Church of the Churchless

Platonic Zen exercises

Not many people find a connection between Zen and Platonism. I do, though these themes are more implicit than explicit in my book about the Neoplatonist philosopher, Plotinus.

So it was a pleasure to hear from someone who resonates with a Greek'ish blend of rationality and mysticism. That would be Nicholas Coleman, head of religious education at Wesley College in Melbourne, who wrote to me recently.

He had kind things to say about "Return to the One," which attracted me to him right off the bat.

Thank you very much for writing Return to the One. The margins of my copy are filling rapidly with affirmations of points well made. Admittedly I'm only up to p.249, but I can no longer resist jotting of this e-mail.

Nicholas went on to talk about his own spiritual approach.

I teach a philosophy of life called "Platonic Zen" which draws together what I've learnt of Perennial Philosophy from combing through the traditions of the West (Plato, Philo, Plotinus (!), Ps-Dionysius, Eckhart, Cudworth, Jung, Schumacher, Schuon, etc) and the East (Gautama, Lao-Tzu, Nagajuna, Shankara, Padmasambhava, Ramana, Chogyam Trungpa, etc) in order to find ideas that help make sense of my own spiritual experience.

The goal of Platonic Zen is for practitioners to attain God-realisation themselves. To that end I've devised five spiritual exercises, the second of which I see clearly echoed in your notion from Sara Rappe (p.30) that a distinction can be realised between the transient contents of consciousness and the consistent container of consciousness (again, that's my adaption of what you actually write).

I asked him to tell me more about Platonic Zen. In a second message Nicholas said:

If I may speak on behalf of the whole of humanity, I think we've generally got the wrong idea about ourselves. Instead of realising what we are, we think we're something that we're not. The ordinary empirical ego convinces us that it's real and in charge of what's happening in the material world. We let it get away with that pretense, although it isn't real and isn't in charge.

Why do we believe its false claims? Because it's easy and attractive to believe them. For they're accompanied by the (equally false) promise of enduring life. We can feel that something unborn in us will live forever and the empirical ego claims to be that unborn something. By believing ourselves to be the ego we think we might live on, not physically but in some kind of essentially ego-centric after-life.

Interesting. And pretty close to how I see things. I asked Nicholas if he'd be willing to share his Platonic Zen exercises. He kindly sent me the first three.

Here they are, in a Word file. Download 123_platonic_zen_exercises.doc

Nicholas asked for feedback on them, so comment away if you feel the spirit. Usually I'm not big on exercises – always skip them when I come across them in a spiritual book – but these are more intriguing than most.

My inside look at RSSB books

It's interesting that currently churchless me once was so involved in writing books for a decidedly churchy organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

A couple of years ago I blogged about "How writing a book rewrote me." This was the third, and last, major RSSB book project that I was involved with.

The end result was "Return to the One: Plotinus' Guide to God-Realization." But it wasn't published by RSSB, even though the plan all along was that this would be the first in a Mystics of the West series.

I have to give credit to Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru who heads up Radha Soami Satsang Beas, for wanting to study the teachings of Western philosophical mystics like Plotinus – even though the effort came to a crashing halt.

Early on in the book project, Gurinder Singh mailed me a list of possible subjects for a Mystics of the West book. I chose Plotinus because I was intrigued by him and resonated with the approach of Greek philosophy – open-minded non-religious, and rational, as noted in my earlier post.

Also to Gurinder Singh's credit, when I was in India in 1998 I asked him, "If I find a conflict between the teachings of Plotinus and of RSSB, what should I do?"

His reply: "Stick with Plotinus."And that's what I did.

Which is one reason why I ended up publishing the book myself. I wasn't willing to compromise my description of Plotinus' marvelous mystic philosophy to fit with how the RSSB Publication Department powers-that-be wanted the book to turn out.

Our disagreements came down to a few areas that might seem fairly inconsequential, but were important to me. I talked about one issue in the other post – whether there is such a thing as a "Western mind." (Since I have one, I'm convinced that there is.)

Also, RSSB wanted to include quotations from a previous RSSB guru, Charan Singh, after each chapter title – to show that West and East were on the same wavelength when it came to spirituality.

I was OK with this, but just for the version of the book that would be published non-commercially by RSSB. I saw no reason, none at all, to mix up RSSB teachings with Plotinus' philosophy in the commercial version that would be sold to the general public.

This related to another disagreement I had with RSSB Publications staff. They wanted me to include a mention of my involvement with Radha Soami Satsang Beas, so that readers would know "where I was coming from."

I even was asked to thank Charan Singh (the guru who initiated me in 1971) in the introduction for making it possible for me to write the book – supposedly, I guess, by infusing my consciousness with enough wisdom to grasp Plotinus' not always easily graspable teachings.

I balked at that too.

I told RSSB that I've always had a better than average ability to understand complex subjects and write about them fairly clearly. That preceded my involvement with RSSB meditation. It's an integral part of my makeup, not a gift from my guru.

And on the "where I'm coming from" front, my position was that if a knowledgeable reader couldn't tell that I'd been a member of an Indian-based mystic/meditation group for thirty years, then there was no need to mention this.

I mean, I sent drafts of the book manuscript to scholars who were experts on Plotinus. I got lots of suggestions and criticisms back, but nobody ever suggested that my interpretation of Plotinus was slanted in a particular fashion.

Yet RSSB wanted me to talk about how my immersion in the organization was related to my "take" on Plotinus. I kept saying that I'd never seen a similar mention of an author's personal philosophy in any of the scholarly books I'd read about Plotinus.

It simply was taken for granted that the author had done his or her best to write about Plotinus teachings, not his own way of looking at the world.

Sure, "Return to the One" includes a lot of Brian Hines along with Plotinus. That's inescapable, because I wrote the book, not a robot. However, I successfully separated the "me" aspects of the book from the "him" (Plotinus) aspects.

At the moment my book is #2 on an Amazon search for "Plotinus," right behind Plotinus' Enneads. That's satisfying. It's the most readable book about an influential Greek philosophy who should be more widely read.

I wish Radha Soami Satsang Beas had been less concerned about infusing the book with a RSSB slant. But this is par for the course with RSSB publications about mystics who aren't in the direct Radha Soami Satsang Beas guru lineage.

There's a decided tendency – and I can't go into this in detail in this already lengthy post – toward slanting a mystic's teachings to more tightly fit with RSSB dogma.

This would be somewhat understandable, though still not acceptable, if an overtly religious organization was doing it. But RSSB bills itself as a "science of the soul," and scientists need to be as objective as possible in their writings and research.

A key tenet of the RSSB philosophy, which is shared by all sorts of mystic teachings, is that words can't encompass ultimate reality. Given this, I always found it difficult to understand why RSSB books were so concerned with saying things the same way, and describing metaphysical principles in consistent language.

Might as well end by quoting myself (from the "Infinity is Ineffable" chapter).

Our whole approach to the One will be thrown off course if we believe we can travel to enlightenment through words or thoughts. It isn't a matter of, say, pondering the Buddhist Dhammapada for my whole life and then realizing that the Christian Bible contains a more correct description of divine reality.

This would be like me believing that God is square and then finding out that God actually is a circle. Since I was looking for some sort of spiritual shape, I wasn't far off the mark and might simply observe, "Oops, I made a slight mistake; now I know better."

But if God is formless and nameless, far removed from any shape or word, then a much more radical change of direction is needed. A person's entire consciousness must be transformed if he or she is to experience God. A way has to be found of experiencing emptiness, of entering into the nothingness that is the threshold to the One.

Marcus Aurelius’ meditations move me

In my previous post about death and Stoicism, I didn't give my main Stoic man, Marcus Aurelius, the blog time that he deserves.

So yesterday I found my well-thumbed copy of his Meditations, a hard to find 1964 translation by Maxwell Staniforth, and re-read some of Marcus' marvelous observations on living a good life. And dying a good death.

I'm putting this post in my "Plotinus" category because both of these philosophers, one of whom I've written my own book about, shared a fundamental Stoic philosophy.

Which moves me.

Now, that's sort of a contradiction, because Stoicism holds (along with Buddhism) that it's possible to be detached from the ever-changing circumstances of life. We have the power to choose our subjective response to objective reality so events don't excessively move us.

Some quotations from the Meditations:

Among the truths you will do well to contemplate most frequently are these two: first, that things can never touch the soul, but stand inert outside it, so that disquiet can arise only from fancies within; and secondly, that all visible objects change in a moment, and will be no more. Think of the countless changes in which you yourself have had a part. The whole universe is change, and life itself is but what you deem it.

Never go beyond the sense of your original impressions. These tell you that such-and-such a person is speaking ill of you; that was their message; they did not go on to say it has done you any harm. I see my child is ill; my eyes tell me that, but they do not suggest that his life is in danger. Always, then, keep to the original impressions; supply no additions of your own, and you are safe. Or at least, add only a recognition of the great world-order by which all things are brought to pass.

That "great world-order" doesn't include a personal God. So Marcus and Plotinus resonate with my churchless soul. Using modern parlance, we'd say they're spiritual but not religious.

Staniforth's Introduction makes this clear. It's available in its entirety via Google Book Search. Pages 7-25 are a good overview of Stoicism and Marcus Aurelius.

I like how (on pp. 21-22) Staniforth talks about how Marcus, ostensibly a Stoic, was so obviously moved by moods of hope and depression, and how he had an evident longing for sympathy and affection.

The Meditations are Marcus Aurelius' diary, a deeply personal record of his struggles to live up to the high Stoic standards he set for himself. Staniforth says that when "we overhear the philosopher-emperor's secret communing with his own soul, and remember that at no time is he addressing any human auditor but himself, I believe every instinct tells us that we are in the presence of a man who is simple, humble, and utterly sincere."

Guess that helps explain why his writings move me so much. Marcus doesn't speak from a holier-than-thou perspective (though his ego does occasionally come through). He's uncertain about what will happen after death – refreshing, compared to the spiritual know it all's of both his and our time.

In death, Alexander of Macedon's end differed no whit from his stable-boy's. Either both were received into the same generative principle of the universe, or both alike were dispersed into atoms.

He who fears death either fears to lose all sensation or fears new sensations. In reality, you will either feel nothing at all, and therefore nothing evil, or else, if you can feel any new sensations, you will be a new creature, and so will not have ceased to have life.

Happy the soul which, at whatever moment the call comes for release from the body, is equally ready to face extinction, dispersion, or survival.

Stoicism in general, and Marcus Aurelius in particular, appeal to my modern scientific mind. There's little in the Meditations that conflicts with current understanding of the universe, once we realize that the Stoic "God" is the same as "Nature."

Staniforth says, "Stoicism is thus a pantheistic creed: that is to say, it holds that God is immanent in all created things, but has no separate existence outside them."

There's a universal order in the universe (not surprisingly). The Stoics, along with Plotinus, called it a World Soul. I call it the laws of nature. Same thing, really.

Nature does its thing. So do we, who also have a soul – consciousness. The big difference between us and the World Soul is that we're a part of the whole, and the World Soul is the whole.

Which makes for a big power imbalance.

As the saying goes, "man proposes and God disposes." I tried to drive our Prius up the driveway last night. Nature, however, had put a layer of snow over some ice. After spinning my wheels I backed down into the garage.

Nothing wrong had happened. There was no call for me to say, "How cruel is the world!" I simply had to adjust myself to circumstances, to objective reality. I put the garbage can in the back of our all-wheel-drive Highlander Hybrid and got up the hill without much problem.

If you are doing what is right, never mind whether you are freezing with cold or beside a good fire; heavy-eyed, or fresh from a sound sleep; reviled or applauded; in the act of dying or about some other piece of business. (For even dying is part of the business of life; and there too no more is required of us than 'to see the moment's work well done'.)

Nature always has an end in view; and this aim includes a thing's ending as much as its beginning or its duration. She is like the ball's thrower. Is the ball itself bettered by its upward flight? Is it any worse as it comes down, or as it lies after its fall? What does a bubble gain by holding together, or lose by collapsing? The like is true of a candle, too.

Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on to say, "Why were things of this sort brought into the world?"

As I observed in "Death shines under a full moon," religion finds something wrong with the cosmos that needs to be fixed: "that nature, God, Tao, whoever or whatever runs the cosmos, has seriously screwed things up. And it takes a savior, a guru, a god-man, a revelation, a miracle, to get life and death back in order."

I like how Stoicism sees the order of the universe as being just fine the way it is. That puts the responsibility for getting in tune with it on us.

All the blessings which you pray to obtain hereafter could be yours today, if you did not deny them to yourself.

When a man finds his sole good in that which the appointed hour brings him; when he cares not if his actions be many or few, so they accord with strict reason; when it matters nought to him whether his glimpse of this world be long or fleeting – not death itself can be a thing of terror for him.

I'll end with a passage from Marcus' Meditations that contains, in three sentences, one of them very long, a wonderful summation of Stoic philosophy. I broke it up into a more poetic format – didn't change any wording.

You are composed of three parts:
body, breath, and mind.
The first two merely belong to you
in the sense that you are responsible for their care;
the last alone is truly yours.

If, then, you put away from this real self
– from your understanding, that is –
everything that others do or say
and everything you yourself did or said in the past,
together with every anxiety about the future,
and everything affecting the body or its partner breath
that is outside your own control,
as well as everything that swirls about you
in the eddy of outward circumstance,
so that the powers of your mind,
kept thus aloof and unspotted from all that destiny can do,
may live their own life in independence,
doing what is just,
consenting to what befalls,
and speaking what is true –
if, I say, you put away from this master-faculty of yours
every such clinging attachment,
and whatever lies in the years ahead
or the years behind,
teaching yourself to become what Empedocles calls
a "totally rounded orb, in its own rotundity joying",
and to be concerned solely with the life which you are now living,
the life of the present moment,
then until death comes
you will be able to pass the rest of your days
in freedom from all anxiety,
and in kindliness and good favour with the deity within you.

Plotinus and I make so much sense

Today I made a lot of sense to myself. Per usual. When I heard myself explaining how Neoplatonism relates to Christianity and why not-knowing is the highest form of religion I was totally convinced that I knew what I was talking about.

This afternoon it was nice to have two captive audiences: me, whom I can’t seem to ever get away from, and a man with whom I have a business relationship, who was trying to entice me to sign up for additional services.

We’d never met, as he’d taken over our account from another guy, so this was a get-to-know-you conversation. Naturally he had to ask what I did. “Basically retired now. I’ve been writing books and keeping up my blogs.”

He then made the mistake of asking what I wrote about. This ended up reducing his sales pitch time considerably. Tip: unless you’ve got time to spare, don’t ask a woman who has recently given birth if her child ever does anything cute, and don’t ask a writer what his books are about.

I rolled through “God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder” and “Life is Fair” quickly, but found myself getting more and more enthusiastic about Plotinus and “Return to the One.” Partly because I knew that as soon as I stopped talking, the effort to sell me stuff would start.

But mostly because I was just making so damn much sense, I couldn’t bear to stop listening to myself. You had to be there (as I was, fortunately). However, I’ll try to recreate some of my 5-10 minute synopsis of what Plotinus, Christianity, and the cosmos is all about.

Plotinus, it’s been said, is “Plato without the politics.” So you’re left with Greek spirituality, minus all that boring stuff about the perfect form of governance. It’s also said that if you add Jesus to Plotinus’ Neoplatonism, you’ve got Christianity.

St. Augustine was a big fan of Plato and Plotinus before he became a Christian. The Gospels are mostly stories and don’t say much about the nature of God, soul, creation, and such. So Augustine took Plotinus’ philosophy, grafted it onto Jesus’ teachings, and voila, a Christian theology.

People think that the Greeks were rationalists. But Plotinus was a mystic and had profound experiences of the divine. He realized that thinking can only take you so far. After that, you’re in the realm of Mystery. For him, that was the One. Christians say, “God.”

Makes sense to me. Here we are, sitting in your office, a teeny-tiny part of a 14 billion year old universe. So far as we know, this is the only life in our part of the galaxy. Isn’t that amazing, that we’re here at all? To me, that’s what a genuine sense of religion is all about: Wonder.

Plotinus taught that it isn’t possible to say anything about God, the One. How could you? Whatever we know is something other than the One, because it is knowable—separate, distinct, dual. God can’t be known. Only approached as Mystery.

If every religion would recognize this, wouldn’t the world be a better place? Christians think they know what God is like. So do Muslims and Jews. Even Buddhists, though they don’t speak about “God.”

I don’t know anything about God. Neither do you. Likely nobody does. If we all could sit down together and honestly say “I don’t know” as one, that’d be terrific. Plotinus reminds us that silence is the best way to worship God. Just being present with…whatever.

Sure seems like that should be One, not more than one. Physicists aren’t searching for theories of everything—just one theory. So God likely is One also. If there are two things, given how the world is so nicely interconnected they have to be united in some fashion. Whatever does the final uniting is God, the One.

Science knows a lot about the very small through quantum theory. Science knows a lot about the very large through relativity theory. But the two theories can’t be fit together so far. Superstrings, that’s a possibility. Vibrating energy. Is that God? Nobody knows.

It’s a mystery.

That seemed like a good place to stop talking. Especially since I was only getting a polite smile in response, not the standing philosophical ovation that my not-so-humble self felt that I deserved.

When some papers were pushed across the desk toward me, I got a glimmer why. I noticed a classy-looking silver ring, on which was emblazoned a cross. I’d suspected that I wasn’t talking with a Wiccan. Suspicion confirmed.

So I had to be content with making sense to myself. Didn’t make a convert to churchlessness today. That’s good, I guess.

If you become a believer in anything, even if that is nothing, isn’t that something? And isn’t belief the essence of religion?

Good questions. Looks like I’ve got to have another conversation with myself.

Simple spirituality

I’m attracted to simplicity. My mind is complex, like most minds are. So in spite of this, or because of this, a great big “Yes!” resonates in my psyche when I come across seriously simple summations of spirituality. (Guess I should make that a “Yes-s-s-s!”)

“God is love.” Pretty good. But that’s too simple for me. And overly Hallmark cardish. I prefer Meister Eckhart’s way of putting it. A wonderful blend of simplicity and profundity.

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.

Like Toby Johnson, I frequently begin and end my meditation with an attempt at grokking this appealing, yet elusive, two sentence mystic theology. I like how Eckhart unifies the seeker and what is sought, the seer and what is seen.

Also, knowledge and love, which are too often regarded as spiritual contraries rather than precisely the same phenomenon. How is it possible to truly love something or someone you don’t really know? And how is it possible to really know something or someone without uniting as completely as possible with it/them—the essence of love?

One is the simplest number. And the simplest spirituality. Religions adore “two,” “three,” or more. The Trinity always has seemed way too complex for me. Even the common metaphor of drop (soul), wave (spirit), and ocean (God) all being the same thing seems to excessively divide the ultimate unity that both science and mysticism point to.

“The eye with which I see God is exactly the same eye with which God sees me.” The same-sounding “eye” and “I” in this English sentence makes it a marvelous koan. Here I am, looking out at the world and inward at myself.

How astounding, this Eckhartian hypothesis that what is doing the looking is precisely what I’m looking for. And, how baffling. Yet that’s the nature of utter simplicity: formless, featureless, ungraspable, unrecognizable.

One and nothing sum to the same total. With one, there is nothing other. With nothing, there is only that one.

The mystic Greek philosopher Plotinus advises, “One must not make it [the One] two even for the sake of forming an idea of it.” Oops. I’ve been doing just that. But I figure that it is much better to think about the One than about the Many, even though my thinking is divisive.

There are ideas that turn you toward simplicity. There also are ideas that turn you toward complexity. By and large, you can tell the difference between spirituality and religion in just this fashion: how simple is the message being preached?

Religions shun the use of Occam’s Razor. They don’t want there to be simply one, for then what place would there be for priests, prophets, gurus, masters, and other mediators if no distance separates God’s eye and our eye?

I consider that true sages like Plotinus point us toward the truth within ourselves, while false teachers point us toward the truth that they say lies within them. Here are a couple of favorite Plotinus quotations from my book:

If you have become this, and seen it, and become pure and alone with yourself, with nothing now preventing you from becoming one in this way, and have nothing extraneous mixed within your self…if you see that this is what you have become, then you have become vision.

Be confident in yourself: you have already ascended here and now, and no longer need someone to show you the way. Open your eyes and see.

And:

This is the real goal for the soul: to touch and to 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]!

The Neoplatonic Church

A few days ago I heard from Eric Grainger about a recently formed Neoplatonic Church. It’s a great idea. The world needs more Neoplatonism and less fundamentalism, that’s for sure.

Eric wanted to post my “Become One to know the One” essay about Plotinus’s spiritual teachings on the Church’s web site. I told him, sure. It’s now on the Meditation and Contemplation page.

Plotinus’s Neoplatonism is a marvelously appealing blend of rationality and mysticism. Some philosophies and religions are highly rational; others are highly mystical. But if someone wants a spirituality that embraces both reason and mystery, nothing can beat Neoplatonism.

Plotinus is one of those rare mystics who lived and taught completely outside of a religious tradition. Like other Greek philosophers, he was his own man. Though deeply respectful of Plato and other philosophical forebears, he thought for himself. His basic spiritual advice, “Return to the One,” is simple and compelling.

Here are some excerpts from Eric’s email message. I like what he’s up to and hope that the Neoplatonic Church becomes another source of support for the churchless.

We expect to find some commonality between your Churchless ideas and this project as we too are opposed to dogma and have long been wary of organized religion. We would like to develop something that only distantly resembles the typical church. When I was in seminary (a very, very brief stay), several of the professors mocked my fondness for saying that we needed a church without preaching, collection plates, and/or Sunday services.

Two of the founders and I make our livings as clinical social workers and liberally tap that profession's lessons regarding small groups and non-profit organizations. We also hope to utilize our understanding of counseling (but not therapy) to help people develop their own version of neoplatonic thought and practice.

We hope the Neoplatonic Church can be a welcoming place for folks with beliefs as varied as the ones held by the Plotinian, Syrian, and Athenian schools. We strive to organize an unorthodox (by today’s standards) religious organization for Pagans and Theists alike (not to mention all the subgroups) to receive supportive fellowship, have access to some educational opportunities, and engage in some dialectic challenge as they find their individual religious/spiritual way. We hope to encourage much self thinking and mystical exploration.

Become one to know the One

I love to see my name in print, so I had to do some imaginative visualizing when the September 2005 issue of “Spiritual Link” arrived in the mail a few days ago. My essay, “Become One to know the One,” was the first main article in the issue, but Spiritual Link doesn’t print the names of authors.

Well, let’s make that some authors. Readers were told that the poem on page 2 was by Bulleh Shah and the two quotations on page 9 that I included at the end of my piece were by Charan Singh. However, all the stuff on pages 4 to 9 that I wrote gave the appearance of being channeled or manifesting out of the ether.

I probably sound egotistical. That wouldn’t be surprising, since I am egotistical. As is everyone who has an ego, which certainly includes me. And that’s my point. I was happy to write this article for Spiritual Link, a magazine published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB)—the India-headquartered religious organization to which I’ve belonged for some thirty-five years.

It isn’t a lack of recognition that bothers me. It’s the lack of naturalness that bothers me. As I’ve said before, I use RSSB as an example of what is wrong about religions because it is the religious group that I’m most familiar with. So here’s an example of how a religion forces the naturalness of spirituality into artificial contours.

Name. No name. What’s the big deal? It doesn’t matter, in one sense. Yet, in another sense, it does. For this policy of enforced anonymity among contributors to the magazine is a symptom of a disease that afflicts almost all religious paths. Namely, believing that spirituality is an outward appearance rather than an inward actualization.

RSSB doesn’t print names of contributors because it believes that doing so would make the authors more egotistical. As if losing one’s ego has anything to do with losing one’s name. If this were the case I’d have become “X” a long time ago, thereby obviating the need for all the daily meditation I’ve put in over the years.

This morning I was reading Thomas Merton’s book, “New Seeds of Contemplation.” Here’s some of what Father Merton says about humility:

A humble man is not disturbed by praise. Since he is no longer concerned with himself, and since he knows where the good that is in him comes from, he does not refuse praise, because it belongs to the God he loves, and in receiving it he keeps nothing for himself but gives it all, with great joy, to his God.

…The humble man receives praise the way a clean window takes the light of the sun. The truer and more intense the light is, the less you see of the glass…There is danger that men in monasteries will go to such elaborate lengths to be humble, with the humility they have learned from a book, that they will make true humility impossible.

How can you be humble if you are always paying attention to yourself? True humility excludes self-consciousness, but false humility intensifies our awareness of ourselves to such a point that we are crippled, and can no longer make any movement or perform any action without putting to work a whole complex mechanism of apologies and formulas of self-accusation.

I’ve been to RSSB gatherings where I’ve thanked someone for giving me a cup of coffee and a doughnut. Instead of the volunteer simply saying, “You’re welcome,” I hear: “Oh no, brother. Please don’t thank me. I’m doing everything on behalf of the guru. He is the real doer, not me. I am just an instrument in his hands.”

I think to myself, “Hmmmm. This humble selfless instrument standing before me sure sounds like a self-willed someone, given the lengthy response I got to my pithy ‘thank you.’” Why can’t religious people act as naturally as non-religious people?

People have names. Authors of articles should be named. That’s the natural thing to do. If a magazine is going to connect the names of supposedly egoless “saints” such as Bulleh Shah, Tukaram, Charan Singh, and Thomas a Kempis with their writings, then the names of decidedly egoist non-saint authors such as myself surely should be printed.

For it makes much more sense to leave anonymous the writings of someone who is considered to have become the One, or God, for they will have left behind the trappings of an individual identity. I haven’t. So it gave me a strange feeling to open up the magazine and see that my nameless article gave the impression of having spontaneously sprung out of nowhere, while I remember all too well the effort it took me to bring it into being.

Most of the article came verbatim from a chapter in my book about Plotinus, “Vision is Veracity.” It’s probably my favorite chapter. I just changed a few lines and added some quotations from Charan Singh. I wanted to show that when you strip unessential dogma from the RSSB teachings, you’re left with a philosophy that bears a close resemblance to Plotinus’ mystical Neoplatonism.

If you want to know God, you have to know as God knows. That’s Plotinus’ spirituality in a nutshell. Nobody else can do that knowing for you. You’ve got to know for yourself. It’s direct spiritual experience that the mystic is after, not (as the Persian mystic Rumi puts it) “transmitted news.” There aren’t any shortcuts to direct experience, because that is the shortcut.

It doesn’t matter what name you call yourself or others call you. You can’t fake spiritual experience by acting like you’re merged with God—“I’m nothing; He is everything”—when you really haven’t. Honest egotism will get you a lot farther than dishonest humility, because like is attracted to like: I’m confident that Truth with a capable “T” resonates within our being when we’re true to ourselves.

An excerpt from my article is in a continuation to this post. You can read the whole thing in this PDF file:
Download become_one_to_know_the_one.pdf