Church of the Churchless

Why God is an illusion, along with other supernatural stuff

Here's a perplexing question: Why are so many people convinced that they've had an experience of God, or some other supernatural entity, when there is no demonstrable proof that these things exist?

Are these people lying? Some probably are, but not all. So the most likely explanation is that they've fooled themselves into believing that their divine experience was real.

How this happens is one of the subjects psychiatrist Ralph Lewis discusses in his fascinating book, "Finding Purpose in a Godless World: Why We Care Even if the Universe Doesn't." 

I've just started reading this book,  but can tell that I'm going to enjoy it a lot. Here's some excerpts from the initial 60 pages.

It is said that seeing is believing. But actually believing is seeing -- we often see what we believe to be there, misinterpreting our senses in illusory ways. Moreover, our senses are sometimes susceptible to complete hallucinations, creating perceptions out of nothing at all.

When people experience perceptions of non-actual reality, the last thing they are willing or able to believe is that those perceptions could have been due to their own brain malfunctioning -- their mind playing tricks on them...We give our subjective experience too much credence.

...Clearly we find our own subjective perceptions arrestingly compelling and are more willing to doubt the laws of physics than to doubt our own minds. People underestimate the capacity of our brains to create their own convincing realities.

They underestimate how powerfully realistic some dissociative experiences, hallucinations, and other well-recognized mental/neural misperceptions can seem. Come and sit in my office for a week and listen to people argue passionately (and even seemingly rationally) that their demonstrably implausible perceptions are real.

Then judge for yourself which explanation is more plausible -- that the bizarre experiences that you will hear described are actually real, or that the human brain can easily fool us into believing weird things.

...A scientifically valid hypothesis must therefore be constructed in such a way that the potential for it to be falsified is built into the hypothesis itself. In other words, it should be a hypothesis that is testable and that lays itself open to the challenge of potentially being proven wrong.

The hypothesis that all swans are white is falsifiable by finding a swan that is not white. In contrast, a hypothesis that there exists a green swan is unfalsifiable: it cannot be undermined by evidence because it is structured in such a way that it cannot be definitively disproved, no matter how many swans we find that are not green.

Supernatural and superstitious beliefs are almost invariably structured as unfalsifiable hypotheses. The existence of God is the green swan hypothesis. 

Psychiatric delusions are often also structured this way: the delusional person explains away evidence that contradicts the delusion by expanding and elaborating the delusion with additional layers of explanation.

For example, the doctor who points out the impossibility of the paranoid conspiracy against the patient must be one of the conspirators. Delusions typically cannot be reasoned away. 

I've got a new non-religious "mantra"

I don't believe in mantras any more, having found the wisdom to deconvert from an Indian philosophy that espoused repeating some supposedly holy words silently in one's head not only during meditation, but as much as possible throughout the day.

Looking back, this was a ridiculous thing to do. 

A mantra essentially mesmerizes the brain, distracting the repeater of a mantra from being fully aware of what is happening both in the world outside and inside of them. 

It's a way of denying reality. Often a mantra is believed to have some sort of supernatural power, which of course is a bunch of crap. 

As noted recently in a blog post, mindfulness has become my meditation.

I want to experience the world as fully as possible, not as I'd like it to be, or as I imagine it to be, but as it actually is -- insofar as I, or anyone else, is able to do this, given the inherent limitations of a subjective consciousness attempting to comprehend an objective reality.

So I have a new "mantra" that isn't really a mantra, because I only say it to myself a few times a day. It's more like an adage, a reminder of what I value as I go about my daily doings.

I am a child of the present moment, who finds delight in small things.

Those words came to me pretty much full-blown while I was exercising at our athletic club. Since, I've tinkered with the wording a bit, and enjoy how this adage currently sounds. 

It's essentially self-explanatory, but I'm pleased do some explaining of it nonetheless.

I am a child of the present moment isn't original. I recall that I first read those words in a Rumi book, at a time when I devoured every English language book about Rumi's writings that I could find.

Translator William Chittick speaks of a well-known saying, "The Sufi is the child of the present moment."

However, I don't view this saying as Chittick describes it: "which is to say that a Sufi lives with the awareness of God's presence at every moment." Since I don't believe in God, obviously it doesn't make sense to imagine the presence of a non-existent being.

Instead, I simply do my best to be aware of what is before me at every moment. Naturally I still remember the past and envision the future, but I try to keep in mind that those remembrances and envisionings also are part of the present moment. 

Everything is. There's nothing other than the present moment. How could there be?

I added who finds delight in small things to remind myself that it's senseless to keep looking for Big Wonderful Things that are either physically far-off, or might appear in the future. 

Sure, there's nothing wrong with Big Wonderful Things: a vacation in Hawaii, a new car, falling in love, the birth of a child, getting a promotion, winning the lottery. But most things in life are much smaller.

Enjoying a cup of coffee. Taking a walk in nature. Writing a blog post. Reading a magazine in a hot bath while sipping a glass of wine. (These are things that I find delight in every day.)

For many years, decades really, I was filled with a sense of spiritual grandiosity.

I believed that I was on a path that would lead to knowledge of ultimate reality, which lay in a supernatural realm distant from this physical world. I thought that not only was God on my side in this quest, but so was a guru who was God in Human Form.

Weird ideas? For sure. I'm glad I've left them behind.

Now I'm content with small things, everyday things, simple things. I aspire to becoming more childlike even as I grow older, since children have a marvelous ability to find playful pleasure in ordinary objects. My adage is an aspiration that serves as a compass heading for me when I'm tempted to veer off into old grandiose habits.

I am a child of the present moment, who finds delight in small things. 

Works for me. And probably only for me, since everyone has to find their own meaning.

Thoughts about enlightenment from a Church of the Churchless visitor

I like to hear from people who read my blog posts -- especially when what they say is supportive of my churchless un-preaching.

Here's an email message that I got today from John. After I asked if I could share his message, he said "sure." I like John's perspective on things. He and I carry on a fairly regular correspondence. 

Hey Brian.  Wow.  I really enjoyed reading your latest post on enlightenment!  To me, that is so freeing!  I’ve pretty much come to the same conclusion.

There is a lot of pressure involved in trying to become “enlightened”.  You know what I mean?  In my Christian days, it was either trying to walk in the spirit and not in the flesh, or trying to be more like Jesus, or not sinning, or whatever.  Then you get into, what is sin?  There are the biggies; don’t kill, steal, cheat, lie, etc. 

But some believe that wearing shorts is a sin.  Or having musical instruments in the church is a sin.  And so forth.  Depending on how strict the group was, we never would consistently live up to that and we just felt bad a lot of the time.  So you mix the stress of just living everyday life on this planet with chasing enlightenment or salvation or whatever… And it really can become unbearable.

I haven’t really consciously chased enlightenment that I can remember.  From what I’ve read, it’s hard to get two people to agree on what exactly enlightenment is or what it means. 

Some say it’s the cessation of suffering.  Others say it’s some kind of realization and living out of your “God self”.  Both of these are pretty vague.  LOL  Others say it’s just being present or mindful.  I guess in that case, you can have moments of enlightenment? 

Kind of like you said in your post;

…some Buddhists view enlightenment as being totally immersed and accepting of the present moment. I, and everyone else, am capable of doing this. Not always, but often. So this makes me "enlightened" at times, along with everybody else in the world."

Also from your current post, I read this and went, Yes!

Because there is no way to tell whether someone is enlightened. This is an intellectual concept made up by certain religions and spiritual paths to justify their specialness. They've made up a word, "enlightenment," then claimed that if devotees do such and such, they can become enlightened.

Whatever that is.

That’s so true!  It’s almost like marketing.  LOL  If you join us, and do our thing, you can become more enlightened than the other guys...  And I love the addition of, “Whatever that is”.  

I’ve gone through periods of reading a lot, so I can’t remember who said this or the exact wording. 

But it went something like, you can have various experiences for various reasons.  One experience may even seem like what you think is enlightenment.  But don’t try to hang on to any of them, including what you thought was enlightenment.  Experiences come and go.  Let them come and go.

Another one said that when you think a person is enlightened, ask their spouse if that is true.  LOL

I guess all these different opinions and points of view keep the world a more interesting place.  If we all believed the same thing, I guess it would be boring.  Right? 

But I am grateful for the, what I would consider, solid and more down to earth influences that I have had.  Whether meditation, or yoga, or tai chi, it seems that most of the books that I’ve read and people I’ve practiced with have all stressed being here and now.  Not chasing some undefinable enlightenment. 

I look at these things as simply tools that help me get through life a little more smoothly.  When I’m meditating on a regular basis and practicing tai chi as well, I do seem to handle stress better, respond to difficult situations better, etc.  But I don’t really see it as a spiritual thing, like many of my friends do. 

The general idea of many folks that I know is that when you do some kind of “spiritual” practice, then you live more out of your spirit man than you do this earthly man. 

Well, I no longer think that I’m divided like that.  I think what you see is what you get.  When I do my practice, I just think that my mind is less cluttered and distracted, and my body is more relaxed, so it’s just naturally easier to process life in a way that seems a little smoother.  If that makes sense?  

Thanks again for the great posts. 

I hope you and yours are doing well.

John

"Enlightenment" is a meaningless concept

Over on this post of mine there's been a comment conversation about enlightenment. "JB" left this cogent comment, which I agree with.

Tim Rimmer said: "Wasn't that the nature of the Buddha’s realisation? - All is Dukkha, yet ‘one’ is able to remove/get past it?"

That one is able to remove/get past suffering is unadulterated mythology. The hero, the savior, the enlightened person- these are all variations on a theme. This is the mythical theme that has encapsulated humankind's greatest hope. It is a dead giveaway that the "enlightened masters" are all from the ancient past. Those that claim to be enlightened today are invariably discovered to have the same neuroses and foibles as the average person, sometimes far worse. Instead of realizing that enlightenment is the stuff of legend, we radically redefine enlightenment to accomodate them.

There are no enlightened beings and never were.

"Manjit" left a reply, which I found unconvincing.

Basically it was that because lots of people claim to have "enlightenment" experiences, that means there is such a thing as enlightenment. Well, lots of people claim to have been abducted by aliens, which doesn't mean this actually happens. 

Here's an excerpt from Manjit's comment.

So, are you here REALLY stating that YOU have never had any experiences of "enlightenment" or, say a "kundalini awakening" or "absorption in the sound-current" or inner "communion" with "love" or "light", or "astral projection" etc etc?

So again, Manjit is arguing that because people say there is such a thing as enlightenment, this means there is such a thing as enlightenment. Which, of course, is untrue, since people often say things that are false. (Just watch President Trump talk.)

Here's the comment I left on this subject.

The best argument against there being such a thing as "enlightenment" is that it is entirely possible and valid to have arguments about whether there's such a thing as enlightenment.

There aren't arguments about whether there are rich people, artistic people, musical people, mathematically-gifted people, lazy people, productive people, or a myriad of other kinds of people.

But there are indeed arguments about whether there are enlightened people. Why?

Because there is no way to tell whether someone is enlightened. This is an intellectual concept made up by certain religions and spiritual paths to justify their specialness. They've made up a word, "enlightenment," then claimed that if devotees do such and such, they can become enlightened.

Whatever that is.

Here's a challenge to anyone who believes that enlightenment is real. Describe how it is possible to distinguish an enlightened person from an unenlightened person.

Imagine the spiritual equivalent of a police lineup. You're presented with a dozen, or a hundred, or a thousand, or seven billion, people. Your job is to point out the "enlightened" people.

How would you do this? What questions would you ask them? What answers would you find persuasive, and why? What behaviors or actions they perform would you want to observe? Which of these behaviors or actions would show they're enlightened, and why?

My strong suspicion is that believers in the reality of enlightenment would say that this is an ineffable personal experience, or state of being, that can't be described or observed.

OK. Fair enough.

This sounds like the dreams that I have every night. Or the feelings I have throughout the day. This would make "enlightenment" one of a myriad of personal experiences that only have reality within the mind of the experiencer.

But this means that enlightenment isn't anything special. In fact, it may not even exist as a genuine subjective reality, since it could refer only to a normal state of being that certain religions or spiritual path have elevated to a special experience.

For example, some Buddhists view enlightenment as being totally immersed and accepting of the present moment. I, and everyone else, am capable of doing this. Not always, but often. So this makes me "enlightened" at times, along with everybody else in the world.

The fact that there's no agreement about what enlightenment means is strong evidence that it doesn't really exist except as a religious/spiritual concept.

"Teaching is impossible." An excerpt from The Wooden Bowl book.

People often make spirituality into something complex, argumentative, esoteric. They consider there's a right and wrong way to meditate, to worship, to live life. 

I used to be one of those people. I'm a lot less dogmatic now. 

Recently, like today, which is pretty damn recent, I've been both entertained and bemused by a rash of comments on this blog where people have been arguing about this and that. 

I enjoy those sorts of interchanges. Except when I don't. 

In those latter times, I try to remind myself of how simple spirituality can be. And how it really isn't necessary to bring in that often-contentious word, spirituality. 

Why not just say, how simple life can be.

I've started reading The Wooden Bowl, a book recommended to me by a visitor to this blog who emails me interesting messages about what's going on in his life from time to time. 

It's out of print, but I found a used copy on Amazon that cost me just a few bucks. It took a while to arrive by media mail, but it was worth the wait. 

I really like the down-to-earth approach to meditation, and life, that the author, Clark Strand, describes. Here's the first chapter, "Teaching is Impossible."

"Meditation cannot be taught." So said my first teacher, Deh Chun, an elderly Chinese hermit who lived the last years of his life in Monteagle, Tennessee. "Only learning is possible," he said, "sometimes."

What he meant was that meditation can only be practiced. If it is taught, then, by definition, what is taught is not really meditation at all, but something else. Some method or philosophy, but not meditation itself.

When I consider the years of our association, the most remarkable thing is that I cannot recall any particular thing I learned from him. I can't point to a particular conversation we had and say, "Well, you know, then Deh Chun said such and such and everything was clear."

At the time, nothing was clear. When I think back on it now, I realize that his entire teaching consisted of being in the present moment, with nothing else whatsoever added on.

Being with Deh Chun was like dropping through a hole in everything that the world said was important -- education, progress, money, sex, prestige. It was like discovering that nothing else mattered and all I needed was now -- the moment -- to survive. 

Sitting there in the little house, listening to the water boil, to the twigs crackling in the wood stove, I was temporarily removed from the game. That was the genius of his teaching, that he could bring forth that transformation without even saying a word.

His was a state of complete simplicity. Like water, the direction of his life was downward, always seeking lower ground. When I met him he lived in a ramshackle two-room house heated by a wood stove the size of a typewriter. There was no furniture, only a few turned-over crates and several cardboard boxes in which he kept his clothes.

His bed consisted of two sawhorses on top of which he had placed a 3 x 5 sheet of plywood. and a piece of packing foam. I remember thinking once that this bed suited him perfectly, his body was so light and small.

A similar structure in the other room served as a desk for writing letters and for painting his ink-wash Chinese landscapes. Propped against the back door were spades, a shovel, and a rake, tools he used to tend a plot of land the size of two king-size beds laid end to end.

With the exception of tea, soybeans, peanut butter, molasses, and occasional wheat-flour, whatever he ate came from there.

We would sit in his little house without saying much of anything. Early on I learned that he was not disposed to give instruction in any formal way. He would serve me lunch, or sometimes breakfast if I'd managed to get there early enough, and then I'd wash up. 

Afterward we would talk about his garden, or more likely we would remain silent for a long while and then it would be time to leave.

Nowadays, in books on meditation, it has become standard practice to say that your teacher was a mirror that allowed you to see your true self. But that was not my experience with Deh Chun. It was more like floating weightless on the Dead Sea and looking up at an empty sky.

There was a feeling of tremendous peace and freedom, but that was all. I didn't know anything after I was done. Trying to pin him down on some aspect of meditation was as pointless as trying to drive a stake through the air. He taught one thing and one thing only, and that he taught to perfection: meditation happens now.

After the first few visits to his house, I realized nothing pivotal was going to happen, but I kept returning anyway without knowing what it was about him that held my attention.

I was a college student, and fairly typical of other nineteen-year-olds in that I was not particularly interested in spending time with someone four times my age. Especially someone who by ordinary standards was little better than a bum.

Deh Chun was completely simple. He lived on fifty dollars a month. He was a Buddhist monk who never spoke of Buddhism, an accomplished landscape painter who never sold his work. He wore only secondhand clothes and was without pretension of any kind. 

Long after his death, it is finally clear to me that he taught only by example. 

Recently, a friend of mind said of a certain Catholic priest, "He practices what he preaches, so he doesn't have to preach so loud." Deh Chun practiced so well he didn't have to preach at all. 

Autosuggestion plays a role in mystical experiences

There's a well-known Carl Sagan saying, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

So if someone makes a claim about having experienced a supernatural realm of reality, that extraordinary claim obviously requires extraordinary evidence in order for it to be believable.

And a related requirement is that other explanations for the supposed mystical experience should be seriously considered, since most likely an extraordinary claim actually is the result of something quite ordinary. 

To give a mundane example, when I was a young child I recall waking up in the middle of the night and seeing an intruder standing at the foot of my bed. I was terrified. Eventually I got up the courage to turn on a light. What I'd seen was my cowboy hat that I'd put on a bedpost. I was nearsighted, so I couldn't see what it was very clearly without my glasses.

Below you can read an email response I sent today to a Church of the Churchless visitor who had some questions about how I view people who claim to have had profound supernatural experiences. As you'll see, the visitor suggested two possibilities, that these people either are liars or nuts (meaning, in English slang, mentally off).

I suggested an additional possibility, autosuggestion. I didn't use that term in my response (though a commenter I quoted did), but it is basically is what I was getting at. Googling this term, I found an American Psychological Association abstract called "Hypnotic suggestion produces mystical-like experiences in the laboratory: A demonstration proof."

Here's an excerpt:

Our findings represent a demonstration proof that hypnotic suggestion can play a viable role in inducing mystical-type experiences of varying degrees among about a third of participants in a laboratory context and support the hypothesis that the ability to experience hypnotically induced mystical-type experiences varies as a function of hypnotic suggestibility.

Part of what the blog visitor was interested in was whether my decision to leave Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based spiritual organization, was affected by the lack of mystical experiences reported by RSSB devotees. I mention this because the first part of my response addresses this question. 

This is how I responded to the person. Earlier I'd pointed out to the person that this was a decidedly secondary reason for my RSSB disilusionment. I cleaned up some language in my reply that wasn't as clear as I wanted it to be upon second reading. 

Your thought experiment, “what if they’d come forward with detailed accounts of inner visions…,” is one of those counterfactual cases that (usually) strikes me as rather unproductive.

 

It assumes that life, or reality, hinges on a single happening, a single fact, and if that happening or fact had happened, rather than something else happening, then such and such would have occurred rather than this and that.

 

Obviously there is no way to test this, since reality moves only in one direction, forward in time. It’s like people saying, “What if Hillary Clinton hadn’t decided to have her own email server?” Yes, it does seem like this would have removed obstacles to her becoming president. 

 

But then we have to think about what would have made Clinton decide not to do this. Seemingly some changes would have had to occur in her consciousness, in her personality, in the advice of those around her, likely in other things also. How would those changes have affected her candidacy? 

 

Likewise, lots of satsangis having reports of profound mystical experiences wouldn’t occur in a vacuum. This would entail widespread changes in their psyches, which likely would alter the culture of RSSB/Sant Mat, and so on.

 

I understand the allure of “if only…then…” Our minds are made to think of alternative futures. That’s a strength of being human. But there are limits to retrospective ponderings of how life would have been altered if only something different had happened.

 

Regarding the choices of liars or nuts, there are other possibilities. Jesse just addressed this in a comment:

One Initiated, You are literally reading me quotes from your cult's handbook on a website written by an ex cult member. You ask about first hand experiences- "What's your take on those ? All illusions ?" And my answer is "Yes." Absolutely I think that as far as people seeing things in their head when they sit still for a few hours it is all illusions. As I said earlier- auto suggestion. When you can find a way to prove otherwise, let me know. Otherwise, keep rambling about your cult while your Greedy Guru gets richer and richer and your country gets poorer and more corrupt. Doesn't matter to me. Jesse

Sitting for hours every day for years with eyes closed, focused on visualizing the form of one’s guru, repeating words associated with the names of rulers of supernatural regions — that has to have a big influence on one’s mind. I’m reading several books about how the mind uses prior knowledge to make predictions about what will happen next in the world.

 

Meaning, we don’t simply see the world as it is. We see the world as we expect it will be. The mind is continually making predictions, then comparing those predictions with what is actually occurring.

 

When it comes to inner experiences, there is no “actually” to compare to. Everything is happening in the mind. So it is easy to see how ardent devotees of Sant Mat whose most fervent desire is to see the guru within and experience supernatural realms have their minds generate those experiences, largely or entirely through unconscious means.

 

Something similar could also happen with people who aren’t connected to an organized religion or spiritual path, since their unconscious could produce visions without the person’s conscious awareness of the source of those visions.

 

In a dream, there is no way to know that you are dreaming until you wake up.

 

I suspect the same is the case with mystical visions generated by the brain as a response to long-held desires. I could be wrong, and the experiences could be genuine. But I’m not aware of any instance of someone having a mystical experience that resulted in valid knowledge of some aspect of the physical world that wasn’t already known to them.

 

No mystic has ever revealed a new law of nature, or even anything else about the world that wasn’t common knowledge.

 

This indicates that if mystical visions occur, they have no bearing on knowledge of this world — which seems strange, because this world commonly is considered to be a lower version, or reflection, of higher realms of reality. So one would think that knowledge of those higher realms would bring along with it increased knowledge of this lower realm. 

 

But it doesn’t. 

Tips for my Typepad blog visitors who are having a problem with comments

Some visitors to this Church of the Churchless blog have problems with leaving a comment on a post. Usually this is due to the comment being identified by Typepad, my blogging service, as "spam."

When this happens, I need to approve the comment after checking the spam section of the blog's comment file. I try to remember to do this daily, and when possible, several times a day.

Just realize that sometimes I'm away from my computer for quite a while, so I'm unable to check the spam section. And sometimes I forget to do this, being busy with other things. Rest assured that I should find a wrongly-identified spam comment within a day or two, and publish it.

Here's some tips and observations about leaving a comment:

Best to log-in with a Typepad account. I suspect that logging in with a Typepad account makes it more likely that a comment will be published smoothly. I have to do this myself when I want to leave a comment. This is the first option shown in the "Post a comment" box when you click on "comments" at the bottom of a post.

Here's a link that should lead to the page where you can create a free Typepad account. If the link is broken, just click on the Typepad icon in the "Post a comment" box. Here's what the page looks like. Note that you can choose what name to have displayed. I'm pretty sure that this doesn't have to be your real name, if you're concerned about confidentiality.

Or, log-in with another account. As shown above, you also can log-in with a Facebook, Twitter, Googgle+, and a number of other accounts. As noted above, this should increase the chances that a comment will be published smoothly, since your identity will be confirmed. 

Don't try to publish a comment repeatedly. A few commenters on this blog try to publish a comment repeatedly after Typepad doesn't publish it. This leads to numerous repeated comments in the spam section. This makes it more difficult for me to check the spam section, since I have scroll through what sometimes is a long list of lengthy comments wrongly identified as spam to look for other valid comments.

And every time I click on "publish," the spam page refreshes, so to find another wrongly identified comment I have to scroll through a bunch of repeated comments that I've already looked at.

So the lesson, as noted above, is to log-in either with a Typepad account, or one of the other accounts.This should decrease the chance that a comment is correctly identified as spam.

I suspect that when someone tries to repeatedly publish a comment, the Typepad commenting software will consider this as an increased sign that the comment is spam, but I could be wrong about this. Still, if a comment doesn't appear the first time, doing the same thing again probably won't make the comment appear.

Make sense with your comments. I rarely unpublish comments. This only happens if a spam comment makes it through the spam filter; if a comment is nonsensical; if a comment is in a foreign language; or if a comment crosses the line into an excessive personal insult or profanity (very rare, thankfully).

Here's an example of a comment that I unpublished because it couldn't be understood: "will use his phantasy MUST BE will lose his phantasy which = with it's ups"

Let me know if you've followed these tips and still can't post a comment. Send me an email via the link in the right sidebar, describing in as much detail as possible what you did in attempting to post a comment. I'll share that info with Typepad support staff and hopefully they can figure out what the problem is.

Nice quotes from "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist"

I'm a big fan of Stephen Bachelor, who writes about Buddhism from a pleasingly non-religious, non-supernatural perspective.

I didn't like "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist" as much as his other books, but some quotations from this book that someone emailed to me resonated with my psyche. 

Here they are. The boldfacing was added by the person who sent me the quotes.

To be conscious of what is happening in the present requires training in mindfulness, which Gotama described as “the one way” to achieve the kind of focused presence and responsiveness needed to function optimally on a groundless ground.

Indeed, he spoke of mindfulness (sati) as being grounded (pat hāna) in whatever occurs in one’s body, feelings, and mind as well as in the world about one. Mindfulness is to be aware of what is happening, as opposed to either letting things drift by in a semiconscious haze or being assailed by events with such intensity that one reacts before one has even had time to think.

Mindfulness focuses entirely on the specific conditions of one’s day-to-day experience. It is not concerned with anything transcendent or divine. It serves as an antidote to theism, a cure for sentimental piety, a scalpel for excising the tumor of metaphysical belief.

“When a monk breathes out long,” said Gotama, “he knows: ‘I am breathing out long.’ Breathing in short, he knows: ‘I am breathing in short.’”

Such a person acts in full awareness when looking ahead and looking away, when flexing and extending his limbs, when wearing his robes and carrying his bowl, when eating, drinking and tasting, when defecating and urinating, when walking, standing, sitting, falling asleep, waking up, talking and keeping silent.

...There is nothing so lowly or mundane that it is unworthy of being embraced by mindful attention. Mindfulness accepts as its focus of inquiry whatever arises in one’s field of awareness, no matter how disturbing or painful it might be. 

One neither seeks nor expects to find some greater truth lurking behind the veil of appearances. What appears and how you respond to it: that alone is what matters.

The person who sent me these quotes added some thoughts of his own.

A Buddhist friend of mine whom I used to meditate with talked this way about meditation. It makes a lot of sense to me and also takes the frustration out of it. 

Instead of going away from a time of meditation thinking that I didn’t get anything out of it because I didn’t have some “experience," now I see it as there is no wrong way to meditate or a “bad” session. 

Because I’m just paying attention to what is actually happening. If that makes sense?

Yes, it does make sense. This is the way I meditate now also. Or at least, how I try to meditate.

It's difficult to break past habits of believing that certain kinds of experiences are to be sought for in meditation, like a calm mind. 

But I'm getting better at this, in part through the guided meditations I listen to every morning via the Calm app on my iPhone. They're very much in line with the Buddhism Stephen Bachelor is talking about.

After listening to a guided meditation, I then engage in my own "free-form" meditation. 

Why I don't believe in anyone's supposed supernatural experience

Today I got an email from someone who said:

Well, here in your blog itself, you have all of these people sharing their experiences.  Huge voluminous paragraphs detailing all kinds of dramatic experiences, with stars and moons and spatial flight and GIHFs [God In Human Form] popping up with personal guidance and what-have-you.  My question is : Why do you ignore them now, now that you do see these experiences spoken of, quite plainly?

This was my response.
----------------------------
As you might expect, I consider that people who say they’ve had experiences of a supernatural reality are either deluding themselves, or other people. Both are possible, of course, if someone believes they’ve had a genuine experience, then tries to convince others that it was real. 

I’m reading an interesting book, Selfie. 

The author notes that culture is a key ingredient in human experience. This is obvious, of course, when it comes to so-called mystical experiences. How often do Christians have a vision of Krishna? Very rarely, if at all. 

Likewise, how often do Sant Mat devotees have a vision of Jesus? Very rarely, if at all.

The only way I could begin to accept that “supernatural” experiences are real would be if everyone who reported that sort of experience had virtually identical descriptions of it. But they don’t.

 

A few minutes of Googling turned up some examples. Here’s some people who had visions of Jesus.

 

http://www1.cbn.com/700club/ron-zaucha-vision-jesus

 

https://www.godisreal.today/jesus-vision/

 

And there’s people who have visions of fairies, with whom they interact.

 

http://www.fairycongress.com/seeing-fairies/

 

So why should I believe Sant Mat devotees who claim to have visions of the radiant form of their guru, or some supernatural realm that's part of the Sant Mat dogma? Why should their visions be given more credence than the people who have visions of Jesus or of fairies?

 

Now, some would say that ALL supernatural experiences must be accepted as real, because there are myriads of kinds of supernatural realities. I guess this would be similar to an alien visiting Earth and landing in a tropical forest, while another alien landed on a pole and saw snow/ice. 

 

OK, that’s possible. However, a big difference is that Earth is part of physical existence, so the various parts of our planet can be explored, photographed, etc.  

 

And I’d argue that going that "believe everything" route requires giving up any semblance of a rational, evidential, factual take on reality. We then would end up accepting all sorts of conspiracy theories, alternative views of science, crazy ideas of every variety. 

 

So I choose to not believe in the objective reality of anyone’s description of a supernatural experience, rather than believe in all of them. There’s no evidence that a supernatural reality even exists, much less that humans are able to experience it via some sort of elevated consciousness.

 

     -- Brian

Gurinder Singh's billionaire nephew rumored to succeed him as RSSB guru

This morning someone emailed me a link to a juicy story, "Brothers Singh and the squandering of a business empire."

The brothers referred to are Malvinder and Shivinder Singh, the nephews of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) guru Gurinder Singh.

RSSB is headquartered in India, but has a worldwide reach. I used to belong to this spiritual organization whose guru is considered to be God in Human Form by true-believing devotees. 


I say "true-believing," because Gurinder Singh, shown above, has been promulgating revised versions of the RSSB teachings, so it is unclear whether the guru himself believes in v.1.0, v2.0, or v3.0. The latter versions downplay the "perfect living master" dogma that was a core tenet of v.1.0.

What I found most interesting in the story was a section called The Radha Soami connection. I've boldfaced the part about Shivinder Singh being expected to serve as the next RSSB guru.

Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a self-described “philosophical organisation” was founded in 1891 by Dera Baba Jaimal Singh. Shivinder is the nephew of the sect’s current guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillion, referred to as “babaji” by followers. The previous guru, Charan Singh, was Shivinder’s maternal grandfather. Gurinder is the fifth leader of the sect, which is based out of Beas near Amritsar.

Film actor Shahid Kapur is one of its followers and his wedding with Mira Rajput was facilitated by the sect. Their wedding was held at a farmhouse owned by Shivinder. Gurinder played a pivotal role in putting Shivinder and Malvinder at the top at Ranbaxy after a battle for control of the drug maker followed Parvinder’s death in 1999.

Shivinder is expected to succeed Gurinder. “Gurinder has looked after Shivinder as his own son and he is expected to take over the leadership of the sect,” said a person close to the family, who did not want to be named.

There have been significant business links between Fortis Healthcare and Religare Enterprises (both promoted by Malvinder and Shivinder) and RSSB. The family of Gurinder Singh, including his sons Gurpreet and Gurkirat, owned a significant stake in Religare, as reported by Mint in July 2015. Gurinder’s son Gurpreet served as the chief executive of Religare Health Trust (RHT), a subsidiary of Religare. Singapore-based RHT is the holding company of Fortis Healthcare.

This wasn't new news to me, since back in 2016 I'd quoted someone who commented on my blog post about another livemint story, "Shivinder Singh's ties with low-profile sect go beyond spirituality." 

Looks like Shivinder is on his way to become the next Guru ..... What do you think Brian and Dr. Lane?

Well, I didn't really know what to think then, and the same is true now. All I can say is that the business of being an Indian guru has changed a lot from the time I was initiated in 1971 by Gurinder Singh's predecessor, Charan Singh -- who was Gurinder Singh's uncle.

Back then the RSSB teachings said that spirituality should be job #1 for people seeking God-realization, not making gobs of money. But as I've reported in previous blog posts, Gurinder Singh has become hugely rich himself during his stint as guru, and he is intimately entwined in the shady business dealings of Malvinder and Shivinder Singh, as detailed in the recent story about them.

Here's the posts:

Radha Soami Satsang Beas guru makes $254 million

Religare's money connections with the Radha Soami guru

Gurinder Singh's son becomes CEO of Religare subsidiary

"Dirty money" tied to RSSB guru's Ranbaxy wealth

Billionaire Shivinder Singh plans to volunteer for RSSB guru

There's also mention of the connections between the Singh brothers and RSSB in a post I published recently, "Devastating criticism of Gurinder Singh Dhillon by a RSSB insider." Here's one of the comments included in that post that were left on my blog by the insider. What's said below will make more sense if you read the story about the Singh brothers' business problems.

Nietzsche. Great ! You've made the effort to backtrack into Gurinder's current financial status and what you've stated sums up the facts very well. I'm relieved that what I've been harping about on the COTC ( that makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist in the process ) has some validation from an independent fellow blogger... :)

 

My additional thoughts are : Gurinder ordered the Ranbaxy sell-out, and as a faith policy, Shivinder and Malvinder do not over-rule anything HE decides. The final " go ahead boys " was given by Gurinder. I know this because the celebratory cheers resounded with a boisterous " Baba-ji does not make any mistakes ! " that came from none other than Sunil Godhwani, Baba-ji's right-hand man.

 

Before the news hit the press, everyone knew that a chunk of that booty would be pumped into Religare. Of course, Ranbaxy's health was generously inflated, but the sell-out was the best possible move from a financial standpoint — considering that the Singh Brothers made quite a mess of the succession when they inherited the company, which subsequently reflected in the company's performance over the years.

 

There was a joke in the corporates circles here that Parminder Singh was in a big shock in heaven when he learnt that Gurinder had advised his sons to sell Ranbaxy. His reaction was : " What ? Who the f*** is he ? " ( LOL ) This entire Religare affair that Gurinder's having with the Singh Brothers is in direct conflict with his role as a Guru, whether he's teaching 1.0 or 3.0. His insatiable appetite for wealth is sick, specially when there is no charitable initiative for the poorer sections of the Sangat that make up for ninety-five percent of his following.

 

IMO, Gurinder wants them to remain hungry and foolish otherwise they will not be interested in the salvation promise, which is why I think that Sant Mat 3.0 will never be introduced to the langar. You are absolutely right about the Mc-Donald's style of operations at Fortis. Also, the services they provide are the Micky-D's equivalent of fries and nuggets. It is all about the money, with little regard for ethical practice and human life.

 

But, it is interesting to note that post Ranbaxy, none of the Singh Brothers' businesses have been particularly profitable. It is too early to call, but Fortis is struggling. And, going forward, the competition will intensify. Religare is hemorrhaging under the acumen-devoid leadership of Sunil Godhwani and is showing no signs of recovering. Religare continually gets mini bail-outs from the huge cash reserves that the Singh Brothers are currently sitting on, but the well could dry-up in less than a decade if their current run continues.

 

It is also possible that Gurinder could make some bad ( not-so-GIHF ) decisions. Our comments here are forming a valuable archive for those who will seek to find out more, specially after the radical shift in the Sant Mat teachings. I like the Japanese quote, it applies to all of us.

The livemint story has this to say about Sunil Godhwani, who, as noted above, is called the guru's "right-hand man" by the RSSB insider. (Baba-ji is an honorific for the guru).

Religare was run by the Singh brothers’ one-time close confidante Sunil Godhwani from 2001 to 2017, before he decided to step down. “He was introduced to the Singh brothers by the RSSB,” the person close to the family said, adding that Godhwani was also an ardent follower of the sect.

So there are very close ties between the Singh brothers' business dealings, RSSB, and Gurinder Singh, which basically, can be summed up as a complex mess. Here's how the livemint story ends:

Godhwani could not be reached for comment. The Ranbaxy business dynasty is now in disarray. With a slew of legal and regulatory battles ahead, the Singh brothers have limited elbow room to start a new business or revive remnants of existing ones. A rich legacy has been squandered.

"Existence is entirely futile." A brave essay on the human condition.

With the author's permission, here's a highly thoughtful, well-reasoned, nicely-written email message I received recently that presents a stark, but persuasive, perspective on the human condition. 

I enjoyed reading about what led this person to change from a hopeful spiritual person to a nihilistic atheist. The message ended with an invitation to me to comment on it, which I was pleased to do -- which led to some further thoughts from the message sender.

I've shared an edited version of our interchange after the essay itself. Enjoy. And I mean that word, enjoy, because even though what follows will strike many people as being depressingly bleak, I find the essay to be a refreshingly honest view of the suffering that inevitably accompanies consciousness and self-awareness.

Hi Brian,

Thanks for the thoughtful and witty blog. I have enjoyed it a lot.

I'm writing to share my story of what precipitated my personal transition from a somewhat hopeful "spiritual" person to a nihilistic atheist. I'm writing because I know that you also made the journey from believer to atheist, and I thought you might find this interesting. If not, forgive me and delete this as soon as possible.

I grew up in a conservative Christian home although I never could genuinely believe in those inane ideas. In my young adulthood I migrated toward eastern spirituality with my final resting spot being Buddhism due to the fact that it is non-theistic (seemed the most plausible). Through those years I read as much on these topics as I could, along with other books on philosophy (especially existential philosophy), practiced meditation, etc.

Throughout my entire life of critical thinking, the phenomenon of suffering has drawn the most of my intellectual resources.

Anybody who stares into the abyss of suffering that exists very quickly realizes that the existence of suffering utterly and irrevocably destroys any belief in God and any belief in "ultimate" meaning/purpose. This became more and more difficult to ignore, so I nestled into the notion that life was essentially neutral. The existence of suffering made it impossible to be "good", yet I thought it might still be neutral. 

One quick disclosure: I have an incurable and untreatable genetic disease that leaves me in almost constant pain, both physical and emotional.

So, early on, this journey began as a quest to see if this predicament could be reasonably reconciled with an existence that could still be deemed "good". I latched onto accounts of profound mystical experiences, where the individual relayed experiences of bliss, joy, love and the unshakable knowledge that existence was overflowing with benevolence.

The fact that these experiences occurred buoyed me. During that time, I think I collected and read every experience that was ever put into print. I also found websites that had collections submitted by people. 

Fast forward: I now understand these experiences to essentially be a psychological coping mechanism. The fact that the overwhelming majority proceed from deeply traumatic periods bolsters this understanding.

The human mind is adaptive and it creates psychological fictions when it needs to.

Some have contended that these experiences are too life enhancing to represent some pathological state or to be the product of trauma. I thoroughly disagree and I compare them to the phenomenon of dissociative personality disorder. This is an immensely powerful and effectual response to trauma, sometimes triggered by only a single traumatic event (usually sexual abuse).

While the casual onlooker may see an abnormality, this is a phenomenon that allows for coping with the trauma. In this sense it is adaptive and "positive". Compare this to the trauma of simply being alive with the pervasive stress and pressures of survival and the omnipresent fear of death/extinction. All of this against the backdrop of apparent meaninglessness. It is no wonder that the psyche generates these encouraging fictions.

Mystical experience, like religion in general, is a natural phenomenon. Homo sapiens, the cognitive animal, needs cognitive encouragement to survive and nothing accomplishes this more than the conviction that life is essentially meaningful, blissful, loving, and peaceful regardless of the appearance to the contrary. 

So, this was one of my discoveries that started to put a crack in the armor of my hope. The other being ontology and pondering the nature of time. Long story short, I kept coming up against what I now call the "impenetrable impasse of ontology." Every philosophy, religion, and even branches of science (physics, cosmology) eventually reaches this impasse.

In short, we cannot account for the existence of anything without providing for the existence of something that is timeless, eternal, or outside of time; something that is uncaused. This can be conceptualized as an eternally preexistent static Being, "substance," or energy.

Theistic religion invented a creator being; they reached the impasse. Modern cosmology has conceived of the uncaused as pure potential in the form of "quantum foam." This eternal something can also be conceived in the form of an endless causal chain, infinitely regressing into the past. In this case, it is only the chain or sequence itself that is uncaused and eternal. Some theories in modern astrophysics have reworked this theory (see the book Endless Universe).

The bottom line is that something eternal must exist. To many this is immediately hopeful. To me, it is the absolute deathblow to hope.

What this impasse of ontology showed me is that existence is entirely futile.

I realized that eternity itself is the epitome of futility. I realized that suffering is directly born out of an eternal chaos and is not temporary in any way, shape, or form. If this universe is either the latest conflagration of an endless causal chain or the product of a timeless substance, the result is the same.

Anything uncaused simply exists—existing for no purpose or reason—and anything it generates must also be correspondingly devoid of meaning and purpose.

But the most problematic feature is that this purposeless energy/process generates unfathomable degrees of pure misery. Anything eternal does not ultimately evolve, progress, or change at all. Thus, it is process that will never cease generating this misery. I realized in the starkest possible terms that suffering is entirely inescapable and eternal. 

As horrifying as it was, this made sense to me because I had come to actually view suffering as being the very core and essence of life.

I had long known negative experience to be greater quantitatively and qualitatively. Not only is profound suffering universal and ubiquitous, but it is also far more consequential.

Negative experience is more impactful and carries incomparably greater psycholgical weight than anything positive (except maybe the fictive mystical experience, hence its survival value). A single traumatic event can utterly destroy a life, while the same cannot be said for an exceedingly happy event. 

I also realized that there can be no experience without being limited, as consciousness can only exist if it has a "point-of-perspective" from which to experience.

All the new age drivel about an "infinite consciousness" is just that -- pure drivel. It is an abject contradiction in terms and is categorically impossible. The necessity of limitation as a functional condition for the existence of consciousness further strengthened my discovery that suffering is inescapable.

The one and only hope that I carry with me today is that I will be entirely obliterated at death, which I certainly presume will be the case.

Over my long journey, I have come to realize that suffering is the very nature of being alive and nothing can change that as it is ultimately derived from a unchanging eternal "cause." Suffering would not be occuring right here and now if it was not an intrinsic aspect of existence. The blind chaos that spits out universes will forever generate universes of pure agony, just like the one we are living in.

This is why I look forward to death more with each passing day. I loathe such clichés as "life is a gift." Life is not a gift. Life is a random yet inconceivably tragic event. 

Thanks for listening. I'd love to hear your thoughts if you have the time and would like to respond.

 This is some of what I said in my reply.

There’s a lot to say about what you said. You’ve obviously thought long and deeply about matters that most people don’t think at all about. Kudos to you for doing that. You’ve shown a lot of courage, discarding spiritual/religious crap that merely tries to smooth over the evident suffering and pain in this life by providing specious answers to difficult questions. 

 

I tend to see existence as being generally neutral, since likely consciousness is fairly rare in the cosmos. At least, as compared to the vastness of interstellar space and the hundreds of billions of stars in a typical galaxy.

 

But when consciousness is involved,  I think you’re correct: pain and suffering are inevitable.

 

This is particularly true when a being has not only awareness, but self-awareness. Our dog suffers (she hates loud bangs, so fireworks last night stressed her out), but I don’t see any sign that she worries about her suffering. When she is in pain, mental or physical, she suffers. Then, she is back to enjoying her dog life.

 

I heartily agree with you that mysticism, spirituality, religion — they’re all attempts to deal with the oppressive reality of a universe that doesn’t give a shit about us.

 

You say that the cosmos generates universes of pure agony. Yes, this certainly can be true. Your life testifies to that, as do countless other examples of people who suffer horribly, not to mention the lives of countless animals raised in terrible conditions for the eating pleasure of humans (I’m a vegetarian, partly for that reason).

 

Yet for me, and obviously there’s no right or wrong answer here, being so personal, I find the universe to be essentially neutral — which was your initial conception. I can’t argue against your current view, since it also makes good sense. I just tend to see us humans as an anomaly, rather than a feature of the universe. Somehow we have developed sufficient consciousness to become aware of our awareness, which now is both our greatest strength and also our greatest weakness.

 

This is part of the essay-writer's response to my thoughts.

 

I see where you are coming from to say that the physical universe is , in and of itself, value-neutral. If the universe had only produced inert bits matter, I agree that it would be value-nuetral. Yet I find the fact that it eventually generated self conscious beings to be tragic -- a tragedy which tips the scales in the direction of negativity. 

 

In many schools of philosophical thought, our principle predicament is often articulated as our confrontation with a meaninglessness/purposelessness universe (i.e., a neutral universe).  I wrote an essay some time ago that it is not meaninglessness that makes life problematic, but suffering. If life was meaningless yet beautiful, existence would certainly still be a mystery but it would not be a problematic mystery.

 

The lack of meaning only becomes a problem in the context of suffering and thus, it is the existence of suffering that is the original, fundamental, insurmountable  problem. People will always fool themselves with various schemes of purported meaning that can be dreamed up, but the reality of suffering will always be there to slap them in the face. Suffering cannot be denied and is always there to keep us honest.

 

I find religion/mysticism to be a survival strategy of our species. In this way I understand it and don't blame people. There will always be psychological crutches. Doubtful anyone would even be able to function at all with none. 

 

My psychological crutch is the conviction that death is total obliteration. A crutch need not always be untrue. I think that our eventual extinction is the greatest accidental gift the universe bestowed on us. 

 

We are an anomaly, yet we are an anomaly of the universe that is left to experience the very universe that randomly generated us. In this sense we are unique and uniquely cursed. Our subjective experiences of pain are of an entirely different order than mere space rocks colliding into each other.

 

Relatively speaking, sentience is the "most important" phenomenon in the universe because it the most consequential. When compared against an infinite expanse of swirling gasses and molten rock, one suffering person is incomparably more important. 

 

[Regarding some quotes about our psychological zombie'ness that I shared.] We are zombies in the sense that we are programmed by nature and there isn't a thing we can do about it. We are programmed to seek out positive experience and avoid negative experience. This is only possible for beings that are conscious and capable of experience. We seek to gain positive experience and avoid negative experience because we know what it is like to experience.

 

Thus, there is some link between that in us which seeks future experience and that which has/had experience. I know of no better candidate for that which has experience than consciousness. Does this imply that consciousness is somehow active? I don't know, but if so, I know that it acts to no avail.

 

The absurdity of life is such that we can never have what we are wired to seek. Our instincts are fundamentally at odds with reality. 

 

 

I got mail...

Well, not really mail (who writes personal letters these days?), but an email.

I always like to hear from people who feel supported by what I write on this blog. I enjoy speaking truth and exposing the falsities of religion.

Here's part of what an emailer who has recently deconverted from the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) belief system, also known as Sant Mat, said:

I related to a lot of what you wrote about Sant Mat.  In fact, I didn’t find anything I disagreed with!

It seemed you had many of the same thoughts I did – the same doubts.  It was good to see someone else share their experience of disillusionment with RSSB, its teachings, and so on.  I felt my doubts were validated. 

I wasn’t necessarily a spiritual lost cause. There were others out there that left Sant Mat and found a way to live that was more authentic and that led to them becoming a better human being in this world, in this very now.  I yearn for some of that. 

To feel okay being grounded in the here and now. To do some meditation that doesn’t center on repeating a bunch of holy names and sitting for hours on end waiting and hoping to “see” the Master and/or hear the bells and see the lights…

 

RSSB fined $484,000 after Haynes Park death

Someone just emailed me a link to a BBC News story, "Haynes Park Science of the Soul fined after man's death."

Science of the Soul is another name for Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a spiritual group headed up by an Indian guru that I used to be a member of.

I'm not at all surprised to read that the organization was fined £364,000 for an attempted cover-up after scaffolding collapsed at the Haynes Park meeting center, which equals $484,000 in dollars.

Amrik Blaggan, 57, died in hospital two days after he fell about 2m (6.5ft) from a platform at the Science of Soul centre in Haynes Park, Bedfordshire,

The scene was cleared despite the group being told to leave it untouched, Luton Crown Court heard.

Science of the Soul had pleaded guilty to health and safety offences.

Police attended the scene on the day of the fall in April 2014 and told the group that under no circumstances should the scaffolding platform be touched because experts would need to examine it.

However by the time environmental health officers arrived for an inspection, the tower had been removed and there was no evidence of how it looked and functioned, the court was told.

However, a police constable who attended the scene on the day had luckily taken photos of the tower in situ before he left.

Ethics often takes a back seat when a religion such as the Science of the Soul feels threatened by worldly authorities.

One would think that people involved with a "spiritual" organization would be extra-careful to be honest and open with a health and safety investigation, but obviously one would think wrong in this case.

Radha Soami Satsang Beas volunteers -- sevadars is the Indian term -- tend to think that whatever they are doing in the name of the guru is OK, even when it isn't. Here someone died because of gross negligence. 

Sentencing the group, Judge Barbara Mensah said an expert who looked at the photos taken by the officer had concluded the tower was "unsafe".

Prosecutor Michael Vere-Hodge QC said a meeting hall had been constructed in the grounds either in 2009 or 2010, without planning permission.

Mr Blaggan, a volunteer at Science of the Soul, climbed a mobile scaffold as lighting was fitted, and sustained serious head injuries when he fell..

Mr Vere-Hodge said the scaffold was "grossly unsafe by anybody's reckoning".

He said police and paramedics were called but said there was an "attempted cover-up" as the scaffold had been removed and the roof repaired before investigators arrived.

Shameful. But I wouldn't be surprised if many Radha Soami Satsang Beas true believers consider that the man's death was the result of the guru's will, or at least of the man's bad karma. 

Which is crazy, of course. Along with every other sort of supernatural religious belief.

There's good reason to think we are zombies. I'm OK with that.

Ah, the stories we tell ourselves. About our self. Likely on planet Earth only we humans do this. Somehow our brains have evolved the capacity to conjure up stories featuring our favorite subject, Me, that often, if not usually, are far from the truth.

 

I've started reading a compelling book, “Selfie,” by Will Storr. Subtitle: “How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing to Us."

 

In a chapter called The Tribal Self, Storr tells the tale of a gangster guy, John, in Great Britain who did despicable things, including  beating someone badly outside of a London nightclub, as mentioned in the passage from the book that I've shared below. 

 

Yet John managed to rationalize his behavior as not only being acceptable, but even exemplary, since he was standing up for the members of his "tribe." Which is what we all do, since culture has a much greater influence on us than we assume, given that, like fish, we swim in a cultural sea that is normally almost entirely invisible to us, since it both surrounds us and, to a large extent, is us. 

 

Below is a passage from that chapter that I really liked. Storr speaks here about subjects that I've read about in many other books  about modern neuroscience, yet rarely, if ever, expressed so clearly and passionately.

 

The passage starts off with a mention of our brain's "interpreter."

 

This isn't a language translator. Rather, it is, as Storr puts it, "...your internal monologue, the chatty voice that narrates it all, interpreting everything that's happening to you, discussing it with you, making theories about it, never shutting up."

 

This being a blog, where I write about stuff and other people comment on what I've written (or, as often happens, comment on something else entirely), there's a heck of a lot of interpreting going on. So read on to learn what modern neuroscience and psychology have to say about the stories we tell ourselves.


(The bad news is, we're zombies! And the good news is, we're zombies!)

Will Storr writes:

 

The disconcerting truth is that we all have interpreters narrating our lives, and they’re all just guessing. We all confabulate, all the time. We’re moving around the world, doing things and feeling things and saying things, for myriad unconscious reasons, whilst a specific part of the brain constantly strives to create a makes-sense narrative of what we’re up to and why. 

 

But the voice has no direct access to the real reasons we do anything. It doesn’t really know why we feel the things we feel and why we do the things we do. It’s making it up. 

 

Since these experiments [with split-brain patients], study after study has demonstrated ordinary, everyday confabulation in non-split-brain participants. My favourite involves people who were shown two photos of the opposite sex and asked to choose which they were most attracted to. The photos were then placed face down and, with a magician’s sleight of hand, switched.

 

The photos were then shown again, now in the wrong positions. Incredibly, only 17 per cent of of participants noticed that they’d  been switched. Those that didn’t notice were asked to give a detailed explanation as to why they’d found this person more attractive, as opposed to the other one. They merely confabulated away, listing all the reasons, even though they were actually describing the wrong person.

 

Our brains invent stories like this because they want to make us feel like we’re in control of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviour. The guesses the interpreter makes might be right. But they might just as easily be wrong. 

 

‘When we set out to explain our actions, they are all post-hoc explanations using post-hoc observations with no access to nonconscious processing,’ writes Gazzaniga. Any inconvenient facts that don’t fit with the interpreter’s story are ignored or suppressed. ‘That “you” that you’re so proud of is a story woven together by your interpreter module to account for as much of your behaviour as it can incorporate, and it denies and rationalizes the rest.’

 

All this means that ‘listening to people’s explanations for their actions is interesting but often a waste of time.'

 

If this is correct, it leads us toward an uneasy conclusion,. Imagine, for a moment, that a human works like this: you’re a zombie, just behaving automatically, sometimes chaotically, and the only reason you think you’re in control of your behaviour is that you have a dishonest voice in your head that tells you that you are.

 

When you do something, like decide who you fancy, or beat someone nearly to death outside a London nightclub, your little voice tells you those acts were the result of conscious decisions made by you, and then lists all the reasons you were right — but actually you’re like a zombie, with no free will, being fooled into believing you have the ability to make conscious choices by your lying little voice.

 

Wouldn’t that be odd?

 

Well, yes. It’s also widely believed to be true. The disconcerting fact is that what we do in the world is, depending on which academic you believe, either largely or wholly controlled by our unconscious. 

 

‘If you devote your time to thinking about what the brain, hormones, genes, evolution, childhood, foetal environment and so on have to do with behaviour, as I do,’ writes the professor of biology, neuroscience and neurosurgery Robert Sapolsky, ‘it seems simply impossible to think there is free will.’ 

 

Most of those who argue that we do have free will believe its power to be limited, marginal or conditional. The illusion that we have it in the way we think we do is perhaps the most important and most devious job of the self.

 

Well, I find it to be strangely comforting to know that, no matter how the world appears to me, the stories I have in my head about my life, my beliefs, my behavior, my sense of right and wrong, my conception of my place in  the grand cosmic scheme of things — all those stories really aren’t under my conscious control, but have popped out of the dark recesses of my unconscious, accompanied by a falsehood that feels good, but almost certainly isn’t true: “You are the author of these stories, via your own free will.”

 

Being a zombie strikes me as a pretty damn good thing, actually.

 

It means that who I am, deep down, is very different from whom I appear to be to myself. Since I love mysteries, this leaves me with a primal, albeit probably unanswerable, question:

 

Who am I, when I’m not busy embracing stories about myself that my unconscious conjures up, which I mistakenly assume to be my own conscious creation?”

 

Lastly, here's another bit of good news: research shows that not believing in free will has no relation to ethical behavior. So giving up a belief in free will won't make you a jerk. 

Devastating criticism of Gurinder Singh Dhillon by a RSSB insider

Gurinder Singh Dhillon is the current guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a spiritual organization headquartered in India that has a worldwide reach.

In this post I'm sharing 27,000 words worth of comments left on this blog by "Tara," a woman who had an up close and personal view of both Gurinder Singh (photo below) and the RSSB organization prior to her becoming disillusioned by what she saw, which led to her leaving the RSSB fold.

What you'll read below is an extensive sampling of the comments left by "Tara"from 2010 to 2014. I selected comments that struck me as being particularly interesting, either because they related to Gurinder Singh's financial dealings, RSSB goings-on, or Tara's personal doubts about the validity of the RSSB teachings.

I figured this would be an appropriate time to share Tara's comments, since tomorrow is Independence Day in the United States, and in many of her comments, Tara celebrated her newfound independence from religious dogmatism and hypocrisy. 

Since Typepad, my blogging service, organizes searchable comments by date, with the most recent appearing first, for convenience this is how I've ordered Tara's comments. In other words, the comments Tara left in 2014 appear first, and those she left in 2010 appear last.

Click on the continuation link to read more than the first few comments. I had to insert that break because otherwise this very lengthy post would make it difficult to find my previous posts.

I realize that readers of this blog who aren't familiar with Radha Soami Satsang Beas will find much of what Tara talks about somewhat difficult to understand. Here's explanations of some of her abbreviations: GSD or GS means Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the RSSB guru; RS refers to Radha Soami, shorthand for either Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), or the Radha Soami philosophy.

What impressed me as I read through Tara’s comments is how intelligent, witty, and well-informed she is. And I rarely came across a typo, or even a poorly-worded sentence. She writes clearly, passionately, honestly. I regret that, most likely, I’ll never be able to meet her.

I've copied in the comments, which are separated by a dashed line, exactly as Tara wrote them -- aside from a few instances when I noted a repeated word, such as "the the." I've added paragraph breaks to make the comments more readable, since Typepad eliminates paragraph breaks in the comment search feature that bloggers like me are able to make use of .

It's really remarkable how much time and effort Tara put into these comments. In one of her comments, she says that a therapist advised her to write about her deconversion from the Sant Mat philosophy espoused by RSSB, since, as Tara repeatedly notes, it was quite difficult for her to leave an organization that her family had been part of for four generations.

I applaud Tara for her courage to speak her mind in these comments, and to disclose what amounts to devastating criticisms of both Gurinder Singh Dhillon and the RSSB organization that he heads up. 

Lastly, if you're not familiar with the Radha Soami Satsang Beas teachings, a blog post of mine about how Gurinder Singh has been altering them would help you better understand many of her comments: "Has Gurinder Singh revised Sant Mat to v. 3.0?"

Now, on to the comments from "Tara"...
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Avi, GSD [Gurinder Singh Dhillon] is constantly on the move and a private jet is always at his disposal. IMO, how does it really matter whether it is from Religare or whether it is a private charter from another aviation firm. The important thing to find out is whether these trips are billed to Beas.

 

Gurinder has become astoundingly wealthy over the last few years and I believe that he can afford his own private travel. In this day and age and in GSD's current position, it would be normal to want to save travel time as RSSB's operations are global. Cyclically, it would probably take two years if GSD keeps his Satsang schedule and visits each center. I don't really think private travel in such a big deal !

 

What concerns me more, is the entire shift in ethos, the making of a quasi-religion, Dera's profitability driven motives, the creation of unimaginable personal wealth through dubious means and the total absence of humanitarian initiatives. ( Sant Mat demystified ? )

 

Oh ! I remember Charan [Singh, the previous guru] sitting in the co-driver's seat of his ivory Fiat, wearing his Ray Ban aviators, arm resting on the window and the wind blowing through his beard. A cloud of dust left in the tracks of the car at the Beas river bank ... through which a cacophony of voices would come alive, Seva interrupted.

 

Men and women would rush to catch a glimpse of him and he would oblige with a smile, hands folded, a " Radha Soami " ... I think I'm still lost, somewhere, in these childhood moments, where I do believe that Charan's love for the Sangat, despite the loopholes in the philosophy, was genuinely present and felt by all.

 

I've been trying to get in touch with the Babani family ( Mr. Babani was Charan's secretary ) to find out what really went wrong after Charan passed. There was a dispute between Dera and Babani's kin. It had to do with a property that was willed to Dera, or so Dera says. By some accounts, Babani died an unhappy man. It will be interesting to hear what the Babani family members have to say.

 

It is futile to compare Charan's and Gurinder's expenditures or any similarities, including the Gurudom. Charan's followers, the old school, are either off the path, confused or are reluctantly on the fringes of ( RS ) Sant Mat ... My own, rather hardcore RS family, is too proud to admit that it has all gone astray.

 

The love is gone, and with it, all traces of spirituality that the mission possessed. The fool from the old school thinks that Gurinder is carrying out Charan's will.

 

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Gaz, I live in India, but I go to the UK and US quite often. I've got extended family who is very close to Baba Ji [Gurinder Singh] and equally close to most people in his first circle. That is how I get to learn about ' the latest ' though it has now become tiring and boring. But, GSD's a great administrator, you got to hand him that.

 

Well, the mildly interesting thing is that even the government / government departments in India are weary of questioning holy men. Somewhere in their collective psyche they do not want to ' mess ' with Guru's. They come cracking down on innocent men and treat them like dirt, but even if they have a sack of mud on a Guru, you'll rarely see them do too much about it.

 

In the case of RSSB, their PR is slick with the bureaucracy, so no one can touch them. I think GSD in particular, has established a good equation with the red tape ... just like is the case with the other corporate giants and power houses of the country. In that sense, I do not see the difference between RSSB's practices and the practices of other corporations, the only difference being that RSSB is seldom questioned and can get away with much more undemocratically, and leniently so ... :)

 

Well, with regard to the video, it was factually correct, IMO. Forget Rampal, he's a weirdo, the same has been chronicled by the oldest Sikh families of the Punjab. I happen to know a very prominent Sikh historian and he told me the same. This information is archived, but some of it is so old that it doesn't seem to have a valid voice.

 

The Sikhs of course, bring their hot-bloodedness to the fore and start quoting the GGS [Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book] and that's a distraction from the real facts. Also, I don't think RS is ' ahead ' of Sikhism by any stretch of the imagination. Okay, I'm Sikh by birth, but I'm a fringe-Sikh and I'm all for criticism. ( I even pushed the head priest < granthi > of a gurudwara once, in full public view, for reasons that will make for a funny post, someday. )

 

It is just that I think that RS philosophy is more psychologically damaging than the dictates of other missions and religions. Of course, this is my personal opinion, I was a real bummer at meditation and I couldn't see the light. The question is, how many have ?

 

 

Hobby Lobby ad in Oregonian calls for a Christian theocracy

I'm not a fan of Hobby L0bby, to put it mildly.

When they opened a store here in Salem, Oregon, I did some research on the company and wrote a blog post that listed five good reasons not to shop at the store. Here, in headline form, is what I said shoppers at Hobby Lobby  were supporting:

(1) Denying contraception coverage to women employed by corporations owned by religious zealots.
(2) Teaching the Bible in public schools as "true" and "good." 
(3) Smuggling artifacts from Iraq, an act that supports terrorism.
(4) Supporting the election of Trump.
(5) Helping fund a $500 million Museum of the Bible.

Here's another reason not to shop at Hobby Lobby -- the company buys a full page ad in newspapers around the country close to July 4 that in very clear terms calls for the United States to be a Christian theocracy. 

This is a photo of the ad that ran in yesterday's Portland Oregonian. 


If you want to read it, here's a link to the ad on the Hobby Lobby web site. But wait... there's a better way to read Hobby Lobby's paean to theocracy.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation has put together a way-cool annotated version. You click on a quote in the Hobby Lobby ad, then you can read the quotation in its original form and context.

Often it turns out that Hobby Lobby has purposely mangled the quotation to make it better fit their Christian theocratic world view.  Many of the quotes are deliberately misleading, which shows how little respect Hobby Lobby has for truth-telling. 

A letter to the editor in the Eugene Register Guard does a good job of critiquing the Hobby Lobby ad.

The Register-Guard’s full page “paid advertisement” from Hobby Lobby on July 1 offends me on several grounds. One, it’s right-wing evangelism masquerading as a 4th of July ad. Two, it says “A good America is a Christian America.” Three, it uses misleading, out-of-context quotes as evidence.

I have nothing against Christianity or Jesus. I love them both. But mixing Jesus with government is dangerous and misguided. God and Christianity trump the Constitution. This ad offers random quotes — endorsements — for God-and-Christianity by a few Founding Fathers and 18th and 19th century judges. What’s not there: The founders and Supreme Court vehemently disapprove of mixing church and state.

Alas, somehow Hobby Lobby fell in love with theocracy. Hobby Lobby owners should watch “The Handmaid’s Tale.” It’s a feel-good series for everyone, and exactly what America needs.

 And here’s a tip for the R-G. Maybe try harder to discriminate between paid advertising and religious right recruitment? There’s even a clue in the bottom banner of the ad itself: “If you would like to know Jesus as Lord and Savior, visit Need Him Ministry ...” and “download a free Bible for your phone.”
     -- Michael Janover, Eugene

Janover is correct about the founders of our country being opposed to the United States becoming a Christian nation. I've written numerous blog posts on this subject. Check out my post, "More quotations from 'Nature's God,' a marvelously insightful book," for links to several of them. 

Here's some quotes from that book that I shared in the post:

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.