A few more tidbits ... no names mentioned as we are all 'one' .... :)

Nothing you have written expresses your frustration better than this statement, and I have great sympathy with your frustration. But the reason for your dilemma isn’t out here. It isn’t in the texts, it isn’t in the world, it isn’t in the lack of logic or reason, the reasons for your frustrations is the straight-jacket of "beliefs" you wear which limit your growth. Only you limit you.

I see this problem all the time, and unfortunately over the Internet highway it is even more frustrating to deal with because all I can offer is these words on a screen. The problem is that you, and millions upon millions like you hope to find the answer in those "words". You hope to discover enlightenment in "words that relate". You hope that your intellect and your mind will be able to sit there and use reason and logic and arrive at a point when you "get it" and are "awakened". But no one was ever enlightened by reading or listening to words. What they had to do was to put the content of those words, the instructions of those words into "practice". They need to "do" instead of to "read". And it really is not enough to just sit and meditate. To sit with eyes closed, contemplating your own thoughts as they randomly dance across your mind is not going to do it. There are ground rules which operate as in any active system. These ground rules include things like: not lying, not killing, not stealing, not having excitable thoughts, etc. Things which amount to the eightfold noble path and the five Buddhist precepts or in the case of Deepak’s interpretation, the Seven Spiritual Laws.

These are all measures which help create the fertile ground for Enlightenment. For Realisation. For the stilling of the mind which is the central and determining factor in "attaining". But as you have said yourself, "it does take some effort".

It is the attempts to make the appropriate effort which is what lets down the ordinary guy. The ordinary man or woman who wishes for things to change must initiate some change herself before any change can actually happen. You can’t just sit and hope and you can’t just carry on as normal in the hope that IT will happen. IT will happen, eventually, but by then you’ll already be dead. But if you are already constrained by a lot of beliefs which prevent you from moving, then it becomes impossible.

Essentially, "it does take some effort" to succeed in stilling the mind to the point where words, images, sounds, music, movement and even the idea of Self have disappeared. There are several ways that this total stillness of the mind can occur, that I know of. And this does not include intelectualising, reasoning or philosophising.

A) In a "near-death" experience people will come to know the Divine through an "out of body experience". This experience is always transformative. The sense of bliss, ecstasy and love one feels in this experience is partnered with the sense of a great benevolent Entity offering deep reassurance. Sometimes, but rarely, a message may be relayed to the subject.

B) Through some enormous personal trauma or some deep dark depression a person will experience what has come to be known as "The Dark Night of The Soul". This experience is often very vivid and powerful. Having reached the very bottom of despair the mind finally comes to a dead end, without any further solutions and a breakthrough happens which can often manifest into a breakdown. The mental homes are full of such cases where someone has gone through the gap in a moment of despair but still conscious and returned from the experience believing they are Christ, Jesus, God, etc., Through treatment and medication they are eventually convinced by the doctors that they were deluded and had experienced a psychotic event.

C) Epilepsy. Many epileptics report similar experiences to those reported by "near-death" victims of a blissful unity etc., One does not have to be an epileptic to have an epileptic seizure. Sometimes isolated attacks can occur just once in a lifetime as a result of stress, lack of sleep, exhaustion etc. In such instances the mind again comes to a complete stop and for just a few minutes the subject may experience God in this gap, but again this remains an unconscious experience. It just happens. I know a friend of a friend who occasionally has quite mild seizures which can happen in mid sentence during a conversation and he just sort of goes somewhere else for a minute or two and then seems to return.

D) Meditation. This is the act of consciously bringing the mind to a complete standstill. However, achieving it is no easy task otherwise the world would be full of enlightened beings. It requires many aspects of the psyche to be harmonised. Aspects which are highlighted in Buddhist and Spiritual teachings. It requires a certain quality of "doing" without doing. These things are beyond western language which is why so much Buddhist language is used because they have made words for these experiences. By achieving through meditation something much more powerful happens. Since this Way involves conscious volition, one is able to gain a great deal more information and wisdom from the experience in what I can only describe as a cosmic download. Which brings us neatly to the question "is man a machine"? Afterall this was essentially Descartes line of reason, but it has been described in quite different ways by Gurdjieff and if you’d read the rest of that Skeptical link you posted you would have gained some perspective of his ideas:

Gurdjieff was hardly the only spiritual thinker to anticipate what seems at first to be a uniquely modern, technological deconstruction of the self. Buddhist psychology also holds that there is no core essence, no atman, no singular "I." Instead, traditional Buddhists divide the self into a number of "heaps" (skandas) that are composed of a shifting array of perceptions, judgements, mental categories, thoughts, and awareness. The material in these heaps is constantly shifting around, pushed and pulled by habit, desire, and the constantly changing causes and conditions of the world. Behind this ceaseless activity lurks no fixed platonic forms or eternal souls, but only the empty flux of constant change.

Because this groundless flow terrifies us, Buddhist shrinks reasoned, we build castles out of the shifting sands of consciousness, and proclaim them stable, real and eternal. Within our minds, we reify an essential self, whose inability to respond spontaneously to the flux of things, or to recognize the emptiness in its heart, helps generate the delusions and sufferings of samsara. Indeed, Gurdjieff sounds a bit like a dour Buddhist when he says that "to awaken means to realize one's nothingness, that is to realize one's complete and absolute mechanicalness and one's complete and absolute helplessness."

However, even this depressing analysis contains the seed of hope, a seed that Gurdjieff believed lay in our very capacity for realization and awareness. By paying attention to our own mechanical routines, we cease to identify with them, and this de-identification shifts our attention towards the higher "I" that observes its own process and directs, as best it can, its own inner growth. This transcendence-through-feedback separates the essential self from the automatism of the machine, and creates a crystal of consciousness capable not only of genuinely directing its own activity, but of actually surviving death.

I interpret our mechanicalness as being tied into that aspect of us which has no free Will, which you highlighted rather well in answer to my question on Free Will. I thought that was the answer I most agreed with. Because of our conditioning and all the other events in our life that determine what we do and who we are, we tend to have next to no free will. We tend to be buffeted here and there by random as well as mechanically controlled systems such as economics, political order, theological beliefs, work, etc. From the moment the alarm goes off in the morning we fall into a mechanical routine like a well oiled engine. It is through the success of breaking out of these mechanical habits and especially the mechanical thought patterns which occupy our minds that we eventually find true freedom, and to do that one has to just "let-go". The very gestalt of reason as we know it must be discarded before true reason and right perception can ever be realized.

...but they see your arguments and beliefs as valid and logical. Difficult to argue against. You have obviously given the matter a great deal of thought. In fact, I would go so far as to say that probably eighty percent of the people who regularly read here will find it difficult to find much fault in your reasoning. In your beliefs. In your opinions.

If you were to take your arguments on the street, to the man in the street, religionists aside, I think you would get more than 90% agreement. Possibly as high as 99%. Ninety nine percent of Westerners who are non religious may agree with you. Even amongst the religious, the Christians and Jews and Moslems of Western society I am sure you would find the majority agreeing with your reasoning but, as a matter of faith, those groups would choose to believe that there is more to it than you are saying, and as a matter of faith choose to believe what their religion and their elders and the State tells them. This would be what their own "exclusive" majority tends to "believe", i.e. that God of the Bible and myth which you referred to in answer to my questions. Those who live with man made morality would agree with your logic but, as someone pointed out they would "believe something for which there is little more than faith to support the belief".

I fully accept that my own views and those of others here, tend to be minority views. So much so that I would place us in the one percentile group when placed against prevailing world "opinions".

Although you say Deepak Chopra speaks to a large audience I would challenge this. I would say that Deepak is most popular in America and specifically in California. That even there he appeals really only to a small group. I don’t know what the current U.S population is, but judging by his publication figures I would imagine that he appeals to less than a million people, most of them well-read intellectual types. You can tell me what percentage that is, if you like. His wide appeal in the U.S, thus far, I put down to his use of the words "affluence" and "success" which appeal to the capitalist American psyche. Although his books are published internationally it is very rare in Europe or Asia to come across anyone who knows who he is and even more unusual to find anyone familiar with his work. I am speaking only of my own experience of course and I am speaking of course of the man in the street, friends and family. Amongst my own friends only a handful are familiar with his writings and these are essentially people that Grace and I have introduced to Chopra’s writings because they were in need of "self-help" and because we are fans and supporters of his broad message. He is quite well known in India, of course, simply by virtue of being an Indian success story himself.

My point is, Deepak Chopra’s views are essentially my views and those of many others here. We may vary in some interpretations and understandings since between us we have different sources and influences other than Chopra, such as Rajneesh, Ouspensky, Gurdjieff, Crowley, Jung, Buddha, Redfield, Niel Donald Walsh, Hazrat Inayat Khan, Ken Wilbur, Rumi, Krishnamurti, Stuart Wilde, Michael Talbot, Ram dass, Yogananda or Richard Bach, to name a few notable ones. But these views remain, essentially, a minority view even though recent years has seen a real resurgence in their ideas and teachings. These guys are essentially the guys you seem to refer to as "masters" when you say,

"Unfortunately, the only evidence we seem to have for soul or spirit or mind is what "masters" tell us."

For me, listening to these words and beliefs, what I hear is a man who seems to make the world of the "masters" and that of "us" and "we" (meaning your own), for me you seem to make these worlds mutually exclusive in your mind. You limit yourself a great deal in the first place by saying all you can do is read about IT. That the idea of "realizing" IT is not possible for mere mortals like "us". In a sense, the only way you can give these ideas of Chopra and the other mystic’s any validity whatsoever is to kind of intellectually "canonise" the messengers, thereby excluding yourself and anyone you know on a personal level from actually "knowing" Spiritual Truths. Do you see what I’m saying?

You are excluding the possibility that these "masters" were just ordinary men who "mastered". You prefer to believe they are exceptional men, divinely chosen. Special. Much as the religious man thinks of Jesus or Mohammed.

Essentially, I find that the difference between my world and your world is that yours is an exclusive world limited to the "prevailing opinions" the "prevailing beliefs" with which you have been conditioned. Whereas my world, the world of Chopra is inclusive. All the ideas you so eloquently put forward are already included in our world view. We were not born in a vacuum of Spirituality, but rather, as has been testified by others and myself, we too come from your world and from your world view. We were once skeptical non-believers, cynical, angry, logical, scientific, educated, intelligent people who used to think just like you. I’m not quite sure how many times this particular fact has been relayed to you, but you always dismiss it and then pour scorn on our claims that we now "know" differently. We don’t exclude science and reason. Far from it, we include it. Chris lives and works within science. We champion it. We use it to demonstrate spiritual truths, where possible.

Your world is limited rather than expansive. You believe things like :

"Value your own opinions. Value them enough to reject any others that don't make sense to you, or that disappoint you. You are the owner of your thoughts and opinions. Don't sell them to another, no matter how persuasive that other's appeals may be."

I have to ask, where is there room in this declaration for learning, for growth? There is none. You are proudly declaring, ‘believe only what you already know and nothing more’! The unknown remains unknown. And you don’t even own those opinions. They were largely handed to you through the education systems, through the media systems, through your parents beliefs and through books. That’s why they are essentially "beliefs" on which you have formed "opinions". I have already given you definitions for both the word "belief" and "opinion" and they amount to convictions without "proof".

Essentially, the difference between the way you think and the way a religious zealot thinks is indiscernible. You just have different "belief systems" both of which are essentially based on prevailing opinions and cultural conditioning. That, essentially boils down to one definition of "us" when he writes:

"When an intelligent person believes something for which there is little more than faith to support the belief, what else can you say except that the person believes simply because he or she wants to? "

Not only is there no more room in your cup, but you cling to the contents of your cup, guarding your cup for fear that this is all the sustenance in the world. The "master" on the other hand has emptied his cup. He has given up his "beliefs". He is always open for more, and he is prepared for his ideas to change as things change. This is what X meant when he said so eloquently, "it’s all B/S!" And one of the Anonymous ones asked, "even the things that you are saying?" And Terry replied "yes!" It is like the Zen proverb where a man approaches the Zen Master and says, "What is Truth?" and the Master replies "Truth is a Lotus flower". The man irritably says, "What nonsense." And the Master says "Oh, isn’t it?" When one is capable, not just conceptually, but in a very real sense to accept that everything he believes is B/S, then one is really able to enter the mind set of "let-go". One can let go their beliefs. Then the cup is emptied. Only on the foundations of "let-go" are we able to go into "no-mind" and discover what it is to simply "be". To be a human "being". In simply "being" we stop projecting our limitations on reality and are finally free to realize the "unknown".

Regarding the Soul, while your dictionary carries a different definition, I’m sure you would agree from your knowledge of world religions that Christianity, Islam and Judaism believe in a Soul which survives death and goes to Heaven or Hell, while Buddhists and Hindus believe in a "Higher Self" which translates pretty much to the Western and Islamic Soul, with the difference being that the Higher Self survives death to be reborn or reincarnated. So 90% of world religious belief systems believes the Soul survives death. In any case, I hope that you don’t mind if we work with this more common definition of the Soul which you have already indicated you do not believe in. I would like to begin with this statement of yours:

"Personal persuasions, perhaps based on reading what others have thought, are our only ways of knowing the meaning and essence of soul and spirit and mind. It's like we all have a notion of these things, and hope there is some validity to them, but we haven't been able to verify their existence beyond the philosophical arena."

I have some sympathy with this sentiment in that the paragraph I have quoted and most of your posts used the "we" and the "us" in an inclusive way which seemed to speak for all of us. I think that there are many here who had difficuly with this way of expressing ideas which were essentially your own personal opinions. I do not believe they represented the beliefs of myself, and others. (If I left anyone out I hope they can speak for themselves.) However, they were presented with some authority and conviction, the same kind of conviction which advised a newcomer to the Forum whom had entered seeking advice :

"Value your own opinions. Value them enough to reject any others that don't make sense to you, or that disappoint you. You are the owner of your thoughts and opinions. Don't sell them to another, no matter how persuasive that other's appeals may be."

I think since you are essentially a self confessed skeptic of spirituality and especially Deepak Chopra, that you should question your qualification or authority to be his spokesman, as in the advice you gave to the newcomer, or our spokesman when it comes to knowledge or understanding of Spirit, Soul and God. I hope you will give that some consideration. I think if someone visited a church for councel they would not expect to receive it from an atheist. I think if you are going to give that kind of advice you might consider qualifying the advice by declaring in the first place that you are a non-believer. IMO.