Church of the Churchless

Mel Gibson’s passion of drunken anti-Semitism

Ah, more evidence of how fervent Christian fundamentalism converts people into jerks. First we hear that Mel Gibson, he of “The Passion of the Christ” fame, has been arrested for drunken driving.

“Well,” I think, “that shows Gibson has human failings like everyone else. Hopefully this will knock him off his holier-than-thou religious horse.”

But then a review of the arresting officer’s report finds that Gibson went on an anti-Semitic tirade when he was arrested. According to TMZ.com:

The report says Gibson then launched into a barrage of anti-Semitic statements: "F*****g Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." Gibson then asked the deputy, "Are you a Jew?"

The Jewish Anti-Defamation League, among many others, had serious concerns about anti-Semitism that seemed to be evident in “The Passion of the Christ.” Diane Sawyer asked Mel Gibson about these accusations in a 2004 interview.

Sawyer asks, “Are you anti-Semitic?” Gibson says, “No, of course not...For me, it goes against the tenets of my faith…To be anti-Semitic is to be un-Christian, and I’m not.”

Right, Mel, you’re not. A true Christian, that is. Like lots of fundamentalists, Gibson talks the spiritual game a hell of a lot better than he plays it. Here is the mug shot of Hypocrisy.

Listening to conservative talk radio this evening, I was surprised to hear little sympathy for Gibson. Not many were buying the theory that his anti-Semitic rantings were caused by his drunkenness.

I agree. I haven’t been drunk since my high school days. But I remember that guys who were jerks before they got drunk turned into bigger jerks after downing a six-pack. Angry guys got angrier. Funny guys got funnier. Alcohol brought out what was inside them.

So I find it hard to believe that a devout loving Christian with no anti-Semitic leanings would, upon being arrested for drunken driving, yell “F*****g Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."

“F***** cops!” I could believe. Not “F***** Jews.”

Let’s raise a glass, then, to one more in a long line of crusading moralistic fundamentalists whose Christianity is loudly evident on their lips but sadly absent from their hearts.

Mel Gibson has entered a recovery program. I wish him the best of luck in getting free of dependence on alcohol. And also, dependence on Catholicism. Neither are doing him any good.

[Next day update: today Gibson admitted to making anti-Semitic remarks but denies that he is an anti-Semite. Interesting. Does this mean that he now will admit that he made a pro-Christian movie, but will deny that he is a Christian? The Jewish Anti-Defamation League finds Gibson's protestations of "I said it but I didn't mean it" unconvincing. I agree.]

Wings of love fly in two directions

This afternoon I rolled out of my nap bed, glanced at the pile of overly devotional books that I’ve culled from my bookcase, and decided to pick up the topmost title: “On Wings of Love,” by Madeleine.

It was published in 1972 by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) in South Africa. I’ve got the first (and likely only) edition, which constituted 1,000 numbered copies. Mine is #919. For that reason alone, this previously unread book is now a keeper.

For another reason also: Madeleine, whose last name isn’t revealed, is a poetess of blunt words and intense passion. A foreword by Janak Puri notes that this twenty-something (who now is, or would be, a late-50’s or early-60’s something) is a South African whose love poetry flows from a bottomless well of devotion to Charan Singh, her spiritual Master.

I was initiated by Charan Singh in 1971, so Madeleine and I are of the same RSSB generation. Most people would say that we are entirely different in other ways, however. Madeleine is a devotional “bhakti” through and through, while my spiritual bent is much more in the meditational “jnana” tradition.

Reading some of her poems, though, I’d have to differ with anyone who says that we are markedly different. Madeleine’s wings of love fly her in one direction, mine in another. Yet we both love the ultimate reality who has no name, but gets called many things, including “God.”

I know this for a fact, because while I only know Madeleine through her words, I know me from the inside. And I’ve felt her feelings about the guru Charan Singh, if not with the same intensity.

In January 1978 I flew out of the Punjab’s Amritsar airport, having spent two weeks in India at the headquarters of RSSB—a.k.a. “the Dera.” Before that I’d never seen Charan Singh in person. Looking out the plane’s window at the snow-covered Himalayas, I remember thinking, “Master, I don’t want to have any more thoughts of my own; they are all yours from now on.”

This passage is from the last of Madeleine’s poems:

Indeed, I wish my love were so true,
That if I had a thousand heads
I would cut them all off –
And then I might submit
Not one – but a thousand! – at your Feet!

So I believe that it’s false to make a hard and fast distinction between “bhaktis” and “jnanis.” Each variety of spiritual seeker aims at union with the ultimate, love. That longing gets expressed in different ways. Some people, like Madeleine, express themselves emotionally. Other people, like me, express themselves in a more detached manner.

But I can tell you that the un-feelable feeling or un-thinkable thought that underlies those varying sorts of expressions is the same. I know this because I’ve felt deep emotion for someone I considered at the time to be a God in human form, and I’ve thought deep ideas about formless mystery.

The root from which both states of mind sprout is the same. I’m sure of that. However, the wings of love do fly in different directions even though the goal—unity with the ultimate—is shared by bhaktis and jnanis.

Madeleine perceived God in a person, Charan Singh. She longed for the guru’s glance, his attention, his presence. I can’t do that any more. I long for what lies beyond what I know now, recognizing that for all I know, the “beyond” could be right here, right now.

Astrophysicist Arthur Eddington said about the cosmos, “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.” And whatever it is, I love it. Or at least, I want to love it--to unite with it so fully that I am it.

That love necessarily takes a much different form from Madeleine’s, because you don’t write poems to the unknown, wait by your mailbox for a letter from the unknown, or fly off to India to sit at the feet of the unknown.

Alan Watts puts it nicely in his “The Wisdom of Insecurity.”

To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run. The same is true of life and of God. The present phase of human thought and history is especially ripe for this “letting go.” Our minds have been prepared for it by this very collapse of the beliefs in which we have sought security.

From a point of view strictly, if strangely, in accord with certain religious traditions, this disappearance of the old rocks and absolutes is no calamity, but rather a blessing. It almost compels us to face reality with open minds, and you can only know God through an open mind just as you can only see the sky through a clear window. You will not see the sky if you have covered the glass with blue paint.

…To discover the ultimate Reality of life—the Absolute, the eternal, God—you must cease to try to grasp it in the forms of idols. These idols are not just crude images, such as the mental picture of God as an old gentleman on a golden throne. They are our beliefs, our cherished preconceptions of the truth, which block the unreserved opening of mind and heart to reality.

…what religion calls the vision of God is found in giving up any belief in the idea of God.

Fly away from belief on the wings of love. You just might find God in the empty sky of nothingness.

Evolution is sacred, religion is profane

Here are two books. One fills me with reverence for the creative power that caused life to appear on Earth and continues to guide the course of every living being. The other elevates man above all things, profanely denying the reality of the Source that created and sustains us.

That’s why I just finished reading Richard Dawkins’ “The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution” and hardly ever pick up the Bible. Truth inspires me. Fables don’t.

Unfortunately for the propagation of truth, Dawkins’ book is a challenging read. It won’t appeal to those who resonate with this Stephen Colbert-inspired summation of how life developed on Earth: “God made us in seven days. Case closed. What’s so difficult to understand about that?”

Evolution is complicated. I looked at every page of “The Ancestor’s Tale,” but I skipped over the excessively technical parts. It was the big picture that I primarily was interested in, not the details. Which is, in one line:

We all come from one.

A single ancestor (Dawkins says “concestor,” or common ancestor) of all surviving life forms on this planet.

Backward chronology in search of ancestors really can sensibly aim towards a single distant target. The distant target is the grand ancestor of all life, and we can’t help converging upon it no matter where we start—elephant or eagle, swift or salmonella, wellingtonia or woman.

…As things stand, it appears that all known life forms can be traced to a single ancestor which lived more than 3 billion years ago…back to the universal progenitor of all surviving organisms, probably resembling some kind of bacterium.

That’s humbling, isn’t it? Trace your family tree back 3.5 billion years and you encounter your primal bacterial parent. More recently, as this Wikipedia article illustrates, your ancestors were plants, fungi, and sponges. Then sea squirts, and lampreys.

Looking backward from the present, Dawkins’ “Rendezvous 1” is our first meeting with members of another species. Actually, two species: chimpanzees and bonobos. For about six million years ago humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos shared a common ancestor, and about two million years ago bonobos split off from the chimp line (“mya” in this figure from the book means “millions of years ago”).

What did this common ancestor look like? Dawkins’ answer was an eye-opener for me, because I had never questioned the over-simplification, “We’re descended from the apes.”

"The prudent answer is that Concestor 1 was more like a chimpanzee, if only because chimpanzees are more like the rest of the apes than humans are. Humans are the odd ones out among apes, both living and fossil. Which is only to say that more evolutionary change has occurred along the human line of descent from the common ancestor, than along the lines leading to the chimpanzees.

We must not assume, as many laymen do, that our ancestors were chimpanzees. Indeed, the very phrase ‘missing link’ is suggestive of this misunderstanding. You still hear people saying things like, ‘Well, if we are descended from chimpanzees, why are there still chimpanzees around?’"

Because we aren’t descended from chimpanzees. We’re descended from the common ancestor of both humans and chimpanzees, Concestor 1. Amazingly, Dawkins’ pilgrimage to the dawn of evolution requires only 39 such rendezvous with common ancestors until we meet the Eubacteria.

What is the proof that this actually happened? Dawkins lays out the evidence, which extends far beyond the fossil record.

If every fossil were magicked away, the comparative study of modern organisms, of how their patterns of resemblances, especially of their genetic sequences, are distributed among species, and of how species are distributed among continents and islands, would still demonstrate, beyond all sane doubt, that our history is evolutionary, and that all living creatures are cousins. Fossils are a bonus.

In the July 17, 2006 issue of TIME magazine Francis Collins, a genome mapper and evangelical biologist, explains why he, as a devout Christian, accepts the reality of evolution. The article, “Reconciling God and Science,” says:

Did Collins think it possible that all species are products of evolution—except for humanity, which God created separately?...That notion “gets you into a series of real problems,” he [Collins] replied. He sketched one out: the human genome contains nonfunctional elements in the precise spot where they can be found on the chromosomes of lower animals.

If God was creating humans afresh, Collins asked, “why would he insert a pseudo-gene that has lost its ability to do anything in the same place that it appears in a chimp?” Barring evolution, “you’re forced to the conclusion that God was trying to mislead us and test our faith—and I have trouble with that kind of conjecture.”

So any religion worth believing in has to meld its theology with the theory of evolution. Anyone who believes in God has to accept that the creative power works through processes of random mutations and natural selection over billions of years. Instantaneous creation is a fantasy.

A fantasy that deserves to be discarded. Even by—no, especially by—the religious faithful. For how is it possible to love the Creator without embracing the truths that science has revealed about creation? To my mind, it is heresy to substitute subjective human ideation for natural God-made reality.

Especially when that reality is so much more magnificent than the fables in the Bible and other holy books. Evolution points to the unity of all life, a brotherhood, sisterhood, and neuterhood that binds each human being to every other Homo sapiens, and each member of all the species on Earth to every other form of life.

Through our DNA we are connected to chimps, star fish, daisies, sea gulls, centipedes, and coral. We may also be united on some spiritual level to a God who is not of this world, but that is merely a hypothesis.

Evolutionary theory directs us toward reality—the oneness of life on Earth. What could be more sacred than that?

Turn on, tune in, or drop out?

I came of age in the 60’s, so “turn on, tune in, drop out” resonates with me. But now I’m more interested in exploring the spiritual, rather than psychedelic, implications of these words.

It’s always dangerous to reduce complexities to dualities. But I’m always ready and eager to try. It seems to me that most spiritual seekers are either turn-on’ers or tune-in’ers. I belong to the latter camp, so if my description of these options seems to favor tuning, that’s the reason.

Tune-in’ers are trying, obviously, to tune in to something. God. Spirit. Cosmic truth. Ultimate reality. Buddha nature. Tao. Pure consciousness. Whatever they call it, it’s capable of being contacted. Right here, right now.

That big It often is considered to be all-pervasive, omnipresent, foundational. There’s no getting around it. Or over it. Or under it. It’s the essence of all that exists, so the problem doesn’t lie in locating it. It’s in attuning oneself to the divine presence.

This can happen in many ways. Meditation. Mindfulness. Love. Compassion. However it happens, somehow the consciousness of a tune-in’er is transformed into a receiving set for a more meaningful station of reality, sort of like changing the channel from MTV to PBS.

Turn-on’ers, by contrast, consider that divinity can’t be perceived without a cosmic switch being thrown to the “on” position. And that can’t happen from our end. It requires the hand of a mediator, someone who intercedes for us and produces enlightenment where before there was only endarkenment.

Jesus, for example. Or a guru, angelic presence, avatar, master, goddess, spirit guide—believers put their trust in many personages who, they hope, are capable of lifting a fallen soul to the spiritual heights. Often all that is required is faith in the intercessionary power. To believe is to be saved.

Now, tuning-in is a much more scientific approach to seeking the Meaning of It All than is turning-on. Scientists don’t pray, “Laws of nature, please manifest yourselves so we can discern your presence.” No, they assume that reality is always there to be realized.

In other words, the truth is out there. It doesn’t play hide and seek. Those with the eyes to see, perceive it. Ultimate reality isn’t standing in the dark with a finger on the light switch, waiting for a spiritual seeker to utter the right words. “Abracadabra.” “Namu abida butsu.” “Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” “Open sesame.”

Today I had an urge to clean up several bookcases. I took a look at the many religious, mystical, spiritual, and philosophical books sitting in my office and an extra bedroom. I got a queasy feeling.

Many of them meant nothing to me anymore. They were relics of bygone days. My turn-on days. My devotional days. The days when I envisioned that a Big Guy Upstairs was watching over me and was going to press my spiritual elevator’s “up” button.

Sometime. Any time now. Soon, for sure. Still waiting. No problem. Got plenty of time. Button will be pressed. Upper floor of consciousness will appear. Sometime. Any time now.

Fuck it. I’m taking the stairs.

The turn-on books are sitting in stacks on the floor. I’ve got to decide whether to store them, sell them, or give them away. They don’t interest me anymore.

I’ve always been a tune-in’er at heart. But for various reasons—laziness, longing for a father figure, whatever—there’s been a devotional turn-on’er side of me that hasn’t sat comfortably with my scientific tune-in’er side.

On an organizational level, the same tension is evident in the Sant Mat group, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), with which I’ve been associated for many years. I was attracted to the goal of attuning one’s soul with spirit, a.k.a. surat shabd yoga. Yet I also was repelled by RSSB’s teaching that this could only happen when the guru wants it to.

That struck me as anthropomorphic, unscientific, and fundamentalist. Christianity in another form, really. Instead of Jesus taking on your sins, the guru does. And you don’t move an inch on the spiritual path until the guru changes the stop light to green.

Consider these quotations from the July 2006 issue of “Spiritual Link,” the RSSB magazine:

This you have to understand, that you are nothing, but all belongs to the Master.

Without the Master we cannot make spiritual progress and without us he will not shower his grace.

So when the Master is in a good mood and he is ready to shower more grace on you, will you be ready, or will the opportunity pass you by?

The Master is the mediator between God and us—he knows what pleases him.

No one can leave this “land of slaves” without a Master. We cannot even begin our journey home until we have found one and received initiation from him.

All we need to do is trust and obey him.

Well, maybe. But I’ve read a lot of science books. And I’ve never heard it said, “To find out the truth about reality, all you need to do to trust and obey scientists.” No, what you have to do is study reality. Scientists can point the way to truth, but they don’t turn truth on or off for your benefit.

Trying to tune in to reality makes a lot of sense for me. Hoping that someone else will turn on reality for me doesn’t.

Of course, there’s another option. Drop out. Sounds appealing. As the linked article says, "Consciousness will always be one degree above comprehensibility."

Soul is still lost, but I’ve found my keys

I can’t say that I’ve experienced Zen’s Great Doubt. Or the Dark Night of St. John of the Cross. But I do know what it’s like to lose my keys. I’m hoping that this was a message from God. Or at least the Key Fairy.

Last Thursday afternoon I started to rush out the door, semi-late as usual, to drive to my martial arts class. I reached into my hip bag for my keys and found…nothing. Now, this lack of finding pretty much describes my daily search for my soul in meditation.

But the difference is that earlier in the day I’d had my keys in hand, so I knew that I’d lost something. Never having found my soul, so far as I can tell, I’m not bothered when it doesn’t turn up.

I was seriously irked, though, when I dashed around the house, looking in the usual suspect places for my keys, and came up empty. I remembered that in the morning I’d carried them out to the carport, thinking that I needed to move the Prius in order to get the mower out of the garage.

However, Laurel had driven the car into town. So I recalled that I’d gone back into the house to hydrate before tackling some field mowing and had left the keys inside. No doubt about it. Absolutely. For sure.

Which made it all the more irksome to be running around the house in circles, aware that I was increasingly late for my class, certain that if I looked here or there just one more time the keys would magically appear, because I was certain that they were somewhere inside and I couldn’t believe—refused to believe—that I wouldn’t be able to find them.

Until the realization hit me that I could either have the keys lost and completely miss my class, or have the keys lost while I enjoyed the portion of the class that I could still attend if I left right now. So, I dug up spare house and car keys. And left immersed in a mystery.

Driving to Salem I was mildly pleased that I’d been able to accept my lost condition. Part of me had wanted to stay home and search for the damn keys until I found them, because having lost them when I was sure that they couldn’t be lost was driving me crazy.

However, a saner part of me was saying , “Chill out, brother. You can look for them later. Now they’re lost. Later they’ll probably be found. And even if they aren’t, is that the end of the world?”

It turned out that Warren and Dave, my martial arts classmates, hadn’t even started by the time I got there. I told them my lost keys story. Warren responded with a lost key tale of his own. His involved looking all over the neighborhood, and then finding them close to where he began his search.

That story seemed to have some spiritual significance. I hoped mine would too. And, indeed, I believe it does. For my intuition was correct when I told Warren and Dave, “I suspect that it’s going to turn out that Laurel is behind my lost keys.”

When in doubt, blame the wife. Seemed reasonable at the time.

And even more reasonable when I got home, walked into the living room, and saw a note on the rug. With my keys sitting next to it! “We need to exchange our keys,” Laurel had sweetly written.

“What the hell!” I not so sweetly screamed. “I spent fifteen minutes looking for my keys, and you had them! What's this about an exchange? I don't have yours!”

It turned out that I’d dropped my keys in the hallway, just as I had thought. Laurel had forgotten that she’d put her own keys in a gym bag. So when she looked in her purse and couldn’t find them, she glanced around, saw my keys, and figured that they were hers.

The lesson here—and this is where I find (or manufacture) some mystical meaning to all this—is that there was no way I was ever going to find my car keys the way I’d been going about it. I could have looked fruitlessly for hours, because my assumption that they must be where I had left them was wrong.

Likewise, people think that divinity can be found by following the instructions of a holy book or holy person. “Look here, do this, and bingo, you’ll find your soul.” Or God.

I doubt it. The most believable descriptions of enlightenment, satori, or God-realization—whatever you want to call it—are that it comes unexpectedly out of the blue, swoop! You can’t anticipate from which direction, or in what manner, because the Ultimate isn’t bound by directions. Or manners.

Anyway, I now have an increased confidence in the value of letting things stay lost when they can’t be found. Like keys. And souls. And God. Frantic searching doesn’t help if you’re looking in the wrong fashion.

It’s better to wait and trust that what has been lost will be found. The cosmos has a way of revealing itself. But on its own terms, not ours. I like to think that one day each of us will return to our spiritual home and say, just as I did, “Ah, finally. This is what I’ve been looking for.”

To find God, get off the mind road

Churches are big on mind roads. That’s what they want you to travel on. In the church’s theological car, of course. Propelled by faith that you’re eventually going to get to God. Driven by the savior, mediator, master, guru, or prophet who supposedly knows the territory.

Problem is, nothing travel-worthy is apparent apart from the belief that there is. That’s why it is a mind road, not a real road. The pavement is cobbled together from passages found in holy books, words heard from the mouths of holy teachers, images seen by eyes that have gazed upon holy places and icons.

Which are all in the mind of the believer. When the belief is gone, so is the mind road. Real roads aren’t so ephemeral. When I’m driving on I-5 from Salem to Portland, if I take my eyes off the road or allow my mind to daydream about a more pleasant activity, the road is still there.

Not so with a mind road. So the advice of the sincerest spiritual sages throughout the ages is to get off it, if you’re on one. As most people are. If you belong to an organized religion, you’re on a mind road. If you consider that you’re on a defined spiritual path, you’re on a mind road.

And it could be said that if you’re occupied with thinking about how to get off the dead end of an imaginary way to God, you too are on a mind road. “You” likely includes me as I write this, and you as you read this.

But there’s a big difference between some short ruts that lead straight into the wilderness of divine Mystery, and a four-lane freeway of theological speculation that goes on, and on, and on, leading nowhere but to Blind Faith.

Zen Buddhism is small on mind roads. Zen says that they don’t lead past the Gateless Barrier. I don’t know what this barrier is. If I did, I suppose I’d be beyond it. So I’ll stop traveling on my mind road and let Wu-men, a thirteenth century master of the Rinzai school, speak about another way.

“Mu” is Japanese. “Wu” is Chinese. The words roughly mean “without” or “have not.” Roughly is the operative adjective, as Wu-men explains.
-----------------------------

(From “The Gateless Barrier: the Wu-men Kuan,” translated and with a commentary by Robert Aiken)

A monk asked Chao-chou, “Has the dog Buddha nature or not?”
Chao-chou said, “Mu.”

Wu-men’s Comment:

For the practice of Zen it is imperative that you pass through the barrier set up by the Ancestral Teachers. For subtle realization it is of the utmost importance that you cut off the mind road. If you do not pass the barrier of the ancestors, if you do not cut off the mind road, then you are a ghost clinging to bushes and grasses.

What is the barrier of the Ancestral Teachers? It is just this one word “Mu”—the one barrier of our faith. We call it the Gateless Barrier of the Zen tradition. When you pass through this barrier, you will not only interview Chao-chou intimately.

You will walk hand in hand with all the Ancestral Teachers in the successive generations of our lineage—the hair of your eyebrows entangled with theirs, seeing with the same eyes, hearing with the same ears. Won’t that be fulfilling? Is there anyone who would not want to pass this barrier?

So, then, make your whole body a mass of doubt, and with your three hundred and sixty bones and joints and your eighty-four thousand hair follicles concentrate on this one word “Mu.” Day and night, keep digging into it. Don’t consider it to be nothingness. Don’t think in terms of “has” and “has not.” It is like swallowing a red-hot iron ball. You try to vomit it out, but you can’t.

Gradually you purify yourself, eliminating mistaken knowledge and attitudes you have held from the past. Inside and outside become one. You’re like a mute person who has had a dream—you know it for yourself alone.

Suddenly Mu breaks open. The heavens are astonished, the earth is shaken. It is as though you have snatched the great sword of General Kuan. When you meet the Buddha, you kill the Buddha. When you meet Bodhidharma, you kill Bodhidharma. At the very cliff edge of birth and death, you find the Great Freedom. In the Six Worlds and the Four Modes of Birth, you enjoy a samadhi of frolic and play.

How, then, should you work at it? Exhaust all your life energy on this one word “Mu.” If you do not falter, then it’s done! A single spark lights your Dharma candle.

Wu-men’s Verse:

Dog, Buddha nature—
the full presentation of the whole;
with a bit of “has” or “has not”
body is lost, life is lost.

Bush’s stem cell veto harkens back to the Middle Ages

Today President Bush vetoed legislation that would have loosened federal restrictions on embryonic stem cell research. In so doing he continued the not-so-fine tradition of elevating nonsensical religious doctrine above scientific fact and human compassion.

Here are some remarks from Sen. Arlen Specter that I caught on C-SPAN. I have to fault Specter for his lack of knowledge about Galileo (whose heresy was for claiming that the Earth revolves around the sun, not that it is flat), but otherwise his sentiments resonate with my churchless soul.

We have seen in our historical perspective where Galileo was imprisoned because he believed that the Earth was not flat, that Boniface the 8th stopped the dissection of cadavers which retarded medical science for centuries, where women were denied anesthesia by the Scottish Church in childbirth because it was God’s will that they not have that kind of relief.

And a century from now people will look back on what we are doing today in wonderment at how there could be any doubt about using these stem cells to save human lives and save human suffering.

Amen to that. There will come a time—and I hope it is much less than a century—when the sanctimoniousness of right-wing fundamentalists in the year 2006 will seem as bizarrely closed-minded as the Church’s indictment of Galileo in the year 1630 does now.

If you, a friend, or relative has diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, a spinal cord injury, or any of a host of other medical problems for which embryonic stem cell research holds great promise, come November remember that the Republican Party is anti-life.

As I wrote yesterday on my other weblog, Bush considers that using microscopic embryos for stem cell research, rather than discarding them, is murder. Yet there simply is no rational basis for believing that eight cells growing in a piece of lab equipment is a human life.

But reason and clear vision are deactivated in the minds of those who cling to theological fantasies. Which includes not only George Bush, but everyone else who elevates faith to an undeserved position on the scale of human values.

The faith that God is more pleased that a few embryonic cells remain frozen in an in vitro fertility clinic than used for research aimed at preventing human death and suffering obviously is a dangerously misguided faith.

Yet just as stem cells are able to become many different kinds of organs, so can faith morph into many different forms of superstition. The seemingly positive faith that “Jesus saves” and the clearly negative faith that “research on a microscopic embryo is murder” flow from the same well of gullibility.

We have not yet evolved out of a Middle Ages consciousness. Not by a long shot. Not so long as United States Senators can open up a book written in pre-scientific times and orate with a straight face, “I cannot vote for this bill because it is contrary to the Bible.”

The Inquisition is no longer with us in a manifest form. However, its spirit lives on in the narrow fundamentalist minds of a disturbingly large proportion of our nation’s leaders. Sadly, our President is among them.

Who’s afraid of this big bad blog?

This Church of the Churchless weblog doesn’t strike me as scary. Not like a big bad wolf. Pretty much all I do is say it as I see it. My most frequent utterance is “I don’t know.” For variety I try to express this un-profundity in alternative ways, but they all end up pointing at my metaphysical cluelessness.

My musings wouldn’t be threatening if it weren’t for a secondary theme: “I don’t know, and there’s no proof that you do either.” It’s the sentiment after the comma that strikes at the heart of organized religious pretension.

I have to assume that this is what galls the ecclesiastical authorities who represent Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the mystico-spiritual organization that I’ve been associated with for over thirty years and which I have much fondness for.

So much fondness, that I regularly take some time and trouble to critique RSSB’s failures to live up to its claim that it preaches a “science of the soul.” If I didn’t care about the organization I’d give it as much attention as I do to goings on with the Southern Baptists.

Another reason RSSB pops up in my posts fairly frequently is that I still have some connections with this group. As I wrote about back in February, Matt (a New Zealand RSSB initiate) and I collaborated on publishing a German translation of my first book, “God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder.”

The translation was of a shorter and simpler version, but it contained almost all of the quotations from books written by RSSB gurus and disciples that were in the original version. When “God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder” was published in 1995, six thousand copies of my book were purchased by RSSB for resale through its own distribution channels.

What I tried to do was show that mysticism can be a spiritual science, just as physics is a material science. The book didn’t appeal to everyone in RSSB, for sure. But it struck a chord with those who looked upon meditation more as a method for knowing ultimate reality than as devotion to a personal god or guru.

I didn’t mention back in February why I got involved in publishing the German translation. Matt had contacted some RSSB powers-that-be and asked if his translation could be copied and made available to German speaking disciples. They said, “No.”

I couldn’t leave it at that. I felt bad that Matt had put so much work into his translation, only to have it rejected by the group that he had primarily performed this service for. So I emailed Matt and told him that one way or another, we’d get “Wenn Gott flüstert, donnert es in der Schöpfung” published.

And we did. I ended up publishing the book under my own imprint, Adrasteia Publishing. I paid for the book design and setup costs. It’s a print on demand title made available through Lightning Source and thence to online bookstores like Amazon-Germany.

I priced the book most reasonably. Likely I’ll never make back the money I put into publishing it. Not that I care. Like Matt, I considered this project to be a gift to German speaking readers. Our payback wouldn’t be in dollars (or euros). I feel like I’ve already been well-compensated.

After the book was published RSSB was contacted once more. Could the book be made available through their distribution channels? After all, six thousand copies of the English version were bought and resold at cost by RSSB. Why not do the same on a smaller scale for the German translation?

This time a reason for “No” was given. “It’s because of Brian Hines’ Church of the Churchless blog.”

How ridiculous.

There are good reasons for rejecting a non-fiction book. Untrue. Uninteresting. Uninspiring. Unintelligible. However, rejecting a book because the author has a weblog where he writes about what he wrote about in the book—that doesn’t make sense to me.

Admittedly, I write about other subjects too. Including the aforementioned criticisms of Radha Soami Satsang Beas. Yet I always think back to the words of Charan Singh, the guru who initiated me: “Our critics are our best friends.” In science that is true. In religion it isn’t.

So RSSB has helped make the point that I dwell on in some of my posts. When the focus is on the messenger rather than the message, you know you’re in the domain of religion rather than science. If a revered guru says something, by itself that doesn’t make it right. If a heretical disciple says something, by itself that doesn’t make it wrong.

I’m with the X-files: the truth is out there. There’s nothing to fear but our failure to find it. And maybe not even that.

Wisdom from Carl Sagan: A pale blue dot

This is Earth from 4 billion miles away. In his book, “Pale Blue Dot,” Carl Sagan mused upon the meaning of this photo taken by Voyager 1 as it sped out of the solar system.

As senseless war rages in the Middle East and other places around the world, I urge you to take a few minutes and read his words:

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives.

The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.

It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.'

Thanks to The Huge Entity for introducing me to this image and Sagan’s thoughts, which I hadn’t been exposed to before. More information about the photo can be found here, where I learned that the stripe in which the Earth is embedded is a beam of light from the Sun.

Positive Atheism has a nice collection of additional Carl Sagan quotations. As someone who believes that spirituality minus science equals a bunch of religious crap, I resonated with Sagan’s skeptical attitude toward blind faith religiosity. Here are two examples:

In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. --Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP keynote address

Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? ... No other human institution comes close.
--Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, p. 30

And this moved me.

Contrary to the fantasies of the fundamentalists, there was no deathbed conversion, no last minute refuge taken in a comforting vision of a heaven or an afterlife. For Carl, what mattered most was what was true, not merely what would make us feel better. Even at this moment when anyone would be forgiven for turning away from the reality of our situation, Carl was unflinching. As we looked deeply into each other's eyes, it was with a shared conviction that our wondrous life together was ending forever. --Ann Druyan, Epilogue to Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium

Top ten signs you’re a fundamentalist Satsangi

I enjoyed reading “Top ten signs you’re a fundamentalist Christian.” That stimulated me to jot down my own list for Satsangis, a.k.a. followers of the contemporary Sant Mat movement.

It’s a work in progress. If you're acquainted with this philosophy, feel free to add on to the list via a comment, if you like.

I need to point out that when I say “you,” a few years ago I could have said “I.” For I know whereof I speak with this list, having been a fundamentalist Satsangi myself for many years.

Now I’ve seen the light. And I like to believe that as a result I’m closer to the light.

-------------------------

(10) You have never had a profound mystical experience yourself, and you don’t know any other initiates who have had one. But you’re convinced that this is the highest mystic path.

(9) You believe that rites and rituals are useless for attaining God-realization. Yet you go to satsang every Sunday, folding your hands and saying “radha soami” when you walk in the door.

(8) You consider that engaging in pilgrimages and visits to holy places are pointless religious practices. However, the trip you took to India to spend time at the Dera was a highpoint of your spiritual life.

(7) You feel the guru’s loving presence keeping you company throughout the day. However, when you aren’t thinking about the guru or doing the practices he enjoins, you aren’t aware of him. You never wonder, “If someone is only here when I imagine him, is he real?”

(6) You look down on deluded intellectuals, Vedantists, and jnanis who believe they can think their way to God-realization. You know this isn’t possible because you read thoughts in a Sant Mat book that said just that.

(5) You feel terrible if you don’t read the label on a box of cookies and inadvertently eat some egg whites. You never give money to street people, no matter what condition they’re in, because that would be interfering with their karma.

(4) You have worked diligently for years toward merging your soul with God’s spirit, establishing a direct personal relationship with the divine. However, if an impulse or intuition comes to you that isn’t given a thumbs-up by the Sant Mat books, you’re afraid it’s a trick of the “negative power.”

(3) You are grateful that you’ve broken free of traditional religious dogma that required you, without evidence, to have faith that a dead Son of God will save your soul after you die. Yet the only difference is, now you have the same unfounded faith in a living Son of God.

(2) You are committed to expanding your circle of love, compassion, and selfless service beyond the narrow confines of sectarianism. But almost all of your friends are satsangis. And you believe that it is much more important to perform seva for the guru at a local, regional, or national satsang center than to volunteer at a nursing home.

(1) You are absolutely sure that you’re on the direct path of light and sound back to God. Except, you have never seen the light. Or heard the sound. But that doesn’t matter, because the Bible tells you so. Oops, did I write “Bible”? I meant to say “Guru.”

Simple spirituality

I’m attracted to simplicity. My mind is complex, like most minds are. So in spite of this, or because of this, a great big “Yes!” resonates in my psyche when I come across seriously simple summations of spirituality. (Guess I should make that a “Yes-s-s-s!”)

“God is love.” Pretty good. But that’s too simple for me. And overly Hallmark cardish. I prefer Meister Eckhart’s way of putting it. A wonderful blend of simplicity and profundity.

The eye with which I see God is exactly the same eye with which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowledge, and one love.

Like Toby Johnson, I frequently begin and end my meditation with an attempt at grokking this appealing, yet elusive, two sentence mystic theology. I like how Eckhart unifies the seeker and what is sought, the seer and what is seen.

Also, knowledge and love, which are too often regarded as spiritual contraries rather than precisely the same phenomenon. How is it possible to truly love something or someone you don’t really know? And how is it possible to really know something or someone without uniting as completely as possible with it/them—the essence of love?

One is the simplest number. And the simplest spirituality. Religions adore “two,” “three,” or more. The Trinity always has seemed way too complex for me. Even the common metaphor of drop (soul), wave (spirit), and ocean (God) all being the same thing seems to excessively divide the ultimate unity that both science and mysticism point to.

“The eye with which I see God is exactly the same eye with which God sees me.” The same-sounding “eye” and “I” in this English sentence makes it a marvelous koan. Here I am, looking out at the world and inward at myself.

How astounding, this Eckhartian hypothesis that what is doing the looking is precisely what I’m looking for. And, how baffling. Yet that’s the nature of utter simplicity: formless, featureless, ungraspable, unrecognizable.

One and nothing sum to the same total. With one, there is nothing other. With nothing, there is only that one.

The mystic Greek philosopher Plotinus advises, “One must not make it [the One] two even for the sake of forming an idea of it.” Oops. I’ve been doing just that. But I figure that it is much better to think about the One than about the Many, even though my thinking is divisive.

There are ideas that turn you toward simplicity. There also are ideas that turn you toward complexity. By and large, you can tell the difference between spirituality and religion in just this fashion: how simple is the message being preached?

Religions shun the use of Occam’s Razor. They don’t want there to be simply one, for then what place would there be for priests, prophets, gurus, masters, and other mediators if no distance separates God’s eye and our eye?

I consider that true sages like Plotinus point us toward the truth within ourselves, while false teachers point us toward the truth that they say lies within them. Here are a couple of favorite Plotinus quotations from my book:

If you have become this, and seen it, and become pure and alone with yourself, with nothing now preventing you from becoming one in this way, and have nothing extraneous mixed within your self…if you see that this is what you have become, then you have become vision.

Be confident in yourself: you have already ascended here and now, and no longer need someone to show you the way. Open your eyes and see.

And:

This is the real goal for the soul: to touch and to behold this light itself, by means of itself. She does not wish to see it by means of some other light; what she wants to see is that light by means of which she is able to see. What she must behold is precisely that by which she was illuminated.

...How, then, could this come about? Eliminate everything [that is not light]!

Saying “the end” to Sant Mat fairy tales

I’ve got nothing against fairy tales. But there’s a time and place for them. Like, when my daughter was a pre-schooler and she was ready for bed.

They don’t belong in religion, as comforting as they may be. Of course, some would say that religions are nothing but fairy tales. Faced with the ogres of death, suffering, and meaninglessness, humans have conjured up magical spiritual “princes” who ride to the rescue of the soul.

All you need to do is believe.

I’m open to the possibility that there is more to spirituality than fantasy. Yet I’m also convinced that before we can know whatever reality may lie beyond the physical, it’s necessary to be firmly in touch with the reality right before our eyes.

Fantasy leads to fantasy. Reality leads to reality.

If I had believed in Christian fairy tales for thirty years, I’d be using the New Testament as an example of spiritual gullibility here at the Church of the Churchless. However, I’ve been a follower of Sant Mat—the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) branch, to be specific.

So it’s the Sant Mat fairy tales that interest me, along with many other fellow initiates who are similarly coming to realize that they had bought into beliefs that have nothing to do with genuine spirituality or mysticism, and everything to do with wanting magical happy endings.

Here’s how a RSSB picture book, “The Journey of the Soul,” ends. This is a wonderful book, written and illustrated by Victoria Jones, a friend of mine. I’m not criticizing the theory that it is possible for the soul to return to the Ocean of Light. But until it is realized as a reality, it’s simply a hypothesis to be researched through meditation or other means.

Yet many Sant Mat devotees swallow this faith’s teachings whole. Gulp!

Having learned that this leads to unpleasant religious indigestion—a swelling of the fantastical organs that makes movement toward truth difficult, if not impossible—a laudable critical examination seems to be taking place among those who want to separate spiritual wheat from the chaff.

Burp! Here are some examples.

From the Radha Soami Studies discussion group, a fascinating post: “Meeting with a Sant—The day Radhasoami Mat Died.” Manjit writes:

Indeed there many people who benefit from association with RS gurus. And this can be truly beautiful.

But, dare I say it, these are not 'true' seekers of the 'Truth' or the 'Absolute'. These are dualistic thrill seekers, bliss seekers.

There will always be a point, in a genuine & sincere seeker's life, where a choice is made to abandon the duality & projections of the RS path & guru. I'm certain of it. It will, nay MUST be found in the end, there never was a real 'guru' except one's own mind & being, and that IT is pathless & formless.

All the rest including guru, satsang, darshan, shabd-yoga etc will be found to be nothing but illusory duality, of no more relevance to the 'Absolute' than the biscuit that was eaten with tea this morning.

And from the ExSatsangi Support Group, an equally interesting message from an ex-RSSB representative whose family members were part of the inner circle surrounding Charan Singh, an RSSB guru: “RSSB.” He concludes with:

When I finally left RSS Beas I had a Great Doubt and some anger in what had trapped me in all those years and the habitual attachments just fell away.

I have of course to contend with a diminutive social life because I jettisoned my cult world view and the people there are not comfortable with free thinkers. I have family members who are unwilling to respond to questions about their life from their own true perspective. The mental straitjacket and the lack of joy which I see in their life is sad.

I have now settled in the Zen way of living our ordinary life attentively as the most dignified way to live.

Both writers consider that they are seeing more clearly now. I have no doubt that their commitment to seeking spiritual truth is as strong, or stronger, than before. I know that mine is, even though I’m considered a heretic by the RSSB faithful.

Well, it’s true that I’ve wandered off of the party-line Sant Mat path. But that’s because it wasn’t getting me to where I want to go: spiritual understanding, satori, enlightenment, nirvana, gnosis—whatever you want to call it. I had fallen into a state of mistaking fantasy for reality, concepts for experience, beliefs for truth, fairy tales for what-is.

I’ve described one of my own experiences that led to my saying “the end” to Sant Mat fairy tales in “Did I see God in first class?” To quote myself (one of my favorite activities):

I understand the allure of what Hindus call bhakti marg, salvation through love and devotion. Though much more inclined to the spiritual path of jnana (knowledge through meditation), I’ve got my bhakti tendencies and have been known to shed a tear at the thought or sight of a guru. But that was then. I believe that I’m wiser now.

Wiser, because I’ve concluded that if I have to think or emote my way to reality, this isn’t a reality worth having. When I let loose of an object, gravity takes it to the ground regardless of whether I’m thinking “Gravity is great” or feeling “I love gravity so much!” Gravity, like all the other laws of nature, just does what it does—automatically.

If there is a spiritual dimension to reality, it makes sense to me that higher laws of the cosmos also will operate naturally and spontaneously. When my inner vision is clear, I’ll experience them without effort, just as I open my eyes in the morning and effortlessly see a world guided by physical laws.

…If I have to believe in God in order to experience God, then that experience is of my own belief, not of God.

I’d be overjoyed to see God in human form. Heck, in any form. A formless form would be fine also. But I want this seeing to be unmistakable, crystal clear, impossible to be doubted. I don’t want to substitute imagination for the real thing.

Maybe I saw God in first class. Maybe. Maybe isn’t good enough. I want to be sure that God is more than, as the song goes, “just a slob like one of us.” Show me. Then I’ll believe, not before.

The glory of being spiritually lost

If you feel like you’re spiritually lost, be thankful. Smile. Laugh. Dance. Your lucky star is shining brightly on you. You’re way closer to the mystery we call “God” than those who believe that they’re on a well-marked path to the divine.

There’s no such thing. I’m not confident of much when it comes to religion and spirituality. But I’m quite sure that the road to God doesn’t have any white lines down the middle of it. You can’t see, feel, hear, smell, or touch it. The surest way to know if you’re off the track is to say, “Ah, this is the way.”

The cosmos doesn’t reveal its ultimate secret—whatever that might be—so easily. If there was a road map to God, or a guide who could take a seeker there, this reliable spiritual direction finder would have risen above the many spurious claimants whose cacophonous urges to “Follow me!” make the world’s religious bazaar so noisy.

For about thirty years I believed that I’d found a singular path to the divine. I thought that Sant Mat, in the guise of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, had it all. A living guru who served as a guide. A map of the mystic territory to be traversed. A meditative technique to move you along.

When it dawned on me that I wasn’t getting anywhere, nor, by their reports, were any other of the many fellow disciples that I regularly conversed with, I faced some choices: continue on with my seemingly progressless path; search for a path that showed more promise in taking me where I wanted to go; or embrace the path of pathlessness.

I’ve settled on the last option. Both my heart and my mind say Yes, Yes, Yes to it. For how long they’ve been making this utterance, I can’t say. Maybe my whole life. I don’t know when I wrote these scribbled words that were on a piece of paper that fell out of “The Bijak of Kabir” when I picked the book up this morning.

Lost. Get more lost. Further lost. So lost that I’ll never be able to find even myself. So lost I can’t even find the meaning of “lost.” Darker. Deeper. Where the wild things roam. The place that I’ve always avoided because it’s the place that I know I have to go. One day. On death day. I’m afraid to look into that hole. It will swallow me. I want to be eaten alive. So I won’t die again. There’s no avoiding it. But it’s the easiest thing to miss. The obvious always is.

I can tell you, it’s devilishly difficult to become spiritually lost. I mean, utterly lost. I keep finding paths in the wilderness of my mind. In my daily meditation I frequently find myself saying: “God damn it, I’m still following some tracks!”

Even when I finally seem to be lost—what a joy—I eventually realize that I’ve been following a trail marked “Lost.” I’m still on my way to somewhere, not nowhere.

Reading a book about pathlessness isn’t the same as being there. But “The Bijak of Kabir” encourages me to keep on looking for the emptiness that has no entrances, no exits, no ground, no air, no walls, no floor, no anything. And no nothing.

Here are some thoughts that are attributed to this 15th century North India mystic who eschewed all religions and didn’t write a word.

Seek the bird’s, the fish’s path. Kabir says, both are hard. I offer myself to an image: the great being beyond boundaries and beyond beyond.

Heaven and hell are for the ignorant,
not for those who know Hari.
The fearful thing that everyone fears,
I don’t fear.
I’m not confused about sin and purity,
heaven and hell.
Kabir says, seekers, listen:
Wherever you are
is the entry point.

Pandit, you’ve got it wrong.
There’s no creator or creation there,
no gross or fine, no wind or fire,
no sun, moon, earth, or water,
no radiant form, no time there,
no word, no flesh, no faith,
no cause and effect, nor any thought
of the Veda. No Hari or Brahma,
no Shiva or Shakti, no pilgrimage
and no rituals. No mother, father
or guru there. Is it two or one?
Kabir says, if you understand now,
you’re guru, I’m disciple.

Remembering the empty, the easy,
a light broke out.
I offer myself to a being
based on nothing.

Drop family, drop status,
seek the nonexistent space,
destroy the shoot, destroy the seed,
reach the unembodied place.

Knowledge in front, knowledge in back,
knowledge right and left.
The knowledge beyond knowledge
is my knowledge.

Moving within limits: man.
Moving without limits: saint.
Dropping both limits and non-limits—
unfathomable thought.

In the wood where lions
don’t tread
and birds don’t fly,
Kabir ranges
in empty meditation.

Use the strength of your own arm,
stop putting hope in others.
When the river flows through your own yard,
how can you die of thirst?

They searched and searched, searched some more—
it just kept disappearing.
After all that search, when they couldn’t find it,
they gave up and said, “Beyond.”

Buddha enlightens Jesus about the self

A meeting between Jesus, the Christ and Siddhartha Gotama, the Buddha. I’d love to be able to sit in a corner and listen in. Maybe even throw in a question or two.

Obviously so would Carrin Dunne, who wrote “Buddha & Jesus: Conversations.” Carrin said that she is a Christian with a growing interest in Eastern religions, particularly Buddhism.

I enjoyed this short (112 page) book, which was loaned to me by Warren, my Taoist marital arts teacher. He said that he felt Gotama gets the better of the arguments. I agree.

Dunne’s book was published in 1975. I note that a 2004 book about the I Ching was co-authored by one Carrin Dunne. I like to think that this is the same person, and that after writing about Jesus and Gotama Dunne continued to migrate toward the East.

For me the most interesting dialogue revolved around the subject of the self. To put it bluntly, I’d say that Gotama kicked Jesus’ ass. Spiritually speaking. Christianity just seems way too personal to be an accurate reflection of ultimate truth.

I can’t believe that the Word which supposedly created the cosmos became flesh and walked among us. Give me a break. The power behind the big bang that over 15 billion years has brought into being 100 billion galaxies, how could this force be encapsulated in a finite human being?

Who, according to Gotama, doesn’t even exist as a separate self. Gotama considers the self to be “the absolute source of illusion, the heart of ignorance and bondage.” Jesus, on the other hand, says that the self “is not only valuable but of infinite, irreplaceable value. Far from being the source of illusion, I see it as the source of truth.”

Gotama tries to set Jesus straight:

Infinite value? The source of truth? Indeed our differences are great if you mean what you say. I hope we can understand one another. I was deeply heartened when I heard you say that men must leave self behind to follow along the way, but I was disturbed when you added that to follow the way was to follow you.

Your way of putting it confuses the issue—which is a question of leaving all self behind, myself, yourself, all selves, the whole notion of self. You would do better to distinguish clearly between your person and your teaching.

Great advice, which applies equally to religions and spiritual paths of both the West and East. For it isn’t only Christianity which brings divinity down to a highly personal level and has a human proclaim that “I am the way, the truth and the life. No man cometh unto the Father but by me.”

This also is the teaching of many Eastern guru-based faiths. The guru is considered to be God in human form, just as Jesus is viewed by Christian believers. Thus Indian mystical philosophies such as Sant Mat (“path of the saints”) bear much resemblance to Christianity in their emphasis upon love and devotion directed toward an earthly person.

Jesus feebly tries to claim that when he asks men to follow him, this “is the most radical form of self-renunciation.” Gotama replies:

Forgive me if I still cannot grasp your language. When I speak of leaving self behind, I mean not only this particular self, but all notion of self, whether particular or universal, human or divine. You seem to be asking men to renounce themselves in order to cleave to another self, your own, which becomes a new world, an all-encompassing self for them—your desires in the place of their desires, your thoughts in place of their thoughts.

Jesus admits that “When you put it that way I can see why they say that I am possessed and raving. It sounds like the ambition of a self-obsessed madman.”

Gotama: “I am sorry to say it, but it does.”

It takes two to Tango, though. There is no guru without a disciple. I’ve seen tens of thousands of disciples staring spellbound at a guru, hanging on his every word, drinking in every manifestation of his personality.

Even when I was highly devoted to Sant Mat, in the guise of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas branch, I couldn’t understand this emphasis upon the person rather than the teaching. Some Western disciples loved to go to talks by the guru where he would speak entirely in an Indian language they couldn’t understand, just to be in his presence.

I found it boring.

I’ve also seen Westerners give their own talks about Sant Mat where they would mimic the gestures and speaking style of the guru. Just as Dunne says, they strove to submerge their own personality in the personality of another. I’d sit there thinking, “This is weird.”

For the person they wanted to become was someone else. They wanted to skip Socrates’ step of “Know thyself.” Buddha advises that this is the first, and likely also the last, step toward enlightenment. Why take on another persona when you are clueless about your own?

So I’m with Gotama in this regard. And most other regards. It makes sense to me to look within for spiritual truth, not without. I can admire another person, but I can never become him or her. My devotion should be to my own higher self, not to someone else’s.

Or, lack of self. Whichever, I’m confident that the self or non-self I discover at the end of my quest won’t belong to some other person.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson said:

How many people are there in Boston? Two hundred thousand. Then there are so many sects. I go for Churches of one…The faith that stands on authority is not faith. The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul.

…The soul gives itself, alone, original and pure, to the Lonely, Original and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads and speaks through it….Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

Poised on the pivot point of uncertainty

Tilting one way or the other. That’s easy. Maintaining centered balance. That’s difficult, whether we’re talking about physical, mental, or spiritual activity.

Last night, as I wrote about on my other weblog, I went to bed thinking that I probably had Lyme’s disease. A rash had appeared on my back, circling the site of a tick bite. It was Sunday and too late to do anything about it.

So I tossed and turned, pondering what lay ahead if I indeed had Lyme’s disease. I couldn’t shake the anxiety that came with my tilt toward the Yes, you do. Then, sometime in the early morning, the thought hit me: You don’t really know. It could be No, you don’t.

Right away I felt better. My situation hadn’t changed, but now I was poised on a pivot point of uncertainty. Most of my anxiety lifted. I was free floating, ready to head in any diagnostic and treatment direction that presented itself.

Which turned out to be an urgent care clinic in Bend, where in the waiting area this afternoon I had plenty of time to read some science magazines that I’d brought along. Michael Shermer’s recent essay in Scientific American, “The Political Brain,” hit home for me.

For it could as well have been called “The Anxious Brain.” Or, “The Religious Brain.” The research Shermer described speaks indirectly to all sorts of tiltings, and what happens after someone has tilted. However, it was directly aimed at detecting political biases.

Shermer, who isn’t a member of any organized political party, says:

I have close friends in both camps, in which I have observed the following: no matter the issue under discussion, both sides are equally convinced that the evidence overwhelmingly supports their position.

This surety is called the confirmation bias, whereby we seek and find confirmatory evidence in support of already existing beliefs and ignore or reinterpret disconfirmatory evidence.

A brain study using functional magnetic resonance imaging pinpointed how this happens. Thirty strong Republicans and thirty strong Democrats were asked to assess statements by George Bush and John Kerry in which the 2004 presidential candidates clearly contradicted themselves.

Shermer reports that both of the true believer groups were critical of the disfavored candidate, while they let their own guy off the hook. Parts of the brain associated with emotions, conflict resolution, judgments about moral accountability, and reward/pleasure were most active. Reasoning, however, was quiescent. One of the researchers said in a press release:

Essentially, it seems as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones.

In the area of religion, I’ve heard long-time followers of an Eastern meditative practice say: “If you don’t get results in meditation, this means that the guru is saving up the merit of your devotion, and it will be given to you after you die.”

Twirl, twirl, twirl.

Similarly, it is believed that if the guru asks you to do something that doesn’t make sense, this is a test of your faith in his divine perfection. So it is necessary to consider that all of the guru’s commands are right, even if some clearly appear to be wrong.

Twirl, twirl, twirl.

The doctor and I sat together in the exam room and considered the options. I liked how she brought in a book opened to the Lyme disease page. We stood side by side and read about symptoms together.

For a while she wasn’t sure what to do. Nor was I. I had hoped that she’d take a look at my rash and say, “No, you don’t have Lyme disease.” But she didn’t know enough to say that. Eventually a course of antibiotic treatment was prescribed.

Made sense to me. Better safe than sorry when it comes to a nasty bacteria that may or may not be inside my system.

I filled the prescription. The pharmacist told me to take the Doxycycline after breakfast and dinner. I went back to our cabin and read the printed instructions. The capital letters “TAKE THIS MEDICINE ON AN EMPTY STOMACH” leapt out at me.

More uncertainty. More balancing on a pivot point. Full stomach, empty stomach. Maybe I’ll go with half-empty. It seems that when I look closely at almost anything these days, what I see are choices hidden in a fog of could-be-this-could-be-that.

I used to be more inclined to leap blindly in one direction or another, just to be doing something. And then, like the study participants Shermer describes, I’d ignore any evidence that maybe, just maybe, the other way has some points in its favor.

I’m more attracted to staying in the center now and keeping options open. I sent the tick that bit me off to a lab for testing. The doctor and I talked some about what I might want to do if the tick turns out to be negative for Lyme disease.

I said, “Then I could stop taking the antibiotics.” She replied: “But first you should check out the lab’s false negative statistics. There will be some chance that the tick really does have the disease.”

You never know. You just never know. And it’s a relief to know that. The compass needle is happiest when it can swing in any direction.

Musings on the Metolius

It’s easy to get into an meditative mood while walking along the banks of the Metolius River. It becomes an instant river about a mile upstream of our central Oregon cabin, gushing out of springs that carry water from distant sources.

Since the upper reaches are mostly spring fed, the Metolius’ water level doesn’t change much throughout the year. Vegetation is able to grow on logs and rocks that, with the passage of time, become islands of life.

This evening, on my ritual dog walk, thunder clouds were starting to form. Per usual, Serena, the dog, and Brian, the human, didn’t encounter any other people. It was just us and nature.

Beautiful.

No matter what has been worrying me before I set out on a walk, the Metolius magically leads it to fade away. I suspect that the magic is always there. Inside me, inside all of us. Nature just opens the door to what we normally shut ourselves away from.

Peace. Acceptance. Contentment. A sense that whatever is happening with the world, or with us, it's all right. Things are flowing along as they should. The river of life knows what it is doing.

I used to say, “Ah, just like a Japanese Zen garden.” Then I realized how foolish I was. Zen gardens are like nature, not the other way around. Nature is the original, humankind the copier.

In our garden I’ve tried to position rocks so that they don’t look like I tried to position the rocks. It’s damn hard. The Metolius does it effortlessly.

A thought: Is this the way It really is? Perhaps the big It, that which we’re wondering “What is It all about?” truly is this simple, this no worries, mate. Religion urges us to solve the problem of human existence. Maybe there is no problem to solve.

Walking along the Metolius, it certainly seems so. Until the thunder starts.

More accurately, until Serena notices the thunder. I’d been hearing it for several minutes before she did. However, Serena had been on some super-intense chipmunk chases (she never catches them, and mostly never sees them; it’s the smells that entice her).

Dashing through the Ponderosas, fully immersed in the joy of the hunt, thunder wasn’t on her mind. Juicy chipmunks were. But then she stopped running and tuned in to the distant rumbling. Whereupon she started to go into her thunder-phobia.

Serena wasn’t in any danger. She thought she was, though. Suddenly she couldn’t enjoy what was giving her so much pleasure before. Her sole goal was to find a place to hide. Fortunately, I had a leash. She tried to dig herself a hidey hole under a fallen tree. I had to drag her out.

A thought: Is this the way I am too? Are most of my fears and anxieties as nonsensically founded as my dog’s aversion to loud noises? (Once a loud nearby thunder clap startled her; ever since then, Serena freaks out at gunshots, firecrackers, and, of course, thunder).

Religion offers us a place to hide. From fear of death, pain, suffering, misfortune, non-existence, meaninglessness, isolation—lots of things. But do we need to put our head in the sand (or under a tree stump)?

An alternative is to embrace the flow of life. No matter what it brings.

During a happier moment today, Serena demonstrated a jump-right-in attitude that makes a lot of sense. Especially on a hot day (the Metolius is 48 degrees—just right for her, hypothermia for me).