Church of the Churchless

When the gods stopped speaking to us

About three thousand years ago the divine voices shut up.

Until then, says Julian Jaynes, humans habitually heard messages from the gods. However, those communications merely were being transmitted from one side of the brain to the other and were mistakenly construed as coming from an outside source.

Religion as we know it arose as a reaction to the silence. After the breakdown of the bicameral mind, people became consciously aware of the interior mental space that previously was the province of the gods. A replacement was needed. Jaynes says:

This breakdown resulted in many practices we would now call religious which were efforts to return to the lost voices of the gods, e.g., prayer, religious worship, and particularly the many types of divination I have described, which are new ways of making decisions by supposedly returning to the directions of gods by simple analogy.

Jaynes’ book, “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,” isn’t the easiest reading—as you can surmise from the wonderfully elusive title. My dentist is a big fan of the book. He talked me into buying it during a one-sided dental chair conversation in which my end of the dialogue was necessarily guttural.

I’d started reading Origin but had given it up as being too mystifying for even my mystiferious mind until my previous post about our inner ventriloquists impelled me to pull it from the bookshelf again.

Now I was more motivated to dig into it, as I thought it might shed some light on the voices that I hear in my own head. Which, I know, come from me. But it didn’t seem to be much of a stretch to imagine what it would be like to sense that the thoughts that I speak to myself were coming from an external source.

This, Jaynes argues semi-convincingly, still occurs with schizophrenics. And also with normal people from time to time. I remember being awakened from a nap by a “Brian!” that sure sounded like it came from someone standing by the bed. Jaynes, a Princeton psychologist who died in 1997, gives many other examples of what he calls vestiges of the bicameral mind in the modern world.

Could be. His theory is controversial. It continues to be promulgated through the Julian Jaynes Society. They have links to many articles related to the theory by Jaynes and others (which only are available to society members, however).

What I like most about the book is how it reminds us that what we’re aware of is a small fraction of our mental landscape. (When Jaynes speaks of “consciousness” he usually seems to be referring to what I’d call “self-awareness.”)

Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it.

The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.

Absolutely. My afternoon started with two frustrating phone calls to IBM/Lenovo tech support. The new ThinkPad that I’d gotten to replace my wife’s out-of-date Emachines laptop wouldn’t display the correct resolution (1280 X 800) no matter what I did.

During my first all-too-conscious call I was instructed step by step in how to download and install proper video card and BIOS software that, for some inexplicable reason, was missing from the ThinkPad. Holding the phone in one hand, typing with one finger of the other, doing my best to not screw up the computer more than it was already—I was uncomfortably self-aware.

After engaging in additional recommended unsuccessful efforts to get the screen to look like it should, via a follow-up call I succeeded in getting IBM to send a technician out tomorrow morning to either fix the damn computer or give me a new one (my purchase of an extended service contract now looks like a wise decision).

I then was eager to embrace an alternative aspect of reality.

Cleaning the gutters. We’ve had a dry Oregon fall but several inches of rain are forecast over the coming week. I strapped on my Stihl backpack blower, clambered up a ladder, and proceeded to blow out half a year’s worth of oak leaves, pine needles, and other debris.

This involved getting as close as I could to the edge of the roof and directing the tip of the blower tube along the open gutter. It was fun. A lot more fun, at least, than talking to tech support. Even when I got to the two-story parts of our house.

Charlie, the voice that ventriloquismistically speaks inside my head much of the time, was pleasingly silent. My attention was focused on not falling off the roof and getting the gutters squeaky clean. Charlie was nowhere to be found. Nor, in a sense, was I.

I was simply doing what I was doing, not thinking “this is what I need to do” while I was doing it. That would have been duplicative. And distracting. Occasionally I caught myself ruminating about something or other. Like, how later I might write on this blog about not ruminating while cleaning the gutters.

Oops! That’s what I was just doing, I’d say to myself. Charlie was down, but not out.

Jaynes reminds us that those voices we hear inside our heads—who are us—aren’t necessary much (or most) of the time. They’re doppelgangers, extraneous hangers on. Just as the religious voices outside of our heads are. Which, if Jaynes’ theory holds water, are the same as the inner voices.

Here’s how Jaynes describes the condition of the ancients prior to the breakdown of the bicameral mind:

In driving a car, I am not sitting like a back-seat driver directing myself, but rather find myself committed and engaged with little consciousness. In fact my consciousness will usually be involved in something else, in a conversation with you if you happen to be my passenger, or in thinking about the origin of consciousness perhaps.

My hand, foot, and head behavior, however, are almost in a different world. In touching something, I am touched; in turning my head, the world turns to me; in seeing, I am related to a world I immediately obey in the sense of driving on the road and not on the sidewalk.

And I am not conscious of any of this. And certainly not logical about it. I am caught up, unconsciously enthralled, if you will, in a total interacting reciprocity of stimulation that may be constantly threatening or comforting, appealing or repelling, responding to the changes in traffic and particular aspects of it with trepidation or confidence, trust or distrust, while my consciousness is still off on other topics.

Now simply subtract that consciousness and you have what a bicameral man would be like. The world would happen to him and his action would be an inextricable part of that happening with no consciousness whatever.

And now let some brand-new situation occur, an accident up ahead, a blocked road, a flat tire, a stalled engine, and behold, our bicameral man would not do what you or I would do, that is, quickly and efficiently swivel our consciousness over to the matter and narratize out what to do.

He would have to wait for his bicameral voice which with the stored-up admonitory wisdom of his life would tell him nonconsciously what to do.

Interesting. The bicameral man sounds a lot like Lao Tzu’s Taoist sage.

A truly good man is not aware of his goodness,
And is therefore good.
A foolish man tries to be good,
And is therefore not good.

A truly good man does nothing,
Yet leaves nothing undone.
A foolish man is always doing,
Yet much remains to be done.

Unlearning ventriloquism

I’m trying to learn how not to be a ventriloquist. As should we all. Isn’t one of “Me” (or “You”) enough? Why are there, like Edgar Bergen and his wooden sidekick Charlie McCarthy, two people performing on the mental stage where we play out our lives?

Maybe more. I’m still trying to figure how many of me there are (or is) inside of my cranium. Seems like there should be only one, given that I go by the singular name of Brian.

Yet that other guy, who I’ll call “Charlie” in honor of my ventriloquismistic Ed Sullivan show memories, sure seems to be a part of me also. I hear him talking inside my head all of the time. About the only time Charlie shuts up is when I try to catch him in the act of doing his schtick.

Then he’s a no-show. Makes me wonder: am I my own ventriloquist? If so, who is the dummy and who is the performer? Is the person wondering right now “Is Charlie really me?” really me? Or…oh my God...is Charlie so skilled he’s doing the wondering about himself as well as the talking?!

It’s pretty damn confusing. The only way I’ve been able to get close to figuring out who’s behind my mental gabfest is akin to restoring order in a noisily unruly kindergarten. Everybody back to your seats! Shut the fuck up! Don’t talk unless you’re called on!

(Well, for obvious reasons pre-school teachers don’t throw in swear words. But since I’m talking to my own personas here, I like to get salty with them.)

Almost universally, respected teachers of spiritual and mystical subjects say that establishing silence in the classroom of the psyche is important. Absent that, you don’t know what the hell is going on.

The jibber-jabber could be deeply meaningful—a message from God, Tao, Buddha-nature, whoever—or it could just be Charlie joking around again. Until we figure out who is behind the thoughts that speak to us almost incessantly, it doesn’t make sense to trust them.

Especially not when those voices make such dramatic claims. “A glorious life after death awaits if you believe.” “Have faith and all things are possible.” “God loves you.” Nice ideas, but what evidence is there that they come from any other source but Charlie?

Who, I’m beginning to strongly suspect, is none other but me when I’m absent-minded. That is, I throw my own mental voice in moments of unawareness. Then I respond to my conversationalist as if he was actually a separate being. Not a dummy, because I’ve lost track of how those words I hear in my head were mouthed.

“So, what do you think? Should we have that leftover lasagna for dinner?”
“Good idea. There’s just one piece left. Better grab it before the wife does.”
“Excellent advice. I like your style!”
“Back at you, buddy! Let’s eat.”

I talk with myself like this a lot. During my meditation time, though, I get some glimpses into what’s going on. Also at times throughout the day when I either am absorbed enough in something to stop talking to myself about it, or when I consciously attend to the mentally repeated mantra that is the focus of my meditation practice.

Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy couldn’t both talk at the same time. Neither can Brian and my own “Charlie.” I’ve found that when I’m attentive to speaking a sound inside my head, Charlie shuts up. He only comes to life when I drift off into unawareness.

So, extrapolating my personal experience to cosmic proportions (one of my favorite activities), I conclude that 99.9% (maybe more) of religious revelations are meaningless crap. Just as my conversations with Charlie are.

I don’t know nothing about nothing when it comes to God and such. I know this because there isn’t a genuinely divine thought in my head when I’m actively aware of my spiritual non-awareness.

It’s only when I let Charlie start jabbering on his own, saying whatever pops into his wooden mind, that I can delude myself into believing that I’ve got my act together.

I’m pretty darn sure that my ventriloquism-inclined psyche isn’t very different from other people’s minds. With possible rare exceptions, those great revelations about the nature of God that fill holy books come from an all-too-human mind, just like mine, unaware that it is blabbing to itself.

Internal ventriloquism is a skill we need to unlearn if we’re serious about hearing what reality has to say. Charlie needs to shut up. Silence, I suspect, is akin to godliness.

And maybe exactly the same.

Letting go of God. And Uncle Fred.

Julia Sweeney, former Saturday Night Live actress, has let go of God. She’s content, though she says that for her God was like a friendly uncle who lived in your head and always was willing to hear what you had to say.

“Now there’s nobody to listen to my thoughts but myself,” I heard her tell Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air show last night. Since I tuned in on the car radio shortly before arriving home, I found the NPR archive and listened to the entire interview today.

Sweeney is entertaining (not surprising, given her background). Also, fair and balanced, unlike Fox News. She doesn’t bash religion, though she’s become a non-believer after being dedicated to Catholicism.

She started off the interview with a story about how the breakup of a long-term relationship that she thought was going to lead to marriage left her depressed. Sweeney mouthed the words “heal me.” The room filled with light. God embraced her. She felt connected to the universe.

Later, Gross asked her what she made of the comforting experience now. “Firing of the right temporal lobe,” Sweeney said. She considers that she’d been coached by her Catholic upbringing to have those sorts of experiences.

“I look at it scientifically now. Now I have a skeptical way of looking at the world, and I mean that in a positive way. I see things rationally. My life is much better now.”

She feels free. I could relate to what Sweeney said about enjoying the new-found privacy in her brain. During her religious phase she’d not like someone, then hear an internalized proscriptive voice in her brain saying “You should like them.” Now she follows her own heart without a meddling middleman.

Who, of course, was herself all along. But before she believed that God was watching what she thought and did, taking an interest in her daily life, offering up advice. Like, “Be a good person.”

Gross said that some people consider that you can’t be a good person without religion. Absent a religious moral code, your baser instincts will take over and you’ll do god knows what. Sweeney disagreed.

She pointed out that whole societies like Norway and Sweden are decidedly non-religious, yet have much lower crime rates than the hyper-religious United States. She said, “I feel that I’ve become a more moral person.” We’re social animals, she noted, and instinctually want to get along with our fellows.

Sweeney spoke about her brother’s difficult death from cancer. Looking back, she feels that religion kept her family from being in touch with reality. At the time she believed that God deals a hand of destiny cards and watches to see how you handle what you’ve been given.

Now, she rejects the notion that events are preordained. Her brother’s dying is simply what occurred. Bad things happen. That’s part of life. To her, this is “beautiful and comforting.”

Her “Letting Go of God” CD is available next month. Some excerpts can be heard here. I listened to the Deepak bit. Sweeney has read many of Deepak Chopra’s books and has educated herself about the reality of quantum mechanics—which is a lot different from Chopra’s New Agey simplistic “we create our own reality” interpretation.

She concludes that Deepak Chopra is full of shit. On the whole, I agree.

Sweeney also has a blog. I was impressed that her blog archives go back to November 2003. As a writer, and also as a seeker of truth, she seems to be for real.

Loud siren is a wake-up call

God, it’s said, works in mysterious ways. So I’m willing to believe that the siren on the side of our house that blared for ten minutes across our neighborhood yesterday evening was a divine message directed to me.

My wife, too. And all of us, really. The message is universal: Be aware. Look. See.

We were running late, per usual, for our weekly Tango class. There was going to be a guest instructor so I wanted us to be on time. I was ready a few minutes before Laurel, per usual.

“We should leave the dog in,” she said, hurrying to the door. “She had to go to the vet today and deserves some home-time.” I glanced at the dog lying on the living room carpet. Walked into the entryway. Armed our security system. Went out the front door. Locked it.

About seventy-five minutes into our two-hour class Laurel freezes. “The thought just came to me: did you press the ‘away’ button on the security system? We left the dog in, and she would have set off the motion detector.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I remember arming the system, but not whether I pressed that button.” The more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t remember. When I phoned home for messages, the answer was evident.

A neighbor had called. Wanted to let us know that the alarm had gone off for ten minutes. He’d walked over and checked on things. Nothing looked amiss (not a surprise). The security company also had phoned. Wanted to let us know the sheriff’s office had been alerted to a possible burglary.

Laurel said we should go home right away. We did, missing the last part of the class. She was worried that our loud-noise phobic dog had been driven crazy by the siren going off.

“Maybe Serena tried to run through a glass door in order to get away from it,” Laurel fretted. Briefly I had the notion that our dog could have tried to chew her ears off, but the anatomical impossibility of this reassured me that we’d find Serena in one piece after we sped home.

Which was indeed what we found. After taking down a note from a sheriff’s deputy that was stuck on our front door, we encountered the family dog peacefully lying on the living room rug right where we’d left her. I phoned our neighbor and thanked him for coming over.

“I’m an idiot,” I told him. “Five seconds after I walked past our dog, lying on the floor in a room where we have a motion detector, I press the button that arms the detector.” “Hey, don’t be too hard on yourself,” he told me, “we all can be idiots.”

True. But I still want to look upon this embarrassing episode as a loud wake-up call. Too often I go through life half-aware. I do things semi-consciously. I’m partly here in the present moment, and partly there in an intended future that hasn’t happened yet.

Yesterday my fingers were arming the security system while my mind was thinking about whether we’d be late for the Tango class. End result: we weren’t late, but we missed 45 minutes of the class because of my absent-mindedness.

Increasingly I’m coming to believe that spirituality, or whatever you want to call the “More” side of life, starts (and maybe ends) with being fully aware. Of what’s right in front of us. Not of a future heaven, paradise, satori, enlightenment, awakening, revelation, or second coming.

What’s here. Now. Only when we’re fully in touch with the apparent here and now, I suspect, will we be capable of perceiving whatever More may exist on a subtler sphere of reality.

Interestingly Wayne, the guest Tango instructor, focused on getting his eight beginning students to do just that. He had us practice some basic (yet challenging) leading and following drills. The man shifts the woman’s weight to one side or the other, then takes a step. And she follows.

After a while Wayne interrupted the drill. “Leaders, I can see that all of you are getting ahead of yourselves. While you’re taking a step you’re looking toward the next planned movements. One thing at a time. Lead. See what happens. How does she follow? Be aware. Of that single step.”

He demonstrated with the other instructor, Jodi. One step, fully led, fully followed. Pause. Done. Completed. Then…another step. Fully led, fully followed.

Nothing half-assed about it. Not partly here and now, partly there and then.

This morning I went for a walk with the dog. It’s a walk I’ve taken most days for many years. But not usually fully present. Today, I tried to be more aware.

Of…

A pool on non-yet-flowing Spring Creek

Leaves carpeting the trail

An old tree friend who I don’t look up often enough

A hanger-on

Ducks skimming Spring Lake, startled by a man and his dog

A stump that's grown a green head of moss

Morning tree lace

Green before the fall

Reuters’ tag line used to be “Know. Now.”

Excellent advice. I'm making a vow to follow it more assiduously.

Proofs that God exists

Well, it’s hard to argue with over three hundred proofs of God’s existence. Guess I’m going to have to become a believer.

Oh, darn. By mistake I clicked the next link down on the Atheists of Silicon Valley “Humor” page. Now I know there are about an equal number of disproofs of God’s existence.

Now I’m confused. Got to get my faith back.

I went down the proofs list and found a bunch that made beautiful sense to me. Especially after drinking a bottle of wine and watching Fox News for an hour. Once my incredulity neurons were stupefied, it was clear:

God exists.

Read on and believe.

ARGUMENT FROM MIRACLES
(1) My aunt had cancer.
(2) The doctors gave her all these horrible treatments.
(3) My aunt prayed to God and now she doesn't have cancer.
(4) Therefore, God exists.

MORAL ARGUMENT (II)
(1) In my younger days I was a cursing, drinking, smoking, gambling, child-molesting, thieving, murdering, bed-wetting bastard.
(2) That all changed once I became religious.
(3) Therefore, God exists.

ARGUMENT FROM INCOMPLETE DEVASTATION
(1) A plane crashed killing 143 passengers and crew.
(2) But one child survived with only third-degree burns.
(3) Therefore, God exists.

ARGUMENT FROM INFINITE REGRESS
(1) Ask Atheists what caused the Big Bang.
(2) Regardless of their answer, ask how they know this.
(3) Continue process until the Atheist admits he doesn't know the answer to one of your questions.
(4) You win!
(5) Therefore, God exists.

ARGUMENT FROM LONELINESS
(1) Christians say that Jesus is their best friend.
(2) I'm lonely, and I want a best friend.
(3) Therefore, God exists.

ARGUMENT FROM CREATIVE INTERPRETATION
(1) God is:
(a) The feeling you have when you look at a newborn baby.
(b) The love of a mother for her child.
(c) That little still voice in your heart.
(d) Humankind's potential to overcome their difficulties.
(e) How I feel when I look at a sunset.
(f) The taste of ice cream on a hot day.
(2) Therefore, God exists.

ARGUMENT FROM SUBJECTIVITY
(1) Everything is subjective.
(2) No subjective proof can be superior to any other subjective proof.
(3) Based upon my subjective opinion, your opinion, that if everything is subjective then, perforce, God is subjective, is false.
(4) Therefore, God (objectively) exists.

PROOF BY ANECDOTE
(1) God can be seen by those who believe in Him.
(2) If the God is seen, then He must exist.
(3) I have seen God.
(4) Therefore, God exists.

ARGUMENT FROM LACK OF DISPROOF
(1) You can't prove God doesn't exist!
(2) Therefore, God exists.

God wants to be forsaken

My churchlessness and agnosticism is adored by God. Yes, God looks upon me with more favor than all those worshipful Christians, Muslims, Jews and other religious types.

For God wants to be forsaken. Happy to oblige, my friend. It’s a pleasure to comply with the divine will.

I learned about what God wants from Meister Eckhart, the German theologian and mystic. He’s got some excellent doctrinal credentials, chief among them being accused of heresy by Pope John XXII.

You know that a Catholic is pointing toward the truth when he’s branded a heretic. So we need to take seriously the advice Eckhart proffered in one of his sermons.

Of course, it sounds astonishing to say that the soul should forsake God, but I assert that it is more important for the soul to forsake God to attain perfection than it is for the soul to forsake creatures, or all will be lost.

The soul must exist in a free nothingness. That we should forsake God is altogether what God intends, for as long as the soul has God, knows God, and is aware of God, she is far from God.

Now, it isn’t easy to understand Eckhart. He recognized that himself, concluding another sermon in this fashion.

Whoever has understood this sermon, I wish them well. Had no one been here, I would still have had to preach it to this collecting-box. There are some poor folk who return home and say, “I wish to sit down, to eat my bread and to serve God.” But I say by the eternal truth that these people shall remain in error and can never attain what those others attain who follow God in poverty and in exile. Amen.

D.T. Suzuki, a teacher of Zen, explains that for Eckhart “God” and “Godhead” are “as different as earth is from heaven.” Godhead is empty of everything that can be known, perceived, understood, comprehended. So, says Suzuki, to Eckhart pure nothing “is the highest point at which God can work in us as he pleases.”

With him God is still a something as long as there is any trace of movement or work or of doing something. When we come to the Godhead, we for the first time find that it is the unmoved, a nothing where there is no path to reach. It is absolute nothingness; therefore it is the ground of being from whence all beings come.

If this isn’t unclear enough, here are some additional Meister Eckhart quotations that have the delicious effect of overturning our unduly stable metaphysical apple cart.

But I say that if someone perceives something in God and gives it a name, then that is not God. God is above names and nature.

Taking leave of God for the sake of God is the greatest act of renunciation that someone can make.

Therefore we ask God to free us from “God” so that we may be able to grasp and eternally enjoy truth where the highest angels, the fly and the human soul are all one—in that place where I desired what I was and was what I desired.

Your soul should lose all her mental nature and should be left non-mental, for if you love God as “God,” as “Spirit,” as “Person,” as “Image,” then all this should be abandoned. You must love him as he is a non-God, a non-Spirit, a non-Person, a non-Image.

You are never better placed than when you are in complete darkness and unknowing.

Ah, thank you Meister Eckhart. I’m reassured that my meditation is going just fine.

Gangaji, Eli, and Neo-Advaita hypocrisy

Ah, nothing like a guru-student sexual affair to spice up a churchless blog. Through my friend Randy’s “Gangaji’s Pinprick” and “More on Gangaji and Eli Jaxon-Bear” posts I’ve learned about some Neo-Advaitan hypocritical failure to practice what you preach.

Understand: the hypocrisy is what bothers me about spiritual teacher Eli, who is married to fellow spiritual teacher Gangaji, having a three-year affair with a much younger female student. Affairs happen. Usually they should remain a private matter.

Some of the commenters to an Ashland (Oregon) Daily Tidings story about Jaxon-Bear’s affair wondered why this was newsworthy.

Well, I agree with a Ron who said, “When you have an Ashland-based group that has some national prominence, and that is a spiritual organization whose leader gets caught with his pants down, so to speak, that's news.”

(Another commenter called Ashland “ten square miles of land surrounded by reality.” Neale Donald Walsch of “Conversations with God” fame, the subject of my previous post, also lives in Ashland. Along with other gurus. I love this quirky southern Oregon town, noted for its Shakespeare festival, which is about three and a half hours down I-5 from where I live.)

Coincidentally, if there is such a thing, yesterday I had coffee with my philosophical friend Patricia. She’d brought along the most recent issue of “What is Enlightenment?” It featured a critical article about Neo-Advaita that I found interesting: “Who’s Transforming Anyway?”

The author, Tom Huston, describes his youthful descent into the craziness of this New Agey teaching that we’re all already enlightened; we just don’t know it. Concerning Andrew Cohen and the editors of “What is Enlightenment?” Huston says:

No matter how effective a mystical teaching Advaita might have been in India’s ancient past, its newborn Western child, Neo-Advaita, seemed to be missing something significant. Isolated from its Eastern religious and historical context and taught as a quick-fix, no-frills contemporary path to spiritual enlightenment, they noticed its tendency to ignore traditional values like ethics and the cultivation of personal integrity.

Gangaji is one of the Neo-Advaita teachers mocked in Jessica Roemischer’s related previously-published piece, where Stacey Heartspring encounters the post-modern craze of Neo-Advaita. Here’s a typical Neo-Advaita bit of blather from Gangaji:

There is nothing that keeps you from the realization of your inherent, permanent, present freedom except your imagination that somebody or something is keeping you from that.

Neale Donald Walsch, who by and large echoes Gangaji’s and Eli’s outlook, says pretty much the same thing:

It’s not really a question of stepping into an experience so much as it is allowing it to flow through us more fully and more completely. It is quite possible for anyone to do that without any sort of training, without any particular sort of discipline, without any study, but with just a willingness to have the experience. And the first step is to allow the possibility that it could occur, because of course if you don’t think it could occur, then it cannot.

Well, fine. I haven’t realized my “inherent, permanent, present freedom.” But it’s possible that Gangaji and her hubby Eli have.

She’s written a book that promises to reveal how we all can “directly experience the perfect radiance of who you really are.” And at this very moment spiritual seekers are enjoying the “rare gift of being with Eli in an advanced setting for ten days.” So we have to assume that Gangaji practices what she preaches about desperation:

Find who is feeling desperate. The feeling of desperation only continues because you assume that you are, in fact, something that the feeling is hooked on to.

Hmmmm. I wonder why Gangaji and Eli had to go through a three month separation to resolve their differences if neither of them is a “something” that can be hooked by negative feelings, and if, as fellow Neo-Advaitist Tony Parsons says, “all concepts of good or bad, original sin, karma or debt of any kind are products of an unawakened mind.”

Eli and Gangaji, who somehow spoke as one voice in this interview, say:

Each of us needs to experience the ignorance, to find the place of fundamentalist certainty, fear, aggression, and animal territoriality, and to discover what is deeper. What is deeper is the next stage in the evolution of the human. It is the transcendental realization that you are not limited to human animal-ness. I do not mean merely to understand this, or to believe this, or to hope this is so, but to directly realize it for oneself. This requires the willingness to turn one’s back on personal identity as a male or female human animal.

Yet a student of theirs says that Eli is a “sexual predator who abused his power in the most egregious way.” Sounds pretty animalistic to me.

I’ve got no problem with men or women acting like animals. That’s a big part of what makes sex enjoyable. What ruffles my avian feathers is when a religious or spiritual figure pretends to be something that he or she is not, or says one thing and does another.

Another proponent of Neo-Advaita, Francis Lucille, says that “the only sin is to take yourself for a sinner.” I don’t agree with that point of view, but it is admirably simple and clear.

If it is true, though, then there wouldn’t have been a need for the Gangaji Foundation to issue an apologetic letter to their community of followers.
[Update: This letter has been removed by the Foundation. However, emails from the Foundation relating to the scandal still can be found at another web site.]

What was initially seen as a matter between adults is now recognized to be a betrayal of the teacher/student relationship and an abuse of power. A trust with the larger community also has been broken. This is an important revelation as real harm is being experienced by the student and is being fully acknowledged. The repercussions of this betrayal are reverberating in ways that were never imagined, but are very painful.

Tom Huston describes how he awakened from the relativistic nightmare of Neo-Advaita that, for a time, passed for spiritual truth in his excessively nihilistic eyes. There’s a valuable lesson for all of us here: fundamentalism doesn’t only come in the guise of traditional religion.

Tell it like it is, Tom:

Night after night, day after day, I’d storm Zen Buddhist forums, atheist forums, Christian forums, and even Natalie Portman fan discussion forums with my proselytizing passion for the Neo-Advaita way. “You morons think you’re real? Try this,” I’d say, as I dished out the intoxicating truth that renders human beings and their concerns into utter irrelevancy.

…“If all is One, then nothing is wrong,” said the notorious murderer Charles Manson. And while I didn’t actually kill anybody as I spread my love of Neo-Advaita far and wide, I probably did as much damage as one can with words alone, subverting all beliefs, trouncing all opinions, actively denying all values, hopes, and dreams—and loving every second of it, as I savored my absolute power over all relativity.

Yesterday Patricia and I talked about the big difference between thinking that you’re an enlightened spiritual person and actually being such. Passionate Neo-Advaita advocates, like all true believers, are prone to confusing the two. Thinking so doesn’t make it so.

If you claim to have turned your back on being a human animal, having a lengthy sexual affair with one of your students is just a touch contradictory (to put it mildly). Still, it’s always possible to take heart from a saying that my friend Hans is fond of repeating:

No one’s life ever is completely wasted. He can always serve as a horrible example for others.

Hey, God, shut up! No more conversations

Like a good lapsed Catholic, I will begin by confessing that I’ve never read “Conversations with God.” Nor any other of Neale Donald Walsch’s follow-up books (whatever or whoever God is, “wordy” certainly defines the supreme being).

I have, however, perused brief articles such as I found in a New Connexion issue that I’d picked up at a natural food store, needing some reading material to accompany my lunch of whole wheat pizza.

In a “What Does God Really Want?” interview, Walsch clues us in to the meaning of life as revealed by the Big Man Upstairs. Who, to encapsulate Walsch’s core message, is you. And me. And Neale Donald Walsch. Though a few of us get to enjoy million dollar book deals as a result of our identity with God, and most of us don’t, sadly.

Appealingly, I learned that God doesn’t require anything of us. Not meditation, or study, or anything else. Right now each of us is experiencing our own divinity. If we don’t know this, it’s because we aren’t willing to have the experience.

Somewhat paradoxically, however, Walsch says there are tools and techniques with which people can move themselves into the actual experience of God. Conveniently, these will be described in his latest book, “The Holy Experience.”

The article says that sample chapters are available for free on Walsch’s website. I couldn’t find any mention of them, but lots of unfree stuff for sale was easy to locate.

Well, the New Connexions piece told me that the central thought of “What God Wants” ($14 direct from Walsch and Co., $14.95 at Amazon) is “contained in chapter 13, and that chapter is a series of blank pages.” Thus I suggest saving your money. Why pay for nothing when that’s available gratis?

I may sound unduly critical of Walsch. Actually, I think he’s on to something. Fame and fortune, certainly. Yet also more than that. Heck, anyone who raises the righteous ire of true believing Christians earns kudos from me (some criticisms here and here). And positively, the notion that God speaks to each of us equally appeals to my churchless soul.

Yet what intrigues me the most is the question of what happens when God stops yapping away. Walsch whipped out a yellow pad and started scribbling when he began to get inspirations from God. Which, he’d be the first to admit, means from himself. (But calling his book “Conversations with Me” would have put a crimp in his publishing deal, for sure).

In the same vein, I’ve had plenty of conversations with God. I’m having one right now, in fact. I search my consciousness for inspiration, get a flash of insight, and transmit it through my touch-typing fingers to a computer screen, where it soon will be uploaded to this blog so that others may admire my divinity.

We all do this. There’s no reason to believe that Walsch has any special connection with truth that anyone else lacks. He’s a skilled marketer and purveyor of feel-good New Age platitudes. I’ve got a certain talent for communicating my own platitudes. So do we all.

The conversations we have with ourselves are interesting, no doubt. They keep me blogging away most days. But are the words inside my head, the ones that I speak to myself in a recursive blabfest that has lots of entertainment value but previous little wisdom, what I’m really after?

If so, I’ve got it.

If not, I don’t. And that’s a lot closer to how I feel.

God, my good friend whom I’m told is me, you need to learn how to shut the fuck up. Once in a while, at least. Now I know that we’ve been having this conversation for a long time. Ever since I started meditating in 1969, right?

I think it’s time to take our relationship to the next level. By which I mean, you need to take a hike. Adios, amigo. It was nice knowing you. Sayonara. One of us is unnecessary, and since I have a special fondness for me, I’m letting you go. Not that I believe you’ll depart my cranium immediately. This likely will be a gradual goodbye.

Walsch’s philosophy, says one of his critics, basically is monistic. Sounds right to me. There’s only one thing going on in the cosmos. Let’s call this “God.” And take this to a logical conclusion. Conversations require two to verbally tango. So who is talking to who when we’re conversing with God?

Probably Walsch has an answer to this question. But no matter. To my increasingly monistically inclined mind it’s wrong. The whole idea of questions and answers, speakers and listeners, words and silence, seems off-base when it comes to the ultimate.

I can’t prove that assertion. Or even clarify it. It’s just what God told me to say. That son of a gun is still hanging around.

Religion as poetic expression

Before I jump into today’s subject, looking upon the practice of religion as an art, I’ve got to comment on Church of the Churchless comments to my posts.

These offerings by other people are wonderful. Frequently I read them and think, “God, these are so much wiser and more meaningful than what I wrote.” Also, better written. I deeply appreciate these (almost) always thoughtful sharings. If you’re not reading the comments, you’re missing out on a big part of this blog.

Flowing into this notion of religion as art, via these comments I love to see, or at least get a glimpse into, how fellow churchless seekers of …whatever...view their seeking. There’s no right or wrong here. No truth or untruth. No better or worse.

Like art. Now, I’m exceedingly unartistic when it comes to the traditional arts such as painting and music. It would be entirely fair for someone to look upon my stick-figure drawings or off-key singing and say, “That’s really bad.”

So I’m not suggesting that all forms of art are beyond judgment, that you can’t reasonably pronounce this to be superior to that. However, when religion is considered as a purely subjective and personal art form, the usual rules of criticism don’t apply.

This is one of the insights I’ve gained (or inferred) from Don Cupitt’s “After God: The Future of Religion.”

Cupitt, like Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and others, argues that traditional theistic religions are an anachronism. Their dogmas simply aren’t believable or acceptable in this modern world (notwithstanding the fact that most of the world’s inhabitants still accept, and will continue to accept, dogmas of one variety or another.)

Here’s what Cupitt concludes, speaking to those of us who can’t tolerate religion as it is, yet don’t want to discard what is worth saving from the religious impulse.

You may well be skeptical about the severely reconstructed notion of religion that I am putting forward. It seems to be religion without metaphysics, religion without creed, religion no longer focused around a power center outside ourselves, religion without a structure of authority, and religion without a gathered community of people who are very conscious of a clear line between themselves, the elect, and the rest of humanity.

In place of all that, I am offering only religion as a toolkit, a small set of attitudes and techniques, by practicing which we can grow in self-knowledge (the Eye of God), learn to accept the transience and insubstantiality of ourselves and everything else (the Blissful Void), and learn to say a whole-hearted yes to life (Solar Living). Another item is yet to be added: it is the Poetical Theology, which is (briefly) a license to make whatever new use we can of the surviving scraps of vocabulary, ritual, and symbolism that are available to us.

Cupitt urges us to have fun with religion. Be creative with it. Indulge your artistic license. Write, produce, direct, and act in your own religious production. He finds a poetical strand in Christianity (and, I assume, other religions) that can be elaborated upon with unfettered delight.

It shows up whenever a religious theme is treated with a touch, or more than a touch, of irony, satire, self-mockery, or playfulness. It shows up when the normal hierarchies and valuations are mocked and reversed at feasts such as Carnival and Christmas. It shows up when believers consciously allow themselves to overelaborate their own myths—just in fun.

…I am suggesting that we can and should now be uninhibited and eclectic in creating new religious meanings, practices, and narratives out of the materials available to us. The poetical theology will fiction and refiction our religion, tell and retell the old stories. What will make it a theology will be its use in helping ourselves to see ourselves and our life with a greater clarity of moral vision, in helping us to be “easy, going” about the transience of everything, and in showing us how to live ardently.

There’s nothing wrong with ritual, so long as it springs from the heart, isn’t taken super-seriously, and isn’t foisted on others. By and large my life is ritual free. But here and there, now and then, I enjoy indulging in some poetical theology.

My wife likes to have a moment of silence before she eats a meal. I usually don’t do this on my own. When we’re together it’s nice, though, to hold hands with Laurel, close my eyes, and utter a speechless prayer before chowing down. I don’t believe that any divine being is aware of what I’m doing. Yet I am. Which is all that matters.

In the morning I meditate for an hour or so. Even if I don’t get any uplift from raising my consciousness, the strong cup of coffee that I sip during my pre-meditation reading assures that I enjoy a bit of caffeine-fueled nirvana.

When I finish reading, I often find myself reverently holding the book’s cover to my forehead and intoning to the author (or Someone) “Thank you for this inspiration.” From the outside, this would look just like a fundamentalist Jew, Muslim, or Christian praising their holy book.

On my inside, I guess I’m doing just that. Except, I might be praising the newest title from scientists Stephen Hawking or Brian Greene. My “religious texts” span a broad horizon. This morning I found pre-meditation inspiration in Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion.”

Different strokes for different folks. That’s the beauty of looking upon religious practice as an art form.

You can Howl. As loud as you want. Without worrying about what the neighbors will think.

(Aside: I don’t think before today I’d ever read Ginsburg’s creation. Wow, he mentions Plotinus! We’re almost brothers.)

…who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kaballa because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas…

Skepticism, cynicism, and science

On this blog I’m still flogging my “In Good Spirit” interview with mediums Marcel and Lenny. Hey, it’s been a long time since I was on a radio program. Okay, this was an Internet program, but that still counts.

My interview starts at about minute three of the archived file and stops at about minute eighteen. We covered quite a bit of ground in that quarter hour.

As I noted in the previous post, when I listened to the recording I was aghast at how often I interjected a “you know.” I was totally unaware at the time that I was doing this. When I mentioned this to Laurel, who heard the interview live on my laptop, she said “I didn’t notice that.”

Interesting. It makes me wonder how much else I, and everyone else, unduly takes for granted about how we see the world. If I’m unaware of some things that I’m saying, how do I know what else I’m blind to?

I also was struck by the fact that I proudly proclaimed myself an agnostic, explaining that this comes from a-gnosis, not knowing. Yet there I was unconsciously throwing in “you know’s” all over the place. Well, at least I wasn’t saying “I know.”

At one point Marcel said that he appreciated the way I expressed my metaphysical skepticism. Cynicism, on the other hand, turns him off. Me too. I explained that skeptics are open-minded. They don’t want truth to come to them secondhand, through a glass darkly.

Cynics are much more negative. I’m fine with a smiling Humbug! But a cynic would growl, Bah, humbug! Big difference.

I was sort of surprised to hear Marcel say that listeners to Achieve Radio (“the positive side of broadcasting”) don’t much like skeptics. I’ve always figured that New Age types are more open-minded than traditional religious believers.

And again, what is skepticism but dedicated open-mindedness? Not clutching onto any old purported truth that happens to meander by, but scanning the horizon in all directions for evidence of the Real Thing.

If you listen to the program, you’ll hear my paean to science and the new physics get interrupted. Probably a wise move by Marcel, since I’m sure he could tell that I was just getting warmed up on the whole quantum connection thing.

It really is amazing that previously paired photons, or other atomic particles, are able to instantly communicate between themselves across any distance, speed of light be damned. I started to point out that this “communication” doesn’t involve any exchange of information, so no faster than light signaling by humans is possible.

Still, whatever the universe is like, deep down, science recognizes that this mysterious foundation of the cosmos is far removed from our current understanding. The quest of physics for a Theory of Everything is stalled, notwithstanding the prodigious efforts of some of the earth’s greatest intellects.

For me, this is the source of a powerful sense of awe. I don’t need religious belief to make me fall on my knees before Whatever the Hell It Is that’s responsible for all this.

As I said on the show, simply contemplating that our universe of about 100 billion galaxies, each with an average of around 100 billion stars, somehow fit within the confines of an atom at the instant of the Big Bang, is mystery enough for me.

Who needs God? That’s just a conception. Evidence for the Big Bang is everywhere. (Countless particles left over from the primal microwave radiation are impacting each of us right now).

Along these lines, sort of, I came across this Thomas Jefferson quote in Richard Dawkin’s “The God Delusion” today.

The priests of the different religious sects…dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight, and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subdivision of the duperies on which they live.

Welcome, "In Good Spirit" listeners

I enjoyed my conversation with Marcel and Lenny on Achieve Radio's "In Good Spirit" tonight. Marcel mentioned the Church of the Churchless several times, so maybe some new blog readers have found their way here.

I wrote about my reading with Marcel, the medium, last month, so it's slipped off the listing of most recent posts. For those interested in how a skeptic viewed his first reading, click on "I visit a Hollywood medium, Marcel Cairo."

When (or if) Achieve Radio puts up an archive of tonight's show, I'll blog about it. For sure.

[Update: Marcel sent me a link to last night's program. It was a bit painful to listen to myself, though I seemed to make pretty good sense. Was surprised at how often I said "you know" though. Bad habit.]

Dancing free, not to a pattern

About 90 minutes into our Tango class last night the instructor asked us, “Are you ready to really challenge yourself, to drive yourself crazy?” There wasn’t much of a response from the dozen students. I meekly muttered, “Sure…I guess.”

Up to that point we’d mostly been working on an ocho cortado pattern. At first it drove Laurel and me crazy, so that explains why we weren’t thrilled to hear that we were about to be driven even crazier.

Six simple steps. But each has to be led and followed. Laurel and I struggled to get the pattern down. Then the rhythm. Carlos and Jodi, our highly competent teachers, gave us tips.

My main problem was not following Laurel after I led a movement. I had a preconceived notion of where she should go. When she didn’t end up where I expected her to be, I had trouble adapting. I’d gotten a geometric ocho cortado pattern in my head rather than the feel of the moves, which in Tango can move any which way so long as the man and woman stay connected.

So what was the next phase of our Tango development to be? Carlos told us: “You’ve been following the ocho cortado pattern. Now, break it. Be spontaneous. Do whatever you want. Experiment. Try different things.”

Interesting. It’s easier, much easier, to follow a dance blueprint than to create your own unique movement in time and space. Yet that’s where the evolution of learning Tango takes you. And is why Carlos likes to call Tango the “Ph.D. of social dance.”

A while back I wrote about getting a glimpse of Tango Zen. That’s still what I have, just a glimpse. But finding connections between the spontaneity of dance and the freedom of churchlessness continues to intrigue me.

There’s a natural rhythm to life and the cosmos, that, when you move freely with it, feels so right. The trick seems to be not trying to mimic someone else’s pattern.

That’s why religion binds. Jesus, Buddha, Mohammad, Lao Tzu, Krishna, Moses, Kabir—they all danced to their own music. Similarly, we need to dance to ours.

Tango on, spontaneously and freely. Life is your lovely partner.

I'm on "In Good Spirit" tonight

Tonight two mediums gang up on little ol' skeptical me on Achieve Radio, an Internet broadcasting system. Hope I survive. One of them is Marcel Cairo, the Hollywood medium I had a session with and blogged about recently.

I enjoyed talking with Marcel, so I'm looking forward to doubling the medium pleasure this evening. Here's a blurb about the show.

Download marcel_lenny_in_good_spirit.htm

I'm pretty sure the interview will be archived online, for those who have the good sense to watch "Lost" at 9 pm (PST) rather than listen to live Internet radio.

Sam Harris shakes up a Christian nation. And, me.

I loved “Letter to a Christian Nation.” Sam Harris punctures every variety of religious vanity. Though his focus is, obviously, on the follies of Christianity, Harris’ razor-sharp dissection of one religion leaves in shreds every faith-based belief system.

I read nearly all of the 96 pages in one evening. It’s hard to put down this book. I agree with Harris nearly 100%, but even if you don’t—and most Americans won’t—his blunt epigrammatic style will draw you in.

After all, right off the bat Harris establishes some common ground between he and his Christian audience.

You believe that the Bible is the word of God, that Jesus is the Son of God, and that only those who place their faith in Jesus will find salvation after death. As a Christian, you believe these propositions not because they make you feel good, but because you think they are true.

Before I point out some of the problems with these beliefs, I would like to acknowledge that there are many points on which you and I agree. We agree, for instance, that if one of us is right, the other is wrong. The Bible is either the word of God, or it isn’t. Either Jesus offers humanity the one, true path to salvation, or he does not.

From there, Harris is off and running. Since neither Christianity, nor any other religion or spiritual faith, can prove that it knows the nature of ultimate truth, it isn’t difficult for him to demonstrate the folly of religious certainty.

For Harris, as for me, a scientific approach toward knowing reality is the only sensible way to go.

In the broadest sense, “science” (from the Latin scire, “to know”) represents our best efforts to know what is true about our world…The core of science is not controlled experiment or mathematical modeling; it is intellectual honesty.

It is time we acknowledged a basic feature of human discourse: when considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn’t. Religion is the one area of our lives where people imagine that some other standard of intellectual integrity applies.

I’m proud of my churchlessness. But Harris’ bold defense of truth in the face of religious attempts to substitute faith for facts made me realize how wishy-washy I can be.

I’ll listen to someone’s recitation of their religiosity and think to myself, “That’s bullshit.” Yet I won’t say it. Harris says it. As he should. As we all should.

In his first book, “The End of Faith,” Harris reserves special scorn for religious moderates and liberals. He does the same in “Letter to a Christian Nation.”

I have little doubt that liberals and moderates find the eerie certainties of the Christian Right to be as troubling as I do. It is my hope, however, that they will also begin to see that the respect they demand for their own religious beliefs gives shelter to extremists of all faiths…Even the most progressive faiths lend tacit support to the religious divisions in our world.

If somebody said to me, “Global warming isn’t happening,” I’d reply, “You’re wrong.” I wouldn’t say, “Well, you’re entitled to your belief” because this issue is too important for erroneous ideas to trump the truth.

Yet often I’ll keep my mouth shut when a believer spouts some equally indefensible statement about God, morality, life after death, or such. Partly I’m motivated by a desire not to rock the conversational boat.

But Harris is right: in the past, and to some extent now as well, I’ve held equally indefensible beliefs that I didn’t want others to question. So I’d hold to a policy of mutual assured religious destruction. “You could demolish the arguments I use to defend my faith just as easily as I could destroy yours; so let’s each hold our fire.”

Intellectually dishonest. Yet it worked. The cost of this I’ll scratch your absurdities if you’ll scratch mine is too high to tolerate, though. Personally as well as culturally. Blind belief threatens to tear apart the social fabric. In the United States; in the world.

So each of us needs to suck it up and allow our most cherished spiritual and religious fantasies to be seen for what they are: egotistical attempts at wish-fulfillment. Harris points out that scientists and non-believers are the most humble of humans, while the religious display astounding arrogance.

There is, in fact, no worldview more reprehensible in its arrogance than that of a religious believer: the creator of the universe takes an interest in me, approves of me, loves me, and will reward me after death; my current beliefs, drawn from scripture, will remain the best statement of the truth until the end of the world; everyone who disagrees with me will spend eternity in hell…An average Christian, in an average church, listening to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse—and there have been some extraordinarily arrogant scientists.

Read “Letter to a Christian Nation.” Even if you’re not Christian. If you’re a spiritual believer of any stripe, Sam Harris is speaking to you too.

A thoughtful “no thanks” to Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Most people give less thought to choosing a religion than to picking out a new car. Ford and Toyota owners tend to be loyal to their favored automobile company, but if they find that a different brand has a better vehicle, they’ll jump ship.

That’s the way it should be. Why stick with something that isn’t a good fit for you? Yet religious affiliation is strongly inertial. If you were born in a Christian culture, most likely you’ll end up embracing Christianity. Ditto with Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and other religions.

More and more, though, we’re moving in the direction of a global culture. Thomas Friedman says, “the world is flat.” Meaning, connected. So now there are many more choices available on the cultural menu. Religiously, you can be a Nebraskan Buddhist or a Tibetan Baptist.

It all depends on your spiritual taste buds. Take some bites of a faith that seems promising. Consider how pleasant this sample seems. Ponder the digestibility of its teachings.

In the end it comes down to a simple “Yum!” or “Ugh!” (with many gradations of liking and disliking, of course). When asked why they chose or rejected a particular religion, many people respond with little more than a “It felt right,” or the obverse.

Nothing wrong with that. Just as no reason needs to be given for hating green peppers—this comes naturally to me—it’s fine to let spiritual preferences remain unexplained.

But I enjoy a thoughtful explanation none the less. Such came into my hands recently in the form of an email from Mike Weston, with whom I’d corresponded previously. Mike has been looking into the pros and cons of becoming an initiate of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a group that I’ve been associated with since 1970.

It was interesting to learn what he’s concluded. And why. Here, with Mike’s permission, is his story. Read on.

Not seeing is believing

Andrew Sullivan offers up another alternative to “I’ll believe it when I see it” and “I’ll see it when I believe it.”

In his TIME essay, “When Not Seeing is Believing,” Sullivan points toward “I’ll believe it when I don’t see it” as the preferred theology for the 21st century. Or any century in which fundamentalism threatens to rend the fabric of secular civilization.

How, after all, can you engage in a rational dialogue with a man like [Iranian president] Ahmadinejad, who believes that Armageddon is near and that it is his duty to accelerate it? How can Israel negotiate with people who are certain their instructions come from heaven and so decree that Israel must not exist in Muslim lands?

Equally, of course, how can one negotiate with fundamentalist Jews who claim that the West Bank is theirs forever by biblical mandate? Or with Fundamentalist Christians who believe that Israel's expansion is a biblical necessity rather than a strategic judgment?

There is, however, a way out. And it will come from the only place it can come from--the minds and souls of people of faith. It will come from the much derided moderate Muslims, tolerant Jews and humble Christians.

The alternative to the secular-fundamentalist death spiral is something called spiritual humility and sincere religious doubt. Fundamentalism is not the only valid form of faith, and to say it is, is the great lie of our time.

I like Sullivan’s embrace of spiritual doubt. He says, “If God really is God, then God must, by definition, surpass our human understanding…There will always be something that eludes us. If there weren’t, it would not be God.”

However, I feel that Sullivan goes further than is justified in claiming that God can be partially comprehended via Scripture, reason, religious authority, and our own experiences of the divine.

He doesn’t explain why, if this is so, religions are all over the theological map. It’s difficult to discern much agreement between Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism on what It is all about.

So I wish that Sullivan had left off the last two words of, “If God is beyond our categories, then God can’t be captured for certain.” Give fundamentalism a dogmatic inch, and it’ll take an undoubting mile.

The tent of “I don’t know” can comfortably hold every person on Earth. But allow differing species of certainty to creep in under the flap and pretty soon the screeching and hollering will begin.

Infidel! Evil-doer! Pagan! Apostate! Devil-worshipper! Unbeliever!

It’s difficult to envision what a genuinely uncertain belief in God would look like, though. If doubt is the mainstay of a spiritual practice, what separates believers from the faithless?

Well, seemingly nothing. Which brings us all under the tent of unknowing, a nice place to hang out together.

Let skepticism blossom

Should I be skeptical about skepticism? That’s an interesting notion. But after pondering the question as a good skeptic would, I’ve decided that skepticism should continue to blossom in me. And, hopefully, the world, which would be a better place with more of it.

So I’ve got to respectfully disagree with an essay that a Church of the Churchless visitor recently pointed me toward: “The Death of Skepticism.” The author, Steve Pavlina, does his best to make a convincing argument that we should be as skeptical about skepticism as we are, say, about a claim that the moon is made out of green cheese.

But I’m not convinced. The main problem with Pavlina’s piece is that he doesn’t understand what skepticism is all about. He says that skeptics are closed, while non-skeptics are open. He also says that skeptics believe in objectivity, while non-skeptics believe in subjectivity.

That’s simplistic. And wrong. Peter Suber, a philosophy professor at Earlham College, gets it right in his essay on “Classical Skepticism.” Here’s some of what he has to say in his introduction to the subject

Compared to non-skeptical philosophical positions, skepticism is very simple. It is easy to understand, although it is commonly confused with things it is not.

Skepticism in religion, for example, is not atheism. It is not even agnosticism. No genuine skeptic ever doubts or denies or disbelieves any theory, any hypothesis, or any belief. In fact, this is the only obstacle to a clear understanding of skepticism: we think we already know what it is and we are wrong.

To skeptics, this unfounded pretense to knowledge is itself an example of the greatest sin they know, which is variously called rashness, conceit, pride, dogmatism, presumption, and culpable ignorance.

To the Greeks "skepticism" meant inquiry, and a skeptic was an inquirer. The skeptics so named themselves because the essence of their position was not doubt or denial or disbelief, but continual inquiry.

They did not believe in the reality of a god, for example, but neither did they deny it. Nor did they even say that nobody could ever know for certain one way or the other, as agnostics do. Skeptics said instead, "I personally do not know at the moment but I am trying to find out."

The differences between this and atheism, agnosticism, and indifference have led to confusion.

All three components of the skeptics' statement are important. (1) They speak only for themselves and confess only their own ignorance. (2) They speak only for the present and do not claim that their ignorance is inescapable. They do not say that knowledge is impossible for themselves or for others. (3) And they always add that despite their own present ignorance they are inquiring for the truth of the matter.

They have not given up; they are optimistic —or at least hopeful —or at least undefeated —or at least unrelenting.

Right on, Dr. Suber. You’ve expressed my own skeptical attitude much better than I could. You’ve strengthened my conviction that skepticism is the wisest position we can take toward ourselves and the world. Skeptics are humble truth-seeking optimists, not grumpy nay-sayers.

I respect Steve Pavlina’s belief in the power of subjectivity. He’s convinced that “I’ll see it when I believe it” is a more accurate representation of how the cosmos operates than “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Pavlina is trying to use the power of intention to manifest a million dollars for each person taking part in the experiment. I wish them luck. So far the participants have subjectively estimated that, on average, an additional $592 has come each person’s way. Not bad. Also, not a million dollars.

On the whole, the observable universe seems to be tilted much more in the direction of objectivity than subjectivity. The dependability and universality of the laws of nature testify to that conclusion. Humans can think and believe what they want. That’s the special blessing (and curse) of Homo sapiens.

However, for the time being my personal opinion is that truth is what it is, not what we may want it to be. I may very well end up changing my mind, because that’s what skeptics frequently do. Skepticism is at the other end of the philosophical spectrum from dogmatism, which suits me just fine.

I’ll end with another quote from Suber that resonates with my skeptical soul (see continuation to this post).

Open presence meditation

The story in “On Buddhist meditation practice” about meditators not being startled by a tree trunk crashing or heavy hail falling reminded me of a chapter in Matthieu Ricard’s “Happiness.”

Ricard is a long-time Buddhist. He’s participated in scientific studies concerning the neurological correlates of meditation. I suspect that the subject he’s talking about is himself.

He says that the startle response is one of the body’s most primitive reflexes. It responds to activity in the brain stem and is usually not subject to voluntary control. “The stronger a person’s flinch, the more he is inclined to experience negative emotions.”

The researchers hooked up the Buddhist meditator to equipment that would measure his reactions. Ricard says, “The experimenters opted for the maximal threshold of human tolerance—a very powerful detonation, equivalent to a gunshot going off beside the ear.”

The subject was told that within five minutes he’d hear a loud explosion. He was asked to try to neutralize it. Hundreds of other people had taken this test. Nobody had ever been able to stop the startle response. Not even police sharpshooters.

But the meditator could. He’d been practicing two types of meditation: single-pointed concentration and open presence. The best effect, he found, came with open presence meditation. He said:

In that state I was not actively trying to control the startle, but the detonation seemed weaker, as if I were hearing it at a distance. In the distracted state, the explosion suddenly brings you back to the present moment and causes you to jump out of surprise. But while in open presence you are resting in the present moment and the bang simply occurs and causes only a little disturbance, like a bird crossing the sky.

It seems, Ricard concludes, that the meditator’s body registered all the effects of the detonation, but it had no emotional impact on his mind.

The meditator’s performance suggests remarkable emotional equanimity—precisely the same kind of equanimity that the ancient texts describe as one of the fruits of meditative practice.

Well, this is my mind of spirituality. Measurable. Discernable. Practical. Instead of pie-in-the-sky you’ll-be-rewarded-when-you-die religiosity, the best forms of meditative practice deliver results here and now.

Which is where and when, the concluding page of my well-thumbed “Zen Flesh, Zen Bones” tells me, we should be looking for whatever the hell it is we’re all searching for.

What is Zen? Try if you wish. But Zen comes of itself. True Zen shows in everyday living, consciousness in action. More than any limited awareness, it opens every inner door to our infinite nature.

Instantly mind frees. How it frees! False Zen wracks brains as a fiction concocted by priests and salesmen to peddle their own wares.

Look at it this way, inside out and outside in: consciousness everywhere, inclusive, through you. Then you can’t help living humbly, in wonder.

“What is Zen?”

One answer: Inayat Khan tells a Hindu story of a fish who went to a queen fish and asked, “I have always heard about the sea, but what is this sea? Where is it?”

The queen fish explained: “You live, move, and have your being in the sea. The sea is within you and without you, and you are made of sea, and you will end in sea. The sea surrounds you as your own being.”

Another answer:

Suppose I should leave the empty space as that. Or, rather, as That. But there’s always another answer, after another answer.

Today I came across a “Lost” poem by a fellow Salem, Oregon blogger. Burton says that he’s a cynical, sarcastic Presbyterian. Also, a non-traditional know-it-all who questions authority.

I’d say he has some Zen in him too. Nice poem, Burton.

For those who want to diminish the startle in their lives, here’s Ricard’s description of open presence meditation.

Open presence is a clear, open, vast, and alert state of mind, free from mental constructs. It is not actively focused on anything, yet it is not distracted. The mind simply remains at ease, perfectly present in a state of pure awareness. When thoughts intrude, the meditator does not attempt to interfere with them, but allows the thoughts to vanish naturally.

On Buddhist meditation practice

Today I got another email from my “Balancing Sant Mat faith and doubt” correspondent. I enjoyed learning more about how Buddhist meditation practice looks upon supposedly mystical phenomena like inner light and sound. This person’s description of how a group of Buddhist meditators reacted to dramatic outer sound also is interesting.

Read on…