Posted inReligions Spiritual practice/meditation

Being religious without a religion

Can you be religious and not belong to a religion? Of course. In fact, I believe this is the only way to be genuinely religious—to give up religion. This seems contradictory, but one non-religious “religion,” Buddhism, already has proven that it can be done. I’m referring to original Buddhism, that of the Buddha himself. After the Buddha died, it wasn’t long before his teachings were turned into a traditional religion. However, Huston Smith writes in “The World’s Religions” that few traces of six normal features of religion can be found in the Buddha’s message. These features are authority, ritual, speculation,…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Consistency is foolish

Today I got an email from a man who had finished reading my first book and wondered if I was “full of self-deluding crap." He asked me, “Would you presently like to make any ‘corrections’ or ‘retractions’ from what you wrote and published about ten years ago?” Why, of course I would. I entirely agree that I’m full of self-deluding crap now, but I like to believe that I was even fuller a decade previous. So this diminution in B.S., no matter how small it might be, has produced a corresponding change in how I view lots of things. The…
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Posted inGod Spiritual practice/meditation

Nirguna and saguna, two visions of God

It may be a simplification to say, “There are two kinds of people in the world,” but often this seems to be true. Certainly it is with men and woman (leaving aside a few hermaphrodites) and I’m coming to believe that such is the case concerning our conceptions about God. Some people are attracted to the idea that God is beyond being, formless, inconceivable, pure mystery, unfathomable through our usual organs of cognition and perception. nirguna, to use a Hindu term. Others find this vision of God too distant, too detached, too abstract. They are drawn to a saguna divinity…
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Posted inGod

If God is mysterious, so are we

Most people accept that the nature of God is a mystery. But these same people believe that they understand the nature of themselves, the being who confidently declares “The nature of God is a mystery.” Yet what evidence is there that we are any less mysterious than God? Do we know our essence? Can we identify from where our acts of creation emanate? Are we justified in saying anything definitive about ourselves other than, as God said to Moses, “I am who I am”? These questions are sensitively explored by Luther Askeland in his essay, “Final Duties, Old Bones,” which…
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Posted inMiscellaneous

A British churchless blogger

Check out “Off The Beaten Track,” the blog of a British man who has left the well-trodden path of Christianity and is heading toward the wide-open spaces of spirituality. It was nice to get an email from Paul, the OTBT’er, who has made the Church of the Churchless his blog of the week. I’m honored. Faithless hands meeting across the sea. In the Best of Off The Beaten Track section I found “Do Not Believe,” which features some great advice from the Buddha about following your own way. I also noted via the most recent OTBT post that Paul had…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Religions

What are the odds?

Beating exceedingly long odds (1 in 146 million), someone in Oregon just won $340 million in the Powerball lottery. This got me to thinking, what are the odds of someone winning the God lottery? That is, of choosing the right religion or spiritual practice and enjoying a really big prize: salvation, enlightenment, heaven, gnosis, god-realization. I’ve enjoyed reading the comments to my previous “I’ve been fired” post. Some I agree with, some I don’t. This statement by Robert Searle (mildly edited for clarity) got me pondering probabilities: I am coming to the conclusion that the much despised term "blind faith"…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

I’ve been fired

Well, my Meister Eckhart fantasy has been fulfilled. I’ve been fired from giving talks (known as “satsangs”) at meetings of my spiritual group because my Church of the Churchless writings have been too heretical. Yesterday our local secretary informed me that he had been told by a regional representative, Vince Savarese, that my blogging about Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) had caused a lot of people to be uncomfortable. In New York. In India. All around the RSSB world. Naturally I blurted out “Wow, that’s great! People are reading my blog!” It didn’t bother me to hear that I’ve been…
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Posted inBooks Personal/Stories

I’m becoming my favorite book

Standing in front of the Book Bin’s Eastern religion section today, I experienced a literary mini-satori: The only book I really want to buy is me. My exceedingly mild enlightenment descended upon me after a minute or so of browsing. I’d been thumbing through the only sections, Buddhism and Taoism, that are of any interest to me recently. The voluminous shelves of Christian books, ugh. Judaism, no interest. Islam and Sufism, too preachy. So I was reduced to pawing through a few square feet of Buddhist and Taoist writings, and even here I found myself replacing possible purchases almost as…
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Posted inUniversism

Our churchless discussion group

Last night we Salem Universists got together for our third meeting, this time at the Blue Pepper coffee house in downtown Salem. Once again our discussion covered a lot of ground: fear of death, reality of evil, contacts with departed souls, moving from fundamentalism to open-mindedism, among other subjects. I’d told my fellow Tai Chi students about the group and invited them to drop in on the meeting. Jill and Connie did. In the two hours that we spent together on the couches in the Blue Pepper loft I felt like I came to know them much better. As I…
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Posted inVedanta/Advaita

Spirituality in one word

“Wow!” “Camat!” That’s all of spirituality in one word, for both words mean the same thing. “Wow!” is English; “Camat!” is Sanskrit. Both point to wonder, the touchstone of spirit. I learned about camat from Luther Askeland. Recently I’ve been re-reading Luther’s book, “Ways in Mystery.” His thoughts stimulated some of my own: “Mystery is omnipresent” and “Dismantling the golem project.” So it was a treat to get an email message from Luther on Monday. We’ve corresponded by snail mail a few times, but I didn’t know that this Minnesota philosopher and woodworker had a cyberspace presence. Probably because of…
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Posted inReligions

Religion is bad for societal health

The more religious a country is, the more dysfunctional it is. That’s the basic conclusion of a study reported in The Journal of Religion and Society. A Los Angeles Times article, “The Dark Side of Faith,” summarizes the findings of the researcher, Gregory S. Paul: He found that the most religious democracies exhibited substantially higher degrees of social dysfunction than societies with larger percentages of atheists and agnostics. Of the nations studied, the U.S. — which has by far the largest percentage of people who take the Bible literally and express absolute belief in God (and the lowest percentage of…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Mystical dreams and experiences

Last night I had a dream. I can’t remember most of the details, but the basic theme was that some clever unseen vandals had torn apart an apartment building where I was living. One moment all the apartments were normal. The next moment, all of the identifying room numbers had been switched around; all of the doors had been torn off their hinges and left lying next to the now-unclosable openings to the rooms; and all of the contents of the apartments—furniture, appliances, books, clothes, and so on—had been scattered randomly among the rooms. So the residents, including me, were…
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Posted inHumor Religions

Become a religion of one

Most people belong to a religion with many members. There are about two billion Christians in the world, over a billion Muslims, and nearly a billion Hindus. Sure, company is nice, but here are some reasons to become a religion of one: --You can hold a worship service whenever and wherever you want. Your church just needs to be as big as you are. --No contentious arguments about leadership. Any jockeying for power in your religious organization will be between you and you. --Doctrinal disputes are easily resolved. What you say, goes. --If you’ve ever wanted to be known as…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Religions Spiritual practice/meditation

My religious unconversion

Lots of people talk about their religious conversion. Few speak about their religious unconversion. Google gave me 7,150,000 results for “religious conversion” and just 187 for “religious unconversion.” I hope to make it 188. I’m proud of my unconversion. Much prouder than of my previous conversion. For it is more challenging to embrace a universal spiritual openness and uncertainty than a defined spiritual system and its corresponding dogma. Each unfaithful person has their own unconversion story. Google gave me “Escape From Religion, My Untestimony,” the tale of an increasingly questioning Christian, and a (long) riff on “The Meaning of Life”…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Dismantling the golem project

A golem is an animated being crafted from inanimate material. It’s a popular figure in Jewish folklore and legend. There’s always something lacking in a golem because it has been created by man, not God: “Much as Man is Created in the image of God, the golem is created in the image of Man, a replication that loses fidelity.” We’re all engaged in creating our own golems. These are idealized images of what we hope someday to be. A creature that has no doubts, no anxieties, no misgivings, no uncertainties, no fears, no miseries. Our project is to make the…
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