Church of the Churchless

Feeling religiously special can be enjoyable, but it's dangerous

Before I criticize a comment on a recent blog post by Spence Tepper, a frequenter commenter on this blog, I want to start off on a warmer note.

I've never met Tepper in person, but I like him through his words. He's intelligent, a good writer, and often makes a good case for his beliefs -- which are more sympathetic toward the supernatural and mystical experience than my own, but since I used to believe in much the same way he does, I understand where he is coming from.

It's good to have a mixture of religious believers and religious skeptics commenting on this blog. Definitely makes for more entertaining comment discussions than if everyone had the same views. 

So when I criticize Tepper's perspective on how the brain works, I'm not judging him. As I often note on this blog, if people who embrace God and supernatural entities simply said, "This is what I believe," I'd have little or no problem with that, since I used to believe the same thing.

But when statements of facts are made without evidence to make them up, or when someone changes the subject when they're pressed to provide evidence about an assertion about our shared objective reality (as opposed to their personal subjective reality), then I feel a duty to challenge that person.

Here's what Tepper said that kicked off what I view as a defense of objective truth as currently understood by modern neuroscience.

And if we can go to that place of awareness within ourselves free of filters, a place where filtering and conceptual reconstruction do not function, who knows what we may experience? Maybe God? But no label would work there. Maybe reality directly. Maybe pure experience of the moment. Maybe the moment is eternity.

Those four "maybe's" don't bother me much. What caught my eye was the first sentence, an assertion that awareness can be free of filters and concepts. This simply isn't true. Again, using "true" as meaning the best understanding of neuroscience at this moment in 2023.

Andy Clark, a highly experienced and respected professor of cognitive philosophy puts it this way in his book, The Experience Machine, which I've been writing posts about recently. Clark buttresses his 228 page book with many references to neuroscientific research.

What we see, hear, and feel -- even when everything is working exactly as it should -- is never a direct reflection of the state of our own body or the wider world. Instead, the world and body we experience is always part construct: a product of your conscious and nonconscious predictions.

So there's no doubt that Spence Tepper was wrong when he claimed that awareness can be free of filters and concepts. But you might be thinking, what's the big deal with him being wrong? Here's my answer.

Tepper shared some later comments about how meditation changes the brain. Sure, it does. But neither meditation nor any other sort of spiritual practice can completely change the nature of the brain. Every experience changes the brain, not just meditation. Yet Tepper is claiming a sort of special superiority in religious experience that I find very troubling. That attitude leads to dogma and prejudice.

There's a real danger when people believe they have a special relationship with reality or God that other people lack. That's what Tepper was promulgating, and I consider that this goes against the laudable belief in equality that should be the hallmark of human culture.

By "equality," I mean that without exception, each of the eight billion humans has the same basic constituents of life. Yes, our bodies and brains differ. Some people have highly functioning brains and bodies; other people have problems with how their brain or body functions.

But we don't think that Albert Einstein had a completely different brain than anyone else. Nor do we think that a highly skilled runner who can complete a marathon in record-breaking time has a completely different body than anyone else.

And unless we're deeply infected with a religion virus, we don't assume that some people have an extra supernatural addition to their being that allows them to perceive reality from a higher perspective that us ordinary people lack.

Yet that's what Spence Tepper was assuming, apparently about himself, when he said that awareness can function without filters or concepts, and that maybe, just maybe, this special capacity allows someone with that sort of awareness to know God.

Let's consider how unlikely this is.

For in order what Tepper said to be true, the foundations of modern science would need to be overthrown. Given what neuroscience understands about experience always, not sometimes, being filtered through a mesh of our past experiences and present predictions, pure awareness of the sort claimed by Tepper would have to be supernatural, non-physical. 

And there's simply no evidence of this. Sure, there's lots of talk about consciousness being separable from the body and brain, but no proof of this.

Lastly, it is false that meditation or any other practice can prevent nonconscious influences from affecting how we perceive the world, even if it is possible to become more aware of conscious influences. Clark writes:

Expectations, many of them unconscious, are always at work as our brains construct our experiences. Such effects are inevitable and can be extremely helpful. 

This is obvious. What kind of life would we have if all we possessed was the sort of unfiltered non-conceptual awareness that Tepper not only wrongly believes exists, but is desirable? 

You wouldn't recognize a loved one, because you'd have no concept of "this is my spouse" (or child, or friend, or whoever). You wouldn't be able to drive a car or use any sort of device, because you'd have no concept of what it was for or how it worked. You wouldn't have any sense of the past or future, since those require memory or anticipation, both of which involve concepts.

But religious believers don't think much about the implications of their crazy beliefs. Because those beliefs cause them to feel special, and superior to the poor unenlightened humans lacking their divinely inspired understanding, religions prosper by setting themselves up as places where ordinary people are transformed into Very Special People.

This isn't all that different from forms of prejudice that we're all familiar with. Which is why religiosity is so dangerous. Instead of embracing the truth that all humans are part of the same Homo sapiens family, faiths founded on supernatural myths foster division in much the same way that African-Americans have been viewed as inferior.

Whenever certain types of people are viewed as inherently different than other types, prejudice and discrimination have a fertile field to grow in. That's why I feel so strongly that religious beliefs which assume some humans have a special relationship with God or the supernatural, while other humans don't, are so dangerous.

Bluntly put, I don't see myself as anything special, because that's the truth. Spence Tepper does see himself as possessing special mystical knowledge, and almost certainly that isn't true. Again, I don't think Tepper is a bad person for feeling this way. I used to feel that way myself.

I just view Tepper as having bought into a perspective where he, and I gather others like him, have a superior way of knowing that's off limits to the rest of us. But maybe I'm wrong about this.

I'll change my mind if Tepper states that his brain and awareness are just like everybody else's: imperfect ways of understanding reality that nonetheless do a pretty damn good job of letting us live life pleasantly most of the time without anything supernatural about them.

How the brain makes predictions come true

Before discussing the subject that's the title of this post - how the brain makes predictions come true -- I'll shoehorn in a related personal story about my check ordering saga.

Recently Columbia Bank, which my wife and I use for a checking account, was bought by Umpqua Bank. For many years I've ordered checks for our Columbia Bank account when the supply ran low. Last month was the first time I'd ordered checks with Umpqua Bank on them.

Balancing our checkbook about a week ago, I noticed that we'd been charged on May 17 for the cost of mailing the Umpqua Bank checks I'd ordered. That got me to wondering why the checks hadn't arrived.

After that bit of wondering, every time I opened our mailbox I'd look to see if the checks had been delivered. But day after day, no checks. When May became June, I started to worry that the checks had been lost. 

Yesterday I decided to contact the web site that produces and mails checks. Looking for a way to do this, I noticed a FAQ (frequently asked questions) page. One question was about what to do if a check order hasn't arrived. 

The advice was to log in to your account, then click on an "order status" link. I did that. And was surprised to find that the checks had been delivered. Which I immediately remembered had happened. 

So how is it that I kept looking in our mail for checks that were sitting in a drawer in our house? Here's my theory. As noted in my first two posts about Andy Clark's book, The Experience Machine, modern neuroscience says that the human brain is constantly making predictions about the world.

(See here and here.)

Thus rather than perception being an objective mirror of the outside world, the brain is using past experience to predict what is most likely to appear in a given situation. Discrepancies between that expectation and what is actually perceived are errors that, ideally, lead us to fashion a more accurate understanding of what's there.

In my case, I didn't have any experience ordering checks with Umpqua Bank on them. So even though all of my Columbia Bank orders had arrived without a problem, my brain wasn't as confident about the May check order.

When I saw the charge for the checks on our bank statement, a sense of "something is wrong" popped into my head. I didn't think that thought. It just appeared in my mind with a convincing sense of rightness. 

From that point on, "something is wrong" formed the prediction in my brain when I opened our mailbox. Every day no checks were there, that strengthened the prediction. Of course, the problem was that there actually wasn't a problem. 

But I needed an external push to realize that -- the FAQ about not getting a check order. For my brain was in a closed loop founded on a basic error: that the checks hadn't arrived. Sure, most people reading this are probably thinking, "You're a fool for not looking in the drawer."

No argument there. However, I never thought to look in the drawer where we keep blank checks because my brain was saying that the checks hadn't arrived with a sense of certainty that resulted in me looking for the checks every day we got mail.

Bottom line: the brain works in mysterious ways.

Regarding how the brain makes predictions come true, here's how Andy Clark describes the basic process. It shows how perception and action are much the same, since each uses prediction and error correction to do their job.

To see how this works consider a simple action such as turning my head to see the seagulls out of my office window.

...The sound of the gulls, and the fact that I'm now looking for a nice example of prediction-based action control, makes me want to look out the window and see the gulls. I do so.

In predictive processing terms, what happened is this. The sound of the gulls, and my need for a familiar example, made me strongly predict looking toward the gulls. The best way to get rid of the resulting prediction errors (which were many, since I was still actually looking at my busy computer screen) was to turn my head just so and move my eyes just the right amount. 

...The deep unity (under predictive processing) of perception and action should now be apparent. There are two different, but equally effective, ways to minimize prediction errors during our encounters with the world.

The first is by using prediction errors to help us discover the best guess about how things are out there in the world. But the second is to act so as to make the world fit some of our predictions. Instead of finding the prediction that best fits the sensory evidence (perception), you now find or create the sensory evidence that best fits the prediction.

ln the case of my supposedly missing checks, my brain initially had made a prediction that the checks hadn't been delivered after I noticed that our account had been charged for them. Yes, that prediction was wrong, since the checks had been delivered and were sitting in a drawer.

But it felt right.

And every day I opened our mailbox and saw no checks, that perception made the prediction seem even more right. It was action that corrected the errors being made. Once I realized that the checks had been delivered, and that I'd forgotten putting them in the drawer, I walked to the drawer, opened it, and picked up the packet of Umpqua Bank checks.

Now the new prediction -- the checks were in my possession -- had been confirmed with no errors.

As I get deeper into The Experience Machine, I'm learning some ways we can improve our relationship with the world and ourselves. That will be the focus of my next post about the book, which I'm enjoying a lot.

Here's a fresh way of looking upon attention

I'm continuing to read and enjoy Andy Clark's The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality. It's one of the best books about modern neuroscience that I've ever read, and believe me, I've read a lot of them.

My first post about the book laid a foundation for these subsequent posts, as I get deeper into The Experience Machine. This is a one sentence summary of the Big Idea discussed in the book -- which makes a heck of a lot of sense.

Predictions and prediction errors are increasingly recognized as the core currency of the human brain, and it is in their shifting balances that all human experience takes shape.

In a "Psychiatry and Neurology" chapter, Clark talks about prediction errors. Those are the difference between what the brain expects to perceive, given sensory inputs and prior experience, versus what is actually perceived.

Ideally those errors are reduced as we learn more about the slice of reality we're attending to.

But sometimes they aren't, which can create problems for us, big or small. Here's how Clark explains this. It won't be completely understandable, since I'm just sharing small excerpts from his book, but you should get the gist of his message.

Varying estimates of precision alter patterns of post-synaptic influence and so determine what (right here, right now) to rely on and what to ignore. This is also the way brains balance the influence of sensory evidence against predictions.

In other words, precision variations control which bits of what we know and what we sense will be most influential, moment by moment, in bringing about further processing and actions. Expressed like that, the intimacy of precision and attention is apparent. 

Precision variation is what attention (a useful but somewhat nebulous concept) really is.

For example, suppose I want to find a needle recently dropped in a bed of hay. According to predictive processing, my brain ups the precision-weighting on specific aspects of the visual information that would indicate a small silvery object, thereby increasing my chances of success.

That's what attention, if these accounts are correct, really is -- attention is the brain adjusting its precision-weightings as we go about our daily tasks, using knowledge and sensing to their best effect. By attending correctly, I become better able to spot and respond to whatever matters most for the task I am trying to perform.

Precision estimation is thus the heart and soul of flexible, fluid intelligence. 

But what happens when precision estimations misfire? This would skew the impact of different bits of sensory evidence, and of different predictions. Precision estimation is the brain's way of telling itself where, and by how much, to place its bets.

When this goes wrong, our brains will bet badly; they will misestimate what to take seriously and what not to take seriously, thereby generating false or misleading experiences. This is exactly what seems to be happening with functional disorders. In these cases, unwilled misallocations of precision act as self-fulfilling prophecies.

Predictions of pain or impairment become highly overweighted, and those predictions overwhelm the actual sensory evidence, forcing experience to conform to our own hidden but misplaced expectations.

I found examples of this to be fascinating.

As I said in my first post about the book, it's going too far to say that this proves that we create our own reality. However, our brains definitely shape our experience of reality, sometimes in disturbing ways. "Functional" here means that there is a loss of function without evidence of systemic, or structural, damage of disease.

There is good evidence that misfiring precision assignments (unusual patterns of attention) play a role in many, perhaps all, functional neurological disorders. For example, simply distracting the sufferer by making them direct their attention elsewhere often makes functional (but not structural) tremors vanish. 

...This creates a version of the famous "refrigerator light illusion." You might infer that your fridge light is constantly on just because the light is on every time you look inside. But actually it is the act of looking (opening the door) that turns on the light.

Similarly, you might believe you have a near-constant tremor because the tremor is always there when you pay attention to it. But if the tremor is actually in whole or in part the result of the process of "predicting and attending" itself, that assumption may be wildly wrong.

...Strongly anticipating pain, numbness, weakness, or other symptoms alters patterns of attention (precision-weightings) in ways that can either amplify or entirely generate the experience -- which then seems to confirm those very expectations. 

...To make sense of these self-constructed feelings of pain, numbness, weakness, or paralysis, sufferers may start to suspect deep hidden causes -- such as persistent hidden illness. These new beliefs then further reinforce the expectations of those symptoms, reinforcing the cycles of aberrant attention.

...This is rather like the case of the performer with stage fright whose true abilities are masked by their own mounting expectations of failure. The circularity is daunting. Every new instance of stage fright confirms the expectations of failure, and those expectations ensure that the instances of failure accumulate.

Recognizing this circularity is, however, often the first step in breaking the cycle, as we'll see later when looking at ways to "hack" our own predictive brains. 

For lots of people, pain is an unpleasant part of their daily life. Clark speaks about pain in this chapter.

Individuals will differ in how they assign precision to bodily signals, including those associated with pain and disability. Moreover, living with a condition for a long time enables idiosyncratic expectations (for example, about severity in different contexts) to arise and become ingrained.

This means that even where there is some standard structural cause such as a bulging or herniated disc in someone with back pain, the way we experience our symptoms may over time come to involve large doses of mindset and expectation.

In a certain sense, chronic pain at that point is perhaps best considered not so much as a symptom, but as the disease itself -- the very state that needed to be addressed. 

...It shows us exactly why, as leading pain theorist Mick Thacker puts it, we need to move away from thinking of pain as a simple sensation, a direct signal of damage or potential damage, to a view of pain as a perception.

Like all perceptions, it takes shape only thanks to the precision-weighted interaction of predictions and current bodily signals. It is that process of combination that provides the wiggle room that enables persistent pain or impairment without damage, threat, or disease.

This is not to say that everything will respond to changes in expectations. It won't. But attention and expectation are key players in the construction of all our experiences of health and illness, and this is true even when standard structural causes (damage or disease) are present.

Our brains don't see reality as it is, but as it's predicted to be

My new favorite book talks about a fascinating subject that I've read about before, but never so clearly and in so much depth as Andy Clark's The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality.

Now, before New Age types get all excited about how the human mind creates its own reality, this definitely isn't what Clark, a professor of cognitive philosophy, is describing. But it is true that each of us fashions our view of reality to some extent in accord with our previous experiences.

Clark starts off by relating a story of how he woke up to the sound of bird noises. Except, he soon realized that his surroundings were perfectly quiet. What had happened was that his partner had gotten a smartphone app that plays a birdsong rather than a traditional alarm.

After hearing the birdsong app for several days, Clark's brain had played a trick on him. Here's how he describes the trick, followed by a summary of his book's thesis.

I now find that I quite often awake well in advance of the start of the actual alarm, already seeming to hear the faint onset of those prerecorded chirps. These are genuine auditory hallucinations, caused by my new, strong expectation of waking to the subtle sound of the birds.

There is probably nothing sinister about my proneness to this hallucination. It has long been known that hallucinations, both auditory and visual, can be quite easily induced by the right kind of training. 

But these, as well as a myriad of other intriguing phenomena, are lately falling into place of signs of something much larger -- something that lies at the very heart of all human experience. The idea (the main topic of this book) is that human brains are prediction machines.

They are evolved organs that build and rebuild experiences from shifting mixtures of expectation and actual sensory evidence. According to that picture, my own unconscious predictions about what I was likely to be hearing as I awoke pulled my perceptual experience briefly in that direction, creating a short-lived hallucination that was soon corrected as more information flowed in through my senses.

That new information (signifying the lack of birdsong) generated "prediction error signals" and these -- on this occasion at least -- were all it took to bring my experience back into line with reality. The hallucination gave way to a clear experience of a silent room.

But in other cases, as we'll see, mistaken predictions can become entrenched and contact with reality (itself a complex and vexed notion) harder to achieve. Even when there are no mistakes involved, and we are seeing things "as they are," our brain's predictions are still playing a central role.

Predictions and prediction errors are increasingly recognized as the core currency of the human brain, and it is in their shifting balances that all human experience takes shape.

This book is about those balances and an emerging science that turns much of what we thought we knew about perceiving our worlds upside down. According to that science, the brain is constantly trying to guess how things in the world (and our own body) are most likely to be, given what has been learned from previous encounters.

Everything that I see, hear, touch, and feel -- so this new science suggests -- reflects hidden wells of prediction. If the expectations are sufficiently strong, or (as in early chirps of the bird alarm) the sensory evidence sufficiently subtle, I may get things wrong, in effect overwriting parts of the real sensory information with my brain's best guess of how things ought to be.

This does not mean that successful sensing is simply a form of hallucination, though the mechanisms are related to those of hallucination. We should not downplay the importance of all that rich sensory information arriving at the eyes, ears, and other senses.

But it casts the process of seeing -- and of perceiving more generally -- in a new and different way. It casts it as a process led by our brain's best predictions: predictions that are then checked and corrected using the sensory inputs as a guide.

With the prediction machinery up and running, perception becomes a process structured not simply by incoming sensory information but by difference -- the difference between the actual sensory signals and the ones the brain was expecting to encounter. 

I'll be interested to see if this is reflected in the rest of the book -- I've only finished the first chapter -- but it makes sense to me: that religious or mystical experiences occurring entirely within one's own mind, not out there in the world, are especially prone to being hallucinations resulting from strong predictions, or expectations, of what should occur.

After all, as we've seen in the above excerpt from Clark's book, what keeps the brain in close touch with reality is sensory information that corrects erroneous predictions about what ought to be perceived. 

So if a religious believer is engaged in closed-eyes meditation with the expectation that their devotion will result in experiencing God, Jesus, the astral form of their guru, divine light/sound, or whatever, and their brain manifests such an experience, there's no way for that person to use error-correcting sensory information to bring "what appears to be" into closer correspondence with "what actually is."

I said closer correspondence because in one of the last pages I read this morning, Clark dispels the notion that there's any such thing as reality "as it is" -- a favorite saying of many spiritual writers that I'm pleased to see makes little sense. Here he's talking about pain and other sorts of medical symptoms, but his point applies generally.

Since all human experience is constructed from mixtures of expectation, attention, and sensory stimulation, it will never be possible to experience either the world or your own body "as it really is." Indeed, it rapidly becomes unclear what this could even mean. 

Instead, there exists a deep continuity between cases where expectation and attention create symptoms (as we saw earlier) "from whole cloth" and cases where they also reflect the operation of some more standard form of disease and injury. Functional disorders simply lie at one end of this spectrum.

If you want to experience how your brain uses prior experience to predict current reality, check out these examples of sine-wave speech.

First listen to the brief SWS (sine-wave speech) audio. Probably you can't make any sense of it. Then listen to the original audio. After you hear the original, listen again to the SWS audio. If you're like me, and probably you are, now the SWS audio will be quite clear, since your brain has the experience of the original audio to predict what the SWS audio is saying.

This is my favorite Rumi quotation

For several years, a few decades ago, I became obsessed with the great Sufi poet, Rumi. I devoured every English translation of his writings I could find, also buying books that weren't literal translations, but were written in the spirit of Rumi.

Eventually I donated most of my Rumi books when my obsession abated. But I kept a few, including William C. Chittick's translation of Rumi, The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi.

One reason I held on to that book was that it contained my favorite Rumi quotation, from his Masnavi. 

Fear the existence in which you are now!
Your imagination is nothing, and you are nothing,
A nothing has fallen in love with a nothing,
a nothing-at-all has waylaid a nothing-at-all.
When these images have departed,
your misunderstanding will be clear to you.

I've memorized this passage. I ponder it fairly frequently.

It's become sort of a koan for me -- an intriguing bit of spiritual poetry that defies easy explanation, though it also has a seemingly clear meaning that is compatible with Zen and Buddhism in general.

I readily admit that different people will view this quotation in markedly different ways. All I can say is how it speaks to me. 

Yes, there is reason to fear the existence in which I am now. However, this is the same existence that virtually everybody on this planet inhabits: an existence filled with imaginings of things that don't actually exist, of a past that is no more, of a future that is yet to be.

My imagination, though a wellspring of creativity and mental fascination, can lead me into dead ends, dark alleys, wasted cognition, detachment from the non-imaginary here and now.

Worse, I tend to believe that the being doing the imagining, me, possesses more inherent existence than is warranted. The self that I thought for much of my life was eternal, a soul drop of a divine ocean, actually is, as Rumi says, nothing. 

Nothing, at least, that is independent, freestanding, immutable. Whoever or whatever I am, my strong suspicion is that I'm as insubstantial as the imaginings I so frequently engage in.

Yet as Rumi's poem observes, my imagination and me are in love with each other, though neither of us possesses any enduring substance. We are two nothings engaged in dancing together in a wispy ballroom of frothy existence.

Still, Rumi holds out hope for me. And for everybody in a similar situation. Who, again, is almost all of the eight billion people who cling to the dual delusions of barely-existent imagination and selfhood. 

For if I were to be able to exist without imagining what isn't there, which includes the solid self that also is a nothing rather than a something, Rumi says that my current misunderstanding of what life is all about would be cleared up.

Is this a fantasy? Perhaps. Rumi's words just seem to me like they have a ring of truth, though I have no reason to assert that they are true. I simply am attracted to this bit of tantalizing Rumi poetry.

What if religions are wrong and there's nothing to find?

In my experience, the most difficult part of writing is the first sentence and the last sentence. With one, there's nothing that comes before. With the other, there's nothing that comes after. So those sentences are unique.

I struggled with the first sentence in my book, Return to the One. Until finally, a sentence popped into my head that seemed just right to me.

If something has been lost and you're not sure where to look for it, there's good reason to start searching right where you are rather than far afield.

Then I spoke about the familiar situation (familiar to me, at least) of looking for your car keys only to discover that they were sitting unnoticed in a pocket or purse the whole time.

But let's think about what's necessary for a search to make sense. To begin with, you really need to have lost something. Meaning, it was in your possession at one point, and now it isn't. Then there has to be a decent probability that you can find that thing you used to possess.

If you're on a cruise and drop your glasses into the ocean while leaning over a railing, you know what you've lost, but for all practical purposes you have a zero chance of finding that item.

In Return to the One I argued that we have a sense of loss, yet most of us don't understand what we're longing to recover: God, or the One. I feel like I did a pretty good job making that argument, yet in my current frame of mind I no longer find what I wrote to be persuasive.

I still like my first sentence in the book, though. But now I see it as pointing toward the desirability of living in the here and now, rather than a there and then. After all, where we are, where everyone is, without exception, is the present moment.

No searching required. Just be here now.

This, of course, is the essence of mindfulness. And of the non-religious aspect of Buddhism, which includes Zen. Such distinguishes these forms of spirituality from the seeking forms of spirituality and religion where there is much talk of a path to be followed, and signs of progress along the way.

Here's some illustrative passages from Jon Kabat-Zinn's book, Mindfulness for Beginners: reclaiming the present moment -- and your life.

Not only is it always now. The "curriculum" of this adventure we call living, where mindfulness can play such a pivotal role, is always what is unfolding in this moment, whether we like what is happening or not. 

Whatever is arising in this moment becomes the curriculum for liberating ourselves from the shackles of greed, hatred, and delusion. We do not need some ideal or romantic fairy tale of what would be best for us. What we most need is what is already given to us: the actuality of things as they are in the only moment we will ever have -- this one.

...So as we have already seen, the notion that in meditation practice there is no place to go, nothing to do, and nothing to attain can be quite strange and mysterious -- even foreign -- to our striving temperaments and our need to always be getting better.

...Non-striving is not trivial. It involves realizing that you are already here. There's no place to go, because the agenda is simply to be awake. 

It is not framed as some ideal that suggests that after forty years of sitting in a cave in the Himalayas, or by studying with august teachers, or doing ten thousand prostrations, or whatever it is, you will necessarily be any better than you are now.

It is likely that you will just be older. What happens now is what matters.

If you don't pay attention now, as Kabir, the great Indian poet of sixteenth-century India said, "You will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death."

...Awareness itself is what mindfulness is about. It is not about achieving an ideal, or a particularly desirable or longed-for special state.

If the mind is thinking: "If I meditate I'll always be compassionate. I'll be like the Dalai Lama. I'll be like Mother Teresa" or whoever your spiritual guru/hero of the moment is, it may help to remind yourself that you don't stand a snowball's chance in hell of being like the Dalai Lama or Mother Teresa or anybody else. Nor do you know what their interior experience is.

The only person that you have the remotest possibility of being like is yourself. And that, when it comes down to it, is the real challenge of mindfulness: the challenge to be yourself.

The irony, of course, is that you already are.

Here's a great Tina Turner song

I saw Tina Turner perform with her jerk husband Ike at either Winterland or Fillmore in San Francisco during my college days in 1968 or 1969. (Hey, like they say, if you can clearly remember the 60's, you weren't really there.)

I was high on something, naturally. Being close to the stage, absorbing her amazing energy -- that was an experience I'll never forget. So sorry that she died. Here's a song of hers that sends chills up my spine.

How we talk online is much different from how we talk in person

Next year I'll celebrate the 20th anniversary from when I started this blog in 2004. But, hey, I figure that  I might as well spread out the festivities by making some observations from time to time about this here Church of the Churchless.

Like, right now.

The most important thing I want to say is gratitude. Over the years I've learned a great deal from the people who visit this blog and leave comments. Typepad, my blogging service, says there have been 70,198 comments on 3,390 posts. 

So that's about 21 comments, on average, per post that I've written. I read most comments, though if I'm busy, I'll just take a glance at a comment, especially if it's a lengthy one. 

Those comments are my blog's way of having a conversation -- with me, and with other blog visitors. I wish Typepad allowed for editing of comments by the people who share them, and that it was possible to organize the comments in a different fashion than in a chronological fashion.

But wishes aren't reality. Anyway, I deeply appreciate the time and effort people put into their comments, though obviously the quality varies from a high quality essay to random observations that make little sense.

Which is no different from the conversations all of us have in everyday life. But otherwise, there's big differences between how people communicate online versus in person. 

Online, many choose to not use their real name. I can understand why in certain circumstances. For example, on this blog criticism of a religious leader, or the religion itself, can be problematic if someone uses their real name and is still involved with the organization they're criticizing. 

That's why most people who write to me with an interesting story about their faith ask that I share it anonymously. The downside of anonymity, though, is that it enables people to say things in cyberspace that they'd be reluctant to say to someone face-to-face.

I'm definitely guilty of this myself at times. So if I'm directing a blog post or a comment at a specific person, I need to do better at visualizing that person standing in front of me as I say what I want to say about them.

Another problem with online conversations is that in ordinary life communication doesn't just involve words. It also involves a tone of voice, facial expressions, body language. And of course, an ability to say things like "I don't quite understand; please elaborate on what you meant when you said _______"

So its easy to misunderstand those with whom we interact online.

I like to express strong opinions. Many commenters on my blog posts also like to express strong opinions. So we’re going to feel misunderstood by other people at times. That comes with the territory of expressing strong opinions in a setting where only written words can be shared, not the other ways we use to communicate with people.

In a way it's surprising that comment conversations on this blog are as friendly and productive as they usually are, given how many obstacles there are to understanding another person in cyberspace.

But sometimes feelings get hurt. This is unfortunate, though often unavoidable. Partly it's due to different ways of communicating between men and women. I don't want to overemphasize this. It just seems like a reality to me. 

I talked about this in a 2005 post on my HinesSight blog, "Why men don't share their feelings."

“How’re you doing?” says Dennis as I walk into the Pacific Martial Arts changing room. Instead of replying with my habitual robotic “Fine, how’re you?” I have a crazy impulse to actually tell him. I’ll share my feelings!

“Well, my feet have been tingling for about a week. I don’t know what’s going on. I’ve got an appointment to see a doctor tomorrow.” Without missing a beat (appropriately: Dennis is a drummer) I hear, “You’ve got a brain tumor. No doubt about it. You’re going to die.”

For the rest of our hour and a half training session, whenever I stop to check on how my feet are doing Dennis again says, “Oh yeah, you’ve got a brain tumor. Your time is up.”

Sensei Warren, our regular martial arts instructor, came in late. After telling him my tale of tingling feet I got a marginally better prognosis: “You’ve got diabetic neuropathy. No doubt about it. You’re going to lose your feet.” And I don’t even have diabetes.

Now, I know both Dennis and Warren care a lot about me. They demonstrated their manly concern by telling me that I’m either going to die or lose my feet. If one of them had given me a big hug and said “Don’t worry, everything is going to be all right,” I would have begun to worry that he had a brain tumor.

If I want sympathy, I’ll tell my troubles to my wife. From my marital arts buddies I get camaraderie and support that isn’t expressed in words. Dennis taught the class that evening. He started off by saying, “Let’s work on kicks tonight since your feet are giving you a problem.”

Which is what we did. For almost an hour. The unspoken message was, “Your feet are OK. Suck it up. This is no big deal.” That’s pretty much what the doctor said the next day: “Your feet look fine; I’ll do a blood test anyway; call me in a month if you’re not better.”

I'm sharing this anecdote because it points to a seeming fact: men are more comfortable with the rough-and-tumble of online communications because they're more used to joking around with each other in some rough ways.

This is fine.

But I worry when a woman shares something on this blog, then gets attacked in an intense fashion. Mostly or entirely by men. That's when I feel protective toward the woman, since I feel responsible for providing a safe space for people to share their ideas without feeling like they're in some sort of danger.

Well, those are my thoughts for tonight. Thanks for listening. I'll get back to a regular Church of the Churchless blog post soon.

Open Thread 46 (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.

Mindfulness: whatever happens is the curriculum of that moment

One of the things that I like about the Buddhist notion of emptiness, where change is omnipresent because nothing possesses an inherent existence, is how much money it saves me on books.

For I've found that rather than buying a new book to get some fresh ideas, I can look over the books I already own and reread them. This gives me fresh ideas because I've changed from the last time I read the book, so much of it will seem new to me.

Case in point: a few days ago I was looking at the mindfulness section in my office bookcase and noticed Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness for Beginners: reclaiming the present moment -- and your life. 

Amazon tells me that I bought the hardcover version in 2011, twelve years ago.

Since, I've learned a lot abut mindfulness, but I still consider myself a beginner, so I decided to take another look at the book. Based on my highlighting and notes in the back part of the book, I can tell that what most appeals to me now is different from what I liked in my first reading. 

Here's some passages that resonated with me in the first part of the book, which I finished re-reading today.

(1) I'm not opposed to the idea of discipline. However, I also like to flow with life as much as possible. A mini-chapter on "The Beauty of Discipline" (they're all just a few pages long) had some good things to say on this subject.

The discipline I am referring to is really the willingness to bring the spaciousness and clarity of awareness back over and over again to whatever is going on -- even as we feel we are being pulled in a thousand different directions. 

Just taking this kind of of stance toward our own experience, without trying to fix or change anything at all, is an act of generosity toward oneself, an act of intelligence, an act of kindness.

The word discipline comes from disciple, someone who is in a position to learn. So when we bring a certain discipline to the cultivation of mindfulness and are aware of how challenging it is to bring a sustained attending to any aspect of our lives, we are actually creating the conditions for learning something fundamental from life itself.

Then life becomes the meditation practice and the meditation teacher, and whatever happens in any moment is simply the curriculum of that moment. 

(2) I've never understood why some people view thinking as negative, something opposed to a spiritual life, a mindful life. A "Befriending Our Thinking" chapter corrects this misconception.

It is very important as a beginner that you understand right from the start that meditation is about befriending your thinking, about holding it gently in awareness, no matter what is on your mind in a particular moment. It is not about shutting off your thoughts or changing them in any way.

Meditation is not suggesting that it would be better if you didn't think and were simply to suppress all those sometimes unruly, disturbing, and disquieting, sometimes uplifting and creative thoughts when they arise.

If you do try to suppress your thinking, you are just going to wind up with a gigantic headache. Such a pursuit is unwise, pure folly -- like trying to stop the ocean from waving. It is the very nature of the ocean for its surface to change as a result of changing atmospheric conditions.

...The mind is similar. The surface can be extremely labile, changing constantly with the changing "weather patterns" of our lives: our emotions, moods, thoughts, our experiences, everything, often with little or no awareness on our part.

We can feel victimized by our thoughts, or blinded by them. We can easily mistake them for the truth or for reality when in actuality they are just waves on its surface, however tumultuous they may be at times.

The entirety of our mind, on the other hand, is by its very nature deep, vast, intrinsically still and quiet, like the depths of the ocean.

(3) There's a me. But it's not mine. This teaching of Buddhism, and also of modern neuroscience, is both wonderfully appealing to me and also wonderfully confusing. Jon Kabat-Zinn explains things in a chapter called "Our Love Affair with Personal Pronouns -- Especially I, Me, and Mine."

The Buddha taught for forty-five years. He is said to have said that all of his teachings could be encapsulated in one sentence. If that is so, perhaps we might want to remember what it was, even if we don't necessarily understand it at first. Imagine forty-five years of profound teaching distilled into one sentence: "Nothing is to be clung to as 'I,' 'me,' or 'mine.'"

It might be helpful to reflect on what the Buddha might have meant when he used the verb "to cling." "Nothing is to be clung to as 'I,' 'me,' or 'mine'" does not mean there is no "you." It isn't suggesting that perhaps you will have to hire someone to put on your pants in the morning because there's no "you" to do it.

Nor does it mean that you should give away all the money in your bank account because it is not yours and there is no real bank anyway.

What it means is that clinging is optional, that we can recognize it when it arises and choose not to feed it. It means that the selfing habit is a major part of our default setting, that mode of mind that we revert to constantly when we go unconscious or drone on in the automatic pilot doing mode. 

It means that how we relate to all our moments, all our experiences, is a choice.

It means that we can make the choice, moment by moment, to recognize how much we do cling to "I," "me," and "mine," how self-oriented and self-preoccupied we can be, and then decide not to cling to them, or more reasonably, to catch ourselves when we do it.

It is saying that we don't have to automatically and with no awareness fall into the habits of self-identification, self-centeredness, and selfing. What is more, if we are open to looking at ourselves afresh, we can really see that these thought-habits actually distort reality, create illusions and delusions, and ultimately imprison us.