Church of the Churchless

Alan Watts talks about Man and Nature

Here's another installment in my sharing of notes I'm taking as I listen to audio recordings of Alan Watts that Sam Harris has put on his Waking Up app. 

This talk is titled "Man and Nature." It presents the traditional Chinese view as being most in line with modern science, a view I agree with. There's a reason the classic book was called The Tao of Physics, rather than, say the Jesus of Physics or the Brahman of Physics. 

Chinese philosophy is thoroughly naturalistic, leaving aside offshoots that are religious/supernatural. This helps explain why I'm enjoying the talks by Watts so much, since I find Taoism (or Daoism) to be my favorite spiritual approach, along with non-religious Buddhism, especially Zen.

Enjoy.

Man and Nature

Experience leads us to feel that we're isolated centers of will and action placed in a world that is not us. Science tells us something different. An ecologist would say that what you do is what the whole universe is doing here and now, like a wave being the result of the ocean.

The real you isn't a puppet that gets pushed around. We've been hoodwinked into believing that you only exist in your own skin. Our real body is that, plus the whole external environment.

Don't view things that way, and we despoil the environment. We try to vanquish the world. We need a new consciousness that the real self is more than the conscious ego.

This unknown self is more Us than I, connected to everything that is. Knowing that, you see that you never die, instead appearing in various forms. 

What is nature? Not something artificial. There's an idea that nature is outside us. There is human nature, but you can't trust it.

(1) The Western theory is that nature is a machine, an artifact. It is made by God, like a table made out of wood. A construct, and someone knows how it was put together -- the architect, God. Later, the view changed to no God, but nature was still seen as a mechanism. Most of us look at our bodies as a chauffeur looks at a car.

(2) The East Indian theory is that nature is a drama. Maya/illusion, art, play. In Hinduism ultimate reality is an eternal boundless self. The universe doesn't tell you that self is vibrations of the universe. Brahman plays hide and seek eternally. Self pretends it is lost. Kali Yuga is an age of darkness we're supposedly living in now.

(3) The Chinese theory is that nature is of itself, so, marked by spontaneity. Automatic, but not machinery -- rather, biology. The heart beats by itself. Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, grass grows by itself. Tao is the course of nature. Words can't describe it. 

There's a great difference between Tao as nature with no boss, and the Judeo-Christian view of God as Lord of Nature. With original sin, you can't trust human nature. The Chinese would say, if you can't trust yourself, you can't trust anything. Can you mistrust yourself if you don't trust yourself?

If you can't trust yourself, you're totally mixed up. You have no leg to stand on. In this respect Taoist and Confucian philosophy are in agreement.

Confucius taught that the highest virtue is human-heartedness. Virtue doesn't mean morality. Above all, trust human nature in full realization that it is both good and bad. A "good" war is based on human greed for treasure, women, whatever. A "bad" war is based on ideologies. 

If you're going to do something evil, do it for a plain simple selfish motive. Don't do it in the name of God. Because if you do, it turns you into a monster who is no longer human, but self-righteous. 

Humans are complex. We don't know ourselves at all, really. You're much more than your conscious thoughts. 

Western mechanical theory. Indian drama theory. Chinese organic theory. Nature, including human nature, is a system of organic anarchy. So the Chinese come closest to getting it right. 

When you look at clouds, you know at once they aren't a mess. Patterns of foam on water never make an artistic mistake. We humans are all wiggly. Is there something wrong with how the stars are arranged? Should they be organized in a regular pattern? Do you praise peaks in a mountain range for being high, or the valleys for being low?

When people visit a place called Inspiration Point, they say, ah, just like a picture. Someone goes to see Picasso and says, your paintings don't look like anything. Picasso asks, do you have a photo of your girlfriend? He takes one out of his wallet. Picasso says, is she really so small as that?

Natural order is like order in trees and mountains. They are orderly, but we can't put our finger on the order. Order of nature is thus in a way indefinable. Nature is a self-ordering principle that doesn't know how it does it.

Government always is a mess. Government always is opposed to people. Taoists say the state should be as unobtrusive as possible. Simply help the people and don't claim any merit for yourself.

So here is a conception of nature as something we must trust. But nature isn't completely trustworthy. Sometimes it lets you down with a wallop. 

It's a great thing if you can learn what the Chinese call purposelessness. Like waves washing against the shore with no meaning. Haven't you gone on a walk with no purpose in mind? All music is purposeless. Same with dancing. Do you dance to arrive at a particular spot on the floor?

Same with us. There's no "God's purpose." 

Here's the choice. Are you going to trust it, or not? That "it" is you and nature and everything around you. Now, there will be mistakes. But if you don't trust it at all, you're going to strangle yourself. You'll surround yourself with laws and rules and police and guards. 

Who will look after the guards? No go. To live, I must entrust myself to the totally unknown. I must trust nature that doesn't have a boss.

Alan Watts speaks about the Myth of Myself

Here's another installment in my sharing of notes I'm taking as I listen to audio recordings of Alan Watts that Sam Harris has put on his Waking Up app. 

This talk focuses on the fascinating subject of who the "I" is. Most of us believe that this refers to someone inside our head that we consider to be Me. But Watts disagrees, viewing us as basically being the same as the cosmos. 

In a bit of synchronicity, a few minutes ago I checked my email and found a message from a local spiritual teacher, Jessica Amos. Echoing Watts, she wrote in part:

In his book Going Home, Thich Nhat Hanh talks about the concept of "This is, because that is," using the visualization of ocean waves...

Imagine you are a wave on the ocean, and surrounding you are many, many other waves. If you (the wave) look deeply within yourself, you will realize being there depends on the presence of all the other waves. Your coming up and going down, being big or small, depend entirely on how the other waves are. 
 

"Looking into yourself, you touch the whole, you touch everything -- you are conditioned by what is there around you."

Here's my notes of Watts' talk. Enjoy.

Myth of Myself

"I" is a profound mystery. You can't touch your finger with your finger. Or "I" with "I." Most believe we are a skin-encapsulated ego. We regard our self/ego as being inside our head.

Not so in other cultures. Japanese/Chinese would point to their heart or solar plexus as the seat of self. But we locate our self between the ears and behind the eyes. We have an idea of ourselves as a little man in the head getting signals from outside and controlling the body voluntarily.

A child asks: "Mommy, who would I have been if I had a different father?" The child gets an idea from their culture that mommy and daddy pop the child into a body. The idea is that we're a soul or spiritual essence imprisoned in a body.

So we speak of confronting reality, of coming into the world, of being an island of consciousness. What is outside of me is not me. This results in estrangement between me and the outside world.

Actually, we don't come into the world. We come out of it. Each of us is a symptom of the state of the universe as a whole. 

There are two great myths, ideas we try to use to make sense of the world.

(1) The world as artifact, like clay made into a pot. Everything has been made. But the Chinese disagree. They see things growing naturally, like a seed turning into a plant. Others, though, believe there's a celestial architect. 

God is a mastermind who knows everything. Unfortunately, this becomes too much for modern man, being watched by a cosmic judge. Everywhere is this eye judging and watching you.

(2) Instead, we get another myth, that of the purely mechanical universe. The idea of the universe being run by a kindly gentleman doesn't make sense. Outside the human mind, there's just a chaotic interaction of blind forces.

Energy is totally stupid. Our intelligence is an accident. The universe doesn't share our feelings. It must be beaten into submission. These ideas also don't make any sense.

You can't get an intelligent organism living in an unintelligent environment. An apple tree apples. Our Earth peoples. We grow out of this world just as apples grow out of an apple tree. A tiny seed has the potentiality of an giant oak within it. 

The usual notion of us being isolated egos in a bag of skin is a hallucination. When you try to describe the behavior of an organism, you must also describe the environment. Walking requires a description of the floor.

You couldn't see me without the background. In order to see me you must see not just what's within the boundary of my skin but what's outside too.

The only thing to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets is this: For every inside there's an outside, and for every outside there's an inside. Different, but they go together. What is hidden is implicit. What is obvious is explicit. 

Your behavior can't be separated from the world around you. Each of us is a waving of the entire cosmos. But we feel that we're a stranger in this world. This depends on a false notion of ourself. 

We have two kinds of consciousness. Spotlight is conscious attention, or concentration. Floodlight is what lets you drive a car while you're talking to a friend. But our culture says that conscious attention is me.

We ignore floodlight consciousness, which is always operating. So we have a sensation of ourselves as just the spotlight, leaving us unaware of most of our being. Our real deep self is the whole of being. 

Being is infinite variety. You are what the whole thing is doing. Each one of us is the world playing this way for a while. Yet we fear death. We tell our children, you've got to be educated and whipped until you're really human.

We get the ghastly Christian ego who feels he's homeless, an orphan. We have a sensation of being a stranger on the earth. 

We speak of confronting reality, of facing facts, such as we're an island of consciousness in an alien world. We feel estranged from the external world.

We need to realize that the real self is not just the conscious ego. We don't know how we know. We're unaware how we grow our hair or digest our food. Our unknown self is inseparably connected with all there is.

You never die. What you are just appears in different forms. If you want to know how the inside of your head feels, open your eyes and look. That's how the inside of your head feels.

Courageous criticism of Gurinder Singh Dhillon

Today "Natasha" left three comments on a recent blog post, "RSSB guru standards have sunk a lot since Charan Singh's time." RSSB stands for Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an organization currently led by Gurinder Singh Dhillon, often abbreviated as GSD.

I admire people like Natasha who speak truth to power. Here's what was said in the three comments. It takes courage to stand up against people like Dhillon, especially in a country like India where religious zealots often treat critics harshly. RS is a shorter way of referring to Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

I have RS friends in India that say the lower caste members of RS say that GSD only meets with rich people. He only appoints rich people from higher castes to positions of authority. This is common knowledge of the lower caste members of RS who do seva at the Dera. Their kids get denied admission to the Dera school but no one will admit to that. And they don’t get the same level of care that higher caste RS sevadars or westerners get. They say the only reason the officials protect GSD from legal troubles is in order to get the votes from his followers. This is common knowledge in the Punjab. Westerners are so naive with what they believe about the guru. The caste system is alive and well at the Dera.

And many of them believe his wife was murdered to keep him and his sons from going to prison. In the Punjab this is very common behavior from powerful people. They have also little respect for women.

Westerners can’t speak to the kind of person GSD is because they don’t know the Punjabi culture. They don’t know how he behaves in Punjab and with officials. They don’t spend anytime with him and don’t know him on a personal basis. They only know what they are told by high caste members of RS. If Americans lived among the poor people in Punjab they would understand what he is really like and they would know what people think of him here. He just another powerful guru who says what people want to hear but does only what is in benefit for him. This is very common with gurus. I don’t understand how westerners can serve someone they don’t know. And they don’t know him at all.

Alan Watts on finding the balance between gooey and prickly worldviews

Here's another compilation of notes I'm taking from audio recordings of Alan Watts that Sam Harris has shared on his Waking Up app. This talk is called Seeing Through the Net. It's 47 minutes long, but you can get the gist of what Watts said by reading my summary in a much shorter time.

"Who guards the gods?"

In modern times many have the goal of rational control of everything inside and outside us. But things have gotten so complex, nobody knows what to do. If you try to run a hospital, or a business, there's so much red tape.

You don't understand the basic assumptions of your own culture if that's the only culture you know. What do you mean by the good life, rationality, and so on? So find complex cultures different from your own, such as Chinese or Indian.

Triangulation often is better than a single line of sight. What are you going to do if you're a god with technological powers? Most people don't know what they want. 

What if you could control your dream and experience 75 years in one night? Are you wise enough to play at being God?

The Western model of the universe is political, engineering. No Chinese child would ask, "How was I made?" However, Western thought has a creator. The world is a construct. We look at things as bits of information.

But the physical universe is wiggles. Clouds, mountains -- no sharp edges. Some fishermen held up a net and looked at things through it. Likewise, we break up the world into measurable units. We come to think that this is the way the world really is. Discrete, made up of points.

Prickly people want precision. Gooey people say, you don't understand. Actually, the universe is both. Look close, prickly. Broader view, gooey. 

The capacity to look via scanning is like a spotlight. A floodlight has less intensity, but you see more all at once. A spotlight notices those things for which we have notation. A thing is a unit of thought. To talk about the universe you have to reduce it to things

As one understands a machine, we have reduced the cosmos to bits. This is very fruitful in being able to control the world via technology. 

We reduce the infinite wiggleness of the world to grasp it in thought. In medicine, you get a specialist who looks at a patient as a gall bladder. But there are fundamental differences between a mechanism and an organism. 

Trying to control the world only through scanning, bit by bit, things will look overly complex. We face an information explosion. Even computers won't help much.

What if we went from from spotlight to floodlight? What if we could grasp a situation instantly, intuitively? With pattern recognition, humans can recognize an object instantly. Humans have no problem with this, while computers do.

Brain: you yourself are this thing you can't figure out. You are the most complex thing that has been encountered in the cosmos. What you want is surprise. When you've figured everything out, you'll be bored.

Ideally, a person trusts his own brain. He makes his best discoveries without thinking.

But others only will believe you if you explain in a bit by bit fashion. This takes time. Most decisions in life can't wait. I'm not against technology. But new respect for organic organization is needed. We've got to let back some goo in the system, not just prickle.

The brain can solve problems without us knowing how. 

Practical issue: if technology relies exclusively on linear thinking, it will destroy its environment, because everything becomes too complex.

Are we going to foul things up by insisting on using linear input/analysis, without trust in multiple inputs that we can't pin down because it is you? In Chinese culture, man's essential nature is good, unlike the Christian notion of sin.

Native Americans have a saying, "Paleface doesn't know he is hungry until he looks at his watch." We've confused the menu with the dinner, and we're starving. Symbols are not reality.

How to sound like Alan Watts in two easy steps

As noted in a couple of recent posts (here and here), I've been enjoying listening to audio recordings of Alan Watts' talks that Sam Harris has shared on his Waking Up app.

I'm pretty sure I've read all of Watts' books, some of them several times, notably The Wisdom of Insecurity, which I absolutely love.

But the audio recordings have given me a fresh appreciation for how Watts viewed the world, or more broadly, reality. His spontaneous speech -- he spoke without notes -- offers a window into his mind that is clearer in some respects than his books provide.

So here's how you, or me, or anybody, can sound like Alan Watts in two easy steps.

(1) Look for complementary opposites, not just a favored perspective. Watts continually points out that up doesn't exist without down; black without white; life without death; truth without falsehood; figure without background; love without hate; and so on.

In this regard, as in many other regards, Watts is a thorough-going Daoist.

The yin-yang symbol encapsulates how opposites relate to each other. Within yin there's a bit of yang; within yang there's a bit of yin. Each can transform into the other, showing that there's no such thing as a stand-alone concept, even if we'd prefer that this were the case -- as in life somehow existing without death.

Everything is related to another thing that may appear to be distinct from the first thing, but which upon closer inspection is inseparable from it. There's no way we could see a white cloud if there wasn't blue sky providing a background. So clouds and sky really are one thing, not two.

(2) Look for organic naturalness, not controlled transcendence. Watts' speaking style illustrated this. He doesn't have an outline that he follows, a scripted speech. Instead, you can sense his mind darting this way, then that way, and back again, sort of like a jazz band riffing on a musical theme rather than a symphony playing a composer's sheet music.

Here too his viewpoint is Chinese/Daoist rather than Western/Abrahamic or Indian/Hindu. He doesn't consider that we humans are spiritual beings inhabiting a material world. Instead, we are natural beings inhabiting the natural world. There's no difference us between us and nature. Our job isn't to control nature, but to live in harmony with our fellow natural beings and entities.

A creator God has no place in his worldview. Nor does the notion that we are sinners, fallen souls, strangers in a strange land. What keeps us dissatisfied is the false idea that satisfaction lies somewhere other than the here-and-now we find ourselves in.

RSSB guru standards have sunk a lot since Charan Singh's time

Writing recently about how the current guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), Gurinder Singh Dhillon, threatened people whose village is involved in a property dispute with RSSB, got me to thinking about how different things are guru-wise compared to the time Dhillon's predecessor, Charan Singh, headed up the organization.

I was initiated by Charan Singh in 1971. He died in 1990. So for nineteen years I was exposed to how Charan Singh handled being guru.

This included two weeks in 1977 I spent at the Dera, RSSB headquarters in India, when I got to hear him speak and answer questions in English at evening meetings along with having two brief personal interviews with Charan Singh.

Plus, I read all of his books numerous times, listened to cassette tape recordings of him speaking and answering questions, and repeatedly watched several RSSB videos made during the time Charan Singh was guru. 

There was never any doubt in my mind that Charan Singh was a deeply warm, friendly, honest, humble, sincere, compassionate person. Let's leave aside the question of whether he was God in Human Form, as the RSSB teachings say.

Charan Singh was an exemplary person. He fulfilled his duties as RSSB guru with grace. The only "scandalous" talk I ever heard about him was that he had disciples bypass India customs through some scheme involving watches, if I recall correctly.

The fact that I can't remember this very well shows that it wasn't a big deal. 

Compared to what Gurinder Singh Dhillon has been accused of, it's absolutely nothing. I have no problem recalling most of the scandals the current RSSB guru has been enmeshed in, though I may have omitted some in this 2020 post, "RSSB guru's life should be closely examined."

Here's an excerpt from that post, which nicely sums up why I think it makes sense to pay close attention to how Dhillon has been behaving. In short, not very well, especially compared to previous RSSB gurus.

Dhillon is a public figure. He is the leader of a religious organization with millions of followers. He is shown in You Tube videos that are viewed by many.

And Dhillon also has been the subject of many stories in the Indian financial press regarding the involvement of the guru, his family, and close associates in a financial scandal where allegedly hundreds of millions of dollars were illegally siphoned off from companies once controlled by the Singh brothers, who are relatives of the guru, into shell companies and unsecured loans to the Dhillon family.

Here's a sampling of blog posts I've written about the questionable activities of the RSSB guru.

Malvinder's criminal complaint casts light on RSSB guru's role in financial fraud
Devastating criticism of Gurinder Singh Dhillon by a RSSB insider
Delhi Police financial fraud charges point to RSSB guru's involvement
Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the RSSB guru, accused of making death threats
Sheetal Talwar talks about death threat made from RSSB satsang office
Sheena's "Memoirs of a Seeker" throws light on Gurinder Singh Dhillon
Bloomberg story shows Gurinder Singh Dhillon's shady business dealings
RSSB guru appears to have lied about his financial problems

It is easy for a guru to appear all spiritual, loving, and trustworthy when he or she is sitting on a stage, surrounded by fawning followers, with nobody asking tough questions about the guru's personal life outside of his religious duties. 

But none of us is only who we are at our best public moments. There's much more to us that only comes to light in private moments. Knowing the full picture isn't important when it comes to most people we know.

For example, I don't need to know the private life of my doctor, hair cutter, plumber, or electrician, because this isn't relevant to my relationship with them. However, in the case of a guru who is considered to be God in Human Form by his devotees, a trusted spiritual guide with upstanding morals, it definitely is highly relevant how the guru behaves in his private life.

I just spent an enjoyable four days, Monday through Thursday, watching every prime time minute of the Democratic National Convention. It didn't feature just the public side of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It also showed lots of details about their personal and private life.

That's the only way to understand who a politician really is. And it's also the only way to understand who a guru really is. You can't claim to be a "perfect" guru if in your personal life you're doing some decidedly imperfect things.

So if you're a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, ignore the admonition to not be interested in the guru's personal life. Sure, usually a person's private life should be off-limits to public scrutiny. But not when a person occupies an important public role, like wanting to be President or Vice-President of the United States.

In that case, as in the case of a guru who supposedly is a highly elevated spiritual being capable of guiding people back to God. it makes sense to get to know the entire person, not just their public persona.

Description of Gurinder Singh Dhillon "secret" video

I've gotten a description of the video shared in a recent blog post where Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) in India, is talking in Punjabi. 

Apparently Dhillon is threatening those who live in Waraich, a village that is next to the boundary wall of the RSSB headquarters in the Punjab known as the Dera. Reportedly Dhillon was instrumental in acquiring the land of Waraich and the villagers filed a petition in the Punjab high court that made Dhillon angry.

The guru visited the village gurdwara (Sikh temple) where a local person made this video. Even though Dhillon and previous RSSB gurus used to be against India's caste system, in the video Dhillon says "mei ve jatt da put haa mera pind bhindranwale de naal hai," which means "I am son of jatt [upper caste and very aggressive in nature] and my village is next to Bhindranwale's village."

A Britannica article says that Bhindranwale was a "Sikh religious leader and political revolutionary whose violent campaign for autonomy for the Sikh state of Punjab and armed occupation of the Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple) complex in Amritsar led to a violent and deadly confrontation with the Indian military in 1984." The article about him concludes with:

In July 1982 he moved to the Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple) complex in Amritsar. He gathered a considerable following of like-minded Sikhs and stockpiled weapons. In early June 1984 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered Indian troops to attack the complex, and, in the fighting that followed, several of its buildings were heavily damaged. According to the government authorities, hundreds of people were killed in the action, including Bhindranwale. Other reports (notably from Sikhs) put the death toll considerably higher, possibly as many as 3,000. For many Sikhs, he died the death of a martyr.

Assuming this summary is correct, and I have no reason to believe it isn't, it sure seems like Dhillon is acting very unlike an enlightened guru in the video. His mention of Bhindranwale appears to be a threat directed at the villagers, implying that Dhillon can be as tough as Bhindranwale was.

How us old folks view time

Over on my HinesSight blog, tonight I wrote "Time has a different flavor for old folks like me." Give it a read, especially if you're younger than me (likely you are), so you can see what the future holds.

This is how the post starts out.

Remember when you were three? Probably not. I recall what that age was like via my memory of what my young daughter and her friends would say when asked how old they are.

"Three going on four." They were so eager to be older, they'd fudge their age to get the next birthday into the answer.

Believe me, those days are long gone for us old folks. I'm fine with saying "73" when asked my age. What's more annoying is having to scroll down through history when a web site wants me to select the year I was born.

2000's, gone. 1990's, keep going. 1980's, around halfway there. 1970's, graduated from college. 1960's, high school. 1950's, childhood. 1940's, ah, finally reached the promised age-land. Which reminds me that World War II had only been over for a few years when I was born in 1948.

Dude, you're ancient! I'll say to myself.

For sure you'll never hear someone my age say "Seventy-three going on seventy-four." We've already got plenty of reminders that while time marches on for everybody, it feels like it's sprinting after you qualify for Medicare.

"Secret" video of Gurinder Singh Dhillon speaking in Punjabi

Someone sent me this video of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, speaking to some people. I haven't gotten a translation yet. Below is what the person told me. I used a photo of the guru as a thumbnail, since the video's images are so indistinct.

If someone could translate the video into English, that'd be great. I'll then share the translation in an update to this post, if what Dhillon says is interesting. I'm curious what "the thing" is referred to below. A translation can be emailed to me, using the address in the right sidebar.

----------------------------

Hello Brian , I'm sending you one video of so called baba gurinder singh g which was u can say hidden video made by one of lady who were present there when the thing happened , the video is in punjabi language . You need translators who could translate it in very true nature.. Plz translate it and will make it possible to become come in ur blog.

Moving essay about a neuroscientist preparing for death

Here's an essay from The Atlantic, "A Neuroscientist Prepares For Death." I'm a subscriber, so I don't know if non-subscribers can read this amazing essay. Click on the link and see if it works for you. If not, I've copied in what David J. Linden wrote below. He makes some cogent observations about why almost all religions believe in an afterlife.

A Neuroscientist Prepares for Death

About the author: David J. Linden is a neuroscience professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute. His most recent book is Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality.

When a routine echocardiogram revealed a large mass next to my heart, the radiologist thought it might be a hiatal hernia—a portion of my stomach poking up through my diaphragm to press against the sac containing my heart.

“Chug this can of Diet Dr. Pepper and then hop up on the table for another echocardiogram before the soda bubbles in your stomach all pop.”

So I did. However, the resulting images showed that the mass did not contain the telltale signature of bursting bubbles in my stomach that would support a hernia diagnosis. A few weeks later, an MRI scan, which has much better resolution, revealed that the mass was actually contained within the pericardial sac and was quite large—about the volume of that soda can. Even with this large invader pressing on my heart, I had no symptoms and could exercise at full capacity. I felt great.

The doctors told me that the mass was most likely to be a teratoma, a clump of cells that is not typically malignant. Their outlook was sunny. Riffing on the musical South Pacific, my cardiologist said, “We’re gonna pop that orange right out of your chest and send you on your way.”

While I was recovering from surgery, the pathology report came back and the news was bad—it wasn’t a benign teratoma after all, but rather a malignant cancer called synovial sarcoma. Because of its location, embedded in my heart wall, the surgeon could not remove all of the cancer cells. Doing so would have rendered my heart unable to pump blood. The oncologist told me to expect to live an additional six to 18 months.

I was absolutely white-hot angry at the universe. Heart cancer? Who the hell gets heart cancer?! Is this some kind of horrible metaphor? This is what’s going to take me away from my beloved family, my cherished friends and colleagues? I simply couldn’t accept it. I was so mad, I could barely see.

[And now comes the part where I’m weeping while I type.]

Five years ago, I met Dena and we fell for each other hard. This wasn’t mere “chemistry”; it was more akin to particle physics—a revelation of the subatomic properties of love. Dena has uplifted me with her pure and unconditional affection, her kindness, beauty, optimism, and keen intelligence. She is the best wife anyone could want, and she is way better than I deserve. Leaving her behind will be the very hardest part of this whole awful situation.

Until the moment of that diagnosis six months ago, I had been the luckiest man in town. My twins, Jacob and Natalie, have been nothing but a delight for 25 years. I’ve been fortunate to have a long career in academic science with the freedom to pursue my own ideas, which is a gift like no other. My good friends are a constant source of joy and amusement. By any reasonable measure, I’ve had a great life, full of love, creativity, and adventure.

I may be dying, but I’m still a science nerd, and so I think about what preparing for death has taught me about the human mind. The first thing, which is obvious to most people but had to be brought home forcefully for me, is that it is possible, even easy, to occupy two seemingly contradictory mental states at the same time. I’m simultaneously furious at my terminal cancer and deeply grateful for all that life has given me. This runs counter to an old idea in neuroscience that we occupy one mental state at a time: We are either curious or fearful—we either “fight or flee” or “rest and digest” based on some overall modulation of the nervous system. But our human brains are more nuanced than that, and so we can easily inhabit multiple complex, even contradictory, cognitive and emotional states.

This leads me to a second insight: The deep truth of being human is that there is no objective experience. Our brains are not built to measure the absolute value of anything. All that we perceive and feel is colored by expectation, comparison, and circumstance. There is no pure sensation, only inference based on sensation. Thirty minutes fly by in a conversation with a good friend, but seem interminable when waiting in line at the DMV. That fat raise you got at work seems nice until you learn that your co-worker got one twice as large as yours. A caress from your sweetheart during a loving, connected time feels warm and delightful, but the very same touch delivered during the middle of a heated argument feels annoying and presumptuous, bordering on violation.

If someone had told me one year ago, when I was 59, that I had five years left to live, I would have been devastated and felt cheated by fate. Now the prospect of five more years strikes me as an impossible gift. With five more years, I could spend good times with all of my people, get some important work done, and still be able to travel and savor life’s sweetness. The point is that, in our minds, there is no such thing as objective value, even for something as fundamental as five years of life.

The final insight of my situation is more subtle, but it’s also the most important. Although I can prepare for death in all sorts of practical ways—getting my financial affairs in order, updating my will, writing reference letters to support the trainees in my lab after I’m gone—I cannot imagine the totality of my death, or the world without me in it, in any deep or meaningful way. My mind skitters across the surface of my impending death without truly engaging. I don’t think this is a personal failing. Rather, it’s a simple result of having a human brain.

The field of neuroscience has changed significantly in the 43 years since I joined it. I was taught that the brain is essentially reactive: Stimuli impinge on the sense organs (eyes, ears, skin, etc.), these signals are conveyed to the brain, a bit of computation happens, some neural decisions are made, and then impulses are sent along nerves to muscles, which contract or relax to produce behavior in the form of movement or speech. Now we know that rather than merely reacting to the external world, the brain spends much of its time and energy actively making predictions about the future—mostly the next few moments. Will that baseball flying through the air hit my head? Am I likely to become hungry soon? Is that approaching stranger a friend or a foe? These predictions are deeply rooted, automatic, and subconscious. They can’t be turned off through mere force of will.

And because our brains are organized to predict the near future, it presupposes that there will, in fact, be a near future. In this way, our brains are hardwired to prevent us from imagining the totality of death.

If I am allowed to speculate—and I hold that a dying person should be given such dispensation—I would contend that this basic cognitive limitation is not reserved for those of us who are preparing for imminent death, but rather is a widespread glitch that has profound implications for the cross-cultural practice of religious thought. Nearly every religion has the concept of an afterlife (or its cognitive cousin, reincarnation). Why are afterlife/reincarnation stories found all over the world? For the same reason we can’t truly imagine our own deaths: because our brains are built on the faulty premise that there will always be that next moment to predict. We cannot help but imagine that our own consciousness endures.

While not every faith has explicit afterlife/reincarnation stories (Judaism is a notable exception), most of the world’s major religions do, including Islam, Sikhism, Christianity, Daoism, Hinduism, and arguably, even Buddhism. Indeed, much religious thought takes the form of a bargain: Follow these rules in life, and you will be rewarded in the afterlife or with a favorable form of reincarnation or by melding with the divine. What would the world’s religions be like if our brains were not organized to imagine that consciousness endures? And how would this have changed our human cultures, which have been so strongly molded by religions and the conflicts between them?

While I ponder these questions, I am also mulling my own situation. I am not a person of faith, but as I prepare for death, I have a renewed respect for the persistent and broad appeal of afterlife/reincarnation stories and their ultimately neurobiological roots. I’m not sure whether, in the end, faith in afterlife/reincarnation stories is a feature or a bug of human cognition, but if it’s a bug, it’s one for which I have sympathy. After all, how wonderfully strange would it be to return as a manatee or a tapeworm? And what a special delight it would be to see Dena and my children again after I’m gone.

David J. Linden is a neuroscience professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute. His most recent book is Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality.