Church of the Churchless

Taoism—a philosophy for fools

I’ve philosophized my way through the world’s major religions and quite a few of the minor ones. I’ve lost my faith, found my faith, and lost it again. Several times. I expected that I’d get wiser as I got older, but the opposite has occurred.

At fifty-seven I know less about God than I did at twenty-one. Back in 1969 I was teaching yoga and meditation. I could hold forth on the meaning of Indian phrases such as “Tat Tvam Asi,” thou art that. The “that” is ultimate reality. I actually believed it.

Now, as I wrote about a few days ago, I feel like I’m becoming more of a spiritual fool with every not-knowing moment. I appreciated the comments on that post, especially grayfields’ thoughts. When I hear, “you’ve given voice to my own thoughts,” I feel warm in my foolish soul.

We’re all in this together. Not that I have any idea what “this” is. Or what “together” means. Regardless, the thought rings true. Everyone is speaking someone else’s words along with his or her own.

After all my reading of mystical, religious, and philosophical literature, I’m convinced that there’s nothing new to be said. The goal isn’t fresh saying, but fresh understanding. So I gravitate toward words that stimulate an Oh, yeah! in me, a recognition that here is the way to…I don’t know what, but I sure want to be there.

That place is for me. Not anyone else. Spiritual fools tend to be communally attracted to magnets of not-knowing, though, such as Taoism. The crazy smile of the Taoist philosophy has room for many individual foolish grins. So let’s lift a cup of churchless intoxication and fail to grasp some of the wisest lines that can’t be understood.

These quotations are from “The New Lao Tzu,” Ray Grigg’s enjoyable fresh interpretation of the Tao Te Ching.
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Those who know of the Tao
recognize it as great.
Why is it great?
Because it is different.
Why is it different?
Because it cannot be understood.
If it could be understood,
it would not have lasted
from the beginning of the beginning.

The wise know
they do not know;
The fools do not know
they do not know.

The Tao that can be named
is not the nameless Tao.
The Tao that can be known
is not the unknowable Tao.

Look but it cannot be seen,
so it has no form.
Listen but it cannot be heard,
so it makes no sound.
Think but it cannot be thought,
so it defies understanding

Because it cannot be discerned,
it cannot be discovered.
Because it cannot be thought,
it cannot be known.
Still it seems to be something,
a something that is everywhere
but nowhere.

How can anyone who just drifts and wonders,
who can’t even be sure of themselves,
Take seriously all these rituals,
all this herding?
It seems better just to be alone and quiet,
not belonging anywhere.
Everyone else seems eager and dutiful,
but the deeper way seems lonely and confusing.
Everyone else seems clear and definite,
but the deeper way seems dark and uncertain.

What is a person to do when being adrift at sea,
when being blown aimlessly anywhere,
seems to be a more profound calling?
When everyone else seems busy and purposeful,
what is to be done with an urge
that is confusing and lonely,
and different?

When everyone else
is guided by the affairs of people,
What is this urge
that comes from the Great Mother?

God calls me a fool. I agree.

Churchless brothers and sisters, God spoke to me this morning. Now the spirit is calling me to share the word. I’m just a tool. Also, a fool.

That was the message: “Brian, you don’t know.” To which I replied, “Oh God, you’re so right. I don’t know.”

Now, I can hear the skeptics asking, “How do you know that God was speaking to you if what you heard was, You don’t know?” Well, all I can say is that I know what I know, and I don’t know what I don’t know. And I know that God was letting me know that I don’t know.

Seems clear to me.

As so much often does in the morning when the caffeine is flowing through my hyped-up neurons and reading one of my holy churchless books tunes me into the harmonies of the cosmos’ deepest mysteries.

Like, the ultimate mystery: existence. And, the penultimate mystery: why something exists within existence. In this rarefied philosophical territory, I’m gasping fruitlessly for the air of even the slightest understanding.

As are we all. Such was the divine inspiration stimulated by my reading of John Horgan’s “Rational Mysticism.” In a concluding chapter he says that no one—not Jesus, not Buddha, not Muhammad, not Moses, nor any other guru, sage, or prophet, no one—could ever know the ultimate whys and wherefores of creation.

Why is there something rather than nothing? No one knows. And if you don’t know that, then any claim to knowing It All is spurious.

Laughingly so. Ridiculously so. Which helps explain why, after my not-knowing revelation had been revealed to me, I felt so good. For quite a while my meditation mantra became “I don’t know…I don’t know…I don’t know.” With every repetition I became more connected to the great Don’t Know.

There’s a joy to being a religious fool. I could feel the pressure of got to know…got to know…got to know dissipating. I felt emptier, lighter, freer. I realized that I’ll never know, you’ll never know, no one will ever know. Not everything. Not the deepest mysteries. They’re unknowable.

Existence. Life. Consciousness. Science doesn’t have a clue. Religion doesn’t have a clue. Humanity is clueless. That brought a foolish smile to my meditative face. The pressure to know is off. Accept it.

You exist. You’re alive. You’re conscious. But nobody can know what existence is, what life is, what consciousness is. To penetrate those mysteries you’d have to be non-existent, not-alive, unconscious. Who, then, would be around to do the penetrating? Or be aware of what lies at the bottom of it all?

We are what we’re trying to know. It isn’t possible to know when there isn’t a sub-atomic particle’s distance between us and the object of knowledge. There can be no knowing when there isn’t a knower and the known.

But there can be fools who don’t know. I’m happy to be part of this august group. Which includes everybody on the planet. Including those who believe that they know.

Are they even bigger fools? Good question. Have to say, though: I don’t know.

Mantra meditation: wax on or wax off?

In the movie, “The Karate Kid,” Mr. Miyagi begins to teach karate to young Daniel by having him do chores requiring simple repetitive movements. Who can forget the memorable Zen wisdom of “Wax on wax off”?

Repeating a mantra is a spiritual equivalent of Mr. Miyagi’s training method. This has been the core of my meditative practice since I started studying yoga thirty-seven years ago. If I had gotten a dollar for every time I’ve said a mantra in or out of meditation, I’d be rolling in riches.

Since that didn’t happen, the question is: have I benefited spiritually from the countless hours I’ve engaged in mantra meditation? I don’t know. But I suspect that I’ve frittered away much of the potential benefit by failing to understand the difference between waxing on and waxing off.

Most of the time our minds are full of useless thoughts. Repeating a mantra such as “Om” is supposed to clear out a lot of that unessential mental debris. Instead of cultivating many different thoughts (most of them weeds), we’ve thinned the garden of mentality down to a single crop.

This monoculture of consciousness would produce a boring blandness if the mantra was all that we were aware of. What’s the point of trading the rich diversity of our external and internal worlds for an endlessly repeated word (or words)? However, the basic hypothesis of mantra meditation is that clearing the mind of clutter enables us to perceive reality more clearly.

When I’m not wearing my contact lenses, I usually have my glasses on. Like right now. I don’t clean them very often. Between me and my computer screen are a bunch of blurs. Dust. Grime. Dirt. Water spots. Still, all that isn’t as bad as how my dark glasses looked after my wife wiped them with a cloth that had gotten smeared with hand lotion. Wax on. Couldn’t get it off. Couldn’t see clearly. Had to put on another pair of dark glasses before I crashed the car.

This points to the problem with the mantra meditation hypothesis. A mantra can just as easily obscure as it clarifies. It all depends on whether you are waxing on or waxing off. I’ve come to believe that a mantra filled with meaning is akin to the greasy cloth that my wife used to try to clean my glasses.

That word, or words, leaves a mental residue. For example, a traditional Christian mantra is “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” Assuming that you know English, it would be almost impossible to repeat those words without thinking about Jesus and mercy. You may stop yourself from thinking about other things, but Jesus’ mercy is certainly going to be on your mind.

I believe that mantra meditation can lead to a clearer view of reality. Inside of my head, I feel like I’m getting closer to the essence of life, existence, and consciousness when I sit on my meditation cushion in darkness and silence, repeat a single syllable, and become aware of what remains. Outside of my head, I feel more connected to other people and the world when my mind is filled with the simple unifying sound of a mantra rather than many divisive thoughts.

For a long time, though, I repeated a mantra that had a significant meaning to me. I realize now that this meaning was like Mr. Miyagi’s wax. Every time I repeated the mantra I was rubbing something onto my consciousness, rather than clearing something off.

Basic rule of car cleaning: you don’t use the same cloth to clean the wax off that you used to put the wax on. Applying this principle to meditation, I’ve come to the conclusion that the more meaningless a mantra is, the better. It shouldn’t be associated with a person, theology, metaphysics, or goal that has any meaning.

Churches have stained glass windows. Those images are there to capture your attention and prevent you from seeing what is, in reality, outside the church’s confines. A mantra with meaning has an equivalent effect. Every time you repeat it, you’re placing a conceptual filter between you and what is really there.

I don’t know if we ever can see through the glass of our consciousness, clearly. But we certainly have the option of either adding onto the mental grit and grime or removing as much as we can.

Wax off. Wax off. Wax off.

Like I asked before, “Mantra meditation: what’s in a word?”

Ideally, nothing.

Freeing ourselves from religious fantasy

Fantasies can be fun. Angelina Jolie and I have had some great times together. Only in my imagination, unfortunately. I would have had a lot more fun if she and I had met in reality.

In this instance I know the difference between fantasy and reality. When it comes to religion, however, the line dividing fiction and truth can be devilishly difficult to discern. In fact, there’s good reason to say that religiosity is nothing but belief in something that hasn’t yet been experienced.

Heaven. God. Jesus. Enlightenment. Nirvana. Allah. Tao. Buddha-nature. These are just words. Like Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, and Big Foot, they refer to entities that haven’t been proven to exist.

In short, they are fantasies. Yet for some reason most people consider that it is good to free ourselves from a belief in an imaginary Santa Claus, while it is bad to free ourselves from a belief in an imaginary God or other manifestation of divinity.

Hmmmmm. It seems to me that it’s always good to perceive reality as clearly as possible. If we call the ultimate reality “God,” then it makes sense that God will be approached by discarding falsehood and embracing truth. Every fantasy thrown out of the mind is one less bit of clutter that can obscure our perception of things as they are.

This is why I liked so much what my European churchless sister had to say. As shared in my previous post, she spoke about how she woke up from a self-hypnotic state in which mere belief had been confused with actual knowledge. She was speaking of a belief in Sant Mat, an Eastern form of spirituality, but her message applies equally to Christians, Jews, Muslims, or anyone who considers that blind faith is the core of spirituality.

Actually, faith is the rind. It can be discarded without losing anything important. In fact, faith in fantasies is what keeps us from reaching the Real Thing, so it has to be let loose before genuine spirituality can be grasped.

In his book, “Turning the Mind into an Ally,” Buddhist sage Sakyong Mipham describes the concentric onion skins of crap (my phrase, not his) that cover up “the point in the middle of the circle [that] represents the fortitude and clarity that underlie the wildness of our scattered mind.”

From crudest to most subtle, he says that these obscuring mental activities are: our life, fantasies, emotions, discursive thoughts, and subtle thoughts. Fantasies, then, are just about as destructive to meditative calm as is worrying about whether you remembered to set the recorder to tape the special two hour conclusion of “Lost” tonight (to pick an example out of my own onion skinned mind).

Mipham talks about taking a step toward the center of the meditation circle:

Here we might meet the full-blown fantasy. A fantasy is a very large thought that has the power to take us far, far away from the present moment. It’s like a story that we tell ourselves, a movie that we run, a soap opera that draws us in and puts us in a trance. Because it’s potent and absorbing, we’d sometimes rather believe a fantasy than reality. Under its spell, we don’t even remember that we’re meditating.

He gives the example of a student of his who had been meditating for a year. The student told Mipham about his experiences—insights and images had come up in meditation. He had passionate ideas that he wanted to discuss. Mipham told him to keep practicing. A year later he found the student calmer and more relaxed. When asked about the previous experiences, he said:

“Oh, I dropped all that. I realized it was just a giant thought. It lasted about a year, and in the past few months I’ve just seen it for what it was and let it go. It felt like dispersing a cloud.”

Jesus loves me and died for my sins so that I may enjoy everlasting peace with him in heaven. Full-blown fantasy. Let it go.

The guru who initiated me is God and will guide me back to the highest spiritual region. Full-blown fantasy. Let it go.

There is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet. Full-blown fantasy. Let it go.

Jehovah made a covenant with his chosen people, the Jews, which will never be broken. Full-blown fantasy. Let it go.

Remember the immortal words of Philip K. Dick, blessed be his science fiction writer soul: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

If your reality goes away when you stop fantasizing about it, it never was real to begin with.

A nasty truth, naked and rough

I want to share some thoughts from a woman who emailed me from Europe. Like me, she’s a Sant Mat initiate (satsangi) in the Radha Soami Satsang Beas line. Also like me, she’s gone through some intense soul-searching.

I’ve mildly edited her words for clarity, but left her English style intact. (Believe me, she writes infinitely better in my language than I can write in hers). Here’s her first message:

Hello, I just found your site and have lovely laugh when I was reading some of your stories. I am your spiritual sister, a so called satsangi. A year ago I would consider you as an idiot, but not now. I had a breaking point, a meeting with a nasty truth, naked and rough.

I hardly survived this losing of self hypnotic state. For a few months I have been confused, because I WAS an example of a perfect disciple, and then, everything was over. All my dreams of this parallel reality in which I believed so much.

But look!! I haven’t lost anything, except my dreams, and I got freedom. Freedom to choose how will I live.

I realised that if I meditate of any other reason then for myself, because I want it, it’s wrong. If I believe in something is because I want to believe. It doesn’t matter am I on the right side or the wrong one. It’s just me here, and no one else.

And this was a most unexpected and glorious experience in contrary of everything I had in mind about Sant Mat. I can say that Master gave me this, because he believed I can handle it. So in the background of all these doubts there is his Love. Its impossible to say what I want to say, but just to tell you, you are great!

Love from _______

I wrote back to her, saying:

“Thank you for sharing your experience. Very interesting. You did well, trying to explain what can't be explained. Still, I would love to hear more about your ‘nasty truth, naked and rough.’ Can you speak more about what this truth is? I think I understand, from what you said in your message, but would like to know more. Like you said, you are my spiritual sister. It seems that we have come to similar conclusions about this Path.”

Here’s her reply.

Brian, you are right. We came to similar conclusions, just we are dealing with them a little bit different. I surrendered to the fact I know nothing about it. I don’t blame anyone for this because going to the Sant Mat was my decision and I take responsibility for it.

And if I’m honest, Sant Mat helped me to survive in the very difficult phase of my life. Relationship I built with Baba Ji gave me strength and hope. I had a great experience of His love and Grace, so I think I became too dependent on Him. I don’t say this has an absolute value. It has value for me. It could be just mental trick to find a spiritual friend and surrender to Him. I don’t care. The importance is that it helped me.

So when the time was ready, I just realised that we know nothing about God, about Master, about Sach Khand. These are just empty words, which give to people some confidence and hope for the future. We repeat these words and think we KNOW! And the nasty truth is, we don’t! We just believe.

I was very shocked to know this and of course completely confused. I realised my own helplessness in this matter. No meditation will save me, not even my morality and my effort will save me. We are actually too weak and too ignorant to do anything. So I just gave up in the sense to achieve a goal.

Now I’m thinking that maybe there is no goal in the sense of separation from us, that WE are the goal, and this life is just a means to realise that. Now I meditate because it gives me peace of mind, because there, inside of me exists a lonely warm space where I can feel alone, but not lonely, in peace with myself and the world.

Does God exist? I don’t know. I don’t care. I have responsibility to myself. Master is only a guide, nothing more and nothing less. We still need to love ourselves. We still need to take the action.

In my new position I feel good, knowing that things are not in my hands. Just for the record, last November I stopped going to satsangs and stopped giving speeches. I was glad to receive your mail, so I hope it was not the last one.

Love from _______

Wise thoughts. We think we know. But we really just believe. It can feel nasty to realize this truth. Yet what a gift it is.

If you believe you’re at your destination, but you aren’t, you’re much worse off than if you understood where you actually stand on the spiritual path. A mirage can look an awful lot like a pool of water. Sand can’t quench thirst, though.

It’s better to keep walking across the desert than to mistakenly consider that an oasis is real.

“Thou shalt doubt,” the first commandment

Proving that there is a churchless God, yesterday I turned on the TV for my morning cable news fix just in time to hear Andrew Sullivan speak on C-SPAN about the genuine form of faith: doubt.

Sullivan is my favorite conservative essayist and blogger. I thought that his recent piece about the dangers of Christianism (as contrasted with genuine Christianity) was great. It was a treat to hear him on a Book Expo of American lunch session panel with fellow book floggers Pat Buchanan, Arianna Huffington, and Frank Rich.

His book, “The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back,” won’t be released until October. I expect I’ll be buying it. Not because I want to get back my conservative soul, but because I enjoyed Sullivan’s take on faith and doubt. Here’s some of what he had to say:

The soul, when it is beleaguered by fear, has two options. It can create a certainty, an ideology, a mantra, that it will cling to with white knuckles. To make sense of the world, to reassure itself, to tell itself it’s safe, regardless of the empirical evidence, to suspend rational judgment, and to capitulate to a form of psychological and spiritual fundamentalism.

That, I think, is what has happened to conservatism. It has been high jacked by fundamentalism. The emergence of the religious right in this country, and in the middle East—fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Christianity—gearing up for what the extreme elements on both sides actually literally regard as an apocalyptic battle, this is the great question of our time.

The waging of war between two absolute certainties where doubt is banished, where all dissent is regarded as treason, when empiricism is regarded as a threat, and where individual freedom is always sacrificed on the altar of security and paternalism.

What I try and do in this book is to restore and to remind conservatives that there is another conservatism. There is another tradition, within the conservative political tradition, that resists fundamentalism, resists certainty, and is rooted fundamentally in doubt. Against the conservatism of fundamentalism, we have and must advance the conservatism of doubt.

And there are two areas in which that doubt must be allowed to grow and flourish. The first is religion. You know, there are two kinds of religious faith. And the great lie of today is that the only genuine form of religious faith is fundamentalist. That the only real form of religion and faith is adherence to a set of doctrines that cannot be questioned and which must merely be imposed.

There is another kind of Christianity and another kind of faith that understands, first of all, that God, if God exists, must by definition be unknowable to us. We cannot know for certain what God’s ways are and what God is telling us to do at any given moment in time.

We cannot know, at any moment, what God wants us to do, let alone believe as some people do that God has a position on stem cell research, or capital gains, or welfare reform. These are emanations of an enormous hubris and a betrayal of faith as it is properly understood.

Because the root of all faith is doubt. No human being would ever come to think of God unless he asked questions of the meaning of life and questioned himself.

The kind of faith I’m talking of is, I think, actually held by a majority of Americans who have had their own faith high jacked in public by fundamentalists. And the mainstream media which has not been alert enough to what real Christians and real faith is in this country has swallowed their line and had religion actually defined by the likes of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.

Now the faith I’m talking about is one that looks at God and feels humility. That believes in service, that practices mystery, that engages in wordless sacraments that manage to describe the ineffability of the divine. It is a faith that is always interwoven with doubt. It is a faith that asks, “What should I do?” not what someone else should do.

It is a faith that finds it hard enough to impose our own beliefs on our own actions, let alone want to use government and law to coerce the actions and beliefs of other people.

Bible and The Da Vinci Code are both fiction

I’m used to hearing absurdities when I listen to conservative talk radio, but this really jarred me: today I heard “The Da Vinci Code” being compared to holocaust deniers. Geez, righties, you should at least make a halfway attempt at rational discourse.

This evening Victoria Taft interviewed Michael Chapman of the Media Research Center, which bills itself as “the leader in documenting, exposing and neutralizing liberal media bias.” He was frothing about all the Christian bashing that’s gone on with coverage of The Da Vinci Code book and movie.

Funny. I haven’t noticed it. I’ve read quite a few articles about The Da Vinci Code (and the book itself). Without exception they’ve noted that the book is fiction and that its claim that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and had a daughter is just that: a claim which neither can be proven nor disproven.

Just like the Bible itself. Almost certainly, the Bible is nearly as fictional as The Da Vinci Code. Scholars agree that there were many conflicting accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings circulating among the early Christian community. There wasn’t agreement about whether he was human or divine, resurrected or plain dead, a Jewish prophet or a harbinger of a new faith.

A few Gospels were picked out of many. Bingo, a religion was born. A fictional religion, in the same sense that second- or third- hand accounts of happenings that may or may not have occurred fifty years ago are fiction. It’s impossible to distinguish truth from untruth in such a mish-mash.

So Chapman was way off base when he said that The Da Vinci Code is to Christianity as holocaust deniers are to the killing of six million Jews. He bemoaned the fact that the media jumps all over someone who writes a book about how the holocaust never occurred, but has been giving The Da Vinci Code lots of positive press.

Earth to Michael Chapman: this is because the holocaust is an irrefutable historical fact; Christian theology, on the other hand, is entirely subjective and thus eminently debatable.

Both Chapman and Taft used the term “Christian bashing” a lot. They’d probably give this appellation to many of my Church of the Churchless posts. Well, if I or Dan Brown (two writers on opposite ends of the best seller list) were to point out that there is no evidence for the existence of leprechauns, I guess believers in Irish elves would call that “Leprechaun bashing.” Me, I call it stating the obvious.

Good Christians, you’re in the same boat as good Jews, good Muslims, and good believers of any other religion. Your faith is the only thing keeping you afloat. There’s no objective evidence that you’re floating on real water.

Dan Brown knows that The Da Vinci Code is a product of his own mind. In that sense he’s more in touch with reality than religious believers who mistakenly consider that because a holy book says “everything written here is true,” that makes it so.

Brown said something of the sort at the beginning of his book and that statement certainly hasn’t been uncritically accepted. So why shouldn’t the Bible be equally open to debate? And, yes, even bashing.

The Media Research Center notes disapprovingly that Da Vinci Code actor Ian McKellen said in an interview:

Well I've often thought that the Bible should have a disclaimer in the front saying, this is fiction. I mean walking on water? I mean it takes an act of faith. And I have faith in this movie. Not that it's true, not that it's factual but that it's a jolly good story and I think audiences are clever enough and bright enough to separate out fact and fiction and discuss the thing when they've seen it.

Right on, Ian. Bible and The Da Vinci Code: two fictional pieces of literature. Read them both. Enjoy them both. Just don’t take them as fact. Or, too seriously.

Beware of the Christianists

Islamists use Islam to further their narrow political agenda. Christianists use Christianity in the same way. Hearty churchless thanks to Andrew Sullivan for sharing this insight in his recent TIME magazine essay, “My Problem with Christianism.”

Your problem is my problem too, my friend. I like Sullivan. Politically, he’s conservative on Iraq and other issues. But culturally he’s progressive. And not coincidentally, gay. He’s appeared on Bill Maher’s HBO program several times. Sullivan is well-spoken, humble, and clearly a nice guy.

Which helps explain why he dislikes so much the cocky certitude of Christianists who believe that they, and only they, know what God wants of us. This just happens to be precisely what the right wing of the Republican Party wants. Amazing. God only speaks to conservative Christian ideologues.

Sullivan makes a lot of sense here:

And there are those who simply believe that, by definition, God is unknowable to our limited, fallible human minds and souls. If God is ultimately unknowable, then how can we be so certain of what God's real position is on, say, the fate of Terri Schiavo? Or the morality of contraception? Or the role of women? Or the love of a gay couple?

Also, faith for many of us is interwoven with doubt, a doubt that can strengthen faith and give it perspective and shadow. That doubt means having great humility in the face of God and an enormous reluctance to impose one's beliefs, through civil law, on anyone else.

Naturally the Christianists are threatened by a devout Catholic who refuses to accept every bit of Church dogma and the right-wing party line. Gregory Borse considers that there is no room for individual moral choices in Catholicism. He says that he belongs to the Catholic Church; the Catholic Church doesn’t belong to him.

OK. Agreed. I belong to the American Automobile Association. I don’t believe that AAA belongs to me. But I can disagree with some of the central policies of that organization and still be a member. Tell the Pope to shove it on abortion, gay marriage, and female ordination, and you’re not going to be welcome at the Vatican.

That’s why Christianism, or any “ism,” is so dangerous. It is intolerant and authoritarian. If you mistakenly believe that you’re carrying out God’s will, like George Bush does, any and all evidence that you’re on the wrong track is going to be ignored. I talked about this in “Religious values have no place in politics.” Andrew Sullivan makes a similar point in his blog:

I'm not arguing that faith should have no role in political discourse. Someone's faith will affect her politics. My faith informs my own positions on torture, the death penalty, gay dignity, the Iraq war, and so on. But in the political sphere, mere recourse to religious authority is insufficient, because, by definition, it cannot persuade those of a different faith or no faith at all.

And so religious doctrines need to be translated into moral arguments, applicable to any citizen with good will and an open mind. When Tom DeLay, at a Republican gathering, invokes Christ as his ally; or when the Catholic hierarchy comes close to barring votes for Democrats; or when Jesse Jackson uses the pulpit to garner Democratic votes, they have crossed an important line. It's important to defend that line - for the sake of politics, and for the sake of faith.

In another post Sullivan observed that the Christianists are fighting back against his eminently reasonable suggestion that religion should focus on spirituality, not politics. Hugh Hewitt is worried that others are going to pick up Sullivan’s term.

Be worried, Mr. Hewitt. Be very worried.

Christianist. Christianist. Christianist. I’ve picked it up.

Breaking free of family influences

Bear with me, Church of the Churchless visitors. This personal story concludes with a churchless moral.

Idly watching a high school teen flick on Comedy Central, “She’s All That,” while stairmastering this afternoon, I was taken aback when a character spoke some lines that could have been said by me at his age—with some slight modifications.

I heard Zack, a senior, tell Laney (in so many words): “My dad wants me to go to Dartmouth. He always has. It’s just been expected of me. He’s always saying, ‘Zack, you’ve got to make up your mind about college.’ But I know what he means. I’m supposed to choose Dartmouth.”

Me too. My father graduated from Dartmouth. He never was a part of my life, though, so that isn’t where the pressure came from. It was my grandfather who was dead set on me going to his alma mater, Dartmouth, and its associated Tuck Business School.

Grandpa Lewis was a New England businessman. He was a founder of the Lewis-Shepherd Company, which made electric lift trucks (a.k.a. “materials handling systems”). His eldest son, Jack, was his heir apparent. I was the oldest male in the next generation, my mother being Jack’s sister and Grandpa Lewis’ daughter.

So it was taken for granted that I’d eventually head up the family business. That was simply how things were supposed to be. Unquestioned. When I became a teenager, I remember that I started getting Dartmouth sweatshirts for Christmas from my grandfather. Every year. Whoopee. Just what I didn’t want.

When college began to loom closer, I learned more about Dartmouth. A men’s school. In New Hampshire. Ergo, no girls. And cold. Just what I didn’t want. I was a sunny California boy.

It wasn’t difficult for me to decide that there was no way I was going to Dartmouth. The idea of dedicating my life to selling electric lift trucks didn’t thrill me either. I wanted to major in journalism. I applied to U.S.C. and was accepted.

The tough part was telling my family what I wanted to do; my mother, uncle, grandfather—they all were zeroed in on me attending frigid girl-free Dartmouth. I can’t recall how I broke the news. I do remember that it wasn’t received well. A lot of Dartmouth momentum had built up over the years. My family had my future all planned out for me. Problem was, it wasn’t the future I was drawn toward.

Happily, my mother understood. Maybe she never was all that keen on me being the Lewis-Shepherd businessman of the next generation. She was an intellectual, a truth-seeker. I’m sure there is truth in electric lift trucks, but it wasn’t the sort that my philosophical mind was attracted to. My mother could relate to that.

I ended up going to San Jose State College, about as distant from Dartmouth (in many ways) as you could get. I was admitted to an experimental program called Tutorials in Letters and Sciences. Each semester of my freshman and sophomore years was spent in a single twelve unit “class,” plus three units of electives.

The class was all small group seminar discussion. No more than ten students and a professor. Lots of reading. Lots of writing. Lots of thinking. Lots of discussion. The idea was to take a single period of history, such as the early Greeks or the Renaissance, and simultaneously study the literature, art, science, politics, and whatnot of the time.

It was great. I loved it. Wasn’t Dartmouth. Was just what I needed.

And what I wouldn’t have experienced if I’d marched in step with family tradition. Which gets me, finally, to my churchless theme. My family wasn’t religious. Business was what they had faith in, understandably. It had provided a good life for my grandfather, uncle, and other family members. I was supposed to believe in business too.

I couldn’t. I wasn’t cut out to be a traditional businessman. That wasn’t my way, my calling, my karma, my destiny, whatever you want to call it. I feel fortunate that I wasn’t also pressured to follow a certain religion, as so many children are. Probably the pressure to believe in a certain fashion about God is more powerful than the pressure to believe in a certain fashion about how best to make money.

Make your own choices. Don’t blindly follow in your family’s footsteps. That’s my simple moral. There’s a complication, though.

It’s easy—almost inevitable, in fact—to become your own “ancestor” as you grow older. You’re seemingly emancipated from external family pressure, but now you’re generating your own traditions that you feel beholden to.

“I’ve always had these beliefs about God. I’ve always worshipped in this way. I need to honor my heritage.”

No, you don’t. You can change your mind. You can make an abrupt change of direction. You can head in any spiritual direction. You can start a new tradition at any moment.

My mother taught me that when she fully supported my non-Dartmouth college choice. Happy Mother’s Day, wherever or however you are. You’re still living in me and your other child, Carol Ann. We’re independent, just like you were. Your gift to us keeps on giving.

Wave relaxing into ocean. Ahhhh….

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at Maui waves the past nine days. Hopefully I’m starting to get their spiritual message.

“Dude, we’re the same as the ocean. Just like you are the same as God, Buddha nature, Tao, whatever you want to call it. Relax, brutha. Hang loose. Trust us, we know: when you’re not the wave, you’re the ocean.”

The thing is, waves are a lot more interesting than the flat ocean. When I sit on the beach and gaze out to sea, mostly I focus on the waves. (Which, sadly, have been calm the whole time we’ve been here, leaving my boogie board unused. Boo hoo, poor me.)

Waves are active. Waves are doing something. Waves stand out. Yet, waves don’t last. They always end up sinking back into the ocean, becoming the ocean again.

In his book, “No Death, No Fear,” Thich Nhat Hanh says that this is nirvana: realizing yourself as water, as well as a wave.

Our foundation is nirvana, the ultimate reality. You can call it God or the kingdom of God. This is the water in which we live. You are a wave, but at the same time you are also water.

…A wave does not have to die in order to become water. She is water right here and now. We also do not have to die in order to enter the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is our very foundation here and now.

This is the problem with religions. They interpose a bunch of illusory crap between us and God, between the waves and water. Dogmas, theologies, concepts, commandments. Are these things real? For sure, not as real as the foundation that supports them.

Religiosity is like sand. It shifts. Even more: it separates us from the water. If what Thich Nhat Hanh says is true, it is water, just like everything else. But until religion is realized as such, it’s a barrier between us and what we long for.

If you have a notion about nirvana, that notion should be removed. Nirvana is empty of all notions, including the notion of nirvana.

…You are what you are looking for. You are already what you want to become. You can say to the wave, “My dearest wave, you are water. You don’t have to go and seek water. Your nature is the nature of nondiscrimination, of no birth, of no death, of no being, and of no non-being.”

Practice like a wave.

Good advice. All it takes is letting go. Relaxing. Being what we already are. Ocean.

Tuning in to religion-less religion

A few days ago I used the term “religion-less religion” in a "I'm working on my Wu" post. Over at the Yoga Loft, they’re asking, “See It Three Times, Is It More Than Coincidence?”

I don’t know. Could be a cosmic synchronicity. Could be a random happening. Could be something else. Regardless, I enjoyed what the Yoga Lofter had to say about religion-less religion. The first time this term came up was in a conversation with his or her mother.

We agreed that all the world's problems seem to stem from people trying to stick the concept of God into religion. So many wars, so much blood, so much ego, so much waste--all in the name of God.

Amen to that. This morning I picked up Meister Eckhart, the medieval Christian mystic, and read:

Also you should not wish to understand anything about God, for God is beyond all understanding. A master says: If I had a God that I could understand, I would not regard him as God.

If you understand anything about him, then he is not in it, and by understanding something of him, you fall into ignorance, and by falling into ignorance, you become like an animal since the animal part in creatures is that which is unknowing.

If you do not wish to become like an animal therefore, do not pretend that you understand anything of the ineffable God.

What then should I do?

You should sink your “being-you” into his “being-him,” and your “you” and his “him” should become a single “me” so that with him you shall know in eternity his unbecome “isness” and his unnameable “nothingness.”

Wu. We always come back to Wu.

I poked around Yoga Loft while I was there and also liked this post about “Allowing Ourselves to Be Penetrated.” Yes, guys, it’s OK. They’re mainly talking about life here.

I’m working on my Wu

Maui is a good place to work on my Wu Project. “Wu” is a Chinese term that means no, nothing, nada, negation, not. That pretty much describes me on the beach: a lump of nothingness that is content to do…nothing.

Except, what I almost always do. Think about the nothing that I’m doing. I mean, even when I’m just lying on my mat, staring blankly at the ocean, stuff is going on inside my head. I’m aware. I’m perceiving. And, I’m judging.

A cell phone rings a few feet away. I think, “Good god! Cell phones should be banned from the beach. Why does she have to talk to her friend now?”

A woman on a beach towel lights up a cigarette. I think, “She’s got children! Doesn’t she know how bad second-hand smoke is for them? Her doctor should give her a lecture.”

An overweight couple saunters by. “America, the land of obesity! They’re killing themselves with calories. Is it so tough to exercise and give up desserts? Come on, people.”

So, yeah, I’m doing nothing outwardly, but inwardly a whole lot of chatter is going on. That’s why I’ve been working on my Wu more assiduously today. “Wu,” after all, can be a mantra as well as a term.

Heck, anything can be a mantra. Om. Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna, Krishna, Hare, Hare. Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me. Juicy fruit. Banana. Whatever.

I’ve used several mantras over the almost forty years I’ve been meditating. I’ve found that the choice of sounds doesn’t matter, so I’ve become a believer in shorter is better. The anonymous author of “The Cloud of Unknowing” advised a one syllable mantra (though, as a medieval Christian, he didn’t use that term).

He favored “God.” To me, “Wu” is synonymous. It connotes mystery, via negativa, the nothingness from which somethingness emanates. But again, whatever. The only thing that matters, in my experience, is shutting down the mental chatter with a mantric smother. Then I feel much more in touch with what’s simply there, as contrasted with my complex commentary about what I’m perceiving as there.

Just a cell phone ringing. A woman talking to her friend.

Just a woman smoking a cigarette. Enjoying a vacation with her husband and children.

Just two people walking down the beach. Who happen to be hefty.

Wu, Wu, Wu. When I negate my thoughts, judgments, criticisms, and comments about what I’m perceiving on Napili Bay, what’s left is much closer to what is really there. As the Buddhists say, suchness. What is.

Last night Laurel and I walked into one of the Lahaina art galleries on Front Street. I overheard one of the staff explaining a painting to another couple. He was showing them how the artist had drawn faces that aren’t apparent until you realize that they are part of the ethereal sky, not the earthy landscape.

You know, the figure and ground sort of thing. I stared and stared at the painting, unable to see what the guy was talking about, until flash!, there the faces were. I was looking for them in the outline of a mountain, while that outline actually demarcated the faces in the sky.

This was a lot like my Wu work on the beach today. I found that when I was my normal thinking/judging/critical self, my perceptions were focused on me. Whatever I saw, it all came back to me.

People weren’t just people. They were objects of my praise, neutrality, or scorn. Waves weren’t just waves. They were objects that (at the moment) were too small for boogie boarding and, hence, useless to me.

But when the mantra was working, a sudden shift would occur. I’d simply observe while listening to “Wu, Wu, Wu,” rather than my thoughts. Things just were, rather than things that instead should have been this or that, because I’d prefer them so.

For me, spirituality has come down to changing how I relate to the world. I want to perceive reality as clearly as possible, not through the glass of my own prejudices, darkly. I don’t know how this happens, but I like what D.T. Suzuki says about “Wu” (in Japanese, “Mu”). In Zen practice “Mu” or “Wu” is used as a koan. “Has a dog the Buddha nature?” “Mu.”

Go figure it out, says the Zen master. Except you can’t think it out. Thinking won’t lead to a Zen-acceptable answer. Suzuki says that Mu literally means “no,” but when used as a koan the meaning doesn’t matter. It is just a meaningless sound from which meaning may eventually erupt.

This monotonous repetition of the sound “Mu!” will go on until the mind is thoroughly saturated with it and no room is left for any other thought. The one who thus utters the sound, audibly or inaudibly, is now completely identified with the sound. It is no more an individual person who repeats the “Mu!”; it is the “Mu!” itself repeating itself.

When he moves it is not he as a person conscious of himself but the “Mu!” The “Mu!” stands or sits or walks, eats or drinks, speaks or remains silent. The individual vanishes from the field of consciousness, which is now thoroughly occupied with the “Mu!”

Indeed, the whole universe is nothing but the “Mu!” “Heaven above, earth below, I alone am the most honored one!” The “Mu!” is this “I.” We now can say that the “Mu!” and the “I” and the Cosmic Unconscious—the three are one and the one is three.

When this state of uniformity or identity prevails, the consciousness is in a unique situation, which I call “consciously unconscious” or “unconsciously conscious.”

No concepts there. No dogmas there. No theologies there. All that is there is what is there. Sign me up for that religion-less religion.

Going with the flow

My wife and I are in Maui right now. I’m sitting on the balcony of our condo, watching the waves roll into Napili Bay. Seems like a good time to think about going with the flow.

Of course, thinking and flowing are like oil and water. They don’t mix very well. Still, there’s a certain flow to thought when you just let it happen. It’s conscious controlling that messes the flowingness of anything up. That’s the bugaboo of religious concepts—the subject of my previous post.

They’re like rocks in the ocean. As an avid boogie boarder, I know all about those. I’m aware of the location of just about every large rock in Napili Bay. They’re where you don’t want to go when you catch a wave. Big waves aren’t dangerous. They’ll just toss you around. It’s hitting a rock or a reef that will wreck your day.

Rigidity sucks. Stay clear of it.

In “Lectures on Zen Buddhism” (one of the essays in Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis), D.T. Suzuki talks about flowing. Don’t let the book’s title put you off: this is a great essay.

Suzuki urges us to become artists of life. However we earn our living, this should be our real profession. He says that “in point of fact we are all born artists of life and, not knowing it, most of us fail to be so and the result is that we make a mess our lives, asking, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ ‘Are we not facing blank nothingness?’”

The problem is that we’re facing in the wrong direction, where meaning won’t be found: outwardly. Suzuki assures us that “an artist of life has no need of going out of himself. All the material, all the implements, all the technical skill that are ordinarily required are with him from the time of his birth, perhaps even before his parents gave him birth.”

Cool. You don’t need to be saved. You don’t need to get religion. You don’t need a guru. You don’t need to heed the word of God. All you need to do is learn how to unlearn all the crap that you’ve been taught about what you are not.

Don’t copy. Be an original. Art isn’t imitation. Listen to Suzuki.

To such a person his life reflects every image he creates out of his inexhaustible source of the unconscious. To such, his every deed expresses originality, creativity, his living personality. There is in it no conventionality, no conformity, no inhibitory motivation.

He moves just as he pleases. His behavior is like the wind which bloweth as it listeth. He has no self encased in his fragmentary, restrained, egocentric existence. He is gone out of this prison.

One of the great Zen masters of the T’ang says: “With a man who is master of himself wherever he may be found he behaves truly to himself.” This man I call the true artist of life.

Yesterday afternoon I felt an urge to do some Tai Chi forms and a few martial arts kata that I’ve taichized. A sandy outcropping on the edge of Napili Beach beckoned to me. Weddings often are performed there. It’s a beautiful spot, facing Molokai.

When I mentioned my intention to Laurel she said, “Just don’t do it by me. You’re going to look funny. It will seem strange.” I didn’t blame her for having that reaction. I understood how she felt. But I didn’t care what other people on the beach would think. I always do these forms several times a week, and it was time to do them again.

I’m glad I did. How often am I going to be able to do Tai Chi in the soft sand, with waves crashing over rocks and dashing me with foam? I didn’t care if people were watching me. Nor did I care if people weren’t watching me. For the moment (and just for the moment, sadly) I was in a Zen-ish state of mind. Suzuki again:

But let a man once look within in all sincerity, and he will then realize that he is not lonely, forlorn, and deserted; there is within him a certain feeling of a royally magnificent aloneness, standing all by itself and yet not separated from the rest of existence.

…What makes him feel that way comes from his personally experiencing creativity or originality which is his when he transcends the realm of intellection and abstraction. Creativity differs from mere dynamism. It is the hallmark of the self-determining agent called the Self.

[By contrast] Individuality…is liable to become associated with self-asserting power. It is always conscious of others and to that extent controlled by them. Where individualism is emphasized, the mutually restricting feeling of tension prevails. There is no freedom here, no spontaneity, but a deep, heavy atmosphere or inhibition, suppression, and oppression overpowers one and the result is psychological disturbance in all its varieties.

I know a bit about sword techniques. I’ve studied the Japanese katana and have two “live” blades plus several wooden practice bokken. I’m slowly learning a Tai Chi sword form. However, I’ve done very little freeform sword fighting.

Still, from my other marital arts experience I can relate to Suzuki’s Zen wisdom here—which applies equally to all of us fighting the battle of life. He is relating the advice of Takuan to his swordsman disciple Yagyu Tajima-no-kami.

Takuan’s advice is chiefly concerned with keeping the mind always in the state of “flowing,” for he says when it stops anywhere that means the flow is interrupted and it is this interruption that is injurious to the well-being of the mind. In the case of a swordsman, it means death.

…When the swordsman stands against his opponent, he is not to think of the opponent, nor of himself, nor of his enemy’s sword-movements. He just stands there with his sword which, forgetful of all technique, is really only to follow the dictates of the unconscious.

The man has effaced himself as the wielder of the sword. When he strikes, it is not the man but the sword in the hands of the unconscious that strikes. There are stories in which the man himself has not been aware of the fact that he has struck down the opponent—all unconsciously.

Now, that’s flow. Real artistry. Conscious concepts get in the way. “I need to hold the sword this way.” “If an attack comes from this direction, I will parry in this fashion.” Thoughts like these interrupt the genuine knowledge, prajna, that springs naturally from within.

Religious thoughts are similarly obstructive. “Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.” “There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet.” “Without a living guru, god-realization is impossible.”

Ideas like these cut us off from the reality toward which they supposedly point. They interpose dogma between us and direct experience. Does anyone really know any of those statements to be true? No. But the faith of billions rests on theological hypotheses like these.

They’re considered to be rocks on which to stand. Actually, they’ll bust your head. Trust yourself. Flow with the waves of life and stay away from reefs of rigidity. When given a choice between one religious way or the highway, head for the open road.

Going beyond religious concepts

Here’s one of the handful of passages from countless spiritual books that I’ve read which truly resonate with me. As I said in “Start erasing your spiritual blackboard,” I’m a believer in writings that say “Don’t believe in me.” This is one of those.

It comes from a well-thumbed book of mine, “The Master Answers.” Published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the book consists of verbal questions directed to Charan Singh, an Indian guru, and his off-the-cuff answers.

Near the end of my RSSB speaking career, I kept coming back to the following question and answer about the nature of God. Charan Singh is wonderfully Zen-like in his response. He strikes at the heart of theological dogmatism that places unreasonable confidence in concepts.

Unfortunately, most RSSB disciples haven’t contemplated this interchange to the degree that they should. They believe in belief. They consider that what they read in the RSSB literature and dutifully repeat when asked, “What do you believe?” is a valid reflection of reality. Of course, it isn’t.

Charan Singh reminds us that unless we know our own self, we’re spiritually ignorant, no matter how many ideas about God spin around in our heads. As the Greeks said, “Know yourself.” That comes first. And also, probably, last.

Charan Singh was asked: “Could you give a concept of the Lord?” This is his answer. I love it.

“He is a Power. Give it any name. We cannot even say it is power. We cannot say He is a person. It is difficult to describe Him. I think it is best for us to know Him rather than to describe Him.

We all try to think with our own limited intellect what He would be like. What are we? Have we ever thought about ourselves?

…When the soul is in the body we are alive, moving about, doing everything that you see. What is the concept of the soul? We have seen many people dying. Have we seen or have we any witness who has ever seen anything going out of a body at the time of death?

We have no concept of the soul, and that means we have no concept of ourselves. Then how can we have a concept of the Lord?

The concept that we have of ourselves should be the same as our concept of the Lord.”

Start erasing your spiritual blackboard

For most of my life I’ve been busy writing on my spiritual blackboard. By “writing,” I mean my attempts to make sense of Ultimate Mystery by reading, thinking, talking, and listening in understandable human terms.

In short, a whole bunch of blah, blah, blah. Books, sermons, magazines, talks, conversations, ponderings, conceptualizings, imaginings. Every word, every thought, every perception, every emotion—each has left a scribbling on the blackboard of my mind.

Yours too, if you’ve ever given much consideration to the big questions of life. What is the nature of God? Where will we go when we die? How do we know what is right and what is wrong?

We’re so used to classroom learning, it’s natural to believe that there are answers to such questions. All we need to do is find the right teacher. Problem is, every teacher has different answers. I know. My personal blackboard is filled with conflicting responses to the same questions.

Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Sant Mat, Wicca, Sikhism, Neoplatonism, whatever—pick any two “isms” and you’ll have two theologies, two philosophies, two moral codes, two cosmologies. So whatever you write on your mental blackboard, there’s no reason to believe that it’s anything more than one guess about God among many.

There’s another way. Start erasing. Mystics throughout the ages have termed this the via negativa, the negative way. In my opinion, it’s the only way. All other ways lead to anthropomorphic suppositions, not authentic truth.

So my advice is to get rid of the unnecessary. One of my favorite mystical mottos is “When in doubt, throw it out.” Isn’t that the essence of meditation? And also of science? Occam’s Razor tells us that the simplest explanation is the best.

Erase. Erase. Erase. When you come to a thought, emotion, intuition, or perception that makes you pause and say “this is too wonderful to be discarded,” keep it for the moment as a special treasure. Then go on erasing the rest of the crap.

I’ve read countless spiritual books. Only a handful of passages deeply resonate with me. Yet those few words, as they say, speak volumes. And that’s because these favorite sayings point me toward the blackboard, not what is written on it. That blackboard is my mind. Or soul. Or consciousness. Or self.

Whatever you want to call it, it’s the entity that all the writing is written on. Yet most of us, certainly me included, pay little attention to the blackboard. Our focus is on the writing—thoughts, emotions, conceptions, imaginings.

Some writings say, “Erase me.” Others similarly urge, “Concentrate not on me, but what I’m written on.” These are just about the only words I want permanently on my blackboard now. They make sense to me. Everything else is coming to seem like meaningless scribbling.

Blah, blah, blah.

Of course, I have to end with this: now that you’ve read this post, erase it. Contemplate what remains after the erasing. Who did the writing? Who the erasing? And what is the writing written on? Answer those questions and you’ve composed a genuine holy book.

You.