Church of the Churchless

Dibloggenes explains the universe in a mere 1,070 words

Here's the second comment from Dibloggenes that I've elevated to the profound status of a Church of the Churchless blog post. (I can hear the typing of Dibloggenes as he redoes his resume to include this newfound honor; the first elevated blog post is here.)

I admire any and all attempts to explain the universe, especially when they clock in at a sparse 1,070 words. The Bible, Newton's Principia, and Darwin's Origin of Species are all much longer. And, without the occasional bursts of humor that make Dibloggenes' treatise more sparkly than it would otherwise be.

One reason I like what follows is that it mentions the One so often. If your interest in the One is stimulated by Dibloggenes, clearly your best move is to buy my book, "Return to the One: Plotinus's Guide to God-Realization." I can't guarantee that the One will be pleased with this, but I sure will be.

Enjoy...

And now, as previously threatened: The Universe Explained for Dummies. These are my own conclusions to date, subject to revision at any time. They have been abbreviated to allow the reader less of a commitment to follow along. I have placed these under four topic headings to make it easier to dismiss large chunks of my thinking at one fell swoop.

THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM
1) In a universe that requires material (or attenuated material) bodies to manifest the limitless creative urge of the One, by necessity this involves conflict, i.e., the introduction of the no longer unitary awareness. This is a concomitant of the polarities we see everywhere, and that have been philosophized about for 3000 years, give or take.

2) We are steeped in the appearance of “individuation.” This is prior to individuality, which is a showing forth of those tendencies we associate with personality. Individuation is simply the atomizing of everyone and everything into constituent parts. Our senses report at a level in normal consciousness that what we perceive is real, but actually it is an abstraction. If we could see at the energetic level ( more than a few claim this ability) we would understand foreground and background, player and play are really all just one.

3) Human beings have truly made God in man’s own image. Believers are so wedded to the idea of a personal God that they are horrified at the suggestion this may not be true. Test it yourself: you’ll find folks are more gracious to quiet atheism than they are to a quiet belief in an impersonal deity. And what is that, but no more than the One, the unitary consciousness, that which precedes any individuation at any level, conceivable or not.

FROM THAT FLOWS
A personal God is a god...

1) Who is free to pick winners and losers; 2) to have chosen people and nations as His main squeeze; 3) to appeal to as if He were deaf and dumb to our needs; 4) who will remain forever an enigma to us as the problem of the origin of evil is one that monotheism never has been able to satisfactorily scrape from the bottom of its shoe.

Instead, think Universal/Unchangeable/Immutable Law. This Law subsumes all lesser laws, known and unknown, on all levels of manifested existence. Magic is the conscious or unconscious understanding and application of the Law, either in white (selfless) or black (selfish) flavors. The vast majority of humankind practice gray magic throughout their life, alternating between white and black as their lower faculties buffet them.

The One IS the Law; the One is A collective dynamic, for lack of a better term, that is inexorable in its workings. All justice, all mercy, all vengeance, all indifference are contained within it in exquisite balance. Appealing to It is pointless, as it already has done the math and set in motion the sequence of events most conducive to the ends of the One. When miracles happen after prayers are made, it is because the faithful harnessed the Law, albeit without their knowing it.

WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF EARTH LIFE?
Assuming there IS a purpose, I propose it is the conscious re-integration of the faux individual personality into a unfettered experience of unity with the One, an oceanic immersion that overwhelms our sense of isolated individuality. Sound familiar? Sure it does; it’s been preached by esoteric schools and natural mystics for thousands of years. It also dovetails nicely with the idea if we are looking for the anchor that keeps us in the world’s harbor, look to individuation. Examine it, turn it to and fro and really understand what it is...and what it is not.

Our individuality, from life to life, seems to be as substantial as leaves, twigs and grass that are swirled together in a stream by the various eddies and vortexes. This flotsam comes together due to obeying certain laws of fluid dynamics, but there is no substantial reality to this observed instance. It may drift downstream, or break up before our eyes.

Was it real? Yes. What was the purpose? None we may discern. What happened to the wreckage when it dissolved? Went their separate ways, perhaps to reunite, perhaps never to be in contact again. Why would we care if “we” don’t continue since the vast majority of humanity have no recollection of anything more than early childhood. The cases of seeming recall of a previous life is more interesting as it brings into focus the question, “What is doing the remembering here?”

TORA! TORA! TORA! DERA! DERA! DERA!
How do the above conclusions pertain to the value of participating in Sant Mat, and RSS Beas flavor? I believe the Audible Lifestream is an authentic account of how humans may experience a direct connection with the Law, that foundation and organizing principle of all creation.

For anyone who cares to spend the time assaying the world’s esoteric literature and reports of mystics, it appears to me to be a foregone conclusion that concept is a more or less accurate representation of a phenomenon foreign to all but a relative few.

However, for those few, I do not doubt the authenticity of that experience. In fact, how we choose to engage with this Word—when once we are made aware of it—is the crux of the question of participation in the most important activity we will ever undertake in this life.

Do we need a guru to connect us to it? Some gurus say yes, some gurus say no. What is the appropriate response if we believe our Contact may not be of the caliber we assumed was required? The truth is, each one of us by necessity must own our beliefs. Who calls us, who is worthy, what sect or branch do we trust, why am I feeling shaky on this path?

We can’t escape the need to erect a superstructure of beliefs, whether they originate within ourselves, are influenced by the thinking of others, or blindly follow someone who claims insights that we don’t possess. Those who claim no religious beliefs have expressed their own beliefs. This is an unavoidable and inevitable outcome. The question is, what will be our response to it?

If you’ve read this far, please use the code VISINE 2022 upon checkout to help with the eyestrain you are probably experiencing. Have a great Sunday!

I'm re-reading the book I wrote about Plotinus with a fresh eye

Recently I started re-reading the book I wrote about Plotinus' teachings, Return to the One, because someone had told me they'd ordered it, and I wanted to see if I still agreed with what I said about this Neoplatonist Greek mystic philosopher.

After all, I hadn't taken a look at the book for several years. It brings in a modest amount of Amazon royalties each month, but when I'm occasionally asked about the book, my typical response is along the line of "I still agree with much of it, but my views have changed quite a bit since I wrote it."

So the game I've been playing with myself these past few days is to find what still resonates with me in Return to the One. 

One rule of that game is this: taking the advice I offered to readers in the "Preliminaries" section of the book, I'm trying to take a Big Picture view of Plotinus and what I wrote about his teachings, rather than a literal view where every word means just what it says and nothing more.

Be more concerned with grasping the broad outlines of Plotinus's philosophy than the specifics. It is better to comprehend the treatises in the Enneads as a whole, in an almost intuitive fashion, than to try to assemble a logical understanding bit by bit.

Having finished re-reading that Preliminaries section, I was struck by some passages relating to the self, a subject I'm fascinated by, because I'm convinced that neither I nor anyone else has an enduring self or soul, in line with Buddhism and modern neuroscience.

Plotinus said this, according to his student Porphyry, quoting from my book.

In like fashion, we're told that Plotinus refused a request made by one of his students to have a portrait made of him, explaining: "Isn't it enough that I have to bear this image with which Nature has covered us? Must I also consent to leaving behind me an image of that image -- this one even longer-lasting -- as if it were an image of something worth seeing?"

Thus Plotinus viewed his genuine being as something other than his physical form. This wasn't a self, though. Here's how I put it.

The primary goal of the mystic philosopher, as Plotinus teaches in the Enneads, is to bring the movable center of his or her consciousness into alignment with the unmoving center of existence, the One. A person's illusory and shifting sense of individuality thus must be distinguished from a true sense of self. If one traces his or her I-ness back to its source, as one would trace a line (or radius) back to the center of the circle from which it emanates, then the core of one's self will be found to be identical with the core of everything.

That's a nondual sort of philosophy, which makes sense, since Plotinus viewed the One as the essence of existence. 

But it struck me that since Plotinus was writing in a pre-scientific age (the 3rd century), he had no idea of how the brain functioned. So in reclaiming Plotinus' teachings for our modern age, I took a look at what I said about the self in the initial part of Return to the One, viewing those statements as a neuroscientist or secular Buddhist might.

Here's the passages I came across.

Thus something can exist, yet barely be. And this, of course, includes one's own self.

Our goal is to be one, not many. In reality, for each of us there is only one being thinking thoughts and acting our actions. So whenever someone thinks one way and acts another a division is created that is at odds with the true nature of both the self and the cosmos. Truth is One, not multiple.

Whatever I am, I am not an object that I can look upon, separate from the consciousness doing the looking.

In the Enneads, Plotinus points us toward the only way of unmasking the deepest mysteries of life: become the mystery you wish to unmask and be nothing else. If you want to know what the essence of life is, simply be alive. If you want to know what the essence of consciousness is, simply be conscious. If you want to know what the essence of the One is, simply be the One.

Sam Harris, echoing Buddhist teachings that he is intimately familiar with, likes to say in the guided meditations on his Waking Up app, things such as:

Look at something. Be aware of that perception. Then briefly look for an entity that is doing the looking which is separate from the perception. In the moment where you don't find such an entity, that not-finding is what you're looking for.

Which sure sounds similar to the nondual Oneness at the core of Plotinus' teachings. Anyway, I'm going to continue re-reading my book, looking for more connections to my current atheist frame of mind in Return to the One.

My response to someone wanting to know how my views on Plotinus have changed

I hate to let an interesting question emailed to me and my (hopefully) interesting response go unused, so here they are as a blog post. 

Greg, my correspondent, said in his message that he had been initiated into a different form of Sant Mat than the RSSB version I was a member of for 35 years. That explains why my response mentions Sant Mat. 

He also said that he lives in Ashland, a town in Oregon close to the California border, so I figured he would recognize my mention of the 2021 ice storm, even though it didn't affect southern Oregon. I added a couple of links to the portion of Greg's message pertaining to Plotinus.

Greetings Brian,

I wanted to reach out to say I’m really enjoying your book on Plotinus. So much so that I went to your site to know more about you, especially given that so many other books on him seem to be deeply academic while yours has a different flavor- sharing a research of a different kind.

I was wondering about a statement on your site regarding your work- “Given the reality of evolution, it isn't surprising that my views on science, spirituality, and philosophy have changed quite a bit over the years. Which doesn't definitely mean that some of what I said in these books isn't true. I just feel that it isn't true for me any more, or that likely it isn't scientifically true given humanity's current understanding of reality.”

I was hoping to know what of this relates to your work on Plotinus- given I am reading it and I read things like this to learn and generally only those things I feel are worth reading. Are there critical pieces of this work you now see differently ?

This was my reply.

Greg, nice to hear from you. As a good start at answering your question about how my views have changed since writing Return to the One, you could take a look at the “Plotinus” category of my Church of the Churchless blog. The most recent entries are at the top, so if you want to see how my attitudes have changed, you could scroll to the bottom and work your way up. Or the reverse. Up to you.

 

https://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/plotinus

 

A brief overall answer is that Plotinus, sort of like capitalism if I remember Marx correctly, contained the seed of his own destruction. Meaning, I immersed myself in Plotinus at about the same time I was having increasing doubts about RSSB, the branch of Sant Mat I was a member of for 35 years.

 

I’d always had a decidedly scientific and non-religious approach toward Sant Mat, not being a big fan of strong guru-worship, which many initiates practiced. That became stronger as I absorbed Plotinus’ blend of Greek rationality and mysticism. Yes, reason and science can tell us a great deal about the universe, our world, and ourselves. But mysteries inevitably remain.

 

Notably, the whole Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing thing. My human mind can’t grasp the possibility that nothing could produce something. So it sure seems like something must always have existed. I used to think this was God, spirit, cosmic energy, whatever you want to call it. But the obvious alternative is that the cosmos always has existed. After all, if something always has existed, why not assume that it is what we can sense, rather than something other-worldly?

 

So the appeal Platonic dualism once held for me, which Plotinus shared, gradually diminished. The idea that this physical world is the dregs of creation, though the best it could be (a Plotinian idea) came to seem less appealing. If this world is all there is, a very real possibility, aren’t I diminishing my appreciation of what likely is my one and only life by spending so much of my attention in meditation and elsewhere trying to rise above this world to a supposedly better one?

 

I came to answer “Yes” to that question. I more strongly embraced Buddhism, especially the Zen variety. Taking up Tai Chi practice in 2004 after many years of hard style/karate martial arts, I fell more in love withTaoism (Tai Chi basically is Taoism in motion).

 

Sure, some people take a dualistic attitude toward both Buddhism and Taoism, but I liked the simple chop wood, carry water side — maybe in part because we live on ten acres outside of Salem and there’s a lot of wood and water to deal with (especially after the 2021 ice storm, and the recent very wet spring that is stopping me from mowing some grassy areas until the standing water disappears).

 

Anyway, this is a start at addressing your comments and questions. I still agree with a lot in Return to the One. It’s the idea that the One is separate from and less positive than the Many that I’ve pretty much let go, though who knows, I might come full circle and embrace that view again. Of course, being 73, I don’t have a heck of a lot of time left to do that circling.

 

— Brian

My talk about the One at a RSSB National Satsang Weekend

It's a discovery! Not of buried treasure, unfortunately, but of a post I wrote for my HinesSight blog a few months before I started this Church of the Churchless blog. 

I came across a link to it while looking through early churchless posts to include in a second book of post compilations. Since there has been recent discussion about oneness on this blog, I figured it would be good to share this May 2004 post.

Since I'd written a book about Plotinus' teachings, Return to the One, it was easy for me to talk on this subject.

Not lost in translation (May 30, 2004)

This morning I gave a 45 minute talk to the 500 or so National Satsang Weekend attendees at the Science of the Soul Center here in Petaluma, California.

No, I’m not a member of a cult, no matter what my wife says (jokingly, I should emphasize, just as I fondly call her “infidel” with a smile on my face). Aside from my talks, Laurel chooses not to attend meetings of my spiritual group, for reasons I can completely sympathize with.

I look upon spirituality as a science that investigates whatever may lie beyond the physical reality with which we are familiar now. So I resonate to the “science” aspect of the Science of the Soul. But other members take much more of a religious approach, believing that the mere fact of being accepted as an initiate by the Master who heads the organization makes you a Special Soul, marked for salvation while people like my wife are doomed to a lesser quality afterlife.

Today I couldn’t resist making some remarks about this annoying attitude.

I said that scientists the world over are united in their search for the truth about materiality. A physicist doesn’t care if a colleague comes from another country, another culture, another religion, another whatever. All that matters is their common commitment to unraveling the laws of physical nature through the scientific method.

So science unites people.

Strangely, most religions and spiritual paths divide people, even though they claim to be devoted to the one God, or the one metaphysical reality. Thus, I observed, it is strange that a materialistic enterprise, science, is a unifying force on our planet, while a supposedly non-materialistic enterprise, religion, is a divisive force.

My main theme was the One.

This is the best term for God, I argued, because it most clearly reflects an almost universal tenet of mystical philosophies: beneath all the manyness without and within us lies the ineffable, formless ground of being. Call it God. Call it the One. Trace anything in creation back to its source. There is the One.

Since the One is everywhere and everything, though also separate from everywhere and everything (statements like this are what make mysticism mystical), we too are the One. But this won’t be evident to us until we get rid of all the manyness that obscures our oneness. Meditation is the scientific practice that, theoretically, brings this about.

(I say “theoretically” because the practice is darn difficult to practice, for me as for most other people).

Yet meditation needs to be supported by a person’s whole approach to life. If this is divisive, as when someone thinks they are part of a special group that has a special claim to special spiritual knowledge, that attitude isn’t going to lead this person closer to unity. I think I got this point across pretty well, though it wasn’t my main emphasis. Mostly I talked about Plotinus’s teachings concerning the One and how we are able to return to this ultimate reality.

This was the first time I’ve had a talk translated.

Because many older members of the Science of the Soul group were born in India and don’t speak English well, 45 minute talks given in English get a 15 minute translation into Hindi (or maybe Punjabi, I don’t know which). The translator jotted down five or so pages of handwritten notes while I was talking, came out on stage and sat down next to me after I was done, and proceeded to summarize what I said.

It was sort of fun to listen to the cadences of a language I can’t understand, other than a few words. There were lots of “paramatmas,” which I’m pretty sure means God, or close to it. Heaven knows how some of my slang-infested English got translated, and whether “Stoic” means much to many of the traditional Indians—who also dress traditionally.

Laurel and I love the colorful attire of the Indian women, all the saris in every color of the rainbow. And the Indian food served at lunch and dinner brought smiles to our stomachs. All in all, a pleasant multi-cultural weekend, different sorts of people coming together in pursuit of the One.

I'm pleased that my ideas about God have changed

I just had an enjoyable hour-long phone conversation with a man who wanted to talk with me about my book, "Return to the One: Plotinus's Guide to God-Realization." 

It has been so long since I'd picked up the book, I read through it really quickly this morning to refresh my memory about what I'd written.

I have to say that I was impressed. Hey, I made a lot of sense! 

However, early on in our phone conversation I had to tell this guy that my views about both Plotinus, and spirituality in general, have changed quite a bit since I wrote Return to the One. 

Not completely, of course. For example, I still consider that there must be something eternal, which for me is best called "existence." If existence didn't exist, nothing else could.

Another good word for existence is the One, since existence is the foundation, or substrate, of, well, everything that exists. That makes existence an overarching unity. 

However, since this man liked Return to the One a lot, finding Plotinus's philosophy highly appealing, he was a bit (maybe a lot) taken aback by how much my views had shifted over the past fourteen years or so.

Near the end of our conversation he even read a passage from my book in an attempt to convince me that what I'd written was true. Which was kind of weird, but in a nice way.

I did my best to explain that I still believe in some broad themes of Return to the One. I just now prefer to look upon those themes in a more naturalistic and scientific fashion. Instead of "soul," I prefer to think of "consciousness." Instead of "spirit," I've come to favor "laws of nature." And as already noted, I like "existence" more than "God" or "the One."

We talked about how I was able to write the book, even though I knew next to nothing about Plotinus, a 3rd century Greek Neoplatonist philosopher, before I started to research it.

Plotinus's ideas fit fairly neatly into the Eastern form of mysticism and meditation that I'd spent about 35 years practicing before writing Return to the One. So I had a lot to draw on, including my extensive reading in other sorts of mystic philosophies both of the East and West.

What I found most interesting about our conversation was this man's surprise that my views about spirituality could have changed so much. For me, the issue was simple: when I wrote Return to the One I believed in what I said. Now, I have other beliefs. I've changed. 

For the better, in my opinion. 

Doesn't everyone change? Our tastes in music, food, hobbies, clothes, and so much else evolve over time. We also learn more about the world, so our factual knowledge is constantly changing. Yet somehow our spiritual/religious beliefs, or the lack thereof, are supposed to stay constant?

That doesn't make sense to me.

It presupposes that there's some sort of divine objective truth, like 1 + 1 =2, which, once you possess it, shouldn't be discarded. Well, if anyone knows what that truth is, please enlighten me as to what it is. I used to believe that such existed, but I don't anymore.

Change happens. Such is the way of the world. Also, the way of how we view the world, philosophically, religiously, spiritually. 

"The Realm of the Wise" is a book I both agree and disagree with

A while back I got an email from Marc Deprey, who shares my interest in Greek philosophy -- notably Plotinus' conception of the One as being both the fountainhead and essence of existence. 

Deprey said that he'd written a book, "The Realm of the Wise," that has quite a bit in common with my book about Plotinus' teachings, "Return to the One." 

Bookaholic that I am, I couldn't resist ordering a copy from Amazon. The Realm of the Wise is appealingly short -- just 134 pages. 

There is very little, if any, overt religiosity in Deprey's book, another plus. He cites Plato's famous Allegory of the Cave, just as I did in my own book. 

In this cave scene, it is we who are bound. It is we who see density in the shadows. It  is we who see separate, distinct things where inter-connectedness and interdependence pervades. It is we who see these reflections as the only reality and dismiss the surrounding space that makes them possible as meaningless, as no-thing. It is we who are prisoners in our own cave, which for us is filled with our thoughts, perceptions, and sensations and nothing more. 

So Deprey, like many other truth-seekers, considers that this world basically is an illusion. We're absorbed in staring at shadows on a cave wall. We need to find a way to turn around and experience the ethereal light that illumines the objects of physical reality. 

I pretty much agree with these sentiments. We don't see the world as clearly as we should. Our minds are full of misconceptions. We drive ourselves (and others) crazy with our interpretations of reality that are way off the mark. Thus much of Deprey's book has a Buddhist'y sort of tone that I liked. 

Meaning, we need to distance ourselves a bit from the feelings, thoughts, desires, and such that all too often drive us in negative and unproductive directions. We'd be better off looking at ourselves from more of a detached perspective. But Deprey goes farther.

The book's subtitle is Finding Your Wise Guide. This isn't a person. Nor is it any other entity separate from ourself. 

When the essential quality of the universe, namely simple awareness itself, informs us, we have entered the Realm of the Wise.

...When it comes to determining the best action, the most compassionate, the wise way, we expect our mind to be its own master. In contrast, dogs are wiser than us. Our dog looks for its master, "whines" in longing love when separated from him or her. In the same way, our mind also longs for its master. 

But unlike our dog, we feel alone, and our aloneness generates fear forcing our mind to act impulsively without insight. So who is our mind's master? The Wise Guide, the unconditioned awareness, the intelligent space.

Nice sentiments. Not too long ago, I would have agreed with these words. Even now, I wish they were true. Indeed they might be, but I've got some problems with the notion of "unconditioned awareness" in my current mindset. 

I just can't understand what "simple awareness itself" could be like. After all, there is much evidence that consciousness, or awareness, is produced by the workings of the brain. And there is essentially zero evidence that awareness exists independently of the brain.

Now, I readily admit that I've gone back and forth on this question in thirteen years of Church of the Churchless blog posts. In 2011 I wrote favorably about the notions of pure awareness and Absolute Unitary Being. 

This isn't any sort of other-worldly mystical state, according to the authors. They describe how, physiologically, the brain can produce a feeling of oneness that transcends our usual feeling that there's a difference between subjective me and the objective world.

I kind of doubt, though, that this is the same as Deprey's "unconditioned space," which appears to be more like a calm, clear consciousness that can reflect worldly objects and mental images without being affected by them. 

Again, as much as I would like to believe that this sort of awareness is possible, I just can't accept that it does. It seems more like wishful thinking than an actual state of being. 

If you want to know why I feel this way, check out "My (only) big problem with Sam Harris' 'Waking Up' book." Here's some excerpts.

Harris sees a mystery where there doesn't have to be one. He distinguishes between (1) brain processes and (2) consciousness. But if consciousness is a product of the human brain, not something separate and distinct from the brain, then consciousness is part of what the brain does.

Consciousness is a brain process.

...Sam Harris seems to believe that consciousness is something "extra" that gets added on to brain processes. Otherwise, why would Harris speak about "pure consciousness"? 

Here's another passage from Singh's book which speaks to this issue.

Complaining that psychology can't explain why red things look red to our brains is like complaining that a chef who has demonstrated how to combine and cook all the ingredients of a casserole still hasn't explained why a casserole has come out of the oven.

Casseroles simply are what get produced by that precise cooking procedure. Conscious experiences simply are what get produced by environments stimulating brains to deal with ongoing events.

I'm with Singh.

Harris has an extensive history of meditating under the tutelage of various teachers. He has left behind most of the mystical crap that was part of those teachings, but seemingly not all of it. Harris' attachment to "consciousness" being something distinct from what the brain does appears to be a holdover from those earlier Buddhist days. 

This is another Paul Singh quote that makes a lot of sense to me.

Being conscious is necessary for enjoying life, but consciousness isn't something that people have. Biologically and psychologically, it only makes sense to say that an animal can consciously enjoy eating food, but it is the eating of food that is enjoyed and not the consciousness as well.

We don't say, "That meal was a pleasure to eat, and my consciousness of eating was pleasurable too." There is no such thing as consciousness as yet another thing for us to enjoy. We simply enjoy the things around us. It is the food that is enjoyable, not the consciousness of the food.

Similarly, when I open my eyes and look at an apple on the table in front of me, I see the apple, not a consciousness of the apple. There aren't two things, a seen apple and a consciousness of the apple, involved here. If I say, "The apple is in my consciousness," I can only mean to say "I see the apple," or "The apple is in my range of vision."

Imagine a psychologist asking a subject to look at that apple on the table, and then asking, "Don't tell me whether you see the apple. I'm sure that you see the apple. I just want you to tell me if the apple is in your consciousness." 

Surely this would be a joke. Seeing the apple is just being conscious of the apple. Having consciousness is simply being conscious of what's going on. There is no such thing as consciousness over and above simply being alive and aware of one's surroundings.

Cool! A video review of my "Return to the One" book about Plotinus

Here's an unexpected, but welcome, surprise from Jason Youngman -- his video review of "Return to the One," my book about the teachings of Plotinus, a Greek mystic philosopher, that was published in 2004 (in 2009, having gotten the rights back, I re-published it via Amazon's Create Space).

 

Youngman did a good job enscapsulating Plotinus' (or, if you like, Plotinus's) teachings in a few words and images. "Letting go" is a nice way of describing how Plotinus viewed a return to the One -- the impersonal highest reality. 

My Facebook cover photo got morphed into an image in the video, as shown above. Below is the unaltered image of me rocking a mask that I'd bought at the marvelous Oregon Country Fair in Veneta. 

In the twelve years since "Return to the One" was published, my views about the nature of the cosmos have changed quite a bit. But I still resonate with the notion of One. 

It seems unarguable that something has always existed. Most religions refer to this something as God. Most scientists call this something nature, the laws of nature, the multiverse, or such.

Plotinus speaks of the One. I like to think of this something as Existence, a subject I've tackled (but never brought to ground) in various blog posts. See, for example, here, here, and here.

Regardless of the name we humans give to primal reality, I enjoy pondering its imponderableness. So did Plotinus. We have that much in common. Along with a beard.

Free readings from Swami Abhayananda

Someone sent me an email that says:

A brief Message from Swami Abhayananda:

I am making all my books, proems, and articles available for free download for the benefit of all interested spiritual seekers. To download any of the books, proems, or articles listed on my website, please click on this link: http://themysticsvision.weebly.com/downloads.

Yes, "proem" is a word. It means introduction/preface. I've learned a new word. 

Don't know anything about the Swami. By chance I clicked on one of his essays, "The Ascent of the Soul," that focused on Plotinus, the Greek philosopher I wrote a book about.

So, hey, we've got something in common. 

My letter to a supposed Godly guru

As noted in my previous post, devotees of various Indian "Sant Mat" movements believe that the gurus who head up these groups are GIHF -- God in human form. If such were true, Jesus is alive and well in various bearded, turbaned male bodies.

Including that of Gurinder Singh, guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB). I was an active member of RSSB for over thirty years. Near the end of my involvement with the organization I had quite a bit of personal contact with Gurinder Singh. 

I had several private interviews with the guru, and met with him in some other group sessions. We also corresponded by mail about several books that I wrote under the auspices of Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

Recently I've been resonding to emails from someone who is highly interested -- perhaps "mildly obsessed" is a better way to put it -- in learning details of how and why I de-converted from the Sant Mat belief system.

I've told him that why? is a problematic question when it comes to complex human behavior. None of us is privy to the unconscious workings of the brain. Yet neuroscientists know that most of the why's behind the what's of our actions and thoughts aren't available to conscious awareness.

I can give reasons for what I do, as can you.

Whether those reasons bear much resemblance to brain-based reality is a whole other matter. So I've told the guy to read the posts on this blog in the "Radha Soami Satsang Beas" category to understand my viewpoint on the "why?" question, realizing that it's impossible for anyone (including me) to know exactly why I do the stuff that I do.

However, another question I got asked is easier to answer: what was the last communication I had with Gurinder Singh before I departed RSSB for other spiritual locales? Rummaging through my Return to the One files yesterday, it didn't take me long to find the April 17, 2003 letter to Baba Gurinder Singh ("Baba" is a term of respect). 

Now, I realize that the letter won't be of much interest to anyone other than those who are curious about how my book about Plotinus ended up being published by me, rather than RSSB, or are into the whole guru-disciple thing and want to see how a disciple (moi) speaks to a guru about a volunteer task he's taken on.

I hadn't read this letter for many years. Perusing it yesterday, I was impressed with myself. I'd forgotten how generous and respectful I was right up until the end of my relationship with Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

In the letter I talk about how files of two books have been given to RSSB: Return to the One, and a rewrite of God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder -- which was distributed by RSSB until the publisher went out of business and new copies of the book became unavailable.

Brian-bashers, who are heard from regularly in disparaging comments on this blog and emails to me, have this notion of my Enormous Ego firmly in mind. They like to believe that I left Radha Soami Satsang Beas because the organization wouldn't go along with my egocentric efforts to have the Plotinus book published exactly as I wanted it.

Not true. 

After about seven years of research, writing, reviewing, and copious re-writing, the letter to Gurinder Singh shows that I happily gave RSSB Return to the One to publish, or not, as they saw fit. After this book was put on hold by RSSB for nine months, and didn't show any sign of coming back to life, I decided -- entirely reasonably -- to go ahead with publishing the book on my own.

But I fulfilled my commitment to the guru, and organization, which I was still a part of at that time. I had agreeed to write a book about Plotinus, a marvelous Greek philosopher, as part of a "Mystics of the West" series.

No pay. No royalties. Just for the satisfaction of learning about Plotinus' teachings, and sharing that knowledge in a readable fashion with people who wouldn't find the scholarly books about Plotinus comprehensible.

Radha Soami Satsang Beas was invited to publish its own version of my book, editing as desired the draft I'd sent to India. However, I told the guru that I wasn't willing to dilute or misinterpret Plotinus' philosophy in an attempt to make his teachings match up with the spiritual worldview of RSSB. 

So kudos to me. Re-reading the letter, I come off sounding even better than I'd remembered. I love me! (If that's a sign of ego, so be it. Long live ego, and long live love.)

Here's the letter:
Download April 2003 letter to Gurinder Singh 

Why materiality? What's the point?

One of the reasons I love my blogging gig, even though I get paid precisely nothing, and even have to pay for the privilege of doing what I do, is getting email messages like this:

I'm in the process of reading Return to the One which led me to your website and blogs.  Your writings have made me question, think, and laugh.  Thanks! I have spent many a year searching for something to satisfy this deep longing within.  I've known for sometime that I wasn't going to find "it" in the material world and have read zillions of books and tried various spiritual traditions hoping that they would lead me to that place of "final fulfillment." Long story short, your book and my recent foray into Buddism have led me to the realization that everything I seek is within me already and meditation is the highway to my destination...which really isn't a destination, but you know what I mean. So, now I'm trying to practice daily meditation and throw in a bit of yoga.... My question for you Brian (keeping in mind I haven't finished the book yet and you may provide an answer on the last page), is why materiality?  What's the point?  If Spirit residing in the upper realms is complete as it is and needs nothing, why does it take this journey  into bodies, animals, and nature?  Is it because it wants to "know or experience" itself, is it just an unstoppable desire to move from the simple to the complex? It's like "we" incarnate here and then we all, in some form or fashion, try to get back to where we came from.  Why don't we just stay where we are and kick back? Once again, thanks for your book and sharing your thoughts and musings online. Peace, Margie

Margie, you've asked some excellent questions.

My short response to why materiality? is... "Why" implies a choice; the cosmos isn't a product of choice. My short response to what's the point? is... there isn't one.

Now, these responses aren't incompatible with the Neoplatonic teachings of Plotinus that I described in Return to the One. Plotinus says that all things emanated from the One as if by necessity. And since he viewed the One (ultimate reality) as ineffable, there's no point to the cosmos that could be understood by us humans -- assuming such exists at all.

But if you've read some of my blog posts, almost certainly you know how much my attitude toward life has changed since I wrote that book.

I'm pleased to keep it in print because there is a lot to like about Plotinus. Plus, Amazon sales bring in over half of the cost of my Mini Cooper S loan payment each month. With my turn toward here-and-now materiality-embracing, I get more meaningful enjoyment from driving my Mini than envisioning abstract spiritual possiblities that only exist in the human mind.

Yesterday I was talking with a philosophically-minded friend about the classic "Why is there something rather than nothing?" question. What I said to her was basically how I ended a post I wrote earlier this year.

What is simply is. There is something rather than nothing. I find this eminently satisfying. More than that, actually, much more. It's awesome. Mindblowing. Astoundingly meaningful.

Why? LIke existence itself, there's no why.

Which means, there's no point either. Not to the universe. Not to me. Or to you, to anything.

"Why" and "point" are human intellectualizations. They have their place in certain situations, like my wife asking me why her printer isn't working, or when we're confused about what someone is saying and ask, what's your point?

But when it comes to the cosmos, "why" and "point" are meaningless words.

This is why I've become even more irreligious since writing Return to the One. I'm no longer interested in getting back to where I supposedly came from (heaven, God, the One, pure spirit, whatever) because I no longer believe there's any place but where I am right now.

So, yes, let's kick back. 

Yesterday my wife and I had a pleasant private dance lesson. Though we've been learning ballroom/partner dancing for over five years, a lot of moves aren't in our repertoire. So near the end of the swing lesson, when our instructor said "Do you want to learn how to dip?", I told her, "Absolutely. This is what has been missing from my life!"

I could tell that my wife wasn't quite as excited, since after learning a simple Lean to Side Dip, we moved on to the much cooler Woman Goes Way Over dip. (Don't know the actual names of these dance moves.)

With the second dip I embraced my wife with both hands, took a fairly large step to my left, and turned my body, holding my wife up as her back faced the floor and her non-standing leg assumed as much of a feminine, graceful, elegant position as was possible for a woman wondering if I was going to drop her.

The dip took trust. On her part. On my part. My wife had to believe she would be embraced as she relaxed into the dip. I had to believe that I was fully capable of holding her up.

Materiality is what holds us up. It sustains us. We can trust it.

Like you said, Margie, "why don't we just stay where we are and kick back?" No reason not to. We have no choice. No alternative. If we find ourselves in a spiritual realm -- unlikely, but possible -- then that's where we are. For now, though, Earth is our home. Probably the only one we'll ever know.

Try resting in the embrace of God, spirit, or some other supposed supernatural entity. No one can do it, because these are abstractions, concepts, neurological brain-firings that we humans mistake for substantial reality.

I'm not saying that materiality always dances with us as we want it to. Quite the contrary. Just as with person-to-person dancing, there are bumps, missteps, awkward moments, feelings of "what the hell is happening?" (That's how my wife and I dance, at least.)

But it's the rhythm of the dance between us and materiality that's important, not the specific steps. This is a lesson that's been drummed into us by our dance instructors: stay in harmony with the music, and you'll be dancing the way you should, even if how you move is simple and basic.

Same with the music of life.

The only band that's really playing is that of materiality, the physical universe. Thoughts about spirituality, Platonic forms, divine beings, they're just... (duh) thoughts. They can't sustain you, because they exist only within your own brain. 

There's no point to materiality because it simply is. It holds us up because there is nothing else. We trust it because there is no other option for us.

Time...the essence of enlightenment?

Einstein showed that we live in spacetime, a continuum comprised of the familiar three dimensions of space and the much more mysterious dimension of time.

Nobody knows what time is really all about. Not scientists, not philosophers, not mystics. And certainly not theologians.

We have a sense of it passing. But the theory of relativity proves that this sense differs for people in different circumstances.

Two events, simultaneous for some observer, may not be simultaneous for another observer if the observers are in relative motion. Moving clocks are measured to tick more slowly than an observer's "stationary" clock.

Astronomers look up into the sky and observe stars in distant galaxies. Their vision is of a natural time machine, because the light from those stars can take from minutes (our Sun) to billions of years (the edge of the universe) to reach us.

So they are looking back in time. It takes about eight and a half minutes for light to reach Earth from the sun. Thus if the Sun disappeared, it would be take that long before we knew about it.

What has already happened at one place in space hasn't yet occurred at another place. Scientists say "a supernovae just took place in galaxy X." But that could have been billions of years ago.

Now is relative. The "power of now" is a popular notion (and a best-selling book). However, there's more to time -- and reality -- than our now.

All those galaxies millions and billions of light years away have their own nows, as do all of the inanimate and (likely) animate entities elsewhere in the universe. We can grasp this intellectually, with difficulty, but it's very difficult to actually experience time markedly differently than we do now.

Sure, time slows down and speeds up for us -- a subject that has been of more than a little interest for me as I grow older and a week rushes by in just a few days.

I've learned some tips to make life seem to last longer. However, seemingly the best thing would be to view time in a completely fresh fashion. After all, most -- if not all -- of our problems arise because of time.

No time (as we know it), no arising. Or setting. 

I'm clueless about what would replace our normal sense of time. But I've been reading a book, "The Tao of Meditation," that has given me a new perspective on what enlightenment might be all about.

A different view of time, the fourth dimension.

Man is the ruler in three dimensions, but he is the pawn of time. He has no control over it and no ordinary means of comprehending it as a dimension. Man is born and dies in time, and in between he only perceives the now-present, now-present, now-present of it.

When he is twenty he can't see himself at sixty. When he is sixty, the young man of twenty is gone. He admonishes, "Know thyself," and forgets himself from minute to minute, unable to see the ends of his words or actions, or the beginning of the chain in which he is linked.

Appealingly, the book doesn't offer up much of an explanation of what a more enlightened perspective would be like.

What would be the fourth dimensional view of time? We can't talk about that because we have no way of knowing about it. It is beyond all three dimensional knowledge; it is a part of the Tao. Whatever we might say would be pure superstition or fiction. 

Still...

The purpose of T'ai Chi Chuan is to seek stillness in motion. The aim of meditation is to seek action in inaction. This is experienced from the sense of their opposites within motion and within tranquility.

It is possible with patience and persistence to feel, as if intuitively, very subtly, very delicately, the nature of time. By following this feeling we may move close enough to the border of the fourth dimensional world to get a glimpse of that reality. This is the first stage of enlightenment.

Well, as I so often say: maybe.

What I like about this notion of enlightenment is that it doesn't involve any supernatural journeying -- no soul traveling, no grand mystic ascent, no exploring of any spatial realm other than where we are right now.

Perhaps it's time that is the dimension to be more fully understood, not so much space, whether physical or metaphysical.

Albert Einstein:

A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest ... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Ken Wilber is wrong about Plotinus

I've got a love-hate thing going with Ken Wilber, a prolific writer and creative thinker who relentlessly preaches the marvels of an Integral approach to understanding reality.

Sometimes I like what Wilber says (see here and here). Sometimes I don't (see here and here).

His misunderstanding of Plotinus, a Neoplatonist Greek philosopher, is especially irritating to me. I wrote a book about Plotinus, "Return to the One." I spent several years reading just about every book in English that describes and analyzes Plotinus' teachings.

So when I saw how Ken Wilber mangled Plotinus in an attempt to demonstrate that Plotinus' outlook is on the same page as Wilber's nondual perspective, I was filled with righteous philosophical indignation.

Which made me eager to write an expose of "What Wilber Gets Wrong About Plotinus."

Frank Visser asked me if he could post this piece on his Integral World web site. Naturally I said sure. (It also is included in a recently published book of Wilberian essays, "Spheres of Awareness.")

I re-read my piece yesterday. It's pretty damn good, if I say so myself (and why shouldn't I?). I was impressed with how much I knew about Plotinus and Wilber when I wrote it, since my ponderings since have drifted in other directions.

Ken Wilber gets nailed to a non-scholarly wall by his failure to go beyond a superficial reading of Plotinus. This is typical Wilber behavior.

In an effort to cram all of human knowledge into his Integral framework, a lot of distortions have to be made so that everything fits together into, well, a Theory of Everything.

Wilber is notoriously touchy about criticism. This helps explain why his writings haven't gotten much attention in academia, where "just trust me" doesn't fly with skeptical scholars.

Instead, Ken Wilber mostly preaches to the choir of his faithful followers through the EnlightenNext magazine and countless seminars, workshops, and such. I've got no problem with this. Wilber has some interesting things to say.

But his sayings shouldn't distort facts. Plotinus is one of Wilber's key Western philosophical mainstays who offers some balance to the generally Eastern/Buddhist thrust of the Integral viewpoint.

However, I demonstrate that Plotinus is a monist, not a non-dualist.

If you read those Wikipedia articles, it's hard to tell the difference between monism and non-dualism. My essay, though, shows that Wilber's description of non-dualism is markedly different from Plotinus' One.
Download Wilber and Plotinus article2

As I say at the end of it, obviously I don't know what ultimate reality is like. Nobody does, Ken Wilber included. All we can do is look at evidence and come to the best conclusions we can.

I've got a strong scientific bent. It seems to me that understanding the observable universe is the best first step (and maybe the last step) toward grasping unseen mysteries.

In Carl Sagan's "The Varieties of Scientific Experience" he writes:

Contrast this [anthropomorphic view] with a quite different version of God, one proposed by Baruch Spinoza and by Albert Einstein. And this second kind of god they called God in a very straightforward way. Einstein was constantly interpreting the world in terms of what God would or wouldn't do.

But by God they meant something not very different from the sum total of the physical laws of the universe; that is, gravitation plus quantum mechanics plus grand unified field theories plus a few other things equaled God.

And by that all they meant was that here were a set of exquisitely powerful physical principles that seemed to explain a great deal that was otherwise inexplicable about the universe.

Laws of nature, as I have said earlier, that apply not just locally, not just in Glasgow, but far beyond: Edinburgh, Moscow, Peking, Mars, Alpha Centauri, the center of the Milky Way, and out by the most distant quasars known.

That the same laws of physics apply everywhere is quite remarkable. Certainly that represents a power greater than any of us. It represents an unexpected regularity to the universe. It need not have been. It could have been that every province of the cosmos had its own laws of nature.

So it's reasonable to look upon the laws of nature as "God." Many of these laws can be formulated in mathematical terms. And most mathematicians are Platonists of one variety or another -- as is Plotinus.

Here's how I put it in my essay:

Shimon Malin, a physicist, has written about the relationship between science and Plotinus's teachings in his book, "Nature Loves to Hide: Quantum Physics and the Nature of Reality, a Western Perspective." Malin says:

For Plotinus, the sensible world is a mere reflection of the noumenal; for science, the sensible is the real thing, the only reality there is. The world of science is the world as given by the senses. Oddly, however, the Nous [Intellect] is not entirely absent from it. The Nous did lose its life, but not its presence. The idea that the sensible world is sustained and directed by an invisible substratum is the fundamental premise of science. This invisible substratum is called “the laws of nature.”

...So if I had to place a bet on which conception is closer to the truth, Wilber's non-duality or Plotinus's hierarchy of being (soul, spirit, and source—the One), I'd put my philosophical money on Plotinus. For the existence of the well-structured and seemingly unchanging laws of nature argues against Wilber's holonic, shape-shifting belief that the One is the Many.

There seem to be levels of being in the cosmos, some more real, permanent, and substantial than others. At the least, there are (1) laws of nature and (2) what is governed by those laws. Plotinus goes further and says that those laws are transmitted by soul from a transcendental Intellect that gets its power and wisdom from a even higher reality—the One.

As Wilber says, Plotinus's vision is coherent and compelling. I only wish that Wilber had presented that vision more accurately in "Sex, Ecology, Spirituality." Plotinus deserves better.

Platonic Zen exercises

Not many people find a connection between Zen and Platonism. I do, though these themes are more implicit than explicit in my book about the Neoplatonist philosopher, Plotinus.

So it was a pleasure to hear from someone who resonates with a Greek'ish blend of rationality and mysticism. That would be Nicholas Coleman, head of religious education at Wesley College in Melbourne, who wrote to me recently.

He had kind things to say about "Return to the One," which attracted me to him right off the bat.

Thank you very much for writing Return to the One. The margins of my copy are filling rapidly with affirmations of points well made. Admittedly I'm only up to p.249, but I can no longer resist jotting of this e-mail.

Nicholas went on to talk about his own spiritual approach.

I teach a philosophy of life called "Platonic Zen" which draws together what I've learnt of Perennial Philosophy from combing through the traditions of the West (Plato, Philo, Plotinus (!), Ps-Dionysius, Eckhart, Cudworth, Jung, Schumacher, Schuon, etc) and the East (Gautama, Lao-Tzu, Nagajuna, Shankara, Padmasambhava, Ramana, Chogyam Trungpa, etc) in order to find ideas that help make sense of my own spiritual experience.

The goal of Platonic Zen is for practitioners to attain God-realisation themselves. To that end I've devised five spiritual exercises, the second of which I see clearly echoed in your notion from Sara Rappe (p.30) that a distinction can be realised between the transient contents of consciousness and the consistent container of consciousness (again, that's my adaption of what you actually write).

I asked him to tell me more about Platonic Zen. In a second message Nicholas said:

If I may speak on behalf of the whole of humanity, I think we've generally got the wrong idea about ourselves. Instead of realising what we are, we think we're something that we're not. The ordinary empirical ego convinces us that it's real and in charge of what's happening in the material world. We let it get away with that pretense, although it isn't real and isn't in charge.

Why do we believe its false claims? Because it's easy and attractive to believe them. For they're accompanied by the (equally false) promise of enduring life. We can feel that something unborn in us will live forever and the empirical ego claims to be that unborn something. By believing ourselves to be the ego we think we might live on, not physically but in some kind of essentially ego-centric after-life.

Interesting. And pretty close to how I see things. I asked Nicholas if he'd be willing to share his Platonic Zen exercises. He kindly sent me the first three.

Here they are, in a Word file. Download 123_platonic_zen_exercises.doc

Nicholas asked for feedback on them, so comment away if you feel the spirit. Usually I'm not big on exercises – always skip them when I come across them in a spiritual book – but these are more intriguing than most.

My inside look at RSSB books

It's interesting that currently churchless me once was so involved in writing books for a decidedly churchy organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

A couple of years ago I blogged about "How writing a book rewrote me." This was the third, and last, major RSSB book project that I was involved with.

The end result was "Return to the One: Plotinus' Guide to God-Realization." But it wasn't published by RSSB, even though the plan all along was that this would be the first in a Mystics of the West series.

I have to give credit to Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru who heads up Radha Soami Satsang Beas, for wanting to study the teachings of Western philosophical mystics like Plotinus – even though the effort came to a crashing halt.

Early on in the book project, Gurinder Singh mailed me a list of possible subjects for a Mystics of the West book. I chose Plotinus because I was intrigued by him and resonated with the approach of Greek philosophy – open-minded non-religious, and rational, as noted in my earlier post.

Also to Gurinder Singh's credit, when I was in India in 1998 I asked him, "If I find a conflict between the teachings of Plotinus and of RSSB, what should I do?"

His reply: "Stick with Plotinus."And that's what I did.

Which is one reason why I ended up publishing the book myself. I wasn't willing to compromise my description of Plotinus' marvelous mystic philosophy to fit with how the RSSB Publication Department powers-that-be wanted the book to turn out.

Our disagreements came down to a few areas that might seem fairly inconsequential, but were important to me. I talked about one issue in the other post – whether there is such a thing as a "Western mind." (Since I have one, I'm convinced that there is.)

Also, RSSB wanted to include quotations from a previous RSSB guru, Charan Singh, after each chapter title – to show that West and East were on the same wavelength when it came to spirituality.

I was OK with this, but just for the version of the book that would be published non-commercially by RSSB. I saw no reason, none at all, to mix up RSSB teachings with Plotinus' philosophy in the commercial version that would be sold to the general public.

This related to another disagreement I had with RSSB Publications staff. They wanted me to include a mention of my involvement with Radha Soami Satsang Beas, so that readers would know "where I was coming from."

I even was asked to thank Charan Singh (the guru who initiated me in 1971) in the introduction for making it possible for me to write the book – supposedly, I guess, by infusing my consciousness with enough wisdom to grasp Plotinus' not always easily graspable teachings.

I balked at that too.

I told RSSB that I've always had a better than average ability to understand complex subjects and write about them fairly clearly. That preceded my involvement with RSSB meditation. It's an integral part of my makeup, not a gift from my guru.

And on the "where I'm coming from" front, my position was that if a knowledgeable reader couldn't tell that I'd been a member of an Indian-based mystic/meditation group for thirty years, then there was no need to mention this.

I mean, I sent drafts of the book manuscript to scholars who were experts on Plotinus. I got lots of suggestions and criticisms back, but nobody ever suggested that my interpretation of Plotinus was slanted in a particular fashion.

Yet RSSB wanted me to talk about how my immersion in the organization was related to my "take" on Plotinus. I kept saying that I'd never seen a similar mention of an author's personal philosophy in any of the scholarly books I'd read about Plotinus.

It simply was taken for granted that the author had done his or her best to write about Plotinus teachings, not his own way of looking at the world.

Sure, "Return to the One" includes a lot of Brian Hines along with Plotinus. That's inescapable, because I wrote the book, not a robot. However, I successfully separated the "me" aspects of the book from the "him" (Plotinus) aspects.

At the moment my book is #2 on an Amazon search for "Plotinus," right behind Plotinus' Enneads. That's satisfying. It's the most readable book about an influential Greek philosophy who should be more widely read.

I wish Radha Soami Satsang Beas had been less concerned about infusing the book with a RSSB slant. But this is par for the course with RSSB publications about mystics who aren't in the direct Radha Soami Satsang Beas guru lineage.

There's a decided tendency – and I can't go into this in detail in this already lengthy post – toward slanting a mystic's teachings to more tightly fit with RSSB dogma.

This would be somewhat understandable, though still not acceptable, if an overtly religious organization was doing it. But RSSB bills itself as a "science of the soul," and scientists need to be as objective as possible in their writings and research.

A key tenet of the RSSB philosophy, which is shared by all sorts of mystic teachings, is that words can't encompass ultimate reality. Given this, I always found it difficult to understand why RSSB books were so concerned with saying things the same way, and describing metaphysical principles in consistent language.

Might as well end by quoting myself (from the "Infinity is Ineffable" chapter).

Our whole approach to the One will be thrown off course if we believe we can travel to enlightenment through words or thoughts. It isn't a matter of, say, pondering the Buddhist Dhammapada for my whole life and then realizing that the Christian Bible contains a more correct description of divine reality.

This would be like me believing that God is square and then finding out that God actually is a circle. Since I was looking for some sort of spiritual shape, I wasn't far off the mark and might simply observe, "Oops, I made a slight mistake; now I know better."

But if God is formless and nameless, far removed from any shape or word, then a much more radical change of direction is needed. A person's entire consciousness must be transformed if he or she is to experience God. A way has to be found of experiencing emptiness, of entering into the nothingness that is the threshold to the One.

Marcus Aurelius’ meditations move me

In my previous post about death and Stoicism, I didn't give my main Stoic man, Marcus Aurelius, the blog time that he deserves.

So yesterday I found my well-thumbed copy of his Meditations, a hard to find 1964 translation by Maxwell Staniforth, and re-read some of Marcus' marvelous observations on living a good life. And dying a good death.

I'm putting this post in my "Plotinus" category because both of these philosophers, one of whom I've written my own book about, shared a fundamental Stoic philosophy.

Which moves me.

Now, that's sort of a contradiction, because Stoicism holds (along with Buddhism) that it's possible to be detached from the ever-changing circumstances of life. We have the power to choose our subjective response to objective reality so events don't excessively move us.

Some quotations from the Meditations:

Among the truths you will do well to contemplate most frequently are these two: first, that things can never touch the soul, but stand inert outside it, so that disquiet can arise only from fancies within; and secondly, that all visible objects change in a moment, and will be no more. Think of the countless changes in which you yourself have had a part. The whole universe is change, and life itself is but what you deem it.

Never go beyond the sense of your original impressions. These tell you that such-and-such a person is speaking ill of you; that was their message; they did not go on to say it has done you any harm. I see my child is ill; my eyes tell me that, but they do not suggest that his life is in danger. Always, then, keep to the original impressions; supply no additions of your own, and you are safe. Or at least, add only a recognition of the great world-order by which all things are brought to pass.

That "great world-order" doesn't include a personal God. So Marcus and Plotinus resonate with my churchless soul. Using modern parlance, we'd say they're spiritual but not religious.

Staniforth's Introduction makes this clear. It's available in its entirety via Google Book Search. Pages 7-25 are a good overview of Stoicism and Marcus Aurelius.

I like how (on pp. 21-22) Staniforth talks about how Marcus, ostensibly a Stoic, was so obviously moved by moods of hope and depression, and how he had an evident longing for sympathy and affection.

The Meditations are Marcus Aurelius' diary, a deeply personal record of his struggles to live up to the high Stoic standards he set for himself. Staniforth says that when "we overhear the philosopher-emperor's secret communing with his own soul, and remember that at no time is he addressing any human auditor but himself, I believe every instinct tells us that we are in the presence of a man who is simple, humble, and utterly sincere."

Guess that helps explain why his writings move me so much. Marcus doesn't speak from a holier-than-thou perspective (though his ego does occasionally come through). He's uncertain about what will happen after death – refreshing, compared to the spiritual know it all's of both his and our time.

In death, Alexander of Macedon's end differed no whit from his stable-boy's. Either both were received into the same generative principle of the universe, or both alike were dispersed into atoms.

He who fears death either fears to lose all sensation or fears new sensations. In reality, you will either feel nothing at all, and therefore nothing evil, or else, if you can feel any new sensations, you will be a new creature, and so will not have ceased to have life.

Happy the soul which, at whatever moment the call comes for release from the body, is equally ready to face extinction, dispersion, or survival.

Stoicism in general, and Marcus Aurelius in particular, appeal to my modern scientific mind. There's little in the Meditations that conflicts with current understanding of the universe, once we realize that the Stoic "God" is the same as "Nature."

Staniforth says, "Stoicism is thus a pantheistic creed: that is to say, it holds that God is immanent in all created things, but has no separate existence outside them."

There's a universal order in the universe (not surprisingly). The Stoics, along with Plotinus, called it a World Soul. I call it the laws of nature. Same thing, really.

Nature does its thing. So do we, who also have a soul – consciousness. The big difference between us and the World Soul is that we're a part of the whole, and the World Soul is the whole.

Which makes for a big power imbalance.

As the saying goes, "man proposes and God disposes." I tried to drive our Prius up the driveway last night. Nature, however, had put a layer of snow over some ice. After spinning my wheels I backed down into the garage.

Nothing wrong had happened. There was no call for me to say, "How cruel is the world!" I simply had to adjust myself to circumstances, to objective reality. I put the garbage can in the back of our all-wheel-drive Highlander Hybrid and got up the hill without much problem.

If you are doing what is right, never mind whether you are freezing with cold or beside a good fire; heavy-eyed, or fresh from a sound sleep; reviled or applauded; in the act of dying or about some other piece of business. (For even dying is part of the business of life; and there too no more is required of us than 'to see the moment's work well done'.)

Nature always has an end in view; and this aim includes a thing's ending as much as its beginning or its duration. She is like the ball's thrower. Is the ball itself bettered by its upward flight? Is it any worse as it comes down, or as it lies after its fall? What does a bubble gain by holding together, or lose by collapsing? The like is true of a candle, too.

Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on to say, "Why were things of this sort brought into the world?"

As I observed in "Death shines under a full moon," religion finds something wrong with the cosmos that needs to be fixed: "that nature, God, Tao, whoever or whatever runs the cosmos, has seriously screwed things up. And it takes a savior, a guru, a god-man, a revelation, a miracle, to get life and death back in order."

I like how Stoicism sees the order of the universe as being just fine the way it is. That puts the responsibility for getting in tune with it on us.

All the blessings which you pray to obtain hereafter could be yours today, if you did not deny them to yourself.

When a man finds his sole good in that which the appointed hour brings him; when he cares not if his actions be many or few, so they accord with strict reason; when it matters nought to him whether his glimpse of this world be long or fleeting – not death itself can be a thing of terror for him.

I'll end with a passage from Marcus' Meditations that contains, in three sentences, one of them very long, a wonderful summation of Stoic philosophy. I broke it up into a more poetic format – didn't change any wording.

You are composed of three parts:
body, breath, and mind.
The first two merely belong to you
in the sense that you are responsible for their care;
the last alone is truly yours.

If, then, you put away from this real self
– from your understanding, that is –
everything that others do or say
and everything you yourself did or said in the past,
together with every anxiety about the future,
and everything affecting the body or its partner breath
that is outside your own control,
as well as everything that swirls about you
in the eddy of outward circumstance,
so that the powers of your mind,
kept thus aloof and unspotted from all that destiny can do,
may live their own life in independence,
doing what is just,
consenting to what befalls,
and speaking what is true –
if, I say, you put away from this master-faculty of yours
every such clinging attachment,
and whatever lies in the years ahead
or the years behind,
teaching yourself to become what Empedocles calls
a "totally rounded orb, in its own rotundity joying",
and to be concerned solely with the life which you are now living,
the life of the present moment,
then until death comes
you will be able to pass the rest of your days
in freedom from all anxiety,
and in kindliness and good favour with the deity within you.

Plotinus and I make so much sense

Today I made a lot of sense to myself. Per usual. When I heard myself explaining how Neoplatonism relates to Christianity and why not-knowing is the highest form of religion I was totally convinced that I knew what I was talking about.

This afternoon it was nice to have two captive audiences: me, whom I can’t seem to ever get away from, and a man with whom I have a business relationship, who was trying to entice me to sign up for additional services.

We’d never met, as he’d taken over our account from another guy, so this was a get-to-know-you conversation. Naturally he had to ask what I did. “Basically retired now. I’ve been writing books and keeping up my blogs.”

He then made the mistake of asking what I wrote about. This ended up reducing his sales pitch time considerably. Tip: unless you’ve got time to spare, don’t ask a woman who has recently given birth if her child ever does anything cute, and don’t ask a writer what his books are about.

I rolled through “God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder” and “Life is Fair” quickly, but found myself getting more and more enthusiastic about Plotinus and “Return to the One.” Partly because I knew that as soon as I stopped talking, the effort to sell me stuff would start.

But mostly because I was just making so damn much sense, I couldn’t bear to stop listening to myself. You had to be there (as I was, fortunately). However, I’ll try to recreate some of my 5-10 minute synopsis of what Plotinus, Christianity, and the cosmos is all about.

Plotinus, it’s been said, is “Plato without the politics.” So you’re left with Greek spirituality, minus all that boring stuff about the perfect form of governance. It’s also said that if you add Jesus to Plotinus’ Neoplatonism, you’ve got Christianity.

St. Augustine was a big fan of Plato and Plotinus before he became a Christian. The Gospels are mostly stories and don’t say much about the nature of God, soul, creation, and such. So Augustine took Plotinus’ philosophy, grafted it onto Jesus’ teachings, and voila, a Christian theology.

People think that the Greeks were rationalists. But Plotinus was a mystic and had profound experiences of the divine. He realized that thinking can only take you so far. After that, you’re in the realm of Mystery. For him, that was the One. Christians say, “God.”

Makes sense to me. Here we are, sitting in your office, a teeny-tiny part of a 14 billion year old universe. So far as we know, this is the only life in our part of the galaxy. Isn’t that amazing, that we’re here at all? To me, that’s what a genuine sense of religion is all about: Wonder.

Plotinus taught that it isn’t possible to say anything about God, the One. How could you? Whatever we know is something other than the One, because it is knowable—separate, distinct, dual. God can’t be known. Only approached as Mystery.

If every religion would recognize this, wouldn’t the world be a better place? Christians think they know what God is like. So do Muslims and Jews. Even Buddhists, though they don’t speak about “God.”

I don’t know anything about God. Neither do you. Likely nobody does. If we all could sit down together and honestly say “I don’t know” as one, that’d be terrific. Plotinus reminds us that silence is the best way to worship God. Just being present with…whatever.

Sure seems like that should be One, not more than one. Physicists aren’t searching for theories of everything—just one theory. So God likely is One also. If there are two things, given how the world is so nicely interconnected they have to be united in some fashion. Whatever does the final uniting is God, the One.

Science knows a lot about the very small through quantum theory. Science knows a lot about the very large through relativity theory. But the two theories can’t be fit together so far. Superstrings, that’s a possibility. Vibrating energy. Is that God? Nobody knows.

It’s a mystery.

That seemed like a good place to stop talking. Especially since I was only getting a polite smile in response, not the standing philosophical ovation that my not-so-humble self felt that I deserved.

When some papers were pushed across the desk toward me, I got a glimmer why. I noticed a classy-looking silver ring, on which was emblazoned a cross. I’d suspected that I wasn’t talking with a Wiccan. Suspicion confirmed.

So I had to be content with making sense to myself. Didn’t make a convert to churchlessness today. That’s good, I guess.

If you become a believer in anything, even if that is nothing, isn’t that something? And isn’t belief the essence of religion?

Good questions. Looks like I’ve got to have another conversation with myself.

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 Neoplatonic Church

A few days ago I heard from Eric Grainger about a recently formed Neoplatonic Church. It’s a great idea. The world needs more Neoplatonism and less fundamentalism, that’s for sure.

Eric wanted to post my “Become One to know the One” essay about Plotinus’s spiritual teachings on the Church’s web site. I told him, sure. It’s now on the Meditation and Contemplation page.

Plotinus’s Neoplatonism is a marvelously appealing blend of rationality and mysticism. Some philosophies and religions are highly rational; others are highly mystical. But if someone wants a spirituality that embraces both reason and mystery, nothing can beat Neoplatonism.

Plotinus is one of those rare mystics who lived and taught completely outside of a religious tradition. Like other Greek philosophers, he was his own man. Though deeply respectful of Plato and other philosophical forebears, he thought for himself. His basic spiritual advice, “Return to the One,” is simple and compelling.

Here are some excerpts from Eric’s email message. I like what he’s up to and hope that the Neoplatonic Church becomes another source of support for the churchless.

We expect to find some commonality between your Churchless ideas and this project as we too are opposed to dogma and have long been wary of organized religion. We would like to develop something that only distantly resembles the typical church. When I was in seminary (a very, very brief stay), several of the professors mocked my fondness for saying that we needed a church without preaching, collection plates, and/or Sunday services.

Two of the founders and I make our livings as clinical social workers and liberally tap that profession's lessons regarding small groups and non-profit organizations. We also hope to utilize our understanding of counseling (but not therapy) to help people develop their own version of neoplatonic thought and practice.

We hope the Neoplatonic Church can be a welcoming place for folks with beliefs as varied as the ones held by the Plotinian, Syrian, and Athenian schools. We strive to organize an unorthodox (by today’s standards) religious organization for Pagans and Theists alike (not to mention all the subgroups) to receive supportive fellowship, have access to some educational opportunities, and engage in some dialectic challenge as they find their individual religious/spiritual way. We hope to encourage much self thinking and mystical exploration.

Become one to know the One

I love to see my name in print, so I had to do some imaginative visualizing when the September 2005 issue of “Spiritual Link” arrived in the mail a few days ago. My essay, “Become One to know the One,” was the first main article in the issue, but Spiritual Link doesn’t print the names of authors.

Well, let’s make that some authors. Readers were told that the poem on page 2 was by Bulleh Shah and the two quotations on page 9 that I included at the end of my piece were by Charan Singh. However, all the stuff on pages 4 to 9 that I wrote gave the appearance of being channeled or manifesting out of the ether.

I probably sound egotistical. That wouldn’t be surprising, since I am egotistical. As is everyone who has an ego, which certainly includes me. And that’s my point. I was happy to write this article for Spiritual Link, a magazine published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB)—the India-headquartered religious organization to which I’ve belonged for some thirty-five years.

It isn’t a lack of recognition that bothers me. It’s the lack of naturalness that bothers me. As I’ve said before, I use RSSB as an example of what is wrong about religions because it is the religious group that I’m most familiar with. So here’s an example of how a religion forces the naturalness of spirituality into artificial contours.

Name. No name. What’s the big deal? It doesn’t matter, in one sense. Yet, in another sense, it does. For this policy of enforced anonymity among contributors to the magazine is a symptom of a disease that afflicts almost all religious paths. Namely, believing that spirituality is an outward appearance rather than an inward actualization.

RSSB doesn’t print names of contributors because it believes that doing so would make the authors more egotistical. As if losing one’s ego has anything to do with losing one’s name. If this were the case I’d have become “X” a long time ago, thereby obviating the need for all the daily meditation I’ve put in over the years.

This morning I was reading Thomas Merton’s book, “New Seeds of Contemplation.” Here’s some of what Father Merton says about humility:

A humble man is not disturbed by praise. Since he is no longer concerned with himself, and since he knows where the good that is in him comes from, he does not refuse praise, because it belongs to the God he loves, and in receiving it he keeps nothing for himself but gives it all, with great joy, to his God.

…The humble man receives praise the way a clean window takes the light of the sun. The truer and more intense the light is, the less you see of the glass…There is danger that men in monasteries will go to such elaborate lengths to be humble, with the humility they have learned from a book, that they will make true humility impossible.

How can you be humble if you are always paying attention to yourself? True humility excludes self-consciousness, but false humility intensifies our awareness of ourselves to such a point that we are crippled, and can no longer make any movement or perform any action without putting to work a whole complex mechanism of apologies and formulas of self-accusation.

I’ve been to RSSB gatherings where I’ve thanked someone for giving me a cup of coffee and a doughnut. Instead of the volunteer simply saying, “You’re welcome,” I hear: “Oh no, brother. Please don’t thank me. I’m doing everything on behalf of the guru. He is the real doer, not me. I am just an instrument in his hands.”

I think to myself, “Hmmmm. This humble selfless instrument standing before me sure sounds like a self-willed someone, given the lengthy response I got to my pithy ‘thank you.’” Why can’t religious people act as naturally as non-religious people?

People have names. Authors of articles should be named. That’s the natural thing to do. If a magazine is going to connect the names of supposedly egoless “saints” such as Bulleh Shah, Tukaram, Charan Singh, and Thomas a Kempis with their writings, then the names of decidedly egoist non-saint authors such as myself surely should be printed.

For it makes much more sense to leave anonymous the writings of someone who is considered to have become the One, or God, for they will have left behind the trappings of an individual identity. I haven’t. So it gave me a strange feeling to open up the magazine and see that my nameless article gave the impression of having spontaneously sprung out of nowhere, while I remember all too well the effort it took me to bring it into being.

Most of the article came verbatim from a chapter in my book about Plotinus, “Vision is Veracity.” It’s probably my favorite chapter. I just changed a few lines and added some quotations from Charan Singh. I wanted to show that when you strip unessential dogma from the RSSB teachings, you’re left with a philosophy that bears a close resemblance to Plotinus’ mystical Neoplatonism.

If you want to know God, you have to know as God knows. That’s Plotinus’ spirituality in a nutshell. Nobody else can do that knowing for you. You’ve got to know for yourself. It’s direct spiritual experience that the mystic is after, not (as the Persian mystic Rumi puts it) “transmitted news.” There aren’t any shortcuts to direct experience, because that is the shortcut.

It doesn’t matter what name you call yourself or others call you. You can’t fake spiritual experience by acting like you’re merged with God—“I’m nothing; He is everything”—when you really haven’t. Honest egotism will get you a lot farther than dishonest humility, because like is attracted to like: I’m confident that Truth with a capable “T” resonates within our being when we’re true to ourselves.

An excerpt from my article is in a continuation to this post. You can read the whole thing in this PDF file:
Download become_one_to_know_the_one.pdf