Church of the Churchless

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