Church of the Churchless

“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.]

Ramana: Simplicity

Ockham’s razor is a rule in science and philosophy that the simplest explanation is the best. Extending this principle to religion and spirituality, Ramana, a twentieth-century Indian mystic, shines.

Only recently did I began reading Ramana seriously. I wish I had done so earlier. I’d always thought that the Vedanta teachings which form the core of Ramana’s message were intellectual and complex. They can be, if a complex intellectual tries to communicate Vedanta.

But when the teachings are described by Ramana in the lively question and answer format of “Talks with Ramana Maharshi,” the highest form of Vedanta is revealed as marvelously simple and practical. This is Advaita, literally “not two.”

What could be simpler than one?

Advaita finds unity at the core of the cosmos. So does science. Or, at least this is what science expects to find. The quest of physicists is for the theory of everything that is the root explanation of the universe, not for the theories of everything.

Ramana’s teachings thus have an appealing scientific flavor. This is in contrast to most other spiritual paths and every religion, which expect you to believe in things that defy rational explanation or direct experience. Why? Because any faith founded on dualism necessarily posits a gap between the believer and what is believed.

If I believe in God, there obviously are two entities involved here: “I” and “God.” Given this situation, confirming my belief gets complex. Somehow I have to narrow the divide between me and divinity so what now is just a subjective idea or emotion for me becomes an undeniable objective fact.

So spiritual systems generally proscribe dogmas and theologies that amount to marching orders. Do this, don’t do that; follow this course, not that one. If the believer follows directions and treads the spiritual path in the correct manner, then the promise is that he or she someday will arrive at God’s doorstep (taking “God” to mean ultimate reality, not necessarily a personal being).

The more steps you’re asked to take, the more potential missteps there are. This is why I’m much attracted to Ramana’s simplicity. He says that all of Vedanta can be summed up in two Biblical passages: “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14) and “Be still, and know that I am God!” (Psalms 46:10).

Eckhart: Detachment

Today the birth of God’s son is celebrated. Most people think this child of the Father is Jesus. Meister Eckhart, the medieval Catholic mystic theologian, suggests another possibility: it is each of us.

I find this idea much more palatable and convincing than the traditional notion that Jesus somehow was born miraculously by a virgin woman so that he could die for our sins. Eckhart considers that “virgin” really means “someone who is free of all alien images, as free in fact as that person was before he or she existed.”

This conception points us toward a state of consciousness that everyone can achieve, not just Jesus. There are many problems with modern Christianity. One of the worst is its emphasis on stories of the past rather than transformations of the present.

As we note frequently here at the Church of the Churchless, most Christians feel that if they merely believe in the divinity of Christ, that’s enough: believe and you’re saved. The exact mechanism by which salvation takes place is a mystery. How could the death on a cross of someone over two thousand years ago alter the course of someone’s life (and afterlife) now? What connection is there between the soul of Jesus and the soul of you or me?

Eckhart asks “Where is he who is born King of the Jews?” He answers, “This birth takes place in the soul just as it takes place in eternity, no more and no less. For there is only one birth, and this takes place in the essence and ground of the soul.”

So the virgin birth of God’s son didn’t only happen to Mary in the manger. This is just a metaphor and not to be taken as a historical fact. A recent article in Newsweek, “The Birth of Jesus,” points out that the four gospels don’t tell a common story about Jesus’ birth. How could they? There is no real evidence that Jesus ever spoke of how and where he was born, and neither Mary nor Joseph is cited as a direct source. A court of law would say that the whole Christmas story is hearsay and not to be trusted.

Vivekananda: Strength

In my “Five Books to Support the Churchless” post, I said I’d share what I like most about the teachings of Vivekananda, Ramana, Eckhart, Plotinus, and the anonymous author of “The Cloud of Unknowing.” Each points toward the same spiritual goal, unity with the ultimate reality of God. Yet I find that each emphasizes a different quality needed to become one with the One.

For Vivekananda the quality is strength. In his presentation of the ancient, yet still new, Vedanta philosophy he continually urges us to realize that there is nothing to fear. Only in duality can fear exist. I am only afraid of things that are not me, whether they be immaterial or physical. An attacker who tries to steal my wallet isn’t me. A cancer that upsets my body’s health isn’t me. An obsessive thought that won’t leave my mind isn’t me.

Or so I believe. Maybe, says Vivekananda, all these things really are me. For if the cosmos truly is one, not many, then there is no “other” to fear. This is the highest teaching of Vedanta, unqualified monism.

A dualistic religious perspective that sees God as separate both from nature and the human soul has to grapple with the problem of evil. “How,” Vivekananda asks, “is it possible that under the rule of a just and merciful God, the repository of an infinite number of good qualities, there can be so many evils in this word?”

The Hindus, he answers, never put the blame on God or on a separate Satan. Instead, they hold the eminently scientific view that effects spring from causes in a never-ending chain. Vivekananda says, “Therefore no other person is needed to shape the destiny of mankind but man himself….’We reap what we sow.’”

So here is one source of strength, the fact that each of us creates our own destiny. If we don’t like the circumstances in which we find ourselves, we can do something about it. Fresh causes will led to fresh effects. It isn’t necessary to passively wait for God to save us from our suffering, for our own actions have created both our joys and our despairs. What we have created, we can change.

But Vedanta goes farther than this dualistic idea that the entity known as “me” can cause effects in “not-me” that will then alter my condition (for example, if I am nice to people they will be nicer to me, thereby making me happier).

Vivekananda says, “The real Vedanta philosophy begins with those known as qualified non-dualists. They make the statement that the effect is never different from the cause; the effect is but the cause reproduced in another form. If the universe is the effect and God the cause, it must be God Himself; it cannot be anything but that.”

This means that the universe is the body of God, just as the flesh and bones writing or reading these words is the body of me or you. As the soul is considered to be immanent in the human body, so is God immanent in the body of the entire universe. Bodies come and go, whether they be individual forms or entire universes (the Big Bang may culminate in a Big Crunch), while souls and God remain unchanged forever.

So this qualified non-dualist philosophy encourages even greater strength in you and me. At heart we are not weak, isolated, limited beings who are born, live for a brief spell, and then die. We have the capacity to realize our oneness with the All—God. Vivekananda says, “There is not a particle, not an atom in the universe, where He is not. Again, souls are all limited; they are not omnipresent. When their powers become expanded and they become perfect, there is no more birth and death for them; they live with God for ever.”

Yet Vedanta urges that even this exalted conception of the soul be expanded. This is non-dualistic Vedanta or Advaita, “not two.” Namely, one. According to Vivekananda this is where human thought finds its highest expression. “It is too abstruse, too elevated,” he says, “to be the religion of the masses…It is difficult for even the most intelligent man or woman in any country to understand Advaita—we have made ourselves so weak; we have made ourselves so low.”

According to Advaita the truth is that there aren’t many souls in the universe. There is only a single soul: the Self. From one perspective this is God, Brahman. From another perspective it is an individual soul, Atman. Regardless, there is no difference between God and the soul, Brahman and Atman. All is One.

Vivekananda says, “The whole of this universe is one Unity, one Existence—physically, mentally, morally, and spiritually. We are looking upon this one Existence in different ways and creating all these images upon it.”

Who then should we worship? A God far off in the heavens? No. A savior sent by God to redeem us? No. A natural world separate from ourselves? No. A book, icon, holy relic, place of pilgrimage, or other sacred object? No. Advaita Vedanta teaches that the only entity worthy of our worship is wonderfully close at hand:

Our own Self.

I’ll let Vivekanada explain this bold assertion in his own words. As you read them, feel the strength within you. I love how he reminds us that we have been beaten down for so long by religions that weaken us, we have lost touch with the power of the soul that is our birthright. And also our deathright. That power can’t be taken away from us, even though most of us have voluntarily surrendered it.

Take it back. Become spiritually independent. Let the energy of the cosmos flow through you, for it is you.

[All of the excerpts in this post are from “The Atman,” a talk delivered by Vivekananda in Brooklyn, February 2, 1896]

Five books to support the churchless

Come December all kinds of “Best Whatever” lists pop up. Best Movies, Best Albums, Best TV Shows, and many more. Maybe that’s why I feel the spirit to list my favorite five books to support the churchless, those who are spiritual but don’t belong to an organized religion that has its own pre-selected holy writings.

These are books that I read and then re-read. These are books that I could read a thousand times and still feel like I am reading them for the first time. Why? Because I’ll never plumb the depths of their mystical-spiritual messages.

Or perhaps I should say, “message.” For even though I have two books about Christian spirituality, two books about Indian (Vedanta/Advaita) spirituality, and one book about Greek (Neo-Platonic) spirituality, the essential message of each is surprisingly similar: Truth is within, not without. To know the One that many call “God,” make your consciousness single and simple. The spiritual being you want to become, you already are.

Here are my choices for Best Books to Support the Churchless:

Meister Eckhart: Selected Writings
Return to the One: Plotinus’s Guide to God-Realization
Talks With Ramana Maharshi: On Realizing Abiding Truth and Happiness
The Cloud of Unknowing: And Other Works
Vivekananda: The Yogas and Other Works

I must point out that “Return to the One” was written by me, which arguably should have disqualified it from consideration if this list is to have a glimmer of objective credibility. However, I have some reasonable reasons for including it.

Plotinus is a great philosopher and mystic, but not a clear writer, by and large. So few people can read his writings (the “Enneads”) directly and make much sense of them. And there are very few other popular books about Plotinus’s teachings. In fact, that’s why I felt impelled to write “Return to the One.” Nobody else had written the sort of book about Plotinus that I wanted to read.

Plus, I believe that one of the books a churchless person relies upon to keep his or her faithless faith on track should be the person's own book. Now, this doesn’t mean a published book or even a carefully written unpublished book. It could be a journal, a collection of scribbled notes, a diary, a weblog, even a single post-it note. What matters is that the “book” reflect what the person really believes about spirituality, not what someone else has told him or her to believe.

Here’s a nice quote from Vivekananda along these lines:

“Do something. Think some thought; it doesn’t matter if you are right or wrong. But think something. Because my forefathers did not think this way, shall I sit down quietly and gradually lose my sense of feeling and my own thinking faculty? I may as well be dead. And what is life worth if we have no living ideas, no convictions of our own, about religion? There is some hope for the atheists, because though they differ from others, they think for themselves.

The people who never think anything for themselves are not yet born into the world of religion; they have a mere jelly-fish existence. They will not think; they do not care for religion. But the disbeliever, the atheist, cares and he is struggling. So think something. Struggle Godwards. Never mind if you fail, never mind if you get hold of a queer theory. If you are afraid to be called queer, keep it in your own mind; you need not go out and preach it to others.

But do something. Struggle Godwards. Light must come. If a man feeds me every day of my life, in the long run I will lose the use of my hands. Spiritual death is the result of following others as in a flock of sheep.”

This sentiment is just one reason I love to read Vivekananda. There are many other reasons, some of which I’ll share in another posting. In fact, before the month is out I’ll share what I like most about each of my five Best Spiritual Book choices.

If you have some favorite books of your own that you think belong on the Church of the Churchless recommended reading list, please share them.