Church of the Churchless

Miracles aren't so miraculous in the light of mathematics

We humans have some innate amazing capabilities. However, intuitively grasping mathematical principles, including statistics and probability theory, isn't one of them. Or at least, this is very rare.

That's why almost everybody mistakenly overestimates the rarity of unusual events. I wrote about this in a 2014 post, "Miracles" happen all the time. Mathematics demands them. In that post I included this question from a book I was reading:

How many people must be in a room to make it more likely than not that two of them share the same birthday?

The answer is 23. I would have thought the answer was many more. Even after I've read the reason why 23 people is the answer (it has to do with exponents, basically), I still have difficulty understanding that reason. 

The December 2024 issue of New Scientist has a story by mathematician Sarah Hart, "The surprising maths that explains why coincidences are so common." (It's a British magazine, so they say maths.)
Download The surprising maths that explains why coincidences are so common | New Scientist

Hart starts off by relating an experience.

I had a strange experience in a cafe recently. When paying for coffee, I asked to use the toilet. After I tapped my PIN into the card reader, the barista handed me a slip of paper that was blank apart from a single number – the same one I had just tapped into the keypad! It turned out that this was also the entry code for the bathroom door.

Was this evidence of a shadowy plot by the agents of Big Caffeine? No, it was just a fluke, but the event got me thinking about coincidences more generally. Occasionally, we are faced with events that seem so improbable we can’t help but feel the universe is sending us a message. As a mathematician, I know that coincidences are often far more likely to occur than we think – and this fact can have serious consequences everywhere from the science lab to lottery kiosks and the law courts.

My coffee shop experience is a good place to start because we can calculate the exact probability of it happening by chance. There are 10,000 possible four-digit numbers, meaning a 1 in 10,000 probability that the door code matches my PIN. Unlikely, yes, but let us put it in context. The cafe was in York, UK – a popular tourist destination with 8.9 million visitors annually. If each visitor has one bank card, we would expect around 890 cards each year to have the same PIN as that cafe’s bathroom door code. I don’t feel so special now.

Looking more broadly, there are so many events happening to every person each day, coincidences are bound to happen frequently. But we aren't aware of all those seemingly unusual events. Usually we only know about them when they happen to us or a close friend.

Or when they're so unusual, they become a news story, as was the case with the Bulgarian National Lottery when the same six winning numbers came up on two consecutive draws. Hart explains why this actually was to be expected.

Such analyses can help explain some of history’s most breathtaking coincidences, such as the curious case of the Bulgarian national lottery. In September 2009, the same numbers – 4, 15, 23, 24, 35 and 42 – came out in two consecutive draws.

It sounds like a fix, but the statistician David Hand calculated that the game would only have to run for 43 years before it becomes more likely than not for the same numbers to be drawn at least twice. (The lottery had, by this point, been running for 52 years.)

So when someone says of a seemingly unlikely event, "It was a miracle," almost certainly it wasn't. (I was inclined to omit almost, but science tells us that nothing is absolutely certain, just extremely likely.)

Coincidences appear to share with miracles this psychological phenomenon: it's all about us. This was pointed out in the explanation of why it only takes 23 people in a room for it to be more likely than not that two of those people share the same birthday. 

Skeptical about how this could be true, we picture ourselves going up to the other 22 people and asking them if their birthday was the same as ours, July 18, say. What we don't picture is each of those 22 people doing the same thing with everybody else in the room. The author of the explanation says:

Take a look at the news. Notice how much of the negative news is the result of acting without considering others. I’m an optimist and do have hope for mankind, but that’s a separate discussion :).

In a room of 23, do you think of the 22 comparisons where your birthday is being compared against someone else’s? Probably.

Do you think of the 231 comparisons where someone who is not you is being checked against someone else who is not you? Do you realize there are so many? Probably not.

The fact that we neglect the 10 times as many comparisons that don’t include us helps us see why the “paradox” can happen.

It's natural to feel that the world revolves around us. After all, the only person who we're in direct intimate contact with as a subject rather than an object is ourself. But statistics and mathematics shows us that we're less important in the grand scheme of things than we typically view ourselves as being.

Having someone call us just when we're thinking of contacting them may seem miraculous from our personal point of view (which happened to me), yet isn't at all surprising when we look at things from a broader perspective where billions of people are contacting each other.

We like to think that the universe is sending us meaningful messages through rare or unexpected events. Actually, laws of probability are sending us non-meaningful messages.

I like the idea that love is akin to spaciousness

Love. What is it? For me, love has been easier to feel than to describe.

It seems to have something to do with attraction, since I want to be closer to people and things that I love, while the opposite is true of people and things that I hate or dislike.

Every night I say "love you" to my wife before we go to sleep. She says the same to me. It's a ritual that means a lot to me, in part because it makes me feel good to know that if I die in my sleep, those would have been the last words my wife would have heard from me.

Bumper sticker sentiments, such as God is love, strike me as almost totally meaningless. They sound fine, but they lack the concreteness of feeling love for someone or something that clearly exists, which isn't the case with God.

As noted before, this is why the title of Zen master Henry Shukman's book, Original Love, gave me some pause before I decided to buy it from Amazon. Fortunately, after reading 105 pages I'm liking how Shukman looks upon love. 

Basically, love is about spaciousness, which he relates to awareness being able to encompass anything and everything we can be aware of.

Love is like space in the sense that it gives space for things to be the way they are. It allows us to be in a troubled state. When we're no longer at war with the state we're in, our sense of identification can switch from being wrapped up in the trouble and relocate to the state of acceptance.

So while the trouble is still there, our identity can migrate from the knot of trouble to the broader context that is accepting of that knot. It's the sense of love that pulls us there. Love is a magnetism.

It's like gravity, except that rather than drawing us toward an object, it draws us into its spaciousness, which can comfortably hold the difficulty. Love loves what is difficult, which makes it no longer difficult. Explore this for yourself and see if you agree.

But what is the source of this love? It's actually simple too.

Once we are less narrowly focused, once we uncouple attention from what it has been contracting itself onto. we sense simply more of the space of awareness. Rather than being stuck in one little quadrant of awareness, we recognize more quadrants.

...One of the very features of original love is its unlimited awareness. At the deepest level, all forms of awareness are forms of it. It not only is aware of all, but also allows all experience to arise, and immediately and unconditionally meets it.

...The path to awakening, to original love, can be summarized as follows. We start to settle down. We start to lessen the hold of the hindrances.

The suffering many of us have lived with as a vague background condition -- a sense of lack, of deficiency, or a hunger, a hankering after things not yet here -- has come to the fore, and we are getting to know it more clearly. As a result of allowing it to be as it is, it is starting to dwindle and at times release itself.

As this happens, we begin to open up more to our actual experience in the here and now. We notice the whistle of the wind in the trees, the distant hum of traffic, and the sounds of a neighborhood. We relish the play of light and shadow, and we feel the magnificence of the weather, whether sunshine, cold mist, or crackling thunderheads. 

...We are returning to a natural appreciation for being, for the gift of living itself, without any need for accomplishment.

There are things about my wife that annoy me, just as there things about me that annoy her. Same is true of our dog. She can be annoying at times, and I'm sure I can annoy our dog. However, love is able to encompass those annoyances, making them appear less important in the overall light of love.

This is why what strangers do can be especially annoying. Typically I'm only aware of my irritation about their action, lacking the context of love that makes it much easier for me to accept the annoying things my wife and dog do.

One place where I frequently get annoyed is the circuit training weight room in my athletic club. Two of the three times a week I exercise at the club is just before my 4:30 pm Tai Chi class. I arrange my arrival at the club so I'm able to get my workout in prior to driving to downtown Salem for the class.

Not having a lot of leeway in that schedule, I get irked when someone is sitting at a machine that I want to use, phone in hand, staring at the screen as if it was the most important thing in the world, rather than doing what I believe people should do with a weight machine: exercise!

Recently I've been experimenting with having a more spacious awareness of the situation in line with how Shukman views love. I look at the person with the phone on the machine that I want to use in the limited time I have left at the club not as someone who is trying to irritate me, but as someone who is doing something important to them.

That thought alone changes my attitude. I realize that they may be communicating with a friend or loved one or business associate. They may have a much more vibrant social life than I do. They may not have any sense that I, or anyone else, is waiting to use that weight machine.

My annoyance is fueled by narrowly limiting my awareness to (1) what I want to do, and (2) how an action of someone else is preventing me from achieving that want. As soon as I view the situation more broadly, seeing the other person as having their own wants and needs that are just as important as mine,  I feel my irritation lessening. Sometimes it disappears completely.

A small step, to be sure. But I'm grateful that some of what Shukman says in his book, and in his The Way app that I have on my iPhone, is having a positive effect on me.

We are both the mind and the observer of the mind

Recently I read an essay in either the New York Times or Washington Post by someone who spoke about how Thich Nhat Hanh's classic little book, "The Miracle of Mindfulness," had changed his life. 

That spurred me to head to Amazon to see if I'd already bought that book. Yes, Amazon told me, you did, in January 2019. Looking through the Buddhism section of my bookcase, there it was, all 139 pages of it.

I've been re-reading parts of The Miracle of Mindfulness the past few days. Published 50 years ago, in 1975, the book is wonderfully clear and concise. Here's a passage that I quoted in a February 2019 post. It's a great depiction of what mindfulness is all about.

If while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not "washing the dishes to wash the dishes." What's more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes.

In fact, we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If we can't wash the dishes, the chances are we won't be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands.

Thus we are sucked away into the future -- and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.

Today I had a glimpse of another way to appreciate mindfulness while on a dog walk along one of the trails in our rural neighborhood. I was strolling along the familiar path, thinking about what I was going to write about on this blog in a few hours.

Suddenly it struck me that my body was on a walk in nature, while my mind was contemplating a future activity that I'd do while sitting at my laptop computer in my home. I realized, "My prehistoric ancestors would have found this to be dangerous, having their thoughts in one place while their body was in another place."

For if dangerous animals, or dangerous fellow humans, were lurking behind a tree or in the brush, and a distracted mind failed to notice them, that could be the last distraction an early human ever experienced before their death.

Nowadays there usually isn't such a stark penalty to be paid for a lack of mindfulness, which Thich Nhat Hanh says is "keeping one's consciousness alive to the present reality." He also says, "There is no reason why mindfulness should be different from focusing all one's attention on one's work, to be alert and to be using one's best judgment."

I'm grateful to Thich Nhat Hanh for clearing up something that has always bothered me, the familiar image of meditation as being akin to a rider controlling an elephant, with the elephant being our often unruly mind and the rider being... what? 

I used to think that maybe this was a higher mind or soul, something separate from our everyday mind. But the image still didn't make much sense to me. If there is an entity that controls the mind, then what controls the entity doing that controlling? Another entity? If so, what controls it? Where's the end of all this controlling by various entities?

Thich Nhat Hanh has a simple answer from the Zen perspective: there's just one entity, the mind. It's both the controller and what is controlled.

When I mentioned the guard at the emperor's gate, perhaps you imagined a front corridor with two doors, one entrance and one exit, with your mind as the guard. Whatever feeling or thought enters, you are aware of its entrance, and when it leaves, you are aware of its exit. 

But the image has a shortcoming: it suggests that those who enter and exit the corridor are different from the guard. In fact our thoughts and feelings are us. They are a part of ourselves. There is a temptation to look upon them, or at least some of them, as an enemy force which is trying to disturb the concentration and understanding of your mind.

But, in fact, when we are angry, we ourselves are anger. When we are happy, we ourselves are happiness. When we have certain thoughts, we are those thoughts. We are both the guard and the visitor at the same time. We are both the mind and the observer of the mind. 

Therefore, chasing away or dwelling on any thought isn't the important thing. The important thing is to be aware of the thought. This observation is not an objectification of the mind: it does not establish distinction between subject and object. Mind does not grab the mind; mind does not push mind away.

Mind can only observe itself. This observation isn't an observation of some object outside and independent of the observer.

...Mindfulness of feeling in feeling is mindfulness of feeling directly while experiencing feeling, and certainly not contemplation of some image of feeling which one creates to give feeling some objective, separate existence of its own outside of oneself.

...The objectivity of an outside observer to examine something is the method of science, but it is not the method of meditation. Thus the image of the guard and the visitor fails to illustrate adequately the mindful observation of mind.

The mind is like a monkey swinging from branch to branch through a forest, says the Sutra. In order not to lose sight of the monkey by some sudden movement, we must watch the monkey constantly and even to be one with it. 

Mind contemplating mind is like an object and its shadow -- the object cannot shake the shadow off. The two are one. Wherever the mind goes, it still lies in the harness of the mind.

...Once the mind is directly and continually aware of itself, it is no longer like a monkey. There are not two minds, one which swings from branch to branch and another which follows after to bind it with a piece of rope. 

...Your mind will take hold of mind in a direct and wondrous way which no longer differentiates between subject and object. Drinking a cup of tea, the seeming distinction between the one who drinks and the tea being drunk evaporates. Drinking a cup of tea becomes a direct and wondrous experience in which the distinction between subject and object no longer exists.

Dispersed mind is also mind, just as waves rippling in water are also water. When mind has taken hold of mind, deluded mind becomes true mind. True mind is our real self, is the Buddha: the pure one-ness which cannot be cut up by the illusory divisions of separate selves, created by concepts and language.

But I don't want to say a lot about this.

Germany surviving Hitler doesn't reassure me about Trump

I don't believe that evil exists.

At least, not in the way that word typically is used, as someone or something with wholly negative qualities that border, if not actually inhabit, a dualistic metaphysical realm where Good is inherently opposed to Evil as opposite cosmic forces.  

I do believe that sometimes people do really bad things. Not because they are evil. Because they are people with both the capability and the intention to do those bad things. 

Murder. Rape. Torture. Whether those who carry out horrendous acts like these do so of their free will, or via deterministic causes, doesn't affect the pain and suffering they inflict on their fellow humans.

Hitler frequently is cited as the epitome of evil, or as I prefer, of acting really badly.

Yesterday the Salon discussion group my wife and I have belonged to for many years held our monthly meeting at the home of one of our members. Politically we all lean in the leftward direction, so Donald Trump featured prominently in our conversing. 

Not in a positive way, of course, though I did say that I hoped Trump would find a way to save TikTok, something I wrote about on my Salem Political Snark blog last night. And several of us noted that it made sense to deport undocumented migrants to the United States who have committed serious crimes.

After we'd talked quite a bit about the danger Trump poses to our country and the world during his second term as president (which begins tomorrow), a woman who was a young child in Germany during World War II said:

A German friend who I keep in touch with told me, "If Germany survived Hitler, the United States will survive Trump."

Well, while I appreciated the attempt to assuage my concerns about Trump, that statement didn't do much to reassure me. I replied with, "But millions of Germans died in World War II along with six million Jews; though Germany survived Hitler, those people didn't."

Some Googling just revealed that Germany had 5,553,000 military deaths in World War II and 6,600,000-8,800,000 combined civilian and military deaths -- which I assume doesn't include the 6,000,000 Jews killed in concentration camps. 

Yes, Germany now is a prosperous democracy. That's great.

However, the blunt fact remains that an autocratic ruler, Hitler, did tremendous damage to Germany and the entire world. I understand the desire to look upon history as being on a long-term positive course, but a more realistic view is that history can take a dark turn lasting hundreds of years in which human progress toward prosperity, democracy, and equality first stalls, then reverses.

History, it often is said, is written by the winners.

Though I'm no expert in the history of World War II, my understanding is that absent some blunders made by Hitler (such as invading Russia, and an inability to construct an atomic bomb), the Axis could have won the war -- obviously with far-reaching negative consequences. Our history books now would look upon Hitler with admiration, not criticism.

On a personal level, we humans seem to have a bias toward negativity, since evolution primed us to see danger lurking even where it wasn't, given that a single failure to recognize a mortal threat would leave a prehistoric human dead, while reacting to unreal threats just ended up being a waste of time.

However, when it comes to long-term historic trends, I sense that nowadays most people (including me, usually) have a bias toward seeing things steadily improving, albeit with inescapable temporary downturns along the Way of Progress.

I hope that outlook is correct. But I suspect that it isn't. The Dark Ages lasted a long time in medieval Europe. The Renaissance eventually occurred, thankfully. Now we live in times that are much more fast-moving, volatile, and unpredictable. 

Hopefully the United States will survive the next four years of another Trump presidency. There's a chance, albeit slim in my decidedly personal opinion, that my country will not only survive, but thrive. 

And yet... some paragraphs from the Wikipedia page, "Adolf Hitler's rise to power," concern me, because they show how an autocrat or dictator can come to power through a democratic process, then undermine democracy in a highly scary fashion. 

Hitler ran for the presidency in 1932 but was defeated by the incumbent Paul von Hindenburg; nonetheless, he achieved a strong showing of second place in both rounds. Following this, in July 1932 the Nazis became the largest party in the Reichstag, albeit short of an absolute majority. 1933 was a pivotal year for Hitler and the Nazi Party. Traditionally, the leader of the party who held the most seats in the Reichstag was appointed Chancellor.

However, President von Hindenburg was hesitant to appoint Hitler as chancellor. Following several backroom negotiations – which included industrialists, Hindenburg's son Oskar, the former chancellor Franz von Papen, and Hitler – Hindenburg acquiesced and on 30 January 1933, he formally appointed Adolf Hitler as Germany's new chancellor. Although he was chancellor, Hitler was not yet an absolute dictator.

The groundwork for the Nazi dictatorship was laid when the Reichstag was set on fire in February 1933. Asserting that the communists were behind the arson, Hitler convinced von Hindenburg to pass the Reichstag Fire Decree, which severely curtailed the liberties and rights of German citizens. Using the decree, Hitler began eliminating his political opponents.

Following its passage, Hitler began arguing for more drastic means to curtail political opposition and proposed the Enabling Act of 1933. Once enacted this law gave the German government the power to override individual rights prescribed by the constitution, and vested the Chancellor (Hitler) with emergency powers to pass and enforce laws without parliamentary oversight.

The law came into force in March and by April, Hitler held de facto dictatorial powers and used them to order the construction of the first Nazi concentration camp at Dachau for communists and other political opponents. Hitler's rise to power was completed in August 1934 when, following the death of President von Hindenburg, Hitler merged the chancellery with the presidency and became Führer, the sole leader of Germany.

In retrospect, Hitler's rise to power was aided in part by his willingness to use violence in advancing his political objectives and to recruit party members willing to do the same. The party engaged in electoral battles in which Hitler participated as a speaker and organizer. Street battles and violence also erupted between the Communists' Rotfrontkämpferbund and the Nazis' Sturmabteilung(SA).

Once the Nazi dictatorship was firmly established, the Nazis themselves created a mythology surrounding their rise to power. German propaganda described this time period as either the Kampfzeit (the time of struggle) or the Kampfjahre (years of struggle).

The goal is our chosen direction, says Zen master Henry Shukman

I think it'd be cool to be a Zen master. However, to do that I would have had to actually practice Zen under the guidance of a Zen master, rather than admire Zen from the outside and practice it in my own idiosyncratic fashion.

Henry Shukman, who wrote the book Original Love that I'm reading now, and fashioned The Way app on my iPhone that I've using every morning in a cyberspace form of Zen meditation, is indeed a Zen master.

I just checked out the Sanbo Zen International web site and Shukman is listed there along with other masters of Sanbo Zen.

Shukman has an appealing way of explaining what meditation is all about. I like these passages from his book.

Becoming a meditator, opening up to a path of meditation, could be viewed as slowing down the car, parking it, getting out of it, and walking -- going through life at a pace where we can experience the sensory details of the trip.

...The problem is that in our pursuit of goals, we tend to get distracted from the richness of our actual life. It's not wrong to have goals and aspirations. It's healthy, and inspires and motivates us. But what if we could let them simply be the valley track we've chosen to walk down?

We're going in a certain direction. Fine. But as we go, we're going to experience each step of the journey -- each moment, this very moment -- so that the goal is our chosen direction, not something we're obsessing about reaching as quickly as possible, to the exclusion of all current experiences here and now.

Otherwise, what will happen once we reach the goal? We'll very likely set another goal, and speed off toward that one as fast as we can. And so on.

By slowing down, by deciding that each moment is worth experiencing for itself, we can broaden our life. It's not that life has no direction. It's that paying attention to what happens along the way makes life richer and fuller.

Even though we're moving in a chosen direction, it actually matters more to us how it is here and now than how it might be down the road. And some even say there is a curious law of nature, by which we'll fulfill our goals sooner and more amply if we savor the journey toward them.

This very moment, right now, as it is -- somehow we start to recognize it as already complete. Already the world is fulfilled. That's not to say there aren't problems and immense challenges -- as well as cruelty and suffering, and injustice and oppression.

We must call out these issues and devote serious, sustained effort to their resolution. At the same time, we can appreciate the wealth given to us in any moment, by the moment itself. And we trust that the positive orientation that appreciation arouses will help us to better play our part in making this world a kinder place.

Shukman says that in early Buddhism the first of four foundations of mindfulness is "mindfulness of body."

This may seem obvious, but in some spiritual, religious, and mystical traditions the body is viewed as the jailhouse of the soul. Our goal supposedly is to break the bonds that tie soul to body so we can rise beyond the crude physicality of this lowest domain of creation and ascend to "heaven."

Such is completely at odds with Buddhism in general, and Zen in particular. Pleasingly, Shukman explains why mindfulness of body is so important from a modern neuroscience perspective. 

In a nutshell, our large hominin brains are well equipped for rehearsing future scenarios and for rehashing past events. Some speculate that our thick prefrontal cortex evolved to run simulations -- to model the outcomes of possible courses of action. Apparently, it was also to rerun past events, presumably to learn from them.

When we're involved with outward tasks that occupy our attention, we tend to feel okay. We're engaging what some researchers call the task positive network. When we're having downtime, or "idle time," the default mode network is activated, whereupon we spend more time lost in thoughts of the past and of imagined futures than we do experiencing the moment at hand.

This leads to unhappiness. Why? Because we tend to regret the past and fear the future. Our brains evolved to have a strong negativity bias, meaning they act more powerfully and persistently to perceived threats than to perceived rewards. After all, if we neglect a genuine threat just once, than we might die.

So our brains not only "fire" at threats but also "wire" the threat response more strongly, in order to prompt that response again more readily if necessary. So we have work to do just to get to a more balanced state vis-a-vis the world.

...To tell ourselves not to dwell on the past or future seldom works. The mental habit is too strong, reinforced by a million years of evolution. If we offer our attention an alternative area of focus, then this shift makes it easier to break the spell of rumination. 

Hence anytime we shift our attention to our body experience, we are necessarily focusing on the here and now. The body lives in the present tense. It doesn't have the capacity to "live" anywhere else. Only the mind can do that.

I like how Henry Shukman views love

Well, I'm on Day 2 of an approximately year-long journey on what meditation teacher Henry Shukman calls The Way.

Pleasingly, I don't have to journey to India or Tibet, nor go on lengthy meditation retreats. All I needed to do was install an app on my iPhone and pay $89.99 for a year's worth of daily talks and guided meditations that comprise The Way.

One thing that I like about Shukman's approach is that The Way is unique, to my knowledge, among online meditation instruction with its "no choice" format. I've tried quite a few meditation apps. They all have offered a large array of material -- guided meditations, interviews with spiritual teachers, talks on various subjects, videos, and such.

By contrast, with The Way, you start at the beginning and proceed step by step along a single path. Nice and simple. I ordered Shukman's most recent book, Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening. I started reading the book today. 

It's well written and has an appealing message, based on the first 20 introductory pages. I usually shy away from spiritual writings that talk about love as being the most important thing. Not that love isn't important. It is. I just don't enjoy lofty paeans to love that aren't grounded in practicality.

From what I can tell, Shukman views love in much the same way as I look upon oneness. It's an evident fact, not an abstraction or emotion. The basis of love is connection, which is facilitated by a recognition that what we normally consider to be our self actually doesn't exist. His first paragraphs are:

This is a work of unabashed advocacy. It seeks to persuade you that a radical reversal in our ordinary understanding of self and world is available. And that it matters because it not only brings us closer to reality, but also has far-reaching benefits, both for an individual and for society at large.

This book is about the best subject. It's about the single most astounding fact you will ever come to know. It's about you.

You yourself are the most astonishing reality in the whole universe. You -- right where you are, right now, whether you are reading these words while standing at an airport newsstand, slouching in a subway car rattling under the streets of a great city, sagging behind the wheel on a gridlocked freeway, or sitting at a lamp-lit desk at night scrolling down the Amazon home page -- are not what you have taken yourself to be.

Yes, you are the person with the history, hopes, relationships, physiology, aptitudes, and fallibilities that help to define who you think you are. But you are also both much more, and much less. When we get right down to it, our sense of self is an illusion, like a mirage over a hot road, no more substantial than a reflection on the surface of a lake. To "awaken" is to realize this, and this book is a guide to catching glimpses of what that means.

If this book succeeds even a little, it will open a crack in your sense of self -- a chink in the armor of your certainty, of your confidence in the basic assumptions we all make about life -- that will allow a revelation to begin to unfold in your life, as well as in the lives of those around you, and ultimately, perhaps, in the whole human family, and through it, in the great family of all animate beings.

This book is about joining wholeheartedly in the play of this cosmos, which bursts forth in a spectacular array of life on this planet. Here, the bare mineral desert of the galaxy, in its vast, austere beauty, explodes in the wild play of life. This is the universe's garden. This right here is the treasured hothouse. Right here is where the cosmos blooms. 

And among the many forms in which it blooms, here is the creature -- you -- that has enough consciousness to be cognizant of its situation, to know how it evolved to be what it is, and to be aware of its own awareness. And to discover in its very bones that it is part of the whole of creation. The universe is blooming right now as you. 

So it appears that Shukman looks upon reality much as I do. That we live in a highly interconnected cosmos, bound by universal laws of nature. Any feeling of being separate from reality, of being a stranger in a strange land, a soul tossed out of some supernatural paradise who needs to find its real heavenly home -- that is an illusion fostered by our sense of being a distinct self.

Less self, more connection with everything else. We are a wave, or a ripple, tossed up by the ocean of the universe. It is possible to relax back into that ocean through meditation and other approaches that lessen our sense of being separate and distinct from all that surrounds us. Pain and pleasure, hate and love, war and peace -- whatever we experience emerges from the whole called the universe.

Shukman writes:

The proposition of this book -- and of the deep meditation traditions from which it draws -- is that it is possible to see through our sense of ourselves as separate entities, and to break an enchantment we didn't know we had been caught in.

Far from this risking a dissociative tumble into a vortex of nihilism, breaking the spell that separates us from the universe can be the single most healing, positively life-transforming event that can happen to us, with massive beneficial impacts on our priorities, orienting us away from self-protection and self-promotion and toward concern for the well-being of others, arising from a deep sense of connection. 

And the reason awakening can accomplish all this is that it opens up a boundless love -- the "original love" of this book's title.

Today I got this email message from Shukman about meditation. I like his style.

They say the only bad session is the one you didn’t do. A good reminder to try and keep a consistent practice.

But there is a deeper truth here. We often think that a sit where we had a calm mind we did ‘right’, and a sit where we got distracted by thoughts we did ‘wrong’.

But there is no performance here. There really  is no good or bad meditation session. There is simply our experience in the moment – each moment has its own intrinsic value just as it is. And the key thing is being still and quiet, knowing there is nothing to live up to, no special condition we have to find. 

In the next session on The Way we explore arriving in the present moment, to observe our experience just as it is. No expectations, no preconceived notions of good and bad – just you being you. If you'd like to experience this, click the button below from your mobile phone to start your next session.

Why general relativity leads me to prefer Zen'ish meditation

Ever eager to cram together two seemingly highly separate subjects into a profound (or pseudo-profound) blog post, here's my take on relativity theory and Zen.

I got to pondering the connection after two events in my life today tilted me in that direction. 

Event #1 occurred when I read an article in the August 6, 2022 issue of New Scientist that I'd dug out of the bottom of a forgotten pile of unread magazines. In it Chandra Prescod-Weinstein, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire, described why general relativity is known as a background independent theory.

In Einstein's special relativity, which came before general relativity, she says that while now space and time were no longer separate, but merged into space-time, "This theory did share something with the Newtonian perspective: while space and time were no longer absolute, they remained a stage on which events unfolded."

Prescod-Weinstein then says that to understand what this means, it's like a ruler that never changes shape. This is because rulers, like other objects in everyday life, are background dependent -- the background being our familiar notion of time and space as the backdrop against which events unfold.

The situation is different in general relativity, which includes gravity in Einstein's more comprehensive theory. She quotes theoretical physicist John Wheeler as capturing the essence of general relativity with "Space-time tells matter how to move; matter tells space-time how to...curve."

This means that general relativity is a background independent theory, for there is no background against which the curvature of space-time occurs. The way I understand it, general relativity is the background of our universe. She writes:

Now imagine if your ruler stretched out when you put it near a more massive object. In other words, how you measure distance depends on where you measure and whether you are near an object that has mass. Your ruler, the metric, now depends on its location in space-time and what is inside of space-time.

This was the radical revision in our understanding of space-time necessitated by the merger of special relativity with gravity, which we call general relativity (or "GR" as physicists call it).

...To make this more concrete, let's return to the stage. It is now very weird! It is no longer fixed and unchanging in the background. The very shape of the stage itself depends on whether an actor is on it, where they are on the stage, and what they are doing -- for example, if they are rotating, walking across the stage or simply standing still.

Their presence shapes the stage and, of course, the shape of the stage will affect how someone or something can move across it. Events now happen to space-time too, not just inside of it. This is the meaning of background independence.

The notions of background dependence and background independence got me to wondering where philosophical, religious, mystical, and metaphysical discussions such as what we engage in on this blog fit in. 

Using, or some would say, misusing, the metaphor of general relativity, it seems to me that one reason why discussions of that sort never end up with any firm conclusions agreeable to everybody is that when human thought is divorced from a grounding in the physical world, there's no unchanging background against which the reality of those thoughts can be assessed.

Meaning, it's as if (as in the case of general relativity) the "ruler" used to measure a thought was changed  by that very thought. For example, someone's belief that God exists typically leads them to view arguments for God's existence more favorably than, say, an atheist's view that God doesn't exist.

After thirty-five years of embracing supernatural notions about God and higher regions of reality, I've become more and more attracted to meditation approaches that are grounded in actual here-and-now reality rather than hypothesized there-and-then reality. 

Which brings me to event #2, my cancellation of the 14-day free trial of Loch Kelly's Glimpses app that I'd downloaded to my iPhone and mentioned in my previous post. After listening to more of what the Glismpses app offers in Kelly's approach to meditation, it struck me as too other-worldly for my taste.

Instead, after reading the third message from Oshan Jarrow's five-day course on deepening one's meditation practice, More to Meditation, I decided to try out an app mentioned in that message, a Zen meditation series called The Way.

It looks enticing. I get twelve free guided meditations before I have to fork out some money for the full deal, which entails about a year's worth of training from Henry Shukman, the Zen teacher who came up with the idea for The Way with help from some talented friends and colleagues. 

Check out descriptions of The Way on Reddit, TechCrunch, and Medium. Today I got one day closer to my upcoming Zen enlightenment. And I won't have to be hit on the head with a stick or sit for hours on an uncomfortable cushion. All I need is my iPhone and a VISA card.

Great Vox article: How meditation deconstructs your mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's an example.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some thoughts about what oneness is, and isn't

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A couple of paragraphs gives the gist of the article.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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