Going beyond “I am a (fill in the faith)”

It was the kickoff to a great coffee house conversation today: "So, Brian, would you say that you're still a satsangi?" Meaning, a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB)—an India-based spiritual organization.

I've had this sort of talk before. It leads to all sorts of interesting spinoff questions that apply to anyone of any faith. What does it take to deserve to be called a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, or any other persuasion?

I started with an obvious answer. "I was initiated into RSSB thirty-six years ago. Guess that means I'm a satsangi." Hans, my philosophical discussion partner, wasn't satisfied with that.

"Lots of people have been baptized Christian, but they aren't really Christians." Agreed. So we delved deeper.

After an hour or so of latte-fueled give and take, I finally began to reach the core of what the question pointed to in me. This came after Hans asked me if I still believed in some central Articles of Faith for RSSB disciples. Such as that a living guru is necessary to make spiritual progress.

"No, I don't really believe that any more," I said. "But I'm not sure whether it's true or false. I'm not sure about much of anything now. Beliefs that used to be important to me now seem like a bunch of empty words, concepts lacking any grounding in direct experience."

I told Hans about my "Believers, I'm even more deluded than you think" blog post. There I wrote that the current guru (Gurinder Singh), like the previous one (Charan Singh), emphasizes actually experiencing spirituality rather than just thinking about religious teachings. However…

Most RSSB initiates fill their heads with thoughts, images, emotions, and imaginings rather than emptying themselves and becoming receptive to unvarnished reality. I used to do this too, so I know whereof I speak.

I'd sit every Sunday in a satsang hall, adorned with photos of the guru, listening to a speaker read from an RSSB book, which taught that after death the Master would meet the disciple and take him or her to Sach Khand and the lap of God.

I'd feel grateful that I wasn't a deluded Christian who at that moment was sitting in a church, adorned with images of Jesus, listening to a preacher read from the Bible, which taught that after death Christ would meet the disciple and take him or her to heaven and the lap of God.

Eventually the absurdity broke through. I was decrying religion founded on blind faith, yet I had embraced a religion founded on blind faith.

Every organized religion or spiritual practice, pretty much, has its less mystical and more mystical sides. Even supposedly mystic philosophies like Radha Soami Satsang Beas, or Sant Mat. "Belief" is on the less side; "Experience" is on the more side.

So if you stay stuck on the fly paper of a belief system, you're not going to do much moving. Toward God, satori, enlightenment, self-understanding, or anywhere else.

In his delightful Buddhism is Not What You Think: Finding Freedom From Beliefs, Steve Hagen says:

Instead of putting faith in what we believe, think, explain, justify, or otherwise construct in our minds, we can learn to put our trust and confidence in immediate, direct experience, before all forms and colors appear.

…This is faith in its purest form: trust in actual experience before we make anything of it—before beliefs, thoughts, signs, explanations, justifications, and other constructions of our minds take form.

Belief can't hold a candle to the bright light of direct experience. But so long as a believer is fixated on the flickering candle flame—got to keep believing, got to keep believing—his or her awareness is going to be distracted from the really real reality that shines with infinitely more luminosity.

My wife and I saw Steve Martin's adapted play, "The Underpants," last night at Salem Repertory Theatre. (Interestingly, two of the actors walked into the coffee shop just as I was about to leave, which led to another interesting conversation with them).

"Religion is a lot like one of the characters in the play," I said to Hans. He lusts after a woman whose underpants fell down while she was watching a parade. It isn't all that difficult to seduce her, since she is married to a rigid, controlling, passionless guy.

Her would-be lover is a would-be poet, in love with words. More than her, it turns out. Before too long she is sighing, "Take me! Take me!" to the poet.

That should have caused a different part of his body than his literary sense to get aroused. But instead he runs into his bedroom to grab a pen and paper, not her. The poet has to capture the moment in words rather than experiencing it in reality.

Believing that you're about to have sex with a woman is a lot less satisfying than actually having sex with her. You've got to give up the belief and take the plunge, so to speak, into the real thing.

Rumi used almost exactly the same analogy as the playwright in "Tales From the Masnavi" (Arberry translation):

A lover, being admitted to sit beside his beloved, thereupon drew out a letter and read it to her. The letter, which was in verse, told over her praises together with much lamentation, misery and supplication.

"If all this is for my sake," said the beloved, "to read this now you are with me is a sheer waste of time. Here I am beside you, and you read a letter! This is certainly not the sign of a true lover."

Hans and I talked about how there's all these stories in the mystic literature about eccentric, crazed, unconventional, rule-breaking ecstatic lovers of the divine.

However, the stories are told in a decidedly settled setting. If someone jumped up and actually started acting like that, they'd be thrown out of the meeting room.

Well, if that's where the Wild Mystics roam, better to be wandering out there than sitting primly in your religious seat. Even if that means losing your identity and the ability to say "I'm a _______."

Comments

[ander]

So here is a story from Rumi to fill the empty space up to ."

The Sunrise Ruby

In the early morning hour,
Just before dawn
Lover and beloved wake
and take a drink of water.

She asks ”Do you love me or yourself more?
Really, tell the absolute truth.”

He says, “ There’s nothing left of me.
I’m like a ruby held up to sunrise.
Is it still a stone, or a world
made of redness? It has no resistance
to sunlight.”

This is how Hallaj said, I am God,
and told the truth!

The Ruby and the sunrise are one.
Be courageous and discipline yourself.

Completely become hearing and ear,
And wear this sun-ruby as an earring.

Work. Keep digging your well.
Don’t think about getting off work.
Water is there somewhere.

Submit to a daily practice.
Your loyalty to that
is a ring of the door.

Keep knocking, and the joy inside
will eventually open a window
and look out to see who’s there.

Peace to all

[catherine]

Can't help thinking of REM's,' losing my religion'... but identity- does one ever lose it completely? Recently I have become interested in mine.

Aya Kemma (an Australian Buddhist Nun- labelled!)was asked if she had difficulty letting go of men. She answered,'No, there are plenty of men around all the time (monks), but I have difficulty letting go of my opinions, views, comments, judgements and pre-conceptions ( and the similar rest that you listed above).' When I heard her say this I was about 21 yrs old and was thrown into a quandry, because my work involved doing just that.

I like the idea of wild mystics roaming, but not crazed ones. If you're game spotting, the visible wild roaming ones water down in Rishikesh, but a first hand experience of a wild mystic 'roaming'around in my lounge gave me the prim notion that that's just self-indulgence. Trouble is, a nervous breakdown would look very similar. I also saw a girl I knew when I was a student leaping in ecstacy down a pathway (her shapely leg was 'inadvertently' shooting out with each leap between the thigh high slit in her skirt and she was shouting out loudly, ' I am in love! I am in love with Jesus!' Any takers?

Good to hear that Hans was your philisophical partner during this discussion. That ' Am I still a satsangi?' is a kick-off to a great coffee house conversation. One such discussion in a coffee house ended up with people walking out, and the discussion being labelled an 'altercation'(confrontation).

Well there's my comment, criticism etc.!

[Edward]

Good parables. Maybe the link is in transitioning from the training wheels of the yeshiva to the Harley of the Zohar. I am only dissatisfied by insufficient knowledge when I know enough to know I know too little.

By setting up a hierarchy of spiritual achievement, organized religions exploit the axiom that "the power of persuasion is no match for anticipation." After the snapshot comes the seduction, and the poet moves to a very different yoga. As should we.

Gosh, kindergarten teachers must think I'm an idiot. I know how to read! Why do they keep teaching reading?

[elizabeth W]

Brian, as a disbeliever of anything smacking of religion/spiritual "faiths", would like to say thst in the years I studied RSSB prior to initiation, what eventually "got" to me was the Sound Current (call it what you like but not tinnitus). When reading about it I simply thought this was a nebulous kind of thing with no grounding in reality, just something dreamed up by so-called mystics.
But then one day at the office I suddenly heard it. And applied for initiation! there and then. It felt st the time like going into a laboratory & obtaining the desired result. Empirical, scientific evidence.
I was overjoyed. Here it was. Wow. You speak very little about this, Brian. I do know from direct experience (whatever the cause) that this sound has the power to withdraw one's consciousness to a different level. It all may simply be some neuron acting in a certain way on command from the hqs of the brain. I don't know. No, I'm not a satsangi any longer in a sense (how I loathe labels), do not attend satsangs now but do "know" the pulling strength and power of that sound.
In the RSSB teachings there was much emphasis on not discussing this sound and even now I find hesitation within myself
which seems to come without volition so that I refrain somewhat in my deliberation.
Whatever, Brian, your writing as ever sre superb.

[tao]

Elizabeth W,

As I said in my previous comment under another post, at this point I kind of hesitate to make comments in this blog anymore, probably due to the rather poor reception that I've had here in the past. And thats funny in so much as how I am hardly ever at odds with what Brian has to say, yet I am the one that most often gets criticised and bashed for being more or less in sympathy and agreement with him. It must be that some people, in their spiritual immaturities, need some villian to blame.

That being said, I would like to express my thoughts about some of your statements.

You wrote:
"...in the years I studied RSSB prior to initiation, what eventually "got" to me was the Sound Current (call it what you like but not tinnitus)."

Why not call it a possible form of tinnitus? I know of that which you speak, but there is nothing to prove that it is anything beyond a neurological phenomena.

"But then one day at the office I suddenly heard it. And applied for initiation! there and then."

So you had an experience that you assumed validated that which you had been lead to believe by Santmat literature. And you bought into the belief system.

"It felt at the time like going into a laboratory & obtaining the desired result. Empirical, scientific evidence."

I am sorry to inform you, but a mere subjective internal sense perception is hardly any "empirical scientific evidence".

"I do know from direct experience (whatever the cause) that this sound has the power to withdraw one's consciousness to a different level."

That is but your subjective experience and perception, and presumed result. Even if the so-called "level" of your consciousness seemed somehow related to, and affected by, this perceived sound, it does not represent anyhing beyond a perceptual phenomenon.

"I'm not a satsangi any longer .... but do "know" the pulling strength and power of that sound."

Again, your presumption that an internally perceived "sound" is by no means representative of any sort of real spiritual growth or implicit awakening.

"In the RSSB teachings there was much emphasis on not discussing this sound and even now I find hesitation within myself ... so that I refrain somewhat in my deliberation."

Well this inhibition and reluctance certainly seems indicative of your still being more or less under the spell or under the artificially imposed mindset and belief system that you had acquired from Santmat and its spiritual cult dogma.

Even though it may seem to you to be a natural response to hesitate, you would be wiser to overcome that and to free youself from such subtle influences.

You are a sovereign being and you should not feel mentally or emotionally inhibited in your questioning or consideration of your experiences, or from the expressing of your thoughts and/or experiences.

[Catherine]

Tao, your effort is worthwhile and appreciated. Thank you.

Elizabeth, the fact that a person can hear an extra-ordinary sound does not mean that they should buy into the first belief system they come across(as Tao rightly puts it)just because it mentions a sound current. Sant Mat is based entirely on faith that the RSSB guru is the highest manifestation of human consciousness (despite what he so charmingly and self-effacingly says) and that he is able in his radiant form to lead initiates through all the music imbued regions that exist which in SM theology is only 5 with the Guru and 2 further on. Initiation is believed to be powered by the guru with 5 super-charged names. Initiates are chosen.
Do the RSSB gurus have this power? This is the critical point. If not, their role is merely for social upliftment and their considerable power is similar to that of figures in pop, politics and royalty. The unclear succession lines of so many Sant Mat gurus from Shiv Dayal, and the fact that we don't know S. Dayal's predecessor, is for starters, well worth giving some consideration.

[Tears]

Brian--

I apologize for not commenting on anything in particualr to this post.

I wanted to make amends to you for being inconsiderate, selfish, fearful and dishonest for a previous post. I was judging you and I was wrong.

--Tears