Church of the Churchless

Maya is illusion: Alan Watts' good news

People are fond of saying to someone they disagree with, "get real!" It's a put down to be told that you're living an illusion.

So when Eastern religions tell us that this physical existence is maya, not really real reality, it's natural to feel concerned.

Even though life seems pleasant enough most of the time, what if I'm living a dream and a much better state -- nirvana, satori, enlightenment, god-realization, buddha nature -- awaits beyond my current consciousness horizon?

Not to worry, says Alan Watts in "Become What You Are," a book that belies its title because Watts tells us that it's impossible to be anything other that what we are. I quoted this passage in a previous blog post.

The idea of God is a finger pointing the way to Reality, but when people try to join God and Reality, to identify the one with the other, to find the former in the latter, they are trying to join together two things that were never in need of being joined. This is like trying to make the eyes see themselves.

I flipped through "Become What You Are" this morning and found some references to a subject that both interests and confuses me: nonduality.

Writings on nonduality seem to imply, or even flat out state, that our ordinary perceptions of reality are off-base -- that the cosmos actually is much more of a oneness than a manyness, so if we see duality we aren't seeing truly.

Watts has a refreshing perspective on nonduality which I sum up as maya is illusion. After all, what's more dualistic than dividing reality into what seems to be, and what really is?

But one of the principal mistakes of Western interpretations of Asian thought is to equate Brahman with the infinite and the realization of one's identity with Brahman as a change from finite to infinite consciousness.

...But Brahman or Reality is beyond opposites, being that what does not require distinction for its existence. For Brahman is all things, this world we see around us, together with our consciousness and the thoughts in our minds and the feelings in our hearts.

To see Brahman we have just to look with our eyes, for Brahman is nothing other than what we are beholding at the moment.

For a long time I've wondered what the difference is between a enlightened being and someone unenlightened, if our ordinary vision already is beholding reality in all its glory. Watts, as he so often does, anticipates my question and addresses it.

In view of this it will also be asked what is the difference between a sage and an ordinary ignorant man. We are accustomed to believe that a sage or mystic is one who beholds God or Brahman in all things; but if Brahman is all things, surely an ordinary man in seeing them is doing no less than the sage?

This is perfectly true, but the difference between the sage and the ordinary man is that the latter fails to realize it.

...But [for the sage] this certainly does not mean that in place of himself, other people, houses, stars, hills, and trees he sees a formless all-pervasive and infinite luminosity, which seems to be some people's idea of the Divine Reality.

If such a state of consciousness were possible, it would still be dualistic, involving an utter difference between Reality and the ordinary world. It should rather be said that he feels Brahman, the force of the universe, at work in everything he does, thinks, and feels, and this gives a powerful and liberating impulse to his spirit.

In other words, wisdom is realizing that spiritually there is nothing to seek; mystically, there is nothing hidden. What we see is what there is. Illusion is the belief that this world, this moment, this state of consciousness is illusory.

That's good news. Even more: great news!

To Christians, the good news of the Bible is that we're saved through Jesus. To Watts, the good news of a proper understanding of Eastern philosophy is that there's nothing to be saved from.

But you are free to abandon yourself to actual life and to know that living in God is another name for this abandonment, for watching the snow and walking down the street.

...You say you do not feel this abandonment right now. What do you expect to feel? It is not a feeling; it is feeling. It is not a thought; it is thinking. If it were a particular thought or feeling there could be coming into it and going out of it; but God is One and all-inclusive, and here there can be neither coming nor going, inside or outside.

...It is your real self, that has no hiding-place. Destroy the universe and it remains. No, you can't feel it -- but then how can you know anything about it at all. Because you can use it and feel its use, just as "the wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof but canst not tell whence it cometh nor whither it goeth."

Don't worry about yourself. You don't have one (a self).

Ah, I love instant enlightenment.

OK -- not exactly instant, because I had to watch 54 minutes of a You Tube video before I got to Thomas Metzinger's philosophical "money shot" right at the end.

But I had enjoyed Metzinger's book, "The Ego Tunnel," which I blogged about here, here, and here.

So when I saw a mention of the video on my Twitter feed, I figured that it would be worth watching. I'm a sucker for a Zen-titled talk, "Being No One," from someone who specializes in scientific perspectives on the philosophy of mind.

Most of Metzinger's presentation is pretty darn boring. I listened to it more than I watched it, dividing my attention between his ideas and browsing my habitual morning web sites.

One of his basic notions is that our self-model, our sense of "me," is a simulation. I don't claim to completely understand Metzinger's explanation of how this comes about, which is rather complicated.

However, I could grasp his point that evolution, via natural selection, favored humans who could simply recognize the presence of a wolf -- no need to also know how the brain processes sensory and cognitive data behind the scenes of conscious awareness.

So we have a naive realism. Metzinger said, "We didn't need to distance ourselves from ourselves." And...

We are systems, which are not able to recognize their own sub-symbolic self-model as a model. Therefore we operate under the condition of a naive-realistic self-misunderstanding.

We necessarily experience ourselves as being in direct and immediate epistemic contact with ourselves.

Metaphorically speaking, you are a system that continually confuses itself with the content of its own self-model.

This avatar doesn't know it has a visual cortex; it just sees with its eyes. It doesn't know it has a motor cortex; it just acts with its hands.

Meaning, I think, that it just seems so obvious "I" am the center of my "self."

That there is an ethereal being I call "me" who seemingly is separate and distinct from all of the crude physical goings-on in my body, neurons firing chemically/electrically, food being digested and crapped out, etc., etc., etc.

Given this assumption, which is almost universal among human beings, the quest for our true self becomes all-important.

People want to be self-fulfilled. They seek self-realization. They wonder what happens to the self after death. They yearn for enlightenment, which often is considered to involve ego-loss or becoming selfless.

Metzinger, however, dissolves these notions in some wonderfully intriguing closing remarks.

Given all this, isn't it true that the self is an illusion? I think it is not true, because it contains a logical mistake.

On the level on which we are talking, there is no such thing as truth or falsity yet. There is nobody who could have an illusion in this system.

So if you really wanted to stay with the idea that the self is an illusion, you would have to say that it is an illusion which is no one's illusion.

Then he addresses the big question: immortality of the soul.

If it is true that the self is not a thing, but a process, as I have described it, then it is also true that the tragedy of the ego dissolves. Because strictly speaking, nobody is every born and nobody ever dies.

Good news. I guess. Not that there is an "I" who guesses. But I'm still guessing.

Here's the video:

Wanted: a religion that reflects reality

Well, already there's a seeming contradiction in this blog post -- the title. Because if a religion truly reflected reality, it'd be part of the scientific world view, not religiosity.

So what I mean by "religion" is something more like a philosophy, poetic vision, or statement of what life is about. A meaning-dimension that adds depth to the everyday here and now while remaining consistent with the consensual truths about the cosmos known to science.

Traditional religions come up way short in this regard, along with most non-traditional faiths.

Consider some of the facts (open to alteration, of course) that a reality-based religion would have to mesh its teachings with:

-- Our universe is some fourteen billion years old, having gotten its beginning in a "big bang" that produced a still-happening (and accelerating) expansion of time and space.

-- Over the history of the universe, originally formless matter and energy have congealed into increasingly complex conglomerations that bear no imprint of having been formed by anything but the laws of nature.

-- Those laws led to life arising on Earth about 3.7 billion years ago. Evolutionary principles such as natural selection guided the appearance (and disappearance) of species. Now Homo sapiens is capable of pondering how and why we're here.

There doesn't seem to be room for a personal creator God in this realistic view of reality. Thus it's difficult, though not impossible, to be a scientifically-minded Christian, Jew, or Muslim (to do this, you have to embrace a non-fundamentalist conception of your religion).

Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism fit better with modern science, but by no means completely. Reincarnation or rebirth, for example, are tough to reconcile with the extremely limited (some would say nonexistent) evidence that human consciousness survives death in some fashion.

I didn't like the singer or the music much, but her churchless lyrics are appealing. Sample (with some misspellings corrected):

Don't need no Hare Krishna Hare Krishna,
Hail Mary, Hail Mary god.
Got no yen for zen, Bhagavad-Gita or Gurdjieff.
No Mormon, Methodist, Seventh Day Adventist god,
no absolutes beyond refute,
no reverential preferential Judaic Messianic god.
No Bibles, no Mahayanas, Dalai Lama
instant dharma gods.
Don't need no spiritual suicide or
prefrontal lobotomizing god.
Don't need no stoic sexless
antiseptic god.
Don't need no neon crucifix,
no jade Buddhas, no Vedas or Upanishads,
no camels or needles or Papal decrees,
no mail-order ikons, Korans or Mandalas,
no Sri Chimnoys, Meha Babas, or Ayatollahs,
no Gautamas, no Manitou, Ouspensky or Marx,
no yin/yang, no tao, no tarot or incense,
no sacred mushrooms
no dianetics,
no Tibetan prayer mats
no "Immortal invisible gods only wise".

That said, I still feel there's a place -- even more, a necessity -- for awe and a sense of mystery in my personal world view. 

For many people, religion fulfills the same need. Their faith leads them to look beyond the narrow confines of everyday existence toward the limitless horizon of whatever.

However, as a beautiful demolisher of religious fakery says, believing in dogma is like eating invisible food. You think you're getting some sustenance, but it's all empty calories.

I feel the most satiated when I dive into a hearty meal of ultimate awe -- ignoring unsatisfying tid-bits of religious, spiritual, mystical, or philosophical speculation.

The universe is. I am.

Holy freaking fucking amazingly obvious yet also astoundingly mind blowing.

Often it's said that the ultimate question is "Why is there something rather than nothing?" I used to agree. However, now I prefer to dump the question mark plus the first word, and transpose the next two.

There is something rather than nothing.

Grok that. 

When I do, or make a honestly-aweful attempt, I'm left with what feels like the closest I can come to reality-based "religion" (using that word as I defined it above).

Science tells us a lot about what the something is that surrounds us, and is us. But neither science, nor religion, nor anything or anyone else can penetrate the mystery of There is... .

Is just is. Always was, always will be. Praise is. 

No need to call it "God." Too much garbage associated with that word. I want to keep my awe clear and simple. Focused on the mystery of existence, not on what exists within is.

Reality is. Unreality isn't. Nothing more to say (for now).

Primal awe: the mystery of existence

I don't need concepts like "religion," "spirituality," and "mysticism" to feel a sense of awe. All I need to do is contemplate the ultimate mystery these words point to.

Existence. The fact that the cosmos is. And I am. 

As I've noted before, the primal mystery of existence is the black hole of all knowledge, experience, understanding, and whatever. 

It makes notions like enlightenment, theory of everything, self-realization, ultimate reality, perfect truth, and the like go zap! -- sucked into a cosmic void of not-knowing that erases false claims of knowing-it-all.

How could it be possible to fathom the "it" of existence? Where is the vantage point from which existence can be examined?

Existence is. We are. End of story.

No matter what religious, philosophical, or scientific tales are told in an attempt to explain why or how the cosmos is, the final word always is a gigantic question mark.

I like what I said in my "Deepening the Mystery of Existence" a few years ago.

I could be sitting at the right hand of God, immersed in the glories of divine light and sound, being taught how the Almighty creates creation, and I'd still have questions: "God, who created you?" "God, how do I know this isn't an illusion?"

I could hear a booming, "I am the Lord, thy God, eternal, uncreated." That voice still would be part of existence. I'd still be clueless about whether there is a why? for the existence of the world, taking the "world" now to include spiritual as well as physical reality.

Or "God" could laugh and say, "Fooled you. You're right, everything I've shown you is an illusion—the Matrix, a computer simulation. It looks just like a real universe, doesn't it? I'll show you how the programming works."

Now I'm zapped into another dimension where I see God, and me, and universes being formed out of cyberspace and cyberenergy. But I still have no way of knowing whether there is a why? to that.

I don't know whether I've reached really real reality, or even if there is such a thing, because I'm still stuck in existence. It's impossible to get outside of existence and learn about it objectively. Like everybody else, I'm always on the inside, looking in, even if I were able to reach a spiritual realm.

We humans abhor the vacuum of uncertainty.

If we don't know the whys and wherefores of something, there's a strong desire to pretend that we do. And when that something is everything -- existence -- the explanatory urge is intense.

Hence, religion. "God created the heavens and the earth." "God is, was, and always shall be." "In the beginning was the Word."

Religious believers feel comforted by these meaningless notions. The familiar phrases paper over the void of existential mystery: that anything is at all. Authentic awe of the ultimate unknown is replaced by a false feeling of this is the way things are.

The truth is that no one knows why or how anything is, or even whether "why" and "how" have any meaning when we speak of is.

Most of us have watched movies with a totally unexpected plot twist at the end, such as "The Sixth Sense." In a flash, we're forced to reinterpret everything previously shown in the film.

With the mystery of existence, there's no final credits, no "the end," no tidy wrap-up that answers all of our questions. So we can't know what sort of plot twist might unravel all of our understandings.

What is, is. As New Agey as this sounds, it's the most honest ultimate answer.

All we know is that something's happening here: existence. Those who are comfortable with leaving mystery mysterious remain churchless. Others need the warm blanket of religion, because not-knowing gives them a chill.

For me, awe is awesome. It fires me up. I enjoy contemplating the mystery of existence and knowing that I will never unravel it. To quote myself again:

Meditating this morning after reading Munitz' final chapters, I felt strangely peaceful. Looking into the darkness of my clueless consciousness, for a moment I was relieved of the "What's it all about?" that has gnawed at me for most of my life.

Some questions are unanswerable. Some questions are so questionable, we can't be sure they are valid questions. Such is the mystery of existence.

Floating free in perpetual ignorance—that struck me as not so bad. Maybe better than being lashed to a time-bound pseudo-truth.

Shake up your unexamined worldview -- it's fun!

I used to cling to a quasi-fundamentalist view of the cosmos. Now, I don't.

I've come to enjoy a deliciously exciting sensation of feeling rigidly settled ways of looking at the world transform into a more naturally fluid vision of reality.

"Naturally," because if there's one thing we can be sure of, it's that we can't be sure we know everything about anything. So I love someone who comes along with a Paradigm Shaker which busts up worldviews that are widely accepted without good reason.

Don Cupitt, for example. I read his book "After God" a few years ago. I liked it then. Taking another look at it the past few days, I like it even more now.

It's tough to encapsulate Cupitt's take on religion and God briefly. He was a minister in the Church of England who lost faith in a "realist" view of God. (Non-realism basically says, "our understanding of the world helps produce the way it is." You can listen to Cupitt discussing this in an interview.)

This Library Journal review of his book that I found on Amazon does a pretty good job of summing it up.

Cupitt (philosophy, Emmanuel Coll., Cambridge) redefines what it means to believe in God while accepting that God does not exist. He argues that there is indeed an unseen intelligible, or spirit world, among us. But this world is made up of words and symbols. The world of religion is a mythical representation of the world of language.

Cupitt's is a postmodern religion that sees God not as a transcendent reality but as a reflection of human selfhood. According to Cupitt, this conception of religion frees one from the belief in absolutes, which, he says, spells the death of religion. Human beings themselves are the only source of meaning and value. Belief in God, Cupitt holds, is a valuable and interesting form of consciousness. While Cupitt's analysis will not be accepted by many, his book offers a well-wrought argument.

Below is part of his argument: a wonderful description of how most people, overtly religious or not, perceive reality. Largely, it's taken for granted as being the way things really are.

But when it comes to reality, taking things for granted isn't justified.

When you read the following excerpt from "After God," consider how easily someone -- perhaps you -- could agree with these propositions. And also how easily they could be refuted.

As I read each of the twenty-two brief assumptions, I experienced a increasingly pleasant sensation of vertigo, of falling from a belief-perch that previously seemed solid, but used to, and in some ways still was, preventing me from floating freely in the warm waters of reality.

Cupitt says that he came up with this schema after a senior Fellow in his college died. His successor said, "Well, he knows now, doesn't he?"

Those words are a window. I thought about them for a few days, analyzing them backward, and came up with this:

Life

1.  Truth is not manufactured by us; it is discovered by us, or dis-covers (the Latin vela, "veil," gives us the word re-veals or un-veils) itself to us.

2.  The answers to all properly framed questions, both questions of fact and questions of value, preexist out there, objectively.

3.  There is a great and final Answer to the mystery of our existence, out there, awaiting us.

4.  All these truths and answers (2, 3) are, so to say, tailored to our faculties and our requirements. They are in principle accessible and intelligible to us, so that we may reasonably hope and expect to discover them, or have them reveal themselves to us.

5.  There is then something quite dazzling, namely a preestablished harmony between thought and being, language and reality; between the questions we want to ask and the Answer that the nature of things is waiting to give us. (Notice that this most astonishing doctrine is also the one most profoundly taken for granted.)

6.  The final Answer will be revealed to us in or through death.

7.  Our life is a pilgrimage toward death, the moment of truth, the moment of absolute knowledge.

8.  Our life is a journey, then, from

(a) the relative to the absolute; from
(b) time to eternity; from
(c) the changing, sensuous world of becoming to the realm of pure timeless intelligible Being; from
(d) the particular to the universal; and from
(e) the mediated, discursive, through-a-glass-darkly sort of knowledge, to pure face-to-face unmistakable vision.

9.  Each person's life is a story scripted beforehand, and there is a great Story of Everything whose plot has been revealed to us in a Book.

The Binary Contrasts

10. The binary contrasts (in #8 a-e), and a number of other related contrasts, are all analogously asymmetrical.

11. In each of the cases cited, the second of the pair:

(a) is prior;
(b) is superior (that is, greater in both value and reality, and therefore standard-setting); and
(c) in some way governs or produces or brings about the first.

12. Thus the spiritual world above is in every way better and greater than this material world below.

Being and Value

13. There are degrees of reality, and of value.

14. The scale of degrees of being is also a scale of degrees of value, or goodness, or perfection.

15. The Most Real is therefore the Most Good, and vice versa: for the Highest Good is -- has to be -- the Supreme Reality.

16. To gain the highest knowledge, we must purify our souls and perfect ourselves; and one should, in particular, prepare for death.

Causality

17. Ex nihilo nihil fit ("Out of nothing, nothing comes to be").

18. Every change has a cause; or, every thing that is has a cause of its being.

19. The cause is prior to the effect; the cause is responsible for, or accounts for, the effect. 

20. The cause is superior in reality to the effect.

21. The qualities that are found in the effect preexist in a higher degree in the cause.

22. Our last end is the absolute knowledge of what is greatest, most real, and most perfect; a knowledge in which we shall enjoy perfect happiness.

This is brilliant stuff. Cupitt nailed me!

He managed to set down the core principles that used to prop up my worldview. And still does, in some respects, or I wouldn't have felt the previously-mentioned vertigo as I realized, "I've been holding tightly on to assumptions that are best grasped lightly."

But enough about me. How about you?

I bet most people who visit this blog, even many of the devoutly churchless, would still agree with a large share of the propositions Cupitt lists above.

Even more than agree, in this sense: these propositions tend to be unexamined and taken for granted, being part of a worldview that is so obviously true, few people stop to ponder how questionably true it is.

in my next post I'll talk about what Cupitt advises for an "After God" way of living happily and meaningfully.

Science is real -- you are too (but in a different way)

Thanks to Pharyngula, I got turned on to a "Science is Real" video by They Might be Giants. l love it when cartoonish characters make so much sense -- more than a lot of real people.

"What's real?" is a terrific question. There's no end to possible answers. It seems to me, though, that some things almost certainly are really real about reality.

For us human beings -- every species is different in this regard -- there's a shared reality. If there wasn't you woudn't be able to read these words that I've written, and I wouldn't be sitting in a downtown Salem coffeehouse writing them.

Science studies this shared reality. This "common ground" isn't comprised of isolated dusty dry facts, but of life's interwoven verdant richness.

What would existence be like if there was no one to share it with? If we were solipsistic creatures who only knew the reality of me, not we? Whenever science uncovers a publicly demonstrable truth about the cosmos, it adds to the common ground of humanity.

Here is love. Here is hate. Here is togetherness. Here is separateness.

Here is everything real that exists outside of our individual psyches. Here -- on this common ground -- is where we become more than ourselves, because we imbibe the richness of reality that is other than us.

Yet...you and I also are real.

We think, we dream, we feel, we imagine, we sense, we are conscious of all sorts of happenings that are ours alone, incapable of being displayed on the common ground of reality.

On this private ground lie the roots of art, music, poetry, religion, spirituality, mysticism, and so much else. When visible sprouts grow, some become organized belief systems that can be studied in a scientific (or quasi-scientific) fashion.

However, public isn't private. Common ground isn't private ground. Objectivity isn't subjectivity.

Each requires the other. But neither one is the other. Life, both individual and collective, requires both perspectives -- the outer and the inner, the scientific and the personal. We should honor both.

Unfortunately, religious fundamentalists often try to elevate the private ground of personal belief to a status it doesn't deserve, and can't be allowed to assume.

Believe what you want. Just don't expect me to share your view of reality. If I say, "there's a coffee cup on this table," we can determine whether I'm telling the truth. Coffeehouse tables are part of humanity's common ground.

But if you consider that Jesus saves, or your guru is God, that's private territory. Feel free to occupy it -- it's yours. Not mine, though. So don't try to drag me into your belief system.

A respectful invitation to explore what you find so wonderful is fine. Just accept my "no thank you" if that's how I choose to respond, as I need to accept your rejection of my own private reality.

As I've said before (quite a few times), I absolutely adore Philip K. Dick's marvelous single sentence encapsulation of a whole lot of philosophy:

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

That's because the sort of reality Dick is speaking about isn't ours. The coffee cup on this table isn't produced by me. It isn't held in existence by me. It's part of shared reality -- common ground.

However, reality has another side. A belief side. A private side. Our beliefs, whether religious or otherwise, are real.

Only for us, though. Only for us.

Here's the big cosmic question: "What's the question?"

Back in my true believing days, I figured that I knew both the questions to ask and what the answers were. For example:

Q. How does one return to God?
A. Get initiated by a perfect living guru, and follow his teachings about meditation and other matters.

A Christian, on the other hand, would think along these lines:

Q. How is one saved from sin?
A. By accepting Jesus as his or her personal savior.

Of course, the questions presume quite a bit.

In my case, that there is a God. And it is possible (plus desirable) to return to God. In the Christian case, that there is sin. And one needs to be saved from it.

How do we know that we're even capable of asking meaningful cosmic questions? (By "cosmic," I'm referring to ultimate, metaphysical, and deeply existential sorts of queries.)

Asking a good question means that we know quite a bit about something. At the least, that it exists as some thing. Having come to this conclusion, we can inquire about its thingness.

If God exists, then it makes sense to wonder what God is like. If salvation is possible, then it makes sense to seek a way to be saved. If human beings have (or are) an immaterial soul, then it makes sense to try to experience this state of being.

If. If. If.

A lot of theological and metaphysical discussions, on this blog and elsewhere, assume that a good question has been asked. Much or most of the time, this assumption presumes the existence of something for which there is no convincing evidence.

It took me quite a while to begin to realize this. Once I did, I started down a churchless path.

At first I came to a mental signpost that said, "I know the Big Questions of Life. But I don't know the answers." Continuing onward, I reached another milestone: "I'm clueless about what questions to ask of the cosmos."

Let's take the oft-cited biggie: Why is there something rather than nothing?

Answers to this ultimate cosmic question can be put forth, but they're unsatisfying, whether religious, scientific, or philosophical. That Why in the query... why is it there?

I mean, why not take that word out, and switch the next two words around? Leaving: There is something rather than nothing.

We can all agree with that.

Making a question out of existence's existence could be the ultimate cosmic joke. Understand, I don't know that it is. But it seems more likely to me that we humans have no idea what to ask about existence, then that we know enough to ask a meaningful question.

As noted earlier, something has to exist before we can ask a good question about it. Existence exists -- that seems pretty damn clear.

But is it some thing? That's a great question. Or, an incredibly lousy one. Who knows?

In my wisest moments of mystic intuition, which could also arguably be described as my most vivid delusions, I grok:

The cosmos just is. Religions and philosophies come up with a freaking large load of conceptual crap about ultimate origins. What is, is. That's it. A-fucking-men.

That isn't a question. Or an answer either. Just an embrace of cosmic mystery.

Nature is real, religion is illusion

Here's one big change that churchlessness has produced in me: I no longer believe that this world -- where all of us are living now -- somehow is less real than an unseen theoretical heaven or higher realm of the cosmos.

In fact, it's hard for me to accept that I ever believed this, because it doesn't make any sense.

What would make someone turn away from what is right in front of them and try to embrace something imaginary that has no demonstrable evidence of its existence? Short answer: religion.

Or, some sort of mental illness.

In either case, the nature-denier lacks the capacity to say "Yes!" to what is genuinely present in the world, preferring for one reason or another to view the here-and-now as illusion, maya, devil's trickery, samsara, or whatever other word captures their feeling of "This isn't real."

Today I came across a piece that makes this point nicely, "Giving credit where credit is due."

It talks about how strange it is that religious types aren't able to see the marvelousness of nature, which is not only all around them, but is them, while claiming to know all about a distant God who is only an abstract concept.

To see nature do it, and then say "nature can’t do it—it must be a god," is interesting to say the least. I’ve never seen a god, let alone seen a god do anything amazing (or anything mundane for that matter). So, how could it possibly be easier for me to identify a god as the cause of what I observe that nature does, than to identify nature as the cause of what I observe nature does? How did “god” come into this equation? At what point do we employ a touch of god to get the grafting to work or to breed the new spaniel? Which step was “add a bit of god” in that?

...If I have never seen a god and don’t know what a god is or how it functions and operates and what actual impact it has on anything—how do I employ it and use it to produce explanatory function for anything in nature? How is what cannot be observed, examined or understood, useful or helpful in understanding anything? If I don’t understand natural process Y, and I say it’s the result of undefined function X—what have I learned? What have I explained or added to our knowledge? How does that help at all? And why would I put such a baseless thing forward as useful or real?

Nicely said.

And highly germane to a book that briefly attracted my attention at a bookstore recently, "Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality." The title was intriguing, but it didn't take much thumbing through it to realize that the author was imagining the fingerprints.

Not surprisingly, this also was the conclusion of science blogger PZ Myers, who wrote about the book here. After I read the review of "Fingerprints of God" he mentions, I was thankful that I didn't waste my money on buying the book.

Hagerty concludes by erring on the side of amorphous belief, concluding that "the language of our genes, the chemistry of our bodies, and the wiring of our brains - these are the handiwork of One who longs to be known."

I liked one of the comments on the review.

Thank you so much for including this quote. What a breakthrough! Why it's almost as if I should establish a lonely hearts club for "the One." Either that or not buy the book, and therefore save a tree for "the One".

Searching for the reality in nonduality

I've been enjoying a comment conversation that's been happening on my "Mind in the Balance" post. The basic theme is whether nondualism is just another belief system, like any other philosophy or religion, or a genuinely unique direct realization of reality.

Might as well throw some of my own ideas into the discussion stew.

First off, though, I've got to admit that while I understand the notion of "dualism" pretty well, "nondualism" has never lodged in a comprehension niche within my mind.

Of course, nondualists like Ramana and Nisargadatta -- whose teachings I'm familiar with via a number of books I've read -- would say something like, "Of course you can't understand nonduality. There's nothing separate from you to understand. You are it!"

OK.

In a sense I can sort of understand, oops, I should say be, that. Since reality always is experienced subjectively, through the lens of consciousness, it isn't possible to know what the cosmos is like objectively, from the outside as it were.

We can't get outside of reality, or existence. The whole of existence thus reasonably seems to be viewed as one great big bunch of something, which could be called nonduality.

Shifting gears, so to speak...

I spent eight hours today finishing up a three-day Team Oregon motorcycle safety class. Most of the time I was sitting on a 200 cc bike, getting a refresher course in turning, stopping, swerving, and other motorcycling basics.

Now, what's the point in all this? Of all the things I could do in the limited time I have here on Earth, where does zooming around on a motorcycle fit in the Great Cosmic Scheme of Things?

A nondualist, seemingly, would answer, "Nowhere. And everywhere. Form is emptiness; emptiness is form. A motorcycle is reality. Also, it isn't."

Zen, which strikes me as basically nondualist, finds chopping wood and carrying water to be eminently respectable activities. Along with any other sort of activity someone might decide to pursue, including motorcycling.

It's all in how you do it, whatever "it" may be. Or more accurately, how the "you" is that is doing it.

And here's where I start to wonder about whether nonduality really can be said to be more real than any other way of looking at the world. I mean, maybe it is. Yet maybe it isn't. Who can tell?

Let's say there was a recognized nondualist among the ten Team Oregon students in the motorcycling class I just completed. Ramana himself, for the sake of argument.

How could we tell the difference between someone who supposedly has realized the truth of nonduality, from someone who hasn't? Would they operate a motorcycle differently? Would they communicate differently? Would they be distinguishable in any way?

I suspect not.

Zen is fond of saying that there's nothing special in that way. And I'm not aware of any evidence that, aside from the nondual'ish words uttered by sages such as Ramana, a neutral observer could tell the difference between someone "realized" and someone who isn't.

Isn't this the same problem we face in sorting out truth claims of various religions? Each says, "Ultimate reality is like this."

But when asked to supply some demonstrable evidence of this, we're asked to take the claim on faith -- perhaps with an assurance that after death all will be revealed, or that the truth of this only can be experienced, not demonstrated.

So I can understand why skeptics look upon nondualism as one more philosophical system that makes interesting statements about what really real reality is like, yet isn't able to answer those who respond with: show me.

Again, I realize that in nondualism there is no "me" to be shown anything.

And this might well be the case. I don't know. It just seems to me that might well be isn't enough to justify giving the nod to nondualism over dualism, if someone is looking for the philosophy that best reflects reality.

I could be off base here. Or not even in the ballpark.

However, here's how I see the nondual situation: blindly. I've read, and re-read, the words of nondual sages. I don't grasp what it is like to experience nonduality. I don't see how it is any different from what I'm experiencing now.

In fact, those sages often say, This is It! You've got It! There's nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to become.

Great.

I can embrace the lazy man's way to enlightenment. Doing nothing sounds fine to me. Or rather, doing nothing special, since I'm looking forward to doing a lot with my soon-to-be delivered Suzuki Burgman scooter.

Why, though, does nondualism seem to be so dualistic? This is what keeps nagging at me. If it takes a lot of "spiritual" practice to realize the truth of nondualism, doesn't this divide reality into those who see the cosmos for what it is, and those who don't?

And if that's true (as seems to be the case; otherwise why are there nondual sages?), then how can we tell the difference between the Realized and the Deluded? 

If it's only a matter of words, a claim by some of "I know," this seems to be the same sort of take-it-on-faith that religions ask of us.

But as I so often say, I could be wrong. The conversation continues...

Meaning of life is made, not discovered

I love books that lead me to look upon something familiar in a fresh way. Like, life's meaning. I've spent a lot of time pondering the meaning of life. And, searching for it.

Now that I've read about half of Eric Maisel's "The Atheist's Way" (highly recommended), I realize that my pondering is on the right track. The searching, not so much.

In fact, Maisel has done a good job of convincing me that viewing the meaning of one's life as something to be discovered leads nowhere. Unless you want to adopt someone else's values, rather than your own.

Before you can make meaning, an odd kind of election process must occur. You must nominate yourself as the meaning-maker in your life and as the hero of your own story. Then you must consciously elect yourself to that position.

You must decide to put yourself before everything and everyone else, not in a grandiose, egotistical, or narcissistic way but in a way that reflects the idea that you alone decide what meaning you intend to make.

...Few people actually nominate themselves in this way. Most defer to the meaning-making apparatus of their culture, taking comfort in the fact that others have built a meaning nest for them.

This built-in cover allows them to avoid taking responsibility and at the same time causes them to grow grandiose, narcissistic, and egotistical. As soon as you put on the robes of your culture and add gravity to your mere humanness by wearing the badge of your profession, your club, your gang, or your clan, you participate in life more selfishly.

...To nominate yourself as the hero of your own story is to step outside society, not with the intention of turning your back on it but with the intention of not allowing it to dictate to you.

...When I nominate myself and begin to make my meaning, I can't then quote Scripture, the law, an opinion poll, expert evidence, tradition, or anything else as the reason for my life decisions. What I must say is, "I've thought it over and decided."

Facts are discovered. Objective reality is discovered. Meaning is made. Subjective reality is made.

But many people -- and I've been guilty of this to some extent -- have it backwards. They believe that scientific truth, objective reality, can be manufactured so it accords with some religious or metaphysical dogma.

They also consider that the meaning of life has been set forth by a god, guru, prophet, or other form of divinity. So we need to find out what that meaning is, not make it ourselves.

Maisel's approach is much more in attune with what we know about reality.

There is no sign of God, or gods. There is no reason to believe that the cosmos cares about us, is aware of us, communicates with us, or has a plan for us. So the meaning of our life has to be created by us.

Maisel writes:

When our younger daughter came home from college one year she presented me with a coffee mug. The mug had a motto: "Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself."

This is a tremendously liberating and energizing realization.

As soon as I began to read "The Atheist's Way" I realized how much I'd bought into the notion that the meaning of life was sitting somewhere out there waiting to be discovered. I no longer believed that God or a guru was the source of that meaning.

But I still held a largely unconscious assumption that if the rock bottom truth of the universe could be discovered (which includes the possibility that it is bottomless), meaning would come along with it.

Now I see that objective reality is one thing, and the meaning I attribute to it and my life is another thing. Nobody else can create that meaning for me.

You and you alone are the sole arbiter of the meaning in your life. The second you turn to someone and say, "What does life mean?" or "What should my life mean?" you have slipped into a mind-set that courts inauthenticity and depression.

The second you agree with someone simply because of her position or reputation, whether that someone is a guru, author, cleric, parent, politician, general, or elder, you fall from the path of personal meaning-maker.

You and you alone get to decide. That is the awesome proposition facing every modern person. The revolutionary idea that I'm proposing is that, as limited as we are in a biological and psychological sense, we are exactly that free in an existential sense.

If we do not live that way, honoring that existential freedom, we get sad and depressed. If we do not live that way, we find ourselves wishing that we had opted for authenticity and had decided to matter.

There is, of course, a web site for "The Atheist's Way." The first chapter of Maisel's book can be read there.

Have a look. Then decide for yourself what it means to you.

Logocentrism isn't cool for the churchless

Wow, this blog is rocketing upward in philosophical sophistication. After putting up a post where I used the word "deconstruction" as many times as I could, now I've got "logocentrism" in a title.

My inspiration, as before, is a wonderful philosophy comic book by Jim Powell, "Deconstruction for Beginners" (which I surely am).

The basic notion of logocentrism, which is a bad, bad, bad thing to Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, is sort of hard to pin down -- which is to be expected from a philosophical approach that dismantles the foundation of meaning.

Here's a pretty good brief description.

1. Belief that at the origin of the whole existence there are abstract “ truths” which are organized in absolute categories. They exist only in the divine Mind and Word, and we can reach them only using language.

2. Ellis: illusion that the meaning of a word has its origin in very structure of reality and from this reason the truth regarding that structure seems to directly appear in our mind.

So if you're logocentric, you believe that Truth with a capital "T" exists in some elevated realm of the cosmos, and human beings can know this Logos directly, nothing standing in between us and reality pure, plain, and simple.

Religiosity is based on logocentrism. So is fundamentalism.

Ditto for the commenters on this blog who are supremely confident that they know what is metaphysically true, and other deluded souls, such as yours truly, don't. 

It seems then, that churchlessness and logocentrism don't get along very well. Here's some excerpts from Deconstruction from Beginners that cast more light on the subject, in the form of a dialogue between Mark Twain and some other characters.

Twain: Well what is logocentrism?

Uma: It is a term coined by Jacques Derrida. Let me give an example: The Glorious Glorious Bliss of God's Phallus, and all of traditional HIndu culture, believes that there is a Divine Word or Logos dwelling at the very Center of the entire Universe!

That word is "Om." He feels certainty because he feels this Divine Word will guarantee the truth of everything he speaks. It's like the Word of the Law in the law books that the traffic cop depends upon when he gives you a ticket for not stopping at the stop sign.

Twain: Well isn't that just like the Christian belief that the Divine Word or Logos dwells at the very basis of creation?

Uma: Yes, so you see, logocentrism exists in both the West and the East.

Twain: What else does a logocentric attitude imply?

Uma: Logocentrism also means that our own consciousness can perceive the world so intimately that there is nothing in between our consciousness and the world.

The Glorious Glorious Bliss of God's Phallus: In my infinite awareness I see the world purely. The world is fully present to my infinite consciousness.

Uma: And also, logocentrism implies that awareness can be fully present to itself, can know itself nakedly.

The Glorious Glorious Bliss of God's Phallus: In my mystical state of bliss my inner awareness swims within itself -- knowing itself -- and knowing that the mystical vibration of Om dwells at the basis of my entire Universe.

Uma: This type of thinking Derrida calls onto-theology. It is a theology of Being.

The Glorious Glorious Bliss of God's Phallus: Out of the full presence of my pure consciousness flow my thoughts. From my thoughts flows my speech. And from my speech flow my writings. (Although I never write, but leave it to my stupid, unenlightened disciples to write down what I say -- because writing is dirty, slimy, and perverted.

Powell goes on to point out that deconstruction "deconstructs notions of an absolute origin -- an origin from which other things are derived."

And that "all these desires for a fixed Center are desires for a secure, stable presence that will form a strong, certain foundation for belief systems."

What I found most interesting about the dialogue above is something I hadn't thought much about before: that Eastern or mystical belief systems which presuppose that human consciousness can merge with a Cosmic Principle are as logocentric as the Western religions which posit God as the rock-solid foundation of creation.

Certainty is the common denominator, a belief that ultimate truth can be known so intimately by a human consciousness, the words of Truth Knowers can be trusted.

Well, maybe. Me, I doubt it. There's no good answer to a question posed in Powell's book.

Twain: So the Centrism part of the phallocentrism thing is as ornery as the Phallo part?

Uma: Absolutely! In fact, people in almost every culture cherish their own idea of a sacred Center to the universe. For the Buddhists, the Buddha is at the Center. For Christians it is the Word of God, Christ. For a Swahili, it is Bumba. But for the Glorious Glorious Bliss of God's Phallus, it is the Phallus-Egg itself and the hum of Om!

Coyote: How can Christ, Bumba, Om, Yahweh, Allah, Buddha and Krishna all be the Center of the Universe??!!

Attempted answers welcomed. Believable answer not expected.

Laying bare how the ego tunnel is dug

Nobody is directly in touch with reality. Every human digs his or her own ego tunnel through the experiential world.

This is one of the central messages of Thomas Metzinger's fascinating book, "The Ego Tunnel." A blend of philosophy and neuroscience, I finished reading it a few days ago. Liked the book a lot. Haven't been able to blog much about anything else since I started it.

Being a big Stephen Colbert fan, understanding how the ego tunnel works puts a new spin on "truthiness."

Things that a person claims to know intuitively or "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.

Religious beliefs, of course, are truthiness writ large. Dogmas are held to be true because they feel so right, so real, so directly experienced.

Such is the illusion of the ego tunnel.

Metzinger lays bare how evolution has made the processes by which the tunnel is constructed transparent to us, in somewhat the same way as the brain is how we sense reality, but we can't subjectively sense the brain itself (surgeons can operate on it without anesthesia since neurons don't sense pain).

What's new now are the breakthroughs in human understanding of how humans understand. The walls of the ego tunnel are beginning to include scientific pictures of the walls of the ego tunnel.

Our inherent bias toward truthiness is being reflected back upon itself, providing a truer image of reality. Not completely undistorted -- such likely is impossible, ontologically -- but much clearer.

Neuroscience is linking up with philosophy. We're getting intriguing glimpses into what the meaning of human life could be like when it's stripped of egregious religious, metaphysical, mystical, and other-worldly fantasies.

Again, almost certainly we can't ever get down to the bare bedrock of reality. But standing on firm ground is much preferable to wallowing around in the muck of unchallenged truthiness.

Belief, religious or otherwise, is fine. We just need to recognize that beliefs are part of the ego tunnel, as is every sort of experience, and aren't unvarnished truth.

No one gets all that excited over a debate about whether vanilla ice cream is better than chocolate. We recognize that this is a personal preference, a question best left to the arbiter of individual taste buds.

If religious preferences were looked at in the same way, the world would be a lot more accommodating, non-fundamentalist, non-judgmental, and relaxed about the Big Questions of Life.

Wars, real or cultural, aren't fought over what sort of ice cream people like.

The problem, Metzinger points out, is that the neuroscientific workings of the ego tunnel aren't understood by most people -- not even those in "advanced" countries like the United States.

Our science is 21st century. Our everyday experience of the world is still 1st century, by and large.

Meaning, most of us believe, as did most of the ancients, that how we see the world is how the world is. We uncritically accept what appears on the walls of our own ego tunnel as being True, god damn it, and if anyone disagrees with that, well, they're mistaken!

Facing facts can be difficult. Even scary. What if this physical life is all there is? What if God is just an idea in people's brains? What if when we die, that's it? Finito.

I like what Metzinger had to say in his closing pages:

Many fear that through the naturalistic turn in our image of mind, we will lose our dignity. "Dignity" is a term that is notoriously hard to define -- and usually it appears when its proponents have run out of arguments.

However, there is one clear sense, which has to do with respecting oneself and others -- namely the unconditional will to self-knowledge, veracity, and facing the facts. Dignity is the refusal to humiliate oneself by simply looking the other way or escaping to some metaphysical Disneyland.

If we do have something like dignity, we can demonstrate this fact by the way we confront the challenges to come, some of which have been sketched out in this book.

We could face the historical transition in our image of ourselves creatively and with a will to clarity. It is also clear how we could lose our dignity: by clinging to the past, by developing a culture of denial, and by sliding back into the various forms of irrationalism and fundamentalism.

...Unless the interests of others are directly threatened, people ought to be free to explore their own minds and design their own conscious reality-models according to their wishes, needs, and beliefs.

Developing a consciousness culture has nothing to do with establishing a religion or a particular political agenda. On the contrary, a true consciousness culture will always be subversive, by encouraging individuals to take responsibility for their own lives.

The current lack of a genuine consciousness culture is a social expression of the fact that the philosophical project of enlightenment has become stuck: What we lack is not faith but knowledge.

Choose reality, not religion

If you could be hooked up to an "Experience Machine" that keeps you in a state of permanent happiness (or take a drug with the same effect) would you do it?

I came across this intriguing question in Thomas Metzinger's "The Ego Tunnel," a book that I've been blogging about recently. This thought experiment was suggested by Robert Nozick.

Metzinger says:

Interestingly, Nozick found that most people would not opt to spend the rest of their lives hooked up to such a machine. The reason is that most of us do not value bliss as such, but want it grounded in truth, virtue, artistic achievement, or some sort of higher good. That is, we would want our bliss to be justified.

...He [Nozick] insisted that we would not want sheer happiness alone if there no actual contact with a deeper reality -- even though the subjective experience of it can in principle be simulated.

When I first read this, I wasn't sure what my choice would be. I took a lot of psychedelic drugs in my youth, being the baby boomer that I am (as the saying goes, "if you remember the '60s, you weren't there").

So, like most of us, I've got a strong leaning toward if it feels good, do it.

On the other hand, I enjoyed those psychedelic experiences because they weren't permanent. The first time I took LSD, another guy and I became convinced that we were permanently crazy. It wasn't a pleasant feeling. The best spin we could put on it was, "Crazy isn't so bad."

But what if we were in a permanent blissed-out state and didn't have any way of remembering what had gotten us into it? This would be the Experience Machine.

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want that. I can't say for sure, because some circumstances -- like being in severe intractable pain -- probably would make me want the suffering to go away, no matter the existential cost.

On the whole, though, I think Nozick is correct.

We humans are meaning-seeking creatures. We want our happiness to be grounded in reality, though we're perfectly willing to take temporary excursions into la-la land via drugs, alcohol, imaginings, movies, fictional books, and such.

Religion also. There's no problem with embracing religious fantasies that make us feel good, so long as we keep in mind what opiate we imbibed.

However, many true believers end up plugging themselves so strongly into the Experience Machine of religious dogma that they forget a crucial fact: their blissful feelings of divinity are being cranked out by their brain's fantasy generator.

Nothing wrong with this. Like Janis Joplin sang, "Feeling good was good enough for me."

But is feeling good good enough, when it isn't grounded in reality? This was one of the first questions I asked myself when I started this blog in 2004. Then, as now, for me genuine faith isn't blind at all.

Which is why I prefer reality over religion. This is some of what I said back then -- pretty much the same conclusion Robert Novick came to.

Here's how to tell the difference between true faith and false faith: Imagine that you are standing in the middle of a bare windowless room. Two doors lead out of the room. Both are closed, but can be opened with a turn of the doorknob. The doors are marked with signs that describe what awaits on the other side: (A) Reality, (B) Belief

After you open a door, you have to walk through it. The door then will shut and you never will be able to leave the place you have entered. Choose Reality and you will know things as they really are, from top to bottom of the cosmos. You will know whether or not God exists and, if so, the nature of this ultimate divinity. You will know whether death is the final end of your existence or if it is the beginning of another form of life. You will know whether there is a meaning to the universe beyond what human beings ascribe to it.

Or, choose Belief and you will know only what lies within the confines of your current suppositions about the nature of the cosmos. For the rest of your life you will be confident that what you believe to be true, really is. Any evidence to the contrary will not make an impact on your mind. You will remain doubt-free, faithful to the beliefs you now hold about God, creation, life, death, and the purpose of human existence.

Which door would you choose to walk through?

Before answering, consider carefully the potential ramifications of your choice. Reality is an unknown, a mystery. It could be frightening or fabulous, painful or pleasurable, warmly loving or coldly uncaring. Do you want to embrace absolutely real reality? Or would you rather hold on to your beliefs about what is real?

Someone with the type of faith extolled by the Church of the Churchless would unhesitatingly choose Door A and boldly stride into Reality. For their faith is not in anything particular, but is a faith that truth can be known, should be known, and, indeed, must be known.

Maybe "Is" is all there really is

Everybody has a different idea about what reality is really like. Religions, philosophies, mystical teachings, belief systems -- the only thing universally agreed upon is that something is real.

Yet what if every experience of reality, including every conception of reality, leads us in a direction that isn't real?

Like many people, I have a fondness for "Holy fuck!!!" movies. (Example: The Sixth Sense)

I call them that because this is what I say when the ending is so shocking, so upside down from what has come before, so mind-blowing, that the cozy world of understanding that I've created inside my brain is blown to bits.

My bet -- and naturally this is all it is, an intuitive hunch -- is that if humans are capable of comprehending ultimate reality, the realization would turn out to be a lot more like a wild Holy fuck!!! than a calm As I suspected.

I termed this "something else entirely" in a "You're religious, but are you right?" post. Lots of belief systems assert that final truth is mysterious, ineffable, beyond words, incapable of being captured by human cognition.

Yet I don't get from them that disorienting, yet strangely exhilarating, feeling that a genuine something else entirely experience blasts into my psyche.

The following excerpt from Thomas Metzinger's "The Ego Tunnel" had that quality for me. Of course, I'm me and you're you. (Or so it seems...) So you might yawn at what elicits a Wow! from me.

This is good writing. And good philosophizing. Metzinger's eliminative phenomenalism seemingly is akin, if not identical, to other similar notions in Eastern and Western philosophies.

But the way he expressed himself here gave me a fresh Holy fuck!!! experience of the notion that pure consciousness is all there is.

Which means that Is could be what really is.

Read on.

Stuck in "The Ego Tunnel" without a self

Take a guess: was the following written by (A) a Zen master, or (B) a philosopher of neuroscience?

In this book, I will try to convince you that there is no such thing as a self. Contrary to what most people believe, nobody has ever been or had a self.

Here's the answer.

Thomas Metzinger has a great title, "Director of the Theoretical Philosophy Group at the Department of Philosophy of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany." He's also head of a Neurophilosophy Section there.

Not surprisingly, Metzinger is capable of writing some pretty involved stuff -- such as this summary of a previous book, "Being No One."
Download Being No One

I browsed that precis until I got to some lines that I could understand. Or at least, believe that I understood. (SMT stands for Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity.)

First, it is important to understand the central ontological claim put forward by SMT: No such things as selves exist in the world. For all scientific and philosophical purposes, the notion of a self – as a theoretical entity – can be safely eliminated. What we have been calling "the" self in the past is not a substance, an unchangeable essence or a thing (i.e., an "individual" in the sense of philosophical metaphysics), but a very special kind of representational content: The content of a self-model that cannot be recognized as a model by the system using it.

Metzinger's new book is "The Ego Tunnel." Thankfully, it makes the same basic points as "Being No One," but in a more readable fashion (it's billed as his first popular book aimed at general readers).

A few chapters in, I'm enjoying it.

I hesitated before ordering "The Ego Tunnel" from Amazon after reading a review in New Scientist. The reviewer's big criticism was that no reputable neuroscientist believes in the "self," so Metzinger was tearing down a straw man.

OK. But most people do believe they have a self -- some mysterious ineffable essence, often termed soul, that inhabits their bodies and survives physical death.

Metzinger debunks this notion with philosophical precision, grounding his arguments in solid neuroscience. After the sentences I began with, he goes on to say:

But it is not just that the modern philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience together are about to shatter the myth of the self. It has now become clear that we will never solve the philosophical problem of consciousness -- that is, how it can arise in the brain, which is a purely physical object -- if we don't come to terms with this simple proposition: that to the best of our current knowledge there is no thing, no indivisible entity, that is us, neither in the brain nor in some metaphysical realm beyond this world. So when we speak of conscious experience as a subjective phenomenon, what is the entity having these experiences?

I haven't read far enough to fully understand Metzinger's answer to that question.

Since elsewhere he's said, "Strictly speaking, nobody is ever born and nobody ever dies," I'm pretty sure he's going to say that the entity I call me is No One (good guess, since that's in the title of his previous book).

The New Scientist reviewer thought the ego tunnel is a "forgetable metaphor." Well, I like it. This isn't a new idea, that our brains selectively pick out bits and pieces of information which become conscious experience, but Metzinger explains it clearly:

This is why it is a tunnel: What we see and hear, or what we feel and smell and taste, is only a small fraction of what actually exists out there. Our conscious model of reality is a low-dimensional projection of the inconceivably richer physical reality surrounding and sustaining us... Therefore, the ongoing process of conscious experience is not so much an image of reality as a tunnel through reality.

Humbling. 

Yet we have excessive self-confidence in what appears on the walls of our ego tunnel (including the mistaken notion that a "self" is doing the observing) because it isn't possible to recognize the process by which the tunnel is being dug.

So my ego tunnel seems absolutely real to me, as does yours to you, and we end up arguing about our subjective representations of reality, each of us wanting our own ego tunnel to be considered as really real -- failing to understand that, in Metzinger's words, "We see only what our reality tunnel allows us to see, and most of us are completely unaware of this fact."

This doesn't mean, though, that reality is entirely subjective. I can't claim that I grasp everything Metzinger is saying here, but I like his concluding simple idea.

To form a successful theory of consciousness, we must match first-person phenomenal content to third-person brain content. We must somehow reconcile the inner perspective of the experiencing self with the outside perspective of science.

And there will always be many of us who intuitively think this can never be done. Many people think consciousness is ontologically irreducible (as philosophers say), because first-person facts cannot be reduced to third-person facts. It is more likely, however, that consciousness is epistemically irreducible (as philosophers say).

The idea is simple: One reality, one kind of fact, but two kinds of knowledge: first-person knowledge and third-person knowledge. Even though consciousness is a physical process, these two different forms of knowing can never be conflated.

Knowing every last thing about a person's brain states will never allow us to know what they are like for the person herself.

Reality is subjective. Reality is objective. One reality, two ways of knowing it. That idea resolves a lot of knotty philosophical and metaphysical problems.

As does the idea that there is no self. My self, or soul, doesn't have to be saved if it doesn't exist. Nor do I have to worry about self-realization, self-understanding, or self-actualization.

I can simply merrily burrow along in my ego tunnel, along with everyone else in the world -- who are doing their own burrowing. We can share the third-person knowledge Metzinger speaks of (2 + 2 = 4; July 4 is Independence Day) but not what it is like for us to know.

Difference and similarity. Togetherness and separateness. Unity and duality. One reality, several ways of knowing it.

New Age leader sees the skeptical light

This is Skeptical Inquirer news from 2004, but it's still interesting:

A former leader in the New Age culture - author of nine titles on auras, chakras, "energy," and so on - chronicles her difficult and painful transition to skepticism. She thanks the skeptical community and agonizes over how the messages of scientific and critical thinking could be made more effective in communicating with her former New Age colleagues.

Karla McLaren, the convert to skepticism, rambles on a bit in her essay (a writing quality that I have considerable personal experience with myself), but ends on a clear and convincing note.

One of the biggest falsehoods I've encountered is that skeptics can't tolerate mystery, while New Age people can. This is completely wrong, because it is actually the people in my culture who can't handle mystery - not even a tiny bit of it. Everything in my New Age culture comes complete with an answer, a reason, and a source. Every action, emotion, health symptom, dream, accident, birth, death, or idea here has a direct link to the influence of the stars, chi, past lives, ancestors, energy fields, interdimensional beings, enneagrams, devas, fairies, spirit guides, angels, aliens, karma, God, or the Goddess.

We love to say that we embrace mystery in the New Age culture, but that's a cultural conceit and it's utterly wrong. In actual fact, we have no tolerance whatsoever for mystery. Everything from the smallest individual action to the largest movements in the evolution of the planet has a specific metaphysical or mystical cause. In my opinion, this incapacity to tolerate mystery is a direct result of my culture's disavowal of the intellect. One of the most frightening things about attaining the capacity to think skeptically and critically is that so many things don't have clear answers. Critical thinkers and skeptics don't create answers just to manage their anxiety.

Good reminder that believers in traditional religious dogmas aren't the only ones prone to closed-mindedness and gullibility. There's a lot of that in some New Age'ers also.

d’Espagnat sees mystery at heart of reality

Reading a recent issue of New Scientist last night, I came across a brief mention of Bernard d'Espagnat winning this year's Templeton Prize for "arguing that quantum physics implies that reality must be partially unknowable, or 'veiled.'"

Sounded intriguing. And right up my interest alley, since I've done a lot of reading and writing about how quantum physics relates to mysticism and spirituality.

Here's a longer New Scientist piece about d'Espagnat's views (he's a physicist and philosopher of science). Excerpt:

So what is it, really, that is veiled? At times d'Espagnat calls it a Being or Independent Reality or even "a great, hypercosmic God". It is a holistic, non-material realm that lies outside of space and time, but upon which we impose the categories of space and time and localisation via the mysterious Kantian categories of our minds.

"Independent Reality plays, in a way, the role of God – or 'Substance' – of Spinoza," d'Espagnat writes. Einstein believed in Spinoza's God, which he equated with nature itself, but he always held this "God" to be entirely knowable. D'Espagnat's veiled God, on the other hand, is partially – but still fundamentally – unknowable. And for precisely this reason, it would be nonsensical to paint it with the figure of a personal God or attribute to it specific concerns or commandments.

The "veiled reality", then, can in no way help Christians or Muslims or Jews or anyone else rationalise their specific beliefs. The Templeton Foundation – despite being headed up by John Templeton Jr, an evangelical Christian – claims to afford no bias to any particular religion, and by awarding their prize to d'Espagnat, I think they've proven that to be true.

Absolutely. I don't see how assuming that reality is partially veiled from us offers any support to religiosity, since what is behind the veil is, obviously, unseen and unknown.

I've argued before, and will undoubtedly do so again, that science is incapable of grappling with the primal question of existence: Why does anything exist at all? And so is religion. Or mysticism. Or any attempt to know the unknowable.

Of course, this might not even be a real question. The "why" above presumes a creator, or reason. Yet existence may be simply a given, not to be reasoned about, never to be fathomed.

This seems to be close to what d'Espagnat is saying. I read the statement he gave on accepting the prize and agree with his basic stance (but not all of the particulars). See what you think.
Download D’Espagnat Statement 

I like that he mentioned Plotinus, the subject of a book I wrote, "Return to the One." This long-dead Greek philosopher doesn't come in for much attention these days, though he should -- being one of the few truly non-religious mystics.

For indeed – and this is nothing else than the second consequence I just mentioned – this “ground of things,” this Real, quite obviously is not a thing.  Clearly it is not imbedded in space, and presumably not in time either.  Let us call it “Being” if you like.  Or “the One,” following Plotinus.  Since science cannot tell us anything about its nature, clearly it cannot tell us what its nature is not.  And, similarly, it cannot rule out the possibility that also other forms of mind activity yield imprecise glimpses on it.

Note the "imprecise" and "glimpses." It's important to keep in mind that d'Espagnat is very much a supporter of science, and doesn't equate a partial intuitional unveiling of the One with the clarity scientific knowledge provides of the Many.

I do not claim for a moment that, just because he/she feels such an emotion, the listener to a Beethoven symphony or the beholder of Vermeer's View of Delft acquires a knowledge comparable in nature to scientific knowledge.  Moreover, artistic emotions essentially imply the impression of a mysterious realm which we may merely catch a glimpse of.  Manifest is the difference with science, which, within its domain proper, does really dispel mysteries.

A BBC news story listed five ways scientists look upon their field's relationship with religion. (1) The Atheist, (2) The Sceptic, (3) The Platonist, (4) The Believer, (5) The Pantheist.

Aside from The Believer, I've got a bit of each of the others in me. Which goes to show, as one would expect, that there's no single way to look upon the veiled mystery of ultimate reality.

Mystery is mystery. Why not leave it at that?

Some religious believers will seize upon d'Espagnat's views as justification for their dogmatism above divinity. However, they need to pay attention to what he said at the end of his acceptance speech. I find the last sentence to be a leap of faith, but the rest makes good sense.

Sure, it is not for a scientist such as me, who spent his whole life juggling with equations, to speak on spirituality.  I stand outside the temple, so to speak.  Still let me state once again that I feel myself deeply in accordance with the Templeton Foundation’s great, guiding idea that, even in this domain, science does shed light. 

In my view it does so mainly by rendering unbelievable any intellectual construction – of whatever nature – claiming to yield access to the ultimate ground of things with the sole use of the simple, somewhat trivial notions everybody has.  In particular, it reminds us that, even though images are needed, the letter kills, so that in this particular field science finally incites us to primarily resort to personal mental deepening. 

Ultimately therefore its message there is not so very different from the one we get from the most beautiful and inspiring Romanesque cloisters.  Of course I don't forget that in the world at large spirituality takes up many different forms and that some of them are quite definitely to be brushed aside, either because they went astray into fanaticism and apology of violence or just because they indoctrinate and overuse simplistic images of the type that stir up the crowds. 

The worse, in that realm, verges the best.  But the best exists.  I consider I have sound reasons to believe in the ground of things I mentioned, lying beyond our ability at conceptualizing and which from time immemorial thinkers, less naive than was often thought, called “the Divine.”  I like conceiving it to be infinitely lovable and am therefore convinced that those among our contemporaries who believe in a spiritual dimension of existence and live up to it are, when all is said, fully right.

Life is change. Why cling to a religion?

I've been thinking about some of the changes that have happened in my life. Starting with marriage, since it's our anniversary today. (Laurel and I were smart to get married on St. Patrick's Day; when green beer starts to be mentioned, I'm reminded of what I shouldn't forget).

After being married for eighteen years to one woman, now I've been married for nineteen years to a different woman. Good change.

After getting a Master's Degree in Social Work, I realized that I wasn't cut out for counseling and worked on a Ph.D. in Systems Science. Good change.

After buying a Ford Fairmont in the 1970s and seeing what American cars were like (had VWs before), I switched exclusively to European and Japanese models. Good change.

After spending nine years in traditional Shotokan Karate, I switched to a mixed martial arts style and then to Tai Chi. Good change.

After being an early Macintosh adopter, for a long time I went to the dark side and embraced Windows computers, but now have returned to the Mac fold. Good change.

After my wife had several purebred, high-strung, hip-problem prone German Shepherds, we got a good-natured, mellow, healthy Shepherd-Lab mix. Good change.

There have been plenty of other changes in my sixty years of living, of course. As there are in every person's life.

We move around, marry and divorce, shift jobs, have children, get sick and become healthy, take up new activities, alter political persuasions, and so much else.

Yet when it comes to our core religious or philosophical beliefs, many people believe that these should remain fixed for a lifetime. I know this is true, because I've had so many fundamentalists tell me, "Brian, how could you change your beliefs?"

Well, it's easy. Change is always happening. It's the only constant.

It's strange, really, this notion that we should remain content with a religious choice made at a young (or even old) age, or even stranger, stick with one that was chosen for us because it was the faith of our parents.

Growth and increased understanding come with experience. That's why second choices usually turn out better than first choices.

For example, I learned about relationships from my first marriage, about martial arts from my first karate training, and about mysticism/ meditation from my first guru initiation (well, second in a sense).

In each case I'm happier with my subsequent choice(s). When I made them, I had a better grasp of who I was, what I wanted, and what didn't work well for me the first time around.

So there's no reason for anyone to feel that something is wrong if an urge arises to change to a different religion, spiritual path, philosophical persuasion, or belief system.

Today I came across a Zen lecture by Suzuki Roshi that spoke about change. I didn't resonate with all of the essay, but liked this part.

There is a famous koan about a man who climbs to the top of a hundred foot pole. If he stays at the top, he is not the enlightened one. When he jumps off the top of the pole, he may be the enlightened one. How we understand this koan is how we understand our practice. The reason we feel that something should be pulled out is because we stay at the top of the pole. Then you have a problem. Actually there is no top of the pole. The pole continues forever, so you cannot stop anywhere. But you think because you have some experience of enlightenment that you can rest there, observing various sights from the top of the pole.

Things are continuously growing or changing into something else. Nothing exists in its own form or color. When we think, "Here is the top," that is already a misunderstanding. Then you will have the problem of whether or not to jump. But you cannot jump from here. It is not possible. And even though you try to stop at the top of the pole, you cannot stay there because it is growing continuously. You may think it is possible to stop, but it is not.

That is the problem. That is why you should practice and forget all about the top of the pole. To forget about the top of the pole is to [be] where you are right now. Not to be this way or that way, or to be in the past or future, but to be right here. Do you understand?

You should forget this moment and grow into the next. That is the only way. For instance, when breakfast is ready, my wife hits some wooden clappers. If I don't answer, she may continue to hit them until I feel rather angry. Why we have this kind of problem is quite simple. It is because I don't answer. If I say, "Hai!" ("Yes!"), there is no problem. Because I don't say, "Yes!" she continues to call me because she doesn't know whether or not I heard her.

Sometimes she may think, "He knows but he doesn't answer." When I don't answer, I am on the top of the pole. I don't jump off. I believe I have something important to do at the top of the pole and think, "You shouldn't call me. You should wait." Or I may think, "This is very important! Don't you know that? I am here, on top of the pole! Don't you know that?" Then she will keep hitting the clappers. This is how we create problems.

So the secret is just to say, "Yes!" and jump off from here. Then there is no problem. It means to be yourself, always yourself, without sticking to an old self. You forget all about yourself and are refreshed. You are a new self, and before that new self becomes an old self, you say, "Yes!" You walk to the kitchen for breakfast. So the point of each moment is to forget the point and extend your practice.

As Dogen Zenji says, "To study Buddhism is to study yourself. To study yourself is to forget yourself on each moment. Then everything will come and help you." Everything will assure your enlightenment. When I say, "Yes!" my wife will assure my enlightenment. "Oh, you are a good boy!" But if I stick to this, "I am a good boy," I will create another problem.

Hmmmm. I didn't realize before that saying "Yes!" to my wife is how my enlightenment will take place.

Fortunately for my spiritual progress, I say it all the time. No man stays happily married for nineteen years without countless, "Yes, dear's."

Yes to science and mysticism, no to religion

I've pondered the nature of reality for about five decades. Specifics aren't becoming much clearer, but I feel like I'm making progress on three basic questions and general answers.

(1) Is it possible to learn about the universe? Yes.
(2) Is it possible to learn about the ultimate origin of the universe? No.
(3) Is it possible to marvel at the mystery of the "Yes" and "No" above? Yes.

The two affirmations in 1 and 3 lead me to embrace science and mysticism. The negative in 2 causes me to reject religion.

Pretty damn simple.

This makes so much sense to me, it's difficult to understand why so many people get things completely backwards. They reject the knowable world that science honestly explores, while accepting the unknowable realm that religion falsely posits.

I suspect the reason relates to a fear of mystery.

Lovers of science have no problem saying, "I don't know." Ditto with mystics, who accept that the ultimate questions of existence have no answers.

Such as the biggest question of all: Why is there something rather than nothing?

Some argue that this question is meaningless; others say that it points to the ineffable nature of "God" (using that word in the only way it should be used -- as synonymous with "Mystery").

We can make progress toward understanding the what of our universe. What it and we are made of. What energizes it. What holds it together. What connections exist within it.

We are completely, utterly, marvelously, wondrously blocked from understanding the that of our universe. That it, or anything else in the cosmos, exists at all.

Consciousness can conceive or be aware of many things. But not of the primal that. Some words attempt to encompass it.

Being. Existence. God. Ultimate reality. Suchness. Brahman. Wu chi.

No word succeeds. No experience succeeds. Nothing succeeds in casting any light on the mystery of something.

This is where mysticism begins and ends: at the everpresent formless boundary between what can be known, and what can't.

If you take a step toward knowing, you're in the real world of science (and everyday life). If you imagine that you've understood what can't be known, you're in the fantasy realm of religion.

I fully accept that there is more to be understood about consciousness, mind, meditative states, subtle energies, and other subjects pursued by those with a spiritual bent.

However, none of this is genuine mysticism.

Mysticism is about mystery, plain and simple. Investigations into what can be known are science. This tells us more about what exists within reality, but nothing regarding the primal that of existence.

So it doesn't matter if someone has entered the seventh heaven (assuming there is such a thing) wearing an ethereal gown of cosmic light. Confronting the mystery of why this, or anything else, exists, they are bounced back onto the same level of existential ignorance we all are bound to.

Recognizing that God is mystery...wisdom.

Believing that God can be known...foolishness.

Luther Askeland put it this way in his "Ways in Mystery."

Life on the way of unknowing is not a steady progress or an ascent toward an attainable or even verbally specifiable goal. It is repetition, a continually beginning over; it is again and again to awaken as if for the first time to the subtle and infinite mystery that pervades each space, each moment I occupy.

Here, as before, we do not move "forward" toward answers and explanations. We don't "explain" the world's existence, or our own acts and lives, and then "move on." We don't seek answers to the questions of why the world exists or how action is possible.

Instead, we slowly begin to realize that our questions are not the first steps of a limited question and answer process; they are infinite koans which, sooner or later, bring verbal awareness to a halt, so that mystical awareness can burst out of all answers and all questions and dwell in the inconceivable.

Does the universe have a purpose?

Here's a thoughtful, well-written essay that was emailed to me recently by W. Kelly Lundrigan. I'm pleased to post it, as I like Kelly's style.

That said, I can't resist adding my own comments (in blue italics). I found myself agreeing with Kelly up to a point, then, not so much. Add your own ideas to our bloggish conversation if you like.
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The wonderful thing about life to me, at this point when we know so much, is that we actually still know so little.  We are still, essentially, living a mystery.  At least as to the big questions such as "where do we come from?" and "where do we go?"  We don't, even after all we have accomplished, know the answers to these ultimate questions. 

Agreed. But let's keep in mind what you said, Kelly -- we are living a mystery -- when we get into your further conclusions.

Maybe we are not supposed to know while we are here. Its funny, where you can't know with a scientific certainty, it has to come down to what you can believe in the end.  Even for those of us who love the scientific method and would prefer to spurn a lack of rational, logical chain of deduction, we feel the need to decide what we believe in this regard, because it determines how we live the remainder of the "life" we have in this sphere of existence.

Well, why not simply accept one's not-knowing, rather than feel the need to believe in something that's unprovable? You seem to assume that belief concerning the ultimate nature of the cosmos is an irresistible urge. I doubt that it is.

I am as fact-based, rational and irreverent toward religion as they come.  But I can't conclude, even based on what we DO know, that this "void" of utter nothingness exists, of which we are terrified by our attempt to even comprehend and wrap our minds around.  There is no void guys.  Stop worrying.  We never lose or destroy matter or energy; it just goes somewhere else in a different form.

I'm not sure what you mean by a void of utter nothingness. When I speak about nothingness, I'm usually referring to it in a personal sense -- the nothing that each of us will not experience (because nothingness obviously can't be experienced), yet what we will become in a sense, after we die. Assuming that death is the end of an individual's consciousness.

Yes, matter or energy isn't destroyed; it just changes form. But if our consciousness is dependent on being in a human form, then the dissolution that occurs at death certainly is a cause for worry. If I'm worried about not existing as a conscious being, that is.

You fear the loss of consciousness which you equate to "being."  I have come to deal with that feeling of fear by thinking of it this way.  At worst, all that is left of me are the ripple effects which are created by what I do while I am here.  In that sense, you survive your bodily death by everything you do while you are alive, no matter how small (good or bad). 

Your children will remember your love and what you taught them, whether it be a love of the outdoors they pass on to their children, your wonderful recipe for spaghetti sauce that your descendants are still enjoying lifetimes after you are gone, how to ski, to respect others and their right to exist and be happy, what it means to be just and fair, family traditions, and so on. 

Every kind act you demonstrate toward another person will change, in some small or large way, that person's outlook and the way they treat others, and so on.  Every principled stand you take to do what is right, no matter how painful and hard, will inspire and give courage to others to do the same.

Nice ideas, which are indeed comforting up to a point. But your "at worst" really equates to "no life after death." That's pretty bad to many/most people (including me). That said, I do enjoy the thought that what I've done here on earth will have the ripple effects you spoke about, leading to a sort of impersonal immortality -- though the ripples will fade into near-nothingness quite quickly.

I could go on and on, because the point is, (I'm sure you have got it by now), your life has an infinitely expanding ripple of effects on other lives into the future.  Thus, we never cease to exist.  After being granted the ultimate gift of existence from whatever "entity" governs "existence" (and I do believe there is one, as I explain below), your impacts upon this sphere of existence are infinite.  And, therefore, permanent. 

As above, not really permanent. Or infinite. Theoretically perhaps, but in a practical sense we've already lost track of how, say, a Neanderthal has affected present day humanity. A million or a billion years from now, what impact will each of us have on the cosmos?

Even though your consciousness may, at some point, become lost, or at least unable to communicate with those who remain in this sphere of existence.  If that is all we get, is that really so bad?  Think about it, just as a “worst case” type of scenario, while I explain why I don’t think that’s all we get.

Again, dying and never existing again...that's a scary proposition for many people. I'm not speaking of becoming lost or unable to communicate. We're talking of utter non-existence, forever and ever. The only worser case might be suffering horribly for eternity.

While I can understand why the sudden “blinking out” of your consciousness scares you, (it is certainly a scary thought because Descartes was as right as we can get with what we know: thinking really does equate to being for us), there is no reason to conclude our consciousness ceases to exist.  (This is the part where you have to decide what you believe, cause I can’t get you to here with science). 

Hmmmm. That leaves blind faith, or unfounded belief. I'll turn your statement around: there is no reason to conclude our consciousness continues to exist. Isn't that a much more likely eventuality, given the lack of evidence that there's life after death?

Let’s try to use what we do know to make some deductions using logic, which never fails us, at least as far as it can go.  Let us use Descartes' reasoning as a starting point.  He used one simple, unassailable fact that he could prove was real, at least to himself:  he was thinking.  He had thoughts. 

What did that mean, to have “thoughts”?  And what did it mean to be able to question in your thoughts whether “you” actually exist and can be questioning your ability to be having “thoughts” while you are thinking?  To Descartes, it meant he must actually “exist” as something; as some conscious entity.  That, ultimately led Descartes to believe he had proven the existence of “God” as he understood God to exist.

Most philosophers consider that Descartes seriously botched his proof of God argument. I agree. It's very flimsy reasoning, founded as it is on...reasoning. See, for example, this critique. Excerpt: "His attempt, therefore, to vindicate the validity of human knowledge failed essentially, because, by rejecting the reliability of his own powers to discover and know truth, he made it impossible for himself to extricate himself from the net of his own universal doubt."

It leads me to something similar, which is that the fact of existence, and “creation,” of “being,” gives rise to at least an inference, if not a deduction, that it occurred as an act of “will” and a plan of “design” rather than as a random occurrence.

There's no evidence of this. Inferences and deductions are creations of human thought. I find it difficult to believe that the cosmos operates by the rules of how people think.

I understand there are really no random occurrences and that probability theory would account for the creation of our universe and the earth and the incredible coincidence of it being perfectly suited for human beings who have conscious thought because under probability theory even the most unlikely outcomes happen in the stretch of infinite time. 

What I don’t understand, or accept, is that the forces that shaped our universe just happened. Everything else being equal, nothingness is just as likely as somethingness.  In fact, the reason we need the “void” theory is that we need the existence of the void to give meaning, relationally, to the opposite, which is “existing.”  

Again, I don't see where this notion of nothingness comes from. Where is the "void" in reality? Isn't it just a human concept? Why can't the cosmos simply be, always existent? Yes, people need opposites to make sense of anything. But what is the opposite of the cosmos as a whole? Why posit an opposite to everything? Wouldn't that also be part of everything, leaving no opposite?

So why do we have an expanding universe, with matter, etc..instead of there being “nothing?”  What set it off?  No one knows, of course, even quantum physicists who are much brighter than me and who have thought about it much longer.  They explain it by theorizing about a “singularity” where time, space, and essentially everything about our dimension as we know it, ceases to “be” as we know it.  But they don’t know what it would become instead at that point.

We understand our somethingness.  It is all around us.  We study it constantly, it really is all we have, all we know.  We don’t understand nothingness.  In fact, we can’t even prove nothingness exists. We have never seen it. We just presume it does because, to put it simply, where we don’t understand things, we tend to fear and to believe the worst. 

To repeat, I'm not aware of any scientist or philosopher who argues for a nothingness that exists in any objective sense. That would be absurd...an existent nothing. Rather, individual entities (like you and me) can essentially become nothing -- when the something that we are dissolves into formless matter/energy.

But why did our “somethingness” ever come about?  What does it mean that we have, as humans, the most powerful motivating force ever in our essence, that of love?  (I know, we have hate too).  But here is the point.  Why does any of it exist?  Just by chance?  How can chance even apply in nothingness?  If there is nothing, what “chance” or probability is there of something coming out of nothing? 

None, at least that I can see.  Zero probability.  If there are no atoms, quarks, antimatter, electrons, or whatever particles (I can’t keep track of them all anymore) spinning around somewhere as gases bumping into one another, there is zero chance of something being created.  Ever.

You're assuming that there was a creation. That once there was nothing, and then there was something. As I said before, this doesn't make sense, and you agree. However, it is entirely possible that the universe bounces in and out of existence, being a "bubble" tossed out the "sea" of a much larger unseen cosmos -- which has always existed. So, no need for a creator. The cosmos simply is.

The fact of our existence is all we have to go on.  We know we exist.  That fact gives rise to the conclusion, perhaps not deductively, but through inference that it is more likely than not that our existence is intentional and an act of will and design by some entity or process that we simply do not, and perhaps never will, understand. 

If we can't understand it, why say stuff about it? I don't see how you derive a conclusion of intentionality and design from an unknown entity or process that we don't understand.

Like I said, maybe we are not supposed to.  Isn’t it enough that we have been given the wonderful, extraordinary and exquisite gift of life and existence?  Like I said, it boils down to what you ultimately believe, which comes from your gut, your intuition, your logic, and the feelings and experiences (love) you have stored inside of you from the course of your life. 

That's fine. But personal belief is different from universal reality. People can believe what they want in their gut, while the universe follows the principle of "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

But, it simply makes no logical sense to believe there is a “void” of nothingness that will ultimately and finally prevail despite all the “somethingness” we see around us.  Our existence, and experience, and progress as humans, has some meaning that cannot, intrinsically, be denied.  We exist for some purpose.  And that purpose defeats death, my friends, whatever “death” really is.  Just wait and see.

What else can we do? To repeat: nothingness may prevail against our personal somethingness, while the universe goes on merrily existing. I don't see the undeniable meaning and purpose that you do, which seems to derive from your faith in things unseen and unknowable.

But be comforted while you are waiting by the fact that whatever entity or force turned “nothingness” into “somethingness” for us thought enough about us to give us an existence that holds some of the most blissful things imaginable.  It would not make sense that it has no plans for us beyond the physical existence we have now.  I realize it gave us some of the hardest things imaginable to deal with too. 

But, the cost that goes along with being a conscious, sentient being which is aware of its own existence is….that you are aware of your own existence.  And thus, what it would mean to “not” exist.  We are, in that sense, effectively “gods” ourselves.  Capable of creation and destruction, with conscious decisions to pursue either course. 

Or at least we are images of what “god” must be, and what we are a part of.  But, for me, the fact of existence and creation of all that is around us, persuasively negates the probability of us disappearing into nothing.  We are here, and conscious of being here, for a reason.

I hope you're right. However, there's no evidence for this hypothesis. Every world religion (except Buddhism, which isn't really a religion) posits a reason for human existence. So it seems to me that while you say you're non-religious, your belief system is a form of personal religiosity.

That's fine. But the conclusions you've come to don't seem to follow logically or reasonably from your premises. You've got a big leap of faith going on.

Reality isn't black and white

While it might look like Taoists are big on black and white, this yin-yang symbol actually speaks otherwise.
 
Yes, there are dualities in the universe. Lots of them: male/female, positive/negative, wave/particle, good/bad ... and on and on and on.

But it's those little circles that tell the most meaningful part of the story -- how there's yin within yang, and yang within yin. The farthest reach of black blends with the beginning of white, and vice versa.

If we think in terms of this or that, we're not seeing reality rightly.

The world appears in shades of gray to eyes attuned to how things are, rather than how we imagine or conceive them to be.

I got thinking about this last night when I was writing a post on my other blog, "iPhone shows money can buy happiness." That sounds so materialistic, so non-spiritual, so crude.

Haven't we been told from an early age, "Remember, money can't buy happiness"? But here I am, three days into owning a 3G iPhone, and I'm happier than I was before.

Sure, we can debate the definition of happiness ad infinitum. We can parse words and argue about whether my feeling of iPhonish satisfaction is genuine. We can delve into the writings of great thinkers -- religious, philosophical, moral -- and compare my thoughts with theirs.

But the plain fact remains, as evidenced by my direct inner knowing, that I'm happier now than before I handed over my VISA card to an AT&T employee and bought an iPhone.

Sometimes money buys happiness. Sometimes it doesn't.
Sometimes meditation brings peace of mind. Sometimes it doesn't.
Sometimes religion has something to teach us. Sometimes it doesn't.
Sometimes trust in a guru leads to wisdom. Sometimes it doesn't.

Most questions about what life is all about, whether these be political, scientific, spiritual, or any other variety, are best considered from a sometimes frame of mind.

Even when there's no evidence of any exceptions to the rule, which is the case with solidly proven laws of nature. Science never closes the door to a possibility of a rule being broken.

Whereas, fundamentalist religion and moralism does.

Which is crazy, because here there's no evidence of truthfulness, as there is in science. Yet believers cling to dogma as if it was a life preserver that could be depended upon, instead of realizing that swimming freely in the ocean of Maybe and Sometimes is a better way to stay afloat.

Why? Because reality has a lot more buoyancy than imagination.

I can tell myself, "Brian, money doesn't buy happiness. You've got to crawl into your meditation closet, shut your eyes, and get to work on eliminating that damn ego of yours which keeps on desiring stuff. Then you'll experience the bliss of merging with the cosmos."

Nice thoughts.

Yet when I find myself happier after getting some new techno-toy, I have to trust my direct experience rather than an idea of what would, could, or should be experienced.

Along this line, I feel that each of us knows what kind of person we are. But often we deny that knowing, because it conflicts with a concept we have of ourselves -- which may be an idealized "me" that doesn't bear much resemblance to the real thing.

Last year I agonized over whether I should get a maxi-scooter (a Suzuki Burgman) to commemorate the post-sixty phase of my ongoing "midlife crisis."

I ended up ordering one, then canceling the order. In a way, whether I ever get a high-powered scooter isn't all that important compared to the intuitive knowing that coursed through my psyche when I signed a credit card slip for a $500 deposit.

I'm a scooter/motorcycle person.

This was me, a guy who wanted to ride fast again on two wheels, accepting the danger that this entails, because it's damn fun.

I'm also an iPhone person. I love gadgets, especially high-tech ones that do amazing things. They make my life happier and more fulfilling.

Such doesn't mesh with the Buddha's teachings. Or Jesus'. Or Plato's.

Well, they were themselves, and I'm me. I can learn a lot from other people about some things.

When it comes to me, though, I'm my best teacher. And since spirituality is billed as a path of self-discovery, the guru I've got to bow down to is myself.

Mostly. There's no black and white here, or anywhere.

Tim Minchin's poetic response to blind belief

Thanks to the always-interesting Pharyngula, this morning I spent an enjoyable ten minutes listening (and reading, because the poor audio requires a video'ized transcription) to Tim Minchin's marvelous "Storm."

[Update: there's now a replacement "video" with clear audio and no transcription, which I've embedded below.]

Here's the You Tube video description:

Tim Minchin's stunning performance of his beat poem 'Storm' Eloquently and wittily honouring reason, science and life appreciation and debunking homeopathy, psychics, alternative medicine, religion etc. Live performance at the 9 carols for a Godless Christmas Show, 21st December 2008, Hammersmith Apollo.

I related to Minchin's relating of his encounter with an attractive New Agey girl whose gullible anti-scientific bent irritates him at a dinner party. She says...

You can't know anything.
Knowledge is merely opinion.

But the human body
Is a mystery
Science just falls in a hole
When it tries to explain
The nature of the soul.

Eventually, after a sufficient number of glasses of wine, Minchin can't take her B.S. any more. He responds...

Life is full of mystery, yeah, but
There are answers out there
But they won't be found,
By people sitting around,
Looking serious,
And saying, isn't life mysterious,
Let's sit here and hope,
Let's call up the fucking Pope,
Let's go on Oprah,
And call up Depak Chopra.

There's more good stuff in the video, of course.

I've been there and done that myself: been unable to keep my mouth shut when I hear someone expressing an extreme anti-science view (reasonable criticisms are fully in order; the scientific method demands it).

Minchin says it so well.

Isn't this enough?
Just
This world?
Just
This beautiful, complex
Wonderfully unfathomable
Natural world?

Watch on.

Primal mystery: the birth of consciousness

I ponder death a lot. The notion of me not existing any more isn't appealing, to say the least.

It isn't my body that I'm afraid of losing. It's my awareness, or consciousness. I'd be cool with living on as a disembodied soul, so long as I was aware of it.

But ...being extinguished completely ...forever ...not a trace of consciousness left. Yikes!

Some say that it isn't possible for us to contemplate death, not in a realistic fashion.

We know what life is like because it's being experienced as we envision death. Yet non-existence obviously can't be imagined, since imagining occurs while we're existent.

So death is a mystery lying on the other side of bodily life.

Either our consciousness will continue after we die, or it won't. There's no way to know which will happen. If anybody claims otherwise, ask them "Since you're still alive, how can you be sure what you'll be after you die?"

Now, let's turn our attention in the other direction: toward the birth of consciousness, rather than its death.

Surprisingly, I hadn't thought about this much until yesterday.

That every baby in its mother's womb is going along like a recently sprouted sprig of grass, growing yet unaware, until suddenly (I assume it's sudden) the light of awareness comes on.

Consciousness. The baby changes from (1) being alive, to (2) being aware of being alive.

In those three additional words, "being aware of," lie every mystery, every truth, every everything that comes with being human. Or any other sort of creature with consciousness.

What boggles my mind -- as it should, because this is mind-boggling stuff -- is the instant, the dividing line, the moment, the difference between being alive and being conscious of life.

Spirituality, religion, mysticism, science, philosophy: these all depend, and flow from, that mysterious birth of consciousness.

That's our real birth. The birth of you and me.

When we pop out of the womb, that's a secondary birth. (Note to abortion opponents: I'm pro-choice and don't see what I just said as inconsistent with that position, though I realize others could reasonably disagree.)

If we could understand what happens at this birth of consciousness, which likely occurs with a puppy in the same fashion as it does with a human baby, the cosmos would be a lot more understandable.

Consciousness is the ultimate Secret of the Universe, since without it no other secrets can be revealed.

Yet we don't know the nature of consciousness. Not scientists. Not mystics. Not theologians. Not philosophers. Not anybody.

Each of us experienced its first blossoming as a baby in the womb. And we have no idea what it is. That's marvelous.

I could go back much further, of course. To the big bang -- the birth of our entire universe. Was consciousness present in the cosmos at that moment, or did it come into being later?

Another unanswered, and maybe unanswerable, mystery.

When we don't understand the birth of consciousness, I don't see how it's possible to claim knowledge about what happens at its death.

My bet is, our personal consciousness is gone forever. But I'd be (ecstatically) happy to be otherwise surprised. I'll just have to wait and see.

Like everyone else.

Beyond Ken Wilber's bounded reality

I've got mixed feelings about Ken Wilber.

Sometimes he strikes me as a self-absorbed guy who's fervently marketing his Integral Philosophy as the answer to every question, even though it strikes me as a conceptual exercise without much reality meat behind it.

Then I read something Wilber has written and resonate with it. (A sampling of my divided opinions toward Wilber is here, here, and here.)

I wasn't planning to renew my subscription to "What Is Enlightenment?" when the magazine changed it's question mark spots and became EnlightenNext, an even more brazen vanity massager for Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen -- who call themselves the "guru" (Cohen) and the "pandit" (Wilber).

But the sample issue that came in the mail had an interesting guru-pandit dialogue on "The Interdynamics of Culture + Consciousness." This is an area where Wilber makes pretty good sense.

When it comes to consciousness, we can talk about absolute consciousness and we can talk about relative consciousness... so absolute consciousness is indeed pure consciousness. It's not a thing; it's not an object; it's not a mist. If you have to think about it at all, it's a vast open emptiness in which all objects arise.

...But that's just the absolute component. What have become so important, as we have started to create an East-West integration, are the relative aspects of consciousness. And these relative aspects have to do with how you interpret that absolute experience of consciousness.

...So you can have a full-blown satori, or consciousness experience, but depending on where you are in this developmental scale, you'll interpret it according to different values.

You can interpret it in a magical, or egocentric, fashion: "I and I alone have this pure consciousness." You can interpret it in a mythic, or traditional, value structure, which is the next major stage, and believe that this experience is given just to one group, one people, or one chosen tribe.

And so on, with other stages providing the foundation for other interpretations.

Which leaves us with the crazy multiplicity of religions, each taking what likely is the same experience of love and connectedness with the cosmos, and framing it in a unique conceptual fashion.

Christians ascribe their uplifted feelings to Jesus. Followers of a mystical meditation system consider that the guru's grace is responsible. New Age types sense the presence of an angel or spirit guide working behind the scenes.

Wilber says:

The interpretation of a spiritual experience is as important, or more important, than the spiritual experience itself. That sounds kind of shocking at first, but the more you think it through, the more you realize it is exactly right on the money.

I believe Wilber is correct up to this point. But then he goes further: arguing that there is a highest and best way of interpreting spiritual experiences, and -- no big surprise -- it happens to be his very own Integral Philosophy.

The integral structure is the value structure that is basically the truest to the real nature of absolute consciousness.

Well, I doubt it.

How likely is it that the universe, which Wilber likes to call Kosmos, is arranged or structured in exactly the fashion that a 21st century Homo sapiens named Ken Wilber has intellectualized it to be? Not very.

Of course, any description of How Things Really Are is going to fall short of how things really are. Words aren't reality. Nobody, including Wilber, seriously disagrees about that.

But some conceptual models come closer than others to reflecting the universe as it is (in contrast to how a human mind would like it to be, or imagines it to be). This is the goal of science: to describe as accurately as possible how the natural world works.

It's also the goal of Rolf Sattler, who emailed me recently. He said:

I would like to let you know that on my website www.beyondWilber.ca I published a book entitled Wilber’s AQAL Map and Beyond. In the first part of this book I discuss some of the most fundamental limitations of Wilber’s map, and in the second part I present a dynamic mandala that overcomes them.

Sattler is an interesting guy. For some (obvious) reason I like his silver-haired bearded appearance. He's a retired botany and biology professor who is very much into Taoism, Yoga, and such-ness.

His overview of why it's necessary to go beyond Wilber's model of the cosmos makes good sense to me.

Wilber loves organized hierarchies where things are neatly nestled in tidy relationships with other things. This may capture the mechanical aspect of the universe, but life, consciousness, and ultimate reality (whatever the heck it might be, or not be) seem much less amenable to Wilber's conceptualizing.

So Sattler's summary of his downloadable book strikes me as a better reflection of the cosmos, in all of its mysterious glory, than Wilber's often dry-as-dust model of quadrants, levels, holons, and whatnot.

I haven't done more than skim through the book. What I've read about Sattler's "mandala" approach to modeling reality sounds good, though.

Contemplating the mandala does not only provide insight into reality, the Kosmos, but also communion with it. As we become aware of the source in the empty center of the mandala, we can realize that this center is the center of the Kosmos and ourselves. Thus, the centers of the mandala, the Kosmos, and ourselves coincide—they are one center, not in a spatial or temporal sense, but in the sense of the unnamable mystery that pervades all existence. 

Contemplating the mandala can also be liberating in several ways: instead of being caught in only one meaning of each concept, we can move freely to other complementary meanings; instead of being caught in only one way of relating the circles of concepts, we can entertain other complementary relations; and instead of being caught only in the manifest world cut off from its source, the empty center, we can see everything in relations to the source which bestows sacredness on the Kosmos including ourselves. 

The meaning of life? Life.

Pretty obviously, I'm entering the simple phase of my philosophical trajectory. In my life I've thought a lot of complex thoughts. I've written some complex books.

I've followed a complex spiritual path (Sant Mat, which has lots of rules and posits a dazzlingly involved cosmology). I've embraced the teachings of a guru, Charan Singh, who had advice on countless subjects associated with the inner and outer life of his disciples.

Now, all this strikes me as way too much. As do the intricacies of every religion.

Most scientists suspect that simplicity lies at the heart of reality, notwithstanding the seeming complexity of the material manifestation.

What's good enough for the cosmos is also fine with me. I'm ready to bow at the altar of just enough. And seriously consider that it's time to end my spiritual search.

An image keeps popping into my head of people setting off from a jungle clearing into unknown territory, bent on searching for the ultimate treasure trove. Everybody follows a path in a different direction. Nobody returns with what they're looking for.

Then there's the fools who sit on their butts in the middle of the clearing, drinking and eating and chatting and having a good time.

They're the only ones not going anywhere. But they sure seem to be richer than the treasure-seekers.

From an early age I've assumed that the most important purpose of life is to find the meaning of life. It appeared so obvious that there's more to being human than just living as a human being.

I desperately wanted to find the secret sauce that made everyday existence genuinely tasty. I deeply desired the key that unlocked the door leading to the hidden chamber of How Things Really Are.

Now, there's another feeling that won't leave me: the sensation that every moment I'm alive is stupendously, unimaginably, indescribably precious -- because likely my life is a volume of awareness set between the bookends of not yet existent and gone forever.

If this life is the only one we'll ever live (admit it: even if you're a true believer, you know this is highly probable), each instant of experience possesses a value that can't be valued.

And yet... so often we fritter those moments away.

I'm not suggesting that one moment is more valuable than another. Or that one sort of experience is more valuable than another.

Just that the meaning of life is the living of it. Fully. Consciously. With gratitude.

Frequently I say "thank you" when I stagger out of bed in the morning, make coffee, and walk up the driveway to get the newspaper.

I have no idea who I'm talking to. I doubt that anyone besides me can hear what I say. I simply feel like thanking reality, existence, the universe, whatever, for making life possible. My life. At this moment.

I hesitate to call this feeling "spiritual." Yet it is the most honest spiritual sensation I've ever had.

Boxing up varieties of belief

Most people don't like to be put in boxes. Meaning, categories. Hey, I'm an individual, unlike anyone else! we like to believe.

Fair enough.

But I see nothing wrong with putting how we believe into boxes. So I've done just that -- stimulated into belief-categorizing action by a question that's been running through my mind recently:

Why do some people's proclamations irritate or please me more than other proclamations?

I'm speaking generally here, about all sorts of utterances. Verbal sayings. Blog posts and comments. Books. Magazine articles. Any way that someone communicates a belief from their brain into mine.

Sometimes I get an instant emotional rush of What the @#$%&! as soon as I register a communication that rates high on my irritation scale. Other belief messages produce a pleasant smile, and not just because I agree with what I've heard.

So what's going on here? What are the varieties of belief that generate such different reactions in me?

Here's how I've put believing into boxes. (click to enlarge the image) This isn't terribly sophisticated, but it reflects the basics of how I see people -- me included, naturally -- and their beliefs.

First, I'm assuming that everything anyone is aware of, or communicates to others, is a belief. Meaning, it isn't 100%, guaranteed, no doubt about it, Truth with a capital "T." There's always a possibility of being wrong, or at least not totally correct.

For example, our basic assumptions about reality could be off-base. This could be a computer simulation. We all could be part of a dream. Or dead and in an afterlife that seems like living. Whatever.

Regardless, we feel like we know something about what's going on. That's a belief. Which we have some reasons for believing -- as shown on the "Good Reasons for Belief" heading. I've divided those reasons into just two categories: "Few" and "A Lot."

I could discuss what a good reason is. But I won't. I think most people know the difference between a good and bad reason for believing something. Evidence is key, just like in a trial.

However, some beliefs don't require evidence. Subjective opinion is a perfectly fine manner of believing. I don't need a reason for saying "I prefer vanilla ice cream to chocolate." Or, "I can't stand to listen to rap music."

Recognizing that reason-light opinions of this sort are subjective, most people don't try to push them onto others. That's where my "Insistence on Belief" heading comes in: it divides beliefs into how strongly they're forced onto people who may not hold them.

If you don't have good reasons for a belief, as is the case with religions, yet you want it to be accepted by others, I call this a "Dogmatic Assertion." Take it or leave it; but you'd better take it.

On the other hand, well-founded beliefs that should be accepted by everyone are "Objective Facts." Like gravity and electromagnetism. Or 2 +2 = 4. Societies can't function without a general consensus about facts of this sort.

If you've got a lot of good reasons for believing something, yet you aren't out to push the belief onto other people, I call that a "Non-assertive Truth."

Examples: a talented musician who knows he can play the piano well, but doesn't rush to show off on every keyboard he comes across. Or a well-read person who could correct a misquote he hears in a conversation, but chooses to let the error go.

Here I've shown some typical language used by people operating in each belief box. Three of the four are rarely irritating.

The only one which is almost guaranteed to gall me, now that I've embraced churchlessness, is "Thou shalt..." -- frequently used by those who don't have good reasons for what they believe, but want other people to accept their beliefs nonetheless.

Lastly, this shows the types of people who frequent each category of belief. I had some trouble coming up with a term to put in the upper left corner. "Liker/disliker" is kind of lame. Suggestions welcomed.

Whatever this box is called, we all spend much time in it. Life is largely about liking and disliking, minimal reasons required.

Republican or Democrat. Football or baseball. Cats or dogs. Pickup or sports car. Blond or brunette. PBS or MTV. Christian or Buddhist. Vegetarian or meat-eater.

Make your choice. Feel free. Go for it.

Just don't claim that I need to follow in your footsteps, if all you've got is "I like" or "I dislike" to back you up. Reasons please! Good ones. If you don't have them, you're a fundamentalist who is wasting my time.

However, I'm always ready to listen to those in the "Scientist" category. I use this term loosely, meaning anyone whose beliefs are founded on solid evidence and experience. A dance instructor can be a scientist in this sense, because what they're teaching is demonstrably true.

I was thinking of "Humble sage" in a similarly broad sense. Many people know a lot yet don't broadcast it to the world. Content to tend a productive tasty garden, they don't feel a need to open up a vegetable stand.

Well, my goal here was to both better understand how I see different varieties of believing, and explain to myself and others why I react the way I do to people who come across as being in the various belief boxes.

Like I said, I rarely have a problem with anybody who isn't acting from the fundamentalist mindset. If someone says to me, "I love feeling that Jesus is by my side," I'll respond with "That's wonderful."

That statement doesn't need a reason. Love and feeling stand on their own. It's only when the sentiment is rephrased as "If you don't accept Jesus, you're headed to hell" that we have a problem.

Now you'd better come up with some damn good reasons why I should believe in my eternal damnation. So far, I haven't heard any.

Shared reality is better than private reality

Sometimes you hear people say, "He's off in his own private world."

Now, this may not be such a bad thing. But few of us would want to be in a totally closed off fragment of reality, because that would be exceedingly lonely.

Comments on a recent post got me thinking about shared (or "intersubjective," as one person put it) realities, versus private realities.

In my experience, the most satisfying moments in life are when I feel connected with other people. Or with nature. Or with some other animate or inaminate entity, such as our dog -- or my newly beloved MacBook computer.

At these times I feel that the world is more one than many, more united than divided, more loving than hateful, more cooperative than competitive.

I've got a sensation of being part of something bigger than myself. In some small (or large) way, I've escaped the bounds of an ego-encapsulated existence where it's all about me, me, me.

For this to happen, there's got to be some sort of shared experience of reality going on. If the sharing is with a person, such as my wife, we both have to be tuned in to a similar sensory and cognitive wavelength.

We can't mutually resonate with the glory of a sunset if one of us has our eyes closed. We can't both have a intimate understanding if one of us isn't listening to what the other is saying with an open mind.

Applying this to spirituality, I've come to feel that my goal is to try to break down the barriers that keep me in a private world where the meaning of life is limited to what I believe it to be. I want to be inclusive rather than exclusive, a resident of a psychological habitat without many fences rather than a gated community.

I recall standing in line at a movie theater back in my true believing days. There I was, like everybody else, waiting to buy a ticket.

Suddenly I thought: Wow! I'm a disciple of a great Indian guru, a god-realized soul. I've been taught a mantra and meditation approach that will take me to the highest regions of reality. I'm so fortunate!

Now I saw my fellow movie-goers differently. I stood straighter, feeling apart from them. I was on the way to knowing the truth of the cosmos, and they weren't. Lucky me. Poor them. I enjoyed the feeling.

At the time I didn't recognize it as a feeling of superiority. But that's what it was. And it was founded on a belief system that encouraged me to split myself off from a shared reality.

I wasn't just another person in line at a movie theater. I was an initiate of a perfect satguru! I was someone who could repeat a secret mantra that mystically connected me with God! I was so cool!

This is what a dogmatic belief system can do: provide a lens through which experience is distorted, so that the believer is seen to stand on higher ground, reality-wise. Cinemagraphically, religious believers see themselves as full color people in a gray-scale world.

Reading Jon Kabat-Zinn's "Wherever You Go, There You Are" this morning, I came across some quotes that blended with my own ponderings.

We all carry around ideas and images of reality, frequently garnered from other people or from courses we have taken, books we have read, or from television, the radio, newspapers, the culture in general, which give us pictures of how things are and what is occurring. As a result, we often see our thoughts, or someone else's, instead of seeing what is right of front of us or inside of us.

...We can live in a dream reality of our own making without even a sense of the loss, the gulf, the unnecessary distance we place between ourselves and experience.

...We can all be imprisoned by incessant wanting, by a mind clouded with ideas and opinions it clings to as if they were truths.

...Perhaps ultimately, spiritual simply means experiencing wholeness and interconnectedness directly, a seeing that individuality and the totality are interwoven, that nothing is separate or extraneous.

If you see in this way, then everything becomes spiritual in its deepest sense. Doing science is spiritual. So is washing the dishes. It is the inner experience which counts. And you have to be there for it. All else is mere thinking.

At the same time, you have to be on the lookout for tendencies toward self-deception, deluded thinking, grandiosity, self-inflation, and impulses toward exploitation and cruelty directed at other beings. A lot of harm has come in all eras from people attached to one view of spiritual "truth."

...Moreover, our ideas of spirituality frequently ring with a slightly holier-than-thou resonance to the attuned ear. Narrow, literalist views of spirit often place it above the "gross," "polluted," "deluded" domain of body, mind, and matter. Falling into such views, people can use ideas of spirit to run from life.

And split themselves off from other people.

Reality offers plenty of mystery

It's baffling why people feel the need to fantasize about God and the supernatural when here-and-now reality is so full of bedazzlement.

This is one of the reasons why I liked Julia Sweeney's "Letting Go of God" so much. I resonated with her embracing science after discarding traditional religions and New Agey speculation.

My morning meditation corner usually has a selection of books near at hand. I bounce back and forth between mystical/spiritual and scientific themes, because I find just as much inspiration in a down to earth discussion of material reality as in a soaring paean to soulful wonders.

You want wonder? Wonder about this – some thoughts echoed in Sweeney's monologue.

The universe is some 14 billion years old. Earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years. For most of that time, nothing much was happening, life-wise, on our planet. Bacteria, single-celled creatures, slime, that sort of stuff.

To exist as that…not very enthralling.

Yet here we are, humans, able to be both aware of our awareness and conscious of our evolutionary history. We can stand back and say Wow! to where we are now.

As Sweeney says, we carry all of life within our genes. We've been everything, literally. And still are. There's an unbroken connection between the first stirring of life on Earth and us. If there wasn't, we wouldn't be here.

It's easier to recognize this in our most recent human ancestors. Mother + father = me. And you. We're entirely the product of two people, as they were. And so on, and so on.

If any one of those couplings, going back tens of millions of years, hadn't been consummated…no me or you.

Of course, this "miraculous" happenstance also is entirely predictable. Our existence is testimony to the fact that each of our ancestors successfully got it on, merging eggs and sperm countless times, the end result being a being who can read or write a blog post like this.

So there's another way to look at death, other than fearfully: with wonder and gratitude.

Yes, it's too bad that we can't live for a thousand years, or forever. Yes, it's too bad that life is filled with problems, suffering, misfortune, confusion, uncertainty.

However, the fact is that each of us is alive to ponder life. Didn't have to be that way. There was no cosmic guarantee at the beginning of time that you'd be you and I'd be me.

Yet here we are!

Wow!

Ten undeniable metaphysical truths

OK. Before getting into the meat (or tofu) of this Moses-like blog post, let's break down the title.

Ten. Just seems the right number. The Ten Commandments should be cast aside in favor of my revelation. Plus, I haven't come up with my truths yet, but intuitively I'm pretty sure that, given the amount of red wine I just poured and my sipping speed, I can come up with ten before the glass is empty.

Undeniable. Yeah, I wish. None of the brilliant stuff I write on this blog has received the unquestioning acceptance that it deserves, so I've got no illusions about how this post will be received. I just mean that anyone with sound reason and clear perceptions of reality (namely, someone like me) won't be able to deny what I say.

Metaphysical. Not sure if this is the right word, but I don't feel like quibbling over it. What I'm expounding concerns the nature of what, if anything, lies beyond the physical. So, it's "meta."

Truths. Well, sure. What follows seems so obviously true to me, I can't understand why everybody in the world doesn't bow down before my deca-truthiosity and proclaim, "So utterly right you are, Brian!"

I keep repeating these truths in blog posts, in one form or another, as well as in comments to those who don't understand how correct I am. Maybe now I can simply point people to this post and say "#3 and #7," sort of like a Chinese menu of metaphysical correctness.

Here goes…

(1) Nobody on Earth knows what happens after death. Why? Because if you're still alive on this planet, you aren't dead yet. My logic is impeccable. Near death or mystical experiences don't count as pointers toward a possible afterlife, because they're experienced in this life.

(2) There's no solid proof for God or any other unearthly divinity. If there was, religious skeptics wouldn't have a doubting leg to stand on. Everybody would believe. Plus, whatever religion preached the gospel that matched the proof would overwhelm competing faiths lacking the support of that evidence.

(3) No religion has more validity than any other. This follows from (2). Given that there's no evidence of God, in the sense of a personal (or even impersonal) entity that consciously creates and/or sustains the physical universe, every religion rests on the same foundation: the shifting sand of human speculation.

(4) Miraculous powers are possessed by no one. Ever since cameras and other forms of objective documentation came into existence, miracles have taken a decided downturn. Jesus supposedly walked on water a couple of thousand years ago, but there's no scientifically defensible proof of a major (or even minor) miracle since. Likely reason: nobody can perform one.

(5) Mystical, religious, or spiritual experiences never can be corroborated. Claims abound of people who have seen God, angels, beings of light, or whatever; who have experienced enlightenment, satori, Buddha nature, or whatever; who have risen to heaven, astral planes, paradise, oneness, whatever. Fine. Good for them. Nobody can know whether this is fact or fantasy.

(6) Physical proof of a metaphysical reality belies the truth claim. This relates to (5). Any sort of metaphysical evidence that can be perceived by the bodily senses obviously is physical. So unless it falls in the realm of the miraculous, ruled out by (4), such evidence can be explained by the material laws of nature.

(7) Consciousness or awareness doesn't count as a divine revelation. Devotees of certain "Eastern" faiths, such as Vedanta or Zen Buddhism, basically look upon a higher state of consciousness – or pure awareness – as a manifestation of foundational reality. That may be. But a crystal clear mentality still is rooted in materiality, the physical brain, not metaphysics.

(8) If God is ineffable, a mystery, anyone who speaks about divinity is spouting falsehoods. More simply put, this truth says "If you know God, why the hell are you blabbing about him (or her)?" Prophets, mystics, saints, gurus, yogis, and so on often claim that God is beyond words. Then they blab on and on about this. What gives?

(9) Absolute unity doesn't permit anyone to know about it. Often ultimate reality, personal (God) or otherwise (the One), is considered to be an unbroken wholeness. Well, if there's (a) absolute unity and (b) someone aware of it, we've got two things. So consciousness of oneness belies the claim that such exists, in a sense similar to (6).

(10) Reality is marvelously beyond our understanding, just as we know it. My proof: I'm down to my last sip of wine, sitting outside on our deck on a warm Oregon summer night, watching a crescent moon through the branches of a three hundred year old oak tree, little me being part of a 14 billion year old universe whose beginning and end almost certainly will forever remain beyond the reach of human cognition.

Which means…the mysteries of this physical realm are plenty enough to grapple with. Who needs imaginary metaphysical enigmas?

With nature, no need for God

God is all there is. Nature is all there is.
God is infinite. Nature is infinite.
God works in mysterious ways. Nature works in mysterious ways.
God is omnipresent. Nature is omnipresent.

You get the idea. And that's the simple essence of Richard Carrier's "Sense and Goodness Without God," though he takes 424 pages to explicate it.

I've read a bit over half of Carrier's book, which I was drawn to buy after reading (and writing about) his From Taoist to Infidel essay.

I'm enjoying it. A lot. Probably because Carrier thinks much like me, aside from the fact that he's much more knowledgeable than I am in many areas of science, philosophy, history, and what not.

It's easy for me to recognize wisdom in someone who believes in the same stuff I do. I also appreciate his self-publishing "Sense and Goodness Without God." It's a lot better than most of the crap non-fiction that populates the spiritual section of bookstores.

But since his book requires some thinking (gasp!), I imagine Carrier got a brush off from publishers who couldn't imagine that there's a market for spirituality minus other-worldliness.

Here's a taste of what Carrier's metaphysical naturalism is all about.

Given the lack of clear evidence for a god, and the fact that everything we have seen happen, which was not caused by humans, has been caused by immutable natural elements and forces, we should sooner infer the opposite: that immutable natural elements and forces are behind it all.

…For now, observe that the only things we have ever proven to exist are matter, energy, space, and time. Since we can explain everything by appealing to only those things and their properties, then (all else being equal) such an explanation is the most plausible one around – leaving no need and no sound reason to go beyond them and invent all manner of unproven entities, like gods and spirits and miraculous powers.

…It follows that no matter how you look at it, there can be no "ultimate" explanation in the sense people want. The very concept is a logical impossibility. Even the idea of an infinity of explanations would itself be in need of some inexplicable "brute fact."

…Thus the question for us really is: Where do we stop? What is the one, ultimate "brute fact" that needs no explanation? Certainly, most people say this is God, that God is self-explanatory, having no origin, that God exists necessarily as the one brute fact.

But that requires resting on a huge number of assumptions. Why not just stop with what we actually know – the natural world? Certainly this is just as viable. After all, if a god needs no explanation, then why does nature need one?

Excellent question. Which really doesn't require an answer. Just a brute fact: no explanation needed.

Doubt, darkness, digging deep

I keep thinking about John Shanley's lines from my previous post.

Each of us is like a planet. There's the crust, which seems eternal. We are confident about who we are. If you ask, we can readily describe our current state…Your answers are your current topography, seemingly permanent, but deceptively so.

Doubt is a recognition that personal earthquakes happen. Magma can erupt at any moment. Continents shift. Fast, not requiring eons to reshuffle the contours of our existence.

Yet each of us erects belief structures upon this unstable ground. We're drawn to do so by the same natural forces that cause the tectonic shifts.

Such is the universe's yin and yang. Creation and destruction. Light and darkness. Order and chaos.

To only doubt…that way lies madness, indecision, depression, suicide. To only believe…that way lies fundamentalism, rigidity, closed-mindedness, unreality.

There must be a middle way. Not in the Buddhist sense, necessarily. But something like that. A way of living that melds confidence in what we know and experience now with a sense, This could change in the next instant.

Not only "could." Will. This will change in the next instant. Life is constantly demolishing my expectations, my understandings, my supremely confident belief that I've got things figured out.

Last night I realized that Outlook wasn't keeping up with my email message typing. I had to repeatedly press the space bar to make distinct words ratherthanrunonletterslikethis.

Amazingly (in retrospect), I jumped to the conclusion that it was an Outlook 2007 problem. I fired up Google, typed in "Outlook slow typing" and found countless complaints about this Microsoft offering not keeping up with fingers on a keyboard.

It was so obvious.

And became more obvious the more I thought about it. Until, after I'd tried some of the suggested software fixes, finding no effect, a disturbance broke through my encrusted mind: "It's the spacebar, stupid."

And so it was.

A few minutes of "sticky spacebar" Googling later, I'd pried off the plastic cover and finished cleaning the mechanism with some WD 40 soaked Q-tips. Back to normal now. Thank you, doubt, for breaking up my unsupported certainty.

Last week, while vacationing in central Oregon, I bought "The Ruins" at the Paulina Springs Bookstore. I felt like reading a good horror story, and the cover of the book featured a to-die-for (if you're the author) blurb from Stephen King:

"The best horror novel of the new century."

From the first page I struggled to put the book down. I was sucked into an unrelenting tale of good intentions gone awry, of people making choices that seem utterly right to them and turn out to be utterly wrong, of young people who had their lives ahead of them until a sinister force appears with a different notion.

I was surprised by how much I liked entering a fictional realm where you know (or at least deeply suspect) that nothing is going to turn out to be likable.

Scott Smith, the author, skillfully led me into the psyches of the characters. Along with them, in my imagination I struggled to deal with a situation that starts off as worrisome, evolves into something bad, and goes steeply downhill from there.

"The Ruins" was an antithesis to the spiritual books that are my usual reading fare. I found myself resonating with a worldview in which no matter how deep a person digs for courage, compassion, understanding, and truth, that effort is going to be undercut by an uncaring corner of the cosmos.

Well, not just uncaring. Evil. Uncaring would have been a godsend for these visitors to a Mayan jungle. They had to deal with an actively malevolent force.

Which I don't believe exists. My bet is that the universe has a "humans, shumans" non-attitude towards us. It doesn't give a shit about our existence because it doesn't give a shit about anything. Including itself.

So when those tectonic shifts happen, there's no reason for me to take them personally. They shake up my certainty with a powerful earthquake of doubt, but I can't assume there's any purpose behind it all – though I'd like it if I were the epicenter of some divinity's concern.

In "The Ruins," meaning (or meaninglessness) comes from within. Nobody or nothing is going to save you. What you make of the horrifying and horrible situation is up to you. A paragraph from near the end:

She thought briefly about praying – for what, forgiveness? – only to realize she had no one to pray to. She didn't believe in God. All her life she'd been saying that, instinctively, unthinkingly, but now, for the first time – about to do what she was about to do – she could look inside and claim the words with total assurance. She didn't believe.

Blast the religious loonies into oblivion

Passion. Religious believers consider that they're the only ones with it. For example, they have "The Passion of the Christ." It fills Christians with energy, conviction, determination, zeal.

Well, there's also "The Passion of Reality." It fills me with exactly the same feelings. Just as fundamentalists are driven to rid the world of Satanic influences (including pagans like me), when I come across nonsensical dogmatic blathering my reality-loving blood begins to boil.

I get fired up to defend the ramparts of truth against the neo-barbarian hordes who want to substitute superstition for science (and a scientifically founded spirituality).

This morning, on Pharyngula, I came across a well-deserved rant about another blithering apologist.

I read these lame exercises in making excuses by theologians, and I don't understand how anyone can be foolish enough to fall for them. The latest example is by Edward Tingley, who babbles on painfully about how believers are the true skeptics, the true scientists, while claiming that the believers have a deeper, stronger knowledge than mere atheists.

Yet nowhere in his ramble does Tingley ever give any evidence or rational reason to believe in his god or any god — in fact, he triumphantly declares that there is no evidence — god exists, but (I can scarcely believe he makes this argument seriously) he's hiding…hiding in such a way that only someone "muscled up with virtues" can see him. It's the Emperor's New Clothes argument all over again.

Exactly. I muscled up with the virtue of reading crap that I don't believe in and headed over to Tingley's Christian web site to inspect "The Skeptical Inquirer: If Only Atheists Were the Skeptics They Think They Are."

It was painful to peruse. I confess that I didn't read every word. But only a small proportion of the words made any sense, so I'm pretty sure I didn't miss anything important.

These sentences seem to capture the essence of Tingley's argument:

A seeker of truth has to go where the truth can be found, and to go on until it is found, and both the atheist and the agnostic are early quitters… Maybe, if he exists, God would show himself directly to our senses. But maybe he wouldn't. Maybe he would hide from us—maybe he is a Deus absconditus.

… We now have evidence for a conclusion that all our fellow seekers of truth ought to draw: Either God does not exist or he exists but does not show himself to our senses.

… When the smart scientist of the seventeenth century was asked, "Is clear water pure?" he did not go with his gut and answer "yes" or "no." "The naked eye says yes," he answered, "but is there an instrument better than the naked eye with which to see?" We need to listen to the scientist who claims that there is, and that scientist is Pascal.

That instrument is the heart. "It is the heart which perceives God, and not the reason"… In a world in which God both exists and hides, relying upon conclusive evidence is the way to be wrong about God.

Wow! What an amazing load of bullshit.

Tingley says that since there is no evidence for God, either (1) God doesn't exist or (2) God wants to hide from us. The simplest explanation obviously is (1), in the same sense that since there is no evidence of gnomes who live under flowers in our garden, either (1) they don't exist or (2) they want to hide from my wife and me.

Now, someone else could move into our house and have a deep sense of conviction in his or her heart that there really are gnomes under our flowers. They just want to hide, and don't want to leave any demonstrable evidence of their existence other than that heartfelt sense.

Great. Each to his own. I've got no problem with gnome-lovers or with God-lovers. Just call your devotion what it is: a purely personal vision that has no foundation in objective reality.

Don't try to conflate what you feel in your heart with genuine knowledge. Don't insult truth by equating your subjective conviction that gnomes, God, Big Foot, the Tooth Fairy, or Santa Claus is real with how the cosmos truly is.

Just say, "I don't know, but I'm pretending that I do because it feels good." That's honest.

There's various ways to respond to those who, like Tingley, want to foist their medieval faith-based claptrap onto those of us in the 21^st century who are just fine with what the Renaissance brought us. Physicist Brian Greene takes the high road in his "Put a Little Science in Your Life."

He correctly sees science as more than just an activity pursued by white-coated nerds off in their own little experimental worlds.

The reason science really matters runs deeper still. Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that's precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations — for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences.

Then there's the low road, which attracts me more after having my heart tell me that Tingley and his fundamentalist friends need to be stopped with some shots across the bow before they kill civilization. This is the path taken by "Carnival of the Elitist Bastards."

Here she stands in dry-dock, awaiting launch: a ship of the line, cannon gleaming, masts straight and strong: the H.M.S. Elitist Bastard, built to withstand the endless assaults of ignorance. Her mission is to seek and destroy stupidity and make the world safe for knowledge once more. Where she sails, no IDiot is safe, no ignoramus secure: she's armed to the teeth and filled with a feisty crew begging for battle.

Only when necessary, though. Since I'm an ignoramus in so many ways, you're my comrade in not-knowing if you're similarly willing to admit your ignoramusness.

Notice the if. It's important. Like Socrates said, those who believe they know when really they don't are disadvantaged compared to those who know that they don't know.

Worse, they disadvantage the rest of us when they try to found social or educational policies on their religious ignorance – such as teaching creationism/intelligent design in public schools or not supporting embryonic stem cell research.

When Tingley and his band of "I feel God in my heart" no-nothings who believe they do set themselves up as superior to us genuine godly ignoramuses, that's a call to arms.

Time to unfurl the sails of the H.M.S. Elitist Bastard and show them who really rules the roost of ultimate reality: Mystery.

I know I’m right about uncertainty

Ooh! It feels so good to have my view of life confirmed. Today someone sent me a link to "On Being Certain," which talks about a book with the same name by Robert Burton, M.D.

It's subtitle is believing you are right even when you're not. Nice!

Not that it applies to me. Because I know I'm right about uncertainty. Why, I've read marvelous blog posts about this subject, each of which, I'm pleased to say, was written by me (see here, here, here, and here).

And now I learn from a description of Burton's book that science shows I've been even more right than I thought I was.

You recognize when you know something for certain, right? You "know" the sky is blue, or that the traffic light had turned green, or where you were on the morning of September 11, 2001--you know these things, well, because you just do.

In On Being Certain, neurologist Robert Burton challenges the notions of how we think about what we know. He shows that the feeling of certainty we have when we "know" something comes from sources beyond our control and knowledge. In fact, certainty is a mental sensation, rather than evidence of fact. Because this "feeling of knowing" seems like confirmation of knowledge, we tend to think of it as a product of reason. But an increasing body of evidence suggests that feelings such as certainty stem from primitive areas of the brain, and are independent of active, conscious reflection and reasoning. The feeling of knowing happens to us; we cannot make it happen.

I get an enjoyable tingle up my spine (caused by a primitive area of my brain?) when I hear about how uncertainty rules the mental roost.

Of course, part of that good feeling comes from a sensation of it's good to be able to depend on something…I mean, nothing.

Regardless, this shows that I'm much more of a Taoist than a fundamentalist. In Taoist writings people jump into raging rivers, bounce around in the current, then emerge with advice for those watching with wide-eyed amazement from the bank.

"Just go with the flow, dude." (or words to that effect)

This seems a lot closer to how life really is than the "find a path and stick to it" philosophy. But the author of the "On Being Certain" article, Harriet Hall, says that some may be genetically predisposed to embracing certainty.

Richard Feynman said, "I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things… It doesn't frighten me."

On the other hand, many people, especially religious fundamentalists, can't deal with uncertainty. They demand absolute answers and cling to their certainties even in the face of contrary evidence. Why are people so different in their need for certainty? We know there is a gene associated with risk-taking and novelty-seeking. Burton makes an intriguing suggestion: could genetic differences make individuals get different degrees of pleasure out of the feeling of knowing?

I can't quite figure out the connection between all this and another story I read this morning that, intuitively, seems deeply significant to me: "Wine's Pleasures: Are They All in Your Head?"

But I'm certain there is one.

I started drinking red wine only a few years ago. It didn't take me long to realize that the descriptions on the back of the bottle bore little resemblance to how the wine tasted to me.

As the article says, one description of an Argentine red goes: "Dark and rich, with lots of fig bread, mocha, ganache, prune and loam notes. Stays fine-grained on the finish, with lingering sage and toast hints."

Toast? Mostly me and my wife get tongue-tied after we say, "Um. Good."

I was pleased to read that price doesn't relate much to quality when it comes to wine. What counts more is that the imbiber believes he or she is drinking an expensive bottle. Thoughts of high cost translate into yum, apparently.

Much like religion.

Feeling you're part of a rare and exclusive spiritual vintage adds much to its enjoyment. The religious equivalent of Two-Buck Chuck (which was equal to a $55 cabernet in a taste test) often doesn't have the same appeal.

But it can.

Just as understanding when to dress up and when to dress down is intuitive for many people, so, too, does it become instinctive over time for wine lovers to know which is the proper bottle to open. But that requires experience of many different wines. Eventually the novelty of great wines, or expensive wines, can wear off.

"Sometimes a great Beaujolais is a better choice than La Tâche," said Nathan Vandergrift, a statistical researcher at the University of California at Irvine, who has seen the wine business as a retailer, an importer and distributor, and most recently as a blogger at the Vulgar Little Monkey Translucency Report. Mr. Vandergrift has had plenty of Beaujolais, and a fair amount of La Tâche, one of the most highly sought wines in the world.

Would that we all could achieve that sense of freedom and zen-like serenity, where we've had our fill of all else and can simply choose the right wine because it's the right wine.

Say “yes” to reality, denying nothing

I'm surprised to find myself saying yes! so enthusiastically to a book by Ken Wilber. Though I'm just four chapters into "Integral Spirituality," it's producing more positivity in me than irritation – a big change.

If you aren't familiar with Ken Wilber, his life work is to figure out how everything fits together. And I do mean everything.

His personal and institute web sites point to a dazzling intellectual and philosophical production. The guy is undeniably brilliant and creative. Also, provocative and full of himself.

I've read quite a few of Wilber's previous books. I've written an article, "What Wilber Gets Wrong About Plotinus," that's slated to be published as part of a collection of essays exploring his integral vision. Here's the article in Word and PDF formats; it'll be edited somewhat for publication.

Download wilber_and_plotinus_article2.doc

Download wilber_and_plotinus_article2.pdf

I didn't like how Wilber tried to cram Plotinus' Greek Neoplatonism into a Buddhist/Advaitist/nondual understanding of reality.

I got the sense that Wilber wasn't so much honestly positioning Plotinus' philosophy in his own integral framework, as bending Plotinus' teachings to fit into a favored Wilberian mold.

There's a different slant in "Integral Spirituality," though. It's almost disturbing how much I've enjoying the book. I don't know whether I'm becoming more like Ken Wilber (scary!) or if Wilber has softened his over zealous trumpeting of his conceptual schemas.

Regardless, I've gotten quite a few intuitive flashes of Oh, yeah; right on! in just the first 100 pages. Wilber is saying pretty much the same thing as in his previous books, but I'm hearing his message more clearly now.

What I like most about his all-encompassing vision of physical, mental, and spiritual reality is this: it doesn't exclude anything. Which makes great sense. Why throw out obvious aspects of existence?

Yet lots of people do this. As noted in my previous post, they unjustifiably elevate one or the other of the "I," "It," and "We" perspectives.

Subjective, communal, or objective reality – the domains of beauty, goodness, and truth (art, morals, and science) – aren't recognized as co-equal. So extremist positions are taken: Truth is relative. Science doesn't know anything. Mysticism is just imagination. What can't be observed isn't real.

Wilber, bless his integral soul, is trying to show that nothing needs to be excluded from human knowledge and experience. What we need to do is figure out how it all fits together.

What if we took literally everything that all the various cultures have to tell us about human potential – about spiritual growth, psychological growth, social growth – and put it all on the table? What if we attempted to find the critically essential keys to human growth, based on the sum total of human knowledge now open to us?

What if we attempted, based on extensive cross-cultural study, to use all of the world's great traditions to create a composite map, a comprehensive map, an all-inclusive or integral map that included the best elements from all of them?

Whew! The pressure would be off. No need to agonize over whether to embrace modern science or ancient religion, matter or spirit, body or mind, break dancing or meditation, whiskey or herb tea.

It's all a part of life. It. I. We. Objective. Subjective. Communal. Different ways of experiencing existence. All just as it/I/we should be.

Wilber asks, "Where is Spirit located?"

Here's a simple thought experiment. Picture the following men (or make them women if you like), and then tell me which you think are probably the most spiritual?

1. A man in an Armani suit.
2. A man driving a red Ferrari.
3. A man pitching baseball in the major leagues.
4. A professional comedian.
5. A mathematician.
6. A man in a tank top lifting weights.
7. An Olympic swimmer.
8. A college professor.
9. A model.
10. A sexual surrogate.

Which do you think is the most spiritual? Which do you think is the least spiritual?

It's funny, isn't it, the things we think are not spiritual? Why do we picture most of these people as not being very spiritual? Or conversely, why do we have such a hard time seeing them as being spiritual? Aren't we actually just giving our own prejudices about where we think spirit is or is not to be found?

Or worse: aren't we really just announcing how old and fragmented and NOT INTEGRAL our ideas about spirit are? Why is telling jokes not spiritual? Why is something beautiful – a car, a suit – not spiritual? Why is physical excellence not spiritual? Why is sex not spiritual? Why is…

It's a new world, it's a new spirituality, it's a new time, it's a new man, it's a new woman. All of the above categories are deeply spiritual. Mostly all that list is, is a list of things we are afraid to allow spirituality to touch.

Dead from the neck down, with no humor, no sex, no aesthetic sensibility whatsoever, wasting away, spending one's days and nights ignoring the world and lost in prayer…what a strange God, that.

SF Gate columnist Mark Morford has the same message, expressed in a more earthy fashion. I liked his "How to abandon your God."

And what of the other big question, the one no one really talks much about and certainly no one really teaches you? It is this: How does one actually abandon a religion? How do you dump your God and choose another, or none, or the one deep inside yourself? I mean, besides lots of wine and Yeats and education, open-throated sex and experimental drugs and sitting on the lap of the Buddha sipping absinthe and reading old Tom Robbins books and meditating on the nature of stillness and the divine feminine and Cate Blanchett?

Tentative answer: Maybe you don't. Maybe it's not about abandoning God at all, and instead merely broadening your definition of the divine so as to encapsulate and swallow it all, every God, every dogma, every attempt to corner the market on belief and parse it and put it into cute little boxes and break us all up into angry tribes who stomp our feet and wave our little gilded books and launch screaming bloody wars over promised lands and chosen peoples and crucifixes and crusades and witches and pagans and gays.

In other words, maybe you abandon God by realizing it's all God, it's all divine, all hot, thrumming, vibrating connection in all places in all things at all times. And hence, to try and parse it and restrict it and beat it into submission and claim it for one people, one history, one country or church or authoritarian body, is actually the highest form of divine insult.

Or, you know, grand cosmic joke. Same thing, really.

Turning around the guns of religious skepticism

It's so easy to fire skeptical bullets at deluded religious believers. Because they aren't me. It's a lot tougher to turn my big guns around and point them at myself.

Yet that's what we all need to do – especially those who call themselves "churchless."

The way I see it, we often fail to recognize that while we've demolished the most obvious walls of blind faith that kept us confined within dogmatic bounds, often we've just retreated to a smaller and less obvious belief structure.

We've shrunk our religiosity from a grand cathedral to something much more humble. However, it's still a church. And there's more demolishing to do before we're closer to the bare rubble of reality.

As noted in "Is there anything to do but be?" I enjoy the comment conversations on this blog. Visitors have different styles, because everybody is different.

Some come off sounding pretty darn confident that they know what the cosmos is all about. Others express their best guess in a personal fashion and leave it at that. You could call this "I'm right" versus "I like."

I fly both ways, though I make an effort to stay within "I like" as much as possible. At least when it comes to mysticism, metaphysics, philosophy, and similar sorts of subjective speculations.

With science, claims of "I'm right" can rest on a much solider foundation. Why? Because the scientific method demands skepticism.

And a competent scientist will direct his most intense skepticism at himself. A hypothesis about the nature of reality has to be falsifiable. If there's no way you can be wrong, you can't be right.

Increasingly, the Western monotheistic religions are being rejected because the notion of a personal anthropomorphic God who intervenes in human affairs is too unbelievable.

But as Meera Nanda, a philosopher of science, observes in "Spirited Away," those who are deeply skeptical about traditional religious claims often are shallowly accepting of New Age, Eastern, and holistic ways of looking at the world.

But as secularists have begun to take on religion there is a danger that in calling for a rigorous evidence-based examination of one area they leave other areas untouched. In banishing religion from the front door some of these secularists are happily letting other forms of supernatural thinking in through the back.

… Attacks by feminists, environmentalists and others on the sins of 'reductionist western science' have created a positive aura around 'holistic science' which, it is claimed, overcomes the gap between the subject and the object. It is easy to debunk faith. Faith is by definition a relationship of trust regardless of evidence.

Spiritualism has learned to dress up its metaphysical abstractions in the clothes of empiricism, neuro-physiology and quantum physics. In contrast to the obvious irrationality of believing in an all-powerful, all-knowing invisible being, belief in 'spiritual energies' which can be 'directly experienced' by anyone simply by altering the state of their consciousness can appear so much more rational, even 'scientific'.

However, they're not. Nanda takes Sam Harris, author of "The End of Faith," to task for not being as critical of his own spiritual beliefs as he is of Islamic, Christian, and other fundamentalists.

But this bilious attack on faith, the aspect of the book which has received all the attention, only sets the stage for what seems to be his real goal: a defense, nay, a celebration of Harris' own Dzogchen Buddhist and Advaita Vedantic Hindu spirituality. Spirituality is the answer to Islam's and Christianity's superstitions and wars, he tells us. Spiritualism is not just good for your soul, it is good for your mind as well: it can make you "happy, peaceful and even wise". Results of spiritual practices are "genuinely desirable [for they are] not just emotional but cognitive and conceptual".

She makes some good points. It's easy to forget that while "God," "Allah," and "Jehovah" are abstractions, not directly observable or demonstrable, so are "Being," "Nonduality," and "Pure Awareness."

In science (Thomas Kuhn notwithstanding) anyone with functioning senses, adequate training and right apparatus can see the same star, the same DNA molecule, the same electron. But not everyone with adequate training in meditation techniques, and the right atmosphere, sees the same mystical reality: some see God, some see nothing at all and some, without any meditation at all, see what the mystics see. The mystical beliefs which Harris so approves of are every bit as unscientific, untestable and unverifiable as the religious belief he so aggressively attacks.

Don’t obscure life with blind beliefs

It was one of those moments when the universe seemed to be sending me a wake up! call. I have them fairly frequently.

I'd probably be aware of more if I wasn't asleep so much of the time. Not literally, though napping is one of the things I'm best at; what I mean is sleepwalking through life – absorbed in something other than what is really going on.

A few days ago I was walking up our driveway to get the morning newspapers. We live in rural Oregon countryside, so when I talk to myself on a cold dry December day I don't expect that anyone will be around to hear me.

On this particular newspaper-getting mission I was thinking about my Galobet acronym. Though basically faithless now, I still like to keep my salvation options open.

So I was running through my GALOBET divinities, saying hello to some entities who might, just might, have something to do with the fact that I was alive, in beautiful Oregon, on a winter day when it wasn't raining (will miracles never cease?).

"Hi," I said aloud. "God, Allah, Lord, One, Brahman, Emptiness, Tao – thanks for doing whatever you do, assuming any of you exist and are listening to me. I'm happy to be something rather than nothing."

That was a nice sentiment, I suppose. And I was enjoying hearing me talk to myself.

But then I glanced up and came eye to eye with a genuine being. A deer. Which was standing in a field next to the driveway, looking right at me.

I'd almost missed it. I was so focused on hearing my thoughts spoken aloud, I wasn't paying much attention to the world outside of my head.

A world of deer, grass, wintry air, a barely risen sun, men talking to themselves as they walk to get the newspaper.

In short, the real world.

I'd been talking, in my faithless fashion, to religious/spiritual entities that I either don't believe in at all (God, Allah, Lord – the Western pantheon) or don't envision listening to me (One, Brahman, Emptiness, Tao – the more philosophically plausible Greek and Eastern pantheon).

Even so, I'd distracted myself from perceiving what was right in front of me. Of course, I could just as well have been musing to myself about what would be on the front pages of the newspapers we get.

Or anything else.

But the genre of religious conceptions is a particularly powerful obscurer of really real life. That's because dogmatic beliefs are clung to with a power that my half-hearted interest in Galobet or the front page news pales in comparison to.

I know, because I've been there and done that: tried to keep my mind full of religious thoughts during as much of my waking hours as possible.

Of course, I didn't consider that I was obscuring reality back when I envisioned the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas accompanying me throughout my day. A lot like Harvey, but not as tall.

I've heard that Christians do the same thing. Except it's an invisible Jesus instead of an invisible guru who stands by your side – your best friend, leaving aside the minor detail (for many) that friends should be real.

There could be life after death. Or life before birth, as was suggested on one of the first Church of the Churchless Message Board posts.

But who knows for sure? Only someone who has died. And they can't tell the rest of us.

Who are here, living – very likely the only life we'll ever experience. A life that is so unbelievably precious, it begs to be lived as fully and eyes-wide-open as possible – not veiled behind beliefs about what may be.

What is: that's always right before us. Looking back wide-eyed. Like a deer standing in an Oregon field on a winter day.

The positivity of unbelief

Unchurched, nonbeliever, atheist. Those prefixes – un, non, a – imply an undeserved negativity. Consider "atheist." That simply means, not a theist.

To most people this is something bad. If you don't believe in an unknown, unseen god, there's something wrong with you. But there's no term for those who don't believe in unicorns or the Tooth Fairy.

Except, "those who don't believe in unicorns or the Tooth Fairy."

A commitment to understanding reality as it really is usually is viewed as a good thing. But not when it comes to belief in god. Then those who want their reality founded on facts, rather than faith, get tarred with an epithet like unbeliever.

Carl Van Doren, though, revels in that appellation. I enjoyed his essay, "Why I Am an Unbeliever," in Christopher Hitchens' "The Portable Atheist."

Here are some excerpts for your unbelieving pleasure:

Belief, being first in the field, naturally took a positive term for itself and gave a negative term to unbelief. As an unbeliever, I am therefore obliged to seem merely to dissent from the believers no matter how much more I may do. Actually I do more. What they call unbelief, I call belief.

…What I have referred to as the gift of faith I do not, to be exact, regard as a gift. I regard it, rather, as a survival from an earlier age of thinking and feeling: in short, as a form of superstition. It, and not the thing I am forced to name unbelief, seems to me negative.

It denies the reason. It denies the evidences in the case, in the sense that it insists upon introducing elements that come not from the facts as shown but from the imaginations and wishes of mortals. Unbelief does not deny the reason and it sticks as closely as it can to the evidences.

…Many believers, I am told, have the same doubts, and yet have the knack of putting their doubts to sleep and entering ardently into the communion of the faithful. The process is incomprehensible to me. So far as I understand it, such believers are moved by their desires to the extent of letting them rule not only their conduct but also their thoughts. An unbeliever's desires have, apparently, less power over his reason.

…There is no moral obligation to believe what is unbelievable any more than there is a moral obligation to do what is undoable.

…Beliefs, like tastes, may differ. The unbeliever's taste and belief are austere. In the wilderness of worlds he does not yield to the temptation to belittle the others by magnifying his own. Among the dangers of chance he does not look for safety to any watchful providence whose special concern he imagines he is.

…He builds himself up upon truth and barricades himself with it. Thus doing, he never sags into superstition, but grows steadily more robust and blithe in his courage. However many fears he may prove unable to escape, he does not multiply them in his imagination and then combat them with his wishes.

Austerity may be simplicity and not bleakness.

Getting down to rock-bottom reality

When we feel like somebody is putting us on, "Get real!" is an appropriate response. But what the heck is real? Most of us think we know. However, are we really right about reality?

I'm a sucker for big questions like this. So when I see a chapter called "Consciousness and Reality" in a book, my philosophical spine starts to tingle.

That chapter is in Eugene d'Aquili and Andrew Newberg's The Mystical Mind, which I praised in my previous post. It reduces a whole lot of scientific, philosophical, and religious speculation, thousands of years of it, down to a single question.

Which is primary, external reality or subjective awareness?

Scientists say "external reality." They argue that conscious awareness arises from the brain, which is part of material reality. Most mystics and religious types say "subjective awareness." They argue that consciousness – whether personalized as God or impersonalized as a cosmic force – creates and maintains materiality.

Most people's everyday experience is a blend (or you could say, mish-mash) of these perspectives. Newberg and d'Aquili write:

To the naïve observer, there is an absolutely certain sense that there is a reality external to the self that appears to be characterized by a heavy, substantive reality often termed matter or material reality.

The naïve observer also has the absolutely certain sense of a conscious self that seems to have a light, changeable, and ethereal quality often termed mind, spirit, or sometimes soul. The naïve terminology is anything but exact.

That's for sure. Because they point out that everything known about the seemingly objective external world, whether by scientists or anyone else, exists within subjective awareness. Knowing requires a knower.

What is known may indeed exist even if no one is aware of it. I find it difficult to believe that the universe was non-existent for the billions of years it took for conscious beings to evolve after the primordial Big Bang. And yet:

From the point of view of any careful examiner of the world, the only thing that is certain is that all aspects of material reality, including the laws of science and the mind/brain itself, exist within subjective awareness.

OK. So what if instead of assuming that subjective awareness arises out of material reality, we assume that material reality in some sense arises out of subjective awareness?

Solipsism immediately rears its self-centered head. It's pretty clear that my subjective awareness doesn't create material reality, because if it did a convertible Mini Cooper S would be sitting in our carport rather than a Prius. And my bald spot wouldn't be, well, bald.

So whose subjective awareness do the laws of nature really reside in? Beats me. And everyone else, since there's no proof that an entity called "God" exists. On the other hand, d'Aquili and Newberg correctly point out that we also have no way of knowing that the universe as we know it exists outside of our way of knowing.

Since all of material reality exists at least in the mind of the analyzing knower, and since one would have to step outside of subjective awareness to ascertain whether any reality other than subjective awareness exists (a patently impossible situation), then one is constrained to see material reality (its past and future), the laws of nature, and science itself as aspects of present subjective awareness.

As disagreeable as such an epistemological position might be to those of us trained in Western science, it is the only possible rigorous stance unless one wishes to make a complete act of faith that the vivid sense of the otherness of external reality, which certainly exists in subjective awareness, reflects an isomorphic referent outside of subjective awareness.

But anybody who has taken a dog for a walk, as I do just about every day, knows that this isn't the case. I'm strolling along, immersed in sights and sounds of the Oregon countryside, and Serena (the family pet) is off in another world of scent . With her nose to the ground, she is transfixed by another perspective on reality, knowing things about passing deer and coyotes that I'm completely clueless about.

So neither dog nor human can say, "The external world objectively is as I perceive it, even if none of my species existed to be subjectively aware of those perceptions."

In the end, d'Aquili and Newberg argue for an integrated approach to the problem of subjective awareness and material reality. Instead of either/or, they point to the possibility of both/and. Nice and Taoistic.

The cultures of the Far East tend to favor consciousness or subjective awareness as prior. The cultures of the West tend to ascribe priority to external reality. But, in principle, there is no way to choose except by cultural prejudice or personal aesthetics.

…But there is a strange theological conclusion to be drawn from the fact that individuals and cultures have an irreducible choice whether "external" reality or "subjective" consciousness is primary.

In the first case, one can conclude with certainty that the concept and experience of God, and all religious phenomenology, are generated by the brain and nervous system. In the second case, one can conclude with equal certainty, from a rigorous phenomenological reflection on experience, that God (absolute unitary being or pure consciousness) generates the world (including the brain) and subjective experience itself.

Since it is in principle impossible to determine which starting point is more "fundamental," external reality or the awareness of the knower, one is forced to conclude that both conclusions about God (AUB) [absolute unitary being] are in a profound and fundamental sense true – namely that God is created by the world (the brain and the rest of the central nervous system) and that the world is created by God.

More about absolute unitary being in my next post.

Maybe the meaning of life is…life

Given how philosophical I've been for so many years, it's sort of surprising to me that I'm losing interest in pondering the meaning of life. More and more, living life is meaningful enough.

Adding something called meaning seems like decorating a cake that's already nicely frosted. It can be done, but what's the point? How many layers does life need?

I do keep reading about the meaning of life, though. This morning it was the final chapter in Nicholas Fearn's book about the latest answers to the oldest questions: "The Meaning of Life and Death." I liked this passage:

A student once asked the English linguistic philosopher J.L. Austin to explain what 'existing' was. Austin replied that it was 'like breathing, only quieter.' It is not surprising that the naked background of life, divested of any meaning-given activities should often be thought rather purposeless. We might wonder how such a featureless vessel possibly could have a purpose.

Fearn goes on to talk about how "the purpose, meaning, or value of any object is a relation it has to something outside itself." But my life being lived by me—taken as a whole—where's the outside of it?

Yes, I talk to myself frequently, setting up a division between my life and me. "Brian, are you really enjoying ___? Wouldn't ___ be more meaningful for you?"

Yet when I engage in these sorts of Me vs. Myself conversations, there's an absurdist quality to them. For I already know the answer. My life is the answer. I'm not a prisoner on a chain gang, forced to slave over a hot copier at Kinko's sending out the minutes of our neighborhood association—which I did this very afternoon.

Aside from involuntary and autonomic activities like breathing, digesting, eliminating, sleeping and such, what I do with my life is my own doing. At least, it feels that way. Whether free will or fate rules the daily activity roost, that's for wiser minds than mine to decipher.

Increasingly, questions such as "free will or fate?" fail to resonate with me like they used to. I'm folding pages in half, stapling them, sticking an address label on the front, placing a stamp in the upper right corner, opening the mail slot and dumping in the minutes. Tomorrow the postman will deliver the minutes to eighty-eight neighbors. A few will even read them.

That's sweet enough for me. I no longer feel the need to add an extra layer of "it's my karma," "selfless service reduces the ego," or another sort of pseudo-meaningful frosting.

Abstractions like those seem a whole lot less real than folding, stapling, sticking, placing, opening, and dumping. The meaning of my forty-five minutes at Kinko's was directly experienced by me, right then, right there. Now I'm on to something else: writing about it.

For $4 Google Answers offered up a response to someone's query, "What's the meaning of life?" That seems too much to pay, given that the question likely contains its own answer.

I prefer Julian Baggini's take on the question (which, naturally, I found via a Google search).

The only sense we can make of the idea that life has meaning is that there are some reasons to live rather than to die, and those reasons are to be found in the living of life itself.

I know that may not seem like enough, but if you expect a 10-course banquet, even the finest smorgasbord looks meagre in comparison. Trying to work out the meaning of life can be rather like trying to assemble Ikea furniture when you're convinced that you're missing a piece or haven't been given the proper instructions.

But the real problem is that you're trying to put together an elaborate Maråker cabinet when you have only got a standard three-shelf Billy bookcase. Something only seems to be missing because you're expecting much more.

What is reality?

That's a great title: "What is Reality?"

It gets right down to the nitty-gritty of what life is all about. Being real. Whether we live only once, or have an opportunity to live another physical or metaphysical existence, making the most of these precious human moments means really living them.

So I leapt to open an issue of New Scientist magazine that had "The Big Questions" emblazoned on the cover. "What is Reality?" is the biggest of the big in my opinion. And seemingly that of the magazine's editors also, since they featured Roger Penrose's essay on this subject in the numero uno position.

I've read a couple of Penrose's books. Can't say that I understood them even halfway completely, but the guy is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. And I struggled with high school trig.

Nonetheless, I enjoy Penrose's ability to meld his profound scientific and mathematical knowledge with deep philosophical musings. Here's his entire article, which is eminently readable.
Download what_is_reality_by_roger_penrose.doc

On this blog my posts and visitor comments often touch on the question of what's really real. I lean toward the objective reality side; others tilt toward subjectivity, seemingly arguing that whatever reality is, it can't be separated from the consciousness that's aware of it.

Penrose sets up a straw man sort of argument at the beginning of his piece. Like many politicians he utilizes a "Some say" approach that is one of the few things in his essay I don't agree with. I've never heard anyone say the following, just as I've never heard anyone support the "Some say we shouldn't fight the terrorists who hit us on 9/11" phrase so beloved by Bush and Cheney.

Some might even feel driven to the view that one's own particular conscious experience is to be regarded as primary, and that the experiences of others are themselves merely things to be abstracted, ultimately, from one's own sense data.

He correctly rejects this solipsistic position — which is pretty much held only by the seriously mentally ill. But he also rejects a much more common belief, one probably shared by some who are reading these words.

Even if such a solipsistic basis is not adopted, so that the totality of all conscious experience is taken as the primary reality, I still have great difficulty. This would seem to demand that "external reality" is merely something that emerges from some sort of majority-wins voting amongst the individual conscious experiences of all of us taken together.

I'm with Penrose. There's just too much evidence of an astonishing regularity underlying the universe. Of course, it isn't so astonishing when we consider that if reality was unpredictably chaotic, life as we know it couldn't exist. (This basically is the Anthropic Principle, which points out the obvious: if the universe wasn't suitable for life, we wouldn't be here wondering why the universe is suitable for life).

Among the basic laws of physics that we know – and we do not yet know all of them – some are precise to an extraordinary degree, far beyond the precision of our direct sense experiences, or of the combined calculational powers of all conscious individuals within the ken of mankind.

…It would be a mistake to think of the role of mathematics in basic physical theory as being simply organisational, where the entities that constitute the world just behave in one way or another, and our theories represent merely our attempts – sometimes very successful – to make some kind of sense of what is going on around us.

…To me, such a description again falls far short of explaining the extraordinary precision in the agreement between the most remarkable of the physical theories that we have come across and the behaviour of our material universe at its most fundamental levels.

This is the point where a lot of spiritually-inclined people part company with science. But not me. Mathematics is able to describe and predict how many, if not most, physical systems behave (in theory, at least). I've got no problem accepting that the same likely is true of you, and me (in theory, at least).

It's natural to think of ourselves as special, somehow outside the laws that govern material reality. The structure of space and time, gravity, moving bodies, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, fluid dynamics, nuclear forces—these phenomena and so much more can be modeled with remarkable precision by scientific theories which are primarily mathematical.

To me, that's beautiful. It reflects the unity and order of the cosmos. And I'm a part of it. Yes, I see the world subjectively, as do we all. But underlying the vagaries of individual consciousness is a whole other order of being that Penrose points us toward.

It isn't really physical, because materiality fades away once one reaches the foundational quantum world.

Whether we look at the universe at the quantum scale or across the vast distances over which the effects of general relativity become clear, then, the common-sense reality of chairs, tables and other material things would seem to dissolve away, to be replaced by a deeper reality inhabiting the world of mathematics.

You could look upon this as the mind of God. But I'd rather not. It is what it is. Which we don't know, because there's debate over whether mathematics simply describes how the stuff of physical reality operates, or whether there's another plane of reality that the mathematical laws of nature emanate from.

I'm attracted to the second option. Like most mathematicians, so is Penrose.

Might mathematical entities inhabit their own world, the abstract Platonic world of mathematical forms? It is an idea that many mathematicians are comfortable with. In this scheme, the truths that mathematicians seek are, in a clear sense, already "there", and mathematical research can be compared with archaeology; the mathematician's job is to seek out those truths as a task of discovery rather than one of invention.

To a mathematical Platonist, it is not so absurd to seek an ultimate home for physical reality within Plato's world.

And that is decidedly "spiritual," though it's difficult to discern much difference between mathematicality and spirituality if one accepts Penrose's basic premise: that reality is mysteriously both objective and tied to the conscious subjectivity of those who experience it.

We do not properly understand why it is that physical behaviour is mirrored so precisely within the Platonic world, nor do we have much understanding of how conscious mentality seems to arise when physical material, such as that found in wakeful healthy human brains, is organised in just the right way.

Nor do we really understand how it is that consciousness, when directed towards the understanding of mathematical problems, is capable of divining mathematical truth. What does this tell us about the nature of physical reality? It tells us that we cannot properly address the question of that reality without understanding its connection with the other two realities: conscious mentality and the wonderful world of mathematics.

World picture puts a frame around reality

Some people look at things so bizarrely.

Like Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, authors of the hugely popular "Left Behind" series of books that takes a fictional view of events surrounding the Second Coming of Jesus—which for LaHaye and Jenkins won't be fiction when the Big Day comes.

Yesterday I heard them interviewed on a right-wing Portland talk show. The host asked them how they were faring on their book tour to the least-churched state in the nation.

(Whenever I hear that fact, I always feel like cheering, Yay, Oregon! We're #1!)

LaHaye and Jenkins said, "Just fine. We've got a lot fans here." Which I'm sure is true. To a certain sort of Christian, it's got to be hugely appealing to hear that unbelievers are going to be consigned to some nasty suffering come the Tribulation—I'm short on the details, never having read any of their books.

When asked if it was fair that non-Christians were going to be treated so badly when the Good Times start to roll, the answer basically was: "Well, that's what the Bible says, so that's the way it's going to be. End of story."

Weird! I thought, turning off the car radio as I pulled into the natural food store's parking space. So freaking weird. How could anybody believe that stuff?

And yet…during my Eastern religion fundamentalist phase I believed in equally strange weirdness. I was certain that the guru had implanted his radiant astral form in my forehead consciousness at the time of my initiation, and that this being now was aware of my every thought and action, stepping in now and then to tweak my karma as he saw fit.

If LaHaye and Jenkins heard that, they'd be entirely justified in saying: So freaking weird. How could anybody believe that stuff? Yet millions of Sant Mat disciples all over the world do.

Here's the thing: to some extent everybody is weird from any perspective other than our own. Close to home, my wife thinks that my habitual failure to shut kitchen drawers all the way is completely mystifying. Well, she has her own quirks, believe me.

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein speaks of world pictures that frame the way we see the world. Milton K. Munitz talks about this in "Does Life Have a Meaning?", which I've just started reading.

According to Wittgenstein, a world picture is a set of fundamental beliefs comprising a fixed framework that, for the one who adopts it, is groundless. This means that it does not rest on deeper grounds or foundations: it is not derived from and justified by appeal to other, supposedly more fundamental, beliefs or evidence. "At the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded." [Wittgenstein quote]

Fascinating. I love it. We're all floating free in well-structured belief bubbles, but each of us is supremely confident that mine is tethered firmly to reality—as contrasted with how blowing-in-the-wind the belief structures belonging to other people are.

Yeah, right.

When pressed, none of us, not one, could point to any solid evidence that the way we personally view the world leads to an objectively true understanding of reality. Science has a pretty good claim in this regard, but science isn't a person. And it relies on mathematical world pictures, which are much less subjective than beliefs.

Thus religious world pictures (Munitz says Wittgenstein preferred this term to "world view") are as groundless as any other sort. There are people whose life largely revolves around the fortunes of their chosen sports team. My mother wasn't quite this extreme, but when "her" San Francisco Giants won, you could sense an elevated mood in the Hines home.

Similarly, finding a choice empty parking space elicits a "Praise Jesus," "Allah is great," or "Guru's grace!" in those whose world pictures filter reality in a certain fashion. Every day events get attached to a structured belief system like ornaments being placed on Christmas tree limbs. Ah, another little miracle.

In a recent issue of Newsweek, mega-church pastor Rick Warren speaks of the evidence he sees for God.

I see the fingerprints of God everywhere. I see them in culture. I see them in law. I see them in literature. I see them in nature. I see them in my own life.

Okay. But the impressions Warren takes to be divine fingerprints appear much different to non-Christians with an alternative world picture. For example, as a mark from the hand of Darwinian natural selection.

Personally (as if it were possible for me to start off a sentence with "Impersonally"), I find the notion of pruning my belief structures increasingly appealing. Like everyone else, my world picture always will determine the lens through which I view reality.

But I can see through the glass more darkly, or less darkly. Pulling into a parking space can just mean that I'm pulling into a parking space.

As noted in a previous post, I like the world picture of David Ignatow, a poet:

I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment on my life.

Deepening the mystery of existence

Pondering "Why is there something rather than nothing?" will blow your mind. This is the most common way the mystery of existence is framed, as noted in my "Existence exists. Amazing!"

But, hey, why stop there? If we're going to have our minds blown, might as well blow up what's doing the blowing up also. Bigger the explosion, the better.

This morning I plucked Milton K. Munitz' The Mystery of Existence from my bookshelf. This is a deeply philosophical book that isn't the easiest of reading. I'd read most of it before flaming out from intellectual overload on the final chapters.

Today, though, I managed to grasp Munitz' basic point that had eluded me before. Asking "why?" presumes there's an answer. You've already framed the problem by your very questioning.

Actually, he says, this is what we should be asking:

Is there a reason-for-the-existence-of-the-world?

Oh man! Before, I was standing on the abyss of our ignorance about why there is something rather than nothing. The void was unsettling enough, having no discernible boundaries. However, I had the sense that somewhere in that blob of mystery there was an answer.

Humans might never know it. It might remain hidden in the abyss forever. Yet the notion that a "why" concerning the mystery of existence itself existed—this was a lodestone offering at least some vague directionality to the search for ultimate reality.

The truth about existence was out there. Probably way out there, impossibly far removed from the ability of a Homo sapiens consciousness to know it. Still, "out there" points somewhere, even if it's impossible to ever get there.

Munitz super-sized the mystery for me. There's no reason to assume the existence of a "there" where a why resides. The problem is considerably deeper that just not knowing why there is something rather than nothing. We don't even know whether there's an answer to the question.

The void just became much voider, the mystery a lot more mysterious.

I realized that as non-religious as I am, I'd still been clinging to a traditional metaphysical assumption: there's a reason why existence exists.

That reason is said to be known only to God. Or Tao, Buddha-nature, Allah, the Great Spirit. Or to the future, when science will reveal all. Or to an alien civilization far more advanced to ours. Or even to no one, the reason being part and parcel of existence itself.

Regardless, the reason existed. And not just in a subjective mind, but objectively. Munitz says:

Of the broad possibilities canvassed earlier, according to which a reason-for-the-existence-of-the-world could be either an "assigned" reason or an "objective" reason, it would only be the latter, in the last analysis, that would count. We should want to know, quite apart from any conceptual scheme, where there is, or is not, a reason-for-the-existence-of-the-world.

Trouble is, we can't. Munitz spends quite a few pages laying out his arguments for why this is the case. At the end of his "Philosophical Agnosticism" chapter he sums up the not-knowable situation, saying that we don't even know where to begin to answer the question of whether there's a reason for the world's existence.

With other human beings, it's different. We can figure out reasons for what they did or made.

We establish that they had such reasons, and what they were, by getting evidence of the relevant kind (but not by resorting to a theory, myth, or metaphysical construction). In the simple, straightforward case, this consists in asking the person in question, or in examining some document, or other reliable source, for the required information.

The relevant evidence is obtained through some channel of sensory experience and by interrogation. These resources, however, are completely lacking in trying to establish that there is a reason-for-the-existence-of-the-world. Where, then, shall we turn?

We are completely lacking in clues. The prospects of getting knowledge from some form of "direct" inspection (without having to resort to faith, postulation, or the analogizing speculations of some metaphysical conceptual system) are simply unavailable.

Hence this avenue of establishing knowledge of the existence or absence of a reason-for-the-existence-of-the-world is not open to us. We must admit our total ignorance.

Fine with me. But not for the world's religions, spiritual paths, philosophical systems, and other claimants of ultimate knowledge. Their stock in trade is answers—or at least the promise of an answer to the mystery of existence.

The answer, though, isn't blowing in the wind. For if there's wind, or blowing, it's coming from the question side of existence, not the side where an answer may or may not be. Munitz implies that anything of this world—thoughts, perceptions, emotions, conceptions—"would provoke the very question we are trying to answer."

And not only this world. Munitz shuns mysticism in his book, but to my mind other-worldly perceptions also would be question-provoking rather than answer-providing when it comes to the ultimate mystery of existence.

I could be sitting at the right hand of God, immersed in the glories of divine light and sound, being taught how the Almighty creates creation, and I'd still have questions: "God, who created you?" "God, how do I know this isn't an illusion?"

I could hear a booming, "I am the Lord, thy God, eternal, uncreated." That voice still would be part of existence. I'd still be clueless about whether there is a why? for the existence of the world, taking the "world" now to include spiritual as well as physical reality.

Or "God" could laugh and say, "Fooled you. You're right, everything I've shown you is an illusion—the Matrix, a computer simulation. It looks just like a real universe, doesn't it? I'll show you how the programming works."

Now I'm zapped into another dimension where I see God, and me, and universes being formed out of cyberspace and cyberenergy. But I still have no way of knowing whether there is a why? to that.

I don't know whether I've reached really real reality, or even if there is such a thing, because I'm still stuck in existence. It's impossible to get outside of existence and learn about it objectively. Like everybody else, I'm always on the inside, looking in, even if I were able to reach a spiritual realm.

Munitz speaks of religious experiences:

To say that these experiences are genuinely revelatory of an independently existing, transcendent Being, and are not merely expressions of deeply felt human yearnings, or the projections of human imagination and its myth-making propensities, is precisely what needs to be established.

One cannot appeal to the experiences themselves to establish this; they are not self-authenticating…What supporting, public tests, or independent criteria of corroboration are there, by which to separate the spurious claims of the visionary from the possibly authentic?

None. Yet it could be argued that the mystic doesn't demand any proof of what is being directly experienced. Fine. I'll agree with that. Experience is its own corroboration for the experience.

The fact remains: it isn't possible to experience anything other than existence. No one can step outside of existence and ask it "Why?" The question always reverberates inside the mystery. We don't even know whether an answer exists, much less what it might be, if it does.

Meditating this morning after reading Munitz' final chapters, I felt strangely peaceful. Looking into the darkness of my clueless consciousness, for a moment I was relieved of the "What's it all about?" that has gnawed at me for most of my life.

Some questions are unanswerable. Some questions are so questionable, we can't be sure they are valid questions. Such is the mystery of existence.

Floating free in perpetual ignorance—that struck me as not so bad. Maybe better than being lashed to a time-bound pseudo-truth. And there's always the bit of hope that Munitz left me with, near the end of his final chapter.

In saying that the mystery of existence is unanswerable, I mean "unanswerable relative to the already known methods of achieving knowledge of reasons." If "reason" is understood in its ordinary uses—as "purpose," "scientific explanation," or "evidence"—then it makes no sense to say there is a reason for the existence of the world.

…I should not wish to dogmatize about the possibility that some other "rational method," not hitherto known by man, might be developed in the future course of human evolution, or perhaps is already possessed by some special type of "mind" wholly unknown to us.

But we, now, have no knowledge of such a method: nor do we have any rational method within our present resources by which we could undertake to establish the existence or character of this "method."

Well, I guess the method, if it exists, will have to come to us—not us to it.

I'm here. Surprise me.

(If this post leaves you hungry for still more confusion, "Something's happening here: Existence" contains the thoughts of Will, a fellow admirer of existential mystery.)

Consider a cosmos that is only consciousness

There’s always another side. To anything. A coin can’t have “heads” without “tails.” Being on this side of the wall implies a that side. So I have no problem flipping the pancake of my “Consider a cosmos with no consciousness” post.

Reading the final pages of Suzanne Segal’s Collision With the Infinite this morning got me thinking about what lies behind, beyond, within, and without my consciousness of thinking about those final pages.

Early on in the book I read that Segal had a profound experience at a bus stop in Paris. In fact, it’s listed in her Acknowledgments:

The Parisian mass transit system, for providing a bus stop in lieu of a bodhi tree.

Suddenly she felt separate from her body, a disconcerting feeling.

“I” was now behind my body looking out at the world without using the body’s eyes…Instead of experiencing through the physical senses, I was now bobbing behind the body like a buoy on the sea.

Segal had been a long time practitioner of Transcendental Meditation before she became disillusioned with the TM organizational bullshit and ego trips. Yet, she writes:

The thought did arise that perhaps this experience of witness was the state of Cosmic Consciousness Maharishi had described long before as the first stage of awakened awareness. But the mind instantly discarded this possibility because it seemed impossible that the hell realm I was inhabiting could have anything to do with Cosmic Consciousness.

Her book describes the frustration of consulting psychotherapist after psychotherapist, spiritual adept after spiritual adept, none of whom could explain what had happened to her. Segal eventually earned a Ph.D. in psychology, which didn’t cast light on her condition either.

On her own, with the aid of some intensive meditation, she got it. Which essentially was: Segal was it. Or you could say, IT. That’s all there is. One substance she likes to call “vastness.” In other words, the infinite.

What seems to have occurred at the bus stop in Paris is that the human circuitry of this life started to participate consciously in the sense organ with which the vastness is constantly perceiving itself. The vastness is the substance of all things, existing everywhere simultaneous with the appearance of form.

…The human circuitry is made of the same substance. When it consciously participates in the sense organ that the vastness is always using to perceive itself, the human circuitry becomes aware—not through its own sense organs, but through the sense organ of the vastness—that the substance of the infinite is its naturally occurring state.

Cool. And believable. I liked Segal’s book a lot more than I thought I would. I was prepared for New Agey pabulum. But she drew me in with her apparent honesty and forthright determination to figure out what had happened at the bus stop.

For a long time Segal thought that she was going (or had gone) crazy. That indeed is one interpretation of her dissociated state of consciousness. But she eventually concluded that if the cosmos indeed is only consciousness, realizing this is so “awesome” (a word I don’t like much, but Segal does), it’s crazy to expect that the experience is going to be akin to anything familiar to her, or us, now.

The infinite reveals itself to the mind in mysterious, unimaginable, and ungraspable ways. But the mind, by its very nature, tends to reject what it cannot grasp…In my case, the mind mounted an all-out effort to pathologize the emptiness of personal self in an attempt to get rid of it. This attempt proved unsuccessful.

…Life is being lived out of the infinite substance of which it is made, and this substance—which is what and who we all are—is constantly aware of itself out of itself. What an extraordinary way to live!

Indeed. And a scientific way also, in my opinion. For the vastness of the cosmos clearly is conscious, in some mysterious fashion, of the laws of nature that are identical with the vastness of the cosmos.

As above, so below, it’s often said. But to Segal, there’s no “above” or “below.” Just It.

Reality is a terrible thing to waste (on religion)

I admire anyone who writes this boldly about believing in God:

You believe in God. You also believe that we have a soul that lives eternally once our earthly bodies fail us. You believe that both of these statements are true. Now that we’ve agreed upon what you believe, let me tell you what I know. (Not what I believe to be true, but what I know to be true.) I know these statements you believe to be true are false. I know they are false because I know they are not true.

That anyone is Jon, a Church of the Churchless visitor who sent me a link to his “This is all there is” blog post. Jon said that I’d helped him realize something that he already knew. Indeed, I mused along the same lines as he did in “What if this is all there is?”

Another reason I admire Jon’s essay is that he starts off with an algebraic bang. You don’t see that often in spiritual writings. He begins with a question and goes from there:

It’s true that you believe your soul (X) is (=) some part (Z) of (x) your earthly being (Y), correct?

Exercise your algebra-deprived brain and make your way through Jon’s interesting argument. Or, take a short cut to his mathematically-supported conclusion.

Come to find out, your “soul” and your earthly being, your heavenly being, and whatever “part” of you it is, is actually all the same thing. It’s all there is. This (right here, right now, at this very moment, is all there is.)

There will be never be anything else because this (This) is all there is and ever will be…There is never anything other than the truth. A lie (or belief) exists only in your imagination…Stop believing in things and start knowing things. The lies have got to stop.

…I know that I am here because I know that I’m not there. I can pretend I’m “there,” but that belief exists only in my imagination. I am always only ever here…“There” does not exist in reality. It’s a belief only in our imagination.

Yes. Reality is a terrible thing to waste (thanks, United Negro College Fund, for being able to adapt your famous phrase). We can spend our lives imagining that we’re experiencing something that we’re not. Or we can live in the truth of what actually is.

Which, if you’re a believer, is God’s creation. So denying reality is denying God. Thus faith and belief are blasphemies.

Yesterday our local newspaper’s religion columnist quoted from a church newsletter. Jim Young, of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, urged people to “discern the movement of the Spirit in our daily lives.”

The first step is to find a quiet place where one can be attentive to the ever-present God.

I thought, “good advice.” In fact, that’s as far as we need to go. Any further misses the mark.

Because Young then said to focus on the past and the future:

Reflect on the past year with gratitude…Review the past year like you would replay a movie in your mind…The final step is to reconcile and resolve to move forward.

Well, the first step made sense to me. As, I’m pretty sure, it would to Jon. Reality here and now is real. But the past and future isn’t. Most of us already do our best to flee from the unvarnished truth of the present moment.

Religion’s emphasis on imagination and fantasy just adds to our illusion.

Hope is the present moment

I live just sixty miles or so from Mt. Hood, where two climbers are still missing on the mountain and one has been found. Dead. Both local and national news is focused on this drama. I am too.

This afternoon I was zeroed in on a television tuned to CNN while exercising on a stairmaster at my athletic club. There was lots of talk about hope. A snow cave had been discovered. Rescuers were making their way to it.

Driving home, I heard on the radio that a body had been recovered. Yet hope was still being expressed that the two other climbers were still alive. Hope, hope, hope. The airwaves were filled to overflowing with chatter about hope.

I’m a believer in positive thinking. More accurately, I usually think positively. It doesn’t do much good to believe in something unless you also do it. So I resonate with all this hopefulness, though it seems misguided to me. Close, but no cigar.

During my daily dog walk, I take many steps. I can’t recall ever hoping that I’d take another step. I just do it. If I ever fall and break a leg, then I suppose I’ll be doing some hoping.

As the families of the missing climbers are, because they—like the radio and television commentators I heard talking about hope today—are helpless. When you can’t do anything about a situation, you hope.

By comparison, I’m pretty sure that the mountain rescue teams are doing hugely more searching than hoping. The abstraction called “hope” is concretized by action: lowering yourself down an icy slope toward the likely location of a lost climber.

In that moment, to be distracted by thoughts of what might be is risky. Take care of now and then will take care of itself.

Western religion thrives on hope in an imaginary future. I wonder if a Buddhist or Taoist cable news channel covering the story of the missing climbers would fill the airwaves with so much talk of hope. I suspect not. A reality-based spirituality worships the present moment.

I’ve written before about the journey between two steps in Tai Chi. And, everywhere else in life. Getting from here to there isn’t a discontinuous lurch. It’s an unbroken journey. Intention, the cousin of hope, does indeed propel you.

But the calculus of intention or hope resolves itself into the infinitesimal of the present moment. I hope that lifting my right foot will result in a forward step. Yet there is no place along the way where what isn’t suddenly takes a quantum leap into what is.

“Hope” is a chimera, a word pointing to a non-existent that I necessarily am clueless about.

And also, to what my ego demands of the cosmos. When I hope, my directorial mind is writing a screenplay for the future. My plot line shall be what will be, because I am the one with an Academy Award-worthy script in hand.

Problem is, everyone else in the world has their own script. As does nature, which generally does a rewrite as it sees fit. Of course, by nature I don’t mean nature. For me that word is a placeholder for whatever is really going on. If I knew what it was, I’d be enlightened.

Or a poet. Which could be the same thing. Like David Ignatow:

I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment on my life.

Whatever has happened, is happening, or will happen on Mt. Hood is simply that. Happenings. I’ve asked “What’s God got to do with lost climbers?”

I’m pretty sure the answer is, nothing. That also happens to be the answer to another question: “What does hope have to do with finding lost climbers?” Or, God.

The changing face of faith

Got to get psyched up, so to speak, for another Internet radio interview tonight with mediums Marcel and Lenny. Tune in your computer at 8 pm PST here for a discussion of “The Changing Face of Faith.” Here’s the blurb that got emailed to me.
Download in_good_spirit_12606.doc

I’ll jump on their medium turf and look into the future: Marcel and Lenny will challenge my spiritual skepticism. And I’ll say, “But skepticism is the doorway to openness.” Or something like that.

Maybe I’ll talk about walking up our driveway to get the newspaper in the morning. A few days ago I was lost in thought, pondering what I’d do after I got the newspaper in the morning even though I hadn’t yet reached the paper box.

Then…a gap in my pondering. A flash of movement. I saw a deer standing in the field, staring at me. I looked back. We had a deer-human moment. It jumped over the fence. I walked on.

My face has eyes. My eyes connect me with the world, along with my other senses. But most truly, only when I’m open to whatever comes along. When I’m focused on something that exists only in my imagination—“after I read the front page I’ll drink some coffee and then meditate for a while”—I risk missing what exists now in reality.

Like, a deer standing in the field. Like, who knows what else.

So to me the changing face of faith means moving away from looking at life through spread mental fingers, believing in this but not in that, refusing to consider the possibility of X while embracing the hypothesis of Y.

Eyes wide open. No rose-colored glasses. Believing in it when you see it, not before. That’s the sort of faith I find attractive, the kind I wrote about in “Don’t believe, just have faith.” In that post I quoted Alan Watts:

The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Fairly frequently I’m asked, “Brian, have you lost your faith?” God, no! I’ve found it.

What I’ve lost is my unfounded faith in dogma that I have no evidence for, and in the notion that just because I firmly believe something, it must be true. But that sort of faith should be lost. It’s worthless.

The faith I’ve found, or at least come closer to, is a trust in reality—whatever it may consist of. I don’t need to make reality conform to my wishes or desires. All I have to do is open my eyes and see. As clearly as possible.

With my changing face of faith.

[Next day update: per the link in Marcel's comment, below, the eighteen minute interview can be listened to here. Click on the December 6, 9 PM, option. I've also written about the experience on my other weblog. See "My radio interview about the changing face of faith."]

Churchless doesn’t mean anti-church

It’s so easy to firmly embrace black or white, right or wrong, belief or unbelief, progressive or conservative. The human mind seems to be naturally attracted to dualities. In my “Reality is shades of gray” post I quoted Diane Ackerman, who is addressing the question of whether nature or nurture explains our personalities.

Even to ask that question implies a dichotomy nature doesn’t pose. Only we pose it. It’s easier for our brain to handle alternatives, to divide every issue into extremes, which requires less brainwork to fathom and less time to evaluate…life rarely offers clear alternatives. Most of life sprawls on a continuum of possibilities, compromises, extenuating circumstances…most of anything falls between opposite poles, every idea or feeling includes gradations.

Consider the reaction to my previous post, “Another RSSB initiate sees the light.” I liked what Howard had to say. He commented on both negative and positive sides of his chosen “religion” (Radha Soami Satsang Beas). He’s still involved with RSSB, whereas I’m not, but we look upon this organization similarly: grayly.

Over on the Radha Soami Studies discussion group, black and white was much more in evidence. Browsing the group’s messages, as I do most days, my eye lit upon the appealing title of the first reaction to my post: “Brian Hines hits one out of the park—must read!”

However, the very next commenter to that home run message said that the post made him ill. He urged that Gurinder Singh, the current leader of RSSB, should pull the plug on his guruship and, indeed, the entire organization. I haven’t read all of the other comments but they seem to be in the same vein: strikeout.

One person even said, “nausea was rising as I began to read the post. Skimming it a little further I had to quit.” Gosh, Howard and I seem to be health risks. Maybe I need to put an upfront warning on this blog: “Caution: reading these posts may cause illness or nausea.”

Nah. I’m not going to do that. I’d rather say: “Suggestion: read these posts with an open mind.” In my experience, it’s reading with a rigid preconceived point of view that causes mental indigestion. You barf on stuff that doesn’t mesh neatly with what’s already in your cranium.

Gray!!?? Waiter, I thought you only served black or white here. Take this back to the kitchen and bring me something that’s either “this” or “that.” My stomach is churning just looking at this mish-mash.

About seventeen years ago my first wife and I got divorced. It was difficult for us. Most divorces are. For quite a while all I could focus on was the bad feelings we had toward each other at the end of our eighteen year marriage.

Those who get divorced from a church or spiritual group after a longstanding marriage understandably tend to have the same reaction: there’s nothing good about that S.O.B. But eventually, especially after I got married again, I could look back on my first marriage with a clearer perspective.

We loved each other for many years. We had a daughter together. We supported each other through good times and bad times. Each of us struggled to keep the marriage together. We couldn’t, though. So we split up. Now each of us has found another partner and is happier than when we were married to each other.

In short (and in cliché), we moved on.

When you can’t see anything positive about an ex-spouse or an ex-church, you haven’t moved on. You’re not seeing that person or that organization clearly. Your negative feelings toward any positive mention of them/it—“illness,” “nausea”—are a symptom of excessive attachment to an entity that you claim to have detached from.

Yet you haven’t. You’re still mentally joined at the hip with your ex if you can’t read something partially positive about them without being emotionally jerked around. After being churched, there’s no necessity to be totally anti-church. You can pick and choose what you still like and dislike about the faith that you no longer have total faith in.

Lastly, I continue to be surprised by how nastily negative many disillusioned RSSB initiates are toward the group’s guru, Gurinder Singh. Howard seems to view him more positively than I do, yet I still have no trouble finding quite a few good things to say about Gurinder.

Maybe this is the difference between me and the guru-bashers: I don’t expect as much from him. Some RSSB devotees view the guru as God in human form, a perfect being. I never did, not really, though I tried to for a while. I certainly don’t see Gurinder as perfection personified now.

It wouldn’t surprise me if a driving instructor has a traffic accident. Or if a dance teacher trips and breaks a leg. Stuff happens. Nobody is perfect, even those with special expertise. I can accept that a guru doesn’t act spiritual all of the time. Gurinder Singh is a human, not a god.

Now, if the ads for a driving instructor said, “He’s the absolute best in the world! Never makes a mistake!” and he turned out to be at fault for rear-ending another car, I’d think, “Well, guess he isn’t perfect after all.” I’d still feel comfortable learning from him. I just wouldn’t ascribe qualities to him that evidently he doesn’t have.

So the strange thing is, those who criticize a guru (or other religious leader) for not living up to some standard of perfection often still expect him to act almost perfectly. For example, many in the Radha Soami Studies discussion group want Gurinder Singh to eat humble pie and admit openly that he isn’t the divine being that many disciples make him out to be.

Well, it never hurts to ask. Myself, I’d like George Bush to admit that he misled us about the supposed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and Saddam’s ties to Al Qaeda. But I’m not going to hold my breath while I wait for him to do that. Bush is an imperfect president (to put it mildly).

And the way I see it, every guru, imam, pope, rabbi, priest, or whatever is similarly imperfect. To expect them to do the absolute right thing is to ascribe to them qualities that only a divine being would possess. It’s one thing to claim that the emperor has no clothes, yet quite another to demand a kingly proclamation: “I’m naked.”

I’m increasingly content with gray. Works for me. Yet if you are attracted to black or white, be my guest. I’m simply suggesting that you’re missing out on some interesting shades of reality.
----------------------------
Next day update: this morning I read the chapter on "Hatred" in Matthieu Ricard's Happiness, a Buddhist perspective on life. Here are some quotes that fit with the theme of this post:

Hatred exaggerates the faults of its object and ignores its good qualities...Our perception of being wronged or threatened leads us to focus exclusively on the negative aspects of a person or group. We fail to see people and events in the context of a much vaster web of interrelated causes and conditions.

...What can we do when we hate our brother, our colleague, or our ex-husband? They obsess us. We brood over their faces, their habits, and their quirks until they make us sick; our obsession relentlessly converts mundane aversion into persecution. I knew a man who turned red with anger at the slightest mention of the wife who had left him twenty years earlier.

Reality or belief: which are you seeking?

Here’s a thought experiment that, if you conduct it honestly, will tell you a lot about yourself. What you’re looking for in life. How you comfort yourself when the wild things howl. Whether you tilt toward science or religion.

I first wrote about the Two Doors two years ago this month, back when the Church of the Churchless had just laid its cornerstone. I still often think about my thought experiment. I also try to put it into practice.

So here, extracted from my November 2004 “Just have faith” post, is a re-run of the Two Doors.

Here's how to tell the difference between true faith and false faith: Imagine that you are standing in the middle of a bare windowless room. Two doors lead out of the room. Both are closed, but can be opened with a turn of the doorknob. The doors are marked with signs that describe what awaits on the other side: (A) Reality, (B) Belief

After you open a door, you have to walk through it. The door then will shut and you never will be able to leave the place you have entered.

Choose Reality and you will know things as they really are, from top to bottom of the cosmos. You will know whether or not God exists and, if so, the nature of this ultimate divinity. You will know whether death is the final end of your existence or if it is the beginning of another form of life. You will know whether there is a meaning to the universe beyond what human beings ascribe to it.

Or, choose Belief and you will know only what lies within the confines of your current suppositions about the nature of the cosmos. For the rest of your life you will be confident that what you believe to be true, really is. Any evidence to the contrary will not make an impact on your mind. You will remain doubt-free, faithful to the beliefs you now hold about God, creation, life, death, and the purpose of human existence.

Which door would you choose to walk through?

Before answering, consider carefully the potential ramifications of your choice. Reality is an unknown, a mystery. It could be frightening or fabulous, painful or pleasurable, warmly loving or coldly uncaring. Do you want to embrace absolutely real reality? Or would you rather hold on to your beliefs about what is real?

Someone with the type of faith extolled by the Church of the Churchless would unhesitatingly choose Door A and boldly stride into Reality. For their faith is not in anything particular, but is a faith that truth can be known, should be known, and, indeed, must be known.

In short, my churchless friends, nut up.

Life is tough. Religion offers comfort. The comfort of blind faith and unproven belief. “Everything will be fine after death. God will take care of you. There is a reason you’re going through your present troubles. God has a plan for you. Rejoice.”

This morning I finished the last chapter of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. He speaks of the consolation that religion brings people. Yet, he adds:

Religion’s power to console doesn’t make it true. Even if we make a huge concession; even if it were conclusively demonstrated that belief in God’s existence is completely essential to human psychological and emotional well-being; even if all atheists were despairing neurotics driven to suicide by relentless cosmic angst—none of this would contribute the tiniest jot or tittle of evidence that religious belief is true.

…Life without your wife may very well be intolerable, barren and empty, but this unfortunately doesn’t stop her from being dead. There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and purpose.

…The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as well and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed.

Nicely put. I also like Betty Fanek’s “Where Do Atheists Find Comfort in Times of Danger?” She points out the difference between false comfort and genuine comfort, the latter being distinguished by actually solving a problem. Or at least seeing it for what it is, not as how we’d like it to be.

Fanek quotes George Bernard Shaw:

The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

Reality or belief? At every moment, we stand before two doors. In every thought and action, we approach one or the other.

Let skepticism blossom

Should I be skeptical about skepticism? That’s an interesting notion. But after pondering the question as a good skeptic would, I’ve decided that skepticism should continue to blossom in me. And, hopefully, the world, which would be a better place with more of it.

So I’ve got to respectfully disagree with an essay that a Church of the Churchless visitor recently pointed me toward: “The Death of Skepticism.” The author, Steve Pavlina, does his best to make a convincing argument that we should be as skeptical about skepticism as we are, say, about a claim that the moon is made out of green cheese.

But I’m not convinced. The main problem with Pavlina’s piece is that he doesn’t understand what skepticism is all about. He says that skeptics are closed, while non-skeptics are open. He also says that skeptics believe in objectivity, while non-skeptics believe in subjectivity.

That’s simplistic. And wrong. Peter Suber, a philosophy professor at Earlham College, gets it right in his essay on “Classical Skepticism.” Here’s some of what he has to say in his introduction to the subject

Compared to non-skeptical philosophical positions, skepticism is very simple. It is easy to understand, although it is commonly confused with things it is not.

Skepticism in religion, for example, is not atheism. It is not even agnosticism. No genuine skeptic ever doubts or denies or disbelieves any theory, any hypothesis, or any belief. In fact, this is the only obstacle to a clear understanding of skepticism: we think we already know what it is and we are wrong.

To skeptics, this unfounded pretense to knowledge is itself an example of the greatest sin they know, which is variously called rashness, conceit, pride, dogmatism, presumption, and culpable ignorance.

To the Greeks "skepticism" meant inquiry, and a skeptic was an inquirer. The skeptics so named themselves because the essence of their position was not doubt or denial or disbelief, but continual inquiry.

They did not believe in the reality of a god, for example, but neither did they deny it. Nor did they even say that nobody could ever know for certain one way or the other, as agnostics do. Skeptics said instead, "I personally do not know at the moment but I am trying to find out."

The differences between this and atheism, agnosticism, and indifference have led to confusion.

All three components of the skeptics' statement are important. (1) They speak only for themselves and confess only their own ignorance. (2) They speak only for the present and do not claim that their ignorance is inescapable. They do not say that knowledge is impossible for themselves or for others. (3) And they always add that despite their own present ignorance they are inquiring for the truth of the matter.

They have not given up; they are optimistic —or at least hopeful —or at least undefeated —or at least unrelenting.

Right on, Dr. Suber. You’ve expressed my own skeptical attitude much better than I could. You’ve strengthened my conviction that skepticism is the wisest position we can take toward ourselves and the world. Skeptics are humble truth-seeking optimists, not grumpy nay-sayers.

I respect Steve Pavlina’s belief in the power of subjectivity. He’s convinced that “I’ll see it when I believe it” is a more accurate representation of how the cosmos operates than “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Pavlina is trying to use the power of intention to manifest a million dollars for each person taking part in the experiment. I wish them luck. So far the participants have subjectively estimated that, on average, an additional $592 has come each person’s way. Not bad. Also, not a million dollars.

On the whole, the observable universe seems to be tilted much more in the direction of objectivity than subjectivity. The dependability and universality of the laws of nature testify to that conclusion. Humans can think and believe what they want. That’s the special blessing (and curse) of Homo sapiens.

However, for the time being my personal opinion is that truth is what it is, not what we may want it to be. I may very well end up changing my mind, because that’s what skeptics frequently do. Skepticism is at the other end of the philosophical spectrum from dogmatism, which suits me just fine.

I’ll end with another quote from Suber that resonates with my skeptical soul (see continuation to this post).

The best one-sentence metaphysics ever written

Here it is. My absolute favorite sentence. It’s wise. It’s profound. It’s deep. It’s practical. It’s spiritual. Best of all, it’s true. Drum roll, please. Pregnant pause for dramatic effect…

A little longer…(don’t peek! don’t look below!)

OK. I can’t stand the waiting, even though I know what I’m about to say.

From Philip K. Dick’s “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” (1978), ninth paragraph:

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

Here’s the entire paragraph:

It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question “What is reality?”, to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." That's all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly.

For quite a while my spiritual practice has been founded on that one line. I’ve used it in many talks and writings. I repeat it to myself a lot. I first read it in the “Edge” section of the Portland Oregonian. That’s a humor column. Dick’s quote was in a collection of supposedly weird items found on the Internet.

I didn’t think it was weird at all. I memorized it right away. I’m still trying to fathom the implications of that single sentence. From those thirteen words an entire metaphysics can be constructed. Or, perhaps we might better say, deconstructed.

Out of the corner of my eye I can see a white hold-the-newspaper-down rock on the patio table where my laptop sits. Whether or not I believe in the rock, it’s there. My wife senses it too. So does everyone else who walks onto our deck. The rock is real, no doubt about it.

On the other hand, I don’t think I’ve thought once about God today. Certainly not this evening. I was focused on playing ball with our dog, eating dinner, and then watching a recording of the Oregon State—Boise State football game.

God hasn’t been in evidence, unlike the rock. Ditto for Jesus, Buddha, Allah, Krishna, Holy Spirit, Tao, Big Foot, Godzilla, King Kong, and every other entity that requires a thought to bring it into existence. Beliefs are sustained by thoughts. No thoughts, no beliefs. (Or so I believe; I could be wrong; but even if there is such a thing as a thoughtless belief, I’ll bet that it was born through thought).

My daily meditation now is founded on Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. So are my spiritual beliefs, which is why I don’t have many. I’ve found that when I stop thinking about religion or spirituality, there isn’t much left of what generally passes for divinity.

What remains is either nothing or everything. I mean, during the brief meditative moments when I’m neither aware of the external world or internal thoughts, emotions, and such, there’s just awareness of me being aware of nothing but awareness.

When external sensations and internal cognitions return, everything is present. But all this isn’t present as beliefs. Right now I don’t believe that I’m hearing crickets, feeling the weight of my body on a chair, and thinking what I’m going to write next. These are clear and evident realities.

And that’s what I want: reality. Yes, I want a pleasant, meaningful, satisfying reality. But prior to those adjectives is what they modify: reality. If pleasure, meaning, and satisfaction are merely free-floating abstractions with little or no connection to substantial existence, they’re useless.

So I’m with Philip K. Dick. I’d rather surrender my insubstantial religious beliefs that don’t point to anything concrete, than dilute reality with fantasy. Concerning the times in my life that have meant the most to me, I can say, “Wow, that was real!”

I’ve done a lot of believing. But none of it has been memorable. There’s quite a bit of empty space on my bookshelves now, because I’ve been storing or discarding books that are belief-full and reality-empty. A passage from Thoreau’s “Walden” (which always will be on a shelf) comes to mind:

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well. For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out.

In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything to say. “Tell the tailors,” said he, “to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch.” His companion’s prayer is forgotten.