Yes, I've changed my mind about spirituality. That's a good thing.

Today a commenter on one of my blog posts said something astoundingly obvious -- that what I write about now is different from what I wrote about five or ten years ago.

Well, duh...

I'm constantly changing, as are we all. I learn, grow, evolve, change my mind, look upon things differently. 

Since I've published a book that consists of Church of the Churchless posts from the early years of this blog, 2004 to 2006, I'm well aware of how my approach to spirituality has changed since then.

If you read Break Free of Dogma, and naturally everybody should, you'll see that I've added a short introduction to each post that talks about how I look now at what I wrote back then.

That's because my own journey of breaking free of religious dogma was a gradual affair.

I can liken it to dismantling a Belief House that was built up over my 35 years of being an active member of a India-based religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

It took me quite a while to figure out what parts of that Belief House still appealed to me, and what parts needed to be demolished because they didn't fit with my current understanding of reality.

Earlier this year I wrote "Changing your mind is a superpower. Use it." Here's excerpts.

I have a superpower. But unlike those with superpowers who inhabit the pages of comic books and the screens of movie theaters, my astounding ability is available to everyone.

It's called changing your mind. 

I'm sure you've used it  -- many times. After all, we change our minds about countless things during the course of our lives. For example, I've changed my mind about my...

Politics (Used to be conservative, now I'm a liberal).
Cars (I've gone from a 57' VW bug to a 2017 VW GTI, with many other makes in between). 
Marriage (Got divorced, then remarried).
Profession (Earned a master's in social work, then went into health planning/research).
Eating (Loved meat until I became a vegetarian in 1970).
Residence (Grew up in the country, then lived in cities, now back in the country again).
Religion (Was Catholic for a while as a child, then a believer in an Eastern religion, and now an atheist).

So how is changing your mind a superpower? After all, everybody does this, all the time. True, but since we're so used to changing our minds, it's easy to overlook how marvelous this ability is.

First, to change your mind you need to have one.

Rocks don't have minds. Nor do stars. Living beings, though, have various sorts of minds. We humans have a powerful one. Other primates, ditto, though to a lesser degree. Plants have some sort of cognizance, but probably not a mind. Computers are very adept at certain tasks, yet so far lack what we would call a "mind."

Thus people are able to learn, adapt, modify our thinking, feeling, intuition, and such.

Because very little of human behavior is controlled by instinct, we have the capacity to transmit knowledge between people and across generations. We can read Plato and understand a great mind that lived thousands of years ago, thereby altering our own.

One of the best things about being able to change our mind is how good it feels, and how freeing it is. 

...I'm not saying that change is always welcome, or even tolerable.

That isn't what I mean by changing your mind being a superpower. Sure, it is possible to reduce anxiety, fear, suffering, and such by altering one's thoughts and feelings, but I'm not aware of anybody who can remain completely unmoved by severe pain, disappointment, or loss. 

What is possible, though, is altering our psyche to embrace a new reality, even though it may be unwelcome. That's a superpower in and of itself -- the ability to say "This is...," no matter what those three dots stand for.

Here's some examples of what I mean.

On this blog I've been writing quite a bit about the legal, financial, and ethical troubles involving the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), Gurinder Singh Dhillon. I was a member of RSSB for 35 years, so I like to use this organization as an example of how religions can be wrong, and do wrong, since I'm so familiar with it. 

(If I'd remained a Catholic for 35 years, then became an atheist, likely I'd be using Catholicism as an example of bad religion.)

Fairly frequently commenters on my blog posts about the Dhillon family's alleged criminality will say something like, "Brian, when it turns out that the guru did nothing wrong, you're going to be unable to accept this." 

That really isn't true. 

Because I'm adept at changing my mind, if the Indian legal system ends up exonerating Gurinder Singh Dhillon, I'll accept that reality with very little trouble. In the same fashion, back in November 2016 it took a few days for me to fully accept that Donald Trump had been elected president of the United States.

But it didn't take long for my mind to adjust to a new reality.

Now I'm hoping Trump will be a one-term president. If that doesn't happen, and he is re-elected, I'll be disappointed. However, I won't deny that this happened. (I do worry, though, that Trump won't be able to accept the reality of a 2020 defeat.)

I'll end by noting that even though I'm used to many varieties of religious craziness after 15 years of regularly writing here on the Church of the Churchless, it still surprises me when a commenter expresses extreme surprise at how I could have changed my mind about the validity of the RSSB teachings after being a member of the organization for such a long time.

Often I'll ask them how many things they have changed their mind about during their lifetime. Have you stuck with the same job, same car, same residence, same friends, same political views? Almost certainly not.

There's something about religion that encourages a rigidity of mind that isn't nearly as evident in other areas of life. Members of some religions, like Mormonism or Scientology, will shun people who leave the religion. Yet if someone changes their mind in a way that leads them to join the religion, that's not only fine, it's marvelous. 

For many fundamentalists, mind-changing is a one-way street. It's great if you convert to their religion, yet horrible if you deconvert.

Strange? Yes.

But since just about every religion believes that it, and it alone, is privy to the eternal ultimate truth of the cosmos, this encourages true believers to denigrate anyone who embraces that religion, then chooses to leave it. I guess changing one's mind makes those fundamentalists fearful that their chosen faith really isn't true.

Which, almost certainly, it isn't.

I feel good about having changed my mind to realize this. It's much more pleasurable to accept reality as it is, or at least as it appears, than to cling to a rigid way of thinking that no longer makes sense to me.

Comments

[Sonia]

Georgy,

Perhaps Gurinder caters to a rougher crowd. I’m sure he would have done well in the Merchant Navy.

What I don’t understand, though, is why he has such a difficult time with people criticizing him. It shouldn’t bother him in the least if he’s so tough.

[Sonia]

Alcoholism and other addictions all stem from past trauma. It's not a life choice as most people like to think, it's self medication for deep pain. You would love the Gabor Mate M.D. literature on addiction. He is a pioneer in the field.
As I told Jen in the previous post, it seriously effects the electromagnetic field of the body which is why I don't drink or take drugs anymore even though the temptation arises when am stressed out!

Posted by: Maria de La Torre | December 25, 2019 at 03:09 AM

Thanks, Maria!

I will check Dr. Gabor Mate’s work. 🙏

[Sonia]

Maria de La Torre,

I checked out just a few of Dr. Gabor Mate’s videos. His research and way of explaining addiction is so powerful. Addiction doesn’t run in my family at all. And I never had an “addictive personality” till after leaving Dera last December. It is no doubt trauma that requires the brain for these types of addictions.

Before joining RSSB I only drank from the ages of 21 - 31. I drank at a club one night when I was 18 and got alcohol poisoning so couldn’t stand the smell of alcohol after that. I didn’t start drinking again till I was 21 and then I stopped at 31 the year before I got initiated. During those ten years I never had a problem. I only drank once or twice a month and never more than a few glasses of wine.

So what happened during my 14 years as a Satsangi that would traumatize me so much? Or was it just a culmination of things? All I know is that when I got on the plane to leave India last December I started drinking and drank a lot every day until I finally joined AA in mid October.

Was it the trauma from last December?

It was a shock to my whole family and to myself. I try to look at incidents in my life that could prove I always had an alcoholic chemistry but nothing can explain why—when I was free to drink as much as I wanted (ten years from 21 - 31) I didn’t have any attraction to alcohol.

https://youtu.be/ARyq_BtCVMo

[Sonia]

It was interesting to see what Dr Mate has to say about shame trauma and addiction and how it requires the brain. I think my brain was COMPLETELY rewired at Dera last December. Normally I would insert crazy face emoji here but it’s not funny.

Sexual abuse, depression, mental illness, suicide... none of those things are first world problems.

[Jesse]

"I didn’t get that impression at all. He seemed quite polite and good humoured to me when spending 3 days answering often the most tedious questions."

Georgy, didn't you say in an earlier comment that you weren't a satsangi at all and that you knew nothing about rs?