Church of the Churchless

Being religious without a religion

Can you be religious and not belong to a religion? Of course. In fact, I believe this is the only way to be genuinely religious—to give up religion.

This seems contradictory, but one non-religious “religion,” Buddhism, already has proven that it can be done. I’m referring to original Buddhism, that of the Buddha himself.

After the Buddha died, it wasn’t long before his teachings were turned into a traditional religion. However, Huston Smith writes in “The World’s Religions” that few traces of six normal features of religion can be found in the Buddha’s message.

These features are authority, ritual, speculation, tradition, grace, and mystery. Smith says that the Buddha wanted to clear the ground of a Hinduism that had become overgrown with weeds of ritualism and superstition:

The consequence was surprising. For what emerged was (at the start) a religion almost entirely devoid of each of the above-mentioned ingredients without which we would suppose that religion could not take root.

So if you aspire to being spiritual without being religious, the Buddha’s original teachings are a fine model for a “faithless faith.” Huston Smith shows how Buddha turned upside down each of the six features of typical religions.

(1) Buddha preached a religion devoid of authority. He challenged each individual to do his own religious seeking.

“Do not accept what you hear by report, do not accept tradition, do not accept a statement because it is found in our books, nor because it is in accord with your belief, nor because it is the saying of your teacher. Be lamps unto yourselves. Those who, either now or after I am dead, shall rely upon themselves only and not look for assistance to anyone besides themselves, it is they who shall reach the topmost height.”

(2) Buddha practiced a religion devoid of ritual. He argued that “belief in the efficacy of rites and ceremonies” is one of the Ten Fetters that bind the human spirit.

(3) Buddha preached a religion that skirted speculation. He didn’t want his disciples to be diverted from the hard road of practice into fields of fruitless speculation. A disciple observed:

“Whether the world is eternal or not eternal, whether the world is finite or not, whether the soul is the same as the body or whether the soul is one thing and the body another, whether a Buddha exists after death or does not exist after death—these things the Lord does not explain to me.”

(4) Buddha preached a religion devoid of tradition, urging his followers to slip free from the burden of the past.

“Do not go by what is handed down, nor on the authority of your traditional teachings. When you know of yourselves: ‘These teachings are not good: these teachings when followed out and put into practice conduce to loss and suffering’—then reject them.”

(5) Buddha preached a religion of intense self-effort. No god or gods could be counted on, not even the Buddha himself. Every individual must tread the path himself, through self-arousal and initiative.

(6) Buddha practiced a religion devoid of the supernatural. Dallying with paranormal powers, he said, amounted to looking for shortcuts, easy answers, and simple solutions that could only divert attention from the hard, practical task of self-advancement.

“It is because I perceive danger in the practice of mystic wonders that I strongly discourage it.”

It’s amazing, really. The Buddha, acknowledged as one of the world’s great religious leaders, never set out to found a religion. More than that: he actively discouraged his followers from accepting the usual tenets of religion.

No authority. No ritual. No speculation. No tradition. No grace. No supernatural mystery.

No, no, no, no, no, no. What remains is an emphatic “Yes!” Smith says that the Buddha said Yes to…

Experiencing truth directly
Investigating cause and effect scientifically
Finding pragmatic solutions to life’s problems
Ending suffering
Examining the human psyche, not abstract theology
Espousing equality between the sexes and classes
Emphasizing individuals, not social collectives

“Therefore, O Ananda, be lamps unto yourselves. Betake yourselves to no external refuge. Hold fast as a refuge to the Truth. Work out your own salvation with diligence.”

Consistency is foolish

Today I got an email from a man who had finished reading my first book and wondered if I was “full of self-deluding crap." He asked me, “Would you presently like to make any ‘corrections’ or ‘retractions’ from what you wrote and published about ten years ago?”

Why, of course I would. I entirely agree that I’m full of self-deluding crap now, but I like to believe that I was even fuller a decade previous. So this diminution in B.S., no matter how small it might be, has produced a corresponding change in how I view lots of things.

The tone of my correspondent’s email message implies that changing one’s mind is a bad thing to do. Yet Ralph Waldo Emerson praised inconsistency in his classic essay on “Self-Reliance.” I re-read his words today:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.

… The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing.

Now, naturally I don’t consider myself to be a “great” soul. But Emerson’s advice seems to be directed toward those who aspire to make their souls as expansive as possible, regardless how narrow is their current understanding of life’s deepest mysteries.

Every day I find myself changing. So in ten years I’ve changed a lot. I was asked by this man, “Do you now wish to step away from your advice that one ought ‘find’ their own ‘perfect master’ in pursuing mystical knowledge?” Yes. Sort of.

Presently I’m not sure whether a guru or master is necessary for making progress on a spiritual path. Before, I thought that having a teacher is as helpful in studying the nature of the world inside of us as it is in learning about the outside world.

It’s tough to learn physics by yourself. Getting instruction from a trained physicist makes more sense than trying to figure stuff out on your own. Whether this also is the case with mysticism has become an open question for me.

I’m less certain about many statements that I’ve made in the past. This includes my previously confident proclamation that having a guru is good. Thus I’ve rewritten my first book, “God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder” to make it more consistent with my current conceptions.

My book tried to relate the new physics with mysticism. I said that science is a collective pursuit of truth while spirituality is an individual effort toward the same end. Each is marked by continual changes in conclusions as new evidence and experiments throw fresh light on a subject.

When I re-read what I wrote many years ago, often I cringe. However, I believe that the cringing is a sign of growth, not of regression.

It’s a recognition that what I once thought was the end of the road turned out just to be a mile marker along the way. This is akin to the feeling I’d have if I had settled into a lawn chair to watch a fireworks show, waited all night for the heavens to light up, and then realized that I was still far from the fairgrounds.

In the morning I’d wake with an embarrassed smile, chuckling at my mistake. But I wouldn’t regret what I had done, for the doing had made perfect sense to me at the time. I’d simply fold my chair and head on up the road, hoping to find what I was looking for around another bend. I wouldn’t stay in the same place.

That would be foolish. I want to experience fireworks, not my own consistency.

Nirguna and saguna, two visions of God

It may be a simplification to say, “There are two kinds of people in the world,” but often this seems to be true. Certainly it is with men and woman (leaving aside a few hermaphrodites) and I’m coming to believe that such is the case concerning our conceptions about God.

Some people are attracted to the idea that God is beyond being, formless, inconceivable, pure mystery, unfathomable through our usual organs of cognition and perception. nirguna, to use a Hindu term.

Others find this vision of God too distant, too detached, too abstract. They are drawn to a saguna divinity that has a form, attributes, personality, and can be related to as a father, mother, friend, spouse, or other familiar human connection.

Of course, no one is 100% nirguna or saguna, just as no one is 100% masculine or feminine. However, my experience is that this distinction between God as formless or with form is central to how a person looks upon religion and spiritual practice. Put two nirgunas in a room and likely they’ll get along great, even if one is a Christian and one is a Muslim.

For if you can’t say anything about the nature of God, there’s nothing to argue about. But two sagunas who belong to different religions are apt to disagree vociferously about whether God is best worshipped through the form, say, of Jesus or of Krishna. They will also debate what form of worship or ritual is most pleasing to their personalized deity.

I’ve always been much more of a formless guy. I tilt strongly in the nirguna direction. My attempts to be a loving, obedient, faithful devotee of a personal divinity (alive or dead, human or ethereal) always felt strained to me. Outwardly I could fold my hands and prostrate myself as the genuine spiritual bhaktis (lovers) did, but rarely did this feel authentic.

Quite often I’ve been told that I live too much in my head, that my spirituality is overly intellectual, that I should stop thinking so much. I respond with the thought, “Thanks for the advice. I am who I am, though.” It’s difficult to understand another person. Our natural tendency is to assume that our way is the only way.

Love is wonderful. However, there are an infinity of ways to love. It is possible to love the formless just as ardently as some form. It is equally possible to passionately love impersonal universal truth, this being much of the motivation for the sacrifices scientists make in their efforts to lay bare the laws of nature.

Yesterday I talked by phone with a friend. We spoke, as we always do, about both worldly and spiritual matters. He said that the older he gets, the more he’s struck by how grace lies at the heart of his vision of spirituality.

Grace, to him, means an undeserved gift. Genuinely humble, my friend doesn’t feel that his own efforts are capable of leading him closer to divinity. “I’m waiting for God’s grace,” he said. “Or the guru’s grace, which perhaps amounts to the same thing.”

I was moved by his evident sincerity. I could tell by the tone of his voice that he was speaking of matters that can barely be spoken of, even to oneself.

After our conversation was over I got to thinking about my own conception of grace. I don’t believe that there is a personal being out there (or in here) who turns on the Grace Dispensary when a deserving soul comes to his or her attention. That may be the case, but it strikes me as an anthropomorphic saguna conception.

Being so nirgunish, I consider that existence itself is grace, for it is utterly undeserved. Existence simply is and I’m grateful for it, since otherwise neither I, nor anything else, would be. Everything that exists in existence similarly is grace.

The laws of nature and all that the laws produce: energy, matter, consciousness. All grace. Our ability to experience existence in all of its marvelous diversity. More grace. As is the possibility that we can go beyond mere awareness of materiality and tune into higher spiritual realities.

My conception of grace is decidedly impersonal, but it fills me with as much awe and thankfulness as my friend’s personal vision. One of us is largely nirguna and the other is largely saguna, but what we share is more important than our differences: we’re both trying to swim to the other shore.

Here’s what Huston Smith has to say about spiritual swimming in his book, The World’s Religions:

The personalist [saguna] will see little religious availability in this idea of a God who is so far removed from our predicaments as to be unaware of our very existence. Is it not religion’s death to despoil the human heart of its final treasure, the diamond of God’s love?

The answer is that God serves an entirely different function for the transpersonalist [nirguna], one that is equally religious., but different all the same. If one is struggling against a current it is comforting to have a master swimmer by one’s side.

It is equally important that there be a shore, solid and serene, that lies beyond the struggle as the terminus of all one’s splashings. The transpersonalist has become so obsessed by the goal as to forget all else, even the encouragement of supporting companions.

(Here is how a thoughtful Hindu bridges nirguna and saguna.)

If God is mysterious, so are we

Most people accept that the nature of God is a mystery. But these same people believe that they understand the nature of themselves, the being who confidently declares “The nature of God is a mystery.”

Yet what evidence is there that we are any less mysterious than God? Do we know our essence? Can we identify from where our acts of creation emanate? Are we justified in saying anything definitive about ourselves other than, as God said to Moses, “I am who I am”?

These questions are sensitively explored by Luther Askeland in his essay, “Final Duties, Old Bones,” which I’m pleased to be able to share with Church of the Churchless visitors.
Download final_duties_old_bones.pdf

As I mentioned in a recent post, Luther and I have exchanged several emails recently. In one of them he sent along this unpublished essay and said that it would be fine if I put it up on my weblog.

I’m a big fan of Luther Askeland’s writing, which is the same as saying that I’m a big fan of Luther, even though we’ve never met or even talked on the phone. Some people write so honestly, you come to feel like you know them as well as anyone you’ve ever known.

I’ve read Luther’s book, Ways in Mystery, several times, just as I have his “Final Duties, Old Bones” essay. I love Luther’s dedication to digging ever deeper into the mystery that lies at the heart of both the cosmos and of us. He suggests that it is the same mystery. That rings true for me.

If the mystery we call “God” is omnipresent, the hidden essence of the smallest atom and the largest galaxy, then it also is within us—or is us. Yet Luther observes that while over the span of thousands of years we Homo sapiens have steadily disabused ourselves of the anthropomorphic notion that God can be described in human terms, we still cling to the fiction that we can be so described.

For remarkably, and in fact: that we as conceived beings—as apparent topics of conversation, as seeming objects of thought—are pure myth is a truth more readily accessible to us than is the mythical nature of any conceived god…The “I” as talked and thought about—the “I” as conceived—is fiction.

Luther’s writing often makes me stop and think. He has a knack for taking familiar ideas and looking upon them in a fresh way. I’ve read most of the books that Luther refers to. Like him, I’ve poured through the message of Meister Eckhart, other Christian mystics, Plotinus, Buddhist sages, Zen masters, many others.

I’ve said “Yes!” to all of these paeans to mystery, urgings to leave aside all that can be said or thought about God so that the unknowable can be approached in the only way that is possible: as unknown.

Yet I’ve never exclaimed the same exuberant “Yes!” in reference to my own purported self-knowledge. For somehow I still believe that my own life is comprehensible, even though God’s nature is not. As Luther says:

We demythologize the gods, with comparative ease, long before it even occurs to us to demythologize ourselves.

This is the final duty, he suggests, of these “old bones.”

Within our own unthinkable reality we will be unidentified, edgeless, neither “many” nor “one.” It will not occur to us to dream that “we” can relate to, observe, ponder, or conceive “ourselves”—to ask how “I” really feel about “myself” or “my life” will seem as odd as asking in all seriousness how Zeus really feels about his. Instead of looking at the inconceivable exclusively from the outside, and theologically, we will now, just like the gods, be it.

Yes.
Yes.
Yes.

A British churchless blogger

Check out “Off The Beaten Track,” the blog of a British man who has left the well-trodden path of Christianity and is heading toward the wide-open spaces of spirituality.

It was nice to get an email from Paul, the OTBT’er, who has made the Church of the Churchless his blog of the week. I’m honored. Faithless hands meeting across the sea.

In the Best of Off The Beaten Track section I found “Do Not Believe,” which features some great advice from the Buddha about following your own way.

I also noted via the most recent OTBT post that Paul had taken a quiz intended to show what sort of religion you best fit in with. He and I are on very much the same wavelength, with both of us fitting into the independent “spiritual” category. After taking the quiz I was told:

Your ideals are mostly spiritual, but in an individualistic way. While spirituality is very important in your life, organized religion itself may not be for you. It is best for you to seek these things on your own terms.

Amen to that.

What are the odds?

Beating exceedingly long odds (1 in 146 million), someone in Oregon just won $340 million in the Powerball lottery. This got me to thinking, what are the odds of someone winning the God lottery? That is, of choosing the right religion or spiritual practice and enjoying a really big prize: salvation, enlightenment, heaven, gnosis, god-realization.

I’ve enjoyed reading the comments to my previous “I’ve been fired” post. Some I agree with, some I don’t. This statement by Robert Searle (mildly edited for clarity) got me pondering probabilities:

I am coming to the conclusion that the much despised term "blind faith" can be very essential because after all it is the only real way to find the truth...after one has undertaken intellectual research of course. Remember too it is fifty-fifty. Sant Mat is either right, or wrong. Why not take a bet...accept the Teachings again. You have nothing to lose. It is either right, or wrong. If it is right you have everything to gain. If you are wrong then you know for certain when you leave this world.

Since I’m a believer in objective reality, I agree with Robert that Sant Mat or any other religion is either right or wrong. But what are the odds that a spiritual path actually leads to the claimed destination? (God, the Absolute, the One, Ultimate Reality, Buddha nature, the Tao, whatever you want to call it)

I don’t see any reason to say that it is 50-50. How could this be true, given that there are so many widely divergent world religions? Thousands, if not tens of thousands, counting the great and small. Assuming that there is indeed an objectively true spiritual domain, what are the odds that any particular religion possesses an accurate knowledge about this realm and how it is possible to reach it? (or become it)

Extremely small. For as is the case with almost everything, there are many ways to be wrong and only a few ways (or a single way) to be right. Again, this assumes that there is an objective criterion by which wrongness or rightness is gauged.

If God is whoever or whatever I claim him/her/it to be, then obviously there’s no way for me to be wrong. But if the reality we call “God” is really real, then some of the hypotheses about God that form the basis of religions are going to be wrong and some are going to be right.

What are the odds that my religion or your religion is a jackpot winner? I don’t know. It just seems likely that the odds are a great deal less than 50-50, especially when you consider the probability that no religion is a winner. For in all of recorded history, no conclusive proof ever has been provided that God or a higher metaphysical reality exists.

So let’s be generous to spirituality and say that the odds are 50-50 that there is anything other than materiality, leaving aside the question of what this “anything” might consist of. Then, let’s be optimistic about the odds that if there is indeed something spiritually real, any particular religion has a 1 in 100 chance of being correct about it (given the thousands of competing metaphysical philosophies, these are generous odds).

If you and I are religious believers, this leaves us with 1 in 200 odds that our chosen faith is correct. By contrast, an atheist has a 1 in 2 chance of being correct, given the assumption above. These are, of course, arbitrary numbers picked out of the blue. Nonetheless, I keep coming back to the basic question, “What are the odds?” Greater than most faithful generally consider, I suggest.

A big reason why I’ve come to sound like a heretic within my previously chosen faith, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), is that I have been seriously pondering this question. To me, this is a hopeful sign of humility, not a distressing portent of spiritual backsliding. I no longer assume that, out of all the myriad religions in the world, I’ve been blessed enough to choose (or be chosen by) the very best one.

Likely, I haven’t. Perhaps because there isn’t any “best,” all religions being on a wild goose chase in their quest to know a non-existent God. Perhaps because there is indeed a clearly superior path to God and I haven’t recognized it yet.

I’d like to improve my odds from whatever they are now. Robert said that if I’m wrong about a chosen spiritual path such as RSSB then I’ll find that out after I leave this world. This strikes me as an unwise strategy for playing the God-game. If I don’t seem to be getting the rewards that have been promised, the wiser approach seems to be to change what I’m doing.

As the saying goes, “If you keep on doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep on getting what you’re getting.” I realize that religions promise a big payoff after death, but I’m no longer into promises. Having reached the age of 57, and growing older by the second, I want the real deal. No more promissory notes, thank you.

Lastly, there’s another way to look at this “What are the odds?” question. What are the odds that I could seriously pursue a spiritual path for thirty-five years and find myself at the same place from which I started? I’ve changed over the years. A lot. We all do. We change physically, mentally, emotionally, and, yes, spiritually.

Being an optimist, I consider that most of these changes in us can be called “growth.” Even going downhill physically can be an opportunity to grow in other respects, coming to gracefully accept the inevitable aging process, for example. Yet a religion generally decries any change in a believer that causes him or her to believe differently. People grow while religions, by and large, stay constant.

This creates a tension. A person either has to deny evident growth or at least some tenets of a previously-chosen religion. I’ve chosen the latter course, because what I directly experience is much more real to me than abstract dogma.

When the choice is between loyalty to the truth or to a religious institution, keep in mind this story in Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions:

Lincoln Steffens has a fable of a man who climbed to the top of a mountain and, standing on tiptoe, seized hold of the Truth. Satan, suspecting mischief from this upstart, had directed one of his underlings to tail him; but when the demon reported with alarm the man’s success—that he had seized hold of the Truth—Satan was unperturbed. “Don’t worry,” he yawned. “I’ll tempt him to institutionalize it.”

I’ve been fired

Well, my Meister Eckhart fantasy has been fulfilled. I’ve been fired from giving talks (known as “satsangs”) at meetings of my spiritual group because my Church of the Churchless writings have been too heretical.

Yesterday our local secretary informed me that he had been told by a regional representative, Vince Savarese, that my blogging about Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) had caused a lot of people to be uncomfortable. In New York. In India. All around the RSSB world.

Naturally I blurted out “Wow, that’s great! People are reading my blog!” It didn’t bother me to hear that I’ve been making some people uncomfortable. I regularly hear from others that they appreciate my posts, so it all evens out. Yin and yang. Like and dislike. Attraction and repulsion. That’s the way of the world.

Regardless, the RSSB powers that be don’t want me to be a speaker anymore. I said, “That’s fine. Now the folks at the Radhasoami studies discussion group who have been taking bets that I wouldn’t last as a speaker beyond mid-2006 will feel vindicated.”

Interestingly, about ten days ago I’d been asked to write another article by an editor of the official RSSB magazine, “Spiritual Link.” She emailed me, “I so enjoy reading what you write on your blog. It is that kind of energy that I’d like to see in an article.” So what one hand chastiseth, another hand praiseth.

Since I’d been expecting to be charged with heresy at some point, the news of my firing didn’t affect me much. The only real pang came when I deleted two reminder items for next weekend on my Outlook calendar: “prepare satsang” and “give satsang,” since I’ve been speaking monthly for more than fifteen years.

If anyone involved with RSSB wanted to peruse my writings about the organization, I made it easy for them. They’re all neatly listed in a single weblog category and Google also does a good job of searching them out.

I quickly read through my RSSB-related posts this morning, trying to picture how they would appear to a defender of the faith. Not surprisingly, they didn’t seem all that heretical to me, but then I’ve got a natural bias in favor of me. A couple of my favorites are “Don’t believe, just have faith” and “‘I’ is a humble word.” (I presciently noted in the latter post that being fired for heresy was an ever-present possibility.)

Whenever I quoted Meister Eckhart in a talk, which was frequently, my pat line was “Anyone who is accused of heresy by the Pope can’t be all bad.” In fact, in my opinion that’s a badge of honor.

Understand: in no way am I comparing myself to Meister Eckhart. What we share is a passion for mysticism, a disdain for organized religions that cut people off from a direct experience of mystery, and a love of philosophical language. With that comes an understanding of the limits of saying anything about “God.”

Eckhart had an exalted understanding of those limits. I just have a crude understanding. Yet what little I possess has been steadily driving me in the direction of the boundary between words and wordslessness. I’ve become obsessed with trying to figure out what prevents me from crossing to the other side, where mystery lies.

My obsession tends to be expressed in words, of course. That’s a problem. A big problem. Still, I feel like I’m on the right track. For a long time I believed that my finely honed ability to conceptualize spirituality meant that I was becoming more spiritual. Now, as the saying goes, I realize that my initial B.S. status had merely progressed to an M.S. (more of the same) and Ph.D. (piled higher and deeper) in Mystical Pretension.

Thus the fundamentalist religion that I’ve been attacking really is myself. My increasing disbelief in my own dogmas has been projected onto Radha Soami Satsang Beas because that is where the dogmas came from. Believe me, the person who has been made most uncomfortable by my writings is me.

Again, I don’t claim to possess a speck of genuine Eckhartian understanding. But I still resonate to Luther Askeland’s description of Meister Eckhart’s call to pursue an “inner poverty:” (this is from Luther's book, "Ways in Mystery")

We have the feeling that we are not yet real, that we only have the time between now and death to create, somehow, that reality which right now is painfully absent. Human life, therefore, is from the very first day an instinctive effort to “become,” yet Eckhart urges the necessity to “un-become,” that is, to reverse life’s underlying direction and goal.

He calls for the abandonment of all efforts to incorporate reality, to become, and to “make something” of ourselves and our lives. On the contrary, we are to work diligently to cut away whatever reality and substance it may seem that hard work or chance has created.

This reversal applies, above all, to all forms of inner and spiritual wealth. All attempts to acquire the right religious attitudes, accomplishments, and knowledge are to be abandoned. Turning aside from the goal of making ourselves spiritually, we must jettison whatever spiritual wealth, value, and standing we thought were ours.

I never thought I had much. And what little I thought I possessed seems to be steadily going down the drain. The older I get, the less I know. At this rate, I’m going to be a cipher by the time I die. Which, hopefully, is a good thing. Not that I have any choice in the matter.

For at least five years virtually all of the talks that I’ve given to my spiritual group have been on the related themes of not-knowing, emptiness, and confusion. I deeply appreciate the opportunity that I’ve been given to better understand my own not-knowing, emptiness, and confusion. As above, what I’ve been speaking and writing about is me.

In sort of a celebration of the end of my RSSB speaking, I’ll mark the occasion by sharing several of my favorite satsangs. I usually spoke quite spontaneously and with relatively few notes, but these talks are actually fairly well organized. I called them the “Energetic Embrace of Emptiness” and “Closing the Circle.”
Download seattle_satsangmarch_2000.pdf

Download sedona_2001close_the_circle.pdf

I’m becoming my favorite book

Standing in front of the Book Bin’s Eastern religion section today, I experienced a literary mini-satori: The only book I really want to buy is me.

My exceedingly mild enlightenment descended upon me after a minute or so of browsing. I’d been thumbing through the only sections, Buddhism and Taoism, that are of any interest to me recently.

The voluminous shelves of Christian books, ugh. Judaism, no interest. Islam and Sufism, too preachy. So I was reduced to pawing through a few square feet of Buddhist and Taoist writings, and even here I found myself replacing possible purchases almost as soon as I glanced at the front and back covers.

Dogmatic. Too personal. A rehash. Superficial. Overly intellectual.

Then the flash of insight hit me. What I was looking for was a spiritual book that exactly expressed everything that I already hold to be true. In short, I wanted to read about me. My beliefs, my approach to fathoming the meaning of life, my meditation practice, my God-philosophy.

I wasn’t searching for fresh truth. I wanted a validation of what is already true for me. I wasn’t trying to find answers to the big questions of life. I hoped to find that someone else had dealt with the questions in the same way as I am.

The obvious ridiculousness of my self-reflective quest almost made me walk out of the book store. Almost.

For I ended up buying “Dropping Ashes on the Buddha: The Teaching of Zen Master Seung Sahn.” Again, not so much because I’ll learn anything new from the book. I just liked the idea of dropping ashes on the Buddha. Or Jesus, God, Allah, Lao Tzu, Moses, Zoroaster, the Pope, a guru—anyone who is unduly reverenced for reasons that aren’t genuinely reverential.

Someday, perhaps, I’ll stop buying spiritual books that simply reflect my own vision of reality. I’ll have enough confidence in myself to trust me directly, instead of feeling drawn to highlight passages that I could have written and muttering, “Ah, well said.”

Whenever I go to Powell’s Books in Portland, one of the country’s largest bookstores, where the religious and metaphysical area seems to go on forever, I’m struck by how the browsers in each aisle so closely reflect the subject matter being browsed.

There in the Wiccan section will be a long-haired woman in a flowing purple dress wearing lots of jewelry. There in the Judaic section will be a serious-looking man with a skullcap. There in the Christian section will be a soberly-dressed teenager with a cross around her neck.

And there in the Eastern philosophy section will be a gray-haired man with a beard wearing a batik shirt. Me. Looking for a book that will affirm what I already know. Or rather, am pretty sure that I know. As are my fellow spiritual book-browsing comrades.

The wisdom we’re all looking for is us. We just aren't convinced of that yet.

Except, when I read what I just wrote, I have to ask, “Don’t I know that, since I said it?” Yes, I do.

But the question is, am I ready to hear my own answer?

Our churchless discussion group

Last night we Salem Universists got together for our third meeting, this time at the Blue Pepper coffee house in downtown Salem. Once again our discussion covered a lot of ground: fear of death, reality of evil, contacts with departed souls, moving from fundamentalism to open-mindedism, among other subjects.

I’d told my fellow Tai Chi students about the group and invited them to drop in on the meeting. Jill and Connie did. In the two hours that we spent together on the couches in the Blue Pepper loft I felt like I came to know them much better. As I did Laura, Tom, and Laurel, the Universist old-timers.

Yes, I even learned some new things about my wife. And I’m pretty sure the same was true for her, since I spoke my mind in a somewhat different way than I had before. All six of us revealed deep thoughts and feelings about how we view God, the afterlife, human relationships, the meaning of it all.

Chit-chat is fine. I love to talk about politics, sports, and other typical coffee house conversation topics. But when we get down to conversing about what means the most to us—our deepest beliefs, hopes, fears, sureties, uncertainties—that’s when the covers get stripped away and I feel like I’m truly beginning to understand the heart of someone else (or myself).

I’m enjoying how our group is able to come together around the general search for life’s meaning, rather than a specific answer. I mean, until now every religious or spiritual group that I’ve been involved with has been centered on a discrete path. If you don’t want to buy into that path, then you’re always going to be an outsider.

But last night the six of us talked about our decidedly different paths. Our commonality was that we all are still searching. None of us believe that our spiritual path, as defined or ill-defined as it may be, is the only way. That’s refreshing.

I never felt any judgment or negativity from anyone else, no matter what I said. We agreed and disagreed politely, though often firmly. I talked quite a bit about my fear of death and uncertainty about what will happen after I take my last breath.

Per usual, I found it easy to answer the question, “Why are you so afraid of death?” “Because I’m going to be dead!” I was inspired by how other people seemingly are ready to embrace dying. I’m not. Hopefully when the moment comes, I will be.

If I am, some of the credit will go to the people who listened to me last night. We all need people to lean on, the churchless as well as the churched. Members of organized religions have a built-in support group that they see every Sunday (or whenever).

I’m pleased that we Salem Universists are starting to form our own source of spiritual support. It isn’t answers that I need from other people; it’s an affirmation of my questioning and a simple “Yes, I hear you.”

Spirituality in one word

“Wow!” “Camat!” That’s all of spirituality in one word, for both words mean the same thing. “Wow!” is English; “Camat!” is Sanskrit. Both point to wonder, the touchstone of spirit.

I learned about camat from Luther Askeland. Recently I’ve been re-reading Luther’s book, “Ways in Mystery.” His thoughts stimulated some of my own: “Mystery is omnipresent” and “Dismantling the golem project.”

So it was a treat to get an email message from Luther on Monday. We’ve corresponded by snail mail a few times, but I didn’t know that this Minnesota philosopher and woodworker had a cyberspace presence.

Probably because of Luther’s classic writing style, and my assumption that he still lives in Welch, Minnesota, I’d always pictured him writing letters by hand under candlelight (probably after bringing the cows in).

Yet wonder of wonders, Luther has not only has email but also a website, where you can see an appropriately mysterious photo of him in his rural element and download a booklength essay: "When the Word-Animal Discovers Signlessness: A Reflection on the Possibility of the Mystical."

Here’s some of what Luther had to say. I’m thankful for being exposed to a new word, “camatkara.” I read on this web site that camatkara means consciousness without obstacles, the consciousness of a subject “who is finessed in the vibration of a marvelous enjoyment.” Sounds good.

Hello Brian. The last few days our paths have crossed, probably both in cyberspace and in mystery. I wanted to check back to your website and read through 5-6 of your recent blogs, and so I discovered of course that you have also been looking at some of my stuff lately.

We certainly seem to be in the same place--edgeless mystery!

When you say that "Wow!" and similar words are the best possible form of spiritual utterance, I'm reminded of a Sanskrit word I've frequently thought about lately: “camatkara.” It's an important term in Kashmir Shaivism, a monistic Shaivism with some basic similarities with the Vedanta.

“Camat” just by itself is an exclamation of surprise, astonishment, or wonder, just like "Wow!". “Kara” has the basic meaning of making or doing. So the basic sense of camatkara could be translated as "saying 'Wow!" or maybe as "the Wow!-word" or even the "Wow! experience."

The word is often translated as meaning astonishment, amazement, etc. And this word is frequently used in Kashmir Shaivism to point to the supreme spiritual experience or realization.

You wrote recently about the oddness of everything. Lately I've been thinking back about my fairly long path (I'm now 63) and trying to discern its main threads. And one of the most important of them is just the strong sense of that oddness.

For it has long seemed to me that the basic thing spiritually "wrong" with us isn't sin, but our extraordinary dullness. Unaware of mystery, we usually act as if all this ("the world," "This") is perfectly normal, "just what you would expect," when in fact it's infinitely abnormal, the "strangest thing," or as you write, full of oddness.

On a lighter note, I feel much more on top of things, having learned how to create a "religion of one." As soon as I sign off, I plan to look at my driver's license and get started. Thanks! and all the best to you in all your endeavors.
--Luther

Religion is bad for societal health

The more religious a country is, the more dysfunctional it is. That’s the basic conclusion of a study reported in The Journal of Religion and Society. A Los Angeles Times article, “The Dark Side of Faith,” summarizes the findings of the researcher, Gregory S. Paul:

He found that the most religious democracies exhibited substantially higher degrees of social dysfunction than societies with larger percentages of atheists and agnostics. Of the nations studied, the U.S. — which has by far the largest percentage of people who take the Bible literally and express absolute belief in God (and the lowest percentage of atheists and agnostics) — also has by far the highest levels of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

I’d always suspected as much. Lots of people in the United States like to put down Europe as a hotbed of quasi-socialist secular humanism, but the mostly non-religious European countries must be doing something right, because they have fewer murders and abortions than this highly Christianized nation.

Laurel and I took a trip to Victoria, B.C. soon after we got married. I remember being asked by a Canadian border guard if we had any guns or pepper spray in our car. Laurel hesitated for a second before answering and he said, “Well, do you?” She admitted that she had pepper spray in her purse because she was planning to go jogging in Victoria.

The guard looked at us with a mildly superior Canadian stare and told her, “You won’t be needing that sort of thing here.” Which, we didn’t. We felt much safer in Canada than in the United States, notwithstanding the much larger percentage of fundamentalist Christians here.

Morality has nothing to do with religiosity. If anything, this study suggests that the opposite is true: the more religious people are, the more immorally they act. My wife has observed this in her psychotherapy practice. In her experience domestically violent men often are evangelical Christians who believe that they have a God-given right to treat their wife and children any way they want.

Along these lines, in my state the longtime chairman of the Christian Coalition of Oregon is being investigated for having molested three female family members when they were pre-teens. Stories like this pop up all the time: a seeming paragon of Christian morality turns out to have been hiding a much darker persona.

A London Times piece about Paul’s study notes that religious belief can cause damage to a society:

Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its “spiritual capital”. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.

The full study report, academically titled “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies,” can be read here.

It has some holes, no doubt. There are no sophisticated analyses of statistical significance. And the author seems to have an anti-religion ax to grind, judging by the tone of his writing.

That doesn’t bother me much. Paul deserves a lot of credit for taking a first step toward seeking a solid factual answer to a question whose answer tends to be assumed in the United States: Is religion good for a society?

President Bush and his right-wing cronies win elections by decrying the decline of religious moral values. Their policies are aimed at making religion (more precisely, the Christian religion) a much stronger societal force, the assumption being that this would be a good thing.

In reality, it wouldn’t. This study strongly suggests that a healthy society is one where religious belief is kept to a minimum and respect for science is raised to a maximum. In Paul’s words:

Indeed, the data examined in this study demonstrates that only the more secular, pro-evolution democracies have, for the first time in history, come closest to achieving practical “cultures of life” that feature low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion.

The least theistic secular developed democracies such as Japan, France, and Scandinavia have been most successful in these regards. The non-religious, pro-evolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator. The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted.

In the interest of balance, here is a criticism of the study by a Southern Baptist minister and theologian who, not surprisingly, disagrees with Paul’s thesis.

Mystical dreams and experiences

Last night I had a dream. I can’t remember most of the details, but the basic theme was that some clever unseen vandals had torn apart an apartment building where I was living.

One moment all the apartments were normal. The next moment, all of the identifying room numbers had been switched around; all of the doors had been torn off their hinges and left lying next to the now-unclosable openings to the rooms; and all of the contents of the apartments—furniture, appliances, books, clothes, and so on—had been scattered randomly among the rooms.

So the residents, including me, were wandering around wondering “Where is the place I used to live?” You couldn’t tell. With no numbers next to the doors, and no doors to keep people out of a place, and no identifiable personal belongings in any room, every apartment seemed the same: chaotic. We kept asking each other, “Who did this? How was it possible that this could happen?”

I don’t usually try to figure out dreams. But I thought some about the dream this morning. My first intuitive aha! was that it pretty much reflected how my spiritual evolution (or, some would say, devolution) has been going: from having neatly organized beliefs to a much less tidy unknowing and unsureness about where truth really lies.

I’ve been meaning to share an email message that Aaron Buss, a regular Church of the Churchless visitor, shared with me a few weeks ago. This is a good time to do so. Aaron wrote about a roughly similar dream that he had. Who knows? Maybe my dream was influenced by a memory of Aaron’s dream.

In addition, Aaron speaks about some waking mystical experiences. He wrote me on the day I posted “I reveal my mystical experiences," so I have to assume that this is the “stuff” he refers to at the beginning of his message.

Aaron, like me, is a Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) initiate. The “Baba Ji” he refers to is the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon. Baba Ji is an Indian term of affectionate respect for a elevated spiritual person; I don’t know the exact meaning, though this definition gives a sense of how “Baba Ji” is used.

Here’s Aaron’s message:
------------------------------------------
Brian, wow. So some days I feel like I am sitting here in front of the computer reading your stuff and it's like I wrote it myself (well, except for the complex syntax and big words).

You're writing down exactly what I'm feeling. Even though I was initiated in 1984, some time after you, the exact same thing is happening to me at this same moment in time. Coincidence that I found your blog and things are going along this way with at least two of us feeling this way? I would imagine there must be many more satsangis [RSSB initiates] having this same experience.

I had a dream the other night that seemed strangely like a premonition:

I was in a condo building kind of like where I used to live. Something had happened. When I looked down at the floor, I could see the cracks in the foundation, even through the carpeting. It freaked me out so I went outside to inspect the outside of the building, and when I got around to the other side of the building, it turned out that the whole other side had been demolished and everyone had moved out.

But it was in the process of being rebuilt and remodeled because it had grown old and worn out. Strangely, during my dream I wasn't upset by this at all. I only wondered to myself "gosh, why didn't anyone tell me this remodeling was going on?" And I went back into my apartment and just kind of sat there staring at the cracked foundation and wondering if anyone was ever going to tell me about what was happening.

Then I woke up and didn't think much about this dream again until now. At first I thought, maybe the fact that I started drinking beer was the crack in my foundation (guilt). And then I thought "no, I think some kind of renovation is underway, and it will all be put back together somehow, only it will be better than before."

There was one other time when I had a dream that I remembered and thought about for a long time. It was 1982.

I dreamt I was swimming around in a river and I could breathe under water just fine. I came upon a muddy bank. There was a hole in the bank that I could see something inside of. I grabbed this wrapped up bag - some kind of burlap or something, and pulled it toward me. It had a knot around it and when I opened it up this bright light came up and in my hand was a big ruby and other gems. Around that time a friend of mine said she had a dream about me and that she couldn't explain it but something really great was going to happen.

That's when I met some satsangis and was fascinated by them because I had never met a vegetarian before. They gave me a book to read about the path, and when I flipped open the book, the very first line I read was "Everyone hath rubies in his bundle, O Bhika, but how to untie the knot he doth not know." (or whatever that oft-read quote is).

So from that time on I was hooked on everything I read. It was like absolute magic reading about reincarnation and karma and worlds of creation and all that (even Mormons believe in this kind of thing I hear). But as I wrote on your site once, I went through years of conflict over being gay. Somehow I just have never believed that God could give a shit. I mean, it seems to me that if you're a good person and you're not hurting anyone, who cares?

Then in 1995 when I was visiting Baba Ji, I'll tell you I saw something, or at least thought I did. Maybe it was delirium from the train ride, who knows. But I felt these waves of energy coming from something that was not a human being but something that was white with masses of color; all the colors of the rainbow floating around in a white ethereal pulsating light. It was like something you would have seen on an episode of Star Trek.

But out of this light came something I could only describe as waves of love. It didn't have cares or worries, it was only "an ocean of peace and bliss." And I couldn't say whether this thing I saw, or thought I saw, appeared to me because I mentally associated God with the guru, or whether the guru was actually somehow connected to it and channeling it. But I know that I had seen this thing before somewhere. Because when I saw it, it was familiar to me.

Once as a child I woke up in the middle of the night to a glowing form. My brother was sleeping in the same bed but wouldn't wake up even though I shook him. This thing spoke to me without any words being spoken out loud. All I remember is that it communicated with me about my life. I don't know what it said but I know it wasn't anything bad; it was like "everything's cool, you'll be okay" kind of like that. And I never saw it again until twenty years later.

So those are my experiences. There's not much for twenty years of meditating but it seems like, what choice do I have? Like a lot of people do, I want to know whatever it is that created all this and merge back into that great link, and when I do I know none of this will matter, but that somehow it was an important part of my own soul's evolution.

I like to think that I really understand how you are feeling. There is some kind of renovation going on, I just don't know where it's leading to. That's always a little scary. But I don't think it's taking us to a bad place. I think it's taking us to a better place.
--Aaron

Become a religion of one

Most people belong to a religion with many members. There are about two billion Christians in the world, over a billion Muslims, and nearly a billion Hindus. Sure, company is nice, but here are some reasons to become a religion of one:

--You can hold a worship service whenever and wherever you want. Your church just needs to be as big as you are.

--No contentious arguments about leadership. Any jockeying for power in your religious organization will be between you and you.

--Doctrinal disputes are easily resolved. What you say, goes.

--If you’ve ever wanted to be known as “Most eminently enlightened great being” or “Her highly esteemed holiness,” within your own mind at least, this is your chance.

--Beer and tortilla chips can be your holy sacraments. Or, cake and chocolate.

--Sex between clergy and parishioners is absolutely fine. Encouraged even. It’s all in your own hands. Literally.

--Finding a name for your religion is easy: just look at your driver’s license. The hard part is deciding between “ism,” “ity,” or whatever. In my case, Hinesism sounds OK, Hinesity terrible. Hinesiosity, maybe. I need to schedule a meeting with myself on this.

--No worries about declining membership. You’re already as low as you can go (death will take your religion down to zero devotees, but that’ll be the least of your worries).

--Salvation is assured. All you need to do is write “salvation is assured” on a holy post-it note and then have faith in your divine revelation Heck, if it works for Christians, Jews, and Muslims, it’ll work for you.

--The next time someone says, “Who died and made you the pope?” you can reply with a straight face, “What do you mean? Nobody had to die, I’ve always held that office.”

But seriously…I’ve got shelves of books from each of the world’s great mystical traditions—Christian, Sufi, Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu—that support the contention, “Become a religion of one.”

Science seeks universal material truths through a collaborative process of rigorous investigation. Mysticism seeks universal spiritual truths through an individual process of rigorous investigation.

Don’t believe it when you hear, “When two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I” in reference to spiritual presence. In truth, that’s when God is not present—in a group.

Believe it: the best religion has a membership of one.

My religious unconversion

Lots of people talk about their religious conversion. Few speak about their religious unconversion. Google gave me 7,150,000 results for “religious conversion” and just 187 for “religious unconversion.”

I hope to make it 188. I’m proud of my unconversion. Much prouder than of my previous conversion. For it is more challenging to embrace a universal spiritual openness and uncertainty than a defined spiritual system and its corresponding dogma.

Each unfaithful person has their own unconversion story. Google gave me “Escape From Religion, My Untestimony,” the tale of an increasingly questioning Christian, and a (long) riff on “The Meaning of Life” by a thoughtful ex-Catholic who now subscribes to a religion of personal growth.

In my own case, it took me a long time to realize that I was in a religion that I needed unconversion from. Christianity is an obvious religion. Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a.k.a. Sant Mat, Science of the Soul, Surat Shabd Yoga, is an unobvious religion. For it emphasizes a mystical practice of meditation and claims to be a scientific means of self- and god-realization.

I took this claim at face value for nearly thirty years. I believed that I’d escaped from the false promises of traditional religions and their insistence that salvation depends on belief, rather than the other way around. That is, I thought that in RSSB one comes to believe in a mystic truth after directly experiencing it—which would make this a spiritual science.

But gradually I started to see that my chosen faith had almost as many hallmarks of religion as Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. Since the RSSB philosophy is virtually indistinguishable from Sikhism, which definitely is an organized religion, this shouldn’t have been such a shock to me.

Somehow, though, I’d come to feel that since a central tenet of RSSB is that a living guru or master is essential for making true spiritual progress (while for traditional Sikhs a holy book, the Adi Granth, fills this role), I was a member of a non-religious group.

And yet, I’d sit through RSSB sermons (satsangs) where, if I simply transposed the word “Jesus” for “guru,” the talk could have been given in a Christian church:

“God has sent the guru to take us back to Him…The guru takes our sins on his own shoulders…Faith in the guru is all-important…Unless a person submits himself to the guru, he can’t be saved…The guru will meet us at the time of death and keep us out of the devil’s hands.”

I was torn. I enjoyed hearing that because I’d been initiated by a supposedly Perfect Living Master (PLM) who is considered to be God in Human Form (GIHF), my worries were over. My soul now was saved from the wheel of reincarnation. Within a maximum of four lifetimes the PLM would see to it that I was back in the lap of God, because he had the power to do this, being GIHF.

Now, the four lifetimes bit wasn’t pleasant news. Naturally I’d prefer that my salvation occur immediately, if not sooner, since the Brian Hines that I’m interested in getting saved obviously wouldn’t be around in even one succeeding lifetime. I mean, if I’m going to be saved, what’s the point if I’m not going to know about it?

Nonetheless, salvation in any form of consciousness—even one where all sense of my personal identity had been lost—sounded a lot better than eternal damnation. So I continued to listen to the RSSB sermons, playing my little game of theological transposition by saying “Jesus” inside my head every time I heard “guru” or “master.”

Until the split between my heart and my head began to tear me apart. My intuitive heart was telling me, “You’re becoming a religious fundamentalist, thinly disguised in a mystic’s garb.” My reasonable head was saying, “You’ve invested so much into becoming a devout believer, you can’t throw all that away now.”

It was a long-dead Greek mystic philosopher, Plotinus, who was instrumental in healing me. In the course of writing a book (Return to the One) about Plotinus’ spiritual teachings, I came to realize that my intuition and my reason, my heart and my head, didn’t have to be at odds.

In other words, I could seek spiritual truth in an open-minded, scientific, non-dogmatic, inclusive fashion, just as Plotinus and his fellow Greek philosophers did several thousand years ago. All I had to do was hold onto the open-minded, scientific, non-dogmatic, and inclusive aspects of my current spiritual practice, and jettison the rest.

Dogma overboard! I enjoyed hearing the sound of my excessively rigid beliefs splashing into the deep waters of Mystery, hopefully never to resurface. A year and a half ago I wrote about what was happening to me: “I’ve become the person I warned myself about.” I said:

I’ve become the heretic that I used to warn myself about, one of those who thinks for himself and doesn’t follow the party (or Master’s) line simply because the word has come down from on high, “This is how it should be done.” Yes, I start with this. However, if that turns out to be more efficacious than this, I make the change. Such is the way of science. And also of nature. Flexibility. Adaptability. Openness. Evolution.

Religious conversion means confining yourself in a box. It may be a better box than what you were in before—happier, more loving, healthier—but it’s still a box. Yet while you’re in the box of a particular religion or spiritual path, the message you’re going to hear is that God, Allah, Buddha-nature, the Tao, or whatever, is beyond all confines, all descriptions, all bounds, all attempts to limit the limitless.

So it’s entirely natural to experience a religious unconversion after being converted. More than natural, it’s essential if you want to follow a spiritual path all the way to the ultimate. As the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart put it so simply, you have to take leave of “God” in order to find God.

“God” is shorthand for all of the concepts, theologies, beliefs, dogmas, and rituals that stand between us and the embrace of naked reality (I recall that Rumi said, “lovers want each other completely naked”). The religious impulse begins by looking through a doctrinal fence at the glories that lie beyond. Then, it smashes that fence.

There’s no other way to get to the other side: Mystery. Which to me means Oneness. What is more mysterious than unity? Yet the One is what we’re all seeking, according to Plotinus:

For each thing wishes not just for being, but for being together with the good...For all individual things do not strive to get away from each other, but towards each other and towards themselves; and all souls would like to come to unity, following their own nature.

To unity, following their own nature. Not someone else’s nature. Their own.

For the One is everywhere and in everything. Including me. That’s the gift I got from Plotinus, the dawning of a realization that God, the One, can’t be bounded. There’s no way you can draw a box around God and say “this is outside, and this is inside”—because the One is, clearly, One.

Unconversion. That’s the path to God. Turning away from anything and everything that limits the soul. Embracing the limitless.

Dismantling the golem project

A golem is an animated being crafted from inanimate material. It’s a popular figure in Jewish folklore and legend. There’s always something lacking in a golem because it has been created by man, not God: “Much as Man is Created in the image of God, the golem is created in the image of Man, a replication that loses fidelity.”

We’re all engaged in creating our own golems. These are idealized images of what we hope someday to be. A creature that has no doubts, no anxieties, no misgivings, no uncertainties, no fears, no miseries. Our project is to make the golem come alive as the person we are not now, yet imagine ourselves being in the future.

As I said in my previous post, I’ve been enjoying my re-reading of Luther Askeland’s great book, Ways in Mystery. The past few days I’ve made my way through his “Nobody Knows My Name” essay. Luther speaks about golem projects and why it’s so important to dismantle them.

Our attempt to create a golem-self takes place in our own consciousness, of course—not in a workshop. But there are similarities between an attempt to fashion an idealized being that will be known as “me” and a effort to construct, say, a canoe. In each case building materials have to be collected from various locations and brought together in a central location.

A canoe is built out of material things: wood, metal, glue, lacquer, and such. A golem-self is built out of concepts, beliefs, ideas, hopes, and such. Often a religion or spiritual philosophy offers up a ready-made golem blueprint, a model of a person that is held out as the ideal we should seek to realize.

No matter from where our golem project springs, the basic goal is to define ourselves by concentrating what is now dispersed. Luther says:

We instinctively try to draw all that is fluid, dispersed, and formless about ourselves into a center, to ‘concentrate’ our tenuous, spectral reality into one place. Why? Our goal is to work this ‘concentrate’—ourselves—into the form of a human being and then to create for this human being a ‘life.’

The problem, though, is that we already are alive. We already have a life. This is our clear and present reality. We’re just not satisfied with it. We want more. We seek to be saved from existing as the person we are now by the person we one day hope to be. We envision that all the time and effort we’re putting into the construction of our golem will be worth it if our idealized blueprint springs into being and replaces the unfinished messiness of who we are now:

Clearly there is something quixotic, even messianic, about the golem project—that human being we are working so hard to create is as it were the purely personal messiah of our own particular history. The golem is the savior who someday will redeem me from the formless nothingness, the future-craving pure potentiality, in which I think I begin: my golem constitutes that future reality which is the one possible justification of my present travail.

The craziness of undertaking this golem project eventually will sink in. For Luther points out that in virtually every religion and mystical tradition, “God” (who goes by many terms) is beyond all human attempts to confine the ultimate within bounds. God is mystery: formless, edgeless, wordless.

So if the reality we call “God” is the security that we seek, the foundation that finally will give our lives a solid grounding, what is needed is to break free of the limited human existence that we are now—which includes the idealized human existence that we are envisioning ourselves becoming in the future.

It isn’t concentration that we should seek, a bringing together of the parts that we believe will constitute our ideal golem-self, but rather a dissolution of those fantasies, concepts, imaginings, beliefs and what-not that we currently are trying to assemble in the workshop of our mind.

We hope it will be something that holds together but deep down we know that it never will. For who we truly long to become isn’t someone made out of lifeless abstractions, nor does this being have a name. Call this person “soul,” perhaps, though that word is just a vocalization lacking substance.

We won’t become who we truly are, says Luther, until we give up the attempt to make sense of ourselves. Our golem project has to be dismantled. For what we’re trying to do is make the mysterious private soul into a visible public golem, something that we can display to others, describe in words, delimit in defined characteristics.

It’s crazy, this attempt to confine the boundlessness of God and soul within the body of the golem we envision ourselves as being one day. Instead, we should pull up anchor and allow ourselves to be drawn over the distant horizon into mystery, floating free.

But there is another form of solitude—‘floating solitude’—in which the tether binding us to our golem project is at least temporarily broken. Floating solitude may be voluntary or the unplanned result of circumstances. I may simply yield to a sudden impulse to do nothing—to drift—or I may find myself in a situation in which I am temporarily cut off from all possibility of working on my golem. Whatever the cause, the soul now has its back turned to those sheltered coves and inlets in which our golem projects, our ‘lives,’ normally pass; it is now drifting toward an open sea.

At first, we are going to feel like we’ve lost something precious: the promise of a well-fashioned life where everything finally fits together. The open spiritual sea can be scary. There are no landmarks there, no solid ground, no dogmas, theologies, or belief systems that we can anchor ourselves to. But anchors keep us bound to one place. That’s what they are designed to do.

The reality we call God lies in a direction opposite to where we were turned while working on our golem-self.

The condition we normally seek—a golem condition of defined, crystallized, visible, self-comprehending particularity—is the reverse of a blessed and godlike condition. The direction and place toward which we are normally turned—the clear, common light—is a place of failure and certain doom, but in the opposite direction, in those fringes toward which our backs are turned, lies uncontained divine ‘life.’

Now, everything I’ve been saying, and quoting Luther Askeland as saying, might sound like just a more refined golem project. That is, the goal of the project now is to create a golem-self that will dismantle the original half-finished golem. This would be meaningless, if it were to be the case. We’d simply have traded a castle in the sky for another castle from which attacks could be launched at our original creation.

Instead, we have to take away the raw materials from which golems are created: words. Words are fine for building conceptual structures in material reality, but useless for any sort of genuinely spiritual pursuit. So dismantling our golem project means dissolving the faith we have put in the reality of concepts such as “God,” “soul,” “divinity,” “spirit,” “revelation,” “grace,” “guru,” “enlightenment”—all those meaningless sounds that we utter within via our mind and without via our lips.

The first phase of conversion, the via purgativa, means therefore to work at dismantling our golem, to let its parts return to dust as we walk away…We will no longer aspire to a structured understanding within that particular form of knowing we call English. Instead, breaking out into that edgeless realm which lies outside English, we will begin learning to fly shaman-like outside the word-body.

That word-body is our golem. It has to die, at least during our seeking of the truth about God and soul. Wordlessness is the path to reality. I’ll be saying more words on this subject soon, I'm quite sure.