Church of the Churchless

Don’t believe, just have faith

Sunday I gave a talk to my spiritual group that inspired me. So before I lose touch with my self-induced inspiration, I figured that I should capture it in a weblog posting. That way hopefully I can re-inspire myself as needed.

However, I have to admit that this whole way of thinking is at odds with what I was talking about. Namely, the absurd split between “I” and “me.” More defensible are the splits between “belief” and “faith” or “religion” and “science.” Nonetheless, we humans love to divide up reality with concepts divorced from experience, then get anxious about feeling divorced from nature, other people, God, and ourselves.

Alan Watts says that the only way to cure anxiety is to honestly recognize what’s real about the human condition. Suffering, pain, death, disease, unhappiness—yes, shit happens. This is a cold, cruel world. And also, a warm, comforting world. It’s up to us how it seems. Any alteration in the seeming, though, has to begin and end honestly.

I cited the adage that paranoids have enemies too. In his wonderful book, “The Wisdom of Insecurity” that I’m reading now,Watts says it is wrong to make the presence or absence of neurosis the touchstone of truth, and to argue that if a man’s philosophy makes him neurotic, it must be wrong. (This book was published in 1951, when people still talked about neuroses.)

So he says that it’s absurd to reason that because most atheists and agnostics are neurotic, and most simple Catholics are happy and at peace with themselves, the views of the former are false and those of the latter are true.

I liked this passage:

It is as if to say, “You say there is a fire in the basement. You are upset about it. Because you are upset, there is obviously no fire.” The agnostic, the skeptic, is neurotic, but this does not imply a false philosophy; it implies the discovery of facts to which he does not know how to adapt himself.

Like, I’m going to die. That’s a fact. I don’t know what to do about it. I think about death frequently. I don’t like the idea of it at all, especially as it applies to me, myself, and I. As Woody Allen said (more or less), “I don’t want my works of art to live on after me. I want me to live on after me.” Amen, brother.

Everyone feels insecure about something or other. Usually, lots of things and lots of others. Watts says that religious belief is one of the main ways people try to deal with anxiety. The reality of uncertainty is replaced with a belief that such-and-such is going to happen for sure in the future.

Jesus saves. The second coming is coming. Allah welcomes the faithful into paradise. The guru takes on his disciples’ karma. All beings will one day realize Buddha nature.

Whatever the belief is, it concerns a future happening or distant state of affairs, not an immediate direct experience. Yet since the present is all there is, memories of the past and anticipations of the future being part of the here and now, religious belief can’t be genuinely fulfilling.

For the future is, obviously, always around the corner. The promise of God-realization remains the carrot out of reach that we keep expecting to get with the next plodding step. So we step, and step, and step, to the end of our days. Always wanting. Never getting. Yet, says, Watts, there really is a reality that, if we could just see it, would make us say, “This is what I’ve been yearning for!” He says:

The discovery of this reality is hindered rather than helped by belief, whether one believes in God or believes in atheism. We must make here a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be.

The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Recently someone emailed me a essay by a Professor Krishna of the Krishnamurti Foundation in India. I liked it a lot and quoted Krishna in my talk. It’s called “Science and Spirituality: Two Aspects of a Single Reality.” Here’s an excerpt on the subject of belief:

The other factor that has very seriously bogged down the religious quest is belief. What does belief mean to a person who is in quest of truth ? We have to regard it the same way as a scientist regards a theory. The theory is not the truth, the model is not reality. We have to do experiments to find out what is true. But when we have belief, we are merely accepting something without evidence, which has little value.

Experimentation. For me, that’s the core of spirituality. Otherwise we’re just stuck in a bog of competing religious beliefs, all of them possibly true, none of them definitively so. I don’t want to risk the fate of my eternal soul, assuming I have one, on flinging a dart blindly at the world’s board of alternative religions and pledging allegiance to whichever belief system I land on.

Currently I still align myself outwardly with the mystical tradition of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB). I’m the treasurer for our local group. I give a talk about once a month to my RSSB brothers and sisters. But last Sunday I told my audience that I’ve come to the point where I can no longer speak about belief. I can’t spout off the dogma about guru, God, karma, soul, initiation, spirit, heavenly regions, reincarnation, all that stuff.

Instead, I’m an enthusiastic cheerleader for conducting the experiment of meditation. Prof. Krishna says, “The scientific quest is to discover the order in the external world of space, time, energy and matter. The spiritual quest is to discover order in our consciousness.” That’s what meditation is for me: an attempt to find out what simple order, if any, is at the root of my chaotic, confused, complex, cacophonous consciousness.

I don’t know what that order is. I want to. That’s faith. I don’t need belief. Just faith. Borrowing a metaphor from Alan Watts, I said that faith is akin to opening up the roof of a house and putting a skylight in so you can see what’s above, while belief is akin to painting the skylight’s glass blue. It’s a little bit like reality, but not much.

After I finished my talk a friend came up and said, “You’re crazy.” I replied, “But don’t you agree with what I was saying?” “Yes,” he said, “But I’m crazy too.” Well, two’s company. What he meant, I think, is that my attitude toward spirituality and the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas sounds heretical to many believers. Crazy, even.

Strangely, I’ve never felt more sane. Is this madness? Maybe. But it strikes me as a fine madness.

My friend said that the present guru of RSSB, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, is the most heretical of all. I tend to agree with him, though it has been a while since I’ve heard Gurinder Singh speak.

In my talk I quoted an anecdote that Ron Morey told me about his trip to India earlier this year. He said that Gurinder Singh said something along the lines of, “If you come to me and say that you have 100% faith, I won’t believe you. But if you say that you have doubts, now we can have a conversation.”

The faith being spoken of here really is belief. Having doubts is what I call true faith. You’re open to truth, not closed-up inside walls of illusory understanding.

Less belief, more faith. That’s my recipe for spiritual growth.

Religious Americans: tolerant but gullible

Since I have a decidedly nontraditional attitude toward spirituality, it was reassuring to see that a Newsweek/Beliefnet poll found that 79% of Americans answered “Yes” to the question, “Can a good person who doesn’t share your religious beliefs attain salvation or go to heaven?”

Of course, I’d feel even better if I could get that assurance directly from whatever higher power is responsible for doling out salvation.

Nonetheless, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Christians appear to be more tolerant than I have been giving them credit for. Evangelical Protestants were the least tolerant, but 68% still were willing to give a heaven pass to non-believers.

I wonder though, whether those answering the question were thinking of Wiccans when they heard “person who doesn’t share your religious beliefs,” or merely a Christian denomination other than their own.

About a third of both Protestants and Catholics said that they often or sometimes explore the spiritual ideas of other faiths. This is encouraging also. Non-Christians were more eclectic, with about half falling into this category.

That’s the good news about tolerance. The bad news is the gullibility of religious Americans. Which essentially means Americans, because 87% of people in this country identify themselves as Christian (85%), Jewish (1%), or Muslim (1%). The United States is one of the most religious nations and, not coincidentally, one of the least informed about science.

I was channel surfing through the cable news channels yesterday and caught the results of a CNN poll about evolution and creationism. The anchor said, “Americans are equally familiar with both explanations of how we came to be. And roughly the same number of people believe each theory is true.”

Oh, Lord! God help us!

On the whole Americans believe that evolution, which is backed up by extremely solid scientific evidence, is as true as creationism, which is backed up by precisely zero scientific evidence. How gullible can our citizens be? (Answer to my own question: gullible enough to believe lots of other things without evidence, like Bush’s economic and Iraq policies).

Amazingly, 61% said that evolution should be taught in public school science classes and 54% said the same about creationism. The poll results should have been 100% and 0%. Creationism and intelligent design deserve to be discussed in a religion class, but not a science class.

Better yet, they should be examined in a psychology class, as this Time magazine letter writer said in the August 29 issue:

I appreciate columnist Charles Krauthammer’s clear and unequivocal statement on the dangers of the creationist intrusion into science instruction [Aug. 8]. I am a behavioral scientist and university professor, and I have always been dismayed that behavioral-science departments do not include major sections on the power of religious thought and belief. But the theory of “intelligent design” [which claims there is a supernatural influence in the origin of life, as opposed to Darwinian evolution] is neither good science nor good religion.

How can well-meaning people genuinely think that our culture will advance by turning our backs on rational thought and empirical evidence? Whether it be fundamental questions like the origin of the species or such applied problems as HIV prevention, global warming and lack of health care, the empirical world will always win out. Self-serving or politically and religiously “correct” beliefs—whether from the right or the left—only distract us from a real understanding of ourselves and our world, to our eventual cost.

David J. McKirnan, Ph.D., Dept. of Psychology, Univ. of Illinois at Chicago

The more I thought about it, tolerance and gullibility aren’t really opposed at all. I shouldn’t have been so surprised to learn that religious Americans are tolerant of other people’s beliefs, because religiosity is founded on faith-based acceptance of unproven propositions about the cosmos.

So just as the religious have no problem giving nearly equal weight to evolution and creationism, they also have no problem giving nearly equal weight to alternative spiritual beliefs. Everything is possible in the realm of faith. No facts required. Simply believe.

I wish Americans were a lot less tolerant of religions. Especially their own. For this would lead them to be less gullible of religious dogma. Especially their own.

As I frequently observe here in the Church of the Churchless, I’m highly intolerant of intolerance. And one of the worst forms of intolerance is ignoring scientific facts. In my opinion it’s fine to tolerate religious beliefs so long as they remain personal, private, and non-political.

But when blind religious faith tries to shove clear-eyed scientific fact out of the science classroom, it’s time to push back.

Hard. Reality deserves to be fought for.

Seeing clearly now

My philosophical mind is always trying to find the commonalities in spirituality. Also, my scientific mind. We don’t say “What science do you believe in?” But “What religion do you believe in?” is a common question.

That’s because science is a universal approach to learning about physical reality, while every religion considers that it alone holds the key to the truth about a presumed spiritual reality. So scientists are able to stand on common ground with other people, while religious believers end up isolated on their own distinct islands of false understanding.

I’m attracted to the possibility that it’s possible to have a genuine spiritual science. I don’t know what this would look like. However, I suspect that seeing clearly now would be a central value.

For a Wikipedia definition of the scientific method is: “essentially an extremely cautious means of building a supportable, evidence-based understanding of our natural world.” Ditto for an understanding of whatever may be above, beyond, or beneath the natural world.

To me, “supportable” and “evidence-based” means that you’re in touch with what is objectively really there, not what you subjectively presume to be there. So I found it interesting that while the two of us who have shared our God experiment are doing very different things, we’re both trying to see clearly.

Every day I spend some time meditating, trying to look within myself. Punkindunkin said that she spends time in nature, taking in the world around her. For both of us, if we let our perceptions be obscured we’re going to miss out on a lot of the reality that is both within and without us.

Which is why I consider that stilling my mind’s chatter is the #1 thing I can do to get more in touch with both the natural world and any supernatural world that may exist. Just as a dirty or misshapen lens on a telescope leads to a distorted view of reality, so does a confused consciousness.

By “confused” I don’t necessarily mean illogical or mistaken. I just mean that my mind is full of junk that keeps me from being aware of the here and now. Almost every evening I go on a half hour walk through the woods and around a lake with our dog.

If I’m engrossed in thinking about something, often I barely notice what is right around me. A mountain lion could be lying on a branch above the trail and I’d likely be oblivious to it (but, fortunately, our dog wouldn’t).

This is why I’m a big fan of using some sort of mantra to keep useless extraneous thoughts to a minimum.

A mantra is just a word or words that you repeat mentally instead of all the other stuff that keeps spoken by our inner voice, such as this typical on-the-dogwalk recitation of mine:

“what am I gonna eat tonight nothing in the fridge maybe laurel will cook something nah can’t count on it starving man I’m starving what’s in the freezer isn’t there a pizza no damn we ate it last week jesus I’m gonna starve but got to feed dog first hey where is dog anyway shit she’s way ahead chasing deer how’d that happen oh yeah I was thinking of something”

In his book “Open Mind, Open Heart” Thomas Keating says:

“Many people are so identified with the ordinary flow of their thoughts and feelings that they are not aware of the source from which these mental objects are emerging. Like boats or debris floating along the surface of a river, our thoughts and feelings must be resting on something. They are resting on the inner stream of consciousness, which is our participation in God’s being.”

I don’t think it’s necessary to call this “God’s” being, but Keating is a Christian and that’s how he sees things. I prefer to just call it being, or even better, reality. Consciousness is how we connect with reality. If we aren’t conscious, we know nothing about reality.

Building on Keating’s metaphor, I use a simple one-syllable mantra as a transparent boat floating on the stream of my consciousness. Keating aptly observes that thoughts and feelings usually are like boats with large holds to explore. You see a thought-boat going by, hop on board, and start exploring all the nooks and crannies below decks. Pretty soon, you’ve lost touch with the real world above, where mountain lions, dogs, and lakes exist.

It wouldn’t make sense to pay so much attention to a mantra that it too obscures your view of the world. I’ve make this mistake in the past. I used the mantra as a way to put blinders on rather than see more clearly, like saying “No No No No No!” when someone says something you don’t like, rather than listening to what’s being said.

Now my mantra is like a transparent boat that I barely notice. It’s just a way of keeping me in touch with the natural stream of my consciousness rather than with all the thoughts, feelings, imaginings, worries, memories, anticipations, and so on that I would otherwise be focusing on—big boats with large holds that catch my attention yet never bring me the cargo of contentment that I’m searching for.

I like Keating’s view of faith:

“Faith is opening and surrendering to God [or, I’d say, reality]. The spiritual journey does not require going anywhere because God is already with us and in us. It is a question of allowing our ordinary thoughts to recede into the background and to float along the river of consciousness without our noticing them, while we direct our attention to the river on which they are floating.”

It seems that to see really clearly is to see what is seeing.

What’s your God experiment?

We all have beliefs about the nature of “God,” a term that to me is synonymous with “ultimate reality.” If you believe that the physical universe is all there is, that’s your hypothesized God. Alternatively, if you believe that there is a spiritual reality apart from materiality, then that’s your hypothesized God.

I’m interested in how you are trying to turn that hypothesis, whatever it might be, into certainty or near-certainty. Specifically, what is the One Thing you do that is most central to your pursuit of truth and meaning?

By “do,” I mean that this One Thing is an action you perform that can be described to others. It is something specific that another person can do, just like you. In other words, it’s a God experiment. This is how you have chosen to seek answers to the big questions of life.

Reading an article today in the online New York Times, “Scientists Speak Up on God and Science,” helped spur me to ask this question of Church of the Churchless visitors. A scientist is quoted as saying, “Belief is never an issue in science.”

For Dr. Miller and other scientists, research is not about belief. "Faith is one thing, what you believe from the heart," said Joseph E. Murray, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1990 for his work in organ transplantation. But in scientific research, he said, "it's the results that count."

So, how are you seeking results that would help answer the God question? There may be lots of things you’re doing. What, though, is the One Thing that is most important to you? Maybe you haven’t gotten meaningful results from your God experiment yet. Maybe you don’t have a theory about why you’re doing what you’re doing. That’s fine.

Again, I’m interested in the doing—not the theorizing or believing. I’ll try to make this more clear by sharing my own One Thing. It may be that nobody else will choose to leave a comment to this post describing their One Thing, but I hope some people will.

For me, spirituality and the search for truth isn’t an abstraction. It’s really real. If my search doesn’t involve doing something concrete, I’m building spiritual castles in the sky, not in reality. So here’s my One Thing. I’ve shown you mine; will you show me yours?

I meditate for an hour every day. Sometimes in one chunk, sometimes in two half-hour blocks. My meditation chamber is in a walk-in shower that we don’t use often (definitely not while I’m meditating). I sit on a pillow, put an eye mask and noise-deadening headphones on to lessen sensory stimulation, and meditate away.

I use two meditation techniques: (1) I repeat a single word. That slows my thinking down. My goal is to be conscious of my own consciousness, not of anything else. I figure that if reality is everywhere, then if I can get in touch with the core of what’s most real about me, I’m getting closer to universal reality. And (2) I do nothing. I just open myself up to whatever is there in my inmost consciousness. Usually that’s also nothing. Sometimes, there’s something.

During the rest of the day, apart from the meditation hour, as much as possible I try to mentally repeat that word like a mantra, or just remain mentally quiet. Easier said than done, of course. I figure that the less I think about what I’m experiencing and simply experience it, the more real those experiences will be.

And that’s about it. I could go on and on about all the fancy metaphysical theories that support my One Thing practice, but what’s most important is what I do, not what I hypothesize about what my doing will lead to, or why I do it. Like the scientist said, “It’s the results that count.”

Live your own life

The absurdity of what I was contemplating hit me as I was stair-mastering away at the athletic club this afternoon, watching a TV that was showing Tiger Woods finish the ninth hole at the NEC Invitational.

For some reason I’ve started to enjoy watching televised golf tournaments. I hope this isn’t a sign that I’ve got a brain tumor. There’s no rational reason to play the game—it’s expensive, eighteen holes takes forever, you get minimal exercise—much less watch it.

But I started thinking that maybe I should cut my usual routine at the club short so I could get home in time to see Woods and Kenny Perry battle it out over the final few holes.

In other words, instead of doing something athletic myself, I was seriously considering chucking that in so I could sit on my butt on a couch and watch other people act athletically.

As soon as I realized the ridiculousness of this I vowed to hold fast to my original intention: 35 minutes on the stairmaster, a complete circuit of the Nautilus weight room, then some karate kata, Tai Chi forms, and yoga postures.

I’m 56 years old. However many years I have left to live, I’ve got to focus on living my own life—not anyone else’s. That is as true for my spiritual life as for my athletic life. It’s fine to watch sports on TV so long as the watching doesn’t interfere with my own exercising.

Ditto for “watching” other people’s spiritual pursuits via books, talks, recordings, and the like. Getting spirituality secondhand is as absurd as getting exercise secondhand. Watching someone run a 10K isn’t going to improve my own cardiac capacity, nor is learning about someone else’s search for the divine going to bring me any closer to God-realization.

After finishing my complete exercise routine and doing several errands, I got home just in time to see Woods play his final shots on the 18th hole. I didn’t feel like I missed anything important. I was happy that I’d chosen to live my own life rather than watch someone else live theirs.

I love Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on “Self-Reliance.” Here’s how it starts out:

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instill is of more value than any thought they may contain.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.

Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Well, it doesn’t seem right to end a post about living your own life with a quote from someone else. So, here’s a passage I wrote from my book about the Greek philosopher Plotinus. It’s in the “Happiness is Here” chapter.

Consider three people reading, respectively, a romance novel, a pornographic magazine, and a religious scripture. Each finds enjoyable the feeling of love, broadly speaking, that their reading material produces in them. In one person this love has a romantic tinge, in another a lustful flavor, in the last a sacred sense. But the common element between them is that they are experiencing a feeling that approximates, to some degree, the sensation they would have if they actually possessed the object of their desire.

“Oh, to be swept away by the man of my dreams.” “Oh, to make passionate love to the woman of my fantasies.” “Oh, to be in the presence of my blessed God.” The feelings that accompany such thoughts, says Plotinus, are pleasurable only in a severely limited sense because what we really want are the feelings that accompany not a thought, but reality.

Ersatz feelings of the sort just described thus can become an unhealthy substitute for the real thing. It’s wonderful if reading stimulates us to find a real man, a real woman, or a real God that can satisfy our longing.

But if we remain content with, in Plotinus’ words, “the feeling produced by something one has not got,” then it can be argued that we are worse off with that false feeling. The danger here is the same sort of danger faced by a seriously dehydrated person who hallucinates that he is drinking water when a well is within his reach.

An honest embrace of faith

Earlier this month I heard from a New Zealand woman, Elizabeth Wagner, who has come to embrace faith after a lengthy period of faithlessness. I liked how honestly she spoke about her spiritual journey, so with her permission I’ve shared her email message below (mildly edited for clarity and to Americanize those weird British spellings like “endeavour”).

Her thoughts are sort of a counter point to the “More criticism of Radha Soami Satsang Beas” post that similarly included a guest opinion from a person who, like me and Elizabeth, has had a long-time connection with RSSB, a.k.a. Sant Mat.

As I said in that post, this Church of the Churchless blog is concerned with churchlessness in general. But since my personal evolution from faith to faithlessness has occurred in a Sant Mat context, that’s the faith I often focus on, since it’s the one I know best.

Likewise, Elizabeth speaks of returning to the Sant Mat fold. However, her description of moving from faithlessness to faith to faithlessness to faith could have been written by a Catholic, Buddhist, Muslim, Jew, or whoever. If we’re honest, most of us would admit to being torn between the poles of unbelief and belief. Elizabeth simply is more honest and self-aware than most.

The past few days my wife and I enjoyed talking about all sorts of subjects, spirituality included, with good friends who were visiting, Ron and Rita Morey (Ron’s special interest is the mystical glory of golf; I have my own attitude toward this crazy sport—see “Golf’s essential insanity” on my other weblog).

One morning Rita and I discussed the meaning of a movie we both found deeply moving, the European version of “The Vanishing.” I won’t give away the ending, but basically it involves the choice a husband is given by the man who kidnapped his wife: “Take these pills,” the man says, “and when you wake up you’ll know what happened to her.”

Always open to borrowing a powerful idea, I’ll admit that this scene was in the back of my mind when I wrote my “Just have faith” post. There I talked about a similar, but less dramatic, choice: being able to walk either through a door of Belief or a door of Reality. Would you prefer to hold onto your cherished beliefs—such as that your wife is still alive, or God loves you—or do you want to know what is truly real?

Elizabeth says, “The need to believe is so strong it overwhelms the ability to believe in nothing.” Yes, it is. I agree that we need to believe in something. The question is, What is the nature of that something?

Elizabeth is struggling to find her answer, as am I. I admire how she’s going about her search. Here’s her message to me:

Dear Brian:

Greetings. To say how refreshing it is to read criticism and analytical views of RSSB [Radha Soami Satsang Beas] on the net. I give a huge sigh of relief.

Yes, after some years on the path it became to me somewhat infuriating to hear that this is the only path; that we don't know how lucky we are, etc. etc. ad nauseum. I found every fault I could with Sant Mat, the mind never ceasing in this regard.

I would like to have this opportunity to state my own little "story.” I visited Dera [Indian headquarters of RSSB] in 1984, 1986, 1988 and 1991. My first visit was in a depressed and miserable state (family reasons).

I came away from that visit in a state of bliss which remained with me for about six weeks—an altered state of consciousness. Whatever the trigger, even the grossest and ugliest was beautiful, composed of love and only love. I knew without the slightest doubt that the path was real, knew with solid certitude. I could not work, watch TV or radio and, from being a voracious reader I wondered how anyone could possibly look at a printed word. Yes, Charan Singh [the RSSB guru] gave.

My nature and temperament is that of an existentialist. From a young age I followed closely the works of Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Genet, and others, which correlated exactly with my own trend of thought. Part of my mind still exists at that level, the existential absurdity always around.

My next three visits were just that, visits to see the guru, ordinary but interesting and nothing more than that. Years passed and slowly the mind began to find fault with the teachings and I came to believe Sant Mat was just another path, one of many, just a little up from Catholicism, fundamentalism, Buddhism or whatever, just a fraction more believable.

For some considerable time I mentally left Sant Mat, wanting nothing to do with it, calling myself an atheist who understood and believed nothing; that life is absurd; that we exist in a mechanistic world; that the brain can produce anything it wants to, meaning good (and bad) effects from meditation, that the [inner mystic] Sound was an auditory, natural sound, audible to anyone if they listened. That the whole thing was nothing but a sham, a so-called valid justification for the horror and terror of existence with extinction at the end, giving meaningless hope where there is no hope, made up by possibly well-meaning persons whose lives were so ghastly they had to invent an elaborate and sophisticated system based on light and sound techniques in an endeavor to justify an otherwise pointless existence.

And I stayed at that level, for a long, long time.

However, and there's always a 'however'!, now things have swung around again as they do. Relatives become absolutes which, in turn, become relatives again, ad infinitum. I now realize that Sant Mat is the highest path that one can find on this planet (relative to my particular intelligence and knowledge). Having traveled widely on this globe investigating many religions, philosophies, etc. I can find nothing higher than Sant Mat.

If the whole thing is a fraud, so be it; it's the greatest and biggest fraud I know of and I don't care if it is just that—in a sense that doesn't matter. I believe that everything is an illusion anyway, absurd in its context, so I choose now to go along with the "you don't know how lucky you are" statement and on my deathbed trust that I have the opportunity to think and concentrate only on Him because it suits me to do so.

The need to believe is so strong it overwhelms the ability to believe in nothing. And if there's nothing, I shall not know. And if there is something in it all I will have wasted much of my life believing in nothing but that's how I'm shaped.

So I'm now back in Sant Mat (in my mind anyway); there's nowhere else to go. Sant Mat can well be called a cult, which it probably is, but again, that simply doesn't matter.

Whew! How great that all feels to express. Thank you, Brian, for this chance to speak and I look forward to reading more of your columns.

Elizabeth Wagner, New Zealand

Fundamentalism is religious racism

Racists erroneously believe that there is proof one race is superior to another. Fundamentalists erroneously believe that there is proof one religion is superior to another.

Thus there’s a natural affinity between fundamentalism and racism. This is one reason, among many, why fundamentalism in any form—Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, whatever—can’t be tolerated by tolerant people.

On my other weblog, HinesSight, I recently wrote about the danger of “Religious right on a crusade.” Now, many people would accuse me of overreacting to the attempts by Christian fundamentalists to take control of the political, educational, and judicial systems in the United States.

“Why don’t you just let those on the religious right do what they want and focus on your own spiritual path?” goes the argument. I can understand this point of view, but I can’t accept it.

I try to be a tolerant person. However, it’s extremely difficult for me to be tolerant of intolerance. That’s when I become an extremist—when I see that someone else’s basic human rights are being attacked by an intolerant “ism” such as racism or fundamentalism.

There are clear connections between the two. This study found a positive correlation between fundamentalism, authoritarianism, homosexual discrimination, and racism, noting that “Results support the previous research of the fundamentalism-authoritarianism-racism relationship.”

The Fundamentally Aware web site discusses the connection between fundamentalism and racism, as does the article “A theology for racism: Southern Fundamentalists and the civil rights movement.”

So toleration of fundamentalist faith-based religions is dangerous. For anyone who blindly believes that his or her religion is superior to all others will find it easy to blindly believe that his or her race (or sex, country, sexual orientation, etc.) is superior to all others.

As I noted in my afore-mentioned other post on this subject, fundamentalism is inherently opposed to reason. So scientific facts aren’t going to convince a closed-minded fundamentalist that races and religions are much more similar than they are different, and that there is no basis for considering that one race or religion is superior to any other.

Fundamentalism is based on faith. Thus faith is the root of prejudice and intolerance, as Sam Harris persuasively argues in his book “The End of Faith.” Faith isn’t a positive thing. It’s horribly negative, responsible for countless instances of killings, tortures, hatred, discrimination, and such.

Fundamentalist extremism is kept afloat by an ocean of faith. Eliminate the faith and the extremism would be left high and dry. For example, the August 8/15 issue of The New Yorker quotes a Marine lieutenant general:

“This is no more a war on terrorism than the Second World War was a war on submarines. The decisive terrain in this war is the vast majority of people who are not directly involved but whose support, willing or coerced, is necessary to insurgent operations around the world.”

If this is true of the Muslim people who tolerate Muslim extremists, it is equally true of the Christian people who tolerate Christian extremists. The intolerant fundamentalist religious right in the United States is being supported by the passive tolerance of what likely is a majority of Christians who are opposed to Christian theology being forced down the throats of unbelievers.

Just as the Ku Klux Klan remained a powerful force until the broader culture disowned racial intolerance, religious intolerance will be with us until believers of all faiths say to the extremists among them “We won’t put up with this any longer.”

I hope that day is coming soon. I fear that it is a long way off.

Science is flexible, religion is rigid

It’s good to be flexible physically, mentally, and especially, spiritually. This is why science should be embraced and religion rejected. For religion promotes a truth-denying rigidity while science emphasizes the need to be open to reality in all of its guises.

The current controversy about the teaching of intelligent design, which is creationism in new clothes, illustrates this difference between open-minded science and don’t-bother-me-with-facts religion.

Science is founded on the scientific method, a process for revealing the truth about how things work in the physical universe. Whatever demonstrable truths this process ends up finding are added to science’s fund of knowledge. The scientific method isn’t out to prove a predetermined outcome. Surprises are common in science. Well-established theories get overturned all the time.

Religion, by contrast, is founded on faith, a firm belief in unproven future outcomes: personal salvation, divine revelation, a second coming, and so on. Like George Bush’s faith that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the unfactual core around which his war plans were built up, religions try to fix the facts about physical reality to match preconceived notions.

There is absolutely no factual basis for creationism or intelligent design. None whatsoever. But Christian fundamentalists are unable to loosen their faith in the Bible’s inerrancy even in the face of overwhelming evidence that evolution has guided the universe since the big bang banged fourteen billion years ago: stars evolved, galaxies evolved, solar systems evolved, planets evolved, and here on Earth life evolved.

I’ve argued before that creationism is blasphemy. For whether you believe in God or not, the universe came into being somehow. If a conscious Creator created the universe, then science is revealing the Creator’s artistry. If unconscious laws of nature created the universe, then it still is a secular sort of blasphemy to deny objective physical reality in favor of an all-too-human subjective creation myth.

Rigid religious beliefs keep us from recognizing scientific truths. It doesn’t much matter whether these beliefs are those of a major world religion such as Christianity to which billions belong, or an entirely individualistic religion—the Religion of Me. In either case, faith in the reality of things unseen serves to blind us to what is right before our eyes. Namely, our own experience. Or, lack of experience.

If we haven’t directly experienced the metaphysical truths that we have faith in, then our faith is groundless. And this is the case with 99.999999% (more nines probably are justified) of the world’s faithful believers. We all are agnostics, really. We don’t know whether any metaphysical reality exists, or, if it does, the nature of that non-physical realm of existence.

Yet, we rigidly cling to our irrational religious beliefs with a fierce tenacity. Our backbones stiffen with someone challenges our unfounded faith. Our psyche tenses when a skeptic probes the foundation of our convictions with a “That makes no sense to me; how can you believe that it is true?”

I know whereof I speak, for I have been such a religiously rigid person. After my wife and I got married fifteen years ago, we’d spend many hours talking about our spiritual beliefs. A conversation would go along pleasantly enough until Laurel hit a nerve. I’d feel myself tightening up when she asked a question such as, “Why are you so sure your spiritual master has special powers and knowledge? He just seems like a normal person to me.”

I’d get defensive. Then, irritated. I couldn’t roll with her inquiring psychological punches because her doubts echoed my own, but I was unable to admit this to myself. So instead of openly acknowledging the huge gaps between (1) what I believed to be true, and (2) what I knew for sure to be true, I covered that honest vacuous hole of unknowing with a hypocritical solid sheet of surety. “Oh, you’re wrong, Laurel! You’re so wrong! So, so, so wrong!”

Since then I’ve learned quite a bit about myself. I’ve learned that when I can’t calmly listen to someone else’s criticism of my spiritual beliefs with a sincere feeling of “They may be right and I could be wrong,” I’m failing to practice the scientific flexibility that I espouse. I should be ready and willing to change my beliefs when new information indicates that a cherished article of faith isn’t founded in reality.

My goal is to hang onto just a single absolute: Don’t cling to absolutism. I want to be able to flow wherever the currents of truth lead and not get hung up on any damn religious rocks.

Greetings to Salem churchless and churched

If you’ve found the Church of the Churchless by reading the Statesman-Journal’s article today about local bloggers (only part of which is posted online), welcome, new visitor.

A note to the churchless: if you think you might be interested in a local face-to-face discussion group about faith, faithlessness, non-religious spirituality, keeping science and religion separate, and similar topics, take a look at my “Plunging deeper into Universism” post.

If you want to join this group, which has been founded under the Universism banner more for convenience than anything else (the Universists are way more organized than I am, and espouse a similar faithless philosophy), you can sign up here. We haven’t met yet, but probably will do so soon.

A note to the churched: if you’re a fundamentalist Christian who saw a mention of the Church of the Churchless and feels the need to save my soul, I appreciate the concern but must respectfully decline any and all offers to get involved with my salvation. If you want to pray for me, that’s fine, but please make it for a Mini Cooper.

For quite a while I’ve been praying for a Mini Cooper S (prayer recently has been updated to a convertible Mini) to God, Allah, Buddha, Krishna, the Tao, and every other deity or cosmic force I have heard about. Since only a Volvo wagon and Toyota Prius continue to reside in our carport, I can only assume either that my message isn’t getting through, or that the being on the receiving end isn’t interested in making my life more joyful and fulfilling.

A note to “God,” whatever your nature might be: if you’d like another fervent convert here on Earth with the capacity to spread word of your majesty, all you have to do is manifest that convertible Mini Cooper S in my driveway in any miraculous or non-miraculous manner you choose, leaving an unmistakable sign/description of your divinity in the passenger seat. I’ll then blog your glory to the world for the rest of my days (when I’m not tooling around in the Mini, at least).

Uncertainty: Be sure of it

We all need something to cling to. The big question is, “What?” What can be counted on to support us when everything else falls away? What will stay with us and never leave? What is the stable center around which the rest of our crazy spinning life can revolve?

This is a theme that I keep coming back to in these Church of the Churchless “sermons.” I do so because I’ve been searching for that reliable something my whole life, as have we all. I haven’t found it yet. I’ll willing to bet that you haven’t either.

For if we have a longing for something more, different, or better than what we possess now, we aren’t in touch with whatever it is that satisfies completely. That “whatever” goes by many names: God, the One, Buddha-nature, Ultimate Reality, Allah, to name a few.

Today I was looking over Descartes’ “Meditations” before, appropriately enough, my morning meditation. Now, before you stop reading this post, expecting that a mention of Descartes is bound to precede a really boring philosophical dissertation, let me assure you that Descartes is a cool dude.

He’s just misunderstood. Most people quote his famous “I think, therefore I am” and believe that this sums up Descartes. I’ve read quite a few spiritual books where Descartes is dismissed as an intellectual who was fixated on logical thought rather than intuitive understanding.

I beg to differ. I’ve read his “Meditations” several times. Descartes starts to lose me after Meditation III, but up until then I feel like I know where he’s coming from (to use some non-philosophical terminology). I’m no Descartes. However, I’ve been there myself—that psychological place where what you used to believe in so strongly doesn’t make sense anymore, where the center no longer holds and nothing has stepped in to replace it.

It’s the Void. Uncertainty. Doubt. Angst. Dark Night of the Soul. Most of us have been there. Few, if any, have been able to rationally analyze what that place is like as well as Descartes.

He begins by saying, “It is now some years since I detected how many were the false beliefs that I had from my earliest youth admitted as true, and how doubtful was everything I had since constructed on this basis; and from that time I was convinced that I must once for all seriously undertake to rid myself of all the opinions which I had formally accepted, and commence to build anew from the foundation.”

That’s beautiful. And courageous. It takes a lot of guts to question everything that you’ve been accepting as the gospel truth. Descartes isn’t out to pussyfoot around the periphery of religion and philosophy, tidying up a few logical loose ends. He wants to penetrate to the core of what is true beyond a shadow of a doubt, discarding everything that is uncertain:

I shall proceed by setting aside all that in which\the least doubt could be supposed to exist, just as if I had discovered that it was absolutely false. And I shall ever follow in this road until I have met with something that is certain, or at least, if I can do nothing else, until I have learned for certain that there is nothing in the world that is certain.

In the movies about the “Matrix,” our world turns out to be a computer simulation, a theory that some argue makes sense philosophically and scientifically. Descartes came up with a similar notion back in the seventeenth century. He says that instead of God, the cosmos could be ruled by an evil genius who “has employed his whole energies in deceiving me.”

So everything that we take to be real—the heavens, earth, colors, sounds, and all other external things—could be illusions and dreams fabricated by this Artificer. This sounds a lot like the Eastern philosophical idea of maya. Reality isn’t what it appears to be. What we consider to be solid and trustworthy really isn’t, like a dream that fades away upon waking.

Okay, now we get to Descartes’ really good stuff. This is where Descartes becomes a mystic, notwithstanding the rather pedantic and scholarly style with which he wrote. For he realizes that he can’t count on anything in the outside world, for it could be merely dream stuff. And that includes Descartes’ own body, which is made of the same material the world is.

Descartes frequently is criticized as a dualist who splits apart the unity of mind and body. I don’t understand why, from a spiritual standpoint, that is seen as a bad thing. Doesn’t almost every religion say that soul or consciousness exists apart from the body? If all that we are is extinguished when we die—end of story, finis, case closed—there is little basis for a genuine spirituality.

If physical matter/energy is the root of reality, then when my physical body disintegrates at death, so do I. For there is no “I” apart from the collection of cells now manifesting as a living being known as Brian.

Similarly, Descartes is searching for what is really real. He has decided that he can’t count on the outside world. So he denies his senses and body, then asks: “What follows from that? Am I so dependent on body and senses that I cannot exist without these?” He imagines that he’s been persuaded that “there was nothing in all the world, that there was no heaven, no earth, that there were no minds, nor any bodies: was I then likewise persuaded that I did not exist? Not at all; of a surety I myself did exist since I persuaded myself of something.”

Thus Descartes comes to the conclusion that there is one thing he can be certain about: “I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it, or that I mentally conceive it.”

I am. I am. I am.

This direct awareness of one’s existence isn’t a thought, for I know that I am even when I’m not mentally thinking to myself, “I am.” Indeed, Descartes says that “it seems to me that I see light, that I hear noise and that I feel heat. That cannot be false; properly speaking it is what is in me called feeling; and used in this precise sense that is no other thing than thinking.”

Here’s Descartes’ bottom line as I understand it (in his first three Meditations at least; later on he skates back into some thin philosophical ice when he tries to prove the existence of a good God):

I can be fooled about everything outside and inside of me. With one exception. There’s an “I” being fooled. For absent the awareness of that “I,” there’s no being around to be fooled. In like fashion, I can have everything taken away outside and inside of me. With one exception. There’s an “I” being robbed. For absent the awareness of that “I,” there’s no being around to be robbed.

There is a center. There is something we can count on. There is a certainty in this uncertain world. It is that sensation of “I am.”

Of course, there’s no guarantee that I, or you, will continue to have that sensation after we die. If such is the case, there’s no problem, for there won’t be any “I” around to have a problem.

But so long as I’m aware of myself being aware, herein lies the only refuge that I can truly feel safe in: the awareness of my own existence. In Eastern philosophy there’s the notion of sat-chit-ananda, existence - consciousness - bliss.

Descartes echoes the first two aspects of this tripartite unity, existence and consciousness: the certainty of “I am.” The bliss aspect isn’t addressed by Descartes, so far as I can tell, which might well explain why he seems to have been compelled to leave that simple awareness of his own existence to bring the Christian God back into the picture in his later Meditations.

In Meditation III, though, he sounds like almost everyone who has attempted to still his or her mind and reach the unchanging center of consciousness. It is indeed strange that we pay so much attention to what is false and doesn’t last, while what is undeniably true and enduring—the “I” paying attention—almost entirely escapes our notice.

Although really it is very strange to say that I know and understand more distinctly these things whose existence seems to me dubious, which are unknown to me, and which do not belong to me, than others of the truth of which I am convinced, which are known to me and which pertain to my real nature, in a word, than myself. But I see clearly how my case stands: my mind loves to wander, and cannot yet suffer to be retained within the just limits of truth.

Truth comes in two guises

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve shared a marvelous insight about the nature of the universe with other people and had it fall as flat as a baking powder-less pancake.

I’ll speak with astounding passion, clarity, and insight, laying out a metaphysical truth that is so evident to me I figure there’s no way I’ll fail to be showered with praise by an audience grateful beyond belief for being given the gift of my revelation.

Yet…actually there’s just a brief moment of silence, as if everyone is mentally praying, “Dear God, please let this conversation head off in a different direction.” Which it does when nobody deigns to comment on my pearls of wisdom.

I have a theory about why this happens that can be summed up as “Truth comes in two guises.” That’s Truth with a capital “T,” objective truth. Add in subjective truth and you get four guises.

This marvelous insight came to me while my wife and I were in a Victoria, B.C. hotel room about a dozen years ago. I was pondering how to organize a chapter in my first book, “God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder.” Suddenly everything became clear to me.

There are subjective and objective states of being. There also are symbolic and non-symbolic states of being. Two times two equals four, which results in this figure that explains everything in the universe:

OK, maybe you’re not convinced. That’s fine. My figure can encompass your skepticism. Your doubt is in the lower left-hand quadrant, the domain of thinking. Thinking is subjective, and also symbolic. So you can say or write to me, “Brian, this doesn’t make any sense.” I’ll understand you, because if you communicate in English I’ll understand your symbolically communicated thoughts.

But if you’re also emotionally irritated that I’ve tried to explain the majestic cosmos in a stupid simple diagram, that additional state of being is in the upper left quadrant, the domain of feeling. Feeling is subjective, like thinking. However, it is non-symbolic and thus private. You really can’t put into words how you feel. You can try, though, which is a big part of what poetry is all about.

However, when I’m trying to share my great above-mentioned insight, it’s with an eye to have people say “Yes, that’s so true!” not “Yes, I understand how you feel!” Which gets us into the right-hand side of the diagram, the objective domain of science.

When I hold forth on how I see the nature of God and the meaning of life, it isn’t the same as me saying, “Look out the window at that flock of robins.” Robins are observable. God and the meaning of life aren’t. Robins are part of a shared public reality. God and the meaning of life are part of a personal private reality. So I can’t expect that other people are going to exclaim “Yes, I see” when I talk about God. However, if they have normal vision, this is just what they should say when I point out the robin flock.

Now, the big metaphysical question is whether there’s a domain of objective yet non-symbolic reality, the upper right quadrant in the diagram. In my book I theorized that there is, and the state of being that corresponds to it is contemplation. Meaning, it’s possible to experience an objectively true metaphysical reality within our private consciousness.

The first line of the Tao Te Ching points to this hypothesized domain: The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. And later: Those who know do not talk. Those who talk do not know.

Which sums up my spiritual status, for I talk a lot—both in speech and in writing. And I sure don’t know.

Still, I try to know. I’m open to the possibility that there is both an objective truth that can be told and an objective truth that can’t. This is akin to the situation on the left side of the diagram, where there is both a subjective truth that can be told (thoughts) and a subjective truth that can’t (feelings).

Material science operates in the symbolic area of the objective realm; spiritual science in the non-symbolic area. What this means is that, as the Tao Te Ching points out, it’s impossible to establish a one-to-one correspondence between a spiritual reality and a related symbol such as a word, equation, image, or such.

I say, “Look at that robin in the tree” and people turn around to see what I’m seeing. I say, “God is realized by unknowing rather than knowing” and they have only the faintest idea what I’m talking about. And I have to confess that I’m in the same boat: having only the faintest idea what I’m talking about.

On this Church of the Churchless blog we play out some of these same dynamics. Regular readers of comments to my posts will have observed that people can get testy when their pronouncements about what is spiritually real aren’t accepted by other commenters. This is human nature, for we all have egos that like to be stroked with a ‘You’re so right.”

However, that’s an unrealistic expectation when metaphysics is being discussed. For no one can provide any proof that what they’re claiming to be true really is. A material scientist can publish the results of an experiment, or let a skeptic observe the experiment being conducted. Neither is possible with what I’m calling “spiritual science.”

This is why I don’t believe there ever will be consensus about the nature of God and the meaning of life. If there are metaphysical truths to be known, they will remain private to the knower. If anyone else wants to know these purported truths, they must experience the knowing directly and not second-hand.

I enjoy spirited discussions about the big questions of existence. I’m pleased when people take the time to express their views on these subjects to me. I enjoy reading emails and Church of the Churchless comments that basically say “Here is the truth; I know it to be so.”

If you say this, just don’t expect that I or anyone else will agree with you. In spiritual science your truth can’t be my truth, while in material science it can. If you know the atomic weight of uranium, that will be my knowledge also if I look at physical reality correctly. However, we get into problems, both personally and societally, when people expect that a particular religious viewpoint should be accepted by others.

For there are two kinds of truth: that which can be told, and that which must remain unexpressed. Why should someone believe that what you’re saying about what can’t be said is true?

A witty rebuke to creationism

Don’t miss this great “Open Letter to Kansas School Board” that demands equal teaching time for the theory that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster.

The letter’s author, Bobby Henderson, presents persuasive evidence to support his argument that, if Intelligent Design is an alternative scientific theory to Evolution, then so is the Flying Spaghetti Monster theory.

What Henderson demands is “one third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.”

I enjoyed this Open Letter a lot. A good way to combat ridiculous ideas like Intelligent Design/Creationism that claim to compete with science is to laugh at them. If that means laughing at President Bush, who recently said that Intelligent Design should be taught in the classroom along with the Theory of Evolution, then so be it.

The Theory of Evolution is a “theory” in the same sense as the Theory of Relativity. Namely, so much scientific evidence has been found in favor of it, there is little if any doubt that it is true. Whereas Intelligent Design, on the other hand, has exactly zero scientific evidence in support of it.

However, if Kansas wants to be known as the Dumbass State, where creationism is on equal footing with evolution, I’m happy to help with the publicity. I’ve ordered a Kansas Museum of Science t-shirt through Henderson’s web site that has a depiction of some people riding a dinosaur and the caption, “5,000 years ago man conquered the huge beasts who roamed the lands ...”

I’ll wear it proudly. Everyone who laughs at it will be proving that creationism belongs in comedy clubs and churches, not science classrooms.

Plunging deeper into Universism

As reported on my other weblog, I’ve decided to sponsor a Universist face-to-face discussion group here in Salem. Currently the group has two members: me and my wife, Laurel. This makes it easy for us to meet, but it would be nice to expand the membership between the confines of Hines.

So if you live in the Salem area, consider becoming a group member (sign up here). Though this discussion group will be under the Universist banner, there’s essentially no difference between the philosophy of Universism and what gets preached here at the Church of the Churchless.

I know this, because I read all the way through the Universism FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) today. A brief browse of the Universist web site had led me to strongly suspect that Universism and me were highly compatible. Studying the FAQs convinced me that this was the case.

[Note: the Universism Movement FAQs were edited after I wrote this post. They now are considerably improved and more readable. The comments below refer to the original version.]

Highlighter in hand, I was expecting that I’d mark some “?”s in the margins. After all, I rarely agree completely with a philosophical or metaphysical writing. However, in making my way through the twelve pages I only encountered one area of significant potential disagreement, and that was soon cleared up.

My sole question mark was penned in when the author, Ford Vox, said “We have no authority to pronounce a religious truth we find because as Universists we recognize there are no universal religious Truths, just personal ones, and even those are open to challenge with new experiences and information.”

That struck me as an overly confident statement for a movement that espouses an ardent embrace of uncertainty as an antidote to faith-based religious certitude. Who can say whether there are universal religious truths? Maybe they exist; maybe they don’t. Universism says that “We cannot have a true search if the conclusions are preset.” Wasn’t Vox doing just that?

However, on the next page I read the answer to this question: “What does Universism mean when it says there is no universal religious truth? Isn’t it likely that God exists or doesn’t, one or the other is the truth, for example?” Here’s a portion of the excellent answer:

Objective reality is that which we can learn about through science. Universism addresses the domain of existential, religious and moral questions for which science has no certain answers. Universism presents the empowering absence of a religious reality that applies to everyone. In the absence of religious reality, no one has religious authority.

It can truly be said "Universists have faith in nothing." If universal religious truth is ever found it will no longer be religious Truth, it will be science fact. Presenting a religious truth requires faith, a dangerous concept eschewing reality. Rather we advocate reasoned uncertainty in these areas until they are made apparent through the light of science.

When a fact becomes known, it is no longer religious. It is mystery that makes things religious, and it is mystery that Universism advocates we use as a motivating force for good, for continuing progress to understand that mystery, beginning with the individual search, rather than funneling the mystery's power into faiths which can spiral out of control.

The domain of Universism will shrink with every advancement of science, and ultimately disappear completely. In the meantime, Universism will accelerate the progress of science by emphasizing to humanity how open our possibilities really are, how our future is limited only in imagination.

Nicely said. Here are a few other quotes about faith from the FAQs that I enjoyed:

Faith is adherence to a religious Truth despite evidence to the contrary and without continuing efforts to seek out, understand and weigh evidence. Faith devalues the universe and disrespects our individual efforts to understand the universe.

Universists do not rely on the “comforting” force of faith in our lives; we no longer need constancy and tradition. In its place we celebrate the living world that changes every day, the reality we know, and the aspects of reality that are uncertain. Our constancy is our engagement with the universe and our ready receptivity.

[Universism] is a philosophy liberating people from faith whether that faith is Christianity or atheism or deism (etc.), replacing that faith with open continuing inquiry. It is the great insight of Universism to state that an absolutely certain atheist or deist or pantheist (etc.) is harboring a faith, just as a Christian; she is not a freethinker.

I was a bit reluctant to embrace an “ism,” but the FAQs reassured me that Universism is a commitment to the open-minded search for truth and not the holding onto of any set-in-stone dogma.

Anyway, “Universism” is just a word. What’s important is the philosophy expressed by the word: “A progressive, naturalistic worldview in which all meaning and purpose is understood through personal reason and experience.”

I’ve got no problem signing on to that.

Salem Universists

[Note: I've stepped down as organizer of the Salem Universists group. Reason is described in my "I abandon Universism" post. So far no one wants to take over as organizer, but such might happen.]

Welcome. Here you'll find information about the Salem, Oregon Universists, a group devoted to discussing the big questions of life in a dogma-free fashion. We are tolerant of any and all spiritual, religious, or philosophical beliefs other than intolerance.

This is the weblog of Brian Hines, organizer of the Salem Universists. I'm using this Church of the Churchless post as a web page where people can get information about our group.

You can join the Salem Universists and learn about upcoming meetings on our MeetUp.com listing. When we meet in a public place the date, time, and location are shown to anyone visiting our MeetUp listing. Only members can view information about meetings at a private home.

If you have questions about the Salem Universists, email me or give me a call: 503-371-8892.

Visit the web site of the worldwide Universist Movement. There you'll find much to explore, including this introduction to Universism, answers to frequently asked questions, and a great cartoon guide to Universism (if you read nothing else, look at this).

I've written about my own conversion to Universism in "Universism, a kindred unfaith" and "Plunging deeper into Universism."

And my take on some initial meetings can be read in "Salem Universists meet, noisily" and "Our churchless discussion group."

Support for the churchless

What supports the churchless? What’s the spiritual equivalent of firm physical ground beneath our feet that provides solidity for every step?

“People of faith” are able to cling to a set of beliefs which usually promise that, no matter how much this world may appear to be a whirlpool where everything changes but change itself, someone or something—Jesus, God, Allah, Guru, Buddha, Krishna, the One—is an utterly dependable rock.

The problem, though, is that this rock isn’t visible. So you aren’t able to hold onto it directly, as you could a real rock in a real river. It’s the idea of a rock that is being clung to. And ideas aren’t reliable. They’re as substantial as the ephemeral connections between neurons that hold them shakily in existence.

One of my oft-repeated favorite sayings is from Philip K. Dick: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

So the true Rock of Ages isn’t a belief, but an absence of belief. As Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.” Not only freedom, solid ground also. When you’ve stopped clinging to everything that can’t be depended upon, you’ve got a chance to hold on to something that can.

Rumi, the great Persian mystic, said the same thing as Philip and Janis in his own inimitable fashion:

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.

So, how do we clear up our misunderstanding? How do we get rid of images that are nothing and realize the something that remains when illusion leaves?

The answer is contained in countless spiritual teachings. It isn’t complicated. Beliefs and imaginations are thoughts. Get rid of thoughts and you’re much closer to reality. In his wonderful book, “Open Mind, Open Heart,” the Christian contemplative Thomas Keating says:

“I think it can be said that the essential point of all the great spiritual disciplines that the world religions have evolved is the letting go of thoughts. Everything else is subsidiary to that. The goal is to integrate and unify the various levels of one’s being and to surrender that integrated and unified being to God.”

Since he’s a Catholic, Keating frames this method of centering prayer within the Christian tradition. But the beauty of what could also be called mantra meditation is that the method, when practiced properly, leaves traditions of every sort behind.

For as Keating stresses in his book, what you’re trying to do in centering prayer is find the source of thoughts, the thoughtless divine ground of being: “Like boats or debris floating along the surface of a river, our thoughts and feelings must be resting on something. They are resting on the inner stream of consciousness, which is our participation in God’s being.”

So the spiritual journey, he says, “does not require going anywhere because God is already with us and in us. It is a question of allowing our ordinary thoughts to recede into the background and to float along the river of consciousness without our noticing them, while we direct our attention toward the river on which they are floating.”

Beautiful.

I’ve read many books about meditation, but Keating’s “Open Mind, Open Heart” is my favorite. I’ve practiced mantra meditation for thirty-six years and can tell when someone has walked the walk of this practice, as opposed to merely talking the talk. Keating has been there and done that. He understands how the mind works and how the mind can be led to stop working.

You can get a taste for Keating’s book through these excerpts from each chapter. The basic method is wonderfully simple: pick a simple word of one or two syllables that appeals to you and mentally return to that word when you become aware of thoughts.

There’s a lot more to be said about centering prayer. Likely I will be doing just that in another post. But now I’m going to take the dog for a walk and stop thinking. I’ll replace the thoughts that have been floating along the stream of my consciousness with a single word.

That word isn’t rock-bottom reality. It brings me closer to it, though.