Church of the Churchless

A dialogue about Radha Soami Satsang Beas

A few days ago I posted a message from Shiloh, "The anguish of losing a loved one to exotic religion." That was part of my communications with her.

Here's the other part: a question and answer dialogue we had about Radha Soami Satsang Beas, the India-based spiritual organization that is the exotic religion Shiloh was concerned about.

We exchanged several email messages after Shiloh wrote to me, asking if I'd help her better understand the organization that I was an active member of for many years.

Here's our Q & A exchange, starting with some introductory remarks and moving to eight questions about Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

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Shiloh: I will be very grateful if you can help me with these questions, Brian, since I feel you are in a unique position to evaluate this movement with your years of involvement and the books you wrote associated with Radhasoami.

It seems to me that your seemingly ‘fruitless’ investment of thirty-eight amazingly patient years, has become an immensely valuable grounding for your post in its role of revealing to other seekers the pitfalls and time-wasting illusions of this particular path.

Especially since I dearly love and care about my sister, I personally feel deeply grateful for your openness and honesty about your experiences, which must ultimately save many souls much needless pain and confusion. So thank you for valuable work and whatever time and consideration you give to this particular letter.

Brian: No problem. Re. the paragraph above, I wouldn't say "fruitless." I gained a lot from my involvement with RSSB. For most of the three decades plus I was quite content. Sort of similar to my first marriage. Getting divorced doesn't take away all of the loving times. It just means that after the loving, a distancing occurred.

You might mean by "fruitless," though, that I didn't soar to higher regions of reality. If so, this presumes that such exist. Or that it is important to reach those realms to be "spiritual." Now, I'm not so sure. Some see this as sour grapes, a result of failed meditation. But to me it feels more like an understanding that inner and outer, spirit and matter, soul and body aren't so different. Maybe not different at all. 

Shiloh: Sorry you misunderstood me. I thought if I wrote ‘seemingly’  before ‘fruitless’ and encased ‘fruitless’  itself in inverted comas I would convey that this is not my personal feeling but how it could appear to others.

Here’s my questions, your answers, and my comments on your answers:

(1)  Is it true that one is required to pledge life-long loyalty to the Sant Mat master upon initiation?

Brian: Yes, this is true. It is supposed to be a life-long commitment. But of course, many initiates drop out along the way. Sort of like marriage. The vow is "till death do you part," but divorces are common anyway.

Shiloh: This ruling was surely designed to make any initiate wishing to drop out because of doubts, feel especially guilty and bad.


(2)  Is an initiate encouraged to meditate on an image – whether mental or photographic – of the master?

Brian: In the Charan Singh days, no. You had to have seen the guru in person. Then you could visualize his form (face/eyes) during meditation. This is part of the reason I went to the Dera in 1977, because I'd been initiated for almost seven years and hadn't seen Charan Singh in person.

Shiloh: Whatever the template used for this visualization, I find it suspicious, since in the pliable astral sphere, long-held thoughts become things. This tells me that disciples are being encouraged to build their own thought forms of the master which they could then see and mistake for his radiant form if they are ever successful in leaving the body.

Which further tells me that the master has no confidence in his own ability to appear in his light body to any out-of-the-body satsangis. This combined with praying for the Guru’s grace puts one in mind of the Christian biblical exhortation not to worship graven images.

(3)  Are satsangis encouraged to ‘pray’ to the master and to expect mental interaction with him about such petitions?

Brian: Well, not really. Surrender is encouraged more than prayer, in the sense of prayer being asking for specific things to happen. Praying for the guru's grace is encouraged, though. That's pretty much what meditation is about, in a sense. An initiate isn't told to expect a response to prayer. Certainly not "mental interaction."

Shiloh: Since one surrenders oneself to the will of the Guru and prays to him (if only for grace) the master clearly replaces God in the satsangi’s life, usurping what many would feel should be the Creator’s unique role in human lives.

(4)  Does the movement’s hierarchy hint at earthly or afterlife harm for satsangis who leave, thus ensuring uneasiness about ever leaving?

Brian: Yes. The idea is that once initiated, you're stuck to the guru/God forever -- the bulldozer metaphor that you might have heard of. Meaning, if you’re chained to a bulldozer, no matter how much you try to move in a different direction, you’ll end up going where the bulldozer does.

One RSSB devotee has been threatening me with Sant Mat hellfire for having questions about the path. I don't know about earthly harm, but lack of faith in the guru incurs some training/discipline after death, I seem to recall reading in some of the books.

Shiloh: This confirms my uneasiness about this movement setting up a premeditated trap, which the novice, after initiation, cannot easily extricate himself from emotionally. It seems to me that few uncertain souls (stressed-out and sleepless - especially at first - due to the long hours of meditation) would find the courage to risk such a fate no matter how disillusioned they may feel.

(5)  Are Kal and the mind used to dispel the disciple’s rational assessment of the master and his words and actions?

Brian: Absolutely. Questioning is supposed to happen before initiation. Afterwards, the initiate is warned to beware of Kal, the Universal Mind who stood on one foot for eons and earned the right from God to rule the lower regions of creation. (Shiloh: Great heavens! How spiritually athletic!)  Kal's job is to keep souls here, and the mind is his means of doing so.

Shiloh: I rest my case. The above-mentioned attitude nullifies the checks and balances ingrained into our very souls to guard against deception. Willfully giving up the critical mind must indefinitely commit one to labor, with dwarfed mentality, through a spiritual never-never land where the only hope of eventual rescue is through painful disillusionment. Since my sister defensively denied that there was any such requirement, she obviously knows, deep down, how dubious this is.

(6)  Do you know of anyone who has seen (first hand) the current master accompanied by machine-gun-bearing guards?

Brian: I went to India, to the Dera headquarters of RSSB, in 1998 to finish my book Life is Fair. While there, I saw Gurinder Singh walking around accompanied just as you said, by machine gun bearing guards. It was a bit surprising. But also understandable, given the tensions in the Punjab.

Shiloh: I agree. But only because I think the master is a mere man and not God.  If I thought he was God, seeing him protected by guns would blow my mind: after all how could God protect anyone else if he could not protect his own incarnated form without physical guards bearing material weapons?

I cannot imagine how this behavior squares up with those believing him to be God. Further, if God is love why would he even attract enemies? After all, Jesus’ death was apparently destined to save mankind and he did not arm himself against it but offered himself up to those who wanted him killed. And if God, embodied as the present guru, wanted to remain on earth longer, why couldn’t he make his earthly instrument safe without the offensive bad-example use of weaponry? After all no one is holding a gun to his head! (Or are they?)

Thinking of the current master as a man, I’ve just experienced my first pang of empathy.  I believe he was a reluctant successor – and  how terrible it must be to have to spend your entire life pretending to be God. How ghastly must be the constant scrutiny and the act of putting on a holy front and the continual dread of doing or saying something ungodly?

Hold on: even if any mistakes are made, the secret of his true human identity would remain safe with so many adoring satsangis primed to put a profound spin onto any awkward accidents! There seems little room for truth in god-man movements.

(7)  Is it true that satsangis are subtly pressured to donate money or property to the movement?

Brian: In my experience, subtly. Not overtly. I don't know what it is like in the Indian community.

Shiloh: I’m glad you mentioned the latter since I suspect that pushing for donations might be more easier and acceptable among faith based, notoriously blindly-believing Asian communities, and thus may be much more blatant there. This of course reveals the usual motive behind so many religious charades: money and possessions and the power that accompanies these things.

(8)  Is it an observable fact that the current master lives lavishly and travels in luxury?

Brian: Don't know if you have read the post on my blog by the Caribbean guy. Here's a link. He addressed this subject.

Shiloh: Thanks. Having now read this, I must confess it confirms my early belief that the current master seems more preoccupied with physical pleasure and material possessions than with the spiritual evolution of his fellow man.

Open Thread 5

Here's another Open Thread (previous OTs are still open, of course). Leave a comment about anything you want to talk about. From now on comments on other posts need to be related to the subject of the post, or they will be candidates for deletion. So an Open Thread is the place for miscellany and whatever. Feel free. No personal attacks on other commenters (or me), please: criticize a message, not the messenger.

The anguish of losing a loved one to exotic religion

Here's a well-written, thoughtful message from a woman who is disturbed that her sister has joined the spiritual group that I was a member of for many years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB). 

Shiloh emailed me a while back, asking some questions about RSSB that I answered. I'll share those Q & A in another post soon. I asked Shiloh if she'd be OK with me sharing her thoughts in a blog post.

She was. And chose the title for this post.

Shiloh expresses herself well. She's a great example of how someone can be churchless, yet godly. As I often say on this blog, personal beliefs in god are fine so long as they are recognized for what they are.

Personal. Beliefs. Read on...
_____________________________

A message from Shiloh:

Dear Brian,

Coming from a loose Christian background, I am a fellow churchless one in that I have always been content with what was in my own heart and felt no need to seek God outside of it. I did free-form meditation from age eleven and consciously left my body several times from the age of thirteen. I have always believed in God, felt protected, loved and driven to serve – not a master but all creation.

As an adult, at different times over the years, I looked into two Eastern movements, not primarily for spiritual guidance, but in the hopes of improving my meditation and learning to astral travel at will.  After linking up with these exotic movements, I experienced associated phenomena (in both instances, strangely, before initiation). Although this was fascinating and intriguing, I divorced myself from both movements on points of principle, early on.
 
Being churchless is what I advocate, and in spite of upholding the teachings of Jesus and seeing his life as the highest earthly example (that I know of), I cannot accept the cruelties, errors and inconsistencies in the Bible and have never wanted to join any Christian church –  most of which seem to me to be rigidly stultified in their own brick buildings.

I believe each of us is capable of having a personal internal relationship with God, and have long felt that priests, whose purpose is supposedly to connect congregants with their God, often unknowingly do the opposite.

Which is why I was particularly horrified when my own sister joined the Radhasoami movement. (If priests, with their intercessions etc, stand between us and God, then gurus with their I-am-God implications must surely block Him out completely!) Alice has dutifully read much of the official RS literature, but this seems worth little since her only investigation into the guru’s godhood is conducted via other blindly-believing fellow devotees.
 
However, having myself consciously experienced (outside of Sant Mat) the astral plane, and (without being told of it) aspects of the Sound Current, I believe that the movement’s promised phenomena are real and achievable, if very rarely achieved (according to many ex-satsangis) and certainly not guaranteed. What these phenomena mean, and their benefits or lack thereof, are open to speculation.

What I cannot accept is the claim (A) that only Sant Mat adherents experience sound, light and astral projection, and (B) that its guru is a perfect living master (divinity incarnate) with an ability to raise his disciples to the ultimate in spiritual heights, to protect them from astral ‘monsters’ and from the consequences of their deeds – i.e. sparing them from endless karma-fraught future lives.

While I can accept enlightened mortals as teachers, I feel deeply disturbed about any man being set-up as an exclusive stand-in for God. Even more sinister is the requirement that followers give up the use of their own God-given minds – a necessary step if one is to hand over one’s life to another human being.
 
My sister believes that since she may never meet her master, no harm can come of belonging to this movement even if it turns out that the master is not God. I disagree, since what she is saying, in essence, is that truth does not matter. But Truth, after all, is objective reality, and whatever moves us away from that must necessarily distort our view of things and thus affect us in countless unknown ways.

Yet Alice, like thousands in this movement, is prepared to give up her free will, her life’s direction and her reasoning faculties to rely on the Guru’s ruling on everything – all this without evidence and on the fallible recommendations of others. I feel amazed that anyone can expect so little of the Creator of this marvelous Universe, that they so readily confer His exalted identity onto what, to all outward appearances, is a mere man.
 
With kind regards,
 
I am,
 
Shiloh

Without God, how can religion be divine?

I thought I'd just thrown twenty bucks down a non-fiction hole.

A few scant hours after buying Robert Wright's "The Evolution of God" (at 25% off!) my wife, who was reading the Sunday Oregonian, said: "You're not going to like this review of the book you just got." 

She was right. Thumbing through the first few pages of the book while considering whether to buy it, I'd focused on Wright's first hand.

On the one hand, I think gods arose as illusions, and the subsequent history of the idea of god is, in some sense, the evolution of an illusion.

That elicited a right on from my churchless non-soul. So I paid less attention to Wright's other literary appendage.

On the other hand: (1) the story of this evolution itself points to the existence of something you can meaningfully call divinity; and (2) the "illusion," in the course of evolving, has gotten streamlined in a way that moved it closer to plausibility. In both of these senses, the illusion has gotten less and less illusory.

I've only read a few chapters so far. I'm liking "The Evolution of God."

But I'm preparing myself to discount the validity of Wright's other hand, which, according to the critical review, lends an air of implausibility to the final chapter.

His assiduous labors into the origins of the idea of God have erected a colossal edifice. In the last 50 pages or so, Wright tosses an undersized and feeble theory over its parapets to justify all this effort. Though it's sure to stimulate a lot of discussion, this is a thoroughly wrongheaded book.

Here's a summary of the theory Wright offers. Human beings, he writes, "are 'designed' by natural selection to be good out of obligations to others, for fear of the disapproval of others, in pursuit of the esteem of others." Cultural evolution -- the passage of human groups from small bands of hunter-gatherers to chiefdoms and then on to states and empires -- builds on the ingredients of this "design" to create a moral economy, which leads to the discovery of "moral truths," which are sanctioned in religious organizations as the orders of gods, or, ultimately, of God, the all-knowing, law-giving, all-powerful Being.

"If history naturally pushes people toward moral improvement, toward moral truth, and their God, as they conceive their God, grows accordingly, becoming morally richer, then maybe the growth is evidence of some higher purpose, and maybe -- conceivably -- the source of that purpose is worthy of the name divinity."

There are a lot of assumptions in that sentence, but the most powerful one for Wright's argument is the assertion that "history naturally pushes people toward moral improvement." Is this the moral improvement that after 5,000 or so years of Western religion gave us Nazism? Wright's arguments are silent on this question, because they have already asserted the answer -- that as a species we're somehow morally superior now to our ancestors wandering out of Africa. How do we know? Because we have found the idea of God. This is tautology, not proof.

Makes sense. But, hey, I'll keep an open mind as I read the book, though I suspect that I'll have the same reaction of the reviewer when I get to the end of it.

Here's another skeptical perspective on Wright's "morality is divinity" thesis. Like most biologists, this guy doesn't see evidence of purpose in evolution.

Check out the comments to that "Morality doesn't equal God" post. They're pretty high quality. And numerous. I enjoyed the pithy one-sentence wisdom of #8.

Morality doesn't prove gods for much the same reason that Christmas presents don't prove Santa.

Churchless folks have revelations also

When I used to give talks (a.k.a. satsangs) at gatherings of the India-based spiritual group that I was a long time member of, one of my stock lines was "The easiest vow for most of us to follow is the injunction not to disclose our inner experiences."

Ha-ha. Laughter would follow.

Because people knew that I was speaking the truth: meditation resulted in almost precisely zilch, nada, zero enlightenment or ensoundenment experiences (the practices of this organization were intended to bring about contact with divine light and sound).

So when the guru enjoined his disciples not to speak about their grand mystical insights into cosmic mysteries, this was a pretty darn easy commandment to obey -- given that nobody I knew was having any (we figured that it was OK to speak about not having inner experiences).

Since I entered my churchless phase, I've actually had more cosmic revelations. Which isn't surprising, since when you're starting at zero, the only way to go is up on the revelation scale.

Take today, an excellent day to take.

Sunny, warm, clear skies. Not at all uncommon during our beautiful Oregon summers. (As Gov. Tom McCall said, please, come and visit; just don't stay here.)

My wife, Laurel, and I were on a trail ride when IT hit me particularly strongly -- IT being a familiar sensation that waxes and wanes, but rarely leaves me entirely these churchless days.

Life...it isn't going to last forever. Not even close to forever. This moment, this view, this sensation of being on horseback, there's no way to value IT. Except maybe as infinitely precious.

This revelation, which many other people have also, is horribly devalued by religious belief. I know, because I used to believe that Real Life was going to begin sometime in the future, likely after I died and went to heaven (the Eastern philosophy equivalent, of course).

Or when the enlightenment curtain lifted in my psyche and I saw things as they really are, not as how my current deluded maya-encrusted mind viewed the world.

Not surprisingly, this there and then focus, which is a hallmark of religious belief systems, worked to dilute my appreciation of the here and now. Now -- what a beautiful word! -- I'm much more aware of how precious each and every passing moment is.

Because when my life is over, I no longer believe that more moments will be forthcoming.

Later in the day, on an evening dog walk, I spotted a busy bee. Firing up the ultra-zoom on my camera, I enjoyed capturing bee-moments as it flitted around the flower.

The insect had its thing to do. I had mine. Our moments intersected for a moment before we went our separate ways.

IT was present here also, that sensation of never again, so now! that seems to be amplified when I look through the viewfinder of my camera and press the shutter button.

I'm grateful for that feeling. I don't consider that it comes from anywhere but myself. However, there's plenty of room to bow down before the mystery of self.

No god is needed for revelations. Just an awareness of what is.

Open Thread 4

Here's another Open Thread (previous OTs are still open, of course). Leave a comment about anything you want to talk about. From now on comments on other posts need to be related to the subject of the post, or they will be candidates for deletion. So an Open Thread is the place for miscellany and whatever. Feel free.

Know yourself first, God second (if at all)

Often it's said, "God is mystery." People love mysteries. They're interesting, intriguing, and, well, mysterious.

So religious believers, rather strangely, somehow combine an acceptance of well-defined dogmas, teachings, commandments, and such with an embrace of a Great Unknown.

Mysticism, to which I'm considerably more attracted than religion, dumps the "acceptance" stuff and jumps right into the "embrace."

Mystics say, I want mystery (that's why they're called mystics).

So does science. The known is appealing to scientists. But it's the unknown that really gets their truth-seeking juices flowing. 

The central thing that differentiates my churched self from my churchless self is this: now I've realized that the first, and maybe only, cosmic mystery I want to solve is who I am, not who or what God is.

Such was a point I made in my previous post about Robert K.C. Forman's fascinating book, "Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness." 

The book's index only has one reference to God.

And this is a negative one, since Forman speaks about how a beginning monk, when asked why he is doing such and such, will give an answer that refers to certain objects or goals: samadhi, God-Consciousness, or whatever. In other words, an intention.

Intentions or desires are interesting. But they're not really mysterious. The big mystery is what underlies intentions. And everything else that appears in a person's consciousness. 

Consciousness thus is the here-and-now, right in front of me, closer than the end of my nose, analogy to God -- in that consciousness is the seeming source of what is in our minds, just as God is considered to be the creator of what is in the universe.

But our consciousness is directly accessible to us. God isn't. So it makes sense to mystics (and me) to focus on figuring out the Mystery of Me first and the Mystery of God later.

If at all.

"If at all," because it might turn out that our clear and present consciousness is the primal mystery, not a murky and distant God. (Some traditions equate the two, of course, as in atman is brahman.)

Forman has had a profound mystical experience himself. He's also an academic, so he is able to analyze the experience and place it within the context of mystic philosophies and practices.

His basic thesis is this:

The evidence provided by mystics leads us to distinguish between two concepts that are generally not distinguished: intentional consciousness and awareness per se...In the pure consciousness event, we argued, mystics experience their own awareness to be without content.

...Awareness itself functions and remembers itself differently than it remembers content. It does not know or remember itself through any kind of intentional structure, but rather, we said, just unintentionally knows and holds itself together through time.

Thus we can distinguish two distinct epistemological structures: knowing intentionally, which [William] James divided into knowledge-by-acquaintance and knowledge-about, and the nonintentional form of self-knowing, which I call "knowledge-by-identity."

Knowledge by identity is an epistemological structure that any and every conscious being must have, a knowing what it is to have a consciousness simply by virtue of being conscious.

In other words (and I'd be the first to agree that Forman uses some fairly abstruse words), we know consciousness by being aware.

As Popeye said, "I am what I am." (Or rather, "I yam what I yam.")

Knowledge by identity.

What's beautiful about this thesis, which makes a lot of both experiential and intellectual sense to me, is how it points toward a non-metaphysical oneness.

Forman observes that while being an American is profoundly different from being Japanese, the awareness per se of an American likely is the same as the awareness per se of a Japanese. Or any other human being.

Often it is said that we don't know what it is like to look through another person's eyes. Meaning, what it is like to be them, rather than our own self.

Jean-Paul Sartre speaks a lot about this -- how we are a subject to ourselves and an object to others.

Existentialists like him tend to find this a bit (or a lot) depressing, since it seems to establish an unbridgeable gulf between our subjective sense of self and the appearance of others as objects within our consciousness.

But this notion of awareness points toward a commonality between every person on Earth, and maybe even between all sentient beings of any sort.

Take away what each of us is conscious of, and perhaps what is left is... awareness pure and simple.

Watching my dog stare at a chipmunk hole at this moment, I can't help but feel that if I subtracted all the contents of my human consciousness from my awareness, and if she could subtract all the contents of her canine consciousness from her awareness, we'd be pretty much the same.

Maybe exactly the same. Awareness. Consciousness aware of being conscious.

One. Which is pretty darn close to what God often is considered to be.

Jerk leads to temporary comment moderation

I'm temporarily going to comment moderation on this blog, where I approve comments before they are published, because Neut er all (a.k.a. Walker, JAP, etc.) has been posting comments under other people's names -- tAo, Catherine, Robert, others, including me, Blogger Brian.

I can tolerate insults and attacks on me, but not when they involve other people. Since I have a life apart from blogging, I can't delete identity theft comments as soon as the jerk posts them.

As I've said before, I've been reluctant to go to comment moderation because I want comment conversations on this blog to be as easy to engage in as possible. But posting comments under someone else's screen name is over the top.

Another example: Neuter/Walker/JAP is using my email address on other web sites.

Here's the churchless lesson.

This guy almost certainly is a devotee of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, the organization I used to be an active member of. The RSSB guru wouldn't condone this behavior. Nor would any decent person.

But fundamentalism makes people believe that any action can be justified in the name of their god. This is a great example of why churchlessness is the way to go: you don't want to end up like this true believer, trying to steal people's identities and stop honest discussions on this blog.

I need to consider what to do to protect visitors to this blog from having fake comments posted under their name. Until then, I'll stick with comment moderation.

Mysticism is all about doing...nothing

I used to work hard at meditation. I did a lot of mantra repetition, several hours at a stretch. This was supposed to get me into an elevated state of consciousness where mystical sound and light phenomena would appear.

Now, my approach is to do as little as possible when I meditate each morning. I think of it as the lazy guy's way to enlightenment (assuming enlightenment exists -- a whole other question).

It's nice to know that a noted student of mysticism, Robert K.C. Forman, says that I'm on the right track.

Here's an excerpt from his book, "Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness" (which I've blogged about before).

The word mysticism, like religion, truth, and modernity, is pivotal but murky. It can denote the unintelligible statements of an illogical speaker, a schizophrenic's vision, someone's hallucinations, a drug-induced vision, the spiritual "showings" of a Julian of Norwich or a Mechthilde of Magedeburg, the unspoken, silent experience of God that Meister Eckhart called the "Divine Desert," or the Buddhist Nagarjuna's empty shunyata. 

...Roland Fischer has put forward a "cartography" of states of conscious arousal which includes all of these so called "mystical" states. Hallucinations, acute schizophrenic states, and the visions and auditions of a Julian of Norwich fall on the ergotropic side of the chart. These are states of hyperarousal: cognitive and physiological activity are at relatively high levels.

On the trophotrophic side are hypoaroused states, marked by low levels of cognitive and physiological activity: here we find HIndu samadhi, mushinjo in zazen, the restful states associated with The Cloud of Unknowing's "cloud of forgetting," or Eckhart's gezucket.

...I propose reserving the term mysticism for trophotropic states. I will call ergotrophic phenomena such as hallucinations, visions, auditions, etc. "visionary experiences."

Forman is interested in exploring the nature of consciousness. He used to be (and maybe still is) the Executive Editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, a well-respected publication that I once subscribed to.

The contents of consciousness are different from consciousness itself. This seems almost indisputable. I've been conscious of countless different things throughout my life. Throughout, though, these things have appeared in a seemingly single consciousness.

As many "ergotrophic" mystics have said, if we reduce or eliminate the contents of consciousness, then consciousness pure and simple (or at least purer and simpler) will be evident.

Many people, including some commenters on this blog, place a lot of importance on what happens during meditation. Someone recently said that if you're not hearing inner sound or seeing inner light, you're not experiencing the Real Thing.

Others, and increasingly I'm among them, consider that it doesn't really matter what phenomena pop up in one's consciousness, because this doesn't lead to a genuine realization of what consciousness itself is.

And clearly consciousness is King when it comes to understanding the nature of reality, because if we aren't conscious of something, it doesn't exist for us.

Here's how I started off my previous post about Forman's book:

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

Do we construct reality or discover it? In some sense both, most likely. Forman says that modern philosophical constructivists and the ancient Buddhist scholar Paramartha agree on quite a bit.

But -- and this is the critical point -- on the fundamental claim that experiences are constructed by language, concept, and past experiences, they agree profoundly: every ordinary experience of an object is in significant ways shaped, delimited, and controlled by our previously learned, habituated perceptual and cognitive categories. And this, it goes without saying, is the key claim in the modern-day constructivist's account of mysticism.

How many devout Christians have a vision of Buddha while meditating?

When I was a member of an India-based spiritual organization, initiates were instructed to meditate upon the face of the guru. If some being appeared within one's consciousness during meditation, and it wasn't accompanied by the guru's form (the reality of which was to be tested by repeating a mantra), then that being was supposed to be ignored as a fake.

This is a good example of constructing reality out of concepts and expectations. The scientific method is a way of determining the relative extent to which a purported truth has been manufactured, or discovered.

However, when an experience is personal and one-of-a-kind, it can't be subjected to a research study.

So Forman's goal is to demonstrate that mystical knowledge isn't subject to constructivist criticisms. He does a good job of this.

To summarize the argument so far, we have said that constructivists claim that mystical experience, like any experience, results from prior shaping of expectations. This shaping, they say, is of the intentional object. But, we noted, there is no mental or sensory intentional object in the pure consciousness event and thus nothing to shape.

...Mystical experiences don't result from a process of building or constructing mystical experience, we've suggested, but rather from an un-constructing of language and belief. It seems to result from something like a releasing of experience from language.

Fairly frequently, commenters on this blog who subscribe to a particular belief system call me a quitter for having forsaken my faith in certain spiritual dogmas. That's absolutely wrong, given Forman's definition of mysticism.

By letting beliefs, expectations, effort, and such go, what remains is consciousness pure and simple (or like I said before, purer and simpler).

A frequently-heard adage is "self-realization before god-realization."

My churchlessness has adapted this to "self-realization, then see about realizing god." Meaning, we're going to have a much clearer view of reality if we get straight who we are before we start jumping to conclusions about a possible external divinity.

And this self-realization doesn't take any effort, according to Forman. It's right in front of our eyes. In fact, it is our eyes -- along with everything else we are.

Really, we know our minds, and indeed we know what it is to be a thinking, feeling conscious being, by virtue of the fact that we have a mind, or are conscious. It is a peculiarly diaphanous element, consciousness: hard to define, hard to contact, hard to know.

But it is only by virtue of our firsthand, first-person acquaintance with this ineffable and sui generis phenomenon that we know anything at all, and certainly know anything at all about our own minds.

We do not know it as we know the color of the desk or as we know another's fears. We know it in a peculiarly direct way: by virtue of being it.

Open Thread 3

Here's another Open Thread (previous OTs are still open, of course). Leave a comment about anything you want to talk about. From now on comments on other posts need to be related to the subject of the post, or they will be candidates for deletion. So an Open Thread is the place for miscellany and whatever. Feel free.

Shoddy religious arguments keep being repeated

One of the pleasures of having a blog devoted to the praise of churchlessness is being exposed to the strange reasonings of religious true believers. If you're a regular reader of comments here, you know what I mean.

I'm sincere about the "pleasure" part. Disagreements are part of the spice of life. If everybody thought the same way, that'd be horribly boring.

But I enjoy creative, strong, substantial arguments in favor of religiosity (or against science and rationality). After almost five years of hearing the same platitudinous, weak, flimsy arguments, I frequently start reading a fundamentalist's comment and think, "Oh no, not this again."

In hopes that the anti-churchless types will come up with some fresh gotchas! to send my way, I'll share three examples of the sort of "religion is right and you're wrong" spurious arguments that keep being repeated here.

(1) Science can't explain X (love, music, consciousness, life, art, whatever).

Yeah, agreed. So what? The scientific method isn't intended to provide explanations about every aspect of existence, human or cosmic.

Some questions seemingly are unanswerable, such as "why is there something rather than nothing?" Others fall into the realm of personal subjectivity. My wife keeps asking me why I don't like to eat pinto beans. All I can reply is, "There's no why. I just don't like them."

Science, however, can explain a whole heck of a lot more than religion can.

So when I'm looking for an explanation to scratch a question mark itch in my mind concerning some aspect of objective reality, I look toward science rather than a holy book -- even if the scientific hypothesis is tentative and incomplete while the religious dogma is confident and well established.

As the saying goes, "it's better to be roughly right than precisely wrong."

(2) There's no proof that X doesn't exist (God, life after death, heaven, miracles, whatever), so that's why I believe in X.

This argument is guaranteed to generate a WTF? in my mind whenever I hear it (and that's often). I can't believe that anyone takes this flawed reasoning seriously. But it keeps popping up in comments, no matter how many times the absurdity of it is pointed out.

A satirical You Tube video does a pretty good job of laughing off this "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence" argument. Gosh, since there is no evidence that gnomes aren't making the flowers in my garden bloom, it must be true!

Most of the comments on "Ask Atheist Reddit: Can you prove God doesn't exist?" support the same conclusion: it's virtually impossible to prove that something doesn't exist; the burden of proof is on someone to show that it does.

Here's another guy's way of saying the same thing: 

First, those who study logic will freely admit that you cannot disprove God's existence. Disproving a statement of instantiation in the context of a very large domain requires visitation of the entire domain. We don't have that technology.

Second, those who claim existence may claim whatever they want, but traditional logic principles and various formal rules of logical debate require the person making the affirmative claim to offer the proof.

Stated another way, you claim existence of God. We dispute your claim. The monkey (your evolutionary uncle...) is on your back as the next step in the formal process.

...Just don't go nuts and try to assert some kind of bonehead logic. That, we will shoot down in a heartbeat.

(3) Skeptics about religion are secular fundamentalists because they're sure there's no God.

Wrong. Skeptics are looking for demonstrable evidence in support of metaphysical beliefs and don't find any. That's what makes them skeptical.

If someone said, "There's an elephant in your kitchen," you'd look around to see if this was true. Not finding an elephant, you'd be justified in saying "I don't believe you."

But who knows? Maybe there is some sort of pygmy elephant that you've never heard of. It could be in a cupboard that you failed to look in. Neither scientists nor skeptics claim 100% surety.

They simply tilt toward accepting the truth that has the most evidence in favor of it. Since there is basically zero evidence that God exists, or for life after death, a sincere truth-seeker is drawn toward the most defensible conclusion.

Which isn't always the most pleasant or emotionally satisfying conclusion. Personally, I'd much rather know that there is a God who will take care of me after I die. But since I don't know that, I can't delude myself that I do.

Every morning I meditate.

I've meditated daily for almost forty years. If God wants to pay a visit to my consciousness, my door is open. I'm not 100% convinced of anything when it comes to metaphysics, mysticism, the supernatural, and non-bodily consciousness.

For sure, I'm no secular fundamentalist. Fundamentalists believe without evidence. I'm a non- believer without evidence. Big difference.

Floating in a boundless sea

Before Jed McKenna's "Spiritual Enlightenment" is put away on a shelf, I wanted to add some positivity to my previous mostly negative post about the book -- which I finished today.

I still don't like how McKenna fictionalizes what is presented as reality: that he is an enlightened teacher who presides over a fawning group of non-dual truth seekers at his quasi-ashram in rural Iowa.

And I still doubt both that enlightenment exists, at least in the fashion McKenna describes it to be, or that he has achieved the state of all-knowing clarity which McKenna annoyingly claims on page after page of this paen to himself.

That said...

"Spiritual Enlightenment" is well written. Fiction or not, it presents a compelling, consistent philosophy, plus a believable portrait of a guy whose brand of enlightenment is considerably different from what most spiritual seekers consider self-realization to be.

I like McKenna's iconoclastic vibe. I just wish he had turned more of his iconoclasm back onto himself, rather than directing almost all of it toward the deluded fools who follow other belief systems.

Here's some quotes from his book that rang generally true to me. I only wish more of the book did.

The supposed mega-bliss of spiritual awakening is a carrot dangling from a stick no less than love or wealth or power.
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We're all afloat in a boundless sea, and the way we cope is by massing together in groups and pretending in unison that the situation is other than it is.
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Fear of the unknown is what keeps everyone busily treading water. All fear is fear of the unknown. If someone in such a group of water-treaders betrays the group by speaking the truth of their situation, that person is called a heretic and society reserves its most awful punishments for heretics. If someone decides to stop struggling and just sink or float away, every possible effort is made to stop him, not for the benefit of the individual, but for the benefit of the group. To deny at all costs the truth of the situation.
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The truth of the situation is that eventually, there's nothing. Infinity. Eternity. The void. The abyss. Eventually, every water-treader has to deal with the fact that it's just him, the infinite ocean and nothing in-between.
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Allegiance to any spiritual teaching or teacher, any outside authority, is the most treacherous beast in the jungle. The first thing we want to do when we begin our journey is find the companionship and validity that comes with an established group, and in so doing we effectively end the journey before it begins.
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The power of our devotion to teachers and teachings is not a reflection of their value, but of ego's will to survive. It's ego, the false self, that exalts the guru and declares the teachings sacred, but nothing is exalted or sacred, only true or not true.
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Think for yourself. That's the golden rule. Think for yourself. Make it your mantra. Tattoo it on the inside of your eyelids.

Open Thread 2

Here's another Open Thread (previous OT is still open, of course). Leave a comment about anything you want to talk about. From now on comments on other posts need to be related to the subject of the post, or they will be candidates for deletion. So an Open Thread is the place for miscellany and whatever. Feel free.

Jed McKenna -- an illusion of enlightenment?

In "Spiritual Enlightenment," Jed McKenna tells us that he is enlightened. In fact, he says that a lot. Which got me to thinking, now that I'm a bit over halfway through the book (which was recommended to me by an old friend)...

Does enlightenment exist?
If so, what the heck is it"?
How would we know someone is enlightened?

Other questions come to mind also, because this is one of those intriguing/exasperating books that make me say "what a bunch of crap" on one page, and "right on, brother Jed" on the next.

Such as, does Jed McKenna exist as the sort of guy he puts himself out to be in the book?

Namely, someone who has achieved non-dual enlightenment, owns a big farm house somewhere in rural Iowa, and acts as a guide to all kinds of folks who come to this quasi-ashram to be disillusioned of all their fake religious, mystical, philosophical, and spiritual beliefs, and absorb the unexcelled wisdom of Jedism.

Since the Jedism blogger says this on his home page, I'm strongly inclined to accept the prevailing opinion that someone going by "Jed McKenna" has written a fictional book with non-fiction overtones.

Yes, we understand that “Jed Mckenna” is a fictional character or alter-ego, perhaps in the same way that “Don Juan” of the Carlos Castaneda books may have been, but that doesn’t diminish the impact that the ideas, images and intuitions have had on many people.

Now, just because Jed McKenna has made up stuff about his life, this doesn't mean that he has made up his enlightenment. However, the questions I asked above still remain.

Over and over, Jed talks about himself in the fashion below. It may sound tongue-in-cheek, but believe me, he wants us to believe him.

The difference between us isn't that I'm enlightened and you're not. The difference is that I know it and you don't. I possess selfless awareness and you don't... I basically believe that I know everything and nobody else knows anything... The greatest men and women who have ever lived are just children on a playground to me.

Jed's "trip" (as we used to say in the '60's) is demolishing everyone else's view of reality but his own.

He's got a way with words, and almost surely he's making up the conversations in his book anyway, so not surprisingly enlightened Jed comes out on top of every meaning-of-life dialogue in "Spiritual Enlightenment." (Spoiler alert: there isn't one -- a meaning of life.)

There's a lot of fawning praise of the book on Amazon. So I zipped right to the minority 1-star reviews. Quite a bit of thoughtful skepticism here. Such as:

Which brings up the interesting question, when he became enlightened, how did he know his other state-of-being was to be called "enlightenment". And not, for instance, "satori", "nirvana", "at-one-ness", "super-acidity", what have you?

The original words from which the word "enlightenment" was created: "nirvana" or "nibbana" and "satori" etc have been lost for thousands of years, so how did McKenna arrive at this state and said "Ah, this is the state of 'enlightenment'". How did he know it was not a state of permanent foobarisment?

In fact, he makes such strong and fine distinctions, that one wonders if there is a hidden school somewhere that maintains the old traditions: "That was spiritual awakening, not non-dualism, McKenna. Drop down and give me twenty! Now let's work on mystical one-ness for the next hour."

This reader review encapsulates the main problem I have with Jedism, or any "ism" that claims it's followers possess a clearer view of ultimate reality than the rest of us deluded fools.

We're expected to accept some guy's (rarely, gal's) claim of enlightenment without any evidence that he has achieved it -- or even often, as in Jed's case, that there is any way to describe a state of enlightenment.

"You'll know it when you become it," is Jed's oft-repeated message to his (fictional) acolytes. If someone asks "What is it?" or "How do you get it?" the basic answer is to seek what is truly true with great raging determination, a la Ramana's admonition to keep asking "Who am I?"

Here's some of the many contradictions in the book.

Spiritual teachers aren't to be trusted, and aren't really needed (Jed got enlightened on his own). But Jed clearly enjoys playing guru to his disciples, even though he'd deny that this was what was going on. 

Jed McKenna decries spiritual paths that exalt a guru and declare the teachings sacred, but he fills the first ten pages of his book with blurbs extolling him and what he's written (since, he's self-published several more titles about the truth of Jedism).

Everybody has to find truly true truth for himself or herself. However, there's only one acceptable outcome: non-dual enlightenment, whatever that is.

Along that line, it's tough to recognize the non-duality in Jed's enlightenment. In the book Jed acts like a normal, albeit deeply egotistical and self-centered, human being. He bikes, drives, skydives, shovels gravel, goes on walks, reads, watches TV, conducts interviews, and such.

Put him in a Mystic Lineup, and I don't see how a guy like Jed would reliably be chosen as the One Genuine Enlightened Being out of a bunch of other candidates.

Like I said, he talks the game better than most, but the question remains whether there's any meat/tofu under the bun of his verbiage.

Meaning, Jed, along with most other spiritual, mystic, and religious faiths, considers that it's possible to illuminate the darkness of primordial mystery. This, I guess, is "enlightenment" -- seeing what IT is all about -- even if IT can't be described to anyone else.

Jed loves to use a quasi-Platonic analogy.

Everybody but him is watching the movie of life, not realizing that it is just a dramatic production, not reality. Jed, though, has seen through the screen, projection mechanism, and all that. He knows that everybody is just playing a role, like actors in a movie.

This assumes that everyone has a self, or consciousness, that is non-role'd in some fashion -- a really real identity, better termed a non-self, that is the touchstone of truth. The diamond of reality compared to which everything else is costume jewelery.

Well, maybe.

But I doubt that Jed is the real deal. Or, that anyone is. I lean toward leaving mystery mysterious rather than trying to explain it away with a magic word: "enlightenment."

There's a lot to like in Spiritual Enlightenment. I resonate with Jed's talk of black holes. I just question whether there is really any light at the end of the black hole tunnel. For me, truth is admitting "yes, blackness" when the big questions of life and existence remain unanswered.

Jed, however, believes it is possible to fly right through cosmic mystery and come out the other side.

Here's the most directly I am able to say this: The one and only truth of a person lies like a black hole at their very core, and everything else, everything else, is just the rubbish and debris that covers the hole.

...All fear is ultimately fear of this inner black hole, and nothing on this side of the hole is true. The process of achieving enlightenment is about breaking through the blockage and stepping through the hole, and anything that's not about getting to and through the hole is just more rubbish and debris.

Well, this assumes that it is possible to step through ourselves, or everyday reality, and reach somewhere else. Since the cosmos supposedly is non-dual, according to Jedism, I don't understand all this talk about rubbish and debris being so undesirable compared to the black hole.

Here's another way at looking at things: the Hubble Deep Field in 3-D. I like the idea of no end to the cosmos. Or of seeking the truth of it.

Are auras real? Yes and no.

Recently Maggie sent me a scanned photo of her aura that was taken 10-15 years ago. She asked for a particular caption when I shared it on my blog: Maggie's Radiant Form. Glad to oblige.

Maggie wanted me to point out:

"There are two types, one like mine which shows the colours of your personal energies (everyone's is different) and the second Kirlian photos which is a lot of squiggles and lines. Only experts can read those with any accuracy. The first type you have to have the gift of sight or clairvoyance."

I told her that I didn't know much about aura photography and was skeptical that what is shown has any spiritual or metaphysical significance.

I've seen aura booths at the Oregon State Fair. My wife has had several people tell her that they could see a blue/green aura surrounding her, which happen to be her favorite colors. Freaky! (I asked Laurel, though, if she was wearing blue and green at the time -- she couldn't remember.)

And that's just about the extent of my exposure to auras. So I engaged in some Googling of the subject, which leads me to this admittedly quickly-arrived-at conclusion:

Auras are real. And also not.

I'm speaking here of the kind that can be photographed. Obviously something is producing the halo-like imagery around Maggie. Since we can see it, it's real. The question is, "what is it?"

The Aura Imaging web site offers up a lot of information on the subject. Here's how the AuraCam 6000 camera works.

The Auracam 6000 consists of one or two hand sensors which are connected through cables with the camera. Polaroid instant film is put into the camera and is adjusted and aligned to the customer. Once the customer puts their left and right hand onto hand sensors, the AuraCam 6000 begins to gather standardized biofeedback parameter data through the hand sensors.

The measured points of resonance are connected with certain organs and the electromagnetic field of the person; this information about the energetic and auric qualities of a human being are then delivered to the camera. Through a patented operation, these parameters are projected as a radiant, colorful aura field around the body onto the Polaroid film, along with the image of the person.

Several words caught my attention: "standardized biofeedback," "patented operation," "parameters are projected." And, of course, "customer."

Here's an interesting description of a skeptic's visit to a psychic fair, where he forked out $40 for two aura photographs. They turned out radically different. He says:

Indeed, a look at the actual process employed-described by Coggins [inventor of the Auracam 6000] "intensified Kirlian imaging"-shows it to be not the actual image of the body's unseen image field but the imitation of such a field based primarily on something called skin resistance. That is one of the physiological variables measured by a galvanometer as part of a polygraph or "lie detector," whereby an unfelt electrical current passes through the subject's hands and detects sweat-gland activity associated with nervousness.

Again, something real is happening here.

But what it seems to be is an electronics engineer making a gadget that lets entrepreneurs charge people for having their "aura" photographed. [Note: as the skeptic's article points out, Kirlian photography uses a different technology that doesn't involve a camera.] 

Ever the diligent investigator, I invested 14 minutes of my time into watching a You Tube'd video from a Sci-Fi channel program that supposedly showed the validity of aura photography.

Not really. Not even close.

A supposed aura reader told a few people some things about themselves that made them go "why, yes, that's me!" I wasn't impressed, especially since the reader was looking right at the individuals and could gauge their personality from obvious clues (appearance, demeanor, style of dress, etc.)

Some aura readers, such as those my wife encountered, claim to be able to see auras directly, without the aid of any technology.

This article demolishes that notion pretty persuasively. Of course, believers will say that the failure of a few aura readers to demonstrate their ability in a controlled experiment doesn't mean that nobody can.

True.

But until somebody presents demonstrable evidence that auras are a manifestation of a person's subtle etheric body, and not just manipulated electronic imaging or imagination, I'll remain an aura skeptic.

Open thread

Commenting experiment: an Open Thread post. Meaning, leave a comment about anything you want to talk about. From now on comments on other posts need to be related to the subject of the post, or they will be candidates for deletion. So an Open Thread is the place for miscellany and whatever. Feel free. If this works out, I'll put up a new Open Thread weekly or so.

Existentialism and churchlessness: great fit

I've been rediscovering existentialist philosophy lately, since I'm re-reading Jean-Paul Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" after a long absence from the pages I densely highlighted decades ago.

Sartre was an atheist. Atheist existentialism isn't the only form of this philosophy, but non-belief in God is much more compatible with an existentialist perspective than believing is.

It's tough to encapsulate Sartre's outlook on life. He's a marvelously rich and complex thinker.

I love getting into his head via what he wrote in "Being and Nothingness." Sartre often writes in a dense intellectual style, but (thankfully) he frequently throws in nuggets of simplicity that inspire my churchless psyche.

A few paragraphs below are a few examples from my fresh highlighting in the book. The passages are pretty easy to understand, especially if you keep in mind the existentialist adage: existence precedes essence. 

Which means, for Sartre there is no God, Platonic form, noumenon, soul, real self, or ultimate reality hidden behind the contents of human consciousness. What you see is what there is, basically.

Here's the quotes:

The appearance does not hide the essence, it reveals it; it is the essence. 

Consciousness is the knowing being in his capacity as being and not as being known...The existence of consciousness comes from consciousness itself.

Whatever being is, it will allow this formulation: "Being is that and outside of that, nothing."

We must be careful never to posit nothingness as an original abyss from which being arose...This means that being is prior to nothingness and establishes the ground for it.

Man is always separated from what he is by all the breadth of the being which he is not...Man is the being through whom nothingness comes to the world.

Descartes following the Stoics has given a name to this possibility which human reality has to secrete a nothingness which isolates it: it is freedom. 

Thus the condition on which human reality can deny all or part of the world is that human reality carry nothingness within itself as the nothing which separates its present from all its past.

It is in anguish that man gets the consciousness of his freedom...Anguish is precisely my consciousness of being my own future, in the mode of not-being.

I apprehend my freedom as being the possible destroyer in the present and in the future of what I am.

It follows that my freedom is the unique foundation of values and that nothing, absolutely nothing, justifies me in adopting this or that particular value, this or that particular scale of values. As a being by whom values exist, I am unjustifiable.

Values are sown on my path as thousands of little real demands, like the signs which order us to keep off the grass.

In anguish I apprehend myself at once as totally free and as not being able to derive the meaning of the world except as coming from myself.

Everything happens as if the world, man, and man-in-the-world succeeded in realizing only a missing God.

Man pursues being blindly by hiding from himself the free project which is this pursuit...Objects are mute demands, and he is nothing in himself but the passive obedience to those demands.

If consuming these Sartre snippets makes you hungry for more, but your reading diet doesn't include the 800 pages of "Being and Nothingness" (paperback translation by Hazel Barnes), I found these short overviews by Austin Cline to be well written and accurate:

Existence Precedes Essence
Atheism & Existentialism
What is Existentialism?
What Isn't Existentialism?
Abandonment: Condemned to Be Free

I also enjoyed Jayne Forish's take on Sartre's existence precedes essence tenet. She stresses that with freedom comes responsibility.

In conclusion, existence precedes essence in the sense that at birth man is a being for whom nothing is predestined. Through man's own individual life-quest, he discovers and chooses the meaning of his own life. Man creates his existence through living, plain and simple.

Living involves the freedom to make choices as well as the acknowledgement of responsibility for the choices one makes. With no a priori meaning in the universe, man is free to choose his essence as well as define the essence of the world which surrounds him.

Man at first exists without purpose, but then he defines himself in the world through his actions and shapes the meaning of his existence by those actions. One's identity cannot be constructed by any outside force; no one else can choose the essence of another.

Therefore, identities are constructed solely by the individual's freedom of consciousness. Values are formed similarly, for no universal concept of morality exists prior to birth. Only through action and choice do values form, for "value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose."

When a human being first enters existence, he immediately begins to live and to choose the shape of his essence and, consequently, his values and identity.

An evolved comment policy

I love to get comments on my blogs. Open discussion is a big part of what churchlessness is about.

What I don't like, though, and I'm pretty sure almost all blog visitors would agree with me on this, is having to wade through comments made by people who aren't interested in furthering the purpose of this blog, but clearly have another agenda.

So I'm going to be more assertive in deleting comments that are off-base.

I'm tired of dealing with "flame wars," a bane of the Internet. I'm tired of responding to commenters who want this churchless blog to go away.

There's a big wide world out there. If you don't like the Church of the Churchless, go someplace else. It's just a click away. Note that I'm not saying you should go away if you want to share a differing opinion about some substantive churchless discussion.

I'm just going to crack down harder on comments that are clearly intended to disrupt open discussion, not engage in it. The recent "Walker" dust-up gave me the impetus to evolve in this direction.

Yesterday I was talking to a friend about how upset I got when a guy from Germany impersonated me, posting comments in my name and trying to make it look like those comments were coming from me. 

i said that this led to a back-and-forth string of argumentative comments that disturbed some visitors to the blog who want to read about interesting topics, not "nyah, nyah, you're one!" sorts of school-boy insults.

She said, "Yes, I'm one of those sensitive people myself. I can't stand it when people get that way on the internet." This made me realize that allowing ridiculous comment crap to remain on my blog is even worse than I'd been thinking it was.

So it's going to go, whenever I notice it. Meaning, some comments will remain up until they're unpublished. That's the price of open discussion.

Bottom line: if you support the churchless purpose of this blog and want to take part in a comment conversation on some topic, great. Comment away.

But if your main goal is to disrupt, insult, disparage, and otherwise try to throw wrenches into the machinery of open discussion, please go away. And realize that any comments you do leave are going to disappear in fairly short order.

Defenders of Reality, armor up!

There used to be an old barn in a field near my house in Oregon that had a saying painted on the wall that faced the I-5 freeway: "Soldiers of the Lord, armor up!"

I appreciated the martial passion and energy, but not the theology. Yeah, that's what we really need in the world right now, more frenzied religious extremists.

What is needed, though, are Defenders of Reality -- soldiers of science, reason, and demonstrable evidence. Astronomer Carl Sagan sounded the warning of an attack back in 1995, in his book "The Demon-Haunted World."

I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before?

Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us -- then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.

The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.

We churchless have a responsibility to defend the territory of our shared reality.

This is not only the domain of scientists, but of everyone who seeks the brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind in commonality, not division, in what binds us together, not what separates us.

Around the world at this moment people are courteously gathering together in the name of science and the scientific method. Discussing. Debating. Learning. Researching. Studying.

It doesn't matter what country these people are from, or what religious beliefs are common in each person's culture. Science seeks a shared understanding of the natural world that we all inhabit, our common ground.

When my two-year-old granddaughter starts school (not far off), I want her learning about what's real in the world, because this is what a child in China, Zambia, Indonesia, Chile, or anywhere else should also be learning.

It's too idealistic to think that humanity can ever inhabit a war-less, poverty-less One World. But science is one of the most powerful means we have for bringing about an ignorance-less Earth.

All that's needed is enough people willing to armor up in defense of reality. Which means, embracing Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit ("baloney" is American slang for nonsense).

Then it's up to each of us to decide how vigorously we will employ it. Carl Sagan said in his book:

Imagine that you enter a big-city taxicab and the moment you get settled in, the driver begins a harangue about the supposed iniquities and inferiorities of another ethnic group. Is your best course to keep quiet, bearing in mind that silence conveys assent?

Or is it your moral responsibility to argue with him, to express outrage, even to leave the cab -- because you know that every silent assent will encourage him next time, and every vigorous dissent will cause him next time to think twice?

Likewise, if we offer too much silent assent about mysticism and superstition -- even when it seems to be doing a little good -- we abet a general climate in which skepticism is considered impolite, science tiresome, and vigorous thinking somehow stuffy and inappropriate. Figuring out a prudent balance takes wisdom.

...As I've tried to stress, at the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes -- an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and the ruthlessly skeptical inquiry of all ideas, old and new.

This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. The collective enterprise of creative thinking and skeptical thinking, working together, keeps the field on track.

Troll alert

"Walker" is leaving comments as "Brian." I've proven that he is, because the IP address he used for "Brian" was the same as for "Walker." 

I have things to do today that may keep me from deleting his lying, trolling comments for a while. Just wanted people to know that this guy not only can't speak the truth in his own comments, he also doesn't have the guts to comment under his own name.

[Update: I'm away from home today, working on a remodeling project with a nail gun. Which, believe me, is a lot more satisfying than dealing with troll'ish comments. When I have time I'll make screenshots of Walker's IP address as recorded by TypePad, and also of the IP address of the commenter posing as me -- which will be seen to be the same IP address, and so the same person.]

[Further update: here's screen shots of the comments left by "Brian" and "Walker" within a few hours of each other. Note that the IP addresses are identical, proving that the same computer was used to post both comments. Yes, Walker was posing as me -- an utterly reprehensible action.]

  

Sartre speaks to the churchless

I read some passages from Jean-Paul Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" to my wife recently. Her reaction: "How the heck can you make sense of that?"

Reasonable question. Sartre can be dense.

But I love how he rambles along in his French existentialist intellectual writing style for a while, then throws in a simple clear gem that makes me go Wow! Right on, Jean-Paul.

For example, how he ends these thoughts.

Anguish in fact is the recognition of a possibility as my possibility; that is, it is constituted when consciousness sees itself cut off from its essence by nothingness or separated from the future by its very freedom. This means that a nihilating nothing removes from me all excuse and that at the same time what I project as my future being is always nihilated and reduced to the rank of simple possibility because the future which I am remains out of my reach.

But we ought to remark that in these various instances we have to do with a temporal form where I await myself in the future, where I "make an appointment with myself on the other side of that hour, of that day, or of that month." Anguish is the fear of not finding myself at that appointment, of no longer even wishing to bring myself there.

"Being and Nothingness" is 811 pages long as I noted in a previous post. However, just the two paragraphs above show why Sartre is a patron saint (god, he would have hated that appellation) for the churchless.

He says, correctly in my opinion, that we choose ourselves. This is scary. Also, exhilarating, as I wrote about on my other blog in "Sartre, scootering, and sensuality." 

If someone believes in a religion, that belief is his or hers. Not any one else's.

Believing is an action, not a state. It has to be continually reaffirmed, though often (or usually) we don't consciously realize how free we are to hold onto or discard a belief.

That's why Sartre speaks wonderfully about anguish being the fear that I won't find myself at the apppointment I've made with myself for some time in the future. ("Anguish," to my understanding, isn't so much anxiety as the realization of our freedom to choose.)

Someone believes in Jesus, or a guru, or whatever, for a long time. Then, she doesn't.

When the person was a true believer, she envisioned the appointment with herself that Sartre spoke of: a continued believing that carries on into the future (in the same way as a newly married couple imagines growing old together, not getting divorced some years down the line.)

But nothing comes between our present and our future. For Sartre, this "nothing" doesn't imply unbroken continuity, as when we say "Nothing is blocking the road between here and town."

No, nothing is nothingness. Freedom.

The gap between our subjectivity and things as they are in themselves, or being as it is in itself. The following quote is denser than the preceding one, but it offers a flavor of Sartre's view of nothingness.

But the nothingness which arises in the heart of consciousness is not. It is made-to-be. Belief, for example, is not the contiguity of one being with another being; it is its own presence to itself, it's own decompression of being.

...Thus the for-itself [individual consciousness] must be its own nothingness. The being of consciousness qua consciousness is to exist at a distance from itself as a presence to itself, and this empty distance which being carries in its being is Nothingness.

In this blog post I can't do a good job of explaining what Sartre means here. Here's a short and fairly simple attempt, though.

Things just are. A table is what it is. A table.

It's full of itself. All it is is what it is, a table. This is what Sartre calls Being-in-itself, which doesn't know that it is, because something unconscious isn't anything but itself. Meaning, it isn't aware that it exists. It just exists.

Humans, however, are Being-for-itself. We are conscious, including being conscious of our consciousness. This produces a distance from everything in existence, including ourselves.

Yes, there is a pre-reflexive consciousness that simply is. There has to be, because the nothing that separates Being-for-itself from itself isn't being. It is nothingness. Only being is. The rest is nothingness.

People talk about being one with God, one with the guru, one with Jesus, one with something. For Sartre (and also for me), that's impossible.

Oneness, in the sense of identity or no difference, is death for humans. If you and I aren't two, we're non-existent. I recall an Eastern sage, Ramakrishna, saying "I don't want to become sugar; I want to taste sugar."

Becoming sugar, or ashes, or God, or anything else, is to be non-existent. Unconscious. Dead. Who wants that?

This is what human life is: separateness, choice, freedom, anguish, joy, searching, finding, not-finding. If we were merely being, we would be a stone, a tree, a star, a table.

We are conscious. We are aware of existing. We know that we are free to choose. This is our joy. And also our anguish. Sartre says:

In anguish I apprehend myself at once as totally free and as not being able to derive the meaning of the world except as coming from myself.

"Sickest Buddhist" video spotlights spiritual hypocrisy

Oh, yeah, in my true believing days I knew people who were so damn proud of how humble they were. And who acted like jerks while preaching high-minded morality to others.

So I could relate to Arj Barker's slickly produced and smile inducing video where he raps out his claim to being the Sickest Buddhist. (embedded at end of this post)

You can read the lyrics if you can't understand all of them, thanks to YogaDork. Sample:

I’m the illest Buddhist you’ve seen
all the ladies wanna meditate with me
I look so serene when I bust a lotus
but i don’t have an ego so I wouldn’t even notice

I think of you before I think of myself
that’s probably why people think I’m so chill
But still I’m hell of intense
my clothes have little bells and they smell like incense

This stuff is funny. And also it isn't. Because it's so true.

I'm much more familiar with Eastern varieties of spiritual hypocrisy, because I was involved with organized yoga and meditation practice for about thirty-five years.

Now, I can understand the defense this Buddhist blogger offers up to the Sickest Buddhist video.

I want to say "Hey guys, did you read the paper today, the part where Goldman Sachs and Exxon screwed the entire planet 100 million times as badly as any confused Buddhist or yogi ever has? Did you hear the lyrics of the latest corporate rap song that reduces humanity to its most superficially glittering impulses for millions of young people to consume without a thought? Did you see how Republicans stonewalled on healthcare reform again? Then please stop talking about Buddhists and Yogis."

But the followers of any spiritual path or religion who can't laugh at its weirdnesses and excesses don't have a right to say, "please stop pointing those out to us." They should be the first to admit how bizarre dogmas, rituals, and such can be.

One of my prouder moments during my humble stage was helping a talented artist come up with Sant Mat cartoons that made gentle (or not-so-gentle, depending on one's sense of humor) fun of Radha Soami Satsang Beas devotees.

Buddhists should be thanking Arj Barker for bringing smiles to so many faces. Enjoy:

Sickest Buddhist from GenerateLA on Vimeo.

Sacrificing a child for religion gets two months jail time

Here's some bad news for children being abused or killed in the name of religion: last Friday an Oregon judge sentenced Carl Worthington to two months in jail for sacrificing his child, Ava, in the name of Jesus.

It's disturbing that this legal slap on the wrist is all Worthington got for committing an atrocious crime. As Oregonian columnist Susan Nielsen said today, religious crazies benefit from a double standard under my state's laws. 

This trial should inspire Oregon to look outside its borders and consider the following:

First, other states aren't so deferential to parents who withhold lifesaving medical care and offer prayer instead. A woman in Wisconsin who let her daughter slowly die of untreated diabetes was convicted of homicide this spring and faces up to 25 years in prison. Her husband is on trial now for the same offense. [Note: he was convicted and could get the same sentence as his wife.]

Second, it's hard to define what qualifies as "religion." In a few recent cases of fatal medical neglect, parents claimed a religious defense because they were diligently following some spiritual advice they found on the Internet.

Third, other states have gotten into trouble for maintaining an Oregon-style patchwork that allows a religious defense in some circumstances but not in others. Appeals courts tend to throw out convictions when they notice the absurdity of punishing the same behavior that is singled out elsewhere for protection. 

On the positive side, Judge Maurer got it exactly right when he sentenced Carl Worthington. This is just what I've been saying in my posts on this subject.

"I will stand by my assessment that this was wrong, wrong, wrong," Maurer told a Clackamas County courtroom full of supporters from Worthington's church. "This was an unnecessary tragedy"..."This, religious tenet or not, is simply wrong -- fundamentally and simply wrong," Maurer said.

As noted before, I was surprised at how some commenters on this blog tried to excuse criminal neglect -- not taking a child to the doctor when she had a life-threatening condition that could have been easily treated with antibiotics.

SImply wrong. It's refreshing when judges cut through religious and pseudo-philosophical crap.

There have been quite a few letters to the editor published about the verdict and sentencing. Here's a sampling:

I am absolutely disgusted that the jury failed to convict the Worthingtons of manslaughter in the faith healing death of their daughter.

If there was ever a case of child abuse that directly caused the death of a child, this was it. Denying necessary medical treatment for a child is no different than denying that child food, water or shelter from the elements. Abuse is abuse and religion is no excuse.

Rather than practicing a perverted form of Christianity, what if the Worthingtons were followers of the "Spaghetti Monster" and claimed it was part of their religion to not seek medical help? I'm sure the verdict would have been different.

What a sad statement this jury has made on its behalf and that of the American justice system. Rabbit hoarders and others who neglect their animals receive harsher punishment than the Worthingtons will receive for killing their child.
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I was particularly struck by two details in your story on the Worthington verdict (July 24).

First, the report that "Of 78 children buried in the [Followers of Christ] church cemetery from 1955 to 1998, at least 21 could have been saved by medical intervention, according to a 1998 analysis by The Oregonian."

This means the demise of little Ava Worthington brings the death toll to 22. Twenty-two children have suffered and died of preventable causes in the name
of their parents' religious beliefs.

In the words of presiding juror, Ashlee Santos: "Granted, they didn't take her (Ava) to the hospital, but it was truly because they thought she was getting better ... That was the best epiphany moment."

Some epiphany. The Worthingtons didn't take their baby to the hospital because they don't believe in hospitals. They don't believe in medical treatment, period. Somehow, the foreperson overlooked this central fact.

I wonder who the 23rd child in the cemetery will be?
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What stands out for me about the Worthington case is that Raylene's parents are going on trial in January for "criminally negligent homicide" because Raylene's brother died of a curable "urinary tract blockage."

These may be nice people, but they "kill" their children.
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Put your faith in the mythological teachings of a 2,000-year-old itinerant carpenter instead of the collective wisdom of millennia of human learning and experience and this is what you get. Dead and suffering children.

The Worthington jurors let their good sense be overcome by their empathy for the unrepentant and unreformed parents of this unfortunate innocent child.
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Ava Worthington died because her parents reject medical science and the ability of physicians and medicine to cure sick patients and ameliorate suffering.

I wonder how far their rejection of science goes. Do they have a car? Do they have a television set in their home? A radio? A refrigerator? A gas or electric stove? Air conditioning? Heating? Electric lights?

All of these and many other everyday items are products of scientific endeavors. I am sure the Worthingtons do not live in a cave with only a log fire to cook their food and warm themselves at night.

Why is it they can make use of many products of science and yet deny science that would save their child? I find this very troubling.

Me too. Thankfully, Judge Maurer ordered that Worthington provide medical care for his five year old daughter and the baby his pregnant wife is carrying.

No more Christian child sacrifice. Never. Ever. Religion doesn't belong in 21st century civilization. It's an archaic relic of ancient mythologies. Truly freaking bizarre:

Ava Worthington died in March 2008 while church members gathered around her for prayer, "laying on of hands," anointing her in oil and administering small amounts of wine.