Church of the Churchless

Godless rituals for the churchless

Religion isn't all bad.

That was the not-so-surprising consensus at the monthly meeting of the Salon discussion group that my wife and I helped start up here in Salem about seventeen years ago.

The members are almost all godless Prius-driving, expresso-sipping, organic food-eating progressives like us.

Religiosity comes in for regular bashing, but since we're into open-mindedness and diversity, believers are embraced so long as they don't try to press their faith onto others.

Last night a woman talked about how much she liked taking some Christian children out to lunch at a fast food restaurant. She'd just met them. When they all sat down at a table, she noticed that nobody was starting to eat.

"We always say grace first," the oldest child explained. "Fine," our friend said. "Let's do it." The children formed a circle of hand-holding. Then one of them said three simple sincere sentences, thanking God for the food and other stuff I've forgotten.

This story led into a fairly lengthy group discussion of how rituals can be comforting and create a sense of community. However, nobody wanted to join a church just for ritualizing.

So the question became, "What sorts of rituals suit people who don't believe in God?"

A man talked about he used to live in a small Colorado town where residents had a wide variety of belief systems: Zen Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Native American, Scientology, even SETI. 

He and his wife would have dozens of diverse believers over for Thanksgiving dinner. Seated at a long homemade table, everyone would hold hands just as the children did.

But a period of silence would ensue, not words, so each person could do whatever inside their head. Including nothing, which is usually what I do during a moment of silence.

The discussion group members agreed that we humans need some rituals in our lives. Laurel, my wife, talked about how she's gotten into the habit of pausing before eating and taking several deep breaths with her eyes closed. This brings her into the culinary moment.

I said I'd just read in some book that a purpose of Zen'ish rituals, like the Japanese tea ceremony, is similar: to focus attention on the marvelous quality of what is present before us right now, right here.

It doesn't matter so much what that what is, I added, so long as the "ritual" (if that's even an appropriate word to use in this context) helps us appreciate the wonder of everyday existence.

At quality coffee houses they make my nonfat vanilla latte with this sort of flair. In a ceramic cup, a swirl of expresso on top of the foam, just so. I always look at it appreciatively before I take my first sip.

"This," I think, "is life as it's meant to be lived."

Which, I told the group, most likely is the only life we'll ever live, an afterlife being a decidedly chancy proposition. So each and every moment is almost (or precisely) infinitely precious.

Rituals that point us toward a transcendent imaginary divinity aren't as wonder-producing as godless rituals focused on the really real here-and-now, I said.

When attention is divided between this moment and a hypothesized heavenly better moment to come, which is the context of almost all religious rituals, we tend to lose sight of how marvelously special life is -- in all of its finitude.

If anyone wants to share their own favorite non-religious ritual, comment away. I'm always interested in hearing how the churchless worship without dogma, hierarchy, or blind belief.

Most inspiring message in a movie

When I ponder what line spoken by a character in a movie has inspired me the most, here's my answer (share yours in a comment, if you like).

Jodie Foster, playing Ellie Arroway, a scientist searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence, in Contact -- a movie based on Carl Sagan's novel.

Strapped into a machine whose construction was made possible by technical drawings contained in mysterious messages from the Vega star system, not knowing what the machine does or if she'll be killed when it is activated, enduring violent shaking as The Machine is first turned on, Ellie tells mission control...

I''m okay to go! I'm okay to go! I'm okay to go!

That's the courage of scientific inquiry. Also, of spiritual seeking, mystical meditating, and full-bodied living of every variety.

Being okay to go. To follow one's passion wherever it takes you.

Throwing caution to the winds when a stronger force -- truth, love, exploration, artistry, creativity, whatever -- courses through your consciousness and whispers "this way...this way."

Carl Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan, wrote an introduction to "The Varieties of Scientific Experience," a book that describes Sagan's personal view of the search for God.

He believed that the little we do know about nature suggests that we know even less about God...he never understood why anyone would want to separate science, which is just a way of searching for what is true, from what we hold sacred, which are those truths that inspire love and awe.

HIs argument was not with God but with those who believed that our understanding of the sacred had been completed. Science's permanently revolutionary conviction that the search for truth never ends seemed to him the only approach with sufficient humility to be worthy of the universe that it revealed.

The methodology of science, with its error-correcting mechanism for keeping us honest in spite of our chronic tendencies to project, to misunderstand, to deceive ourselves and others, seemed to him the height of spiritual discipline. If you are searching for sacred knowledge and not just a palliative for your fears, then you will train yourself to be a good skeptic.

I've just started to read this book. Today I couldn't resist jumping ahead to a final chapter which has some after-talk Q & A's between Sagan and members of the audience.

In these spontaneous interchanges, I got a feel for how strongly Sagan sought the truth in whatever form it might appear. He was eminently "okay to go."

But only if there was some chance of finding truth in a particular direction. He wasn't big on wild goose chases, forays into Beliefland that weren't based on some demonstrable evidence of a hitherto unknown reality.

One questioner tried to get Sagan to admit that the pursuit of psychic phenomena was worthwhile, even if someone hadn't experienced such, just as it is possible to know that it is possible to play the piano without currently knowing how.

I like Sagan's response.

But I can require, at least, before I start practicing the piano that I see that a piano exists, that I see someone sit down at the piano, move his or her fingers, and produce music.

That then convinces me that there is such a thing as a piano, there is such a thing as music, and it is not hopelessly beyond the ability of humans to produce music from a piano.

But when I ask for something comparable in the psychic world, I am never shown it. I never have someone come up and produce an -- I don't know -- a twenty foot-high psychic dragon. Or have someone come and write down on the blackboard the demonstration of Fermat's last theorem.

There simply is never anything that you can get your teeth into. You understand why I feel a little frustrated about this?

Oh, yes. I do.

I've been meditating every day for forty years. I've been okay to go wherever and whenever a metaphysical reality beckons. 

So far I haven't come across any convincing evidence of it. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Just that, as Sagan said, those wanting to chomp on truth aren't able to find it at the table of psychic phenomena.

Ann Druyan said:

And in all things, even when it came to facing his own cruel fate -- he succumbed to pneumonia on December 20, 1996 after enduring three bone-marrow transplants -- Carl didn't want just to believe.

He wanted to know.

Maya is illusion: Alan Watts' good news

People are fond of saying to someone they disagree with, "get real!" It's a put down to be told that you're living an illusion.

So when Eastern religions tell us that this physical existence is maya, not really real reality, it's natural to feel concerned.

Even though life seems pleasant enough most of the time, what if I'm living a dream and a much better state -- nirvana, satori, enlightenment, god-realization, buddha nature -- awaits beyond my current consciousness horizon?

Not to worry, says Alan Watts in "Become What You Are," a book that belies its title because Watts tells us that it's impossible to be anything other that what we are. I quoted this passage in a previous blog post.

The idea of God is a finger pointing the way to Reality, but when people try to join God and Reality, to identify the one with the other, to find the former in the latter, they are trying to join together two things that were never in need of being joined. This is like trying to make the eyes see themselves.

I flipped through "Become What You Are" this morning and found some references to a subject that both interests and confuses me: nonduality.

Writings on nonduality seem to imply, or even flat out state, that our ordinary perceptions of reality are off-base -- that the cosmos actually is much more of a oneness than a manyness, so if we see duality we aren't seeing truly.

Watts has a refreshing perspective on nonduality which I sum up as maya is illusion. After all, what's more dualistic than dividing reality into what seems to be, and what really is?

But one of the principal mistakes of Western interpretations of Asian thought is to equate Brahman with the infinite and the realization of one's identity with Brahman as a change from finite to infinite consciousness.

...But Brahman or Reality is beyond opposites, being that what does not require distinction for its existence. For Brahman is all things, this world we see around us, together with our consciousness and the thoughts in our minds and the feelings in our hearts.

To see Brahman we have just to look with our eyes, for Brahman is nothing other than what we are beholding at the moment.

For a long time I've wondered what the difference is between a enlightened being and someone unenlightened, if our ordinary vision already is beholding reality in all its glory. Watts, as he so often does, anticipates my question and addresses it.

In view of this it will also be asked what is the difference between a sage and an ordinary ignorant man. We are accustomed to believe that a sage or mystic is one who beholds God or Brahman in all things; but if Brahman is all things, surely an ordinary man in seeing them is doing no less than the sage?

This is perfectly true, but the difference between the sage and the ordinary man is that the latter fails to realize it.

...But [for the sage] this certainly does not mean that in place of himself, other people, houses, stars, hills, and trees he sees a formless all-pervasive and infinite luminosity, which seems to be some people's idea of the Divine Reality.

If such a state of consciousness were possible, it would still be dualistic, involving an utter difference between Reality and the ordinary world. It should rather be said that he feels Brahman, the force of the universe, at work in everything he does, thinks, and feels, and this gives a powerful and liberating impulse to his spirit.

In other words, wisdom is realizing that spiritually there is nothing to seek; mystically, there is nothing hidden. What we see is what there is. Illusion is the belief that this world, this moment, this state of consciousness is illusory.

That's good news. Even more: great news!

To Christians, the good news of the Bible is that we're saved through Jesus. To Watts, the good news of a proper understanding of Eastern philosophy is that there's nothing to be saved from.

But you are free to abandon yourself to actual life and to know that living in God is another name for this abandonment, for watching the snow and walking down the street.

...You say you do not feel this abandonment right now. What do you expect to feel? It is not a feeling; it is feeling. It is not a thought; it is thinking. If it were a particular thought or feeling there could be coming into it and going out of it; but God is One and all-inclusive, and here there can be neither coming nor going, inside or outside.

...It is your real self, that has no hiding-place. Destroy the universe and it remains. No, you can't feel it -- but then how can you know anything about it at all. Because you can use it and feel its use, just as "the wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof but canst not tell whence it cometh nor whither it goeth."

Become yourself before trying to be one with God

I started to practice yoga and meditation when I was 20 years old. Forty-one years later, I'm still at it: trying to find the real me and the truth at the heart of the cosmos.

Along the way, in 1990, I married a woman who has taught me as much, or more, about reality than meditation has.

Laurel is a psychotherapist (now retired). She helped me understand that attempting to transcend this world is crazy if you haven't first come to grips with yourself and how you relate to other people.

This is a central theme of John Welwood's essay, "Double Vision: Duality and Nonduality in Human Experience."

The tag line of Welwood's web site is Integrating Western Psychology & Eastern Spiritual Wisdom. A worthy goal.

During the decades I was an active member of a mystical/spiritual organization headquartered in India, I met many people who fell into a general diagnostic category of Seriously Screwed Up. 

Like me, they'd spent countless hours on their meditation cushion. Yet all of this gazing inward hadn't made them either comfortable with themselves or capable of having warm, open, egalitarian relationships with other people.

Welwood does a good job of analyzing how a single-minded focus on transcending this world so Oneness can be revealed is more than a little contradictory.

On the human plane, our lives evolve and unfold through the relative play of duality — otherwise known as relationship. Indeed the central, defining feature of the human realm is relationship— the network of interactions with others that supports our life from the cradle to the grave. Relationship only happens when there are two— who engage in a dance that continually moves back and forth between twoness and oneness.

In this way, the human realm serves as a bridge linking samsara— the experience of separateness— and nirvana— nonseparateness. This is why being human is a living paradox, and also a field in which a vast range of feeling— from unbearable sorrow to unthinkable joy— is possible. 

However, there is a one-sided perspective circulating in the contemporary spiritual scene that uses the absolute truth of nonduality to disparage or belittle the relative play of duality in human experience. This perspective casts nonduality in a primarily transcendental light, regarding only absolute truth— the nonexistence of separate entities— as real, while seeing phenomenal existence — the play of duality— as unreal, illusion, untruth. 

...In the name of nonduality, it creates its own form of dualism by setting up a divide between absolute truth and relative human experience.   

This pretty much sums up Welwood's message, but he's got a lot more to say in the essay's twenty-one pages.

I don't claim to understand what nonduality is all about, though I hear the word used a lot.

I'm baffled by what an experience of nonduality would be like. Duality I get: it's the world of separate stuff that I know now. Oneness I sort of get, though I don't see how it'd be possible to be conscious of One, because then there would be two: One and an awareness of it.

Welwood doesn't do much to help me grasp what nonduality is, but I liked his warning about over-emphasizing it.

Nondual teachings that mainly emphasize the illusory quality of human experience can, unfortunately, serve as just another dehumanizing force in a world where our basic humanity is already under siege at every turn.

What is needed in these difficult times instead is a liberation spirituality that helps people recognize nondual presence as a basis for fully inhabiting their humanity, rather than as a rationale for disengaging from it. We need a spiritual vision that values and includes the central playing-field where our humanity expresses itself— relationship. 

"Oneness" or "nonduality" are concepts. The reality in which we live and breathe is dual. There's us, and there are others. Other things, other people, other living beings.

When we recognize and accept these differences, that's wisdom. And, truth. Whatever we're experiencing, that's what's true for us. Our notions about some transcendent ultimate reality -- God, nirvana, enlightenment, heaven -- are just that: notions.

This kind of perspective avoids two major pitfalls on the spiritual path — spiritual bypassing and the spiritual superego — which are ways of imposing on oneself a higher spiritual perspective that lies far beyond one's actual state, thus creating further inner division.

When people try to bypass, or prematurely transcend, their current psychological condition by trying to live up to some noble spiritual ideal, this does violence to where they are. And it strengthens the spiritual superego, the inner voice that tells them they should be something other than they are, thereby reinforcing their disconnection from themselves. 

I've always felt that for a man, being married is the surest and fastest route to losing his ego, because once the honeymoon is over it doesn't take long for him to realize that from this point forward, he must submit to a higher power. (One example among many: I hadn't realized that I'd been hanging up towels the wrong way, but Laurel has enlightened me.)

So I enjoyed this section of Welwood's piece.

Swami Prajnanpad recognized the significance of this discrepancy between people's spiritual practice and their ability to embody it in their relationships, often telling students who wanted to study with him to "bring a certificate from your wife."

He saw marriage as a particularly powerful litmus test of one's development, because in it one is "fully exposed...All one's peculiarities, all of one's so-called weaknesses are there in their naked form. This is why it is the testing ground." In solitary spiritual practice, the spiritual aspirant "may accomplish perfection and feel: 'Oh! I am at ease, oh, I can feel oneness.' "

But in marriage, "everything gets confounded." Yogis discover that their so-called realization "was only on the superficial level. It had not percolated deep within. It simply appeared to have gone deep. Unless you are tested on the ground where you are fully exposed, all those outward achievements are false. This is the point, and you have to grasp this completely."

After God, a richer life awaits

So what's to be done after giving up a belief in God? (Or any other metaphysics founded on blind faith rather than demonstrable evidence.)

First, pat yourself on the back -- or any other place that feels good -- and offer up some congratulations from you to you.

"Great job, me. I've made the right choice: to embrace honesty rather than deception."

But just as smokers often need a nicotine patch to help them break an unhealthy habit, going cold turkey off of God can be tough. After all, believing in the Big Guy Upstairs has been fulfilling, perhaps for a long time.

How to replace that source of pleasure, meaning, and support? What's going to warm a true believer when the cold winds of reality start blowing around in his or her psyche?

In his wonderful book, "After God," Don Cupitt offers up some suggestions.

The theme of my previous post about this book was how much fun it can be to shake up our worldview. However, after the shaking, many escapees from the confines of a religion want to settle into another means of diving into the depths of what life is all about.

That includes me, for sure. This blog is called Church of the Churchless for a reason.

If I simply wanted to be churchless, I'd go do something completely unrelated from spirituality, philosophizing, and pondering ultimate cosmic questions. Instead, my goal is the same as before: to live life wisely and well. I'm just going about this in a different fashion. Hence, this "Church."

Cupitt says that we don't have to give up every trace of religiosity after we've realized that dogmatism isn't for us. Religion can be used as a toolkit from which we pick up practices that continue to seem appealing.

Now, though, we use them in the context of a non-realistic view of God. Cupitt uses Donald Duck as an example of what this means:

"Yes: but what then was the god? It is a mistake to suppose that the god was something over and above the image of wood or stone that was venerated in worship...Each and every Donald Duck image published by the Disney Studios really is Donald Duck himself; there is no superior original. Donald Duck is a vivid character to millions, maybe billions, but he simply doesn't need to have any existence outside his own iconography."

So each of us is free to create our own conception of what "God" means for us, using that word in the sense of what we feel life is all about -- our ultimate aspirations.

Cupitt suggests that three themes can be productively salvaged from the old outmoded way of religious believing.

We should learn to pursue our own personal growth by exploring and flipping among several different forms of selfhood and views of life. There is no One Great Truth anymore, and there never will be again. It is now better to maintain a small personal repertoire of different truths, paths, and goals, to be utilized ad lib.

The Eye of God

A Christian nonrealist like me may often find himself dropping back into the old type of God consciousness, praying or worshiping because he wants to or because it helps. And why not? I actually think I love God more now that I know God is voluntary. I still pray and love God, even though I fully acknowledge that no God actually exists.

...The old way of living coram Deo (as if before the face of God) was valuably consciousness-raising and morally stabilizing, and one may usefully continue to pray to God just as one may find oneself often talking to and thinking of a dead person.

The Blissful Void

Not only in Buddhism but also in other religious traditions, the final goal of meditation and contemplative prayer is a state in which all imagery, difference, and form have disappeared, and the subject too is emptied out into void bliss.

...I am suggesting that we should use the Discipline of the Void, meditation upon the underlying universal emptiness and nothingness, as a background against which to set and to see the flux of our life. The Blissful Void, sunyata, thus replaces the old metaphysical God, and gives -- to us Westerners in particular -- a new and much-needed way of getting our life in perspective.

Solar Living

It follows that we ourselves are the only makers of meaning and value. Such meaning and value as we can descry in our life must be value that we have ourselves ascribed to it and projected into it. All the colors and "feels" of things are our own feelings, projected out. Ethics therefore must be solar.

We no longer have any metaphysical reason or excuse for withholding ourselves. We should pour ourselves out as the sun does, identifying ourselves completely with the outpouring flux of all existence.

...Life can't be possessed or clutched at: we should pour ourselves out and pass on, without hesitation or regret. We can get ourselves together only by leaving ourselves behind. This is solarity -- to live by dying all the time, heedless, like the sun and in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount. 

...We are no longer fearful about dying, or afraid to give ourselves away. we pour ourselves out recklessly into symbolic expression and then pass on, pass on, and pass away, without regret.

Churchless folks have revelations also

When I used to give talks (a.k.a. satsangs) at gatherings of the India-based spiritual group that I was a long time member of, one of my stock lines was "The easiest vow for most of us to follow is the injunction not to disclose our inner experiences."

Ha-ha. Laughter would follow.

Because people knew that I was speaking the truth: meditation resulted in almost precisely zilch, nada, zero enlightenment or ensoundenment experiences (the practices of this organization were intended to bring about contact with divine light and sound).

So when the guru enjoined his disciples not to speak about their grand mystical insights into cosmic mysteries, this was a pretty darn easy commandment to obey -- given that nobody I knew was having any (we figured that it was OK to speak about not having inner experiences).

Since I entered my churchless phase, I've actually had more cosmic revelations. Which isn't surprising, since when you're starting at zero, the only way to go is up on the revelation scale.

Take today, an excellent day to take.

Sunny, warm, clear skies. Not at all uncommon during our beautiful Oregon summers. (As Gov. Tom McCall said, please, come and visit; just don't stay here.)

My wife, Laurel, and I were on a trail ride when IT hit me particularly strongly -- IT being a familiar sensation that waxes and wanes, but rarely leaves me entirely these churchless days.

Life...it isn't going to last forever. Not even close to forever. This moment, this view, this sensation of being on horseback, there's no way to value IT. Except maybe as infinitely precious.

This revelation, which many other people have also, is horribly devalued by religious belief. I know, because I used to believe that Real Life was going to begin sometime in the future, likely after I died and went to heaven (the Eastern philosophy equivalent, of course).

Or when the enlightenment curtain lifted in my psyche and I saw things as they really are, not as how my current deluded maya-encrusted mind viewed the world.

Not surprisingly, this there and then focus, which is a hallmark of religious belief systems, worked to dilute my appreciation of the here and now. Now -- what a beautiful word! -- I'm much more aware of how precious each and every passing moment is.

Because when my life is over, I no longer believe that more moments will be forthcoming.

Later in the day, on an evening dog walk, I spotted a busy bee. Firing up the ultra-zoom on my camera, I enjoyed capturing bee-moments as it flitted around the flower.

The insect had its thing to do. I had mine. Our moments intersected for a moment before we went our separate ways.

IT was present here also, that sensation of never again, so now! that seems to be amplified when I look through the viewfinder of my camera and press the shutter button.

I'm grateful for that feeling. I don't consider that it comes from anywhere but myself. However, there's plenty of room to bow down before the mystery of self.

No god is needed for revelations. Just an awareness of what is.

Mysticism is all about doing...nothing

I used to work hard at meditation. I did a lot of mantra repetition, several hours at a stretch. This was supposed to get me into an elevated state of consciousness where mystical sound and light phenomena would appear.

Now, my approach is to do as little as possible when I meditate each morning. I think of it as the lazy guy's way to enlightenment (assuming enlightenment exists -- a whole other question).

It's nice to know that a noted student of mysticism, Robert K.C. Forman, says that I'm on the right track.

Here's an excerpt from his book, "Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness" (which I've blogged about before).

The word mysticism, like religion, truth, and modernity, is pivotal but murky. It can denote the unintelligible statements of an illogical speaker, a schizophrenic's vision, someone's hallucinations, a drug-induced vision, the spiritual "showings" of a Julian of Norwich or a Mechthilde of Magedeburg, the unspoken, silent experience of God that Meister Eckhart called the "Divine Desert," or the Buddhist Nagarjuna's empty shunyata. 

...Roland Fischer has put forward a "cartography" of states of conscious arousal which includes all of these so called "mystical" states. Hallucinations, acute schizophrenic states, and the visions and auditions of a Julian of Norwich fall on the ergotropic side of the chart. These are states of hyperarousal: cognitive and physiological activity are at relatively high levels.

On the trophotrophic side are hypoaroused states, marked by low levels of cognitive and physiological activity: here we find HIndu samadhi, mushinjo in zazen, the restful states associated with The Cloud of Unknowing's "cloud of forgetting," or Eckhart's gezucket.

...I propose reserving the term mysticism for trophotropic states. I will call ergotrophic phenomena such as hallucinations, visions, auditions, etc. "visionary experiences."

Forman is interested in exploring the nature of consciousness. He used to be (and maybe still is) the Executive Editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, a well-respected publication that I once subscribed to.

The contents of consciousness are different from consciousness itself. This seems almost indisputable. I've been conscious of countless different things throughout my life. Throughout, though, these things have appeared in a seemingly single consciousness.

As many "ergotrophic" mystics have said, if we reduce or eliminate the contents of consciousness, then consciousness pure and simple (or at least purer and simpler) will be evident.

Many people, including some commenters on this blog, place a lot of importance on what happens during meditation. Someone recently said that if you're not hearing inner sound or seeing inner light, you're not experiencing the Real Thing.

Others, and increasingly I'm among them, consider that it doesn't really matter what phenomena pop up in one's consciousness, because this doesn't lead to a genuine realization of what consciousness itself is.

And clearly consciousness is King when it comes to understanding the nature of reality, because if we aren't conscious of something, it doesn't exist for us.

Here's how I started off my previous post about Forman's book:

It’s astounding, really. We all confidently say, “I think…,” “I believe…,” “I feel…,” “I see….” Yet we don’t know who or what the “I” is. So how confident should we be about all those statements we make, to others and to our own self, when the nature of the statement-making entity is a mystery?

Do we construct reality or discover it? In some sense both, most likely. Forman says that modern philosophical constructivists and the ancient Buddhist scholar Paramartha agree on quite a bit.

But -- and this is the critical point -- on the fundamental claim that experiences are constructed by language, concept, and past experiences, they agree profoundly: every ordinary experience of an object is in significant ways shaped, delimited, and controlled by our previously learned, habituated perceptual and cognitive categories. And this, it goes without saying, is the key claim in the modern-day constructivist's account of mysticism.

How many devout Christians have a vision of Buddha while meditating?

When I was a member of an India-based spiritual organization, initiates were instructed to meditate upon the face of the guru. If some being appeared within one's consciousness during meditation, and it wasn't accompanied by the guru's form (the reality of which was to be tested by repeating a mantra), then that being was supposed to be ignored as a fake.

This is a good example of constructing reality out of concepts and expectations. The scientific method is a way of determining the relative extent to which a purported truth has been manufactured, or discovered.

However, when an experience is personal and one-of-a-kind, it can't be subjected to a research study.

So Forman's goal is to demonstrate that mystical knowledge isn't subject to constructivist criticisms. He does a good job of this.

To summarize the argument so far, we have said that constructivists claim that mystical experience, like any experience, results from prior shaping of expectations. This shaping, they say, is of the intentional object. But, we noted, there is no mental or sensory intentional object in the pure consciousness event and thus nothing to shape.

...Mystical experiences don't result from a process of building or constructing mystical experience, we've suggested, but rather from an un-constructing of language and belief. It seems to result from something like a releasing of experience from language.

Fairly frequently, commenters on this blog who subscribe to a particular belief system call me a quitter for having forsaken my faith in certain spiritual dogmas. That's absolutely wrong, given Forman's definition of mysticism.

By letting beliefs, expectations, effort, and such go, what remains is consciousness pure and simple (or like I said before, purer and simpler).

A frequently-heard adage is "self-realization before god-realization."

My churchlessness has adapted this to "self-realization, then see about realizing god." Meaning, we're going to have a much clearer view of reality if we get straight who we are before we start jumping to conclusions about a possible external divinity.

And this self-realization doesn't take any effort, according to Forman. It's right in front of our eyes. In fact, it is our eyes -- along with everything else we are.

Really, we know our minds, and indeed we know what it is to be a thinking, feeling conscious being, by virtue of the fact that we have a mind, or are conscious. It is a peculiarly diaphanous element, consciousness: hard to define, hard to contact, hard to know.

But it is only by virtue of our firsthand, first-person acquaintance with this ineffable and sui generis phenomenon that we know anything at all, and certainly know anything at all about our own minds.

We do not know it as we know the color of the desk or as we know another's fears. We know it in a peculiarly direct way: by virtue of being it.

Support individual searching for meaning

My Indisputable Churchless Truths have been holding up pretty well, judging from the comments on them so far. So I've been pondering their implications for how I, and others, react to peoples' descriptions of what they find meaningful in life.

One of the truths is:

Each individual must determine, or choose, his or her own meaning of life, because life's meaning isn't a given like gravity or electromagnetism.

Religions consider otherwise, of course. A true believer finds the meaning of life in the Bible, Koran, Vedas, Guru Granth Sahib, or the words of some revered spiritual teacher.

Yet this still is a choice -- to accept a set of religious beliefs. So we can't get away from the need for individuals, whether churched or churchless, to determine what makes life meaningful for them.

This blog is dedicated to supporting non-religious searching for meaning. As I've mentioned before, when I started the Church of the Churchless in 2004, it didn't take me long to come up with a pithy "tag line" to put at the top of the page.

Preaching the gospel of spiritual independence

(I'm not nearly as fond of the term "spiritual" now, but it still is useful shorthand for a non-religious pursuit of what life is all about -- more appealing to most people than "philosophical independence," for sure.)

I wanted to bring this up because I find that some commenters on this blog, including me from time to time, fail to make a distinction between (1) a statement of collective religious belief and (2) a description of what an individual finds spiritually or philosophically meaningful.

There isn't a hard and fast distinction between (1) and (2), but they clearly are different.

Example: someone leaves a comment on a post that says Christianity, Islam, Sant Mat, Hinduism, or another religion is true, and I'm an idiot for not recognizing this. I'll respond along the lines of Oh, yeah, who says? Show me the evidence.

However, if someone comments, "I really enjoy meditating in the morning as [fill in a spiritual practice] teaches," what goes through my mind is That's great. I'm glad this person has found something that is so meaningful to him or her.

Likewise, it doesn't bother me to hear, "I don't know if my religion is true, but I get a lot of satisfaction from believing in it." This is humble, non-dogmatic, personal.

Whatever people want to believe, that's their right. They just shouldn't demand that anyone else accept beliefs that have no demonstrable convincing evidence behind them.

(However, I also have quite a bit of sympathy for The Wandering Taoist's position in his "Nothing Personal" post, which argues that individual religious beliefs can have significant collective consequences that affect many other people.)

Where I think some commenters on this blog go awry -- and I'll admit that occasionally I've been guilty of this -- is treating someone's personal statement about what is meaningful to him or her as if this was You Must Believe! religious dogma.

I'm fine with attacks on collective religious authoritarism. But not with questioning someone's individual philosophy of life.

Especially when that someone is me.

Not so much because I'm so important to me (though naturally I am), but because the questioning of what is meaningful to me made me realize that it's unfair to do this to anybody.

Understand: I'm cool with criticism, debate, or disagreement of something I write. I've been an avid writer for most of my life. I'm used to people approving or disapproving of what flows from my mind and onto paper (or now, screen).

However, recently I got quite a bit of grief from some commenters when I talked about how much I enjoyed philosophical Taoism -- which is about as far from religion as a "spiritual" (broadly speaking) philosophy can be.

This made me realize that sometimes this blog can get off track, since its goal is to support an individual's non-religious search for meaning. Such is going to be essentially non-debatable, since meaning is much more of an I like, not an I'm right.

I like strawberries (particularly the Oregon variety). Who can disagree wth my liking?

I like philosophical Taoism. Who can disagree with my liking? 

When I express my adoration for strawberries or Taoism, I'm not saying that you should like them also. I'm simply describing what I find appealing about these things. I'd enjoy it if you tried them and found them likable also, but I've got no expectation of that.

Anyway, I wanted to throw these thoughts out in a hope that people who participate in comment conversations on this blog will ponder the difference between dogmatic religiosity and individual meaning.

We should challenge the former and support (or at least tolerate) expressions of the latter.

Churchless lesson: a tale of two fairs

What can fair-going teach us about churchlessness? Glad I asked. I'll answer my own question...

Thursday I went to the Marion County Fair here in Salem to relieve my wife of crushing boredom -- a four hour shift on a slow day womaning a booth sponsored by an earth-friendly organization she belongs to.

I chatted with her for a while, then explored the fair. At the other end of the exhibit hall I came across some sort of senior citizen "athletic" event, the quotation marks being justified by this bean bag toss nature of the activity.

Apparently senior centers were competing against each other, as the players were decked out in team t-shirts. Though I'm sixty myself, I found the whole scene more than a little depressing.

Chairs lined up in neat rows. Everyone sitting politely until their turn to toss came up. A youthful coordinator (staff member? volunteer?) keeping the game in order. I wanted to hear some trash talk.

Hey, granny, you got nothing! With those bony arms you'll going to throw that bag all the way to the end of your big toe. Forgot your Geritol?

The rest of the county fair had a similarly unnatural, sterile, unhealthy, overly organized feel to it. I kept thinking, "This is all-American." Along with, "America could use some improving."

A day later my wife and I drove an hour or so south of Salem to the Eugene'ish Oregon Country Fair. What a difference!

Here's a photo of one of the wonderfully chaotic parades that wend their way through the twisting, tree-lined, organic paths that fairgoers wander as they peruse the fair's cornucopia of counterculture artistry.

(You can persuse other photos of the Oregon Country Fair on the blog post I put up last night, and there's many great photos on the Fair web site.)

The contrasting atmosphere at the two fairs struck me as reflective of the difference between religiosity and churchlessness:

Uptight vs. hang loose
Rigid vs. flowing
Communal conformity vs. individual expression
Seriousness vs. smiles
Commandments vs. relaxed "whatever"

Now, I don't want to give the impression that the Oregon Country Fair is unorganized. It is anything but.

From buying tickets, to parking, to reasonable rules (no alcohol, for example), our fair-going experience was enhanced by the much-appreciated work of many volunteers and a few full-time staff.

However, I loved the looseness of the Fair -- how the organization (comparable to a loosely defined philosophy of life) contributed to the free expression of individuality, rather than limiting it.

Recently some commenters on this blog have suggested that all philosophies with even a hint of metaphysics to them, such as Taoism and Buddhism, can be equated with overtly dogmatic and authority-based religions, such as Christianity and Sant Mat.

Well, this is akin to saying that because the Marion County Fair and Oregon Country Fair share a last name, this makes them the same. Experience each of them, though, and the differences are evident and obvious.

Me, I prefer my philosophy of life to be churchless.

And my fair-going, heavier on the sex, drugs, and rock & roll (each much more present at the Oregon Country Fair than at the Marion County version) and lighter on tradition, conformity, and staidness.

Faith -- the embrace of mystery

"Faith." We use this word so often. Yet most of us haven't given much thought to what it means.

I enjoyed browsing through a bunch of definitions of faith submitted by commenters to a New York Times online piece.

This is the first submission.

The suspension of reason and rationality for a dream.

This is the second submission.

Faith is knowing something should be true, being certain it is, and having no insight into one’s collisions with reality.

Reality is wrong. Other people are wrong. Why can’t they see what I see? It’s all about failures to re-interpret one’s original misinterpretation of experience. Faith is blind,
and that’s a problem.

Faith is not calm, it is heated, sure of itself, and prone to be unrealistic.

And this is the third, which led me to a short essay (and recording) that stimulated me to title this post the way I did.

There’s never been a better analysis of Faith than the following: http://thisibelieve.org/essay/21932/

Dude is a Franciscan who acknowledged that faith is not knowing what you can’t know… and being okay with it. Perhaps the opposite of so many that we consider to be Faithful today.

Seriously, please give it a listen.

I did. Along with a simultaneous read. And liked what the Catholic priest had to say. Nicely churchless, though coming from a churched guy.

Here's Richard Rohr's concluding words:

People who have really met the Holy are always humble. It’s the people who don’t know who usually pretend that they do. People who’ve had any genuine spiritual experience always know they don’t know.

They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind. It is a litmus test for authentic God experience, and is — quite sadly — absent from much of our religious conversation today.

My belief and comfort is in the depths of Mystery, which should be the very task of religion.

Is there anything wrong with life?

More and more, I'm wondering if the biggest problem with life is believing that life is a problem. Personally, I just don't see how there could be anything wrong with Life as a whole, capital "L" version.

Yet religions tell us that there is.

Christianity speaks of original sin, and of a fall from God's good graces. Similar teachings are found in Islam and Judaism. Buddhism informs us that life is suffering. In Hinduism, the everyday world is maya, illusion, not the place a psyche wants to be.

The root of "religion" is relegare, which denotes a binding back to God. Which, of course, wouldn't be possible unless there had been a previous loosening -- a distancing from divinity that now makes life (and a supposed afterlife) a lot less pleasant.

Yet where is the evidence for this? Show me the problem with Life. Sure, there are lots of discrete problems I, and everyone else, has to deal with.

But let's consider how something becomes a "problem." Seemingly it is when an actual state of affairs doesn't match up with a desired optimal state of affairs.

My TV won't turn on. I'd like it to. Now I have a problem. It used to work. Now it doesn't. Problem!

What, though, would lead me to conclude that Life as a whole has a problem? There's nothing to contrast Life with, no perfectly functioning alternative state of existence that would cause me to say, "Oh, that's how Life is supposed to work."

I've spent quite a bit time with some people -- gurus and advanced disciples -- who supposedly were well on their way, if not entirely there, to a spiritual realm of being. I've seen videos of the Dalai Lama and other religious leaders, such as the Pope.

None of them show any sign of having left this Life behind. Each appeared to be solidly human, with strengths and weaknesses, just as we all are.

Still, most people on Earth have bought into the religious notion that Life (with a capital "L") is a problem begging to be solved. By faith, revelation, surrender to God/Guru, meditation, spiritual practice, or some other means.

True believers often say, "A teacher is needed to learn everything else in life. Religion is no different." Well, yes it is.

I accept that my dance instructor can teach me her skills because I can see her dancing a lot better than I can. But where is the evidence that someone can Life better than the rest of us? This is what religions claim -- that LIfe itself, as lived by us now, is the problem with our lives.

And we need to be saved, enlightened, or otherwise raised into a whole other form of Life. Which, however, is nowhere to be seen. Only conceptualized in religious dogma.

I've been enjoying the blog dialogue that began with a comment by OshoRobbins on this post on May 23. He pretty much made the same point: that there is no place to get to on a spiritual or religious path.

Life is Life. This is it. There is no place to go, and no one else to be, except where and who we are -- human beings living our earthly lives.

If we ever are living some other form of existence, that will be obvious. Until then, which likely will be never, it's senseless to imagine that there is a problem with Life because it doesn't match up with some abstract hypothetical state of affairs.

Heaven. Nirvana. Paradise. Whatever.

On another post, I said:

If we have a real self that has been covered up by gobs of illusory ego-crap, then our goal should be to restore that divine cosmic gem to its original shining glory. However, what if our problem is believing there's a problem with our self?

Same reasoning applies to LIfe as a whole. What if our problem is believing there's a problem with Life?

Danes and Swedes are some of the happiest people on Earth. Most of them don't obsess over the meaning of life. They simply live life, enjoyably. Ditto with citizens of other Scandinavian countries, which are minimally religious.

So the next time you think, as most of us do, "I've got to figure out what life is all about," try telling yourself: "No, you don't."

Enlightenment through sex

Sex and spirit start (in English) with the same sinuous letter. But otherwise most people feel that they aren't, well, bedfellows.

Spirituality usually is considered to have something to do with rising above, or beyond, carnal desires, while sexuality is all about down and dirty bodily goings on (and pumpings out).

But the current issue of EnlightenNext magazine focused on the relationship between sex and spirituality. Per usual, the articles came to a predictable conclusion that nonduality is the key to understanding (the magazine is a sometimes annoying mouthpiece for Ken Wilber's philosophy).

I enjoyed learning what's happening in the world of sexual enlightenment. The One Taste movement is on the cutting edge of orgasmic satori.

In a world of separation, OneTaste is about connection. We provide tools for intimacy in everyday life. Going to the root of experience, OneTaste integrates the principles of mindfulness with the practice of sexuality: mindful sexuality. By nourishing and including this basic and essential part of life, we discover richer relationships, an embodied sense of self and the uncompromised feeling of wholeness.

Orgasmic meditation sounds a whole lot more fun that the variety I've been practicing (meditation, I mean).

Orgasmic meditation is a technique that develops mindfulness, concentration, connectedness and insight in a paired practice that focuses on sensation generated through manual stimulation of the genitals. Core orgasmic meditation techniques are simple forms within a timed framework that allow practitioners to extend the deep interior states associated with meditation into the arena of human connection. This can facilitate greater physical and mental health, deeper connection to relationship and for some, a method for spiritual aims.

A New Age pickup line can't be far away: "Hey, baby, want to come back to my place and help me achieve enlightenment?"

The most intriguing article in the issue was about David Deida, though. Some feel he is a disturbing guy who encourages pick-up artists in the "seduction community." I don't know if that is true. I did find quite a bit to like in his philosophizing.

Here's an excerpt from Ross Robertson's piece in EnlightenNext:

Consciousness, as Deida describes throughout his work, is the masculine pole -- stoic, penetrating, unperturbable, and instinctually capable of ripping the feminine open to God. Light, on the other hand, is the feminine -- hot, passionate, beguiling, ultimately desirous of being ravished open to the brink of ecstatic madness.

Men tend to have a stronger masculine essence, he explains, and women a stronger feminine, but it doesn't really matter which partner assumes which side of the polarity in the end.

The main thing, according to him, is not to suppress this masculine-feminine, ravisher-ravishee dynamic for the sake of equality but to embrace it as the root a relationship's authenticity and interpersonal magnetism.

This rings true to me. Integrating male and female energies is a foundation of ballroom dance, as I wrote about in a Tao of Tango post.

It also is the essence of Tai Chi, which blends yin and yang throughout its movements (here's a photo I took yesterday of my instructor, Warren, and a classmate, Dave, playing at push hands).

But there's a difference between "masculine/feminine" and "dominance/submission." In ballroom dance men lead and women follow. However, this is entirely voluntary, unforced, natural (mostly, at least).

In a guru-disciple relationship, by contrast, often there is more than a little tinge of master-slave roles, as I showed in this post. This is part of the reason why I didn't feel comfortable with all the talk of "surrendering to the beloved guru" when I was an active member of an Indian spiritual organization.

The guru even is called "Master." Admittedly, this also is done in martial arts schools, among other places. But not with the same fawning submission or uncritical acceptance of someone else's orders.

David Deida seems to recognize the inherent powerful polarity of masculine/feminine energies that can be experienced outside of conventional religiosity. Having a decided existential streak myself, I resonated with this passage in the article.

If you're not yet familiar with his work, his irreverence and immodesty are part of what of what has made his voice so fashionable within the growing community of seekers looking to transcend both the taboos and formalities of traditional religious worldviews and the bland sensitivity of your average politically correct, spiritual nice guy.

His basic philosophy -- that God and sex, death and life, consciousness and energy are all part of one divine play, and you never know when you might be run over by a truck or struck down by lightning, so now is the time to worship at the altar of life, love, and orgasm as if this was your last day on earth -- has garnered him a great deal of attention over the last decade.

On his website I browsed through some free chapters from Deida's books, including "Stop hoping for a completion of anything in life." Right on.

It's never going to be over, so stop waiting for the good stuff. As of now, spend a minimum of one hour a day doing whatever you are waiting to do until your finances are more secure, or until the children have grown and left home, or until you have finished your obligations and you feel free to do what you really want to do. Don't wait any longer. Don't believe in the myth of "one day when everything will be different." Do what you love to do, what you are waiting to do, what you've been born to do, now.

I also enjoyed "Unclench as if asleep," where Deida talks about the fear that underlies, to one degree or another, most people's lives. Then I listened to "How to party," an important subject that gets short shrift in most religions.

At the end of that talk he says that nothing matters is masculine, and everything matters is feminine. Yet masculinity also is presence (heaviness, mass), while femininity is love (opening to the universe).

In the end, there's no end. To sex, spirituality, exploring the mysteries. Just jump in. And do it.

On waking up twice

How do we know the difference between dreaming and waking life? Dreams seem real while we're immersed in them. So does everyday existence.

When we wake up from a dream, how do we know this isn't still part of the dream? I love Thomas Metzinger's telling of a twice-waking tale in his book, "The Ego Tunnel," which I blogged about before.

But before getting to that... a tale of my own.

Yesterday I sat down in Salem's Court Street Starbucks with a grande Pike Place in one hand and my laptop knapsack in the other. I fired up my MacBook and checked email, listening with half my attention to eight or so guys having a coffee house meeting.

"God" kept floating into my ear canal. Pretty soon it became evident that this was some sort of Christian men's group. The leader asked a new member to speak his mind.

Which had to do with how he was sure that God was giving him messages to do this or that -- join the group was part of it, I believe. He was convinced that these divine signs weren't coincidences. I couldn't follow the details and still peruse my emails.

The men were just a few feet away from me. I was the only other person in that section of the Starbucks store. I felt like an alien visitor to Earth listening to a conversation that would sound freakily weird on my world.

Except, when I got in my car and drove away I started to think about all the weird coffee house conversations that I've had over many years.

I've sat around with friends who believed as I did -- that we were initiated by a guru, God in human form, who now resides within our head in his subtle spiritual form and is going to accompany us through vast mysterious higher realms of consciousness, taking care of our karmas along the way, bringing into our lives exactly what is needed to break the cycle of reincarnations that have kept us being reborn as animals, plants, insects, and god knows what else for countless eons.

Yet I had just been sipping my coffee and typing away on my laptop, feeling a sense of relief (and also, I have to admit, superiority) that now I wasn't enchained by ridiculous dogmas like those Christian guys were.

As if I, or they, have any choice in what we believe. Or not believe. Metzinger writes:

Probably most professional philosophers in the field [of physical underpinnings of actions and of conscious free will] would hold that given your body, the state of your brain, and your specific environment, you could not act differently from the way you're acting now -- that your actions are predetermined, as it were.

...This is a widely shared view: It is, simply, the scientific worldview. The current state of the physical universe always determines the next state of the universe, and your brain is a part of this universe.

Sure, I've been doing some waking up. Not because I stood outside of myself, watching my brain dream religious fantasies, and then turning on some sort of Enlightenment Alarm Clock.

No, I've just been cruising along inside my ego tunnel, as we all are, doing whatever, however, whenever.

I feel more awake now. But how do I know what is "waking"? How does anybody?

Here's Metzinger's story about waking up twice. A lot of food for thought here. (And another blog post, I'm pretty sure.) OBE stands for "out-of-body experience."

---------------------------
"During the night of May 6, 1986, I became consciously aware that I was sleeping and also spiraling out of my physical body, in the typical manner described by Swiss biochemist Ernst Waelti (see chapter 3). Here is my 'case study'.

Standing in front of my bed, I immediately realized that, for the first time in two years, I had entered the OBE state again. The clarity, the same electrified sense of lightness in my double body, made me excited and extremely happy, and I immediately began to experiment.

I moved toward the closed glass door of the second-floor balcony in my parents' house. I touched the door, gently pushing it until I penetrated it and slid out onto the balcony. I flew down into the garden and landed on the lawn, where I moved about in the dim moonlight and looked at things. Again, the whole experience was crystal clear.

When I became afraid of not being able to sustain the condition much longer, I flew back up, somehow returned to my physical body, and awoke with a mixture of great pride and joy. I had not managed to make any verifiable observations, but I had had another OBE, in a clear, cognitively lucid way, fully controlled and without any intermediary blackouts. I sat up, wanting to take notes as long as everything was still fresh, but couldn't find a pencil.

I jumped out of bed and went over to my sister (who slept in the same room), woke her up, and told her, with great excitement, that I had just managed to do it again, that I had just been down in the garden, bouncing around on the lawn a minute ago.

My sister looked at her alarm clock and said, "Man, it's quarter to three! Why did you have to wake me up? Can't this wait until breakfast? Turn out the light and leave me alone!" She turned over and went back to sleep. I was a bit disappointed at this lack of interest.

I also noticed that while fumbling with the alarm clock, she had accidentally set it off. It was beeping away and I hoped it hadn't wakened anybody else. Too late! I could hear someone approaching.

At that moment, I woke up. I was not upstairs in my parents' house in Frankfurt but in my basement room, in the house I shared with four friends about thirty-five kilometers away. It was not quarter to three at night; the sun was shining and I had obviously been taking a short afternoon nap.

For more than five minutes, I sat on the edge of my bed almost frozen, not daring to move. I was unsure how real this situation was. I did not understand what had just happened to me. I didn't dare move, because I was afraid I might wake up again, into yet another ultrarealistic environment.

In dream research, this is a well-known phenomenon called false awakening."
---------------------------

Seeing differently vs. seeing different things

Once when we were on Maui, walking along Lahaina's charming Front Street, I saw a Proust quote on a board outside an art gallery. Since we were vacationing on a tropical island, far from home, it made me think.

There are several versions of the translation. Here's one close to what I read that night:

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Proust seems to have hit upon a central existential choice. In pursuing personal growth, do we focus on doing different things, or on looking upon things differently?

Some friends and I chatted about this last Sunday. None of us are big into traveling or thrill-seeking. Outwardly our lives appear pretty mundane compared to people who are always off on a new trip or fresh adventure.

Yet we didn't feel that we were stuck, unchanging, mired in routine. I said that even though every day I usually go on the same dog walk, around the same lake, each time is different.

I'm never quite the same person. Even when nature looks much the same -- climate, vegetation, wildlife -- my senses and brain process the dog walk differently. So I never get tired of taking the same geographic route, because the journey always is varied within my psyche.

Much discussion on this blog centers around a similar Proustian distinction. That's because religions, spiritual paths, philosophical teachings, and meditation approaches tend to reflect the same duality.

Some emphasize having different experiences. Others, experiencing differently.

Zen Buddhism, for example, doesn't focus much on other-worldly, mind-blowing mystical experiences.

Everyday here and now, such as pouring a cup of tea, is valued just as much (if not more so) as far out extraordinary excursions into alternative realities of consciousness.

Other faiths, such as the version of Sant Mat that I followed for over thirty years, emphasize the necessity of soul-soaring inner experiences, hearing cosmic sounds and seeing divine light.

These are considered to be the touchstone of spiritual progress, which helps explain why some commenters on my blog posts say that if I haven't had such experiences, then my decades of daily meditation have been in vain.

I used to agree with that perspective. But now I resonate more with "have new eyes" than "see new landscapes." And I don't think it's entirely, or even mostly, due to not having seen the inner regions that, Sant Mat teaches, await the soul traveler.

Seeing different things... this approach says that reality is divided into better and worse realms, that where we are now is not where we should be, that what we have to do is transplant ourselves into a heavenly domain far distant from Earth's crude materiality.

Could be.

However, there's a lot to like in the notion of seeing things differently... accepting that reality is just fine the way it is, that what's needed is a shift in perspective rather than a shift in time and space, that no matter how many new experiences are added to our "What We've Done" account our wisdom net worth won't increase much.

As I've mentioned before, one of the things that drove me in a churchless direction was having more involvement with higher-ups in a mystical-religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

These were people who had risen to positions under the direct supervision of the guru, who is considered to be god in human form. They had lots of meditation experience, lots of face time with RSSB gurus, lots of volunteer (seva) time under their karmic belt.

Yet I saw that they were just as egotistical and flawed as I was. Maybe more. So this led me to wonder, "What good is all of these supposedly spiritual experiences that they've had, if their attitude toward life hasn't changed in any observable fashion?"

People can travel to India every year, meditate for hours every day, feel love and devotion for a guru at almost every conscious moment. Yet all this can leave them just as they were before, aside from memories of their experiences.

I've found that when I don't worry about having certain spiritual or mystical experiences, it becomes easier to open up to a fresh way of experiencing -- everything.

More and more, my life is suffused with a sense of mystery and wonder that I hadn't felt during my true believing days, probably because back then I wrongly considered that I was well on the way to unraveling the Big Cosmic Mysteries.

So I understand, imperfectly but at least a little, how it is possible to flip into a fresh way of experiencing life that isn't dependent on particular experiences.

This doesn't denigrate the importance or significance of experiencing this or that. But when we're always waiting for something more to happen, we're not going to appreciate the happening that always is right at hand.

Spiritual experiences don't exist

People talk about "spiritual experiences" all the time. I've done my fair share of that myself. Yet frequent mentions of these words in a comment conversation on this post got me thinking about what they mean.

Conclusion: by themselves, nothing. Which fits with an earlier notion, that "spirituality" is a meaningless word.

A blog visitor asked me recently if I believed that people have had spiritual experiences. I replied, yes, people consider that they've had them. But before we can judge what this means, we need to define "spiritual."

And that's difficult to do, since there are so many definitions of "spirit." Any experience can be called spiritual, really.

Reaching the top of Mt. Everest. Having really great sex. Enjoying a glass of Oregon Pinot Noir. Meditating in a Zen monastery. Listening to Jimmy Hendrix. Seeing the Pope. Dancing the tango.

When I say that spiritual experiences don't exist, I'm looking upon "spirit" the way many do: as something metaphysical, other worldly, non-material.

Obviously any human who is alive can't be said to have had a spiritual experience, since he or she is experiencing life via a physical human brain. Similarly, as another commenter (tAo) noted recently, no one alive knows whether life continues after death, because anyone living hasn't died yet.

So it'd be better if people talked less about spiritual experiences, and more about experiences that they consider to be spiritual.

Meaning, tell me about the experience. Don't label it "spiritual." Describe it.

What were you doing when the experience you call "spiritual" happened? What did you see, hear, feel, taste, touch? Has it resulted in any lasting changes? Did you learn anything from the experience?

Again, this is necessary because the word is so vague.

If someone says, "I had a sexual experience," we have a pretty good idea what he or she means. (Of course, even here there is a lot of room for widely different varieties of experience.)

"Spiritual," though, can mean almost anything.

In Zen it could be chopping wood or carrying water. In mystic faiths it could be superconscious immersion in the bright white light of ultimate reality.

The only thing the word can't mean, in any meaningful sense, is a non-physical experience -- since anyone who claims to have had one did so as a physical human body.

"Churchless" is a 360 degree perspective

Thanks again to Shin for sharing his or her doubts about Radha Soami Satsang Beas, which formed a recent post. I've enjoyed the comments also.

These thoughts have, not surprisingly, gotten me thinking ... about my own evolution from a fervent RSSB true believer to who I am now.

It's sort of tough to encapsulate my current state in a few words, like I used to be able to do with "RSSB initiate" or "RSSB disciple." This is progress.

Before, my spiritual focus was narrow. Even though I read widely in other traditions -- Sufism, mystical Christianity, Greek philosophy -- I was mostly interested in how these teachings related to the Sant Mat belief system.

I was looking for truth along a narrow section of the philosophical, or spiritual, horizon.

While I was more open-minded than most religious believers, I'd still put on devotional blinders that prevented me from seeing that really real reality could lie in a considerably different direction from where I was facing.

That was toward a guru, a dualistic theology, a rigid set of lifestyle commandments, a well-defined meditation approach, an obedience-demanding organization that didn't tolerate dissent.

There are other ways. A multitude of ways. Maybe even an infinity.

Because if there is one thing humans have learned about ultimate reality, it is that we know nothing about ultimate reality. Nothing for certain, for sure.

So a sincere truth seeker shouldn't forestall any possibilities. Reality can lie in any direction; a 360 degree perspective needs to be embraced. We don't want truth to tip-toe up behind us and remain unnoticed as we gaze in the opposite direction.

Shin brought up the subject of meditation. I still meditate every morning. Now, though, it's with a who knows? attitude. For example:

Who knows...?
whether God exists
whether consciousness continues after death
whether any existent divinity is personal or impersonal
whether minds can connect non-physically
whether psychic stillness leads to deeper reality waters
whether we can even ask cogent questions about the cosmos

I sure don't.

So I sit down on my meditation cushion with a let's see and show me. I might start off with a churchless prayer that goes something like this.

Hey, God, if you exist, I'm here. Show me what you're like. Or if any other entity is aware of me -- angel, guru, disembodied soul, advanced alien being, whatever or whoever -- let's have a chat. My consciousness is open for truth-business, so long as you've got good intentions (I'd just as soon not meet up with demonic presences, though even that could be interesting). 

This sort of talk is directed at the possibility that some being can communicate with me. Since I don't know what or who this might be, I put out a "Welcome" sign for Allah, Jesus, Buddha, Jehovah, Krishna, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or anyone else who wants to drop by my awareness.

So far my meditation has been pretty damn solitary, however. This leads me to suspect that the really real reality I'm looking for isn't outside of me, but rather is me.

Which isn't an original suspicion, of course, since some version of that hypothesis lies at the root of almost every deep mystical teaching or philosophy. Heck, it's even how I started off my book about Plotinus (which is one of my favorite sentences in the 369 pages).

If something has been lost and you're not sure where to look for it, there's good reason to start searching right where you are rather than far afield.

It's good to have a 360 degree perspective. But that doesn't necessarily mean looking far away toward a distant horizon. 

Meister Eckhart, a medieval Christian mystic, put it this way:

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.

What's more all-encompassing and 360 degree'ish than one?

Danes and Swedes don't obsess over meaning of life

For most of my sixty years I've seriously pondered the Big Question, "What is the meaning of life?" So much so, I've assumed that anyone who doesn't engage in similar pondering is shallow, clueless, frivolous, unaware.

After all, Socrates said: "The unexamined life is not worth living."

But there's intriguing evidence in Phil Zuckerman's "Society Without God" that most people in Denmark and Sweden simply live life, without questioning its meaning. And the citizens of these nations are among the happiest in the world, according to comparative surveys.

So what gives? Zuckerman lived in Scandinavia for fourteen months, interviewing about 150 Danes and Swedes and conducting other sociological research. Here's what he says at the end of a chapter about fear of death and the meaning of life.

Having conversation after conversation like those excerpted above led me to some deep thinking. Some serious pondering. But not about the meaning of life. Rather, I deeply pondered the deep pondering of the meaning of life.

Put simply: I began to seriously question just how important and significant "knowing the meaning of life" really is for people, after all. Is it truly such a burning matter? Is it really such a deep, universal concern?

...Based on my research among Danes and Swedes, I have started to theorize that most people, most of the time -- at least in certain cultures -- don't actually worry too much or actually even care about the "ultimate meaning of life."

...Sure, every human who has ever lived may, from time to time, wonder why we are here and what the point of it all is at certain special moments, now and then. Call them fleeting moments of existential pondering.

But I would argue that these fleeting moments of existential pondering come and go, and are not necessarily the moments that people construct their lives around, or devote inordinate amounts of energy to. At least not contemporary Scandinavians, who are living proof that the quest to know the ultimate meaning of life need not be a deep or vexing human obsession.

Here's some examples of what Danes and Swedes told Zuckerman:

Do I wonder about the meaning of life? No, I don't go that deep.

I don't know if I think about the meaning of life. The meaning of my life, I think, is just to have a good life for myself and the people I care about.

It has no special meaning. People try to find some special meaning. We are born, we live, and we die.

But sometimes you can ask yourself, now you are here what are you going to do? Do something, you know, so that when we get to the end you can say I did something good for other people.

I basically think that life is about what we do now, and whatever makes us happy and feel like we're achieving something. That's the meaning of it. Because if you think of it, look at animals. They just live and they're happy. I hope, at least.

The meaning of life is living your life and having a good life, and you should not be living life waiting for something afterwards.

Amen to that. More and more, I've been coming to the same conclusion:

"The meaning of life? Life."
"Maybe the meaning of life is...life"
"Meaning of life is right now, or never"

"Spirituality" is a meaningless word

After trying to lead a spiritual life for most of my 60 years, I feel eminently qualified to make what may seem to be a radical suggestion: Let's do away with spirituality.

Not so much the actions people associate with being spiritual, but how the word is usually used -- and the divisiveness that comes with splitting reality into "spritual" and "material" spheres.

Actually, the problem with spirituality isn't that the word is meaningless. Rather, it has so many meanings, most of them aren't recognized by someone using the term in a particular sense.

Check them out.

"Spirit" and "soul" are closely connected. So are the ways these words are used. Listening to a talented jazz singer, a woman says "Wow, that was really soulful."

She doesn't mean immaterial or other-worldly. Just that the song touched her deeply, bringing out feelings not usually encountered in everyday life.

Similarly, I've come to feel that for me spirituality points toward the subtle, reflective, philosophical, mysterious, what's-it-all-about? side of life. It isn't opposed to the gross, unthinking, crude, obvious, it-is-what-it-is side -- just as heads isn't opposed to tails.

There's no such thing as a one-sided coin. Or a one-sided life.

First consider a topless pole dancer in a strip club. Now, a tutu clad ballet dancer in Swan Lake. Different words would be used to describe their performances and the feelings aroused in their audiences.

However, both dancers are doing their thing in the physical world. There's nothing metaphysical about either, though "spiritual" would be more likely to be used in one instance than the other (some guys would disagree, though).

Likewise, I've reached the point where it's tough for me to resonate with those who use "spirituality" as meaning a life disconnected from the physical.

I just don't get what they mean.

They talk about other-worldliness while they're in the world. They speak about existing without a body while being a body. They extol going beyond the brain and mind while using a brain and mind to do the extolling.

Maybe there's such a thing as spirit completely separate from matter.

But if so, there's no way for us material beings to know, because each of us connects with reality through a physical body and brain. As noted above, everyone who says "Our real self is spirit" does so speaking as a material entity.

My fondness for Taoism springs in large part from its non-dualistic understanding of spirituality. Here's how A Personal Tao looks upon "soul" and "spirit."

Soul is what we are. (click to enlarge)

Spirit is soul in motion. (click to enlarge)

So spirituality would be moving -- living, acting -- as what we are. A can't-miss proposition.

Tom Clark says it nicely in "The Case for Naturalistic Spirituality."

Because most folks are dualists, the idea of naturalistic spirituality still seems a contradiction in terms. Spirituality is generally thought to involve "higher planes," souls, spirits, and other supernatural phenomena. How can naturalists, including atheists, take spirituality seriously without violating a core tenet of their worldview, that no separate supernatural realm exists?

Clark is an admirer of Andre Comte-Sponville's "The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality," just as I am (see here and here).

When you subtract the supernatural from spirituality, you're left with something real -- though now there's little reason to use the word "spiritual."

The universe is constant change

How to deal with change? As David vanWyngaarden says below, this is a big philosophical and existential question. Heck, maybe the only question.

Because if change didn't exist, neither would life. So we wouldn't be around to wonder about life. Or change.

David emailed his thoughts to me and said it'd be fine to share them if I wanted. Which, I do.

When I read David's mention of "flow" in competitive karate, I wrote back and told him that I'd had similar intuitions during my nine years of Shotokan training -- which continued with my migration to mixed style martial arts, and now, Tai Chi.

Interestingly, David told me that Shotokan also was his style, but currently his focus is on Tai Chi's Yang long form of 108 movements, which I also practice.

So we've got quite a bit in common, including a view that moving with change (in contrast to trying to stop it) is the way to go in life -- as if we had any choice.

I don't think we do, except, as David notes, conceptually. This is one area where I do disagree some with him, since he says that religions urge us to accept change and live within it.

Yes, that's true, insofar as we're told to accept God's (or karma's) will. But virtually every religion, and maybe I should have left out "virtually," posits an unchanging realm that awaits us at the end of the Change Road if we do the right religious things.

Salvation. Eternal life. Enlightenment. Nirvana.

These steady-states are contrasted with the ebb and flow of earthly existence, which is considered to be less desirable than a changeless something-or-other.

Well, if change is life, and life is change, perhaps there's no escaping changing. Except by death, and we're not there yet.

Here's David's essay:
---------------------------------------

The Universe is constant change. Life = Change.
by David vanWyngaarden

Nothing original here. But this observation is the deepest we've been able to go, philosophically. There's no logic beyond this point.

We don't know why it changes, just that it does. Constantly.  Speculation for the reason for the change is God, and then religion. We've seen how far this can go.

Two paths from here:
1. Stop the change.
2. Accept the change and live within it.

1. Stop the change.

Knowing. Language is the process of taking a snapshot of reality and labeling it. Form a mental concept, affix a word to it. The more you know, the more unchanging mind concepts you have. The more you've stopped change.

But you can't stop the universe from changing. So you're just creating a comforting and minimally effective illusion that you have. The universe goes on changing. And now you've separated yourself from it. Or so you think...

Aristotle hit the same wall and said to know something in a world of constant change is to answer four questions about it. Answering these four questions has become the basis for our civilization, our science, our technology, medicine, law, everything.

Holy cow!

2. Accept the change and live within it.

All spiritual practices and religions seem to have this at the core.

A 'master' says surrender to the change, surrender to God, accept suffering; the result is salvation, enlightenment, awakening. A better way to live.  We have to take the word of those who have gone before.

Faith.

After 5+ years of competitive karate, I found myself getting 'in the zone' a few times. This was such a transcendent state that I ended up concluding that it's the same state as the Buddhist concept of Awakening. Satori.

It never lasted long, but, hey, I'm convinced, it IS a much better way to live. It IS real.
But why?

If the universe is constant change, or to use another slightly different phrase, constant manifestation, then the aforementioned separation results from your trying to stop the change.

Aligning simply requires surrendering and accepting what is. Then you're no longer separate from it. The universe can manifest through you instead of you trying to drive the change yourself.

That's what the universe does, it manifests. Constantly. One of its manifestations is YOU!  Why not let it continue manifesting, THROUGH YOU? Transcendence!  Lol.

Unfortunately, we have to give up the idea of controlling our own fate, which may be why it's so difficult. Everything, every mental concept, every logical proof, every cherished belief must be surrendered in favour of what IS.

Yikes!

But regardless, there's no logic beyond the basic observation of the 'problem of change.' It all comes down to this: do you want to try to stop the change or live in the change?

If the decision is to live in the change, the task then becomes undoing the massive accumulation of mental concepts.  Unlearning something every day.

The easier(?) approach is to change what you identify with. Instead of the usual identification with your mind-concepts, it is apparently possible to identify as nothing more than consciousness, awareness.

Simple Being.

I could give details, but Eckhart Tolle has already done it extraordinarily well, without religious baggage.  If you haven't read his books, I'd highly recommend them. They're not the 'pop' spirituality I thought they'd be. Completely authentic; extraordinarily deep, and very readable.

Another good one is William Samuel. Less known, but equally sensible and deep.

Well, there it is. A brief history of the world. With homework. Took me 40 years to research and a week to write.

Could use another re-write, but I'm sure you get the point.

David

End of spiritual questions is the final answer

Having finished U.G. Krishnamurit's "Mind is a Myth," I haven't changed my initial impression of this anti-guru. As I said in my first post about U.G., he's intriguing, irritating, and inspirational.

U.G. urges people to make up their own minds. He sees humanity as being bound by conditioning and an excessive preoccupation with thoughts. We trust what others have said in the past even if it conflicts with our own immediate knowing.

I like his emphasis on uniqueness.

I submit that nature is attempting to create a unique individual every time something is created. ... By using the model of Jesus, Buddha, or Krishna we have destroyed the possibility of nature throwing up unique individuals. Those who recommend that you forget you[r] own natural uniqueness and be like someone else, no matter how saintly that other person may be, is putting you on the wrong track. It is like the blind leading the blind.

Naturally there's a place for teachers, experts, guides. But something real has to exist that we can be taught about or guided toward.

U.G. sees ideals -- God, spirit, enlightenment, salvation, ultimate truth, the Good, limitless love -- as being fabrications of human thought. At an early age they're presented to us by our culture as things to be striven for.

And usually we keep on trying to attain our ideal until the day we die. This applies even if we're trying to become free of goals, like a diligent Buddhist who sets out to alter his consciousness so he always lives in the mindful present moment.

U.G. says in response to a questioner:

People are looking for enlightenment. You say you are not, but it is the same. Whether you want a new car or simple peace of mind, it is still a painful search. The secular leaders tell you one way, the holy men another way.

It makes no difference, as long as you're searching for peace of mind you will have a tormented mind. If you try not to search, or if you continue to search, you will remain the same.

You have to stop. You don't stop searching because such an act would be the end of you.

You are lost in a jungle, and you have no way of finding your way out. Night is fast approaching, the wild animals are there, including the cobras, and still you are lost. What do you do in such a situation? You just stop. You don't move...

In the early 1990s I had an Apple computer on which I played a pinball game, Loony Labyrinth. I played it a lot. I was addicted to it.

My wife was almost driven crazy by the Loony Labyrinth theme music, especially after I became proficient at making my way through the levels of the game. I could easily play a single game for half an hour.

Eventually I became disturbed by how much time Loony Labyrinth was taking out of my day. I tried to stop playing. But I couldn't. I'd manage a day or two of going pinball cold turkey, but soon I'd be feeding my addiction again.

Until...

I entered the Loony Labyrinth sweet spot, the zone, pinball nirvana. The game began normally. Then I reached levels of Loony Labyrinth'ness never attained before. I couldn't make a mistake. Extra balls and higher levels kept popping up without end.

I think I reached a billion points before the last ball was lost and ecstatic congratulations appeared on my computer monitor. Along with "Play again?"

No thank you. I had zero interest in Loony Labyrinth. My addiction to the game had instantly dropped away without any effort on my part. I never played it again.

Reading U.G.'s "Mind is a Myth" reminded me of how I bounced back and forth between desiring to play Loony Labyrinth, and desiring not to play Loony Labyrinth, until that spontaneous unforced moment came when I simply wasn't interested in Loony Labyrinth.

You must find your basic question. My basic question was: "Is there anything behind the abstractions the holy men are throwing at me? Is there really anything like enlightenment or self-realization?" I didn't want it. I just had this question.

So naturally I had to experiment. I tried so many things, this, that and the other. For a while. Then you find out one day that there is nothing to find out at all! You reject them completely and totally. This rejection is not a movement of thought at all, not a superficial denial. It is not done to attain or achieve something.

I've experienced that sort of who cares? clarity now and then. Sometimes life seems so simple, so fine just the way it is, yet also so mysterious, so impossible to comprehend. I grok that there's no answer to life's biggest spiritual, religious, and philosophical questions -- because there's no way to form a cogent query.

And a little while later I order another spiritual, religious, or philosophical book from Amazon -- because searching for answers to unanswerable questions is just so darn much fun.

I can relate to U.G. Krishnamurti. But I'm not him. Like U.G. says, each of us is unique. We have to find our own way, or non-way, by ourselves.

Still, my Loony Labyrinth experience causes me to feel that I understand, in some small sense, what U.G. is getting at.

What seems to have happened to me is not that my hunger has been satisfied, either with breadcrumbs or the whole loaf of bread, but that the hunger found no satisfactory answer and burned itself out.

All these thirst-quenchers haven't helped to quench my thirst. But somehow in my case the thirst burnt itself out.

...After that there were no more questions. The thirst burnt itself out without ever satisfying itself. Not the answers, but the ending of questions, is the important thing.

Meaning of life is right now, or never

What's the meaning of life? For many people, me included, this is a vitally important question. Finding the answer to it is a big part of what gives life meaning.

But wait...something is wrong here.

If what gives life meaning for me is a search for the meaning of life, I've got a couple of problems.

(1) If I ever find the answer, then life won't have meaning for me any longer, because the meaning was in my searching, not my finding. (2) Maybe I won't ever find the answer, in which case my life has been meaningless, though the time I spent fruitlessly searching for the meaning of life counts for something, I guess.

What I'm doing here is thinking philosophically. Or at least, thinking.

Lots of religious believers and spiritual seekers consider this to be wasted activity. They disparage thinking, viewing it as the antithesis to faith, intuition, insight -- the real way to God or ultimate truth.

Well, I beg to differ. Along with Julian Baggini, a philosopher whose book ("What's It All About?") I blogged about recently.

In that post I talked about Baggini's view of ego loss and selflessness. I liked how he cuts through a bunch of often-unexamined religious crap with clear thinking and common sense.

Thinking may not get us to the promised land, but it points us in the right direction, helping prevent us from wandering off into a wilderness of mumbo-jumbo and foundationless beliefs.

Here's some additional Baggini thoughts about the meaning of life (drawn from his initial chapters) that struck me as right on.

First, even if God created the cosmos, the meaning of life doesn't necessarily follow from its ultimate origin.

Knowing that the laptop on which I'm typing these words came from an Apple factory in China says nothing about the meaning my beloved MacBook has for me. Baggini says:

Consider wild berries that are gathered for food by humans. The story of their origins -- how they evolved -- is not the story of what purpose they serve for humans who come along and eat them, unless we say that God created wild berries so that we could eat them.

This is a kind of answer I would resist for reasons I will shortly explain. For the moment we simply need to note that we cannot assume that answering the question about something's origins tells us about its future or present purpose.

Second, and this relates to "how they evolved" in the quote above, the meaning of life isn't dependent on its being wired into the universe by someone or something else, such as a personal God.

Meaning is within each of us. Even if someone subscribes to a religiously-inspired faith concerning what life is all about, that belief is rooted within his or her own mind, not elsewhere.

So there's no reason why a meaning we arrive at on our own is any less valid than a meaning that supposedly is dropped down from the heavens into our laps.

We would prefer to live our lives in "bad faith," pretending that how we live and ought to live are not down to our choice but a product of fate, outside forces, or supernatural design.

...Why should we think that assigned purposes are inferior to predetermined purposes, and that only the latter can make life meaningful?

...The fact, then, that we can find no purpose or meaning in the origins of human life is no reason for supposing human life has no purpose or meaning.

Third, and most important in my opinion, a quest for the meaning of life has to end somewhere and sometime. And that might as well be here and now.

Some people believe that life will be truly meaningful when they get the next best material thing: house, car, computer, vacation, jewelry, healthy body, child, whatever.

Some people believe that life will be truly meaningful when they get the next best spiritual thing: enlightenment, salvation, satori, heaven, nirvana, grace, whatever.

Both types of people are forever chasing a string of "because's" that never comes to an end. They do this or that because it supposedly will lead them closer to the Meaning of Life promised land. Yet each step is followed by another step, not a standing still.

I have rejected the view that life's purpose can be understood by looking backwards to its origins. But that doesn't mean the only alternative is looking forward to its ultimate end. Just as the restaurant staff are fulfilling their professional purposes in the present simply by doing their job, couldn't we fulfill life's purpose in the present simply by living our lives?

...So if life is to be meaningful, the "why/because" series cannot extend indefinitely into the future. At some point we have to reach an end point where a further "why" question is unnecessary, misguided, or nonsensical. Otherwise the purpose of life is forever beyond our reach.

...As we have repeatedly seen, at some point we have to reach the stage where a "why" question can be met with an answer along the lines of "Are you nuts? Why wouldn't anyone want that?" If not, the "why/because" series just extends into the indefinite future.

...Yet so many of us do look towards some idyllic future when we have "made it" as providing purpose for what we do. This is a mistake and at its root is a failure to realize that if what is being worked towards is worthwhile in itself, then so are many other things that are within our grasp right now.

Losing your self is so egotistical

"Losing your self." "Ego-loss." "Becoming one with the cosmos." These words sound good, but do they really mean anything? And even if they do, is that thing desirable?

For a long time I was an active member of a religio-mystical organization (Radha Soami Satsang Beas) that put a lot of emphasis on soul drops merging into God's ocean.

Again, a superficially pleasing image -- brings to mind a super orgasm of consciousness, a final busting loose of boundaries into a cosmic Ahhhhhhhh...

But here's the thing: if nobody is around to merge, or bust loose, or have a soulful orgasm, what's the point?

More: how can it be said that anything has even happened, if there's no entity aware of the happening?

Plotinus, the Greek mystic philosopher, addressed these questions when he said that it'd be crazy if, after strenuously striving to understand the nature of God, someone ceased to exist right at the point of attaining that goal.

That's one problem with the notion of losing your self to find your self, a philosophical enigma wonderfully discussed in the "Lose your self" chapter of Julian Baggini's "What's It All About?"

Once again I am going to be brisk with an idea that many will feel deserves more serious attention. But this whole notion is just incoherent. If one genuinely lost one's sense of self, one would not be able to report any feeling of oneness with the universe. Rather, at the end of the meditation, one would report coming back to awareness after having lost any sense of consciousness, a bit like the way one feels after waking up. Any euphoric feelings during such a form of meditation have to be had by oneself or else there can be no feelings at all.

And this is great; Baggini nails it:

A further problem with this idea is that it suggests the meaning of a person's life is not to have a life at all. You reach your highest potential by losing your sense of self altogether -- in effect, by ceasing to exist. We end up with another impressive-sounding paradox: the meaning of your life is for you to lose all sense of that life. Well, that can be arranged -- it's called death.

So it's clear that ego-loss doesn't actually entail losing a sense of I-ness, or awareness of existing as an entity separate from the cosmos. Like Baggini says, loss of awareness is called death, not enlightenment.

However, wouldn't lessening one's sense of ego or separateness be a good thing? This could be desirable for a couple of reasons.

(1) It brings us closer to reality if the universe actually is founded on unity rather than multiplicity. (2) It enables the self to flourish by decreasing anxiety and other negative emotions caused by a sensation of me, me, me.

Reason #1, of course, doesn't carry with it any guarantee that coming closer to the monistic truth is going to be pleasant. It could be painful and unpleasant to merge into cold, dark, uncaring emptiness.

This isn't how religious, mystical, and spiritual teachings view ego-loss. Rather, it's seen in the Reason #2 sense -- as something that's going to lead to much reduced suffering, and maybe even total elimination of psychic pain.

Here's how Baggini sees the situation. Makes sense to me.

The reason I am being a little brutal here is that I think there is a terrible dishonesty among some of those who claim that what they are trying to achieve is a lessening of attachment to ego. The clear truth is that people who find this path satisfying are living contented lives.

In other words, they like their "spiritual practices" because they make them feel more content, at peace, or whatever, than alternatives they have tried. So despite all the fine words about losing their egos, they are in fact simply engaging in another form of self-gratification. This isn't materialistic or harmful to others, so we tend to look upon it quite kindly. But it is not in any sense a way of life which shows disregard for self-interest.

Absolutely.

I've spent a lot of time around people (one of whom was me, for many years) who believed they were engaging in "selfless service" to a guru or God through inward meditation and outward forms of volunteerism.

Yet their selves got a lot of satisfaction from this. And they considered that all this bhakti (love) would help them get closer to cosmic truth.

So there were a heck of a lot of benefits to the self in all of this supposed selflessness. A final quote from Baggini:

Whichever way you look at it, this is about satisfying the self, not lessening concern for it. It may be a worthwhile form of life, but it must be seen for what it is.

Is awareness watching awareness the highest truth?

I'm always looking for shortcuts to enlightenment, bliss, nirvana -- whatever you want to call it. For a long time I was on a spiritual path.

Paths take time to travel. I'm too old for paths. I want to see the promised land right goddamn now! Not after death. Not after years of meditation practice.

Now!

So my attention perked up when I got an email today from an occasional Church of the Churchless visitor who said, in part:

A guy by the name of Michael Langford, (who I recently ran across) says that he had followed Sri Ramana's 'self inquiry' method for some 27 years without getting much in the way of results.  Then in 2001, while visiting Tirunnivalli (sp) and the Ramana Ashram there, he made a slight change as to how he practiced this method and that in the subsequent 2 years and 1 month, he says he merged into . . . whatever . . . bliss-awareness-love . . . you know, the whole deal.

I've always had a strong interest in Sri Ramana, Sri NIsargadatta,  Annamali Swami, and a couple others.  Personally, I always felt RSSB's  'Simran' [mantra meditation] to be too 'noisy'  and preferred something more silent. 

On an RSSB CD from the 1988 series, from a cassette dated 23Nov88, around track 19/20 or so, Maharaj Ji [Charan Singh] answers a series of questions and comments from a young lady . . . and says that Simran takes you to a state of silence in which one couldn't repeat the names . . . and that this silence is the state to be achieved . . . however one gets there.  That was my understand of what was said.  That kind of justifies to me my own proclivities toward silence as opposed to simran.

I feel the same way. Mantra meditation, where you calm and focus the mind by repeating a word or words, seems to be a means without an end.

That is, you've reduced mental noise by whispering to yourself.

It's a quantitative rather than qualitative change. Pleasant, useful, worthwhile. But is this the highest state of human consciousness?

The email pointed me toward Albigen.com, a site that looked familiar. Since the Internet couldn't have existed in a past life, I'm pretty sure my deja vu sense was the result of having looked over these awareness watching awareness writings not too long ago.

I've seen lots of claims like this: "The Most Rapid and Direct Means to Eternal Bliss." I'm always skeptical of them.

But I also like the words "rapid," "direct," and "bliss." So I read on. Or, re-read on.

There's a surprising amount of material on this web site describing the rapid and direct method. I found that disturbing. I wanted to share the method in today's blog post and didn't want to spend all night learning about it.

So I focused on the Awareness Watching Awareness "book," thirteen online chapters that I zipped through quickly.

More quickly than the author wanted me to read them, since I kept coming across admonitions to read the sentences slowly, savoring them like fine wine. Well, I chugged them down like beer.

In Chapter 4 I learned that I'm supposed to devote at least two hours a day to the Awareness Watching Awareness (AWA) practice. Naturally my dogma-averse mind immediately popped up with "who says?"

And so it went through the brief book. On the whole, I liked the message. But the tone is preachy.

Like Langford, I'm also an admirer of Ramana and have read several books about his teachings. And I too am a long-time meditator who is looking to make meditation into something more than endless looking for the moment that will end the desire for looking.

Chapter 6 describes how the author came to his breakthrough "it's all about awareness watching awareness!" realization.

If you want to jump right into how-to, Chapter 7 is where the method is revealed. There's a variety of descriptions of AWA. This is the basic one:

Shut your eyes. Notice your awareness. Observe that awareness. Turn your attention away from the world, body and thought and towards awareness watching awareness. If you notice you are thinking, turn your attention away from thought and back towards awareness watching awareness.

OK. Makes sense. But I kept wondering, "Why not just be aware? Isn't this practice dividing awareness into two, while it seems to be one?"

Maybe Langford addresses this question somewhere. I could have missed it in my rush to get to the mystical "money shot."

The final Chapter 13 has the most disturbing dogma. Langford goes into full-on fundamentalist fire and brimstone mode here.

If you do not do your spiritual practice everyday, you will continue to be caught in the cycle of birth and death, birth again, death again, birth again, death again and in that cycle, eventually, all of the thousands of forms that suffering takes will enter your life.

If you do not do your spiritual practice everyday, you will experience death, diseases, violence and thousands of other types of suffering, lifetime after lifetime.

Dude, lighten up. You're giving non-dualism a bad name. If I wanted to be threatened with eternal damnation I would have stuck with Catholicism.

Where Langford goes astray, I'd say, is a common problem in spiritual writings of this sort (I should know, because I've fallen prey to it myself).

It pops up when someone has a profound spiritual or mystical experience and then extrapolates that to apply to everybody. This is the seedbed of religious dogma: an individual understanding is turned into a universal truth.

I think Langford is on to something with his awareness watching awareness insights.

However, they aren't unique to him. Many others have had similar experiences and managed to write about them in a less preachy fashion.

I've come to meditate in pretty much the way that's encouraged by the AWA method. I don't do it for several hours a day though. And I don't feel the urge to make this my main life's work.

Langford did. That's great. But I'm me, just as you are you.

Each of us has to find our own way. Awareness watching awareness may be an aspect of it. Or, not.

Here's a nice summary of the AWA approach that I found via this laudatory site:

Download awareness_watching_awareness.pdf

No need to live life fully. Just live.

"Living life to the fullest" is an adage that used to mean much more to me than it does now. In my true believing days I'd be anxious that I was missing out on the purpose of earthly existence.

Which I took to be: pursuing a spiritual path that would lead me out of the illusion of earthly existence.

So, in accord with the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (an Indian organization led by a guru), I diligently meditated for several hours a day and did my best to not get attached to worldly entanglements.

I failed, of course. Thankfully.

Because a religiosity which judgmentally divides life experiences -- worldly/spiritual, meaningless/meaningful, empty/full -- not surprisingly leads to a divisive and psychologically unhealthy outlook.

If someone is continually wondering, "Am I living my life to the fullest at this moment?" all that questioning is going to suck the joy out of the moments.

I'm still enjoying re-reading Alan Watts' "Become What You Are." Here's some passages from the Tomorrow Never Comes chapter.

When we say that all things in the universe are the creative activity of God, this is really like putting legs on a snake or painting the reflection in a mirror. It is not to be compared to seeing that activity as it is, although we say that it is God's activity to draw attention to it in a particular way.

But the trouble is, people spend so much energy looking for the God that they fail to see the activity, which is surely a sad state of affairs. What is this activity? The rivers flow; the flowers bloom; you walk down the street.

...The idea of God is a finger pointing the way to Reality, but when people try to join God and Reality, to identify the one with the other, to find the former in the latter, they are trying to join together two things that were never in need of being joined. This is like trying to make the eyes see themselves.

Yet how do we arrive at the state where to watch the snow falling is so much one with God that we need no more introduce God than put red paint on the roses?

Whence all this hurry to arrive at a state? Are you not already watching the snow? Are you not already face-to-face with the eternal mystery? Take it easy for a while; just watch the snow falling or the kettle boiling, and not so much hurry.

...But you are free to abandon yourself to actual life and to know that living in God is another name for this abandonment, for watching the snow and walking down the street.

...You say you do not feel this abandonment right now. What do you expect to feel? It is not a feeling; it is feeling. It is not a thought; it is thinking. If it were a particular thought or feeling there could be coming into it and going out of it; but God is One and all-inclusive, and here there can be neither coming nor going, inside or outside.

...As the verse says:

This you can not describe, nor paint,
Nor yet admire, nor feel.

Spiritual ego worse than worldly ego

Losing the ego... what's up with that? In most religions, particularly Eastern ones, this is supposed to be a supreme goal of spirituality. Yet no one has ever seen an "ego," much less the absence of one.

I've come to feel that "losing the ego" is one of those phrases that sounds like it means something -- and gets repeated in sermons, satsangs, and such as if it did -- but actually points to an absurdity.

How would a person without an ego, a sense of "I," personal desire, look? How would he or she be different from other people? Could we distinguish a no-ego person from an ego person?

Anthony de Mello, a Jesuit priest who I've praised as a spiritual rebel, addresses these questions in "Awareness." I started to re-read this book in a fashion that, in my old true believing days, I would have called miraculous.

Now, the word I'd use is curious. Meaning, interesting in an I'm clueless about what it means fashion.

The day after I wrote my "The Meaning of Life? Life" post, I was drawn to peruse my bookcase for some fresh pre-meditation reading. Scanning the many spiritual, philosophical, and mystical titles, I picked up de Mello's "Taking Flight" -- which I hadn't looked at in a long time.

Flipping to a page at random, I saw one highlighted passage:

For the secret of life is to be found in life itself -- not in doctrines about it.

"Well, far out!" I thought. "A message from God. But wait! I don't believe in God. So, I guess it's just a message."

I put the book back. I chose "Awareness" instead. Here's some quotes on the ego question:

I said there were two types of selfishness; maybe I should have said three. First, when I do something, or rather, when I give myself the pleasure of pleasing myself; second, when I give myself the pleasure of pleasing others. Don't take pride in that. Don't think you're a great person. You're a very ordinary person, but you've got refined tastes.

Then you've got the third type, which is the worst: when you do something good so that you won't get a bad feeling. It doesn't give you a good feeling to do it; it gives you a bad feeling to do it. You've making loving sacrifices but you're grumbling... That's the worst kind of charity, when you're doing something so you won't get a bad feeling.

...Say this scrap of paper is a billion-dollar check. Ah, I must renounce it, the gospel says, I must give it up if I want eternal life. Are you going to substitute one greed -- a spiritual greed -- for the other greed?

Before, you had a worldly ego and now you've got a spiritual ego, but you've got an ego all the same, a refined one and one more difficult to cope with.

Right on. I much prefer worldly assholes to spiritual assholes.

If you're going to be a jerk, and we all are in varying degrees of jerkiosity, why not be a straightforward Yes, I am jerk? That's so much more honest than being an I'm just a humble servant of God (or guru) jerk.

De Mello says, and I agree, that everybody without exception does what they do because it makes them feel better than doing something else. Like an old friend used to say, "We're pleasure-seeking missiles." We lock on to the goal of happiness and fly in that direction.

Self-sacrifice, love, charity. These are all ways people use to feel happy. Some other ways are self-assertion, hatred, possessiveness. Different strokes for different folks, all directed toward feeling good.

Ego is there in every case. With true believers, it just gets covered up under a layer of holier-than-thouness.

Not to mention names, but one of them is mine, I came to see the truth of this when I worked with high-ranking sevadars in the Radha Soami Satsang Beas organization. I'd always believed that decades of spiritual practice, meditating with love and devotion just as the guru instructed, would cause someone to be a better person.

What I found, though, was that big egos, controlling natures, and selfish desires simply were transmuted into a subtler form. Like De Mello says, this made someone's jerkiosity more difficult to discern -- but it was still there.

Think of all the good deeds you've done, or of some of them (because I'm only giving you a few seconds). Now understand that they really sprang from self-interest, whether you knew it or not. What happens to your pride? What happens to your vanity?

What happens to that good feeling you gave yourself, that pat on the back every time you did something that you thought was so charitable? It gets flattened out, doesn't it?

What happens to that looking down at your neighbor who you thought was so selfish? The whole thing changes, doesn't it?

"Well," you say, "my neighbor has coarser tastes than I do."

You're the more dangerous person, you really are. Jesus Christ seems to have had less trouble with the other type than with your type. Much less trouble. He ran into trouble with people who were really convinced they were good.

Other types didn't seem to give him much trouble at all, the ones who were openly selfish and knew it.

Yes, that's me. Now that you've read this post, leave me a comment. Tell me how much you love what I wrote! Make me feel good!

If you do, you'll feel good too. And that's what life is all about.

Make life more of a silent movie

I'm fond of encapsulating the meaning of life in a pithy phrase. Only problem is, I keep coming up with different capsules.

Back in my psychedelic-fueled youth, it was "the universe is a paper bag turned inside out." Recently, I realized that it was folly to "overlay the actuality of my day with an idealized version of it."

Today, it's "make life more of a silent movie." This thought came to me, and it seemed so enormously profound I instantly knew it must be the key to understanding everything.

I only wish I understood what I said to myself.

But, ooh! -- that's it! Not understanding my own mental speaking is exactly what I need to know. So I've got it! By not having it.

I seem to be telling myself something along the lines of my previous, "Hey God, shut up! No more conversations." However, since it isn't possible to step into the same thought-river twice, that can't be true.

Whatever.

I just enjoy the image of life being a silent movie. I don't mean totally silent, because there still are sounds in it.

At the moment I'm blogging away on my laptop in a coffee house. People are talking. The expresso machine is making whooshing sounds. Music is playing in the background. I can hear a teeny-tiny click as each of my new MacBook's keys are pressed.

Someone could make a movie of this scene right now, and they'd capture all that I just mentioned. Because it's real. Everybody in Salem's Blue Pepper could experience what I am, if they paid attention (and borrowed my computer for a while).

What's missing from this silent movie reality is the overlay of voices within my head. You know these voices. We're all familiar with them.

"Am I going to be able to finish this post before my dance lesson? ... only got ten minutes ... That woman has an annoying laugh ... wish they'd play better music ... hey, dude, turn down your computer's speaker, can't concentrate with a You Tube video blaring in my ear."

These voices -- they're with us almost everywhere we go. Yes, they're a part of reality. But they're my reality, and your reality, not our shared reality.

This is the beauty of a silent movie. It just is what it is, no narration or interpretation required. Life is a lot simpler when the screen of consciousness we're viewing it on isn't filled with unnecessary verbiage.

Voiceovers supplied by us aren't required.

Such is the province of religion: supplying concepts and beliefs that become a obtrusive dogmatic soundtrack playing over the silent movie of unadorned reality.

Parking places downtown are scant. Ah, a car just pulled out -- right in front of the place I want to go. Praise the Lord! Or Jesus, the guru, Allah, a guardian angel. Inside his or her mind a true believer narrates an imaginative metaphysical story about a down to earth event.

I am being taken care of. How blessed it is to have a friend in _____ [fill in name of favorite divine being].

I used to enjoy hearing those sorts of voices inside my true believing head. Now, silence is more appealing.

Then I'm better able to hear reality say, What's happening is what's happening.

Spirituality without God

Is an atheist or agnostic spirituality possible? Sure. And I've read a book that proves it: Andre Comte-Sponville's "The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality."

This morning I browsed through the final chapter again, liking it even more the second time through. My first post about the book was on the theme of desiring God isn't proof of God.

That's true, but sort of negative. Comte-Sponville ends his book with a positive flourish, arguing that not only is an atheist spirituality possible, but really it is the only authentic way to establish a loving, truthful connection with the cosmos.

First, what is spiritual? Is it something other-worldly, non-materialistic, transcendent? Or is it a term for the inner, aware, conscious side of being human?

Comte-Sponville argues for the latter, and I've come to agree with him.

Taken in its broadest sense, spirituality can be said to include virtually all aspects of human life and spiritual is more or less synonymous with "mental" or "psychic." Today, this sense of the word has pretty much gone out of use, and when people talk about spirituality, they are usually referring to a rather limited part of our inner life (though it may contemplate limitlessness) – the part that involves the absolute, the infinite and the eternal. It is, in a sense, the spirit's farthermost point and its greatest amplitude.

Mystery surrounds us. It is us. The far out also is close at hand.

Spirit, says Comte-Sponville, is part of nature. Adding on abstract concepts such as "God" or "soul" distances us from an immediate intuitive spiritual experience of enchantment, awe, wonder, humble not-knowing.

I feel like I've experienced what he's talking about. Often I'm simply blown away by a wordless sensation that I can best try to describe as …

The universe is. So am I. We have so much in common. I'm alive for a while, aware of being. Being something, someone, somewhere. But also (and more importantly), simply being. Existing within existence. I've got no idea what all this means. Never will. I'm just grateful to be an infinitesimal part of it, experiencing a speck of time within the vast expanse of eternity.

Comte-Sponville puts it better than I can. Here he's describing an oceanic sense of connectedness with It All that doesn't involve any sort of conventional religious sense of a detached divinity.

Firstly, there is the suspension of familiarity, banality, repetition, "been there done that" – the spurious self-evidence of ordinary awareness. All at once, it is as if everything were new, singular and astonishing – not irrational, perhaps, but inexplicable or incomprehensible, beyond all forms of reason. Given that reason is a part of it, how could reason possibly contain it? This is what I call mystery.

Secondly, or rather at the same time, there is the suspension of questions and problems – not because they have all been resolved, but because they are no longer raised. Why is there something rather than nothing? The question vanishes and all that remains is the answer, which is no longer an answer, since there is no longer a question.

All that remains is being, reality, what I have called self-evidence. Woody Allen comes close to it in one of his aphorisms: "The answer is yes. But what is the question?" There is no question, which is why the answer is always yes.

… Wittgenstein put it most aptly: "For an answer which cannot be expressed, the question too cannot be expressed … The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem."

I can't say that I've stopped searching for the meaning of life. But I'm becoming more aware of the games that I play with myself along the way.

I like to ponder the mystery of existence. I enjoy exploring mystical paths that point to a void, nothingness, mind-blowing incomprehensibility. And yet, in the back of my blown mind is an expectation: someday it'll be clear.

Hey! Who says?! Where the hell did I get that notion, someday it'll be clear? What vestige of religiosity is clinging in my supposedly churchless mind that assures me of my eventual salvation from cluelessness?

Comte-Sponville says:

Yet there are the occasional moments of grace, when we cease hoping for anything other than what is (and this is no longer hope; it is love) or what we are doing (and this is no longer hope; it is will). Moments when nothing is missing, when there is nothing to either wish for or regret and when the question of possession is irrelevant (because having is replaced by being and doing) – this is what I call plenitude.

…While we are living it, it is neither a concept, a reflection nor a comprehension. It is an experience. It is a fact. It is a bedazzlement. The present is here, and it is all there is. It never vanishes; it continues. It changes ceaselessly; therefore it is unceasing. All is present; the present is all. All is true. All is eternal, here and now!

I have no idea what these words mean. Yet I know that they're absolutely true.

Just as I have no idea what the meaning of the universe is. Yet I know that the existence within which I'm existing is absolutely true. How could it not be?

Try not to be what you are or to be what you are not!

…Instead of looking at yourself, you can see. Instead of pretending, you can act. Instead of waiting, you can pay attention. What could be simpler than simplicity? And what could be rarer? It means being one with yourself, so much so that the self vanishes, and all that remains is oneness – the act itself, awareness itself.

You were taking a walk? All that remains is the walk. You were making love? All that remains is desire or love. You were meditating? All that remains is meditation. You were acting? All that remains is action – such is the secret of martial arts, which is why they involve spirituality.

You were being? All that remains is being itself.

Make your own path

It isn't often that I get inspired by a bank ad. More accurately, it's been never. Until last Sunday, when I noticed the big bold print in an Umpqua Bank advertisement in the Salem newspaper.

If you make your own path,
you can't lose your way.

Ooh! So Zen.

As was one of the questions in last night's presidential debate between Obama and McCain.

What don't you know and how will you learn it?

Terrific question. The answers were just OK, something about expecting the unexpected. Which fits with the Umpqua Bank philosophy.

Many spiritual and religious faiths stress the need for a guide. I used to believe that such was necessary, that without a guru to show you the Truth Path and how to stay on it, you'd wander aimlessly in a maze of karmic illusion.

Now, I feel that one word in the sentence I just wrote above makes all the difference. Should it be "the Truth Path" or "a Truth Path"?

If there's only one way, you'd better try to make sure you're on it.

However, if there's no evidence that ultimate reality is reached in this fashion rather than that fashion (or, more cynically, in any fashion at all), then choosing your own path makes good sense.

Self-doubt is a confidence killer. And a happiness destroyer.

When I was a kid the small town I grew up in would show movies outside on summer Friday nights. I saw the Walt Disney flick where Davy Crockett dies at the Alamo many times. One of Crockett's lines got burned into my psyche.

Be sure you're right, then go ahead.

(check out the poster of Crockett riding a couple of crocodiles; that's confidence)

Religions offer up ready-made spiritual paths, complete with dogmatic and moralistic curbs designed to keep believers from steering off the purported way.

Problem is, all the paths are different. So anybody choosing one religious way necessarily has to reject countless others.

Why not follow the Umpqua Bank approach? Reject every way except your own. Then you won't have to worry about getting off-course, since wherever you go will be the place you want to be.

Say your spirituality in one sentence

If you were cast away on a mental desert island and could only bring one spiritual sentence along, what would it be?

Tough choice.

I like words. I read a lot. I write a lot. I enjoy pondering what lies beyond the ponderable. My shelves are filled with many favorite books, each containing favorite lines.

In the end, though, I'd have to stick with what I've called the best one-sentence metaphysics ever written (by Philip K. Dick):

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

Now, I'm not saying that I believe this sentence. What I like about it is how some great questions are raised in its confident simplicity. That's more important than any answer.

It might be that when belief stops, so does reality – if "belief" is taken to be subjective consciousness, the whole kit and caboodle of thoughts, feelings, sensations, imaginings, and such.

Thus maybe reality amounts to nothing in the absence of belief.

However, experience argues otherwise. The universe seemed to do just fine on its own for the 13+ billion years humans weren't around to believe anything (of course, I wasn't around back then, so can't say for sure).

Anyway, I'd like to know other peoples' favorite spiritual sentence. I use "spiritual" in a broad sense, as encompassing philosophy, religion, metaphysics, mysticism, and meaning of life musings in general.

Comment away, if you like.

Just before I wrote this, I read a comment from Rain on another post. Sounds like her sentence might be, "It's all about love."

Interesting thoughts. It reminds me of many years ago sitting in a Christian church and listening to the pastor say it's all about love. I thought that's too simple. It can't just be that simple. Now, many years later, I would say the same thing. It's all about love. Learning to love in the truest sense, learning what love is, experiencing it and letting it experience me. Understanding that love isn't always giving someone else what they want. It's not ignoring justice but it's loving through it all. Truly learning and experiencing real love is the simplest and hardest thing anyone will ever do.

Sink down to heaven

Rise up! Elevate your consciousness! Soar to the heavens!

Spirituality usually is viewed as involving some sort of ascent. Earthly concerns supposedly hold us down, while divinity lies on a more ethereal plane of reality.

I used to believe this.

I've spent countless (almost) hours in meditation seeking to focus all of my attention at a point inside my forehead – the Third Eye, or eye center – after which, I was told, my soul consciousness would be transported into higher spiritual regions.

Writing a book about Plotinus, a Greek mystic philosopher, helped move me to a different viewpoint. Plotinus taught that the One, or God, is both everywhere and nowhere.

The One is all things and not a single one of them… It is because there is nothing in it that all things come from it: in order that being may exist, the One is not being, but the generator of being.

After my book was published, I engaged in some back and forth email discussion with a philosophy professor who had started to read it. This ended after he told me that I'd placed too much emphasis on ascending to the One, rather than finding the center.

At the time I disagreed with him. Now, I don't.

Four years of Tai Chi practice likely has a lot to do with my newfound appreciation for sinking down. My instructor frequently reminds us, as we're beginning a Tai Chi form, "Sink down from below, rise up from above."

Which leaves you centered. Movement in Tai Chi flows from the body's midsection, the waist and hips. Being rooted to the floor brings speed, power, flexibility, spontaneity (sounds paradoxical, but it isn't).

This morning I finished reading Peter Ralston's "Cheng Hsin: The Principles of Effortless Power." Ralston is a martial artist with a philosophical bent. His focus is on allowing action to flow from being. As Plotinus said, being isn't the ultimate, but it's darn close.

Being always is, not surprisingly. So there's no need to strain to find it. Ralston says:

If I had to choose a single principle to follow, it would probably be the principle that manifests itself as the state of being relaxed. Taken as its broadest meaning, this principle permeates every aspect of what we do. The principle here seems to evoke being at rest, or the "unused state."

It is what is so about anything before self's activity uses the thing for a purpose other than simply being and performing its natural function. Therefore our alignment to this principle requires us to remain and/or to return constantly to the unused or open state, the position of rest or natural function, allowing things to "sit on the floor" rather than "holding them up."

Cheng Hsin (roughly translated as source of being) principles apply to all aspects of ourselves, both body and psyche. From my Tai Chi and dance experience, I can testify that relaxing and sinking is key to success in these activities.

And I'm learning the benefits of doing the same in meditation – plus life in general. Basically, what I do during my morning meditation period now is relax, sink, and say "hello."

This also is what's done in Tai Chi push hands and partner dancing (particularly Tango). You ground yourself, connect to the other person in a tension-free manner, and have a non-verbal conversation.

Tai Chi speaks of "listening skills." In dance, there's leading and following. Each requires sensitivity to what's really going on with the other person, and responding appropriately. That's what I mean by hello: reaching out and touching someone, communicating openly.

It is only a lack of conscious awareness, experience in and from the source of the moment, that cramps appropriate changeability; and changeability is the demand of life, not holding a position or structure.

Listening is an openness to feeling the condition of the world around and inside us… Even in the middle of activity involving what is actually occurring, we must continue to listen to that which is not yet manifest. This requires a real freedom and nonattachment, and a complete openness and willingness to change.

…In a sense, listening is letting things be exactly the way they are, and interpreting is noticing that they are that way.

When I begin to meditate, I like to say "hello." I don't know if any consciousness other than my own can hear me. It's sort of like picking up the phone before I've heard it ring. On the chance that someone might be on the other end of the line, I say "hello."

If there's no answer – and so far I haven't gotten one in my meditation – I have to assume that I'm talking to myself. But hey, I'm someone! So a conversation still is happening.

And silence, the voice of sunken stillness, may be the most eloquent speech of all.

What is the "form" of your mind? What shape is it? What color, size, or qualities does it have? Experience it. Become conscious of whatever may be the case. It may not exist at all!

Not-Knowing is the original or fundamental condition of Being.

…We must also refer to the priority given to those things unseen: Nothing (wu chi), or the source of Being, is given priority over anything appearing. Being takes precedence over the activity that is mind, so emptiness and openness are held requisite for any thought or feeling to occur.

I like. The Cheng Hsin system is too organized for my taste (but that's what organizations do, not surprisingly). The basic philosophy, though, appeals to my Taoist soul. Here's some good advice for both meditation and life:

Be open: to any possibility. Since you don't already have a direct experience of your subject, you cannot rule out anything.

In order to create such openness, and so true questioning, you must allow yourself to experience actually and deeply that you do not know.

Allow not-knowing in this moment to bring you to an authentic emptiness – free from pre-conceptions, programming, and assumptions – In relation to your subject of contemplation.

Churchless have more faith than believers

When you don't believe in religion or dogma any more, most people think you've become less spiritual – not as committed to fathoming the mystery of God.

Actually, the opposite is true. Jack Haas says it well in his "The Way of Wonder."

Faith, absolute faith, is the acceptance of walking with eyes fully open into the infinite darkness; faith is without expectation, hope, petition, or piety, or it is not faith, it is merely belief. Belief is a characteristic of concept, faith is a characteristic of mystery; for 'belief' is the acceptance of something we do not know, whereas 'faith' is the acceptance that we do not know.

…For just as we can receive the knowable only by 'knowing', so it is that we can receive the Unknowable only by not-knowing.

If God is considered to be the One – infinite, omnipresent, without a second, all-pervading ultimate reality – then what is there to know, and who is there to know it?

Making God into an object redefines the supreme divinity into an entity like us: a thing, force, or person that exists within existence. This anthropomorphizing succeeds in making religion possible, for now God can be reached via a "path," just like the Eiffel Tower can.

Begin here. Do this. End up at God's doorstep.

Neat and tidy. All that's required is to believe in the rightness of the path. God no longer is unknown mystery, for both the way and the endpoint are tidily defined.

Only problem (and it's a big one): religion has converted Godliness into a concept that can be understood by the human mind. Wonder and Mystery have been collapsed into commandments, tenets, beliefs, theologies, and other attempts to force the unknown One into the cage of conceptual structures.

Genuine faith is a rejection of these graven images that humans have formed not out of stone, metal, or wood, but words. Genuine faith is an unreserved opening to what can't be known or described, because God isn't an object.

More from Haas:

When we have given God back his or her rightful being – which is to say, his or her unknowability – then what happens is that we begin to also find out our own proper place in the cosmos; when the event (God) which is so important to our lives becomes impossible to understand, then we also become impossible to understand, after all we were 'created in his own image'. And if that image is beyond our imagination, then we must also be beyond our own imagination.

When God's attributes are gone, our own attributes are gone, and only then is it possible for the two mysteries to blend into One; before this absolute unknowing occurred – when we 'knew' God and ourselves – we saw them as distinct, different entities – for that was the only way to 'know' them (i.e. by separating them), but when we finally 'unknow' God and ourselves, only then, when the lines of division vanish, can the separate entities merge into One.

I used to believe in a path back to God. That's what religions offer: an understandable roadmap to replace the terra incognita of an incomprehensible cosmos.

Eventually it dawned on me that every path necessarily lies on known territory (otherwise no one would know about it). Yet what I'd been drawn to since my childhood was beyond the light: darkness.

Now I'm comfortable with not-knowing anything about God. And in that ignorance…I feel much closer to God.

“Shut up” video has a lot to say

Thanks to a comment from Dvorah-gee! on my "Hey, God, shut up! No more conversations" post, I've been able to enjoy a music video made by disciples of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (not the musician).

It made me smile. And I appreciated the message. Shut up! indeed is a fine response…to ourselves, when our minds chatter away unnecessarily about ridiculous bullshit.

Be happy. Love. Hard to argue with those sentiments.

I also liked another video from Dvorah-gee! that puts forth the utterly reasonable proposition that the meaning of life is meaninglessness.

I'd never heard of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (guess at a certain spiritual level you earn a double Indian honorific). His goals, according to the Wikipedia article, are to relieve stress on the individual level and to relieve disease and violence on a societal level.

A CNN piece described his visit to Iraq and a meeting with the country's prime minister. Apparently quite a few Iraqis resonated with his meditative/yoga philosophy – which I wouldn't have expected.

Browsing through the Sri Sri and The Art of Living web sites, I found too much of a guru-focus for my taste. But at least this guy seems sincere, doesn't take himself overly seriously, respects other faiths, and is trying to make the world a better place.

If only all religious leaders did the same.

Spirituality is as simple as 1, 2, 3

It might not be apparent from my wordiness, but I really do like to keep things simple. And the basics of spirituality, philosophy, religion, the meaning of life – whatever you want to call it – can be as simple as 1, 2, 3.

There's no magic in a trinity, of course. Plus, there's any number of different 1, 2, 3's. That's one of the principles of my 1, 2, 3, which yesterday I described in a comment addressed to Brad.

My questions, of course, could be directed to anybody. Including myself. Here they are.

(1) Brad, do you believe that you know the truth about the cosmos? Or at least, that you are on a path leading to knowledge of this truth? (yes, no, don't know)

(2) Brad, if you answered "yes" to 1, do you believe that other people could find this truth in different ways? (yes, no, don't know)

(3) Brad, do you believe that a cosmos-truth seeker would make an unbroken progression toward knowing this truth, or would the path to truth take unexpected twists and turns, impossible to predict in advance? (unbroken, unexpected, or don't know)

My answers are (1) Don't know, (2) Yes (even though I didn't answer "yes" to #1), (3) Unexpected.

This says a lot about myself. I'm looking forward to getting Brad's answers, because I think they will similarly reveal some basics about where he's coming from philosophically.

These questions popped into my head, and I didn't give much thought to them before including them in my comment. Still, I think they're a good way of sorting out fundamentalists from open-minded people.

I like Question #1 because most religions and spiritual paths presume a "yes" answer from adherents. Yet I consider myself to be a serious spiritual seeker, and I find it easy to answer "don't know." In fact, given my Taoist (and Unitarian) leanings I can't imagine offering up any other response.

In my true believing days, though, I would have said "yes." No problem. A Yes to #1 does not a fundamentalist make, unless it's accompanied by a No to #2.

(Upon further consideration, as above, I now see that #2 can be answered regardless of the answer to #1 – if #2 is rephrased to say "Assuming that it's possible to know the ultimate truth about the cosmos, do you believe that people could find this truth in different ways?")

I asked this of Brad, because from his previous comments he strikes me as a No-man on this question. I could be wrong, of course. But I get the impression that he thinks that because I no longer follow the strict Sant Mat/RSSB party line, I've meandered off of the only path to divine truth.

This presumes, of course, that there's only one way to knowing the Big Truth Upstairs (or Inside). Recently someone emailed me about my seeming flight from orthodoxy, after writing a book – "Life is Fair"— that was published by RSSB.

I told the person:

I haven't "left the path," as you put it. I'm still very much on the path. Only difference is, I no longer believe that there's only one way along the path, or that there's only one path. This is, by the way, just what Gurinder Singh [current RSSB guru] says, from what I hear. So all I've left is the religious or fundamentalist aspect of Sant Mat, which I consider to be progress rather than backsliding.

Then there's question #3, about a path to truth being predictably straight, or marked by unexpected twists and turns. From my reading of the most respected mystical and spiritual literature, there's virtually universal agreement that twists and turns is how the road to truth is laid out.

Why, the very word "conversion" implies an abrupt about turn. Fundamentalists simply consider that there's only one abrupt turn allowed on a spiritual, mystical, philosophical, or religious path – the one that brings a person to a particular set of dogmas.

Any further changes of direction are a no-no, which is why Brad (and others) take me to task for not sticking with a certain way for my entire life. This is precisely how a religious fundamentalist would think, but it's not how genuine mystics look upon the "wayless way."

If your perspective on life, consciousness, and the cosmos isn't changing, you're stuck in a dead zone. Or, I suppose, you could be at such an exalted spiritual level that you've reached the peak of Mount Truth and have nowhere else to go.

Unlikely. Very unlikely. Which is why my three questions are a good guide to sorting out the open-minded seekers from the closed-minded fundamentalists.

By their answers, you shall know them.

How marvelous: to be alive!

Religion, spirituality, mysticism, philosophy, theology – all this stuff can be pretty damn complicated. So many beliefs, thoughts, concepts, dogmas, imaginings, speculations.

I've enjoyed throwing myself into this complex stew, and have even contributed to thickening it through some books, my Church of the Churchless musings, and countless conversations.

But more and more, the essence of my attitude toward the big questions of life is…less and less.

By which I mean: one intuitive direct experience is coming to overshadow all of the other religio-spiritual contents of my psyche.

It feels much more real and true than these other meanderings of my mind, which tend to be second-hand or hypothetical in nature.

I'm alive! And I won't always be. How marvelous!

Nine words. A whole lot of meaning.

To me, at least. If you haven't experienced the sensation I'm talking about – on a gut, not a thought, level – then what I'm saying may elicit a "Huh?" rather than a "Yes!"

It happens to me frequently. Usually a couple of times a day intensely; otherwise it's sort of background music to my life, a feeling that's always there but not always consciously attended to.

Yesterday it happened again in my Tai Chi class. Listening to the instructor make some point, about the sword form, I believe, the room and everyone in it came into extra-sharp existential focus.

This is happening, right now. I'm alive and able to be a part of it. Someday I'll be dead. How precious is this moment!

That sentiment sounds a bit trite and Hallmark card'ish expressed in words. The feeling itself was wordless. It was an ah…, a big breath of clear and present reality sucked into my psyche.

To my mind (and I don't have any other one to work with), this is the most authentic "spiritual" sensation I've ever had. I put that word in quotation marks, because the feeling really doesn't have anything to do with other-worldliness or non-materiality.

I guess it's somewhat akin to the thisness or thatness of Buddhism. But I don't know. I'm not a Buddhist. And it feels universal, not something attached to any particular creed.

Here each of us is, alive. It's absolutely astounding, the most marvelous thing. Fourteen billion years ago the universe came into being. It'll ramble on for many tens of billions of years more.

And I'm able to live for a miniscule span of time (in comparison to the cosmos' longevity) in the midst of all this. Experiencing my experience. Conscious of my consciousness. Aware of my awareness.

I readily admit that mostly I sleepwalk through my day, doing what I need to do, lacking the ah… feeling that washes over me like a cosmic tsunami when the seawall of mundaneness is breached for a moment.

Yet when that wonder is present, it's wonderful – making any other form of religiosity or spirituality seem dry as dust.

Meditation as a work out

I've been meditating every day for a long time. About thirty-eight years. It never gets old. There's always something fresh going on in my head, which is both a delight and a frustration.

For most of my meditating life, I've approached it with a spirit of devotion. Or at least, semi-devotion. Meaning, I viewed meditation as a means of approaching what It's All About.

I felt that maybe "It," "All," and "About" pointed to God. Maybe Nature. Maybe something else. Whatever, the act of opening myself up to it seemed deserving of a bit of reverence.

So I got into the habit of bowing before I entered my meditation area. I wasn't sure who I was bowing to – guru, God, myself, Tao, ??? – but it felt right to do so.

I've given that up. I don't know whether this is a sign of progress or of retrogression, assuming there's any direction signs on a meditative path, but here's my current attitude.

It's a work out. Just as I exercise my body several times a week at an athletic club, so do I spend some time every morning putting my psyche through some concentrative/contemplative paces.

I've written about how meditation teaches the brain new tricks. It also seems to increase brain size. (For some reason I don't get junk email about this, in contrast to pitches for increasing the size of another organ.)

The brain size study looked at meditators who practiced Buddhist insight meditation, which the article says "focuses on whatever is there, like noise or body sensations. It doesn't involve 'om,' other mantras, or chanting."

But I suspect the same benefits to the gray matter would accrue from just about any form of meditative practice. A researcher says:

"The goal is to pay attention to sensory experience, rather than to your thoughts about the sensory experience," Lazar explains. "For example, if you suddenly hear a noise, you just listen to it rather than thinking about it. If your leg falls asleep, you just notice the physical sensations. If nothing is there, you pay attention to your breathing." Successful meditators get used to not thinking or elaborating things in their mind.

Religion is based on thinking, concepts, imagination, visualization, anticipation. You're told what a supposed divinity is like, and you try to tune yourself into this entity that isn't there – but is promised to await you around the corner.

All that is exactly the "elaborating things in their mind" that meditators try to avoid. So it's an antidote to religious fantasy, when practiced correctly.

A healthy work out.

What does it mean to be “spiritual”?

That's a great question. I ask it of myself frequently.

Even though I don't have a firm answer, I've continued on with using the words "spiritual" and "spirituality" a lot – in talking with people, in writing on this blog, in musings within my own mind.

I used to think that spiritual was opposed to material, that it had something to do with an ethereal soul, an aspect of ourselves that is disconnected (potentially, at least) from physical reality.

But this would mean that you'd have to leave this world to be genuinely spiritual. Since everyone on Earth is, obviously, earthly, spirituality would be impossible here.

Reading Andre Comte-Sponville's "The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality," I came across an understanding of "spiritual" that makes sense to me. More sense, in fact, that the sense I was speaking to myself.

Spirituality is the life of the spirit. But what is the spirit? "A thing that thinks," said Descartes, "that is to say, that doubts, affirms, denies, that knows a few things, that is ignorant of many, that wills, that desires, that also imagines and perceives."

And I would add: a thing that loves, that does not love, that contemplates, that remembers, that mocks or jokes…Little does it matter whether the thing in question is the brain, as I believe it to be, or an immaterial substance, as was Descartes's conviction. Whatever it is, we use it to think, to want, and to imagine.

…The spirit is not a substance. Rather, it is a function, a capacity, an act (the act of thinking, willing, imagining, making wisecracks…) – and this act, at least, is irrefutable, since nothing can be refuted without it. "The spirit is not a hypothesis," as Alain put it, because hypotheses can exist only by and through the spirit.

In short, it's our inner life. Not something mystical, airy-fairy, mysteriously divine, other worldly. It's what we are at every moment, when we're aware of what we are at every moment (and also, not aware).

Today, during my Tai Chi class. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirrors that run along one wall of the studio. I don't like to look directly at my image. It creeps me out. Usually I keep my focus close to the bottom of the mirrors.

Probably that isn't good for my Tai Chi posture, but I don't care. I'd rather not be reminded for an hour and a half of what the outer Brian looks like, now that he's reached the graying age of 59.

But this afternoon a thought popped into my head: "That's not you." At that instant I found that looking at myself didn't bother me as much. I'd made a disconnect between the inner me and the outer me, the spirit and the body. This is how Comte-Sponville sees things also.

Taken in its broadest sense, spirituality can be said to include virtually all aspects of human life and spiritual is more or less synonymous with "mental" or "psychic." Today, this use of the word has pretty much gone out of use, and when people talk about spirituality, they are usually referring to a rather limited part of our inner life (though it may contemplate limitlessness) – the part that involves the absolute, the infinite and the eternal. It is, in a sense, the spirit's farthermost point and its greatest amplitude.

Spirituality, then, doesn't necessarily entail religion. In fact, there's no necessary connection between them.

We are ephemeral beings who open onto eternity and relative beings who open onto the absolute. This "openness" is the spirit itself. Metaphysics means thinking about these things; spirituality means experiencing them, exercising them, living them.

…This is what distinguishes spirituality from religion, which is merely one of its possible forms. The two can be conflated only by virtue of metonymy or misnomer. They are as whole and part, genus and species. All religions involve spirituality, at least to some extent, but all forms of spirituality are not religious.

Whether or not you believe in God, the supernatural or the sacred, you are confronted with the infinite, the eternal and the absolute – and with yourself. Nature suffices. The truth suffices. Our own transitory finiteness suffices. Otherwise we could not conceive of ourselves as being relative, ephemeral or finite.

Doubt shall set you free

I just came across a nice paean to doubt. Certainly, I like it.

I took part of the doubt quiz, then jumped to the study guide for "Doubt," the play. The playwright, John Patrick Shanley, says:

Each of us is like a planet. There's the crust, which seems eternal. We are confident about who we are. If you ask, we can readily describe our current state. I know my answers to so many questions, as do you. What was your father like? Do you believe in God? Who's your best friend? What do you want?

Your answers are your current topography, seemingly permanent, but deceptively so. Because under that face of easy response, there is another You. And this wordless Being moves just as the instant moves; it presses upward without explanation, fluid and wordless, until the resisting consciousness has no choice but to give way.

Read on for more from Shanley about embracing tectonic shifts.

Having a revival by yourself

I used to go to an Indian mystic meditation group's version of "church" every Sunday to have my faith renewed. Well, sort of.

Actually, what I enjoyed the most was getting together with friends after the service (a.k.a. satsang) was over. We'd go out for coffee and talk about all sorts of stuff, including how unsure we were about what we supposedly believed in.

Now on Sundays I skip the service and head right for the coffee klatsch. But some days I still have a lingering longing for a revival. Problem is, I don't know what I'm trying to bring back to life.

I suspect, life. The times I feel unsure of myself are when I sense that need for an external bolstering of my What's Life All About? confidence. Meaning, when the question mark gets larger.

However, those times don't come as often as when I was a true believer in an organized spiritual system.

Makes sense. You don't need to be renewed when you don't have a faith that's grown old and stale. Every day is new and fresh for me now, because I don't cling to rigid patterns of acting and thinking nearly as much.

In short, you can't feel like you're off the path if you're not on one.

I do have my own way, though. We all do. There's no way to go through life without your own manner of making sense of it – which I called finding your own meaning in meaninglessness.

Churchless types like me have reached a point where we've accepted that there's no demonstrable proof of one religion, philosophy, or meditation approach being superior to any other. The ultimate truth may be out there, but it does a damn good job of hiding itself.

Some people find comfort in numbers. They enjoy belonging to a faith with adherents in the millions or billions. However, even if 100% of people believe in something that's wrong, this doesn't make it right.

So there's good reason to add one more belief system to the countless varieties already extant: your own. That way you don't need to go anywhere for a revival. You can renew your faith from right inside your own head.

I don't have any general advice about how to do this. All I know is what I find helpful, which might only work for me. It's pretty much the same as what makes my dancing go better, a subject I've written about quite a bit in the Tango/Dance section of my other blog.

Confidence. Trust in yourself. Leading decisively.

Or, following. Because while dancing with a partner involves separate roles, a leader and a follower, when you're dancing life with yourself you're both a leader and a follower. (See "I'm learning to Tango with life.")

Patterns are a big part of ballroom dancing. But patterns are made to be broken. Then we get into a higher form of dance, with a lot more spontaneity and creativity. I'm not there yet. I can see the promised land, though.

In the form of accomplished dancers, like the woman my wife and I took an Argentine Tango workshop from last Saturday. Rachel, like some spiritual teachers, has the ability to inspire her students to expand their horizons. What she can't do, though, is dance for them.

One of the points Rachel emphasized at the workshop is that Argentine Tango, unlike any other dance style (and she knows most of them), can be danced to just about any music.

Why? Because Tango is spontaneous, fully led and fully followed.

Its patterns are linked in a patternless fashion, once you get beyond the beginner's necessary repetition of basic movements. The follower can't anticipate what move is coming next, because the leader can go in many different directions, following his (or her) own sense of rhythm.

I pretty much said it all in "Dancing Tango with myself." Of course, I'm still needing to say it. That's part of dancing with life.

One of the central themes of The Tango Lesson, a great movie, is the tension between leading and following. In a climactic scene Pablo Veron tells Sally Potter, his partner: "You should do nothing. When you dance—just follow! Otherwise you destroy my freedom to move."

Is Pablo right? Wrong? Both right and wrong? Neither? Only Tango knows. And Tango isn't telling.

All I know is that based on my dancing with myself throughout my waking hours, I sympathize with Pablo. Sometimes I'm a terrible follower. I lead myself in a certain direction, then feel resistance. From me.

"Is this the correct thing to do?" "Maybe there's a better way." "Are you sure?" "Shouldn't you think some more before jumping into this?" "How will it look if you make a wrong step?"

Just follow, Brian! Be an empty vessel. Fill yourself with your self.

Finding meaning in meaninglessness

I was a true believing existentialist my sophomore year in college.

I devoured Sartre, Camus, all those guys who I could picture sitting in a Parisian coffee house, smoking unfiltered cigarettes, sipping thick expresso, and waving their hands animatedly as they agreed, in so many ways, that Life, it is so totally fucked! (in a French accent and with more of a literary twist to the sentiment, naturally).

That's just how I felt.

So I got a tremendous amount of meaning out of all the meaninglessness that I absorbed from existentialist writings. That's what held me together through some pretty weird 1968'ish Flower Child experiences.

I've been reminded of this by reading Robert Burton's "On Being Certain," the subject of several previous posts. Rather lengthy and complicated posts, because his book is filled with subtleties, scientific and otherwise, that are hard to briefly encapsulate.

Here's another try.

The main personal insight I've gotten from "On Being Certain" is that everyone is hard-wired neurologically and biologically to have an uncontrollable sense of meaning and knowing (the two are so similar, it seems OK to lump them together).

Scientists. Religionists. Atheists. Theists. Whatever "ist" you are, there's this sense of meaning/knowing within your consciousness. It's so fundamental, you could almost say that it is your consciousness.

Without it, we'd barely be human. And likely suicidal.

So as I noted in my last post, religious believers and unbelievers aren't as different as I thought before I read Burton's book. He helped me see that we all necessarily believe in something that's immune to rational analysis or willful control.

This something is a sense of meaning/knowing that springs from a "hidden layer" of the brain. That layer takes perceptual inputs and converts them into our personal take on reality.

We can't see or understand how the mysterious conversion process works. That's why neurologists call it "hidden." Thus each of us sees through a glass darkly. There's no other way to see. It's impossible to disentangle our individual sense of meaning/knowing from the "objective" world.

So is everything relative? Is knowledge a personal choice? Do we create our own reality?

No. Burton emphasizes this over and over. Speaking of medicine, he says:

The purpose of this chapter is to expose the limits of any concept of rationality or objectivity, not to suggest that all answers are equal and everything is relative. Some opinions are more likely to be correct than others….To provide the best care possible, we should know when we are basing our decisions on science and when they are based upon unsubstantiated experience, hunches, and gut feelings.

…Recognizing the limits of the mind to assess itself should be sufficient for us to dispense with the faded notion of certainty, yet it doesn't mean that we have to throw up our hands in a pique of postmodern nihilism.

And yet…

To insist that the secular and the scientific be universally adopted flies in the face of what neuroscience tells us about different personality traits generating idiosyncratic worldviews. Try telling a poet to give up his musings and become a mechanical engineer. Or counsel a clown that he'd more useful as a mortician.

…For me, Beckett's portrayal of meaningless is both hilarious and curiously uplifting. Watch a good Beckett production and you often find yourself nodding at others in the audience. The great mystery is how the humorous presentation of pointlessness creates its own deep sense of inexpressible meaning, including a feeling of camaraderie with others sharing the same ironic viewpoint.

We are meaning-seeking creatures. We can't help it. Even when life appears to be meaningless, we say to ourselves Ah, now I get it!

Humility is in order. Also, compassionate understanding. Of both ourselves and others. We're all hungry for meaning and knowing. We feed ourselves in many different ways. Starvation is the only option not on the table. I look at other people's choices and think "Yuck! That's disgusting!"

But to them, it's marvelous meaning-fare. We don't consider that there's an absolute food preference truth; people just have different tastes. It's the same with the meaning of life: this is a personal choice, not objective reality.

I usually skip endnotes in a book, figuring that this is where the author puts non-essential stuff that's too boring or scholarly to fit in the main narrative. Browsing through the final section of "On Being Certain" though, I ran across a couple of interesting notes from Burton.

Honest. Reflective of his main theme. Pleasingly self-reflective.

In writing this book, I have caught myself selecting facts to fit or support a preconceived idea that I've wanted to convey. This isn't a prudent admission if I want you to accept my ideas as being reasonable. On the other hand, it is an inescapable component of my thesis.

And…

I don't personally see the point of Weinberg's comment that our increasing understanding of the world makes it seem all the more pointless. I understand his arguments, but rather than evoking a sense of personal despair, they make me laugh at the ridiculousness of believing that we can understand why we are here.

If there is some meaning or purpose, please don't tell me. If a sign were to drop out of the sky and tell me what the meaning of life was, and it wasn't to my liking, I'd be much more disappointed than if I didn't see the sign. Not knowing gives me license to pursue the ridiculous.

My basic personality has prompted my writing a book pointing out that the determination of pointless or purposeful cannot be a purely rational decision. I enjoy the basketball-gorilla video because it confirms my deepest suspicions that we are more likely to see what we want to see and less likely to see that which isn't of any interest – including purpose or pointlessness.

Meditation – an ever present “church”

I meditated before I became a true believer. I meditated all during my faith-filled years. And I continue to meditate now that I'm in my churchless phase.

For me, meditation is an opportunity to open myself up to…whatever. The motto of the X-Files (American TV show) was "The truth is out there."

Also, in here: consciousness.

Where you don't need anyone else – no preacher, guru, rabbi, priest – to show you the way. Nor do you need to go some place – a church, temple, mosque – to be on the way.

Which might well be no way. I don't know. Sometimes I feel like I'm going somewhere in meditation. Other times, nowhere at all.

Mark Morford's column, "Sit down, shut up, breathe," sings the praises of meditation. He's anti-religion but pro-cushion sitting.

But meditation, well, it abides none of that noise. It brings you into the here and now and plops you into the lap of stillness and reminds you that there is more to it all than mania and media and political moronism, that you have incredible power to change your own habits and tendencies and daily love quotients, that god often speaks in whispers and flutters and quiet little licks on your heart and only when you dial down your raging internal dialogue can you actually hear what the hell she's trying to say. Hell, what's not to like?

After reading countless books about meditation and mysticism, I keep coming back to my favorite: "Open Mind, Open Heart." (I prefer the original edition, maybe because it's so familiar to me; this is the new edition).

It's sort of strange that with all the Buddhist, Taoist, Vedantist, and other Eastern writings on my book shelves, a Christian guide to contemplative prayer resonates so readily with me.

But I'm fine with strange. Some time ago I stopped trying to figure myself out. I like my morning meditation because it's an opportunity to stop figuring.

Me. The world. My wife. Our dog. The "Lost" TV show. Everything.

I like "Open Mind, Open Heart" because it offers up a specific, easy to understand, not so easy to do, method of meditating.

This morning I re-read Thomas Keating's summary of the centering prayer method. It bears a lot of resemblance to mantra meditation, except the word(s) being repeated are downplayed – they're viewed as a pointer rather than a means.

Generously, this chapter is available on the Centering Prayer web site in two parts, here and here (the whole book is, in fact; scroll down to "Open Mind, Open Heart").

Don't let all the mentions of "God" turn you off if you're not into a personal deity. Keating views God as mystery. Though a male mystery, apparently, along with 62% of people in Britain who took part in a recent poll.

Our experiences of God, however, are not God as He is in Himself. God as He is in Himself cannot be experienced empirically, conceptually, or spiritually. He is beyond experiences of any kind. This does not mean that He is not in sacred experiences, but that He transcends them. To put this insight into another way, He leads us by means of sacred experiences to the experience of emptiness.

Here's the best recommendation for Father Keating's centering prayer method: a Catholic fundamentalist considers it dangerous.

Critics are our best spiritual friends

The worst thing about belief? In one way or another, it's always unbelievable.

The best thing about belief? When the unbelievable is stripped away, you're likely to be pointed toward truth.

So strippers – no, not that kind (sadly) – are all-important on a spiritual journey. Without them, religious or other sorts of dogma are accepted uncritically, leaving us wandering in a maze where every path leads anywhere you believe it will.

The Indian guru I began to follow in 1971, Charan Singh, was fond of saying: "Critics are our best friends." His disciples would nod, seemingly taking the words to mean that criticism can help make us humble.

True. But it's possible to embrace spiritual criticism more deeply, in a fashion that has the potential to change the entire direction in which we're moving (as opposed to merely proceeding in the same direction less egotistically).

This requires a lot more openness. And yes, humility. It means accepting the possibility that cherished beliefs you've held for many years, perhaps for most of your life, are just that: beliefs.

Not the truth.

Recently I've been alternating between reading two books before my morning meditation. One I've written about before in several posts, "Consciousness is All" by Peter Dziuban.

The title, not surprisingly, says it all about the book. Dziuban is an enthusiastic advocate of the notion that consciousness is the sole reality. So enthusiastic, often his advaitish, non-dual outlook seems uncomfortably dogmatic to me.

When that happens I put down his book and pick up "The Dream Weaver" by Jack Bowen. He's a philosopher.

Philosophers often are put down by spiritual types because they think and reason a lot. As if that's a bad thing. What's forgotten is that beliefs also are thoughts. Unexamined thoughts. Uncritically accepted thoughts.

What philosophical examination can do, and often does very well, is strip away the seemingly solid foundation of a belief structure. Bowen does this skillfully in his book.

So far I've read chapters about "Knowledge," "Self, Mind, Soul," "Science," and "God." With each subject I'm left with questions rather than answers. Ideas that seem to make sense are shown to be nonsensical from a different perspective.

For example, I came across a critique that pertains to the consciousness is all belief – which, for Dziuban, assumes that awareness is separate and distinct both from what one is aware of and also the brain/body.

Look at the clouds. It would be wrong to say that clouds have water in them, separate from them. Clouds are water – condensed water. There's no water separate from clouds, or clouds separate from water. We'd be wrong to say, "I have a mind and a brain" just like we'd be wrong to say "Look at the cloud and the water" or, "Look at the water and the H-two-O."

Your "mind is indivisible" argument assumes that the mind exists to begin with. If the mind doesn't exist, then it can't be indivisible. Just like little invisible Martians under your bed can't be red if they don't exist.

Just because someone perceives two things differently, doesn't mean they are uniquely different things: that has more to do with the perceiver than the thing being perceived. How I perceive something is hardly a quality of that thing.

Now, this is just one side of the argument. But when it's seen that there are two sides, dogmatic belief can no longer rest on blind faith.

You've got to choose one side or the other based on what makes the most sense to you. And with spirituality, often neither side is going to be persuasive.

In large part, this is because the spiritual search usually is for Oneness, the Ultimate – which can't have two sides to it. It's a leap into mystery, not a journey along a path demarcated by neat and clean boundaries.

So when someone points out the illogic of a cherished belief that you or I have been clinging to, we should be grateful. We've just been given a pointer: Not this way.

The frustrating thing is, every belief can be shown to be illogical, indefensible, improvable. Which is a good thing, because eventually we're totally surrounded by signs that say Not this way.

At that point, there's nothing to do but stand still, utterly perplexed.

And there we are.

Like what you believe, believe what you like

On big religious days like Easter, the faithful get to hang out with other believers and enjoy a pleasing group validation of shared beliefs.

Today our local newspaper had a story about how 70 Christians turned out for a sunrise service in the Oregon rain and cold. A woman was quoted:

This is a good way to start Easter – with other believers.

Sure, why not?

If I could find 70 other people who agreed with whatever the heck it is I believe in – an amorphous faithless faith that changes frequently – I'd love to hear them tell me, "Brian, you're so absolutely right!"

Ah, music to my ears. But the reality is that I have to sing my own tune to myself if I want to enjoy a hymn that trumpets the power and glory of Brian'ism.

This can be a dilemma for the churchless.

Humans are social beings. We like to associate with people who validate us. Religions offer a time and place for the faithful to come together and tell each other, "We've got the truth that other deluded souls lack."

Problem is, on the next block there's another religious gathering taking place where the same thing is being said. And the truths contradict each other.

So I've concluded that spiritual truth isn't what we should be looking for. Rather, it is spiritual like. (In an earlier post I talked about the difference between "I'm right" and "I like.")

I like raspberries.

For breakfast today I had a bowl of oatmeal with some Oregon raspberries on top. I didn't need anyone else to tell me that I liked what I ate. And no one could have talked me out of my sensation of Yum, good.

Conversely, sometimes my wife – who believes I should be eating more different types of vegetables – will ask me, "Why don't you like brussels sprouts?" (or turnips, or cooked cabbage, or…)

I never know what to say, other than "Because I don't like them."

I like what I like because I like it. I don't like what I don't like. Sure, I like it when others like what I like. But if someone else doesn't like what I like, I still like it.

Yesterday a woman told me about an Easter service where mesh was put over a cross and members of the church brought flowers to stick into the display. "Sounds lovely," I said. "It was," she agreed.

Terrific. I've got no problem with people liking religion. There's a lot to like about the music, the atmosphere, the feeling of community, the volunteerism, the uplifting messages.

When it comes to like, no reasons are required. Everyone should feel free to like what they believe and to believe what they like, just as we all should like what we eat and eat what we like.

In "The Tao is Silent" (which I like a lot), Raymond Smullyan quotes some poems.

The fiddler plays.
Though no one listens,
The fiddler plays.

Although not consciously trying to guard
the rice field from intruders,
The scarecrow is not after all
standing to no purpose.

Most people hate egotists.
They remind them of themselves.
I love egotists.
They remind me of me.

You ask me why I live in
these blue hills.
I smile, but do not answer.

Admirable is he, who when he
sees lightning, does not say
"Life goes by like a flash."

Life, and religion, and relationships, and philosophy – everything becomes much simpler when we realize that I like what I like, and so do you.

Once we try to go beyond, into whys and wherefores, we enter complex territory. Stumbles abound. Stammering predominates. Explain yourself! bounces off a brick wall of What can I say?

I'm a defender of truth. But not of like, which doesn't need defending.

I consider that there's a shared reality, the province of science, where good reasons need to be given. Once religion crosses the border into "I know…" rather than "I like…" it needs to be prepared to justify its truth claims.

So if you enjoyed the love of Jesus yesterday, bless you. If you didn't, bless you. More importantly, bless yourself, whatever your religious inclination (or lack thereof) may be.

If the only thing we like is to like what others like, will we ever like anything for longer than the time it takes to move from one other to another other?

A better approach is to like what we like just to like it. Especially when it comes to religion and spirituality, because there aren't any reasons to be found here – just likes disguised as "because's."

After meditating for 20 years, why no change?

Here's a good question for anyone who's been involved with a spiritual, mystical, or religious group for a long time. Do members of the group change and become better people, or do they get stuck at a certain level?

In my experience – which consisted of thirty-five years of intimate contact with Radha Soami Satsang Beas disciples – I found that "stuck" was much more common than "change."

I didn't expect this. When I got initiated by the organization's guru in 1971 (basically the equivalent of a Christian being born again and accepting Jesus as his savior), I looked upon the senior RSSB members reverentially.

They had decades of meditation under their belt. They'd spent lots of time at the RSSB headquarters in India. They were able to have close regular contact with the guru, who was considered to be God.

So for many years I figured that obviously they were exemplary human beings, having had the opportunity to develop beyond what normal people were capable of.

However, when I began to work more closely with these senior disciples it became clear that they were just as humanly flawed as anybody else. Maybe more so, because they considered themselves as being on a flawless spiritual path.

Some of my eventual disillusionment with Radha Soami Satsang Beas stemmed from this realization that twenty, thirty, or forty years of meditation didn't make someone a better person.

I began to wonder, "If these high-ranking disciples haven't changed, what are my chances?"

Reading Ken Wilber's "Integral Spirituality" has given me some insights into why lots of spiritual practice doesn't necessarily produce lots of personal change.

Wilber says that no system of meditation, Eastern or Western, encompasses modern understanding of how humans move between developmental stages or levels of consciousness.

This diagram is similar to one in the book. It's complicated. But the basic notion is simple. The vertical axis shows the stages (denoted by colors) and the horizontal axis shows several conceptual schemas, which Wilber has integrated.

Basically, the higher stages are more all-encompassing. You identify with more and more of reality, what Wilber likes to call the Kosmos. You become less parochial in your outlook, able to see alternative points of view.

States of consciousness are different. Through meditation or other means, you can enter into "mystical" conscious states no matter what stage of development you're at, as this diagram shows.

For example, someone with a magical way of looking at the world may have a profound mystical experience. Not surprisingly, Wilber says they'll interpret it magically.

The point is that a person can have a profound peak, religious, spiritual, or meditative experience of, say, a subtle light or causal emptiness, but they will interpret that experience with the only equipment they have, namely, the tools of the stage of development they are at.

So if you have a magical or mythic belief that a guru is God, and can produce divine revelations through meditation in accord with his instructions, then whatever meditative experiences you have will be viewed as the guru's grace.

A Zen practitioner may have the same experience, yet interpret it much differently. Wilber's point (if I understand him correctly) is that meditative states may loosen up your consciousness and help you achieve a more evolved stage of development, but this isn't at all guaranteed.

In fact, attachment to a defined religion or spiritual path can work to keep you stuck at a lower stage, because organizations almost always operate on a conventional or conformist level (the amber stage in the diagram above).

You're expected to toe the line, do what you're told, keep the faith, hold to the commandments, respect authority, identify with the group.

Problem is, evolving to a higher stage of consciousness or personal development involves a broader angle of vision. You don't see yourself as a Christian, Buddhist, or satsangi. Your focus isn't on a narrow set of beliefs and moral injunctions.

So moving to a higher stage means leaving behind some of the attitudes that served you well (or at least, served you) at a lower stage.

Concomitantly, Wilber says that you need to integrate aspects of yourself that often get shunted off into a "shadow self." I don't have time to go into this in much detail here, but I saw this happening in RSSB disciples – including myself.

Supposedly negative emotions, RSSB's litany of "lust, anger, greed, attachment, egotism," were seen as products of the Negative Power, a.k.a. the devil. They weren't part of the disciple, but something to be pushed away.

This also keeps people stuck.

The anger, starting as an "I," is now an "it" in my awareness, and I can practice vipassana meditation on that it-anger as long as I want, where I use "bare attention" in my meditation and simply notice that "there is anger arising, there is anger arising, there is anger arising" – but all that will do is refine and heighten my awareness of anger as an it.

…Amidst all the wonderful benefits of meditation and contemplation, it is still hard to miss the fact that even long-time meditators still have considerable shadow elements. And after 20 years of meditation, they still have those shadow elements. Maybe it is, as they claim, that they just haven't meditated enough. Perhaps another 20 years? Maybe it's that meditation just doesn't get at this problem…

Try something different. Open up. Let the sunshine in and dissolve the shadow.

Religious beliefs keep us from spiritually dancing

I've learned a lot from dancing. Or, even after several years of lessons, what often feels more like attempting to dance.

Regardless, it's a lot more like real dancing than I was capable of before. Just as I now feel like I'm better able to dance spiritually, having given up religious beliefs that kept me overly rigid.

Rigidity and dancing – not a good mix. Sure, after just a few lessons it's natural to be unsure of yourself. You haven't gotten the steps down, so you earnestly try to move just right.

And pretty soon you realize that this earnestness, necessary as it may be in the beginning, is keeping you from experiencing what ballroom dancing is all about.

Moving harmoniously with a partner to the music.

When Laurel (my wife) and I can do this, it feels great. More and more, we're able to. Why? Because we're learning how to go beyond the idea of dancing to the experience of dancing.

In the terrific book by Alan Watts ("The Wisdom of Insecurity") that I wrote about in my last post, he talks in a similar fashion about how religions mistake words for reality.

They never get around to actually dancing spiritually, but keep on talking about how one day they'll get out on the floor and give their partner a spin. After death. After enlightenment. After salvation. Someday.

The common error of ordinary religious practice is to mistake the symbol for the reality, to look at the finger pointing the way and then to suck it for comfort rather than to follow it. Religious ideas are like words – of little use, and often misleading, unless you know the concrete realities to which they refer.

I'm at the ballroom dancing stage where, mostly, my goal is to learn the defined movements of Tango, Waltz, Foxtrot, Nightclub 2-Step, and other dances my wife and I have been exposed to.

But a day will come, hopefully fairly soon, where I'll be capable of the increased spontaneity and free-form expressiveness that marks more expert dancers. I see this in the senior students at the dance studio where we take lessons, and I really see it in the professionals competing in PBS's America's Ballroom Challenge.

These top-of-the-line dancers mix together all sorts of styles in their show dances. They aren't constrained by convention, rigid rules, or "thou shalt's."

Except the commandment to look good, shake it, express yourself, and show what you've got. They flow. Which, as Watts says, is what religion is terrible at.

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance. Religion, as most of us have known it, has quite obviously tried to make sense out of life by fixation.

It has tried to give this passing world a meaning by relating it to an unchanging God, and by seeing its goal and purpose as an immortal life in which the individual becomes one with the changeless nature of the deity.

…We think that making sense out of life is impossible unless the flow of events can somehow be fitted into a framework of rigid forms.

In other words, beliefs. But it isn't possible to fluidly dance with life when you're bound to a rigid framework. (Though some try.)

With partner dancing, you quickly realize that mis-steps happen. A lot. However, the biggest mistake is to compound a mis-step by not moving with it.

If the leader heads off in a direction the follower wasn't expecting, go with him (usually the man leads). If the follower responds in an unexpected fashion to a lead, go with her.

In dancing with life, whatever is happening to us and with us – that's our partner. We're attached, so long as we're alive. So go with the moment. Wherever, however, whenever.

Pretty damn simple. A lot simpler than ballroom dancing. But not easy.

Because we think it isn't simple. And that makes it complex. Silly us. Watts:

The natural world gives us many examples of the great effectiveness of this way. The Chinese philosophy of which judo itself is an expression – Taoism – drew attention to the power of water to overcome all obstacles by its gentleness and pliability.

…A body of water does not run away when you push it; it simply gives at the point of the push and encloses your hand.

…Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared.

…From this follows, quite naturally, absorption. It is no effort; the mind does it by itself.

…To ask how to do this, what is the technique or method, what are the steps and rules, is to miss the point utterly. Methods are for creating things which do not yet exist. We are concerned here with understanding something which is – the present moment.

Keep it simple. Now.

The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance. Like music, also, it is fulfilled in each moment of its course.

Let it go. So simple.

Most people think that being spiritual or religious means holding on to something or someone. That's what they think faith means: clinging to unproven beliefs or an unsubstantiated savior.

"Jesus died for our sins." "Guru is God." "There is no God but Allah."

There's no end to religious dogma. An amazing variety of thoughts and world-views are contained in the minds of true believers.

If you can conceive of it, likely someone has faith in it at this moment. So how is it possible to choose which of these countless belief systems is worthy of acceptance, given that they contradict each other and lack evidentiary proof?

My advice: let them all go.

Every single one. Start fresh. Or as fresh as possible, since it's hard to sweep the belief-floor completely clean after a lifetime of religious rubbish has been strewn around.

That's been my goal for the past decade or so – out with the old and in with the new. Which to begin with (and maybe to end with) will be a new that's nothing.

Not an absolute nothing. It's nothing but what is really there. It'll feel like nothing, though, if your spiritual or religious practice used to be founded on ideas, concepts, emotions, imaginings, and beliefs.

Getting rid of clutter, whether physical or mental, can be bittersweet. Bitter, because we get attached to our crap, as useless as it is.

Whenever I'm poised to toss a worn-out shirt in the garbage, or take an unwanted book to Goodwill, there's usually a part of me that says, But maybe I should keep it…

I can't think of any reason to. It just can be hard to let go of familiar objects. And even harder, to let go of familiar beliefs.

Which is where the sweet part comes in, when I do let go. Then I feel the lightness that comes with a reduction in my crap burden. I've gotten rid of something that I didn't need, which means there's more room in my life for useful stuff.

For quite a while I've only been attracted to philosophical or mystical teachings that take the same approach to spirituality: toss out whatever you can.

If it moves, it goes, because reality isn't all the clutter – it's the floor that our mental crap sits on.

As non-Christian as I am, one of the books that sits permanently in my meditation area is Thomas Keating's Open Mind, Open Heart (this is a new edition, which I haven't read, but am confident is as good as the original).

Most mornings I open it up and read a few paragraphs to inspire my churchless soul. Into letting go.

Keating preaches the value of repeating a simple word during a period of contemplation to cut down on the myriad thoughts, religious or secular, that normally fill our minds.

Even that word is to be let go also. It isn't the goal, but rather it represents our intention to reach the source of the stream of consciousness upon which our thoughts, emotions, beliefs, perceptions, and what-not float.

Some excerpts:

The sacred word is not a vehicle or means to go from the surface of the river to the depths. It is rather a condition for going there. If I hold a ball in my hands and let go, it will fall to the floor. I don't need to throw it.

In similar fashion, the sacred word is a way of letting go of all thoughts. This makes it easier for our spiritual faculties, which are attracted to interior silence, to move spontaneously in that direction. Such a movement does not require effort. It only requires the willingness to let go of our ordinary preoccupations.

…The chief thing that separates us from God is the thought that we are separated from Him. If we get rid of that thought, our troubles will be greatly reduced.

…By training ourselves to let go of every thought and thought pattern, we gradually develop freedom from our attachments and compulsions.

…God's presence is available at every moment, but we have a giant obstacle in ourselves – our world view.

"God," for me, is a synonym for "reality." And that's pretty much the meaning Keating ascribes to the word.

Something remains when all of our ideas and beliefs are let go of. Whatever it is, no name can describe it. But it's real. And here, now.

Just let go. And there, it is.

Believers, let’s have a faith-off

Everybody's familiar with a face-off. It's a confrontation. Well, I'm challenging religious believers to something similar: a faith-off.

Bring it on. Your best philosophical stuff.

Let's see who can be reasonably considered to have the most faith – churchless me, and those who share my antipathy to dogmatism, fundamentalism, and other "ism's," or those who profess the traditional religious commitment to a belief in the reality of things unknown.

In my utterly biased opinion, it's no contest. Those, like me, who proclaim a faithless faith are head and shoulders above the crowd of religious believers.

For open-mindedness is a much higher virtue than walling oneself off in an illusory fortress of knowledge, that, in reality, is completely open to attack by arrows of truth.

One of my first Church of the Churchless posts was "Just have faith." Re-reading it just now, I'd say that it pretty much says it all. Such as:

Faith is wonderful.
Faith is all we need to be spiritual.
Just faith. Faith alone.
So we shouldn't have faith in anything other than pure, naked, empty faith.

What is faith stripped of thought, emotion, perception, expectation, imagination? Whatever it is, that's what we are seeking. Such is the message at the mystical core of every deep spiritual teaching.

… Such is a scientific faith, a faith that does not foreclose in advance any possibility about what reality may consist of, a faith not in the unproven pronouncements of some supposedly holy person or book but in one's own direct experience of divinity--or direct non-experience, as the case may be.

I recall several encounter groups that I took part in which included a trust-building exercise. I'd stand with my eyes closed. Other group members would be behind me.

Then I'd lean backward until I fell over, making no attempt to break my fall. It was disconcerting, requiring faith that someone would catch me before I banged my head on the hard floor.

However, I'd seen my companions take their positions. I'd talked with them beforehand. The group leader had explained what we were going to do, and why my trust was justified.

In short, I had a framework for my faith. It was akin to religious faith (except much more valid), because it wasn't really a leap into the unknown. It was a step along a well-trodden path of existing ideas and feelings.

Not what I talked about in "Just have faith." Naked, empty faith. Pure faith. Faith that doesn't require anything else to prop it up.

In a subsequent post, "Don't believe, just have faith," I quoted Alan Watts' view of how one gets in touch with the deepest roots of reality.

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

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

So, yes, I'm ready for a faith-off.

I haven't yet been able to let cast off all my clinging to spiritual beliefs, but compared to religious believers I've got much more confidence that reality will catch me when I let go.

What’s wrong with thinking too much?

Fairly often I'm told, "Brian, you think too much." Invariably this statement comes from someone who is thinking that I think too much.

So this pot calling the kettle black sort of sentiment doesn't have much effect on me. I find it interesting, though, that almost always the person telling me I think too much is a religious devotee.

Usually a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, my once chosen faith, because I still hang out with RSSB initiates – most of whom have no problem with my current churchlessness.

But even when I was giving talks to the faithful I'd still hear the same refrain once in a while: "You think too much." The implication is that spirituality and thoughtfulness are necessarily opposed, that somehow God gave us brains but doesn't want us to use them.

Which reminds me of an insightful comment that I got today on a post on my other blog. I wrote about our "Further unplugging of the Christmas machine." Harry responded by saying that I needed to go even further down the no-Christmas road, as he and his wife have.

But we are adults and have free wills just as God planned it.
Out of respect for him, we use our free will to chose [sic] and direct our efforts.

Agreed, Harry. I also have eyes. It'd be ridiculous to not use them, because I see too much.

When religious types decry thinking, what they really object to is questioning. Because I don't know anyone, religious or not, who doesn't think. A lot. It's part of being human.

Devotees think when they pray, worship, meditate, read holy books, attend church services. They think when they go to work, talk to friends, watch TV, or play a sport.

All of this thinking apparently is fine. But when someone like me thinks about whether a certain spiritual or religious practice makes sense, then this is Bad thinking!

Actually, I'm pretty sure the difference between me and those who say that I think too much isn't in the quantity of our respective thoughts.

I meditate every morning and try to quiet my mind. I often practice Tai Chi, a mind-slowing activity recommended today by a commenter to another blog post. I try to keep my own simple thought-free mantra in mind as much as possible during the day.

So I'm not thinking all of the time, for sure.

Even more: I'm not nearly as attached to my thoughts as I used to be. Especially religio-spiritual-philosophic thoughts. If they point me in a different direction that feels right and makes sense, I change course.

Thus it's more than a little strange that those who tell me I think too much are decidedly reluctant to let go of their own thinking. Year after year, decade after decade, religious devotees have the same old thoughts running through their heads.

"God is…" "The moral thing to do is…" "To reach divinity it's necessary to…" "The truth about reality is…"

My ideas along these lines are continually changing. And I'm comfortable with accepting a big blank thoughtless I don't know in my mind – which threatens the faith of the faithful.

There's nothing wrong with thinking. I'm doing it right now, and so are you. We just should recognize when to think, and when to stop thinking.

Which is why I'm about to turn on the TV.

Don't be a metaphor of yourself

I love metaphors. And I hate metaphors.

Yes, a rose is a ruby reflection of ever-blossoming reality. And truer still, rose is a rose is a rose.

When it comes to religion, just about all we're offered is metaphors. God is like… Fill in the dots. Our father, our mother, our lover.

Heaven is like… Disneyland without the long lines. Everything good without the bad.

More and more I want the real deal without the metaphorical wrappings. Either say it like it is, plain and simple, or admit that you're just a metaphor-monger.

I still read a lot of philosophical, spiritual, and mystical books. But sometimes they make me want to throw up.

I start to gag on allegories and roundabout ways of saying nothing. Most disturbing are my own past attempts to describe what I don't know in words that only point to themselves.

Speaking of words, Rumi and I used to be best friends. In my own mind, at least. For more than a year about all I read was Rumi, Rumi, Rumi.

Somewhere I seem to recall a tale of him being asked, "Speak to us without metaphors." He said, "You're a metaphor of yourself. What else can I do?"

I thumb through my Rumi books now and wonder what I liked so much in them. But that bit about metaphors still speaks to me.

Heck, I may have made up the Q and A above myself. So maybe me is speaking to me.

One of the most oft-heard platitudes in the spiritual circles where I used to travel is "Self-realization before God-realization."

Sounds good. Start close to home. Nothing is nearer to me than my self, so far as I know (or don't know). So why is this self-realization business so darn difficult to transact?

Why can't I simply be who or what I am, minus all the metaphors of myself?

Some days I feel like… Fill in the dots. A physical being having a spiritual experience. A spiritual being having a human experience. A clueless being having a "what the #%$&@!" experience.

Here's another after-the-dots answer: None of the above, and who gives a shit anyway? There's a jillion ways to say "X is like…". None is true.

"It is what it is" supposedly was the #1 cliché of 2004. Whenever I hear those words I think, "That says nothing." And, "so true."

In his book The God We Never Knew, Marcus Borg quotes himself, saying this is a line made by a character in a novel he imagines writing.

Tell me your image of God, and I will tell you your theology.

Bork argues for a "spirit model" of God, rather than the "monarchial model" of modern day Christianity (and many other faiths).

But a model is still a metaphor of reality. Not the thing itself. If you want to go beyond theologies, images have to be discarded.

Right now some Sudanese Muslims want a British teacher executed because her class named a teddy bear "Muhammed."

This is what happens when metaphors run wild and images are mistaken for the Real Thing. Crazed crowds imagine that Allah is offended by a teddy bear called Muhammed.

Guys, a teddy bear is a lot more real than Allah or Muhammed. You should be hugging one rather than your religious fantasies.

If we're going to get excited about a heresy, here's a suggestion:

Death to metaphors! Stone those thoughts!

No more I'm like… , God's like… , Spirit's like… , Soul's like… , Heaven's like… .

A teddy bear is a teddy bear is a teddy bear. What is, is.

Remember, everybody must get stoned. Metaphors too.

Time to fire our gurus

Thanks to my friend Randy, I got turned on to Tijn Touber's thoughtful piece, "D.I.Y. Guru." (For the acronym impaired, like me, D.I.Y. stands for "do it yourself").

I liked it. It fits with my understanding of how we should regard a guru – as someone begging to be fired.

So it's time to fire our gurus (facts, truths, religious persuasions, principles, dogmas) so the guru in ourselves can emerge. It's time to become as great as the gurus we followed--just as authentic, unique and obstinate.

This is not an act of aggression or disrespect. On the contrary, it is an act of love and gratitude. The greatest compliment we can pay our gurus, coaches and therapists is to make clear that we no longer need them. The treatment was successful; the guru died.

Any guru who wants lifetime employment as the disciple's lord and master isn't worthy of being followed. Yet too often spiritual seekers end up in a position of fawning dependence that stifles their growth.

An unequal relationship means there is a glass ceiling the follower can barely penetrate. To grow beyond the master is difficult, particularly when you are taught not to trust your own wisdom.

Today my Tai Chi instructor talked about Bruce Lee, who is generally regarded as the greatest martial artist of the twentieth century.

He said that Lee never took on any title. Not "Sifu," not "Sensei," not "Master." He was just Bruce Lee, himself. Yet he clearly knew his martial arts stuff and could teach with the best of them.

One of the comments on the Ode Magazine web site, where the piece was originally published, says that the true translation of the Sanskrit word "guru" is "teacher."

It seems that once again, the West has taken a word with quite a simple meaning and message from another part of the world and misunderstood it, or even deliberately manipulated it perhaps?

A good teacher is someone who indeed inspires us with their teachings and to learn, but also makes it very clear that it's the teachings that are the only important thing. All those I have had the privilege to come into contact with have stressed the absolute necessity of not taking their word for anything, but to find out the truth for oneself.

Absolutely, it's an absolute necessity to be your own D.I.Y . guru. Bruce Lee's philosophy encourages this.

I'm not a master. I'm a student-master, meaning that I have the knowledge of a master and the expertise of a master, but I'm still learning. So I'm a student-master. I don't believe in the word "master." I consider the master as such when they close the casket.

Loosening the bounds of “I am…”

Who am I? Well, that depends.

Yesterday I had an opinion piece published in our local newspaper. A few days ago an editorial page assistant phoned me and asked how I wanted to be described at the end of the piece.

I said, "Retired writer, blogger, and land use activist would be fine."

She must not have heard the "b" in "blogger" because I ended up as a "logger." Some readers must have wondered how an Oregon logger became such a strong supporter of an environment-friendly ballot measure.

But what's in a name? I wasn't bothered. Heck, I have a small chainsaw. And I've even managed to cut down some dead trees with it. Maybe I really am a logger.

Each of us fills in the "I am …" ellipses continually throughout our life. We have various occupations and avocations (blogger, logger), relationships (child, parent, spouse, grandparent), states of mind (happy, sad, frustrated, content), and much more besides.

The more flexible we are concerning our I-am ness, the more open we'll be to change, fresh experiences, expanding our boundaries. That's one of the problems I have with religion.

It expects you to have a rigid "I am…" identity. I am a Christian. I am a Buddhist. I am a satsangi. I am a Wiccan. I am a Muslim.

You can be happy one day and sad another. But you'd be seen as unduly fickle if you were a Jew yesterday, a Taoist today, and a Hindu tomorrow.

Yet, why couldn't you be?

Robert Thurman says in his book, "Infinite Life":

The Buddha was happy about not knowing who he was in the usual rigid, fixed sense. He called the failure to know who he was "enlightenment." Why? Because he realized that selflessness kindles the sacred fire of compassion.

When you become aware of your selflessness, you realize that any way you feel yourself to be at any time is just a relational, changing construction. When that happens, you have a huge inner release of compassion.

Your inner creativity about your living self is energized, and your infinite life becomes your ongoing work of art.

I'm no Buddha, that's for sure. But with the aid of mescaline, or some other psychedelic, I have a distinct memory of a '60s experience that at least was in the ballpark of what Thurman is talking about.

I was with a group of fellow "stoners" who'd headed off to a San Jose-area park to be high with nature. The path we were on led around a hill.

I felt energetic and forged on ahead by myself. My feet were flying through the northern California landscape. Until I rounded a corner and saw a different sort of group on the left side of the trail a short ways ahead of me.

Bikers. Drinking beer. Next to their choppers. With their equally tough-looking old ladies. At the time San Jose was a headquarters for the Gypsy Jokers motorcycle gang, which had a reputation rivaling the Hells Angels.

I didn't know anything about the bikers I was walking toward. But my first reaction was that I was an isolated peaceful hippie dude stoned on mescaline with long hair, glasses, and a corduroy coat, and they were cultural near-opposites in almost every way. Not good.

However, something snapped in me the very next moment. As I walked nearer to them I didn't feel like there was any difference between us. I could see them looking at me. I looked at them. More, I became them.

"What's happening, man?" someone called out. "Hell if I know," I said with a smile. They laughed. I laughed. I felt like I could sit down with them, have a beer, and fit right in.

My fear vanished as soon as I stopped thinking "I am…" and "They are…" Sure, it was partly (or mostly) the mescaline talking, but I suddenly felt that I was them and they were me, and we were all in this park getting high together.

Not exactly akin to the Buddha's enlightened experience of selflessness under the Bodhi Tree. But, hey, I'll take a speck of understanding any way I can get it.

Passing the biker group I realized that "I am…" can be flexible and boundless, not rigid and restricted.

Some things we always are; some things we always aren't; but there's a huge store of being-possibilities available to us moment to moment.