Church of the Churchless

Know that you know a lot less than you think you know

I subscribe to The Atlantic, so I'm going to take the liberty of copying in a great piece from the online The Atlantic, "How to Know That You Know Nothing." 

(Maybe it's available to non-subscribers, but not knowing for sure that it is, I thought I'd take the advice put forth in the piece and realize that since I'm not confident that I know, I might as well share it this way.)

This shows that Harvard psychology professors can sound a lot like Zen masters. Which isn't really all that surprising, since Zen possesses a lot of psychological wisdom.

Enjoy.

If there’s one thing we might regret at the end of life, it’s that we missed out on moments that mattered—not because we weren’t physically there, but because our mind wandered off to some unknown place.

In this episode of How to Build a Happy Life, we explore why it’s uniquely challenging to “live in the moment,” how we limit our own curiosity by assuming that we know best, and why the illusion of stability pulls us from living every day fully, and in the moment. A conversation with the Harvard University psychology professor Dr. Ellen Langer helps us think through a daily struggle: How do I stay present?

Arthur C. Brooks: A big part of happiness is learning to live in the moment. What does that actually mean? And more importantly, how do we do it? It turns out that living in the moment, or at least being fully alive right now has two components: mindfulness and curiosity.

You need to figure out a way to focus on the present, to be really experiencing your current time frame, as opposed to thinking about the past or thinking about the future. Now, there’s a reason that that’s hard to do. The human brain makes it possible for us to be in other time periods than in the current moment. I can imagine that I’m in the future, practicing future scenarios in my life. That’s called prospection. That’s about living in the future.

Other people tend to think about the past a lot, and one of the things that we know from research on the elderly is they tend to be kind of retrospective, thinking about the past. The problem is, if you’re excessively prospective and/or retrospective, it can crowd out your ability to be alive right now.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Lots of people confuse what I do with meditation, but meditation is a practice; mindfulness is the result of that practice. The mindfulness that we study is immediate. It’s simply noticing new things. And in the process of noticing new things, that puts you in the moment. You have all these people who say “be in the present,” and that’s great, but it’s an empty suggestion. And even simpler than this, if one deeply appreciates uncertainty—recognizing everything is always changing, everything looks different from different perspectives, so you can’t know. And when you recognize that you can’t know or you don’t know, you tune in. When you think you do know, you don’t pay any attention.

Brooks: The big theme that I really want to talk about here is how to enjoy our lives more. One of the things that you emphasize in your work a lot is that we don’t enjoy our lives enough, because we’re not actually there. What does that mean?

Dr. Langer: Over these 40-some-odd years, we find that mindlessness is pervasive. Most of us are not there, and they are not there to know they’re not there. You know, the only way some people realize they experience this is imagine you’re driving and you want to get off at exit 28, and all of a sudden, you see you’re at exit 36. So then you say, Wow, where was I? What I mean by “you’re not there” is that you are more or less behaving like a robot. Everybody has had that experience.

You know, you are miserable, and somebody says, “Hi, how are you?” And you say, “Fine, thank you.” And you’re not aware of it, and you’re not trying to hide it. Most of what we do is done on, as it’s called, automatic pilot, but the mindlessness goes far beyond that.

I wanted to write a book a long time ago, Arthur—I never wrote this one—that was called Is There Life Before Death?, because I found, you know, all these people worrying about life after death. Many people come alive, sadly, after they get some terrible diagnosis or they have a stroke or they find out they have cancer. When I speak to people who are miserable or whatever, I simply tell them that all you need to do is take care of the moment, just right this second. And if you keep doing that, then over the course of the day, you know, you’ve had a fine time.

Brooks: Why is it that we’re so distracted from the present? What is distracting us from actually noticing things around us?

Dr. Langer: Well, we have an illusion of stability. We think things are staying still. So if you’ve seen it once, you’ve seen it; you don’t need to keep paying attention to it. But there’s something I think that needs to be added, which will explain why people keep doing this. Many people pretend because they think they should know. They think, You know, so therefore, I don’t want you to know that I don’t know. And here’s the big secret for everybody: Nobody knows. You change from making a personal attribution for not knowing—I don’t know, but it’s knowable. Therefore, I’ll pretend; I’ll feel stupid, insecure—to a universal attribution: I don’t know. You don’t know. Nobody knows. Okay, so now let’s find out together and explore together. If you think you know something, there’s no reason to pay attention.

Anything can be made exciting; anything can be made boring. I picked up these kids—this is back years ago, when it was okay to pick up hitchhikers. And I was in Italy, and they were wearing nyc T-shirts, so you knew they weren’t from New York.

And so I picked them up, and I asked them, “How did you like New York?” And one of them answered right away and said, you know, he didn’t like it at all. It was boring. There was nothing to do. There are few places, to my mind, that are more exciting. And if you took me and you put me in the middle of a wheat field, I probably would look at it like, Well, it’s all the same, but not to a farmer.

Brooks: Let’s go to the future. So, you know, one of the things that I talk an awful lot about with Marty Seligman is prospection, and Marty believes that we shouldn’t be called Homo sapiens. We should be called Homo prospectus.

One point, he had this dispute with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, where the Dalai Lama was talking about mindfulness, and he said, No, Your Holiness, it’s natural that we live in the future, especially people who are ambitious and go-getters. And it’s actually important because we have to practice future scenarios, et cetera. How can we live enough in the future to be successful but, at the same time, enjoy our lives? How do we get that balance right?

Dr. Langer: I think that everything that you’re doing because of the future is based on a mistaken notion about predictability. Prediction is an illusion. Now, I know Marty doesn’t believe that. Let me convince your audience just quickly. I do this with my advanced decision-making class, and I say to them, “I’ve been teaching a version of this class for the last 40 years. I’ve never missed a class. What is the likelihood I’m going to be here next week?”

It’s a small class; we go around the room. These are Harvard kids, so they don’t say 100 percent. They say ridiculous things like 97 percent, as if there’s some calculation, but essentially they’re all saying I’ll be there. Now I say, “Okay, I want each of you to give me a good reason why I won’t be there.” The first one always says, “Well, you’ve been doing it for 40 years; you’ve been there. You deserve the time off.” The next one says, “Your dog has to go to the vet.” The next one says, “You’ve got a flat tire.” And they easily come up with things.

Then I say to them, “Okay, what is the likelihood I’m going to be here next week?” And it drops to 50 percent. And when you fully realize that we don’t know, that you can plan all you want for some future event and then something else will happen that pulls you away. But if the planning for the future is giving you a happy present, that’s fine; there’s nothing lost by it. When you stick to your predictions, you’re limiting yourself rather than expanding your universe of possibilities.

Brooks: From your perspective, goal setting is valuable to the extent that it enhances the quality of your life right now.

Dr. Langer: At the moment, yes. And I think that what we want to do, and the way I describe being mindful, is to be rule, routine, and goal guided. Most of us are mindless, so we’re rule, routine, and goal governed. You don’t want to have a rule that says you do something at time one—that’s when you’re committing to that rule—when at time two, it’s totally irrelevant. Recognize that outcomes are in our heads. They’re not in events.

A simple example, you know, if you and I go to lunch and the food is good, that’s great. You and I go to lunch and the food is awful. That’s great. Presumably, I’ll eat less, and that’ll be better for my waistline. If I take the view that the event is good or bad, then I’m in this position where I do everything I can to get the good, and I run away as fast as I can from anything bad. And once I recognize that the good/bad is in my head, I can be still and just enjoy whatever happens.

Brooks: So you and I are going back to the classroom in person for the first time in a super long time, and let’s say that your fall class, weirdly unexpectedly, goes really, really poorly. What’s your strategy then, because you’re not going to get stressed?

Dr. Langer: I have a one-liner that friends of mine put on their refrigerators, which is “Ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience?” Too often we respond to things. You know, if the class didn’t go well, Oh my God, my life’s going to be—no, of course not. Let’s say you and I are going out and we have a bad conversation and it’s Oh my God, that’s going to destroy the relationship! No. No relationship is going to be made or fall apart based on one situation. No life is going to depend on failing one test or giving one bad class.

Brooks: Ellen Langer. What a joy. What a gift that you’ve given to our audience today, and what a gift that you’ve given me. So thank you very much.

Dr. Langer: It’s my pleasure, Arthur. Stay well.

Genuine spirituality is very simple. Not like religion at all.

Here's what I've come to realize after over fifty years of searching for spiritual truth.

For most of that time, I had things completely backward, because I didn't understand how simple genuine spirituality really is. 

I've got lots of company in that regard. 

At first, almost everyone approaches spirituality, or religion, like everything else in life. It's viewed as something to be desired, then worked for, then hopefully attained.

This is how we get a college degree. This is how we get our first real job. This is how we get married. This is how we have children. This is how we become proficient at a sport like golf, surfing, or tennis.

We seek instruction from people who have the sort of knowledge we want. We put in effort aimed at achieving our goal. We get support from friends and family who inspire us to keep pursuing our dream rather than get discouraged.

Then... we repeat the process. Because desires and attainments never end. 

When spiritual advancement or a religious quest is viewed in this way -- and almost everyone does just that -- disappointment is inevitable. 

After all, how many people do you know who are completely satisfied with their life? I'm willing to bet, zero. And naturally that includes you, along with me.

This is the problem with making spirituality into a commodity, something to be purchased with the proper amount of time, energy, knowledge, enthusiasm. 

We expect that just as we're able to achieve a good education, get a worthwhile job, or find a loving partner, we should be able to become a spiritual person if we channel our desire in that direction.

Most people pursue this approach for their entire life.

A few stick with the same religion or spiritual path until they die. Most, though, try several forms of spirituality, moving from one to another in the same way people change jobs, romantic relationships, athletic activities, cars, homes, and such.

New spiritual goals replace old ones. Or the same spiritual path/religion undergoes a sort of remodeling project. Fresh ideas take the place of stale ones. But the same basic approach mentioned above holds:

Something is desired, then worked for, then hopefully attained.

There's a better way, though. It's so simple, most people fail to grasp it. I certainly did, even though I've been an admirer of Zen Buddhism and Taoism ever since my college days in the late 1960s.

Zen and Taoism, in their non-religious forms, come the closest of any organized philosophy to that simple better way. Mindfulness, also -- which really is Buddhism expressed in a different modern fashion.

This way actually is better described as a non-way, since it doesn't involve any steps, any path, any destination, any goal. 

It's just attending to life as it appears to us at every moment.

Now, I realize that statement sounds ridiculously trite to most people. All I can say is that I agree. It is ridiculously trite. Which is why I love it so much.

I'm not saying I've become a Zen master or a Taoist sage. Far from it.

I'm just a regular old guy doing his best to keep my head above water as I cope with the everyday problems I've had to deal with my entire life. However, I'm gradually starting to see life in a different fashion.

Which is difficult for me to put into words. So I'll let Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen teacher whose words make up the book I've been rereading, "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind," describe what I'm struggling to say.

In our practice we have no particular purpose or goal, nor any special object of worship.

...You may think that if there no purpose or no goal in our practice, we will not know what to do. But there is a way.

The way to practice without having any goal is to limit your activity, or to be concentrated on what you are doing in the moment. Instead of having some particular object in mind, you should limit your activity.

When your mind is wandering about elsewhere you have no chance to express yourself. But if you limit your activity to what you can do just now, in this moment, then you can express fully your true nature, which is the universal Buddha nature. This is our way.

When we practice zazen [meditation] we limit our activity to the smallest extent. Just keeping the right posture and being concentrated on sitting is how we express the universal nature. Then we become Buddha, and we express Buddha nature.

So instead of having some object of worship, we just concentrate on the activity which we do in each moment.

When you bow, you should just bow; when you sit, you should just sit; when you eat, you should just eat. If you do this, the universal nature is there.

U.G. Krishnamurti and Zen have quite a bit in common

As noted a few days ago, I'm taking another look at U.G. Krishnamurti through his book, "Mind Is a Myth."

I read a few pages every morning, along with a Zen book by Shunryu Suzuki I'm re-reading, "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" -- the title of which shows that Krishnamurti and Zen aren't totally in sync. 

But there's definitely some commonalities. 

They both can be outrageous.
They both aren't afraid to defy conventional ways of thinking.
They both focus on the physical world.
They both have no interest in supernatural fantasies.
They both advise to live in the present moment.

Zen, at least in its Soto form/lineage, teaches that there is no difference between enlightenment and the act of sitting in meditation. Or doing anything else with full attention. 

Suzuki says, "Enlightenment is not some good feeling or some special state of mind. The state of mind that exists when you sit in the right posture is, itself, enlightenment."

So there's a certain absence of goals in Zen. Suzuki says, "When you do something, just to do it should be your purpose."

You know, the whole chop wood and carry water thing. Just chop wood. Just carry water. Don't add unnecessary gaining ideas to simple actions. 

In a Mistakes in Practice section, Suzuki says:

There are several poor ways of practice which you should understand. Usually, when you practice zazen [meditation], you become very idealistic, and you set up an ideal or goal which you strive to attain and fulfill. But as I have often said, this is absurd.

When you are idealistic, you have some gaining idea within yourself; by the time you attain your ideal or goal, your gaining idea will create another ideal. 

So as long as your practice is based on a gaining idea, and you practice zazen in an idealistic way, you will have no time actually to attain your ideal. Moreover, you will be sacrificing the meat of your practice. 

Because your attainment is always ahead, you will always be sacrificing yourself for some ideal in the future. You end up with nothing. This is absurd; it is not adequate practice at all. 

In passages I read this morning, Krishnamurti speaks using different language, but I see some close connections between his view and that of Suzuki.

Understanding your goal is the main thing. To achieve that goal implies struggle, battle, effort, will, that is all. There is no guarantee that you will reach your goal. 

You assume the goal is there. You have invented the goal to give yourself hope. But hope means tomorrow. Hope is necessary for tomorrow, not for today.

You know. You want more knowledge so you can develop better techniques for reaching your goal. You know that there is no guarantee that more experience, more knowledge, more systems and more methods will help you reach your goal.

Yet you persist; it is all you know how to do. Seeing today demands action. Seeing tomorrow involves only hope.

...You want to see meaning in your life. As long as you persist in searching for a purpose or meaning to life, so long whatever you are doing will seem purposeless and meaningless.

The hope you have of finding meaning is what is causing the present state of meaninglessness. There may not be any meaning other than this.

...Life, the so-called material life, has a meaning of its own. But you have been told that it is devoid of meaning and have superimposed a fictitious layer of "spiritual" meaning over it. 

Why should life have any meaning? Why should there be any purpose to living? Living itself is all that is there. Your search for spiritual meaning has made a problem out of living.

You have been fed all this rubbish about the ideal, perfect, peaceful, purposeful way of life, and you devote your energies to thinking about that rather than living fully.

In any case you are living, no matter what you are thinking about. Life has to go on.

Late this afternoon I went for a walk with Mooka, our dog, around the community lake a short distance from our property.

Mooka enjoyed sniffing for creatures in the vegetation on the water side of the earthen dam. I enjoyed the view. Life seemed fine, just the way it was.

Returning to the trail that leads to our house, fallen leaves heralded the coming of winter. Life seemed fine, just the way it was.

The bright red of a tree next to our water feature caught my eye. Life seemed fine, just the way it was.

The ancient white oak in our yard lost two large limbs in an ice storm last February. It survives, continuing to gladden my heart as I snapped one last photo before going inside to feed our dog. Life seemed fine, just the way it was. 

I take another look at U.G. Krishnamurti

Back in 2009 I wrote a blog post about U.G. Krishnamurti, calling him intriguing, irritating, inspirational. That was based on reading some of his Mind Is a Myth book, which has an appealing copyright notice.

My teaching, if that is the word you want to use, has no copyright. You are free to reproduce, distribute, interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, do what you like, even claim authorship, without my consent or the permission of anybody.

The book is still available online. But recently I got a paperback copy after being reminded of the book when a passage was quoted in something else I was reading. 

I still feel the same way about U.G. Krishnamurti, not to be confused with J. Krishnamurti. It's perplexing that even though he claims he has no teaching to share, and harshly criticizes gurus, the book consists of transcripts of conversations he had with people who sought him out -- maybe because they liked to be insulted.

Which Krishnamurti does a lot. 

Below are some excerpts from the initial part of the book that will give you a feel for his philosophy and style. There's quite a bit to like about his irreligious outlook on life, and also a lot not to like about the way he talks. 

He's provocative, for sure. An introduction says that Krishnamurti's childhood "was, in short, steeped in religious lore, philosophical discourse, and the influence of various spiritual personages."

However, "It was in these early years of his live that U.G. began to feel that 'something was wrong somewhere,' referring to the whole religious tradition into which he had been immersed almost from the beginning."

So his rejection of religion was based on a deep understanding of what later turned him off. This is part of what he says in the book's The Certainty That Blasts Everything chapter.

Your problems continue because of the false solutions you have invented. If the answers are not there, the questions cannot be there. They are interdependent; your problems and solutions go together, because you want to use certain answers to end your problems, these problems continue.

The numerous solutions offered by all these holy people, the psychologists, the politicians, are not really solutions at all. That is obvious. If there were legitimate answers, there would be no problems. 

They can only exhort you to try harder, practice more meditations, cultivate humility, stand on your head, and more and more of the same. That is all they can do. The teacher, guru, or leader who offers solutions is also false, along with his so-called answers.

He is not doing any honest work, only selling a cheap, shoddy commodity in the marketplace. If you brushed aside your hope, fear, and naïveté and treated these fellows like businessmen, you would see that they do not deliver the goods and never will.

But you go on and on buying these bogus wares offered up by the experts.

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All their philosophies cannot compare to the native wisdom of the body itself. What they are calling mental activity, spiritual activity, emotional activity, and feelings are really all one unitary process. 

The body is highly intelligent and does not need these scientific or theological teachings to survive and procreate. Take away all your fancies about life, death, and freedom, and the body remains unscathed, functioning harmoniously.

It does not need your or my help. You don't have to do a thing. You will never again ask stupid, idiotic questions about immortality, afterlives, or death. The body is immortal.

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Life has no beginning and no end. A dead and dying body feeds the hungry ants there in the grave, and rotting corpses give off soil-enriching chemicals, which in turn nourish other life forms. You cannot put an end to your life, it is impossible. 

The body is immortal and never asks silly questions like "Is there immortality?" It knows that it will come to an end in that particular form, only to continue on in others. Questions about life after death are always asked out of fear. 

Those leaders who would direct your "spiritual life" cannot be honest about these things, for they make a living out of fear, speculations about future life, and the "mystery" of death.

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As long as you think you have something to renounce, you are lost. Not to think of money and the necessities of life is an illness. It is a perversion to deny yourself the basic needs of life. You think that through a self-imposed asceticism you will increase your awareness and then be able to use that awareness to be happy.

No chance. You will be peaceful when all your ideas about awareness are dropped and you begin to function like a computer. You must be a machine, function automatically in the world, never questioning your actions before, while, or after they occur.

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For this reason the whole guru business is absolute nonsense. This has always been the case, not just now. Your self-denial enriches the priests. 

You deny yourself your basic needs while that man travels in a Rolls Royce car, eating like a king, and being treated like a potentate. He, and the others in the holy business, thrive on the stupidity and credulity of others.

The politicians, similarly, thrive on the gullibility of man. It is the same everywhere.

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If your meditation, sadhanas, methods and techniques meant anything, you wouldn't be here asking these questions. They are all means for you to bring about change. I maintain that there is nothing to change or transform.

You accept that there is something to change as an article of faith. You never question the existence of the one who is to be changed. The whole mystique of enlightenment is based upon the idea of transforming yourself.

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Any action that takes place at the conscious level of your thinking existence is a reaction. Pure, spontaneous action free of all previous actions is meaningless. The one and only action is the response of this living organism to the stimuli around it.

That stimulus-response process is a unitary phenomenon. There is no division between action and reaction except when thought interferes and artificially separates them. Otherwise it is an automatic, unitary process, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. There is no need to stop it.

Just as in reality there is no separation of action and reaction, so there is no room for the religious man in the natural scheme of things. The fresh movement of life threatens his source of power and prestige. Still, he does not want to retire. He must be thrown out.

Religion is not a contractual arrangement, either public or private. It has nothing to do with the social structure or its management. Religious authority wants to continue its hold on the people, but religion is entirely an individual affair.

The saints and saviors have only succeeded in setting you adrift in life with pain and misery and the restless feeling that there must be something more meaningful or interesting to do with one's life. Existence is all that is important, not how to live.

We have created the "how" to live, which in turn has created this dilemma for us. Your thinking has created problems -- what to eat, wear, how to behave -- the body doesn't care. I am simply pointing out the absurdity of this conversation.

Once you get the hang of it, you just go. I have no message to give mankind.

"Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" is a classic that I like a lot

Recently I wrote about how always trying to improve yourself is foolish. Since this makes a lot of sense to me, I'm attracted to Zen Buddhism because it shares that perspective, by and large.

This attraction is long-standing. 

One of my favorite Zen books, The Supreme Doctrine, has been in my hands since 1969, when I couldn't bear to return it to the San Jose Public Library while I was going to San Jose State College.

Another favorite is Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. I have the 1973 first paperback edition. A few days ago I started re-reading it after a long absence.


Shunryu Suzuki's words (the book is based on his recorded talks) always refresh and center me. 

These days I have minimal tolerance for spiritual books that aren't grounded in here-and-now physical reality. I've had my fill of supernatural bullshit. 

Zen is notorious for cutting through the crap. I like all of the many Zen books that grace the Buddhist section of my bookshelf. 

But there's something about Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind that really appeals to me. Here's some quotations from the initial chapters that I've read the past few days. Zazen means meditation.

For Zen students the most important thing is not to be dualistic. Our "original mind" includes everything within itself. It is always rich and sufficient within itself. You should not lose your self-sufficient state of mind.

This does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and a ready mind. If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few.

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In the beginner's mind there is no thought, "I have attained something." All self-centered thoughts limit our vast mind.

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This is the most important teaching: not two, and not one. Our body and mind are not two and not one. If you think your body and mind are two, that is wrong. If you think that they are one, that is also wrong. Our body and mind are both two and one. 

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That is why Buddha could not accept the religions existing at his time. He studied many religions, but he was not satisfied with their practices. He could not find the answer in asceticism or in philosophies. He was not interested in some metaphysical existence, but in his own body and mind, here and now.

And when he found himself, he found that everything that exists has Buddha nature. That was his enlightenment. Enlightenment is not some good feeling or some particular state of mind. The state of mind that exists when you sit in the right posture is, itself, enlightenment.

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When we practice zazen our mind always follows our breathing. When we inhale, the air comes into the inner world. When we exhale, the air goes out to the outer world. The inner world is limitless, and the outer world is also limitless.

We say "inner world" or "outer world," but actually there is just one whole world. In this limitless world, our throat is like a swinging door. The air comes and goes out like someone passing through a swinging door.

If you think, "I breathe," the "I" is extra. There is no you to say "I." What we call "I" is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale. It just moves; that is all. When your mind is pure and calm enough to follow this movement, there is nothing: no "I," no world, no mind nor body; just a swinging door.

So when we practice zazen, all that exists is the movement of the breathing, but we are aware of this movement.

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If you want to obtain perfect calmness in your zazen, you should not be bothered by the various images you find in your mind. Let them come, and let them go. Then they will be under control. But this policy is not so easy. It sounds easy, but it requires some special effort. How to make this effort is the secret of practice.

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The only effort that will help you is to count your breathing, or to concentrate on your inhaling and exhaling. We say concentration, but to concentrate your mind on something is not the true purpose of Zen.

The true purpose is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes.

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The true understanding is that the mind includes everything; when you think something comes from outside it means only that something appears in your mind. Nothing outside yourself can cause any trouble.

You yourself make the waves in your mind. If you leave your mind as it is, it will become calm. This mind is called big mind.

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Strictly speaking, any effort we make is not good for our practice because it creates waves in our mind. It is impossible, however, to attain absolute calmness of our mind without any effort. We must make some effort, but we must forget ourselves in the effort we make.

In this realm there is no subjectivity or objectivity. Our mind is just calm, without even any awareness. In this unawareness, every effort and every idea and thought will vanish.

So it is necessary for us to encourage ourselves and to make an effort up to the last moment, when all effort disappears. You should keep your mind on your breathing until you are not aware of your breathing.

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We say, "A good father is not a good father." Do you understand? One who thinks he is a good father is not a good father; one who thinks he is a good husband is not a good husband.

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But so long as you think, "I am doing this," or "I have to do this," or "I must attain something special." you are actually not doing anything. When you give up, when you no longer want something, or when you do not try to do anything special, then you do something When there is no gaining idea in what you do, than you do something.

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If you continue this simple practice every day you will obtain a wonderful power. Before you attain it, it is something wonderful, but after you obtain it, it is nothing special. It is just you yourself, nothing special.

As a Chinese poem says, "I went and I returned. It was nothing special. Rozan famous for its misty mountains; Sekko for its water."

People think it must be wonderful to see the famous range of mountains covered by mists, and the water said to cover all the earth. But if you go there you will just see water and mountains. Nothing special.

The chance that you know something others don't is very small

After over fifty years of pursuing spirituality in one form or another, I've come to one firm conclusion. I'm nothing special.

And neither are you. Nor is anybody else.

Now, I'm not saying that everybody is the same. Obviously every person is different. We all have different thoughts, emotions, talents, likes and dislikes, appearance, and so on.

What I mean is that we're all material beings living in this material world, to sort of quote Madonna. 

So whatever we know about the world, almost certainly other people possess the same knowledge. Most of us like to think that in some way we're special when it comes to what we know. 

But the truth is that we're not. 

Some would say that our beliefs can be unique, shared by no one else. But a belief is different from knowledge. Knowledge is a true statement about reality, while a belief isn't.

Sure, we often say things like "I believe the Earth goes around the Sun." Actually that is something we know. It's a fact. 

Whereas "I believe in God" is a genuine belief. It isn't grounded in reality. There's no demonstrable evidence for that statement. 

Beliefs are limited only by our imagination. Knowledge is limited by what is true. 

Of course, a belief can be transformed into knowledge through evidence. And evidence can transform knowledge into belief if what once was thought to be true turns out to be untrue.

For example, almost everybody used to know that the Earth was flat. Now we know it is round, so that confident initial knowledge actually was a shaky belief.

Yet there's still a Flat Earth Society. Untrue beliefs take a long time to completely die, if they ever do.

A few days ago I wrote "A Bayesian argument against miracles." The takeaway quote by Steven Pinker in that post was Which is more likely -- that the laws of the universe as we understand them are false, or that some guy got something wrong?

This relates to the notion that no one possesses special knowledge. Over thousands of years, humanity has built up a store of shared knowledge.

It is ever-changing, which is the nature of knowledge. The more we know, the more there is left to know. Sometimes this is described as the Island of Knowledge having a vaster shoreline as the island expands in size.

Science is by far our best means of arriving at a shared understanding of what is real and true. Sure, scientific knowledge is constantly changing, just as our individual knowledge does. 

But science has ways of correcting errors that individuals don't. It may take a while for an untrue theory to be overturned. However, there's no doubt that science steadily progresses toward a more accurate picture of reality.

This accomplishment means, in Carl Sagan's words, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

During the seventeen years this blog has existed, I've debunked a great many religious supernatural claims. This doesn't stop people from continuing to believe in them.

Almost every day someone leaves a comment on one of my posts that amounts to an extraordinary claim about the nature of reality. If true, it would overturn much of modern science, since the claims people make go against the well-proven laws of nature.

But those extraordinary claims always lack extraordinary evidence. Or even ordinary evidence. 

The big question is, why do people continue to believe things that lack demonstrable evidence? There are plenty of reasons. Here's a few of them.

-- They want to believe in the supernatural so badly, they ignore the lack of evidence for it.
-- They enjoy the attention other people give them when they make supernatural claims.
-- They like to feel they possess knowledge no one else has.
-- They are out to make money from followers who revere them.
-- They have deluded themselves into mistaking belief for knowledge.

Having been a religious believer for thirty-five years, I understand the appeal of considering that God, spirit, heaven, angels, and such are as real as rocks, goldfish, iPhones, and clouds.

But eventually I grew out of my unfounded religiosity, because solid truth was more important to me that flimsy belief. This is why I put so much emphasis on being honest about what we actually know, versus what we would prefer to be true.

Wishes are one thing. Reality is another. 

A Bayesian argument against miracles

For quite a while I've been interested in Bayesian reasoning/statistics, even though I've never understood this subject very well.

Now I'm reading Steven Pinker's new book, "Rationality." It has a chapter on Beliefs and Evidence that focuses on Bayesian reasoning. Which is, basically (this is an introduction to an online tutorial):

Bayes' rule or Bayes' theorem is the law of probability governing the strength of evidence -- the rule saying how much to revise our probabilities (change our minds) when we learn a new fact or observe new evidence.

"Prior probability" in the Bayesian perspective is our credence in an idea before looking at the evidence for something. "Posterior probability" is our credence in an idea after we've examined the evidence.

How this is calculated is kind of complex. But even without knowing anything more about Bayesian reasoning, the following excerpt from the Beliefs and Evidence chapter should be mostly understandable, with the exception of the paragraph in parentheses, which is quite technical.

Pinker explains why believing in miracles doesn't make sense.

Our neglect of base rates is a special case of our neglect of priors: the vital, albeit more nebulous, concept of how much credence we should give a hypothesis before we look at the evidence.

Now, believing in something before you look at the evidence may seem like the epitome of irrationality. Isn't that what we disdain as prejudice, bias, dogma, orthodoxy, preconceived notions? But prior credence is simply the fallible knowledge accumulated from all our experience in the past.

Indeed, the posterior probability from one round of looking at evidence can supply the prior probability for the next round, a cycle called Bayesian updating. 

It's simply the mindset of someone who wasn't born yesterday. For fallible knowers in a chancy world, justified belief cannot be equated with the last fact you came across.

As Francis Crick liked to say, "Any theory that can account for all the facts is wrong, because some of the facts are wrong." This is why it is reasonable to be skeptical of claims for miracles, astrology, homeopathy, telepathy, and other paranormal phenomena, even when some eyewitness or laboratory study claims to show it.

Why isn't that dogmatic and pigheaded?

The reasons were laid out by that hero of reason, David Hume. Hume and Bayes were contemporaries, and though neither read the other, word of the other's ideas may have passed between them through a mutual colleague, and Hume's famous argument against miracles is thoroughly Bayesian.

Nothing is esteemed a miracle, if it ever happen in the common course of nature. It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should die on a sudden: because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. But it is a miracle, that a dead man should come to life, because that has never been observed in any age or country.

In other words, miracles such as resurrection must be given a low prior probability. Here is the zinger:

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish.

In Bayesian terms, we are interested in the posterior probability that miracles exist, given the testimony. Let's contrast it with the posterior probability that no miracles exist given the testimony. 

(In Bayesian reasoning, it's often handy to look at the odds, that is, the ratio of the credence of a hypothesis to the credence of the alternative, because it spares us the tedium of calculating the marginal probability of the data in the denominator, which is the same for both posteriors and conveniently cancels out.)

The "fact which it endeavors to establish" is the miracle, with its low prior, dragging down the posterior. The testimony "of such a kind" is the likelihood of the data given the miracle, and it's "falsehood" is the likelihood of the data given no miracle: the possibility that the witness lied, misperceived, misremembered, embellished, or passed along a tale tale he heard from someone else.

Given everything we know about human behavior, that's far from miraculous! Which is to say, its likelihood is higher than the prior probability of a miracle. 

That moderately high likelihood boosts the posterior probability of no miracle, and lowers the overall odds of a miracle compared to no miracle. 

Another way of putting it is this: Which is more likely -- that the laws of the universe as we understand them are false, or that some guy got something wrong?

Always trying to improve yourself is foolish

This morning I meditated, as I always do. Via my iPhone I also listened to a Buddhist speak about Buddhist teachings, as I sometimes do. 

What surprised me, sort of, is that afterwards I felt somewhat worse. It was as if trying to improve myself led to me feeling like I'd temporarily gone backward on the improvement front. 

As soon as I went back to simply living my life -- having lunch, going grocery shopping, listening to CNN and MSNBC as I drove around in my car -- my mood improved.

For quite a while I've been toying with the idea that engaging in a never-ending spiritual search for more... more self-awareness, more control of my emotions, more mindfulness, more knowledge of how my mind works, all that is akin to running on a hamster wheel of self-improvement. 

Meaning, when I'm always trying to get somewhere better than where I am now, I'm missing the opportunity to be satisfied with the present moment.

Obviously this isn't a groundbreaking insight. It's common sense that's been echoed by many people much wiser than myself. Today I simply had a stronger feeling that I need to break free of the habit that was with me for the 35 years I was a religious believer, Eastern religion variety.

The habit of considering that there always was another step to be taken on the spiritual path, another flight of stairs to be climbed on my ascent to the spiritual heights. 

Though I've been able to leave behind most of the religiosity that used to be so important to me, the desire to keep searching for greater levels of meaning, happiness, and contentment never left me. But more and more, I'm getting used to the idea of not needing more. 

This is hard to describe.

It's not like I'm becoming fatalistic or uncaring. I still have many goals that I want to pursue. I'm dedicated to trying to make the world a better place. I'm committed to remaining a good husband, father, grandfather, friend.

However, I can do all that without feeling like some essence within me needs to improve. After a lifetime of studying the world's religious, philosophical, and mystical writings, along with daily meditation for up to several hours a day, there's really nothing new that I need to learn or experience in the realm of "spirituality." 

(I put that word in quotation marks because it doesn't capture what I am getting at, but it's the best word I can come up with.)

It's a relief to just settle into the life that I've living, instead of feeling there's a better life awaiting me around some corner.

For many years I've been saying on this blog that mindfulness has become my meditation. That's still true. It's just that even mindfulness can become a chore, an exercise to get better at, instead of simply attending to what's happening right here, right now without viewing that as mindfulness.

If what I've said in this post doesn't make sense, here's some previous posts on this theme, along with an excerpt from each. Maybe they'll help explain what I'm trying to get at here.

Ending the spiritual search

Always looking for more from life than what life already is giving me is beginning to seem unwise. 

More meaning. More happiness. More purpose. More depth. All that more, more, more seems to lead to a hamster-wheel sort of existence.

Spiritual seeking can become such a habit, the seeker doesn't realize that they're going around and around without really getting anywhere.

If we're in an endless loop of seek-find-seek-find, the way out is to either stop seeking or find that which satisfies completely. 

Since I'm not completely satisfied with life (who is?), it seems to me that giving up a quest to make life into something that it isn't already is the best way to go.

End of spiritual questions is the final answer

I've experienced that sort of who cares? clarity now and then. Sometimes life seems so simple, so fine just the way it is, yet also so mysterious, so impossible to comprehend. I grok that there's no answer to life's biggest spiritual, religious, and philosophical questions -- because there's no way to form a cogent query.

And a little while later I order another spiritual, religious, or philosophical book from Amazon -- because searching for answers to unanswerable questions is just so darn much fun.

Great quotes from "Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: a Zen Guide."

"It's a little harder for most people to realize that not only is the mind that I'm trying to escape the only mind I have, but that the mind that I'm seeking is also the mind that I already have. The perfection that we're so busy pursuing is to be found nowhere but right here in the very moment, regardless of its content. This is the most basic spiritual insight that we can have. This moment is it! What we've desperately been seeking is already here."

Why atheism makes sense even if theism doesn't

Even though it's true that usually people aren't described by their unwillingness to believe in imaginary things -- there aren't afairyists who proclaim their skepticism about the existence of fairies -- the situation is different in regard to God.

Below I've shared an excellent comment from Appreciative Reader that was left today on a recent post of mine. The comment explains why even if the notion of God is incoherent, which of course it is, there's still good reason for atheists to object to the belief in God held by billions of people. 

After all, believers in fairies don't try to impose their belief on other people, whereas highly religious countries like the United States have their politics greatly influenced by fundamentalists who consider that whatever they imagine their God wants, like an end to legal abortion, should apply to everybody.

Plus, atheism is a stand for truth, reality, reason, evidence. Even if religious believers didn't try to impose their beliefs on others, many atheists (certainly me included) would feel the need to point out that God is a hypothesis lacking any demonstrable factual foundation. 

Here's the comment from Appreciative Reader, which is a reply to another commenter, 271 Days. His mention of Adam Dalgliesh led me to Google the name, which I'd never heard before. Wikipedia told me this is a fictional character in a series of  fourteen mystery novels by P.D. James, a British thing from what I could tell. 

@271Days:

Heh, okay, I get what you’re saying. You’re saying the term “God” itself is incoherent, so that the term “theist” would be incoherent and meaningless too; and, as such, its obverse, that is to say, “atheist” or “atheism” would also not be quite coherent. Fair enough, that makes sense, so far as it goes.

Here’s three separate observations, as far as this, that I’m enumerating separately in the interests of clarity:

(1) Your argument is based squarely on how wide, in fact wide to the point of incoherence, is the term “God”. Therefore, it fails the moment we move from the general to the particular.

So that when it comes to the Christian God, or the Judaic, or the Islamic, atheism continues to be a valid position. Likewise, when it comes to the Hindu gods, or the Shinto gods, or for that matter the Roman and Greek pantheons of yore, then too atheism continues to be a sound position to take. Ditto the RSSB God.

Even, for that matter, some kind of Deistic impersonal Oneness-God, or some completely watered down abstract Aquinian “prime mover” God, or whatever --- the moment you move from wide-open generalization to any kind of exactitude, immediately atheism once again makes complete sense.

(2) This is kind of topsy-turvy, in the sense that you’re suggesting that atheism does not make sense because theism, generally speaking, itself does not make sense. In order to suggest that atheism is an invalid position, you’re first and foremost suggesting that theism itself is an incoherent and invalid position.

And you know what? I can live with that. It is entirely possible that if, a century or two down the line, theistic superstitions become relegated to arcane history books, and the word “God” and “theism” will draw blank stares from everyone other than history nerds; should that come to pass, then the term “atheism” itself will become meaningless, absolutely.

Unfortunately we’re not there yet, though. As long as there remain theists, so long atheism remains a valid position. If the moment a theist comes out and declares himself such, you’re willing to jump out and tell him that what he’s saying is incoherent and nonsensical, the atheist will be content to stay silent in the sidelines. Of course, if and when the theist, in response to your ridicule, now moves from the general to the particular, well then, that’s when you GO TO #1.

(3) This third point is merely a variation on #1 and #2 above, but still might be meaningful for the sake of emphasis. Do you believe in the existence of ampembalanxes, 271Days? Yes, or Not-Yes? If the censor arrives at your door with his clipboard and asks you, “Do you tick a “Yes” to the question, ‘Do you believe in ampmbalnxes?’ ”, I guess you won’t agree to tick it, right?

You may either just say “No” (choosing to define “No” in this context as simply “Not-Yes”); or you may just tell him his question is not meaningful without further clarification. The point is, you don’t tick in a “Yes”, you don’t say you believe in said undefined ampembalanxes. I don’t see why the atheist wouldn’t be content to do the same for the God question.

I don’t think the reasonable atheist has any kind of fixation over God. If people around him stopped going on and on and on about unsupported claims about God, the reasonable atheist would be content to not say anything at all. Let theism disappear completely from the face of the earth; and so will atheism.

If what I’ve tried to convey, in some detail, by those three (overlapping) points above, is what you’re saying here, then I guess we’re in agreement. But if you’re somehow trying to claim that while atheism is an incoherent position, but at the same time theism makes sense to you, then I’m afraid your argument is totally mistaken, and I disagree with you in the strongest possible terms, for reasons already discussed very clearly above.

-------

“Forgetting about that book for a second my view is simple. No matter what you posit ie. cosmos, universe, laws, you have already posited awareness first. You can’t get behind awareness. Whatever you say requires awareness first. Awareness is the First Principle. So I think we can logically say Awareness/Being/Spirit/ is God. You don’t have to question if awareness exists. It exists before anything else possibly can.”

-------

I don’t see that, at all.

I think you’re conflating two things here: on one hand, what we know about something; and on the other, how we’ve come to know of it.

Sure, as far as the latter, awareness is indeed the first principle. You cannot become aware of some facet of existence without first having become aware in the first place. That’s tautological, absolutely. First principle, as you say.

However, that most certainly does not apply to the thing we’re becoming aware of. Sure, you need to first to become aware in order to become aware of the universe/cosmos. But that is most certainly not to say that awareness itself must first have existed in order for the universe/cosmos to exist or to have come into being.

You’re basically stating the former position, and ending up implying the latter; and this latter position, when you unwrap your implicit argument and look clearly and closely at it, makes absolutely no sense at all, and in fact is plain wrong.

An analogy may make this obvious point doubly clear. Is it necessary for James’s Adam Dalgliesh to be alive in order for him to finally understand who is (or are) the one (or ones) that did away with the publishing magnate, whose murder he’s been investigating? Absolutely, yes.

But that speaks only to Dalgliesh’s personal understanding, and not the subject of his investigation. Dalgliesh’s life, his consciousness if you will, is necessary to his personal understanding of the perpetrator’s identity, yes, absolutely; but his life and/or his consciousness have nothing at all to do with who the perpetrator(s) actually might be.

Of course, as earlier (that is, as with your argument about the semantics around theism and atheism), if you’re merely making the former argument without in fact meaning to slip in, by implication, the latter argument, then once again I don’t disagree with you.

If all you’re saying is that in order for there to be awareness of the universe/cosmos, there must first be awareness --- and if you just stop there, not making any further implicit claims --- then fine, we’re agreed. But that’s just a blindingly obvious truism, an out-and-out tautology, and I don’t see the point of making that argument at all.

Still, and like I said, if you choose to make that focused argument, entirely pointless though that argument seems to me (“pointless” in that it leads nowhere at all, and is most certainly not a refutation of atheism in any shape or form), then okay, I don’t disagree with you.

Open Thread 41 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread.

Remember, off-topic comments should go in an Open Thread. 

If you don't see a recent comment, or comments, posted, it's because you've failed to follow the above rule. Keep to the subject of a blog post if you leave a comment on it. And if you want to use this blog as a "chat room," do that in an open thread.

As noted before, it's good to have comments in a regular blog post related to its subject, and it's also good to have a place where almost anything goes in regard to sharing ideas, feelings, experiences, and such. That place is an Open Thread.

Leave a comment on this post about anything you want to talk about. Remember that I'm moderating comments, so it could take a while for your comment to be published. Almost every comment submitted to an Open Thread will be approved. Personal attacks on someone are an exception, as is hate speech. Argue with ideas, not insults.

Though I haven't been doing too well on this, I'll try to remember to always have an Open Thread showing in the Recent Posts section in the right sidebar. If one isn't showing, I've added an Open Threads category in, naturally, the Categories section. You can always find an Open Thread that way.

So if you're a believer in some form of religion, mysticism, or spirituality, this is where you can put your "praise God," "praise Guru," or "praise _______" comments.