Church of the Churchless

Freedom, says Alan Watts, isn't personal but a quality of the world

I don't believe in free will. But I believe in freedom. This isn't a freedom of my personal will to do what I choose. It is the freedom of realizing that I'm part of the unified whole we call the universe. 

This view is scientific. I much prefer it to unscientific notions of free will that basically say, "Because we humans feel that we have free will, it must be so." Unfortunately, feelings have little or nothing to do with truth.

In his book, Determined, Robert Sapolsky laid out the reasons why free will is an illusion. An appealing illusion, to be sure, but an illusion nonetheless. His core conception is similar to a central tenet of Buddhism: causes and conditions result in stuff happening, with the happening producing more causes and conditions that result in additional stuff happening.

We members of Homo sapiens aren't separate from all the happenings of the universe just because we have an evolved brain/mind that can make us feel like we're observing the world from a detached vantage point.

In truth, we're as much a part of nature as a daisy, rock, wolf, or hurricane is. This is so obvious it really shouldn't need to be pointed out. However, because our mind is prone to seeing ourselves as being an isolated "I" who often is at odds with what is not us, we need to be reminded that our sense of selfhood is a sometimes useful falsehood tossed up by evolution. It isn't the way things truly are.

Alan Watts explains this well in his terrific little book, The Wisdom of Insecurity, which he wrote in 1951. I finished re-reading it today. Here's a passage about the nature of freedom.

The meaning of freedom can never be grasped by the divided mind. If I feel separate from my experience, and from the world, freedom will seem to be the extent to which I can push the world around, and fate the extent to which the world pushes me around.

But to the whole mind there is no contrast of "I" and the world. There is just one process acting, and it does everything that happens. It raises my little finger and it creates earthquakes. Or, if you want to put it that way, I raise my little finger and also make earthquakes. No one fates and no one is being fated.

Of course this is a strange view of freedom. We are accustomed to think that, if there any freedom at all, it resides, not in nature, but in the separate human will and its power of choice.

But what we ordinarily mean by choice is not freedom. Choices are usually decisions motivated by pleasure and pain, and the divided mind acts with the sole purpose of getting "I" into pleasure and out of pain. But the best pleasures are those for which we do not plan, and the worst part of pain is expecting it and trying to get away from it when it has come. You cannot plan to be happy.

I'll end with some additional passages from the book about another seeming truth: our awareness of the world in nondual. Meaning, there isn't (1) the world, and (2) our knowledge of the world. What we know of the world is the world. There's just one thing going on, not two.

Certainly most people feel separate from everything that surrounds them. On the one hand there is myself, and on the other the rest of the universe. I am not rooted in the earth like a tree. I rattle around independently. I seem to be the center of everything, and yet cut off and alone.

...Nevertheless, the physical reality is that my body exists only in relation to this universe, and in fact I am as attached to it and dependent on it as a leaf on a tree. I am cut off only because I am split within myself, because I try to be divided from my own feelings and sensations. What I feel and sense therefore seems foreign to me. And on being aware of the unreality of this division, the universe does not seem foreign any more.

For I am what I know; what I know is I. The sensation of a home across the street or of a star in outer space is no less I than an itch on the sole of my feet or an idea in my brain.

In another sense, I am also what I do not know. I am not aware of my own brain as a brain. In just the same way, I am not aware of the house across the street as a thing apart from my sensation of it. I know my brain as thoughts and feelings, and I know the house as sensations. In the same way and sense that I do not know my own brain, or the house as a thing-in-itself, I do not know the private thoughts in your brain.

But my brain, which is also I, your brain and the thoughts within it, as well as the house across the street, are all forms of an inextricably interwoven process called the real world. Conscious or unconscious of it as I may be, it is all I in the sense that the sun, the air, and human society are just as vital to me as my brain or my lungs.

If then, this brain is my brain -- unaware of it as I am -- the sun is my sun, the air my air, and society my society.

...That there is a sun apart from my sensation of it is an inference. The fact that I have a brain, though I cannot see it, is likewise an inference. We know about these things only in theory, and not by immediate experience. But this "external" world of theoretical objects is, apparently, just as much a unity as the "internal" world of experience.

From experience I infer that it exists. And because experience is a unity -- I am my sensations -- I must likewise infer that this theoretical universe is a unity, that my body and the world form a single process. 

...But you will cease to feel isolated when you recognize, for example, that you do not have a sensation of the sky: you are that sensation. For all purposes of feeling, your sensation of the sky is the sky, and there is no "you" apart from what you sense, feel, and know.

This is why the mystics and many of the poets give frequent utterance to the feeling that they are "one with the All," or "united with God," or, as Sir Edwin Arnold expressed it -- Foregoing self, the universe grows I. 

I ponder the new Pope and the present moment

This morning I turned our TV on, wanting to watch some news while I did my physical therapy exercises, to find that CNN's attention was focused on the Vatican following white smoke coming from a chimney -- the sign, along with bells, that a new Pope has been elected by the cardinals.

I found this fascinating in a theatrical sense.

Meaning, since I'm not at all religious and don't believe in God, who the Pope is only matters to me in a "political" fashion. I liked Pope Francis because he genuinely cared about the poor and downtrodden, a moral quality far removed from Trump's lack of compassion and caring.

But when the new Pope was announced, who shockingly was from the United States, the first time a Pope has been from North America, I was moved by the intense cheering from the large crowd gathered in St. Peter's Square.

When Robert Prevost started to speak -- the Pope name he chose is Leo XIV -- he talked about the need for world peace and loving everyone. Again, this was so refreshing to hear, compared to the crap that issues from Trump's mouth every time he opens it (guess I need to work on loving everybody), that briefly I felt tears welling up in my eyes.

The revealing of a new Pope truly is majestic. Not surprisingly, it appeared that Prevost/Leo XIV was overcome with emotion, though he managed to keep it in check as he uttered his initial remarks as Pope.  I'm no fan of Catholic dogma, but I give the Church high marks for putting on a good show.

Turning to the subject I was planning to focus on in this post before the Pope's selection grabbed my attention, I've been looking through Alan Watts' classic little book (152 pages), The Wisdom of Insecurity.

My granddaughter is about to graduate from high school. I had the idea of sending her a book, along with an accompanying letter, that I've enjoyed as a guide and support when life doesn't turn out how I wanted. Which will happen often to my granddaughter, as it already has to some extent, and as it does to everybody.

I find The Wisdom of Insecurity highly readable, well reasoned, and timeless in a certain sense. Watts wrote it in 1951, yet his analysis of modern society and the stresses people feel is just as applicable today. More so, actually, given the current state of technology, social pressures, and constant online stimulation. 

Here's some passages from the "On Being Aware" chapter that resonated with me.

To understand that there is no security is far more than to agree with the theory that all things change, more even than to observe the transitoriness of life. The notion of security is based on the feeling that there is something within us which is permanent, something which endures through all the days and changes of life.

We are struggling to make sure of the permanence, continuity, and safety of this enduring core, this center and soul of our being which we call "I." For this we think to be the real man -- the thinker of our thoughts, the feeler of our feelings, and the knower of our knowledge. We do not actually understand that there is no security until we realize that this "I" does not exist.

...There is no experience but present experience. What you know, what you are actually aware of, is just what is happening at this moment, and no more.

...To say that experience is momentary is really to say that experience and the present moment are the same thing. To say that this moment is always dying, or becoming past, and always being born, or coming out of the unknown, is to say the same thing of experience. The experience you have just had has vanished irretrievably, and all that remains of it is a sort of wake or track in the present, which we call memory.

While you can make a guess as to what experience is coming next, in actual fact you do not know. Anything might happen. But the experience which is going on now is, as it were, a newborn infant which vanishes before it can even begin to get older.

...To be aware, then, is to be aware of thoughts, feelings, sensations, desires, and all other forms of experience. Never at any time are you aware of anything which is not experience, not a thought or feeling, but instead an experiencer, thinker, or feeler. If this is so, what makes us think that any such thing exists?

We might say, for example, that the "I" who is the thinker is this physical body and brain. But this body is in no way separate from its thoughts and sensations. 

...When you see clearly that memory is a form of present experience, it will be obvious that trying to separate yourself from this experience is as impossible as trying to make your teeth bite themselves. There is simply experience. There is not something or someone experiencing experience!

You do not feel feelings, think thoughts, or sense sensations any more than you hear hearing, see sight, or smell smelling. "I feel fine" means that a fine feeling is present. It does not mean that there is one thing called an "I" and another separate thing called a feeling, so that when you bring them together this "I" feels the fine feeling. 

There are no feelings but present feelings, and whatever feeling is present is "I." No one ever found an "I" apart from some present experience, or some experience apart from an "I" -- which is only to say that the two are the same thing. 

...We are being aware of the fact that any separate "I" who thinks thoughts and experiences experience is an illusion. To understand this is to realize that life is entirely momentary, that there is neither permanence nor security, and that there is no "I" which can be protected. 

...The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the "I" out of the experience. 

...Sanity, wholeness, and integration lie in the realization that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate "I" or mind can be found.

Deep thoughts about my obsession with a frustrating Starlink internet problem

For a bit more than 24 hours I've been obsessed. Not with the state of suffering humanity. Not with how I can become a better person. Not with any high level moral obsession that I'd be proud of.

No, my obsession was with why our normally reliable Starlink satellite internet had stopped working. This is our only genuine broadband option out here in the wilds of rural south Salem, Oregon, where we live a whole six miles from the city limits of a state capital but have "broadband" options that people in Outer Mongolia would scoff at. (6-7 Mbps DSL over copper phone lines isn't broadband).

But that's another story. My story in this post is about the deep meaning of my obsession and how it turned out. I have to write about this, because at the moment that's all I'm able to think about.

I won't go into all of the geeky details of what I've done in the past day, which started when I came home yesterday afternoon and found that our Starlink broadband had gone offline. Usually restarting the router solves the problem.

That didn't work. I tried other suggestions on the Starlink app on my iPhone, which I could only access with our dreadfully slow cellular connection, just 1-3 Mbps at best. (Yeah, we truly do live in an internet desert of sorts.) We have a Verizon range extender, but it requires an internet connection. 

I reset the router to factory settings. Didn't work. I switched the router with another Starlink router I'd installed downstairs to form a mesh network for better coverage. Didn't work. Sometimes the router would connect with the dish on our roof, but almost instantly the connection would be lost. That told me the problem likely was with the router, not the dish. 

I'd put in a support request with Starlink, but aside from what looked like a canned response based on the key words in my request, I couldn't contact a real human being. Starlink is a technical marvel but its support is minimal at best, as it can take days or even weeks to get a response. Last night I decided to order a new Starlink router from Amazon. The delivery was to be between 5-10 pm today.

After spending most of last night trying everything I could think of to get our Starlink system working, and an hour or so this morning, I was really frustrated.

I'm a news junkie. Also a streaming TV junkie. I love to follow the news throughout the day on my iPhone, iPad, and laptop. In the evening I love to zone out with something non-political. Recently I started watching Game of Thrones, as I'd only seen a single episode when the series first came out. Now I'm hooked on it. So the withdrawal period yesterday and tonight was tough.

As soon as 5 pm arrived today I started opening the front door frequently to see if the new router had arrived from Amazon. At 7:30, about two hours ago, it had. Visions of Game of Thrones and internet surfing burst into my head. I ripped open the box and replaced the old router with the new one, then waited for the good news.

Sadly, there was bad news.

A red light appeared after several minutes, a sign that the router couldn't connect with the dish on our roof, which happens via a cable. I reset the router. The same thing happened. Now my frustration was really extreme. I'd been convinced that the problem was with the router, not the dish. If the dish needed to replaced, that was going to be more expensive and take more time.

Still, I started to look at how quickly I could get a new dish, either from Starlink or a local reseller. Staring  at the list of things to purchase on the Starlink web site, I noticed that a DC power supply looked like the power supply of our current third generation dish, which is considerably smaller than the power supply that came with the new router I'd just bought. (Starlink used to have a separate power supply for the dish and router; now the dish gets its power from the router.)

That led me to what turned out to be a great idea: use the old power supply with the new router. When I did that, bingo! Almost an instant connection. I'd been correct that the old router was the problem. But I'd assumed that I should use the power supply that came with the new router, which apparently didn't have enough oomph (technical electrical term) to power our dish.

Well, I've gotten more geeky than I expected. I guess it is therapeutic for me to convey my deep frustration with trying to fix the Starlink problem, and then deep relief when I finally found the solution, though a lot of trial and error (mostly error, until the very end).

Here's what I take away from this experience.

 For over a day my mind was consumed with how to get our broadband functional again. I did do some other things, like go grocery shopping today, but Starlink was in my thoughts, lurking in the background when it wasn't in the foreground. I knew that this wasn't a highly meditative thing for me to do, being so obsessed with the problem that I had difficulty living in the present moment. It was hard for me to sleep last night, as I kept thinking about the problem and what may be causing it. 

But here's the thing.

All my worrying, all my distress, all my frustrations -- all that served to keep driving me forward to find a way out of those painful feelings. It'd be going too far to say that this was similar to the Great Doubt of Zen Buddhism. Still, I've said it, as I like the idea that I've gained something from what I went through yesterday and today.

I wish I was more of a relaxed person. Usually I sort of am. However, when something consumes me, when I feel a strong drive to do something, I can get pretty intense. Part of me wishes I wasn't this way, but another part says, "If you weren't this way, you wouldn't be who you are."

I'm a strong believer that often our greatest strengths are our greatest weaknesses. We want to have one without the other. I doubt that this is possible. What annoys me about myself (and annoys other people also, I'm sure) can be an asset in certain circumstances. I didn't give up on finding a solution to the Starlink problem, even though I was tempted to find someone in our area who installs Starlink systems and turn the problem over to them.

In the end, it was simply looking at a picture of a power supply on the Starlink web site that caused my mind to say, "Hey, you should try switching the power supplies." So in that sense it wasn't me that solved the problem, it was the wider world. Which sounds pleasingly Buddhist. I'll end on that note.

If an experience promises to transform us, it's difficult to decide about it

Should you become a vampire if the opportunity presented itself? More realistically, should you have a child? If you're deaf from birth, should you get a cochlear implant? 

These questions, among others, are raised by philosopher L.A. Paul in her book, Transformative Experience. It's a fascinating look at something I'd never thought much about before: if an experience promises to transform us, it's difficult to decide whether to have the experience.

I'll add a question that came to mind as I read the book. Should you join a religion or other form of spirituality that claims to be able to markedly alter your view of yourself and reality as a whole?

I first heard of L.A. Paul and Transformative Experience through an article in the December 9, 2024 issue of The New Yorker. The online version is titled "The Philosopher L.A. Paul Wants Us to Think About Our Selves: To whom should we have allegiance -- the version of ourself making choices, or the version of ourself who will be affected by them?"

I'll share a PDF file if the link doesn't work for you.
Download The Philosopher L. A. Paul Wants Us to Think About Our Selves | The New Yorker

The article was so interesting, I decided to buy the book. It goes into considerably more detail about transformative experiences, but the basic problem addressed by Paul is appealingly simple.

Usually we make a decision about whether to do something by considering the expected value of either doing, or not doing, that something. Expected value is simple conceptually, though statistically can get pretty complicated. Here's one non-mathematical explanation.

If someone offered you a free beer, but told you there’s a 1% chance it contains poison, you wouldn’t drink it. That’s because the badness of drinking poison far outweighs the goodness of getting a free beer, so even though you’re very unlikely to end up with poison, it’s not worth drinking.

We all make decisions about risk and uncertainty like this in our daily lives. And when trying to do good, we often face even greater uncertainty about the ultimate effects of our actions, especially when we consider all their long-term effects.

In practice, we don’t — and can’t — know for sure what the effects of our actions will be. The best we can do is to consider all of the good and bad things that could result from an action, and weigh them by how likely we think they are to actually happen. So you should think of the possibility of dying in a car crash as twice as concerning if it’s twice as likely.

We call this the ‘expected value’ of our actions, which is the technical term for the sum of all the good and bad potential consequences of an action, weighted by their probability. (You can read more about the technical definition here; it’s why in our definition of social impact, we say what matters is promoting ‘expected wellbeing,’ rather than just ‘wellbeing.’)

For example, if a disaster rescue effort has a 10% chance of saving 100 people, then its expected value is saving 10 lives.

If another effort has a 20% chance of saving 50 lives, then it would also save 10 lives in expectation, and so we could say it has similar expected value.

Of course, it’s rare to be able to have that much precision in your estimate of either the total potential benefits or the likelihood that they occur. But you can sometimes make rough, informed guesses, and it can be better to work with a rough guess than with no idea at all.

Paul, though, points out a complication with transformative experiences such as those I mentioned at the start of this post. If the action you take ends up making you into a different sort of person than you were when you decided to undertake that action, rationally there's no way for you to predict the action's expected value, because the deciding self is different from the experiencing self.

Consider becoming a vampire. That sounds ghastly to me in my current human form. But as Paul says, which fits with what I've learned about (fictional, thankfully) vampires, after someone becomes a vampire, reportedly they love their new blood-sucking self and want to convert others to vampire'ness.

So in my current state of mind, I definitely don't want to become a vampire. However, if an opportunity to become a vampire presented itself and I said "Go ahead, bite me," I'd be thrilled with that decision because I'd have been transformed into a person who is beyond happy with being a vampire.

Deciding whether to have a child is a very different decision, but similarly transformative. I can attest to that, since while I've never become a vampire, I became a parent in 1972 when my daughter Celeste was born.

As Paul notes in both the article and book, it is impossible to know what it's like for you to have a child until you've experienced this. Sure, you can talk to people who have decided to remain childless as well as to people who have decided to have children.

But they're not you, with all of your unique characteristics, values, preferences, and such. And other peoples's children aren't the child you will have should you decide become a parent. You don't know if your child will be perfectly healthy or suffer from some birth defect. You don't know how easy or difficult it will be to care for your child. And you don't know how becoming a parent will change you.

I recall thinking soon after my daughter was born, "I no longer feel like a child of my parents; now I feel like a parent of my child." Big difference. Suddenly my wife and I were responsible for a helpless baby that needed constant care. Becoming a parent was both more satisfying and more difficult than my pre-child self expected. 

Likewise, Paul speaks of how members of the Deaf community (she capitalizes the word) have mixed feelings about cochlear implants that allow deaf people to hear for the first time, albeit imperfectly. Some deaf people feel that the experience of being part of a tight-knit Deaf community outweighs the benefits of being able to hear. Others feel differently.

But until a deaf person has a cochlear implant, they don't know how this transformative experience will affect them. It's different if someone lost their hearing, as they know what it means to be able to hear. Again, it doesn't really help to talk with both people who are congenitally deaf and people able to hear from birth, because anyone considering a cochlear implant is unique and how they will be transformed by the implant experience is impossible to know in advance.

The problem seems unsolvable, and in a way it is. But Paul suggests one way to look at transformative experiences, that makes sense to me. I'll save that for another post, though.

Here's a passage from her book that will give you a feel for her writing style. Clear, yet decidedly philosophical. After all, she's a philosopher.

What you care about, when making a decision about your own personal future, is not the third person descriptive knowledge that you will have certain properties in the future, but your experience-based first personal knowledge of what it will be like for you to have these properties.

In other words, you care about what it will be like for you to experience your future, because you want to determine your preferences in terms of your expected subjective values. For example, maximizing your expected subjective value of becomes a species-typical hearer is what you care about when you make the decision to get a cochlear implant.

When we confront the decision to become a vampire, or to have a child, or to become a violinist, and so on, from our first personal perspective, a third-personal way of assessing and modeling the experiential outcomes is often insubstantial and unhelpful, because it merely involves describing the experiences, not determining their subjective values.

The special, first personal sense in which you know what it will be like to experience the likely results of your choice is the sense that fits with our centered perspective on the world and is reflected in our subjective values.

...Transformative experiences, then, confront you with the basic unknowability of your subjective future in a context where new and dramatic changes are occurring, and transformative decision-making draws out the consequences of that epistemic fact.

In an important sense, when facing a transformative choice, you lack the knowledge you need in order to have authority and control over who you will become when you choose how to act... Instead, you grope forward in deep ignorance of what your future conscious life will be like.

Gurus take us into the realm of lost souls

After writing about Steven Harrison's book in my previous post, "Doing Nothing -- a book about ending the spiritual search," below are additional passages that appealed to me.

Which doesn't mean that I resonate with everything in Doing Nothing. Some parts are a bit overly New Age'y for me, and I came across a mention of divinity that seems at odds with Harrison's message. But on the whole, I enjoy his blunt assessment of the problem with spiritual searching.

Basically, it boils down to a simple assertion that is in line with both neuroscience and Zen: whenever we're seeking salvation, enlightenment, mystical experience, or whatever for ourself, this ends up strengthening our sense of self -- and that sense is what keeps us from feeling at ease in this messy, confusing, changeable world, our only true home. 

To give an example from my life, and my sense of self, whenever I use the circuit training weight room at our athletic club, I get annoyed when someone is sitting at a machine I want to use for longer than I think they need to.

But my view of what the proper time is comes from the way I use the machines, which is pretty quickly, usually just 20 repetitions, aside from 48 repetitions on the abdominal machine. And certainly at times I will be using a machine that prevents someone else from using it.

So recently I've been silently saying, Hope you're having a good workout, when I find myself getting annoyed at a person who, in my irritated frame of mind, seems to be camping out on a machine I want to use. This relaxes me. I no longer feel like I'm in a battle with the other person. They're just doing what I'm doing, exercising in the circuit training weight room in their own way.

In these passages Harrison speaks of how we confer authority upon a guru or spiritual teacher because we wrongly believe that this will benefit ourself, a self-centered point of view.

This teacher is our projection, the reflection of our fear, anxiety, and laziness. We project a father figure who is certain, authoritative, and disciplined. We project a mother figure who is nurturing, forgiving, and uncritical.

...This guru game is like the enlightenment game, we play it because we do not want to face our emptiness.

We have misunderstood our confusion when we think there is an answer to it. The confusion is not a result of questions that are too hard, but rather a questioner who is disintegrating. Confusion is the introduction to true intelligence. This is an intelligence without a center and without the dominance of thought.

If we sacrifice that intelligence in the name of the guru, if we put aside our spiritual responsibility for the authority of another, we have entered the realm of lost souls. Beware all those who enter here. The souls are lost. The guru is lost.

Power is corruption. There is abundant evidence in the sex and money scandals of a multitude of gurus that this is the case. How many insightful and charismatic teachers have become mired in intrigue and deception as their followers rationalize their leader's behavior?

The movement to increasing stupidity is the very nature of this structure, because the first step, the abdication of responsibility, is a misstep.

Harrison also warns against the lure of seeking experiences through meditation. This is another trap, often linked to the guru trap, since sometimes a guru is a person's meditation teacher.

It should not be surprising then that meditation becomes the hunt for experiences. The mind that is dissatisfied with its life is dissatisfied with itself and looks for this other.

There is a state of bliss, a state of peace, a state of love that it hunts for, a state that will be different, better, more complete than the mind which is hunting.

And yet, the field in which the mind hunts for this other, is the mind itself.

Finding nothing but itself, the mind, the meditator, looks for significance in what it finds. It finds experiences, states, gods and demons. From this it creates descriptions, explanations, and instructions. From this are created philosophy and religion. 

...The mind has folded into itself. It has discovered a self-created truth and yet is still contained within itself. 

If we are told to sit, close our eyes and look for the white light, we will create that white light. Or Buddha. Or Shiva. Or Jesus.

This is interesting in its own way. We can be educated or conditioned to experience particular phenomena in our meditation.

It can appear to be a joyful experience to find our god in meditation. But where did our god come from? Is this not a projection of the same mind that is in profound conflict? Isn't our god, the serene and compassionate one, an expression of this conflict? By creating this being of light, do we not imply that we exist in the shadows, that we are not that? Are we not still in conflict?

...The question is often asked, "How do we go beyond our minds?" The question presumes that we will still be there observing it all when "beyond" is reached. Beyond the mind means beyond the questioner, so who will be there to observe?

...We do not live lives of originality and discovery, but rather lives echoing the perspectives we have inherited.

The most fundamental conditioning is that of "I am," the basic sense of self-centeredness. This is the sense that there is a thinker who thinks thoughts and who somehow lives in our bodies. This is the illusion that we have location. 

...Any approach to ourselves is from ourselves and is consequently part of the conditioning. It is a hopeless dilemma, and there is nothing we can do about it.

So, can we do nothing? A simple thing: nothing. There is a fundamental quiet in nothing.

...Doing nothing outlines the doer in an unmistakable way. If we wish to approach our mind, the most direct way is to do nothing. If we want to go beyond our mind, do nothing.

Perhaps what becomes most clear when we do nothing is that thought keeps on going, as though we were doing something. There is great humor in this. There is no on/off switch to thought. We are sure that we are the thinker of these thoughts, but they seem to have a mind of their own.

But if these thoughts do have a mind of their own, then who is the thinker? And more important, where is this thinker, this "me"?

The most fascinating thing is that we cannot find the thinker anywhere. Thoughts are coming and going, feelings, images, plans, dreams, fears and even commentaries on these thoughts are occurring. But, we cannot find the thinker in the nothingness anywhere. Just thought. 

...Our entire reality is built upon a premise of a "me" located in our body. Perhaps it is time to look again.

Doing Nothing -- a book about ending the spiritual search

Back in 2013 I wrote a blog post about a book by Steven Harrison, Doing Nothing: Coming to the End of the Spiritual Search. I was pretty positive about the book in "Doing Nothing. Sounds like my kind of anti-religion," though I hadn't read it.

Here's a tip for authors of books in the spirituality, religion, mysticism, and meditation genres:

If you want readers to finish your book, don't include a mention of another title like "Doing Nothing: Coming to the End of the Spritual Search."

I stopped reading during my pre-meditation quiet time when I came to that mention.

I wrote down the name of the book for future inspection, then turned to another book that didn't have anything to do with spirituality. Must obey...

When I fired up Amazon on my MacBook Pro, "Doing Nothing" seemed sufficiently interesting to justify a buy. Heck, if author Steven Harrison is persuasive, maybe this will be the last book about spirituality I'll ever purchase. 

(Not likely, but hey, its possible.)

It does bother me a bit that Harrison has a pretty extensive web site devoted to doing nothing. How much explaining does it take to back up the simple assertion, nothing needs to be done?

But I suppose that's justified.

Many people have built up so much momentum in their search for the meaning of life, recognizing that IT is right here, right now can require some active braking before the present moment is seen for what IT is.

A few days ago I noticed Doing Nothing languishing in my bookcase next to another book that I was interested in looking at again. From my highlighting, I could tell that I'd read most of it, but not the final chapters. (It's short, 132 pages.) For some reason I never wrote another blog post about the book

Re-reading it, I'm liking Harrison's style. His Introduction provides a good summary of his simple thesis, which I find difficult to argue with. I'll share some passages from the Introduction that earned my highlighting. Which, actually, comprises most of the Introduction.

This book is a work of investigation into the bare actuality of our existence. It was not written for the purpose of creating a particular philosophic or ideated approach to life.

It is not a description of a methodology, or a way to get from confusion to clarity. There is no way, no system, no instruction that will give us certainty in living our lives. Systems, philosophies, beliefs are static, and life is dynamic.

...We are in need not of a new ideology but of the intention and the integrity to look directly at the structures of mind already in existence. We need no one to mediate this view, since it is inherently clear when we are willing to look firsthand at the actuality of our lives.

We can observe directly for ourselves that the basic structure of our reality consists of thought forms arising out of nothing and passing away. There is no observable continuity to this arising-passing away. But there also arises the idea that there is a thinker, a central "me," which is the creator of these thoughts. This "me" is a concept, not an actuality.

This central thought, repetitive, subtle, and usually unconscious, is the core of the reality in which we exist. It is the basis for the entire web of our psychology, social functions, and cosmological and theological beliefs.

The examination of this basic idea of self is the essential beginning of understanding. If this "me" is a thought form, too, and if it also is arising and passing away as all thought appears to do, then who are we? Who is the observer of this passing away of the "me"?

This book is intended to take the reader on a journey through the structure of mind and, perhaps, into the quiet space out of which thought occurs. It leaves some of the work to be done by the reader.

...At a young age I was moved by the pain and discord in the world around and inside me...Leaving the security of an Ivy League university, I sought to find a complete, final, and universal answer to this pain.

I sought out every mystic, seer, and magician I could find throughout the world. I subjected myself to severe austerities, long periods of isolation, and meditation. I studied the world's philosophies and religions. I spent long periods in India and in the Himalayas, searching, contemplating, being. Throughout the past twenty-five years, I have been a student and teacher of all that I have discovered.

And it was all useless.

No system, philosophy, or religion could address the human condition. Even though I was discovering greater and greater depths of the mind and consciousness, no experience could solve my dilemma. No matter how far I traveled, no matter how intensely I practiced, no matter what master I found, I was still the center of the experience. Every experience, no matter how profound, was collected by the "me." 

The problem was the collector.

At one point, I went to see a powerful yogi in the Himalayas. I suggested to this man, who had obviously obtained a deep insight into life, that I had come to learn all he knew about the powers of the inner world. His response was simple and to the point: "Why do you want power? What are you afraid of?" Then he walked away.

The exploration of that fear was the beginning and the end of my spiritual journey.

Somewhere in all of this occurred the profound discovery that the problem was not pain and discord but the seeker. The very grasping for an answer, for a response, for a solution that relieved me of the burden of feeling, was the problem. Without the grasping of the seeker, there is no solution. Without a solution, the nature of the problem fundamentally changes.

There is no position, ideology, philosophy or religion that responds to the question that life poses us. These systems are designed to give us the  certainty, solidity, and solace of an answer. The question that life brings is is the movement of life itself, intrinsically dynamic, uncertain, and vital.

For those who have the interest, the fact of existence is present all the time. It may be touched in the quiet, without the distortion of belief. In the face of the vastness, the magic, the unknown quality of life, and in a moment of true humility, we may discover the actuality that washes away all our concepts.

This book is an accounting of this interest, and anything found in it should be tested by the reader's direct contact with who he or she is. This contact comes not with the reading of these words but in the silence that occurs after the words, the thoughts, the "me" pass into nothingness.

It may sound like Harrison is anti-thoughts and anti-concepts. In one sense he is. In another sense he isn't. I'll share some passages from a later chapter that points to his fairly subtle view of emptiness (not to be confused with Buddhist emptiness).

Understanding that we cannot escape, we try to change. We try drugs. We try psychotherapy, meditation, yoga, religion. We try to become something that is free from pain. Yet becoming is the source of pain. The pain is the constant motion to reach for something else, something outside of us that will resolve us, but in fact never does.

We become increasingly spiritual, loving, and altruistic. We live like a demon encased in a saint's clothes. Outwardly, we are happily enlightened, or at least moving satisfactorily on the path to actualization. Inwardly, we are in pain.

...Our entire life is lived relative to this pain, and yet we have never fully felt and embraced our pain. If we embrace it we embrace ourselves, we embrace nothing.

It is this fundamental emptiness that has awakened us to our lives. It is not in fact painful. It is empty. This vast space is the gateway of our reality... We are not describing a null state. We are describing a very full and complete universe that is simply absent a viewer.

Yet, in this universe, viewing is taking place. Reality, which is the cognition of thought, is occurring. This happens without a thinker. This is emptiness.

...This emptiness does not negate the reality of thought and the cognition of thought. The world does not disappear in this emptiness, it occurs in this emptiness, and it is transformed by the recognition of this emptiness.

We may say that the world is illusion, but it is the viewer that is an illusion. The illusion is that the viewer is constant and solid. The illusion is that the viewer sees an objective world that exists outside its conditioning.

...The view, without a viewer, arises out of the emptiness. Emptiness is not an abrogation of responsibility in the world. On the contrary, full contact with the world brings full responsibility for the world with it. This is only possible when the notion of a view dissolves.

Our happiness, our well-being, our integration, cannot be separated from the world's, because we cannot be separated from the world.

What is changeless? Important question that I'm not sure about.

I stay in touch with a few people from my high school years, including an old friend that I went to elementary school with. He's as philosophically and spiritually minded as I am, so I enjoy our periodic email exchanges.

In our most recent sharing of views, my friend included a quote from a previous message I'd sent him. I was referring to Robert Wright, the author of Why Buddhism is True, a book I've written about on this blog.

Wright says that the main illusions Buddhism can help us dissolve are a belief in an enduring unchanging self, and the related illusion that things outside of us in the world also possess an independent unchanging quality. He makes a good case, drawing both from Buddhism and neuroscience, that rather than a single Self, we actually are comprised of a bunch of mental modules, any one of which can come to the fore at a given time.

My friend said that from an early age his journey of prolonged self-inquiry has centered around the question, "What is changeless?" He shared some thoughts about this question, but noted that any answer truly can't be described or conceptualized.

He may be correct. However, that didn't stop me from responding to him today with:

I always enjoy your observations about life, reality, and all that. We’re both attracted to this sort of thing, though sometimes I feel like I’m almost as far away from realizing the truth of that “thing” as I was fifty years ago. 

Yes, I too struggle with what’s changeless versus what changes. Consciousness and awareness —that seems changeless, at least while we’re alive, because without it we wouldn’t know anything else, including what’s changeless or changeable. Beyond that, it’s an open question.

I know several people who have suffered from dementia lately. It’s a side effect of growing old, though one of the people is in his 50s I believe. It’s really difficult for loved ones, and the person themself, to see the person slipping away in the sense they’ve always known them and others. What remains is the bodily person and some memories and personal characteristics, but a lot is gone.

I do my best to remain centered in what’s actually happening with me, versus what my mind says might happen in the future or has happened in the past. This is tough sometimes, though. Mindfulness practice says to accept the toughness along with the mental thoughts of past and future, plus the physical reality of here/now. 

This strikes me as wise, even if I can’t manage it all the time. If change is happening continuously, accepting all those changes perhaps is the only way to deal with change.

 

Every time I go to my Tai Chi class I’m presented with images of the Taoist symbol showing yin flowing into yang, and yang into yin. There’s a never-ending balancing going on within and without us. Staying aware of all that balancing, the back and forth, maybe is the best I can do — since controlling what happens within and without me is impossible.

 

Is there anything that never changes? My intuition says "No." But I could be wrong about this.

For example, the laws of nature may never change. Yet physics and cosmology tell us that the laws of nature appeared at the moment of the big bang which marked the beginning of space and time, or spacetime in Einstein's formulation. 

If infinity or eternity exists, and I lean toward believing that they do, are they changeless? Maybe. At least, insofar as we know, since I have no idea how it would be possible to tell if there's a beginning or end to infinity or eternity.

But those examples are far removed from everyday life. Sure, religions say that God is beyond change, as is the soul, which some consider to be a changeless bit of being that survives a person's bodily death. This is in the realm of theology, though, not here-and-now reality.

In my life I can't think of anything that hasn't changed. Nor can I think of anything that could be changeless, whether it be part of my life or someone else's life. Again, as I said to my friend, consciousness is a constant in everyone's life, including my own. 

But to elevate consciousness to some sort of Cosmic Certainty, beyond change, strikes me as going way too far -- since every conscious being that has existed on our planet since life first arose has died and lost consciousness.

Sure, people love to imagine that consciousness is changeless, even considering this the hallmark of soul. That's merely an idea, though, a pleasant concept with no grounding in fact.

If someone else can come up with something that is changeless, not just theoretically but in demonstrable reality, leave a comment on this post. I'd be delighted to learn that change is almost universal, except for _________. Can anyone fill in that blank?

I like the idea that who I am is competing brain modules, not a distinct self

UPDATE: If you want to get the gist of Kurzban's book in a 17 minute video, rather than buying and reading the book, here's Kurzban explaining some central concepts about the brain that cause us humans to be hypocrites. 

Having finished Robert Kurzban's book, Why everyone (else) is a hypocrite: Evolution and the modular mind, it's time to share some (possibly) final thoughts about the book before it gets shelved away.

The basic notion of brain modules has grown on me. Though computer analogies are risky when discussing how the brain works -- the human brain is what it is, not a computer -- Kurzban likens modules to subroutines that get called on to perform some special function.

These aren't physical parts of the brain. They're functions spread out across the brain's complex architecture. 

Mindfulness practice suggests labeling as a worthwhile activity. Meaning, if I'm anxious about something, telling myself "worrying is happening" can provide a certain distance between me and that emotion.

After reading this book, I've adapted that advice to say "worry module is active," or words to that effect. For me, this works even better than "worrying is happening," because viewing myself as composed of modules reduces my perception of myself being a distinct unified self.

Instead, I'm a collection of modular processes crafted by evolution. These modules mostly work unconsciously below the surface of awareness. What Kurzban calls the "press secretary" is the module most of us view as Me.

When the workings of a module become partly conscious, the press secretary describes what's going on both to the outside world and to our inside world -- those voices that speak within our head in the form of thoughts, images, and other forms of mental chatter. 

Kurzban stresses that evolution cares about our genes being passed on to the next generation. Knowing the truth about ourselves, or feeling good about ourself, is a lesser priority, if a priority at all.

Imagine a brain that when faced with a bear, instead of feeling all those unpleasant things like fear and terror, bathes itself in contentment. A bear... I think I will experience "flow" and be in the moment, me and the bear... I am one with the bear... ahhhh... AAAHHH!... 

The bear food brain is no more plausible than the brain that arrives at various facts -- like Fred's belief that he's not going to die of cancer -- because doing so is "protective" or "feels good." Mechanisms whose function is to make someone feel good per se have no real function at all as far as evolution is concerned, since the feeling itself is invisible to selection.

For most of my life I've felt that something was wrong with me if I didn't feel good. But this assumes there is a "me" who doesn't feel good, and an "I" who worries about the inability of "me" to feel good. In line with Buddhist philosophy and modern neuroscience, the modular view of the brain undermines this assumption.

Which I find highly reassuring. It's sort of akin to me not worrying about the health of my entire iPhone when an app stops working as it should because I know that the apps are separate entities, so a malfunction with one doesn't mean the whole device is messed up.

Similarly, an understanding of brain modules allows us to look upon our diverse thoughts, emotions, intentions, actions, and such as separate mental processes. If one module is doing something painful, distressing, or unproductive, this doesn't mean my whole psyche is messed up.

Here's Kurzban speaking about preferences.

The evidence reviewed here suggests that we shouldn't think of preferences as being things that are recorded in people's heads. Decisions are the result of the operation of different subroutines of the mind being brought to bear on individual decision problems. 

For this reason, far from being consistent, choices change depending on the way different modules operate. Because modules work differently depending on context, state, and history, changing any of these things might change the decisions we observe.

...Indeed, various threads across different fields have been converging on the view that far from preferences being listed in a book in one's head, they are constructed on the fly as one is faced with different decisions.

In any case, if choices are the result of the activity of different modules, each of which operates by its own evolved logic, then it's no wonder that people's choices look so inconsistent, even reversing themselves.

It's because there's no particular reason that they would look consistent. If the context one's in, or the state one's in, turns certain modules on, then the preferences in those modules will drive one's performance. In a different context, the very same options will be evaluated by different modules, leading to the possibility of a different choice being made.

So when you ask what pen I want, you can't think that you're just asking "me" what pen I want. You're asking the modules that are active in the particular context in which you ask me.

Near the end of his book, Kurzban has a passage about hypocrisy -- an important concept, since it's in the title of the book.

Modularity explains why everyone is a hypocrite. Moral(istic) modules constrain others' behavior. The mob's moral sticks can be used to prevent an arbitrarily wide set of acts. At the same time, other modules advance our own fitness interests, often by doing the very same acts our moral modules condemn.

In this sense, the explanation for hypocrisy lies in the rather quotidian notion of competition. Organisms are designed to advance their own fitness interests, which entails harming others and helping oneself and one's allies. Hypocrisy is, in its most abstract sense, no different from other kinds of competition. 

So if hypocrisy is nothing less -- but nothing more -- than a manifestation of competition, then why does it seem so offensive?

...The answer lies in the nature of morality. One might wonder why morality evolved in the first place, but a key feature of morality is that humans seem designed to accept -- even create -- rules that constrain their own behavior, as long as these rules constrain others' behavior as well. 

Morality can be seen as the informal equivalent of a justice system. I'll agree to rules that specify that I can be punished for various deeds, but only as long as everyone else is subject to the same rules. This makes sense; we shouldn't expect evolved creatures to be designed to consent to limit their own options, but not others'.

Often I seem to be conscious, but not aware

I go back and forth, trying to decide whether being conscious and being aware are the same thing, or different things. Sometimes I equate the two. But I recall someone (Ron E.?) expressing a different opinion in a comment on one of my posts. 

At the time I discounted that idea. But after what happened to me in my Tai Chi class yesterday -- which wasn't all that different from what has happened to me many times before -- I'm more inclined to believe that being conscious and being aware are indeed distinct mental processes.

We were doing a form that I was very familiar with, the 37 Form, or Cheng Man Ching form. Near the beginning of the form I suddenly felt that our instructor, Warren, had missed some moves. After that, the form seemed normal.

When we were done, Warren said something like he often does. I think it was "Any questions or comments?" I blurted out, "Well, we skipped high pat, followed by three kicks." Instantly several other people said, "No, we did that." So did Warren.

At first that surprised me, as I had no recollection of doing that part of the form, even though I was told that I had indeed done the moves. Then I said, "I remember trying to decide what to have for dinner, Amy's Pad Thai or Veggie Loaf. Guess that thought was more powerful than paying attention to the form."

So I was undeniably conscious, because I had done the entire form and I wasn't sleepwalking. Yet there was a gap in my awareness of doing the form. 

I think my Tai Chi experience of being conscious, yet not aware of a physical action, was unusual only in that I'd spoken of this to a group of people, who let me know that this is what happened. Otherwise, it was basically the same as when I close the door on my car, walk away, and then go back to check to see if I'd locked the door.

I do this fairly frequently. Not once, I'm pretty sure, have I ever found that I didn't lock the door. It's such a habitual action -- touching the door handle of my Subaru Crosstrek after turning the car off -- that I do it automatically, which frees my mind to be aware of other things.

Also, when I do a Tai Form on my own, as happens at the end of my exercise routine at our athletic club, it isn't unusual for me to be unsure if I'd done all the moves of my favorite lengthy Water Boxing form. Since I know that if I do the entire form, almost always I end up in just about the same position as where I started, if I finish the form and am in that position, it's a strong sign that I did all the moves.

Yet my awareness was elsewhere while I was doing part of the form. That "elsewhere" was some thought, most likely, because when I'm aware of what my body is doing, there's no gap in my awareness. Same with locking my car. 

In Susan Blackmore's book, Ten Zen Questions, her first question is "Am I conscious now?" Here Blackmore seems to be equating "conscious" with "aware." At least that's how this passage sounds to me.

Am I conscious now?

Of course I am. Yes, I am conscious now.

But something odd happened. When I asked myself the question it was as though I became conscious at that moment. Was I not conscious before? It felt as though I was waking up -- coming to consciousness when I asked the question -- because I asked the question.

What is going on? (Calm down. Take it slowly.) Am I conscious now?

I can remember what was happening just before I asked the question, so it seems that someone must have been conscious. Was someone else conscious a moment before -- as though the waking up is a change in who is conscious? 

It certainly didn't feel as though it could have been me because I just woke up, but surely it wasn't anyone else, for who else could there be in here?

Another possibility is that I wasn't really conscious before I asked the question. This is deeply troubling. For I've never asked this question before. Surely I cannot have been unconscious, or semi-conscious, all my life, can I? Perhaps there are lots of things that make me conscious apart from asking this particular question.

Even so, this is rather scary. It certainly seems as though I must spend a lot of my time unconscious, otherwise I could not have this definite sensation of coming awake when I ask "Am I conscious now?"

It's interesting how this simple question of being conscious (or aware), or being unconscious (or unaware), points to profound philosophical and neuroscientific issues. Seemingly this supports a contention that "I" does not exist as most of us think it does, given that the entity we call "me" can exist in so many different states.

In one of her final chapters Blackmore says this.

So I reject many of those common assumptions and would say instead the following:

There is nothing it is like to be me.

I am not a persisting conscious entity.

I do not consciously cause the actions of my body.

Consciousness is not a stream of experiences.

Seeing entails no vivid mental pictures or movie in the brain.

There is no unity of consciousness either in a given moment or through time.

Brain activity is neither conscious nor unconscious.

There are no contents of consciousness.

There is no now. 

I am not claiming to provide a coherent alternative, much less a new theory of consciousness, but here is my best attempt to describe what I think we should be trying to explain.

At any time in a human brain there are multiple parallel processes going on, conjuring up perceptions, thoughts, opinions, sensations, and volitions. None of these is either in or out of consciousness for there is no such place.

Most of the time there is no observer: if consciousness is involved at all it is an attribution made later, on the basis of remembering events and assuming that someone must have been experiencing them in the past, when in fact no one was.

If this doesn't make sense to you, don't worry. Remember: her book is called Ten Zen Questions. The questions are easy. It's the answers that are difficult.

Open Thread 49 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread.

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

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

Leave a comment on this post about anything you want to talk about. Personal attacks on someone are an exception, as is hate speech. Argue with ideas, not insults.

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

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