After what has seemed like a very long wait, A Philosophical Critique of Empirical Arguments for Postmortem Survival (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) was released earlier this month, quickly appearing on the Amazon Best Sellers list in the category of books in analytic philosophy (reaching #3 in the top 100, and #1 new release).  The Contents, Preface, and Chapter 1 are available for viewing at Palgrave, Amazon (Kindle Edition), and on the homepage at michaelsudduth.com. Due to the high volume of purchases (a pleasant surprise), Amazon has the book on back order for the fourth time since its release, with another stock expected this coming week. I’m working with the marketing department at Palgrave to ensure that the book gets to distributors like Amazon in a timely manner. I’ve also created a Facebook page – Philosophy of Postmortem Survival – for the book that provides updates and links to various related resources.

Although the book has been published, I continue with writing projects on the topic of survival, which will no doubt include responses to critics once readers have digested the book and its arguments. I can only hope that the critical engagement with my arguments, which I certainly welcome, will exceed in quality some of the strange emails and incoherent Facebook rants I’ve received from a small number of disgruntled survivalists. By contrast,  while writing my book and subsequent to its completion, I’ve had some promising discussions with other philosophers and some survival researchers who are interested in participating in and collaborating on critical work in this area.

One of the aims of my book was to help build a bridge between survival research and the tradition of analytic philosophy, something analogous to the constructive dialogue that emerged between analytic philosophy and philosophy of religion in the last century.  While theistic philosophers, mainly in the Christian tradition, have made a number of important contributions to the philosophy of postmortem survival over the past thirty years, the specific topic of empirical arguments has been largely sidelined since the death of C.D. Broad and H.H. Price.   The interest expressed by a handful of philosophers of religion (e.g. HD Lewis and John Hick) has been something of an exception.  However, the Immortality Project at UC Riverside (under the direction of philosopher John Martin Fischer) provides some reason for optimism that a broader range of mainstream philosophers will help advance the exploration of the empirical dimensions to the question of life after death.  Perhaps the forthcoming Near-Death Experiences: Understanding Visions of the Afterlife (Oxford University Press, May 2016), co-authored by John Martin Fischer and Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin, will make an important contribution to this.

In the coming months I’ll continue blogging on topics related to my book. I’ll begin this in my next blog (tentatively scheduled for publication on Thanksgiving this coming week), by discussing neuroscientist Sam Harris’ critique of near-death experiences as evidence for life after death, specifically Harris’ critique of Eben Alexander’s book Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (2012).  Harris blogged on this in October 2012 and November 2012, and incorporated his critical remarks in chapter 5 of his more recent Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion (2014).  In a recent but brief exchange with Alexander on Facebook, I told him that I think Harris is essentially correct in his negative evaluation. Alexander begs to differ and appealed to Bernardo Kastrup’s 2012 critique of Harris as something of a definitive refutation of Harris’ arguments.  I’ll comment on Harris’ argument and show why Kastrup’s response falls considerably short of a refutation. Indeed, Kastrup failed even to understand Harris’ critique of Alexander.

In the meantime, and since many people have asked, I provide here an updated list (with links) of my main blogs on postmortem survival since 2013.

2015 Posts

What’s Wrong with Survival Literature (9/29/15)

Awakening Survivalists from Their Dogmatic Slumber (9/28/15)

Personal Reflections on Life After Death (8/7/15)

No Exit for Survivalists (4/27/15)

Survivalists in the Crosshairs (4/25/15)

2014 Posts

NDEs: Evidence for Life After Death? (9/9/14)

Falsification, Simplicity, and Survival (6/4/14)

Response to Prescott’s Minions (5/30/14)

Response to Michael Prescott (5/19/14)

Chris Carter’s Challenge: Survival vs. Superpsi (5/12/14)

Getting Sober about Survival, Part 3 of 3 (2/28/14)

Getting Sober about Survival, Part 2 of 3 (2/11/14)

Getting Sober about Survival, Part 1 of 3 (1/29/14)

Interview on Postmortem Survival (1/20/14)

2013 Posts

Clarifying My Critique of Survival Arguments (2/19/13)

“Wrong Turns” in Arguments for Postmortem Survival (2/9/13)

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There continues to be a plethora of articles and books published on near-death experiences, children who claim to remember past lives, apparitional experiences, and mediums who deliver ostensible messages from the deceased. And here I refer not to the trumped up, obviously exaggerated if not fabricated stories perpetuated through the tabloids and “ghost hunting” television programs, but to phenomena studied in academic settings such as the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, Medical School, and research institutes such as the Windbridge Institute in Tucson, Arizona.   The kinds of ostensibly paranormal phenomena studied by empirical researchers are often adduced as evidence for life after death. Arguments historically purporting to show this I designate “classical empirical arguments” for postmortem survival. While the arguments may differ in various respects, they have a common generic structure: certain data are said to be evidence for survival because the hypothesis of survival allegedly provides the best explanation of the data. The explanatory argument for survival is found in most of the published books and articles favorable to survival as far back as Richard Hodgson’s late nineteenth-century articles on the evidence for survival based on the trance mediumship of Mrs. Leonora Piper.

For several years now I’ve expressed a general disappointment in how survivalists have developed and presented the empirical case for survival. In my previous blog, I said that the nub of my critique is the inadequacy of survivalist arguments purporting to show that the survival hypothesis is the best explanation of the relevant data. I argue that this inadequacy is rooted in the widespread failure of survivalists to acknowledge, much less critically engage, the large number of auxiliary assumptions that must be enlisted for the survival hypothesis to do explanatory work. Survivalists are unsuccessful at showing that the survival hypothesis actually explains anything largely because of their suppression of required auxiliary assumptions. Furthermore, this suppression creates the additional illusion that survivalists have successfully “ruled out” rival hypotheses, such as the living-agent psi hypothesis that purports to explain the data in terms of psychic functioning (extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis) in living persons. Since classical empirical arguments for survival depend on the survival hypothesis explaining the data better than various proposed counter-explanations, the suppression of auxiliary assumptions perpetuates the illusion that survivalists have shown that the survival hypothesis is the best explanation of the data.

Anticipating a central theme in my forthcoming Philosophical Critique of Empirical Arguments for Postmortem Survival (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), in this blog I outline a few of the widespread conceptual problems that plague survival literature, and I show how they each converge on the suppression of auxiliary assumptions.

1. The Generic Explanatory Survival Argument

To appreciate the conceptual failures in survival literature, it’s important to have a general idea of what the argument for survival is supposed to look like. The argument survivalists make or (as is more often the case) wish to make is an explanatory argument. The basic idea is that the phenomena of near-death experiences, alleged communications from the deceased through mediums, claims to past-life memories (and correlated phenomena), or some such ostensibly paranormal phenomenon provide data that constitute evidence for survival because survival explains these phenomena. More precisely, the phenomena are evidence for survival because the survival hypothesis is the best explanation of the data.

Where “E” ranges over some (narrow or broad) strand of data from paranormal phenomena, explanatory survival arguments are, structurally or formally speaking, two-tier arguments consisting of an explanatory inference and an evidential inference.

1. There is some evidence E.

2. The survival hypothesis S explains E.

3. No other competing hypothesis C explains E (as well as S explains E).

Therefore:

4. S is the best explanation of E.

Therefore:

5. E is evidence for S.

Let’s call this the “generic explanatory survivalist argument” (hereinafter, GESA). GESA is a two-tier argument: (1) through (4) is a standard form of an inference to the best explanation, and (4) to (5) constitute an evidential inference – explanatory power converts to evidential cash value. This is the kind of argument you’ll find implicitly or explicitly adopted in the literature, for example in Almeder (1992), Braude (2003), Carter (2012), Fontana (2005), Gauld (1982), Griffin (1997), Lund (2009), Paterson (1996), Stevenson (1974), and Tucker (2005, 2013).

As a generic argument, there are two important more specific issues GESA does not address but which are essential to actual empirical survival arguments.

First, nothing is said above about how good E is as evidence for S, that is, the degree of evidential support E offers for S. And here survivalists differ. Some contend that E increases or raises the probability of S. Others take the view that E is evidence favoring S over some the rival hypotheses C, and thus E makes S more probable than C. Both of these views are, of course, compatible with S having a very low net plausibility or probability. Still other survivalists take a stronger position and claim that E renders S very probable, or at least probable to degree N, where N > ½, and so survival is at least more probable than not. This latter view is particularly prominent among survivalists who maintain that the empirical arguments provide enough evidence to rationally justify belief in survival.

Second, nothing is said in GESA about explanatory criteria. So GESA is silent on what would be required for S (or some other hypothesis C) to explain E or to be the best explanation of E. Typically, explanatory criteria at least include S’s leading us to expect E, or S’s better leading us to expect E than does C (“predictive power” in the broad sense, or “accommodation” to evidence). Some survivalists, however, wish to roll in other qualities such as simplicity and the need for independent support. I’ll comment on these below.

GESA allows a fairly succinct statement of my main criticism of classical empirical survival arguments. As I explained in my previous blog, the survivalist who sports GESA (or some specific version of it) faces something of a dilemma. He can effectively argue in favor of premise (2), but only if he explicitly incorporates a range of auxiliary assumptions about the nature and character of the afterlife. Alternatively, and this is what survivalists typically do, he can effectively argue for premise (3), but only if he shelves the assumptions required to be justified in affirming premise (2). Consequently, what the survivalist cannot (consistently) do is effectively argue for both (2) and (3). In this way, the survivalist loses his reasons (and hence justification) for affirming (4) – the survival hypothesis is the best explanation of the data.

But let’s see how survivalist strategies of argument conveniently mask this dilemma.

2. “Lazy Testing” – Evading the Burden of Explanatory Reasoning

Speaking in the context of arguments that purport to show the existence of an intelligent designer of the universe, philosopher of science Elliott Sober has identified a form of explanatory reasoning that he aptly calls “Lazy Testing”:

The lazy way to test a hypothesis H is to focus on one of its possible competitors H₀, claim that the data refute H₀, and then declare that H is the only hypothesis left standing.  This is an attractive strategy if you are fond of the hypothesis H but are unable to say what testable predictions H makes. (Sober 2008: 353)

Sober’s “lazy testing” diagnosis is quite appropriate as a way of characterizing a widespread pattern of reasoning within pro-survival literature. Most survivalists allege, often with great emphasis, that the survival hypothesis is a testable hypothesis, and yet in the literature this claim is given short shrift and we’re left wondering quite rightly whether it’s true at all. What we typically find in the relevant literature is an accumulation of data, consisting largely of testimonial claims and descriptions of the methods/conditions of their verification, all recounted with an impressive narrative. Survival is then something of a sotto voce inference – merely asserted to be the best explanation because all other known explanations fail. One can randomly select a work on survival and it’s likely you’ll find this structure of argument (e.g., Almeder 1992, Carter 2012, Fontana 2008, Tucker 2005, 2013). But as Sober has noted, the alleged vices of rival hypotheses do not confer virtue on one’s preferred hypothesis, but this is all that one would have to hang hope on in the absence of one’s preferred hypothesis having any virtue of its own.

Hence, one problem in the literature is that survivalists fail to show the explanatory virtue of the survival hypothesis itself, but this is masked by the nearly exclusive emphasis on how other hypotheses allegedly fail to account for the relevant evidence. The thing to see here is that arguing in support of premise (3) of GESA is entirely legitimate, and so we should expect survivalists to attempt to debunk the alleged explanatory virtues of rival hypotheses. The crux of the issue, though, is whether (i) survivalists present a positive case for the explanatory virtues of the survival hypothesis (hence offer support for premise (2) of GESA), and whether (ii) the justification for affirming premise (2) involves reasons that are compatible with the reasons offered as a justification for affirming premise (3). Otherwise put, we need to evaluate the “ruling out” of rival hypotheses (in premise (3) of GESA) in the light of what has been established with respect to the explanatory virtues of the survival hypothesis itself (premise (2) of GESA).

The survivalist counter-response is easily anticipated. The survivalist will claim that he does support premise (2), for he points to the evidence being what we would expect if survival were true, the simplicity of the survival hypothesis, the survival hypothesis being falsifiable, and the survival hypothesis being independently supported – each alleged explanatory virtues. Yes. There is no doubt that survivalists make such claims, or proffer such considerations, but the claims either lack adequate development or grounding, or they involve a logical sleight of hand that is masked by the emphasis on considerations used to rule out competitors.

So let’s look with greater scrutiny at survivalist dialectical maneuvers with respect to each of the aforementioned presumed explanatory virtues: survival leading us to expect the data, the alleged simplicity of the survival hypothesis, falsifiability, and independent support.

3. “Suppressed Assumptions” – The Perils of Predictive Power

I invite the reader to peruse Richard Hodgson’s famous “Further Record of Observations of Certain Trance Phenomena” (1897-98). Hodgson says repeatedly that the data provided by trance mediumship are exactly what we would expect if the survival hypothesis were true (and not what we would expect given rival hypotheses), a claim that quickly became a staple of survivalist explanatory claims and so may be found in countless pro-survival books and articles. Yet neither Hodgson nor his survivalist descendants have shown that their quasi-predictive claims are true. They merely assume that such claims are true because they make a large number of assumptions about what surviving persons would be like in the afterlife. If they were to try to show that these predictive claims are true, it would be evident, as E.R. Dodds (1934) later argued, that the survival hypothesis is not a single or simple hypothesis, but a “hydra-headed” hypothesis involving various collateral assumptions about, for example, the powers, knowledge, intentions, and character of survivors.

Therefore, the survivalist is justified in affirming premise (2) of GESA only if the survivalist is justified in a large number of additional assumptions about the afterlife, e.g. if persons were to survive death, they would have the requisite powers and intentions to communicate with the living, could efficaciously exercise such powers, and would have sufficient continuity of memory and character as to be identifiable by living persons as some specific formerly living person. And to show that we’re justified in accepting premise (2) would require showing that we’re justified in accepting the assortment of auxiliary assumptions. In other words, the survival hypothesis only leads us to expect the data if it is what I call a robust survival hypothesis, a simple survival hypothesis (affirming the survival of the self or our individual consciousness) supplemented with additional assumptions.

However, the introduction of a robust survival hypothesis raises the difficult question of the epistemic status of the required auxiliary assumptions. Are we justified in accepting such claims? At all events, what’s transparently clear is that survivalists have not shown that we are justified in accepting such claims, nor even that the survivalist is so justified. And to this extent, the survivalist has not shown that anyone is justified in accepting premise (2) of GESA. Otherwise put, survivalists have not shown that the survival hypothesis explains anything because they’ve not acknowledged, much less independently supported, the range of assumptions without which survival explains nothing.

Now a crucial point to note here, though, is that the suppression of auxiliary assumptions also infects showing that we’re justified in accepting premise (3), and in two ways.

First, in order to justifiably maintain premises (2) and (3), the survivalist’s justification for the survival-friendly auxiliaries (required for the survival hypothesis to have predictive power over the relevant data) must exclude our being justified in rival auxiliary assumptions. These rival auxiliaries would include (i) rival auxiliary assumptions about the afterlife such that if they were true, we would not expect the relevant evidence and (ii) rival auxiliaries that when conjoined with rival non-survival hypotheses would lead us to expect the relevant evidence. The second is particularly important because one way in which survivalists have tried to rule out rival hypotheses is by treating those rival hypotheses in their most stripped down form and then (correctly) arguing that they cannot accommodate the evidence. This is a frequent strategy found in survivalist dismissals of appeals to extra-sensory perception among the living to account for the apparently extraordinary knowledge mediums possess or that young children who claim to remember past lives possess. But this is a logical sleight of hands. Neither a stripped down survival hypothesis nor a stripped down appeal to living-agent telepathy or clairvoyance will lead us to expect the relevant data. Each candidate explanation must be taken in a fairly robust form, and in the case of living-agent psi must be combined with various psychological assumptions (e.g. concerning motivations, the range and capacities associated with dissociative phenomena, rare cognitive skills). So the question is whether there is some robust form of the appeal to living-agent psi that will lead us to expect the data at least as well as some robust survival hypothesis.

Second, it’s equally clear that, when survivalists wish to dismiss appeals to living-agent psi on the grounds that the data are contrary to what such a hypothesis would lead us to expect, survivalists are (perhaps unwittingly) working with their own “bulked up” version of the living-agent psi hypothesis. They adopt various assumptions about the scope, potency, and refinement of psi, and how it might interact with dissociative phenomena and the sudden manifestation of unusual skills. Stephen Braude (2003) has addressed in some detail this problematic feature of survivalist attempts to rule out counter-explanations in terms of living-agent psi. Surprisingly, or perhaps not surprisingly, none of the major pro-survival books since Braude (2003) have as much as addressed Braude’s challenge, and this includes Fontana (2005), Lund (2009), Carter (2012), and Tucker (2005, 2013). What Braude has rightly noted is how suppressed assumptions about psi are operative in survivalist efforts to rule out the appeal to living-agent psi. What’s crucial in the debate, then, is how these assumptions stack up against alternative sets of assumptions that produce a robust living-agent psi hypothesis that does indeed lead us to expect the evidence. Since Braude has himself proposed such a robust living-agent psi hypothesis, it would be incumbent upon survivalists to rule out this robust living-agent psi hypothesis. To date they have failed to do this.

So I’ve been arguing above that survivalists prematurely pop the celebratory cork of having ruled out rival hypotheses by treating those hypotheses in either very simple versions that, like a simple survival hypothesis, radically underdetermine the evidence, or by treating them in a narrow band of robust forms that poorly accommodate the evidence but by virtue of questionable survivalist assumptions. What the literature has failed to produce is a thoroughgoing engagement with robust rival hypotheses that do accommodate the evidence in a way that is comparable to how a robust survival hypothesis may accommodate the evidence. Of course, a precondition of any such evaluation would an acknowledgement of survivalist auxiliary assumptions that permit the survival hypothesis to accommodate the evidence. And so we see that the suppression of auxiliaries is highly salient to both showing that the survival hypothesis explains the data and that it does so in a way superior to competitors.

4. “Suppressed Assumptions” – Simplicity, Falsifiability, and Independent Support

But the suppression of auxiliaries infects survivalist attempts to rule out competitors in another way. Survivalists often support premise (3) in GESA by arguing that the survival hypothesis is simpler than competitors, for example, simpler than an appeal to a living-agent psi hypothesis, which allegedly must be stretched into a “super-psi” hypothesis that requires living persons to accomplish extraordinary psychic feats, e.g. telepathically or clairvoyantly mining and integrating information from multiple sources.

However, when survivalists appeal to the relative simplicity of the survival hypothesis in this context, without exception they are referring to a hypothesis of survival sans auxiliary assumptions, and this simple survival hypothesis is then compared to rival hypotheses in their most robust forms, bulked-up with various auxiliary assumptions. A great example of this is the survivalist discontent with appeals to living-agent psi, which survivalists contend can only explain crucial strands of data by being amped up into a “super-psi” hypothesis, an appeal to living-agent psi supplemented with various auxiliary assumptions that permit psi to have a potency and refinement beyond what has been independently established to exist. That a survival hypothesis (without auxiliaries) is simpler than a robust rival hypothesis is a red herring. What’s at issue is the simplicity of the hypotheses in their mutually robust forms because it’s only in these forms that they would have a claim to predictive power as a central explanatory virtue.

This impacts the interrelated issues of falsifiability and independent support/testability as well. Any hypothesis can be made falsifiable by conjoining it to the right assumptions, so neither the survival hypothesis nor rival hypotheses are prevented from securing this apparent explanatory virtue. My hypothesis of an invisible gardener in my yard is falsifiable given, for example, the added assumption that he attracts blonde women between the ages 21 and 34. What is crucial is that our auxiliary assumptions, without which hypotheses make no predictions, be independently testable. What survivalists must show is that the survival hypothesis is, unlike competitors, genuinely falsifiable since its assumptions are independently testable. They have not done this, but unless one acknowledges the role that auxiliary assumptions play, this requirement is easily bypassed. And it becomes easy to target rival hypotheses as failing to secure a virtue, which not even the survival hypothesis can secure. Consequently, when survivalists claim that the survival hypothesis is falsifiable and independently testable, but appeals to “super-psi” are not, it’s important to see that a simple survival hypothesis is not falsifiable and a robust survival hypothesis requires auxiliary assumptions that are no more independently testable than those employed by rival theories, indeed probably less so.

To the extent, then, that simplicity, falsifiability, and independent testability are considered explanatory virtues, it’s clear that survivalist arguments create an illusion that they successfully rule out rival hypotheses. This is masked by the suppression of auxiliary assumptions, for once these assumptions are introduced the simplicity, independent testability, and falsifiability of rival hypotheses – including robust living-agent psi – are at no more of a disadvantage than the survival hypothesis itself. Or at any rate, until such time as survivalists treat their preferred hypothesis in its appropriate robust form, we have no good reason to accept the survivalist contention that premise (3) of GESA is true. And so we lose our reasons for supposing that the survival hypothesis is the best explanation of the data.

5. Concluding Thoughts

To sum up: the survivalist suppression of auxiliary assumptions creates the illusion that the survivalist has shown that premises (2) and (3) in GESA are true. More precisely stated, it creates a twofold illusion. First, it creates the illusion that the survival hypothesis explains the data because rival hypotheses apparently don’t explain the data. Second, it creates the illusion that rival hypotheses – such as the living-agent psi hypothesis – don’t explain the data (as well as survival) because they lack some virtue the survival hypothesis is presumed to possess, but which, as I’ve argued, dissolves upon more careful scrutiny,

The survivalist suppression of auxiliary assumptions is a fallacy that infects survivalist literature. It’s widespread in its presence, it’s far reaching in its implications for the assessment of the survival hypothesis. The fallacious nature of the suppression of auxiliary assumptions may be put in more systematic terms as follows:

• It permits survivalists to create an appearance of explanatory virtue for the survival hypothesis by facilitating an exclusive focus on how poorly alternative hypotheses fare. But this lazy testing simply evades the burden of showing that survival explains anything at all.
• It creates the illusion that survivalists have ruled out the appeal to living-agent psi as a rival hypothesis with at least equal explanatory power. This is an illusion because:
  1. The process of “bulking up” hypotheses (generating robustness) can easily accommodate evidence, and this principles holds equally for the living-agent psi hypothesis and the survival hypothesis, each of which in their suitably robust forms can equally account for the relevant evidence.
  2. Survivalists have not shown that a robust survival hypothesis is simpler than a robust living-agent psi hypothesis (that accounts for the data), and so they have not shown that the relevant kind of survival hypothesis has any advantage over living-agent psi alternatives at this juncture.
  3. Survivalist auxiliary assumptions are not independently testable, and so if the plausibility of a robust living-agent psi hypothesis (that accounts for the evidence) is reduced for this reason, the same applies mutatis mutandis to a robust survival hypothesis (that accounts for the evidence). Thus, the survival hypothesis has no advantage here.
  4. A robust living-agent psi hypothesis is no less (trivially or non-trivially) falsifiable than a robust survival hypothesis, given the right sort of auxiliary assumptions, so the survival hypothesis has no advantage at this juncture.

Hence, for the above reasons I maintain that survivalist fails to show that anyone is justified in accepting premises (2) and (3) of GESA. It follows that we have a defeater for the conclusion (4). So, we should not accept the survivalist claim, on the basis of (2) and (3), that the survival hypothesis is the best explanation of the data. And this defeat will transfer to other explanatory arguments for survival that are specific instances of GESA, which make use of the explanatory criteria discussed above.

In my forthcoming book, I propose a formalization of the classical arguments that drops the reference to explanatory power and unpacks the arguments purely in terms of (Bayesian and Likelihood) confirmation measures. I argue that these arguments also fail, which suggests that the problems associated with auxiliary assumptions are not limited to explanatory survival arguments but apply more broadly to empirical arguments for survival, at least those based on paranormal phenomena.

 

Works Referenced or Cited

Almeder, R. (1992). Death and Personal Survival. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Braude, S. (2003). Immortal Remains: the Evidence for Life after Death. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Carter, C. (2012). Science and the Afterlife Experience: Evidence for the Immortality of Consciousness. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions.

Dodds, E.R. (1934). “Why I Do Not Believe in Survival.” Proceedings of the Society of Psychical Research 42: 147–72.

Fontana, D. (2005). Is There an Afterlife? A Comprehensive Overview of the Evidence. Blue Ridge Summit, PA: O Books.

Gauld, A. (1982). Mediumship and Survival: A Century of Investigations. London: William Heinemann Ltd.

Griffin, D.R. (1997). Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Lund, D.H. (2009). Persons, Souls, and Death: A Philosophical Investigation of an Afterlife. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Paterson, R. (1995). Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death. New York: Saint Martin’s Press.

Sober, E. (2008). Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stevenson, I. (1974). Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, 2nd Ed. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press.

Tucker, J. (2005). Life Before Life: Children’s Memories of Past Lives. New York: Saint Martin’s Griffin.

Tucker, J. (2013). Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives. New York: St. Martins Press.

My Philosophical Critique of Empirical Arguments for Postmortem Survival (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) will be released in early November (a revised publication date).  As readers of my blog are aware, while I think the classical empirical arguments for life after death engage interesting and arguably provocative paranormal phenomena, I don’t think these arguments succeed in showing that there is good evidence for the persistence of the self or our individual consciousness after death. Most generally stated, this negative verdict is the central claim for which I argue in my book.

Survivalists, of course, have confronted my central claim before among other writers and they’re well acquainted with the array of skeptical objections that have been deployed to dismiss their arguments. The methodology of the empirical research is defective. Paranormal phenomena are bogus. Survival is conceptually incoherent or unintelligible. Survival contradicts what we know about consciousness from cognitive neuroscience, specifically the dependence of consciousness on a functioning brain. There are better non-survival explanations of the data. However, let me underscore that I make no such claims, and none of my arguments depend on these well- worn skeptical claims or the arguments that have been offered in support of them. This is because, as I recently explained in “Personal Reflections on Life after Death,” I’m not a typical skeptic. More importantly, my arguments are not the typical skeptical arguments. Thus, survivalists should be prepared to abandon their existing arsenal of counter strategies and pre-rehearsed responses to the common skeptical evaluations of their arguments. They’re going to have to do something they’re not accustomed to doing, at least for the last half century. They’re going to have to come up with a new argument, and – not to add the prospects of insult to injury – do so in a way that is conversant with the conceptual territory of formal epistemology, something they’ve never done. My aim is to substantively and formally recalibrate the empirical survival debate. Psychologically speaking, my aim – if I may conjure the spirit of the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant – is to awaken survivalists from their dogmatic slumber.

The nub of my critique concerns the inadequacy of survivalist arguments for supposing that the survival hypothesis is the best explanation of the relevant data, a longstanding and widespread survivalist contention. I argue that the inadequacy of survivalist arguments is rooted in the widespread failure of survivalists to acknowledge, much less critically engage, the large number of auxiliary assumptions that must be enlisted for the survival hypothesis to do explanatory work. Survivalists are unsuccessful at showing that the survival hypothesis actually explains anything largely because of their suppression of required auxiliary assumptions, and furthermore this suppression creates the additional illusion that survivalists have successfully ruled out rival hypotheses. Since classical empirical arguments for survival depend on the survival hypothesis explaining the data better than various proposed counter-explanations, the suppression of auxiliary assumptions perpetuates the illusion that survivalists have shown that the survival hypothesis is the best explanation of the data.

It’s important to clarify that I don’t argue that the survival hypothesis is not the best explanation of the data. I’m arguing that survivalists have failed to show that survival is the best explanation of the data. Hence, my critique does not depend on the claim that there is some rival hypothesis that provides an at least equally good explanation. It’s true that I’ve written much about appeals to living-agent psychic functioning (extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis) as the widely acknowledged nearest competitor to the survival hypothesis. Like Stephen Braude, I’ve argued that this explanation is, at least in its more sophisticated forms, a much better explanation of the data than survivalists have been willing to acknowledge. However, I do not claim that it is an equally good explanation of the data. No. My argument is more nuanced. What I claim is that survivalists have not adequately ruled out this counter-explanation. Why? Not because adequately ruling it out requires dissolving the logical or empirical possibility of highly refined and potent psychic powers in human persons (a common survivalist red herring). I claim that survivalist objections to living-agent psi hypotheses apply mutatis mutandis to the survival hypothesis itself; at least this is so once we acknowledge the kinds of auxiliary assumptions required for the latter to have explanatory power.

So, on my view, the survivalist can effectively argue that (i) the survival hypothesis explains the data, or the survivalist can effectively argue that (ii) the living-agent psi hypothesis does not provide an at least equally good explanation of the data. But what the survivalist cannot consistently argue is both (i) and (ii). Thus, the survivalist is unable to show that the survival hypothesis is the best explanation of the data. The only reason why this has not been apparent is that survivalists are either unconscious of the assumptions required for the survival hypothesis to have explanatory merit or they have intentionally concealed these assumptions or been less than forthright about them and how they bear on the survival argument. Hence, it’s the unconscious or conscious suppression of essential auxiliary assumptions that’s the nub of failure in the survival literature.

Given the ubiquitous nature of this logical problem in the pro-survival literature, my book is, in a sense, an indictment against the entire field of “survival research” and the pro-survival literature it has spawned. To be sure, inquiry into alleged empirical evidence for survival has seen some good days, for example, at the hands of thinker such as C.D. Broad, C.J. Ducasse, E.R. Dodds, Gardner Murphy, and H.H. Price. In more recent times, Alan Gauld and Stephen Braude have produced high caliber explorations of the topic, and David Ray Griffin and R.W.K Paterson have each published sympathetic yet informed and fair summaries of the empirical case for survival. But these lights of intellectual engagement are exceptions in a history and field dominated by lesser lights whose treatments of the topic have been sadly constrained by mediocre reasoning and conceptual naiveté. Here I include such widely praised pro-survival works as Robert Almeder’s Death and Personal Survival (1992), David Fontana’s, Is There an Afterlife? (2005), and Chris Carter’s Science and the Afterlife Experience: Evidence for the Immortality of Consciousness. (2012). These works merely reinvent the crooked wheel on which the empirical survival debate has been riding since its inception in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Like so many other survivalists, these survivalists have not only failed to advance the debate, they have perpetuated confusions that obfuscate both the empirical argument for survival and the counter-arguments of skeptics.

Consider but one illustration of the conceptual obfuscation that plagues the literature. Survivalists who appeal to near-death experiences or claims to past-life memories seem to be under the impression that the argument for survival is effectively made merely by piling on data. Like butter on popcorn at the movies, the more the better. In much the same way, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theists built increasingly large compendia of alleged instances of “design” in the natural world, content to let the suggested or sotto voce argument uncritically swing on the rusty bolts and squeaky hinges of assumptions at least as controversial as the conclusion they wished to derive. Survivalists in the last century have adopted a similar strategy, and this strategy has fostered a climate in which the argument for survival disappointingly exhibits a level of logical rigor inversely proportional to the excessive bravado of some of its most vocal claimants. Facts do not an argument make, and the overemphasis on the former by empirical researchers has lulled them into a false sense of security with respect to the latter. For this reason I speak of the collective failure of survival literature, a failure that is fundamentally conceptual in nature, not empirical.

In my next blog (tentatively scheduled for next week), I’ll outline the failure of survival literature with more detail and explain how various widespread defects in the literature converge on the particular fallacy I’ve noted above, the fallacy of suppressed auxiliary assumptions – the central theme of my forthcoming book.

Michael Sudduth

Truth is a dancer, spinning you around, tossing you aside,  taking all your breath. And at long last, when you think you’re about to die, you fall blissfully into her tender arms. Truth is a lover.  Truth is a dancer.

Sometimes truth appears as Krishna, sometimes as Jesus, sometimes as the Buddha, sometimes as Allah, but if you’re really lucky you’ll see it as the dog laying in the shade, the teardrop rolling down your face, and the ground upon which you walk.

The greatest challenge in the search for enlightenment is finding the path that leads to it, and the greatest challenge in the search for the path to enlightenment is realizing where you are at present.  The path you’re seeking is actually where you are in your present condition, and the light you hope to find at the journey’s end is already your present reality.  It’s shining as the I behind your I. 

Everything you are in this very moment – your love, your hate, your joy, your sadness, your health, your addiction – it’s all an expression of the Absolute.

Being born is Zen. Drinking is Zen.  Eating is Zen.  Breathing is Zen.  Loving is Zen.  Dying is Zen.  You are this.  You’ve always been this. You’ll never be more than this.  There is nothing more than this. What then are you seeking?  Birth is now. Death is now. Breath is now. 

What’s in a breath? A child playing in the sand. A young woman singing to her cat.  The philosopher deconstructing arguments.  The gardener planting flowers. The lover laughing.  Cook cooking. Actor acting.  Dancer dancing.  Poet writing. Tear drop falling.  Lover leaving.  Gods dying. Devils being born.  What’s in a breath? Your redemption. Your Self – the sweetest freedom.

To see the flower without judgment is all that is meant by Nirvana. So let this be your practice: stroll through gardens and pick flowers for the wreath that will celebrate the day of your death. 

One who contemplates the ocean in silence and one who plays in it with laughter are non-different, for resistance is found in neither one and consequently peace is found in both.

Seek as one who wishes to find nothing. Practice as one who wishes to achieve nothing. And most fundamentally, love as one who wishes to receive nothing. 

What is it to love, to truly love? It’s to embrace the deepest mystery and risk the greatest folly. It’s to bear your unbearable absence and find you inescapably present, recurring apparition of my nostalgic night.  It’s to watch for you at ocean’s edge and see you dancing as the waves. It’s to watch for you at sunset and see you as the light that is gradually transformed into night. What is love, you ask?  It’s to stand in the center of the fire with you and watch our world be burned, and then to be buried beneath the ashes of passion’s tortured expectations.

If you wish to open your heart wide to love, open your heart wide to pain, for he who suffers little loves even less.  Therefore kiss with tender lips the center of your sorrow and make love to your relentless pain. Then you shall dance with desire and stand in the center of the fire. 

If you can bear your sadness long enough, you will see that it is not your sadness you carry, but the sadness of the world.

The substance of everything unpleasant in life is the very bliss we wish we had instead.  

Today is the first day of Autumn, just when I thought she was in the past. But Autumn always returns, and I’m learning to embrace her presence afresh each time with an open acceptance, whether accompanied by joy or sorrow.  She’s just a season, though Keats perhaps thought she was a goddess. Like the waves upon the sea, the breath upon my lips, the rising of a craving, the blooming of a flower, the passion of a lover, Autumn comes and goes. Impermanence. That’s the basic truth. That’s the deal. And yet she remains my beautiful teacher, and my love for her abides.  She nails this painful truth into my heart. I let her cut me and bleed me into gratitude and peace, and then I am free – the sweetest freedom.

True freedom lies in the ability to say “yes” to whatever places you on the fine line between utter destruction and complete fulfillment. Anything short of this is a life half lived, and any such life is hardly lived at all.  

Divested of expectation, you overflow with gratitude.

Only one thing prevents us from experiencing God . . . the failure to realize what we love most in life. 

If I knew that this would be our last night together, I would give you just one thing, my silence, for this love of mine is not something that can be spoken, nor even understood, not even by the gods.

People don’t fear death as much as they fear silence. In fact, they fear death only because it’s the great inescapable and eternal silence.  If you would then conquer the fear of death, regularly enter silence.  And in the silence, experience freedom as the other side of nothingness, the complete negation of yourself.

The following is an excerpt from my new book in progress Truth is Dancing: An Invitation from the Other Side of Consciousness.

Chapter 1:  The Invitation

Beloved, for many days, indeed many years, I have often returned to you, reached out my hand to you, and called out to you, whether in the noonday hour or the silence of the night.  I have tried to capture your attention so that I could capture your heart, for if you could feel my breath for a moment, however brief, you would fall into my arms forever.  Long have I hoped that you would look into my eyes and dare me to dance with you, first upon the fallow land, then upon the burning stone, and finally upon the ocean waves.

Moved by compassion, I came to you as the wind. I touched your skin and caressed your hair, and yet I was unseen.  I came to you as the sun, thawing out your frozen hopes and melting your deepest expectations until they dried up in my light.  These, your most sacred possessions, I absorbed, and they fell from my eyes as the early morning rain in spring, tiny drops of water, by which I kissed your weary face.  But I was unseen.

I yearned to dance with you, my love, and in my restless longing you stood, dry and parched, thirsting for the depth that I am.  So I came to you as the ocean. You entered me and I enveloped you.  I was wet and my wetness entered you. You were satisfied for a time, but I remained unseen.  So I came to you as your breath. You took me in and let me out, but you did now know me.  Yet from this intimacy, I was born as the lover who came to you.  You kissed me, but your lips touched only the nakedness of your dreams.  And in those dreams, I was the tiger that hunted you as prey, even the devil desiring your soul.  But my face you could not see because you stood only in the shadow of your fears.

None of this drew out your surrender, and so I came to you as God.  You then surrendered and worshipped the Majestic, the Mysterious, and the Eternal.  You were filled with awe and reverence for the Name, but I remained nothing more than a ghost upon the wind.

All this was but a bid for you to dance with me, my love. But I remained a stranger to your vision, the unknown dancer on the other side of consciousness. Yet I never gave up on you, my beloved. I could not abandon you to the motherless night, which nurtures only the illusion of life and death. No. I was, I am, and I shall always be the eternal lover whose desire for you bleeds the river that takes you to the boundless ocean.

And where or when did you come closest to seeing me, to feeling my kiss upon your trembling lips?  Where? When? Only when at long last I appeared to you as emptiness, your emptiness, and you felt yourself falling into my arms and caught a glimpse of these eyes that have looked upon you with a burning and relentless passion.

Here I am, my love.  And here you are, even now, in my loving arms.  Look deeply into my eyes.  I know, love, you are drowning, but breathing the air from which your world was born. You are dying, but more alive than ever.  You are burning, and your world is on fire, but your ignorance is melting away.  You are lost, but exactly where you should be.  You are dissolving and yet more solid than ever.  Yet you cannot name the ground on which you stand, unseen as it is, nor name the space through which you move, unfelt as it is.  You cannot embrace the nakedness in which you were born, much less the formless night in which you are being called to surrender to this unsettling silence, a silence in which your greater pain and greater Self are together realized.

Listen to me, now, as I whisper in your ear. Feel my breath fall gently upon your skin as I speak. Relax, for my words are neither a broker nor a burden of truth. I can only reveal what you have always known.  I can only illuminate the earth on which you walk, the sky beneath which you bow in the hope that love will enter you, and the hour in which you are finally dissolved.

I want only one thing from you in this moment of terrifying vulnerability.  I want you to sit with your deepest pain, your most inescapable suffering. Call it forth even now.  What has broken you? What has robbed you of your faith? Who has captured your breath in a bottle and cast it out to sea?  Be with this pain for a few moments if you can.  I want you to see it, to see it clearly.  I want you to become friends with it.  No, I wish for something greater. I want you to see that this one you have called your “enemy” is and has always been your friend and your deepest confidant.  And when you meet Pain along life’s path, I want you to call Pain “love waiting to be revealed.” I want you to dance with her, and then tell me of her kiss, which awakened you from the dream you called your life.

from Michael Sudduth, Truth is Dancing: An Invitation from the Other Side of Consciousness

Image reproduced by permission of Alysha Houston.

Helen De Cruz (Assistant Professor of Philosophy at VU University Amsterdam, and former post-doctoral fellow at University of Oxford) has just published an interview with me about my spiritual journey and work as a philosopher at Prosblogion, an academic philosophy of religion blog. Helen has graciously permitted me to post the entire interview here, but I encourage readers to visit Prosblogion and read the other interviews their and comment in the thread at Prosblogion, if you’re so inclined.

A couple of introductory comments.

First, Helen has been interviewing various philosophers on the relationship between their professional work as philosophers and their spiritual journey.  Her interview with me is the ninth in the series.  I’m grateful for the invitation she extended to me to participate in this wonderful interview series.  I recommend her interviews with other philosophers for those interested in the type of exploration Helen has documented.

Second, this is my first extended discussion of my spiritual journey since my rather “infamous” January 2012 “Open Letter” that announced my departure from Christianity and entrance into eastern spirituality. To her credit, Helen was one of the few academically trained philosophers who sensibly weighed in on the backlash against me at the hands of some conservative Christian bloggers.  Helen’s observations at the time were a breath of fresh-air over against the tabloid-like demonstration of sensationalism and libelous personal attacks.

Helen De Cruz Interview at Prosblogion 

This is the ninth installment of a series of interviews I am conducting with academic philosophers about their religious practices. In this series of interviews, I ask philosophers about their religious practices and the influence on their philosophical work. Follow the links for parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8. The contributors are in various stages of their career, tenured and untenured. Interviews were conducted through e-mail and responses are not edited.

This interview is with Michael Sudduth, a full time lecturer in the Philosophy Department at San Francisco State University, where he is also the coordinator of the university-wide religion program. He has been teaching at SFSU since January 2005.

Can you tell me something about your current religious affiliation/self-identification?

My upbringing was moderately religious, mainly under the influence of my grandmother rather than my parents. My mother had been a nominal Christian in Iran before she came to the United States in 1964, but my exposure to Christianity came mainly from grandmother who gave me my first Bible when I was about 9 years old.  She was a fairly liberal Protestant Christian.  While she didn’t attend church much, she was always reading the Bible and “spiritual” books.  Although encouraged to explore spirituality, I didn’t really take up the pursuit until my teenage years, during which time I explored occult phenomena and eventually had a conversion experience that eventually led to my embracing one of the most rigid forms of Christianity I could find – Calvinism.  After flirting with the Christian Reformed Church, I ended up settled in the Calvinistic Baptist church for many years.

I gradually disengaged from my strict Calvinism in the course of my formal education, first at Santa Clara University (where I learned that Catholics could be good Christians, much to the horror of my fellow Calvinists). Later, at the University of Oxford, I developed an inclusivism that embraced all types of Christians.  I remained fairly conservative for about ten years (through several teaching positions, first at Calvin College and then Saint Michael’s College in Vermont). By the time I returned to California in 2004, I was pretty much done with Calvinism, and within a few years I was done with Christianity too. I don’t mean to suggest, of course, that Christianity altogether ceased to be an influence, only that I ceased to identify myself as a Christian.

After taking up a teaching position at San Francisco State University in 2005, I began teaching World Religions and related philosophy of religion courses each semester.  This led to my deeply engaging the eastern religious and philosophical traditions for the first time in my career.  In early 2011 I officially announced my movement into the Indian Vaishnava bhakti tradition, though my heart and interests had been in this tradition for a few years at this point.  In 2013 I returned to a study of Advaita Vedanta, the Vedic-Hindu tradition of non-duality, which I had taken up on earlier occasions since 2006, both Shankara’s Advaita and more contemporary versions of Advaita.  This quickly led me to Zen Buddhism, which at least from one angle could be described as a particular variant on the non-dual tradition associated with the Upanishads and Advaita Vedanta. I began practicing Zen meditation in late 2013, and in June 2014 I moved into a Zen retreat center, where I’m still a resident.

While you could call me a “Zen practitioner,” I don’t care much for the label “Zen Buddhist” or “Buddhist.”  As I explain on my professional website, my spiritual journey has taken me on many paths, each of which informs my current approach to the Sacred or Transcendent.  I still enjoy good Christian gospel music and on different occasions chant “Hare Krishna,” but I try to make as much room as possible for silence, which for me is the more challenging and lively dance with God.

Could you say a bit more about the reasons that precipitated your taking up these very distinct spiritual paths?

In the first instance, I would emphasize that my movement through these distinct spiritual paths reflects an evolving total life situation over the past 30 years. I think one’s religious orientation is strongly conditioned by personality, experience, and reflection—constituents, we might say, of the total life situation. I think these factors combine to just make one tradition “feel” right. There was a time when Christianity felt right, and there was a time when it no longer felt right. We might say that Christianity ceased to accommodate my total life situation, but Vaishnavism felt right. This was not a sudden shift, but, as I suggested above, a gradual transition over a few years.

Of course, just to be clear, in taking up Vaishnavism, and later Zen, I continue to carry aspects of the earlier traditions with me. All traditions with which I have connected at earlier times inform my present understanding of the Transcendent. This is why I don’t particularly care for the term “conversion,” as I think it ignores the persisting influence of one’s earlier orientation. I see my taking up different paths at different times as more about an evolution and enlargement of spiritual orientation. To be sure, certain beliefs or practices fall away in the transitions, but there’s always been important continuity for me.

Now I’d say that there have been four general kinds of considerations that have precipitated my taking up the traditions I have at particular periods. First, does a tradition illuminate what I already know about my life? Second, how well does a tradition fit with my overall intellectual outlook (be it informed by science, philosophy, psychology, etc.)? Third, how connected do I feel to the “truth” as expressed through the symbols of the traditions? And finally, do the spiritual practices of the tradition facilitate my moral and spiritual development in a way that is important to me at the time?

Let’s take up the first factor. There were very specific events and patterns in my life that gradually seemed better illuminated by eastern spirituality and philosophy than Christianity.  Some of these events and patterns concerned my relationships with other people, my attachments and corresponding experiences of suffering, and so forth. What I found in the exploration of my own experience was confirmed and deepened by the insights of eastern spirituality and philosophy. In my “Open Letter” (2011), in which I announced what at that time I described as my “conversion” to Gaudiya Vaishnavism, I explained the role that the Bhagavad Gita played in illuminating various aspects of my life, and I compared it to how the Gospel according to John had illuminated my life in my late teens and early twenties. In each case, it was not a matter of interpreting my experience in the light of the teachings of the texts, though of course there’s something to be said for that too, but the initial connection was grounded in how the text provided further illumination on matters already known directly from my experience.

As for second factor, after teaching world religions regularly for many years I concluded that the different religious traditions of the world shared a basic vision, worked out in different ways according to one’s individual dispositions. Inclusivism seemed more plausible to me than exclusivism, and this made Vaishnavism and the philosophy of Vedanta intellectually appealing. But there were many other philosophical issues that made the eastern traditions more appealing to me as a religious philosopher, for example, a strongly apophatic approach to the divine, panentheism, monism, and a more empirical and pragmatic epistemology. Around 2010 my interest in psychology also took off in a big way, largely as the result of a deeper engagement with the work of William James. This led me to depth psychology, and specifically Carl Jung, and eventually an exploration of depth-psychological therapeutic modalities and their interface with eastern spirituality. My own emerging psychological views struck me as more at home in the climate of eastern spirituality than Christianity, and this actually played an important role in my adopting a non-dual interpretation of the bhakti traditions and my eventual movement into Zen.

Now I must grant, and several Christians have repeatedly noted, that much of what I have said above would be equally accommodated in the mystical streams of Christianity. To a certain extent, yes. Two points though. First, some of my more recent philosophical and psychological views strike me as more at home in the eastern traditions. For example, I think what I would now characterize as my “pluralistic” approach to religion is more at home in texts such as the Upanishads or Dogen’s Genjo Koan than in the Bible. And this pluralism also fits nicely with my Jungian view of the unconscious. Second, and more importantly, above I noted two other kinds of reasons for taking up these various traditions, and these reasons clearly favor eastern spirituality over Christianity for me.

The symbolic expression of religious truth has been increasingly important to me over the past nine or ten years. As I was exposed to eastern religious symbolism, for example, the murti (images of the divine) and the poetry of the Indian mystics, I just connected with it more than I did with Christian symbolism. Curiously, during the second half of my life as a Christian I had developed an attraction to Christian artwork, something contrary to my original iconoclastic tendencies when I was under the influence of Calvinism. Also, my aesthetic appreciation of nature really kicked in after an automobile accident in March 2011. As a Christian my experiences of nature often triggered experiences of God (typically feelings of awe and reverence), but after my accident God was more directly present in the experiences of nature, and often not as a personal being, and the overall feeling was more intimate than what I had earlier experienced. Eastern religious symbolism captured such experiences of intimacy with the world and God in a way that deeply resonated with me, more so than Christian symbolism.

As a theoretical interjection, I would add that when it comes to our attraction to symbols, I think we’re often not aware of the whole situation, the deeper layers of the attraction. The subjective factor here is deeply rooted in unconscious material. The symbol in my view represents a situation in the unconscious life and facilitates an engagement with it at the level of consciousness. But something is working itself out, and I would say that it is God that is present and moving this process, something James proposed in his Varieties of Religious Experience and Jung later further developed. So I’m quite happy just to let things unfold and be with and learn from whatever is arising. This is part of what it means to dance with God, an important motif in the bhakti traditions of India and, in its own way, in Advaita Vedanta and Zen.

Finally, the effectiveness of eastern spiritual practices was a very significant factor facilitating my embrace of eastern spirituality. For example, the devotional practices associated with Vaishnavism, and subsequently the meditation practices of Advaita and Zen contributed to important progress in my moral and spiritual development. Zazen (Zen meditation) has also interfaced in profound ways with my psychological and psychotherapeutic interests, ranging from my interests in trauma, addiction, and dissociative phenomena to my involvement with (Jungian) analysis and Internal Family Systems therapy.

While I enjoy good intellectual exercises, fundamentally for me it’s about spiritual practices. Do they work for me? Do they give me insight into myself? Are they efficacious for cultivating virtues such as love and compassion? If chanting Hare Krishna is going to make me more mindful of God’s presence in my life and intensify my love for God, I’ll do it. If Zen meditation is going to make me conscious of what I am otherwise unconscious, make me more satisfied with each moment of life, and make me more receptive of people and their needs, I embrace it. As I see it, our individual relationship to God is not something separate from all this. It’s very much the essence of it.

You mention that you’ve engaged in devotional practices associated with Vaishnavism, and now the meditation practices of Advaita and Zen. Could you say a bit more about what these practices comprise (in a way that people unfamiliar with the traditions get a sense of what it’s about and what you do?).

Vaishnavism is a Hindu devotional theistic tradition in which Vishnu or Krishna is worshipped as the Supreme Being. The spiritual practices in Vaishnavism consist of different modes of devotional service (bhakti) designed to cultivate a personal and intimate relationship with God. Bhakti includes mantra meditation (usually with beads), devotional singing, meditating on Krishna (though images or scriptural narratives), and the making of various offerings to Krishna, especially food offerings. Really anything done for Krishna is devotional service to him, but these are some of the regular practices. Although Vaishnavas worship in temples, consistent practice of devotion at home is important, and this includes having an alter with images of Krishna (and often also one’s guru), mantra meditation, and the regular offering of meals to Krishna.

The height of my Vaishnava practice was early 2011 to summer 2013, during which time I also visited Audarya, the Gaudiya Vaishnava ashram in Northern California where Swami Tripurari is the guru. Tripurari was an influence on me for several years, and I spent time at the ashram in 2011 and also in 2014. I was deeply impressed with the kind of devotion I observed, as well as the kindness of the devotees. I have a deep appreciation for my experiences there. I think the ability to practice in a spiritual community is a rare and wonderful opportunity, and it can be deeply transformative. I should add that contrary to what a number of Christian bloggers have incorrectly reported, I was not, nor have I ever been, a member of or otherwise affiliated with ISKCON (the International Society for Krishna Consciousness). There are many strands of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, and ISKCON, though significant, is only one among many Gaudiya traditions.

For me, Vaishnavism really inspired a commitment to daily meditation practice, whether practiced at home or outdoors. The practice involved focusing my mind on Krishna as the object of my devotion, regularly though not exclusively as mantra meditation with japa beads, usually doing several rounds of chanting each day. In a sense the term “practice” can be a bit misleading because eventually the activity I’m calling “practice” here just becomes a spontaneous and habitual orientation. Also, for me, the richly aesthetic nature of Vaishnavism (true of bhakti traditions in general) offered something more meaningful to me than the aesthetically sterile Protestant traditions with which I was associated for 20 years.

What I find particularly fascinating is my movement from this form of theistic meditation to forms of non-theistic meditation, which led me to rediscover Advaita Vedanta and eventually to take up Zen practice. Contrary to what one might suppose, this was actually a very natural progression for me.

According to Gaudiya Vaishnavism, devotion moves in the direction of deeper intimacy between the self and God, and in that intimacy the separateness between the subject and object gets dissolved. Gaudiya and Sufi love poetry each wonderfully represent this in the language of lovers who lose themselves in each other. Devotion begins from the standpoint of the duality intrinsic to the subject-object relation, but this just falls away at some point when bhakti is ripened. The movement that begins with the attraction to the other (as the other) ends in the dissolution of the subject and object. Hence, Rumi said that lovers experience what love requires, namely their own death. We might say that the two become one. Better yet, the two have always been oneness dancing as two. What is true of human lovers is true also in the case of love for God. You cannot experience God in the deepest intimacy until the ego dies and the sense of separateness vanishes.

To be clear, Gaudiya Vaishnavism asserts a persisting duality between the self and God, and this duality is supposed to be essential to devotion. However, for me even this fell away. By this I don’t mean duality is not experienced, just that it’s understood to be a relative or provisional feature of devotional experience. In other words, I came into a non-dual understanding of devotion, a view that certain strands of Vaishnavism and Shaivism (another Hindu devotional tradition) have accommodated.

Here’s how the transition occurred. In 2013 my meditation practices began gradually shifting away from attention to the object (God or Krishna) to the contemplative exploration of the nature of the very consciousness by which Krishna is known and experienced. Who is this one meditating on Krishna? Who is this one loving Krishna? It is I, but who is this I? At first glance, this appears to be a turn from the object “out there” to some subject “in here,” but in a sense it’s the dissolution of the distinction altogether. I experienced what Ramana Maharshi spoke of as going or falling into the heart. If I begin with any I-thought (whatever it happens to be), and I inquire into it, I’m led to its source, an “I” behind the “I,” the I-am-ness from which the belief and subsequent feeling that I amthis or that arises. What’s here in this I-am-ness is simply the abiding presence of awareness. Moreover, when I more deeply explored this awareness through various contemplative and meditative exercises, it became clear to me that this awareness was not something separate from anything that was happening: a bird chirping in the tree, a car racing down the street, a person smiling at me in some café, a Jimi Hendrix song playing on my computer, or Krishna looking at me through the eyes of the murti (divine image). If I lend my attention to what’s appearing in the form of thoughts, feelings, or sensations, I have no direct experience of these apparent objects as separate from the knowing by which they are known.

Importantly, it’s just this sense of non-separateness that is spontaneously present in the natural course of life, in falling in love, in the depth of playing a musical instrument or singing, painting or sculpting, or pulling weeds in one’s garden. From one vantage point, when we’re lending attention to apparent objects, we might speak of the presence of awareness as the witnessing background of all experience. But if we relax attention to objects, this presence of awareness is very much on the face of experience. Like a television or movie screen, we’re always looking at it, but it goes unnoticed because attention is directed to an unfolding narrative.

What I have just described is “Self realization” in the Hindu philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, the non-dual branch of Vedanta, or the no-self teaching of Buddhism. I’ve discussed this and correlated ideas in greater detail in several blog posts over the past year, for example in “The Myth of Enlightenment”  and “Zen Sinking in the Ocean”. Roughly stated, in non-dual traditions, the practice of meditation aims not at attaching one’s mind to a God or anything else through devotional service, but realizing that behind the self, behind this body-mind, there is the Self (Advaita Vedanta) or Big Mind (Zen), which is none other than the awareness that is non-separate from life as it is happening. In a sense, meditation discloses this by disclosing the unity of the knower, knowing, and known. What’s interesting here is that I very naturally found myself on this path of practice from the path of devotion. In this way, the intimacy I initially experienced with Krishna was transformed into the seamless intimacy of all experience. In this intimacy, this I–loving-Krishna is non-separate from the Krishna-loving-me because we are oneness appearing and dancing as two. As Meister Eckhart more beautifully put it: “the eye by which I see God is the eye by which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, and one love.”

In my exploration of contemporary Advaita Vedanta (e.g., teachers like Rupert Spira and Adyashanti) I came into contact with Zen. I ended up reading Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, Sekkei Harada’s Essence of Zen, and Eihei Dogen’s Genjo Koan. I connected with Zen largely because I realized that I was already very much in the kind of practice-experience described by these authors. I wanted to venture further into it, and it also nicely fit the psychotherapeutic modalities I had been exploring for a couple of years.

So I have characterized myself as a “Zen practitioner,” and this is informative to a certain extent. The heart of Zen is its meditation practice, called zazen. Like all Buddhist meditation, zazen involves looking at what we’re normally looking at but noticing what we typically don’t notice, a kind of clear seeing, as well as mental tranquility. However, zazen is somewhat unique in the way it achieves or exhibits this. It’s not a classical form of meditation. There’s no attempt to alter or otherwise control the mind, for instance, by directing or keeping one’s attention fixed on some particular object, e.g., an image, mantra, thought, or even one’s breath. In this way, zazen differs from other Buddhist meditation practices that involve guided meditation or other techniques for directing the mind in particular way. Zazen is simply letting the mind be and just watching or observing whatever is arising in the way of thoughts, feelings, and sensations, but where this seeing takes place non-reactively, without clinging or aversion.

As part of my exploration of Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, which grew out of my previous and continuing interest in Jungian analysis, I had already been cultivating mindfulness. The ability to observe sensations, feelings, and thoughts as they arise in particular circumstances, even develop a kind of conversation with them as expressions of “parts” of oneself, plays an important therapeutic role in IFS. Among other things, it allows us to discover and compassionately engage more subtle psychological patterns associated with trauma and suffering, and which play a powerful role in influencing behavior. However, it was clear when I began studying Zen that in my existing mindfulness practice I was running straight into phenomena highly salient to Buddhism: the impermanence of things, including the complex and fluid nature of “the self,” my attachments, and also how suffering or lack of satisfaction was rooted in attachments. Ultimately, I saw that “the self” that I thought was here is a fiction. In fact, there is no “me” at the center of my life; indeed, there is no “me” and there is no “center.” We can use these words of course, but in fact there’s just life happening, and there’s really not even that. I’ve tried to express the experience here and its implications for spiritual practice through aphorisms and various contemplative exercises in the blog posts cited earlier, as well as others such as “Ode to Autumn – the Sweetest Freedom” and “The Boundless Ocean of Experience” .

This attraction to meditation, and zazen in particular, arose because it brought together the whole of what I call my experience in a natural and evident manner. I don’t separate psychological wellbeing, understanding, and spiritual attainment. Everything that is happening is part of the path, and so becomes practice, practice illuminating and cultivating practice, which of course from the non-dual Zen perspective is not something separate from the goal. So in the Soto Zen tradition (with which I’m involved), we emphasize shikantaza (just sitting to sit). This is the idea of “goalless practice.” For me, this just means practicing, regardless of what goal or intention the mind may frame for the practice at a given time, and ultimately just not caring so much about whether or not there’s some goal there or what the goal happens to be.

As readers of my blog on my professional site are aware, since May 2014 I’ve been living at Jikoji Zen Center  in the Los Gatos mountains in the California Bay Area. So I’m deeply connected to Zen practice on a daily basis and in the context of a spiritual community (sangha) of fellow practitioners committed to Buddhist precepts and Zen as a way of life. Although as a resident at Jikoji I’m involved in formal Zen training, I think Sekkei Harada has best summarized the way of Zen when he said that Zen is finding great satisfaction in every moment, down to the smallest detail of life. This is just another way of saying that the fullness of life is non-separate from fullness that is what I call “my” life.

All the members of our community (the sangha) have individual practice agreements with the teaching leadership at the center. These agreements are crafted to enable each of us to pursue and cultivate Zen practice given our diverse personal and professional responsibilities. An important part of the individual practice, of course, is our practice as a group. We practice zazen as a group, usually once or twice a day for a period of 30 to 40 minutes per sitting. The first sit is at 6:00am, and the second in the evening, after dinner. Group meditation takes place in building called a Zendo, where we sit on a cushion in silence, room lights dimmed, and our eyes open (though gaze softened) facing the wall a foot or so away from us. Morning sits conclude with a short service that involves chanting (sometimes in Japanese), the offering of incense at a central alter, and prostrations to Buddha, the Dharma (truth), and the Sangha. On Sundays we have two sits in the morning, a dharma talk, and a group lunch. Several times a year we also have intensive meditation periods (between a few days to a week long) called sesshins. During these times we may sit in meditation for up to ten to twelve hours a day, and they also include periods of teaching on Buddhist precepts. Our practice also extends to various tasks we have to maintain the Zen center.

So for my last question, I’d like to ask, how your own spiritual journey has impacted your work as a philosopher?

Most generally stated, I’d say there’s been something of a reciprocal relationship between my spiritual journey and work as a philosopher. On the one hand, my spiritual interests and experiences have guided my philosophical work in some important ways, but my philosophical work has also played a significant role in influencing my religious beliefs.

Let’s go back to my first twelve years in professional philosophy. I was focused on the epistemology of religious belief during this period, and my main project was devoted to synthesizing Reformed epistemology (with its emphasis on the proper basicality of belief in God) and the tradition of natural theology. This project grew out of my earlier interest in apologetics as a young Calvinist in the 1980s. After a four-year flirtation with the presuppositional apologetics of Gordon Clark and Cornelius Van Til, after enrolling at Santa Clara University I began a serious engagement with the broader climate of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy of religion. By the time I reached my senior year as an undergraduate at Santa Clara University, I had started to form some preliminary ideas in religious epistemology concerning evidentialism and properly basic theistic belief. These ideas took off during graduate school at Oxford under the supervision of Richard Swinburne, and they came to culmination after a dozen or so articles with my book The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology (Ashgate 2009).

A few things strike me about this first phase of my work as a professional philosopher.

First, I think it’s pretty clear that the experience of God as a significant feature of my spiritual journey gave rise to and subsequently sustained my long-standing philosophical interest in the epistemology of religious experience, and more specifically the idea of immediate knowledge of God or properly basic theistic belief. My attraction to Christianity in my late teens and early twenties was rooted in personal experiences of God. This impressed upon me early in this journey the deeply intuitive or experiential nature of the grounds for belief in God. And the post-Christian phase of my spiritual journey has confirmed this as well, as I’ve had Vaishnava theistic experiences and also many non-dual or monistic experiences.

Second, as far back as I can recall, I’ve always been prone to a reflective habit of mind, seeking clarification, confirmation, and the elaboration and systematic articulation of what is given more directly in my experience. (In my pre-teens I was a huge Elvis Presley fan. My mind wanted to do something with the aesthetic enjoyment of the music, and so I created the first analytic discography of Elvis Presley music.) I think this explains the specific contours of my interest in religious epistemology, specifically my interest in synthesizing religious experience and reasoning as equally important grounds for our knowledge of God. Fundamentally, I think this has been motivated by my personal interest in synthesizing two aspects of my own experience and personality: intuition and reasoning.  In other words, there’s an important motivation here to understand the unity of two distinct cognitive functions, a subtle mode of self-exploration stimulated by my encounter with the numinous at an early age.

Were it not for my spiritual experiences, I doubt I’d be much interested in the nature and epistemology of religious experience. (Similarly, were it not for my having various ostensibly paranormal experiences, I doubt I’d be very interested in the critical exploration of these phenomena.) In fact, I might not even be a philosopher. It’s not simply that the spiritual journey has placed certain questions on the radar for philosophical exploration. It’s supplied me with experiences that have stimulated the asking of philosophical questions of a far-reaching sort.

Of course, given the importance of religious experiences in my spiritual journey, I’ve relied on philosophy to assist me in reflecting on the nature of these experiences, to critically work out an interpretation of religious experience. This is one reason why I’ve adopted a pluralistic understanding of religion and religious experience. While I’m convinced there is something veridical occurring in these experiences, the critical exploration persuades me to reject a kind of naïve realism about the experiences, whether its Jesus or Krishna one is experiencing. This also nicely fits with the Advaita and Zen understanding of religious experience. So there’s actually an important convergence of my current spiritual practice and my philosophical understanding of religious experience.

From the perspective of my more recent and present eastern spiritual practice, I’d say that I’ve opened up to a more diverse range of modes of philosophical inquiry. I remain very committed to and interested in the rigorous logical and conceptual analysis characteristic of analytic philosophy, but it no longer has a monopoly on my intellectual life and approach to philosophy. I see its limits in a way I didn’t earlier, and I certainly have no interest in utilizing it for the purposes of apologetics, so much an integral part of my use of philosophy in my Christian days. So let me say a few things about this.

When I took up Vaishnava practice, I think a number of Christian bloggers thought I was going to become some sort of apologist for Vaishnavism. I’m quite happy to have disappointed them. I never intended to become an apologist for Vaishnavism, nor do I intend to be one for Advaita or Zen. Indeed, the entire idea just strikes me as misguided and utterly uninteresting. When I moved into eastern spirituality I had already taken an important step in the direction of having no interest in defending my beliefs or trying to convince people to believe what I believe. To be sure, many people have a need for this, and I don’t intend to discourage them from pursuing it. But my experience after nearly two decades of Christian apologetics and philosophical debate gradually fostered a deep skepticism about this sort of activity, something my study of the psychology of belief has also reinforced. I think much philosophical debate, and especially religious apologetics, tends to be less about the issues ostensibly being discussed, much less a search for clarity and truth, and more about the persons themselves, expressions of their need to be right, to be seen or validated, and so forth, which at least for myself was motivated by my own insecurities.

Eastern spirituality brought a significant psychological shift for me. I was simply more interested in cultivating spiritual practice (e.g., meditation), reading the relevant literature, and working on intellectual projects simply because it was enjoyable to do so regardless of where I went with it or whatever anyone else had to say about it. From a psychological perspective, I’d say that the more conscious I became of the psychodynamics behind my engagement with apologetics, the activity became less tempting, but inevitably and naturally the energy behind the activity gets re-channeled. As the apologetic function of philosophy dissolved for me, philosophical inquiry became more about a process of self-exploration, and this was intrinsically satisfying to me. And while conceptual analysis and rigorous argument are still important to how I do philosophy, they don’t have a monopoly on it. Equally important, as a result of my Zen practice, there’s a significant degree of cultivated non-attachment to expectations and outcomes of intellectual activity.

To illustrate, I just finished writing a book (forthcoming in the Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion series) in which I apply confirmation theory to the tradition of empirical arguments for life after death. The topic has interested me for many years, in a sense all my life, and on multiple levels. But my attitude towards the book and its argumentation is very different from the attitude with which I approached my first book. While I’ve taken care to write a scholarly work, and I think I’m basically correct in my critique, I’m not too concerned about whether I’m correct. I’ve written it with what I take to be a warranted confidence but also with a deep sense that the project is something of an adventure, something exploratory, and the analytical approach I take captures only one aspect of a many-sided debate. As for the analytical rigor, I find it an enjoyable exercise, quite independent of where it all goes (or does not go). Moreover, it allows me to meet, in a conscious and fairly playful manner, an important assortment of psychological needs. In a way, the whole thing becomes therapeutic, even a kind of meditation, and consequently can facilitate deep self-revelation. I’ve explored this in depth in my blog post “Confessions of a Bullshit Philosopher”. And this is an important way in which Zen has impacted my work as a philosopher. The whole force of Zen practice is to observe what is happening in this moment. It’s not about stopping or controlling what the mind is doing but taking a “backwards step” from what the mind is doing, observing it, maybe chuckling a bit at it, letting it pass through you, and just moving on. In other words, enjoy philosophy, but just don’t take it too seriously.

Equally important, though, I acknowledge that analysis and logical rigor constitute only one kind of philosophical inquiry. In contrast to my forthcoming book on empirical arguments for post-mortem survival, I’m currently writing a book that explores love, awakening, and God, but I’m using a contemplative and poetic approach.  This is an approach I’ve used in many of my blog posts on my professional website during the past year. This is very much in the spirit of Advaita and Zen, aimed at facilitating a certain kind of engagement with the unconscious, enlargement of our experience, and transformation of our orientation towards the world. I agree with Jung that “we should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect,” for at best the intellect reaches and coveys only a very limited domain of truth. Other modes of inquiry, exploration, and expression are equally important: meditation, poetry, fiction, music, and various psychotherapeutic modalities. I wouldn’t say that these approaches are intrinsically any less philosophical than the methodology of analytic philosophy. In fact, I’d say that when a philosopher owns anything in the deepest way, it becomes philosophy.

And, for me, the connection with spirituality is transparent. I’d say that we encounter God in a very broad continuum of human experiences and expressions of human nature. Indeed, there is nothing that can fail to mediate the Sacred. So what I pursue as a philosopher is, if I may use the language of William James, from the “remoter side” of consciousness, very much God pursuing me. Consequently, the right path is simply wherever I am. There are, of course, from the mystical or pluralistic viewpoint, many such paths leading us to God, apparently even for me over the course of this experience I call “my life.” Yes, I have chosen analysis and critical reflection, but I have equally chosen what Rumi aptly called “the path of song and dance.”

Friends:

As most of you know, in addition to posting scholarly material in my blog, I also post poetry and contemplative explorations. In the past year I’ve published One Love, Presence, and The Deepest Silence.  I realize that not all subscribers are interested in these more artistic pieces, but I’d like my blog to exhibit the full-range of my work as an author.  So I have decided to post here three other poems.  The first, “The Other Side of Midnight,” was composed May 9, 2015, and the other two, “Our Eternal Night” and “The Eye of Shiva,” earlier this year. These poems, like my other ones, are about love, the self, and the Divine.  Among the themes I dance with here are love as the death of the self, the pain of rejection and losing someone we deeply love, and how God is present and experienced in the bliss and pain of love. Since I regard my poetry as a manifestation of unconscious material, it’s an important means of exploring the self and understanding my total life situation. However, there is also an important archetypal dimension to the poetry. Were it not for the archetypal images that arise in these poems, they would only be artistic autobiography.  So I offer them in the interest of our mutual journey into and engagement with the underworld of the unconscious. 

 

The Other Side of Midnight

 

In the solitude of the fragile moment

breathless, broken,

shattered into tiny pieces of the night,

my soul singing

her song, which had been a compelling fiction,

fell to silence,

as she dissolved and vanished from my sight.

Selah.

 

If I could speak freely of that hour

when love and loss met face to face,

I would hold my breath long enough

for the deeper anger to be known

and share the bread of this beauty

and drink the cup of bitterness

from which our mutual gratitude was born.

 

Love and loss were her precious gifts to me,

yet the illusion of her relentless hold

could only be dissolved by the ebb and flow 

of holding on and then letting go 

of what was real and what was not.

And then I recalled the forgotten day

when she danced upon the burning sand

and the ocean laughed and named us 

“love longing for life but desiring death.”

This we were, and nothing more,

but of course, nothing less than this,

when we sealed our eternal love

and unconscious yet fated betrayal 

with our first sacred, timeless kiss.

 

A ghost she was from the very beginning,

yet she turned the clouds into living stone,

gave the dark and formless unconscious form 

and then entered me with her chilling breath,

first upon my face, then upon my heart,

yet her words were nails, her love a hammer,

pounding out a reluctant self-redemption.

Form without substance, shape without color,

just a blind, frozen, and fading projection,

the path upon which every lover must walk

to be crucified by his own heart’s desire.

 

How shall I describe the essence of My Love,

the goddess shakti who gave me birth

and by whom I have tasted an eternal death?

Sudden and vast unspeakable brilliance

annihilating me with her blinding light,

quickly, invisibly collapsing on itself,

leaving only ashes of tomorrow’s dream.

the glory of a dying, lifeless sun.

 

Sing me your song, 

my precious springtime lover

Give me the melody 

of your grief-stricken heart,

your consuming fire, 

the deepest truth of all,

sabotaging lie that annihilated me

in the madness of 

your impenetrable night.

 

You were the goddess 

that fell from the sky,

shattered, scattered, 

and dissolved into the earth

and yet never separate 

from this one I call “I” 

the silent sound, 

and the groundless ground,

the path of chaos I have walked.

 

In the solitude of the fragile moment

lovers appear as a kiss upon your lips

but first as the dirt beneath your feet,

butterflies dancing upon an Autumn wind,

swirling through your trembling hands,

a melody melting into the silence of the night,

where everything we are is finally dissolved,

there, on the other side of midnight.

Selah.

 

Our Eternal Night

  

Sinking in the golden sand of an endless shore

slowly fading sun kisses the sky goodnight.

Here against these waves I penetrate

the silence space,

where God is a darkness

Jesus crucified, Vishnu humanized,

the Goddess, visualized

not as one but two,

keeps dancing naked in the night,

but it’s the ocean that was my Great Mother,

whose bleeding heart gave me birth.

to whose sacred womb I now return.

 

Waves, like our shattered, scattered love,

tossing us about, tearing us apart,

yet I give myself up and surrender 

to the waves on this silent winter night,

and sacrifice myself with the deepest trust

to the frigid yet loving, moving current,

as it takes me under this last time.

This depth is non-separate from the sky

we cannot fly.

This death non-separate from the life

we cannot live.

This love non-separate from what I am,

which you could not accept.

This time non-separate from the space

in which I would have danced with you,

if only for a moment while the sand 

caressed our bare and blistered feet.

 

You said this was a dream, that it is,

for more than a dream I could not wish,

more than a dream I could never pray,

more than a dream my magic could not make.

And yet, there, in the stillness 

of your frigid eastern night, 

I was, I am, and I will be

I – when you touch yourself in the dark

I – when ecstasy seizes you at dawn

I – when your breath becomes the music

to which you dance and sing, which in time 

will dissolve all your deeper pain.

 

If I could give you one gift, it would be

the seeing of my knowing all your pain,

the pain of wanting, the pain of striving,

the pain of too much tenderness when

the handsome poet stole your eternal love

and left her lying naked in the rain,

the pain when he penetrated you, 

and left you wanting more of the same,

the pain when you shattered his heart,

the pain of remembering, the pain of forgetting,

the pain of living, and the pain of dying,

the pain of knowing, the pain of unknowing,

the pain of clarity, the pain of mystery.

 

They cursed my silence, they cursed my words,

but I was only a ghost for love’s eternal longing.

Seeing not seen, hearing not heard,

just the watcher of their dreams,

nothing more, aye, nothing less,

for their lips could not kiss the face 

of their own perpetual pain and

embrace the shame that burned

rejected gypsy lovers at the stake.

And so they could not make love to me,

the shadow behind their fears,

the weeper behind their tears,

the god Shiva seized by Shakti

and slain under the power of their 

undying virgin love.

 

Fear not, my unseen lovers,

for I am neither dead nor living

neither prince nor poet

not human enough even to be a pauper,

so I cannot pay for the well-deserved

ridicule and betrayal I have endured 

these many days, these many lives,

but yet I carried the fire of the gods

that utterly destroyed the tenderness 

of the sand upon which we walked

and turned our entire world to stone.

 

Yet I shall come to you again, when 

the winter snow has become spring rain

turning dying brown into living green

and deer drink again from flowing streams.

As raindrops kiss your neck, and

a gentle breeze wraps around your waist,

and butterflies dance with you in the woods,

let it be, love, let yourself go

breathe it all in as far as it can go.

Surrender to the invisible presence,

and feel me enter you for the first time.

 

The Eye of Shiva

 

His eye is the power of my I.

The I behind this I.

The I within this I.

Healing, revealing

the rhythm of my unconsciousness

along the path of silence

 

His eye is the seeing of the truth.

The truth behind this I.

The truth within this I.

Healing, revealing

The rhythm to which lovers dance

Along the path of silence

 

His eye is the feeling of the shadow.

The shadow behind this I.

The shadow within this I.

Healing, revealing

The demons of a shattered mind

Along the path of silence.

 

His eye is the inconceivable infinite depth.

The depth behind this I.

The depth within this I.

Healing, revealing

The blissful and painful thoughts

Along the path of silence.

 

His eye is the purest meditation.

The meditation behind this I.

The meditation within this I.

Healing, revealing

The world of all dualities

Along the path of silence.

 

His eye is the image of the goddess.

The goddess behind this I.

The goddess within this I.

Healing, revealing

The voices of distant lovers

Along the path of silence.

 

His eye is blissful transforming love.

The love behind this I.

The love within this I.

Healing, Revealing

The dissolution of this I

Along the path of silence.

 

Michael Sudduth

I want you to sit with your deepest pain, your most inescapable suffering. Call it forth even now.  Be with it for a few moments if you can.  I want you to see it, to see it clearly.  I want you to become friends with it.  No, I wish for something greater. I want you to see that this one you have called your “enemy” is and has always been your friend and your deepest confidant.  And when you meet Pain along life’s path, I want you to call Pain “love waiting to be revealed.” I want you to dance with her, and then tell me of her kiss, which awakened you from the dream you called your life.

 

I would like to announce my new book project, from which the above quote been taken. 

Truth is Dancing: An Invitation from the Other Side of Consciousness

This project has been inspired by my thirty-year spiritual journey, especially the very difficult journey of the past year, which began a year ago today with one of the more traumatic events of my life, perhaps the most traumatic I’ve ever experienced.  Very much in the spirit of many of my blogs since last summer, this work will be a poetic and contemplative exploration of love, awakening, and God.

I decided on this project primarily for three reasons. 

First, in the course of the past year I’ve received lots of emails from people who have thanked me for my blogs on eastern spirituality and the philosophy of love.  It seems that these blogs have really helped people in their own journey, and a number of readers have asked me to write a book along these lines.  While there’s much to be said for scholarly writing, my latest project is intended for a general audience, a gift of sorts to all seekers. In this way I wish to acknowledge not only the persons whose lives I’ve touched in some way through my writing but the many people who have touched my life in the past year.

Second, in the past month I’ve been struck with how many friends and acquaintances of mine are, as I did a year ago, undergoing a painful marital divorce, breakups with their partners, or who are otherwise deeply challenged by struggles in their relationships with a significant other.  Right here, in this confusion and pain, there is a profound invitation coming to us, and so an opportunity for consciously owning the transformation that is taking place.  None of what is happening, however painful, is separate from the path we are walking, nor the spiritual aspirations to which we are committed.

Finally, when my fiancée of three years walked out on me never to be heard from again, I knew that I would eventually write about my experiences.  Waiting a year has given me some important clarity but also a deep gratitude for the large residual of mystery that remains.  During this past year, I’ve gone through the whole spectrum of emotions, in their various cycles and epicycles, punctuated at various times with a widening of understanding of myself.  Most importantly, despite the range of emotion and thoughts, there has been to this hour an undeniable and recurring gratitude for everything I was blessed enough to share with Autumn, which really made it the best relationship I ever had. From where I stand now, I offer this work in the spirit of compassion, not only for my ex fiancée, but for everyone who has been compelled to choose, sometimes the unthinkable, because they had to choose from a place of a deep suffering.

Truth is Dancing will include the poetic, contemplative, and photographic expressions of the invitation I’ve received from what I’m calling the “other side of consciousness,” as well as my response to this invitation.  Of course, I can’t say what this other side of consciousness is, for the main objective of the book is to help readers explore their own experience, meet this “other side” for themselves, and discover its invitation to them. 

It’s going to be a bit like Rumi meets Gibran meets Jung meets Oriah Mountain Dreamer meets Zen meets bhakti meets Muse meets Black Sabbath.

My projected completion date is fall 2015.  While I will continue to write scholarly material related to my forthcoming book on postmortem survival, stay tuned for more on the new writing project. 

Michael Sudduth

Friends,

My most recent blog “Survivalists in the Crosshairs” had over 500 hits within the first 24 hours, which surpassed my earlier high volume posts on near-death experiences (September 9, 2014) and the logic of survival arguments (June 4, 2014). Not surprisingly, I’ve received a number of emails and Facebook comments concerning the blog.  While I don’t allow comments to be posted in my blog, readers are always welcomed to email comments to me or interact with me on my Facebook where I engage in limited informal discussion.  I also try to answer all emails. At times I have incorporated responses to emails in my blog.  Here is one such occasion.  Facebook friend Aedon Cassiel has given me permission to post his Facebook query here, which is followed by the response I posted on Facebook.

“Michael, I think I follow most of what I’ve heard you say, and I like the overall tone of what I hear. But I have to confess that I can’t, for all that, form any clear picture in my mind of what actually would satisfy you. That’s not a “what’s your problem, what would even make you happy?!” but a request for clarification, if such is possible. For all I can tell you’ve made critiques to some extent of basically any way I can imagine anyone might go about the project.” – Aedon Cassiel

Aedon:

I’m tempted to bite the bullet here and say, “nothing will satisfy me.” So let’s take that approach first, a kind of worst-case scenario. Besides being an interesting bit of psychological autobiography, so what? This fact, if it is one, hardly counts as evidence against the cogency of my arguments. If the project (at least as traditionally conceived) is intrinsically defective, your observation is exactly would we would expect. Self-defeating arguments are notoriously difficult to save. And I guess that would just be too bad for proponents of the classical arguments, at least given the traditional parameters of these arguments.

But this sort of response would be overly simplistic and misleading.

First, I don’t saddle my arguments with the stronger conclusion that any empirical survival argument does not succeed, or even that any empirical survival argument based on paranormal phenomena fails. This simply does not follow from anything I argue, even if neither you nor I can at present positively specify how the classical arguments can succeed. This may simply be our inevitable epistemic situation at present. For example, given the nature of my critique, the success of the classical arguments may depend on future developments in the scientific understanding of consciousness.

Second, as I have repeatedly noted in my blog and also explain in my book, there are many potentially fruitful alternative approaches to the epistemology of belief in postmortem survival. I would be happy to see survivalists take up the following approaches. Here are three.

(1) Explore the prospects for an experiential justification for belief in survival, similar to what many twentieth-century Christian philosophers have argued concerning theistic belief. A few philosophers have offered programmatic suggestions in this direction, but there’s nothing equivalent to Alston’s Perceiving God (Cornell, 1991) or Plantinga’s Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford University Press, 2000) for belief in survival.

(2) Explore the prospects for constructing the classical arguments within the framework of a religious or spiritual tradition. This may be highly relevant when it comes to the problem of auxiliaries, for the kinds of auxiliaries survivalists routinely assume are embedded in the religious and spiritual traditions of the world.

(3) Explore the prospects for belief in survival being based on multiple grounds (including religious grounds), each of which makes a distinctive contribution to the justification of belief in survival. Following Alston’s suggestions at the conclusion of Perceiving God, I developed this with reference to theistic belief in my 2009 book on natural theology, I would encourage survivalists to pursue this with respect to belief in survival. 

The upshot of (1), (2), and (3) is essentially to break the grip that “SPR logic” has had on empirical inquiry into survival. The classical arguments may indeed be irreparably logically “jacked up” given the traditional narrow parameters empirical survivalists have imposed on the inquiry and arguments. So be it.  Sometimes you just need to throw away that old vacuum cleaner and buy a new one. The only thing more challenging than the defects of the classical arguments would be the cognitive intransigence of some of their biggest proponents who regularly confuse rigorous argument with what amounts to little more than the not so clever rearrangement of their prejudices.

Michael Sudduth