Quest Magazine

Printed in the Spring 2019  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Leslie, Price,"Blavatsky in the Light of Academe" Quest 107:2, pg 28-33

By Leslie Price 

H.P. Blavatsky (1831–91), HPB, as we call her, is the one of the few nineteenth-century esoteric authors widely remembered today. She is, of course known to Theosophical Society members, but not always read by them. Only in recent decades have her (almost) complete works become widely available. Some of her essays and reviews were long out of print until included in the Collected Writings, edited by Boris de Zirkoff and published between 1966 and 1991. The standard edition of her letters is still in progress. There are varying versions of her Esoteric Instructions.

HPB’s reputation long remained under the cloud of the 1885 report of a committee of the Society for Psychical Research, which branded her an impostor, until in April 1986 Dr. Vernon Harrison, in the Journal of the SPR, was able to clear her of having forged the Mahatma Letters.

In Theosophical libraries, we can find many studies of HPB’s teachings. Some of the best were in the Blavatsky Lecture series. But she is now receiving more academic attention than ever before. No doubt that can be arid or hair-splitting, but it is much better than the indifference or contempt that is still found on occasion; it is possible to publish an academic book which discusses HPB, but does not include her own work in the bibliography. One may wonder if the author has actually read her.

In their detailed studies, scholars today often ask the questions that scholars enjoy: What sources did she use? Did she change her mind over time? Who influenced her, and whom did she influence? Theosophists now find themselves in a more crowded landscape. As well as ourselves, who are sympathetic to HPB, and the traditional opponents, who denigrate her—skeptics, fundamentalist believers, rival occultists—there is a community of scholars who can deploy expertise in various languages and who have access to electronic and paper resources which few Theosophical groups can match.

In May 2002, the academic journal Esoterica (not to be confused with the British Theosophical journal of that name) hosted the first North American Symposium on the Study of Esotericism at Michigan State University. There the participants created a new scholarly organization, the Association for the Study of Esotericism (ASE), along with a mission statement and a set of goals. Its primary mission is to support excellence in scholarship and to foster communication among scholars who, though their work originates from a wide range of fields, find esotericism a common theme of their research.

The European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE) is another learned society, established in 2005 to advance the academic study of the various manifestations of Western esotericism from late antiquity to the present and to secure the future development of the field. ESSWE works closely with ASE.

A wide network of supporting groups, publications, and events now exists with the general aim of promoting scholarship into esotericism. Some of their work is freely available in various blogs, websites and inexpensive journals, but other research appears in costly books or periodicals, which presents a challenge to financially hard-pressed Theosophical bodies.

If we are to appreciate the wisdom of HPB, however, we need to pay attention to this new research in order to supplement the original texts and generations of Theosophical comment on them. Fresh eyes, with different presuppositions, may notice points which we have overlooked.

In the Theosophical Society in England (TSE), we got an early warning of this rise of scholarship because it was in London, with the warm support of Dr. Hugh Gray, then general secretary, that the journal Theosophical History was launched in 1985, and the associated TH conferences began in 1986. At that first conference, speakers included Dr. James Santucci, who was teaching a course on Theosophy to religious-studies students in California; the late Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, later to hold the chair in Western esotericism at Exeter University; and Paul Johnson, who wrote the best-selling HPB study of the 1990s, The Masters Revealed (1994), which incidentally came from a university press: State University of New York Press.

After Santucci became editor of Theosophical History in 1990, the field was firmly linked to scholarship, and most of the great scholars of Western esotericism have contributed to this journal, including Antoine Faivre and Wouter J. Hanegraaff. The doyenne of British historians in the field, Jean Overton Fuller of the Astrological Lodge of London, was a pillar of the TH conferences and the journal.

In 2013 came the launch of “Enchanted Modernities, Theosophy, Modernism, and the Arts,” an international network funded by the Leverhulme Trust, which, through a series of events, exhibitions, and concerts, explored the relationship between Theosophy and the arts from approximately 1875 to 1960. Art historian Janet Lee, then of the TSE executive committee, often represented Theosophists in this seminal project, publications from which are still appearing.

Indeed, esotericism as an academic area is now well established. For the 2015 Riga conference of ESSWE, the program and abstracts alone covered eighty pages. Much of this was not relevant to Theosophy, but some of it was. There was, for example, a seminal paper at Riga on the Masters by one of the leading esoteric historians, Joscelyn Godwin, which will appear shortly in an academic symposium on Theosophy.

These scholarly developments challenge Theosophists to reconsider where HPB’s essential contribution lies.

We learn from the letters of the Mahatmas, and from HPB herself, that she was a messenger, with the mission of establishing a society which would be a vehicle for their message. To help launch the Society, she used phenomena (and came to regret it) and stimulated a general interest in occultism. Gradually through her writings, and through the growth of the TS, these themes were developed. In general, The Secret Doctrine summarized what could be made known about the evolution of the cosmos and of man, while Voice of the Silence set out a spiritual path.

To establish her authority, HPB wrote on many subjects, but it does not appear that she was equally versed in all of them from the beginning. Certainly her writings show her citing some authors and later others, and expressing herself in different ways over time.

A few days before she passed away in 1891, Mme. Blavatsky completed an article entitled “My Books.” It was mainly about the problems with her first book, Isis Unveiled, but had general application. She wrote:

Friends, as unwise as they were kind, spread abroad that which was really the truth, a little too enthusiastically, about the connection of my Eastern Teacher and other Occultists with the work; and this was seized upon by the enemy and exaggerated out of all limits of truth. It was said that the whole of Isis had been dictated to me from cover to cover and verbatim by these invisible Adepts. And, as the imperfections of my work were only too glaring, the consequence of all this idle and malicious talk was, that my enemies and critics inferred—as well they might—that either these invisible inspirers had no existence, and were part of my “fraud,” or that they lacked the cleverness of even an average good writer (Blavatsky, 195–96; emphasis here and in other quotes in the original). 

HPB went on to say:

When I came to America in 1873, I had not spoken English—which I had learned in my childhood colloquially—for over thirty years. I could understand when I read it but could hardly speak the language. . . .

I had never been at any college, and what I knew I had taught myself; I have never pretended to any scholarship in the sense of modern research; I had then hardly read any scientific European works, knew little of Western philosophy and sciences. The little which I had studied and learned of these, disgusted me with its materialism, its limitations, narrow cut-and-dried spirit of dogmatism, and its air of superiority over the philosophies and sciences of antiquity. . . .

Until 1874 I had never written one word in English, nor had I published any work in any language (Blavatsky, 197).

However, she insisted:

 Save the direct quotations and the many afore specified and mentioned misprints, errors and misquotations, and the general make-up of Isis Unveiled, for which I am in no way responsible, (a) every word of information found in this work or in my later writings, comes from the teachings of our Eastern Masters; and (b) that many a passage in these works has been written by me under their dictation. In saying this no supernatural claim is urged, for no miracle is performed by such a dictation (Blavatsky, 196).

Even when writing on Tibetan matters, HPB would make mistakes. David Reigle, who has done much to establish the authentic nature of her inspiration, has warned of this in an important appendix to one of his papers, “On Errors in H.P. Blavatsky’s Writings”:

Blavatsky brought out a number of erroneous statements that were copied from the published books available at the time. The explanation for this is, I think, not far to seek. Blavatsky, like the secretary of any busy executive today, was given certain basic materials and then left on her own to make a coherent presentation of them. This meant supplementing them with whatever sources were then available. She herself would not necessarily have known that the publicly available sources were faulty, any more than anyone else at that time would have. Her adept teachers were busy men, and simply did not have time to check everything she wrote. This is only common sense, and would have been taken for granted in any other situation. Blavatsky repeatedly disclaimed infallibility for her writings. It is quite unreasonable to assume that everything she wrote is free from errors, as some of her followers assumed. Because much of her material came from her adept teachers, they thought that all of it did (Reigle, 35–36).

Let us to turn to some recent examples of scholarship which help us understand how Blavatsky developed her public work. There is a free online journal called Correspondences. In volume 5 (2017), there are two articles about HPB. The first is “The Theosophical Imagination” by Wouter J. Hanegraaff. He claims:

It is well known that the worldviews of modern Theosophy are based largely on authoritative claims of superior clairvoyance. But what did clairvoyance really mean for Theosophists in the decades before and after 1900? How did it work? And where did the practice come from? I will be arguing that the specific type of clairvoyance claimed by Theosophists should not be ­confused—as is usually done in the literature—with its Spiritualist counterpart: while ­Spiritualists relied on somnambulist trance states induced by Mesmeric techniques, ­Theosophists relied on the human faculty of the imagination, understood as a superior ­cognitive power operating in a fully conscious state. As will be seen, this Theosophical understanding of the clairvoyant ­imagination can be traced very precisely to a forgotten nineteenth-­century author, Joseph Rodes Buchanan, whose work was subsequently popularized by William and Elizabeth Denton. Buchanan’s theory and practice of “psychometry” is fundamental to the clairvoyant claims of all the major Theosophists, from Helena P. Blavatsky herself (Hanegraaff, 3).

Is this actually so? Our colleagues, such as Erica Georgiades and Kurt Leland (who is an authority on Besant’s and Leadbeater’s work), immediately questioned this, and the debate will continue. For example, Besant’s biographer Dr. Muriel Pécastaing-Boissière will present a paper at the July 2019 ESSWE conference in Amsterdam on Besant’s understanding of clairvoyance.

Moreover, how does Hanegraaff’s analysis fit with the one by Geoffrey Barborka in H.P. Blavatsky: Tibet and Tulku? Barborka understood HPB to be a tulku, that is, an expression of a high Tibetan being, for whom clairvoyance was one of many powers.

The second relevant paper in Correspondences is “Reincarnation in H.P. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine” by Julie Chajes (formerly Julie Hall). She argues that

Throughout her career as an occultist, H. P. Blavatsky (1831–1891) . . . taught two distinct theories of rebirth: metempsychosis and reincarnation. This paper provides a detailed description of the latter, as outlined in Blavatsky’s magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine (1888), and contemporaneous publications. In so doing, it offers several correctives and refinements to scholarly analyses of Theosophical reincarnationism offered over the last thirty years (Chajes, 65).

Even in her own lifetime, Theosophists were trying to reconcile what HPB said in Isis with what was later taught. Did she really teach two distinct theories?

There is a note under the first page of Chajes’s paper: “The publication of this paper was made possible by grants from The Blavatsky Trust and the Israel Science Foundation.” That Trust is of course a supporter of the European School of Theosophy and was a primary sponsor of the chair in Western esotericism at Exeter University. It is clearly aware of the importance of engagement with the academic world.

But I am certainly not arguing that scholars are a new source of infallibility and that Theosophists should defer to them. They can be wrong!

Let me give you an example of this. In May 1964, a new book was reviewed in the Theosophical Journal of the TSE: Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances A. Yates.

One can see the attraction of such a book to Theosophists. Was not Bruno a past incarnation of Annie Besant? Are not Theosophists part of the Hermetic tradition? The suggestion made by Frances Yates that occultism imbued the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was congenial. The book was an immense success, and after much other scholarly work, Yates was eventually promoted to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for services to Renaissance studies.

More detailed examination by scholars, however, indicated that Yates had gone astray. As Hanegraaff has recently observed:

Most of her guiding assumptions have proved to be incorrect. She misidentified important thinkers such as Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Giordano Bruno as “Hermetic philosophers”; she marginalized the actual Hermetic philosophers active in the Renaissance period; and she miscontextualized the Corpus Hermeticum, suggesting incorrectly that it was grounded in astral magic and concerned with questions leading up to modern science (Hanegraaff, 1–2).

Theosophists must therefore proceed cautiously, like any other students. There are today many scholars working on Theosophy and related topics, and this is welcome, but they, like Theosophists, can fall into scholarly temptation.

 

What applies to the humanities is also pertinent to science. The founders were very conscious that on one side there was dogmatic theology, its authority declining, and on the other science; already in his inaugural presidential address of 1875, Henry Steel Olcott spoke of “the arrogance of science.” He hoped that there would soon be an actual scientific demonstration of occult power by George Henry Felt, whose famous lecture, “The Lost Canon of Proportion of the Egyptians,” triggered the decision to launch the TS. But Felt did not deliver; neither elementals were conjured up nor anything else.

Olcott also believed that ancient civilizations had practical knowledge of occult science, the “profound scientific attainments of the ancient magi,” as he termed them. Certainly in his travels across the world, he witnessed some remarkable phenomena, but demonstrating what had been known in the past to present-day savants proved more difficult.

After the founders arrived in India, the teachers behind the Society emerged though the Mahatma Letters. We must remember, of course, that these letters were known only incompletely until A. Trevor Barker published the full text in 1923. These teachers attached great importance to science. You will recall the statement of Koot Hoomi in a letter to A.O. Hume: “Modern science is our best ally” (Barker, 63).

Ed Abdill, former vice-president of the TSA, has provided a reassessment of science in the Mahatma Letters and in The Secret Doctrine. In his book Masters of Wisdom, he draws attention to a comment of KH: “If our greatest adepts and Bodhisattvas have never penetrated themselves beyond our solar system,—and the idea seems to suit your preconceived theistic theory wonderfully, my respected Brother—they still know of the existence of other such solar systems, with as mathematical a certainty as any western astronomer knows of the existence of invisible stars which he can never approach or explore” (Barker, 135). Similarly KH writes: “No planets but one have hitherto been discovered outside of the solar system, with all their photometers, while we know with the sole help of our spiritual naked eye a number of them; every completely matured Sun-star having like in our own system several companion planets in fact” (Barker, 162).

Abdill concludes: “These statements of K. were a prediction of what we call ‘exoplanets’ and we now know there are more than a thousand of them” (Abdill, 107). I have highlighted these statements, which are among other correct scientific prophecies by the Mahatmas, because when I was young there were only nine planets and one solar system. Now there is one star, called Trappist 1, which has no less than seven planets, and doubtless this record will soon be broken.

What of current Theosophical contributions to science? Here we are fortunate to have a recent assessment by Egil Asprem, now at Stockholm University, in “Theosophical Attitudes to Science: Past and Present.” This is a seminal paper, which should be studied by all Theosophical leaders.

Asprem reminds us of the danger of celebrating an aspect of contemporary science which appears to support Theosophy. The classic example was the concept of ether, which in Victorian times was believed to be a medium through which a variety of physical phenomena occurred. It was tempting to approximate this to the occultist understanding of the ether. Twentieth-century physics largely dropped the concept of the ether.

Some Theosophists also believed that clairvoyance could be used to obtain knowledge of subatomic realms—occult chemistry. Here too as physics changed, so the Theosophical findings came into question. When I was young. I met Dr. Lester Smith, who was confident that a new interpretation of the findings of occult chemistry could verify them by means of quark theory. At the TS in England today Professor Gwyn Hocking, till recently our national secretary, has reinterpreted occult research in the light of remote viewing.

Between approximately 1935 and 1980, it was possible in the United Kingdom for a Theosophical Research Centre (TRC) to flourish, in which active scientists and doctors carried out research with clairvoyants, and published books, journals, and pamphlets. Indeed in the TSE archives, notes of experiments go back to a Science Group formed in the early 1920s.

About 1960 a crisis took place when the TRC leaders found that some of their research disagreed with what Theosophical teachers had written. This was highlighted by a Discrepancies Subcommittee of the TRC. The only public account of this can be found in the 1998 Blavatsky Lecture by Professor Arthur Ellison.

The TSE therefore closed down the Discrepancies Subcommittee, and in his lecture Dr. Ellison suggested the natural home for such work, which had become the Scientific and Medical Network (SMN), founded in the U.K. in 1973. This reminds us that the teachers made it clear that they worked through bodies other than the TS.

Dr. Asprem concludes his survey of Theosophy and science by citing the work of Dr. Edi Bilimoria, then a senior member of Blavatsky Lodge in London, and since 2011, active in SMN. One of the current SMN initiatives is the Galileo Commission, which is hoping to facilitate a change in the scientific outlook (https://www.galileocommission.org/).

Dr. Bilimoria, who alerted me to this, notes, “Whilst not exactly ‘Theosophy-Science’ it is a major step in that direction preparing the ground, in my opinion, for more esoteric seeds to sprout.”

Is it possible that William Crookes, perhaps the greatest scientist ever to join the TS, who became a member in 1883 and was a personal friend of HPB, was a disappointment as a Theosophist? He never played any part in the administration of the Society or its leadership. He joined the London Lodge, which under the leadership of A.P. Sinnett was largely detached from the work of promoting Theosophy in England. Sinnett was preoccupied with psychism, and I fear that Crookes shared this preoccupation—beyond what the Third Object enjoined.

In our own time, the leading scientist in the TS is Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, and his books certainly advance Theosophical ideas. Dr. Sheldrake celebrated forty years of TS membership in 2018; he had joined when working in India.. But again he plays no part in TS affairs. Perhaps that is wise!

In conclusion: Theosophists should keep in touch with academic research into HPB’s work. One way is through events dealing with particular aspects to which scholars and Theosophists (the two groups overlap, of course) are invited to offer papers. Another is for Theosophists to attend scholarly gatherings where HPB is under discussion.

Theosophical libraries should also invest in the books and journals which report such work. National Sections, for example, and major lodges ought to subscribe to Theosophical History. I commend the practice of the Theosophy Science group in Australia of publishing a regular free newsletter, and of holding conferences, often in association with regular national Theosophical conferences. 

The wisdom of HPB lies with that in which she had been initiated, as a disciple on the path, able to show others that path which she faithfully followed. We can learn from noncommitted scholars on many factual points, and they from us, but this is subordinate to the spiritual message and the response of each of us. 

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Source Material 

Abdill, Ed. Masters of Wisdom: The Mahatmas, Their Letters, and the Path. New York: Tarcher Perigee, 2015.

Asprem, Egil. “Theosophical Attitudes towards Science: Past and Present.” In Olav Hammer and Mikael Rothstein, eds. Handbook of the Theosophical Current. Leiden: Brill, 2013: 405–27.

Barborka, Geoffrey A. H.P. Blavatsky: Tibet and Tulku. Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1966.

Barker, A. Trevor, ed. The Mahatma Letters to A.P Sinnett. 3d ed. Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1962.

Blavatsky, H.P. “My Books.” In Collected Writings, vol. 13. Edited by Boris de Zirkoff. Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1982: 191–202.

Chajes, Julie. “Reincarnation in H.P. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine.” In Correspondences, 5 (2017): 65–93.

Ellison, Arthur. “Science, Consciousness, and the Paranormal.” Blavatsky Lecture, Theosophical Society in England, July 26, 1998.
Hanegraaff, Wouter J. “Hermes Trismegistus and Hermeticism.” In M. Sgarbi, ed. The Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. N.p.: Springer, 2018.

———. “The Theosophical Imagination.” In Correspondences 5 (2017): 3–39.

Reigle, David. “Tsongkapha and the Teachings of the Wisdom Tradition.” Appendix 2 is entitled “On Errors in H.P. Blavatsky’s Writings.”

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Leslie Price was founder editor of the Theosophical History journal from 1975 to 1978 and is currently an associate editor. He was secretary of the Theosophical History conferences held regularly in London from 1986 to 2016. This paper was first presented at the European School of Theosophy in October 2018.  

 

 

 

 

 

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Printed in the Spring 2019issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Will, Tuttle,"The Enlightenment Fallacy" Quest 107:2, pg 22-26

By Will Tuttle

Flesh free from the three objections, not prepared, unasked, unsolicited, there is none. Therefore one should not eat flesh.
 —Arya Shantideva

Theosophy, while not a religion but a search for truth, draws heavily from Buddhist insights. Buddhism, like Theosophy and most religions, is a system of teachings aiming to assist its adherents to attain spiritual enlightenment. The underlying idea is that as we cultivate our awareness and awaken spiritually, we naturally help to bring healing and harmony not just to ourselves, but also to our society.

Spirituality transcends the particularities of religion, history, and culture, and addresses the dimension of ourselves that is consciousness and is not essentially separate from other beings. Spiritual awareness, whatever the religious or nonreligious trappings may be, naturally gives rise to compassion for others, including animals, and also to ethical behavior, because it’s the lived realization that beings are not merely material objects, but are sentient manifestations of life inherently deserving of respect.

The Consequences of Herderism

Animal agriculture is the antithesis of spirituality. It reduces beings to the status of harvestable commodities, stealing their sovereignty through routine sexual abuse, mutilation, and death. This destroys not just their lives, purposes, and happiness, but undermines ours as well. It fosters a desensitized awareness focused on separateness, denial, entitlement, competition, and consumerism. Our freedom is eroded by enslaving animals. Herderism, the core organizing principle of our society for the past 10,000 years, is the practice and accompanying mentality of routinely and relentlessly reducing beings to mere material commodities to be imprisoned, killed, and used. Herderism’s hubristic mentality of entitlement suppresses spiritual awareness in individuals and in our cultural institutions, including our religious institutions. Through acculturation, this has become invisible to us.

When we have religious teachings, practices, and teachers that do not question animal agriculture or eating animal-sourced foods, we have religions that lack spirituality and that tend, ironically, to reduce spiritual awareness while contributing to delusion, injustice, and war. The four core practices of animal agriculture are: mentally reducing beings to mere material objects; enslaving them from birth to death; sexually abusing them and stealing their offspring; and premeditatively killing all of them. On every level—physically, cognitively, emotionally, sexually, spiritually, culturally, and ethically—animal agriculture undermines our sensitivity and awareness, and promotes materialism and the exploitation of the weak by the strong. The fact that it is so widespread and deeply rooted makes its devastating effects virtually untrackable to their source, even to those of us who consider ourselves to be spiritually oriented.

Because all of us have been raised in a culture organized around herding animals for food, we have been wounded from birth by the medical, educational, religious, familial, economic, and governmental institutions compelling us to participate in animal agriculture. When we eat animal foods, we are not only harming our physical health, we are also eating attitudes that reduce our psychological, cultural, and spiritual wellness. Food is our most intimate connection with nature and with our culture, and being required from infancy to eat foods of terror and toxicity suppresses our innate wisdom and sense of connectedness with the other intriguing and beautiful expressions of life on earth. Herderism, because it requires and ritually indoctrinates both desensitization and disconnectedness, reduces our capacities to care, feel, and make connections, eroding our ability to understand the cause of suffering.

We have been told from childhood that hot dogs, hamburgers, cheese, eggs, and fish sticks are our tasty friends, giving us needed protein, calcium, and other health benefits, and that ranching and fishing are natural and noble activities that help to feed us and keep our world healthy. Fortunately, we are waking up from this erroneous narrative and realizing that our “friendly” foods, and the industries based on animal exploitation, are actually our deadliest enemies, as cows, pigs, and chickens have certainly long realized. They relentlessly harm every dimension of our health, but this reality—and our capacity to awaken and understand it—is suppressed by our social institutions.

Spirituality and Religion 

Religion is the social institution that is perhaps best-suited to upholding ethical standards and demanding protection of the weak, but it is compromised by two competing loyalties. It has a mission to encourage the spiritual impulse in people, but it also has a mission to support and transmit prevailing cultural norms and values. Spirituality, however, has no such divided loyalty, and propels us only to discover our true nature, even if it means questioning cultural narratives. Spirituality recognizes the pig in the bacon, the cow in the cheese, and the injustice and trauma that we are causing by eating these foods and feeding them to our children. Spirituality rejects this unnecessary violence and calls for an awakening from this abusive behavior, as well as from the underlying materialism and reductionism that inform animal agriculture.

This is the great tension between spirituality and religion. Spirituality can never condone the culturally approved practices of animal exploitation and abuse for food, clothing, entertainment, research, or any purpose, because it is rooted in respecting the interconnectedness and unity of life and consciousness. It is not concerned, as religion is, with supporting existing cultural values. Spirituality includes animals because they are endowed with sentience as we humans are. Thus teachers and teachings are fully spiritual when they explicitly renounce all forms of animal agriculture, animal-sourced foods and products, and other forms of animal abuse.

There may be religious teachers who do not question animal agriculture because their primary aim is to maintain the prevailing cultural narratives, be popular, and be financially successful. However, as soon as spirituality comes into play, materialism and practices of exploitation are vigorously questioned and abandoned, and replaced by teachings that cultivate respect, kindness, and freedom for all.

Buddhism seems to have begun as a fully spiritual teaching in this sense, questioning injustice and violence, and helped shift the ancient Indian culture away from the practice of animal sacrifice and toward vegan living based on respect for all. This may have been somewhat easier at that time, because Indian cuisine was more organized around plant-based foods then, except for the practice, apparently brought by immigrants from Egypt and central Asia, of exploiting cows for their milk. When Buddhism later spread to East Asian countries like China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, which had no tradition of using cows for milk, the Buddhist teachings and teachers evolved to explicitly encourage vegan living, a practice continuing to this day.

Buddhism, rooted as it is in ahimsa, has thus been an often hidden thread in the centuries-old tapestry of vegetarianism and veganism as they have evolved throughout the world. Both Buddhism and veganism are living, transformational forces in peoples’ lives.

The gift of veganism is the insistence on practicing ahimsa in daily life by explicitly including animals within our sphere of mindful caring and kindness. But veganism in itself lacks a foundation in cultivating deeper awareness, inner stillness, and receptivity. As vegans, we can fall prey to despair and anger because of our unique and still unaccepted orientation, and may become mired in depression, anger, or alienation, or in blaming, shaming, and criticizing behaviors.

Although Buddhist ahimsa has been watered down in many cases by corruption, convenience, conformism, fear, hubris, taste, ambition, hypocrisy, and sloth, Buddhism brings the gift of mindfulness and the cultivation of meditative awareness. Just as vegan practice can bring an essential clarity and accountability to Buddhist practice, Buddhist practice can bring depth, mindfulness, and resilience to vegan practice. Together they can create a more comprehensive framework for personal and social transformation.

For example, a primary danger for Buddhist practitioners is sometimes referred to as “Zen sickness,” a dull pseudoserenity in which our routinized meditation and way of thinking keep us stuck in a detached, enforced calmness. Buddhist practice calls us to awaken out of any enforced mental state to full aliveness and responsiveness in the moment-to-moment awareness of our lives. Eating animal foods dulls our sensitivities. Mindful vegan living can help reconnect us with the purity, passion, joy, and aliveness that our cultural wounds have repressed, and can reconnect us with the compassion and awareness that have been covered over by years of indoctrination.

On the other hand, some of us try to justify eating animal foods because we tell ourselves we are bringing the Buddhist practice of mindfulness to our nonvegan meals. Not far from where we live in northern California, for example, there’s a local slaughter facility advertising that it provides “mindful meats.” This coopting of Buddhist terms and ideas is readily apparent. We would never consider promoting mindful raping, mindful stealing, or mindful harming, because mindfulness is the antithesis of these behaviors. Mindfulness is the cultivation of awareness, and to willfully abuse others requires us to submerge our awareness beneath a distorting narrative that rationalizes toxic attitudes and behavior. Buddhist practice is an effort to liberate our minds from the narratives that hold us in delusion and cause violence. Veganism is clearly a helpful ally in this effort.

The world’s religions promote ahimsa, and yet virtually all of them, even Buddhism and Jainism, which seem to champion it, continue to be hijacked into justifying violence toward animals by the pervasive demands of animal agriculture. As we as individuals make efforts to awaken from the cultural trance of herderism and routinized animal abuse, our transformation is our contribution to our collective transformation, helping our spiritual and religious communities reclaim their authentic foundations. We liberate animals from the violence of “mindful meats” and liberate Buddhism from this violence to its teachings as well, freeing it to illuminate and inspire compassion and liberation for all as originally intended.

The Enlightenment Fallacy 

Outer compassion and inner stillness feed each other. Veganism and ethical living are essential to our spiritual health because they remove a fundamental hindrance to our individual path and help create harmony in our community.

There’s a saying attributed to the eighth-century lama Padmasambhava: “Though the view should be as vast as the sky, keep your conduct as fine as barley flour.” This essential teaching, emphasizing vegan values of caring and kindness, is an important healing antidote to a damaging delusion common in many spiritual communities. We can call this delusion the “enlightenment fallacy,” because it arises as a false sense of individual license to do as we like because we believe we are spiritually advanced. This fallacy activates and reinforces the basic sense of entitlement and arrogance that is inserted into all of us as products of a culture organized around eating foods sourced from animals. This violence is well understood today to be completely unnecessary and counterproductive to our physical, cultural, and environmental health. However, the enlightenment fallacy attempts to justify this by “spiritualizing” our disconnectedness, denial, and daily contribution to violence through propagating what seems to be a more lofty and enlightened perspective. This fashionable perspective clouds our awareness and convinces us that our behavior of buying and eating animal-sourced foods either is not relevant to our spiritual practice or is actually an indication of our spiritual attainments. There are several versions of this enlightenment fallacy.

One is that because of our spiritual attainment, we are now free of attachments and judgments. We are no longer trapped in the net of discrimination, this fallacy affirms, and are therefore free to eat anything we like. We see that everything has “one taste,” and now that we have discovered this and have freed ourselves from the discriminating mind, we can live our lives free from the rules that are only meant for those who are less accomplished.

Another version is that because we are more enlightened, we now realize that the whole phenomenal world is but maya, an illusion, and therefore no animals are really killed, and in fact nothing negative ever really happens. Love is the only power, so we can eat our hot dogs with love and understanding and no harm is done. This narrative assures us that we either transform the negativity with our high vibration or that we are so awake that we realize that the animals we’re eating are illusory, as is all pain and suffering, so it doesn’t matter what we do in the outer world. All that matters is the quality of our consciousness.

A similar narrative is that we have attained the “karmaless” state, where we are free from karma, duality, and consequences. We realize there is no essential self, and no world, and we are thus free to do as we like. We are no longer bound by conventional morality, which is a system of rules that is artificial and imprisons us in delusions of “good” and “evil.” Now we are free of this confining dualism, the narrative goes, and we can act as we please.

Many Buddhists and other spiritual practitioners follow a similarly tempting rationalization, proclaiming that spiritual illumination is liberation from dualism and rules and that they are free to do as their “heart” tells them, or to eat the foods to which their “body” guides them. They love the animals they eat. They are blessing them and helping them to have a more evolved rebirth. Or even better, they see that it’s all just a play of illusion and that the One Light is always shining, no matter what is happening in the outer world.

Padmasambhava’s wisdom (and there are many other examples of this wisdom in the Buddhist teachings) addresses the devastating fallacy in these hubristic narratives. When our view is as vast, deep, bright, and all-encompassing as the sky, then we keep our conduct as fine as flour. It’s precisely because our view is vast that we are more sensitive to the consequences of actions and take them seriously. We experience the infinite interconnectedness of all manifestations of life, and our heart is naturally bursting with compassion for others, even as we see they are not “others” at all, but essentially inseparable from us. This realization is the foundation of authentic morality, kindness, and spiritual awakenings. We naturally delight in helping and blessing others as best we can, and recoil from actions that exploit or abuse others for our own advantage.

We should be suspicious of any narrative that allows or encourages harming or using others because of seeing they are not separate, or seeing they are eternal and undamageable, and so forth. Clinging to either duality or nonduality is still clinging. There are many aspects to the enlightenment fallacy, and the various rationalization narratives are all the more insidious because of the armor they bestow, hardening hearts and conveying a toxic pseudospirituality that harms not just animals but everyone touched by these delusions. While it may be helpful and healing to practice viewing the pain and loss that we personally experience as transient and illusory, it is the height of delusion to discount the pain and loss we inflict on others by rationalizing it as being transient and illusory. We may often add further layers to the narrative, for example that it’s just for their own good, or it’s just their karma, or that we’re just not attached to outer forms, or that we’re just reflecting back to them their own violence. The “just” in all these narrative excuses is the just of justification.

To the degree we are wounded and abused as children, we tend to grow into adults who are propelled to likewise inflict abuse on others. As products of a technocratic herding culture, we are all harmed from infancy in countless ways, and our woundedness can erode our capacity to be mindful of our conduct and sensitive to our inner wisdom and to others. The Buddhist teachings call us to heal, to look deeply and mindfully, and to question the fundamental narrative of the herding culture into which we’ve all been born. This herding narrative, which reduces beings to commodities, is the utter antithesis of both bodhi and karuna, wisdom and compassion, the prime teachings of Buddhism, which free us as individuals and create the foundation of communities where harmony, joy, equality, and abundance are possible for all.

Awakening from the desensitizing stupor inflicted on us from infancy by the herding culture is a monumental effort. It calls us to question virtually all of our inner narratives and explanations, and to cultivate our capacity for inner silence so that we can be free from this harmful conditioning. In receptive awareness, we find that intuitive insight emerges, and this can be seen as the foundation of the wisdom and compassion that are at the heart of the Buddhist dharma.

Ahimsa and Cultural Transformation 

The transformative insight that the historical Buddha experienced and shared as best he could is a direct understanding of the deeper truth of our nature, bringing peace, joy, and freedom. It is insight into the cause of suffering in the delusion of essential separateness, which compels us to try endlessly to get what we want and keep away what we don’t want, and to see others as instruments in this miserable struggle. This is samsara, the suffering that never ends in countless lifetimes until we awaken our heart and mind and realize that we are all waves on the same ocean. This awakening and teaching, the hidden thread that has brought healing through the ages, is available to each and every one of us now.

We live in challenging times. Animal agriculture continues to devastate our earth’s ecosystems, our culture’s harmony and sanity, and our physical health. More insidiously, it also erodes our cultural and personal intelligence, and our awareness, empathy, and creativity. Our short-term future is in question at this point. It’s well understood that we could go extinct soon, without ever understanding why it happened. The vegan dimensions of many traditions of wisdom, including Buddhism, have been repressed for too long under the din of animal agriculture’s narrative of domination, greed, and elitism.

Nevertheless, by opening our eyes and looking deeply, we can discern a bright and beckoning path into a positive future. Increasing numbers of us are being called to this path and are calling others to join us. There is nothing stopping us from proceeding along this bright path to new dimensions of peace, abundance, and freedom. Fear, delusion, attachment, and conformism are the primary obstacles.

Virtually all religious traditions today are open to more explicitly recognizing the importance of a commitment to respect and kindness for animals. Each of us can contribute in our unique way to this opening of awareness. We are called to more fully embody the values of kindness in the crucible of our relationships with all kinds of animals, including the most difficult ones, humans. It is through congruence and transparency that living truths are transmitted.

The earth we inhabit is beautiful and abundant and can easily feed and support all of us. When we awaken from the consumerist trance of animal agriculture, the land and waters will heal, along with our minds, bodies, relationships, and communities. This is the vision of engaged and caring awareness and action implicit in Buddhism and veganism. Buddhist teachings call for vegan living, and vegan living calls for the same awakening from deluded narratives toward which Buddhist practice aims.

May we give thanks every day for another opportunity to awaken, to contribute to our community, and to cultivate our minds and hearts so that our view becomes as vast as the sky and our conduct as fine as barley flour.

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Dr. Will Tuttle is author of the acclaimed best-seller The World Peace Diet, published in sixteen languages. A recipient of the Courage of Conscience Award and the Empty Cages Prize, he is also the author of several other books on spirituality, intuition, and social justice, as well as the creator of online wellness and advocacy programs. A vegan since 1980 and former Zen monk, he is cofounder of the Worldwide Prayer Circle for Animals. With his spouse, Madeleine, a Swiss visionary artist, he lectures extensively worldwide.

This essay is adapted from a forthcoming book of essays edited by Dr. Tuttle: Buddhism and Veganism: Essays Connecting Spiritual Awakening and Animal Liberation.

 

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Printed in the Spring 2019 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Jeff, Rasley,"Should I Stay or Should I Go? Can a Skeptic Ever Find the Right Church?" Quest 107:2, pg 14-21

By Jeff Rasley                                                      

Should I stay or should I go?
If you say that you are mine
I’ll be here till the end of time
So you got to let me know
Should I stay or should I go? 

If I go, there will be trouble
And if I stay it will be double

                     —The Clash

I came to the Quakers out of need, but stayed because I found something I’d lost.

The first time I attended an Indianapolis First Friends worship service was at the invitation of my friend Tim Meyer. Tim was a member of a 2007 mountaineering expedition to Yala Peak that I organized. (Yala Peak is an 18,000-foot-high mountain in the Langtang region of eastern Nepal,) He was also the first contributor to a fundraising project I organized for the village school in Basa, Nepal.

Niru Rai is the owner of Adventure GeoTreks, the outfitter company I have partnered with on Himalayan expeditions since 2006. He employs guides, cooks, and porters from his home village, Basa. During the 2006 expedition, our guide, Ganesh Rai, told me the school in Basa had only three grades, and the village wanted to add fourth and fifth grades. Back in Katmandu, Niru asked whether I would be willing to raise $5000, which would pay for the materials needed to add two classrooms and would pay the salaries of fifth- and fourth-grade teachers for three years. Villagers could provide the labor to build the addition to the school, and the government would pay the teachers’ salaries after three years.

Wow, what a bargain! Five thousand dollars was all it would take to provide kids in Basa with two more years of education.

Fundraising to expand the school was so successful that Niru and I decided we should work together on other projects for Basa.

I visited the village in 2008. It didn’t have electricity, water, or toilets. No road reached the village; there were no vehicles, not even a bicycle. I learned that the villagers wanted electricity so they could have light after dark from sources other than their cooking-fire pits.

Niru, Mike Miller, a friend and electrical engineer, and I worked out a budget and determined that the cost of all the parts and materials required to build a little hydroelectric plant on the stream that supplied water for the village was only $22,000. The villagers could supply the necessary labor.

We needed a tax-exempt organization through which contributions could be funneled so donors could claim a charitable tax-deduction. A Presbyterian church I had belonged to had supported previous fundraising projects. But I’d parted ways with the Presbyterian church.

That’s when Tim Meyer suggested I come with him to meeting at Indianapolis First Friends. (Quakers call their worship services “meetings,” and they refer to the congregation as “the Meeting” and to the place of worship as a “meeting house.”) Tim’s plan was to introduce me to the Meeting and then ask First Friends to be the sponsor (“fiscal agent” in IRS lingo) of the fundraising project.

The plan worked. I was invited to speak at the monthly meeting for business at First Friends. A resolution was approved that the Meeting would act as fiscal agent for the Basa Village hydroelectric project.

The Meeting continued to support infrastructure development in Basa even after the Basa Village Foundation (BVF) became a separate tax-exempt corporation. The BVF has fund-raised and worked with Niru and the village to build a water system and a new school and provide smokeless stoves, temporary medical clinics, school uniforms, coats and shoes, solar-powered LED lights, computers, and books for the school. The BVF also contributed funds to rebuild the village after earthquakes in 2015, and has plans for future projects in other remote villages.

Tim’s fortuitous invitation was the pebble dropped into the pond that rippled out to connect Quaker Friends in Indianapolis with my Rai friends in Basa. (Most of the villagers in Basa belong to the Rai ethnotribal group of eastern Nepal.)

 The willingness to help and my first experience of a Quaker service at First Friends led me to think Tim’s introduction could satisfy another need. A couple years earlier I’d left the Presbyterian church of my forefathers and mothers. I had been church shopping since then.

The welcome I received at First Friends on my first visit was not nearly as boisterous or moving as the one I received in Basa on my first visit to the village. The Quakers did not greet me with flutes and drums. I wasn’t showered with flowers, and there wasn’t any dancing and singing. I did receive a few hugs and friendly handshakes after the worship service, along with tea and cookies. I wasn’t overwhelmed with hospitality as I was in Basa, where every family wanted my fellow trekkers and me to visit their homes and sample their homemade brew and a plate of rice.

What really made an impression on me at the first Quaker service I attended was what they called “unprogrammed worship.” During the service there were hymns, choir and organ music, and a sermon—all the familiar elements of a mainline Protestant service. The new twist was fifteen minutes of the unique form of traditional Quaker worship. (We had moments of silence in Presbyterian services, but the moment was over as soon as you bowed your head.)

Pastor Stan explained that the spirit of God is in all of us and that, if the spirit led anyone to speak, they should do so. Otherwise, we should center down in silence and wait upon the spirit. When the quiet time began, it felt like a hundred pairs of lungs were breathing together. In that silence I felt the awesomeness of the universe and gratitude to be alive in it. The feeling was similar to experiences I’d had in Nepal in Hindu puja (worship) ceremonies, Buddhist mantra chanting, and Rai dancing. It was a thoughtfully pragmatic worship experience. It allowed busy people living in urban America time to relax and meditate. It also allowed the opportunity for anyone who felt so led to speak from their heart.

So I went to the Sunday meeting the next week, and the week after that, and the week after that. The openness to diverse views, sincerity in worship, a communal method of decision making, and an emphasis on positive values rather than doctrinal beliefs at First Friends fit my conception of how a worship community ought to be.

Four generations of my family had sat in our pew at First Presbyterian Church of Goshen, Indiana. But I left the denomination of my heritage because the structural and doctrinal rigidity of Presbyterianism no longer worked for me. My evolving attitude toward religion was influenced by experiences in Nepal and India, where I had been trekking, climbing, and engaged in philanthropic projects since 1995. The animistic, nature-worshipping Rai people had especially influenced my theology.

Such lofty considerations hadn’t enticed me to sample First Friends. I just wanted to find a sponsor for fundraising projects in Basa. Finding a community that synced with my idea of what a church ought to be was serendipity. After attending First Friends for eighteen months, I became a pledging member in 2011.

Last year, I resigned my membership.

The Basa Rai do not have a formal religion, regular religious services, or a written language. They tell stories about gods and spirits in their native language, and they celebrate weddings, births, and Hindu and Buddhist festivals. Each time I lead a trekking group to Basa, we are showered with flowers. There is lots of singing, dancing, drinking, and eating. Without the distractions of TV, radio, telephones, and vehicles, the subsistence-farmer villagers delight in any excuse to party.

The village shaman performs healing and other ceremonies, but Western medicine is also respected. The Basa Rai have lived their traditional way of life for hundreds of years. Fundamental to that way of life is sensitivity to other people and to nature.

Once when I was walking with Ganesh Rai, I started to kick a rock out of the middle of the trail. He gently gripped my shoulder, stepped in front of me, and moved the rock out of our way. He explained that the rock’s spirit should be respected.

Below the high mountain passes, trekking through rainforests or jungles with Ganesh and other guides from Basa is a lesson in botany and biology. They name all the flora and fauna we encounter and describe both the medicinal and the dangerous characteristics of plants and trees. The village depends on wood burning for heat and cooking, but they do not kill trees. Sticks are gathered and branches can be cut, but a tree won’t be chopped down unless it is dead.

The Basa Rai grow what they eat. They will only eat meat if the animal is dying. They live a simple and beautiful way of life, with family and communal relationships at the center. Visitors to the village are rare, but strangers are welcomed as guests.

In Basa and throughout Nepal we greet each other with “Namaste,” which serves as “Hello” but also has a spiritual connotation of “I recognize god in you.” So I recognized a certain amount of congruence between the animistic spirituality of my Rai friends and the Quaker understanding of God in all of us.

My own view is that some form of energy (maybe the vibrations of string theory, or whatever) is animating our universe and everything in it. Scientists studying cosmogony and cosmology are discovering more information and developing deeper understandings of the properties that govern the universe. Imagining and theorizing is fun and creative, but it’s not Truth.

Theological propositions may seem logical when the premises of the particular religion are accepted. But what is the real purpose of constructing an imaginary system, claiming it is Truth, and demanding that others believe it? I don’t think the purpose is benign. I do think we are better off admitting our ignorance and remaining agnostic about what we don’t actually know.

The story-myths of the Rai are about supernatural spirits. They are told differently by different storytellers. The Rai don’t have religious doctrines or exclusive practices, so they have happily incorporated Hindu and Buddhist festivals into their calendar. A Christian church was built in Basa because Tek, one of the village elders, learned about Christianity and decided he would like to be a preacher. Tek doesn’t have a Bible, but occasionally a few families gather in the church to sing and hear Tek talk about Jesus.

Religion at its best is imaginatively creative, tolerant, and inclusive. Religion at its worst claims it alone has the answers to unanswerable questions and condemns or scorns those who disagree.

One reason I left the Presbyterian church is that Calvinist theology is cruel and ridiculous. It says that before the beginning of time, in his infinite wisdom God decided the ultimate fate of every human—who goes to heaven and who to hell: double predestination.

But I still wanted to participate in a community of people who gather together to share in the awe and gratitude I feel for the existence of our world, to talk about it, sing about it, contemplate it, and break bread together. I could travel halfway around the world and trek over 10,000-foot-high passes to experience all of that in Basa; but in Indianapolis?

Thanks to Tim, I discovered that I could drive five minutes from my house to experience that at Indianapolis First Friends. There it seemed my desire to participate with others in experiences that express awe and wonder at the beauty and mystery of existence, without ceding rationality to superstition or rigid orthodoxy, could be fulfilled.

I soon learned that many members of First Friends, and many Quakers, believe in Christian superstitions and irrational beliefs. Pastor Stan made it clear, however, that his and any other Quaker’s beliefs were theirs alone and not the official position of First Friends or the Society of Friends (the Quaker denomination).  

The successor to Stan was Pastor Ruthie. She is a trained opera singer and has a voice that can send a sinner to heaven. She has a warm and sweet personality. Unlike Pastor Stan, her Sunday messages were expressly evangelical Christian. Almost every Sunday she said things in her sermon that are at odds with my animistic agnosticism.

Ruthie describes God as actively intervening in human affairs. An example that felt like fingernails on a chalkboard to me was “God can heal your ouchies.” Ruthie was talking to kids in vacation Bible school about “what God can do for you.” A god who would respond to a child’s prayer to heal her scraped knee while allowing other children to be molested, murdered, and starved, is no god I can worship. It troubled me that the next generation of Quakers is being indoctrinated into a theology similar to the one I grew up with and that took so long to deprogram myself of.

Although she knew that I do not share her beliefs, Ruthie asked me to lead a weekly discussion group prior to Sunday worship. I led the class for several years. I was also asked to deliver the message in worship a few times during both Stan’s and Ruthie’s tenures. My theology or lack thereof was not a bar to becoming a voice within the Meeting. (My book, Godless: Living a Valuable Life beyond Beliefs, was promoted in the First Friends newsletter and reviewed in the national publication, Friends Journal.)

Toleration of difference is a fundamental value of First Friends. In the adult discussion group I led (“The Wired Word Coffee Circle”), Duffy, a self-described evangelical Christian, was a regular participant. Howard was a self-described atheist. The other regular attendees covered the theological spectrum between those polar positions. Another regular, Daoud, is Muslim. Every week we engaged in passionate discussions and disagreements, then went to worship together. The acceptance of difference, disagreement, and diversity kept me coming back to spend Sunday mornings at First Friends.

Not all Quaker Meetings are as tolerant as First Friends. Conservatives in the Western Yearly Meeting (a regional Quaker organization) tried, but failed, to unrecord (meaning defrock) a well-known pastor-author, Phil Gulley. Gulley had openly preached and written about universalist theology. He claimed that the Christian way is not the only way to understand God. Several conservative Meetings withdrew from Western Yearly Meeting after the bid to unrecord Pastor Gulley pooped out. In 2012 the Indiana Yearly Meeting expelled the West Richmond Meeting for openly welcoming gays and lesbians.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 guaranteed the constitutional right to same-sex marriage. At this point, during Ruthie’s tenure, First Friends undertook a series of meetings and discussions to discern whether the Meeting should perform same-sex marriages. There was overwhelming support for performing same-sex weddings in the meeting house. But two members left because they were upset about how slow the process of discernment was moving and that the Meeting did not express public support for the right to same-sex marriage. On the other hand, at least three members left because they could not abide the Meeting’s violating the biblical injunction against homosexuality.

The issue was finally resolved at a monthly meeting for business after months of discussion. Because no one stood in the way and refused to accept the proposal, a policy of allowing same-sex marriage of members was approved.

My initial enthusiasm for Quakerism was tempered by observing internal squabbles and by Pastor Ruthie’s anthropomorphic conception of God. But where else in Indianapolis could I find a worshipping community that tolerated my animistic agnosticism?

The founder of the Friends movement, George Fox, in seventeenth-century England proclaimed that it was revealed to him through study of the Bible and revelation that God is in all people. Early Quakers developed a communal way of decision making, which requires consensus to the extent that no member “stands in the way.”

I’ve witnessed decision making in the Basa village, and it works very much like the Quaker way. Everyone in the village gathers by the school, and they talk until a consensus is reached. The meeting about how to build and operate the hydroelectric system lasted the better part of two days. The outcome was a plan in which every villager had a role from serving food to stringing wire up a sheer 100-foot-high cliff to operating the completed generator.

The Quaker concept of God, coupled with a tradition of holding no doctrines and consensus decision making, seemed as close as I would come to finding a worship community that could tolerate me and that I could tolerate.

I did not want to get sucked into ecclesiastical disputes or the minutiae of administering a church, so I never went to a Yearly Meeting and kept a distance from the internal politics of First Friends. I had rejected the doctrinal baggage of Christianity, but I still felt a visceral pull to be connected to a church. I was programmed to get up Sunday morning and go to church.

The spiritual hymn

Lord, I want to be a Christian
in my heart, in my heart.
Lord, I want to be a Christian in my heart.
In my heart, in my heart . . .

was embedded deep in my psyche.

I could tolerate anthropomorphic theology to feed my need so long as I wasn’t forced to return to the status of stealth worshipper, as I had been in the Presbyterian church.

I’ve known numerous members of Christian congregations who are stealth worshippers. They don’t agree with their denomination’s doctrines, but they continue to find meaning in the community of their church. Stealth worshippers enjoy worship services, communal sharing, and other activities, while secretly rejecting “truths” claimed by their church.

I have given talks and sermons for a number of diverse churches in Indianapolis and Chicago and have heard the “confessions” of stealth worshippers. Many of them are convinced that they need to keep their disbelief to themselves or share it only with trusted friends.

At one point I was a candidate for ordained ministry in the Presbyterian church. An elder of my church, knowing that the candidates committee was going to examine me about my beliefs, asked me what I would say when questioned about the resurrection of Jesus.  Bill sidled up beside me during the coffee klatsch after services, darted guarded looks in all directions, and then whispered his question. Bill admitted that he didn’t believe in the resurrection and wondered how a rational fellow like me was going to duck The Question. He assumed I did not believe in Christian myths like the virgin birth and resurrection, but to hold leadership positions within the Presbyterian denomination, one had to pretend to believe.

Because I went to seminary, I came to know quite a few Christian ministers. As an attorney, I represented several churches and ministers in legal matters. Several Protestant ministers and two Catholic priests came clean with me about their disbeliefs. I discovered that when they were not “on,” many pastors shared my agnosticism.

As a candidate for the ministry, I was counseled by other Presbyterian ministers to “just tell them what they want to hear” in order to pass the examinations about my beliefs. I was covaledictorian of my seminary class, won awards for accomplishments in ancient Greek and Hebrew, and was “highly recommended” by the psychologist who performed personality tests for our presbytery. But I was forced to part ways with the Presbyterian church.

During my oral examination, a committee member exclaimed, “Why, you seem more like a Buddhist than a Calvinist!” What un-Calvinistic blasphemies might be unleashed had I led a congregation in chanting Om mani padme hum instead of the Apostles’ Creed?

The candidates committee decreed that I should go through Calvinist reform school if I wanted to proceed as a candidate for ordained ministry. I demurred.

At First Friends, there was no need for stealth. Howard, the atheist, Duffy, the evangelical fundamentalist, and Daoud, the Muslim, were all active and popular members of the Meeting.

I haven’t agreed with some of what is spoken or prayed under the roof of First Friends, but I’ve never felt forced to mouth words I do not believe, as I did every Sunday in Presbyterian services when we recited the Apostles’ Creed. The version we recited is a litany of statements which, by the time I was an adult, I thought absurd, irrational, or mythological.

Services that include the elements of traditional Christian worship—hymns, chants, incense, candles, prayers, sermons, meditative silences, confessions, and after-service coffee—but not declarations of faith can comfortably include skeptics. Most churches claim to welcome everyone, but they only admit into membership those who swear to a set of orthodox beliefs. Instead of welcoming all, Christian doctrines divide and separate.

When religious services are stripped of divisive truth claims, skeptics, agnostics, and atheists can participate unstealthfully. Why not truly welcome everyone into the community so that anyone can enjoy all that is good about religion—the music, meditation, hearing a good message, supporting just causes, and drinking coffee after services?

First Friends has stripped worship services of any overt affirmation of Christian doctrine. But as time went on, I regularly found myself sitting at the back of the sanctuary wishing it would take the next step: to cease and desist making statements about a god that does not exist.

But to try to impose my animistic agnosticism on the Meeting would be to commit the same sin of doctrinal intolerance that had driven me from the Presbyterian church. So why did I commit that sin?

After Pastor Ruthie resigned, a pastoral search committee (PSC) was formed to replace her. I offered to serve on the PSC. I intended to try to influence the committee to find a pastor like Phil Gulley, who would advocate universalism.

I was not chosen by the nominating committee to serve on the PSC. I was informed I could serve as an alternate, which meant I should attend the committee meetings but would not participate in the hiring decision.

I interpreted this message from the inner circle of First Friends to mean that there is a limit to the commitment to toleration and progressive theology, and that I was outside the limits for influencing leadership of the Meeting.

          So should I stay or should I go?

 

Biology teaches that every living creature on earth descends from the same original first cell. Astrophysicists and my Rai friends claim that everything in our universe is connected, as it all comes from the same original source. So it makes a certain sense to say that everything in the world has spirit.

Regardless of what one imagines about reality beyond rational proof, surely we can all agree that it is good that our world exists and (unless one is suffering unbearable pain) that to be alive in it is good. It is good to share gladness and sadness with others. Why must religions make it any more complicated than that?

Some Christian friends that have trekked with me in Nepal find it amusing that local Hindus believe praying to the god Ganesh will bring success in business. Ganesh’s father, Shiva, cut off his son’s head and replaced it with an elephant’s. Ganesh’s usual mode of transportation is to ride a mouse. How successful can that guy with the big ears and trunk riding a mouse be at securing a business deal?

At the same time, many Christians believe the walls of Jericho fell down because the Ark of the Covenant was paraded around for seven days. They believe that Saul and his companions were blinded by a light on the Damascus road but that only Saul heard the voice of Jesus. Hallucinations are a symptom of schizophrenia, so maybe Christians ought to restrain their derision of the beliefs of other religions.

Why not admit our ignorance of the answers to questions like how the universe was created? Why not accept that an afterlife in heaven or hell defies experience and logic? The religious response of awe and gratitude is the creative source of beautiful art, literature, cathedral architecture, the canticles of St. Francis, and the meditations of Thich Nhat Hanh. The schismatic and doctrinal demands of authoritarian religious (and political) regimes have the opposite effect. They divide and conquer.

I came to the Quakers at First Friends with an ulterior motive. Instead of turning me away, the Meeting responded like the Good Samaritan. By treating me as a friend in need, Hoosier Quakers extended a helping hand halfway around the world.

But this year I thought I might finally be ready to cut the cord with religious organizations. Then I discovered All Souls Unitarian Church about fifteen minutes from my house. I was asked to deliver the message at an All Souls service this summer. The Unitarians I met were very friendly and the church gave half the offering collected that Sunday to the Basa Village Foundation. During the service and lunch afterward I did not once experience fingers on a chalkboard or hear talk of God healing anyone’s ouchies.

Should I stay or should I go?

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Jeff Rasley is the author of ten books; the most recent is Island Adventures: Disconnecting in the Caribbean and South Pacific. He has published numerous articles in academic and mainstream periodicals. He is an award-winning photographer, and his pictures taken in the Himalayas and Caribbean and Pacific islands have been published in several journals. He is the founder of the Basa Village Foundation, which raises money for culturally sensitive development in the Basa area of Nepal. He currently serves as a director of five other nonprofit organizations.

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VOLUME 107, NUMBER 2

CONTENTS

Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Can a Skeptic Ever Find the Right  Church?
Jeff Rasley

The Enlightenment Fallacy
Will Tuttle

Blavatsky in the Light of Academe
Leslie Price

The Occult World of Pamela Travers
Paul V. Young

From the Editor's Desk
Richard Smoley

Viewpoint: Ahimsa in Practice
Barbara Hebert

Member' Forum: On Compassion and Ahimsa
Miles Standish

 

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