Posted inScience

Prayer doesn’t work. It’s a fact.

Wow! What a surprise this isn’t. Researchers have found that praying for heart bypass patients had no effect on their recovery. In fact, the complication rate was higher for those patients who were confident that someone was praying for them, compared to those who were uncertain of such prayers. This implies that if you’re faced with a serious situation you shouldn’t say, “Please pray for me.” Rather, make it “Please, don’t pray for me.” Another interpretation: “The results laid bare Jesus' hostility towards those who think he can be bothered with their personal problems.”
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Posted inTaoism/Tai Chi

Believing in problems may be our only problem

I’m addicting to solving problems. Or at least, trying to solve them. The Mega Problem that has occupied my attention for most of my life is “What’s life all about?” I’ve always assumed that there is an answer to this question. Religion, philosophy, science, psychotherapy, self-improvement systems. These all spring from the assumption that there are problems to be solved and the purpose of life is to find the answers. But what if this assumption is ill-founded? What if the cosmos actually is absolutely fine just as it is, us included? Could it be true that erroneously believing in the…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

As the steps disappear behind you

Recently I got an email from a Church of the Churchless visitor who said, “Still read your website. Looks like all those years of meditation are bearing fruit.” I wrote back, “I don’t know whether years of meditation are bearing fruit. I feel more and more barren. Could that be the prelude to bearing fruit? I can only hope.”

Then I received a wonderful response. My correspondent shared thoughts, experiences, and quotations about spiritual chaos, the breaking up of what is orderly and familiar so that fresh realizations are able to grow. I liked what she said so much, with her permission I’m sharing her message almost verbatim here.

Sometimes it wasn’t clear where her own words left off and a quote began. I may have made some mistakes with my quotation marks. But then, the source of a wise statement doesn’t really matter. Truth is truth, no matter from where it springs.

The first part of her message follows. To read the rest, click on the “continue reading” link.
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Hi Brian,

As for your meditation bearing fruit . . .Well, from my viewpoint, it is obviously so. From my studies and personal experience, when a soul makes a breakthrough in awareness the “world” doesn’t usually break out in applause and encourage it to move forward.

The “world” usually tells you to shut the fuck up or says you are weird. “Hey, get back here where you belong.” Or, “you don’t fit in anymore.” And if you are not experiencing consolations within, which is apparently standard for this part of the journey, it can be lonely.

I don’t feel like I can explain my perception as well as I would like. But, for now, here’s just a few things that come to mind.

From Anthony De Mello’s The Heart of the Enlightened: Given the nature of the spiritual quest: “A man came upon a tall tower and stepped inside to find it all dark. As he groped around, he came upon a circular staircase. Curious to know where it led to, he began to climb, and as he climbed, he sensed a growing uneasiness in his heart. So he looked behind him and was horrified to see that each time he climbed a step, the previous one fell off and disappeared. Before him the stairs wound upward and he had no idea where they led; behind him yawned an enormous black emptiness.”

Various yoga or esoteric traditions describe the path of evolution as a spiral, going through complete cycles of seasons on each step. During some of the fall or winter seasons, there is the appearance or feeling you are going down, but the reality is you are still on the same step cycling through all the seasons of that stage. And the seasons are effecting changes in you.

And forces within you are drawing you onward and forward into the next season and cycle, and ultimately into the next step or stage. And even though you had been getting closing and closer to placing your foot on the next step, when it happens it seems like suddenly you are in a different place. And you look back, and like Jon Stewart, go “Whaaaaaaaa?” and rub your eyes. The step below has vanished.

So there is no going back because, like it or not, something within and without is driving you. It’s like birth. You may feel like you’re being squished to death – but out you go, like it or not. The point is, you are now entering into unknown, expanded territory, and it is difficult to integrate the new expanded territory with the old.

You may miss the security of being closer to what you thought was the ground and you may miss some of the comforts and familiarity of prior steps. You may no longer have the fringe benefit of a community supporting you for believing and acting like they do. When the going gets rough, nostalgia makes you long for past, simpler times, when you thought you had it all figured out. When the pressures and insecurity that go with the new territory become uncomfortable, you make some half-hearted attempts to go back down a rung, or even two, to recover that security.

But you discover that the lower rungs no longer provide the comfort you hoped for. The rung below has “disappeared” for you — and there is nothing to go back to. You can only go forward into the new unknown. The familiar One is always and ever present and calling you closer, but it’s hard to believe in the chaos of this transition phase.

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Posted inPersonal/Stories Wu Project

An old koan rises from my past

So, yesterday there I am re-reading my long ignored copy of “Zen in the Art of Archery.” I turn a page and find a rent receipt from August 1968 stuck in the book. College days. Beginning of my junior year at San Jose State. Had recently gotten back from Europe, where I’d spent the second semester taking classes in Zadar, Yugoslavia. I’d rented an apartment with a couple of other hippie potheads. That explains the reference to three cleaning deposits. I idly turn the receipt over. Find some handwriting. Mine. I read: “There will be light when there is no…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

More skepticism about Sant Mat

Periodically I get email messages from dissatisfied initiates of Radha Soami Satsang Beas. They’ve come to regard the RSSB (or Sant Mat) philosophy with considerable skepticism. Because I believe in the potential of a genuine spiritual science, which requires that the results of spiritual “experiments” be openly discussed, I’m pleased to share these messages when the author gives me permission. Bob did, so you’ll find his story below. It’s well written and provocative. I’m still a vegetarian and feel that I always will be. The idea of eating animal flesh after thirty-seven years of meatlessness turns my stomach. But Bob’s…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas

In praise of divorce

Yesterday a friend told me that she found an old book of mine lurking in the shelves of Powell’s Books in Portland. Her email message said: Hey, Brian! Guess what I found at Powell’s today . . . an old copy of The Path of the Masters lurking in the Indian philosophy section -- instead of Sikhism. Since it was an older version smelling of mildew I just had to take a look -- and guess what I found inside, an inscription “To Brian . . . from Sue . . . 1970.” Sue was my first wife. We got…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Religions

Go ahead and believe

I’m a skeptic. That’s my nature. But if you’re a believer, more power to you. Skepticism feels right to me. Belief feels right to most people, since belief in a “God” of some sort is a decided majority opinion, particularly in the hyper-religious United States. I understand the allure of belief in a higher power. Faced with the uncertainties of life—death, disease, distress (to name a few)—it’s tremendously reassuring to consider that you’re being cared for and loved by God or some other manifestation of divinity. Such as a guru. In response to my “Who is the guru?” post, Nick…
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Posted inMystics Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Who is the guru?

I’ve been thinking about the four options concerning who Jesus was, according to biblical scholar Bart Ehrman: a liar, a lunatic, the Lord, or a legend. When it comes to a long-dead historical figure like Jesus, these options make sense. But what about a modern-day guru who is similarly proclaimed to be God in human form? I was initiated by such a guru, Charan Singh Grewal. I sat at his feet, literally. I had two personal interviews with him. I heard him speak many times. I saw him worshipped by tens of thousands of devotees as a divine incarnation. And…
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Posted inBooks Christianity/Jesus

Losing faith in the fiction of Jesus

Christians sometimes say that there are just three options as to who Jesus was: a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord. Bart Ehrman adds a fourth option: legend. Ehrman is a Biblical scholar and author of “Misquoting Jesus.”

His book strikes at the heart of Christian faith. For the Bible is considered to be the inerrant Word of God. But the problem is, we don’t know what those words were. There is no original trustworthy Biblical text. All we have are copies of copies of texts that were changed countless times over the centuries, sometimes from simple clerical error, sometimes purposely.

Ehrman once was a devout evangelical. Now he is an agnostic. His scholarship caused him to realize that the words of the Bible can’t be trusted. There’s no proof that Jesus was divine, that he was resurrected from the dead, that he performed miracles, that belief in him results in salvation.

You can believe in Jesus if you like. You can also believe in the Easter Bunny. Or Santa Claus. Or leprechauns. If it makes you feel good to believe in a legend, do it. Just don’t expect that other people should take you seriously or respect your ill-founded faith. Ehrman writes:

Occasionally I see a bumper sticker that reads: “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.” My response is always, What if God didn’t say it? What if the book you take as giving you God’s words instead contains human words? What if the Bible doesn’t give a foolproof answer to the questions of the modern age—abortion, women’s rights, gay rights, religious supremacy, Western-style democracy, and the like?

What if we have to figure out how to believe on our own, without setting up the Bible as a false idol—or an oracle that gives us a direct line of communication with the Almighty?

Reading “Misquoting Jesus” was a real eye-opener for me. This is billed as the first book about modern Biblical textual criticism that is aimed at general readers, not scholars. I’d always been skeptical that the gospels bore much resemblance to what Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John actually said (leaving aside the bigger question as to whether what they said is true).

Now I know that my skepticism is well-founded. I suspect that most Christians think the Bible they read on Sunday was written soon after Jesus’ death and has come down to us unaltered. Nothing could be further from the truth. If their Christian faith rests on the words of the Bible, it is resting on slippery sand. Ehrman says this about Biblical texts:

Not only do we not have the originals, we don’t have the first copies of the originals. We don’t even have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later—much later…If one wants to insist that God inspired the very words of scripture, what would be the point if we don’t have the very words of scripture?…It’s a bit hard to know what the words of the Bible mean if we don’t even know what the words are!

There are several worthy candidates for the title of World’s Craziest Major Religion. I go back and forth trying to decide which faith deserves this dishonorable honor. Usually Christianity and Islam run neck and neck in my mind. I’ll give this to Islam, though: at least the modern day Koran is, to my understanding, unchanged from the days of Mohammed. Muslim beliefs may be weird, but at least they’re consistently weird.

Christianity, by contrast, is a mish-mash of dogma that has been cobbled together over the centuries. Little, if any, can be reliably traced to Jesus. There’s little doubt that if Jesus returned to earth today and took a look at the Christian faith he’d say, “What the hell is that all about?”

Ehrman has rejected a religion that no longer made sense to him. He talks a bit about his personal journey from faith to faithlessness in “Misquoting Jesus” but mostly keeps himself in the background. As a continuation to this post I’ll include a fascinating Washington Post review of his book that provides a fuller picture of Ehrman, the man.

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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Hitting all my conversational buttons

Life, death, consciousness, psychic phenomena, science, acceptance. Last night the conversation at our monthly Salon discussion group covered a lot of ground. There were just five of us, fewer than usual. Two believers in “something more,” two scientifically-minded skeptics, and me—the balanced Libra who bridged the two camps. Generally our group focuses more on politics and Bush-bashing than anything else. Yesterday the conversation was predominantly personal and philosophical. For me it was a delightful grab bag of what I like to talk about most: the Big Questions of Life. Consciousness. Lynda, our hostess, had recently attended several workshops about brain…
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Posted inUniversism

I abandon Universism

Well, it was sort of fun while it lasted, belonging to the “faithless” religion of Universism. But the Universist Movement is acting too much like a traditional religion for my taste, so I’m jumping ship. I just deleted the Universist banner on this blog. A symbolic gesture that definitely won’t go down in history along with Luther’s pinning of his Ninety-Five Theses to a cathedral door but, hey, it’s a statement. It seems that whenever an independent, free-thinking, counterculture movement gets organized, it starts to take on the qualities of whatever it is rebelling against. By all accounts Christianity was…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation Wu Project

Spiritual emptiness: it’s a good thing

Most people consider spiritual emptiness something to be avoided. After all, if we’re not filled with the love of Jesus, Buddha-like compassion, the fear of God, or whatever (and there are lots and lots of whatevers) then we’re empty. Isn’t emptiness a bad thing? When the gas tank is empty, your car stops running. When the cupboard is empty, you’ve got nothing to eat. When the bookshelf is empty, you can’t do any reading. But what about when your spirit, or mind, is empty? Is there really nothing there, or is there more there when nothing is there than when…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Wu Project

Best answer often is “None of the above”

My manly self-image isn’t based on mechanical aptitude, so my ego is letting me share these stories. Then I’ll turn to my area of real competence: analyzing the anecdotes. Saturday morning I sold our old generator to a guy who saw my ad in the classifieds. He said he’d come by around eight. I figured that the sale would go more smoothly if the generator would start. Sometimes it’s a terror to get going when it hasn’t been started for a while. I don’t run the generator very often, so I got out the manual and reviewed the start-up procedures.…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas Wu Project

Tracking the trajectory of my Wu Project

Here’s documentation of my first original quasi-spiritual insight. Today I dragged this piece of paper out of my “treasures box,” where I keep various memorabilia from my youth. I wrote the poem when I was 13 after gazing up at the stars one night from the backyard of our rural home in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. It goes like this: Look up to the heavens What is there? Tiny pinpoints of light But is that all? Look past the stars Into the blackness of the void. What lies there, waiting for man’s first faltering steps Into the…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Taoism/Tai Chi

Three laughers at the tiger ravine

Today I came across a scroll, painted by Bangaku, of “Three Laughers at the Tiger Ravine.” This anecdote explains their laughter. "This is an allegory in which three literati realize by accident that spiritual purity cannot be measured by artificial boundaries. One day the poet Tao Yuanming and the Taoist Lu Xiujing traveled to the Donglin temple on Mt. Lu to visit the Buddhist theologian Huiyuan who lived there as a recluse, vowing never to cross the stone bridge over the Tiger Ravine that marked the boundary of the sanctuary. After an evening together, Huiyuan accompanied his friends as they…
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