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July 2008 
The Yoga of Skepticism
Posted on Mar 21st, 2006
by 
Bill
Bill
I started out exploring the topic of non-ordinary experiences, psychic phenomena, and the like in a state of maximum credulity.
I was eleven years old and ready and willing to believe anything, anything at all, was possible.
I started out doing occult rituals and meditations I found in various books, as experiments, to see if they worked. And I instantly discovered altered consciousness, altho I didn't know that was what I had discovered at the time, I only knew that if I did certain things I got these various types of feelings in the body, and that my mind would race, filled with images, thoughts, and ideas. And that I rather liked it.
So I studied more and more, and did more and more practices, exercises, rituals, and that type of thing. I was able to see auras, do astral projection, concentrate 'energies' in my 'energy body' and make other people feel them, and apparently cause this and that kind of effect with those 'energies'. I learned to communicate with entities, angels, gods and goddeses, the 'higher self', aliens, all the usual suspects. Talking with God was effortless. Complex Visions were commonplace. At the very least I had proven to myself that with the right type of training non-ordinary experiences could be had by almost anyone.
One principle guided me thru all of this. "Be true to the experience". Look directly at the experience itself, and not the descriptions from books or from other people, and try to understand the experience as it was, not as I wanted it to be.
This is still the most powerful Yoga I know. Be True to the Experience. Be truthful to yourself about the experience.
And now, 38 years later, because it is my displine to be true to the experience, I have a new practice, the Yoga of Skepticism.
Most people interested in the spiritual experience are afraid of skepticism. (except when it is applied to the brands of yoga they don't happen to like.) They are afraid that skepticism will collapse the delicacy of the non-ordinary experience, that it will dispell the "willful suspension of disbelief" that is in some ways the secret of all spirituality.
It doesn't. Skepticism is the mystic's closest friend. It purifies and exalts the true. It cleanses the experience of the storylines and folklores which contaminate it's meaning. It reveals the Self and the No-Self and orients them in the center of a real universe.
Skepticism is the most beautiful and sublime of Yogas.
Be True To Your Experience. Look at it directly, without trying to make it fit any mold. Don't believe anything, one way or the other, just see for yourself. Be skeptical of the old storys and the trdaitional answers. This practice leads to amazing wonders.
---
Sorry to get all mystical and shit on everybody here, occupational hazard.... ;-}
I was eleven years old and ready and willing to believe anything, anything at all, was possible.
I started out doing occult rituals and meditations I found in various books, as experiments, to see if they worked. And I instantly discovered altered consciousness, altho I didn't know that was what I had discovered at the time, I only knew that if I did certain things I got these various types of feelings in the body, and that my mind would race, filled with images, thoughts, and ideas. And that I rather liked it.
So I studied more and more, and did more and more practices, exercises, rituals, and that type of thing. I was able to see auras, do astral projection, concentrate 'energies' in my 'energy body' and make other people feel them, and apparently cause this and that kind of effect with those 'energies'. I learned to communicate with entities, angels, gods and goddeses, the 'higher self', aliens, all the usual suspects. Talking with God was effortless. Complex Visions were commonplace. At the very least I had proven to myself that with the right type of training non-ordinary experiences could be had by almost anyone.
One principle guided me thru all of this. "Be true to the experience". Look directly at the experience itself, and not the descriptions from books or from other people, and try to understand the experience as it was, not as I wanted it to be.
This is still the most powerful Yoga I know. Be True to the Experience. Be truthful to yourself about the experience.
And now, 38 years later, because it is my displine to be true to the experience, I have a new practice, the Yoga of Skepticism.
Most people interested in the spiritual experience are afraid of skepticism. (except when it is applied to the brands of yoga they don't happen to like.) They are afraid that skepticism will collapse the delicacy of the non-ordinary experience, that it will dispell the "willful suspension of disbelief" that is in some ways the secret of all spirituality.
It doesn't. Skepticism is the mystic's closest friend. It purifies and exalts the true. It cleanses the experience of the storylines and folklores which contaminate it's meaning. It reveals the Self and the No-Self and orients them in the center of a real universe.
Skepticism is the most beautiful and sublime of Yogas.
Be True To Your Experience. Look at it directly, without trying to make it fit any mold. Don't believe anything, one way or the other, just see for yourself. Be skeptical of the old storys and the trdaitional answers. This practice leads to amazing wonders.
---
Sorry to get all mystical and shit on everybody here, occupational hazard.... ;-}
Access: Public
Ah ha! Wonderful teaching. This is the part I like: Don’t believe in anything.
My thoughts exactly. I either know, as in ouch that’s hot…, or I don’t know, as in how deep is the ocean?
As a child I distrusted the word believe because it had ‘lie’ right there in the middle it it.
Blessings.
Hi Arpana, yeah, well, I have this minor tendency to burst into ecstasy, and sometimes the prose just has to follow along. ;-} But, I've been putting on the mind of skepticism in some of my conversations and I wanted to have something to point to that explains how i am viewing and using skepticism as a spiritual discipline.
I dig your profile. Serial religious immersion as the path beyond belief. Nice stuff. Me too. An excellent discipline.
What you say here, Bill, reminds me of a bit from the book Jacob Atabet, by Michael Murphy. Near the end, one of the main characters has had a breakthrough, and the person facilitating him says “What do you see?”
The character answers, “Well, it looks like a city of lights….” or something like that, and the facilitator says, “No! Don’t tell me what it LOOKS LIKE. Tell me WHAT YOU SEE.”
Following the analogy, most of the time, most of us want to say that something looks like something else, that it reminds us of something else or is similar, but we do that so that we don’t have to face the nakedness of the perception in all its original glory, whatever that might be.
Actually what we see may also not turn out to be what actually it is!! Rather, we need to observe. By observing we are detached from the object.
I like your blogs. Please do visit my latest blogs and write a few lines of comments.
That's an extremely important observation, Kalyan.
As you suggest, we need to watch closely _over time_. And we need to keep an open mind all the while, and not let our first thoughts and judgements and guesses cloud our observing.
And most important of all, we need to watch especially carefully for dissonances, for the things that don't fit, for the things we can't explain. That's where the juiciest stuff lies, not in what we think we know, but in what confuses us.
Most people tend to love what they know, and this is natural enough. But the wisest people love what they _don't know_. They look for it everywhere.
Observe, obschmerv. Sometimes you have to ACT … and if that means by SEEing, then it is by SEEing. Perhaps the current state of world affairs comes from too much Observing and not enough Seeing and then Doing.
(Oops, the Aries Sun and Moon just got away from me on my birthday…)
Well, that depends on the level you're operating in.
If what you are observing is a potential mate, you gotta bust a move.
But if what you are observing is the movement of the stars or the way the mind constructs the experience of an “aura”, there's no big hurry. ;-}
I guess I should say, “the apparent movement of the stars”…
Well, what if you are observing how reality is co-created before you, on a variety of levels? That’s both something that has been ongoing since the apparent movement of the stars started, and yet it is something that changes, in real time, all the time.
Well, Jordan, as you already know, there’s not much hurry about that either.
Certainly nothing like the hurry a shapely human form, or a hurtling rock, demands.
But I sure do enjoy looking at the manufacture of apparent reality, and as close as I can, to the stuffness of actual reality too.
Actual stuffness is so damn quick, tho, and these brains only resolve normally at a few fractions of a second, so you gotta be on your toes to see stuffness.
Or, you got to be taking advantage of the time-bending filters already built into our systems. Precognition is a survival adaptation…
What exactly is this Yoga of Skepticism? Simply looking at everything with the mind of a skeptic!! That is, disbelieve everything around you. Even the fact that you are existing, breathing, eating, drinking….!! It is the anceint principle of “Neti, Neti” of the Vedas. Not this, Not that..
For me it is all about soaking in everything around me. My concepts and perceptions keep changing, every moment. I have a new line thinking every now and then. I believe in miracles, the unexplained, the beyond. I find no reason not to believe in what my senses don't perceive. This life is one of immense possibilities. Maybe, one day I can transcend and move on to the beyond. Maybe, one day I can discover my capacity to dissolve, transmute and recover this physical form out of thin air, so to speak. These are possibilities,…
How does the Yoga of Skepticism differ from Descartes “hyperbolic doubt,” the doubting of everything (except that he was doubting), which, in part, at least from the perspective of intellectual history, has led to our current world crisis?
Kalyan, I just wanted to say, I love the neti neti practice, it has been a favorite discipline of mine since I first learned about it at the age of 17, in my first college level religious studies class. It's principle has been a guide to me all these years.
“Is this enlightenment?”. “Not This, Not That.”.
I think of the Yoga Of Skepticism as learning how to remain poised between belief and disbelief, to require neither acceptance or rejection of each idea in the flow of ideas.
Sometimes this comes off as materialism or reductionism, but as I see it, that reaction is just an understandable mild discomfort at my declining to believe or disbelieve the storylines of the people involved.
Everybody is understandably invested in the storylines they tell - but their investment doesn't mean their storylines aren't a comfortable fiction.
Jordan, I'm not up on my Descarte these days, so I'm not sure if 'hyberbolic doubt' and the Yoga of Skepticism might not be the same thing. But I tend to think they are not. Descartes “doubt” sounds like a reaction to the extreme 'faithiness' of his time.
The Yoga of Skepticism was started from a single question I asked myself a few years ago.
The question was, “Suppose all the siddhis and all the extraordinary claims of all the practicioners and gurus were fictions, with no substance? Would this mean that enlightenment meant nothing? Or is there value in enlightenment even if all the claims and stories were false?”.
Or, to paraphrase the question, “Should one pursue enlightenment, even if there is no reward?”.
The only way to start answering that question, is to need neither to believe, nor to disbelieve. To learn how to perceive _fiction_, especially the fiction that one thinks is true.
Bill,
Descartes, so the story goes, locked himself in a stove (to keep warm) overnight and decided that he would get to the roots of knowledge by doubting … everything. The one thing he could not doubt, however, was the fact that he was doubting. Hence, Cogito Ergo Sum, “I think, therefore I am.” Perhaps it is not, as you suspect, really related.
When you posit the possibility that all the extraordinary claims “were fictons, with no substance,” are you suggesting they don’t happen at all, or they happen but are irrelevant? I, for one, know they happen. Why, in fact, you are among the strongest generators of these phenomena that I’ve ever encountered.
So, you must, it seems to me, be suggesting that they are irrelevant, which is close to the warnings given by the Traditions to totally ignore, and perhaps even eschew, these powers and phenomena.
But underneath all that, I like what I understand of your Yoga of Skepticism: assume it is all a fiction, even that which you most ferverently believe and experience as not being a fiction. Given that, then where is one?
I'm a bit late for the dance on this one, but:
I heartily agree with you, Bill. My interpretation of your “Yoga of Skepticism” ties into Crowley's caveat that the student is “earnestly warned against attributing objective reality to any of these phenomena,” and that the most qualifiable results come from energized enthusiasm “without lust of result.” This seems a strange paradox as, more often than not, a student of the occult has begun his studies with precisely these two ends in mind: to experience objective reality, and to obtain some results from his practice. It also seems an insidious trick to dangle the carrot of sidhis in front of a novice to entice them into interest in a system, and then tell them they must forego the carrot altogether yet keep on running. I too wondered for a while whether or not all the talk and vague promises of praeternatural phenomena were just a bunch of hocus-pocus meant to distract and amaze. I don't care anymore whether or not they are “real” or “fake”, as such. Subjectively they exist. And since my subjectivity shapes my “reality” – no matter how much I protest – they have a direct bearing on the way I live my life. They are not party tricks, but mile markers on my road. For me to say categorically, because I've been able to describe an item hidden on someone's person, that therefore no object can escape my notice and knowledge of everything is available to everyone, well, that amounts to cock-sure dogma and grandiose fanaticism. The question, then, for me is: “Is being enlightened preferable to remaining unenlightened?” And the answer is a resounding yes. It's about the exploration of the world and the opening of mind. And if some far-out shit happens along the way, cool.
It's interesting to note that with all religion, spirituality, and occultism, there's a built-in “lure”. Some kind of reward, almost always a reward that gives the individual _a special advantage over others_, is built into the package. I don't think we can find an example of a religion or a 'spiritual' practice that doesn't have a reward - if they occur, they don't last long.
Certainly when I first started studying this stuff, I wanted occult powers. Then as the years passed and my understanding of this stuff became more sophisticated, my sense of the rewards became more sophisticated.
Now, other human culture and knowledge streams have rewards too - metallurgy, medicine, music, if you study any one of those long enough you have a knowledge that can be used and sold.
The reward promised in religion and spirituality is more intimate - not just something you can make and sell, it's a direct, fundamental _power over_ or a heirarchical supremacy - “I am better than you because I will go to heaven and my religion says you will not.”.
If you model religion and 'spirituality/occultism' as a meme, a promise of intimate reward element like that, makes a lot of sense.
——————–
As far as the active manifestation and use of the siddhis is concerned, if you examine them closely, “neither believing nor disbelieving but observing closely and remembering and recording” (which is my definition of the yoga of skepticism), you will soon start sto see that there is something very strange about the siddhis.
When I was younger I tried to explain this 'strangeness' with the idea of the “law of the conservation of synchronicity” - That there is a limit to the amount of sychronicity that can be expended in any given situation, which limits the amount of effect the siddhis can produce in any given situation.
But there are alternative possible explanations… ;-}
I always found your use of (Robert Anton Wilson’s?) conept of “sychronicity control, ” or the ability to increase the intensity of syncrhonicity, pretty useful. My memory as to the limits as to how much synchronicity could flow was that it wasn’t so much about getting past some kind of “conservation boundary,” but that if you went too far past wherever you were it would potentially become not just outright fundamentally weird, but actually dangerous. (But maybe those two are the same if it gets weird enough … how much “juice” can the old human brain/body/genes interface take before it starts shaking apart, perhaps to come together at a higher level, perhaps not…)
Sure, everyone loves a big payoff. We're all endorphin junkies. It's almost as if we were engineered to strive towards something…
When you say that there is something “strange about the siddhis,” and that it may have something to do with “conservation of synchronicity,” do you mean that synchronicity, like energy, cannot be created nor destroyed and that if a majority of it is in use at the moment (say, across the globe), as it were, then you can only utilize the remainder? Or do you mean that we, as individuals, “store up” synchronicity and must mete it out in doses? Or both?
Have you read anything by Ingo Swann? He was involved in government sponsored research into remote viewing during the Cold War, and he speaks of remote viewing as being one point on the spectrum of possible siddhis available to humans. What's interesting is that he proposes that we humans have a great deal of sensory information bombarding us all the time (think Borges' story, “Funes, the Memorious”), and that we only “perceive” a small portion of it according to the greater or lesser fallibility of our sensory transducers (i.e. – translation of acoustic, light, or other waves into an “understanding” of their meaning and significance by our brains), and that if the proper mental information grids and sensory transducers were constructed then we could theoretically consciously control such things as “intuition”, access to the “Akashic record”, and perhaps even our own non-local influence over things and events. If this were the case then, to my understanding, the “conservation of synchronicity” would lose all significance. With efficient mental apparatus we should ideally be able to see the synchronicity inherent in everything and be able to act or not act upon it.
Anyway, this seems to be a boiled-down version of what all the systems say. For instance Buddhism's “right seeing” and the “awakening” of the Bible which lead to enlightened states. I much prefer Swann's no-frills context. Don't get me wrong, I love the poetry of holy writ and concede its inspirational powers, but for sober, active self-transformation purple prose is distracting.
Bill wrote:
“Skepticism is the mystic’s closest friend. It purifies and exalts the true. It cleanses the experience of the storylines and folklores which contaminate it’s meaning. It reveals the Self and the No-Self and orients them in the center of a real universe.”
Oh this is going on my fridge for sure! “Purifies and exalts the true….” Totally!
Skepticism is not about never believing in anything; it is about having high standards for truth. It clears a path for realization which, in this sense, could be described as requiring ultimate standards for truth.