Church of the Churchless

Pure Consciousness isn't what its name implies

I don't like the term pure consciousness. Or its identical twin, pure awareness. I've written about this dislike in some blog posts: here, here, here, and here. 

Obviously I've got no problem with talking about consciousness or awareness, which in my view are the same thing. If we're conscious of something we're aware of that thing.

It's the pure that rubs me the wrong way.

That word conjures us an image of something absolutely clear and transparent, nothing in it except consciousness/awareness. (From now on I'll just speak of consciousness rather than wearing out my laptop's slash key.)

Sure, I get the idea that consciousness is akin to an empty sky in which clouds, birds, airplanes, and such are contained. I jotted down a couple of ways Sam Harris describes consciousness in this fashion in his Waking Up app's guided meditations.

Consciousness is the space in which everything is arising on its own; rest as that... You are the condition in which everything is appearing.

So this seems to presume that what is most real about us isn't what we're aware of, but a formless that composed of pure consciousness. 

Well, it's a nice idea. It just doesn't make sense, though. Where's the evidence that consciousness ever can be experienced in such a pure state, there's no content of consciousness? 

And if this somehow were possible, how would someone know they've experienced pure consciousness? After all, there can't be a sense of "This is pure consciousness," for that sense clearly isn't pure, it's a sensation of this is pure consciousness. 

Thus if consciousness truly was pure, there would be no way for that purity to contain an experience of purity, for experience always is of something. After all, what would pure experience be like?

Nothing, I guess, for the experience would be of nothing.

I got to thinking about pure consciousness because Paul Breer talks about it quite a bit in some chapters near the end of his book, Beyond Self-Realization: A Non-Sectarian Path to Enlightenment. I've enjoyed his right-on take on free will (it doesn't exist) and the ethereal Self (nobody has one).

However, his frequent use of "Pure Consciousness" rubbed me the wrong way, at least until I read enough about how Breer uses this term to realize that when he's referring to isn't really pure.

Breer's book consists of dialogues between a group of people taking an enlightenment course at a local library led by someone who, not surprisingly, bears a lot of resemblance to Paul Breer. Here's some passages describing Pure Consciousness.

What I "see" is Pure Consciousness in the background of my perception of you; just as in an enlightenment experience you would see Pure Consciousness in the background of your perception of me. 

At the same time I see both you and me in the conventional sense, that is, as separate individuals, you over "there," me over "here." In the foreground, I see the two of us as separate individuals; in the background I see (with my inner eye) Consciousness Itself which serves as the Source for the distinctions I make in the foreground. The same would be true for you if the roles were reversed.

...Whenever you gain access to Pure Consciousness, you will experience it as a background to whatever you see, hear, taste, touch, or smell -- and that includes your awareness of me. I'm not saying, as your books apparently suggest, that everything in the universe contains Pure Consciousness. 

When I say that the world is One, I'm referring to the sense of Wholeness created by THAT which serves as background for whatever I perceive in my foreground. The experience of wholeness takes place "here"; it's not something that exists in blades of grass, bluebirds, trash cans or any other objects of perception.

Oneness, in other words, is a feature not of the universe itself nor of the objects in that universe, but of our own perception of the world when viewed from a background of Pure Consciousness.

...Most fundamentally, you are Pure Consciousness. As such, you are THAT which enables an organism with a brain and nervous system to make distinctions and use those distinctions to construct a perceptual field composed of objects and a subject.

Even after you have discovered your deeper nature (Pure Consciousness), you retain a limited identification with the part (as body-mind) you are playing in a particular perceptual construction. In other words, you are both the "movie" (the construction) and the context (Pure Consciousness) in which the movie is playing.

So when I burrow down into the nitty-gritty of what Breer is saying here, it seems to be quite simple and uncontroversial. 

Consciousness is necessary for perceptions of the world. From birth until death, being conscious is how we perceive everything inside and outside of us -- the contents of consciousness. I'm not sure how this realization translates into enlightenment, since it seems to be a basic fact of life.

But maybe that's what Zen masters are getting at when they keep pointing the student searching for enlightenment back to everyday perceptions. Cooking rice. Running water. Ringing of bells. 

I don't disagree with how Breer views Pure Consciousness. Just seems to me that what he's talking about is merely consciousness being the foundation of all experience. Which is damn obvious.

 

Likely we don't even know the questions to ask of the cosmos

We all have questions. About all kinds of stuff. What's wrong with my computer? Who will win the next presidential election? Is that lump on my chest anything to be concerned about?

Almost always, our questions are presumed to have answers. Maybe not right now, but eventually. The winner of the 2024 presidential election will be known after the votes are counted, not before. Until then all we can do is wait.

And hope. That's when I turn a bit religious, even though I'm an atheist: Dear God, please don't let Donald Trump win a second term!

But the questions I find most interesting, especially after imbibing some Oregon marijuana courtesy of my beloved PAX vaporizer, are the ones that we humans are clueless about. Meaning, not only don't we know the answers, we don't even know the questions to which we lack the answers.

It'd be good if I could give some examples, but of course I can't. No one can.

Because what I'm talking about is a fundamental inability of us humans to grasp the Deep Unknown well enough to even fathom the basic contours of what we don't know.

This isn't just a difference in degree of, say, our inability to know what sperm whales are saying with their clicking sounds. That was the subject of a fascinating story in The New Yorker, "Talk to Me: Can artificial intelligence allow us to speak to another species?"

Most of us have heard of the famous philosophical/neuroscientific question, What is it like to be a bat? In this case, researchers trying to decipher the meaning of sperm whale clicks, which travel great distances through the water, are faced with the problem of how the whales look upon the world.

Surely very differently than we do.

But through artificial intelligence, it is hoped that with a large enough database of whale click patterns, known as codas, "it [AI] could then -- once again in theory -- generate sequences of codas that a sperm whale would find convincing. The model wouldn't understand sperm whale-ese, but it could, in a manner of speaking, speak it. Call it ClickGPT."

OK. That'd be way cool.

However, the story says that it's possible that nothing in our human experience matches up with some, or even all, of sperm whale experience. Researchers are hopeful this isn't true, but it might be.

And this relates to a fellow mammal on our very own planet. Imagine how much more difficult -- I'd say impossible -- it would be to grasp the fundamental questions of the cosmos, leaving aside the answers. This presumes, of course, that such questions exist.

I suspect that they do, though naturally I'm clueless about what the questions might be. The best I can do is gesture in the direction of where my intuition causes me to believe that such questions might be lurking.

What boggles my mind above all other boggles is the notion that something always has been, is now, and always will be. That sounds like a religious notion, but it really isn't. 

Sure, religious believers consider that God is the everlasting entity. However, as I've pointed out many times on this blog, and surely will do so many times in the future, saying that God always has existed brings us no closer to fathoming the boggle than saying the cosmos always has existed.

Actually, less close, since we know the cosmos, in the form of our universe, exists, while there's no convincing evidence that God does.

Regardless, it seems to me that we humans are very limited in our ability to comprehend eternal existence. We don't even know whether, when it comes to the cosmos, "eternal" means endless time or outside of time.

And for sure we don't know what even farther out questions about the cosmos could be asked if the human brain had a capacity to ask them. Again, I'm not assuming that the questions could be answered.

What I'm saying is that we humans, no matter how wise, intelligent, or enlightened we might be, lack the ability to come up with those questions because all we're capable of is fathoming queries that relate to our human experience -- which lacks any experience of existence having always existed.

No free will is the secular version of karma

It had to be. During my religious days -- well, make that 35 years -- I wrote two books that addressed the subject of karma.

In God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder, karma was secondary to my main theme of spirit being the creative power of the cosmos. But in Life is Fair, the whole book was about this spiritual law of cause and effect.

Now, when I've become an atheist, I'm fascinated by the strong neuroscientific and philosophical arguments against free will. What's interesting is that no free will is almost exactly the same as karma.

Guess I was meant to not believe in free will. 

Of course, often karma is viewed as having supernatural elements, especially in its Eastern religious form. Karma is seen as extending over multiple lives, through reincarnation. But otherwise, no free will is the secular equivalent of karma.

To demonstrate this, below are some quotes from the literature of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the India-based religious organization headed up by a guru that I belonged to for those three and a half decades.

I assembled these quotes in the course of my research for my first book. I read, or rather re-read, every book in English published by RSSB and took notes on various subjects concerning how mysticism and the new physics could relate.

Here's some of what the RSSB books say about karma, which sounds just like the notion of no free will, leaving aside the references to God as being the overseer of karma and mentions of past lives. Every quote is from a book written by one of the RSSB gurus, such as Charan Singh and Sawan Singh.

The Karmic Law is supreme on the material and mind planes, and nothing happens of its own accord, spontaneously, so to say. The law governs the planes; therefore, no haphazard happening of events takes place anywhere, whether the events are of microscopic or astronomical dimensions. (Sawan Singh)

According to the layer of our Karmas that comes into action, our Lord makes people act towards us in that way. So we should never blame anybody. (Charan Singh)

Our present life was marked out in the minutest detail, even before we were born, and no change can be made in that now. (Charan Singh)

No person, dead or living, can influence the life of another person. That is settled strictly according to the law of Karma. You go where your attachments are and you reap what you sow. These are eternal laws which work in this creation and every soul is bound by them. (Charan Singh)

Everything in our life is predestined according to the karmas of our past life, but this does not preclude all effort on our part. The effort that we make is also part of our destiny. We, in fact, have no free will as we call it... our will is very limited and what we call free will is all circumscribed by our birth, the family we are born into, the country, the education, and so forth, over which we had no control. All these circumstances have moulded our thoughts and we act and think accordingly. (Charan Singh)

There is no necessity to worry because whatever is destined, whatever has to happen, has already happened, is already destined. (Charan Singh)

We cannot think why should we do anything if it is already written in our destiny and we will get it automatically anyway. If a thing is in your destiny, then your way of thinking will be to develop it. We are all just like puppets who are dancing, and the strings are being pulled by Him according to our karmas. The realized souls and the unrealized souls are all dancing in the same way. The only difference is that the realized souls know that He is pulling the string and the unrealized souls think that they are dancing by their own effort. (Charan Singh)

If we look at it on a grand scale, from the top down, we have hardly any free will at all...We may say that this is my decision, this is my free will, but we forget what has led us to make that decision, to think in that direction... So, on a broader scale, we have absolutely no free will at all. Everything was planned, so to say. But with our limited view, looking from here up, we have free will. (Charan Singh)

We cannot know what is our karma or what is in store for us... Karma will be taken care of automatically. We should not try to analyze what is our karma or what is not our karma, for that will take care of itself. (Charan Singh)

What destiny has planned for you will come to pass without any planning on your part. Your destiny will cause you to act and make effort according to its plan. Destiny and effort go hand in hand. One is as much a part of the other as the sun and its rays. (Jagat Singh)

A mindfulness lesson in the checkout lane

This afternoon I was in a south Salem Fred Meyer checkout lane. There was only one person ahead of me, so I decided to skip the self-checkout, which I usually prefer as the lines aren't as long.

When the person in front of me moved forward, I didn't immediately do the same with my grocery cart. I heard the man in back of me say something. Couldn't make it out exactly, but it sounded something like "you can move now."

Anyway, I ignored the comment, unloaded my groceries on the conveyor belt and soon was at the head of the line. As the female clerk rang up my items, I got out some coupons for certain items I was buying. I handed them to the woman after she had scanned all of my purchases.

Everything went smoothly until she said, "Oops. I pushed the wrong button. Got to ask for an override." She picked up a phone and dialed her manager. As we waited for him to show up, I told her that it'd be nice if she could punch in her own override. Why did a manager have to do it?

She said that her manager trusts her, but the corporate higher-ups don't. That led to a discussion between the clerk and me about how employees of a big business shouldn't be criticized for having to implement policies established by executives. 

We had time to talk because even though the clerk could see her manager down at the self-checkout section, he wasn't moving in her direction. I suggested she wave her arms, which she did, but that didn't help because the manager was facing away from her. 

Eventually she phoned him again and he indicated that he'd be doing the override soon.

At that exact moment, pretty much, I saw that the man in back of me in line, who had put all of his items on the conveyor belt, was picking them up and placing them back in his cart. I said to him, "We'll be done here in just a bit."

He angrily told me, "Thanks for holding up the line," as he continued to pick up his items. I replied, "Hey, this wasn't my fault, and it wasn't her fault either. It just was a glitch." The manager then appeared, held out his override tag or whatever it is for the clerk to scan, and said to me, "Sorry it took so long. I had something else to deal with."

So the irritated man in back of me, who looked to be somewhere around my age, in his 70s, put all of his stuff back in his cart and left the checkout line just as the clerk was finishing up my purchase. I said to her, "Bad timing on that guy's part. Now he's going to have to wait in another line."

Now, since I'm in a mindfulness frame of mind, having written a few days ago about my re-reading of Jon Kabat-Zinn's Wherever You Go, There You Are, I found this check-out line experience to be a great example of what goes wrong when mindfulness is forgotten.

Meaning, when we allow our negative thoughts and emotions to override the evidence of our senses. Believe me, I'm an expert on this, because frequently I've had feelings akin to the irritated man in the line behind me. 

It's easy to jump to conclusions based not on objective reality, but on what we believe is happening. I doubt that the man understood that the reason for my delay in checking out was an innocent error by the clerk in pushing a button on her touch screen.

Maybe he wasn't listening closely to what she said to me and to her manager on the phone. Maybe he was hard of hearing. Or maybe he knew what the problem was and still became irritated. He might have been having a bad day and this was the experience that sent him into a major irritation. 

Regardless, as noted in my previous post, there's a lot to like in Kabat-Zinn's observation:

Think of yourself as an eternal witness, as timeless. Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear?

The man behind me was seeing the checkout line through the lens of his impatience and irritation. Again, I've been there and done the same thing, so I can't judge the man for this. He was simply reacting from his own subjective perspective.

For me, on the other hand, the delay in checking out as we waited for the manager wasn't bothersome at all. The clerk and I were talking about what was happening. We shared a common view that big corporations like Kroger, which owns Fred Meyer, can have absurd employee policies. 

I knew that the clerk was doing her best. When the manager finally appeared, I had no doubt that he also was doing his best. This was just a minor problem caused by a simple mistake. When the clerk told me, "I pushed the wrong button," I said to her, "I do that all the time." 

Hopefully I've learned something from this episode.

Maybe the next time I start to get irritated at someone, I'll pause and remind myself that whatever is happening, it's what is happening. Almost certainly no one is trying to make me irritated. I'm doing that to myself by expecting something to occur which is different from what is actually occurring. 

That's why I'm attracted to mindfulness so much, which is defined by Kabat-Zinn as paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, nonjudgmentally.

UPDATE: After writing this post, this morning I woke up irritated at a fairly minor health problem that bothers me at times. I was going to tell my wife how I felt. Then I realized that my irritation wasn't very different, and maybe not different at all, from the man in my checkout lane story getting upset at having to wait a while in line behind me while the clerk dealt with a problem. 

The lesson for me is that it's a heck of a lot easier to observe when someone else is being unmindful and self-centered than when I am. But maybe I've learned something. By not complaining about my problem, which wouldn't have done anything to help the problem anyway, my wife had an open conversational window to talk about some things she was interested in. I ended up feeling better listening to her than I would have if I'd done my complaining.

Sure, sometimes it makes sense to let our negative feelings out. But sometimes it isn't. 

 

Mindfulness meditation is like briefly being dead

Whenever I need a heaping dose of reality shorn of unnecessary concepts, my eyes wander to a bottom shelf in my office where the mindfulness books hang out. 

This morning I was drawn to pick up a book by Jon Kabat-Zinn that I'd read before, Wherever You Go, There You Are. 

I've read other mindfulness books by Kabat-Zinn. As he says in the introduction, his previous book, Full Catastrophe Living, is largely aimed at people akin to those who use his stress reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center run by Kabat-Zinn.

That book had to be quite detailed and comprehensive. Also, thick. Wherever You Go, There You Are is aimed more at a general audience. It's clearly and simply written with many short chapters, several of which I re-read today.

I was struck by how much I agree with Kabat-Zinn's description of what meditation is all about. His take on meditation is pretty much how I've come to view it. When I meditate now, I follow my breath, not trying to change my breath, like by making it shallower or deeper, faster or slower, just being aware of the sensation of breathing.

But this sort of meditation is markedly different from the form of meditation I practiced during the 35 years I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru which taught that the purpose of meditation is to leave this world behind and enter a supernatural better world.

Meditation, according to Kabat-Zinn and Buddhism, is almost precisely the opposite of this. Today I read:

New Yorker cartoon: Two Zen monks in robes and shaved heads, one young, one old, sitting side by side cross-legged on the floor. The younger one is looking somewhat quizzically at the older one, who is turned toward him and saying: "Nothing happens next. This is it."

It's true. Ordinarily, when we undertake something, it is only natural to expect a desirable outcome for our efforts. We want to see results, even if it is only a pleasant feeling. The sole exception I can think of is meditation.

Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are. Perhaps its value lies precisely in this. Maybe we all need to do one thing in our lives simply for its own sake.

But it would not be accurate to call meditation a "doing." It is more accurately described as a "being." When we understand that "This is it," it allows us to let go of the past and future and wake up to what we are now, in this moment.

People usually don't get this right away. They want to meditate in order to relax, to experience a special state, to become a better person, to reduce some stress or pain, to break out of old habits and patterns, to become free or enlightened.

All valid reasons to take up meditation practice, but all equally fraught with problems if you expect those things to happen just because you are now meditating.

You'll be caught up in wanting to have a "special experience" or in looking for signs of progress, and if you don't feel something special pretty quickly, you may start to doubt the path you have chosen, or to wonder whether you are "doing it right."

In most domains of learning, this is only reasonable. Of course you have to see progress sooner or later to keep at something. But meditation is different. From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state, every moment a special moment.

When we let go of wanting something else to happen in this moment, we are taking a profound step toward being able to encounter what is here now.

Beautiful! So refreshing.

This demolishes the absurd notion that just because someone has a different experience in meditation than you do, that means one of you is more advanced spiritually or mystically. I love the simple wisdom in From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state, every moment a special moment.

There's no better or worse in meditation, no higher or lower. There's only "This is it." Doesn't matter at all what it is. 

I also enjoyed reading Kabat-Zinn's description of meditation as being akin to dying, except, of course, the actually being dead part. He writes:

People think of meditation as some kind of special activity, but this is not exactly correct. Meditation is simplicity itself. As a joke, we sometimes say: "Don't just do something, sit there." But meditation is not just about sitting, either.

It is about stopping and being present, that is all. Mostly we run around doing. Are you able to come to a stop in your life, even for one moment? Could it be this moment? What would happen if you did?

A good way to stop all the doing is to shift into the "being mode" for a moment. Think of yourself as an eternal witness, as timeless. Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear?

The funny thing about stopping is that as soon as you do it, here you are. Things get simpler. In some ways, it's as if you died and the world continued on.

If you did die, all your responsibilities and obligations would immediately evaporate. Their residue would somehow get worked out without you. No one else can take over your unique agenda. It would die or peter out with you just as it has for everyone else who has ever died. So you don't need to worry about it in any absolute way.

If this is true, maybe you don't need to make one more phone call right now, even if you think you do. Maybe you don't need to read something just now, to run one more errand.

By taking a few moments to "die on purpose" to the rush of time while you are still living, you free yourself to have time for the present. By "dying" now in this way, you actually become more alive now. That is what stopping can do.

And when you decide to go, it's a different kind of going because you stopped. The stopping actually makes the going more vivid, richer, more textured. It helps keep all the things we worry about and feel inadequate about in perspective. It gives us guidance.

Try: Stopping, sitting down, and becoming aware of your breathing once in a while throughout the day. It can be for five minutes, or even five seconds. Let go into full acceptance of the present moment including how you are feeling and what you perceive to be happening. 

For these moments, don't try to change anything at all, just breathe and let go. Breathe and let go. Die to having to have anything be different in this moment; in your mind and in your heart, give yourself permission to allow this moment to be exactly as it is, and allow yourself to be exactly as you are.

Then, when you're ready, move in the direction your heart tells you to go, mindfully and with resolution.

More wise advice.

I enjoy taking a few breaths, feeling the air passing into my nose, visualizing the air filling an empty cavity on the inhalation, then leaving the cavity empty on the exhalation. That emptiness is akin to the dying Kabat-Zinn speaks of.

It helps me look upon whatever I'm experiencing at the moment from a perspective of me being absent. What would the situation be like if there was no "me" aware of it? Well, then there would be the same thing happening, but not with a sense of like/dislike, pleasure/pain, good/bad, and the other pairs of opposites that aren't objectively there, but are part of my subjective response to what's going on.

Spirituality is simple without Self and free will

So why do I enjoy pondering the notion that we not only aren't an enduring separate Self (a central tenet of Buddhism), we also don't possess free will (a central tenet of neuroscience)?

Though I haven't heard anyone asking me this question, I heard the voice that speaks inside my head asking it, so I'm pleased to answer myself.

Note that the "self" in that second sentence isn't capitalized as the "Self" in the first sentence was. That's to distinguish between the metaphysical idea of Self -- often expressed as soul -- that somehow exists separate from the physical body/mind, and the common sense idea of self as being that physical body/mind.

In other words, there's no doubt that each of us is a distinct self. But there's a lot of doubt that residing within that self is a separate and distinct Self that enters the bodily self at birth, leaves it at death, and isn't affected by anything, being eternal.

I used to believe in such a Self during the 35 years I was an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a dualistic religion based in India and led by a guru who taught that our true nature is Soul, not body, and that the purpose of life is for the Soul to journey through higher regions of reality back to God.

This grandiose task involved many complications, because extricating the Soul from the grip of mind and matter supposedly wasn't easy, requiring arduous spiritual practice that included 2 1/2 hours of daily meditation that might extend over four lifetimes. (RSSB believed in reincarnation.)

RSSB initiates also vowed to be strict vegetarians, not drink alcohol or ingest recreational drugs, abstain from sex outside of marriage, and lead a "clean and moral" life -- whatever that means. 

Thus there were many things you had to do to save your Soul. These were different things, in large part, than believers in Christianity, Judaism, or Islam are expected to do.

But the common denominator between all dualistic religions that I'm familiar with is how difficult and complex it is to please God by doing what supposedly is required to break the bonds of this earthly life and return to "heaven," which goes by a variety of names but is considered to be much different from this world.

What a relief its been to leave all that supernatural superstition behind. I'm not saying that I'm completely cleansed of the religious beliefs that I used to embrace, but since 2005 I've become steadily more spiritually independent.

That has led me to an increasingly simple world view. Well, more than a world view, for I actually experience things differently now. For quite a few years I've read, and thought, and felt, and meditated in accord with the assumption that I am not a Self, nor do I possess free will. 

Those two assumptions are closely related, because the only way to possess a will that is free of the deterministic causes and effects that control everything other than, perhaps, the quantum realm where randomness appears prevalent, is to believe that an immaterial Self or Soul resides within us, or as us, that can act without being affected by those causes and effects.

Life is so much simpler and more satisfying without a Self or free will. Sure, problems still have to be dealt with. That comes with life. However, I feel like a large metaphysical load has been lifted from me now that I no longer believe that I have to make of life something larger than it naturally is.

Enlightenment. Satori. God-realization. Whatever we want to call it, that thing used to gnaw on me like an itch that wouldn't go away no matter how much I scratched it. In fact, the scratching, the quest for a supernatural transformation that would make me more than human, was producing the itch.

Now, lacking a Self, there's no Self to be saved, no Self needing God's or Guru's grace, no Self requiring assistance in being freed from the karmic wheel of reincarnation, no Self standing apart from the natural world. 

I still meditate. I still enjoy exploring ways to be happier, calmer, more energetic, loving, calm, and at peace with myself and other people. I was a vegetarian before I joined RSSB and I've continued to be a vegetarian after I left RSSB.

So I still consider myself a spiritual seeker. I'm just seeking what is attainable and real, rather what is  fantasy and illusion. And that feels oh-so-good.

Alan Watts on Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism

Though Alan Watts was an Anglican minister and served as chaplain at Northwestern University, in the book he wrote in 1940 when he was just 24, The Meaning of Happiness, three Eastern religions/philosophies garner the most attention and praise.

That's because Watts correctly sees Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism as being transformational, rather than metaphysical, as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are. Just picture Christianity without Jesus, or Judaism without the history of the Jewish people, or Islam without the revelation of the Koran via Mohammed.

Hard to do, if not impossible. But Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism do just fine without any history or personalities. Even Buddhism teaches "if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." Meaning, Buddha the person isn't at all necessary to understand Buddhism. Watts says:

For the wisdom of the East has a strictly practical aim which is not mere knowledge about the universe; it aims at a transformation of the individual and of his feeling for life through experience rather than belief.

This experience is psychological, not metaphysical, and except in certain specialized fields has no relation to occultism or to what we understand in the West as philosophy.

In an interesting chapter called "The One in the Many," Watts describes how the three Eastern practices aim to lead to a realization that the reality of this world partakes of the reality of all existence.

That, in a nutshell, is the open secret of happiness, according to Watts: accepting what is, here and now, for the smallest piece of the world where we live and breathe possesses the same reality as the vastest reaches of the cosmos.

The Upanishads are the foundation of what was subsequently known as Vedanta, which is to say the "end" of fulfillment of the Vedas, the Vedas being the earliest of all Hindu scriptures. With matchless economy and beauty of language the Upanishads speak in a number of different ways of Brahman, the One Reality which is expressed in all the manifold forms, objects, activities, and living beings of the universe.

...Therefore the phrase "That art thou" (tat tvam asi) is the first, fundamental principle of Vedanta arising from the second, that all things without exception are Brahman, not by participation, for Brahman is one and indivisible. Hence Vedanta is also known as the system of Advaita (literally, "not two") or nonduality, and nonduality in philosophy is the natural expression of total acceptance in psychology.

...In other words, if man has the experience of separateness, this experience also is Brahman since there is nothing other than Brahman. Maya is not illusion as against reality, for in the Vedantist conception there is nothing apart from Reality which may be set over against it. Thus we may say that while there is no actual separateness from Brahman, there is certainly an experience of separateness, and this experience is real even though it is incomplete and relative.

Buddhism sprang into being in India as a reaction to Vedanta losing its way. 

But invariably there came a time when the experience was obscured by the doctrine, when the psychology of religion became the philosophy of religion and the Brahmanic tradition degenerated into scholasticism, ceremonialism, and fantastic extremes of asceticism whose object was not to accept the opposites but to destroy them, so negatively was the doctrine interpreted.

I love how Watts describes the Buddhist scriptures, which fell into much the same trap as Vedanta did. 

Although we have in writing a prodigious number of words attributed to the Buddha, little is known of him.

...The earliest records of his teaching are found in the Pali Canon, three large groups of scriptures which read, for a great part, like a statistical report compiled on wet afternoons by monks who had nothing better to do. 

...As for the sections on psychology, never were there such ponderous lists of minutiae, the apparent aim of which is to analyze the human being down to the last detail and so prove that he does not really exist. 

On the plus side, as revealed in the Dhammapada: 

The Buddha's teaching is unique in its utter lack of theology; it concentrates wholly on the necessity of arriving at a personal immediate experience and dispenses with the doctrinal symbol of that experience. In this respect it is the only truly psychological religion. 

...In its most concrete form ordinary, everyday experience is just how you feel at this moment. In a certain sense Buddhism is very much a philosophy and a psychology of the moment, for if we are asked what life is, and if our answer is to be a practical demonstration and not a theory, we can do no better than point to the moment -- now!

It is in the moment that we find reality and freedom, for acceptance of life is acceptance of the present moment now and at all times.

...For this reason Mahayana Buddhism teaches that Nirvana or enlightenment cannot really be attained, because the moment we try to attain it by our own power we are using it as an escape from what is now, and we are also forgetting that Nirvana is unattainable in the sense that it already is. 

Lastly, there's Taoism.

All our reasoning is based on the law of cause and effect operating as a sequence. Something is happening now because something else happened then. But the Chinese do not reason so much along this horizontal line from past, through present, to future; they reason perpendicularly, from what is in one place now to what is in another place now.

In other words, they do not ask why, or from what past causes, a certain set of things is happening now; they ask, "What is the meaning of those things happening together at this moment?" The word "Tao" is the answer to this question. The present situation within and around oneself is Tao, for the present moment is life.

...This is another way of saying that there is a harmony called Tao which blends all events in each moment of the universe into a perfect chord. The whole situation in and around you at this instant is a harmony with which you have to find your own union if you are to be in accord with Tao.

When you have discovered your own union with it, you will be in the state of Te, sometimes rendered as "virtue" or "grace" or "power," but best understood as Tao realized in man. 

So it all comes down to accepting the reality of what is in the present moment. Pretty damn simple, when Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism are stripped down to their essence.

True acceptance is the way out of the vicious circle of duality

I like to read books by Alan Watts. Other people don't like Watts. Some of them visit this blog. So when I write about how I enjoy what Watts has to say, probably they find those blog posts irritating.

Such is the play of duality. It's how the world works, generally.

Love is inconceivable without hate. Up is inconceivable without down. Absent dualities, we're simply left with what is, reality without a second. But the moment we ascribe human qualities, such as likes and dislikes, to aspects of reality, duality appears.

(I'm not saying that reality is completely absent of duality. Light and dark, or positive and negative charge, seemingly would be present without people. This is a point in The Tao of Physics. However, there's no doubt that in large part we humans manufacture duality out of the way we conceive of things.)

In the book Watts wrote in 1940 when he was just 24, The Meaning of Happiness, he speaks of the vicious circle of duality. 

The problems of duality are clearly stated in the Christian faith, but they often pass unrecognized under the symbols in which they are contained. The story of the Fall, of the eating of the fruit of Good and Evil, describes man's involvement in the vicious circle -- a condition in which, of his own power, he is able to do nothing good that is not vitiated by evil.

In this condition it may be said that "all good deeds are done for the love of gain," that is, with a purely self-interested motive, because "honesty is the best policy." 

Every advance in morality is counterbalanced by the growth of repressed evil in the unconscious, for morality has to be imposed by law and whenever there is compulsion there is repression of instinctual urges. Indeed, the very formulation of the ideal of righteousness suggests and aggravates its opposite.

Thus St. Paul says, "I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet." So, too, Lao Tzu remarks in the Tao Te Ching, 

When the great Tao is lost, spring forth benevolence and righteousness.
When wisdom and sagacity arise, there are great hypocrites. 
When family relations are no longer harmonious, we have filial children and devoted parents.
When a nation is in confusion and disorder, patriots are recognized.
Where Tao is, equilibrium is. When Tao is lost, out come the differences of things.

I love the solution that Watts proposes. I also love the way Watts says it. He has a wonderful ability to describe subtle ideas in an easy to understand way. When I read his books, often I'm struck by a feeling of "Wow, so nicely said. I've thought along this line myself, but never in such a clear way." 

Here's what Watts says about how to avoid making acceptance of reality into a dualistic vicious circle.

The motivating power of the vicious circle is pride. In Christian terms we should say that man is not willing to be saved as he is; he feels that it is necessary for him to do something about it, to earn salvation by his own self-made spirituality and righteousness.

The Grace of God is offered freely to all, but through pride man will not accept it.

He cannot bear the thought that he is absolutely powerless to lift himself up and that the only chance of salvation is simply to accept something which is offered as freely to the saint as to the sinner. If nothing can be done to earn this Grace it seems to set all man's self-imposed ideals at naught; he has to confess himself impotent, and this is more than he can bear.

So the gift of Grace is tacitly ignored, and man goes on trying to manufacture it for himself.

When it is said that man will not let himself be saved as he is, this is another way of saying that he will not accept himself as he is; subtly he gets around this simple act by making a technique out of acceptance, setting it up as something which he should do in order to be a "good boy."

And as soon as acceptance is made a question of doing and technique we have the vicious circle.

True acceptance is not something to be attained; it is not an ideal to be sought after -- a state of soul which can be possessed and acquired, which we can add to ourselves in order to increase our spiritual stature.

If another paradox may be forgiven, true acceptance is accepting yourself as you are NOW, at this moment, before you have even begun to make yourself different by accepting yourself. 

In other words, as soon as we try to make the ideal state of mind called "acceptance" something different from the state of mind which we have at this moment, this is the pride which makes it so difficult to accept what we are now, the barrier that stands between man and that which we call God or Tao.

But when it is suggested that we should find union with God here and now at this very moment, everyone is outraged and begins to make excuses. "After all, how can we attain such sublime understanding at the moment? We are unprepared. We are not good enough. We shall have to do all kinds of things first. We must meditate and train ourselves in religious discipline, and then perhaps after many years we shall be fit and worthy to attain the greatest of all attainments."

But this is surely a peculiar form of blindness and false pride, masquerading as humility. We see God every time we open our eyes; we inhale Him at every breath; we use His strength in every movement of a finger; we think Him in every thought, although we may not think of Him, and we taste Him in every bite of food.

This is an old story to those who have studied the wisdom of the East, but still the search goes on, a search for something we have never lost, something which is staring us right in the face, a search which the Buddhists sometimes describe as "hiding loot in one's pocket and declaring oneself innocent."

It is difficult just because it is too easy, for man finds it so hard to climb down from his high horse and accept that which is, freely and unreservedly. 

Small wonder, then, that we are advised to become again as little children, who have an inconvenient way of drawing attention to obvious things which the adult mind cannot or will not see. For spiritual understanding is not a reward given to you for being a great person; you cannot acquire it any more than you can acquire the wind and the stars.

But you can open your eyes and see it.

That seeing, Watts says, doesn't require the embrace of any philosophy, religion, spiritual path, or mystical pursuit. However, it lies at the core of three nondualistic practices: Vedanta Advaita, Buddhism, and Taoism.

Watts describes these practices well in chapters that follow his vicious circle discussion, and how to escape it. That probably will be the subject of my next churchless blog post. Which will irritate some and please others. 

Why I embrace the dark side of me and the world

Looking back, I don't think I ever was a full-on dualist, just a half-hearted one.

This was during the 35 years I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a religious organization based in India whose core teaching was that this world in which we live and breathe isn't our true home but a temporary resting place -- since the purpose of life is to return to higher regions of reality and God through extensive meditation, devotion to a guru believed to be God in Human Form, a vegetarian diet, abstinence from alcohol and drugs, and morality, including no sex outside of marriage.

Thus the RSSB teaching was thoroughly dualistic. The guru would say things like, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience." Which I recall is a quote from Teilhard deChardin.

I never fully embraced this notion of the world as a place to be escaped from. I didn't like the judgmentalism of so many RSSB initiates. They considered themselves to be God's chosen people, even though that honor is claimed by many, if not most, dualistic religions. They were even proud of their humility.

When I gave talks about the RSSB teachings, which was frequent, I'd pay lip service to the oft-repeated adage that it was crucial to shun lust, anger, greed, attachment, and egotism. However, I never came across a single person during my 35 years of RSSB membership, including the guru, who didn't manifest these and other so-called "negative" emotions and qualities.

Which are better termed simply emotions and qualities. 

In my experience, the people who talked the most about having overcome negative emotions and qualities were seriously lacking in positive emotions and qualities. It was as if all the attention they paid to stifling their dark side left them with insufficient energy to manifest their bright side -- especially in a natural fashion rather than a stilted artificial fashion.

One reason I detested holier-than-thou attitudes back then, and still do, is that I grew up in a family with a lot of dysfunction. Not just my immediate family, which was very small. My mother was divorced and I had a half-sister ten years older than me who got married at 18, so wasn't around much. My father wasn't in the picture, a man who I only spent an hour with in my entire life, aside from my baby years.

And that hour was very weird, not satisfying at all. My mother didn't speak much about my father. She told me that they got a divorce after he refused to move to Texas, a drier climate than Massachusetts, on the advice of doctors following the birth of my sister Evie, who was born with a congenital heart condition. Supposedly my father's job as a General Electric efficiency expert was more important to him.

Just as alcohol was more important to my mother than sobriety for much of my childhood. That was her biggest dark side, I suppose, as my father's cold detached ambition was to him. In addition, I grew up listening to tales of my mother's relatives facing their own divorces, drinking problems, affairs, and such. 

There was a lot of financial and artistic success in my family. Also, a lot of dark side dysfunction. They were all good people. They were family. They were lovable. So early on in my life I learned an important truth: we all are driven by forces outside of our control. Genetic, psychological, cultural. Scratch the surface of a so-called saint and you'll find a sinner.

That's why I get irritated when some commenters on my recent blog posts take self-righteous shots at two authors I like a lot: Alan Watts and Paul Breer.

Both men make no claim to being saints. Breer was in prison for two years; Watts had a drinking problem and relationship problems. Their personal lives were completely in accord with the messages in their books. Breer was a passionate believer in the illusion of free will and an immaterial self. Watts was a fervent advocate for a spirituality founded on being and acting natural, which included embracing the dark side of life.

Here's how Watts described the dark side in a book he wrote in 1940 when he was only 24, The Meaning of Happiness. These are wise observations about life that narrow-minded religious moralists should seriously consider, rather than reject out of hand.

If you sit still for a while, completely relaxed, and let your thoughts run on, let your mind think of whatever it likes, without interfering, without making suggestions, and without raising any kind of obstacle to the free flow of thought, you will soon discover that mental processes have a life of their own.

They will call one another to the surface of consciousness by association, and if you raise no barriers, you will soon find yourself thinking all manner of things both fantastic and terrible which you ordinarily keep out of consciousness.

Over a period of time this exercise will show you that you have in yourself the potentiality of countless different beings -- the animal, the demon, the sartyr, the thief, the murderer -- so that in time you will be able to feel that no aspect of human life is strange to you -- humani nihilism a me alienum puto. ["I consider nothing human is alien to me."]

In the ordinary way consciousness is forever interfering with the waters of the mind, which are dark and turbulent, concealing the depths. But when, for a while, you let them take care of themselves, the mud settles and with growing clarity you see the foundations of life and all the denizens of the deep.

...For the unconscious is not, as some imagine, a mental refuse-pit; it is simply unfettered nature, demonic and divine, painful and pleasant, hideous and lovely, cruel and compassionate, destructive and creative. It is the source of heroism, love, and inspiration as well as of fear, hatred, and crime.

Indeed, it is as if we carried inside of us an exact duplicate of the world we see around us, for the world is a mirror of the soul, and the soul a mirror of the world. Therefore when you learn to feel the unconscious you begin to understand not only yourself but others as well, and when you look upon human crime and stupidity, you can say with real feeling, "There but for the Grace of God go I." 

 

The whole universe is at work in every thought and action

I'd thought that I'd read, or at least heard about, every book by Alan Watts -- one of my favorite authors. But then I saw a comment on this blog where someone recommended The Meaning of Happiness: The Quest for Freedom of the Spirit in Modern Psychology and the Wisdom of the East.

So I ordered it, as the commenter said that Watts had interesting observations about free will, one of my favorite subjects. Sweet! Favorite author plus favorite subject equals enjoyable reading.

Watts wrote The Meaning of Happiness in 1940, when he was just 24 years old. Though I'm just a few chapters into the book, it's clearly the product of an intellect wise beyond his years. In a preface written in 1952, Watts says that his ideas have gone far beyond the philosophy of the book.

I'm sure that's true. However, The Meaning of Happiness contains themes that continued on through the rest of Watts' life, such as the folly of viewing reality as being divided into material and supernatural spheres.

I haven't come across specific mentions of free will yet, but a section where Watts talks about the nature of spirituality implies rather strongly that what we call "our" will actually is the will of the entire universe, a view that I find both scientifically correct and emotionally inspiring.

Here's some excerpts that resonated with me.

In itself, spirituality is purely an inner experience; it has no necessary effect whatsoever on one's outward behavior judged from the standards of efficiency and worldly wisdom. This is not to say, however, that it is something absolutely private and personal, finding no expression that others can see.

For spirituality is a deep sense of inner freedom based on the realization that one's self is in complete union and harmony with life, with God, with the Self of the universe or whatever that principle may be called. It is the realization that that union has existed from all time, even though one did not know it, and that nothing in all the world nor anything that oneself can do is able to destroy it.

It is thus the sense that the whole might of the universe is at work in one's every thought and action, however trivial and small.

...In one sense you feel that your life is not lived by you at all; the power of the universe, fate and destiny, God Himself, are directing all your motions and all your responsibilities are blown to the winds. In another sense you feel free to move as you wish; you seem to be moving life with the same vast power with which life moves you, and your littlest acts become filled with gigantic possibilities. 

Indeed, physicists tell us that the stars are affected when we lift a single finger.

The result of these two feelings is that you no longer distinguish between what you do to life and what life does to you; it is as if two dancers moved in such perfect accord that the distinction between lead and response vanished, as if the two became one and the same motion.

By the whirling, ever-changing movement of this dance you are carried along without pause, but not like a drunken man in a torrent, for you as much as life are the source of the movement. And this is real freedom; it includes both freedom to move and to be moved; action and passivity are merged, and in spirituality as well as in marriage this is the fulfillment of love.

All this, however, does not take place in the ecstasy of trance, in some abstract state of consciousness where all shapes and substances have become merged into a single infinite essence.

The spiritual man does not perform his ordinary activities as one in a dream, letting his surface thoughts and deeds run on mechanically. He can become just as absorbed in the usual affairs of the world as anyone else, but in a certain way he sanctifies them for under his hands sharpening a pencil becomes as much a religious act as prayer or meditation.

Indeed, he can afford to become absorbed in everyday affairs almost more than others, and he can do so with a certain zest and abandon for to him ordinary human thoughts and activities are as much included in the dance of the spirit as is anything else.

This, indeed, is much of his secret, for he knows that spirituality does not consist in thinking always about the spiritual as such. His world is not divided into "watertight compartments" and his religion is not a special form of thought and activity, for the spiritual and the material are not separated. 

...Those who cannot feel that man's principal concern should lie outside this world, who feel that salvation has nothing to do with removal to another realm of experience or with mere obedience to a moral law -- such people can find little assistance from religion as usually taught, and today they constitute a very large proportion of intelligent men and women.

For the nineteenth-century conflict between religion and science was, for those whose eyes were open, a stripping off of nonessentials from religion, but unfortunately official religion seldom saw it in this way. It clung to supernaturalism, which, rightly or wrongly, rationalist science has discredited, and continued to make it the keystone of spirituality.

But that kind of religion does not encourage the type of love upon which spirituality is founded. We have seen that its technique is imitative and thus unlikely to produce genuine, firsthand religious experience; we have also seen that its contempt of this world and its concentration on the world hereafter has little to do with the essentials of religion.

...In this sense, religion is union with life; whether that life is this present life of physical form, of thought and feeling with brain and soul, or whether it is a life of purely psychic substance is beside the point.

These are only different grades of existence; they are not different grades of spirituality, for the same spiritual laws apply in every grade of existence, and when one has learned union with one of them, one has discovered the secret of union with any of them.

We have suggested that the secret of this union lies in a positive attitude toward the world in which we live. 

To repeat the question which religion has to answer, we want to discover how we can learn to be united with life in all its expressions, in living and dying, in love and fear, in the outer world of circumstance, and in the inner world of thought and feeling, so that in union with it we may find freedom and happiness. 

To be united with life in all its expressions may seem a large demand to make on oneself, for those expressions include disease, pain, death, madness, and all the horrors which man can devise, wittingly or unwittingly, for his fellow creatures. 

In fact the "nub" of the whole problem is the acceptance of the dark side of life, for this is the very occasion of our unhappiness. "Acceptance" may seem a weak word for a positive attitude of love, but it is used because the type of love in question is relaxed.

It is positive but not aggressive; it grows in its own way and is not forced. Therefore we may say that it is not enough to tolerate the dark side of life; acceptance in this sense is much more than a "let it be" with a resigned shrug of the shoulders.

Let us call it "creative acceptance," though because this phrase smacks overmuch of philosophical jargon we will write the noun and only remember its qualifying adjective. This is perhaps wise in another way, for a truth oddly comes out of a play on words: to be genuine, acceptance must be unqualified.