Church of the Churchless

Our inner voice is linked to our various selves

Most of us have an inner voice speaking to us inside our mind.

It can either be voluntary, as when I read "Most of us have an inner voice" and can hear those words silently echo within my brain. It can also be involuntary, as when I do something wrong and hear "You're an idiot" admonishing me without my consciously willing those words.

This inner voice generally is taken for granted. It's just part of our mental background. 

But a few years ago, when I was into vaping cartridges filled with concentrated cannabis oil (marijuana is legal here in Oregon), I overdid a new cartridge that was more potent than what I'd used before.

After a few inhales, I started to feel strange. Well, let's make that stranger than usual. In my high state of mind, the thoughts being spoken by my inner voice suddenly seemed really bizarre. Who the heck was doing that speaking inside my head? 

I didn't exactly freak out. However, I was hyper-conscious of my inner voice, which now felt more like a mental intruder than a companion that was part of me. It took an hour or two before I felt like my usual self again.

The July 9, 2022 issue of New Scientist has an article called "Internal affairs" in the print edition and "How to understand your inner voice and control your inner critic" in the online edition. Here's a PDF file.
Download How to understand your inner voice and control your inner critic | New Scientist

It turns out that my marijuana-induced experience of my inner voice pointed to a probable psychological truth. The voice inside our head reflects not just one self, but many.

Early theories of consciousness suggested that we each have one “self”, with distinct likes, dislikes and motivations. Yet while we generally feel like one coherent person, many psychologists now consider the singular self to be an illusion. Instead, they argue that we are made up of many selves, each with a different set of motivations and standards.

This means that our inner chatter may be a result of the different roles that form our sense of self. “I as a mother”, for example, would live by a different set of standards than “I as a friend”. And “I the deadline-meeter” has a different set of goals to “I, who likes a bit of celebrity gossip”.

So when I felt that my inner voice was an intruder, that may have been because the thoughts being spoken within my mind were at odds with the wordless sense of self that would have found the intense marijuana high more enjoyable without all that mental chattering.

A sidebar in the article talks about what happened when a woman lost her inner voice.

A silent mind

Losing your inner voice is an experience that neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor understands well. In 1996, a stroke knocked out her ability to talk to herself in her head for five weeks. Now recovered, she describes the aftermath of her stroke as a “blissful silence” without the cacophony of internal speech. It created a feeling of being untethered from her sense of self in a way that left her feeling peaceful. “It was liberating to not maintain the pressure of my ego self,” she says.

But it also had downsides. Bolte Taylor says the lack of a coherent inner narrative left her unable to function. Among other things, she couldn’t determine where her body was positioned in relation to the world around her, was unable to retrieve autobiographical memories and had a lack of self-conscious emotions, most notably embarrassment.

A typology of inner voices makes pretty good sense to me, though based on my own personal mental experience I'd quibble with the nature and number of these characters.

In getting to know our inner voice, it may also be helpful to identify who is actually doing the talking. Puchalska-Wasyl attempted to do this by asking hundreds of people to rate their most common inner speakers based on a variety of emotional outcomes.

Her analysis boiled down their inner speakers to four basic characters: the Faithful Friend, the Proud Rival, the Ambivalent Parent and the Helpless Child.

The Faithful Friend is an advocate: caring and positive and always on hand to provide encouragement. In Puchalska-Wasyl’s sample, this was the most common inner voice experienced. Second was the Proud Rival, a high-fiving positivity coach who challenges a person to up their game. The Ambivalent Parent offers love, support and, at times, a hefty dose of criticism. The Helpless Child is the most negative, arriving with a feeling of powerlessness and a need for support.

Determining which voice pops up most often can be difficult. One option is to pay attention to your inner dialogue and notice which version of your inner voice is talking and how it makes you feel. Given that internal dialogues are a useful tool in psychotherapy, identifying which type of voice predominantly guides you may help you to reframe the conversation for the better, writes Puchalska-Wasyl in a paper on the subject.

Prior experiences and assumptions determine how we view reality

As I've noted previously on this blog, one of the spiritual phrases that now irritates me, yet used to make sense to me, is "as it is." 

There's a mistaken notion that it's possible to see reality as it is, objectively. That notion gets elevated into various sorts of mumbo-jumbo where this or that meditation technique, or whatever, supposedly gives someone the ability to perceive what is actually there with no trace of illusion.

Today I finished reading another chapter in David McRaney's book, How Minds Change. "Socks and Crocs" was super-fascinating. I'll try to do the chapter justice in this summary of it.

He starts off by telling the familiar story of The Dress -- which some people see as white and gold (that's me) and others as black and blue.

There were various theories about why this occurred. A neuroscientist, Pascal Wallisch, is quoted in the chapter, having done extensive research on The Dress and similar images. He wrote a Slate piece, "Two Years Later, We Finally Know Why People Saw 'The Dress' Differently."

Even outside of vision scientists, most people just assume everyone sees the world in the same way. Which is why it’s awkward when disagreements arise—it suggests one party either is ignorant, is malicious, has an agenda, or is crazy. We believe what we see with our own eyes more than almost anything else, which may explain the feuds that occurred when “the dress” first struck and science lacked a clear explanation for what was happening.

Two years later we have a much better idea of what may have been a reason for the varied perceptions: People’s perceived color is also informed by their perception of lighting. And the image of the dress, taken on a cellphone, contained a lot of uncertainty in terms of lighting conditions. Was it taken inside or outside? This matters because it implies artificial or natural light. Was the dress illuminated from the front or the back? This matters because if it was back-lit, it would be in a shadow, otherwise not.

The brain cannot be accused of epistemic modesty. It is well-known that in situations like this—where it faces profound uncertainty—it confidently fills in the gaps in knowledge by making assumptions. Usually, its assumptions are based on what it has most frequently encountered in the past. For instance, if the sensory information is more uncertain, observers will estimate object speeds to be slower than they actually are, presumably because slow objects are much more common in the environment than fast ones. (Indeed, most objects in any given field of view don’t move at all.) Color and lighting are no exception.

As the illumination conditions are impossible to clearly assess in the dress image, people make assumptions about what they are. Different people do this in differing ways, which is what causes the different interpretations of color. At least, that’s what my research shows, thanks to 13,000 people, including many Slate readers, who took surveys on what they saw when they saw the dress and also compiled other information about how they generally perceived the photo and the world.

The dress actually is blue and black. But most people see it as white and gold, at least initially. Why? Well, the more time someone had spent exposed to natural light, the more likely they saw the dress as white and gold. The more time someone had been exposed to artificial light, the more likely they saw the dress as blue and black.

McRaney says:

Either way -- and this is the important point for us going forward -- the ambiguity never registered. Whatever colors people saw subjectively, the image never seemed ambiguous because consciously people experienced only the output of their processes, and the output differed depending on a person's prior experiences with light. The result was a lie told to them by their brains that felt obviously true.

...When we encounter novel information that seems ambiguous, we unknowingly disambiguate it based on what we've experienced in the past. But starting at the level of perception, different life experiences can lead to very different disambiguations, and thus very different subjective realities.

When that happens in the presence of substantial uncertainty, we may vehemently disagree over reality itself -- but since no one on either side is aware of the brain processes leading up to that disagreement, it makes the people who see things differently seem, in a word, wrong.

...In psychology, there's a term for this cognitive blind spot, for when your disambiguations feel undeniably true. It's called naive realism, and it's the belief that you perceive the world as it truly is, free from assumption, interpretation, bias, or the limitations of your senses.

The late psychologist Lee Ross, who helped popularize the term, told me that it leads many of us to believe we arrived at our beliefs, attitudes, and values after careful, rational analysis through unmediated thoughts and perceptions.

Unaware that different priors can lead to different disambiguations, you believe you've been mainlining pure reality for years, and it was your intense study of the bare facts that naturally led to all of your conclusions. According to Ross, this is why people on each side of any debate believe their side is the only one rooted in reality.

...The truth is that we are always reaching our conclusions through disambiguation, but all of that work is done in our different brains without us knowing it. We just experience, in consciousness, the result.

You think you are experiencing the world as it truly is, and when a lot of people are sure their version of reality is the really real version at the same time that a lot of other people are sure that no, in fact, their version is, you get arguments that break the internet (like The Dress), but also the Inquisition, the Hundred Years' War, QAnon, and anti-mask protests during global pandemics.

Here's a figure in the chapter that apparently came from Pascal Wallisch.

McRaney summarizes this approach, called SURFPAD.

When you combine Substantial Uncertainty with Ramified (which means branching) or Forked Priors or Assumptions, you will get Disagreement. 

In other words, when the truth is uncertain, our brains resolve the uncertainty without our knowledge by creating the most likely reality they can imagine based on our prior experiences. People whose brains remove that uncertainty in similar ways will find themselves in agreement, like those who saw the dress as black and blue.

Others whose brains resolve that uncertainty in a different way will also find themselves in agreement, like those who saw the dress as white and gold.

The essence of SURFPAD is that these two groups each feel certain, and among the like-minded it seems those who disagree, no matter their numbers, must be mistaken. In both groups, people then begin searching for reasons why so many people in other groups can't see the truth without entertaining the possibility that they aren't seeing the truth themselves.

There isn't nature and humans. Nature is all there is, including us.

Recently a hugely important bill that, in part, contains hundreds of billions of dollars to fight global warming, passed the U.S. Senate with exactly zero support from Republicans. 

This is so crazy, it makes people in mental hospitals seem positively sane. 

There's no logical or empirical basis for the conservative claim of a need to balance human economic interests with environmental interests. Not when it comes to global warming, which threatens to upend human civilization if greenhouse gas emissions aren't cut dramatically, and soon.

Nature isn't a nice thing to preserve. Nature is what we are. 

It's absurd to consider that we Homo sapiens are somehow separate from nature, or controllers of nature, or that God created nature for our benefit, as many Christians believe. 

No nature. No us. That's the simple obvious fact. 

But just as dualism leads people to wrongly believe that an immaterial soul resides within the physical body, so a long history of dualism in both Western and Eastern philosophy leads people to wrongly believe that the natural world is a pale reflection of a higher supernatural reality that's our true birthright.

I've started reading a book by James Bridle, Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines -- The Search for a Planetary Intelligence. The Introduction speaks of how we need to look differently upon our relation to the natural world.

Here's some excerpts.

More than ever, it is time for re-imaginings. Yet this act of imagination cannot be ours alone. To think against human exceptionalism requires us to think outside and beyond it, and to recognize in Blake's vision the deep truth of his words: nature is imagination itself. 

In this truth is encapsulated the philosophy behind the phrase I used earlier: the more-than-human world. 

Coined by the American ecologist and philosopher David Abram, the 'more than human world' refers to a way of thinking which seeks to override our human tendency to separate ourselves from the natural world. 

This tendency is so pronounced it is rife even within environmentalism, the movement which seems to bring us closer to nature and thereby to preserve it. For in so framing our intentions, we have already set up an implicit separation between ourselves and nature, as if we were two separate entities, unbound by inseparable ties of place and origin.

Conventional terms such as 'the environment', and even 'nature' itself (particularly when opposed to 'culture'), compound the erroneous idea that there is a neat divide in the world between us and them, between humans and non-humans, between our lives and the teeming, multitudinous living and being of the planet.

In contrast, the 'more-than-human world' acknowledges that the very real human world -- the realm of our senses, breath, voice, cognition and culture -- is but one facet of something vastly greater. All human life and being is inextricably entangled with and suffused by everything else.

This broad commonwealth includes every inhabitant of the biosphere: the animals, plants, fungi, bacteria and viruses. It includes the rivers, seas, winds, stones and clouds that support, shake and shadow us.

These animate forces, these companions on the great adventure of time and becoming, have much to teach us and have already taught us a great deal. We are who we are because of them, and we cannot live without them.

...We have come, as the shock of more-than-human consciousness testifies, to think of 'nature' as something separate from ourselves. When we speak of the fantastical futures envisioned by high technology, we speak of a 'new' or 'next' nature, some utopia of computation which further alienates and supplants the actual ground we came from and still stand upon. 

It is time to put aside such adolescent solipsism -- both for the sake of ourselves and of the more-than-human world.

There is only nature, in all its eternal flowering, creating microprocessors and datacentres and satellites just as it produced oceans, trees, magpies, oil and us. Nature is imagination itself. Let us not re-imagine it, then, but begin to imagine anew, with nature as our co-conspirator: our partner, our comrade and our guide.

Anecdotes no substitute for good arguments and evidence

Here's a cartoon from the Skeptical Science web site, which is skeptical about global warming skepticism. It makes a great point about the limitations of personal experience and isolated examples.

Whenever someone claims to have experienced the presence of God or some other supernatural phenomena, a valid response is "So what?" People claim that all sorts of crazy stuff are true. A lot more than a claim is needed before anyone else takes them seriously.

Best way to change someone's mind is to let them change it on their own

I've read another chapter in How Minds Change, by David McRaney.

This one is called "Deep Canvassing," as opposed to the shallow sort of canvassing that I've done occasionally where you knock on the door of a person you want to encourage to vote in a certain way, have a brief chat with them, and hand them a brochure about your favored candidate.

Deep Canvassing is the brainchild of a California group, the Leadership LAB (stands for Learn Act Build), which is the political action arm of the Los Angeles LGBT Center, the largest LGBTQ organization on earth.

The LAB wanted to change opinions about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and other people with a queer identity. Through a lot of experience knocking on doors in southern California and having fairly lengthy conversations with people, they evolved an approach to changing minds that research has shown to be effective even with just a single conversation.

(See here and here for stories in the Atlantic and New York Times about that research.)

Below are excerpts from the Deep Canvassing chapter that provide a pretty good overview of what was found to work, and not to work, in changing minds. Basically, providing facts or arguing with someone rarely is productive. Encouraging the person to think about their own thinking -- that's the way to change a mind.

Naturally my own mind wondered about how that applies to this Church of the Churchless blog. After all, since 2004 I've been encouraging people to be spiritually independent rather than a follower of an organized religion, mystical path, or form of spirituality.

Since regular commenters on this blog run the gamut from avid religious believer to fervent atheist, over the years I've observed that by and large, trying to convince someone to alter their frame of mind regarding religion/God/spirituality may be interesting and entertaining, but almost always fruitless.

My own conversion from religious believer to skeptic was along the line of what the LAB folks found, albeit slower. The change in my outlook didn't come from any outside pressure. It evolved organically over quite a few years as, bit by bit, I came to see things differently as regards the guru-led organization I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

If someone had come to my door during the time I was a RSSB devotee and told me that I'd be better off leaving the group, I would have shut the door in their face. Instead, Laurel, the woman I married in 1990 after getting divorced from my first wife, would simply ask questions about RSSB, some of which I had difficulty answering.

I didn't have a dramatic change of heart about RSSB in the same way the LAB has found that attitudes to LGBTQ people can sometimes alter significantly after a single meaningful conversation. Probably this is because religious beliefs tend to be more complex and more central to a person's identity than how they feel about gays.

But my many talks with Laurel about our spiritual beliefs (at the time she followed a New Age channeler, which caused me to question her about him) seemed to help sow some seeds within my mind that eventually sprouted into me changing my mind about RSSB.

Here's the chapter excerpts. The "I," of course, is the author, David McRaney.

I couldn't shake the idea that I, too, was probably one conversation away from changing my mind about something, maybe a lot of things. But I also recalled how many conversations I'd had that only made my convictions stronger.

I thought about the truthers and all the conversations they had in New York. I wondered what made these interactions different. 

In the training after the videos, Laura handed things over to Steve, and I got my first clue. He opened by telling the crowd that facts don't work. A serene man with a gentle and patient spirit, Steve put away his persistent smile and raised his voice to address the audience on this point.

"There is no superior argument, no piece of information that we can offer, that is going to change their mind," he said, taking a long pause before continuing.

"The only way they are going to change their mind is by changing their own mind -- by talking themselves through their own thinking, by processing things they've never thought about before, things from their own life that are going to help them see things differently."

He stood by a paper easel on which Laura had drawn a cartoon layer cake. Steve pointed to the smallest portion at the top with a candle sticking out. It was labeled "rapport," the next smallest layer was "our story," and the huge base was "their story."

He said to keep that image in mind while standing in front of someone, to remember to spend as little time as possible talking about yourself, just enough to show that you are friendly, that you aren't selling anything.

Show you are genuinely interested in what they have to say. That, he said, keeps them from assuming a defensive position. You should share your story, he said, pointing to the portion of the cake that sat on top of the biggest layer, but it's their story that should take up most of the conversation.

You want them to think about their own thinking.

The team tossed out lots of metaphors like these. For instance, Steve later said to think of questions as keys on a giant ring. If you keep asking and listening, he told the crowd, one of those keys was bound to unlock the door to a personal experience related to the topic.

Once that real, lived memory was out in the open, you could (if done correctly) steer the conversation away from the world of conclusions with their facts googled for support, away from ideological abstractions and into the world of concrete details from that individual's personal experiences.

It was there, and only there, he said, that a single conversation could change someone's mind.

...Steve would tell me later that they had learned over many conversations that reasons, justifications, and explanations for maintaining one's existing opinion can be endless, spawning like heads of a hydra. If you cut away one, two more would appear to take its place.

Deep canvassers want to avoid that unwinnable fight. To do that they allow a person's justifications to remain unchallenged. They nod and listen.

The idea is to move forward, make the person feel heard and respected, avoid arguing over a person's conclusions, and instead work to discover the motivations behind them. To that end, the next step is to evoke a person's emotional response to the issue. 

...I nodded, still unsure why facts and logic were such a bad idea.

Steve explained that after thousands of recorded conversations they had found that battling over differing interpretations of the evidence kept the people they met from exploring why they felt so strongly one way or the other.

People could remain in the logic space doing battle with the canvasser's facts for hours and never leave, safe and unable to tap into why those facts evoked such powerful feelings. The LAB tried arguing the facts for years, and it had long proved a waste of time.

"Doing this work has taught me that people make their decisions about issues like this, in their life and when they're voting, at a really emotional, visceral level," said Steve.

"What I envision when I'm standing in front of a voter is that people have this intellectual, logical reasoning process. That's one part of how they process the world and make decisions. But they have this almost entirely separate emotional reasoning process which is based on feelings and things they've experienced."

Steve said they used to hand-hold people and try to walk them through why certain facts should be compelling, why they should obviously change their minds, but his hunch now is that it will never work. 

A canvasser's reasoning can't be copied and pasted into another person. The facts that matter to them probably won't matter to the other person at all.

Great Zen story about letting go

Recently I tried to tell someone about a story in the Zen Flesh, Zen Bones book that I've had since my college days, 1966-71. 

(It's got a price of 95 cents on the cover. I see that Amazon has a copy of that 1961 edition listed for $81.53. But to me its priceless (almost), I've enjoyed the book so much over the years.)

When I checked the book today, I found that while I'd gotten the gist of the story correct, but not the details. Regardless, I really like the story.

Great advice about letting go, whether of the past or of anything else that needs releasing.

This was my misremembered version.

Two Zen monks who are walking along come to a river where a woman is standing on a bank, unable to cross the rushing water.

 

One monk puts her on his back and carries her across. The monks then walk on in silence for a while until his companion says, “We monks are not supposed to have anything to do with women. Why did you do what you did?” The other monk says, “I dropped her a mile back. You are still carrying her in your mind.”

 

And this is the version in Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. 

Tanzan and Ekido were once traveling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was still falling.

Coming around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the intersection. 

"Come on, girl," said Tanzan at once. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud.

Ekido did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. Then he could no longer restrain himself.

"We monks don't go near females," he told Tanzan, "especially not young and lovely ones. It is dangerous. Why did you do that?"

"I left the girl there," said Tanzan. "Are you still carrying her?"

Leaving dogma behind is like discarding a confining diving suit

I've read a couple of chapters in David McRaney's book, "How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion." 

One chapter I skipped ahead to read, because I was curious to learn how some people enmeshed in the hateful Westboro Baptist Church were able to leave this Christian cult. 

(The book says Westboro members would do things like protesting the funeral of Matthew Shepard, "a young gay man who was beaten, tortured, and left for dead in a remote portion of Wyoming by two men who offered him a ride home from a bar. At his funeral, the church carried signs that read NO TEARS FOR QUEERS.")

Here's some excerpts from the Westboro chapter. They're about Zach, who used to be a Westboro member. The first passage relates to the fact that a gay waiter at an Olive Garden restaurant recognized Zach as having recently left Westboro.

After that meal [which the gay waiter paid for], he started wondering if all of the assumptions tied to his former life were true. If his beliefs about gay men were wrong, then what else? 

His first thoughts were of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry and how Westboro had told them the girls who go to their concerts were "simple sluts." Simple-minded, stupid, and promiscuous. He immediately, and for the first time, questioned it.

He felt overwhelmed by a torrent of information that he once considered noise. All at once, he began to feel an intense uncertainty not only about what was true, but about who he was.

He said the most alarming thing was the realization that if he had gone to Olive Garden while he was still in the church, the waiter's act of kindness might not have made any difference at all. He would have found a way to interpret it differently.

Zach was still unpacking what it all meant. He was shocked to realize he was open to all sorts of change, and once he realized it, an array of alternative beliefs, attitudes, and values became newly acceptable.

"The first time I talked to a Jewish person, I thought what Westboro taught me at first, and then I was like, 'I don't want to listen to that.' I want to try to see reality for what it is. I want to think with an open mind and to make discoveries. There's a great deal of mystery in this world that I walk in, in this universe."

Today, he said, "I have gay friends. I have bisexual friends. I have pansexual friends." He was still struggling, though, still rebuilding his models, still expanding his mind. Zach said he recently began dabbling with Buddhism.

Zach reiterated that he didn't leave the church because he changed his opinions; he changed his opinions because he left the church. And he left the church because it had become intolerable for other reasons. 

Leaving opened him up to the possibility he could be wrong about many things, and that began a difficult period of rebirth.

...His whole life, Zach remained trapped in dogma, wearing it like a diving suit, interacting with the same world as the people shouting from across the picket line but never making actual human connection with it.

Zach has since taken off that suit.

He is even taking part in the parallel universe across the street. He's spent time at Equality House and participated in pickets against the church, holding signs with messages like YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL and FORGIVE AND FORGET. At those protests, he shouts, "Let's kill them with kindness," and "Let's show them what loving your neighbor is all about."

...I said it reminded me of what we had spoken about earlier, an insight from Piaget: how once we learn something is incorrect, we also learn that the source from which we learned that thing can be incorrect, which opens us up to the idea that maybe the sources we trust could be wrong about a lot of other things.

In science, intuition arises from facts, not facts from intuition

I found a column by Chandra Prescod-Weinstein in the July 9, 2022 issue of New Scientist interesting for several reasons. 

This professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire has a take on the expanding universe that I hadn't come across before. As she says in the column, the simplest way to describe this is a familiar one: just as the distance between dots on a balloon that fills with air will increase as the balloon expands, so do galaxies within our universe.

But this image is misleading, because a balloon exists in a larger reality, like a room. So we can be led to think that the universe is expanding into a larger space, which can't be correct, since space-time is what's expanding. You'll see that Prescod-Weinstein finds the mathematics of relativity theory to be much superior to the balloon analogy. Unfortunately, most of us can't grasp that mathematics.

It's often said that intuition plays a big role in science, as in everyday life. However, intuition isn't divorced from facts, but is an outgrowth of facts. I experience this whenever I'm in the market for a new car. I'll research some automotive options for months, reading reviews, perusing car manufacturer web sites, watching You Tube videos, and such.

All that information will confuse me at first. I'll see the pros and cons of various cars, unable to decide which would be best for me. Then one day... I know. I don't consciously arrive at the knowing. My mind just settles on an intuitive choice: Car X is what I should buy, not Cars A, B, or C. But without all the facts I'd learned, my brain wouldn't have been able to come up with a wise intuitive decision. Prescod-Weinstein speaks of something similar.

I've ordered her book, The Disordered Cosmos. At first I was going to pass on it after looking at the Amazon listing, since the book includes more than science. In the end, though, I decided that I liked her non-traditional outlook on science, as described in the listing.

One of the leading physicists of her generation, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is also one of fewer than one hundred Black American women to earn a PhD from a department of physics. Her vision of the cosmos is vibrant, buoyantly nontraditional, and grounded in Black and queer feminist lineages. 

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein urges us to recognize how science, like most fields, is rife with racism, misogyny, and other forms of oppression. She lays out a bold new approach to science and society, beginning with the belief that we all have a fundamental right to know and love the night sky. The Disordered Cosmos dreams into existence a world that allows everyone to experience and understand the wonders of the universe.

Here's her New Scientist column.

THE origin story we tell about the universe goes roughly like this: there may have been a big bang (we aren’t sure), then space-time expanded extremely rapidly (we think) and has continued to expand ever since, even picking up the pace in relatively recent times (we are fairly certain). It is a nice story, and one I largely believe is true. But what does it mean when we say that space-time expanded?

In presentations to broad audiences, I explain by asking people to imagine an unfilled balloon with special dots on it. Imagine that as the balloon fills with air, the dots stay the same size, but, as one would expect, the distance between the dots expands. Pretend those dots are galaxies and, roughly speaking, this is what is happening to space-time.

The expansion of space-time means the space-time between galaxies grows, making the distance between galaxies larger as time goes on. There are exceptions to this. Galaxies that are gravitationally bound to each other won’t be pulled apart; for example, the Milky Way and Andromeda are on course to eventually collide and merge. The Milky Way also has many satellite galaxies in its orbit or otherwise gravitationally bound to it.

Other than ties through gravity, galaxies are generally “moving” away from each other because space-time continues to grow between them. The balloon analogy helps us understand this with some intuition, without needing to take several years of courses in order to fully understand general relativity as a technical subject. However, it also introduces problems that one can avoid if the subject is only looked at in mathematical terms.

As a scientist with deep knowledge of general relativity – the first advanced physics subject I trained in – I don’t necessarily need to spend a lot of time interpreting the equations to suit my intuition. Rather, part of my job is to develop new intuition based on the latest results from mathematical derivations, lab experiments and astronomical observations. The way I lead my life as a scientist involves a foundational commitment to looking at the world as it is and revising my understanding as I gather new information.

In the case of expanding space-time, I have to think carefully about what I mean by “space-time”. General relativity teaches me to think about space-time as a phenomenon that is described by the ruler we use to measure distances, an equation we call the metric. Therefore, expanding space-time means that the metric changes with time in such a way that spatial distances get larger as time goes on. This is something of an idealisation: we know this isn’t happening on the scales of everyday life here on Earth.

I am lucky because I can work through the equations and get a feeling for how this works mathematically, which makes it intuitive in a language that has more words than everyday English. This raises the question of translation from my technical, mathematical vocabulary into phrases that are comprehensible to broader audiences.

So we return to the balloon, which, yes, gives some good intuition, but can also get a reader thinking. Specifically, I know at least one person who is a regular reader of this column (thank you!) started to wonder where the space-time is expanding into. Certainly that is a limit of the balloon analogy. When we are blowing up a balloon, the balloon is expanding into the room we are in. Another way of putting it is that the balloon exists in a background, where the room is that background.

I introduce this way of thinking because it is one we scientists use when we describe general relativity, which we call a “background independent theory”. Relativity is described in this way because it doesn’t matter how we map out the coordinates in this theory, the physical reality it describes stays the same. There is a lot more to unpack here and not enough space (or time!), so let me just point out that this implies the space-time of general relativity doesn’t have a room. In other words, space-time is expanding, but into nothing in particular. The expansion is simply a growth in distances. It isn’t a material either, so it isn’t coming from somewhere. The distances just grow and grow.

Weird, right? If you don’t think so, that itself is odd. As I write in The Disordered Cosmos (now available in paperback), the universe is always more queer and fantastical than we think. The fundamental nature of space-time is an example of this fact. We exist in space-time and nothing in daily life necessarily makes us think it is a particularly strange phenomenon. Then again, we exist, and we are pretty odd, so maybe we should expect the nature of most things to be, on some level, unexpected.

If God doesn't exist, what difference does this make?

If my wife didn't exist, that would make a huge difference in my life for the worse. Same goes if my daughter, her husband, and my granddaughter didn't exist. I'd feel the loss terribly.

But when it comes to God, so what? 

God has had absolutely zero influence on me during my 73 years of living. I've never had any sort of relationship with God. 

The only effect God has ever had on me came from my attitude toward God, my belief or lack thereof in God, my imaginings about God. 

So if God exists, or if God doesn't exist, that makes no difference to me. Or I'd say, to anyone else, for we all create God in our image, or non-image.

There's no evidence that God has ever had any effect on anybody. All we can say is that believing in God, or not believing in God, has effects on people.

This is much different from, say, gravity. Gravity, unlike God, clearly is real. I drop something and it falls to the floor. That's gravity at work.

If gravity didn't exist, that newfound lack would change life on Earth so dramatically, life wouldn't even be possible anymore.

With God, though, believers and unbelievers in God live their lives in the same way, because God has no evident causal influence on anything or anyone.

If you disagree, share in a comment exactly how you know God makes a difference in your life.

What would be different if God didn't exist? To atheists like me, that's a trick question, since we're virtually 100% certain that God is a fantasy, so God already doesn't exist in the lives of believers.

Again, only their belief in God exists, not God.

As noted in a recent blog post, Philip K. Dick said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

When people stop believing in God, God goes away. This shows that God isn't real. By contrast, stop believing in gravity. You'll find that gravity is unaffected by belief.

Time for a summer blog post re-run

It's hot here in Oregon. Really hot. Hundred degree hot. Way hotter than normal. (Thank you for nothing, global warming.)

This evening my brain doesn't feel like composing a fresh blog post. Time to dig into my vast repository of Church of the Churchless posts, 3,225 over the past 18 years, and share a summer re-run.

I wrote this one in June 2005. It's one of my favorites. Of course, I probably shouldn't say that, since now the other 3,224 blog posts are going to feel bad. Oh, well, can't worry about that when it's this hot.

Did I see God in first class?

I may have seen God in first class. The first class section of an Alaska Airlines flight from San Francisco to Palm Springs, to be exact. Or, maybe I didn’t.

In the early ‘90s I was traveling from Portland to attend a “bhandara," or spiritual gathering, of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) devotees in Palm Springs. After changing planes in San Francisco I found myself in a right side aisle seat in the coach row directly behind first class, idly watching other passengers board.

A middle-aged Indian gentleman caught my eye. Bearded, he was wearing a white turban and blue jeans. His first class seat was across the aisle and one row up from mine. Before sitting down he glanced around the rear of the plane and our eyes briefly met. Then he took his seat and I returned to perusing a magazine. Nothing special seemed to have happened.

But it had, to quite a few other people sitting near me. For they were Bay Area RSSB members who also were heading to Palm Springs for the bhandara where the satguru (true guru) was to speak. And that Indian gentleman sitting a few feet away from me was the satguru—Master Gurinder Singh.

I began to hear whispers. “That’s him.” “The master is sitting in first class.” “I don’t believe it.” I hadn’t recognized Gurinder Singh, even though I’d seen him before at a bhandara in Vancouver, B.C. Fervent RSSB devotees consider the satguru to be God in human form, much as Jesus is regarded by devout Christians.

The difference being, Jesus is dead and Gurinder Singh was sitting alive and well in an Alaska Airlines first class seat. Imagine that a Christian gets on a plane and sees Jesus seated a few rows ahead of him and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the atmosphere on the flight to Palm Springs—among the RSSB disciples, at least.

I got mildly caught up in the excitement. However, even back then, when I was much more involved—psychologically and otherwise—with RSSB than I am now, I didn’t consider that seeing the satguru was a big deal. And until I made the connection between “Indian man wearing a turban” and “Master Gurinder Singh,” seeing him wasn’t even a small deal.

For I didn’t feel a hint of anything special until the disciples around me started up the “It’s him!” whispering campaign. Wouldn’t you think that if a person truly is God in human form, such would be obvious? Not just to those who already believe in the person’s divinity, but to everyone—believer and unbeliever alike. Jesus, of course, suffered the same lack of recognition. If his purported godliness had been transparently apparent, impossible to deny, by the time he died Jesus would have had a lot more than a handful of followers.

Psychedelic researchers speak of the importance of set and setting in determining the nature of a LSD (or similar drug) experience. “Set” includes the personality of the individual; “setting” includes cultural views about what is real. If someone with a devotional frame of mind joins a group like RSSB that affirms the divinity of a guru, then this person may very well see God sitting in first class. I, on the other hand, just saw an Indian man.

My wife, Laurel, joined me in Palm Springs a few days later. She was more interested in shopping and sunshine than attending the bhandara, but I did talk her into going to two RSSB meetings. At one of them she got to sit in the front row, just a few feet away from the stage where Gurinder Singh spoke and answered questions—a highly favored spot to devotionally-minded disciples.

Afterwards Laurel said to me, “He just seemed like a regular person.” I couldn’t argue with her. I believed then, and still do, that Master Gurinder Singh is uncommonly intelligent, insightful, well-spoken, charismatic, and inspiring. But I had no reason then, nor any now, to assert that he is God in human form. I’ve stopped being concerned with the level of divinity someone else possesses, and now am almost exclusively focused on getting in touch with my own hypothesized higher self.

I understand the allure of what Hindus call bhakti marg, salvation through love and devotion. Though much more inclined to the spiritual path of jnana (knowledge through meditation), I’ve got my bhakti tendencies and have been known to shed a tear at the thought or sight of a guru. But that was then. I believe that I’m wiser now.

Wiser, because I’ve concluded that if I have to think or emote my way to reality, this isn’t a reality worth having. When I let loose of an object, gravity takes it to the ground regardless of whether I’m thinking “Gravity is great” or feeling “I love gravity so much!” Gravity, like all the other laws of nature, just does what it does—automatically.

If there is a spiritual dimension to reality, it makes sense to me that higher laws of the cosmos also will operate naturally and spontaneously. When my inner vision is clear, I’ll experience them without effort, just as I open my eyes in the morning and effortlessly see a world guided by physical laws.

As I quoted Philip K. Dick in the course of describing the Church of the Churchless symbol, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” This probably is my favorite spiritual one-liner. In my opinion that single sentence, when properly understood, contains the entire essence of volumes of profound mystical literature that fills my bookcases.

If I have to believe in God in order to experience God, then that experience is of my own belief, not of God.

I’d be overjoyed to see God in human form. Heck, in any form. A formless form would be fine also. But I want this seeing to be unmistakable, crystal clear, impossible to be doubted. I don’t want to substitute imagination for the real thing.

Maybe I saw God in first class. Maybe. Maybe isn’t good enough. I want to be sure that God is more than, as the song goes, “just a slob like one of us.” Show me. Then I’ll believe, not before.