Spirit of Things

Can faith move mountains and rescue lost souls? Stand-up comic and author of My Dirty Shiny Life, Lily Bragge thinks so because her life was a shambles before she converted to Christianity. Former barrister and founder of the Shanti Mission Harmony Centre in NSW, Shakti Durga, has also experienced a powerful transformation from her New Age faith in Eastern and Western mysticism. But Los Angeles-based sociologist of religion and author of Society without God, Phil Zuckerman, has no truck with the certainties of faith.

Rachael Kohn: Imagine being addicted to heroin, relationships going from bad to worse, and having your child taken away from you. Now imagine being a successful barrister, and being stressed, depressed and in personal crisis. How would you change your life?

Hello, I'm Rachael Kohn, welcome to the Virtue of Faith on The Spirit of Things Seven Vital Virtues Series.

MONTAGE

Billy Graham: You must be willing to receive Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour by faith. By faith, you receive it!

Man: The woman whose recovery from inoperable lung cancer and cancer of the brain has been deemed to be Mary MacKillop's second miracle by the Catholic church, has spoken publicly.

Man: It's a miracle from God. One child to survive from the whole family, floating on the water by himself. This is a miracle. God wanted this.

Woman: Some in the church say we're at the dusk of faith.

Man: I'm a sceptic about physical miracle cures; I don't think God is a conjuring artist.

Woman: But while the church is worried, no such concerns exist here.

Woman: In Lourdes, belief is booming.

Woman: It's a vision of Mary. We're coming almost every day.

Man: Here at the northern end of Coogee Beach for the last few weeks, an apparition has been visible late in the afternoon.

Woman: We were here last night, and we just felt a presence, a love, I'm a believer. I just felt her presence then, I didn't see anything, but I felt it. I cried.

Billy Graham: By faith and my faith you receive Christ, and when you do, the Bible says God forbids every sin.

ELVIS SINGS

Rachael Kohn: They say faith can move mountains, but faith in God or a Higher Power is something people are often embarrassed to admit. One of my guests today, Phillip Zuckerman, discovered that when he interviewed people in Denmark and Sweden, they were positively squeamish about faith in God. Phil is a sociologist at Pitzer College in Los Angeles and he'll join me in a discussion, together with two remarkable women: Lily Bragge in Melbourne has written My Dirty Shiny Life about the pain, hedonism, addiction and loss she suffered before she found faith in God, in her early 40s. Shakti Durga in Sydney is a new age guru who established The Harmony Centre Foundation in Bundanoon, New South Wales. There she gives spiritual guidance to people who are undergoing the kind of stress and meaninglessness that she did before she opted out of the law, and went on a spiritual journey of healing.

Well let's start with a sort of definition of what is faith, and Lily, can I ask you, what is faith to you?

Lily Bragge:For me, faith is the difference between having a life worth living, and a life not worth living, which sounds kind of extreme and probably a tad melodramatic, but it really is as fearsome and simple as that for me. I was discussing it with my husband this morning, just the notion of faith and what it means to him, to me, and how it's such a personal thing, and it reminded us both of that William Blake quote from 'Auguries of Innocence' 'If the sun and moon should doubt, they'd immediately go out.' And I spent most of my life doubting, and not really caring, and definitely having no faith in anything except myself in a very undirected way, and the antithesis I imagine of what Shakti Durga's faith in self would manifest, so a very wayward sense of just not really having faith in anything.

Searching for it without really searching.

Rachael Kohn: Well that's a pretty whole definition. Shakti, can I ask you, is faith substantially different from knowledge?

Shakti Durga: I think so. Because I think that knowledge gives us ideas about the physical world that we can prove in some empirical way and I think that faith, it's a system of beliefs, it's a paradigm if you like, within which we put our knowledge, and so depending upon one's level of consciousness and one's life experience and one's social conditioning and religious conditioning, then one will have a different faith to the next person. But I think for me, that faith is definitely about constructing a paradigm and I believe that it's every person's responsibility to formulate a paradigm for themselves. It does give their life meaning, and I totally agree with what Lily said, actually, about it being a method by which we find meaning and purpose in our lives.

Rachael Kohn: So it's very much an individual thing, that each person constructs. Phil, as a sociologist of religion is it important for you to distinguish between faith and religion?

Phil Zuckerman:Oh, absolutely. These are two very, very different things.

Rachael Kohn: How do you distinguish them?

Phil Zuckerman:Religion can refer to organisational practices, rituals, beliefs, behaviours, structures, buildings, food, gatherings. I mean religion is at the organisational level, at the structural social level; faith is usually at the individual personal level in terms of homosociological respect.

Rachael Kohn: Well Lily, your life was a roller-coaster ride with a lot of pain, dysfunctional parents, there was drug addiction, you even lost custody of your child, which you write about in My Dirty Shiny Life. Could you have written that book, gone over all that painful ground, if you didn't have faith in God today?

Lily Bragge:I doubt whether I could have written it with the level of understanding and self-awareness that I came to have through having my faith. Because years ago, I used to work as a performer, and I strip-mined my family because it begs for it, really, given that my father was a career criminal and my mother was a strait-laced classical music-loving academic, and I had a lot of bizarre things happen to me in larger-than-life kind of stories. And as a performer, I used to do family stories and I didn't realise until many years later, and people would come up to me and say, 'That was so brave', and I always thought, Well what are they talking about? Bravery has nothing to do with it.' I was just telling it like it was with, as I said, no real understanding that having had faith and writing that story, writing the book probably eight years after conversion to Christianity, I had a level of depth and understanding that I just assume has come purely because of my faith, and that it's grown deeper and stronger as each year has gone on.

Rachael Kohn: Well in the midst of all that pain, you did try to lever yourself out of it. And certainly humour and talking about it must have been one way, but also taking drugs and heroin, was that a way of trying to lever yourself up into a state of bliss?

Lily Bragge:I think so, and I remember reading something years ago when I'd done a runner somewhere, to a faraway town to try and get clean, and I was hanging out and feeling pretty desperate and awful, and someone thrust a Deepak Chopra book under my nose and I started reading it and one of the things he said was that taking drugs, particularly drugs like heroin, is a diminished and a corrupt search for spirituality, and I really believe that, because I was simultaneously trying to anaesthetise myself as well as indulge in rampant hedonism. But it was also such a destructive behaviour, because the benefits, they were far outweighed by the curses of it.

Rachael Kohn: Well you also tried to commit suicide.

Lily Bragge:Yes, a number of times, I became a serial suicidalist.

Rachael Kohn: And at one time, it seemed like the end. I mean you wrote a letter to your son, really a farewell note. But when that didn't work, you asked God to give you a sign if he existed.

Lily Bragge:I did.

Rachael Kohn: And there was nothing.

Lily Bragge:I got nothing, a big, fat nothing. On a rehab bed in what was a lamentable town to me at the time, Wagga Wagga. Just sitting there, just thinking, 'God, if you exist, can you just give me some sign to get me out of this.' And, nothing. And there was a poster on the wall in the rehab room and it's a cliché poster of some man walking in the sand and there's two sets of footprints but only one person in the picture, and some bit of quote from scripture about God always being with you, and I remember looking at it, just thinking, 'That's just insane', but frankly, nothing was as insane as what I was at the time.

Rachael Kohn: Why did you turn to God at that point? I mean was it just the poster?

Lily Bragge:Oh, I was desperate Rachael, I was just so despairing and hopeless and filled with terrible depression and multiple addictions and I'd made such an excruciating mess of my life, I felt like I'd polluted and poisoned everyone around me. The only thing that kept me going really at that time were substances, whether it was nicotine or heroin or alcohol or food, or whatever it was, I was just constantly filling up a hole that refused to be filled, and it wasn't until a friend of mine who's got great strong faith, there was something different about her, and we'd known each other for nearly 30 years, and I told her the whole sorry story, and I just said, 'What is it about you?' and she said, 'It's God', and I was horrified. Just thinking, Oh, you crazy piece of elastic, I love you, but really, you know, how sad and terrible is that. And she said, 'Can I pray for you?' and as uncomfortable as I was, I felt, Well everything else you know, antidepressants, shrinks, hospitals, rehab, nothing seems to be working, maybe that will work, and that was the beginning of it.

Rachael Kohn: Well we'll come back to you, but I want to go to Shakti, because you had also huge challenges. Hard times, depression, why wasn't your life as a barrister, with upmarket cars and a live-in nanny, working for you?

Shakti Durga: Because I was depressed and because I felt that there was something more than this that I just couldn't quite discover what it was, and I was going through a pretty bad marital situation at the time, and in fact that divorce catapulted me into looking further for answers in my life. I'd been raised as a Catholic and I'd been a somewhat rebellious teenager in terms of Catholicism; it just didn't resonate with me the way that it was portrayed by our lovely old parish priest, so I turned away from any kind of spiritual path during my 20s and just pursued my career, and like Lily, I relate to the hedonistic part of life at that stage, too. And then after this divorce, a colleague actually said, 'You should learn to meditate because you're so stressed', so I did that. I went and studied with Barbara and Terry Tebo who run the Life Spring Foundation in Sydney. Marvellous people, and they mentored me for about seven years, and the meditation started off as a lifeline and no-one was more surprised than me when it became something that gave me experiences that I've never before conceived of.

Rachael Kohn: But you also followed some very well-known teachers like Sai Baba for example, who manifests miracles regularly. Did you have any doubts about putting your trust in them?

Shakti Durga: No. I hadn't expected that I was going to find anything when I went to Sai Baba's ashram. I actually went there with another teacher from Australia who was running a meditation retreat at that ashram, and so I was really going there because she was going, rather than because I wanted to go to Sai Baba's ashram, and I was quite surprised when I got there that I felt this exquisite sensation whenever Sai Baba entered the room. It was this deep sense of love and wonder and awe that at the time was very new to me. I didn't relate to the Indian customs and the way people sang in foreign language, and all that was quite challenging for me, but I soon found a delight in it, and I could allow myself to kind of merge into the experience, and what came within me then was I guess the beginning of a long series of mystical experiences.

Rachael Kohn: Do you think you were given a divine push?

Shakti Durga: I definitely think I was given a big shove Rachael. I think I needed it. So I've had the supreme good fortune to work closely with two other gurus, one of whom was Master Choa Kok Sui who started the pilot healing movement internationally, so he was the first person in whom I really saw this divine essence and it's very hard to describe. You really need to experience it. But by being in his presence, one's mood was altered by the sheer magnificence of this man.

Rachael Kohn: That's Shakti Durga, formerly known as Kim Fraser, who was a successful barrister for 16 6ears before she gave it all up to focus her attention on healing and teaching at her Shanti Mission Harmony Centres. With her is Lily Bragge in Melbourne, who now lives in Wisconsin. She's a writer, former stand-up comedian and author of My Dirty Shiny Life and from Los Angeles, we're joined by Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist of religion and atheist who's written Society Without God, a survey of religious attitudes in Denmark and Sweden.

This is the Seven Vital Virtues Series on The Spirit of Things, and we're talking about Faith.

Well Phil Zuckerman, is the talk of divine action making you nervous as a sociologist?

Phil Zuckerman:Well not really, no. I mean I listen to stories like this every day, it's what I study, I've been hearing these kind of stories for 20 years, so it doesn't make me nervous at all, I think it's quite fascinating.

Rachael Kohn: But you're not a believer yourself, are you?

Phil Zuckerman:No, that's correct.

Rachael Kohn: Doesn't that hamper a sociologist of religion? I mean you're actually studying something whose core belief you don't really get, personally.

Phil Zuckerman:Oh sure. I mean there's you know an insider perspective on religion, and there's an outsider perspective, and I think both are important and both give us a false sense of the phenomenon and I think an outsider or a non-believer, is able to see things about faith or spirituality religion that the insider can't, and vice versa, there are certain things that the believer understands that an outsider can never relate to. But you know, that's a problem with all social science. I mean how do you study nationalism if you're not a nationalist? How do you study police violence if you're not a policeman.? How do you study art if you're not an artist? I mean that's the nature of the beast. I'm fascinated by religion, I'm fascinated by spirituality and faith and so sure, as a non-believer, I'm never going to get the complete picture, but I hope I can generate a few insights along the way.

Rachael Kohn: OK, so how about an insight on Lily and Shakti, are they actually responding out of a sense of need, and is this the way sociologists generally view faith? That it comes out of personal stories of need?

Phil Zuckerman:Hmm. Wow, that's a big question. Obviously difficult for me and I would never want to make any grand statements about Shakti or Lily, given that I'm in a little studio in Los Angeles and you're all in Australia and I've only been listening to their stories for about 10 minutes or so, so they're essentially complete strangers to me, so I would never deign to say, Well I know what's really going on with them; I don't know them, and they sound like very thoughtful and interesting people. I can say this: that their stories do fit certain patterns. So for example, when we study people that were not believers, but then became believers, and conversely when we study people that were believers and have lost the faith, usually those are triggered by relatively different phase.

It usually is emotional need, a trauma, psychological trauma, that propels people to find or seek or experience faith or religion, whereas people who were religious and then dropped it and become agnostic or atheists. It's usually a long process, usually quite intellectual, they don't want to do it but they just over several years, find that they just can't believe it any more. But it's usually prompted by not like an emotional crisis, but it does seem that psychological or emotional crises in people's personal lives, divorces, depression, drug addiction, those are sort of standard trampolines into faith and belief. I don't say that to discount their stories but it does fit a certain pattern that is perhaps of note or interest to someone wanting to study this. Are they actually experiencing something? As a sociologist I would say Well, who can say? But as a sceptic myself, of course I don't think that there's this guru guy that emanates magical beings out of his body and I don't think that there's an invisible, magical deity in the sky that helps people out in need.

Rachael Kohn: Can I just take you to the major study you did on the Danes and Swedes, because there is a whole society in which you found that most of them don't have faith in God, despite the fact that they pay their taxes to support the Lutheran church.

Phil Zuckerman:Yes, I mean millions and millions of people live lives without religious faith, and I was interested in those people. I wanted to know a little bit about them, and they're not very well studied, so I wanted to go to a part of the world that is among the least religious corner, and that was Scandinavia, where people are among the least religious, belief is very minimal, belief in God, faith in God is very minimal and marginal, and I did live there for a spell, and did interview as many people as possible, and I found that people there at least, were able to live decent, normal, meaningful lives without faith in God per se, and that they're not all running around killing each other, and they're not hopelessly depressed or numbed in some of hedonistic blur of nihilism. They're living purposeful, committed lives, without fear from God.

Now that's just what's going on there, and I'm not saying that that's for everybody and I'm not saying that that's how life should be or ought to be, but I wanted to show that it was possible. And of course they do have sort of a cultural religion. They do celebrate certain holidays and they do support the taxes for church buildings and so on and so forth, but in terms of actual deep belief or deep spirituality, it's not very strong in Scandinavia, and I can also say sociologically that we know that where religious belief is strongest, where people are really religious, where faith is really at the core of their lives, and where they're praying a lot and they're fasting a lot and they're meditating a lot, those places tend to be not doing so well. They're among the poorest countries on earth, they're full of chaos, corruption, crime, hunger, homelessness, hopelessness, and so if they're tapping into something, that something isn't responding very nicely as we saw in Haiti, which is perhaps one of the most, if not the most, religious and spiritual country in the Western Hemisphere. Sociologically, we don't see a correlation between faith and wellbeing that we would expect, and we do see a correlation between sort of secularity wellbeing.

And here at a personal level there's no question that faith can really help people. No doubt about the psychological individual level.

Rachael Kohn: Lily, when you first were taken by friends to a church, how did you feel about seeing people who were happily praying to Jesus in an intimate and heartfelt way. How did you feel and act?

Lily Bragge:I was excruciated, absolutely unequivocally excruciated. I prickled in my skin, and I broke out in a hot-cold sweat, and I looked at people and it was a happy-clappy Pentecostal church, and the women were smiling at me beatifically, like Stepford Wives on Jesus crack. And the music was saccharine, it was manipulative to me, it felt like manipulative feel-good music that - I was so resistant on so many levels. But the pastor there preached a message that resonated with me very strongly, and it was about taking responsibility for yourself, but also in your abject weakness being able to hand your weakness over to something, someone, who could be your strength. And about a father who loved and it was a message about not a vengeful, wrathful God, but there was something also that happened with the music.

Well I was uncomfortable because I was, everyone was standing and swaying their arms in this kind of ecstatic state, most people were, and there were only one other person besides myself who was sitting down, and that was an old lady who was incapable of standing, and so I felt compelled to get up but only because it was like manners in the house, kind of went, 'Oh I'd better stand up and sing along to these words on a screen', and it was just awful for me. But the music went somewhere and I felt I suppose it was just opening my heart was so hard and I defy anyone who uses heroin for a long time to not create an incredibly hard shell and heart around themselves, because it is such a heartless thing that when you're in the throes of a heavy, active addiction, and something cracked that shell, and I started to weep, and I was so embarrassed that I had tears running down my face as well. I was thinking, 'Come on, get a grip', but I realise in retrospect that what was happening was my heart was kind of cracking open and sorrow was flooding - I was flooded with sorrow, and as time went on that sorrow became sweet sorrow. And I was disturbed as well with the notion of when I started to believe, intellectually, it just bothered me so terribly that I was believing in something that seemed so ridiculous. I'd always been resolutely agnostic because to me, to be an atheist was just as crazy as being a full-on believer. And so it was that stuff that Shakti was saying before about the experience she had with Sibaba and what he was emanating, I get that on a personal level with my relationship with Jesus.

Rachael Kohn: So in a sense, you're faith isn't just a suspension of disbelief or total suspension of critical thought or doubt, you always a conversation going on inside you?

Lily Bragge:Yes, absolutely. But I did - once I started to belief, I did pray for God to birth in me a faith that was as fierce and bedrock strong as that of King David's. I wanted to have an unshakeable faith because everything I'd ever believed in never really - I never really stuck with it, and a lot of people have said to me, Is your Christianity a phase like you know when you were a lesbian for three years, or when you went bankrupt, or when you were on heroin? Is it just another one of Lily's crazy phases? But it's - I'm in my ninth year of it now and it gets stronger and deeper as each year goes on.

Rachael Kohn: Is that when you started to see signs, or were you always a believer in the supernatural?

Lily Bragge:I've always had a bit of an oobity-boobity spooky sense, and I've had a lot of dreams, and I'm very intuitive, and I used to be obsessed with psychics, and New Age-y stuff, and every psychic I ever saw would always say, 'Ah, you're one of us', and blah-blah-blah. And my father, he had uncanny sixth sense, so I've always believed in gut instinct, intuition, the antithesis of reason really, but with an intellectual grounding and just thinking, Oh, being fascinated, but as a believer in God, I totally and absolutely embraced the super, supernatural elements and I've witnessed miracles. I belong to a prayer group where we have an 85%, pushing 90% success rate of answered prayer.

Rachael Kohn: Is that the Ednas?

Lily Bragge:The Ednas, absolutely The Ednas, with our silly name but we're very serious about our spiritual warfare.

Rachael Kohn: Can I just ask you one thing, Lily, at that time you didn't tell people about your faith.

Lily Bragge:Oh no. Absolutely. I was so embarrassed. I'm the Mouth of the South. I talk about anything, gaping wound. I have no compunction about talking about anything whatsoever, and when I became a Christian and I come from such a secular, humanist, liberal, where most people put their faith in their intellect and their education and status and all those things, and for me to become a Christian from the background that I came from, and also I have a very strong network of dear, dear gay friends, so when I'm embracing Christianity and the bible and I'm reading Hell and Heaven that damnation and all that, so it was very confronting. And I couldn't tell anyone for a long time because I was so embarrassed. For me, I liken it to a person who comes from a very conservative background and they're gay and they come out of the closet, and it's just very difficult. There's shame and there's a sense of failure or whatever it is, but you need to express who you are and that's what it was like for me to be a Christian in the world that I live in. I'm used to being, you know, people just going 'Oh, could she be any nuttier?' But as my atheist friend Fiona Spelt-Norman says, despite thinking of me as completely delusional for believing in God, she just say, 'Junkie Lil versus Christian Lil, there's no comparison.' And it's quite true.

Rachael Kohn: That's Lily Bragge whose harrowing life of addiction, depression and incarceration is now past history as she triumphs in a life full of faith and love.

This is The Virtue of Faith on the Spirit of Things, Seven Vital Virtues series.

SONG: 'I'm a Believer'

Rachael Kohn: Along with Lily Bragge we're in conversation with Shakti Durga, a spiritual teacher and the author of Dimensions of Wealth. And Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist of religion at Pitzer College, Los Angeles, who's written Society Without God.

Well just briefly, Phil, did you encounter Danes and Swedes who were embarrassed about talking about their faith?

Phil Zuckerman:I actually did. It was not as extreme as what Lily just said, but sure I interviewed people were believers, or had found Jesus and so on and forth, and actually, yes, experienced feelings of embarrassment, they didn't want to talk about it, they were ashamed of it, that they would be ridiculed. That's truly how secular Scandinavia, is that you're actually embarrassed if you are a believer, or some people were.

Rachael Kohn: Were they embarrassed about Christian beliefs in particular? Did Danes entertain other beliefs in ghosts, or trolls or magic or the supernatural?

Phil Zuckerman:Yes, I actually did find a lot of people that always had those you know, campfire ghost stories. I think those are pretty common, and heard a lot of stories about supernatural things, weird things happening that couldn't be explained and those are not considered suspect. I mean whether they're true or not, I mean just in terms of how people react, but to be specifically Christian, to really believe the creeds of Christianity, they are considered pretty silly by most - in fact when I went to interview people and ask them, Do you believe that Jesus was born of a virgin or that he was resurrected, I mean people often laughed and thought, 'Are you seriously asking these questions?' Like, a guy from Sweden, I asked him if he really believed in Adam and Eve and he said to me, 'What do you mean?' And I said, 'Well, do you believe that Adam and Eve were the first people put there by God in the Garden?' and he said, no-one believed that; I'm 58 years old, I've never met a living human being who believes such things. And I said, 'Well, you've never been to the United States'. So yes, people that actually believe the literal specifics of Christianity, did experience a little bit of embarrassment and they tended to keep to themselves, you know, they found the little church group, they found the little bible study group and that was kind of where they had their sense of support and social networking, because it was embarrassing for people. It's fascinating.

Rachael Kohn: Shakti, your beliefs are pretty context, they take in Eastern notions of chakras and karma, the etheric and astral bodies, and also some Western notions of the soul drawn from Kabbala, and even some power of positive thinking from the New Age. What gives you the faith that all of these belong together in some kind of system?

Shakti Durga: My life experiences, and the experiences of the thousands of people that I've helped with the paradigm that I live by. I believe that in answer to this discussion that we've been having about the different types of faith, I think one of the tools we can look at here is spiral dynamics. And I'm not sure if you're familiar with Spiral Dynamics.

Rachael Kohn: I have come across it but I think you need to explain it.

Shakti Durga: So Spiral Dynamics is a model of consciousness that talks about the evolution of human consciousness from the very earliest time when man was an ape or whatever man was, and all that was important was survival. So the religion was survival; there was no space for anything else. And then when man got good at that and became a tribal being, then the tribe developed intricate rituals that had to do with belonging to the tribe. And the spirituality of that age was very much about nature sprites and divas and that the stream was holy and that there was a troll in the stream or there was whatever else language you want to use, depending upon which continent you're on. But really every tradition in the world has come through that level of consciousness, and then we had the breaking out of the young people who didn't want to be conscribed by the tribal elders, and they wanted freedom and then you have the pushing out of their new ways of doing things, leading to the kind of empire-building: the Ottoman Empire and other Empires coming along and the religion then becomes obsequious to the ruler because otherwise you're going to get your head cut off, and so there's a whole new kind of faith comes along, and that can get a bit wild, because the old fears that held you in check in the tribe, no longer have any weight for you, so you pretty much do whatever you want to do.

Then came along another paradigm of control that was needed to curb the excesses of that, and I think that pretty much describes some of the religious traditions such as Christianity and the Islamic world, but came in answer to the wildness that was the dominant characteristic of human consciousness, and they had a very civilising effect I think, but because people's consciousness is not just on one level and includes all the levels of consciousness that have come before it, yes, tribalism came into it, and yes, superstitious beliefs came into religions as part of the formulation of those religions. As the consciousness evolved, we moved then again past the transcendence and the belief that our help will be in afterlife, things will be great in the afterlife, and let's just be restrained now and then we break out of that into the worshipping of science and business and how is it that we can improve factors of production and other things to make us a better society.

And each of these things actually adds to society and then that gets out of control and so then we have to have the Green movement, you see. And each of these goods tends to hate the other one, and they all fight with each other and what we need now is faith to jump an abyss by which we can put all these things together and come up with a new faith that includes all of the relevant factors of where human consciousness now is which is remarkably more evolved than it's been in the past.

Rachael Kohn: Well you've introduced, or at least you are part of a new kind of wave of introducing new dimensions of faith, and I would say that your book, Dimensions of Wealth is one expression of that, in which you write about naturally-manifesting wealth as a consequence of thinking about it. It sounds a bit utilitarian to me, so how does it work? I mean that's a fairly materialistic spin on faith.

Shakti Durga: It is, but that's only one very small factor of the overall philosophy which I live by. I believe that there is a dimension of our consciousness that has to do with how we think, and I believe that there are other dimensions to our consciousness beyond that, including the soul which lives by a whole set of rules that I doubt that we have time to talk about, and also that we have this energetic body, which holds our consciousness in place, and so if we get all of these aligned properly, I actually believe that we can prove that life is better with the faith and if we use our mind constructively, therefore you enhance our spirit, then we can actually pull to ourselves circumstances in life that are much better than we ever had before.

Rachael Kohn: Yes, you actually talk about teaching people how they can have heaps of money by repeating affirmations that the Divine is raining money down on them, and all they need to do is to be open to receive it.

Shakti Durga: At the level of the mind they need to not block themselves by believing they'll always be poor. So the antidote to that is to create other beliefs that will allow the divine abundance in. I don't believe for a moment that it's as simple as that, and certainly in the book I develop the theory way beyond that, and I believe that we also have to look at the factors of faith being one of the factors in receiving from the divine what we want. I believe that one of the reasons prayers don't get answers is because people don't believe they're going to be answered, and that that cancels out your prayer. So that I actually think that if we have faith, we have the strongest potential of having our prayers answered, no matter what religion we might be, or whether we don't have religion and we just believe in being a good and loving person, which to me is another religion, if you see what I mean. So I think that it's a complex question but that we can certainly change our circumstances very much by proper application of faith.

Rachael Kohn: Well Lily, in contrast, Christian faith in a god that performs miracles if prayed to, is a little bit different from the idea that you can actually manifest miracles yourself. And isn't that what the Ednas are all bout?

Lily Bragge:Well we are and I say spiritual warfare because we believe it's battle between principalities and powers. And God in his love for us, that we are precious to him, he's counted the hairs on our heads and knows us by name, and in believing that, we believe in God's will, but we also believe in the power of intercession and calling in angels and that we are - so it's very similar in lots of ways to what Shakti is talking about. But I rest in Jesus with that, and it's like I always rejected religiosity and religion as such, I went straight for personal relationship with God, and so I go to the Father through the Son, and the Ednas, with whom I'm meeting tonight, we're praying for a friends of ours whose little boy is going through really fierce chemo, and leukaemia has gone backwards the last few weeks, and his mother doesn't believe, is not a Christian, but she's asked the Ednas to pray and that happens a lot, and I think that's because people feel helpless in situations where there is no control, particularly if you've got a world where you can control, where you think that you can control it. And I think it's interesting that a lot of people who don't profess faith, will ask me and the other Ednas, 'Will the Ednas pray for us?' and we do.

I know what when I feel like something is unbearable, I just hand it over and for me there's a release and a freedom in that, and a hope and a future where before I didn't have one.

Rachael Kohn: Phil, how does a sociologist make sense of miracles that apparently work or people who are praying for others, and effect a change?

Phil Zuckerman:Wow. Well I don't know where to begin here, I don't want to offend anyone. So I'm not -

Rachael Kohn: Just, what would a sociologist say about it?

Phil Zuckerman:Well we see no evidence that prayer works and all the most legitimate studies of prayer have shown no effect at all. But that doesn't mean that people change their ways of thinking or think deeply about things, or focus their energy on things, there isn't going to be a result. I think a sociologist would say, 'Sure, if you're focusing hard on a goal in life, or if you're putting your thoughts and your deep feelings about a person or something that that can affect, we know that thoughts can affect our physicality, our physiology, so there's no question that what we might call meditating or prayer, can have some type of result. But you know, the notion that there's this invisible cosmic magician in the sky that you ask to cure a child who's dying of cancer, I mean this is just very, very difficult to swallow. I mean there's no evidence that this kind of thing works, and why does this God even need to be prayed to, if this God is all-knowing and has counted the hairs on this poor boy's head, doesn't he already know that this child is suffering? Wouldn't he just cure the kid, and if he doesn't want to cure the kid, that's God's will, I mean what do the Ednas think that they are somehow like tapping on God, that she's so busy, and good thing there's the Ednas to sort of bring boy -

Lily Bragge: Can I just say Phil, that it's about believing in a God that we worship and that we love, and a God that knits together, brings all things together for good, and lots of things cannot be explained, that the rational mind cannot come into this. Intellect is redundant in all of this; it's about when Shakti was saying she's believing in prayer, so even her and I are worlds apart, we're very close in some other ways because the Ednas pray from a point of belief. We have faith that God will answer, and if he doesn't, if the worst happens and this little boy - for example, the worst scenario, that he would die and not get well, then -

Phil Zuckerman:But that's not the best scenario? So he can be in the arms of Jesus? I mean it's very confusing to me, and Shakti's thing about prayer was like the ultimate Catch-22 of a used-car salesman, like you know, praying will get this result, and if you don't get the result, well you really believe in the prayer. I mean it's a game of coconuts and it's just a ploy. And you say that prayer's not rational, but you're speaking of it as if it's a cause and effect. So if you want to speak of - cause and effect, you can't have it both ways.

Lily Bragge:My rational response is that I believe that prayer - I've seen over and over anecdotally where prayer has been answered, where the Ednas will get together once a week, it's a fluid group, and it is women who have deep, abiding faith, and things happen. And sometimes it doesn't. And when you say, isn't the best possible result for him to be with Jesus right now, right now at this point in time with him and his family, no, his life is cut short. If that -

Phil Zuckerman:It's God will.

Lily Bragge:- to happen, and yes, if it's God's will, it's God's will, which is sometimes - it's like the Bible is filled with unpalatable truths. The world is a groaning planet, filled with absolute pain and devastation everywhere you look. I mean the thing is, if the worst was to happen for his family and he was to die, faith in God means that there is more chance of seeing him again, of being reunited in heaven, and that to me is something that is a lovely thing to cling on to rather than it being the end.

Rachael Kohn: Lily Bragge and Phil Zuckerman going head-to-head on Faith in God and the Afterlife, here on The Spirit of Things' Virtue of Faith discussion. Do you believe in an afterlife? Why not tell us about it on our website, and Add Your Comment.

Time to hear from Shakti Durga.

Shakti, how would you respond to this conversation so far?

Shakti Durga: Phil was working from such a different paradigm, that it's almost difficult to have a discussion. When I think about my paradigm, I teach that paradigm over nine weekends.

Phil Zuckerman:How much does it cost?

Shakti Durga: It's by donation Phil. I live in the world and so therefore it is - of course I make a living from it, because I don't believe - I haven't taken a vow of poverty you see. But in any event we do run by donation. Over nine weekends I can explain a coherent philosophy by which I could answer every single question that you've posed, all of the dilemmas could be answered cogently and rationally, but using a different paradigm to the one that you're using. The paradigm that I adopt says that we live in a five-dimensional reality, not a two-dimensional reality. Phil, I think you are trying to live in a one-dimensional reality which is just the physical world. And just the logic that we use to negotiate life in the physical world, and I think that this era in which we're living, many people are doing the same thing, and I believe that it can have a great result in society, you can have people paying your taxes, and you can have people believing that they need to help others because they've got a good heart, and that's fine.

But what I'd suggest is that it could be helpful to explore the other four dimensions which I've learnt about during the last 20 years of deep study, and personal experience. And we can understand then how prayer does work, and the role that faith plays. Faith is a spiritual law to me, as well as a paradigm of belief, that the law of faith says if I believe in something with every fibre of my being, with my heart and soul, that I am going to change the probability of that thing occurring on earth, and that's part of my faith, Phil, so I understand that it's not part of your faith and I respect your right to have a different faith. But I think that it's also nice if the rationalists and the sociologists can respect something that perhaps they haven't studied, which is multidimensionality.

Rachael Kohn: Lily and Shakti, I get the sense that for both of you, your faith journey was not only spiritually and psychologically strengthening, but it also kind of gave you both a new identity. Shakti, is that the case for you?

Shakti Durga: Definitely. I think that for me, changing my name from Kim Fraser, former barrister, to Shakti Durga, spiritual teacher, has been a profound shift in my consciousness, and I've moved from a place of wishing to control things, to a place of wishing to enable things. It's a very different way to live one's life, and I find that as I kind of surrender myself into what I perceive to be divine service, that the divine's working through me in ways that would have been impossible had I stuck to the beliefs that I had in my rationalist years in my 20s. I feel that miracles are a very real part of my life, and I believe in this law of correspondence that says that if something's true in the inner world, there'll be a physical sign in the world; a sign by itself is meaningless, and anybody who just goes, 'Oh that's a sign' without there having been some mystical experience to pin it on, to me is just foolish.

Rachael Kohn: Lily, isn't your name related to a sign?

Lily Bragge:Absolutely. And I think the parallels between Shakti and I are quite poignant and they're kind of ironic and hilarious as well, and it's delightful to me to have the counterpoint of Phil with the rationalist, intellectual mindset and the sociologist perspective as well. Because I changed my name. I've changed it twice, and the first time was years before I believed, which was to Lily; I was born Linda Kathleen Bragge, and I changed it to Lily 16 years before I ever believed in God. And it was because the name just appealed to me. But once I believed in God I realised that God presents me with lilies at times in my life. I know the rationalist response is 'That's just a lily growing', but I get them at times of despair and times of hope and auguring in new things. And I've had physical impossibilities, seemingly, with a lily that's been presented the day that my husband and I met one another, he came across one that came up through three inches of tar, which would be something that you would say would not be able to happen. I get lilies as a sign, and when I converted to Christianity and I was baptized, I took a middle name and my middle name, like Shakti Durga means everything spiritually for Shakti from Kim Fraser, I took the middle name because I changed from Linda Kathleen to Lily Bragge, and I haven't had a middle name for 16 years, took the name of Grace, because I went from a state of dis-grace to being given grace. And the thing is, I had done such things in my life that seemed to me unforgivable.

I was a liar, a cheat, a thief, I'd polluted and poisoned pretty much every relationship and taken advantage of everyone for a long time, masquerading on my likeable-ness and the fact that I was a likeable rogue, and that I'd do appalling things and people would say, 'But we still like you' and I traded on that for a very long time. But when it came to being honest and coming from the point of complete, absolute brokenness and knowing that my heart had given itself over to this God that was a friend, first and foremost, and a saviour. I needed to be saved.

Now Phil, to me, it sounds like he is organised and maybe he comes from good foundations, with a good solid family, which I kind of had a lot of good foundations, but I had also very, very bad dysfunctional ones, a lot of violence and sexual abuse, and I think that if you come from a world that is secure, and you know that you're well-loved, it's easier to not have to rely on God if you're not brought up in a religious household. And so like you said before, I fit a standard mould in terms of the conversion, although a lot of people don't convert, apparently the stats for someone converting at my age when I was 40 (a Biblical number - after 40 years in the desert) is one in 200,000 because it's not until we're much older, where people do the deathbed conversions in old age. And young people, one in three or four around 21 apparently, convert into Christianity, I don't know how accurate.

Rachael Kohn: Well Lily, it sounds like you've done some sociological research. We need to come to a conclusion, so I'd like to ask all of you, each of you, do you think faith can move mountains? Can faith make life new? Shakti?

Shakti Durga: Well for me, it does. So I don't really need to believe in faith because my life is a continual stream of it, and so it is for the people that I surround myself with. And so there isn't any question for me that faith is an important and indispensible reality, and yes.

Rachael Kohn: Phil, in your sociological research, have you seen that faith can make life new?

Phil Zuckerman:I guess it depends what you mean by faith. If by faith you sort of mean an inner feeling, a deep hope, a sort of trust even when it's irrational, a sort of deep feeling towards things, if that's what you mean by faith, then I think Yes, we can show empirically that such feelings can affect how people live, what their aspirations are etc. etc.

However, if by faith you mean, you know, belief in things that simply aren't true, I think faith is far more of a damaging phenomenon than a positive phenomenon.

Rachael Kohn: Does anyone really live without faith in something unseen?

Phil Zuckerman:Yes. Again it depends what you mean.

Rachael Kohn: Do you live with faith in some things that are unseen?

Phil Zuckerman:I would say absolutely. But I don't believe in - yes, I certainly have faith - again by faith you mean a sort of internal trusting, a sort of sensitivity, a hope, a caring, if that's what you mean by faith, but if you mean by faith what Paul said in his Letter to the Hebrews, you know, belief in things not seen, surety of things hoped-for, well yes, we're all going to rely on that in times of stress and in times of pain, but to live our lives that way, we would be - it would have I think very negative consequences, because we would have no way with which to live in reality. I mean, even Shakti admitted she lives in a world that has to have money, so I mean obviously you can accuse me of living in a purely physical world but it seems like the only reason we're speaking to each other across the planet in this radio broadcast was created nor from faith but through empirical science and -

Rachael Kohn: Well gosh, if you knew how difficult the technology of all of this was to set up, you might wonder about the faith here at the ABC that we can actually get all this working as we do.

Phil Zuckerman:Fair enough.

Rachael Kohn: Lily, I guess faith has moved mountains for you. Can you ever imagine a time when you come to a point where you doubt it all? Can you imagine -

Lily Bragge:Well I did, when I was engaged to a man who died of liver cancer, and my faith was profoundly shaken. I shook my fist at God and raged at him. I tried to leave God, but God wouldn't leave me. And there is nothing that makes sense to anyone who doesn't believe in that. It just can't possibly resonate in a way that is logical, because it's completely illogical, but I just don't care. Faith for me is what I believe in this little boy being healed in that I have a faith in God that he'll be healed and if he's not, if the physical reality is that he is not healed here, then it doesn't make me run away any more, because my faith is a journey that I'm going on that grows, and it shifts, but the core of it is strong and fierce.

Rachael Kohn: Well I think faith really is a journey and I thank you all for taking us a little bit further on that journey today.

Lily Bragge, Phil Zuckerman, Shakti Durga, it's been wonderful talking to you all.

Lily Bragge:Yes, it's been great. Thanks, Rachael, thanks Phil and thank you, Shakti.

Shakti Durga: Thank you.

Rachael Kohn: Cicero, the Roman philosopher, said 'Courage is full of Faith' and I guess you can see that in people who've not only had faith but the courage to change their lives. My guests were Lily Bragge in Melbourne, who now makes her home in Wisconsin; Shakti Durga of the Shanti Mission Harmony Centres, and Phil Zuckerman, our sociological sceptic, who says he's fascinated by religion. He joined us from Los Angeles.

The program today was produced by me and Geoff Wood with sound engineering by Mark Don.

'Faith has to do with things unseen, and hope with things not at hand', said the 13th century Italian priest, Thomas Aquinas. Hope is our next Vital Virtue, so don't miss that discussion on September 5th.

In the meantime, we've got amazing stories for you in August, like the surprisingly radical theologian, Florence Nightingale. But next week it's Shir Madness, with amazing musicians like Deborah Conway [actually Fay Sussman and Nadya Golski] who'll be heading up the first Jewish Musical Festival in Australia.

I'm Rachael Kohn, join me then for The Spirit of Things.

Images

Click on an image to view full size.

Guests

Lily Bragge
is a US-based writer and journalist who was born in Melbourne. She has written and performed for stage, comedy, film and television and is a contributor to various Australian newspapers including The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and Sunday Age.

Shakti Durga
is founder of the Shanti Mission and creator of The Path to Ease and Grace. She describes herself as a multi-faith teacher of energetic healing. A former barrister with degrees in law and economics, Shakti studied with Master Choa Kok Sui in the Philippines, Sai Baba in India and Sri Jaya Nara in Bali,and now leads seminars, creates meditation and chant CDs, and writes books, her most recent being Dimensions of Wealth: Natural Manaifesting With Ease and Grace (2009).

Phil Zuckerman
is Professor of Sociology at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His areas of specialisation include the sociology of religion, deviance, and social theory. He is the author of Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment, (2008).

Further Information

Shanti Mission Harmony Centres
The Shanti Mission Harmony Centres are described as schools for the soul which means that they are centres of study in respect of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual good health.

Phil Zuckerman 's Pitzer College Homepage
Pitzer College was named for benefactor, noted philanthropist, and orange grower Russell K. Pitzer (1878-1978). Founded in 1963 as the sixth institution of The Claremont Colleges, Pitzer began as a residential liberal arts campus for women with a curricular emphasis in the social and behavioral sciences. Pitzer was the first independent women's college to open in the United States since Bennington College in 1932. In 1970, Pitzer became co educational with a student population of 618 women and 80 men.

Phil Zuckerman's 65 Greatest Songs for Atheists and Agnostics
As Phil notes, "The songs complied here offer a variety of irreligious, agnostic, secular, naturalistic, or atheist opinions and perspectives, representing a wide continuum: from the harshly damning to the sublimely happy, from literal debunking to mild innuendo." An interesting choice for a sociologist of religion.

Seven Vital Virtues
Visit other programs in The Spirit of Things' monthly series, exploring all seven virtues from Prudence to Temperance, Courage, Justice, Faith, Hope and Love.

Publications

Title: My Dirty Shiny Life
Author: Lily Bragge
Publisher: Penguin, 2010

Title: Dimensions of Wealth: Natural Manifesting With Ease and Grace
Author: Shakti Durga
Publisher: Higher Guidance, 2009

Title: Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment
Author: Phil Zuckerman
Publisher: NYU Press, 2008

Music

CD title: Elvis: The Complete '68 Comeback Special
Track title: If I Can Dream
Artist: Elvis Presley
Composer: W. Earl Brown
CD details: RCA 88697 33275 2

CD title: Relax: Sublime Music for Reading and Lounging
Track title: Opus
Artist: Coco De Mer
Composer: Plack/Rechtman
CD details: Rasa/ Incantation IRCD 1008

CD title: Neil Diamond: The Ultimate Collection
Track title: I'm a Believer
Artist: Neil Diamond
Composer: Diamond
CD details: Columbia 485235 2

Presenter

Rachael Kohn

Producer

Geoff Wood and Rachael Kohn