A Quiet Watercourse

Quite some time ago (in 2006 in fact), I commented on the difference between Spirituality and Religion.  Over time I’ve stuck to my guns, that they are NOT the same thing, and I’ve seen a few comments around the place that have made me want to revisit this old territory for a quick post.

I like to define Spirituality as a sense of that which is common between us, regardless of Religion; that we are not islands in the world and that we are not separate from, but intertwined with the world around us.  It provides a sense of the sacred in the world, that some things go beyond our materialism, and that we should look beyond the daily grind and the “rat race”.

Some of what I just said can be said of what it though of as Religion.  I think that Religion is a set of rites, rituals and customs that sit on top of Spirituality, that provide more of a framework and structure.  To a degree this is needed, I don’t argue that point, but it is not a good thing it it should grow to stifle things.

The comment that spurred me to write this was that if you have Spirituality without Religion you just have a vague feeling of goodwill, in my view, that isn’t accurate and is quite derisive.  I’ve come to realise more and more over time that there’s a lot more to a simple Spirituality then a vague feeling of good will, it seems to be a much more intuitive thing and it also seems more feminine to my sense of it.  As any Taoist or Zen Buddhist will tell you there is a thing that can be dimly sensed that is beyond being articulated in words, that can only be glimpsed intuitively and can’t be grasped by reason as is the case with the scriptures of a by the book religion.  Further to this, you must do the glimpsing yourself, a priest cannot do the work for you, you must work to your own salvation!

To try to bind it in scriptures is (as Alan Watts so brilliantly said) to walk into the restaurant and eat the menu instead of the meal.  My own conclusion that has been spurred by the comment I read, is that Spirituality without religion is quite valid if difficult to grasp and also not so easy to fit into neat categories with names.  It can live without overt Religiousness quite happily.   Religion without Spirituality on the other hand is doomed from the outset.  It would seem to me to be a set of scriptures and rules and rituals that have had the original point somehow lost along the way, if this is the case, then is religion without spirituality a hollow soulless shell?

Well, if you look back a few posts, you’ll find that I felt compelled to invesitgate my home team; the Anglican Church.  It was a well meaning enough idea, I felt moved to reinvestigate them, to see if I’d missed something and dismissed them too hastily, all those years ago.

So I bought a copy of a NIV bible and a book on the history of the gospels, also a book on the history of the God belief and it’s interpretation[2].  Well, the bible is an interesting read, I found myself pointing out a problem before we’d left the Creation, and as for the flood and the whole Sodom & Gomorrah thing, well others have covered the Noah’s Ark story in more detail than I ever could.  S&G was just mishandled full stop, at least to my mind.

I fast forward to the New Testament and find myself perplexed by the differences in the Gospels, yes I appreciate they were written by different men for differing audiences, but there are problems that go beyond that.  Inconsistent reporting is the most outstanding, but that is something I can’t really overlook in a text that makes the claims this book does.

Then I wander through some sites and find that nobody agrees on the interpretation, some very literalistic (see my essays for my views on that) and some very liberal but nothing that really solves the issues I see.

So I revisited arguments, religious apologetics vs skeptics, I found that things haven’t really changed.  To be honest, I got heartily sick of debates where nobody really manages to resolve anything honestly.  All I saw were arguments full of smokes and mirrors obscuring tactics, which made me ask ‘If you religious apologetics can’t even discuss this on the level, is it even worth bothering with at all?’, I appreciate that everyone does it (even inadvertently) from time to time, but there is so damn much of it in what I was reading that it made me sick to the depths of my mind.

That was what did finally it, I have what I consider legitimate criticisms of organised dogmatic Christianity and couldn’t find a straight externally verifiable (i.e. not circular logic) answer that didn’t shoot at least some of the bottom layer of cards out from under the whole edifice.  All the answers I could come up with that worked left me with a thing that wasn’t much of anything (no omnipotent interventionist creator, no legitimate ancient dogma, etc) and I realise now I was applying the valuable lessons I learned from reading the Kalama Sutta.

Eventually, I realised I was reading the Bible as a Skeptical Buddhist, which kind of resolved things for me.  Things were finally sealed by my learning about the Panadura Debate (or Panadura Controversy) in Sri Lanka.  An exact transcript of this doesn’t exist as far as I know, but I have searched and found a commented summary of it gleaned via an Internet forum.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the growing campaign for the British government to apologise for the treatment of Alan Turing.

I support this campaign, and have already signed the petition linked to above. But it’s not just because I think Turing was treated abysmally badly, but also because I think we still harbour the sort of tendencies that led to Turing’s treatment and that needs to be highlighted.  We need to stop writing people off because of one bad thing, it seems that as soon as we realise that they’re not perfect there’s hell to pay, our treatment of high profile media figures is a perfect example of this.  Lao Tzu, Buddha and Jesus all warn us away from this behaviour, and while I’m not sure what Psychology has to say on the matter I can’t see it being particularly favourable.

What’s been equally interesting is comments I’ve been reading on the story, the feeling that maybe the British should apologise for everything from the Empire onwards.  Of course, if that sort of thing is acceptable, then the old colonial powers (yes, all of them, it wasn’t just us Brits) will be apologising for the next hundred years!

But the point I’d like to make is that the current generation can’t be held responsible for things that were done by past generations, I appreciate that people are hurt or national pride (and I think that this is mostly pride) has been injured, but once reasonable amends have been made (like the symbolic apology above) we need to move on and drop the blame game.

Of course, this failure to forgive grudges is mirrored in the doctrine of original sin.  I’ve been reading about the history of both the middle eastern religious movement and also the Bible, and it’s fascinating to see how the way the people have regarded the text has changed and to be honest, it tells you more about people than it does about God.

As for original sin, there are questions over how literally the story of the Garden of Eden was intended to taken, with the strong possibility that it was never intended (as with much of scripture) to be read literally.  My own feeling is that it is not.

The doctrine was heavily influenced, but not originated, by St Augustine of Hippo, the idea being that Adam’s sin is passed down to all of his descendants.  Now quite aside from the fact that several churches disagree with this doctrine, there is another problem.

Consider that our reasoning powers, the ability to have the kind of awareness we do, are evolved right there into our nature.  This would put that doctrine in the position of condemning a person simply for being Human, so along comes the Church with the cure.  Nice setup isn’t it?  I’ll also point out right here though that not all churches accept original sin, I don’t believe in tarring everyone with the same brush.

But, let’s face it, Evolution does rather torpedo the Eden story and with it original sin.  I prefer another reading of it, which is that the great weight and inertia of human history, culture and society have combined to put us in a position where we often fall short.  This sounds very much like Karma and is also the position of many Orthodox Churches.

To summarise?  We need to stop writing people off for not being perfect and once people and countries have apologised, stop guilt tripping them indefinitely.  Finally we need to realise that the sins of the fathers do not fall onto the shoulders of their sons.  If we’re to have a healthy future, we have to let go of things.

I just posted a new essay I’ve been working on, inspired by the phrase “Cafeteria Chistianity”.

I’ve always believed that we can’t take ancient texts at face value, but must look beyond them using them as signposts to the truth, not literal truth themselves.  To make this mistake is to not see the wood for the trees, or to use a wonderful phrase I picked up from the brilliant Alan Watts, to eat the menu not the meal.

Anyway, without further ado you can find my new essay “Cafeteria religion” in the sidebar, or just click here.

On my spiritual journey, I’ve been through a few places.  I’ve investigated Paganism, Atheism, Taoism and Buddhism.  Of course, when I started on this journey, I started as an Anglican.

Now, I’ve looked in depth to a lot of places, but not given Anglicanism the same viewing.  When I saw the Anglican Church apologise to Darwin, I felt that said a great deal that they could do that.  On closer inspection, it seems Darwin was Anglican himself and that Anglican community was (on the whole) quite quick to accept evolution.

So I plan to take a closer look at my home team (if you’ll pardon the football/soccer analogy) and see what I can find there.

The Anglican church is on the whole a very liberal one, not fire and brimstone, so I feel much safer doing this exploration there than with a bible thumping literalist organisation.  But as I’m sure my regular readers know, I have no time for scriptural literalness and consider it to be getting lost.  I have a couple of great little metaphors for that which I’ll save for my next post.

I’m also going to try a change in tack.  When I philosophise about something I’ll write an article rather than trying to spread things over multiple shortish posts.

So I have a book on the origin of the Gospels, and it also examines their writing style.  It’s already given me ideas for further reading and material of my own to develop, watch this space!

Well, I had an interesting experience in Secondlife last night, at a sim called “The Buddha Center” they showed a BBC video on the life of the Buddha.  As aide from the odd technical hiccup it was an enjoyable experience and when I found the video on YouTube, I thought I’d share it with everybody!

It’s 50 minutes in length, so be sure you have a cup of Tea when you click play, and the DVD purchase notice will vanish after the first 30 seconds or so. 

I’ve been reflecting on the phrase “The Meaning of Life” recently. The feeling arose within me that a meaning would remove all uncertainty from our lives, and it would also absolve us of responsibility for finding our own direction in life.

But as surely as we would lose the responibility, we also would lose the power to change the story, to take control. Let’s consider an opposite idea then, what if there isn’t a meaning in the way we like to think? I think that the meaning is to live mindfully in the moment, no matter what you happen to be doing.

OK, consider, if life is lived in the moment. So by looking for a meaning of life outside of the moment, from some external source, does our search mean we then miss the meaning?

I was meditating the other day when something came to my mind about these 3 little fellows.

So we have “See No Evil”, “Speak No Evil” and “Hear No Evil”.  There are a few meanings attached to these guys, from outright denial of evil (head in the sand) to a refusal to perform certain actions in case they propagate evil.  My own personal focus tends to be a little more on the inner world and I’d like to journey that way, if you’ll consent to walk with me for a minute.

The most obvious meaning is the physical one, literally a “head in the sand” approach, but I feel that this misses the mark.  At least, it does for me.  I would aim, personally, for the inner eyes, ears and mouth.  Not so much a denial of negativity, a refusal to see, but a sense of not allowing your inner self to be blinded, deafened or struck dumb by negativity.

For me there is a sense of trying to see and hear through what may seem to be a simple act of negativity to what underlies it, trying not to let the immediate feelings block that perception.  The same applies to our speech, we do need to try to think before we speak, we need to try to avoid perpetuating the negative situation we are faced with.  Examples of this can be found in most tabloids, something bad happens and the articles and stories use non-neutral emotive language, exactly what isn’t needed and exactly when it isn’t needed.

I feel the above qualities are certainly found along the eightfold path, it’s why we have to make the effort to awaken, to see clearly into the moment.

I was mulling Karma the other day after a number of events I’ve had happen.  I thought to myself “Rich, why don’t you put your thoughts into text and see how things go?”  So I plan to and hope to make 2 (or maybe even 3) posts.

So, I now need to explain what in the world I mean by that post heading.  Here goes.

I’ve seen the definite meme that Karma is some sort of divine judgment force, that there’s some kind of mystical account being kept for us.  I think that’s an unlikely state of affairs.

I tend to apply Occams Razor which means I usually go for the simplest explanation, thus I consider Karma to be a simple matter of cause and effect.  The reason it looks mystical is, in my view, down to the simple fact that we do not (and cannot possibly) possess (or keep track of) all the information in any given situation.  There are just too many variables, many of which are hidden.

For example, a person may well injure themselves in the gym, but again no mystical judgement force is involved.  Unheeded bad habits, poor exercise form over a number of years, simple carelessness, maybe even an undetected medical condition all can be factors.

So let’s build from the gym example, I gave examples of bad secular karma above.  But are there examples of good?  Of course there are, because there are things that can be doen to combat the above, even before they happen.

This is where I invoke parts of the Eightfold path. Right Mindfulness, awareness of your habits while using machines and performing exercises.  Mindfulness of the fact you may have a condition and taking that into account.  Right Action ties in by actually getting you to the doctors to get that condition checked, or seeing a Personal Trainer to get your poor form corrected.

Buddhist readers can no doubt take my example and tie the other elements of the path into it, so as is my habit, I’m going to leave the question open as a thought exercise for the reader.

It’s been a while since I posted here, but make no mistake, I’m still here.

During a Buddhist meeting in Second Life last weekend, there was a mention of levels of attainment and such things.  Later, I fell to thinking.  The whole thing with the notion of “levels of attainment” has its place, but at what point does it become a hinderance?

I know of martial arts instructors who don’t offer grading or belts because these things have been seen to cause elitism and attitude among students.  I can see the same risk with levels of attainment, but also they are something for us to cling to.

There are stories in Zen that illustrate this when a person in a humble position demonstrates greater knowledge and insight than the “worthies” in the upper reaches of the hierarchy.  So, in order to reach the truth, shall we let go of levels and hierarchies?  Do we recognise that the highest level is no level?

We need to be honest, are we doing this for an acknowledgment of an instructor/mentor, or for the rewards of the process?

Is this an ego trip or are you here for real?