is difficult for even the most intelligent man or woman in any country to understand Advaita—we have made ourselves so weak; we have made ourselves so low.”

According to Advaita the truth is that there aren’t many souls in the universe. There is only a single soul: the Self. From one perspective this is God, Brahman. From another perspective it is an individual soul, Atman. Regardless, there is no difference between God and the soul, Brahman and Atman. All is One.

Vivekananda says, “The whole of this universe is one Unity, one Existence—physically, mentally, morally, and spiritually. We are looking upon this one Existence in different ways and creating all these images upon it.”

Who then should we worship? A God far off in the heavens? No. A savior sent by God to redeem us? No. A natural world separate from ourselves? No. A book, icon, holy relic, place of pilgrimage, or other sacred object? No. Advaita Vedanta teaches that the only entity worthy of our worship is wonderfully close at hand:

Our own Self.

I’ll let Vivekanada explain this bold assertion in his own words. As you read them, feel the strength within you. I love how he reminds us that we have been beaten down for so long by religions that weaken us, we have lost touch with the power of the soul that is our birthright. And also our deathright. That power can’t be taken away from us, even though most of us have voluntarily surrendered it.

Take it back. Become spiritually independent. Let the energy of the cosmos flow through you, for it is you.

[All of the excerpts in this post are from “The Atman,” a talk delivered by Vivekananda in Brooklyn, February 2, 1896]

Five books to support the churchless

Come December all kinds of “Best Whatever” lists pop up. Best Movies, Best Albums, Best TV Shows, and many more. Maybe that’s why I feel the spirit to list my favorite five books to support the churchless, those who are spiritual but don’t belong to an organized religion that has its own pre-selected holy writings.

These are books that I read and then re-read. These are books that I could read a thousand times and still feel like I am reading them for the first time. Why? Because I’ll never plumb the depths of their mystical-spiritual messages.

Or perhaps I should say, “message.” For even though I have two books about Christian spirituality, two books about Indian (Vedanta/Advaita) spirituality, and one book about Greek (Neo-Platonic) spirituality, the essential message of each is surprisingly similar: Truth is within, not without. To know the One that many call “God,” make your consciousness single and simple. The spiritual being you want to become, you already are.

Here are my choices for Best Books to Support the Churchless:

Meister Eckhart: Selected Writings
Return to the One: Plotinus’s Guide to God-Realization
Talks With Ramana Maharshi: On Realizing Abiding Truth and Happiness
The Cloud of Unknowing: And Other Works
Vivekananda: The Yogas and Other Works

I must point out that “Return to the One” was written by me, which arguably should have disqualified it from consideration if this list is to have a glimmer of objective credibility. However, I have some reasonable reasons for including it.

Plotinus is a great philosopher and mystic, but not a clear writer, by and large. So few people can read his writings (the “Enneads”) directly and make much sense of them. And there are very few other popular books about Plotinus’s teachings. In fact, that’s why I felt impelled to write “Return to the One.” Nobody else had written the sort of book about Plotinus that I wanted to read.

Plus, I believe that one of the books a churchless person relies upon to keep his or her faithless faith on track should be the person's own book. Now, this doesn’t mean a published book or even a carefully written unpublished book. It could be a journal, a collection of scribbled notes, a diary, a weblog, even a single post-it note. What matters is that the “book” reflect what the person really believes about spirituality, not what someone else has told him or her to believe.

Here’s a nice quote from Vivekananda along these lines:

“Do something. Think some thought; it doesn’t matter if you are right or wrong. But think something. Because my forefathers did not think this way, shall I sit down quietly and gradually lose my sense of feeling and my own thinking faculty? I may as well be dead. And what is life worth if we have no living ideas, no convictions of our own, about religion? There is some hope for the atheists, because though they differ from others, they think for themselves.

The people who never think anything for themselves are not yet born into the world of religion; they have a mere jelly-fish existence. They will not think; they do not care for religion. But the disbeliever, the atheist, cares and he is struggling. So think something. Struggle Godwards. Never mind if you fail, never mind if you get hold of a queer theory. If you are afraid to be called queer, keep it in your own mind; you need not go out and preach it to others.

But do something. Struggle Godwards. Light must come. If a man feeds me every day of my life, in the long run I will lose the use of my hands. Spiritual death is the result of following others as in a flock of sheep.”

This sentiment is just one reason I love to read Vivekananda. There are many other reasons, some of which I’ll share in another posting. In fact, before the month is out I’ll share what I like most about each of my five Best Spiritual Book choices.

If you have some favorite books of your own that you think belong on the Church of the Churchless recommended reading list, please share them.