Church of the Churchless

Religious knowledge totals exactly zero

Zero: it never fails to astound me that this is the sum total of genuine religious knowledge accumulated throughout human history. There have been so many worshippers, so many devotees, so many seekers of divinity.

And the demonstrable metaphysical facts that have been accumulated from all of this effort? None. Absolutely none. There is not a single shred of objective evidence that reality consists of anything more than the universe we know now.

If there were, such a fact would have been trumpeted in banner headlines across every newspaper in the world. Core scientific theories would have had to be revamped. Possessors of this truth would have had a permanent seat on Oprah’s couch reserved for them.

Nonetheless, I’ll admit that religions meet many human needs. They give believers a sense of community, relief from anxiety concerning the unknown, an opportunity to engage in altruistic service, comforting rituals, and other benefits.

Yet none of this addresses the core religious quest: discerning the nature of God (or, for godless religions, of ultimate reality).

If we were to grade religions on their demonstrable metaphysical accomplishments, they’d get an “F.” In the arena of earthly achievements, I’d grant them a “C” (the Crusades, Inquisition, Islamic terrorism, and other negatives bring down their grade).

Virtually every religion, spiritual path, or mystic practice claims to know the truth about God or ultimate reality. Every teaching has it’s A, B, C’s down. For example, “There is (A) a personal God who (B) loves us and can be reached through (C) the Lord’s grace.”

The problem is, an X, Y, Z exists for every A, B, C: “There is (X) a universal impersonal power that (Y) is detached from creation and can be reached through (Z) meditative effort.”

What we have then, is an overarching religious equation that sums to precisely nothing:
(A + B + C +… ) – (X + Y +Z + …) = 0.

In other words, the purported truths cancel each other out. Another more radical way of considering this equation is that each of its terms also is zero, since every metaphysical statement is unproven and so lacks any truth value.

Regardless, I’m led to conclude that either nothing exists beyond the physical, or whatever exists is so ineffable as to be nothing that can be described or confirmed in worldly terms. My mind impels me to lean toward the first option, while my heart (and fear of nonexistence after death) makes me hope that the second option is true.

In either case, we’re left with a big fat religious zero. Nada. Zilch. Nicht. Nothing.

The only question is whether this nothing is really Nothing, or whether it is a reflection of the nature of Everything. That’s what my Wu Project is all about—trying to lay bare the essence of nothing.

It’s like trying to catch invisible butterflies with a net made out of the void. Decidedly challenging. And infinitely entertaining.

How I wrote a holy book

Did you know that I wrote a holy book? Yes, indeed. Brian Hines, the unpastor of the Church of the Churchless, is the author of “Life is Fair.” It was published in India by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) in 1999 with a first printing of 25,000 copies.

When I first got a copy of the book I enjoyed looking at the back page. There was “Life is Fair” listed in the Books on Sant Mat in General category, right along with such classics as “The Path of the Masters” by Julian Johnson.

I wrote the book because I was asked to. One day the phone rang and I found myself talking to Faith Singh, the head of RSSB publications in India. She said that a book project aimed at explaining the karmic rationale for vegetarianism had stalled. Faith asked if I’d like to review the work that had been done so far and take it from there.

I said, “Sure.” The guru who initiated me, Charan Singh, reportedly had said that he’d like to be able to hand out a little book that would explain why it is wrong to eat meat. He died before such a book could be written. I was honored to be able to offer my guru a posthumous gift.

I got to thinking about “Life is Fair” while watching the first episode of PBS’s Bill Moyers on Faith and Reason last Friday. Salman Rushdie was his guest. Near the end of the program Rushdie was shown reading from “The Satanic Verses.” This was the supposedly blasphemous book that forced Rushdie to spend ten years underground, hiding from Islamic assassins.

A transcript of the Rushdie interview is well worth checking out. He’s a courageous guy who knows first-hand how dangerous true believers can be. He has no qualms about writing “The Satanic Verses.” I haven’t read the book, so was interested to hear the excerpt read by Rushdie.

It is about an educated scribe, who happens to be called Salman, and his experience taking down rules dictated by the prophet Mahound—who is channeling the Archangel Gibreel. Salman suspects that the revelations have much more to do with Mahound’s earthly ambitions than any godly purpose.

Salman began to notice how useful and well-timed the angel's revelations tend to be, so that when the faithful were disputing Mahound's views on any subject from the possibility of space travel to the permanence of hell, the angel would turn up with an answer, and he always supported Mahound.

So Salman starts to change Mahound’s recitations. Minor changes at first. Then, when Mahound doesn’t notice the alterations when his words are read back to him, bigger edits. For example, “He said Christian. I wrote down Jew.” Mahound still is clueless.

Here's the point. Mahound did not notice the alterations. So there I was actually writing the book or-- or rewriting anyway, polluting the word of God with my own profane language.

But good heavens if my poor words could not be distinguished from the revelation by God's own messenger, then what did that mean? What did that say about the quality of the divine poetry? Look, I swear, I was shaken to my soul. It's one thing to be a smart bastard and have half suspicions about funny business, but it's quite another thing to find out that you're right.

I can tell you for a fact that no angel helped me write “Life is Fair.” The book came right out of my own mind, then improved with some expert editing by Jean Rosenblatt, Faith Singh, and others. I have no idea whether the metaphysical side of what I wrote is true. I thought at the time that is was, but now I don’t know.

Karmic law may guide what happens to souls after death. Or it may not. Each of us will find out after we die.

“Life is Fair” contains intriguing spiritual hypotheses which will make a lot of sense, or seem like nonsense, depending on your perspective. In no way is it a divine revelation. Yet my book is read at meetings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas devotees as if it was. The same is true of the other books published by RSSB. It is assumed that if this religious organization puts its stamp of approval on a title, the words inside can be trusted.

Yet in the case of “Life is Fair” I know that they can’t be, since I wrote them most fallibly. I read other books about karma and vegetarianism. I delved into my own experience. I stared out the window, came up with ideas, and typed them into my word processor. Then I’d re-read what I wrote and change it. Sometimes I’d start a chapter over again from scratch.

I’m willing to bet that most (if not all) “holy books” have been written in much the same fashion. Human beings put down what they believe to be true. But they don’t know for sure. So a reader should give their words no more credence than he or she would give the content of any other book.

No book is holy, just as no flag is. Today, thankfully, the United States Senate failed to approve a constitutional amendment that would ban burning of the American flag. Proponents talk of “desecration,” as if a piece of cloth somehow could be divine.

Nothing earthly is. Not the American flag. And certainly not books written by all-too-human beings.

Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.

Living in the now

What if this is all that there is? This. Right here, right now. A succession of moments in the physical world. After we die: nothing. No more “this.”

As I so often repeat here at the Church of the Churchless, I don’t know. I sure hope there is life after death. As Woody Allen put it, “I don't want to achieve immortality through my work I want to achieve it through not dying.”

But here’s another Woody Allen quote: “You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.”

Recently a friend, Randy, and I shared some thoughts via email about Eckhart Tolle and his “The Power of Now” philosophy. A while back I started to read the book but it didn’t grab me. With over 600 mostly positive Amazon reader reviews, obviously a lot of other people resonate with his message.

As they should. I fully agree with Tolle’s prescription for a happy, fulfilling, and enlightened life. It’s just the way he packaged his “be here now” advice that left me literarily listless.

I told Randy that the mystic spiritual path we both were initiated into many years ago has some failings. Like most other religions, it preaches withdrawal from this world in the hope of entry into a better one. I said:

Sant Mat seems to emphasize a "this world is shit, get out of it" mentality. That may be good advice, but the downside is that it encourages people who already are depressed, withdrawn, unsocial, etc. to embrace their dysfunction. I've come to think that it'd be a cruel joke if this world really is all that there is--no life after death--yet so many religious people end up trying to ignore it in the hope that heaven will be their reward for detachment.

It seems strange that God would choose to create our physical universe, and then desire above all that souls escape from it. In Islamic thought we are told, “God was a hidden treasure and wanted to be known.” Meaning, creation is the observable manifestation of hidden divinity.

So why not enjoy God’s gift? Fully. Enthusiastically. Passionately. Every day I sit for an hour or so in meditation with closed eyes and ears, trying to tune in to whatever may lie beyond the physical. But the rest of the time I seek to drink in the sights, sounds, and other perceptions of materiality.

Why ignore what is here now? This. If this is all that there is, then every earthly moment is infinitely precious, for there is no infinity to look forward to. Yet even if there will be life after our deaths, it still seems that each moment is to be richly savored, for it never will come again.

God may have other sorts of existences ready for us, but this present earthly one is the gift to be enjoyed now.

I don’t usually listen or agree with Dr. Laura. However, while station-surfing as I was driving around this afternoon I heard this radio psychotherapist advise a woman with a sexual problem: “You don’t want to die, looking back, at 102 and think of all the nights of passion you’ve missed.”

Today I spent a highly enjoyable hour watching belly dancers with evident joie de vivre and listening to Middle Eastern music at Salem’s World Beat Festival.

Yes, God certainly has given us lots of treasures. When you’re married, though, there’s a limit to what can be known about some of them.

[Tomorrow I'll probably post more belly dancing photos on my HinesSight weblog. Yesterday's post was about a less-joie de virvre'ly first day at the World Beat Festival.]

Worshipping at the altar of science

I don’t go to church. Who needs fantasy when reality is so much more compelling? When it comes to conveying the mystery and majesty of the cosmos, the fanciful tales found in holy books pale in comparison to findings of modern science.

For example, I’ve read a lot about emptiness in Buddhist writings. Nothingness comes in for a lot of mention also—not only in Buddhism, but in the mystic teachings of every religion (“nada, nada, nada,” says St. John of the Cross).

Yet this eleven-mile wide web page really hit home to me how little of something, and how much of nothing, the world is made of. This page shows the scale of a hydrogen proton and it’s surrounding electron.

At first I dragged the Firefox scrollie thing all the way across to the electron, not having read the entire accompanying narrative. It’s more impressive, though, to do as suggested and start clicking your way one screen at a time. I didn’t have the patience to travel eleven miles a foot or so at a click. That would be a worshipful thing to do, however.

There’s a lot more inspiring science in this Daily Kos “Friday Science” post, where I learned about the hydrogen atom web page. I already knew that there are about 100 billion stars in an average galaxy like ours, and there are at least 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe.

You want humility and ego loss? Ponder 100 billion times 100 billion. That’s how many stars there are in the universe. And you’re one person on one planet orbiting one of those stars. You share Earth with six billion other human souls and countless other sentient beings.

We’re nothing. Yet also, everything. Because whatever the universe is composed of, we are too. It’s a mystery what most of that “whatever” is. Here’s a pie chart that shows how much of the universe is made of ordinary matter and energy: just 5%.

Yes, scientists figure that 70% of the universe is composed of dark energy and 25% of dark matter. “Dark” means that they can’t perceive it, yet know that it is there. A lot like God, aside from the “know that it is there” part. You want mystery? Embrace science.

Religious images and icons leave me cold. Photographs of deep space—now those get me fired up to better understand the creator of It All.

Here’s a slick and quick slide-show overview of what science knows and doesn’t know about dark matter/energy. The Cosmic Variance blog is another good entry point to cutting edge science expressed in (mostly) easy to understand terms.

I enjoyed the “Church-going” post. Scientist Sean writes about giving his spiel on cosmology and atheism to a church group that talks about religion and science. Here’s an excerpt that reverberated with me:

There are several ways that thinking like a scientist could have led us to believe in God (or the supernatural more generally). The most obvious would be if God just kept showing up in our world and performing miracles; a sensible scientific approach in that case would be to search for the “laws of nature” that were in effect when God wasn’t around, and treat his manifestations as outside that box.

More subtly, we might look for evidence of design in nature, or we might look for impassable “gaps” in our understanding (like the beginning of the universe, or the origin of life and/or consciousness) that only God could bridge. I’m perfectly happy to contemplate that such things could be part of a logically possible world;

I just strongly believe that, in the actual world in which we find ourselves, there are no such fingerprints of design or unbridgeable gaps, and hence no scientific reason to appeal to the supernatural. We don’t understand everything in nature, but there’s absolutely no reason to think that it’s not understandable (even the beginning of the universe etc.) in terms of purely mechanical laws.

So God, as an hypothesis, is discarded along with geocentrism and phlogiston and the Steady State universe and whatnot. Sadly, it’s taking a little while for the discarding to actually sink in, but I suspect it’s just a matter of (perhaps a very long) time.

Spiritual nomads

Over at the wonderfully named Ambivablog, amba is “Calling all spiritual nomads.” Her piece is well-written and thoughtful, as befits a blogger with an impressive literary resume. (I’d love to be able to say about myself, “wrote a lot of reviews for The New York Times Book Review.”)

I was pleased to note that amba says that Church of the Churchless is a new favorite blog of hers. Same back at you, my churchless sister. I thoroughly enjoyed your spiritual nomad piece. Especially the musical chair analogy.

Say “Religion” in this strange new world of ours, and I see a game of musical chairs. The music stops – that promiscuous Pied Piper world beat that got Catholic priests dancing with Buddhist monks, Israelis with Palestinians, Southwest tourists with sacred kachinas -- and everybody scrambles for their chair: their church pew, synagogue seat, prayer rug or meditation cushion. And in the silence, dotted with distant gunfire, I’m left standing there. Without a chair.

And in these lines you perfectly captured the I’m Footloose But I Don’t Know Where I’m Heading predicament of many, if not most, spiritual nomads:

I don’t care what faith you were born into, what you call your higher power, what spiritual disciplines you do or don’t practice: if you viscerally resist having your religion organized for you, if living with your questions is the only form of worship that feels honest and alive to you, you’re one of us. Like many of our biblical forebears, we postmodern pilgrims answered a call to leave the houses of our fathers and strike out for an unknown future. We’re deeply convinced that that call came from the Spirit, and we’re not turning back. But right now a lot of us feel lost, with no promised land in sight.

I’m with you. And also, not. Together and solitary, that’s the paradoxical duality of the spiritual nomad. I don’t want to pitch my metaphysical tent at one of the crowded religious oases where hundreds of millions find solace and comfort. Christianity, Judaism, Islam—too confining. At times even Buddhism and Taoism seem too dogma-bound for my increasingly theologyphobic psyche.

Yet I sure don’t want to wander in the wilderness forever. The temptation is to find my own just-room-for-one spiritual oasis and settle in comfortably under my own home grown belief system. Lie on my back, stare at the stars, and feast on the nuggets of wisdom that drift down from the Truth Trees that I’ve planted myself.

But then what difference would there be between me and all the religious true believers camped out at their own oases, apart from numbers? In essence, I’d have formed a Religion of Me and become my one and only disciple. What’s up with that?

As with so many other questions concerning the meaning of it all, I’m left with a big fat “I don’t know.” A few intuitions seem to be attempting to scurry under the fabric of my tent of unknowing, however.

In the vast philosophical, religious, and metaphysical desert where countless people have sought ultimate truth, and no one has brought back definitive proof of having found it, tracks abound. My bookcases are filled with them. It isn’t paths that we lack, but rather the certainty that any of them lead somewhere.

And just about all that I’m certain about is that such certainty is a mirage. It doesn’t really exist. Faith is an attempt to reassure ourselves that the spiritual path we’re on will take us somewhere good. Heaven, enlightenment, nirvana, paradise, the promised land. The problem is, nobody living or dead can show us that they’ve gotten there themselves, so why should we believe in the path they urge us to tread?

I’m rapidly losing faith in paths. Yes, I’d rather be a spiritual nomad who is free to explore all paths than a true believer who is locked into only one. But that still leaves me on a path, albeit of my own choosing. What are the chances that my own individualistic wandering is going to lead me any closer to Truth than the well-worn paths trod by so many other seekers?

Slim. My growing suspicion is that the way out of the wilderness isn’t via any path at all. At least, not one on ground level. I want to believe in a Way. However, some forty years of research into spiritual ways, via both direct experience and the descriptions of others, has led me to strongly suspect that the only path leading somewhere real is absolutely unlike any means of getting around in everyday life.

In spiritual traveling, movement keeps you stuck. Stillness is what soars. When it’s combined with lightness. Unbearable lightness. “Unbearable,” because achieving a state in which spiritual lift-off is possible means discarding everything that keeps me tied down to wilderness level.

Including concepts. Thoughts, beliefs, hopes, imaginings—these are dead weights. I know so. Every day in meditation I feel them wrapped around my consciousness. They’re damnably difficult to let go off. They allow me to travel horizontally in any direction I choose. Oases of all sorts are easy to reach. But that keeps me in the realm of the familiar.

Where Truth doesn’t lie. I don’t know that for sure. Yet the deepest insights of both science and mysticism, and my own intuition, tells me this is the case.

So, I float. Or rather, attempt to float. To become stiller and lighter, a bubble of being capable of being wafted aloft by…whatever. I’d love to become a truly far-out spiritual nomad.

Someone who wanders in places unseen and unknown. Even to myself.

Let go. Then let go of letting go.

I’m attracted to simple spirituality. That’s probably because my mind is complex, like most people’s minds are. I need to balance myself out. Yin and yang.

So when I come across a believable one-sentence summation of spirituality, it catches my eye. And my heart. This is from Thomas Keating’s wonderful “Open Mind, Open Heart,” one of my favorite books.

I think it can be said that the essential point of all the great spiritual disciplines that the world religions have evolved is the letting go of thoughts.

Yes. On this Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Taoism can agree. (I’m not sure about Judaism, the most thought-obsessed religion). Or rather, the mystics of these traditions are in agreement. For they recognize that no thought, emotion, or perception can encompass the unfathomable mystery of ultimate reality, which many call “God.”

Keating advocates the practice of centering prayer. He says that this is different from mantra meditation, but in many respects it is similar. Keating says that the mental repetition of a word—“God,” “love,” “peace,” whatever appeals to you—is an act of intention, not attention.

That is, your goal isn’t to attend to the mantra, but rather you intend to unite with what lies beneath the contents of ordinary consciousness. As Voltaire said: God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. (Or maybe it was someone else who said this.)

Head for the center of yourself and you’ll find God. That’s the idea, for Keating and countless other mystics. He says:

Centering prayer is an exercise in letting go. That is all it is. It lays aside every thought. One touch of divine love enables you to take all the pleasures of the world and throw them in the wastebasket. The Diamond Sutra says it all: “Try to develop a mind that does not cling to anything.” That includes visions, ecstasies, locutions, spiritual communications, psychic gifts. These are not as valuable as pure consciousness.

I admire a Catholic priest who quotes the Diamond Sutra. I also admire Keating for his sensitivity to the games meditators play. As a long-time meditator myself, I know what he is talking about.

Letting go is tough enough. Letting go of letting go—that’s much tougher. But essential. I manage to stop thinking. Then a thought comes, “Wow! I’m not thinking!”

Oops.

Well, at least my intention is to let go of thoughts, which naturally includes theological dogma, metaphysical hypotheses, imagined higher powers, and all other mental machinations that draw me away from my center. And after letting go, I’d like to be able to let go of letting go.

To just be whoever I am when I’m not engaged in trying to be someone else.

Followers of fundamentalist religions and sects have an opposite intention. Their goal is to hold on. And more: to hold on to holding on. They only are interested in finding what they already believe to be true. If an astronomer puts a green cheese filter over the lens of his telescope, that’s how the moon will appear. Falsely.

Truth is found with open clear eyes. Yesterday I happened to glance down at the counter of a store where my wife had just bought a hat. A saying was taped to the wood: “You are lost the instant you know what the result will be.” Nice.

I’ve spent many years in an Indian mystic tradition where the guru is considered to be the end-all and be-all. Essentially, god in human form. I was told to distrust any spiritual realization that wasn’t in accord with the guru’s teachings. The result was set in stone, like the tablets of Moses. “Thou shalt experience X, Y, and Z.”

I’ve let go of those rigid presumptions. Now, I’d like to be able to let go of letting go. I can’t make that happen. That’d just be another form of clinging to an expectation. Keating says:

Trying dilutes the basic disposition of receptivity that is necessary for the growth of contemplative prayer. Receptivity is not inactivity. It is real activity but not effort in the ordinary sense of the word. If you want to call it effort, keep in mind that it is totally unlike any other kind of effort.

It is simply an attitude of waiting for the Ultimate Mystery. You don’t know what that is, but as your faith is purified, you don’t want to know. Of course, in a sense you are dying to know. But you realize that you can’t possibly know by means of any human faculty; so it is useless to expect anything. You don’t know and can’t know what you are waiting for.

Wu. We keep coming back to Wu.

On being spiritually lost

Today I learned that I’m heading for the Sixth Level of Hell, where heretics are sent. Well, it could be worse. Fraudulent, malicious, pandering, and treacherous souls end up in levels seven, eight, and nine. I’ll be living the good afterlife by comparison.

To find out how doomed you are yourself, head to Dante’s Inferno Test. After answering a few questions (be honest or you’ll make it worse on yourself!) you’ll know what’s in store for you, hell-wise.

Funny thing is, I don’t feel spiritually lost. I realize that my Sixth Level of Hell score is based on Christian rules (this test is founded on Dante’s Divine Comedy). My answers pointed toward a non-belief in God and an acceptance of conditional morality.

To Christianity this earns me a hot spot. But a Buddhist scoring system might well have given me a “You’re cool.”

There is no objective criterion for being spiritually lost. That’s because there is no way of knowing for sure what the destination is. How can you be lost without an observable “there” about which you can say, “I don’t know how to get there”?

Here’s what it’s like to be really lost. Or at least, on the edge of it. Some years back my wife and I got new cross-country skis and decided to try them out on a supposedly easy trail near the Hoodoo ski resort.

The trail wasn’t as easy as we had expected. The sun was starting to set and we hadn’t gotten around the loop. The snow was crazily deep that winter. So deep, almost all of the trail marker symbols stuck high on the trunks of trees were covered up. In places it was hard to follow other people’s tracks.

Then it began to snow. And get darker. We hadn’t seen any other skiers for hours. We seemed to be heading in the general direction of the parking lot. But at times we appeared to be heading toward a wilderness area.

I wasn’t sure that we were lost. But it was beginning to look like a good possibility. I vividly remember the chill up my spine. It wasn’t from the cold. It was from thinking, “We could be out here all night if we don’t find our car soon.” Being lost in a deep snowy dark forest is a scary proposition.

It turned out that we were on the right path. We turned a corner and saw a couple coming toward us. I wanted to hug them. They assured us that the parking lot was just a little ways ahead. It was.

My point is, when you’re really lost, you know it. Yes, it’s possible to wander around for quite a while believing you’re on the right track. But eventually the mismatch between where you are and where you want to be will become obvious. In the case of our cross-country ski excursion, scarily obvious.

There’s no similar obviousness in religion and spirituality. An adherent of a particular faith has to tell you that you’re lost before you suspect you are. After I hear, “Did you realize that unbelievers will never find their way to heaven?” I may think, “Gosh, then I’d better believe!”

The thing is, though, if you wait a little longer you’ll run across someone else with a markedly different idea of what the “way” is. Every religion has its own spiritual goal and a unique approach to getting there. If the goals were as obvious as a parking lot, it would be easy to sort out which spiritual paths get you to their destination and which don’t.

However, in reality the ultimate goals are invisible. If a religion could show me “God,” “heaven,” “paradise,” “enlightenment,” “satori,” or “Tao” I’d eagerly sign up for instruction in how to find my way there. Failing that, I’m left to my own devices. As are we all.

If you feel spiritually lost, it’s temping to latch onto someone who promises to lead you out of the wilderness. Before you do, though, consider a couple of questions:

Are you really lost? Or do you have a different problem? Such as feeling unhappy, unfulfilled, unloved, or uncertain. If so, I’d suggest that you’re not lost at all. You’re finding what it’s like to be human.

To repeat my favorite mantra, I don’t know. There may be a promised spiritual land over the horizon. One or more of the world’s religions and spiritual paths may be able to lead you there.

Maybe. But right here, right now, are you spiritually lost? Is there any spiritual place that you know exists, yet you can’t find your way to it? If there isn’t, are you really lost?

Trust your gut. If the only time you feel lost is when someone else tells you, “you’re lost,” then you’re not. Out in the snow I didn’t need anyone to inform me of my physical situation.

The same holds for our spiritual situation. No holy book, Pope, or guru is needed to tell you that you’re lost. Decide for yourself. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re exactly where you want to be.

I get a glimpse of Tango Zen

Monday night at my Tango class the instructor taught us a pretty complicated move. Muy Tangoish, so it was cool. But difficult for our four-month-old Tango brains to grasp. My wife and I gave it a try, though.

From the man’s perspective: Step, step, trap her foot, turn her to left, stop her, cross step, side step, move her around with waist turn, trap her foot, step forward into centering position, step, step, step.

Well, it looks better on the dance floor than on a computer screen. However, at first I struggled to get the moves down. Then we started practicing.

And did OK. Heck, maybe better than OK. Within a few minutes Laurel and I were Tangoing along nicely. Until I started thinking, “Wow, we’re Tangoing along nicely.” That was the kiss of death for the new move.

“Hey, what’s going on?” Laurel complained. “You were doing fine before. Now you’re not.” “I know,” I said. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to make X, Y, and Z flow better.”

“Well, go back to how you started,” my non-shrinking-violet wife told me. Which I tried to do by just doing it, not by thinking about how to do it. Eventually I got back to where I had been. And then better than that, after we practiced the move for another half an hour with very little analyzing.

It was a revealing Tango Zen experience. I began by knowing that I didn’t know. Did fine. I progressed to knowing that I knew. Fell apart. I ended up not-knowing that I knew. Best of all.

In his book, Tango Zen, Chan Park talks about this sort of thing in refreshingly brief chapters.

Whatever feelings and thoughts arise while dancing Tango—just let them pass by with no attachment to anything. Zen teaches us to open our minds and see things as they are. Be ready to let feelings and thoughts come and go without engaging them. Resist the impulse of analyzing or judging them. However, don’t push away or avoid them either. Just listen to the music and dance.

…For Tango to be Tango, we need to make each and every movement with confidence. No hesitation. In Zen we strive to celebrate our own nature, our unique gifts and abilities. We are who we are and, likewise, we dance Tango the way we are. For self-confidence, we need to block our self-consciousness by stopping the self-critical monologue, e.g. the mental chatter while dancing Tango. Be easy on yourself, as you are the best you can be Here and Now!

It struck me that the attitude I had during my awkward period at the dance class was akin to feelings I had when I was overtly religious. At one time I thought that I knew a lot about the faith I was committed to, that of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB). I knew what was right and what was wrong. I was constantly afraid that I’d make the wrong move.

Eat some meat, fish, or an egg by mistake. Imbibe some alcohol. Fail to meditate for the required period of time each day. Act against the wishes of the guru. I was stumbling all over myself trying to make precisely right moves on the spiritual path. I was self-consciously attempting to be humble and lose my ego.

Didn’t work. Couldn’t work. Would never work.

Here are some quotations from the Tango Zen book.

There is only the one Way—straight, open, and utterly empty of obstructions. –Yuan-Wu

Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself. –Zen Proverb

Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free: Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate. –Zhuagnzi

Do not follow the ideas of others, but learn to listen to the voice within yourself. Your body and mind will become clear and you will realize the unity of all things. –Dogen

Master technique and then forget about it and be natural. –Anna Pavlova

There is Buddha for those who don’t know what he is, really. There is no Buddha for those who know what he is, really. –Zen saying

I have no desire to prove anything by dancing. I have never used it as an outlet or a means of expressing myself. I just dance. I just put my feet in the air and move them around. –Fred Astaire

How can you be sure there is no God?

Good question. Easy answer: I can’t. I don’t know if God exists. Here’s another question. “How can you be sure there is a God?” The correct answer is equally easy:

You can’t. You don’t know if God exists. So we’re really in complete agreement. I don’t know and you don’t know. On this, agnostics and the faithful are as one.

At least, they should be. Such is the well-reasoned conclusion of the convincing “How can you be sure there is no God?” essay that I recently read on the Ex-Christian.net web site.

Unfortunately, most believers deny the reality of their uncertainty. And they make an additional mistake by equating these decidedly unequal propositions: There is no God. There is a God. The author of the essay correctly observes that affirming something is true is much different from affirming that there is no evidence of something being true.

I’m confident that fairies don’t exist. You may be equally confident that they do. However, the burden of proof is on you, not on me. I don’t have to prove the non-existence of fairies. Rather, you have to offer proof that they do exist.

Often you hear it said (by those who still believe there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, for example) that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” But both the scientific method and common sense are founded on positives, not negatives.

I can’t prove that replying to an email message from Nigeria won’t enrich my bank account by ten million dollars, but I delete it unopened anyway. It’s up to spammers to convince me of the veracity of their pitches, just as it is up to a scientist who claims a research breakthrough to produce the results.

Nobel prizes aren’t awarded to those who say, “Prove I didn’t discover the secret of the universe.” So why is it that the religious faithful are so adamant in asking non-believers to produce evidence that God doesn’t exist? As ex-Christian Dave says:

Someone could state that the Earth is being held in space and spun by giant invisible spirits. Now, before anyone would be expected to accept that belief, they would be well within their rights to ask for some evidence that supports the belief.

I agree that the world is hanging on nothing and spinning. I might not know how the Earth could possibly hang in space and spin, but I don’t believe invisible ghosts on steroids are pushing it in a steady rotation. I might not even have a better explanation than a “ghost theory,” but I still deny that such a thing is true.

It falls to the person who claims to have the explanation to provide the supporting evidence. It doesn’t fall to me to provide evidence as to why I don’t believe in the ghostly world turners. All I need do is state that the evidence presented by the "spirit theorists" is unconvincing.

I need not provide evidence as to why I deny the explanation; I simply deny that the evidence presented is sufficient for me to accept and believe.

So stand tall, fellow agnostics, doubters, heretics, and unbelievers. For testimony to the correctness of our stance is heard everywhere, though it is spoken mutely. When the faithful are asked to provide demonstrable evidence to support a belief in God, their silence says it all.

Eastern fundamentalism

Last night someone said to me, “So you were part of an Eastern form of fundamentalism.” For a moment I was taken aback. Me, a fundamentalist?

On this weblog I like to foam at the mouth about the dangers of fundamentalist religious attitudes. (By the way, did you hear the one about a man who walks into a bar and sits down between an alligator and a born-again Christian woman?)

Fundamentalism takes many forms, and is defined in various ways. Scott Bidstrup says:

In my view, a fundamentalist religion is a religion, any religion, that when confronted with a conflict between love, compassion and caring, and conformity to doctrine, will almost invariably choose the latter regardless of the effect it has on its followers or on the society of which it is a part.

Somewhat similarly, Bruce Lawrence says that fundamentalism is “the affirmation of religious authority as holistic and absolute, admitting of neither criticism nor reduction.”

Focusing on the root of the word, my take is that fundamentalists mistakenly assume that they have attained something fundamental, and cling to it with all their might no matter what. Even when evidence points to that supposedly fundamental thing as being contingent, subjective, shallow, or derivative.

Yesterday, during a meeting of our Salem churchless discussion group, I was talking about how someone had emailed me and asked if I was an initiate (a.k.a. “satsangi”) of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (an Indian-based spiritual organization). If so, she wanted to know “are you still in it or found another way?” I replied:

I am indeed a RSSB initiate—from way back in 1971. Last Sunday I was asked by a friend, “Do you still call yourself a satsangi?” Good question. I said, “I don’t know what to call myself now. The word ‘satsangi’ doesn’t mean much to me anymore. It’s just a word. I am still avidly interested in knowing who I am, and what the nature of ultimate reality or God is. That’s the important thing, not what I call myself.”

Have I found another way? Another good question. I don’t follow the RSSB vows with the same diligence I used to. I meditate for about an hour a day, not 2 ½ hours. I have an occasional glass of red wine. I experiment with alternative mantras.

Maybe I’m doomed. But I figure that if God is so picky and demanding that He/She/It will send me to hell, or deprive me of salvation, because of these seemingly small things, then maybe this isn’t a God that I want to be saved by. My wife forgives me for my faults (except when I forget to re-seal the whole wheat bread loaf in its plastic bag with a twisty tie—that’s unforgivable!). Won’t God?

My way now, whatever it is, is more open than it used to be. I’m less sure of myself. I’m more receptive to other people’s ideas and beliefs, so long as they aren’t dogmatic about them. I don’t believe that RSSB possesses the whole truth about the cosmos, though it might. I just don’t know.

It was after I told the group my “sins” against the RSSB commandments—less time spent meditating, some wine now and then, repeating a different mantra than I was taught—that the Eastern fundamentalism comment was made. Interesting. I’d always thought of these more as rigid rules rather than as manifestations of fundamentalism.

But I readily admitted that Eastern religions are as prone to fundamentalism as are Western religions. In the case of RSSB, or Sant Mat, the rigidity doesn’t come so much from dogmatic adherence to scripture as from a belief that the guru who heads the organization is a God-man.

When God speaks, you’d better jump! However, the problem with purported scriptural or personal God talk is that it’s impossible to know from what source the words really spring. Divine or human? Can’t tell.

So the reasonable thing to do is to keep an open mind. God talk always comes to us through a human writing or voice. Thus it is most likely that “God” actually is a member of Homo sapiens who honestly but erroneously believes that God is speaking through him, or is deceiving us about the source of his all-too-human revelation.

Like I said, though, you just don’t know. And that “don’t know” is what separates fundamentalism from genuine spirituality. Fundamentalists deny their not-knowing. Genuinely spiritual people humbly admit to it.

For several decades I was a true believer. I didn’t meditate for two and a half hours a day, using the mantra I was given by the guru, eschewing even a drop of alcohol, because I was experiencing a greater degree of spiritual realization via these disciplines. No, I was doing these things because I never thought of questioning them.

I was a fundamentalist. Obedient, dogmatic, unscientific. I liked to say that I was a spiritual scientist conducting the experiment of meditation. But I didn’t question why the results I was getting weren’t what was hypothesized. Nor was I open to altering the experiment based on those results, as any genuine scientist would have done.

My eyes are open now. Of course, a RSSB fundamentalist would say that I’ve been blinded by my ego, or maya, or mental machinations, or bad karma. Maybe. I don’t know.

All I know is that mystery has come to seem fundamental to me, not particular rules, commandments, dogmas, or theologies.

I’m alive. Wow!

I’ve been having a strange sensation recently: I’m alive. It’s accompanied by: One moment I won’t be. Amazing.

What’s even more amazing is how many days there have been out of the total I’ve lived (21,065) when I didn’t have this sensation. I took life for granted. I didn’t envision my own non-existence.

Maybe it’s taking getting older and passing the 21,000 day mark to begin to appreciate the marvel of being able to appreciate anything.

I’ll be walking the dog, or standing in Tai Chi class, or getting out of bed in the morning, and suddenly I’ll be struck with a realization—not a thought, not an emotion, but a knowing—that there will come a time when it will be the last time I’ll do that thing. Or anything.

Maybe this sensation is the most genuine understanding of the mysteries of life that I’ll ever have. If so, I’m appreciative. Not that I understand anything about those mysteries; but at least I feel a deep sense of awe about the fact that I am able to not understand.

I could have been nothing at all. I could never have existed. And one day I will be just that: nothing at all and non-existent. Bodily, at least. Yet for now, this moment, I am. I am alive, I am conscious, I exist.

Which is far out. So far out, I can’t even begin to comprehend the billions-year-long series of astonishments that combined to bring me to be alive at this place and this time.

The big bang fourteen billion years ago. The formation of stars and their destruction as supernovae to form the heavy elements of which I’m made. The coagulation of Sol-orbiting particles into this Earth. The sparking into existence of primitive life. The evolution of that spark into a rich conflagration of species that have flamed up and burned out over many hundreds of millions of years, with one continuing trail of life culminating in the entity that is me.

It’s just too freaking unlikely to be true. Yet, it is. Here I am. As you are. Isn’t that amazing?

I wish I could say that this insight has made me a better person, that I live life more deeply now, that I cherish every moment. It hasn’t, and I don’t. Still, I feel that even though I’m no closer to grokking the mystery of the cosmos, the darkness is more apparent to me.

Blind and stumbling around, I marvel at the pain of sharp corners and the relief of soothing softness. I can’t see what’s really there, but at least I know that I can’t see. Enlightenment would be nice. Absent that, I’m happy with endarkenment

Beats the absence of either. Envoidenment.

That could well be where I’m heading after death. Who knows? None of us do, until after we die. And then there might be no knowing of anything, including death.

So I’m left with a feeling that I might call gratitude if I knew that there was an entity I could be grateful to. “God” is just three letters for me. An abstract idea, not a clear and present reality.

It isn’t so much gratitude, thankfulness, or appreciation as a simple Wow! To feel my fingers typing these words on my new laptop, to see my wife chopping vegetables in the kitchen, to hear our dog settling into her post dinner curled-up lassitude with a canine burp—it’s amazing.

From the big bang to this in 13.7 billion years of never-ending wow’s, almost all of which occurred outside the ken of sentient beings. And now here I am, a sentient being, alive, conscious, participating in all this. For a while, until I die and participate in something else.

Wow!

Take your dose of Daily Afflictions

You’ve got to love a self-help book that advises, “It’s not whether I arrive; it’s how I lose my way.” Along with, “My life is worthless, but it’s mine.” And, “The future is full of possibilities that I must shoot in the head.”

In this world of organic antioxidant green tea, Andrew Boyd’s Daily Afflictions is a refreshing blast of lukewarm stale coffee. With a cigarette butt on the bottom. The back cover warns what awaits the reader:

In Daily Afflictions, affirmational bromides become Boyd’s Trojan horse—for a Nietzschean text of dark truths and painfully hard-won wisdom. Attractively designed for desperate readers on the run, Boyd’s bitter pills are an unbeliever’s guide to the realm of Higher Truth. And they might even make you laugh along the way.

Yes, absolutely. This book is one of my churchless favorites. It is cynical, ironic, existential, mystical, and best of all, true. Most slim volumes filled with pithy wisdom that you find around bookstore cash registers make me want to barf. They’re too sickly sweet to keep down.

Daily Afflictions, on the other hand, urges me to puke. Hypocrisy, false hope, self-delusion, get it all out. That’s real. Boyd’s alter ego is Brother Void. His peak mystical experience wasn’t exactly that of being embraced by the light:

The fabric of the air gave way. An immense field of horror spread before him. And from within him a terrible emptiness rose to meet it, hemorrhaging through the room, into the night, to the zeniths of space and time. Now go, go, go. Don’t turn away. Go through it, follow it, sail right on into it. And he dove forward like a reckless cone of life, leaving behind all he had ever known or wished for.

Excerpts from the book can be found on the Daily Afflictions web site. I particularly like “Skeptical Mysticism.” Boyd hits it right on the bull’s-eye of unbelieving belief.

You often hear about believers who have a crisis of faith. But what of the skeptics among us who have a crisis of doubt?...I am One with a God I do not believe in.

(For another perspective on Daily Afflictions, this review in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s “Daily Cardinal” is worth a read.)

Does God play favorites? I doubt it.

It’d be wonderful if God favored some people over others. So long as I was among them. Otherwise, I’d be on the outside of God’s Favor Party, wishing that I was part of the in-crowd.

As I’ve noted before, and surely will again, it’s amazing how almost every religion believes that its adherents are the only favored ones. Jews are a chosen people. Christians have been singled out for salvation. Muslims are beneficiaries of the ultimate revelation.

Eastern religions are less prone to believing in favoritism, but even in Buddhism there is the assumption that following the Buddha’s teachings is the best way to escape samsara and suffering. So if you’re not fortunate enough to be a Buddhist, you’ll be more likely to keep treading the wheel of reincarnation rather than relaxing in Nirvana land.

In John Horgan’s book, “Rational Mysticism,” this I’m-special attitude is called “the scandal of particularity.” He attributes the term to religious scholar Huston Smith, who in an interview with Horgan said that this refers:

To the doctrine that God’s doings can focus like a burning glass on particular times, places, and people(s)—in the interest, to be sure, of intentions that embrace human beings universally.

Horgan says, “To my mind, the scandal of particularity is the root of all religious evil. The conviction of certain individuals and peoples that they are divinely chosen leads to religious self-righteousness, fanaticism, intolerance. Also, what kind of God would play favorites? If such a God exists, do we really want to worship Him?”

Good question. Like Horgan, I find it difficult to believe that the marvelously consistent and all-embracing laws of nature have been created by a capricious God. Science has found that impartiality rules the universe. Gravity and electromagnetism don’t play favorites.

Horgan rejects as delusional any mystical vision, or derived spiritual doctrine, tainted by the scandal of particularity. “All of us must be God’s sons and daughters, or none of us. All are chosen—or damned—or none.”

Yes, I like this choice of all or none. It’s a 50-50 proposition, assuming that the alternatives are equally likely. But if I assume that God looks with favor only upon a single religion or spiritual path, then my odds of becoming buddies with divinity are slim. With so many options to choose from, how am I going to figure out which has earned a thumbs up from God?

In addition, there is something deeply paradoxical about considering both that I’m one of God’s chosen few, and that in humility I’m on my way to becoming one with the One. It’s going to be hard to discard my ego after feeling so special.

In 1971 I was initiated by an Indian guru, Charan Singh, into a very special group of God’s chosen souls. For many years I enjoyed the thought that out of six billion people on Earth, I was one of a million or so who had been given a “Get Out of Maya Free” card.

You couldn’t earn this card through any thought or action in this lifetime. No, either you were born deserving of it, or you weren’t. The guru spoke of the “marked souls” that God wanted to be brought back to Him.

Every saint is sent into this world for particular souls—allotted souls, and those souls alone will come to him. They alone will have faith in him. They alone will be receptive to his teachings. They alone will practice meditation and go back to the Father. So it is always with the grace of the Father that a disciple is drawn to the Master.

Well, who knows? This could be true. By now those lines reek of the scandal of particularity to me. Maybe I’m saved and my wife isn’t. Maybe I’m deserving and she isn’t. Maybe I’m God’s favorite and she isn’t.

But I doubt this is true. Even more: I hope it isn't.

“Be Still and Know that I am God” DVD—not still enough for me

I surprised myself, walking out of Hollywood Video with a rental DVD about Christian contemplative prayer. “Be Still and Know That I am God” appealed to me because I’m a big fan of The Cloud of Unknowing, a medieval text that inspired the modern Christian centering prayer movement.

The DVD disappointed me, though. My suspicions were aroused when I read the back cover and didn’t see any mention of leaders of the centering prayer movement that I was familiar with, like Thomas Keating or M. Basil Pennington.

When I watched the film I understood why. “Be Still” doesn’t preach the glory of genuine stillness. Rather, it advocates a half-assed stillness. True, the film emphasizes the virtue of listening to God, as contrasted with speaking to God through prayer and such.

But the “listening” is limited to the message of scripture, rather than a genuine empty receptivity. One speaker said that God will never go against the words of the Bible, so if you receive an inner communication that doesn’t reflect scripture, you shouldn’t trust it.

I saw people reading passages from the Bible. Then they’d re-read them. Four times. Whatever lines struck you the most, you were supposed to focus on. Whatever your mind mentally highlights after reading scripture, that’s supposedly God’s personal communication to you.

Whoopee. I don’t consider this to be close to what meditation or centering prayer is really about. If getting an aha! feeling after reading something interesting brought you closer to God, I’d be in his lap by now. So far as I can tell, I’m not.

Promoters of true Christian contemplative centering prayer say that it’s desirable to become a lot stiller than the “Be Still” DVD teaches. Basically, the idea is that a single word (The Cloud of Unknowing advocates one syllable) be repeated until there are no other thoughts in the mind.

So, the method of centering prayer bears a lot of resemblance to mantra meditation. Buddhists, Hindus, and other forms of Eastern philosophy are right at home with this type of Christian contemplation.

Not surprisingly, this freaks out Christian fundamentalists. They figure that if a Zen monk or Yogi ascetic does it, it’s got to be devil-inspired. Thus even the mild stillness urged upon Christian faithful by this DVD is too much for Brian Flynn, who warns “Be Still and Know…that you are being deceived.”

The Achilles heel of contemplative prayer has always been its lack of biblical support. The choice is clear, we either come to God on his terms or any way man sees fit. Coming to God through a practice taught by mystics during the Dark Ages which they borrowed from eastern religions is not coming to God on His terms.

I left the New Age to escape practices like these, because I knew they lead to deception. I am not going to stand by and watch while my brothers and sisters in Christ fall into the same trap. The participants in this DVD are in scriptural error and must be confronted. No matter how much these modern day mystics try to attain the silence they will never receive silence from me.

Good god. Poor Brian. My namesake has so little faith, he doesn’t trust that God has the power to speak to us in any way he wishes. In words. Or wordlessly. Through the Bible. Or any other writing. With the aid of a mediator. Or directly to the soul.

Brennan Manning is cited in the acknowledgements at the end of the film, but, I believe, doesn’t appear in it (I didn’t watch every minute of the DVD). A website out to expose the dangers of contemplative spirituality shares some excerpts from Manning’s writings. He makes a lot of sense to me.

The first step in faith is to stop thinking about God at the time of prayer. Contemplative spirituality tends to emphasize the need for a change in consciousness. We must come to see reality differently.

Choose a single, sacred word. Repeat the sacred word inwardly, slowly, and often. Enter into the great silence of God. Alone in that silence, the noise within will subside and the Voice of Love will be heard.

I can understand why right-wing Christian fundamentalists are scared of such talk. Lord, imagine what would happen if the voice of love began to be heard by them. I don’t think they’d be able to say that God wants a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, more deaths from AIDS because condoms are sinful, or the death penalty.

Yoism, an open source religion

Hey, it works for Linux, the alternative to Windows. So why not apply open source principles to the creation of a new-time religion? Out with dogmatism and hierarchy; in with freedom and independence.

Such is the allure of Yoism, which bills itself as the world’s first open source religion. Thanks to a link sent to me by Church of the Churchless visitor Steve, I’ve been able to browse around the intriguing cyberhalls of Yoism and get a feel for the Almighty Yo.

Yo, I learned, is “the Infinite Unknowable Essence from which all that we experience manifests.” All right, I can get behind that. I’m suspicious of anyone who claims to know what God is like, but once you start using words like “infinite” and “unknowable,” you’re starting to make mystical nonsense—the only way to go when it comes to the Ultimate.

There’s proof for the existence of Yo. And it makes pretty good sense. Or, nonsense. Below is the core Yoist conclusion. It is founded on scientific fact. The new physics—quantum theory, in particular—does indeed tell us that the seeming obviousness of the everyday world emanates from a wildly mysterious foundation. Yo.

In aiming to create models of Truth/Reality that are consistent with the world of direct experience, the scientists have now done something that the words in their scientific lexicon can't fully describe. They have shown that the experienced world is, indeed, maintained by/supported by/generated from an unseen world.

This unseen world manifests as the collective human experiential world in a lawful, stable, and consistent manner that, as our knowledge advances, is increasingly predictable, is independent of any individual's wishes and biases, outlasts our death or lapses in consciousness.

In contrast, our individual experiential worlds appear to fluctuate from individual to individual or, within one individual's experience, it fluctuates from moment to moment, mood to mood, or state to state. And the only world each of us knows (the world of our individual personal, direct experience) appears to end when the individual dies.

Thus, our fragile, unstable, fluctuating, personal experiential worlds are produced by (emanate from) an inconceivably huge, profoundly stable, foundational field of space/matter/time that manifests following its own rules or patterns of action, which we discern and call its "laws."

From the above, it isn’t surprising that Yoism finds a compatible philosophical partner in Buddhism. However, there is a refreshing eclecticism in the Inspirational Writings of Yo. I was pleased to find that two of my favorite sacred teachings made it into the collection: Kissing Hank’s Ass and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

The Book of Yo is the continually evolving product of Yoism’s Open Source Truth Process.

By "Truth" we simply mean the clearest expression of a system of ideas and beliefs that is most consistent with reality as it is directly experienced. Ours is a truth that you can test and experience directly, with your own senses and mind. Our truth is not based on narrow human authority (dogma, received wisdom, and imposed truths). Rather, it is based on the broad authority of the collective human experience of being-in-the-world, i.e., the human experience of reality.

Sounds good to me. Yo! Check it out.