#1
One meaning of “no guru” is not being a guru; another is not having a guru. My new absence of restraint in expressing myself after retiring as a teacher (plus my new dedication to transparency) frees me to profess—or confess—some of the beliefs at which I’ve arrived as a spiritual independent—that is, someone who has not had a primary guru or spiritual teacher. Perhaps my experience will help others who strive spiritually on their own. (It should also become clear why the restraint from revealing my beliefs in the classroom was justified in terms of prudence as well as principle.)
This essay is intended to be a rational and, I will say, scientific argument for what is here called Paganism, which is generally equated with polytheism. My experiences as a scientist (and as a person) have led me to the conclusion that Paganism is the best spiritual path, if path it be.
There might be a question as to whether this amounts to a profession of belief or a confession, since there are many prejudices in the world today but Paganism has perhaps been the most common target throughout history in the West, being condemned by scientists and religionists alike, but for different reasons, of course. The main reason Paganism seems less of a target today is the success of its repression in the past. Yet the prejudice remains; in college, for example, the knowledge that a professor is a Pagan might compromise ots credibility because Paganism is seen as nonsensical or simply silly in most intellectual circles; at the primary and secondary levels, parents of students would likely take note, more or less negatively, on moral and/or intellectual grounds.)
The word “spirit” essentially means consciousness, whether natural or supernatural: A person with “school spirit” is one who devotes (earthly) attention or consciousness to the school; in other-worldly terms, whether God or a ghost, consciousness is the one and only necessary quality that any spirit or Spirit must possess (the idea of an unconscious spirit being absurd if not oxymoronic). So it is the meaning of spirituality to seek to expand—deepen or heighten—one’s consciousness without reference to what kind of path or approach one takes.
In this rational presentation, spirituality is seen as earthly and natural, and can be approached scientifically by referring to experience exclusively in physical, worldly terms: While some beliefs refer to what can be called the supernatural, the beliefs themselves exist in the physical mind—our individual earthly spirits—and are appropriately the objects specifically of cognitive science.
Western philosophy is generally excluded from discussions of spirituality although the word literally means the “love” (philo) of sophon, a word that has been translated as “beingness”—which, at such a grand level of abstraction, seems close enough to the meaning of consciousness that philosophy is essentially synonymous with spirituality here.
A religion is essentially a particular path or approach to spirituality. Anthropologists and others wrangle about what exactly a religion is, but to cut to the quick here, the aspect of religion by which Paganism has been defined historically is not the positive presence of its polytheistic beliefs but the absence of the Bible as its path. Paganism, that is, has been defined by what it is not, with its departure from Scripture coming up front, in the First Commandment. However, while Paganism is generally associated with polytheism—as it is here—there is no doctrine that dictates what Paganism must be. And whether Paganism can be called a religion or not depends on whether freedom of belief can be regarded as a path. (The spiritual freedom in Paganism includes the possibility of choosing to accept the Bible in whole or part, in contrast to the compulsion to believe, which is at the core of the Biblical faiths, as reflected in the act of commanding.)
The kind of polytheism that is ordinarily associated with Paganism is the ancient Mesopotamian model, more familiar today in its ancient Egyptian and Greek forms. In this type of system, the many deities and other spirits are individual entities or identities, separate from one another, the cosmos being composed of consciousnesses conspiring, competing and often conflicting among themselves. However, the Indian Hindu model of polytheism is profoundly different—and better, cognitively. In the Hindu model, all the deities (the traditional number of them is 330 million, an ersatz for an infinite number) are aspects of the one God—the Atman or Universal Soul—and are mystically understood to be identical with It, or Ot. In this system, all conflict or contention in the spiritual and physical realms is fundamentally unreal—all contained in the One. (In a sense, the Hindu model of polytheism is the ultimate monotheism because what is known as physical reality is not really real, and nothing but God exists.) Technically, this thinking is found in the Vedic scripture of the Upanishads and is known specifically as the Vedanta, which has been the strongest influence on me and can be treated independently from the rest of Hindu culture. (Westerners who are not born into a caste and therefore do not fit into Hindu culture but who follow the philosophy are known as Vedantists.)
The key to understanding and experiencing either kind of polytheism is that the world is seen as a conscious place—a place “full” of Spirit/s. The Biblical religions encourage people to see God behind everything that happens, which is seeing consciousness in the world indirectly. The polytheist perceives consciousness to be inherent in the phenomena that surround us—and, ultimately, are us.
As aspects of God, the specific spirits are points of attention that enable the mind to focus on what is beyond our ability to see. It is well recognized by Biblicists that the image or idea of God is impossible for the human mind to grasp. (The Hindu idea of the One is even harder to conceive, if that makes any sense.) Seeing the Godness in sensible things simply works better, cognitively—a more efficient operation of the mind—facilitating any spiritual path (that permits doing it).
One of the worries in the Bible is idolatry, the worship of what is supposed to be merely a symbol of God. However this is a risk only when the symbol is a thing separate from God, as in the Bible. It cannot be a problem, logically, when the symbol is seen as another aspect of God.
The primary problem with Paganism, again, is the First Commandment, which, based on the Mesopotamian understanding of polytheism, forbids the worship of gods other than Jehovah. Ignoring the (big) problem between the modern belief that Jehovah is the only God and the wording of the Commandment, which seems to indicate the existence of other gods, the Hindu model makes this commandment moot, since Jehovah being jealous of another god, in Hindu terms, would be like someone being jealous of ots own face or foot.
The word “pagan” started as a slur word among the Romans, meaning “person of the field” or peasant. (Pagans long ago embraced the slur, as other people pleading for relief have done more recently, such as the Quakers and Queer people.) Pagans were seen as culturally backward and inferior by the Romans (who were also polytheists at the time) and the pagans were in fact “backward” in many ways, including religion, anthropologically speaking. Apart from the prejudice, the spiritual beliefs and practices of the pagans were more consistent with those of their primitive ancestors before the emergence of civilization.
Anthropologists call primitive religion “animism,” meaning the belief in spirits or souls of things, which is not inconsistent with Paganism here. One difference between animism and the Paganism that evolved in civilization is the “size” of spirit. Saying that one sees consciousness in things presumes on what “things” are, and it is part of the theory of evolution as it apples to cognition that in civilization people began to conceive of abstract ideas, such as Love and Justice and War, not to mention a “single” God. Civilized Pagans such as the early Romans saw spirit in these larger phenomena and elevated them to the new rank of deity while the cognitively less developed peasants still focused on the smaller spirits of individual trees and rocks and clouds.
When the Romans were Christianized, of course, what had previously been the mere inferiority of the Pagan peasant came to be perceived as evil, and a pogrom began that has lasted since then. One of the reasons Pagans generally did not convert to Christianity was another aspect of their backwardness—their illiteracy. The Faith is based on writing, on Scripture, and conversion in any meaningful sense relies on the ability to read script—the written word (as distinct from reading signs in nature, as primitives and peasants could do). For those peasants in Europe who did convert, at least technically, it was, no doubt, as much the threats of punishment from a more earthly god, the Emperor, that “inspired” them—and even then, it is questionable how their beliefs really changed in their minds: The Vatican today counts among the faithful many people who practice “syncretic” religions, such as Voodoo, that infuse more indigenous spirits into a superficially Christian system.
When teaching World History to the 9th Grade, the conventional text represents only the positive side to the invention of writing, and a profound positive it is, partly defining the subject of history itself. But according to one philosophical principle there are two sides to everything, and the negative side to writing, which might be expected to be equally profound, could be its impact on the perception of truth itself, in making truth seem static, for one tends to apply the permanent, unchanging nature of the written word to the meaning that the word represents. And this can have a debilitating effect when working with the deeper levels of truth, as in a spiritual quest, since the static-ness of such truths is in obvious contrast to one’s everyday life, thus creating a deep disconnect in trying to actualize those truths. In other words, Scripture by its very nature makes it harder to relate to its truths: In keeping with the Commandments, for instance, what it means to honor one’s parents changes according to context, and sometimes from one moment to the next (not to mention that the stories told in Scripture are locked permanently in the past). The Words become a distraction from seeing God in our lives, if that’s what spirituality is about.
Perhaps the most popular topic in anthropology is the usually exotic or bizarre (to us) beliefs of the primitives, and it is the accepted style in describing such cultures as if everyone in the society held the same beliefs, as is believed to be so in the Biblical religions (based on the ability to refer to Scripture). While it is probably true that everyone in any particular primitive society believed in the same spirits, there was no compulsion to do so. In principle, everyone was a shaman, although certain individuals achieved status by their perceived ability to deal with the spirits. The principle of spiritual independence was not articulated because it was taken utterly for granted. The compulsion to think (and speak) certain (scripted) words perceived as (unchanging) truths in people’s minds had not yet “evolved.”
While one illusion about truth is created by writing, a very different kind of illusion has been created by pictures. Since the consciousness in a thing such as the sea cannot be directly depicted, the qualities of the thing were represented in human (and other) graphic forms such as Justice in the image of a blindfolded woman holding a scale. But of course many people see those pictures in their minds when addressing or alluding to these deities, like Christians who envision God as a bearded man on a throne in the sky. How much the individual bears in mind that the image is merely a symbol is a personal matter, and the significance of the illusion (or delusion) is proportional to the depth to which the image displaces the reality in people’s minds. The more one sees the deity as that pictorial figure, the more difficult it is to see consciousness in the actual things over which those figures are imagined to hover and “rule.”
Paganism as presented here departs from classic Hinduism according to whatever compulsion there may be to accept a Scripture or any other belief or practice. Scripture in Hinduism is different from that in the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions in the attitude toward infidels—those who don’t share the same interpretation of certain words. The Hindu writings are more consistent with the primitive attitude, while judgment and condemnation are built into the Abrahamic religions from the start. Condemnation is based on ideas of good and evil. While in the East the two sides are parts of the same One, in the West good and evil remain fundamentally opposed almost forever.
Disagreements in the West on the interpretation of Scripture (not to mention its outright rejection) have resulted in horrors being committed in the name of the Good, each side seeing the other not as wrong, much less merely different, but as evil—or Evil. (In the East, the Hindus, Taoists and Buddhists have known their own horrors, no doubt, but very rarely committed on behalf of a spiritual path or deity, as seems almost endemic among the Jews, Christians and Muslims of the West (with perhaps an added dimension of irony to the horrors in the fact that they all believe in essentially the same God).)
In the realm of spiritism—the infinitude of phenomena in which consciousness is believed to exist—there are believed to be spirits who do “evil” for the sake of the good, such as the Protector Demons in Tibetan Buddhism (and resembling many people in the “real” world, such as soldiers who kill for their country). In the East generally it is balance that is sought, not purity, as in the West—purity being a quality that embodies opposition (not to mention the virtual impossibility of achieving it (and the psychological ramifications of living with a sense of failure at the deepest level)). A cultural survival of the good demon in Christianity is found in gargoyles, the little monsters that crouch in the corners and crevices of cathedrals to protect the buildings if not the worshippers from harm—remnants, no doubt, of Europe’s spiritually more balanced Pagan past.
No Guru 