Church of the Churchless

A compassionate perspective on Sant Mat and the spiritual pursuit

Here's a guest blog post from someone who writes well, thinks clearly, and has an interesting perspective on the spiritual pursuit. Kinder and gentler than my own attitude toward cults and religions. I added a couple of links to the person's post.

Dear Brian,

I was searching the internet for Sant Mat history and I found your blog.

As I was reading it, back and forth, there have been quite a few entries of people over the years, I felt glad that I found some answers that clarified my own thinking.

So then I wanted to , you know, say something too (^__^)

But I couldn’t post my ramblings directly from the comment section of the blog, so I registered with Typepad and tried to sign in, but that didn’t work either, so now I am sending my waffle to you directly.

Maybe you could be so kind and post it on my behalf. If not, no worries.

All I can do is say, Brian, nice of you to be so engaged with the world, I am glad you are lighting up the world you live in and are making a difference. You and me live far apart from one another, another world, another life, another reality and here and now we are. How wonderful. Thank you!

Love and Light. [name not shared at person's request]

Here is what I was going to post:
-------------------------------------------------
Ramblings:

I am from the the SOS [Science of Spirituality] branch, I knew nothing of the other branches of Sant Mat, indeed was unaware of this there is so much more to Sant Mat, it was a good eye opener to get some history on this here blog.

I’ve never really bought into the whole thing but grew up with it. I am doing my own thing though. I am just me. My conclusion after reading many people’s thoughts on this topic for me are:

At least Sant Mat is promoting a peaceful mind. Joy of inner self. Ok, so I think that Rajinder is fully engaged in the guru game, he has too many followers for it to be. I remember when it was Darshan one could still go and personally speak with 'the master’, he was available for talks for long into the morning hours to answer all questions his followers had.

And the Kirpal crowd even more so, small and intimate. I am speaking Westerner here.  Small gatherings. The group recognition one found, the validation through the other followers. It was a time of newness, hope and joy.

And yes, it can become a slog and a chore, but I think that would happen to the person anyway if that’s the blueprint of the person. We are what we are. Sometimes we can change. Often we get stuck. I think we all get drawn to something or other.

I mean look at these most ridiculous cults out there, the gullibility of human beings is just mind boggling. But there is all sorts out there. Before we patronise others' opinion, have we not all fallen for something or other at some point? And do we not understand how when one is convinced of something how one becomes zealous?

So when we meet a zealous person, do we need to throw stones at them?

Anyway the game is (joy, pain, love, hate, devotion, insert your own thing here), and we play it wholeheartedly. And pain is part of how we experience existence. Some people play seriously and for a long time, decades, and it is beautiful to watch, or painful; and then they find: nope, that’s not it.

And go away from it with things learned. Things experienced. Things understood and things misunderstood. And being the person that they are.

Not every human is the same but there are a variety of maybe self fabricated realities, some handed down generations to generation in human history, available to everyone, and we all chose that which is akin to us.

It is already perfect. And yes, the game is a trap, that is what Ram Dass said, and everything is a game, a play, and yes the cult prays on the gullible and enhances guilt. But it also encourages choice of goodness and positivity.

Maybe then we have the choice of recognition. We can try to understand the essence of any of these teachings and live it, understand our motivations and try to be a good person and incidentally Love is a thing. It’s ok to change ones mind, and its ok to be imperfect. Its already perfect.

A lot, I think, is just filler. With intuition and imagination we seem to be able to experience many things in life. Together with other people who experience something similar.

If not a cult, a religion then possessions, or philosophy, or intellectualism, or art, or shamanism, or hedonism, or trance; anything that we use as a template to fill our need, or to fill the void, or just to make us happy for a moment and then relive this moment with the help of that which has found us on our way and offers itself to us  - its good and right and real, and then it becomes a trap if we play it for real, if we play it to the detriment which is addiction. (Ram Dass said)

We can argue till the cows come home about that these are an impossibility these guru teachings, whether these mystics and sages are but power hungry ego trippers with their old old tales and so on, argue about the reality of all these things that are supposedly happen in other spheres, the existence of angels, ghosts, demons, gods, spirits and all that, but there is such a thing as a shared reality.

Many people together experiencing one reality. And it’s real for them. How important is it to be right if we deem it to be wrong?

And yes, it is up to us to question the things that we are told, when we are out of ecstatic state and in the light of day. And then use that which seems right to us at that moment in time. And it is up to us to be open to things that are improbable. And it is also up to us not to judge others too harshly.

I guess that the addiction to the cult is just like any other addiction. There will come a point when we say, yay or nay. And either just be, or move on to fit the raster of existence to our picture of how things should be. Hypnotised, enticed, duped or otherwise.

As Osho said: play it, play it with all your heart.

I think that we need not warn others overly much or with such vehemence, because no one will be swayed who believes, by what they then feel are naysayers and attackers. It is right to point things out, to offer another point of view, like for instance the fact that some of these people selling religion are also selling themselves on top of the religion.

Isn’t it that masters and priests have had their knowledge handed down to them, hearsay from the past, plus their own garnish of experience.  And sometimes people need these other people that point this out to them as a reminder that they can ask questions, but on the whole it seems to me the people have to change their minds from within, by themselves, alone, when they are ready. And some will never be ready till its over.

People can tune into time itself, one hears, but I don’t think this applies to everyone, or else we would all be geniuses and holy men and woman. I think for most of us we are just part of the Mandelbrot pattern of the universe.

It is. And it is already perfect. And isn’t it all exciting really?

I love all these different ideas that are floating around. And one can embrace it all. And the guilt thing, well, my mum made me feel so guilty over everything all my life, really the Master had nothing on me. I don’t think that we can really really overcome our blueprint, (free choice, you’re having a laugh, right?)

But there is so much variety of experiences. And there is so much goodness and Love along the way. And also there is so much pain and anguish of those that are it.

I have seen young, wonderful earnest and committed beauty of belief. Young men and woman, almost aglow with the effort to please the universe, the master and god. Lovingly applied and with such strong energy. And I have seen them fall into the maelstrom of despair. But I have also seen growth and letting go and moving on to the next thing that illuminated these friends from within.

Really, it doesn’t matter what the thing is that has replaced it, the person remains the same.

I love the tarot traditions too, more of an ego tool really, and also I love the ‘energy is a thing’ thing. And mumbo jumbo. What fun!

And biology is amazing too, how everything works in harmony (or doesn’t), how hormones work and how emotion is influenced by it, and one can try to influence ones body and bio rhythms with breathing techniques, pretty cool stuff floating around - and very, very old traditions at that. Yoga. Looking after ones body - well, it’s a good thing!

All the stuff that happens to us humans, to the microbes, to the plants, to the animals, to the planets, to the universe. It’s all pretty awesome.

And also it isn’t. It just is, we are experiencing it, we are judging it, we are playing it. So I hear.

I’m off to work now. I work in care. I found that all people just want Love in the End, we all have a need to be loved. Why not love one another more? People are filling their minds with gurus because they have a need. Let them be. And when they are disillusioned, be kind. It’s a thing: kindness. Do good. Have compassion. Get off the me, me ride. Well, this kinda works for me anyway.

Thanks for listening and thanks for sharing your experiences here on this blog.

Love and Light. Sincerely, the Fool.

How to reply to 14 crazy things religious believers say

Since it's July 4, Independence Day, here in the United States, I thought I'd mark the occasion by composing 14 replies to some crazy stuff religious believers might say. This is in line with my commitment to spiritual independence. And also because, as I said in a post on my HinesSight blog, I'm not feeling good about our political independence these days.

Enjoy...

If someone says, God must exist eternally, because the cosmos couldn't create itself, reply: If nothing created an eternal God, then nothing could have created an eternal cosmos, the difference being that the cosmos clearly is real, and there's no demonstrable evidence of God.

If someone says, Consciousness is immaterial, unrelated to the physical brain, reply: Then if I hit you over the head with this baseball bat, really hard, you'll still be normally conscious. I'm ready to try this experiment after you sign a form releasing me of all liability. Are you up for this?

If someone says, I have complete faith in life after death being better than this life, reply: Then why haven't you committed suicide yet?

If someone says, Atheists are immoral because only God and His messengers know the difference between right and wrong, reply: I double-dare you to tell this to the Dalai Lama, face-to-face, since Buddhism doesn't believe in God.

If someone says, I've had a personal experience of God, reply: And I've had a personal experience of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, so I win, 3 to 1!

If someone says, God has given humans dominion over all creatures great and small, reply: Excellent! Don't you have a dog and cat? I've been having a craving for a canine/feline stew, so crate them up and I won't have to shop for dinner.

If someone says, Anyone who rejects God is doomed to hell, reply: I'm sorry to hear of your impending horrific afterlife. Since there are thousands of different gods, you've rejected all but your single chosen god, so all those other gods are going to be super-pissed at you.

If someone says, My guru is God in Human Form and he deserves my selfless service, reply: What a coincidence! I'm also God in Human Form and have a lot of household chores that need doing. Here's my address. Look forward to seeing you soon. 

If someone says, God is real because I feel blissful when I think of Him, reply: It sounds just like how I feel whenever I think of Trump being convicted of a conspiracy to defraud Congress by plotting the January 6 insurrection, and thereby prevented from ever holding public office again.

If someone says, Words are powerless to describe the Almighty Lord, reply: Then why don't you shut the fuck up.

If someone says, Science is a pitifully poor way to know reality compared to mystical wisdom, reply: I look forward to getting your smartphone, computer, car, television, microwave, and all the other devices you own that are founded on modern science, since you're so dismissive of scientific knowledge. 

If someone says, Atheism is a belief system just as much as religions are, reply: Guess you also consider that people who have no interest in golf are believers in not-playing-golf, even though they never think about golf except when someone asks why they don't play that game. 

If someone says, There are no atheists in foxholes, reply: How do you know? Can you speak the language of foxes?

If someone says, Near-death experiences prove there's life after death, reply: Do you understand the difference between "near-death" and "death"?

Open Thread 43 (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 might be 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. 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.

How the heck could God create humans in her own image?

Today I was planning to write about another subject, but after responding to a commenter who embraces the idea that humans are made in the image of God (who I prefer to view as a nonexistent female, hence this blog post title), I went with that notion.

I'm not sure why Andrew Stephens shared the links in his comment. I'm assuming he uses Musk and Harari as examples of godless secularists, which probably is accurate. Personally, I admire both of these men, being a happy user of Musk's groundbreaking Starlink satellite internet system and having enjoyed each of Harari's brilliantly written books.

Brian, you will be pleased to know that Elon Musk wants to start human trials with Neuralink this year. https://www.wired.com/video/watch/wired-news-and-science-the-science-behind-elon-musks-neuralink-brain-chip

Also, Yuval Noah Harari describes humans as 'hackable animals' and 'useless eaters'. https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/hope-people-believe-in-scientists-instead-of-religious-leaders-yuval-noah-harari-on-covid-19-pandemic-1666859-2020-04-14

Some of us prefer to believe that humans are made in the image of God.

This was my reply.

Andrew, there's also some of us who prefer to believe that humans are made in the image of humans, and that dogs are made in the image of dogs, and that giraffes... you get the idea.

Do you actually think that God, the supposed creator of this vast universe, looks like a human? I realize that this is how God typically is depicted, an old white guy rocking a cool long beard, but this notion seems really dubious.

So what is it about humans that makes you believe we are the image of God? When I see the news each day, this strikes us as exceedingly unlikely. To offer a couple of examples, what is it about Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump you find godlike?

If God is good with invading Ukraine and trying to overturn an election, I'm pleased to be an atheist.

I should also mention that it's as certain as anything in science that humans evolved into our present Homo sapiens species over millions of years. Billions, actually, if we go back to the first cellular life on Earth. Given your theory, at what point did humans become made in the image of God?

Was it only when Homo sapiens appeared on the planet? If so, what changed in the nature of Homo sapiens that wasn't godlike before our species evolved into its current form? Or do you believe other species in our evolutionary family tree, like the Neanderthals, also were made in the image of God?

I'm curious, because this whole "made in the image of God" thing has never made sense to me. It just seems way too anthropomorphic, aside from the fact there's no demonstrable evidence for God. If God exists, a big "if," I don't see how humans would be made in the image of God but not, say, alien beings in a galaxy far, far away.

Or do you consider that all conscious beings are made in the image of God? If so, I'll tell our dog the good news.

Proving how clueless I am about Christian theology, I had to Google "how are humans made in the image of God" before composing this post to learn that the image of God idea comes from Genesis in the Old Testament, so it is a tenet of Christianity and Judaism.

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them (Genesis 1:26-27).

Not surprisingly, there's no agreement about what it means for God to have created humans in her own image. As I said in my reply to Andrew, the Genesis passage predates our modern understanding of evolution, so the idea that God created Adam and Eve is, of course, ridiculous.

However, one website I came across asks, How could humans have evolved and still be in the "Image of God"? I was curious to know the answer, but it wasn't very persuasive.

How might these models of the image of God fit with evolution? At BioLogos we believe that God created humans in biological continuity with all life on earth; the distinct cognitive abilities we have were given to us by God through this gradual process. We also believe that God created us as spiritual beings; God established a unique relationship with humanity by endowing us with his image and calling us to an elevated position within the created order. Science cannot judge our spiritual capacities or divine calling, so there is no contradiction. These various views are affirmed by individuals in the BioLogos community, and in fact the views are not mutually exclusive.

Good try, though this approach goes against the plain language in Genesis that God created humans, not  that God set up a gradual billions-of-years-long process for Darwinian natural selection to come up with us Homo sapiens. 

I took a glance at some other Google search results, but my head started to hurt from reading Christian gobbledygook, so I didn't get very far with this. If you have a greater tolerance for that than I do, some links are here, here, here, here, here, and here. 

Self comes and goes in our lives, though we don't have one

"Self" and "soul" are closely related. Both words point to the notion of something within us, or that is us, which stands apart from the world in a transcendent sense.

What I just wrote points to the absurdity of believing that it is possible or necessary to cultivate our self or soul. 

If self/soul is something within us, then it isn't actually a core reality, since the us it is within encompasses  a lesser self/soul. If self/soul is us, we're already that which we are, so nothing needs to be done.

By contrast Buddhism and Taoism, along with modern neuroscience and certain philosophies, say that our sense of self is an illusion, even though it seems real to us. So does a mirage, but that illusion can be dispelled by coming closer to it.

The problem with the self illusion is that it is tied into our sense of being someone who is aware of objects that are separate from our subjectivity. I wrote about this in a previous post about Jay Garfield's book, "Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self."

(First post about the book is here.)

Garfield speaks about the times our self illusion drops away in a chapter called Immersion -- Selfless spontaneity and skillful living. Some excerpts:

So far, we have been emphasizing the degree to which the illusion of self is natural and almost unavoidable. But this does not mean that we succumb to that illusion at every waking moment. There are times -- perhaps more than we realize -- when we don't represent ourselves as selves at all, when we spontaneously engage with the world in ways that implicate no sense of self.

And indeed, these may be the most pleasant and rewarding moments of our lives.

...In order to get our minds around the experience of selflessness, it is useful to recall the deep connection between the sense of self, the understanding of experience in terms of subject-object duality, and of action in terms of free agency. 

To take ourselves to be selves, as we saw in chapter 1, is to take ourselves to be subjects with a very different mode of existence than that we assign to our objects. It is to regard ourselves as standing against the world rather than as being embedded in it. And it is to take our self-knowledge to be immediate, as opposed to the mediated knowledge we have of our objects.

Each of these modes of self-awareness is an aspect of subject-object duality, of taking experience to be a relation between these two entities of entirely different kinds. That polarity of subject and object in our experience is tantamount to the reification of a self. So, to the extent that we have experiences that are nondual in character, we are experiencing ourselves without positing a self.

We can make the same point about agency. To see ourselves as selves is to see ourselves as free agents acting upon the world, capable of agent causation that initiates actions on motives, actions whose causes lie entirely within us. 

...This is how subject-object duality looks in the domain of action. In perceptual experience the subject is divorced from the world and located as a spectator of it. By analogy, in action the agent is divorced from the casual nexus and acts freely upon it.

Once again, then, to the extent that we experience ourselves as fully immersed, and not as freely initiating actions directed upon objects, our agency is nondual in character: we act without superimposing the self or the duality between self and other implicated by the sense of causally independent agency.

Garfield then relates the Taoist story of Butcher Ding. He was so skilled at cutting up an ox, his knife slices through the animal, dismembering it, without ever needing to be sharpened. Garfield says:

This reminds us of another aspect of the nonduality of our experience. We do not exist outside of our environment, perceiving it as subject, acting upon it as agent; we are nondually immersed in it, with no clear boundary between ourselves and everything else.

This tale might appear to be anti-intellectual, or to suggest a complete abandonment of self-awareness. But that would be to read it incorrectly. The Zhuangzi does not mean to say that in achieving spontaneity, or selflessness, one gives up entirely on the ability to think and to calculate.

As Ding says, "whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I'm doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety..."

I think that this is the most important moment in this parable, although it is easy to overlook. Careful, calculating thought can also, the Zhuangzi suggests, be spontaneous, and can be conducted without positing a self.

We can become absorbed in thought, in solving a problem, or in a complex conversation or debate just as easily as we can become absorbed in carving an ox.

...We hence see that it is not the presence of explicit thought that distinguishes ego-involved experience from ego-less experience. Instead, this distinction reflects the degree of immersion in activity and so the degree to which explicit awareness of oneself as standing outside that activity is diminished.

...When we are completely immersed in activity -- whether the physical activity of carving an ox or the cognitive activity of thinking about how best to carve that ox -- our sense of self, and with it, the experience of the duality of subject and object in experience, vanish. 

There is only the experience of a flow of activity.

Delusion of imagining you're an instrument of the divine will

Here's a right-on illustration by L.K. Hanson. I saw this on a Facebook post yesterday. The person who shared it said that Hanson's work appears in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

When people talk about being a special instrument of the divine will, I'm reminded of Garrison Keillor's description of his fictional Minnesota small town, Lake Wobegon, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”

In the world of fundamentalist religion, all the believers are especially attuned to God's will. Which can't be, given how different religions typically are from each other. But their delusion works for religious believers, since it allows everybody to be above average when it comes to knowing what God wants.

Even crazier, of course, are the smaller number of fundamentalists who go a step further up the above average scale by claiming they actually communicate with God. Or, at the height of grandiosity, purport to actually be one with God in some respects. (Sometimes, in every respect.)

In a blog post called "My strange RSSB initiation story" I related how in my last year of college a bunch of us got involved with a crazed Greek yoga teacher we called Yogiraj who tried to meld East and West by establishing his Christananda Ashram.

After we confronted him about how he'd used his initiation into Radha Soami Satsang Beas by Charan Singh to create his own personal Sant Mat philosophy with him as the guru, he told us that Jesus actually was his best divine friend.

One day, after the store closed, we got up the guts to confront Yogiraj. What a scene it turned out to be. I still remember it well.

We were standing near the back of the store, us six in a semi-circle facing Yogiraj. We told him about our doubts -- that what he was teaching at the ashram had been copied from RSSB and wasn't the real deal.

Yogiraj's reaction was fiercely intense.

Those Greek eyes blazed with anger. "Charan Singh isn't my guru!" he yelled. "Christ is my guru! He talks to me! He tells me what to do!"

That was enough. With those words it all became clear. We knew that Yogiraj went on his own retreats down in his basement, doing god knows what. What it was, we now realized, was him getting face time with Christ.

More accurately, what he imagined to be Christ. (Christians, of course, would disagree with my skepticism.)

Looking back, while we were correct to view Yogiraj as delusional to believe that he was chatting with Jesus Christ, it's strange that we were so unquestioning of the RSSB teaching that the guru was God in Human Form.

Maybe the difference was that Yogiraj flatly stated that Jesus, the supposed Son of God, was telling him what to do, while the RSSB gurus generally have been more reticent to say that they communicate with God -- though they're fine with the RSSB books that say the guru is God's emissary to the world.

Anyway, the Bertrand Russell quote is as apt today as when Russell said it. More so, in fact. These days both Democratic and Republican presidents are fond of ending speeches with "And may God bless these United States of America."

If God exists (a gigantic "if"), wouldn't God bless every country equally? I no longer believe in God, but if I did, I sure wouldn't consider that God is a Christian, Muslim, Jew, or any other religion. It seems clear that religions are made by humans, and God is also, almost certainly.

Awareness doesn't require a subject who is aware

A few days ago I wrote about how there's no need to find your self, because you don't have one. That's the central message of Jay Garfield's book, "Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self."

Sounds good to me. One of my favorite humorous pieces from The Onion is Search For Self Called Off After 38 Years.

Here's how it starts off.

CHICAGO—The longtime search for self conducted by area man Andrew Speth was called off this week, the 38-year-old said Monday.

"I always thought that if I kept searching and exploring, I'd discover who I truly was," said Speth from his Wrigleyville efficiency. "Well, I looked deep into the innermost recesses of my soul, I plumbed the depths of my subconscious, and you know what I found? An empty, windowless room the size of an aircraft hangar. From now on, if anybody needs me, I'll be sprawled out on this couch drinking black-cherry soda and watching Law & Order like everybody else."

"Fuck it," he added.

My sentiments exactly, though I don't like black-cherry soda or Law & Order. 

The passages below from Garfield's book are considerably more philosophical than The Onion piece, but they share the same message. Stop looking for your self. It's an illusion. 

Here Garfield is talking about a minimal approach to the self. By minimal, he means something that isn't a full-blown transcendent self/soul such as the Atman in Hinduism, the whole ground of being thing where the self/soul is a drop of the ocean of Brahman/God.

Instead, the minimal self is essentially the subject of experience, a view held by Galen Strawson, Evan Thompson, and Dan Zahavi. Strawson puts it this way.

I propose to take the unchallengeable, ontologically non-committal notion of the subject of experience in a minimal or 'thin' way... I mean the subject considered specifically as something 'inner', something mental, the 'self', if you like, the inner 'locus' of consciousness considered just as such.

Well, Garfield finds that notion eminently challengeable. Here's how he describes his challenge, which makes a lot of sense to me. Simply put, there can be thoughts without a thinker, perceptions without a perceiver, and awareness without a singular self that is aware.

To say that awareness is necessarily a property of a subject of awareness, while perhaps seeming to be an innocent grammatical point, in fact commits the very fallacy of reification that we addressed in chapter 2. That is the fallacy of going from the mere fact of awareness to the existence of a subject of awareness. 

To draw this inference is kind of like going from the claim that it is raining to the claim that there is something that is the agent of raining, that is doing the raining. To presume that the very fact of awareness entails the existence of a subject -- in the strong sense that Strawson and other friends of the self have in mind -- is to assume that which is to be proven, viz., that awareness presupposes a self. 

The parallel to the failure of Descartes's cogito argument in which he goes from the mere fact of thinking to the existence of a substantial subject of thought is striking.

...Awareness is most plausibly an umbrella property that reflects an extremely complex set of underlying properties and relations. If this is the case, awareness can be present -- a person can be aware -- without there being any single thing that is aware, just as a nation or corporation can act without there being a singular entity that performs that action.

Now, we might say that if there is awareness, something is aware, e.g., a person, just as we can say that when a corporation sells a product, something, e.g., the corporation, is the seller. But it is plain in that case that we do not thereby implicate a localizable single thing that is a subject or an agent, only a broad set of processes and events.

So even if we grant that awareness always has a subject-object structure, the defender of the reality of the self is not entitled to the premise that the subject is singular, and so cannot presume that it is a self.

But there is also a second, deeper problem with this argument.

The first premise, as we have just noted, presupposes that awareness must have a subject-object structure. We granted that premise for the sake of argument, and we saw that even then we do not get a good argument for the reality of a self. But we can also question the presupposition.

The idea that awareness always has a subject-object structure -- with a subject characterized by a kind of interiority, as opposed to the exterior object that is somehow brought into awareness in that interior space -- might well be an illusion of consciousness.

That is, it might be a fabrication, not a basic reality.

To put the point more precisely, the conviction that awareness is fundamentally a relation between an independent subject and a substantially distinct object may be the result of a cognitive illusion, just as the conviction that we are selves is not the consequence of looking inside and simply finding a self, but of cognitive illusion.

...It makes a great deal of biological, psychological, and ecological sense instead to think of awareness as a constant modulation of the open interaction between an organism and its environment, of the adjustment of the state of the organism and attunement of the posture and goals of the organism as its senses and movements interact with the world it inhabits.

In other words, we can think of awareness as a mode of embedding of the organism in its world, instead of the relation between an interior subject and an exterior object, even if that is how it appears to us in introspection.

To think of awareness in this way is to take seriously the idea that we don't stand against the world as subjects that detect its properties or agents that act on it, but instead are part of the world, and that awareness is more an attunement to our environment than a recording in our minds of what is going on outside.

This approach to cognition, which is called the "embedded, embodied, enactive" model of cognition, is gaining wide acceptance among philosophers and cognitive scientists.

The view that introspection may be wildly deceptive, called "illusionism," is also gaining currency in the philosophy of mind today, inspired in part by the analysis of human existence developed by twentieth- and twenty-first-century existential phenomenologists.

But it is very old in India, and underlies the idea of the nonduality of consciousness articulated both in the Vedanta school and in Buddhism. Philosophers in each of these traditions argued that we are subject to pervasive confusion not only regarding the external world, but also regarding our own nature and regarding the structure of our experience.

So we shold treat Strawson's first premise with suspicion. This suspicion, we have seen, is justified for two reasons: first, our existence may well be that of a complex set of subjective processes as opposed to that of a single self; second, the subject-object structure of awareness that he takes for granted may well be illusory.

Relax: no need to find your self, because you don't have one

I've become a fan of easygoing approaches to spirituality. That's one reason I enjoy Taoism so much. The Taoists I've known don't look upon life very seriously. Neither do many Buddhists.

A common denominator of Taoism and Buddhism is that neither philosophy assumes that we have a self or soul. Meaning, they're selfless. 

This takes the pressure off of goals such as self-realization, self-awareness, knowing one's self, and so on. Those sorts of practices still can be pursued, but with the understanding that there's no such thing as an unchanging self or soul lurking within us. Just substitute "person" for "self."

No-self philosophies, or religions if you like, are very different from self-centered philosophies/religions such as Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. The latter are seriously concerned with what happens to one's immortal soul.

The former say, "What soul? What self? We humans are like everything else that's alive in the world -- ever-changing, interdependent, part and parcel of all that surrounds us, and indeed is us."

Having been a believer for 35 years in an Eastern philosophy that taught we have, or are, a soul, and that the goal of life was to merge one's soul with God insofar as this is possible, I'm able to contrast that point of view with my current embrace of Taoism and non-religious Buddhism.

I'm a lot more relaxed now in my meditation. I no longer try to leave this world behind in hopes of finding a better supernatural reality, but instead simply try to be more aware of what is right here, right now, both inside and outside of me.

This image comes to mind. 

No-self meditators are akin to people lounging on a beach, cool drink in hand, lounging under an umbrella, idly feeling the sand move beneath their toes, watching the sun go down over the ocean. Self-centered meditators are akin to people who make sure they complete an intense workout every day in the hotel exercise room even though they're supposedly on a vacation.

After hearing Jay Garfield converse with Sam Harris for 90 minutes or so on Harris' Waking Up iPhone app, I bought Garfield's book, "Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self." It's an enjoyable read, though a bit philosophically dense in places.

(Garfield is a Professor of Philosophy, Logic, and Buddhist Studies at Smith College and a visiting professor of Buddhist philosophy at Harvard Divinity School.)

I've read four of the ten chapters, so have a way to go in the book. Garfield's Big Idea is that while we are not selves, we are persons. OK, that may seem obvious to those who, like me, embrace science, dislike religion, and don't believe in a soul. But the notion of a self is tough to break away from entirely.

Garfield writes:

In order to be successful, these no-self positions must show both that the idea of the self is incoherent and that everything that the self is meant to explain can be explained in its absence. That is, the proponent of the no-self view must show that everything that the self is meant to explain can actually be accomplished by a person, a socially embedded human being with no self.

In an early chapter, the writings of Candrakirti, a Buddhist who lived in 600-650 CE, are discussed. Garfield says:

Candrakirti was writing in an Indian context. So, the view of the self that he took as the object of negation in his argument (an argument we will explore in chapter 2) is the view that to be a sentient being is to be an atman. This term is usually and appropriately translated into English as self or soul. The idea that the atman lies at the core of our being is ubiquitous in orthodox Indian philosophy, and it was a principal target of Buddhist critique.

In the Vedas, and in particular, the Upanisads -- the texts that ground many of the orthodox Indian philosophical schools -- it is characterized as unitary, as the witness of all that we perceive, as the agent of our actions, and as the enjoyer of our aesthetic experience. It is regarded as that which is always the subject, never the object; and as that which persists through life despite changes in body and mind, and which even persists beyond death and in transmigration.

Sounds good, right? I certainly thought so for 35 years.

But gradually I came to realize that almost certainly I didn't have a self or soul, and that was perfectly fine with me. This realization came about through a variety of means: daily meditation, Buddhist literature, a whole lot of books about modern neuroscience, and simply being mindful of my everyday experience. 

Garfield also uses Western philosophers to buttress the contention of no-self found in Buddhism. This quote from David Hume was familiar to me, but a pleasure to re-read.

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without perception, and I never can observe anything but the perception.

A comment from Garfield follows that quote.

Moreover, he [Hume] points out, the collection that we find is not constant, but is always changing. There is nothing permanent in our experience.

If this is so, Hume argues, when we use the word self, there is nothing to which it refers: we are nothing more than bundles of psychophysical processes -- changing from moment to moment -- who imagine ourselves to be more than that.

Note, once again, this is not the absurd claim that we don't exist, but rather the claim that the way we exist -- as persons -- is not the way that we normally take ourselves to exist -- as selves. 

I'll have more to say about this illusion of the self as I read more of "Losing Ourselves."

I respond to a B.S. comment about my 52 years of meditation

UPDATE: Spence Tepper has apologized to me for his ridiculous attempt to claim that my 35 years of daily meditation while a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, usually for several hours a day, amounted to "nothing." Good for Spence. He recognized how wrong he was.

Hopefully from now on he will realize that my approach to meditation is the wise one: don't challenge someone's personal experience in meditation, but DO challenge any claim that this experience proves the existence of a supernatural realm beyond the physical.

Spence doesn't like my skepticism toward his brand of religious fundamentalism. I've pointed out to him that his proselytizing comments are being left on a Church of the Churchless blog, not a Church of the Churched blog. For 18 years I've criticized religious fundamentalists who want others to believe in their dogma without any evidence. I sure won't stop now.

One of the joys, if that's the right word, of having a churchless blog for the past 18 years is that I get a lot of first hand experience responding to religious fundamentalists who, for reasons known only to them, like to leave judgmental comments on a blog devoted to spiritual independence.

Here's a latest example, a comment from Spence Tepper today which was so ridiculous, I figured it deserved to be elevated to a blog post so its absurdity could be on fuller display. My responses to Tepper are in bold italics. 

Hi Brian Ji
You wrote
"Hope this clarifies things. Demanding proof of someone who, say, claims to have experienced the divine sound and light that creates and sustains the cosmos is fully warranted."

Exactly. And that's why there is the meditation.

Had you conducted the practice with any discipline at all you would have your own evidence first hand.

Wrong assumption #1. I was initiated by Charan Singh into the practice of meditation as taught by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) in 1971, after first learning to meditate from a yoga teacher while in college.

I diligently followed the RSSB meditation instructions for 35 years. Never missed a day of meditation. Mostly I meditated for 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours a day. When I was working and had a young child, it was more difficult to do the prescribed 2 1/2 hours. So I had plenty of discipline in my meditation. You shouldn't make assumptions about someone else's meditation experience.

Also, hope you realize that RSSB stresses that initiates shouldn't talk about their meditation experiences. I'm OK with this being done, since I've done it myself. But you, like me, are breaking a RSSB rule.

You could have said," Yes, I saw the blinding light and have been able to reproduce it at will. Then I saw the sun, then the moon. I'm convinced it is simply the brain gaining access to signal directly outside the visual nervous system....but why the sun, why the moon? I'm still investigating to try to see where these images may have come from. They are far more intense than memory, especially when I can take time to look at them, even approach them... "

You could have developed a real theory around real information.

I did develop a real theory around real information. Based on my 35 years of RSSB meditation experience, and countless (almost) conversations with other members of RSSB about meditation, I've come to the conclusion that while some people report seeing scenes of supernatural regions of existence beyond the physical, almost certainly these don't reflect an objective reality but rather are subjective emanations of their brains, since there is no demonstrable evidence of those supernatural regions other than subjective reports.

Now all you have is the second hand evidence of the founders of every religion. And of every mystic who ever lived and documented what they went through.

Utterly false statement. There are lots of different approaches to meditation. What I experienced during my 35 years of RSSB meditation was very close to, if not exactly, how Buddhist and Taoist teachings describe meditation. I felt my self slipping away, probably because I don't have or am a self. I felt a sense of unity with all things, probably because everything is interdependent. Mystics have all sorts of different experiences. I don't really consider myself a mystic, but I've certainly had mystical experiences that are very difficult to describe in words.

Yes it evidence. And yes it deserves to be evaluated. But the only way to do this objectively is create the conditions to recreate the experience in your own lab and then you may test it as millions of others have done and are doing every day, with any way you like, including testing your own hypothesis about the causes.

You failed to do this.

Not true. I conducted the experiment of meditation, RSSB style, for 35 years. I've written a lot on this blog about what I found. Use the search box in the right sidebar to find those posts. Your fundamentalist attitude prevents you from realizing that different people can meditate and have very different meditation experiences. There isn't one right way to meditate, and there isn't one genuine meditation experience. If you believe there is, you're hugely mistaken about what meditation is all about. 

Let me be more pointed, Brian Ji.

You didn't have to reproduce the entire journey.

Again, you're assuming there's only one journey people take in meditation. Actually, people have all kinds of different journeys. 

Any part of it would have been fine. But what you report is zero.

Not at all. Every day I meditate, continuing to the present -- today -- I have a decidedly-nonzero meditation experience. Just because it isn't your experience doesn't make it any less meaningful or valid for me. 

That's practically impossible.

It's very possible. You should get out more and talk with other people about their meditation experiences. Since I did so much public speaking for RSSB, wrote three books on behalf of RSSB, and was the secretary of our local group for many years, as noted above I've talked with lots of people about meditation. Again, a Buddhist or Taoist would find my meditation experiences perfectly compatible with their spiritual outlook.

Anyone with a minimum of self-discipline can conduct any of a variety of meditation methods and at least watch their thoughts.

I've done that, and much more, for 52 years of daily meditation. It's astounding how you believe that, without ever having met me or knowing me in person, somehow you believe that you're privy to what I've experienced in meditation. How do you think you know this? Obviously it isn't possible. 

They could at least report what was happening to their body as they did so... And as they worked to gain some control, some level of mastery.

Geez, unbelievable. All of your own meditation sure hasn't affected the Judgmental part of your brain. I could ask, "Spence, how could you do so much meditation and end up such a religious fundamentalist with an exaggerated sense of your own divinity?" Oops, looks like I did just ask that.

They could at least notice the change in their thinking during meditation. And even learn how their brain reacts to different thoughts, how simran works, how distraction alters your level of consciousness wakefulness, and how focus raises it to observe more thoughts, their seeds and their destination all at the same time.

Been there. Done that. For 52 years.

But you report zero.

Wrong.

Not only does that make no sense at all. It is downright suspicious.

And not in any way scientific.

So there is no point in leaping to conclusions when you have not made the least effort to note just exactly what happened and to report it here for peer review. Then we can discuss what is going on within.

Why? I'm preaching the gospel of spiritual independence on this blog. I don't view meditation the way you do, as a way of demonstrating how evolved meditation has made me. I see meditation as a form of mental exercise and relaxation, in much the same way I view physical exercise. Tai Chi helps me understand what my body can do. Meditation helps me realize what my mind can do.  

As to what others report, they are reporting what happened to them, not for you to take second hand, but to note as their guide, testable reference points. Your own experience from your own effort is all that matters.

Hey, I agree with your last sentence. So why did you write this lengthy comment, most of which goes against what you just said?

The other testimony is meaningless to you because clearly you didn't take it seriously. Sorry to be so blunt.

I'm sorry to be so blunt in return, but you're totally wrong.

But you are being less than candd to suggest that 35 years x 365 days x 2.5 hours was spent entirely unconscious.

Wrong again. Amazing how many times you can be wrong in one blog post comment. I was awake and aware for virtually every moment in my 52 years of daily meditation. Sure, occasionally I fell asleep, but that was fairly rare.

31, 937.5 hours...

That's not meditation. It's sleep.

And what you just said isn't an intelligent observation. It's bullshit. 

Science delivers accurate predictions. Religion doesn't.

Yay, me! I finally finished reading Johnjoe McFadden's book, "Life is Simple: How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe." 

It took me longer than expected, because I didn't find McFadden's lengthy descriptions of the life and times of historical figures in science, starting with the ancient Greeks, to be all that interesting. I guess he felt he needed to do that in order to buttress his case for how science came to embrace the adage of William of Occam: "Entities should not be multiplied without necessity."

This doesn't mean that the world is simple, just that in attempting to understand the world, our models of reality should be as simple as possible -- which in some cases, could mean being quite complex, if reality is complex.

I liked the end of the book more than the rest of it. That's where McFadden discusses modern science such as relativity theory and quantum mechanics. I'll probably write another blog post or two on those subjects.

Here's excerpts from a section called The simple truth? 

I like McFadden's skepticism about ever knowing ultimate truth. "Ultimate reality" has always been a term that appealed to me. But his argument below about the apparent impossiblity of ever being able to know that we've contacted ultimate truth makes sense to me.

According to postmodernists, science merely takes its place alongside other belief systems such as religion, mysticism, witchcraft, folk beliefs, astrology, homeopathy or the paranormal. Each has, they claim, its own truths and none can claim any monopoly on the truth.

...William of Occam would surely have disagreed. He insisted that there was a stark difference between science and religion, as science is based on reason, religion is based on faith. Yet the postmodernists disagree.

Many of their arguments are heavily influenced by the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951).

...In 1921, Wittgenstein published his hugely influential Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in which he examined the relationship between language and reality and, at this stage of his career, appears to accept (philosophers still argue about the meaning of much of Wittgenstein's philosophical statements) that science can make statements about the world that are verifiably true.

Thirty years later, in his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein seems to abandon the quest to discover how language represents the world and instead argues that there are only different ways of using language or 'language games', whose meaning is derived solely from their use.

This argument seems to have much in common with William of Occam's nominalist insistence that words refer to ideas in our heads, rather than universals or essences that exist in the world.

...There is, however, another postmodernist insight that is both true and crucial to the role of Occam's razor, though it does not lead down the path taken by the postmodernists. Truth really is, as they argue, unknowable. 

This is something that is shocking even to scientists who are generally taught that science is an inexorable march towards the truth.

Imagine that science were one day to attain the blissful state of knowing everything, i.e. 'the truth'. How would we know? Knowledge of ultimate truth presupposes some means of peeking behind the curtain of evidence provided by our senses or scientific instruments to see the 'real' world rather than the one viewed through our senses or scientific instruments.

It supposes that there is some knowable, complete, and perfect world, a world of idealised Platonic forms, the very view of the world Occam disproved so many centuries ago. 

If like Occam we reject this view of the world we have to rely instead on our sensory inputs and a potentially infinite variety of models of the cosmos that could fit that data and explain our place in it. Yet that does not mean, as the postmodernists argue, that all models are equal.

When drawing up a horoscope, today's astrologers do not consult accounts of the moodiness of the god Mars or the lustful habits of Jupiter. They instead turn to planetary tables based on Kepler's simple model of the solar system.

Believers in the paranormal organise their meetings by phone and email, not telepathy; and, if the meetings are overseas, they fly by plane, not levitation.

Science may be a language game or model but, unlike the vast majority of models, from alchemy to feng shui, homeopathy and the indecipherable postmodernist tracts that dismiss science, its models actually work because they are simple and thereby deliver accurate predictions.