 
Totality Beliefs and the Religious Imagination

Anthony Campbell

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2009 Anthony Campbell

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About the author

Anthony Campbell was a consultant physician at The Royal London Homeopathic Hospital (now The Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine) for over twenty years. He retired in 1998. He has published books and articles on homeopathy, medical acupuncture, and complementary medicine as well as three books on back pain for patients. He has many interests outside medicine and has published a novel as well as several books on non-medical topics, including two on Transcendental Meditation, which are discussed in this book.

For M-C, who profoundly disagrees with me but respects my right to have a different opinion.

Reviewers' comments

I especially like Campbell's autobiographical approach to religion, where he explains his religious journey throughout his life. This gives him an opportunity to present some arguments, but more importantly, to put these into context and tell the reader why those arguments moved him. The result is not so much a philosophical meditation as a story. And such a story is powerful in its own way. Reading it is like listening to the wisdom of a thoughtful person who has had interesting experiences in a long life. Because this wisdom is based on an individual's experience, it is to a certain degree personal. It may not always be easy to generalize and make into an abstract argument. But I find it fascinating and valuable nonetheless. [Taner Edis]

Anthony Campbell gave the rather challenging title of "Totality Beliefs and the Religious Imagination" to what is really a most readable autobiography, a story, during which he shares a remarkable depth and breadth of knowledge and a distillation of his personal philosophy. We read biographies not just as non-fiction "stories", but also in hopes of finding something about ourselves as much as the subject of the biography, and Campbell's story is one in which many will find a mirror, reflecting, and perhaps rendering more clear, their own thoughts about this life. [John Floyd]

**Contents**

Preface

Chapter 1. The Casaubon Delusion

Chapter 2. Roman Catholicism

Chapter 3. Starting TM

Chapter 4. Doubts and Difficulties

Chapter 5. Moving On

Chapter 6. Mysticism

Chapter 7. The Religious Imagination

Chapter 8. Buddhism

Chapter 9. Miracles

Chapter 10. The Soul

Chapter 11. Letting Go

Appendix: References for Chapter 9

Bibliography

Preface

There are many motives for writing, but one is to clarify one's ideas to oneself. The result is more a voyage of exploration than a formal setting out of views. This book is in that category – written in the first instance for myself, though I hope it may be useful to at least some readers. The ideas I look at here have been in my mind for more than fifty years, so it seems that now is the time to put them down on paper if I am ever going to do so.

Many books criticising religion have appeared in recent years, but most have been written by people who never had a religious belief or lost it early in life. This one is different, in that it offers an inside view of what it feels like to be immersed in two quite different religious belief systems and then to leave them. At various times in my life I have been involved in Roman Catholicism and in Transcendental Meditation (TM), which is based on Indian (Advaita – non-dualist) metaphysics. Many years ago I wrote a book on TM called _Seven States of Consciousness._ Occasionally someone who has come across my website sends me an email to ask if I am the Anthony Campbell who wrote the book and, if so, do I still agree with what I wrote there and do I still practise TM? The answers I give to such people are usually greeted with silence; I never hear any more from them.

I don't much like having to reply to these correspondents because simple yes or no answers to their questions would be misleading and to reply in more detail would require more time and space than an email could easily accommodate. In a way, this book is a reply to questioners of this kind but its relevance is, I hope, not at all confined to people who practise TM or have given it up. I am writing here for people who question the need to adhere to any totality belief system. The book may be useful to anyone who thinks they are reaching a similar position but wonders what it will feel like if they let go. I want to show that letting go can actually yield a great sense of freedom.

Whatever I may have been in the past, today I regard myself as a fully paid-up supporter of the values of the Enlightenment – the intellectual movement which began in France, Germany and Britain in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries (historians argue about the exact chronology) and advocated reason as the primary basis of authority rather than revelation.

These values are under attack today in all kinds of ways. I may even have contributed to this myself in the past, by using "enlightenment" in a different sense, to mean almost the opposite – to refer to a mystical form of illumination that is non-rational. So this book is, in a sense, a recantation of former views, but no matter. I have always believed that we should be prepared to change our minds when the evidence demands it.

It hardly needs saying that a book of this kind must be deeply indebted to the ideas of others. There are few original ideas, particularly in religion. The Bibliography lists all the books referred to in the text and also others that I have found useful in helping to shape my thoughts.

Chapter 1. The Casaubon Delusion

_It is perhaps surprising that men come to regard the happiness which a religious belief affords as a proof of its truth. If a creed makes a man feel happy, he almost inevitably adopts it. Such a belief ought to be true; therefore it is true._ – William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience).

It is said that when the writer Gertrude Stein was dying, her companion, Alice B. Toklas, asked her urgently: "Gertrude, Gertrude, what is the answer?" To which Gertrude replied, very reasonably: "What is the question?"

Alice's question was about the Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything. In Douglas Adams's _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ the supercomputer Deep Thought gives us the answer to such a question, which is "Forty-two". This may be about as far as we are likely to get with all-embracing questions about ultimate meaning, but many of us find it hard to accept. There seems to be something in the human mind that is always searching for totality answers, for all-encompassing solutions. But it is a perilous quest. It can even degenerate into a kind of madness.

The Casaubon delusion

In George Eliot's Middlemarch Edward Casaubon spends his life in a futile attempt to find a comprehensive explanatory framework for the whole of mythology. He is writing a book which he calls the Key to all Mythologies. This is intended to show that all the mythologies of the world are corrupt fragments of an ancient corpus of knowledge, to which he alone has the key. He is, of course, deluded. His young wife Dorothea is at first dazzled by what she takes to be his brilliance and erudition, only to find, by the time he is on his deathbed, that the whole plan was absurd and she can do nothing with the fragments of the book that she is supposed to put into order for publication.

In memory of Mr Casaubon, such attempts to find all-encompassing explanations might be called the Casaubon delusion. It is due to an almost pathological overgrowth of pattern-seeking behaviour, which pushes a normal function of the mind beyond its limits. Sometimes it takes the form of believing that the universe is constructed like a giant cipher, a cosmic intelligence test set for us by God which it is our business to puzzle out. Complete esoteric systems have been founded on this belief. Mr Casaubon was part of a long tradition.

For an example of a real-life Mr Casaubon one might take the late John G. Bennett (1897–1974). He was a man of great ability and intelligence, first chairman of the British Coal Utilisation Association, who spent most of his life pursuing enlightenment in one form after another, always hopeful but always more or less disappointed. His quest began when he was blown off his motorcycle by a shell in France in 1918 and spent six days in a coma, during which he had an out-of-body experience. This convinced him that we survive our bodily death.

After the war he served as an intelligence office in Turkey, which stimulated his interest in Sufism. There he also met G.I. Gurdjieff, the Greek–Armenian teacher and mystagogue, and his pupil P.D Ouspenksy. He became convinced that Gurdjieff knew many secrets and had the key to enlightenment, and he worked intensively with both these teachers between the wars.

For much of his life Bennett was affected by the belief that there is a secret organization of initiates, Masters of Wisdom based in Central Asia, which guides human affairs. He was convinced that Gurdjieff had made contact with these people and was in some sense their representative, and it was his ruling ambition to reach them himself. In 1945 he set up an establishment at Coombe Springs in Surrey, where he taught his own version of Gurdjieff's "System".

In 1962 he met Idries Shah, who was claiming to have made contact with the Guardians of the Tradition or what Bennett called the Hidden Directorate, the source of Gurdjieff's knowledge. Bennett was at first wary of Shah but soon became convinced that he was genuine. After some hesitation he prevailed on the Council which acted as trustees to give Coombe Springs to Shah outright, believing that Shah would use it to establish a Sufi centre. Shah promptly sold it at profit to a housing developer.

At various times in his life Bennett became involved not only with Gurdjieff and Ouspensky but also with Subud, Roman Catholicism, Hinduism, Sufism, and Transcendental Meditation. In fact, one gets the impression that there was hardly any major twentieth-century religious or esoteric movement that Bennett did _not_ try. Towards the end of his life he decided that it was finally time for him to be a teacher in his own right, and he set up the International Academy for Continuous Education at Sherborne, in Dorset. It seems that in his last year he was trying to create a way of worship that would be suitable for people without a formal religious orientation. His followers tried to continue with his ideas at the Academy after his death but within a few years things fell apart.

Whether you choose to call extreme spiritual "seeking" of this kind delusional is, I suppose, a value judgement. Much hinges on whether you think there is something to be found. But even if it is delusional, it is merely an exaggeration of the inbuilt pattern-seeking tendency we all have, without which there would be no science or art.

The same pattern-making tendency can be seen at work if you are listening to people speaking an unknown language, especially if you are not attending closely. You may be startled by apparently hearing a word or phrase in your own language. It was not really there, of course. Your brain picked out certain sounds and mistakenly interpreted them as meaningful. A few years ago there was a vogue for claiming that the voices of the dead could be heard in the static picked up on the radio between stations. The same phenomenon was at work there.

At a still more abstract level we instinctively seek for meaning in the events that happen to us, and the more important the events, the more we want to find meaning in them. It is difficult, for many people impossible, to accept that there is no ultimate meaning in our lives, our illnesses, our deaths. The search for meaning is what gives rise to religions.

This pattern-seeking capacity must certainly go far back in evolutionary prehistory. Whether as hunter or hunted, animals need to be able to pick out and identify meaningful patterns in their environment. The tiger looking for an antelope amid the leaves of the jungle, the antelope watching out for the tiger, or a bird trying to pick out a moth camouflaged against the bark of a tree – all these are seeking for visual patterns. We have to do the same thing when we cross a busy road; we won't last long if we fail to spot the pattern of an oncoming bus.

I lived at one time in a house which contained a lot of abstract paintings, many made with the artist's hands instead of a brush. I happened to be in a room where one of these works hung on the wall when a visitor arrived and stared at the painting. "I can't make anything out of this," he said. "Oh, it's easy," I said; "look, it's a garden in sunlight; there's the pattern of the leaves, there's a summerhouse ..." and I went on to describe various things you could make out in the painting if you looked at it closely. The visitor was convinced and went away quite impressed. I myself was sure that these things were there to be seen, in a sort of pointilliste representation. But, talking later to the artist's wife, I discovered that the painting was purely abstract and none of the things I thought it represented were supposed to be there at all.

Religion and the Casaubon delusion

Many people tell you that their religion is the most important thing in their lives, yet if you accept some of the criticism of religion that has appeared in recent years you would undoubtedly have to conclude that all of it is an example of the Casaubon delusion. Writers including Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett have all, in one way or another, told us that religion is a delusion. In fact the title of Dawkins's most recent book on the subject is The God Delusion. If they are right, it follows that most of the world's population is deluded, since the majority believes in one religion or another. And even in a secular society like that of Britain today there are plenty of educated people, including scientists, who say they are Christians. Are we to conclude that they are all deluded?

It may be helpful to put the matter in a slightly less emotional light by looking away from religion and thinking instead about some philosophical ersions of totality beliefs. The great metaphysicians such as Plato and Spinoza have produced thought systems that are not religions but answer similar questions to those addressed by religions. As Stuart Hampshire acknowledges, the construction of such systems approaches and may even exceed the limits of human reason.

"But one must also understand the motives of those who overstep these limits in pursuit of complete and final explanations [my italics], since these are the perpetual motives from which philosophy itself arises; and even the most critical may respect and enjoy the extravagant extension of pure reason in its furthest ambition."

Spinoza is particularly interesting because he occupies an equivocal position between philosophy and religion. In his own day he was reviled as an atheist; today he is often called a pantheist. He rejected revealed religion as superstition yet in his writing he frequently mentions God. But Spinoza's God is not personal, and you certainly don't pray to him. He is also not transcendent, not distinct from the universe. In fact, he is the universe. The phrase Spinoza uses to describe him (or it) is "God or Nature". From some points of view Spinoza might be called totally irreligious, which is what he seemed to his contemporaries, but from another he could be said to have isolated the true core of religious belief from its irrelevant superstitious encumbrances. That seems to have been what he thought himself.

It would surely be wrong to call Spinoza's system an example of the Casaubon delusion, yet great metaphysical systems do, as Hampshire says, go beyond the limits of our reason. But rather than label them delusive perhaps we could call them totality beliefs, a more neutral term, which I think can also be legitimately applied to religion.

This emerged in a debate about the existence of God between Bertrand Russell and the Jesuit Father F.C. Copleston which was broadcast in 1948. Copleston said: "An adequate explanation must ultimately be a total explanation, to which nothing further can be added." To which Russell replied: "Then I can only say that you're looking for something which can't be got, and which one ought not to expect to get."The difference between Russell and Copleston could not be resolved by argument, because it came from a difference in temperament. As Hampshire says:

"But perhaps, in the last resort, no one will fully understand and enjoy Spinoza who has never to some degree shared the metaphysical temper, which is the desire to have a unitary view of the world and of man's place within it." [Hampshire, 1956]

We could say the same, I think, of religion. To appreciate it requires the "religious temper". [See Chapter 11.] It seems that some people demand totality explanations while others, while they may recognize and even feel the need for such explanations, will never be able to accept them. Most of us, I think, have both these tendencies within us to varying extents, and the argument is therefore internal as well as external. We may debate the pros and cons of religion in our own minds as well as, sometimes even more than, with other people. I know I have done so, and this book is largely an account of where that debate has brought me – a different destination from what I expected at the outset.

Of course, even religious believers don't usually regard all religions as equal and do think that some belief systems exemplify the Casaubon delusion. Undesirable belief systems of this kind are often labelled cults.

The notion of cults is an interesting one. Cult is a four-letter word. There is no agreed definition of what constitutes a cult. I think myself that a cult is any religious or quasi-religious group that you disapprove of, which is why sociologists often prefer to use neutral terms such as "new religious movement" or "alternative religion". We have a religion, other people have cults. As David Barrett remarks in _T_ _he NeTw Believers_ _,_ all religions begin life as cults. If you doubt what I have just written, ask yourself how you think about Scientology. Is it a cult or a religion? The chances are that if you are not a Scientologist you describe it as a cult; if you are, you describe it as a religion. Religion, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

What you cannot do is use the strangeness of their beliefs as the criterion for deciding which groups are cults. Anthony Storr refuses to label anyone as insane simply because of the bizarre beliefs they may hold. Almost all human beings, he finds, have unjustified beliefs of one kind or another, so what matters is not what they believe but how they function in the world and in society. He cites here the strange story of the late Dr John Mack, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard who shocked his colleagues by publishing a book in which he revealed that he took seriously the stories of his patients who claimed they had been abducted by aliens and subjected to unpleasant experiments, usually with a sexual element. Most of his colleagues thought he was himself deluded and he nearly lost his tenure as a result. But Storr does not regard him as psychotic, given the absence of other symptoms of mental disorder. It seems that Mack's willingness to take these ideas seriously was part of a wider attitude of acceptance of the unorthodox and the spiritual. He said: "We are spiritual beings connected with other life forms and the cosmos in a profound way, and the cosmos itself contains a numinous intelligence. It's not just dead matter and energy."

This way of thinking was linked with his experimentation with psychedelic drugs and with "holotropic breathwork", which was the brainchild of another psychiatrist, Stanislav Grof, and his wife. It is described as "a safe and simple way to trigger experiences of non-ordinary consciousness that open us to psychic depths and spiritual understanding. Lost memories from our personal history, experiences from our birth, and archetypal and cosmic phenomena that become available to us in holotropic awareness, helping us transcend the constraints of our ordinary thoughts and habits.

The training for teachers of holotropic breathwork sounds like a perfect recipe for the acquisition of totality beliefs. To become a certified teacher requires about 600 hours' residential training and takes at least two years, during which instruction is provided not only in abnormal psychology but also in numerous esoteric matters including world cosmologies, theologies, shamanism, astrology, alchemy, imagery in nonordinary states of consciousness, perinatal and transpersonal themes in art and culture, the psychological and philosophical meaning of death, psychic phenomena, and meditation.

Mack's adoption of the beliefs of his patients was no doubt influenced by such ideas, as he said himself, but this does not mean that he was insane. "One man's faith is another man's delusion." [Storr, 1996]

Not all religions or cults are equal, of course. A few are like black holes, totally destructive for those who have the misfortune to be captured by them. Once you come within their event horizon you are drawn inexorably inwards until you are torn to pieces by the overwhelming strength of their belief system. The Jonestown massacre, the Waco siege, and the Aum Shinrikyo sarin attack in the Tokyo Underground are just some examples of how this can end.

Most of us find no difficulty in saying that these belief systems are dangerous, but surely the same is not true of the mainstream religions? Yet some critics, such as Richard Dawkins, unequivocally condemn all religions. Dawkins says that to indoctrinate a child with any of them is equivalent to child abuse! Having myself had such an indoctrination and come out the other side without, as far as I know, suffering any long-term adverse effects I think this may be a bit excessive. But I understand why he says it.

I enjoy reading the books of Dawkins and similar critics of religion and agree with much of what they say, but I am drawn temperamentally towards the somewhat more measured critical approach of atheists such as Marghanita Laski, Iris Murdoch, and Taner Edis. These writers reject the truth claims of religion but still recognize that to dismiss all of it out of hand as a delusion is too sweeping and misses out much that is important. As Murdoch has written: "God does not and cannot exist. But what led us to conceive of him does exist and is constantly experienced and pictured." [Murdoch, 1992] I think this is correct. It seems to be hard to escape from religion.

The persistence of religion

For quite a few years I have been publishing book reviews on my website. There are well over 300 of them now and they are useful, at least to me, as a kind of mental travel journal, a diary of my reading and therefore of my thinking over many years. What surprises me about this is the large number of books about religion that I have read. Currently there are over 60, which is more than in any other category. I should not have expected this, because for many years now I have not thought of myself as a believer. But evidently I am not indifferent to religion.

There has in any case been a shift in public attitudes. For much of the last century it was reasonable to think that religion was on the decline, at least in most modern technologically-based societies. True, it was still active in the USA, but in Europe ever fewer people went to church and population surveys showed most people to be only mildly interested in religious questions. Some still believe this trend will continue. Steve Bruce, for example, is a sociologist who thinks that the decline of religion in Western liberal democracies is irreversible. [Bruce, 2002] But many people still describe themselves as "spiritual", whatever they may mean by this, and I am less confident than Bruce that the progress towards secularism is irreversible.

The Theos website currently (March 2008) has a discussion about this, based on a survey they carried out. While this may not be a neutral source of information, some of their findings are intriguing. They found that 57 per cent of those surveyed thought that Jesus had been raised from the dead, with over half of these believing it was a bodily resurrection. Forty per cent thought Jesus was the Son of God, and bizarrely this included 7 per cent of the 250 atheists interviewed! But if the atheists were confused, so, too, were quite a few of the church-going Christians; most (79 per cent) believed that Jesus had been bodily resurrected but only 42 per cent of these believed that they themselves would be resurrected, though this is what the Church teaches. [http://theosthinktank.co.uk/]

Abandoning all belief systems feels risky, like deciding to do without a safety net if you are a trapeze artist. Most people don't want to do it. In a BBC programme called Beyond Belief the psychologist Susan Blackmore said she had practised Zen meditation for over thirty years though she does not call herself a Buddhist. Another of the speakers remarked that it was difficult to keep up the practice of meditation if it was not done in a religious context, and that the function of religion was to provide a sense of purpose in life on the basis of belief . Susan profoundly disagreed. She said:

"I don't know if I am different from everybody else, but when I get to a point where something awful has happened – when I'm asking: "what's the point of it all?" – I find it so reassuring to say "there is no point" ... But it's diametrically opposed to what you get in the major religions."

The other speakers found this nihilistic and depressing, but I am with Susan here. All the same, she is right in thinking she is unusual in not wanting to immerse herself in a belief system. There seems to be a widespread idea, particularly in the USA, that religious belief is, in principle, a good thing, and the more firmly held, the better. I am unpersuaded. Politicians are often accused of lacking beliefs, yet when they do act in accordance with deeply-held beliefs the results are not always happy. Pragmatists probably do less harm.

Some time ago I heard a discussion on the radio about cults. Those taking part were generally rather dismissive of them, but one made a remark that has stayed in my mind ever since. Speaking of some fairly innocent if irrational cult, he said that those who believed in it might be deluded but "at least they believe in something". This struck me as a curious position to adopt. Is it really preferable to believe in something, anything, rather than to suspend judgement? Shall we not then find ourselves in the situation of the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass, forced to believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast?

The psychology of totality beliefs

Many people remain quite happily enclosed in their totality belief and find indeed that it gives them a sense of security. But others experience doubt in varying degrees, usually because of what has been called cognitive dissonance. The term was introduced by Leon Festinger in 1957, to describe the psychological discomfort we experience when there is a conflict between two sets of beliefs. Festinger's original example concerned a UFO doomsday cult. When the prophesied destruction of the earth failed to occur the members of the group experienced dissonance between their belief in the prophecy and the fact of its non-fulfilment. Many of them resolved this by accepting a new revelation – that the earth had been spared by the aliens for their sake.

Cognitive dissonance does not occur only in a religious context but it may become particularly acute in that setting because of the importance of the issues involved. Not everyone seems to feel it, but those who do will naturally try to reduce or eliminate it, because it is uncomfortable. There are three main ways of doing this.

1. _Denial– try to ignore the dissonance_. This is usually the first solution tried and it will work for a time. How long it does so will depend on how great is your tolerance for dissonance and on the degree of mutual support you get from fellow-believers. If everyone round you seems to be untroubled by apparent discrepancies in the belief system you may decide there is nothing to worry about. Sooner or later, however, you will probably find that you move on to one of the other solutions.

2. _Reinterpret parts of the belief system_. It is often possible to decide that some of the components of the belief system don't mean what they seem to mean, or perhaps there is a hidden meaning below the surface which can modify or even completely contradict the surface meaning. This is a very useful recourse. It reduces the cognitive dissonance, certainly, but it does more than that. Because you are able to discern the hidden meaning you feel superior to those who fail to do so. You become part of an in-group within an in-group. This provides an extra level of privileged esotericism. The process can go further, with successive layers of esoteric belief or initiation.

Semi-secret societies such as Freemasonry exhibit this behaviour. Within some versions of Islam we find the same idea: each verse of the Qu'ran is said to have four levels of significance. Sometimes the exoteric or surface meaning is compared to the shell of an egg, which protects the delicate yolk (the esoteric meaning) from the eyes of the uninitiated. This kind of esoteric interpretation reached its greatest intensity in the mediaeval Ismaili Caliphate in Cairo.

3. _Abandon the belief system_. If none of these solutions work you may have to call it a day and give up the belief system completely. Ceasing to believe does resolve the dissonance but it has its own cost. You have to admit that you have been fooled – or have fooled yourself, which is probably worse. And there are other costs too, including loss of friendships among fellow-believers and possibly financial loss as well, if you have been a member of an esoteric group that demands contributions from its members. Ceasing to believe in a comprehensive belief system can feel like the end of a love affair or a marriage, and can take equally long to get over. Some people never do get over it fully and continue to feel a sense of loss and betrayal for years after the end of the affair. So perhaps becoming involved in such belief systems is something to avoid at all costs?

Chapter 2. Roman Catholicism

_It is worth of remark that a belief constantly inculcated during the early years of life, whilst the brain is impressible, appears to acquire almost the nature of an instinct; and the very essence of an instinct is that it is followed independently of thought._ – Charles Darwin.

Roman Catholicism is perhaps one of the best examples of a totality belief system. As a Catholic you are told pretty firmly what is true and what is untrue, and though the Church has become a lot less autocratic in recent times it still seeks to be as authoritarian as it can.

I was a cradle Roman Catholic, but ours was not one of the old Catholic families. My grandfather was a convert so my father was brought up as a Catholic. His religion was completely central to his life. My mother, who was Swiss, converted to Catholicism, I suppose from Calvinism, after her marriage. We went to Mass every Sunday and I made my First Communion when I was six. This was quite exciting, though I have to say that for the most part I found church pretty boring. The Mass was in Latin at this time, which didn't help. I used to look forward to the sernon, which was at least in English.

Roman Catholicism was then very different from what it is now. Not only was the Mass in Latin; the priest had his back to the congregation and faced the altar, communing with God. The new arrangement, with the priest facing the congregation and celebrating the Mass in the vernacular, is supposed to make religion more approachable. No doubt it does, but there is also a loss. The old arrangement lent the proceedings an air of mystery and numinousness which they now no longer have.

It is interesting that many religions have a sacerdotal language which they use on ceremonial and ritual occasions and which is largely unintelligible to most of the laity. The modern tendency to do away with such things in the interest of 'relevance' seems generally to weaken the emotional impact of religion. Many Anglicans lament the abandonment of the Book of Common Prayer, with its seventeenth-century language. The attempt to take away the mysterious element from religion may seem like a good idea, but the practical results are often not what was intended.

A Catholic upbringing

I went to a faith school. My father was educated at Downside, a Catholic public school, and it was taken for granted that I would go there too. At the age of nine I was sent to Worth, which was then a preparatory school for Downside though it is now a public school in its own right. I went on to Downside when I was 13. Both Worth and Downside are run by Benedictine monks.

We sometimes read horrific accounts of Catholic upbringing, with vivid reports of hell-fire sermons and sadistic floggings. Downside was not at all like that (though there were of course beatings, as at any public school at that time). The monks were mostly urbane and cultured and the approach to religion was intelligent, even intellectual. (And sometimes worldly and almost irreverent. I remember one monk, whom I liked, telling us that the Church had to make provision for mixed marriages because "most Catholic girls have faces like the back of a bus".)

This is not to say that religion wasn't important and indeed central to our lives, for it was. We used to go to Mass in the Abbey on most weekdays and on Sunday there was a High Mass (sung Mass). We sang hymns, often in Latin, but we also heard the monks' choir performing the mediaeval religious music known as plainchant. All this was so much part of our lives that it was common for boys to sing Latin hymns in the shower. When we learnt Latin in class we always used the Church pronunciation, and to this day I can't get used to hearing Latin pronounced in the modern way ("v" as "w", "c" as "k") which is supposed to be more authentic.

The headmaster, a stout and rather intimidating monk with thick glasses who suffered, it was said, from diabetes and who was nicknamed The Bear, was particularly anxious to make sure that we had a thorough grounding in our religion. We were expected to learn the Catechism by heart. This was a small grey book with questions and answers about the Faith. It began, I remember, like this:

Q. Who made me?

A. God made me.

Q. Why did God make me?

A. God made me to know him, love him, and serve him in this life and to be happy with him for ever in the next.

The Catechism was supposed to answer all the questions about life that one might be expected to ask. This was certainly the view of The Bear, who used to say: "Some people talk about searching for the meaning of life. You don't have to do that; you already know what the meaning of life is." I found this rather depressing. The romantic notion of looking for meaning in life attracted me, and later I was to spend a good deal of time doing just that.

The Bear was keen to emphasize the difference between a Catholic public school and the rest. "I have no wish to clothe Catholicism in the robes of Dr Arnold of Rugby" was one of his sayings. He used to attend the annual Headmasters' Conference, and he claimed that when asked what he was preparing his boys for he replied "death". I believe that this remark was not original to him, and perhaps he never really made it, but it does express an important truth about the way religion was understood at Downside.

I had no real doubts about the truth of my religion while I was at school. This was to be expected, because, as The Bear used to tell us, we never would have Doubts, only Difficulties, though he never explained exactly what the difference between them was. However, he was probably right about me at this time, because I never asked myself really difficult questions.

I do remember encountering a Difficulty when I was reading Matthew's Gospel, which I took as a minor subject for the Higher Certificate (forerunner of GCE "A" Levels). I was puzzled by Jesus's repeated assurances to his disciples that they would see the Second Coming in their own lifetimes. Obviously they had not seen it, so what could these statements mean? To suppose that Jesus might have been mistaken was unthinkable. After all, he was God as well as man, therefore infallible and omniscient, so why did he say these things? Perhaps he turned off his omniscience when he was in human form? It was all rather difficult to understand. I suppose I must have asked the monk who was teaching us for clarification, but I can't remember what answer I got. In any case, questions of this kind didn't bother me for very long, and I soon forgot about them.

Another puzzle concerned the Last Judgement. At the end of the world, the Gospel informed us, Jesus would arrive to judge the living and the dead, one lot being sent to Hell, the rest to Heaven. But what happened when you died? The Church taught that there was a judgement then as well. You might go straight to heaven if you were lucky, otherwise you would probably go to Purgatory. There you would be punished and purified for some time, though the actual period of penance could be reduced by doing certain things that carried an indulgence, such as repeating particular prayers – a sort of remission of sentence for good behaviour.

But surely it was unnecessary to have two judgements? It was reasonable to have a collective judgement for everyone who was alive when the world came to its end, perhaps, but if you were already in Heaven would you have come back to earth for a passing-out parade? And presumably something of the same sort would apply to people who were in Hell. This seemed a little vindictive, rather like gloating over their misery.

Questions of this kind, although perplexing, were not serious obstacles to faith. We were, in fact, smugly convinced that we possessed the Truth. It all fitted together very nicely and logically. Jesus, who was of course also God, had chosen Peter as his successor and told him to found his Church. Ever since that time a succession of Popes had maintained the tradition. They were divinely guided so whenever they spoke "ex cathedra" (admittedly it wasn't always easy to decide when they were doing this) they were guaranteed to be infallible, so we knew what to believe. In this respect we were much better off than the Protestants, who seemed to lack any kind of guidance and in consequence were liable to believe almost anything. (The doctrine of papal infallibility was defined by the pope himself, Pius IX. at the First Vatican Council in 1870. Not all the nearly 800 church leaders who attended the Council agreed with the doctrine and about 60 members left before the vote was taken.)

Catholics at that time were not supposed to attend Protestant services and certainly receiving Communion in a Protestant church was prohibited. It was possible to do this by mistake, because High Church Anglicans conducted services that were almost indistinguishable from Catholic ones. We were told the story of an Irish girl who inadvertently received the wrong sort of Communion on a visit to London.

We knew we were a religious minority in the country, but sooner or later most people with any sense would come to see that we were right. The general tone was set by one monk, a man of great charm, with teeth which protruded from his mouth in a remarkable fashion. He was universally known as Tusky.

Tusky used to travel outside the monastery a good deal and thus frequently found himself sharing a train compartment with strangers. Outside the monastery the monks didn't wear their habits but they did wear clerical garb, so they were readily identifiable as clerics. Being so sociable, Tusky would get into conversation with the people he met and the topic of religion would naturally crop up.

Tusky used to relate these dialogues to us with gusto, no doubt editing them suitably in order to make it abundantly clear how effectively he had dealt with hostile arguments. But probably not too much editing was required: he was, as I have said, a most charming man and it would have been difficult to disagree with him too forcibly.

It is quite difficult to convey an accurate impression of what it was like to be brought up as a middle-class Catholic in the 1940s, so different are things today. In many ways we were educated in just the same way as our contemporaries at other public schools, but always there was this extra dimension in our lives.

Perhaps I can best explain it by saying that we had a "primitive" sense of magic. After all, the boundary between religion and magic is a hazy one, if it exists at all. Protestants often play down the supernatural element in Christianity but for Catholics it is always there. Catholics are supposed to believe that the host and wine are literally transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Rather like the Virgin Birth, in which we also believed, this is an idea that perhaps made sense in the Aristotelian philosophy on which Thomas Aquinas based his theology. It makes little sense in the modern understanding of physics and chemistry, but given our ignorance of these matters we were not troubled. (Although it seems nearly unbelievable today, hardly any boys studied science. There was a small science class, with about a dozen pupils, but they were looked on as somewhat eccentric. I don't suppose Downside was unusual among public schools of the time in this respect.)

There was a huge sense of the numinous attached to all of this, centred on the consecrated host and wine. We boys used to tell each other the no doubt apocryphal story of the priest who was saying Mass when a large spider fell into the chalice just after he had consecrated the wine. To let the creature run away after this was unthinkable, so the priest duly swallowed the spider.

None of this awe or reverence, however, prevented us from taking the opportunity to drink the dregs of the unconsecrated left-over wine after we had "served" a priest at his private Mass. This was regarded by us as one of the perks of the job. It was fairly unpleasant to swallow (I presume it was cheap.

Transubstantiation is major magic, but we also experienced minor magic. For example, on St Blaise's feast day we had our throats touched with crossed candles to ward off sore throats, though I have a suspicion that some of the more intellectual monks were not too happy about this one. We believed, naturally, in the efficacy of prayer. We were far removed from the imaginative world of a Spanish or Irish countryman of the time but we didn't belong wholly to the modern world either. We had an easy instinctive acceptance of the magical or supernatural which probably almost everyone had in earlier times but which has largely been lost by modern city dwellers, though it does emerge in a bastardized form as a belief in astrology and suchlike nonsense.

Devotion to the Virgin Mary is characteristic of Roman Catholicism and we were not backward in that regard. As has often been said, especially by C.G. Jung, the role of the Virgin within Catholicism goes some way towards modifying the exclusively male attributes of the Old Testament God.

To be brought up in such an environment may have benefits for one's emotional and imaginative life. It may not be an accident that a number of writers and artists, such as Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Eric Gill, have been Catholics. It probably also does something for one's historical consciousness, making it easier to think oneself back into the mindset of the Middle Ages. A hymn I used to enjoy singing was the Salve Regina. This was originally a Cistercian prayer to the Blessed Virgin, first recorded in 1140. Marina Warner says that the crusaders may have sung it in the field, when "its delicate sadness would have made it one of history's strangest battle cries". [Warner, 1976]

But from a psychological point of view an Eastern Orthodox background may be even better to grow up in than a Roman Catholic one. Roman Catholicism has, or at least had, a rather restrictive Roman legalistic framework of practice and belief which the Eastern Church largely escaped (or so I am reliably informed by my wife, who is Greek and therefore Orthodox).

The understanding of religion that I formed in these years was largely a legalistic one. I was clear about what you were allowed to do and were forbidden to do and what you were supposed to believe and not allowed to believe. We avoided eating meat on Friday, we went to Mass every Sunday, and we went fairly regularly to confession and communion. You could believe that humans were descended from apes but you had to accept that at some time in the past a human soul was infused into one of these ape-men.

I find it curious in retrospect that the word "mysticism" was unknown to me at this time. When I first heard it used, in my twenties, I had to look it up in a dictionary. This is not to say that such deeper issues had no place at Downside. There was and is a very sophisticated theological and philosophical magazine called The Downside Review, and the monk who edited this publication, Illtyd Trethowan, held a small discussion group to which some boys belonged. I was not one of these. On the whole, like many of my contemporaries, I accepted Catholicism unquestioningly and without thinking a great deal about it. We swam in our religion as a fish swims in the sea. It was our natural environment and we took it completely for granted.

School was more influential in forming my religious outlook than was home, which is hardly surprising, given that more of my time was spent in school than at home. My father was in the Army and had been abroad throughout much of the war and for some years after that, so that I saw more of my mother than of him. She was, as I have said, a convert to Catholicism, and certainly she practised regularly, but I think that for her religion always had a strong social component that it lacked for my father. As a young man he had seriously considered becoming a priest. Later in life he did become a member of a religious "Third Order" (a kind of religious-in-the-world), and later still, after my mother's death, he became a "monk" (more correctly, a Canon Regular) and a priest in the Order of the Praemonstratentians or White Canons, thus fulfilling his early ambition.

At Easter we used to go on retreat for a few days before the end of term. During this time we attended church more frequently, we were supposed to read appropriate books, and we listened to talks from a retreat leader. This would sometimes be someone brought in from outside, perhaps a Dominican or a Jesuit. The boys were divided into groups according to age and the different groups had their own retreat leaders. Even for the younger boys, however, the question of death was not shirked. Catholics are supposed to reflect, each night before going to sleep, on the Four Last Things: Death, Judgement, Hell, and Heaven. This certainly made an impression on me, for I can still remember it after more than sixty years, but I can't say that death was very vivid to my young mind.

Some Downside boys did have profound religious experiences, I believe. At any rate, some of my contemporaries went on to join the monastery as monks later on and another has become a quite well-known theologian. But for almost the whole time I was at school I continued to find attendance in church mostly boring, as I had as a small boy.

The main exception was the evening candle-lit service of Benediction, at which we used to sing a hymn to the Virgin (Mary Immaculate, Star of the Morning ...) which I always enjoyed. In retrospect, I think this was rather sentimental. I am ashamed to admit I was largely unmoved by the plainchant, which now seems to me to be musically far preferable, like the difference between milk chocolate and dark chocolate. (One exception: the Tenebrae service in Holy Week, which took place in complete darkness, always produced a strong impression on me.)

My attitude to religion changed in my last year at school. In most years I found retreats, though a welcome break from school, something of a bore, but that year it was different. The priest leading the retreat for us older boys was a Jesuit, and the theme he took for his talks was preparation for the outer world.

We knew little about this world, having spent our formative years in the isolated and rather unreal environment of a single-sex public school attached to a monastery, but most of us, certainly including me, were eager to find ourselves at large in it. And, inspired by the Jesuit, I saw myself going out into that world equipped with the priceless gift of the Faith. There was nothing apologetic about the role we were encouraged to take on. We would not be defending the Faith against attack by unbelievers, we would be acting as beacons of light in a sea of darkness. Not for the last time in my life, I felt myself to be the proud bearer of a message of enlightenment that the benighted world outside sorely needed.

For the first few years after I left school my belief in Catholicism continued much as before. It survived my period of National Service, which I spent as a sergeant in the Royal Army Educational Corps, mostly in Malta. About the only serious Difficulty that occurred to me in these years concerned free will.

As Catholics, we were taught that we sinned because we chose, of our own free will, to disobey God. Well, all right, but what did that really mean? The Devil (I still believed in him at this time) was able to tempt us to sin, presumably by a sort of telepathy (you had to believe in extra-sensory perception for this to work). Either you yielded to the temptation or you didn't, but what gave you the final push? This was where free will came into it. But surely the choice you made would be influenced by the kind of person you were, over which you had no control? It might also be influenced by your circumstances – perhaps you were brought up in poverty and ignorance. No doubt God would allow for this, but even if your circumstances were better, it was difficult to see how a choice could be absolutely free. Yet what was the alternative? Chance? But randomness hardly constituted free will either.

The conventional Catholic answer, which I had heard frequently in religious talks at school, was that each time you yielded to temptation, that made it harder to resist the next time. I could see the force of the argument, but what seemed to follow was that once you slipped at all, even to the smallest extent, you were less likely to resist temptation next time. This seemed to mean that you were on a permanent downhill slope to perdition. How were you supposed to stop your slide?

It almost seemed as if the very first moral decision you took, probably before you could remember, would determine the rest of your life. But what decided that very first moral choice? Some people brought up the doctrine of Original Sin at this point, but I couldn't see that it helped much. If you said that our present moral weakness was due to a wrong decision by Adam and Eve, that just displaced the problem into the past without solving it. It was difficult to avoid the conclusion that one's moral choices must ultimately be determined by God, but that was a difficult one too. A conclusion of that kind must lead to Calvinism – to the theory that your ultimate destiny in heaven or hell is decided arbitrarily by God before you are born and that nothing you do can alter this. I did not become a Calvinist but I did continue to read everything I could find on the free will question, though without gaining a great deal of illumination.

Losing the faith

It was after I had left the Army and was living in Madrid that I lost my faith. It seemed to happen quite suddenly. By chance I had met another former Downside boy, Christopher, who was also living there. I had not known him well at school, for he was a year older than I and was in a different House, so that our paths had hardly crossed. But now we had much in common. We both were hispanophils and both were deeply engrossed in getting to know the country and its people.

At this time Christopher was undergoing a period of religious doubt, or perhaps Difficulty, and we used to spend long hours sitting in bars arguing about religion. He would raise objections to the faith and I would confidently trot out my stock answers. At first I entered into these discussions with cocksure enthusiasm, but this soon began to change when I discovered that my arguments were not merely failing to convince Christopher, they were not even convincing me. Before very long I found that I had effectively argued myself out of believing in Catholicism.

Catholic doctrine is like knitwear: if you unpick one piece of it the whole thing starts to unravel. Our discussions started, I seem to remember, with Papal infallibility, and we went on from there. Once that was doubted the authority of the Church seemed to go with it, and soon other dogmas – the divinity of Christ, the Trinity – quickly followed. Before long I was wondering about the existence of God.

From this distance in time the suddenness of my loss of faith seems to me surprising. I can only assume that it arose from a profound lack of self-knowledge. My faith must have been draining away without my realizing it over a number of years, but not until I was called on to articulate my belief did I discover that it was no longer there. But what is perhaps equally surprising is that my initial reaction to my loss of faith was not despair or angst but rather a sense of freedom and relief. Now I realized that Catholicism had been for me a mental straitjacket. No longer was "the meaning of life" presented to me in a small grey book which I must perforce accept. Instead the whole of life lay before me and it was up to me to discover its meaning.

I now think that many of our beliefs arise for reasons that we are not aware of.. Oddly enough the Catholic Church seems to agree with this. According to the Catholic Encyclopaedia there are things we can know only by Divine faith. These are "mysteries hidden in God, but which we have to believe and which can only be known to us by Divine revelation." [My italics.]

I would wish to substitute unconscious brain processes for Divine revelation but the final result seems to be much the same. Both are outside your control: "this Divine light and this Divine grace are pure gifts of God, and are consequently only bestowed at His good pleasure."

So what happens when, like me, you lose your faith? God just takes it away, apparently. "God's gift is simply withdrawn." So it isn't your fault, or is it? The withdrawal of faith is "punitive". God may have taken your faith away but you will almost certainly go to hell as a result. Too bad.

Although I felt an immediate access of freedom when I ceased to believe in Catholicism, a Catholic upbringing is seldom as easy to shake off as that. In the years that followed I quite frequently had nightmares associated with a sense of a crime committed or a betrayal, and there was still an underlying sense of fear about death. Was it possible that there would be an afterlife, in which I should no doubt go to Hell? These ideas persisted throughout the time I spent as a medical student in Dublin and for a number of years afterwards, fading away only gradually. Nearly ten years after I ceased to consider myself a Catholic I told my first wife that if ever I were seriously ill she should send for a priest, though what I would have said to him in those circumstances I have no idea.

Christopher was interested in mysticism, which I knew nothing about, and in Hinduism, which I also knew nothing about. And he told me about the ancient Near Eastern religions and their theme of the dying god who is resurrected. Did such mythologies, with their obvious parallel with Christianity, invalidate Christ's resurrection as just another myth or did these prefigurations make it on the contrary more authentic? You could look at the matter in either way. Ten or fifteen years later we might have thought of going to the East in search of enlightenment but it was too soon for that; the hippy migrations of the sixties still lay in the future.

Retrospective

For a long time after I ceased to believe in Catholicism I largely lost interest in Christianity, though I certainly hadn't lost interest in the kinds of questions that religion is supposed to answer. But recently I became curious about the origins of Christianity, wanting to discover where the ideas I had been familiar with as a boy had come from. If you think about it, Christianity, especially Roman Catholic Christianity, is a very strange affair. If you had never heard of it before and encountered it in the writings of an anthropologist about a hitherto unknown culture you would be incredulous. A dying and resurrected God, a God who is simultaneously one and three, a ritual in which the participants believe they are literally eating the flesh and drinking the blood of this God ... And the symbols we take for granted: God as a pigeon, Jesus as a lamb or with his heart exposed in his chest. And then we find it odd when the Hindus represent God with an elephant's head!

For the last two centuries scholars have been studying the origins of Christianity in the same way as they study other religions. Although there is naturally a huge variety of opinions about what this work tells us, one thing at least seems to be clear: Jesus was – obviously – not a Christian! He was a first-century Jew bringing a message to his co-religionists and he had no intention of founding a world religion. His message was that the Kingdom of God was at hand.

This much is fairly well established, but now the problems really begin. Exactly what Jesus himself understood by the Kingdom is something that has exercised and perplexed generations of scholars for the last two hundred years, but the consensus of opinion, apparently, is that he saw the immediate future in apocalyptic terms. So my boyhood puzzlement about the sayings in the Gospels which seem to expect a quick end to the world was justified. That is exactly what Jesus himself expected. This idea has been well set out for the non-specialist reader by Bart D. Ehrman. [Ehrman, 1999] Other writers I have found helpful here are Paula Fredriksen [Fredriksen, 1998, 2000] and E.P. Saunders. [Saunders, 1993]

Apocalyptic ideas like those that Jesus believed in were current in first-century Judaism, for a variety of historical reasons, especially the Roman occupation. They were probably linked with Zoroastrian religious concepts, which included a Saviour who would appear at the end of time to destroy evil. Apocalyptically minded Jews believed that God would shortly intervene to overthrow the forces of evil, personified in Jesus's time by the Romans, after which the Kingdom of God would be instituted to usher in a new order of peace and harmony. This would be done by a Saviour called the Son of Man. Although Christians now think this title is simply an alternative way of referring to Jesus himself, Ehrman holds that, at least in the early parts of Mark's Gospel, it really refers to someone other than Jesus – the coming Saviour from Heaven.

All this was supposed to happen within the lifetime of Jesus himself, or at least the lifetimes of his disciples. As time went by after Jesus's death and the Kingdom did not arrive, some readjustments became necessary, especially when those who had known Jesus began to die off. We find Paul tackling this problem in his first Letter to the Thessalonians, where he says that the dead Christians will rise from their graves and then join with the living to greet the Lord in the air before returning with him to his kingdom on earth. But later many Christians began to interpret Jesus's words in a figurative sense. Perhaps they referred to a judgement that people faced at the time of death, or the Kingdom might be the community of the faithful living in peace and harmony with one another. And Jesus himself was transformed from a Jewish teacher and miracle-worker into a divine incarnation.

This was a gradual process, beginning with the writings of Paul, who has almost nothing to say about the historical Jesus. There were numerous different views of Jesus in the first few hundred years of Christianity, but the religion was codified at the Council of Nicea in the fourth century, when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman empire under Constantine and his successors. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) is a central figure at this time, especially in the Western (Catholic) Church, which attaches a lot of importance to his formulation of the doctrine of Original Sin.

So Christianity today is a complex belief structure that originated with Jesus of Nazareth but bears only an indirect relation to what he taught. Many people want to project their own social and ethical preoccupations on Jesus but, as Fredriksen says, "the more facile the ethical or political relevance that a particular construct of Jesus presents, the more suspect its worth as history". As Sanders puts it, "Such views merely show the triumph of wishful thinking".

If you read the Gospels with the assumption that Jesus was an apocalypticist, many of the puzzles and inconsistencies that otherwise arise are resolved, but it also becomes plain that when Christianity developed into a religion in the modern sense of the word it became very different from anything that Jesus envisaged. It is often said that if Jesus could return today he would be astonished at the Church that has arisen in his name. This is true, but such statements don't go far enough. Jesus would not expect the world to be here at all.

Ironically, those American Christians who expect to be taken up into heaven in the Rapture are probably nearer in spirit to Jesus than are most mainstream Christians!

Chapter 3. Starting TM

"I have said it three times," said the Bellman

And what I say three times is true."

– Lewis Carroll (The Hunting of the Snark).

Western interest in Eastern religions is not new. At the end of the nineteenth century the Theosophical Movement was founded by Helena Blavatsky and "Colonel" Henry Olcott and became hugely popular under their successor Annie Besant. Though largely forgotten today, at its peak of popularity Theosophy attracted many thousands of adherents and did much to popularise ideas of Hinduism and Buddhism in the West.

In the twentieth century this trend towards acceptance of oriental religions continued, influenced by writers such as Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood. Christianity was being increasingly seen by many as a worn-out shell of a religion. It might have had real content in the past but now it was merely going through the motions. Eastern religions, in contrast, held out the promise of genuine spiritual experience. And in the 1960s they became linked in people's minds with the hippy movement, rebellion, and pot-smoking. They became, in other words, part of the New Age.Not entirely by coincidence, the 1960s saw the arrival in the West of a number of Eastern gurus, among whom was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of the Transcendental Meditation movement. I was one of the many people who took up TM then. Transcendental Meditation movement. I was one of the many people who took up TM then.

I might have ceased to consider myself a Catholic or even a Christian by this time but that didn't mean I no longer had any interest in religion. I was still hoping to find a way of answering the kinds of existential questions that Catholicism had once seemed to answer. My wife, who was Iranian, was nominally a Muslim but her view of Islam was similar to my view of Catholicism. Although she was not a Sufi, she resembled many Sufis in regarding all religions as different paths to God. She had long had a desire to practise some form of meditation since, as she said, if the Buddha had found a way, a way there must be. Today the difficulty would be to choose from among the bewildering variety of meditation systems on offer, but in the 1960s there was still very little in London, where we were living; one simply didn't hear about such things.

I was not myself particularly enthusiastic about the idea of meditation, but my attitude changed when I heard a talk given on the radio by J.M. (Jack) Cohen, whose name was well known to me as a writer and translator. His talk was called The Spiral Path. In it he outlined some of his early experiences in the course of his spiritual quest, and then described how he had found what he was looking for in the message of an Indian monk, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who was teaching something he called Transcendental Meditation.

Now, if I had heard of MMY from another source I might not have been so inclined to take him seriously, but Cohen was someone whose intellect and integrity as a writer I respected. If he said there was something important here I was prepared to listen. I was particularly struck by one thing he said: this meditation was meant for everyone. This was important for me, because I wanted to avoid anything that smacked of esotericism. My wife, naturally, was enthusiastic, so I wrote to Cohen to find out how we might learn the meditation. The information duly arrived and a few weeks later we found ourselves listening to an introductory talk given in lecture rooms in the Caxton Hall, almost opposite New Scotland Yard.

I can remember little of what was said that evening but one thing certainly startled me. This was the claim that meditation was easy. Everything I had ever read on the subject previously had indicated that it was a supremely difficult thing to do, requiring many years of dedication before one could begin to get anywhere. How could it possibly be easy? And yet the speakers themselves impressed me. It wasn't just that they sounded intelligent and sincere, though they did; they conveyed a sense of vitality and happiness that was impossible to disregard. I think it was mainly this that made us want to learn.

There was one slight catch. Learning the meditation was quite an expensive business – we were asked to pay a week's wages for the privilege. This was rather more than I had expected, but we resolved to go ahead. So before long we found ourselves ringing the bell of a flat in Richmond and feeling, I have to say, remarkably foolish. We had been instructed to bring fruit, flowers, and a new white handkerchief each, to be used in a ceremony of some kind. I felt very much like turning tail, but I was prevented from doing so by a conviction that it was now or never. If I didn't see this thing through I would never have the courage to try again and would never know what might have happened.

Inside the flat there was a smell of incense. We were greeted by helpers, who spoke in hushed tones, collected our fee, and introduced us to the instructor, or initiator, as he was called. He was a thickset man of middle height, balding and seemingly aged about 60, who was almost at once called to the telephone. A medical conversation ensued and I realized he was a doctor of some kind. In fact, as I learnt later, he was an orthopaedic surgeon. His name was Vincent Snell.

After a few questions he took us into a room with drawn curtains where a table had been set up as a small altar. Various items stood on the table, the most prominent of which was a coloured photograph of an Indian monk. He had saffron robes, long hair and beard and a band of whitish cooling sandal paste across his forehead. This was MMY's late guru, known as Guru Dev (Divine Guru). It was from him that MMY claimed to have obtained the meditation.

The initiation ceremony was conducted in Sanskrit. Vincent spoke softly, repeating what I assumed were prayers or invocations of some kind. I felt a little as if I were "serving" a Catholic priest at Mass. The ceremony didn't take long. At the end we all knelt down and Vincent whispered in my ear the sacred syllable, or mantra, that I was to use in meditation. We then sat down on chairs and, following instructions, I closed my eyes and repeated the mantra mentally. Nothing happened, and after a few minutes I was dismissed to continue meditating by myself in another room.

We were not supposed to compare notes about our experiences, but of course we did, and found that neither of us had experienced anything at all. We began to fear the worst. However, when we returned to see Vincent next day he explained what was wrong. The problem, in my case at least, was that I had preconceptions about what should happen and how I should be meditating. I was in effect trying to bludgeon myself into some kind of trance state by forcibly repeating the mantra to myself in a rhythmic way. This, I was told, was a mistake. Instead I was supposed to let it come and go as it would, without trying to hold on to it or keep it going. This worked much better and soon I found myself drifting into a dreamy state that felt quite pleasant. We returned for further instruction on subsequent days and continued, as instructed, to meditate for half an hour morning and evening.

And so we embarked on something which was to play a major role in our lives for the next eleven years. Shortly after we began to meditate, a residential course at which MMY was expected was held at Bangor in North Wales. You had to have been meditating for at least three months to be allowed to attend. Fortunately we just made the grade, so we decided to go.

The Bangor course of 1967 was the occasion when MMY changed from being a rather obscure Indian teacher known only to a relatively small number of adherents to become an internationally famous figure whose name kept turning up all over the place. This development was thanks to his association with the Beatles, then at the peak of their own fame. They met MMY in London, were impressed, and started to meditate. MMY invited them to come with him to Bangor, so our rather sedate and tranquil meditation course was transformed overnight into a media circus. I will describe that episode in a moment, but first I need to say something about MMY and TM as they were at that time, for there are considerable differences between the Spiritual Regeneration Movement, as it was then known, and TM as it is today.

MMY was an Indian monk who first arrived in the West in the late 1950s. His name was probably Mahesh Prasad Varma. Maharishi is an honorific title meaning Great Seer. He had been a disciple of a renowned Indian teacher called Swami Brahmananda Sarasvati, who lived from 1869 to 1953. For most of his life the Swami was a strict reclusive, but for the last thirteen years or so he was prevailed upon to ssaccept the post of Shankaracharya of Jyotir Math in the Himalayas. (Jyotir Math is one of four monasteries, or seats of learning, founded by the original Shankaracharya, who is thought by most modern scholars to have lived about 800 CE.)

According to his own account, after his master's death MMY remained for a time in solitude in the Himalayas and then began to teach. He inaugurated the Spiritual Regeneration Movement (SRM) in Madras in 1958. Soon afterwards he came to the West. He established the SRM in Los Angeles in 1959 and in Britain in 1960.

In America, as might be expected, growth was rapid at first. For some years MMY travelled round the world, starting branches of his organization in many countries. In Britain many of the original meditators were members of the Study Society, which had been founded by former students of P.D. Ouspensky after his death to continue his ideas. Ouspensky had been a prominent student of a strange Armenian–Greek mystic called G.I. Gurdjieff, who first appeared in Russia just before the revolution. Many intellectuals had been disciples of Gurdjieff between the wars, spending time at his establishment at Fontainebleau, near Paris. But Ouspensky had broken with Gurdjieff and had set up his own organization in England, where he taught what he called the System, based on his understanding of Gurdjieff's ideas.

Shortly before his death Ouspensky, by then a sick man, disavowed the methods that he had been teaching for so long, but the Study Society members continued to believe that a new teacher would eventually appear, and MMY was at first seen as the answer to that expectation. Jack Cohen, whom we later got to know well, had been a member of the Study Society, and so had our teacher Vincent Snell. But by the time we became involved with TM MMY had severed all links with the Society, probably because they wished to integrate TM with their own ideas rather than maintain its "purity" as MMY insisted they should. Nevertheless the Ouspensky–Gurdjieff methods tended to leave strong traces on those who had been conditioned by them and not all the older members who had stayed with MMY had been able wholly to shake off their former ideas.

TM today is associated with a good many activities which were not part of the scene in the 1960s, and I shall look at these later, but in 1967 it was, at least superficially, fairly simple and pragmatic. When MMY first came to the West he described his teaching in religious terms, but quickly realizing that many Westerners were suspicious of religious and mystical language he changed his mode of presentation and recast the meditation as a technique for improving people's material happiness and fulfilment. He also created a new organization, the International Meditation Society, which existed alongside the original Spiritual Regeneration hMovement. Newcomers could join this rather than the SRM. The content of the material was the same but MMY thought it would sound less off-putting to secular people.

But the religious aspect was never really abandoned, only temporarily de-emphasized. Newcomers to TM were told, quite truthfully, that they could learn the technique as a practical tool to use in their lives without troubling about any deeper philosophical issues, but those who became more closely involved soon found that they were expected to become familiar with Indian metaphysical ideas. MMY talked about these at length in the residential courses which were very much a feature of the Movement in those days.

The essential claim of TM at this time was that all you needed to do to achieve fulfilment was to meditate twice a day. Half an hour was the recommended time for meditation; later this was reduced to twenty minutes. "Fulfilment" in this context could mean various things. It could mean simply becoming more energetic, more successful in your activities, and generally happier in a mundane sense, or it could mean spiritual enlightenment. The general idea was that people would begin by seeking whatever they understood by a more fulfilled and enriched life, but gradually, as their consciousness expanded, they would begin to see that the real purpose of meditating was to attain those higher states of consciousness that the great religions, especially the Eastern religions, describe as the goal. Thus TM had something for everyone. Whether your ambitions were mundane or spiritual, TM would lead you to achieve them.

This may sound simplistic, stated baldly like that, but MMY had an elaborate and sophisticated philosophical system to impart. He did not, of course, invent all this. It came from the vast storehouse of Indian philosophy and spirituality, but he had a remarkable gift for explaining these unfamiliar ideas to Westerners in a way that they could understand and relate to.

States of consciousness

At the centre of his teaching was the idea of a number of "states of consciousness". The three everyone is familiar with are waking, deep sleep, and dreaming. The fourth state is that which we were supposed to attain during meditation: a state of "restful alertness", in which you are awake and conscious but not conscious of anything in particular, hence "pure awareness". The "purity" refers to the absence of content, not the virtuousness of being in this state, although that is implied as well. Meditation was supposed to make you more virtuous.

Initially this fourth state could be attained only during meditation, but with continued practice it was expected to spill over into the waking, sleeping, and dreaming states, at first intermittently but later permanently. Once it became permanent you had achieved the fifth state, known as Cosmic Consciousness. Once reached, Cosmic Consciousness, which we abbreviated to CC, was supposed to persist even while you were asleep. This sounded exciting enough but it was not the ultimate goal.

The Buddhist nirvana was equated by MMY with Cosmic Consciousness and was rather disparagingly referred to as merely a staging post to the two higher states that would be achieved by practising TM, which he called God Consciousness and Unity Consciousness. By God Consciousness he did not mean what a Christian might understand by the term; he meant a God-like state of consciousness on the part of the meditator. This was obviously rather difficult for us to imagine, but MMY explained it by saying that in God Consciousness you saw everything transformed, as if in a golden light. I gained the impression that it was a form of divine intoxication.

Beyond God Consciousness lay Unity Consciousness. This was the state alluded to in the Upanishads, in which you saw that everything was simultaneously One and many. To achieve this was the ultimate aim of TM.

Anyone who has read a reasonable amount of the Western or Eastern mystical literature will certainly recognize parallels with what MMY is talking about here. What was special about MMY was not that he pointed to hitherto unheard-of experiences or states of mind but rather that he integrated them into a logical structure, and also, of course, that he offered a method whereby you could hope to attain them for yourself. This was heady stuff indeed for anyone who had spent a lifetime looking for spiritual fulfilment, as many meditators had.

MMY did not claim that he had discovered something new, quite the opposite. He insisted that he was reviving ancient knowledge that had been lost. Later, in collaboration with Western scholars, he produced a translation of part of the Indian classic known as the Bhagavad Gita, which he said was the book of this system of meditation.

There was another aspect of his teaching which many people found harder to accept. This was his insistence that spiritual progress did not depend on following ethical precepts. He stood all this on its head. Whereas traditional teachers told you that you must first follow ethical guidelines and only then try to reach enlightenment through meditation, MMY said that all you needed to do was to meditate regularly; if you did that you would automatically become more moral. When in the course of a radio interview Malcolm Muggeridge asked whether meditating would make a thief into a super-thief, he laughed and said that a thief who meditated would no longer want to be a thief.

These were the ideas that we were to begin to encounter at Bangor in the summer of 1967. On our arrival we found everyone in a state of intense excitement. Later we came to know this state of mind well, because it invariably characterized the courses at which MMY was expected to attend. Nor did it diminish once he arrived. On the contrary, courses of this kind were anything but tranquil, for everyone seemed to have their own particular expectations and agenda. Many people wanted to have personal meetings with MMY and there would be queues waiting outside his door for hours at a time, often late into the night. Long-standing meditators would be eligible for "advanced techniques" – modifications of the basic meditation instructions that were supposed to enhance the effectiveness of the process and speed up the gaining of Cosmic Consciousness. There was always a mood of anticipation, partly pleasurable, partly fearful, as one waited to know whether one would receive one of these so-called "fertilizers".

On this occasion the excitement was even greater than usual, as the rumour flew about that MMY was to arrive accompanied by the Beatles. And indeed it proved to be not just a rumour. Scores of pressmen and photographers appeared, and soon there the Fab Four were, sitting up on the platform in the lecture hall alongside MMY. Reactions in the audience were, I think, rather mixed. There was a fair age range among meditators but most at this time were middle-aged and middle-class. They realized that the publicity engendered by the Beatles' "conversion" was a great opportunity for TM to gain a wider audience but they also saw that the situation needed to be handled carefully if it was not to get out of hand. But MMY himself had no such reservations. He evidently believed that there is a tide in the affairs of men and he fully intended to take it at the flood to be led on to fortune.

For the next two days the Beatles monopolized MMY's time and attention and continued to appear with him on the platform. There was talk of a concert. Then came the catastrophic news of the death of their manager, Brian Epstein, and they had to leave. MMY was no doubt disappointed, but many of his audience were quietly relieved.

With the Beatles gone the course took on a more normal character. We would meditate for several hours at a time and assemble a couple of times each day for MMY to talk to us. It was now that we began to form a clearer idea of what his teaching really was about. He described for us the way in which repeated meditation would allow us to become accustomed to the state of Pure Awareness (the fourth state, Transcendental Awareness), until by repeated exposure it at last became permanent in the form of Cosmic Consciousness.

The analogy he used was that of the traditional Indian method of dyeing cloth. In rural India, it seems, the cloth is dipped in the dye and then allowed to fade in the sun. At last, after repeated fadings and dippings, the colour becomes permanent and no longer fades. This is how we were supposed to proceed on the path to CC: alternately meditating and acting in the world. Rather than try to hold on to the tranquil state of awareness that meditation produced, we should deliberately let it be swamped by activity. It was said to be a wholly automatic process. There was no need to do anything more or to think about it intellectually, although, paradoxically, MMY spent many hours explaining the details to us.

From this distance it is difficult to recapture exactly what I thought about it all at the time. My memories of that first course are overlaid by those of other courses and meetings with MMY that came later. I will therefore quote what I wrote about it in 1973.

"[MMY] was at first sight a disappointment. I don't quite know what I expected a great spiritual teacher to be, but certainly I did not expect this tiny figure, constantly bubbling over with laughter. He was disconcerting; he made me think of a blob of mercury, bright and mobile, unpredictable, impossible to seize. The only thing I was sure about was that he was totally unlike anyone I had ever met. We soon realized, however, that all these superficial impressions were beside the point. It was contrary to all my instincts to admit such a thing, but I saw that Maharishi was so original a teacher that my normal standards of judgement were quite inappropriate. By the time he left we knew that he had changed our lives beyond recall. I don't mean that we were swept away by some great flood of emotion; we simply realized that we had crossed a watershed."

What was most important for me at this time was that I thought I had found in TM a way of recapturing a version of the religious outlook I had had as a youth. MMY told us that TM was a physiological technique. It depended, he said, on the functioning of the nervous system. At the same time it was also a spiritual path. Thus it seemed to offer a bridge between the material and the spiritual; we could have both at once. Science and spirituality were one.
True, there were some things he said which I found hard to accept, such as the claim that during the time you were in the state of restful alertness your heart would actually stop beating. This didn't make physiological sense. What evidence, I wondered, did he have for this? But it seemed to be permissible to leave these questions on one side, for it was a basic principle of TM, as of many kinds of Indian spirituality, that truth is different in different states of consciousness. For us, at our relatively "unevolved" level of awareness, many things might seem incomprehensible or impossible which at a more advanced level might be perfectly ordinary. A little humility was therefore advisable. Eventually all would be revealed. (An example of coping with the early stages of cognitive dissonance.)

How long, we wondered, was "eventually"? In other words, how long would it take an average meditator to reach Cosmic Consciousness? MMY was perhaps understandably a little reluctant to give a figure, though he insisted that it was not a lengthy process and would not, as most traditionalists asserted, require many lifetimes. We could expect to attain it in this life. When pressed, he named a figure of seven years. But it was important that meditators should not consciously strive for Cosmic Consciousness or try to imagine themselves into it. MMY called such deliberate striving "mood-making". Just as in meditation we were not supposed to try to achieve anything but simply to take things as they came, "innocently", so in life. We should just meditate regularly and take it for granted that we were on the path.

Continuing the practice

Throughout the following years our lives were very much bound up with TM. We attended numerous courses both in Britain and abroad. Some were small and were headed by experienced meditators such as Vincent, but larger ones were also held at which MMY generally appeared. In Britain these mainly took place on university campuses during the vacations. Abroad, with an international gathering, the venue was generally a group of hotels in the mountains, for example at a ski resort in summer. There would usually be one or two hundred meditators there. The numbers increased as the years went by, but many were regulars so one made a lot of friends.

The usual sequence of events was that we would arrive and settle in to await MMY, who would in turn arrive a few days later. The pattern of the course was much like that of a religious retreat. We meditated for several hours in the morning, interspersing the sittings with physical yoga. There was generally a talk at some time during the morning. After lunch we had free time in which we might go for a walk in the mountains, followed by more meditation and then another talk in the evening. Until MMY turned up the talks would be given by one of the senior meditators. These were relatively calm periods, but everyone was waiting for MMY with a sense of mounting excitement.

Finally he would arrive by car, and we would line up to greet him, which was customarily done by presenting a flower. Once MMY was on the scene the excitement remained at a high pitch pretty well continuously. Partly this was because many people were expecting or hoping to be given an "advanced technique", but also because the talks were exciting.

In those years MMY seemed to be progressively revealing more and more of his teaching on each course. The seven states of consciousness which I described briefly a little while back were not given to us all at once, but in installments, so each course was like an opening into a vision of new possibilities. We sometimes asked ourselves whether this was a carefully thought-out plan on MMY's part or if he was himself discovering these things as his own experience deepened. All the lectures were recorded on tape – at first in sound only, but later on video, so that they could serve as teaching material for people on later courses when MMY was not present.

In addition to these residential courses for meditators in the West, MMY also held longer courses in India at Rishikesh. It was a considerable cachet for a meditator to have attended one of these Indian courses, not least because it was there that MMY used to train initiators – teachers of meditation. There were still relatively few teachers in Britain or indeed in the world, but MMY's intention was to spread the knowledge of TM as fast as possible and he was about to embark on a period in which the number of teachers would be vastly increased. On more than one occasion he implied or openly stated that this was because the spread of TM was essential for world peace. There was not much time to avert (unspecified) disasters, he said, and TM was the only way that could be done, hence the need for hurry. If enough people meditated the "atmosphere" would improve and everything would get better. I had no possibility of going to India, much though I would have liked it, but after I had been meditating for 19 months I was asked if I would become an initiator by going on a training course in Switzerland. I was naturally delighted and, in view of the relatively short time I had been meditating, considerably flattered, so I accepted without hesitation.

A small group of us from different countries went to Nyon. We had already learnt the Sanskrit invocation and recital of names that were used in the ceremony and now we practised the various steps of the ritual. A few days later MMY arrived in a Rolls Royce owned by Henry Nyburg, a wealthy expatriate Englishman who was one of MMY's staunchest supporters. MMY announced that Henry would examine us on what we had been learning, but Henry, a charming but very shy man, demurred, so the exam didn't take place. A few days later MMY gave us the quiverful of mantras that we were to use for the various categories of initiates. And so we were authorized to go out into the world as ambassadors of TM.

Chapter 4. Doubts and Difficulties

_To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilised man._ – Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

I did a lot of teaching of TM in the first few years after becoming an initiator, especially to university students. I enjoyed this but certain problems did arise concerning the nature of the TM teacher's role. As a teacher, one was supposed to follow a carefully laid down set of instructions, without deviating from them in any way.

The reason for this was self-evident. We were, after all, not "enlightened". I, indeed, was still a comparatively new meditator. Hence we knew only what we had been told by MMY and our practical ability to advise people derived entirely from this together with our own fairly limited range of experience in meditation.

Our expertise, such as it was, consisted in imparting the meditation itself in the standard manner and in "checking" people afterwards to make sure that they were doing it correctly. We were not supposed to advise them about their private lives, nor were we encouraged to offer explanations of the experiences that came up during meditation. MMY always insisted that "experiences" were not important; what did matter was the effects of meditation in everyday life, although this didn't prevent him from starting every meeting by asking if anyone had had any good experiences.

Meditators were supposed to beome happier, more energetic, more fulfilled and so on. Now, this was all very well in theory, if a bit simplistic, but in practice it was difficult to restrict oneself to just sorting out people's meditation technique and nothing else. Some meditators produced very bizarre experiences that had happened to them in meditation and demanded to know what they meant. We had a stock answer to such questions; we said they were due to "unstressing".

This related to the theoretical framework of TM that MMY was using at the time. The idea was that the nervous system retained traces of many events that you had experienced, whether pleasant or unpleasant, and these traces, or "stresses", then clouded your perception and prevented you from being enlightened. Meditation was supposed to dissolve the stresses. In the process various experiences might occur but they were not significant in themselves, they were mere by-products. So if people reported visions, say, or strong emotional states, or whatever it might be, the explanation was that these things were due to "unstressing". But not all meditators found this satisfying. The experiences often seemed to have definite meaning in themselves and it simply was not enough to dismiss them as irrelevant accompaniments of "normalization of the nervous system".

One thing that a number of us noticed was that meditation didn't seem to help much if you were feeling depressed or anxious; indeed it could be difficult to meditate at times like these. Meditation might help to prevent you from becoming unhappy, perhaps, but it was less useful once you were unhappy. This required explanation too.

MMY insisted that meditators should to enjoy "the support of Nature". If you meditated your life was supposed to run more smoothly. So if something disastrous happened to you, did that mean that meditation didn't work or that you weren't meditating properly? In practice, meditators might have accidents, illnesses, or bereavements just like anyone else, but this could prove a problem for their understanding of TM. One friend who was a very experienced and convinced meditator left the Movement when her son was killed in a traffic accident. She was unable to reconcile this with what she had been told to expect in her life as the result of meditating.

The stock answer in such situations was "karma". Often represented as the "law of cause and effect", it was supposed to be scientific. It implied that whatever you experienced in your life, good or bad, was the consequence of some action you had performed previously either in this life or a previous one. (The standard Indian belief in reincarnation was assumed in TM.) Meditation couldn't prevent these effects from taking their course although it could ensure that you built up good karma for the future.

Many meditators seemed to find the karma idea wholly satisfactory as an explanation for whatever happened to them but I couldn't help feeling that it wasn't really adequate. For one thing, it was so comprehensive that there was no way of disproving it. It was about as vacuous as the statement that whatever happened to you was the will of God. For another, it seemed merely to displace the problem into the past. It was really the same question I had long ago been puzzled by in my Catholic years in connection with sin. What was the first link in the chain?

I was constantly encountering questions like these in teaching. There was no way I could answer them wholly within a TM framework. Whether I liked it or not I had to rely to a considerable extent on my own knowledge of life and on reading. Indeed, I was more dependent on non-TM sources of knowledge than were most initiators, because I was a doctor. Many of the people I taught produced mental or physical symptoms that required medical knowledge for their evaluation. Increasingly I felt I was acting as a general practitioner as well as an initiator.

I found being a TM teacher difficult in another way. There was a disconcerting tendency for the people one taught to meditate to look up to one as a kind of mini-guru. They credited me with a degree of enlightenment that I was painfully aware I didn't possess. I think there is a potential risk here for teachers of any subject, but it is particularly serious in the case of someone who purports to be a spiritual guide. Some became taken in by the adulation they received from their own devotees and suffered disastrous ego inflations in consequence. Some broke away from the TM movement and set up as mini-gurus on their own account. This was emphatically not a temptation that affected me. In fact, I was uncomfortably aware that my own experience of meditation after several years was not progressing as rapidly as I had hoped in the beginning.

What, I wondered, had I actually achieved? There were two sets of criteria that one might use to assess one's progress. The first was the degree of change in one's life. I thought there probably had been something favourable here. When I first started to meditate I noticed a sudden diminution in the amount of background "noise" in my mind. It was as if a constant chatter of voices had fallen silent. This was agreeable, and so was another change: I found that I was less thrown off balance by sudden inputs from the outside world. For example, if an emergency occurred when I was driving, the speed-up in heart rate that ensued tended to die away more quickly than formerly, or so I supposed.

Of course, these changes, even if real, might have nothing to do with meditation. They might have happened anyway, perhaps just as an effect of age. But whether they were due to meditation or not, they seemed to have come to a stop. They had come about almost as soon as I started to meditate but there were few further changes in the following months and years. Other people noticed the same thing in themselves. One popular explanation was that when you started to meditate you moved at once from a "stressed" to a comparatively "unstressed" state, so the contrast was very noticeable. Later, after meditating for a time, you would be constantly on a more even keel so the differences would be smaller and more smoothly graded. This was a fairly persuasive argument but was it perhaps too much like special pleading?

Then there was the question of what actually happened, or didn't happen, within meditation itself. As I have said, "experiences" were not supposed to be important, but if I was going to stand any chance of reaching Cosmic Consciousness in seven years, or even in one lifetime, surely I ought to be reaching at least the Fourth State, Pure Awareness, from time to time during meditation? But I didn't seem to be.

There had in fact been two occasions where something of the kind might have happened. Both occurred quite soon after I started meditation. On two successive days I found myself, while meditating, floating in a kind of empty space. I couldn't recall entering this space; I was just there. As soon as I realized what was happening a change began. Now it was as if I were looking down into a pool of still water. As I gazed at it the surface of the pool began to ripple and break up, and then I realized that I was looking at my own mind. The ripples increased until I was back in everyday consciousness.

This was fascinating, but what did it mean? Was it pure awareness? Was it a true insight into the nature of reality? Or was it merely an interesting psychological experience, of no real significance? I didn't know. Later, I tried to describe it to MMY and asked him if there was anything beyond it. No, he said, there wasn't. But I was left with the feeling that he had not really understood what I was saying, or I had not really understood him.

The experiences, whatever they were, impressed me a good deal at the time and made me feel that I was getting somewhere. Unfortunately, they never recurred. Most of the time in meditation I seemed to be simply going to sleep. This was not supposed to be a bad thing. MMY always said that one should not resist sleep in meditation and that one slept because one's nervous system needed it, but it did seem to be going on for a long time in my case.

Almost the only other experience of note that I had during meditation occurred after I received one of the "advanced techniques". For perhaps a couple of months afterwards I found that meditation was genuinely blissful. This was reassuring because it resonated with something we always told new meditators about but which I, at least, didn't generally experience; I mean the blissful character of meditation. This was one of the chief claims MMY made on behalf of TM. It was supposed to bring us into contact with what MMY called Being.

Being was said to be the very basis of our existence. MMY said that it had three qualities , which he described as Absolute Bliss Consciousness. This was a translation of the Sanskrit Sat–Chit–Ananda: Sat = Being, Chit = Consciousness, Ananda = Bliss. We were supposed to experience this in meditation. To describe how you got there MMY used the analogy of "diving".

The mind, he said, was like a pond. In the ordinary way our attention is at the surface of the pond, but in TM we experience progressively deeper levels of awareness. We didn't have to make this happen, he insisted. It happened automatically because, as we went deeper, we experienced greater happiness. And the reason for this was that the nature of the Self is Being, and therefore blissful. We were drawn "downwards", as it were, by the Bliss-consciousness that lies at the bottom of the pond.

Now, if I were honest I would have to say that, for me, meditation was not as a rule particularly blissful.. It was generally more or less neutral, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. For this short period after I was given that advanced technique, however, it was quite different. I could stay in meditation for forty minutes or an hour, aware of where I was and what was happening but experiencing this state of intense happiness. And then, gradually, it ceased to occur, and meditation went back to what it had been before. Later I received other advanced techniques but the effect was never reproduced.

Other people told me they did find meditation blissful, so my own failure to experience it except very occasionally must be because my nervous system is not constituted in the correct way for this to occur. But it did mean that I was at something of a disadvantage when telling people what they were supposed to experience.

New developments in TM

There had always been a strong American element in TM but in the early 1970s this was becoming increasingly apparent. More of the participants at TM courses in Europe were Americans and they were beginning to occupy positions of power in the hierarchy of the Movement internationally. Most were young, either still at university or only recently out of it. Some of the older British meditators found themselves side-lined and naturally resented it.

MMY seemed to feel most at home with Americans. (A long-standing meditator who knew him better than most used to say he was a natural Californian.) The hippy values of the sixties were still in evidence, although it is a measure of MMY's authority that when he told the young teachers that they ought to wear suits, shave their beards, and cut their hair they obeyed without demur.

In keeping with this West Coast environment there was a good deal of talk of "negativity" and "positivity". To have serious doubts about TM would certainly be "negative", but it was also "negative" to think or talk much about illness, death, war, famine, over-population, or any of the other individual or collective threats we might feel exposed to. Instead we were supposed to concentrate on the beneficial effects of TM. If the meditation were only practised widely enough, we insisted, all these problems would be solved. There was no need to go into the details of how this would come about, but everything would be taken care of automatically, thanks to the increased creativity of meditators on the one hand and the beneficial effects of TM on society at large on the other. "Support of Nature" was the key.

Perhaps because of the increasing American element, a certain amount of Puritanism seemed to be creeping into the Movement. In the early 1970s I was one of the trustees of the SRM, the charity responsible for spreading the knowledge of TM in Britain. For some reason we felt it necessary to go to see MMY, who at that time was in Mallorca, and a group of us flew out there. Feeling hot on our arrival we went to the bar in the hotel where we were staying and ordered beers. As we sat drinking them a young American TMer came over and stared at our table incredulously. "Is that ... BEER?" he ventured at last. We confirmed that it was. The young man was speechless; he just shook his head in disbelief and walked away.

MMY himself appeared to believe in all this "positivity", at least in public. He had taken to giving each new year a name; 1972 was the Year of the World Plan, 1973 was the Year of Action for the World Plan, 1974 was the Year of Achievement for the World Plan, for example.

In 1974 he made his last public appearance in Britain, at an event staged in the Albert Hall. He spoke little himself, leaving most of the talking to prominent Movement figures, and he seemed uncharacteristically subdued. The event was not a great success but nevertheless MMY proclaimed the arrival of a Golden Age of Enlightenment – literally golden, for all the literature of the TM movement was now embellished by having the titles picked out in gold lettering, which tended to come off on one's fingers. In private, too, he was generally up-beat, although he continued to emphasize the need to hurry to get people to start meditating in order to counteract the harmful stresses of modern life, which he blamed for such things as civil disorder and war, and even earthquakes.

An unkind critic might have said that the TM movement, if not its founder, was beginning to suffer from delusions of grandeur. One manifestation of this was seen in 1976, the Year of Government, in which MMY inaugurated the World Government for the Age of Enlightenment, complete with ten Ministers. They had titles such as Minister for Development and Consciousness, Minister for Natural Law and Order, Minister for Health and Immortality. There were also Governors of the Age of Enlightenment, who were supposed to form a kind of elite administrative corps like a celestial civil service. The TM movement was becoming a vast bureaucratic hierarchy. Partly for this reason, but also because of the sheer increase in numbers, ordinary meditators now had little chance of seeing MMY in person as opposed to on videotape, let alone of talking to him face to face.

By now the theoretical basis for TM had also been given a facelift. For many years it had had a triple front. There was the original Spiritual Regeneration Movement (SRM), but there were also the International Meditation Society (IMS) and the Students' International Meditation Society (SIMS), which were supposed to present the teaching in a more secular form so as not to put off the less religiously inclined. In 1970, however, a decisive shift of emphasis occurred, when MMY launched what he called the Science of Creative Intelligence (SCI). Henceforth it was by this name that the ideas underlying TM were always to be known. It was not just a change in name. A large amount of teaching material was produced and was used to "structure" (a word MMY had become fond of using) lengthy "SCI courses", which meditators paid to attend.

In 1971 a university, Maharishi International University (MIU), was founded at Goleta, California. The new university initially lacked a home but in 1974 one was acquired at the former site of Parson's College in Fairfield, Iowa. In 1995 MIU was rebranded as Maharishi University of Management. Its stated aims are:

1. To develop the full potential of the individual.

2. To realize the highest ideal of education.

3. To improve governmental achievements.

4. To solve the age-old problem of crime and all behavior that brings unhappiness to our world family.

5. To bring fulfillment to the economic aspirations of individuals and society.

6. To maximize the intelligent use of the environment.

7. To achieve the spiritual goals of humanity in this generation.

All this reflected a change in MMY's strategy. As well as promoting TM itself, which he continued to do, he was trying to make inroads into established areas such as education, health, and politics.

Reactions to SCI among meditators varied a good deal. Some who took an SCI course thought it was wonderful; they welcomed what they saw as the separation of TM from religion and mysticism. Others, mainly those long-standing meditators who had originally joined the movement in the quest for spiritual fulfilment, regretted the change to the more intellectual language of SCI. And even some of those who were not religiously inclined thought that the content of SCI was pseudo-scientific.

For my part, I took the coward's way out and avoided attending an SCI course altogether. But the new terminology couldn't be ignored entirely and I did read a lot of the SCI material to find out what it was about. I was frankly disappointed. There was nothing in it that was new; it was simply the same material that I was used to, presented ("structured") in a way that was supposed to make it teachable in the modular form used by courses in American universities. I found it wordy and dull, and I felt unhappy about using the new terminology.

But the Movement was doing well. Large businesses were paying for their employees to learn to meditate to reduce stress and increase productivity, and big international symposia were being held at which speakers of repute were prepared to appear. At one of these which I attended, at Amherst, Massachusetts, the chief speaker was Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome and at the time a perhaps rather unlikely intellectual hero for American students. He was certainly a draw, and so were some of the other speakers, though not all were received as enthusiastically as Buckminster Fuller. A neuroscientist who described his vivisection experiments on monkeys didn't go down well, though MMY appeared untroubled by his presentation.

But MMY took care not to let any of the speakers upstage him. After they had presented their piece, often to tumultuous applause, he would always follow up with a talk of his own. I had the distinct impression that the more enthusiastic the audience were about any of the speakers, the less MMY liked it. As for Buckminster Fuller, MMY's comments in private later made it clear that he thought the great man was just a comic turn ("Buckminster Fuller and his little triangles, ha ha ha ..."). Nevertheless he always listened with great attention to what was said by scientists, especially physicists, and turned their ideas to his own account by showing, or claiming to show, that the ideas of modern physics had all been anticipated by SCI, which was supposed to be an expression of timeless Indian wisdom.

This was a popular idea at the time. Fritjhof Capra among others was preaching the doctrine that the languages of physics and of mysticism were virtually indistinguishable. There was in any case no need for MMY to depend on outside speakers to provide him with up-to-date knowledge of physics, for there were by now several physics PhDs among the senior meditators and they presented SCI in scientific or pseudo-scientific terms.

There were other scientists in the movement too. One, Keith Wallace, carried out a study of EEG (electro-encephagraphic) changes in meditation that was the first of many such conducted later by others. These were taken to show that the state of "restful alertness" produced by meditation wasn't merely subjective but could be demonstrated to exist objectively, using the latest technology. MMY naturally was delighted and Keith became a prominent figure within the Movement, in spite of the pleas of his older collaborator, Dr Herbert Benson, that he should distance himself from it for the sake of his career. (Benson, who was not a TMer, later went on to develop his own version of meditation, using the word "One" as a mantra.)

It was clear to me, however, as to other meditators with a scientific background, that MMY's attitude to science was not that of a scientist. It was always said that he had studied physics at Allahabad University. I am not clear what the basis for this claim was – I never heard MMY himself allude to it – but if it was true, it was also true that respect for the scientific method hadn't rubbed off on him. He had no interest in research as such, which was for him simply means to an end. If he could use the results of a study for publicity and to support his claims for TM, fine; if the research didn't seem to show what he wanted it to show he would either ignore it or, if possible, put a different slant on it so that it appeared to favour his argument after all. This is uncomfortably suggestive of what the physicist Richard Feynman called "cargo cult science". It has the outward form of science but lacks its substance and critical spirit.

A few of us had a discussion with him about some research that had recently come out which showed that Zen meditators had produced tracings similar to those of TMers, though possibly more pronounced. MMY simply refused to accept that the research could be right.

MMY frequently spoke about "evolution". Many in his audience no doubt thought he was using a scientific concept, but this was far from the case. His version of evolution had nothing in common with Darwinian natural selection. What he had in mind was spiritual growth of the individual in this life and progress through various stages of existence, by reincarnation, in line with the Indian scriptures.

"At the lowest end of evolution we find the inert stages of creation. From there, the life of the species begins, and the creation changes in its intelligence, power, and joyfulness. The progressive scale of evolution continues through the different species of the vegetable, the egg-born, the water-born, the animal kingdom and rises to the world of angels. Ultimately, on the top level of evolution, is He whose power is unlimited, whose joyfulness is unlimited, whose intelligence and energy are unlimited. [Mahesh Yogi, 1968]

The affinity here is not with Darwinism, it is with the notion of the Great Chain of Being, the idea which began with Plato and continued down through the Middle Ages in Western thought. This is a very unscientific idea. Its association with Indian thought probably began with the Theosophists at the end of the nineteenth century but it has been continued since then in the writings of various Indian metaphysicians.

Listening to MMY over the years I came to the conclusion that I, and probably many others in his audience, sometimes misinterpreted what he said or unconsciously altered his words in our minds to fit in with our own preconceptions. For example, he talked a good deal about the nervous system. He said that the various higher states of consciousness he described all depended for their existence on states of the nervous system. They were, in other words, physiological as well as psychological or spiritual. This meant, he said, that in principle it ought to be possible to attain illumination by taking a pill.

This was a fascinating idea, but what did he understand by the nervous system? I automatically translated it to mean "central nervous system", or simply "brain", but I came to suspect that this was my interpretation and not what he had in mind. Probably he really was thinking about the "subtle" nervous system of chakras and so on that Indian yoga describes. This is not something you would encounter in the pages of Gray's Anatomy.

Perhaps this explained another thing he said about the nervous system, which seemed to me to contradict the claim that Cosmic Consciousness depended on a particular physiological state. He maintained that, once gained, this consciousness could never be lost, no matter what happened to the possessor of the state. How, I wondered, could that be true, given the known dependence of mental functioning on the brain? A small injury, a minor change in the chemical constitution of the blood, and consciousness would be altered or even lost. How then could Cosmic Consciousness be permanent no matter what happened? But presumably the subtle nervous system would be immune to these things.

Other meditators made their own interpretations of what he said and these were often quite different from mine. Indeed, it was not just a matter of interpretation. More than once I was told by someone who had been at the same talk as I that they had heard MMY say something which I not only had not heard myself but could not conceive him to have said under any circumstances. I could only conclude that some of us, at least, were hearing what we wanted to hear.

The fact is that MMY always remained very Indian. He himself said this. He hadn't, he insisted, seen much of the West. Certainly he hadn't taken on Western ways of thought. One problem was his method of presenting a difficult or unfamiliar idea. "Let's take an example," he would say, and my hopes would rise. I thought we were going to be given a concrete instance of how the idea would work in practice, but what followed was never an example, it was always an analogy. He seemed to feel that analogies supported his case instead of merely illustrating it; a method of arguing that I found unsatisfactory.

Writing about TM

The question of how to understand MMY was particularly important for me in the 1970s because I was doing a fair amount of writing about his ideas. [Campbell, 1973, 1975] My first TM book, _Seven States of Consciousness_ , was published in 1973 and it reflects how I thought at the peak of my enthusiasm for TM. In it I set forth MMY's description of the seven states and tried to relate these to certain ideas in Western philosophy, particularly the mind–body problem. It was the first serious book on TM to appear and it sold well, at least to meditators. It was published in the USA as well as in Britain and was translated into several languages.

The second book, _The Mechanics of Enlightenment,_ was rather different. It was an attempt to connect Western accounts of the psychology of creativity with MMY's Science of Creative Intelligence. I thought myself that this was in some ways a better book than Seven States and so did some readers whose opinion I valued, but it didn't do as well. Partly this was because by the time it appeared in 1975 there were other books available on TM, but partly, I think, it was something in the writing. It lacked some of the fire and enthusiasm of the earlier book. I was aware of this even at the time I was writing.

Certain reservations were beginning to form themselves in my mind about the whole SCI undertaking and I suppose, looking back on it, that the book was in a sense my attempt to exorcise the demons of doubt that were being roused by cognitive dissonance. It contained a good many of my own ideas and interpretations and I was not entirely sure how far MMY would have approved of them. For my account of creativity I drew in part on Marghanita Laski's important study _Ecstasy_ , of which more later. I broadly agreed with her analysis of the process, but the problem was that she was an atheist and therefore adopted a wholly naturalistic view of the matter. It was not easy to reconcile this with MMY's version of creativity.

In my final chapter I tried to resolve these issues by linking TM to certain other things I was interested in at the time, particularly research into the paranormal and Jung's notion of the collective unconscious. The connections may not be immediately obvious, but the reason I made them was that at this time MMY was placing a good deal of emphasis on the ability of meditators to transform society simply by meditating. MMY described this as a beneficial effect of TM on the "atmosphere". I was not, even at the time, fully convinced of the reality of this alleged effect (which meditators christened "the Maharishi Effect"), and I didn't mention it specifically in the book. However, it was a central part of SCI philosophy and couldn't be ignored altogether, so I brought it in obliquely. I wrote about the crisis that seemed to be confronting our civilization at the end of the twentieth century and the need for a radical transformation of our society. Then I said:

"For society to be transformed, Maharishi holds, there is no need for all, or even a majority, of society to practise TM; as few as one in a hundred would suffice. Maharishi compares society to an unstable physical system poised to make a phase transition, as when a supersaturated solution is about to crystallize. In such a system, a very small impetus – the introduction of a few seed crystals, for example – can cause the phase transition to occur."

This was as far as I felt I could go, and I really could go that far only because, at the time, I was convinced of the validity of research into the paranormal, which seemed to provide a basis for MMY's claims. However, by bringing in the paranormal, the collective unconscious, and similar ideas to bolster what felt to me to be a rather shaky SCI claim I was verging on special pleading. This is not to say that I didn't believe what I wrote in _The Mechanics_. I did, but I was finding it increasingly necessary to reinterpret MMY's claims for TM in a way that I could go along with, and I was not sure that I was justified in doing this. I was becoming uncomfortably aware that I was in danger of over-intellectualizing TM in an increasingly desperate attempt to make it acceptable to myself in my own terms.

The root of the problem was, once again, MMY's tendency to use analogies as proof of his claims when what was needed was concrete examples, and to make dubious use of science. The EEG studies allegedly showed that during meditation people's brain waves became synchronised and coherent. The two halves of the brain were supposed to work in synchrony and the brain as a whole took on an over-all synchronised electrical pattern. This was hailed as proof that TM was making the individual more harmonious, more "unified".

Now, even granting that the EEG studies would stand up to replication – and so far it was only meditators who had done them – what did they really prove? The EEG is a crude tool for studying the brain at best and it is pretty well impossible to demonstrate exact relationships between EEG states and ordinary states of consciousness, let alone the extraordinary states that TM was supposed to give rise to. But that was only the beginning of the difficulty. MMY was happily equating this harmonious brain state to harmony in society at large. He claimed that the mental and physical harmony achieved during meditation would somehow spread out into the "atmosphere" and affect everyone else.And the EEG studies were only part of the picture. MMY was being supplied with further analogies by the physicists in his entourage. Now entropy and quantum physics were brought into the equation as well.

"This law, the third law of thermodynamics, states that entropy (disorder) decreases when temperature (activity) decreases and that the condition of zero entropy, perfect orderliness, coincides with a temperature of absolute zero (absolutely no activity) ... This suggests a striking analogy [sic] to the synchrony of brain waves induced by the very deep rest of TM. If we define for the purpose of comparison a "mental temperature", corresponding to the level of mental and neurophysiological activity, and systematically reduce this through the technique of TM, we perceive a class of tendencies in the human mind that reminds us of the third law as seen in the realm of basic physics. This quantum mechanical analogy [sic] suggests that orderliness in the brain and in thinking is natural to man. TM accomplishes this orderliness by providing an opportunity for the mind to follow the natural tendency of the most general patterns of nature." [Quoted by Mason, 2005]

This seems to me to be pseudo-scientific gobbledygook, but increasingly we were supposed to use language of that kind in talking about TM.

Over the years studies by meditators continued to be carried out, all purporting to show that crime rates and other social indicators were favourably influenced in towns where large numbers of meditators were living. Claims were also made on a larger scale. Teams of meditators were dispatched to trouble spots around the world and TM was said to have influenced whatever good developments took place on the international scene.

At about this time I started a magazine I called Creative Intelligence, in which I published articles on literature, philosophy and science by meditators. I did this because I felt that we were talking a lot about creativity, claiming repeatedly and loudly to everyone who was prepared to listen that TM enhanced our ability to be creative, but we really didn't have a lot to show for it. What had we actually created apart from the TM movement itself? True, there were lots of creative meditators – artists, architects, musicians, writers, choreographers – but had their work improved since they had been meditating, and even if it had, was it due to meditation?

My own experience had not been particularly encouraging in that regard. I had published a novel before I started to meditate, but in spite of several subsequent attempts I had not managed to complete another. Still, I was committed to the idea that TM and creativity were more or less synonymous, so I thought it would be a good idea to provide a magazine in which meditators with ideas could publish them. There was no need, I said, for the articles to be overtly related to TM, and in fact I particularly wanted to avoid the kind of propaganda endorsement of TM that characterized most of the Movement's publications.

This was ultimately the magazine's undoing. It proved popular with meditators and it went through six issues. By that time it was becoming increasingly difficult to find suitable contributions and I was having to write some of the material myself. Then it began to attract criticism from Headquarters. MMY himself didn't read it (in fact he didn't read anything), but some of the attendant young Americans criticized it for not being sufficiently "positive". In other words, it was not propaganda. This was true, of course. I could have argued but it would have meant a lot of friction and, to tell the truth, I was becoming tired of the struggle to produce the magazine, so I let it die.

Chapter 5. Moving On

"I can't believe that!" said Alice.

"Can't you?" the Queen said, in a pitying tone. "Try again: draw a long breath and shut your eyes."

_Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things."_ – Lewis Carroll (Through the Looking Glass).

For a number of years after this I continued to meditate regularly, even if no longer with the same sense of conviction, but long-suppressed doubts were beginning to surface. Quite early on in my TM career I had been at a weekend course, led by Vincent Snell, at which someone had asked a deep question. Vincent had said something about "witnessing" the state of Pure Awareness, awareness without an object. "Who is doing this witnessing?" the questioner wanted to know. "If 'I' am the witnesser, and what I am witnessing is the Self, what exactly is going on? The description of the process doesn't seem to be coherent." I had wondered about this too, so I was glad to have the question raised. Unfortunately, Vincent couldn't answer it. In fact, it was evident that he didn't even understand it very well. I hoped that eventually all would become clear to me, perhaps after I had meditated for longer, but it never did.

Now the time for such prevarication had passed. I had to think seriously about what I believed or didn't believe. Of course, a critic could always say that I was being brash and presumptuous in preferring my own opinion to that of the sages. That might well be true, but it couldn't be helped. After all, my original decision to follow this particular spiritual path had to be taken in the light of my own understanding. Did that mean that the decision could never be revised or revoked if my understanding changed?

And my understanding was indeed starting to change. The central thesis of TM was that in meditation you become one with the essence of the universe, which MMY originally called Being and now had renamed the Source of Creative Intelligence. Think for a moment what this means. The state of "restful alertness" is not just a psychological phenomenon; it affords a direct insight into the very heart of existence. You don't actually know this while you're in the state of pure awareness, because by definition you are not aware of anything in this state except awareness itself, but eventually you do know it when you reach the state that MMY called Unity Consciousness. Now you know at first hand how the universe works. You perceive that your individual consciousness, at its deepest level, is identical with the universal consciousness of the cosmos. "Thou art That."

This idea is basic to the Advaita Vedanta philosophy, which speaks of the small self and the large Self. During meditation the yogi is supposed to become one with the Self, or rather, to realize that this is what he or she was all along. When MMY spoke of self-knowledge, as he often did, this is what he meant: Self-knowledge rather than self-knowledge. He was not interested in the kind of self-knowledge that a Western psychoanalyst would have in mind, and he had a poor opinion of psychoanalysis (about which, however, he had only scanty hearsay knowledge).

One problem with all this was that, as I have said, not only was I not anywhere near the state of Unity, I had not even reached the state of restful alertness – pure awareness – except perhaps on two occasions very early on in my practice of TM. This could well be a deficiency in me rather than in TM, of course. In fact, it probably was, because other TMers apparently did reach the state in meditation pretty regularly. All the same, questions remained. Was the Vedantic claim, magnificent and sweeping though it might seem, really true, or was it what the psychologist William James would call an over-belief? That is, was it an interpretation of an ecstatic experience rather than a direct contemplation of truth? How could it be verified, anyway?

Perhaps the ancient seers of the Upanishads simply misinterpreted their experiences. (The Buddha actually held that this was the case.) If so, the whole of MMY's analysis of states of consciousness falls to pieces. If the state of witnessing the Self is not what the yogis said it is, it does not afford an insight into the nature of reality at all. The whole scheme of enlightenment which I had argued for in Seven States would be a glorious and seductive vision but ultimately an illusion.

Vernon Katz, a very senior meditator who had worked with MMY on his translation of the Bhagavad Gita, actually asked MMY about this on one occasion when I was present. How could MMY be sure, he wanted to know, that the state of Unity was not just an illusion? MMY was not offended by the question; he simply gave a little laugh and said: "That state is worth living." So for MMY, as for many mystics through the ages, the state of illumination was self-validating. But whether to believe him had to be, for all of us, a value judgement.

Like any other grand metaphysical system, the Advaita Vedanta is in the end a totality belief. If you accept it you have an explanation for everything: all This is That. Nothing more can be added. Father Copleston would no doubt have welcomed this, were it not for the fact that he was subscribed to a different totality belief system. When I first encountered it the impact of the Advaita Vedanta was overwhelming, and all the more so because we were told that it was not merely abstract but could be realized in our own consciousness thanks to TM. But now I was less sure.

And then there was MMY himself: I had seen a good deal of him, and I knew that he was a human being, with frailties like those of other human beings. How far should one discount them in assessing his pronouncements? I was not convinced by his claim that meditation would, by itself, improve people's behaviour.

It would have been easier to put aside such questions were it not for a sense of dissatisfaction that I was starting to feel about the way in which TM was developing on the wider scene. Many of these changes came about after I ceased to be involved with it, but even in the early 1970s the trend was becoming apparent.

The most dramatic of these developments was undoubtedly the introduction of "yogic flying" in 1976. There is an ancient Indian text known as the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali which describes all kinds of paranormal abilities that are supposed to be produced by the practice of yoga. They include the ability to remember past lives, to know another person's mind, to become invisible, to perform astral travel, to become as strong as an elephant, and to levitate. As a Hindu traditionalist MMY accepted the reality of these powers without question. Moreover, he had always maintained that the "eight limbs of yoga" all found their fulfilment in TM, so it ought to be possible for TMers to do any of these things once they had reached a certain level of practice. This was the origin of "yogic flying", or levitation, which forms part of an advanced programme known as the Sidhis.

It seems extraordinary that someone as intelligent and experienced as MMY undoubtedly was could not have foreseen the effect of announcing the news about levitation to the press. However, in spite of his many years in the West and his extensive contacts with the media, there were certain lessons he seems never to have learnt. Many meditators were unhappy with this new adventure but those who stayed in the Movement had no choice but to go along with it. To be fair to MMY, the real motive for embarking on the TM–Sidhi programme, as it was called, was not just to produce a spectacular display of levitation and so win adherents to TM. He believed that practice of the new technique would speed up individual and especially collective "evolution". The beneficial effects of "flying" on the environment were said to be 100 times as powerful as those of "ordinary" meditation.

People who had done the "flying" programme admitted that it was really a kind of hopping but said that it happened spontaneously and was an intensely ecstatic experience. I was prepared to believe this but it seemed to be bringing TM uncomfortably close to other strange esoteric spiritual movements of the time such as the Toronto Blessing or Subud, in which people likewise produced all sorts of bizarre physical manifestations. Matters were not helped when at last, in 1986, a public demonstration of levitation was held for over 120 journalists at the Capital Convention Center in Washington DC. They were treated to a display by "experts in the Technology of the Unified Field", hopping about like frogs on sponge mats.

Another public relations fiasco occurred in 1992, when MMY decided that TM should go into politics. After a musical send-off at the Albert Hall by the ex-Beatle George Harrison, the Natural Law Party was inaugurated. It fielded over 300 candidates at the next General Election and continued to figure in several subsequent elections both in Britain and abroad. No candidate won more than a few hundred votes and although participation in elections did bring TM to people's notice, it probably also linked it in their minds with other fringe political organizations such as the Monster Raving Loony Party.

Even less welcome, from my point of view, was the addition of Ayurvedic medicine to the TM picture. It had always been a TM claim that meditation improved your health, and there was a little research evidence to show that it did have modest effects in lowering blood pressure and reducing the incidence of certain illnesses. But in my experience MMY had always been cautious and pragmatic in his claims. If anyone asked him a medical question he invariably referred them to their doctor.

But now things seemed to be changing. There was a progressive "Indianization" of TM. The trend had always been there but now, presumably because MMY felt more confident, it was becoming more evident. Ayurvedic medicine was now openly advocated for meditators as a treatment for a large range of disorders including AIDS, and some meditating doctors within the organization began to practise it. This was to have unfortunate consequences later for two of these doctors, who found themselves before the General Medical Council charged with improper conduct on the grounds that they were promoting the use of compounds whose nature they were largely ignorant of; both were struck off.

Equally unwelcome to me was the introduction of Indian astrology. Meditators were sent invitations to have their horoscopes cast by astrologers retained for the purpose by the TM organization. They were also invited to have "yagyas" (Hindu ceremonies) performed on holy days such as the Day of Krishna or Day of Ganesh. The performance of these ceremonies was said to ensure "Fulfilment of desires, Happiness, Reduction of anger, Removal of fear and worries, Freedom from imprisonment, Removal of great problems", as well as numerous other benefits. Meditators were told they could "select one or two or more of these purposes as well as any other desire you may wish to express. A Maharishi Jyotish Pandit will then recommend the appropriate Maharishi Yagyas according to your birth chart. This can easily be arranged by your Local Tour Coordinator or you may contact our office."

TM today seems to be continuing the trend towards politicisation. In the aftermath of the Iraq war MMY prohibited the teaching of TM in Britain, apparently as a kind of punishment. This seems a little illogical, in view of the benefits for society that the practice is supposed to bring. Anyway, the position changed when Tony Blair left office and was succeeded by Gordon Brown, whose policies were considered "more peace-orientated". TM was now allowed to be taught in Britain again, and England even acquired a Raja in the person of Peter Warburton.

New additions to the original TM programme are still appearing. Sthapatya Ved is a system of designing houses to enhance the owner's enlightenment, affluence, and fulfilment; I suppose it is an Indian form of Feng Shui. Gandharva Veda Music is described as "the rhythm and melodies of nature expressed in music". The music is played on a flute, sitar, or tabla, or is sung. Some music is supposed to affect the weather, causing rain, for example.

Communities of TM practitioners have been set up in various places, including Skelmersdale in Lancashire and Fairfield, Iowa, in the USA. In these places there is a Dome which serves as a meeting place to practise meditation or the Sidhis as well as for social gatherings; in effect, it is a temple.

All this Indianization is not how TM was first presented to us when I took it up in 1967. Whether it was all part of a far-reaching plan or something that just developed as time went by is difficult to know, but I suspect it was a mixture of the two.

Most of these innovations were still in the future in the 1970s. I should have found them impossible to justify or defend to people outside the TM movement had I continued to be involved in it, but I no longer was. I made no formal break but, like an old soldier, I simply faded from the scene.

As I watched these developments from the periphery a line from a poem by Louis Macneice often went through my mind: "It's no go the yogi man, it's no go Blavatsky." It was tempting to feel cynical amusement, but looking at it all now as a relative outsider, I could not help regretting the changes that had come over the Movement. Perhaps naively, I had thought at the beginning I was signing up for something different.

When I first encountered MMY he had spoken repeatedly of the need for "innocent experience". We were supposed to meditate without expecting any particular results; "take it as it comes" was the watchword. The Movement itself had had a certain innocence in those days, which now it had very definitely lost. People were being encouraged to take up TM in the expectation that it would enable them to fly, to become invisible at will, to walk through walls, even to become immortal. The Movement seemed to have taken leave of reality and also to have lost an important measure of "spirituality".

Portrait of a guru

If you got deeply involved in TM you inevitably absorbed a lot of Indian ideas. One aspect of this was the relation to the guru. Indian spiritual life is very much bound up with devotion to the guru, who is supposed to take on something of the role of God and indeed may even be worshipped as divine. For us, of course, MMY was our guru, even though he never made any claim to be divine and constantly referred to his own master, Swami Brahmananda, as the source of all his knowledge. But he did have many of the attributes of a guru.

A guru needs to have certain qualities, which Stevens and Price, in their book Evolutionary Psychiatry, relate to those of the shaman. Among the shamanic qualities are a strong personality and the ability to enter an altered state of consciousness at will. MMY did have both these characteristics.

He undoubtedly had a strong personality. He was generally able to dominate and control self-assured businessmen, scientists, military personnel, politicians and others, at least when he was on his own territory (he was sometimes less successful when not on home ground). You nearly always felt he was in command of what was happening.

His appearance helped here. Though physically small, with his flowing locks and beard and his white robe he stood out dramatically among his Western followers. As for going into altered states of consciousness, he would always start a meeting by closing his eyes and (presumably) meditating for a few minutes. Often, when asked a question, he would again close his eyes briefly before answering. We assumed that on these occasions he was "contacting the level of Being", although for all we knew he could have been reciting the multiplication table.

Another characteristic of the shaman is that during his apprenticeship he first spends many years as the pupil of an elder shaman and then undergoes a time of trial during which he remains in solitude and acquires his mystical powers. (Compare Jesus, with his baptism by John and his forty days in the wilderness.)

According to MMY himself, his history contained both elements. He spent many years as pupil of his own teacher, Swami Brahmananda, and after his master's death he remained for many months in solitary meditation in a cave in the "Valley of the Saints" in the Himalayas. MMY himself sometimes alluded to these experiences and they were common knowledge among meditators, so that they helped to endow him with something like a shamanic aura.

A good deal of what went on at TM courses would be likely to enhance MMY's status as guru, whether or not this was deliberately intended. Much of his time was spent sitting on a stage, being stared at by an audience. Stevens and Price remark on the importance of the gaze in human (and animal) groups. As a rule, a direct gaze is taken as an indication of hostility, but a dominant individual accepts the gaze of his "subordinates" as his rightful due and does not experience it as a threat.

A subdominant animal will be intimidated by a stare from the leader. This sometimes happened in meetings with MMY. If he felt it necessary to put someone in their place he did so very effectively, with a glare and a few sharp words. But this was an unusual event; it was seldom that MMY needed to exert his authority in this direct way. As a rule he obtained his effects more subtly, by means of humour (he had a great sense of humour) and his very considerable charm. But there was never any doubt about who was the chief. Anyone who disagreed with him too fundamentally on matters of policy had no choice but to leave the Movement.

Westerners don't generally feel at ease in a guru–disciple relationship, not having been accustomed to it from childhood as a cultural phenomenon, and yet when they do become devotees of a guru it can be an overwhelmingly intense emotional experience. The intensity can be such that it may be something like falling in love, and, as I mentioned in Chapter 1, there is a similarity between loss of faith in a spiritual path, especially one with an identifiable guru figure at its head, and the end of a love affair. This happened to several meditators whom I knew, who became quite bitter against MMY after they left the Movement.

Another psychiatrist who has written extensively about the guru phenomenon is Anthony Storr. [Storr, 1996] He lists a number of features shared in varying degrees by many gurus, which overlap a good deal with those cited by Stevens and Price. Typically, a guru is someone who believes that he (more rarely, she) has been granted special spiritual insight into Truth. which is supposed to be of widespread, often universal, significance. MMY certainly believed this. The gaining of this illumination often follows a period of stress and suffering. In MMY's case, as we have seen, this may correspond to the period he spent in the "Valley of the Saints" in the Himalayas after his Master's death.

Gurus are often intolerant of disagreement on the part of their disciples. MMY was pretty tolerant of questions but he reacted strongly against any infringement of his authority. Once, when we were discussing plans for refurbishing a hotel he had acquired to make into a headquarters, he suggested destroying a marble fireplace.

"Oh, Maharishi, you can't do that," someone exclaimed. He rounded on the unfortunate person in a blaze of anger. "Don't tell me what I can or can't do," he said; "I can do whatever I like. If I want to tear the whole building down, I will." We were all taken aback; I had never seen him in this mood before.

TM had some of the traditional aspects of a guru–disciple relationship but there were also differences. In India meditation is customarily taught one-to-one by guru to disciple. MMY had deliberately gone beyond this tradition in trying to establish a world-wide meditation movement, with many thousands of initiates. Obviously this could not be done in the traditional way, but he wanted to adhere as closely as possible to that model. Hence TM teachers conducted the initiation ceremony in the traditional manner and in a real sense they acted as intermediaries between the initiate and the guru. The ultimate guru was Swami Brahmananda, MMY's own guru, but none of us knew him except as a figure in a photograph. MMY, on the other hand, we did know; he was our living link with the Swami. For the individual meditator, then, there was something like a hierarchy, a Great Chain of Being, which went like this: meditator– initiator– MMY– Guru Dev– God. This was never spelled out in so many words, and certainly there were plenty of meditators who would have rejected it if it had been, but a spiritual structure of this kind was implicit in the way the Movement worked.

I felt no temptation to regard MMY as divine or superhuman, but I did suppose that he must be in some sense enlightened. Indeed, unless that was the case, what reason could there be for following his ideas? All the same, something in me was not entirely happy about all this. More than once I dreamt of MMY in western clothes, without a beard and with short hair. Another meditator told me he had a similar dream. And at least once I dreamt that MMY was twisting my arm. No elaborate interpretation was needed to elucidate the meaning of such dreams and I found them disturbing. My wife had a more relaxed attitude to MMY. "Perhaps he's laughing at us all," she said.

Some people went a good deal further in their belief in MMY's infallibility. One friend of mine, a very intelligent and intellectually sophisticated man, believed quite seriously that MMY never made mistakes. Once he saw MMY, who was sitting as usual on his bed talking to some people, lean back against what he thought was a cushion, but it was not there and he fell back against the wall. My friend said that he caught MMY's eye and they both knew that he had made this deliberate mistake simply in order to make the rest of the people in the room think he was fallible. My friend believed that MMY was actually incapable of making a real mistake of this kind. MMY himself was more realistic. When in a lecture someone asked him if he ever made mistakes he shook with laughter. "I'm not supposed to," he said.

The friend who believed in MMY's infallibility later left the Movement with feelings of great bitterness. Yet another falling out of love.

My wife and I saw a good deal of MMY over the years, for by this time we were both TM teachers. He was more approachable then than he later became. Quite often, for one reason or another, we would find ourselves members of a small group of perhaps a dozen people who would be working with him on some project connected with publicising and spreading TM. MMY liked to use these meetings for brainstorming. They would typically take place in his hotel room, with MMY sitting on his bed holding court while we sat facing him on chairs or the floor. The discussions often went on late into the night. Sometimes they took the form of drawing up elaborate and fanciful plans for residential TM sites, with buildings, grounds, and fountains. Once the discussion centred on the possibility of getting the Pope to endorse the value of TM.

MMY seemed to find such planning a relaxation after the labours of the day. And he had other opportunities to relax as well; sometimes he would take off in a helicopter belonging to a rich meditator and tour the mountains, looking for suitable places to build a centre or an academy.

It is difficult to convey a clear idea of his character, he had so many different faces. Sometimes it seemed to me that he acted almost like a mirror, reflecting back to the person he was talking to whatever was in that person's psyche at the time. He was very astute in many ways yet he seemed to be a bad judge of character, at least of Westerners. He was always keen to associate with scientists of all kinds, in the hope that he would find them willing and able to provide scientific support for his programme, but he seemed incapable of seeing that some visitors were complete time-wasters. Once someone came to see him about some quite absurd theory he had thought up. It was obvious to all of us that the man was a crank, but MMY gave him half a day of his time, only to find at the end that the theory had been a complete mare's nest. Mistakes of this kind were not too serious, but he was also capable of making appointments that turned out to be disasters.

Enlightened or not, he had not progressed entirely beyond human vanity. (Storr lists narcissism as one of the characteristics of gurus.) Once a parcel arrived, a present from a meditator; among its contents was a bottle of hair restorer. MMY was not pleased. "I don't need this," he said indignantly; "why she is sending it to me?" But perhaps it was not vanity so much as a reluctance to accept the inevitability of ageing. (My wife suggests that he may have wanted to say that loss of hair and ageing didn't matter. This is is possible, though it is not the impression I had at the time, which was one of irritation.)

MMY was a realist in many ways but he seemed to be determined to avoid discussion of death. When my mother-in-law died I told him about it. He said nothing, and thinking he hadn't heard, I repeated it; still nothing. Another aspect of this near-denial was his insistence that if you practised TM you would slow down or even reverse the ageing process.

With my Catholic background and awareness of the Four Last Things I found this attitude to death disconcerting. I do remember his talking about death on one occasion but this was an exception. Generally his emphasis was wholly on personal and collective development and death seemed to be an unwelcome intrusion in all that. And the little he did say on the subject was surprising, for he insisted that dying was a very painful and unpleasant ordeal. At the time he said this, books were coming out in the West about the "near-death experience", which was almost invariably described as being deeply meaningful and even blissful. It was hard to reconcile these accounts with MMY's description of it.

It is perhaps surprising that there were very few stories about MMY that credited him with any kind of miraculous or paranormal gifts and he certainly never made any claims of that kind – he was no Sai Baba. His concern was wholly with TM and the Movement. But was he in the ultimate state of Unity? Naturally, we meditators discussed this, but there was no way we could answer the question. MMY himself insisted that you could not tell another person's "level of consciousness" unless you were yourself at that level.

Critics outside the movement, of whom there were plenty after the Beatles episode had ended – predictably – in mutual disillusionment, made various accusations, including some of sexual impropriety. These were almost certainly malicious and misconceived. Whatever else MMY might be, he was no Gurdjieff or Rajneesh, and his life was too public for him to have had much opportunity to engage in adventures of that kind even had he wished to do so.

He was also accused of profiteering, and it was undeniably the case that starting to meditate in the first place, let alone coming on courses and so on, was an expensive business. He responded to that charge by saying that he had no pockets, and admittedly he did not handle money himself, but it could also be said that he had no need to, given that he lived comfortably and had helicopters, luxury cars, and other facilities at his disposal whenever he wanted them, thanks to the generosity of rich meditators. But although he took an almost childlike delight in gadgets of all kinds he did not seem to be dependent on material wealth. Unlike Rajneesh, he did not accumulate numbers of Rolls Royce cars for his personal use.

It would be harder to refute a charge that he enjoyed exercising power. Certainly he was autocratic, but the trouble with this accusation is that he would not have seen anything wrong with expecting to be obeyed unquestioningly. That, after all, is the prerogative of the guru, and obeying the guru's commands is the pupil's path to enlightenment.

A critic could say that he suffered from an enormously over-inflated ego, but, once again, that would not be a failing from his point of view. He had no time for the humility that is traditionally enjoined on Christians. He was entirely against any attempt to restrict or negate the self. On the contrary, his teaching was that you should let the self expand until it becomes the Cosmic Self. Expansion of the self is thus not merely something to be tolerated, it is actively to be encouraged. Not all Christian meditators were entirely happy with this notion, and nor was I, although by now I did not regard myself as a Christian.

Probably because of his indifference to ego inflation, he tolerated a lot of status-seeking among meditators. It was a little like being at the court of a mediaeval monarch. Much jostling for position went on and there were winners and losers, although MMY always remained commendably loyal to those who had helped him at the beginning of his career in the West. They always retained their position of honour at his court.

Gurus like MMY are notoriously difficult to evaluate, both because they are complex in themselves and because they are difficult to make out against the background of adulation from their followers, which tends to blur their outline in a golden haze. (Literally so, in some cases; one meditator assured me that she had on occasion seen MMY surrounded by golden light.) If you set MMY alongside other twentieth-century gurus such as Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Steiner, Krishnamurti, and Rajneesh, I should say he has done more good than many and a lot less harm than some.

This is not to say that he should be regarded as superhuman or exempt from the normal standards of judgement that we apply to other people. The Tibetans are supposed to have a saying that you should catch the guru when he is being a guru. That is, every guru has faults and you should select those of his pronouncements that are really inspired and ignore the rest. This seems to be excellent advice, but it does pass the responsibility back to you, the pupil; only you can decide which of the guru's sayings you ought to listen.

The psychology of gurus' adherents is quite as interesting as that of the gurus themselves. Outsiders often regard disciples of gurus as gullible fools, but Storr insists that this is not the case. Anyone is liable to become a disciple and he acknowledges that he can envisage circumstances in which he might succumb. The psychological mechanism for becoming a disciple, Storr believes, is wired into our brains, because we are lifelong learners.

Both mentally and physically, humans could be thought of as immature apes – a phenomenon called neoteny. Other primates, such as chimpanzees, have relatively large brains and small faces in the foetal stage but lose these characteristics as they become older. We do not. Chimpanzees also learn most easily when they are immature, but we can go on learning throughout life. We therefore feel a need for teachers, which means authority figures, and this is what our susceptibility to gurus depends on. So gurus are generally people who speak well and persuasively, often at great length. This was certainly the case with MMY. In fact, he sometimes referred to himself as a "talking guru"– in contrast, I suppose, to other gurus who remain in silence.

I regard my involvement with TM as a valuable learning experience. The meditation itself did have beneficial effects, even if they were not as profound or far-reaching as we expected. And I think it was a privilege to see the guru phenomenon at first hand, though I am relieved to have emerged from it. This taught me that Storr is right: no one has privileged access to truth. There are no ultimate spiritual authorities on whom we can depend. This does not mean that all the pronouncements of gurus should be discounted, but nor should any of them be accepted uncritically. Caveat emptor.

I should say that the worst feature of TM, at least so far as its effect on me was concerned, was that it induced a considerable degree of smugness, and I don't think I was alone in this. We TMers felt that we were in possession of a uniquely valuable body of knowledge which placed us in a position of superiority compared with the unenlightened general population. We were special. Those who had not seen the light were definitely at a lower state of consciousness.

This frame of mind was reminiscent of the sense of complacent superiority that I had had as a Catholic in my late 'teens: another example of Jack Cohen's spiral path, which keeps bringing you back almost to the same place but with a little apparent progress each time. So my eventual loss of belief in TM was a sobering experience, forcing me to realize that I had no better claim to insight into truth than anyone else.

This was unwelcome, of course, but in another way it was also both salutory and liberating. Just as my earlier loss of faith in Catholicism had freed me from the need to accommodate my thinking to a set of guidelines imposed from without, so too with TM: no longer was it necessary to make allowances for claims that seemed dubious. But it took me many more years to adjust fully to this new sense of freedom and to realize that I could finally relinquish the picture I had of myself as a spiritual "seeker". I come back to this in my final chapter.

Postscript

Maharishi died while I was writing this book, on 5 February 2008. He is thought to have been 91. He had laid down what he intended for the future course of the Movement. As he had foretold, he has himself taken on the mantle of Guru Dev for his followers – a kind of posthumous apotheosis. He is reported to have appointed a 48-man governing council and a 5-man governing body, led by a Maharaja in the person of Tony Nader, a Lebanese physician and neuroscientist. This supreme ruler will remain in silence, the state he has been in the last two years, transmitting his thoughts and influence to the five-member governing council.

At MMY's funeral at Allahabad on the Ganges, 35 Rajas were present, attired in white robes and wearing gold crowns.

Chapter 6. Mysticism

Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;

But will they come when you do call to them?

– Shakespeare: Henry IV Part 1

Many of us took up TM because we believed that it would provide direct experience of Reality. One could also say that MMY was teaching practical mysticism, though he disliked the word because he thought it had connotations of mystification. Mysticism is a difficult term to define, but here I'll take it to mean some kind of altered state of consciousness that provides access to knowledge that is not available in the ordinary state. On this basis, TM was a form of applied mysticism.

People who are sympathetic to mysticism often advocate what has been called perennialism. The idea of a perennial philosophy was probably first put forward by Aldous Huxley in a book with that title, [Huxley, 1972] though others have taken it up and run with it subsequently. The underlying assumption of perennialism is that, in spite of any apparent differences or even contradictions there may be in what they say, the mystics in all places and at all times have had the same experience, which is of contact with the source of everything – what MMY called Being. Perennialists suppose that all the great religions of the world stem from this level, although the original insight inevitably becomes distorted and obscured in the hands of less enlightened interpreters.

Whether all the mystics really do say the same thing in different ways is contentious. The philosopher Walter T. Stace was one of the staunchest defenders of this view, though he has been strongly criticised for simplifying or distorting mystical reports. In any case, the really important issue is whether any of the mystics' claims to insight into Truth are valid. If they are, presumably we should be devoting a lot of time and effort to trying to achieve a similar realization – always supposing that is possible for us ordinary folk. And even if it is not, we presumably should believe what they say. But are they right?

Bertrand Russell thought not. He said: "We can make no distinction between the man who eats little and sees heaven and the man who drinks much and sees snakes. Each is in an abnormal physical condition, and therefore has abnormal perceptions." [Russell, 1935] But another atheist and sceptic, C.D. Broad, was less dismissive of the possibility: "One might need to be slightly 'cracked' in order to have some peep-holes into the super-sensible world." [Broad, 1953] I don't think one can legitimately infer the truth or falsity of a claim on the basis of the mental state of the person who makes it. Conceivably, fasting, LSD, or ayahuasca really do provide insight into layers of reality that are normally hidden from us.

John Hick is an interesting theologian who believes that there is something which he calls "the Real" at the root of all religious experience but, unlike Stace, he does not think we ever get unmediated knowledge of it, even in the profoundest mystical experience. We always see it through "masks" or "faces" that we interpose between us and it and we can never experience it (or It) directly. [Hick, 1986] As he frankly concedes, this means that you cannot use mystical experience as evidence for the Real.

But many religious writers have sought to derive totality beliefs from mystical experience, as have the mystics themselves. In fact, it is a feature of mystical experience that it tends to give rise to totality beliefs. I don't think this is an issue we can resolve by sitting down and reflecting about it. Two writers who have made a practical attempt to settle it by direct inquiry are John Horgan and Marghanita Laski.

John Horgan's view

The science writer John Horgan has explored this question in his book _Rational Mysticism,_ [Horgan, 2003] which is based partly on his own experiences of drug-induced altered states but also includes reports of interviews with several advocates of the perennial philosophy. One of these is Ken Wilber, who has constructed a vast, complex (and to me impenetrable) explanatory scheme for it which has impressed many people. Moreover, Wilber practises what he preaches, for he claims to have attained a considerable level of mystical enlightenment on a more or less permanent basis, being able to maintain self-awareness even during sleep – something even the Dalai Lama can't do, according to Wilber. This sounds like the state of Cosmic Consciousness we were supposed to attain in TM. Horgan found Wilber impressive but was disturbed by his apparent pride in his own spiritual attainment. I don't find this wholly surprising, remembering my own TM experiences.

As well as Wilber, some others of those interviewed claimed to have attained, temporarily or permanently, states that would be described as "enlightened". One of these, John Wren-Lewis, achieved permanent self-awareness even in sleep (like Wilber) after he recovered from a coma caused by poisoning. Horgan suggests, probably correctly, that his "enlightened" state is the result of brain damage. Other mystics have described something similar. This raises interesting questions. Can "spiritual awakening", if that is what it is, sometimes arise from the loss of normal functioning? There is a parallel here to some reported cases in which people suffering from early dementia have acquired artistic abilities they had not previously displayed.

(This also resembles cases of idiots savants and brain-damaged children with astonishing musical or artistic abilities, such as the girl referred to as Nadia, who produced impressive drawings of horses and other figures in full perspective before she was six.)

Bede Griffiths, the Benedictine monk who spent much of his life in India, suffered a stroke towards the end of his life that diminished his intellectual capacity. Far from regarding this as a disaster, he thought that it simplified things for him and allowed him to concentrate on what really mattered.

At the end of his exploration Horgan comes to a negative conclusion. Mystical experience, no matter how compelling it feels at the time, does not provide us with assurance of immortality or rebirth or of our cosmic significance. It also – and this seems to me to be important – does not endow those who attain it with superior moral wisdom: some apparently enlightened individuals have behaved as badly as anyone else. You may find this either liberating or depressing, depending on how you look at it.

On the whole I find it liberating, but I would not want to push that too far. Mystical experience is clearly immensely important to those who have it. So we need to see whether there is a way to accept the importance of altered states of consciousness without necessarily believing everything that those who have experienced these states tell us. The writer who has done most to help me find a middle way between belief and scepticism about this is Marghanita Laski.

Laski on mysticism

Laski was a professed atheist who, like Iris Murdoch, found herself unable to escape from thinking and writing about religion. This was why she was drawn to the study of those unusual but widespread experiences that are usually labelled mystical by religious writers, though she preferred the more neutral term ecstatic. She approached the subject in two ways: she constructed a questionnaire and gave it to 63 friends and acquaintances over three years, and she collected a large number of literary texts and analysed them for content. She published her findings in a remarkable book called _Ecstasy: A Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences._ [Laski, 1961]

At the outset Laski distinguishes two kinds of ecstasy, which she calls "intensity" and "withdrawal". These correspond fairly closely with what other writers, such as Stace, have termed the extrovertive and introvertive mystical experiences. She is uncertain about how the two types of experience are related to each other and in her introduction to the book she regrets that she was unable to learn more about withdrawal, in part because this seems to be more characteristic of Eastern mysticism, which she did not feel competent to discuss in detail. The book is thus mainly concerned with intensity ecstasy.

From her survey Laski reached a number of conclusions. Intensity ecstasy is typically rather brief, usually lasting a few minutes, occasionally up to an hour. When it seems to last longer than this the effect may be due to what Laski calls "afterglow". There is a tendency for intensity ecstasy to be associated with feelings of light and upward movement, and for withdrawal ecstasy to be associated with dark and downward movement. Ecstasy may be accompanied by physical sensations of various kinds, usually pleasurable but sometimes painful.

Ecstasies may be of various kinds. In some the person feels that life is joyful, purified, renewed; Laski calls these Adamic. In others there is a feeling of knowledge gained, and this involves the idea of contact with a source of knowledge, often identified with God. Taken to the extreme, this state results in the experiencer becoming identified with what is experienced: he or she actually becomes God. This is generally frowned on within Christianity, although writers on mysticism often grade these experiences in order of supposed value.

A permanent experience of union with God, if it could be attained, would presumably correspond with MMY's God Consciousness, while withdrawal ecstasy would be what was supposed to happen during meditation – an approach to, or attainment of, pure awareness.

The circumstances in which ecstatic experiences occur are variable. Childhood is often thought to be a time when ecstasy is common or even semi-permanent, but Laski presents evidence which suggests that this may not really be the case. Women may experience ecstasy in childbirth, although this does not seem to be related to whether the birth was easy or difficult, painful or relatively pain-free. Sexual love may also precipitate ecstasy, and people were clear about the difference between "ordinary" orgasm and ecstasy.

These associations are interesting because a hormone called oxytocin is released in both orgasm and childbirth, as well as in breast-feeding. This is now known to have profound psychological effects, inducing feelings of calm, relaxation and well-being. It is thought to be important in forming the attachment between mother and baby. It may also partly explain what happens in the brain when we fall in love, a state which often has a good many similarities to ecstasy; many people have noticed the resemblances between accounts of mystical and erotic experiences. It therefore seems quite likely that oxytocin release may be an element in at least some types of ecstasy, though it obviously cannot be the whole explanation since in most cases oxytocin release does not cause ecstasy.

Laski uses the term "trigger" for the circumstances that can induce ecstasy. Sudden or flashing lights are often triggers and are also used as images used to describe the feelings of ecstasy. We know that the brain is affected by photic stimuli of this kind, which can even cause epilepsy in susceptible individuals. (There is a connection between epilepsy and mystical experience– see Dostievsky's _The Idiot._ ) Other common triggers are waves of the sea, and water in general. Works of art may also have this property. But Laski concludes that we know little about which qualities are important in triggers, and further research would be worthwhile.

Throughout history, and no doubt long before history was written, people have tried to induce ecstasy, often by means of drugs. Laski was writing before drug-taking became so widespread in Western culture as it is today but she does say something about the subject, mainly in connection with mescalin, which was in the news at the time thanks to Aldous Huxley. [Huxley, 1954] She points out a number of differences between naturally occurring ecstasy and experiences reported by people using mescalin and she seems rather unimpressed by their claims.

What is particularly valuable about Laski's approach is that she puts forward a theory about the experiences she describes. Her view is that ecstasy (intensity ecstasy, anyway) is closely related to problem-solving and creativity. In very general terms, she suggests, the process has five stages.

1. The asking of the question. Someone finds themselves deeply preoccupied with a problem of some kind – intellectual, religious, mathematical, or whatever.

2. The collection of material. The person continues to think about the issue, amassing information about it in all kinds of ways – reading, talking to others, pondering it. This phase can last for months or years and may be accompanied by great emotional distress.

3. The fusing of the collected material. This typically occurs very rapidly. Suddenly – sometimes almost in an instant – the solution to the problem simply arrives in the mind. Often it takes the form of a joining up of two ideas that were previously thought to be separate – hence "fusing". It is this moment of dazzling insight that precipitates the ecstatic experience.

4. The translation of the fused material into communicable form. If the creative insight is to have any practical effects on the world it needs to be expressed in a way that others can understand. Often this means verbally although it may also be visually, musically, or mathematically, for example.

5. The testing of the answer. Not all creative insights, even those accompanied by ecstasy, prove to be valid once the ecstatic experience has passed. So the person who has experienced the ecstasy and obtained the insight has to evaluate it and see if it stands up to criticism.

These five stages are discussed with the aid of abundant quotations, taken from accounts of religious conversion, scientific discovery, and other sources. Laski is not the only writer to present an analysis of this kind – Storr, for example, gives a similar, though less detailed, description in his study of gurus [Storr, 1966] – but Laski's is the fullest and best that I have seen.

When the creative process occurs in answer to a religious question the end result is the formation of what William James would call an over-belief. At this point Laski, as an avowed atheist, parts company with those who see ecstatic or mystical experience as guaranteeing the truth of religious claims, but she is very far from saying that ecstasy has no importance at all.

"I do not think it sensible to ignore, as most rationalists have done, ecstatic experiences and the emotions and ideas to which they give rise. To ignore or deny the importance of ecstatic experiences is to leave to the irrational the interpretation of what many people believe to be of supreme value ... I do not believe that to seek a rational explanation of these experiences is in any way to denigrate them, but rather that a rational explanation may prove at least as awe-inspiring as earlier interpretations." [Laski, 1961]

Laski's book is among the very best to have appeared on this important subject. It deserves to be ranked with William James's _The Varieties of Religious Experience_. I should say it largely succeeds in what it sets out to do: to provide a satisfying secular explanation of ecstatic experience. And, as an added bonus, it is superlatively well written. It is one of those books I reread at intervals and always get something fresh from. Yet it does not seem to have received the attention from secularists who write about religion that I think it deserves.

(There is a rather sad footnote to this. Some 25 years ago I was living in a house in London which belonged to my future second wife. She was abroad at the time and I was on my own. The house was on the market because we intended to move, and a couple came to view it, thinking it might be suitable for their son. I recognized the woman at once as Marghanita Laski. Before she left I asked her name; she said it was Mrs Howard. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask if she was also Marghanita Laski, especially since we had previously had some correspondence about a linguistic question she had raised in an article she wrote. But, with stupid British reticence, I said nothing. I should have loved to tell her how much her book had meant to me, but the opportunity had gone for ever, for not long after this she died.)

Mysticism and religion

Not all creative ideas prove to be valid when we examine them critically, and the same is true of ideas derived from ecstatic experience, because this is linked with creativity.

What we get from the mystics is always an over-belief, and over-beliefs must be tested. Mystical pronouncements are not necessarily true. So I am not persuaded that we can draw messages of universal relevance from what the mystics tell us. And, as John Horgan astutely points out, if you reject the view that mysticism tells us anything of universal importance you come pretty close to saying that all mystical visions are illusions, since universal significance is often what the mystics themselves claim for their insights. Beliefs derived from ecstatic experiences do not have divine authority, and need to be checked for validity in exactly the same way as any other kind of creative insight. Being a mystic does not exempt you from error. We all have ideas that seem brilliant at the time, but which, in the cold light of day, have to be rejected.

In fact, it is characteristic of insights that arrived accompanied by ecstasy that they carry a sense of overwhelming significance. Nineteenth-century accounts of experiments with "laughing gas" (nitrous oxide) provide numerous examples of people who had seemingly profound insights into the nature and purpose of the universe, wrote them down at the time, and later found them to be meaningless. I have had a similar experience on waking from dreams. Presumably there is some brain mechanism that produces this feeling of utter conviction and is sometimes triggered inappropriately. The degree of conviction one feels about a belief tells one nothing about its truth.

Chapter 7. The Religious Imagination

_Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed, Thracians red-haired and with blue eyes; so also they conceive the spirits of the gods to be like themselves._ – Xenophanes.

In this chapter I want to explore the connection between religion and the imagination. Marghanita Laski's theory of a connection between creativity and ecstasy tells us something important, I think, about the way religious beliefs are formed and also why they are generally so firmly held. On Laski's theory these beliefs often arrive in the mind as the long-sought answer to a question. This is true for people who undergo a conversion experience, and also for those who, while brought up in a religion, come later to understand how it gives real meaning to their lives.

Religions are concerned with questions which matter to us profoundly, such as: Where did we come from? Where will we go when we die? How should we live? So there is a lot of pressure on us to come up with the right answer, and a corresponding tendency to hang on to the answer tenaciously once it has been accepted, often even in the face of subsequent contrary evidence.

Religion, I want to suggest, has more in common with creativity and imagination than with belief. It seems to me that the critics of religion who are attracting so much attention today often make the mistake of concentrating too much on belief, which is not the central issue for most people who are religious – many of whom, if challenged, would find it difficult to say exactly what it is they believe. I recently heard a sociologist on the BBC say that when she asked a Church of England vicar for permission to talk to his parishioners he gave it willingly, but stipulated that she should not ask them what they believed because that would confuse them!

This may appear surprising, because, historically, Christians have always attached a lot of importance to belief, and many persecutions in the past have been based on what appear to us to be obscure points of doctrine. Other world religions have mostly been more tolerant of divergent beliefs, and nowadays Christians too are usually less obsessed with doctrinal issues than once they were. For many people today, calling yourself a Christian seems to be mainly a question of assenting to the notion that Christ is your Saviour, without a lot of detailed intellectual examination of what this means.

Nevertheless, critics of religion generally do direct their fire at issues of belief. And they often try to explain religious beliefs by means of the meme hypothesis, which Dawkins put forward almost as an afterthought at the end of Th Selfish Gene. [Dawkins, 1976] In that book he talks about genes as replicators, which "want" to reproduce themselves in successive generations. (This is a metaphor, of course. Gernes canno literally 'want' anything.) Genes are made of DNA. But the idea of a replicator, he suggests, can be generalized to quite an abstract level. Replicators do not have to be DNA, they can also be ideas. Ideas that succeed in replicating themselves by transferring themselves from one brain to another are memes.

Since Dawkins first suggested it the idea of memes has proliferated enormously, so that today we have a "science" of memetics, textbooks on memetics, journals of memetics, websites on memetics, while references to memes constantly appear in books and articles on all kinds of subjects. But it can be quite difficult to say what a meme is, or rather what it is not. Almost any idea that catches on could be thought of as a meme. Examples often cited include catchphrases, songs you can't get out of your head, and wearing baseball caps back to front. In fact, I suppose, you could use the meme idea itself as an excellent example of a meme, so widely has it spread. This is what computer programmers would call a recursive phenomenon: the meme idea illustrating itself.

For a fervent anti-religionist like Dawkins memes have obvious relevance to religion. Dawkins has indeed claimed that religions are an example of meme transfer, and the same idea has been developed at some length by Susan Blackmore in her book on memetics, _The Meme Machine,_ [Blackmore, 1999] where she has a whole chapter on the relevance of memes to religion. The chapter is called "Religion as memeplexes".

By "memeplexes" she means groups of memes that go together. In this, as in other ways, memes are supposed to be analogous to genes. Genes are never found singly; they travel about in groups. So, too, do memes; they travel about in memeplexes. So Catholicism is a memeplex – inside, I suppose, the larger memeplex of Christianity. The Catholic memeplex includes the idea of an omnipotent and omniscient God, the belief that Jesus Christ was the son of God, the Virgin Birth, the infallibility of the Pope, and so on.

We can take this idea further, and critics of religion certainly want to. In biology viruses are parasites which are made of DNA or RNA. Some viruses are thought to be genes that have escaped from bodies and become wild, as it were. Conversely, at least some of our genes are probably viruses that have entered our bodies and become domiciled there. (If this sounds unlikely, remember that our mitochondria, the little organelles in our cells that use oxygen to generate our energy, were originally free-living bacteria that became incorporated into our cells. If bacteria have done this, why not viruses? More on this below.)

Memes are supposed to invade our brains and lodge there, very much in the way that viruses invade and lodge in our cell nuclei. So they are parasites. And, because religions are memeplexes, they too are parasites. It is pretty well impossible to remove viruses once they have succeeded in writing themselves into our nuclei – this is the problem with HIV. Dawkins, Blackmore and other critics regard religion in much the same way – as mind parasites.

The meme idea is attractive in some ways as an explanation for religion and it may to some extent account for the content of religious beliefs. But I think it is less successful as an explanation for the existence of religions in the first place or even for the ease with which they are transmitted from one generation to the next. I should like to give the chief role here, not to beliefs, but to narrative. This is an important part of what I mean by the religious imagination.

Religion as narrative

Human beings are story-telling animals. Every early society seems to have had its story-tellers, who were often oral epic poets, and the earliest literature that has come down to us (the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Gilgamesh Epic) is narrative. Today we still enjoy stories in the form of plays, films, and novels, whose continuing popularity is evidence of the importance of emotions and of narratives. True, there was a time when "literary" novels were almost devoid of story, but that seems to be changing now. Narrative is making a comeback even there, and at the popular level it had never gone away. Where would Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" novels be without narrative?

Narrative is also at the heart of probably every religion we know of. The Old Testament is not a philosophical treatise, it is mostly a huge collection of stories which are framed in the over-arching story of God's covenant with Israel. The same is true of the New Testament, which is essentially the story of Christ's life, death, and resurrection. Jesus himself used stories – parables – to convey his meaning.

Probably few people apart from religious professionals spend much time thinking about doctrinal statements such as the Nicene Creed or the Thirty-nine Articles. Statements of belief are not how most people encounter their religion as children; they generally meet it as narrative. My own introduction to Christianity by my father began with his telling me stories from the Old Testament, and I should guess that something of the kind is the experience of many people who have had a Christian upbringing. Belief arises from narrative, not narrative from belief.

In fact, Christianity is more dependent on narrative than probably any other major religion. It is based on a story that begins with Genesis, when Adam and Eve disobeyed God and bequeathed Original Sin to their descendants. The human race therefore stood in need of redemption, so God sent his son to earth to die as a sacrifice. So we have a primal curse and a hero who comes to lift the curse, which he does at the cost of his own life. But there is a happy ending, because God brings the hero back to life in a more glorious form. A similar theme is found in many folk tales, and in many Greek myths the hero dies but then is immortalised by Zeus, sometimes in the form of a constellation. And Christianity has other mythic elements too, including the promise of the hero's reappearance at a future date – like King Arthur and many others.

Narrative is deeply infused in other religions too. Hinduism contains innumerable narratives of the deeds of the gods, for example in the Mahabharata. _The Bhagavad Gita_ , which MMY described as the book of TM, is a (small) excerpt from this huge epic. Even Buddhism, probably the most "intellectual" among religions, starts with the narrative of the Buddha's quest for enlightenment. Buddhists are also familiar with a huge number of stories about the Buddha, not only in his final existence on earth but also in his innumerable previous lives.

Islam might at first glance seem to be an exception, because the Koran does not consist primarily of narrative (though it does include some narratives). However, the origin of Islam is based on a narrative (the story of the Prophet's reception of the Koran), and Islam accepts the divine inspiration of the Old Testament, which is, as we have seen, largely made up of narratives.

As religions develop they accumulate stories about the lives of their saints and prophets– more narratives. New religions typically also start from a narrative: Mormonism, for example, begins with the story of Joseph Smith's discovery of the golden tablets on which was inscribed the Book of Mormon. In almost all traditional societies the process of initiating young people into the mysteries of the tribes seems to have consisted largely in telling them stories about the deeds of tribal gods and ancestors.

The emotional brain

If we emphasize belief rather than narrative in religion we make the mistake of placing too much weight on the analytic and rationalising part of our mind. Antonio Damasio is a neurologist who has done a lot to put matters in the right perspective. In Descartes' Error [Damasio, 1994] he says that there is a tendency for writers on the mind–brain problem to concentrate on reasoning and the logical faculty and to regard the emotions as a rather regrettable accompaniment, of no real relevance to our understanding of how our minds work. And even if they do accord importance to emotion, they often seem to regard it as something separate from intellectual activity. (For understandable reasons this is particularly true of those who favour the view that the brain is more or less a computer.)

This is "Descartes' error", according to Damasio. He has become convinced, by his observation of patients with brain damage, that reason alone is insufficient even for the efficient operation of the intellect. Damage to certain brain areas, notably the prefrontal cortex, can leave the patient apparently intellectually unimpaired but incapable of making complex decisions. Such a patient, for example, may understand the factors involved in conducting his business but may nevertheless keep reaching decisions that are manifestly disastrous.

The cold robotic decision-making that, for some science fiction writers, characterizes the mental processes of super-computers or Star Trek's Mr Spock is really typical of brain-damaged individuals. Spock would not function well in the real world. We need our emotional biases for our complicated decision-making to work.

The archetypal instance of the effects of prefrontal damage is Phineas Gage. In 1848, in New England, Gage suffered an injury when a tamping rod he was using to compress a blasting charge was blown through his skull by an explosion. It destroyed much of the front part of his brain but he survived and, at first, appeared to be largely unaffected mentally. However, his personality was profoundly altered. From being a responsible foreman he became feckless and irresponsible, unable to hold down a job for any length of time.

Damasio describes this case at length and also discusses other broadly similar cases of which he has personal experience. He gives details of how his patients performed on mental tests and how their lives were affected. Like Gage, these patients were apparently more or less intact intellectually but their ability to function as complete human beings was subtly but profoundly impaired.

For example, one of these patients had a brain tumour successfully removed but his frontal lobes were inevitably damaged during the operation. Although his intelligence was unaffected he could no longer carry on his professional work. He had to be prompted to go to work, and when he got there he might start on one task and persist with it even when it was time to change to something else, or he might spend the whole day pondering how to classify a paper he had just read. Thus he could manage isolated tasks well but could not integrate them into a wider frame of reference. He lost his job, became involved in unwise financial speculations, and ended up bankrupt. In spite of being confronted with the disastrous consequences of his decisions he was unable to learn from them.

So what is wrong with patients like these? What is missing? The answer, according to Damasio, is emotional biasing. In people with normal brains their decisions are weighted by emotions and this enables them to take decisions quickly according to how they feel. Patients with damaged prefrontal lobes, in contrast, are robot-like. He illustrates this vividly by means of an anecdote.

A patient with this kind of brain damage had driven to the hospital on icy roads. He recounted his experiences en route logically and dispassionately, describing how he had avoided accidents by calmly applying the rules for driving on ice while others about him were panicking and skidding by slamming on the brakes. Yet when he had to decide between two dates for his next appointment he spent half an hour listing the advantages and disadvantages for each of the proposed dates, until at last, in desperation, Damasio chose the date for him, whereupon the man thanked him, put away his diary, and left. This episode, Damasio says, illustrates the limitations of pure reason in making decisions.

Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" is profoundly mistaken, according to Damasio. Thinking is a late evolutionary development. Long before there was thought, there was feeling, and we are still primarily feeling organisms. The same mistaken idea underlies the currently fashionable view that mind is a software program embodied in a brain. Those cognitive scientists who talk in this way are unconsciously falling into dualism – something they would no doubt fervently deny if it were suggested to them! There are implications here for medicine, which Damasio touches on in a postscript.

Much of the book deals with the brain, but Damasio makes the important point that it is not only the brain that we need to focus on. Feeling includes the body as a whole. He uses the metaphor of a landscape to describe this idea. The viscera (heart, lungs, gut) and the muscles are the components of this landscape, and a "feeling" is a momentary view of part of that landscape. These feelings are totally essential to the quality of being human. "Were it not for the possibility of sensing body states that are inherently ordained to be painful or pleasurable, there would be no suffering or bliss, no longing or mercy, no tragedy or glory in the human condition."

Religion, ritual and the emotional brain

Damasio's view is very relevant to how we should think about religion. Although religions include belief systems, these generally arise not from intellectual arguments but from – literally – gut feelings. (As late as the seventeenth century the gut was still considered the site of the emotions; hence Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.")

The reason why religions have such a strong hold on human societies is that they touch the human psyche not at the intellectual but at the emotional level, where it is more powerful. And this allows us to connect religion, narrative, and ritual with one another, to explain why religion is so inextricably part of human consciousness.

Ritual is a form of drama, which presupposes narrative. Take the Catholic Mass. This is a symbolic re-enactment of Christ's Passion. At its centre is the moment when the priest repeats the words ascribed to Christ at the Last Supper: "Here is my body – take it. Here is my blood – take it." You could hardly ask for a stronger drama.

Belief is not what is crucial here. In fact, you don't even need to believe in the literal truth of the story that underlies the ritual to find it meaningful. Some intellectually highly sophisticated people find value in religious ritual even though they don't believe in God. Martin Rees is one of our most distinguished scientists – Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society, no less – who was interviewed recently by Joan Bakewell for the BBC Radio 3 series Belief. [January 2008] She asked him if he agreed with the description of him as a churchgoer who doesn't believe in God. He said he was suspicious of dogma but he shared with religious people a concept of the mystery and wonder of the universe, and even more of human life. He therefore participates in Church of England religious services., which are, as he put it, the custom of his tribe.

Another scientist who has a similar attitude is Ursula Goodenough, a biologist who describes herself as a "nontheist". But she still thinks that religion is very important and indeed she attends the Trinity Presbyterian Church, where she sings in the choir, recites the liturgy and prayers, and generally participates in the religious life. [Goodenough, 1998, 2000] She writes that humans need "grand compelling stories" that help us to orient us in our lives and the cosmos. She thinks that evolution can provide such a story.

Goodenough uses her scientific knowledge to feed her religious imagination. It is also possible for atheists to approach religion imaginatively from a literary direction. The novelist Jim Crace was interviewed in the same BBC Radio 3 series as Martin Rees. [27 December 2007] He is a life-long atheist, having been brought up that way, but he recognizes the emotional importance of belief and worries about what could be substituted for it. The question has inspired a lot of his writing.

Being a novelist, he is of course fully aware of the importance for religion of narrative, which he sees as a Trojan Horse to seduce people into belief. And he says that he recognizes the importance of religious ritual and drama. When he was living in the Sudan he took part in the Eid festival at the end of Ramadan and even fasted during Ramadan. He has also participated in Jewish rituals.

Another novelist who makes the connection between fiction and religion is Julian Barnes. In his recent meditation on death [Barnes, 2008] he describes Christianity as a great novel, perfectly exemplifying what Hollywood is always seeking, a tragedy with a happy ending. "Religions were the first invention of the fiction writers."

The roots of drama are in religion. In ancient Greece plays were performed (literally, 'taught') as part of religious festivals in honour of the God Dionysus and, unless revived, were performed only once. Although there was plenty of excitement in the performances, the audience was always aware of their religious character. The plays dealt with the relations of the human to the divine and of the human to the material world.

And this religious dimension is not totally absent from the theatre even now. Today in Iran the martyrdom of Husayn is commemorated annually in passion plays, just as Christ's Passion was commemorated in Europe in passion plays in the Middle Ages. It is doubtless significant that the only forms of Christian worship that are growing instead of declining in Britain today are those with minimum doctrinal content but maximum emotion, brought on by singing and even "speaking in tongues" – dramatic performances, of course.

Religion and language

If narrative is important, we need to think about how stories are told. This implies language – stories are expressed mainly in words. They can be expressed in pictures too, of course, as they are in comics or the mediaeval stained glass windows, but even here there is nearly always some accompanying text. Relying entirely on pictures for a story with any degree of complexity is likely to be cumbersome at best and probably confusing for the spectators.

So religion needs language if it is to be communicated, but the connection may go deeper. Every human society we know of has possessed religion. Every human society we know of has possessed language. Noam Chomsky claims that there are similarities in the structure of all languages that point to the existence of a "universal grammar". The grammar or "deep structure" of human languages is very complex, yet young children seem to have an innate ability to master this complexity within a short time, as if by instinct. This has suggested to many people that the rules of grammar are in some sense built into the human brain during evolution.

Much the same has been claimed for religion. Its universality suggests to many that it is an innate property of the human mind, presumably owing to an inherited structure in the brain. Perhaps being human inevitably means that you are very likely to be religious.

I want to take up this idea but to modify it in what I hope is a constructive way. In his book _The_ _Symbolic Species_ [Deacon, 1997] Terrence Deacon rejects Chomsky's view and proposes instead the hypothesis that languages evolve in a kind of symbiotic relation with the human mind. The fact that young children are able to learn languages with apparent ease, he suggests, does not mean that they have some extraordinary innate linguistic ability but rather that human languages have evolved to be learned easily by immature minds.

There is a two-fold evolution going on here. Certainly the human brain has evolved linguistic capabilities that are absent in the brains of other primates, but at the same time languages have adapted themselves to be readily learnable by children. This clearly has something in common with the meme idea, which Deacon does mention in passing, but it places more emphasis on evolutionary change in language than we find in the writings of most memeticists.

If we now look at religion we find, I believe, a number of rather close similarities with Deacon's view of language. I want to suggest that religion, like language, has evolved to be easily learned by children. The following features seem to be relevant.

1. Religious people are often reproved by the non-religious, and even by some co-religionists, for having a "childish" view of God, and this is in a sense reflected in references to God the Father (today often transformed by feminists into God the Mother). If religion has evolved to be easily learned by children, this makes good sense. Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he said (Matthew 18, 3): "Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." (This does not mean, of course, that religion is childish, any more than language is childish.)

2. The language-learning ability of children is different from that of adults. There is a long-held view that this indicates a "critical period" for language learning, similar to the "imprinting" phenomenon in birds. Deacon disagrees, suggesting instead that a degree of immaturity may be actually necessary for language acquisition in this way. Whatever the explanation, the phenomenon certainly exists, as anyone who has tried to learn a new language in later life can testify. But religion is acquired by children in a very similar way to language. Many people are taught religion literally at their mothers' knees, and religions infused early in life in this way have a different "feel" from those that may be adopted later as the result of conversion.

3. Religious beliefs inculcated in childhood are difficult to shake off, just as one's "mother tongue" is more persistent in the face of disuse than languages learned in later life. Seen in this way, the well-known if apocryphal Jesuit saying "Give me a boy until he's seven and he's mine for life" takes on a new significance.

4. Acquiring a religion involves to some extent learning a new vocabulary and syntax: for example, the old Quaker use of "thee" and, in some Christian circles, phraseology such as "believing on Jesus" instead of the vernacular "believing in". And because what is said may partially condition what can be thought, the use of such speech patterns will have subtle psychological effects on the speakers, tending to limit what can be named and hence what can be thought. So religion and language are closely connected at the structural level.

5. Many religions have a sacred language – Hebrew for Judaism, classical Arabic for Islam, Sanskrit for Hinduism, Pali for Theravada Buddhism, Latin for the Catholic Church. Because religions are generally ancient the languages they use are often partially or wholly unintelligible to the laity and sometimes even the clergy, but contrary to what religious modernisers suppose, this linguistic remoteness is a strength, not a weakness. Misguided attempts to bring the language up to date often coincide with a loss of religious faith, and it is difficult to say what is cause and what is effect. Some Roman Catholics still lament the abandonment of the Latin Mass in favour of the vernacular, and disuse of the Book of Common Prayer by the Church of England has not prompted an influx of young worshippers to the pews. [Freeman, 2001]

6. Just as there seem to be certain "universal" features of grammar, so with religion: there are hints of a "deep structure". For example, there seems to be a tendency for two separate tendencies to form within mature religions. In Western Christianity we have Catholicism and Protestantism: Catholics go in for devotion to the Virgin Mary and the saints and their priests wear complex vestments and conduct elaborate rituals, all of which are frowned on to a greater or lesser extent by Protestants.

In Buddhism there is the distinction between Theravada and Mahayana: the Theravada is relatively austere and unemotional, whereas the Mahayana has the Bodhisattvas (who compare in some ways with the saints in Catholicism) and elaborate ceremonies. Within Islam there are likewise differences in tone between Sunni and Shia: in a Shia country such as Iran you frequently see pictures of Ali, Husayn and other "saints" in taxis and elsewhere which are curiously reminiscent of Greek icons and Catholic saints' pictures.

It would of course be wrong to push these resemblances too far, yet it is difficult not to notice the similarities in "feel". Catholicism, Mahayana, and Shiite Islam have something in common, and so do Protestantism, Theravada, and Sunni Islam.

7. Languages, as Deacon emphasizes, are not static but evolve over time. They behave in fact like living organisms. The same is true of religions. Deacon writes:

"As a language passes from generation to generation, the vocabulary and syntactical rules tend to get modified by transmission errors, by the active creativity of its users, and by influences from other languages ... Eventually words, phraseology and syntax will diverge so radically that people will find it impossible to mix elements of both without confusion. By analogy to biological evolution, different lineages of a common ancestral language will diverge so far from each other as to become reproductively incompatible. [ibid.]

If we substitute "religion" for "language" we have a pretty exact description of how Christianity evolved from Judaism. They have become different species, which can no longer "interbreed". Within religions there are often subspecies – the different denominations within Christianity, for example – and believers in one of these usually find it fairly easy to move to a different one. So an Anglican can convert to Roman Catholicism, or a Catholic to Orthodox Christianity, without too much difficulty. The subspecies are capable of interbreeding though in practice they seldom do.

8. Finally, and very speculatively, may the origins of both language and religion go back to the very beginnings of modern human consciousness? Many people believe that there was a qualitative shift in human consciousness about 50,000 years ago – the so-called Great Leap Forward, when tool-making became more complex and the cave paintings in France and Spain first appeared. We do not know why these paintings were made but a fair guess is that they had some sort of religious or magical significance.

We also do not know when language first developed, but one suggestion is that an elaborate form of speech first became available to humans at about the same time as the paintings. If these ideas are at all correct, it would follow that language and religion were closely connected at their very inception. I am sceptical about this idea of a late origin for language myself, but the connection between art and language may still hold even if both are much older than 50,000 years.

Religion: parasite or symbiont?

According to Deacon, we could think of languages as parasites or viruses. However, that is probably too severe, as he concedes, since languages are after all beneficial to their hosts and should therefore better be regarded as symbionts. So is religion a parasite or a symbiont? We could not do without language, but could we do without religion? Perhaps it has become so deeply infused into our minds and our culture that we cannot rid ourselves of it.

An analogy comes to mind here: the mitochondria in our cells. These are structures – organelles, as they are rather poetically known, meaning tiny organs – that were originally free-living organisms. But at some stage in the distant past they became permanent denizens of "advanced" (eukaryotic) cells, which depend on them for their ability to use oxygen for energy.

When oxygen first appeared on our planet it was a poison, a toxic by-product of life that began to accumulate in the atmosphere owing to photosynthesis. But certain bacteria acquired the ability to process it and make it harmless. Later, some of these bacteria were incorporated into other kinds of cells, where they eventually became essential – not just as detoxifiers of oxygen but as producers of energy. Today we cannot do without either mitochondria or oxygen. This is an analogy, I want to suggest, for what happened with religion.

At some stage in our evolution our hominid ancestors realized that they were going go die, an awareness that probably no other animal (except perhaps elephants?) has. Trying to come to terms with this potentially toxic knowledge must have brought about a profound change in our psyche, and religions were the result of this.

Are religions our psychological mitochondria, which help us to cope with the awareness of our inevitable end? Without them, awareness of death might have destroyed us. Perhaps religion exists to detoxify the fear of death, in so far as this can be done, generating in the process much art and literature, as mitochondria generate energy. But perhaps they are, for the same reason, now indispensable to us.

I can discern two mutually contradictory sets of ideas about this in my own mind, which find echoes in much of the contemporary writing about religion. One view is that religion is a primitive survival that we need to outgrow, and if we fail to do so our civilization will go down in conflict triggered by interfaith terrorism and wars. The other is that our civilisation cannot survive for long without it. Both, perhaps, are true.

Religion is certainly ancient – probably prehistoric. We do not know why the great cave paintings of the upper palaeolithic were made but it is a reasonable guess that they had some shamanistic meaning. This is David Lewis-William's view in The Mind in the Cave. [Lewis-Williams, 2004]

Central to his position is the view of cave art as a social activity. He considers a number of different caves in detail, particularly the great site at Lascaux, and shows how they can be regarded as making up a kind of theatre(!) in which a society could have staged its ceremonial events. Although we cannot know what was in the artists' minds we can make reasonable assumptions about what they thought they were doing. Lewis-Williams says that it is as if we were looking at a mediaeval cathedral without any knowledge of Christianity. We could not know anything of the ideology that had inspired its construction but we might speculate fairly accurately about the function of its different areas.

The function of cave art seems to have been, in the broadest sense, religious. As such, the tradition it started has continued right down to our own time; we still have religion in plenty. In a postscript to his study Lewis-Williams offers his thoughts on what this means for us. The capacity for transcendental experience seems to be wired into our brains, he thinks, as it was apparently not in the Neanderthal brain. From this has come much great art. It has also produced the potentially disastrous conviction that God speaks to us, telling us how to conduct our own lives and how other people should conduct theirs.

Many people, even those with a scientific world view, recognize the need for a religion substitute, and this often leads them to talk about the importance of preserving a "spiritual" sense of meaning in the absence of formal religious belief. "Spirituality" is used in all kinds of ways by different people, but it need not necessarily refer to a world outside or above the material physical. Scientists often use it to mean a feeling of reverence or awe for Nature.

Michael Ruse provides an example. He is, somewhat unusually, a professor of both zoology and philosophy. He does not think that attempts by progressive theologians to reconcile Darwinian evolution and a belief in the Christian God will really work. We must "recognize that Dawkins is right, that Darwinism is a major challenge to religious belief and that you cannot simply pretend that nothing very much has happened". [Ruse, 2004] But he continues to argue for what he calls a theology of nature (as opposed to a natural theology). This appears to rely on an aesthetic response to nature – a near-mystical appreciation of the beauty of the living world. And he quotes a remark once made to him by Ernst Mayr: "People forget that it is possible to be intensely religious in the entire absence of theological belief." This attitude would be quite at home in Buddhism but I think that many Christians would find it too impersonal.

Another scientist who seeks to preserve what he regards as the essence of a religious outlook in the face of non-belief is Chet Raymo. [Raymo, 1999] He does this by making a distinction between what he calls Skeptics and True Believers. You can, he says, have religious Skeptics and scientific True Believers. The test is not what they believe but their attitude to their belief. So religious Skeptics can be depressed at times, because they find difficulties with their belief systems (presumably as the result of cognitive dissonance), whereas a scientific True Believer goes in for pseudo-scientific mysticism. I should say that physicists such at Fritjhof Capra who say that mystical pronouncements and quantum physics are really pointing to the same reality are good examples of scientific True Believers. [Capra, 1972] The similarities they cite seem to me to be superficial and largely verbal, of no real significance.

I sympathise with Raymo in his rejection of scientific True Belief but I have to say I find his own solution rather thin. It is much the same as Ruse's answer – a kind of nature mysticism. He provides two examples of how this is supposed to work. He tells us how he saw Comet Hyakutake together with a spellbound group of students, and he reflects on the fact that we, today, can predict the path of the comet and of other heavenly bodies. But the knowledge we have does not diminish our sense of wonder – rather it adds to it. He would like NASA to produce a full-length film of astronomical images, a panorama of beauty that would, he believes, provide a true modern counterpart to the mediaeval cathedrals.

In a second personal testimony to his sense of wonder at the beauty of Nature he tells us of an encounter with a large blue heron. As it flew off he stood and applauded. Once, he says, the heron might have had a totemic meaning for us, but today we can only recapture this sense of its deeper significance with the help of science, which enables us to weave the heron into a web of wider meaning.

I find this story rather disturbing. The thought of standing and applauding a heron seems to have something self-conscious and theatrical about it. Since it could not mean anything to the heron, the intended audience was presumably Raymo himself (and was he thinking he might use it later in a book?).

Raymo has made a valiant attempt to use a scientist's sense of wonder as a substitute for religion but I don't think it works. He builds too much on rather inadequate foundations. Even if we accept that he experienced what he calls an "epiphanic moment" when he saw the heron, this does not really help us. We cannot rely on Raymo's intuition at second hand. We need to see our own heron, or its equivalent, but even if we do, how do we translate this experience into a comprehensive religious vision based on science, which is what Raymo seems to be asking for? The task of building a religious utlook for the twenty-first century is more daunting than he seems to realize.

What Raymo and others are talking about is experiences of the kind Marghanita Laski calls Adamic ecstasy. Valuable though these are to those who have them, I don't think they will do as a foundation for a post-theistic religion.

No one I have come across has proposed a viable substitute for traditional religion. All the suggested solutions seem to me to be artificial and lacking in life, like a sort of spiritual Esperanto. Artificial languages do not work and I don't think artificial religions will either.

Chapter 8. Buddhism

But hope not life from grief or danger free

Nor think the doom of man reversed for thee.

– Samuel Johnson.

About twenty years ago I thought I had the whole question of religion pretty well tied up; nothing more to think about. I described myself as an agnostic, which meant that I did not see any way of reaching firm conclusions about the existence of God or any of the other questions that had once preoccupied me. I had not formulated the idea of the Casaubon delusion at the time, but if I had I would have said that I had finally escaped from it.

But one thing I had not come to terms with was the thought of death. I was in my mid-fifties, so barring accidents, wars, or sudden illnesses there was no reason to think it was imminent, but it would have to be faced at some time and I was increasingly coming to realize that I had not made any real attempt to think about it. I decided to look again at Buddhism, something I had not done since I was a medical student in Dublin many years earlier.

MMY had a poor opinion of Buddhism, saying that Nirvana was "merely" Cosmic Consciousness and only a stepping stone to the heights of God Consciousness and Unity Consciousness. But my ideas had changed now and I was prepared to think again. I knew several ex-TMers who had been attracted to Buddhism. Jack Cohen, from whom I first heard about TM, became disillusioned with it at about the same time as I did, and for similar reasons, but this did not put an end to his quest for a spiritual path. He and his wife Audrey had been supporters of the Tibetan Buddhists since the early days of their arrival in Britain, and now they began to spend more time at the Kagyu Samye Ling monastery in Scotland which they had helped to found. I was not myself attracted to Tibetan Buddhism, which was a lot more metaphysical than TM, but Theravada Buddhism seemed a possibility.

Theravada Buddhism is less well known in the West than the Tibetan form. Since the Chinese annexation of Tibet and the exile of most prominent Tibetan religious figures, including the Dalai Lama, our knowledge of Tibetan religion has emerged from the foggy realm of legend and mystery. Numerous books on Tibetan religious practices have appeared and Tibetan monasteries have been established in several Western countries. Buddhism in many people's understanding is now synonymous with Tibetan Buddhism, which is characterized by esoteric beliefs, elaborate rituals, and complex meditation practices; it also assigns a central role to rebirth. So the popular idea of Buddhism is rather different now from what it was a few decades ago, and rationalists are probably more likely today to dismiss Buddhism automatically as something that does not interest them.

Today there are two main forms of Buddhism, Mahayana and Theravada. (There were others in the past but they no longer exist.) Mahayana Buddhism, which is the category that Tibetan Buddhism belongs to, is elaborate and complex in comparison with Theravada Buddhism, which is relatively austere and unemotional. As a rough analogy, Mahayana Buddhism could be compared with Roman Catholicism or perhaps Orthodox (Eastern) Christianity, Theravada Buddhism with Presbyterianism (appropriately, because both names refer to religions supervised by "the Elders"). But note that this is indeed only a very rough analogy, intended just to give a preliminary idea of the "feel" of the two traditions. (To complicate matters still further, Zen is classified as Mahayana, yet it is comparatively austere and has a degree of resemblance to Theravada.) Mahayana Buddhism contains elements derived from Tantrism, an occult Indian mystical system, and is associated with methods of inducing altered states of consciousness. – hence much of its fascination for certain Westerners. It is mainly Theravada Buddhism that I am writing about here.

Buddhism has been called an atheistic religion, but this is misleading. The true Buddhist position is more that of standing aside from questions about God. The theistic religions postulate a God who creates the world, but Buddhism is unconcerned with such questions. For Buddhism the world is simply there, given. It has the properties it has, and that is all we can say about it. In fact, gods do figure in Buddhist tradition, being inherited from Hinduism, but they are not creators. They are part of the cosmos, subject to the cycle of birth and death like other beings. And it is unnecessary to be concerned with them; as a monk once remarked to Richard Gombrich, "Gods are nothing to do with religion". Gombrich, 1998]

Some people go so far as to deny the name of religion to Buddhism because of its indifference to God. For Christians it is pretty well inconceivable to think of religion without God. And there is another difference between Christianity and Buddhism as well: Buddhism is not much concerned with questions of belief. You don't become a Buddhist in the way that you become a born-again Christian, by undergoing an emotional conversion and taking on belief in, and a personal relation to, a Redeemer. Rather, you look at the ideas of Buddhism and, if you find they appeal to you, you may decide to incorporate them into your life. Or you may practise Buddhist meditation without necessarily calling yourself a Buddhist. Indeed, from the Buddhist point of view it is a mistake to become over-preoccupied with matters of belief. These are just opinions, and not of ultimate importance. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that if you make a big fuss about identifying yourself as a Buddhist you have probably misunderstood what Buddhism actually is.

Beliefs are seen as attitudes of mind, and therefore neither to be fought against nor adhered to. This has important consequences. It means, for example, that there is no need for Buddhists to get into a quandary about science. Christians quite often seem to worry about trying to reconcile the Biblical account (or accounts) of creation with modern Big Bang cosmology, and the rejection of Darwinism by Biblical fundamentalists in the USA and elsewhere prompts endless argument and even litigation. For Buddhism, all this is irrelevant. It is hard to think of any scientific discovery or theory that would threaten essential Buddhism. The Dalai Lama has said that "if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims". [Dalai Lama, 2005]

Rebirth is probably the Buddhist idea that most often troubles Western intellectuals who feel some attraction to Buddhism. In fact, it is quite a difficult question for Buddhists themselves, because it is a fundamental notion in Buddhism that there is no persisting Self – no detachable soul which could continue from one life to the next. Nevertheless, the Buddha appears to have accepted the correctness of the general Indian belief in rebirth which was already current in his time.

One explanation offered is that the last thoughts of the dying person may condition the birth of someone who is due to be born later. This does not seem to be a fully satisfactory answer, and it raises as many problems as it solves. At least one prominent Theravada Buddhist teacher in modern times is reported to have rejected the rebirth idea, and my own experience of Theravada monks in Britain has been that they tend to adopt a non-committal attitude to the matter. Certainly all the emphasis is on the here and now, with little being said about any possible future or past lives.

The Buddha himself consistently refused to be drawn into metaphysical speculations of this kind, and it is still entirely possible to practise Buddhist meditation and call yourself a Buddhist while being agnostic about rebirth or even dismissing it altogether as an outmoded idea. Belief, once again, is not the issue.

An encounter with Buddhism

This easy-going attitude made me feel sympathetic towards Buddhism, at least its Theravada form. I also liked the fact that Theravada Buddhism is not esoteric. It does not go in for secret initiations – it is said to offer an "open hand". So after some hesitation I decided to visit a Theravada monastery near Hemel Hempstead, about twenty miles north of London.

sIt is called Amaravati, meaning Deathless in Pali. (Pali is derived from Sanskrit and is the language of the Buddhist scriptures.) It was founded by an American monk known as Ajahn Sumedho, who had studied for ten years under a well-known Thai monk called Ajahn Chah. ('Ajahn' is a title of respect in Thai, meaning 'teacher'.) Many of the monks and nuns who live at Amaravati, and also at another monastery in Sussex, had also lived in Thailand, in what sounded to me like pretty demanding conditions. They spoke about these rather as one hears ex-Paratroopers describe the training they went through.

I was considerably impressed by a number of the people I met at Amaravati. Others have had a similar response to Buddhist monks. Malcolm Carrithers, who has written one of the best short introductions [Carrithers, 1993] to the Buddha and his teaching that I know, tells us that some of the Buddhist monks he met impressed him by their personal qualities. For example, he was with them when they encountered dangerous wild animals in the forest. The monks stood their ground and spoke quietly to the animals, which turned round and went peacefully on their way.

The only wild animals I saw at Amaravati were rabbits, which presented few opportunities for the monks to exhibit unusual resolve or calmness in the face of danger, but I did get the impression that they were people who had achieved a considerable degree of what Jung would call self-realization. Others have noticed something similar: the philosopher Galen Strawson, for example, says he thinks that Buddhist monks may have succeeded in altering profoundly how they experience themselves and others and that this may provide them with a more correct view of the world.

Encouraged by what I had seen I decided to try out Buddhist meditation for myself. I participated in several retreats lasting up to ten days at the monastery. We followed the monastic routine, which meant getting up early to meditate and not eating after midday. We didn't talk at meals and were not supposed to read. None of this sounds very demanding but I found it surprisingly difficult to keep up for more than a couple of days at a time. On a longer retreat I began to be quite depressed – not something I suffer from as a rule – and was on the point of leaving. But I went to see Sumedho, who said that he thought I was trying too hard. He advised me to read if I felt like it and generally not to be over-conscientious. This worked, and the depression lifted.

The Buddhist meditation we did was of two types. One, called samatha (Sanskrit: samadhi) is similar to yogic meditation and therefore to TM. There are many ways of doing this but at Amaravati we used the simplest, which consisted merely in "watching the breath". But there was no discussion of particular states of consciousness, as in TM. According to Carrithers the Buddha rejected the yogic teaching of successive planes or levels of consciousness that the meditator was supposed to pass through. Carrithers thinks that in the yogic system these were thought of as actual locations in the spiritual cosmos, and reaching them was even a sort of astral travel.

The Buddha disputed the claim that achieving these states represented the goal of the spiritual life, first because they were temporary and not permanent, and second because achieving them did not in itself lead to intellectual and moral development. (This was something I could confirm from my own experience.) While yogic meditation has its value in stilling the mind, the Buddha was saying, something more is needed: a change in the quality of thought and feeling. It was in the light of this that he developed his own distinctive form of meditation, known as Insight Meditation (vipassana).

This was the kind of meditation that was mainly emphasized at Amaravati and the kind that interested me. The whole point of it is that there is no "technique" involved at all. The essence of it is to be aware of what is going on in the mind at each moment. On the retreats we practised this while sitting and also while walking. The ideal sitting position was on a cushion with legs crossed, but if you were stiff, like me, you could use a chair. You then attended to what was passing through your mind and to any physical sensations there might be (mainly discomfort in my case, especially when I made the mistake of going back to the floor.)

To do the walking meditation you marked out a distance of twenty or thirty paces and walked up and down it while paying attention to the physical process of walking as the feet touched the ground and your weight was transferred from one foot to the other. This is a way of promoting "mindfulness", and that kind of awareness should ideally be maintained in all the activities one undertakes in life. It was for this reason that we were not supposed to speak while eating, for example. The idea was to keep the mind focused on the process of eating. We practised this throughout the retreat; Buddhists are supposed to do so in the whole of their lives.

This was one of the main differences between the yogic path, which we were following in TM, and Buddhism. "Mindfulness" was not part of TM and indeed was if anything discouraged; the meditation was supposed to be enough in itself to effect a gradual transformation. Another difference was that, in TM, we were not expected to alter the way we behaved; we should rely on the meditation to improve our behaviour. I was not convinced from my experience that this was the case.

For Buddhists, meditation only makes sense if combined with observing what are called the precepts. These are not divinely ordained "commandments" in the Biblical sense but are rules or guides for "right living" and are essentially intended to avoid causing harm to oneself or others. (The rules for monastics are more demanding than those for lay people.) Sumedho said that if you didn't follow the precepts you might as well forget about meditating; the two things had to go together. This made sense to me.

Yet another difference from TM was that Buddhists pay a lot of attention to illness and death. This is not morbid or melancholic; Buddhism is founded on the recognition that these things are part of life and can't be avoided. I should say that this honesty was one of the things that most strongly appealed to me about the Buddhists I met.

As I have said, it was partly the death question that made me think of exploring Buddhism in the first place, and I did find that it gradually became less troubling for me. Perhaps this was simply due to age – it is said, though I do not know how correctly, that the question often comes to seem less important as one gets older. But I think the Buddhists' frank acceptance of our mortality played a part. And I also gained a rather unexpected piece of self-knowledge from my encounter with Buddhism.

I came to see that you will not get very far on the Buddhist path unless you take it pretty seriously, which probably means spending at least some time living as a monastic. Buddhism began as a monastic discipline, and although many lay people do practise Buddhist meditation today, especially in the West, I am not sure how effectively it can be pursued outside its original setting. And this, I know, is not for me. In fact, I have never had much success in practising formal insight meditation regularly, though I am sure it would be a good thing to do. The most I can achieve is to remind myself from time to time of the need to be "mindful" in everyday life.

So my experience of Buddhism did not provide me with any kind of profound revelation or mystical illumination, but this was fine because by the time I went to Amaravati I had ceased to expect or even to want any such thing. In fact, I realized that I am now a lot less attracted to such ideas than I used to be. I come back to this in my final chapter.

Buddhism as a philosophy

Michael Carrithers writes of the Buddha: "His teaching was suited to a world of different political philosophies and different religions, but a world in which certain basic values must guide personal relations if we are to live together at all, and it is difficult to see how that mastery could be irrelevant to us." This seems to me to be essentially correct. Many of us today feel that the world is faced by almost insuperable problems: war, terrorism, ecological and environmental catastrophe. All these things arise from our own minds. They are in principle soluble, but the solutions appear to be beyond our reach. What makes them unattainable is, in large measure, human greed, human desires, and fanatical adherence to belief systems. We are blinded by our own desires, and trample others and destroy our world to attain our ends.

A world in which Buddhist values were the norm rather than the exception would certainly be a much pleasanter place to live in. It may well be that such a state is unattainable, but unless we do at least approach it there seems little chance that our society will endure for very long. This is surely something that concerns materialists as much as the religiously minded; in fact, rather more so, since for materialists this is the only world we have.

People who are attracted to Buddhism but wish to avoid all semblance of a religion may find the similarities between Buddhism and the ancient philosophy of Stoicism worth exploring. Jean-François Revel is an agnostic philosopher whose son, Matthieu Richard, is a biochemist who gave up science to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk.

A series of dialogues between them was published a few years ago. [Revel and Rickard, 1998] I thought that Revel's contributions were the more interesting. He finds that Buddhism is quite close to Stoicism and this makes him sympathetic to it. He thinks it contains a great deal of wisdom, which he defines as an alliance of happiness and morality, but he acknowledges that it is more difficult to live according to wisdom if a background of metaphysics is lacking. "Yet such limits have to be accepted. Wisdom will always be a a matter of conjecture. Ever since the Buddha and Socrates, man has struggled to turn it into a science, but in vain." This sums up a lot of what I feel about Buddhism myself.

Buddhism, medicine, and the "Why me?" syndrome

Outside the religious context, I have found that Buddhist philosophy has a lot of relevance to medical practice. It has been said that the Buddha described his system as if he were a physician. This may have been because he lived at a time when people were beginning to live in towns and so were becoming subject to new diseases as a result of over-crowding and poor sanitation. Like a physician, he starts by identifying a problem: people are dissatisfied and unhappy. He diagnoses the cause of this, namely the fact that we experience desires which are often not fulfilled, and even when they are fulfilled we quickly become dissatisfied and want something else. (Our modern economic system depends on this. How would advergtising work otherwise?) And he proposed a cure, the Noble Eightfold Path, which we today call Buddhism.

The sense of dissatisfaction the Buddha identified is called dukkha, which is usually translated as "suffering". But though it does include what we would think of as suffering, dukkha also refers to much milder feelings of discontent or discomfort. This is important, because people sometimes think that Buddhism must be a pretty depressing religion if it attaches so much importance to suffering. Even a brief encounter with practicising Buddhists will provide abundant evidence to the contrary, but in any case Buddhism doesn't say that all life is dukkha, only that life contains dukkha, which I take to be self-evident.

The Buddha's diagnosis seems to me pretty obviously correct, and it certainly corresponds with something I found in my professional life. I spent many years in complementary–alternative medicine (CAM), but eventually I became disillusioned with it, in part because of its failure to recognize reality. This was exactly the same mentality as I earlier encountered in TM: I mean the wish to ignore, as far as possible, anything "negative" in life.

To listen to some CAM practitioners you would think that if you eat the right things, live in the right surroundings, and above all think the right thoughts and feel the right emotions you will never be ill. And it follows that if you have become ill it's your fault. This is the modern secular equivalent of feeling guilty because you have sinned and God is punishing you by inflicting disease. It is a metaphysical justification for disease masquerading as a scientific explanation, but the metaphysical element never really disappears. People want to find some reason to explain why they have become ill, and if they have done everything they think they should they feel they are being punished unfairly – the "Why me?" syndrome.

Metaphysical "explanations" of this kind for disease are bogus. There is no natural right to health. We have come into existence thanks to natural selection. Certain consequences follow from this quite inevitably, and one of them is liability to disease.

Many diseases are caused by parasites – viruses, bacteria, worms – which, like us, have evolved through natural selection. These organisms are trying to survive, just as we are, and they do so at our expense. Parasites are present everywhere in the natural world. There are parasites of parasites, and even parasites of parasites of parasites. So there is a never-ending arms race between us and the parasites. We evolve better methods of defence and they in turn evolve better methods of attack.

Even cancer can be understood in this way. We could think of cancer cells as internally produced parasites. The offending cells acquire the ability to reproduce without limit and to overcome the mechanisms we have that are supposed to prevent this happening, and so they multiply in the body by means of natural selection. Most cancers tend to arise in old age, but there are also childhood cancers. One cancer expert thinks that these are comparable with other congenital abnormalities, part of the price we pay for having genetic diversity. There may be no "cause" in the ordinary sense for childhood cancers; they are simply mistakes that inevitably arise in the complicated process of structural engineering in the embryo. [Greaves, 2001]

Darwinism tells us that we are all subject to illness by the mere fact that we have been born. It is quite true that diet, exercise, not smoking, and avoiding excessive alcohol intake will make it more likely that we will be healthy, but there are no guarantees. You may do everything that you ought to do, think "positively," avoid "junk" foods, and all the rest of it, and still suffer any of the myriad illnesses to which we are all subject. And if you don't die in youth or middle life, as few do these days, you will age, and you may then suffer from senile dementia or any of the other degenerative diseases that lie in wait for us. In fact, the longer you live the more likely it becomes that you will suffer from these things.

The Darwinian insight is exactly the same as that of the Buddha. The reason we get ill is nothing to do with Original Sin or any other religious or metaphysical notion; it is a consequence of the fact that we are biological organisms, subject to the process of Darwinian selection. Conventional medicine has made amazing advances in diagnosis and treatment but it has not abolished disease and ageing and no doubt it never will. Alternative medicine enthusiasts often imply that they can prevent cancer and other degenerative diseases by alterations in lifestyle and in other ways, but they have no privileged insight into these things. They can't give you any better advice about healthy living than you would get from your GP. Don't be taken in by the merchants of permanent health and happiness.

One of the things I like about Buddhism is that it faces the reality of our situation without flinching. The Buddha did not attempt to explain or justify the existence of suffering and disease, he simply acknowledged that they were part of life and told people how to live in spite of them. This is true wisdom. There is a well-known story about the Buddha in which a mother asks him to restore her dead son to life. He promises to do so if she can find a house in which no one has ever died. She tries and of course fails, and in so doing realizes the omnipresence and inevitability of death.

Unless we die suddenly in the prime of life, most of us will sooner or later experience the truth of the rather bleak view of life that I have just sketched. If you don't believe me, read a few biographies or, if you are old enough, look around you at the lives of your friends. How many people have you heard of or do you know personally who have lived a long life without major illnesses of any kind and who have finally died at an advanced age with only a few days of preliminary illness? Not many, I'll bet. "Count no man happy until he's dead," the classical aphorism runs.

I often remember a remark in a novel by Vladimir Nabokov: "When we're young, we think these things onlyhappen to other people; as we get older, we realize we are those other people." Quentin Crisp has compared life to a race across open country under fire – an image that appeals to me. And Susan Sontag has written:

"Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place." [Sontag, 1973]

To the question "Why me?" there can, ultimately, be only one answer: "Why not you?" What I like about Buddhism is that it faces this truth unflinchingly and without sentimentality.

Chapter 9. Miracles

How many stories of this nature have, in all ages, been detected and exploded in their infancy? How many more have been celebrated for a time, and have afterwards sunk into neglect and oblivion? — David Hume (On Miracles).

Some time ago someone emailed me to tell me that my view of religion was wrong. Miracles were still occurring, she said; in fact, there was a Christian pastor in Africa who had raised several people from the dead. The occurrence of miracles is often cited as evidence for the truth of a religion andthis is particularly the case for Christianity. Jesus is supposed to have performed lots of them and he was himself reported to have been miraculously raised from the dead. And the priest performs a miracle every time he says Mass and turns bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. So it is not surprising that some Christians claim that miracles are still occurring today.

I had long had a vague interest in the alleged occurrence of miraculous healing. My first book was a novel ( _The Sacred Malady_ ). [Campbell, 1967] The theme of the book was paranormal healing, though not in a religious context, for the healer was a somewhat dissolute painter who found himself on occasion obliged to work his "miracles" even though he didn't really want to. I included a conversation between one of the characters and a Catholic priest on the subject of miraculous cures, in which I allowed a certain degree of scepticism to show through. But that was fiction; can it ever be fact?

David Hume said that it is never rational to believe in miracles because the testimony of the person who reports such events is always less credible than the notion that the events did not happen as described. This is a strong argument but how good is the available evidence? In the last few years there have been attempts to prove the reality of divine intervention by conducting randomized controlled trials in which one group of patients is prayed for whileanother is not.

I find it extraordinary that anyone would think that trials of this kind make sense theologically. Even if I were a theist – especially if I were a theist – I would not expect them to work. Are we seriously meant to imagine God saying to himself: "Oh look, those nice doctors are asking me to take part in this clinical trial to prove I exist. I'd better do so or people will stop believing in me."? Surely he could find an easier way to demonstrate his existence if he wanted to.

If we leave this aside, what have the trials shown? Not much. Many of them failed to control for age, sex, education, ethnicity, marital status, or degree of religious belief, and when corrections for these were introduced any beneficial effects attributed to prayer disappeared. There were also problems with how the results were recorded and analysed and with many other aspects as well. A trial published in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine in 2001 was later withdrawn after one of the authors was found not to have been a doctor, as claimed, but to have an MSc in parapsychology. Moreover he was subsequently indicted on charges of mail fraud and theft, to which he pleaded guilty.

One well-conducted trial has been published, but it gave negative results for prayer. What is particularly interesting about this research is that its principal author was Dr Herbert Benson, whom I mentioned earlier in connection with TM research and who has long been sympathetic to the idea that prayer can help patients. The report cost $2.4 million and was published in The American Heart Journal in 2006. [H. Benson and others, "Study of the therapeutic effects of intercessory prayer in cardiac bypass patients". American Heart Journal 2006;151(4):934-942.]

A total of 1802 patients undergoing coronary bypass surgery in six hospitals was studied. There were three groups: two were prayed for and one was not. Prayers began the night before the surgery and continued for two weeks afterwards. Half the patients who were prayed for were told about it; the remainder were told they might or might not be prayed for. All the patients were followed up for 30 days after surgery.

There were no significant differences in outcome between people who were prayed for and those who were not. In fact, the small differences that did exist were if anything in favour of not being prayed for. There were complications in 59 per cent of those who knew they were prayed for and in 51 per cent of those who were uncertain; 18 per cent of those who were prayed for had major complications such as heart attack or stroke, compared with 15 per cent of those who were not prayed for. But these differences did not reach conventional levels of statistical significance.

So there is little or no good evidence from clinical studies to show that prayer works, but then, as I say, I would not expect there to be, even on the assumption that a God who interferes in the running of the world exists. But isolated reports of miraculous cures, such as are said to occur at Lourdes, might be a different matter.

Miracles or spontaneous recovery?

From time to time we read reports of people who have recovered from serious or normally fatal illnesses thanks to what appears to be miraculous intervention. Sometimes this is ascribed to healing, sometimes to prayer, but there is always the implication that something paranormal has occurred. This is often attributed to divine intervention. A letter that Dr R. Westcott sent sent to the British Medical Journal in 2002 will serve as an example of the kind of thing I have in mind.

Dr Westcott is a GP who described himself as an atheist doctor and wanted to know how he should respond to what happened to one of his patients. This was Jim, a non-religious man suffering from asbestosis which he had acquired as a result of his work as a submarine engineer. Then he was diagnosed with a mesothelioma of the chest wall.

This is a well-known complication of asbestosis, and is a malignant tumour which is regarded as invariably fatal. Radiotherapy had little effect and Jim was becoming weaker. His wife decided that they should go for a Mediterranean holiday, and they picked the Greek island of Cephalonia. While there they visited a monastery. An old nun singled Jim out and and asked him what his illness was. She took him to a priest, who performed some kind of prayer or ritual involving some holy relics. Immediately after this Jim felt stronger, and his recovery continued after his return home. The tumour was now no longer apparent and Jim appeared to be in remission, though Dr Westcott was still concerned that he might relapse later. (In fact, Dr Westcott informed me in an email that this did happen.)

Sceptics who are confronted with cases of this kind generally take refuge in two kinds of objection: either the original diagnosis was wrong or the cure was due to the conventional treatment the patient had received previously. Neither of these seems likely to apply in Jim's case, nor in a number of others. So does this mean that we must accept that divine intervention, or at least paranormal healing, is a reality? Do miracles truly occur? Cases like that reported by Dr Westcott certainly give one pause, but before accepting them as proof positive of the miraculous, I think we need to look a little more closely at what they actually tell us.

I find it interesting that many claims for miraculous cures concern recovery from cancer. These are certainly highly impressive and dramatic and to many people seem to provide incontrovertible evidence for a miracle. But how often does cancer remit without adequate treatment outside of a religious context?

To try to get an idea of how frequently this happens I carried out a search via MEDLINE for reports of spontaneous remissions of cancer (that is, remissions occurring without treatment or with inadequate treatment). This produced some twenty-odd papers on the subject; there are doubtless many more to be found. These were the main results. [Full references are given in the Appendix.]

Adult T-cell leukaemia/lymphoma (Takezako Y. et al., 2000).

Adult T-cell leukaemia (Murakawa M. et al., 1990).

Oesophageal leiomyosarcoma (Takemura M. et al., 1999).

Lung cancer following myxoedematous coma (Hercbergs A,1999).

Hepatocellular carcinoma (2 cases; Magalotti D. et al., 1998).

Non-small-cell lung cancer (Kappauf H. et al., 1997).

Lung metastases from primary uterine cancer (Mastall H., 1997).

Liver cancer (Van Halteren H.K. et al., 1997).

Pleural and intrapulmonary metastases from renal carcinoma Lokich J., 1997). Squamous cell lung cancer (Schmidt W., 1995).

Bladder cancer (Hellstrom P.A. et al., 1992).

Intrahepatic, peritoneal and splenic metastases after hepatectomy for hepatocellular carcinoma (Terasaki T. et al., 2000).

Disappearance of lung metastases from hepatocellular carcinoma (Toyoda H. et al., 1999).

Large-cell and polymorphic lung cancer with extensive metastatic disease (Kappauf H. et al., 1997).

Metastatic malignant melanoma (Hurwitz P.J., 1991); several similar cases cited in the literature.

As this undoubtedly incomplete list indicates, spontaneous remission of cancer, though very rare, does happen and is well authenticated outside a religious context. This will probably come as a surprise to many people, including some doctors. How do such events come about?

A number of the papers I looked at discuss possible mechanisms by which spontaneous remission of cancer might occur. The most popular suggestion is some form of immunological reaction, though this is still unproved. There is a long-standing impression that psychological states influence the functioning of the immune system, which would perhaps offer a means by which the patient's belief might help to bring about a cure.

There are also other ideas. There seems to be a connection between fever and remission of cancer; fever in childhood or adulthood may protect against the later onset of cancer and spontaneous remissions are often preceded by feverish infections. There is a case of remission following myxoedema coma (coma due to underactivity of the thyroid gland) which suggests that hypothyroidism may trigger cell death (apoptosis) in tumours. Yet another idea is that a chemical change in DNA called methylation, which is involved in cell differentiation, may play a part.

In summary, then, while the mechanisms of spontaneous remission are by no means fully understood, there are plausible suggestions to explain the phenomenon. And what emerges from the cases I have cited is that if we divide diseases into those that may, no matter how rarely, recover spontaneously and those that do not, we must place cancer in the "may recover" category. This means that cancer cures, no matter how gratifying to patients who experience them and to their relatives, are not necessarily miraculous. They lie within the boundaries of possibility in the natural world.

What, then, would count as a genuine miracle, an event that could not be accommodated within the realm of the natural? It is of course difficult to set limits on what can occur naturally, but I think an example of something which, if it happened, would very probably have to be taken as miraculous would be regrowth of an amputated finger or limb. If this seems a lot to ask, how about something seemingly simpler? An optic nerve damaged by glaucoma never recovers its function in the ordinary course of events; sight lost through glaucoma is lost for good. If sight were restored in a reliably diagnosed glaucomatous eye, that might count as a miracle. (I would certainly like it to happen to me.) To my knowledge, however, no such case has been reported. These are just two examples out of many. What we need for a "genuine" miracle is recovery from some accident or illness in which no spontaneous cure has ever been shown to occur. But cancer does not fit the bill.

I therefore think that, although there are well-attested instances of spontaneous recovery from cancer within a religious or paranormal context, this is not convincing evidence for divine intervention. The fact that a patient recovers after having been prayed for does not prove that the prayer was responsible for the recovery. Here are some possible alternative explanations.

1. It could be coincidence. We do not know how many patients suffering from cancer are prayed for but probably many are. We normally hear nothing about those for whom the prayers are not answered. If very many patients are prayed for, it is possible that among these there will by chance be some who recover spontaneously but who would have done so even if they had not been prayed for.

2. It seems likely the immune system is involved in at least some spontaneous remissions of cancer. We know that the nervous system influences the immune system so this could explain why the patient's beliefs and emotional state might on occasion bring about a remission. The fact that a patient had no conscious expectation of cure (as in the case reported by Dr Westcott) does not negate a possible influence of this kind.

3. believer in miracles could argue that even apparently spontaneous remissions are really miraculous. Perhaps God works his miracles through "normal" physiological pathways rather than by suspending the ordinary laws of physiology, and perhaps he refrains from curing glaucoma and regenerating amputated limbs in order to keep us guessing, or because he does not want to force our belief. This is logically possible but unverifiable, since there could be no way to identify such miracles, so the idea can be neglected in a scientific context.

Chapter 10. The Soul

_My opinion of death, brother, is [that] when a man dies, he is cast into the earth, and his wife and child sorrow over him. If he has neither wife nor child, then his father and mother, I suppose; and if he is quite alone in the world, why, then, he is cast into the earth, and that is an end of the matter. –_ George Borrow (The Romany Rye).

The idea of the soul is central to Christianity. It can be traced at least as far back as classical Greece, where Plato's account of the soul contains most of the elements that later characterised Christian theology. For Plato the soul is immortal and retains the characteristics of the living person after death. The Platonic soul is complex rather than simple, made up of differing elements. This provides for psychological struggle and uncertainty, and so can accommodate the contest between good and evil that is so prominent in Christian thought.

Nevertheless it was Aristotle rather than Plato who was to have the greater influence on Christian thought. This may appear surprising, because Aristotle's view of the soul does not leave much room for immortality or separation from the body. But Aristotle did seem to allow for separation of what he called the rational part of the soul (nous), and Christian theologians such as Thomas Aquinas extended this notion very considerably. As Rosalind Osmond says: "Nothing in Aristotle's account leads to the idea of the survival of a human soul with an individual personality, but this difficulty was largely ignored or glossed over by later Christian commentators." [Osmond, 2003]

The immortality of the soul has always been taken for granted in Christianity and the only question has been whether the soul is saved or damned. Since there is no question of reincarnation in Christianity the fate of the soul is fixed at death, and there are many references to this decisive moment in mediaeval literature. But there is an apparent inconsistency here, because – as I noted when I was writing about my Catholic upbringing – there is also supposed to be a collective judgement at the end of time, as predicted in Scripture. To reconcile this difficulty it has often been supposed that the soul exists in a disembodied form after death until the Last Judgement, when its body will be resurrected in a transfigured form and the two will be reunited. Exactly how this will work out has, not surprisingly, led to a fair amount of head-scratching among theologians.

The relentless advance of scientific understanding of how our personalities depend critically on our brains has induced increasing scepticism about the existence of the soul, but at a popular level many people continue to cling to the notion.

"Yet the desire to believe in something beyond the physical exists. It spends itself in astrology, in rigid fundamentalism, in meditative exercise, in vague reference to the numinous, in a passionate desire for past certainties." [Rosalind Osmond, 2003]

Near-death experiences

It is particularly in relation to death and the survival of death (an oxymoron, if ever there was one) that questions about the soul arise. Death may be the bourne from which no traveller returns, but in recent years there has been a spate of reports disputing this. People now recover from accidents and illnesses that would have been fatal in earlier times, and sometimes they describe what appear to be near-death experiences (NDEs) that occurred while they were apparently unconscious.

Such accounts, in fact, go back to the dawn of history and philosophy (Plato relates a semi-mythical case), but the modern interest in the phenomenon began with Raymond Moody's book _Life After_ _Life_ , published in 1975. [Moody 1975] Moody is a doctor who described cases he had come across in his patients. Another doctor, Kenneth Ring, published further studies of the same thing, beginning in 1979 [Ring 1980] and he was followed by a number of others. From all this work there emerged a "standardized" paradigm of the NDE. Although not everyone who has memories of this kind will recall all of these features, most will have at least some of them.

In a "typical" NDE you see your body from outside, and then move away down a long dark tunnel towards a bright light, where waits a Being of Light who provides a non-judgemental life review. Next, you may encounter family members who have died, and the experience may end with your being told that it isn't time for you to die and you must return to life. People who have had such experiences generally describe them as being overwhelmingly blissful. They say they felt safe and loved and didn't want to return to their bodies.

The International Association for Near-Death Experiences (IANDS) exists to study such phenomena. Peter Fenwick, a past president of the Association, is a prominent neuropsychiatrist who takes seriously the possibility that NDEs are really what many people believe them to be – windows into what happens to us after we die. Fenwick is quite clear about what this would mean. We would have to abandon most of what we think we know about the mind and the brain. "The brain identity theory – the reductionist view that consciousness is entirely dependent on brain function – then must fail, and this would have a heavy cost for science. Do not underestimate this cost."

Many writers have concluded, like Fenwick, that the NDE provides evidence of life after death, although they have to admit that the experiencers have not actually died. The alternative view is that all these experiences, no matter how fascinating, are produced by the dying brain and tell us nothing about the possibility of survival. People who have had such an experience often say that it has convinced them of the reality of survival, but Susan Blackmore is an exception, for she too has had an out-of-the-body experience which had many of the features of an NDE, so that she is able to say: "I have experienced it too and I have come to a different conclusion from you."

A different, and very interesting, approach to the NDE has been taken by Carol Zaleski, who skirts the question of whether it provides evidence of an afterlife in favour of considering what it has meant in cultural terms. In her thoughtful and impressive book _Otherworld Journeys_ she compares modern versions of the NDE with mediaeval ones, finding both resemblances and differences. To a considerable extent, it appears, the NDE has always been subjected to much cultural overlay. [Zaleski, 1987]

Zaleski suggests that we "view otherworld visions as artifacts of the imagination". The otherworld journey is essentially a narrative, and she seems to think that we ssshould approach it in the same way as we assess a novel or a play, rather than scientifically or philosophically. She refuses to commit herself on the evidential nature of NDEs, seeming to feel that this is not the right question to ask. I can't myself wholly follow her here.

Scientific interest in NDEs is relatively recent. In earlier years the evidence cited for survival came, not from NDEs, but from alleged mediumistic communications. Most rationalists automatically dismiss all such material as intrinsically worthless, not deserving to be taken seriously by anyone with a critical mind. But a few philosophers and psychologists have taken it seriously, and some of these (John McTaggart, C.D. Broad, and John Beloff) were avowed atheists. All three thought that the available evidence made survival seem at least a possibility. Broad, at any rate, could hardly be accused of wishful thinking, for he wrote: "I think I may say that for my part I should be slightly more annoyed than surprised if I should find myself in some sense persisting immediately after the death of my physical body. One can only wait and see, or alternately (which is no less likely) wait and not see." [Broad, 1966]

A more recent opinion from the academic psychologist Alan Gauld is equally non-committal.

"Certainty is not to be had, nor even a strong conviction that the area of one's uncertainty has been narrowed to a manageable compass ... a rational case, of either tendency, built on evidence, however difficult to interpret, is to be preferred to any amount of blind belief or blind disbelief." [Gauld, 1982]

Belief in survival is often equated with wishful thinking, so it is worth mentioning that neither Broad nor Gauld is particularly optimistic about the form that survival, if it occurs, might take. They think that at least some of the mediumistic reports point to temporary survival followed by a gradual fading away, which would be worse than simple extinction; or there might be survival in a zombie-like state. There are even more unpleasant possibilities, including post-mortem fusion with other entities or bits of "psychic flotsam and jetsam" that could be floating around. Perhaps we had better hope that the sceptics are right and there is no survival. Reincarnation is popular in some quarters but in view of the way the world is developing at the moment I would not welcome that possibility myself.

A personal assessment

When all is said and done, the great difficulty that all attempts to validate the survival idea encounter is the apparently one-sided dependence of the mind on the brain. No matter how much evidence is offered for survival, the contrary evidence surely outweighs it enormously. Almost all attempts to explain how survival might work seem to lead to some form of philosophical dualism – the idea that the mind and the brain are separate entities. Believers in survival find themselves pretty well obliged to resuscitate the soul in some shape or form. But the evidence from neuroscience makes it overwhelmingly probable that dualism just will not work. Which seems to rule out survival from the start.

All the same, I have to say I find Gauld, Broad, and others who have written on similar lines disturbing. Their opinions are liable to induce a measure of cognitive dissonance in people like me. While these writers may have been mistaken, it will hardly do to dismiss them as gullible fools. They are, or were, critical thinkers, with no religious axes to grind, and they have done the research, which most of us have not. So their findings pose a challenge to sceptics, or at least to a certain class of sceptics.

True and false sceptics

True scepticism, I suggest, is an uncomfortable state of mind for many people, including a good few self-styled sceptics. Ultra-scepticism can become just another belief system, which we adopt as a principle and cling to in the face of any evidence to the contrary. There can be fundamentalism within disbelief, just as there is fundamentalism within religion.

The point has been well made by the former parapsychologist Susan Blackmore in her essay Why I have given up. [In Kurtz, 2001] She thinks there is no good evidence for the paranormal but it is not inconceivable that such evidence could turn up. But many sceptics, she says, rule this out as impossible in principle and prefer to accept the most far-fetched alternative explanations rather than admit ignorance. Sceptics and true believers are often mirror images of each other.

"Yet if we are going to study psychic claims at all, we must always consider the possibility that they are true. Unlikely as it is, ESP and PK might exist. There could be forces as yet undiscovered. We should accept the best explanation we can find – not the one that we like the most. The lesson we should learn [from ESP experiments] is not that believers find it hard to be open-minded but that we all do."

I am sure this is right. Survival is exceedingly unlikely, but we would be wrong to exclude it dogmatically. The last thing we need is to allow scepticism to become yet another version of the Casaubon delusion!

Survival without the soul

So if the soul cannot exist, at least as traditionally conceived, is there any way that survival could be understood, even as a thought experiment, within a naturalistic world view? At the moment I can see two possibilities, both highly speculative.

One would be to accept that we are living in the Matrix – that we are simulations in a computer. If that is the case the problem disappears. When we "die", the simulators merely choose toss reprogram us back in again to a different part of the simulation, perhaps labelled Heaven or Hell. On this hypothesis the simulators have god-like status so far as we are concerned. I discuss the simulation idea in the next chapter so I say no more about it here.

The second possibility is even more radical and takes us into pretty deep waters. It concerns the nature of reality and of time. An atheistic philosopher who has speculated about this is Bryan Magee. In his autobiography, _Confessions of a Philosopher,_ [Magee, 1999] he describes where he stands after a lifetime of inquiry. His basic position seems to be that we can never hope to know what reality is in itself. There is something behind appearances that will always, in principle, be inaccessible to us.

He insists that believing this does not make him religious. He complains that religious believers think he makes token acknowledgement of the mystical while remaining excessively rationalistic, while rationalistic humanists think he is a kind of religious fellow-traveller. "A third alternative – that we can know very little but have equally little grounds for religious belief – receives scant consideration, and yet seems to me to be where the truth lies." This is a position I can sympathize with.

Magee sees the nature of time as being at the centre of the mystery of what reality is. Perhaps, he says, "the passage of time is unreal, an illusion, and ... in reality all time is present". He regards this question as closely bound up with that concerning the nature of the self. He is sure that there is an immaterial self, but he doubts if it has any existence apart from a body and a brain.

"My own particular self may have come into existence when or after my body did, and may cease to exist when my body dies. It may be something that has evolved over millions of years in undisentanglable relationship with brains, and may have no way of existing separately from my brain." [Magee, 1999]

But he is unsure about this, because he also suspects that our selves are in some sense outside space and time, so it is conceivable that we may not perish together with our physical bodies, though this is something we can probably never know.

Magee's suggestion that time may be unreal recalls the theory of the physicist Julian Barbour, who holds that time does not exist. He describes this idea in his book The End of Time. [Barbour, 1999] Barbour, I should emphasize, is a respected physicist, whose ideas are taken seriously by a number of other physicists and philosophers.

It is, of course, intensely difficult to make oneself understand how time could be unreal. If there is no time, what meaning can we attach to the notions of past or future, and – even more difficult to accommodate – our perception of motion? Barbour suggests that what we see as motion, in a leaping cat or a diving kingfisher, is really a series of still photographs, which are somehow brought together by the brain to produce an illusion of movement.

This recalls the very interesting fact that in certain kinds of brain damage the ability to perceive objects in motion is lost. Barbour mentions this, but not the equally interesting observation, recorded by Oliver Sacks, that some patients suffering from post-encephalitic Parkinsonism found themselves frozen in time for years, until released from this state, though only temporarily, by the drug levodopa.[Sacks, 1978]

Trying to picture oneself in a timeless state is probably something like a fish would feel if it tried to picture itself living on dry land. Our language has no vocabulary to describe this, and Barbour finds himself repeatedly forced to use temporal language to describe his theory, even though he acknowledges that this is just shorthand. Indeed, even if he is right, will it ever be possible to feel that he is? The analogy that comes to mind here is with the shift from an earth-centred to a sun-centred universe that took place in the sixteenth century. No doubt many people, and not only churchmen, found that hard to come to terms with, but the imaginative shift from a time-based to a timeless universe would be incomparably bigger.

If Barbour is right, the notion of survival would surely look entirely different. In fact, survival would presumably have no meaning because everything would be present simultaneously. Barbour is himself open to the metaphysical implications of his theory, which he thinks tend towards pantheism. "The whole universe ... is the closest we can get to a God." (This seems to have been Spinoza's position.)

There are many compelling reasons for thinking that survival is a non-starter, of which the dense interlocking of mind and brain is only one, though the strongest. Another is that it seems to depend on an absurd overestimate of our importance in the scheme of things. If humans survive, why not chimpanzees and other great apes? And monkeys? Dogs, cats? Sheep, cattle ... oysters? Where do you stop?

I have every expectation that when I die I shall go out like a light. But some very clever and well-informed people who were not religiously motivated have thought that there is at least a little evidence in favour of survival that cannot be dismissed out of hand. If this evidence should ever become more compelling than it is at present – which in the nature of things is unlikely – I hope and believe that it could be accommodated within a naturalistic world outlook. The radical view of time favoured by some physicists is just one possible framework for this.

The position I take here is close to what John R. Searle has said about God. If it should ever be demonstrated that God exists "that would have to be a fact of nature like any other. To the four basic forces in the universe – gravity, electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear forces – we would add a fifth, the divine force. Or more likely, we would see the other forces as forms of the divine force. But it would still be all physics, albeit divine physics. If the supernatural existed, it too would have to be natural." [Searle, 1999] This brings us to what is rather quaintly called metaphysical naturalism, which is the theme of my final chapter.

Chapter 11. Letting Go

_Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence does evil come? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?_ – Epicurus.

What I have been describing in this book is a perhaps rather halting progression from belief to disbelief, from religion to irreligion. This has been a process of letting go. Looking back, I am quite unable to understand how I managed to believe some of the things I did. If you are yourself a sceptic you have probably been muttering "What took you so long?", while if you are religious you will wonder why I went so pig-headedly in the wrong direction. It is time to try to sum up where I have arrived now.

I don't think religion is true but at times I can find it in me to wish it was. The Victorians felt this, and I can respond to the sadness in Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, and to Thomas Hardy's wish, in _The Oxen_ , that on Christmas Eve he might find the animals kneeling down in adoration – he was "hoping it might be so". But in other moods I am enormously relieved to be free of religious belief, and to avoid the consequent need to try to live with cognitive dissonance.

If we take this view we know we are alone. No one has given us the answers. All revealed religions and their scriptures are human productions. Like ecstatic experience, from which they may at times derive, they have to be judged by what they say and not by their claims to divin inspiration.

But perhaps we don't have to go all the way to atheism? Is there a half-way house, an escape clause? Many in the nineteenth century thought there was and some still think so today. It is called deism.

Deism – a God of the Gaps

By the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century many thinkers in the West were rejecting the notion of revealed religion. In 1823 we find Thomas Jefferson writing about Christianity to John Adams:

"... the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being ... in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors."

Jefferson was over-optimistic: the USA is still waiting for the dawn of reason he expected. But we notice that although he did not believe in Christian dogma he still refers to a supreme being. Jefferson, like many other thinkers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, was not a theist but neither was he an atheist, he was a deist. He believed that the world had been created by God but He had not revealed a religion to us. It was up to us to discover the truth by the exercise of our own reason.

Deism still has its adherents today. The philosopher Antony Flew recently caused a sensation by announcing that after a lifetime of militant atheism he now believes in God. He changed his mind because he was persuaded that the appearance of DNA in the world was so improbable an event that there must have been a Designer.

This change of mind does not mean that Flew is now a Christian, he is a deist. You don't pray to his God or worship him; he is just an explanation for a puzzle, a God of the gaps. He need not be omnipotent, simply very intelligent and powerful. Nor, of course, need he be good. In fact, he need have none of the attributes of the Christian God except the ability to design things – a sort of super-engineer.

Flew has evidently been convinced of God's existence by a version of the Argument from Design, though in the form he has expressed it one could also cite it as an example of what Dawkins has neatly termed the Argument from Personal Incredulity. And it suffers from the weakness that if a plausible explanation for the appearance of DNA could be produced, as seems perfectly possible, Flew's reason for believing in God would vanish.

Perhaps intellectual arguments of this kind may be persuasive to a professional philosopher like Flew, but they are not what inspires most religious believers, who know there is a God because they experience him in their lives and in the world. For them God is more like a perception than a belief.

Flew's argument does not convince many atheists either, most of whom expect that the origin of life will be explained in the not too distant future. But there is another version of the design argument that is less easy for them to dismiss. At the most basic structural level the universe does look uncomfortably as if it had been designed. In the words of the late Fred Hoyle, it seems to be a put-up job. In some sense the universe appears to have known we were coming.

The problem for atheists is that if certain cosmological numbers were only slightly different from their actual values the universe as we know it would not exist, and nor, obviously, would we. Various ways round this difficulty have been proposed, the prevalent one being that favoured by Martin Rees. {Rees, 1999] This is the so-called Goldilocks scenario. Our universe may not be the only one that exists. There may be innumerable universes out there, each having different laws and conditions, and among them there will by chance be some that are suitable for life. Obviously we could not exist in a universe that was not suitable for life, so of course our universe is suitable.

There are a lot of ingenious variations on this theme but they all come to more or less the same conclusion. Yet it is going to be difficult, probably impossible, to provide scientific evidence for the existence of other universes, and critics can and do object that the whole idea seems like special pleading. They can claim, with some plausibility, that the notion of a Designer is more economical.

Not that deism has all the answers either. The deist says that there must be a God to explain the universe. But then the sceptic counters by asking: who created God? You are not supposed to ask this question, the theologian replies. God is the ultimate cause, the unmoved mover, the uncaused cause. But in that case, why not stop with the universe itself? Why should the universe not be its own cause?

Actually, if you must have a Designer, it seems to me that on the facts we currently have you would be better off believing in what Plato in the Timaeus called the demiurge than in the Christian omnipotent God. This is a super-intelligent being who imposes order on chaos – on material that already existed. The universe we have is the result of his efforts. He did his best but there are still a lot of imperfections. All the problems in our world would then be the fault of the demiurge, who is powerful but not all-powerful, knowledgeable but not omniscient. And good but not all-good? That too, perhaps.

The notion of a demiurge fits the known facts quite well without the obvious difficulty of explaining illness and suffering in a world designed by a God who is both all-powerful and all-good. But who, what, and where is this demiurge? There does not seem to be a place for him in our world. One possible answer lies in an extended version of our own technology.

The simulation hypothesis

A number of philosophers and scientists have played with what could be thought of as a technological variant of Deism – the simulation hypothesis. Perhaps we really do live in the Matrix. The basic idea is that super-intelligent beings have constructed a virtual universe in a computer and are simulating us. These beings, it is suggested, could be our own descendants in the far future (although there seems to be an element of circularity in that idea) or else super-intelligent inhabitants of other worlds or even other universes. In any case, we would not be "real", and the simulators would have the status of gods so far as we are concerned.

The more I think about this scenario, in fact, the more indistinguishable it seems from the Creator God hypothesis. If you believe in a God who created the world and us, you ought to give equal credence to the idea that we are just simulations in a world of virtual reality.

As so often, there was a delightful anticipation of this by Lewis Carroll in that profoundly metaphysical book, _Through the Looking Glass_.

"[The Red King is] dreaming now," said Tweedledee: "and what do you think he's dreaming about?"

Alice said: "Nobody can guess that."

"Why, about you!" Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. "And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you'd be?"

"Where I am now, of course," said Alice.

"Not you!" Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. "You'd be nowhere. Why, you're only a sort of thing in his dream!"

"If that there King was to wake," added Tweedledum, "you'd go out – bang! – just like a candle!"

"I shouldn't!" Alice exclaimed indignantly. "Besides, if I'm only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know?"

"Ditto," said Tweedledum.

"Ditto ditto," cried Tweedledee.

He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn't help saying, "Hush! you'll be waking him, I'm afraid, if you make so much noise."

"Well, it's no use your talking about waking him," said Tweedledee, "when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real."

"I _am_ real!" said Alice, and began to cry.

"You won't make yourself a bit realler by crying," Tweedledee remarked: "there's nothing to cry about."

"If I wasn't real," Alice said– half-laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous – "I shouldn't be able to cry."

"I hope you don't suppose those are real tears?" Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.

Alice's dilemma is a very ancient one. The seventeenth-century Spanish playwright Calderón used it in his play Life is a Dream, and long before him the Chinese Taoist sage Chuang Tzu said on waking that he could not be sure if he was a man who had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly who had dreamt he was a man.

The simulation hypothesis is much like solipsism – the idea that nothing exists but me. It seems to be impossible to disprove but, as Paul Davies says, it is best ignored for that very reason.

I should say the same of deism, which I see as a cop-out. For many eighteenth and nineteenth century thinkers it seems to have been a half-way house to atheism – a step they were emotionally unwilling to take. In this they were at one with most people throughout history. In fact, the attempt to eliminate religion is almost certainly never going to succeed. At all times and places most people have been religious. It is not belief that requires explanation but nonbelief. As Taner Edis has written, "For most people, learning to do without a God is a costly undertaking for no clear benefit." [Edis, 2002]

Naturalism

Yet, for whatever psychological reasons, this is not my position. I prefer to go the whole hog and have learned to do without God. The way I now like to think of these things has been beautifully expressed by Lee Smolin.

"The world will always be here, and it will always be different, more varied, more interesting, more alive, but still always the world in all its complexity and incompleteness. There is nothing behind it, no absolute or platonic world to transcend to. All there is of Nature is what is around us. All there is of Being is relations among real, sensible things. All we have of natural law is a world that has made itself. All we may expect of human law is what we can negotiate among ourselves, and what we take as our responsibility." [Smolin, 1997]

I love this almost lyrical passage, taken from a book about science, because it gives the lie to those who say that if you don't believe in the supernatural you lack poetry and vision.

In more prosaic philosophical terms, the position Smolin describes here is called naturalism. This always seems to me an odd word. To describe oneself as a naturalist might suggest that one spends most of one's time out in the country studying beetles, but in the present context it refers to a particular philosophical outlook. It takes two forms, one more radical than the other.

Methodological naturalism is the application of naturalism to science. It assumes that science can be practised without referring to anything outside the natural world, though it leaves room for the existence of the supernatural, including the idea that there is a God who started the whole thing off. Scientists who are also religious believers will therefore be methodological naturalists.

Metaphysical naturalism (also called ontological naturalism) is the more radical position that there is nothing apart from nature. For a slightly more technical definition, here is the beginning of the entry in Wikipedia.

"Metaphysical naturalism is any worldview in which the world is amenable to a unified study that includes the natural sciences and in this sense the world is a unity. According to such a view, nature is all there is, and all things supernatural (which stipulatively includes spirits and souls, non-natural values, and universals as they are commonly conceived) do not exist. [Wikipedia, "Metaphysical Naturalism"]

So on this view there is no God. Everything that exists is in principle capable of being studied and explained by science, although in practice, of course, our minds and resources may not be up to the task. This is how I see things myself.

This position is called "metaphysical" because it can't be proved to be true. There is no conclusive evidence either way, so it is an agnostic view. Adopting it is, in a sense, a choice we make.

But what does it really mean to say we choose to believe something? We wish to say we believe on rational grounds, and we can usually supply reasons for what we believe. But as I said in Chapter 2 when I described my loss of belief in Catholicism, I think that many of our beliefs arise from brain processes that are not accessible to consciousness.

This is quite similar to what happens when we think we perform a willed action. Daniel M. Wegner has made what I think is a convincing case, based on experiment rather than philosophy, for the theory that the conscious will is an illusion. [Wegner, 2002] There are two pathways to action, he suggests. There is the "real" but unconscious pathway that produces the action, and a second "apparent" pathway that produces the illusion of conscious initiation of action. This is certainly a disturbing idea – where does it leave our ordinary ideas of justice, retribution, responsibility and so on? But I suspect it is right, and some very recent research supports the idea. [Soon C.S., Brass M. and others, "Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain". Online Brief Communication Abstract, Nature Neuroscience, 13 April 2008.]

Wegner says that free will is best understood as an emotion – "authorship emotion". Belief, I should say, is produced in just the same way as our willed actions – it is "belief emotion". We imagine we arrive at our beliefs rationally, after weighing up the evidence, but all this happens after we have formed the belief, it is not what gives rise to the belief in the first place. There is a vast amount of brain activity going on that never reaches consciousness, just as the pictures on our television screens are produced by electrical activity we cannot detect and few of us understand except in the vaguest way.

The emotional character of belief explains why it is so firmly held, particularly in matters of politics and religion, and why such convictions are notoriously impossible to alter by argument. When our opinions about such matters do change, the new outlook simply emerges in our mind as a given, and we then find the reasons that show why we are right.

This has been my own experience. At various times in my life I held other views, but now I find I am a metaphysical naturalist. I am sure that this a rational view to hold, but I am also sure that I have adopted it because it feels right for me. And I continue to recognize its provisional nature, which is – I hope – my insurance against falling into the Casaubon delusion.

What it means in practice

One reason that many people have for rejecting metaphysical naturalism is that it appears to be a bleak view. It means that no one is in charge. No seers in the Himalayas gave us the Truth in sacred texts at the dawn of time. There is no Hidden Directorate in Central Asia or anywhere else. Whatever messes we make we will have to clear up ourselves if we can. No one will come to rescue us: no visitors from outer space, no angels, no Saviour at the end of the world to make everything right. So there is no plan in human history – no scheme of redemption, no divinely ordained purpose.

There is no plan in prehistory either. Evolution is a mindless process with no goal in prospect; it was not set up to produce us. The probable reason the dinosaurs are not still here now is that the Earth was struck by a meteorite 65 million years ago. But unless you wish to picture God hurling a thunderbolt at the Earth and calling out: "Time's up for you, Dinosaurs; make way for the mammals!" this was a purely chance event, which might perfectly well not have occurred. It is easy to imagine a world still populated by dinosaurs.

Nor was their extinction the only or even the biggest such world-reshaping disaster to hit our planet. The great extinction at the end of the Permian, about 251 million years ago, was much bigger, resulting in the loss of more than 90 per cent of the species on Earth – and those that did survive probably did so mainly by good luck. We're here, but we might easily not have been. So we had better make the most of the opportunity chance has given us.

This view is not bleak for me. In fact, I prefer it to the main alternative, which is to suppose that there is a puppet-master up there pulling the strings. All the same, I can sympathize with those who seek to preserve a shred of purpose in their view of life, even though they reject any kind of God.

The religious temperament

There seem to be two classes of atheists. One group, who might be called untroubled atheists, consists of those who never had a religious belief or lost it quite early in life and never thought much about it again. Examples are Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Jonathan Miller. The second group is that of the troubled atheists: many nineteenth-century unbelievers were in this category and more recent examples include Iris Murdoch and Marghanita Laski. The people in this group don't necessarily regret their atheism or wish they could believe (though some do), but they recognize that the questions religion seeks to answer are important and think religion as a phenomenon deserves being taken seriously.

Another way of describing the same difference is in terms of what has been called the religious temperament. Thomas Nagel is an atheist philosopher who says he has this temperament, which he describes as a disposition to seek a view of the world that is similar to that provided by religion though it is not religious. Not only does he not believe in God, he actively doesn't want there to be a God. At the same time he is unable to dismiss as meaningless the kinds of questions that religion traditionally has sought to answer. The ultimate example of this is what he calls the cosmic question, which is: How can we find a relation to the universe at the deepest level?

This question is regarded as meaningless by most atheists and as in any case insoluble, therefore not worth considering. But Nagel finds it to be inescapable. He discusses it at length in his impressive essay Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament, which I recommend to anyone who discerns this characteristic in themselves.

As I have said, not everyone does. David Hume, Nagel thinks, is the major philosopher who most conspicuously lacks the religious temperament, though he is certainly not unique. Hume's outlook, which Nagel believes is probably dominant among atheists, places physical science at the top of the hierarchy of understanding for the universe as a whole. But the universe revealed by chemistry and physics, however beautiful and awe-inspiring, is meaningless – it is incapable of meaning. We can get a lot of aesthetic and intellectual satisfaction out of trying to understand it but we will never find that this provides a reason why we are here.

This way of thinking, Nagel complains, renders our situation in the ultimate analysis absurd – a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. He wants to escape from this depressing prospect by finding a way of integrating our life with the cosmos as a whole.

At this point we are often told that the answer is humanism. Many atheists say that human life provides us with the best answer we can expect, which is that the human species or community gives meaning to our individual lives, and this is the nearest we can come to a world soul. I have never thought that this is an adequate response and I am glad to find that Nagel doesn't either. Our life is too parochial, too limited, for it to work. Moreover, I can't see that humanity is such a resounding success that it could serve as an answer to the cosmic question. I therefore don't like to describe myself as a humanist.

Nagel thinks, or hopes, that it may be possible to find an answer by seeking an element of purpose (teleology) in the way the universe is constituted, though of course without postulating a Creator of any sort to back it up. He acknowledges that this attempt to find even a vestige of meaning – he recognizes that it will not be much more than that – may fail. "In that case, since the cosmic question won't go away and humanism is too feeble an answer, the absurd has my vote."

Paul Davies is a scientist who also seems to have the religious temperament and, like Nagel, favours some kind of purpose-based (teleological) theory to explain the existence of minds. Teleology is very unfashionable in science today, largely because it seems to offer a toehold for religion, but Davies says that it could be accommodated within science if we accept the possibility of backward causation in time, which would allow observers today or in the future to help shape the nature of reality in the past. This might lead to a self-explaining universe, with no need to postulate anything else to account for it. The idea certainly sounds very odd but apparently it is scientifically at least semi-respectable. Like Nagel, however, Davies realizes that it would not be a substitute for religion – at most it would be "science with a friendly face".

If you find these last ideas difficult to come to terms with, you are not alone; it seems that Davies does too. He concludes his book as follows:

"The whole paraphernalia of gods and laws, of space, time and matter, of purpose and design, rationality and absurdity,meaning and mystery, may yet be swept away and replaced by revelations as yet undreamt of." [Davies, 2006]

I can go along with that. It seems to me self-evident that our present understanding of the material universe must be quite partial and inadequate. Less than a century has passed since astronomers believed that our galaxy was the whole universe. Then they discovered that there are more galaxies than we can count, and the universe may even be infinite. Now there is a recognized science of cosmology, in which questions about the origin of the universe, which used to be confined to theology, can be discussed in a secular context. The world as we now understand it would have been inconceivable to the scientists of the nineteenth century. Who knows what it will look like in two hundred years, always assuming that our civilization endures that long? So I am very far from thinking that we have all the answers or even all the questions.

In fact, I would go further. Our brains have evolved to deal with practical matters such as not falling over cliffs, avoiding predators, and finding food, shelter and mates. It is astonishing that they are also capable of speculating about highly abstract questions such as the origin of the universe. It seems quite likely that there are other matters that we are incapable of thinking about, just as a chimpanzee is incapable of thinking about quantum mechanics.

But some people then go on to say that our ignorance makes it arrogant to reject all religious answers. "How can you do this," they say, "when there is so much you don't know? Why shouldn't there be a supernatural realm as well as this one?" But if there is something we are incapable of thinking about we can't even know that we are incapable! Anyway, this is where I stop. Having been involved in at least two major totality beliefs in the course of my life I now prefer to let go of all such metaphysical speculations.

I didn't always think this way. For much of my life I supposed I had the religious temperament; but now I find I don't, or if I do, it is to a smaller extent than I thought. I can understand why many people feel the need for this dimension in their lives but I see I can live without it. I don't have any great psychological difficulty in accepting that our existence is absurd.

It isn't a loss. Most things stay the same. Morality has no necessary dependence on one's metaphysical beliefs so my behaviour is probably no worse than it would be if I were a believer. As for a sense of wonder at the world, that is as strong as ever, perhaps even stronger since I think we have nothing else to look forward to. The disappearance of species which our short-sighted greed and profligacy is bringing about is all the harder to bear for that. I would rather burn the Mona Lisa than destroy a species.

I find nowadays that I can simply let go of the ultimate questions. I no longer feel a compelling need for a totality answer. Here I am in agreement with Richard Feynman, who said "I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell". [Edited transcript of a BBC Horizon interview in 1981]

I know this is a minority view. Most people, at all times and in all places, have wanted certainties, and most have tended to believe in an unseen world. It is often said that the refusal to do so comes from intellectual arrogance, an over-valuing of the rational mind at the expense of the imagination. This was William Blake's view and he is often quoted today by those who want to disparage the values of the Enlightenment in favour of mysticism and intuition. But I don't think that rationality and imagination are mutually exclusive, as the passage from Lee Smolin I quoted just now shows. We need imagination, but we have always to check our creative intuitions against reality. This is what Marghanita Laski's theory of ecstasy implies, and she was right.

There nevertheless may be a price to pay for lacking religious belief. Many studies over the last twenty years have concluded that having a religious outlook and participating in some kind of religious ritual have psychological benefits. People who do these things tend to live longer, healthier lives than those who don't.

It is not entirely clear how we should interpret these studies, but even if they are valid, what follows? One can't believe to order. It is apparently possible to participate in the life of the Church without believing in its dogmas, as do, for example, Martin Rees and Ursula Goodenough. But I think you have to have the religious temperament for this option to work, and it wouldn't work for me – I have always found church boring. It is a bit like tea-drinking, which is also supposed to be good for you; but if, like me, you can't stand the taste of tea, you won't drink it no matter how healthy a choice it may be.

I am quite prepared to believe that lack of religious sensibility is a congenital deficiency in me. It may be like being tone deaf: a disability you are stuck with that cuts you off from an area of experience that most other people enjoy. But if lacking religious sensibility has a cost for the individual, as perhaps it may, the cost for society is probably more serious. As other atheists have said, the decline in religious belief – if it continues – represents "an impoverishment, a drying up of the one of the deeper springs from which the human imagination in time past has been nourished". [Dodds, 1977] Our mainly post-religious society, obsessed as its members often are with having a good time and hang the consequences, is dysfunctional in many ways and one can understand why traditional believers, especially Muslims, dislike and despise it.

For as long as we have been fully human, it seems, we have believed in and sometimes experienced an unseen world of spirits, and whether we can live without that awareness, illusory though it may be, is still uncertain. What, if anything, should or can be done about it, I have no idea.

I think that if there was one thing I would like to know before I die it is whether there is any other intelligent life in the universe. Everything seems to hinge on that. If there is, our disappearance from the scene would be bad for us but would not make much difference in the grand scheme of things. If there isn't, perhaps we over-value intelligence.

There is no doubt of the importance – to us – of intelligence. It is what distinguishes us from the rest of life on this planet. Language, art, philosophy, and science are supremely significant – for us. Indeed, they are all the more important for possibly being unique in the galaxy or even the universe. But this does not mean that the universe exists to produce minds. The belief that it does may be the last stronghold of anthropocentrism, the ultimate hubristic delusion. (Do insects, bats and birds believe that the purpose of the universe is to produce creatures with wings?)

Whether this is so or not, the universe will go on in its appointed course and finally dissolve into nothingness, be reborn, or do something else we cannot conceive of. Long before that happens our sun will have expanded into a red giant and swallowed us up. But we may not have to wait that long for our end; in fact, at the present rate of progress it may take less than a hundred years. Martin Rees does not give our civilization a better than 50:50 chance of making it until the end of this century. [Rees, 2003]

Would it matter? It would to us. Life would go on and would recover from our depredations, but it would take a long time. After most of the mass extinctions in the past it has taken about 10 million years for life to regain its former diversity. That is about five times as long as creatures we would think of as approximately human have been on earth, so it is not going to help us much. (Dawkins has speculated, not very seriously, that after a man-made disaster resulting in large-scale extinction, rats would survive and there might arise a species of intelligent rodent.)

But even if we succeed in avoiding disaster, which at a minimum will require us to prevent catastrophic climate change, the longer term does not look brilliant. Stephen Oppenheimer remarks that the effects of global warming could be little more than a blip on the way to the next glacial maximum, [Oppenheimer, 2003] and Richard Fortey is still more pessimistic, comparing mankind to a "parasitic tick gorging himself on temporary plenty while the seas are low and the climate comparatively clement. But the present arrangement will change, and with it our brief supremacy." [Fortey, 2004]

The very continents we stand on and fight over are shifting under our feet. All the land masses have come together in supercontinents several times in the prehistory of the Earth and it will happen again. When it does, the conditions for life will become all but intolerable both on the land and in the ocean. Nothing stays the same, nothing is constant. ("All that arises, ceases"– the Buddha]

My favourite Shakespeare play has long been _The Tempest_ , and particularly these lines which, for me, say it all.

These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a wrack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

Appendix: References for Chapter 9

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Heim M.E., Kobele C. Spontaneous remission in cancer. Onkologie, 18(5) (pp 388-392), 1995.

Heim M., Schwarz R. Spontaneous remission of cancer: Epidemiological and psychosozial aspects. Zeitschrift Fuer Psychosomatische Medizin und Psychotherapie, 46(1) (pp 57-70), 2000.

Hellstrom P.A., Malinen L., Malinen H. Spontaneous remission of bladder neoplasm. European Journal of Surgical Oncology, 18(5) (pp 521-523), 1992.

Herbert V. Unproven (questionable) dietary and nutritional methods in cancer prevention and treatment. Cancer, 58(8 SUPPL.) (pp 1930-1941), 1986.

Hercbergs A. Spontaneous remission of cancer – A thyroid hormone dependent phenomenon? Anticancer Research, 19(6A) (pp 4839-4844), 1999.

Hercbergs A., Leith J.T. Spontaneous remission of metastatic lung cancer following myxedema coma. Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 85(16) (pp 1342-1343), 1993.

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Schmidt W. Spontaneous remission of a cancer of the right lung, following left side pneumonectomy because of squamous cell lung cancer, four years ago. Atemwegs und Lungenkrankheiten, 21(10) (pp 536-538), 1995.

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