Exploring Mysticism and Parapsychology. This blog is also an attempt to promote awareness of a Modern Universal Paradigm known as Multi-Dimensional Science. It offers a "Scientific" testable Hypothesis for a more "objective" understanding of claimed Psychic and Spiritual Phenomena. A link to this subject should be found on this page or alternatively it can be found easily via a word search.Please note that the Internet articles here may not always reflect the views of the Blogger.
One spring morning in Tucson, Arizona, in 1994, an unknown philosopher named David Chalmers got up to give a talk on consciousness, by which he meant the feeling of being inside your head, looking out – or, to use the kind of language that might give a neuroscientist an aneurysm, of having a soul. Though he didn’t realise it at the time, the young Australian academic was about to ignite a war between philosophers and scientists, by drawing attention to a central mystery of human life – perhaps the central mystery of human life – and revealing how embarrassingly far they were from solving it.
The scholars gathered at the University of Arizona – for what would later go down as a landmark conference on the subject – knew they were doing something edgy: in many quarters, consciousness was still taboo, too weird and new agey to take seriously, and some of the scientists in the audience were risking their reputations by attending. Yet the first two talks that day, before Chalmers’s, hadn’t proved thrilling. “Quite honestly, they were totally unintelligible and boring – I had no idea what anyone was talking about,” recalled Stuart Hameroff, the Arizona professor responsible for the event. “As the organiser, I’m looking around, and people are falling asleep, or getting restless.” He grew worried. “But then the third talk, right before the coffee break – that was Dave.” With his long, straggly hair and fondness for all-body denim, the 27-year-old Chalmers looked like he’d got lost en route to a Metallica concert. “He comes on stage, hair down to his butt, he’s prancing around like Mick Jagger,” Hameroff said. “But then he speaks. And that’s when everyone wakes up.”
The brain, Chalmers began by pointing out, poses all sorts of problems to keep scientists busy. How do we learn, store memories, or perceive things? How do you know to jerk your hand away from scalding water, or hear your name spoken across the room at a noisy party? But these were all “easy problems”, in the scheme of things: given enough time and money, experts would figure them out. There was only one truly hard problem of consciousness, Chalmers said. It was a puzzle so bewildering that, in the months after his talk, people started dignifying it with capital letters – the Hard Problem of Consciousness – and it’s this: why on earth should all those complicated brain processes feel like anything from the inside? Why aren’t we just brilliant robots, capable of retaining information, of responding to noises and smells and hot saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an inner life? And how does the brain manage it? How could the 1.4kg lump of moist, pinkish-beige tissue inside your skull give rise to something as mysterious as the experience of being that pinkish-beige lump, and the body to which it is attached?
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What jolted Chalmers’s audience from their torpor was how he had framed the question. “At the coffee break, I went around like a playwright on opening night, eavesdropping,” Hameroff said. “And everyone was like: ‘Oh! The Hard Problem! The Hard Problem! That’s why we’re here!’” Philosophers had pondered the so-called “mind-body problem” for centuries. But Chalmers’s particular manner of reviving it “reached outside philosophy and galvanised everyone. It defined the field. It made us ask: what the hell is this that we’re dealing with here?”
Two decades later, we know an astonishing amount about the brain: you can’t follow the news for a week without encountering at least one more tale about scientists discovering the brain region associated with gambling, or laziness, or love at first sight, or regret – and that’s only the research that makes the headlines. Meanwhile, the field of artificial intelligence – which focuses on recreating the abilities of the human brain, rather than on what it feels like to be one – has advanced stupendously. But like an obnoxious relative who invites himself to stay for a week and then won’t leave, the Hard Problem remains. When I stubbed my toe on the leg of the dining table this morning, as any student of the brain could tell you, nerve fibres called “C-fibres” shot a message to my spinal cord, sending neurotransmitters to the part of my brain called the thalamus, which activated (among other things) my limbic system. Fine. But how come all that was accompanied by an agonising flash of pain? And what is pain, anyway?
Questions like these, which straddle the border between science and philosophy, make some experts openly angry. They have caused others to argue that conscious sensations, such as pain, don’t really exist, no matter what I felt as I hopped in anguish around the kitchen; or, alternatively, that plants and trees must also be conscious. The Hard Problem has prompted arguments in serious journals about what is going on in the mind of a zombie, or – to quote the title of a famous 1974 paper by the philosopher Thomas Nagel – the question “What is it like to be a bat?” Some argue that the problem marks the boundary not just of what we currently know, but of what science could ever explain. On the other hand, in recent years, a handful of neuroscientists have come to believe that it may finally be about to be solved – but only if we are willing to accept the profoundly unsettling conclusion that computers or the internet might soon become conscious, too.
Next week, the conundrum will move further into public awareness with the opening of Tom Stoppard’s new play, The Hard Problem, at the National Theatre – the first play Stoppard has written for the National since 2006, and the last that the theatre’s head, Nicholas Hytner, will direct before leaving his post in March. The 77-year-old playwright has revealed little about the play’s contents, except that it concerns the question of “what consciousness is and why it exists”, considered from the perspective of a young researcher played by Olivia Vinall. Speaking to the Daily Mail, Stoppard also clarified a potential misinterpretation of the title. “It’s not about erectile dysfunction,” he said.
Stoppard’s work has long focused on grand, existential themes, so the subject is fitting: when conversation turns to the Hard Problem, even the most stubborn rationalists lapse quickly into musings on the meaning of life. Christof Koch, the chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and a key player in the Obama administration’s multibillion-dollar initiative to map the human brain, is about as credible as neuroscientists get. But, he told me in December: “I think the earliest desire that drove me to study consciousness was that I wanted, secretly, to show myself that it couldn’t be explained scientifically. I was raised Roman Catholic, and I wanted to find a place where I could say: OK, here, God has intervened. God created souls, and put them into people.” Koch assured me that he had long ago abandoned such improbable notions. Then, not much later, and in all seriousness, he said that on the basis of his recent research he thought it wasn’t impossible that his iPhone might have feelings.
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By the time Chalmers delivered his speech in Tucson, science had been vigorously attempting to ignore the problem of consciousness for a long time. The source of the animosity dates back to the 1600s, when René Descartes identified the dilemma that would tie scholars in knots for years to come. On the one hand, Descartes realised, nothing is more obvious and undeniable than the fact that you’re conscious. In theory, everything else you think you know about the world could be an elaborate illusion cooked up to deceive you – at this point, present-day writers invariably invoke The Matrix – but your consciousness itself can’t be illusory. On the other hand, this most certain and familiar of phenomena obeys none of the usual rules of science. It doesn’t seem to be physical. It can’t be observed, except from within, by the conscious person. It can’t even really be described. The mind, Descartes concluded, must be made of some special, immaterial stuff that didn’t abide by the laws of nature; it had been bequeathed to us by God.
This religious and rather hand-wavy position, known as Cartesian dualism, remained the governing assumption into the 18th century and the early days of modern brain study. But it was always bound to grow unacceptable to an increasingly secular scientific establishment that took physicalism – the position that only physical things exist – as its most basic principle. And yet, even as neuroscience gathered pace in the 20th century, no convincing alternative explanation was forthcoming. So little by little, the topic became taboo. Few people doubted that the brain and mind were very closely linked: if you question this, try stabbing your brain repeatedly with a kitchen knife, and see what happens to your consciousness. But how they were linked – or if they were somehow exactly the same thing – seemed a mystery best left to philosophers in their armchairs. As late as 1989, writing in the International Dictionary of Psychology, the British psychologist Stuart Sutherland could irascibly declare of consciousness that “it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.”
It was only in 1990 that Francis Crick, the joint discoverer of the double helix, used his position of eminence to break ranks. Neuroscience was far enough along by now, he declared in a slightly tetchy paper co-written with Christof Koch, that consciousness could no longer be ignored. “It is remarkable,” they began, “that most of the work in both cognitive science and the neurosciences makes no reference to consciousness” – partly, they suspected, “because most workers in these areas cannot see any useful way of approaching the problem”. They presented their own “sketch of a theory”, arguing that certain neurons, firing at certain frequencies, might somehow be the cause of our inner awareness – though it was not clear how.
Illustration by Peter Gamelen“People thought I was crazy to be getting involved,” Koch recalled. “A senior colleague took me out to lunch and said, yes, he had the utmost respect for Francis, but Francis was a Nobel laureate and a half-god and he could do whatever he wanted, whereas I didn’t have tenure yet, so I should be incredibly careful. Stick to more mainstream science! These fringey things – why not leave them until retirement, when you’re coming close to death, and you can worry about the soul and stuff like that?”
It was around this time that David Chalmers started talking about zombies.
* * *
As a child, Chalmers was short-sighted in one eye, and he vividly recalls the day he was first fitted with glasses to rectify the problem. “Suddenly I had proper binocular vision,” he said. “And the world just popped out. It was three-dimensional to me in a way it hadn’t been.” He thought about that moment frequently as he grew older. Of course, you could tell a simple mechanical story about what was going on in the lens of his glasses, his eyeball, his retina, and his brain. “But how does that explain the way the world just pops out like that?” To a physicalist, the glasses-eyeball-retina story is the only story. But to a thinker of Chalmers’s persuasion, it was clear that it wasn’t enough: it told you what the machinery of the eye was doing, but it didn’t begin to explain that sudden, breathtaking experience of depth and clarity. Chalmers’s “zombie” thought experiment is his attempt to show why the mechanical account is not enough – why the mystery of conscious awareness goes deeper than a purely material science can explain.
“Look, I’m not a zombie, and I pray that you’re not a zombie,” Chalmers said, one Sunday before Christmas, “but the point is that evolution could have produced zombies instead of conscious creatures – and it didn’t!” We were drinking espressos in his faculty apartment at New York University, where he recently took up a full-time post at what is widely considered the leading philosophy department in the Anglophone world; boxes of his belongings, shipped over from Australia, lay unpacked around his living-room. Chalmers, now 48, recently cut his hair in a concession to academic respectability, and he wears less denim, but his ideas remain as heavy-metal as ever. The zombie scenario goes as follows: imagine that you have a doppelgänger. This person physically resembles you in every respect, and behaves identically to you; he or she holds conversations, eats and sleeps, looks happy or anxious precisely as you do. The sole difference is that the doppelgänger has no consciousness; this – as opposed to a groaning, blood-spattered walking corpse from a movie – is what philosophers mean by a “zombie”.
Such non-conscious humanoids don’t exist, of course. (Or perhaps it would be better to say that I know I’m not one, anyhow; I could never know for certain that you aren’t.) But the point is that, in principle, it feels as if they could. Evolution might have produced creatures that were atom-for-atom the same as humans, capable of everything humans can do, except with no spark of awareness inside. As Chalmers explained: “I’m talking to you now, and I can see how you’re behaving; I could do a brain scan, and find out exactly what’s going on in your brain – yet it seems it could be consistent with all that evidence that you have no consciousness at all.” If you were approached by me and my doppelgänger, not knowing which was which, not even the most powerful brain scanner in existence could tell us apart. And the fact that one can even imagine this scenario is sufficient to show that consciousness can’t just be made of ordinary physical atoms. So consciousness must, somehow, be something extra – an additional ingredient in nature.
It would be understating things a bit to say that this argument wasn’t universally well-received when Chalmers began to advance it, most prominently in his 1996 book The Conscious Mind. The withering tone of the philosopher Massimo Pigliucci sums up the thousands of words that have been written attacking the zombie notion: “Let’s relegate zombies to B-movies and try to be a little more serious about our philosophy, shall we?” Yes, it may be true that most of us, in our daily lives, think of consciousness as something over and above our physical being – as if your mind were “a chauffeur inside your own body”, to quote the spiritual author Alan Watts. But to accept this as a scientific principle would mean rewriting the laws of physics. Everything we know about the universe tells us that reality consists only of physical things: atoms and their component particles, busily colliding and combining. Above all, critics point out, if this non-physical mental stuff did exist, how could it cause physical things to happen – as when the feeling of pain causes me to jerk my fingers away from the saucepan’s edge?
Nonetheless, just occasionally, science has dropped tantalising hints that this spooky extra ingredient might be real. In the 1970s, at what was then the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases in London, the neurologist Lawrence Weiskrantz encountered a patient, known as “DB”, with a blind spot in his left visual field, caused by brain damage. Weiskrantz showed him patterns of striped lines, positioned so that they fell on his area of blindness, then asked him to say whether the stripes were vertical or horizontal. Naturally, DB protested that he could see no stripes at all. But Weiskrantz insisted that he guess the answers anyway – and DB got them right almost 90% of the time. Apparently, his brain was perceiving the stripes without his mind being conscious of them. One interpretation is that DB was a semi-zombie, with a brain like any other brain, but partially lacking the magical add-on of consciousness.
Chalmers knows how wildly improbable his ideas can seem, and takes this in his stride: at philosophy conferences, he is fond of clambering on stage to sing The Zombie Blues, a lament about the miseries of having no consciousness. (“I act like you act / I do what you do / But I don’t know / What it’s like to be you.”) “The conceit is: wouldn’t it be a drag to be a zombie? Consciousness is what makes life worth living, and I don’t even have that: I’ve got the zombie blues.” The song has improved since its debut more than a decade ago, when he used to try to hold a tune. “Now I’ve realised it sounds better if you just shout,” he said.
* * *
Illustration by Peter GamelenThe consciousness debates have provoked more mudslinging and fury than most in modern philosophy, perhaps because of how baffling the problem is: opposing combatants tend not merely to disagree, but to find each other’s positions manifestly preposterous. An admittedly extreme example concerns the Canadian-born philosopher Ted Honderich, whose book On Consciousness was described, in an article by his fellow philosopher Colin McGinn in 2007, as “banal and pointless”, “excruciating”, “absurd”, running “the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad”. McGinn added, in a footnote: “The review that appears here is not as I originally wrote it. The editors asked me to ‘soften the tone’ of the original [and] I have done so.” (The attack may have been partly motivated by a passage in Honderich’s autobiography, in which he mentions “my small colleague Colin McGinn”; at the time, Honderich told this newspaper he’d enraged McGinn by referring to a girlfriend of his as “not as plain as the old one”.)
McGinn, to be fair, has made a career from such hatchet jobs. But strong feelings only slightly more politely expressed are commonplace. Not everybody agrees there is a Hard Problem to begin with – making the whole debate kickstarted by Chalmers an exercise in pointlessness. Daniel Dennett, the high-profile atheist and professor at Tufts University outside Boston, argues that consciousness, as we think of it, is an illusion: there just isn’t anything in addition to the spongy stuff of the brain, and that spongy stuff doesn’t actually give rise to something called consciousness. Common sense may tell us there’s a subjective world of inner experience – but then common sense told us that the sun orbits the Earth, and that the world was flat. Consciousness, according to Dennett’s theory, is like a conjuring trick: the normal functioning of the brain just makes it look as if there is something non-physical going on. To look for a real, substantive thing called consciousness, Dennett argues, is as silly as insisting that characters in novels, such as Sherlock Holmes or Harry Potter, must be made up of a peculiar substance named “fictoplasm”; the idea is absurd and unnecessary, since the characters do not exist to begin with. This is the point at which the debate tends to collapse into incredulous laughter and head-shaking: neither camp can quite believe what the other is saying. To Dennett’s opponents, he is simply denying the existence of something everyone knows for certain: their inner experience of sights, smells, emotions and the rest. (Chalmers has speculated, largely in jest, that Dennett himself might be a zombie.) It’s like asserting that cancer doesn’t exist, then claiming you’ve cured cancer; more than one critic of Dennett’s most famous book, Consciousness Explained, has joked that its title ought to be Consciousness Explained Away. Dennett’s reply is characteristically breezy: explaining things away, he insists, is exactly what scientists do. When physicists first concluded that the only difference between gold and silver was the number of subatomic particles in their atoms, he writes, people could have felt cheated, complaining that their special “goldness” and “silveriness” had been explained away. But everybody now accepts that goldness and silveriness are really just differences in atoms. However hard it feels to accept, we should concede that consciousness is just the physical brain, doing what brains do.
“The history of science is full of cases where people thought a phenomenon was utterly unique, that there couldn’t be any possible mechanism for it, that we might never solve it, that there was nothing in the universe like it,” said Patricia Churchland of the University of California, a self-described “neurophilosopher” and one of Chalmers’s most forthright critics. Churchland’s opinion of the Hard Problem, which she expresses in caustic vocal italics, is that it is nonsense, kept alive by philosophers who fear that science might be about to eliminate one of the puzzles that has kept them gainfully employed for years. Look at the precedents: in the 17th century, scholars were convinced that light couldn’t possibly be physical – that it had to be something occult, beyond the usual laws of nature. Or take life itself: early scientists were convinced that there had to be some magical spirit – the élan vital – that distinguished living beings from mere machines. But there wasn’t, of course. Light is electromagnetic radiation; life is just the label we give to certain kinds of objects that can grow and reproduce. Eventually, neuroscience will show that consciousness is just brain states. Churchland said: “The history of science really gives you perspective on how easy it is to talk ourselves into this sort of thinking – that if my big, wonderful brain can’t envisage the solution, then it must be a really, really hard problem!”
Solutions have regularly been floated: the literature is awash in references to “global workspace theory”, “ego tunnels”, “microtubules”, and speculation that quantum theory may provide a way forward. But the intractability of the arguments has caused some thinkers, such as Colin McGinn, to raise an intriguing if ultimately defeatist possibility: what if we’re just constitutionally incapable of ever solving the Hard Problem? After all, our brains evolved to help us solve down-to-earth problems of survival and reproduction; there is no particular reason to assume they should be capable of cracking every big philosophical puzzle we happen to throw at them. This stance has become known as “mysterianism” – after the 1960s Michigan rock’n’roll band ? and the Mysterians, who themselves borrowed the name from a work of Japanese sci-fi – but the essence of it is that there’s actually no mystery to why consciousness hasn’t been explained: it’s that humans aren’t up to the job. If we struggle to understand what it could possibly mean for the mind to be physical, maybe that’s because we are, to quote the American philosopher Josh Weisberg, in the position of “squirrels trying to understand quantum mechanics”. In other words: “It’s just not going to happen.”
* * *
Or maybe it is: in the last few years, several scientists and philosophers, Chalmers and Koch among them, have begun to look seriously again at a viewpoint so bizarre that it has been neglected for more than a century, except among followers of eastern spiritual traditions, or in the kookier corners of the new age. This is “panpsychism”, the dizzying notion that everything in the universe might be conscious, or at least potentially conscious, or conscious when put into certain configurations. Koch concedes that this sounds ridiculous: when he mentions panpsychism, he has written, “I often encounter blank stares of incomprehension.” But when it comes to grappling with the Hard Problem, crazy-sounding theories are an occupational hazard. Besides, panpsychism might help unravel an enigma that has attached to the study of consciousness from the start: if humans have it, and apes have it, and dogs and pigs probably have it, and maybe birds, too – well, where does it stop?
Illustration by Peter GamelenGrowing up as the child of German-born Catholics, Koch had a dachshund named Purzel. According to the church, because he was a dog, that meant he didn’t have a soul. But he whined when anxious and yelped when injured – “he certainly gave every appearance of having a rich inner life”. These days we don’t much speak of souls, but it is widely assumed that many non-human brains are conscious – that a dog really does feel pain when he is hurt. The problem is that there seems to be no logical reason to draw the line at dogs, or sparrows or mice or insects, or, for that matter, trees or rocks. Since we don’t know how the brains of mammals create consciousness, we have no grounds for assuming it’s only the brains of mammals that do so – or even that consciousness requires a brain at all. Which is how Koch and Chalmers have both found themselves arguing, in the pages of the New York Review of Books, that an ordinary household thermostat or a photodiode, of the kind you might find in your smoke detector, might in principle be conscious.
The argument unfolds as follows: physicists have no problem accepting that certain fundamental aspects of reality – such as space, mass, or electrical charge – just do exist. They can’t be explained as being the result of anything else. Explanations have to stop somewhere. The panpsychist hunch is that consciousness could be like that, too – and that if it is, there is no particular reason to assume that it only occurs in certain kinds of matter.
Koch’s specific twist on this idea, developed with the neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi, is narrower and more precise than traditional panpsychism. It is the argument that anything at all could be conscious, providing that the information it contains is sufficiently interconnected and organised. The human brain certainly fits the bill; so do the brains of cats and dogs, though their consciousness probably doesn’t resemble ours. But in principle the same might apply to the internet, or a smartphone, or a thermostat. (The ethical implications are unsettling: might we owe the same care to conscious machines that we bestow on animals? Koch, for his part, tries to avoid stepping on insects as he walks.)
Unlike the vast majority of musings on the Hard Problem, moreover, Tononi and Koch’s “integrated information theory” has actually been tested. A team of researchers led by Tononi has designed a device that stimulates the brain with electrical voltage, to measure how interconnected and organised – how “integrated” – its neural circuits are. Sure enough, when people fall into a deep sleep, or receive an injection of anaesthetic, as they slip into unconsciousness, the device demonstrates that their brain integration declines, too. Among patients suffering “locked-in syndrome” – who are as conscious as the rest of us – levels of brain integration remain high; among patients in coma – who aren’t – it doesn’t. Gather enough of this kind of evidence, Koch argues and in theory you could take any device, measure the complexity of the information contained in it, then deduce whether or not it was conscious.
But even if one were willing to accept the perplexing claim that a smartphone could be conscious, could you ever know that it was true? Surely only the smartphone itself could ever know that? Koch shrugged.
“It’s like black holes,” he said. “I’ve never been in a black hole. Personally, I have no experience of black holes. But the theory [that predicts black holes] seems always to be true, so I tend to accept it."
It would be satisfying for multiple reasons if a theory like this were eventually to vanquish the Hard Problem. On the one hand, it wouldn’t require a belief in spooky mind-substances that reside inside brains; the laws of physics would escape largely unscathed. On the other hand, we wouldn’t need to accept the strange and soulless claim that consciousness doesn’t exist, when it’s so obvious that it does. On the contrary, panpsychism says, it’s everywhere. The universe is throbbing with it.
Last June, several of the most prominent combatants in the consciousness debates – including Chalmers, Churchland and Dennett – boarded a tall-masted yacht for a trip among the ice floes of Greenland. This conference-at-sea was funded by a Russian internet entrepreneur, Dmitry Volkov, the founder of the Moscow Centre for Consciousness Studies. About 30 academics and graduate students, plus crew, spent a week gliding through dark waters, past looming snow-topped mountains and glaciers, in a bracing chill conducive to focused thought, giving the problem of consciousness another shot. In the mornings, they visited islands to go hiking, or examine the ruins of ancient stone huts; in the afternoons, they held conference sessions on the boat. For Chalmers, the setting only sharpened the urgency of the mystery: how could you feel the Arctic wind on your face, take in the visual sweep of vivid greys and whites and greens, and still claim conscious experience was unreal, or that it was simply the result of ordinary physical stuff, behaving ordinarily?
The question was rhetorical. Dennett and Churchland were not converted; indeed, Chalmers has no particular confidence that a consensus will emerge in the next century. “Maybe there’ll be some amazing new development that leaves us all, now, looking like pre-Darwinians arguing about biology,” he said. “But it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if in 100 years, neuroscience is incredibly sophisticated, if we have a complete map of the brain – and yet some people are still saying, ‘Yes, but how does any of that give you consciousness?’ while others are saying ‘No, no, no – that just is the consciousness!’” The Greenland cruise concluded in collegial spirits, and mutual incomprehension.
It would be poetic – albeit deeply frustrating – were it ultimately to prove that the one thing the human mind is incapable of comprehending is itself. An answer must be out there somewhere. And finding it matters: indeed, one could argue that nothing else could ever matter more – since anything at all that matters, in life, only does so as a consequence of its impact on conscious brains. Yet there’s no reason to assume that our brains will be adequate vessels for the voyage towards that answer. Nor that, were we to stumble on a solution to the Hard Problem, on some distant shore where neuroscience meets philosophy, we would even recognise that we’d found it. Follow the Long Read on Twitter: @gdnlongread
This article was amended on 21 January 2015. The conference-at-sea was funded by the Russian internet entrepreneur Dmitry Volkov, not Dmitry Itskov as was originally stated. This has been corrected.
The following essay is my response to a series of questions posed by a reader of Brian Hines' blog, Church of the Churchless.
APPRECIATIVE READER WRITES:
But I think what you are saying is that you are indeed critiquing the theology not as a layman but as a scientist, as someone who’s put in the requisite work in terms of picking up the math and physics and existing theory (in short, in the capacity of the scientist). In your case, this would translate as someone who’s acquired the book-knowledge, the history of the faith, the details of the theology; and also, crucially, the meditation; and also, even more crucially, the actual inner “experiences”. Am I right?
DAVID LANE REPLIES:
I think each of us are (at some of our best moments) working scientists in the sense that we observe certain phenomena and try our best to figure out why it is so. We come up with all sorts of hypotheses and then if we are honest in our inquiry we test out our guesses against other ideas and the one that is (relatively) best at explaining the data we tend to accept, even if only tentatively. Thus when it comes to meditation and spirituality, each one of us has to engage in the experiment and then decide (avoiding as best as possible group think and theological tethering) how to interpret what arises, hopefully keeping open minded to alternative viewpoints.
APPRECIATIVE READER WRITES:
[Quick little on-the-side comment/request while on the matter of your “experiences : Would you be comfortable sharing those experiences in your own words? Actual personal experiences only, not what’s “supposed to be”? I’d be REALLY interested, fascinated, to be able to learn about that. I understand they ask you not to talk about this sort of thing, and if you’re not comfortable breaking that particular tenet of theirs, then it’s cool. Although I’m hoping you’ll say you find that particular tenet amongst the unreasonable and pointless diktats of RSSB, and that you will be able to relate to us something of what you’ve “seen within”.]
DAVID LANE REPLIES:
I think one of the underlying reasons that Sant Mat gurus have argued against revealing one’s inner experiences is because they can be so personal and particular. As for myself (and what I suspect is common or more universal and not merely due to individual peculiarities), I have noticed the following during shabd yoga meditation:
1) prolonged simran or repetition does help one to keep at the eye focus and that once this is sufficiently accomplished the extremities of the body have a very pleasant (at times almost exhilarating) feeling of numbness. In the article The Science of Going Within we described the process and theorized that it may have a biochemical basis similar to sleep paralysis.
“According to adepts and serious students of shabd yoga, one of the first signs that the meditation technique is working is the distinct feeling of numbness in the lower extremities. This is coupled with a sense of conscious withdrawal where one oftentimes intuits that something profound is about to occur, such as entry into a new and luminous state of awareness. The intriguing question—at least from a neurobiological perspective—is to pinpoint biochemically what is happening during this first stage of meditation. It appears that the same chemicals that keep your body relatively still while asleep and dreaming (where one might be surfing, jumping, or flying…. with arms and legs moving about in all sorts of rotations) may also be activated in deeper stages of meditation. The fundamental difference being that in dreaming one is usually unconscious of such chemical interferences whereas in shabd yoga one consciously feels the onslaught of these chemicals becoming operative.In a breakthrough study, two Canadian neuroscientists, Patricia Brooks and and John Peever, located two neurotransmitters which inhibit bodily movement when dreaming. As reported in the Journal of Neuroscience's press release, “During REM sleep — the deep sleep where most recalled dreams occur — muscles that move the eyes and those involved in breathing continue to move, but the most of the body's other muscles are stopped, potentially to prevent injury. In a series of experiments, University of Toronto neuroscientists Patricia L. Brooks and John H. Peever, PhD, found that the neurotransmitters gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and glycine caused REM sleep paralysis in rats by “switching off” the specialized cells in the brain that allow muscles to be active. This finding reversed earlier beliefs that glycine was a lone inhibitor of these motor neurons. “Interestingly, sleep paralysis, where one feels incapable of moving their body during sleep, which is on occasion accompanied by nightmares or visions, may offer a tantalizing clue to what may be transpiring during the first significant stages of shabd yoga meditation Sleep paralysis is a transcultural phenomenon and can be either a chronic condition where one's sleep patterns can be dramatically impacted or occur in only isolated and rare episodes. Sleep paralysis can range from one minute to an hour. A number of theories have been proposed to explain why it occurs, but it appears that such disruptive sleep patterns are directly correlated to a disjunction between R.E.M. and wakefulness where an erstwhile smooth transition between such states is somehow damaged or altered. Shabd yoga is a relatively simple technique, arguably dating back to the pre-Vedic period in India, which is designed to induce a conscious out-of-body experience that is facilitated by a three-fold method of constant repetition of certain words, listening to internal, subtle sounds, and focusing on inner light/lights. As Charan Singh, the late spiritual master at Radhasoami Satsang Beas, explains, “The electric current or battery charge you feel is the withdrawal of the spirit currents from the body. This will gradually change to numbness of the body and travel upward. Please do not become frightened over this withdrawal of he soul current from the body.” Shabd yogis in general, however, have not tried to correlate their inner journeys with a deeper neurobiological understanding since their practice has been intertwined for centuries with a gnostic-like theology where the body and the spirit are viewed as distinct entities. However, if shabd yoga meditation is indeed a neurobiological process then there should be telltale signs of such that can be quantified by accurately measuring the levels of neurotransmitters such as gamma-aminobutyric acid and glycine in the brain while one is feeling the sensation of conscious paralysis while meditating. Indeed, one wonders if there are not chemical ways of inducing the same effect in non-meditators and seeing whether or not they report similar experiences as their shabd yoga counterparts. Our hypothesis is that shabd yoga practitioners who experience the onslaught of numbness in their extremities (which shouldn't be confused with parasthesia—the sensation that one feels when one's foot goes to “sleep”) during deep meditation are experiencing a biochemical process that is similar to what happens when we are asleep and certain neurochemicals manifest to inhibit bodily movements. In other words, shabd yoga induces a conscious sleep paralysis of sorts. If this is correct, we should be able to ascertain whether or not gamma-aminobutyric acid and glycine levels are operative.”
2). The sound current or shabd is a real phenomenon since it appears that almost anyone can hear internal sounds within him or herself during moments of concentration. It also has variations of subtleness and intensity and when the meditation is going smoothly such sounds can have a deeply pulling effect, such that one can have sensations of being pulled out of the body and a rushing feeling. The larger twin questions, however, are: What is causing this sound? And, what does it ultimately mean?
Sant Mat and Radhasoami and Nad Yoga related groups have already decided on the ontological significance of shabd and have made it the cornerstone of their respective theologies and claim it is the manifestation of the Supreme Being. God’s calling card, so to say. If we take a more agnostic position (and avoid the religious overlays that are invariably intertwined with shabd experiences), then we can keep open to a multiplicity of explanations, some of which may be purely physiological in origination.
But uncovering a physical basis to the sound current shouldn’t be surprising since there is nothing demeaning when relating consciousness and its manifestations to material substances, especially when matter itself (given its hierarchical structure) is as mysterious as saying something is purely spiritual.
Yet, when a religious path has predicated its entire superstructure on a particular interpretation (as we see in shabd yoga circles), that same religion will tend to resist explanations that differ with its core dogma. This is why calling Radhasoami a science is fraught with difficulties, given its preset ideology.
This is also why reading and understanding Faqir Chand’s life and work can be so controversial and liberating. Faqir has a more open-ended approach to the subject, despite being appointed a guru in the tradition by Shiv Brat Lal. Faqir repeatedly stated that he could be wrong about his interpretations and asked other shabd yoga masters to correct him if that were the case. Moreover, Faqir provided a much more psychological understanding of the inner regions and radically exclaimed that all inner visions (regardless of their majesty) were entirely self-generated and a product of one’s own mind.
APPRECIATIVE READER WRITES:
What you’re saying (as I understand it—correct me if I’m wrong) is this: just as in science you have observations, basis which you build hypotheses: thus in this case you have experiences and insights, and basis those experiences and insights you’re building up a theology. So the theology is not “revealed”: what is “revealed” are the experiences and insights (the counterpart of science’s observations), while the theology is the attempted interpretation of those experiences (the hypotheses, in other words). Am I right? And basis your own experiences (as well as what you’ve read, Faqir Chand for instance), you’re questioning elements of the theology.
DAVID LANE REPLIES:
Yes, what you write here is spot-on. We seem predisposed to connect our inner experiences with a preset cartography such that we start to believe that they are one and the same. We have a projective arc, similar in import to what Freud had discovered with his patients who invariably “transferred” all sorts of motivations on his part, never recognizing them as their own. The difficulty is that when one has an extraordinary experience (as I did with speaking in tongues at the age of 15), there is often a deep desire to make sense of it. So we look around and depending on our culture we try to “fit” the numinous encounter within a given framework, such as I did when I was given the Bible as a roadmap for understanding glossolalia. Once this happens, we then entangle our inner experience with an outer theology, giving it more power than it might deserve. This became uber clear to me when I examined Kirpal Singh’s claim that he could give inner experiences to his disciples on the day of their initiation or during a special meditation sitting. As I explained in the Kirpal Statistic,
Self Projected Visions
“It turns out that almost everybody has the inherent ability to see inner light and hear inner sound. Moreover, almost everybody has the capacity to have an out-of-body experience and behold wondrous inner visions. You don't need to go to an Indian guru to have such experiences indeed, you don't need to go anywhere at all. In the early 1980s when I was teaching religious studies at a Catholic high school, I tried several meditation experiments with my students which convinced me that Kirpal Singh and other gurus like him were taking undue credit for their disciples' inner experiences. In my trial mediation sessions, I informed my students beforehand about the possibility of seeing inner lights and hearing inner sounds. Naturally, given the boring routine of secondary education, my students were intrigued. I informed them that I knew of an ancient yoga technique that would facilitate their inner voyages. I turned the lights off, instructed them briefly about closing their eyes gently and looking for sparks of light at the proverbial third eye. I told them that I would touch some students on the forehead lightly with my fingers. They meditated for some five minutes. I then proceeded to ask them about their experiences. [Kirpal Singh invariably did such a process directly after his initiation ceremonies; he also kept a running tally of how many saw stars and so on-something which I have called the 'Kirpal Statistic'.] To my amazement, since I felt that Kirpal Singh and others were actually transmitting spiritual power, the majority of my students reported seeing light. A few students even claimed to have visions of personages in the middle of the light. Others reported hearing subtle sounds and the like. I repeated the experiment on four other classes that day. I have also in the past ten years conducted the same experiment on my college students (both undergraduate and graduate). The result, though differing in terms of absolute numbers, is remarkably the same. The majority see and hear something. It doesn't take a neuropsychologist or a sociologist trained in statistics to realize that Kirpal Singh and others were simply tapping into an already built reservoir of meditational possibilities. Religious devotees seem overly eager to give up responsibility for their own neurological happenings, believing instead that it takes a 'Master' to draw their attention 'within.' This may or may not be the case (and I am not implying that gurus don't have anything good to offer), but one thing is certain: Kirpal's claims, and others like his, cannot be divorced (as they often are in Sant Mat related groups ) from an initiates own cultural and psychological field of interplay. It is that interplay, that acceptance as fact of a guru's method and the disciple's own inherent capacity neurological or mystical for inner experiences, which fuels the claims of would-be masters. It seems wise to me, in light of Near-Death Experiences and the plethora of other meditation accounts, to inspect how we see and hear during our inner voyages of light and sound. Then we may be able to understand why such experiences can occur to almost anybody, anywhere, anytime. It may also help us contextualize and appraise the claims of gurus like Kirpal Singh, who insist on taking credit for their disciples' wondrous visions. If, as I have suggested, that anybody can act as a conduit for such other-worldly experiences, then Kirpal and gurus like him should be judged on some other criteria, since their claims for uniqueness and exclusiveness are anything but unique and exclusive. The 'Kirpal Statistic' is exactly that: the probable outcome that the majority of meditators, provided the necessary instructions in Shabd or Nad yoga practice, will see and hear something.”
APPRECIATIVE READER WRITES:
Gurinder Singh steadfastly refusing to directly engage with crucial questions, that too appears distinctly fishy! What you say about large numbers and too little time is true I suppose, but surely answering crucial questions squarely is one of the chief functions of the Guru/Sheikh? (Yes, I know about the “inner guidance” theory. I’ll take that with a pinch of salt, unless someone can say that they themselves have received such inner guidance from the Guru. Have you, David?) Although I suppose there is always the Faqir Chand interpretation of even that inner guidance (should such guidance actually have been forthcoming), so that the “inner Guru” is seen as no more than a mental projection, or something like that. (Yes, I’ve read a bit on Faqir Chand’s experiences and views, after finding out about him from Brian’s blog. Especially that part where his followers say they saw him and were guided and/or helped by him, but Faqir Chand himself did nothing nor was aware of anything of this kind.) In which case clearing people’s genuine doubts (that is to say, teaching) would become one of the prime duties of the Guru, right? Which would make Gurinder Singh’s shying away repeatedly from tough questions look even more suspicious! And why would someone keep quiet about this? The only answer that suggests itself is: to perpetuate the myth about themselves. That’s plain dishonest and underhand, isn’t it? What is your own hypothesis on all this, David? What would you say is the role of the Guru, then? You seem to agree with Faqir Chand: in which case, why do we even need a Guru? (I mean Guru as defined by RSSB; there are others that define a Guru merely as a teacher, which is a wholly separate and acceptable definition.) He isn’t GIHF; he isn’t some kind of supernatural conduit ; so all he is a teacher, right? Can’t you have four of them at the same time, then, or forty? Or none?
DAVID LANE REPLIES:
You raise some very elemental and important questions here. Let me see if I can tackle the Faqir Chand issue first. It has been my experience that Beas related gurus (and those related to Dayalbagh, Soamibagh, and Peepalmandi) have distanced themselves from Faqir’s more sweeping revelations, particularly what the outer guru knows and doesn’t know about the inner state of their disciples.
I remember the strange reaction I got from the Dera administration (specifically Professor K.S. Narang, who was Chairman of Publications and later Chairman of the Dera Board) back in the Winter of 1981 about me wanting to publish Faqir Chand’s autobiography, which Faqir had kindly dictated in Urdu and had translated at my request. Faqir had only died just three months prior (September 11, 1981) and I was keen to finalize a printed version of the book for larger distribution. Prior to visiting the Dera that session I had sent a proof copy of The Unknowing Sage (the title I gave to Faqir’s autobiography) and a copy of my M.A. thesis, Radhasoami Mat (which was a genealogical description of how Radhasoami developed since the death of its founder, Shiv Dayal Singh).
I can still vividly recall meeting with Professor Narang in his administrative office at the Dera and how he tried to convince me not to publish Faqir’s narrative or my M.A. thesis. It struck me as quite strange since just prior the same administration had asked for several copies of my work on Eckankar so that they could distribute it to their Western representatives. Something didn’t settle right for me at that time. Narang’s words (which apparently came directly from Charan Singh) were that I would be doing “no service to Sant Mat.” I protested and explained that Faqir’s experiences were unique and of great benefit to those embarked on spiritual quest since he was so frank and honest in his descriptions. Instead of engaging me with what Faqir had realized in his life, Narang tried to cast dispersions on Faqir’s character. I was taken aback by this tactic since it appeared to me (even at the time) that the Dera should be more magnanimous about a mystic who had just died even if they may have disagreed with his findings. My gut feeling was that Faqir Chand’s revelations about how little the guru knows hit a sore spot among the Dera hierarchy since it contradicted the status quo. I say this precisely because even if the Beas gurus were much more knowing than Faqir (and were the “Perfect Masters” their literature describes), they would understand that Faqir’s revelations would help explain “lesser” gurus and how their respective disciples get all sorts of miraculous visions, even if they had no power whatsoever. But Beas didn’t see it this way; instead they saw it as a challenge. This too would be fine with me if Beas would openly and clearly explain (with evidence and not merely anecdotes) how exactly Faqir Chand was mistaken. Instead, when I pushed this issue the only responses I got were elliptical and couched in mitigating language that could be taken in several different ways.
I distinctly remember being at the Beas train station as I was getting ready to depart and having a sinking feeling in my stomach that the Dera was not being as straightforward as they should be. Something felt amiss, at least to me.
I went ahead and published the Unknowing Sage and even published an edited section of it for the Laughing Man Magazine in the United States a few months later in 1982, which was widely distributed. I also resisted the Dera’s attempt to have me curtail my researches into early Radhasoami history even though I knew they were touchy (insecure?) about their early connections (and dissociations) from the Agra satsang. When it came to my Ph.D. dissertation at UCSD, I got a letter from Professor Narang requesting that I should not publish such material.
Again, I compared and contrasted this with how the Dera welcomed my Eckankar research (which was much more controversial) with how sensitive they were about delving into early Radhasoami succession history. It should be stated that the Dera has been much less forthcoming than almost any other satsang about releasing pertinent information about their development. Even though I was not initiated at the time (and working as Professor Juergensmeyer’s Research Assistant for the express purpose of developing the most comprehensive guru genealogical history to date), the Dera officials balked when I asked them pointed questions about their relationship with the Taran Tarn satsang (founded by Baba Bagga Singh) and its then present leader Sri Pratap Singh. [Sidenote: Pratap Singh was succeeded by his son, Deva Singh.] Whenever I wrote letters to Professor Narang or others at the Dera trying to unearth certain key historical facts I was only given the scantiest of facts.
It is a matter of historical record that the Dera has been somewhat duplicitous in its reconstruction of early Radhasoami history. For instance, a close comparison of the first English translation of Partap Singh’s letters to Sawan Singh and Bibi Rukko after Jaimal Singh’s death (published five decades ago) with the second and unabridged translation (printed thirty years later) shows a concerted effort early on to mislead readers on certain core issues, including the status given to Jaimal Singh and the directives concerning initiation.
Beas’ bowdlerizing of history to its own favor is unmistakable and, I am sure, is common with almost all other religious movements as well. But this doesn’t then mean that we should turn a blind eye to such manipulations. I say all this primarily because it seems to me that Beas’ reaction to Faqir Chand is one of an organizational concern since his revelations casts a pale shadow on the theological hype that is spliced throughout their most popular texts. Faqir Chand claims (and there is no reason to doubt his memory on this, given how forthcoming he has been on other matters) that he went to Sawan Singh early in his tenure to be relieved of his duty as a guru since he knew that if he told the unvarnished truth it would cause a controversy. He states that Sawan not only backed his ministry but even admitted that he couldn’t be as honest as Faqir given the constrictions of his large and growing organization.
So, yes, I do think that Gurinder Singh and Beas want to have their cake and eat it too. At one end we hear that Gurinder can respond in a very human (and unknowing) fashion and at the other continue to publish books where it is repeatedly claimed that the gurus at Beas are Perfect or are God in Human Form. Whereas Agra gurus have been “orthodox” or fundamentalist in its doctrines (“Radhasoami Mat is the highest religion of all) and Beas masters more “paradoxical” (depending on the audience), Faqir Chand (based as he was in Hoshiarpur) has been heretical and his teachings considered a radical heterodoxy. It is little wonder, therefore, that Faqir’s revelations have been met at best with unconvincing refutations and at worst with uncomfortable silence.
Faqir Chand was very upfront about the dishonesty he saw in Sant Mat gurus and he was not in the least shy in calling them out on it (even by name). As Faqir himself argued, “My physical form appears in visions to many of my satsangis and helps them to tide over some of their difficulties. I receive numerous reports of this effect from the satsangis concerned, orally and by letters. In my heart of hearts I know for certain that I do not know where and when these visions arise and help them miraculously; nor do I produce them. Then, how does it happen? What is the explanation for this? I believe that the intensified faith of these devout persons becomes creative and produces these results. Many so-called gurus mis-appropriate the credit for similar happenings, which take place in their disciples, whose own true faith should be held responsible for those results. By the lack of moral courage and honesty on the part of pseudo gurus, credulous disciples are kept in the dark and fleeced under fake pretenses. I alert the faithful, but simple-minded satsangis, to beware of such sneaks and their false claims.” (cited in the new book, The ProjectiveArc: Guru Visions and Theological Tethering).
Theological Tethering
I think the guru can be extremely helpful in the spiritual quest provided that he or she is a transparency to our own innermost yearnings and not as a “catcher’s mitt.” Undoubtedly bhakti is a powerful force and very helpful in meditation. But there is a paradoxical Catch-22 in this dyad. The more one values one’s master, the greater one’s expectations become about that person. So when a disciple thinks his guru is God it can act as a tremendous force in focusing one’s mind during meditation, not to mention outer darshan during satsang. Such bhakti does indeed work as a sort of spiritual aphrodisiac, even if the guru in question has no power whatsoever. But despite the obvious fact the disciple is doing all the heavy lifting in the relationship (since he is doing the projecting), he or she must actually believe that the guru is the one with supreme power. Thus, if the devotee finds out (like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz) that the Master is merely human it is really quite difficult to get as energized as before. Ignorance of a guru’s lack of power is indeed a pathway to a certain form of bliss. This is akin to what happens when one is mesmerized by a famous person (a movie actor, a singer, a model) and then sees them in person for the first time. If they are really enamored with the star they get an indescribable rush when coming into contact with them. But if they see through the “star making machinery” (to quote Joni Mitchell) that luminous rush dissipates.
Perhaps this is why the guru game works in the beginning, provided that the disciple can overwhelmingly convince him or herself that the person initiating them is indeed God in Human Form. Otherwise, if they pull the curtain too soon like Toto and see only a balloonist from Kansas (or, in our case, an Indian man with a nicely tied turban), then all that projected energy goes away. Now, this doesn’t always have to be the case, but it does seem to be such with the majority who find out that their so-called Perfect Master doesn’t live up to the literature’s hyped billing.
Perhaps this Catch-22 is why Beas and other related gurus are reticent about following Faqir Chand’s lead because it would cause many disciples to forego the path. Simply put, if you think your Guru is God you are much more willing to put in hours of meditation and hours of seva. If, however, you think your guru is merely human (and without requisite magical abilities, since it is your own faith and devotion creating the internal fireworks) then the urge to perform extraordinary devotions may slacken, if not devolve altogether.
Of course, the guru interplay doesn’t have to be this way. If the teacher can serve as a transparency to one’s self, who consistently forces the disciple to look within and not to some external icon or to serve the needs of an organization, then perhaps having such a guide can be liberating.
To be sure, Sant Mat gurus do talk this way (the real path is within you) but far too often the student gets enveloped into the needs of the institution that entraps one into its unique theological net. All of this is quite understandable and Max Weber has written at length about the routinizing of charisma and how a small group inevitably turns bureaucratic the larger it becomes.
If you look at the vast numbers now following Gurinder Singh, it is little wonder that he must exercise tremendous restrictions in order to keep his organization under control and still thrive.
One must acknowledge that Gurinder is in a very difficult position and how he keeps the whole satsang afloat is impressive indeed. But this, in turn, doesn’t mean that one has to agree with his approach or his views on differing subjects. I, for one, can appreciate that on one end of the spectrum, he wishes to act as the Spiritual C.E.O. and expand the satsang and its centers worldwide. But what may be imperative from an organizational standpoint may not dovetail with what certain individuals seek and desire from a spiritual path.
As to your question about how many gurus one can have, I think it all depends on how we view the teacher in question. Certainly, in life we have innumerable guides but when it comes to forming tight relationships with others we tend to have very few close partners since it requires so much time and energy, not to mention that most dreaded of words . . . commitment. I think quite frankly it is an individual affair and depends almost entirely on one’s own perceived needs and desires at the time.
APPRECIATIVE READER WRITES:
Brian’s written a blog post where he links the primacy of the Guru in RSSB to a cultural trope more than anything else. That there is such a cultural trope is very true; but do you yourself agree that the primacy of Guru is no more than just that? What does your own experience say? Do we really a need a Guru (with capital G) at all (as opposed to just a teacher)? [I’m looking for personal answers, basis personal experience, not pro forma dogma. But I don’t think you’d proffer pro forma dogma anyway, so perhaps that qualification was unnecessary.]
DAVID LANE REPLIES:
Faqir Chand had a very interesting take on this whole Guru business and the need for one. In his first few letters to me (given how young I was), he suggested that such yearnings are due to some deficiency in our early life and those who are better acclimatized to their surroundings and circumstances tend not to get obsessive about such spiritual pursuits. So to answer your question, I think no one needs a guru at all, except (and the emphasis is rich with irony) if one believes that he or she needs one. Silly analogy, but no one really needs a “living” teacher to learn how to surf unless, of course, one thinks it is necessary. It is our needs, our desires, which fuels and sustains the Master/disciple paradigm. This doesn’t mean that gurus are not helpful (just like surf instructors they can be), but they can also be detrimental as well. One doesn’t have to look any further than to John-Roger Hinkins, Sathya Sai Baba, and Thakar Singh to underline this point. In other words, I don’t buy the theological dogma that the transcendental being of the multiverse (if there is such a one) has somehow closed the pearly gates to all and sundry unless they got initiated by Babaiamtheonlyone in the hill station of Simla.
APPRECIATIVE READER WRITES:
Finally : What do you think of Gurinder Singh, then? You don’t think he’s GIHF, that much is clear from your comment. So what is he then, spiritual adept, or charlatan? Or something in between?
DAVID LANE REPLIES: I have many different thoughts about Gurinder Singh. Let me start off positively and say what has impressed me. 1. Having met Gurinder Singh in a fairly long personal interview in Austin, Texas, and seeing him upfront in Chicago, Palm Springs, and New Delhi, I have found him to be quite intelligent and very sharp. 2. I think Gurinder’s architectural tastes are quite refined and he has approved some exquisite building designs. 3. Gurinder has inspired thousands of his followers to be sevadars and perform tireless tasks in constructing large properties and organizing satsang events in countries across the globe. I have been treated with the utmost kindness by these volunteer helpers and much credit must be given to Gurinder for guiding such a large congregation. 4. Gurinder has resisted being photographed and has discouraged publicity about himself and Radhasoami Satsang Beas. He has also strengthened the requirements for initiation, insisting that neophytes make absolutely sure they are ready to follow such a path. This is altogether commendable. 5. Because Gurinder has traveled extensively he has made it easier for interested seekers to see him and ask questions. Now, on the opposite end of the spectrum, I have had reservations about Gurinder Singh from almost day one. But as I have said on several occasions, this may be due to my own myopia. For whatever reasons (and I could spell them out in detail, but I have done that too many times already), I just don’t feel entirely comfortable with Gurinder Singh, whereas with Charan Singh I felt entirely at home. Somehow I am a square peg to Gurinder’s circle. I truly wish it were otherwise. I did deeply enjoy going to satsang in Delhi and even have fond memories of Gurinder’s “Pope mobile” darshan. I also love satsangis in general as they are an exceptionally nice and kind group of people. But maybe we all get to a stage where we need to focus more on the internal quest and less on the external machinations of one. Charan Singh captured this well when he said that he wished for us to give up this game of the form and turn our love towards the formless. I do know that I meditate more now than ever and that I appreciate the hard work that sevadars do to make one’s experience at satsang a comfortable one. Emotionally I am still very much attached, even if theologically I am an unrepentant heretic. I want to thank you Appreciative Reader for your finely tuned questions and for giving me the opportunity of thinking anew about these important issues. Having just visited India in November and going to Agra where Radhasoami was first founded has flooded me with memories of what it was like when Charan Singh was still alive. I have absolutely no regrets about getting initiated in 1978 even if I am not anyone’s ideal of a satsangi. In conclusion, let me say some words about why I admire what Brian Hines has accomplished with his blog and why I think it is vitally important that his critical voice be heard and not prematurely silenced. Brian Hines has been extremely open about his spiritual life and he has shown tremendous courage in revealing what he has accomplished (and not accomplished) doing shabd yoga meditation. Too many readers in the past (with an orthodox bent of mind, no doubt) have lambasted Brian alleging that he didn’t follow the path properly or that he should lessen his criticisms of Radhasoami. I don’t agree with this for a nano second. Brian Hines’ blog is satsang in the purest sense of that term. He is trying to tell the truth in the best way he knows how. Jagat Singh is famously quoted as saying that 90 percent of spirituality is clear thinking. The best way to develop those skills of “vichar” and “vivek” is to take one’s rusty brain and have it cleaned and sharpened by one who is willing to think differently than you. This doesn’t mean that one agrees with everything that is written (I don’t even agree with all that I write sometimes), but one honors and appreciates when one takes the time to systematically explain his or her philosophy. Brian Hines has done me (and I believe countless others) a great service and I think that needs to be acknowledged. It is truly ironic that when he was asked to discontinue giving “official” satsangs sanctioned by Beas, Brian was liberated in the process and upped his game and gave even more profound ones. Charan Singh said on many occasions that critics are our best friends. I think there is much truth in that. Charan also gave a very wise piece of advice to me and others when we were young (and it has stuck with me all these years) He wrote that even if you spend your whole life researching and questioning the path, it is not time wasted but time gained. I think Radhasoami Satsang Beas is better served by its critics than those keeping silent because of blind allegiance.
Though physics has achieved much......far more could be achieved of a practical advantage with the advancement of the new paradigm of Multi-Dimensional Science. See link http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Multi-Dimensional_Science
This table provides an overview of the scientific relevant discoveries which would have to be predicted in its entirety by a theory of everything, in order to claim itself as a success.
Advances in the knowledge of the laws of nature consisting either of experimental discoveries or theoretical proposals that were confirmed experimentally.
