What Compels Belief?

Originally posted Wednesday, May 1, 2024

When I wrote that I was having trouble with “the God question.” I was stuck, logically, perhaps linguistically, even structurally, with a long essay that I’d been working on for months, “A Buddhist looks at the proofs for the existence of God.” How might we consider the nontheistic stance of most Buddhist philosophers as they examine scholastic philosophy?  My starting point was Thomas Aquinas’s “Unmoved Mover,” then moving through the other “rational” arguments for the existence of God, including Saint Anselm’s Ontological Argument. I examined each argument objectively to determine how or if I was moved to belief. I am happy to say that I am still an agnostic until you lock me up in the shrine room or hand me a personal crisis I need help with.

But I find something lacking in a strictly intellectual discourse. There’s no emotional juice. I think the materialists bypass or even eliminate emotions because they make things messy. 

A friend suggested that I try the Gaia or Goddess model, and my personal reaction was: Is there something intellectual, spiritual, or material lacking in my life that 'believing’ in the goddess would remedy? Suddenly, I was thrown out of my ordinary world. Of course, all beliefs have consequences. Even a cursory self-examination reveals that many beliefs, assumptions about reality, and even prejudices influence me, even when I am not entirely aware of their existence, much less of their influence or inner workings. Do I believe simply because it makes me feel good, or do I believe because I am persuaded by a convincing rational argument? When I Google the scientific effects of serotonin levels in people of faith, it will show that in the long run, I will be happier if I surrender some of my mad, neurotic desire to seize control and hand it over to a Higher Power. If I believe that the early bird catches the worm, I get up earlier, catch people when they are more alert, make more money, and thus am happier. Or maybe not. Using Pascal’s bet: my chances of happiness remain high as long as you don’t require that I bet the farm.

My mother changed doctors when she found out that her specialist didn’t believe in God. She told me that confidence in a physician was based on a belief that decisions about her health were guided by God’s invisible hand. When faced with major surgery in the last years of her life, she turned to a team of Indian doctors at Yale New Haven Hospital. I didn’t ask her whether she had checked their religious credentials, but I suspect it fell into the “They believe in something” category—Krishna, Jesus, deities tend to blend into one as we age. Yes, among my beliefs is that Indian doctors make a much better living in New Haven than in New Delhi. Perhaps a motivational belief for Indian medical students when applying for residency in the US turns out to be true: an Indian doctor in the US earns between 125,000 and 180,000 USD, whereas in India, he or she would only earn about 50,000 USD.

I have argued that “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is a junk statement, but it persists. “Something is better than nothing” is not a strictly philosophical or faith statement. Let me examine it more closely. What kind of belief statements does it encompass, and how are these statements changed, strengthened, or made true by a personal assertion that they are true always and everywhere, despite any evidence to the contrary? Let’s look at a few examples.

In Germany in the 1930s, the belief that the Aryan race was superior to the rest of humankind was gaining traction. It had such dire consequences that it would probably be best left on the junk heap of intellectual, spiritual, and moral history. But enough people assented, and it devolved into a horrific war, as well as the attempted extermination of the Jewish race.

In the West, or at least among intellectual elites, people adhere to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But before the end of the Second World War, the statement or definition was not “a given.” Most of the male governing class agreed that any statement would include civil and political rights, until Eleanor Roosevelt convinced the United Nations to include social, economic, and cultural rights. Her belief has changed how we think about and argue about the structure of human society on Earth. 

Some have argued that, in his comments on Genesis 1, Augustine's claim that the Lord gave humanity dominion over the earth and its creatures set the stage for the exploitation of the earth that has led to the climate crisis. The burnt earth thesis probably extends further into the early Fathers, and it is even harder to prove that, as a belief, it was partially responsible. Adopting some notion of Gaia, or goddess consciousness, might be an antidote to this kind of thinking and nudge us to treat the material world with more respect and even reverence. Thank you Gerta Thunburg for capturing our imagination. You show us that belief takes more than just intellectual assent. Imagination and dreams carry some weight.

Does assenting to a personal belief in a God being, he/she/it, god or goddess, have any value? I could argue that it might have the opposite effect: it muddies the waters and makes us “deluded,” to borrow a Buddhist term. It might be time to go back to Saint Thomas and Anslem to disentangle the mess I got myself into.

Mr. Gurdjieff was a misogynist. Period. I brought receipts.

Is someone trying to edit him? Compare the meeting notes of Thursday, July 22nd, appearing in “Transcripts Of Gurdjieff's Wartime Meetings 1941-1946” (Book Studio, p.19) with the meeting of the same date recorded in “G.I. Gurdjieff Paris Meetings 1943” (Dolmen Meadow Editions, p.87).

There is a substantial missing passage in the Dolmen Meadow version. The excised passage in full reads:

[A long silence.]

P: May I ask a question, sir? There is one thing which has preoccupied me for a long time. How should a man act towards a woman so as to be her master and make her happy? To be really master of the situation.

Gurdjieff: Your question is, what is it necessary to do. First of all you must be a man inside yourself. Every woman should feel herself a man’s slave. This is the property of women, they are made that way. For that there is a law. You ought to represent the boss, the master. You should consider all things as the master. If you are like that, she, without manipulation, without anything, (it always happens) becomes your slave. Without explanations or anything, it only depends on you. If I am a man I will have a woman. This depends on what I am, what you are. If I ought to have seven wives all seven will be my slaves, perhaps because I am a man. Not only will all seven be unable to deceive me but they will tremble at the mere idea of deceiving me; they feel that they have a master. These seven women always and everywhere are my slaves. This, firstly, is what is necessary. Now secondly many other things are still necessary. What I have just said is the main thing. Now I say secondly: You are man, she is woman. Nature has given you more possibilities than to woman. You have more physical strength; everything you have more than her. Amongst all these things you have more logical thought than the woman. You should first prepare her, calm her, put her into a certain state and then logically explain to her what can happen for the future. Show her life not for today but life in a month, in a year, in five years time. As it is established on earth that if husband and wife live well together they will live a long time together, and as life is long it is necessary to explain to her what things she must not do and what she must do. If you explain to her as I have told you, she will do it.

P: One must not be angry, never negative?

Gurdjieff: You must be the opposite. Science says a woman is hysterical, she has five Fridays in one week. Man, a real man, has one Friday. Science of all epochs explains this. If you are not master of your state you do not know which Friday she has today. What you have decided, put that into her. You tell her. Even if she is at Friday number three, do the same number four or number five—do the same. If you continue a hundred times, a thousand times, she will transform herself and will receive that which you wish. You are obliged to be a man; she is obliged to fulfil her obligations as a woman. You cannot be egoist. You are a man. You ought to demand of her that she be woman. If the man is an egoist, he is merde. He wants to do everything (as it pleases him, by chance) and he expects his wife to be a woman? Little by little it can happen that she may reach the same state as him; either nature does it or it becomes established by force of law. Begin at the beginning. If she has five Fridays a week and if you, not being a man, have two or even three Fridays in a week, first of all, try, like any normal person to have only one Friday each week. When you succeed in having only one Friday, she too will have only one Saturday. Logical thought even automatically makes understandable the present, past, future and the rest. The man must be a man. Your question is very original and characteristic for everybody. A man can demand everything of his wife but he can only demand if he is, in truth, a man. If he is a man of the middle sex it is impossible. This, by the way, exists in all languages; there are two kinds of prostitutes, prostitutes in skirts and prostitutes in trousers. In trousers it is neither man nor woman—middle sex. He who always in his waking state is a man can never belong to the middle sex. Whether it be his mother, his sister or his wife, she will act as she is told to. Woman does not depend upon herself. If you are not a man then you are a prostitute and you suggest to her that which she is. You are half a man.

[All fall silent.]    

(@Dan Chirica)

The Stray Dog, Wandering with Gurdjieff

Real Wars kill people. Mythological Wars create cults

23rd April 2022, the Feast of Saint George

I'm going to write about Mr. Gurdjieff against the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

I cannot hide from real human suffering. If I really acknowledge how little I can do to change this situation, I know I'm powerless. Nonetheless, I constantly check online for the latest updates. I count the children evacuated from Mariupol. I wonder how many fighters remain in the labyrinth of bunkers and tunnels built to withstand a nuclear attack.

I know which side I should root for, or more accurately, I know which side I want to win, although I'm not aware of all the factors that govern my impulses. It seems clear that there are good guys and bad guys. I don’t know if Volodymyr Zelenskyy is hiding secret sins, but I can see Vladimir Putin in Russian TV news clips, keeping his distance at the end of a long white table with arcane golden imperial symbols planting its legs on the floor. His generals sit far away. Does anyone give him accurate information about the progress of his narcissistic war? It's a world of lies and manipulation. I have no reason to believe otherwise, though if I were in Russia, I would hear an entirely different story, and I know I would feel differently. What is accurate information, what is propaganda, and how can I tell the difference? Using filtered information is always tricky. I find sympathy impossible.

I am uneasy. My perceptions are almost archetypal, like watching Arjuna and Lord Krishna surveying the battlefield, going on and on about the “big picture.” I should direct my reflection back to the Bhagavad Gita when things are less heated, the actual winners and losers have been sorted out, and the bodies buried. All wars have consequences, but I am not in the horrific underground labyrinth of Mariupol. It is a theoretical conversation. I cannot know how or where we have been injured, even when I try to get personal about the cost.

However, this mythic, fable-like perspective is perfect for examining the story of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff.

The Stray Dog*

More than 100 years ago, during the Bolshevik Revolution, very close to this same battlefield, Gurdjieff started his wandering that would eventually take him and his followers to France. He had tried, unsuccessfully, to establish his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Tbilisi, then soon after in Essentuki. By 1920, he and his followers left Georgia for Constantinople. He'd become a stray dog, forced into roaming by the progenitors of the army currently bombing, slaughtering, and raping.

This small group of men and women was drawn from the Russian elite. Eventually, they found their way to Le Prieuré in Fontainebleau-Avon. This French chateau, the residence of Louis XIV's secret wife, Madame de Maintenon, was abandoned after a previous revolution impoverished its aristocratic owner. Then the first major global conflict created a mammoth fixer-upper where these homeless exiles set up an esoteric school.

They remained an elite group for the next 29 years he taught. Some prominent figures came to study with Gurdjieff, but he authorized very few senior students as teachers and left us scant, for the most part, very difficult, poorly written materials. Yet he has an outsized impact on modern spirituality. Many proponents of the Western Enneagram cite Gurdjieff as the source of their psychological/spiritual tool, though their claims are far from certain.

Gurdjieff was vague about his teachers. In Meetings with Remarkable Men, and in several other places, he makes them the stuff of legend, idealized characters, almost caricatures in a mythic story of discovery and intrigue. They imparted a special, hidden teaching. They are never clearly identified. This is the very nature of esotericism—obscure and only understood by a small number of people with special (and perhaps secret) knowledge. Understanding these teachings requires an initiation.

I meet “The Work.”

I moved to Berkeley in 1973 and began work in Claudio Naranjo’s Seekers After Truth, a name he borrowed from Gurdjieff. Our group of 50 to 60 people came from all walks of life. There were psychologists and professors, a Jesuit priest and a Franciscan Friar, two seminarians, one former nun, a devotee of Swami Rudrananda, a rabbi’s wife, and one woman who’d been associated with the Gurdjieff Foundation; several Ph.D.’s, two medical doctors, school teachers, at least one lawyer, more than a handful of psychology graduate students, body workers, therapists, a film-maker, a martial artist, a C-level New York fashion executive, Ravi Shankar’s mother-in-law, one professional journalist and a film distributor; but there were also carpenters, house painters and a French hippie. We were mostly white, straight (only 2 or 3 gay people), a large proportion of Jews, one Muslim, and a few Asians.

We explored the Enneagram of Fixations, and, by extension, told ourselves we were engaging in “The Work.” The figure of G.I. Gurdjieff, always referred to as “Mr. Gurdjieff,” or "Mr. G.," his pronouncements, statements about the nature of the universe, humankind’s ultimate purpose, and his methods for spiritual work were treated as sacrosanct.  Beelzebub's Tales was spoken of in hushed tones, but rarely read. If you read it but didn’t understand his jibberish or the insidious properties of the mysterious organ Kundabuffer, you were advised to re-board the spaceship Karnak and delve more deeply into the mysteries that eluded you. This language purported to have roots in several esoteric Eastern spiritual disciplines. Using it, wrestling with the complexity of the inner states it purported to describe, was part of the process of introspection, which Gurdjieff described as “Self-Remembering.”

Gurdjieff’s teaching has been passed down to us in several distinct categories. The carefully written unreadable book, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson: An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man; Meetings with Remarkable Men, apparently combines his own autobiographical work with a draft by his student, A.R. Orage, and finally Life is Real Only Then, When “I Am,” are fragments of talks edited by one of his principle students, Jeanne de Salzmann. The writing of students that Gurdjieff authorized, most notably P.D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous, also received his imprimatur.

There are anecdotal memoirs of students, plus extensive transcripts of his talks. The writings of men and women (both genders are represented, but men far outnumber women) who stand in the lineage of Fourth Way teachers who purport to transmit Gurdjieff’s teaching and to claim authority to teach. Finally, there are extensive writings by people who describe their own experiences and interpretations of his teachings. These vary widely from memoir to metaphysical speculation to hagiography.

I use the word “myth” to denote stories told about Gurdjieff’s understanding of the complexity of our human nature, driven by some overriding knowledge of the ultimate purpose of our human predicament. They include the repetition of phrases or instructions to people who sought his direction as they undertook their own inner search. Though Gurdjieff was a real person who had real contacts with humans that were, from their reports, immensely transformative, the myths that I am talking about are, for the most part, second-generation, embellished stories that share more with Aeneas’s journey from Troy than, and (I chose my example carefully) Krishnamurti’s talks at Ojai. Though I love Virgil’s poetry, I prize Jiddu Krishnamurti’s analysis.

I was born five years before Gurdjieff died in Paris, 29 October 1949. I met and had several conversations with one person, Lord John Pentland, who knew Gurdjieff over a long period and had been his student as well as a person he authorized to teach. I also knew several of Pentland’s students, most intimately a fellow Jesuit and gay man, Father Tom Charbeneau. I met the writer, Pamela Travers, who was Gurdjieff’s student, and I had a long association with Kathy Speeth, who sat on Gurdjieff’s knee when she was a toddler. I worked intensively for several years with Henry Korman, who claimed to be in the lineage of Fourth Way teachers, but later confessed to being a fraud. Others, most importantly Claudio Naranjo, used selected phrases and stories about Gurdjieff in their own teaching. Although I have combined this experience with my wide reading, I state at the outset that I am not a student of the Fourth Way, nor do I claim to have conducted a comprehensive study of Gurdjieff’s Teaching.

Gurdjieff’s public portrait is complex and tightly edited by his followers. On top of that, each one does his or her own editing. I have tried to report as accurately as possible what I can surmise from my own reading and research, as well as what I’ve been able to glean from second-hand accounts. For the purposes of argument, I've set my narrative against an idealized version of the man I’ve pieced together. Naranjo did not present himself as an heir to Gurdjieff’s teaching, but he was certainly conversant with it and frequently cited Gurdjieff as a prototypical teacher of the inner work he favored. He labeled him a “trickster,” standing in a venerable line of teachers who use unorthodox, even unethical means to compel a student to learn something they can’t see for themselves. Naranjo talked about “The School,” an interrelated set of teachings and teachers whose work could be traced, using some psychic map, to the same Source.

This unfettered style often veers outside normal ethical norms and opens the possibility for abuse. The end justifies the means. Our newfound sexual freedom encouraged an attitude of laissez-faire, which inevitably led to exploitation. Naranjo was very interested in psychedelics—he encouraged experimentation with drugs, notably LSD and Ayahuasca; he and his leaders allowed interactions that were outside professional guidelines; teachers’ credentials went unchecked or were inflated. In post-hippie, Beatnik California, Naranjo was not alone, encouraging some of these behaviors, engaging in some, and turning a blind eye to others. Many New Age teachers shared this sin. It comes part and parcel with the top-down authority structure that framed the conversation.

Trying to be as transparent as I can be in this conversation, I have spent an inordinate amount of time in my adult life exploring New Age esoteric and occult, a highly suspect endeavor, populated with the likes of Mme Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Edgar Cayce, Charles Webster Leadbeater, or Aleister Crowley. They all purported to be authentic or enlightened teachers with a clear channel to “All that Is.” This is rocky terrain, rife with snake oil salesmen and outright frauds. Some of these people were more convincing than others, basically because they spun better yarns, but the frauds all seem to have this in common—their stock in trade was taking advantage of vulnerable people. In my case, it was a severe personal crisis that I didn’t even recognize. I was looking for a way out. By directing my attention to my plight, seeming to dismantle it and returning life to some level of normalcy, acceptance, and happiness, roped me into its intrigue.

Several friends have discouraged my investigation. One asserts that Naranjo is not as important as he was when we were part of SAT, that his influence is waning. Another warns that negative comments deter people from undertaking the difficult work of introspection. These cautions do not deter me. The influence of Gurdjieff in modern, non-religious practice is far wider than might appear at first glance. It warrants examination. It extends from the presentation of the Enneagram in a Catholic setting to several “Human Potential Trainings/Processes,” notably the processes directly connected to the Fischer-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy, which Naranjo promoted and introduced to SAT. 

Most importantly, “The Work '' struck a chord with me, opening up a world that I had to explore. I got caught in the trap of not being able to see my own plight clearly. When I could open my eyes, I was forced to admit that I’d been the fool. It was a very uncomfortable predicament. The amount of personal capital that I’d already invested obscured the situation. What makes this gnostic enterprise difficult to crack is that it begins to unmask both the entrapment and the self-deception, the very thing that I’d sought to free myself from in the first place. It provided some sense of relief, but a half-right answer is still wrong. Freeing one hand provided relief, but I was still a slave.

The logical fallacy of the Argument from Authority.

Let's examine the logical fallacy that brings down the whole house of cards. Gurdjieff argues that man has the possibility of being awake, but to wake up, he or she must set an alarm, a conscious mechanism he or she inserts into his unconscious routine to remind him that it's a dream. But there’s a catch: once the alarm clock has been set and has worked a few times, the mechanisms of our human mind grow numb to its sound, and it doesn't work. We fall back into sleep. The human perpetual sleeping machine needs a perpetual waking machine, one that stands outside the habitual way of being. Thus, we need an awake man (sometimes a woman, but rarely), a guru who knows, vs. an ordinary asleep man just going through the rituals of survival and coping. To top off the esoteric mechanism, when you realize that you are asleep, you need to find and pay this awake person to wake you up.*

The argument from authority is “[a] formal fallacy in which it is argued that because a perceived authority figure (or figures) believes a proposition (relevant to their authority) to be true, that proposition must therefore be true. This is also known as an appeal to authority. This fallacy occurs when person Y claims that person X is experienced in the topic at hand. Therefore, whatever person X believes is the truth. Alternatively, this can also occur if person Y claims to be the authority, therefore whatever person Y believes is true. This fallacy is a special case of the generic fallacy where the source is used to justify the acceptance of a conclusion.”

Who stands in the position of X at the top of the enterprise of the Western Enneagram as the person of authority? When describing the origins of the Enneagram, we find oblique references to Gurdjieff. The main candidates for any authorized source swing between the truly secret teaching of Gurdjieff or his followers, to Arica founder Oscar Ichazo and his student Naranjo, with some dubious stops in the Sarmoung or Naqshbandi brotherhood, or (this one is close to my heart) in the work of a 17th-century Jesuit polymath, Athanasius Kircher. 

I argue that all these stories are fishy—to use a technical term. Most conversations about spiritual life are crippled by weak arguments. The impulse to expand the world beyond what we can perceive and verify is not the exclusive property of Gurdjieff's metaphysical construct. The awake person knows something that you do not know, something your present condition blinds you from seeing, but something that can alter your present condition by correct analysis. I argue that this argument from authority is consistent across all revealed religions: for example, the dogmatic claim that the Pope, by virtue of his authority alone, can issue statements that are “infallibly true” despite any factual evidence. I will also point to the passion for miracles, physical occurrences that stand outside the normal laws of cause and effect. I use the word “passion'' purposefully because even if we can’t personally witness these extraordinary events, we “believe” them, assuring ourselves in the benevolence of the unseen world, guiding us when we lack clarity, and for the purposes of this argument, providing authority as we grapple with the unknown.

The proponents of what I call the Western Enneagram Teaching as a tool for self-observation point to the appearance of the nine-pointed mandala in Gurdjieff’s teaching, plus a few other references, found mostly in the works of Ouspensky and Bennett. But in Gurdjieff, the Enneagram outlines the steps for the movements, or sacred dancing, combined with a rather complex set of laws of three and octaves—certainly nothing that points to 27 categories of personality fixations, virtues, or holy work.

The first person in the Americas, and the first person to refer to an Enneagon, was the Bolivian esotericist Oscar Ichazo. In 1968, Ichazo presented lectures on his theories of Protoanalysis at the Institute of Applied Psychology in Santiago, Chile. It was there that Naranjo made contact with Ichazo. Later at Ichazo’s first training in Arica, Chile, Naranjo began his own investigation of what he termed the Enneagram of Fixations.

Naranjo wove a convoluted tale of Sufi masters disguising their teaching and tricking their disciples, and wove it into his story about receiving the Enneagram from Ichazo. My skeptic tells me he was just trying to establish an authorized teaching lineage by characterizing his difficult relationship with Ichazo as a Sufi trick. To further break with the pesky facts, Naranjo describes his understanding of the Enneagram as the result of automatic writing. Appealing to an otherworldly realm for evidence, one of Ichazo’s disciples says that an esoteric volume fell from a shelf in Ichazo’s study, opened up to the Enneagon diagram, and Ichazo divined its gnostic meaning.

I want to point out that all these conversations themselves are privileged. They rely on the status of the speaker rather than hard evidence to prove the validity of the Enneagram/Enneagon. Both the claims and statements fall entirely within the argument from authority to confirm the system’s validity.

You don’t believe me? Then why are we still having this argument about the correct or authorized source? Q.E.D.

Debunking some myths around “Mr. Gurdjieff” and “The Work.”

Before I begin to debunk any mythological constructs. I will note what first attracted me to "The Work,” what I found useful, where I opened myself to abuse, and finally, how I began to become disenchanted. Throughout, I will be paying close attention to language. Zen posits that what's important to discuss is beyond words, but we have to use words; they may be an approximation, but they are the only tool available to humans. Some esoteric language points to important issues in life, while other language—I will use a less technical, but very precise, word to describe this abuse—is gibberish.

When I was 29 years old, after just a few months working with Naranjo, I had an experience that lifted a huge weight that I’d been carrying for many years. Sitting in that ramshackle fraternity house in Berkeley, it struck like lightning. Its debris would take years to sweep up. I uncovered the motivation for my decision to train as a Jesuit, a dream that began in adolescence. Unpacking it, dealing with the consequences, including the abuse that played out, would be a long, slow, and costly process, but it opened a new vista for my life that I could not have imagined. I remain grateful, but in retrospect, the experience was so overwhelming that I was blinded to its limitations.

These were heady days. Naranjo told us that he was setting up a school that would be a smorgasbord of available spiritual disciplines, shorthand for “Esalen Style.” Experimentation was the norm, and, given the circumstances, the path might prove rocky, even dangerous. I knew that I needed psychological help, but I also wanted to avoid professional treatment. As a Jesuit, therapy was not out of bounds, but still carried enormous baggage if I wanted to advance in the Order. The prospect of blending spirituality with the insights of psychology provided cover. For any psychological process to work, however, it requires a level of vulnerability, but in the freewheeling world of SAT, time-tested ethical and professional principles have been suspended. There were casualties, and personally, I ran up against very difficult obstacles. Being raped by an uneducated tailor who claimed to be the psychic channel for a dead psychiatrist certainly fits in that category.

Naranjo, much like Gurdjieff in Meetings with Remarkable Men, told tales of receiving information from other sources. Bob Hoffman told him things about his past that Hoffman could not have possibly known, or that was Naranjo’s claim,* and therefore the whole group would be subjected to the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy, despite Hoffman’s obvious lack of professionalism. On the other hand, the discipline of Fritz Perls was far from unprofessional, and when Naranjo sat in that chair, he was the consummate professional. People in SAT relied on Helen Palmer’s costly psychic readings as prognosticators of behavior patterns, things to work on. Some people used their alleged connections to the other side as sources for psychological investigation. There was Anne Armstrong (who gave me unsolicited and disastrous advice about a business deal) and a specious Chilean palm reader to whom Kathy Speeth is indebted for losing her license to practice therapy in California.

I made a list and named names, far from complete, to point out the otherworldly, suspect sources of many of the psychological techniques used to probe the roots of personal psychological makeup. Key to any of this having therapeutic benefits is surrender. Suspension of judgment opens the back door to the unexpected, revelatory, hidden motivations, the dark family secret that has been lurking and putting up barriers. However, investigation shifts from analysis of counterproductive behaviors to tracing their source, as if dream analysis á la Oracle at Delphi had become a substitute for free association, and the mind-altering experience of LSD a quick route to the fruits of meditation practice.

But what if this type of inquiry does not stand the test of time or produce real results? Spiritual charlatans have a huge bag of tricks—they act like drugs—to induce experiences of ecstasy and revelation. I was told over and over to “suspend [my] judgment, enter into another state where things will be revealed.” This is an exact quote; some version of this is repeated ad nauseam to this day. To be honest, sometimes sleight of hand is useful in discovering a personal blind spot, but at some point, if the trick is not revealed for what it is, it becomes part of the illusion.

We know that some mental processes work below the surface. They are unconscious; if they remain hidden, they wield enormous influence, and we remain in their thrall. But a simple dream about having a heart attack is no predictor. Casual or surface exploration serves little purpose other than to induce fear. When a friend told me about having a dream like this, I asked if he’d seen a cardiologist. But I also knew that I suspended my judgment many times when it would have been better to allow my actually well-trained critical faculty to maintain the upper hand.

Hoffman once told me that his dreams had predicted that he would be cured of cancer because he had a higher calling, and I believed him until I took care of him when he was dying of cancer. I’d been doing professional hospice work for nearly a decade, so I was not particularly shocked by his lack of acceptance of his own death. He was in complete denial, expecting another psychic miracle and very angry when it didn’t appear. I have detailed some of the unraveling of his pretense and absurd lies behind his psychic understanding of life in other writings. Perhaps I ought to listen to my mother and not speak ill of the dead. I have to confess that I was far too close to the man to be objective. His sexual abuse was always in the background, but he never made amends—he was far too arrogant to admit any faults. But there was also something more interesting going on, the beginnings of the erosion of the framework underpinning his system and, by extension, the entire work that Naranjo undertook with his groups.

In response to a friend's request to examine particular Gurdjieff sources, I came across some talks in which he made very definitive statements about the differing roles of women and men. These were the urtexts, transcriptions of his talks to students either at Le Prieuré or in his Paris flat. It seemed all very high-tone, even provocative, but it had the confrontational tone of a bully. Part of my mind revolted, and I realized that it was simply outright misogyny, delivered in an extremely arrogant tone, quite similar to what I experienced in the men whom I’d met who claimed their authority by referencing the Armenian seer.

There was no abrupt “Ah ha” moment. In my mind, I'd constructed a protective shield for this figure who was held in utmost reverence by people I respected. He was, we were told, a man who knew himself. I told myself that the misogyny had to be a function of time, place, and circumstance; this charismatic member of an elite group who’d undertaken a heroic exploration of ancient traditions and helped find a key to some of life's mysteries, and provided a key, or what I imagined was a key, to self-understanding.

But what if Gurdjieff himself was an ordinary man ruled by circumstance? Being a man lulled to sleep by life’s circumstances was exactly what “The Work'' sets out to conquer. This sleep keeps us enslaved. What about all the rest of what Gurdjieff claimed? The house of cards began to fall. I gave up surrendering to a set of ideas that produced a modicum of results. They were based almost exclusively on the word of a man who claimed authority by his experience and hard-won understanding of man’s plight. It stood or fell on his authority, real or imagined. I could no longer stake my life on this teaching.

The argument from authority is “[a] formal fallacy in which it is argued that because a perceived authority figure (or figures) believes a proposition (relevant to their authority) to be true, that proposition must therefore be true.” But what this authority figure proposed was blatantly false. What Hoffman claimed about the psychic workings of the mind was absurd. Naranjo's claim about the origin of the Enneagram of fixations was at best a hallucination. Gurdjieff was a bully, a sexist, and a misogynist. Believe them at your own peril. Q.E.D.

I do not, however, want to throw out the whole barrel as if it were filled with rotten fish that stinks to high heaven. I remembered the words of Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, whom Gurdjieff thought was a convivial partner to share a glass of vodka with at The Stray Dog, but “a weak man”. If Self-Remembering can get us here, even for an instant, it was worth all the effort.

“…that you can know consciousness only in yourself. Observe that I say you can know, for you can know it only when you have it.”

And I emphasize this sentence: “And when you have not got it, you can know that you have not got it, not at that very moment, but afterwards.”

After a period of time and reflection. It took a while.

____________________

Notes:

*The Stray Dog. A Saint Petersburg cafe where Gurdjieff held forth, according to G. Lachman. It is the presumed site that elicited the comment from Gurdjieff that Ouspenskyy was a personable guy to drink vodka with, but a weak man.

* When I first heard of wokeism, this is what my mind conjured up, and the term does insist on a degree of blanket “correctness,” including its underlying assumptions.

Ichazo has said that “in order to understand the originality of the perspective of the Arica Integral Teachings, it is important to remember that Buddhism is based on the epistemological and immediate discovery or knowledge of the world as being fundamentally in a state of suffering (Skt. samsara). This is the First Noble Truth. What the Arica Theory proposes is an ontological foundation with the discovery that one step behind suffering, we find the actual root of that suffering, and this step behind discovers, answers, and defines the ontological proposition that there must be a being, an Ego–entity, that supports that suffering.” The Roots of Buddhism and Arica Integralism

Bibliography

Claudio Naranjo
End of Patriarchy: And the Dawning of a Tri-Une Society, Paperback – 1 Jan. 1994
Cf. Chapter on the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy

How about a New Year’s resolution to dedicate some time every day to meditation? Not lip service or telling yourself it's a good idea, but really sitting down and meditating. James Ishmael Ford graciously highlighted some of my work with “The Examen” of Saint Ignatius in a sermon he gave a week ago Sunday at the Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist church in Pasadena, California. As an experiment, I removed almost all of Ignatius’s theology, but I didn’t intend to make him some hidden agnostic Zen Master. I just wanted to see if the Examen still had any teeth in a more agnostic context. The jury’s still out. Here’s a link to my piece, Looking at The Particular Examen of Saint Ignatius with Fresh Eyes.

A Meditation on Meditation 

Getting a handle on a difficult term

James Ford January 5th, 2026

The following is substantially the sermon I delivered for the worship service at the Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist church in Pasadena, California, on the 28th of December, 2025. If you are wondering what the hubbub is when people speak of “meditation,” perhaps this will help…

When I’m off for a Zen meditation retreat, I’ve long since stopped being mildly annoyed when friends respond to the news with something like, “Oh, I wish I could take off for a few days and just chill, too.”

Zen meditation retreats are many things, but chill is not something I would call one. Nor relaxing. Nor getting away.

What I realize is that when people use the word meditation, it really needs further definition.

Here is one way to begin to look at that term, and to consider whether it might actually be something of use, and if so, what kind of meditation might one seek.

I’ll start with a brief exploration of what people sometimes mean when using the word. And then a bit deeper of a dig into one or two ways of meditating that might be useful to many. And maybe tease another kind of meditation for those who are throwing themselves deep into the quest for meaning and direction.

I recall many years ago visiting the renowned San Francisco Zen Center. They have a tiny bookstore, which I like to drop by and investigate when I find myself at the Center. This time I noticed there was a small sign on offer. It read “Don’t just do something, sit there.”

I delighted in the pure counterculture of that sign.

In a sort of bottom-line sense, meditation usually means something we do with our heads. Often it is bringing our heads and our bodies together. Depending on who you’re talking to, meditation can be body scanning, that is noticing and usually relaxing parts of our bodies. It might involve visualization, or a somewhat similar form of guided meditation. It can be as simple as reflecting maybe on the day.

And. There are forms of meditation rooted in religious traditions, like Buddhism’s practice of loving kindness or Christianity’s Lecto Divina, reading sacred scriptures mindfully. Some meditations note thoughts or feelings as they arise. Others incorporate breath practices ranging from counting or following the breath to kundalini yoga using the breath to awaken energies. While still others are other kinds of body practices ranging from walking meditation to Qigong or Hatha yoga.

To begin a list.

For most secular forms of meditation might be particularly of interest.

The most probably most famous of these is Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, MBSR to the initiate. It’s a program developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn who was then a professor at the medical school at the University of Massachusetts in Worcester, and who would become the founder of the school’s Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society. Looking at his program, it is at its core simply dropping religious language from the ancient Buddhist meditation manual the Satipatthana Sutta, that is the “Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness.”

That text while probably drawing on sources that may go back to the historic Buddha himself, is generally believed to have been compiled in the first century before our common era. Kabat-Zinn expanded this meditation manual with other practices like guided meditation and yoga into an eight-week course he called that mindfulness-based stress reduction.

It has become wildly successful in the medical community to aid in stress management, chronic pain, and all in all offering a sense of general well-being. He and his associates moved beyond claims and applied controlled experiments to understand the why of it. Feel free to google for details. (Here’s a link directly to them) Out of his and his associate’s work MBSR has become a complementary discipline in treating depression, hypertension, and immune disorders.

However easily adapted it might be to secular uses, its worth noting meditation is rooted in religious or, if you will, spiritual sensibilities. The original goal is not that sense of well-being science has found in many of the disciplines.

With that the distinction between prayer and meditation can be a bit difficult to unravel. In Judaism prayer is often seen as more corporate action, the words addressed to God in a temple service for instance. While the word meditation is often reserved for private contemplation. For Christians while again prayer is often seen as directly addressing God, meditation often involves mentally unpacking a teaching, perhaps from scripture for spiritual solace and growth.

Buried in that is a definition I’ve seen around that while a bit triumphalist has some use. Here prayer is talking to the divine, while meditation is listening. The reality is that in both cases we’re being invited to our deepest encounters with the real. So disdain for the one is probably not as useful as one might think.

But what does this encounter with the real mean?

Well, several things.

Finding ways to give ourselves a little space and to look at what we’re up to can be an enormous gift. And honestly, this is the point of my sharing this meditation on meditation here and now, in the luminous moment of our moving from year into year. And with that finding ways to address the hurts both in our own hearts, and those of the world.

And while there are disciplines I consider going even deeper into the matter, here’s an example of that kind of meditation, where mental health and maybe some larger intimations of connection can be found in the adaptation of ancient spiritual practices.

An old friend of mine Ken Ireland is a former Jesuit. Although I’ve been told by friends there is in fact no such thing as a former Jesuit. I know him as a Zen practitioner who has lived for the last decade in Dharmsala, you know the Dalai Lama’s homebase in India, and because of visa issues for the past year in Thailand.

In his personal life Ken has adapted the famous Ignatian “Examination of Conscience,” also called the “Examen” in a secular, or at least somewhere in that area in a very interesting way. Like with MBSR, I see possibilities for the secularly minded. As well as for others on more specifically spiritual paths. With his permission, I share it here.

“Ignatius (who developed the large practice of his Spiritual Exercises in 1522) recommends undertaking the Examen for a relatively short period of time, 10-15 minutes, at three distinct times every day: upon rising, before the mid-day meal, and upon retiring. In the morning, as your day is not yet filled with conscious and unconscious actions, you resolve to reflect and remember what you are going to look for if you have identified a ‘chief characteristic.’” This is the nub of the discipline, seeing who you really are. Not what you would like to be, but who you are. And this is found in discovering that chief characteristic.

Ken continues. “Usually, you will hone in on what you’ve determined is your greatest obstacle to living in freedom and love - some trait, a repeating negative pattern, a persistent inner dialogue, resentment or prejudice. This becomes a tool that helps focus your review of the day’s events. It is almost always a moving target. You might work with a spiritual director to figure out a useful self-interrogation.”

So, with that invitation, Ken’s version of the steps of the Examen. There are a lot of parts to unpack, but here and now, I’m just giving the bare bones.

First: Quiet yourself. Become aware of the simple goodness of the universe. We see the gifts of life, the blessings of this human world through faith, the eye of love. Be thankful.

Then: Look within to see clearly, understand accurately, and respond generously to what is occurring in our lives.

Then: Review the history of the day (hour, week, or month) in order to see concrete, specific instances of the influence and activity of what we have identified as our chief characteristic. These can be detected by paying attention to strong feelings that may have arisen in situations and encounters. Over time more subtle feelings will become apparent.

Then: Examine these instances, our actions, reactions, words and feelings to see whether you have collaborated with deep inner guidance or yielded to the influence of evil in some way. Express gratitude and regret.

Then: Plan how to use our own inner guidance skillfully to avoid or overcome the negative influence of the chief characteristic in the future.

I’m quite taken with Ken’s secular Examen. It definitely fits the bill for a vital and useful kind of meditation. In his and Ignatius’ invitation, we see both our best and our worst. The real made personal.

And. In my own practice, you may have heard I’m a person of the Zen way, the discipline is less discursive.

That said, there are many mansions in the ways of mediation. Which brings both disadvantages and advantages. To my mind the disadvantages of Zen and its cousin mindfulness, mindfulness as an ancient Buddhist practice; includes less clarity on direction, less focus on accomplishment. But includes the advantages of finding perspective, of seeing who we are and how we exist within a web of relationships with other people and the world itself. And so something I’ve found might well be worth all the bother.

Maybe even something to try on in this new year, rife as it is with opportunities for hurt and healing.

A couple of years ago I wrote a brief piece for the Buddhist magazine “Lion’s Roar” offering a simple five-step guide to a basic mindfulness meditation practice.

I think sharing it here may be a good way to conclude my little meditation on meditation. It’s not Zen, which adds more wrinkles to the matter. But instead is a basic review of that core practice adapted by many in many times and places, including the good Dr Kabat-Zinn.

1. Choose a quiet and uplifted place to do your meditation practice. Sit cross-legged on a meditation cushion, or if that’s difficult, sit on a straight-backed chair with your feet flat on the floor, without (if you can) leaning against the back of the chair.

2. Place your hands palms down on your thighs (or knees) and take an upright posture with a straight back, relaxed yet dignified. With your eyes open, let your gaze rest comfortably as you look slightly downward about six feet in front of you.

3. Place your attention lightly on your out-breath, while (at the same time) remaining aware of the environment around you. Be with each breath as the air goes out through your mouth and nostrils and dissolves into the space around you. At the end of each out-breath, simply rest until the next breath goes out (of its own accord). For a more focused meditation (with fewer opportunities for distraction), you can follow both out-breaths and in-breaths.

4. Whenever you notice that a thought has taken your attention away from the breath, just say to yourself, “thinking,” and return to following the breath. In this context, any thought, feeling, or perception that distracts you is labelled “thinking.” (There are more advanced forms that slice and dice the distractions for finely. But “thinking” really will do.) Thoughts are not judged as good or bad. When a thought (or sensation or feeling) arises, just gently note it and return your attention to your breath and posture.

5. At the end of your meditation session, five minutes, ten, or half an hour, or perhaps a full hour, bring calm, mindfulness, and openness into the rest of your day.

The good folk at Lion’s Roar provided lovely illustrations for the piece. One in particular showed the meditator fully engaged. They had a relaxed person sitting with arrows pointing out from all around her body.

I wrote back about how the illustrations, as pretty as they were, and they were, missed the deeper point of this exercise. We’re not trying to project ourselves out into the world in this practice but allowing ourselves to encounter the world as it actually presents itself to us. That real once more. Or, at least to come as close as such can be accomplished given the limitations of our senses, and our endless proclivity to put a story on everything.

The twelfth-century Japanese Zen master Eihei Dogen in his essay, Uji, “Being Time,” put it like this:

“When the self advances and confirms the ten thousand things, the world, is called delusion. But when the ten thousand things come to the self, that is called awakening.”

In my note to my editors at Lion’s Roar, I said the arrows should be pointed toward the meditator.

They wrote back how that was lovely, but they paid good money for the illustrations and they were staying.

I suspect there are several lessons to be gleaned from that exchange.

So. A little grist for the mill. Something that might even be of use as we move out of this lamented year into, well, who knows what we’re moving into.

And, if you’re wanting to go deeper still, there are other types of meditation, as well.

Zen, for one. The way of my heart…

https://youtu.be/esU-3IC2J9E

A Buddhist Looks at the Arguments for the Existence of God

© Kenneth Ireland, March 28, 2024

Back to Lenten Practice

Wednesday Feb 14, – Thursday Mar 28, 2024

It has been years since I even noticed Lent, but this year, I prepared myself for the central mystery of the Christian faith. I had been writing about my relationship with Cardinal Avery Dulles, a remarkable man from whom I learned an enormous amount, whom I loved and, as a quirk of fate, happened to be a famous and well-regarded, even revered figure in both the Jesuit order and the official Catholic hierarchy. For several years, while I was a Jesuit, he was my spiritual advisor, and informally held that role for the rest of his life. He was disappointed when I stepped away from the more orthodox expressions of the Christian faith, but he was never harsh or judgmental. He always treated me as a friend and was extremely generous. I am very grateful for our friendship.

Several Jesuits and former Jesuits have been authorized to teach Zen, but I am not in that elite group. I was in the Jesuits for a decade, and when I left, I turned my back. In total honesty, I indulged hostility towards the institutional church like so many gay men of my generation. When I gave myself wholeheartedly to Zen, I discovered traces of Ignatian prejudice in my practice. Uncovering what was not apparent to me has taken years of careful work. My feet were so planted in either camp that I couldn’t distinguish any separation. I became known in my sangha as a Jesuit Buddhist. 

I hit on another sentence to describe my project, “A Buddhist looks at arguments for the existence of God, and a former Jesuit weighs these arguments in the Zendo.” It became important for me to specify that part of my argument had been colored by meditation practice. 

In the few weeks till Easter, I certainly can’t settle any argument about the existence of God, but following the age-old Lenten practice of penance and purification, I hope to clear away some of the underbrush obscuring these old questions, at least for me. 

When I write, I consciously try not to allow academic rules and conventions to hamper me. I know that this can be what we used to call the occasion for sin, but I also don't owe allegiance to any religious authority, and the days of the burning at the stake are over. Although I will try to be as balanced as any aspiring bodhisattva can be, I know that I have a definite point of view, which I will state as clearly as I can and then, like a good Jesuit scholastic and Zen student, try to refute my own argument. I take this work seriously, but I will also have as much fun as possible.

Capitalizing God as an honorific carries many linguistic nuances and preferences. I would prefer to separate us from our preconceptions and not treat God in the preferential way that the capitalization “God” might imply, but I’ve decided to follow the linguistic convention of capitalizing God. I intend it to be neither theist nor atheist, and not derogatory, just neutral. When referring specifically to YHWH, Jehovah, or the Father in the translations of the Jesus gospels as they come to us, I use the honorific “God.’ I may not always be consistent.

And finally, my conclusions surprised me, though I cannot claim to have satisfactorily resolved any of the issues I tackled.

A Jesuit theologian with the papal imprimatur asks me about God's existence.

During our last meeting, Avery Dulles said to me, "I hear that Buddhists haven’t settled the God question.” Of course, he knew the answer: most Buddhist schools are non-theistic; they do not usually entertain the question of divinity, neither affirming nor denying a supreme deity, certainly not in the same way that Christians do. But in Catholic dogmatic theology, statements about the nature of divinity are the coin of the realm. For Avery, the existence of a Godhead, a personal deity, was central, along with expressing or “confessing” assent to its existence.

That afternoon, despite our friendship, or perhaps because of it, I felt Avery was trying to pry an answer out of me that would undermine my Buddhist beliefs. His tone was friendly, loving, even playful, not in any way disapproving or forceful, but he was serious. He was trying to push me towards a more traditional faith because, for him—and for most serious Christians—assent to the existence of God, saying “I believe,” is key to salvation. I couldn’t respond that I still believed in God because, honestly, I was leaning more towards the agnostic end of the spectrum, an answer that would surely have disappointed him. My love for the man overrode any other considerations. 

Avery was a Jesuit through and through, and I might have countered with an invitation to inquiry, but I didn’t have the skill to turn a rhetorical or speculative question into an opening. I didn’t know how my friend would take it, perhaps almost as blasphemy, although my real fear was that he would have just made fun of the question—and me.

We might have waded into the tricky currents of sweeping, generalized truth statements that leave one floundering on rocky shores, or, to return to my speculative ruminations about placing my bet on the right pony, the kind of restrictive notions that Jesuits liked to argue about with Pascal and the Jansenists. Avery would have enjoyed that: this essay honors our friendship.

“Something rather than Nothing” 

First, let’s look at the question itself. “Why is there something as opposed to nothing?” is a religious question, or at least religions worldwide have appropriated it. Any preacher worth their salt will warn you to think about what happens after death. They call up an ontological fear and create an answer to the question: what persists after our experience ends?  

That question seems based on raw emotion, so it’s not scientific or philosophical. It might be psychological, even then, you have to lay down some parameters. I’m going to leave it for another time. My characterization won’t win me many converts among my religious friends who have been trained in the traditional seminary rendition of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s theology. Some of them even call it  “the Big Question,’ encompassing belief and unbelief, who we are, where we are in the universe, and how we got here. Our answers are expected to have the clarity of a clarion bell, dispelling our doubts and clearing the path to salvation. Proponents and believers claim it demands an answer.

The question itself is a canard, or in French slang, a hoax. To clarify the possible answers, let’s give it the hair-splitting it warrants before we begin. The question is designed to introduce the question of God into ordinary discourse and ultimately leads us down a rabbit hole. It is formulated to skew the answer. Any answer is, at best, an assessment of probability rather than a true statement. My former Jesuit philosopher teacher, Ed MacKinnon, argues that the proposition is a statement that can be held by reasonable people rather than a proof as in science or mathematics. (Why is There Something? Edward MacKinnon, Philosophia 51 (2):835-855 (2023). I disagree.

If, for example, we follow Piaget and examine how a child learns about the world, among his or her first questions might be, “What is that?” pointing to Fido. Then he or she might ask, “Can I pet Fido?” “Why did Fido bite me?” or “Is Fido hungry?” but certainly not “Why is Fido there?” You usually don’t get to that before post-grad philosophy and debating Kant’s idea of denotation or Gilbert Ryle’s “Fido-Fido fallacy,” which he and Wittgenstein label “primitive word magic." (Meaning, Use and Rules of Use, Raziel Abelson. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.) In our case, Fido becomes “something with identified meanings vaguely about God,” much like the neo-Platonists who identified the deities of Mount Olympus with ideas and virtues to pass the muster of logic. I am not saying that such questions are out of order, but that they need much more explanation and definition before we are allowed to label “Something” as ontologically real and demand justification for its existence.

Is the question “Why is there something?” even a good question? 

Because I am going first, I will lay out my objections.

Begin with the concept of negation. The question posits “not-Nothing.” However, in this sense, nothing may just be “not everything that presents itself to our minds,” as an extrapolation or inference, not a definition. 

The double negative serves no purpose in the argument other than to get God in the door. “Something rather than nothing” is not even ordinary language. The way we speak in ordinary language does not include the inherent claim that we cannot know “something is something” unless we posit its negation. We are not obliged to imagine a world in which “what is so” is not. That is absurd. 

Joanie Mitchell teaches us, "You don’t know what you got till it's gone.” What do we get when we take away something? Her answer is “a parking lot.” To be clear, her answer to the question is “What’s left, or what did we replace it with?” and not what is this thing (state or condition) that you are naming “Not-a-parking-lot?” 

Ms. Mitchell uses a rhetorical strategy to affirm our knowledge (and appreciation), not an ontological definition of nothingness. Following Aristotle, Aquinas posits an orderly universe governed by natural law in which man has his place to know and serve God. In return, he is promised cash and prizes (which he may or may not receive, which is another problem to which he will return later). At this point, it is enough to say that It is also possible and legitimate in this universe to take away any promised benefits. That is variously called estrangement, hell, or sin. Aquinas knows all this through faith, not reason or empirical observation, though Aquinas does claim that there is no contradiction between faith and reason. When Darwin, Einstein, and Heisenberg et al. blew the supporting physics all to hell, modern schoolmen filled in the blanks with whatever cosmological ideas they fancied, but again, I would point to the neo-Platonists filling their empty blanks with virtue and form when they kicked out Zeus and his buddies. Sleight of hand. Bunk. That’s a technical term.

When Bill Clinton was asked in his famous deposition before Congress if there was a sexual relationship between him and Monica Lewinsky, he initially said there "is" no sexual relationship (US News & World Report, Ronald Brownstein and Kenneth T. Walsh). He went on, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the — if he — if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not — that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.” Some commentators said this was his pitch to the Talmudic scholars among his judges. I contend that he just needed to get himself out of a hot pickle. Theists using the word “something” as an ontological bridge between science and faith are not much better than Clinton parsing the verb "to be” concerning sex. I don’t need a Rabbi to point to the duplicity because that is why we are parsing the verb “to be.” There has to be nothing out there, or we’d find ourselves in a hot pickle.

Let’s return to little Freddy or Frederica, who learned that Fido is called a dog. Hopefully, they also learned practical ways to avoid being bitten by Fido. They include feeding, training, learning to gauge Fido’s moods, and how to get him into his dog house if needed. But the question remains: how do we get from there to “Why do we have Fido rather than not-Fido?” 

How did this become a religious question, and why is it essential to get the correct answer? I will ask the Buddhist before I ask Aquinas, though I might use him as my reference point when I describe the hot mess that his religionists get us into. I am going to characterize four arguments for the existence of God. I intend to hold them as an object of meditation in a Buddhist way, but as I write them, I find myself trying to demystify them. They each have become almost a caricature of our culture’s way of thinking through these questions.

Instead of proving or disproving that God exists, I propose a more modest goal: to examine the claim that God exists. This avoids what seems impossible — to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a supernatural being has control and power in the universe, and whose existence or essential being makes the workings of the universe possible. It also sets philosophy on a more solid footing (in my view) — to use the tools that are available to human beings and evaluate various claims solely to determine whether or not they are possible or reasonable, and secondarily, that these beliefs provide us with some guidance about living our lives in a fully human way that is ethical and loving. Based on our understanding of human history on Earth, these questions and their proposed solutions have been debated. That is all we can say with certainty.

On a personal note. I have spent several hours a day for the past six weeks thoroughly reviewing and examining as many of these arguments or claims as possible. My emphasis has been mainly on the scholastic proofs following the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas that Catholic seminarians have studied since the Council of Trent. In addition to reviewing my intellectual history, I also searched for new work that has been done since I was at Boston College almost 60 years ago. But I was also trying to honor the question proposed by my friend and mentor Avery Dulles before he died: how might Buddhists settle the question about God? I will be 80 in a few months. I have spent far more time in meditation halls than in seminary, which has influenced my views.

Clockwork Orange, or shooting marbles on the Lyceum’s almost perfectly level floor 

Let’s tackle “The Unmoved Mover.” It purports to be the most universal of the arguments, or at least the TV Bishop Robert Barron would have us believe so; it is allegedly the most palatable that believers put forth to their enlightened naturalistic colleagues because it is based on a particular analysis by Aristotle, which also gave rise to the scientific method through his understanding of causality. Its religious formulation might be broadly called “Deistic.” 

Those who claim to follow Aristotelia over the 2400-year crooked path to our discussion talk about the existence of God as the “Unmoved Mover” or the “Uncaused Cause.” However, for each of the five contingency arguments that St. Thomas takes from Aristotle, there are two prongs: observation and logic, the moving parts, and the moving mental parts. One is locked down by observing the world as it is, and the other is abstracted from those observations, with hypotheses or checking questions.

Using the instruments of scientific observation, we can measure speed, distance, force, resistance, gravity, sound waves, etc., all of which seem to give the Thomists a comforting certainty that there is an “unmoved cause” at the very beginning. But is that conclusion supported by science? You can “move” from moved to unmoved using carefully constructed experiments, scientific instruments, and observation. However, tracing back to a primordial mover observation seems to uncover more moving parts, going faster and in all directions. I assert that focusing on one single mover is inconsistent with the data and requires a leap of faith.

For the moment, let’s set aside some of the more irksome consequences of conceiving of God as a personal being and merely describe him as a kind of clockmaker who has set the universe in motion according to a set of observable and predictable physical laws. Thomas Jefferson, a man of the Enlightenment, gave this advice to his nephew Peter Carr in 1787: "Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear." God and reason are synonymous, or God him/her/itself is reasonable. This is a distinction that I am going to have to sit with.

If God sets the universe in motion and allows reason, even divine reason, to dictate or at least guide its workings, does this guarantee that justice, love, and benevolence will prevail?  We no longer need to believe in a revealed God to be a good person, but can we point to the intricacy of the mechanism and say that God exists? But how do you find the benevolence of our universe being swallowed up in a black hole or the 700 species of Ornithoscelida, dinosaurs extinguished by an asteroid that veered off course 65 million years ago? The burden of that proof rests on the Deist. Mr. Jefferson.

Jefferson held a deep conviction in “The Laws of Nature and Nature's God.” We should also examine the proposition that such laws exist without blindfolded fear. In Deist thought there is a hierarchy to the things that God condones or encourages. We know that God exists because of the good order we see in nature. Nature, being revealed as science, allows us to understand the order of the universe. The science of the Enlightenment was based on the unfolding principles of the scientific revolution. 

Driving south on Highway 280 from San Francisco, I cross over the Stanford Linear Accelerator, a huge isolated tubular structure over two miles long that passes under the highway near Sandhill Road. Since 1966, the SLAC has been conducting experiments using isolated electrons traveling at speeds beyond my powers of imagination. Beyond that crude description, I don’t understand much, but I do know that scientists at Stanford won the Nobel Prize for developing a facility that allows us to decipher the actual activity of particle physics. This is centuries and worlds away from Aristotle’s Physics, which I envision being the careful study of the action of marbles on the (as level as possible) floor of the Lyceum from which Aristotle and his students began to measure mass, movement, distance and time which led to his geocentric model of movement in the universe. But rather than fault Aristotle for failing to grasp that our earth was not the focal point for movement in the Universe, I am astonished that his school was able to decipher so much given their primitive instruments of observation and measurement. 

Centuries later, these crude experiments would lead to both Newton’s Apple, Thomas Aquinas’s cosmological proofs for the existence of God, and after the Council of Trent, most Catholic priests were taught in seminary that the Universe was created ex nihilo by a Being who set the world in motion. The question remains: has it been shown that there was an urge or force at the beginning that initiated the inevitable, linked causal incidents we observe?

Hiking into the Source

What happens when a meditator searches for the Unmover or the Source of all of it? In the hours of silent meditation, within our inner world, we might imagine that we have traced many thoughts, feelings, and stories to their source. You’d think the search for an Unmoved Mover would be a cakewalk.

Late one Fall fifteen years ago, I sat in a week-long retreat up along the Klamath River in a small cluster of vacation cabins with Jon Joseph Roshi. For one of our afternoon meditations, Jon asked a long-time practitioner to lead us up into a cavern where he had done some photography. He was a spry old bird, perhaps having a decade on me but moving with the grace of a man many years younger.

That afternoon, we were to follow one of the several small gushing mountain streams that fed the Klamath. The walls of the ravine were steep. Though the rains were not torrential, it was very wet. We were to climb in silence, practicing walking meditation, kinhin, as best we could. It was a challenging, narrow path; the small, fast-moving stream dropped off sharply to the north. I had to concentrate more on where I was stepping than on my exhalation. I needed a stick to stay balanced. The thick green moss covering the stones, the only toehold, was slippery. They were laid out by nature's architect, who’d thrown out the handbook for a comfortable and safe ratio for step and tread. It was proving more difficult than initially advertised. Our spry photographer probably thought it was a stroll in the park. I did not.

Perhaps after a half-hour’s climb, we reached a pool. The combination of boulders tumbling down the ravine, plus beavers or storms felling the tree trunks, closed the remaining gaps and formed an expanse of perhaps 10 meters of still, mirror-like water. The stream seemed too narrow for the salmon run, but I still knew there was life under the mirror that reflected the tall pines with the bright blue that gave them an almost Technicolor background. I could also hear the soft sounds of what were probably small rivulets feeding my source, but had reached some kind of source. It was not the Big Bang beginning; it was not ex nihilo, but it was a beginning.

Buddhists are trained to look for change. We call it impermanence. Even more than karma, change is the one immutable law in the Buddhist Universe.  When I asked my first Buddhist teacher what “Impermanence” meant, he said, “You’re going to die, and along the way, the world is always changing.” When we look for change, for the moment of change, that observation changes our world. When I finally reached the still pool high above the Klamath, which might have been the beginning of something, I felt my racing heart and the quickness of my breath as I became aware of small, almost imperceptible drips between the rocks higher up. This makes pinpointing or even imagining a First Mover hard, if not impossible. It also makes positing an Unmoved Mover so vague that it is meaningless, or at least extremely limiting. I’ll go with vast and holy.