Church of the Churchless

Violent crimes have much to teach us about fast and slow thinking

In 2011 I bought, read, and enjoyed Daniel Kahneman's book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow." In a blog post I wrote about the book, I included some passages from Kahneman about System 1 (fast) and System 2 (slow) modes of thinking.

Some years ago, the psychologist Timothy Wilson wrote a book with the evocative title Strangers to Ourselves. You have now been introduced to that stranger in you, which may be in control of much of what you do, although you rarely have a glimpse of it.

System 1 [the fast brain] provides the impressions that often turn into your beliefs, and is the source of the impulses that often become your choices and your actions. It offers a tacit interpretation of what happens to you and around you, linking the present with the recent past and with expectations about the near future.

It contains the model of the world that instantly evaluates events as normal or surprising. It is the source of your rapid and often precise intuitive judgments. And it does most of this without your conscious awareness of its activities.

System 1 is also, as we will see in the following chapters, the origin of many of the systematic errors in your intuitions.

...Because System 1 operates automatically and cannot be turned off at will, errors of intuitive thought are often difficult to prevent. Biases cannot always be avoided, because System 2 may have no clue to the error. Even when cues to likely errors are available, errors can be prevented only by the enhanced monitoring and effortful activity of System 2.

As a way to live your life, however, continuous vigilance is not necessarily good, and it is certainly impractical. Constantly questioning our own thinking would be impossibly tedious, and System 2 is much too slow and inefficient to serve as a substitute for System 1 in making routine decisions.

The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high. The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own.

Fast and slow thinking is a core concept in a fascinating article by Malcolm Gladwell in the June 9, 2025 issue of The New Yorker, "The Heat of the Moment: To stop violent crime, we need to grasp what really drives it." Here's a PDF file. (The online version has a different title from the print edition.)
Download What We Get Wrong About Violent Crime | The New Yorker

The article begins with a tale of a killing of a man, Jeremy Brown, who punched a woman in the face in a fast-food restaurant, Maxwell Street Express, on the South Side of Chicago because he was incensed that she was trying to make a time-consuming special order when there were many customers in line.

That impulsive System 1 action would have been bad enough, but it snowballed when the woman, Carlishia Hood, texted her son after the argument started, asking him to come inside. The son got angry when he saw his mother being repeatedly hit. He pulled out a gun and shot Brown in the back. After he ran outside, the son kept firing and killed him.

Gladwell's article is a thoughtful review of a book by Jens Ludwig, "Unforgiving Places." I was surprised that no one apparently had thought of this before, given how much attention is paid to violence in the United States (a decidedly violent country), but it makes a lot of sense.

Ludwig is the director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, and he uses as a heuristic the psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s version of the distinction between System 1 and System 2 thinking. According to Kahneman, these are the two cognitive modes that all human beings toggle between. The first is fast, automatic, and intuitive. The second is slow, effortful, and analytical. Ludwig’s innovation is to apply the dichotomy to criminal acts.

A System 2 crime might be a carefully planned robbery, in which the assailant stalks and assesses his victims before attacking them. This is what criminologists call instrumental violence: acts, Ludwig writes, “committed in order to achieve some tangible or ‘instrumental’ goal (getting someone’s cash or phone or watch or drug turf), where violence is a means to some other, larger end.” A System 1 crime, by contrast, is an act of what Ludwig calls “expressive violence”—aimed not at gaining something tangible but at hurting someone, often in a sudden burst of frustration or anger.

The central argument of “Unforgiving Places” is that Americans, in their attempts to curb crime, have made a fundamental conceptual error. We’ve assumed that the problem is instrumental violence—and have fashioned our criminal-justice system around that assumption. But the real problem is expressive violence. The ongoing bloodshed in America’s streets is just Maxwell Street Express, over and over again.

Recall that Kahneman said in the passage above that System 1 (fast) thinking works fine for most routine decisions. Opening the refrigerator, I don't need to get all analytic about which leftover to have for dinner. My intuition can tell me. But if my doctor says that I really need to lose some weight to reduce the risk of a serious medical condition, repeatedly basing my eating choices on intuition is likely to get me into trouble.

Knowing this, I can choose to do the "slow, effortful, and analytical" System 2 thing to override my snap preference for high calorie meals. This is pretty much what I do to maintain my current weight at just about what I weighed in high school. (I'm proud of this, which is why I'm mentioning it.)

Frequently, like just about every night, I have an urge to have a dessert that goes beyond the two low sugar cookies that only have 100 calories total. But when I get on the scale every morning, the System 2 pleasure I feel at keeping my weight down compensates for the System 1 disappointment of me saying "no" when my mind says, "Hey, Brian, you really should be eating a slice of frosted cake rather than those pathetic low-carb, high fiber cookies."

Here's how Gladwell's article ends. It contains some good advice for all of us.

He [Ludwig] wants us, instead, to take System 1 behavior seriously. First, stop talking about criminals as if they occupy some distinct moral category. Neither Jeremy Brown nor Hood’s son was evil. They were caught in an unforgiving moment. Second, stop locking up so many people for long prison terms. The best way to keep arguments among teen-agers from turning violent is for adults to step in and tell them to cool down—and mass incarceration drains adults from troubled neighborhoods.

Third, spend more time thinking about what makes one neighborhood safe and another unsafe. Ludwig cites a randomized trial in New York City’s public-housing projects, which found that developments given upgraded outdoor lighting experienced a thirty-five-per-cent reduction in serious crimes compared with those left as is. A well-lit space makes it easier for bystanders to see a confrontation unfold—and makes those involved a little more self-conscious.

But the biggest opportunity, Ludwig argues, lies in behavioral modification. He writes about a program in Chicago called BAM—Becoming a Man—which teaches teen-agers how to navigate potentially volatile encounters. In a large randomized trial, Ludwig compared students on Chicago’s West Side and South Side who had participated in BAM with those who hadn’t, and found that participation reduced arrests for violent crime by fifty per cent.

He describes one of the program’s exercises, in which students are paired off. One is given a ball; the other is told he has thirty seconds to take it.

Almost all of them rely on force to try to complete the assignment; they try to pry the other person’s hand open, or wrestle or even pummel the other person. During the debrief that follows, a BAM counselor asks why no one asked for the ball. Most youths respond by saying their partner would have thought they were a punk (or something worse—you can imagine). The counselor then asks the partner what he would have done if asked. The usual answer: “I would have given it, it’s just a stupid ball.”

Exactly. It’s almost always a stupid ball. Or someone asking to hold the pickle. No one walked into Maxwell Street Express that night expecting to die, or to kill. But that’s the nature of expressive violence: no plan, no purpose—just a match struck in passing. As Ludwig reminds us, we have been trying to stop violent offenders without understanding what goes on in the mind of the violent offender.

Two 14-year old girls raped by Radha Soami Satsang Beas worker

For those who don't believe that sexual assault doesn't occur in Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the India-based religious organization headquartered in India that I belonged to for 35 years, here's a story from October 2024 about the rape of two girls by a RSSB sevadar, or volunteer worker. There's a good chance this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to sexual assault in the organization. 

A shocking case of rape of two minor girls has come to light from Radha Soami Satsang Beas in Bulandshahr, Uttar Pradesh.

The victims, who used to play in the premises of ashram located in Syana Kotwali area, were raped by the 65-year-old sevadaar. The incident came to light when a minor girl became four months pregnant.

The police have arrested the accused sevadaar.

Two 14-year-old girls, of a village in Syana police station area of Bulandshahr district, used to go to play in the premises of Radha Soami Satsang Beas every day. A sevadaar used to feed these girls intoxicating sweets in the name of prasad and used to rape them. The sevadaar has been committing the crime for the last eight months.

The matter came to light when a girl started experiencing stomach pain. When the family got the daughter examined by a doctor, it was found that she was four months pregnant. When the family asked the daughter about it, she revealed everything to her family.

The girl also told that her other friend also used to go to the ashram with her. The other girl also told the same thing. Then both the families lodged a complaint of the incident in the police station. The police registered a case and arrested the accused and sent both the girls to the district hospital for medical examination. The police are investigating the case.

 

Here's another story about the same incident.

 

Bulandshahr:Two minor girls were allegedly raped by a 75-year-old Radha Swami Satsang Vyas worker in the Syana Kotwali area here, police said on Friday.

The incident came to light after one of the victims became pregnant. Based on the families' complaints, the ashram worker used to rape them by feeding intoxicants in the name of sweet pills for eight months. We have arrested the accused, police said.

Police further said that the victims are from different families in the village and studying in classes six and eight, who used to go to the Satsang Vyas Ashram. "One of them stays right in front of the ashram. Therefore, both would go to play on the ashram premises," police added.

According to Bulandshahr Superintendent of Police Shankar Prasad, "A few days ago, one of the victims started having stomach pain and was rushed to the doctor. After the ultrasound report came, she was found four and a half months pregnant."

"The victim shared the entire incident with her kin mentioning her friend's story as well. Subsequently, both of the families headed to the Kotwali police to file a complain," the SP added.

Kotwali Police Station in-charge Premchand Sharma said that the accused chief servant Mohanlal was arrested. "The accused confessed his heinous act during the interrogation process," Sharma added.

 

Acceptance, says the Mindful Geek, is the key to real growth in meditation

I've meditated almost every day since 1969, when I became studying yoga during my college years under the instruction of a crazed Greek man who blended Christianity and Hinduism in a strange way. 

Even so, I still consider myself almost as much of a beginner when it comes to meditation at my age of 76 as I was at the age of 20. (Guess that's why I like the book, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.)

I have no idea what produces real growth in meditation. But other people do. Like the author of The Mindful Geek, Michael W. Taft. I started reading the book last year, writing a post in December called "'The Mindful Geek' is a meditation guide for secular skeptics."

Then I put the book away after getting through about half of it. Today I picked it up again, reading and enjoying the chapter on Acceptance. Taft considers acceptance to be key.

In mindfulness meditation, you try to accept every experience. Even if the experience is unpleasant, negative, or unsettling, you attempt to accept it as it is. That's why the meditation algorithm includes the acceptance step -- it reminds you often to let go of any resistance to whatever you're meditating upon.

Acceptance is the key to real growth in meditation. All of the practices in this book are effective to some degree at improving your life. Different people respond better to some than to others, but they all work well.

If, however, I had to choose just one thing out of this whole book, a single practice to give someone to most improve their life, it would be the practice of acceptance. In my opinion, acceptance has the most power to positively impact your sense of wellbeing. You can practice acceptance as part of meditation and also as you walk around in daily life.

This is a rather trivial example, but it comes easily to mind because I just experienced it -- having watched the Oregon State baseball team lose to Coastal Carolina in the Men's College World Series. Being an Oregon State fan (go Beavers!), I wanted the team to win.

After a disastrous first inning where the Beavers quickly ended up down 3-0 to Coastal Carolina, I held out hope for a win until the final innings. Eventually it dawned on me that for this game at least, Coastal Carolina was the better team, having better pitching, hitting, and fielding (that's basically all that baseball consists of).

With that realization, which could be termed acceptance, I was able to watch the rest of the game in a much more relaxed fashion. I had stopped feeling that something was wrong with Coastal Carolina leading Oregon State 6-1, that somehow this was an undeserved punishment of the Beavers by the Baseball Gods.

I still wanted Oregon State to win their next game on Tuesday, which would put them into a rematch with Coastal Carolina (they'd have to beat undefeated Coastal Carolina twice to make it into the World Series finals next weekend). But I could accept them losing again to a team that outplayed them today, the final score being 6-2.

Taft shares what he calls a "pseudo-math equation" created by Shinzen Young, a former math professor who uses that sort of equation to describe the principles of meditation.

The equation is simple: P x R = S, or "pain times resistance equals suffering." This means that your level of suffering from pain is dependent upon how much you can let go of resisting it. In other words, relief from pain is all about how much you can accept the pain. Japanese author Haruki Murakami has a famous quote, which sums up the situation nicely: "Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional."

This applies to both physical and mental/emotional pain. I was feeling quite a bit of pain about Oregon State losing to Coastal Carolina until it dawned on me that the Beavers' opponent simply was better than they were today. Once I stopped resisting this fact, my mental pain dropped considerably. Not to zero, because I still am bothered that they didn't win. But considerably.

The final part of the Acceptance chapter deals with emotional acceptance. This passage makes a lot of sense to me.

One of the most common complaints I hear from meditation students is that they had a "bad meditation." Upon inquiry, it turns out that they experienced some negative emotions during sitting, and that's why it was "bad."

Often, they had been looking forward to having a good meditation, and so they were disappointed, angry, upset, ashamed, and/or guilty about the fact that they felt bad during meditation. Really, their "bad" meditation was a good meditation that simply felt unpleasant.

True, meditation is supposed to improve your wellbeing, but that doesn't mean it will always improve your emotions during practice. It also doesn't mean that you will never feel bad. I'll discuss specific ways to deal with emotions in the  coming chapters, but in this context, the important thing is to simply accept them.  

Fighting everything all the time, resisting what's happening, creates a lot of needless stress. You can wear yourself out struggling against the inevitable, and stress is bad for you. At least during your meditation practice, if not at any other time during your day, let go of all the struggling.

Let go of resistance. Relax, release tension, let go of the need to change everything. Say, "Yes" to experience. Breathe easy. Let everything just be the way it is right now, even if that's scary and it hurts. You'll feel better if you do.

Why religious disillusionment can be more painful than political or work disillusionment

Today the Oregon Government Ethics Commission voted to move ahead with the investigation of a complaint against the Mayor of Salem and city councilors that I'd filed last March with the Commission. I wrote about this on my Salem Political Snark blog in "Ethics Commission approves investigation of my complaint against Mayor Hoy."

That made me feel really good, as I'd put quite a bit of time and effort into researching and filing the complaint. I did this because it bothered me that Mayor Hoy appeared to have engaged in prohibited private "serial communications" with members of the City Council that resulted in the forced resignation of the City Manager, Keith Stahley.

But here's the thing.

Though it definitely seems to be the case that Mayor Hoy did something that's prohibited by Oregon's public meeting law, I wasn't all that surprised that this happened. So I wasn't disillusioned by what Hoy did, because I don't have high expectations for ethical behavior from politicians. The same applied during my pre-retirement years: often I was disappointed by how my supervisors or fellow employees behaved at work, but I wasn't disillusioned, since I didn't expect them to be anywhere close to perfect.

No one expects politicians or business leaders to be saints. At least, I'm not aware of anyone who thinks this way. However, when it comes to religious organizations, the situation is different. Sainthood is bestowed in the Catholic Church on deceased members of the church who have demonstrated a supposedly high form of spirituality and kinship with God.

Going further, some Eastern religions -- including one I belonged to for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) -- teach that there are Perfect Living Saints on our planet today who manifest divine qualities, being considered God in Human Form, just as Jesus was. So if someone is a believer in RSSB or the broader Sant Mat ("path of the saints") movement that RSSB is part of, they are prone to looking upon a guru of their faith as a saint, and not a mere human being.

This helps explain why followers of religious organizations in general, and saint-focused organizations like RSSB in particular, are more likely to be severely disillusioned when they observe leaders of their organization behave in ways that are not only unsaintly but unseemly even by everyday standards. The sex abuse of boys by Catholic priests is a clear example of this.

Sex abuse is always a bad thing. However, it becomes an even worse bad thing when the abuse occurs at the hands (or other body parts) of religious leaders who are viewed by followers of their faith as being trusted spiritual guides. That's when a feeling of disillusionment really sets in -- when someone has put their heart and soul into trusting a priest, bishop, minister, guru, or some other religious leader and has experiences that cause that trust to dissolve in a bursting of their "I trust in you" bubble.

This has happened to me. I've seen it happen to other people I know personally. I've also observed it occur in the many messages I've received since I started this blog in 2004 from people who want to share with me their disillusionment with a religious organization or religious leader. This sort of disillusionment can be much more painful than disillusionment with a politician or business leader who acts badly.

It is more painful because the expectations were higher, so a failure to match those expectations by a religious leader involves more of a fall. People are attracted to a religious organization in part because it promises to be a refuge from worldly problems and concerns. Putting one's faith in a higher power, especially a higher power that is immanent in another living human, can feel absolutely wonderful. But when that faith is dashed by observations of behaviors that are decidedly flawed, it hurts. 

Much more so than when a politician or business leader fails to meet our expectations, since few of us look upon those people as modern day saints. That role belongs to religious leaders, which is why it can so disturbing when they let us down.

Why I removed the previous post

UPDATE: Because some of the comments on this post are wildly inaccurate, here's some additional context. I still feel bound by confidentiality to not state explicitly why the person who provided me with information about the Sabnanis asked me to remove the previous post. So I'll simply state some general observations about my experience with other religious "whistleblowers."

After I started this blog in 2004, I've heard from many people disillusioned either with the teachings of their religious organization (usually, but not always, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, because I belonged to the group for 35 years) or with the behavior of people associated with the religious organization. These people would share their story with me via email or a phone call.

Sometimes they'd ask that I share their story on this blog. Sometimes I'd ask them if it would be all right to share their story. In either case, frequently the source of the story would be worried about blowback, negative consequences, if they ever were identified. This might be because their family was still deeply enmeshed in the religious organization and relatives would be upset if they criticized that faith. Or it might be fear of retribution if leaders of the organization or fanatical followers learned their identity.

My point is that people have legitimate fears of going public with stories that put either the teachings of a religious organization or leaders of a religious organization in a bad light. It takes courage to overcome those fears and go public with a story. Based on my extensive experience with this over the years, I've come to admire those who contact me with information that needs to be known. This generally requires anonymity and confidentiality, as the National Whistleblower Center says on their web site. The statement below refers primarily to job-related whistleblowing, but the general principle also applies to religious organizations.

Individuals who come forward with evidence of fraud or wrongdoing at a company or organization may find themselves retaliated against for their disclosures. According to a study from the Bradley University Center for Cybersecurity, nearly two-thirds of the whistleblowers surveyed experienced some form of retaliation, including termination, forced retirement, negative performance evaluation, social ostracism, and blacklisting from other jobs in their field. The best way for a whistleblower to prevent retaliation is to remain anonymous. If your company does not know who you are, it will be harder for them to retaliate.

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Wanted to let readers of this blog know that I removed the previous post about the Sabnanis at the request of a person who provided me with the information that I shared in the post. If I'm able to share why they asked me to do this, I will. If not, it's because I respect the wishes of people who send me sensitive information about their experiences with religious leaders. Often it's difficult for someone to decide whether they want to reveal a disturbing or painful experience. Occasionally they change their mind about going public after telling me their story. 

Got some good and bad news: I'm going to die on December 7, 2039

If you can't stand this heretical, ungodly, religion-bashing blog, I've got some good news for you. The Death Clock app says I'm going to die in December 2039. (I don't expect to be writing blog posts after I die, unless an atheist miracle happens.) 

The bad news is that this is about 14 1/2 years from now. So you're going to have to put up with many more blog posts that you dislike.

The Death Clock app calls their when-you're-going-to-die prediction "Save the Date." Church of the Churchless haters might want to start making plans for a Yay He's Finally Gone party, though I doubt restaurants accept reservations over 14 years in advance.

Yesterday I wrote about my experience with the Death Watch app in a post on my HinesSight blog.

Thanks to a story in the Washington Post, "How many years do I have left? An app gave me helpful insights," today I learned how long I have to live -- based on the answers I gave to 29 questions. The story gave some examples of the questions.

Although the specific date of death is obviously not intended to be accurate — the app’s disclaimer says it’s “for fun only” — it does tie your personal habits to your likelihood of living into old age and tells you what lifestyle changes might buy you more time. Thus Death Clock AI’s motto: “Know your date. Change your fate.”

After responding to 29 questions — including how much of the day I spend sitting, whether I get at least seven hours of sleep a night and whether I get all my recommended cancer screenings — I had my answer. A darkly humorous “Save the Date” card suggested I plan my end-of-life celebration for April 17, 2042, but I also learned the most likely ways I would die: sleep disorders, cardiovascular disease or cancer, in that order. Of course, cancer and heart disease are the two big killers in the United States. But I was surprised by how harmful sleep issues are.

As I said in the post, I decided to cancel my three-day free trial of Death Clock after getting my Save the Date results because the difference in longevity between my current habits and better habits was small, only about six months.

That's what happens when a slim, fit, vegetarian, non-drinker, non-smoker, frequent exerciser who gets regular medical screening and eats healthy with few sweets answers the 29 questions. However, I noted in the post:

The estimate is that 84% of my life is complete. Guess I need to make the most of the remaining 16%, though given the uncertainty of life and death, it could be that actually my life is 99.99% complete and I'll have a sudden heart attack before I finish this blog post. (Got to type faster...)

For most of my adult life I've been afraid of death, which includes talking about my death. So I consider it to be progress that I enjoyed my experience with the Death Clock app -- though I admit that I would have been less positive about it if I'd gotten a prediction that I'd die in two years rather than fourteen years.

Growing old seems to bring with it a natural lessening of fear about death, which I've expressed as a primal fear of non-existence. Obviously all I've ever known is existing. Non-existence is difficult to fathom, since nobody has ever known what it is like to not exist, and nobody ever will know this, because knowing requires existence.

The dream for us old folks, or at least this old folk, is to gradually accumulate enough annoying aches, pains, and other medical problems that ends up with a feeling, "I'm looking forward to the release of death." Then, ideally, death soon follows -- not too soon and not too late.

Unfortunately, this dream often is a fantasy. Many people die quite a while before they are ready to take their last breath, while many other people die quite a while after they've come to feel that life is no longer worth living. The sweet spot of dying at just the right time is, sadly, often not what happens to us.

I enjoyed what the Death Clock predicted for me because as I said yesterday in my post about the app, "Ninety-one seems like a pretty good age for me to die. Pleasingly older than I am now (I'm 76) yet not excessively old, which 100 seems to be."

I also appreciated the opportunity offered by Death Clock to face my inevitable demise head-on. Like I said, for most of my life I've avoided talking about death because I enjoy life and don't like the prospect of not living. 

Sure, intellectually I understand that death is inevitable. It comes to every person, as well as to every living thing. Emotionally, though, it's difficult to envision everything that we care about -- relatives, friends, nature, the universe -- no longer existing for us, since we lack the consciousness of existence.

It's no wonder that religions promising life after death in some heavenly realm are so popular. The fear of death is a powerful motivation to embrace a faith that promises our last breath marks the beginning of a glorious new life with God.

Or, a not-so-glorious new life here on Earth, for those who believe in reincarnation. Either way, religions  view the date of one's death as marking the opening chapter in a fresh story about life, rather than a page saying The End.

I deeply doubt that optimistic story is true. There's a slight possibility that it is, but until I experience life after death I'm sticking with the Death Clock and its prediction that one day each of us will be no more... almost certainly forever.

How Amit Sood escaped his Asian Indian spiritual traditions

Once in a while I enjoy picking up Mindfulness Redesigned for the Twenty-First Century, by Amit Sood, M.D. to remind myself why I liked the book so much when I first read it in 2019. Here's the blog posts I wrote about Sood's book back then.

Mindfulness Redesigned for the Twenty-First Century -- my new favorite book
Dalai Lama isn't big on single-pointed attention
Don't look within for inner peace. Look without.

This morning I re-read the "Guilty and Back" chapter where Sood describes how the traditions he grew up with in India held him back from coming up with the modern approach to meditation and mindfulness that he espouses in his book. 

Here's his story. I shared it in my first post about the book, but if it was worth re-reading for me, I figure that it will be worth re-reading for anyone else who visits this blog.

Feeling Guilty

Challenging an age-old practice was extremely difficult for me. If you understand my background, it will make sense to you.

Meditation practices and teachers are highly respected in Asian Indian families. Many teachers are revered as spiritual leaders of the society. Their images are placed in each room. In daily prayer, people bow to the images, decorate them with flowers, and light incense sticks in front of them. People see their teachers in dreams to solve personal problems. In families with a faith-based practice, these teachers are considered conduits to God. Annoying or disbelieving them or their instructions could be considered worse than heresy.

I have met several teachers who indeed deserve a high pedestal, but some do not. Nevertheless, if a teacher is caught committing nefarious practices, as has happened numerous times, instead of lowering the pedestal, the unsuspecting students often reframe by saying that the teacher is testing their spiritual resolve by creating this drama.

With this cultural perspective etched within me, my guilt, conflict, and anxiety grew along with the doubts I shared in the previous chapter. I felt vulnerable. Will these doubts bring bad luck, illness, or curse to my family? I thought. The scientist in me conflicted with myths and rituals I had learned as a child. A master of overthinking, I did what I do best with such conflicts. I stopped thinking about it and tabled the idea.

Overcoming guilt

I didn't stay put with the idea for very long. My return journey started when I heard about people with no meditation experience who were perceiving the deepest samadhi states as a result of acute stroke. I read about brain tumors and seizures causing sacred visions and spiritual experiences.

Could these states and visions just be a product of our brain's electrical activity? I asked myself. If that is the case, will it be worthwhile to spend my entire life seeking such experiences?

Some neurological disorders can provide "deeply spiritual"
experiences without much "spiritual effort".

Then I read about swamis who had obtained these experiences but were doing very bad things. I heard stories about self-styled gurus who claimed to be adept at awakening people's kundalini (and many of their followers felt their "energy" and saw the "light" with their help) but were nothing but greedy, immoral charlatans. They were illegally usurping money and property, abusing women and children, and committing other unspeakable crimes.

I saw a few of them getting caught, was amazed at how low they could go in trying to defend themselves, and could clearly see the selfish psychopath beneath the long hair and saffron color. My uninformed faith in some of these traditions began to crack. That worked wonders on my guilt. (I should mention that not all swamis are fake. I have personally met several masters of meditation who I deeply respect, who are humble, selfless, and kind, and are truly living each day to help the world.)

Looking deeper

With my blind faith unblinded, the more I studied, the deeper I looked and the more learners I worked with, the more convinced I became that most mindfulness programs in their current form need editing  before they can optimally help twenty-first-century brains.

In our effort to make mindfulness simpler, despite our good intentions we have misrepresented some of its constructs. 

Further, some of the language and philosophy is 2,500 years old. It simply needs to be refreshed. What is old and practiced for thousands of years doesn't always have to be perfect or even right.

After all they anointed cow dung on umbilical cords that caused tetanus, didn't believe in pasteurization, practiced child labor, and bad-mouthed any woman who stepped outside the house to join the workforce. (Unfortunately all of these are still happening in some parts of the world.)

The result of my deeper search was freedom. While I still revere the timeless wisdom of many scriptures, I have largely escaped my childhood blinders, partly because I feel confident in the new tool we now have to study the truth: science.

Using the scientific method polished with common sense I came up with a few key ideas for how to better align our understanding of mindfulness with twenty-first-century challenges so it can better serve resilience.

Few ideas

Here is what I thought was needed:

-- Integrate twenty-first-century neuroscience to help better understand the human condition. Philosophy alone isn't enough.
-- Offer skills that emphasize uplifting emotions and not just attention training.
-- Have more explicit focus on compassion, gratitude and forgiveness.
-- Abbreviate the training time.
-- Offer practices that are shorter and more relevant to people's lives.
-- Enhance focus on relationships to decrease perceived loneliness.
-- Integrate hope, inspiration, and courage in the program.

In addition to above, I felt adding humor to the program (and life) was vital. Fun and laughter are great sources of bonding and inspiration, and if we keep the training and the skills dry, they will remain inaccessible, particularly to the younger generation.

I debated and doubted these thoughts for months but couldn't negate any one of them. As a next step, I considered a three-part solution:

(1) Educate people about their brains, emphasizing how our neural traps generate negative emotions and hurt our attention.
(2) Offer different (briefer and deeper) attention practices that are easier to practice and adopt, that provide uplifting emotions, and that center on relationships.
(3) Return mindfulness to its ecosystem in the company of compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, relationships, hope, inspiration, and courage.

I strongly believed I was moving in the right direction, but received pushback from some old colleagues in the field. Pushbacks often demoralize me and they worked their magic this time also. But each time I saw someone struggling whom I couldn't optimally help, the thoughts creeped up again.

I needed one final push. Then His Holiness the Dalai Lama came to my rescue.

This is a great scene in Netflix's The Four Seasons about emotions and reality

Sometimes I get more meaning and wisdom from a short television scene than from a long book. That was the case last night when my wife and I finished watching The Four Seasons on Netflix, a streaming series (not to be confused with the 1981 romantic comedy with the same name).

I can't avoid giving away an important happening in the final episode, so consider this a spoiler alert.

It really isn't necessary to understand what The Four Seasons is all about to appreciate the dialogue in a scene that I thought was really well written and thought-provoking. But here's the trailer if you want to spend two minutes getting up to speed on the series.

The scene features one of the three couples in The Four Seasons. Danny (on the left below) is married to Claude (on the right). Danny is down to earth while Claude is much more sensitive and effusive. 

Danny and Claude are each trying to cope in their own way with the sudden unexpected death of their friend Nick in a traffic accident. Claude had a dream that Nick has become a butterfly. He spoke about this at Nick's funeral service after Nick's ex-wife, Anne, requested that he speak. Danny thought that the whole butterfly thing was ridiculous.

Here's a transcript of a scene that led me to tell my wife, "Wow, that was really well done."

Claude: Don't be mad at me. Anne asked me to speak. I... Just because you don't believe that Nick's a butterfly, that --

Danny: No, I don't. And I kept telling you that, but you kept saying it anyway. Claude, you never give me space to feel what I'm feeling.

Claude: Of course I want you to feel. That's all I ever want.

Danny: No, no, no, no. You want me to feel good. And happy. And when I don't, you say some stupid bullshit about our friend being a bug.

Claude: It's not bullshit. It's beautiful.

Danny: What if I had died? Would you go around telling everybody I was a fucking bird? I feel like you're off in Nonsense World, and I'm facing all of this completely alone! A horrible thing happened to our friend, and it was random and meaningless, so stop trying to make meaning out of it. I don't want to hear "no, it's okay, he's not really gone," because he is. He's not a butterfly. He's dead. And it's not beautiful or part of a greater plan. It's just sad! So just let me feel sad.

Claude: Maybe he's not a butterfly.

Danny: No. Maybe he is. Let's just walk. 

Here's what made me like this scene so much.

First, I related to Danny's desire to face the reality of Nick's tragic death (he's played by Steve Carell) without the crutch of wishful thinking that he isn't really dead, but has taken on another form -- a butterfly. 

Second, Danny is justified in wanting Claude to just let him feel sad. While Claude enjoys looking on the bright side, even when the death of a friend has occurred, Danny is fine with feeling the dark side of sorrow.

Third, because Danny and Claude love each other, this scene ends in a pleasing fashion. After hearing how strongly Danny feels about facing Nick's death head-on, Claude admits that maybe Nick isn't a butterfly. To which Danny says, no, maybe he is.

Danny and Claude end up giving each other some room to engage in their own style of grieving. They can't embrace their spouse's way of dealing with Nick's death, but they recognize that each of them cares deeply about Nick. 

Such is love. One person may not be able to understand why their lover feels a certain way, yet they can express their differences while remaining united in their commitment to each other.

Quantum theory is still largely unexplained, but that's how science works

Quantum theory (or quantum mechanics) is the foundation of our modern world. Without it, we wouldn't have computers, the Internet, GPS, and so many other inventions that we've come to take for granted. 

I'm fascinated by quantum theory.

Though it is generally associated with goings-on at the atomic and subatomic level, not at the level of everyday life, since everything is made up of particles and energy, obviously the existence of we humans and all that surrounds us is dependent on quantum processes.

This is where much of the mystery of quantum theory resides: how is it that the uncertain, shape-shifting, probabilistic realm of quantum mechanics becomes the certain, dependable, deterministic realm of the world we inhabit?

The April 19, 2025 issue of New Scientist features a cover story, "The Idea That Shook Reality," in honor of 100 years of quantum physics. Two of the articles about quantum physics particularly appealed to me. 

Physicist Carlo Rovelli tackled the history of quantum mechanics and how a misunderstanding of one of the pioneers in this field affects how we look upon quantum physics today. Here's a PDF file of his article, along with an excerpt that talks about how Rovelli views quantum phenomena.
Download Carlo Rovelli on what we get wrong about the origins of quantum theory | New Scientist

What quantum phenomena tell us about reality is still debated (see “What does quantum theory really tell us about the nature of reality?”). There are various interpretations. I think that Schrödinger’s waves are only a mathematical representation of the information that a physical system has about another. This reading of quantum phenomena is called “relational”, because it emphasises that we can only describe how systems affect one another, not how they are in isolation. In other interpretations, such as “QBism“, quantum states only code our own knowledge of a system.

In light of these ideas, it is clear to me that Schrödinger’s waves obscured, rather than clarified, the theory developed by Göttingen’s wizards and Dirac. It misled the community into viewing quantum theory as a revelation about mysterious waves (or mysterious “quantum states”), instead of reading it in the straightforward Göttingen way: a theory of the probabilities of the manifestations of a system to any other system.

I think what quantum phenomena tell us is that the world is genuinely probabilistic and granular at the scale fixed by the Planck constant, and that reality is constituted by manifestations of physical systems to one another. This is captured in the words of Niels Bohr: “In quantum physics the interaction with the measuring apparatus is an inseparable part of the phenomenon. The unambiguous description of a quantum phenomenon is required in principle to include a description of all the relevant aspects of the experimental arrangement.”

Little about this idea needs to be changed, a century later: all that is required is to replace “the measuring apparatus” with “any other physical system” the object is interacting with. The world is the ensemble of ways that physical systems affect one another. This is what quantum physics seems to me to be about. That is quantum mechanics as Max Born, the scientist who named it, had conceived it.

I like Rovelli's perspective. It downplays the view of some physicists that the measurement or observation of some quantum phenomenon by a conscious being is what converts the probabilistic "could be this, could be that" quantum realm into the certain "it is this, not that" nature of everyday reality.

When mangled by New Age types who have a very shallow knowledge of quantum mechanics, that view becomes "we create our own reality" -- which isn't at all what quantum theory says. As Rovelli noted, it is likely that any physical system that a quantum object is interacting with results in the so-called collapse of the wave function.

That collapse manifests in a shift from a probability that a quantum phenomenon will take on some value, to a certainty that it has that value. This is why quantum computing is so difficult. In order to preserve the quantum nature of computing, which is highly powerful in some unusual ways, the workings of a quantum computer have to be isolated from the outside world or the quantum phenomena  go away.

A curious thing about quantum mechanics is that while the mathematics are well known and highly effective, the meaning behind all that math is hotly debated. Some physicists take the "shut up and calculate" attitude in which the search for meaning is downplayed in favor of practical applications.

Daniel Cossins takes on the question of meaning in his New Scientist article. It's fairly long, so here's a PDF file. Since I like the notion of objective collapse, which seems to be Rovelli's position, I'll share some of what Cossins says about this subject.
Download What does quantum theory really tell us about the nature of reality? | New Scientist

But there is also objective collapse, a suite of models proposing that quantum mechanics is incomplete and that something else has to be tacked onto the Schrödinger equation to explain wave function collapse. “The [key] difference with the standard interpretation is that the collapse of the wave function is not something that occurs by magic at the end of the measurement process,” says Angelo Bassi, a theorist at the University of Trieste in Italy. “It’s just part of the dynamics.”

Collapse models have garnered more attention than most in recent years, partly because they offer a plausible explanation of how classical reality emerges without reference to human observers. We don’t see large objects like picture frames and paint brushes in a superposition, it says, because the collapse process works in such a way that the more interacting particles there are, the more readily collapse occurs.

What triggers this continuous collapsing isn’t entirely clear. Some models don’t say, others posit that it is just gravity. But Bassi says there may ultimately be no good answer – it may just be a property of nature. “That’s why I like collapse models, because they try to open the door to a new world which we don’t understand at the moment – something beyond quantum mechanics that we are not grasping.”

What really sets collapse models apart, however, is that they can be put to the test. Uniquely, they make explicit observational predictions that differ from what standard quantum mechanics predicts. The idea is that this constant process of spontaneous collapse should cause quantum objects such as particles to constantly jiggle around, which, in turn, means they emit excess energy that should be detectable, even if the signal is extremely faint.

The bottom line is that physicists don't agree about the meaning of quantum theory -- what it tells us about the nature of reality. This is the way of science: disagreement, debate, theorizing, experimentation, uncertainty, open doors, blind alleys, progress, setbacks. 

Anyone who believes that they know what the meaning of quantum theory is doesn't really understand quantum theory. I speak from experience here. I read a lot of books about quantum mechanics when I was researching my first book, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder, which is about the relation of modern physics and ancient mysticism. 

I was quite accurate in discussing the basics of quantum theory. Where I went astray was trying to make the meaning of quantum theory fit with the teachings of the religious group I belonged to at the time, Radha Soami Satsang Beas. In other words, I embraced a view of quantum physics that matched my personal philosophical view of reality rather than taking a more objective and dispassionate perspective.

Live and learn. That's a good scientific motto. Also a good motto for everyone else, certainly including me.

You can feel better by giving yourself the advice you'd give someone else

Subjectivity is what separates us from other people. Meaning, each of us knows our self as a subject, a person we know from the inside, while we know someone else as an object, a person we know from the outside. 

I recall that Sartre discussed this at some length in Being and Nothingness, a book that I devoured as a college student during my existentialism phase, but which, when I looked at it fairly recently, gave me more of a headache than inspiration.

Still, Sartre was on the right track when he spoke about being the Other to a friend who enters a coffeehouse where they agreed to meet. The gaze of the friend is toward Sartre as an object, while Sartre, in gesturing to the friend, views him as the object. 

Mostly we want to be viewed as having the rich inner life that we experience directly through our subjectivity. If someone doesn't do this, we might say, "Hey, don't treat me like an object!" 

However, in his book Shift: Managing Emotions So They Don't Manage You, Ethan Kross says that treating ourselves as an object, doing our own self-objectifying, can be a useful means of dealing with difficult emotions and situations.

Here he's speaking about tennis player Novak Djokavic using a bathroom break as an opportunity to give himself a talk after he'd lost two sets to a younger player.

To me, the most remarkable thing about this story isn't the incredible comeback. It's not even the fact that Djokovic gave himself a pep talk. It's the pronoun usage. He doesn't say, "I can do it." He says, "You can do it."

This small, seemingly insignificant change in language is consequential. Why? As you've no doubt experienced, and as I wrote about in Chatter, it's much easier for us to give advice to other people than it is to give ourselves advice.

The name for this phenomenon is Solomon's paradox, eponymously named after the Old Testament's King Solomon, who was famously adept at doling out wisdom to others but often stumbled when it came to his own life (he got involved in several extramarital affairs that ultimately led to his downfall).

Using the word "you" to silently refer to yourself is called distanced self-talk, and it works like this:

"You" is a word we almost exclusively use to think about and refer to other people. So, when you use that word to refer to yourself, as Djokovic did, it gives you distance and shifts your perspective. It gets you to think about yourself the way you would think about someone else. 

This slightly weird, seemingly tiny linguistic shift is consequential because the difference between "I am stressed out" and "You are stressed out" is big. If I'm stressed out, I might feel panic, a racing heart, and a looping anxiety.

If someone else is stressed out, I might feel compassion, empathy, and a desire to soothe their nerves. By talking to myself using the word "you," I am casting myself in the role of "someone else." I'm able to see and to feel my situation from a different perspective.

Using your own name (instead of "I") or even the third person "he" or "she" also works as a linguistic shifter in much the same way that "you" does. Come on, Ethan, you can finish writing this chapter!

This makes a lot of sense. I've used this technique myself frequently, talking to myself as if I was someone else when I'm stressed or facing a tough situation. It's a valuable way to gain some distance from painful emotions while still keeping in touch with what's happening in a realistic fashion.