Church of the Churchless

What is seva in the RSSB organization?

Here's a provocative piece by Osho Robbins, a frequent commenter on this blog who emailed it to me.

He writes about a recent experience where volunteers ("sevadars") acted in a high-handed manner at a large gathering of RSSB (Radha Soami Satsang Beas) followers -- an India-based group that I was a member of for many years.

What is seva? What is selfless service? Great questions.

What is seva in RSSB? 
by Osho Robbins

This is an interesting question for an RSSB follower to contemplate.

It is just (a) following orders given from those above you?

Or is it (b) using your own discretion to be HELPFUL to another.

Conceptually the idea of seva is to be of service to others. In fact the word actually means service.

So you would think that if you are a ‘sevadar’ at some event, like a national satsang meeting, then the purpose of doing seva would be to make the life of those attending the event easier, not harder. I completely understand that the sevadars have a set of rules to adhere to.

However, is service simply the act of getting compliance? Or is it about helping things to go more smoothly?

At the end of the national satsang meeting, the logical thing to do would be to open many of the tent exits to allow the people to leave the the satsang easily. Why would you want them all to squeeze through a few exits? And if anyone tries to leave another way – stop them. How exactly is that considered to be seva? 

I attended the national satsang at Haynes park in the UK a week ago.

At the end of the satsang, when they are announcing that nobody should leave yet, I stood up and made a sharp exit. Why? Because I don’t want to be in the stampede of people who are going to be getting up in about 30 seconds time.

So I exit the tent by the closest exit which is to my right. It turns out that this is only for those who want to use the toilets and washrooms. So when I try to exit towards the car parking area, I am stopped and told there is no exit this way. Well, I can clearly see there is an exit, but what they mean is that I am not allowed to exit this way.

Anyways I turn to go back towards the tent and then start to wonder what the purpose of these stupid rules is. So I walked straight past the sevadar who tried to stop me from taking the forbidden exit. He asked me to stop and I said I need to get back to my car as I am in a hurry. Well, he called for backup. I love these situations because it tests who the sevadars are and what they are all about. 

The one sevadar starts to push me back as I am walking peacefully towards the car park area. I ask him calmly to stop pushing me otherwise I will sue him for assault. This seems to do the trick and he stops pushing me.  Then five more highly trained sevadars turn up. They tell me to turn around and go the other way. One folds his hands saying it’s a humble request. So then I stopped to talk to them and this is what I said.

“Can anyone explain to me why I cannot exit this way?” Of course nobody had an answer other than “It’s not allowed, please go the long way around.”

So then I said, “I am going to turn around and go the long way around, so there’s no issue about that. However, if this is not an exit, can you tell me why it was not announced in the satsang hall. How was I supposed to know this is not an exit?”

And more than that, I said to them “What you are doing is not seva. You can call it by some other name, like following orders, but it is definitely not seva because seva should make life easier for the sangat, not harder. What is the logical reason for closing this exit? All I want to do is go back to my car and leave the site. Why exactly do I need to go back into the tent and exit that way? What is the purpose and who made this rule? And if you can’t tell me, then why are you blindly enforcing these rules that are pointless?”

This does raise a lot of questions. If seva is simply following orders, then who is making the rules? If you ask the Guru, he says he doesn’t get involved in these small details. In which case, someone else is making these rules. Why? And why is no other sevadar questioning them? 

I do of course know the answer.

In RSSB, there is an hierarchy. The people at the top give orders to those below them and they in turn command those below them. To question the person above you is considered insubordination and nobody dares to do it. If they did, they would immediately be asked to leave their seva. So, out of fear of losing their seva everyone obeys. And they see other sevadars doing the same, so this becomes the natural thing to do.

So seva becomes OBEDIENCE. It becomes an unspoken rule that to question the person giving you an order is akin to questioning the guru, which of course is a big no-no. 

Now this explains a lot. It explains why the sevadars have no individuality and are just order followers. They cannot think for themselves. They are zombies. This is a far cry from true spirituality. No sevadar is allowed to think or voice their opinion. A friend of mine once accompanied me to a seva day and observed that is was just like a concentration camp because everyone simply followed orders. 

The statements I made to those sevadars fell on deaf ears.

I said to them that this is not seva because they are making my life difficult for no logical reason. Those sevadars are too far gone to even hear a thing I say. They are too conditioned to follow orders. As far as they are concerned they have just done their duty and will feel good about it.

The other big questions this raises is about MEANS and ENDS. The seva is meant to help in the spiritual progress of the disciple. However, I would suggest that it hinders. Why? Let’s see.

Firstly the sevadar becomes totally distracted from the whole reason why he first became initiated. He did not become initiated to BE A RADHA SOAMI. He took initiation on the basis that it might lead to spiritual enlightenment. He might traverse spiritual regions and reach the goal of sant mat. 

Secondly, the act of doing seva creates ego in the sevadar, not humility. It also becomes like the rat race. Instead of chasing money the sevadar is chasing power and position. This is blatantly obvious as sevadars who do seva more regularly move up the chain of command. If they decide to give their seva less time they are warned that they will lose their position and will have to start at the bottom.

This also happened to me when I was a satsang speaker.

When the powers that be stopped me from doing satsang they said I could start again but would have to start at the bottom of the chain as a local speaker first and work my way up to national status. This of course is all nonsense and just to prove it I applied to be a speaker again. As soon as they realized it was me – they stopped me from being a local speaker because this is a power game. 

My point is that this is a far cry from the original reason for getting initiation. 

In the same national satsang – I went to the mike and made a statement. I said “Rabi ik gunjaldar, Rabi ik gurakh dhanda. Phid is diya paunda pagal ho jai banda” This translates as:

“God is a mysterious puzzle. Trying to solve it – you will go mad”

I then spoke about Kabir and said “Kabir says that I tried in every way but failed to find God. He says as long as I was looking for him, I did not find him. Then in the second stanza he says that in the end I still did not find him. What happened instead was that kabir disappeared and God appeared. Which means the meeting never happened.”

I simply made this statement and let the guru make his own comments. He said that he agreed. The ego has to disappear first. He said this happened through meditation. 

Now Kabir is making a very important point in his verse.

He is saying that God will not become a decoration for your ego. You cannot hang God on your ego. You cannot claim to have found God, as your disappearance is the appearance of God. Meaning that YOU go then GOD comes. GOD already is and you are overshadowing him. You are like the wave in the ocean. You want to survive. You want the guru to come at your death and save you. Impossible.

No wave ever survives because the wave is unreal. Only the ocean survives because it is real. The waves come and go and the ocean remains. In the same way souls come and go. However we are told that we are a soul and the soul is eternal . Therefore we will survive death. That now becomes a worry because we want to make sure that we go to Sach Khand and the guru will come and save our soul. 

However, Kabir is saying that there is no separate soul. You are not real. You just think you are real. Your ego created the illusion that there is a YOU. There is no You. There is only the ONENESS. You do not exist as a separate entity. If you did exist – then the ONENESS would be an illusion because there is more than one. ONENESS means that there is only the ONE and there is no other. 

Paltu says “Paltu there is only the ONE there is no other.” The scripture cannot be any clearer, but the reader creates his own meaning to make it fit in with his own beliefs.

That is all we do in life. We make sure that we are right and we make everything fit. 

A man phones his mother and says “Mum, I am a zombie”. She says “Son, you are not a zombie”.

He insists he is, so she asks him to call his father. “Dad, I’m a zombie”.

“Son, you are not a zombie” says his father. Again he insists he is. So his father says, “Do zombies bleed?” “No” says the son. “Great” says the father, “Now take a pin and stick it in your finger”.

A few minutes later, the son says “WOW – zombies DO bleed!”

A must read for the churchless: "Faith No More"

Short. Sweet. Persuasive. There's a lot to like about a piece in the Milwaukee Magazine, "Faith No More," by Mario Quadracci.

Download Faith No More PDF (in case the piece ever disappears from the magazine's web site)

Quadracci nails a theme that I like to harp on also. It isn't up to atheists to prove that god and supernaturalism don't exist; it is up to theists to prove that god and supernaturalism do exist. He writes:

I could try to convince you that we reside in a purely naturalistic universe. I could attempt to demonstrate the human authorship of all of history’s gods and the holy books ascribed to them. I could labor to show the historical, scientific and logical fallacies of many of religion’s claims. All of this could be done.

But these aren’t the reasons I abandoned my belief in God. The reason has nothing to do with the substantial evidence for the nonexistence of a deity. They have only solidified my position. The reason I’m an atheist has everything to do with the entire lack of evidence for a god.

Theism makes a positive claim about the nature of reality: “God exists.” Atheism is simply the lack of that belief. Atheism makes no claims. Therefore, the burden of proof falls exclusively on the theist. Yet, the fact that we continue to debate the topic of God’s existence proves theism has thus far failed its probative responsibility.

Certainly, if God manifests himself in reality, we should be able to detect him in some way. If he doesn’t, then he would be indistinguishable from nonexistent and should be treated accordingly. Yet, no one, ever, not even once, has been able to demonstrate anything supernatural. And so we are told to take it on “faith.”

Read the entire short essay. It's excellent. 

As are many of the comments on the piece. Here's selected parts of an interchange between several commenters, including Quadracci, that I particularly enjoyed. I've corrected a few spelling errors.

Jeff Norman: 
I liked the first half of this story. In particular, I liked that Quadracci wrote, "Atheism is simply the lack of...belief [in God]. Atheism makes no claims."

Pity that he then goes on to make a whole host of claims—starting with the assertion that faith is "intellectually dishonest" and going on to indict the religious as being responsible for most of the world's problems. And most ironic of all, he proselytizes for the atheism he'd said makes no claims, stating that he wants to "plant the seed of doubt in someone's mind...[and] move another person away from superstition."

I'm not sure how that's any different from someone with a tie and a Bible showing up telling me how to think. As an atheist myself, I strongly dislike the arrogance of many publicly outspoken atheists, who seem to have made a new religion of their beliefs. I wish Quadracci had acted in accordance with the idea that "atheism makes no claims": it's a description, not a position. It's entirely possible to reject the claim of divine reality without insulting those who still accept it.

Jeff Ferris:
I'm an atheist, I make no claims. But I do desire evidence. Why is that a contradiction? Why cannot I not, when told of the "beauty of god", ask for someone to provide evidence? Should I keep silent, allowing the claim to be interpreted as fact, then taught as dogma? Would you apply the same argument to any other claim, such as politics, where a conservative position should never be challenged by a progressive because it might insult the conservative? When my kid's school district wants to celebrate a god, should I be silent unless I offend someone?

Voice Sanity:
Jeff Norman: "Pity that he then goes on to make a whole host of claims—starting with the assertion that faith is 'intellectually dishonest' and going on to indict the religious as being responsible for most of the world's problems."

You are confused. Theism and theists make claims, claims that go on for all eternity it seems. There are libraries full of them, people spend their lives making these claims and even interrupt you on the street and knock on your door to make them.

And there isn't even a wisp of evidence for any of this. If you'll accept claims without evidence, then why not accept this:

Xenu (/ˈziːnuː/), also called Xemu, was, according to Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, the dictator of the "Galactic Confederacy" who 75 million years ago brought billions of his people to Earth (then known as "Teegeeack") in a DC-8-like spacecraft, stacked them around volcanoes, and killed them with hydrogen bombs. Official Scientology scriptures hold that the thetans (immortal spirits) of these aliens adhere to humans, causing spiritual harm.

Might as well. Because evidence is how we decide what is really something to believe. You reject all other claims because of the lack of evidence. We reject yours for the same reasons.

Jeff Norman:
Voice Sanity -- Pretty sure I never said that theism doesn't make claims. Of course it does. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the way Quadracci moves from *rejecting* those claims (perfectly fine - and I'm in agreement with him there) to making claims of his own *on behalf of atheism*, as if it, too, is just another belief system. It's not: It's not about "belief" at all, but about (as you note) what there is and is not evidence for. But see, just as I don't come knocking on your door arguing my beliefs that (say) Roger Daltrey's singing on The Who's 'Quadrophenia' is the best male rock vocal performance ever...same thing: it's when Quadracci gets on the case of people who are just living their lives that he bugs me.

Mario Quadracci:
Mr Norman, beliefs and the processes we use to ascertain and hold them inform our actions and dispositions. Therefore I have a huge problem with people's claims about "knowledge" gained through simple assertions based on books written by people for whom the hammer was emerging technology. I just don't think it's a valid method to explain the beginning of the cosmos by appealing to a story that must be true in order to validate the feeling of Jesus in someone's heart. That is not an honest exploration of reality.

Also, I am not synonomous with atheism so the claims I make (faith is intellectually dishonest etc.) are not being made by atheism they are being made by me who counts atheist amongst a wide array of descriptive language about myself. You are right in that I could have ended the story at "Atheism makes no claims," and in a way I adopted some burden of proof when I expressed my views on faith. But that's a whole lot different than writting "atheism is the belief no gods exist." As for my burden of proof here, I don't think it's an immense challenge to defend the proposition that faith is dishonest etc. I welcome any debate on this.

Tjaart Blignaut:
Jeff Norman -- the problem is that people of faith do claim to know things they cannot possibly know, like how the universe was created. We don't need to put on velvet gloves just because there is a perception of atheists as being annoying or constantly picking fights. No matter what we do we will be perceived negatively. If we are too nice we will be accused of trying to be manipulative. I don't think this is a fight we can win.

As for Dawkins, I have to come to his defense despite his many mistakes. If someone didn't come out and say it boldly like The God Delusion did, nobody would be questioning their strongly held beliefs. Yes we have a voice, but if we are too quiet nobody will listen. Not everybody needs to rock the boat, but I think you owe some empathy to those who do. Understand their goal of starting the conversation without just being ignored. 

I don't really know what "spiritual" means anymore

Recently I had an essay rejected by the Spiritual Naturalist Society because the powers-that-be there, where I've become a regular contributor (for now...), didn't think that being politically active, in the sense of being involved in public policy debates, was a "spiritual" practice.

(See my post, Naturalism needs to rule public policy debates.)

This got me to thinking, again, about what that problematic word, spiritual, means. Most people, along with the dictionary, consider that it mostly refers to something supernatural, other-worldly, divine. 

But how does a naturalist, someone who only considers the material world to be real, differentiate between what is spiritual and what isn't?

Back in 2008, in What does it mean to be "spiritual"?, I quoted Andre Comte-Sponville, the author of "The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality." His answer made generally good sense to me then, and still does.

Taken in its broadest sense, spirituality can be said to include virtually all aspects of human life and spiritual is more or less synonymous with "mental" or "psychic." Today, this use of the word has pretty much gone out of use, and when people talk about spirituality, they are usually referring to a rather limited part of our inner life (though it may contemplate limitlessness) – the part that involves the absolute, the infinite and the eternal. It is, in a sense, the spirit's farthermost point and its greatest amplitude.

So if "spirit" refers to mental, which tends to be my leaning, there isn't anything in human awareness or experience that isn't spiritual. And that obviously includes political activism.

Restricting "spiritual" to mean only the farthest limits of material existence, a contemplation of the vast extent (maybe eternal) of time and space, that strikes me as unduly restrictive. 

Can't I be spiritual while I'm raking leaves, writing a blog post, drinking wine, walking the dog around a nearby lake, testifying at a city council meeting, enjoying nature, or doing any number of other everyday things? 

If so, what makes some of these everyday things "spiritual" and other things "unspiritual"? This was the question I posed to folks in the Spiritual Naturalist Society in some emails after my essay was rejected for publication on their web site.

Since I don’t see anything other than naturalistic reality as being, well, real, then “spiritual” — a problematic word — must not involve anything supernatural. The question then becomes: what is the difference between being a naturalist, and a spiritual naturalist?

 

Zen, for example, seemingly ends up with no distinction. We chop wood and carry water… after recognizing that a belief in something over and above this leads us astray. The whole “first there is a mountain, then there isn’t, then there is” thing.

 

...Having been part of a deeply mystical India-based guru-led meditation organization for 35 years, I’m very familiar with the notion that life has  “spiritual” and “non-spiritual” aspects. But this is a dualistic conception, one usually founded in an assumption that the physical world, and our physical self, is just a pale reflection of a more vibrant immaterial reality.

 

Now that I’m atheistically and naturalistically-inclined (have been for about 11 years; maybe more), this doesn’t ring true for me any more. In my daily life I don’t feel like there is a light that goes on in my (non-existent) soul when I’m doing something spiritual, and that goes off when I’m immersed in a non-spiritual worldly activity. 

 

So I’m questioning the SNS’s assumption that only certain aspects of a person’s life are part of a naturalistic spiritual practice... You may be a bit rigid as to what is fair game to be considered part of a “spiritual practice.”

 

If there is no supernatural realm, then everything in the natural world could be part of such, if looked upon rightly. Otherwise, where is the ground for carving out some pieces of human experience and calling them “spiritual,” while calling other parts something else? 

Well, I'm open to other arguments.

I just haven't come across any convincing ones yet that would make me think that a naturalistic/atheist spirituality has to be restricted to only certain aspects of human experience.

Here's other blog posts I've written on this always-intriguing subject, some of which may contradict what I've said here, since I really am unsure what "spiritual" means for a materialist. 

Spirituality is experienced, not proven
"Spiritual" and "Science" -- two words that belong together
A secular Easter thought: "spiritual" isn't supernatural or religious
I'm churchless. And as "spiritual" as ever.
Real spirituality is realizing you aren't a soul, or self
Step out of the separate self, and you're spiritual

Naturalism needs to rule public policy debates

Below is an essay that I wrote for the Spiritual Naturalist Society (I'm a contributing writer), but which struck them as too political for their tastes -- politics and policy-making apparently not being part of what they consider to be a "spiritual practice." 

So, boo-hoo, it was rejected for their site.

I'm going to present some arguments to the Spiritual Naturalist Society folks about why no bounds should be placed around a naturalistic worldview. If there is no supernatural realm, it doesn't make sense to me to consider some aspects of a naturalistic person's life to be spiritual, and some aspects non-spiritual.

I meditate every morning. I go for a walk in nature every day. I do Tai Chi almost every day.

If these activities are "spiritual," then why isn't writing elected officials to advocate for some policy position, such as signing the deal with Iran or doing more to avert global climate change, or testifying at a city council meeting?

And also, fighting the interjection of faith-based supernatural religious beliefs into public policy debates, which, as you'll read below, was a big part of what our nation's revolutionary deistically-inclined founders strongly held to be true and good.

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Naturalism needs to rule public policy debates

There’s no place for supernatural religious beliefs in discussions of public policy.

So, please, believers, leave out all mentions of God, soul, spirit, divine will, and such when you want to weigh in on abortion, embryonic stem cell research, LBGTQ rights, or other morally-fraught issues.

Being a political activist, my Christian friends (whether liberal or conservative) recoil when I speak like this. They feel it is fine to express their religious views in debates about how government should deal with matters of public policy.

I disagree.

After reading Matthew Stewart’s marvelously written and researched book, “Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic,” I’ve got fresh argumentative ammunition to bolster my long-held contention that religious views founded on supernaturalism shouldn’t be brought into the public sphere.

(See my 2004 blog post, Religious values have no place in politics.)

The founders of our nation intended the United States to be an Empire of Reason. Stewart writes:

Human beings achieved self-government only after they learned how to discard the politically dangerous delusions that arise from the common religious consciousness. At least, that is more or less how America’s founders saw the matter.

…The cultivation of the sciences and the development of culture and the arts become not just the route to advancing the other interests of the state but the end of the state itself.

The enlightenment of the people becomes their own true religion, while the shell of tradition vanishes into empty symbols of the life of individual and collective self-realization.

True piety in a reasonable world is the pursuit of happiness through the improvement of the understanding. Call it the religion of freedom.

Stewart dives into some deep historical and philosophical waters in “Nature’s God.” Its 435 pages aren’t the easiest to read or summarize succinctly.

So here’s a couple of metaphors that, to me, do a good job of showing why Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen, Thomas Young, and other leaders during revolutionary times worked so hard to make reason, not faith, the foundation of our nation’s governance.

Imagine that you’re part of a residents’ committee charged with managing the common property of a housing development. The group is looking at a grove of trees, some of which may need to be removed to restore views.

A member of the committee interrupts the discussion. “I’m not in favor of taking down any trees,” she says. “I believe there are tree sprites, invisible fairies, living in them. The sprites would be harmed if any tree was removed.”

How could you respond to that? You want to tell the woman, “What you’re saying is crazy,” but that would sound impolite.

So you reply with, “Well, you’re welcome to your beliefs, but this committee is responsible for doing what’s best for our community. We have to base our tree removal decisions on what everybody knows to be real, not on the supposed desires of supernatural tree sprites.”

This is closely akin to how many religious people approach the question of abortion.

They believe that an immaterial soul enters the embryo at the moment of conception, or soon thereafter. Other people look upon abortion as a secular matter, a decision to be reached between a woman and her doctor based on personal moral and health concerns.

Once fervently-held religious supernaturalism enters a public policy discussion, it is difficult, if not impossible, to engage in an open debate where reasoned arguments are put forth, factual evidence carefully considered, and a fairly-arrived at decision determined.

Consider this second metaphorical example.

A group is playing poker. A hand has been dealt. The cards have been played. Everything is on the table for examination. A player with four aces prepares to pull in the chips she has won. Until she hears…

“Stop. I won this hand. I’ve got a straight flush, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 of clubs.”
“No, you don’t. We can all see your cards. You’ve got nothing.”
“Ah, those aren’t my real cards. My real cards are invisible. Only I can see them — give me the chips I’ve won.”

Who would do that?

The game has been played fairly. The only cards that count are the physical ones handed out by the dealer. There are rules for deciding which combinations of cards win out over other combinations. If someone brings in supernatural invisible cards, this makes playing a fair game of poker impossible.

Though I’ve used simple examples of tree cutting and poker playing, the same principles were at the root of why the American Republic was founded as a naturalistic Empire of Reason rather than a supernatural Empire of Faith.

Here’s another passage from “Nature’s God” where Stewart speaks of how our nation’s founders viewed private and public religiosity.

The separation of church and state that emerges from the early modern revolutions in philosophy and politics does not in fact imply that the modern secular state is or ought to be neutral with respect to religion in every sense of that term. Rather, this separation at least implicitly involves the creation of a certain kind of public religion.

This new public religion is indeed tolerant of every religious belief -- but only insofar as that belief is understood to be intrinsically private. It does not and ought not tolerate any form of religion that attempts to hold the power of the sovereign answerable to its private religious belief. It also does not and ought not tolerate any attempt to shield the doctrines and practices of any religion from critical scrutiny.

…In short, the state may adopt as a part of its public religion only whatever may be safely dissolved back into reason.

In the context of the American Revolution, Stewart’s mention of a sovereign doesn't refer to a king, queen, president, parliament, or congress. Rather, it means the people of the newly formed United States.

Thus it is the power of the people that isn’t obliged to answer to any private religious belief.

If someone tries to interject a faith-based doctrine that isn’t answerable to reason into a public policy question, this is as inappropriate as someone arguing that a tree can’t be cut down because of supernatural sprites, or claiming to have won a hand of poker because of invisible cards.

Here’s a succinct explanation of what Stewart means by “public religion.” Basically, it is deism, which in his conception isn’t far removed from atheism, being a naturalistic view of the universe.

The popular deism or natural religion that America's revolutionaries hoped to promote was distinguished above all by its commitment to the defining value of the Empire of Reason: the improvement of the understanding.

Thus the goal of these radical nation-building philosophers wasn’t so much to exclude God from the American Republic, as to include all of reality. This is the only way genuine understanding of what is true and good can be achieved.

In keeping with the guiding principle, it [an immanent rather than transcendent view of morality] says that whatever moves us, like whatever moves anything in the infinite universe, must be explicable. So the good always comes with reasons for its goodness; those reasons must refer to those motives that we generically identify as pleasure and pain; and those reflections on the affections can always be the subject of further reflection, elaboration, and qualification.

Given the diversity of these United States, our Constitution — as serious as it is — reminds me of a joke that begins with “A Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, Atheist, Wiccan, Muslim, Taoist, and Rastafarian walk into a bar…”

Except, the bar is our nation. And there are many more types of citizens than the nine I mentioned. One could argue, as many types as there are individuals living in this country, since every person is unique.

What is the common ground on which we all can stand during our debates and discussions about what is best for us?

What evidence and facts can be brought into attempts to reason our way to some sort of consensus on complex controversial issues?

The answer to both questions is Nature and Nature’s Laws. Everybody lives in the same natural world. We all breathe the same air, drink the same water, walk on the same Earth, gaze into the same sky.

Yes, humans also hold a wide variety of ideas about what, if anything, might lie beyond the physicality of this universe.

But those hypothesized supernatural conceptions divide us, while the actuality of science, and the understanding that flows from reasoned consideration of what is known to be real — that unites us.

Such was the unparalleled vision of our nation’s founders. Near the end of his book, Matthew Stewart speaks of what remains for this vision to be fulfilled.

In our tolerant age, we like to say that everybody is entitled their own worldview, that every worldview comes with its own “narrative” of the history, and that all such narratives are created equal.

So, according to the wisdom of polite society today, it’s a matter of personal preference whether the modern world emerged out of humankind’s emancipation from the shackles of religious superstition or whether instead it sprang directly from the head of Zeus, or was delivered in the form of a bountiful continent to this or that group of sectarian zealots.

But the only choice we really have is whether to be conscious or to persist in destructive delusions. Of course, it remains just as fashionable now as it was in Jonathan Edward’s day to lament the nihilism that supposedly grips us when we shed the false certainty of ignorance, and to bemoan the doom that will surely befall us when we depart from the simple faith of our fathers.

But the fact remains that the common power of humanity — the capability for cooperative action that is really just another word for our moral well-being — was never greater than after we lost our religion.

…The founding of the American Republic did not bring freedom to the slaves. It did not give justice to Native Americans. It did nothing to liberate women. And it still hasn’t prevented malefactors of great wealth from twisting the political process to their advantage. 

All of these struggles fell to subsequent generations, and the provisional victories obtained thus far have been the work of those who have understood in one way or another that the American Revolution remains an ongoing concern.

The main thing we can learn now from the persistence in modern America of supernatural religion and the reactionary nationalism with which it is so regularly accompanied is that there is still work to be done. For too long we have relied on silence to speak a certain truth. The noise tells us the time has come for some candor. It points to a piece of unfinished business of the American Revolution.

More quotations from "Nature's God," a marvelously insightful book

I can't describe how much I enjoyed reading Matthew Stewart's book, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. It isn't the easiest book I've ever read, to put it mildly. 

Stewart dives deep into historical and philosophical waters in the book's 435 pages. At times I wondered why he was paying so much attention to a certain subject. But by the end of "Nature's God" I understood, pretty much, how each chapter contributed to his literary goal.

Which, basically, was to dispel the myth of the United States being founded as a Christian nation. Or more broadly, as a religious nation. In truth, this country was founded as an Empire of Reason. 

I've written several blog posts about the book, here, here, and here. As with my first post, mostly filled with quotations from "Nature's God," I've done the same in this post -- starting at the point in the book that I left off with in the first set of quotations.

Stewart is just a freaking brilliant author.

Like I said, his book takes some effort to understand. You have to fit together a bunch of historical and philosophical pieces to get a good glimpse of the picture that is the foundation of the American Revolution and our constitution.

In the quotations below, I particularly enjoyed Stewart's discussion of how the founders of this country distinguished between private and public religion. This supported a post on my other blog, "Religious views have no place in fetal tissue debate."

Enjoy. Read slowly. Then consider reading the quotations over again. I've had to do this. Repeated readings sometimes are needed to really fathom what Stewart is getting at, for me at least.

All virtue, according to this line of thought, is a matter of pursuing one's genuine interest or self-realization. It supposes an awareness of oneself, and of every aspect of one's actual life, in the present. It is not far from what in the Buddhist tradition is called "mindfulness."

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More dramatically, Spinoza tells us that we do not desire or detest things because we judge them to be good or evil; we judge them good or evil because we desire or detest them.

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So the good always comes with reasons for its goodness; those reasons must refer to those motives that we generically identify as pleasure and pain; and those reflections on the affections can always be the subject of further reflection, elaboration, and qualification. 

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A still deeper insight embodied in the radical conception is that our knowledge of good and evil, such as it is, cannot be replaced with a thoughtless calculation delivered by some moral theory on the basis of some fixed set of rules, for it must follow from our awareness of the interconnections of things in the universe as a whole, taken without limit.

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The radical philosophy at the origin of liberal modernity, then, is not properly speaking (or exclusively) a humanism. It is closer to a naturalism that might one day be expected to embrace all species, a planet, and perhaps the universe itself.

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Thus: to complete the logic: if vice turned out to be a condition of happiness, then presumably God would clamor to see us vicious.

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For good and evil are nothing but pleasure and pain insofar as we are conscious of them.

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If one were to rummage through the history of philosophy for the words that might express the moral wisdom at the core of American liberalism -- the knowledge that we realize ourselves individually and collectively not by bemoaning our depravity and abasing ourselves before inscrutable deities but through the improvement of the understanding that brings with it both pleasure and virtue -- it would be difficult to find a more apt phrase than the one Jefferson placed at the heart of the Declaration of Independence: the pursuit of happiness.

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But today we don't really need to wonder what a society founded on the principles of atheism would look like. We just need to understand aright the history of the United States.

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Liberalism in its original form is not the elaboration of some common moral intuition, the articulation of an arbitrary creed or cultural formation, or a theory of justice. It is a theory of power. Its principal claim is that the source of human power and freedom is the understanding. It rests in an essential way on the same radical philosophy that begins with Nature's God and passes through nature's virtue.

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The radical political philosophy that guided the American Revolution, on the other hand, begins not with this common assertion of the moral equality of human beings but with an explicit denial of the premise concerning the natural inequality of human beings. Human equality begins in nature, it says, not in moral imperatives.

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The demand for equality among beings that are naturally equal is really just the demand that all power should explain itself. A justice that comes from nature is in essence a justice that comes with reasons and is therefore subject to explanation and revision. It is this insistence on explanation -- not any moralistic imperative to be nice to other people, nor the appeal to arbitrary and unreliable feelings of empathy arising out of the human breast -- that would make the Enlightenment such a revolutionary force in human history.

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The Empire of Reason, to be clear, does not contain or restrict nature but realizes it, and so it is also, by definition, the most powerful form of state. It maximizes the freedom or power of the individual, insofar as we understand freedom or power as rational self-determination (as opposed to the satisfaction of passions). But the rational self-determination or power of the individual, as we know from radical ethics, is in fact coextensive with the rational self-determination of the collective.

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The radical freedom of thought begins with the claim that the mind is not in fact free to affirm or deny ideas at will, but is rather constrained to follow the evidence and reasons presented to it. The mind achieves its freedom, according to this line of thought, by pursuing reasons and evidence toward a more perspicuous understanding of itself, its own body, and the world around it. The mind needs its ideas in the same sense that the body needs to appropriate pieces of the outside world in order to generate itself.

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Not grasping that power is nothing but the understanding itself, human beings naturally tend to anthropomorphize it. Power, they tend to think, always belongs to the kind of thing that has a proper name. So they confuse the political power of their own collective with that of the king or institution that happens to wield it, in the very same way that they confuse the collective power of all things in nature with that of a presiding deity, to which they give the name of God.

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The common ideas about things make it especially difficult to see how it is that the sovereign, as distinct from government, may be identified with the people.

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The most obvious general principle of democracy is that it finds one way or another to give all individuals an equal voice in public affairs.

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The common religious consciousness supposes that right belief alone is the foundation for right action, and so it concludes that good religion is the necessary foundation of good government... The radical philosophers, on the other hand, say that understanding, not belief, is the source of all morality, and that the reasonable state embodies this understanding in its laws.

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America's founders were functionally unanimous in their conviction that good government starts with human beings as they are -- mostly irrational and hence vicious -- and produces virtue by relying not on acts of conscience but on acts of law.

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Tyranny happens when a society turns against itself, with one part usurping the power of whole and applying it to the exploitation of the rest.

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The opposite of the Empire of Reason is in reality the Empire of Faith. Hobbes calls it "the Kingdom of the Fairies"; in more modern terms, we could say that the opposite of democracy is theocracy.

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Thus, superstition permits individuals suffering from one set of passions to feed off individuals suffering from another according to a logic that neither side understands, and in this manner society lacerates itself in a fury of thoughtless self-destruction. 

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No proposition could have elicited more support from the radical precursors to the American Revolution than that the priests are the chief instrument of tyrants.

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Human beings achieved self-government only after they learned how to discard the politically dangerous delusions that arise from the common religious consciousness. At least, that is more or less how America's founders saw the matter.

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The equality that Jefferson announced and that Lincoln partially advanced is at bottom the demand that all power must explain itself. In reality, the revolutionary force in the Declaration of Independence is the guiding principle of philosophy.

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Every thing in the universe strives to persist in being, say the radical philosophers, and the power of nature through which the human mind strives to persist is the power of the understanding.

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From the radical position that Locke and Spinoza share, it follows that religion is not a fundamental category of human experience for legal or political purposes in either its public or its private aspects.

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The separation of church and state that emerges from the early modern revolutions in philosophy and politics does not in fact imply that the modern secular state is or ought to be neutral with respect to religion in every sense of that term. Rather, this separation at least implicitly involves the creation of a certain kind of public religion.

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This new public religion is indeed tolerant of every religious belief -- but only insofar as that belief is understood to be intrinsically private. It does not and ought not tolerate any form of religion that attempts to hold the power of the sovereign answerable to its private religious belief. It also does not and ought not tolerate any attempt to shield the doctrines and practices of any religion from critical scrutiny.

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In short, the state may adopt as a part of its public religion only whatever may be safely dissolved back into reason.

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The important point is that such false religion remains confined to the private sphere, as a purely inward matter, where it is rendered harmless by the same civil laws that forbid the state from attempting to interfere with it.

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It is precisely because they identify religion with its purely private or inward aspect that Jefferson and Madison insist that government can neither restrict nor impose it through an establishment of religion.

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It alerts us to the fact that behind the definition of religion as a purely private affair there stands another religion, or a sense of piety, and this object of this ur-religion, or true piety, is not any particular deity or doctrine but the pursuit of understanding itself.

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In short, they [the founders of this country] wanted to bestow upon America the blessings of popular deism, or that variety of religion that translates into lively metaphors and memorized rituals the radical and essentially atheistic philosophy on which the modern liberal state rests.

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Jefferson was certain that priestcraft and its paraphernalia of mystifying dogma would wither under the disinfecting light of the new empire of reason.

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The popular deism or natural religion that America's revolutionaries hoped to promote was distinguished above all by its commitment to the defining value of the Empire of Reason: the improvement of the understanding.

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It is only to the degree that religion is not what it once was, moreover, that we can and ought to tolerate it, and may hope to find in it some limited utility for modern society.

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America's mainstream religion is at bottom one form or another of popular deism, and popular deism is just atheism adapted to the limitations of the common understanding of things. To say that the United States is a "one nation under God" is to conceal behind a euphemism the fact that it is and always has been one nation under nature. Whatever else we pretend to believe, we are in practice mostly atheists now -- and for that we should be grateful.

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The best account of the spread of secularism remains the one that Jefferson first suggested: that it is the natural consequence of the freedom of thought in a free society. Not the orbits of the planets or the origin of the species but the daily movement of social, moral, and political experience in the modern world has made secularism inevitable.

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To attempt to explain the world today through the experience of the common religious consciousness is to live in a kind of moral chaos. It is to inhabit a house of fractured mirrors, where submission to inscrutable authorities counts as freedom, where that which is good for the health of the individual and the collective is called evil, and where all are expected to bear the lifelong burden of pretending to believe one thing while doing another.

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Once upon a time, it took a certain kind of genius to see that atheists could be virtuous. Today, only those blinded by bigotry can think otherwise. The revolutionaries of the early modern period needed their books to imagine a world free from the chains of the common religious consciousness. Today we need only our eyes.

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Ideas are acts of understanding. They derive their power from their truth, not their acceptance. They involve clearing away old delusions, not erecting new ones. They don't settle the future; they only make sense of the past. They are the ground of our freedom, not an instance of it. And the history of the past several hundred years shows that ideas in this sense did change the world.

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Self-governance became possible -- however imperfectly -- only after radical philosophy cleared the field of those common misconceptions through which human beings participate in their own enslavement. 

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But the fact remains that the common power of humanity -- the capability for cooperative action that is really just another word for our moral well-being -- was never greater than after we lost our religion.

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The main thing we can learn now from the persistence in modern America of supernatural religion and the reactionary nationalism with which it is so regularly accompanied is that there is still work to be done. For too long we have relied on silence to speak a certain truth. The noise tells us the time has come for some candor. It points to a piece of unfinished business of the American Revolution.

America's founders reasoned their way to a secular republic

How did the United States come to be the secular constitutional republic -- arguably also termed a democracy -- that it is now? Why aren't we ruled by a king or queen? Why aren't we a theocracy?

I've vaguely been interested in these sorts of questions, but I'm not a big history buff. So reading Matthew Stewart's book, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic, is pretty much my first serious venture into learning about my country's revolutionary origins.

In my last post I shared a bunch of quotations from the book. Here I want to take a stab at relating what I've learned so far (I've still got about fifty pages to read) in my own words, without quoting from "Nature's God."

After all, when I finish the book the usable part of the contents will be in my mind. It is less important that I understand exactly what Stewart is arguing, as that I understand it in my own way. So here's my reasoned take on some core themes of "Nature's God."

People often say that many of the leaders of the American Revolution were deists, rather than theists. This is true. They didn't believe in a personal god who took a special interest in earthly affairs. Or any affairs within the universe.

Their god basically was synonymous with nature. Thus understanding the laws of nature was the best way to understand God. 

Knowledge doesn't come from some transcendent source. It is immanent, not transcendent. Meaning, we humans have the means to know reality via our senses, reasoning, experimentation, observation, analysis, and all the other characteristics of the "scientific method," broadly speaking.

Morality also is immanent. As is knowing how to be happy.

If we act in accord with Nature's Laws, this is the deist equivalent of obeying transcendent commandments handed down by a god. Revelation is useless for gaining understanding or knowledge, because it isn't founded on reason, evidence, observable reality.

So our Declaration of Independence speaks of the "pursuit of happiness."

Government exists to express the will of the people as to the best way to regulate human affairs so as to make this pursuit most fruitful. Again, it is a matter of learning, of experimentation, of trying things and seeing how they work, then changing direction on the basis of new knowledge.

Because there isn't a god-given sense of what is right and wrong, of what produces more or less happiness, it takes effort to learn what works, and what doesn't -- on both a personal and societal level. Discussion, debate, criticism, questioning, these are essential both for individuals (like in our own head) and for associations of people (like cities, states, nations).

Ideally, everyone has an equal capacity and right to take part in the messy, yet valuable, democratic processes of electing people to represent them, and then critiquing their performance. 

The differences between people are small in comparison to what makes us similar. Thus it doesn't make sense to restrict control of government to people of a certain gender, race, education, wealth, or whatever. 

Everyone is capable of using his/her reasoning ability to argue for certain policies and choices. It is the quality of reasoning that matters, not the quality of someone's character, faith, religion, ancestry, or such. This is the "radical" side of the American Revolution that, of course, doesn't seem radical or revolutionary at all to most of us today.

It just did back in the late 1700s, when it was widely assumed that power should reside in royalty, church officials, landed gentry, white people, men, and other subsets of humanity. 

Left to ourselves, following our instincts, we often screw things up.

Thus we need to carefully consider the wisdom of our actions both on an individual and societal level. "I will..." is just as vacuous as "Thou shalt..." unless what follows is backed up by solid evidence, careful reasoning, considered discussion.

The reason why Epicurus and those who followed in his philosophical footsteps advocated moderation in most things isn't because this sort of "Middle Way" reflects a transcendent moral or ethical law. Rather, it is just the way nature operates.

If we eat too much, we feel sick to our stomach. If we drink too much, we get a hangover. If we have sex with every willing attractive person we come across, we complicate our lives. So moderation in food, alcohol, and sexual relations isn't a matter of morality, it is the best way of being happy in the long term.

Similarly, when left to themselves people often over-indulge on a social level. We will be tempted to usurp others' property, possessions, money, and so on. Thus government exists as a necessary social conscience. Again, this requires commitment to a "learning culture," just as individual happiness does.

Since there is no God looking after us, and no moral rules other than the natural consequences of nature's laws, we humans have to feel our way along as best we can. Our guide isn't a transcendent revelation of "This is the way things are." Rather, it is a never-ending search for truth, wisdom, knowledge, reality.

There is no end to this search.

Choices between better and worse ways of acting always will confront us, both as individuals and as members of the body politic. If we have good reasons for doing this rather than that, and learn from the results of our actions, that's the best we can do.

Such was the vision of our country's founders.

Naturally Matthew Stewart expresses this much more clearly and completely in his book than I've been able to do in this blog post. But it was enjoyable to give it a reasoned try.

Quotations from "Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic"

l am loving Matthew Stewart's brilliantly written book, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic.

It demolishes the absurd oft-heard claims that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. Yet it is difficult to summarize Stewart's arguments why this is untrue.

"Nature's God," which I'm about 2/3 through, is a complex blend of history and philosophy. It isn't enough to simply say that this country was founded by deists, not theists. 

Yes, this is true.

But to understand the book's subtitle, "The Heretical Origins of the American Republic," not surprisingly requires Stewart to journey through a whole lot of philosophy, beginning with Epicurus in ancient Greece. He is an excellent writer and an amazingly skilled philosopher.

Still, my mind is regularly boggled, in a decidedly pleasant and stimulating fashion, as I make my way through the chapters.

So I figured that rather than trying to explain the book in my own words, I'd use the authors'. Here's a collection of quotations up through page 274, culled from my highlighting scheme. 

The quotes do a pretty good job of summarizing Stewart's central arguments. But naturally many (or most) of them will leave the reader with as many questions as answers. Which is one of Stewart's main points: truth comes from active reasoned understanding, not passive revelatory faith.

Enjoy...

Although America's revolutionary deists lavished many sincere expressions of adoration upon their deity, deism is in fact functionally indistinguishable from what we would now call "pantheism"; and pantheism is really just a pretty word for atheism.

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In the universe as Lucretius found it, there is no heaven but the one we project on the stars overhead. There is no hell but what our imagination can conjure out of our fears of this world. And there is nothing at all outside of experience that can bring us any more happiness, misery, good, or evil than we can find within the limits of the world we inhabit.

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The bare outlines of the Epicurean philosophy are first discernible among America's revolutionary deists at this level, where the pursuit of happiness and true piety merge with the scientific spirit.

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The body, in short, is not an artifact of design but the outcome of a fortuitous natural process. Like everything else in the Epicurean universe, it is a kind of beautiful accident, the output of an algorithm that generates astounding complexity from the operation of a few simple rules.

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If "true piety" is just the contemplation of the universe, then there is no difference between the study of nature and the worship of God.

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Indeed, "Nature's God" was the presiding deity of the American Revolution.

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God, according to this conception, is the eternal this-ness of all things. It is the being-ness of beings, or the eternal being of all beings.

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While Spinoza and his successors ultimately ascribe our ignorance to the very lawfulness of nature itself, the common religious consciousness attributes it to the inscrutability of God's purposes and intentions, which is to say, the arbitrary or unlawful aspect of God's agency.

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Which is to say, in a manner of speaking, that nature is God's revelation, and science is the true theology.

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Radical philosophy attempts to show that nature itself contains a principle of infinite activity; that it is the real source of the enigmas we falsely gather under the name of God; and that it is the font of everything that we may value.

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To cut a long story short: "Nature's God," the God of Thomas Young and the presiding deity of the American Revolution, is another word for "Nature."

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In the infinite universe of Nature's God, "creation" and "Creator" refer to the same thing.

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Modernity exists because the soul does not.

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Our explanations of ourselves, all our cherished experiences of this or that time of day, our memories of last night's dinner, and our theories about the future of the universe and our place within it, all consist of ideas that explain one piece of the universe through another, while what we grandly call our conscious mind is just the string we tie around the bundle of ideas that makes each of us what we distinctly are.

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Belief is a matter of evidence, not choice.

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To perceive something is already to perceive a cause for our experience in the world, which is to have an idea. (When we see a desk, for example, we don't see a collection of sense data but an explanation for such a collection.)

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It follows that revelation -- a series of representations that we have no reason to hold true apart from our desire to believe in their truth -- is not a form of knowledge or consciousness or belief at all. It is simply the sign of a desire that must always be explicable through some other ideas. It belongs by its very nature to a mind that does not know itself and cannot be acting freely.

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But this is to suppose precisely what the radicals deny: that truth may take the form of a revelation, and that the freedom of the mind consists in its ability to choose what it will believe without reason or cause.

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The picture-theory takes for granted that the mind, by virtue of being "inside" of the "gallery," has a perfect grasp of itself before it knows anything about anything else. According to Spinoza, on the other hand, the mind is not "inside" anything. It is just another idea, out there in the world, that happens to explain or represent the activity of a particular body.

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Less technically, we could say that the mind of any individual is simply the theory that explains the behavior of that individual's body.

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On the whole, this radical view of the self gives flesh to the intuition -- obvious from experience yet previously withheld from science on the basis of common religious prejudice -- that mind and body are deeply interconnected and that the consciousness and self-consciousness that come with them are always matters of degree.

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According to radical philosophy, on the other hand, the body is an act of substance no less than the mind. Its activity is nothing other than the activity of nature itself, understood and expressed in a certain way.

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Eternal life means nothing other than this life, lived and understood in its most complete form.

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The traditional conception of immortality also takes for granted that the purpose of the afterlife is to resolve ethical problems across time zones: actions in this life receive their just consequences in the next. In the philosophical conception, however, eternal life stands only for the incompleteness of moral equations in this life, not as a term within those equations.

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From the analysis that Locke and Spinoza share to this point, it follows that freedom of the mind, properly understood, does not consist in the ability to affirm propositions without reason or cause, as the common view supposes. Rather, freedom is just the power of the understanding itself.

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Radical philosophy supposes that the long and arduous path to freedom passes through the continuous improvement in our knowledge of ourselves and of the entire universe around us.

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The obstacles this liberalism seeks to overcome are not whatever prevents us from clinging to what we wish to believe, but those that would constrain the questioning, the criticism, the search for evidence, and the conversation with others that might compel us to change our minds.

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A genuinely liberal political system likewise aims not to satisfy the existing impulses of the majority but to hold the actions of an entire collective accountable to reason.

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Genuine liberalism is at bottom a system designed to ensure that self-government among naturally passionate individuals takes place, as it must, through acts of understanding. It is both a republic of learning and a learning republic. In its ideal form -- never perfectly realized in any specific set of institutions -- it is a truth machine, and the purpose of its truths is freedom.

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Behind such historical judgments it isn't hard to detect the same, transcendental conception of morality writ large. Only righteous belief produces righteous leaders, the reasoning goes, and only righteous leaders can create a righteous system of government: ergo, the founders of this great nation must have been great believers. And if we have fallen on hard times, this can be only because we have lost our belief in the goodness of being good, our "religion." Yet the fact of the matter is that the history of ideas moved in exactly the opposite direction.

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The transcendental conception of morality is deeply flawed, even self-contradictory, a kind of hallucination conjured out of common misconceptions about the nature of self, mind, and freedom.

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The radical philosophy from which America's founders drew their ideas of virtue therefore set about to demolish and replace the common idea of morality. Radical philosophy says, in a nutshell, that virtue is happiness; that acts of understanding, not acts of faith, are the foundation of morality; and that the public good is nothing but the private good perspicuously understood.

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Belief in God, the soul, and otherworldly authorities offers only a simulacrum of morality, often quite at odds with the thing itself. Otherworldly religion is not the cure for nihilism but a symptom of it. It has nothing to do with good government: virtuous people are the consequence, not the cause, of virtuous government.

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Call this radical ethical philosophy the "immanent" conception of morality. It wasn't popular at the time of the Revolution and is far from universally accepted today. Yet it had influence enough at the time to make possible the creation of the American Republic, and it remains the best way to make sense of moral life.

30-plus days into Headspace meditation, I'm liking it a lot

A bit over a month ago I discovered Headspace, which was founded by Andy Puddicombe, a British guy who trained as a Buddhist monk before starting this online meditation site.

My first free trial experience on July 7 led me to write "Yikes! I actually like a guided Headspace meditation."

I'm not a big fan of guided meditations. Usually they irk more than relax me. I get annoyed with the (usually) New Age'y tone of the person doing the guiding.

Hey, if anybody is going to annoy me while I meditate, I'm perfectly capable of filling that role myself. After about 45 years of daily meditation, that's one thing I've learned from contemplating the workings of my mind.

(Maybe the only thing... but at least that's one thing.)

A few minutes ago, though, I actually enjoyed a ten minute guided meditation. Listening on my laptop while sitting outside on our deck, I made it through the first Headspace lesson with essentially zero annoyance.

With the aid of a discount "coupon" code I found through the grace of the great god Google, after trying out ten free 10-minute guided meditations I decided to sign up for a full year's worth of Headspace. I think the cost was around $70-80. 

Seemed like a fair price for enlightenment. Which isn't really what I'm after, though. Not now, in my current churchless frame of mind.

For about thirty-five years I used to meditate from an hour to two and a half hours a day, using a mixture of mantra meditation and open awareness techniques. I gained a lot from all that meditating. However, I'm finding the Headspace approach to be more appealing.

Again, for the person I am now.

Before, I was very mystically inclined. I believed it was possible to detach my consciousness from my bodily being and enter higher supernatural realms of reality. The Sant Mat meditation I practiced was founded on a theology that viewed this world as an illusion, a pale reflection of much more vibrant spiritual dimensions.

Over time I grew disenchanted with this dualistic philosophy. Not only wasn't there any demonstrable evidence that it was true, it didn't even make sense. 

Sant Mat taught that supposedly the lower mental and physical realms of creation were under the control of a Negative Power, Kal, who -- yeah, I know this sounds really weird -- stood on one foot for eons, impressing "God" (Sat Purush) so much he got the right to oversee our universe.

Which means our goal should be to get out of this wretched dump of materiality and become pure soul again. Psychologically, this isn't a healthy way to live. I knew quite a few Sant Mat devotees who were disgusted with their own body and mind, seeing them as obstacles to becoming a pristine spiritual being.

By contrast, Puddicombe's Headspace meditations are pleasingly here-and-now centered. I've completed the first 30 days of guided meditations. This unlocked the full panoply of Headspace content. I'm now into a Self-Esteem series. 

A recent New Yorker article, "The Higher Life," describes how trendy mindfulness is in today's high tech world, and how the Headspace approach to meditation has become so popular. The piece is well worth reading in its entirety.

Here's a description by author Lizzie Widdicombe (interesting that she wrote about Andy Puddicombe) of how her Headspace experience went.

The basics of mindfulness meditation are easy to find—you can download instructions from the Web. But, Puddicombe told Brzezinski at THRIVE, “I liken it to driving a car. It’s helpful to have someone sit there with you at first.” With noise-cancelling headphones, the app creates a surprisingly intimate experience—Puddicombe could be whispering in your ear.

He starts each session with a “checking in” routine, the contemplative equivalent of buckling your seat belt and adjusting the rearview mirror. He tells you to take a few deep breaths, to notice any background noise (instead of blocking it out, or screaming at its creator to shut up), and to become aware of “the different physical sensations . . . the weight of the body, the contact between the body and the chair.”

Slowly, he draws attention to your breath, which you count in sets of ten. Puddicombe savors the breath the way some people do wine. He talks about it appreciatively, pointing out its protozoan wisdom (“Remember, the body knows how to breathe”), its soothing rhythm, its oceanic rise and fall.

The seconds pass slowly. You seem to drop, briefly, into another dimension—the realm of quiet walks and kindergarten nap time. Like travel, the chief boon of meditation might be the way that it throws the place you came from into relief.

I’d never noticed what an incredible racket was going on in my mind: to-do lists, scraps of conversation, ancient memories. Sometimes Puddicombe’s voice would register as a distant peep. As calm set in, I’d occasionally achieve a few seconds of relaxed concentration—the meditative grail—which felt as if I were walking on a balance beam.

Just as often, I’d lose the thread and nod off completely, or begin composing angry e-mails. Puddicombe’s voice would interject. “It’s perfectly normal to be distracted,” he’d say. “Just bring the attention gently back to the breath.”

Puddicombe's Headspace guided meditations are, bluntly put, Buddhism without the bullshit.

Meaning, without the religious'y stuff that turns me off about traditional Buddhism. Karma. Rebirth. Eightfold path. Dharma. I think the Buddha correctly recognized some important facts about how the human mind works.

But he didn't have the benefit of our modern scientific understandings.

Sure, Buddhism's contention that we don't have a self or soul in the sense most people believe they do -- a steadfast ongoing ethereal consciousness largely or entirely distinct from the workings of the physical brain -- is remarkably consistent with 21st century neuroscience.

This doesn't mean that the rest of Buddhism deserves to be incorporated into someone's meditation practice. I was pleased to see in the article that Headspace irks some traditional Buddhists. 

Mindfulness and Meditation are only two of eight life-style choices that the Buddha instructed his followers to practice, in order to break free from the cycle of suffering and rebirth. The others involve a code of ethics. They include Right Understanding, Right Motivation, Right Livelihood (not making a living in a way that harms other beings), Right Action (not killing or hurting people), Right Speech, and Right Effort (diligence).

To pluck some things from the list, while ignoring others, strikes many Buddhists as absurd. McMahan said, “It would be as if somebody went to the Catholic Church and said, ‘I don’t buy all this stuff about Jesus and God, but I really dig this Communion ritual. Would you just teach me how to do that bit? Oh, and I want to start a company marketing wafers.’ ”

Well, if someone doesn't want to embrace the whole Buddhist thing, or the whole Catholic thing, or the whole thing of any other religion, there's nothing wrong with picking and choosing the parts they do like. 

Mindfulness and meditation really don't have anything to do with theology or supernatualism. All that counts is if these mental exercises have positive effects, in the same way as physical exercises do.

A final observation: during my more than three decades as a member of a mystical spiritual organization, I was struck by how many people in the group really didn't progress much as caring, compassionate, calm, centered human beings.

They were so focused on getting out of this world and entering a hypothetical "heaven," they pretty much ignored what it takes to be a normal happy, healthy person.  The term Spiritual Bypassing nicely captures their condition -- which I shared to some extent.

Spiritual bypass is a defense mechanism. Although the defense looks a lot prettier than other defenses, it serves the same purpose. Spiritual bypass shields us from the truth, it disconnects us from our feelings, and helps us avoid the big picture. It is more about checking out than checking in—and the difference is so subtle that we usually don't even know we are doing it.

The shorthand for spiritual bypass is grasping rather than gratitude, arriving rather than being, avoiding rather than accepting. It is spiritual practice in the service of repression, usually because we can not tolerate what we are feeling, or think that we shouldn't be experiencing what we are feeling.

The Headspace guided meditations are completely different from this.

They're about being here, not somewhere else. About being who we are, not someone else. About being in the present moment, not sometime else. 

1000 musical fans of Foo Fighters display religion-like devotion

I'm not a religious person. But I respond to emotional displays of devotion that have a sort of religious quality to them.

Such as this wonderful video of a thousand musicians and singers assembling in an Italian field to play the Foo Fighters "Learn to Fly" -- with the goal of getting the band to put on a concert in Cesena, Italy.

 

I was moved by the video. And I'm not even a fan of the Foo Fighters. 

We humans are social animals. We enjoy getting together with other people and doing stuff. We also enjoy watching masses of humans do that stuff. Or watch people who are watching other people do stuff, which is one of the appeals of viewing a football game in a 100,000 seat stadium.

Religions tap into this universal proclivity of Homo sapiens. So did the organizer of this event. At the end of the video he talks about his year-long effort to get a thousand people to play "Learn to Fly" together. 

It worked.

Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters promised that he would come to Cesena. This is a much greater accomplishment than the unanswered prayers of countless Christians for Jesus to return in a second coming. 

The Foo Fighters are going to make a first coming to Cesena. Devotional mission accomplished.

The Rockin' 1000 event was organized last year by Fabio Zaffagnini, who described the performance as a "huge, huge miracle." Zaffagnini used crowdfunding to raise more than $50,000 for the performance, with the hope that it would convince Dave Grohl and his bandmates to hold a concert in Cesena. It seems to have worked. The band later tweeted a link to the video, writing: "Ci vediamo a presto, Cesena," which means "See you soon, Cesena."

Of course, the organizer of the event benefitted from the Foo Fighters actually existing, compared to God and Jesus, who almost certainly don't.

[Note: nit-pickers left comments on the You Tube video, which has over 18 million views, saying -- probably correctly -- that the actual event couldn't have sounded like this, because the audio almost certainly contains just a few drummers, guitar players, and singers, not all 1,000 people.

OK. So what? It's still a great video. We all shade reality to our own liking. It's only when we fool ourselves into believing that the unreal is really real, as religions do, that problems arise.]