Church of the Churchless

Flee from the fear of God

Yesterday John, a commenter on my “Reality is the best religion” post, gave me some advice: “If you desire to become more wise than [sic] consider that wisdom begins with the fear of god.”

I must be a real dumb-ass, because I’ve never been able to muster up much of a fear of God. I’m afraid of a lot of things—death, disease, Bush appointing a Supreme Court justice, missing the final episode of “Survivor”—because I have either directly observed these fears or can reasonably imagine their occurrence.

But I’ve never seen God. And I bet John hasn’t either. So how does he know that it’s wise to fear God? Maybe God doesn’t even exist, in which case fearing God would make as much sense as fearing the boogeyman. I can understand why an impressionable child would believe that something unseen lives under his or her bed and threatens to get them. I can’t understand why a mature adult would believe in an unseen God who is similarly deserving of fear.

Strangely, John also said, “In this world there is nothing so real like the love of Jesus Christ.” Since Jesus is purported to be the son of God, this implies that God also is real. How could a son be more real than his father? I suppose a son’s love could be more real than his father’s love. Yet it seems to me that if God exists, it is much more likely that God’s love would surpass Jesus’ love rather than fall short of it.

Trying to understand why I should fear the loving Christian God, I perused scripture on a “Why Fear God?” web page. It didn’t make much sense. First I read that "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." (John 3:16 NIV). Ah, eternal life: that sounds good. Sign me up.

A bit further down the page, though, I came to "The LORD Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy, he is the one you are to fear, he is the one you are to dread.” (Isaiah 8:13 NIV), and also, “But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.” (Luke 12:5). Oh, hell: that isn’t appealing. Cancel my application.

The Christian God described in the Old and New Testaments isn’t somebody I want to spend any time with. Certainly not eternity. He’s a father who only loves children who fear him: As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him. (Psalms 103:13)

I also read, “To find balance between love and fear look to your childhood. As children, we all loved our earthly fathers, but we feared the times of discipline (which was for our own good). ‘The fear of the LORD is pure, enduring forever. The ordinances of the LORD are sure and altogether righteous.’ (Psalms 19:9 NIV)"

Well, I grew up without a father. And my mother believed in maternal love, not fearful discipline. So I guess I didn’t experience the child abuse that apparently is needed to appreciate why I now need the fear of the Lord.

My wife is a psychotherapist. Frequently she counsels people who are being, or have been, harmed by a “good Christian” man who thinks that his woman and children should fear him just as God teaches that He should be feared.

If you find yourself in such a situation, flee it. Do something about it. Fight it. Don’t put up with it. Life is too short and too precious to be lived in fear. Don’t be afraid of a human father, and don’t be afraid of a heavenly father. All too often people put up with fear because they are more afraid of losing the security that an authoritarian father-figure provides.

Mussolini made the trains run on time and Saddam Hussein kept the electricity on. Well, I’d rather wait for a train and eat in the dark than live under a dictator. In the same fashion, I’d rather deal with the consequences of having an open mind than live confined in the dogmatism of a fundamentalist theology.

This page, “Reality versus God and the human illusion of fear” from Escape from Watchtower.com nicely encapsulates the choice between being (in the author’s words) a Mr./Ms. Fundamental, Theist, Formula, Religion person or a Mr./Ms. Mystic, Poet-Thinker, Existentialist, Agnostic, Nontheist person. The author added “science” in the first category, but I question whether it belongs there. For a religion based on fear, such as fundamentalist Christianity, is rooted in a primitive pre-scientific misunderstanding of how the world works.

Science knows that the cosmos is lawful, not arbitrary. The universe shows no evidence of a Zeus-like God who capriciously throws sinners into hell and elevates the faithful into heaven. Yet the religious faithful believe in old texts from a bygone age which were written by people who viewed the world in an unscientific fashion. Those people didn’t know any better; we do. So it is time—actually, long-past time—to embrace spiritual beliefs that are in tune with how reality is, rather than how it isn’t.

Buddhism isn’t immune from rituals and religiosity, but the core of this spiritual philosophy reflects a modern mindset. My Christian correspondent told me that wisdom begins with the fear of God. This excerpt from the second page of an essay called “Why Buddhism?” makes a lot more sense to me:

From the Buddhist point of view, wisdom is based on right understanding and right thought, the realisation of universal law and the development of insight. Insight means not only to see the truth, but to perceive the way of complete liberation from the state of unsatisfactoriness in life.

Therefore, real wisdom cannot be found in academic institutions or in the laboratories of scientific research, nor even in a place of religious worship where people go and pray or perform rites and rituals. Wisdom is within the mind itself. When experience, understanding, realisation and purification are complete, this wisdom, comprising of the highest perfection, will arise and be seen. The aim of life is the attainment of this wisdom. Instead of searching into outer space, man should make the effort to explore the space within. Then he could reach his final goal.

Buddhism advocates right action, or morality, but not out of a fear of God. Rather, “Evil is to be avoided for the welfare of all living beings, not for fear of god or his punishment.” I’ve been a vegetarian for over thirty-five years. The main reason I don’t kill animals for food is because it would seriously bother me to know that I’ve made them suffer. I also consider that karma and reincarnation are part of the fabric of reality, so I also don’t want to incur the consequences of unnecessary killing (which is immediately evident in the form of diseases related to meat-eating).

Believing in universal laws of natural consequences, causes and effects, is much different from believing in a whimsical personal authoritarian God who punishes sinners and rewards the faithful.

This choice of beliefs can be simply encapsulated in a T-shirt slogan.

Which is most appealing to you: this or this?

I’ll take “No Fear,” please.

Living in the Mystery

Here's a thoughtful and well-written post, "Living in the Mystery," from a relatively new weblog in Corvallis, The Yoga Loft.

I heartily agree with this thought: I am always curious about someone who tells me without solicitation "I am a Christian" or "I am a Buddhist." They use this as a shield to keep people out, and to try and convince others that they hold the corner on something powerful.

All too true.

Religious questioning is natural

Like most bloggers, I love getting email. Making connections with like-minded (or unlike-minded) people from anywhere in the world is a wonderful reward for the time and effort that goes into a weblog.

Recently I got a message from another member of the spiritual group, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), that I’ve been involved with for thirty-five years. This is how my correspondent ended his email:

I do not know whether you will feel the following questions too personal to answer, but if you do not mind , will you mind answering them?: Are you or were you ever a satsangi? What is your spiritual philosophy these days? Can you comment at all on the Sant Mat Gurus, especially Maharaj Gurinder Singh? How do you recommend one seeks the Ultimate Truth?

By “satsangi” he meant specifically an initiate of the mystical path known variously as Sant Mat, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Science of the Soul, Surat Shabd Yoga, or Radha Soami. Satsangi is a generic word that literally means “one who associates with truth (sat).” Since many spiritual groups in India and elsewhere consider that they are on the path to knowing truth, you can be a “satsangi” of various denominations—to use a rather ill-fitting Christian term. “Satsang” is a meeting of satsangis, a service if you will.

I was asked good questions, some obviously much easier to answer than others. Though personal, I didn’t mind making a stab at answering them and have shared my response below. I realize my language will seem foreign to many people. But substitute, for example, “Pope” for “Master” and “Catholic Church” for “Radha Soami Satsang Beas” if my message seems too distant from your own experience.

My basic point is universal: after you’ve belonged to a religious or spiritual organization for more than a few years, it’s natural to be more critical of it. The more knowledgeable you become about a church, faith, philosophy, or theology, the more flaws you’ll find.

The ultimate reality we call “God” can’t be confined within any manmade system. Religions try to put bounds around boundlessness, but this is a futile exercise. Truth always finds a way to express itself. So I encourage people to trust their direct experience over abstract concepts.

When something seems wrong about the spiritual path you’re following, likely it is. If it appears that you can drop some inessential ritualistic practice, almost certainly you should. Keep what works for you; discard what doesn’t.

Here’s my mildly edited response to the questions I was asked:

Truth

Here's a nice quotation from Andre Gide that I saw on pdxleft:

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.

Those who are certain they know what is true almost certainly are mistaken.

“The Big If,” a kindred weblog

Laurel’s “Fearing Fundamentalism” article that was published in “Salem Monthly” caught the eye of a Salem writer. He emailed Laurel, expressing interest in our plans to organize a local Church of the Churchless discussion group.

I’ve enjoyed browsing his “The Big If” weblog, whose masthead reads: “Some people think it’s crazy to believe in anything but death after life. Other people think it’s crazy to believe that death ends life. If death doesn't truly kill us--that's the big if--it changes everything.”

Amen to that, The Muse Guy (nom de plume of the weblog’s author). It does indeed change everything. Most postings on The Big If focus on near-death experiences and the evidence (or lack of it) for life after death. But “The Universe Made Me Do It” takes a broad look at how “the Universe” has become a substitute term for “God,” as in “Your house will sell when the Universe says it’s time.”

This is an apt observation that I had never thought of before. Nonetheless, when Laurel had finished reading that post she exclaimed, “Are you sure you don’t have another weblog? This guy sounds just like you.” I not-so-humbly thought, “Ah, how wonderful that Salem has another wise and eloquent writer on metaphysical matters.”

We do indeed seem to be kindred spirits. The Muse Guy has, well, mused on what it would be like to invent the church of your fondest dreams. Most of his vision sounds wonderful to me, though as a singing- and dancing-impaired person I’m not wild about the idea of expressing my spirituality in these fashions. My dream would be to observe the singers and dancers from a stationary mute position, waiting for the “service” to revolve back to talking.

Laurel and I are visualizing the Church of the Churchless as more of a discussion group. But it certainly is true that people “discuss” in different ways. Some are cerebral, some are emotional. Some are highly verbal, others are largely non-verbal. Some are looking for support, others seek to be challenged. A truly open, inclusive church would accommodate many types of people.

Concerning near-death experiences (NDEs), I enjoyed reading Treesha Richie’s account: “Near-Death Experience Of God As Holographic Presence Of Light And Sound.” Treesha facilitates meetings of the Portland Oregon Friends of IANDS (International Association for Near-Death Studies). I’m fascinated by stories of near-death experiences, largely because I readily admit to a deep fear of death. I’ve never had a NDE, per se, but I’ve experienced being embraced by the dark—the scary flip side of being embraced by the light.

Philosophically, near-death experiences tend to support a belief in reincarnation and karma. However, the Western (or at least American) mind seems to have a different “take” on this than Eastern mystics. For Hindu and Buddhist sages, reincarnation is unwanted and karma is its cause. But often the New Age approach is to look upon desire, the root of karma, as a good thing. “We are born again so that we may experience fresh desired forms of earthly life.” This is just what the Buddha said is the cause of suffering: desire.

So I’ve always found it hard to understand why coming back for another earthly life is supposed to be so great. If I’m confused, anxious, and looking for answers to the big questions of life now, what is going to change the next time around? I really like the prospect of experiencing God as a presence of light and sound, holographic or otherwise. Give it to me now though, not just after death. And don’t take it away once I have it.

Many forms of meditative practice refer to “dying while living.” This interests me more than actually coming close to dying and seeing what I experience, a decidedly chancy proposition. Voluntarily attempting to die to physicality while sitting comfortably on my meditation cushion is more appealing to me than non-voluntarily crashing head-on into a semi truck.

To my mind, NDEs offer an advance peek at what lies near the end of the spiritual path. Meditation is the path itself.

Hell joke’s serious side

A friend recently emailed me the “Chemistry of hell” joke that has been circulating on the Internet for years, though I couldn’t recall having seen it before. The version that I got is in the continuation to this post. The joke seems to be evolving, as it now has a nice “Oh, my God!” paragraph at the end that earlier versions didn’t have.

As humorous as this story is, it has some deep philosophy in it. Notably, the idea that since most religions state that anyone who isn’t a member of that faith is going to hell, and few (if any) people belong to every religion in the world, then everyone is going to hell.

I thought of this joke as I was reading a message from a Muslim student who attended a lecture by Sam Harris. Harris wrote “The End of Faith,” a book that I praised on my other weblog after reading only 30 pages. After finishing the book, my initial favorable impression only grew stronger.

As the student writes, Harris boldly attacks all religions as being equally non-sensical and opposed to a truly spiritual view of the world, fellow human beings, and ourselves. What made me think about hell is her observation that bodyguards were present during Harris’ talk. Would a scientist who criticized an unfounded theory need protection from those who believed in it?

Hell isn’t a real place like Death Valley in the summertime. It is the manmade creation of religions. It is as real as the irrational untested beliefs of religious fundamentalists. Yet this illusion has its all-too-real effects: people who question religious dogma need bodyguards to protect them from believers in a loving God.

To me, this absurdity is what’s truly hellish.

“God’s Politics” a timely book

The author of “God’s Politics,” Jim Wallis, was on the Daily Show recently. I don’t often recommend a book before I’ve read it (or, in this case, even seen it), but I am now. Wallis struck me as intelligent, devout, caring, and open-minded. His cause is freeing religious involvement in politics from right-wing Republican confines.

Wallis called himself an evangelical Christian. He considers that the entire Bible, not just selected smatterings from here and there, should be the foundation for how a Christian melds religion and politics. He said that Jesus spoke about caring for the poor much more often than he did about condemning gay marriage or banning abortion (like, many times for the former versus zero for the latter.)

I’ve argued that religious values have no place in politics. But, the reality is that religion and politics are deeply intertwined in the United States. If this is to be, then broadening our conception of “religious values” is the best way of assuring that narrow fundamentalism doesn’t hijack political discourse and turn this land of the free into a theocracy.

I’m hopeful that Wallis will be able to make his book a springboard for a social movement, which, from comments he made on the Daily Show, seems to be his intent. Too many Christians believe that the Republican Party is the only political tent that will shelter their deeply-held religious beliefs. That’s hogwash.

Lying and deception isn’t a religious value. Turning your back on the poor and sick isn’t a religious value. Failing to be a wise steward of the natural world that God created isn’t a religious value. Needless killing isn’t a religious value.

Which political party is favored by God? I’m quite sure that “God’s Politics” answers, “neither” (I’ll let you know for sure after Amazon delivers a copy). This surely is a step in the right direction. Or rather, neither the right nor the left direction.

Plotinus: Vision

For more than eight years I’ve been a close friend of a long-dead Greek philosopher, Plotinus. Obviously I haven’t sat down and talked with him directly, but I feel like I have, so intensely and intimately have I studied his teachings in the course of writing a book: “Return to the One: Plotinus’s Guide to God-Realization.”

Plotinus is the last of five mystics that I’ve been writing about. Each is a worthy “patron saint” for the churchless, and each exhibits a special quality that I try to describe in a single word. For Plotinus it is vision.

I’ve read countless religious, philosophical, metaphysical, and mystical books. My bookshelves are full of attempts to make sense of the vast cosmos. Most writers don’t come close. They present compelling (or, not so compelling) descriptions of some particular aspect of the big picture, while ignoring what falls outside of their particular purviews.

What I love about Plotinus is that he doesn’t leave anything important out of his mystic philosophy. His focus is on the One, what many call “God,” the unity that underlies everything else. By definition, a thought of the One draws our attention to everything rather than this thing or that thing. Plotinus urges us to ponder what lies beyond the time and space with which we are familiar now.

This can be nothing less than really real reality. In “The Elegant Universe,” physicist Brian Greene describes cutting-edge research into string theory and the origins of our universe. Strings, amazingly small one-dimensional bits of vibrating energy, are theorized to be the rock-bottom foundation of physical reality.

But what does that foundation rest on? What is the resting place of strings before they produce a home for material entities, and themselves, to live in? Greene writes (p. 378):

“In the raw state, before the strings that make up the cosmic fabric engage in the orderly, coherent vibrational dance we are discussing, there is no realization of space or time….Imagining such a structureless, primal state of existence, one in which there is no notion of space or time as we know it, pushes most people’s powers of comprehension to the limit (it certainly pushes mine)….We run up against a clash of paradigms when we try to envision a universe that is, but that somehow does not invoke the concepts of space or time.”

About seventeen hundred years ago Plotinus presented just such a vision in his “Enneads.” He and his philosophical forebear, Plato, foreshadowed modern physics in conceiving of an unchanging spiritual realm that is the source of the material universe. This world, the World of Forms, is the immaterial original and our world is the physical reflection. Plotinus says, “All that is here below comes from there, and exists in greater beauty there. For here it is adulterated [by matter], but there it is pure.”

Plotinus’s vision of reality is wonderfully scientific. It isn’t founded on a personal God but on the universal consciousness of the One and spirit, termed “Nous” in Greek. Nous contains the Forms that comprise the blueprint of our reality. Even more, Nous or Spirit is those Forms.

Creation is seen as a continuous cascading flow of conscious energy. From the Source (the One) emanates Spirit (Nous); and from Spirit emanates Soul, which includes the particularized bits of consciousness that we know so well as “me,” “you,” and every other living thing. There are no gaps in Plotinus’s grand conception of the cosmos. All fits together in a compelling rational schema that I am barely hinting at (if you want the full philosophical meal deal, buy my book—I note that “Return to the One” is now selling at a nice discount on Amazon).

I could go on and on about Plotinus’s mystic teachings, but I’ve already done that to the tune of 338 pages. So I’ll content myself with sharing a few of my favorite Plotinus quotations. In these passages he cuts to the core of how to know the One, or God.

The One isn’t something separate from ourselves, for it is, obviously, One. If there was anything else in existence then we’d have the One and that other entity, which would make at least two. Science and mysticism each have a decided fondness for simplicity and unity. One it is, then. And we are part of it. More simply, we are it.

Plotinus advises: If you seek to know God, the most direct approach is to know the seeker.

I’ll end with a paragraph from my book that I wrote, followed by two wonderful quotations from Plotinus. There isn’t anything more than this to spirituality, when you eliminate everything that isn’t essential. Namely, not One.

“Plotinus tells us that the means by which we now know the creation must become the end that we seek. Like a snake that swallows its own tail, the sage turns his attention back upon the consciousness that usually attends to outer things and thoughts. Uniting within himself the knower and the known, the One is revealed as the ground of the sage’s own self.”

We must believe that we have seen him [the One] when, suddenly, the soul is filled with light, for this light comes from him and is identical with him….This is the real goal for the soul: to touch and behold this light itself, by means of itself. She does not wish to see it by means of some other light; what she wants to see is that light by means of which she is able to see. What she must behold is precisely that by which she was illuminated …..How, then, could this come about? Eliminate everything [that is not light]!

For this reason the vision is hard to put into words. For how could one announce that as another when he did not see, there where he had the vision, another, but one with himself?

Lincoln, Bush, and God’s will

After I wrote my previous “Prayer is irreverent” post I came across a wonderful passage written by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, a meditation on the divine will. It begins like this:

The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party.

Contrast these elevated and subtle sentiments with our current president’s utterances. This is what Bush was reported to have said at a meeting in 2003 with the Palestinian Authority prime minister: “God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam [Hussein], which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East.”

Lincoln felt that the will of God prevails and neither side in a conflict could justifiably claim God was on their side. Bush feels that God is talking to him and wants him to attack Al Qaeda and Iraq.

If a murderer said that God had told them to kill people, he or she would be eligible for an insanity defense. But in Bush’s case, this made him eligible to be re-elected president of the United States.

I look forward to the day when, in order to be elected, a political candidate has to assure voters that he or she isn’t hearing messages from God. This would give us saner leadership, that’s for sure.

Prayer is irreverent

Being a man, it’s easy for me to imagine that I’ve got God-like qualities, at least when it comes to omnipotence and omniscience. Every evening I wield the TV remote control with amazing grace. What I will to appear on the screen does, and my ability to use the DISH Network’s “find” command is nothing short of miraculous (to those who don’t bother to read manuals, at least, a group that includes my wife).

So I feel qualified to speak for God: “It really irks my Divine Being when you humans pray to me. It’s just one demand after another. ‘Do this, don’t do that.’ Don’t you think that I know what needs to happen and what doesn’t need to happen? Hey, here’s a message from heaven to Earth: I’m God! You’re not! I’ll take care of my own business, and I’ll also take care of yours, whether or not you babble your useless prayers.”

Praying to a personal God is deeply irreverent, so long as the prayer is anything other than “thy will be done.” These are the only truly reverential words in the Christian “Lord’s Prayer.” Most of the rest of the prayer is a bunch of demands that contradicts these humble sentiments: Give us bread every day; forgive our trespasses; lead us not into temptation; deliver us from evil.

I feel God channeling through me again: “Jesus Christ almighty! Shut up with all the advice! I know what’s going on, everywhere, all the time. I created Creation, you know. And I damn well know how to run it now. Whenever I hear a so-called ‘believer’ blabbing on about what he or she wants me to do, I can tell that this person has no faith in me. On the other hand, I just love those who go with the flow and accept whatever happens as my will. Because, it is.”

Here’s an example of some Christian blasphemy, Chaplain Shackelford’s request for prayers that God will intervene in the upcoming Iraq elections. His unit, the 57th Transportation Battalion, will be delivering voting machines and ballots in Iraq. This is a worthy duty, no doubt. But encouraging people to pray for the electoral process is mixing prayer and politics in an unseemly worldly way.

Shackelford says, “This is a political battle that needs spiritual intervention.” Good lord. Someday, and I hope that day is not far away, statements like this will be viewed in the same fashion as, “This man’s fight against cancer needs a virgin sacrifice.”

Superstition and ignorance are steadily being replaced by knowledge of how things really work. But in the realm of religion, what Carl Sagan called “the demon-haunted world” all too often masks the real world of natural causes and effects that God has created.

If you want to pray, then pray for the eradication of prayer. Now, that’s a genuinely holy sentiment. Here’s what Meister Eckhart had to say on the subject:

Now I hear you ask: “How do I know that it is God’s will? My answer is that if it were not God’s will even for a moment, then it would not exist. Whatever is must be his will. If God’s will is pleasing to you, then whatever happens to you, or does not happen to you, will be heaven. Those who desire something other than God’s will get their just reward, for they are always in trouble and misery….They love God for the sake of something else which is not God. [such as a smooth-running election in Iraq]

Why bad tsunamis happen to good people

“Why?” is a many-faceted word when it comes to disasters. Science can tell us the physical reasons why the tsunami hit South and Southeast Asia, but people in the area (and elsewhere) also want answers to broader questions: Why us? Why here? Why now?

These are queries in an article by Kenneth Wordward in the January 10 issue of Newsweek: “Countless Souls Cry Out to God.” The article describes how survivors of four faiths, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, are variously conceiving the metaphysical meaning of the tsunami cataclysm.

The Hindu inhabitants of poor fishing communities don’t have sophisticated theological views. They believe that life is controlled by capricious deities who have the power to destroy as well as to create. So it is important to propitiate the deity, who usually is female, and cool her anger.

Buddhists in the area also have weather gods who both can be blamed and propitiated, but karma is the overriding explanation for the tsunami. A scholar is quoted: “Buddhists will look to the idea of karma and ask what they did, individually or collectively, that a tragedy like this happened.”

Muslims consider that all natural laws are part of God’s will. Since Allah is the essence of mercy and compassion, even a tsunami that kills over 150,000 people has some hidden, positive purpose. Perhaps God is testing a person’s faith by taking away a child or a spouse. If belief remains strong, a Muslim presumably has passed this divine test.

Christians look to Jesus’ suffering on the cross for inspiration in coping with their own pain and despair. “If Jesus could endure, then so can I.” Yet the notion of a God of love is difficult to reconcile with the deaths of so many innocents. Job was tested to the extreme, but why would it be necessary for God to put an entire region of the world through tortures?

The article concludes with, “The miracle, if there is one, may be that so many still believe.” Nicely said.

For none of the explanations offered up by the four religions is very satisfying. To my mind the Buddhists have the edge, since karma theory really is nothing more than the scientific idea of cause and effect applied over more than one lifetime.

A believer in karma will consider that those affected by the tsunami are reaping the effects of actions committed in previous incarnations. So even though the ocean may seem to have meted out life and death arbitrarily, on a deeper level destiny was in control of who lived and who died, who needed rescuing and who became a rescuer.

Still, I don’t know if karma is true. In the past my belief in karma has helped me get through some difficult times, such as a car accident on the Santiam Pass where I walked away unscratched and a woman in the other car was killed. The accident wasn’t my fault, but I was one of the drivers. Why her and not me? Further, the accident wouldn’t have happened at all but for some amazingly precise timing and positioning of the two vehicles. Was this accident truly accidental, or were the five of us involved in it brought together by some unseen hand of providence?

I have no idea. I used to think that I did. But now I’m willing to admit my ignorance about the answer to the hidden “why?” that may or may not underly the obvious “why?” (ice on the road’s shoulder; rear-wheel drive; loss of traction by one tire that led to my car lunging into the other lane).

I understand the desire of religious believers to make things that happen in their lives—especially the dramatically “good” and “bad” things—part of a greater spiritual design. I’ve done this myself, a lot. I’ve found comfort in believing either that a benevolent higher power was guiding the course of my life, or (less comfortably) that whatever I’m getting I deserve, because I’ve penned destiny’s invitation in my own hand.

More and more, though, I’m inclined to just take events at their face value. The tsunami occurred because of an earthquake. People died because they lived near the ocean. Why make life more complicated or mysterious than it already is? At the risk of sounding like Donald Rumsfeld: what we know we know, and what we don’t know we don’t know; if we think we know what we don’t know, we know less than we would if we simply don’t know.

(Actually, Socrates expressed ideas like that way before Rumsfeld, and I prefer to associate my not-knowing with a true philosopher rather than a Defense Department poseur.)

If we want comfort, I believe there is much comfort in simply accepting reality as it is. Not as we imagine it to be, or as we wish it would be, but just as it is. If what happens comes from God—great. We have accepted God’s will. If what happens comes from some other source, such as the mechanical workings of nature or man’s free will, then this also is great. We have accepted what is, regardless of how it came to be.

Whether we live just this life or many lives, life is too precious to be denied. To deny any part of life that is real is to rob ourselves of something that will never come our way again. This includes the good as well as the bad.

Eyes wide open is how I aspire to live. Seeing what is real, not seeing what isn’t. Pretty simple to say. Very hard to do.

Scale of the universe

We are small. Very, very small. The universe is large. Very, very large. Most people have no idea how insignificant we, Earth, and even the Sun are in relation to the universe. Even smart scientific people.

Once I gave a talk to a group of medical students at the Oregon Health & Science University. Instead of telling a joke to warm up the audience, I asked them, “Does anyone have an idea how many stars there are in our Milky Way galaxy?” No one knows the answer for sure, but I figured that I’d get some reasonable guesses. Yet I didn’t. I was surprised. (Estimates range from 100 billion to 400 billion stars).

Most of us want to have a sense of where we stand in relation to the cosmos. Often you hear someone say, “I felt so connected to everything at that moment.” But shouldn’t we have at least a vague sense of what that “everything” consists of, if such a statement is to possess any validity?

Usually God, the purported creator of the cosmos, is considered to be someone you can have a relationship with. You can relate to him, her, or it on some sort of personal level. This presupposes that God exists on a scale accessible to humans. The creator’s power, wisdom, intelligence, consciousness, love—whatever anthropomorphic qualities we might assign to the ultimate Mystery—are not so distant from our own as to make them impossible to perceive or comprehend.

Well, whenever I start to think this way, I like to ponder the scale of the physical universe. For whatever attributes the creation possesses, the creator seemingly should possess in more abundance. Aren’t a mother and father greater than their baby?

A Question of Scale is a web site based on “The Powers of Ten:” a book and movie that take us on a grand journey up and down from the scale of humans, outward to the furthest reaches of the universe and inward to the equally unfathomable quantum world. I urge you to take Bruce Bryson’s cyber-journey. I did just now and it brought tears to my eyes (but then, I get all choked up over scientific stuff like this).

We have no idea of where we stand in relation to even the material universe, not to mention any metaphysical realities that may exist. None whatsoever. Bryson’s web site attempts to give us a glimpse of the immensity of the cosmos and how small we are in relation to it, but I hesitate to call this an “idea.” Our minds are too limited to hold such an understanding, even if each of us had the mind of an Einstein.

For more mind-boggling, read To See the Universe in a Grain of Taranaki Sand by Glen Mackie. Mackie wonders whether Carl Sagan’s words could be literally true: “The total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.”

Since he is a Lecturer in the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing in Melbourne, Australia, Mackie is able to come up with an answer to this question. In short, yes, the stars probably do outnumber the grains of sand. I’m feeling even smaller…

I’m finding that embracing insignificance can be exhilarating. I rushed back to Google for more web pages and found Steven Dutch’s Scale of the Solar System and Universe. This is a more straightforward treatment of the subject, but it has some nice sand-related facts. I learned that if the Earth were the size of a grain of sand, then our Milky Way galaxy would be 5,000,000 miles across.

Five million miles vs. a grain of sand. That’s the relation between our galaxy and our planet. And me? A sub-atomic particle on the grain—maybe not even that. More: if the Sun were the size of a grain of sand, then the nearest neighbor galaxy to us, Andromeda, would be 1,500,000 miles away. The nearest.

There are at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe vastly further away from us than Andromeda. What we see of the cosmos when we look up at the night sky is essentially nothing, just a few thousand stars that lie near us in our corner of a single galaxy.

Good God. I have no idea, none at all.

And that, for sure, is the wisest thought I’m going to have today.

The Cloud of Unknowing: Devotion

“The Cloud of Unknowing,” written in the fourteenth century by an anonymous English Christian, is the fourth of my Five Books to Support the Churchless that I’ve been writing about. I’m trying to sum up the essence of each book in a single word. For “The Cloud of Unknowing” it is devotion.

But this is a devotion utterly unlike that practiced by most Christians, and also unlike that practiced by almost everyone of any faith. For the author, whom I’ll call Anonymous, espouses an apophatic spirituality. As this web site explains, “apophasis” is a Greek word that means “without images.”

So in the course of providing advice about how to pursue a contemplative life, Anonymous relentlessly demolishes the usual notion that devotion to God consists of thinking about the scriptures, feeling love for Jesus, doing good works, or any of the usual outward manifestations of religiosity.

Engaging in these things is fine, he says, but they are decidedly lower forms of devotion: “There are two ways of life in Holy Church. One is the active, the other is the contemplative life. Active is the lower, contemplative the higher.” But what should be contemplated? I can contemplate my wife because she is right in front of me. I can’t contemplate God because he/she/it is nowhere to be seen. Or heard, touched, smelled, tasted.

Yet according to Anonymous I’ve just answered my own question. If God is nowhere to be seen, then nowhere is exactly the place where I have to go to practice my devotion. The passage below conveys the core of what “The Cloud of Unknowing” prescribes to Christians and, really, everyone who aspires to know what lies beyond appearances:

‘Well,’ you will say, ‘where are I am to be? Nowhere, according to you!’ And you will be quite right! ‘Nowhere’ is where I want you! Why, when you are ‘nowhere’ physically, you are ‘everywhere’ spiritually. Make it your business then to see that your spirit is tied to nothing physical, and you will find that wherever that thing is that you are giving your mind to, there you are too in spirit, just as surely as your body is where you are bodily!

And though your natural mind can now find ‘nothing’ to feed on, for it thinks you are doing no thing, go on doing this no thing, and do it for the love of God….Let go this ‘everywhere’ and this ‘everything’ in exchange for this ‘nowhere’ and this ‘nothing’….One can feel this nothing more easily than see it, for it is completely dark to those who have just begun to look at it.

Unfortunately, based on my thirty-five years of daily meditation and countless conversations with other students of contemplation, I can say that it also is completely dark to those who have been looking at the nowhere and nothing for a long time. Anonymous advises, though, that there is no better way to God than staying still and silent in the cloud of unknowing that stands between us and ultimate truth.

All this might sound rather abstract, but it isn’t. Close your eyes and there you are, staring straight into the dark cloud that Anonymous speaks of. How big is that space that each of us enters when we aren’t paying attention to the physical world? A first impression places it within our head, yet when you take a look around you can’t discern any boundaries to the blackness that extends in all directions.

Perhaps it is just the backside of my eyelids that I am looking at. Even so, the question then arises, “What is the true nature of the being who is doing the looking?” Whatever it is, says Anonymous, it isn’t anything physical: “You know well that God is a spirit, and that whoever would be made one with him must be in truth and in depth of spirit far removed from any misleading bodily thing.”

So this is why a cloud of forgetting has to be placed between the contemplator and everything physical, which means all of creation. For Anonymous reminds us that the Creator isn’t what has been created. When our devotion is directed toward a material thing or a mental thought, this is idolatry. It doesn’t matter if the thing is a holy icon or the thought a holy prayer: these obvious objects are far distant from the Mystery of God.

We are apt to think that we are very far from God because of this cloud of unknowing between us and him, but surely it would be more correct to say that we are much farther from him if there is no cloud of forgetting between us and the whole created world. Whenever I say “the whole created world” I always mean not only the individual creatures therein, but everything connected with them.

…Indeed, if we may so reverently, when we are engaged on this work it profits little or nothing to think even of God’s kindness or worth, or of our Lady, or of the saints and angels, or of the joys of heaven, if you think thereby by such meditation to strengthen your purpose. In this particular matter it will not help at all.

Then what will help? The work Anonymous speaks of is entering into the cloud of unknowing, for he just told us that God is farther away when we are aware either of perceptions of the created world or of our thoughts that are connected to some material entity. And this includes every thought, for since we have no experience of God’s immateriality, even supposedly divine thoughts are tied to our thoroughly anthropomorphic guesses about what God is like.

What Anonymous wants us to do is become, as nearly as possible, pure being, existence itself. This contemplative work is a striving not to be anything physical or personal, but simply to be: “For if you think about anything in particular except your own bare, blind existence—and this, remember, is God’s purpose and your own—then you are on the wrong track; you are back again at your speculating and guessing; and this distracts and separates you not only from God but from yourself as well.”

The highest form of Christian devotion, then, is expressed through a mantra, just as in Eastern traditions. A single word is to be repeated over and over again. If our attention is fully on this word, and our eyes are closed to the world, we will be able to enter the cloud of unknowing after putting the cloud of forgetting between us and everything we know now. It doesn’t really matter what this word is, says Anonymous. He simply advises that the shorter it is the better, “being more like the working of the Spirit.”

It could be a word like “God” or “love.” The choice doesn’t matter much, so long as it is one syllable (though Anonymous favors “God”). It would be best to have nothing at all standing between our consciousness and God, but if there is to be anything, it should be as small as possible: a single syllable.

What we have here in “The Cloud of Unknowing” is a pure Christian mystical practice that is virtually identical to Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim mystic practices. The ridiculous theological squabblings between adherents of different faiths disappear when the thoughts that produce all that dissention are stilled.

Call it centering prayer; call it mantra meditation. The practice is the same, and it brings mystics together under the sheltering tent of wordless reality. Well, there is still at least one word or sound, but that too fades away when the contemplator pierces through the cloud of unknowing and reaches the clear sky that contains no objects, no differences, no separateness.

One word. One practice. One truth. What could be simpler?

Fix this word fast to your heart, so that it is always there come what may. It will be your shield and spear in peace and war alike. With this word you will hammer the cloud and the darkness above you. With this word you will suppress all thought under the cloud of forgetting.

So much so that if you are tempted to think what it is you are seeking, this one word will be sufficient answer. And if you would go on to think learnedly about the significance and analysis of that same word, tell yourself that you will have it whole, and not in bits and pieces. If you hold fast, that thought will surely go.

I’ve read “The Cloud of Unknowing” so many times, on many pages the passages that I haven’t highlighted stand out from a mass of yellow or green emphasis. This is one of the best guides for meditation, and it likely was written by an English country parson—not an Indian yogi or Sufi sheikh.

I wish that all Christians could become as well acquainted as I am with their own mystic heritage, which extends far beyond “The Cloud of Unknowing.” Most Christians have little or no understanding of what great teachers in their own tradition—Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, Pseudo-Dionysus, Nicholas of Cusa, the “desert fathers,” and others—have taught: true devotion to God is expressed by stillness and silence.

One word. That’s all you need to know the One. A church isn't required to practice this devotion. You are your own church, and you can hold your own one-word service within your consciousness whenever you want.

[All of the excerpts in this post are from “The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works,” translated into modern English by Clifton Wolters, Penguin Books.]

Start worrying about your religion if...

After reading my last post, a friend enquired about whether any lightning strikes have been observed heading for my increasingly faithless soul. He was joking. But the vision of bolts from heaven being thrown at the unfaithful got me thinking: Isn’t it strange that, jokingly or not, we can entertain the idea that a God who supposedly is so much better than us also can be imagined as so much worse?

I make no claims about possessing any divine qualities. But if you disagree with me, almost certainly I won’t get mad at you. Peeved maybe, but not mad. So right off I seem to be a better person that the God of the Bible, who gets really testy if you doubt him or fail to heed his commandments.

I’m not going to follow any faith that worships an entity possessing fewer good qualities than a decent human being. This would be going backwards rather than forwards. If a religion aspires to less than an exemplary person already possesses, then it is heading in the wrong direction.

Let’s make the baseline of theorized divinity the observable qualities of what is generally considered to be a “good person.” Anything above that is gravy, and possibly God—or a God-realized human being. But not anything below.

This is why I feel justified in criticizing some central aspects of both the spiritual path that I’ve been associated with for a long time—Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a.k.a. Sant Mat—and also every other organized religion that I’m acquainted with. They put before us the ideal of a supreme being that doesn’t strike me as supreme at all. And, probably not coincidentally, the personal qualities of long-time adherents of these faiths also generally fail to rise to the standard of a good atheist.

I had a coffee house conversation on this subject recently with another friend who, like me, has believed that being a teetotaler and a vegetarian is morally uplifting. Yet she said, “I’ve found that the nicest people drink and eat meat.” Part of what she meant is that these people just try to live a normal human life. They don’t think that they are doing anything special, as many of us high-minded holier-than-thou vegetarians do.

Taoists like to say that when virtue is lost, righteousness abounds. Virtue is acting naturally, doing the right thing without thinking “I’m doing the right thing!” Righteousness is acting unnaturally, following rigid rules or commandments that all too often make us a worse, rather than a better, person.

When I started to open my eyes and take a closer look both at myself and others who had been similarly pursuing the Radha Soami Satsang Beas spiritual path for many years, this is what I saw: People who seemingly could talk the spiritual game much better than they could play it and lacked the qualities of humility, courtesy, openness, self-criticism, flexibility, and, most importantly, love, that I’ve observed in many other people without a whit of faith in either God or guru.

What’s the deal here? How is it that someone who assiduously follows the tenets of a religion can end up being less of a good person than someone who just acts naturally? My suspicion is that the answer has to do with a fundamental flaw at the core of most spiritual paths: believers wrongly consider that they can become divine without first being human—truly human.

This erroneous conception is fostered if a religion or spiritual path puts forward a conception of God who himself/herself/itself possesses fewer good qualities than a decent Homo sapiens.

So I think you should start worrying about your religion if the God or guru you believe in…
--is so unloving you are punished for making mistakes
--is so vain you have to bow down before this being, literally or figuratively
--is so egotistical you must daily praise him/her/it
--is so uncaring you have to keep begging through prayers for what you need or want
--is so insecure that questions and criticisms aren’t tolerated
--is so prejudiced only certain chosen people are singled out for salvation

It’s great to belong to a church that aims to transform people into the image of God. But if that ideal is less desirable than the sort of good person I meet every day here on the streets of Salem, then maybe you should consider the virtues of becoming churchless.

Why I’m not a Christian

A few days ago I got an email from a thoughtful and well-spoken Christian, Steve, who had come across the Church of the Churchless. He disagreed with what I said in my “Brother of Jesus ossuary hoax” posting: “Christianity, if it is true, should be independent of Jesus Christ.” I enjoyed reading Steve’s thoughts, and hope he won’t mind my sharing them. Download Message from a Christian.doc (28.0K)

Steve, I admire your commitment to Christianity. I also like the attitude reflected in your comment, “I say this not in an effort to convert you….” Amen to that, and I hope you take this response of mine in the same spirit, for I’m not out to convert you to my unfaith either. I simply enjoy our interplay of ideas. Your email message stimulated some reflections of my own that encompass the theme of this post, “Why I’m not a Christian,” but also go beyond them.

For not only am I not a Christian, increasingly I find myself not anything else either. I don’t know what I am. For thirty-five years I’ve called myself a “satsangi,” a generic Indian term that means a member of a sangat, or congregation if you like. Interestingly, the spiritual organization that I’ve been a part of—Radha Soami Satsang Beas, or RSSB—in some ways is more Christian than any denomination that believes in the divinity of Jesus.

Why do I say this? Because the centerpiece of RSSB, along with related groups that fall under the rubric of “Sant Mat” (path of the saints), is a living master who is considered to be, like Christ, a Son of God. The master, or guru, is regarded as God in living form (or GILF, as some discussion groups abbreviate him). Many Sant Mat disciples come from a Christian background. Frequently they find that their relationship with the master and his teachings offers them everything that Christianity did, and then some.

I used to have no doubts about Radha Soami Satsang Beas or my own master, Charan Singh. Now I do. I consider this to be spiritual progress, not backsliding. I used to accept many things on faith that now I put in a “maybe, but remains to be proven” category. This is a big category in my mind. I’ve got countless concepts about God and spirituality filed away from a lifetime of reading, meditating, and general life-experiencing.

What I am sure of would fit on a few post-it notes; what remains a hypothesis fills shelf upon shelf in the library of my mind.

Once I realized this, I could no longer say with my previous ease, “I’m a ________.” That blank has had numerous entries during my fifty-six years: Catholic, hippie pothead, existentialist humanist, satsangi, and now---nothing. Well, “nothing” in the sense of a tidy moniker that I can assign to the form of my spiritual aspirations.

If I had to give a one-word answer to the question, “What do you believe in?” it would be “reality.” This certainly isn’t nothing, but since it is nothing in particular and everything in all I feel that Churchlessness is the straightest path to ultimate truth.

Steve, you said that “Truth—with a capital ‘T’—is outside its [science’s] realm and science is not qualified to posit nor hypothesize in the spiritual or philosophical realm.” Well, then, what is Truth inside if it is outside of science? In other words, where does Truth with a capital ‘T’ reside?

This is the big question. Really, it is the only question. All other queries can be reduced to this Mother of All Questions. My Christian correspondent said that “Scripture is meant to reveal specifics of God; his nature, desires, guidelines and plans.” So does Truth reside in a book? I can’t believe this. How did it come to be in a book? That place, the source, is what I want to find.

Steve’s message ended with: “I don’t see Christianity being on shaky ground at all. However, if you remove Christ from Christianity, you no longer have Christianity.” Yes, we agree on at least the last sentence. However, I consider that a faith which stands or falls on the nature of a single person, dead or alive, is on shaky ground. Others who number in the billions, disagree. And that’s fine by me.

I just cannot accept that the keys to the mysteries of the cosmos are held by a particular man or woman, and no one can pass through the doorway of Truth without following in that person’s footsteps. Could Truth play favorites in this fashion? Can only a chosen few become citizens of Ultimate Reality, with the rest of us destined to remain aliens in this strange material world?

Science seeks the universal, not the particular, for the rock bottom of reality seemingly must be something (energy? consciousness? spirit?) capable of supporting everything. Thus the way of science in knowing physical existence also is the way of knowing spiritual existence. Such is my hypothesis, at least, and it rests comfortably with me.

Along these lines, the New York Times web site had an interesting article today called “God (or Not), Physics and, of Course, Love: Scientists Take a Leap.” The question “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” was posed to scientists, futurists, and other creative thinkers. Their answers are fascinating. I’ll include the entire article in a post continuation. Here’s how one person, David Meyers, answered the question in a fashion that I wholeheartedly agree with:

As a Christian monotheist, I start with two unproven axioms: 1. There is a God. 2. It's not me (and it's also not you). Together, these axioms imply my surest conviction: that some of my beliefs (and yours) contain error. We are, from dust to dust, finite and fallible. We have dignity but not deity.

And that is why I further believe that we should a) hold all our unproven beliefs with a certain tentativeness (except for this one!), b) assess others' ideas with open-minded skepticism, and c) freely pursue truth aided by observation and experiment.

This mix of faith-based humility and skepticism helped fuel the beginnings of modern science, and it has informed my own research and science writing. The whole truth cannot be found merely by searching our own minds, for there is not enough there. So we also put our ideas to the test. If they survive, so much the better for them; if not, so much the worse.