Church of the Churchless

Ibn ‘Arabi on the impossibility of becoming nothing

I've read the Koran (in translation, naturally). It didn't resonate with me. Really tough to get through – but Muslims say that a lot, maybe everything, is lost in translation.

Somewhat strangely though, I went through a phase where I couldn't stop reading Rumi. He was a Sufi, the mystical side of Islam. My bookshelves are full of Rumi titles, including Nicholson's three volume translation of the Masnavi.

I rarely pick up a Sufi book any more. There's too much monotheism left over from Sufism's Islamic roots to appeal to me, now that I'm in a Taoist/Buddhist phase.

All this Rumi talk of "His ruby lips" and "kiss of the Beloved" …ugh.

But I just read an excerpt from Ibn 'Arabi's "Divine Governance of the Human Kingdom" that gave me a fresh outlook on Sufism and mystical Islam. It's included in One: Essential Writings on Nonduality, edited by Jerry Katz.

I liked these passages because the notion of becoming nothing is appealing only insofar as it is a metaphor, not reality.

During my deeply devoted Radha Soami Satsang Beas days, when I'd hear disciples say "The guru is everything, I am nothing," I liked the humble sentiment. But it never made sense to me.

After all, if someone is in love with the guru and wants to be just like him, and the guru is everything, then shouldn't that person want to be everything also, rather than nothing? Plus, if you're nothing, how can you love? Or be devoted? Or be anything?

Religions often preach the virtue of extinguishing individuality, ego, willfulness. Yet as Ibn 'Arabi (1165-1240) says below, this presumes that there is something to extinguish.

If reality is truly one at its foundation – a hypothesis that makes a lot of sense to me, both scientifically and spiritually – what's up with all this talk of nothingness and somethingness?

Here's how Ibn 'Arabi puts it, presenting Islam in a refreshing non-dualistic fashion.

You cannot know your Lord by making yourself nothing. Many a wise man claims that in order to know one's Lord one must denude oneself of the signs of one's existence, efface one's identity, finally rid oneself of one's self.

This is a mistake. How could a thing that does not exist try to get rid of its existence? For none of matter exists. How could a thing that is not, become nothing? A thing can only become nothing after it has been something.

Therefore, if you know yourself without being, not trying to become nothing, you will know your Lord. If you think that to know Allah depends on you ridding yourself of yourself, then you are guilty of attributing partners to Him – the only unforgivable sin – because you are claiming that there is another existence besides Him, the All-Existent: that there is a you and a He.

Our Master, the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him), said:

He who knows himself knows His Lord

He did not say:

He who eliminates himself knows his Lord!

…That which exists and is visible is He. There is nothing but He, so how could nothing cease to be?

…Therefore, do not think anymore that you need to become nothing, that you need to annihilate yourself in Him. If you thought so, then you would be His veil, while a veil over Allah is other than He. How could you be a veil that hides Him? What hides Him is His being the One Alone.

Well, I still don't like the "He's" and "Lord's" in reference to Allah. But these are just ways of speaking. I mentally translate them into "It" and "Reality," which seems to be the sense Ibn 'Arabi is intending.

There's only One Thing Going On. It's all around us, and indeed is us.

No need for religion when there's nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to become.

Scrupulosity, a religious mental illness

Do you know someone who tries to follow every commandment, injunction, rule, and ritual of his or her religion absolutely correctly? Within their faith they probably are considered to be exemplary examples of rectitude.

But there's another way of looking at them, which I learned about today thanks to a blog comment from Sapient. They could be suffering from scrupulosity – a mental disorder.

Religious belief, and membership in a faith community are important factors in the lives of many individuals. In addition to moral and spiritual guidance, they can provide a sense of purpose, structure and community. For certain individuals, religious beliefs become compulsive, joyless behaviors.

The individual may constantly worry that he or she might say or do something blasphemous. He may fear that he has committed sin, forgotten it and then neglected to repent for the sin. He may spend long hours searching his mind to try to ferret out evidence of un-confessed sins. He is unable to feel forgiven.

Specific obsessions and compulsions vary according to the individual's religion. An Orthodox Jew might worry that he did not perform a particular ritual correctly. He might obsess about this for hours. A Roman Catholic might go to confession several times a day. Another individual could believe that anything he does might be sinful. This individual might become so paralyzed with doubt, that he or she becomes afraid to do or say anything at all.

Sapient said that members of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based group with which I was associated for many years, are especially prone to scrupulosity, with many taking medication for anxiety problems.

I'm inclined to agree, though I also resonate with one of Roland deVries' (a RSSB official) favorite sayings about initiates: "Satsangis are run of the mill people." Meaning, they're as messed up as everyone else in the world.

I certainly had my own tendencies toward scrupulosity during my deeply devoted decades. RSSB initiates are supposed to meditate two and a half hours a day. I wore a watch with a countdown timer and set it for 150 minutes. I wouldn't let myself go to sleep at night until the timer had counted down to "0:00" and beeped at me.

It was ridiculous, really. There I'd be, sitting in as good an imitation of a meditation posture as I could muster late at night, half-heartedly/ mindedly passing the mantra repetition time until I could say, "Vow fulfilled for another day!"

Other initiates would obsess over the possible presence of eggs or animal rennet in some restaurant food, as if eating a few specks of something not on the official RSSB diet plan would make all the difference to their salvation.

These are symptoms of scrupulosity, for sure. Fear and anxiety replace positive emotions such as love and optimism. The religious experience becomes narrowly focused on not doing anything wrong, rather than on opening up to an expansive confident spirituality.

When I Googled for more information about scrupulosity, I found that the Catholic Church is well aware of its dangers and warns against falling prey to an excessive fear of sinning.

The idea sometimes obtaining, that scrupulosity is in itself a spiritual benefit of some sort, is, of course, a great error. The providence of God permits it and can gather good from it as from other forms of evil. That apart, however, it is a bad habit doing harm, sometimes grievously, to body and soul.

There's online information for Catholics about "Scrupulosity and how to overcome it." Trust in God's love is advised to overcome a painful spiritual disorder.

I particularly enjoyed browsing through some issues of the "Scrupulous Anonymous" newsletter. It's aimed at overly scrupulous Catholics, but contains wisdom for the overly rigid of all faiths.

I liked the message of Rev. Thomas M. Santa, C.Ss.R. in "Dance like no one is watching."

It doesn't matter if you are dancing with the music or dancing in spite of the music. To dance like no one is watching you is to experience the unburdened self.

Now imagine if you can, never being free enough to even give yourself permission to dance, even when no one is watching. Imagine yourself so burdened by guilt, so burdened by a false sense of responsibility, so burdened with a preoccupation of what another person might think or say if they observed you dancing.

To be burdened in such a way that you cannot experience a sense of freedom even when you are alone—what a burden that would be!

I believe that many scrupulous people are so burdened with guilt, fear, and anxiety, and with the preoccupation that they are always being measured and in some way come up short, that they have never experienced freedom. In fact, I believe that some members of our little group are so burdened that they mistrust any feeling of freedom.

It is almost like they have become so accustomed to not being free, that they seem to prefer it, even when an opportunity is presented that might lead to something new.

I believe that there are members of our little group who have never enjoyed the experience of dancing by themselves (and it really doesn't matter if it is dancing, it could be any other experience of pure freedom), and I am saddened by this thought.

I am saddened because I believe that the kingdom of God is a kingdom of freedom, especially freedom from burdens that are unnecessary.

How can a person who does not feel free become free? How can a person lay down the burdens of guilt, fear, and anxiety? It is possible, but it is not easy. Unfortunately, to become free you have to be willing to risk, to take a chance.

To become free, to experience freedom, means you have to be willing to take the chance of being discovered, observed, measured, and be willing to accept the consequences. In a very real sense, it means that you must be willing to step into the unknown, the uncharted, and the seemingly dangerous arena of faith.

In order to experience the freedom of a child of God, you must be willing to experience ordinary and everyday human activity without making the judgement that to be ordinary is somehow displeasing to God. To experience freedom means you must be willing to experience being human, and being human means being less than perfect.

For some people, the thought of not being perfect, or at least not trying to be perfect, is a very paralyzing thought and something that is very difficult to imagine, let alone experience.

Yes. But for RSSB initiates there's another complication. Many believe that the master who initiated them is perfect, a satguru, and also demands perfection of his satsangis.

As Rev. Santa observed, they aren't able to imagine that spirituality can be divorced from perfection. Being ordinarily human is unthinkable.

Well, each to his own. But it's difficult for me to believe in a God who demands such scrupulous attention to every command.

Flowing with the river of life, dancing freely to our own music – I think the oh-so-worshipful Tina gets it right.

“God’s Christian Warriors” shows crazy side of religion

Anyone who thinks that Christianity is a warm, fuzzy, loving religion needs to watch, or read, God's Christian Warriors – part of a CNN special series on Muslim, Jewish, and Christian fundamentalism.

The whole idea of a religious warrior is crazy, of course. That's what made the two hours my wife and I finished watching last night especially weird.

When someone fights for something real, that's understandable even if you don't agree with their cause. But when you see people all passionately fired up to defend something imaginary, that's bizarre. It'd be diagnosed as insane if it weren't for the pervasiveness of religious mental illness in so many cultures around the world.

Now, I'm all for a decent dose of craziness, because it makes life much more interesting. Unadulterated sanity is boring. However, the caveat is that crazy people can't mess up the lives of others. Then they have to be dealt with.

Unfortunately, it's tough to medicate the 53% of Americans who, according to CNN's Christiane Amanpour (host of the series), believe that evolution is wrong and creationism is right.

Nor to treat the delusions of the now deceased Rev. Jerry Falwell while he was alive, when he responded to Ms. Amanpour's question about whether he still believed that this nation's abortion policies caused us to be attacked on 9/11.

If we in fact change all the rules on which this Judeo-Christian nation was built, we cannot expect the Lord to put his shield of protection around us as He has in the past.

Yeah, that shield sure was working well during the Civil War, when millions of Americans died. And go figure: the Supreme Court hadn't legalized abortion yet. Must have been some other national depravity that caused the Lord to lower his protective shield back then.

This way of thinking is utterly strange. Yet it was repeated over and over again during God's Christian Warriors. Most of the time by angry white men who are absolutely, completely, 100% convinced that they know what's right and how the world should behave.

If the loving touch of Jesus has made them humbler, gentler, and kinder, I can only wonder how off-the-wall they were before Christianity transformed their souls.

Jimmy Carter, a Christian president who seems to understand a more genuine message of Jesus, said:

It's impossible for a fundamentalist to admit he is ever wrong, because he would be admitting that God was wrong.

Well, that's only the case if you consider that you know all about God. Which Christian, Jewish, and Muslim fundamentalists do, because the Bible and Koran tell them so (leaving aside the not-so-small problem of the many contradictions between Old Testament, New Testament, and Koranic revelations).

It's when religious zealotry merges with political policy-making that things really get crazily scary. Pastor John Hagee is a fervent Christian Zionist. Israel can do no wrong in his eyes, which only see the world through Biblical blinders.

Amanpour asked him whether God really has a foreign policy. Indeed He does, Hagee said. In line with a "Supporting Israel" page on his web site, Hagee referred to Genesis 12:3 and told her:

Concerning the Jewish people, that's His [God's] foreign policy statement.

If you don't have that Old Testament passage memorized (and I hope to God you don't), here it is.

And I will bless them that bless thee and curse him that curseth thee; and in thee shall all nations of the earth be blessed.

Dear lord. Hagee, along with millions of other true Christian and Jewish believers, wants the 21^st century foreign policy of the United States to be guided by a vague Biblical verse written thousands of years ago. That'd be comical if it wasn't so serious in a nuclear age.

Fortunately for my teeth grinding (which otherwise would have been nearly continuous throughout God's Christian Warriors), there were a few Christians scattered throughout the program who embodied a more appealing form of Christianity.

Jimmy Carter was one. Richard Cizik, a prominent environmentalist evangelical, was another. (He says that polluters will have to answer to God, not just government.)

My favorite non-crazy Christian was pastor Greg Boyd. I've got to like an evangelical who's considered a heretic by fundamentalists. He talked about seeing a Fourth of July service at another church.

And there was patriotic music playing and a flag waving in the background. It showed a silhouette of three crosses. And four fighter jets came down over the crosses and split, with a flag waving in the background.

And there were some people who stood up. They were ecstatic. And I started crying, because I -- I wondered, how is it possible that we went from being a movement of people who follow the messiah, who taught us to love our enemies, to being a movement that celebrates fighter jets, that fuses Jesus' death on the cross with killing machines?

And that was, I guess, a -- a wakeup call to me about how serious this problem is among evangelicals in America.

The problem of unfounded righteousness always is going to be with us so long as Christians fail to recognize that they're fallible human beings, just like the rest of us.

It's fine to have personal opinions about what's right and wrong. It isn't fine to try to impose them on everybody else, using blind faith in an unknown God as your battle cry.

That happens to be the name of Ron Luce's movement: Battlecry. Luce, a forty-six year old, is out to save the youth of America. From what, I'm not sure. But whatever it is, it's dangerous. Amanpour asked him why he's declared war on the American lifestyle.

We call them terrorists, virtue terrorists, that are destroying our kids. They're raping teenage America on the sidewalk. And everybody's walking by as if it is OK, and it isn't OK.

Hmmmm. I guess Luce is upset because teenagers are having sex, smoking pot, drinking and doing other stuff that teenagers have always done.

If Luce was a decade or so older he'd have a memory of the '60s, like I do, and realize that a better term for "virtue terrorists" is "having a good time." (In fact, he admitted that he did these things himself when he was younger).

My parting piece of advice to any Christian warriors who read this post is this: it's all right to be who you really are, and allow other people the same freedom.

Observe the case of Idaho Senator Larry Craig, who came into the news today after pleading guilty to a bathroom stall incident. If you turn to Craig's senatorial web site, on his personal philosophy page you can read that one goal of his is to:

Defend and strengthen the traditional values of the American family.

That's great. And personally I've got nothing against Craig's bathroom stall behavior, so long as it is consensual. Here's what is reported to have happened after Craig went into a public rest room that was already occupied by a plain clothes police officer.

According to Roll Call, the arresting officer alleged that Craig lingered outside a rest room stall where the officer was sitting, then entered the stall next door and blocked the door with his luggage.

According to the arrest report cited by Roll Call, Craig tapped his right foot, which the officer said he recognized "as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct."

The report alleges Craig then touched the officer's foot with his foot and the senator "proceeded to swipe his hand under the stall divider several times," according to Roll Call.

At that point, the officer said he put his police identification down by the floor so Craig could see it and informed the senator that he was under arrest, before any sexual contact took place.

One more Christian warrior, who was rated 100% by the Christian coalition, bites the hypocritical dust. May many more follow in his footsteps until honest this-is-who-I-am-ness rules the land.

Senator Craig, it's OK if you're gay. Just be who you are. Michael Vick, just tell us that you're sorry for your dog fighting – saying you've found Jesus doesn't make your apology any more believable.

Science keeps painting religion into a corner

Believers in the supernatural, do you feel a bit more cramped today? Like there's less room for your beliefs to roam unquestioned?

You should, if you've been following the out-of-body news. Scientists have been able to induce out-of-body experiences in healthy people. They didn't need to nearly die on an operating table and look down at their bodies from an external vantage point.

All it took was some virtual reality goggles, a camera, and a stick.

Now, this is just a first step toward understanding out-of-body experiences. It doesn't rule out the possibility that human consciousness is able to exist separate from a body.

And heck, in-body experiences aren't completely understood either – how the brain manages to create a sense of self separate from the world.

Nonetheless, this is one more in a long line of scientific advances that have the cumulative effect of painting religious, spiritual, mystical, and metaphysical belief systems into an ever smaller corner.

Big Bang cosmology explains the universe's creation (though not completely). Evolutionary theory explains how complex life forms arose on Earth (though not completely). Quantum physics explains how all the somethings in existence can be founded on essentially nothing (though not completely).

I had to add the (though not completely) qualifiers to head off anti-science types who would be quick to tell me, "But Brian, there are a lot of gaps in scientific knowledge."

Yes, admitted. By both me and scientists.

However, there's a big difference between the empty spots scattered around the large expanse of Knowledge that's been painted by science, and the utterly blank unfinished corner that Religion has been crowded into.

By which I mean, in case this metaphor is getting too metaphorical, that science has pretty darn good explanations for almost everything that religious belief systems take on faith to be supernatural or metaphysical.

So what's a believer to do? One option is to shut your eyes, put your hands over your ears, and mutter "You don't exist, you don't exist" to scientific knowledge. This is the fundamentalist approach, both Western and Eastern.

After a book I wrote about karma and vegetarianism, "Life is Fair," was published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) I got an email from an anxious RSSB initiate. He didn't like all the mentions of evolution in the book. He said that if evolutionary theory were true, it would destroy his faith in the RSSB teachings.

I found this very strange. Isn't the spiritual quest supposed to be in the direction of reality? How could learning more about what is real be destructive of spirituality?

To me, science is the best friend of someone sincerely seeking spirit. For if you believe that spirit (a.k.a. shabd, in the Indian vernacular) is the essence of the supreme being, it isn't going to be explainable by science – even though spirit/shabd is considered to be the ultimate source of nature's laws.

A similar argument can be applied to Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or any other sort of belief in an other-worldly God. If your God or Supreme Being is reducible to material explanations, then this divinity isn't very spiritual, is it?

Paint away, science. Confine my religious beliefs into the smallest possible corner.

This should be the prayer of every spiritual seeker. For every time a metaphysical belief is explained by science, you've got less room for fantasy, dogma, imagination, and blind faith to operate. You've getting shoved in the right direction: toward inexplicable Mystery.

I wish I could say something about that mysterious corner of existence that most strongly resists science's knowledge painting brush. But if I could, it wouldn't be what it is.

Emptiness. Wonder. Awe. Ignorance. Confusion. Paradox. Not-knowing.

Even here though, science is able to throw hints in our direction. No matter how small that unexplained corner of the cosmos seems to be, almost certainly it's way larger than we can even begin to imagine.

There's plenty of room to roam there, for those unafraid of bursting religious fetters.

“Wholly Spirit” searches for a plausible God

Kudos to Grey Austin. Not only has he written a thoughtful, readable book about his search for a universal ultimacy that makes more sense than the personalized Christian God, but he's evolved a terrific white beard.

I've been thinking of letting mine grow out a bit. Not to Austin's Father Christmas length, but he's inspired me. Both beardly and spiritually.

I'm a sucker for self-published books that are carefully written/edited and present a unique perspective. "Wholly Spirit" fills the bill on both counts. (So does mine, in my not-humble opinion.)

Austin's book has an unvarnished honest feel to it. He's shared musings about the nature of the universe, God, and what life is all about that were composed over a number of years. I enjoyed seeing how his thinking (and feeling) changed from a fairly traditional Christian perspective to a scientifically founded Taoist-friendly outlook.

Which is pretty darn close to how I see things too. Like Austin, I used to have a much more anthropomorphic conception of divinity than I do now. But unlike him, my "God" was mediated to me by a living guru rather than Jesus.

Nonetheless, Austin's transition in understanding from God as Person to God as Nature mirrors my own in many ways. He says:

Thinking about God has been a problem for me for some time. I grew up picturing God as a being – not necessarily an old man in a robe and beard, but an entity somehow separate and other than "His" Creation, which is to say, the universe and its inhabitants.

I gradually came to believe that God could not choose to act on some individual's or nation's behalf or at their behest if such action would disrupt the flow of natural events. Still, I had the lingering sense that "with God all things are possible."

If God were not a separate being, with what or whom could I have a relationship and to what or whom could I pray? And what did prayer mean if God could not reach down a finger and stir the pot for my benefit or respond to even my most altruistic requests?

As those in my church continued to use anthropomorphic terms for God, I began to translate all that I heard into more naturalistic terms; but that was wearisome and could almost make me feel that I didn't belong. I also didn't have the natural processes sorted out enough to make some of the connections between anthropomorphism and naturalism with any degree of confidence.

Now I see that I was empowering God to act in the physical world and at the same time doubting that God could. This wasn't God's problem; it was mine. Now I suggest that "God" is the expression of faith that we use to give meaning to the natural world rather than creator of or active agent in the world.

With respect to prayer, I have come to recognize that I can be grateful and express my gratitude without being grateful to a "Someone." I can express affirmation, aspiration, regret, and even awe without the necessity of addressing it to an Other.

Another excerpt from Austin's book can be read here. "Wholly Spirit" doesn't appear to be available from the usual online book sellers, but I got a copy quickly and easily from the book's distributor.

Austin ends up with a "theology" or cosmology of Cosmic Wholeness: "I found that all is one and I am one with all."

That sounds New Agey, yet Austin is anything but. He's committed to melding the best of rationality and science with the best of intuition and mysticism.

The process that is consistent throughout the physical, organic, human, and inner realms might be thought of as intelligent energy, communicating and facilitating healing and wholeness at all levels of reality. The classical example of this model is the Buddha for whom there was no God figure, who taught reliance on human qualities as a way of life, and who counseled accepting things just as they are.

Thanks for the chlorine gas, Mom (cough, cough)

There I am, eleven or twelve years old, some age thereabouts, hunched over a test tube on my back porch, carefully following the instructions in my science kit that said, "Conduct this experiment in a well-ventilated area."

Good advice. Because this, thankfully, was before the days when anal-retentive product safety types could stand between a boy and his homemade chlorine gas.

As instructed, I put the chemicals into a test tube. I added water. I put my nose close to the test tube and waved my hand over the end of it to waft some of the gas into my nostrils.

Then I hacked and coughed for at least five minutes. It was a moment of science that is still clear in my mind at the age of 58.

Thank you, Mom.

A woman who'd divorced a jerk, my father, who never paid a dime of child support payments, she didn't have much money back then. Yet she paid for monthly Things of Science kits, if I remember the name correctly, that her son enjoyed immensely.

I got to thinking about this inner child stuff in the course of wondering why I react so strongly when someone trashes science, whether they be a commenter on this blog like William or the inaptly named Discovery Institute, a primary purveyor of creationist intelligent design B.S.

Must be that I got imprinted onto science at an early enough age so now I see it threatened and rush to protect it, like one of those orphaned baby monkeys that learned to look upon a rag doll as if it was its mother. Try to take it away and the monkey would scream like crazy.

I'm not quite that attached to science. But I spent many happy boy-hours at a card table inside my bedroom closet, where a chair and me could just barely fit with the sliding door closed.

I set up my chemistry set and other science experiments on the table, a bare light bulb hanging from an extension cord serving for illumination. That was me as a youth, a kid, an immature pre-teen.

And now? Every morning I make a strong cup of coffee in our kitchen. I then take it in hand and walk to an unused tiled shower in another part of the house. There I open up the sliding door and step over an extension cord that snakes from the shower to a bathroom electrical outlet.

I sit down on cushions rather than a chair. Plus, instead of just a light I've also got an electric clock and space heater. So, yes, I've changed, grown up, matured. Sort of.

My meditation area, my laboratory, usually still has a strong scientific presence, books that tell me what's happening with modern cosmology, evolutionary theory, quantum physics. They're pleased to share shower space with more explicitly spiritual literature, Taoist, Buddhist, whatever-ist.

That whiff of chlorine gas, it was real. When I read about chlorine attacks in Iraq, I had a much better understanding of what the victims experienced because of my back porch experiment more than forty-five years ago.

Such is the power and glory of science. It puts us in touch with reality. Not religious dogma, superstition, imaginings, conjectures, theology.

My mother didn't force me to endure any more Catholicism after I resisted nuns cramming my cranium with whatever the hell I needed to know to be confirmed. (Included something about venial and mortal sins, I do remember that.)

Her "religion," which has become mine, was learning. Learning how the world works. Learning how the mind works. Learning how the world and mind work together to produce such things as fingers typing on a laptop, communicating signals sent from a blogger's brain onto the World Wide Web where others can read words written in Oregon from any place on Earth.

With my allowance and chore money I was able to buy a Hallicrafter's short wave radio back in those good old vacuum tube days. I learned how long of an antenna was needed to pick up what I wanted to hear. It got strung out of my bedroom window, along the roof, and thence across our back yard, precariously supported by some lumber scraps.

I could sit at my desk and listen directly to what most adults had to glean from newspapers and magazines. I heard Radio Free Europe preaching to those commies in Russia. I heard Castro's propaganda emanating from Cuba.

Glorious. A gift of science. The ability to tune into distant places, unfamiliar and foreign, while sitting at my roll-top desk in Three Rivers, California.

And now? I close my science or spirituality book. I put on my noise deadening ear protectors and light obstructing eye shades. I take a last sip of coffee. I settle myself into my meditation cushions as comfortably as I can.

Then I listen. Trying to tune in to whatever is being broadcast on whatever frequency my consciousness can pick up. Still up to the same boyish tricks. I'm older, but I'd never say I'm wiser.

What I am is still a lover of science. Sitting in my own little laboratory. Doing some experiments. Wanting to learn a bit more about how the world and me work.

Some days, it's like sniffing chlorine gas. Not pleasant at all. Other days, it's like hearing an unexpected voice from halfway around the world, telling me something I've never heard before.

So if you read this blog and catch me blasting someone for being anti-science, hopefully now you'll understand better why this fifty-eight year old, going on eleven, feels the way he does.

To me, science isn't different from life. At least, life as it should be lived. Especially when we're trying to figure something out. Like, the meaning of life. Or why we want to figure out the meaning of life.

I'll end with a quote from Natalie Angier's "The Canon." What it points to is: we're all scientists.

You don't need to work at a laboratory bench to follow a scientific game plan. People behave scientifically all the time, although they may not realize it.

If someone is trying to fix a DVD player, they do experiments, they do controls," said Paul Sternberg, a developmental biologist at Caltech. "Step one is observation: What does the picture look like? What are the possible things that could be wrong here? Is it really the player, or could it be the television set? You come up with a hypothesis, then you start testing it. You borrow your neighbor's DVD player, you hook it up, you see your TV set is fine. So you check your DVD's input, output, a couple of wires. You may be able to track down the problem without really understanding how a DVD player works.

"Or maybe you're trying to troubleshoot your pet," Sternberg said. "Why does the fish look funny? Why is my dog upset? I'll feed the hamster less or I'll feed it more, or maybe it doesn't like the noise, so I'll move it away from the stereo system. Should I take Job A or Job B? Well, let's see how long the drive would be from the office to my daughter's school during rush hour; that could be the killer factor in making a decision.

These are all examples of forming hypotheses, doing experiments, coming up with controls. Some people learn these things at an early age. I had to get a Ph.D. to figure them out."

Is it negative to be anti-Christian?

My wife and I try to be positive people. So when Laurel told a man we'd just met today, "You should know that we're anti-Christian," I hoped that this believer wouldn't take our negativity personally.

Fortunately, he didn't. I went on to explain that it isn't so much Christianity that turns us off as fundamentalism – which comes in many guises. Christian fundamentalists just happen to be by far the most common variety in our neck of the world's woods.

This cartoon does a good job of summing up what we find objectionable about so many Christians. They take the most ridiculous parts of the Bible literally, rejecting science in the process, but look upon the most elevated aspects of Jesus' message metaphorically.

"Love your neighbor as yourself." "Judge not, lest ye be judged." "Sell everything you have and give it to the poor." Whaaaaaat? Jesus couldn't have meant us to take that stuff seriously. He's all about stopping gay marriage, abortions, and stem cell research, right?

Well, I'd bet on wrong, though it's an open question whether Jesus even existed, much less how he'd feel about 21^st century social issues.

So I don't see it as negative to be anti-Christian if what you're against is Christian negativity. Negate a negation and you're left with something positive. Or neutral, at least.

Still, I'm pretty much on the same wavelength as Michael Shermer's "Rational Atheism" essay in Scientific American. He argues that while religious beliefs have to be dealt with when they conflict with scientific facts or violate principles of political liberty, skeptics should be cautious about going overboard with all-out attacks on religiosity.

Shermer's five reasons are:

1. Anti-something movements by themselves will fail.
2. Positive assertions are necessary.
3. Rational is as rational does.
4. The golden rule is symmetrical.
5. Promote freedom of belief and disbelief.

Here's his explanation of #5, which is difficult to argue with.

A higher moral principle that encompasses both science and religion is the freedom to think, believe and act as we choose, so long as our thoughts, beliefs and actions do not infringe on the equal freedom of others. As long as religion does not threaten science and freedom, we should be respectful and tolerant because our freedom to disbelieve is inextricably bound to the freedom of others to believe.

Yes. And I recognize that while I no longer see the need to pursue my "do-gooder" activities under a religious banner, other people feel differently.

For example, Jonn, the man with whom Laurel and I had an interesting chat this afternoon at a table outside of the charming Sisters Coffee Company in (where else?) charming Sisters, Oregon.

(As an aside, Sisters Coffee has a reference to Jesus prominently displayed behind the cash register, and an open Bible near the seating area; this means nothing to us heathens, because they serve great lattes and sweets).

Jonn came up to us with some comments about something he and I have in common: a gray beard. Ostensibly he wanted some feedback on a desirable beard length, but pretty clearly a primary motivation for sitting down with us was to share his Christian-related vision of a cause called "Profits for Peace."

Which I'm still vague about. The description on his web site doesn't cast much light on what his recently formed non-profit organization is all about.

But, hey, we're down with sustainable peace. I'm just understandably a bit skeptical about whether "Profits" or "Peace" is the main goal of this group, notwithstanding its non-profit designation.

Regardless, talking with Jonn helped Laurel and me to remember that many (if not most) Christians aren't of the fire and brimstone fundamentalist variety. Yes, they're committed to their faith. And yes, they want to act on that faith. There's nothing wrong with either "yes." Often, a whole lot right.

Someday, I hope, people won't identify themselves as Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, or whatever. Nor will they be anti- or pro-religion. Humankind will have evolved beyond such distinctions.

Until that blessed time comes, it should be the goal of each of us to tolerate differences of belief and unbelief with as much goodwill as we can muster.

Yet only, as Shermer said, when one person's thoughts, beliefs and actions don't infringe on the equal freedom of others.

If you want to take away my grandchild's right to learn the scientific truth of evolution, unmixed with creationist or intelligent design B.S., then you'll have a fight on your hands. Or if you want to stifle federal funding for embryonic stem cell research that could benefit millions out of a fundamentalist interpretation of scripture.

Remember, Christians: the Bible says Thou shalt not pray in public! Keep your beliefs private and no negativity from unbelievers shall fall unto you.

Science takes the honest path

For me, science is energizing while religion sucks the life out of my soul. Or whatever the heck it is that makes my life lively.

As I said in a comment to my "Quantum Christian gobbledygook" post, deflating the ridiculous proposition that electromagnetism casts any light on the Trinity was deeply satisfying. I felt so good after writing that post.

Doing my best to look upon reality with eyes wide open unleashes something that could easily be called "mystical" if it wasn't so natural. Speaking truth to bullshit – that brings us closer to the angels.

More accurately: it would, if there were any.

Today I stumbled upon some YouTube videos of Sean Carroll giving a talk at the recent Daily Kos convention. Carroll is a physicist with an engaging sense of humor. He started off his "Hey, I Uploaded a Video" post with:

Just got back from a great trip to Beijing, very enjoyable if a bit tiring, where much musing was done on the Primordial Existential Question, about which more anon. But I also mused a bit about what this blog needs, and I came to the conclusion that must have been obvious to everyone else long ago: more videos of me.

Sean, you'll get no argument here, even though I've only visited the Cosmic Variance blog a few times. I enjoyed your pithy discussion of what the universe is made of.

Short answer: almost entirely not of what we are. You and I, said Carroll, are made of ordinary matter. But that constitutes just 5% of the universe's total stuff.

The rest is 25% dark matter, which hasn't been detected yet (if you want to know how scientists can come up with a precise percentage of how much there is of something undetectable, watch the videos), and 70% dark energy – which is inherent in the fabric of empty space.

That's way cool. And gloriously mysterious. It isn't the false mystery of religion, which posits hypothetical metaphysical entities and then breathlessly proclaims how inaccessible they are.

Well, yes. This is what you'd expect if something isn't real: it'd be unreachable and unknowable.

But science is pretty darn sure that dark matter and energy are real. We just don't know their nature. That's a true mystery.

Near the end of the second video Carroll talked about the movie, "What the Bleep Do We Know?" He said that the film is full of nonsense. It claims that we can change reality into what we want by thinking about it. The people who made it, he noted, must have earned themselves high-ranking jobs in the Bush administration.

David Albert, a physicist and philosopher of science professor at Columbia, was interviewed for four hours by the filmmakers. They took 10 seconds of what he said and completely mangled his meaning.

Carroll said that Albert now is doing his best to communicate how we really should go about trying to understand reality. Which, in Carroll's paraphrase of Albert's message, is:

Look, when you're trying to understand the world, there are two approaches you can have.

One kind of approach is that when you try to look at the world you come with a precondition, you come with a set of demands that the world tell a story that is flattering to you.

The other thing you could do is to come with an authentically open mind and open heart. Expend many different hypotheses and compare them to the evidence. And accept what the evidence tells you. Discard the hypotheses that don't fit the evidence and believe in the hypotheses that do. And that second method is called science.

And I would like to say that it's more than that, that the second method is called honesty. And it's probably a good method to use in all sorts of fields of human endeavor.

Amen to that.

Here's Albert himself on the subject of "What the Bleep Do We Know?" and how we should go about knowing more. Double Amens to this.

It seems to me that what's at issue (at the end of the day) between serious investigators of the foundations of quantum mechanics and the producers of the "what the bleep" movies is very much of a piece with what was at issue between Galileo and the Vatican, and very much of a piece with what was at issue between Darwin and the Victorians.

There is a deep and perennial and profoundly human impulse to approach the world with a DEMAND, to approach the world with a PRECONDITION, that what has got to turn out to lie at THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE, that what has got to turn out to lie at THE FOUNDATION OF ALL BEING, is some powerful and reassuring and accessible image of OURSELVES.

That's the impulse that the What the Bleep films seem to me to flatter and to endorse and (finally) to exploit - and that, more than any of their particular factual inaccuracies - is what bothers me about them. It is precisely the business of resisting that demand, it is precisely the business of approaching the world with open and authentic wonder, and with a sharp, cold eye, and singularly intent upon the truth, that's called science.

Not religion. For sure.

Christian quantum gobbledygook

I didn't get a free book. But I was able to write a blog post with gobbledygook in the title, which is a fine second prize. My investigation into how Christians are mangling quantum theory began with an email that arrived yesterday.

The header read:

'God the Final Frontier' - New Book Explains How Discoveries In Science Reveal the Nature of God Even A Child Can Understand.

That sounded promising. I can be childlike. And I want to know the nature of God. Tell me more.

The author's approach is unique because it reveals scientific discoveries such as how quantum physics provides positive proof for the doctrine of the Trinity (one of the most controversial doctrines in Christianity), and how Einstein's Theory of Relativity fit's the Genesis account of creation, in simple, easy to understand language.

Well, I didn't like the apostrophe in "fit's." But the email apparently came from a public relations firm, not the author, and everybody knows PR types can't write.

I wanted to know how quantum physics proves the Trinity. And praise be, the last words of the email were "Note: Review copies are available by replying to this e-mail . Please furnish your shipping address."

Ooh, ooh! I was excited. I replied as quickly as my trembling fingers could type. Then I got another email:

Brian, review copies are available for established publications and media personalities.

What?!!! This blog is an established publication. The Internet is a form of media. And I've got a personality. Where's my damn free review copy?!!!

My reply must have been forwarded to the author of "God the Final Frontier," because I heard from him. We exchanged a few emails and figured out that the firm which sent out the publicity emails had omitted the "established publications and media personalities" qualifier without his knowledge, which led to my premature free book! excitement.

Fair enough. But I was still curious about quantum physics proving the doctrine of the Trinity. I'd browsed around the book's web site and read some sample pages. One of them, thankfully, got right to my question (page 39).

Philip DelRe, the author, said that he'd typed "light" on the World Wide Web (Can you do that? Don't you have to use a search engine?). In less than a minute he found himself in a quantum physics laboratory in England (Cool. I've never been able to get into one of those Internet tubes and actually go somewhere like that).

He quoted verbatim from the website:

Light is made up of three types of particles, or wavelengths, each distinct from the other, no one of which without the others would be light. Each has its own separate function. The first originates, the second illuminates or manifests, the third consummates, or completes. The first is called invisible light; it is neither seen nor felt. The second is both seen and felt. The third is not seen but is felt as heat.

Hmmmm. Now I'm no physicist, but I've read a lot of science books and magazines. Somehow this quote just didn't seem like what you'd expect to find on a quantum physics web site. So I fired up Google and went exploring.

I tried various combinations of quotes from this passage. Nothing popped up at first. That struck me as strange, since usually Google is great at finding quotation sources. So I emailed the author and asked where he found the quote.

Mr. DelRe replied that he failed to note the address of the site and hasn't been able to find it again. He said, "It was a lab. In England. Google apparently moved it and I have tried cannot find it again."

OK. However, I was still curious about the quotation. So I pressed on. Eventually I hit on the right combination of Google search terms and was directed to a Google Book Search result for another book, "Love's Immensity Or the Progressive Revelation of God Through His Hebrew Names" by Bertha Carr-Harris.

This sure wasn't a quantum physics lab website. But Carr-Harris' book had almost the same language.

Light is constituted of three rays, or groups of wave-lengths, distinct from each other, no one of which without the other would be light. Each ray has its own separate function. The first originates, the second formulates, illuminates or manifests, and the third consummates. The first ray, often called invisible light, is neither seen nor felt. The second is both seen and felt. The third is not seen but is felt as heat.

Progress. Except no citation was given here either. I poked around Google a bit more and found some other Christian references to light as reflecting the nature of the Trinity. For supposedly the Father is neither seen nor felt; the Son is both seen and felt; and the Spirit is not seen but felt.

The Trinity is a mystery. Light, though, has had a lot of, well, light shone on it. What I learned with some additional Googling, combined with my own common sense, cast some dark shadows over these attempts to use quantum (or electromagnetic) theory to support Christian dogma.

For one thing, I couldn't find any reference to light being composed of three types of particles. My good friend Wikipedia confirmed that the elementary particle that defines light is the photon. There are three basic properties of all electromagnetic radiation – intensity, frequency, polarization – but not three distinct "rays" or "wave lengths."

It's true, though, that the electromagnetic spectrum is made up of ultraviolet, visible light, and infrared. Humans can see visible light, but not ultraviolet or infrared. Infrared light can be felt, so at least part of the DelRe and Carr-Harris quotes are vaguely accurate.

But only vaguely.

I have no idea, scientifically speaking, how unseen and unfelt ultraviolet light (the "Father") is supposed to originate, while unseen and felt infrared light (the "Spirit") consummates. (Except, microwaves are on the infrared side of the spectrum, and they do a good job of heating up leftovers for me to consume).

I also don't know how it's possible to say that the ultraviolet range of the electromagnetic spectrum can be considered "unseen and unfelt." Scientists see it all the time with their instruments, such as radio telescopes. Just because it's unseen by the human eye doesn't mean it can't be "seen" by other means.

God is different, of course. God can't be proven to be seen in any fashion. So this is another way the Light = Trinity analogy breaks down. Somehow the above-mentioned Christian authors never thought about the fact that if the ultraviolet spectrum really was unseen and unfelt, it wouldn't be part of the scientific canon.

Which happens to be the title of a book I'm reading, "The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science." Proving that there is synchronicity (but not that there's a God), my bookmark was left at the exact place where Natalie Angier, the author, began to describe how light works.

It turns out that if the pseudo-quantum Christian connection between light and the Trinity is correct, bees and pit vipers are closer to the Father and Holy Spirit than humans are.

Our eyes evolved to respond as best we could to ambient light, and the sun is very good at propagating light waves that are between 15 and 32 millionths of an inch long. This is the slice of light that we immodest Homo taxonomists have designated as visible light, or optical light, or daylight.

Yet the terms are terribly blinkered. Other animals can see light lying well outside the so-called visible range – in the ultraviolet, in the infrared, in radar. Bees, for example, see perfectly well in the ultraviolet range, and many flowers beckon their pollinators with ultraviolet stripes, while the pits of a pit viper detect infrared light, the signature thermal radiation that emanates from meal and menace alike.

So rather than proving that the "Trinity" revealed by electromagnetism is an objective reality, actually science shows that what is seen and unseen depends on what sort of being is doing the seeing. God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – is in the eye of the beholder, whether human, bee, or pit viper.

The electromagnetic spectrum also reveals that light isn't three separate things, or any other number of separate things. It is one thing. Electromagnetism. So much for the Trinity. As a NASA web site says:

We may think that radio waves are completely different physical objects or events than gamma-rays. They are produced in very different ways, and we detect them in different ways. But are they really different things? The answer is 'no'. Radio waves, visible light, X-rays, and all the other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum are fundamentally the same thing. They are all electromagnetic radiation.

Nice. Rather than confirming the Christian dogma of the Trinity, what science knows about light points in the direction of Eastern (and Western, in guises such as Plotinus) philosophy that posits an impersonal Oneness as the ultimate reality.

Good try, Mr. DelRe and Ms. Carr-Harris. But you need to look somewhere else to support your belief in the Trinity. If I may make a suggestion, try blind faith.

A koan for all guru-based faiths

Here's something about gurus and disciples that I find intriguing. I guess you could call it a koan of sorts, because whatever conclusion you come to about it won't make sense rationally.

Which could well be the correct conclusion: that the whole guru bhakti system is so full of contradictions, it deserves jettisoning.

But this is just a possibility, one of many. I'm asking questions, not supplying answers.

I'll describe this koan using specifics from the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) branch of Sant Mat. However, the basic questions are applicable to just about every guru-based faith, especially those that emphasize devotion to a spiritual teacher.

Who often is believed to be a God-realized being. This is the case with RSSB. The guru is viewed as God in human form, an incarnation of the highest divinity similar to how Jesus is considered in Christianity.

The guru who initiated me in 1971 was Charan Singh. He died in 1990. Before his death Charan Singh appointed a successor, Gurinder Singh, who similarly had been initiated by him.

Charan Singh would give talks (or satsangs) to thousands of people. He'd sit on a high podium. Devotees would gaze spellbound at him, hoping to catch a glance (darshan).

The devotional attitude of Sant Mat initiates essentially is, "The guru is everything; I am nothing." We can imagine Gurinder Singh sitting in the audience while Charan Singh was alive thinking just that. He is everything; I am nothing.

Yet there came a day when Gurinder Singh found himself on the same podium, having been elevated to the status of guru. So now all the initiates are looking at him, thinking "The guru is everything; I am nothing."

But wait! How did Gurinder Singh go from being nothing to everything? At what point did this happen? Was it sudden or gradual? Did this transformation depend on the formal conferring of guru status, or did it occur in some other fashion?

And a more basic question: Did the change from nothing to everything even happen?

Do you see what I'm getting at? These are intriguing questions that I never gave much thought to back when I was one of those true believing initiates trying to be as nothing-ish as possible while I was in the presence of the guru.

I didn't spend much time musing on the fact that the guru once was a disciple, just like me. In the Sant Mat tradition a disciple is the humble servant of the guru. Yet what changes when a disciple becomes the guru?

Overnight, the servant becomes a master (in fact, this is what the RSSB gurus are called in English, Master). Even stranger, gurus often say that they are still nothing compared to their own guru, who is everything to them.

Yet that guru (Sawan Singh, for Charan Singh) generally has his own guru. And so it goes. So somehow all the gurus are both nothing and everything.

However, the disciples are just nothing. Unless they become a guru, then they're everything.

It's pretty confusing. Well, that's to be expected when you mix hierarchy (guru on top, disciple below) with mysticism (all are One).

The supposed nothing to everything transformations strike me now as a bit of organizational sleight of hand, a way of inculcating obedient submission among the millions of RSSB initiates. Without it, you're left with something much more akin to Buddhism than Sant Mat.

A spiritual teacher who isn't higher or lower than his students.

Now, I'm not saying this is the answer to my koan. Like I said, I don't know what the answer is, or even if there is one. I just find it intriguing to ask:

When someone is nothing, how does he become everything while remaining nothing?

Religion’s dangerous certainty

Yesterday I chatted with a guy who is deeply Christian, yet also moderately scientific. For at least twenty years he's come over when we needed some repair work done on our security system.

Standing around, watching him do his circuit testing thing, we eventually get around to our usual philosophical conversation dance. I know he's a true believing Christian; he knows I'm decidedly something else.

The Taoist art hanging around the house and bookshelves filled with titles like "The End of Faith" and "God is Not Good" probably is a giveaway. I'm also not shy about expressing my skepticism to his certainty.

That's what I notice the most when I talk with Tom (not his real name). His certainty. About certain things, at least.

When he's diagnosing a problem with our security system, he's open to all possibilities. He eliminates them one by one until he's found the reason for our maintenance call.

But when our conversation turns in a metaphysical direction, Tom is darn sure of where he stands. Whereas I'm not. So we don't usually argue. Instead, he'll express his firm opinion and I'll respond, "Well, that's interesting. But I don't know how we'd ever know it for sure."

A topic yesterday was how God, or by inference any unseen non-physical being, would affect goings-on here on Earth. Tom opined that all it would take would be the subtlest tilting of a material or mental action in one direction or another.

Like when you can't decide whether to accept a job offer. You ponder the pros and cons, finding them almost equally balanced, then end up saying "Yes" or "No" on an intuitive feeling of This is the right thing to do.

Tom thought this is the way God intervenes in human affairs, with imperceptible nudges. I said, "OK, that's a possibility. Chaos theory tells us that small actions can have big effects. But it doesn't seem like there'd be any way to prove that God was responsible, since in this case the action is undetectable."

From there we went on to other subjects. Tom considered that he knew something about God. I didn't. I couldn't prove Tom was wrong. I didn't feel like I had to. I also couldn't prove that fairies don't exist. Or unicorns.

And I also don't feel like trying to change anyone's religious mind. Especially if they're not open to the possibility of changing.

When the topic of global warming came up, however, I was seriously tempted to do some arguing. Fundamentalism is only tolerable to me when it doesn't affect anyone else. In this case, it does. Like, every living thing on the planet.

Tom is as sure that humans aren't causing global warming as he is sure about how God acts in the world. The difference between the sureties is that his climate change convictions are demonstrably wrong, given the current scientific consensus, whereas his religious convictions simply can't be demonstrated to be right.

I needed to get to my Tai Chi class, so I didn't have time to tell Tom that (1) It isn't true that all the other planets are warming just like Earth, and (2) It also isn't true that increased output from the Sun is sufficient to explain recent global warming.

Those were just a few of the certainties that my conversational companion should have been a lot more uncertain about.

However, fundamentalism in one sphere usually carries over into others. It's rare to find a religious fundamentalist who is open to accepting scientific truths. That's because science demands a basic (dare I say "fundamental"?) attitude of uncertainty.

And that's certainly unacceptable to a fundamentalist.

In the August 4 issue of New Scientist there's an article, "Can we learn to love uncertainty?," by David Malone. Some excerpts:

You might think that no one could argue with the value of certainty. It has the air of one of those indisputably good things, like world peace or motherhood. But I would argue that the pursuit of certainty has become a dangerous addiction. Like alcohol, it makes us feel safe, but it is also making us stupid and belligerent.

Few notions have become as deeply embedded in our culture as the belief that there is a perfect certainty to be had – and the desire to have it. It has survived virtually intact the transition from religion to rationalism as the touchstone of our society. Even as science squeezed out belief in God and scriptural certainties, a perfect law-governed creation remained; it was just under new management. Science has become, in the minds of many, the new guarantor that there is certainty and that we can attain it.

Well, I don't know what Malone means by "many." In the United States it's definitely nowhere near a majority. Many more Americans are convinced that religion offers certitudes than that science does.

Still, Malone correctly points out that if people are looking for certainty in science, they'll be disappointed.

We need to reach an accommodation with uncertainty. Not only is the universe uncertain, but so too is human knowledge. Science as a process should never have fostered any illusions about this: it was always about provisional truths, and knew it. Perhaps it's time for us to finally accept that we shouldn't believe in science because we think it's certain, but precisely because it's not.

Certainty is totalitarian. It forecloses further thinking. Not one of the theories devised by Newton, Darwin, Einstein or Planck is certain and perfect. Powerful and beautiful they undoubtedly are, but they are still partial and incomplete approximations of truth.

…The profound discoveries of modern mathematics and science show that life and thinking flourish only in the luminal and fertile land that lies between too much certainty and too much doubt. The art of scientific inquiry is to tack back and forth between the two.

The art of philosophical and spiritual inquiry also.

But if I'm going to make a navigational error, let it be in the open seas direction of doubt, because certainty is a reef that stops the good ship Inquiry in its tracks.

Wanting. Do I want it?

I'm an expert wanter. I want, want, want. All day long, I want. Much of the night too, because my dreams are filled with wanting.

When I'm hungry I want food. When I'm horny I want sex. When I'm sad I want happiness. When I'm scared I want safety.

And so it goes, one wanting after another. Right now I want to write a blog post about wanting. After I finish, there will be something else to want. Dessert. Television watching. Dog patting.

I've heard so many spiritual talks and read so many religious books about how important it is to want the Right Thing. Which is supposed to be God. Or self-realization. Or selfless service to others. Or ______.

Whatever it is, it's something. Even if it's wanting to stop wanting. That's still a want.

More and more, I sit down for my morning meditation time and wonder, "What's up with all this wanting?" Here I am, sitting on my cushion, about to turn the light out, shut my eyes, and…what?

Why do I meditate? Why do I do anything? Because I want. There's always a goal that I'm pointing myself toward, even if it's hazy, fuzzy, indistinct, unconscious. My right index finger reaches out to the "M" key because I want to type "My."

Want, want, want. What's the difference what I want, when the wanting is the same?

For most of 1969 I mainly wanted to get high on marijuana and psychedelics. For most of 1970 I mainly wanted to get high on meditation and other spiritual practices.

I thought that I was making progress, getting somewhere, evolving. For the next thirty-plus years I continued to want.

I wanted to raise my daughter the best I could. I wanted my education, then my career, to follow a high arc. I wanted to be a model disciple, a loving husband, a worthy citizen.

The object of my wanting keeps changing over my fifty-eight years. But not the wanting itself.

I used to be satisfied with a 10 cent comic book. Now it takes a $20 Amazon purchase to fulfill my reading want. I used to spend happy hours with a two buck model that had lots of parts to assemble. Now I want my spendy GPS receiver to pull in eight satellites right out of the box.

I used to want to follow my guru's instructions exactly. Then I wanted to attune myself to my own inner compass.

Want, want, want. What's the difference what I want, when the wanting is the same?

I'm getting to the point in my meditation where I'm much more interested in figuring out who this wanting creature is than engaging in more of the same wanting.

Yes ,that's a want. But at least it's aimed at getting down to the bare skeleton of wanting, not its haute couture.

I can prettify my wants as much as I want. Dress them in attractive spiritual-sounding, pseudo-profound words. Accessorize them with references to lofty philosophical principles. Minimize them or maximize them stylishly.

I can't pretend any longer that they're anything other than what they are. More wanting.

I'm not saying there's ever an end to wanting. If I believed that, it'd just be another want. Or something I didn't want, which is just a want flipped upside down.

When I used Google to find Robert Bly's wanting-creature poem, via the results page I found myself. I'd forgotten that I'd quoted the entire poem just six months ago.

And that I said just about the same thing as I'm saying now.

There's wanting. And there's something else. Not not-wanting. That's the same thing, not something else.

Whatever it is, I want it.

The craziness, confusion, and contradiction lying behind those six words…I want that too.

Hubble photo of deep space is naturally divine

There's no reason, none at all, to look for divinity in a holy book, person, building, or icon. The Hubble space telescope's Ultra Deep Field photograph of the farthest reaches of space contains more authentic mystery and awe than any religious dogma.

And readers of the Sunday comics were exposed to it last weekend, thanks to Opus.

Berkeley Breathed, Opus' creator, points to the craziness of considering that we humans are the center of the cosmos. Science has revealed, in countless ways, that the Earth and everything on it is just a part of the whole called Universe.

A very small part. Very, very, very small.

Seeking humility? Embrace science, not religion. Religious believers hold that God looks with special fondness upon the members of Homo sapiens, that we are made in the image of the Creator, that we occupy a pinnacle at the top of creation.

Well, I doubt very much that this is so, since the universe is vastly over-designed if its purpose is to showcase you and me.

The Hubble telescope was trained on a minute speck of space for about a million seconds, 11.3 days of viewing time. As described in this 2004 news release, 800 exposures were taken of a seemingly almost empty small section of sky.

How small? The Opus comic describes it as the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length. Alternatively, science writer Chet Raymo explained it this way.

Take two pins or sewing needles and, at arm's length, cross them. The small square where the two pins overlap is approximately the visual area represented by the Hubble Ultra Deep Field photograph.

There are about ten thousand galaxies in the image. Ten thousand. An average galaxy has around 100 billion stars. Ten thousand times a hundred billion. That's a lot of stars. Many of which surely have planets. Of which some sustain life. Where, I bet, beings much more sentient than us ponder the nature of the universe in a much wiser fashion than we do.

For we humans are, by and large, completely clueless about our place in the grand scheme of things. Back in my health policy days, I used to give quite a few talks on health care rationing, death with dignity, and other subjects.

I remember going to the medical school in Portland to speak. I asked a class, "does anyone know how many galaxies there are in the universe?" I figured that these science students were good candidates to have an approximate answer. I figured wrong. No one even hazarded a guess.

It's at least 100 billion. Galaxies, not stars. Each of which, remember, has about a hundred billion stars. A hundred billion times a hundred billion. That's more than a lot. It's inconceivable.

Like how God is supposed to be. Except, the universe is really real. The whole sky is 12.7 million times larger than the tiny deep space speck of it photographed by the Hubble telescope. Yet that infinitesimal bit contains at least 10,000 galaxies.

And we're on a planet orbiting one of several hundred billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, which is 100,000 light years in diameter, another impossible-to-conceive-of number, but which pales in comparison to the 13.7 billion light year distance from us to the edge of the observable universe.

Observable. Not the whole thing.

So come on, religious true believers who consider that your faith knows What It Is All About. Get real. You don't. You haven't even got a glimmer of understanding of what It is, not to mention what It is About.

I'm deeply grateful to live in a time when humans can point a telescope at a minute speck of sky and reveal a hint of the universe's nature. I called it "divine."

That's just a word. But it's a fitting word. For if anything is going to fill us with a sense of divinity, of how marvelous it is to be existent, alive, and conscious, it's the Whole Thing – Universe.

Sant Mat’s “five holy names” aren’t so holy

Today Tucson Bob left a comment that got me thinking about my own evolving attitude toward mantra meditation. He said, in part:

I will say that Sant Mat meditation, at least the basic technique of simran (mantra repetition), seems to me to have a dulling, dumbing-down effect that seems to interfere with intuitive perception.

Imagine you are in a wilderness at night. It is pitch black and you know there is a predator out there. All your being, all your senses are fully in the moment listening for some sound or movement to indicate where that predator is. You are fully absorbed in the present situation, in the immediacy of your current reality. No simran is necessary at this time and would actually be a hinderance to full awareness of what is. Your mind is totally quiet absorbing the sounds of the night because of the urgency of the situation. It is alert, ready.

This is a good non-meditation. Be fully present in whatever you are doing. The mind will wander off. No matter, it can't be helped. When you are fully aware again, just be that way.

Tucson Bob and I are pretty much members of the same Sant Mat meditation class. He was initiated into the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) branch of this Eastern faith in 1970. Me, in 1971. He flamed out of the movement after about twenty years. Me, after more than thirty.

Between us we've done a hell of a lot of mantra meditation. Like all RSSB initiates, we were given a mantra that consisted of "Five Holy Names" to repeat.

The mantra was supposed to be kept super duper secret. And I did, along with every other initiate I knew. But now, with the rise of the Internet, you can do a Google search and find the names easily. They've also become fodder for what I hope is a satirical web site (but it's hard to tell the difference between spiritual satire and seriousness these days).

The names supposedly are holy because they refer to the rulers, or defining characteristics, of five metaphysical regions of the cosmos: Sahans-dal-kanwal, Trikuti, Daswan Dwar, Bhanwar Gupha, and Sach Khand. Sant Mat practitioners believe that the names are charged with spiritual power by the initiating guru.

They're supposed to be repeated throughout the day, as well as during much of one's meditation time. However, like Tucson Bob said, open awareness of reality that's actually present isn't facilitated by concentrating on a mantra that is intended to lead to another hypothesized realm of existence.

So over the years I gradually became less rigid about my own approach to mantra meditation. Even when I was a RSSB true believer, I experimented with using just one of the five names as a mantra. I found that one was as good as five when it came to quieting my mind.

What's holy about a word? Words aren't reality. "Fire" isn't hot. "Water" isn't wet. These are just terms that stand for something else that does have the ascribed qualities.

I've written some other posts about mantra meditation, here, here, here, and here. The last one dealt with whether mantra meditation is a waxing on or a waxing off (using Mr. Miyagi's karate training language). I said:

I believe that mantra meditation can lead to a clearer view of reality. Inside of my head, I feel like I'm getting closer to the essence of life, existence, and consciousness when I sit on my meditation cushion in darkness and silence, repeat a single syllable, and become aware of what remains. Outside of my head, I feel more connected to other people and the world when my mind is filled with the simple unifying sound of a mantra rather than many divisive thoughts.

For a long time, though, I repeated a mantra that had a significant meaning to me. I realize now that this meaning was like Mr. Miyagi's wax. Every time I repeated the mantra I was rubbing something onto my consciousness, rather than clearing something off.

Basic rule of car cleaning: you don't use the same cloth to clean the wax off that you used to put the wax on. Applying this principle to meditation, I've come to the conclusion that the more meaningless a mantra is, the better. It shouldn't be associated with a person, theology, metaphysics, or goal that has any meaning.

Churches have stained glass windows. Those images are there to capture your attention and prevent you from seeing what is, in reality, outside the church's confines. A mantra with meaning has an equivalent effect. Every time you repeat it, you're placing a conceptual filter between you and what is really there.

True enough, in my experience. But I'm coming to see that Tucson Bob's there's a predator analogy is apt. When we're really open to clear and present reality, we don't want any self-generated sounds or images, meaningless or not, coming between us and whatever is out there.

However, failing complete emptiness I still believe that having a single meaningless sound in my mind is better than the largely random voluminous chatter that all too often fills my psyche. When I need to think in words, I should think in words. Most of the time, I don't. A simple mantra serves to remind me to shut the fuck up.

This is a crude summary of the central message of one of my favorite books about meditation, "Open Mind, Open Heart" by Thomas Keating. Whenever I pick it up, which is often, my churchless self is struck by the subtitle: "the contemplative dimension of the Gospel."

Well, I'll take inspiration wherever I find it. I like Keating's attitude toward repeating a word, or words in meditation. This isn't an exercise in concentration, but rather intention.

The sacred word, whatever one you may choose, is sacred not because of its meaning, but because of its intent. It expresses your intention to open yourself to God, the Ultimate Mystery, who dwells within you. It is a focal point to return to when you notice you are becoming interested in the thoughts that are going by.

…The chief thing that separates us from God is the thought that we are separated from Him. If we get rid of that thought, our troubles will be greatly reduced.

I'm not big on the word "God," so I mentally substitute "Tao" or "Reality" when I read these passages. "Him" becomes "It." Aside from that, the Catholic Keating and the churchless me are on the same spiritual page.

There's nothing holy about a word, or name. Like I said, it's hole-ness that we should be seeking, not holiness – natural open awareness of what's really going on, not an artificial religious imagining.

Blink! Don’t think. “Religion is …”

Fill in the dots, those wonderful empty ellipses… One or two words, that's all it takes. For me, it's bullshit. For you, it could be anything. Including bullshit.

"God's revelation." "Delusional." "Our salvation." "Worthless."

The point is, each of us has an intuitive understanding of religion – which I take to include all sorts of spiritual, mystical, and meditational practices. You could say, we grok it.

I've just starting reading Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink." Subtitle: "The Power of Thinking Without Thinking." Appropriately, I'm going to intuit the message of the whole book after perusing just 40 pages.

It's fascinating. Consider the tale of the marble statue of a nude male youth, a kouros, that supposedly dated from the sixth century BC. An art dealer, Gianfranco Becchina, offered it to the Getty Museum for $10 million.

Experts poured over it. A geologist spent two days analyzing the stone to determine how old and authentic it was. Documents verifying a trail of ownership were closely studied by the legal department. After fourteen months of study the Getty decided to buy the statue.

Then Evelyn Harrison took a look at it.

She was one of the world's foremost experts on Greek sculpture, and she was in Los Angeles visiting the Getty just before the museum finalized the deal with Becchina. "Arthur Houghton, who was then the curator, took us down to see it," Harrison remembers.

"He just swished a cloth off the top of it and said, "Well, it isn't ours yet, but it will be in a couple of weeks." And I said, "I'm sorry to hear that." What did Harrison see? She didn't know. In that very first moment, when Houghton swished off the cloth, all Harrison had was a hunch, an instinctive sense that something was amiss.

Keep in mind, though, that Harrison was an art expert. You or I could have gotten a glimpse of the statue and our hunch regarding the authenticity of the sculpture wouldn't have meant anything. We'd just have been guessing.

So there is informed and uninformed intuition. At least, I'm intuiting that there is. When I get to the end of Gladwell's book, I'll know more about this.

Just like now I know a lot more about the mystic-religious faith that I followed assiduously for over thirty years, compared to my first thought of "Oh, yeah, Sant Mat is for me."

I remember reading the first page of the first Sant Mat book I ever picked up, Sawan Singh's "Philosophy of the Masters, vol. 1." It spoke to me. It seemed absolutely right.

And then, decades later, it didn't. Was I wrong to trust my initial intuition? Maybe.

Our unconscious is a powerful force. But it's fallible. It's not the case that our internal computer always shines through, instantly decoding the "truth" of a situation. It can be thrown off, distracted, and disabled. Our instinctive reactions often have to compete with all kinds of other interests and emotions and sentiments…It is possible to learn when to listen to that powerful onboard computer and when to be wary of it.

Again, I don't know what Gladwell is going to advise on the "listen or be wary?" question. But here's my own advice, based on my own experience.

The more you know about something, the better able you are to grasp it in a blink! You've got a lot of inputs going into that unconscious onboard computer Gladwell talks about. It has plenty of facts to work with.

Now, this seemingly is at odds with a conclusion that I've come across in my first 40 pages. Namely, that a little bit of knowledge goes a long way.

However, I just jumped ahead to page 272, because I had an intuition that in a later chapter I'd find a quote to support my point of view. And here it is, in the context of assessing the performance of basketball players.

What set Michael Jordan apart from his peers was his attitude and motivation. And those qualities can't be measured with formal tests and statistics. They can be measured only be exercising judgment, by an expert with long years of experience, drawing on that big database in his or her unconscious and concluding, yes, they have it ,or no, they don't.

So I say, put more trust in your snap judgment about a religion or spiritual path that snaps after years or decades of experience, than in your initial intuitive perception of it.

In short, don't be afraid to change your mind. Keep looking at your chosen (or unchosen) religiosity freshly. Listen to that small still voice that speaks in single words.

A few months later, Houghton took Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, down to the Getty's conservation studio to see the statue as well. Hoving always makes a note of the first word that goes through his head when he sees something new, and he'll never forget what that was when he first saw the kouros.

"It was 'fresh' – 'fresh,'" Hoving recalls. And "fresh" was not the right reaction to have to a two-thousand year old statue.

The Getty's catalogue now has this notation next to a picture of the kouros: "About 530 BC, or modern forgery."

Fresh. Not the right reaction to ancient art. But it's the way we should try to blink! at life's every moment, including our religiously inclined (or disinclined) ones. I liked these lines from an Amazon reader review of Gladwell's book.

Less is more only when less is more. However, Gladwell's book does a universal service in alerting us that this is in fact what we are prone to do whether we know it or not. Good mindfulness is being tuned in to our pattern recognizing processors, but also knowing when to feed it and when to starve it, realistically confronting it when called for and then immediately resetting it so it stands as a linchpin. It stands as the stake that tethers the generous leash of our doggie Buddha Brains, giving us some slack but then snapping us back, always reminding us it's there, the Now that cradles the past and imagines the future.

Taoism wants us to be holey, not holy

I've been attracted to Taoism for a long time. Even before I knew anything about it. Early in my teen years (maybe a bit before) I visited San Francisco's Chinatown.

I came back with a bunch of cheap art, bought from my allowance. I was enthralled with the images of misty mountains drawn with a few brushstrokes, usually including a tiny solitary figure walking along a path.

Who knows where that early instinctive attraction to Taoism came from? I sure don't. My mother had no inclination toward Eastern philosophy or art. I wasn't exposed to such in any other fashion, so far as I can remember. But I had those scrolls and prints up in my bedroom for quite a few years.

They seemed entirely natural to me. As does Taoist philosophy now, along with Tai Chi, the current stage of my martial arts evolution.

I've been reading and hugely enjoying a new book in my Taoism collection. "Daoism Explained" by Hans-Georg Moeller is brilliant. It looks at Taoism/Daoism in a fresh light. Familiar Taoist stories and images are becoming new for me again, thanks to Moeller's insightful take on classic writings.

He translates the eleventh chapter of the Daodejing (or Tao Te Ching).

Thirty spokes are united in one hub.
It is in its [space of] emptiness,
Where the usefulness of the cart is.

The hub, says Moeller, is at the center; it is empty; it is still; and it is single, being a center. This is the Tao. Yet it isn't only the empty hub. The Tao is the spokes also. It is the process (not a substance) that makes the world go 'round.

So Taoists try to reflect the emptiness of the hub. They seek to be holey, rather than holy. An artificial morality is anathema to them. In ancient China it was the moralistic Confucians who came in for Taoist scorn. Today fundamentalists of other persuasions make the same mistake:

Failing to see that prevention is better than cure, that emptying oneself of notions about right and wrong produces a natural ethical sense. Moeller:

If people learn to follow the Way (dao) and the "own course" (ziran), then morality will not be required because everything will be just naturally fine. From a Daoist point of view, morality is the virtue of latecomers…Instead of focusing on the Dao and trying to naturally follow it in the first place, the Confucians seem to attempt to "help" the Dao once they have already failed to correspond to it.

It's easy to miss the Tao. That's why Taoism is so simple to follow. You want to miss the Tao. The entire difficulty comes from making the Tao into something that can be spotted, understood, perceived, sensed, worshipped, contemplated, meditated upon.

In Chinese Tao is wu (emptiness, non-presence) rather than you (fullness, presence). If you believe you've got it, you don't.

If something "is there" or if somebody "has something," there is fullness; and if nothing is there or if somebody "has nothing," then there is emptiness. In this sense you designates a place or spot where there is something while wu designates a place or spot where there is nothing. In the image of the wheel, the spokes are obviously in the place of you – in the space where there is something (the turning spokes cover all the space around the hub), whereas the hub is in the space of wu.

Religions adore presence. They make God or ultimate reality into something transcendent that exists Out There, a Platonic form of divineness that we fallen humans must struggle to reach.

Religious humility, egolessness, surrender – this is a means to attain a glorious end. True believers see themselves as being on a spiritual roller-coaster. "If I can just go down far enough, I'll then be able to rise up."

Back in the days when I looked at the mystic-religious path of Sant Mat (Radha Soami Satsang Beas branch) through uncritical devotional eyes, I failed to recognize this. I didn't see that my efforts to prostrate myself before the guru, and thence before God, sprang from a elevational goal.

Even when my eyes were downcast, focusing on the humble descent of the spiritual roller coaster, I was keeping a look out for the anticipated swoop upwards. Wheeeeee! Sach Khand! God-realization! Paradise!

Now, I don't know where I'm heading. Up. Down. Sideways. Nowhere. Somewhere. I'm clueless.

Which, more and more, feels natural to me. Because after some forty-five years of investigating the meaning of life (including my teenage Taoist phase, which was followed by a lot of listening to Bob Dylan, so that period should count) here's a big part of what I've learned:

The sum total of agreed-upon human knowledge about what lies beyond the physical is precisely zero.

There's a virtually endless supply of religious dogma, countless volumes of philosophical speculation, large crowds of supposed spiritual gurus, endless stories of the miraculous. But when you add them all together and discard the unproven, unlikely, and unbelievable, what's left is a big pile of nothing.

And that exactly equals what Taoism says should be found by anyone seeking the hub of the cosmos, the pivot point around which everything in existence swirls.

Everything that exists, in its entirety, exists by itself, and at the center of this entirety of presence is "nothing" – or more precisely, nonpresence (wu). This is the "Dao of heaven" (tian dao).

Beautiful. Taoism finds emptiness at the core of reality. This empty Tao is holey, not holy. It can't be worshipped, revered, prayed to, or otherwise made an object of veneration, because it isn't separate from the potential venerator.

When I try to lay hold of my own innermost essence, I can't do that either. The core of my being is as squirmy, slippery, and shadowy as the Tao is. And as the God that religions and mystic faiths claim to know, but can never provide proof of.

There's a story in the Zhuangzi about fish drifting along free and easy. A couple of sages discuss this seeming happiness of fish, wondering whether it is possible to know what makes a fish happy if you're not one yourself. I liked Moeller's commentary.

If one "rambles" free and easy, one has no friction whatsoever with one's surroundings and so is part of a seamless, easygoing process…When Zhuangzi claimed to know about the happiness of fish, he did not claim to be able to feel the exact same feeling. He was just saying: I feel perfect by rambling around, and the fish feel perfect by rambling around.

At the center, wu. Nothing.

Rambling around wu. Perfect.