Dialogue on Religion
Rubén Feldman-González
Translation: Domhnall O´Brien
Fairbanks, Alaska, USA – 28th August 1996.
Interlocutor: It seems natural to start with the question: what is religion?
Rubén Feldman González: The origin of the word religion means: to gather energy to transcend the human condition and all conditioning from the home, books, beliefs, ideas and words.
I: According to that definition religion would have no social value.
RFG: How can an individual gather energy to break with all conditioning, unless he lives in a compassionate home, a compassionate society, without fear and without ferocity?
Such compassion, such absence of conflict cannot occur unless we call this planet “our planet”.
At present the planet belongs to only five percent of human beings, the other ninety five percent live in various levels of slavery, slavery that receives euphemistic names such as “jobs”, “contracts”, etc.
I: Or is it that religion is impossible while one is oppressed (or while one is the egotistical oppressor), poor, ignorant, or merely fighting for survival and some degree of well earned dignity.
RFG: For religion to transcend all human conditions, human beings have to share the economy of the planet (which does not impede ecology), human beings have to share politics, science, technology, and all real spiritual understanding.
I: Why does religion create such skepticism, fanaticism, distortion, so many cults and such antagonism?
RFG: I explain the cause of that in my literary work, which consists of several books.
We overvalue words and thought. Our perception is fragmentary and we overvalue it. The solution is Unitary Perception.
I: Why have so many people said that religion cannot be defined?
RFG: Because they don’t have a revelation. Revelation is the religious experience itself, the true life itself.
Revelation doesn’t occur because we live a life that is deprived of intelligence, constantly insulting intelligence.
If you smoke or drink alcohol, if you eat in an unintelligent way, if you perceive life in divided and fragmented pieces, if you are overburdened by work and sleep little, if you don’t exercise, how can you ask, “How come Revelation has not occurred?”
I: Religion has also been defined excessively in the major theologies.
RFG: Yes, we substitute real life with a mountain of words. We prefer words to life.
I: So then, each culture and faith manifests religion and faith in a different way. Diversity is more common than unity in the expression of religion.
RFG: That is because religion was incorporated by the culture and not as it should have been, that religion would be the element that frees people from their own culture, from all conditioning and even from the human condition.
I: So the purpose of religion is not the creation of a “chosen” people.
RFG: No! Religion means to concentrate all our energy to live the life that is beyond choice, beyond the programs that other people want to “implant” in our mind.
The Resurrection is only for those who are free of the conditioning that is active in their particular cultures.
Religion begins once you are free of beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, traditions, and the knowledge that so many in your culture are trying to impose.
I: But then religion changes your character and makes it more responsible.
RFG: Of course, but religion is not a program, it is not another condition of your culture.
I: William James said something like this: Religion is the understanding that there is a supreme order and that our supreme good lies in adapting ourselves to the supreme harmony of the cosmos.
RFG: We are already part of the harmony of the cosmos, but we refuse to have a Unitary Perception of it. The supreme harmony is not outside of Rubén or outside of you.
The songs, dances, rites, beliefs, groups, churches, ministers, priests and gurus, will not give you the religious experience, nor contact with that supreme harmony. They can only hypnotize you, but hypnosis is not religion.
I: Is religion measurable?
RFG: (Laughing) You don’t know the religion that counts the number of times you go to church in a year, or counting the pages of the Bible (or some other book) that you read every month.
The true church is spiritual or, that is, invisible. If you are a good person you belong to it. If you live for permanent gain, prestige and power, you do not belong to that church.
If you go to church as an obligation to make contacts for your businesses, your gain and your prestige, then you are only pursuing your own goals.
In that case you devalue the meaning of religion, which is to concentrate all your energy, to transcend the human condition.
I: What place does obedience have in religion?
RFG: Obedience means to be open to life. If you are open to life in Unitary Perception, Revelation can occur. Revelation will not occur by following the Pope, the patriarchs, the gurus, the priests, the shamans, the quacks, the lamas and all that bunch of words and rites that passes for “religion”.
I: Is there a method that one can use so that Revelation occurs?
RFG: No. Simply live your life in an intelligent and compassionate way.
I tend to believe that Revelation and the psychological state of blessing constituted the normal life of man before he began to live so stupidly and brutally, degrading life to the level of a mere miserable survival, within a sinister and egocentric existence.
Let me repeat: religion is beyond culture and theology.
I: And what is religion for you?
RFG: The worship of life, the creed of love, the devotion to friendship, that knowledge that universal consciousness is a reality because I have lived it for seven days in succession. “That” was revealed to me in the desert of Southern California in 1986 and I call it “That”. I call it “That” because it is immeasurable and indescribable. My Catholic friends and my family called it “a visit of the Holy Spirit”, my Buddhist friends from Madras called it “enlightenment”.
I: Why for only seven days?
RFG: I put that question to my friend Jiddu Krishnamurti. He said, “what do you do with your energy?”
I: And what has happened since then?
RFG: I believe that universal consciousness is in everything and in anything that I say or do.
I: And what did you do for Revelation to occur in your life?
RFG: I believe it was the constant attempt without effort to live in Unitary Perception every day, at each moment.
I: Is Unitary Perception innate or do we have to learn it?
RFG: We are born with it but it is lost before four years of age because of the excess of thought, music and language in our culture and we have to relearn it. Because of that I speak about Unitary Perception and my literary work is based on that.
I: Is there a difference between religion and “herd instinct”?
RFG: Yes. Herd instinct is the pursuit of security within the human condition. It is probably in the genes.
Religion, on the other hand, is to totally embrace the sense of uncertainty which is to move in the unknown, beyond human conditioning and even beyond all knowledge and human understanding. Religion is not an instinct. It goes beyond that as well.
I: The genes probably make us into egotists and religion makes us into altruists.
RFG: If the genes make us into egotists, man would not have survived for such a long time on the planet.
I have studied the indigenous cultures of Alaska, Patagonia, Southern California, as well as in Pennsylvania. Originally they saw the Earth as “ours”, none of them said “this land is mine”.
The Incas or the Aztecs never said, “this gold is mine” or “those birds are mine”. The Mapuches of Patagonia got angry with me if I didn’t share their food with them when I made pediatric visits to their homes.
The Eskimos of Alaska treated me as an equal, often without much respect, but I believe that fact is due to the suffering, the exploitation, the tuberculosis, the AIDS and the alcohol that the euroamerican man brought to them.
If we are going to survive as a species we have got to stop seeking permanent personal and national gain, prestige and power.
We are teaching children to be afraid and to think in an egotistical way.
Egotism has nothing to do with genes or with survival.
The genes are too intelligent to be “egotistical”.
I: Would you agree with those who say that the scriptures are unnecessary “reductions” of religion to make it accessible to the brains or the understanding of children?
RFG: A boy needs to be a man before he feels the need to go beyond the human dimension. A girl needs to be a woman before she feels the need to go beyond the human dimension.
Religion by definition goes beyond the word, the symbol and beyond thought.
Let me insist that “Religion” means to “gather energy” to transcend the human condition and all the programs that have been designed by the fathers, the educators, the philosophers, the ideologists, the theologists, etc.
I: Then there is no room for the scriptures?
RFG: Can you read the scriptures without a preformed interpretation, without any program, without any conditioning?
I: Could religion be the search for equilibrium when we feel loneliness, fear, alienation and weakness?
RFG: The search for homeostatic equilibrium is within the “realm” of the human condition.
Religion is the ultimate act of intelligence, seeking the total perception of reality, when we understand that being a human being is not all that we could be. The caterpillar is not all that the caterpillar could be. The caterpillar becomes a butterfly before dying. For that reason, religion without revelation is just a product of thought, language and symbol.
Look, within thought religion could be understood by the child who says, “I will continue on after death in some manner”.
This is the “conservation” stage of the thought process, and the idea of continuity after death is not disputed by any kind of questioning about what the “I” is, about what it is that continues, about what death is, and about what “in some manner” means.
Unfortunately the followers of Abraham Maslow and Jean Piaget have introduced religion in a continuum of time, which gradually reaches stages, crowned with the union of the head of God and the “I” (or God knows what).
Later in life the same child can understand (with thought) that eternity is the vertical line that crosses with the horizontal of time in the “right now”.
This intellectual understanding is part of a stage in the development of understanding.
But Revelation is not part of that gradual development process. Revelation is not part of evolution or growth.
Evolution, growth and development of thought occur gradually in time. Not Revelation.
For that reason I say that there are two presents. The present of the horizontal which is the transition (now) from the past to the future. This is the “known” present.-
But the present of the vertical of the cross is the “unknown”, the a-temporal now, the blessing of living in Unitary Perception.-
I: So what could facilitate Revelation or Enlightenment?
RFG: A life that is peaceful, ordered, honest.
I: Victor Frankl would say that “a search for meaning” is also necessary.
RFG: Why don’t we look at that for just a moment please!
In the idea of seeking a meaning we still have an objective, a growth, a gradual reaching in the mind.
We don’t see that we live “below life”. Our life is less than what it could be, less energetic, less intelligent, less peaceful.
Revelation shows you in an instantaneous way, that the energy of the true life is a reality.
In the energy of enlightenment all search for meaning ends. In that moment true life begins.
The man that really lives and that sincerely lives, is not seeking meanings, philosophies, mantras, prayers, all that chatter that is called “religious” or “spiritual”.
I: But what is the first step to true life?
RFG: The first step is the last.
You live silently, peacefully, intelligently and honestly.
In that simple, austere and ordered life is the first and last step.
I: Would life not become a mechanical routine?
RFG: That is what we have, a routine life, a predictable life, contrary to silence, contrary to peace, contrary to intelligence, and a life that is very dishonest and chaotic. There is no true dialogue so that we can together discover the truth of nothing, including true religion. That does not even happen in the schools, or in the universities or in the churches!
For most people religion is a social convenience, something that is never going to interfere with the life of security, routine, prejudices, divisive symbols, war as a way of life and the entrenched habits of behavior and thought, of dogmas and myths.
I: So religion is to gather energy so as to be able to be in real reality? “Real reality” is the spiritual experience itself.
RFG: (Laughing) Yes but look at the fear we have of real reality. We have to cover it all the time with words, symbols, dogmas, myths, philosophies, metaphysics, etc. and so on interminably.
We are afraid of experiencing life directly. We want others to do it or we want others to do it for us.
I: And they appear to swap the spiritual experience for some type of mantra, prayer, rite, mass, puja, etc.
RFG: The spiritual experience of Revelation or Enlightenment is more than memory, knowledge, language and behavior.
I: Some people claim that every thing that happens can be understood as a religious or spiritual experience.
RFG: Of course. For that reason, in my literary work I make the distinction between Unitary Perception and its “nucleus”.
The “nucleus” of Unitary Perception is “That” and “That” is indescribable and ineffable.
When I remember the Revelation of 1986 only a few words that could be compatible with That come to mind: joy, energy, intensity, order, peace, unity with all humanity, the irrelevance of time, the presence of one’s body in the totality of space… space is one, humanity is one, time ceases. I went from misery to plenitude. Reality became greater than fantasy.
That experience made it possible for me to do forty tours around the world, to speak about Unitary Perception, each time losing everything that I had in terms of money, properties, including the loss of family, friends, work, academic opportunities, etc.
That experience made me healthier and clearer in my mind. It also made me avoid crowds, ever since that occurred.
Psychic phenomenon began to occur. I cured a few people but I don’t do it on demand.
I: Have you ever taken street drugs?
RFG: No sir! Street drugs only destroy us. I have never used them.
I: What would have happened if you had not experienced “That”?
RFG: I believe that I would already be dead from the sorrow of seeing what human beings could be and are not, out of pure stupidity. That sorrow continues in me but kills me more slowly now.
I: So Revelation has made you more capable of facing sorrow.
RFG: I believe so. It’s also easier for me to be content for no reason. In general we are only content for a reason.
I: Do you feel closer to God?
RFG: I don’t know what God is. I only know what is said about God. If God is Universal Consciousness, I would say yes. I am Universal Consciousness because Universal Consciousness is the only thing that there is in the whole Universe. What I am saying is very real and obvious for me.
I: Are you a person without egotism?
RFG: (Laughing) No! I still like chocolate and beautiful women.
But in Unitary Perception what is called “I” is part of what can be observed, in the complete and intense observation of all of the observable.
I: Can you tell me something about that joy that you felt in 1986 (June 21st)?
RFG: It was like having been in solitary confinement for forty-six years and suddenly I had been given the total freedom to move and go wherever I wanted. It was something like that.
I: Have you mastery over snakes?
RFG: I try to keep as much distance as I can between snakes and myself.
The level of our dialogue is starting to drop and I think it would be better if we stop here.
I: Let’s have a coffee and then we can come back because I have more questions to put to you.
(30 minutes pause for coffee)
RFG: Without Revelation or Enlightenment you don’t know what religion is.
Only “That” experience can change your life, your thought, and your behavior so that your life becomes austere, honest and peaceful.
Walking around with a snake around your neck might be impressive but it will not change you.
Its as about as religious as emptying your bowels.
Psychedelic drugs will not change your life, they will only destroy your brain. Why call a drug induced trance or the álcoholic intoxication,“something religious”?
Why make such a fuss about speaking in tongues or having visions of angels?
We overvalue true life (non-imaginary life) and its enthusiasm, its energy, its revelations, its enlightenment, because our life has become mediocre, simply centered on earning a living.
As I said before many times: “This has to end for “That” to begin”.
I: What do you think of the studies of Yogis and meditators with electroencephalograms and the finding that they have more alpha waves or rather alpha waves of great amplitude?
RFG: Firstly: The electroencephalogram is not a great measure of brain activity.
Secondly: trying to find correlations between the body and the mind or between the body and brain activity, goes beyond the theme that the body is one with the mind.
Thirdly: An alpha wave hardly guarantees us that a person has gathered the tremendous energy that they need to transcend the human condition, or that they are free from the human condition.
Let’s be skeptical about these “measurements” (many of which were never replicable).
I: Was Paul the apostle an epileptic, Teresa of Avila a hysteric and Francis of Assisi a little bit mad?
RFG: I don’t know. If Paul, Teresa and Francis really transcended the human condition or even if Buddha, Jesus or Krishnamurti did it… Would it help us?
I don’t believe so, unless we take Unitary Perception very seriously and that we ourselves live a life that is very peaceful, austere and honest.
The study of abnormal psychology or the psychology of animals will not help us even one bit to suspend language and thought to begin to listen at the same time. Is that not so?
(Pause in silence)
Unitary Perception is a change in the nature of perception, and it is the first step towards a true life, which is already here but that doesn’t interest us.
I: Is the religious experience part of the activity of the right brain?
RFG: That’s an absurdity. The brain works like a hologram and is one with the whole body and the whole body is one with the universe.
We grow because of the rays of the sun. Women have a period every month because the moon moves around the Earth every month. The light in Alaska is capable of altering bodily functions like sleep, the gastrointestinal movements and even mood. The cycles of humidity and dryness, of heat and coldness in Alaska do similar things with the bodily functions. We are just beginning to understand these things. I am watching these changes in my body since I came to live in Alaska and also experimenting with periods of dieting followed by periods of eating freely, I see big changes in myself with all these variables changing periodically.
I: Are those experiments good for your health?
RFG: God knows! I just want to see what happens. When I fast for two days I feel great energy, when humidity is at one hundred per cent I feel irritable, ok, it could be important but I doubt that it has any thing to do with religion. Those are only ways in which the body adjusts to environmental extremes.
I: What would you say about Jaynes Theory of the bicameral mind? that the right brain has a religious experience but it is obliterated by the language and the interpretations of the left brain?
RFG: It is interesting but there is no reason to believe that our brain is different from the first men on Earth. What I mean is that there is no evidence as such. Jaynes Theory is pure speculation. That theory is nothing more than science fiction.
I: The cult of Mary has been explained as an unresolved Oedipus complex in males who are in love with their mothers in a reality that is ambivalent between sex and nutrition. The Passion of Jesus on the cross, by identification, will resolve the guilt through the punishment of the son, and the son can be with either a capital or a small letter.
All of that, of course, is of an unconscious nature.
RFG: We love convoluted explanations, we love the complex philosophical discourse. But in my experience our repugnance for silence has to be carefully reviewed. Silence is the fundamental threshold for Revelation and the religious experience.
Of course I am referring to silence in Unitary Perception.
I: There is a great diversity of religious experiences and of interpretations of these.
RFG: Of course! That is a convenient belief within the power structure of a feudal empire, be it Persia, Greece, Rome, Britain, Turkey, Russia, Austria, or America.
The phrase “many roads lead to Rome” is used every time that religion is discussed.
If we distract people, there will be no Revelation. In Rome people received bread and circus (panem et circenses). American people look at television, drink beer and spend the great majority of their time earning a living. No energy remains to free oneself from the human condition unless you are very careful of what you do with your time. In the new-age supermarket there are thousands of Gurus, “meditation techniques”, mantras, prayers, fetishes, pyramids, songs, crystals, drugs, dances, books, etc.
In such an environment there is no danger that a true religious Revelation or Enlightenment will occur, which is the natural right of all human beings.
There is only one way: Unitary Perception.
And it is not even a way but simply the suspension of language, imagination and knowledge which starts by directly perceiving all of the perceptible both within and without at the same time.
If you live your life in Unitary Perception and without effort there is a chance of enlightenment for you.
Unitary perception is the foundation of all action in daily life.
To be content for no reason is part of Unitary Perception, so the search for enlightenment to bring contentedness to our lives has to stop also.
I: So you are saying: “Don’t expect anything from Revelation or Enlightenment?”
RFG: Yes sir. But if we change our perception of reality from what it is, that is, from fragmentary and divisive, to a compassionate and unitary perception this will inevitably bring changes in society and in every activity of the human being.
I: You are also saying that in Unitary Perception the world ceases to be a conglomeration of discreet, sensory stimuli that can be measured.
RFG: Yes.
In Unitary Perception you enter an a-temporal dimension which is beyond all measure, including the measure of distance, velocity and time.
This does not mean that you cannot measure things sensibly with thought, because thought can still be operating in Unitary Perception.
I: So Unitary Perception and Science are not mutually exclusive.
RFG: Of course not. In Unitary Perception scientists are as scientific as they are compassionate. A good example is Professor David Bohm.
I: I heard that Professor Bohm made a deal with his wife Saral to not have children.
RFG: And I did the same with my wife Cecilia, once we discovered that we don’t need more men and more women but that we need good men and good women.
I: Could we speak about introverted versus extroverted mysticism?
RFG: I don’t want to get into the verbal game that is born out of our acquired or induced repugnance for silence, peace and intelligence.
This thing of “introverted versus extroverted” is a game that has been invented by thought, the same as “eastern versus western” or “the right brain versus the left” and all that business.
I: Then, can we talk about the “numinous conscience” described by Otto and Jung?
RFG: The word “numinous” implies a division between the subject and object, between the observer and the observed, which is not present in Unitary Perception.
I: So there is no transcendent object?
RFG: Fragmentary Perception has created the superior “I”, Brahma, the humanoid Gods, etc.
In Unitary Perception you will see that all of these inventions disappear.
I: The great mystery is that we feel ourselves to be separate from God despite being his creatures.
RFG: I know an even greater mystery: that people aren’t interested in Unitary Perception, that they don’t take it seriously. People compare Unitary Perception to something they already know or try to connect it (or connect the person who speaks about Unitary Perception) with some writer or philosopher who has said something senseless in the past.
This problem is a great source of sadness for me. I see that man is capable of exploring something with other men, beyond a superficial exchange of opinions, an erudite repetition of some ancient joke of Chuang Tzu or of some more recent phrase attributed to Jesus Christ.
You can say “the truth sets us free”: fantastic. I believe that is so. Now, let’s discover together the truth of that in our own daily lives.
I: You are talking about a unifying vision...
RFG: -Interrupting- No sir, everything is already united but we don’t know that until we attempt Unitary Perception. Humanity is one.
But if you feel different, separate or better than me, it’s just because of a widespread distortion of perception, which I call Fragmentary Perception, which is based on the overvaluing of thought, symbols and imaginary realities.
I: We are one with an eternal God?
RFG: Are we?
I: If I read the news in the paper today, I don’t think so!
RFG: Without Unitary Perception we will not be aware of the undivided reality of the cosmos and humanity, we will not see that the cosmos is one, space is one and humanity is one. Meanwhile undivided reality is merely a plaything of thought or philosophy.
How can we be aware of invisible reality without the mind being completely quiet and silent in Unitary Perception?
I: While we only think about earning a living we don’t go very far.
RFG: It’s more than that. We have to talk about silence and of how we hate it.
We have to talk about how to live with a silent mind in Unitary Perception.
I: And simply do it.
RFG: And simply do it.
I: I have to believe in you and in Unitary Perception first, in order to take it seriously.
RFG: Sir, to be serious you don’t need me.
Simply examine Unitary Perception and attempt it without effort constantly every day.
That is the only way in which you will see its nature and its benefits.
You are not serious if you simply abandon the attempt of Unitary Perception.
Be scientific about this, explore Unitary Perception for yourself.
I: Will there be a tremendous change in my behavior?
RFG: Please, discover it! Discover it yourself! Stay far away from all religious organizations. It is a journey that you have to make alone. And also abandon all the books.
I: How could a fragmented mind like mine be capable of perceiving unitarily?
RFG: It cannot. “This” has to end for “That” to begin. You have to suspend language and the habit of thinking and imagining, then you are capable of listening silently.
I: Are you a psychologist of religion?
RFG: There isn’t even an integrated theory of psychology yet. But if you want to label me I would prefer that you call me a religious psychologist.
I am not going to tell you stories, nor am I going to entertain and torture you with interpretations. Instead I will begin very honestly and tell you from the start: you have to live with a very profound, silent mind that listens, from there we can have an honest, friendly and exploratory dialogue.
I: When you say “this has to end” you are implying a great quantity of terrain. Is that right?
This means that the search for security, meaning, esteem, respect, power and prestige have to cease. Is that right?
RFG: Of course. On this journey you are alone.
Will you start this journey to exit from the hypnotic prison, which is your conditioning?
