1. Reality is ONE.

There can be no contradictions in the eastern mindset, which sees reality as a Unity. The Beatles sang is their song, 'Dear Prudence', 'you are part of everything'. The eastern mind seeks for the unity in all things. This might sound pretty smart and enlightened at first. But it can lead to real stupidity. For example, cruelty and non-cruelty, in the Hindu way of thinking, are ultimately equal, and there is no intrinsic difference between them. But which Hindu would be indifferent to the idea of someone pouring boiling water over his head, instead of giving him a cup of coffee? Such philosophy doesn't work in practice...

All this amounts to is confusion and a denial of the basic categories without which we can neither behave rationally nor make intelligent judgments. In fact, even an advocator of irrationality
depends on rationality in order to get his ideas across, using the medium of language which in turn depends on structure, order and convention. No guru who preaches against the mind could make
a convert of anyone who had no mind to first listen to the guru. A totally irrational person would be a babbling idiot or a vegetable, unable to convince anybody of anything. I am not saying that rationality is the ultimate measure of truth, for some things transcend rationality. Yet I contend that none of God's truth is irrational or illogical...

2. Reality is illogical.

The quotes above by eastern philosophers illustrate this. Eastern religions often say all kinds of illogical and contradictory things...Eastern religionists can get away with saying almost anything as long as people turn their minds off and pretend that they too see the enlightenment behind it all. But are these irrational, illogical statements really enlightened?

We hear things like, 'God is beyond thought.' If by that we mean that thoughts cannot communicate to us any true knowledge of God, we are already talking nonsense. For then, God must be beyond any thought - including the thought that God is beyond thought. Therefore this statement 'God is beyond thought' is not telling us anything meaningful or true about the nature of God.

Sometimes illogical, absurd statements like 'When you do not understand, then you will know' or 'God is beyond thought' sound profound. But actually they don't make any sense, not even to the
guru who utters them, and then hides behind his silence or perhaps further aphorisms. R.C. Sproul puts it this way: 'Absurdities often sound profound because they are incapable of being
understood. When we hear things we do not understand, sometimes we think they are simply too deep or weighty for us to grasp when in fact they are merely unintelligible statements like 'one hand
clapping'.'

There is no need for you or me to join the ranks of those who are taken in by this sort of mind-numbing nonsense. This is not to deny that abandoning rationality might produce euphoric experiences for some. That may be true, but it could also lead to a form of insanity - and a loneliness in which there is no longer anyone able to get through to you to help you.

3. Reality is experience.

The eastern philosophers teach that true reality cannot be known except through experience. Reasoning about reality has little value for them. Once people have entered into some of these
experiences they assume that the teaching which led them into these experiences must be part of the truth. But this does not follow logically at all. It is true that eastern mysticism can lead to some very amazing altered states of consciousness. So can drugs. Neither kind of experience itself proves that the interpretation of the experience itself is right.

The interpretations we put on our experiences are not derived only from the experiences themselves, but more especially from what we have been taught. If someone is taught that they are one with God, and that by hypnotising themselves they will come to know the truth of this, they may well experience something strange and different when they do this, but it doesn't prove they
are one with God. The idea that they are one with God didn't come from the experience, but from what someone told them or what they read. It may have also come from an evil spirit. Many religions acknowledge the existence of evil spirits - so why should such explanations be rejected out of hand?

Until the experience can be described somehow, it is not going to help us develop good relationships with each other. On the contrary, it will encourage us all to retreat into our own
private escapes from reality. It produces a detachment from people, not the kind of compassion that results in practical action.

An unusual experience only proves that unusual things occur inside us at times. They don't explain why they happen. It requires an idea, a thought, indeed rational language - in order to give any
kind of explanation to the experience, or even to say that it is beyond words.

Michael Fackerell
Return to Index -:- Top of Index

• [pvc tubing bent like an Old American West wagon's cover overhead, with some kind of peach-colored fine cloth sewn like curtains stretched over it; this was lit from outside the darshan tunnel in a manner that can only be described as theatrical -- and thick, padded carpeting underfoot. The darshan tunnel was incredibly perfumed -- gardenias, probably. This is all inside a 'Colliseum' or 'Civic Center' or 'Convention Center' owned by other people -- premies brought in more than a ton of building materials, and carpenters went to work constructing sketch-housing inside the colliseum!]