Ever since I was at school I have wondered if there is any truth in religion. I didn't like the idea of God. The Hindu idea of Brahman seemed more likely. Although God and Brahman are often thought of as the same, they are different. God is a being who has thoughts and emotions, likes and dislikes. Brahman is not a being, it is pure consciousness.
When it comes to life after death, I didn't like the idea of heaven and hell. Reincarnation seemed more likely. It isn't that people are rewarded or punished perpetually, it's more that there are consequences of actions. If you behave in a hateful way then you may end up in an unpleasant situation.
So I was attracted towards the religion of India. Hinduism, and Buddhism. Buddha didn't believe in Brahman, so it was a bit of a puzzle how that fitted in. Lots of people believe that all the religions are saying the same thing really just expressing the truth in different ways.
I think that people who commit suicide probably don't believe in life after death. If you believe in heaven or hell then it seems unlikely you would want to kill yourself: you're not going to go to heaven. If you believe in reincarnation then you're not going to solve any problems, just make things worse for yourself. I was unhappy as a teenager and I thought about suicide but not seriously. I thought Enlightenment would be the more sensible thing to do, then I would be free of suffering.
Sometimes people think of Enlightenment as the death of the self, especially in Buddhist ways of thinking. I can now see that this is misleading. The self is just a small part of your mind. The self is like a part of a machine that you can remove and the machine keeps on running much as before. Thinking continues. Emotions continue. Sensing and movement continue as before. Suffering continues, although there is no sufferer.
I couldn't see this when I was young. I thought that Enlightenment would be the end of suffering. There are many things that people think Enlightenment is. I have come to the conclusion that it is about nothing but Nonduality. Nonduality means that you no longer perceive that the world is separate from you. Before there was Subject and Object, after Enlightenment there is just one. The Subject is you, the Object is anything you turn your attention towards.
I used to wonder if Enlightenment was a permanent state of consciousness, or something that you might glimpse just once in a particularly deep meditation. I thought perhaps it could be either. Maybe the difference between Hinduism and Buddhism is this. I also wondered if, when it becomes a permanent state then it might be possible for the lower self to be more and more controlled by the higher self. Eventually there would be a perfected human being with mind and body controlled by God or Brahman. He or she would be an expression of God: when he or she speaks then it would be God speaking to us. I wondered if there have ever been people like that.
Not all Hindus believe in Brahman, and some Buddhists believe in something similar to Brahman. One of the most important Hindu teachers was Shankara. He taught something called Advaita Vedanta. Each of us has an inner consciousness, which is something different from the mind. This inner consciousness or awareness is called Atman. Our Atman seems to be different from Brahman, but this is an illusion. We can overcome this illusion and then we will be enlightened.
I thought that if there is any truth in religion it would be this. This is the clearest expression of the truth, other religions are attempting to express the same reality but none so well. I thought that it is possible to prove this. If I meditated then I could become enlightened and then I could prove it to myself. I would not be able to prove it to anyone else, but they would have the choice of following the same path.
This was the fundamental idea in my spiritual beliefs. Without this my spiritual beliefs would have no basis. Accepting it would allow me to develop my beliefs to incorporate other ideas consistent with it. A common idea is that there are different levels of reality. There is the physical world, which is the lowest level. There is the level of Brahman or pure Consciousness which is the highest level. Between these two is the level of the mind.
That gives us three levels. You can subdivide them to get five or seven levels. The Theosophical Society and various occultists talk about seven levels of reality, but whether it is seven, or five or three is not important. We have a presence on each of these levels of reality. They are called Planes of Existence or Planes of Consciousness.
I used to believe in the idea of spiritual progress or spiritual development. We are all on a path of development. Some of us are progressing rapidly, some of us are slower or have stopped. It is our destiny to escape from the cycle of rebirth and end suffering. It is the most important thing that we can work towards in life. It's as if we're all in prison but there is an escape hatch. The method of escape is something that was built into us from the beginning.
It's only recently that I came across facts which challenged these ideas. I read a book by Daniel M Ingram which is about Enlightenment. He writes a lot about what Enlightenment isn't. He doesn't believe that it frees us from reincarnation. He doesn't believe in reincarnation. He doesn't believe that Enlightenment will make us better people. He thinks it is just about Nonduality.
Another thing about Ingram's ideas is that he writes about two completely separate forms of spiritual development. These two forms give different but comparable results. His path is the path of Theravada Buddhism, the path of vipassana meditation combined with samatha meditation. This, he assumes, is the original teaching of the Buddha.
However, he heard about another path. This is called Actualism (also called Actual Freedom) which seems to be a method that a man called Richard in Australia stumbled upon. Ingram tried this method and got spectacular results. You could say there are many methods of development, but I thought they all have the same end result. Now it seems there are different results.
It's as if there isn't an escape hatch, there are two escape hatches, and we can't be sure where either of them leads. This makes it seem that there's nothing natural about spiritual development and Enlightenment. They aren't our destiny, they aren't inbuilt into us. Meditation isn't something natural, like placing a pot plant in the sunshine so it can grow. Meditation is unnatural, forcing the mind to do something against it's nature. Starving parts of the brain of sensory stimuli so that they shut down and make us perceive things that aren't real.
It's just playing about with your brain. Making your brain do tricks. Perceptual distortions. You perceive that everything is light. You perceive that you're in a vast empty void. You perceive that everything is part of you. You perceive that there is no you and things are aware of themselves. You perceive your Self stopping and then your brain rebooting followed by a bliss wave. All these are common perceptions. If that's what you want, fine. But there's no point in it, any more than there's any point in stamp collecting. When you've got the complete set, what do you do then?
So Ingram's book and his venture into Actualism caused me to doubt the validity of my core spiritual beliefs. There were other things too. Someone who had been in Lifewave wrote an account of his Enlightenment experience. We didn't have anything like that in the 1980s. He said that everything seemed to be part of him. It would have been easy for me to have thought that this isn't what Shankara meant by Enlightenment. I could have said that the Lifewave Enlightenment isn't the real Enlightenment.
However, it's easy to see that if someone starts perceiving everything to be part of them then they can explain that by thinking that they must have merged with the universal consciousness. Whether you call it Brahman or God. So I started thinking that the whole idea of Atman and Brahman is a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of this state of consciousness. This isn't proof of the existence of Brahman or God. People in early India had no concept of brain functioning and could only explain their experiences by supernatural ideas.
I found lots of other people who had the same experience of perceiving everything as part of you. Suzanne Segal wrote the same thing in her book. Someone on a different forum said the same thing. The author Ken Wilber describes it, he calls it One Taste. It's quite common. It's not exclusive to the John Yarr club.
One Taste doesn't appear to be the same as Ingram's Enlightenment. They are both Nonduality but they are not the same. Whatever it is that Actualism achieves is different again. There are similarities between all three.
I have become a materialist. The world is pretty much how Richard Dawkins and others see it. If you think that I am rejecting the Wisdom of the East then there are two things that you should realize. First that Buddha didn't believe in Atman or Brahman. Not all meditators have the same realizations. Second that in India there is a long tradition of materialism. It is called Charvaka or Lokayata. There was a man called Ajita who was teaching this at about the same as Buddha in the same part of India.
I'm not trying to indoctinate people into my own beliefs. I'm just trying to explain why I don't believe what I used to believe and what many believe today. I've wasted enough of my life trying to reach a goal that isn't there. I want to tell people what I would have liked to be told 40 years ago. I hope that this may help them. Or at least make them think.
When it comes to life after death, I didn't like the idea of heaven and hell. Reincarnation seemed more likely. It isn't that people are rewarded or punished perpetually, it's more that there are consequences of actions. If you behave in a hateful way then you may end up in an unpleasant situation.
So I was attracted towards the religion of India. Hinduism, and Buddhism. Buddha didn't believe in Brahman, so it was a bit of a puzzle how that fitted in. Lots of people believe that all the religions are saying the same thing really just expressing the truth in different ways.
I think that people who commit suicide probably don't believe in life after death. If you believe in heaven or hell then it seems unlikely you would want to kill yourself: you're not going to go to heaven. If you believe in reincarnation then you're not going to solve any problems, just make things worse for yourself. I was unhappy as a teenager and I thought about suicide but not seriously. I thought Enlightenment would be the more sensible thing to do, then I would be free of suffering.
Sometimes people think of Enlightenment as the death of the self, especially in Buddhist ways of thinking. I can now see that this is misleading. The self is just a small part of your mind. The self is like a part of a machine that you can remove and the machine keeps on running much as before. Thinking continues. Emotions continue. Sensing and movement continue as before. Suffering continues, although there is no sufferer.
I couldn't see this when I was young. I thought that Enlightenment would be the end of suffering. There are many things that people think Enlightenment is. I have come to the conclusion that it is about nothing but Nonduality. Nonduality means that you no longer perceive that the world is separate from you. Before there was Subject and Object, after Enlightenment there is just one. The Subject is you, the Object is anything you turn your attention towards.
I used to wonder if Enlightenment was a permanent state of consciousness, or something that you might glimpse just once in a particularly deep meditation. I thought perhaps it could be either. Maybe the difference between Hinduism and Buddhism is this. I also wondered if, when it becomes a permanent state then it might be possible for the lower self to be more and more controlled by the higher self. Eventually there would be a perfected human being with mind and body controlled by God or Brahman. He or she would be an expression of God: when he or she speaks then it would be God speaking to us. I wondered if there have ever been people like that.
Not all Hindus believe in Brahman, and some Buddhists believe in something similar to Brahman. One of the most important Hindu teachers was Shankara. He taught something called Advaita Vedanta. Each of us has an inner consciousness, which is something different from the mind. This inner consciousness or awareness is called Atman. Our Atman seems to be different from Brahman, but this is an illusion. We can overcome this illusion and then we will be enlightened.
I thought that if there is any truth in religion it would be this. This is the clearest expression of the truth, other religions are attempting to express the same reality but none so well. I thought that it is possible to prove this. If I meditated then I could become enlightened and then I could prove it to myself. I would not be able to prove it to anyone else, but they would have the choice of following the same path.
This was the fundamental idea in my spiritual beliefs. Without this my spiritual beliefs would have no basis. Accepting it would allow me to develop my beliefs to incorporate other ideas consistent with it. A common idea is that there are different levels of reality. There is the physical world, which is the lowest level. There is the level of Brahman or pure Consciousness which is the highest level. Between these two is the level of the mind.
That gives us three levels. You can subdivide them to get five or seven levels. The Theosophical Society and various occultists talk about seven levels of reality, but whether it is seven, or five or three is not important. We have a presence on each of these levels of reality. They are called Planes of Existence or Planes of Consciousness.
I used to believe in the idea of spiritual progress or spiritual development. We are all on a path of development. Some of us are progressing rapidly, some of us are slower or have stopped. It is our destiny to escape from the cycle of rebirth and end suffering. It is the most important thing that we can work towards in life. It's as if we're all in prison but there is an escape hatch. The method of escape is something that was built into us from the beginning.
It's only recently that I came across facts which challenged these ideas. I read a book by Daniel M Ingram which is about Enlightenment. He writes a lot about what Enlightenment isn't. He doesn't believe that it frees us from reincarnation. He doesn't believe in reincarnation. He doesn't believe that Enlightenment will make us better people. He thinks it is just about Nonduality.
Another thing about Ingram's ideas is that he writes about two completely separate forms of spiritual development. These two forms give different but comparable results. His path is the path of Theravada Buddhism, the path of vipassana meditation combined with samatha meditation. This, he assumes, is the original teaching of the Buddha.
However, he heard about another path. This is called Actualism (also called Actual Freedom) which seems to be a method that a man called Richard in Australia stumbled upon. Ingram tried this method and got spectacular results. You could say there are many methods of development, but I thought they all have the same end result. Now it seems there are different results.
It's as if there isn't an escape hatch, there are two escape hatches, and we can't be sure where either of them leads. This makes it seem that there's nothing natural about spiritual development and Enlightenment. They aren't our destiny, they aren't inbuilt into us. Meditation isn't something natural, like placing a pot plant in the sunshine so it can grow. Meditation is unnatural, forcing the mind to do something against it's nature. Starving parts of the brain of sensory stimuli so that they shut down and make us perceive things that aren't real.
It's just playing about with your brain. Making your brain do tricks. Perceptual distortions. You perceive that everything is light. You perceive that you're in a vast empty void. You perceive that everything is part of you. You perceive that there is no you and things are aware of themselves. You perceive your Self stopping and then your brain rebooting followed by a bliss wave. All these are common perceptions. If that's what you want, fine. But there's no point in it, any more than there's any point in stamp collecting. When you've got the complete set, what do you do then?
So Ingram's book and his venture into Actualism caused me to doubt the validity of my core spiritual beliefs. There were other things too. Someone who had been in Lifewave wrote an account of his Enlightenment experience. We didn't have anything like that in the 1980s. He said that everything seemed to be part of him. It would have been easy for me to have thought that this isn't what Shankara meant by Enlightenment. I could have said that the Lifewave Enlightenment isn't the real Enlightenment.
However, it's easy to see that if someone starts perceiving everything to be part of them then they can explain that by thinking that they must have merged with the universal consciousness. Whether you call it Brahman or God. So I started thinking that the whole idea of Atman and Brahman is a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of this state of consciousness. This isn't proof of the existence of Brahman or God. People in early India had no concept of brain functioning and could only explain their experiences by supernatural ideas.
I found lots of other people who had the same experience of perceiving everything as part of you. Suzanne Segal wrote the same thing in her book. Someone on a different forum said the same thing. The author Ken Wilber describes it, he calls it One Taste. It's quite common. It's not exclusive to the John Yarr club.
One Taste doesn't appear to be the same as Ingram's Enlightenment. They are both Nonduality but they are not the same. Whatever it is that Actualism achieves is different again. There are similarities between all three.
I have become a materialist. The world is pretty much how Richard Dawkins and others see it. If you think that I am rejecting the Wisdom of the East then there are two things that you should realize. First that Buddha didn't believe in Atman or Brahman. Not all meditators have the same realizations. Second that in India there is a long tradition of materialism. It is called Charvaka or Lokayata. There was a man called Ajita who was teaching this at about the same as Buddha in the same part of India.
I'm not trying to indoctinate people into my own beliefs. I'm just trying to explain why I don't believe what I used to believe and what many believe today. I've wasted enough of my life trying to reach a goal that isn't there. I want to tell people what I would have liked to be told 40 years ago. I hope that this may help them. Or at least make them think.
