Church of the Churchless

Getting real at a coffeehouse Sunday “service”

I don't go to the Radha Soami Satsang Beas version of church (satsang) anymore. But in a way, I still attend a service. And it's a lot more real and satisfying than the one way "sermons" I used to listen to, and give, back in my true believing days.

Yesterday I got together, as usual, with my Sunday coffeehouse conversing bunch. Most have had, or still have, a connection with RSSB. We're not dogmatic, though, and that makes all the difference.

Most of the time it was just me, Lynette, and Hans huddled at a table, sipping expresso and munching on nachos, making tremendous progress at figuring out the mysteries of the cosmos.

Next week, we'll do it all over again.

That's the beauty of open, unstructured, respectful discussion. You feel good about where you're going, even though you know that the road has no end.

I was able to try out some arguments from a book that I've halfway through reading, which I can tell is going to become one of my all time favorites in the What's It All About? genre. It's "The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality" by Andre Comte-Sponville, a French philosopher and professor at the Sorbonne.

It's wonderful. And not only because I agree with almost everything Comte-Sponville says. It's the way he says it that grabs me just as much.

He'd fit right in with our coffeehouse discussing. He's got one of those marvelous minds that cut through intellectual crap and focuses right in on the essence of a subject. In this case, the nature (or non-nature) of God, and how we relate to God's existence (or non-existence).

Later I'll share some specifics from Comte-Sponville's book. For now, I'll relate how immersing myself in some right on philosophical writing affected my talking with Lynette and Hans.

Without being obnoxious, or so I hope, I kept trying to bring us back to solid ground. Reality. Here and now, rather than there and then.

Concepts are mind frothings, like the top layer of a latte. It's enjoyable to sip, but underneath is the heart of the drink. Same with speculating about the nature of the cosmos and human existence. Sticking with what we directly experience makes for much better musings.

Like Comte-Sponville, we'd start talking about God and I'd say, "First, let's ask What is God?" If that word, "God," is just a concept with no substantive reality behind it, discussing divinity is like analyzing unicorn behavior.

It's all make believe – though taken with great seriousness by the world's religions. Leaving the purely conceptual froth aside, what we're left with is communing in a community of fellow believers or seekers.

That's what we were doing at the coffeehouse. And that's what billions of people do in their own religious gatherings: enjoy the presence of other people with whom they share a common bond.

OK, I can't resist sharing some Comte-Sponville quotes along these lines.

What binds believers together, as seen by an outside observer, is not God, whose existence is open to doubt; rather, it is their communion within the same faith. Such, according to Durkheim and most sociologists, is indeed the true content or primary function of religion – it favors social cohesion by reinforcing communion of thought and adhesion to the rules of the group.

…The question of faith should not obfuscate the more decisive question of fidelity. Do I really wish to subject my conscience to a belief (or unbelief) that cannot be verified? Do I really wish to derive my morals from my metaphysics and measure my duties against my faith? That would mean giving up a certainty for an uncertainty, an actually existing humanity for an only possibly existing God. This is why I sometimes like to describe myself as a faithful atheist.

…I had given a lecture, somewhere in the provinces, on the idea of a godless spirituality. Among the people who had come up to chat with me after the lecture was a rather elderly man who introduced himself as a Catholic priest (and I saw there was a small golden cross pinned to his lapel). "I came to thank you," he said. "I enjoyed your lecture very much." Then he added, "I agreed with everything you said."

I thanked him in turn, but could not help adding, "Still, Father, I must admit it surprises me to hear you say you agreed with everything I said. Surely you can't agree when I say I don't believe in either God or the immortality of the soul!"

"Oh," said the elderly priest with a benevolent smile, "those are such secondary matters."

Beautiful. And so true. That's why our coffeehouse conversing was so enjoyable yesterday.

We zeroed in on immediate human reality and left the secondary matters – God, guru, soul, life after death – for the conceptualizers.

Get real. Is there anything else to do?

Artifacts of my non-heretical heresy

My wife found some note cards when she was cleaning out a drawer. "Here," she said, handing them to me. "They're yours."

No doubt. My handwriting is distinctive, in the sense of unreadable.

But I can decipher my own scribblings. Most of the time, at least. (I've been known to hand a store clerk my grocery list and ask, "Can you tell me what I wrote down here?")

I thumbed through the cards and realized what they were: an initial attempt to organize themes for the talks that I used to give regularly at meetings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) devotees.

After I'd jotted down some thoughts on a handful of cards I gave up, realizing that my unorganized speaking approach was something that I'd never be able to cast off.

Still, there was some benefit to writing down these ideas. Now they serve as a window into my past true believing mind. Which, not so surprisingly, turns out to be quite similar to my current skeptical mind.

Do we ever really change our personality spots? I don't think so. We just make up different stories about them.

Here's what I said back then, whenever "then" was. Ten years or so, probably.

I'm considered a RSSB heretic now. But reading the cards, I realized that whatever I think today isn't so different from what I thought then. That's why I consider my heresy non-heretical.

Non-existence would be proof that God doesn't exist. Hence, it is terrifying. Of course, no one has experienced it. But prospect is dreadful, depressing, scary.

God is existence [Meister Eckhart]. All beings thirst for existence. This thirst is infinite, because existence is infinite. A longing that never lessens. With spirituality, eating causes hunger. Love…love, a circle with no end.

God is one. We need to look through everything and see God within. A single great chain of being. If Master [the guru] lies along that chain, our attachment to him is beneficial. If not, then it isn't.

Why do we not see God? Why is he missing? Perhaps, because the One is everything and so is everywhere. All is spirit, so spirituality is omnipresent. But we see only the crudest side of spirit.

Satsang [sermon, basically]. No truth in satsang, none at all. The true word can't be spoken. So, no heresy. Heresy is a matter of will, not intellect. Even the Master never says anything that is true.

Brain has no sensation at all, so we may sense all things. Likewise, when our non-material consciousness is empty of all self-induced sensation, it perceives what is beyond the self.

What is the most amazing thing we can say about God? How little, if anything, we can say about God. Same with Master; same with us.

Knowing. Do I know what I am talking about? No. But I know that I am talking. And this is the only true knowing: immediate and intuitive. Meister Eckhart: "To know God is to know that He causes us to know."

What you know of yourself is what you know of God. Self can't be known; it is lived.

Beautiful blonde at end of bar. "Buy a girl a drink?" We're accustomed to "but's" accompanying fulfillment of desire. Can't throw ourselves completely into anything, which is wise with worldly desires. But with spirit – need to boldly embrace.

Many words, less truth. No agreement. Even "holy names" not holy.

Struggling to label my belief in unbelief

Sometimes silence says more than words. Recently an old friend asked me, "Do you still consider yourself to be a satsangi?"

I stared into the depths of my Starbucks latte. I started to speak, then closed my lips. The question spiraled deeper into my psyche. I waited to see if it'd hit bottom.

Satsangi – I knew what my friend meant by the word. An initiated member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a mystic-religious group with headquarters in India and branches around the world.

But the term is used much more broadly. Wikipedia associates it with another belief system. And here's a really different satsangi.

A non-fundamentalist member of any religion would face the same difficulty as I did. If you feel comfortable with some aspects of Catholicism, Buddhism, Judaism or any other "ism," but not other aspects, are you faithless or faithful?

I was baptized a Catholic. I had my first communion. But I never went through confirmation. So am I still a Catholic? I don't feel that I am, not a bit. Yet I've been told that baptism entitles a person to burial in a Catholic cemetery.

So maybe I am, from the Church's perspective.

And almost surely I'm still a satsangi from the point of view of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, because it's believed that the guru who initiates you never leaves the side of your soul – until the highest heaven is reached. Well, maybe. For sure, I'm not sure.

Eventually I answered my friend in a roundabout way. I told him that for a while in my true believer days I felt like I was standing on a solid spiritual floor.

Then, bit by bit, the ground started shifting beneath me. I was on an elevator, not terra firma. A jerky elevator. I'd stay on one belief level for a while, then whoosh! – I'd suddenly drop a ways down my tower of faith.

I'd remain there for a bit longer, until another whoosh! free fall dropped me further down the scaffolding of belief that I'd once perched myself upon. And I haven't reached bottom yet, I'm confident.

I said that I used to find these seeming descents (I don't know which way is up anymore) disconcerting. Now, though, they're enjoyable. I like the feeling of floating more freely, less encumbered by dogmatic ties.

Maybe eventually I'll become a completely unattached bubble of unbelief, I said, blown by whatever winds reality conjures up.

"This sounds to me like just what Radha Soami Satsang Beas teaches," my friend commented. "You're detaching from the mind and attaching yourself to spirit."

Well, I'll be, I thought. He might be right. My unbelief could be making me into a true believer of a different sort, sort of like going around the world by turning 180 degrees from the direction I faced before and ending up in the same place – but with a contrary viewpoint.

The main thing I thought, however, was how limited words are. We like to ask, "Republican or Democrat?" "Believer or unbeliever?" "Chocolate or vanilla?" Nuances, shades of gray, kind of this/kind of that – these aren't as appealing as black and white categories or labels.

Yesterday the Portland Oregonian ran a lengthy story in the Sunday paper, "Oregonians take many paths to religion: a state where fewer claim a particular faith yields stories of unusual journeys."

A while back the reporter, Nancy Haught, had asked for readers to send her an email describing their change of faith. Naturally, I did. A blurb from my message was included in a sidebar to the main story.

"Each of us is left with our private faith. Which again, for me, is faith that reality is all we need (though I readily admit that I'm still prone to fantasies and wishful thinking, especially when reality gives me harder knocks than I feel I deserve).
--Brian Hines, Salem, skeptical Taoist"

Last week Nancy emailed me, asking for permission to print the quote. She also wanted a one word description of my current beliefs.

I didn't labor too long over my response. "Taoist" came to mind right away. But that didn't sound quite right. So I added in "skeptical" and pressed the send button.

Skeptical Taoist still is lacking. Yet so is any word.

Radha Soami Satsang Beas embraces the Internet

I like it when a religious organization shows some flexibility. So kudos to the group that I belonged to for some thirty-five years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, for significantly expanding its embrace of the World Wide Web.

Today I learned that the RSSB web site has a new look. Previously there was basically just a home page and a catalog of RSSB publications.

Now there's much more, including essays on the Sant Mat philosophy that forms the core of the group's teachings.

For a long time the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh, asked that disciples refrain from discussing Sant Mat on the Internet. Many initiates have been reluctant to read or comment on this blog, or the Yahoo Radha Soami studies group, for that reason.

Now that RSSB itself is more actively disseminating information over the web, hopefully this reluctance will vanish.

I've browsed through most of the web site's pages. Here's a few observations.

The home page says:

There are no rituals, ceremonies, hierarchies or mandatory contributions, nor are there compulsory gatherings. Members need not give up their cultural identity or religious preference to follow this path.

Well, leaving aside the dubious claim of no rituals or ceremonies, dictionary definitions of "hierarchy" are a series of ordered groupings of people or things within a system and the organization of people at different ranks in an administrative body.

Having been a member of the RSSB hierarchy for several decades, I can say for a fact that it includes: (1) the guru, (2) managers of various RSSB functions, including representatives who administer goings-on in different countries and regions within large countries, and (3) secretaries who organize local meetings (satsangs).

If there isn't a RSSB hierarchy, how could I have been fired as a satsang speaker a few years ago?

The reason that was given was my blogging here on the Church of the Churchless, because it had been making a lot of people uncomfortable. Thus I found this statement on the RSSB "Philosophy" page interesting.

They [members] are free to make their own choices in life and maintain any cultural or religious affiliations they choose. RSSB does not involve itself in the personal lives of its members.

Except when the personal life includes a hobby of blogging about spiritual and philosophical subjects, including some critiques of Sant Mat.

Understand: I don't object to a religious organization choosing who it wants to speak at meetings. I'm just pointing out that several pages on the RSSB web site make the organization sound a lot less hierarchical and controlling than it really is.

Along that line, I found that the web site's introductory pages are considerably more ecumenical than the essays, which are a truer reflection of Sant Mat teachings.

The home page starts off with:

Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) is a philosophical organization based on the spiritual teachings of all religions and dedicated to a process of inner development under the guidance of a spiritual teacher.

Hmmmm. For sure, not all religions agree with the Sant Mat philosophy. Not even close.

I guess the word "spiritual" offers the required wriggle-room, since RSSB would argue that while the outward teaching of every other religion conflicts with Sant Mat, the inner mystical teaching doesn't.

I'd disagree even with that, though. Sant Mat says that the soul returns to God under the guidance of a guru who is divinity made flesh, traversing higher spiritual regions and leaving the material and mental worlds of illusion (maya) behind.

This is far removed from orthodox Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Also Buddhism and Taoism. Hinduism and Sikhism come closest to being in accord with Sant Mat, but even here there are significant differences.

So this is my biggest quibble with the revamped RSSB web site, and RSSB in general. Sant Mat has a legitimate claim to religious validity, as do all of the world's religions. (Whether a claim can be backed up – that's the big question.)

However, I don't think Sant Mat should claim that it is the common denominator of every religion and spiritual/mystical path, because it isn't.

Consider this statement in one of the essays:

It is only when we finally meet a saint or master that a soul can rise above this level of duality, of action and reaction, reward and punishment, and discover its true spiritual nature…They [masters] re-connect the soul to the holy Word, and explain the technique of discovering God within the body.

Yet the essay also says:

Sant Mat concerns itself with this common ground which is the spiritual heart, or heritage, of every great religion.

Again, this isn't true. I'm intimately familiar with the Sant Mat teachings. I'm also well acquainted with the tenets of the major world religions.

Most recently my study has focused on Taoism and Buddhism, because I resonate best with these approaches to fathoming the big questions of life.

The core of Sant Mat – initiation by a living guru who connects the disciple's soul with spirit, and thereafter guides the soul through higher realms of reality – isn't found in Taoism or Buddhism. Nor is it found in the Western monotheistic religions.

This doesn't mean that Sant Mat is wrong. Just that the RSSB teachings need to stand on their own, and not attempt to be supported by an illusory connection (or even supposed identity) with other religions.

Loving is one thing, investing another

I've had an interesting email exchange with someone who noted my statement in a previous post:

"Often I hear believers say, on this blog or elsewhere, that sharing their personal experience runs the risk of enlarging their ego. In my opinion, the risk lies in the other direction."

She disagreed, saying that for her (a Sant Mat initiate), love is the whole of spirituality. And love should be private.

The inner personal experience of meditation is regarded by many satsangis as a very personal, private, and precious gift which has relevance only to oneself. The experience is a special gift from the inner master or sound, (or whoever/whatever one calls the giver of the gift), and is far more private than special gestures of love between two people in a loving relationship. In a latter relationship, I would feel that I am betraying something of that bond of love if I were to share their special "gifts" without the express permission of my beloved. So, too, with those inner experiences.

I told her that I respected those sentiments, as I used to feel much the same way. However, given my current outlook, it seems to me that the analogy with a "loving relationship" isn't really appropriate when it comes to a guru-disciple or god-believer connection.

Loving is one thing, investing another. If love is truly all that Sant Mat, or any other spiritual path, is about – great. Love one another is pretty darn pure and simple.

But my correspondent also refers to inner experiences that are gifts of the guru, god, or holy spirit (in Sant Mat, the three are virtually synonymous, sort of like the Christian Trinity).

She implies that these experiences are the spiritual equivalent of a sexual union. You don't talk about what goes on in the bedroom with your physical lover, and you don't talk about what goes on in the meditation chamber with your divine lover.

Here's how I see it, though.

If you're in an intimate relationship, or married, it's presumed you're having sex. You may not want to offer up juicy details, but if someone asked me, "Do you have sex with your wife?" I'd have no problem saying "Sure."

However, Sant Mat disciples – like most initiates of a guru – are extremely reluctant to admit that they're even involved in a metaphysical relationship with their master. They'll say, "I can't talk about it; it's too personal."

Well, I'd like to know details, but I'd be happy with much less. Do you get "gifts" of mystical experiences that you know are coming from the guru? Yes or no. Leave aside a mention of what they are. What's wrong with sharing the general nature of your spiritual relationship?

My suspicion is that what's wrong is that the gifts aren't as clear cut or demonstrable as the Sant Mat teachings promise. This makes Sant Mat more of an exercise in investing, and less an exercise in loving.

Meaning, Sant Mat promises certain experiences. A meeting with the guru's radiant astral form. Journeying with the radiant form through higher regions of reality. Merging with the ultimate cosmic energy in the form of light and sound. Entering a formless realm beyond time and space.

This isn't love. This is investing. It's an exchange relationship, really.

At the time of initiation the disciple promises to keep to certain vows, and the guru agrees to take the initiate under his spiritual wing – guiding the disciple back to his or her divine Home.

Problem is, it's said that this promise isn't always fulfilled in one's lifetime. Thus the investment of meditation, vegetarianism, and such isn't guaranteed to show a payoff until a maximum of three additional reincarnations have been lived.

In lots of cases, though, the guru's gifts are supposed to be bestowed in the present lifetime. This is why the meditation practice is billed as a "science." You do certain things, and certain results happen.

It's akin to handing over $10,000 to a investment advisor who says "I can make your money grow." Then you wait. And you wait some more.

No checks in the mail. Not even any financial statements. You've got no indication that the guy is making any money for you. Reading the investment agreement more closely, you note it says:

--You may not make any money until after you die.
--If you make money in this lifetime, you may not know it.
--You can't ask other investors if they're making money.
--You can't tell other investors if you're making money.

Huh? When you entered into this deal, you were sure it was a good one. So you didn't worry about that fine print. But now that the expected payoff hasn't shown up, you're curious about what's going on.

You can't understand why all the secrecy. If so many people are making money through this investment advisor, why isn't wealth evident? You know some fellow investors, and though they won't tell you how they're doing, their lifestyle appears just the same as before.

When you inquire about this, another clause in the agreement is pointed out:

--If you make money, you can't flaunt it.

I could go on in this vein, but hopefully you get the idea. Sant Mat may be the real deal. However, the way the deal is structured, it bears a lot of resemblance to a financial scheme that would make you think, There's something shady going on here.

So this is another way of explaining why I favor full disclosure of initiates' spiritual net worth. If mystical wealth is being accumulated, let's hear about it.

That's the only way for investors/initiates to know whether the payoffs that aren't being made to them, are to other people – which would go a long way toward establishing the credibility of the setup.

Love doesn't have anything to do with credibility. It stands by itself. Promised spiritual experiences, though, either are forthcoming or they're not.

Show me the money. Then I'll know if the deal is credible.

Is there anything to do but be?

I love it when a Church of the Churchless post comes back to life. Resurrection! Praise Blog!

The past week there's been an intense high-quality discussion on last November's "Another RSSB initiate bites the dust" – a 75 comment interchange since February 12. I've followed the conversation mostly from afar, though I've thrown in a comment or two of my own.

As frequently happens on this blog, the specifics often have to do with Radha Soami Satsang Beas, the mystic-religious organization I was involved with for thirty-five years.

But the general themes are universal.

One of which, to my mind the central topic, is whether spirituality involves doing anything at all. My innate laziness likes this notion.

Just be. Simple.

And entirely in line with deep mystic philosophy, from all sorts of sages. Including the guru, Gurinder Singh, who currently heads up Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

I went to India in 1998. While I was at the Dera, RSSB's headquarters in the Punjab, I heard Gurinder say at an evening meeting of Western disciples, "How difficult is it to do nothing?"

He was talking about meditation. Interestingly, this is the only thing I remember from any of the meetings where he spoke (aside from some comments he made to me about a book I was working on).

It struck me at the time as being both remarkably trite and remarkably true.

Meaning, it was one of those statements that sound profoundly wise coming from a distinguished looking Indian guru, replete with beard, turban, and flowing white garments, and profoundly simplistic coming from almost anyone else.

Of course, it's indeed difficult to do nothing if this is taken to mean stopping all thoughts, emotions, imaginings, and what not in meditation.

But there's a broader meaning, one which kept arising in the comment conversation that started February 12. Doing nothing except being what you are. Now that's really doing nothing, because there's nothing to be done.

For example, on February 17 Tulsi said:

The One is playing a game of hide and seek with itself. All paths lead to nowhere because there is nowhere to go. Just be as you are, really are, right now, which is just fine as it is.

On the same day Aman replied:

Yes there's no where to go or reach in the end the final realization is of the self which is present now agreed but just the knowledge of the self is not enough there has to be a process which will unfold the real self & that realization will not be a mere thought or belief system which you've come to understand but instead it will be a result & conclusion to your experiment with your self & your soul.

And so the dialogue goes. Where it stops, nobody knows. At least, I sure don't.

More and more, I find myself tilting toward the nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to become camp. But what do I know? I could be completely wrong.

Maybe my soul needs a total makeover, and I'm sitting here contentedly unkempt, not realizing what a shabby state my self is in.

Who knows for sure? Again, not me.

I'll end by mentioning that while I read and enjoyed all of the 75 comments, Manjit's February 18 submission was particularly interesting. I appreciated his openness and honesty in talking about the validity of his "mystical" experiences.

However, my intense desire for the truth caused me a great, great deal of problems. I began to question, REALLY question, what my inner experiences really showed. I tried testing them. Astral projecting to a place and counting the money on top of a cupboard and then subsequently checking in 'real' life if I was correct (never). Reading the testimonies of countless other 'seekers' who saw the 'radiant form' of their obviously deviant 'guru'. Reading Neural surfer and Chand. Etc etc etc. The avenues which disprove the RS theology quite convincingly are both obvious and many.

Thanks to all for this stimulating interchange. Per usual, no answers. Just great questions.

Jesus is alive and well in India

Most Christians would be surprised to learn that right now, in 2008, millions of people believe that a man in India not only teaches the same spirituality as Jesus, but is the same godly being.

Yes, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a branch of Sant Mat, holds that the path of the saints (a translation of "Sant Mat") is identical with the teachings of Jesus. One of the RSSB books, "Light on Saint John," says:

Since most of you have a Christian background, I shall try to explain the teachings of all the Saints in the light of the Bible, for their teachings exactly coincide with those contained in the Bible, if rightly understood.

…If you go deep into the roots of Christ's teachings, you will find that his teachings are the same as the teachings of all other Saints, and in that light I will discuss Saint John with you.

Pretty amazing. And to my currently churchless soul, extremely difficult to accept.

For even during the thirty years or so I was a largely uncritical RSSB devotee, this purported equivalence between the message of the Gospels and Sant Mat was hard to swallow.

As I noted in a recent post, RSSB uses the New Testament in contradictory ways to cozy up to Jesus. On the one hand, the Bible is decried (correctly) as an entirely human document whose language has been fiddled with for centuries, not a one-time divine revelation.

Yet certain Biblical verses are also cited unquestioningly to support the contention that Jesus' message is the same as the teachings promulgated by RSSB gurus such as Charan Singh (who wrote "Light on Saint John").

A few days ago I got an email message from someone who said:

I've been reading your blog about RSSB, the organization, and have been enjoying it a great deal. Could you tell me which books by the RS masters claim that Jesus was a "sant mat 'guru'?" I know that you say this is an RSSB contention but I'm wondering if any of the masters, in their writings or tapes, have said as much. From what I remember of the master's books, tapes, this claim is not directly made.

Well, actually it is. I dug out some RSSB books from storage boxes in our attic and browsed through them yesterday. It was interesting to re-read passages that now strike me differently.

What's most interesting is that Master Charan Singh is speaking as much about himself, as he is about Jesus, when he interprets the Bible in the light of Sant Mat teachings.

The teachings of different Saints cannot themselves be different. Because the Lord is one, the way to realize Him must also be one, for He is within every one of us. We have to search for Him within ourselves, under the guidance of one who has himself realized Him within, as Christ did in his lifetime …Masters may take birth in any nation, race, or religion, but they all preach the same Truth.

So since Jesus is a Master or Saint, and Charan Singh is a Master or Saint, and all Masters or Saints have trod the same path to God-realization, whatever Charan Singh says about Jesus applies to himself.

This helps explain why so many RSSB initiates come from a Christian background. In the person of the guru they believe they've found the 21^st century Jesus (the current RSSB master is Gurinder Singh Dhillon, who succeeded Charan Singh after he died in 1990).

I used to find these Sant Mat dogmas appealing, because I liked the idea that I was "chosen" and "saved." But now they strike me as overtly religious. I can't accept Christianity in an Indian guise. (All quotes from "Light on Saint John." My comments on a quote follow in italics.)

John the Baptist's answer points out a fundamentally important law of the Creator: that each Master has been allotted a certain number of "sheep" to initiate and take home to the Father, and that only the Father determines which souls are for which Mystic.

Well, maybe. But this notion of predestination is ethically challenging. Repugnant, even. Some people are born to be saved and returned to God; others aren't. And that's it. The Creator decides who merits salvation and who doesn't.

There are two types of people in this world: those who are devoted to a perfect Master, and hence devotees of the Lord, and those who are devoted to the mind and senses. The devotees of the Lord always remain devoted to their Master and become free from sin by doing the spiritual practice as directed by him. The others are dominated by the mind and senses and have worldly values, which cause them to do worldly things, and this in turn causes an accumulation of sins and karmas – the chains that bind us to the material world – thus preventing us from going home to our Father in heaven.

There's a lot to comment on here. The duality. The "us" vs. "them" mentality. The equation of devotion to the guru with devotion to God. The warning that only the spiritual practice enjoined by the guru is sin-free. My wife, who isn't a RSSB initiate, used to do a great Saturday Night Live "church lady" imitation when she heard these sorts of sentiments expressed. "I'm doomed," she'd say, "doomed!" Somehow, I doubt it.

There is no difference between me and my Father. You are spiritually blind and deaf, you cannot see and hear Him in the Spirit. Therefore, out of His mercy and grace He has come down to your level in the physical form to instruct you and put you on the path leading back to Him. It is He that you see in the physical form and it is He who is teaching you. I do nothing. It is the Father who is doing everything.

In Sant Mat and RSSB, the guru is God. This is similar to Christian Trinitarianism, but a bit more extreme. My understanding is that Christians consider Jesus to be one in nature with God the Father, but not the same as God. Here Charan Singh seems to be saying that Jesus (and by implication, himself) is God in human form.

People believe that they are worshipping God, but they do not really know what they are worshipping. In fact, they are being deceived by the negative power, who will further ensnare and entangle them in this world again and again. The negative power tricks them into thinking that they are worshipping the Father and thus prevents them from contacting a living Master, so that they may not know and worship the one true God.

I keep hearing from RSSB devotees, "this is not a religion." But the quote above is pure fundamentalism. There is one way to God, devotion to a living Master or guru. If you're not on that path, you've been deceived by the negative power, the Devil. Again, my wife would disagree. Of course, from the RSSB perspective that's just the negative power speaking.

Until we contact a living Master who has realized God, we can never realize the Father.

Clear and simple. Only problem is, how can anyone know that someone has realized God? This is the big question. And I've never gotten a good answer to it.

Playing fair with words

Yesterday I got some advice from a commenter on a post to "be silent." I responded right away, because this is one of my favorite subjects – playing fair with words.

Zion, I always find it interesting when someone, like you, advises that silence is the best policy -- and posts a public comment using many words.

If I should be silent, shouldn't you? Or do you know me better than I know myself? And does your advice only apply to me, or also to yourself?

…I'm curious about this: how do you know that "those who know always keep quiet." Does this mean that someone who never speaks or writes anything "knows"? You just wrote something. Apparently this means that you don't know.

So how is it possible that you can offer such contradictory advice? If you knew, you would keep quiet. Since you didn't, I have to assume that you don't know.

If you are to be believed, every single holy book and every single holy person who ever uttered a word, or taught in some other communicative fashion, doesn't know. I find this easy to believe, by the way -- that people who claim to know about higher realities, really don't.

But again, when you undercut everyone else who speaks, your own speaking is cut away also. Anyway, thanks for the advice. As you can see, I'm not taking it.

I don't mind people telling me what I should do. If I did, I wouldn't have been able to stay married for 36 of my 59 years, that's for sure.

My wife frequently tells me I should be neater and cleaner around the house. She's neat and clean, so her actions match her advice. That's consonant with the Golden Rule approach to morality (mentioned here).

But when someone uses thoughts to tell me "you think too much," or words to tell me "be silent," my bullshit detector goes off.

Start with yourself, dude is my immediate response.

The post that stimulated the "be silent" comment was about RSSB books. So it's appropriate to use some Radha Soami Satsang Beas publications as another example of how words are used unfairly.

A number of RSSB books relate Christianity to Sant Mat, which is the foundation of RSSB teachings. I won't go into the nature of these relations here, because my concern is with how the Bible is used to support the RSSB contention that Jesus basically was a Sant Mat "guru."

On the one hand, RSSB authors (including the guru who initiated me, Charan Singh) correctly note that the words in the Bible have been messed around with since the New Testament was written.

And that these writings were composed a long time after Jesus lived. So we don't have a dependable record of what Jesus said.

Yet after saying this, somehow these same authors feel justified in explaining the genuine message of the Gospels, using quotations from the Bible to support the notion that Jesus was a vegetarian, meditating mystic who initiated disciples into an inner path of light and sound that leads to higher spiritual realms.

Even when I was a fervent RSSB devotee, I'd read this stuff and think, huh?

How could it be that some words in the Bible can't be trusted when they support a traditional view of Christianity, but other words can be used to argue that Sant Mat and Jesus' teachings are essentially identical?

I'm up with wordlessness, believe me. I spend a good share of my day doing my best to keep my psyche as word-free as possible.

Other times, like now, I open the gate to my word animals and let them run free. Words are what they are, neither good or bad. How we use them – that's the question.

Fairly. That's part of the answer. We shouldn't expect other people to adhere to a word standard that's different from our own.

A parent who screams to a child, "You're too loud!" doesn't have much credibility. Nor does someone who writes, "we should keep our thoughts to ourselves."

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.

More evidence Sant Mat is a religion

Yesterday Jay Lou left a comment on one of my posts that started off, "I don't want to be rude to you. But if you can't say anything good about something then don't say it at all."

I was surprised by that sentiment. I seem to recall an elementary school teacher saying something similar back in first or second grade, but adults rarely, if ever, speak that way.

It struck me as remarkably unscientific.

Yet it was pretty obvious that the commenter was a devotee of Sant Mat (likely the Radha Soami Satsang Beas branch), a spiritual path that I used to follow assiduously, and which likes to call itself the "Science of the Soul."

For the rest of his comment was:

This path is to be experienced on our own. It doesn't always work with everyone, even the Masters say that. Even though things might be going good for you but at the time of your death you will see what you have turned your back on. This mind of ours makes us doubt a lot and we have to control it. I'm just saying this to you to please don't say anything about the path, if you can't say anything good then don't say anything at all. Respect the path for what it is, even if you think its wrong and gives and didn't work for you. I think you have lost faith and don't know what you have lost. I just hope one day you understand and find what you are looking for.

It's difficult to imagine a scientist advising a colleague, "Don't say anything about this theory. Respect it for what is, even if it appears to be wrong and unworkable."

But it's easy to picture a religious fundamentalist wanting to stifle criticism of his belief system. Which sure seems to be the case here.

Lots of God-fearing people are, obviously, swayed by fear. Guru-fearing people also. I used to be one of them, so I understand where Jay Lou is coming from.

He believes that if you're not initiated by a perfect living Master who has been sent by God to take on the sins (karma) of marked souls who are destined to return to their heavenly father, then you're screwed after you die.

Just as Christianity teaches, there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth as you're thrown into the clutches of the Devil (which Sant Mat calls the "negative power" or Universal Mind).

Well, maybe at the time of my death I really will see what I've turned my back on. But I doubt it. What I've made a commitment to face myself toward is truth – reality.

It's difficult for me to imagine that reality is going to turn into fantasy after death. And I don't see any evidence that the cosmos has been set up so that certain souls are punished post mortem, and other souls are rewarded.

My spirituality, if you want to call it that (I think of it more as reality'ity), is premised on a scientific assumption: universal laws are just that. They apply to everyone, everywhere.

Gravity doesn't care if someone believes in it or not. Gravity doesn't care if someone criticizes it, or not. Gravity doesn't care if someone calls it by every swear word in their lexicon, or not.

By contrast, many people believe that God (or his emissary, such as a guru) does care. So they are super-careful about not taking the Lord's name in vain, bad mouthing their chosen divinity, expressing doubts about this being, and such.

They view God as akin to an easily offended human. Someone you don't want to say anything bad about, because he doesn't take kindly to criticism. Hence, "if you can't say something good, then don't say anything at all."

Well, what I say about Sant Mat and Radha Soami Satsang Beas on this blog is based on more than thirty-five years of intimate experience. I diligently followed the path that Jay Lou refers to, and now I feel entirely justified in speaking about what I found – and didn't find – along the way.

That's science, whether it be directed at knowing physical reality or what, if anything, may lie beyond the physical. You say it like it is, recognizing that "is" continually changes as reality becomes better understood.

What you don't do is censor the truth as you perceive it because such might offend someone. That's ridiculous, especially if it's considered that ultimate reality (a.k.a. "God") is the one being offended.

If God is that fickle and hyper-sensitive, I've got no interest in kissing his ass. Actually, I'm not interested in divine ass kissing regardless of God's desires in this regard, because if I'm going to affix my lips to a posterior, I want it to be a real one.

Jacob just submitted his own blog comment on "Reality is the best religion." My reaction? Right on, dude.

I agree, im 16, many people around me believe that their is a heaven or hell, why? i mean maybe if life was a movie or video game sure, but seriously when has something like that ever been seen before your eyes? when you die, your dead so live it up

I also liked Benito's response to Jay Lou. Nicely said.

Liberalists vs. fundamentalists in Sant Mat

Reminding me of myself when I was less than half of my current pushing 60, today disgustingly young Adam sent me an email about his take on Sant Mat.

I replied, and got his permission to share his thoughts. Below is Adam's message, followed by my reply. I like how Adam differentiates between "liberalism" and "fundamentalism."

The question in my mind (and Sam Harris') is how distinct these approaches to spirituality really are. Adam thinks that it's possible to separate out the crazily dogmatic aspects of an organized religion, while still remaining true to the group's core principles.

In my own experience, that way led to contradictions and stresses that eventually caused me to break away from the dogma and the organization.

And as I say in my reply to Adam, if the leader of a religious organization doesn't support the craziness and the dogma, how is it possible for that fundamentalism to continue? That's why I find it difficult to follow the leader while denying what is done under the auspices of the leader.

Here's today's email exchange (F.Y.I, Gurinder Singh is the current guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, the Sant Mat branch to which Adam belongs, and I used to be an active part of):

Dear Brian, I am a younger (27) recent initiate into Sant Mat. It has been interesting to read your blog, and also the posts of your regulars. I am pulled to share my perspective with you...don't know why exactly, probably because you're out there, listening, thinking about this stuff.

I still don't know exactly where you stand in regard to Sant Mat. It's clear to me that you have little or no faith in it anymore, but I also sense an undercurrent of love for your master, Charan Singh, and an open-minded curiosity about the universe that seems would fit quite well into the version of Sant Mat in my head. Maybe I'm wrong.

OK, my perspective. I have been involved in an ongoing email dialogue with a good long-time friend of mine from high school who also happens to be Muslim. We basically connected in high school because we could have metaphysical conversations with each other in an environment that didn't really encourage such discussions.

I have my meditation practice, he has his prayer rituals, but we differ on one point that has recently come up for us. I, like you, am very critical of religion. I have read Sam Harris' "End of Faith," as well as Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion," and haven't yet made it through the Christopher Hitchens literature, but want to.

I find all of this lit to be not completely in sync with how I feel, but insightful, and engaged in perhaps the most important cultural war of our time. In my discussions with my friend, we have (very simply and for the sake of argument) divided the Western world up into two large groups of people: those who have some sort of religious leaning, and those who have a more liberalist background.

Those with a religious background focus more on things like morality, right and wrong, ritual, holy books, "faith" (which often means lack of reason), and controlling one's actions, while a liberalist tends to focus more on scientific understanding, plurality of opinion, and democracy. Under a liberalist system, religion can exist, but liberalists often feel judged and controlled when they encounter religious systems.

This is the argument I have posited to my friend. This is because I feel the neocons in our country are basically the most dangerous group of people I have witnessed in my short life, and they couldn't exist without their connection to a (doubtless corrupted) version of Christianity.

This is all to say that both types of people can be found in Sant Mat. There are those who wish to treat it as a religion, are ritualistically oriented, etc., and then there are those more like you, who were at one time very drawn to Sant Mat, probably because it seemed like the greatest experiment in consciousness you could embark upon. Maybe I don't understand you, and I could be wrong. I am certainly in the second category.

And I get frequently turned off by religious attitudes, whether in Sant Mat or anywhere else. For me, though, this is not so much of a problem in my own relationship to Sant Mat. This is because I keep Sant Mat very simple in my mind. There are the four vows, three of which are meant to facilitate meditation and keep our karmas to a minimum, and then there is the meditation and the master. And that's it.

Yes, there's satsang [spiritual talks] and seva [service], the bhandaras [large gatherings] and the weekly meetings, and all that stuff. But Charan Singh has made it perfectly clear that no one has to do these things if they don't want to. Sometimes I go to satsang, and if I don't want to, I just don't go. Sometimes I do seva, and if I don't want to, I just don't do it.

And regarding the master, I don't get too hung up on the Guru, Sat Purush, God-in-human-form thing. I don't get it, but I also don't think it's so important for me to get. What is important for me is that I really want to meditate. The chakras seem real to me because I can feel them in my body. I like the feeling of concentration, and the notion of concentrating all of my energy at the eye center makes intuitive, visceral sense to me, and, having been around Gurinder Singh, I believe that at the very least, he is practiced in this exercise.

That's enough for me. When it starts to feel too Sant Mat'y, I just do my own thing. And the masters (at least Gurinder) have often said that the master-disciple relationship is very high -- and that it's ok to think of him like a teacher, a friend, a guide, or whatever word doesn't feel so far out as "master."

I wonder if your frustration is with your guru and the meditation, or is it more with the organization? For me, the guru and meditation is Sant Mat, and everything else is just the scaffolding. But you can't fault the teacher for the craziness of the students. You are a scientist, right? You don't believe in science less just because you have had to subsist alongside grant-hungry, egotistical, money-crazed peers, right?

All the best,
Adam

--------------------------
Here's my reply…

Adam, yes, I still do have fondness for Charan Singh. As a teacher who, by and large, made pretty good sense. I just don't view him as God in human form anymore, if I ever did. I say that, because looking back I'm not sure how much I believed, and how much I believed in believing, if you get what I mean (which I'm sure you do).

Your analysis of the two sorts of spirituality, liberalist and fundamentalist, rings generally true. Sam Harris, however, would say that the liberalists support the fundamentalists, because both sides support faith-based religiosity. I'm not as extreme as Harris, but I understand his position and agree with it by and large.

For example, the Sant Mat vows have to be taken on faith. Meditation is a consciousness experiment, but the other vows are basically moral in nature. I had sex with my first wife before we got married, and before we got initiated (both in 1971, the really old days). I know lots of satsangis who ignore the "no sex before marriage" thing. It just doesn't make any sense, except as a rule to be followed because it is a rule set down by the guru. Which gets back to believing in believing.

That said, I admire and respect your approach to Sant Mat. It meshes with mine back when I was a devoted satsangi. All I can say, and this is just my own experience, is that when that approach is taken consistently with the RSSB organization, I learned that the powers-that-be are much more fundamentalist than liberalist. And since they take their marching orders from the guru, it's hard to come to any other conclusion than that Gurinder Singh, for all his liberalist talk, supports the "straight and narrow" approach organizationally.

I eventually found that I couldn't reconcile my liberalist attitude with the fundamentalist actions that were expected of me if I was going to continue to be active in the organization. That conflict led me to make a break with RSSB, though I still go to coffee with my old satsangi friends most Sundays.

I'm not a scientist, by the way. I did spend two years working on a Ph.D. in Systems Science, but that's more a science of sciences than a discipline itself. I've just read a heck of a lot of science books and subscribe to several science magazines.

    --Brian

Another RSSB initiate bites the dust

It's always a pleasure to hear from another heretic. Yesterday Fred, a fellow disillusioned initiate of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, sent me an email titled "Another one bites the dust."

Well, Fred says he's back to sipping red wine. So his un-conversion isn't as dryly uncomfortable as that title implies.

In fact, when you read his thoughtful message you'll see that he's doing just fine. Real fine, in fact.

Apart from his observations about RSSB, I enjoyed Fred's description of an orgasmic meditation session. He asked me for meditation pointers, but obviously I should be kneeling at his feet (oops, that doesn't sound quite right, given the context).

I've offered up the message in three formats. It can be read as a continuation to this post. It also can be downloaded in Word or PDF format by clicking on the links below.

Word: Download note_to_brian.doc

PDF: Download note_to_brian.pdf

Thanks to thankfulness on Thanksgiving

Last year I thought I'd said about all there was for to me say about "Who should I thank on Thanksgiving?"

Existence. You can't get down to a deeper level of thankfulness than that.

I am. Oh yes. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

If I wasn't, there'd be no thanking. Or anything else.

Well, there's always something more to say. Just not a whole lot. About thankfulness. Right now.

Yesterday I was given some notes that described recent talks given by the current guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Gurinder Singh.

Glancing through them I was struck by a question and answer about thanking.

Someone got up and thanked the organizers who made it possible for the meeting to be held. The guru reportedly said:

You will be doing them a disservice by thanking them.

I thought, "how sad." Religions end up with so many ridiculous rules and restrictions.

In an effort to crush the ego and become a selfless servant (of God, the guru, whoever), disciples are being asked to give up normal human niceties.

"Thank you." What's wrong with saying that?

Beats me, as I said last month in "RSSB's strange fear of praise."

We shouldn't be shy about expressing our thankfulness.

To other people. To existence. To anyone or anything else.

Tomorrow, like every day, is a time for Thanksgiving.

When the old sermon doesn’t soar anymore

What seems to be the final newsletter that I'll be getting from my old "church," Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), came in the mail yesterday.

RSSB no longer is going to mail the newsletters. You'll have to go to meetings (satsangs) to get the information – some of which is about upcoming meetings, so go figure.

I'll miss getting this publication, which comes from the Western Regional Office headed up by Vince Savarese. I read it mostly to gauge my reaction to reading it.

Like lots of other people who have become more churchless over the years, I used to find the RSSB literature inspiring. It made my psyche soar. Now, it doesn't. The sermons haven't changed. My attitude toward them has.

I'm not claiming that now I know the truth about God, the cosmos, life, and the hereafter. I just look upon those who do make just a claim with considerably more open-minded skepticism.

In Christopher Hitchens' new book, "The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever," he says in the introduction:

I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record of any human being who was remotely qualified to say that he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim – so modestly and so humbly – to possess.

It is time to withdraw our "respect" from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world.

In the Fall 2007 RSSB newsletter, Vince quotes from a book by Sawan Singh, "Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. III." Sawan Singh supposedly knew the "mind of God." Even more, he is considered by RSSB devotees to be God, as are all satgurus (true gurus).

Gurus describe the real austerities through which the cycle of birth and death is ended and the soul reaches the door of the Master. The greatest of the austerities is the Master's service, through which the Lord dwells in the heart.

…He who withdraws his mind and senses from the pleasures of the senses and puts them in the service of the Master is a real ascetic.

Even when I was a RSSB true believer, all this talk about reaching the door (or feet) of the Master struck me as strange. What about God? Isn't the supreme being our goal, not a human being? It's similar to how Jesus dominates Christianity, while God fades into the background.

Further, given my scientific approach toward spirituality I'd get frustrated with the circular reasoning found in the RSSB literature. In the newsletter Vince quotes from another RSSB book, "Call of the Great Master."

Someone has asked the guru, Sawan Singh, how one can recognize a perfect Master and know that the Path he teaches is the true one. Here's the guru's answer:

There are one hundred and one kinds of Gurus in the world, and a seeker certainly finds it difficult to choose the right one from amongst them. Saints have mentioned in their writings signs and marks by which one can recognize a perfect Master and the true "Word" with which He baptizes.

Hmmmm. So you're supposed to read the writings of a perfect Master to learn what the signs are of a perfect Master. Not surprisingly, the perfect Master who wrote those writings describes someone exactly like himself.

In the same fashion, whenever I read a brochure from, say, Toyota, I learn that the best cars in the world are made by – no big surprise – Toyota. Now, this may indeed be the case. But there has to be an independent source of truth for claims like that, whether they be for the best guru or the best car.

It's like when Christians say, "The Bible is the word of God because it says in the Bible, This is the word of God." That's how con artists operate, asking people to believe them because they're so believable.

Another newsletter-inspired thought: I've done a lot of "seva" (volunteering) for RSSB. An awful lot. Years and years of it. So I understand the attraction of performing selfless service for the guru and a spiritual community in general. It feels good to give of yourself.

But Hitchens makes an excellent point:

Nine times out of ten, in debate with a cleric, one will be told not of some dogma of religious certitude but of some instance of charitable or humanitarian work undertaken by a religious person…My own response has been to issue a challenge: name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.

As yet, I have had no takers. (Whereas, oddly enough, if you ask an audience to name a wicked statement or action directly attributable to religious faith, nobody has any difficulty in finding an example.)

The RSSB teachings put a big emphasis on serving the Master. The newsletter contains a call for volunteers to construct bathrooms at the RSSB center in Petaluma. Design/Construction seva (service) also is available at other centers around the world.

There's nothing wrong, and a lot right, with volunteering. But there are plenty of "seva" opportunities close to home for anybody, religious or not. Charitable organizations always are looking for warm bodies willing to lend a hand.

What bothers me now, and even concerned me in the days when I did a lot of volunteer work for RSSB, is that members of religious groups often come to feel that volunteering done under the auspices of their group somehow is more worthy than other sorts of service.

It isn't very selfless to consider that the service you're providing is going to result in your getting spiritual goodies, up to and including salvation. Yet this is how the RSSB faithful look upon seva for the guru.

Hitchens again:

If we stay with animal analogies for a moment, owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are god.

(Cats may sometimes share the cold entrails of a kill with you, but this is just what a god might do if he was in a good mood.) Religion, then, partakes of equal elements of the canine and the feline. It exacts maximum servility and abjection, requiring you to regard yourself as conceived and born in sin and owing a duty to a stern creator.

But in return, it places you at the center of the universe and assures you that you are the personal object of a heavenly plan. Indeed, if you make the right propitiations you may even find that death has no sting, and that an exception to the rules of physical annihilation may be made in your own case.

It cannot be said enough that this preachment is immoral as well as irrational.

RSSB’s strange fear of praise

What's wrong with telling someone "Good job"?

I can't think of any reason not to give out praise when congratulations are due. But religiously minded members of Radha Soami Satsang Beas sure did back in my RSSB speaking days.

I suspect that not much has changed. Which is too bad. Because spirituality should start from a base of being fully human.

That is, if we aren't engaging in the normal social niceties that bring people together and make everyday life flow more pleasantly, it's hard to see how we're on a path that leads to some sort of higher realization.

Quite a few years ago I remember being part of a panel that was advising satsang ("church") speakers at one of the periodic large RSSB gatherings. One of the organization's representatives said, "The worst thing anyone can do is congratulate a speaker after he or she has given a satsang." (satsang also means a talk, or sermon)

He explained that praise feeds the ego, so we shouldn't say anything even so simple as Thank you, I enjoyed your talk.

I disagreed. I told the group that if after years or decades of meditation a RSSB speaker is so easily influenced by a passing compliment, this is a pretty pitiful comment on the person's spiritual accomplishment, or lack thereof.

Good lord. Every day each of us gives and receives a lot of praise and blame. At work, at home, at school, on the highway ("Watch where you're going, you jerk!").

We should be able to let most of it roll off our backs without throwing us off balance. Especially if we claim to be following a spiritual practice, or path, that supposedly inculcates a feeling of detachment from worldly affairs.

Yet here was a high-ranking RSSB functionary telling initiates that they needed to walk on eggshells around satsang speakers, because a bit of praise could send their ego into a uncontrollable paroxysm of "Wow, I'm so great!"

Myself, I always enjoyed it when people came up to me after I gave a talk.

Some would have questions. Some would express their appreciation for my echoing their own feelings, because they didn't know that other initiates were as scientifically spiritually skeptical as they were. Some would take me to task for screwing up on some metaphysical or philosophical point.

Regardless, I liked the interchange. Person to person. Heart to heart. Mind to mind. Honest free-floating conversation, everybody saying what was true to them.

Like I said in a previous post, sat means truth. How can you have a genuine satsang if there isn't sat in both the speaker and the audience?

Being real – to me that's a big part of what spirituality, which really is nothing more than living life, is all about. Heck, maybe the only part.

"Thank you." "I didn't like what you said." "Here's where we differ." If that's what you feel, say it. Don't be afraid of being yourself.

There's nobody else you can be.

Faith or falsehood? “I can’t wait to die”

Religious people often look upon death as a ticket out of this world and into a better one. Me, I'm clinging to what I've got until I have hold of something else.

So I was intrigued by the following email message from a Church of the Churchless visitor. I know just what he's talking about, as during my devoted Radha Soami Satsang Beas days I encountered quite a few initiates, or satsangis, who couldn't wait to die (some who were seriously ill, some who were not).

My correspondent wanted to know my thoughts on this topic. Well, to me it's mostly about honesty. I'm afraid of death, so I understand why someone would want to feel that they're going to live on after their body dies.

However, the way I see it I need to live authentically here and now. "There and then" is fine – when it happens. But so long as it hasn't, I want to embrace the reality that I truly know, not what I falsely imagine.

This is me. You're you. The writer is himself. And the person he's talking about is someone else.

There's no right or wrong here. Just different ways of coping with life and death, present and hoped-for experience, what is and what might be.

Hi Brian, thought I'd send you a short note regarding a Satsangi friend, who I found out yesterday, is dying of cancer. If you wish to include this information in your discussion group, go for it.

Having done a bit of research on alternative cancer treatments and just wanting to wish him well, I thought I'd give him a call.

His response was interesting. First off, he wasn't interested in any information that I had that could possibly be helpful to him. And, he was primarily doing the things he was doing for his cancer just to go along with the wishes of those closest to him.

He was looking forward to dying soon and had complete faith in the Master. He went on to admit that his faith was "belief" and that all of us are really agnostics when it comes down to it. I agree with him.

You know, during my active years as a satsangi, I commonly heard this "I can't wait to die" rhetoric, as though it was a sign of spiritual advancement or something of that nature. One of the big "turn offs" to me with regards to the RS philosophy was its "anti-life" "anti-body" stance.

Seems that the goal was to get out of the body and to get out of the world, as though the cause of all our problems originated from "being in the world". This dualistic stance between the life of "spirit" and "worldly" life was one of the key factors that lead to my departure from RS.

So getting back to my friend, he seems very content to live in "His" will as he stated, while waiting for his "grand prize" (my description) when he dies.

Something seems very amiss here. And yet, he seems very content. His cancer is quite advanced and the likelihood of recovery is very slim.

Any thoughts you have on this topic would be greatly appreciated.

Some darn good advice

On first reading, I didn