Church of the Churchless

Reality requires a broad scientific look, not narrow mystic visions

Put on your philosophical wading boots. I'm about to jump into the deep end of some interesting, but sort of complex, questions about the nature of reality as seen through the eyes of quantum physics.

But rest assured that, in accord with the focus of this Church of the Churchless blog, I'll be drawing some inferences about what makes sense, and what doesn't, when it comes to religious, mystical, and spiritual claims about reality.

This might take a few blog posts, so I'll do my best to keep this initial post as short and simple as possible.

(Which means, it is going to seem lengthy and complex to many readers; sorry about that, it's the nature of the philosophical beast we're trying to come to grips with.)

I'm about two-thirds of the way through a fascinating book, "What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics," by Adam Becker. Becker is a science writer with a Ph.D. in astrophysics.

The key word in the title is meaning. Here's why.

Historically, the prevailing view of quantum physics is known as the Copenhagen Interpretation, which often is pithily summed up as "shut up and calculate!" In other words, most physicists don't worry about the underlying meaning of what is known about the quantum world.

They're content with the fact that the mathematics of quantum mechanics are amazingly accurate and precise, which is why we've experienced such fantastic accomplishments in fields such as computer technology, lasers, medical imaging, and so much else.

Now, I'm going to quickly jump into the religious/mystical side of life, to avoid readers of this post heading off to another corner of the World Wide Web. 

In Becker's "More Things in Heaven and Earth" chapter, he discusses a useful analogy to illustrate the core philosophical debate between the "shut up and calculate" folks, and the "let's dig deeper for underlying meaning" folks. This is basically the distinction between logical positivism and realism.

Before we get into that analogy, I need to say that I'm not arguing for a simplistic direct connection between logical positivism and mystical ways of thinking, versus realism and scientific ways of thinking, because the situation is murkier than that. Here's some quotes from Becker:

The logical positivists were understandably opposed to philosophical castles in the sky and the tortuous prose they were often defended with. But the logical positivists weren't merely against metaphysics -- they believed they could actually dismiss metaphysical claims as meaningless.

Meaning, they held, was a matter of verification: knowing what a statement means is equivalent to knowing how to specify it using your senses. According to the positivists, when you say "it's hotter outside that it is in here," you really mean "if you go outside you will feel hotter than you do in here."

The statement's meaning is the method of verifying it empirically -- and if there's no way of verifying a statement against your senses, then that statement has no meaning.

...But idealist and theological claims aren't the only kinds of statements that make no contact with the senses.

There are also more straightforward claims like "the couch is in the living room even when nobody's there," that can't be confirmed directly. Statements like these about the existence and persistence of material objects independent of perception are realist claims -- they're statements about a real world that exists whether or not there are any humans around,

These statements are fundamental to science. Yet some of the positivists, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, dismissed realist claims as meaningless too, because they can't be verified by experience. All that is meaningful, on the positivists' account, are statements about perceptions, along with the purely logical statements of mathematics. 

Obviously mysticism isn't a mathematical enterprise. But leaving that aside, over the fourteen years I've been writing on this blog I've heard countless (more or less) stories of how someone had a vision of God, or of Jesus, or of a guru, or of divine light and sound, or whatever. 

When I and other skeptics would ask for evidence that those mystical experiences were real, typically the response would be along this line: "I know what I experienced, and it felt genuine to me, so you should believe that it was real."

This is basically a positivist argument.

Of course, unlike scientific positivism, there really isn't any way for other people to reproduce that experience -- though believers in mystic visions like to say things like, "You just need to meditate in this fashion for a long time, and have faith in God/guru/angelic beings/whatever."

I'm going to turn now to Becker's analogy, which hopefully will make my point more clear. He uses something most of us are familiar with, a TV remote control that has stopped working, to illustrate the distinction between positivism and realism.

Quine's paper, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," took aim at the core of the positivist program, the verification theory of meaning. Quine pointed out that there was no way to verify single statements -- all attempts to verify a statement inevitably involve the assumed truth of other statements, which are themselves subject to the same problem.

For example, say the remote control for your TV isn't working, and you can't turn the TV on. You suspect that the batteries in the remote are dead. You can verify this by replacing the batteries and trying to turn on the TV with the remote again. You do this, and the TV turns on.

Does that mean you were right? No.

It's entirely possible that the batteries in the remote control weren't dead at all. Maybe the remote had a short and will only work intermittently, no matter what batteries you use. Or maybe the old batteries were in backward, and you didn't notice; you just popped them out and put in new ones pointing the right way.

Or maybe something more exotic is going on: maybe the remote always worked, but when you tried it before, the TV mysteriously shifted its picture to the infrared and its sound to the ultrasonic, so you couldn't see or hear it; the TV happened to go back to normal after you changed the batteries, but not because you changed them. 

The last idea is clearly preposterous -- how could that happen? -- but the point remains that in testing out the new batteries in the remote, you've assumed a wide variety of basic facts about the world, all based on previous experience, and any of which could, in principle, be wrong.

This isn't merely true of suppositions about batteries in remote controls; verification of any statement behaves this way 

Looking out the window and saying, "It's raining outside," assumes that your view through the window's glass gives you an accurate picture of the outside world, and that your eyes are functioning property, and that the dimmed light and falling droplets  are in fact caused by a rain cloud and not an alien spaceship blotting out the Sun and dropping some exotic substance onto your front lawn.

So you can never verify a single statement: you're always stuck verifying the entirety of your knowledge about the world, or at least a very large fraction of it. As Quine put it, "Our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body."

With the verification theory of meaning left gasping for air, Quine dismissed the idea that it's meaningless to talk about unobservable things. Unverifiable statements must have meaning, because no individual statement is verifiable.

Thus the "metaphysics" so dreaded by the positivists came roaring  back: rather than speaking simply of sensations, Quine contended that it was perfectly intelligible to speak of physical objects with existence independent of the speaker.

So this gets me back to the title of this post: reality requires a broad scientific look, not narrow mystic visions.

I'll talk about this more in another blog post, because this one is plenty long already. For now I'll simply observe that without using these terms, for quite a few years I've been engaged with positivist believers in mystical experiences who don't want to take a broad realistic view of the cosmos.

For example, a supernatural experience typically demands that someone assume that human consciousness can function outside of the physical brain; that there are spiritual realms of existence beyond the physical universe; that there are "laws of nature" unknown to science, and so on. This sort of worldview requires a very different understanding of reality than is known either to science or everyday experience.

Which is why I no longer believe in it.   

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

I respond to criticism of my book that I no longer fully believe in

As noted in a post three weeks ago, I've gotten God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder back in print, even though I no longer believe in much of the mystical/spiritual aspect of the book. 

Spencer Tepper, a frequent commenter on this blog, bought a copy of the book, which I appreciate. I also appreciate a comment he left where he critiqued some of what I said in the first part of God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder.

It's a bit strange that I feel the need to defend a book that I don't totally believe in, but Tepper focused on a topic that I do consider to be absolutely true: that materiality is different from spirituality -- at least as spirituality is viewed through the lens of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) or Sant Mat, which was the perspective from which I wrote the book back in the 1990s. 

So it's sort of weird that Tepper is criticizing part of a book that was welcomed by the current RSSB guru, who arranged for several thousand copies of my book to be bought by RSSB, which greased the wheels for its initial publication by Threshold Books. 

I say this because Tepper is an RSSB devotee, albeit seemingly not a standard one, since his views differ from the RSSB teachings in certain important respects. Anyway, here's Tepper's comment, and my responses in blue. 

Hi Brian I'm working my way through your book and it did strike me in a completely different way today. It is elegant in its prose. But it's logic, at least in the first few pages, seems hopelessly flawed. You wrote "Materiality can be observed and measured with the physical senses of sight. hearing, touch, small, and taste. This distinction is important because it separates material science from spiritual science."

Yes, I consider this to be true. If something is material, meaning part of the physical universe, it isn't "spiritual" in the sense I'm using that term. The mystic philosophy of Sant Mat (which, again, is what I based the spiritual aspect of my book on) teaches that there are five regions of reality beyond the physical. The goal of Sant Mat meditation is to raise one's soul consciousness to those regions, aided and guided by spiritual light and sound.

This may be a case of reductum ad absurdum. The "material sciences" measure many things well beyond the range of the physical senses. From the distant cosmos to subatomic waves of pure energy, to brain waves and the firing of dendritic interlaces, science extends our vision and understanding. And in distinction to your claims, it often does so measuring indirectly.

When Tepper reads more of my book, he'll see that I note that science uses instruments to aid the human senses. Telescopes aid the eye, for example. And other instruments allow humans to detect electromagnetic frequencies beyond the range of the senses. But the measurements Tepper refers to all have to be cognized by one or more of the physical senses. How else would scientists know about the results of their experiments and observations? I talk a lot about quantum theory in my book, and this area of science deals almost entirely with indirect measurements, since there isn't agreement about the nature of the quantum realm.

We learn about gravity from objects that fall or move in space, not a direct measurement of gravity waves. When you wrote this you faulted, I believe falsely, the physical sciences for being unable to measure spiritual events because they have no apparent measurement in physical reality. Today you fault spirituality for exactly the same reason. Despite your development, your reasoning remains based in the same argumentation.

I don't understand what's being said in the comment above. Gravity waves are a physical phenomenon. Human senses interpret the observations made by highly sensitive machines that are able to detect gravity waves emanating from deep space. Given my definition of spiritual events, which is that used by Sant Mat, it isn't possible for a physical entity to detect a non-physical entity, such as the shabd or sound current posited by the RSSB teachings.

These days I regularly point out on this blog that there is no demonstrable evidence of a spiritual reality. This is consistent with what I said in my book, because physical reality is distinct from any spiritual reality that might exist. Thus any spiritual reality can only be known by an experiencer of it, since as I say in my book, that reality would be non-symbolic -- incapable of being described in words, symbols, images, numbers, or such.

Earlier you constrained science to what could be measured at the time. Today you constrain spirituality because of those same constraints. But in both cases the argument is premature. Your argument extends well beyond your evidence. Even thoughts are correlated to biochemical events. What happens to us is connected to this world.

I totally agree, given my current materialist perspective. However, mysticism as taught by the RSSB gurus has a different perspective: that soul consciousness is separable from the human brain, and it is possible to be aware of spiritual realms of reality that have no connection with this physical universe.

Spirituality and all the classic experiences noted repeatedly in mystic literature and mythic symbols throughout recorded history must at some point find measurable correlates. You quote Max Planck "Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and, therefore, part of the mystery we are trying to solve."

Tepper is wrong on this point. Most mystical literature teaches that God, and associated"heavens," are incapable of being described symbolically. They must be experienced, not talked about. The Planck quote cited above supports this notion. Spiritual mystery can be comprehended only by becoming it, or at least grasping it in a non-conceptual fashion. So it is entirely wrong to claim that mysticism seeks "measurable correlates" of mystical experience.

This echoes the same argument for analogous reasoning made by Thomas Aquinas, when he wrote that God cannot be understood by deduction, since God is not a reducable element that can be manipulated, but is in fact greater than this creation. And this echoes Kant's argument that reason cannot accurately extend too far beyond its premeses of common experience to explain metasphysic experience.

Agreed, in the sense that I noted above: mysticism teaches that reasoning can't reach into spiritual realms of existence, a point I stress repeatedly in my book.

But as the tools of science are honed in studying mystic experience we certainly can and will gain greater insights into it. All the modern research into meditation and its physiological effects are evidence, hard evidence of this. I think the same flaw in reasoning from your book pervades your current thinking. You once dismissed scientific inquiry as too limited to capture the full range of reality. Your argument then seemed to be 'If science can't test it today, science must be too constrained to witness true mystic experience' . You now dismiss mystic experience for the same reason.

I disagree, given the RSSB/Sant Mat form of mysticism I based my book on. Again, the RSSB  teachings aim at merging the drop of the soul with the ocean of shabd, the sound current that is believed to be the source from which lower levels of creation spring. This is very different from meditation approaches that aim at making the mind (which is the physical brain in action) more relaxed, concentrated, and such. Tepper's definition of "mystic experience" isn't the one I use in my book, which is the same as that taught by the RSSB gurus.

You seem to now be saying 'If mystic experience can't be tested it must be false, non-existent.' Brian, I hope you can see both of these are unscientific and fallacious claims, based as they area on a single false premise: Your arguments are too final for either science or statements of divinity, based as they are on flawed human limitations, either in meditation or science. But in both cases development invalidates that argument.

Tepper clearly hasn't finished reading my book. What he says above is the exact opposite of what I say in the book. God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder is founded on the premise that there are objective, yet non-symbolic, realms of reality that lie beyond the bounds of material science. So I say over and over in the book that it isn't possible for material science to find signs of a spiritual reality.

You site [sic ] Joe Rosen's definition of science based in the study of what is reproducible and predictable (reliable). All meditation practice and specifically the internal experiences that accrue must at some point meet these same criteria in order for the practitioner to conclude they are witnessing truth. Your approach to criticizing science as a means of creating a space to defend meditation is based on a flaw that had to crumble at some point.

Yes, I correctly describe what material science is all about. Spiritual science is not material science. As I say in my book, if there are spiritual realms of reality that are non-physical, a physical science can't be aware of them. This is why I say that non-symbolic contemplative meditation is the only way of (possibly) contacting a spiritual reality. The fact that there is no agreement among the world's religions and mystical teachings about what a spiritual reality is like now leads me to believe that no such reality exists. 

I wonder why you would choose to write this book without first having a thorough grounding of spiritual experience that met the conditions for reliability and repetitive reproducibility at your volition, so that you could test it, and get beyond imagination and subjective experience.

Well, I spent 35 years meditating every day for several hours, as instructed by Charan Singh, the guru who initiated me in 1971. I consider that a "thorough grounding" in the Sant Mat mystical teachings. I conducted the experiment of  contemplative meditation with fortitude, diligence, and attention to detail. Tepper is free to engage in judgmentalism, and he appears to consider himself superior in spiritual wisdom. Maybe he is. But there is no way to know, because I continue to believe that genuine spirituality isn't capable of being communicated in words or any other symbols.

I'll end by noting to Tepper that this book was reviewed and read by numerous "higher-ups" in the Radha Soami Satsang Beas organization, and was approved by the guru Gurinder Singh himself. So even though Tepper believes that my book doesn't accurately reflect the mystical teachings of Sant Mat, the guru and other leaders of Radha Soami Satsang Beas considered that it did.

Militants kill 305 Sufis in the name of God. Religions are crazy.

All terrorist attacks are despicable and difficult to comprehend. But when Muslim militants killed 305 Sufis, members of their own religion whose supposed crime is viewing Islam differently -- that's freaking insane. 

Back in my true believing days, before I saw the atheist light, for several years I became a huge fan of Rumi. I bought just about every English language book about Rumi and his teachings. Rumi was a Sufi. So this helps explain my outrage at the killings in the Sinai Peninsula. 

Here's some excerpts from a New York Times story, "Who Are Sufi Muslims and Why Do Some Extremists Hate Them?"

Sufism is a mystical form of Islam, a school of practice that emphasizes the inward search for God and shuns materialism. It has produced some of the world’s most beloved literature, like the love poems of the 13th century Iranian jurist Rumi. Its modern-day adherents cherish tolerance and pluralism, qualities that in many religions unsettle extremists.

But Sufism, often known as Islamic mysticism, has come under violent attack in recent years. On Friday, militants stormed a Sufi mosque on the Sinai Peninsula, killing at least 305 people in what officials are calling the worst terrorist attack in Egypt’s modern history. The attack followed several assaults on Sufi shrines in Pakistan over the past year carried out by Sunni extremists. (The vast majority of Sufis are Sunni, though some are Shiite.)

What is this form of Islamic belief, and why has it come under assault?

...Sufism, known as tasawwuf in the Arabic-speaking world, is a form of Islamic mysticism that emphasizes introspection and spiritual closeness with God.

While it is sometimes misunderstood as a sect of Islam, it is actually a broader style of worship that transcends sects, directing followers’ attention inward. Sufi practice focuses on the renunciation of worldly things, purification of the soul and the mystical contemplation of God’s nature. Followers try to get closer to God by seeking spiritual learning known as tariqa.

...Sufism has shaped literature and art for centuries, and is associated with many of the most resonant pieces of Islam’s “golden age,” lasting from roughly the eighth through 13th centuries, including the poetry of Rumi.

In modern times, the predominant view of Sufi Islam is one of “love, peace, tolerance,” Mr. Knysh explained, leading to this style of worship becoming synonymous with peace-loving Islam.

...The Islamic State targets Sufis because it believes that only a fundamentalist form of Sunni Islam is valid.

Some fundamentalists see the reverence for saints, which is common in Shiite Islam, as a form of idolatry, because in their view it shows devotion to something other than the worship of a singular God. Some consider Sufis to be apostate, because saints were not part of the original practice of Islam at the time of the Prophet Muhammad, who died in 632.

...Imam Feisal said that attacks on Sufi worshipers, besides being a “major sin,” are the result of the politicization of religion in the region over the past few decades. Egypt, in particular, he said, is a place where that politicization has fueled extremism.

“When religion becomes politicized,” Imam Feisal said, “it is not good.”

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

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

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

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

Dear Brian,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Sant Mat follower returns to Jesus (and wants to hear from others who have done this)

Here's a message I got from someone who tried to follow both Sant Mat and Christianity. After developing doubts about the Science of Spirituality branch of Sant Mat (led by guru Rajinder Singh), she returned to her faith in Jesus.

Below the woman says, "If anyone has any information about Science of the Soul that is not commonly known or discussed, I would be interested in hearing their stories. Especially from those that have chosen to leave the path for Christianity."

Even if this doesn't describe you, the woman is interested in comments -- whether positive or negative -- from anyone who reads her story. Here it is:

I have been following the posts about Science of the Soul and Radhasoami at this website for a few months trying to glean information about aspects of Sant Mat that are not discussed in Satsang. I was initiated by Darshan Singh in the early 80s and was a devoted follower for many years---but after time I started having niggling doubts which caused me great anguish and soul searching.

I was a Christian before I started following Sant Mat, and for a time, I tried to follow both paths, as Sant Mat always stresses that it is not a religion, but a scientific method for experiencing God. I found this to be totally unrealistic, and one day I found myself weeping because I thought I would have to abandon my first love which was Jesus.

People on the Path had told me that Jesus was a "lesser" Master, and certainly was of absolutely no use in this lifetime due to the need for a living Master. I can't remember when I was more depressed.

Finally I read Sar Bachan, and that book so appalled me, that I began to slowly disentangle myself from Sant Mat. This was difficult as my husband was a group leader, and was dismayed by my increasing doubts about the Path. I found that I could not live without faith in Jesus Christ, and became more and more depressed. Finally, I made the break and left Sant Mat, and returned to my faith in Jesus.

Do I think Jesus is the ONLY way?---I put that thought on the shelf of "things-I-leave-to-God-to-sort", but given the number of holy people in other paths, I have a hard time believing that.

One of the minor things that began to trouble me about Science of Spirituality, was the extravagant wealth of the Master (Rajinder Singh.) Although the preaching is about letting go of material things and focusing on the spiritual, he was living in a mansion, driving expensive cars, and draping his wife in diamonds, while many of his followers suffer in want.

Followers rationalize that he earned this money, but why is he living such a blatantly materialistic life style while espousing non-materialism? I heard him once say that one did not need to worry about trashing the environment, because the quicker it was destroyed, the sooner the cycle of births and deaths could end, and the Golden Age could be ushered in (this is NOT an exact quote, but the gist of what was said during Satsang.)

There seems to be a rationalization for any behavior or comment that is uncomfortable, and this troubles me. It also appears that Rajinder's son is slated to become the next Master which goes against Kirpal's own words that the mastership cannot be inherited. As of now, the succession has gone from Kirpal to his son, to his grandson, and perhaps in the future his great-grandson.

If anyone has any information about Science of the Soul that is not commonly known or discussed, I would be interested in hearing their stories. Especially from those that have chosen to leave the path for Christianity.

I still have a great love and respect for the followers of Sant Mat (my husband is still very devoted, but has reluctantly come to terms with my change of heart), but I wonder how honest they are about their "inner experiences." I never had any that were anything spectacular (although the few ones I had were Christian in nature), but perhaps that is the reason for all the secrecy?

Oh, and the teachings about chastity, even in marriage. They nearly ruined my relationship with my husband. How can they be healthy.

Anyway, I welcome any comments, positive or negative. I have found my home with Jesus. I am not "religious', but merely want to follow Christ and surrender all to Him. As far as what others want to do, I leave all that in God's hands. Those hands are compassionate and loving.

Tough talk about Rajinder Singh from a disillusioned ex-disciple

Recently I got an email from someone who was initiated by an Indian Sant Mat guru, Rajinder Singh, and now realizes that this supposed divine being isn't really what he claims to be.


This person gave me permission to share the message, which I've done below with some mild editing in line with the person's wish to remain anonymous.

I'm always pleased to hear about someone's disillusioned experience with a religion or religious teacher. This is a wonderful thing, waking up from an illusion. 

Feel free to share your thoughts about what this person says in a comment, as my correspondent would like readers of the following message to do.

Hi Brian, I’m glad I found your blog. I also contacted the ex satsangi group but did not get a reply. 

You can post my message on your blog if you like, I’d like people to comment, but please leave out the information about where I am from and my name. This posting may be interesting because there is a lot about other Sant Mat Gurus here but not so many from the Darshan-Rajinder line.

I have been initiated by Sant Rajinder Singh Ji Maharaja in 2013 - long distance initiation, did I really believe that?! I saw him for the first time in the last two weeks. Seeing him in reality after watching his videos for 2 years was nice at first, but I had a very bad experience when my son was initiated.

I took part on the initiation together with my son, who was taken away from me and made to listen to the sound current for 40 mins. until he started to cry. The satsangi told me later he was having experiences! How ignorant is that?! He was simply in pain from fingers stuffed in his ears!

Also, the person responsible for the foreigners here is starting to push us around. This made me realize after 2.5 years of daily up to 2.5 hrs meditation and more in workshops, that I do not want to follow guru god Sant Rajinder Singh Ji any more. 

I am quite confused now - my poor boy has to watch as I have to explain to him what happened and why I misbelieved so much before. All the questions that Sant Mat has answered: Who am I? Why is there suffering? Where do we go after death? are now wide open again for me and I think I have to be very careful to not stuff that hole with another scam.

From my Satsang friends I hear all the "It was Karma", "You have to overcome it“, "This was best for your son", "Stand up during Darshan and talk to the Master" - shit and I can’t believe it.

If I stand up during Darshan, the first thing that will happen is that everyone around me will get annoyed and angry because they think after 3 hours of waiting it’s them who should be close to him. The second thing to happen is that I can’t speak calmly in such a situation and english is not my mother tongue. And I am quite sure the third thing will be a response like "Your son will be fine" or "Have faith" and I’m not sure I can control my anger when that happens.

There are many thoughts in my head now, also emotions, and sometimes I catch myself doing Simran without wanting it.

There are so many things I give myself permission to think now.

Kirpal, Darshan, and Rajinder, these were/are the current godmen, and it JUST SO HAPPENS that they are one family? Please. Also, you would think that there is a woman in that line somewhere - for god, gender is nothing, right? Then why are all of the Masters men? Yes there is Mira Bai but women are really under-represented.

I never had experiences of any kind, never even felt the "sense currents" collect at my third eye, even after 2 hours of perfectly sitting still and being totally concentrated. During initiation Rajinder asked who saw a sun, the moon, a Master within, and we only meditated 25 mins. half of the Indians raised their hands.

What?! I am sure there are so many not meditating properly, and they saw the radiant form of the Master, and me, after two years of meditating everyday, nothing? Not even a flash of light? No, not even as HE touched my third eye.

Also, this science thing - it’s like Freud, and I never liked Freud's way of forcing people to believe him. If you say anything against it, you just have to develop further "in the right direction", otherwise you are "in denial". One way or another, it’s your responsibility. But at the same time "we are nothing" and "Master is everything".

I am mild in judgement to myself because I only needed this one week in his presence to realize he is just a man like everyone else. He might even be a saint. But he is not God. He does not know what is going on in our minds.

Well, I can’t prove that. But as you are allowed to have a hypothesis and check it, my hypothesis was that my son would feel at least in peace during meditation, that he would be appreciated and taken good care of. But Master ignored him and the Satsangis around him made him cry. For me, this is enough proof that there is something wrong in this Satsang and I don’t want to go there any more.

The next problem I have to deal with is what will I believe in in this life.

I know many readers think, you don’t have to believe in anything, you have yourself. I did not write this to get an answer. I write this, because I am in that state now where you are kind of lonely and insecure and you don’t have a mass of sheep around you assuring you that you are doing the right thing, and this feels new and a bit sad. But I’ll get through it, because I’m a grown person and 2 years of being wrong is something that I can overcome.

One thought for SEVA: I was always wondering how holding a satsang is better and holier SEVA then feeding the hungry or playing with orphans. Even working in the SEVA kitchen is basically just feeding yourself.

Maybe I will write some words for my own comfort, hoping that it will help someone else, too: you don’t need to spend your whole money traveling the world and sitting and waiting for hours for a Master to be close to god. By the way, before I joined Sant Mat, I was wondering how all this flying is ok?! It is very harmful for the environment that all the Satangis fly all the time!!

And also, I am vegan and never understood how Master can promote dairy. If you know a little bit about milk production: you can be sure that cows and baby cows are exploited and killed. And then the Satsangi answer: well, if Master blesses a dairy, the cow will sure be reborn at his Lotus feet in the next life! - yeah. you be sure of that.

Sitting in a chair in an atmosphere that you like is enough. You don’t need to sit in meditation for hours to be at peace and know that you are a good being. It is enough to just scan your system, ask yourself how you feel, what you think, and what would serve you right now. Sleep? Talking to a good friend? Writing down some thoughts? You don’t need hours of studying holy scriptures.

You already know what is present in your life, where you want to put time in and where you don’t want to put time in. There is a reason why there are so many people on earth (if you believe that god created us). Wanting to make them all equal and making them do the same thing is ignoring an important trait of human nature.

We are all different children of god, we are all equal, and Masters are not above or below us. And: it is me who has the responsibility and the power to build my life. Nobody else. That I can control only very little in this life is a fact that I have to deal with on my own. Everything else is denying my personal responsibility. This might be scary, but again, is another thing that sane grown-ups are capable of handling.

Warm ex satsangi greetings, _________

My response to someone's mystical experience of "heaven"

Once in a while someone emails me a description of a marvelous mystical experience they've had. Usually the person is a devotee of the organization I belonged to for about 35 years -- Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

RSSB is led by a guru who is considered to be God in human form, in much the same way as Jesus is viewed by Christians. Except, the guru is alive. Once initiated by the guru, supposedly he places his "radiant form" within the disciple's consciousness. 

Then the radiant form leads the mind/soul of the disciple through various higher stages of reality until they reach Sach Khand (roughly, heaven) together. At least, that's the way it is supposed to work. Demonstrable evidence of this actually happening is, charitably, slim.

More accurately, I'd say, non-existent.

Still, there are quite a few personal tales like the one below. I'm assuming the person who contacted me is fine with his experience being shared since he speaks of "wanting to give non-believers a different perspective."

By and large I agree with what Sam Harris said in his critique of Eben Alexander's claim that he almost died and went to heaven.

As many of you know, I am interested in “spiritual” experiences of the sort Alexander reports. Unlike many atheists, I don’t doubt the subjective phenomena themselves—that is, I don’t believe that everyone who claims to have seen an angel, or left his body in a trance, or become one with the universe, is lying or mentally ill. Indeed, I have had similar experiences myself in meditation, in lucid dreams (even while meditating in a lucid dream), and through the use of various psychedelics (in times gone by). I know that astonishing changes in the contents of consciousness are possible and can be psychologically transformative.

So I also generally assume that when someone shares a profound mystical experience, he or she actually had the subjective perceptions, feelings, and such being described. But this is a long way from what the person wants me and others to believe about the experience.

Namely, (1) that it reflects objective truths about reality that exist outside of the person's brain/mind, and (2) is an experience that should be as meaningful to others as it was to the person. 

Regarding (1), lots of people have described their experiences of seemingly supernatural realms beyond the physical. For example, a brief bit of Googling led me to a Jesus Evidence web site containing some detailed descriptions of heavenly encounters. 

I found myself walking in this beautiful place where I felt safe, secure, and a great love and peace over me. As I began to look around I saw a river, clear and transparent almost crystal. The green grass was as deep as an emerald stone, the sky was so beautiful as the light was so bright. Then I looked to see who was holding my hand. It was Jesus. His eyes were like fire and ever so kind, so full of the purest of love that you could ever imagine. His hand was so big compared to mine. It had light coming out of the scar where the nail had gone through his hand. He took me to this wonderful place where I saw lots of children. As the other children gathered around Jesus and myself, He talked to us.

So are we supposed to believe all of these many varieties of spiritual/mystical experiences, some of them, none of them? My view is, none of them, unless there is convincing evidence that what a person experienced points to hitherto unknown truths about objective reality.

Dreams can seem real while we're having them. So can hallucinations. Ditto with drug-induced visions. The brain/mind frequently conjure up subjective sensations and perceptions that don't exist outside of a person's cranium.

Again, though, this doesn't take away from the reality of the experience as experienced by the experiencer.  As you can read below, the person who contacted me is convinced that he had a blissful vision of the guru and supernatural realms.

Which leads to the second issue: whether anyone else should view a mystical experience as deeply meaningful. Put differently, if another person had the same experience (leaving aside the question of whether it is subjectively or objectively true), would it seem as profound to them?

I suspect not.

I say this based on a lifetime of having people tell me things like, "You've got to see this TV show; you'll love it!" After which I watch it, and don't love it at all. Same is true in reverse, of course. I enjoy things that other people find distasteful.

Riding a motorcycle or scooter, for example; this makes me profoundly happy, while the few times I got my wife to ride with me, she hated the experience.

Now, I think that if I had experiences like those described below -- in a dream, say -- I'd find them enjoyable and interesting. But there's no way to know whether they'd be as meaningful to me as they were to the person who emailed me. 

Since I don't believe in the divinity of Jesus, having a vision of him probably wouldn't mean a whole lot to me. But to a Christian, likely it'd be a Wow! experience. 

Thus my reaction to the description below basically is:

It's great, guy, that you had such an enjoyable experience. Hope you can understand why, without solid evidence, I can't believe that this is anything but your personal subjective experience, not a reflection of objective reality. It was deeply meaningful to you, but you're you, and everyone else is who they are. 

Here's the message I got:

Hello Brian trust all is well in your karmic dance of life.

Feel - know that must put the negativity of your website into perspective .

My first visit to your website was ‘accidental” ... in that had read your Sant Mat recommended book ... was searching to see what else you had written.

As a result of reading your site at the time ... felt an impulse to respond to one of your articles (cannot remember which one now) 

My response was simply … that had been a long time initiate  ... had satisfied self from inner experiences ... that what was in the Sant Mat books is genuine.

So to now ... 

this am during meditation had a “knowing” to go to your website to read the articles in the last few years ... here is my response.

Though it is not advisable to share ones inner experiences ... am about to do so to give non believers a different perspective given out of love not ego! 

This experience in 2004 was 7 years after my initiation on 26/7/1997 by Beloved Babaji’s representative ...had diligently followed Beloveds guidelines ... have had other inner experiences prior-since but this is the one that is not so personal .

Experienced such indescribable Joy-Bliss ... Beloved Babaji’s  Blessing in Meditation ... such energy surges from the feet up  my whole body racked by spasms ... tingly heat ... eventually lost all bodily feeling ... like being paralysed ... such ringing inside my head ... colours-flashes of very bright white .

Saw self from above self … from above the planet trailing a silvery thin cord ...  self was in the form of an embryo attached to the earth with a mothers umbilical cord...

Rushing starriness ... moon ...  then went straight through the sun ... then beautiful landscape ... rocky gentle river, fir trees, meadows, high snow flecked mountains ... like in the Canadian Rockies ...

Master took off his turban ... he smiled as he flicked his beautiful, glistening shoulder length hair ...no trace of grey in hair-beard ...thought how beautiful-radiant ... reminded me of  Master Jesus ...

Through the whole experience was doing simran … felt so Contented, Joyful, Blissful ...then seemed to zip back into my body ... like a genie into a bottle ... once again could move ... elapsed time 1 hour 20 mins 10 pm

NOTES:

It’s wonderful how Master answers one through the books … subsequently read what Master Sawan  Singh wrote which substantiates this experiences  … 

"When by repetition of the names, with attention  fixed in the eye focus, you have become unconscious  of the body below the eyes ... your attention will  catch the sound current ... select the church bell, and discard all other sounds ... slowly your soul will leave the body and collect in the eyes ...

When  the concentration is complete, it will appear as if  you are separate from the body... the starry sky will appear in time ... fix your attention in the  bright star  and continue repetition ... 

When approached it will burst, and your attention will penetrate through it ... the starry sky has been crossed ... in the same manner the sun and the moon  ... after the moon, Masters radiant form appears, fix your attention, and hand yourself over to Master .  

Conclusion:

~ Based on my 18 years of experience ... if initiates do not have inner experiences ... there are probably 3 reasons 

I They are not doing the daily time required ... at initiation made the commitment to do 3 hours daily ... once made did not have to make a daily decision 

II They are not doing it properly ie falling asleep...not concentrating etc

III They do not go with the FLO ... Faith Love Obedience ... Meditation is Devotion ... there should be no expectations ...

Beloveds Grace will come when the time is right

At beloved Babajis request all references to RSSB were removed … 

Trust this information will help some

Alan Watts talks about the source of spiritual authority

Over on my "Let's add a new L-word to 'Who is the guru?' possibilities" post, William left a comment today:

Hi Brian
I was listening to a talk on the topic of What is a Guru? by Alan Watts. You may well find it interesting. Here's the link that will bring you to the pertinent part of that talk. https://youtu.be/sAq2NY0Tjf8?t=1m54s

Since I enjoy reading Watts' books, saw him speak in person back in the 1960's, and like his audio recordings, I watched about half of the You Tube video today.

Here's the link William sent, which starts at about the two minute mark.

 

I resonate with almost everything I heard Watts say, agreeing that the only authority a guru, master, or other religious personage has flows from the devotees who choose to elevate that person to a position of spiritual leadership.

Otherwise, where could any authority come from?

There aren't qualifications for becoming a guru, as there are for professions such as medicine, law, engineering, and so on. Anyone can claim to be a spiritual adept. Usually it is very difficult, if not impossible, to find objective evidence that what the "guru" claims to know about the cosmos is actually true, and/or that the guru can do what he or she claims, supernaturally speaking.

So Buyer Beware is excellent advice for anyone looking to purchase some spiritual authority.

DMT, a natural psychedelic chemical, could produce "spiritual" experiences

Someone sent me an email with a link to an article whose title was so intriguing, I was eager to read the piece: "The psychedelic drug that could explain our belief in life after death."

DMT (Dimethyltryptamine) is the most powerful hallucinogenic drug around. The class A psychedelic is so potent that under the 1971 UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances its manufacture is strictly for scientific research and medical use and any international trade is very closely monitored. But it also naturally occurs in the human body.

Now a Senior Psychologist at Greenwich University, Dr. David Luke, is trying to undercover a link between DMT and 'near death experiences' to explain elves, tunnels of light and centuries old folklore. On July 8th he’ll talk about his research at an event in conjunction with SciArt collaboration Art Necro at The Book Club in London.

I'd heard of DMT before, having quoted Sam Harris in a post about Eben Alexander's ridiculous claim that while in a coma, supposedly with no brain activity, he experienced heaven. I called the post "Heaven is NOT real, no matter what Eben Alexander says." Harris said:

...Everything that Alexander describes here and in his Newsweek article, including the parts I have left out, has been reported by DMT users. The similarity is uncanny.

...Does Alexander know that DMT already exists in the brain as a neurotransmitter? Did his brain experience a surge of DMT release during his coma? This is pure speculation, of course, but it is a far more credible hypothesis than that his cortex “shut down,” freeing his soul to travel to another dimension.

Anyway, the article about research into DMT is well worth reading. Back in my college days I used LSD and mescaline. I had some profound experiences, but nothing like what DMT can produce.

A pioneering medical doctor in the 1990’s called Rick Strassman , started injecting people with DMT as part of a medical research project. About 50 to 60 participants were given high doses and they reported some extremely bizarre phenomena.

Approximately half of the participants on a high dose reported being in other worlds and encountering sentient entities, i.e. beings of an intelligent nature which appeared to be other than themselves. The experience was so powerful that participants were convinced of the reality of experience with these other beings.

...The beings themselves took on various forms. Sometimes they took on the form of little elves or imps or dwarves, sometimes they’re omniscient deities, other times they’re angelic beings. But they’re specifically not humans.

Well, the brain/mind works in mysterious ways.

No one knows why ingesting a chemical that the brain produces on its own causes people from different backgrounds and cultures to have similar experiences of sentient beings. But since this phenomenon has a physical cause, it's difficult to argue that DMT is a passport to a supernatural reality.

Let's add a new L-word to "Who is the guru?" possibilities

Back in 2006 I pondered the question, Who is the guru? 

By "guru," I meant someone who is (1) alive today, and (2) considered by his/her devotees to be, if not actually God in human form, darn close to this exalted level of divinity.

This is, obviously, a different sort of religious personage than, say, a Christian minister. Or even the Pope. It is easy to visualize them sincerely believing that they are God's representatives on Earth, while recognizing that they are entirely human.

In some Eastern religions, though, the distinction between God and guru is minimal. Even nonexistent.

The Indian guru I was initiated by in 1971, Charan Singh, was considered to have attained a state of God-realization by his followers. 

No longer believing this, my "Who is the guru?" post was an attempt to make sense of the fact that Charan Singh, along with his successor Gurinder Singh, could sit on a podium in front of tens of thousands of adoring disciples who looked upon them as not only godly, but as God.

I’ve been thinking about the four options concerning who Jesus was, according to biblical scholar Bart Ehrman: a liar, a lunatic, the Lord, or a legend. When it comes to a long-dead historical figure like Jesus, these options make sense. But what about a modern-day guru who is similarly proclaimed to be God in human form?

I was initiated by such a guru, Charan Singh Grewal. I sat at his feet, literally. I had two personal interviews with him. I heard him speak many times. I saw him worshipped by tens of thousands of devotees as a divine incarnation. 

And yet, I still don’t know what to make of him. Or his successor, Gurinder Singh Dhillon. Who is the guru? A philosophically-inclined friend of mine likes to say, “There’s only one question to ask a guru who is supposedly God in human form: Are you who people claim you are?”

But given Ehrman’s four options, the answer wouldn’t be all that revealing. If the guru was a liar, you couldn’t believe what he said. Ditto if he was a lunatic. And even if he truly was the Lord, and said as much, what reason would there be to believe him? Plus, one could argue that a God-man would be so humble, you’d never hear a claim to divinity pass his lips.

With living gurus the legend option doesn’t come into play. They’re alive and kicking, not legendary. Quite a few men (and a few women) of recent vintage are considered by the faithful to be manifestations of God. For example, Meher Baba, Ramakrishna, and Lokenath. 

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

I ended up preferring a fourth option, loyalist.

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

This theory got support in a video David Lane made about Charan Singh, as described in a 2013 post, "Charan Singh was a loyal guru." 

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

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

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

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

It seems to fit, as rarely used as the word is.

1. sleight of hand.

2. trickery; deception.

3. any artful trick.

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

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

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

Interesting. Read on to peruse Shermer's entire essay.

Modern mystics, why should anyone believe your "vision"?

After more than ten years of blogging on this here Church of the Churchless -- 2,410,012 page views; 2,036 posts; 29,750 comments -- I'm still asking this question.

Why should the claims of "modern mystics," who claim to have personally experienced God, spirit, heaven, or some other manifestation of divinity, be taken more seriously than the countless similar claims that have been made by innumerable others throughout recorded history?

I keep on asking this question in various ways, both in blog posts and replies to comments, because it seems to me that those alive today who would have us believe in their supposed brush with the divine shouldn't be given any more credence than those who are dead and gone.

Among the well-known major figures, Jesus, Mohammed, and Moses, along with less familiar Christian, Islamic, and Judaic mystics, saints, seers, and such. 

On my book shelves also sit books filled with stories of other Eastern mystics and yogis such as Yogananda, each of whom spoke about encounters with supernatural phenomena. Largely, those stories contradict each other, while being in conflict with one or more of the major religions.

The divine is personal. Or impersonal. It is part and parcel of creation. Or detached from it. It takes great effort and/or grace to realize. Or simply opening one's awareness.

Broadening beyond supernaturalism, Zen, non-religious Buddhism, and Taoism teach that what is most real about the cosmos is entirely natural, capable of being found in the most commonplace things. Even "shit and piss," according to Chuang Tzu.

It's clear that after thousands of years of searching for the Divine Meaning of It All, many humans have claimed to have discovered signs of it.

Problem is, those signs don't match up.

And there is no demonstrable evidence of it. If some sort of non-physical, possibly timeless, higher dimensional realm of reality exists, it sure lacks any way (or desire) to make itself known with even a minimal degree of certainty.

Yet people today -- as tomorrow, and the next day, and the next -- keep on claiming that they have experienced what can't be proven to exist outside of their own minds.

Comments from them regularly appear on my blog posts. I occasionally get emails from them. Whenever I do, my question arises again:

Why should the claims of "modern mystics," who claim to have personally experienced God, spirit, heaven, or some other manifestation of divinity, be taken more seriously than the countless similar claims that have been made by innumerable others throughout recorded history?

If anyone can enlighten me on this, I'm open to the illumination.

What is meant by a "fake" guru?

A few days ago I wrote a blog post called "Kumare: truthful movie about a fake guru." Here I want to do some additional pondering about what it means to be fake. 

This is a subject of more than theoretical interest to me.

Back in my college years, 1969-70, I studied yoga and meditation with a long-haired, charismatic teacher who looked a lot like the movie's Kumare (even though my teacher was Greek, and Vikram Ghandi, who became "Kumare," is Indian.)

My weird story of how I switched from the first guru to another guru can be found here.

l changed gurus after discovering that the Greek guy was fake in various disturbing ways. I'm also no longer involved with the second guru, finding after he died that fakeness pervaded his teachings and organization in other sorts of ways.

But what does fake and true mean when it comes to gurus? This isn't an easy question to answer, one of the reasons Kumare is such a fascinating movie.

Kumare' students liked him a lot. Kumare was an excellent listener. Kumare was accepting and non-judgmental. Kumare stimulated his students to deal better with their problems and pursue their goals more avidly. Kumare created a warm, positive, energizing atmosphere in his yoga classes.

What of that is fake? Nothing. 

My wife, a retired psychotherapist, was impressed with how Kumare/Ghandi utilized good counseling techniques in his one-on-one interactions with students. Clearly he served as a friend and shoulder to lean on for them.

Which also is how I viewed my first yoga teacher.

"Yogiraj," as he called himself, stabilized my scattered, psychedelic, hippie self of that time. I became a vegetarian. I stopped using drugs. I became adept at Hatha Yoga. I started meditating daily. None of that was fake. A few days a week I still do some of the yoga postures that I learned so many years ago.

My yoga teacher's fakeness came from him almost certainly not being who he claimed to be: someone with supernatural knowledge/power. (When he told me and other students that he communes with Christ in his basement, not figuratively but really, we all said "goodbye.")

Kumare's fakeness, on the other hand, was of a different variety. He never claimed to have any unique powers. In fact, his core guru-message was You don't need a guru; you are your own guru.

However, most or all of Kumare's students looked upon him as someone special. Well, in fact, he was. As noted above, Kumare/Ghandi came across as a kind, warm, gentle, understanding person. In that sense he indeed was special.

Yet not unique. Lots of people have those qualities. But few here in the United States look as exotic as Kumare did. 

(At least to American eyes. I remember mentioning to a friend who had, like me, been to India, "I wonder how Indians manage to not be continually distracted by the amazing street scenes of colorful saris, flower clad animals, gaily decorated trucks, and all that, endlessly going by in a stream of buzzing confusion." He sensibly replied, "Hey Brian, to Indians that's normal. They would find our lifeless strip malls exotic.")

So the way I see it, Kumare was truthful when he told his yoga students, "You are your own guru." What they wanted, they already had.

It just took a guy with a fake Indian accent, pretending to be someone other than he was, to give them the feeling that they could lose weight, have a better romantic relationship, succeed in business, be more compassionate, or whatever.

This sort of fake truthfulness is akin to what someone feels when they go to a Lady Gaga concert. Uplifted by both the singer's message and stage presence, they might tell their friends, "Lady Gaga is amazing! I had the most wonderful experience watching her!"

Well, actually the concert-goer is the amazing one. As are we all.

Because whatever we feel, whatever we experience, whatever we believe, whatever we think -- those feelings, experiences, beliefs, and thoughts are all manifested by a human brain. Our own brain. Yours, mine, everybody else's; each of us fashions a world through the largely mysterious workings of human consciousness.

Truth and falsehood aren't really germane concepts within that inner world. What is, is. What is felt, is what I feel. This is the truth Kumare expressed to his students: no one else creates your reality. You do. 

This morning I was browsing through Raymond Smullyan's "Who Knows? A Study of Religious Consciousness" and came across an apt passage.

I know a very remarkable lady who is a painter, poet, and playwright. She is devoutly religious and calls herself a Christian Buddhist. (She believes that Jesus was a Buddha.)

...To my great surprise, she once told me that God exists purely in the mind! (That reminds me of my fantasy that God exists purely as an ideal!) Sometime later, I asked her how her vision differs from atheism.

She replied, "Atheists also believe that God exists purely in the mind, but the atheists believe that God is therefore unreal, whereas I believe that things existing in the mind can be real." 

Of course they are. Thoughts, feelings, beliefs, experiences, perceptions -- heck, everything that exists in the mind is real, since it is produced by a real brain. 

However, not everything existing in the brain relates to something existing in the world outside the brain. This gets us into some deep philosophical/ espistemological waters that I'm not going to dive into this late at night, and this far into an already lengthy blog post.

I'll just end by saying that gurus are justifiably called "fake" if they claim to have some knowledge of a supernatural world, or even knowledge of the natural world, that they actually don't have.

Since Kumare never made such a claim, he was fake only in his presentation of himself as an esoteric Indian yogi, instead of the regular New Jersey guy he actually was. But insofar as he pointed his students toward an embrace of the reality existing within themselves, and as themselves, he was a truth-teller.

Kumare: truthful movie about a fake guru

"How do you know I'm not a fake? Maybe I just have the gift of gab."

There's a guru in India whom I'm familiar with, Gurinder Singh, who used to frequently say this. Maybe he still does.

At the time I was associated with the organization Gurinder Singh leads, his disciples would look upon those statements as a sign of some sort of humility/ Zen'ish koan/ anti-mystical mystic utterance.

Which, interestingly, is almost exactly what students who flocked to a genuinely fake guru, Kumare, a.k.a. New Jersey-born Vikram Ghandi, felt when at every yoga class he taught he told them "The only guru you need is inside yourself" and "I'm not a guru."

In the Nightline video embedded below, Ghandi says that when he told his students this, people thought it was a riddle. Ghandi also says:

If we wake up on a desert island with no scripture, we still could live perfectly happy lives.

A non-religious Amen to that, brother.

A few nights ago my wife and I watched "Kumare," the documentary Ghandi made. We streamed it via Netflix. Clicking on the link will reveal quite a few other online places the film can be watched.

Do it. It's inspiring. And fascinating.

"Kumare" reveals the power of belief in a unique fashion. The movie shows real people being drawn to embrace a fake guru who also is a real person. What Kumare teaches in the movie is similarly both false and true. He makes up rather absurd yoga postures and practices, yet his students benefit a lot from them.

This short (about five minutes) Nightline piece about Kumare and Vikram Ghandi will give you a good feel for the movie. [After embedding a You Tube link, I discovered that ABC news demands that the video be watched on You Tube; so you'll be led there if you click on the "play" arrow. Or click here.]

 

Ghandi is a convincing guru. Naturally he speaks perfect English, being born in the United States. He used his grandmother's accent as the model for his Kumare-talk, which he pulls off flawlessly.

A New York Times review of the movie captures the philosophical spirit of Kumare.

“Faith begins as an experiment and ends as an experience.” That quotation from the Anglican priest William Ralph Inge, which begins the documentary “Kumaré: The True Story of a False Prophet,”evokes the film’s ambiguous exploration of religion, teaching and spiritual leadership.

...Initially, Mr. Gandhi recalls, “I wanted to see how far I could push it.” He is shown presiding at one gathering with a picture of himself between portraits of Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden. But his earnest followers, including a death-row lawyer, a recovering cocaine addict and a morbidly obese young woman, are sympathetic, highly stressed Americans who pour out their troubles.

As Mr. Gandhi warms to these people, who demonstrate an unalloyed faith in his wisdom, the film becomes a deeper, more problematic exploration of identity and the power of suggestion, and its initially sour taste turns to honey. The meditations, mantras and yoga moves he invents, however bogus, transform lives, as his followers discover their inner gurus and gain a self-mastery.

For all his deceptiveness, Mr. Gandhi is not an egomaniacal prankster but a benign teacher whose “mirror” philosophy involves uniting the everyday self with the ideal self. A goal of this practical program of discipline and reflection is to cultivate an inner guru so that you don’t need someone like Kumaré.

“Kumaré” builds up to the big reveal, in which Mr. Gandhi, with great trepidation, presents himself to his flock as himself, without mystical trappings and speaking in his regular voice.

The film’s message lies in a paradox expressed early in the film. His impersonation was the biggest lie he’s ever told and the greatest truth he’s ever experienced. It is a thought worth pondering.

Spiritual sages were clueless about how the brain works

Almost every religious prophet, mystic guru, spiritual sage, revered master, elevated yogi, or other supposed knower of what lies beyond everyday appearances shares a common denominator: 

They were essentially clueless about the human brain with which they made their pronouncements about divine reality. 

So they had no idea about how the knower of their purported knowledge works.

I'd realized this before, but the factiness of this fact hadn't really hit me until I started reading Patricia Smith Churchland's "Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy." 

In the Introduction, Churchland reminds us how neuroscience has only come into its own very recently. By contrast, advances in physics, astronomy, and such were able to be made much earlier.

By the end of the nineteenth century, physics, chemistry, astonomy, geology, and physiology were established, advanced scientific systems. The science of nervous systems, however, was a much slower affair.

...The crux of the problem is that brains are exceedingly difficult to study. Imagine Hippocrates observing a dying gladiator with a sword wound to the head.

...Remember, in 400 B.C. nothing was understood about the nature of the cells that make up the body, let alone the special nature of cells that make up the brain. That cells are the basic building blocks of the body was not really appreciated until the seventeenth century, and neurons were not seen until 1837 when Purkyne, using a microscope, first saw cell bodies in a section of brain tissue.

...Figuring out how neurons do what they do requires very high-level technology. And that, needless to say, depends on an immense scientific infrastructure: cell biology, advanced physics, twentieth-century chemistry, and post-1953 molecular biology. 

...Bit by experimental bit, neuroscience is morphing our conception of what we are. The weight of evidence now implies that it is the brain, rather than some nonphysical stuff, that feels, thinks, and decides.

That means there is no soul to fall in love. We do still fall in love, certainly, and passion is as real as it ever was. The difference is that now we understand those important feelings to be events happening in the physical brain.

It means there is no soul to spend its postmortem eternity blissful in Heaven or miserable in Hell. Stranger yet, it means that the introspective inside -- one's own subjectivity -- is itself a brain-dependent way of making sense of neural events.

The ancients did as well as they could with the knowledge they had.

Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Taoist sages, Hindu seers -- everybody who sought to understand reality before the advent of neuroscience did so with a big handicap:

Not knowing the nature of the knower, the human brain.

So we live in exciting times. We're nowhere near the end of the path that leads to full knowledge of the knower. Heck, we may have barely taken a few steps along that path.

But we're vastly more knowledgeable than everyone who has lived before these modern times. Including those revered as spiritual, religious, and mystic adepts. Many of them left us marvelous inspiring insights into the nature of life, living, and the cosmos. 

However, we mustn't forget that those accomplishments lacked one important bit of understanding: how the human brain works.

Charan Singh was a loyal guru

It's a reasonable theory: that a guru who supposedly is "god in human form" isn't a liar, lunatic, the Lord, or a legend.

He or she is a loyalist, someone who carries out the role of a divine person because he or she is loyal to the person/organization who elevated them to their gurudom.

This was what I argued in "Who is the guru?" 

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

A new video by David Lane, a.k.a. neuralsurfer, adds weight to this hypothesis. It's called "Charan Singh and the Way of Surrender."

 

David addressed this question in a response to someone on his Radha Soami Studies discussion group. Here's part of what he said.

Charan didn't opt out of the role for a whole variety of reasons (family loyalty, I believe, being number one), and from my perspective (American, individualistic, atomistic) I think he should have done a radical Faqir Chand move and stopped the madness...

He should have said, in my opinion: GAME OVER.

He didn't.

Now I have had a number of Indian T.A.'s [teaching assistants] working with me for years and the more I got to understand how tight an Indian family can beit gave me a deeper understanding of the pressures inherent in such a complex......

Clearly, one can argue that Charan's loyalty to family (or, more precisely, HIS PERCEPTION of such loyalty) is what led to him to accept the role of guru and not really buck the system.

It may be partially understandable on some level, but let's be clear (and I agree with Gloria on this point), IT IS NOT ENLIGHTENED. It has nothing to do with "truth" as a spiritual path.

OPB's "Rajneeshpuram" reminds me of Oregon's guru weirdness

From 1981 to 1985 Oregon, where I live, was graced (if that's the right term) by the arrival of an Indian guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, whose followers founded a community in central Oregon: Rajneeshpuram.

Last night my wife and I watched a recording of Oregon Public Broadcasting's hour long documentary of how the Rajnesshees rose and fell, "Rajneeshpuram." The full program can be watched online. I recommend it to anyone interested in the goods and bads of cults.

That clearly is what Rajneeshpuram was, a cult.

However, it's unclear to what extent the guru, who later changed his name to Osho, was involved with the sleazy stuff that happened. The documentary shows Bhagwan as quite detached from the running of the commune, which he left to Ma Anand Sheela -- a charming but dangerous Indian woman.

As the main planner of the 1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack, she served twenty-nine months in prison for assault, attempted murder, telephone tapping, immigration fraud and product tampering.

Aside from all that, along with other nasty behavior, I guess you could say she was "spiritual." Whatever that means. Sheela was devoted to her guru. And also devoted to herself and her band of women who ran Rajneeshpuram. 

I'd forgotten about a lot of the goings-on that were shown in the documentary. It's well worth watching. You have to see the video footage of what went on at Rajneeshpuram to believe what happened before Sheela went to jail and Bhagwan left the United States as part of a plea bargain.

During the time Rajneeshpuram was being built into a thriving community of up to 7,000 people (starting from a virtually deserted 64,000 acre ranch), I recall seeing red-clad devotees around Salem and Portland. 

They seemed normal enough. Yet in the documentary you see these acolytes of Bhagwan/Osho actively participating in some decidedly weird behavior. The Rajneeshees took over the nearby town, Antelope, by force of numbers. They they ran the town, including the school, like the religious cult that they were.

Having been a member of an Indian guru-centered group myself from 1971 to 2005 (Radha Soami Satsang Beas), I could easily identify with some of the Rajneeshee's behaviors and attitudes. Bhagwan owned several dozen Rolls-Royces, which he liked to drive himself.

The documentary shows Bhagwan slowly driving by long lines of red-clad devotees, their faces beaming with adoration, hands clasped together in the traditional Indian greeting. Bhagwan would take both hands off the wheel and return the gesture -- an action that shocked a local resident who encountered the guru in one of his Rolls-Royces on a public road, waved at him, and got the no-hands driving move in response.

Excessive guru devotion makes people behave in strange ways. I can testify to that, having been one of those people. However, my guru only drove around in normal cars, though disciples would line up for his "darshan" (sight of him) in just the same way Rajneeshees did.

A few years ago my daughter gave me one of Bhagwan/Osho's books. It was about fearlessness. I read some of it. I liked it. The guru's philosophy is pretty appealing. However, it's difficult not to judge Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh by what happened at the community where he lived while all the crimes and political shenanigans were going on.

That said, I kept thinking while watching "Rajneeshpuram," Gosh, I wish the community was still in existence -- in the wonderful form that could have been. 

Rajneeshpuram seemingly started off weird in a good way. People came from all over the world to be part of a unique way of living. Some sold their possessions and donated them to the cause, wishing to join a community founded on love, devotion, service, and spirituality.

Nothing wrong with that.

And especially there was nothing wrong with the excellent vegetarian food served at Rajneeshpuram. I would have loved to be able to visit Rajneeshpuram in its hey-day (something I never did). The documentary shows several restaurants at the town center that looked highly tempting to my vegetarian taste buds. Organic gardening and a dam transformed the central Oregon high desert into a oasis of sorts.

Some Rajneeshpuram-related videos apart from the documentary can be seen here. There's four minutes of a Bhagwan talk at the bottom of the page. He definitely had the Indian guru thing down. Bhagwan's sense of humor is appealing, but his cluelessness about the shady political manipulations isn't.

 

Inner planes of creation... revealed (on a poster)

Impressively artistically cool. True? That's a whole other question. 

This arrived in my email inbox today. Could have come from God. If She uses a pseudonym email account.

Which seems to belong to Tassos Z. Who adapted the image from the Way of Mystics site. 

Mystical experiences. What's the big deal with them?

Mystical experiences were on my mind today, after someone left a comment on a blog post inquiring about whether I'd gone inside while meditating or heard sacred sounds.  

I replied. But then I thought, "What's the big deal with supposed mystical experiences?"

Most religions, forms of spirituality, and philosophical systems don't pay much attention to them. Most Christians or Buddhists aren't out to see fantastical scenes of the astral plane, or bliss out on a supernatural light and sound show.

Their goals are to become better people; to learn what reality is all about; to be of service to humanity; and other thoroughly non-mystical aspirations. 

I don't agree with most of Christian dogma, and much of the Buddhist viewpoint. However, I've come to appreciate that if any good is to come from pursuing an organized form of spirituality, it should manifest as evident goodness in how the practitioner relates to other people and the outside world.

For many years I was a member of an India-based organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), which emphasized meditation aimed at hearing divine sound and seeing divine light. Quite a few other offshoots of the Sant Mat movement preach the same gospel.

I had a few experiences along those lines, but I can't say they had any spiritual significance.

Lots of people hear bell tones, ringing, and such inside their head. They're tinnitus sufferers. And even if inner sounds or lights arise from some other source, like sensory deprivation via lengthy meditative withdrawal from perceptions of the outside world, what's the big deal with them?

When I was in college during the 60's (decade, not my age), I had many mystical experiences. You can too. Just find some LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, peyote, or other psychedelic substance, ingest it, and wait a little while.

I experienced amazing insights into the nature of existence. (See here and here.) So what?

Did those experiences have any lasting effect on my personality, my character, my relationships, or anything else? No. Likewise, do non-drug-aided mystical experiences have any similar lasting effects? Sometimes, it seems, judging from the number of "I almost died and saw Jesus" books on the market. 

However, those almost died and went to heaven purported experiences are much different from meditating and hearing some sounds, or seeing some lights. In my thirty-plus years of talking with lots of fellow RSSB meditators, I can't recall anyone who said he/she had become a markedly different person after a mystical experience(s).

My observations of high-ranking RSSB disciples bore this out. Those who had been in the organization the longest, and who presumably had the most meditation to their karmic credit, didn't demonstrate laudatory qualities lacking in ordinary people.

This included the guru himself, who is considered to be the very essence of divine light and sound. I found him to be an interesting, charismatic guy, but not any wiser, ethical, or compassionate than countless other human beings.

Again, what's the big deal with mystical experiences if there's no sign that those who purportedly have had them are any different from, or better than, ordinary folks?

David Chapman makes this point in his typically creative fashion in "Wholeness, Connection, and Meditation: Competing Visions." Excerpt:

      And as for connection:

• Monism promises “total connection with the Absolute Infinite” (or with “the whole universe,” as though that were a single thing). But meaningful connections can only be made with specific, finite beings in this here-and-now world.
• To achieve unity, internalizing meditation deliberately cuts you off from everyday reality, which is supposedly a distraction and not spiritual enough.
• You are supposed to “turn inward,” to find a “profound inner experience” that connects you with the divine reality. This is nonsensical. Experiences are not connections; connections aren’t inside you; you can’t connect yourself with all things by cutting yourself off from them.
• In practice, monists’ relationships with other people, and with their physical environment, usually become godawful messes. Monist practice makes you self-obsessed, unreliable, and unwilling to deal with mundane practicalities. 

Mystical experiences prove nothing

Whatever I say in this post -- and as a blogger I never know what that is until I say it -- it won't be anywhere near as good as what David Chapman has said in his "Are Mystical Experiences Metaphysical Evidence?"

So the best thing you could do is stop reading what I've written, and read Chapman now. The second best thing would be to click on the links I've given after you peruse this post.

But if you've ever believed that a mystical experience means something beyond the obvious, that someone has had some sort of experience, I strongly urge you to read Chapman's post.

Today, tomorrow, some day. Whenever. Just do it.

His post is that good. Chapman is an excellent writer, thinker, and interpreter of meditational/mystical phenomena, Buddhist or otherwise.

This is how he starts off:

Here is an extraordinary spiritual teaching:

• Mystics, across many different cultures and religions, all describe their insight experiences similarly.
• This couldn’t happen unless their accounts were accurate.
• So we must believe what they say.

What is extraordinary about this teaching is that it [is] so widely accepted, and yet so obviously false. As I’ll explain:

• If mystics all gave similar descriptions of their experiences, it could just mean that they are all mistaken in the same way.
• But, in fact, mystics from different cultures give wildly different descriptions, which generally reflect their cultural background.

This is one of the points I made in my previous post, "Atheism challenges personal spiritual experiences." Chapman says:

What mystics really care about is the metaphysical aspect. That, many claim, is essentially the same in all cultures. Mystics report:

• The discovery that they have no real self; the discovery of their True Self.
• Direct perception of the transcendent reality behind appearances; direct perception of fact that there is no transcendent reality behind appearances.
• Total separation from the world; total unity with the world.
• Finding that they are utterly insignificant in the presence of the glory of God; finding that they are God; finding that God has removed himself from the universe; finding that there never was a God.
• A perfect conceptual understanding of religious doctrine; a perfectly non-conceptual understanding of the reality beyond doctrine.

Uh, wait. It is not obvious that these are all the same…

Yeah, that's putting it mildly. The meaning of mystical experiences is all over the map. No consistent conclusions can be drawn from the widely divergent descriptions of these experiences.

Read all of Chapman's post to learn what meaning he derives from this meaninglessness. And take a look at the comments on his post. They're almost as interesting as what Chapman says.

Mysticism is as real as fundamentalist religion

Yesterday David Lane left this comment on a recent blog post:

Yes, good point you make here about the epistemology of "knowing" in fundamentalist religion versus mysticism. Here is a link to something I wrote that dovetails with your point:

https://sites.google.com/site/msacmagazinesparttwo/home/POLITICSOFMYSTICISM.pdf?attredirects=0&d=1

Because I always enjoy what David has to say, I clicked away and found an interesting six page PDF-file essay, "The Politics of Mysticism."
Download Politics of Mysticism

Here's some excerpts -- the formatting is a bit screwed up, since I copied text from the PDF file. No big deal, since you really should read the whole thing.

Perhaps  the  most  problematic  issue  confronting   transpersonalists  is  the  veracity of  inner  experiences.  For   many  involved  in  new  religious  groups  mystical  encounters,  like  near-­‐‑death  and  out-­‐‑of-­‐‑body  excursions,  offer  evidence  of their  respective  guru'ʹs  rightful  position  or  succession.   This  has  been  especially acute  in  several  Sant  Mat  related  groups,   particularly  Kirpal  Singh'ʹs  Ruhani Satsang,  where  mastership  disputes   are  often  resolved  by  resorting  to  one'ʹs inner  meditation  experiences.  But   there  is  a  rub  in  all  this  that  for  the  most part  lies  uninspected  by  those   newly  initiated.  

No  doubt  a  religious  devotee  may  use  such  experiences  as  proof  for   the authenticity  of  his/her  guru  or  group,  but  what  he/she  fails  to  realize   is  that  there  are  thousands,  if  not  millions,  of  people  who  also  claim   personal revelations  which  convince  them  of  the  truthfulness  of  their   chosen  path.  Even Elvis  has  hundreds  of  devotees  who  reported  seeing   his  radiant  form  at  the end  of  a  long  dark  tunnel  when  they  underwent  a   near-­‐‑death  experience.  So if  someone  in  Memphis  can  see  Elvis  in  their   meditation,  are  we  then  supposed  to  believe  in  the  spiritual  mastership   of  Elvis?  Don'ʹt  get  me  wrong,  I am  the  first  to  admit  that  the  King  had   some  great  songs  during  his  career, but  just  because  a  crew  of  devoted   fans  have  glimpses  of  him  in  the  alleged after-­life  does  not  constitute   documented  proof  of  his  spiritual  attainment.

...What  is  the  primary  difference  between  a  fundamentalist  Christian   and  a  mystically  inclined  yogi,  especially  when  it  comes  to  evaluating   their  ultimate truth  claims?  Both  think  they  have  uncovered  the  truth.   The  former  by  the revealing  "ʺWord"ʺ  of  the  Bible;  the  latter  by  the   manifesting  inner  "ʺWord"ʺ  of the  higher  regions.  Yet,  in  both  cases,  the   neophyte  is  subject  to  doubt,  to skepticism,  to  deception,  since   revelations  of  truth  (both  inner  and  outer)  are manifold.  The  Muslims   have  their  Koran;  the  Sikhs  have  their  Guru  Granth Sahib;  and  the   Christians  have  their  Bible.  And,  for  the  mystics,  yogis,  and sages  who   turn  inward  what  do  we  find?  The  Hare  Krsnas'ʹ  see  Lord  Krishna; the   Saivites  see  Lord  Shiva;  and  Ruhani  Satsangis  (depending  upon  your   affiliation)  see  Sant  Rajinder  Singh,  or  Sant  Baljit  Singh,  or  Sant  Sadhu   Ram. 

But,  as  the  argument  goes,  the  devoted  mystic  will  say  that  his  or  her   experiences  are  authentic  (because  of  the  utter  certainty  of  the  encounter)   and  the  experiences  of  others,  especially  if  they  belong  to  a  rival  group   which  splintered  off  after  a  succession  dispute,  are  misguided,   secondary,  or illusory.  So  what  we  actually  have  in  effect  here  in  in  terms   of  truth  claims is not  essentially  different  than  that  of  a  fundamentalist.

"The Beginning of Infinity" -- inspiring science

I don't know whether physicist David Deutsch's optimism expressed in his new book, "The 'Beginning of Infinity," is justified. I'm only about a quarter of the way through it, so maybe his later chapters imply more of a downer that what I've read so far.

His basic thesis, though, is both inspiring and believable. There are no limits to knowledge. Human life -- individual or collective -- is a never-ending journey on the path to more.

Whenever there has been progress, there have been influential thinkers who denied that it was genuine, that it was desirable, or even that the concept was meaningful. They should have known better.

There is indeed an objective difference between a false explanation and a true one, between chronic failure to solve a problem and solving it, and also between wrong and right, ugly and beautiful, suffering and its alleviation -- and thus between stagnation and progress in the fullest sense.

In this book I argue that all progress, both theoretical and practical, has resulted from a single human activity: the quest for what I call good explanations.

Though this quest is uniquely human, its effectiveness is also a fundamental fact about reality at the most impersonal, cosmic level -- namely that it conforms to universal laws of nature that are indeed good explanations. This simple relationship between the cosmic and the human is a hint of a central role of people in the cosmic scheme of things.

(Note: from what I can tell, when Deutsch says "people" he really means evolved conscious beings, who could be aliens quite different from us.)

For a long time I was so much into supposedly ineffable meditation and mysticism, I rejected the idea that good explanations are the key to understanding reality. But I've changed, and reading Deutsch's book is changing me further.

I mean, think about it: what's the difference between a fundamentalist religious belief in God that can't be challenged because it is faith-based, and someone's claim that "I know what ultimate truth is, but I can't explain it to you"?

The astrophysicist Martin Rees has speculated that somewhere in the universe 'there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can't conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can't understand quantum theory, it could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.'

But that cannot be so. For if the 'capacity' in question is mere computational speed and amount of memory, then we can understand the aspects in question with the help of computers -- just as we have understood the world for centuries with the help of pencil and paper.

As Einstein remarked, 'My pencil and I are more clever than I.' In terms of computational repertoire, our computers -- and brains -- are already universal.

But if the claim is that we may be qualitatively unable to understand what some other forms of intelligence can -- if our disability cannot be remedied by mere automation -- then this is just another claim that the world is not explicable.

Indeed, it is tantamount to an appeal to the supernatural, with all the arbitrariness that is inherent in such appeals, for if we wanted to incorporate into our world view an imaginary realm explicable only to superhumans, we need never have bothered to abandon the myths of Persephone and her fellow deities.

So human reach is essentially the same as the reach of explanatory knowledge itself.

India's "godmen" face questions about their wealth

Interesting story in the Washington Post about how spirituality has become a lucrative profession for Indian gurus and yogis. 

For centuries, their image was as barefoot ascetics who spent their lives in solitary Himalayan meditation.

But now India’s gurus, “miracle workers” and spiritual leaders, often collectively known as “godmen,” have become savvy, powerful figures who control vast philanthropic and business empires, dabble in politics and manipulate the media.

There's no mention of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas. But he's another good example of the trend toward making lots of money while preaching detachment from material pursuits. (See here, here, and here.)

Physicists are becoming mystics (sort of)

Unseen dimensions of reality. Trillion year cycles of cosmic birth and rebirth. Laws of nature utterly unlike ours. Mysterious connections between the physical universe and other realms.

These sound like the airy-fairy notions of mystics who have been smoking something stronger than tobacco in their hookas.

But they're all serious hypotheses of modern physics.

Their cosmological implications are described by noted physicist Brian Greene, author of "The Hidden Reality," in a Hovering Universes in Nearby Dimensions chapter I read this morning before meditating.

Inspirational stuff for my churchless non-soul. Having written (plug alert!) a book about mysticism and the new physics back in 1995 -- "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder" -- I've kept up my interest in what science can tell us about The Big Questions of Life.

However, there's a big difference between the 1995 me and the 2011 me: now I'm much more inclined to stick with the science and not infer far-out mystical conclusions from scientific theories.

After all, physics and cosmology are plenty way out there all on their own. If someone is longing for a big dose of blow-your-mind conjectures about the nature of ultimate reality, modern science has the goods.

Here's some Greene quotes from the above-mentioned chapter:

-- "The more precise methods rectified this failing, revealing a string/M-theory universe with ten dimensions of space and one of time, for a total of eleven spacetime dimensions."

-- "Like strings, higher-dimensional branes can be big...To grasp what I mean, picture first a long string, as long as an overhead electric cable that runs as far as the eye can see. Next, picture a large two-brane, like an enormous tablecloth or a gargantuan flag, whose surface extends indefinitely."

-- "If a three-brane is enormous, perhaps infinitely big, the situation changes. A three-brane of this sort would fill the space we occupy, like water filling a huge fish tank."

-- "Space, at least the space we directly inhabit, would be far more corporeal than generally imagined. Space would be a thing, an object, an entity -- a three-brane. As we run and walk, as we live and breathe, we move in and through a three-brane. String theorists call this the braneworld scenario."

-- "Some braneworlds might be much like our own, filled with galaxies, stars and planets, while others might be very different. On one or more of those branes there might be self-aware beings who, like us, once thought that their slice -- their expanse of space -- was the entirety of the cosmos."

-- "In string theory's braneworld scenario, we would now recognize this as a parochial perspective. In the braneworld scenario, our universe is just one of many that populate the Brane Multiverse."

-- "Our reality could be a floating slab in a higher-dimensional expanse, but we'd be permanently imprisoned, unable to venture out and explore the grander cosmos... Another braneworld could be hovering millimeters away, but because light can't travel across the gap, we would never see the slightest hint of its presence."

-- "In a braneworld scenario, then, gravity provides our only means of probing beyond our three-dimensional spatial expanse."

-- "Like particles and strings, branes can surely move through the surrounding environment they inhabit. And so, if the universe we observe and experience is a three-brane, we could very well be gliding through a higher-dimensional spatial expanse."

-- "Perhaps, then, when two branes collide they wipe out whatever structures may have coalesced during either of their histories, from galaxies to planets to people, while setting the stage for a cosmic rebirth."

-- "The essence of this cosmology thus involves worlds that repeatedly cycle through time, generating a new variety of parallel universes called the Cyclic Multiverse."

-- "Steinhardt and his co-workers estimated the time scale for a full cycle of the colliding cosmic tango -- birth, evolution, and death -- and came up with about a trillion years. In this scenario, the universe as we know it would merely be the latest in a temporal series, some of which may have contained intelligent life and the culture they created, but are now long ago extinguished."

-- "In this scenario, all of our contributions and those of any other life-forms our universe supports would be similarly erased."

-- "And if you ask about the beginning of the entire cycle of universes, the answer is simply that there was no such beginning, because the cycles have been repeating for eternity."

-- "The braneworld scenario, and the multiverses to which it gives rise, is one resulting area of investigation with the capacity to profoundly remake our perspective on reality."

Well, that's for sure.

Currently there's no experimental or observational evidence that substantiates the existence of braneworlds. Scientists are searching, though. If gravity is found to subtly leak away beyond our universe, this would point to a higher-dimensional space where it leaked to.

Regardless, I love how physics is coming up with theories that are as "out of the box" as any mind-expanding mystical musings. Even nicer: science has reasonable reasons for its far-out hypotheses, whereas mystics, by and large, don't.

Let's put the mystery back into mysticism

I love mystery. It's something that can't be explained and isn't understood. I also love mysteries, books that center on a mystery which -- almost always -- is explained.

But until it is, it isn't. A mystery remains mysterious until it is understood.

"Mysticism" sort of sounds like "mystery." However, according to the Great God Wikipedia, it's more about communing with or being aware of an ultimate reality/truth. So a mystic supposedly understands a mystery of some cosmic significance.

Like...

Whether metaphysical realities exist. What happens after we die. If consciousness is possible without a physical body. How the universe began. Whether there is a master plan to human life, or if it is unguided.

Since Homo sapiens is still debating and discussing such queries with as much Who knows? as our species did thousands of years ago, it's obvious that the Big Questions of Life are as much a mystery now as they ever were.

So let's be honest. Let's allow mysteries to be what they are: mysterious. When a mystery is explained, when it is understood, it becomes something else: knowledge.

Not just private knowledge, since this doesn't unravel a mystery. We all have subjective intuitions where the nature of the cosmos becomes absolutely crystal clear to us.

For a moment. And usually unexplainably.

To dissolve a mystery, it must be explained as well as understood. There are lots of prophets who only are acclaimed in their own minds. You can hear them muttering on downtown street corners and find them in mental hospitals.

Or being worshiped by devoted followers. False purveyors of answers to life's mysteries are commonplace. Frequently they're called "mystics" who supposedly have understood what the rest of us haven't.

OK. Then show us the goods. Lay out the explanations for those Big Questions of Life. Let's see how persuasive they are, how much demonstrable evidence there is for them.

If this is done -- and my book shelves are filled with many of those answers -- it becomes clear that the explanations are all over the philosophical and metaphysical map. Christians don't agree with Hindus who don't agree with Muslims who don't agree with Buddhists.

Mystery wins out. As it always has. As it likely always will, to some degree. We're not ever going to be able to explain everything in existence, especially existence itself.

Beyond the knowledge space illuminated by human understanding lies darkness. Mystery. I used to be fearful of it. So I grabbed onto answers, even if they didn't really answer the questions I was asking (and still am asking).

As Socrates taught, knowing that you don't know is a big part of wisdom. Maybe the most important part. Empty minds can be filled. Minds who think they are already crammed with knowledge can't be.

Yesterday I came across a blog post about "Scientility." This awkward word has been proposed as a science-friendly substitute for "spirituality," as when someone says, "Wow. I just had the most amazing spiritual experience."

Almost always, it is anything but. Not spiritual, not other worldly. Physical. Yet on-the-edge physical, out there closer to Mystery, where the unknowings roam.

Francois Choquette came up with scientility. Good for him. I like his intention, though his new word doesn't wow me. Here's part of how he describes it. (Go here for the full description.)

Scientility: Describes the sensation that a scientist or amateur of science experiences when he/she observes an amazing phenomenon, for which his/her qualifications or knowledge makes them experience it [with] a greater degree of appreciation and joy than people without that knowledge.

...Richard Feynman said it best, but didn't have the word scientility to describe it:
"I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull."

I think he's kind of nutty. [...] There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts."

Mystery always is with us. The more we know, we more we know we don't know. As the saying goes, “The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.”

It's lovely to stand on the edge of what we understand and look toward what we don't. There's nothing to see, of course. Which is the beauty of it. Mystery is the open vista that lies beyond our fenced-in bits of knowledge.

When mysteries are falsely believed to have been understood -- the bane of religiosity, sprituality, and mysticism -- we close ourselves up in a cage of our own making. Free yourself.

The sheer strangeness of everything

Sanity is consensual.

If there's someone else who sees the world in the same way I do, that gives me at least a little bit of confidence that I'm not way out in weirdo-world -- though I'm not saying that would be a bad thing.

This morning I came across a passage in Stephen Bachelor's new book, "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist," that echoed sensations I have frequently these churchless days, and tried to describe at the end of my "Mysticism doesn't have to be mystical" post.

Here's how Bachelor says it:

One evening at dusk, as I was returning to my room along a narrow path through the pine forest, carrying a blue plastic bucket slopping with water that I had just collected from a nearby source, I was abruptly brought to a halt by the upsurge of an overpowering sense of the sheer strangeness of everything.

It was as though I had been lifted onto the crest of a great wave that rose from the ocean of life itself, allowing me for the first time to be struck by how mysterious it was that anything existed at all rather than nothing.

"How," I asked myself, can a person be unaware of this? How can anyone pass their life without responding to this? Why have I not noticed this until now?" I remember standing still, trembling and dumb, with tears in my eyes. Then I continued on my way before night fell.

This experience made me uncomfortably aware of a chasm between what I was studying and something that had happened to me in my own life that struck me as vitally important. The Buddhist texts with which I was familiar did not seem to speak about, let alone value, such experiences as the one that had just shuddered through me.

Mysticism doesn't have to be mystical

For most of my life -- age 18 to 55, or thereabouts -- I've been an avid embracer of mysticism.

During my psychedelic period, I wasn't only aiming at getting high via LSD, mescaline, and such. Along with many other flower children, I also was trying to experience a higher form of consciousness.

We'd ponder the Tibetan Book of the Dead, then see if we could experience some of the bardos via a pill rather than meditation.

After a few years I stopped using drugs and devoted myself to meditating several hours a day with the same intent: learning whether our everyday way of viewing reality was truly "normal," or whether consciousness could be enlightened and perceive the cosmos from a more elevated perspective.

Looking back at those many years of mystic practice, I've come to realize how confining a mystical belief system can be -- even one that called itself a "science of the soul," supposedly far different from dogma-ridden religions. 

"Belief" and "mystical" are notions that don't get along very well. At least, not the way I've come to look upon mysticism.

Words, concepts, ideas, beliefs, and other thought-based forms of cognition are a big part of being human. But we Homo sapiens also are able to intuit, grok, commune, directly experience, and otherwise relate to reality suddenly, immediately, at one fell swoop, rather than bit by bit, step by step, understanding by understanding.

Mystics are out to find something hidden.

But if you presuppose what that "something" is, if you believe you know what the mystery is that a mystic practice supposedly will reveal, how mystical is that? Sure sounds a lot more like a religion than mysticism to me.

As the Grand Exalted Wikipedia proclaims, mysticism has many different meanings. I'm not saying that I have a better one. In fact, I'm mainly saying that I don't have any one.

And that's why I feel that I'm much more of a mystic now that I'm churchless. I've stopped believing. I still meditate, but I have no (or little) idea why I'm doing it or what I'm going to gain from it, if anything.

I just meditate because I like meditation, in pretty much the same way I eat strawberries because I like strawberries. Intellectually I understand that both things -- meditation and stawberries -- are good for me in certain ways.

However, the taste of each is what I enjoy, not the thinking about them.

When I believed in a supposedly mystical set of spiritual teachings, I never genuinely felt like a mystic. There always was a big bunch of expectations, suppositions, do's and don'ts, injunctions, rules, and rituals standing between me and the Great Unknown.

Dropping that stuff brought me closer to whatever it is I am, but don't know; to whatever it is the cosmos may be, but I'm clueless about.

I no longer believe that I have to look within myself, closed-eye inwardness, for mystic inspiration. The outside world is just as mysterious to me as my unknowing consciousness.

Much of the time while I'm bustling around doing my daily stuff, I have a feeling that seems deeply mystical to me -- much more so than the pseudo-mysticism I used to embrace, which actually was highly conceptual since it required an acceptance of teachings far divorced from immediate experience.

Mysticism doesn't have to be mystical.

By which I mean, mysticism doesn't have to be viewed as a voyage to some far-off hidden level of reality that lies way beyond the horizon of everyday life.

Yes, some people look upon mysticism that way. Which is fine. As the Wikipedia article says, some forms of mysticism are dualistic, while others aren't. There's a lot of choices:

• Nullification and absorption within God's Infinite Light (Hassidic schools of Judaism)
• Complete non-identification with the world (Kaivalya in some schools of Hinduism, including Sankhya and Yoga; Jhana in Buddhism)
• Liberation from the cycles of Karma (Moksha in Jainism and Hinduism, Nirvana in Buddhism)
• Deep intrinsic connection to the world (Satori in Mahayana Buddhism, Te in Taoism)
• Union with God (Henosis in Neoplatonism and Brahma-Prapti or Brahma-Nirvana in Hinduism, fana in Sufism)
• Theosis or Divinization, union with God and a participation of the divine nature (in Catholic Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy)
• Innate Knowledge (Irfan and Sufism in Islam)
• Experience of one's true blissful nature (Samadhi Svarupa-Avirbhava in Hinduism and Buddhism)
• Seeing the Light, or "that of God", in everyone (Quakerism)

My personal mystic experience has been along the lines of Taoism: "deep intrinsic connection to the world," though those words naturally don't reflect whatever the heck it is I feel whenever I feel whatever I'm feeling.

The best way I can express it is... gratitude... awe... wonder... bemusement... at the marvelous fact that for the moment I'm existing as part of an existence that every other existent person and thing shares.

Here I am. Here we are. Here it is.

For me, that's mysticism. And it isn't at all mystical. I simply have come to see the same world with different eyes. Unknowing eyes. Unbelieving eyes. Unreligious eyes.

If you're attracted to another form of mysticism, like the "complete non-identification with the world" mentioned above, that's great. Let's just agree that mystics come in all varieties -- including those who don't feel that mysticism is mystical.

Mystic atheism is a cool non-belief

I've found a new way to describe myself philosophically: mystic atheist. Along with agnostic, humanist,Taoist, and existentialist. 

Maybe I'll make up a non-business card with this title, since it fits with my non-belief system. The card would stimulate some interesting conversations when I handed it out, I bet.

Thanks for discovering mystic atheist go to two people: one guy who emailed me about another guy. The first wanted to tell me about "Kissing Hank's Ass," a marvelous irreligious fable that I'd already blogged about several years ago.

The second is James Huber, who wrote the piece. When I followed the email link to his web site, I noticed a couple of other writings that looked interesting. "Mystic Atheism" then led me to "Materialistic Enlightenment."

Interestingly, I'd mentioned "Mystic Atheism" in my 2006 blog post about "Kissing Hank's Ass." But I guess I wasn't ready to appreciate it's profundity back then.

Now that I've reached a higher stage of mystic atheist materialistic enlightenment, I'm better able to resonate with Huber's insights -- an excerpt from which you can read a few paragraphs down in a continuation to this post.

I love how he speaks about a "presence" that he sensed when he was experiencing some form of religiosity or spirituality. Eventually he realized that this presence was the common denominator between all religions and spiritual paths:

Everyday physical reality.

What I understood in that shining moment were that all the mystic experiences I had ever had could easily be unified with a single, simple principle: they're all 99.9% bullshit. What truth they hold is simple, ordinary, reality. They look exotic and mysterious because they go to great lengths to hide reality. The truth at the center of all religion shines through despite the metaphysical trappings, not because of them.

Read on, and you'll find out that God spoke to Huber, revealing that God doesn't exist. Ah, that's my kind of enlightenment.

Why be shy about sharing mystical experiences?

I'm an admirer of Taoism. I resonate with these lines in the Tao Te Ching:

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.

Those who know do not talk.
Those who talk do not know.

Makes sense.

How could the essence of the cosmos be encompassed by words? The human mind wasn't around at the big bang some 14 billion years ago, so it's difficult to see how a verbal explanation could capture the fullness of ultimate reality.

But silence has another side: speaking. Yin and yang are manifestations of the Tao. Too much of anything, for too long, is unnatural. We've got to have balance.

So I don't understand or agree with the reticence of many mystics, gurus, sages, and such to talk about their "inner" experiences (or lack thereof) of a supposed enlightened state of being.

Another Tao, tAo, is a frequenter commenter on this blog. Today he shared some interesting thoughts on this post.

Referring to gurus in the Sant Mat tradition who are considered by their devotees to have traversed higher spiritual regions of the cosmos, tAo said (with some typos corrected):

you see this is also where i disagree with you slightly. you say that this is "their claim". but they have not claimed any such thing. if you or anyone can produce any book or lecture where they have made such a claim, i will be willing to consider it. but i have not seen it. i have read all the books and i don't remember ever reading them making that claim. they talk all around it, but they don't actually claim to have experienced it. that is the thing that tricks most people (like yourself) into ASSUMING (and then believing) that these so-called masters have experienced what is described in the literature. but the truth of the matter is that they never actually admit that.

Good points.

I've been to India twice. I've attended numerous talks by two gurus, Charan Singh and Gurinder Singh, who are considered to be "God in human form (GIHF)." Like tAo, I've read every book published by the Radha Soami Satsang Beas organization (and there are lots of them), many of which were written by GIHF gurus.

But until today it hadn't fully dawned on me how rare it is for a direct claim of an inner mystical experience to be made by them. Not only rare, it may well be non-existent.

Why is this?

Well, two possible reasons leap out. (1) The gurus have never had a mystical experience of some spiritual domain of existence. (2) The gurus don't want to talk about their experiences.

Skeptics and true believers, not surprisingly, favor different hypotheses. Having been in the latter camp myself for several decades, I can understand how silence can be viewed as being akin to godliness.

"Ah, this shows how divinely humble the guru is," a devotee will say after hearing the guru respond to "Are you really God?" with "I'm no one special. I'm just a servant of my own guru."

Nice sentiment. But what if he is actually telling the truth? He hasn't had any special mystical experiences, and he doesn't have any special knowledge about the cosmos.

This is the problem with assuming that those who know do not talk, because those who don't know also do not talk -- since they have nothing to say. If you ask me how to fix the brakes on your car, I might smile and shrug my shoulders while pointing to the auto repair shop down the street.

If you believe that I'm a master mechanic who wants to hide his expertise under a mantle of enigmatic mystery, you'd be wrong. I'm simply clueless about most matters related to automotive inner workings.

The most honest thing for me to do would be to explicitly say, "I've got no idea how to fix your brakes. And for sure you don't want me to learn how on your car."

Of course, someone knowledgeable about brake jobs should be equally eager to offer you some advice. Either way, silence would be a cop-out, impolite, an unnecessary deception. Why not acknowledge one's experience, or inexperience, about something?

Often you hear that gurus don't want to speak about their mystical experiences to avoid being idolized by devotees, or out of a sense of humility.

But they already are put on a pedestal by their followers. And aren't enlightened beings supposed to be beyond the vagaries of an ego, which entails worrying about the proper level of humbleness to project to other people? What's the matter with simple straightforward honesty?

"Yes, I have experienced such and such. It's hard for me to describe those experiences. Yet if you want me to try, I'll do my best. What questions do you have?"

This would be a refreshing response from a guru, mystic, or sage. As would, "I'll be straight with you. I've never experienced anything out of the ordinary in my meditation. I'm sorry to disappoint my devotees, but I don't know what you think I do."

Naturalness is appealing to me. Fakery isn't.

Most gurus and spiritual leaders look like they're playing the role of a guru or spiritual leader. This is to be expected, but it also is off-putting to me.

In normal human conversations, people aren't evasive. If I ask someone, "Have you ever been to Paris?" they don't respond with "What is the reality of the one who is asking this question?" or "If I told you, how would this benefit your own international traveling?"

They just answer the simple freaking question! "Yes." "No." There's nothing difficult in uttering one of those two words.

Likewise, gurus should be able and willing to answer this question: "Have you personally experienced the mystical states that your teachings describe?" And entertain follow-up questions if the reply is "Yes."

There's no "Perfect living master" or "God man"

Most religions believe that it's possible for a perfect human being to walk the Earth who is intimately connected with divinity, if not identical with it. (Almost always they're male, so this is why I said God man in the title to this post.)

As noted in a previous post, there are numerous candidates for this supremely elevated GIHF (god in human form) position.

As some Vedanta folks point out, there are quite a few historical contenders for a GIHF appellation. Jesus, Buddha, Rama, Krishna, Moses, Muhammad, Chaitanya, Ramakrishna are cited, though some of these names are questionable candidates. (Buddha didn't teach there was a God, and I don't think many Christians recognize Moses as God in human form.)

Problem is, there's no evidence that a perfect living master, which is how guru-based faiths often refer to a God man, has ever existed.

So just as it is reasonable to say "There's no one-eyed, one-horned flying purple people eater" (remembering this song shows how old I am), it's also reasonable to say "There's no perfect living master or God man."

If anyone disagrees with me, state your reasons in a comment.

Just make them convincing. You're going to need to define "perfect" and "god" for starters, so we can compare the attributes of a GIHF candidate with the characteristics of a supposed ultimate divinity.

As noted in "God-man or Asshole? The guru conundrum," true believers often try to wriggle out of the lack of evidence for human perfection by claiming that imperfection is a sign of it.

Meaning, if God was obviously manifest in a person, everyone would accept his (or her) divinity instantly, no faith or effort required. Since God doesn't want things to be this easy for humanity -- don't ask why -- perfect living masters/God men keep themselves hidden.

Well, it could also be argued that so do one-eyed, one-horned flying purple people eaters. Along with fairies, leprechauns, goblins, and angels. And anything else that the human mind can imagine, but doesn't exist in reality.

Ah, another term that needs defining: reality. 

It's often said that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. Most people, including me, would agree. I've learned to always say "Oh, so cute!" when someone shows me a baby (or puppy) photo.

That may not be my honest reaction, but I understand that to a new parent or dog owner their precious little bundle of wonderfulness is unalloyed perfection -- at least until the kid starts saying "No!" or the puppy chews up the couch.

So I also understand that devotees of a supposed God man, living or dead, view him as ideal in much (or exactly) the same way a lover says to his beloved, "Honey, you're so perfect for me!"

But this is much different from saying that someone is more than human, possessing transcendent divine qualities that, for one reason or another, aren't obvious.

I've visited this subject before in some blog posts other than those mentioned above:
If a satguru isn't God, what is he?
Who is the guru?
Top ten signs you're a fundamentalist satsangi

I keep returning to it for several reasons.

One is that a belief in someone's divine perfection forms the foundation of rigid religious dogmatism. The Bible, Koran, Adi Granth, or other holy writing can't be challenged because its human source supposedly was error-free.

Another is more personal: for over thirty years I diligently adhered to meditative and other practices enjoined by a "perfect living master," Charan Singh. He set himself forth as possessing extraordinary capabilities, including but not limited to...

-- Existing in various ethereal forms (astral, causal, spiritual) in addition to the physical
-- Placing his "radiant form" within the psyche of each disciple at the time of initiation
-- Being able to know what was happening in the lives of disciples, and even changing their destiny (karma) at times
-- Guiding the disciple through higher regions of reality and communicating with him or her throughout the process

There are many other purported God men who make, or have made, other sorts of claims (see here, here, and here). These are mostly examples from the "Eastern" side of religion and mysticism; the "Western" side has its own GIHF candidates.

If reality has any meaning beyond the utterly subjective ("truth is in the eye of the beholder"), some or all of these guys aren't who they claim to be: God.

I've come to the conclusion that all is the word of choice in the preceding sentence. Again, if someone likes some, argue your case. Explain how it's possible to tell the difference between a "perfect" and "imperfect" master.

And answer a more basic question: What is the demonstrable evidence that any human has achieved perfection or godliness?

Mysticism is all about doing...nothing

I used to work hard at meditation. I did a lot of mantra repetition, several hours at a stretch. This was supposed to get me into an elevated state of consciousness where mystical sound and light phenomena would appear.

Now, my approach is to do as little as possible when I meditate each morning. I think of it as the lazy guy's way to enlightenment (assuming enlightenment exists -- a whole other question).

It's nice to know that a noted student of mysticism, Robert K.C. Forman, says that I'm on the right track.

Here's an excerpt from his book, "Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness" (which I've blogged about before).

The word mysticism, like religion, truth, and modernity, is pivotal but murky. It can denote the unintelligible statements of an illogical speaker, a schizophrenic's vision, someone's hallucinations, a drug-induced vision, the spiritual "showings" of a Julian of Norwich or a Mechthilde of Magedeburg, the unspoken, silent experience of God that Meister Eckhart called the "Divine Desert," or the Buddhist Nagarjuna's empty shunyata. 

...Roland Fischer has put forward a "cartography" of states of conscious arousal which includes all of these so called "mystical" states. Hallucinations, acute schizophrenic states, and the visions and auditions of a Julian of Norwich fall on the ergotropic side of the chart. These are states of hyperarousal: cognitive and physiological activity are at relatively high levels.

On the trophotrophic side are hypoaroused states, marked by low levels of cognitive and physiological activity: here we find HIndu samadhi, mushinjo in zazen, the restful states associated with The Cloud of Unknowing's "cloud of forgetting," or Eckhart's gezucket.

...I propose reserving the term mysticism for trophotropic states. I will call ergotrophic phenomena such as hallucinations, visions, auditions, etc. "visionary experiences."

Forman is interested in exploring the nature of consciousness. He used to be (and maybe still is) the Executive Editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, a well-respected publication that I once subscribed to.

The contents of consciousness are different from consciousness itself. This seems almost indisputable. I've been conscious of countless different things throughout my life. Throughout, though, these things have appeared in a seemingly single consciousness.

As many "ergotrophic" mystics have said, if we reduce or eliminate the contents of consciousness, then consciousness pure and simple (or at least purer and simpler) will be evident.

Many people, including some commenters on this blog, place a lot of importance on what happens during meditation. Someone recently said that if you're not hearing inner sound or seeing inner light, you're not experiencing the Real Thing.

Others, and increasingly I'm among them, consider that it doesn't really matter what phenomena pop up in one's consciousness, because this doesn't lead to a genuine realization of what consciousness itself is.

And clearly consciousness is King when it comes to understanding the nature of reality, because if we aren't conscious of something, it doesn't exist for us.

Here's how I started off my previous post about Forman's book:

It’s astounding, really. We all confidently say, “I think…,” “I believe…,” “I feel…,” “I see….” Yet we don’t know who or what the “I” is. So how confident should we be about all those statements we make, to others and to our own self, when the nature of the statement-making entity is a mystery?

Do we construct reality or discover it? In some sense both, most likely. Forman says that modern philosophical constructivists and the ancient Buddhist scholar Paramartha agree on quite a bit.

But -- and this is the critical point -- on the fundamental claim that experiences are constructed by language, concept, and past experiences, they agree profoundly: every ordinary experience of an object is in significant ways shaped, delimited, and controlled by our previously learned, habituated perceptual and cognitive categories. And this, it goes without saying, is the key claim in the modern-day constructivist's account of mysticism.

How many devout Christians have a vision of Buddha while meditating?

When I was a member of an India-based spiritual organization, initiates were instructed to meditate upon the face of the guru. If some being appeared within one's consciousness during meditation, and it wasn't accompanied by the guru's form (the reality of which was to be tested by repeating a mantra), then that being was supposed to be ignored as a fake.

This is a good example of constructing reality out of concepts and expectations. The scientific method is a way of determining the relative extent to which a purported truth has been manufactured, or discovered.

However, when an experience is personal and one-of-a-kind, it can't be subjected to a research study.

So Forman's goal is to demonstrate that mystical knowledge isn't subject to constructivist criticisms. He does a good job of this.

To summarize the argument so far, we have said that constructivists claim that mystical experience, like any experience, results from prior shaping of expectations. This shaping, they say, is of the intentional object. But, we noted, there is no mental or sensory intentional object in the pure consciousness event and thus nothing to shape.

...Mystical experiences don't result from a process of building or constructing mystical experience, we've suggested, but rather from an un-constructing of language and belief. It seems to result from something like a releasing of experience from language.

Fairly frequently, commenters on this blog who subscribe to a particular belief system call me a quitter for having forsaken my faith in certain spiritual dogmas. That's absolutely wrong, given Forman's definition of mysticism.

By letting beliefs, expectations, effort, and such go, what remains is consciousness pure and simple (or like I said before, purer and simpler).

A frequently-heard adage is "self-realization before god-realization."

My churchlessness has adapted this to "self-realization, then see about realizing god." Meaning, we're going to have a much clearer view of reality if we get straight who we are before we start jumping to conclusions about a possible external divinity.

And this self-realization doesn't take any effort, according to Forman. It's right in front of our eyes. In fact, it is our eyes -- along with everything else we are.

Really, we know our minds, and indeed we know what it is to be a thinking, feeling conscious being, by virtue of the fact that we have a mind, or are conscious. It is a peculiarly diaphanous element, consciousness: hard to define, hard to contact, hard to know.

But it is only by virtue of our firsthand, first-person acquaintance with this ineffable and sui generis phenomenon that we know anything at all, and certainly know anything at all about our own minds.

We do not know it as we know the color of the desk or as we know another's fears. We know it in a peculiarly direct way: by virtue of being it.

Mysticism good. Religion bad. So says Sam Harris.

My churchlessness was wonderfully energized by Sam Harris' "The End of Faith" when it came out in 2004 -- the same year I started this blog.

Harris has a philosophy degree from Stanford and is working on a doctorate in neuroscience, so he's got a balanced perspective on soft beliefs and hard facts.

This morning I picked up The End of Faith and reread the almost-final "Experiments in Consciousness" chapter. I'd remembered that he'd said positive things about mysticism after trashing religion, and was curious to revisit his thoughts after five years or so.

My conclusion: right on, Mr. Harris.

At the core of every religion lies an undeniable claim about the human condition: it is possible to have one's experience of the world radically transformed...The problem with religion is that it blends this truth so thoroughly with the venom of unreason.

The challenge for us is to begin talking about this possibility in rational terms....It is difficult to find a word for that human enterprise which aims at happiness directly -- at happiness of a sort that can survive the frustration of all conventional desires.

The term "spirituality" seems unavoidable here -- and I have used it several times in this book already -- but it has many connotations that are, frankly, embarrassing. "Mysticism" has more gravitas, perhaps, but it has unfortunate associations of its own.

Neither word captures the reasonableness and profundity of the possibility that we must now consider: that there is a form of well-being that supersedes all others, indeed, that transcends the vagaries of experience itself.

Harris then launches into praise of "mysticism" that is as strong as his condemnation of religion. And he makes great good sense.

Over on this post we've been having an interesting comment conversation about whether Taoism and Buddhism (Dzogchen variety, particularly) can be considered metaphysical belief systems.

I've been arguing, "no." I'm pretty sure Sam Harris agrees. His description of his bookcase sounds a lot like mine, when he says:

I have selected a passage at random from a shelf of Buddhist literature. The following text was found with closed eyes on the first attempt from among scores of books. I invite the reader to find anything even remotely like this in the Bible or the Koran.

Harris has a lot of evident fondness for Buddhism. Me too, along with Taoism -- writings about which occupy center stage on my own bookcase.

Both philosophies are firmly rooted in the reality of everyday human experience, not some airy-fairy other-worldly metaphysics. The passage Harris found in his Buddhist book talks about manifest awareness and the absence of an observer.

It is psychologically profound. Also, entirely consistent with modern neuroscience.

Similarly, the ancient Taoists grasped the importance of "being in the flow" way before sports announcers started saying excitedly, "Man, Kobe Bryant is out of his mind and in the zone! Forty points at halftime!"

My well-worn copy of Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English's translation of the Tao Te Ching says on the back cover:

The philosophy of Lao Tsu is simple: Accept what is in front of you without wanting the situation to be other than it is. Study the natural order of things and work with it rather than against it, for to try to change what is only sets up resistance.

...If we watch carefully, we will see that work proceeds more quickly and easily if we stop "trying," if we stop putting in so much extra effort, if we stop looking for results. In the clarity of a still and open mind, truth will be reflected.

Likewise, Harris writes:

This is an empirical claim, not a matter of philosophical speculation. Break the spell of thought and the duality of subject and object will vanish -- as will the fundamental difference between conventional states of happiness and suffering. This is a fact about the mind that few Western scholars have ever made it their business to understand.

It is on this front that the practice of meditation reveals itself to be both intellectually serious and indispensable. There is something to realize about the nature of consciousness, and its realization does not entail thinking new thoughts.

A few hours ago I started on my almost-daily dog walk, an event that Serena doesn't let me forget. We have two usual routes: a walk through the woods and around a lake that is a bit over a mile, and a more aerobically challenging two mile walk on a paved road loop.

I felt like going on the lake walk. It was evident that Serena was more in the mood for the road (more interesting smells, I suspect). I flowed with Serena. At first. Because when we came to a path that intersected the road, I headed down it.

Serena happily bounded ahead, off her leash. Heading toward the lake, albeit in a more indirect fashion that I at first intended, I realized that this route would have us avoid a hornet nest that my wife had noticed at dog nose height, near the trail on our property, and had warned me about.

It was the familiar "good news, bad news, who knows?" Taoist story.

I head off in an undesired direction, which ends up leading me to where I wanted to go -- perhaps avoiding a stinging problem that the dog and I could have encountered if I'd stuck with my initial conscious intention.

My unspectacular tale is the sort of everyday experience that Harris finds so interesting. And mysterious.

How does our consciousness guide us through life? How does unchanging awareness relate to the everchanging sensations, thoughts, emotions, desires, and such that continually course through our mind?

If these kinds of questions are termed "mystical," its because the answers are a mystery, not that investigating the nature of human consciousness leads us into some metaphysical realm.

But as Harris noted above, thinking about thoughts won't help in studying how awareness functions thoughtlessly. He adds:

We all know what it is like to read whole paragraphs, and even pages of a book without assimilating a word. Few of us realize that we spend most of our lives in such a state: perceiving the present -- present sights, sounds, tastes, and sensations -- only dimly, through a veil of thought.

We spend our lives telling ourselves the story of past and future, while the reality of the present goes largely unexplored. Now we live in ignorance of the freedom and simplicity of consciousness, prior to the arising of thought.

Religiosity can't exist without thoughts, concepts, dogmas, beliefs, imaginings.

Mysticism (or "spirituality," if you prefer that term) can. Non-religious Buddhists and Taoists are totally happy just being. No need to give a name to this, though "suchness" is used in Buddhism and the "way" in Taoism.

Science and religion have something in common: they both are focused on what exists within existence, on what consciousness is conscious of, on what knowing is knowledgeable about.

Mysticism is centered on bridging, or even dissolving, these dualities. Harris says:

Indeed, many suggest that it is our search for happiness -- our craving for knowledge and new experience, our desire for recognition, our efforts to find the right romantic partner, even our yearning for spiritual experience itself -- that causes us to overlook a form of well-being that is intrinsic to consciousness at every present moment.

...The experience of countless contemplatives suggests that consciousness -- being merely the condition in which thought, emotion, and even the sense of self arises -- is never actually changed by what it knows. That which is aware of joy does not become joyful; that which is aware of sadness does not become sad.

...The roiling mystery of the world can be analyzed with concepts (this is science), or it can be experienced free of concepts (this is mysticism). Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time.

Where the skeptical meets the mystical

The title of this post is the tag line on David Lane's web site, Neural Surfer. I like it. That's a great place to be -- the shore line of reality where skepticism shovels away the loose sand of mysticism, getting closer to a solid bedrock of truth.

Here's a sample of David's take on the subject: "Tangled Phone Lines: why Richard Dawkins hung up on Ken Wilber."

Like me, David is an initiate of Radha Soami Satsang Beas who has decided to take seriously the precept that it's possible to have a "science of the soul."

I clearly believe that mysticism can be studied scientifically. Indeed, it already has been for decades.

I don’t necessarily think that mystics and skeptics should depart company and go on their respective ways, but I do think that if they seriously communicate with each other something is bound to give. And what each side may have to give up is more than they might be willing to concede.

...if a mystic is serious about studying the subject scientifically it means that he or she may have to radically revise their understandings and prior theological dogmas about what is actually happening when they undergo a transformation of consciousness.

He uses Faqir Chand as an example. Chand was an Indian guru who was appealingly honest about his mystical powers. Or rather, non-powers.

For example, when disciples would claim that Chand had appeared to them in his "radiant form," Chand would reply that he knew nothing about this. Yet David speaks about how other gurus were reluctant to concede that mystical experiences are only within a disciple's mind, not in some sort of objective reality.

To be truly scientific, an organized religious or mystical faith has to honestly admit "These teachings could be wrong."

However, how many do so? Not many. Maybe none, in fact.

So it is necessary for anyone who wants to pursue a scientific approach to mysticism to strike out on the Reality Road on their own. Because organizations have a vested interest in preserving their belief system, even it is wrong.

Are there universal mystical principles?

A few days ago George posted a comment where he asked what people thought of these statements:

The principles common to mystical beliefs appear to be:
1) the existence of a Divine formless force underlying everything.
2) each person has a true inner self, kernel or spark surrounded by egos or wills clouding their perceptions and ability to know thy inner self and the Divine.
3) using meditation to allow connection or alignment of the inner self with the Divine and thus experiencing direct knowledge of the Divine, rather than thru the intellect with its egos which is inherently limited.
4) our purpose is self knowledge of the inner self, to know who we are, to know thyself.

Taoism appears slightly different, but appears to still require man to know himself to align his/her will or ego with nature, and that this is best achieved by putting the mind into a still passive or meditative state unburdened by the intellect or thought.

I didn't want this question -- are there universal mystical principles? -- to be lost in a string of comments, so dug it out for inspection.

It's a big question, obviously. I used to believe that there was such a thing as the Perennial Philosophy, but now I'm much less sure.

For those willing to wade through some fairly complex ideas about the perennial philosophy, these notes on a book by Jorge Ferrer are worth reading. I resonate with Nigel Wellings' conclusion:

At base I do not believe there has ever been a perennial philosophy until Huxley invented it. That in contrast there are a great variety of transpersonal and spiritual experiences available to us that are not essentially the same but which have all been valuable within their own cultural context. That it is only when we have the ability to compare them that we also then have a problem of making value judgments.

The main reason I agree with these sentiments, especially if the perennial philosophy is taken to be as George describes it in the four principles above, is that some mystic teachings don't emphasize (or even acknowledge) a distinction between "true inner self" and "the Divine."

These are dualistic concepts that don't seem to fit in with nondual philosophies such as Advaita, Buddhism, and Taoism. Here the self is viewed as a fiction or illusion to be seen through, not as a distinct entity that can merge with another entity, the Divine.

So when George says that Taoism is "slightly different," I'd say "very different." I've read a bunch of books about Taoist philosophy, and have practiced Tai Chi for about five years (which embodies Taoism).

In this post I discussed how Taoism is both similar to in some respects, yet also quite different from, the Sant Mat philosophy. I said:

The way I see it – and I understand that everyone has a unique vision of how things are – the Taoist notion of a divine melody pervading the universe is a more genuine reflection of Sant Mat's shabd, dhun, or "sound current."

That is, by and large Taoism lacks the religious dogma and metaphysical baggage that organized spiritual faiths carry along.

Taoism and Sant Mat both teach that mental conceptions obscure a wordless primal reality. However, Taoism (like Buddhism) espouses no-mind, not-knowing. Sant Mat, however, is based on an involved belief system. Once someone has bought into the beliefs, further questioning and conceptualizing is supposed to stop.

So while Taoism has no-mind, Sant Mat has locked-in-place mind. The aspiring Taoist mystic seeks to embrace mystery directly; the aspiring Sant Mat mystic considers that cosmic mysteries will be revealed after traveling a well-defined path.

Thus I think George is correct in identifying the four principles as being parts of many mystical teachings. But not all of those paths adopt all of the principles. And style is as important as substance, in my opinion.

Taoism and Buddhism, for example, take themselves much less seriously than faiths like Sant Mat do. In no small part this is due to the absence of a savior or guru in these more wide open and iconoclastic mystic pursuits.

From the introduction to The Book of Chuang Tzu:

Trying to read the book through logically will only produce faint, ghostly laughter. And the one who will be laughing at you from afar will be the spirit of Chuang Tzu. For if there is one constant theme in the book, it is that logic is nonsense and that eclecticism is all, if you wish to open yourself to the Tao and the Te -- the Way and the Virtue of all.

U.G. Krishnamurti -- intriguing, irritating, inspirational

I don't know what to make of U.G. Krishnamurti. That would have pleased him, I'm sure. (He died in 2007.)

U.G. liked to say, "I have no teaching...I have no claims." Yet he was one of those un-teachers who somehow managed to do a lot of what sure looked like spiritual guiding.

Personally, I find such behavior exasperating.

I want to scream, "Dude, if you've got nothing to say, if you don't want to be looked upon as a guru, don't talk to people, don't let them make recordings and videos of you, don't allow books to be made out of your conversations!"

So I found a lot to agree with in David Quinn's critique of U.G. Krishnamurti. Such as:

Accordingly, I find UG's attempts to repel people very insincere. The fact that he is frequently abusive, often rudely telling people to go away, is held up as a kind of proof that he is somehow different to the other gurus, that he really doesn't sell himself in order to be popular. But it doesn't wash with me. Look deeply into the man and you will see all the con tricks of a typical salesman.

UG doesn't really want to repel people. He only wants to be seen to be doing so. This is his image, his trademark style. It is the covert means by which he can attract a following. I mean, if he truly wanted to repel people, he could do so very easily.

On the plus side, I've been enjoying "Mind is a Myth," which mostly consists of transcribed conversations people had with U.G. (It's available for free online, in accord with U.G.'s marvelous copyright notice, which I like a lot.)

This morning I read the Not-Knowing is Your Natural State chapter.

Though U.G. claims that his teaching (oops, non-teaching) isn't related to anything that has come before, it sounds very similar to Zen, Advaita, Dzogchen, Taoism, and other messages that basically say "what you're looking for is what you are."

You have no recourse but to use thought to get what you want in this world. But when you seek to get what does not exist -- God, bliss, love, etc. -- through thought, you only succeed in pitting one thought against another, creating misery for yourself and the world.

...If there is anything that can happen, it must happen now. Since you don't want anything to happen now, you push it away into something you have named "the future."

...Instead of being what you are -- unkind -- you pursue the fictitious opposite put before you -- kindness. To emphasize what we should be, only causes strain, giving momentum to what we already in fact are.

In nature we find the animals at one time violent and brutal, at others kind and generous. For them there is no contradiction. But man is told he must be always good, kind, loving, never greedy or violent. We emphasize only one side of reality, thus distorting the whole picture.

...You have to be saved from the very idea that you have to be saved. You must be saved from the saviours, redeemed from the redeemers. If it is to happen, it must happen now.

There's quite a bit that I find questionable in the U.G. unteachings. However, I resonate with the core of his non-message.

U.G. usually is quite abrupt, even insulting, to his questioners. But here's a Q & A where the lucky person making the query got a pat on the back, apparently because he perceived the essence of what U.G. is about.

Q: So it is the fantasizing about a non-existent ideal person, society, or state that dooms and fixes me where I am. My belief in what I am does not determine what I in fact am. Is that it?

U.G.: That's it. And the greatest ideal, the most imposing, perfect and powerful is, of course, God. It is an invention of frightened minds. The history of human thinking has produced saints, teachers, gurus, and bhagvans. Man has already messed up his life, and religion has made it worse.

Kabir was too wild for religion

Kabir was a fifteenth century North Indian mystic poet. I've called him a "patron saint of spiritual independence." Like Steve Martin, he was a wild and crazy guy.

Yet you wouldn't know that from how some faiths, such as Sikhism and Sant Mat, try to tame Kabir and confine him within a religious tradition. In a recent post I said:

But Sant Mat, in its modern form, lacks the sort of pin that punctures the dualistic, self-righteous, dogmatic bubble. ("Modern," because the 15th century Kabir, who is held up as a Sant Mat saint, did a great job of pinpricking in his more iconoclastic poetry.)

After writing that I dug out my favorite Kabir book, "The Bijak of Kabir." (If you want a copy, get a used one; I don't know why the current printing by another publisher is so expensive.)

Here's what Kabir says the experience of truth is not:

There's no creation or creator there,
no gross or fine, no wind or fire,
no sun, moon, earth or water,
no radiant form, no time there,
no word, no flesh, no faith,
no cause and effect, nor any thought
of the Veda. No Hari or Brahma,
no Shiva or Shakti, no pilgrimage
and no rituals. No mother, father
or guru there...

Kabir didn't want sycophants.

I've burned my own house down,
the torch is in my hand.
Now I'll burn down the house of anyone
who wants to follow me.

If you think you understand Kabir, you don't.

It's a heavy confusion.
Veda, Koran, holiness, hell --
who's man? who's woman?
A clay pot shot with air and sperm.
When the pot falls apart, what do you call it?
Numskull! You've missed the point.

Kabir and religion; oil and water. No mixing.

The fearful things that everyone fears,
I don't fear.
I'm not confused about sin and purity,
heaven and hell.
Kabir says, seekers, listen:
Wherever you are
is the entry point.

Pretty damn simple.

Remembering the empty, the easy,
a light broke out.
I offer myself to a being
based on nothing.

On that day neither air nor water.
On that day creation -- who gave birth?
On that day neither womb nor root.
On that day neither knowledge nor Veda,
on that day neither sound nor sorrow,
on that day neither body nor house,
no earthly place, no sky or space.
On that day no teacher, no one to teach,
no difficult path, in or out of reach.

Of the sourceless state, what to say?
No town, nowhere to stay;
seen without a trace;
what do you call that place?

“Perfect” gurus: myth or reality?

Those steeped in a Western monotheistic religion, such as Christianity or Judaism, might be surprised to learn that millions of people in the world today believe that God walks on Earth in a human form – divinely perfect.

Some Christians believe that Jesus was perfect, but his flawed humanity seems to be as important as his divinity. In like fashion, most Muslims consider that Muhammad was a flawless conduit for God's message as revealed in the Koran, but the Prophet himself isn't revered as God.

It's only in the Eastern religions, so far as I know, that a person is viewed as essentially identical with the Supreme Being. These are the "perfect gurus."

Comments on a recent Church of the Churchless post got me pondering this subject. As a long-time member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a branch of Sant Mat, I'm intimately familiar with the whole perfect master thing. I've even sat down and talked with a couple of them, Charan Singh and Gurinder Singh.

One obvious fact about perfect gurus is that there isn't any outward sign of their perfection, as this essay describes. Their bodies are imperfect, as they get sick and age. Their minds are imperfect, as they forget things and make mistakes.

So where does the supposed perfection lie? On a different plane of reality – that of soul or spirit. Just as God can't be seen directly, neither can the guru's perfection. It has to be taken on faith.

And believe me, many disciples do.

This is easier to accomplish for native Indians, for example, because gurus are a staple of Eastern cultures. Western minds (like mine) have a more difficult time accepting that outward imperfection masks an inward perfection.

A few weeks ago my wife and I took a Rumba class with another couple. As often happens in dance classes, they got to bickering in a friendly fashion.

"Hey, you should be doing the move like this." "Well, I would be if you were doing your part right." And so on. After a while I saw they were in a big hug, cooing at each other like lovebirds.

"We're perfect partners for each other!" "Yes, we are!" In this case, "perfect" wasn't any sort of objective standard, but a quality of love. You can't argue with that.

However, when perfection is measured against a yardstick, that's different. Who can forget the iconic image of Bo Derek in "10"? (Though I've learned from comments on my most beautiful woman in world post that beauty truly is largely in the eye of the beholder.)

Gymnastics has more definite criteria for assigning a "perfect 10." Yet even here there are subjective disagreements among judges.

So how is it possible to say that a guru is spiritually perfect, when it's so tough to assess physical perfection? Where is the standard for judging how well someone is in harmony with ultimate reality?

This presumes that someone else – the judge – knows the nature of ultimate reality, a.k.a. God. Similarly, it takes a expert who knows the nature of an ideal diamond to assess the relative perfection of a gem.

For many years I've heard disciples speak of their guru as being a "perfect master," or "God in human form." I rarely, if ever, did this. It always struck me as the height of ego to make such a statement, following the adage It takes one to know one.

I'm so imperfect, in so many ways. We all are.

He among us who lacks flaws, let him judge who else is perfect. That person sure isn't me. And I'm also pretty sure it isn't all the devoted disciples who look upon their guru with eyes that see no imperfections in him.

(Regarding the masculine language, I liked the final question on this ExPremie.org page. The suggestion is to ask a guru, Prem Rawat, "Can you think of any Perfect Mistresses?")

As with the couple in our dance class, it seems that often starry-eyed disciples are so much in love with the guru they can't bring themselves to notice any flaws. This is akin to the infatuation phase of a relationship where everything the other person does is just wonderful.

After a few years of living together, those charming eccentricities turn into irritations. The love may be stronger, but the vision is clearer. Ditto with a guru-relationship, ideally.

I don't see any benefit to considering that another human being is spiritually, mystically, or divinely perfect. A student can benefit from a teacher's instruction without viewing him or her as infallible. In fact, it's questionable whether genuine learning can take place without developing an ability to critique what you've been told.

In my martial arts slanted Tai Chi class this afternoon, the teacher said, "I'm going to show you four moves; then you're going to have to figure out what comes next yourself." Now that's good instruction.

Believing someone is perfect and can do no wrong is a stepping stone to cultish behavior. Some gurus are notorious for abusing disciples, sexually or otherwise. Others exercise more subtle forms of control. Regardless, giving up one's capacity to question isn't healthy – mentally, psychologically, or spiritually.

Googling "perfect guru" today, I came across some interesting links in addition to those already shared.

--"The Perfect Guru" strikes me as a parody of perfection characteristics. Others take this piece quasi-seriously. You can decide for yourself.

--A chapter from "Stripping the Gurus" by Geoffrey Falk is about Andrew Cohen. It's titled "Sometimes I feel like a God."

--Here's a "History of Perfect Masters" by a Sant Mat student. See who's in and who's out. Sorry, Buddhists – the Buddha didn't make the list.

--Another "Lineage of Perfect Masters." Some overlap, but there's plenty of disagreement about who qualifies for the Perfect Master Club.

Keeping consciousness simple

It’s astounding, really. We all confidently say, “I think…,” “I believe…,” “I feel…,” “I see….” Yet we don’t know who or what the “I” is. So how confident should we be about all those statements we make, to others and to our own self, when the nature of the statement-making entity is a mystery?

Last night I managed to watch about fifteen minutes of an interview with Deepak Chopra before this I-entity overdosed on New Age gobbledygook. Nonetheless, I did appreciate how Chopra focuses on unraveling the essence of consciousness.

He believes that consciousness is foundational in the cosmos—a reversal of the usual scientific way of thinking, in which mind emerges from matter. Maybe. I sure hope so. For this implies that consciousness survives bodily death, not being dependent on matter for its existence.

If this is to be anything other than an article of faith, little different from “Jesus saves,” there has to be direct experience of consciousness separate from physical thoughts, emotions, perceptions, imaginings, and such.

In his book, Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness, Robert K.C. Forman talks about what this experience is like. Forman is a mystic as well as a scholar. He discusses his own altered perceptions of reality that stem from many years of meditative practice (Forman describes himself as a neo-Advaitist; he says his primary teachers are Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Ram Dass, and Meister Eckhart).

I just finished re-reading this book. Some chapters are densely intellectual, but overall Forman achieves his aim:

It is my hope that this book will serve to finally close the door on the possibility that one can assume without further justification that mysticism is constructed, and will open the door to much broader and more far-reaching debates on both the deeper character of mysticism, and on what mysticism has to show us about the nature of human consciousness and life.

By “constructed,” Forman means that the mystic’s or meditator’s conceptual/linguistic scheme shapes his or her mystical experiences. Most of the time this is the case. When have you heard of a Christian contemplative encountering the Buddha or Allah? Somehow Jesus makes an appearance instead.

But “most of the time” doesn’t mean “all of the time.” Forman argues persuasively that it’s possible to experience a pure consciousness event (PCE).

One is not perceiving or thinking about some thing, even a one, but rather is coming to be that one thing which one inherently is, if you will, without any additional mental content…the distinguishing mark of the pure consciousness event is that it is not described as an experience of something.

So supposedly there’s nothing that a PCE could be constructed out of (unless, a skeptic might suggest, the prior expectation that a PCE is possible; however, Forman provides instances of PCE’s coming from out of the blue, unexpectedly).

In the article “What Does Mysticism Have to Teach Us About Consciousness?,” you can get the essence of his message. (tip: for easier reading, minimize your web browser to make the page width narrower).

I liked how Forman begins with a common-sense tenet: to understand something complex, turn to its simple forms. He likens the pure consciousness event to E. coli, whose simple gene structure allows researchers to understand the gene functioning of complex species.

Well, E. coli isn’t the most appealing image to plant in my mind before I meditate. But I’m sure these little bacteria look cute to their mothers. And if I’m ever going to have a PCE of my own, there won’t be any thoughts of anything in my consciousness, E. coliish or otherwise.

Religion asks us to become someone new. Mysticism invites us to be who we’ve always been, but have mislaid under all the crap that we’ve piled into our consciousness. Strip it away and you’re left with something simple and pure: awareness. Commenting on Meister Eckhart’s teachings, Forman says:

Eckhart instructs his listener to drag the inwardness outward, as it were, bringing it into activity. One is to act in such a way that reality—activity, thought, perception, etc.—is perceived and undergone while not losing the interior silence encountered in contemplation [of a PCE].

Conversely, one is to lead “reality into the inwardness,” i.e., make the silent inwardness dynamic. In other words, one is to learn to think, speak, walk, and work without losing awareness of the inward silence.

…We may characterize this as a new pattern of mystical experiences: the Dualistic Mystical State, or DMS. It may be defined as an unchanging interior silence that is maintained concurrently with intentional experience in a long-term or permanent way.

Hope this doesn’t sound too complicated. Really, it isn’t. The basic notion is that we can know things separate from our own consciousness, but we can’t know the knower, because we are that. Or as a Buddhist would say, we are That.

We can be who we truly are. That’s all. We can’t know, describe, analyze, or perceive our own self, for it is impossible to stand outside of awareness (if you could, you’d be aware of that). So spirituality starts, and likely ends, by coming to grips with who is trying to be spiritual.

Religion would have us look up toward a distant God, or outward toward a divine person worthy of emulation. However, this just adds additional objects to the already crowded contents of our consciousness.

Uh-oh. I have a premonition that I’m about to quote myself. Why resist? Can’t fight the urge. Must turn to my “Simplicity is Superior” chapter in Return to the One.

Most of us remain absorbed in what is showing on the screen of consciousness and never make much of an effort to discern how those images are projected. This keeps us imprisoned in Plato’s cave of illusion, absorbed in counting the shadows on the cavern wall and debating among ourselves which comes first and which after, which is most desirable and which least desirable, all the while failing to turn around and learn the source of the light that produces the shadows.

We aren’t going to be able to approach the single source of consciousness, the One, so long as we are occupied with its many products…Adhering to the adage “know yourself” means being present to one’s self as one’s true self, not looking upon one’s self as if it was an object, something to be perceived or pondered.

…It isn’t necessary to go through life as a sort of double image: a me that does things and a largely unnecessary hanger-on inside my head who watches and comments on the doer. The internal mental dialogue most people take for granted is akin to a play-by-play announcer who never stops gabbing about what is happening on the field of our awareness.

The problem is that I already know what is going on because I’m directly experiencing it. I should be able to wash the dishes without an inner voice telling me the obvious: “I’m washing the dishes.”

Wow. The guy who wrote those words sure makes a lot of sense. Interesting that he happens to be me. I’ve got to listen to him more often. Except, he just told me not to, so I guess I won’t.

Adyashanti bursts my orgasmic bubble

Just as I predicted, I’ve been enjoying Adyashanti’s “Emptiness Dancing.” But I was disappointed when I read this morning that enlightenment isn’t going to be something like an infinitely extended orgasm.

Well, to be more precise Adyashanti left open at least a slight possibility that this could be the case. So I won’t let my hopes die entirely. He did say, though, that orgasmic enlightenment wasn’t his experience. And since his breakthrough occurred after 15 years of Zen meditation, I’ll take him at his word.

However, my experience of enlightenment was simply the demolition of everything that I thought it was going to be. And I have never met anyone who has truly and authentically awakened to the Truth who has ever said anything other than that.

I have never met a single person who has come back and said, “Adya, you know it’s pretty much like I thought it would be. They usually come back and say, “This is nothing like anything I thought it would be. And this is nothing like any of the spiritual experiences I have had before in my life, including experiences of bliss, love, union with the divine, or cosmic consciousness.”

Makes sense. I like how Adyashanti keeps emphasizing that experiences always are transitory—even mystical ones. So they aren’t what the genuine spiritual seeker is really looking for: enduring truth. A state of being, on the other hand, never ceases to be.

Like, I’ve always been aware of being whatever I am for as long as I’ve existed as a self-aware human being. Yet I’ve also had lots of experiences that have come and gone, most of which I’ve consciously forgotten.

So there’s the being that is the lasting me, and then there is the conglomeration of transitory experiences that I often (or usually) mistake for the entity that I am. My problem, says Adyashanti, is that I’ve never gotten in touch with awareness pure and simple.

Recognize that there is nothing that experiences this moment, but even that nothing is known and experienced. There is something mysterious that knows, something mysterious that experiences in this moment, but you can’t say what it is because, when you say what it is, it’s not that.

It’s closer, more immediate. As soon as you think about it, you see it’s not that thought. It’s before that thought. No description is necessary, so just rest on that edge, on the precipice, on the direct experience, directly feeling as though you do not exist and yet knowing that you do.

One thought about this mystery sets apart heaven and hell. Thought rips the unity into pieces to be analyzed by the mind. But silence unifies…Don’t get lost in thought or you miss your life. Just simply relax, and relax, and relax. It’s the simplest act of faith and trust.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

When there are no voices speaking in my head—my voices, crazily speaking to myself what I already know—everything falsely religious fades away. Where is Jesus when I’m not thinking about him? Where is Buddha, God, Allah, Tao, Guru? Dead and gone, along with all the other fantasies that have only as much reality as my mind gives them.

Silence. Stillness. Simply being what I am when I’m not busy pretending to be someone else. That’s when the wild real things start to appear. They shy away from pretension. They don’t like the company of hypocrisy.

The only way to enter silence is on its own terms. You can’t go there with something, only with nothing. You can’t be somebody, only nobody. Then entrance is easy. But this nothing is actually the highest price we ever pay. It’s our most sacred commodity.

We will give our ideas, our beliefs, our heart, our body, our mind, and our soul. The last thing that we’ll give is nothing. We hold on to our nothingness because that’s our most sacred commodity, and somewhere inside we know this.

Only the nothing enters the silence; that’s the only thing that gets in. The rest of what we are just bangs at the nonexistent door. As soon as you want something from the silence, you are moved outside of silence again.

Shhhuuuusssshhhh.

St. John of the Cross: “nothing, nothing, nothing”

This afternoon I came to appreciate the wisdom of St. John of the Cross’ emphasis on “nada, nada, nada.” And I didn’t even need to be given a koan by a Zen master. A worthy substitute, I can assure you, is trying to install a Linksys wireless router.

My old one had inexplicably stopped working. The new one wouldn’t start to work. My first call to India-based tech support led to a koanic download that supposedly would solve all my problems.

Nada. It didn’t.

What I kept getting, after dutifully connecting the router as instructed, was an error message that basically said, “We have been able to connect to the Internet. But your router is a mystery to us. We are unable to configure it because the installation program does not support this strange device we’ve encountered. Good luck, and goodbye.”

I’d bend down to stare at the router sitting under my wife’s desk. Yes, it was a brand new Linksys WRT54GS router, fresh out of the box, which I was trying to install via Linkys’ configuration program. The whole thing was a mystery. Just like God.

I took the path of hoped-for enlightenment so many have followed: I journeyed to India. Again. Via a toll-free number. This time my tech support guru led me through a manual install. It seemed to get the router working, but now my ThinkPad laptop couldn’t connect to it as I was able to before.

I had a sneaking suspicion that this might just possibly have something to do with the laptop falling off a TV table yesterday. Indeed, IBM tech support (in Atlanta) told me where the wireless hardware switch could be located. It’d been knocked to the “off” position.

Yet my wireless Internet connection was still nada. Nothing. A software problem was suspected. I tried to turn the software on. Nada. Nothing. I wasn’t able to perform a system restore, as IBM had suggested. Nada. Nothing. I was at my wit’s end—which doesn’t take long to reach when it comes to wireless computer mumbo-jumbo.

I gave up. I started composing a “help” message to IBM tech support, hoping to reach a more exalted level of software competence. I confessed my ignorance. I pleaded for a return call.

Then I glanced at the Wireless Network Connection icon. It was back to normal looking. I disconnected the modem cable. I was online! I had done nada. Nothing. Yet I was connected. Clearly, a message from the great god Nada in support of the Wu Project.

I had an overwhelming desire to get in touch with my inner nothing. An attitude of gratitude for getting my wireless Internet back. I took a nap. Nada for twenty minutes. Then I picked up a St. John of the Cross book and read some before I meditated. Not quite so much nada as with my nap. But a lot more nada than I’d experienced while working on the router problem.

Nothing can be a wonderful something. Doing nothing finally got my wireless connection working. Hopefully it’ll get my soul in good order also (assuming I have one).

This passage from St. John is from his creative tribute to nada, a sketch of the Ascent of Mt. Carmel.

To reach satisfaction in all
desire its possession in nothing.

To come to possess all
desire the possession of nothing.

To arrive at being all
desire to be nothing.

To come to the knowledge of all
desire the knowledge of nothing.

To come to the pleasure you have not
you must go by a way in which you enjoy not.

To come to the knowledge you have not
you must go by a way in which you know not.

To come to the possession you have not
you must go by a way in which you possess not.

To come to be what you are not
you must go by a way in which you are not.

Simple spirituality

I’m attracted to simplicity. My mind is complex, like most minds are. So in spite of this, or because of this, a great big “Yes!” resonates in my psyche when I come across seriously simple summations of spirituality. (Guess I should make that a “Yes-s-s-s!”)

“God is love.” Pretty good. But that’s too simple for me. And overly Hallmark cardish. I prefer Meister Eckhart’s way of putting it. A wonderful blend of simplicity and profundity.

The eye with which I see God is exactly the same eye with which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowledge, and one love.

Like Toby Johnson, I frequently begin and end my meditation with an attempt at grokking this appealing, yet elusive, two sentence mystic theology. I like how Eckhart unifies the seeker and what is sought, the seer and what is seen.

Also, knowledge and love, which are too often regarded as spiritual contraries rather than precisely the same phenomenon. How is it possible to truly love something or someone you don’t really know? And how is it possible to really know something or someone without uniting as completely as possible with it/them—the essence of love?

One is the simplest number. And the simplest spirituality. Religions adore “two,” “three,” or more. The Trinity always has seemed way too complex for me. Even the common metaphor of drop (soul), wave (spirit), and ocean (God) all being the same thing seems to excessively divide the ultimate unity that both science and mysticism point to.

“The eye with which I see God is exactly the same eye with which God sees me.” The same-sounding “eye” and “I” in this English sentence makes it a marvelous koan. Here I am, looking out at the world and inward at myself.

How astounding, this Eckhartian hypothesis that what is doing the looking is precisely what I’m looking for. And, how baffling. Yet that’s the nature of utter simplicity: formless, featureless, ungraspable, unrecognizable.

One and nothing sum to the same total. With one, there is nothing other. With nothing, there is only that one.

The mystic Greek philosopher Plotinus advises, “One must not make it [the One] two even for the sake of forming an idea of it.” Oops. I’ve been doing just that. But I figure that it is much better to think about the One than about the Many, even though my thinking is divisive.

There are ideas that turn you toward simplicity. There also are ideas that turn you toward complexity. By and large, you can tell the difference between spirituality and religion in just this fashion: how simple is the message being preached?

Religions shun the use of Occam’s Razor. They don’t want there to be simply one, for then what place would there be for priests, prophets, gurus, masters, and other mediators if no distance separates God’s eye and our eye?

I consider that true sages like Plotinus point us toward the truth within ourselves, while false teachers point us toward the truth that they say lies within them. Here are a couple of favorite Plotinus quotations from my book:

If you have become this, and seen it, and become pure and alone with yourself, with nothing now preventing you from becoming one in this way, and have nothing extraneous mixed within your self…if you see that this is what you have become, then you have become vision.

Be confident in yourself: you have already ascended here and now, and no longer need someone to show you the way. Open your eyes and see.

And:

This is the real goal for the soul: to touch and to behold this light itself, by means of itself. She does not wish to see it by means of some other light; what she wants to see is that light by means of which she is able to see. What she must behold is precisely that by which she was illuminated.

...How, then, could this come about? Eliminate everything [that is not light]!

The glory of being spiritually lost

If you feel like you’re spiritually lost, be thankful. Smile. Laugh. Dance. Your lucky star is shining brightly on you. You’re way closer to the mystery we call “God” than those who believe that they’re on a well-marked path to the divine.

There’s no such thing. I’m not confident of much when it comes to religion and spirituality. But I’m quite sure that the road to God doesn’t have any white lines down the middle of it. You can’t see, feel, hear, smell, or touch it. The surest way to know if you’re off the track is to say, “Ah, this is the way.”

The cosmos doesn’t reveal its ultimate secret—whatever that might be—so easily. If there was a road map to God, or a guide who could take a seeker there, this reliable spiritual direction finder would have risen above the many spurious claimants whose cacophonous urges to “Follow me!” make the world’s religious bazaar so noisy.

For about thirty years I believed that I’d found a singular path to the divine. I thought that Sant Mat, in the guise of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, had it all. A living guru who served as a guide. A map of the mystic territory to be traversed. A meditative technique to move you along.

When it dawned on me that I wasn’t getting anywhere, nor, by their reports, were any other of the many fellow disciples that I regularly conversed with, I faced some choices: continue on with my seemingly progressless path; search for a path that showed more promise in taking me where I wanted to go; or embrace the path of pathlessness.

I’ve settled on the last option. Both my heart and my mind say Yes, Yes, Yes to it. For how long they’ve been making this utterance, I can’t say. Maybe my whole life. I don’t know when I wrote these scribbled words that were on a piece of paper that fell out of “The Bijak of Kabir” when I picked the book up this morning.

Lost. Get more lost. Further lost. So lost that I’ll never be able to find even myself. So lost I can’t even find the meaning of “lost.” Darker. Deeper. Where the wild things roam. The place that I’ve always avoided because it’s the place that I know I have to go. One day. On death day. I’m afraid to look into that hole. It will swallow me. I want to be eaten alive. So I won’t die again. There’s no avoiding it. But it’s the easiest thing to miss. The obvious always is.

I can tell you, it’s devilishly difficult to become spiritually lost. I mean, utterly lost. I keep finding paths in the wilderness of my mind. In my daily meditation I frequently find myself saying: “God damn it, I’m still following some tracks!”

Even when I finally seem to be lost—what a joy—I eventually realize that I’ve been following a trail marked “Lost.” I’m still on my way to somewhere, not nowhere.

Reading a book about pathlessness isn’t the same as being there. But “The Bijak of Kabir” encourages me to keep on looking for the emptiness that has no entrances, no exits, no ground, no air, no walls, no floor, no anything. And no nothing.

Here are some thoughts that are attributed to this 15th century North India mystic who eschewed all religions and didn’t write a word.

Seek the bird’s, the fish’s path. Kabir says, both are hard. I offer myself to an image: the great being beyond boundaries and beyond beyond.

Heaven and hell are for the ignorant,
not for those who know Hari.
The fearful thing that everyone fears,
I don’t fear.
I’m not confused about sin and purity,
heaven and hell.
Kabir says, seekers, listen:
Wherever you are
is the entry point.

Pandit, you’ve got it wrong.
There’s no creator or creation there,
no gross or fine, no wind or fire,
no sun, moon, earth, or water,
no radiant form, no time there,
no word, no flesh, no faith,
no cause and effect, nor any thought
of the Veda. No Hari or Brahma,
no Shiva or Shakti, no pilgrimage
and no rituals. No mother, father
or guru there. Is it two or one?
Kabir says, if you understand now,
you’re guru, I’m disciple.

Remembering the empty, the easy,
a light broke out.
I offer myself to a being
based on nothing.

Drop family, drop status,
seek the nonexistent space,
destroy the shoot, destroy the seed,
reach the unembodied place.

Knowledge in front, knowledge in back,
knowledge right and left.
The knowledge beyond knowledge
is my knowledge.

Moving within limits: man.
Moving without limits: saint.
Dropping both limits and non-limits—
unfathomable thought.

In the wood where lions
don’t tread
and birds don’t fly,
Kabir ranges
in empty meditation.

Use the strength of your own arm,
stop putting hope in others.
When the river flows through your own yard,
how can you die of thirst?

They searched and searched, searched some more—
it just kept disappearing.
After all that search, when they couldn’t find it,
they gave up and said, “Beyond.”

God-man or Asshole? The guru conundrum.

Ever since I met her, I’m been trying to convince my wife that I’m God. It just seems so obvious: I understand Windows XP and can fix her computer when something goes wrong; back when we used a VCR, I could program it to do whatever we wanted; I know how to hang a picture so it is centered perfectly over a piece of furniture.

Yet my husbandly divinity remains unrecognized. For some reason Laurel focuses more on such things as: my inability to put the kitchen sponge in its holder, rather than on the bottom of the sink; my incapacity to fold t-shirts properly and place them neatly in their designated drawer; my reluctance, after cutting off a slice of bread, to reintroduce the whole wheat loaf back into the bag where it is supposed to stay fresher.

Guess I should start calling myself a guru. Then my human failings could be construed as signs of my godliness.

This is what I learned by reading the May 2006 issue of the Western U.S.A. Newsletter, published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB)—America. Every month the RSSB representative for the Western states, Vincent Savarese, writes an article about some aspect of this organization’s teachings.

The issue that just arrived in the mail speaks about the guru as God-man, someone who has merged with God and so has no imperfections. If you want to know God, supposedly you have to be accepted by a guru.

The saints tell us that we need to find and associate with someone who is perfect. We say God is perfect and is absolute reality. But we haven’t seen or met God. Can we see that Perfect Being without an intercessor? Unequivocally all saints and masters say we cannot. We need a teacher who has met God and merged with God, an enlightened being, a God-Man, a Sat Guru, or Perfect Master.

Isn’t that amazing? Walking around on Earth are perfect beings who are incarnations of God, just as Jesus and Krishna were considered to be.

Why is it, then, that the multitudes don’t fall at their feet and worship them? What explains the fact that, back in the early 1990s, my wife got to sit just a few feet away from a purported God-man (Gurinder Singh Dhillon) and came away from a lengthy meeting with him saying, “I didn’t feel anything special. He just seemed like a regular person to me”?

Savarese offers up the reason:

Saints and mystics tell us only the soul is perfect and so also the Perfect Master. The Perfect Master is perfect within at all times and can be perfect outside if he wishes, but he guards his perfection very carefully…What is confusing to many people is that Masters may act forgetful, show fatigue or annoyance, may mispronounce a written name or call a female a male or vice versa.

Ah! This is exactly what I’ve been telling my wife! My seeming imperfections are just a necessary disguise to cover my Godliness. Otherwise, I’d be spending all of my time fending off wanna-be disciples who would desire to give me their devotion, money, and, in the case of young attractive women, their bodies. (Hmmmm. Now that I think about it, why would I want to disguise myself?)

So it turns out that there is no way to judge whether a guru is merged with God. If the guru acts perfectly divine, this is proof that he is an enlightened being. If the guru acts imperfectly human, this is proof that, in Savarese’s words, “He chooses to play the role of an ordinary man much of the time.” Why? Because, “If he didn’t he would attract all manner of miracle seekers and not the truth seekers he was meant to meet.”

Pretty good gig. Perfection means godliness. Imperfection also means godliness. It’s akin to a band being able to play as many off-key tunes as they wanted, because the audience would believe them when they said “We mean our songs to sound that way; if you are our fans, love the way we play them, not how you want to hear them.” Savarese writes:

For the disciple of the perfect Master, for the gurmukh, for the servant of the King, there is one simple and urgent rule…obedience. Logic and self-preservation, self-importance, must be set aside. He will provide everything for the thoroughly obedient disciple.

But not, apparently, for the disobedient disciple. As someone else put it, “He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!” Santa Claus, guru, God: what’s the difference? They all reward obedience and punish independence.

The nagging problem, though, is that nasty old fly in the ointment: reality. If Santa Claus, guru, or God aren’t really what we believe them to be, what then? Does it make sense to keep believing in the absence of evidence? What makes children stop believing in Santa Claus? Is this a mark of increasing maturity or a disturbing loss of faith?

Which brings me to the question with which I began: is the guru a God-man or an Asshole? Perhaps these seem like harsh choices. Indeed, previously I’ve suggested another option, the guru as loyalist (adding to the three traditional “L” options of the Lord, a liar, or a lunatic).

However, upon further reflection I’m beginning to think that loyalist and liar belong together in the broader “Asshole” category. This reduces the choices to two: God-man or Asshole, assuming that lunatic doesn’t fit. I realize that this may offend those who consider that the guru is God.

But here’s why it shouldn’t: if the guru truly is God, notwithstanding the lack of evidence, he, like God, isn’t affected by anything I or anyone else says about him. Heck, the same is true even for ourselves, really. I get put down, insulted, and criticized all of the time by other people who comment on my weblog postings and send me emails. By and large, it washes off my back. With God, it wouldn’t even come close to his back.

On the other hand, if the guru really isn’t God, I don’t see how he deserves any other title than Asshole. What else should you call a man (or woman) who accepts the fervent devotion of his followers, who fails to dissuade those who consider him to be God incarnate, and who encourages absolute obedience to his dictates as the only means of spiritual realization—yet isn’t who he claims to be?

For many years, before I’d meditate in the morning I would carry on a one-sided conversation with the guru who initiated me: Charan Singh. “Good day, Master. How are you? Hope to see you soon, inside or outside, in the heavenly regions or when you come to visit us physically.” And so on.

I still talk to him. But in a different fashion now. “How’re you doing, Asshole? Don’t like that name? Well, either you’re God and am aware of me speaking to you, or you were a fake and aren’t aware of anything now that you’re dead. So, if you’re God, come and talk to me now that I’ve got your attention. If you’re not, then Asshole is the perfect name for a man who claimed to be a Perfect Master for almost forty years, but knew that he wasn’t.”

It’s a conundrum. I don’t know which is true: God-man or Asshole. All I know is that for me, seeing is believing. I’ll believe someone is God when I see unequivocal evidence of this (as to what that might be, all I can say is that I’ll know it when I see it). Until then, if you say you’re God, I’m going to use my alternative title for you.

Who is the guru?

I’ve been thinking about the four options concerning who Jesus was, according to biblical scholar Bart Ehrman: a liar, a lunatic, the Lord, or a legend. When it comes to a long-dead historical figure like Jesus, these options make sense. But what about a modern-day guru who is similarly proclaimed to be God in human form?

I was initiated by such a guru, Charan Singh Grewal. I sat at his feet, literally. I had two personal interviews with him. I heard him speak many times. I saw him worshipped by tens of thousands of devotees as a divine incarnation.

And yet, I still don’t know what to make of him. Or his successor, Gurinder Singh Dhillon. Who is the guru? A philosophically-inclined friend of mine likes to say, “There’s only one question to ask a guru who is supposedly God in human form: Are you who people claim you are?”

But given Ehrman’s four options, the answer wouldn’t be all that revealing. If the guru was a liar, you couldn’t believe what he said. Ditto if he was a lunatic. And even if he truly was the Lord, and said as much, what reason would there be to believe him? Plus, one could argue that a God-man would be so humble, you’d never hear a claim to divinity pass his lips.

With living gurus the legend option doesn’t come into play. They’re alive and kicking, not legendary. Quite a few men (and a few women) of recent vintage are considered by the faithful to be manifestations of God. For example, Meher Baba, Ramakrishna, and Lokenath.

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

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

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

Gurinder Singh is fond of saying, “How do you know that I’m not a fraud?” and “Maybe I just have the gift of gab.” Devotees consider statements like these to be Zen-like pointers toward his divinity. But who knows? Maybe he’s pointing toward his humanity without being able to explicitly speak of who he directly knows himself to be.

Faqir Chand (1886-1981) is noteworthy in that he was a guru who was worshipped as God in human form by his disciples, yet denied that he had the powers attributed to him. I’ve read some of Faqir Chand’s writings, which are available here. Yet I don’t claim to have a firm grasp of either the man or his spiritual philosophy.

From what I know, he believed that a guru was essential. Or at least highly desirable. Yet the guru wasn’t a miracle worker. Everything that the disciple needed for realization already was part of his self. In fact, it is the self. Better termed, the Self.

Thus inner visions of the guru aren’t the result of any external higher power. They are manifestations of the disciple’s own mind. All is within, but the disciple mistakenly locates his newfound insights as emanating from outside himself.

Faqir Chand apparently considered that loyalty to the truth was more important than loyalty to a guru-tradition. So he spoke bluntly about what he was, and what he wasn’t. In his autobiography, he writes about a talk with Sawan Singh, a guru who was a predecessor of Charan Singh and Gurinder Singh, after Faqir Chand had realized that his disciples were ascribing powers to him that he didn’t have:

But, still, I remained undecided about what I should do? Because I had a lurking fear in my mind that if I disclosed the Truth in plain words the narrow minded, orthodox and illiterate amongst the Satsangis [disciples], would turn against me. Thus in 1942 A.D. I got leave and went straight to Hazur Baba Sawan Singh Ji at Beas to explain my fears and difficulties in person. I had great reverence for Hazur Baba Sawan Singh Ji and I identified him with Hazur Data Dayal Ji Maharaj.

With utmost reverence I submitted to Baba Ji, “Your Holiness, Kindly relieve me from the duty assigned to me by my Guru Maharaj Ji. Pray, take this burden off my conscience, so that I may get released from the sin of disobedience to my Guru.” Hazur Maharaj placed his loving hand on my back and said, “Faqir, I could not disclose the truth in its totality, because of two reasons (i) Satsangis in general do not deserve it, (ii) I am bound by the institutional exigencies.”

“Institutional exigencies.” This supports the loyalist theory. The plain truth isn’t spoken because it would threaten tradition and an organizational heritage.

Faqir Chand boldly told it like it was. I only wish every guru would do the same.

(Courtesy of David Lane, here’s an interesting short video about Faqir Chand and how he first disclosed his “unknowing” status to disciples).

Rumi, love, and non-existence

It’s Valentine’s Day. Love is in the air. But at this moment my thoughts are on non-existence. Which, actually, isn’t far removed from love, according to Rumi. This 12th century Sufi mystic extols non-existence as the highest possible spiritual state, for it opens the door onto Oneness.

So since my previous two posts focused on the fear of not-existing after death (or before it), I decided to dig into Rumi for a much more positive perspective.

These quotes are from William Chittick’s wonderful book, “The Sufi Path of Love.” Chittick organizes Rumi’s outpouring of poetry and prose into clear thematic categories. He also offers his own summary of Rumi’s teachings on each subject.

I went through my phase of being Rumi-crazed before I evolved into my current churchless leaning. However, Rumi still speaks to me. Especially when he talks about non-existence.

What could be more churchless than this? In the non-existence of what we currently consider “existence” to be, there are no dogmas, no religions, no theologies, no gurus, no spiritual practices, no enlightenment, no salvation.

In short, no anything. Which leaves... Something? Nothing? That’s the big question. Here’s how Rumi approaches it:

Non-existence is an Ocean and the world foam. The Sea’s boiling brings the foam into existence. Iran and Turan are but two of its flecks. In this boiling, tell me, what is effort? Why do these patient men boast of their patience?

God has made nonexistence appear existent and respectable; He has made Existence appear in the guise of nonexistence. He has hidden the Sea and made the foam visible. He has concealed the Wind and shown you the dust.

The whole world has taken the wrong way, for they fear nonexistence, while it is their refuge.

The Absolute Being works in nonexistence—what but nonexistence is the workshop of the Maker of existence?

Return from existence to nonexistence! You are seeking the Lord and you belong to Him! Nonexistence is a place of income, flee it not! The existence of more and less is a place of expenditure. God’s workshop is nonexistence, so everything outside the workshop is worthless.

What do I know if I exist or not? But this much I do know, oh Beloved: When I exist I am nonexistent, and when I am nonexistent I exist!

Were your body’s existence to be naughted, then your soul would be exalted—after naughting is complete, you will be in but God’s Oneness.

For a lifetime you have made trial of your own existence. Once you must try out nonexistence!

The beloved said, “You have done all these things, but open your ears wide and listen well: You have not accomplished the root of the root of love and devotion—what you have done is the branches.” The lover said, “Tell me, what is that root.” She said, “To die and become nonexistent.”

Therefore be bewildered and distraught, nothing less, so that God’s help may come to you from before and behind. Once you have become bewildered, dizzy, and annihilated, then your spiritual state will say, “Lead us on the Straight Path!”

In this path, anything other than confusion and madness is distance and alienation from God.

Oh God, show to the spirit that station where speech grows up without words, so the pure spirit may fly toward the wide expanse of Nonexistence—an expanse exceedingly open and spacious, from which this imagination and existence find nourishment.

Images are narrower than Nonexistence—therefore imagination is the cause of heartache. Existence is still narrower than imagination—therefore within it full moons become crescents. The existence of the world of sense perception and colors is still narrower, for it is a cramped prison.

The cause of narrowness is composition and multiplicity, and the senses drag toward composition. Know that the World of Unity lies in the other direction from the senses. If you want Oneness, go in that direction!

The nothingness we fear is the everything we are

What do we fear the most? Losing our identity, a firm sense of who we are. And how does every deep mystic tradition describe the highest reality? As an entity with no characteristics that can be described, existing as it does outside of all limitations and boundaries.

This is one of the many enlightening observations that I’ve come across in Luther Askeland’s essay, “When the Word-Animal Discovers Signlessness: A Reflection on the Possibility of the Mystical,” which is available on Luther’s website.

I’ve been reading a few pages of this lengthy essay every morning before I meditate. The first two chapters hooked me, for it was here that Luther introduced the idea that the common feeling (for me at least) of “I’m clueless!” is a state of consciousness to be embraced, not feared. It’s called the Other Paradox.

The Other Paradox is the fact that the image we have of the best possible condition and the image we have of the worst possible condition are the same image. It is the fact that our perceptions of destiny’s contrary extremes—the most exalted perfection even a god might achieve, and the most wretched fate which might befall any being—are the same perception.

…It is the fact that we picture absolute perfection in the same way as we picture ruination and utter shipwreck. It is the fact—ironic in the “rational animal”—that we reverently, adoringly, longingly, contemplate in God or Brahman a condition which, regarded as a possibility for us, is the most dismal fate we can imagine, an appalling nothingness and oblivion from whose very prospect we spontaneously flee.

Great stuff. As I’ve observed before in other posts about Luther Askeland’s writings, he has a wonderful ability to delve another layer deeper in the world’s spiritual/mystical literature than I’m able to dig myself. I’ve read most of the material Luther references in this essay but haven’t been able to tie my insights together in such a fresh, creative fashion.

He’s absolutely right. God, or ultimate reality, never is considered to be something you can set on a pedestal, look at from every angle, lay bare all of its secrets, and describe down to a “T”.

It’s mystery. Unlimited. Unfathomable. Immeasurable. Inconceivable. It’s the endless spiritual ocean that stretches infinitely beyond the shores of the physical universe. It’s the impossibly vast sky that rises above the small hills and valleys of Earth.

And, says Askeland, as manifested within us it’s the fringes of our awareness—the barely sensed intuition of something more that hovers in the shadows just outside the clear light of the shared common reality where we live our everyday worldly existence. The paradox, then, is that what we’re trying to push away—doubt, mystery, uncertainty, wordlessness, incomprehension—is what leads us closer to the ultimate truth of the cosmos.

We long to be able to say who we are, but his very inability to say who he is is God’s omniscience…Each day we long for something new…but a god’s first response, each morning upon awakening, is infinite and joyful relief that nothing has changed, that it still is and knows “nothing.”

We struggle to escape the dark waters and formless mysteries of our origins; the infinite Brahman rests, marveling and content, in the dark waters and formless mysteries of its origins. We dress ourselves up in words so as to conceal from others and from ourselves the shame of our nothingness, but Shiva exults in his nudity, his non-containment by any name, his breakout from all limiting awareness of being “Shiva” or “God."

…The nothingness which devours us is, for God, the felicitous absence of anything which might retard or attenuate joy’s flow. The appalling abyss into which we fall is the unfathomable source and springhead of that delight’s eternal upwelling. The fringes, those wastes formed of desolation, despair, and madness, lie spread out before the Perfection of Wisdom as a holy and edgeless desert.

There she roams, free of all division and limit, and has happily lost track of all things, even herself.

I like Luther’s message: don’t worry if you feel like you’re the only one who doesn’t have it all figured out. Be assured that “it” isn’t so amenable to figuring. “It” can’t be contained in thoughts, images, theologies, or philosophies. Nor can “It” be encompassed in a holy book or person.

What Luther likes to call This is much more akin to unknowing, doubt, and chaos than to knowledge, faith, and order. When you have no idea about what it is, where it is, why it is, or how it is, this state of emptiness brings you face to face with it.

Don’t fear being a heretical, faithless, unchurched, confused blob of nothing. The mystics of every tradition say with one reassuring voice: “Now you’re getting somewhere! Nothingness is the straight road to everything.”

Kabir, a patron saint of spiritual independence

I love Kabir.

He was a fifteenth century North Indian poet and mystic who “preached an abrasive, sometimes shocking, always uncompromising message exhorting his audience to shed their delusions, pretensions, and empty orthodoxies in favor of an intense, direct, and personal confrontation with truth.”

That quote is from the back cover of Linda Hess’s masterful treatment of “The Bijak of Kabir.” There are many sides to Kabir. He’s impossible to pin down. Yet various religions and spiritual paths—such as Sikhism and Sant Mat—try to make him into one of their own.

A relentless critic of organized religion, Kabir would have laughed at their attempts to confine him within a dogmatic box. Hess shows us a Kabir who was wild, wooly, and utterly unafraid of priestly pretension. She writes:

While drawing on various traditions as he saw fit, Kabir emphatically declared his independence from both the major religions of his countrymen [Hinduism and Islam], vigorously attacked the follies of both, and tried to kindle the fire of a similar autonomy and courage in those who claimed to be his disciples. In a famous couplet he declares:

I’ve burned my own house down, the torch is in my hand. Now I’ll burn down the house of anyone who wants to follow me.

If Kabir insisted on anything, it was on the penetration of everything inessential, every layer of dishonesty and delusion. The individual must find the truth in his own body and mind, so simple, so direct, that the line between “him” and “it” disappears. One of the formulaic phrases in Kabir’s verses is ghata ghata me, in every body, in every vessel. The truth is close—closer than close. One form our foolish cleverness takes is our desperate, seemingly sincere searching outside ourselves. We try to find other people who have the secret, and then we try to understand them.

Boloji.com has a nice Kabir section. Here’s a translation of one of the poems attributed to Kabir. It’s described as “vintage Kabir mysticism.”

Neither am I righteous nor non-righteous
Neither am I an ascetic nor a sensualist
Neither do I speak nor do I listen
Neither am I a servant nor a master

Neither am I constrained nor liberated
Neither am I sad nor jubilant
Neither am I distinctly isolated from anything
Nor am I identified completely with anything

Neither do I go to the world of hell
Nor do I proceed to the world of heaven
All actions are really my actions
But yet I am distinct from the actions

This truth only a rare exceptional one realizes
Such a person sits in quiescence
Oh Kabir don't bring forth any creation
And don't efface anything either

The translator, Rajender Krishan, tries to answer the question “Why Kabir?” in a forthright personal statement of what Kabir means to him. And this essay by Maalok is a fine introduction to Kabir. Here’s an excerpt:

What distinguished Kabir from other “gurus” were his inner conviction and an undying trust in his own self and experience. He seems to have questioned and challenged all scriptural teachings, traditions and rituals, until he himself was able to validate their truth. This, however, should not be taken to imply that he rejected all teachings and practices. To the contrary, given his familiarity with, and his use of stories/teachings from, a variety of traditions, he appears to have openly embraced and accepted any path that could be validated by his own experience. Perhaps, this is why it is so difficult to typecast Kabir into this or that faith or tradition. Sometimes, he was this, sometimes he was that and at other times he was neither this nor that!

Mystery is omnipresent

I’ve been pondering what I wrote about in my last post—that I’ve never had any mystical experiences. It’s true in one sense and completely false in another sense. For everything is mysterious. Hence, mystical.

Luther Askeland, author of the marvelous book “Ways in Mystery,” helped remind me of this. I’ve been re-reading several of his essays the past few days. “The Way of Unknowing” is a classic. Also “The God in the Moment.”

Heck, his entire book is a classic, one of my all-time favorites. Luther and I have traversed the same territory in our mystical/spiritual readings: Buddhism in general, Zen in particular, St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, other Christian mystics, a host of others.

But every time I read “Ways in Mystery”—and it’s been several times—I’m blown away by how Luther peels the onion skin of truth-seeking a level (or two) deeper than I’m able or willing to go myself.

He is utterly dedicated to the pursuit of what lies beyond appearances: mystery. He isn’t content with anything but the real deal, whatever it is. He has played all the spiritual games that I’ve played, yet is able to stand apart from the playing field and analyze the action in a fashion that I’m incapable of.

And yet…we’re brothers. As are we all. Brothers and sisters, in mystery. We pretend to ourselves that we know what’s going on, but we haven’t a clue. Not really. We form religions, philosophies, and sciences that purport to answer the big questions about existence, but they don’t. Not even close.

Where did the universe come from? What will be its end? Is there anything other than the four-dimensional world of time and space that we know now? Does eternity lie on the other side of time, boundlessness on the other side of space? To name but a few questions.

Luther points out that such ultimate queries are the province of the mystic. Scientists and rational philosophers correctly say that those questions can’t be answered with the mental and sensual tools available to us So they turn their attention to more practical investigations.

Alternatively, the average person is preoccupied with living life: raising a family, holding onto a job, pursuing hobbies, keeping fit, watching TV. If he or she considers ultimate questions at all, it is almost always in the context of a religion that provides ready-made answers.

And then, says Luther, there is the mystic:

The mystic is someone who recognizes that the central fact or datum—the existence of the world, of God, or of God and world—transcends our intellect. By way of asking why the world exists, the mystic has discovered that we are part of a reality that our intellect cannot grasp or even properly question. The world has revealed itself to be mystery, or God has been revealed as mystery. Hereafter the mystic’s attention will remain fixed on that mystery.

How one’s attention is fixed on mystery is the big question. Basically it comes down to unknowing, the negative way, via negativa. Luther takes eighty-one thoughtful pages to explore the way of unknowing. It’s hard to do justice to this subject in a few paragraphs. But here’s the kernel, in my own words:

Become the mystery you seek to unravel.

That’s a mysterious statement. I don’t claim to understand it myself. Which is as it should be.

Mystery isn’t something to be understood. It is to be bumped up against, felt, recognized, appreciated, grokked, respected, admired, embraced. Not as something separate and distinct from my own self, but as myself. For just as the “why” of the universe as a whole is mystery pure and simple, so is the “why” of me. And, of course, you.

We like to pretend that, while pondering the dizzying mysteries of the universe, we’re doing so from the solid foundation of a self that makes sense. Yet, in truth the mystery of us is as unfathomable as the mystery of the cosmos. Luther says:

And as my habitual explanations melt away, I begin to see that my acts and my life are not safely enclosed within a sheltering context of explanation and justification. Instead it begins to seem that each of my acts, that my life, is an event that is indescribable, inexplicable and unjustifiable, an act that is just given.

I wrote in Part I that the intellect, having asked, “Why does the world exist?” eventually runs up against the irreducible and impenetrable fact of being. Now, having arrived at the end of our fragile and invariably questionable self-explanations, the intellect finally halts before the inexplicable and irreducible fact of “my life,” and before the impenetrable givenness of each act.

Those are just words. And Luther would be the first to agree that words are just words, not reality. Yet words can point to reality. And to the mystery that lies on the other side of words.

At this moment. At every moment. In this act. In every act. When I’m awake and aware. When I’m asleep and unconscious. Everywhere, all the time: mystery, mystery, mystery.

So I’ve had innumerable mystical experiences, as many as I’ve had experiences of any sort during my fifty-seven years of living. Because mystery is me.

There’s no need to cultivate a sense of the miraculous. All we have to do is open our eyes and see. Every moment is a mystery. The problem with religions and philosophies is that they cover up the miraculous with words, dogmas, theologies, concepts, rituals, beliefs, commandments—all sorts of stuff.

True spirituality is nothing but clearing away all that junk. What’s left is, well, nothing. You can’t pass through the eye of the Mystery Needle until it is free of obstructions.

Which means, you have to be as empty as emptiness, becoming the mystery you seek to unravel. The vacant eye of the needle is threaded with nothing—a subject for another post.

Plotinus: Vision

For more than eight years I’ve been a close friend of a long-dead Greek philosopher, Plotinus. Obviously I haven’t sat down and talked with him directly, but I feel like I have, so intensely and intimately have I studied his teachings in the course of writing a book: “Return to the One: Plotinus’s Guide to God-Realization.”

Plotinus is the last of five mystics that I’ve been writing about. Each is a worthy “patron saint” for the churchless, and each exhibits a special quality that I try to describe in a single word. For Plotinus it is vision.

I’ve read countless religious, philosophical, metaphysical, and mystical books. My bookshelves are full of attempts to make sense of the vast cosmos. Most writers don’t come close. They present compelling (or, not so compelling) descriptions of some particular aspect of the big picture, while ignoring what falls outside of their particular purviews.

What I love about Plotinus is that he doesn’t leave anything important out of his mystic philosophy. His focus is on the One, what many call “God,” the unity that underlies everything else. By definition, a thought of the One draws our attention to everything rather than this thing or that thing. Plotinus urges us to ponder what lies beyond the time and space with which we are familiar now.

This can be nothing less than really real reality. In “The Elegant Universe,” physicist Brian Greene describes cutting-edge research into string theory and the origins of our universe. Strings, amazingly small one-dimensional bits of vibrating energy, are theorized to be the rock-bottom foundation of physical reality.

But what does that foundation rest on? What is the resting place of strings before they produce a home for material entities, and themselves, to live in? Greene writes (p. 378):

“In the raw state, before the strings that make up the cosmic fabric engage in the orderly, coherent vibrational dance we are discussing, there is no realization of space or time….Imagining such a structureless, primal state of existence, one in which there is no notion of space or time as we know it, pushes most people’s powers of comprehension to the limit (it certainly pushes mine)….We run up against a clash of paradigms when we try to envision a universe that is, but that somehow does not invoke the concepts of space or time.”

About seventeen hundred years ago Plotinus presented just such a vision in his “Enneads.” He and his philosophical forebear, Plato, foreshadowed modern physics in conceiving of an unchanging spiritual realm that is the source of the material universe. This world, the World of Forms, is the immaterial original and our world is the physical reflection. Plotinus says, “All that is here below comes from there, and exists in greater beauty there. For here it is adulterated [by matter], but there it is pure.”

Plotinus’s vision of reality is wonderfully scientific. It isn’t founded on a personal God but on the universal consciousness of the One and spirit, termed “Nous” in Greek. Nous contains the Forms that comprise the blueprint of our reality. Even more, Nous or Spirit is those Forms.

Creation is seen as a continuous cascading flow of conscious energy. From the Source (the One) emanates Spirit (Nous); and from Spirit emanates Soul, which includes the particularized bits of consciousness that we know so well as “me,” “you,” and every other living thing. There are no gaps in Plotinus’s grand conception of the cosmos. All fits together in a compelling rational schema that I am barely hinting at (if you want the full philosophical meal deal, buy my book—I note that “Return to the One” is now selling at a nice discount on Amazon).

I could go on and on about Plotinus’s mystic teachings, but I’ve already done that to the tune of 338 pages. So I’ll content myself with sharing a few of my favorite Plotinus quotations. In these passages he cuts to the core of how to know the One, or God.

The One isn’t something separate from ourselves, for it is, obviously, One. If there was anything else in existence then we’d have the One and that other entity, which would make at least two. Science and mysticism each have a decided fondness for simplicity and unity. One it is, then. And we are part of it. More simply, we are it.

Plotinus advises: If you seek to know God, the most direct approach is to know the seeker.

I’ll end with a paragraph from my book that I wrote, followed by two wonderful quotations from Plotinus. There isn’t anything more than this to spirituality, when you eliminate everything that isn’t essential. Namely, not One.

“Plotinus tells us that the means by which we now know the creation must become the end that we seek. Like a snake that swallows its own tail, the sage turns his attention back upon the consciousness that usually attends to outer things and thoughts. Uniting within himself the knower and the known, the One is revealed as the ground of the sage’s own self.”

We must believe that we have seen him [the One] when, suddenly, the soul is filled with light, for this light comes from him and is identical with him….This is the real goal for the soul: to touch and behold this light itself, by means of itself. She does not wish to see it by means of some other light; what she wants to see is that light by means of which she is able to see. What she must behold is precisely that by which she was illuminated …..How, then, could this come about? Eliminate everything [that is not light]!

For this reason the vision is hard to put into words. For how could one announce that as another when he did not see, there where he had the vision, another, but one with himself?

The Cloud of Unknowing: Devotion

“The Cloud of Unknowing,” written in the fourteenth century by an anonymous English Christian, is the fourth of my Five Books to Support the Churchless that I’ve been writing about. I’m trying to sum up the essence of each book in a single word. For “The Cloud of Unknowing” it is devotion.

But this is a devotion utterly unlike that practiced by most Christians, and also unlike that practiced by almost everyone of any faith. For the author, whom I’ll call Anonymous, espouses an apophatic spirituality. As this web site explains, “apophasis” is a Greek word that means “without images.”

So in the course of providing advice about how to pursue a contemplative life, Anonymous relentlessly demolishes the usual notion that devotion to God consists of thinking about the scriptures, feeling love for Jesus, doing good works, or any of the usual outward manifestations of religiosity.

Engaging in these things is fine, he says, but they are decidedly lower forms of devotion: “There are two ways of life in Holy Church. One is the active, the other is the contemplative life. Active is the lower, contemplative the higher.” But what should be contemplated? I can contemplate my wife because she is right in front of me. I can’t contemplate God because he/she/it is nowhere to be seen. Or heard, touched, smelled, tasted.

Yet according to Anonymous I’ve just answered my own question. If God is nowhere to be seen, then nowhere is exactly the place where I have to go to practice my devotion. The passage below conveys the core of what “The Cloud of Unknowing” prescribes to Christians and, really, everyone who aspires to know what lies beyond appearances:

‘Well,’ you will say, ‘where are I am to be? Nowhere, according to you!’ And you will be quite right! ‘Nowhere’ is where I want you! Why, when you are ‘nowhere’ physically, you are ‘everywhere’ spiritually. Make it your business then to see that your spirit is tied to nothing physical, and you will find that wherever that thing is that you are giving your mind to, there you are too in spirit, just as surely as your body is where you are bodily!

And though your natural mind can now find ‘nothing’ to feed on, for it thinks you are doing no thing, go on doing this no thing, and do it for the love of God….Let go this ‘everywhere’ and this ‘everything’ in exchange for this ‘nowhere’ and this ‘nothing’….One can feel this nothing more easily than see it, for it is completely dark to those who have just begun to look at it.

Unfortunately, based on my thirty-five years of daily meditation and countless conversations with other students of contemplation, I can say that it also is completely dark to those who have been looking at the nowhere and nothing for a long time. Anonymous advises, though, that there is no better way to God than staying still and silent in the cloud of unknowing that stands between us and ultimate truth.

All this might sound rather abstract, but it isn’t. Close your eyes and there you are, staring straight into the dark cloud that Anonymous speaks of. How big is that space that each of us enters when we aren’t paying attention to the physical world? A first impression places it within our head, yet when you take a look around you can’t discern any boundaries to the blackness that extends in all directions.

Perhaps it is just the backside of my eyelids that I am looking at. Even so, the question then arises, “What is the true nature of the being who is doing the looking?” Whatever it is, says Anonymous, it isn’t anything physical: “You know well that God is a spirit, and that whoever would be made one with him must be in truth and in depth of spirit far removed from any misleading bodily thing.”

So this is why a cloud of forgetting has to be placed between the contemplator and everything physical, which means all of creation. For Anonymous reminds us that the Creator isn’t what has been created. When our devotion is directed toward a material thing or a mental thought, this is idolatry. It doesn’t matter if the thing is a holy icon or the thought a holy prayer: these obvious objects are far distant from the Mystery of God.

We are apt to think that we are very far from God because of this cloud of unknowing between us and him, but surely it would be more correct to say that we are much farther from him if there is no cloud of forgetting between us and the whole created world. Whenever I say “the whole created world” I always mean not only the individual creatures therein, but everything connected with them.

…Indeed, if we may so reverently, when we are engaged on this work it profits little or nothing to think even of God’s kindness or worth, or of our Lady, or of the saints and angels, or of the joys of heaven, if you think thereby by such meditation to strengthen your purpose. In this particular matter it will not help at all.

Then what will help? The work Anonymous speaks of is entering into the cloud of unknowing, for he just told us that God is farther away when we are aware either of perceptions of the created world or of our thoughts that are connected to some material entity. And this includes every thought, for since we have no experience of God’s immateriality, even supposedly divine thoughts are tied to our thoroughly anthropomorphic guesses about what God is like.

What Anonymous wants us to do is become, as nearly as possible, pure being, existence itself. This contemplative work is a striving not to be anything physical or personal, but simply to be: “For if you think about anything in particular except your own bare, blind existence—and this, remember, is God’s purpose and your own—then you are on the wrong track; you are back again at your speculating and guessing; and this distracts and separates you not only from God but from yourself as well.”

The highest form of Christian devotion, then, is expressed through a mantra, just as in Eastern traditions. A single word is to be repeated over and over again. If our attention is fully on this word, and our eyes are closed to the world, we will be able to enter the cloud of unknowing after putting the cloud of forgetting between us and everything we know now. It doesn’t really matter what this word is, says Anonymous. He simply advises that the shorter it is the better, “being more like the working of the Spirit.”

It could be a word like “God” or “love.” The choice doesn’t matter much, so long as it is one syllable (though Anonymous favors “God”). It would be best to have nothing at all standing between our consciousness and God, but if there is to be anything, it should be as small as possible: a single syllable.

What we have here in “The Cloud of Unknowing” is a pure Christian mystical practice that is virtually identical to Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim mystic practices. The ridiculous theological squabblings between adherents of different faiths disappear when the thoughts that produce all that dissention are stilled.

Call it centering prayer; call it mantra meditation. The practice is the same, and it brings mystics together under the sheltering tent of wordless reality. Well, there is still at least one word or sound, but that too fades away when the contemplator pierces through the cloud of unknowing and reaches the clear sky that contains no objects, no differences, no separateness.

One word. One practice. One truth. What could be simpler?

Fix this word fast to your heart, so that it is always there come what may. It will be your shield and spear in peace and war alike. With this word you will hammer the cloud and the darkness above you. With this word you will suppress all thought under the cloud of forgetting.

So much so that if you are tempted to think what it is you are seeking, this one word will be sufficient answer. And if you would go on to think learnedly about the significance and analysis of that same word, tell yourself that you will have it whole, and not in bits and pieces. If you hold fast, that thought will surely go.

I’ve read “The Cloud of Unknowing” so many times, on many pages the passages that I haven’t highlighted stand out from a mass of yellow or green emphasis. This is one of the best guides for meditation, and it likely was written by an English country parson—not an Indian yogi or Sufi sheikh.

I wish that all Christians could become as well acquainted as I am with their own mystic heritage, which extends far beyond “The Cloud of Unknowing.” Most Christians have little or no understanding of what great teachers in their own tradition—Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, Pseudo-Dionysus, Nicholas of Cusa, the “desert fathers,” and others—have taught: true devotion to God is expressed by stillness and silence.

One word. That’s all you need to know the One. A church isn't required to practice this devotion. You are your own church, and you can hold your own one-word service within your consciousness whenever you want.

[All of the excerpts in this post are from “The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works,” translated into modern English by Clifton Wolters, Penguin Books.]