Church of the Churchless

Great Vox article: How meditation deconstructs your mind

Recently I came across two articles on the same subject -- how mindfulness is just the tip of the meditation iceberg, and how advanced meditation approaches can be described scientifically.

Here's the introductory passages from "Beyond Mindfulness" by Matthew Sacchet and Judson Brewer in the July/August issue of Scientific American.

Millions worldwide practice mindfulness meditation, not just for their mental health but as a means to enhance their general well-being, reduce stress and be more productive at work. The past decade has seen an extraordinary broadening of our understanding of the neuroscience underlying meditation; hundreds of clinical studies have highlighted its health benefits.

Mindfulness is no longer a fringe activity but a mainstream health practice: the U.K.’s National Health Service has endorsed mindfulness-based therapy for depression. Mobile apps have brought meditation techniques to smartphones, enabling a new era in meditative practice.

The approach to research on meditation has been evolving in equal measure. Looking back, we can identify distinct “waves.” The first wave, from approx­imate­ly the mid-1990s into the early 2000s, assessed meditation’s clinical and therapeutic potential for treating a broad set of psychological and physical health concerns.

The second wave, starting in the early 2000s, focused on mechanisms of mindfulness’s effectiveness, revealing why it yields benefits for mental health that are at times comparable to those achieved with pharmaceuticals.

Meditation science is now entering a third wave, exploring what we call advanced meditation—deeper and more intense states and stages of practice that often require extended training and can be experienced through increasing mastery. University research programs are being established to study these altered mental states, similar to new academic endeavors to investigate the merits of psychedelic drugs for personal well-being and a variety of medical conditions.

More interesting to me, because the article is written in a more readable fashion and clearly summarizes  what the above-mentioned third wave of meditation research consists of, is a January 8, 2025 Vox piece, Oshan Jarrow's "How Meditation Deconstructs Your Mind."

It's based on Vox's five-day course on deepening one's meditation practice, More to Meditation. Naturally I signed up for up. Here's some excerpts from the Vox article.

Over the last decade or two, the rise of mindfulness-related practices as a profitable industry has spread the most accessible forms of meditation — like short, guided stress-relief meditations, or gratitude journals — to millions of Americans.

Which is great — basic mindfulness practices that help us concentrate on the present are both relaxing and useful. But as psychotherapist Miles Neale, who coined the term “McMindfulness,” writes, if stress relief is all we take meditation to be, it’s “like using a rocket launcher to light a candle.” Some meditation practices can help ease the anxious edges of modern life. Others can change your mind forever.

One way to pursue happiness is to try and fill your experience with things that make you happy — loving relationships, prestige, kittens, whatever. Another is to change the way your mind generates experience in the first place. This is where more advanced meditation focuses. It operates on our deep mental habits so that well-being can more naturally arise in how we experience anything at all, kittens or not.

But the deeper terrain of meditation is often shrouded in hazy platitudes. You may hear that meditation is about “awakening,” “liberation,” or jubilantly realizing the inherent emptiness of all phenomena, at which point you’d be forgiven for tuning out. Descriptions of more advanced meditation often sound … weird, and therefore, inaccessible or irrelevant to most people.

Part of my hope for this course is to change that. Even if you don’t want to join a monastery (I do not), there’s still a huge range of more “advanced meditation” practices to explore that go beyond the mainstream basic mindfulness stuff. Some can feel like melting into “a laser beam of intense tingly pleasurably electricity,” and ultimately change the way you relate to pleasure, like the jhānas. Others, like non-dual practices (which I’ll get into later), can plunge you into strange modes of consciousness full of wonder and insight that you might never have known were there.

...In a pivotal 2021 paper by cognitive scientists Ruben Laukkonen and Heleen Slagter, that big picture — a model of how meditation affects the mind that can explain the effects of simple breathing practices and the most advanced transformations of consciousness alike — finally began coming together.

Let’s start with plain language. Think of meditation as having four stages of depth, each with a corresponding style of practice: focused attention, open-monitoring, non-dual, and cessation.

Near the surface,“focused attention” practices help settle the mind. By default, our minds are usually snow globes in constant frenzy. Our attention constantly jumps from one flittering speck to the next, and the storm of activity blocks our view of the whole sphere. By focusing attention on an object — the breath, repeating a mantra, the back of your thigh, how a movement feels in the body — we can train the mind to stop getting yanked around. With the mind settled on just one thing, it’s easier to see through the storm.

“Open-monitoring” practices help us get untangled from focusing on any particular thing happening in the mind, opening the aperture of our attention to notice the wider field of awareness that all those thoughts, feelings, and ideas all arise and fall within.

Once you’ve settled the mind and gotten acquainted with the more spacious awareness beneath it, “non-dual” practices help you shift your mental center of gravity so that you identify with that expansive field of awareness itself, rather than everything that arises within it, as we normally do. (I know this probably sounds weird, we’ll get more into it later. Some things in meditation are irreducibly weird, which is part of what makes me think it’s worth paying attention to.)

And finally, for practitioners with serious meditation chops, you can go one step deeper, where even the field of non-dual awareness disappears. If you sink deep enough into the mind, you’ll find that it just extinguishes, like a candle flame blown out by a sudden gust of wind. That can happen for seconds at a time, called nirodhas in Theravada Buddhism, or it can last for days at a time, called nirodha-sammapati, or cessation attainment.

...Now, bear with me. We’re going to retell that story, but using Laukkonen and Slagter’s innovation — the general theory of meditation. The key to this framework is a theory that’s risen to dominate cognitive science in the past decade or so: predictive processing.

Predictive processing says that we don’t experience the world as it is, but as we predict it to be. Our conscious experience is a construction of layered mental habits acquired through past experiences. We don’t see the world through our eye sockets; we don’t hear the world through our ear canals.

These all feed information into our brains, which conjure our experience of the world from scratch — like when we dream — only that in waking consciousness, they’re at least trying to match what they whip up in our experience to what might actually be going on in the world outside our skulls.

The building blocks for these conjured models of the world we experience — the predictive mind — are called “priors,” those beliefs or expectations based on the past. Priors run a spectrum from deep and ancestral to superficial and personal.

For example, say you ventured an opinion in front of your third grade class and everyone laughed. You might have formed a prior that assumes sharing your thoughts leads to ridicule. If that experience was particularly meaningful to you, it could embed deep in your predictive mind, shaping your behavior, and even perception of the world, for the rest of your life.

Similarly, our bodies know how to do some of their most basic functions — like maintaining body temperature around 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit — because we’ve inherited priors from our evolutionary history that holding our body in that range will keep us alive. According to predictive processing, consciousness is constructed via this hierarchy of priors like a house of cards.

With all that in place, science’s new meditation story can be put nice and short: Meditation deconstructs the predictive mind.

But hold on. It took billions of years for evolution to slowly, patiently build us these predictive minds. They’re one of the great marvels of biology. Why would we want to deconstruct them?

Well, evolution doesn’t care whether survival feels good. Conscious experience — as we know it — might be a really useful trick for adapting to our environments and achieving the goals that further life’s crusade against entropy and death. But natural selection cares about ensuring our bodies survive, not that we achieve happiness and well-being.

Which is why you often hear meditation teachers talking about “reprogramming” the mind. We don’t want to just leave the predictive mind in pieces. Again, it’s one of the most useful adaptations life on Earth has ever mustered. But in some departments, we might want to kindly thank evolution, while taking the reins and revising a bit of its work to make this whole business of living feel better.

Each step, from focused attention through to cessation, is a deeper deconstruction of the predictive mind. But “deconstructing” doesn’t mean, like, breaking it.

Instead, the key idea is “precision weighting,” which you can think of as the volume knob on each of the priors that make up your predictive mind. The higher the precision — or volume — assigned to something, the more focus your mind pays to it. The more your experience warps around it.

Deconstructing the mind is to progressively turn down the volume on each layer of stacked priors, releasing the grip they ordinarily hold on awareness. By definition, then, the deeper meditation goes, the stranger (as in, further from ordinary) the resulting experience will be.

Fascinating. And the five-day course, which comes via email, goes into all this in more depth than the Vox article does. In the second day's message (at least I think that's where I'm at currently), Jarow provides some suggestions for where to go to get more instruction in meditation.

I'm quite familiar with focused attention and open monitoring from my fifty-five years of daily meditation. Non-dual approaches, not so much, though in this regard Jarow mentions the book by Thomas Metzinger I wrote about extensively last year, The Elephant and the Blind.

He also mentioned a couple of online sources of instruction in non-dual awareness. One had a bunch of videos, the first of which was about 90 minutes long. I watched a few minutes of it, then decided I wasn't willing to devote that much time to the guided meditations.

I then checked out the Loch Kelly web site. I've heard Kelly speak on Sam Harris' Waking Up app and liked his style. Today I signed up for a 14 day free trial of his Glimpses app that I now have on my iPhone. Kelly says that short glimpses of nonduality can bring about a transformation of consciousness, though it takes longer to do this in those brief chunks than if you meditate for longer periods regularly.

The Cessation thing is intriguing, but at the moment it doesn't really appeal to me. The Scientific American article describes cessations by a single advanced meditator that were examined by the authors using EEG data. What they call "cessation" of consciousness isn't what the word sounds like, but more like a selfless state with echoes of mindfulness.

When we discuss the loss of consciousness during advanced meditation cessation events, it is crucial to differ­entiate it from unconsciousness that is caused by anesthesia, coma (including medically induced coma), physical trauma such as head injuries, and naturally oc­curring events such as sleep. Unlike these states, cessation events in advanced meditation represent a peak meditative experience in which ordinary self-aware­ness and sensory processing are tempor­arily suspended.

...The lowest levels of alpha power and connectivity occurred immediately before and after cessation. The results of this study are consistent with the suggestion that this type of meditation diminishes hierarchical predictive processing—that is, the mind’s tendency to predict and rank self-related narratives and beliefs. The cessation process can ultimately result in the ab­sence of con­sciousness and the emer­gence of a deeply present form of aware­ness and thought that accepts whatever arises, whether positive or negative.

I'm not impressed with NotebookLM or weird notions of oneness

I do my best to accept the diversity of opinions expressed by people who leave comments on this blog. Diversity is good. If we all believed in the same things, life would be super boring. 

However, I'm also big on coherent conversations. While I understand that it is difficult to accomplish this via blog post comments, there's much more value in comments that can be understood by other people, as understanding is the foundation for agreements or disagreements. 

Here's an example.

A few days ago I wrote "Some thoughts about what oneness is, and isn't." It wasn't one of my best blog posts. Adequate, but not more than that. I was hoping that someone else would have something wiser to say about oneness.

Because I've found that Osho Robbins, a regular commenter on this blog, often makes good sense, I did my best to understand what he was getting at in his comments on my oneness post. I failed. Here's quotes from his comments that seem to summarize his position on oneness. 

I have not claimed the existence of ONENESS.
What I have done is shown that ONENESS cannot be known or experienced.
ONENESS is non-existent because it ticks all the boxes for a non-existent thing.
ONENESS has NO CHARACTERISTICS hence it does NOT exist.

OK. I can understand those statements. Oneness doesn't exist and, not surprisingly, it can't be known or experienced. What I can't understand is how Robbins says a whole lot of other stuff in his comments that apparently he considers to be related to nonexistent and unknowable oneness. 

Look, over the years I've been fond of saying that existence exists, and wow, isn't that amazing, that there's something rather than nothing. I readily admit that in one sense, existence can't be known or experienced, since all we can know or experience are entities that exist.

So when I say that existence exists, I'm not claiming that existence is something that stands apart from what exists. This appears to be similar to Robbins' statement that oneness can't be known or experienced, just the unity of things that can be known or experienced. 

However, the difference is that Robbins seems to have a lot of fondness for oneness that doesn't exist. He isn't expressing admiration for love and other manifestations of the unity that undergirds reality, as manifested in universal laws of nature, ecological interconnectedness, and such. 

And that's what I don't get. His take on oneness isn't that it is beyond speech, reason, perception, and other human ways of knowing and communicating. That would put oneness in the sphere of Zen. Rather, it is that somehow we should care about oneness even though it doesn't exist in any fashion.

I can understand the appeal of mysticism, even though I've fallen away from embracing it. What I don't understand is talk about oneness that doesn't exist.

I also don't understand the appeal of NotebookLM, which is capable of fashioning "podcasts" from videos, recordings, or writings, creating two personalities from the thoughts communicated by a single person.

Previously I shared a NotebookLM podcast from Osho Robbins. Then Jim Sutherland, another regular commenter on this blog, emailed me about a NotebookLM podcast fashioned from reports of his about a 2017 visit to the Dera, the headquarters of Radha Soami Satsang Beas in India. 

I listened to about a third of the 17 minute audio podcast. I guess I have a low tolerance for NotebookLM, because I found the artificial intelligence generated voices so irritating, I wished that Sutherland that simply shared a written version of what the podcast is about, rather than having those reports filtered through Notebook LM.

The way I see it, NotebookLM simply is regurgitating a communication that already exists in a podcast form. Nothing new is added by NotebookLM. It merely fashions a pseudo-dialogue between two AI generated "people," each of whom reflects the content of the original communication.

Sure, I can understand the appeal of having the NotebookLM personalities gush over the wisdom contained in something a person has created, be it a video, audio recording, or document. But for me, the listener/watcher of NotebookLM, I don't see what benefit there is in having the original communication fashioned into a "podcast" with the same content.

If I'm wrong about NotebookLM, I'll be pleased to be corrected. That's just how I see it at the moment. 

Some thoughts about what oneness is, and isn't

Oneness comes in for quite a bit of discussion in comment conversations on this blog.

Not surprisingly, there's no consensus about whether oneness exists or what form it takes. That's to be expected, since debates over whether reality is inherently marked by unity or duality have been raging for thousands of years. 

Though I've written a book called "Return to the One," which describes in a lot of detail the teachings of Plotinus, a 3rd century Neoplatonic Greek philosopher, I don't feel like I have anything genuinely wise to say about oneness. 

Nonetheless, here's some non-genuinely-wise thoughts on the subject. They really don't have anything to do with Plotinus, or at least very little. In fact, my current attitude toward oneness is at odds with Plotinus's teachings on the subject in this sense:

Plotinus believed that this physical realm was marked by multiplicity, while the supernatural spiritual realm demonstrated much more unity. Well, that presumes that such a realm exists, so obviously I don't have anything cogent to say about it, as my experience is only of this world.

So let's consider how much oneness there is in the physical reality we all inhabit. There's quite a bit, actually. 

For example, science knows that quantum fields pervade the entire universe. In fact, quantum fields are the universe. No quantum fields -- such as electromagnetism and the nuclear forces -- no universe. 

This was made clear in a provocative article in a recent issue of New Scientist, Volatile cosmology. The teaser after the title says, "The universe as we know it could vanish in an instant. What does our continued existence tel us about the reality we can't see, asks Miriam Frankel." 

A couple of paragraphs gives the gist of the article.

Quantum fields are the fundamental building blocks of the universe, which then give rise to the more familiar particles and forces of the standard model of particle physics. Chief among them is the Higgs field, associated with the Higgs boson, which permeates the universe and gives elementary particles their mass.

The Higgs had been hypothesized for decades, but we were in for a surprise when the particle was finally measured at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva in 2012. The result suggested that the Higgs field isn't stable because it isn't in its lowest possible energy state. We know that objects like atoms or particles tend to want to minimize their energy, so in theory the Higgs could suddenly drop to its lowest possible state in a process known as a phase transition.

This is similar to the phase transition that occurs when liquid water boils to make steam. If you look inside a saucepan of near-boiling water, you will see tiny bubbles of gas nucleating at the bottom. Similarly, a phase transition in the Higgs field would create bubbles of its lowest possible energy.

Those bubbles would contain very strange physics. As a bubble formed, the quantum fields would suddenly shift, effectively rewriting the laws of physics and creating chaos. Terrifyingly, the bubbles would expand at light speed, swallowing everything around them.

Fortunately, this is just a hypothesis, albeit one founded on some solid science. I include it because I think the notion of the universe as we know it dissolving through a phase transition of the quantum field that gives particles their mass is pretty damn cool. I've got more pressing things to worry about, of course.

There's a unity to our universe, as is clear from the "uni" in both words, and the possibility that the universe could swallow itself, so to speak, by the Higgs field undergoing a phase transition. Thus we don't have to look beyond the reality in which we live and breathe to experience a certain oneness. 

For we humans are made of quantum fields, as is everything else. It isn't that we inhabit the universe; we are the universe. How could it be otherwise?

Our conceptions of duality or multiplicity are just that: concepts imagined by the fertile human mind, which has evolved to be capable of fantasizing things that aren't physically real, unless we consider neurons firing in a brain to be physically real, which they are in a limited sense that most of us wouldn't view as genuine reality.

This is where I feel most "spiritual" discussions of oneness go awry. I readily admit that I contributed to this in my book about Plotinus. While I used some concrete examples of oneness -- most of us prefer the unity of love to the division of hate, for example -- I also embraced the other-worldliness of Plotinus's philosophy.

Absolute oneness would be extremely boring. Nothing would happen there. Nothing could happen there.

Any happening would involve change, as all change is from one state to another state, duality. Plotinus recognized this when he noted that it would be crazy for a seeker of oneness to have to fail to exist in order to be one with oneness, for then he or she would lack the ability to experience oneness just when it was at hand. 

Thus oneness can't exist in an absolute form. If it did, like the Higgs field causing all that we know to vanish in an instant, absolute unity would have no entities within it capable of knowing that unity.

So let's be content with the glimpses of unity we enjoy in our better moments where the world seems to hold together in a pleasing sense, and we feel like we're an integral part of the world, not someone looking out upon it from an imaginary vantage point in a separate reality that doesn't exist.

Wow. Here's an AI generated podcast discussion of the RSSB guru's message.

When I got an email yesterday from Osho Robbins, a regular visitor to this blog, at first I didn't know what to make of his description of a new video on his You Tube channel. (Osho Robbins is a pseudonym; I assume Art Ashta is his real name.)

He said:

Hi Brian, one of my friends showed me how to get AI to do an indepth analysis of a video, in the form of a podcast. So I used my previous video, to get a perspective of how AI would handle this. The result is very interesting. 

https://youtu.be/tTXCgAAbh2c?si=Yn8Gqe1aII5oj7Ty

This is solely generated by AI, which is creating two different personalities to discuss and analyse the implications of the statements made on the video I previously posted. Will make an interesting discussion because they conclude, on the podcast, that the statement of oneness cannot be ignored, and if it is accepted then it means the efforts to merge are all in vain. 

 

Hence most disciples just ignore it when the current guru makes such statements because they cannot reconcile these statements with the duality teachings. 

 

kind regards

Osho Robbins

The AI generated video is below, or you can click on the link above. I just listened to the "podcast."

Maybe I missed something on my one-time listening, but I didn't get the impression that the AI generated personalities, one of whom is Robbins/Ashta, arrived at a solid conclusion about the nature of oneness. Rather, I came away with the message that different people will arrive at different conclusions about the oneness message that Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), is conveying in his talks. And that's absolutely fine.

Since this is an AI generated conversation based on a single video that Robbins/Ashta believes points in the direction of oneness, and away from the traditional dualism of RSSB where disciples are to rely on the guru in a journey from this physical realm to higher supernatural realms, obviously it isn't surprising that the conversation is sympathetic to how Robbins/Ashta sees things. Here's the "podcast" video.

So I came away less interested in the message of the "podcast" and more interested in how it was AI generated. Some Googling revealed a September 2024 post with the provocative title, "I tried Google's new one-click AI podcast creator, and now I don't know what's real anymore." Here's most of the text, absent the video made by GoogleNotebookLM.

I’ve had a glimpse of how AI will change the world, and it’s filling me with both fear and wonder in equal measure.

The source of my consternation is Google NotebookLM. NotebookLM takes an article, blog post, or web page, and with just one click produces an audio file of a conversation between two people about it that sounds so natural and realistic that there is no way you’d believe you weren’t listening to two real people talking. They talk with passion and authority about the subject, sound engaged and interested and riff off one another in such a natural way that it takes your breath away. There are even the little sniffs, slight mispronunciations, slurs, and little giggles that all make it sound completely human.

Here's what happened. In my spare time I write a blog about Tai Chi called the Tai Chi Notebook. So, having heard about NotebookLM (the 'notebook' in the name is just a coincidence) I thought I’d throw one of my Tai Chi articles at it, just to see what it did.

Creating the audio is easy. It took it a few minutes to think about it, but it very quickly generated a .WAV file that I could download to my desktop. The audio clip lasted around eight minutes and after I’d listened to it, the world simply wasn’t the same anymore; I no longer had confidence that I could tell what was real and what wasn’t.

The AI had taken my article and explained the key concepts via the 'presenters' having a conversation. It had even expanded on it in new and interesting directions that I hadn't thought of, drawing analogies about what I was saying to other areas of life. The presenters had even introduced practical examples of what I was talking about, and these examples weren't taken from my article but from their wider knowledge of the subject. And, most importantly, it didn’t get any of it wrong.

Obviously, we’re just at the start of the new AI-age at the moment, with key players such as ChatGPT, Gemini and more recently Apple Intelligence only just getting started. NotebookLM doesn’t have that many options right now – you can speed up or slow down playback and that’s about it – but it won’t be long before it lets you choose the type of presenter you want, their accent, their expertise, their political leaning, their personality and, once we move into AI-generated video as standard, how they look. As I wrote recently, AI is already being used in films, and we can imagine a world where a movie is generated on the fly, with the plot changing to suit your whims.

Yes, this will sound terrifying to some, but movies are already flights of fancy that exist in the world of the imagination. It’s when AI intrudes on the real world that I get most concerned. I’ve got a friend whose daughter is applying for university right now, and he tells me that many institutions are saying they don’t require a personal statement anymore because so many are doctored using AI that there’s little point to them.

All of which brings me back to NotebookLM. It can already produce a fantastic podcast out of one of my articles at the click of a button, and it feels like we're on the dawn of a very big change in the way media is produced. I'm not sure I know what's real anymore, and that's something I'm just going to have to get used to.

Free speech is as important in religion as in politics

I'm continuing to enjoy Tim Urban's book, What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies.

He's a wonderfully creative thinker. It's rare that I can read 245 pages of a non-fiction book without coming across something that just seems wrong to me. But Urban's arguments are so compelling and well stated, so far he's convinced me of the rightness of every point he's made.

Recently I read his take on free speech. I'll just describe a few aspects of what he says about this important topic, which is enshrined in the United States constitution in a way that few other countries can match: The First Amendment says that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.

However, private organizations can restrict speech. And various influences, including cultural norms, can make it difficult or awkward for someone to speak freely. Urban writes:

Putting the Higher Mind and Primitive Mind aside for a minute, let's break every human into two parts another way: their Outer Self and their Inner Self. The Inner Self represents what a person thinks; the Outer Self represents what a person says. If we take any given topic, we can depict each of their viewpoints by where they're standing on the Idea Spectrum, and by the color of their head:

We can combine these using a shorthand notation. And we can color these to show what a person is thinking (brain color) and what they're saying (ring color). When a person is being honest and saying what they really think, the two colors are the same, allowing the thoughts of the Inner Self to pass unimpeded through the Outer Self and out into the world.

So, for example, when three people are having a conversation about a topic and everyone is saying what they really think, their brains link together into a three-brain thinking system:

In Chapter 1, we saw how human brains can have emergent properties, combining together into larger superbrains called genies. This only happens when the brains actually connect, which they do by way of expression.

So when people are able to speak their mind freely, good things can happen. This is a foundation of brainstorming. And of psychotherapy, scientific discussions, conversations with friends -- the list is almost endless of positive results through free speech. However...

When a person isn't allowed to say what they think, their ideas become quarantined inside their head, isolated from the outside world. From the communal brain perspective, where each individual human mind is a single neuron in a larger brain, it's as if the axons of the neurons have been hijacked, and any real neural communication ceases.

When I was an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru, for several years I did quite a bit of speaking on behalf of RSSB at meetings called satsangs. 

That word literally means association with truth. Yet often there was a large difference between the truth of what RSSB members were thinking inside their brains and what they were saying outwardly in public. 

Frequently I'd say something in a satsang along the line of "The easiest RSSB vow to keep is the prohibition against revealing inner mystical experiences, because hardly anyone is having any." Usually some people would come up to me after I'd finished speaking and say, "Thanks for saying what you did. I thought I was the only person who felt this way."

Urban writes:

A phenomenon that psychologists call "pluralistic ignorance" begins to set in when no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes. Over time, hearing everyone expressing the same viewpoint, people start to doubt their own beliefs and assume that if everyone is saying it, there must be something to it.

...Throughout human history, clever opportunists have discovered that if you could control what people say, you could write the story people believed. You could dictate the values, the morals, and the customs. You could decide who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. You could create the laws, dole out the rewards, and inflict the penalties. If you could write the narrative, the group became your marionette.

The most effective puppet masters came up with depictions of reality that tapped directly into people's Primitive Minds. Some would stoke fear with stories of imminent danger or invoke rage toward a common enemy to fuel the Primitive Mind's natural fires. Or they might write stories of their own ruthlessness and inflict fear of torture and death on subjects. 

Others would claim knowledge of the divine in order to bring the afterlife into the picture and drive incentives to astronomical heights. 

Free speech is an antidote to these negative outcomes.

Beyond protecting against tyranny, free speech laws open the gates to a dynamic free-speech market -- the marketplace of ideas. In the marketplace of ideas, scientists freely do their research, philosophers freely philosophize, activists freely protest, journalists freely report, and artists and comedians freely challenge norms and test the edges of what's socially acceptable.

If the market's "supply" is made up of the ideas of millions of free-speaking humans, "demand" consists of millions of free-listening ears. To win the key currency of the market -- attention and influence -- ideas have to outcompete other ideas in the market.

In the same way that a free economic market has a natural tendency to push bad products to the fringes while elevating the rest, the marketplace of ideas serves as a vast information filter. Ideas are stripped naked and analyzed from every angle. This exposes and embarrasses false or unwise ideas and prevents them from spreading too widely.

The marketplace of ideas is messy, and it doesn't always succeed at sorting right from wrong and good from bad, but it's a far better system than the alternative: allowing the most powerful people to decide what's true and what's good.

Breathing exercises can calm a frazzled mind

Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to breathing when it comes to meditation and relaxation.

The don't interfere approach, which I generally use, advises that we simply notice inhalations and exhalations with close attention without trying to change our breath. This makes the breath an object of awareness, thereby focusing the mind.

The breath exercise approach, which I also enjoy, advises that we follow certain patterns of breathing to achieve desired ends, like relaxation, increased energy, and such. This makes the breath akin to a muscle that benefits from exercise.

Today the Washington Post had a story that caught my eye, "How to calm your mind with breathing, according to science." Here's how it starts out:
Download How to use breathwork to calm your mind - The Washington Post

Take a deep breath.

Now exhale and notice how you feel.

If you feel even a bit calmer, you have just experienced the power of conscious and intentional breathing.

Research shows that breathwork practices and slowing our breath can alleviate stress and improve mood by harnessing the often subtle but profound influence our breathing has on how we think, feel and behave.

Our “breath accompanies us from birth until death,” said Helen Lavretsky, a geriatric integrative psychiatrist at the University of California at Los Angeles and director of research for the Integrative Medicine Collaborative. As a result, breathing is “an immediate tool available to a human being to self-regulate emotions.”

The relationship between our breath, body and brain has been known for at least 1,500 years, said Paul Dallaghan, a breathwork expert and researcher who is publishing a review on the history of yoga. “One reflects the other. As the breath moves, the mind moves,” he said, citing yoga texts.

More recent research has found evidence supporting this ancient insight.

Several breathing patterns are mentioned in the article, including: "Box breathing involves equal time spent inhaling, holding, exhaling and holding, with each step lasting three or four seconds."

One reason I subscribe to the Calm meditation app on my iPhone is that the app includes six different breathing exercises. Each features a colored ball with a moving cursor around the circumference that's matched to different tones for inhale, exhale, and hold. 

So I can either close my eyes and match my breathing to the exercise via the tone, or open my eyes and watch the moving cursor while hearing the tone. Today I tried the Focus exercise -- "Sharpen concentration and improve performance" -- which uses the Box Breathing technique of inhale, hold, exhale, hold, where each of the four is an equal time. Calm uses four seconds. 

Thus one full inhale and exhale using Box Breathing takes sixteen seconds. This equates to 3.75 breaths per minute, which is quite slow. The Washington Post article says:

Most people breathe an average of 12 to 20 times a minute, though the rate varies from person to person and circumstance to circumstance. More anxious people tend to breathe faster. However, the “magic number” of calming breaths is around 5.5 to 6 breaths per minute — far slower than most people hit, Dallaghan said. This number comes from observations of people in meditative states — moments of calm, quiet and clarity when breathing would spontaneously slow.

I did Box Breathing for four minutes today, via the Calm app. It did feel considerably slower than my usual breathing, especially with the four second pauses after each inhale and exhale. I felt good doing the exercise.

Usually I do the Relax technique -- "Quiet your mind and relieve stress" -- which is a four second inhale and an extended six second exhale. This equates to 6.00 breaths per minute, which feels nicely comfortable to me. The Calm app lets you choose how long you want to do a breathing technique, ranging from one to sixty minutes, or endless. 

I often do the Relax technique for five minutes, which the article says is enough to gain some benefits from a breathing exercise.

A recent study reported that even just five minutes of breathwork each day for about a month could reduce breathing rate, improve mood and reduce anxiety. A 2023 review found that breathwork could help adults with clinically diagnosed anxiety disorders with their symptoms while other research has found breathing interventions helped patients with depression.

"The Surprising Allure of Ignorance," an essay by Mark Lilla

My wife subscribes to the print edition of the Sunday New York Times. As I was taking the discarded December 8 edition to our recycling bin, I noticed an essay in the Opinion section, which was on top of the pile, that looked interesting: "The Surprising Allure of Ignorance," by Mark Lilla.

(That's a gift link from my digital New York Times account, so it should be readable by everybody. But I've also copied in Lilla's essay in its entirety below, as it isn't all that long.)

Lilla is a professor of humanities at Columbia University and the author of the forthcoming book “Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know,” which I've gotten but haven't read much of yet.

I liked his entire essay.

My favorite part, though, because it rings so true with my own personal experience, which is decidedly not ego-less, is where he speaks about how we consider our opinions being extensions of ourselves. So when they're attacked by someone with a differing opinion, we take that personally, as if we were being accosted in a dark alley by a would-be thief of our money. 

But it's just our beliefs being attacked. And no one can forcibly remove them from our brain. Well, not without a lot of work, such as torture and psychoactive drugs used by intelligence agencies (I enjoy reading spy novels). In everyday life, we have nothing to fear from our opinions and beliefs being interrogated to see if they hold up under skeptical questioning.

Yet it sure seems like we do.

This appears to be one of the benefits of meditation: not reacting so strongly to discomfort, whether it be physical or psychological. The June 2025 issue of National Geographic had an article, "An Antidote to Stress," about meditation. Here's an excerpt about an experiment that contrasted the pain felt by a group that had gotten mindfulness training and a control group that listened to a "pretty tame" book.

Volunteers who meditated reported feeling less pain. "We see a 33 percent drop in pain intensity and unpleasantness during meditation, while the pain levels in the control group actually go up," Zeidan says.

Why does meditation provide relief? Zeidan says analysis of the meditators' scans showed pain relief induced by meditation was associated with reduced activation in neural networks involved in self-awareness. The greatest decrease in activation is seen in the medial prefrontal cortex -- a neural hub that plays a prominent role in self-reflection and valuing oneself.

"During the meditation, the self-value is deactivating," Zeidan says. "And the more it goes down, the greater the analgesia, the greater the pain relief." Pain signals are still being received by the brain, but "they are not going into the brain networks that are saying, This is my pain," he explains. In essence, mindfulness appears to help detach the self from the suffering.

This is the essay by Mark Lilla. It's encouraging to think that mindfulness meditation may be able to reduce the discomfort we feel when our beliefs are being attacked, allowing us to be more open and welcoming to those who view those beliefs skeptically. 

Aristotle taught that all human beings want to know. Our own experience teaches us that all human beings also want not to know, sometimes fiercely so. This has always been true, but there are certain historical periods when the denial of evident truths seems to be gaining the upper hand, as if some psychological virus were spreading by unknown means, the antidote suddenly powerless. This is one of those periods.

Increasing numbers of people today reject reasoning as a fool’s game that only cloaks the machinations of power. Others think instead that they have a special access to truth that exempts them from questioning, like a draft deferment. Mesmerized crowds follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumors trigger fanatical acts, and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise. And to top it off we have elite prophets of ignorance, those learned despisers of learning who idealize “the people” and encourage them to resist doubt and build ramparts around their fixed beliefs.

It is always possible to find proximate historical causes of these surges in the irrational — war, economic collapse, social change. But doing so can distract us from recognizing that the ultimate source lies deeper, in ourselves and in the world itself.

The world is a recalcitrant place, and there are things about it we would prefer not to recognize. Some are uncomfortable truths about ourselves; those are the hardest to accept. Others are truths about the reality around us that, once revealed, steal from us beliefs and feelings that have somehow made our lives better, easier to live — or at least to seem that way. The experience of disenchantment is as painful as it is common, and it is not surprising that a verse from an otherwise forgotten English poem became a common proverb: Ignorance is bliss.

We can all find reasons we and others avoid knowing particular things, and many of those reasons are perfectly rational. A trapeze artist about to climb the pole would be unwise to consult the actuarial table for those in her line of work. Even the question “Do you love me?” should pass through several mental checkpoints before being uttered.

But each of us also has a basic disposition toward knowing, a way of carrying ourselves in the world as experiences come our way. Some people just are naturally curious about how things got to be the way they are. They like puzzles, they like to search things out, they enjoy learning why. Others are indifferent to learning and see no particular advantage to asking questions that seem unnecessary for just carrying on.

And then there are people who, for whatever reason, have developed a particular antipathy toward the search for knowledge, whose inner doors are fastened tight against anything that might cast doubt on what they believe they already know. These attitudes are not limited to the uneducated: We have all also fallen into moods where they emerge in ourselves, however uncharacteristically.

Why does this happen? Because seeking and having knowledge is not just a cognitive pursuit; it is also an emotional experience. The desire to know is exactly that, a desire. And whenever our desires are satisfied or thwarted, our feelings are engaged.

Given how rapidly everything changes in life today, doesn’t it often feel better to rest on our intellectual and moral laurels? Why seek truth if truth will require us to do the hard work of rethinking what we already know? Just as we can develop a love of truth that stirs us within, so, too, we can develop a hatred of truth that fills us with a passionate sense of purpose. There can be a clash of emotions, with the desire to defend our ignorance standing as a powerful adversary to the desire to escape it.

One source of this clash is that we consider our opinions to be an extension of our selves, a prosthetic device. When they are attacked or dismissed, we feel that something intimate has been touched. And when our opinions are shown to be wrong, we feel ashamed. Socrates maintained that there is no shame in being wrong, just in doing wrong. He was right. But it’s not the way we initially feel, especially when someone else exposes our errors.

No argument is disembodied. Behind every assertion there is an asserter, and it is he, not his assertion, who wounds our pride. Strange as it may seem, mathematicians and scientists debating matters at the furthest remove from their daily lives can be as dogmatic and touchy as any political partisan. A new elementary particle has been discovered: Is that one giant leap for mankind or one point for our side?

At some point we all decline the opportunity to discover what really is the case. We willingly give up a shot at learning the truth about the world out of fear that it will expose truths about ourselves, especially our insufficient courage for self-examination. We prefer the illusion of self-reliance and embrace our ignorance for no other reason than it is ours. It doesn’t matter that reliance on false opinion is the worse sort of dependence. It doesn’t matter that through stubbornness we might pass up a chance at happiness. We prefer to go down with the ship rather than have our names scraped off its hull.

So as we shake our heads at those charmed by charlatans and demagogues, let us not exempt ourselves. We all want to know — and want not to know. We accept truth, we resist truth. Back and forth the mind shuttles, playing badminton with itself. But it doesn’t feel like a game. It feels as if our lives are at stake. And they are.

"The Mindful Geek" is a meditation guide for secular skeptics

Do I really need another book about meditation? No, I've got lots of them at the moment and have read many more over the 55 years I've been engaged in daily meditation.

But do I want another book about meditation? Absolutely.

That's why Amazon delivered The Mindful Geek by Michael W. Taft to me recently. I was in the mood for a meditation guide that was based on secular non-religious principles that were in accord with modern neuroscience. Taft has a strong background in various sorts of traditions. His first paragraph is:

From Zen temples in Japan to yogi caves in India, I've been meditating for over thirty years. As a result, I have extensive experience in both Buddhist and Hindu meditation techniques. I started in the late 70s, because I was experiencing so much teenage anxiety. Meditation gave me some relief and I was hooked. In the 1990s, I worked as editorial director for Sounds True, a publishing company specializing in spiritual and psychological teaching programs. While there, I had the good fortune to meet dozens of the most popular and interesting spiritual teachers in the world. I produced their programs, which meant that I got exposed to the workings of dozens of traditions.

Taft starts out by talking about the benefits of mindfulness meditation, then observes:

If you are a card-carrying geek, however, the upside of all these possible benefits may be strongly counterbalanced by the downside of having to deal with religion, spirituality, or other things you may consider nonsense. Mindfulness meditation is mainly associated with Buddhist religion, and for that reason can seem deeply suspect to skeptical, rational people.

I'm here to lay that worry to rest. In my experience, you can get many of the benefits of meditation without joining any religion, going to church, or believing in reincarnation or karma. By treating mindfulness as a scientifically-based psychological technique, you can keep your atheistic or agnostic secular skepticism and still maintain a powerful, regular, and deeply effective meditation practice.

Meditation is really a technology. And like any good technology, if you use it correctly, it will do the job reliably whether you believe in it or not. At its heart, meditation is a technique for hacking the human wetware to improve your life. And this book is a manual for how to make the most of that technology for yourself. Let's look more deeply at what meditation actually is.

The definition of meditation offered by Taft is: a psychological practice which makes the unconscious conscious and which improves life. 

For me, "unconscious" points to that part of the brain which is hidden from conscious view. Taft notes that this is the majority of the brain. So I prefer "unaware," making the definition something like a psychological practice which makes us aware of what we're often unaware of and which improves life. This fits with Taft saying:

What does it mean to make the unconscious conscious? It means that meditation calls your attention to things you wouldn't have noticed otherwise. It gives you insights, in other words... When you use meditation to become more aware of what you're feeling, the unconscious or semi-conscious flavors of emotional experience begin to come into focus.

Speaking of neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to change, Taft says that "all learning is neuroplasticity at work," adding:

It means that you can almost "sculpt" your brain in an intentional and directed manner. Whatever you focus your attention on, regularly over time, will change the brain itself -- physically alter it, some parts becoming larger or smaller -- to get better at processing the thing you're focusing on. Within limitations, you can make the brain you want.

He describes what mindfulness is.

What is the difference between meditation and mindfulness? Why use two different words? In short, mindfulness is a type of meditation, a subset of meditation. Specifically, mindfulness means paying attention to your present moment sensory experience in a nonjudgmental manner. That's the basic definition. 

The way the word is used in modern America, mindfulness not only means to meditate, but can also mean a way of directing attention in everyday life, even when you're not practicing formal meditation. 

"Mindfulness" is the modern American translation of at least two words from the ancient Pali language: vipassana and sati. When we're talking about a type of meditation, mindfulness represents the term vipassana, which actually means "insight" or "clear seeing" in Pali. This technique (really a whole group of techniques) is sometimes called insight meditation or vipassana.

When we're talking about a way of directing attention at any time, during formal meditation or not, mindfulness is the translation of the Pali term sati.  Sati actually means "mindfulness," to pay close attention to what you're doing. To go even deeper, sati literally means "to remember," as in "to remember to pay attention to what you're doing."

I like how Taft points out misconceptions about mindfulness meditation. 

The first is that mindfulness meditation means to "clear your mind" or to "have no thoughts." Nothing could be further from the truth. In mindfulness meditation, it doesn't matter how much thinking is going on during the meditation. It literally doesn't figure into the equation. The goal is not to empty your mind of thoughts; the goal is to pay attention to some aspect of your current sensory experience.

...Remember that there are a lot of different kinds of meditation. And some of these techniques do, in fact, ask you to clear your mind. For some reason, those techniques became one of our cultural images of what meditation is about, and that's unfortunate, because "stopping thinking" is not only very difficult to do, even for an advanced meditator, it's also not all that useful. So just let go of that image completely.

The second misconception is that meditation is something that is supposed to be blissful or pleasurable. The cultural image attached to this idea is that of a yogi seated in full lotus posture, fingers curled into a mudra (gesture) of perfection, face suffused with radiant ecstasy. The process of meditation, in this misconception, involves disappearing into a cloud of bliss.

Again, nothing could be further from the case. Mindfulness meditation involves paying attention to your present moment sensory experience nonjudgmentally. That counts no matter if your present moment sensory experience is painful or pleasant, positive or negative. Rather than acting like Ren wearing the "happy helmet" (from the Ren & Stimpy episode "Stimpy's Invention"), in mindfulness meditation, you welcome whatever experience is arising whether it's "happy, happy, joy, joy" or not.

It's possible to have a perfectly good mindfulness meditation while meditating on the body sensations of a headache, for example, or sitting in line at the DMV. There is no need to invoke, produce, or expect any sort of bliss. If bliss happens, that's fine, but you're not trying for it, and you're not trying to hold onto it if it does arise. That's the nonjudgmental part.

Drone fever and prosperity gospel point to religious myth-making

A couple of news stories I came across today are examples of both the limitations of human reason, and how those limitations help to produce religious myths.

The New York Times had a story about the drone sightings that have gotten lots of people in New Jersey and New York all excited. Everyone should be able to read "How Drone Fever Spread Across New Jersey and Beyond," because I'm a digital New York Times subscriber and am sharing the story as a gift link.

Here's some excerpts:

It was a dry and cool Wednesday evening outside the Army’s Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, a longtime military installation that once made the bombs and shells that led to victory in World War II. A contractor there knocked off work and decided to wait out rush hour traffic. He picked up some takeout from Wawa, parked outside a nearby wildlife preserve and settled in to watch an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast on his phone. Then he saw a flash in the side mirror.

A light rising straight up from the tree line and toward the arsenal. He started recording. Could it have been a plane?

Or was it a drone?

And so began what seems to be the origin story of the ongoing drone saga. The contractor called in his sighting to his superiors on Nov. 13, and others followed quickly, first throughout the county, then the rest of New Jersey, then into neighboring states.

Countless people have reported mysterious hovering objects dotting the night skies and posted blurred images — a white light, a black background — on social media. Every day, for weeks. Drones. Drones?

Small drones. Drones big as vans. Blinking, stationary, speeding and zipping and buzzing.

...Was it a foreign government? Our own government? Kids? Visitors from space?

The story grew to consume police departments, sheriffs, the F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security, a former reality TV star with a supposed inside line to NASA, mayors, governors, the White House and the president-elect.

But now it appears increasingly likely that if there were any drones at all, it was very few, and that most of the drones people did see — stay with this — were up there looking for the drones people thought they were seeing.

Mounting evidence, and lack thereof, suggests that perhaps the whole craze has been a sort of communal fever dream fueled by crowd mentality, confirmation bias and a general distrust in all things official.

Mass hysteria, by whatever name it is called, is a well-recognized phenomenon. Afflictions can spread in a school system after one child reports some mysterious symptoms. Soon after, many other children claim to have the same health problem. They aren't lying. They're just manifesting a form of social contagion.

In the drone case, conspiracy theories have been thrown around with no evidence to back them up. Whenever government officials reassured residents of New Jersey and New York that there wasn't any reason to be concerned about the drone sightings, this didn't stop the conspiracy theory of a government cover-up, it served to strengthen it.

"Obviously the government is hiding something," went the crazy reasoning, "because they're assuring us that everything is fine." Of course, the more likely explanation for why government officials were saying everything is fine is because everything is fine. 

But simple truth is less interesting than complex myths. The most likely explanation for why there's no compelling evidence for the existence of God is that God doesn't exist. That's not an entertaining explanation, though. So religions use faith as an explanation, saying that God's absence from the world is a test of religious faith.

Belief in an unseen God requires strong faith. If God was obvious, no faith would be required, so religious believers wouldn't need to exercise their faith muscle.

Which brings me to a second story in the Washington Post, "For some Latinos, 'prosperity gospel' led them to Trump." I also am a digital subscriber to this newspaper, so that gift link should be readable by everybody. Excerpt:

The Lehigh Valley Barbershop was bustling with the next generation of American strivers. The mood among the young men, mostly first- or second-generation migrants from the Caribbean, was hopeful. Their candidate, Donald Trump, had just won the presidential election.

Sitting in high-end silver chairs, the young men talked about the businesses they had built, or would build. That would be more possible, they hoped, with the return of Trump, someone to whom they could relate — a businessman who has made mistakes, they said, but still keeps striving.

“Kamala said, 'Trump is for the rich, I fight for the poor.’ But I don’t want to be low-class — I hope that’s not a bad way to say it. But I don’t want to be there,” said Christian Pion, 31, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris. He became a U.S. citizen last year, a decade after coming to the United States from the Dominican Republic, and cast his first presidential ballot for Trump. “God doesn’t want you to be poor.”

Next to him, his best friend, Willy J. Castillo, 39, who owns the shop and others, worked the register as he talked about Trump’s drive to succeed, overcome and survive. Castillo, who also voted for Trump, identifies with that: “The Bible says ‘God helps those who help themselves,’ right?”

The mix of hope, drive for success and belief in a God who rewards faith, sometimes with financial accomplishments, has become dominant across the United States and Latin America, experts on Latino religion say. The belief system is sometimes called “seed faith,” “health and wealth gospel,” or “prosperity gospel.”

In the past half-century, driven by larger-than-life pastors, it has overtaken other more traditional theologies centered on God’s priority being poor and disenfranchised people, some experts said. This belief system, they said, helps explain what exit polls showed was a significant shift among Latino Christian voters to Trump, who they see as an uber-successful, strong and God-focused striver.

What happened to this passage from the Bible? I guess it is no longer operative for believers in the prosperity gospel.

Matthew 19:23-26 King James Version (KJV) Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

The most obvious absurdity here is Christians believing that they know what God wants, even though there isn't even any demonstrable evidence that God is real, leaving aside the question of what God values -- which supposedly is making a lot of money.

Another absurdity is related to the familiar adage, correlation is not causation. Meaning, just because two things happen in proximity to each other, doesn't mean that one thing caused the other thing.

In this case, some Christians believe that God wants them to be financially prosperous. They then go and work hard to make money, in part because they feel this pleases God (as well as themselves). But many other people simply work hard to make money, with no belief in God. The Post story says:

The movement started in the United States with healers and televangelists such as Oral Roberts and Benny Hinn, who told followers that giving them money would lead to divine blessings, conjuring a transactional God. By extension, personal wealth was seen as a goal for the faithful. It focused on the power of the self, and the idea that God would reward positivity, hard work and confidence.

Well, positivity, hard work, and confidence typically bring their own rewards, no God required. But just as with the drones, many people prefer a complex myth to simple truth. 

Here's our 2024 Holiday Greetings letter

I'm not a Christian, but I have no problem with saying "Merry Christmas." After all, tomorrow is as much a secular day devoted to giving and receiving presents as it is a celebration of Jesus' supposed birthday.

The problem with this celebration is that it's virtually certain Jesus wasn't born on December 25. Wikipedia says:

In the third century, the precise date of Jesus's birth was a subject of great interest, with early Christian writers suggesting various dates in March, April and May.

Steven Hijmans of the University of Alberta writes that "cosmic symbolism" inspired the Church leadership in Rome to choose 25 December, the Roman date of the winter solstice and the birthday of Sol Invictus ('Invincible Sun'), as the birthday of Christ.

Regardless, my wife and I are pleased to flow with the Christmas river, even though we have no interest in the religious side of this holiday. For me, it's a reason to write an annual Christmas letter, which we prefer to call a Holiday Greetings.

Here's this year's letter in PDF and JPEG formats. Because I've written a Christmas letter since 1995, as documented in my regularly updated Collected Christmas Letters post, I didn't feel like breaking that string this year. I do note in the 2024 letter that I'm feeling increasingly like a soon-to-be-extinct creature. 

Download 2024 Christmas Letter PDF