Church of the Churchless

On becoming the person you warned yourself about

Have you ever done something that you said you’d never do? I certainly have. I bet you have too. Such is a mark of flexibility, open-mindedness, and the ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

Only astoundingly rigid people continue to live their lives in the same fashion for many years or decades, doing the same old things, holding the same old beliefs, projecting the same old personalities.

Today I was reminded of a post that I wrote on my HinesSight weblog almost two years ago, “I’ve become the person that I warned myself about.” It’s one of my favorites. Still makes a lot of sense to me (so I must not have changed hugely since April 2004). I talk about how my approaches to the marital arts and to spiritual practice have both become a lot more eclectic.

Not so many years ago, eclecticism was something I didn’t believe in. Traditional Shotokan karate isn’t big on blending martial arts styles. The Shotokan way is pretty much considered to be the way. Similarly, the traditional Sant Mat philosophy isn’t big on blending practices from other spiritual traditions. You’re taught to meditate in a single fashion, regardless of whether it works for you.

I used to think that sticking with a single martial arts or meditation system through thick and thin was the best thing to do. I used to advise other people, and by implication, myself, not to try to cobble together an idiosyncratic blend of styles, techniques, and approaches.

Now I hold a different opinion. I consider that I’ve grown, not regressed. Read my post. Tell me if you agree. It’s fine if you don’t. That’s the beauty of eclecticism. Different strokes for different folks.

Herding cats, Universism’s challenge

It’s not easy to herd cats, as a memorable Super Bowl commercial showed us. Similarly, I’m wondering how the Universist movement (a “faithless” alternative to traditional religion) is going to be able to organize hard-to-corral freethinkers, atheists, agnostics, deists, and the like.

Here in Salem, Oregon I’ve organized a Universist discussion group. I’ve also helped Ford Vox, the founder of Universism, rewrite the movement’s FAQs (frequently asked questions). So my observations are from a friendly perspective, in contrast to those who see the rise of Universism as work of the Devil and the Anti-Christ.

In our Salem Universist meetings we haven’t yet discussed Universism, per se. The topic just hasn’t come up. Sort of strange, isn’t it? Universism bills itself as an alternative to faith-based religions, yet says that it is a religious philosophy. A philosophy without substantive content, in which the individual search for truth and meaning is all-important, not preset answers.

So when we Salem Universists get together there’s no mention of Universism. We simply talk about what’s going on in our lives, and how we’re trying to grapple with the Big Questions. Is there a God? If so, what kind? What’s our relationship with the cosmos? Does life continue after death? To name a few.

There’s nothing uniquely “Universist” in all this. We’re being open-minded, non-dogmatic, and respectful of each others’ opinions. The Universist movement says that these are desirable qualities, but so does almost everybody.

Thus I’ve been trying to figure out what connection exists between talking with friends in a coffee house or living room, and Universism central—which has a fancy web site and is garnering increasing media attention (CNN’s Anderson Cooper probably will air a story about Universism next week).

Increasingly it seems to me that there is a clear distinction between the organization called “Universism” and people who are drawn together under the Universist banner, or otherwise, to discuss spirituality, philosophy and the Meaning of It All. You can’t herd independent thinkers into a corral that they don’t want to enter, even if the fences say “We don’t fence you in.”

I mean, the nature of every organization is to be organized. And when you organize, you necessarily make decisions that affect the entire organization—not just one person. Yet the central tenet of Universism is that each individual is responsible for determining his or her own philosophy of life and morality. Which produces a conflict. Mild, perhaps, but still a conflict.

After Hurricane Katrina hit I got emails from Universism central saying that a charitable arm of the movement had been formed to solicit donations for medical equipment. As Scrooge-like as this may sound, I wrote to the head Universist honcho and told him that there are lots of charitable organizations that my wife and I donate money to. Hopefully, I said, Universism won’t get drawn into becoming a “do-gooder” group when this isn’t its stated mission.

Similarly, this excerpt from a message that went to Universist activists raised my eyebrows:

We’re organizing a Universist ministerial corps to perform weddings, funerals, other ceremonies and spiritual counseling. Universism of course holds that none of us have any special authority about religious matters. Our ordination of Universist ministers will simply certify that this organization is comfortable with these individuals representing themselves in an official ministerial capacity as Universists.

Maybe this is appropriate, but I was attracted to the Universist movement because it didn’t seem to have the attributes of a religion. Yet here we are with ministers being appointed by someone with the authority to anoint them as certifiable Universists, even though the organization says “none of us have any special authority about religious matters.” Again, a contradiction.

I support Universism. However, when I first wrote about it I expressed some qualms about joining up with an organized “ism.”

Cats don’t change their spots. I’m still resistant to being herded. Even into an expansive corral.

The greatest heretic of all

If you’ve ever been called a heretic, take heart. You’re in good company. Really good company.
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“Prisoner at the bar, said the Grand Inquisitor, “you are charged with encouraging people to break the laws, traditions, and customs of our holy religion. How do you plead?”

“Guilty, Your Honor.”

“And with frequenting the company of heretics, prostitutes, public sinners, the extortionist tax collectors, the colonial conquerors of our nation—in short, the excommunicated. How do you plead?”

“Guilty, Your Honor.”

“Also with publicly criticizing and denouncing those who have been placed in authority within the Church of God. How do you plead?”

“Guilty, Your Honor.”

“What is your name, prisoner?”

“Jesus Christ, Your Honor.”

Some people are just as alarmed to see their religion practiced as they are to hear it doubted.
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This is one of the stories in Anthony de Mello’s “Taking Flight: A Book of Story Meditations.” I’ve written before about de Mello, a Jesuit priest, being a spiritual rebel. He was excommunicated by the Catholic Church ten years after his death in 1987.

In 1998 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the present Pope, took the deceased de Mello to task in a “Notification Concerning The Writings of Father Anthony De Mello, SJ.”

It’s too bad that de Mello wasn’t alive to read this fundamentalist blather from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. I’m sure he would have gotten a good laugh out of it. Ratzinger is bent out of shape because de Mello speaks the truth. He is accused of such heresies as saying:

Nothing can be said about God; the only knowing is unknowing…In other passages, the judgment on sacred religious texts, not excluding the Bible, becomes even more severe: they are said to prevent people from following their own common sense and cause them to become obtuse and cruel. Religions, including Christianity, are one of the major obstacles to the discovery of truth.

This truth, however, is never defined by the author in its precise contents. For him, to think that the God of one's own religion is the only one is simply fanaticism. "God" is considered as a cosmic reality, vague and omnipresent; the personal nature of God is ignored and in practice denied.

…He considers Jesus as a master alongside others. The only difference from other men is that Jesus is "awake" and fully free, while others are not. Jesus is not recognized as the Son of God, but simply as the one who teaches us that all people are children of God.

To me, all this makes great sense. I was baptized Catholic and had my first communion. I wonder if there’s some way I could get the Church to excommunicate me too. I’d be honored to share this fate with a distinguished heretic like Anthony de Mello.

[Note: de Mello’s story undoubtedly is inspired by Dostoevsky’s parable, “The Grand Inquisitor.” Here Christ comes back to earth and is told the Church no longer needs him.]

Sant Mat, version 2.0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can only hope.

Revel in your selfishness

Everybody is selfish. Meaning, we all do what makes us happy. You, me, Jesus, Buddha, Mother Teresa, the Pope, everybody. No exceptions. All that distinguishes us is how directly selfish we are.

This is the big aha! I got this morning while reading another Anthony de Mello book, “Awareness,” that the great god Amazon recently delivered to my door. As I noted in my “Be a spiritual rebel!” post, I love de Mello. The love affair is deepening as I dig into this new writing. He writes:

I’m saying that ordinarily everything we do is in our self-interest. Everything. When you do something for the love of Christ, is that selfishness? Yes. When you’re doing something for the love of anybody, it is in your self-interest.

I’ve always been suspicious of people who claim that they “live to please the Lord.” Or the guru. Or their spouse. Or their children. Or whoever. Give me a break. People live to please themselves. We’re selfish creatures. Always have been, always will be.

It’s hard-wired into our consciousness; it’s the way things are. A friend is fond of saying, “We’re pleasure-seeking missiles.” I like the image. Whatever source of pleasure attracts us most strongly, zoom, our happiness homing system causes us to fly right up its tailpipe.

True, often it seems like people behave unselfishly. But if being unselfish didn’t make them happy, they wouldn’t act that way. So, unselfish people are selfish too, because they’re out to make their selves happy. If saintliness made saints miserable, would it be a virtue?

De Mello, a Jesuit priest who knows the games religious people play, puts it this way in “The Masquerade of Charity.”

Let me summarize what I was saying about selfless charity. I said there were two types of selfishness; maybe I should have said three. First, when I do something, or rather, when I give myself the pleasure of pleasing myself; second, when I give myself the pleasure of pleasing others.

Don’t take pride in that. Don’t think you’re a great person. You’re a very ordinary person, but you’ve got refined tastes. Your taste is good, not the quality of your spirituality. When you were a child, you liked Coca-Cola; now you’ve grown older and you appreciate chilled beer on a hot day. You’ve got better tastes now.…But you’re getting your pleasure all the same, except now it’s in the pleasure of pleasing others.

Then you’ve got the third type, which is the worst: when you do something good so that you won’t get a bad feeling. It doesn’t give you a good feeling to do it; it gives you a bad feeling to do it. You hate it. You’re making loving sacrifices but you’re grumbling. Ha! How little you know of yourself if you think you don’t do things this way.

If I had a dollar for every time I did things that gave me a bad feeling, I’d be a millionaire by now. You know how it goes. “Could I meet you tonight, Father?” “Yes, come on in!” I don’t want to meet him and I hate meeting him. I want to watch that TV show tonight, but how do I say no to him? I don’t have the guts to say no. “Come on in,” and I’m thinking, “Oh, God, I’ve got to put up with this pain.”

It doesn’t give me a good feeling to meet with him and it doesn’t give me a good feeling to say no to him, so I choose the lesser of two evils and I say, “O.K., come on in.”…That’s the worst kind of charity, when you’re doing something so you won’t get a bad feeling. You don’t have the guts to say you want to be left alone. You want people to think you’re a good priest!

Self-deception of this sort cuts at the heart of genuine spirituality, which must be based on truth. It leads us to put on a false smile and utter “Praise the Lord!” when we know damn well that this whole hypocritical show has only one purpose: to praise ourselves. How am I coming across? Did the congregation see me acting humble? Should I utter my silent prayer more loudly next time?

Cut the bullshit. Revel in your selfishness. Be happy because you’re happy. Discard the fiction that your joy in life is to serve others. You’re out to please yourself.

Proudly proclaim your allegiance to the Selfish Club. It’s six billion strong, membership granted at birth to every soul on earth, and growing daily.

Become spiritually stronger, not weaker

If spirituality doesn’t make you stronger, what good is it? Not much. Yet often people lean upon religion as if it were a crutch. Instead of walking on their own they hobble along, dragging the weight of dogma, ritual, and slavish dependence with them.

Yesterday I got an email message from “Joe.” He said that I could share his thoughts if I cleaned up his syntax, English being his second language. I’ve done just that below.

Joe makes some important points. He’s addressing himself to members of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the group that both he and I have been associated with for many years. However, strength through self-reliance is a universal spiritual virtue.

“God,” however this term is conceived, is almost universally conceived as the ground of our being—Atman, soul, consciousness, whatever you want to call it. So the “self” in “self-reliance” is much more than the individual ego. It is the Whole Shebang—Brahman, God, Buddha-nature, whatever you want to call it.

If years of spiritual practice/devotion aren’t leading you to greater self-reliance (or rather, Self-reliance with a capital “S”), then you’re not going in the right direction. Which is, of course, no direction, because the Self is right here, right now.

“That thou art.” “Atman is Brahman.” “Be still and know that you are God.” “Soul is a drop of the spiritual ocean.”

Spiritual masters, like other sorts of teachers, point the way. But as Joe says, they aren’t the way. The goal of a master should be to help others become similarly mastered. A master musician who isn’t able to get students beyond playing scales mechanically isn’t much of a master.

His protégés should eventually be able to play music on their own, to compose, to improvise. And yes, to sound their own wrong notes. Similarly, spiritual growth won’t occur when people remain passively dependent on a guru or master.

Every master once was a disciple, and the goal of every disciple should be to become a master. By which I mean, to attain the same spiritual realization (whatever that might be) of the teacher, just as a music student should aspire to be as competent a musician as the person he or she is learning from.

Here’s Joe’s message, edited slightly for clarity:

Hello Brian,

I read your articles once in a while and I am amazed at how many satsangis [RSSB initiates] feel really betrayed. I was initiated in 1986 and in 1992 I realized that the path was feeding my own misery in three dimensions. As the Master said in one of his books, "misery is the worst karma...."

I consequently said to myself: “Joe, (which is not my name) if you cannot personally take care of yourself, who will?” As I slowly came back into this world I realized my own mistakes. As satsangis we believe that the Master will take care of everything in our life.

As many of us know, this is not true. So my first thought is that those who are initiated have to understand that the Master is in your life, but is not your life. This is a big subtlety.

Each of us has to deal with the physical world in all of its facets. The Master mentioned many times that what he did to the initiates was “only” to connect him/her to the Sound Current [spirit] and after that “it is all in His hand” (meaning the Lord). We cannot have any expectations concerning the Master. This is our life.

My second thought is that if as a human being we have the potential to become like God, the many trials must serve the purpose of making us stronger, not weaker. This means that we need to stand for ourselves and accept only the acceptable according to our own wisdom at the time. There is no place for guilt or any other negative feelings. We are growing because we react. We are not living a book; we are living our life.

My third thought is that as satsangis we need to stop accepting spiritually what we would not accept in this world. For example: Would you keep going daily to the University to attend a lecture with a professor who never shows up? Same applies spiritually if your Master is not showing up.

Let go. The Master is there waiting for us to master ourselves. Who wants to deal with the weakest? Certainly not the Masters.

If you think that this article may help, please feel free to correct the syntax (English is my second language) and publish it.

Kind regards, Joe

Assisted suicide is moral, Scalia isn’t

Most of us here in Oregon were thrilled when the Supreme Court upheld our state’s assisted suicide law. Tuesday’s decision was a victory both for state’s rights and common sense.

Twice, Oregon voters have affirmed their belief that terminally ill people with six months or less to live have the right to end their life if they come to feel that it isn’t worth living. I can’t understand how anybody could argue with this.

Who else should be in control of the life of an adult who is capable of making his or her own decisions but that person? No answer comes to mind. People should be left free to live, and people should be left free to die—if that is their choice. Government shouldn’t butt into moral choices that affect no one but the individual making the choice.

Justices Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas disagreed, however. Scalia wrote what a Portland Oregonian editorial called a “peevish dissent.” Wanting to cast my eyes directly upon its peevishness, for the first time in my life I ventured into the legalistic wilds of the Supreme Court web site, where I found both the opinion and the dissents.

Boring. Reading further, still boring. It wasn’t until I got to the very end of Scalia’s dissent, pages 24-25, that I could sense peevishness under all the legalese. Scalia admits that assisted suicide falls within “the realm of public morality” which is traditionally addressed by the states.

Yet somehow he reaches the tortured conclusion that the Attorney General of the United States is better able to decide what is moral for the people of Oregon than the people themselves. Scalia supposedly has a great legal mind, but he is reduced to leaning on his utterly personal opinion when he writes:

If the term “legitimate medical purpose” has any meaning, it surely excludes the prescription of drugs to produce death.

Surely not, Mr. Scalia. Have you read the New England Journal of Medicine article, “Physician-Assisted Suicide—Oregon and Beyond”? Probably not. If you had, I don’t see how you could claim that aiding terminally ill people to make their own carefully-chosen end of life decision isn’t a legitimate medical purpose. Susan Okie, M.D. says:

Oregon’s seven years of experience with this law have been, for the most part, reassuring: medical and legal safeguards established during implementation appear to have prevented abuse, and most patients have had the expected outcome…The law has not had the dire social consequences that some opponents predicted. There is no evidence that it has been used to coerce elderly, poor, or depressed patients to end their lives, nor has it caused any significant migration of terminally ill people to Oregon.

Compassion in Dying of Oregon deserves a lot of credit for helping make Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act such a success. Back in my health planning/policy days I was deeply involved with bioethics issues in this state. It warms my heart to see that Oregon is still leading the fight to keep end-of-life decisions in the hands of the person whose life is ending—not the government.

What worries me, though, is that the religious right will continue to try to push their brand of Christian fundamentalism onto to everybody. This happened in the Terri Schiavo case, it is happening in the debates over abortion and the teaching of intelligent design, and I have little doubt that it will happen in the halls of Congress as attempts are made to overturn Oregon’s assisted suicide law legislatively.

Betty Rollin, author of a LA Times opinion piece, “In the end, peace of mind,” says:

An April Harris Poll showed 70% of respondents answered "yes" when asked if terminally ill people should be allowed to die with a physician's help. If Oregon loses the battle to preserve its law, the comfort Oregonians now have will be lost to them — and most likely to all of us.

The title of a USA Today story about Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act sums it up: “The dying, not the feds, deserve final say on life.”

That surely sounds moral to me, Mr. Scalia.

Atheists in foxholes do exist

Recently a couple of people have asked me, “What’s wrong with believing?” after listening to one of my rants about the power and glory of Faithlessness. It’s a question that is akin to the more basic query: “What’s wrong with feeling good?”

Because religious belief does make many people feel better. Yesterday on a cable news channel I saw an interview with a female doctor about the power of prayer. She said that she had a patient who now was almost totally paralyzed.

He told her that prayer and a belief in God’s goodness—that there was a divine reason or plan for what had happened to him—was sustaining him. Seemingly you can’t argue with that. Whatever works. The interviewer said, “There are no atheists in foxholes.”

Except, there are. No doubt about it. Here’s an example of a man who refused to pray even when he had to wait helplessly outside the operating room where his wife had to undergo a C-section after complications arose.

It’s a good story. He ends with this:

As for all those religious folks out there sitting in their own foxholes, they would do well to reconsider their prayerful ways. After all, if their nightly prayers to God were really effective, they would never have ended up sitting in foxholes in the first place.

I’m not an atheist. I identify more with the terms “agnostic,” “uncertain,” “open minded.” I discussed my attitude toward religious belief in “What’s wrong with faith?” But basically I’m in accord with the non-prayerful atheist, who says:

Searching desperately for comfort, I tried to think of what other people would do to calm themselves down. It occurred to me that most people in my situation would pray. Could it work for me? Was my stubborn atheism placing my wife and child at risk? What did I have to lose?

At this point, I wasn't above trying anything that had a reasonable chance of working. Nonetheless, after considering the possibility of prayer for a few minutes, I realized that praying wouldn't help anything.

What would have happened if I had decided to believe in God just so that I could have someone to pray to? I would have placed myself in the position of praising an entity which has the power to help everyone in need but only gives such help when it is promised loyalty and obedience in return.

Even then I wouldn't have any guarantees because, as even the most fanatical Christians believe, sometimes the answer to a prayer is "no." I wasn't about to place the lives of my wife and son under the power of an all-powerful deity who is nonetheless inconsistent and stingy.

Besides, I still didn't believe in God. If I was sure that God didn't exist, then prayer would be nothing but talking to myself, asking an imaginary entity to influence events in a way that just isn't possible. I knew that the natural laws of the universe work without regard to the personal problems of individual humans. Praying really hard couldn't change the course of the cesarean section any more than it could keep the sun from rising.

Psychologically, I realized that dependence upon prayer would lead down the path to insanity. If I believed that reality could be changed just by my wishes for it to change, then the concept of reality would cease to have any real meaning to me. A reality which follows the whims of my imagination would become nothing but a hallucination. What I needed was to exert control over my anxious imagination, not to surrender to it.

Right on, brother. Religious belief or faith is almost always individualistic. That’s a paradox, considering that humility and loss of ego usually is considered to be a religious virtue. It’s self-centered to believe that a God, guru, angel, Buddha, or whoever is going to bestow upon us the blessing of a miracle that isn’t available to all.

We are special. Divinity cares more about us than others. These beliefs underlie every intercessionary prayer. For if we merely wanted God to give us what is natural, normal, lawful, and regular, we’d merely say “thy will be done” (which, in my opinion, is the best prayer—if you feel the need to pray at all).

It’s better to let reality trump belief. Focus on what is happening, not in what you hope will happen. Focus on what you can change about reality, not on what you hope a higher being will change.

Even in a foxhole. Especially in a foxhole.

The boots at the top of the stairs

Last night my wife and I spent several hours engaged in stimulating conversation with six friends. The eight of us covered many topics. When we turned to miracles and psychic phenomena, our discussion got passionate.

Usually it’s considered that religious/spiritual people have the most passion about their beliefs. For example, “The Passion of the Christ.” But scientific sorts can be equally passionate.

Our group included a Ph.D. chemist, a Ph.D. computer scientist, and a scientifically-minded attorney—each of whom forcefully argued for the primacy of reason, well-designed experiments, and laws of nature that aren’t arbitrary or capricious.

They didn’t put much stock in personal stories that two other group members shared. One woman told about a dream that included details which seemed to foreshadow the death of a friend’s son. When she learned about the circumstances of the death, her reaction was: “Oh my God! That’s just what happened in my dream.”

Another woman told about going to a psychic on the day her father had died. Upon meeting the psychic, he said: “I feel the presence of a loved one surrounding you.” Then he slapped his chest several times and told her, “Something about the heart. Do you know someone with heart problems?”

The woman was convinced that the psychic knew about her father’s death—from a heart attack. However, I couldn’t resist pointing out to her that heart disease is the leading cause of death in this country, so almost everyone has a relative who had, or has, a serious heart problem.

Exposes of supposed psychics point out that they often use general leading comments like “something about the heart” to begin a reading, then work off the response to give the illusion of other-worldly knowledge (for example, if the woman had replied with “Why, yes, someone just died!” the psychic might have said “A parent or grandparent, perhaps?” since older relatives are more likely to have died than younger).

Befitting my Libra-ness, I held to the middle ground on this question of the reality of psychic phenomena, along with the two other members of the group who didn’t clearly fall into either the “strong believer” or “strong skeptic” camps. I’m probably more of a skeptic than a believer, since I’m not aware of any solid scientific evidence that supports the validity of ESP, prayer, and such.

One of my fellow middle-of-the-roaders told a compelling true story of her own about The Boots at the Top of the Stairs. At the risk of mangling it somewhat, here’s my remembered version.

The woman and her husband had moved into a new house. They’d been told by neighbors that a man had died a disturbing death in the basement, which was entered by a door off of the “mudroom”—a place to take off muddy or wet shoes before going from the garage into the house.

One dark and rainy night she needed to go into the basement to put some clothes in the dryer. Her children were asleep. Her husband wasn’t home. She always felt that the basement seemed creepy, as if something awful had happened there. Which, from the story she’d been told, had.

That night she didn’t want to spend any more time in the basement than necessary. Especially after hearing a thump. Startled, she froze and looked around. “Must just be the wind blowing a limb off a tree,” she thought, turning to go up the stairs.

Then she froze again. Someone was standing in the mudroom! She could see a pair of tall rubber boots facing down into the basement. Her angle of vision was such that no more of the person could be seen, just those terrifying boots at the top of the stairs where none had been before.

The children! Suddenly she realized that the entity —whether alive, dead, or undead— was between her and them. Her motherly protective instinct overcame her terror. She grabbed a baseball bat that belonged to her son. She started to climb the stairs, ready to do battle.

And saw…her own boots that she had taken off a few hours ago, but had completely forgotten about.

It was a good story, well-told. The woman spoke after the two believers had related their own tales, and disguised her theme of psychic phenomena de-bunking until the very end of the story. I was entirely ready to believe that she had seen a ghostly vision.

Which turned out to have an entirely normal physical explanation: forgotten boots placed there by her own hand. Fitting. Many of our fears, whether of this world or the world to come, are of our own making.

Fear of God. Fear of the Devil. Fear of stark reality. Fear of breaking a commandment. Fear of getting on the wrong side of religious authority. Fear of speaking the truth. Fear of going our own way. Fear of what others will say. Fear of climbing the stairs and facing our fears.

FDR got it right.

Throwing stones at the devil--idiotic!

I think it’s obvious from today’s news that God is sending humanity a clear and powerful message: religions are idiotic. Even more, they can kill you.

At least 345 Muslim Hajj pilgrims have been killed while throwing stones at the devil. They were caught up in one of the stampedes that happen with disturbing regularity: 1,426 pilgrims were trampled to death in 1990. More recently, 35 were killed in 2001, 36 in 2003, and 251 in 2004.

A rational person would say, “This is absurd. The devil-stoning ritual has to stop. When people are being killed in a devilish fashion while railing against the devil, it’s time to say no.”

No more blind obedience to religious authority.
No more running with the herd, literally or figuratively.
No more accepting of dogmas that defy reason.

As Rich says on the Uncommon Sense blog:

A good rule of thumb is to never allow yourself to be part of anything where you're debased to the point of being referred to as a “pilgrim.” It never ceases to amaze me; how easy it is to render human beings so pathetically meek, weak, and shameless. I'm reminded that Christians often refer to Christ as shepherd and themselves a flock of sheep. I don't know about you, but that analogy makes me ill enough to want to vomit.

I hear you, Rich. Instead of wolves roaming free, howling at the moon from lofty mountaintops, most religious faithful become lapdogs who are content to trot along at the end of a leash.

I can’t believe that God wants us to be imprisoned within the confines of ritual, blind faith, and slavish adherence to dogma. Though no one knows the nature of the hidden ultimate reality we call “God," we do know that our evident human reality includes the capacity to separate fact from fiction, truth from belief, cause and effect from superstition.

It doesn’t make sense that the divine would demand that we throw away the evolutionary pinnacle of Homo sapiens in order to embrace the spirit. Rather, we should build upon the best qualities of which we are now aware—truth seeking, compassion, love, freedom, rationality—and attempt to grow, not shrink.

Religion degrades. It turns us into people who consider that throwing stones at an unseen devil is worth hundreds of deaths. Insane.

Yet some self-introspection is in order lest we consider that, because we’re not Muslim fundamentalists, we are above such craziness. Perhaps we haven’t stampeded bodily in the name of God, but almost everyone has run with the herd in a psychological sense—and it is a truism that actions are the result of thoughts and beliefs. There are many devoted religious people who are one “thou shalt!” away from committing acts of violence against their brothers and sisters.

Witness the Inquisition. Witness the many modern manifestations of faith-based irrationality, a la Pat Robertson’s regular displays of hateful intolerance—the latest of which he just apologized for.

I could list many examples of my own milder throwing-stones-at-the-Devil mentality. Such as, meekly contemplating peeing in my camera case rather than getting up and walking to a restroom while the guru held forth.

And, abjuring the health benefits of a daily glass of red wine for several decades because a commandment of my spiritual group, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, said “thou shalt not imbibe even a drop.” (I’ve found, not surprisingly, that sipping a few ounces in the evening has absolutely no effect on my meditation the next morning, other, perhaps, than reducing my holier than thou quotient).

Spiritual practice should be based on reason and direct experience, not irrationality and distant dogma. Yet most people hold onto nonsensical religious beliefs that should be let go of. Stoning the devil is an obvious example, notwithstanding unconvincing Islamic arguments that there is wisdom behind this ritual.

If anything deserves to be stoned, cursed, and ridiculed, it is the human propensity toward gullibility and groupthink.

Limbo on the way out

This is big news. The design of the cosmos is about to change: the Catholic Church is dismantling limbo.

Theologically speaking, of course. In David Van Biema’s TIME essay that I read last night, “Life After Limbo,” there’s no hint the Vatican believes that its theological ponderings have any effect on reality, per se. Whatever limbo actually is or isn’t, Papal pronouncements have no causal connection with its state of existence.

The whole debate over whether there is a half-baked afterlife in between heaven and hell further proves the ridiculousness of religion. Nobody knows! Most likely, there is no limbo. And no heaven or hell either. But again: Nobody knows!

When I read the story, “Limbo appears doomed by Vatican theologians,” I had to smile at this paragraph:

“Limbo has never been a definitive truth of the faith,” Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI earlier this year, said in an interview in 1984, during his long term as Pope John Paul II's doctrinal watchdog. "Personally, I would let it drop, since it has always been only a theological hypothesis.”

Are you kidding me? Every single doctrine of the Catholic Church, 100% of it, is “only a theological hypothesis.” Ditto for Christianity as a whole, Judaism, Islam, and every other faith-based religion (which means, in effect, every religion).

Christianity, especially, is the product not of divine revelation but of all-too-human men. Modern Christianity isn’t the teachings of Jesus. No one knows what Jesus taught. What we do know is how over many centuries Church leaders made decisions about what doctrines to accept or reject after lots of horse-trading, jostling for power, heated debate, and infighting.

Which is still going on today, as evidenced by the decline of limbo. The Catholic teaching has been that babies born unbaptized are, to state it bluntly, screwed. In the Catholic Encyclopedia, it says:

The fate of infants who die without baptism must be briefly considered here. The Catholic teaching is uncompromising on this point, that all who depart this life without baptism, be it of water, or blood, or desire, are perpetually excluded from the vision of God.

This sounds pretty harsh. So to improve the Church’s marketing efforts in third-world countries, where many babies die before they can be baptized, limbo is being deleted from afterlife possibilities. Heaven and hell then become the only two alternatives, and who believes that an innocent newborn is destined for hell?

So limbo is on the way out. But only the theological variety. Caribbean tourists won’t be affected by the Vatican’s action.

Meditation isn’t dog training

In a comment to my “Be a spiritual rebel!” post, Stephen asked if anyone who reads this blog had been successful in meditating for 2 ½ hours daily over a two-year stretch. He wondered what happens after engaging in this much meditation.

My initial response to him was: not much.

Stephen, now that I have more time to reply to your query, here’s an elaboration based on not just two, but about twenty years of meditating for 2 ½ hours a day (following the mantra-based technique taught by Radha Soami Satsang Beas, or RSSB).

For the other sixteen years I’ve been meditating, my daily dose has been more like 1 to 1 ½ hours. So I’ve put in a heck of a lot of meditation time, even after subtracting the hours I fell asleep.

In a nutshell, what I’ve learned is that meditation isn’t dog training. In other words, my big mystical revelation is a negative, not a positive. After three-plus decades of communing with the depths (and shallows) of my consciousness, I’ve concluded that I’m not a dog.

Hey, that’s something! And I’ll take spiritual progress in whatever form it presents itself.

My dog training analogy comes from Anthony de Mello, the Jesuit priest I’ve been mentioning in my posts recently. Most people who meditate view their minds as something to be controlled, wild beasts that need taming. Thus effort needs to be put into changing an imperfect, misbehaving consciousness into what is hoped will be a more perfect, obedient consciousness.

I used to think this way. Now I don’t. I agree with what de Mello says about the folly of trying to change yourself, whether through meditation or some other means:

You want to become more virtuous, more loving, more meditative; you want to find God, to come closer to your ideals. Think of the sad history of your efforts at self-improvement, that either ended in disaster or succeeded only at the cost of struggle and pain.

…There is another way besides laborious self-pushing on the one hand and stagnant acceptance on the other. It is the way of self-understanding. This is far from easy because to understand what you are requires complete freedom from all desire to change what you are into something else.

You will see this if you compare the attitude of a scientist who studies the habits of ants without the slightest desire to change them with the attitude of a dog trainer who studies the habits of a dog with a view to making it learn something.

Most meditation practices, such as that taught by RSSB, have the aim of achieving a particular state described in a holy book or by a holy master/guru. Thus the devoted meditator is always focused, either consciously or unconsciously, on moving from a present “bad” condition to a future “good” condition.

The mind is considered to be the “bad dog” that prevents movement to the state of self- or god-realization. Generally lots of time and effort is needed to whip this recalcitrant animal into shape. For example, here’s a Buddhist perspective on what is needed to succeed in meditation:

Learning to stay with ourselves in meditation is like training a dog…So whenever we wander off, we gently encourage ourselves to “stay” and settle down. Are we experiencing restlessness? Stay! Discursive mind? Stay! Are fear and loathing out of control? Stay! Aching knees and throbbing back? Stay! What's for lunch? Stay! What am I doing here? Stay! I can't stand this another minute! Stay! That is how to cultivate steadfastness.

I used to believe that this was the way to approach my daily meditation: as a battle with my mind. I’d force myself to sit for the entire 2 ½ hours no matter how bored I was or whatever other activities were competing for my attention. I thought that discipline was key to making spiritual progress.

If I didn’t force myself to tread The Path, how would I ever get where I wanted to go?

Well, that attitude of mine assumed two things: (1) There was somewhere I needed to go, and (2) There was some technique that, if engaged in with enough vigor and determination, could get me there.

In other words, I had bought into the dog training philosophy. I was sure that I’d be able to get the barking, disobedient animal of my mind hooked up to a spiritual sled that would take me all the way to God’s North Pole. Mush! (more accurately, Hike!)

Only problem was, the damn dog never got moving. Thirty-odd years of daily dog training and no results to show for it. At least, not the results that I was told to expect by RSSB. I did get results, exactly the results that should occur given my present understanding of what meditation is all about: letting go.

When I try to control myself, it isn’t surprising that I’m going to end up tying myself in knots. The consciousness that is Me is trying to train the consciousness that is Me. I’m chasing my own tail. I’m going around in circles.

I still meditate every day for about an hour. I don’t worry much about the length of time I put in. I figure that I’m trying to grok what, if anything, is beyond space-time. So it’s nonsensical to sit on my cushion thinking about how much time I’ve been meditating.

I still mentally repeat a mantra. Except when I don’t. I use a one-syllable mantra of my own choosing, not a mantra tied to the concepts of a particular religious or spiritual tradition. Like de Mello says, I want to study this anthill of a cosmos without preconceptions or filters.

That’s the scientific way. I don’t feel anymore like I need to change myself into someone new. My goal is to let go of the old that is keeping me from realizing who I am, and what is happening, right now.

Which is…a spaghetti dinner that needs to be cooked.

I hope what I’ve written makes at least a little bit of sense to you, Stephen. It isn’t easy for me to describe.

Be a spiritual rebel!

Here are some inspirational quotations about spiritual independence from Anthony de Mello, a Jesuit priest who was born in India and wonderfully melded the best of East and West.

In 1998, after his death, his writings were condemned by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the current Pope.

To me that’s a high recommendation of de Mello. If you’re condemned by the Catholic Church, you must be doing something right spiritually.

I have two of his books. The quotations below are from “The Way to Love.” This is an official-looking de Mello website. More excerpts from his writings can be read here and here.

I love the guy. He energizes my inner rebel.
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“But you have also been programmed not to suspect, not to doubt, just to trust the assumptions that have been put into you by your tradition, your culture, your society, your religion.

And if you are not happy, you have been trained to blame yourself, not your programming, not your cultural and inherited ideas and beliefs.”
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“First, realize that you are surrounded by prison walls, that your mind has gone to sleep. It does not even occur to most people to see this, so they live and die as prison inmates.

Most people end up being conformists; they adapt to prison life. A few become reformers; they fight for better living conditions in the prison, better lighting, better ventilation.

Hardly anyone becomes a rebel, a revolutionary who breaks down the prison walls. You can only be a revolutionary when you see the prison walls in the first place.”
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“Your ego is a great technician. It cannot be creative. It goes in for methods and techniques and produces so-called holy people who are rigid, consistent, mechanical, lifeless, as intolerant of others as they are of themselves—violent people the very opposite of holiness and love.”
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“You can get someone to teach you things mechanical or scientific or mathematical like algebra or English or riding a cycle or operating a computer.

But in the things that really matter, life, love, reality, God, no one can teach you a thing. All they can do is give you formulas. And as soon as you have a formula, you have reality filtered through the mind of someone else.

If you take those formulas you will be imprisoned. You will wither and when you come to die you will not have known what it means to see for yourself, to learn.”
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“So, what can teachers do? They can bring to your notice what is unreal, they cannot show you Reality; they can destroy your formulas, they cannot make you see what the formula is pointing to; they can indicate your error, they cannot put you in possession of the Truth.

They can, at the most, point in the direction of Reality, they cannot tell you what to see. You will have to walk out there all alone and discover for yourself.”
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“You have lost the freedom to make a fool of yourself, to be laughed at and to be ridiculed, to do and say whatever feels right to you rather than what fits in with the image others have of you.”
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“Contrary to what your culture and religion have taught you, nothing, but absolutely nothing can make you happy. The moment you see that, you will stop moving from one job to another, one friend to another, one place, one spiritual technique, one guru to another.

None of these things can give you a single minute of happiness. They can only offer you a temporary thrill, a pleasure that initially grows in intensity, then turns into pain if you lose them and into boredom if you keep them.”
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“If we are dissatisfied, not with anything in particular but with everything, then I think we shall find that our discontent brings clarity. When we don’t accept or follow, but question, investigate, penetrate, there is an insight out of which come creativity, joy.

…The day you are discontented not because you want more of something but without knowing what it is you want; when you are sick at heart of everything that you have been pursuing so far and you are sick of the pursuit itself, then your heart will attain a great clarity, an insight that will cause you mysteriously to delight in everything and in nothing.”

Mine disaster shows absurdity of prayer

“Just a few minutes before they were praising God, and now they were cursing.”

That’s how a relative of one of the men trapped in the West Virginia mine described the abrupt mood change when the crowd gathered in a church learned that all but one of the miners actually were dead—not alive, as they had been mistakenly told several hours earlier.

It shows the absurdity of prayer. The belief that God listens to pleas such as “Save the trapped miners, Lord” and decides whether or not to intervene in human affairs almost certainly is superstition.

If prayer has any effect at all (and there is some quasi-scientific evidence that it does), no one knows how this happens. There could be a substratum of consciousness underlying materiality that links living beings in some unknown fashion. This hypothesis is a far cry from believing that a personal God chooses to fulfill some prayers and ignores others.

I like the honest human reaction of those in the church. The relative went on to say, “Our pastor got himself down and he said, ‘Look toward God in this tragedy.’ And one guy said, ‘What in the hell has God done for us?’ For just a few minutes before that, we were praising God.”

Notwithstanding this entirely understandable human reaction, there’s no way that true believers can be convinced that prayer doesn’t work. Witness this West Virginia sign: “Only one miracle.”

Earlier, the faithful believed that God had saved twelve of thirteen miners. A miracle! Now, the truth is that only one of thirteen miners is still alive. It’s still a miracle!

So, what if all of the men had died? Would even that be a miracle? So states Meister Eckhart, the great medieval mystic theologian:

Now I hear you ask: “How do I know that it is God’s will? My answer is that if it were not God’s will even for a moment, then it would not exist. Whatever is must be his will. If God’s will is pleasing to you, then whatever happens to you, or does not happen to you, will be heaven.

Anthony De Mello, a Catholic priest who blends the best of East and West, says that our main problem is simply that we don’t see correctly. We imagine stuff that isn’t there, and we fail to notice reality that is truly present.

In his book Walking on Water, De Mello never speaks of prayer as Christians normally construe it. Rather, he says that “In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments, only consequences…When the eye is unobstructed, the result is seeing; when the ear is unobstructed, the result is hearing; when the palate is unobstructed, the result is tasting. When the mind is unobstructed, the result is wisdom and happiness. If you could get rid of illusion, you would be happy.”

Prayer to a personal God is part of illusion. Give it up and become more divine. Here’s another De Mello quote:

Prayer, love, spirituality, and religion are about ridding yourself of illusions. When religion brings that about, that’s wonderful, wonderful! When it deviates from that, it is an illness, a plague to be avoided. Once illusions have been abandoned, the heart is unobstructed, and love takes hold. That’s when happiness occurs. That’s when change takes place. And only then will you know who God is…

Tell yourself your spiritual secrets

It’s a new year. Time to tell yourself your secrets. Especially, your spiritual secrets. I’m sure you have them. Almost all of us do.

You’re sitting in church, temple, mosque, meeting hall, your own living room. Praying, meditating, singing, listening to a sermon, reading your holy book. And from your psyche’s secret chamber a barely audible whisper comes.

It’s your own voice. But you don’t want to listen to what it is saying. The voice is telling you a secret. Something that is true but rarely spoken to yourself. Not openly. Not directly. Only in whispers.

Which usually are met with a “shush.” Quiet down, secret chamber. I don’t want to hear what you’ve got to tell me. Maybe later. Not now.

And yet, the memory of the whisper is more vivid than a recollection of the loudest shout. Once you’ve heard it speak even once, you can’t deny the secret that you don’t want to tell yourself.

I don’t believe in God. (Or Jehovah, Allah, Buddha-nature, the Guru, whoever).
I no longer am inspired by the Bible. (Or the Talmud, Koran, Dhammapada, Adi Granth, whatever.
I’d tired of these meaningless rules. (Or rituals, rites, vows, commandments, whatever).

Maybe you’ve never had such thoughts. Maybe you’ve never had any doubts about your faith. Maybe you’ve never wondered if your innermost spiritual beliefs were much different from the beliefs you present to the outside world.

Maybe. But I doubt it. We’re all atheists, deep down, for who among us has experienced God directly? The truth is that we don’t know. Our faith in the divine is a pebble resting on the edge of a dark abyss of doubt that we’re deathly afraid to approach.

That whisper coming from our psyche’s secret chamber is an invitation to kick the pebble over the edge and find out what, if anything, will keep it from rolling all the way down into nothingness. That whisper is the most honest voice we’ll ever hear, yet we do our best to shut it up.

It’s always struck me as strange that so many people, including myself, say that they want to fathom the secrets of the cosmos, yet are reluctant to lay bare their own secrets.

Seekers of secrets should start their search close to home: within themselves. When we don’t even want to know the truth about ourselves, how can we lay claim to knowing the truth about the ultimate reality of God?

My bet—or gamble—is that if God exists, He, She, or It resonates with truth (I’d say “rewards” but that sounds too anthropomorphic). Hypocrisy is out of tune with divinity, which to my mind reverberates to the rhythm of oneness.

Thus when I break down the barrier between what I really believe and what I tell myself I believe, this unitary truth-telling effort brings me closer to God, not farther away. Such is my hypothesis, anyway.

There’s a lot of energy locked up in secrets. Telling your spiritual secrets to yourself is empowering. You don’t need to also let the world know about them. However, I’d suggest that the more your outward life reflects your inward self, the less stress you’ll feel.

Acting out an artificial role is more difficult than playing the part of who you naturally are. In the latter case you have to keep remembering what your spiritual stage name is and what lines you’re scripted to speak.

“Praise Jesus.” “I believe!” “God is great.” “Blessed is the compassionate Buddha.” “Guru’s grace is always there.”

So often we speak untruths, albeit with good intentions. It’s what other people in our religious organization want us to say. Or what the organization itself demands be spoken to keep harmony in the ranks. We’re reluctant to rock the boat with the swaying that accompanies the speaking of a secret.

“What?! You don’t believe in _____ any more? What’s wrong? What’s happened to you? How did you come to lose your faith?”

My answer: You’ve got it backwards. I’ve found my faith. Faith in honesty. Faith in telling the truth to myself. Faith in letting secrets out. Faith that sincere doubt is better than hypocritical belief.

I could be wrong about all this. But at least my error will be mine, not borrowed from a holy book. I’m tired of keeping secrets. Especially from myself.