The following is a Q&A that follows my long form essay, “On Not Getting To Denmark.”

Question

I think it was Pope Benedict, who said “one thing that atheist and believers have in common is they will both learn the truth when they die.“ And that is so true because both sides believe a certain thing, but they can’t prove it. What’s so distressing is believers can point to the scripture but that really doesn’t prove that there’s a God. Scriptures are what someone wrote who believed what they were writing is true. I think it was emperor Marcus Aurelius who said “it all boils down to an opinion.“ I would be interested in your thoughts.

Answer

I think the “gap” in Western epistemology, as regards religious understanding, is evident in the fact that there’s no room for what in Sanskrit is referred to as “pratyaskha” (or direct experience). If the question, “How can the ultimate be known?,” is posed, then we in the West invariably succumb to (a) some form of empiricism based on the senses or to (b) some type of rationalism based on reason and logic.

Obviously, whatever God is it’s not–at least not intuitively–a tree, a table, or any other sense object. Nor is it obvious, since atheistic arguments have been powerful here, that God’s existence can be inferred through the use of natural reason alone. In which case, are we left with atheism, agnosticism, or fideism? I discuss this issue in this video: 

No, because what great mystics and seers say is that there’s another way of knowing called “direct experience.” If one lets the senses dissolve (“pratyahara,” or sense withdrawal) and if one lets the mind dissolve, then there comes one-pointed concentration. Now, provided that the attention is fixed solely on the Source, this one-pointed concentration (Papaji: “Fix your attention on the Source”) will ultimately reveal itself to be nothing but the Source. This is the end of subject-object duality.