Church of the Churchless

If you want a fresh self, a right-brain one is worth considering

One of the reasons I'm so attracted to modern neuroscience and ancient Buddhism is that each discipline agrees that the unchanging Self most people believe they have is an illusion -- the reality being that we have multiple selves popping into existence all the time.

Cognitive neuropsychologist Chris Niebauer speaks about this in his book, No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology is Catching Up to Buddhism, which I wrote about a few days ago. Here's a compelling passage from his "Pattern Perception and the Missing Self" chapter.

Noting just how many "yous" appear in a day works to dismantle the illusion of a singular "you" behind it all. A sense of freedom can emerge from the realization that you are under no obligation to be consistent. You need not try to glue the continuous change in the world into one single thing.

Anger may appear with one "you," but that is only one page of the flip-book, which will soon be replaced with another emotion, another perception, another thought. Like the sun rising and setting, these "yous" will come and go. There is no need to cling to some and avoid others.

There need be no conflict between these selves -- so you can abandon the wrestling match between "sinner you" and "saint you." This frees up an enormous amount of mental energy and fundamentally changes how we can experience the world.

Lastly, you can try to notice that in between the yous there are moments when you are so engaged in some activity that the self isn't even noticeably around. This points to a central question of this book: where is the self when no one is thinking about it?

In his next chapter, "The Basics of Right-Brain Consciousness," Niebauer starts off with the fascinating story of Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who had a stroke that took much of her left brain off-line. I wrote about Taylor in "Brain Damage = Enlightenment?"

The stroke caused her inner voice to fall silent, as it affected the side of her brain that deals with language. But as pleasant as this may seem to those of us (which is virtually everybody) afflicted with monkey mind, Taylor had to undergo years of therapy before she could return to her scholarly work. I shared some quotes from her in my blog post. Taylor said:

I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world and the more peaceful our planet will be. And I thought that was an idea worth spreading.

...So who are we? We are the life force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world.

Right here right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are -- I am -- the life force power of the universe, and the life force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form. At one with all that is.

Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere. where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the "we" inside of me.

This is entirely consistent with Niebauer's perspective. He correctly observes that because the left brain is the primary handler of words, language, and concepts, it has the upper hand in determining how most people view the world. Namely, through the lens of words, language, and concepts. 

But there obviously are other ways of experiencing reality. When we walk, ride a bicycle, dance, reach for a glass of water, and such, we Just Do It. We don't think about doing it. We don't talk about doing it. We just do it. Sure, we can also think and talk about those actions, but our doing is distinct from the speaking.

Evolution has brought us a brain divided into left and right hemispheres. So clearly both the left and right brain have important functions. Niebauer summarizes some of them.

In many ways the right brain is the yin to the yang of the left brain. For instance, in the same way that the left brain is categorical, the right brain takes a more global approach to what it perceives. Rather than dividing things into categories and making judgments that separate the world, the right brain gives attention to the whole scene and processes the world as a continuum.

Whereas the attention of the left brain is focused and narrow, the right brain is broad, vigilant, and attends to the big picture. Whereas the left brain focuses on the local elements, the right brain processes the global form that the elements create. The left brain is sequential, separating time into "before that" or "after this," while the right brain is focused on the immediacy of the present moment.

...Another way to summarize the differences between the left and right brain is that the left brain is the language center and the right brain is the spatial center. While admittedly this is reductive, it is a helpful way to summarize decades of research.

Language is categorical; it looks at one word at a time with a narrow focus either as you read or as you speak. When we process the space around us, we deal with the whole at once, not individual parts but how the parts are all connected as they are in any picture.

Niebauer recommends some right-brain activities: yoga, meditation, mindfulness, tai chi, qigong, Since I've been practicing tai chi for twenty years, I resonated with his observation about moving forms of meditation.

When done well, one is conscious of movement within space without verbal labels.

Well, based on my experience, it is possible to do both: be in the right brain flow while still engaging in some left brain verbiage. In my 2008 post about Taylor, I shared this anecdote.

There are lots of ways to get more in touch with our right brain – meditation, dancing, athletics, drugs, sex, to name a few. Getting into "the zone" is a good thing. But for sure, it's not the only thing.

Yesterday I felt great in my Tai Chi class. At the end of it we did the long form, 108 moves that should take around 20 minutes to perform (or "play," in Tai Chi parlance).

About a third a way into the form I thought, "I'm flowing today." About halfway through I thought, "There's no way I'm going to stumble or make a wrong move."

As soon as I said that to myself, my analytical side responded with, "Oh no, you shouldn't be thinking that way. You're going to jinx yourself. You're going to talk yourself out of the zone you're in."

But I didn't.

I kept on feeling in the flow. Part of me was in the zone, and part of me could say "You're in the zone." The two parts weren't interfering with each other, as they sometimes do. I didn't have to shut off half of my brain to play the long form proficiently.

Balance. Not going to extremes. The middle way. Accepting what is. Flowing flexibly. This is the way to approach the left brain/right brain thing. Here's another tip from Niebauer that appeals to me.

Once a day, do something for no reason at all. As one cannot plan to be spontaneous no matter what your left brain tells you, allow for moments of opportunity to arise. If at some point you feel like getting up and taking a walk, do so -- not because you want the fresh air or because work is boring but because you had the inclination and now are acting upon it "for no reason."

Obvious, but needs repeating: our conceptions may seem true, but often aren't

It had been a while since the Great God Amazon blessed me with another book about how our usual conception of the self is an illusion. But after prayerfully searching for "neuroscience" titles, my faith was rewarded with No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology is Catching Up to Buddhism, by Chris Niebauer.

This won't be my favorite book is this genre, but I'm enjoying the first part of it.

I did peek ahead to a later chapter on consciousness and was disappointed to see positive mentions of Rupert Sheldrake. That's an annoyance. However, what I've read so far seems neuroscientifically correct. Niebauer has a Ph.D. in cognitive neuropsychology so that's to be expected. I'll give him a pass on the Sheldrake mentions if that's the only woo-woo stuff in his book.

On the plus side, after I read his chapter on "Language and Categories" this morning I had a strangely satisfying insight that left me feeling lighter and more relaxed. I say strangely because Niebauer didn't say anything that I didn't already know. He just said it in a way that made me feel a bit differently about my own beliefs and conceptions.

The lead-up to that chapter was "Meet the Interpreter." Here Niebauer described the experiments with split-brain patients whose connection between the left and right parts of the brain was severed, often in an attempt to prevent serious epileptic seizures. These experiments demonstrated that the left part of the brain is where language happens, providing interpretations of sensory information known to the right part. 

For example, a split-brain patient had a picture of a chicken's foot presented to the left brain only, and  a picture of a snow scene was shown to the right brain only. Then the patient was shown several pictures to both sides of the brain at the same time and asked to pick which was the most related to the original image they were shown.

The right brain pointed to a picture of a snow shovel while the left brain pointed to a picture of a chicken. Then the experimenter asked "Why is your left hand pointing to a snow shovel?" (The input and output from each side of the body is processed by the opposite side of the brain; so the right brain used the left hand to point to the snow shovel.)  Niebauer writes:

Keep in mind, when the experimenter was talking to the split-brain patient, he was talking only to the patient's left brain, since the left brain controls speech. The left brain should have said, "I haven't talked to the right brain in a long time, I don't know why it does what it does with that left hand," but it didn't. 

Without hesitation, the left brain said, "Oh, that's simple: the chicken foot goes with the chicken and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken coop." The patient stated this with absolute confidence. Here is what's most important about this: the talking left side of the brain easily came up with a plausible and coherent, but completely incorrect explanation based on the evidence it had available.

That's interesting, but few of us are split-brain patients. So what meaning does that have for me? Niebauer explains.

Now I would invite you to think about the interpretive mechanism of your own mind in light of what I've just told you about these experiments. For instance, if something noticeable happens, say a person cuts you off in traffic, someone gets up and suddenly runs out of a room, or an attractive person looks at you a second longer than normal, you hear a voice in your head that creates an explanation of the event: "He is a jerk," "They must have forgotten something," or "He or she is interested in me."

Notice that those are all interpretations; they may be true or they may not be. However, because many people are not conscious of the left-brain interpreter, they can't even consider that their thoughts are interpretations, but rather feel secure they are seeing things "as they really are."

This passage moves the interpreter from the outside to the inside of us.

Because the left brain looks outward and only focuses on objects, categorizes them, and labels them, is it possible that it also looks inward and does the same thing? In other words, does the left brain see thought happening in the brain and continuously create a "thing" out of the process of thinking, which it then labels "me"? 

Is the sense of self related to seeing patterns in randomness? Is it possible that the self we invest so much in is nothing more than a story to help explain our behaviors, the myriad events that go on in our lives, and our experiences in the world?

Have you ever looked up at the stars in the night sky or the clouds during the day and been convinced some pattern was out there? Is it possible that you might be making that same mistake every day when you look within and find an ego or self?

In his next chapter, Niebauer talks about categories.

Another characteristic of the left brain is its constant propensity to create categories. In fact, almost everything the left brain does, from language to its perception of objects in space, is categorial in nature.

What do we mean by category? Categories are just another type of map of reality. They are mental representations that don't exist "out there" in the world, but rather they are only in the human mind -- the left side of the brain to be specific.

Categories are based on the left brain's ability to see differences and create opposites and are formed when things in the world that are continuous are grouped by some common features and then treated as one unit.

This has many benefits for us humans. But it also can lead us to wrongly believe that we know more about the world than we really do. This passage resonated with me. It left me with the aforementioned "lightness of being," because it reminded me that my beliefs, and everyone's beliefs, shouldn't be taken as seriously as most of us do.

Simply becoming aware of the interpreter and the endless categories it creates through judgment frees you from being tied to the inevitability of these judgments. That is to say, when you become conscious of the interpreter, you are free to choose to no longer take its interpretations so seriously. 

In other words, when you realize that everyone's brain is constantly interpreting, in ways that are subjective and often inaccurate or completely incorrect, you might find yourself able to grasp this as "just my opinion" or "the way I see it" rather than "this is the way it is."

You being to see your judgments as simply a different line in the sand than others. When someone approaches you with a "this is the way it is" attitude, you can appreciate that this person is dominated by the left brain, that they are a servant to its master. 

As a result, there is no need to take their actions or attitudes personally; it's a biological function that they have not yet recognized. This small perspective shift is enough to change how we live with each other and ourselves. 

Intriguing idea: chain of causality comes to an end in quantum realm

We live in a world governed by causes and effects. Everywhere we look, this causes that, while that in turn causes something else. This determinism both enables science to be successful in explaining things, and allows we humans to navigate our daily life in a predictable fashion.

The only exception appears to be in the realm of quantum mechanics. While there are disagreements among physicists about the meaning of quantum mechanics, the prevailing view is that probabilities rule in the realm of the very small.

So in the case of an electron, for example, it is impossible to say where it is, exactly, before a measurement takes place. All that is known is the probability of the electron being in various locations according to the wave function.

Interestingly, the wave function evolves deterministically, but the outcome of a measurement is probabilistic. Here's what Google's AI summary says about this:

Yes, the wave function in quantum mechanics evolves deterministically according to the Schrödinger equation. This means that if you know the wave function at one point in time, you can precisely calculate its future evolution. However, when a measurement is made, the wave function appears to "collapse" into a single state, which is a probabilistic event, not dictated by the Schrödinger equation.

 

Here's a more detailed explanation:

 

Deterministic Evolution: The Schrödinger equation, a fundamental equation in quantum mechanics, governs how the wave function changes over time. If you know the wave function at a given time (its initial state), you can use the Schrödinger equation to predict its state at any future time. This evolution is deterministic, meaning the future is predetermined by the present state.

 

The Measurement Problem: While the wave function evolves deterministically, the act of measurement introduces a probabilistic element. When a measurement is made, the wave function "collapses" from a superposition of states into a single, definite state. The probability of obtaining a particular outcome is determined by the wave function, but the specific outcome itself is random.

 

Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics: Different interpretations of quantum mechanics attempt to explain this apparent conflict between deterministic wave function evolution and probabilistic measurement. Some interpretations, like the many-worlds interpretation, suggest that the wave function never truly collapses, and all possible outcomes exist in separate branches of the universe. Others, like Bohmian mechanics, propose hidden variables that determine the outcome of measurements, while still maintaining deterministic evolution.

 

Probabilistic Nature: Despite the deterministic evolution of the wave function, the probabilistic nature of measurement is what leads to the statistical behavior observed in quantum experiments. While the wave function predicts the probabilities of different outcomes, the actual outcome of any single measurement is random. 

A Letter to the Editor in the May 17, 2025 issue of New Scientist presents an intriguing reason why this state of affairs in the quantum realm is necessary. Though speculative, it makes sense to me.

Getting to the bottom of the quantum world
19 April, p 28
From Bernd-Juergen Fischer, 
Berlin, Germany

You say there is no clear reason why the behaviour of subatomic particles can't be governed by deterministic laws, and the fact that they aren't demands an explanation.

Well, here is one: we are working our way down the chain of causality. This will either end or it won't. If it doesn't, then either the search keeps going on and on or causality becomes cyclic and causes may cause themselves.

If, on the other hand, the chain of causality comes to an end, then what? The last part can't have been caused, so it must have been brought about without rhyme or reason, which is a non-scientific way to say randomly.

The fact we find only probabilities in quantum theory shows that, with quantum theory, we have come to the end of the chain.

This seems to assume that quantum theory is the rock-bottom foundation of reality. It may be, but currently there is no viable explanation for how quantum theory and relativity theory fit together. Einstein's equations of space and time, including gravity, which are just as scientifically proven as quantum theory is, don't involve probabilities.

It may turn out that gravity can be included in quantum theory. This seems to be the most common assumption of physicists, that the unbroken smoothness of Einstein's general theory of relativity actually rests upon a deeper law of physics where gravity is quantized by the discovery of an elusive hypothesized particle, the graviton. 

In that case, the letter writer could be proven correct. Cause and effect does come to an end in the quantum realm, which now incorporates all of the known forces: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force.

God gets credit for saving a girl, but not blame for over 49 flooding deaths

Giving God credit for good things but not blame for bad things in the aftermath of disasters is typical among religiously-minded people in the United States, who are usually Christians.

Using a plane crash as an example, if one person survives, while 200 other people on board die, the sole survivor is held out as evidence of a miracle by God. But if God can save that person, God had the power to save the other 200. 

Of course, hardly anyone expects religious belief to be rational or consistent. I certainly don't.

Religions are constructed by humans to meet human needs. Being in accord with reality isn't a must or even a maybe. It simply doesn't matter to believers that their chosen faith is demonstrably true, just that it feels good to them.

Here in the United States, recent devastating floods in the hill country of central Texas have killed at least 49 people with the death toll expected to increase well beyond that as the missing become reclassified as deceased.

The authorities are being quite secretive about the number of people missing along the Guadalupe River, which rose extremely rapidly after thunderstorms fueled by moisture from the Gulf of Mexico stalled out and dumped massive amounts of rain on the area in just a few hours. 

What is known is that 27 children are missing from Camp Mystic, a Christian camp along the banks of the Guadalupe. These are the youngest children at the camp, aged 7-9 I believe, as they were in cabins nearest the river while older children were in cabins on higher ground.

The flooding occurred in the middle of the night. It must have been terrifying to have a wall of water several stories tall come rushing down the riverbed in darkness. This is a horrible tragedy. 

It's understandable that people seize on scattered amazing survival reports to lessen the pain of all the death and destruction. Today I heard a man talk on a news program about finding a girl clinging to a tree who had been swept down the river for many miles after her family had to leave their car when it became submerged in floodwaters as they were trying to drive to safety.

The man said that the girl had stayed afloat in the rushing water for four hours as all kinds of debris, including mobile homes and houses, rushed by her. She was injured and is recovering in a hospital. He said that it must have been the hand of God that saved her -- a miracle.

Well, almost certainly not.

It would have been hugely more accurate to praise the girl, rather than God, for being able to tread water for hours as the river in record flood stage carried her along. But if someone wants to ascribe a miracle to God for saving that girl, they need to explain why God is excused for letting more than 49 other people die, likely including the 27 missing children from Camp Mystic.

Disasters point out the absurdity of religious belief.

The Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, has declared a state Day of Prayer for the victims of the Guadalupe flood. It's impossible to conceive of a more useless act. A Day of Prayer does nothing to help those affected by the flooding, nor does it do anything to prevent a tragedy like this from occurring in the future.

The National Weather Service and a private firm, AccuWeather, issued flood warnings hours in advance. Yet the county where the worst flooding occurred didn't issue an alert because the county doesn't have this capability, preferring not to spend taxpayer money on an alert system. 

We don't know why Camp Mystic staff weren't tracking the storm more closely. Maybe they thought God would protect them, being devout Christians. Unfortunately, their failure to protect the children in their care likely resulted in 27 lives being cut way short. Fixing that doesn't require prayer. It requires a determination to do better.

The Trump administration is slashing staff and money for the National Weather Service. The New York Times has a story about how budget cutbacks at the National Weather Service appeared to have harmed the ability of NWS employees to issue timely accurate warnings in advance of the flooding. Prayer won't help strengthen the National Weather Service. Undoing Trump's budget cuts will.

This is a problem with prayer and religious belief in general. Looking to God for help with problems lessens the motivation to find genuine solutions to those problems. Governor Abbott and President Trump don't believe in global warming.

Yet global warming is causing weather disasters like the Guadalupe flooding to become much more common. Unfortunately, probably many more people in Texas are going to be content with praying for the flooding victims than for addressing the problem of how to adapt to a rapidly warming world where torrential rainfall, hurricanes, tornadoes, drought, and such occur much more frequently.

Zen and Jack Reacher have this in common

My wife and I just got back from a trip to Black Butte Ranch in central Oregon, where we spent several days with my daughter's (Celeste) family -- Patrick (husband) and Evelyn (my granddaughter). They live in southern California and came up for Evelyn's orientation at the University of Oregon, where she'll be a freshman this fall.

Yesterday we made a trip into Sisters for lunch and to browse Paulina Springs Books, a wonderful small town bookstore where I always find something to buy.

Two of the three books I purchased were Lee Child's Make Me and Hiking Zen by two Zen monks, Pham Xa and Pham Luu.

I'm a big fan of Lee Child's books about Jack Reacher, a kick-ass ex-Army MP who travels around the United States with just a toothbrush and the clothes he's wearing, getting into adventures and trouble not of his own making, since Reacher has a strong sense of duty to help people he encounters who are being victimized by someone(s) with power and influence.

It had been a while since I'd bought a Jack Reacher book. But I buy Zen books all the time. This one appealed to me because we were in a beautiful natural setting in central Oregon, and we live full time in a beautiful natural setting in western Oregon's Willamette Valley. 

I didn't expect I'd find any commonality between a thriller book and a philosophical book. Yet I did. Jack Reacher thrillers rarely, if ever, include any descriptions about how Reacher views his life that make me pause and think, "Wow, I resonate with this." In this case, I liked the sentence so much, I committed it to memory as soon as I read it on page 4 of the book I'd just bought.

He had no place to go, and all the time in the world to get there, so detours cost him nothing.

Nicely put, Lee Child. It kind of fits with my oft-repeated meditation advice to myself, "Nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to become."  I described it this way.

Nowhere to go… Here I am, stock still on my cushion. No place else I need to be for the next 30 minutes or so. This is It.

Nothing to do… No mental place I need to arrive at either. I don't need to think, feel, imagine, perceive, or do anything else inside my head.

No one to become… Even more, no transformation of my basic being needs to happen from on high, or down below. Like Popeye, I am what I am (or, I yam what I yam).

This centers me in three dimensions of space, time, and being – exactly where I am. I realize that every movement from this center, on what spiritual traditions call a "path," is going to take me farther away from really real reality, not closer.

That's my theory, at least.

I'm also just a few pages into the Hiking Zen book. Here's some passages that struck me as Jack Reacher'ish. Or maybe it was these passages that made me think the Lee Child sentence was Zen'ish.

Often in everyday life, we walk to arrive somewhere. Hiking Zen's most basic principle is to arrive in each step we take, to stop losing ourselves in thoughts about the past or future.

...The unknown can be scary. It may feel more comfortable to be indoors in a house or to drive to work in a car. Observe, though, how the boxes we spend so much time in affect our minds. The mind mirrors its habitat. If we aren't careful, our worldview is drawn with very clear borders: this is mine, that is yours -- we become territorial, overly attached to our boxes. 

...Observing nature, we realize everything changes, and our habitual fear begins to loosen its grip. 

...To claim our sovereign nature as free, wild, endlessly creative, and beautiful creatures, we need to train ourselves by untraining ourselves. We need to step out of the boxes in which we find ourselves and unravel our contemporary conditioning.

Do we really need life to have meaning? Here's an argument for why we don't.

It's a delight when I write a post on some subject and get a comment that makes me think, "Wow, good points; I've never thought of that before."

This happened with my previous post, What's been most meaningful for me usually wasn't very pleasurable. I've always assumed that meaning is something that is universally valued by people. After all, we hear "That meant a lot to me" and "Doing _______ was one of the most meaningful experiences I've ever had."

But I admit that I've never given much thought to what meaning really means. It's just been a word that I've used for most of my life (I don't recall saying it much as a child, which is interesting) without doing much, if any, contemplating what meaning consists of or why it is valued.

Ron E left a comment on the previous post that I found intriguing, because it provided a fresh perspective on meaning.

Can’t say that meaning or meaningful experiences have played any particular part in my life. I can understand for example that certain signs and symbols such as language convey meanings, but am at a loss to see why we attach meaning or significance to life.

It is said that we are hardwired to seek patterns, purpose, and explanations for the events in our lives. I suppose that can point to a survival reaction or response when assessing natural events or people’s motives and actions. It is not very far removed from assigning supernatural reasons to things. I guess it all comes down to our perceptions and how we habitually interpret life’s happenings.

Apart from our investing things with qualities, essence or meaning, all that remains is emptiness (sorry to bring up a Buddhistic term but it fits). I just don’t see much difference in investing meaning to something and to investing things with essence.

It’s our human tendency, our habit of aligning everything with our levels of self-importance where we allocate assumed importance to what we think and believe. Undoubtedly, our actions are important and have consequences, but unless they are executed for particular reasons such as intent (or meaning) toward a particular outcome, I see no reason to assign thought created meanings to them.

I agree with just about everything said here. Yet I still am attracted to meaningful experiences. This could be akin to how I agree with just about everything Robert Sapolsky said about free will, or rather the lack thereof, in his book Determined, yet I still feel as if I have free will even though I find the arguments against it highly persuasive.

We're all influenced by genetics, upbringing, culture, life experiences, and other factors that go to make us the type of person that we are. It seems entirely reasonable that some people don't have nearly as strong a desire to find meaning in life as I do. Sounds like Ron E is one of those people.

Today I was doing some reading in Hans-Georg Mueller's book, Daoism Explained. Here's some passages I came across this morning that show how Daoism, which I resonate with, has a conception of meaning that seems fairly close to that espoused in Ron E's comment.

It is clear that for Guo Xiang, the fishnet allegory does not say that the Daoist sage "gets the meaning" (de yi), but rather that he/she will be left with "no ideas" -- this is just what he literally says. Guo Xiang obviously read the fishnet allegory in this way: Once a Daoist sage no longer has ideas, then he/she will have attained the "desired" speechlessness.

Thus, when two Daoist sages with empty minds meet, they can hardly start a philosophical conversation. There would simply be nothing to say! They could not discuss any "true meanings"! According to the "Aristotelian" interpretation of the fishnet allegory, the true philosopher will have to go beyond words to in order to "get the meaning." According to Guo Xiang's Daoist reading of the fishnet allegory, the sage has to discard all ideas in order to realize Daoist silence.

...The fishnet allegory is by no means about how to catch and keep some deep thoughts or ideas. It is, on the contrary, about the method of getting rid of thoughts and ideas in order to arrive at a perfect Daoist silence. It is about how to become permanently satisfied and to completely eliminate the hunger for the next dish of meanings and language.

What's been most meaningful for me usually wasn't very pleasurable

Not surprisingly, the older I get, the more often I'm confronted with deaths of friends and relatives. That comes with the aging territory at some point, a point I've definitely reached at age 76. 

Recently a neighbor died who was a few years younger than me. His wife shared an obituary of sorts on Facebook, describing her husband's life -- his interests, hobbies, jobs, and such. I pay more attention to these life summaries than I used to, since I've been doing some pondering of what I'd like said about me after I die.

Since I've been an avid writer for most of my life, I'm leaning toward composing my own eulogy, so I can be sure that my Celebration of Life, or whatever the damn thing would be called, hits what I consider the high points of my life.

Idly thinking about this now and then, I've been struck by a fact that I suspect is fairly universal, though I can't be sure about this, one reason it's the subject of this blog post in my hope to get some feedback from others. What's been most meaningful for me usually wasn't very pleasurable. 

I find this intriguing given that pleasure is something I seek every day. I want my food to be pleasurable. I want my television watching to be pleasurable. I want my exercise routine to be pleasurable. I want my conversations to be pleasurable. I want my dog walks to be pleasurable. 

Yet when I ponder what's been most meaningful in my life, pleasure isn't a quality that comes readily to mind. I'm not saying that I never felt pleasure in doing the things listed below. I did. However, pleasure wasn't what I was seeking when I embarked on these pursuits. It was something deeper than pleasure. 

-- Caring for and raising my daughter
-- Writing three books on behalf of my spiritual organization
-- Co-founding a bioethics nonprofit, Oregon Health Decisions
-- Achieving a black belt in karate
-- Stopping a subdivision that threatened our neighborhood's groundwater 
-- Working to improve the ten rural acres our house sits on
-- Blogging regularly for 22 years
-- Meditating every day for 55 years
-- Earning a master's degree and completing course requirements for a Ph.D.

Now, I'm not claiming that I deserve any praise for doing these things. I used to feel that I did, but from my current old guy philosophical perspective I recognize that what I've done in my life has been determined by many factors, none of which I can be proud of, since I don't believe in free will. 

Everybody, naturally including me, is just doing what they're doing because it is what causes and conditions outside of their control are compelling them to do. Praise and blame for those doings comes easily -- I do this all the time -- but deep down I strongly believe that such isn't warranted.

So what I'm left with as a defensible philosophical position is how I subjectively feel about what I've done in my life. And like I said, my feeling is that my most meaningful doings weren't particularly pleasurable. 

In other words, I didn't do them for the pleasure they brought me. I did them because I had a strong desire to do something difficult that ended up being meaningful to me.

I can't draw any profound conclusions from this. It's just a fact of my life. I can't say that having grasped this fact, now I know what new thing I should do to add more meaning to my life -- since my experience is that meaning is a result of doing something difficult, not a reason to do that thing. 

What I'm trying to say is that with each of the things I listed above, I didn't have a sense of this will turn out to be deeply meaningful for me when I embarked on doing the thing. The meaning was manufactured in the course of pursuing that activity; it wasn't evident at the outset.

Thus for me, meaning is an unsought for gift from the universe. Meaning isn't something that I can produce on demand. It arrives in its own time, for reasons that I'm mostly clueless about, other than my strong suspicion that meaning arises from the undertaking of a difficult activity.

The pleasurable things in my life are mostly easy to do. Like eating a cookie after I finish a blog post, which I'm headed for now.

As an idea, the immaterial soul is dead

As I noted in my previous post about how belief in a human "essence" is almost certainly wrong, Julian Baggini goes on a search for such an entity in his book The Ego Trick: What Does It Mean To Be You?

Everywhere he looks, using a blend of neuroscience and philosophy, the search comes up empty. He persuasively argues that an unchanging essence can't be found in the body and it can't be found in the mind -- since both body and mind are changeable with no sign of an essence.

Then Baggini expands the search to include the religious sphere, where soul is considered by both Western and Eastern religions to be an unchanging, even eternal, essence that survives the demise of body and mind.

Sorry to break this news to those who are staking their life, as well as their afterlife, on the notion of soul, but this is his final paragraph in the book's "Soul searching" chapter.

There are other arguments for the existence of souls, of course. But if you're looking for gold, there has to come a point where you stop digging fruitlessly in one spot and move on to another. To switch metaphors, if the soil is not proving to be fertile, it is better to plant elsewhere than to continue on in the hope that persistence will bear fruit.

In all my years of reading and thinking about soul and self, I've yet to come across a single argument that is left standing after even a little serious scrutiny. As an idea, the immaterial soul is dead, and it's time we buried it, along with any other dreams we might have had about finding the pearl at the heart of our identity. 

What preceded Baggini's mention of "other arguments for the existence of souls" is a discussion of how the idea of the traditional soul has been defended by Richard Swinburne, who used to be a Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at the University of Oxford.

Baggini says that while Swinburne is a Christian, his arguments in favor of soul are claimed to be purely rational and don't rest on his faith. 

One of Swinburne's arguments is that a physical account of a person's life fails to explain everything about them. This does indeed seem like something most of us would agree with, that there appears to be something extra that makes each of us who we are aside from the physical goings-on in our body and mind. 

The conclusion is that a physical account of the world is not a complete account of the world. Therefore, there must be more to the world than the physical.

However, Baggini has a convincing response. 

So it is true, as Swinburne says, that a physical account of the world is not a complete account of the world. But it does not follow that the world is comprised of more stuff than physical stuff. Rather, it simply follows that a complete account of the world is more than just an account of physical descriptions of the movements of stuff.

This should not be a difficult thought. In the same way, a proper account of a game of football is not an account of the changing co-ordinates of the twenty-two players and the ball. If you knew enough about the game, such a description might enable you to infer what was going on, but nothing in it would entail that this was a sport with certain rules and a certain result.

...It is true that wholes are greater than the sum of their parts, but that is not because wholes are additional, different kinds of parts. Persons are no exceptions. We are greater than the sum of our parts, but not because there is some further part left out of the sum. We are nothing but our parts, but we are more than just our parts.

Baggini also dissects another argument from Swinburne that won't appeal to most believers in soul, but is creative. So I'll give Swinburne an "A" for effort on this argument, even though it makes as little sense as his other arguments for soul. I'll quote Baggini at length on this point, because it's an interesting argument and counter-argument.

Swinburne's commitment to the truth seems to be genuine, whatever his ability to arrive at it. So it is that, having argued that souls must exist, he thinks through the implications for this in rigorous detail, accepting them, no matter how bizarre they might seem.

For instance, Swinburne insists that it is essential to start from the facts, and it has not escaped his notice that one cast-iron fact is that functioning brains and bodies are necessary for consciousness, at least in this life. 

It may be a logical possibility that there could be forms of consciousness in other worlds that do not depend on organic matter, but that doesn't seem to be the case in this one.

In this we need to add another compelling fact: if you have a sufficiently complex brain and body, you will be conscious. Combined with the first fact, most people would conclude that brains and bodies are both necessary and sufficient for human consciousness: you can't think or feel without them; and with them, as long as they're working properly, you can't but think and feel.

Having committed himself to belief in souls, however, Swinburne can't accept this position. On his view, the non-material part of us is as essential as the material. No matter how complete our nervous systems are, without souls they couldn't think. But he also accepts that such bodies and brains are necessary for thought, so souls could not think without bodies either -- at least not in this life.

What God in his goodness might decide to make possible in the next life is anyone's guess. 'What I have argued,' he writes, '... is that without a functioning brain, the soul will not function (i.e. have conscious episodes) -- not that it will not exist.'

Swinburne uses the analogy of a light bulb to explain this. 'The soul is like a light bulb and the brain is like an electric light socket. If you plug the bulb into the socket and turn the current on, the light will shine. If the socket is damaged or the current turned off, the light will not shine. So, too, the soul will function (have a mental life) if it is plugged into a functioning brain.'

But, like a magician, it is always possible that God could cause an unplugged bulb to light up if he so wanted: 'maybe there are other ways of getting souls to function than plugging them into brains'.

This analogy shows how far materialist conceptions have come, since it is the mirror image of a much older view: that it is the body which requires animating by an immaterial soul... That even a dualist today accepts that bodies power souls and not vice versa is indicative of widespread belief in the materialist basis of the world. 

...Swinburne's view is a prime example of the limits of the virtue of consistency. He does work very hard to make sure that all its bits fit together. But so many of those bits are just wildly implausible. There is no good reason to think that functioning brains and bodies need souls plugged into them if they are to give rise to thoughts.

There is no good reason to believe that our inability to provide a simple answer to the question of who the results of a split-brain operation are means that there must be some non-physical fact that would answer it. 

And there is no good reason to suppose that the facts about the world that cannot be fully described in the language of physics means that there are substances in the world that are not physical.

Belief in a human "essence" is strong, but almost certainly wrong

On the whole I agree with Amit Sood's view of things. He's an M.D. who has written a book about a more modern approach to mindfulness that I enjoyed reading. I decided to buy a recent book of his, It Takes You to Tango: Leverage the Science of Loneliness to Master the Art of Connection.

It's turned out to be sort of a disappointment. I'm liking the book, but so far it hasn't really done much to inform or interest me. And when I came to several chapters about what Sood calls the Esse, an essence in every person deeper than mind, I got even more disillusioned by the book.

One reason is that Sood appears to base his belief in Esse on what his English teacher, Mr. Kamesh, told him when Sood was a 15 year-old studying at a rural, state-funded school in North Central India. Here's how his story goes.

One morning, during a particularly rough week, he called me to his office to share an insight about water. I had no idea his thoughts would stay with me for the rest of my life, and in some ways, change my life's trajectory. Here is an approximate sequence of what I recall about my discussion that day.

Mr. Kamesh kept a glass half filled with water on the table.

"What do you see here?" he asked.

"A glass of water?" I was confused about where he was going.

"Yes, that's right. Dirty or clean?"

"Clean, I think," I said after peering through the glass.

Next, he took out a plastic bag full of dirt and emptied a few spoons in the water. After stirring gently, he asked, "What do you see now?"

"Dirty water," I said.

He nodded. "What might happen if we leave this water still for a few days?"

"The dust will settle at the bottom."

"Leaving the pure water at the top," his eyes brightened. "What do you learn from this?"

"If you leave the water still, it gets pure." I wasn't sure if I got the right answer or at least the one he wanted.

"Yes, that's good. But here is an even more important lesson. Behind every collection of dirty water is pure water that you can reclaim. Mud starts with pure water, and in the end, the same pure water will separate to leave the dirt. Mud has both dirt and water. While the dirt is more visible, the water keeps it together; otherwise the wind will blow it away."

The story goes on for a bit longer, then Sood says:

As I moved toward high school and then college, I was partially successful at holding on to Mr. Kamesh's teachings that the real me, my essence, my self, remains unblemished by anything that happens to my physical body or mind. This latter realization became a firm conviction as my brain's pre-frontal cortex matured. 

Well, it's a pretty big jump to go from what happens when dirt is stirred into a glass of water to what the essence of a human being is. I have no doubt that Sood has benefitted from believing that a pure unchanging essence is part of his being, along with an impure changeable body and mind. 

But beliefs aren't reality, no matter how they make us feel. Sood says:

For now, I feel comfortable considering our mind (Psyche) and our essence deeper than the mind (Esse) as the two elements constituting our experiencer (our self).

There's simply no evidence for such an essence. Julian Baggini speaks about this in his book, The Ego Trick: What Does It Mean To Be You?

It would be claiming too much to say that neuroscience has fully explained what selves are and how they can exist. Nevertheless, real progress has been made in recent decades and we are now in a position to at least sketch out how the self is constructed.

The most important finding, which seems to be universally accepted by all researchers into the self and the brain, is that brain research has given up on the search for the pearl of self. As the clinical neuropsychologist Paul Broks put it to me, 'We have this deep intuition that there is a core, an essence there, and it's hard to shake off, probably impossible to shake off, I suspect. But it's true that neuroscience shows that there is no centre in the brain where things do all come together.' The unity of the self is not to be explained in terms of a single, unified brain region, which acts as the master controller.

...Broks says that, despite his intellectual convictions, he lives as a 'soul theorist' or 'ego theorist' who persists with the belief in a fixed core of self. 'I think we probably all do, because that's the way we've evolved biologically and sociologically to think and behave. Neuroscience is chipping and will chip away at the cherished ideas that go with that, like the idea that we're autonomous agents with free will and moral choice. But it won't stop us living by them and it probably shouldn't.'

No matter how tenuous a notion the self seems to be under scientific scrutiny, we cannot abandon it because it is the thread on which we hang our lives.

Probably true in most cases. Though it's possible that some people (I'm thinking of Buddhism here) not only intellectually recognize that there is no essence or enduring self, but also experience life from this selfless perspective.

Not knowing is most intimate -- a Zen koan that I grasped instantly

Zen master Henry Shukman's The Way app, which I embarked on in January of this year and have been enjoying ever since, contains guided meditations that include koans. 

Pleasingly, Shukman's view of koans isn't that they are a spiritual puzzle to be solved, but simply messages to consider and see what effect the koan has on us. A few days ago he introduced a koan that I was unfamiliar with: Not knowing is most intimate.

Two Zen teachers meet; one is carrying his bags. “Where are you going?”, inquires the first teacher.

“I’m going on a pilgrimage”, the other teacher responds.

“What’s the purpose of pilgrimage?” asks the first teacher.

“I don’t know.” he responds.

“Not knowing is most intimate.” Replies the first teacher.

Some Googling revealed that this is a much-discussed koan. For example, see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

I've just taken a quick look at those links because I agree with Shukman's approach to koans. There isn't a right or wrong answer to them. There's just how our own mind responds to them. 

Maybe this is an indication that I'm well on the road to enlightenment. Maybe this is an indication that I'm a pathetic Zen imposter.

Regardless, as soon as I heard Shukman share the koan on his The Way app, I understood what Not knowing is most intimate meant to me. Some additional pondering hasn't changed that first impression.

When I know something, whether it is part of the physical world outside of me or part of the mental world inside of me, there's necessarily a certain distance between my knowing and that thing. I know what 7 times 8 is, 56.

(I've heard that young students today in the United States aren't required to memorize the multiplication table; if so, that's disappointing; I use this knowledge a lot.)

That answer, a bit of knowledge, is something that exists within my mind. It comes and goes, depending on whether I need to know what 7 times 8 is. Same applies to everything else that I know which isn't a habitual action, like how to ride a bicycle, that has become part of my innate physical action repertoire.

This means that knowing brings me close to the object of knowledge, but leaves me at some distance from it. I could say that knowing is intimate, but not most intimate. 

That's reserved for my not-knowing. When I don't know something, this truly is most intimate. I don't have to grasp anything. My absence of knowledge is right there, closer to me than anything else could be, an intimacy of ignorance. 

I can forget or misplace objects of knowledge. My not-knowing is very different. It is part and parcel of my consciousness, the nothingness that forms a backdrop to my knowing. 

When I drove to downtown Salem for my 4:30 pm Tai Chi class today, I didn't know where I was going to find a parking place. This absence of knowledge was crystal clear to me. I didn't need to exert any effort. I didn't worry that I might be wrong. Not knowing where I'd park my car was the most intimate bit of non-knowledge in my mind -- along with countless other things that I don't know.

Sure, it takes some effort to consciously realize something that I don't know. However, the not-knowing itself is completely effortless. It isn't something that I acquire. It is something that is so intimate an aspect of my consciousness that to even call it an aspect is going too far. 

Not-knowing is the same as being for me. The sense of "I am" carries with it an inescapable "I am not." Likewise, all that I know rests on the foundation of what I don't know. Pleasingly, it takes effort for me to know. Not-knowing is effortless, since it is the most intimate quality I possess. Or more accurately, fail to possess.