Church of the Churchless

"God" isn't the best name for God

God. Just three letters in this word. But they sure pack a punch.

Countless people have died in the name of "God." Countless good works have been performed. Countless arguments have ensued over what this word signifies.

Dahlia Lithwick dives into this fascinating linguistic tangle in a Newsweek article, "Jesus vs. Allah -- the fight over God's secular title."

Pop quiz: which of the following names represents a non-sectarian, universal deity? Allah, Dios, Gott, Dieu, Elohim, Gud, or Jesus?

If you answered "none of the above," you are right as a matter of fact but not law. If you answered "Allah," you are right as a matter of law but not fact. And if you answered "Jesus," you might have been trying to filibuster David Hamilton, Barack Obama's first judicial nominee.

Hamilton ruled that prayer in the Indiana House of Representatives shouldn't use Christ's name because it favored a particular religion instead of being nonsectarian.

(For those, like me, who get confused about the difference between secular and sectarian: "secular" means worldly rather spiritual, "sectarian" means relating to a sect. So nonsectarian refers to a generalized religiosity, while secular is non-religious.)

It's hard to see how anyone could disagree with Hamilton's point: that "Jesus" is less universal than "God" or "Allah."

But Hamilton's ruling got him into a lot of trouble with fundamentalist Christians, even though he pointed out that the Arabic word "Allah" is used for "God" in Arabic translations of Jewish and Christian scriptures.

I face sort of a similar problem frequently on this blog. How do I refer to whatever (if anything) lies at the heart of the mystery of existence? "God" often sounds just fine to me.

However, the meaning I have in mind when I use this word is fairly close to how Spinoza and Einstein saw "God" -- as the sum total of the laws of nature, not a personal being who intervenes in the world from time to time.

Given this confusion between the various ways "God" can be used, the "One" is a word that has pluses to it. My favorite Greek philosopher, Plotinus, favored it. Along with "the Good." In his Enneads, he wrote:

But if the One -- name and reality expressed -- was to be taken positively it would be less clear than if we did not give it a name at all... Therefore, when you have said "The Good" do not add anything to it in your mind, for if you add anything, you will make it deficient by whatever you have added.

Meister Eckhart, a medieval Christian mystic, had much the same attitude. He preferred "Godhead" to "God," being a word that points to universality rather particularity.

God has many names in Scripture. But I say that if someone perceives something in God and gives it a name, then that is not God. God is above names and nature. We read of a good man who turned to God in his prayer and wished to give him a name. Then a brother said to him, "Be silent! You are dishonoring God!" There is no name we can devise for God.

For sure, since It seems that nothing is a lot closer to "God" than something.

Existence...what is it? Can't be something that exists within existence. Can't be the creator of stuff that exists. Existence is the root, existent things the branches.

That's why I like "the One" as a description of ultimacy. "Emptiness" is a pretty good word also, notwithstanding its Buddhist connotations. Also, "Wu." These terms are not only nonsectarian, they're also arguably secular. So, about as universal as you can get.

Know yourself first, God second (if at all)

Often it's said, "God is mystery." People love mysteries. They're interesting, intriguing, and, well, mysterious.

So religious believers, rather strangely, somehow combine an acceptance of well-defined dogmas, teachings, commandments, and such with an embrace of a Great Unknown.

Mysticism, to which I'm considerably more attracted than religion, dumps the "acceptance" stuff and jumps right into the "embrace."

Mystics say, I want mystery (that's why they're called mystics).

So does science. The known is appealing to scientists. But it's the unknown that really gets their truth-seeking juices flowing. 

The central thing that differentiates my churched self from my churchless self is this: now I've realized that the first, and maybe only, cosmic mystery I want to solve is who I am, not who or what God is.

Such was a point I made in my previous post about Robert K.C. Forman's fascinating book, "Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness." 

The book's index only has one reference to God.

And this is a negative one, since Forman speaks about how a beginning monk, when asked why he is doing such and such, will give an answer that refers to certain objects or goals: samadhi, God-Consciousness, or whatever. In other words, an intention.

Intentions or desires are interesting. But they're not really mysterious. The big mystery is what underlies intentions. And everything else that appears in a person's consciousness. 

Consciousness thus is the here-and-now, right in front of me, closer than the end of my nose, analogy to God -- in that consciousness is the seeming source of what is in our minds, just as God is considered to be the creator of what is in the universe.

But our consciousness is directly accessible to us. God isn't. So it makes sense to mystics (and me) to focus on figuring out the Mystery of Me first and the Mystery of God later.

If at all.

"If at all," because it might turn out that our clear and present consciousness is the primal mystery, not a murky and distant God. (Some traditions equate the two, of course, as in atman is brahman.)

Forman has had a profound mystical experience himself. He's also an academic, so he is able to analyze the experience and place it within the context of mystic philosophies and practices.

His basic thesis is this:

The evidence provided by mystics leads us to distinguish between two concepts that are generally not distinguished: intentional consciousness and awareness per se...In the pure consciousness event, we argued, mystics experience their own awareness to be without content.

...Awareness itself functions and remembers itself differently than it remembers content. It does not know or remember itself through any kind of intentional structure, but rather, we said, just unintentionally knows and holds itself together through time.

Thus we can distinguish two distinct epistemological structures: knowing intentionally, which [William] James divided into knowledge-by-acquaintance and knowledge-about, and the nonintentional form of self-knowing, which I call "knowledge-by-identity."

Knowledge by identity is an epistemological structure that any and every conscious being must have, a knowing what it is to have a consciousness simply by virtue of being conscious.

In other words (and I'd be the first to agree that Forman uses some fairly abstruse words), we know consciousness by being aware.

As Popeye said, "I am what I am." (Or rather, "I yam what I yam.")

Knowledge by identity.

What's beautiful about this thesis, which makes a lot of both experiential and intellectual sense to me, is how it points toward a non-metaphysical oneness.

Forman observes that while being an American is profoundly different from being Japanese, the awareness per se of an American likely is the same as the awareness per se of a Japanese. Or any other human being.

Often it is said that we don't know what it is like to look through another person's eyes. Meaning, what it is like to be them, rather than our own self.

Jean-Paul Sartre speaks a lot about this -- how we are a subject to ourselves and an object to others.

Existentialists like him tend to find this a bit (or a lot) depressing, since it seems to establish an unbridgeable gulf between our subjective sense of self and the appearance of others as objects within our consciousness.

But this notion of awareness points toward a commonality between every person on Earth, and maybe even between all sentient beings of any sort.

Take away what each of us is conscious of, and perhaps what is left is... awareness pure and simple.

Watching my dog stare at a chipmunk hole at this moment, I can't help but feel that if I subtracted all the contents of my human consciousness from my awareness, and if she could subtract all the contents of her canine consciousness from her awareness, we'd be pretty much the same.

Maybe exactly the same. Awareness. Consciousness aware of being conscious.

One. Which is pretty darn close to what God often is considered to be.

Existentialism and churchlessness: great fit

I've been rediscovering existentialist philosophy lately, since I'm re-reading Jean-Paul Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" after a long absence from the pages I densely highlighted decades ago.

Sartre was an atheist. Atheist existentialism isn't the only form of this philosophy, but non-belief in God is much more compatible with an existentialist perspective than believing is.

It's tough to encapsulate Sartre's outlook on life. He's a marvelously rich and complex thinker.

I love getting into his head via what he wrote in "Being and Nothingness." Sartre often writes in a dense intellectual style, but (thankfully) he frequently throws in nuggets of simplicity that inspire my churchless psyche.

A few paragraphs below are a few examples from my fresh highlighting in the book. The passages are pretty easy to understand, especially if you keep in mind the existentialist adage: existence precedes essence. 

Which means, for Sartre there is no God, Platonic form, noumenon, soul, real self, or ultimate reality hidden behind the contents of human consciousness. What you see is what there is, basically.

Here's the quotes:

The appearance does not hide the essence, it reveals it; it is the essence. 

Consciousness is the knowing being in his capacity as being and not as being known...The existence of consciousness comes from consciousness itself.

Whatever being is, it will allow this formulation: "Being is that and outside of that, nothing."

We must be careful never to posit nothingness as an original abyss from which being arose...This means that being is prior to nothingness and establishes the ground for it.

Man is always separated from what he is by all the breadth of the being which he is not...Man is the being through whom nothingness comes to the world.

Descartes following the Stoics has given a name to this possibility which human reality has to secrete a nothingness which isolates it: it is freedom. 

Thus the condition on which human reality can deny all or part of the world is that human reality carry nothingness within itself as the nothing which separates its present from all its past.

It is in anguish that man gets the consciousness of his freedom...Anguish is precisely my consciousness of being my own future, in the mode of not-being.

I apprehend my freedom as being the possible destroyer in the present and in the future of what I am.

It follows that my freedom is the unique foundation of values and that nothing, absolutely nothing, justifies me in adopting this or that particular value, this or that particular scale of values. As a being by whom values exist, I am unjustifiable.

Values are sown on my path as thousands of little real demands, like the signs which order us to keep off the grass.

In anguish I apprehend myself at once as totally free and as not being able to derive the meaning of the world except as coming from myself.

Everything happens as if the world, man, and man-in-the-world succeeded in realizing only a missing God.

Man pursues being blindly by hiding from himself the free project which is this pursuit...Objects are mute demands, and he is nothing in himself but the passive obedience to those demands.

If consuming these Sartre snippets makes you hungry for more, but your reading diet doesn't include the 800 pages of "Being and Nothingness" (paperback translation by Hazel Barnes), I found these short overviews by Austin Cline to be well written and accurate:

Existence Precedes Essence
Atheism & Existentialism
What is Existentialism?
What Isn't Existentialism?
Abandonment: Condemned to Be Free

I also enjoyed Jayne Forish's take on Sartre's existence precedes essence tenet. She stresses that with freedom comes responsibility.

In conclusion, existence precedes essence in the sense that at birth man is a being for whom nothing is predestined. Through man's own individual life-quest, he discovers and chooses the meaning of his own life. Man creates his existence through living, plain and simple.

Living involves the freedom to make choices as well as the acknowledgement of responsibility for the choices one makes. With no a priori meaning in the universe, man is free to choose his essence as well as define the essence of the world which surrounds him.

Man at first exists without purpose, but then he defines himself in the world through his actions and shapes the meaning of his existence by those actions. One's identity cannot be constructed by any outside force; no one else can choose the essence of another.

Therefore, identities are constructed solely by the individual's freedom of consciousness. Values are formed similarly, for no universal concept of morality exists prior to birth. Only through action and choice do values form, for "value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose."

When a human being first enters existence, he immediately begins to live and to choose the shape of his essence and, consequently, his values and identity.

Sartre speaks to the churchless

I read some passages from Jean-Paul Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" to my wife recently. Her reaction: "How the heck can you make sense of that?"

Reasonable question. Sartre can be dense.

But I love how he rambles along in his French existentialist intellectual writing style for a while, then throws in a simple clear gem that makes me go Wow! Right on, Jean-Paul.

For example, how he ends these thoughts.

Anguish in fact is the recognition of a possibility as my possibility; that is, it is constituted when consciousness sees itself cut off from its essence by nothingness or separated from the future by its very freedom. This means that a nihilating nothing removes from me all excuse and that at the same time what I project as my future being is always nihilated and reduced to the rank of simple possibility because the future which I am remains out of my reach.

But we ought to remark that in these various instances we have to do with a temporal form where I await myself in the future, where I "make an appointment with myself on the other side of that hour, of that day, or of that month." Anguish is the fear of not finding myself at that appointment, of no longer even wishing to bring myself there.

"Being and Nothingness" is 811 pages long as I noted in a previous post. However, just the two paragraphs above show why Sartre is a patron saint (god, he would have hated that appellation) for the churchless.

He says, correctly in my opinion, that we choose ourselves. This is scary. Also, exhilarating, as I wrote about on my other blog in "Sartre, scootering, and sensuality." 

If someone believes in a religion, that belief is his or hers. Not any one else's.

Believing is an action, not a state. It has to be continually reaffirmed, though often (or usually) we don't consciously realize how free we are to hold onto or discard a belief.

That's why Sartre speaks wonderfully about anguish being the fear that I won't find myself at the apppointment I've made with myself for some time in the future. ("Anguish," to my understanding, isn't so much anxiety as the realization of our freedom to choose.)

Someone believes in Jesus, or a guru, or whatever, for a long time. Then, she doesn't.

When the person was a true believer, she envisioned the appointment with herself that Sartre spoke of: a continued believing that carries on into the future (in the same way as a newly married couple imagines growing old together, not getting divorced some years down the line.)

But nothing comes between our present and our future. For Sartre, this "nothing" doesn't imply unbroken continuity, as when we say "Nothing is blocking the road between here and town."

No, nothing is nothingness. Freedom.

The gap between our subjectivity and things as they are in themselves, or being as it is in itself. The following quote is denser than the preceding one, but it offers a flavor of Sartre's view of nothingness.

But the nothingness which arises in the heart of consciousness is not. It is made-to-be. Belief, for example, is not the contiguity of one being with another being; it is its own presence to itself, it's own decompression of being.

...Thus the for-itself [individual consciousness] must be its own nothingness. The being of consciousness qua consciousness is to exist at a distance from itself as a presence to itself, and this empty distance which being carries in its being is Nothingness.

In this blog post I can't do a good job of explaining what Sartre means here. Here's a short and fairly simple attempt, though.

Things just are. A table is what it is. A table.

It's full of itself. All it is is what it is, a table. This is what Sartre calls Being-in-itself, which doesn't know that it is, because something unconscious isn't anything but itself. Meaning, it isn't aware that it exists. It just exists.

Humans, however, are Being-for-itself. We are conscious, including being conscious of our consciousness. This produces a distance from everything in existence, including ourselves.

Yes, there is a pre-reflexive consciousness that simply is. There has to be, because the nothing that separates Being-for-itself from itself isn't being. It is nothingness. Only being is. The rest is nothingness.

People talk about being one with God, one with the guru, one with Jesus, one with something. For Sartre (and also for me), that's impossible.

Oneness, in the sense of identity or no difference, is death for humans. If you and I aren't two, we're non-existent. I recall an Eastern sage, Ramakrishna, saying "I don't want to become sugar; I want to taste sugar."

Becoming sugar, or ashes, or God, or anything else, is to be non-existent. Unconscious. Dead. Who wants that?

This is what human life is: separateness, choice, freedom, anguish, joy, searching, finding, not-finding. If we were merely being, we would be a stone, a tree, a star, a table.

We are conscious. We are aware of existing. We know that we are free to choose. This is our joy. And also our anguish. Sartre says:

In anguish I apprehend myself at once as totally free and as not being able to derive the meaning of the world except as coming from myself.

God's goodness is absolutely nothing

For the past few days I've been enamored with my "What's good about God?" question. It keeps running through my mind, particularly the answer:

Nothing.

In the comments to that post I clarified a point that might have confused some people. I didn't mean that people aren't affected -- both positively and negatively -- by a belief in God.

But this is much different from being influenced by God directly. For that to happen, (1) God would have to be real, and (2) God would have to act upon human beings in some demonstrable fashion.

I responded to a comment with...

My question is: what good is God, if God doesn't make any difference in people's lives? Yes, people have beliefs about God that make them act in different ways.

Some of these ways are positive -- an alcoholic stops drinking after surrendering to God -- while others are negative, a terrorist kills in the name of God.

But in neither case can it be proved that an actual reality called "God" is at work. It is the person's brain/mind at work, creating thoughts that become beliefs. Do you see the difference?

There's no evidence that God makes any difference in people's lives. Believing in God does. In the same way, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy have effects in the world (kids make money from their teeth, for example), but these entities exist only as concepts, as thoughts.

I find this tremendously liberating. For some reason, in all of my sixty years I'd never thought about God in this fashion until the thought "What good is God?" popped up unbidden while I was meditating.

Think about it.

In all of human history, which encompasses so much striving to understand the cosmos and what role a god or gods might play in it, there is exactly zero demonstrable evidence that any person has known God or been touched by Him, Her, or It.

Zero. None. Nada.

Yet reality is real. We experience it each and every moment while we're alive. There just is no sign of God anywhere. As I noted in my previous post, there's no way to tell the difference between a godded person and a non-godded person.

Which means...we're free! We can live life without the anxiety that so many people carry around (I know, because I used to be such a person): "I should be working harder at coming closer to God."

That's impossible. Nobody has ever done it.

At least, there's no proof that anyone, alive or dead, has embraced divinity and been changed by the contact in a fashion that isn't part of normal human experience. So as I said in another comment to my post:

Actually, it's liberating to see things more clearly in this fashion. What it means is that if God exists, a relationship with Him/Her/It is going to be super-duper intimate. No one will ever know about it -- not directly. There never will be any proof of it -- not directly.

This is pretty much what "deep" mystics always have said: God is the ultimate mystery (that's why they're called mystics). When we try to make God into something that can be shown to our friends, like a magic trick, that isn't God.

This is it. Right here and now. All there is. All we need. All we'll ever have.

Grab it. Reality isn't ever going to be any closer than it is at this moment.

What you want to do, do it now. What you want to know, know it now. What you want to be, be it now. What you want to have, have it now.

I'm speaking philosophically, of course. Or "spiritually," if you like (though that word has come to mean less and less to me).

LIfe's meaning, the grand purpose of it all, is never going to be revealed in a great gush of Godly grace. Don't expect that you're ever going to become anything other than the ordinary human being you are now.

Because there's no solid evidence that this has happened to anyone in all of human history. And none of us really believes that we're so special, we'll be the first God-being to ever exist.

Life will keep on unfolding until we die. New things will keep happening to us. We will keep changing until change comes to an end.

That's all good. And inevitable. Which is why I call it "good."

Yet God is nowhere in all of this. So stop believing that He/She/It is. There's nothing good, nor anything bad, that God can do for you or to you. Wake up and smell the reality coffee.

God either is nothing, non-existent, or nothing that affects humans in any sort of extraordinary way. In either case, God is nothing.

If you disagree, take up the challenge in my previous post. 

Let's imagine a game show: "Who Has Been Made Better by God?"

A dozen people sit in chairs on stage. The contestant -- let's say it's you -- has to figure out which of the individuals, if any, has an intimate relationship with God, and which are godless.

How would you tell? What questions would you ask?

Given the opportunity to conduct background research on these people, what evidence could you gather that would allow you to say, "Person X is better because of God"?

None. If gathering such evidence were possible, it would have been done by now.

Let's modify the New Hampshire motto. Live free. Then die.

Gazing over the edge of reality

Yesterday I got a request emailed to me:

I was wondering if you could perhaps write one of your essays about "impermanence" or "nothingness" to stimulate some more positive and philosophical responses and discussions.

Glad to oblige.

When I read this I thought of Anaïs Nin, who wrote erotic and pornographic narratives in the 1940s for a dollar a page. The difference between her and me is that I pay for the privilege of writing on this blog. And my musings aren't nearly as stimulating.

Anyway, since I was thirteen I've loved to ponder nothingness. What we don't know, the vast darkness between the scattered stars of knowledge, exerts a powerful pull.

Last night I was in bed reading The New Yorker before going to sleep. Coming across this cartoon, I knew it had to be part of the next day's blog post.

A guy sits in his chair on the edge of a cliff. His wife (I assume) says, "If you want a positive outlook, you're going to have to turn your chair around, Walter."

No Walter, don't do it! Stay where you are!

That void you're staring into is where it's at. (Don't pin me down as to what "it's" and "at" mean -- they're part of the void, so who knows?)

So much of everyday life is devoted to stepping back from the edge of existence. Religions encourage this, even though lots of people mistakenly consider that religiosity involves jumping into the unknown.

Not true.

If someone claims to know what happens after we die, don't believe them. If they're alive and able to engage in claiming, they're not dead. So they've got no experience of what they're talking about.

Death is the deepest and most mysterious void each of us is going to dive into one day. Religious dogmas, like the guy's wife, do their best to turn us around from it.

They promise salvation, resurrection, reincarnation, soul travels, heaven -- all sorts of afterlife goodies to make us forget the empty plate that will stare us in the face at our last breath.

I used to eagerly imbibe those promises that this life is but a foretaste of eternity yet to come. But now I'm a lot like Walter: I enjoy looking into the void. I don't have much of a desire to fill it with imaginings anymore.

Death is real. Keeping this in mind doesn't feel negative to me; if I turned my chair around I don't see how that would produce a positive outlook.

Because the older I get, and the more churchless I become, the greater is my wonder, appreciation, and sense of awe that I'm anything at all.

So far as I know, I was Nothing before I was born and I'll be Nothing after I'm dead (nothing conscious or aware, at least). Yet here I am, in between a huge freaking mass of nothingness, Something!

It hardly matters what I am, or what I'm doing, or how I feel about my being and doings. Whenever I want to, and also sometimes unbidden, I'm struck by a feeling that this moment, right here and right now, never will come again.

Thus, it is infinitely precious. I've traded a promise of infinite life for the reality of experiencing this moment as infinity.

Which wouldn't be possible if I'd continued to step back from the edge of death's cliff and believed that I had plenty of time to experience life, because I wasn't going to die when my body did.

This is hard to put into words. If I wasn't me, I'd have trouble understanding what I'm saying. I don't expect you to. What I feel directly can't be transported through verbiage into someone else's psyche.

All I'm doing is pointing to something that seems not at all unique to me, because I've read many descriptions of similar sentiments in mystic, philosophical, and spiritual writings (Taoism and Zen being my current favorites).

This. Now. 

It's astounding. Incomparable. Priceless. Fleeting. Never to be had again.

Don't look away from it. The seeing draws you to the edge of existence, where loose pebbles of so many kinds (head-on car crash, runaway cancer, sudden heart attack) could cast us into the void.

For now, we're in the easy chair of bodily existence. Staring at every moment at what won't be visible when our moments here on Earth end.

What a gift. There's no need to believe in a Giver to whom we extend our appreciation. Saying Yes! to each instant is thanks enough: to nothing.

Resting in the stillpoint of mystery

So many religious beliefs.
So many philosophical systems.
So many gurus with divergent truths.
So many notions of what life is all about.
So many guides pointing in different directions.

And so few people willing to say, "I don't know."

Ignorance isn't bliss. But neither is illusory knowledge.

I'm much attracted to those who have done their best to sort through the world's collection of answers to life's biggest questions and have the guts to say it like it is:

All come up short.

Virtually everyone ends up choosing sides in the massive Game of Meaning, where countless teams vie to collect the greatest number of people willing to pledge allegiance to a particular set of conceptions.

In his "Ways in Mystery," Luther Askeland clearly describes the confusing situation.

A single good book has an aura of plausibility. Does a collection of several thousand books arguing persuasively for several thousand competing and conflicting points of view have the same aura of plausibility?

Do we get a sense of reasonableness if we stand back and attempt to contemplate the totality of all the competing, conflicting mass of human self-knowledge which, not to speak of either past or future, is being offered today in biology, neurology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, economics, linguistics, literary criticism, theology, and philosophy?

This totality, in fact, is the antithesis of the plausible and rational. It cannot offer us a verbal, conceptual sense of who we are and what we are doing because it offers us hundreds of thousands of rival versions, only a few of which we can actually begin to digest.

This dizzying, seemingly limitless number of increasingly complex, increasingly variegated, mutually competing accounts of our human reality stands in a curiously inverse supporting relationship to the negative way, for it is a self-destructing positive way, one that has reached such a degree of bizarre fecundity and self-contradiction that it cancels itself out as a way for the intellect to discover and reveal who we are.

Ah, I can visualize true believers in a mystic path saying to themselves, "What's been said doesn't apply to me, because my way is beyond the intellect."

If asked for proof of this, they will point to books describing in copious verbiage their supposedly wordless way; to sayings of a spiritual leader who teaches that reality can't be spoken about; to guideposts -- commandments, practices, approaches -- demarcating a supposedly formless path.

Thus we see that no one ever leaves the jungle of competing concepts. They merely cling onto a particular vine for support, ignoring the fact that myriads of other people are equally attached to their own belief structures.

Askeland offers examples of the variety of ideas that we grab onto.

We are flesh; no, we are spirit. We should live for this world; we should live for the next. Let us do our duty; let us enjoy life as much as we can. You are responsible first of all to yourself, to your family, to your clan, to your community, to the nation; do not limit yourself and discriminate, but recognize that your real responsibility is to humanity as a whole, or perhaps to something still greater. Our condition is one of decline, of steady progress of awaiting or seeking to create some drastic change. There must be some purpose, but what purpose could there possibly be? It is imperative to at least try to do something; let us not do, but be. Somewhere, sometime things will be better for us. We are in a tragedy, a comedy. As things are now, so they will always be.

I don't think (nor does Askeland) that we can avoid being attracted to certain conceptions of what It Is All About.

However, wisdom seems to lie in recognizing the arbitrariness of our choices.

There's no universally compelling reason to choose Christianity over Buddhism, existentialism over empiricism, church-going over solitary meditation, or anything else over anything else.

Which, to my mind, indicates that nature -- reality minus human conception -- stands apart from all of the multitudinous ways humans try to make sense of mystery.

So if people are tired of wandering in the jungle of competing concepts, it's understandable why they would clutch onto this one or that one and say to themselves, "Now I've found a place to stand."

There's another option, though, the psychological equivalent of nature's Lagrangian point. This is a place in space where a small object remains in a fixed position relative to two larger gravitationally attractive objects (like the Sun and Earth).

Their gravitational fields balance out at the Lagrangian point, in the same fashion as competing philosophical/spiritual/religious conceptions cancel out to equal "who knows?"

It takes effort to break away from long-held dogmas, just as the power of a rocket is needed to lift a satellite out of the Earth's gravitational field.

But once we realize the relativity of all conceptions about the ultimate meaning of the cosmos, perhaps it is possible to settle into a peaceful Lagrangian state -- resting in the stillpoint of mystery.

Trapped in the goal of having no goal

One of my pet peeves is how often I hear, "Brian, you think too much!" Almost always I'm told this by a true believer (generally in Sant Mat, my previous faith) who is using his or her mind to express that thought.

So obviously that person isn't opposed to thinking, because they're doing it when they tell me "You think too much." What they really are saying is that they don't like what I'm thinking.

Which, when expressed in a Church of the Churchless blog post, often has to do with the futility of religious believing. Those beliefs, whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Sant Mat'ish, or whatever, are thoughts.

Thus actually I spend a good part of my blogging life urging people, "Don't think so much!"

About what can't be thought, at least -- a category that includes concepts involving God, existence, being, consciousness, oneness, and other notions pointing at the ultimate.

By "ultimate," I mean something that can't be divided up. Rock bottom reality, if you like. It isn't possible to stand outside of it and point toward it with a meaningful thought.

If you do, your pointing is in the wrong direction.

You can't think about your thinking, because what you're doing is your thinking.
You can't be conscious of consciousness, since you can't be aware outside of consciousness.
You can't exist separate from existence, given that existing and existence are one.

This is simple stuff. Mysticism 101.

And believe me, I'm well acquainted with that course of study. I've dived deep into the teachings of Rumi, Eckhart, Plotinus, Kabir, St. John of the Cross, Ramana, Zen masters, and many others.

They all say, in one fashion or another, that whatever ultimate reality is, there's no way to it. No path. No technique. No method.

How could there be? It's ultimate reality. It's what is. It's what we and everything else in existence are.

"Closer than your jugular vein." "Right beneath your feet." "The light with which you're searching is what you seek." "Chop wood, carry water."

There's lots of ways to express how close at hand -- so close, there's no place to go -- ultimate reality is. Yet somehow we keep missing it.

Because we're looking for it. And it can't be seen.

Alan Watts expresses this nicely in his "Become What You Are." He speaks of Tao. But he might as well say "God," "Final Truth," "Meaning of Life" or any other synonym for the way things really are.

There is no way, no method, no technique which you or I can use to come into accord with the Tao, the Way of Nature, because every how, every method implies a goal. And we cannot make the Tao a goal any more than we can aim an arrow at itself.

If we once get into the tangled state of the arrow which is trying to shoot itself, the self trying to change itself, we can't do anything to stop it. So long as we think or feel that perhaps we can stop it, that there is some way, violent or subtle, difficult or easy, to make ourselves unselfish, the contradiction will continue or get worse.

...We cannot find release until we have known the real extremity of our situation, and see that all striving for spiritual ideals is completely futile -- since the very seeking thrusts them away.

...Of course, this doesn't mean that a Taoist comes to the table without expecting dinner, or gets on a bus to go nowhere special. I am talking of results in the moral and spiritual sphere -- such things as goodness, peace of mind, sanity, happiness, personality, courage, and so forth.

...The goal in question was some sort of image, some mental picture, some vague feeling, of an ideal, of a state in accord with the Tao, of harmony with the Way of Nature. But it was precisely in relation to such notions and ideals that Lao Tzu said: "Get rid of knowledge; eject wisdom, and the people will be benefited a hundredfold."

He was talking about supposed knowledge of what the ideal way of life is. As I said at the beginning, there is simply no way of knowing what the Tao is. If we cannot possibly define the Tao, we certainly cannot define what it is to be in harmony with the Tao. We have simply no idea of what the goal ought to be.

If then, we act, or refrain from action, with a result in mind -- that result is not the Tao.

...Now this is an immensely important discovery. For it means that I have found out what I, what my ego, actually is -- a result-seeking mechanism. Such a mechanism is a rather a useful gadget when the results in question are things like food or shelter for the organism.

But when the results which the mechanism seeks are not external objects but states of itself, such as happiness, the mechanism is all clutched up. It is trying to lift itself up by its own bootstraps. It is working purposefully, as it must, but to no purpose.

It is looking for results in terms of itself. It wants to get results from the process of looking for results. This is a hopelessly and wildly fouled-up feedback mechanism. There is, however, just this one possibility.

It can realize the whole round circuit of the trap in which it lies. It can see the entire futility and self-contradiction of its position. And it can see that it can do nothing whatsoever to get itself out of it. And this realization of "I can do nothing" is precisely mui.

One has mysteriously succeeded in doing nothing.

And, everything.

Profitable spiritual investing

As the world financial crisis deepens, conversations tend to turn toward money rather than other subjects. Last night I was with a group of people who discussed the ins and outs (not to mention the ups and downs) of investing in tough times like these.

I didn't have a whole lot to say.

Briefly I held forth on the Buddha-like nature of index fund investing, where you don't try to beat the market through some clever scheme but rather rest content with rising and falling in concert with the overall financial tide.

I told my friends, "If the world and national economy go to hell, so will our investments. If things improve, so will our portfolio. It's a humble way to invest, since you're happy to be average."

This is pretty much the same way I feel about my spiritual investing strategy now.

For many years I thought I could beat the system. That is, find a way to salvation, God-realization, enlightenment, or whatever, that would lead to a better result than others would enjoy who weren't privy to the inside knowledge I possessed.

I've written about my shift from "active" to "passive" spiritual investing in previous posts:
"Running so fast to become motionless"
"Spiritual diversification, a sound investment strategy"
"Spiritual investing takes nothing"

In the last post, I said…

Here's some further thoughts about spiritual investing, a subject that I've enjoyed pondering since writing my post of a week ago. I advised that, just as it makes great financial sense to invest in index funds that mirror an entire market, a person's spiritual endeavors should be similarly widely diversified.

However, there's a difference between worldly and other-worldly markets that I neglected to address sufficiently before. When you buy a monetary index fund such as the Total U.S. Stock Market, you end up owning a piece of every single company stock in the United States. Thus diversification is accomplished in a manner that is easy to understand: own a little bit of everything.

But to invest one's soul in the Total Cosmic Spirit Market means taking an exactly opposite approach: owning nothing. You diversify widely into the One by not clinging to any part of the Many—anything that can be demarcated by name or form.

…So I'm convinced that spirituality is, purely and simply, the embrace of Nothing. Nothing, that is, of the world of illusion. Which means everything of the world of reality.

It's a damn good deal: Nothing for Everything. The only trick, and it's damn difficult to figure it out, is how to acquire that spiritual investment capital, Nothing. Seemingly you should be able to find it anywhere just by letting everything else go. Sounds easy enough.

But I've been looking for Nothing inside my head during more than thirty years of daily meditation. I always end up with something. The search continues. I'll keep you posted.

Well, I've done just that on this blog for the three and a half years since I wrote those words. Here's an up to the second update: no change. Nothing still hasn't made an appearance.

I am, though, starting to suspect why. The Nothing that I equated with God (since ultimate reality isn't like anything we know now) probably is much more of a nothing than I suspected. Or could begin to imagine.

So much of a nothing, there's no trace of it. Which leads to a question: "Is there any difference between non-existent and unknowable?"

Mystics and theologians often speak of God as unspeakable. They urge us to think of God as being beyond thought. Rather than seek a divine light, embracing darkness is recommended – the via negativa.

I'm no longer so big on embracing Nothing. I still love the notion of emptiness, of becoming a receptive vessel that can be filled with truth, happiness, knowledge, and other good stuff (including money).

However, the notion that there's a Nothing on the other side of Everything – Christians would call this "God," Taoists "Wu Chi" – maybe this is just a meaningless concept lacking any foundation in reality. People who want to make money don't ask, "What is the ineffable source of wealth?"

They just invest. Not in nothing, but in something. Hoping to get more of it: something.

This morning I read some intriguing passages in Fung Yu-Lan's "A Short History of Chinese Philosophy." I got a different impression of nothingness. Suddenly it seemed a lot more nothing'ish. So much so, there was nothing to it.

The Tao is "Nothing"

The Hsiang-Kuo interpretation made several most important revisions in the original Taoism of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu. The first is that the Tao is really wu, i.e., "nothing" or "nothingness." Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu also had maintained that the Tao is Wu, but by Wu they meant having no name. That is, according to them, the Tao is not a thing; hence it is unnamable.

But according to the Hsiang-Kuo interpretation, the Tao is really literally nothing. "The Tao is everywhere, but everywhere it is nothing."

…Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu denied the existence of a personal Creator by substituting in His place an impersonal Tao, which is that by which all things come to be. Hsiang-Kuo went a step further by insisting that the Tao is really nothing.

According to them, the statement of the earlier Taoists that all things come into being from the Tao simply means that all things come to be by themselves.

…Likewise, the statement of the earlier Taoists that all things come into being from Being, and Being comes into being from Non-being, simply means that Being comes into being by itself.

Makes sense, in a wonderfully simple recursive fashion. The ultimate questions of life basically are answered (or ignored) by "Things are what they are; the universe is what it is."

That's real spiritual index investing.

Meaning of the universe may be meaninglessness

If a movie ever is made of my life, this coffee house moment has to be in it. In an intuitive flash, I got a glimpse into what the universe is all about.

Nothing. None of the above. No answer. Nobody home. No way to know.

A bunch of negatives. But the feeling I had was wonderfully positive.

Unfortunately, it didn't last. While it did, though, I felt lighter, more joyful, the weight of a gigantic question mark having been lifted off of my inquiring psyche.

Reading the first few pages of a book, "The Way of Wonder," preceded my mini satori.

I'm not sure which lines led me to stop sipping my Starbucks skinny venti vanilla latte, look up from the book, and gaze upon Salem's Court Street with fresh eyes. It could have been these words:

Life is an unknowable, inexplicable miracle; there is no solution, and … there is not supposed to be a solution. It is all an unsolvable mystery, and is unreachably far beyond the mind's ken. And that includes the self, like it or not.

…'Wonder', then, is the moment when answerless questions of the universe become not only fully obvious, but electrifying; it is the point where the individual is released from the limiting possibility that life is knowable, and the mind is cut free from the cognitive fetters which enclose it.

Those are words. Not the wordless aha! that washed over me.

For a while I simply looked at the street scene with a lot more wonder, and a lot fewer question marks in my mind, than when I walked into the Starbucks.

I knew that there weren't any answers. I knew that ultimate reality always would remain the ultimate mystery. I knew that I'd die not knowing what It Was All About.

And that was OK. In fact, better than OK: perfect. I thought, "The meaning of life is that we can't know what it is; questioning is the only answer we'll ever get."

Later, on page 157, I found that Haas explained what I was feeling in another fashion:

There is a point in life when all theories, ideas, proofs, and arguments fall irrevocably impotent, and the individual, determinedly bent hard upon comprehending his or her life in the implausible cosmos, will suddenly sense that none of what has been told to them about life is true; that Life, in fact, is not about understanding, but about living, and that the more we try to understand … the less we live.

For there is no wisdom in trying to understand what is not understandable. And there is less wisdom in imagining that one understands what one does not understand. And there is less reason still in retreating from the realization that we absolutely 'do not know,' and shrinking back into a secure, limited lie, instead of accepting the confounding Enigma, and thus embracing life's majesty completely, because of the very fact that it is well beyond our limited comprehension.

This is Life. Ours is the choice whether to obscure it with words, or worship it with wonder.

Real and false faith

"Faith" is one of those words that people use a lot, but sloppily. That is, the meaning is assumed rather than being clearly defined.

So I enjoyed reading a message ("why argue faith?") over on the Church of the Churchless Google Groups discussion forum, which is rarely used – except by spammers. Jptxs (probably not a real name) has some interesting things to say about faith.

So you can take the definition of faith and now use some substitution
and come up with this:

Faith is an opinion or conviction not based on proof.

If that is true, then one can't really disprove a matter of faith,
either.  Right?  If there was no proof in the first place, how can one
offer any argument or proof that would sway someone who actually had
real faith in something.  

… All this brings me to my question: why does anyone bother to argue any
issue to which they claim to have faith?  If you truly have faith in
something, isn't it beyond reproach?  You may have lots of little
beliefs that have built up around your faith you may argue about, but
why argue about the core articles of faith?

Bonus points question: if someone is willing to argue about something
they claim to have faith in, is that a sign that it's really only a
belief that they will drop with proof?

Good questions. It seems to me that what people usually call "faith" really is more akin to a belief founded on shaky evidence.

They have faith that Jesus saves because the Bible tells them so. They have faith that a guru is God because they sense divinity in his presence. They have faith that keeping kosher is correct because their culture supports the dietary laws.

In each case, the faithful can provide reasons – albeit flimsy – that a theological position is founded in reality rather than fantasy. Thus their faith actually is a semi-logical conclusion, not a blind leap.

So, hey, if you want to embrace faith, why not go all the way? Open yourself to the unknown, a.k.a. God, without a whit of proof, none at all, nada, nothing, about what, if anything, lies over the horizon of Mystery.

I've plowed this philosophical ground in a number of posts, including "God wants to be forsaken." However, Alan Watts says it much better (not surprisingly). Here's some quotes from one of my favorite books, "The Wisdom of Insecurity."

We must here make 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 it 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 condition that it fits 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.

…To discover the ultimate Reality of life – the Absolute, the eternal, God – you must cease to try to grasp it in the form of idols. These idols are not just crude images, such as the mental picture of God as an old gentleman on a golden throne.

They are our beliefs, our cherished preconceptions of the truth, which block the unreserved opening of mind and heart to reality.

…What religion calls the vision of God is found in giving up any belief in the idea of God.

…If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.

Really empty your spiritual cup

The "empty your cup" story is a favorite in spiritual circles. Most commonly, it's told from a Zen perspective.

A university professor went to visit a famous Zen master. While the master quietly served tea, the professor talked about Zen. The master poured the visitor's cup to the brim, and then kept pouring. The professor watched the overflowing cup until he could no longer restrain himself. "It's overfull! No more will go in!" the professor blurted. "You are like this cup," the master replied, "How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup."

I'm attracted to emptiness. And, cups.

Every morning, before I meditate, I fill an empty cup with coffee – following the adage, Meditation and strong coffee combine to produce a feeling that all is right with the world (of course, so does the coffee alone).

But here's the thing. I know what's going to fill my cup: coffee. Similarly, the Zen master knew what he wanted to fill the professor with: Zen.

To me, this isn't genuine spiritual or mystical emptiness. You're emptying your mind with an expectation of what's going to fill the void. Lurking behind the screen of nothing is a substantial something.

You aren't really empty, because you're expected to be filled with a specific experience, knowing, emotion, understanding, vision, intuition, or whatever.

Eventually this came to be one of the problems I had with Sant Mat and Radha Soami Satsang Beas. There was a lot of talk of the meditative practice being based on emptying the mind of thoughts and concepts so the purity of soul consciousness could shine forth.

But actually the practice, surat shabd yoga, presumed a whole lot that was supposed to be kept in mind during meditation.

Do this; don't do that. Follow this sort of sound or light; shun other inner experiences. Imagine the presence of the guru; don't attend to visions of other beings. Anticipate that you'll rise to specific realms of mystic reality; don't allow yourself to head in different directions.

If you know for sure what the nature of ultimate reality, or higher consciousness, is like, then I suppose it makes sense to order that up from the vast menu board of spiritual/mystical options. "A grande surat shabd yoga enlightenment, please. Hold the maya."

However, I've come to this conclusion (open to change, as are all my conclusions): given that an experience of ultimate reality likely is going to be much different from any possible conception of it, it's best to remain as open as possible to the manner in which this truth (assuming it exists) might make an appearance.

So one of my goals in meditation is to empty my consciousness of preconceptions. Sure, that goal is something rather than nothing. But it points me in the direction of emptiness, rather than taking me farther away.

I used to feel that there was a path leading to Truth (with a capital "T"), and I was on it. Now, I see the countless religions, meditative practices, forms of spirituality, mystical belief systems, and such as akin to spokes of a wheel emanating from a central empty hub.

That's a Taoist notion. Emptiness isn't revered for what will fill it, but as itself. From the Tao Te Ching:

We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel;
But it is on the space where there is nothing
that the usefulness of the wheel depends.
We turn clay to make a vessel;
But it is on the space where there is nothing
that the usefulness of the vessel depends.
We pierce doors and windows to make a house;
And it is on these spaces where there is nothing
that the usefulness of the house depends.
Therefore just as we take advantage of what is,
we should recognize the usefulness of what is not.

Religious practice is focused on being filled with something.

True faith, though, is to empty your cup and leave it at that. (Here's another way someone said much the same thing.)

Lowering our spiritual center of gravity

I was walking along the Metolius river in central Oregon, semi-lost in thought. Which isn't unusual for me. Like most people, I spend a lot of my day focused on what's going on inside my head.

That's as far from earth level as my six foot bodily consciousness can rise.

Since I've been reading "Tajiquan Theory" in the morning before I meditate, some Taoist lessons came to mind.

Breathe. Focus on your abdominal center, the lower dan tian. Simply be aware. Without thought.

I've heard this in each of the Tai Chi classes that I've been taking for three and a half years. "Rise from above. Sink from below."

Where does that leave you? Centered. Often we carry a lot of tension in our upper arms and shoulders. Letting it go, relaxing the elbows, softening the knees, we settle into a comfortable wu chi stance, rooted.

As in the Tai Chi dojo, so on the riverside trail.

Attention to a few breaths, feeling my abdomen expand on the inhale, contract on the exhale, and my psyche was several feet lower, seemingly. I wasn't teetering along inside wobbly mental confines any longer. Nature and me were much more intimately connected.

That's how I've been feeling ever since I entered my churchless phase: more attuned to the world that exists outside of conceptual thought.

Or at least, on the far edges of it – since I'm not sure that it's possible to completely separate sensation from cognition. The human brain isn't wired in such a dualistic fashion.

It's strange that I hear so frequently, "Brian, you think too much." This advice (or criticism) usually comes from true believers who question my leaving a religious fold. They view themselves as having gone beyond thought into pure spiritual experience.

Yeah, right. I don't see it this way at all. And I feel like I know whereof I speak, because I've been there and done that – the true believing thing.

Belief involves thought. So does faith. Each adds on something to direct experience that isn't naturally there. A complex conceptual superstructure is constructed on top of simple sensation, leaving the psyche top-weighted.

Christians believe in the presence of Jesus. But there's no Jesus actually there in prayer or a church service. Without all the dogma and theology of Christianity, Jesus wouldn't exist. He's only evident when the thought of a believer is active.

Same with guru worship in Eastern faiths, something I know a lot about. The elevation devotees feel in the presence of the guru comes from believing in his (or, rarely, her) divinity. No belief, no elevation.

It's all in the head, another example of top-weighted experiencing. This was the point of my "Did I see God in first class?" post. The ahhhhh from being a few feet away from a purported God-man erupted only from those who believed in him.

By contrast, when I walk along the Metolius there's no believing involved in recognizing the river's beauty. My thoughts keep me from fully experiencing what's really there, rather than being essential ingredients of the experience – as is the case with Jesus or guru worship.

There's nothing wrong with thinking. But when it's the foundation of religious or spiritual faith, we're out of balance, way up there in our own head, not grounded in natural reality.

I'll end with some Alan Watts.

The first element of Chinese Taoist yoga is to stop talking to yourself. Don't explain the world…So one has to get to the nameless state, the nonthinking state, which is called in Chinese wu nien. Wu means "not" and nien means "the heart-mind."

…Now, you will find, if you try, that it is a very difficult thing indeed to stop thinking. "Stopping thinking" doesn't mean to stop using your eyes and your ears and your hands and all your senses. It means that when you see a dog, you don't say "dog" to yourself; you just see what is there. The Buddhists call this the state of suchness.

…When in ancient texts of mysticism you read that it is necessary to go beyond the senses, that necessity can very easily be misunderstood. The texts are not saying that it is the senses – the eyes, the ears, and so on – that falsify.

It is our conceptions of what the eyes and the ears bring to us that cause the falsification…The splendor of a river is that it is the meaning and has none, and there is about it a quality of meaninglessness, of having no meaning and yet being meaning to all nature.

Feeling alive, undeadened by religion

Some more Maui meditations...following up on "Big waves, small waves: no difference?"

I enjoyed the comments on this post. I agree: splitting reality up into awareness and what we're aware of – how is this not another duality that the consciousness is all philosophy tries to get away from?

Reading further this morning into Peter Dziuban's book by the same name, my consciousness made clearer by Kona coffee, I'm struck by how Awareness (with a capital "A") can be made into an abstract divinity with pretty much the same characteristics as God.

I've never been aware of Pure Awareness, unsullied by anything I'm aware of. And I strongly suspect that neither Dziuban nor anyone else ever has either.

Yet somehow I'm supposed to consider this the really real reality, even though it is nowhere apparent. I'm supposed to view what my senses tell me as akin to images on a movie screen: passing, ephemeral, lacking unchanging being.

But where is this Being that Dziuban (and Plato, among many others) talk about? How can it be separated from my here and now awareness, which contains many beings, me included, naturally?

Methinks too much can be made of what most probably either is (1) so absolutely simple, we aren't recognizing it as such or (2) so absolutely different, we aren't looking in the right place.

Whatever.

I'm not interested in trading away the aliveness of the present moment for deadening promises that later, someday, tomorrow, after death, eventually, I'll be aware of something other than what I'm conscious of now.

Laurel and I went on a Pacific Whale Foundation sunset dinner cruise yesterday. It sure seemed real. But the whole time I was only aware of what my senses, thoughts, and emotions conveyed to me – not Awareness itself.

Which was good, because if I'd been in a state of Pure Awareness I would have missed the whales and dolphins that appeared next to the boat (against the odds, according to my experienced captain, given that only a couple of whales are still hanging around Maui).

I'm not denying the possibility that consciousness is separate from the body that each of us is (or at least, seems to be) at the moment.

But every time Dzuiban approaches the central question about consciousness that I raised earlier, it gets skirted. Here's an excerpt from a chapter I read today:

A question that may arise based on all of the preceding might go like the following:

"If the mind is not inside a body or brain, then why does the mind's activity stop when the body is anesthetized? How could anesthesia affect the mind if the mind is not there? And if the mind isn't in the brain, then why don't the mind and body function just as well when the brain is damaged or removed?"

Great questions. No good answer. This one leaves a lot to be desired.

So if it appears the state of a "body" is altered via chemical anesthesia or surgery, naturally the state of the "mind" will appear altered too, for it is all the same, one "stuff." It is not because a mind is inside a body…This book is not denying that such things seem to occur.

Well, as I said before I'm not big on relying on quotation marks to define reality. If I seem to be unaware when I'm anesthetized, a literary device – making it into "mind"—doesn't change the situation for me. Or anyone else.

Feeling alive. Isn't this what life should be about? When I'm catching a wave on my boogie board, soaring down a zipline, or watching a whale surface nearby, I'm absorbed in the moment.

I'm not anticipating the future or remembering the past. For me, this is where the feeling of increased aliveness comes from: being here and now, fully.

Positing some state of Being separate and distinct from what's present, this is the province of religion – whether it be a monotheistic creed or a philosophic exaltation of "consciousness is all."

Way back in the '60s I grooved over Be Here Now. I haven't moved much, if anywhere, since. How could I?

When I’m unconscious, why aren’t I enlightened?

My second straight post with a question mark in the title. I still don't know if awareness can be aware of nothing, so I'll extend my ignorance by talking about what happens when we're unaware of everything.

Like, under anesthesia. Or after being hit on the head with a baseball bat. Or in deep dreamless sleep.This latter state is particularly praised by Advaitist sages such as Ramana.

I like Ramana a lot. But whenever he extols dreamless sleep as being akin to a realized consciousness, I'll pause in my reading and think: Gosh, I'm not sure I want to be enlightened if it means I'm unaware of everything.

What's the difference between being (1) dead and gone and (2) alive and unconscious? Not much.

That's why lots of people have signed living wills that allow life support to be withdrawn if they're in an irreversible persistent vegetative state.

As mentioned in my previous post, I'm reading "Consciousness is All" while here on Maui. A good book, creatively and intelligently written, very much in the Advaita tradition – but without the Indian cultural trappings (which appeals to me).

Today I made my way through the "Consciousness is not the 'human mind'" chapter. In arguing that consciousness isn't tied to the body, Peter Dziuban said:

This point can be illustrated by this typical human assumption: "Consciousness has to be inside the body. Why? Well, suppose my body had surgery, and was given heavy anesthesia. Or suppose my body got knocked out. In each case I would be 'unconscious' or 'unaware.' When any of those things happen to my body, Consciousness stops functioning – at least temporarily – so Consciousness must be inside the body."

First, a literary quibble. I understand the purpose of the quotation marks around 'unconscious' and 'unaware.' But they don't change the fact that when I got my tonsils out as a kid and had an ether-soaked cloth put over my nose, I really was unconscious and unaware for quite a while.

Similarly, you could say that when I take my last breath I'll be "dead." Well, it's sort of nice to see those not really quotation marks again. However, they're not going to change the reality of the situation.

Which, for the anesthesia and knocked out examples, Dziuban sees differently from me.

In such cases something seems to cease functioning, of course. But it is not Consciousness, the Infinite that stops. It is the so-called human, sensing "mind," or that which is finite, that stops. They're not the same.

…In other words, it would be everything one appears to be conscious of that gets disrupted, not Consciousness Itself. It would be everything observable that gets knocked out. Consciousness Itself never is observable to begin with – because it's infinite! So the fact that everything observable seems to have gone doesn't mean Consciousness itself has gone.

Though I'm attracted to Advaitist and non-dual approaches, this is where they and me start to part company: when I'm asked to have what sounds like blind faith in infinite Consciousness. How is this different from blind faith in God?

I mean, I'm unconscious. I'm unaware. Yet supposedly Consciousness and Awareness (the capital letters signifying their universality) proceed on their merry way.

They're still there. They just can't be observed. Well, if consciousness is all, as the title of the book says, why isn't it more noticeable rather than less when the obscuring physical body and mind are removed from play?

In other words, why doesn't being knocked out with a baseball bat lead to enlightenment? Now that the senses aren't working and thoughts have stopped being produced by the mind, shouldn't the purity of Awareness shine much more clearly?

Conceptually (and I know: concepts are a no-no in nonduality) this is a big problem for Consciousness is Everything folks. As for those who believe that immaterial soul consciousness is the true Self.

Again, why isn't the soul's intrinsic awareness evident when the normal functioning of brain/mind is interrupted? What happens is just the opposite. We become much less conscious and aware when the body isn't functioning as usual.

On this note I'll end with a pointer to an interesting post by Manjit on the Church of the Churchless message board, who also tilts strongly toward non-duality, but has some reservations about it. An excerpt:

Midway through a 4 week mini meditational home retreat, checking my emails and reading the posts on the main blog, I thought I'd add my personal understandings of the value of 'spiritual practice'.

Spiritual practice specifically in relation to the absolutist, pure non-dual and so-called 'neo-advatist' etc, views or positions. A View that is promoted by so many, including myself on occassion, on the ChurchoftheChurchless blog. More specifically, the complete and total dismissal of any kind of  'spiritual practice' whatsoever, with a kind of implied belief that by simply adopting that View, it will in and of itself resolve all the various factors which lead to the primal suffering/existential angst/incompleteness etc, which caused one to 'seek' or search for spiritual peace or God or whatever.

Having myself often expressed myself with this 'View' too, it may seem strange or contradictory when I say that sometimes this View comes across as rather hollow or shallow sounding? Even stranger, from my perspective, and I have considered it deeply, it is entirely integral!

In the end, what the @#$%&! do I know? Or any of us knows? Maybe a lot. Maybe nothing.

Today I enjoyed Mark Morford's column about the Earth singing its own music, along with the entire cosmos.

Me, I like to think of the Earth as essentially a giant Tibetan singing bowl, flicked by the middle finger of God and set to a mesmerizing, low ring for about 10 billion years until the tone begins to fade and the vibration slows and eventually the sound completely disappears into nothingness and the birds are all, hey what the hell happened to the music? And God just shrugs and goes, well that was interesting.

Yeah, for sure.

Each of us gets a lot less time than the Earth to ring (maybe). Regardless, when our tone comes to an end, at least we can also say, "well that was interesting."

Can awareness be aware of nothing?

My wife and I are in Maui. We've overcome a lot of struggles to get here, as documented in "From snow to sunshine with snafus."

For example, our first class upgrades didn't get us much of a vegetarian meal on Hawaiian Airlines. The Buddha was right: life is suffering.

I like to keep things simple on Maui. Today we sat in some shade on the beach until the mid-day sun drove us into the ocean -- Laurel to snorkel, me to swim back and forth across Napili Bay.

When to lie on the sand; when to go in the water. Of such Big Questions a vacation should be made of.

It's also another good time to work on my Wu. Which involves a query of more cosmic proportions than our beach dilemma. Namely, can awareness be aware of nothing?

Intuitively, I doubt it. But as I so often say on this blog, what do I know?

My Wu Project, or anybody's, necessarily hits a major roadblock if the answer is "No." Seeking the root of whatever lies at the bottom (or top, or middle) Of It All, one is left with something within consciousness – a duality of (1) something and (2) consciousness of that thing.

I brought with me a new book, "Consciousness is All." I figured, correctly, that it'd blend nicely with the mellow buzz of my cup of Kona coffee in the morning, and more generally, with the whole laid back Maui vibe.

The author, Peter Dziuban, has an engaging style. I'm much attracted to what seems to be a complete lack of quotations in his 296 pages. He just says what he thinks, with no corroboration from holy books, gurus, saints, or seers.

After reading just a few chapters I can tell that a central thought regards the reality of pure awareness.

Awareness truly is. For this to be clear, start with pure Awareness, pure Consciousness only – entirely distinct from the body and everything else you seem to be aware of. One who is alert sees that pure Awareness, all by Itself, alone, never changes or goes away.

Hmmm. I don't know about that, though maybe I'm not alert enough to see it. Sure, for every moment of my 59+ years I've been aware (which Dziuban says is synonymous with being conscious).

I've also been aware of something for each of those moments – except when I was unconscious. Then I wasn't aware of anything, including awareness.

I like the notion of pure awareness, of pure consciousness. It just sounds so…pure. And simple. But I can't imagine what it would be like.

Neither, says my skeptical soul, do many (if not all) of the people who talk about it. Again, though, I could be wrong. It just seems to me that pure awareness is like pure existence: a concept.

How empty can awareness or existence be, and still be something that we can be aware of or know as existent? I find it difficult to imagine being aware only of awareness, or of existing solely as existence.

For one thing, it's deeply creepy. Like being dead, yet not quite. Totally alone. A nothing knowing only its nothingness.

But, hey, I'm just 21 pages into Dziuban's book. Maybe things will clear up with more Kona coffee-aided reading. And perhaps the beauty of Maui is what's making me wonder…

Can there be awareness without stuff to be aware of?

Can there be existence without stuff that exists?

Nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to become

More and more, I'm into specifics when it comes to spirituality. I've spent a lifetime floating in the philosophical, theological, and metaphysical heavens. Now, show me the meat! (or, tofu)

I still enjoy airy-fairy speculation. Heck, what would this blog be without it? Both the posts and comments would be exceedingly brief, that's for sure.

But whenever I get a new spiritual, religious, or philosophical book these days, I thumb through it right off the bat, looking for details. Especially if it deals at all with meditation.

What does the author say we (or even just he/she) should do in an attempt to understand what It Is All About?

Don't give me elevated abstractions. I want down to earth instructions. Absent that, a writing is just a bunch of speculative blah, blah, blah.

Entertaining. But not scientifically or practically persuasive.

So since I don't want to be a pot calling the kettle black, here's what I generally do when I sit down for my morning meditation – fortified with a strong cup of coffee, which caffeinatedly elevates my mood even if the mediation session doesn't.

I have a saying that I repeat, and contemplate, before meditating.

Nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to become

I say this to myself as an encapsulation of my current spiritual outlook. It also serves to get me in a groove that, hopefully, I'll stay in for as much of the meditation period as possible.

Nowhere to go… Here I am, stock still on my cushion. No place else I need to be for the next 30 minutes or so. This is It.

Nothing to do… No mental place I need to arrive at either. I don't need to think, feel, imagine, perceive, or do anything else inside my head.

No one to become… Even more, no transformation of my basic being needs to happen from on high, or down below. Like Popeye, I am what I am (or, I yam what I yam).

This centers me in three dimensions of space, time, and being – exactly where I am. I realize that every movement from this center, on what spiritual traditions call a "path," is going to take me farther away from really real reality, not closer.

That's my theory, at least.

However, it's founded on a whole lot of book learning and life experience. I just choose to ignore all of that learning-experience in favor of the no, no, no at the center of my Nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to become.

I then use a simple sort of mantra meditation to stay close to the center during my meditation.

Lately I've been favoring Wu because it means nothing/negation in Chinese. And I hear "wu chi" a lot in my Tai Chi classes (this is the motionless ready stance that begins and ends each form; from wu chi the tai chi begins).

Something…wu…out of nothing…the empty center. Endlessly fascinating. A sound in my head, uttered by me, where before and after there is silence.

So, yes, I do something. Not nothing. But as little as possible, which is a heck of a lot less than I'm going to do the rest of the day, after I stop meditating.

I enjoy beginning the day with this period of mostly passive yin that contrasts with my mostly active yang the rest of my waking hours.

It's the core of my spirituality, really. Yet it's nothing that I can describe beyond how I've already described it. For there's nothing much to it.

Even less than I think, for sure.

Googling "nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to become" before I wrote this post, I came across a book whose title is two-thirds of my meditation saying.

Well, no one has a copyright on nothing. Though lots of people have said quite a bit about it. Like...

There is really nothing you must be.
And there is nothing you must do.
There is really nothing you must have.
And there is nothing you must know.
There is really nothing you must become.

However, it helps to understand that fire burns,
and when it rains, the earth gets wet.
Japanese Zen scroll

As for me, when I meditate my saying is as minimal as I can make it. Wu, wu, wu.

Absolute unitary being – nothing that’s really something

AUB. An acronym for the highest reality humans can perceive. Or, more accurately, not perceive – because Absolute Unitary Being isn't anything you can be aware of, because it is awareness without any content other than itself.

This isn't just another wild-eyed, New Age, mystic-religious, or psychedelic inspired bunch of far out fantasizing.

Rather, the notion is founded on some solid science. In the book "The Mystical Mind" that I've been blogging about recently (here, here, and here), physician researchers Eugene d'Aquili and Andrew Newberg show how the brain produces experiences that often are termed mystical.

In their opinion, the most mystic experience of all is that of Absolute Unitary Being.

AUB is a state of pure awareness without the perception of discrete reality, without the sense of the passage of time, without the sense of the extension of space, and without the self-other dichotomy. In short, it is pure awareness or awareness without content.

As such, it's the common denominator of every deep form of spirituality or religion, the glue that binds together otherwise disparate philosophies, theologies, and ways of looking at the cosmos.

AUB is analogous to the clear sky across which clouds of all kinds of shapes and sizes move, leading people to look up and say, "That one resembles Mickey Mouse, that one a dog, and there's some large breasts!"

Clearly, in AUB there can be no distinction between what is experienced by different individuals, even from totally different cultures. There may be significant differences in how these experiences are described and interpreted, particularly since they are usually related in terms of the specific cultural and societal milieu from which the experiencer comes.

We maintain, however, that the actual experience of AUB in itself is necessarily the same for any individual who experiences it. This is necessary from a neurophysiological as well as a philosophical perspective. It is necessarily experienced as an infinite, unified, and totally undifferentiated state.

The basic reason for this is that the brain normally does its best to locate the body to which it's connected in time and space. Evolutionarily speaking, this makes great sense. If you're being chased by a saber-toothed tiger, it's important to know exactly where you and the threat are in relation to each other.

But when sensory inputs are shut down, as in closed-eyed quiet meditation (or a sensory deprivation chamber), the brain may do some strange stuff. This is the result of deafferentation, which occurs when incoming information into a brain structure is cut off.

The deafferented neurons, d'Aquili and Newberg say, then begin to function according to their own "internal logic." Here's what happens with the orientation association area.

If this structure is totally deafferented so that it receives no input from the outside world, then it cannot form a sense of space and time abstracted from sensory input. It is still trying, however, to generate an orientation in time and space. It is still working by its internal logic.

It continues to attempt to generate a sense of space and time even without input from the external world to work on. The result is a sense of no space and no time, or conversely it might be described as infinite space and infinite time.

No matter how it is defined, it is the same sensation. The world's mystical literature is replete with experiences of no space and no time or infinite space and infinite time. Therefore, it appears that total or near-total deafferentation of the orientation association area may be involved in the generation of such mystical states.

Note the may. That's how scientists talk. Cautiously, unwilling to bind themselves to a view of the world that makes sense, but hasn't yet been experimentally confirmed to such a degree that it can be termed a valid theory.

However, d'Aquili and Newberg note that functional brain scans of experienced meditators (such as Tibetan Buddhist monks) show the changes that their model of the "mystical brain" predicts.

So, what can we make of all this? To me, it supports my churchless predilections. Because as noted above, AUB is considered to be the highest of mystical states in most traditions (some elevate a "non-dual" consciousness that includes awareness of the physical world to be more elevated than AUB).

A big reason for this is that those who have had an experience of Absolute Unitary Being generally say that it felt a lot more real than everyday reality. They come back changed, as is often the case with those who have a near-death experience.

d'Aquili and Newberg conclude that notwithstanding thousands of years of human pondering about what is real and what isn't, the phenomenological sense of This is real is the best measure of absolute reality. In this article, the authors make their case.

Clearly, baseline reality has some significant claim to being ultimate reality. However, AUB is so compelling that it is very difficult indeed to write off the assertion of its reality. Actually, for individuals having experienced AUB, it seems virtually impossible to negate that experience.

This being the case, it is a foolish reductionism indeed which states that, because unitary consciousness can be understood in terms of neuropsychological processes, it is therefore derivative from baseline reality. Indeed the reverse argument could be made just as well.

Neuropsychology can give no answer as to which state is more real, baseline reality or hyperlucid unitary consciousness often experienced as God. We may be reduced to saying that each is real in its own way and for its own adaptive ends.

It's interesting that people interviewed by d'Aquili and Newberg who have had an AUB experience describe it as neither subjective nor objective. That is, it wasn't a subjective local consciousness, and it wasn't consciousness of objective external reality.

It was something else. Itself. Pure awareness. Thus it's tempting to call it the "ground of being," or some such foundational term.

Well, whatever it is, it sure isn't religious. There's no ritualistic, theological, or personalized content in an experience of Absolute Unitary Being.

No Jesus. No Buddha. No guru. No God. No Allah. No anything that points to a particular religion or spiritual path.

However, some AUB'ers experience it as being suffused with positive affect that leads them to personalize it as "God." Others, such as Buddhists, experience it as suffused with neutral affect and describe it as nonpersonal or void consciousness.

This is one of my few quibbles with d'Aquili and Newberg. Seemingly in an effort to meld personal and impersonal AUB experiences into a single overarching framework, they equate them as reflecting "anterior" and "posterior" natures of God.

Whatever that means. I don't get how an experience of absolute unitary being can be divided into two, or how using the word "God" adds to their scientific explanation of AUB.

But this is a minor quibble. On the whole I've found the notion of absolute unitary being -- the product of specific brain states – to be a marvelous support for a truly scientific spirituality.

One that doesn't seek for ultimate reality "out there" in some mysterious hidden realm known only by revelation, divine grace, or secret mystical techniques, but rather within the brain that each of us possesses right here and right now.

Here's how "The Mystical Mind" ends.

Since the approach presented in this book is firmly based on the neurosciences, on neuroevolutionary theory, and on strict phenomenological analysis, we hope that it will carry a compelling plausibility, indeed probability, to twenty-first century readers steeped in a scientific culture and demanding proof.

Thus, the mystical mind has led us down a new and fascinating path toward the understanding of human beings and their relationship to religion, spirituality, and God. As we stated in our dedication, we certainly believe that neurotheology can help open us to a greater sense of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans – the tremendous and spellbinding mystery – and to the awareness that we, who are brought together in a love of truth, are the mystical minds seeking that mystery.

Ibn ‘Arabi on the impossibility of becoming nothing

I've read the Koran (in translation, naturally). It didn't resonate with me. Really tough to get through – but Muslims say that a lot, maybe everything, is lost in translation.

Somewhat strangely though, I went through a phase where I couldn't stop reading Rumi. He was a Sufi, the mystical side of Islam. My bookshelves are full of Rumi titles, including Nicholson's three volume translation of the Masnavi.

I rarely pick up a Sufi book any more. There's too much monotheism left over from Sufism's Islamic roots to appeal to me, now that I'm in a Taoist/Buddhist phase.

All this Rumi talk of "His ruby lips" and "kiss of the Beloved" …ugh.

But I just read an excerpt from Ibn 'Arabi's "Divine Governance of the Human Kingdom" that gave me a fresh outlook on Sufism and mystical Islam. It's included in One: Essential Writings on Nonduality, edited by Jerry Katz.

I liked these passages because the notion of becoming nothing is appealing only insofar as it is a metaphor, not reality.

During my deeply devoted Radha Soami Satsang Beas days, when I'd hear disciples say "The guru is everything, I am nothing," I liked the humble sentiment. But it never made sense to me.

After all, if someone is in love with the guru and wants to be just like him, and the guru is everything, then shouldn't that person want to be everything also, rather than nothing? Plus, if you're nothing, how can you love? Or be devoted? Or be anything?

Religions often preach the virtue of extinguishing individuality, ego, willfulness. Yet as Ibn 'Arabi (1165-1240) says below, this presumes that there is something to extinguish.

If reality is truly one at its foundation – a hypothesis that makes a lot of sense to me, both scientifically and spiritually – what's up with all this talk of nothingness and somethingness?

Here's how Ibn 'Arabi puts it, presenting Islam in a refreshing non-dualistic fashion.

You cannot know your Lord by making yourself nothing. Many a wise man claims that in order to know one's Lord one must denude oneself of the signs of one's existence, efface one's identity, finally rid oneself of one's self.

This is a mistake. How could a thing that does not exist try to get rid of its existence? For none of matter exists. How could a thing that is not, become nothing? A thing can only become nothing after it has been something.

Therefore, if you know yourself without being, not trying to become nothing, you will know your Lord. If you think that to know Allah depends on you ridding yourself of yourself, then you are guilty of attributing partners to Him – the only unforgivable sin – because you are claiming that there is another existence besides Him, the All-Existent: that there is a you and a He.

Our Master, the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him), said:

He who knows himself knows His Lord

He did not say:

He who eliminates himself knows his Lord!

…That which exists and is visible is He. There is nothing but He, so how could nothing cease to be?

…Therefore, do not think anymore that you need to become nothing, that you need to annihilate yourself in Him. If you thought so, then you would be His veil, while a veil over Allah is other than He. How could you be a veil that hides Him? What hides Him is His being the One Alone.

Well, I still don't like the "He's" and "Lord's" in reference to Allah. But these are just ways of speaking. I mentally translate them into "It" and "Reality," which seems to be the sense Ibn 'Arabi is intending.

There's only One Thing Going On. It's all around us, and indeed is us.

No need for religion when there's nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to become.

Taoism wants us to be holey, not holy

I've been attracted to Taoism for a long time. Even before I knew anything about it. Early in my teen years (maybe a bit before) I visited San Francisco's Chinatown.

I came back with a bunch of cheap art, bought from my allowance. I was enthralled with the images of misty mountains drawn with a few brushstrokes, usually including a tiny solitary figure walking along a path.

Who knows where that early instinctive attraction to Taoism came from? I sure don't. My mother had no inclination toward Eastern philosophy or art. I wasn't exposed to such in any other fashion, so far as I can remember. But I had those scrolls and prints up in my bedroom for quite a few years.

They seemed entirely natural to me. As does Taoist philosophy now, along with Tai Chi, the current stage of my martial arts evolution.

I've been reading and hugely enjoying a new book in my Taoism collection. "Daoism Explained" by Hans-Georg Moeller is brilliant. It looks at Taoism/Daoism in a fresh light. Familiar Taoist stories and images are becoming new for me again, thanks to Moeller's insightful take on classic writings.

He translates the eleventh chapter of the Daodejing (or Tao Te Ching).

Thirty spokes are united in one hub.
It is in its [space of] emptiness,
Where the usefulness of the cart is.

The hub, says Moeller, is at the center; it is empty; it is still; and it is single, being a center. This is the Tao. Yet it isn't only the empty hub. The Tao is the spokes also. It is the process (not a substance) that makes the world go 'round.

So Taoists try to reflect the emptiness of the hub. They seek to be holey, rather than holy. An artificial morality is anathema to them. In ancient China it was the moralistic Confucians who came in for Taoist scorn. Today fundamentalists of other persuasions make the same mistake:

Failing to see that prevention is better than cure, that emptying oneself of notions about right and wrong produces a natural ethical sense. Moeller:

If people learn to follow the Way (dao) and the "own course" (ziran), then morality will not be required because everything will be just naturally fine. From a Daoist point of view, morality is the virtue of latecomers…Instead of focusing on the Dao and trying to naturally follow it in the first place, the Confucians seem to attempt to "help" the Dao once they have already failed to correspond to it.

It's easy to miss the Tao. That's why Taoism is so simple to follow. You want to miss the Tao. The entire difficulty comes from making the Tao into something that can be spotted, understood, perceived, sensed, worshipped, contemplated, meditated upon.

In Chinese Tao is wu (emptiness, non-presence) rather than you (fullness, presence). If you believe you've got it, you don't.

If something "is there" or if somebody "has something," there is fullness; and if nothing is there or if somebody "has nothing," then there is emptiness. In this sense you designates a place or spot where there is something while wu designates a place or spot where there is nothing. In the image of the wheel, the spokes are obviously in the place of you – in the space where there is something (the turning spokes cover all the space around the hub), whereas the hub is in the space of wu.

Religions adore presence. They make God or ultimate reality into something transcendent that exists Out There, a Platonic form of divineness that we fallen humans must struggle to reach.

Religious humility, egolessness, surrender – this is a means to attain a glorious end. True believers see themselves as being on a spiritual roller-coaster. "If I can just go down far enough, I'll then be able to rise up."

Back in the days when I looked at the mystic-religious path of Sant Mat (Radha Soami Satsang Beas branch) through uncritical devotional eyes, I failed to recognize this. I didn't see that my efforts to prostrate myself before the guru, and thence before God, sprang from a elevational goal.

Even when my eyes were downcast, focusing on the humble descent of the spiritual roller coaster, I was keeping a look out for the anticipated swoop upwards. Wheeeeee! Sach Khand! God-realization! Paradise!

Now, I don't know where I'm heading. Up. Down. Sideways. Nowhere. Somewhere. I'm clueless.

Which, more and more, feels natural to me. Because after some forty-five years of investigating the meaning of life (including my teenage Taoist phase, which was followed by a lot of listening to Bob Dylan, so that period should count) here's a big part of what I've learned:

The sum total of agreed-upon human knowledge about what lies beyond the physical is precisely zero.

There's a virtually endless supply of religious dogma, countless volumes of philosophical speculation, large crowds of supposed spiritual gurus, endless stories of the miraculous. But when you add them all together and discard the unproven, unlikely, and unbelievable, what's left is a big pile of nothing.

And that exactly equals what Taoism says should be found by anyone seeking the hub of the cosmos, the pivot point around which everything in existence swirls.

Everything that exists, in its entirety, exists by itself, and at the center of this entirety of presence is "nothing" – or more precisely, nonpresence (wu). This is the "Dao of heaven" (tian dao).

Beautiful. Taoism finds emptiness at the core of reality. This empty Tao is holey, not holy. It can't be worshipped, revered, prayed to, or otherwise made an object of veneration, because it isn't separate from the potential venerator.

When I try to lay hold of my own innermost essence, I can't do that either. The core of my being is as squirmy, slippery, and shadowy as the Tao is. And as the God that religions and mystic faiths claim to know, but can never provide proof of.

There's a story in the Zhuangzi about fish drifting along free and easy. A couple of sages discuss this seeming happiness of fish, wondering whether it is possible to know what makes a fish happy if you're not one yourself. I liked Moeller's commentary.

If one "rambles" free and easy, one has no friction whatsoever with one's surroundings and so is part of a seamless, easygoing process…When Zhuangzi claimed to know about the happiness of fish, he did not claim to be able to feel the exact same feeling. He was just saying: I feel perfect by rambling around, and the fish feel perfect by rambling around.

At the center, wu. Nothing.

Rambling around wu. Perfect.

Sheer absence of soul reveals its nature

Ah, sheer poetry. About the soul. Featured on the front page of The Oregonian Living section yesterday, of all things. I've poeticized a quote from Gunther von Hagens, creator of the Body Worlds 3 exhibit that I wrote about recently.

In the exhibition
the pure absence of the soul
actually
underlines the soul

The longer I am
an anatomist,
the closer I am
to the soul

just
because of
its sheer
absence

I was surprised by the tone of the story, headlined "Exhibit or exhibitionism?" The reporter, Nancy Haught, must have gone out of her way to find people who were offended by this display of plastinated human bodies (plus a camel).

All of the people who donated their bodies did so voluntarily. Yet the story had numerous quotes along the lines of this ridiculous observation from a Unitarian minister (I'd expect a Unitarian to be a lot more open-minded).

People volunteer for all sorts of things. People volunteer to be prostitutes. People volunteer for genital mutilation, to kill themselves. That doesn't mean society should cooperate with their wishes.

My take is that underlying this sort of how could they?! reaction to the exhibit is the commonly held assumption among religious types that the soul, if not itself physical, still is closely linked to the body.

Why else would so much valuable real estate be taken up by graves? This is a great income producer for casket makers and embalmers, but theologically is absurd.

When the body is dead, it's a goner. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Finito.

If there's anything of us that survives death, it sure isn't material. There's no evidence of anyone being resurrected, notwithstanding the blind faith of Christian true believers (and members of other religions with similar supernatural dogmas).

So if you want to hang on to a belief in something spiritual – call it "soul" – that lives on after we die, any sort of physical evidence of it belies the belief.

When it comes to the soul, nothing trumps something.

That's why I liked von Hagens' statement so much. It's deeply profound, though I doubt most Oregonian readers appreciated it sufficiently, being a bump in the road on their dash through the Living section to the comics.

Spiritual emptiness: it's a good thing. The very best.

I don't know if the soul exists. But if it does, I'm pretty sure it won't be found in any familiar place. Like, the body. Or thoughts. Or feelings. Or perceptions.

It'll be hanging out where the really wild things roam.

Nothingness. Which, if you believe physicists and mystics, is a close kin to Everything.

Wu t-shirt leads to philosophical conversations

Usually I just wear my Wu t-shirt to Tai Chi class or the athletic club. Yesterday was pretty grey in central Oregon, so I decided to brighten it up with my yellow Wu attire.

Good decision. After a pleasant walk along the Metolius river, where this photo was taken, I had a couple of pleasant philosophical discussions stimulated by a "What does that mean?"

When I started my Wu Project some fifteen months ago, I knew that what I needed most of all, and first of all, was a Wu t-shirt. What's a project without a t-shirt?

I'm pretty sure that what I've got on my chest doesn't say Kick me or This dumb shit thinks this means Wu. The Wikipedia entry for "Mu/Wu" now shows the character in cursive script, but the small non-cursive icon looks like my t-shirt. Still, whenever someone Chinese walks by while I'm wearing it I prepare myself for hilarious laughter.

The cursive version is cool. Check out this animation that shows the calligraphy stroke order. Beautiful.

Like Wu. And conversations about Wu. My first was in the charming Camp Sherman store. One of the owners pointed at my chest and said, "Explain."

As if I could. But anyone who wears anything but a plain t-shirt should be willing to answer questions about the message they're broadcasting to the world.

"It's Chinese," I replied. "It means Wu. That's a negative—negation, nothingness. But it doesn't have, well, the negative sense we Westerners put on nothing. It's more like the universal that remains when everything particular is negated."

"Infinity," the owner said. "Exactly," I told her. Though exactly isn't exactly a word that fits with Wu, she seemed to hit the word-nail right on the head.

Anyway, it beat talking about the weather. Conversations like the one we had, even brief ones, are so much more satisfying than the usual "How's it going? … Fine" variety. It'd be nice if everybody had a t-shirt that succinctly expressed their philosophy of life (and they were amenable to talking about it).

My other t-shirt inspired conversation came near the end of the Metolius river trail, where you approach the headwaters and are stopped by a fence on private land.

The family pet and I had been following a woman and her yellow lab. Serena and I were faster walkers than they were. We caught up with them near the turning point. She was in her 70s. Her dog, about the same in dog years. The woman had the look of an elderly flower child.

Flowing smock. Brightly colored hearing aids, not disguised at all but prominently displayed in her ears like jewelry. Our dogs sniffed each other. Then she did the human equivalent.

She asked "What's that?" I started to go through my usual explanation, but she politely cut me off. "Yes, Wu. Like Wu-wei." Once again I said, "Exactly."

It turned out that she was a massage therapist who did Qigong. I told her that I practiced Tai Chi and had some experience with Qigong. I demonstrated the "wu chi" (readiness) posture and showed how "tai chi" makes an appearance as soon as Wu differentiates into one thing or another—yin or yang.

Listening to myself talk, I liked what I heard. Not because I was saying it. Because it made sense, in spite of the speaker's Wu ignorance.

"There's got to be something beyond everything that we can ever know or understand," I said. "Out there on the other side of beyond, that's Wu." She smiled.

She and her husband had just moved to Camp Sherman, a quirky community of 200 or so full-time residents. She'll fit right in. Folks around here resonate with Wu as the Metolius River wordlessly speaks it.

Me finding myself. And Van Morrison.

It happened again today. Searching for the meaning of existence via the Great God Google, I looked into the mirror of cyberspace and saw my own truth looking back at me.

Not surprisingly, I agreed with myself. Which, naturally, raises the question: "If what I'm searching for is what I already know, what the hell am I doing Googling?"

I'd been thinking about Tai Chi. Which got me thinking about Wu Chi. Which reminded me of a web site that had a reference to using "Wu" as a mantra – the sound of wind whistling through tree tops. Whoooooooo. Whoooooooo.

Which stimulated me to fire up Google and see if I could find the web site again. Which led to a page of results with only one item of real interest.

One of my Wu Project posts. So I ended up finding what I really was looking for: someone who fully agreed with me. Which, not surprisingly, turned out to be me.

Why don't I trust myself when it comes to the deep questions of life, those no one else can answer for me? I'm more than willing to follow the advice of someone who is expert in an area I'm ignorant about—like plumbing or car repair.

But each of us is our own authority when it comes to What's it all about? Even if we submit to someone else, that act of submission is under our control (I must give credit to a sex article in a women's magazine I recently thumbed through in a waiting room for that bit of insight).

So I'm telling myself to stand taller. As should you, if, like me, you find yourself looking for outside encouragement platform shoes for reassurance that your view of the cosmos is at least a smidgeon above ground level.

I'm never going to find anyone else who totally agrees with me about what it's all about. Or not about. My best shot at a boon philosophical companion is myself. And only then, if I don't get in the way of establishing a trust bond between myself and me.

None the less, I enjoy all of the others on the Road That Isn't Quite Where I Want To Go But is Darn Interesting Nonetheless.

Including the visitors to this here Church of the Churchless.

In a comment today Edward said:

Now drop what you're doing, find the song "Tupelo Honey" by Van Morrison and listen to it like it was your first birthday card. There will be a part of you, big or small, loud or quiet, that says, "Yes, this is true." Not a formal truth, not a provable theorem - just blood warmingly true.

Good advice. You can watch here. Or below. And read the lyrics here. Yes, that's truly true truth. It's got to be. I just said it was.

Soul is superfluous

Usually spirituality is associated with "soulfulness," whatever the heck that means. I used to believe that I knew something about soul. Now, I don't.

Perhaps because soul is superfluous—it's an notion that is so much a part of most cultures, we take it for granted that a human being consists of something above and beyond the physical.

Before leaving for Maui I bought Nicholas Fearn's "The Latest Answers to the Oldest Questions" at a Powell's Books outlet (one of the world's great bookstores; don't miss the main store if you visit Portland, Oregon).

Interestingly, the first chapter I read on "The Problem of the Self" echoed Douglas Hofstadter's conclusions in "I Am a Strange Loop," which I'd just finished (and have been blogging about).

In searching for a self we look for something over and above our attributes, but we do not usually think this way about ordinary objects. For example, I believe that my favourite armchair persists through time without imagining it to have a chair-soul or a chair-ego that possesses its traits.

It has characteristics such as being three feet high at the seat, padded with foam and covered with green cloth, but there is no chair over and above these characteristics.

If we took away the foam and the seat and the cloth and so on, we would not be left with a naked chair, as if objects were ghostly coat hangers upon which traits are hung. Yet this is precisely what we often imagine to be true in the case of persons.

Well, who knows? Maybe it is true. But since soul is, by most definitions, distinct from materiality and mentality, there's no way to perceive it or cognize it.

Like Fearn says, soul is considered to be something ethereal—pure consciousness perhaps—that (or who) somehow manages to serve as the core of our being even though it's essentially nothing.

The more we wish to gain immortality by divesting ourselves of earthly trappings such as physicality, memories and the like, the more we reduce ourselves to nothing at all – and, to quote the American children's author Norton Juster, doing nothing is hardly worth the effort.

Along the same lines, Hofstadter persuasively argues that the "I" of each of us starts out as a blank slate. He finds no evidence that a soul enters the body at birth, or conception, or somewhere in between, and thereafter serves as the "coat hanger" on which the attributes I consider to be Me are hung.

The key point, uncomfortable for you though it will be, is that no one started out in that brain – no one at all. It was just as uninhabited as a swinging rope or a whirlpool. But unlike those physical systems, it could perceive and evolve in sophistication, and so, as weeks, months, and years passed, there gradually came to be someone in there.

…This "I", this unreal but unutterably stubborn marble in the mind, this "Epi" phenomenon, simply takes over, anointing itself as Reality Number One, and from there on it won't go away, no matter what words are spoken.

It turns out, then, that soulfulness is eminently unspiritual. For when we believe that some part of us—no, even more, the essence of us—is eternally distinct from everyone and everything else we encounter in the world (sticks and stones may break my bones, but my soul is immutable), a sense of separateness is inevitable.

Soul is considered to be separate from body. The realm of soul is considered to be separate from the physical universe. Awareness of soul is considered to be separate from material and mental perceptions.

The writings of British philosopher Derek Parfit are discussed at some length in Hofstadter's book. Parfit also pops up in Fearn's first chapter. Hmmmmm. Parfit sightings in two consecutive reads, after a lifetime of never having heard of him.

Here's how that initial chapter ends:

The personal identity debate shows just what happens when we dispense with the soul. For Parfit, the consequences are liberating. He writes that when he thought his existence a fact distinct from his physical and psychological continuity, he seemed 'imprisoned' in himself. 'My life seemed like a glass tunnel, though which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there as darkness.' However:

'When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.'

Another response might be to dwell on how the fleeting status of human existence has been accentuated. Not only are human beings continually coming into being and passing away, but they are even doing this on countless occasions within a single lifetime. We are, it seems, a flicker within a flicker.

If I’m not an “I,” what am I?

My admiration for Douglas Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop," the subject of my previous post, is evidenced by the fact that I just carted the 410 pages to Maui—adding the weight of this hardcover book to my 50 pound suitcase limit, every ounce of which I'm going to need on our return trip after our usual rampaging through Lahaina t-shirt shops.

But I wanted to ponder my strange loopiness some more while on vacation. At the moment I'm listening to Napili Bay waves, rather than Oregon rain, but the same "I" seemingly is doing the listening though its body has traveled far today.

Or so I've always thought.

Hofstadter calls this the "caged bird" metaphor. The cage is the body, or cranium, and the bird is the soul. There's one bird to one cage. And if you're spiritually inclined, supposedly the bird can be freed from the cage.

Satori! Enlightenment! Salvation!

But this presumes that the bird is real. There's an "I" separate and distinct from the physical matter that comprises the brain and the rest of the body. What if there isn't? What if instead of a caged bird, we're actually…

Even Hofstadter has trouble finishing the sentence.

It is not easy to find a strong, vivid metaphor to put up against the caged-bird metaphor. I have entertained quite a few possibilities, involving such diverse entities as bees, tornadoes, flowers, stars, and embassies. The image of a swarm of bees or of a nebula clearly conveys the idea of diffuseness, but there is no clear counterpart to the cage (or rather, to the head or brain or cranium). (A hive is not what I mean, because a flying swarm is not at all inside its hive).

The basic problem is that when you go looking for the "I," it's impossible to pin down. That's what leads Hofstadter to say that the "I" is a hallucination hallucinated by a hallucination.

Sounds a lot like Buddhism and quite a few other maya-embracing philosophies. The difference, though, is that Hofstadter apparently doesn't offer a way out of the illusion (I've got a few more chapters to read). He strikes me as a Buddhist who doesn't believe in enlightenment, just the emptiness of individuality.

Hofstadter's favorite image concerning the sense of "I" comes from his experience of squeezing his hand around a pack of about a hundred envelopes that were in a box. When he did this, he felt a marble in the midst of them. Strange.

He tried to shake the marble out from the envelopes. No luck. Then he went through them one by one and found that each envelope was empty. Even stranger. Upon closer inspection, he realized that at the vertex of each envelope's flap there was a triple layer of paper and a thin layer of glue.

This area couldn't be compressed as much as the rest of the envelope. So when a hundred of them were aligned precisely and pressed together, voila, a marble. Or rather, an epiphenomenon that felt uncannily like a marble.

An epiphenomenon…is a collective and unitary-seeming outcome of many small, often invisible or unperceived, quite possibly utterly unexpected, events. In other words, an epiphenomenon could be said to be a large-scale illusion created by the collusion of many small and indisputably non-illusory events.

Just like the "I." According to Hofstadter my sense that I'm indisputably me (which for you, obviously, is that you're you—not me) arises from countless experiences from birth until now. Each of us is way more than a hundred experience-envelopes stacked up together.

That me-bump we feel in the center of us, it's as real as the marble.

The problem is that in a sense, an "I" is something created out of nothing. And since making something out of nothing is never possible, the alleged something turns out to be an illusion, in the end, but a very powerful one, like the marble among the envelopes.

However, the "I" is an illusion far more entrenched and recalcitrant than the marble illusion, because in the case of "I," there is no simple revelatory act corresponding to turning the box upside down and shaking it, then peering in between the envelopes and finding nothing solid and spherical in there.

We don't have access to the inner workings of our brains. And so the only perspective we have on our "I"-ness comes from the counterpart to squeezing all the envelopes at once, and that perspective says it's real!

I love it. And I hate it.

For me, pondering Hofstadter's book has been like getting on the best ride in the Existential Theme Park. It started off with some exciting ups and downs, which I enjoyed. But then I hit the part where you feel like everything has been pulled out from under you.

Whoa, momma! Stop the ride! No, wait, I want more! Changed my mind again, stop the freaking ride, NOW!

On the whole, I like the feeling of free-falling. Except when I don't. "I"s are like that—fickle. More on this later, after the jet lag wears off and the warm water wears on.

You’re a strange loop (and that’s OK)

Via Douglas Hofstadter, I've got some soul-shaking news to pass on to you. You're a strange loop.

So am I. As is he. We all are. And it's not a bad thing, once you get used to the strangeness and loopiness of our rarely recognized condition.

I'm most of the way through Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop." His new book is an elaboration of themes creatively discussed in "Gödel, Escher, Bach," which I read a long time ago—with difficulty.

Hofstadter has come a long way, both personally and professionally (he's a professor of cognitive science at Indiana University). His wife died suddenly from a brain tumor in 1993. He writes of his love for her, and how he has struggled to relate his understanding of how the mind works with how Carol lives on in his consciousness.

Which, at heart, is a "strange loop." What this means takes a bunch of chapters to explain, some quite dense.

I thought I knew what Gödel's theorem was all about, non-mathematically at least, but it's a lot more involved than my thinking thought. However, the fact that I can think about my thoughts about what Gödel and Hofstadter think about thinking shows that I'm at least in the ballpark of a Gödelian frame of mind.

A plain loop is easy to grasp. It's akin to a thermostat that senses the temperature and turns the furnace on or off to keep the house comfortable. This isn't a strange loop because the thermostat isn't self-aware. There's awareness of the temperature, but not any awareness that the thermostat is aware.

Humans, by contrast, are hugely strange—the strangest loops in existence, so far as we know. We are masters of abstraction and symbols. We observe (generally) friendly furry animals of an astounding variety of shapes and sizes, summing them up as "dogs."

Our ability to conceptualize allows us to jump back and forth between levels of abstraction. Hofstadter observes that we can dream about ourselves dreaming about dreaming. More profoundly, he says, Gödel found that "one of the domains that mathematics can model is the doing of mathematics itself."

This talk about abstractions can easily sound, well, abstract. But when the core message of "I Am a Strange Loop" hits home, as it did to me today, it's anything but abstract. Some of the feel of what I felt is hinted at in Hofstadter's description of a strange loop.

What I mean by "strange loop" is—here goes a first stab, anyway—not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the first stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive "upward" shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle.

That is, despite one's sense of departing ever further from one's origin, one winds up, to one's shock, where one had started out.

Hofstadter illustrates this by M.C. Escher's lithograph Drawing Hands. But the thoughts that I'm thinking as I write this post about how we think, or the thoughts that you're thinking as you read what I've written, are equally good illustrations. Just shyer. He writes:

Fortunately, there are do exist strange loops that are not illusions. I say "fortunately" because the thesis of this book is that we ourselves—not our bodies, but our selves—are strange loops, and so if all strange loops were illusions, then we would all be illusions, and that would be a great shame. So it's fortunate that some strange loops do exist in the real world.

On the other hand, it is not a piece of cake to exhibit one for all to see. Strange loops are shy creatures, and they tend to avoid the light of day.

Here we are, you and I. Except when you say "you and I," I'm the "you" instead of the "I" that holds when I say it. Already that's darn strange. Because it's impossible to point to any sort of "I," whether it is in you or me.

Hofstadter goes so far as to say what he says below. I'll leave his saying alone for now. The hour is late, and while strange loops avoid the light of day, they also avoid the dark of night.

In this strange loop's mind, at least. There will be more to say another day, if the strange loop that is me wants to head that way.

That extremely slight doubt flies in the face of what we all take for granted ever since our earliest childhood, which is that "I"'s do exist—and in most people, the latter belief simply wins out, hands down. The battle is never even engaged, in most people's minds. On the other hand, for a few people the battle starts to rage: physics versus "I."

…My proposal for a truce to end this battle is to see the "I" as a hallucination perceived by a hallucination, which sounds pretty strange, or perhaps even stranger: the "I" as a hallucination hallucinated by a hallucination.

Honoring the mystery that is me (and you)

In 1977 I spent two weeks in India with a guru, Charan Singh. At that time visitors could spend up to three months at Dera Baba Jaimal Singh in the Punjab, soaking up the mystico-spiritual vibes gratis.

Flying off from the Amritsar airport to return home, via Delhi, I remember looking out of my window seat at the majestic Himalaya mountains, saying to myself, "I don't want my thoughts to be mine anymore, but yours."

I was a devoted disciple back then. I still am. What's changed is the meaning I give to yours. Thirty years ago it meant the guru; today it points to mystery.

This, actually, is entirely in accord with Charan Singh's teaching, for he said, "May your love of the form culminate in the love of the formless." It's a natural progression. Really, an inevitable one.

For what we know, no matter how much, is so much less than what there is.

Here each of us is, one of six billion people on an insignificant planet circling an average star that comprises just one of two hundred billion or so stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of a hundred billion or so galaxies in a universe that extends far beyond what can be observed, and could well be just one of countless universes in a cosmos that has no end.

And yet many (if not most) think they've got it all figured out, because the Bible, Koran, Torah, Adi Granth, Vedas, or whatever, tells them so.

They don't know what life is, what consciousness is, what matter/energy is, or what anything is at the root of its really real reality, not to mention what any possible metaphysical existence may consist of. Worse, they don't know that they don't know—or at least aren't willing to admit it to themselves.

I am. Now. That's why the sentiment of my Amritsar airport takeoff moment is still with me. I've just extended yours to encompass the mystery of what I, and you, and everything else in existence is.

Of which I'm clueless. Happily so.

I no longer feel that I have to fly halfway around the world to honor a sacred impulse. The mystery that is me provides worshipful opportunities aplenty.

In my previous three posts I've been equating meaninglessness with mystery. Makes sense, doesn't it? If I knew the Meaning of It All, there wouldn't be any mystery to the cosmos. And there's a lot. So, how to honor meaninglessness?

By not being meaningful. Usually this is considered to be undesirable. I say something to a companion and am told, "I have no idea what you mean." Communication failure! I try again, hoping to make sense this time.

However, if I'm facing in the direction of ultimate Mystery, my communication with what is uncommunicable should be as non-sensical as possible.

I may be speaking with myself. Or, not. Who knows? It's a Mystery. Either way, meaninglessness tunes me in, to some degree, with what lies beyond the meaning of the little I'm aware of now.

My meditation periods used to be deeply meaningful. Now my goal is different. I still enjoy mantra meditation—repeating a word (or words) to still my thought-stream. The mantra used to have a meaning for me. Mystery, though, deserves to be honored with meaninglessness.

D.T. Suzuki speaks of Buddhist mantra meditation as using a name ("Namu Amida Butsu") whose meaning consists in having no meaning. Essentially, the mantra becomes a koan.

Meditation, or "coming into the presence of the Buddha," thus gave way to the constant reiteration of the phrase as not always or necessarily referring to any definite objective reality, but merely as a name somehow beyond comprehension, or rather as a symbol standing for something indescribable, unpredictable, altogether transcending the intellect, and therefore suggesting a meaning beyond meaning.

In other words, meaninglessness.

Wu, Wu, Wu. Woo-woo. Wuuuuuuuuuuu. Whew!

My quest for the meaninglessness of life

I've spent most of my 58 years looking for the meaning of life. That was easy.

I've found lots of meanings in religion, family, friends, jobs, volunteer work, books, causes, charity, martial arts, television, nature, food, sex—you name it, I've probably found some sort of meaning in it.

But as I said before, and before that, I'm now on a quest for meaninglessness. That's tough. Everywhere I turn, there's meanings staring me in the face. And on one level I want them. I'm addicted to meaningfulness. It's what makes life, well, meaningful.

However, like James Park said in his intriguing, but not quite right on for me, cybersermon on "Looking for the Meaning of Life," there's a residual hollowness in all the meanings—even spiritual or religious—with which we desperately try to fill the perceived emptiness in our lives.

When we seek to make our own lives "meaningful", we might be struggling with two different sorts of meaninglessness. We can create many kinds of relative meanings within the assumed areas of meaningful life: money, achievement, love, marriage, children, enjoyment, & religion.

But even when we have fulfilled such meanings, we might still feel an ultimate hollowness, a spiritual or existential meaninglessness. This deeper meaninglessness is not overcome by any of the relative meanings we are able to create or achieve. Ultimate meaning comes only as a gift —independent of whatever relative meanings we can achieve.

Basically, I don't disagree. Park's endpoint, though, is "the removal of existential meaninglessness, not the attainment of any specific meanings." Myself, I'm drawn toward that very existential meaninglessness.

I guess you could call that my new meaning in life. Which, logically, sort of undermines the quest for meaninglessness.

But, hey, complete consistency isn't my goal. When you're trying to go beyond meanings, you've got to expect that some (or a lot) of paradox and confusion will pop up along the way.

Here's what isn't confusing to me: when you pull on an ultimate meaning thread, trying to figure out what the end is attached to, it always comes back loose in your hand.

This isn't true of relative meanings. They may be circular—this depends on that which depends on something else—but at least you have a sense of firm connectivity.

Yesterday my daughter gave birth to her first child, Evelyn Elizabeth Vos, reportedly the absolutely cutest baby that has ever existed in the history of Earth (I believe my daughter, even without having seen any photos yet).

I am the father of Celeste; she is the mother of Evelyn; and so the chain of meaningful relationships goes, without end (since anyone without a relationship to another human doesn't exist).

This is the sort of "emptiness" Buddhists speak of —an interdependence in which everything is connected.

There's another sort of emptiness though, the ultimate metaphysical, philosophical, scientific, spiritual, or mystical variety (ultimate truth-seeking comes in quite a few flavors).

Even when it seems that you've come to a pinnacle of understanding, a Mystery void lies beyond.

"God created the heavens and the earth." Who created God?

"Superstrings form the structure of time and space." What forms superstrings?

"It's possible to experience union with the oneness of existence." How would you ever know it?

Go ahead, try to imagine any meaningful statement about ultimate reality, or any meaningful experience of it, without someone (like me) being able to say, "And behind that is…what?"

The question mark points to the meaninglessness that lies just beyond the furthest extent of human meanings. It isn't to be feared. It's real. And it's not going away.

Ever.

So why not embrace it? Of course, that's impossible. But we can turn in its direction, setting our compass heading for Meaningless Mystery, experiencing with wide-eyed interest the scenery along the way, knowing that the ultimate destination won't ever be reached.

It's funny. The past three posts now, I've started off intending to say something that I never get to. Maybe next time. Maybe not.

Really meaningful meaning, I seem to be learning, is always around the next bend. Since I never catch up to it, I'm more comfortable seeing it as "meaninglessness" now.

And that's become the most meaningful thing to me.

Boundless existence—the backdrop to life’s meaning

Boundless existence. Can you sense it? Can you think about it? Can you relate to it?

No, no, and no. So says Milton K. Munitz in his provocative book, "Does Life Have a Meaning?" I thoroughly enjoyed this short (114 page) exploration of one of the deepest questions we all struggle to answer.

This was the last book Munitz, a distinguished emeritus professor of philosophy, wrote before he died. It's profoundly philosophical, but there's as much of Munitz, the man, between the covers as Munitz the academic philosopher.

It's obvious that he wrestled with the mystery of existence throughout most of his life. I'd read an earlier book of his on that very subject. I liked "Does Life Has a Meaning?" more, because here Munitz persuasively describes how "existents" like you and me relate to boundless "existence."

Short answer: in no way at all. Boundless existence has nothing to do with the things that exist within it—existents.

The awareness of Boundless Existence consists in dwelling on the basic fact that Boundless Existence is totally without properties, that it is utterly unintelligible, that it lacks any materials or powers of its own, that it does not have any concern or interest of one sort or another, conscious or otherwise, that might affect positively or negatively, or contribute in any way to, the character and achievability of various types of meanings in the lives of human existents.

The consequence for our lives are the consequences of having this awareness of the unique "character" of Boundless Existence—the fact that it has no character or properties of its own! It is this realization that is of great import-ance to us.

That passage may sound intellectual. Actually, what Munitz is gesturing toward is anything but. It's the least intellectual no-thing in existence. Because there's no way you can wrap your mind, your emotions, your senses, or any other faculty around Boundless Existence.

How could you? It's boundless. The closest we can come to it is through an awareness of profound wonder that existence exists. Boundless existence is simply That. There's no What to it—none at all.

To become aware of Boundless Existence calls for entering a different mode of experience. It is not reached by a leap of faith. Nor does it consist in a type of access that affords a special source of knowledge It is simply a wholly unique mode of awareness that reveals a different level of Reality from that which comes from observation and the use of concepts of any sort.

I can't tell whether Munitz' awareness of Boundless Existence is anything like my own. However, I resonate with his words—which point toward a empty wordlessness that is utterly unlike any experience we could have of this world, or any other world.

I've looked into that void and it has terrified me. I called it "non-existence," but I might as well have termed it Boundless Existence. Each is a nothingness that has no contact with the something that I am, and hope to continue to be.

Since it is devoid of all properties, Boundless Existence is another way of interpreting and sanctioning the use of the concept of "Nothing."

In just about every mystical tradition that I'm aware of, that's the final terminus of the spiritual path: Nothing. The ultimate beyond—formless, nameless, boundless, timeless, everything-and-anything-less.

You reach the right hand of God, you embrace Buddha nature, you enjoy the unveiled visage of Allah, you achieve union with divine light and sound. And yet…beyond all that, is That.

Boundless existence. The floor upon which everything else rests, yet never is sensed in any fashion (because then it'd just be another thing). Like Munitz, I often feel that I'm aware of it.

But never when I try to be. It's like a unseen presence that flits away on any attempt at closer inspection. Ah, there! The lightest possible grasp is the only way to feel that you're coming close to getting a grip on it.

There's a lot more to say about this unsayable awareness. I might give it a go in another post or two. For now I'll end with how Munitz answers his question: Does life have a meaning?

No. There isn't a meaning.

At the very beginning of this book, I quoted the remark Wittgenstein makes in his Tractatus that "the solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem."

…The notion of the meaning to life—that it is in some way singular, ultimate, or all-encompassing—is a mirage and wholly gratuitous.

…There are meanings of one sort or another in every life of every human existent.

…The awareness of Boundless Existence as a dimension of Reality ("the world") in which we live, has its own distinctive consequence in making the problem of life vanish.

…The problem vanishes insofar as one has an awareness of the situation of the lives of individual human existents "in" Boundless Existence, and that since Boundless Existence is Nothing, Emptiness, then in this respect life has no meaning either.

But stop! Don't commit suicide! Wait for Munitz' final conclusion. It brings back meaning into life.

Because it's within our power to find meaning wherever and however we choose. In typing a blog post. In drinking a glass of wine. In watching an episode of "Dancing With the Stars." All of which I'm either experiencing at this moment, or just about to.

Boundless Existence, the ultimately ultimate reality, doesn't give a rip. There's no meaning in Boundless Existence because there is nothing at all in Boundless Existence. That's why it's boundless. And existence.

Munitz says, and I agree with him, that our lives are meaningful in whatever fashion we make them. You won't find the meaning of life "in some preassigned cosmic or divine source and authority."

Interactions with other existents—people, places, things, pets, nature, whatever—are what provides meaning for us. We can't interact with Boundless Existence, which has nothing in common with what is commonly called "God."

So it's up to us. Entirely.

Munitz cautions against disengaging from everyday life and withdrawing "into a focused, exclusive, meditative absorption into the wholly featureless character of Boundless Existence."

Rather, he says, we should let an intensified awareness of Boundless Existence (it's "emptiness") serve as the backdrop for our various worldly interactions.

Interestingly, the only quasi-spiritual quotation in his book, so far as I recall, is this quotation from the Zen Patriarch Hui-Neng in a footnote:

"The capacity of mind is broad and huge, like the vast sky. Do not sit with a mind fixed on emptiness.

If you do you will fall into a neutral kind of emptiness. Emptiness includes the sun, moon, stars, and planets, the great earth, mountains and rivers, all trees and grasses, bad men and good men, bad things and good things, heaven and hell; they are all in the midst of emptiness.

The emptiness of human nature is also like this."

Beneath buckets of thought, a formless thinking pool

Taoism shuns thoughts, while adoring thinking. Flowing along further with Thomas Cleary’s Taoist Meditation, a focus of my previous post, here’s some additional Taoist sentiments.

Thinking about the Way is correct; thinking about things is error. The Way is inherent in us; when you think about the Way inherent within us, thinking itself is the Way…Thinking is a door of entry into the Way, whereas thoughts are roots of obstruction of the Way.

“I think, therefore I am.” Cogito ergo sum. As noted before, Descartes had this much right. If he’d stopped with his Meditations at this point in his philosophizing, who could argue with him?

Thinking, in the Taoist (and Cartesian) sense of consciousness without thoughts, is the root of who we are. Prior to a thought is…something. Undefined, murky, elusive, yet marvelously aware.

The Great Way is formless; the Universe is the Way with form…There is nothing in the world but one mind. Stirring thoughts create all objects. If thoughts are not produced, objects are spontaneously gone. When you thoroughly examine stirring thoughts, thoughts too are empty and silent. So we know there is nothing lost when deluded and nothing gained when enlightened, because the true mind not dwelling on anything neither increases nor decreases.

I spend some meditation time every day looking into a well. A deep well. Could even be a bottomless well. Not only that, very possibly it has no sides either. Can’t be sure. Haven’t plumbed its depths yet, nor its circumference.

Closing my eyes, darkness. Stopping thoughts (even for a moment), emptiness. And yet, there’s a thinking-rope that connects it all: the depths, the thoughts, the awareness.

Out of the dark pool of consciousness comes a thought. It jumps into a bucket of cognition and is raised to the surface, where I peruse it. Bucket after bucket, thought after thought, attention stays concentrated on what emerges from the mysterious dark pool.

Our real nature is spiritual and most subtle; when thoughts stir it flies off, invisible. If you want to stabilize it, you must look into the source…Just let there be uncovered openness above the stabilized mind and groundless vastness below the stabilized mind. Old habits dissolve, new habits are not created; not bound or obstructed by anything, you get out of the net of the world.

Not so easy to do as to say, though. That uncovered openness and groundless vastness is so damn unsettling. I’m used to occupying myself with a discrete job: hauling up the buckets, then lowering them again to pick up another interesting thought.

When I try to slippery slide my way straight down the thinking rope, I get close to the formless pool. Dipping my toe in feels good. Further submerged, even better. But sinking totally below the surface…difficult to do. Some part of me keeps getting caught on a rising thought bucket. Up I go again.

Better remind myself of the Taoist diving instructions.

As soon as you notice a thought arise, immediately extinguish it; arrest thoughts as they arise, in order to make your mind peaceful and quiet.

Next, even though you may not obviously have any obsessions, still floating, wandering, random thoughts are also to be extinguished.

Work diligently day and night, never giving up for a moment; but only extinguish the stirring mind, do not extinguish the shining mind.

Disappear into the empty mind; do not disappear into the possessive mind.

Do not dwell on any thing and the mind will be stable.

This method is mysterious, with benefits that are very profound. Unless you already have affinity for the Way and have undivided faith in it, you cannot really appreciate it.

Religion asks us to have faith in something. Taoist faith, mystical faith, spiritual faith—this is faith in nothing. Which could turn out to be everything. But until all the somethings go, the nothing that could be everything hides around the thing-corner.

Views of person and self are certainly thoughts, but so are views of attachment to religion, and these must be eliminated too.

…Noncontrivance means not musing or mulling. Though you may act in the midst of love, desire, anger, accumulation, gain, and loss, be always uncontrived.

Even when involved in things, be always unconcerned.

If you concentrate totally, moreover, clarify your mind and purify your will, nourish your energy and make your spirit complete, you will drift into the land of freedom and enter the village of nothing-whatsoever.

…It is all a matter of making space the place you store your mind, using abstruse silence as the place you rest your spirit.

There’s plenty of room in the cosmos’ maxi-storage center. They say it’s easy to find. Just scoot straight down the thinking rope. When you reach the end, let go. And do what comes naturally.

In quiet sitting, whether or not there is a specific process, you should not cling to form…This is called drawing a snake with legs on it; you will bring trouble on yourself.

When we look into the source of this problem, we find it can be attributed to one’s own fixation, inflexibility, and habituation to biased views.

…Practicing the Way is cultivating and nurturing the Way of nature, the natural course.

Sounds easy. Just erase those legs on the snake.

When nothing is something: God

In my last post, I focused on a plagiarized passage that I found in a book published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas. What’s more interesting and significant than the plagiarism, though, is what this misquoted quotation from W.T. Stace points toward:

Nothing. Which he, along with many other mystics and mystically inclined writers, equates with God.

Even the plagiarist, J.R. Puri, seems to agree. For after he steals Stace’s words to speak of a state of pure consciousness that has no empirical content other than itself, consciousness aware of consciousness, Puri says:

And this self-realization is often eventually spoken of as God-realization.

In “Mysticism and Philosophy” Stace himself says this after the passage that I quoted previously:

Since the experience has no content, it is often spoken of by the mystics as the Void or as nothingness; but also as the One, and as the Infinite. That there are in it no particular existences is the same as saying that there are no distinctions in it, or that it is an undifferentiated unity. Since there is no multiplicity in it, it is the One. And that there are no distinctions in it or outside it means that there are no boundary lines in it between anything and anything. It is therefore the boundless or the infinite.

The paradox is that there should be a positive experience which has no positive content — an experience which is both something and nothing.

In Robert K.C. Forman’s book about Meister Eckhart that contains the plagiarized passage, Forman says that for Eckhart the birth of God’s “son” within the soul is a Birth of emptiness within. Eckhart says:

The soul should give Birth to nothing inside herself, if she wishes to be the child of God in whom God’s Son shall be born—in her nothing should be born.

More Eckhart on the same theme:

It appeared to a man as in a dream—it was a waking dream—that he became pregnant with Nothing like a woman with child, and in that Nothing God was born, He was the fruit of nothing. God was born in the Nothing. Therefore he says: “He arose from the ground with open eyes, seeing nothing.”

Below Forman summarizes Eckhart’s core mystic thesis that nothing needs to be done to realize God; what is needful is to undo one’s preoccupation with things and thoughts.

As we have seen, for Eckhart God shares a ground with the soul’s ground, and He has so shared it since man’s preexistence. But in “ordinary” experience, in which man is attached to various cognitive objects, the soul attends to the powers and through them to the external world.

As a result, his thoughts bubble incessantly, and what he perceives as “his” needs enthrall his attention. Activities cover over this place “like a mist over the sun.” By looking in the wrong direction, outward instead of within, the religious “overlooks” this “place” within himself, and hence attends not to God but to the creaturely.

…God is the nothing, is in the nothing, and it is God who is “born” when one is “pregnant” with nothing.

Pretty darn simple. And scientific, the way I look at it. The great mysteries that science has not yet been able to fathom are existence, life, and consciousness. The roots and nature of each are hidden in the depths of…who knows? For we human would-be mystery-unravelers are conscious, existent, and alive.

We’re trying to unravel what we are, a snake swallowing its own tail proposition.

So, as I mentioned before, for many years I’ve enjoyed the plagiarized passage in Puri’s book because it points to the ultimate mystery: me. And you. Each of us is a bit of the grand cosmic Mystery that we’re trying to understand.

It makes sense that we start with what we’re already in direct contact with, existent living consciousness, rather than some distant God. And if unity is at the root of it all, then “us” is going to be the same as “cosmos” anyway.

What bothers me about J.R. Puri, apart from his plagiarizing, is that he shies away from the implications of Stace’s statement that consciousness empty of empirical content is identical with the One—God.

His devotion to the RSSB teachings, which emphasize the necessity of a guru for god-realization, causes him to say a few pages later:

The real object of human love must be the Perfect, the Absolute. And it is through such love that salvation can be attained… But—and it is a crucial but—the all-pervasive, formless entity of God cannot be the object on which our feelings can be fixed or attached.

And what cannot be within the range of “feeling” cannot be within the scope of love. Indeed, for such an entity we cannot be sure even of His existence, let alone His love or worship.

…The master [guru] is the manifest form of the Lord, and it is the manifest form that can be the object of love. And if God can only be realized through love, the master is an indispensable link for God-realization.

Huh? On page 59 Puri said that the self-realization of pure consciousness is equivalent to God-realization. That is, the ultimate reality often called “God” is realized by achieving a state of inner emptiness in which nothing is present but the ground of being—the One.

Yet on page 90 he says that emotional attachment to a particular form of God, the guru, is essential. Actually, Eckhart and many other introvertive mystics (such as Plotinus) taught that attachment to material or mental forms is not only inessential for higher understanding, but an insurmountable hurdle.

A main reason I’ve soured on the RSSB approach to meditation is that it takes such a roundabout route. The meditator’s goal is to unite his or her consciousness with the formless One. But getting there supposedly is facilitated by filling one’s mind with thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and imaginings of the guru’s physical form.

That never made much sense to me. Now it makes no sense at all. I’m too old to take roundabout detours. I very much want to know ultimate reality (assuming it is knowable). The shortest and quickest likely way—that’s for me.

I often think about the very first sentence in my book about Plotinus, “Return to the One.” This line flowed easily from my typing fingertips. Maybe I should have stopped right there and not written another word.

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.

Puri would have us look for our self in the guru’s mind and body. I’m with Stace, Eckhart, Forman, and Plotinus: the One will be realized by becoming the one we truly are, not someone else.

Wu is the way

Yesterday Laurel and I enjoyed a pleasant coffee house conversation with David, a fellow churchless Salem resident who happened upon this blog. He emailed me a while back and we finally got together to chat about matters both mystical and material.

During deep “what’s it all about” talks like the one we had, I find it as interesting to hear what comes out of my mouth as what others have to say. Sometimes I spout out sentiments that surprise me, because if someone else were to utter them, I’d be inclined to think claptrap.

For example, I told David and Laurel, “More and more I’m wondering if there is any meaning-of-life problem that needs to be solved. Maybe my only problem is that I keep thinking there is a problem.”

As soon as those words left my lips I heard New Age platitude! echoing in my self-critical brain. Well, it could have just been the triple latte talking. Nonetheless, I do often say to myself, “Wu is the way.”

Wu-wei is the Taoist term for effortless doing. For most of us, acting takes action. But the Taoist ideal is wei-wu-wei: action without action (“wu” is a negative; “wei” means act or do).

David shared some fascinating stories about his thirty-odd years of spiritual journeying. He’s bounced back and forth between doing the Eastern thing, then the Western thing. Mystical experiences have come his way whichever side of the philosophical continental divide he was on.

Almost always, he said, those experiences were separate from the teachings he was studying or involved with at the moment. Something universal seemed to be what touched him, not a particularized manifestation of higher reality: Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Jehovah, or whatever.

So now David is convinced that dogmas and theologies, as well as the organizations that promulgate them, stand between us and whatever truth may lie beyond the physical. These aren’t roads to reality; they’re barriers.

Remove all that and you’re left with just the Wu Way—the non-existent path that appears before you when there is nowhere else to go.

I think I’m on it right now. And when I stop thinking that, I’ll really be on it.

The key non-travel tip, according to wiser minds than my own, is keeping to the Wu Way when there is both something to do and nothing to do. I mean, it’s a lot easier to do nothing when you’re motionless than when you’re moving.

I’ve revealed that there isn’t much to reveal about my mystical experiences. However, if I dredge my memory back to when I was nine or ten, I can come up with a comic book-related story about what, if I stretch the definition of “mystical experience” to bursting, perhaps could qualify.

At an early age I had a vast comic book collection. That’s mostly what I spent my allowance on each week: those marvelous 10 cent windows into other worlds.

At my mother’s urging, I sold boxes and boxes of my comics for $50 (which now certainly would be worth hugely more), and bought, at my mother’s urging, a Civil War era rolltop desk. So the comics are gone now. All gone.

Except for a few memories. The most distinct is of a page that showed a band of travelers in a long-forgotten Earth era standing on the shore of an sea that stretches beyond the horizon. I can’t recall what sort of adventure they were on, but it was vitally important that they cross the sea.

Without a boat, how? They’re perplexed. Until one of them says, “The water is vanishingly near freezing. Any sort of disturbance will change it to another state.” He picks up a stone from the beach. Throws it into the water.

And, flash, the sea changes to ice. I can still see the frozen ripples radiating out until there was ice from beach to horizon. Then, dressed in their animal skins, the adventurers walk out onto the frozen surface.

D.T. Suzuki relates the story of a Zen adept:

My first koan was ‘Wu’. Whenever a thought was stirred in my mind, I lost no time in keeping it down, and my consciousness was like a cake of solid ice, pure and smooth, serene and undisturbed.

And that of another:

I was returning from an out-of-town trip and was about to climb a flight of stone steps, when the solid ice that had been clogging my brain for so long unexpectedly melted away, and I forgot that I was walking on the roadway.

Who also said, about his state before that experience:

My mental condition then was like the reflection of the moon penetrating the depths of a running stream the surface of which was in rapid motion, while the moon itself retained its perfect shape and serenity in spite of the commotion of the water.

There’s Wu in all of this, I’m sure of it. It’s just so damn difficult to discern that nothing. The more I look for it, the less evident it is. Eventually, I suspect, it’s going to dawn on me that I should just stay put and let that S.O.B. come to me.

God wants to be forsaken

My churchlessness and agnosticism is adored by God. Yes, God looks upon me with more favor than all those worshipful Christians, Muslims, Jews and other religious types.

For God wants to be forsaken. Happy to oblige, my friend. It’s a pleasure to comply with the divine will.

I learned about what God wants from Meister Eckhart, the German theologian and mystic. He’s got some excellent doctrinal credentials, chief among them being accused of heresy by Pope John XXII.

You know that a Catholic is pointing toward the truth when he’s branded a heretic. So we need to take seriously the advice Eckhart proffered in one of his sermons.

Of course, it sounds astonishing to say that the soul should forsake God, but I assert that it is more important for the soul to forsake God to attain perfection than it is for the soul to forsake creatures, or all will be lost.

The soul must exist in a free nothingness. That we should forsake God is altogether what God intends, for as long as the soul has God, knows God, and is aware of God, she is far from God.

Now, it isn’t easy to understand Eckhart. He recognized that himself, concluding another sermon in this fashion.

Whoever has understood this sermon, I wish them well. Had no one been here, I would still have had to preach it to this collecting-box. There are some poor folk who return home and say, “I wish to sit down, to eat my bread and to serve God.” But I say by the eternal truth that these people shall remain in error and can never attain what those others attain who follow God in poverty and in exile. Amen.

D.T. Suzuki, a teacher of Zen, explains that for Eckhart “God” and “Godhead” are “as different as earth is from heaven.” Godhead is empty of everything that can be known, perceived, understood, comprehended. So, says Suzuki, to Eckhart pure nothing “is the highest point at which God can work in us as he pleases.”

With him God is still a something as long as there is any trace of movement or work or of doing something. When we come to the Godhead, we for the first time find that it is the unmoved, a nothing where there is no path to reach. It is absolute nothingness; therefore it is the ground of being from whence all beings come.

If this isn’t unclear enough, here are some additional Meister Eckhart quotations that have the delicious effect of overturning our unduly stable metaphysical apple cart.

But I say that if someone perceives something in God and gives it a name, then that is not God. God is above names and nature.

Taking leave of God for the sake of God is the greatest act of renunciation that someone can make.

Therefore we ask God to free us from “God” so that we may be able to grasp and eternally enjoy truth where the highest angels, the fly and the human soul are all one—in that place where I desired what I was and was what I desired.

Your soul should lose all her mental nature and should be left non-mental, for if you love God as “God,” as “Spirit,” as “Person,” as “Image,” then all this should be abandoned. You must love him as he is a non-God, a non-Spirit, a non-Person, a non-Image.

You are never better placed than when you are in complete darkness and unknowing.

Ah, thank you Meister Eckhart. I’m reassured that my meditation is going just fine.

Hey, God, shut up! No more conversations

Like a good lapsed Catholic, I will begin by confessing that I’ve never read “Conversations with God.” Nor any other of Neale Donald Walsch’s follow-up books (whatever or whoever God is, “wordy” certainly defines the supreme being).

I have, however, perused brief articles such as I found in a New Connexion issue that I’d picked up at a natural food store, needing some reading material to accompany my lunch of whole wheat pizza.

In a “What Does God Really Want?” interview, Walsch clues us in to the meaning of life as revealed by the Big Man Upstairs. Who, to encapsulate Walsch’s core message, is you. And me. And Neale Donald Walsch. Though a few of us get to enjoy million dollar book deals as a result of our identity with God, and most of us don’t, sadly.

Appealingly, I learned that God doesn’t require anything of us. Not meditation, or study, or anything else. Right now each of us is experiencing our own divinity. If we don’t know this, it’s because we aren’t willing to have the experience.

Somewhat paradoxically, however, Walsch says there are tools and techniques with which people can move themselves into the actual experience of God. Conveniently, these will be described in his latest book, “The Holy Experience.”

The article says that sample chapters are available for free on Walsch’s website. I couldn’t find any mention of them, but lots of unfree stuff for sale was easy to locate.

Well, the New Connexions piece told me that the central thought of “What God Wants” ($14 direct from Walsch and Co., $14.95 at Amazon) is “contained in chapter 13, and that chapter is a series of blank pages.” Thus I suggest saving your money. Why pay for nothing when that’s available gratis?

I may sound unduly critical of Walsch. Actually, I think he’s on to something. Fame and fortune, certainly. Yet also more than that. Heck, anyone who raises the righteous ire of true believing Christians earns kudos from me (some criticisms here and here). And positively, the notion that God speaks to each of us equally appeals to my churchless soul.

Yet what intrigues me the most is the question of what happens when God stops yapping away. Walsch whipped out a yellow pad and started scribbling when he began to get inspirations from God. Which, he’d be the first to admit, means from himself. (But calling his book “Conversations with Me” would have put a crimp in his publishing deal, for sure).

In the same vein, I’ve had plenty of conversations with God. I’m having one right now, in fact. I search my consciousness for inspiration, get a flash of insight, and transmit it through my touch-typing fingers to a computer screen, where it soon will be uploaded to this blog so that others may admire my divinity.

We all do this. There’s no reason to believe that Walsch has any special connection with truth that anyone else lacks. He’s a skilled marketer and purveyor of feel-good New Age platitudes. I’ve got a certain talent for communicating my own platitudes. So do we all.

The conversations we have with ourselves are interesting, no doubt. They keep me blogging away most days. But are the words inside my head, the ones that I speak to myself in a recursive blabfest that has lots of entertainment value but previous little wisdom, what I’m really after?

If so, I’ve got it.

If not, I don’t. And that’s a lot closer to how I feel.

God, my good friend whom I’m told is me, you need to learn how to shut the fuck up. Once in a while, at least. Now I know that we’ve been having this conversation for a long time. Ever since I started meditating in 1969, right?

I think it’s time to take our relationship to the next level. By which I mean, you need to take a hike. Adios, amigo. It was nice knowing you. Sayonara. One of us is unnecessary, and since I have a special fondness for me, I’m letting you go. Not that I believe you’ll depart my cranium immediately. This likely will be a gradual goodbye.

Walsch’s philosophy, says one of his critics, basically is monistic. Sounds right to me. There’s only one thing going on in the cosmos. Let’s call this “God.” And take this to a logical conclusion. Conversations require two to verbally tango. So who is talking to who when we’re conversing with God?

Probably Walsch has an answer to this question. But no matter. To my increasingly monistically inclined mind it’s wrong. The whole idea of questions and answers, speakers and listeners, words and silence, seems off-base when it comes to the ultimate.

I can’t prove that assertion. Or even clarify it. It’s just what God told me to say. That son of a gun is still hanging around.

Not seeing is believing

Andrew Sullivan offers up another alternative to “I’ll believe it when I see it” and “I’ll see it when I believe it.”

In his TIME essay, “When Not Seeing is Believing,” Sullivan points toward “I’ll believe it when I don’t see it” as the preferred theology for the 21st century. Or any century in which fundamentalism threatens to rend the fabric of secular civilization.

How, after all, can you engage in a rational dialogue with a man like [Iranian president] Ahmadinejad, who believes that Armageddon is near and that it is his duty to accelerate it? How can Israel negotiate with people who are certain their instructions come from heaven and so decree that Israel must not exist in Muslim lands?

Equally, of course, how can one negotiate with fundamentalist Jews who claim that the West Bank is theirs forever by biblical mandate? Or with Fundamentalist Christians who believe that Israel's expansion is a biblical necessity rather than a strategic judgment?

There is, however, a way out. And it will come from the only place it can come from--the minds and souls of people of faith. It will come from the much derided moderate Muslims, tolerant Jews and humble Christians.

The alternative to the secular-fundamentalist death spiral is something called spiritual humility and sincere religious doubt. Fundamentalism is not the only valid form of faith, and to say it is, is the great lie of our time.

I like Sullivan’s embrace of spiritual doubt. He says, “If God really is God, then God must, by definition, surpass our human understanding…There will always be something that eludes us. If there weren’t, it would not be God.”

However, I feel that Sullivan goes further than is justified in claiming that God can be partially comprehended via Scripture, reason, religious authority, and our own experiences of the divine.

He doesn’t explain why, if this is so, religions are all over the theological map. It’s difficult to discern much agreement between Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism on what It is all about.

So I wish that Sullivan had left off the last two words of, “If God is beyond our categories, then God can’t be captured for certain.” Give fundamentalism a dogmatic inch, and it’ll take an undoubting mile.

The tent of “I don’t know” can comfortably hold every person on Earth. But allow differing species of certainty to creep in under the flap and pretty soon the screeching and hollering will begin.

Infidel! Evil-doer! Pagan! Apostate! Devil-worshipper! Unbeliever!

It’s difficult to envision what a genuinely uncertain belief in God would look like, though. If doubt is the mainstay of a spiritual practice, what separates believers from the faithless?

Well, seemingly nothing. Which brings us all under the tent of unknowing, a nice place to hang out together.

The joy of nihilism

Nihilism has a bad rep. For many the word signifies anarchy, destruction, meaninglessness, bombs thrown by black-garbed acolytes of Nothing. (I copied these images from nihilist web sites; it’s nice not to have to worry about copyright laws; nihilists don’t sue, I assume.)

I have a “nihilism” wrist band. I don’t wear it very often, but when I do it gives me a good feeling when I glance down at it. Free. Independent. Open-minded. That’s what nihilism means to me.

I like the definition offered by the Catholic Encyclopedia: “a Nihilist is one who bows to no authority and accepts no doctrine, however widespread, that is not supported by proof.”

Well, I do bow to authority—if it’s garbed in a judge’s robe, police uniform, IRS agent suit, or such. However, if we’re speaking of religious authority then I am becoming more of a nihilist all the time. Proudly.

This morning I was reading Don Cupitt’s intriguing book, “After God: The Future of Religion.” Cupitt has some good things to say about spiritual nihilism.

It is very postmodern suddenly to realize that we no longer actually need roots, identity, stability, or a provenance. We can do without all those things. Me, I don’t want them anymore. I prefer to be without identity. I’d like to belong to no ethnic group, and to have no Other. They call me a nihilist: but I’m beginning to feel at ease, at home in nihilism.

A friend recently spoke about her churchless evolution. She said that after she stopped going to gatherings of her faith, there was a period during which she felt a sense of loss. Old beliefs were fading away. Old friends also, at least those whose friendship was conditioned on her remaining part of the religious fold (which means they weren’t genuine friends to start with).

The church newsletter kept coming in the mail each month. She’d look at it and feel some pangs. This and that was happening, meetings and celebrations that she used to enjoy being part of, and now she wasn’t. Then…

One day the newsletter came and she started to smile. And laugh. Glory, glory, free at last! Those old connections didn’t matter anymore. The past was past. Now is now. Not having a firm religious belief became joyful rather than problematic.

“Now I’m free to explore whatever sort of spirituality I want to,” she said. “I pick and choose from the spiritual smorgasbord, enjoying what is tasty to me.” She isn’t dining any more on what someone else has ordered for her. She’s trusting her own taste buds.

Nihilism comes from the Latin nihil, meaning “nothing.” Yet to me and my friend, having nothing sure to believe in doesn’t feel like an absence. It’s a warm, energetic, exciting presence of limitless possibility, of explorable territory, of untapped potential.

Cupitt speaks about three tricks, heritages of the old religions, that are worthy of being kept. One trick is “The Blissful Void.”

The Blissful Void is the trick of relaxing completely, slowing oneself and one’s passions down until the self is, as it were, dispersed into the fleeting insubstantial emptiness of all existence. You must learn to experience nihilism as levity, lightness. The strange unexpected happiness this brings is a wonderful deliverance from the fear of death, loss, and suffering.

So, as I see it, nihilism is far removed from meaninglessness. As this definition points out, it’s a rejection of blind faith, not a rejection of reality. It’s a commitment to the “nothing” that remains when dogmatism, authoritarianism, intellectualization, imagination, and rationalization are swept away.

Buddhism and Taoism say that this suchness is what’s really real. I think they’re on to something.

Or rather, nothing.

Adyashanti bursts my orgasmic bubble

Just as I predicted, I’ve been enjoying Adyashanti’s “Emptiness Dancing.” But I was disappointed when I read this morning that enlightenment isn’t going to be something like an infinitely extended orgasm.

Well, to be more precise Adyashanti left open at least a slight possibility that this could be the case. So I won’t let my hopes die entirely. He did say, though, that orgasmic enlightenment wasn’t his experience. And since his breakthrough occurred after 15 years of Zen meditation, I’ll take him at his word.

However, my experience of enlightenment was simply the demolition of everything that I thought it was going to be. And I have never met anyone who has truly and authentically awakened to the Truth who has ever said anything other than that.

I have never met a single person who has come back and said, “Adya, you know it’s pretty much like I thought it would be. They usually come back and say, “This is nothing like anything I thought it would be. And this is nothing like any of the spiritual experiences I have had before in my life, including experiences of bliss, love, union with the divine, or cosmic consciousness.”

Makes sense. I like how Adyashanti keeps emphasizing that experiences always are transitory—even mystical ones. So they aren’t what the genuine spiritual seeker is really looking for: enduring truth. A state of being, on the other hand, never ceases to be.

Like, I’ve always been aware of being whatever I am for as long as I’ve existed as a self-aware human being. Yet I’ve also had lots of experiences that have come and gone, most of which I’ve consciously forgotten.

So there’s the being that is the lasting me, and then there is the conglomeration of transitory experiences that I often (or usually) mistake for the entity that I am. My problem, says Adyashanti, is that I’ve never gotten in touch with awareness pure and simple.

Recognize that there is nothing that experiences this moment, but even that nothing is known and experienced. There is something mysterious that knows, something mysterious that experiences in this moment, but you can’t say what it is because, when you say what it is, it’s not that.

It’s closer, more immediate. As soon as you think about it, you see it’s not that thought. It’s before that thought. No description is necessary, so just rest on that edge, on the precipice, on the direct experience, directly feeling as though you do not exist and yet knowing that you do.

One thought about this mystery sets apart heaven and hell. Thought rips the unity into pieces to be analyzed by the mind. But silence unifies…Don’t get lost in thought or you miss your life. Just simply relax, and relax, and relax. It’s the simplest act of faith and trust.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

When there are no voices speaking in my head—my voices, crazily speaking to myself what I already know—everything falsely religious fades away. Where is Jesus when I’m not thinking about him? Where is Buddha, God, Allah, Tao, Guru? Dead and gone, along with all the other fantasies that have only as much reality as my mind gives them.

Silence. Stillness. Simply being what I am when I’m not busy pretending to be someone else. That’s when the wild real things start to appear. They shy away from pretension. They don’t like the company of hypocrisy.

The only way to enter silence is on its own terms. You can’t go there with something, only with nothing. You can’t be somebody, only nobody. Then entrance is easy. But this nothing is actually the highest price we ever pay. It’s our most sacred commodity.

We will give our ideas, our beliefs, our heart, our body, our mind, and our soul. The last thing that we’ll give is nothing. We hold on to our nothingness because that’s our most sacred commodity, and somewhere inside we know this.

Only the nothing enters the silence; that’s the only thing that gets in. The rest of what we are just bangs at the nonexistent door. As soon as you want something from the silence, you are moved outside of silence again.

Shhhuuuusssshhhh.

St. John of the Cross: “nothing, nothing, nothing”

This afternoon I came to appreciate the wisdom of St. John of the Cross’ emphasis on “nada, nada, nada.” And I didn’t even need to be given a koan by a Zen master. A worthy substitute, I can assure you, is trying to install a Linksys wireless router.

My old one had inexplicably stopped working. The new one wouldn’t start to work. My first call to India-based tech support led to a koanic download that supposedly would solve all my problems.

Nada. It didn’t.

What I kept getting, after dutifully connecting the router as instructed, was an error message that basically said, “We have been able to connect to the Internet. But your router is a mystery to us. We are unable to configure it because the installation program does not support this strange device we’ve encountered. Good luck, and goodbye.”

I’d bend down to stare at the router sitting under my wife’s desk. Yes, it was a brand new Linksys WRT54GS router, fresh out of the box, which I was trying to install via Linkys’ configuration program. The whole thing was a mystery. Just like God.

I took the path of hoped-for enlightenment so many have followed: I journeyed to India. Again. Via a toll-free number. This time my tech support guru led me through a manual install. It seemed to get the router working, but now my ThinkPad laptop couldn’t connect to it as I was able to before.

I had a sneaking suspicion that this might just possibly have something to do with the laptop falling off a TV table yesterday. Indeed, IBM tech support (in Atlanta) told me where the wireless hardware switch could be located. It’d been knocked to the “off” position.

Yet my wireless Internet connection was still nada. Nothing. A software problem was suspected. I tried to turn the software on. Nada. Nothing. I wasn’t able to perform a system restore, as IBM had suggested. Nada. Nothing. I was at my wit’s end—which doesn’t take long to reach when it comes to wireless computer mumbo-jumbo.

I gave up. I started composing a “help” message to IBM tech support, hoping to reach a more exalted level of software competence. I confessed my ignorance. I pleaded for a return call.

Then I glanced at the Wireless Network Connection icon. It was back to normal looking. I disconnected the modem cable. I was online! I had done nada. Nothing. Yet I was connected. Clearly, a message from the great god Nada in support of the Wu Project.

I had an overwhelming desire to get in touch with my inner nothing. An attitude of gratitude for getting my wireless Internet back. I took a nap. Nada for twenty minutes. Then I picked up a St. John of the Cross book and read some before I meditated. Not quite so much nada as with my nap. But a lot more nada than I’d experienced while working on the router problem.

Nothing can be a wonderful something. Doing nothing finally got my wireless connection working. Hopefully it’ll get my soul in good order also (assuming I have one).

This passage from St. John is from his creative tribute to nada, a sketch of the Ascent of Mt. Carmel.

To reach satisfaction in all
desire its possession in nothing.

To come to possess all
desire the possession of nothing.

To arrive at being all
desire to be nothing.

To come to the knowledge of all
desire the knowledge of nothing.

To come to the pleasure you have not
you must go by a way in which you enjoy not.

To come to the knowledge you have not
you must go by a way in which you know not.

To come to the possession you have not
you must go by a way in which you possess not.

To come to be what you are not
you must go by a way in which you are not.

Science shows God does not exist

Ah, excellent! More support for my Wu Project. Physicist Victor Stenger has concluded that “beyond a reasonable doubt the universe and life appear exactly as we might expect if there were no God.”

This quote is from the Amazon description of his forthcoming book, “God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist.” Provocative title. I’m stoked. Amazon has gotten my pre-order. Just need to wait for January 2007 to have my faithless faith invigorated.

Stenger came to my attention recently when I read a review of his “The Comprehensible Cosmos” in New Scientist. Since I found it difficult to comprehend even much of the one page review, I figured that I’d wait for Stenger’s next book—which appears to be less technical—than plow through this title.

I did appreciate this passage from Marcus Chown’s review, however:

The symmetries that lead to the laws of physics are exactly the same as those that would apply if the universe were completely empty. They are the symmetries of the void.

Wu! And…Whew! Great news. I’ve got this primal fear of non-existence, so it’s comforting to know that the something of this universe is founded on nothing. The seeming emptiness of the void, says Stenger, is the source of everything. Chown writes:

Something came from nothing, he [Stenger] says, because something is more stable than nothing. In the beginning, there was the void, governed by the laws of the void, but the void changed into something more structured—rearranged nothing, if you like—just like featureless water changing into crystalline ice because at low temperatures ice is more stable than water.

It’s nice to know that something is more stable than nothing. Hopefully this means that the something I am now won’t revert to a formless blob of nothingness after death. But if it does, the good news is that I won’t be around to worry about it.

What I find most inspiring about Stenger’s yet-to-be-published book is that science has found absolute no trace—nada, zilch, nicht—of God in the universe. This is the conclusion I’ve come to also, albeit from a more mystical perspective.

After thousands of years of people meditating, contemplating, praying, and otherwise searching for some demonstrable sign of God’s presence, the result is total absence. Zero verifiable evidence has been put on the religious table. All we have are subjective claims, not objective facts.

As Stenger says, this is just what you would expect if God does not exist. It is also just what you would expect if there were a reality beyond the physical that does not interact with materiality other than through the laws of nature.

Either way, religious worship is a crock. Almost certainly divinity never has, nor ever will be, found outwardly in a person, book, icon, or holy place. If it is to be found at all, it will be inwardly—in the depths of the unfathomable mystery that manifests as life, consciousness, existence.

Nothing is what we find when we look within. After thirty-five years of meditation I can testify to that. Yet this nothing may, repeat, may, be akin to, if not identical with, ultimate reality.

Such is the ageless message of great mystics. And it is entirely compatible with the message of the new physics. There’s no God out there. Perhaps, though, there is in here.

Take a browse around Victor Stenger’s website. I like his style. It’s refreshing to find a Professor Emeritus of Physics and Astronomy who also is an adjunct philosophy professor.

To find God, get off the mind road

Churches are big on mind roads. That’s what they want you to travel on. In the church’s theological car, of course. Propelled by faith that you’re eventually going to get to God. Driven by the savior, mediator, master, guru, or prophet who supposedly knows the territory.

Problem is, nothing travel-worthy is apparent apart from the belief that there is. That’s why it is a mind road, not a real road. The pavement is cobbled together from passages found in holy books, words heard from the mouths of holy teachers, images seen by eyes that have gazed upon holy places and icons.

Which are all in the mind of the believer. When the belief is gone, so is the mind road. Real roads aren’t so ephemeral. When I’m driving on I-5 from Salem to Portland, if I take my eyes off the road or allow my mind to daydream about a more pleasant activity, the road is still there.

Not so with a mind road. So the advice of the sincerest spiritual sages throughout the ages is to get off it, if you’re on one. As most people are. If you belong to an organized religion, you’re on a mind road. If you consider that you’re on a defined spiritual path, you’re on a mind road.

And it could be said that if you’re occupied with thinking about how to get off the dead end of an imaginary way to God, you too are on a mind road. “You” likely includes me as I write this, and you as you read this.

But there’s a big difference between some short ruts that lead straight into the wilderness of divine Mystery, and a four-lane freeway of theological speculation that goes on, and on, and on, leading nowhere but to Blind Faith.

Zen Buddhism is small on mind roads. Zen says that they don’t lead past the Gateless Barrier. I don’t know what this barrier is. If I did, I suppose I’d be beyond it. So I’ll stop traveling on my mind road and let Wu-men, a thirteenth century master of the Rinzai school, speak about another way.

“Mu” is Japanese. “Wu” is Chinese. The words roughly mean “without” or “have not.” Roughly is the operative adjective, as Wu-men explains.
-----------------------------

(From “The Gateless Barrier: the Wu-men Kuan,” translated and with a commentary by Robert Aiken)

A monk asked Chao-chou, “Has the dog Buddha nature or not?”
Chao-chou said, “Mu.”

Wu-men’s Comment:

For the practice of Zen it is imperative that you pass through the barrier set up by the Ancestral Teachers. For subtle realization it is of the utmost importance that you cut off the mind road. If you do not pass the barrier of the ancestors, if you do not cut off the mind road, then you are a ghost clinging to bushes and grasses.

What is the barrier of the Ancestral Teachers? It is just this one word “Mu”—the one barrier of our faith. We call it the Gateless Barrier of the Zen tradition. When you pass through this barrier, you will not only interview Chao-chou intimately.

You will walk hand in hand with all the Ancestral Teachers in the successive generations of our lineage—the hair of your eyebrows entangled with theirs, seeing with the same eyes, hearing with the same ears. Won’t that be fulfilling? Is there anyone who would not want to pass this barrier?

So, then, make your whole body a mass of doubt, and with your three hundred and sixty bones and joints and your eighty-four thousand hair follicles concentrate on this one word “Mu.” Day and night, keep digging into it. Don’t consider it to be nothingness. Don’t think in terms of “has” and “has not.” It is like swallowing a red-hot iron ball. You try to vomit it out, but you can’t.

Gradually you purify yourself, eliminating mistaken knowledge and attitudes you have held from the past. Inside and outside become one. You’re like a mute person who has had a dream—you know it for yourself alone.

Suddenly Mu breaks open. The heavens are astonished, the earth is shaken. It is as though you have snatched the great sword of General Kuan. When you meet the Buddha, you kill the Buddha. When you meet Bodhidharma, you kill Bodhidharma. At the very cliff edge of birth and death, you find the Great Freedom. In the Six Worlds and the Four Modes of Birth, you enjoy a samadhi of frolic and play.

How, then, should you work at it? Exhaust all your life energy on this one word “Mu.” If you do not falter, then it’s done! A single spark lights your Dharma candle.

Wu-men’s Verse:

Dog, Buddha nature—
the full presentation of the whole;
with a bit of “has” or “has not”
body is lost, life is lost.

The glory of being spiritually lost

If you feel like you’re spiritually lost, be thankful. Smile. Laugh. Dance. Your lucky star is shining brightly on you. You’re way closer to the mystery we call “God” than those who believe that they’re on a well-marked path to the divine.

There’s no such thing. I’m not confident of much when it comes to religion and spirituality. But I’m quite sure that the road to God doesn’t have any white lines down the middle of it. You can’t see, feel, hear, smell, or touch it. The surest way to know if you’re off the track is to say, “Ah, this is the way.”

The cosmos doesn’t reveal its ultimate secret—whatever that might be—so easily. If there was a road map to God, or a guide who could take a seeker there, this reliable spiritual direction finder would have risen above the many spurious claimants whose cacophonous urges to “Follow me!” make the world’s religious bazaar so noisy.

For about thirty years I believed that I’d found a singular path to the divine. I thought that Sant Mat, in the guise of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, had it all. A living guru who served as a guide. A map of the mystic territory to be traversed. A meditative technique to move you along.

When it dawned on me that I wasn’t getting anywhere, nor, by their reports, were any other of the many fellow disciples that I regularly conversed with, I faced some choices: continue on with my seemingly progressless path; search for a path that showed more promise in taking me where I wanted to go; or embrace the path of pathlessness.

I’ve settled on the last option. Both my heart and my mind say Yes, Yes, Yes to it. For how long they’ve been making this utterance, I can’t say. Maybe my whole life. I don’t know when I wrote these scribbled words that were on a piece of paper that fell out of “The Bijak of Kabir” when I picked the book up this morning.

Lost. Get more lost. Further lost. So lost that I’ll never be able to find even myself. So lost I can’t even find the meaning of “lost.” Darker. Deeper. Where the wild things roam. The place that I’ve always avoided because it’s the place that I know I have to go. One day. On death day. I’m afraid to look into that hole. It will swallow me. I want to be eaten alive. So I won’t die again. There’s no avoiding it. But it’s the easiest thing to miss. The obvious always is.

I can tell you, it’s devilishly difficult to become spiritually lost. I mean, utterly lost. I keep finding paths in the wilderness of my mind. In my daily meditation I frequently find myself saying: “God damn it, I’m still following some tracks!”

Even when I finally seem to be lost—what a joy—I eventually realize that I’ve been following a trail marked “Lost.” I’m still on my way to somewhere, not nowhere.

Reading a book about pathlessness isn’t the same as being there. But “The Bijak of Kabir” encourages me to keep on looking for the emptiness that has no entrances, no exits, no ground, no air, no walls, no floor, no anything. And no nothing.

Here are some thoughts that are attributed to this 15th century North India mystic who eschewed all religions and didn’t write a word.

Seek the bird’s, the fish’s path. Kabir says, both are hard. I offer myself to an image: the great being beyond boundaries and beyond beyond.

Heaven and hell are for the ignorant,
not for those who know Hari.
The fearful thing that everyone fears,
I don’t fear.
I’m not confused about sin and purity,
heaven and hell.
Kabir says, seekers, listen:
Wherever you are
is the entry point.

Pandit, you’ve got it wrong.
There’s no creator or creation there,
no gross or fine, no wind or fire,
no sun, moon, earth, or water,
no radiant form, no time there,
no word, no flesh, no faith,
no cause and effect, nor any thought
of the Veda. No Hari or Brahma,
no Shiva or Shakti, no pilgrimage
and no rituals. No mother, father
or guru there. Is it two or one?
Kabir says, if you understand now,
you’re guru, I’m disciple.

Remembering the empty, the easy,
a light broke out.
I offer myself to a being
based on nothing.

Drop family, drop status,
seek the nonexistent space,
destroy the shoot, destroy the seed,
reach the unembodied place.

Knowledge in front, knowledge in back,
knowledge right and left.
The knowledge beyond knowledge
is my knowledge.

Moving within limits: man.
Moving without limits: saint.
Dropping both limits and non-limits—
unfathomable thought.

In the wood where lions
don’t tread
and birds don’t fly,
Kabir ranges
in empty meditation.

Use the strength of your own arm,
stop putting hope in others.
When the river flows through your own yard,
how can you die of thirst?

They searched and searched, searched some more—
it just kept disappearing.
After all that search, when they couldn’t find it,
they gave up and said, “Beyond.”

Religious knowledge totals exactly zero

Zero: it never fails to astound me that this is the sum total of genuine religious knowledge accumulated throughout human history. There have been so many worshippers, so many devotees, so many seekers of divinity.

And the demonstrable metaphysical facts that have been accumulated from all of this effort? None. Absolutely none. There is not a single shred of objective evidence that reality consists of anything more than the universe we know now.

If there were, such a fact would have been trumpeted in banner headlines across every newspaper in the world. Core scientific theories would have had to be revamped. Possessors of this truth would have had a permanent seat on Oprah’s couch reserved for them.

Nonetheless, I’ll admit that religions meet many human needs. They give believers a sense of community, relief from anxiety concerning the unknown, an opportunity to engage in altruistic service, comforting rituals, and other benefits.

Yet none of this addresses the core religious quest: discerning the nature of God (or, for godless religions, of ultimate reality).

If we were to grade religions on their demonstrable metaphysical accomplishments, they’d get an “F.” In the arena of earthly achievements, I’d grant them a “C” (the Crusades, Inquisition, Islamic terrorism, and other negatives bring down their grade).

Virtually every religion, spiritual path, or mystic practice claims to know the truth about God or ultimate reality. Every teaching has it’s A, B, C’s down. For example, “There is (A) a personal God who (B) loves us and can be reached through (C) the Lord’s grace.”

The problem is, an X, Y, Z exists for every A, B, C: “There is (X) a universal impersonal power that (Y) is detached from creation and can be reached through (Z) meditative effort.”

What we have then, is an overarching religious equation that sums to precisely nothing:
(A + B + C +… ) – (X + Y +Z + …) = 0.

In other words, the purported truths cancel each other out. Another more radical way of considering this equation is that each of its terms also is zero, since every metaphysical statement is unproven and so lacks any truth value.

Regardless, I’m led to conclude that either nothing exists beyond the physical, or whatever exists is so ineffable as to be nothing that can be described or confirmed in worldly terms. My mind impels me to lean toward the first option, while my heart (and fear of nonexistence after death) makes me hope that the second option is true.

In either case, we’re left with a big fat religious zero. Nada. Zilch. Nicht. Nothing.

The only question is whether this nothing is really Nothing, or whether it is a reflection of the nature of Everything. That’s what my Wu Project is all about—trying to lay bare the essence of nothing.

It’s like trying to catch invisible butterflies with a net made out of the void. Decidedly challenging. And infinitely entertaining.

Let go. Then let go of letting go.

I’m attracted to simple spirituality. That’s probably because my mind is complex, like most people’s minds are. I need to balance myself out. Yin and yang.

So when I come across a believable one-sentence summation of spirituality, it catches my eye. And my heart. This is from Thomas Keating’s wonderful “Open Mind, Open Heart,” one of my favorite books.

I think it can be said that the essential point of all the great spiritual disciplines that the world religions have evolved is the letting go of thoughts.

Yes. On this Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Taoism can agree. (I’m not sure about Judaism, the most thought-obsessed religion). Or rather, the mystics of these traditions are in agreement. For they recognize that no thought, emotion, or perception can encompass the unfathomable mystery of ultimate reality, which many call “God.”

Keating advocates the practice of centering prayer. He says that this is different from mantra meditation, but in many respects it is similar. Keating says that the mental repetition of a word—“God,” “love,” “peace,” whatever appeals to you—is an act of intention, not attention.

That is, your goal isn’t to attend to the mantra, but rather you intend to unite with what lies beneath the contents of ordinary consciousness. As Voltaire said: God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. (Or maybe it was someone else who said this.)

Head for the center of yourself and you’ll find God. That’s the idea, for Keating and countless other mystics. He says:

Centering prayer is an exercise in letting go. That is all it is. It lays aside every thought. One touch of divine love enables you to take all the pleasures of the world and throw them in the wastebasket. The Diamond Sutra says it all: “Try to develop a mind that does not cling to anything.” That includes visions, ecstasies, locutions, spiritual communications, psychic gifts. These are not as valuable as pure consciousness.

I admire a Catholic priest who quotes the Diamond Sutra. I also admire Keating for his sensitivity to the games meditators play. As a long-time meditator myself, I know what he is talking about.

Letting go is tough enough. Letting go of letting go—that’s much tougher. But essential. I manage to stop thinking. Then a thought comes, “Wow! I’m not thinking!”

Oops.

Well, at least my intention is to let go of thoughts, which naturally includes theological dogma, metaphysical hypotheses, imagined higher powers, and all other mental machinations that draw me away from my center. And after letting go, I’d like to be able to let go of letting go.

To just be whoever I am when I’m not engaged in trying to be someone else.

Followers of fundamentalist religions and sects have an opposite intention. Their goal is to hold on. And more: to hold on to holding on. They only are interested in finding what they already believe to be true. If an astronomer puts a green cheese filter over the lens of his telescope, that’s how the moon will appear. Falsely.

Truth is found with open clear eyes. Yesterday I happened to glance down at the counter of a store where my wife had just bought a hat. A saying was taped to the wood: “You are lost the instant you know what the result will be.” Nice.

I’ve spent many years in an Indian mystic tradition where the guru is considered to be the end-all and be-all. Essentially, god in human form. I was told to distrust any spiritual realization that wasn’t in accord with the guru’s teachings. The result was set in stone, like the tablets of Moses. “Thou shalt experience X, Y, and Z.”

I’ve let go of those rigid presumptions. Now, I’d like to be able to let go of letting go. I can’t make that happen. That’d just be another form of clinging to an expectation. Keating says:

Trying dilutes the basic disposition of receptivity that is necessary for the growth of contemplative prayer. Receptivity is not inactivity. It is real activity but not effort in the ordinary sense of the word. If you want to call it effort, keep in mind that it is totally unlike any other kind of effort.

It is simply an attitude of waiting for the Ultimate Mystery. You don’t know what that is, but as your faith is purified, you don’t want to know. Of course, in a sense you are dying to know. But you realize that you can’t possibly know by means of any human faculty; so it is useless to expect anything. You don’t know and can’t know what you are waiting for.

Wu. We keep coming back to Wu.

Tuning in to religion-less religion

A few days ago I used the term “religion-less religion” in a "I'm working on my Wu" post. Over at the Yoga Loft, they’re asking, “See It Three Times, Is It More Than Coincidence?”

I don’t know. Could be a cosmic synchronicity. Could be a random happening. Could be something else. Regardless, I enjoyed what the Yoga Lofter had to say about religion-less religion. The first time this term came up was in a conversation with his or her mother.

We agreed that all the world's problems seem to stem from people trying to stick the concept of God into religion. So many wars, so much blood, so much ego, so much waste--all in the name of God.

Amen to that. This morning I picked up Meister Eckhart, the medieval Christian mystic, and read:

Also you should not wish to understand anything about God, for God is beyond all understanding. A master says: If I had a God that I could understand, I would not regard him as God.

If you understand anything about him, then he is not in it, and by understanding something of him, you fall into ignorance, and by falling into ignorance, you become like an animal since the animal part in creatures is that which is unknowing.

If you do not wish to become like an animal therefore, do not pretend that you understand anything of the ineffable God.

What then should I do?

You should sink your “being-you” into his “being-him,” and your “you” and his “him” should become a single “me” so that with him you shall know in eternity his unbecome “isness” and his unnameable “nothingness.”

Wu. We always come back to Wu.

I poked around Yoga Loft while I was there and also liked this post about “Allowing Ourselves to Be Penetrated.” Yes, guys, it’s OK. They’re mainly talking about life here.

I’m working on my Wu

Maui is a good place to work on my Wu Project. “Wu” is a Chinese term that means no, nothing, nada, negation, not. That pretty much describes me on the beach: a lump of nothingness that is content to do…nothing.

Except, what I almost always do. Think about the nothing that I’m doing. I mean, even when I’m just lying on my mat, staring blankly at the ocean, stuff is going on inside my head. I’m aware. I’m perceiving. And, I’m judging.

A cell phone rings a few feet away. I think, “Good god! Cell phones should be banned from the beach. Why does she have to talk to her friend now?”

A woman on a beach towel lights up a cigarette. I think, “She’s got children! Doesn’t she know how bad second-hand smoke is for them? Her doctor should give her a lecture.”

An overweight couple saunters by. “America, the land of obesity! They’re killing themselves with calories. Is it so tough to exercise and give up desserts? Come on, people.”

So, yeah, I’m doing nothing outwardly, but inwardly a whole lot of chatter is going on. That’s why I’ve been working on my Wu more assiduously today. “Wu,” after all, can be a mantra as well as a term.

Heck, anything can be a mantra. Om. Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna, Krishna, Hare, Hare. Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me. Juicy fruit. Banana. Whatever.

I’ve used several mantras over the almost forty years I’ve been meditating. I’ve found that the choice of sounds doesn’t matter, so I’ve become a believer in shorter is better. The anonymous author of “The Cloud of Unknowing” advised a one syllable mantra (though, as a medieval Christian, he didn’t use that term).

He favored “God.” To me, “Wu” is synonymous. It connotes mystery, via negativa, the nothingness from which somethingness emanates. But again, whatever. The only thing that matters, in my experience, is shutting down the mental chatter with a mantric smother. Then I feel much more in touch with what’s simply there, as contrasted with my complex commentary about what I’m perceiving as there.

Just a cell phone ringing. A woman talking to her friend.

Just a woman smoking a cigarette. Enjoying a vacation with her husband and children.

Just two people walking down the beach. Who happen to be hefty.

Wu, Wu, Wu. When I negate my thoughts, judgments, criticisms, and comments about what I’m perceiving on Napili Bay, what’s left is much closer to what is really there. As the Buddhists say, suchness. What is.

Last night Laurel and I walked into one of the Lahaina art galleries on Front Street. I overheard one of the staff explaining a painting to another couple. He was showing them how the artist had drawn faces that aren’t apparent until you realize that they are part of the ethereal sky, not the earthy landscape.

You know, the figure and ground sort of thing. I stared and stared at the painting, unable to see what the guy was talking about, until flash!, there the faces were. I was looking for them in the outline of a mountain, while that outline actually demarcated the faces in the sky.

This was a lot like my Wu work on the beach today. I found that when I was my normal thinking/judging/critical self, my perceptions were focused on me. Whatever I saw, it all came back to me.

People weren’t just people. They were objects of my praise, neutrality, or scorn. Waves weren’t just waves. They were objects that (at the moment) were too small for boogie boarding and, hence, useless to me.

But when the mantra was working, a sudden shift would occur. I’d simply observe while listening to “Wu, Wu, Wu,” rather than my thoughts. Things just were, rather than things that instead should have been this or that, because I’d prefer them so.

For me, spirituality has come down to changing how I relate to the world. I want to perceive reality as clearly as possible, not through the glass of my own prejudices, darkly. I don’t know how this happens, but I like what D.T. Suzuki says about “Wu” (in Japanese, “Mu”). In Zen practice “Mu” or “Wu” is used as a koan. “Has a dog the Buddha nature?” “Mu.”

Go figure it out, says the Zen master. Except you can’t think it out. Thinking won’t lead to a Zen-acceptable answer. Suzuki says that Mu literally means “no,” but when used as a koan the meaning doesn’t matter. It is just a meaningless sound from which meaning may eventually erupt.

This monotonous repetition of the sound “Mu!” will go on until the mind is thoroughly saturated with it and no room is left for any other thought. The one who thus utters the sound, audibly or inaudibly, is now completely identified with the sound. It is no more an individual person who repeats the “Mu!”; it is the “Mu!” itself repeating itself.

When he moves it is not he as a person conscious of himself but the “Mu!” The “Mu!” stands or sits or walks, eats or drinks, speaks or remains silent. The individual vanishes from the field of consciousness, which is now thoroughly occupied with the “Mu!”

Indeed, the whole universe is nothing but the “Mu!” “Heaven above, earth below, I alone am the most honored one!” The “Mu!” is this “I.” We now can say that the “Mu!” and the “I” and the Cosmic Unconscious—the three are one and the one is three.

When this state of uniformity or identity prevails, the consciousness is in a unique situation, which I call “consciously unconscious” or “unconsciously conscious.”

No concepts there. No dogmas there. No theologies there. All that is there is what is there. Sign me up for that religion-less religion.

An old koan rises from my past

So, yesterday there I am re-reading my long ignored copy of “Zen in the Art of Archery.” I turn a page and find a rent receipt from August 1968 stuck in the book.

College days. Beginning of my junior year at San Jose State. Had recently gotten back from Europe, where I’d spent the second semester taking classes in Zadar, Yugoslavia. I’d rented an apartment with a couple of other hippie potheads. That explains the reference to three cleaning deposits.

I idly turn the receipt over. Find some handwriting. Mine. I read: “There will be light when there is no darkness and through darkness we cannot find the light.”

Well, fuck me! I think, sitting there in my meditation sanctum, a rarely-used tiled shower stall where I retire every morning with a big cup of coffee to read and contemplate the mysteries of the cosmos. Plus the all-too-familiar ramblings of my own mind, which usually drown out the mysteries.

I’m pissed. Who the hell do I think I am, writing such Zen-ish crap at the age of nineteen just so I could drive myself even crazier at fifty-seven? What irks me, seriously, so much that I feel a few tears starting to form, is that this sentence precisely captures my present existential dilemma.

“There will be light when there is no darkness and through darkness we cannot find the light.” That’s it in a nutshell. That’s the koan I’ve been wrestling with for the past thirty-eight years, and I’d completely forgotten that I’d given it to myself on the back of a rent receipt in 1968.

I wondered whether I’d copied down that line from Eugen Herrigel’s classic description of how he set out to learn archery while he was living in Japan and ended up learning Zen. I’ve scanned through every page, including his concluding treatise on “The Method of Zen.”

Can’t find it. Nor does the sentence pop up on a Google search. I could have read the line somewhere else. Or, as seems likely, I was using the receipt as a bookmark and used the back of it to write down an idea that came to me.

Regardless of the source, this line encapsulates my personal koan. It wasn’t given to me by a Zen master. I gave it to myself. I believe each of us has a koan of this sort, a deep down in the gut paradox that simultaneously drives us crazy and is the lifeline that we cling to for sanity.

That’s where my tears came from. From 19 (and even before) to 57, this koan has been tearing me philosophically, spiritually, and mystically to pieces. Also, keeping me from falling apart. In seventeen words it sums up the essence of everything that I’ve been writing, reading, and pondering for almost four decades.

Sitting on my meditation cushions, it blew me away that with GPS exactitude my extensive inner journeying from 1968-2006 seemingly has brought me around with pinpoint precision to the identical philosophical position from which I started.

Blooming buzzing confusion.

And yet…

There’s that word. Seemingly. I clutch onto it. It’s something to hold onto. Hope that what appears to be going around in circles actually is some sort of spiral. An upward spiral, I wish. But even downward would be better than circularity. I want to get somewhere. Heaven is best, but I’d prefer Hell to nowhere.

“There will be light when there is no darkness and through darkness we cannot find the light.” Oh yeah, Brian, you got that right. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that the finger pointing at the moon isn’t the moon. I’m sure I knew that back in 1968 too, but there are lots of ways of knowing.

Thinking knowing. Feeling knowing. Perceiving knowing. And the Zen sort Herrigel writes about: knowing that isn’t knowing because it isn’t something apart from you that you can know. It is you.

Not this, not that. None of the above, because it isn’t above or below. Somewhere else. Not dark, not light. Something else.

Herrigel asks the Master how the target is hit without the archer’s taking aim. He gets this reply:

“You are under an illusion,” said the Master after awhile, “if you imagine that even a rough understanding of these dark connections would help you. These are processes which are beyond the reach of understanding. Do not forget that even in Nature there are correspondences which cannot be understood, and yet are so real that we have grown accustomed to them, just as if they could not be any different.

“I will give you a puzzle which I have often puzzled over. The spider dances her web without knowing that there are flies who will get caught in it. The fly, dancing nonchalantly on a sunbeam, gets caught in the net without knowing what lies in store. But through both of them ‘It’ dances, and inside and outside are united in this dance. So, too, the archer hits the target without having aimed—more I cannot say.”

Wu.

Spiritual emptiness: it’s a good thing

Most people consider spiritual emptiness something to be avoided. After all, if we’re not filled with the love of Jesus, Buddha-like compassion, the fear of God, or whatever (and there are lots and lots of whatevers) then we’re empty.

Isn’t emptiness a bad thing? When the gas tank is empty, your car stops running. When the cupboard is empty, you’ve got nothing to eat. When the bookshelf is empty, you can’t do any reading.

But what about when your spirit, or mind, is empty? Is there really nothing there, or is there more there when nothing is there than when something is there?

If you liked that last sentence, you’ll love my “Science, Spirit, and the Wisdom of Not-Knowing” essay that I’ve previously plugged on my HinesSight weblog. Of course, writing a quasi-scholarly 24-page footnote filled essay on the subject of not-knowing is a decided oxymoron.

But so is my whole Wu Project, since I’ve been engaged in making something out of nothing by thinking about Wu/Mu. One thought I’ve been having concerns faith.

Who has more faith? Someone who opens himself to a particular anticipated manifestation of divinity, or someone who opens himself unreservedly to however the divine might manifest?

I say, the second person. And in my Not-Knowing piece I provide some quotations from various traditions to back up this assertion (sources are shown in the essay):

For Taoism, “In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired; in the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.”

For Kabbalah, “Ein Sof precedes thought, and it even precedes the Nothingness out of which thought is born.”

For mystical Christianity, “God can be found only by learned ignorance.”

For Zen, “you instantly ‘see’ and understand that things are by virtue of what they are not, and that they owe their being to this not-being which is their ground and origin.”

For Sufism, “what outwardly appears existent is really nonexistent, and what seems to be nonexistent is really Existence. The outwardly paradoxical conclusion is that if man desires existence, he must seek it in his own nonexistence.”

For Buddhism, “if you want to reach the other shore of existence, give up what is before, behind, and in between. Set your mind free, and go beyond birth and death.”

Often you hear religious leaders say, “A tea cup can’t be filled unless it is empty,” to illustrate the importance of being receptive to the inpouring of spiritual teachings. But if the tea cup of our mind is thinking “Where’s the tea? Bring on the tea!” it isn’t truly empty or receptive. It’s got some decided expectations about what is going to fill it.

Back in the days when I was a Radha Soami Satsang Beas speaker, I used to frequently quote Tulsi Sahib’s mystic poetry that begins, in this translation, “Cleanse the chamber of your heart, so that the Beloved may enter. Remove all the foreign impressions, so that He can take His seat there.”

Sounds great. This is a scientific approach to spirituality. Get the instrument of consciousness clear and see what godly impressions it picks up. The problem is, most would-be spiritual scientists have already decided what characteristics the “Beloved” has. Their divine investigation is marred by preconceived ideas that skew the research program.

Here’s another perspective on spiritual emptiness that is closer to my own. Of course, an even truer perspective can be found in what immediately follows the colon at the end of this sentence:

Best answer often is “None of the above”

My manly self-image isn’t based on mechanical aptitude, so my ego is letting me share these stories. Then I’ll turn to my area of real competence: analyzing the anecdotes.

Saturday morning I sold our old generator to a guy who saw my ad in the classifieds. He said he’d come by around eight. I figured that the sale would go more smoothly if the generator would start. Sometimes it’s a terror to get going when it hasn’t been started for a while.

I don’t run the generator very often, so I got out the manual and reviewed the start-up procedures. They were listed as bullet points. Looked pretty straightforward. Just then the guy drove up. I said, “Hey, you’re younger than me, it’s early, and I’m not warmed up. Why don’t you pull the starter cord?”

He did. And then he did again. And again. I read him the instructions. Open choke. Pull three times. Close choke. Try again. We did all that. Still wouldn’t start. I started to feel this deal slipping away.

Then he walked over to the other side of the generator. “Look,” he said. “The Run/Stop switch is on Stop.” He flipped it to Run. Pulled the cord once. It started right away. I felt like a fool. I told him how I felt. He was gracious. “Missing something obvious with a machine, happens to me all the time.”

Somehow I don’t think it happens to him as often as it happens with me (he does maintenance work for a local government) but I appreciated the camaraderie. I told him that I’d just read the starting instructions and it didn’t mention the Run/Stop switch. He looked at the manual. Pointed out a line in the paragraph above the bullet points: “Make sure the Run/Stop switch is set to Run.”

I’d been focusing on getting the choke set right and making sure the fuel valve was open, neither of which had anything to do with the generator not starting.

Second story: I recently got a new DR Field and Brush Mower. After unpacking it the time came to add oil and gas. I took the oil cap off and started pouring in a quart of oil. Then I thought, “Soon I’ll be able to put the cap back on and fire this baby up.” Which brought to mind another thought: “Where did I put the cap?”

I looked around. I didn’t see it. I remembered that the cap was black, like the one on the old DR mower. I was looking for a black cap, no doubt about it. I couldn’t find the damn thing. I’d rolled the mower back a ways to get it more level before adding the oil. I figured the cap might have fallen under the mower. I figured wrong.

After ten minutes of looking around our carport I started to get pissed. Actually, that happened quite a bit earlier. But after ten minutes I was really pissed. It just seemed absolutely bizarre that I couldn’t find something that I was sure was right at hand. I kept retracing my steps. I even looked in the house, thinking that I might have absentmindedly carried the oil cap inside with me when I took a break to eat lunch.

Then I looked down at my feet. There it was, plain as day. A yellow oil cap. I’d been looking for something black. My brain kept ignoring the oil cap even though I’d looked at it many times in the course of my searching. I’d been zeroed in on black. My problem hadn’t been that the oil cap was hidden, it was that I’d been looking for the wrong sort of object.

In both cases I’d fallen into what Robert Persig calls the “truth trap.” At least, it’s darn close to it. In his classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” after talking about the truth trap of yes/no logic, Persig says:

Because we’re unaccustomed to it, we don’t usually see that there’s a third possible logical term equal to yes and no which is capable of expanding our understanding in an unrecognized direction. We don’t even have a term for it, so I’ll have to use the Japanese mu [“wu” in Chinese].

Mu means “no thing.” Like “Quality” it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says, “No class; not one, not zero, not yes, not no.” It states that the context of the question is such that a yes or no answer is in error and should not be given. “Unask the question” is what it says.

Mu becomes appropriate when the context of the question becomes too small for the truth of the answer. When the Zen monk Joshu was asked whether a dog had Buddha nature he said “Mu,” meaning that if he answered either way he was answering incorrectly. The Buddha nature cannot be captured by yes or no questions.

Is the reason the generator won’t start because the choke is in the wrong position or because the fuel valve is in the wrong position? Mu. None of the above.

Will I find the black oil cap if I look long and hard enough? Mu. Wrong question. I won’t find a black oil cap, but I will find a yellow oil cap.

The Wu Project meanders on. I’m getting results from my investigations continuously. Generally the data are telling me, Mu.

Tracking the trajectory of my Wu Project

Here’s documentation of my first original quasi-spiritual insight. Today I dragged this piece of paper out of my “treasures box,” where I keep various memorabilia from my youth.

I wrote the poem when I was 13 after gazing up at the stars one night from the backyard of our rural home in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. It goes like this:

Look up to the heavens
What is there?
Tiny pinpoints of light
But is that all?

Look past the stars
Into the blackness of the void.
What lies there, waiting for man’s first faltering steps
Into the darkness of the universe?

What unknown mysteries lie
Where human eyes cannot see?
In the darkness of the void, perhaps there are things
We should not know, and not find out.

I find it interesting how Wuish—how nothingness oriented—I was back then. I look at my handwriting and try to remember how I felt when I came into the house, sat at my beloved rolltop desk with all the cubbyholes, and wrote those words.

That feeling is lost. But I do remember walking into the living room where my visiting grandmother, Eva H. Lewis, was chatting with my mother and some neighbors. I read my poem to everybody. At first there was absolutely no reaction. They were probably thinking, “What the ____ is this all about?” Can’t blame them.

Then my grandmother spoke up. “I like it!” That’s all she said. And that’s all I needed. I went back to my room feeling affirmed.

My grandmother grew up in New Mexico. She wore dramatic Hopi jewelry, big turquoise-encrusted necklaces and bracelets. She was into organic gardening in the 1950s. She bought one of the first Volkswagens imported into the United States. She was a character, an out-spoken freethinker. And she liked my poem!

Which was about…nothing. Mystery. Darkness. What lies on the other side of light. In short, Wu/Mu.

It’s said that Zen is a journey from “First there is a mountain, then there isn’t, then there is.” The trajectory of my spiritual journey could be similarly (though seemingly inversely) described as “First there is nothing, then there isn’t, then there is.”

Here I am in India at the age of 29, standing in the grounds of the Western Guest House at the headquarters of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (near Beas in the Punjab). Melany and Jim Ramsey are on the right, Jim and Connie Said are on the left. And there I am, lean, beardless, and serious looking in the middle.

I’d gone to the “Dera” because I’d never seen the guru who had initiated me six years prior. I spent two weeks immersing myself in meditation, satsangs (talks), and evening question and answer sessions with Master Charan Singh. It was great. I was devoted. I was sure that I’d found the Truth with a big “t.”

I was still sure in the early 1990s, when the photo for a “sevadar” (volunteer) identification badge was taken. In my 40s now, I’d become hirsute. My crazed expression aptly reflects my spiritual predilection at the time: essentially 100% committed to the Radha Soami Satsang Beas philosophy. I still believed that I had found something I could hold onto for the rest of my life.

And at the age of 57? Now I’m back to nothing. I’m 13 again. I’m still staring into the blackness of the void, except now it is the emptiness of my understanding of my spiritual understanding. When I look past the flickering insubstantial lights of my metaphysical thoughts, emotions, beliefs, hunches, hopes, imaginings, and such, I gaze upon a void.

Which is why I’m embarking on what I call The Wu Project. It’s not serious. Yet also it is. I’ve got few hopes for it. Yet also I’m staking my life on it. I’m still not sure if it is wise to venture into the void. Yet it also seems to me that there is nothing more important to do.

I’m totally confused. Which means, I can only hope, that I’m right on track. As a commenter said recently:

...Woo Woo...(sound of a train a'comin)...Woo Woo...

Wu or Mu? I talk with a cow fancier.

Two days into the Wu Project, I’m right on track. Of course, the great thing about this project is that there’s no way I can be off track. Since the root meaning of Wu is negation, you’re most Wuish when you’re doing the least.

Such is the essence of wu wei, a Taoist term that can be roughly translated as “effortless action.” Wei means to do or act. Stick “wu” in front of it and you’ve got not-doing. Or better put, doing without doing.

So I’ll be taking it slow and gentle with this Wu Project of mine. Which, I need to emphasize, is truly mine. I’m not putting it forth as a model for anyone else, though I do believe that everyone should have a Cosmic Project of some sort—a quixotic crazy doomed-to-failure attempt to fathom the deepest mysteries of the universe.

I’ve decided that for now mine is the Wu Project. Yours could be whatever you want it to be. I’d recommend that you fashion your own unique project, because life is too short and singular to spend it copying someone else. But it’s a free cosmos. If you choose an off the shelf project such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, or any other organized “ism,” have at it. With enthusiasm.

I will admit to having some grandiose conceptions about the Wu Project, however. I’m prone to grandiosity, so that figures. I’ve been pondering this whole Secret of the Universe thing for about forty years and am finally making some significant progress. I’ve reduced the complexity of the subject down to a “there are two kinds of…” simplicity.

To wit, there are two kinds of approaches to unraveling the Secret of the Universe: positive and negative. This isn’t an original idea (what is?). Mysticism is commonly divided into the via affirmativa and via negativa, the way of fullness and the way of emptiness.

Some people want to be filled with a divine vision, belief, concept, love, being, insight, inspiration, presence, or such. Other people want to be emptied of everything, including all that supposedly divine stuff. I’m with them. It’s equally wildly crazy and totally logical.

But I’m digressing from my intention to report on how the first two public wearings of my Wu t-shirt went. I wore it to my Tai Chi class on Monday and today, where I expected it would have an appreciative audience. Indeed, two people asked about the shirt: my marital arts instructor, Warren, and a fellow student, Russell.

Russell didn’t know what the Chinese hanzi for “Wu” meant. Warren did. My conversation with Russell was more satisfying because he uncritically accepted my definition. I like it when people agree with me.

I also like it when people disagree with me, because then I have an opportunity to show them why I’m right and they are wrong (which, I usually presume, must be the case). However, it is unsettling when someone neither agrees or disagrees with me. I can’t say that I dislike it, because there isn’t anything not to like. Nor, to like.

Such a situation is, in short, Wuish. And that’s how Warren acted after I replied to his question: “So, Brian, what do you think your t-shirt means?” I launched into a wonderfully focused description of the alternative meanings of “wu” (“mu” in Japanese). I was concise and utterly accurate, in my not-so-humble opinion.

Warren then walked over to a bench, sat down and said, “Well, OK. If that’s what you think…” I waited for him to say something more. He didn’t. And then he didn’t some more. I waited for him to tell me what he thought “wu/mu” meant. I wanted to know.

Warren has spent a lot of time in the East (Korea and Japan, mainly). He’s married to a Japanese woman. He teaches a class in Eastern Medicine at a college. He’s Taoist through and through. “Come on, man,” I thought, “give me the answer.”

He wouldn’t. He just sat on the bench staring off into space. I recollected that some dude supposedly cut off his arm in order to be accepted by a Zen master, so I figured that I could at least ask one more time. “I want to know. What do you think it means, Warren?”

“Emptiness. You have to be empty before you can be filled.”

Good answer. We talked some more about wu/mu. Warren suggested that my next t-shirt should have the Mu/Wu ideogram on the front and a picture of a cow on the back. That way if someone asked what the image meant I’d say “mu” and turn around.

Nice. I’ll keep the idea in mind. But the main idea of the Wu Project is not to have ideas in mind. However, since “wu” means negation it should also be fine to not not have ideas in mind, which lets them back in.

I’ve got a lot to do if I’m going to figure all this stuff out before the project ends. Also, a lot not to do.