Recently I heard from someone who currently is a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru that I belonged to for 35 years. This person described both what bothers them about their experience as a RSSB initiate, and also what they enjoy about their experience. Their message ended with what perhaps is the most important thing they said, at least to my eyes. Sant Mat is the philosophy underlying the RSSB teachings.
Thanks for having the courage to set up the site and make your views known. I hope to be able to question more, like what you are doing, and remove many of the concepts about sant mat I’ve held over the years, as these I don’t think are serving me well. I just want to be more centered and confident within myself, and reach a better understanding of who I am and what I can do to improve the world (in my very small way) and make me a more balanced, happy person.
I figured that since I was planning to respond to this person today, I might as well do so via this blog post that I’ll copy and send to them in my reply, which will include some observations related to the specifics of what they like and don’t like about RSSB. That explains why what follows is quite general, being my overall attitude toward spirituality these days.
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First off, and this may seem a bit strange, but I’m a fan of strangeness, here’s some spiritual wisdom that I’ve gleaned from re-watching the three Lord of the Rings movies. I’m pretty sure I’d seen them before. However, after immersing myself in watching all eight seasons of Game of Thrones (I skipped the series initially), I was in the mood for more televised fantasy, so I watched the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I still have a bit left to watch in the last movie; tonight I got through the climax where the ring is destroyed in the fires of Mordor and Frodo, along with his fellowship, is safely recovering from his strenuous successful quest.
The basic arc of the Lord of the Rings is from everyday reality to fantastical adventure, with a return to everyday reality. Sure, Middle Earth isn’t everyday from our point of view, but the hobbits’ pleasant living in the Shire is everyday to them.
When Sam, Frodo’s close friend, is trying to encourage Frodo to take the last few steps that lead to the fires of Mordor into which the all-powerful ring must be cast in order to destroy it and save Middle Earth from the ravages of evil, Sam attempts to remind Frodo of the life they used to lead in the Shire. The food, the ale, the dancing, the girls, all the ordinary pleasures they had to leave behind on their assigned quest to destroy the ring.
Frodo couldn’t remember all that. Apparently as the ring-bearer, it’s dark powers had deprived him of the memory of his previous carefree life before the weight of saving not only the Shire but the entirety of Middle Earth was placed on his hobbit shoulders.
But after the ring was destroyed and Mordor fell to pieces, Frodo tells Sam that he remembers now. Frodo’s previous everyday reality has been restored in his mind. He has made a hero’s journey from everyday reality to a fantastical quest and back again to everyday reality. Interestingly, tonight, as has happened before in my watching of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, it took me a minute or two after I turned off the television to return to my own everyday reality of needing to wash the dinner dishes.
I’d gotten so engrossed in the conclusion of the final Lord of the Rings movie, at first my everyday life felt lacking somehow. I missed the thrilling adventures that I’d experienced vicariously via our TV screen. Washing dishes seemed oh so ordinary. Then the spell broke and I started to wash the dishes.
For me, this is an apt analogy of how I’ve come to view my journey into religious believing, RSSB style, and back out of it. For the first 20 years of my life I was ordinary, living an everyday life. Then, as I related in a 2008 post, “My strange RSSB initiation story,” I embarked on a quest to learn the secrets of the cosmos and return to God by putting myself in the hands of my guru, Charan Singh.
During most of the ensuing 35 years when I was an active member of RSSB, culminating in me giving talks at RSSB meetings, writing books for the organization, and doing security seva (volunteer work) at large meetings attended by Charan Singh’s successor, Gurinder Singh, when he came to the western United States or Canada, I felt decidedly unordinary.
I loved the feeling of being special, since the RSSB teachings held that being initiated by a Perfect Living Master, considered to be God in Human Form, was a rare blessing earned by good karmas and the grace of the guru. I’d feel sorry for the vast majority of humanity who would never experience the grand Journey of the Soul through higher supernatural regions of reality that the RSSB teachings said would be guaranteed to every initiate in four lifetimes or less. (RSSB believes in reincarnation.)
If this sounds egotistical, it was. However, at the time it simply seemed to be the truth. Well, until it didn’t.
Bit by bit, drop by drop, my previously solid faith in the RSSB teachings and my guru started to drain away. This happened gradually, barely noticeable at first, until my Faith Level had dropped to such an extent it was obvious both to myself and others. This culminated in October 2005 with me being fired as a speaker at RSSB meetings, or satsangs, as described in the aptly titled “I’ve been fired.”
In the ensuing 20 years, I’ve felt ordinary again. Like Frodo feeling relieved of the weight of the ring after it was destroyed, after a period of some sadness caused by the loss of connections to RSSB that had been built up over 35 years, I rejoiced in simply feeling like a normal human being again. Nothing special. No longer was I on a quest to learn the mysteries of existence. If I could keep my computer running smoothly, I felt like the king of my ordinary world.
Look, I don’t know if this is at all helpful to you. These thoughts just were stimulated in part by your statement, which I’ll repeat again:
I hope to be able to question more, like what you are doing, and remove many of the concepts about sant mat I’ve held over the years, as these I don’t think are serving me well. I just want to be more centered and confident within myself, and reach a better understanding of who I am and what I can do to improve the world (in my very small way) and make me a more balanced, happy person.
The tagline, or motto, of this blog is “Preaching the gospel of spiritual independence.” So in no way do I view my personal spiritual trajectory from ordinary to fantastical to ordinary again as something that you should either follow, or even be interested in. Your choices are up to you. Understand that when I write, even when I’m just writing a reply to an email message, the ideas and words just come.
They don’t feel like they come from me. I deeply doubt there is a me, or a Me. In my current Buddhist’y neuroscientific’y frame of mind, I don’t think I have any sort of enduring self. I’m just the perceptions, thoughts, and feelings that are passing through my mind at any given moment. So I don’t have to beg forgiveness from you if what I’ve just written strikes you as meaningless. It means something to me, or my mind wouldn’t have conjured it up.
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Haha, yes, Lord of the Rings! Great movies those; and the books are even better, much better even than those excellent movies. They’re kind of etched in my mind, the books I mean to say, since way before the movies were made. Although I liked the movies as well: but they couldn’t possibly compare to Tolkien’s incomparable writing (written long before this whole immersive-fantasy genre was even a thing).
Not to intrude on your message for your correspondent, Brian, but: As I remember it, at the end of it all, and after having actually returned and settled down, Frodo finds that he is actually unable to get back to living his everyday ordinary life. His ordeals, and particularly his close physical association with the ring itself, has taken too great a toll, and changed him too much, for him to go back to being the ordinary Frodo that he’d been before he left the Shire at Gandalf’s behest. In fact, he ends up leaving off life as he knew it, and leaves his beloved Shire, and elects to sail off Westward along with Bilbo and Gandalf and Elrond and Galadriel and the rest of them. And Sam it is, Sam his servant and friend, who ends up living the “ordinary” life that Frodo might otherwise have lived, with the whole wife-and-kids-and-garden-of-his-own domesticity deal, over at Bag End, Frodo’s family home. Frodo himself doesn’t, can’t.
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Uhm, ehh, sorry about that somewhat compulsive picking at that particular nit! Just, I absolutely love Tolkien, his books I mean to say, all of them not just LotR; and the details of them are, like I said, kind of etched in my mind. And that’s kind of a standout detail, that one.
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Again, not to take anything away from your message to your correspondent! Wise words, those. …In fact, if he or she is reading this, your correspondent, then I’ll add this if I may:
Brian’s simply being modest here, in suggesting that his adherence to his current worldview is just subjective happenstance, and essentially of the same category as your own belief in RSSB. It isn’t, that’s just his modesty speaking. The fact is, his journey from faith to its absence, “from fantasy to reality” as he puts it, that mental and spiritual journey that he has closely documented here for us, is a completely rigorous one. Undertaken, and reported here, and shared with us, with the fullest sincerity and scrupulousness.
Which is what so draws me to his thoughts, and to his blog here. While you necessarily have to do your own seeking yourself, and arrive at your own answers yourself: but this is as good a place as any, and better than most you’ll find, to use as reference point to aid you in that seeking. You might benefit from, and enjoy, going through his blogs starting from the very beginning — there’s great food for thought in most individual posts, as well as in the sequence of it, from start to now —- heh, “there and back again”, if I may indulge in some Tolkien here! — in the journey and the evolution it represents.
If you do decide to stick around, then your sincere seeking will be assured of welcome and appreciation and unparalleled personal engagement here.
Actually, it occurs to me: Tolkien’s first book, which recounts Bilbo’s adventures, answers perfectly to the analogy you were going for here, Brian, even if Frodo’s journey doesn’t.
Bilbo too goes through all kinds of “adventures”, immeasurably larger than his small limited comfortable domesticity in his Bag End within his beloved Shire. And, at the end of it, like you say he does return to just the same ordinary life he’d lived before he’d left. And he’s content to live that perfectly ordinary life again, for full “eleventy one years”, till the events shown at the start of Lord of the Rings make that ordinary existence no longer possible.
So your message — which is a wise one! — maps perfectly with Tolkien, except with Bilbo’s journey not Frodo’s.
Like I said, I stopped watching the final movie before I learned what happens to Frodo in the end. But he did remember his ordinary previous life after destroying the ring, so at least I got that right. Interesting observation about Bilbo Baggins. Yes, he seemed happy in his Shire life, at least until the ring resurfaced in his life.
I finished watching the final movie in the trilogy tonight. Yes, Frodo does sail off with Baggins, Gandolf, and two other people not in the fellowship. But it took him four years after returning to the Shire. During that time he finished writing down his ring adventures, then gave the book to Sam to write the final few pages. So Frodo lived the ordinary Shire life for those four years before the opportunity came to sail away. The movie didn’t make it clear why he did this, other than, as you said, a certain dissatisfaction with his post-ring life.
The movies were excellent, and true enough to Tolkien’s vision IMV: but still, they don’t come close to the books. First, because Tolkien was Tolkien, inimitable. But also because, I suppose, there’s the limitation of the visual medium vis-a-vis the written word. As well as the fact that there’s only so much you can put into a movie, or even three movies (so that, for instance, the complete absence in the movies of the marvelous Tom Bombadil interlude, as well as the cutting-down-to-the-bare-minimum of the Ents’ part of the story).
I don’t fully remember how they’d depicted the “going Westward” in the movies, I’d watched those a long time back. But this is how it happens in the books (that also I’d read long back, but that left a far deeper impress in me):
For one thing, Frodo never quite returns to “ordinary life”. He does stay through the clearing of the Shire of the remnants of Sauron’s evil, and as you say the writing down of his own account as sequel to what Bilbo had journaled about his own adventures. But throughout, he remains distant, never again the young fully-in-it Frodo, despite still being young, and despite having returned to his beloved Shire and his comfortable life. More like going through the motions of what must be done, and suffering his inability to return to the ordinariness that he so reveled in before.
And as for the “going West”: that is no ordinary trip. The evil of Sauron has been defeated now. But the age of the Elves is now passing; and it is now the start of the Age of Man. And the Elves give up Middle Earth in good grace, leaving it for Man: and *that* is what that sailing away amounts to.
Where they’re sailing to actually draws on the Silmarillion, it is the eternal lands of the immortals. I suppose one could leave that detail out, and think of it instead as a metaphor for simply retiring from life for good. The Elves are in it, in that voyage to the “West”, Galadriel, and Elrond, and the rest of them. And Gandalf as well. Bilbo too: he was fully “eleventy-one” years old at the start of LotR, and now he’s much older and enfeebled by age.
While as ringbearer Frodo gets place of honor in this trip, but in the normal course there’d be no question of his leaving his ordinary life — his very comfortable and very well provided for and very pleasant ordinary life, that he’d once so loved — given that he was still a young man, particularly in Hobbit years, with his whole life stretching out before him. No, he’s not able to return to ordinary life: and instead he leaves to Sam his family home Bag End, and indeed the life he may have had himself, and sails away.
And that going away, it’s not an auf Wiedersehen, not a maybe-see-you-around; but instead a Farewell, a going away for good. And nor is it a seeking out of new adventures for someone that’s gotten used to a larger life; but a leaving-life-behind of someone who finds himself unable to return to ordinary life. All he has gone through has taken too great a toll on him for that.
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Haha, that’s a lot to put in, isn’t it?! …But I wanted to give you a sense of what, as I remember it, the book brings out about Frodo’s going away West, that the movies were probably not able to capture anywhere near fully.
(Again, not to take away anything from the larger message of your post, not in the slightest! After all, Sam did indeed return to ordinary life; and Bilbo did as well, after his particular quest. But not Frodo.)