Church of the Churchless

Prayer doesn’t work. It’s a fact.

Wow! What a surprise this isn’t. Researchers have found that praying for heart bypass patients had no effect on their recovery.

In fact, the complication rate was higher for those patients who were confident that someone was praying for them, compared to those who were uncertain of such prayers.

This implies that if you’re faced with a serious situation you shouldn’t say, “Please pray for me.” Rather, make it “Please, don’t pray for me.”

Another interpretation: “The results laid bare Jesus' hostility towards those who think he can be bothered with their personal problems.”

Believing in problems may be our only problem

I’m addicting to solving problems. Or at least, trying to solve them. The Mega Problem that has occupied my attention for most of my life is “What’s life all about?” I’ve always assumed that there is an answer to this question.

Religion, philosophy, science, psychotherapy, self-improvement systems. These all spring from the assumption that there are problems to be solved and the purpose of life is to find the answers.

But what if this assumption is ill-founded? What if the cosmos actually is absolutely fine just as it is, us included? Could it be true that erroneously believing in the existence of problems is our only problem?

This notion has begun to peck away inside my head more and more insistently. It feels like a baby chick of a realization that isn’t developed enough yet to be born, yet has the potential to become a beautiful reality.

However, given my habitual inclinations naturally I’ve been viewing this budding idea as a problem to be solved. Is it true or false? Should I trust the intuition? What is the evidence for and against it?

Intellectually I know that these questions are just Monkey Mind doing its thing. I don’t see how there could be a rational answer to the question, “Is the search for answers to ultimate questions a fruitful or fruitless pursuit?” That query is part of the problem that either does or doesn’t exist. To ask the question is to foreclose the answer.

Still, if there truly are no problems—just our illusory belief that they exist—then the cosmos’ response to my cogitating can only be: No problems, mate. This includes your thinking that there are.

I’ve only come across one philosophy (if you can call it that, “Way” sounds better) that enshrines No problems, mate at the core of its belief system: Taoism.

Virtually without exception, other religions, philosophies, and spiritual paths either consider that life is meaningless and nihilistic—not particularly appealing—or that life is a problem needing solution.

The solution goes by various terms. Salvation. Enlightenment. Satori. Realization. Understanding. But whatever it is, it’s damn hard to come by. Usually you need help. A savior, master, guru, teacher, grace, God, Buddha, angel—someone or something special has to intervene before you can solve the problem of life.

Not with Taoism. That’s because there’s no problem needing to be solved. Again, the only problem is believing in problems. We overlay the natural order of things, Tao, with our own conceptions about how things should be. This creates a gap between what is and what should be, at which point our contentment is screwed.

Then we feel that we need help. Desperately. So we seek out a religion or spiritual system that promises a solution to the problem that we’ve created ourselves. Only problem is, there’s no problem. It’s akin to calling a locksmith to get the front door open when all we need to do is turn the knob.

Taoists say that we make life a lot more complicated than it really is. Everything is happening as it should. In fact, there’s no way that anything untoward could happen. There only is the Way, Tao, operating at all levels, in every circumstance, from our first to our last breath.

I hope Taoism is true. To me it has the ring of reality. I resonate to notions of the One much more than the Many. The idea that the cosmos is divided into discordant pieces—hell and heaven, devil and God, evil and good, damnation and salvation—strikes me as horribly unscientific. And unlikely.

Nature is just so, well, natural. Everything is beautifully interconnected. Causes and effects flow seamlessly into each other. Nothing stands on its own, disconnected from the larger whole.

I bet there are no problems. Just an inability to recognize and go with the flow of Tao. Here are a couple of stories from “The Book of Chuang Tzu.”

Confucius was sightseeing in Lu Liang, where the waterfall is thirty fathoms high and the river races along for forty miles, so fast that neither fish nor any other creature can swim in it.

He saw one person dive in and he assumed that this person wanted to embrace death, perhaps because of some anxiety, so he placed his followers along the bank and they prepared to pull him out.

However, the swimmer, having gone a hundred yards, came out, and walked nonchalantly along the bank, singing a song with water dripping off him.

Confucius pursued him and said, “I thought you were a ghost, but now I see, Sir, that you are a man. I wish to enquire, do you have a Tao for swimming under the water?”

He said, “No, I have no Tao. I started with what I knew, matured my innate nature and allow destiny to do the rest. I go in with the currents and come out with the flow, just going with the Tao of the water and never being concerned. That is how I survive.”

Confucius said, “What do you mean when you say you started with what you knew, matured your innate nature and allow destiny to do the rest?”

He said, “I was born on dry land and feel content on the land, where I know what I know. I was nurtured by the water, and felt safe there: that reflects my inner nature. I am not sure why I do this, but I am certain that this is destiny.”
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Master Tung Kuo asked Chuang Tzu, “That which is called the Tao, where is it?”
Chuang Tzu replied, “There is nowhere it is not.”
“But give me a specific example.”
“In this ant,” said Chuang Tzu.
“Is that its lowest point?”
“In this panic grass,” said Chuang Tzu.
“Can you give me a lower example?”
“In this common earthenware tile,” said Chuang Tzu.
“This must be its lowest point!”
“It’s in shit and piss too,” said Chuang Tzu.

(More elaborate discussion of these Taoist truths can be found here and here.)

As the steps disappear behind you

Recently I got an email from a Church of the Churchless visitor who said, “Still read your website. Looks like all those years of meditation are bearing fruit.” I wrote back, “I don’t know whether years of meditation are bearing fruit. I feel more and more barren. Could that be the prelude to bearing fruit? I can only hope.”

Then I received a wonderful response. My correspondent shared thoughts, experiences, and quotations about spiritual chaos, the breaking up of what is orderly and familiar so that fresh realizations are able to grow. I liked what she said so much, with her permission I’m sharing her message almost verbatim here.

Sometimes it wasn’t clear where her own words left off and a quote began. I may have made some mistakes with my quotation marks. But then, the source of a wise statement doesn’t really matter. Truth is truth, no matter from where it springs.

The first part of her message follows. To read the rest, click on the “continue reading” link.
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Hi Brian,

As for your meditation bearing fruit . . .Well, from my viewpoint, it is obviously so. From my studies and personal experience, when a soul makes a breakthrough in awareness the “world” doesn’t usually break out in applause and encourage it to move forward.

The “world” usually tells you to shut the fuck up or says you are weird. “Hey, get back here where you belong.” Or, “you don’t fit in anymore.” And if you are not experiencing consolations within, which is apparently standard for this part of the journey, it can be lonely.

I don’t feel like I can explain my perception as well as I would like. But, for now, here’s just a few things that come to mind.

From Anthony De Mello’s The Heart of the Enlightened: Given the nature of the spiritual quest: “A man came upon a tall tower and stepped inside to find it all dark. As he groped around, he came upon a circular staircase. Curious to know where it led to, he began to climb, and as he climbed, he sensed a growing uneasiness in his heart. So he looked behind him and was horrified to see that each time he climbed a step, the previous one fell off and disappeared. Before him the stairs wound upward and he had no idea where they led; behind him yawned an enormous black emptiness.”

Various yoga or esoteric traditions describe the path of evolution as a spiral, going through complete cycles of seasons on each step. During some of the fall or winter seasons, there is the appearance or feeling you are going down, but the reality is you are still on the same step cycling through all the seasons of that stage. And the seasons are effecting changes in you.

And forces within you are drawing you onward and forward into the next season and cycle, and ultimately into the next step or stage. And even though you had been getting closing and closer to placing your foot on the next step, when it happens it seems like suddenly you are in a different place. And you look back, and like Jon Stewart, go “Whaaaaaaaa?” and rub your eyes. The step below has vanished.

So there is no going back because, like it or not, something within and without is driving you. It’s like birth. You may feel like you’re being squished to death – but out you go, like it or not. The point is, you are now entering into unknown, expanded territory, and it is difficult to integrate the new expanded territory with the old.

You may miss the security of being closer to what you thought was the ground and you may miss some of the comforts and familiarity of prior steps. You may no longer have the fringe benefit of a community supporting you for believing and acting like they do. When the going gets rough, nostalgia makes you long for past, simpler times, when you thought you had it all figured out. When the pressures and insecurity that go with the new territory become uncomfortable, you make some half-hearted attempts to go back down a rung, or even two, to recover that security.

But you discover that the lower rungs no longer provide the comfort you hoped for. The rung below has “disappeared” for you -- and there is nothing to go back to. You can only go forward into the new unknown. The familiar One is always and ever present and calling you closer, but it’s hard to believe in the chaos of this transition phase.

An old koan rises from my past

So, yesterday there I am re-reading my long ignored copy of “Zen in the Art of Archery.” I turn a page and find a rent receipt from August 1968 stuck in the book.

College days. Beginning of my junior year at San Jose State. Had recently gotten back from Europe, where I’d spent the second semester taking classes in Zadar, Yugoslavia. I’d rented an apartment with a couple of other hippie potheads. That explains the reference to three cleaning deposits.

I idly turn the receipt over. Find some handwriting. Mine. I read: “There will be light when there is no darkness and through darkness we cannot find the light.”

Well, fuck me! I think, sitting there in my meditation sanctum, a rarely-used tiled shower stall where I retire every morning with a big cup of coffee to read and contemplate the mysteries of the cosmos. Plus the all-too-familiar ramblings of my own mind, which usually drown out the mysteries.

I’m pissed. Who the hell do I think I am, writing such Zen-ish crap at the age of nineteen just so I could drive myself even crazier at fifty-seven? What irks me, seriously, so much that I feel a few tears starting to form, is that this sentence precisely captures my present existential dilemma.

“There will be light when there is no darkness and through darkness we cannot find the light.” That’s it in a nutshell. That’s the koan I’ve been wrestling with for the past thirty-eight years, and I’d completely forgotten that I’d given it to myself on the back of a rent receipt in 1968.

I wondered whether I’d copied down that line from Eugen Herrigel’s classic description of how he set out to learn archery while he was living in Japan and ended up learning Zen. I’ve scanned through every page, including his concluding treatise on “The Method of Zen.”

Can’t find it. Nor does the sentence pop up on a Google search. I could have read the line somewhere else. Or, as seems likely, I was using the receipt as a bookmark and used the back of it to write down an idea that came to me.

Regardless of the source, this line encapsulates my personal koan. It wasn’t given to me by a Zen master. I gave it to myself. I believe each of us has a koan of this sort, a deep down in the gut paradox that simultaneously drives us crazy and is the lifeline that we cling to for sanity.

That’s where my tears came from. From 19 (and even before) to 57, this koan has been tearing me philosophically, spiritually, and mystically to pieces. Also, keeping me from falling apart. In seventeen words it sums up the essence of everything that I’ve been writing, reading, and pondering for almost four decades.

Sitting on my meditation cushions, it blew me away that with GPS exactitude my extensive inner journeying from 1968-2006 seemingly has brought me around with pinpoint precision to the identical philosophical position from which I started.

Blooming buzzing confusion.

And yet…

There’s that word. Seemingly. I clutch onto it. It’s something to hold onto. Hope that what appears to be going around in circles actually is some sort of spiral. An upward spiral, I wish. But even downward would be better than circularity. I want to get somewhere. Heaven is best, but I’d prefer Hell to nowhere.

“There will be light when there is no darkness and through darkness we cannot find the light.” Oh yeah, Brian, you got that right. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that the finger pointing at the moon isn’t the moon. I’m sure I knew that back in 1968 too, but there are lots of ways of knowing.

Thinking knowing. Feeling knowing. Perceiving knowing. And the Zen sort Herrigel writes about: knowing that isn’t knowing because it isn’t something apart from you that you can know. It is you.

Not this, not that. None of the above, because it isn’t above or below. Somewhere else. Not dark, not light. Something else.

Herrigel asks the Master how the target is hit without the archer’s taking aim. He gets this reply:

“You are under an illusion,” said the Master after awhile, “if you imagine that even a rough understanding of these dark connections would help you. These are processes which are beyond the reach of understanding. Do not forget that even in Nature there are correspondences which cannot be understood, and yet are so real that we have grown accustomed to them, just as if they could not be any different.

“I will give you a puzzle which I have often puzzled over. The spider dances her web without knowing that there are flies who will get caught in it. The fly, dancing nonchalantly on a sunbeam, gets caught in the net without knowing what lies in store. But through both of them ‘It’ dances, and inside and outside are united in this dance. So, too, the archer hits the target without having aimed—more I cannot say.”

Wu.

More skepticism about Sant Mat

Periodically I get email messages from dissatisfied initiates of Radha Soami Satsang Beas. They’ve come to regard the RSSB (or Sant Mat) philosophy with considerable skepticism.

Because I believe in the potential of a genuine spiritual science, which requires that the results of spiritual “experiments” be openly discussed, I’m pleased to share these messages when the author gives me permission. Bob did, so you’ll find his story below. It’s well written and provocative.

I’m still a vegetarian and feel that I always will be. The idea of eating animal flesh after thirty-seven years of meatlessness turns my stomach. But Bob’s reentry into meat-eating was a positive experience for him. Vive le difference.

He makes some good points about the relative karmic nastiness of liquor, steak, and doughnuts, arguing that doughnuts take the cake (so to speak). Here’s what Bob had to say:
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I was initiated by Charan Singh back in 1970. Went to the Dera in 1974 and 1984. Stuck to the diet and went to many satsangs until shortly after he died in 1990. Gurinder Singh turned me off and I began to see RSSB for what it really is...a cult/religion that expects blind faith and delivers nothing in return except a false sense of security that one has when they believe by some stroke of unfathomable Grace that they, out of billions of people, have somehow found the one true path to ultimate spiritual bliss and liberation under the protective wing of an almighty Master...not. It's like Jesus with vegetables, meditation, and banwar gupha thrown in.

I never was much of a meditator. Oh, there were periods where I managed to crank out 2.5 hr. sessions (I went four hours once), but usually I lasted less than an hour, and much of that time was spent nodding off. I felt a little guilty about not putting in my time and somewhat inferior to all the highly evolved satsangis who I imagined were hearing peals of celestial thunder and learning many "inner" secrets which, of course, were not to be shared with anyone.

I would look around the room wondering who was experiencing inner regions. If someone seemed particularly focused and calm, or to have some intangible quality (imagined or real), I suspected they were among the chosen ones. But not to worry, Master will reveal the inner splendor when by his grace your time has come. In the meantime you just have more karma to work out. He knows best. You may be almost finished boring through the darkness of the mountain to the sudden burst of light on the other side. By the time Charan died, I wasn't meditating at all.

The alarms went off one day in '81 when we were invited to a beautiful beach by some acquaintances. They knew we were vegetarians and went to the trouble to make us avocado sandwiches instead of the meat sandwiches they were having. Unfortunately they used regular mayonnaise and we had to refuse them, spending the day crunching carrots. This made me very uncomfortable, refusing their hospitality to avoid maybe 1/20 of an unfertilized egg.

It seemed highly irrational to me unless I was truly allergic to eggs. Was I really going to be condemned to rebirth if I ate a bit of this offending substance? Would my vibration become coarsened in such a way that meditation was going to become even more difficult? I never did really get the egg thing, but I still figured Master knew best....eating unfertilized eggs could lead to eating fertilized eggs. Sort of like marijuana leading to heroin use. And the rennet thing. Gurinder has even ruled that out now. Reminds me of the Jains who tiptoe around insects and wear masks to avoid breathing and killing microbes.

Looking back on all this, I realize I was very naive to buy into Sant Mat, but it wasn't entirely a waste of time. The moral structure of the path did help me to live a pretty clean, honest life which kept me out of many of the troubles others have. But at the same time I avoided a lot of opportunities (too worldly) that could have enriched my life. It gave me an excuse to be a slacker as far as being ambitious and reaching my potential in certain ways.

These days, I enjoy reading non-dual, advaita vedanta, zen, ch'an, taoist philosophy. I am sort of nowhere in particular as far as spirituality is concerned which I think is a step in the right direction on the path of no path.

It was interesting going back to eating meat. About eight/nine years ago the heavy grain/starch vegetarian diet was causing me to show some pre-diabetic tendencies. I was putting on weight and getting some arthritis. I read a couple of books that pretty much convinced me I was on the wrong diet for my physiological type. My first non-veg meal in 28 years was salmon cooked by my wife, also vegetarian, who by this time was ready for a change. No problem.

It felt weird to find myself eating meat after so many years, but physically, no problem. I gradually introduced more meat into my diet over a period of several weeks. My first red meat, easily digested, made me feel satisfied, strong, calm, centered, and I was under the impression that so-called "rajasic " food was supposed to agitate me. On the new diet my cholesterol/triglyceride profile improved, I lost 20 lbs., blood sugar swings stabilized and the arthritis went away just by cutting back on grains and replacing them with animal protein.

I am among the majority of humans who do best with some kind of meat in the diet. Maybe a veg diet is adequate if you are sedentary with your hair tied to a bar over your head so that you don't nod off while doing bhajan for seventeen years in a back room. But I wasn't up to that kind of asceticism. I was athletic, a runner, and the body requires plenty of high quality protein to recover from hard workouts. You don't get that from tofu and rice. There is no doubt in my mind that I would have performed better had I been eating steak and rice.

There is suffering and cruelty in the commercial meat industry that is improving but will always be there. But people forget that the cows are going to die one way or another anyway and it ain't gonna be fun for them. Would their fate be better in nature with wolves gnawing on their entrails while still conscious? Or starving through a hard winter or drought? Life feeds on life and since that's the way things are set up, I doubt it's a sin to participate in an honest way.

I've seen cattle raised where I used to live. They hang out in green pastures munching grass all day with their buddies. They mate and live a pretty decent cow's life. If they're sick or injured, they get treated or quickly put down. One day the truck comes to take them to the feedlot where they get to stuff themselves with grain. Finally, they are herded into the slaughterhouse for what is usually a quick kill. Sometimes something goes wrong and an animal has a rough time of it and somebody gets a tough steak. Generally, it's not so bad, relatively speaking, in this dog eat dog world.

About the Sant Mat prohibition against intoxicants: Why does a satsangi have to vow to never allow wine to pass his/her lips as if we all were going to become alcoholics as a result and do foolish stuff which will increase the karmic load? Come on. We're adults here. How about a vow to never get mad, to never cuss, to never eat too many doughnuts?

A gut load of doughnuts will do more to ruin your meditation than a piece of steak any day. And if you keep eating doughnuts, eventually you will get fat with diabetes and heart disease which will make it hard to meditate. Then your health becomes a financial burden on the family. Finally you have a heart attack while driving and mangle some people who sue you and wipe out your family's financial security. All this because of doughnuts. I say doughnuts are worse than booze. There are more fat, sick people than there are alcoholics.

If they were really wise, the masters would ban doughnuts instead of liquor or at least add them to the list.

Anyway, enough said.
Bob
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In praise of divorce

Yesterday a friend told me that she found an old book of mine lurking in the shelves of Powell’s Books in Portland. Her email message said:

Hey, Brian! Guess what I found at Powell’s today . . . an old copy of The Path of the Masters lurking in the Indian philosophy section -- instead of Sikhism. Since it was an older version smelling of mildew I just had to take a look -- and guess what I found inside, an inscription “To Brian . . . from Sue . . . 1970.”

Sue was my first wife. We got married in 1970. That year we also both became enamored with the spiritual philosophy described in “The Path of the Masters,” Sant Mat, a.k.a. Surat Shabd Yoga and other names.

I have no idea how the book found its way into Powell’s. I rarely sell my books, and even more rarely will I sell a metaphysical title. Perhaps I’d gotten a more recent edition by the time Sue and I got divorced in 1989 and she walked off with the older book.

Anyway, I got to thinking. About how close Sue and I were in 1970. How much we loved each other. How wonderful Sant Mat seemed to us at the time. How I thrilled to the mystic message of “The Path of the Masters.” How I was sure that I’d be with both Sue and Sant Mat forever.

Life had other plans for us. Sue and I were happy together for many years, then we weren’t. Sant Mat, in the guise of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), and I also were happy together for many years, then we weren’t.

Now I’m formally divorced from Sue. I’m sort of informally divorced from RSSB, since the organization has fired me from giving talks at group meetings because my Church of the Churchless writings are too heretical. Both divorces are working out fine. All praise to divorce!

When it is naturally the right thing to do. And only then. I’m not a believer in divorce. I was raised by a mother who was a divorcee and never remarried. When I was growing up I wished that I had a father like my friends. But I know that my mother was better off without the jerk she had been married to.

There came a moment in my marriage to Sue when we knew it was over. Dissatisfaction had been building for a long time. Then it came to a head. Nothing dramatic led to the tipping point, no infidelity, no spouse abuse, no dramatic argument. We just knew. Both of us openly acknowledged what had until then been an unstated fact: we weren’t right for each other.

Sue and I are still married—to someone else. We’re happier now. It’s been sixteen years since we got divorced. Time, as they say, heals all wounds. As miserable as we were together, going through the divorce still was difficult. Old habits and attachments die hard. When you’ve woken up with the same person for eighteen years, staring at an empty pillow is tough.

Until there’s a fresh face on the pillow smiling back at you.

Likewise, when I began to have doubts about the Sant Mat philosophy that I’d been spiritually married to for even longer—thirty years or so—I felt horribly conflicted. I was unfaithful and a failure. Also, I was honest and open to growth.

For quite a while I was pulled back and forth. I wasn’t comfortable where I was, metaphysically, but I was afraid to leave my long-time philosophical companion.

What I didn’t know at the time was that you never leave anything or anyone with whom you’ve had an intimate relationship. They always remain a part of you. You can’t get rid of the influence they’ve had on you, nor would you want to. Every day I spent married to Sue contributed to the person I am now, just as every day I spent devoted to Sant Mat has.

“Divorce” usually is considered to be bad. It isn’t. Divorce, in my experience, is a recognition of reality. That’s good. In life there is coming together; there’s also moving apart. It’s a dance.

We may dance our whole life with a single marital or religious partner. Or, we may not. I just got back from a tango lesson. My wife and I asked for help with a sequence we were having problems with.

One of the instructors gave us a tip: “dancing isn’t about doing all of the steps correctly in a mechanical fashion; when you move with the music in harmony with your partner, that’s dancing, no matter what you’re doing.”

This is great advice. Similarly, life isn’t about marching in lockstep to some externally imposed set of moral rules. “Thou shalt forever stay married to your spouse.” “Thou shalt forever remain faithful to your chosen spiritual practice.”

Circumstances change. People grow. The dance of life is much more like a jazz improvisation than a circumscribed ballet. You don’t know what move is going to be demanded of you next in order to keep in harmony with your fellow beings on the great Earth Dance Floor.

Sometimes you need to hold on tighter to what you have. Sometimes you need to let go and grab a new partner.

Go ahead and believe

I’m a skeptic. That’s my nature. But if you’re a believer, more power to you. Skepticism feels right to me. Belief feels right to most people, since belief in a “God” of some sort is a decided majority opinion, particularly in the hyper-religious United States.

I understand the allure of belief in a higher power. Faced with the uncertainties of life—death, disease, distress (to name a few)—it’s tremendously reassuring to consider that you’re being cared for and loved by God or some other manifestation of divinity.

Such as a guru. In response to my “Who is the guru?” post, Nick left a thoughtful comment. Among other things, he wondered what benefit there would be if a guru who is considered to be God in human form disabused the faith of his followers, even if that faith weren’t founded in reality.

Basically this is a “if it feels good, believe in it” attitude. I agree that it’s hard to argue with feeling good. In India millions of people who live tough lives are disciples of gurus such as Gurinder Singh, the current spiritual leader of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

During my two visits to the RSSB headquarters I’ve seen the power of belief reflected in the loving eyes of those Indian devotees. Here are two photos from my 1977 trip, when Master Charan Singh was the guru. These are the captions I wrote on the back of the pictures:

“A (crooked) photo of the Master passing through the outdoor kitchen where meals are prepared free of charge for the throngs at Bhandara time. Several of the numerous large pots filled with a type of lentil soup can be seen at the left.”

“Another area of the kitchen just after the Master has passed by. These women are making chapattis (like tortillas) on metal sheets with a fire underneath. About 20 other fires were in this shed, and as the Master walked by all the women sang devotional songs with such love that it made your hair stand on end. One of the most moving sights that I’ve ever seen. Such love is rare these days.”

It still is rare, about thirty years later. That sort of love is precious. If you’ve got it, keep it. However, love shouldn’t be dependent on the opinions of others, such as me. I used to consider that Charan Singh was divine. Now I’ve arrived at an agnostic not-knowing.

Such may seem like back-sliding to the bhaktis (lovers) who consider skeptics like me to be intellectual hair-splitters whose overly-active minds throw up a dust storm of ideation over the simple clarity of the guru’s godliness.

Could be. But, as Popeye says, “I yam what I yam.” And you are who you are. Who I am (or yam) doesn’t affect who you are when it comes to religious belief or non-belief. If my mere asking “Are you sure?” demolishes your faith, there wasn’t much substance to it and it’s better off demolished.

Nonetheless, entreaties like this on the Radha Soami studies discussion group still move me. I empathize with this Indian disciple’s pleading to please, please stop criticizing the RSSB gurus. But why seek out such criticism on the Internet to begin with? It isn’t as if skeptics are standing outside his house with a loudspeaker blaring unwanted heresies into his ears.

Each to his own. That’s my watchword when it comes to religious belief or disbelief. Who can argue with that? If you’re a believer, have faith. If you’re a skeptic, doubt. Reality isn’t affected by your state of mind, I’m quite sure of that.

If the guru is God, he’ll still be God even if someone screams “He’s a fraud!” And if the guru isn’t God, no amount of saying so will make it true.

Who is the guru?

I’ve been thinking about the four options concerning who Jesus was, according to biblical scholar Bart Ehrman: a liar, a lunatic, the Lord, or a legend. When it comes to a long-dead historical figure like Jesus, these options make sense. But what about a modern-day guru who is similarly proclaimed to be God in human form?

I was initiated by such a guru, Charan Singh Grewal. I sat at his feet, literally. I had two personal interviews with him. I heard him speak many times. I saw him worshipped by tens of thousands of devotees as a divine incarnation.

And yet, I still don’t know what to make of him. Or his successor, Gurinder Singh Dhillon. Who is the guru? A philosophically-inclined friend of mine likes to say, “There’s only one question to ask a guru who is supposedly God in human form: Are you who people claim you are?”

But given Ehrman’s four options, the answer wouldn’t be all that revealing. If the guru was a liar, you couldn’t believe what he said. Ditto if he was a lunatic. And even if he truly was the Lord, and said as much, what reason would there be to believe him? Plus, one could argue that a God-man would be so humble, you’d never hear a claim to divinity pass his lips.

With living gurus the legend option doesn’t come into play. They’re alive and kicking, not legendary. Quite a few men (and a few women) of recent vintage are considered by the faithful to be manifestations of God. For example, Meher Baba, Ramakrishna, and Lokenath.

So I muse over my recollections of Charan Singh and Gurinder Singh, trying to decide whether they’re best described as liars, lunatics, or the Lord.

None of the three appellations seem to fit, lunatic least of all. Each of them clearly was/is of sound mind (Charan Singh died in 1990). They could be liars, but their essential good-heartedness and decency argues against this. On the other hand, their evident imperfections prevent me from grabbing onto the “Lord” hypothesis.

Is there another L-word that better fills the bill? One springs to mind: loyalist. Perhaps when a successor is appointed to fill the shoes of a highly-regarded guru, loyalty both to his predecessor and to the surrounding organization prevents the newcomer from crying out, “Hey, I’m not God! I’m just a man filling the role of a guru.”

Gurinder Singh is fond of saying, “How do you know that I’m not a fraud?” and “Maybe I just have the gift of gab.” Devotees consider statements like these to be Zen-like pointers toward his divinity. But who knows? Maybe he’s pointing toward his humanity without being able to explicitly speak of who he directly knows himself to be.

Faqir Chand (1886-1981) is noteworthy in that he was a guru who was worshipped as God in human form by his disciples, yet denied that he had the powers attributed to him. I’ve read some of Faqir Chand’s writings, which are available here. Yet I don’t claim to have a firm grasp of either the man or his spiritual philosophy.

From what I know, he believed that a guru was essential. Or at least highly desirable. Yet the guru wasn’t a miracle worker. Everything that the disciple needed for realization already was part of his self. In fact, it is the self. Better termed, the Self.

Thus inner visions of the guru aren’t the result of any external higher power. They are manifestations of the disciple’s own mind. All is within, but the disciple mistakenly locates his newfound insights as emanating from outside himself.

Faqir Chand apparently considered that loyalty to the truth was more important than loyalty to a guru-tradition. So he spoke bluntly about what he was, and what he wasn’t. In his autobiography, he writes about a talk with Sawan Singh, a guru who was a predecessor of Charan Singh and Gurinder Singh, after Faqir Chand had realized that his disciples were ascribing powers to him that he didn’t have:

But, still, I remained undecided about what I should do? Because I had a lurking fear in my mind that if I disclosed the Truth in plain words the narrow minded, orthodox and illiterate amongst the Satsangis [disciples], would turn against me. Thus in 1942 A.D. I got leave and went straight to Hazur Baba Sawan Singh Ji at Beas to explain my fears and difficulties in person. I had great reverence for Hazur Baba Sawan Singh Ji and I identified him with Hazur Data Dayal Ji Maharaj.

With utmost reverence I submitted to Baba Ji, “Your Holiness, Kindly relieve me from the duty assigned to me by my Guru Maharaj Ji. Pray, take this burden off my conscience, so that I may get released from the sin of disobedience to my Guru.” Hazur Maharaj placed his loving hand on my back and said, “Faqir, I could not disclose the truth in its totality, because of two reasons (i) Satsangis in general do not deserve it, (ii) I am bound by the institutional exigencies.”

“Institutional exigencies.” This supports the loyalist theory. The plain truth isn’t spoken because it would threaten tradition and an organizational heritage.

Faqir Chand boldly told it like it was. I only wish every guru would do the same.

(Courtesy of David Lane, here’s an interesting short video about Faqir Chand and how he first disclosed his “unknowing” status to disciples).

Losing faith in the fiction of Jesus

Christians sometimes say that there are just three options as to who Jesus was: a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord. Bart Ehrman adds a fourth option: legend. Ehrman is a Biblical scholar and author of “Misquoting Jesus.”

His book strikes at the heart of Christian faith. For the Bible is considered to be the inerrant Word of God. But the problem is, we don’t know what those words were. There is no original trustworthy Biblical text. All we have are copies of copies of texts that were changed countless times over the centuries, sometimes from simple clerical error, sometimes purposely.

Ehrman once was a devout evangelical. Now he is an agnostic. His scholarship caused him to realize that the words of the Bible can’t be trusted. There’s no proof that Jesus was divine, that he was resurrected from the dead, that he performed miracles, that belief in him results in salvation.

You can believe in Jesus if you like. You can also believe in the Easter Bunny. Or Santa Claus. Or leprechauns. If it makes you feel good to believe in a legend, do it. Just don’t expect that other people should take you seriously or respect your ill-founded faith. Ehrman writes:

Occasionally I see a bumper sticker that reads: “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.” My response is always, What if God didn’t say it? What if the book you take as giving you God’s words instead contains human words? What if the Bible doesn’t give a foolproof answer to the questions of the modern age—abortion, women’s rights, gay rights, religious supremacy, Western-style democracy, and the like?

What if we have to figure out how to believe on our own, without setting up the Bible as a false idol—or an oracle that gives us a direct line of communication with the Almighty?

Reading “Misquoting Jesus” was a real eye-opener for me. This is billed as the first book about modern Biblical textual criticism that is aimed at general readers, not scholars. I’d always been skeptical that the gospels bore much resemblance to what Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John actually said (leaving aside the bigger question as to whether what they said is true).

Now I know that my skepticism is well-founded. I suspect that most Christians think the Bible they read on Sunday was written soon after Jesus’ death and has come down to us unaltered. Nothing could be further from the truth. If their Christian faith rests on the words of the Bible, it is resting on slippery sand. Ehrman says this about Biblical texts:

Not only do we not have the originals, we don’t have the first copies of the originals. We don’t even have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later—much later…If one wants to insist that God inspired the very words of scripture, what would be the point if we don’t have the very words of scripture?...It’s a bit hard to know what the words of the Bible mean if we don’t even know what the words are!

There are several worthy candidates for the title of World’s Craziest Major Religion. I go back and forth trying to decide which faith deserves this dishonorable honor. Usually Christianity and Islam run neck and neck in my mind. I’ll give this to Islam, though: at least the modern day Koran is, to my understanding, unchanged from the days of Mohammed. Muslim beliefs may be weird, but at least they’re consistently weird.

Christianity, by contrast, is a mish-mash of dogma that has been cobbled together over the centuries. Little, if any, can be reliably traced to Jesus. There’s little doubt that if Jesus returned to earth today and took a look at the Christian faith he’d say, “What the hell is that all about?”

Ehrman has rejected a religion that no longer made sense to him. He talks a bit about his personal journey from faith to faithlessness in “Misquoting Jesus” but mostly keeps himself in the background. As a continuation to this post I’ll include a fascinating Washington Post review of his book that provides a fuller picture of Ehrman, the man.

Hitting all my conversational buttons

Life, death, consciousness, psychic phenomena, science, acceptance. Last night the conversation at our monthly Salon discussion group covered a lot of ground. There were just five of us, fewer than usual. Two believers in “something more,” two scientifically-minded skeptics, and me—the balanced Libra who bridged the two camps.

Generally our group focuses more on politics and Bush-bashing than anything else. Yesterday the conversation was predominantly personal and philosophical. For me it was a delightful grab bag of what I like to talk about most: the Big Questions of Life.

Consciousness. Lynda, our hostess, had recently attended several workshops about brain research. I said that it was interesting how science is learning more and more about how the brain works, but that the much bigger question is “what is consciousness itself?” Nobody has a clue.

Jenny, a computer science professor, talked about how consciousness is theorized to be an “emergent property” of increasingly complex life. Fine, I told her, but that doesn’t say anything about what consciousness is. It’s still a huge unfathomable mystery. Along with life. But life is easier to grasp than consciousness.

Somehow unalive matter turns into something living. That’s amazing enough. However, adding consciousness to life is a whole other thing. A bunch of cells are alive. They evolve into more complex life. And then…poof! The bunch of cells is aware. It seems to be a jump into a whole different level of being. Especially when we talk about self-awareness.

Self-awareness. I always find it interesting to listen to myself talk during serious discussions like we had last night. Often I surprise myself. Like, I heard myself saying that I’d trade my vaunted human capacity for self-awareness and introspective analysis for something much simpler: peace of mind. I wonder if I really meant it?

We talked about how we think. Then we think about our thinking. And then we think about what we thought about our thinking. Dogs don’t do that. They live in the moment. Eat. Sleep. Poop. Go for walk.

They don’t lie in bed like I do sometimes cogitating: “I’m getting old. I’m going to die one day. That sucks. It sucks big time. Why can’t I live forever? Maybe I can, or will. But I want to know whether I will or not. At least, I think I do. Maybe I don’t. Do I really want to know if when I die, I’ll be dead and gone forever?”

Lynda said that happiness is great. It comes and goes, though. She thought that peace is what each of us really is after. I agreed. However, that damn self-awareness makes it tough to hold onto peace of mind. As soon as you get a glimpse of it, you start analyzing it. “I’m content. For now. But…”

Our ability to anticipate the future and remember the past makes us human, but it also makes us neurotic. I feel like I’d be pleased to trade some of my higher mental abilities for some simple living in the moment peace.

Accepting what comes. Lynda has some serious health problems. I told her that I freak out when I get a cold. I asked her how she manages to stay so positive. She said that she just takes things as they come. You deal with what you have to deal with. I agreed that most of my worries are about what might happen, not what is happening. When something real is before me that I have to cope with, it seems easier to handle than my anticipated potential problems.

Makes sense. How do I handle what doesn’t exist? I can’t, well, get a handle on it, because it doesn’t have any reality outside of my own neurotic mind. Lynda recently was told that she has another disease in addition to the serious disease she’s been dealing with. I asked her how she coped with getting the news? She replied, “I said Fuck!”

Excellent reaction. Right up my alley. Lynda and I like to use Fuck! for emphasis, I noted. The other people don’t. That’s fine, but sometimes it’s the only expression that fits the situation.

I told the group that when I ponder the fact that the universe is 14 billion years old, and is going to exist for many tens of billions of years more, and I’m 57 years old, and I’m not going to live for more than a few decades, I want to scream Fuck it! to the cosmos. Which, in fact, I do, if I’m out of earshot of anyone else.

I may not be accepting the certainty of my death gracefully. However, I’m accepting my lack of acceptance of dying through my clearly expressed Fuck it! It’s a step in the accepting what comes direction, I feel.

Keeping things simple. I enjoyed an interchange between Laurel and Jenny. Laurel was speaking about the possibility that the soul survives after death, and that in the life we’re living now the soul that is us is acting out intentions made either in a previous life or in a pre-rebirth state of “Hmmmm. What sort of human existence do I want to experience next time?”

Jenny listened and said, “But this whole idea of a soul doesn’t explain anything. It doesn’t add anything to what we know about how the brain works. If your brain is injured, your personality can change completely. What does ‘soul’ have to do with all this, when physical changes in the brain can alter the entity we call ‘my self’ so drastically?”

Good points. Myself, increasingly I’ve been trying to discard a lot of metaphysical conceptual garbage that I’ve been carrying around for a long time. (I’m just saying that this is garbage for me; it may be valuable stuff for someone else). I don’t speculate or theorize nearly as much as I used to. I’m much more willing to say, “I’m clueless about that” in response to a question about what I think happens after death or what God is like.

I told the group that I experienced a new feeling while on a dog walk with Serena recently. I was moseying along, pondering the finitude of my existence, when a really simple sensation flooded in on me. Gratitude.

Right now, I was alive. Man! Thank you, whoever or whatever is responsible for that. It could have been otherwise. I could have never existed. This consciousness I call “me” could have never come to be. Yet, it has.

At that moment, staring down at a moss-covered log, I was able to experience being alive. Aware. Conscious. Part of the universe. Even if I died in the next moment, I thought, I’ve experienced something amazing. Experience.

The moment passed. Moments always do. Soon I was back to fretting about this or that. But I had a glimpse of something that maybe, just maybe, would be enough to erase my fear of death if I could hold onto it more firmly and let it grow within me.

Gratitude. Now, if I can just feel that sensation while watching President Bush blather his bullshit at a press conference as strongly as I did while staring at a moss-covered log, I’ll be on to something.

(Yes, I’ll say it before someone else does: at heart, Bush and a moss-covered log are pretty much the same).

I abandon Universism

Well, it was sort of fun while it lasted, belonging to the “faithless” religion of Universism. But the Universist Movement is acting too much like a traditional religion for my taste, so I’m jumping ship.

I just deleted the Universist banner on this blog. A symbolic gesture that definitely won’t go down in history along with Luther’s pinning of his Ninety-Five Theses to a cathedral door but, hey, it’s a statement.

It seems that whenever an independent, free-thinking, counterculture movement gets organized, it starts to take on the qualities of whatever it is rebelling against. By all accounts Christianity was cool so long as it just consisted of Jesus and a handful of disciples.

But look at it now. Rigid, dogmatic, judgmental, controlling, hierarchical, divisive. I’d hoped that the Universist Movement would be different, but trolling through the Universist Forum yesterday I read about a pissing match between Universist leaders (Ford Vox, mainly) and a bunch of freethinkers.

I didn’t have time to read all of the posts thoroughly, so copied the URLs of the most relevant pages concerning this controversy for reference today. If you click on this link you’ll see what I found when I went back to those pages just now:
http://universist.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=8389

“This menu has been disabled.” I recall that one of the gripes the freethinkers had about Vox and his management style was that he doesn’t like criticism and tries to stifle opposing views. Guess they were right.

The criticisms of the freethinkers are still reflected on The Freethought Fellowship forum in the “Is Universism a Failure?” and “What is ‘universizm’…really?” topics. I don’t claim to understand the ins and outs of this split between the freethinkers and the Universists. What bothers me is that there would be any controversy of this sort at all.

With some reservations I signed up for Universism last July, calling it a kindred unfaith. At the time I wrote that I sympathized with John Horgan’s decision not to join the Universists or any other areligious group. In an essay called “Keeping the Faith in My Doubt” Horgan said:

First of all, I’m just not a joiner, more out of laziness than anything else; I avoid commitments that might jeopardize my sports- or sitcom-watching time. An organization for freethinkers--one of the Universists self-definitions--also strikes me as oxymoronic, like an anarchist government. Isn’t the point of being a free-thinker eschewing categories like Satanist, Scientologist or Universist?

Yes, it is. Still, I enjoyed my six months as a Universist. Learned how to set up a Salem Universists MeetUp group (which needs a new organizer now). Met some nice people who I still want to stay in contact with. Had some interesting conversations at our Salem Universists meetings.

But now I feel that there already is too much religious divisiveness in the world. I don’t want to add to it by supporting the Universist Movement’s rather heavy handed attempts to become a non-religious organized religion.

I’ve come to agree with Horgan. Here’s how he ended his essay:

Instead of banding together, maybe we unbelievers should set an example by going in the opposite direction. We should renounce all isms that claim to speak for our most profound personal beliefs. Or rather, since we seem to be headed in this direction anyway, each unbeliever could create his or her personal ism with its own name. Since Universism is taken, I’ll call mine “Horganism.” You can revile it, admire it, or ignore it, but you can’t join it.

OK. I’ll become a fervent believer in “Hinesism.”

Spiritual emptiness: it’s a good thing

Most people consider spiritual emptiness something to be avoided. After all, if we’re not filled with the love of Jesus, Buddha-like compassion, the fear of God, or whatever (and there are lots and lots of whatevers) then we’re empty.

Isn’t emptiness a bad thing? When the gas tank is empty, your car stops running. When the cupboard is empty, you’ve got nothing to eat. When the bookshelf is empty, you can’t do any reading.

But what about when your spirit, or mind, is empty? Is there really nothing there, or is there more there when nothing is there than when something is there?

If you liked that last sentence, you’ll love my “Science, Spirit, and the Wisdom of Not-Knowing” essay that I’ve previously plugged on my HinesSight weblog. Of course, writing a quasi-scholarly 24-page footnote filled essay on the subject of not-knowing is a decided oxymoron.

But so is my whole Wu Project, since I’ve been engaged in making something out of nothing by thinking about Wu/Mu. One thought I’ve been having concerns faith.

Who has more faith? Someone who opens himself to a particular anticipated manifestation of divinity, or someone who opens himself unreservedly to however the divine might manifest?

I say, the second person. And in my Not-Knowing piece I provide some quotations from various traditions to back up this assertion (sources are shown in the essay):

For Taoism, “In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired; in the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.”

For Kabbalah, “Ein Sof precedes thought, and it even precedes the Nothingness out of which thought is born.”

For mystical Christianity, “God can be found only by learned ignorance.”

For Zen, “you instantly ‘see’ and understand that things are by virtue of what they are not, and that they owe their being to this not-being which is their ground and origin.”

For Sufism, “what outwardly appears existent is really nonexistent, and what seems to be nonexistent is really Existence. The outwardly paradoxical conclusion is that if man desires existence, he must seek it in his own nonexistence.”

For Buddhism, “if you want to reach the other shore of existence, give up what is before, behind, and in between. Set your mind free, and go beyond birth and death.”

Often you hear religious leaders say, “A tea cup can’t be filled unless it is empty,” to illustrate the importance of being receptive to the inpouring of spiritual teachings. But if the tea cup of our mind is thinking “Where’s the tea? Bring on the tea!” it isn’t truly empty or receptive. It’s got some decided expectations about what is going to fill it.

Back in the days when I was a Radha Soami Satsang Beas speaker, I used to frequently quote Tulsi Sahib’s mystic poetry that begins, in this translation, “Cleanse the chamber of your heart, so that the Beloved may enter. Remove all the foreign impressions, so that He can take His seat there.”

Sounds great. This is a scientific approach to spirituality. Get the instrument of consciousness clear and see what godly impressions it picks up. The problem is, most would-be spiritual scientists have already decided what characteristics the “Beloved” has. Their divine investigation is marred by preconceived ideas that skew the research program.

Here’s another perspective on spiritual emptiness that is closer to my own. Of course, an even truer perspective can be found in what immediately follows the colon at the end of this sentence:

Best answer often is “None of the above”

My manly self-image isn’t based on mechanical aptitude, so my ego is letting me share these stories. Then I’ll turn to my area of real competence: analyzing the anecdotes.

Saturday morning I sold our old generator to a guy who saw my ad in the classifieds. He said he’d come by around eight. I figured that the sale would go more smoothly if the generator would start. Sometimes it’s a terror to get going when it hasn’t been started for a while.

I don’t run the generator very often, so I got out the manual and reviewed the start-up procedures. They were listed as bullet points. Looked pretty straightforward. Just then the guy drove up. I said, “Hey, you’re younger than me, it’s early, and I’m not warmed up. Why don’t you pull the starter cord?”

He did. And then he did again. And again. I read him the instructions. Open choke. Pull three times. Close choke. Try again. We did all that. Still wouldn’t start. I started to feel this deal slipping away.

Then he walked over to the other side of the generator. “Look,” he said. “The Run/Stop switch is on Stop.” He flipped it to Run. Pulled the cord once. It started right away. I felt like a fool. I told him how I felt. He was gracious. “Missing something obvious with a machine, happens to me all the time.”

Somehow I don’t think it happens to him as often as it happens with me (he does maintenance work for a local government) but I appreciated the camaraderie. I told him that I’d just read the starting instructions and it didn’t mention the Run/Stop switch. He looked at the manual. Pointed out a line in the paragraph above the bullet points: “Make sure the Run/Stop switch is set to Run.”

I’d been focusing on getting the choke set right and making sure the fuel valve was open, neither of which had anything to do with the generator not starting.

Second story: I recently got a new DR Field and Brush Mower. After unpacking it the time came to add oil and gas. I took the oil cap off and started pouring in a quart of oil. Then I thought, “Soon I’ll be able to put the cap back on and fire this baby up.” Which brought to mind another thought: “Where did I put the cap?”

I looked around. I didn’t see it. I remembered that the cap was black, like the one on the old DR mower. I was looking for a black cap, no doubt about it. I couldn’t find the damn thing. I’d rolled the mower back a ways to get it more level before adding the oil. I figured the cap might have fallen under the mower. I figured wrong.

After ten minutes of looking around our carport I started to get pissed. Actually, that happened quite a bit earlier. But after ten minutes I was really pissed. It just seemed absolutely bizarre that I couldn’t find something that I was sure was right at hand. I kept retracing my steps. I even looked in the house, thinking that I might have absentmindedly carried the oil cap inside with me when I took a break to eat lunch.

Then I looked down at my feet. There it was, plain as day. A yellow oil cap. I’d been looking for something black. My brain kept ignoring the oil cap even though I’d looked at it many times in the course of my searching. I’d been zeroed in on black. My problem hadn’t been that the oil cap was hidden, it was that I’d been looking for the wrong sort of object.

In both cases I’d fallen into what Robert Persig calls the “truth trap.” At least, it’s darn close to it. In his classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” after talking about the truth trap of yes/no logic, Persig says:

Because we’re unaccustomed to it, we don’t usually see that there’s a third possible logical term equal to yes and no which is capable of expanding our understanding in an unrecognized direction. We don’t even have a term for it, so I’ll have to use the Japanese mu [“wu” in Chinese].

Mu means “no thing.” Like “Quality” it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says, “No class; not one, not zero, not yes, not no.” It states that the context of the question is such that a yes or no answer is in error and should not be given. “Unask the question” is what it says.

Mu becomes appropriate when the context of the question becomes too small for the truth of the answer. When the Zen monk Joshu was asked whether a dog had Buddha nature he said “Mu,” meaning that if he answered either way he was answering incorrectly. The Buddha nature cannot be captured by yes or no questions.

Is the reason the generator won’t start because the choke is in the wrong position or because the fuel valve is in the wrong position? Mu. None of the above.

Will I find the black oil cap if I look long and hard enough? Mu. Wrong question. I won’t find a black oil cap, but I will find a yellow oil cap.

The Wu Project meanders on. I’m getting results from my investigations continuously. Generally the data are telling me, Mu.

Tracking the trajectory of my Wu Project

Here’s documentation of my first original quasi-spiritual insight. Today I dragged this piece of paper out of my “treasures box,” where I keep various memorabilia from my youth.

I wrote the poem when I was 13 after gazing up at the stars one night from the backyard of our rural home in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. It goes like this:

Look up to the heavens
What is there?
Tiny pinpoints of light
But is that all?

Look past the stars
Into the blackness of the void.
What lies there, waiting for man’s first faltering steps
Into the darkness of the universe?

What unknown mysteries lie
Where human eyes cannot see?
In the darkness of the void, perhaps there are things
We should not know, and not find out.

I find it interesting how Wuish—how nothingness oriented—I was back then. I look at my handwriting and try to remember how I felt when I came into the house, sat at my beloved rolltop desk with all the cubbyholes, and wrote those words.

That feeling is lost. But I do remember walking into the living room where my visiting grandmother, Eva H. Lewis, was chatting with my mother and some neighbors. I read my poem to everybody. At first there was absolutely no reaction. They were probably thinking, “What the ____ is this all about?” Can’t blame them.

Then my grandmother spoke up. “I like it!” That’s all she said. And that’s all I needed. I went back to my room feeling affirmed.

My grandmother grew up in New Mexico. She wore dramatic Hopi jewelry, big turquoise-encrusted necklaces and bracelets. She was into organic gardening in the 1950s. She bought one of the first Volkswagens imported into the United States. She was a character, an out-spoken freethinker. And she liked my poem!

Which was about…nothing. Mystery. Darkness. What lies on the other side of light. In short, Wu/Mu.

It’s said that Zen is a journey from “First there is a mountain, then there isn’t, then there is.” The trajectory of my spiritual journey could be similarly (though seemingly inversely) described as “First there is nothing, then there isn’t, then there is.”

Here I am in India at the age of 29, standing in the grounds of the Western Guest House at the headquarters of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (near Beas in the Punjab). Melany and Jim Ramsey are on the right, Jim and Connie Said are on the left. And there I am, lean, beardless, and serious looking in the middle.

I’d gone to the “Dera” because I’d never seen the guru who had initiated me six years prior. I spent two weeks immersing myself in meditation, satsangs (talks), and evening question and answer sessions with Master Charan Singh. It was great. I was devoted. I was sure that I’d found the Truth with a big “t.”

I was still sure in the early 1990s, when the photo for a “sevadar” (volunteer) identification badge was taken. In my 40s now, I’d become hirsute. My crazed expression aptly reflects my spiritual predilection at the time: essentially 100% committed to the Radha Soami Satsang Beas philosophy. I still believed that I had found something I could hold onto for the rest of my life.

And at the age of 57? Now I’m back to nothing. I’m 13 again. I’m still staring into the blackness of the void, except now it is the emptiness of my understanding of my spiritual understanding. When I look past the flickering insubstantial lights of my metaphysical thoughts, emotions, beliefs, hunches, hopes, imaginings, and such, I gaze upon a void.

Which is why I’m embarking on what I call The Wu Project. It’s not serious. Yet also it is. I’ve got few hopes for it. Yet also I’m staking my life on it. I’m still not sure if it is wise to venture into the void. Yet it also seems to me that there is nothing more important to do.

I’m totally confused. Which means, I can only hope, that I’m right on track. As a commenter said recently:

...Woo Woo...(sound of a train a'comin)...Woo Woo...

Three laughers at the tiger ravine

Today I came across a scroll, painted by Bangaku, of “Three Laughers at the Tiger Ravine.” This anecdote explains their laughter.

"This is an allegory in which three literati realize by accident that spiritual purity cannot be measured by artificial boundaries. One day the poet Tao Yuanming and the Taoist Lu Xiujing traveled to the Donglin temple on Mt. Lu to visit the Buddhist theologian Huiyuan who lived there as a recluse, vowing never to cross the stone bridge over the Tiger Ravine that marked the boundary of the sanctuary.

After an evening together, Huiyuan accompanied his friends as they left the temple. Deeply absorbed in conversation, Huiyuan inadvertently walked with them across the Tiger Ravine bridge. When the men realized what had happened they broke out in spontaneous laughter-- hence the title of the anecdote 'The Three Laughers of the Tiger Ravine.'"

Ray Grigg, in his “The Tao of Zen,” tells the story somewhat differently in a chapter on “Playfulness.” And he’s describing a drawing of the scene by Bunsei. But the meaning is the same.

[The drawing] shows a Taoist, a Confucian, and a Buddhist circled together in uproarious laughter. Apparently the Buddhist had taken a vow never to leave the monastery but, in the enthusiasm of visiting with his two friends, he inadvertently wanders over the bridge of the ravine that defines the monastery’s grounds.

The distant roar of a tiger breaks the spell of their visit and they realize the vow of confinement has been broken. They clasp each other’s hands and laugh. This is the playful spirit that supersedes vows and teachings and ideologies.

I like how Bangaku depicts the faces of the men. The image brings a smile to my own heretical face. Freedom! Release! Tiger roar!

These guys aren’t out to cause trouble. The Buddhist’s friends didn’t visit him with the intention of making him break his vow. They just ended up walking over the bridge naturally. And when the vow was broken, they laughed about it. Naturally.

In 1971, when I was initiated into the mystico-spiritual Radha Soami Satsang Beas path, I made some supposedly lifetime vows myself. I’ve broken a few of them. Not inadvertently, but naturally. And while I’m not laughing (at the moment), I’m certainly not crying either.

What is there to cry about? I vowed not to have sex outside of marriage. Well, after I got divorced and met the woman who would become my second wife, that vow bit the dust. With pleasure. In a few weeks we’ll have been married sixteen years. I don’t think I could be called a womanizer.

I also vowed not to use alcohol or illicit drugs. Now, most nights I drink a single glass of red wine. It’s supposed to be good for your heart. I once believed that it was bad for your soul, but I haven’t detected any spiritual harm yet from my imbibing. If I end up in hell for this at least I’ll have the company of Jesus and countless Catholics.

And lastly I vowed to meditate two and a half hours a day, every day. I actually did this for several decades. Most RSSB initiates don’t. Now I meditate about an hour. My meditation currently is just as shitty or as wonderful (I really can’t tell the difference any more) as it was in my lengthy meditation days.

Here’s the thing about lifetime vows: the intention behind them is great. Like “for better or for worse, till death do us part.” I truly wanted my first marriage to be a lifetime commitment. Life happened otherwise, and both my wife and I were fine with that.

The general notion that we are in charge of our lives, rather than the Way—the Tao, strikes me as the height of egotism. So also is the related notion that we could, or should, keep up a vow to do X for a lifetime. Who are we say what life has in store in us, what twists and turns we are to follow that aren’t visible from our current vantage point?

I admire people who keep promises. And I also admire other people who don’t keep promises. Just as I don’t admire still other people in either camp: promise keepers and promise breakers. It all depends on the situation.

Staying the course is admirable when the course demands to be stayed. It is deplorable when a change of direction is called for. Ray Grigg tells this Zen/Ch’an story:

“What is the solution that accounts for every situation?” asked the Ch’an abbot.

When no one could answer the question, he replied, “As the situation arises.”