Chapter 1
Spiritual Seeking in a World
That Thinks It’s All Nonsense
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SPIRITUAL (Middle English [origin: Old French and Modern French “spirituel” from Latin “spiritualis,” from “spiritus”; see spirit noun, “-al”]): (1) Of, pertaining to, or affecting the spirit or soul, especially from a religious aspect. (2) Standing in a relationship to another based on matters of the soul. (3) Of a person: devout, pious; morally good.—Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 6th ed., s.v. “spiritual”
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In the introduction, I said that modern science, which has given us so much, declares seekers or the spiritually inclined, at best, softheaded folks who are wasting their time because they’re unwilling to be properly scientific in their view of what is and isn’t real and, at worst, superstitious fools, probably with serious stupidity or a psychopathology driving them to seek the spiritual. (Actually it’s not essential science that tells us this but scientism, a rigidified and dogmatic corruption of science that we’ll have a lot to say about later.)
To illustrate the scientistic dismissal of the spiritual, here’s what Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), one of the giants of mathematics, philosophy, and logic, and an important influence on the development of modern science, stated on the matter of the religious and spiritual (1923, 6–7):
That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought or feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system; and the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy that rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.
If a really brilliant person like Russell believes this philosophy of total materialism, it’s rather difficult to put much effort into practices like meditation and prayer, or even into the serious study of spiritual ideas. Most of what we think of as our higher values derives from spirituality and religion: are they all invalidated as nonsense? Is ethics truly the proper conduct of life? If materialism is really true, my reaction is eat, drink, and be merry (and don’t get caught by others if they don’t approve of your pleasures), for tomorrow we die—and life doesn’t mean anything anyway.
If ideas like this were strictly a matter of formal philosophical and scientific theories, all believed, disbelieved, or argued about quite consciously and logically, they wouldn’t have too much of a pathological effect on our lives. But when any philosophy or belief system, spiritual or materialistic, sinks below consciousness in much of its operation, simply shaping our perceptions and thoughts without our being aware of it, we tend to become enslaved by it. This is especially true because modern psychology has demonstrated over and over again that much of what we call “perception” is not a straightforward taking in of what’s actually in the world around us, of reality, but rather a form of automatized, very rapid “thinking,” a processing of perception that can be strongly biased by our beliefs and conditioning so that perception is slanted or biased to apparently validate what we already believe. We have the old adage, “Seeing is believing,” but we have to include the opposite also: “Believing is seeing.” Furthermore, the “reality” you obviously “see” is a major determinant of what you feel, so your slanted perception can strongly bias your emotions.
If you deeply and largely unconsciously believe, to use a simple example, that people are basically brutal and nasty, that they’re mere chimpanzees at heart, you’ll “see” instance after instance of it. It’s not that you see some event and then consciously think about the fact that it could be interpreted as validating your belief that people are brutal and nasty; rather you tend to automatically see brutal and nasty events all around you, which naturally reinforces your basic beliefs that people are brutal and nasty. If you deeply and largely unconsciously believe, on the other hand, that people are basically good (although their goodness is often veiled in a difficult world), you’ll tend to “see” instance after instance of people trying to do the right thing, even when it’s difficult, again, reinforcing your basic beliefs.
I’m optimistic about people, and I realize that my belief system may well bias me in unrealistic ways to see evidence for this. I also firmly believe that we need to seek greater truth about people and the world as much as possible, whether we’re optimists or pessimists, so self-knowledge, understanding how your own mind works, is vitally important, as important as—or in many instances, more important than—knowledge of external things. One of the things I like about essential science is that in the long run (but sometimes it seems way too long!), proper science, as we’ll see in detail later, has self-correction processes built into it that filter out erroneous views and reinforce useful ones. Meanwhile, in the short run, we need to know ourselves as well as our world in order to live more effective lives.
As a psychologist I long ago became aware that many people had semiconscious or unconscious contradictions in their deep belief systems that interfered with their lives. In terms of our specific interests, spiritual possibilities, I’ve talked with innumerable people who consciously thought of themselves as spiritual seekers, who were often quite knowledgeable about spiritual matters but, nevertheless, had something in them holding them back, doubting, sabotaging, and invalidating their own spiritual experiences and knowledge.
To help people increase their self-knowledge in this area, I devised a belief experiment, the Western Creed exercise, to use in my occasional workshops. A belief experiment is basically a matter of consciously and temporarily believing something as best you can for a set period, while observing your emotional and bodily reactions to holding that belief.
I've taken widespread and popular materialistically based ideas (often thought of as scientific "facts") that are very current and powerful in modern culture, and put them in a form that sounds a lot like a religious creed. (In fact, I based this on the formal structure of the Nicene Creed, but note that this isn't intended as a comment on Christianity; rather it's simply making use of a form with religious overtones that's familiar to a lot of people.)
The best way to experience the Western Creed exercise is do it along with my students in an online video hosted by the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (ITP) (see www.alternativedesignsolutions.com/itp/Tart_ITP.html).
If you can do that, I recommend that you stop reading this chapter now and go to the website. If you can’t do that, you can do the written version in the remainder of this chapter, but you can probably get more of an experiential feeling for it by doing it with the online video.
If you’ve decided to do the written version, here we go, working with pretty much the same text as on the website.
Disclaimer: Please note that the following exercise is a learning exercise and doesn’t necessarily reflect my actual beliefs or values or those of any institution I’m connected with, nor is it intended as specific criticism of any religious or spiritual system.
Warning: This experiential exercise was developed for use with mature spiritual seekers who deeply value truth and self-knowledge, and are willing to risk temporary or permanent challenges to their current belief systems in the course of seeking more truth. It’s probably not suitable for children and those with excessive emotional and intellectual attachments to their current belief systems. It’s not essential that you do this exercise.
Transpersonal psychology, still a very young and incomplete branch of knowledge, attempts, on the one hand, to take the spiritual heritage of humanity as being about something real and of enormous importance while, on the other hand, also considering all that we know about human psychology, our good and bad points. Its long-term goals include separating the real from the unreal in the spiritual area as well as discovering how psychological factors can both help and hinder the realization of the spiritual in actual life.
I was one of the founders of transpersonal psychology, and long ago I noticed that many people might consciously aim at high spiritual goals, but their progress toward realizing such goals was often seriously hindered by various psychological factors, ranging from conscious and unconscious attitudes developed by each of us in our personal lives, to general cultural attitudes and beliefs inculcated in and shared by most of us who live in the current era. In the early 1980s I designed this experiential exercise, the Western Creed, for my classes and workshops to sensitize spiritual seekers to some of the major cultural attitudes and obstacles we moderns share in our search.
When you don’t know you have a semiconscious or unconscious attitude or obstacle that interferes with your search, it hinders you, and there’s little you can do about it, because you tend to project the problem as being “out there.” When you know that some of your beliefs and attitudes may be hindering your search, you have an opportunity to try to understand and do something about them.
The Western Creed exercise takes about twenty minutes to do. Ideally you should take part in it just as the filmed participants (students in one of my classes at ITP) in the online video do, standing at attention in front of your computer where you can see and hear the video and repeat the Western Creed exercise words aloud, according to the instructions I give there, and then sit quietly for a few minutes afterward, noting your bodily and emotional sensations and feelings. You can approximate this now by propping up this book so that you can read it while standing at attention in front of it. You might find it best to do this exercise alone or with friends who also participate rather than just watch you.
If this isn’t a good time right now, it would be best to wait for the right time. The Western Creed exercise is most effective the first time you do it wholeheartedly, and it may dull with repetition.
Most people don’t “enjoy” this exercise, for they see some of the contradictions in themselves, but almost all agree that they feel wiser about themselves and thus better able to continue their spiritual search.
You’ll see the word “scientistic” a lot in this book. This isn’t an erroneous spelling of “scientific” but, rather, a shorthand way of reminding us that beliefs in science can become psychologically rigid instead of open to experimental testing, as they always are in essential science. There’s much to be said for being open and flexible about examining our own beliefs, any beliefs, testing them rather than letting them become rigid.
Your main task will be to observe your bodily and emotional reactions to doing the exercise. You needn’t bother to intellectually analyze while it’s going on; you can do that later, after you’ve observed your feelings.
You’ll probably want to take some notes on your reactions, so you might get a pen or pencil and something to write on before going further.
This is an exercise in finding out what you believe. Every one of us is a philosopher, even though we don’t know it. Every one of us has a set of beliefs about the way the world is, the way we are, what’s a good life, and what’s a bad life. In fact we have a lot of beliefs about things like that, and a lot of them, we don’t even know we have. We’ve arrived at some of our beliefs consciously, thinking about our life experience and what we can make of it, but a lot of our beliefs have simply been imposed on us by virtue of being around at the particular times in the particular culture that we live in.
In transpersonal psychology, we’re interested in spiritual and transcendent matters, and tend to think of ourselves as having spiritual belief systems of one sort or another. But we’re also products of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, where a kind of scientistic materialism is a dominant belief system that has many, many effects on us.
As a psychologist, I’ve become more and more convinced that the things we believe and know we believe can be intelligently used as tools, because we can see how well they work, question them if they don’t work well, and think about changing them. Things that we believe that we don’t know we believe, though, are like a set of chains. They just automatically affect our perceptions and thoughts, and trap us.
So one of the things that’s important in any kind of psychological or personal or spiritual growth is becoming more consciously aware of what it is that you actually believe, especially if it’s contradictory to what you previously thought you believed.
I often do workshops or classes for people who think of themselves as very spiritually oriented, who think they’re not held back by materialistic ideas and can just move ahead into the spiritual realms with no conflict. And I can intellectually tell people that we all have certain beliefs just as a result of being part of our culture, but knowing it intellectually and knowing it more deeply at a bodily and emotional level is quite a different sort of thing.
This exercise, which I call a belief experiment, is something that I devised some years ago. A belief experiment is a process in which I ask you to believe something for a limited period, say, ten or twenty minutes. Then we do something in accordance with that belief system or further define that belief system while you believe it. But your job isn’t to intellectually question the beliefs at that point; instead, it’s to notice how your body and emotions feel as we go through the belief exercise. You’re collecting data from this experiment. Then I usually ask people to share what some of these reactions were, because your own and others’ reactions often tell you things you don’t know about what you believe and disbelieve.
Now, how do you just go ahead and believe things? At first, that sounds like a ridiculous sort of idea. But, as an example, every time you go to a movie, you perform a belief exercise. You don’t sit there in a movie saying, “Those aren’t real images in front of me; those are just lights reflecting on a screen. I’m really just sitting here in this seat, and nothing’s really happening.” You believe in the movie; otherwise you don’t enjoy it at all. Another example is anyone who’s ever played a game like Monopoly; you have to be practiced in believing to enjoy playing it. For a short period, those little pieces of wood and paper are very important to you, and you get very excited about them.
It’s the same with a belief experiment. You just “play the game,” as it were, letting yourself get into it for the limited period that you have to do it.
To do this belief experiment, first ask your inner self, “Is it all right to take a chance on believing something that hasn’t even been defined yet, in order to find out something about myself?”
1. Just close your eyes for a moment and ask your inner self, “Is it all right to do this?”
2. Take as much time as you need to get an answer.
3. If you get a yes, fine; open your eyes again.
4. If you get a no, bargain with your inner self a little. It’s only for ten to fifteen minutes. It might be interesting. See if you get an “okay” or a “maybe” answer to that.
5. If you still get a no, you can just fake going through the motions of the belief experiment, because you can learn a lot from that also!
6. Take a few moments to get some kind of permission. (Wait for permission before reading on.)
To use some of the social conditioning we’ve been subjected to as an aid to making this belief experiment more alive and involving for you so that you can see things better, I’d like for you to stand up and erect, as if at attention, while continuing to hold this book. (If you’re doing this in a group, it’s best if all of you stand at attention in neat, orderly rows.)
Now we’re going to do responsive recitation. In a group I’d read out a phrase or line from the Western Creed, and you’d then repeat it aloud. In this solitary book form, you’ll silently read a phrase—a dash marks the pause between each phrase—and then repeat it out loud in a solid, formal way, as if you were pledging allegiance to your flag or reciting a creed in church.
For example—if a sentence were hyphenated like this—to illustrate the process, you’d read, “For example,” pause a moment, say, “For example” out loud, pause several moments while observing your bodily and emotional feelings, then read “if a sentence were hyphenated like this” to yourself, pause a moment, read it aloud, pause several moments to observe, and so on. Note that some words are set in boldface or italics too, meaning that you should give them a little more emphasis when reciting aloud.
I’ve taken widespread and popular materialistically based ideas (often thought of a scientific “facts”) that are very current and powerful in modern culture, and put them in a form that sounds a lot like a religious creed.
In fact, I based this on the formal structure of the Nicene Creed, but note that this isn’t intended as a comment on Christianity; rather it’s simply making use of a form with religious overtones that’s familiar to a lot of people.
You’ll read a phrase that’s separated from others by dashes, pause a moment in between to silently observe yourself, and then repeat it aloud.
To further use our social conditioning to increase the intensity of the Western Creed exercise, now place your right hand over your heart, continuing to stand at attention, as if you were pledging allegiance to your country’s flag. (The right hand over the heart is a specifically American version, but if you have another form from your own culture, feel free to use it.)
Don’t intellectually analyze this Western Creed and your reactions as we go through it. I recognize that you may be a world-class intellect who can logically tear this Creed and exercise to bits or use a barrage of clever thoughts to shield you from the effects of what you’re doing, but that’s not the point: the point is to do it and observe your emotional and bodily reactions. After the belief experiment is over, you can intellectually analyze to your heart’s content. For now, notice how your body feels and any emotional feelings, even if fleeting or faint.
Now we begin. Remember to pause a few seconds in between each phrase that’s separated from others by dashes to note your bodily and emotional feelings.