Story 4: The Belief Experiment

Welcome back to State of the Human.

It's the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

I'm your host, Charlie Mintz.

Today's show is called Trial and Error.

It's all about people trying things out for themselves.

Our last story is about someone who's trying to believe that there's something more in life.

And it can be hard to believe that.

As hard as it is for someone like me, who doesn't believe, who considers himself an atheist, as hard as that can be sometimes, sometimes believing, making yourself believe, forcing yourself into these contortions to believe because there might be a payoff if you do.

That can be really hard.

The next story comes to us from our producer Xandra Clark.

It's about her father.

For almost 15 years, my father chanted the Guru Gita every morning.

The Guru Gita is a Sanskrit hymn in praise of the Guru, or spiritual teacher.

He had the whole thing memorized, and it took him 45 minutes to chant it.

Chanting, meditating in silence, lighting candles and incense and honoring the Guru were all part of my father's morning routine, and they formed the core of his spiritual practice.

He thought that if he did this for long enough, and with enough fervor, he would attain enlightenment, heaven on earth.

I was only 2 years old when my father found spirituality.

He was raised in India as a non-religious Hindu, and was interested but never drawn to spirituality or religion until he moved to the States, where he became a professor of economics at Boston University, married an Irish-Polish Catholic from Maryland, and started a family.

In his youth, he had independently read many of the world's great religious texts, like the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Koran, and the Bible.

But no religion called to him.

Things began to change for my father the day a friend mentioned an ashram he'd visited in upstate New York.

The ashram was a place where devotees of an Indian guru gathered to practice yoga, attend group meditation intensives, and get closer to enlightenment, whatever that was.

My father had heard of gurus and ashrams before, but this ashram appealed to him for a very particular reason.

The guru at this ashram was still living.

She was guiding and teaching people every day through her live talks and presence at the ashram, not through books she had written before she died or scriptures that had been written about her during her life.

My father thought she might hold the key to enlightenment, so he became her disciple.

Right away, the fact that my father had joined an ashram caused problems for my parents.

My mother probably wouldn't have cared too much, but her mother, a practicing Catholic, cared a lot.

She called what my father was doing guru worship.

She thought that his practices were the work of the devil and that he was corrupting my sisters and me.

Despite this, my father stuck with his practice, recognizing that for centuries, mystics have had to resist opposition.

What was some marital turmoil compared to enlightenment, the greatest possible achievement in life?

For my mother, the answer wasn't so obvious.

She respected and loved her mother, who was the only immediate family member she had left.

My grandmother had moved from Maryland to Massachusetts just to help my mother out and babysit my two sisters and me.

And I can imagine my mother felt like she owed her loyalty, even if it meant pushing away my father.

As my mother sided with her mother and my father kept practicing, a small crack between them grew wider and wider until it became a great canyon.

They started fighting about everything.

One of them would suggest something and the other would oppose it automatically.

Soon there would be a shouting match.

I hated the fact that religious beliefs were the root of the problem.

I myself possessed a mishmash of beliefs from church, the ashram, Sunday school and meditation intensives.

I believed in heaven, but I also believed in reincarnation.

I worshiped Jesus, but I also worshiped the guru.

I prayed to one external god, but I also prayed to Krishna, Lakshmi, Ganesh, and the god inside me who unifies all.

By about age 12, I realized I couldn't just believe everything I was told, as much as I wanted to.

I had to choose.

I had to pick which side of the canyon I wanted to stand on.

I guess I chose my father's side.

I think I was attracted to the ancient magic and mysticism of Hinduism.

The chants were in Sanskrit, a beautiful language I didn't understand, but could memorize and repeat like a secret spell.

Catholicism had given me the Ten Commandments.

But I didn't want rules.

I wanted freedom.

My father always gave me freedom to choose whether or not I wanted to come with him to the ashram.

That freedom was much more appealing than the obligation of attending church and Sunday school every week.

And meditation promised complete freedom, the enlightenment my father described.

I had developed a theory that this ultimate freedom, this self-realization, would happen all of a sudden one day, probably during a meditation session, after I had become the best person I possibly could be, so full of love for my fellow men and women that I could work miracles.

And when this moment of self-realization came, I would merge with God.

I would have superhuman powers, like mind reading and healing with just the warmth of my hands, and never getting angry.

I would use these powers only for good, and they would be my secret.

And when I died, I would become a part of the world, a big ball of light would rise out of my body and then fall from the sky like a meteor, sinking into the earth, burying itself deep into the heart of things.

And my mind would still be conscious inside it, listening to the world, and observing what happens on the earth for the rest of time.

At age 14, I told my mother that I wasn't going to get confirmed into the Catholic Church.

I didn't know my father before he was spiritual.

I didn't know him before he thought about God and transcendence and how to achieve the ultimate goal of life.

I didn't know any way he spent his early mornings other than meditating and chanting the Guru Gita.

I knew him as a man who dedicated himself to three things, his spiritual growth, his family, and his work as an economics professor.

The ashram was a huge part of his identity, perhaps the biggest, and part of my desire to visit the ashram was to understand who my father really was.

He seemed set in his ways, poised on the path to enlightenment.

I thought it was a path he'd be on for the rest of his life, a path whose end goal he would eventually reach.

But then, he changed his mind, turned away from that path, became someone different, someone who I didn't understand at all.

Once, when I was about 16, I asked my father if we could take a trip together to the ashram.

We were sitting in the kitchen just after lunch, with the windows open and the warm breeze telling us that summer was close.

Summer meant my sisters and I would have free time, and we could stay at the ashram for a few days or even weeks without worrying about homework.

You want to go to the ashram?

He asked me, looking up from the newspaper with a sad smile on his face.

Yeah, I said, we haven't gone in a long time.

Well, I'll take you if you want to go, he replied, looking down again at the article he'd been reading.

But I haven't really been going lately.

I asked him why he hadn't been going, but he couldn't give an answer that made sense.

He mumbled some response about not liking the recent programs or not feeling as much of a desire to go anymore, and that pretty much ended the conversation.

At home, I watched my father become short-tempered, in a way he hadn't been for years when he was meditating.

He looked frustrated.

He acted tired.

His eyes were full of despair, and we all tiptoed around him in fear of upsetting him.

Worst was that he wouldn't talk about it, no matter how much I asked.

All I knew was that he'd stopped going to the ashram, and eventually he stopped his morning meditation routine, too.

I chalked it up to a midlife crisis, because I couldn't imagine any other reason that he would have changed his mind.

I couldn't believe my father had given up what was so central to his life.

I was sure that one day he would come back around and believe again.

It's been almost five years since my father stopped believing, and he hasn't come back around yet.

These past five years have left me confused and unsure of my own spirituality.

What am I supposed to believe now that my father has turned his back on everything he once believed, everything he taught me?

How can I continue to believe something my father has lost faith in?

Is it my duty to pull him back into the light somehow?

What should I do?

I don't understand how he transformed his belief so radically, how he is now an atheist, since that's what he calls himself.

His atheism goes completely against what I always thought I knew about my father.

Why did he suddenly change his mind?

I decided, finally, to ask him.

One of the first things he told me was something that threw me off my foundations completely.

He'd had doubts all along.

I suppose I never accepted it absolutely 100% because I hadn't yet had any really mind-blowing experience that would tell me, okay, this is definitely it.

I never had that kind of ultimate kind of experience.

And so there was always a little bit of doubt.

Did you ever have any images or ideas of what that feeling might be like?

I suppose in the teachings, you hear about people who attain self-realization who then feel completely one with everything around them.

So I guess I had this image that I would, you know, whereas I would still have a sense of identity, I would kind of transcend the boundaries of my own body and my personality and I would feel one with everything.

And people who I have talked to have said they have felt this.

My father had this same kind of magical image that I had about this self-realization.

And his doubt grew over the 15 years because despite his devoted practice, he never experienced anything like what he imagined he should experience.

And he never met anyone who did, except in small glimpses.

I didn't have any mind-blowing experiences, but I did have some experiences that were interesting and I didn't have explanations for them that suggested to me that maybe there was some truth to what they were teaching.

What kind of experiences?

Can you talk about those a little bit more?

Well, the major experience I had on my first whole weekend-long visit was when I sat in this weekend workshop and the musicians started chanting, even before the official program had started.

Actually, I started crying, and I had this sensation of being home, of finally, finally being home.

Thank But my father began to realize that a lot of these experiences he and his fellow practitioners were having could be psychologically or physiologically explained.

His feeling that he had arrived home at the ashram was just a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Because he imagined he would feel at home, he did.

Ecstatic moments in meditation could be explained too.

The kind of most major experience that people talk about, that meditation gives them, which is a feeling of ecstasy or rapture, I'm now pretty sure that there's an explanation for that and that is that when you meditate and you really slow down, your breathing becomes extremely shallow and it almost stops.

And once your breathing stops, you'll be starving the brain of oxygen.

And apparently when you starve the brain of oxygen, you enter into a kind of a rapturous state.

My father was looking for scientific explanations for his experiences, not for divine explanations.

Even though meditation had helped him become calmer and more even tempered, he wasn't interested in that.

The reason he had meditated all those years was to achieve enlightenment, not to become a better person.

Once he realized that the mystical experiences in meditation could be scientifically justified, he abandoned the practice of meditation.

I remember thinking that this was the ultimate research project.

I mean, I am an academic.

I enjoy research.

I think that's what, you know, it's good in a way what my life is about.

And yes, I remember thinking this again and again and again in those 15 years, that this was the ultimate research project because it was trying to get to the core of what life was about.

What exactly the answer was, I didn't know.

So I was approaching it as a scientific experiment of okay, Hindu philosophy tells you if you do this practice, you get to this goal of self-realization.

So I was willing to do the practice to see what happened.

Although I had always thought of my father as a fully convinced believer who was happily working his way down the path to enlightenment, I now realize that he was never truly a believer.

During his 15 years of practice, he was constantly trying to reason through his experiences, rather than accepting them as experiences of the divine.

He was waiting to find the right proof, waiting to have the ultimate experience that would banish all doubt from his mind and make him believe.

But no experience like that ever came, so he continued to doubt.

And the doubt grew until finally he was confronted with a piece of evidence too big to ignore.

There's an Indian holiday commonly referred to as Raki Day, when sisters give bracelets, or rakis, to their brothers as a way of asking for their protection.

At the ashram, this holiday was always celebrated by the handing out of bracelets from the guru to thank all the disciples for their service.

I was at the ashram one rakhi day, and the custom always was that the guru would give you a rakhi, and you know, you out of your own feeling would give a donation, but there was no quid pro quo.

And that particular year, they announced that they were not gonna be distributing the rakhis in the program, that there were desks set up outside the hall, and after the program, we could go out, and if we made a donation, we would get a rakhi.

So they had made it into a commercial transaction, and that really ticked me off, because it just made it a commercial transaction.

So that was probably one of the first incidents that really made me start thinking hard about, gee, is there validity to this thing, or is this just another commercial enterprise?

But I let that go.

I didn't, at that point, it's not like I dropped out then.

There was really essentially another similar kind of happening that took place, which is that typically every January 1st, the guru would give a talk and would give a message to all of the people following the path.

And then one year, all of a sudden, it became that the guru was not going to come in a program, but instead, there were going to be DVDs of the message available and you had to pay $100 to come listen to the message on this DVD.

And that, it was back to the rocky day thing, where it's just now become a commercial transaction and they're basically trying to extract the most they can out of the people.

And I remember the first year, I paid the $100 and I did go in and listen to it, and the following year, I just couldn't bring myself to do it.

And that second year was when I basically dropped out.

That was it.

After hearing my father talk about his frustration with the ashram's growing interest in making money, I could see why he might have lost his faith in the ashram as an organization.

But other than the fact that he hadn't yet achieved the enlightenment he hoped for, I didn't understand why he had lost faith in all religions and had completely abandoned his belief in God and self-realization in general.

The thing that kind of really finally convinced me that there's no God and there's no quote unquote valid path, it was such an odd thing because I was watching a show on PBS.

It was a show about Mormons.

And they were talking to this woman, they were interviewing this Mormon woman, talking about her beliefs.

And they were talking particularly about this belief that Mormons have that when you die, you are reunited with your family in heaven.

Now, I immediately saw there's a big logical loophole in a big logical problem in this belief, which is are you gonna be reunited as an adult with your children and your spouse?

Or are you gonna be reunited as a child with your parents?

You can't do both.

So to me, it was clear this belief had to be false.

This just doesn't make sense, right?

But she was clearly, truly, 100% sure that this was the truth.

And in that moment, I realized we can convince ourselves to believe anything.

All of this stuff is just nonsense.

It became absolutely clear to me.

And in a funny way, the teachings came to fruition because the teachings always said, when you realize the truth of things, it will be obvious.

There will be just no more doubt in your mind.

And that was the moment at which there was no more doubt in my mind.

My father's belief was always something I could depend on.

It was the rock in my life that kept me attached to God, my spirituality, and the meaning of life.

Now that he has completely rejected his hypothesis, I am uncertain of what to believe.

My roots have been pulled up from the earth that he prepared for me, and I must find a new place to plant them.

I thought that talking with him about his transformation might help me figure out where to replant my roots.

But it hasn't.

I completely understand his reasoning, and he is actually happier now.

He says he feels free to do whatever he wants, because he doesn't have to worry about pleasing anyone, like God or his guru.

But it seems to me that his reasoning, though logical, lacks faith.

I know that, just like the Mormon woman and just like my father for 15 years, I could delude myself into believing something that might be false, just because I want it to be true.

But what if knowing what's true isn't the important thing?

What if the key is to have faith, without knowing for sure what the answer is?

Sometimes I still have that vision of myself as a ball of light, fully conscious, sinking into the earth and becoming one with everything.

It's hard to give up, and I'm not sure I'd ever want to, even if my father no longer thinks it's possible.

I feel good about where I am now.

I don't feel let down.

I don't feel, oh gee, there was supposed to be this, you know, part at the end of the rainbow, and now I realize there isn't.

Right?

That's not how I feel.

I feel like, okay, I've got my answer.

There is no part at the end of the rainbow.

But there is a rainbow.

Xandra Clark is a senior at Stanford and a producer for the Stanford Storytelling Project.

Well, that's our show for today.

You've been listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

The show was produced by me, Charlie Mintz, along with help from Jonah Willingan's Rachel Hamburg and Natasha Ruck.

I want to thank everyone who told their stories today, Professor Krumboltz, Kate and Xandra's father.

For their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Stanford Institute for Creativity in the Arts, Stanford's Oral Communication Program, Stanford Continuing Studies and the Hume Writing Center.

KZSU would like to thank the law offices of Fenwick and West for their continued underwriting support.

Remember that you can find a podcast of this and every episode of State of the Human on Stanford iTunes and on our website, storytelling.stanford.edu.

Tune in next week or soon when we'll hear stories about rejection.

For the Stanford Storytelling Project and State of the Human, I'm Charlie Mintz.

Thanks for listening and try something new.