Church of the Churchless

You wanted old answers, not new questions

It makes sense... to try to make sense out of what makes sense. But if something is senseless, trying to make sense out of it is... (drumroll, please) senseless. 

Such is the mystery of life. Such is the mystery of the cosmos. Such is the mystery of ourselves. To be wondered, not made sense of. 

Jack Haas is a guy who loves wonder, mystery, senselessness. So do I. I've blogged about Haas and his stimulating books here and here. And... here I go again. 

Recently I got Haas' book, The Dream of Being -- aphorisms, ideograms, and aislings. (An aisling is a vision poem; who knew?) Here's some aislings that struck me as well worth sharing. Enjoy. I've added some paragraph breaks in this one to make the writing stream easier to flow with.

the fledgling 

You were trying to complete a puzzle without having first collected all the pieces. You wanted to make sense of what is senseless. You wanted to finish what you forgot you had not started. You sought to reduce yourself towards an irreducibility, to be conscious of vacant ecstasies. You strove to dissipate and to occur, to hope without needing, and to run without fear.

You imagined you were living in two worlds, when actually you were dying in both. You wanted to return to where you never had been. You sought freedom from seeking. You were earnest to be still. You wanted to be. You wanted to not-be. You wanted to detach from detachment, to cling to not-clinging, and to heroically surrender.

You were trying to fall down gracefully. You thought you could be full of emptiness. You wanted to unknow the known and to know the unknown. You sought an intelligent, lucid ignorance. You wanted the reconciliation of the inner with the outer to be a comfortable, sane madness. You were trying to tread water, while still standing on the shore. 

You wanted to die in life, and to live in death. You wanted to attend your own absence. You wanted old answers, not new questions. You wanted nothingness to have context, but then it would be something, would it not? You wanted the spirit to contort into a recognizable form, but then it would not be spirit.

You wanted separateness to be uncategorizable. You wanted directions to the hidden treasure, but then it would not be hidden. You wanted only petty, swallowable, meaningless understandings, so you could continue in the world despite your inability to continue in it.

And a bird, with both feet held fast to a branch, flaps and flaps, curses and screams, and then forever assumes it can't fly.

Great stuff. Haas knows what's been inside my own head. And still is, to an extent I'm unaware of, along with so much else. Here's another sharing...

mirrors

There are naught but mirrors. And a mirror facing a mirror sees the nothing that everything is; sees itself not seeing itself. A reflection reflecting reflection: 'what isn't' facing 'what isn't'. Reflections are reflections.

Just as the individual is not divided, but is only a specific point of reflection to all else. A mirror mirrors that which it is not; it becomes by not being. In order to be it must not be. If it was something it would not be itself. It it was, it would not be.

Life is a stand-off between two men who have guns but not bullets, though neither knows of the other's true poverty. Bluff versus bluff is the battle. No one dies, and everyone's a killer.

A demon is the debelief in itself; you need only accept that it 'is'... and it ceases to be.

A dog unwillingly chases its tail. The tail, however, sees only a great, ferocious beast frantically pursuing it. And even if the tail was informed of the continuum -- that the beast is itself, confused -- still it could not help but be terrified.

We need god because we do not need god.

That is, because of the terror of the internal mystery, we authorize an enigmatic omnipotence to alleviate our own debilitating occurrence; god is the invention of our denials; we deny the incomprehensible within ourselves, forcing the mystery away, onto another, for 'to be' and to be a mystery to ourselves, that is too much for us; we transfer our unknowing, contriving an unknowable omniscience so as to conclude ourselves known; we invent a grandiose not-known to avoid the discomfort of our own ignorance; we point away from ourselves and comfortably gape, until mystery points back at us, and we realize that, all along, we have been captivated and looking at mirrors.

Matt Thornton, mixed martial artist, kicks religion's butt

I love how the World Wide Web leads in so many interesting unexpected directions. Like, from a brief Sam Harris twitter tweet to the blog of a guy who is both physically and intellectually capable of twisting religious believers into knots.

I started off listening to an interview Bobby Nelson, "The Paranormal Skeptic," conducted with Matt Thornton, a mixed martial artist and coach from Portland, Oregon -- just a short ways up I-5 from Salem, the much less cool city where I live.

You can listen to it here. Great stuff.

I've been involved with martial arts for almost twenty years, and enjoy the no-nonsense attitude of most practitioners. Meaning, they're pleasingly open, honest, and blunt. Thornton certainly is, along with being well-spoken and well-informed. 

At the beginning of the interview he talked about how religious skepticism ties in well with the mixed martial arts scene. Traditional disciplines like Shotokan Karate (which I trained in for nine years) bear quite a bit of resemblance to fundamentalist religions -- in that what counts is the techniques and approaches taught by the founder(s) of some martial art.

Whether these really work... not nearly as important. By contrast, Thornton said that the mixed martial arts movement is dedicated to learning what happens when two guys go at each other with minimal rules/restrictions and a maximum desire to put some hurt on the other person.

Likewise, he's heartily in favor of testing the dogmatic claims of religions. "Show me what you've got" is his basic attitude, which he expresses in the interview forcefully.

Can't remember how I was led to Thornton's Guerilla Blog, where his philosophical, skeptical, anti-religion musings are posted. Maybe it was a mention during the Nelson interview. Check it out. The most recent post at the moment talks about the MMA-Skepticism Connection.

The parallels between the promotion of reason within the martial arts and the promotion of reason as it relates to religion or other faith based topics, are nearly endless. One clear example, is the nature of the criticism that tends to get thrown at you. Anytime you tell the truth in plain spoken, non obfuscated language, about anything, martial arts or otherwise, you will end up offending some people. It's just part of the process.

But what is important to realize is that these people are not offended because they think what we are saying is factually untrue, they are offended because we are saying something that is factually true, which they don't think we should say. And that is a very different matter all together.

I enjoyed browsing some other posts. Such as The Faith Hope shell game.

Here is the sneaky part, when non-believers use the word ‘hope’, believers want to be able to perform a slight of hand shell game and pretend that this too is a knowledge claim. As we can see from the examples above however, this simply isn’t true. If I state, “I hope there is life after death” I am not pretending to know something I do not know, I am simply stating my own desire for how I wish reality to be.

However, if, like a preacher I claim, “The soul survives death”, then I am positing an affirmative rather than just a hope, I am pretending to know something I do not know, I am lying; and it is in these situations, when pressed for evidence for these outrageous assertions, that believers are forced to play the ‘faith’ card. 

Also, "Faith" based reasoning, A thought experiment on, identity, and The Enlightenment Delusion. Here's some tough truth-telling from the last post.

One last point, there is an absolute distinction between those that temporarily find themselves searching, seeking, and running through the empty houses of mysticism, religion, astrology, mediums, spiritualism, psychics, bible codes, angel cards, chakras, past lives, karma, crystal healings, self help pop psychology, new age gurus, tarot readings, life coaches, philosophical yoga, and all forms of superstitious rubbish; and con men like Anthony Robbins, Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, John Edwards, David Hawkins, Sylvia Browne, PZ Knight, L Ron Hubbard, Sai Baba, bhagwan shree Rajneesh aka: ‘Osho’, A. C. Bhaktivedanta, Rev Jim Jones and their ‘kind’ (to name but a handful), who, with various degrees of malevolence, profit on selling this poison to the credulous. And we must not forget that, just as we must be able to discern between the two when communicating.

People like the above mentioned ‘spiritual’ gurus are to human well being, what methamphetamine is to small towns. And the distinction I am drawing above is much the same as that between a dealer and a user. Users will self medicate in an attempt to ease suffering. Dealers, people like Chopra and Robbins, profit from exploiting the obvious weaknesses in their target market. They may be in the same pond, but they are not the same fish.

In the case of those stumbling through the empty landscape of woo-woo, I am pointing to a way out. For those selling it, I am offering nothing short of ridicule, and the strict isolation that sociopathic behavior requires. 

Uncertainty: the key to dealing with death and non-existence

Last night I had another of my Holy shit! I'm going to die and not exist forever! moments. I wrote about these disturbing experiences six years ago in "Death and the primal fear of non-existence." 

I’ve come face to face with not-existing. It’s scary. Really scary. I’ve never experienced anything scarier. I can call it “fear,” but it’s more than that. Worse than that. Regular fear arises when something bad is happening or could happen.

But primal fear is looking into the maw of nothing happening to you, because there will be no you around for anything to happen to. Do you get the difference? I hope so. I don’t know if I can describe it any more clearly.

This experience has come to me about a dozen times. Mostly while I’m going to sleep. Occasionally in meditation. It isn’t something that I can bring about on my own. It isn’t a thought; it isn’t an emotion; it isn’t a perception. It’s as if a curtain covering non-existence opens for a moment, giving me a peek into a nothingness that is absolute.

Because I’m not there. I mean, I’m obviously there at the moment, looking into the depths of not-existing for eternity. Yet what I feel all the way down to the marrow of my being is what it means to live for a time and then to not live for all the rest of time.

This time it was a turtle's fault.

The 11 o'clock local news had a segment about a large sea turtle that washed ashore, looking decidedly dead. But it wasn't. If I recall correctly, a CT scan was used to look through the turtle's shell and figure out what was wrong with it.

Unbidden and uncontrollably, one of those Holy shit! realizations washed over me as the news team went on to another story.

I'm going to die eventually. Just like the turtle is. No more living. No more anything. This life is it. All there will ever be. No matter how much I love life, no matter how much I want to keep on living, death is going to throw me into non-existence. Forever. Me gone. All gone. For eternity.

Not exactly cheery bedtime thoughts. As I was brushing my teeth, the unfairness of it all seemed so obvious.

Here I am, alive. I'm a human being who can envision his own death. I enjoy life, but it's slipping away by the day, the hour, the minute, the second. I'm 63 fucking years old! My lifelong experiencing of one-thing-after-the-other is going to come to an abrupt halt with a final thing: the instant of my death. After that... nothing. Not even the awareness of nothing. 

After waking up this morning, I felt pretty much normal again. Aware of death, of course, yet immersed in the living of life. Thankfully. But the primal fear I'd experienced last night was still lingering closer to the surface of my consciousness than it usually is. 

Throughout the day I kept thinking...

About how religious people are able to easily envision an afterlife that isn't a viable post-death reassurance for me anymore. About how illogical my fear of non-existence is, since there's as little reason to worry about not existing as there is of falling into deep sleep: if I'm unconscious, there's no fear, no worry, no anything. 

It dawned on me that (1) not being afraid of dying because of a certainty about life after death has a lot in common with (2) being afraid of dying because of a certainty about non-existence after death. The commmonality is... certainty.

Of course, the odds are with (2), non-existence. Billions upon billions of humans have died with no sign of their continued existence. Evidence of life after death is extremely meager, almost, well, non-existent.

Still, anything is possible. Since no one knows what lies on the other side of death, there's room for uncertainty. (See my "Scientific quasi-remedies for a fear of death.")

Believers in life after death don't know that for sure. Believers in non-existence after death don't know that for sure. Nobody knows! Nobody. Not with certainty. And therein lies a viable way of dealing with death: acknowledge that it's an unknown, and focus on the known. Living, here and now.

This morning I was drawn to read a few chapters in Pema Chodron's "The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times." Often I'm turned off by Zen books that are overly Buddhist'y, edging into dogmatic religiosity. But I liked what Chodon said about The In-Between State.

It takes some training to equate complete letting-go with comfort. But in fact "nothing to hold on to" is the root of happiness. There's a sense of freedom when we accept that we're not in control. Pointing ourselves toward what we would most like to avoid makes our barriers and shields permeable.

This may lead to a don't-know-what-to-do kind of feeling, a sense of being caught in-between. On the one hand, we're completely fed up with seeking comfort from what we can eat, drink, smoke, or couple with. We're also fed up with beliefs, ideas, and "isms" of all kinds. But on the other hand we wish it were true that outer comfort could bring lasting happiness.

...When we find ourselves in a place of discomfort and fear, when we're in a dispute, when the doctor says we need tests to see what's wrong, we'll find that we want to blame, to take sides, to stand our ground. We feel we must have some resolution. We want to hold our familiar view.

...That's why we're encouraged to spend our whole lives training with uncertainty, ambiguity, insecurity. To stay in the middle prepares us to meet the unknown without fear; it prepares us to face both our life and our death.

...We gradually discover that we are big enough to hold something that is neither lie nor truth, neither pure nor impure, neither bad nor good. But first we have to appreciate the richness of the groundless state and hang in there.

...Resting here completely -- steadfastly experiencing the clarity of the present moment -- is called enlightenment.

How to move between horizontal and vertical time

Memories are strange. I've forgotten so much about the past, yet some memories have stuck with me in a surprising fashion.

Fairly early in my meditating years (I've meditated daily since 1970), I'd attend talks by Gordon Limbrick, a Canadian. He habitually offered three pieces of advice: "Keep your back straight; smile inwardly; visualize a trap door opening in the ceiling of your mind."

I liked all three tips back then. I still think of them now. With some variations.

Such as visualizing myself opening a trap door on the ground floor of my body also. This reflects my Tai Chi practice. Often our instructor says, "Draw up from above, sink down from below, feel the ground beneath your feet and breathe"." In Tai Chi you want to be rooted in both earth and sky.

Recently I came across a meditation practice in Lewis Richmond's Aging as a Spiritual Practice (I'm an expert!) that fit in nicely with my usual follow-the-breath approach. It focuses on the difference between horizontal and vertical time.

Here's how Richmond describes the two ways of experiencing time:

To age means to feel the passage of time. It is a little like driving down a long desert highway. Each day or month is a passing road sign. We remember where we were, imagine where we might be going, and have the distinct sense that the car keeps moving faster and faster. I call this kind of time "horizontal time."

Horizontal time begins in childhood -- or rather the childhood we remember -- and continues through adolescence, young adulthood, full maturity, and beyond. The story doesn't end today; it continues around the bend toward various imagined futures.

...There is another kind of time I call "vertical time," which means this present moment: this room, this book, this body, this breath. While horizontal time is largely mental, vertical time is more physical and is expressed in the body and breath.

Unlike horizontal time, vertical time has no before and after. It is always just here. It doesn't have room for memories or imagined futures. Memories and futures are like beads on a string; they roll into view one after another. Vertical time is more like the string itself.

As such, vertical time is much less religious than horizontal time.

Religions emphasize the past and future. The teachings of revelations, prophets, sages, gurus, and holy books point to back then. Promises of heaven, enlightenment, god-realization, and knowledge of ultimate reality point to sometime later.

Richmond is a Zen Buddhist priest, so his religiosity is minimal. Mostly in his book he focuses on how to live happily now, not being overly concerned with where we've come from or where we're going. 

A WildMind blog post has a nice summary of the vertical time meditation practice.

Here is a mindfulness practice from Lewis Richmond’s book, Aging as a Spiritual Practice:

Think of your life and its major events as a horizontal line. Your past stretches to the left of wherever you are on that line; your future stretches to the right. The events that stretch into the past are clear and unchangeable; the future is blurred: you don’t really know what events will eventually occupy that line or how long the line will eventually be. Think of this as horizontal time.

Now let’s move from horizontal time to vertical time. As you breathe in, imagine your breath moves up in a column from your cushion or chair. Breathing out, imagine the breath sinking down into the same place. “This vertical movement doesn’t go anywhere in space,” writes Richmond. “It doesn’t move from a certain past to an uncertain future. It just rests continually in the same spot.”

I've been doing this for a few days during my morning meditation. I like it. 

As mentioned above, I prefer to visualize my breath rising out of a trap door at the top of my head and soaring up into the sky, then sinking through a trap door at the bottom of my spine (or feet) and descending down into the earth.

Richmond also says:

In contrast to a vehicle on the highway of horizontal time, vertical time is like a house resting on a foundation. It is solid.

Even in vertical time, regret and worry do not disappear. But they are no longer the only possibilities. When we include vertical time -- the timeless conviction of the present moment -- we can find relief from the signposts on horizontal time's highway.

Notice too that vertical and horizontal are not separate. They meet in the center of the body. At every moment, we exist simultaneously in horizontal and vertical time.

Yes. But often I'm imbalanced. Horizontal time is too much with me. I'm only semi-present with whatever I'm doing and wherever I am. 

Today, while lifting weights at an exercise club, I noticed how becoming mindful of my breathing seemed to bring me into the here and now more powerfully than usual, probably because of the several meditation sessions where I associated my breath with vertical time.

In this four minute You Tube video (past the two minute mark), RIchmond talks about the column of breath and vertical time -- summarizing the meditation practice in his book.

  

God-man useless compared to Human-man

Came across this great comic in a Daily Kos post. Reminded me of some ridiculous "God is in control of everything" stuff a Christian was quoted as saying in my previous post.

If God-man is so powerful, why does Human-man fail to find him helping out?

Why a Christian woman denies global warming

My wife, Laurel, has been engaging in an exchange of emails with a Christian woman who used to do the same thing with Laurel's sister -- try to convince a religious skeptic that the Bible is God's inerrant truth.

Which, of course, is complete bullshit. 

As is this woman's response, after Laurel noted that viewers of Fox News are horribly misinformed about the reality of global warming. She replied:

It is because I am a Christian that I don't believe in global warming.  

My wife then emailed her:

I am curious why being a Christian causes you to reject that humans are causing global climate change. Doesn't God expect human kind to take care of the planet, and couldn't it be that we are being careless and greedy, and not tending nature as we should? 

Here's the Christian woman's fundamentalist, unscientific, irrational response. My often-caustic commentary is in red. 

I believe in the literal account in Genesis.

Poor you. I suspected that everything you wrote after this would be absurd. I was right. But at least you've given me the gift of making fun of Christian dogmatism. Thanks for that.

God created the heavens and the earth in six days and when He was done He said it was very good. He put everything into the earth that humans and animals would need to survive, including vegetation of all kinds. Because the earth was created at the sound of God's voice and according to His plan, He is in absolute control of His creation.

OK, let's assume you're right. Meister Eckhart, a medieval Christian mystic, said in one of his sermons, “Now I hear you ask, ‘How do I know that it is God’s will? My answer is that if it were not God’s will even for a moment, then it would not exist. Whatever is must be his will."

So if you believe that global warming is God's will, then efforts to combat global warming also are God's will. Likewise, women having abortions is God's will, as are attempts to curtail abortions. In other words, if whatever is happening is God's will, this simply tells us that God is nature, all of reality, a nice pantheistic view that doesn't require the existence of a personal God.

It takes my breath away when I consider the majesty and power of the Lord that is revealed in nature and all of its complexities, including climate and weather. Read the book of Job Chapters 38-41 and allow yourself to believe that God is real and that He has designed the earth with a purpose greater than ourselves.

No, I'm not going to allow myself to do that. Since God supposedly is in absolute control of everything, obviously God doesn't want me to believe in the Bible, or God would make me believe in this ridiculous pre-scientific book written by ignorant tribesmen.

The Lord sets the boundaries of the sea, (Job 38:8-11; Psalm 147:17; Haggai 2:17). He controls the rain and snow (Psalm 147:8 - He covers the heavens with clouds, provides rain for the earth, and makes the grass grow in the mountain pastures. Psalm 147:17-18 He hurls the hail like stones. Who can stand against his freezing cold?  Then at his command it all melts. He sends His winds and the ice thaws.  

Exactly what the Koran says. You and militant Muslims are on exactly the same wavelength.

God is in control of the earth yet he appointed man to take dominion over it.  He put Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to take care of it and be good stewards of the resources God gave them. God gave dominion over the earth to man. In contrast, the EPA is driven to control and restrict our use of God's resources.

I'm confused. Isn't the EPA run by men (and women)? Isn't the EPA administered by a president who was elected by the majority of American voters? If God gave dominion of the earth to man, and mankind has decided that global warming and other forms of environmental pollution are problems that need to be resolved, isn't this in line with God's plan? Where in the Bible does it say that "dominion" means trashing the planet?

Yes, he wants us to manage the earth's resources efficiently and does not want us to be greedy about it. Gen. 2: 15-16. We are ultimately accountable to God for our actions.  I don't need to be told that I must use an expensive and hazardous light bulb to help save the planet. Who is really benefiting and profiting from this new legislation? 

The light bulb manufacturers. They're in favor of moving away from inefficient and outmoded incandescent bulbs. You just said God is in control of everything. Doesn't "everything" include new energy efficiency standards? 

Genesis also makes it clear that it was breaking God's moral laws that brought a curse upon the earth.

The Old Testament also makes it clear that adulterers should be put to death. I take it you are in favor of this and all the other absurd crap in the Bible, since you take the Bible literally. Hope you're keeping your dangerous bull penned up securely. (See here.)

Environmentalists want us to believe that a curse is upon the earth because we are wasting and mis-using the earths resources. Before sin entered the world through Adam and Eve, their was no death or struggle for survival upon the earth. If death and struggle have always been a part of life on this planet then we would have absolutely no need to accept the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ on the cross as our substitute for our sin. 

Huh? Curses aren't part of the belief system of us secular environmentalists. If they were real, after writing posts on this here Church of the Churchless blog for almost eight years I'd be in bad shape given how often true believers curse me. And yes, death and struggle HAVE always been a part of lie on this planet. Just look at the evolutionary record that you don't believe in.

God judged the earth and destroyed His Creation in the days of Noah with the world-wide flood (Gen. 7-9) because the people on the earth were corrupt. They rejected His commandments and were lawless to the point that God regretted making man-kind. The only man on the earth who knew and feared God was Noah so he instructed him to build the ark and warned him that he was going to to destroy the earth with a flood. 

You must be freaking kidding me! I can't believe that any educated 21st century person still believes in Noah's Ark. I mean, I know people do, but to read an email from someone who actually accepts tribal superstitions is different from intellectually understanding how prevalent Christian dogmatism is. I hope you don't vote, but I'm afraid that you do. Scary.

Talk about an EPA cataclysmic nightmare! Every shred of vegetation, along with decaying bones and all carbon shelled land and marine animals were lost during the flood. How was the carbon dioxide going to be removed from the atmosphere now?  Where was the oxygen that was needed to sustain life on the planet? If it is only plant-life that sustains life on the earth and supplies humans with the oxygen we need to survive, then Noah and his family would have surely perished in the flood, but God revealed His Sovereignty once again by keeping them alive to repopulate the earth and take dominion over it again. Gen. 9: 1-3. It probably took a year for the waters to recede and for plant life to begin growing again. The Lord was in absolute control of this process from beginning to end.  Except for the grace of God, Noah and His family would be extinct. 

Except for the gullibility of both ancient and modern humans, fairy tales like those in the Bible wouldn't exist. Do you realize that every other religion also has its own stories of creation and destruction which contradict those in the Bible? Science is the only "story" worthy of being believed, because it is founded on facts and open to revisions when new understandings come along.

It is fascinating to realize that huge reservoirs of plants and vegetation and carbon shelled animals that once existed on the earth before the flood were buried in the earth and are now the basis for fossil fuel (coal, oil, gas, etc). These are God-given resources that were purposely put into the earth by God's design to use for man's sustenance and enjoyment.   

Along with wind power and solar power, I assume you agree, since everything on Earth is god-given, including the skeptical thoughts that are powering this post. Which include, "How did all these fossil fuels have time to be produced if the Earth was created only 10,000 years ago, as most literal believers in the Bible consider?" And, "If fossil fuels can be produced so quickly, why aren't we seeing fresh supplies of coal and oil being produced from recently buried vegetation?"

My hope is in Jesus Christ because someday God will destroy this earth and create a new heaven and a new earth. Rev. 21:1 I know with full confidence and absolute certainty that I belong to Him.

And my hope is that your eyes are opened to the reality of the cosmos. Many people believe in God without any evidence that God exists. I understand why you want to believe that you "belong to HIm." It's nice to have a good friend, even if imaginary. We all need someone to lean on, even if that entity doesn't exist outside of our own mind.

But even if you continue to believe in God, consider how absurd it is to divide reality into what you think should be, versus what actually is. 

You don't seem to deny that global warming is occurring. So notwithstanding your first statement that I shared in this post, your skepticism about global warming appears to be with what should be done about it, not with the fact of its existence.

This -- among many things -- confuses me about fundamentalist Christians. As noted previously, if God is in control of the world, then whatever is happening in the world is God's will. This includes efforts to protect the environment, as well as efforts to trash the environment.

Since both environmentalists and anti-environmentalists supposedly are doing God's will, since nothing happens without God commanding it, we're left with meaningless theology. Skeptics like me are part of God's plan, and religious believers like you are part of God's plan.

This all cancels out to become "Whatever is, is." We humans are still left with the same decisions, same choices, same moral dilemmas. That's why I prefer to leave God out of the equation.

"We each belong to the energy of the moment" -- Jack Haas

Jack Haas wrote one of my favorite books about the meaning of life, and the lack thereof: "The Way of Wonder." Like I said in a blog post stimulated by the book:

It's been a steady substitution. The less I've filled myself with organized religion, the more I've felt a ever-increasing sense of wonder.

I guess I needed to empty myself of theological beliefs, faith-based concepts, and imaginary anticipations of a promised divinity around the corner in order to become much more aware of the Wow! that is right here, right now.

Existence. Life. Consciousness. The amazing fact that we are, that the cosmos is.

After several years of reading and re-reading "The Way of Wonder," I belatedly noticed a mention in it about Haas' other books. Recently Amazon sent me his "In, and Of" -- an autobiographical book that reveals how Haas came to the conclusions about reality that he writes about in "The Way of Wonder."

He writes with a lot of power. Here's some passages from "In, and Of" that appealed to my sense of spiritual independence.

We were born to be naked, and dancing, and kissing each other. We were born to be changeless and changing, mortal and immortal, formed and yet free. We were born to be the stillness inside the fabulous change.

The self is a perpetual baptism, wherein one moves, and moves, and never stops moving; it is the relentless, uncatchable, spectacular, dynamic of the soul that demands to be free.

We each belong to the energy of the moment. In the wildness beyond anarchy, where the individual, rampant from the mean, will accept no compromise, no help, no advice, no method, no limit -- that is the point where the spirit breaks free of its mold, flies beyond itself, and dwells in the infinite expanse of the unimaginable, untethered new. To soar where no archetype can follow, that is to be new, and to be true.

Anyone who breaks free of the imposed structure, who lives life for life itself, with no worry or expectation of reward or praise, develops their own individual force, unknown to the greater part of mankind. We all have it, but most of us give it away to convention, or cowardice.

We were not born to follow others, to learn what they say we should learn, to go where others wander, nor to deny the smallest part of our own force for comfort or acceptance.

We are not alive to toil, to lie, to impress people, or to suffer. We are alive to be life -- to be the great mystery endlessly awakening to itself. We are all God becoming infinitely godlike. And each of us must live it alone. Alone.

God sits in a different seat in each person's auditorium. If we rely on anyone but ourselves, we are doomed; every time we deny the reality that we alone can come upon, we deny reality. And so it is the harsh but essential cosmic law that one who has no acceptance of their own vision... shall see nothing.

Ah, to be sure, before you can blend into the One, you must stand out conspicuously, as that precarious, uncamouflaged happening so visibly bent, blotched, or broken. For in order to be chosen, you must first become a choice.

And so, within the suffocating alienship of society, we must begin the long and forgotten route through strangeness towards home; we are our own gates, our own judges, our own redeemers, and redeemed.

Indeed each of us is alone to hack out our own cramped, ponderous tunnel, towards or away from God knows what, for no imaginable reason.

The way piles up in fragments behind us, and as endless walls ahead, while we flail and flail and perhaps find nothing but the hollow ring of movement through the moldless form of unknowable truth. So be it. The bearings may be on the outside, but the compass lies within.

A spiritual anarchy of biblical proportions is now thoroughly under way. Each person must sedulously mine their own dark, mysterious life.

...Oh, it is a wild and crazy untraveled road we're on. You find your way, you lose your way, you find another, and lose that one, and then another, and they keep coming and going and you keep stumbling along imagining you're going someplace, though the Self never goes anywhere, but only the form and identity find and lose themselves in the flux and flare of the ephemeral.

...Through all the reading I had done regarding the many differing philosophies, spiritual accomplishments, and unique realities other have experienced, all of which inspired me to tear down the walls confining me and pursue greater truths, in the end I was thrown back upon myself and had to abandon all I had learned and heard about from others.

I see now that this is an essential step -- to understand and accept that no matter what anyone else has experienced, or perceives as reality, that we are each born unto this earth to discover our own beliefs, our own truths, and to live out our own lives. And that these truths and realities may differ immensely from one person to another is a hard piece of news for the mind to accept, but I had to accept it in order to believe in my own vision. I had to become an individual.

To be an individual means to exist without pride nor shame, nor yardstick between yourself and all others, but instead to live out your own life, without a thought that it might be different, or wrong, or right, because that is who you are, and there is no option, decision, nor guise. In this way does a person arrive at eternity, having been born out from under the great sea of undifferentiated souls.

...I found that to be a part of the whole I had to also, paradoxically, be apart from the whole. For there is no symphony without separate instruments, no harmony without distinct notes, and no whole without separate parts. And this, my friend, is what is called... the way of sin.

To sin, to be single, to dare to believe in your own vision, and to give God the greatest gift imaginable -- something new, something unique, something called... you.

...To do this, not just outwardly, but at the absolute inner essence of all that you are, is to turn yourself upside-down, let your pockets empty themselves of all you have ever been or wanted to be, and then stand back up and walk on without a clue of who you are or where you're going. And that takes a type of courage which no one applauds, and no movie actor portrays, and no women sing songs of praise and worship about.

But it is the only type of courage which will invigorate and grow the mercurial aspect of the soul; it is the only type of courage which will serve the light-body within; it is the only type of courage which matters in the end when all human roads lead to dead ends. 

...And so our greatest service may be the act of spiritual violence, of disobedient novelty, which rends the fabric and sets us apart from the rest of humanity for a while, until the whole has shifted -- as it must -- and reassimilated our new reality into its necessarily new position. Thus we have helped evolve the universe. This is why the word 'eccentric' means: to come close to the center.

...I ask not that you sanction what I have said. I'm not asking you to agree. I'm not expecting you to understand. I have only my own life, and my own answers. A man must stand up for the vision inside of him, especially if he is the only one who has seen it.

What is real for me must be real for me alone, or what am I calling me? I have no reason, no need, no desire to embrace another person's reality, for mine is much more real for me than any other's ever could be.

The fact that no one else corroborates my reality guarantees that it is true. Each man, his own messiah.

Moral relativism linked with openness to experience

By and large, I'm a moral relativist. This fits with my irreligious inclinations. I don't believe in the Ten Commandments, or any set of moral codes that supposedly emanated from a divine, supernatural, or more-than-human source.

I think Sam Harris got it mostly right in his book, "The Moral Landscape." Even though I lean toward moral relativism, I agree with Harris that human flourishing is the standard by which moral decisions should be made. He writes:

Meaning, values, morality, and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures -- and, in our case, must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain. Rational, open-ended inquiry has always been the true source of insight into such processes. Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident.

(I've blogged about the book here and here.)

June being Gay/LGBT Pride Month, with celebrations going on around the world, an article I came across in Scientific American made me think about how much attitudes toward gays have changed over the past few decades.

I don't know anyone who is openly antagonistic toward lesbians, gays, bisexuals, or transgendered people. But almost all of my friends, family, and acquaintances are open-minded. Meaning, opposed to religious fundamentalism, receptive to facts, accepting of diversity.

According to the article, "Experimental Philosophy: Thoughts Become the New Lab Rats," seemingly intractable philosophical problems such as the nature of free will and of good and evil are being investigated through empirical data.

The author, Joshua Knobe, says: 

These “experimental philosophers” argue that inquiry into the most profound questions of philosophy can be informed by actual investigations into why people think and feel as they do. To make progress on these questions, they use all the methods of contemporary cognitive science. They conduct experiments, team up with psychologists and publish in journals that had previously been reserved primarily for scientists.

Knobe describes a study aimed at better understanding moral relativism. Fundamentalist religious believers hate the notion that morality is an "it depends" sort of thing.

For example, allowing gays to marry depends on whether this contributes to human flourishing, not on what some holy book or holy person says. Likewise, allowing gays to adopt children depends on whether this contributes to human flourishing, not on prejudices, biases, or unfactual opinions.

In the study, Knobe says researchers gave participants a story about people who hold opposite views on a moral question. They then were asked whether one person had to be wrong (the antirelativist answer) or whether there might be no single correct position (the relativist answer).

The most interesting part of the study was this: the researchers also gave each participant a measure of the personality trait "openness to experience." Here's what they found.

The results showed a significant correlation: the higher a participant was in openness to experience, the more likely that participant was to endorse the relativist answer. These studies suggest a hypothesis about the roots of relativism. Perhaps the pull people sometimes feel toward moral relativism is related to a kind of openness.

When confronted with other perspectives and other possible ways of life, they feel drawn to relativism to the extent that they open themselves up to these other possibilities and enter into them imaginatively... people feel drawn to relativism to the extent that they can open themselves to other possible perspectives.

Of course, this doesn't mean that everything is relative. Scientific facts aren't relative.

I have no problem rejecting someone's perspective that God created the world ten thousand years ago, or that human-caused global warming isn't happening. Still, people who reject demonstrable facts about reality aren't bad or evil; they're just wrong. 

However, when it comes to morality, ethics, lifestyles, and the like, often facts either are lacking, or the issue isn't amenable to a fact-based analysis. I have no idea how someone could decide whether wearing blue jeans or black jeans is good or bad. This is simply a personal preference.

Homosexuality would be a relativistic moral question for me even if being gay was a choice. But almost certainly, it isn't.

Like Lady Gaga sings, "I was born this way." Though I'm a man who is sexually attracted to women, I can easily imagine myself being attracted to other men. (After all, I'm married to someone who feels that way, and I know my wife very well.)

I can also easily imagine myself being opposed to moral relativism, partly because I had some leanings in that direction during my true-believing days. But I was never deeply judgmental toward people with differing moral views. I've been a vegetarian for over forty years; I don't believe in killing animals for food; however, I'm fine with meat-eating, having done that myself until I was twenty.

Openness. Embrace it. Along with a fact-based form of moral relativism. If something contributes to human flourishing, its good. If it doesn't, its bad. 

Are humans capable of fully comprehending the cosmos?

It's a marvelous quest, our oh-so-human desire to fully understand the mysteries of the cosmos. Dogs don't do this. Chimpanzees don't do this. Dolphins don't do this. (So far as we know.)

Science and religion are alike in this regard: each seeks knowledge, as much as possible.

Scientists aspire to the discovery of a Theory of Everything which encompasses the core laws of nature. Prophets, mystics, gurus, yogis, and other spiritual seekers hope to know the "mind of God," perhaps even becoming it via enlightenment.

Yet there's an egotistical, anthropomorphic, humancentric undercurrent to these attempts to reveal ultimate reality.

We Homo sapiens aren't content with knowing what clearly can be known: the nature of every day existence. We aren't happy with stopping at the boundaries of what can be observed, experimented on, calculated, modeled, analyzed into patterns of causes and effects.

No, by and large members of our species believe that humans can know everything. (Admittedly scientists are less grandiose in this regard than religious believers; still, they're the ones who coined the term "Theory of Everything.")

Given our place in the universe, this seems almost laughable.

Here we are, creatures with a recently-evolved consciousness capable of knowing a lot of stuff, yet a species confined to one planet circling one of hundreds of billions of stars in one of hundreds of billions of galaxies. 

And we think we can know it all? Or, know all about the All? Come on... let's get real.

That's what MIT psychologist Steven Pinker does in his book, "How the Mind Works." My wife has been listening to an audio version of the book. Yesterday she played me a concluding section where Pinker talks about religion and humankind's ability to fathom the ultimate mysteries of the cosmos.

I was particularly interested in what Pinker had to say, since in a previous blog post I'd questioned whether we have an ability to know ultimate reality -- which to me entails coming to grips with the essence of existence.

There is nothing more mind-blowing than to ponder the astonishing mystery of "is." Personally, I suspect that the fascination we humans have with the philosophical, religious, and mystical questions surrounding why existence exists is a byproduct of our all-too-human cognitive abilities and brain processes.

A more advanced alien intelligence might look upon the question of "Why is there something rather than nothing?" with a resounding Huh? This is a meaningless question. The answer is obvious. Which, however, we wouldn't be able to understand. 

l can't remember the details of what Pinker said on this subject, but it was close enough to what I wrote above for me to stop the audiobook and proudly tell my wife, "Steven Pinker and I think alike!" 

Pinker said that evolutionary processes have caused humans to adapt to the conditions here on Earth. For example, our brains are good at discerning cause and effect relationships. "Joe got bit by a snake with diamond markings; he died soon after; I should avoid snakes that look like that."

Also, we have evolved the ability to fathom to a considerable extent the minds of other people. "Jane is frowning; she's angry at me and holding a large stick; turning my back on her right now wouldn't be a good idea."

Put our capacity to comprehend cause and effect relationships together with what is called our theory of mind ability, and you've got a pretty good start on explaining the foundation of religiosity. We're naturally driven to come up with explanations for why this or that happened, and we're naturally driven to attribute mental states akin to our own to other entities (both animate and inanimate).

If these and many other cognitive abilities weren't adaptive, we Homo sapiens wouldn't have evolved to have them as part of the human brain's repertoire. However, Pinker points out there's no reason to think that we possess a capability to know everything about the cosmos. 

A vastly superior intelligence might very well look upon our religious, mystical, and philosophical musings about the nature of God, existence, creation, and such in much the same way as adults view a toddler's babbling. 

Cute. But way out of touch with reality. 

I think that one of our biggest problems is that we don't know what we aren't capable of knowing. After all, how could we? If we knew what we can't know, we'd be halfway to knowing it, since we could take steps to remedy the limitations in our knowledge-gaining capacity.

I'm mildly (maybe majorly) obsessed with grokking the mystery of existence. One of my favorite activities, and I don't even have to be stoned to do this, is pondering why or how anything is. You know, the famous question Why is there something rather than nothing?

I have a marvelous weightless, floating, dizzy, vertigo-inducing feeling when I brush up against the limits of my brain's capacity to comprehend an existence that seemingly has always existed, a seeming effect without any cause, a cosmos containing consciousness seemingly without any mind behind it.

This feeling isn't unique to me.

I suspect what I feel is close to the mind-blowing sensation countless religious seekers, mystic practitioners, and cosmically-minded philosophers have experienced when they pondered similar ultimate questions.

I used to have a strong desire to penetrate the mystery of existence, to know what lies beyond the outer limits of usual human knowing. Such is the dream of youth and middle age: to be a know-it-all. With additional aging, and perhaps a little wisdom, I've come to look upon things differently.

There's a limit to what I, or anyone, can know. We are human beings having a human experience. Yes, we can imagine that we are divine beings temporarily bound by a physical body, capable of understanding ultimate mysteries through a supernatural enlightenment experience.

Well, maybe. But extremely doubtful.

I used to believe that. Now I'm reluctant to devote much of my remaining life to quixotic pursuits -- such as seeking to know what almost certainly can't be known, or to experience what almost certainly can't be experienced.

It's more important for me to become pretty good at dancing West Coast Swing before I die, than to comprehend the meaning of existence. (My bet: there's isn't one.) 

My Amazon review of "The Mystery Experience"

Killing two birds with one stone (or rather, slicing two pieces of tofu with one knife, since I'm an animal-loving vegetarian), I'm going to talk about my overall impression of Tim Freke's The Mystery Experience in the form of an Amazon reader review.

I read a lot more Amazon reviews than I write. This will help make up for that imbalance. Usually I'm only drawn to submit a review on books that I liked a lot. Such is true with The Mystery Experience, which I've blogged about before here, here, here, and here.

But "liking" isn't the same as "agreeing with." I like to be challenged, to be drawn into a deeper examination of how I look upon life, to be encouraged to reconsider assumptions which may or may not be valid. 

Freke's book did all that. However, I can't agree with him about the mystery of existence. Here's why:

---------------------

I bought "The Mystery of Existence" because, like TIm Freke, I have a longstanding love affair with an unfathomable, exotic, alluring, mysterious mistress: existence. Not the existence of this or that, particular things, but existence pure and simple. Is'ness. The raw fact that any "this or that" exists.

For about the first hundred pages of Freke's book, I felt like he and I were on almost exactly the same mystery-loving wavelength. "Yes!" I kept saying to myself, as I read passages like this:

"The mystery of life is so enormous it takes my breath away and leaves me speechless. It's not some riddle I will one day unravel, but real magic to be marvelled at. It's not a darkness my intellect can illuminate, but a dazzling radiance so splendid that my most brilliant ideas seem dull.

I may go about my daily life as if I know what's going on, but the truth is I really don't know what life is. Nobody does."

Absolutely. Again, what we're talking about here isn't the particulars of life, such as how the brain and body are fashioned, or how evolution has brought about us humans.

Rather, Freke is pointing to the unarguable fact that nobody knows why existence exists -- or even if "why?" makes any sense when the question pertains not to the existence of some particular thing, but to the famous query "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

There is nothing more mind-blowing than to ponder the astonishing mystery of "is." Personally, I suspect that the fascination we humans have with the philosophical, religious, and mystical questions surrounding why existence exists is a byproduct of our all-too-human cognitive abilities and brain processes.

A more advanced alien intelligence might look upon the question of "Why is there something rather than nothing?" with a resounding Huh? This is a meaningless question. The answer is obvious. Which, however, we wouldn't be able to understand. 

As shown by the quote above, at first Freke seems to agree that because nobody can know anything about the basic "is" of existence (in part, or in full, because any answer presumes a pre-existing "is," such as God), everything within existence, including life, is fully submerged in the all-pervading atmosphere of mystery.

Freke correctly says that we need to have our stories, but these don't penetrate the mystery. There are religious stories, scientific stories, philosophical stories, poetic stories. Each of us picks and chooses from these stories, elaborating and adding upon them in our own ways. Then we over-confidently say, "This is what life is all about."

Given how Freke started off his book, I figured that he would maintain a core position: the mystery of life and existence can be subjectively intuited by us humans, but never really known, understood, penetrated, or grasped. After all, Freke said: "I may go about my daily life as if I know what's going on, but the truth is I really don't know what life is. Nobody does."

Well, this isn't the stance in the latter part of the book. Nor in the Mystery Experience retreats that Freke puts on and talks about frequently, sometimes in a rather annoyingly infomercial sort of fashion. 

Because we're told that actually Tim Freke DOES know what life is all about. 

"As a person I am a form in the flow of time. But the deep self is outside of time. It is timeless being... I think most of us have this sense that our deep self is the same now as when we were much younger. I know I do... What I am is timeless awareness witnessing TIm's journey through time.

When I live lucidly I see that I am both mortal and immortal. The person I appear to be in time had a beginning and will come to an end. But the deep self isn't in time, just like a dreamer isn't in a dream. 

As a person, I'm a body that is born to die. But the deep self can't die because it was never born. My essential being is immortal, because being by it's very nature must always be." 

Freke believes that God, or timeless awareness, becomes conscious of itself through the consciousness of beings in time, like us humans. A Koranic hadith has Allah speaking somewhat similarly: "I am a hidden treasure who wanted to be known." This notion also is akin to HIndu teachings of atman and brahman, soul and God, part and whole.

To which I say, fine. But it was disappointing to find such a large dose of mystery-dissolving spiritual dogmatism in the last two-thirds or so of the book. Mystery takes a back seat to various exercises taught at Freke's workshops where people are shown how to get in touch with their "deep self." Finally, he says:

Our pilgrimage has led us to deep love, which is the sacred ground towards which we have been heading all along. When we're conscious of ourselves as an individual expression of the primal oneness, it's an experience of all-encompassing love, This is the heart of the mystery experience.

I can't agree. The heart of the mystery experience is to experience the mystery of life/existence (they're linked, because only conscious living beings can be aware of cosmic mystery). In his workshops, and in his book, Freke claims to know what this mystery consists of. Spoiler alert! He writes:

"My deep love affair is with God as the ground of being and Goddess as the appearances of being. The natural world is an objective expression of the unconscious oneness from which we have arisen. It is the unconscious foundation from which conscious bodies have evolved. When I see the numinous in nature, I see the mystery in the manifest."

OK. That's Freke's story. And it's an appealing story. I can understand why other people would resonate with it. To some extent, I do myself.

I just wish that Freke had stuck with his initial "nobody knows" theme, and emphasized that how he looks upon the mystery of life and existence is his personal way of relating to unfathomable mystery. Religions attract converts by claiming they -- and only they -- understand the ultimate nature of the cosmos. But no religion has any demonstrable evidence to back up its claim. 

And given the seeming impossibility of anyone knowing how, why, or what existence is all about, no sage, prophet, guru, or other person ever could penetrate the mystery. Freke can't either, notwithstanding the author's claim to be able to lead people to a "spiritual awakening."

All that said, and I've said a lot in this review, I still liked "The Mystery Experience" a lot, and can recommend it to lovers of existential mystery. Just be aware that the mystery will remain shrouded in darkness after you finish the book, even though Freke claims to have illuminated it.

Spiritual perfection is an illusion. Simply be human.

A few posts ago, in "Allow cosmic mystery to live, not killing it with religion," I talked about what I didn't like about Tim Freke's book, The Mystery Experience.

Now I want to share some passages that made me think right on when I read them. Yes, I had a few quibbles with what Freke said, but in general I agreed wholeheartedly with him.

After embracing forms of spirituality that emphasized detaching from the world to reach a state of transcendent perfected enlightenment, Freke has seen the light. Not a heavenly radiance, but the illumination that comes from embracing what really is, rather than what is imagined to be.

Here's some quotes from his "A Lover of Life" chapter that I read this morning:

Enlightenment is often understood as an egoless state in which we're fully self-realized and permanently awake. We're free from the cycle of rebirth, so we don't have to reincarnate into this troublesome human existence. 

Most people I meet don't really think they could ever achieve such an elevated state, but they often believe that some great master somewhere has made it to the winning post. 

I no longer see the spiritual journey in this way. I don't aspire to arrive at some ultimate state. The idea of eradicating the ego seems misguided and holds no attraction. My experience of awakening makes me want to fully engage with the human adventure, not escape it. ...I don't aspire to be an enlightened master, rather I aspire to be a humble 'lover of life.'

...I want to suggest that the purpose of the spiritual journey is not to arrive anywhere, but rather to engage with the adventure of life in a new way, so that the evolutionary process unfolds powerfully within us.

...Many people think that the journey of awakening is ultimately about achieving some sort of spiritual perfection. But I want to suggest that to be human is necessarily to be imperfect. We all have our flaws and foibles... even the best of us. Everyone who can walk, sometimes stumbles. The greatest musicians can hit bum notes.

...It's embracing the glorious imperfection of personal existence. It is creatively engaging with the ambiguity of being human.

To aspire to become a lover of life is to aspire to become wise by accepting we'll sometimes be foolish. It's recognizing that we'll always make mistakes because of our lack of consciousness. This is the process of evolution. If we didn't err, we'd never learn. And if we didn't learn we'd never grow.

Indeed, it seems to me, if we're not continually making mistakes we're getting too comfortable and should be taking more risks.

To become a lover of life we must be willing to be a foolish lover... a lost lover... a vulnerable lover... a lonely lover... a broken lover... a frightened lover... a flawed lover... a wounded lover... an inconstant lover.

We must be willing to love being human, with all that this entails. 

"A foolish lover." Made me think about some of my own writings about the joy of foolishness:
I'm an ignorant fool (happily)
God calls me a fool. I agree.
Taoism -- a philosophy for fools

Untrue intuitions lead people to not believe in science

Religious people often claim that believing in God is a difficult path to follow, since it goes against the ways of the world.

Actually, understanding the truth about materiality is a lot tougher than embracing spiritual falsities. If you doubt this, check out an interesting New Yorker article by Jonah Lehrer, "Why We Don't Believe in Science."

The main conclusion I drew from the piece is this: if our intuitions about how the physical world works often are so wrong, why should we believe that our intuitions about God, heaven, soul, spirit, and other aspects of a supposed spiritual world are correct?

Some excerpts:

Last week, Gallup announced the results of their latest survey on Americans and evolution. The numbers were a stark blow to high-school science teachers everywhere: forty-six per cent of adults said they believed that “God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years.” Only fifteen per cent agreed with the statement that humans had evolved without the guidance of a divine power.

...Such poll data raises questions: Why are some scientific ideas hard to believe in? What makes the human mind so resistant to certain kinds of facts, even when these facts are buttressed by vast amounts of evidence?

A new study in Cognition, led by Andrew Shtulman at Occidental College, helps explain the stubbornness of our ignorance. As Shtulman notes, people are not blank slates, eager to assimilate the latest experiments into their world view.

Rather, we come equipped with all sorts of naïve intuitions about the world, many of which are untrue. For instance, people naturally believe that heat is a kind of substance, and that the sun revolves around the earth. And then there’s the irony of evolution: our views about our own development don’t seem to be evolving.

This means that science education is not simply a matter of learning new theories. Rather, it also requires that students unlearn their instincts, shedding false beliefs the way a snake sheds its old skin.

...It would be so much more convenient if the laws of physics lined up with our naïve beliefs—or if evolution was wrong and living things didn’t evolve through random mutation. But reality is not a mirror; science is full of awkward facts. And this is why believing in the right version of things takes work.

Of course, that extra mental labor isn’t always pleasant. (There’s a reason they call it “cognitive dissonance.”) It took a few hundred years for the Copernican revolution to go mainstream. At the present rate, the Darwinian revolution, at least in America, will take just as long.

Guru Gurinder Singh Dhillon's teachings: a logical look

Here's a blunt, honest, and amusing reaction to some questions and answers of an Indian guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, who is considered to be "God in human form" by devotees. 

The author is well-known, Anonymous. (Isn't me, I can assure you.)

Gurinder Singh Dhillon heads up Radha Soami Satsang Beas, or RSSB, which is termed Really Stupid Shitty Bullshit in this PDF document:
Download Gurinder Singh Dhillon questions 

The questions and answers apparently are authentic, having been circulated among RSSB members. The caustic commentary on the Q and A is one person's logical reaction to some religious illogic.

First sermon from the Church of What the Fuck

I'm glad I named this blog Church of the Churchless when I started it up back in 2004. But since I no longer adhere to any religious dogma, I'm free to experiment with my churchlessness.

So here's a mini-sermon from the Church of What the Fuck. The name came to me yesterday as I was thinking some more about why I started to disagree with what Tim Freke was saying in his book, "The Mystery Experience." 

(Reasons described in my previous blog post, "Allow cosmic mystery to live, not killing it with religion.")

As I read deeper into Freke's book this morning, I learned that he's big into God is Love. Well, I've got no problem with love. In fact, I love love. But I'm not attracted to the sort of lovey-dovey spiritual God is Love stuff that clearly turns Freke on.

Especially when the source of that love, the ground of that love, is believed to be cosmic being -- which Freke considers to be unconscious of itself until conscious creatures like us humans come along and start loving, along with all the other stuff we experience.

This is conjecture.

Yes, love is real. It's part of what we Homo sapiens do.

However, there's no good reason (nor any good intuition) to support a belief that what lies in the realm of Mystery beyond all human knowing is love. While I'm not out to be a love killjoy, it irks me when people claim that love is the wellspring of existence.

Here's what we know about the wellspring of existence: nothing.

Nobody has any idea why there is something rather than nothing, or even if that question makes any sense. So nothing is known about existence pure and simple, which some prefer to call being.

I love to ponder the mystery of existence. That's why I bought Freke's book, "The Mystery of Existence." I loved the title. But I can't accept God is love as the essence of that mystery. I much prefer three other words.

What the fuck? or What the fuck! 

(It'd take a whole other sermon to discuss what a difference the ? and ! make to these three holy words; brief answer is that they differ somewhat as to how fuck is used as an intensive; aspiring theologians in the Church of What the Fuck may wish to study here and here.)

What the fuck is my preferred way of relating to cosmic mystery. It's a terrific phrase, pregnant with meaning, as befits its sexual overtones. Here's the Wiktionary definition:

what the fuck!

1.  
   1. (vulgar) Used to express astonishment, shock, incredulity, or disbelief (as a shortened form of expressions such as "What the fuck is going on?", "...are you doing?", or "...is that?").
   2. (vulgar) Used to express nonchalance or the dismissal of any consequences of something one is about to do. I finally said “eh, what the fuck” and quit my job.

Beautiful.

What the fuck? exactly expresses, both emotionally and cognitively, how I feel when I envision the mystery of existence -- how it is that here I am, doing what I'm doing on planet Earth, which is circling one of hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe, which came into existence some fourteen billion years ago, yet existence itself has existed for... What the fuck?... nobody knows... probably eternally.

So since nobody has any idea about what existence/being is all about; since nothing is the only honest answer to what is known about the mystery of existence -- I choose to proclaim a truthful What the fuck? before the majesty of our not-knowing, rather than the much less defensible God is love.

Leave mystery mysterious. Don't contaminate cosmic mystery with human conjecture. Honor honest not-knowing. These are the main points of my first Church of What the Fuck sermon.

I'll end with a preview of a follow-up sermon, where I'll discuss the sacred differences between What the fuck! and What the fuck? As noted in the Wiktionary definition above, What the fuck! expresses nonchalance and lack of regard for consequences.

I'm not suggesting this as a wise course of action in many circumstances, such as smoke coming out of an electrical outlet in your home, or a hacking cough that won't go away. No, I'm talking about a sense of cosmic nonchalance.

What the fuck! is a highly recommended attitude for those in recovery from religious dogmatism, rigid commandments, fear of falling into the Devil's hands, and other fundamentalist bullshit. If you feel like doing something, and can't think of any reason not to other than your religious conditioning, embrace...

What the fuck! Just do it.

Allow cosmic mystery to live, not killing it with religion

"Uh-oh." This is a common feeling for me these churchless days, as I'm reading along in a book that's been enjoyably non-religious, yet suddenly manifests a scent of unjustified dogmatism.

An "uh-oh" followed by a string of highlighted question marks in the margins... this is a sign that even stronger Religiosity alert! Religiosity alert! warning bells are going off in my brain.

Such happened today, when I got to the "Where is Awareness?" chapter in Tim Freke's The Mystery Experience (blogged about previously here and here). I was flowing along just fine with Freke's seemingly unarguable assertion that everything arises in awareness -- including the experience of "external" objective reality.

But this...???

As a person I am a form in the flow of time. But the deep self is outside of time. It is timeless being... I think most of us have this sense that our deep self is the same now as when we were much younger. I know I do... What I am is timeless awareness witnessing TIm's journey through time.

When I live lucidly I see that I am both mortal and immortal. The person I appear to be in time had a beginning and will come to an end. But the deep self isn't in time, just like a dreamer isn't in a dream. 

As a person, I'm a body that is born to die. But the deep self can't die because it was never born. My essential being is immortal, because being by it's very nature must always be. 

...This intuition of immortality raises many profound philosophical questions, which I'm not going to address here. I certainly don't believe that becoming conscious of the timeless presence of being proves that we survive death as a conscious individual. However, understanding that essentially we don't exist in time makes this possibility credible.

...I suggest you become conscious of the deep self and examine your own intuitions.

Well, TIm, I'd say "that's the problem: people believing in their own intutitions when it comes to mysteries that aren't intuitable, nor thinkable, nor researchable, nor seemingly solvable in any way."

As I blogged about a few months ago, it is impossible for us to envision our own existence, because we've always been alive. This is why religions have such a ready audience for their claims of an afterlife.

It just feels right to people, since they have no experience of ever not existing, or of ever not being aware, except during deep sleep and other periods of unconsciousness. And that's a big except, as Stephen Cave says in his book "Immortality." 

There is one big problem with the idea that your consciousness or "awareness" can in some form survive the death of your body. It is something with which we are all in fact very familiar, not least from countless Hollywood films: simply that if you get hit on the head with sufficient force, you will be knocked unconscious. Your awareness of the world ceases; your lights go out.

...Similarly, if you are injected with general anesthetic -- a syringe full of chemicals -- your awareness will be extinguished. For anyone who thinks consciousness can survive bodily death, this is an embarassment. 

l really like the idea of me being an integral aspect of, well, being.

Timeless being. Eternal being. Universally conscious being. I understand why TIm Freke also is attracted to this possibility, as are, I assume most of the people who attend his WOW workshops about embracing the mystery of life.

I just find Freke's intuitions about how his deep self could be an aspect of timeless being to be at odds with a central premise of his book. Namely, that nobody knows what the mystery of life consists of, or how it could be solved. Freke writes:

When I become embroiled with my story I find myself living in a kind of trance. I'm certain I know what's going on, even though I really don't. I exist in a state of numbness that I call 'normality' and I feel only half alive.

But when I wake up I can see that my story is just a story. If I look deeper I discover that hidden behind my story is the pristine, virgin, untouchable mystery. And that's when the mystery experience spontaneously arises.

So even though I look forward to reading the rest of Freke's book, at the moment (154 pages in) I have an impression that Freke doesn't really embrace the pristine, virgin, untouchable mystery that he says he does.

What's up with all of these "intuitions" about the nature of cosmic mystery? What's wrong with simply leaving mystery mysterious? 

Like Freke, I also feel a deep sense of awe at the stark fact of existence. Yes, WOW! (his favorite word) There's at least a hundred billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, which is one of at least a hundred billion galaxies in the universe, which increasingly is being viewed as one of a potentially infinite number of universes in the multiverse.

And here I am, standing at our kitchen counter, typing away on my MacBook in south Salem, Oregon, a 63 year old man trying to grasp my place in a 14 billion year old universe whose mysteries are boundless in every direction of time and space.

I don't know where everything came from or where it is going. Likewise, I don't know where I came from or where I am going.

For many years I wasn't OK with that. I wanted to know! Damn it, I had a right to know! And I believed that someone, in my case a guru, had the key to this cosmic knowledge. Billions of other humans believe that a holy book, a holy practice, or some other holy person is privy to this knowledge.

Now, I'm fine with mystery.

In fact, I love mystery. I'd much rather leave mystery mysterious, then dress it up in some sort of imaginary costume of my own making. That seems disrespectful to mystery.

Some things can be known, if not by us modern humans, than by someone, somewhere, sometime in the cosmos. But it seems to me that some things can't. Like, existence. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd rather leave existence, life, and The Meaning, Or Lack Thereof, Of It All as a mystery.

TIm Freke feels this way also. We just seem to disagree on how much mystery we're willing to leave mysterious. 

Truly "living in the moment" would be horrible

Live in the moment. Oft-heard advice. Seems to make sense. Why worry about the past or obsess about the future? Be here now. Anyway, what choice do we have? Isn't everything happening to us now?

Yes, that's pretty much what neuroscientist Sam Harris says in an interesting You Tube'd talk, "Death and the Present Moment." (Watch from the 20 minute mark to the 30-35 minute mark, if you don't have time to see it all.)

 

But no normal person truly lives in the present moment. Meaning, our experience of the present is conditioned by experiences of the past. Memories, both conscious and unconscious, have a large influence on how the present appears to us.

This is as it should be. In his book, "The Self Illusion," psychologist Bruce Hood describes the condition of a man, Clive, who got herpes simplex encephalitis, which caused damage to his brain and left him with severe amnesia.

In her 2005 memoir, Forever Today, Deborah Wearing describes her husband Clive's tormented existence:

It was as if every waking moment was the first waking moment. Clive was under the constant impression that he had just emerged from unconsciousness because he had no evidence in his own mind of ever being awake before... "I haven't heard anything, seen anything, touched anything, smelled anything," he would say. "It's like being dead."

Perhaps the most harrowing aspect of Clive's condition is that he still remembers fragments of his previous life and knows exactly who Deborah is -- each time he sees her, he runs tearfully into her arms as if it is the reunion of longlost lovers when in reality she may have only left the room minutes earlier.

Without the ability to store new memories, Clive is permanently trapped in the here and now... WIthout the ability to form new memories, everything that is out of sight is out of mind for Clive Wearing.

Sounds horrible. So when we advise ourselves to live in the present moment, we're fortunate that this is impossible for anyone with a normal brain. Hood writes:

One of the greatest discoveries in psychology is that human memories are reconstructed and malleable. We do not have a recording of our own personal experiences in our head like some video archive. There are no microfilms in our memory banks.

Memories are constantly active -- like a story being retold over and over again. Moreover, when we encounter related new experiences, we interpret them in terms of our existing memories, which in turn are transformed by the new experiences. We are constantly integrating the here and now into our past.

This neuroscientific truth is what led me to grab my highlighter and pen a big "?" in the margin next to this sentence in another book that I'm reading (and liking): Tim Freke's "The Mystery Experience."

In the state of beginner's mind I see what-is with fresh eyes, uncontaminated by my previous experience.

No, Tim, you can't.

You may believe that in this present moment you are experiencing it as if for the first time. But unless you have a damaged brain like Clive Wearing's, unconscious processes in your brain are constantly viewing the present in light of your past.

In his book, Bruce Hood includes a quotation by Elizabeth Loftus, "the world's greatest authority on false memories." What she says applies to many areas of life, not just memories.

The most horrifying idea is that what we believe with all our hearts is not necessarily the truth.

Now, to be fair to Freke, he isn't advocating living entirely in the moment (even though he seems to feel that this is possible, episodically). So in this regard he's on the same wavelength as Bruce Hood. Freke says:

There is a current fad in spirituality for "being in the now" instead of thinking about time. I meet a lot of people whose mantra has become 'just be in the present moment.' But we can't just be in the present moment. 

If we actually stopped thinking about time we wouldn't know who we are and what happened yesterday. We'd become amnesiac. And that's not a sign of spiritual awakening. It's a challenging medical condition we'd all like to avoid.

For sure. Just ask Clive Wearing and his wife.

Life is a mystery... and the stories we tell about it

I'm glad that I ignored my qualms about buying TIm Freke's "The Mystery Experience." Ninety pages in, I'm liking the book a lot. 

Not surprising. What's not to like about mystery? And Freke has a pleasing way of talking about what we don't know about life, existence, the cosmos, and other Big Questions.

The mystery of life is so enormous it takes my breath away and leaves me speechless. It's not some riddle I will one day unravel, but real magic to be marvelled at. It's not a darkness my intellect can illuminate, but a dazzling radiance so splendid that my most brilliant ideas seem dull.

I may go about my daily life as if I know what's going on, but the truth is I really don't know what life is. Nobody does.

What? Nobody?

Nobody knows.

Not even the guys in white coats?

Nope.

What about the pope?

Are you kidding?

Or my enlightened guru?

You obviously haven't spent enough time with him.

Or some really smart philosopher like Socrates?

He was famous precisely for knowing he didn't know!

Well Jesus then?

He didn't really exist... haven't you read my bestseller about Christianity?

There's got to be some special person somewhere who's got the whole thing sorted out?

Look. I'm not saying nobody knows just because I don't know and I can't imagine anyone smarter than TIm. I'm saying it because I've come to realize that it's impossible to know what life is.

What do you mean?

Could we ever really explain the mystery of life with words? Would it take a sentence? Or a paragraph? Or a book? Or a whole library of books? Could any amount of words explain away the mystery?

I guess not.

Human beings have created a mountain of words to explain the nature of reality, but under all the words the mystery of life remains as magnificent as ever.

So we can never say what life is with words.

Exactly. And that's why, as the great mythologist Joseph Campbell once said, "The person who thinks he has found the ultimate truth is wrong."

So it isn't just me. Nobody knows what's really going on.

In the ancient Hindu Rig Veda it says 'Who knows the truth? Only the God who sees in the highest heaven. He only knows. Or perhaps not even he knows?'

Now, the main question mark I'm encountering so far with Freke's approach to mystery is this:

I heartily agree that life (even more, existence) is a mystery, and I also agree that nobody knows how to solve the mystery -- or even how to approach it. Yet Freke has written 332 pages about the mystery that nobody knows anything about, and has a thriving seminar/book business based on his approach to not-knowing what can't be known.

This was my original qualm, which arose after I took a look at Freke's web site. It seemed too slick and commercial for my tastes, with all the talk about "a revolutionary approach to awakening." 

How the heck does someone awake to a mystery?

Usually we think of a mystery as something we awake from, in the sense of suddenly saying "Ah, now I see what's going on." But Freke says, "I started my spiritual journey because life was a mystery that I wanted to solve. But I've discovered that the question is the answer. Life is a mystery. That's what life is."

I used Amazon's Look Inside the Book feature to do just that. Then I bought "The Mystery Experience," having been reassured that Freke wasn't another New Agey nondual wordsmith who proffered smooth sounding platitudes with no substance.

Also, I realized that if I was attracted to the book, what difference did it make if Freke had a slick website and a thriving seminar business? Good for him. He wasn't putting himself forth as a guru who knew the truth about ultimate reality; he was trying to get people to understand that nobody knows what life and existence are all about.

However, we do need our stories. 

Stories come in words. Words, as Freke said above, can't explain away the mystery of life. My feeling is, nothing can. Including mystical intuitive aha! wordlessness -- a position that Freke seems to hold also.

So, are stories about the mystery of life useless? Not at all. We just need to understand that they are our stories, subjective, personal, idiosyncratic. They don't explain what life is all about. They aren't guides to an objective reality beyond everyday human experience, as religions would have us believe.

Here's how Freke talks about the mystery and the story.

Life is a mystery about which we tell stories. We all have a personal story about what life is, which we use to help us navigate our lives. A story that helps us understand what's going on... that gives us a sense of who we are... that gives life meaning. Our stories are wonderful. I love listening to people's stories. I'd love to hear your story.

We need a story to help us understand life, because if we didn't have a life-narrative we'd be lost. The problem is that we can easily mistake the story for reality. We can invest so heavily in our beliefs about life that we forget that we really don't know what life is. We can become so caught up in our opinions that we miss the breath-taking mystery. And when this happens, life becomes mundane and empty of wonder.

When I become embroiled with my story I find myself living in a kind of trance. I'm certain I know what's going on, even though I really don't. I exist in a state of numbness that I call 'normality' and I feel only half alive.

But when I wake up I can see that my story is just a story. If I look deeper I discover that hidden behind my story is the pristine, virgin, untouchable mystery. And that's when the mystery experience spontaneously arises.

If God was real and could see us now

Cosmic!

The next morning after I blog about my communication with God, where I learned that this non-existent divine being is deeply irritated with us humans, a cartoon pops up in my Facebook feed with similar message.

 

God isn't happy with deeply religious Americans

I had a conversation with God today. I'm sure of it. Just as sure, at least, as so many other prophets, gurus, masters, and other purported communicators with the divine have been. 

In my case, a godly voice didn't come out of a burning bush. It was more intimate than that: God spoke to me from right inside my own head, which makes it difficult for me to doubt a divine encounter that was so direct.

Below you'll learn what God commanded me to preach.

Be warned, God has a foul mouth. He doesn't mince words when he's seriously pissed. And believe me, He is. Given his omniscience, God was right on top of yesterday's Gallup poll news release.

PRINCETON, NJ -- Forty-six percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years. The prevalence of this creationist view of the origin of humans is essentially unchanged from 30 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question. About a third of Americans believe that humans evolved, but with God's guidance; 15% say humans evolved, but that God had no part in the process.

...The Most Religious Americans Are Most Likely to Be Creationists

Gallup's question wording explicitly frames the three alternatives in terms of God's involvement in the process of human development, making it less than surprising to find that the more religious the American, the more likely he or she is to choose the creationist viewpoint.

...Two-thirds of Americans who attend religious services weekly choose the creationist alternative, compared with 25% of those who say they seldom or never attend church. The views of Americans who attend almost every week or monthly fall in between those of the other two groups. Still, those who seldom or never attend church are more likely to believe that God guided the evolutionary process than to believe that humans evolved with no input from God.

Time to tell you what God thinks about this. Here's what God told me, verbatim.

You fucking religious idiots! You're going to hell. Count on it! Sins I can forgive; willful idiocy, no way. And the disrespect... outrageous. I went to a goddamn lot of trouble to leave you with enough smarts to figure out what the cosmos is all about. 

And now a freaking two-thirds of the bozos who attend religious services weekly say, to hell with the knowledge God has given us, we believe in a made-up story book. Unbelievable. The Bible is chock full of bullshit, which you assholes suck like candy, while you ignore the obvious evidence I left for you.

Hello! Heaven to Earth... is anybody religious listening? Are only my dearly beloved scientists paying attention to my reality?

The Big Bang. Galaxy formation. Supernovas. Life arising on Earth. Evolution. For fourteen billion years I've been waiting for intelligent beings to pop up in your universe who could get a glimpse into how their popping-up happened.

I was looking forward to listening in on more expressions of wonder than I'm getting from religious Americans. Instead of Wow, so that's how God's cosmos is put together! I'm hearing I believe in the Bible, so God created humans just as they are today in the past 10,000 years.

Wrong, wrong, wrong! Super fucking wrong!

So wrong, I'm going to enjoy putting every idiot who chooses the fantasy of creationism over the facts of the cosmos into Scientific Hell after they die. Maybe listening to the same lecture about evolution over and over non-stop for a couple of billion years will drive some sense into their God-empty religious consciousnesses.

And don't get me started about other head-in-the-sand stuff that makes me just as mad. Global warming and species extinctions for example. Hey, humans, you're supposed to take care of the Earth you're on, not trash it!

I'm glad I decided to have a cosmos with a multiverse, which the scientifically savvy among you are starting to see some clues about. There's plenty of other places where intelligence has evolved to understand facts clearly. 

Hopefully those deeply religious asswipes on your planet will see God's light eventually. Thanks for listening to my rant, Brian. I've chosen you to pass on my words through your blog. Appreciate it.

The churchless are my favorite humans. They aren't blinded by religious crap which smears up their vision of my cosmos.

So there you are. A message from God. Believe it. Along with unguided evolution over hundreds of millions of years.

If the Gallup poll creationist trendline doesn't start changing in a more scientific direction soon, God is going to get even more pissed off.

Implications

Despite the many changes that have taken place in American society and culture over the past 30 years, including new discoveries in biological and social science, there has been virtually no sustained change in Americans' views of the origin of the human species since 1982. The 46% of Americans who today believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years is little changed from the 44% who believed this 30 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question.

More broadly, some 78% of Americans today believe that God had a hand in the development of humans in some way, just slightly less than the percentage who felt this way 30 years ago.

All in all, there is no evidence in this trend of a substantial movement toward a secular viewpoint on human origins.

Most Americans are not scientists, of course, and cannot be expected to understand all of the latest evidence and competing viewpoints on the development of the human species. Still, it would be hard to dispute that most scientists who study humans agree that the species evolved over millions of years, and that relatively few scientists believe that humans began in their current form only 10,000 years ago without the benefit of evolution. Thus, almost half of Americans today hold a belief, at least as measured by this question wording, that is at odds with the preponderance of the scientific literature.