Let us examine this question in detail.

CHAPTER I 

 THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 
_______________________

THE GOD CONNECTION 

   Faith in God and spirits has been around for a very long time. Even the Neanderthals a hundred thousand years ago buried their dead with tools and other objects for the next world. Every nation, every people, every tribe has a God or gods and numerous deities, saints, holy and evil spirits and other such paranormal beings in attendance. Is this all superstition and nonsense or something real and important? Let us examine this question in detail.

   To establish that something is true because many people believe it or practice it is, in my opinion, a mistake. Most people have always had erroneous beliefs. Most people are less bright than you and I, less knowledgeable and less perceptive, by virtue of this fact: I have written this document and you are reading it. "They have eyes and see not and they have ears and hear not." Insanity is common everywhere on earth. It is the price we pay for our somewhat complex brains. Do we accept insanity as true and proper thought? Yes, if we live in the Third Reich and want to follow Hitler’s mob.

   I do not think religious beliefs are generally insane. True religion touches the very core of our being. It embodies the moral code, which has no other objective basis. Just as there are quacks, shysters, crooked cops, confidence men and dirty politicians, there are false prophets. There is good and bad religion and somewhere in the wide spectrum of beliefs, there is the finest and purest form of Faith. We shall seek it together. And we shall look at examples of bad religion in chapter five.

   Every dedicated member of a particular Church thinks his or her God is the true one and his set of beliefs the correct moral code. The Church’s teachings are not a theory that can be disputed and argued over with impunity, as theories are treated in Science. Jesus was the only true Son of God and the Light of Faith for all Christians, and, if you believe in Buddha you are a pagan and a proper target for conversion. There is only one Allah for Muslims and Christians are infidels. If you are Catholic, Irish Christian, in Belfast, you are despised by Protestants, Christian Irish. If you are a Shiite, Arab Muslim, you can count on hatred by the Sunni, Muslim Arabs. You divide your nation and people into India and Pakistan, fight wars and prepare nuclear arms, because one side calls God, Allah and the other, Krishna.

   Yet, if we examine all the major religions, below the superficial differences of cultural origin, we find the same essential premises and even the same basic methods of practicing faith. Mohammed said, "What do you think the Koran is? It is the message of God in Arabic. The basic message is that there is an entity or being that operates in Nature and unleashes creative or destructive forces, which form the world. This Great Spirit is connected to us in our innermost minds and in the material world of Nature. When we are being truly creative in our works and we actualize our dreams, we project a force into the universe that unites the spiritual world within with the physical world without. God within us must be approached with caution, humility and respect. He must be given devoted service and adoration. True believers are rewarded and bad people punished in this or the next life on Judgment Day.

   In all faiths there are prophets, holy men and saints that are especially gifted and trained in contacting the Great Spirit. They impart to the rest of us the divine messages. They are angels in the flesh. Moses was such a man and he was very close to Jehovah, like a friend. In the Old Testament there are passages where he admonishes God and with due respect points out to him how He should treat His people. He was very persuasive. Christ declared himself to be the Messiah, the Son of Man, God in the flesh. God was in him and he was in God, being one with Him in spirit due to a very strong communication channel between them. However, in moments of trial he obeyed God’s will and prayed for compassion like the rest of us.

   In all religions, God is approached by means of the subconscious mind. The devotee fasts perhaps, remains passive and quiet and is silent in a natural setting or temple. The holy man prays, meditates, chants in a repetitious manner the same words over and over and enters a trance. A change in consciousness occurs. The brain waves change to the slower alpha or theta rhythms and inspiration is received. This relaxation response is followed by prophecy. "Come with me," wrote Walt Whitman "and I will teach you the secret of all religions. You will not have to know God second hand."

   Is a real connection made at this time with a supernatural being or is this some form of insanity? That this process leads people sometimes to madness and destruction is well documented. Consider the Reverend Jim Jones in Guyana, David Koresh in Waco, Texas and Shoko Asahara, leader of Aum Shinri Kyo in Tokyo. Such charismatic religious leaders have often in the past led their flocks to the slaughterhouse. Adolph Hitler, though not a declared prophet, had much in common with Mohammed and Moses. So did Alexander the Great, who thought he was God. We will get a better look at this question later, after we have briefly examined what is called the human mind.

   After we have laid a foundation for critical religious thinking, we shall attempt to derive a methodology for investigating matters of faith and accepting or rejecting religious notions whatever their source. I, and others like me, want to formulate a discourse on the method of spiritual reasoning such as was established by Rene and Francis Bacon for Science in the seventeenth century. It is absolutely essential that we do that as Mankind enters the 21^st Century in order to preserve the Earth and human civilization as it has advanced so far.

POWERS OF MIND

   From all indications, scientific and intuitive, most humans possess four distinct powers of mind. First is the one most widely accepted and recognized; our ordinary verbal awareness, our logical mind. The locus of this mind is the left brain, which contains the speech center. You should know that words segment and categorize reality. Verbal terms both define and limit. Their use simultaneously empowers and restricts conscious thinking. Feelings, emotions and sensations normally associated with this state of awareness participate in decision making and focusing of the attention to the external world. This is the province of the pragmatic and analytical reasoning which does most of our routine work. Our basic survival depends on it. Do not abandon this awareness while driving on the freeway.

   The second mind, residing in the non-verbal right hemisphere of the brain, is the recently understood holistic or artistic mind. It is conscious also, but in a silent, non-analytical, non-verbal, but integrated way. This mind is not restricted to boundaries and limitations imposed by language. It does not classify impressions and does not break them down into their component parts. Feelings, emotions and sensations are associated with this also, but they are focused on the gestalt or the whole of experience rather than on parts of it.

   Both the verbal and silent minds grow, through an information channel, to a vast area of functioning called the subconscious mind. It has been said that our subconscious is more than 95 percent of the total and those who learn to harness its powers will possess a vast superiority over the rest of mankind. Let us call this the third mind. It has a complicated structure and carries out many functions.

   Clearly the automatic operations of our bodies are controlled by it: breathing, heartbeat, reflex responses, endocrine gland secretions, the parasympathetic system, responses to fear, anger and other strong emotions. In cases of emergency, such as combat, in carries out the necessary actions for a chance at survival. These are basic, primitive, animal functions. Yet some of the highest creative tasks are also performed subconsciously. Great scientific, artistic and religious breakthroughs are conceived in the subconscious and often revealed in dreams.

   When Freud and others first explored the subconscious and wrote about it, they were often ridiculed. They were psychiatrists and their concern was with mental illness caused by emotional injuries buried in the subconscious. So to them the subconscious was a source of trouble, not a cornucopia of ideas and powers.

   Today it seems incredible that anyone can doubt the existence of the holistic mind or the subconscious mind. We can observe these minds functioning in ourselves and in others easily, as we can observe the curvature of the earth from a high mountain. The loci of these minds in the brain can be seen in CAT scans, surgeries and microprobing. Consider bicycle riding, driving a car, doing any task that is well-learned and automatic. Most of our skilled, professional, daily work is done at the subconscious level, allowing the conscious mind to focus, select material, decide on what to do next, allow for new information and to open the channels of communication to other minds and the environment.

   Our subconscious mind, a powerful central processing unit, is programmed by our conscious mind or by others, through verbal, visual, auditory or olfactory signals. We now know how influential television and other media can be in shaping our subconscious attitudes and opinions and even in galvanizing us into action. Parents, friends, teachers, politicians and religious leaders all can put us in a hypnotic and receptive state and program our subconscious mind, even when we are unaware, especially so, of their influence. This is subliminal persuasion. Very effective! It is like being drugged and not knowing it. Then you buy the product.

   The fourth mind is more conjectural. It is the cosmic, universal, or supraconscious mind. Is this part of your own mind or is it a mind that you can tap and use? Is it established through a connection with God? Many great men and women have felt so and have attributed their achievements in science, music, poetry, literature or religion to inspiration from God rather than to their own powers. Mozart, Descartes, Shelley, Tolstoy, and Shakespeare come readily to mind in this connection. I say, what’s the difference? When you are intimately connected with someone, where do you begin and where does the other person end? It was that way with my mother and sometimes she would begin a thought and I would end it or the reverse. When she died, it was like a piece of my heart breaking off. But I think of her often and her spirit lives with me.

   Today many people are turning to a belief in God or at least the spiritual world; some in the traditional ways of our religions, but others in new or foreign ways. The new practices include meditation, Buddhism, crystals, pyramids, flying saucers, aliens and other omens. I am reminded of the many prophetic tools of the past: animal guts, birds, bones, coffee cups and hand palms. You may think this stuff is absurd and I am inclined to agree with you. But let us remember that what is important in these practices is not the tool but the mind using it.

   The way to the cosmic mind is apparently via the subconscious and is reached by meditation and an altered consciousness after mental quietness has been achieved with a reduction or elimination of the chatter of thoughts, sensations, feelings and emotions. The universal mind is perhaps the collective of all living things, maybe even the spirits of the dead and of others not yet born. What is our individual mind, after all, but the collection function of billions of neurons in the brain?

   How can we know that this fourth mind exists? Many bright and well-informed people argue against it. It may be possible to infer the existence of the cosmic mind from cases like that of Mozart, Mendelsohn, Homer, Shakespeare and many other geniuses. It was said of Homer and Shakespeare that they had not existed because no individual could have produced their body of work. There were many poets writing under the same name. But a group never produces a masterpiece; that is always an individual creation. The cosmic connection is with an individual soul, never with a committee. If information is produced which we cannot attribute to environment or heredity, what can be the source. This is the theme of this book and we hope to throw more light on the subject.

   In some individuals there sometimes arises a sense of the divine, the source of ideals and moral principles. This clearly does not derive from our animal evolution, from nature with tooth and claw, but perhaps from our future as a species or a cosmic spring very far away but also very close. What exactly is the mechanism responsible for the transfer of this spiritual energy is not clear to science. EEG waves have been suggested, but these are very weak and quickly disperse. Interference from other transmitters quickly overwhelms them. There may be brain waves, not yet detected, that are emitted at a special frequency and are used as the medium of communication. It has been said that our links of love to others change our narrow self to the universal Self and we become one with those people and things we love and with the mind of God.

THE SOCRATIC METHOD

   This is, as declared in the preface, a book on the philosophy of religion, not a religious book. Yet, I will not be able to help myself from injecting my own beliefs, prejudices and opinions on the subject. My work background was largely academic, so I will do some scholarly things too. One of them is to give credit to other rational and intuitive authors who have had something important to say on the Cosmic Connection; this, before we go on a tour of the world’s major religions.

   Between 400 and 600 BC there appeared a number of major philosophers, visionaries, sages in the East and the West, who saw and understood deeply the basic meaning of life. In India, the Buddha, the Awakened One, as he called himself. In China, Laotse, who showed his countrymen the meaning of the Tao, the way of Heaven and Nature. In Greece about 400 BC, there was Socrates, who, according to Plato, his disciple and scribe, calmly took a cup of hemlock from his executioner and continued his prison symposium as long as he was able to talk. He had been convicted for preaching against the prevalent gods and corrupting the morals of Athenian youth.

   I feel, as Walt Whitman might say, that Socrates’ soul was a brother of my own. He was an ugly little man with a pug nose. He came from a humble background and was never properly educated. He did not write down any of his discourses, the same as Jesus or Buddha. His students were the young scions of the Athenian elite, such as Plato who had been a wrestler in the Olympics and later established the Academy in Athens.

   Plato wrote the dialogues of Socrates, "The Apology," "Crito" and "Phaedo," having to do with the trial, imprisonment and execution of Socrates, and mainly his ideas about the meaning of life and death. Socrates was never satisfied with pat answers in his quest for wisdom. He quietly went about the agora of Athens talking with anyone with a claim to wisdom and asking penetrating questions that deflated egos. He made enemies. Then he gathered his disciples around in one of their homes and spent the night drinking watered wine and having conversation. He himself was very poor and lived in a small cottage with his wife and children. He did not charge his wealthy students any money for his lectures.

   Socrates often said that the god spoke to him. He called him his demon, meaning spirit, not something evil. His friends often caught him in a frozen trance. He would sit without movement for hours. It could have happened on his way to a meeting with friends who missed him or to an important occasion that he completely neglected. When questioned about this strange behavior, he would say the god had been talking to him and had to sit down and listen to what the god had to say.

   Socrates stated his belief in the immortality of the soul with complete assurance and made a detailed argument about this in "Phaedo." Since everything in Nature is cyclical, if death follows life, then life must follow death. The soul, not being perishable, survives death and returns to a new body or joins the gods in Heaven. The soul is rewarded by the gods for doing the right things in life and enters a better world on its next pilgrimage on earth.

   Heaven, the ideal world, is described in detail as seen by Socrates in a dream. Everything there is well ordered, bright, tranquil and perfect in the magnificent company of the gods and other immortal spirits. In this life we sometimes see shadows of this ideal world, like those on cave walls. We look at the outside, the material world with our senses, but we look at the spiritual world through an inner eye. Socrates is urged by his students to escape jail and thus violate the law of his country and he refuses. He says, "I ought to be careful that I did not lose the eye of my soul." This eye allows us to look at Heaven "through a glass darkly."

   Looking at the world with our senses we see material objects and energies, but beyond these exist spiritual forces or principles, attributes, ideals, harmonies, such as the harmony that exists even after the lyre has been destroyed. Such is the nature of the soul, which continues to exist after the body has decomposed. It goes to a "higher earth", free of disease, suffering and death, where the righteous exist forever in peace and joy. The wicked are punished in Hell and are then sent back to our earth to live in animal bodies until they prove themselves worthy of human form once again. Socrates said, "¼ I believe on the authority of one who shall be nameless."

   The earth is round and vast and a hollow place. We look up from the earth to the heavens as fish look at the surface of the water. A better place exists in the heavens for people purified by philosophy, where they live without bodies in beautiful mansions. These are the souls that have given up pleasures of the flesh and seeking after treasures, and instead have sought the jewels of knowledge, temperance, justice, courage, nobility and truth. Socrates indeed of all men of his time, "was the wisest and and best."

CONFUCIUS SAYS 

   On the opposite side of the earth from Socrates’ Greece, in ancient China, around 500 BC, lived another spiritual philosopher, K’ung Ch’iu, Confucius to Westerners. He was descended from a noble family and served in numerous government posts, usually as counselor to the ruler of a province. His disciples collected his teachings in the Analects, which have always had in China as much authority as the Bible in the West. But Confucius was not so much oriented towards religion as he was to philosophy and a pragmatic one to boot. Like Socrates, his thirst and passion for knowledge and wisdom was insatiable, equaled only by his desire to teach other men the fruits of his thinking.

   Confucius, too, was deeply concerned with finding out for himself what was the right way to live virtuously. Much of his teaching in the Analects has to do with the proper way for a gentleman, as opposed to a small, common man, to behave. The key characteristic of the gentleman was benevolence, that is, love for all persons. A gentleman uses his own feelings as a guide to determine how to behave towards others so that he would benefit and not injure them. He said, "Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire."

   A gentleman is also wise and courageous. He has no fear, anxiety or worry because he is capable of doing the right thing and leaving the rest to Heaven. This is The Way or Tao. Just as in ancient Greece, Confucius encouraged the young to study the poetry classics, known as the Odes, and to engage in the right music. Confucius judged some music of his time to be wanton, loose and reckless, which damaged the character of youth.

   Confucius said, "He has not lived in vain who dies the day he is told about The Way." He said, "Put service before the reward you get for it." Also, "Attack evil as evil and not as evil of a particular man." And, "Love your fellow men."

   In a life full of joy and happiness Confucius had his low moments. He said once. "There is no one who understands me. If I am understood at all, it is perhaps by Heaven." In spite of several serious illnesses and assassination attempts, he survived to a ripe old age. He was agile in mind and cautious in giving severe criticism to superiors. He was a rational and practical man, although his connection with the divine was clearly of the deepest kind. No sage is admired more in the Orient than Confucius.

SPINOZA’S SPIRIT 

   Many centuries after China’s Confucius another brilliant intellect tackled the question of God and immortality on rational grounds, this time in Holland. He was called Spinoza and lived his forty three years in the seventeenth century AD, the time of Queen Elizabeth of England, René Descartes in France and Francis Bacon in England.

   Spinoza’s forebears had come from Spain or Portugal, where their name had been Espinoza, had fled the Inquisition and with other Jews settled in the more tolerant Dutch cities. But this frail, little man wanted to explore Divinity in his own way and was banned from the Synagogue. Spinoza wanted to reduce the concept of God down to a few basic axioms and derive from these all other consequences by means of logic such as it is found in Euclid’s geometry. He also wrote political treatises and sided with the losing party, of course, for which error he was put in jail. Given his delicate constitution, he became chronically ill with tuberculosis and, after his release, died.

   Spinoza, however, had developed a following among some bright people. He influenced and was influenced by the famous French mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes, 38 years older and one of the founders of modern science. Spinoza was also an influence on Leibniz, the great German philosopher, and they knew each other personally, although Leibniz denied this friendship to protect himself from the orthodox Christians.

   Everyone who got to know Spinoza loved this gentle little man with the giant intellect. Spinoza never married; the same as nine out of ten great philosophers. He spent his days spinning his yarns of divine logic, culminating in his epic volume, "Ethics". I have read this work, but it took every ounce of patience I possess to get through it. It is a huge structure of definitions, lemmas, propositions, theorems and corollaries, but it is not like any math I read in engineering school and beyond. I can see why it drove away all but the most dedicated scholars of religious philosophy. And yet, there are many bright gems of thought in this and Spinoza’s other works that shine like pure diamonds.

   Spinoza begins from Plato’s thought of the ideal world, which is Heaven, and proceeds to establish its validity on the basis of pure reason. God is simply a collection of attributes having to do with Virtue. His existence can be proven. Spinoza goes ahead and proves it.

   Individual souls are aspects of the Divine Being. Any person can look within and find God. A full complement of 46 chromosomes and the genes to make the linkage are necessary, but otherwise we are all capable of communion with our Creator. Finite things are defined by their boundaries, but God has to be outside of space and time, therefore, infinite. We partake of that infinity when we merely acknowledge our connection to Him. "The mind’s highest good is knowledge of God."

   However, the Spinoza’s concept of God is not without emotional content. The Spirit that descends is a blend of exalted feelings as well as information. The passions have self-preservation as a goal and pleasure itself is good, but the wise man’s self-seeking is different from the common egoist’s, because the wise man does not feel separate from others and the world. A man is in bondage if he is an unwilling part of the whole, but is free through the understanding of himself and his passions. Love of God is a union of thought and emotion and must hold the chief place in the mind.

   Spinoza has influenced me in my hope that I can find answers to the ethical questions and to the existence of God through reason as well as intuition. I wish to walk like a man with two feet, my intellect and my emotions, one side of me supporting the other. Beliefs are great, but evidence is necessary.

THE PASSIONS OF NIETZSCHE 

   As Spinoza was maligned in his day so was Nietzsche is the nineteenth century. An ardent romantic, who studied the Greek classics and the arts and was a university professor, Nietzsche wrote a poetic work "Thus Spake Zarathustra" of religious content and mysticism, the life and sayings of a prophet, Zarathustra. Much of this epic poem is a polemic against the Christian God and established Judeo-Christian doctrines. Naturally it aroused the animosity of the Churches. Nietzsche was declared an antichrist.

   Nietzsche offers us the ideal of the Superman, a superior species of man who embodies our best virtues and strengths and seeks life in this world, rather than in the hereafter. In other literary masterpieces, such as "Will to Power", "Beyond Good and Evil", and "Ecce Homo", this philosopher pursues a shocking, almost mad, ethical course. Among other atrocities, his animosity and contempt for women was pathological. Nietzsche died at age 56, sick from syphilis and insanity. Yet his writings are of great value because they helped liberate Western thinkers from the doctrinal bondage of Christianity.

   Liberation of religious thinking led other philosophers to consider atheism, agnosticism and Eastern mysticism as alternatives to Christian doctrine. The Nazi ideologists were influenced by Nietzsche and set up their own ideal of the superior Aryan German race. Hitler’s "Mine Kampf" makes much of the Will and of Power. With brutal force Hitler and his followers achieved many stunning successes for a decade until they finally destroyed themselves and Germany. Never underestimate the power of a bad idea.

   When I was a boy, Nietzsche was much admired in my group of bright friends. To them he was the authority in the fight against the intellectual oppression of the Greek Orthodox priesthood. I have always found Nietzsche’s works a source of energy and freedom in my own thinking. I have drawn the courage from his fierce and passionate writing to look at age-long doctrines, say "Nonsense!" and go from there to my own thinking about morality.

THE JAMES BROTHERS 

   Very unlike Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity, but just as penetrating, is William James’ "Varieties of Religious Experience." William James, a Harvard psychologist and philosopher, brother to the eminent psychological novelist Henry James, wrote a very detached, objective volume with written accounts and case histories of religious experiences among Christians. Much of that material borders on the pathological area of the mind.

   William James’ book is an authoritative work on mysticism as practiced in the West. James was neither an atheist nor a passionate Christian. He tried to be objective and have an open mind to religious experience. James acknowledges that those with psychic (psychotic?) experiences know that we inhabit an invisible spiritual environment from which help can come in times of need; that our souls are mysteriously one with a larger Soul whose instruments we are. The case histories he describes often reveal schizophrenia, manic-depression and paranoia. It is hard to come away from reading this volume without feeling at least some skepticism about religion. And yet, something very significant and meaningful is involved in these strange experiences.

   James points out that on the one hand there are the conventional believers who follow patterns of faith handed to them by others, established by custom, retained by habit. And those who go to the Source in deep meditation and make their own discoveries, upsetting the established dogmas and the officials who administer the Church. These are the mystics who carve new spiritual pathways, create new myths, or illusions, burn at the stake, die on the cross, or create new cults. An example that given is that of George Fox, founder of the Quaker movement. Another example is Joseph Smith of Mormonism. Both geniuses were with "exalted emotional sensibilities, imbued with authority and influence."

 H. RUSSELL’S PARADOX

   William James cracked Pandora’s box of religion. Bertrand Russell opened up the whole thing to the light of Reason; at least, Russell’s reason. In a collection of essays entitled "Why I am not a Christian", he shocked his generation with his personal discovery of atheism. Incidentally, he followed that up with another shocker, "Marriage and Morals", advocating in the thirties that unmarried couples live together while in college. This cost him his job at New York University, at a time when he needed it. Russell deals with Christianity and Christian ethics, not with hostility like Nietzsche, but with contempt. He also expresses sadness that unfortunately this religious dogma is beneath his intellectual heights, although he admires much in its teachings.

   Russell was a liberal, descended from British nobility and acquiring the title of Lord after the death of his elder brother. In his wonderful "Autobiography of Bertrand Russell," he writes of his early upbringing as a dutiful Christian by a deeply religious aunt and uncle, his parents having passed away when he was a child. That was a somber faith, steeped in the guilt of original Sin and the hope of Salvation. Russell, a brilliant youth by all accounts, liberated himself from this dogmatic burden with the help of agnostics such as Voltaire, Marx and Freud and the discovery of Sex. His intellectual stance towards Faith closely parallels that in Freud’s "The Future of an Illusion." Religion is not bad; it is mistaken.

   As a youth from sixteen to nineteen, I loved reading Russell’s more popular works from "A History of Western Philosophy" to "The Conquest of Happiness." I even waded in a bit into "Principia Mathematica," an important work that burned Russell out for other serious projects by his own admission. Unless you are a specialist in mathematical logic, you will not find this work very readable. Above all, I loved Bertrand Russell’s crystal clarity of thought and his subtle wit. His style of writing that I enjoyed so much as a youth finally won him the Nobel Prize for literature at a very advanced age. Even then in his nineties he was fighting for peace and sanity and being jailed for his antiwar activities, a true Christian in spirit, if not in thought.

   We see in Russell a man who denied his connection to God, while being securely channeled to Him. Some of his mystical feelings are expressed in his essay, "A True Man’s Faith," while his essay "Mysticism and Logic" scoffs at mysticism and extols Reason. Russell’s enthusiasm for Science and the rewards of Mathematics had no limits. I, on the other hand, in my early twenties moved away from science and technology and submerged myself in Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Mann, Flaubert, Hemingway, Whitman, Frost, and many other literary lights. This was during my unsuccessful six-year effort to earn a living as a writer of fiction.

 GOD AS A JOKER

   Voltaire (1694-1778) was a witty Frenchman who lived during the period of the French Revolution in the early eighteenth century. Voltaire made a sport of tweaking the nose of the political and religious establishment in France and was twice jailed and finally exiled from France for twenty years. He derived a lot of enjoyment from poking fun at conventional religious thinkers. You probably know him as the writer of "Candide," with the famous character Dr. Pangloss, a caricature of the German philosopher Leibniz. Pangloss, in the name of an inscrutable Divine Providence, glossed over every outrageous misfortune that happened to his friends and himself.

   Voltaire lived in a time when Church and King ruled people’s lives with an iron hand in France and almost everywhere in Europe. Sometimes the princes of the Church and the dukes of the state were in opposition, as in the "Three Musketeers" of Alexandre Dumas, but customarily these forces cooperated fully in suppressing all dissent. Democracy, however, born in ancient Greece and forgotten for a thousand years, was to be born again soon in America. In France democracy largely meant freedom from hunger. "Give us bread" was the cry, but also, freedom to think and speak one’s mind without fear of punishment. It was a time then the poor and powerless were allied with free thinkers, students and intellectuals against the government.

   When freedom came at last to the common people, King Louis and Marie Antoinette were guillotined. Anarchy and terror came later and with it an overreaction to the yoke of religion. The bishops, princes of the Church, came from the nobility and were allied with it. So the common people decided against the Church and against the Faith. There followed a wave of liberalism not equaled until the communist revolution in Russia in 1917.

   Voltaire was at the forefront of this liberalism and humanism, together with Rousseau. Voltaire clearly believed religious thinking was nothing but superstition and idiocy on the part of the masses and exploitation on the part of the rulers. Voltaire’s weapons against the establishment were wit, ridicule and reason. He saw the comic aspect of life, death and the divine. He punctured with delight the pretensions to understanding by contemporary philosophers, such as Rousseau and Leibniz. Thus Voltaire maintained a sense of proportion, marred only by his intellectual arrogance. His brilliance was matched by his wit. If God is a Joker, Voltaire is one his best interpreters.

AMERICAN SWAMIS, EMERSON, THOREAU AND WHITMAN 

   This triad of American writers had much in common. In the turbulent period of the Civil War, they knew and influenced each other. All three were intuitive writers who admired Oriental philosophy at a time when people thought the Orient had little of value in the way of ideas. Ralph Waldo Emerson was born first and died last (1803-1882). He was the prophet of self-reliance. Trust thyself was his motto. His writing has always seemed to me obscure, but his message is unmistakable. Have faith, rely on divine guidance, be confident and you will achieve your ends. Emerson was the first man of any importance to recognize the genius of Walt Whitman, who is regarded my many as the greatest American poet.

   When I was a youth I read Whitman’s "Leaves of Grass" as most people read the Bible. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was born on Long Island and his father was a farmer and carpenter. Whitman worked as a journalist and later in life subsisted on meager sales of his "Leaves", praised by Emerson. In the Civil War he worked as a war correspondent and nurse. He was probably bisexual and never married, living with his mentally retarded brother.

   Whitman spent many happy days wondering along the beaches of Long Island, Paumanok as he calls it by its Indian name, and composing his immortal poems. "I loaf and invite my soul," he writes. Whitman was a mystic and tapped the Source as well as anyone ever has. "Come and stay with me," he writes "and I will show you the source of all religions." In "Song of Myself," he writes, "And I know the spirit of God is the brother of my own."

   Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), who wrote "Walden", was a naturalist, essayist and poet. He liked living alone at a pond called Walden in close communion with unspoiled nature. He was strange. He was also a mystic, a beautiful writer and an astute thinker on matters of the spirit. He proclaimed "Simplify, simplify, simplify!" His writing is somewhat esoteric, like Emerson’s, but his goal was self-realization, as it has been for many holy men in the East. Thoreau wanted to look for God directly, without intermediaries. He looked for the divine in his own soul.

OTHER LIGHTS ON THE GOD CONNECTION 

Freud

   Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is known as the father of psychoanalysis. He was a medical doctor and psychiatrist. Freud delved into the recesses of the subconscious mind using hypnosis in order to treat his patients. Many of them were women ill with hysteria, a disease often diagnosed for them in those days. Freud was also an important intellect, a philosopher of sorts and an atheist. He viewed the subconscious mind as a cauldron of psychoses and the idea of God as simply the product of sick minds. In his book "The Future of an Illusion," he forecasts, as science progresses, the demise of religion and other low-grade mass hallucinations.

   In Freud’s view, religion answers universal needs of mankind: the need for certainty in a chaotic world, the hope of protection from life’s vicissitudes, the promise of everlasting life in the face of death’s inevitability, moral guidance in the bewildering passage through the social labyrinth. God is simply an inflated father figure, idealized into an entity of immense power, wisdom, compassion and authority. The creator of the believer’s family is thus exaggerated into the Creator of the universe, the Lawgiver and the administrator of reward and punishment at the end of life, if not before.

   Freud is the originator of many ideas regarding the subconscious mind. The id, the superego, and the libido have entered mainstream language in psychological fiction of stories, novels and plays. Such concepts were impressions of the soul from clinical practice and were tinged by the negative aspects of mental illness. Yet Freud was much admired by many of his contemporaries and other practitioners in psychoanalytic arts and attained the rank of a cult figure, clothed in the prestige of medical science.

   Much of what Freud taught as his scientific findings has today been debunked and the practice of hypnotherapy and psychotherapy, which required many years of expensive talk, has largely been superseded by chemical treatments. In spite of some shrinkage, however, Freud remains a towering figure among serious investigators of the human spirit, mainly because of the interest he generated with regard to the subconscious mind.

   Alfred North Whitehead, an English mathematician and philosopher of Science, who taught at Cambridge, England, for 25 years and at Cambridge, Massachusetts, for 13 years, was the collaborator of Bertrand Russell in the monumental Principia Mathematica. The son of an Anglican clergyman, he was not an atheist.

   Whitehead believed that God is the source of what is of value in the universe, but not the Creator of the material world. He wrote "God is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness." He leaves us free to choose between good and evil and moves us by persuasion only. This view of God appears in his books "Religion in the Making," "Science and the Modern World," and "Process and Reality."

   John Dewey, an American educator and philosopher, was the apostle of pragmatism and his theory of knowledge revolved around the notion of how practical certain facts are. If something is not useful, it can be ignored or even declared untrue. Similarly, something that proves extremely useful is acceptable as the truth. So if God does not exist, He has to be invented anyway, because the idea is very valuable to us.

   Dewey liberated himself from conventional religion with great difficulty. But he remained faithful the morality of religion. Jesus was asked," how shall we know who is the true prophet among all the false ones?" "By their fruits, you shall know them," he answered. Consider the consequences for the German people of their belief in a prophet called Hitler. Consider herbs and acupuncture. If something works, it is hard to argue against it. Much of medical practice, which we accept routinely, is based on this kind of a pragmatic belief system.

   Who can truly know the nature of Truth? If I am on the right side of the booby hatch, I know how to behave in accordance with Truth and Justice. If I survive, I am in possession of a kernel of reality. Reason is perhaps nothing but our habitual way of thinking. To break new ground in the field of knowledge, we need to become irrational; but we cannot ignore the consequences of our way of thinking. This is the biological approach to knowledge according to Dewey.

   Born in Vienna and settled in Israel, Martin Buber (1878-1965) claimed God is interdependent with his creatures and He responds to prayers and sacrifices. God needs us as much we need Him, because without us He cannot continue to grow and flourish. We are the salt of the Earth; that is, we flavor God’s spirit food. In his book "Paths to Utopia", Buber sees the ideal community as a spiritual entity connected to God in an intimate way. That is Marxist social theory, but with a sacred dimension.

   Alan Watts (1915-1973) was a major apostle of Zen Buddhism in American and the West. He wrote and spoke in stirring tones and hazy meanings. In Watt’s view, God has no opposites and no limitations. He is boundless, without a distinct separation from His creation. Fusion is an act of Love; fission is one of hate. Love forms bonds and creates things; hate destroys, breaks up bonds and structure, a process sometimes necessary so new forms can appear. A nova explosion, for example, destroys a sun, but it produces the materials from which more advanced star systems can evolve, such as our own planet and our bodies.

   Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), member of the distinguished Huxley family of England, well-known for his futuristic novel, "Brave New World", was influenced by eastern religion and had much of interest to say about God in his "perennial philosophy" essays. Huxley’s writing is highly literary and readable, but his thinking is of lesser quality. He was known to use drugs to enhance his spiritual ventures.

   Drugs force the channels to the spirit world open temporarily and then the gates clamp shut again tighter than before. Psychedelic drugs are like coffee and tea, stimulating temporarily, but borrowing energy from the future.

   At age 37, Richard Maurice Bucke, experienced enlightenment while riding in a coach. This is the subjective light such, such as seen by St. Paul on the road to Damascus to persecute Christians. Bucke was a great admirer of Walt Whitman, Emerson and Edward Carpenter. In his book "Cosmic Consciousness", he writes, "the trait that distinguishes these people from other men is thus: Their spiritual eyes have been opened and they have seen¼ a man is identified as a member of this family by the fact that at a certain age has passed through a new birth and risen to a higher spiritual plane¼ a state of moral exaltation, an indescribable feeling of elevation, elation, and joyousness and a quickening of the moral sense, which is fully as striking than in the intellectual power¼ as sense of immortality or consciousness of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall have them, but the consciousness that he has it already."

   Cosmic consciousness is above self-consciousness, which is above animal consciousness. Bucke defines self consciousness as the power to dwell on one’s own mental states, while cosmic or universal sense is the awareness of the whole world and all its living things, love and concern for all entities. Bucke believed that as the human race as a whole evolves, more beings capable of enlightenment are born. How nice! I hope you and I are two of these superior beings.

   A self taught electronics inventor and mystic who died in an accident relatively young, Itzak Bentov in "Stalking the Wild Pendulum" delved into the mechanics of cosmic consciousness. "When in the meditative state, our bodies go into resonance with the electric field of the planet¼ .If we can pick up the current produced by the thought outside the head, it means that the energy of the thought outside the head, was broadcast in the form of electromagnetic waves at the velocity of light into the environment and finally into the cosmos."

   This is the same notion as the reception of our radio waves by aliens on planets, light years away from Earth. The response may take a long time coming. Since we know from physics that any object is also a wave, possibly our entire bodies and minds are waves that span the earth, the sun or the galaxy center, as electrons form a cloud around the nucleus of the atom. This situation may establish the communication linkages for the cosmic mind. Who knows? Did Bentov know?

   The problem with Bentov’s book is that he sounds like a prophet. This is all like a revelation to him and he explains things with the certainty of a scientist who has given irrefutable proofs for his findings. It is fine to speculate about the mechanics of cosmic communications, but let us declare our speculations as such, and not as scientific truths. Rushing to accept any powerful thought that occurs to us as valid and true leads to error and insanity.

Castaneda

   Carlos Castaneda, in a series of beautifully written books, "A Separate Reality," "Journey to Ixtlan," "The Teachings of Don Juan" and others, explains the teachings of a Yaqui Indian wizard or shaman. These are conversations and training exercises with his Indian holy man, not unlike those of Plato with Socrates. Don Juan teaches Castaneda, sometimes with the aid of peyote, uncommon experiences and different perceptions of reality that we know in our culture.

   When Fritjof Capra of Berkley, California, and a well-known physicist, wrote his book The Tao of Physics, I believe he got carried away a bit with his enthusiasm for eastern mysticism. I have read the same sacred texts as Capra, the philosophy of Lao Tse, the ancient Indian scriptures, the Baghava-gita and the Upanishads and although I admire them greatly I am afraid I cannot draw the same parallels between modern physics theories and the poems of the ancients.

   Basically, the old religious poets were not into the hard knowledge such as we have today about how the universe is constituted and they did not possess the mathematical tools we have for such explorations. The ancients in the east and in the West, such as Democritus and Pythagoras, were speculative thinkers and they spouted a lot of nonsense together with the wise things that are proven true today. Yet the ancients did very well indeed considering that they lacked billion dollar supercolliders, giant telescopes and supercomputers. Yet Capra’s little book is thought provoking. As for myself, I prefer to take my science straight and my religious poetry the same and not mix the two. It boils down to my conviction that religion has to do with the inner world, while science mainly with the outer.

   I have seen Deepak Chopra, M.D. on PBS television and I have read several of his books with interest, among them "Ageless Body, Timeless Mind" and "Quantum Healing". Chopra is a very charming gentleman from India, trained as a Western medical doctor, who was drawn to the mind-body treatment area and ancient Ayurvedic medicine. He has a clinic now in the swank beach town of La Jolla, California, and a series of best selling spiritual books to his credit.

   Basically, Chopra and his fellows are trading on the placebo effect, well known to science. As a matter of fact, in the past, an entire Christian sect sprang from this source, thanks to the prophetess Mary Baker Eddy.

   It is true that what we think affects the body. The example is often given about the thought of sucking a lemon. You salivate, yes, and if you visualize an attractive member of the opposite sex, you become aroused. If you think about pleasant things after a meal, you digest better. If you visualize yourself getting well, when ill, you recover faster. Probably the effect is stronger when the faith is greater; more about that later in this book.

   I find Chopra, in spite of his obscure language, a refreshing voice in the field of spiritualism, trained as he is in medical science. It is also my intention to deal with spiritual matters, but with a firm anchor on reason and the scientific method. As William James pointed out, one who ventures further into the speculative and imaginative world must have an equal hold on sanity and the factual world. Like a tree that endures, we must put roots deep into the soil and bedrock to the same extent as our branches reach out to the sky and light.