Church of the Churchless

Self comes and goes in our lives, though we don't have one

"Self" and "soul" are closely related. Both words point to the notion of something within us, or that is us, which stands apart from the world in a transcendent sense.

What I just wrote points to the absurdity of believing that it is possible or necessary to cultivate our self or soul. 

If self/soul is something within us, then it isn't actually a core reality, since the us it is within encompasses  a lesser self/soul. If self/soul is us, we're already that which we are, so nothing needs to be done.

By contrast Buddhism and Taoism, along with modern neuroscience and certain philosophies, say that our sense of self is an illusion, even though it seems real to us. So does a mirage, but that illusion can be dispelled by coming closer to it.

The problem with the self illusion is that it is tied into our sense of being someone who is aware of objects that are separate from our subjectivity. I wrote about this in a previous post about Jay Garfield's book, "Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self."

(First post about the book is here.)

Garfield speaks about the times our self illusion drops away in a chapter called Immersion -- Selfless spontaneity and skillful living. Some excerpts:

So far, we have been emphasizing the degree to which the illusion of self is natural and almost unavoidable. But this does not mean that we succumb to that illusion at every waking moment. There are times -- perhaps more than we realize -- when we don't represent ourselves as selves at all, when we spontaneously engage with the world in ways that implicate no sense of self.

And indeed, these may be the most pleasant and rewarding moments of our lives.

...In order to get our minds around the experience of selflessness, it is useful to recall the deep connection between the sense of self, the understanding of experience in terms of subject-object duality, and of action in terms of free agency. 

To take ourselves to be selves, as we saw in chapter 1, is to take ourselves to be subjects with a very different mode of existence than that we assign to our objects. It is to regard ourselves as standing against the world rather than as being embedded in it. And it is to take our self-knowledge to be immediate, as opposed to the mediated knowledge we have of our objects.

Each of these modes of self-awareness is an aspect of subject-object duality, of taking experience to be a relation between these two entities of entirely different kinds. That polarity of subject and object in our experience is tantamount to the reification of a self. So, to the extent that we have experiences that are nondual in character, we are experiencing ourselves without positing a self.

We can make the same point about agency. To see ourselves as selves is to see ourselves as free agents acting upon the world, capable of agent causation that initiates actions on motives, actions whose causes lie entirely within us. 

...This is how subject-object duality looks in the domain of action. In perceptual experience the subject is divorced from the world and located as a spectator of it. By analogy, in action the agent is divorced from the casual nexus and acts freely upon it.

Once again, then, to the extent that we experience ourselves as fully immersed, and not as freely initiating actions directed upon objects, our agency is nondual in character: we act without superimposing the self or the duality between self and other implicated by the sense of causally independent agency.

Garfield then relates the Taoist story of Butcher Ding. He was so skilled at cutting up an ox, his knife slices through the animal, dismembering it, without ever needing to be sharpened. Garfield says:

This reminds us of another aspect of the nonduality of our experience. We do not exist outside of our environment, perceiving it as subject, acting upon it as agent; we are nondually immersed in it, with no clear boundary between ourselves and everything else.

This tale might appear to be anti-intellectual, or to suggest a complete abandonment of self-awareness. But that would be to read it incorrectly. The Zhuangzi does not mean to say that in achieving spontaneity, or selflessness, one gives up entirely on the ability to think and to calculate.

As Ding says, "whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I'm doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety..."

I think that this is the most important moment in this parable, although it is easy to overlook. Careful, calculating thought can also, the Zhuangzi suggests, be spontaneous, and can be conducted without positing a self.

We can become absorbed in thought, in solving a problem, or in a complex conversation or debate just as easily as we can become absorbed in carving an ox.

...We hence see that it is not the presence of explicit thought that distinguishes ego-involved experience from ego-less experience. Instead, this distinction reflects the degree of immersion in activity and so the degree to which explicit awareness of oneself as standing outside that activity is diminished.

...When we are completely immersed in activity -- whether the physical activity of carving an ox or the cognitive activity of thinking about how best to carve that ox -- our sense of self, and with it, the experience of the duality of subject and object in experience, vanish. 

There is only the experience of a flow of activity.

Delusion of imagining you're an instrument of the divine will

Here's a right-on illustration by L.K. Hanson. I saw this on a Facebook post yesterday. The person who shared it said that Hanson's work appears in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

When people talk about being a special instrument of the divine will, I'm reminded of Garrison Keillor's description of his fictional Minnesota small town, Lake Wobegon, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”

In the world of fundamentalist religion, all the believers are especially attuned to God's will. Which can't be, given how different religions typically are from each other. But their delusion works for religious believers, since it allows everybody to be above average when it comes to knowing what God wants.

Even crazier, of course, are the smaller number of fundamentalists who go a step further up the above average scale by claiming they actually communicate with God. Or, at the height of grandiosity, purport to actually be one with God in some respects. (Sometimes, in every respect.)

In a blog post called "My strange RSSB initiation story" I related how in my last year of college a bunch of us got involved with a crazed Greek yoga teacher we called Yogiraj who tried to meld East and West by establishing his Christananda Ashram.

After we confronted him about how he'd used his initiation into Radha Soami Satsang Beas by Charan Singh to create his own personal Sant Mat philosophy with him as the guru, he told us that Jesus actually was his best divine friend.

One day, after the store closed, we got up the guts to confront Yogiraj. What a scene it turned out to be. I still remember it well.

We were standing near the back of the store, us six in a semi-circle facing Yogiraj. We told him about our doubts -- that what he was teaching at the ashram had been copied from RSSB and wasn't the real deal.

Yogiraj's reaction was fiercely intense.

Those Greek eyes blazed with anger. "Charan Singh isn't my guru!" he yelled. "Christ is my guru! He talks to me! He tells me what to do!"

That was enough. With those words it all became clear. We knew that Yogiraj went on his own retreats down in his basement, doing god knows what. What it was, we now realized, was him getting face time with Christ.

More accurately, what he imagined to be Christ. (Christians, of course, would disagree with my skepticism.)

Looking back, while we were correct to view Yogiraj as delusional to believe that he was chatting with Jesus Christ, it's strange that we were so unquestioning of the RSSB teaching that the guru was God in Human Form.

Maybe the difference was that Yogiraj flatly stated that Jesus, the supposed Son of God, was telling him what to do, while the RSSB gurus generally have been more reticent to say that they communicate with God -- though they're fine with the RSSB books that say the guru is God's emissary to the world.

Anyway, the Bertrand Russell quote is as apt today as when Russell said it. More so, in fact. These days both Democratic and Republican presidents are fond of ending speeches with "And may God bless these United States of America."

If God exists (a gigantic "if"), wouldn't God bless every country equally? I no longer believe in God, but if I did, I sure wouldn't consider that God is a Christian, Muslim, Jew, or any other religion. It seems clear that religions are made by humans, and God is also, almost certainly.

Awareness doesn't require a subject who is aware

A few days ago I wrote about how there's no need to find your self, because you don't have one. That's the central message of Jay Garfield's book, "Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self."

Sounds good to me. One of my favorite humorous pieces from The Onion is Search For Self Called Off After 38 Years.

Here's how it starts off.

CHICAGO—The longtime search for self conducted by area man Andrew Speth was called off this week, the 38-year-old said Monday.

"I always thought that if I kept searching and exploring, I'd discover who I truly was," said Speth from his Wrigleyville efficiency. "Well, I looked deep into the innermost recesses of my soul, I plumbed the depths of my subconscious, and you know what I found? An empty, windowless room the size of an aircraft hangar. From now on, if anybody needs me, I'll be sprawled out on this couch drinking black-cherry soda and watching Law & Order like everybody else."

"Fuck it," he added.

My sentiments exactly, though I don't like black-cherry soda or Law & Order. 

The passages below from Garfield's book are considerably more philosophical than The Onion piece, but they share the same message. Stop looking for your self. It's an illusion. 

Here Garfield is talking about a minimal approach to the self. By minimal, he means something that isn't a full-blown transcendent self/soul such as the Atman in Hinduism, the whole ground of being thing where the self/soul is a drop of the ocean of Brahman/God.

Instead, the minimal self is essentially the subject of experience, a view held by Galen Strawson, Evan Thompson, and Dan Zahavi. Strawson puts it this way.

I propose to take the unchallengeable, ontologically non-committal notion of the subject of experience in a minimal or 'thin' way... I mean the subject considered specifically as something 'inner', something mental, the 'self', if you like, the inner 'locus' of consciousness considered just as such.

Well, Garfield finds that notion eminently challengeable. Here's how he describes his challenge, which makes a lot of sense to me. Simply put, there can be thoughts without a thinker, perceptions without a perceiver, and awareness without a singular self that is aware.

To say that awareness is necessarily a property of a subject of awareness, while perhaps seeming to be an innocent grammatical point, in fact commits the very fallacy of reification that we addressed in chapter 2. That is the fallacy of going from the mere fact of awareness to the existence of a subject of awareness. 

To draw this inference is kind of like going from the claim that it is raining to the claim that there is something that is the agent of raining, that is doing the raining. To presume that the very fact of awareness entails the existence of a subject -- in the strong sense that Strawson and other friends of the self have in mind -- is to assume that which is to be proven, viz., that awareness presupposes a self. 

The parallel to the failure of Descartes's cogito argument in which he goes from the mere fact of thinking to the existence of a substantial subject of thought is striking.

...Awareness is most plausibly an umbrella property that reflects an extremely complex set of underlying properties and relations. If this is the case, awareness can be present -- a person can be aware -- without there being any single thing that is aware, just as a nation or corporation can act without there being a singular entity that performs that action.

Now, we might say that if there is awareness, something is aware, e.g., a person, just as we can say that when a corporation sells a product, something, e.g., the corporation, is the seller. But it is plain in that case that we do not thereby implicate a localizable single thing that is a subject or an agent, only a broad set of processes and events.

So even if we grant that awareness always has a subject-object structure, the defender of the reality of the self is not entitled to the premise that the subject is singular, and so cannot presume that it is a self.

But there is also a second, deeper problem with this argument.

The first premise, as we have just noted, presupposes that awareness must have a subject-object structure. We granted that premise for the sake of argument, and we saw that even then we do not get a good argument for the reality of a self. But we can also question the presupposition.

The idea that awareness always has a subject-object structure -- with a subject characterized by a kind of interiority, as opposed to the exterior object that is somehow brought into awareness in that interior space -- might well be an illusion of consciousness.

That is, it might be a fabrication, not a basic reality.

To put the point more precisely, the conviction that awareness is fundamentally a relation between an independent subject and a substantially distinct object may be the result of a cognitive illusion, just as the conviction that we are selves is not the consequence of looking inside and simply finding a self, but of cognitive illusion.

...It makes a great deal of biological, psychological, and ecological sense instead to think of awareness as a constant modulation of the open interaction between an organism and its environment, of the adjustment of the state of the organism and attunement of the posture and goals of the organism as its senses and movements interact with the world it inhabits.

In other words, we can think of awareness as a mode of embedding of the organism in its world, instead of the relation between an interior subject and an exterior object, even if that is how it appears to us in introspection.

To think of awareness in this way is to take seriously the idea that we don't stand against the world as subjects that detect its properties or agents that act on it, but instead are part of the world, and that awareness is more an attunement to our environment than a recording in our minds of what is going on outside.

This approach to cognition, which is called the "embedded, embodied, enactive" model of cognition, is gaining wide acceptance among philosophers and cognitive scientists.

The view that introspection may be wildly deceptive, called "illusionism," is also gaining currency in the philosophy of mind today, inspired in part by the analysis of human existence developed by twentieth- and twenty-first-century existential phenomenologists.

But it is very old in India, and underlies the idea of the nonduality of consciousness articulated both in the Vedanta school and in Buddhism. Philosophers in each of these traditions argued that we are subject to pervasive confusion not only regarding the external world, but also regarding our own nature and regarding the structure of our experience.

So we shold treat Strawson's first premise with suspicion. This suspicion, we have seen, is justified for two reasons: first, our existence may well be that of a complex set of subjective processes as opposed to that of a single self; second, the subject-object structure of awareness that he takes for granted may well be illusory.

Relax: no need to find your self, because you don't have one

I've become a fan of easygoing approaches to spirituality. That's one reason I enjoy Taoism so much. The Taoists I've known don't look upon life very seriously. Neither do many Buddhists.

A common denominator of Taoism and Buddhism is that neither philosophy assumes that we have a self or soul. Meaning, they're selfless. 

This takes the pressure off of goals such as self-realization, self-awareness, knowing one's self, and so on. Those sorts of practices still can be pursued, but with the understanding that there's no such thing as an unchanging self or soul lurking within us. Just substitute "person" for "self."

No-self philosophies, or religions if you like, are very different from self-centered philosophies/religions such as Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. The latter are seriously concerned with what happens to one's immortal soul.

The former say, "What soul? What self? We humans are like everything else that's alive in the world -- ever-changing, interdependent, part and parcel of all that surrounds us, and indeed is us."

Having been a believer for 35 years in an Eastern philosophy that taught we have, or are, a soul, and that the goal of life was to merge one's soul with God insofar as this is possible, I'm able to contrast that point of view with my current embrace of Taoism and non-religious Buddhism.

I'm a lot more relaxed now in my meditation. I no longer try to leave this world behind in hopes of finding a better supernatural reality, but instead simply try to be more aware of what is right here, right now, both inside and outside of me.

This image comes to mind. 

No-self meditators are akin to people lounging on a beach, cool drink in hand, lounging under an umbrella, idly feeling the sand move beneath their toes, watching the sun go down over the ocean. Self-centered meditators are akin to people who make sure they complete an intense workout every day in the hotel exercise room even though they're supposedly on a vacation.

After hearing Jay Garfield converse with Sam Harris for 90 minutes or so on Harris' Waking Up iPhone app, I bought Garfield's book, "Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self." It's an enjoyable read, though a bit philosophically dense in places.

(Garfield is a Professor of Philosophy, Logic, and Buddhist Studies at Smith College and a visiting professor of Buddhist philosophy at Harvard Divinity School.)

I've read four of the ten chapters, so have a way to go in the book. Garfield's Big Idea is that while we are not selves, we are persons. OK, that may seem obvious to those who, like me, embrace science, dislike religion, and don't believe in a soul. But the notion of a self is tough to break away from entirely.

Garfield writes:

In order to be successful, these no-self positions must show both that the idea of the self is incoherent and that everything that the self is meant to explain can be explained in its absence. That is, the proponent of the no-self view must show that everything that the self is meant to explain can actually be accomplished by a person, a socially embedded human being with no self.

In an early chapter, the writings of Candrakirti, a Buddhist who lived in 600-650 CE, are discussed. Garfield says:

Candrakirti was writing in an Indian context. So, the view of the self that he took as the object of negation in his argument (an argument we will explore in chapter 2) is the view that to be a sentient being is to be an atman. This term is usually and appropriately translated into English as self or soul. The idea that the atman lies at the core of our being is ubiquitous in orthodox Indian philosophy, and it was a principal target of Buddhist critique.

In the Vedas, and in particular, the Upanisads -- the texts that ground many of the orthodox Indian philosophical schools -- it is characterized as unitary, as the witness of all that we perceive, as the agent of our actions, and as the enjoyer of our aesthetic experience. It is regarded as that which is always the subject, never the object; and as that which persists through life despite changes in body and mind, and which even persists beyond death and in transmigration.

Sounds good, right? I certainly thought so for 35 years.

But gradually I came to realize that almost certainly I didn't have a self or soul, and that was perfectly fine with me. This realization came about through a variety of means: daily meditation, Buddhist literature, a whole lot of books about modern neuroscience, and simply being mindful of my everyday experience. 

Garfield also uses Western philosophers to buttress the contention of no-self found in Buddhism. This quote from David Hume was familiar to me, but a pleasure to re-read.

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without perception, and I never can observe anything but the perception.

A comment from Garfield follows that quote.

Moreover, he [Hume] points out, the collection that we find is not constant, but is always changing. There is nothing permanent in our experience.

If this is so, Hume argues, when we use the word self, there is nothing to which it refers: we are nothing more than bundles of psychophysical processes -- changing from moment to moment -- who imagine ourselves to be more than that.

Note, once again, this is not the absurd claim that we don't exist, but rather the claim that the way we exist -- as persons -- is not the way that we normally take ourselves to exist -- as selves. 

I'll have more to say about this illusion of the self as I read more of "Losing Ourselves."

I respond to a B.S. comment about my 52 years of meditation

UPDATE: Spence Tepper has apologized to me for his ridiculous attempt to claim that my 35 years of daily meditation while a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, usually for several hours a day, amounted to "nothing." Good for Spence. He recognized how wrong he was.

Hopefully from now on he will realize that my approach to meditation is the wise one: don't challenge someone's personal experience in meditation, but DO challenge any claim that this experience proves the existence of a supernatural realm beyond the physical.

Spence doesn't like my skepticism toward his brand of religious fundamentalism. I've pointed out to him that his proselytizing comments are being left on a Church of the Churchless blog, not a Church of the Churched blog. For 18 years I've criticized religious fundamentalists who want others to believe in their dogma without any evidence. I sure won't stop now.

One of the joys, if that's the right word, of having a churchless blog for the past 18 years is that I get a lot of first hand experience responding to religious fundamentalists who, for reasons known only to them, like to leave judgmental comments on a blog devoted to spiritual independence.

Here's a latest example, a comment from Spence Tepper today which was so ridiculous, I figured it deserved to be elevated to a blog post so its absurdity could be on fuller display. My responses to Tepper are in bold italics. 

Hi Brian Ji
You wrote
"Hope this clarifies things. Demanding proof of someone who, say, claims to have experienced the divine sound and light that creates and sustains the cosmos is fully warranted."

Exactly. And that's why there is the meditation.

Had you conducted the practice with any discipline at all you would have your own evidence first hand.

Wrong assumption #1. I was initiated by Charan Singh into the practice of meditation as taught by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) in 1971, after first learning to meditate from a yoga teacher while in college.

I diligently followed the RSSB meditation instructions for 35 years. Never missed a day of meditation. Mostly I meditated for 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours a day. When I was working and had a young child, it was more difficult to do the prescribed 2 1/2 hours. So I had plenty of discipline in my meditation. You shouldn't make assumptions about someone else's meditation experience.

Also, hope you realize that RSSB stresses that initiates shouldn't talk about their meditation experiences. I'm OK with this being done, since I've done it myself. But you, like me, are breaking a RSSB rule.

You could have said," Yes, I saw the blinding light and have been able to reproduce it at will. Then I saw the sun, then the moon. I'm convinced it is simply the brain gaining access to signal directly outside the visual nervous system....but why the sun, why the moon? I'm still investigating to try to see where these images may have come from. They are far more intense than memory, especially when I can take time to look at them, even approach them... "

You could have developed a real theory around real information.

I did develop a real theory around real information. Based on my 35 years of RSSB meditation experience, and countless (almost) conversations with other members of RSSB about meditation, I've come to the conclusion that while some people report seeing scenes of supernatural regions of existence beyond the physical, almost certainly these don't reflect an objective reality but rather are subjective emanations of their brains, since there is no demonstrable evidence of those supernatural regions other than subjective reports.

Now all you have is the second hand evidence of the founders of every religion. And of every mystic who ever lived and documented what they went through.

Utterly false statement. There are lots of different approaches to meditation. What I experienced during my 35 years of RSSB meditation was very close to, if not exactly, how Buddhist and Taoist teachings describe meditation. I felt my self slipping away, probably because I don't have or am a self. I felt a sense of unity with all things, probably because everything is interdependent. Mystics have all sorts of different experiences. I don't really consider myself a mystic, but I've certainly had mystical experiences that are very difficult to describe in words.

Yes it evidence. And yes it deserves to be evaluated. But the only way to do this objectively is create the conditions to recreate the experience in your own lab and then you may test it as millions of others have done and are doing every day, with any way you like, including testing your own hypothesis about the causes.

You failed to do this.

Not true. I conducted the experiment of meditation, RSSB style, for 35 years. I've written a lot on this blog about what I found. Use the search box in the right sidebar to find those posts. Your fundamentalist attitude prevents you from realizing that different people can meditate and have very different meditation experiences. There isn't one right way to meditate, and there isn't one genuine meditation experience. If you believe there is, you're hugely mistaken about what meditation is all about. 

Let me be more pointed, Brian Ji.

You didn't have to reproduce the entire journey.

Again, you're assuming there's only one journey people take in meditation. Actually, people have all kinds of different journeys. 

Any part of it would have been fine. But what you report is zero.

Not at all. Every day I meditate, continuing to the present -- today -- I have a decidedly-nonzero meditation experience. Just because it isn't your experience doesn't make it any less meaningful or valid for me. 

That's practically impossible.

It's very possible. You should get out more and talk with other people about their meditation experiences. Since I did so much public speaking for RSSB, wrote three books on behalf of RSSB, and was the secretary of our local group for many years, as noted above I've talked with lots of people about meditation. Again, a Buddhist or Taoist would find my meditation experiences perfectly compatible with their spiritual outlook.

Anyone with a minimum of self-discipline can conduct any of a variety of meditation methods and at least watch their thoughts.

I've done that, and much more, for 52 years of daily meditation. It's astounding how you believe that, without ever having met me or knowing me in person, somehow you believe that you're privy to what I've experienced in meditation. How do you think you know this? Obviously it isn't possible. 

They could at least report what was happening to their body as they did so... And as they worked to gain some control, some level of mastery.

Geez, unbelievable. All of your own meditation sure hasn't affected the Judgmental part of your brain. I could ask, "Spence, how could you do so much meditation and end up such a religious fundamentalist with an exaggerated sense of your own divinity?" Oops, looks like I did just ask that.

They could at least notice the change in their thinking during meditation. And even learn how their brain reacts to different thoughts, how simran works, how distraction alters your level of consciousness wakefulness, and how focus raises it to observe more thoughts, their seeds and their destination all at the same time.

Been there. Done that. For 52 years.

But you report zero.

Wrong.

Not only does that make no sense at all. It is downright suspicious.

And not in any way scientific.

So there is no point in leaping to conclusions when you have not made the least effort to note just exactly what happened and to report it here for peer review. Then we can discuss what is going on within.

Why? I'm preaching the gospel of spiritual independence on this blog. I don't view meditation the way you do, as a way of demonstrating how evolved meditation has made me. I see meditation as a form of mental exercise and relaxation, in much the same way I view physical exercise. Tai Chi helps me understand what my body can do. Meditation helps me realize what my mind can do.  

As to what others report, they are reporting what happened to them, not for you to take second hand, but to note as their guide, testable reference points. Your own experience from your own effort is all that matters.

Hey, I agree with your last sentence. So why did you write this lengthy comment, most of which goes against what you just said?

The other testimony is meaningless to you because clearly you didn't take it seriously. Sorry to be so blunt.

I'm sorry to be so blunt in return, but you're totally wrong.

But you are being less than candd to suggest that 35 years x 365 days x 2.5 hours was spent entirely unconscious.

Wrong again. Amazing how many times you can be wrong in one blog post comment. I was awake and aware for virtually every moment in my 52 years of daily meditation. Sure, occasionally I fell asleep, but that was fairly rare.

31, 937.5 hours...

That's not meditation. It's sleep.

And what you just said isn't an intelligent observation. It's bullshit. 

Science delivers accurate predictions. Religion doesn't.

Yay, me! I finally finished reading Johnjoe McFadden's book, "Life is Simple: How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe." 

It took me longer than expected, because I didn't find McFadden's lengthy descriptions of the life and times of historical figures in science, starting with the ancient Greeks, to be all that interesting. I guess he felt he needed to do that in order to buttress his case for how science came to embrace the adage of William of Occam: "Entities should not be multiplied without necessity."

This doesn't mean that the world is simple, just that in attempting to understand the world, our models of reality should be as simple as possible -- which in some cases, could mean being quite complex, if reality is complex.

I liked the end of the book more than the rest of it. That's where McFadden discusses modern science such as relativity theory and quantum mechanics. I'll probably write another blog post or two on those subjects.

Here's excerpts from a section called The simple truth? 

I like McFadden's skepticism about ever knowing ultimate truth. "Ultimate reality" has always been a term that appealed to me. But his argument below about the apparent impossiblity of ever being able to know that we've contacted ultimate truth makes sense to me.

According to postmodernists, science merely takes its place alongside other belief systems such as religion, mysticism, witchcraft, folk beliefs, astrology, homeopathy or the paranormal. Each has, they claim, its own truths and none can claim any monopoly on the truth.

...William of Occam would surely have disagreed. He insisted that there was a stark difference between science and religion, as science is based on reason, religion is based on faith. Yet the postmodernists disagree.

Many of their arguments are heavily influenced by the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951).

...In 1921, Wittgenstein published his hugely influential Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in which he examined the relationship between language and reality and, at this stage of his career, appears to accept (philosophers still argue about the meaning of much of Wittgenstein's philosophical statements) that science can make statements about the world that are verifiably true.

Thirty years later, in his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein seems to abandon the quest to discover how language represents the world and instead argues that there are only different ways of using language or 'language games', whose meaning is derived solely from their use.

This argument seems to have much in common with William of Occam's nominalist insistence that words refer to ideas in our heads, rather than universals or essences that exist in the world.

...There is, however, another postmodernist insight that is both true and crucial to the role of Occam's razor, though it does not lead down the path taken by the postmodernists. Truth really is, as they argue, unknowable. 

This is something that is shocking even to scientists who are generally taught that science is an inexorable march towards the truth.

Imagine that science were one day to attain the blissful state of knowing everything, i.e. 'the truth'. How would we know? Knowledge of ultimate truth presupposes some means of peeking behind the curtain of evidence provided by our senses or scientific instruments to see the 'real' world rather than the one viewed through our senses or scientific instruments.

It supposes that there is some knowable, complete, and perfect world, a world of idealised Platonic forms, the very view of the world Occam disproved so many centuries ago. 

If like Occam we reject this view of the world we have to rely instead on our sensory inputs and a potentially infinite variety of models of the cosmos that could fit that data and explain our place in it. Yet that does not mean, as the postmodernists argue, that all models are equal.

When drawing up a horoscope, today's astrologers do not consult accounts of the moodiness of the god Mars or the lustful habits of Jupiter. They instead turn to planetary tables based on Kepler's simple model of the solar system.

Believers in the paranormal organise their meetings by phone and email, not telepathy; and, if the meetings are overseas, they fly by plane, not levitation.

Science may be a language game or model but, unlike the vast majority of models, from alchemy to feng shui, homeopathy and the indecipherable postmodernist tracts that dismiss science, its models actually work because they are simple and thereby deliver accurate predictions. 

Cognitive dissonance is alive and well in commenters on this blog

It's amusing to observe how much work some religious believers who comment on my blog posts go to in defending an obvious fact. 

A recent example is me stating in several blog posts that the notion of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) guru being God in Human Form, or GIHF, is a central RSSB tenet. How can you have a "Path of the Saints" without a saint?

The whole rationale behind the RSSB teachings is that God manifests in the form of a Perfect Living Master (PLM) to guide souls back to Him, because otherwise God remains an unseen, unheard, unknown entity beyond the bounds of time and space.

Today "Appreciative Reader," a commenter who almost always makes a lot of sense, wrote a comment that made me think, right-on. I've shared it below. The blog post the comment was left on is "RSSB teachings: 'The perfect Master is the Lord in human flesh'."

The quotations in the comment below come from another commenter, Spence Tepper. I'll observe that Charan Singh, a previous RSSB guru, said "We're unable to look at simple things in a simple way," or words to that effect. I no longer agree with a lot of what Charan Singh taught, but I heartily agree with that sentiment.

As Appreciative Reader says, it's a simple fact that RSSB teaches that the guru is God in Human Form. Anyone who can't recognize that in a simple way is willfully ignoring reality.

"The belief in GIHF isn't actually encouraged by the Masters, as you see here."

Ha ha ha, back playing cat and mouse, are we? Regardless of what's said *here*, GIHF/PLM has been referenced, as a core teaching, plenty of times *elsewhere*, as Brian's amply shown, and as you've agreed with him already; and indeed, as you've admitted to me as well, and what's more even put forward a conjecture about why they have done it. So no, it isn't true that belief in GIHF isn't actually encouraged in RSSB. Quite the contrary.

"Here is what Maharaj Charan Singh said about this in answer to a question: ...In the beginning we should just take him as a preacher or a teacher or a guide. And when we go in, we will realize what he does for us. We automatically see what he is. In the beginning we are just to take him as a guide, as a friend, as a leader, somebody to put us on the path. Then we ourselves will realize more and more why we need him..."

That's complete, utter BS. Sure that's what MCS says here, but had that been what RSSB is actually doing, then like I'd said they'd simply have actually walked the talk, and actually taught that the master is simply a teacher, and left the initiate to find out for himself what there is to find out. They wouldn't have taught that the master is GIHF, in that case.

You can't have it both ways. You can't, at the end of a long chase, after finally having been cornered, buckle down and admit that RSSB teaches GIHF/PLM; and after I ask, then after a few further rounds of the chasing-the-tail routine, finally buckle down again and put forward your conjecture about why it is RSSB teaches GIHF/PLM; and then after all of that suddenly change tacks and try to present a random quote and basis that quote try to claim, afresh, all over again, that RSSB does not actually teach GIHF.

That's simply trying the old cat-and-mouse routine all over again, that carousel ride I referred to in my first comment in this thread.

Brian had been wondering why you, and a few others following your lead, are trying to claim that RSSB does not teach GIHF/PLM, when it is plain as day that they do. The answer, I conclude, from all of these exchanges, is cognitive dissonance plain and simple.

As I've clearly shown here, RSSB teaches blind faith in essence exactly as the monotheisms do, despite the vow-not-vow thing. That's exactly what my last comment to you was about. To admit that would be to show up RSSB in an unflattering light, as a purveyor of woo; to admit that is to back oneself into a position there can be no defending against rational criticism; therefore the kneejerk reaction is to try to slide off to a different position, even if that position isn't quite based in reality.

Hence these incessant sidebars, and changing the subject, and verbal feints and tricks galore, in these threads. I hope the latest round of rinse-repeat-afresh cat-and-mouse, where after all is said and done you try yet one more time to claim that RSSB does not teach GIHF/PLM might break through that cognitive dissonance and, just perhaps, impinge on an awareness trying desperately to keep its eyes blinkered.

On the other hand, maybe not: because that is the nature of this animal, this cognitive dissonance thing. Fascinating.

RSSB teachings: "The perfect Master is the Lord in human flesh"

Recently I wrote two blog posts about the notion of a guru being God in Human Form. First, I said that this makes no sense. Then I said that Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) does teach that the RSSB guru is God in Human Form. 

Since some regular commenters on this blog are familiar with the RSSB teachings, I was surprised with the pushback that second post got. Even though I'd provided quotes from two previous RSSB gurus saying that, indeed, the RSSB guru is God in Human Form, for some reason this obvious fact was being denied by a few people.

So here's even more definitive proof. I've given away almost all of my RSSB books, but I kept a 1973 first edition of "Philosophy of the Masters (Abridged)" by Sawan Singh, a RSSB guru who often is called the Great Master. 

Understand: I'm not saying that this section below, which was titled Master is the Lord, is true. After 35 years of being an active member of RSSB and writing several books for the organization, I now have big doubts about the RSSB teachings.

Instead, I want to lay to rest any doubt that the RSSB guru is considered to be God in Human Form. Sawan Singh makes this crystal clear. If the current guru, Gurinder Singh, is teaching something else, that could be because he doesn't believe in the RSSB teachings, as I noted in another blog post.

I've boldfaced passages that relate most closely to the guru is God in Human Form teaching, and a related concept -- that no one can know God without being initiated by a Perfect Living Master. Shabd is a supposed divine energy that manifests as sound and light.

Back in 1970, when I first learned about the RSSB teachings, I viewed the following as an exciting invitation to undertake what's been called the Journey of the Soul. Now, though I wish it were true, I see little reason to consider that it is. Further, the idea that there's only one way back to God, that possessed by RSSB, strikes me as cult-like, since this is a claim that all religions are false except RSSB and related Sant Mat teachings.

Here's what Sawan Singh says. Or as his name is shown in the book, Huzur Maharaj Sawan Singh Ji.

The perfect Master is the Lord in human flesh. He is the Shabd personified, "the Word made flesh." Unless we are familiar with the human Master, how can we realize His subtle form, which is the Shabd? The Shabd and the perfect Master are the two means of taking the soul to its original Home.

No one but the Master can reveal the secrets of Reality, and without Him no one can gain release from the bondage of mind and Maya. No one can meet the Lord except through the Shabd, and it is only the Master who can connect the soul with the Shabd. This is the only purpose of their manifestation in this world.

Human beings are endowed with the gifts of intelligence and discrimination to a far greater extent than all the other creatures in this world. All other creatures are, therefore, not worthy of our devotion. Actually, devotion to them would pull us down.

The relationship between beings of the same species has a great deal of power in this world for creating love and attraction. We are on the physical plane, and we can only love one who is also on this physical plane. We are human beings and we should love only a human being.

We have not seen the Lord. How can we offer our love to Him? In other words, it is clear that in order to love the Lord we must love Him through one of his manifestations. Such a man is the Master.

The question arises, why should a man worship another man? The answer is that there is a great difference between one man and the other. A Master has assumed the form of a man, but he is not an ordinary man. Internally He is always in conscious contact with God.

To our limited understanding, the Master may appear to be finite. Actually, he is Infinite. He is the medium for attaining God-realization. He is the medium for taking us from the physical to astral, from astral to causal planes, and even further up -- stage by stage -- to the Unlimited Power above, by means of his instructions and discourses. 

If one were to assert that he worships and contemplates on the form of God, which is omnipresent, it can be said that at the most he contemplates on the form of a vacuum or of the ether. Besides, it is not visible to our sense of sight and it will not be helpful in awakening in us the currents of spirituality.

A Master has two forms. Externally he is a human being; but internally he is, in fact, God. He is in the form of a human being outside; but he is God in man, or God plus man. He has contact with human beings on one side, and with the Lord on the other.

From this point of view he has two aspects. One is that of a human being, and the other is that of God. His real form is Shabd. Shabd creates the physical body and dwells in it. "And the word was made flesh, and dwelt among us."

A Master is the medium through which individuals are connected with God. In other words, God, Shabd, and Master are three different forms of the same Lord. If we offer devotion to Shabd in the physical form, which is the Master, we are then immediately connected with the Lord inside. 

Devotion to the Master is, in fact, true devotion to the Lord.

A study of the ancient history of India will reveal that in prior ages education was imparted by the Masters in places far removed from human habitation, and the student was wholly occupied physically, mentally and spiritually in the service of his Master. Later this type of education began to disappear slowly and in its place idol worship started.

In the present age, such rendering of service to the Master has altogether disappeared except in the case of a rare few. Now God Almighty, in His abundant Grace, has sent His own Incarnations into this world to preach the doctrine of Master-Disciple Service. This tradition of Master-Disciple relationship continues today.

The perfect Master or Sat Guru has a very clear inner vision and can at once see who is fit for this Path. Those that are ready are accepted. He, in His grace, chooses them and makes them followers of the Truth.

When our soul grows weary in its search for the Lord, and is anxious to return to its home, when our eyes long to see the Lord and we hunger for Him, then, in order to fulfill our intense desire, He incarnates as a perfect Master or Sat Guru. 

In order to release the seekers from their bonds He himself comes as a redeemer. He gives the seekers instructions according to their development, and connects them with the Lord.

The secrets of spirituality, or of the practical means by which the soul can become united with the Lord, are given out by a living Master only. This teaching is imparted through an unspoken language. There is no spoken language by means of which it can be imparted. Religious books merely give a few hints about the ascent to the spiritual regions.

The scenes witnessed by the soul with the help of the Master in the subtle regions cannot be fully described. The books, being inanimate, cannot help the soul in its ascent. In the writings of the Saints there is a reference to internal experiences.

The bliss of these experiences can be had by internal progress and not otherwise. It can be achieved through the Sat Guru only. It cannot be had by reasoning. Holy books and scriptures describe it to a certain extent only; but it cannot be experienced except through a living Master.

Finale of "Under the Banner of Heaven" shows absurdity of religion

Back in May I wrote about a streaming series on Hulu, "Under the Banner of Heaven." In the title of that post I called it a compelling story of religion gone bad. 

The series is based on a true story, the murder of a young woman and her baby at the hands of extremely fundamentalist Mormons.

Last night my wife and I watched the final episode. It tied things together nicely, and was the most philosophical of any episode in how the characters talked about atheism and religious belief.

Detective Jeb Pyre, a devout Mormon white guy, has a Native American partner, Bill Taba. Taba is a professed atheist. He doesn't even believe in the message of a tribal chant he sings near the end of the final episode.

He simply says that he likes the sound of it, so he sings it now and then.

The Mormons are constantly referring to Heavenly Father this and Heavenly Father that, since "Heavenly Father" is how they refer to God. 

What we see in the final episodes is the danger of believing that your thoughts and intentions are coming from Heavenly Father. This is the same risk that comes when anyone of any faith embraces the delusion that God or God's messenger is communicating with them directly.

Sure, people can do crazy things and believe crazy stuff even without believing that God is behind their doing and believing. But fanaticism is more likely to take hold of someone when they think they're doing God's bidding.

That's what happens with the murderous Mormons. 

They're discussing how to handle some members of their family who aren't considered to be sufficiently devoted to what the fundamentalists consider the true original teachings of the Mormon Church. Then their leader plays the Heavenly Father card.

He says, basically, "I've heard from Heavenly Father and he wants them to be killed." That pretty much ends the discussion, since no one wants to go against Heavenly Father's will. 

Of course, Taba views this as totally bizarre from his atheist perspective, while Pyre is better able to understand what's going on, being a Mormon himself. As the series progresses, Pyre takes an increasingly loose view of Mormonism, since his investigation into the murders shows the danger of religious fundamentalism.

I really liked a scene where Taba and Pyre are driving along in their police vehicle, trying to figure out where the Mormon murderers are going to strike next and how they can be found before they kill again. 

Taba gets fed up with all the talk from Pyre about Heavenly Father, even though Pyre isn't a fundamentalist Mormon. Taba pulls the car over in a remote area and stalks away to an overlook. Pyre walks after him.

Taba tells Pyre (I'm paraphrasing), "Look at this beautiful nature, Jeb. That's what it is, natural. No Heavenly Father needed. Stop thinking that you have to invoke Heavenly Father to figure out what's going on with this case. Use your brain. Your natural brain. Forget all that Heavenly Father bullshit."

That leads to a breakthrough, now that Pyre has eliminated some unnecessary Mormonism from his detective consciousness. 

After the murderous Mormons have been apprehended, Pyre is shown taking his elderly mother for an outing to a gorgeous spot. I recall it was a pristine lake with mountains in the background. His devout Mormon mother says something like, "Oh, look at what Heavenly Father has given us. It's so beautiful."

But Pyre is looking at life differently now. He tells her, "Mom, forget Heavenly Father. Isn't it enough that you and I are together right now?" She says with a sense of relief while hugging him, as if a religious weight has been lifted from her also, "Yes, Jeb, yes. It's enough."

Here's a You Tube video about the finale, with mentions about the religious aspects.

Sometimes the RSSB guru sounds like he doesn't believe the RSSB teachings

Sort of weirdly, in a recent post, "RSSB does teach that the guru is God in Human Form," atheist me was arguing that the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), my spiritual home for 35 years, say that the RSBB guru is God's right hand man (no female gurus yet) while some current members of RSSB were arguing the opposite -- that the guru is just a regular human like everybody else.

This perplexed me for a while. 

Then I came up with a theory. Being an ancient 73 years old, I was initiated into RSSB way back in 1971 when Charan Singh was the guru. He died in 1990, appointing Gurinder Singh as his successor. So my formative years as a member of RSSB were in the days of what I've called Sant Mat 1.0.

(Sant Mat means the path of the saints; Radha Soami Satsang Beas is part of the contemporary Sant Mat movements.)

In that original Sant Mat philosophy as taught by RSSB, there's absolutely no doubt that a central tenet was that the RSSB guru was God in Human Form, just as Jesus is considered to be in Christianity. In fact, several RSSB books relate the New Testament to the RSSB teachings. 

More: the RSSB teachings v. 1.0 also clearly said that it isn't possible to return all the way to God, a realm known as Sach Khand, without being initiated by a Perfect Living Master, another way of saying God in Human Form. This was noted in the quotes from RSSB gurus prior to Gurinder Singh that I included in the above-mentioned post. 

But in 2006 I wrote a post called "Sant Mat, version 2.0."  Here's what I said.

I’m wondering if there’s been a new release of Sant Mat, a north Indian spiritual philosophy centered around the need to follow a God-realized guru. It certainly seems that way from the remarks of several Church of the Churchless commenters.

Maybe version 2.0 has superceded the original Sant Mat that I was initiated into thirty-five years ago, and which I’ve written about in two books distributed or published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

Though now I’ve been called “Beas’ most articulate critic” (and not only by myself), I still have a genuine fondness for Sant Mat, a.k.a. Radha Soami teachings, and I want to be sure that I’m keeping up with the latest theological developments.

So if you’re a member of RSSB, help me out here. Am I wrong in assuming that the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh, has updated the Sant Mat philosophy? Since Gurinder Singh doesn’t write anything for publication, nor allow his talks to be recorded, nor permit attendees to take notes about what he says, it isn’t easy to make a comparison between the original Sant Mat teachings and the new guru’s version.

But here’s the impression that I get from hearing Gurinder Singh speak four times, spending two weeks at the Dera in India eight years ago, and reports I’ve gotten via this weblog and other sources about what he’s said more recently.

Sant Mat v. 1.0
--The guru is God in human form
--The guru is perfect, possessing God’s divine qualities
--God has chosen certain souls to return to Him
--God delegates the guru to initiate these “marked souls”
--Without initiation by a perfect guru, God-realization is impossible

Sant Mat v. 2.0
--The guru is a human who is seeking God, just like us
--The guru is imperfect, just like us
--Whether we want to pursue God-realization is up to us
--The guru is a spiritual guide, not a savior
--There are many paths to God, not just Sant Mat

This is just an off-the-top-of-my-head summary of several seeming differences between the old and new Sant Mat (or more accurately, RSSB) philosophies. However, if I’m even halfway right about v. 2.0, then kudos to Gurinder Singh. For this is a considerably improved Sant Mat, being closer to a science and further from a religion.

However, I’m a bit skeptical that either the RSSB organization or formal teachings really have changed to this extent. My take is that Gurinder Singh’s breath of fresh spiritual air is being diluted by those RSSB’ers who are either unwilling or unable to understand that this 2006 version isn’t your grandfather’s Sant Mat.

For example, a friend told me that when he went to India he’d hear Gurinder Singh say “We are all gods” when asked if the guru indeed was God. After the meeting ended my friend would ask other attendees what they thought of that rather heretical utterance. Most of them didn’t know what he was talking about. They only had heard what fit with their v. 1.0 conception of Sant Mat.

The winds of change may be blowing, but not in the mind of the typical RSSB initiate. Which isn’t surprising, given that Gurinder Singh has been so reticent to write or speak on the record. The current guru likes to say that he has nothing to add to the historical Sant Mat teachings, so the old books, tape recordings, and videos still serve as the official RSSB party line.

I could be wrong (naturally), but in my more optimistic moments I sense an increased openness in RSSB. This supposedly mystical organization has been heading down the road of becoming a hidebound religion, but maybe Sant Mat v. 2.0 will fix the dogmatic, fundamentalist glitches that are keeping this mystic philosophy from being a true spiritual science.

We can only hope.

After 16 years, now I'm not as positive about RSSB as I was in 2006. But I'm still interested in the apparent mismatch between what Gurinder Singh says in his talks and Q&A sessions, and the original RSSB teachings that I was exposed to for so many years.

It's as if the RSSB guru doesn't believe in some key parts of the RSSB teachings. I have no problem with that, since I'm a big believer in changing one's mind when it comes to religion and spirituality. In fact, in 2011 I suggested that Gurinder Singh has gone further and now has embraced Sant Mat v. 3.0. 

The roots of RSSB are traced back to Shiv Dayal Singh ("Soamiji Maharaj"), who taught from the 1850s until 1878. After him, a lineage of RSSB gurus continues to the present day. So for over 150 years, 1850 to 2000 or so, there was a consistent RSSB teaching.

This is obvious to those of us of the Charan Singh era who repeatedly read all the RSSB books ever published, including Shiv Dayal Singh's Sar Bachan. I'm not aware of any guru who made a significant change to the RSSB teachings until Gurinder Singh in the early 2000s. And then only verbally, since the current RSSB guru hasn't written any books as the previous gurus did.

So the past 15-20 years have been an aberration. I'm not saying Gurinder Singh is a RSSB heretic, though from what I've heard, sometimes he can sound that way. Which to me is a good thing, since I like heretics.

Again, my big insight, which I guess will sound obvious, is that members of RSSB in the Gurinder Singh era have been exposed to a considerable different version of the RSSB teachings than those of us who were part of the Charan Singh era.