The Science of Mind

I imagine a large transparent sphere. All the spiritual and religious traditions are on the surface of the sphere looking in toward the center. There is a tiny little black ball in the center called “The Truth”, and everybody has a different view of “The Truth”, but they are all seeing the same Truth. I have visited the site of the Science of Mind (a certain spiritual tradition that I have studied) observatory on the surface of that sphere and peered toward that little black ball, and the Vedantic site and the Buddhist site and the Taoist site and the Christian site, and even the Sufi site. I am certain that they are all looking at the same little black ball, but it looks a bit different when you look at it from those different angles. I have also discovered that there are lots of people at each site, a few of which are highly intelligent and many who are idiots. The descriptions of the intelligent ones all sound roughly the same, no matter what site they are at, while the idiots fight, defending their misunderstandings of their own religions.

It seems to me that most people think spirituality is about being good, moral, pure, kind, gentle and helpful. I don't believe that at all, because all of those qualities exist as one pole of a duality, and I don't believe that spirit lives in the world of duality. Rather, I believe that if there is spirit, then spirit has to transcend duality.

So Kali (a Hindu goddess who hangs around graveyards and adorns herself with a necklace of human skulls) and Lucifer (one of God's nastier angels) are portrayed as fearsome and even evil, yet they are divine beings. If God created the world, then God must have been the creator of evil, and what was there laying around to create it out of but himself? God is the source of duality, but transcends duality.

It is obvious that nothing in the world of duality can be infinite, omnipotent or omniscient, so a belief in spirit (or God) who has all of these qualities is inconsistent with a belief that "God is good". I don't believe that God is good. God must transcend the good-bad duality.

If God is transcendental, then any conception of God's nature will be a wrong conception. So the first line of the Tao Teh Ching says, "That Tao which can be spoken of is not the true Tao". And the Muslims forbid images of God and the Jews forbid speaking God's name and Moses got pretty pissed off about that golden calf, if I remember correctly. They all warn against the conceptualization of God.

A false belief that my essential nature (my Godness) is "of the world" of duality is the core essential mistake from which all of my suffering springs. The belief in the primacy of duality is the original sin. Remember that Adam and Eve "ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" (they fell into the duality trap), and that right there was the end of the good times.

Therefore, in my opinion, the job of a spiritual practitioner is to negate the false belief that duality is the fundamental fabric of existence. And that negation is the spiritual practitioner's only job. We should forget about saving the world... that's a mission dreamed up by a mind caught in the duality trap. I think that when we fix our false belief, our world will fix itself, or perhaps we will finally realize that there was never anything wrong with the world, only our perception of it.

I think the exoteric message (for the new students) of the Science of Mind is, “you can get what you want by praying in this scientific manner that we teach”. The esoteric message (for the mature students) is that this technique of meditation and prayer has as its purpose the negation of the false belief that duality is the fundamental fabric of existence.