Church of the Churchless

How could a guru who knows he is a fake be a "good person?"

Here's a mildly-edited email from someone who asked me some provocative questions about Charan Singh, a Radha Soami Satsang Beas guru who I was initiated by in 1971, after which I followed his teachings for about 35 years. 

This person apparently sent me an email, rather than posting the message as a blog post comment, because he thought I might be offended by what he said about Charan Singh. 

Since I'm not -- and in fact enjoyed the message a lot -- I'm sharing it here. Following the message, I share my response to the questions about Charan Singh.

Dear Brian,

I was just now going to put in a comment asking you something, but I thought it might be better to write an email instead.  It is clear that, notwithstanding your disillusionment with RSSB, you still have a great deal of affection and respect for your Guru, Charan Singh.  And what I’m asking may seem disrespectful to Charan Singh, at least apparently, although I need hardly add that disrespecting him is not my intention at all.  

Anyway, whatever, I thought it better to write a private email to you, asking you about this, instead of posting on your blog a public comment that apparently calls out someone you still hold in affection and regard.

You say this in response to a reader in the Comments section : “Jen, currently I believe Charan Singh was a good person who did his job as Guru the best he could.  I don’t believe he possessed any divine qualities.  He was appointed to be the RSSB guru.  As a faithful disciple, he carried out that role diligently.”

How do you square those two apparently contradictory views about Charan Singh?  How could he have colluded in this hoodwinking of innocent followers, and still have been a “good person”?

See, a follower or a disciple can be mistaken.  But surely Charan Singh himself knew that he was not the “God in Human Form” (if indeed he wasn’t)?  There is no question of doubt there.  I may be unsure of YOUR status as the Big Sound personified, but not about MYSELF, surely?

This recalls a piece you’d written long back, about Jesus being one of the four Ls (Legend, Lord, Lunatic, or Liar).  With Charan Singh, the Legend option does not hold, right?  So if he wasn’t the Lord, and if he wasn’t a Lunatic, then he surely has to be a Liar?  A cheat?  And a liar is not a good person, a cheat is not a good person!  Unless you mean it in the sense of smuggler-or-thief-or-killer-or-swindler-with-a-heart-of-gold, something like that?  (And I’m guessing you don’t really mean it in that back-handed and snide way!)

Had he been fully honest, Charan Singh would have left people in no doubt at all that he was not “God in Human Form”.   An honest person in his place would have screamed from the roof-tops, a hundred times, a thousand times, again and again till people listened, that he was NOT “God in Human Form”.  You know, like Jiddu Krishnamurty dismantled his Star organization, and relinquished his gilded God-throne.  But no, what did Charan Singh do?  He colluded with that GiHF trope, implicitly if not explicitly he left his devotees with that idea, that he was indeed GiHF, that he was indeed some kind of a superhuman.

You say he “carried out the role diligently”, “as a faithful disciple”.  Why would he do that?  Before he became Guru, I can understand his acquiescing to the organization’s dictates ; but what about after he became Guru?  Why on earth would he agree to continue with the bullshit, after knowing fully well that it was bullshit fair and square?  A full-on disciple might collude in something that seems unclear or wrong to him, because he thinks he himself is mistaken or unknowing, and he’s assuming (or hoping) that his Guru is the Big Sound, or Son of God, or whatever.  

But after someone has been appointed the Big Sound (or Son of God) himself, then he can have no doubt that he is living a lie, can he?  Maybe in the initial days or first few months, he may still be in doubt, maybe he’s thinking, ah, early days yet, perhaps I’ll be hit with divine light soon now.  But when well into his tenure as Guru, he still does not clearly and decisively declare to one and all that he is NOT who his followers think he is, then he is either truly divine (or thinks he is, although he isn’t actually, which would point at delusions, at psychiatric illness), or else he is a dishonest dissembler.

How do you reconcile your opinion that Charan Singh was not divine, with your assessment of him as a “good person”, given your opinion that he was NOT GiHF?  Your position does not seem quite logically consistent, at least not when one takes those words at face value.

P.S.  Like I said earlier, I mean no disrespect at all to Charan Singh.  Nor is this an idle question. (Not, of course, that there’s anything wrong as such with idle questions!)  I myself currently follow (or try to) three different spiritual traditions (just their respective meditation techniques, without necessarily subscribing to all the surrounding mumbo-jumbo of theology and rituals).  One of these three traditions is theistic, and makes claims for one individual as the Big Noise (much like RSSB does).  

Now I try to keep a fully open mind (or so I hope), even as I seek my (experiential) answers via these three traditions, and this gentleman is, to my mind, either truly a Big Noise, or else he is not quite honest.  I don’t see a third way out (other than the “lunatic” option).  Hence my question to you about how you see your ex-Guru Charan Singh.  I’m seeking your personal answer to a question that is very close (at least potentially) to my own personal position, so as to help me arrive at my own personal answer to my own personal question.

Well, here's my basic answer to the question posed to me: How could Charan Singh have colluded in this hoodwinking of innocent followers, and still have been a “good person”?

I've pondered this quite a bit over the years.

Charan Singh was supposed to be God in Human Form, someone who possessed divine powers, such as being able to transcend ordinary space/time and journey to higher regions of reality, along with possessing the ability to communicate with each and every disciple through his astral or causal "radiant" form.

I agree with the message above that it is virtually 100% certain that Charan Singh wasn't who the guru was claimed to be. And since Charan Singh knew himself from the inside, seemingly he would have known that he wasn't God in Human Form with divine powers. 

So how could a seemingly kind, honest, and generous Indian man, Charan Singh, allow himself to essentially live a lie for the 39 years he served as the Radha Soami Satsang Beas guru?

I've come to two possible hypotheses. They're described in blog posts. One is that Charan Singh was a loyalist, as I said back in 2006 in "Who is the guru?"

So I muse over my recollections of Charan Singh and Gurinder Singh, trying to decide whether they’re best described as liars, lunatics, or the Lord.

None of the three appellations seem to fit, lunatic least of all. Each of them clearly was/is of sound mind (Charan Singh died in 1990). They could be liars, but their essential good-heartedness and decency argues against this. On the other hand, their evident imperfections prevent me from grabbing onto the “Lord” hypothesis.

Is there another L-word that better fills the bill? One springs to mind: loyalist. Perhaps when a successor is appointed to fill the shoes of a highly-regarded guru, loyalty both to his predecessor and to the surrounding organization prevents the newcomer from crying out, “Hey, I’m not God! I’m just a man filling the role of a guru.”

The other possibility involves another L-word, as I said in a 2015 post, "Let's add a new L-word to 'Who is the guru?' possibilities."

But an essay by Michael Shermer in his Scientific American "Skeptic" column suggests another possibility. In "Lies We Tell Ourselves: How Deception Leads to Self-Deception," Shermer says:

Trivers’s theory adds an evolutionary explanation to my own operant conditioning model to explain why psychics, mediums, cult leaders, and the like probably start off aware that a modicum of deception is involved in their craft (justified in the name of a higher cause). But as their followers positively reinforce their message, they come to believe their shtick (“maybe I really can read minds, tell the future, save humanity”).

Click on the link above to read the full piece by Shermer. I'll also include it as a continuation to this post. 

Desperate to find an L-word to add to the liar, lunatic, Lord, or loyalist possibilities, the best I could come up with after a brief look at some online thesauruses was to substitute "legerdemain" for self-deception. 

It seems to fit, as rarely used as the word is.
1. sleight of hand.
2. trickery; deception.
3. any artful trick.

So let's add a likely option that answers the question, "Who is the guru?" Legerdemainist. Which actually is a word.

The guru tricks himself into believing that he (or she) is God. Or God in human form, after being viewed as divine by fawning followers. This act of self-deception further bolsters his standing among devotees, as Shermer explains.

As Abraham Lincoln well advised, “You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” Unless self-deception is involved. If you believe the lie, you are less likely to give off the normal cues of lying that others might perceive: deception and deception detection create self-deception.

Naturally I have no idea if Charan Singh actually tricked himself into believing that he was God in Human Form and possessed divine powers. But Michael Sherman's essay offers some good reasons why this could have been the case.

Everybody is prone to self-deception. Why not gurus also? 

The "self" is like a web without a spider

Self... who am I? Will... who controls what I do? Being... do I continue on after death?

These are big questions. Humans have struggled to find answers to them from the beginning of recorded history, and surely long before that. 

Most people accept a view that is common to most religions: I am something other than my physical body; call it soul or spirit. I have free will; so I am responsible for my actions. I possess, or am, a non-material essence that is unaffected by physical death.

Well, maybe. 

But these answers go against the grain of modern science. Including, neuroscience. Granted, the answers are intuitively appealing. This doesn't make them correct, though. 

In the final chapter of "The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why it Matters," psychologists Daniel Wegner and Kurt Gray address the question of The Self. 

Interestingly, answering this question correctly makes the three questions I started with disappear. Or at least, appear much easier to answer. Why? Because if us humans don't have the sort of self we believe we do, what we are is pretty damn obvious:

A web without a spider.

This also is what the cosmos is. In fact, it is what everything in existence is.

Wegner and Gray don't venture into this far-out philosophical territory, but it is a valid conclusion given what science knows about big bang cosmology, evolution, quantum physics, relativity theory, ecology, biology, and many other disciplines.

Here's how The Self chapter of "The Mind Club", and thus the entire book, ends. Wegner and Gray echo the many other books I've read about modern neuroscience and psychology.

It's a beautiful way of looking at the world, once one gets over the resistance to not being a spider, and accepts being simply an integral part of the web.

Daniel Dennett makes an elegant analogy between the self and the center of gravity. Any object with mass -- whether a bowl, a piece of lumber, or even a brain -- has a mathematical center, a precise location that would allow you to balance that object if you were to put it on a pointed stake. 

However, this center of gravity is not a "thing" that exists independently of all the stuff around it, and if you took apart the object, you would never find a separate little object that is the center of gravity.

The self is a lot like that -- it's just the theoretical point that lies at the center of all your mental experiences, memories, thoughts, feelings, sensations, goals, desires, and personal relationships. 

"You" is like a web without a spider, a collection of memories, thoughts, desires, and feelings that is fragile and tenuous and yet still glimmers in the sunshine of perception. 

Or perhaps a better, if less elegant, analogy is that the self is like particleboard, that mainstay of affordable furniture. To all appearances particleboard is hard and very real, and like the self, it can -- metaphorically -- bear the weight of other people, break if struck too hard, and has sharp points that can hurt others.

It is also fundamentally separate from other pieces of of particleboard. However, upon closer inspection you would see that this material is merely a collection of little fibers pressed together and bound with glue. If you placed separate pieces of particleboard in a pool of water, the glue would slowly dissolve until all the fibers separated and floated together, completely intermingling.

In the case of your mind, the glue that binds together your memories -- the fibers of your past experiences -- is the fact that they happened to the same body, the same collection of cells that looks back at you in the mirror every morning.

Despite the ultimate uncertainty surrounding the question of other minds, it is likely that everyone you know has the same powerful emotions and deep thoughts as you do. 

Unfortunately, your own collection of memories, thoughts, and feelings -- your mind -- prevents you from truly appreciating that fact. Being one mind prevents you from truly appreciating the minds of others. This is perhaps the deepest of paradoxes from the mind club.

Being trapped in our own minds prevents us from fundamentally connecting with others, and there is no way to escape our own minds. We are forever a point of view: even if we lose our memories, meditate away our desires, and quiet our constant quest for mental control, we are still a source of perception.

But recognizing this fact provides the secret to transcending ourselves as much as we possibly can. By understanding that we perceive the world instead of understanding it directly, we can realize not only that the self is fragile and that free will is an illusion but also that other minds can be both more and less than they appear. 

Through our odyssey of mysterious minds ranging from dogs to gods, we have seen that all the minds around us -- and our very self -- rest upon perception. 

Nevertheless, these perceptions have the psychological force of raw reality and are what compel us to love and to hate, to harm and to protect. The idea of the "mind club" could be interpreted as meaning that these perceptions of mind are not objectively real, but we suggest that they are the only thing that is real. 

We are perceivers, and from the perspective of perceivers, our perceptions are all we have, and that makes solid the ethereal. As the Buddha said, "Things are not as they are seen, nor are they otherwise." We couldn't agree more.

"Free will isn't. Existence is." My hoped-for TEDx talk.

Well, it's time for my third annual TEDxSalem speaker application.

I was rejected in 2014 and 2015, having pitched Grand Talks About The Cosmos that, obviously, didn't strike the speaker selection committee as being such marvelously interesting topics as I considered them to be.

Noting that the deadline for prospective speakers to apply for the 2016-17 event was coming up on April 18, I decided to pitch another talk idea. This time, Free will isn't. Existence is.

If nothing else, another TEDxSalem rejection will add to my Tortured Artist (or Misunderstood Genius) resume.

In my old age, well, more accurately, my even older age, I can picture myself sitting at the end of a bar, or better, an Oregon cannabis smoking lounge (once they're legal), drowning my tortured artist/misunderstood genius woes with mind-altering substances, telling whoever will listen about my brilliant ideas that have been rejected by an uncaring world not yet ready for The Truth As Known By Me.

Here's how I answered the question, "What would your TEDxSalem talk be about?  What is your 'idea worth spreading?' What revolution do you want to start in our community? Describe your talk."

"Free will doesn't exist." This is a revolutionary neuroscientific fact that hasn't yet been widely embraced. Like Darwin's Theory of Evolution, or Copernicus' sun-centered cosmology, it will take time for the massive implications of this unsettling understanding to be fully understood.

Criminal justice, personal relations, social welfare programs, politics, conceptions of self-awareness -- these all have to be looked at in a new light under the glow of "Free will doesn't exist." And a closely-related fact: The brain is us.

While many people will initially feel chilled when the comforting blanket of illusory free will is taken away by modern science, the warmth of a philosophically unarguable proposition remains: Existence is.

Almost certainly there is no independent conscious will guiding things on either the cosmic or individual level. "Stuff just happens" is a pithy three word encapsulization of the best 21st century understanding of both the world outside and inside of our heads.

But with this realization comes peace of mind, love, interconnectedness, awe at the endless workings of the laws of nature via cause and effect. Once our mind is blown by the fact, "Free will doesn't exist," we are open (not free!) to explore the many positive implications of this revolutionary worldview.

Damn, I'd find this talk super fascinating!

I guess I could just give the talk to myself, if my application is rejected. Or re-read some of my blog posts on the subjects of Free Will Isn't and Existence Is. Here's a sampling:

Free Will Isn't -- here, here, here, and here

Existence Is -- here, here, here, and here

No dragon in the garage. Also, no God in heaven.

I so love it when someone writes a book that says stuff I've been saying on this blog for a long time. Except he says it even better. 

Which explains why I'm liking Paul Singh's "The Great Illusion: The Myth of Free Will, Consciousness, and the Self" so much.

Singh is a scientifically-minded professor of obstetrics and gynecology who was raised in the Sikh religious tradition, and believed in Indian forms of spirituality/healing for a long time.

Until, he saw the light of reality.

Here's an excerpt from his book that speaks to an oft-spoken theme in my blog posts. It is up to religious believers to offer evidence that God exists, not to skeptics to come up with evidence that God doesn't exist.

Carl Sagan's tale of "A fire breathing Dragon lives in my garage" is a perfect example of how those who make scientifically unfalsifiable claims try to shift the burden of proof to others by special pleading at every step of the way.

Someone tells you there is a dragon in his garage. So you take a look in the garage and you don't see any dragon. He tells you the dragon is invisible.

So you decide to spread some flour on the garage floor to detect the dragon's foot prints, but there are none. And so it goes. Your friend will always have an excuse as to why there is no evidence that there is a dragon in his garage.

You tell your friend that there is no evidence that there is a dragon in his garage. But he tells you that you can't prove there isn't. And he is right, you can't prove there isn't a dragon in the garage.

But that is precisely the point of Sagan's tale. The burden of proof is not on you to prove anything. The burden of proof is on the person who makes the claims about the dragon. It is his responsibility to provide evidence for the dragon.

And he can't provide any because there isn't any. And you can't prove his claim wrong because his claim is unfalsifiable. And it is unfalsifiable because it makes no predictions about what you will perceive when you look in the garage. 

Such unfalsifiable claims are nonsense.

This is how all superstition, pseudo-science, and religion works. Believers in such things make extraordinary claims that cannot be falsified. And when they are forced to admit that they don't have any evidence to support their claims, they respond by saying that you cannot prove that they are wrong.

But, again, the burden of proof is on the person making the extraordinary claim about miracles or UFOs or whatever to provide evidence for their claim. The burden of proof is not on the other person to prove them wrong -- something that is absolutely impossible to do given that their claim is unfalsifiable.

The take home lesson is that we should never believe a claim to be true simply because no one can prove it to be false. Theologians are experts at this kind of nonsense. 

Are delusional people making things up? Evidence shows that the human brain is universally delusional in many ways and therefore people who promote superstitions are not particularly more delusional than the rest of us.

It is just that examples of religious delusions are rather classic examples of how the brain creates illusions and delusions. The use of logic and scientific skepticism is a skill that can be used to overcome the limitations of our own brains. 

This skill is like any other skill such as learning to play the piano. It involves training in metacognition as well as basic education in all basic sciences.

The relief of no longer believing in religion

Amazingly, and not a little scarily for me, I've written 2,194 Church of the Churchless posts since I started this blog in 2004. 

I've covered lots of subjects. But an important topic hasn't gotten much attention from me. It's difficult to write about, being elusive, slippery, exceedingly personal, difficult to describe.

What it feels like to (obviously) be the same person I was when I embraced a religion, yet now being a person who doesn't believe in what once was so important to me.

It was difficult to compose those italicized words. Elucidating what they mean... even tougher. 

I guess a word in the title of this post sums up the difference between Religious Me and Non-Religious Me. 

Relief. 

I could have said "relaxation." Relief, relaxation -- yes, that's a pretty good description of the wordless feeling I'm enjoying now.

I'm not saying that I didn't have a sense of relief and relaxation back in my true-believing years (about 35 of them).

But this was more like feeling relieved that I knew which path led to the summit of Mt. Divinity, given how many alternative religious ways there are in this world: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and so on.

My way was The Way. Or so I believed. Just like virtually every other religious believer does. 

So it felt good to supposedly be on the one and only genuine path to God-realization. However, there was a tension that never left me during those 35 years of believing:

Feeling the difference between here and there, now and then, the person I needed to become and the person I was.

Religions describe this difference in various ways. Christianity, for example, considers that humans are sinful. Both original sin and non-original sin need to be washed away through believing in the salvation power of Jesus, good works, prayer, and such. 

(Never having been much of a Christian, I'm a bit vague on how this saving-stuff works.)

Eastern religions, which I'm much more familiar with, believe in something similar. They just call it "karma" rather than "sin." Karmas of countless lives need to cleared away before humans can enjoy union with God, Brahman, Universal Consciousness, or some other form of divinity.

Whether Western or Eastern, religiosity and tension go together. 

There's a problem at the root of Life. The problem needs to be fixed. This takes work. Devotion, prayer, meditation, virtuous morality, service to others. The list of religious practices goes on and on.

It's a big relief to have that weight lifted off of my psyche. In my current churchless state, naturally I still have problems. However, they are everyday life problems, not existential problems which I once thought would determine the fate of my eternal soul.

That's pressure -- feeling that if I didn't meditate correctly, wasn't sufficiently devoted to the guru who would guide me home to God, failed to follow strict lifestyle guidelines like vegetarianism and not drinking alcohol, I'd remain separated from the glory of divinity.

I enjoy feeling like an ordinary person now.

I go about daily life dealing with what comes up. I no longer worry about whether I'm living up to the high standards the religion I once believed in set up for me. 

Well, I realize that what I've said probably won't resonate with those who still believe. I say this in part because of the 31,344 comments I've gotten on those 2,194 blog posts I've written during the past twelve years.

Quite a few of those comments accused me of being a quitter; of being bitter; of being obsessed with criticizing the path I once was on.

None of that is true. I'm happier now. I'm more relaxed now. I feel a sense of relief now. Hope this post helps explain why.