Church of the Churchless

Our brains don't see reality as it is, but as it's predicted to be

My new favorite book talks about a fascinating subject that I've read about before, but never so clearly and in so much depth as Andy Clark's The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality.

Now, before New Age types get all excited about how the human mind creates its own reality, this definitely isn't what Clark, a professor of cognitive philosophy, is describing. But it is true that each of us fashions our view of reality to some extent in accord with our previous experiences.

Clark starts off by relating a story of how he woke up to the sound of bird noises. Except, he soon realized that his surroundings were perfectly quiet. What had happened was that his partner had gotten a smartphone app that plays a birdsong rather than a traditional alarm.

After hearing the birdsong app for several days, Clark's brain had played a trick on him. Here's how he describes the trick, followed by a summary of his book's thesis.

I now find that I quite often awake well in advance of the start of the actual alarm, already seeming to hear the faint onset of those prerecorded chirps. These are genuine auditory hallucinations, caused by my new, strong expectation of waking to the subtle sound of the birds.

There is probably nothing sinister about my proneness to this hallucination. It has long been known that hallucinations, both auditory and visual, can be quite easily induced by the right kind of training. 

But these, as well as a myriad of other intriguing phenomena, are lately falling into place of signs of something much larger -- something that lies at the very heart of all human experience. The idea (the main topic of this book) is that human brains are prediction machines.

They are evolved organs that build and rebuild experiences from shifting mixtures of expectation and actual sensory evidence. According to that picture, my own unconscious predictions about what I was likely to be hearing as I awoke pulled my perceptual experience briefly in that direction, creating a short-lived hallucination that was soon corrected as more information flowed in through my senses.

That new information (signifying the lack of birdsong) generated "prediction error signals" and these -- on this occasion at least -- were all it took to bring my experience back into line with reality. The hallucination gave way to a clear experience of a silent room.

But in other cases, as we'll see, mistaken predictions can become entrenched and contact with reality (itself a complex and vexed notion) harder to achieve. Even when there are no mistakes involved, and we are seeing things "as they are," our brain's predictions are still playing a central role.

Predictions and prediction errors are increasingly recognized as the core currency of the human brain, and it is in their shifting balances that all human experience takes shape.

This book is about those balances and an emerging science that turns much of what we thought we knew about perceiving our worlds upside down. According to that science, the brain is constantly trying to guess how things in the world (and our own body) are most likely to be, given what has been learned from previous encounters.

Everything that I see, hear, touch, and feel -- so this new science suggests -- reflects hidden wells of prediction. If the expectations are sufficiently strong, or (as in early chirps of the bird alarm) the sensory evidence sufficiently subtle, I may get things wrong, in effect overwriting parts of the real sensory information with my brain's best guess of how things ought to be.

This does not mean that successful sensing is simply a form of hallucination, though the mechanisms are related to those of hallucination. We should not downplay the importance of all that rich sensory information arriving at the eyes, ears, and other senses.

But it casts the process of seeing -- and of perceiving more generally -- in a new and different way. It casts it as a process led by our brain's best predictions: predictions that are then checked and corrected using the sensory inputs as a guide.

With the prediction machinery up and running, perception becomes a process structured not simply by incoming sensory information but by difference -- the difference between the actual sensory signals and the ones the brain was expecting to encounter. 

I'll be interested to see if this is reflected in the rest of the book -- I've only finished the first chapter -- but it makes sense to me: that religious or mystical experiences occurring entirely within one's own mind, not out there in the world, are especially prone to being hallucinations resulting from strong predictions, or expectations, of what should occur.

After all, as we've seen in the above excerpt from Clark's book, what keeps the brain in close touch with reality is sensory information that corrects erroneous predictions about what ought to be perceived. 

So if a religious believer is engaged in closed-eyes meditation with the expectation that their devotion will result in experiencing God, Jesus, the astral form of their guru, divine light/sound, or whatever, and their brain manifests such an experience, there's no way for that person to use error-correcting sensory information to bring "what appears to be" into closer correspondence with "what actually is."

I said closer correspondence because in one of the last pages I read this morning, Clark dispels the notion that there's any such thing as reality "as it is" -- a favorite saying of many spiritual writers that I'm pleased to see makes little sense. Here he's talking about pain and other sorts of medical symptoms, but his point applies generally.

Since all human experience is constructed from mixtures of expectation, attention, and sensory stimulation, it will never be possible to experience either the world or your own body "as it really is." Indeed, it rapidly becomes unclear what this could even mean. 

Instead, there exists a deep continuity between cases where expectation and attention create symptoms (as we saw earlier) "from whole cloth" and cases where they also reflect the operation of some more standard form of disease and injury. Functional disorders simply lie at one end of this spectrum.

If you want to experience how your brain uses prior experience to predict current reality, check out these examples of sine-wave speech.

First listen to the brief SWS (sine-wave speech) audio. Probably you can't make any sense of it. Then listen to the original audio. After you hear the original, listen again to the SWS audio. If you're like me, and probably you are, now the SWS audio will be quite clear, since your brain has the experience of the original audio to predict what the SWS audio is saying.

This is my favorite Rumi quotation

For several years, a few decades ago, I became obsessed with the great Sufi poet, Rumi. I devoured every English translation of his writings I could find, also buying books that weren't literal translations, but were written in the spirit of Rumi.

Eventually I donated most of my Rumi books when my obsession abated. But I kept a few, including William C. Chittick's translation of Rumi, The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi.

One reason I held on to that book was that it contained my favorite Rumi quotation, from his Masnavi. 

Fear the existence in which you are now!
Your imagination is nothing, and you are nothing,
A nothing has fallen in love with a nothing,
a nothing-at-all has waylaid a nothing-at-all.
When these images have departed,
your misunderstanding will be clear to you.

I've memorized this passage. I ponder it fairly frequently.

It's become sort of a koan for me -- an intriguing bit of spiritual poetry that defies easy explanation, though it also has a seemingly clear meaning that is compatible with Zen and Buddhism in general.

I readily admit that different people will view this quotation in markedly different ways. All I can say is how it speaks to me. 

Yes, there is reason to fear the existence in which I am now. However, this is the same existence that virtually everybody on this planet inhabits: an existence filled with imaginings of things that don't actually exist, of a past that is no more, of a future that is yet to be.

My imagination, though a wellspring of creativity and mental fascination, can lead me into dead ends, dark alleys, wasted cognition, detachment from the non-imaginary here and now.

Worse, I tend to believe that the being doing the imagining, me, possesses more inherent existence than is warranted. The self that I thought for much of my life was eternal, a soul drop of a divine ocean, actually is, as Rumi says, nothing. 

Nothing, at least, that is independent, freestanding, immutable. Whoever or whatever I am, my strong suspicion is that I'm as insubstantial as the imaginings I so frequently engage in.

Yet as Rumi's poem observes, my imagination and me are in love with each other, though neither of us possesses any enduring substance. We are two nothings engaged in dancing together in a wispy ballroom of frothy existence.

Still, Rumi holds out hope for me. And for everybody in a similar situation. Who, again, is almost all of the eight billion people who cling to the dual delusions of barely-existent imagination and selfhood. 

For if I were to be able to exist without imagining what isn't there, which includes the solid self that also is a nothing rather than a something, Rumi says that my current misunderstanding of what life is all about would be cleared up.

Is this a fantasy? Perhaps. Rumi's words just seem to me like they have a ring of truth, though I have no reason to assert that they are true. I simply am attracted to this bit of tantalizing Rumi poetry.

What if religions are wrong and there's nothing to find?

In my experience, the most difficult part of writing is the first sentence and the last sentence. With one, there's nothing that comes before. With the other, there's nothing that comes after. So those sentences are unique.

I struggled with the first sentence in my book, Return to the One. Until finally, a sentence popped into my head that seemed just right to me.

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.

Then I spoke about the familiar situation (familiar to me, at least) of looking for your car keys only to discover that they were sitting unnoticed in a pocket or purse the whole time.

But let's think about what's necessary for a search to make sense. To begin with, you really need to have lost something. Meaning, it was in your possession at one point, and now it isn't. Then there has to be a decent probability that you can find that thing you used to possess.

If you're on a cruise and drop your glasses into the ocean while leaning over a railing, you know what you've lost, but for all practical purposes you have a zero chance of finding that item.

In Return to the One I argued that we have a sense of loss, yet most of us don't understand what we're longing to recover: God, or the One. I feel like I did a pretty good job making that argument, yet in my current frame of mind I no longer find what I wrote to be persuasive.

I still like my first sentence in the book, though. But now I see it as pointing toward the desirability of living in the here and now, rather than a there and then. After all, where we are, where everyone is, without exception, is the present moment.

No searching required. Just be here now.

This, of course, is the essence of mindfulness. And of the non-religious aspect of Buddhism, which includes Zen. Such distinguishes these forms of spirituality from the seeking forms of spirituality and religion where there is much talk of a path to be followed, and signs of progress along the way.

Here's some illustrative passages from Jon Kabat-Zinn's book, Mindfulness for Beginners: reclaiming the present moment -- and your life.

Not only is it always now. The "curriculum" of this adventure we call living, where mindfulness can play such a pivotal role, is always what is unfolding in this moment, whether we like what is happening or not. 

Whatever is arising in this moment becomes the curriculum for liberating ourselves from the shackles of greed, hatred, and delusion. We do not need some ideal or romantic fairy tale of what would be best for us. What we most need is what is already given to us: the actuality of things as they are in the only moment we will ever have -- this one.

...So as we have already seen, the notion that in meditation practice there is no place to go, nothing to do, and nothing to attain can be quite strange and mysterious -- even foreign -- to our striving temperaments and our need to always be getting better.

...Non-striving is not trivial. It involves realizing that you are already here. There's no place to go, because the agenda is simply to be awake. 

It is not framed as some ideal that suggests that after forty years of sitting in a cave in the Himalayas, or by studying with august teachers, or doing ten thousand prostrations, or whatever it is, you will necessarily be any better than you are now.

It is likely that you will just be older. What happens now is what matters.

If you don't pay attention now, as Kabir, the great Indian poet of sixteenth-century India said, "You will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death."

...Awareness itself is what mindfulness is about. It is not about achieving an ideal, or a particularly desirable or longed-for special state.

If the mind is thinking: "If I meditate I'll always be compassionate. I'll be like the Dalai Lama. I'll be like Mother Teresa" or whoever your spiritual guru/hero of the moment is, it may help to remind yourself that you don't stand a snowball's chance in hell of being like the Dalai Lama or Mother Teresa or anybody else. Nor do you know what their interior experience is.

The only person that you have the remotest possibility of being like is yourself. And that, when it comes down to it, is the real challenge of mindfulness: the challenge to be yourself.

The irony, of course, is that you already are.

Here's a great Tina Turner song

I saw Tina Turner perform with her jerk husband Ike at either Winterland or Fillmore in San Francisco during my college days in 1968 or 1969. (Hey, like they say, if you can clearly remember the 60's, you weren't really there.)

I was high on something, naturally. Being close to the stage, absorbing her amazing energy -- that was an experience I'll never forget. So sorry that she died. Here's a song of hers that sends chills up my spine.

How we talk online is much different from how we talk in person

Next year I'll celebrate the 20th anniversary from when I started this blog in 2004. But, hey, I figure that  I might as well spread out the festivities by making some observations from time to time about this here Church of the Churchless.

Like, right now.

The most important thing I want to say is gratitude. Over the years I've learned a great deal from the people who visit this blog and leave comments. Typepad, my blogging service, says there have been 70,198 comments on 3,390 posts. 

So that's about 21 comments, on average, per post that I've written. I read most comments, though if I'm busy, I'll just take a glance at a comment, especially if it's a lengthy one. 

Those comments are my blog's way of having a conversation -- with me, and with other blog visitors. I wish Typepad allowed for editing of comments by the people who share them, and that it was possible to organize the comments in a different fashion than in a chronological fashion.

But wishes aren't reality. Anyway, I deeply appreciate the time and effort people put into their comments, though obviously the quality varies from a high quality essay to random observations that make little sense.

Which is no different from the conversations all of us have in everyday life. But otherwise, there's big differences between how people communicate online versus in person. 

Online, many choose to not use their real name. I can understand why in certain circumstances. For example, on this blog criticism of a religious leader, or the religion itself, can be problematic if someone uses their real name and is still involved with the organization they're criticizing. 

That's why most people who write to me with an interesting story about their faith ask that I share it anonymously. The downside of anonymity, though, is that it enables people to say things in cyberspace that they'd be reluctant to say to someone face-to-face.

I'm definitely guilty of this myself at times. So if I'm directing a blog post or a comment at a specific person, I need to do better at visualizing that person standing in front of me as I say what I want to say about them.

Another problem with online conversations is that in ordinary life communication doesn't just involve words. It also involves a tone of voice, facial expressions, body language. And of course, an ability to say things like "I don't quite understand; please elaborate on what you meant when you said _______"

So its easy to misunderstand those with whom we interact online.

I like to express strong opinions. Many commenters on my blog posts also like to express strong opinions. So we’re going to feel misunderstood by other people at times. That comes with the territory of expressing strong opinions in a setting where only written words can be shared, not the other ways we use to communicate with people.

In a way it's surprising that comment conversations on this blog are as friendly and productive as they usually are, given how many obstacles there are to understanding another person in cyberspace.

But sometimes feelings get hurt. This is unfortunate, though often unavoidable. Partly it's due to different ways of communicating between men and women. I don't want to overemphasize this. It just seems like a reality to me. 

I talked about this in a 2005 post on my HinesSight blog, "Why men don't share their feelings."

“How’re you doing?” says Dennis as I walk into the Pacific Martial Arts changing room. Instead of replying with my habitual robotic “Fine, how’re you?” I have a crazy impulse to actually tell him. I’ll share my feelings!

“Well, my feet have been tingling for about a week. I don’t know what’s going on. I’ve got an appointment to see a doctor tomorrow.” Without missing a beat (appropriately: Dennis is a drummer) I hear, “You’ve got a brain tumor. No doubt about it. You’re going to die.”

For the rest of our hour and a half training session, whenever I stop to check on how my feet are doing Dennis again says, “Oh yeah, you’ve got a brain tumor. Your time is up.”

Sensei Warren, our regular martial arts instructor, came in late. After telling him my tale of tingling feet I got a marginally better prognosis: “You’ve got diabetic neuropathy. No doubt about it. You’re going to lose your feet.” And I don’t even have diabetes.

Now, I know both Dennis and Warren care a lot about me. They demonstrated their manly concern by telling me that I’m either going to die or lose my feet. If one of them had given me a big hug and said “Don’t worry, everything is going to be all right,” I would have begun to worry that he had a brain tumor.

If I want sympathy, I’ll tell my troubles to my wife. From my marital arts buddies I get camaraderie and support that isn’t expressed in words. Dennis taught the class that evening. He started off by saying, “Let’s work on kicks tonight since your feet are giving you a problem.”

Which is what we did. For almost an hour. The unspoken message was, “Your feet are OK. Suck it up. This is no big deal.” That’s pretty much what the doctor said the next day: “Your feet look fine; I’ll do a blood test anyway; call me in a month if you’re not better.”

I'm sharing this anecdote because it points to a seeming fact: men are more comfortable with the rough-and-tumble of online communications because they're more used to joking around with each other in some rough ways.

This is fine.

But I worry when a woman shares something on this blog, then gets attacked in an intense fashion. Mostly or entirely by men. That's when I feel protective toward the woman, since I feel responsible for providing a safe space for people to share their ideas without feeling like they're in some sort of danger.

Well, those are my thoughts for tonight. Thanks for listening. I'll get back to a regular Church of the Churchless blog post soon.

Open Thread 46 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread.

Remember, off-topic comments should go in an Open Thread. 

If you don't see a recent comment, or comments, posted, it might be because you've failed to follow the above rule. Keep to the subject of a blog post if you leave a comment on it. And if you want to use this blog as a "chat room," do that in an open thread.

As noted before, it's good to have comments in a regular blog post related to its subject, and it's also good to have a place where almost anything goes in regard to sharing ideas, feelings, experiences, and such. That place is an Open Thread.

Leave a comment on this post about anything you want to talk about. Personal attacks on someone are an exception, as is hate speech. Argue with ideas, not insults.

Though I haven't been doing too well on this, I'll try to remember to always have an Open Thread showing in the Recent Posts section in the right sidebar. If one isn't showing, I've added an Open Threads category in, naturally, the Categories section. You can always find an Open Thread that way.

So if you're a believer in some form of religion, mysticism, or spirituality, this is where you can put your "praise God," "praise Guru," or "praise _______" comments.

Mindfulness: whatever happens is the curriculum of that moment

One of the things that I like about the Buddhist notion of emptiness, where change is omnipresent because nothing possesses an inherent existence, is how much money it saves me on books.

For I've found that rather than buying a new book to get some fresh ideas, I can look over the books I already own and reread them. This gives me fresh ideas because I've changed from the last time I read the book, so much of it will seem new to me.

Case in point: a few days ago I was looking at the mindfulness section in my office bookcase and noticed Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness for Beginners: reclaiming the present moment -- and your life. 

Amazon tells me that I bought the hardcover version in 2011, twelve years ago.

Since, I've learned a lot abut mindfulness, but I still consider myself a beginner, so I decided to take another look at the book. Based on my highlighting and notes in the back part of the book, I can tell that what most appeals to me now is different from what I liked in my first reading. 

Here's some passages that resonated with me in the first part of the book, which I finished re-reading today.

(1) I'm not opposed to the idea of discipline. However, I also like to flow with life as much as possible. A mini-chapter on "The Beauty of Discipline" (they're all just a few pages long) had some good things to say on this subject.

The discipline I am referring to is really the willingness to bring the spaciousness and clarity of awareness back over and over again to whatever is going on -- even as we feel we are being pulled in a thousand different directions. 

Just taking this kind of of stance toward our own experience, without trying to fix or change anything at all, is an act of generosity toward oneself, an act of intelligence, an act of kindness.

The word discipline comes from disciple, someone who is in a position to learn. So when we bring a certain discipline to the cultivation of mindfulness and are aware of how challenging it is to bring a sustained attending to any aspect of our lives, we are actually creating the conditions for learning something fundamental from life itself.

Then life becomes the meditation practice and the meditation teacher, and whatever happens in any moment is simply the curriculum of that moment. 

(2) I've never understood why some people view thinking as negative, something opposed to a spiritual life, a mindful life. A "Befriending Our Thinking" chapter corrects this misconception.

It is very important as a beginner that you understand right from the start that meditation is about befriending your thinking, about holding it gently in awareness, no matter what is on your mind in a particular moment. It is not about shutting off your thoughts or changing them in any way.

Meditation is not suggesting that it would be better if you didn't think and were simply to suppress all those sometimes unruly, disturbing, and disquieting, sometimes uplifting and creative thoughts when they arise.

If you do try to suppress your thinking, you are just going to wind up with a gigantic headache. Such a pursuit is unwise, pure folly -- like trying to stop the ocean from waving. It is the very nature of the ocean for its surface to change as a result of changing atmospheric conditions.

...The mind is similar. The surface can be extremely labile, changing constantly with the changing "weather patterns" of our lives: our emotions, moods, thoughts, our experiences, everything, often with little or no awareness on our part.

We can feel victimized by our thoughts, or blinded by them. We can easily mistake them for the truth or for reality when in actuality they are just waves on its surface, however tumultuous they may be at times.

The entirety of our mind, on the other hand, is by its very nature deep, vast, intrinsically still and quiet, like the depths of the ocean.

(3) There's a me. But it's not mine. This teaching of Buddhism, and also of modern neuroscience, is both wonderfully appealing to me and also wonderfully confusing. Jon Kabat-Zinn explains things in a chapter called "Our Love Affair with Personal Pronouns -- Especially I, Me, and Mine."

The Buddha taught for forty-five years. He is said to have said that all of his teachings could be encapsulated in one sentence. If that is so, perhaps we might want to remember what it was, even if we don't necessarily understand it at first. Imagine forty-five years of profound teaching distilled into one sentence: "Nothing is to be clung to as 'I,' 'me,' or 'mine.'"

It might be helpful to reflect on what the Buddha might have meant when he used the verb "to cling." "Nothing is to be clung to as 'I,' 'me,' or 'mine'" does not mean there is no "you." It isn't suggesting that perhaps you will have to hire someone to put on your pants in the morning because there's no "you" to do it.

Nor does it mean that you should give away all the money in your bank account because it is not yours and there is no real bank anyway.

What it means is that clinging is optional, that we can recognize it when it arises and choose not to feed it. It means that the selfing habit is a major part of our default setting, that mode of mind that we revert to constantly when we go unconscious or drone on in the automatic pilot doing mode. 

It means that how we relate to all our moments, all our experiences, is a choice.

It means that we can make the choice, moment by moment, to recognize how much we do cling to "I," "me," and "mine," how self-oriented and self-preoccupied we can be, and then decide not to cling to them, or more reasonably, to catch ourselves when we do it.

It is saying that we don't have to automatically and with no awareness fall into the habits of self-identification, self-centeredness, and selfing. What is more, if we are open to looking at ourselves afresh, we can really see that these thought-habits actually distort reality, create illusions and delusions, and ultimately imprison us. 

RSSB guru makes light of wife-beating and sexual assault

It amuses me, along with disturbing me, when devotees of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an organization with headquarters in India, excuse Dhillon's bad behavior by saying "At least he hasn't been convicted of a crime."

Well, that's a pretty low bar for a guru who is considered by the RSSB teachings to be God in Human Form, possessing divine powers. One would expect that a guru who is supposedly so exalted would behave at least as well as a decent ordinary person would.

But as you can read below in a comment on a recent blog post by Simmi, the RSSB guru advised a woman complaining her husband beat her and sexually assaulted her daughter to "compromise" with him.

That's abhorrent. It's disgusting. Horrible advice. 

And this isn't the first time the RSSB guru has been accused of making light of sexual abuse. I wrote about another instance in Gurinder Singh Dhillon ignores sexual abuse of a child. Here's an excerpt from what the person who observed this instance said to me.

What BBJ [Baba Ji, Gurinder Singh Dhillon] did was not only heartless and ignorant. It was a crime and advice of the worst sort; as any mental health professional will tell you pedophiles do not quit. Pedophilia is a psychiatric compulsion with an almost non-existent rate of “cure”.

 

This is only one example of the many instances of disastrous advice BBJ is always anxious to espouse.

 

At least Huzur [Charan Singh, the previous RSSB guru] had the humility to preface the common sense advice he’d reluctantly give when asked, with the declaration that he himself was no expert in family matters and can be heard on audio tape admitting to be a poor example of a husband and parent.  

 

BBJ however fancies himself an expert in all things, above the law of man and blithely gives the most jaw-dropping and disastrous advice imaginable. The fact is BBJ's “advice” has caused satsangis I know personally the most painful consequences imaginable.

 

Here's the comment from Simmi. I fixed some typos and included definitions of a few words in brackets.

That is really funny thing about mix marriages. I got married with my husband. He was very much into this organisation. GSD [Gurinder Singh Dhillon] was like his God. I remember to support him.

l used to go with him to so called satsang [spiritual meeting] on Tuesday evening and Sundays morning, also so called Seva [volunteer service] regularly. All the preachers used to emphasise on how lucky we were that we got GSD and he is GIHF [God in Human Form].

I was very impressed initially and started believing in it...got initiated. Whenever GSD used to come, it was like OMG, l found the God. Many years l followed his meditation with my husband. Our life was just like around RSSB [Radha Soami Satsang Beas] people. No social and always talk about GSD and how lucky we were, and everything happening in our life because of GSD.

One day in his satsang, one lady asked him that her husband used to beat her up and did wrong with her daughter. Instead of telling her to go to police and leave him GSD said it is all karma. You should talk with your husband and make compromise. I was shocked. How can he give this advice to a mum whose daughter was sexually assaulted

After this l started to see my life more closely and took my RSSB glasses off. l realised RSSB is a big cult and my husband and l was this Cult member. We were cut off from a normal life and wasted many years. I spoke with my husband and said l don't mind if he wanted to continue but l refused to follow GSD any more.

After all this, many other GSD frauds came in the light and my husband also realised that how big cult RSSB is. He also gave up eventually. He was in depression for few years that he wasted best years of his life behind this organisation.

It's been 5 years now..we studied more our birth religion Sikhism and found Sikhism is a real and first Sant Mat [path of the saints] as Sri Guru Granth Sahib has teaching of many saints. We are not very religious but we do our meditation as per Sikhism teachings.

We are very happy now and living a normal life. Whoever is in RSSB, this is the time. Come out ASAP. It is a very big Cult and you are wasting your life. Smell the coffee.

If art is separate from an artist, is a guru separate from their message?

In a recent issue of TIME magazine (May 8/May 15, 2023) there was an interesting story by Stephanie Zacharek, "What Lies Beneath: Grappling with how to approach great works of art by bad men in the book Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma."

It got me to thinking about a roughly parallel question in the realm of religion and spirituality. Can the message of a guru be separated from how they behave as a person? Before I describe how I see this question, here's how the TIME story starts out.

You, me, and everyone we know: whether you're aware of it or not, you're in a relationship with a monster. 

There is surely some artist whose behavior, known to you or otherwise, is scurrilous, reprehensible, possibly worthy of life imprisonment -- and yet you continue to love the work of that artist, defiantly, secretly, or in ignorant bliss.

More often than not, it's brilliant men who get a pass when it comes to how they behave in everyday life. And so, when it comes to laying blame for these conflicts that roil inside us -- can I still watch Woody Allen's Annie Hall and not feel dirty? Is it wrong to feel a frisson of joy as I gaze at the aggressive angles of Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'Avignon? -- the bottom line is that it's men's fault. Why do they have to spoil everything?

And yet -- with her exhilarating book Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma, essayist and critic Claire Dederer holds a small lantern aloft in the darkness. Is it possible to ever separate the art from the artist? And if not, is it possible to find the sweet spot between our rage and our rapture?

Those are just some of the questions Dederer both raises and responds to in Monsters, though this isn't so much a book of solutions as it is an examination of how we approach the art we love. Because the more deeply we engage with art, the more troubled we're likely to be over the sins of the people who make it.

In my case, I find it easy to separate an artist from his art.

But I realize this may be more difficult for women, since often a male artist gets into trouble for sexual misbehaving. I can't recall what Kevin Spacey did (sex with an underage male?) that led him to be ostracized by Hollywood, but whatever it was, my enjoyment of him in the House of Cards series is undiminished. 

When we enter the realm of religion, though, it becomes much more difficult to separate the messenger from his message. If a priest is sexually abusing an altar boy, almost everybody would say that no matter how good a priest he is, he needs to be dismissed from the Catholic Church and criminally charged.

Because for 35 years I was a member of an India-based religious organization -- Radha Soami Satsang Beas -- headed up by a guru, I find the messenger vs. message thing most interesting when it comes to a guru who, according to the RSSB teachings, is viewed as God in Human Form.

The current RSSB guru is Gurinder Singh Dhillon. He's been accused of making death threats and is deeply embroiled in a large-scale financial fraud mess involving his relatives, Malvinder and Shivinder Singh. Dhillon also has done other things that are, at the least, questionable for anyone believed to be Godly, if not a manifestation of God.

Yet Dhillon is a charismatic speaker and a beloved spiritual guide to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of RSSB followers. So in this case, is it possible to separate Dhillon's religious artistry from his worldly behavior?

I think not. Here's why.

An actor is distinct from the roles he plays. A painter is distinct from the paintings he creates. But a guru who acts in a way that's contrary to the message of his teaching -- this strikes me as a different situation.

For while in Christianity it is accepted that all are sinners before God, clergy included, so failings are to be expected, in RSSB, as in other guru-centered faiths, the guru is considered to be the living embodiment of the teachings. Meaning, if the guru is deeply flawed, so is his message.

This helps explain why so many devotees of Radha Soami Satsang Beas go to great lengths to deny that the RSSB guru has done anything wrong, even though much evidence points in that direction. For if Gurinder Singh Dhillon isn't living in accord with the RSSB teachings, this strikes a serious blow at the validity of those teachings.

The appealing notion of "good enough"

Back in my religious-believing days, I would have viewed this as a sign from God. Now, I just see it as an interesting coincidence. But who knows? Maybe it is a sign from God!

Last week I'd scribbled on a large post-it note some of what Sam Harris had said in a guided meditation of his Waking Up app, then stuck the note next to books that I read every morning before meditating. It quoted Harris as saying:

The goal of meditation is to realize that consciousness as it is, is good enough. Not waiting for something to happen. 

I planned to write about "good enough" today in a churchless post. Since I'd been reading about Zen recently, this morning I picked up a book that I'd set aside during my Zen phase: Question Everything, a collection of brief essays from the New York Times philosophy series.

A bookmark I'd put in Question Everything led me to the next essay that I hadn't read yet. The title that leapt out at me was "The Good-Enough Life" by Avram Alpert. I'll share the passages that I highlighted.

Ideals of greatness cut across the American political spectrum... The desire for greatness also unites the diverse philosophical camps of Western ethics.

Aristotle called for practicing the highest virtue. Kant believed in an ethical rule so stringent not even he thought it was achievable by mortals. Bentham's utilitarianism is about maximizing happiness. Marx sought the great world for all. Modern-day libertarians will stop at nothing to increase personal freedom and profit.

These differences surely matter, but while the definition of greatness changes, greatness itself is sought by each in his own way.

Swimming against the tide of greatness is a counter-history of ethics embodied by schools of thought as diverse as Buddhism, Romanticism, and psychoanalysis. It is by borrowing from D.W. Winnicott, an important figure in the development of psychoanalysis, that we get perhaps the best name for this other ethics: "the good-enough life."

...To fully become good enough is to grow up into a world that is itself good enough, that is as full of care and love as it is suffering and frustration.

From Buddhism and Romanticism we can get a fuller picture of what such a good enough world could be like. Buddhism offers a criticism of the caste system and the idea that some people have to live lives of servitude in order to ensure the greatness of others.

It posits instead the idea of the "middle path," a life that is neither excessively materialistic nor too ascetic. And some Buddhist thinkers, such as the sixth century Persian-Chinese monk Jizang, even insist that this middle life, this good-enough life, is the birthright of not only all humans, but also all of nature as well.

...The Romantic poets and philosophers extend this vision of good-enoughness to embrace what they would call "the ordinary" or "the everyday." This does not refer to the everyday annoyances or anxieties we experience, but the fact that within what is most ordinary, most basic, and most familiar, we might find a delight unimaginable if we find meaning only in greatness.

...Being good enough is not easy. It takes a tremendous amount of work to smile purely while waiting, exhausted, in a grocery line. Or to be good enough to loved ones to both support them and allow them to experience frustration.

And it remains to be seen if we as a society can establish a good-enough relation to one another, where individuals and nations do not strive for their unique greatness, but rather work together to create the conditions of decency necessary for all.

Achieving this will also require us to develop a good-enough relation to the natural world, one in which we recognize both the abundance and the limitations of the planet we share with infinite other life-forms, each seeking its own path toward good-enoughness. 

If we do manage any of these things, it will not be because we have achieved greatness, but because we have recognized that none of them are achievable until greatness itself is forgotten.

I could say more about this subject, but I feel that this blog post is good enough as it is.