Why I embrace the dark side of me and the world

Looking back, I don't think I ever was a full-on dualist, just a half-hearted one.

This was during the 35 years I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a religious organization based in India whose core teaching was that this world in which we live and breathe isn't our true home but a temporary resting place -- since the purpose of life is to return to higher regions of reality and God through extensive meditation, devotion to a guru believed to be God in Human Form, a vegetarian diet, abstinence from alcohol and drugs, and morality, including no sex outside of marriage.

Thus the RSSB teaching was thoroughly dualistic. The guru would say things like, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience." Which I recall is a quote from Teilhard deChardin.

I never fully embraced this notion of the world as a place to be escaped from. I didn't like the judgmentalism of so many RSSB initiates. They considered themselves to be God's chosen people, even though that honor is claimed by many, if not most, dualistic religions. They were even proud of their humility.

When I gave talks about the RSSB teachings, which was frequent, I'd pay lip service to the oft-repeated adage that it was crucial to shun lust, anger, greed, attachment, and egotism. However, I never came across a single person during my 35 years of RSSB membership, including the guru, who didn't manifest these and other so-called "negative" emotions and qualities.

Which are better termed simply emotions and qualities. 

In my experience, the people who talked the most about having overcome negative emotions and qualities were seriously lacking in positive emotions and qualities. It was as if all the attention they paid to stifling their dark side left them with insufficient energy to manifest their bright side -- especially in a natural fashion rather than a stilted artificial fashion.

One reason I detested holier-than-thou attitudes back then, and still do, is that I grew up in a family with a lot of dysfunction. Not just my immediate family, which was very small. My mother was divorced and I had a half-sister ten years older than me who got married at 18, so wasn't around much. My father wasn't in the picture, a man who I only spent an hour with in my entire life, aside from my baby years.

And that hour was very weird, not satisfying at all. My mother didn't speak much about my father. She told me that they got a divorce after he refused to move to Texas, a drier climate than Massachusetts, on the advice of doctors following the birth of my sister Evie, who was born with a congenital heart condition. Supposedly my father's job as a General Electric efficiency expert was more important to him.

Just as alcohol was more important to my mother than sobriety for much of my childhood. That was her biggest dark side, I suppose, as my father's cold detached ambition was to him. In addition, I grew up listening to tales of my mother's relatives facing their own divorces, drinking problems, affairs, and such. 

There was a lot of financial and artistic success in my family. Also, a lot of dark side dysfunction. They were all good people. They were family. They were lovable. So early on in my life I learned an important truth: we all are driven by forces outside of our control. Genetic, psychological, cultural. Scratch the surface of a so-called saint and you'll find a sinner.

That's why I get irritated when some commenters on my recent blog posts take self-righteous shots at two authors I like a lot: Alan Watts and Paul Breer.

Both men make no claim to being saints. Breer was in prison for two years; Watts had a drinking problem and relationship problems. Their personal lives were completely in accord with the messages in their books. Breer was a passionate believer in the illusion of free will and an immaterial self. Watts was a fervent advocate for a spirituality founded on being and acting natural, which included embracing the dark side of life.

Here's how Watts described the dark side in a book he wrote in 1940 when he was only 24, The Meaning of Happiness. These are wise observations about life that narrow-minded religious moralists should seriously consider, rather than reject out of hand.

If you sit still for a while, completely relaxed, and let your thoughts run on, let your mind think of whatever it likes, without interfering, without making suggestions, and without raising any kind of obstacle to the free flow of thought, you will soon discover that mental processes have a life of their own.

They will call one another to the surface of consciousness by association, and if you raise no barriers, you will soon find yourself thinking all manner of things both fantastic and terrible which you ordinarily keep out of consciousness.

Over a period of time this exercise will show you that you have in yourself the potentiality of countless different beings -- the animal, the demon, the sartyr, the thief, the murderer -- so that in time you will be able to feel that no aspect of human life is strange to you -- humani nihilism a me alienum puto. ["I consider nothing human is alien to me."]

In the ordinary way consciousness is forever interfering with the waters of the mind, which are dark and turbulent, concealing the depths. But when, for a while, you let them take care of themselves, the mud settles and with growing clarity you see the foundations of life and all the denizens of the deep.

...For the unconscious is not, as some imagine, a mental refuse-pit; it is simply unfettered nature, demonic and divine, painful and pleasant, hideous and lovely, cruel and compassionate, destructive and creative. It is the source of heroism, love, and inspiration as well as of fear, hatred, and crime.

Indeed, it is as if we carried inside of us an exact duplicate of the world we see around us, for the world is a mirror of the soul, and the soul a mirror of the world. Therefore when you learn to feel the unconscious you begin to understand not only yourself but others as well, and when you look upon human crime and stupidity, you can say with real feeling, "There but for the Grace of God go I." 

 

Comments

[Ron E.]

Again, Alan Watts talking about life as it really is - not as we believe or wish it to be. Folk may try to undermine such realities - but they'll always resurface because nature is ultimately all there is.

[Spence Tepper]

If only Watts and Breer had gone further in their explorations they might have discovered that beyond darkness is ineffable light and sound. Once you connect with these you find they are part of a compassionate friend, sweetness from within that helps you deal with the darkness.

Habits don't disappear overnight, but they can evaporate for a time, in a sea of joy.

And in that oneness, all people, it seems also have this same amazing benevolent consciousness deeply buried within them.

Washing the deeply rooted grooves with the even deeper light and sound, in time the conditioning, attachments, addictions and resentment wear away.

To facilitate that we work to build a very quiet life, by worldly standards. To enjoy the gift within, knowing the process is gradual, but pleasant.

The point of spirituality is integration, wholeness with all the parts. So of course becoming aware of these is part of our own enlightenment.

Conditioning from the past is only a form of imbalance. Becoming one with the benevolent light and sound helps pull us into balance.

So that means, Brian, that your Mom and your Dad, Breer and Watts, even me, as you know me, are nothing more than constructions, impressions, within you. Constructions you will need to accept as they are, ss you cannot change them, and even learn to forgive and to love, as part of loving the Brian that makes all these. As part of loving yourself.

That is how the inner and the outer are no different.

And how Oneness can be achieved... Let the past go, honor it, welcome it, and then bring it into that light and sound that integrates all things.

Whatever darkness is in you is part of you. But it isn't bad. Just out of balance. But the power of light and sound is also there, and greater, over time. And a great benevolent presence, great company. Use it.

[Brian Hines]

Spence Tepper, the best thing I can say about your preachy, self-righteous comments is that they make me ever SO HAPPY that I'm no longer part of a dogmatic religious teaching. I heartily reject the fantasy of "light and sound" as the solution to life's problems just as much as I reject the Christian bullshit of "have faith in Jesus." You appear to have no compassion for your fellow human beings, preferring to push platitudes that have no connection with the life of anyone who doesn't believe as you do.

[um]

@ Beian

"" I heartily reject the fantasy of "light and sound" as the solution to life's problems "

Fantasy ..YES!
But who created that fantasy?

Was this fantasy created by:
- The RSSB teachings as part of the Indian Sant tradition?
- The RSSB teacher, in th person of the one that accepted you as a student?
- The RSSB students ...

The personal missery in life of students might have brought them to the door of a but teacher but did THEY ever said or write that they would offer them a solution for their personal misery and that the aim of their teachings was to better the life for humanity in general and individual persons in particular?

It has been my personal understanding and experience that they always stretchend that Sant mat teachings had nothing to offer for the betterment of life in whatever aspect.

Did they not try to hammer that in the listeners mind, day in day out?
Did he not complain again an again, that he failed to bring it home, that life had to be gone trough as once fate?

I too, have tried again and again, not to hear upon him, until finally he made it clear to me in a letter that:

[Quote] It is not meant to give any sort of psychic help to anyone, not for finding any truth at any other place in the world.. It is not to be used for any ulterior motive except to take YOUR own soul back to the lord. Meditation should be done for only one purpose - to go back to where we belong" [end quote]

I too left I all behind, but for my own reasons, reasons not at all related to the teachings and the teacher..

As a speaker you must have experienced yourself, time and again, that people would come up to you after satsang with the desire to discuss things THEY imagined you had said but you never could have said, knowing yourself. You must also have figured out, that whatever answer YOU gave to tell them what YOU said and intended, was most of the tome to no avail.

Based upon this personal experience of yourselkf as a speaker you can easily make up your mind what was the fate of the man on whom's behave you spoke

[Spence Tepper]

Hi Brian
You wrote
"Spence Tepper, the best thing I can say about your preachy, self-righteous comments is that they make me ever SO HAPPY that I'm no longer part of a dogmatic religious teaching."

Watts and Breer preach about enlightenment and oneness as something they already have without having to do all the work of the others whose philosophies they regurgitate. Even as they feed their addictions and exploit children.

It isn't compassion they promote. It's narcism.

Do you really believe as Watts writes that he is the center of the universe?That he is perfect as is and need not long for Truth? And not working, not struggling towards any growth? Not disappointed in his own shortcomings? Not hungry for any direction and support?

I would not be surprised if someone who really believed that had no problem taking advantage of young under age women. Who had no problem making excuses.

Where is the compassion on that? In exploiting children?

[Brian Hines]

Spence, you're wrong about Alan Watts and Paul Breer. You haven't even read their books but you claim to know all about them. Watts wrote his book when he was 24, long before his alcoholism came to light. Breer did go to prison. We don't know what he was convicted of. Regardless, neither man claims to be enlightened or even that enlightenment as usually understood even exists.

I stand by my statement. You're acting like a self-righteous religious moralist who views anybody who doesn't believe and act as you'd like them to as some sort of monster, rather than a normal human being. You must consider yourself to be perfect, since you seem to demand perfection of everyone other than yourself.

You speak of them "feeding their addictions." You're a real jerk if you consider alcoholism something that is voluntarily fed. It's a disease. My mother suffered from a disease, you uncompassionate holier-than-thou bigot. I lived through her alcoholism as a teenager, when her drinking was worst. I'd wake up in the morning and check the level of the vodka bottle to see how much she'd drank the night before.

That wasn't pleasant, to put it mildly. I had to put a pillow over my head to try to drown out her drunken rants from the bedroom next door to mine. She'd insult me, insult her own mother, insult others. But I never viewed my mother as "feeding her addiction." She was in the grip of an affliction that she didn't choose, even though it was destructive to herself and to others, like me.

Before offering your misguided moralistic advice to more people, you really ought to inform yourself about alcoholism and other addictions.

[Spence Tepper]

Brian
You wrote
"neither man claims to be enlightened or even that enlightenment as usually understood even exists."

But Watts wrote,
"For spirituality is a deep sense of inner freedom based on the realization that one's self is in complete union and harmony with life, with God, with the Self of the universe or whatever that principle may be called. It is the realization that that union has existed from all time, even though one did not know it, and that nothing in all the world nor anything that oneself can do is able to destroy it."

Is he not discussing his notion of enlightenment?

Or at least his notion of spirituality?

It looks like a definition of being in love.

Did he really have a
" realization that one's self is in complete union and harmony with life, with God, with the Self of the universe or whatever that principle may be called."?

Or is this his conjecture of these things?

Did he actually have a realization? Or just an idea?

How do you take it?

You wrote
"

[Spence Tepper]

Hi Brian, you wrote
"You're acting like a self-righteous religious moralist who views anybody who doesn't believe and act as you'd like them to as some sort of monster, rather than a normal human being. You must consider yourself to be perfect, since you seem to demand perfection of everyone other than yourself."

Brian, I'm perfectly fine with Breer and Watts holding their opinion. I'm not OK with hurting anyone.

No they don't have to be perfect. Who is? We all have our challenges. I only share what has helped me.

But to claim they have an easy path to understanding oneself and becoming enlightened or truly selfless without any work or effort when they are only mouthing the words others earned through toil is misleading.

They are promising a wealth they don't have and are claiming every one else is foolish to work for it.

If you have compassion for the weak don't belittle them, don't make them helpless. Accept them, help them. But understand your own weaknesses first.

You wrote
"You speak of them "feeding their addictions." You're a real jerk if you consider alcoholism something that is voluntarily fed."

And what are you for suggesting nothing can be done about it?

[SantMat64]

As I've written before, everyone I've known in Sant mat groups had problems with their father. I'm no exception, so don't think I'm casting stones. But the search for a familial wholeness that was absent or perceived to be absent is, I believe, a big reason why people are attracted to guru-centric religions. The guru is the father figure of unconditional love. It's natural that some people would be attracted to that (unconsciously anyway) given their backgrounds.

I think it's debatable whether the guru father figure is a good or bad thing in one's life. But I do think that our critiques of the guru often reveal less about the guru's faults and more about the psychological dynamics of parent substitutes and abandonment issues.

I see these dynamics most often in guru succession sagas. One very typical example: Guru A is revered and loved by a sangat, who overlooks his faults. However, Guru A's successor, Guru B, though virtually identical to Guru A in every way, is harshly criticized. I've seen this play out in various religions, sects, and cults.

To put it in the RSSB context, Charan was the perfect dad we love, and Gurinder is the strange stepdad we resent. Over 20 years of reading posts by disaffected satsangis, and I don't think I've seen more than a couple of Charan initiates even mildly critiquing that guru.

Gurinder, on the other hand... i yi yi the vitriol.

And yet, objectively speaking, these 2 gurus are identical. Whatever Gurinder has done, Charan did the same damn thing. And yet, in the minds of his children, Charan is forever on the perfect dad master clouds.

As for RSSB satsangis being holier than thou, I will say that I'm often depressed by the tone of the usual satsang sermons. I find them irritatingly negative in that peculiar herculean gnostic flavor that is RSSB teachings, viz, you're a million miles from the goal, you're not trying hard enough, you're wasting your life on the trivial, everything is your fault. But that's the RSSB "brand," as it were. RSSB has always presented that negative tone, it's part and parcel of every book and satsang. Attend any RSSB satsang anywhere in the world, you will get the same product, the same as you would visiting a McDonald's and ordering a hamburger. But RSSB's "holierness" isn't the satsangis' doing, it's the RSSB script, the religion's very orthodoxy.

As for Paul Breer, Alan Watts, and their ilk, they too are selling a kind of psychological simulation similar to that of the guru-dad hawkers. I'm fully with Breer and Watts' views on using the technology of Buddhist meditation / philosophy to reduce the stress of the thinking mind. But where Breer and Watts lose me is in their immorality.

Let me be more precise: Not just their immorality, but Breer and Watts's embrace of immorality as synonymous with true freedom and wisdom. CLEARLY didn't work for them. And so while RSSB and like religions may be somewhat lugubrious in their perfectionism, I hold them in higher esteem than gurus who are crypto-Mansonesque.

[PJ]

>everyone in sant mat groups had problems with their father

Damn, that's true. Of me and my then peer group friends.

[PJ]

@SantMat64
I agree, and it makes no sense for them to criticise GSD and not Charan.

If you can falsify one master then you negate the whole line.

Once you realise that one is a psychopathic fraud (you would have to be an evil psychopath to put on this act) then the one who chose them is also falsified, and so on backwards.

[La Madrugada]

BRAVO BRIAN!

Spence Tepper, the best thing I can say about your preachy, self-righteous comments is that they make me ever SO HAPPY that I'm no longer part of a dogmatic religious teaching. I heartily reject the fantasy of "light and sound" as the solution to life's problems just as much as I reject the Christian bullshit of "have faith in Jesus." You appear to have no compassion for your fellow human beings, preferring to push platitudes that have no connection with the life of anyone who doesn't believe as you do.

Posted by: Brian Hines | September 17, 2023 at 09:37 AM

[Spence Tepper]

The word Compassion is being misused here.

"sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others."

Not making excuses for them and oneself to do nothing.
Rather, to accept that this is where we are and with all love, as a brother, stepping in to help.

Compassion is not hopelessness. It is understanding, acceptance, hope, and help to move forward.

Ignoring our shortcomings isn't compassion. Excusing the addictions of others as hopeless is zero compassion.

[DJ]

Addiction is not a disease. It’s simply a nasty habit, says neuroscientist Dr. Marc Lewis, himself a longtime addict and professor of developmental psychology, in his new book, “The Biology of Desire.” Proponents of the disease theory have one talking point that they love to repeat before they hurry to change the subject: Addiction changes the structure of the brain.

To experts in the field the claim that altered brain structure proves the presence of disease sounds ludicrous. The brain is a plastic organ. It changes when you age. It changes when you learn a new language or a musical instrument. It changes when you fall in love. It changes when you have children. It even changes when some judgemental ass calls you a uncompassionate holier-than-thou bigot.
“Addiction may be a frightful, devastating and insidious process of change in our habits and our synaptic patterning. But that doesn’t make it a disease.” “The severe consequences of addiction,” writes Lewis, “don’t make it a disease, any more than the severe consequences of violence make violence a disease, or the severe consequences of racism make racism a disease, or the folly of loving thy neighbor’s wife makes infidelity a disease. What they make it is a very bad habit.”

[manjit]

Hi Spence! Much love and blessings from my corner of the hell realms of heathens and unbelievers!!

You wrote: "Hi Brian,...", "Brian..." & "Hi Brian,...".

Aren't you forgetting something?

It's Pooran Sant Satguru Sri Sri Bhagwan Maharaj Huzur Sadh Sant Baba Paramahansa Sant Baba Brian JI to you.

I shudder to think of how many rotations of the wheel of chaurasi you must suffer for this gross negligence.

Luckily for Sat Purush (but not you), time is but a mere illusion and "you" and your almost infinite lifetimes are but mere fleeting phantasmagoria.

Now doesn't that make you feel better!

EMAHO!

[Spence Tepper]

Hi Manjit!
Yes, it makes me ecstatic.

[manjit]

Hi Spence! You wrote: "Hi Manjit!"

Aren't you forgetting something?

It's Sri Sri Sri Pooran Sant Satguru Sri Sri Bhagwan Maharaj Huzur Sadh Sant Baba Paramahansa Sant Baba Manjit JI to you.

I hope you took notice that I'm 3 Sri's better than Brian.

You wrote: "Yes, it makes me ecstatic".

Hmmm, I dunno. You don't give off the traditional scents of one rapt in ecstasy. Certainly not of the Dionysian kind :) But if you say so!