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

Friends,

Palgrave Macmillan has scheduled a tentative publication date for October this year for my Philosophical Critique of Empirical Arguments for Post-mortem Survival.  Although the book is now in the production phase, I plan on writing further on the topic. I’d like to elaborate more on aspects of the arguments in my book, as well as cover material and issues that, due to constraints of space and time, I was not able to include in my book.

One of the things I’d like to do is provide further commentary on some recent writers on survival. 

As some of you know, I discussed David Lund’s work in one of my 2013 publications in the Journal of Scientific Exploration. I might revisit my earlier critique of Lund in the light of my subsequent and more refined reflections, as well as some detailed correspondence I’ve had with David over the past two years.  One particularly interesting part of the personal correspondence has been David’s response to my challenge to show how he arrives at a judgment of favorable posterior probability for the survival hypothesis, namely that the survival hypothesis is more probable than not given all the relevant evidence and background knowledge.  Unlike his book Persons, Souls, and Death, Lund did try to show this using probability theory. Naturally, I don’t think he succeeded, in part because his argument is, like the arguments in his book, blind to the problem of auxiliaries. But I thought his response was interesting nonetheless.  It would be nice to get Lund to do a round table with me on this, which would be published on my website. We’ll see.

Robert Almeder is another philosopher whose work on survival I’d also like to single out for critical scrutiny, though I do provide critical comments on his arguments in several places in my book.  While Lund at least exhibits an appreciation of the complexity of the survival debate, I don’t think Almeder does. This is what strikes me about his dialectical maneuvers in debate with both Steven Hales (unfavorable to survival) and Stephen Braude (favorable to survival), and it is transparently obvious when anyone claims, as Almeder has for years, that the evidence for survival is so compelling that we would be irrational to reject the survival hypothesis.

Almeder’s argument for survival fails for very much the same general reason that all the classical arguments fail.  His argument is blind to the problem of auxiliaries.  This is particularly acute in his critique of appeals to living-agent psychic function as a rival explanation of the data.  As Almeder argues, this counter-explanation cannot account for the data unless it’s amplified into a “super-psi” hypothesis, which posits a degree/kind of psychic functioning for which we have no independent evidence.  The lack of independent support allegedly rules out “the super-psi” hypothesis as a legitimate explanatory competitor.  But the objection applies mutatis mutandis to the survival hypothesis since it cannot account for the data unless it’s amplified into a “super-survival” hypothesis (or what I more neutrally call a “robust” survival hypothesis) for which there is no independent support.  

Almeder’s objection to the so-called super-psi hypothesis is, more carefully and neutrally stated, an objection to a reliance on a hypothesis whose explanatory power depends on the hypothesis being amplified by auxiliary assumptions for which there is no independent support.  Almeder is correct in principle, but what he fails to see is that this objection defeats the argument for survival since there is no independent support for the kind of auxiliary assumptions required for the survival hypothesis to have explanatory efficacy.  The only reason why this would not be utterly apparent is if one were utterly unaware of the extent to which the simple supposition of personal survival carries no predictive consequences unless amplified by further assumptions which do not satisfy the very epistemic requirements survivalists impose on rival hypotheses.  I plan to focus on Almeder in connection with this issue in my next blog.

And then there’s Chris Carter.  I’ve commented on Carter’s pro-survival arguments in a 2011 review, my January 2014 interview with Jime Sayaka, and in my May 14, 2014 blog.  I have more to say about Carter, not because I think his arguments are particularly good but because so many parapsychologists and survivalists seem to think otherwise.  In fact, Michael Prescott has said of Carter’s most recent book Science and the Afterlife Experience that it is “perhaps the best book I’ve read on evidence for life after death, and I’ve read quite a few. I recommend it highly.”  Now blurbs can be misleading, but I think, knowing Prescott as I do, that his comment was intended as genuine praise of Carter, rather than an indirect statement about how utterly crappy the rest of literary field is on the topic. (Being the best of a poor lot is a fairly underwhelming achievement.)  While I hold Michael Prescott in high regard, and he has been a wonderful interlocutor, I could not more strongly disagree with his assessment of Carter’s work.  No, Carter’s work is not even “perhaps” one of the best; it’s quite probably one of the worst. And yes, this means that I also disagree with the “distinguished” contingent of researchers who have praised Carter’s work in their review blurbs (including Pim van Lommel, Charles Tart, Guy Lyon Playfair, Larry Dossey, and Neal Grossman). I gladly part company with these gentlemen.  They are simply incorrect.

To be quite frank, I have no interest in saving parapsychologists and survival researchers from the deplorable reputation they have on the whole rightly merited, for example because they continue to endorse shoddy scholarship and perpetuate philosophically unsophisticated treatments of psi and survival. However, since I have devoted part of my project to wheeling away the rubbish that has buried empirical inquiry into survival, expect some further commentary on Carter.

Let me repeat a point I’ve made in this blog, and which I also make in my book.  We need to return to the kind of empirical inquiry into the survival question that C.D. Broad, C.J. Ducasse, and H.H. Price had in view and modeled for us.  Apart from the empirically-informed and conceptually-elevated critical discussions by writers like Alan Gauld, Stephen Braude, and David Ray Griffin, the current debate is simply the most recent in a series of bad sequels to what was once an intriguing and promising plot.

Michael Sudduth

Friends,

I wanted to announce some general news and my plans for my website for 2015.

(1) Although my forthcoming book on survival is due out in the fall, and I will continue to write on the topic, I intend to announce my next book project on May 2.

(2) This coming summer I plan on finally developing a section of my website I had designed for resources on postmortem survival. There will be several subpages with articles, books, and videos on different aspects of the philosophy of postmortem survival.

(3) I would like also to make available to the general public a version of one of the classes I teach, either Philosophy of Religion or the Nature of Religious Experience. I may do a Podcast in connection with this.

(4) I’m in the process of putting all my previous paper publications online, going back to my earlier work in religious epistemology and Christian philosophy.  These are located under “Articles” under “Writing” in the main menu, I list the new additions below (from most recent to oldest) with links for your convenience.  Some of these were previously available in the form of paper drafts, so in some cases files have been updated to reflect the actual published version of the paper.

• “Is Survival the Best Explanation of the Data of Mediumship?” in The Survival Hypothesis: Essays on Mediumship, ed., Adam Rock (McFarland, 2013).
• “A Critical Response to David Lund’s Argument for Postmortem Survival.” Journal of Scientific Exploration (Spring 2013).
• Review of Chris Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience: How Consciousness Survives Death. Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2011. Journal of Parapsychology, 75:1 (October 2011).

• “Revisiting the ‘Reformed Objection’ to Natural Theology,” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion (November 2009).
• “The Contribution of Religious Experience to Dogmatic Theology” in Analytic Theology, ed. Michael Rea and Oliver Crisp (Oxford University Press, 2009).
• “John Calvin” in History of the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Nick Trakakis and Graham Oppy (Oxford University Press, 2009).
• “Pico della Mirandola’s Philosophy of Religion” in Miraculum Est Homo: The Renaissance Philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, ed. Michael Dougherty (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
• “Reformed Epistemology and the Recontextualizing of Natural Theology” in Philosophy of Religion: Contemporary Practice and Method: New Essays, ed. Rolfe King and David Cheetham (Continuum Press, 2008).
• “Reformed Epistemology and Christian Apologetics,” Religious Studies (September 2003).
• “The Internalist Character and Evidential Implications of Plantingian Defeaters,” the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion (June 1999).
• “Proper Basicality and the Evidential Significance of Internalist Defeat: A Proposal for Revising Classical Evidentialism” in The Rationality of Theism, ed. Godehard Brüntrup, R.K. Tacelli (Kluwer Academic Press, 1999).
• “The Prospects for ‘Mediate’ Natural Theology in John Calvin,” Religious Studies (March 1995).
• “Alstonian Foundationalism and Higher-Level Theistic Evidentialism,” the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion (February 1995).