Church of the Churchless

If a magic pill makes me happy, is my happiness real?

Does happiness need to be deserved to be genuine? Here's one person, virtuous, moral, ethical. She's kind and generous. Volunteers at her kid's school. Helps out at the homeless shelter. Prays, meditates, goes to church.

All this do-gooding and God-praising makes her happy.

We know, because she scores high on reputable psychological tests that measure happiness. And when she's put in a brain scanner and asked to think about her good works, her left prefrontal cortex "lights up," which is an indicator of a positive mental state.

Here's another person, a gangster. He's sociopathic, vicious, mean, law-breaking. After stealing some high-tech stuff from a warehouse, he learns that another shady-dealer is willing to pay him $4 million for the stolen goods.

All this criminality makes him happy. Not just after a successful heist, almost all of the time. He's a happy guy. Breaking the law is what he loves to do. Also, breaking bones when he feels like it. We know, for the same reasons noted above: psychological tests and brain scanning.

So are both manifestations of happiness equally real, equally genuine? Is there any reason to say that the virtuous woman is happier than the malevolent man?

Tough questions.

Which are ably addressed by philosopher Owen Flanagan in his book, "The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized," which I've blogged about here, here, and here. His focus, obviously, is on Buddhism when he investigates the supposed relationship between virtue and happiness. But the issue is universal.

And complicated. There are lots of subtleties to consider. I enjoyed the thoughtful care with which Flanagan arrives at what turns out to be a non-conclusion. Here's an excerpt from his final chapter.

I still do not see, despite trying to see for many years, why understanding the impermanence of everything including myself [a core Buddhist tenet] makes a life of maximal compassion more rational than a life of hedonism. And isn't that the problem that we keep coming back to, the problem or question that doesn't go away?

...My own way of dealing with this problem is to be and live as a platonic hedonist, to try to maximize pleasures at the places where what is true and beautiful and good intersect. The comfort associated with living in this space, insofar as there is any, comes from thinking that no answer is the right answer to the question of how one ought to live. Thinking this is compatible with thinking that there is much worthwhile in the wisdom of the ages, including Buddhism.

Perhaps all we can expect of philosophical reflection, especially among those of us who live in multicultural, cosmopolitian communities, is that different ways of being and living, different experiments in conceiving of good lives and of trying to embody the wisdom contained in these different ways, keep many options alive, and allow maximal freedom in finding ways to be well and to live well, and perhaps, if we are lucky, to be happy.

...For that purpose, for going forward, Buddhism has something to offer. Is it the answer? Of course not. Nothing is the answer. This is something Buddhism teaches.

Flanagan talks about "the normative exclusion clause" when discussing the relationship between virtue (however it's conceived) and happiness. I hadn't come across that term before, but I've lived it, as has virtually everybody who has embraced an organized religion, spirituality, or mystical practice at one time or another.

Do X, Y, and Z, and you'll be happy. That's the promise. But the problem is that other people do A, B, and C, or D, E, and F, and they also are happy. So what's going on?

If I believe in a guru and embrace every virtue that he advises, while someone else believes in Jesus and embraces every virtue that he advises, and we both end up happy, what's can be concluded? That happiness, a good life, human flourishing (eudaimonia), can be found in many different ways, or that some forms of happiness are The Real Deal and others are worthless fakes?

I lean toward "whatever works." The normative exclusion clause seems judgmental, rigid, moralistic, Protestant ethic'y and holier-than-thou to me. Here's how Flanagan describes it.

...that only happiness caused by virtue counts as wholesome, virtuous -- the kind we are interested in. Defending the normative exclusion clause requires argument. Here are some bases on which one might mount a plausible defense.

First, we might think that there are reasons to say that happiness is only deserved if the happy person participates in producing that state, which she does not do if it is simply produced by a magic pill. Or, in the false-belief case, we might say that an epistemic norm, our commitment to truth, excludes cases where happiness is won by delusion.

Well, I'm fine with getting happiness from a magic pill. Like I said, whatever works. If you've got a happiness-producing magic pill, share it with me. With this caveat, which applies to my worry about religion: 

Side effects should be minimal. I'm not interested in a magic pill which makes me happy, but other people miserable. Nor do I want to take a magic pill which makes me happy at first, but sad later -- when the negative side effects kick in.

Hey, if people feel good by believing in weird notions, go for it, dudes and dudettes. More power to you. LIfe is tough. Whatever gets you through the days and nights, embrace it. Even religion. Marx called it the "opium of the people." 

Problem is, opium can have some serious side effects. A little is OK. A lot can kill you. 

Likewise, there's nothing wrong with getting happiness however, wherever, and whenever you can enjoy some. Forget that "normative exclusion clause." Happiness is just as real with and without someone's notion of virtue.

Just watch out for those side effects. In the case of religion, these include sanctimoniousness, controlling behavior, judgmentalism, excessive self-absorption, violence, and a host of others.

Universe may not be eternal, but existence is

Believers in God who follow modern science will be heartened by a recent article in New Scientist, "Why physicists can't avoid a creation event." 

While many of us may be OK with the idea of the big bang simply starting everything, physicists, including Hawking, tend to shy away from cosmic genesis. "A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God," Hawking told the meeting, at the University of Cambridge, in a pre-recorded speech.

For a while it looked like it might be possible to dodge this problem, by relying on models such as an eternally inflating or cyclic universe, both of which seemed to continue infinitely in the past as well as the future. Perhaps surprisingly, these were also both compatible with the big bang, the idea that the universe most likely burst forth from an extremely dense, hot state about 13.7 billion years ago.

However, as cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston explained last week, that hope has been gradually fading and may now be dead. He showed that all these theories still demand a beginning.

To me, though, I don't see why a beginning to the universe implies anything about the "hand of God" being the cause of creation.

If we didn't know that our galaxy is part of the vastly larger universe, it'd be easy to think that the formation of our solar system can be traced back to the mysterious formation of the Milky Way Galaxy, before which time and space supposedly couldn't exist.

Several decades into the twentieth century, there wasn't any firm evidence of other galaxies. Now, we know there are at least a hundred billion galaxies. So religious believers and unbelievers alike should be extremely cautious about assuming that what we now know about reality is anywhere close to the ultimate truth.

The big bang banged. Our universe came into being. How? From where? Why? When? Nobody knows. It's a mystery.

According to the article, some theories of modern physicists -- eternal inflation, cyclic universe, static cosmic egg -- seem to be on the ropes, inconsistent with mathematical models. What's surprising about that? What I find surprising is that we humans have been able to make as much progress as we have toward understanding the origin of the universe, and how it has evolved during its post-big bang history of 14 billion years.

Sure, us Homo sapiens are the most intelligent great apes.

We've come a long way over the past few million years, far surpassing what other primates are able to achieve, knowledge-wise. Yet it's important to keep in mind that in comparison with cosmic time, monkeys and humans shared a common ancestor just a blink of an eye ago.

I doubt we'll ever be able to comprehend what the cosmos as a whole is like, which probably includes much more than just the universe in which we find ourselves. I doubt even more that we'll ever be able to know, really know, how the origin of everything in existence came to be. 

When I say "we," I mean humans. Almost certainly, our species will die out one day. Perhaps more advanced earthly species will evolve capabilities of consciousness which will enable them to grok stuff we're utterly incapable of understanding. 

Let's suppose some conscious being, somewhere, some time, somehow, grasps (or is) the ultimate truth of the cosmos. This being knows. It groks. It's so attuned to the Absolute Truth of Existence there's not even a Planck length of distance between the being and that truth. This being does its best to communicate what it knows to us humans. And I wonder...

Would we have any chance of understanding? Of knowing what that being knows? Of fitting our repository of limited human truths into whatever lies at the heart of the entire cosmos, our unimaginably vast universe plus all that lies beyond what we know now?

I doubt that we could. I doubt that our great ape consciousness, no matter how evolved it is compared to our primate cousins, would be able to take in the Absolute Truth of Existence and make much sense of it. 

Reminds me of Douglas Adam's Total Perspective Vortex.

The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.

To explain — since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
Trin Tragula — for that was his name — was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.

"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.

And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex — just to show her.

And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion. 

Exactly.

I'd like to know what the cosmos is all about. But not at the cost of having my brain annihilated. I don't want to end up in a mental hospital muttering to anyone who'll listen, "The universe is... is... is..." Heck, that's akin to what I was up to back in the sixties. Been there, done that.

So I'm pretty much content to accept that I'll never know how or why our universe was created in the big bang. Nor will scientists, at least not in the foreseeable future. I can picture the big bang banging, yet what it banged from or what it is banging into... that's beyond my mind's pay grade.

Back when I wrote "Existence exists. Amazing!" I was more open to the possibility that somehow human consciousness could be the missing piece that completes the jigsaw puzzle of reality. Well, it's still a possibility. 

Now I enjoy contemplating the beauty of boundless existence without feeling that I'll ever understand it. Something always has been, even if the universe hasn't. Wow. Beautiful. 

There's no free will, so you're unable to believe me

I gave it my best try last night -- arguing that we humans don't have free will, though it seems ever so obvious that we do. (Of course, it also seems obvious that the sun goes around the Earth, which demolishes the "obviousness" argument for anything.)

My wife and I belong to a three-couple book/article discussion group. Yesterday the subject was the justice system. When it came time for me to share my thoughts, I started off by quoting from Jerry Coyne's column in USA Today, "Why you don't really have free will."

The issue of whether we have of free will is not an arcane academic debate about philosophy, but a critical question whose answer affects us in many ways: how we assign moral responsibility, how we punish criminals, how we feel about our religion, and, most important, how we see ourselves — as autonomous or automatons.

But before I explain this, let me define what I mean by "free will." I mean it simply as the way most people think of it: When faced with two or more alternatives, it's your ability to freely and consciously choose one, either on the spot or after some deliberation.

A practical test of free will would be this: If you were put in the same position twice — if the tape of your life could be rewound to the exact moment when you made a decision, with every circumstance leading up to that moment the same and all the molecules in the universe aligned in the same way — you could have chosen differently.

Well, it was a good choice to lead off my part of the discussion in this fashion. Because it stimulated some passionate exchanges between me and several free-will believers. 

I said that if the goals of the U.S. justice system basically are deterrence, punishment, rehabilitation, and restitution, one of these -- punishment -- should be taken off the table, since people don't have free will. Punishment (retribution) doesn't make sense if someone wasn't able to freely choose between committing a crime or not committing a crime.

Deter further crimes by putting them in jail, and serving as a warning to other potential criminals. Rehabilitate them through education, counseling, training, and such while in prison. Force them via restitution to pay back people they've harmed.

But don't believe that someone deserves to be punished out of a sense that he or she freely willed to commit a crime.

As Coyne implied above, this belief requires a supernatural, immaterial, non-physical source of our actions, a soul or free-floating consciousness unaffected by genetics, prior experiences, environmental factors, memories, unconscious influences, hormones, and so on.

At every moment, I argued, all we know is that what happened, did.

A belief in free will assumes that something other than what did happen, could have. That's an interesting philosophical notion which has inspired lots of fictional works. What if Hitler won the Second World War? What if John Kennedy hadn't been assassinated?

However, we never see those "what if's" in reality. There's only one path through time and space that we follow. Coyne says:

Now there's no way to rewind the tape of our lives to see if we can really make different choices in completely identical circumstances. But two lines of evidence suggest that such free will is an illusion.

The first is simple: we are biological creatures, collections of molecules that must obey the laws of physics. All the success of science rests on the regularity of those laws, which determine the behavior of every molecule in the universe. Those molecules, of course, also make up your brain — the organ that does the "choosing."

And the neurons and molecules in your brain are the product of both your genes and your environment, an environment including the other people we deal with. Memories, for example, are nothing more than structural and chemical changes in your brain cells. Everything that you think, say, or do, must come down to molecules and physics.

True "free will," then, would require us to somehow step outside of our brain's structure and modify how it works. Science hasn't shown any way we can do this because "we" are simply constructs of our brain. We can't impose a nebulous "will" on the inputs to our brain that can affect its output of decisions and actions, any more than a programmed computer can somehow reach inside itself and change its program.

And that's what neurobiology is telling us: Our brains are simply meat computers that, like real computers, are programmed by our genes and experiences to convert an array of inputs into a predetermined output. 

That word, "predetermined," came up often last night. Some of my fellow discussants were strongly opposed to the notion that everything we do, think, and feel was determined at the moment at the big bang, with events simply unfolding according to the laws of physics.

I understand. Again, almost everybody feels like they have free will. I certainly do. But feeling so doesn't make it so. 

Also, I pointed out that the "pre" part of predetermined usually is an abstraction when we're talking about people. Practically speaking, it's more accurate to say that our behavior is determined. Meaning, the human brain is so complex, as are the environmental influences acting upon us, there's no way to precisely predict what someone is going to do.

It's like chaos theory.

Chaotic systems, such as a turbulent river, are deterministic yet unpredictable. Throw a cork into the water above some rapids. You won't be able to predict where it will end up, but it will end up somewhere after innumerable causes and effects act upon it. The cork doesn't use its free will to decide "I'm going to head this way rather that way for no reason, just because I want to."

Yet us humans imagine that we can, the imagining being determined, of course, just as everything else is. 

Last night I was told that without free will, there can't be any morality. I don't get this argument. Other primates act in ways we'd call "moral." Apes demonstrate empathy, concern, sharing. Why is free will required for getting along with our fellow humans?

We respond to other people; we communicate with other people; we learn about their needs, and tell them our own; we do our best to act kindly, compassionately, honestly, generously. Why? Because we're drawn to. This is our nature. We aren't isolated individuals. We're connected with, and influenced by, everything and everyone we come in contact with.

To me, a belief in free will is horribly confining. It implies that I'm a tiny island rather than a vast continent, a free-standing part rather than an integrated whole, a fallen leaf rather than living foliage on the branches of a tree that, ultimately, is the entire cosmos.

Actions are determined. So justice should be determinate.

Within reasonable guidelines, judges should be able to determine sentences which fit with determining factors of the criminal and the crime. Since there's no such thing as a Free Will Fairy which floats above people's heads and makes decisions out of the blue, completely independent of brain functioning, heredity, environmental influences, or whatever, condemning a troubled 14 year old to a life sentence without parole after he shot his grandfather is absurd. 

When we give up belief in free will, genuine morality is possible. Otherwise we're trapped in cruel Old Testament "eye for an eye" vengeance, assuming that we can be as free to punish as a criminal was free to commit a crime.

Jerry Coyne responds to comments on his free will essay here. Interesting give and take. I feel like I understand his position, which makes a lot of sense, but other people are so invested in their free will'ness, they misinterpret Coyne's arguments and fuzzy-up the whole notion of free will.

LIke Massimo Pigliucci does. 

Indeed, it is not surprising at all that we make all sorts of unconscious decisions before we become aware of them... Incidentally, I find it strange when some people argue that “we” are not making decisions if our subconscious is operating, since presumably we all agree that our subconscious is just as defining of “us” as conscious thinking is.

Hmmmm. So an intuition pops into awareness from my subconscious, and when I follow it, that's "free will"? Even though I wasn't free to will it? That's a strange view of free will, not at all as Coyne describes it. 

Bad news: I'm going to die. Good news: I'll be nirvana!

Oh, the unfairness of it all. I really like being alive. Yet one day I'll be dead. Gone. Nonexistent. Forever unconscious. 

Damn it, damn it, damn it! Who the hell arranged the cosmos in this fucked-up fashion?! I want to live forever, or at least much longer than I'm going to, so where's the Complaint Department, Customer Service, Warranty Fulfillment? I need to talk to who's in charge, because this death deal is totally screwed-up.

That's basically how I think in my least harmonious, accepting, live-and-let-die moments. Which are quite frequent, because such thoughts enter my mind a lot.

I've learned, though, to not obsess over them as much as I used to. Yes, I still have a fear of non-existence. But it's not as strong as when I wrote "Death and the primal fear of non-existence." And I'm better able to recognize the ridiculousness in my petulant complaining about death bringing an end to my enjoyment of life.

Where did I get the idea that I'm entitled to anything else but one life here on Earth? What justifies my feeling that something is wrong with the fact that when I die, that's finis for me? 

Religions, mainly. Early on as a child I was told about salvation, life after death, heaven, hell, and such. Later, when I delved into Eastern religions, I learned about reincarnation, bardos, cosmic consciousness, higher realms of reality.

Those notions created the schism in my psyche between what is and what should be as regards death. Unlike an animal, such as our twelve year old family dog, I don't simply live every day as pleasantly as possible until one day I'm no longer alive. 

I, along with the vast majority of people on this planet, have been infected with the worst sort of deceptive advertising.

All those religions and supernatural belief systems have marketed after-life products which don't exist. Yet the sales job has been so successful, most of us are desperate to possess something we've never seen, have no proof of, and will never be able to tell if anyone else has.

Life after death.

In my saner moments, I tell myself, "Who promised you a rose garden? (without thorns)" Life is what it is. Death is all around us. It's impossible to ignore. Yes, I fear death. Yes, I"ve bought into promises of everlasting life and thereby raised my hopes beyond what is reasonable to hope for. But I can still focus on what is real for me here and now, not on illusory dreams of eternal immortality.

Us secular churchless irreligious non-believers enjoy a gift that the faithful lack: a vivid appreciation of how priceless every passing moment is. Heaven isn't a place we aspire to; for us it's the present moment, or it's nothing at all.

There's nothing more amazing, more awesome, more mysterious, I'd even say more divine, than realizing, really realizing with every fiber of one's being, that this present moment will never come again.

And more: that eventually there will be a moment which brings an end to all moments for me, you, everybody. The moment of death.

This morning, during one of my pre-meditation reading moments, I came across these passages in Owen Flanagan's "The Boddhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized." It made me look upon death in a somewhat different manner. Hey, I may be dead, but at least I'll be in nirvana.

Selfless persons are something we naturalists can believe in. Selfless persons whose consciousness continue after they die are not something we can believe in. The problem is that orthodox Buddhism is all about rebirth, sometimes gazillions of rebirths. One rebirth is too many for the naturalist and more is not merrier.

There is some consolation perhaps in the fact that virtually every description of nirvana, the ideal state achieved only by truly enlightened souls, Buddhas -- when they depart the earth -- makes it seem identical to what we would think of as the state of "just being dead," a state totally unaccompanied by the presence of any deity or communing with some heavenly host of (other) saved souls.

Personal consciousness ends, and one's body and spirit are taken to -- absorbed into -- Nature's bosom. gone altogether is me... the state in which you have achieved peace and tranquility because your consciousness is gone, your career as a person is over, and you are as dead as the proverbial doornail.

Buddhism says I'm a soul-less Heraclitean river. Cool!

Everybody wants to be something. That's so much better than being nothing. (Assuming "nothing" is something you can be.)

It seems like I'm some sort of self. After all, I'm fond of saying stuff like "Personally, I think..." and "When I look within myself, I feel..." But Buddhism, along with neuroscience, see here and here, deny that us humans have/are some sort of unchanging permanent self. 

Or soul. Which religions consider to be the same thing as a self, just spiritual, immaterial, divine, eternal.

Whatever we call it, self or soul, the big question is whether our essence is like a diamond, indestructible and unchanging, or like a river, flowing and everaltering. The scientific evidence points riverward. 

As does mainstream Buddhism, according to Owen Flanagan in his fascinating book, "The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized," where he seeks to understand what Buddhism is like without all the weird supernatural stuff.

I should explain what a person^Buddha is and is not, and how a person^Buddha is possible given that there are no selves. Although Buddhists are said to deny that there are persons and selves or persons with selves, this is not really so. Or better, it is so, but the devil is in the details.

When properly interpreted, Buddhists believe that there are persons, and that talk of persons and selves is harmless so long as we recognize that person and self refer to something, a pattern that is conventionally useful but that does not name anything "ultimate" or "really real."

Some kinds of persons, eternal persons, and some kind of selves, indestructible transcendental egos or immortal souls, do not exist at all, but Heraclitean selves do exist. Heraclitean selves are like Heraclitean rivers where both subsist in a Heraclitean universe.

So everything is changing. Including me, you, beliefs, brains, selves, Mt. Everest, ants, galaxies, subatomic particles, who is ahead in the latest presidential poll. Heraclitus sure seems to have gotten that right.

If we hope to base our happiness, our well-being, our satisfaction, on something immutable, unchanging, and eternal -- that hope is going to be still unfulfilled on our death bed. Better to accept that we're all Heraclitean rivers in a Heraclitean universe. 

(Scholarly analysis follows)

Karmic causality -- believable and unbelievable

Karma... a word that both is eminently scientific, and also annoyingly religious. I've spent a lot of time exploring both meanings of karma. 

Ever since I was a kid I've enjoyed learning about science. In my childhood room I set up a card table that fit oh-so-perfectly inside a corner of my closet. I'd sit down at the table, slide the closet door shut, turn on a light that I'd strung over the clothes rod, and spend many happy hours performing experiments with science kits.

Then, as now, the essence of science for me was cause and effect. Do this, and observe that. (See my "Thanks for the chlorine gas, Mom" post.)

That's the believable side of karma: causes lead to effects which lead to more causes which lead... ad infinitum, back to the beginning of the universe. 

Karma, though, generally is viewed as having something particular to do with conscious beings. Usually billiard balls richocheting around a pool table aren't thought of as generating karma. But if a person risks her life to save a child about to step in front of a speeding truck, bystanders will say "that should get her some good karma."

Especially if they're Buddhist. 

Buddhism, like karma, comes in both scientific and religious guises. I'm enjoying Owen Flanagan's new book, "The Boddhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized," which aims to sort out the unbelievable supernatural aspect of Buddhism from the believable natural aspect.

This includes karma. Flanagan likes how the current Dalai Lama supports scientific inquiry and findings of modern science, albeit with some caveats which allow supernaturalism to remain part of his Buddhist teachings.

Flanagan says one form of karmic causality discussed by the Dalai Lama is eminently reasonable and scientific.

The idea can be understood straightforwardly as follows: once sentient beings exist they think, feel, and act in ways that have effects. These effects are of two kinds: personal -- both intrapersonal (on the person herself) and interpersonal (on those with whom the person interacts) -- and environmental, affecting the natural and built worlds. To these one should add social, economic, and political effects.

Karmic causation as depicted in this way is natural. It is not due to theistic intervention at the beginning of the process, say, in creating a Big Bang with a plan, nor is there intentional (intelligent) design along the way other than the effects of the sentient beings (human and nonhuman) who eventually emerged and are creating karmic effects = effects via their actions.

However, Buddhism, Hinduism, and other religious faiths which have karma as a central tenet don't only look upon karmic causality in this scientific fashion. If they did, karma would be an undeniable truth. Flanagan says that karmic causation then could just be called "sentient-being causation," a subtype of ordinary causation.

There's what he calls a less tame (meaning wilder, farther out, much more unbelievable) Buddhist interpretation of karma, though.

Karmic causation untame... names an ontologically unique kind of causation that accounts for how the psyches of future beings are determined by a set of causal processes that involve more than the environmental cum psycho-social-political-economic effects of previous occupants of the earth. 

What is meant by the idea of "the law of karma, by which an intentional act will reap certain fruits" [a Dalai Lama quote] is this: my consciousness does not die when my body does, it goes on and reaps in the next and possibly many (many) future lives what it sows in each antecedent life. 

The Dalai Lama, along with his Buddhist followers, admits there's no demonstrable scientific evidence of past lives. So the aforementioned caveat is brought in:

Science finds no evidence for rebirth, but it has not found its "nonexistence."

Well, science also hasn't found the nonexistence of the Tooth Fairy.

But once we get beyond a certain age, we realize that Mom and Dad are better explanations for why a quarter appears under our pillow after a tooth is put there than the Tooth Fairy. (Not sure what the going rate for a tooth is these days; back in olden times, when I was losing my teeth, I recall getting a quarter.)

So regular cause and effect, not involving karmic causality extending over past lives, now seems much more believable to me than Buddhism's karma untamed version. Religious believers, however, will keep on believing until the impetus for belief loses its energy. That's what happened to me, after I wrote a book which espoused the unbelievable aspect of karma.

Which is the essence of karma tame version. People do stuff; then they do different stuff, because causes keep happening, as do effects.

 

Puppetji on meaning of life

Via an email, someone just reminded me about a source of ageless wisdom that I'd tapped into some years ago, but had forgotten about: Puppetji.

His socksang on "Why Are We Here?" pretty much says it all. Certainly more entertainingly than my recent blog post about finding meaning in life. 

 

l can also recommend "What is Sacred?" as providing a meaningful answer to this oh-so-important question.

 

Finding meaning in the midst of life (not in God, not in "I")

What gives life meaning? Why do we get out of bed in the morning rather than pulling the covers over our head and curling up in existential despair? Where are we to look for purposes, goals, things to do?

God or the supernatural is one answer. Deeply religious people believe that meaning flows down from a divine above. The purpose of life isn't made; it is discovered -- via a holy book, holy person, holy revelation. 

The source doesn't have to be a personal higher power.

In Eastern religions, karma is considered to be the guiding force which leads us to do stuff: marry this person, choose this job, live in this place. As with God-believers, meaning is manufactured by a transcendent entity and delivered into our psyches, where we mistakenly believe our free will is in control.

Alternatively, thoroughly secular people view meaning as being in our hands. Or rather, minds. The meaning of life isn't given; it is created. What's right or wrong, good or bad, desirable or undesirable is up to each of us to decide.

Without an "I," meaning is absent. Only when the thought "I really enjoy writing blog posts" arises is meaning formed within the otherwise meaningless world that surrounds me.

Today, while exercising, I finished listening to a Philosophy Talk podcast of "Nihilism and Meaning." The guest philosopher was Hubert Dreyfus, author of "All Things Shining," a book I blogged about last year most positively.

So while some people surely are drifting aimlessly in a boundless ocean of godless choices, many others believe that they're being propelled along a straight and narrow sea lane with the Supreme Being guiding their course.

I'm familiar with both nautical analogies, which were very real to me when I held fast to them. In college I was an enthusiastic existentialist, devouring Sartre, Camus, and all that existence precedes essence stuff; meaning was to be made by me. Then I embraced an Indian guru; I had faith that my karma and the Master's grace jointly determined everything that happened to me.

Now, I resonate with how "All Things Shining" views a vibrant way of living. After discounting excessive self-confidence as a foundation for one's existence, the authors say:

In contrast with this, a genuine confidence of the sort that seems to have directed Mr. Autrey's actions is driven not by some internal set of thoughts or desires, nor by a calculated set of plans or principles.

Indeed, as in the case of Mr. Autrey, it is experienced as confidence drawn forth by something outside of oneself. It is grounded in the way things actually are, not in the confident person's perhaps self-serving characterization of them. The genuinely confident agent does not manufacture confidence, but receives it from the circumstances.

Listening to Dreyfus discuss his soon-to-be-published book (the podcast dates from January 2010) reminded me of how much sense it makes to follow a middle way between "my fate is in God's hands" and "I'm in total charge of my life."

Dreyfus talked about how the ancient Greeks believed that people could be taken over by a godly inspiration. For example, if Eros turns his attention to you, you're going to fall in love. For sure. Resistance is futile. Might as well embrace Eros and fall freely.

Today, us churchless folk believe as little in the Greek gods as we believe in the God of monotheistic Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. Yet Dreyfus still sees a place for a sort of godliness in the meaning of our lives. The "gods" are naturalistic circumstances, though, not supernatural divinities.

Meaning is made continuously through our experiencing of what is happening all around us. As we respond to those circumstances, opening ourselves up to the realities of the present moment, embracing the desires, urges, wants, intentions, and passions bubbling up into our consciousness, we find that meaning is neither given to us, nor produced by us. 

It arises naturally when we simply attend to where we are, what is happening, how we feel. Dreyfus and his co-author wrote about a heroic action:

Greatness of this sort is nearly mystical to apprehend. It is characterized by the kind of sustained responsiveness to the situation that the Subway Hero embodied when he leapt onto the tracks. It is unflinching, unhesitating, and unwavering, and it has these certain qualities precisely because the activity flows not from the agent but through him.

(Someone has put a recording of the "Nihilism and Meaning" podcast onto You Tube in three pieces, here, here, and here. It's an interesting discussion. I'll embed the videos; audios, actually.)

 

 

 

Are all religions essentially the same?

I used to believe that underneath all the obvious differences between religions, there was a difficult-to-discern common core. Mysticism was what united Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Sikhism, and other faiths.

God is One. Humans have, or rather are, a soul. It is possible for this soul-drop to merge into the One god-ocean.

There. Three simple sentences. Forget all the complex divisive theologies. That's the oft-forgotten genuine essence of every religion: realizing that our true Self is, basically, the same as God. 

It was a nice belief. Warm and fuzzy.

The Indian spiritual organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, that I was an active member of for over thirty years promulgated this creed in books that purported to show how Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Sikhism really were the same once the common mystical essence of each religion was recognized.

And who was the recognizer of this amazing truth? As the old saying goes, you only get three guesses, and the first two don't count. 

Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

That common mystical essence just happened to be exactly what the RSSB gurus and high-ranking devotees taught. If you were a Christian and thought you knew what Christianity is all about, you were mistaken. You needed to buy the RSSB books which explained what Jesus really meant in the New Testament.

Ditto for Judaism, Islam, and Sikhism. To my knowledge Radha Soami Satsang Beas never has gotten around to showing how Buddhism and Taoism are akin to the RSSB teachings, probably because this would be such a stretch.

In a fascinating piece, "Preventing holy wars, by consensus," David Chapman convincingly argues that this all religions are one notion is a load of crap. He focuses on how Consensus Buddhism gets this wrong, but his analysis pertains equally to anyone, including RSSB, who claims to know the common essence of all religions.

If all religions are essentially the same, what is it that is the same about them?

This is a question advocates of the “brotherhood of all religions” would rather skate over. When pressed, they usually produce one of two answers:

• All religions say everyone should be nice to everyone else.
• The essence of all religions is the mystical insight that your True Self is the same as God.

Both of these are factually false.

...Almost no one agrees that your True Self is God

The only major religion that says your True Self is God is Hinduism—and only some Hindu sects.

Nevertheless, the idea that this is the essence of all religions—which are therefore all really the same—is increasingly popular in the West. This is called “Perennialism” by religious scholars.

Perennialism is rejected by most prominent spokespeople for most religions. Perennialists need to argue that all these authorities are deluded about the nature of their own religions. A Perennialist knows The Truth about Islam, that it is really one path among many to becoming God. Most imams consider that the worst idea imaginable, but they don’t really know anything about Islam. Since the essence of Islam is the mystical experience of becoming God, which the imams have lost, they are idiots and should be ignored.

...The third problem with “all religions are essentially the same” is that it has been, from its invention, a tool for totalitarian domination. Whoever gets to say what the “essence” is holds all religious power.

This has been the strategy of American Consensus Buddhism: to define all alternatives out of existence by insisting on sameness.

Read Chapman's entire essay. The comments on his piece also are interesting, including Chapman's responses to some criticisms.

I'm a big fan of his open-minded, intelligent take on both Buddhism and religiosity in general. Check out my previous Chapman-related blog posts here, here, here, and here.

Is my "Life is Fair" book really crap?

A few days ago I got an email from someone who pointed out that, in a recent blog post comment, I'd said: "Karma, reincarnation, rebirth -- no, not solid at all, as evidence is lacking for these ideas."

My correspondent thought that a retraction of sorts was in order, given that in 1998 I'd written a book for an Indian spiritual organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, called Life is Fair. The book is a karmic justification for vegetarianism (complete with cartoons!).

I replied to the emailer by saying that, hey, minds change. Today, I don't look upon karma and reincarnation as I did thirteen years ago. 

A reply to my reply then hit my inbox:

Perhaps you might consider publicizing what may - now - be your "retraction" (so to speak) of your previous "views" - as the crap which I saw them to be when I looked at your book years ago.

That struck me as a reasonable request. At first. Then I did some additional thinking about when it makes sense to publicly retract previous views that currently seem like "crap" to both me and other people.

I talked about this question in regards to Life is Fair in a 2009 blog post: "Shocked at my own beliefs, should I disown me?" Conclusion: no.

Back in the late 90's I thought differently. In the future, who knows?

The only thing I can be certain about is that from this moment until the day I die, I'm not going to be absolutely certain about anything. Probably, I should add, to be consistent.

So after a few days of pondering my emotional reaction to re-reading what I wrote a dozen or so years ago, I've concluded that I was too hard on myself.

Yes, I was disturbed that my beliefs back then fell into a "religiously mentally ill" diagnosis. And when I read how the Brian of that time looked upon evolution, it bothered me that I was less scientific than I'd remembered myself being.

But here's the thing: I changed. And I'm still changing. As are we all.Thankfully.

Because change only stops when we're dead. Until then, living leads us in largely unpredictable ways. Our relationships with other people change; our bodies change; our lifestyles change; our physical activities change; our personalities change; our philosophical and religious beliefs change.

Which is unavoidable. And largely to the good, even though many of life's changes are objectionable to us.

So I don't feel like retracting what I said in Life is Fair. I'm glad I wrote the book. It pleases me to think that some people have become vegetarians as a result of reading it, or were strengthened in their commitment to remain meatless.

I still believe that life is fair.

Just not for the same reasons I offered up back in 1998. Now I'm much more skeptical about the reality of reincarnation. If we haven't had past lives then "karma" is limited to our experiences in this life, plus the genetic heritage in our DNA of ancestors' lives.

But often it isn't possible to prove the non-existence of something, especially when that thing is hypothesized to be beyond the bounds of materiality. I'm not 100% sure that karma and reincarnation aren't real, just as I'm not 100% sure that God doesn't exist.

To me, retractions are justified when a factual error has been made.

If a newspaper story gets someone's age or occupation wrong, or misquotes them, a retraction/ correction is called for. However, opinion writers don't issue retractions. If a columnist changes her mind, she says "I look upon this issue differently now." No apology is required; no mea culpa. 

Recalling my state of mind when I wrote Life is Fair, I don't see how I could have done anything differently. Life is what it is, a cliche that nonetheless is true. 

As I've noted before, my relationship with Radha Soami Satsang Beas and the guru (Charan Singh) who led the organization when I joined up in 1971 strikes me as being a lot like my first marriage. Both began with love, followed by many years of happiness, and ended with a divorce.

Have I ever felt about "retracting" my attraction to my first wife? Of course not. What I felt for her at the time was real. I still feel a lot of fondness for her. We grew apart, but the eighteen years we were married never will leave either of us. Our marriage changed us, led us to grow, albeit in different directions.

Likewise, writing Life is Fair meant a lot to me. I agree with the person who emailed me that some parts of the book aren't scientifically defensible. I'd write it differently today, but yesterday isn't today.