What If Everything You Knew About God Was Wrong?
What if everything you thought you knew about God was wrong? How would you know? Perhaps more to the point, how could you distinguish between what was true and what was not? It's a difficult question to answer, isn't it? Do we believe just because someone told us so? That's pretty shaky grounds for believing in something because people often lie and make stuff up. Yet most of what you believe about God today is something someone else told you.
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Have you ever taken a step back to look at religion objectively? The central feature of religion – the connection between human beings and the Divine – is rarely discussed, even by religious people. How do ordinary people actually connect with the Divine? What do they do that is different that allows this connection?
While religious people often talk about God, they rarely talk about how to enter into a palpable connection with God. Remarkable, isn’t it, that the central and defining feature of an institution as venerable as the church, the synagogue, the temple, or the mosque is rarely discussed. And yet, more than anything, this is what people want from their religion. We want that felt connection. We want the knowledge of how to live our lives in the most productive way. We want the love and security exhibited by those holy people in our midst. How do we get that?
Another remarkable feature about religion – they all want you to start with faith. The logic goes like this – "Believe in the right way (i.e., my way), and you will experience God, and good things will happen to you." On the face of it, this is ridiculous! I can believe all I want that I have a million bucks, but that doesn't make it so. In fact, this kind of reasoning seems quite bizarre when you make it explicit.
On the other hand, holy people – those advanced practitioners of religion like the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa – seem extraordinary, with great wisdom and compassion. In my personal experience with these individuals, there was a tremendous sense of Presence. A sense of palpable power, but not of the usual sort like political or economic power. Something different, something exceptional.
So, we have this conundrum: while the central and defining feature of religions is rarely discussed, we do recognize 'holy people' as exceptional beings we would like to emulate. What can we make of this?
But wait, there's even more absurdity. Each religion typically presents itself as the one true religion. Often, in the case of Christianity, each denomination or sect presents itself as the one true religion of the one true Christianity. Clearly, this can't be true. If there is one true religion, they can't all be the one. So how do you pick and choose? Considering that your eternal salvation may depend upon the right choice – a choice made when you have little or no knowledge of the religion because nobody talks about how it will bring you into relationship with God – the correct choice is perhaps the most important decision of your life. Your choice here apparently affects your outcome for eternity.
Those few holy people who write about their experiences rarely give us roadmaps to follow. And when they do give us maps, like St. Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle, how do we know if that map will work for us? It worked for Teresa – I get that. But that was 400 years ago in a very different culture with a very different mindset. There are no guarantees that such a map will work for me.
And that brings us to another conundrum. Every religious experience seems idiosyncratic – so it looks like there is no lawful or orderly behavior in the spiritual realm. In contrast, the rest of my life is governed by various laws and rules. For example, when I drop something, I expect it to fall down, not up or sideways. But the idiosyncratic nature of religious experiences seems to stand outside these rules and laws. This is a serious problem. If there are no rules governing spiritual behavior or spiritual experiences, then we have nothing. We are lost, and there is no way to gain traction. We will never sort this God thing out.
These claims of exclusivity – ‘the one true religion’ – and the circular logic employed – ‘believe the right way and you will see my God’ – are off-putting. If you squint your eyes at it just a little, it almost looks like an elaborate con.
Further, the apparent idiosyncratic nature of religious experience is just off-putting. Adherents of various religious belief systems want me to devote years of effort for an outcome that may or may not occur. For most of us, this is just not going to happen!
For these reasons and many others, scientists have, for the most part, shunned the study of religion and spiritual experiences. There is no clear point of entry, and from the outside, there is no straightforward ordering of experiences.
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This brings us back to the issue of how we learn about God, or anything, for that matter. The most common way of learning something new is to hear about it from someone who purports to know. That's how things are taught in school – the teacher tells us that 1+1=2, and we believe it. Of course, this kind of knowledge is easy to verify. One orange plus another orange equals two oranges – I can confirm the truth of this with my own eyes. But how do we verify truths about God, an entity we cannot see, hear, or otherwise experience with our senses?
Most of us never take the trouble to think about this, and, as a result, we have all kinds of mistaken notions about God. People simply accept what they have been told. So how can we find authoritative answers to our questions about God?
I think we would go to people we perceive as experts. In my community, that would involve going to the ministers of the local churches, temples, mosques, and synagogues. But when we examine those clergy more closely, we find that everything they learned about God came from someone else. When we dig deeper, we find that that knowledge came from someone else, etc. etc., ad infinitum. So right off the bat, we have to be suspicious about these so-called experts.
Oh yeah, there is that other problem, too, isn't there? Christians don't trust Muslims, who don't trust Jews, and so on. In fact, it is often the case that one group of Christians doesn't even trust what other groups of Christians have to say about God. So where does that leave us? How can we get to knowledge that we can trust? Knowledge that is verifiable?
Well, for starters we can begin to rule out some sources we know we can’t trust. We can't trust the answers of those who are using hearsay. The only thing we know for sure about a hearsay answer is that the person sharing it probably believes it to be true. Unfortunately, belief that something is true doesn’t make it so. So we need to limit ourselves to people who claim to have some first-hand experience of God.
Next, we can’t trust the answers from just anyone who says they have experienced God. What if they are making something up? What if they are working towards some hidden and nefarious end? What if they are on drugs or mentally ill? While these respondents may be sincere in their beliefs, their beliefs are not likely to be grounded in that Ultimate Reality that we call God.
This being said, we do have some agreement about those people who have had actual direct and genuine experiences of the Divine. Something about them sets them apart from the rest of us. People like the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, and the Hindu saint Ramana Maharishi of our own era. We call these people holy people or saints to distinguish them from the rest of us. Of interest, there have been holy people in every historical era. While few and far between, every major religion has noted their presence. And more importantly, every religion has accepted what these holy people have said about God as genuine and authentic. So if we limit our search to the teachings of those commonly recognized by their fellow believers as saints, we will probably have the best chance of discerning what is real and true about God.
Of course, things are a bit more complicated than that. Aren’t they always? We can’t fully trust the answers from a single faith because those answers are sure to be biased in favor of that belief system. If we could discern these biases, we could account for them, but we have no clear grounds for determining any particular preference in these areas. So, if we are to be certain about any answers that we come up with, they will have to come from an agreement between several different faiths or belief systems. For example, if a Christian and a Buddhist can agree on something about God, there is a good chance it is correct. Going further, if all of the major world religions agree on a set of facts about God or about how to reach God, then we could have a great deal of trust in those answers, a trust verging on certainty.
So, if we are to go beyond hearsay about God, we need to limit our search to people who are recognized as saints or holy people by adherents of their own faith system. Because every religion has biases, we must compare the accounts of these holy people from different faiths with each other. Where we find agreement, we can have confidence that their statements are accurate. Indeed, the more agreement we can find between the different religions, the more confidence we can have in the results. This is beginning to sound like a plan of action, isn’t it?
So here is what I propose to do for the remainder of this book. I will choose a text from each major world religion that describes the journey from ordinary life to union with God. Then I will compare these texts with each other to discern areas of agreement. The more substantial the agreement between these descriptions of the spiritual journey, the more trust we can put in the validity of that journey. Going further, knowing about the journey will allow us to draw conclusions about the nature of God and our own human nature – conclusions grounded in a substantial agreement about our human experience of these phenomena and not just intellectual speculations or theories.
I have used several somewhat arbitrary criteria to identify what I believe are the major world religions. First, the religion must have existed for a thousand years or more to be included in this study. Such longevity means that it has withstood the tests of time. Its many adherents have found its beliefs useful in their ordinary lives and in their spiritual quests. The religion would have withered and died if these beliefs had not been useful. Second, the religion must have traveled outside the country of its origin. A belief system that has moved beyond its language and culture of origin is more likely to have had those peculiarities of perception and thought that are artifacts of a particular language or culture ground away over time, leaving only the essence of that faith and practice. Third, the texts from these religions must be available in English translation. Using these three criteria, we identify the major world religions as Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.[1] This array will give us considerable variability in terms of geographic location, historical eras, language groups, and belief systems. As a result, any features that these very different religions have in common must be central to all religious and spiritual endeavors.
These criteria remove from consideration religions like Baha'i, which arose in the 19th century, and the many indigenous religions, many of which have no written texts. While this is unfortunate, it is not a lethal threat to our endeavor. If we can find a high level of agreement between the six religions identified above, it seems reasonable to believe that other religions may have a similar structure. In addition, reducing the number to six leaves us with a much more manageable task since our examination must be done at a granular level of detail.
Our next effort is to identify a text from each of these six major religions. Unfortunately, just choosing different spiritual writers at random would likely result in gibberish since spiritual writers talk about many different topics. So we need to limit the subject matter to a single focus. Since the central feature of all religions is the connection of the human to the Divine, this subject seems likely to reward our explorations.
Among spiritual authors who explore this subject, there are still significant differences in how they approach it. Some describe the qualitative nature of the spiritual transformation; some describe the shape of the spiritual journey from beginning to end. Others take on various polemics, arguing for or against certain positions, certain theologies, and so on. Because I am interested in finding some lawful[2], orderly structure, much of the writings of these spiritual authors are irrelevant for our purposes.
As a result, I have chosen authors from each major religion who describe the shape of their spiritual journey. Their writings present us with discrete structures, which can be compared with each other to see if there is some common structure underlying their spiritual experiences.
If we can find a common structure between our six authors, then we have discovered the basis for an orderly and lawful structure underlying spiritual experience. This means that spiritual experiences can be studied scientifically. If spiritual experiences can be studied scientifically, then it seems reasonable that we can open up the spiritual realm and make significant progress, just as we have made progress in the material sciences, such as physics and chemistry.
Thus, I have chosen a primary spiritual writer from each of the major religions mentioned above. Each writer is considered an authority within their branch of the religion. Each writer describes the spiritual journey as an orderly progression from spiritual naiveté to the most profound unitive experiences. My linguistic limitations forced me to choose books available in English translations.
I have used the following procedures:
1. Each author's stages of spiritual development are summarized in the chapters on their respective religions. I have quoted directly from each translation so that you can see that these are the discrete stages each author described.
2. I then summarized each stage to boil down each step of the journey to its essence.
3. The summaries from these six different authors are then compared in a chart found in the next chapter. This process clarifies the common features between these six religions while also showing their differences.
If we can find a significant correlation among these very different religions -- each of which comes from a different era, a different culture, a different language group, and a different belief system -- then we can conclude, at a minimum, that there exists a previously unknown deep structure in the human psyche. Within this structure, human beings appear to have abilities and capacities that are quite extraordinary. I invite you to turn the page and join me in this remarkable adventure…