To Vedanta folks about events and deep spirit in Iran

Just a few months ago, one of the sponsors of this list organized a major conference in Mumbai (which we discussed at the time) on interfaith dialogue with Iran. I regretted not being able to just pay my own way and come, because I am living off of a retirement pension now -- comfortable enough if I do not spend unnecessarily.

What I regretted most was missing a chance to connect with Mohsen Qomi,  one of the key speakers. Given his role on the program, I did a web search, and learned that he is a really key adviser of Khamanei, and a really powerful thought leader in Iran. But I was baffled by a huge dichotomy in his thinking:

(1) On the one side, he has stressed the importance of developing spirit and not just formalisms, and been emphatic that the formalistic faithful and total materialists are equally abhorrent. This is really central to our human spiritual reality as I see it, and it is exciting to see someone in a position of power who claims the same foundations.

(2) But in many writings, he urges something which looks like a mindless racist crusade to kill all Americans and Israelis. People from those nations have made many mistakes, but so have people from all nations on earth, and uncompromising hatred as a primary value can contaminate everything else, including even (1) itself. 

The events of the past week suggest that we are not called to put these difficulties on a back burner. Donald Trump's comments about Iran remind me of his comments about the FBI; it is good that he cares, but it would be helpful if he said less when he doesn't quite understand what is going on. (My wife says the same about some of my recent efforts to make sense of hairy quantum physics experiments; we all are fallible, and therefore human society needs to become less fragile with respect to that universal fallibility.) Obviously I would not take his comments as a proper starting point for the dialogue which is needed here. 

IN PRINCIPLE, Khomenei's idea of an Islamic Republic (not Khamanei, but Khomenei) does not logically depend on any effort at mass murder of Jews or Americans. Also, the current protests directly address that core idea, not the issue of relations with the US or Israel, and naturally create enormous concern in the leadership of Iran.  Dialogue about that idea itself will be important, both on the mundane level of our existence and on the spiritual levels.

Like the bhakti movement and St Paul in Christianity (and Bernard Shaw in Back to Methusaleh), Qomi emphasized the need to develop and manifest spirit in human life, that law alone is not enough. It seems reasonable to guess that the most important decision makers in Iran have concluded that Western nations like the US have not just separated church and state, but have impoverished the energy, attention, focus and funding used to support the growth and mobilization of the nonmundane aspects of human minds. The concept of Islamic Republic was to modify the notion of Republic to fill that hole. Protesters in the streets of Iran are now complaining about the huge flow of funds to madressas, caused by the power of the clerics, even in devout parts of Iran which most supported Khomenei's revolution in the first place.

One odd thing is that Donald Trump himself and Bannon are supporting the same kind of greater flow of funds to (Christian) madressas, and reduced separation of church and state, in the US itself (as the Ray Moore event illustrates). But he supports Christian formalists... well, like what Qomi rightly complains about. 

If the vast funding of madressas in Iran had funded folks like Sufis or yogins developing real spiritual energy, and positive impacts, I doubt we would see what we now see in the streets of Iran. In principle, the discussions we had with Ramanuja Foundation and Quakers about how to develop real spiritual strength and not just narrow indoctrination, are relevant to the core hope of Komenei, which  the present structure of Iran (providing excess recruitment to power of folks aimed at goals like hatred and suppression of others) is not doing justice to. Spirit alone would be enough to create more harmony, if it were truly stronger. 

Of course, there are karmic effects as well. Iran rightly says we should think about the Palestinian refugees, but Syrian refugees are now a much larger locus of pain on this planet. 

Khamanei would say that support of Assad was necessary to prevent narrow soul-suppressing sectarianism in Syria, which is rational, but which leaves his hands no less pure than those of the US here. It is very sad what tradeoffs have been faced by both nations, and only by less narrow approaches (less narrow than either Quds or Trumps) can we come to have better choices. 

So: time to rethink education of the spirit, and what it really requires? In my view, any really authentic growth of the spirit makes us closer to the noosphere, and thus to each other. 

But of course, narrow and temporary things like the economics of the oil industry have also caused regressive phenomena in all nations. That too will pass.

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Added later:

These are important issues, and I tried to be careful yesterday to do justice to higher intelligence.

But I also agreed yesterday.. if anyone is at all interested, there are more mundane, human and humorous aspects we could discuss here.

For example, when Khamanei said.. "I detect the sign of outside influence here. It is clear that someone with high levels of intelligence is involved..",

was he trying to make it clear to everyone that he was NOT blaming Trump? (Or did he actually believe it was Trump and trying to flatter him the way Putin does so successfully in that case? Putin does have experience in dealing directly with billionnaire oligarchs.) 

If Khamanei were to believe (as Quds folks undoubtedly try to persuade him) that Trump is behind this, it would be as unrealistic as Trump's similar beliefs that an unemployed and depressed old woman in New York (Hilary Clinton)  is the secret Fu Manchu behind the Deep State. (The Deep State or The Swamp is basically a real and serious concern, but it is more like Bannon himself than Hilary Clinton. I have seen quite directly what it is and how it works in many situations, and how it gets to be outside the law by centering itself outside the legal state proper. Using Mercer money to fund theocracy is a beautiful illustration of contradictions fostered deliberately.) The sheer location of the protests should make that clear. Yes, there are a few fingerprints of higher intelligence in these protests, but a different kind of intelligence, not one that we are called to ignore. More like mandate of heaven issues. 

But in the end, sheer demographics are a pervasive source of instability for all nations of the Middle East, likely to grow and affect ALL organized states, as the mobilized mass unemployment rises. In the end, the restrictions on women, forcing them to dedicate more of their lives to having children and reducing their options in other spheres, are a key cause of that, and it is grossly ironic that so many clerics both in Islam and in Christianity demand such an assertion of male biological urges over and against spirit when they claim to be representing spirit. The misunderstanding and misquote of Aristotle by power seeking hypocrites in the West is one of the many deep cultural problems of this world; Iran is certainly not alone in being in a "GOD" (Grow Or Die) situation.

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A few more rough add-on thoughts on interfaith dialogue.

A few weeks ago, Turki Faisal gave a major talk in DC, where he summarized HIS view of spirit and religion in one word: "obedience."

In truth, just as hatred is a kind of central problem in Iran, I have long felt that there is one most central problem in the basic beliefs of Catholicism and Salafism. I gave up Catholicism when I was 8 to 12, because I felt it would be dishonest to accept the axiom that the Pope is infallible. That is central to that organization, because the axiom is basically the foundation for an epistemology of unquestioning obedience to a chain of other people. In Salafism, the belief that "Mohammed is the last prophet" AND that direct spiritual revelation is no longer admissible to anyone (let alone nonclerics) is equally fatal as an axiom. I was excited to see that Qomi appears to reject that viewpoint, but what about "obedience"? I could ask "What does Turki Faisal MEAN by obedience if he rejects any direct personal connection to God?" Just a question.

But it reminds me of a curious situation with Quakers.

In the one time I visited India (2015), I was surprised that the visa on arrival required that we identify religion, by checking about six options or "other". 

It is curious to be asked to define exactly what one believes about spirit and life in just one or two words. But when we have to, we have to, and those who demand this should of course respect the fact that most of us must have reservations about any two-word summary.

In my case, I picked "Quaker Universalist." About half the Quakers in this area are Christocentric Quakers, people of "the book," which in this case means the Bible or the New Testament. About half are Quaker Universalists, people of many books, who generally do look deeply into the Bible but also look just as deeply and respectfully to all the great books conveying the greater mass of human experience and thought. (Certainly Buddhism gets deep attention here.) I usually feel comfortable with that and many other definitions of Quaker Universalism (including the weekly group meditation practiced by all Quakers), but when I think about Islam I suddenly realize the ways in which I seem to be a minority of one.

The vast majority of Quakers, either Christocentric or Universalist, would be JUST as comfortable with THEIR version of obedience to God as Turki Faisal, maybe even more. The vast majority believe that the most important part of the weekly meeting for worship (and meditation practiced elsewhere of course) is to try to listen for the voice of God, and try to obey it. This is not an easy practice, but what is easy and what is right are not always the same. It demands a lot of mental discipline, and people do try to help each other respectfully in learning that discipline, as well as some of the basic disciplines discussed in the New Testament like removing the beam form one's own eye first, and so on). 

But no, I do not rest my mind in the normal fuzzy image of what the word "God" means. I suppose I am closer in a way to those people I met in the high Andes, who think of something like earth mother (more precisely noosphere) and sky father (our deep connections to galaxy and beyond, even a phrase pater galacticus which I have used at times in meditation, with proper respect to Yeshua). And I think more of alchemical marriage than of simple obedience. (My wife at times enjoys how I see analogies between relation with her and relation with God.) I suppose, in the end, this says that OTHER Quaker Universalists are closer to islam than I am.. but the uncompromising quest for real truth might have a few supporters  as well, and I do hope the new dialogues will make room for them.

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Later, one of the Vedanta folks commented:
There are two worst thing which mankind has done to it in past 5000 years. First it divided itself into  different nationalities -

mostly based on artificial  social, economic, religious, cast  and political  considerations. Up to the  

administrative point of view, one could understand the division of mankind into different  nationalities. But when the different

nationalities, created based on artificial social/religious/caste,/economic/political considerations start looking antagonist to each

other, things become worse to worst

The second worst thing which mankind has done to it is  its division in different religions which started looking antagonist 

to each other, None of the so called founder  of any  religion had actually set up any religion during their time. The so called

founders of all religions were actually very secular , truly spiritual, all loving people and  their message and teachings  aimed

equallyat the entire humanity and not a particular section of people. Centuries after the departure of the so called founder of the

 religions that  some of their misled followers, who themselves had gone  astray from the original teachings, created such a

  hardcore instituitionalized  setup around the original teachings that original message became obscure  to the extent that only

outer institution started becoming visible and that is how   separate religions took birth.

================ my reply:

Thanks,...!

Your post reminds me of a beautiful theory, less realistic than your version of the story, but still useful in a poetic or metaphoric sense.

Many of the old cabbalists believed that the whole cosmos was once just one great mind, God, but that it somehow fractured into trillions of tiny sparks. Our true duty, they argued, is to bring the sparks back together. The novel Voyage to Arcturus by John Lindsay echoes that beautiful but incomplete view.

It is very scary, in a way, to think that we were once whole, and fell into schizophrenia. As we look at the religions and politics and cultures of earth, it does have a depressing similarity to hopeless total insanity. Why not just give up on the whole planet? 

As that thought hit me again this morning, I replied with a sentence I wrote a year ago for some folks in the high Andes: "pachamma es una nina." The mental characteristics of insanity (schizophrenia in particular) are sometimes easy to confuse with the characteristics of simple immaturity. We simply have a lot to learn. It is still possible we will not learn enough of the right mix of things, soon enough, to survive at all as a species, but it would be irrational and unnatural not to keep trying, especially as we do seem to be learning and coping bit-by-bit with complex challenges.