Church of the Churchless

Thank you, Church of the Churchless visitors

It’s sort of clichéd for a blogger to devote his last post of the year to thanking his readers. But who’s afraid of a big bad cliché? Not me. I’m doing it anyway.

Thank you.

TypePad, my blog host, tells me that on average a few hundred people enter the cyberspacey Church of the Churchless door every day. I’m grateful.

I talk to myself a lot of the time. That gets old. It’s nice to reach out and touch someone else, even if they’re repulsed by the gesture. Today I caught up on some unreplied emails and came across one from a woman who said:

I do read your blogs once in a while – initially I used to get angry, upset, baffled, and confused by reading them but now I enjoy them…

Apparently not because they’re any less of an irritant. She’s just come to accept that my skeptical/heretical attitude toward religion in general, and Radha Soami Satsang Beas in particular, is simply part of the burden that God’s truth-bearers have to put up with.

You know, the “Take up thy cross and follow me” sort of thing.

Well, I’m happy to hear from everyone who comments on my posts, emails me, or gives me an earful in person about something I’ve written. Really.

I’m the child of my mother, Carolyn Hines. She was a ferocious conversationalist, in the nicest sense. She loved nothing more than a spirited debate. My mother could be a hugely irritating know-it-all, yet she truly did know a lot.

She’d inspire others to bring forth what they knew, or thought they knew, because if you didn’t bring your best game when you debated her, you were going to get blown out of the give-and-take ballpark.

From my mother I got my intellectualism. From my grandmother, Eva H. Lewis, I was inspired to seek the truth that lies beyond thought. Mystery.

As I wrote about in “Tracking the trajectory of my Wu Project,” she affirmed a 13 year-old’s poem about the void of unknowing. And who knows? Echoing Robert Frost, being encouraged at just the right time to take the road less traveled by may have made all the difference for me.

Religion is a well-traveled road. So is science. Another way—I don’t have a good name for it—is what I’m drawn to. As are, it’s pretty evident, many if not most of you. That way is difficult to pin down because it defies description.

It’s the road that I’m sure exists, and will get me where I want to go to, but which is so damn difficult to find it often makes me want to scream. Or, blog about. Or, shed tears for, as I related in “An old koan rises from my past.”

“There will be light when there is no darkness and through darkness we cannot find the light.” Like I said, fuck! What kind of bullshit is this? Well, the kind my mind has been wallowing around in since that 13-year old stared at the California night sky and thought, “What’s in the darkness past the stars?”

I’ve never regretted setting out to answer that question. The search can be lonely, though. Necessarily, it’s taken me into myself, where so far I’ve encountered mostly me. Well, for all I know, entirely me.

Via this blog it’s nice to share what is sharable about the ramblings I take around my state of consciousness. I enjoy feeling a connection with fellow travelers. I’m not sure what direction we’re heading, individually or collectively.

I simply appreciate knowing that there are others on a roughly similar ride. Gracias for being willing to jump on board my train of thought now and then. And special thanks to those who take my musings in a different direction through your comments and emails.

Fresh vistas. New scenery. You guys are great travel companions. May we all get closer to our final destinations in 2007.

Happy New Year.

When nothing is something: God

In my last post, I focused on a plagiarized passage that I found in a book published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas. What’s more interesting and significant than the plagiarism, though, is what this misquoted quotation from W.T. Stace points toward:

Nothing. Which he, along with many other mystics and mystically inclined writers, equates with God.

Even the plagiarist, J.R. Puri, seems to agree. For after he steals Stace’s words to speak of a state of pure consciousness that has no empirical content other than itself, consciousness aware of consciousness, Puri says:

And this self-realization is often eventually spoken of as God-realization.

In “Mysticism and Philosophy” Stace himself says this after the passage that I quoted previously:

Since the experience has no content, it is often spoken of by the mystics as the Void or as nothingness; but also as the One, and as the Infinite. That there are in it no particular existences is the same as saying that there are no distinctions in it, or that it is an undifferentiated unity. Since there is no multiplicity in it, it is the One. And that there are no distinctions in it or outside it means that there are no boundary lines in it between anything and anything. It is therefore the boundless or the infinite.

The paradox is that there should be a positive experience which has no positive content — an experience which is both something and nothing.

In Robert K.C. Forman’s book about Meister Eckhart that contains the plagiarized passage, Forman says that for Eckhart the birth of God’s “son” within the soul is a Birth of emptiness within. Eckhart says:

The soul should give Birth to nothing inside herself, if she wishes to be the child of God in whom God’s Son shall be born—in her nothing should be born.

More Eckhart on the same theme:

It appeared to a man as in a dream—it was a waking dream—that he became pregnant with Nothing like a woman with child, and in that Nothing God was born, He was the fruit of nothing. God was born in the Nothing. Therefore he says: “He arose from the ground with open eyes, seeing nothing.”

Below Forman summarizes Eckhart’s core mystic thesis that nothing needs to be done to realize God; what is needful is to undo one’s preoccupation with things and thoughts.

As we have seen, for Eckhart God shares a ground with the soul’s ground, and He has so shared it since man’s preexistence. But in “ordinary” experience, in which man is attached to various cognitive objects, the soul attends to the powers and through them to the external world.

As a result, his thoughts bubble incessantly, and what he perceives as “his” needs enthrall his attention. Activities cover over this place “like a mist over the sun.” By looking in the wrong direction, outward instead of within, the religious “overlooks” this “place” within himself, and hence attends not to God but to the creaturely.

…God is the nothing, is in the nothing, and it is God who is “born” when one is “pregnant” with nothing.

Pretty darn simple. And scientific, the way I look at it. The great mysteries that science has not yet been able to fathom are existence, life, and consciousness. The roots and nature of each are hidden in the depths of…who knows? For we human would-be mystery-unravelers are conscious, existent, and alive.

We’re trying to unravel what we are, a snake swallowing its own tail proposition.

So, as I mentioned before, for many years I’ve enjoyed the plagiarized passage in Puri’s book because it points to the ultimate mystery: me. And you. Each of us is a bit of the grand cosmic Mystery that we’re trying to understand.

It makes sense that we start with what we’re already in direct contact with, existent living consciousness, rather than some distant God. And if unity is at the root of it all, then “us” is going to be the same as “cosmos” anyway.

What bothers me about J.R. Puri, apart from his plagiarizing, is that he shies away from the implications of Stace’s statement that consciousness empty of empirical content is identical with the One—God.

His devotion to the RSSB teachings, which emphasize the necessity of a guru for god-realization, causes him to say a few pages later:

The real object of human love must be the Perfect, the Absolute. And it is through such love that salvation can be attained… But—and it is a crucial but—the all-pervasive, formless entity of God cannot be the object on which our feelings can be fixed or attached.

And what cannot be within the range of “feeling” cannot be within the scope of love. Indeed, for such an entity we cannot be sure even of His existence, let alone His love or worship.

…The master [guru] is the manifest form of the Lord, and it is the manifest form that can be the object of love. And if God can only be realized through love, the master is an indispensable link for God-realization.

Huh? On page 59 Puri said that the self-realization of pure consciousness is equivalent to God-realization. That is, the ultimate reality often called “God” is realized by achieving a state of inner emptiness in which nothing is present but the ground of being—the One.

Yet on page 90 he says that emotional attachment to a particular form of God, the guru, is essential. Actually, Eckhart and many other introvertive mystics (such as Plotinus) taught that attachment to material or mental forms is not only inessential for higher understanding, but an insurmountable hurdle.

A main reason I’ve soured on the RSSB approach to meditation is that it takes such a roundabout route. The meditator’s goal is to unite his or her consciousness with the formless One. But getting there supposedly is facilitated by filling one’s mind with thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and imaginings of the guru’s physical form.

That never made much sense to me. Now it makes no sense at all. I’m too old to take roundabout detours. I very much want to know ultimate reality (assuming it is knowable). The shortest and quickest likely way—that’s for me.

I often think about the very first sentence in my book about Plotinus, “Return to the One.” This line flowed easily from my typing fingertips. Maybe I should have stopped right there and not written another word.

If something has been lost and you’re not sure where to look for it, there’s good reason to start searching right where you are rather than far afield.

Puri would have us look for our self in the guru’s mind and body. I’m with Stace, Eckhart, Forman, and Plotinus: the One will be realized by becoming the one we truly are, not someone else.

J.R. Puri commits plagiarism in a RSSB book

The tables have been turned. David Lane (a.k.a. the Neural Surfer) has documented how Paul Twitchell , the founder of Eckankar, massively plagiarized from books published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (notably Julian Johnson’s “Path of the Masters”).

But I've discovered that at least one Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) author is guilty of his own plagiarizing. A few days ago I was reading along in a book that I’d gotten myself for Christmas, “Meister Eckhart: Mystic as Theologian” by Robert K.C. Forman.

On page 102 I came to a quotation from W.T. Stace. It seemed awfully familiar.

Suppose that, after having got rid of all sensations, one should go on to exclude from consciousness all sensuous images, and then all abstract thoughts, reasoning processes, volitions, and other particular mental contents, what would there then be left of consciousness?

There would be no mental content whatever but rather a complete emptiness, vacuum, void. One would suppose a priori that consciousness would then entirely lapse and one would fall asleep or become unconscious.

But the introvertive mystics—thousands of them all over the world—unanimously assert that they have attained to this complete vacuum of particular mental contents, but that what then happens is quite different from a lapse into unconsciousness.

On the contrary, what emerges is a state of pure consciousness—“pure” in the sense that it is not the consciousness of any empirical content. It has no content except itself.

It was familiar because I’d quoted almost the exact same passage in my first book, “God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder.” I’d found it in J.R. Puri’s “Guru Nanak: His Mystic Teachings,” published by RSSB (page 59).

Having eliminated all sensations, the mystic next excludes from consciousness all sensuous images, and then all abstract thoughts, reasoning, processes, volitions, and particular mental contents. One may ask, what then would be left of consciousness?

In the absence of any mental content whatsoever, there would be a complete emptiness, a void, a vacuum. One would suppose a priori that consciousness would then entirely lapse and one would fall asleep or become unconscious.

But the introvertive mystics unanimously assert—and there are thousands of them all over the world—that they have attained to a complete vacuum of particular mental contents, and what then emerges is a state of pure consciousness.

It is pure in the sense that it is not the consciousness of any empirical content. It has no content except itself.

So, who is the plagiarizer? Obviously, J.R. Puri. W.T. Stace’s “Mysticism and Philosophy” was published in 1960. “Guru Nanak” was published in 1982. Shame on you, Mr. Puri!

Yet you couldn't even plagiarize competently, adding an extra comma between "reasoning" and "processes" that confused me every time I read the passage.

I can’t stand plagiarism. I’ve written three books and have gone to considerable lengths to give credit where credit is due, quotation wise. I’m not the most organized author. Sometimes I’d include a quote in a draft, then fail to footnote it on the spot because I figured I’d never forget the source.

But I would. Then I’d have to spend a lot of time searching through my library, looking for the quoted passage. My commitment to crediting quotes is so deep, I almost always mention the author’s name in association with a quotation, rather than simply including a numbered footnote.

What was Puri thinking? I try to imagine him working on his book. He’s a long-time disciple of a RSSB guru who emphasized “honest living.” Yet he copies almost verbatim from Stace’s book, giving Stace absolutely no credit for ideas that Puri implied were his own.

When I used to give talks on behalf of RSSB I’d occasionally cite the passage from Puri’s book. I liked it a lot. I still do, but now I know that whoever else Puri was, he was a plagiarist. Apparently he lacked sufficient mystical understanding of his own and needed to borrow from Stace.

I found much of W.T. Stace’s book online, courtesy of Dave Woodward. The material plagiarized by Puri is in the “Introvertive Mysticism” section (Puri also shamelessly copied that title, along with some other prefatory language).

Now I can’t help but wonder how much unattributed copying is present in other RSSB books. I’ve written one myself (“Life is Fair”) and can say that my book is clean. However, who knows about the many other titles published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas?

For a long time I thought that these books had more credibility than most other mystical literature. Increasingly I’m thinking differently, especially after coming across this plagiarism. Again, I find it difficult to understand how someone with so many years of meditation and spiritual devotion under his belt could so easily steal another writer’s words.

Yet at the same time I also find it easy to understand.

Organized religions like Radha Soami Satsang Beas emphasize outward rather than inward spirituality, notwithstanding the lip service paid to direct mystical experience. Most RSSB initiates simply go through the motions, like the vast majority of other religious believers.

Such as J.R. Puri. I don’t know if he is still alive. If he is, I’d like to learn how he explains his plagiarism. Which is, whatever the reason, inexcusable.

Astoundingly, the book jacket of “Guru Nanak” says about Puri:

The author has also lucidly brought forth the close relationship that exists between the mystic experience and ethics as well as religion, drawing on his rich background in Western philosophy. The mystic experience has been shown to be the cause as also the effect of ethical living.

It seems that plagiarism also is the effect of mystical experience. Or at least the ability to write about mysticism. Also astounding is the fact that Puri spent a lot of time in academia, which puts much emphasis on crediting your sources.

Prof. J.R. Puri was head of the Department of Philosophy, Punjabi University, Patiaia from 1969 to 1976. Earlier, he was head of the post-graduate Department of Philosophy, Mahendra College, Patiaia for more than a decade. After his retirement as a teacher of philosophy for more than thirty-five years, his present interest centers mainly on the study and practice of mysticism.

Well, when that was written I think Puri needed a lot more practice. Not at plagiarizing—he was already expert at that. But at the ethics that supposedly accompanies mystic experience.

[12/30 update: Here's a scan of the pages in question. Several commenters to this post have claimed that the mention of Stace on page 58 somehow absolves the plagiarism on page 59. That's ridiculous.

Puri mentions both Walter Stace and Rudolf Otto on page 58. And he gives no indication on page 59 that the third paragraph is cribbed directly from Stace's book. Puri simply changed a few words. Yet he gives no credit to Stace. As I noted in a comment of my own, according to the Indiana University Campus Writing Program, this is a textbook case of plagiarism.

Am I making too much of this? Maybe. But what I find as interesting as the plagiarism is the reaction of some Puri defenders. In my opinion, they aren't looking at the facts clearly. Which is precisely my objection to the True Believer mind: it sees things that aren't there, and it is blind to things that are there.]

“The Pagan Christ” looks at Christmas differently

Spoiler alert: if you’re a Christian who believes that today you celebrated the birth of someone who actually existed, stop reading--if you don’t want to run the risk of having your belief balloon punctured.

Since I’ve never had any allegiance to the historical Jesus, I had no problem breezing through Tom Harpur’s eye-opening “The Pagan Christ,” subtitled “Is Blind Faith Killing Christianity?”

Harpur, a former Anglican priest and professor of Greek and New Testament at the University of Toronto, argues that Christianity is nothing more than warmed over Egyptian and Greek mythology. Jesus never existed as a historical personage. His Gospel story is an amalgamation of allegories that have no basis in literal fact.

Makes sense to me. But not for lots of others. I note that right now this book is selling for a rock-bottom $2.99 direct from Amazon. Probably the Christmas season is a slow period for books about the pagan origins of Christianity.

And Harpur, not surprisingly, comes in for some heavy criticism from erudite fundamentalists like James Patrick Holding.

My brain is still too much in my stomach after excessive gorging on a Christmas dinner to wade through Holding’s lengthy screed. I’ll simply observe that Bible skeptic Robert M. Price has his own extensive critique of Holding, along with critiques of numerous other apologists for Christian dogma.

Myself, I resonate with Harpur’s freeing message:

The personal Jesus concept is truly a limiting, and deeply divisive, dead end. The historical evidence simply isn’t there. It’s a classic example of the emperor’s having no clothes.

What is more, it commits idolatry by making a flesh-and-blood man into God—thus forever alienating Jews, Muslims, and believers of a host of other religions, and making full religious harmony on the planet a perpetual impossibility

It has, most notably in the United States, created a kind of passive-dependent Jesus cult totally prone to extreme magical thinking. It restricts Christhood to one person in all of history, instead of acknowledging the deep, archetypal power of a universal—yes, cosmic—principle and ideal.

Jordan Stratford is a Gnostic Christian blogger who likes “The Pagan Christ.” He straightforwardly lays out the choices: “Either Jesus Christ was a man who lived 2,000 years ago, suffered under Pontius Pilate and died, or he was not.”

Stratford points out, as does Harpur, that middle of the roaders like The Jesus Seminar participants try to have it both ways: Jesus really existed, but the Bible doesn’t accurately reflect who he was or what he taught. Stratford chooses one lane.

In my opinion it is far more honest to accept the premise, as put forth by a new current of writers including Freke and Gandy, that the Jesus story is entirely mythical with absolutely zero historicity.

So what happens with Christmas? If it isn’t a celebration of the birth of a once-real person, what is it? Just an opportunity to stoke the economy, or something more?

Harpur says that it definitely can be something more, so long as we take the Jesus story as a symbol of how divinity can be born in every person. He quotes John Dominic Crossan:

My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.

We’ve got to wise up, Harpur advises.

This is to refute the charge that if the events of religious festivity are thrown out as non-historical, Christmas and Easter and ceremonies like them will lose all their gripping impressiveness.

On the contrary, [Alvin Boyd] Kuhn affirms, the symbols will exert a far weightier significance when they are envisioned truly as symbols and not falsely as events. I can only add that this has been my personal experience too.

The celebrations of Christmas and Easter have become infinitely more potent for me as I have learned to penetrate beyond the externals to the realities within. As Origen says, taken in its literal, allegedly historical sense, “Christ crucified is teaching for babes.”

Or, to quote St. Paul, “But when I became a mature man, I put away childish things.”

Yes, it’s time to grow up and become churchless.

What makes for a nice day?

I ran into a platitude-buster at Salem’s LifeSource Natural Foods today. A new check-out girl started to ring up my items.

She said, “Are you having a nice day?” I was familiar with grocery store etiquette, so responded with my expected line. “Yes, I am. Hope you are too.” That’s where the scripted exchange of pleasantries usually ends.

But she surprised me. She stopped what she was doing, looked me in the eye, and asked, “What’s made it a nice day?”

Nice! Yet also mildly anxiety-producing. I needed to come up with an answer.

Pretty quick, since there were other people waiting behind me. I’d just proclaimed that I was having a nice day. Could I be convicted of check out line perjury if I stood there speechless until a VISA receipt was handed to me?

I thought back to my most recent nice moment.

“This morning my wife told me that I’d probably forgotten to get her a new Self Realization Fellowship appointment calendar for Christmas. Oops. She was right. But I walked in and got the last one that you had. What a relief!”

I continued on a bit, blathering about guardian angels who look over procrastinators. I must have felt the need to say something vaguely Christianish, given the time of year. But that was extra.

The real gift the girl gave me was making me answer to “What’s made it a nice day?”

For one thing, it was nice to have someone inject a dose of freshness into the usual “Are you having a nice day?” back and forth. At Fred Meyer, the traditional grocery store that I frequent, I’m often tempted to reply with a “Sure, aside from being diagnosed with a malignant brain cancer and having my dog die. How are you doing?”

But so far I haven’t gotten up the guts. The LifeSource girl had a much better approach to bringing some genuine (and non-ironic) human connection into the minute we spent together. And she got me to thinking what makes for a nice day.

Nice moments. A day, or a lifetime, is made up of moments. Those infinitesimally brief, yet also eternally long, instants of awareness.

Looking up and down the bookshelves at the store. Not seeing any calendars at all. Ah, they have some. Good. But now…where’s the SRF calendar? Two days before Christmas, they’re probably all gone. Geez, how could I forget? Wait. Isn’t that…yes, one left!

That moment of yes, it was nice. As was taking Serena to the dog park earlier and, after some interminable sniffing of grass and trees, seeing her finally join a compatible canine play group.

Both of those moments were undeniably real. Here and now. I can’t imagine telling the girl, “What was nice today was that I hoped for…” Or prayed for… Or believed in… Or had faith in…

Nice days aren’t in the future. Neither are they in some distant heaven. Nice days may include some hoping, praying, believing, and faithing, but what makes them nice isn’t the unseen, unknown, unintelligible whatever-it-is that these abstract activities are directed toward.

A hypothetical God or ultimate reality doesn’t make for a nice day. Real nice moments make for a nice day. There’s no need to bring God into them. The guardian angels I brought into my check-out line conversation were totally extraneous.

I didn’t sense them at all. Just the Self-Realization Calendar. And my mind’s so-nice yes!

Almost time to celebrate the Christianity meme

Here we are, late December, and there sure is a lot of Christian talk going around. Someone from outer space would be asking, “What’s that all about?” Mangers, wise men, gifts of frankincense and myrrh.

Our alien visitor would be told that Christmas is a celebration of a man who was sent by God to redeem the world’s sins; that he died, was resurrected, and now is able to give other people eternal life in heaven if you believe in him; and that he expects believers to praise his glory to others so that they too can be saved.

“Oh, I see,” the visitor’s Universal Galactic Translator would say. “The minds of your people have been infected by a powerful meme. Our consciousnesses are prone to the same disturbances.”

Not exactly how Christians view the birth of Jesus. But it’s an entirely reasonable explanation of the hold that Christianity, along with other salvific religions, has on billions of Homo sapiens.

The Christianity Meme web site is dedicated to exposing what’s really going on:

"--Christianity is a meme, a mind virus that lives in the minds of people and is spread through proselytization and other means.
--Christianity is a meme about God, but it has no other connection to God.
--The Christianity Meme has been shaped purely by natural selection--the law of survival of the fittest--as it has played out in human minds. It is a sophisticated product of cultural evolution.
--Being a "true Christian" infected by the Christianity Meme will subject you to aid its survival through its adaptations that allow it to exert control over human behavior.
--As a consequence, the more Christian you are the more you are prone to certain kinds of immoral behavior. The Christianity Meme is not bound by the moral principles it carries.
--We seek to expose Christianity for what it is and we advocate a conscious and rational approach to morality in its place."

Makes sense. Memes are theorized to be the mental equivalent of genes. Whereas genes are passed on from parent to child through DNA, memes propagate through cultural forces: books, conversation, magazines, television, movies, art, blogs, all kinds of methods.

When you hear a new song and can’t get it out of your head, that’s a meme replicating itself. Or when you just have to get an Ipod, because everyone else has one. Or, if you’re of a certain age, when wearing a baseball cap anyway but backward becomes unthinkable.

In his essay “Viruses of the Mind” (in A Devil’s Chaplain), Richard Dawkins says, “Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won’t know it, and may even vigorously deny it.”

These are the tell-tale signs that Dawkins says we should look for.

--The patient is impelled by a deep conviction that something is true, right, or virtuous. This conviction isn’t based on evidence or reason, but still is totally compelling and convincing. In other words, “faith.”

--Patients make a virtue out of faith’s being strong and unshakeable in spite of the lack of evidence. Indeed, the less evidence there is, the more virtuous the belief. Once the proposition is believed, it automatically undermines opposition to itself.

--A related symptom is that “mystery,” per se, is a good thing. It is not a virtue to solve mysteries. Rather, we should enjoy them and even revel in their insolubility.

--The sufferer may find himself behaving intolerantly toward vectors of rival faiths, in extreme cases even killing them or advocating their deaths. He also will be negative toward apostates (people who once held the faith but have renounced it) or toward heretics (people who espouse a different version of the faith).

--The patient’s beliefs likely have nothing to do with evidence and a lot with epidemiology. Meaning, it is the faith his parents and grandparents had, for by far the most important variable determining a person’s religion is the accident of birth. If he’d been born in a different place, he’d have a different religion.

--Yet even if the patient follows a different religion from his parents, the explanation still can be epidemiological: he has been exposed to a particularly potent infective agent, a John Wesley, a Jim Jones, or a St. Paul.

--The internal sensations of the patient may be startlingly reminiscent of those more ordinarily associated with sexual love. Some priests speak of the consecrated Host, the supposed body and blood of Christ, in romantic terms: “I would gaze on the Host…soft-eyed like a lover looking into the eyes of his beloved.”

So beware of what lurks within the religious mind. Memes, like viruses, don’t care about you. Their goal is simply to replicate by means fair or foul.

You might find yourself flying a plane into a building at the behest of a religion meme. Or, donating more money than you can afford to a meme that says, “God loves those who give to Him until it hurts.”

Have a Merry Christmas-meme. Just don’t turn your back on the devious creature.

Abandon hope, all ye who seek

Let’s turn Dante on his head. Hope isn’t abandoned at the entrance to hell, but at the entrance to paradise. I’m temped to say that I hope to convince you of this. Don’t want to descend into hell, though.

Hope has been much on my mind lately. Two climbers are still missing on Mt. Hood, fairly near to where I live. Today on cable news I heard more expressions of hope that they’ll be found alive, even though it’s increasingly likely that they won’t.

I’ve been trying to understand what grates on me every time somebody intones the platitude, “We’ve still got hope.” It’s like nails screeching on a blackboard. Yet the nails and the blackboard aren’t readily apparent to me. Hopefully (oops, there I go again) these musings will make me more aware of them.

I know that hope is close enough to faith to make my churchless soul wary of the sentiment. Wikipedia tells me that hope is an emotion while faith is a belief. And that hope often is the result of faith. Further:

The term false hope refers to a hope based entirely around a fantasy or an extremely unlikely outcome.

False hope seems to be what is flourishing both on the news channel airwaves and the slopes of Mt. Hood. I’m pretty sure it is being fertilized by the fervent Christianity of the climbers’ relatives. For acceptance of the saving power of Jesus requires blind faith. At this point, so does a belief that the climbers probably will be found alive.

Yesterday a relative of one of the climbers said at a news conference, after the body of Kelly James had been found, that they need even more prayers now. Double down, even when it’s evident you’ve got a losing hand. I thought, “What those guys need isn’t more prayers, but more searchers.”

So what’s up with this Christian god? He didn’t answer the prayers to save Kelly James. My bet is that he won’t save the other climbers either. Why, then, should anyone believe that he is going to save a soul after death? God sure doesn’t sound like he can be counted on.

Which brings me to another gripe about hope. It’s passive. Weak. Helpless. Not always, but generally. Paradoxically, however, hope also is a last-gasp attempt to control the uncontrollable when the limit of willful action has been reached.

Like I said before, most of the time I don’t hope for something. I just do it. Or embrace it. I don’t hope that I’ll take step after step. I simply walk. I don’t hope for air. I simply breathe. And even if I found myself in a small sealed chamber, it wouldn’t be hope that would bring me oxygen, it’d be either myself or someone else getting me out.

If I were asked to invest in a company led by a CEO who always talked about how he hoped to make a profit, I’d take my money elsewhere. How about a plan, dude? Similarly, a general who tells his troops “I’m hopeful that we’re going to win this battle” would sound wimpish and weak.

Last night my wife and I finally got around to decorating our artificial Christmas tree (yeah, I know; we live in the heart of Christmas tree growing country; but we’ve got our reasons for going unnatural).

Every year we struggle with the same four strands of lights. It’s our little tradition to fuss and bicker about how best to arrange three sets of “steadies” and one strand of “blinkies.” As the man of the house, I consider it my Tao-given duty to take charge of the lights. Plus, I’m taller than Laurel.

There we were, once again staring dumbstruck at the half-strung tree, wondering—indeed, hoping—that the lights would arrange themselves into their usual pleasing symmetry. Half-hearted suggestions passed back and forth between us.

Suddenly I saw the light. “This is what we need to do,” I told Laurel. With manly confidence I grabbed the blinkie strand, unwound it from the tree, and placed it on the lowest level of branches before circling higher. Perfect!

Hope? Who needs hope? Screw hope. Hope was what I felt in my condition of helplessness, when I was clueless about what to do. “Geez, I sure hope we figure out these lights soon, because I’d rather be watching TV.”

Thus hope is abandoned when what you’re close to, or on top of, what you’re hoping for. In the legend of Pandora, all of the world’s evils fly out of the box when it is opened except for Hope, which lay at the bottom. Well, what’s Hope doing in there with all those evils? Sort of implies that it has a kinship with the nasties.

In Alan Watts’ essay, “Birds in the Sky,” he speaks of what lies on the other side of hope.

To know that you can do nothing is the beginning. Lesson One is: “I give up.”

What happens now? You find yourself in what is perhaps a rather unfamiliar state of mind. Just watching. Not trying to get anything. Not expecting anything. Not hoping. Not seeking. Not trying to relax. Just watching, without purpose.

I should say nothing about what comes next. To hold out hope, to promise a result, spoils the whole thing. The final word must be, “There is no hope, no way.” Yet there is no harm in just one more word—one more word about what lies on the other side of despair, provided we all understand that this something on the other side of despair cannot be hoped for, and is in any way thrust away by hoping.

That’s a persuasive Zen argument against hope. But even better, in a different sort of way, is what I read today in Carolyn Hax’s “Tell Me About It” advice column.

Dear Carolyn: How can I walk away from a relationship that I’m not ready to let go of? I’m in a relationship where I’m not treated well. The guy hasn’t made me a priority in his life, and everyone tells me I need to walk away. The problem is that I am not ready to let go. I have that hope in my heart that we’ll work out, and I have absolutely no interest in meeting anyone else. Am I crazy for hanging on? –Starving for His Attention

Dear Starving: Certainly you’re going to let go only when you’re ready to, or when the drama supply dwindles, whichever comes first. If my calling you crazy will move things along, then, sure, I’m at your service. You know, to help. But I doubt it will.

What will help, I think, when it dawns on you, is that people can be busy; people can be slow to date, slow to trust, slow to find you physically attractive; people can be confused, distracted, scarred, grieving—all of them openings for optimistic projection.

But when they enjoy someone’s company, they seek it. Unless he’s transparently happy to see you, don’t weigh yourself down with hope.

So many people waste their lives waiting by the religious telephone for God to call. If he’s real, he’s got your number. If the phone never rings, dump that “hope he calls…” attitude. Find a better companion.

Hope is the present moment

I live just sixty miles or so from Mt. Hood, where two climbers are still missing on the mountain and one has been found. Dead. Both local and national news is focused on this drama. I am too.

This afternoon I was zeroed in on a television tuned to CNN while exercising on a stairmaster at my athletic club. There was lots of talk about hope. A snow cave had been discovered. Rescuers were making their way to it.

Driving home, I heard on the radio that a body had been recovered. Yet hope was still being expressed that the two other climbers were still alive. Hope, hope, hope. The airwaves were filled to overflowing with chatter about hope.

I’m a believer in positive thinking. More accurately, I usually think positively. It doesn’t do much good to believe in something unless you also do it. So I resonate with all this hopefulness, though it seems misguided to me. Close, but no cigar.

During my daily dog walk, I take many steps. I can’t recall ever hoping that I’d take another step. I just do it. If I ever fall and break a leg, then I suppose I’ll be doing some hoping.

As the families of the missing climbers are, because they—like the radio and television commentators I heard talking about hope today—are helpless. When you can’t do anything about a situation, you hope.

By comparison, I’m pretty sure that the mountain rescue teams are doing hugely more searching than hoping. The abstraction called “hope” is concretized by action: lowering yourself down an icy slope toward the likely location of a lost climber.

In that moment, to be distracted by thoughts of what might be is risky. Take care of now and then will take care of itself.

Western religion thrives on hope in an imaginary future. I wonder if a Buddhist or Taoist cable news channel covering the story of the missing climbers would fill the airwaves with so much talk of hope. I suspect not. A reality-based spirituality worships the present moment.

I’ve written before about the journey between two steps in Tai Chi. And, everywhere else in life. Getting from here to there isn’t a discontinuous lurch. It’s an unbroken journey. Intention, the cousin of hope, does indeed propel you.

But the calculus of intention or hope resolves itself into the infinitesimal of the present moment. I hope that lifting my right foot will result in a forward step. Yet there is no place along the way where what isn’t suddenly takes a quantum leap into what is.

“Hope” is a chimera, a word pointing to a non-existent that I necessarily am clueless about.

And also, to what my ego demands of the cosmos. When I hope, my directorial mind is writing a screenplay for the future. My plot line shall be what will be, because I am the one with an Academy Award-worthy script in hand.

Problem is, everyone else in the world has their own script. As does nature, which generally does a rewrite as it sees fit. Of course, by nature I don’t mean nature. For me that word is a placeholder for whatever is really going on. If I knew what it was, I’d be enlightened.

Or a poet. Which could be the same thing. Like David Ignatow:

I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment on my life.

Whatever has happened, is happening, or will happen on Mt. Hood is simply that. Happenings. I’ve asked “What’s God got to do with lost climbers?”

I’m pretty sure the answer is, nothing. That also happens to be the answer to another question: “What does hope have to do with finding lost climbers?” Or, God.

Prayer can be criticized

For me prayer represents what is both wrong and right about religion.

Wrong, because prayer is the epitome of blind faith, religion’s hallmark. Believers imagine they’re communicating with someone they’ve never seen and for whom there’s no evidence of his/her/its existence.

Right, because prayer is a natural human response to feeling powerless, uncertain, afraid, alone, loveless, or some other emotion flowing from an unmet need demanding satisfaction.

Spinoza said that God’s will is “the asylum of ignorance.” When we don’t understand why something happened in the past, or what the future will bring, the anxiety of not knowing or not being able to do anything is relieved by believing that God is in control.

I understand why people pray. I also understand why people get addicted to crack cocaine. But just because there’s a good reason for something doesn’t mean it can’t be criticized or questioned.

To me, prayer is irreverent. It isn’t for lots of other people, such as the relatives of three climbers who are lost on Mt. Hood (the beautiful and treacherous Oregon mountain that isn’t far from where I live).

Yesterday I asked on my other blog, “What’s God got to do with lost climbers?” This is the sort of question I feel comfortable asking in Oregon, the most unchurched state in the nation.

I think some of the commenters to that post live in the Bible Belt, though. Tina said, “This country was founded on God so people who don't like to hear his name mentioned need to leave!”

I responded, “I hope your comment was in jest. Or ironic. If not, you've made my point for me: religion makes people say ridiculous things.”

However, I have to thank Tina for making me feel young again. I haven’t been told to love ____ or leave the United States since the late 1960s. Flashback!

A memory of Roland DeVries, the man who churched me

I heard from a friend that Roland DeVries died last Saturday, supposedly at 4:00 am when he got up to meditate. If so, I’m happy for Roland. Nice way to go.

Roland is the reason I’m now churchless. For he got me churched back in 1971 when he initiated me into Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a branch of Sant Mat. If I’d never been a true believer, I wouldn’t have been able to evolve into an I’ll believe when I’ve got proof’er.

Roland is a good example of how respect and affection for a person can (and should) be separate from whether you agree with them on matters philosophical, political, religious, or whatever.

Over the years I gradually drew away from sharing Roland’s fervent commitment to Sant Mat and the guru, Charan Singh, to whom we both were connected. But I always enjoyed spending time with Roland and his charming wife, Barbara.

Roland was a speaker at most of the large RSSB gatherings (a.k.a. “bhandaras”). For many years he served as the Western U.S.A. representative for Radha Soami Satsang Beas. I’m pretty sure that he used to be a Christian preacher. He had a unique speaking style that betrayed his sermonizing origins.

One of his favorite lines was, “Satsangis are just run of the mill people” (satsangis are RSSB initiates). Inwardly I’d applaud when Roland would say this. It was a welcome counterpoint to the “We’re special” attitude that pervaded the talks other people would give at bhandaras.

However, it always was difficult for me to reconcile my run-of-the-millness with another favorite theme of Roland’s: the power and glory of the guru, who in Sant Mat is considered to be virtually co-equal with God, if not God incarnate.

If the guru is God in human form, and the guru has chosen to initiate me into his flock, then doesn’t this mean that I am a special favorite of the ultimate divinity? This is the traditional Sant Mat party line, which Roland would eloquently echo whenever he spoke.

For example, in the November and December 2006 issues of “Spiritual Link,” the RSSB magazine, I read:

We are on this Path because our time has come. We have been recalled. We are on the list and nobody is going to erase our names. And remember, according to the Sant Mat books, those whom the Master is meant to initiate carry an invisible mark on the forehead—a mark that only a Master can see.

The souls for whom a Master comes are allotted by the Supreme Father. And each and every one of them will come to their Master, by one route or another. And the Master has no choice in the matter, because he comes to do God’s will, not his own will.

…Jesus explains in Saint John of the Bible: “I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd gives his life to his sheep.” Jesus points out that the Master is our loving shepherd who will look after us in this life and lead us to salvation in our eternal home of God’s kingdom.

Now we can understand the hidden meaning in the first line of this psalm: “The Lord is my Shepherd.” – the Lord in his human form is our shepherd or Master.

Well, maybe. As a confirmed agnostic, I’m not going to rule out any spiritual or mystical possibility. But intuitively my heart says, “No.”

I don’t feel special any more. I don’t see myself as superior to my wife, who hasn’t become part of a guru’s flock. I don’t see evidence that RSSB initiates are any more spiritual, compassionate, or loving than non-initiates.

In short, I agree with Roland: satsangis are run of the mill people. I have to say, though, that Roland himself didn’t seem run of the mill to me. He was marvelously unique. I’m pleased that he was part of my spiritual life.

Wherever or whatever you are now, Roland, thank you. For being you.

(P.S. If the rumor of Roland's passing was wrong, I hope someone will pass this post on to him. He'd get a kick out of it, for sure.)

Don’t spam God

It’s rare that I resonate with a Christian message. But I like the general tone of this short “Do you spam God?” piece (a PDF file).

I wonder, though, whether maybe God would prefer not to be bothered at all, compared with getting heartfelt messages. What’s the point of blabbing away to an omniscient omnipresent being?

(Thanks to the New Life Church for sharing this link).

Keeping consciousness simple

It’s astounding, really. We all confidently say, “I think…,” “I believe…,” “I feel…,” “I see….” Yet we don’t know who or what the “I” is. So how confident should we be about all those statements we make, to others and to our own self, when the nature of the statement-making entity is a mystery?

Last night I managed to watch about fifteen minutes of an interview with Deepak Chopra before this I-entity overdosed on New Age gobbledygook. Nonetheless, I did appreciate how Chopra focuses on unraveling the essence of consciousness.

He believes that consciousness is foundational in the cosmos—a reversal of the usual scientific way of thinking, in which mind emerges from matter. Maybe. I sure hope so. For this implies that consciousness survives bodily death, not being dependent on matter for its existence.

If this is to be anything other than an article of faith, little different from “Jesus saves,” there has to be direct experience of consciousness separate from physical thoughts, emotions, perceptions, imaginings, and such.

In his book, Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness, Robert K.C. Forman talks about what this experience is like. Forman is a mystic as well as a scholar. He discusses his own altered perceptions of reality that stem from many years of meditative practice (Forman describes himself as a neo-Advaitist; he says his primary teachers are Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Ram Dass, and Meister Eckhart).

I just finished re-reading this book. Some chapters are densely intellectual, but overall Forman achieves his aim:

It is my hope that this book will serve to finally close the door on the possibility that one can assume without further justification that mysticism is constructed, and will open the door to much broader and more far-reaching debates on both the deeper character of mysticism, and on what mysticism has to show us about the nature of human consciousness and life.

By “constructed,” Forman means that the mystic’s or meditator’s conceptual/linguistic scheme shapes his or her mystical experiences. Most of the time this is the case. When have you heard of a Christian contemplative encountering the Buddha or Allah? Somehow Jesus makes an appearance instead.

But “most of the time” doesn’t mean “all of the time.” Forman argues persuasively that it’s possible to experience a pure consciousness event (PCE).

One is not perceiving or thinking about some thing, even a one, but rather is coming to be that one thing which one inherently is, if you will, without any additional mental content…the distinguishing mark of the pure consciousness event is that it is not described as an experience of something.

So supposedly there’s nothing that a PCE could be constructed out of (unless, a skeptic might suggest, the prior expectation that a PCE is possible; however, Forman provides instances of PCE’s coming from out of the blue, unexpectedly).

In the article “What Does Mysticism Have to Teach Us About Consciousness?,” you can get the essence of his message. (tip: for easier reading, minimize your web browser to make the page width narrower).

I liked how Forman begins with a common-sense tenet: to understand something complex, turn to its simple forms. He likens the pure consciousness event to E. coli, whose simple gene structure allows researchers to understand the gene functioning of complex species.

Well, E. coli isn’t the most appealing image to plant in my mind before I meditate. But I’m sure these little bacteria look cute to their mothers. And if I’m ever going to have a PCE of my own, there won’t be any thoughts of anything in my consciousness, E. coliish or otherwise.

Religion asks us to become someone new. Mysticism invites us to be who we’ve always been, but have mislaid under all the crap that we’ve piled into our consciousness. Strip it away and you’re left with something simple and pure: awareness. Commenting on Meister Eckhart’s teachings, Forman says:

Eckhart instructs his listener to drag the inwardness outward, as it were, bringing it into activity. One is to act in such a way that reality—activity, thought, perception, etc.—is perceived and undergone while not losing the interior silence encountered in contemplation [of a PCE].

Conversely, one is to lead “reality into the inwardness,” i.e., make the silent inwardness dynamic. In other words, one is to learn to think, speak, walk, and work without losing awareness of the inward silence.

…We may characterize this as a new pattern of mystical experiences: the Dualistic Mystical State, or DMS. It may be defined as an unchanging interior silence that is maintained concurrently with intentional experience in a long-term or permanent way.

Hope this doesn’t sound too complicated. Really, it isn’t. The basic notion is that we can know things separate from our own consciousness, but we can’t know the knower, because we are that. Or as a Buddhist would say, we are That.

We can be who we truly are. That’s all. We can’t know, describe, analyze, or perceive our own self, for it is impossible to stand outside of awareness (if you could, you’d be aware of that). So spirituality starts, and likely ends, by coming to grips with who is trying to be spiritual.

Religion would have us look up toward a distant God, or outward toward a divine person worthy of emulation. However, this just adds additional objects to the already crowded contents of our consciousness.

Uh-oh. I have a premonition that I’m about to quote myself. Why resist? Can’t fight the urge. Must turn to my “Simplicity is Superior” chapter in Return to the One.

Most of us remain absorbed in what is showing on the screen of consciousness and never make much of an effort to discern how those images are projected. This keeps us imprisoned in Plato’s cave of illusion, absorbed in counting the shadows on the cavern wall and debating among ourselves which comes first and which after, which is most desirable and which least desirable, all the while failing to turn around and learn the source of the light that produces the shadows.

We aren’t going to be able to approach the single source of consciousness, the One, so long as we are occupied with its many products…Adhering to the adage “know yourself” means being present to one’s self as one’s true self, not looking upon one’s self as if it was an object, something to be perceived or pondered.

…It isn’t necessary to go through life as a sort of double image: a me that does things and a largely unnecessary hanger-on inside my head who watches and comments on the doer. The internal mental dialogue most people take for granted is akin to a play-by-play announcer who never stops gabbing about what is happening on the field of our awareness.

The problem is that I already know what is going on because I’m directly experiencing it. I should be able to wash the dishes without an inner voice telling me the obvious: “I’m washing the dishes.”

Wow. The guy who wrote those words sure makes a lot of sense. Interesting that he happens to be me. I’ve got to listen to him more often. Except, he just told me not to, so I guess I won’t.

Wu is the way

Yesterday Laurel and I enjoyed a pleasant coffee house conversation with David, a fellow churchless Salem resident who happened upon this blog. He emailed me a while back and we finally got together to chat about matters both mystical and material.

During deep “what’s it all about” talks like the one we had, I find it as interesting to hear what comes out of my mouth as what others have to say. Sometimes I spout out sentiments that surprise me, because if someone else were to utter them, I’d be inclined to think claptrap.

For example, I told David and Laurel, “More and more I’m wondering if there is any meaning-of-life problem that needs to be solved. Maybe my only problem is that I keep thinking there is a problem.”

As soon as those words left my lips I heard New Age platitude! echoing in my self-critical brain. Well, it could have just been the triple latte talking. Nonetheless, I do often say to myself, “Wu is the way.”

Wu-wei is the Taoist term for effortless doing. For most of us, acting takes action. But the Taoist ideal is wei-wu-wei: action without action (“wu” is a negative; “wei” means act or do).

David shared some fascinating stories about his thirty-odd years of spiritual journeying. He’s bounced back and forth between doing the Eastern thing, then the Western thing. Mystical experiences have come his way whichever side of the philosophical continental divide he was on.

Almost always, he said, those experiences were separate from the teachings he was studying or involved with at the moment. Something universal seemed to be what touched him, not a particularized manifestation of higher reality: Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Jehovah, or whatever.

So now David is convinced that dogmas and theologies, as well as the organizations that promulgate them, stand between us and whatever truth may lie beyond the physical. These aren’t roads to reality; they’re barriers.

Remove all that and you’re left with just the Wu Way—the non-existent path that appears before you when there is nowhere else to go.

I think I’m on it right now. And when I stop thinking that, I’ll really be on it.

The key non-travel tip, according to wiser minds than my own, is keeping to the Wu Way when there is both something to do and nothing to do. I mean, it’s a lot easier to do nothing when you’re motionless than when you’re moving.

I’ve revealed that there isn’t much to reveal about my mystical experiences. However, if I dredge my memory back to when I was nine or ten, I can come up with a comic book-related story about what, if I stretch the definition of “mystical experience” to bursting, perhaps could qualify.

At an early age I had a vast comic book collection. That’s mostly what I spent my allowance on each week: those marvelous 10 cent windows into other worlds.

At my mother’s urging, I sold boxes and boxes of my comics for $50 (which now certainly would be worth hugely more), and bought, at my mother’s urging, a Civil War era rolltop desk. So the comics are gone now. All gone.

Except for a few memories. The most distinct is of a page that showed a band of travelers in a long-forgotten Earth era standing on the shore of an sea that stretches beyond the horizon. I can’t recall what sort of adventure they were on, but it was vitally important that they cross the sea.

Without a boat, how? They’re perplexed. Until one of them says, “The water is vanishingly near freezing. Any sort of disturbance will change it to another state.” He picks up a stone from the beach. Throws it into the water.

And, flash, the sea changes to ice. I can still see the frozen ripples radiating out until there was ice from beach to horizon. Then, dressed in their animal skins, the adventurers walk out onto the frozen surface.

D.T. Suzuki relates the story of a Zen adept:

My first koan was ‘Wu’. Whenever a thought was stirred in my mind, I lost no time in keeping it down, and my consciousness was like a cake of solid ice, pure and smooth, serene and undisturbed.

And that of another:

I was returning from an out-of-town trip and was about to climb a flight of stone steps, when the solid ice that had been clogging my brain for so long unexpectedly melted away, and I forgot that I was walking on the roadway.

Who also said, about his state before that experience:

My mental condition then was like the reflection of the moon penetrating the depths of a running stream the surface of which was in rapid motion, while the moon itself retained its perfect shape and serenity in spite of the commotion of the water.

There’s Wu in all of this, I’m sure of it. It’s just so damn difficult to discern that nothing. The more I look for it, the less evident it is. Eventually, I suspect, it’s going to dawn on me that I should just stay put and let that S.O.B. come to me.

The changing face of faith

Got to get psyched up, so to speak, for another Internet radio interview tonight with mediums Marcel and Lenny. Tune in your computer at 8 pm PST here for a discussion of “The Changing Face of Faith.” Here’s the blurb that got emailed to me.
Download in_good_spirit_12606.doc

I’ll jump on their medium turf and look into the future: Marcel and Lenny will challenge my spiritual skepticism. And I’ll say, “But skepticism is the doorway to openness.” Or something like that.

Maybe I’ll talk about walking up our driveway to get the newspaper in the morning. A few days ago I was lost in thought, pondering what I’d do after I got the newspaper in the morning even though I hadn’t yet reached the paper box.

Then…a gap in my pondering. A flash of movement. I saw a deer standing in the field, staring at me. I looked back. We had a deer-human moment. It jumped over the fence. I walked on.

My face has eyes. My eyes connect me with the world, along with my other senses. But most truly, only when I’m open to whatever comes along. When I’m focused on something that exists only in my imagination—“after I read the front page I’ll drink some coffee and then meditate for a while”—I risk missing what exists now in reality.

Like, a deer standing in the field. Like, who knows what else.

So to me the changing face of faith means moving away from looking at life through spread mental fingers, believing in this but not in that, refusing to consider the possibility of X while embracing the hypothesis of Y.

Eyes wide open. No rose-colored glasses. Believing in it when you see it, not before. That’s the sort of faith I find attractive, the kind I wrote about in “Don’t believe, just have faith.” In that post I quoted Alan Watts:

The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Fairly frequently I’m asked, “Brian, have you lost your faith?” God, no! I’ve found it.

What I’ve lost is my unfounded faith in dogma that I have no evidence for, and in the notion that just because I firmly believe something, it must be true. But that sort of faith should be lost. It’s worthless.

The faith I’ve found, or at least come closer to, is a trust in reality—whatever it may consist of. I don’t need to make reality conform to my wishes or desires. All I have to do is open my eyes and see. As clearly as possible.

With my changing face of faith.

[Next day update: per the link in Marcel's comment, below, the eighteen minute interview can be listened to here. Click on the December 6, 9 PM, option. I've also written about the experience on my other weblog. See "My radio interview about the changing face of faith."]

Marcel the medium takes on Julia the atheist

Ever eager to help publicize my favorite Hollywood medium, Marcel Cairo, I invite you to peruse his Celebrity News Alert that got emailed to me recently.
Download marcels_celebrity_news_alert.doc

Marcel is engaged in some bloggish back and forth with Julia Sweeney, Saturday Night Live alum, who has morphed into an articulate unbeliever, as I wrote about in “Letting go of God. And Uncle Fred.”

In this post on Sweeney’s blog she exhibits some skepticism toward mediums like Marcel. Well, a bit more than “some.”

You say you believe in the afterlife BECAUSE you are a spiritual medium. What does that mean, exactly? This is what a spiritual medium is to me - a person who takes other people's money by playing on their weaknesses.

Marcel’s response, buried fairly deep in the comments, includes:

What does get under my skin is the aggressive desire by some atheist to dictate their doctrine of truth upon others by trying to eradicate spiritual beliefs and faith in others. It's a bit Draconian.

Well, I don’t think this is what Sweeney and other unbelievers are trying to do. They’re trying to shine some light on blind faith and see if anything is really there. What’s the problem with that?

If the emperor has no clothes, it isn’t possible to eradicate them. They’re already missing. What’s being taken away is the erroneous belief that Emperor Religion is finely dressed. Errors should be corrected. That isn’t Draconian. It’s a gift.

Sam Harris makes “The Case Against Faith”

It’s always a delight to read Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. He’s got a knack for speaking honestly about subjects that often are taboo topics in polite conversation.

Like, “Why do you cling to such weird religious beliefs?” In a November 13, 2006 Newsweek essay, “The Case Against Faith,” Harris socks it to the faithful in six paragraphs that had me cheering from my seat in the churchless bleachers.

After lamenting that more than half of Americans believe the entire cosmos was created 6,000 years ago, he says:

This is embarrassing. But add to this comedy of false certainties the fact that 44 percent of Americans are certain that Jesus will return to Earth sometime in the next 50 years, and you will glimpse the terrible liability of this sort of thinking.

Given the most common interpretation of Biblical prophecy, it is not an exaggeration to say that nearly half the American population is eagerly anticipating the end of the world. It should be clear that this faith-based nihilism provides its adherents with absolutely no incentive to build a sustainable civilization — economically, environmentally or geopolitically.

Newsweek calls the essay “an atheist’s lament.” Well, I don’t know how Harris describes himself, but I’ve read just about everything he’s written and he doesn’t strike me as an atheist. He seems to have the same attitude toward religion that I do: blind faith is a dead end while empirical experience leads somewhere.

From the last two paragraphs of The End of Faith:

Mysticism is a rational enterprise. Religion is not. The mystic has recognized something about consciousness prior to thought, and this recognition is susceptible to rational discussion.

…A kernel of truth lurks at the heart of religion, because spiritual experience, ethical behavior, and strong communities are essential for human happiness. And yet our religious traditions are intellectually defunct and politically ruinous. While spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it.

Clearly, it must be possible to bring, reason, spirituality, and ethics together in our thinking about the world. This would be the beginning of a rational approach to our deepest personal concerns. It would also be the end of faith.

Put up or shut up, supposedly enlightened ones

I readily admit that my reaction to the comment “doctor heal” left a few days ago on my “A thoughtful ‘no thanks’ to Radha Soami Satsang Beas” post wasn’t a sign of an enlightened being. But, then, I don’t make any claim to being such. The commenter, however, said:

I hate to rain on your parade but the inner experiences are very real for us exp ONES>>>better luck next time around. At that point try to leave the intellect where it belongs. Behind.

I assume “exp” means experienced. Meaning, those who have enjoyed the mystical sights and sounds that the Radha Soami Satsang Beas gurus describe in considerable detail in the RSSB literature. And “next time around” refers to my next incarnation. In that rebirth, doctor heal advises me to stop thinking so much.

Can’t argue with that advice. But unfortunately I’m still stuck in this life, where I do use my intellect to decipher the meaning of comments left on my blogs.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve heard from someone who claims to possess mystical knowledge that I lack. I’m always eager to know more, because, well, I want to know more myself. So I said to doctor heal (both in a comment of my own and an email):

Please tell us more. In detail. About your experiences. How did you achieve them? What were they, exactly? Why are you sure they are genuine? Don't leave us unfortunate ones in the lurch. Place your spiritual knowledge where it belongs. Out front.

We ended up exchanging some email messages. I pointed out to doctor heal my post where Howard reported that the current RSSB guru says that it isn’t a big deal to talk about inner experiences, notwithstanding the belief of many disciples that this is forbidden.

But my correspondent replied that it is a big deal, proving, if nothing else, that he considers his own opinion to be more valid than that of the leader of the spiritual organization to whom he pledges allegiance. I was disappointed. As I am every time someone declines to describe their mystical knowledge after telling me, “I know stuff that you don’t.”

Come on, people, don’t be teases. If you’re going to wink at me from the bar, at least let me sit down next to you, have a drink, and hear your story. I’ve been wandering in a barren wilderness of meditation for over thirty years, like many other hungry souls. Throw me a bone.

(As an aside, whenever I feel like a meditation failure I dig out Thomas Keating’s “Open Mind, Open Heart” and read, on page 10:

I continue to meet people who are very advanced in the spiritual journey who insist that they have never had the grace of contemplative prayer as a felt experience of God…Less than five per cent of cloistered contemplatives that I know have the mystical experiences that Teresa or John of the Cross describe. They generally experience the night of sense, and a few experience the night of spirit. Their consolations are few and far between…What is the essence of contemplative prayer? The way of pure faith. Nothing else. You do not have to feel it, but you have to practice it.)

Look, my supposedly enlightened fellow spiritual seekers (or should I say, finders), it’s evident that there is no solid objective evidence for divinity. If there were, science would have incorporated it into theories about the nature of reality. And whoever manifested that evidence, whether a person or an organization, would quickly rise to the top of the religious pecking order.

So we’re left with subjective evidence. In his essay, “Good and Bad Reasons for Believing” (in A Devil’s Chaplain), Richard Dawkins says that three bad reasons for believing something are called tradition, authority, and revelation.

Agreed. Direct experience is a much better reason. Not infallible, but pretty damn good. Thus if I haven’t had a direct mystical experience of a higher spiritual reality, I need to hear about that more exalted dimension of the cosmos from someone who has.

This obviously is a more fallible reason for believing that my own direct experience, since I can be deceived by someone with the gift of gab. Still, if I have the chance to question them carefully and sort out the details of their claimed mystical knowledge, I’ll feel pretty good about believing them. Or, not.

Well, I’m still waiting for that chance. Which is frustrating. Why be so shy, enlightened ones? Often I hear people say that if you talk about your mystical experiences you’ll stop having them. Why should this be true? Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, Buddha, and a host of others related their “godly” experiences. Didn’t seem to hurt them any.

Over on the Radhasoami Studies discussion group David Lane persuasively argues that if someone has matured spiritually, they shouldn’t be affected by childish fears. Like the power that reading or speaking the 26 letters in the English language might have other them.

Another thing: shouldn’t a genuine mystical experience have some profound effect on the experiencer? When I told my wife about my interchanges with doctor heal, she said: “Why would someone spiritually advanced go onto your Church of the Churchless blog and brag about their experiences?” Good question.

D.T. Suzuki quotes Rinzai, a Zen master:

O Venerable Sirs, beware of taking clothes [for realities]. Clothes are not self-determining; it is the Man that puts on various clothes: clothes of purity, clothes of no-birth, clothes of enlightenment [bodhi], clothes of nirvana, clothes of patriarachs, clothes of Buddhahood.

O Venerable Sirs, what we have here are merely sounds, words, and they are no better than the clothes we change…outwardly by means of sounds and words and inwardly by the changing of modes of consciousness we think, we feel, and these are all the clothes we dress ourselves with.

Do not commit the mistake of taking the clothes people wear for realization.

OK. I won’t. But I still would like to see the clothes of the supposedly enlightened ones, if for no other reason than to compare them with my own tattered spiritual rags. For sure, it’d be nice if we could see each other completely naked. I’ll take what I can get, though.

So it comes down to this for me: put up or shut up. Having immersed myself in a terrific football game this afternoon, permit me to engage in some crude sports talk:

Dude! If you come onto my blog, show some respect. This is my turf. Churchless turf. You start talking trash about knowing God and seeing light and hearing sounds and stuff, back it up! Bring your best game when you walk onto my court, man. Don’t just jive me. If you can’t walk the walk, don’t talk the talk.

Hey, that sounds pretty good; but doesn’t “jive” date me? Well, I’m dated.

On a loftier note, I’ll close with a quote from Richard Dawkins, where he’s giving advice to his ten year old daughter:

Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, ask yourself: “Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority, or revelation?” And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: “What kind of evidence is there for that?” And if they can’t give you a good answer, I hope you’ll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.