Church of the Churchless

Flowing with waves while sitting on the beach

I've been paying a lot of attention to waves recently. That's par for the course on Maui, especially if someone is an avid boogie boarder, like I am.

The first few days after we arrived, there were some decent—though not exceptional—waves breaking on the left side of Napili Bay. I had some stimulating rides. Nothing like my "washing machine" experience back in 2004, however (which is good).

Today, like yesterday, the surf has been boogie board unfriendly. Fairly large, but not breaking cleanly. So I've been working on catching waves from the beach—thought waves, which can be done anywhere, really.

You can try it right now, wherever you are and whatever you're doing (which I assume at the moment is reading this blog post, unless you're a multitasker).

The game, or goal, is the same as with ocean waves: blend with them. When you flow with waves, that's the most fun. When the waves go under or over you—not so much fun. When you crash into a rock, least fun of all.

The thrill of surfing and boogie boarding is when you're in the right spot as a breaking wave comes along. It picks you up. You merge with the wave, insofar as that is possible, you being a human body and the wave being water.

It's a quasi-spiritual experience (avid surfers would disagree, saying "Dude, it's a totally spiritual experience!). For isn't the basic notion of spirituality becoming one with something greater than yourself? God. Tao. Buddha nature. Holy Spirit.

A big wave—yeah, that too.

But each of us also continually surfs our own stream of consciousness, and the thought waves that arise in it. To my mind, this is where the sport of spirituality is really played. Religions conjure up a distant concept of divinity that can't be united with, because it isn't here and now, but there and then.

Our thoughts and emotions, though, are always right at hand, coursing through consciousness. Most of my waking moments are accompanied by some sort of inner commentary (verbal or nonverbal) on what I'm aware of.

Walking down to the beach this morning, I encountered a man and woman on the narrow oceanfront path. He was leaning on the railing, staring at something or other in the water, legs extended, totally blocking my way.

My first reaction? A thought: Geez. Does he think he owns this path? He's not even looking to see whether anybody needs to get by. Actually it was a lot more wordless than these words—closer to a mild feeling of irritation than a string of coherent mind-sentences.

His companion tapped him on the shoulder. "Someone's coming," she said. He moved with a "Sorry." "No problem," I told him. Which was true. There wasn't one.

Except, I'd done a crappy job surfing my own mind wave. I was flowing along just fine, grooving along to my on-the-way-to-a-Maui-beach mood, until I saw that the path was blocked. Then it was as if I'd bumped into a reef rock while setting up to catch a wave.

Ouch. What was that?! Not in the right place.

It's interesting how often those mental mind rocks jarringly interrupt the smooth flow of consciousness. Usually I barely notice them—those frequent sensations of irritation, not-rightness, impatience, and such—because they're so commonplace in my everyday life.

Here on Maui, there are fewer externals that mess with my mellow. So I'm more attuned to my self-created inability to let experiences cascade along without me "wiping out"—big time or little time—because I wasn't able to let a thought wave arise and fall naturally with no interruptions or blockages.

Three years after I asked bloggishly, "What is it about waves?," I'm still looking for the answer. Water waves, mind waves—equally fascinating.

Never-endingly so. Like I said back then, as now, it's all about flow.

Soul is superfluous

Usually spirituality is associated with "soulfulness," whatever the heck that means. I used to believe that I knew something about soul. Now, I don't.

Perhaps because soul is superfluous—it's an notion that is so much a part of most cultures, we take it for granted that a human being consists of something above and beyond the physical.

Before leaving for Maui I bought Nicholas Fearn's "The Latest Answers to the Oldest Questions" at a Powell's Books outlet (one of the world's great bookstores; don't miss the main store if you visit Portland, Oregon).

Interestingly, the first chapter I read on "The Problem of the Self" echoed Douglas Hofstadter's conclusions in "I Am a Strange Loop," which I'd just finished (and have been blogging about).

In searching for a self we look for something over and above our attributes, but we do not usually think this way about ordinary objects. For example, I believe that my favourite armchair persists through time without imagining it to have a chair-soul or a chair-ego that possesses its traits.

It has characteristics such as being three feet high at the seat, padded with foam and covered with green cloth, but there is no chair over and above these characteristics.

If we took away the foam and the seat and the cloth and so on, we would not be left with a naked chair, as if objects were ghostly coat hangers upon which traits are hung. Yet this is precisely what we often imagine to be true in the case of persons.

Well, who knows? Maybe it is true. But since soul is, by most definitions, distinct from materiality and mentality, there's no way to perceive it or cognize it.

Like Fearn says, soul is considered to be something ethereal—pure consciousness perhaps—that (or who) somehow manages to serve as the core of our being even though it's essentially nothing.

The more we wish to gain immortality by divesting ourselves of earthly trappings such as physicality, memories and the like, the more we reduce ourselves to nothing at all – and, to quote the American children's author Norton Juster, doing nothing is hardly worth the effort.

Along the same lines, Hofstadter persuasively argues that the "I" of each of us starts out as a blank slate. He finds no evidence that a soul enters the body at birth, or conception, or somewhere in between, and thereafter serves as the "coat hanger" on which the attributes I consider to be Me are hung.

The key point, uncomfortable for you though it will be, is that no one started out in that brain – no one at all. It was just as uninhabited as a swinging rope or a whirlpool. But unlike those physical systems, it could perceive and evolve in sophistication, and so, as weeks, months, and years passed, there gradually came to be someone in there.

…This "I", this unreal but unutterably stubborn marble in the mind, this "Epi" phenomenon, simply takes over, anointing itself as Reality Number One, and from there on it won't go away, no matter what words are spoken.

It turns out, then, that soulfulness is eminently unspiritual. For when we believe that some part of us—no, even more, the essence of us—is eternally distinct from everyone and everything else we encounter in the world (sticks and stones may break my bones, but my soul is immutable), a sense of separateness is inevitable.

Soul is considered to be separate from body. The realm of soul is considered to be separate from the physical universe. Awareness of soul is considered to be separate from material and mental perceptions.

The writings of British philosopher Derek Parfit are discussed at some length in Hofstadter's book. Parfit also pops up in Fearn's first chapter. Hmmmmm. Parfit sightings in two consecutive reads, after a lifetime of never having heard of him.

Here's how that initial chapter ends:

The personal identity debate shows just what happens when we dispense with the soul. For Parfit, the consequences are liberating. He writes that when he thought his existence a fact distinct from his physical and psychological continuity, he seemed 'imprisoned' in himself. 'My life seemed like a glass tunnel, though which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there as darkness.' However:

'When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.'

Another response might be to dwell on how the fleeting status of human existence has been accentuated. Not only are human beings continually coming into being and passing away, but they are even doing this on countless occasions within a single lifetime. We are, it seems, a flicker within a flicker.

Dalai Lama is on Maui too. Is compassion contagious?

At the moment the Dalai Lama and I are on opposite sides of Maui. He's on a two day speaking tour in Paia and Wailuku, and we're condo'ing it on Napili Bay.

We're opposites in more ways than that, obviously. Yesterday the Dalai Lama spoke about compassion, saying "Compassion is the universal message of all traditions."

I often come up short in the compassion department. Tuesday morning, a few hours before the Dalai Lama's free talk at Maui's War Memorial Stadium, my wife took me to task for being self-centered and (one of her favorite ex-psychotherapist terms) "having a sense of entitlement."

Which most men are over-stocked with, in Laurel's entirely accurate opinion.

The Napili Kai Beach Club walkway to the beach is a narrow rocky path. There's room for two people to walk abreast, but just barely. Carrying my boogie board in one hand and a beach mat in the other, I saw some people coming the other way.

I moved over to the right against the railing as far as I could go. It was obvious to me that there was room for the other group to pass. And there was.

But I was criticized as soon as they were out of earshot. "You should have gotten completely off the path when you saw them coming. That's what I did. You need to be more considerate."

The last statement of Laurel's was indisputable, in general. However, I defended myself in this particular instance. "They got by just fine. I knew that they could. There wasn't any reason for me to do anything more."

I was right. Yet also wrong. For I readily admit that my viewpoint of the situation was almost entirely from my own perspective.

It was our first full day on Maui. I was eager to get to the beach. I didn't want to delay my arrival by even a few seconds. I calculated that I could keep on walking, with a rightward sidestep, and not interfere with the other people.

Me, me, me. A Honolulu resident, Caroline Odo, came over to Maui to hear the Dalai Lama. She's quoted in the Maui News.

I have my own faith, and he's still affirming the things that I believe in. It's all about having respect for one another and showing love to one another—you don't have to bring religion into it.

Indeed, the newspaper story says:

He told his listeners not to consider negative emotions to be a natural "part of our mind," but to embrace emotions "that are good for (your) mental health." "These are not religious examples, but scientific explanations," he said.

One of the reasons I like Douglas Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop" so much, the subject of my two previous posts, is that Hofstadter likewise considers the human condition from a scientific/philosophic rather than spiritual/religious perspective.

Like the Dalai Lama, he challenges the notion that each of us is an isolated "I," separate and distinct from everyone and everything else. Hofstadter's conception of soul is markedly different from most religio-mystical teachings (though not so much from Buddhism).

To him, souls aren't encapsulated in a single body—the "caged bird" metaphor. Each of us is the result of innumerable influences acquired over a lifetime of interactions with countless animate and inanimate entities.

Our "I" is shape-shifting continuously; there's no firm boundary between either us and other people, or between the person we are right now and the "I" we have been in the past and will be in the next moment. Hofstadter says:

What makes all of this so counterintuitive — verging on the incomprehensible, at times — is that your brain (like mine, like everyone's) had told itself a million times a self-reinforcing story whose central player is called "I", and one of the most crucial aspects of this "I", an aspect that is truly a sine qua non for "I"-ness, is that it fluently flits into other brains, at least partially.

Out of intimacy, out of empathy, out of friendship, and out of relatedness (as well as for other reasons), your brain's "I" continually makes darting little forays into other brains, seeing things to some extent from their point of view, and thus convincing itself that it could easily be housed in them…[Indeed] your "I" isn't housed anywhere.

Today, leaving the beach after an enjoyable couple of hours boogie-boarding (me), snorkeling (Laurel), and people-watching (both of us), we decided to exchange our wet and sandy towels.

The towel hut wasn't far away on the Napili Kai grounds. But it took us quite a while to get there. We found ourselves behind an older couple, he getting along with a cane, she arm in arm with him—not looking so spry herself.

The wide curving sidewalk allowed plenty of room to pass. We could also have stepped onto the lawn and moved around them easily. Today, though, I didn't feel any inclination to do anything but stay well behind them.

I paused to read signboards. I stopped to look out to sea. I did my best to not let the couple know that some speedier people were behind them.

I put myself in their place: enjoying their vacation, knowing that there won't be many more times they'll be able to visit Maui, happy that they can still hold onto each other and move, albeit slowly, along a walkway beside beautiful Napili Bay. They didn't need a "young" 58 year old breezing past them, a reminder of healthier years gone by that won't come again.

A small – very small – act of compassion. Maybe a tiny bit of the Dalai Lama had entered my soul, from what I'd read in the Maui News this morning and perhaps even vibes that had soared over the West Maui mountains and landed on Napili Bay.

Regardless, I felt better than I had the day before, when I'd kept on walking rather than stepping aside.

After exchanging our towels, Laurel and I found ourselves behind another slow-moving bunch on the oceanside path. Different people, same reaction. I was happy to stroll at their pace, bringing up the rear, hungry for lunch though I was.

When they turned off toward their building, Laurel said, "Wow. You were so patient. I'm impressed." "Actually," I told her, "this time you were the one guilty of tail-gating—or rather, butt-gating. I think you should have stayed further behind them so they didn't feel pressured."

Now, saying those words really felt good. Hah, beat you this time at the compassion game, lovely wife of mine. Which indicates that I've got a ways to go before egolessness is complete.

But, hey, I'm a man. Give me some slack. Like most of my gender, I've got more of an ego to lose.

If I’m not an “I,” what am I?

My admiration for Douglas Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop," the subject of my previous post, is evidenced by the fact that I just carted the 410 pages to Maui—adding the weight of this hardcover book to my 50 pound suitcase limit, every ounce of which I'm going to need on our return trip after our usual rampaging through Lahaina t-shirt shops.

But I wanted to ponder my strange loopiness some more while on vacation. At the moment I'm listening to Napili Bay waves, rather than Oregon rain, but the same "I" seemingly is doing the listening though its body has traveled far today.

Or so I've always thought.

Hofstadter calls this the "caged bird" metaphor. The cage is the body, or cranium, and the bird is the soul. There's one bird to one cage. And if you're spiritually inclined, supposedly the bird can be freed from the cage.

Satori! Enlightenment! Salvation!

But this presumes that the bird is real. There's an "I" separate and distinct from the physical matter that comprises the brain and the rest of the body. What if there isn't? What if instead of a caged bird, we're actually…

Even Hofstadter has trouble finishing the sentence.

It is not easy to find a strong, vivid metaphor to put up against the caged-bird metaphor. I have entertained quite a few possibilities, involving such diverse entities as bees, tornadoes, flowers, stars, and embassies. The image of a swarm of bees or of a nebula clearly conveys the idea of diffuseness, but there is no clear counterpart to the cage (or rather, to the head or brain or cranium). (A hive is not what I mean, because a flying swarm is not at all inside its hive).

The basic problem is that when you go looking for the "I," it's impossible to pin down. That's what leads Hofstadter to say that the "I" is a hallucination hallucinated by a hallucination.

Sounds a lot like Buddhism and quite a few other maya-embracing philosophies. The difference, though, is that Hofstadter apparently doesn't offer a way out of the illusion (I've got a few more chapters to read). He strikes me as a Buddhist who doesn't believe in enlightenment, just the emptiness of individuality.

Hofstadter's favorite image concerning the sense of "I" comes from his experience of squeezing his hand around a pack of about a hundred envelopes that were in a box. When he did this, he felt a marble in the midst of them. Strange.

He tried to shake the marble out from the envelopes. No luck. Then he went through them one by one and found that each envelope was empty. Even stranger. Upon closer inspection, he realized that at the vertex of each envelope's flap there was a triple layer of paper and a thin layer of glue.

This area couldn't be compressed as much as the rest of the envelope. So when a hundred of them were aligned precisely and pressed together, voila, a marble. Or rather, an epiphenomenon that felt uncannily like a marble.

An epiphenomenon…is a collective and unitary-seeming outcome of many small, often invisible or unperceived, quite possibly utterly unexpected, events. In other words, an epiphenomenon could be said to be a large-scale illusion created by the collusion of many small and indisputably non-illusory events.

Just like the "I." According to Hofstadter my sense that I'm indisputably me (which for you, obviously, is that you're you—not me) arises from countless experiences from birth until now. Each of us is way more than a hundred experience-envelopes stacked up together.

That me-bump we feel in the center of us, it's as real as the marble.

The problem is that in a sense, an "I" is something created out of nothing. And since making something out of nothing is never possible, the alleged something turns out to be an illusion, in the end, but a very powerful one, like the marble among the envelopes.

However, the "I" is an illusion far more entrenched and recalcitrant than the marble illusion, because in the case of "I," there is no simple revelatory act corresponding to turning the box upside down and shaking it, then peering in between the envelopes and finding nothing solid and spherical in there.

We don't have access to the inner workings of our brains. And so the only perspective we have on our "I"-ness comes from the counterpart to squeezing all the envelopes at once, and that perspective says it's real!

I love it. And I hate it.

For me, pondering Hofstadter's book has been like getting on the best ride in the Existential Theme Park. It started off with some exciting ups and downs, which I enjoyed. But then I hit the part where you feel like everything has been pulled out from under you.

Whoa, momma! Stop the ride! No, wait, I want more! Changed my mind again, stop the freaking ride, NOW!

On the whole, I like the feeling of free-falling. Except when I don't. "I"s are like that—fickle. More on this later, after the jet lag wears off and the warm water wears on.

You’re a strange loop (and that’s OK)

Via Douglas Hofstadter, I've got some soul-shaking news to pass on to you. You're a strange loop.

So am I. As is he. We all are. And it's not a bad thing, once you get used to the strangeness and loopiness of our rarely recognized condition.

I'm most of the way through Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop." His new book is an elaboration of themes creatively discussed in "Gödel, Escher, Bach," which I read a long time ago—with difficulty.

Hofstadter has come a long way, both personally and professionally (he's a professor of cognitive science at Indiana University). His wife died suddenly from a brain tumor in 1993. He writes of his love for her, and how he has struggled to relate his understanding of how the mind works with how Carol lives on in his consciousness.

Which, at heart, is a "strange loop." What this means takes a bunch of chapters to explain, some quite dense.

I thought I knew what Gödel's theorem was all about, non-mathematically at least, but it's a lot more involved than my thinking thought. However, the fact that I can think about my thoughts about what Gödel and Hofstadter think about thinking shows that I'm at least in the ballpark of a Gödelian frame of mind.

A plain loop is easy to grasp. It's akin to a thermostat that senses the temperature and turns the furnace on or off to keep the house comfortable. This isn't a strange loop because the thermostat isn't self-aware. There's awareness of the temperature, but not any awareness that the thermostat is aware.

Humans, by contrast, are hugely strange—the strangest loops in existence, so far as we know. We are masters of abstraction and symbols. We observe (generally) friendly furry animals of an astounding variety of shapes and sizes, summing them up as "dogs."

Our ability to conceptualize allows us to jump back and forth between levels of abstraction. Hofstadter observes that we can dream about ourselves dreaming about dreaming. More profoundly, he says, Gödel found that "one of the domains that mathematics can model is the doing of mathematics itself."

This talk about abstractions can easily sound, well, abstract. But when the core message of "I Am a Strange Loop" hits home, as it did to me today, it's anything but abstract. Some of the feel of what I felt is hinted at in Hofstadter's description of a strange loop.

What I mean by "strange loop" is—here goes a first stab, anyway—not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the first stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive "upward" shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle.

That is, despite one's sense of departing ever further from one's origin, one winds up, to one's shock, where one had started out.

Hofstadter illustrates this by M.C. Escher's lithograph Drawing Hands. But the thoughts that I'm thinking as I write this post about how we think, or the thoughts that you're thinking as you read what I've written, are equally good illustrations. Just shyer. He writes:

Fortunately, there do exist strange loops that are not illusions. I say "fortunately" because the thesis of this book is that we ourselves—not our bodies, but our selves—are strange loops, and so if all strange loops were illusions, then we would all be illusions, and that would be a great shame. So it's fortunate that some strange loops do exist in the real world.

On the other hand, it is not a piece of cake to exhibit one for all to see. Strange loops are shy creatures, and they tend to avoid the light of day.

Here we are, you and I. Except when you say "you and I," I'm the "you" instead of the "I" that holds when I say it. Already that's darn strange. Because it's impossible to point to any sort of "I," whether it is in you or me.

Hofstadter goes so far as to say what he says below. I'll leave his saying alone for now. The hour is late, and while strange loops avoid the light of day, they also avoid the dark of night.

In this strange loop's mind, at least. There will be more to say another day, if the strange loop that is me wants to head that way.

That extremely slight doubt flies in the face of what we all take for granted ever since our earliest childhood, which is that "I"'s do exist—and in most people, the latter belief simply wins out, hands down. The battle is never even engaged, in most people's minds. On the other hand, for a few people the battle starts to rage: physics versus "I."

…My proposal for a truce to end this battle is to see the "I" as a hallucination perceived by a hallucination, which sounds pretty strange, or perhaps even stranger: the "I" as a hallucination hallucinated by a hallucination.

Virginia Tech killer compared himself to Jesus. Crazy?

Once again, the right-wing conspiracy theorists were wrong. I suspected as much. Tuesday the "Where's Your Brain" blog theorized that Cho Seung Hui, the Virginia Tech killer, was some sort of Muslim terrorist—because the words "Ismail Ax" were written on one of his arms.

That sounded crazily unlikely to me. I left a comment on the blog post saying as much:

Yeah, and you probably think there Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and supported Al Qaeda, right? I realize that facts are irrelevant to the right-wing brain (truthiness rules!), but this post is particularly ridiculous.

Anything is possible, but not everything is true. The guy was a loner South Korean. Not very likely he was an Islamic terrorist, when you think about it. But of course, you aren't (thinking).

So I wasn't surprised when I saw today that far from exhibiting any Muslim leanings, Cho actually considered himself akin to Jesus. "I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and defenseless people," he said.

SusanG, a Daily Kos poster, observed that the Internet has been rife with speculation about a connection between Cho and Islamic jihad, with one shoot-from-the-hipper saying, "Islam has become the tribe of choice of those who hate American society."

Susan commented:

Somehow I don't think we're going to see a lot of speculation from the same sources in the coming days about whether Jesus Christ is a Rambo role model and Christianity is the "tribe of choice of those who hate American society."

Quite right. I also doubt that there will be much talk about the relation between the craziness of someone who kills 32 people on a college campus, and the craziness of a religious true believer who considers that he has been singled out by God for a special mission to save souls.

One crazy feels that he has a divine warrant to kill souls, the other to save them. Admittedly there are large differences between the two grandiosities. But both are founded in an illogical egocentric worldview that's virtually immune to disproof by more reasonable minds.

I'm not saying that religion turns people into sociopathic mass murderers. But those who have passed over the edge of normal mental functioning often find a comfortable, though bizarrely decorated, home in religious belief.

For if you hear unseen beings talking to you, or cling to ideas that have absolutely no basis in physical reality, or are compelled to follow a path in life that lacks any rational signposts, glory be, brother, and praise the Lord, for you are born again!

Or, mentally ill. It's frequently hard to tell the difference between religious and secular craziness. A few hours before the end of his unbalanced life, Cho sent a religious martyrdom video to NBC News.

Obviously he wasn't entitled to claim kinship with a man, mythical or not, who urged us to love others and turn the other cheek. But if Cho was crazy for believing that his "crucifixion" was analogous to Jesus' death on the cross, then several billion Christians also are over their heads in the mental deep end.

U-turns often lead to a better direction

When you realize you're going the wrong way, what do you do? Reverse course. Make a U-turn. I do it all the time, especially now that my wife and I both have some difficulty reading street signs.

(Typical scenario: "We're looking for Acacia Boulevard. Let me know when you spot it." drive…drive…drive "There it is!" "Where?" "Back a few blocks. I couldn't make out the sign until you were past it." grumble…U-turn …drive…drive…drive.)

Bruce Grierson wrote about "The Age of U-turns" in a recent issue of TIME magazine. It was a nice counterpoint to the oft-heard assumption that flip-flopping is a bad thing.

Sure, I could keep on driving straight down the road. But then I'd never get to my destination. Which is better: to remain true to my original course, or make an abrupt change of direction?

Grierson has written a book called "U-Turn: What If You Woke Up One Morning and Realized You Were Living the Wrong Life?" Nice title. (Excerpt can be read here.) That's happened to me several times. It happens to just about everybody.

In the secular epiphany category, I'd been happily working in the health planning/policy field for more than a dozen years. Improving the health care system (or more accurately, non-system) was a big part of my life. It meant a lot to me.

Until, all of a sudden, it didn't. I didn't plan or intend the U-turn. It simply happened. From that moment, I knew I couldn't do what I'd been doing any longer. Now I look back at some remnants of my health policy life that show up on an Amazon search and think, "That sure was a different Brian Hines back then."

I've also flip-flopped philosophically. Beliefs that I thought would forever be the foundation of my way of looking at the world (and cosmos) aren't anymore.

Again, this isn't something that I intended. As with my professional U-turn, the spiritual epiphany of "I no longer am a believer" arrived unbidden.

From the East. My experience dovetails with Grierson's conclusion:

I realized this was what almost all the U-turns had in common: people had swung around to face East. They had stopped thinking in a line and started thinking in a circle. Morality was looking less like a set of rules and more like a story, one in which they were part of an ensemble cast, no longer the star.

By "East," he means an Eastern way of looking at the world.

To Western thinking, the world is linear; you can chop it up and analyze it, and we can all work on our little part of the project independently until it's solved. The classically Eastern mind, according to Nisbett, sees things differently: the world isn't a length of rope but a vast, closed chain, incomprehensibly complex and ever changing.

The past two Tango classes, we've been working on our promenade pivots. When done correctly (and we're a ways from this), a couple can turn 180 degrees in a single flowing motion, each person facing the opposite direction from where he or she started.

A U-turn! Link a couple of them together and you move quite a ways down the floor in an enjoyable fashion. Dance imitating life.

Honoring the mystery that is me (and you)

In 1977 I spent two weeks in India with a guru, Charan Singh. At that time visitors could spend up to three months at Dera Baba Jaimal Singh in the Punjab, soaking up the mystico-spiritual vibes gratis.

Flying off from the Amritsar airport to return home, via Delhi, I remember looking out of my window seat at the majestic Himalaya mountains, saying to myself, "I don't want my thoughts to be mine anymore, but yours."

I was a devoted disciple back then. I still am. What's changed is the meaning I give to yours. Thirty years ago it meant the guru; today it points to mystery.

This, actually, is entirely in accord with Charan Singh's teaching, for he said, "May your love of the form culminate in the love of the formless." It's a natural progression. Really, an inevitable one.

For what we know, no matter how much, is so much less than what there is.

Here each of us is, one of six billion people on an insignificant planet circling an average star that comprises just one of two hundred billion or so stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of a hundred billion or so galaxies in a universe that extends far beyond what can be observed, and could well be just one of countless universes in a cosmos that has no end.

And yet many (if not most) think they've got it all figured out, because the Bible, Koran, Torah, Adi Granth, Vedas, or whatever, tells them so.

They don't know what life is, what consciousness is, what matter/energy is, or what anything is at the root of its really real reality, not to mention what any possible metaphysical existence may consist of. Worse, they don't know that they don't know—or at least aren't willing to admit it to themselves.

I am. Now. That's why the sentiment of my Amritsar airport takeoff moment is still with me. I've just extended yours to encompass the mystery of what I, and you, and everything else in existence is.

Of which I'm clueless. Happily so.

I no longer feel that I have to fly halfway around the world to honor a sacred impulse. The mystery that is me provides worshipful opportunities aplenty.

In my previous three posts I've been equating meaninglessness with mystery. Makes sense, doesn't it? If I knew the Meaning of It All, there wouldn't be any mystery to the cosmos. And there's a lot. So, how to honor meaninglessness?

By not being meaningful. Usually this is considered to be undesirable. I say something to a companion and am told, "I have no idea what you mean." Communication failure! I try again, hoping to make sense this time.

However, if I'm facing in the direction of ultimate Mystery, my communication with what is uncommunicable should be as non-sensical as possible.

I may be speaking with myself. Or, not. Who knows? It's a Mystery. Either way, meaninglessness tunes me in, to some degree, with what lies beyond the meaning of the little I'm aware of now.

My meditation periods used to be deeply meaningful. Now my goal is different. I still enjoy mantra meditation—repeating a word (or words) to still my thought-stream. The mantra used to have a meaning for me. Mystery, though, deserves to be honored with meaninglessness.

D.T. Suzuki speaks of Buddhist mantra meditation as using a name ("Namu Amida Butsu") whose meaning consists in having no meaning. Essentially, the mantra becomes a koan.

Meditation, or "coming into the presence of the Buddha," thus gave way to the constant reiteration of the phrase as not always or necessarily referring to any definite objective reality, but merely as a name somehow beyond comprehension, or rather as a symbol standing for something indescribable, unpredictable, altogether transcending the intellect, and therefore suggesting a meaning beyond meaning.

In other words, meaninglessness.

Wu, Wu, Wu. Woo-woo. Wuuuuuuuuuuu. Whew!

My quest for the meaninglessness of life

I've spent most of my 58 years looking for the meaning of life. That was easy.

I've found lots of meanings in religion, family, friends, jobs, volunteer work, books, causes, charity, martial arts, television, nature, food, sex—you name it, I've probably found some sort of meaning in it.

But as I said before, and before that, I'm now on a quest for meaninglessness. That's tough. Everywhere I turn, there's meanings staring me in the face. And on one level I want them. I'm addicted to meaningfulness. It's what makes life, well, meaningful.

However, like James Park said in his intriguing, but not quite right on for me, cybersermon on "Looking for the Meaning of Life," there's a residual hollowness in all the meanings—even spiritual or religious—with which we desperately try to fill the perceived emptiness in our lives.

When we seek to make our own lives "meaningful", we might be struggling with two different sorts of meaninglessness. We can create many kinds of relative meanings within the assumed areas of meaningful life: money, achievement, love, marriage, children, enjoyment, & religion.

But even when we have fulfilled such meanings, we might still feel an ultimate hollowness, a spiritual or existential meaninglessness. This deeper meaninglessness is not overcome by any of the relative meanings we are able to create or achieve. Ultimate meaning comes only as a gift —independent of whatever relative meanings we can achieve.

Basically, I don't disagree. Park's endpoint, though, is "the removal of existential meaninglessness, not the attainment of any specific meanings." Myself, I'm drawn toward that very existential meaninglessness.

I guess you could call that my new meaning in life. Which, logically, sort of undermines the quest for meaninglessness.

But, hey, complete consistency isn't my goal. When you're trying to go beyond meanings, you've got to expect that some (or a lot) of paradox and confusion will pop up along the way.

Here's what isn't confusing to me: when you pull on an ultimate meaning thread, trying to figure out what the end is attached to, it always comes back loose in your hand.

This isn't true of relative meanings. They may be circular—this depends on that which depends on something else—but at least you have a sense of firm connectivity.

Yesterday my daughter gave birth to her first child, Evelyn Elizabeth Vos, reportedly the absolutely cutest baby that has ever existed in the history of Earth (I believe my daughter, even without having seen any photos yet).

I am the father of Celeste; she is the mother of Evelyn; and so the chain of meaningful relationships goes, without end (since anyone without a relationship to another human doesn't exist).

This is the sort of "emptiness" Buddhists speak of —an interdependence in which everything is connected.

There's another sort of emptiness though, the ultimate metaphysical, philosophical, scientific, spiritual, or mystical variety (ultimate truth-seeking comes in quite a few flavors).

Even when it seems that you've come to a pinnacle of understanding, a Mystery void lies beyond.

"God created the heavens and the earth." Who created God?

"Superstrings form the structure of time and space." What forms superstrings?

"It's possible to experience union with the oneness of existence." How would you ever know it?

Go ahead, try to imagine any meaningful statement about ultimate reality, or any meaningful experience of it, without someone (like me) being able to say, "And behind that is…what?"

The question mark points to the meaninglessness that lies just beyond the furthest extent of human meanings. It isn't to be feared. It's real. And it's not going away.

Ever.

So why not embrace it? Of course, that's impossible. But we can turn in its direction, setting our compass heading for Meaningless Mystery, experiencing with wide-eyed interest the scenery along the way, knowing that the ultimate destination won't ever be reached.

It's funny. The past three posts now, I've started off intending to say something that I never get to. Maybe next time. Maybe not.

Really meaningful meaning, I seem to be learning, is always around the next bend. Since I never catch up to it, I'm more comfortable seeing it as "meaninglessness" now.

And that's become the most meaningful thing to me.

Meaningful meaningless meditation

More and more, I'm trying to make my meditation time as meaningless as possible. That's a change.

I've been meditating, daily, for more than thirty-seven years. After being initiated in 1971 by an Indian guru, Charan Singh, I dutifully followed the meditative practice enjoined by Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

While this supposedly was aimed at emptying the mind so divine sound and light, plus the guru's grace, could flow in, actually there's an awful lot of meaningful content in the meditative method I followed for so long.

A mantra composed of "five holy names," each of which points to a defined metaphysical level of reality. Envisioning the guru's face, principally the eyes and forehead, as this was supposed to contribute to spiritual uplift. Paying attention to certain mystical phenomena to the exclusion of others.

It's difficult to have an empty, open, receptive consciousness when it's filled with so much preconceived content.

So now I'm attracted to a meditation philosophy that fits with the Boundless Existence schema expressed in my previous post. Meaningfulness is all on this side of Boundless Existence, or ultimate reality. It involves relations between existents—particular things, people, objects, ideas, concepts, phenomena, whatever.

Boundless Existence, on the other hand (and it is really other), has no connection with anything. It is nothing, emptiness, inasmuch as nothing whatsoever can be predicated or said about it.

It provokes the most profound sensation of Ahhhhhh. And only that. Intuitive awareness of its presence is as close as we can come to knowing it. That it exists is within the bounds of human comprehension; What it is—that's the Mystery which shall ever remain.

I picture Boundless Existence as sort of a featureless backdrop to all of my other meaningful pursuits. This is how Milton K. Munitz views the relation between bounded and boundless existence in his book, "Does Life Have a Meaning?"

He says that a deep appreciation of the utter and complete Mystery of Boundless Existence delivers us from misleading assumptions, or projections. One is that it's possible to make generalizations about the nature of the universe or reality "as a whole."

As I argued, Munitz-like, in my previous post, no matter how meaningful an existent may be—up to and including the possibility of God—there's a beyond: Boundless Existence. Within that emptiness (assuming "within" has any meaning in this context) all meaning vanishes.

So the quest for a unitary "meaning of life" is fruitless. The foundation of the cosmos, Boundless Existence, bears no relation to all of our human intentions and dreams. Munitz says:

The misleading result of such projections is to withdraw attention from the only possible source of genuine, though limited, control—that by human beings themselves. The realization that since Boundless Existence has no properties of its own that work either for good or ill with respect to human life obliges us to focus on ourselves, both individually and collectively, as agents for both understanding and exercising limited areas of control over the character of our own interactive meanings.

Hey, Munitz is a philosopher. His rather murky language reflects his academic leanings. But his basic point is simple and clear: we make our own meanings in life.

Meaning isn't handed down from on high, like the Ten Commandments. It comes from our never-ending (until we die) interactions with everyone and everything we encounter daily, hourly, minutely, momently.

Thus a backdrop of meaninglessness brings a sharper resolution to whatever produces meaningfulness in life. The letters I'm typing on my laptop's screen stand out because they appear on a featureless white background.

If everything in life is meaningful, nothing is, really. I need the awareness of Boundless Existence's empty, uncaring, cosmic meaninglessness to create a sharp contrast with the meanings, large and small, produced by my interactions with other existents every waking moment of my life.

Silence. That's the key. Munitz says:

To see why an intensified awareness of Boundless Existence, in its own distinctive way, makes the question of the meaning of life vanish, I shall focus on the way in which that awareness is experienced by the cultivation of a special type of silence.

…Since it is not propositional or conceptual, the awareness of Boundless Existence is, to this extent, experienced in silence. If one breaks this silence, it can only be to engage in metaphor, negative statements ("not this, not that…"), or exclamations and expressions of feeling evoked by the experience.

Yesterday a delivery truck driver came to our house. One of the first things he said was "Wow. It sure is quiet out here. I'm used to the city. There's always some sounds where I live."

We've lived in the country for sixteen years. Naturally I'm aware of the silence, but usually it doesn't have a lot of meaning for me. I've come to take it for granted—except when the wind, or cold winter air, brings us the constant thrumming noise of a distant freeway.

The delivery man rejoiced in the quiet. He reminded me of what it makes possible. Hearing birds singing…owls hooting…frogs croaking…geese honking…coyotes howling.

My wife and I love each of those sounds. Which rest on silence—nothing.

As outside, so inside. Meditation, for me, is cultivating awareness of meaningless emptiness. Out of that mental silence, meaning emerges.

There! That! Ah…

Boundless existence—the backdrop to life’s meaning

Boundless existence. Can you sense it? Can you think about it? Can you relate to it?

No, no, and no. So says Milton K. Munitz in his provocative book, "Does Life Have a Meaning?" I thoroughly enjoyed this short (114 page) exploration of one of the deepest questions we all struggle to answer.

This was the last book Munitz, a distinguished emeritus professor of philosophy, wrote before he died. It's profoundly philosophical, but there's as much of Munitz, the man, between the covers as Munitz the academic philosopher.

It's obvious that he wrestled with the mystery of existence throughout most of his life. I'd read an earlier book of his on that very subject. I liked "Does Life Has a Meaning?" more, because here Munitz persuasively describes how "existents" like you and me relate to boundless "existence."

Short answer: in no way at all. Boundless existence has nothing to do with the things that exist within it—existents.

The awareness of Boundless Existence consists in dwelling on the basic fact that Boundless Existence is totally without properties, that it is utterly unintelligible, that it lacks any materials or powers of its own, that it does not have any concern or interest of one sort or another, conscious or otherwise, that might affect positively or negatively, or contribute in any way to, the character and achievability of various types of meanings in the lives of human existents.

The consequence for our lives are the consequences of having this awareness of the unique "character" of Boundless Existence—the fact that it has no character or properties of its own! It is this realization that is of great import-ance to us.

That passage may sound intellectual. Actually, what Munitz is gesturing toward is anything but. It's the least intellectual no-thing in existence. Because there's no way you can wrap your mind, your emotions, your senses, or any other faculty around Boundless Existence.

How could you? It's boundless. The closest we can come to it is through an awareness of profound wonder that existence exists. Boundless existence is simply That. There's no What to it—none at all.

To become aware of Boundless Existence calls for entering a different mode of experience. It is not reached by a leap of faith. Nor does it consist in a type of access that affords a special source of knowledge It is simply a wholly unique mode of awareness that reveals a different level of Reality from that which comes from observation and the use of concepts of any sort.

I can't tell whether Munitz' awareness of Boundless Existence is anything like my own. However, I resonate with his words—which point toward a empty wordlessness that is utterly unlike any experience we could have of this world, or any other world.

I've looked into that void and it has terrified me. I called it "non-existence," but I might as well have termed it Boundless Existence. Each is a nothingness that has no contact with the something that I am, and hope to continue to be.

Since it is devoid of all properties, Boundless Existence is another way of interpreting and sanctioning the use of the concept of "Nothing."

In just about every mystical tradition that I'm aware of, that's the final terminus of the spiritual path: Nothing. The ultimate beyond—formless, nameless, boundless, timeless, everything-and-anything-less.

You reach the right hand of God, you embrace Buddha nature, you enjoy the unveiled visage of Allah, you achieve union with divine light and sound. And yet…beyond all that, is That.

Boundless existence. The floor upon which everything else rests, yet never is sensed in any fashion (because then it'd just be another thing). Like Munitz, I often feel that I'm aware of it.

But never when I try to be. It's like a unseen presence that flits away on any attempt at closer inspection. Ah, there! The lightest possible grasp is the only way to feel that you're coming close to getting a grip on it.

There's a lot more to say about this unsayable awareness. I might give it a go in another post or two. For now I'll end with how Munitz answers his question: Does life have a meaning?

No. There isn't a meaning.

At the very beginning of this book, I quoted the remark Wittgenstein makes in his Tractatus that "the solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem."

…The notion of the meaning to life—that it is in some way singular, ultimate, or all-encompassing—is a mirage and wholly gratuitous.

…There are meanings of one sort or another in every life of every human existent.

…The awareness of Boundless Existence as a dimension of Reality ("the world") in which we live, has its own distinctive consequence in making the problem of life vanish.

…The problem vanishes insofar as one has an awareness of the situation of the lives of individual human existents "in" Boundless Existence, and that since Boundless Existence is Nothing, Emptiness, then in this respect life has no meaning either.

But stop! Don't commit suicide! Wait for Munitz' final conclusion. It brings back meaning into life.

Because it's within our power to find meaning wherever and however we choose. In typing a blog post. In drinking a glass of wine. In watching an episode of "Dancing With the Stars." All of which I'm either experiencing at this moment, or just about to.

Boundless Existence, the ultimately ultimate reality, doesn't give a rip. There's no meaning in Boundless Existence because there is nothing at all in Boundless Existence. That's why it's boundless. And existence.

Munitz says, and I agree with him, that our lives are meaningful in whatever fashion we make them. You won't find the meaning of life "in some preassigned cosmic or divine source and authority."

Interactions with other existents—people, places, things, pets, nature, whatever—are what provides meaning for us. We can't interact with Boundless Existence, which has nothing in common with what is commonly called "God."

So it's up to us. Entirely.

Munitz cautions against disengaging from everyday life and withdrawing "into a focused, exclusive, meditative absorption into the wholly featureless character of Boundless Existence."

Rather, he says, we should let an intensified awareness of Boundless Existence (it's "emptiness") serve as the backdrop for our various worldly interactions.

Interestingly, the only quasi-spiritual quotation in his book, so far as I recall, is this quotation from the Zen Patriarch Hui-Neng in a footnote:

"The capacity of mind is broad and huge, like the vast sky. Do not sit with a mind fixed on emptiness.

If you do you will fall into a neutral kind of emptiness. Emptiness includes the sun, moon, stars, and planets, the great earth, mountains and rivers, all trees and grasses, bad men and good men, bad things and good things, heaven and hell; they are all in the midst of emptiness.

The emptiness of human nature is also like this."

Is God real?

It warmed my agnostic heart to see that this week's issue of Newsweek had "Is God Real?" on the cover. Usually news magazines run religion-friendly puff pieces around Easter and Christmas.

Kudos to Newsweek for asking the tough question. Which, of course, can't be answered.

However, this won't stop hundreds of millions of Christians from going to church tomorrow and glorying in the resurrection of someone who may or may not have actually existed, and is considered to be the son of a God who may or may not be real.

That's too many "may's" for me to take the occasion seriously. Indeed, it's almost comic that after more than two thousand years of fervent believing and God, show us a sign, there hasn't been a definitive one.

So the Newsweek article can quote Rabbi Jacob Heschel as saying:

[God] did not make it easy for us to have faith in him, to remain faithful to him. This is our tragedy: the insecurity of faith, the unbearable burden of our commitments. The facts that deny the divine are mighty, indeed; the arguments of agnosticism are eloquent, the events that defy him are spectacular…Our faith is fragile, never immune to error, distortion, or deception. There are no final proofs for the existence of God, Father and Creator of all.

Jon Meacham, the article's author, concludes: "No final proofs—there it is, the ultimate caveat. Doubt and faith are not at war; they are parts of the same whole."

Astute observation, Jon. The only difference between a believer and an agnostic is that the former isn't willing to admit that he doesn't know whether God is real, while the latter honestly testifies to his own unknowing. This makes the agnostic more honest and humble than the believer.

And possibly truer to God, if such a being exists.

For since no one knows what God is like—surmises and guesses being the currency of every religion—it's just as reasonable to assume that the Almighty is most pleased with the questioning spirit of agnostics who make good use of their God-given rational intelligence rather than naively latching onto nonsensical superstitions.

Meacham writes:

To base one's behavior on a blind acceptance of words put down long ago, however revered those words are, is an abdication of reason and responsibility—and reason and responsibility are, for many believers, gifts from God. Does a Christian in our time really think that, as Saint Paul argued, slavery is divinely ordained?

Every Christian, no matter how devout he or she may be, picks and chooses what to believe in the Bible. An agnostic like me does the same. I simply choose not to believe in the passages that tell me I have to believe in them. That's like going to a used car lot and having the salesman tell you, "Every automobile here is in great running order, trust me on that."

I'd rather kick the tires myself, thank you. Self-substantiating claims such as "We know Jesus died for our sins because the Bible tells us so" have a truth value of precisely zero for me.

There's also a debate between pastor Rick Warren and atheist Sam Harris in the Newsweek issue. Harris runs argumentative circles around Warren, in my utterly personal opinion.

For example, Warren notes that when Jesus says "I am the only way to God. I am the way to the Father," he is either lying or he's not. Well, of course he is. So what? Harris points out that "many, many other prophets and gurus have said that," which is absolutely true. Jesus has a lot of company when it comes to claiming to be the only way.

Warren also fell back onto the frequently heard "atheists are just as dogmatic as believers." No, they're not, Rick.

Atheists and agnostics are firm in their commitment to not accepting a theological proposition as being true unless there's some solid evidence for it. This is entirely different from having faith in dogma that lacks any experiential, observational, or even logical support.

No one knows whether God is real. Atheists and agnostics know that they don't know. Believers pretend they do. Like Socrates in Plato's Apology, this gives the sincere not-knowers a leg up on the pretenders. Socrates speaks of a man who had an undeserved reputation for wisdom:

Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is—for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him.

More than slightly, I'd say. A lot more.

World picture puts a frame around reality

Some people look at things so bizarrely.

Like Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, authors of the hugely popular "Left Behind" series of books that takes a fictional view of events surrounding the Second Coming of Jesus—which for LaHaye and Jenkins won't be fiction when the Big Day comes.

Yesterday I heard them interviewed on a right-wing Portland talk show. The host asked them how they were faring on their book tour to the least-churched state in the nation.

(Whenever I hear that fact, I always feel like cheering, Yay, Oregon! We're #1!)

LaHaye and Jenkins said, "Just fine. We've got a lot fans here." Which I'm sure is true. To a certain sort of Christian, it's got to be hugely appealing to hear that unbelievers are going to be consigned to some nasty suffering come the Tribulation—I'm short on the details, never having read any of their books.

When asked if it was fair that non-Christians were going to be treated so badly when the Good Times start to roll, the answer basically was: "Well, that's what the Bible says, so that's the way it's going to be. End of story."

Weird! I thought, turning off the car radio as I pulled into the natural food store's parking space. So freaking weird. How could anybody believe that stuff?

And yet…during my Eastern religion fundamentalist phase I believed in equally strange weirdness. I was certain that the guru had implanted his radiant astral form in my forehead consciousness at the time of my initiation, and that this being now was aware of my every thought and action, stepping in now and then to tweak my karma as he saw fit.

If LaHaye and Jenkins heard that, they'd be entirely justified in saying: So freaking weird. How could anybody believe that stuff? Yet millions of Sant Mat disciples all over the world do.

Here's the thing: to some extent everybody is weird from any perspective other than our own. Close to home, my wife thinks that my habitual failure to shut kitchen drawers all the way is completely mystifying. Well, she has her own quirks, believe me.

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein speaks of world pictures that frame the way we see the world. Milton K. Munitz talks about this in "Does Life Have a Meaning?", which I've just started reading.

According to Wittgenstein, a world picture is a set of fundamental beliefs comprising a fixed framework that, for the one who adopts it, is groundless. This means that it does not rest on deeper grounds or foundations: it is not derived from and justified by appeal to other, supposedly more fundamental, beliefs or evidence. "At the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded." [Wittgenstein quote]

Fascinating. I love it. We're all floating free in well-structured belief bubbles, but each of us is supremely confident that mine is tethered firmly to reality—as contrasted with how blowing-in-the-wind the belief structures belonging to other people are.

Yeah, right.

When pressed, none of us, not one, could point to any solid evidence that the way we personally view the world leads to an objectively true understanding of reality. Science has a pretty good claim in this regard, but science isn't a person. And it relies on mathematical world pictures, which are much less subjective than beliefs.

Thus religious world pictures (Munitz says Wittgenstein preferred this term to "world view") are as groundless as any other sort. There are people whose life largely revolves around the fortunes of their chosen sports team. My mother wasn't quite this extreme, but when "her" San Francisco Giants won, you could sense an elevated mood in the Hines home.

Similarly, finding a choice empty parking space elicits a "Praise Jesus," "Allah is great," or "Guru's grace!" in those whose world pictures filter reality in a certain fashion. Every day events get attached to a structured belief system like ornaments being placed on Christmas tree limbs. Ah, another little miracle.

In a recent issue of Newsweek, mega-church pastor Rick Warren speaks of the evidence he sees for God.

I see the fingerprints of God everywhere. I see them in culture. I see them in law. I see them in literature. I see them in nature. I see them in my own life.

Okay. But the impressions Warren takes to be divine fingerprints appear much different to non-Christians with an alternative world picture. For example, as a mark from the hand of Darwinian natural selection.

Personally (as if it were possible for me to start off a sentence with "Impersonally"), I find the notion of pruning my belief structures increasingly appealing. Like everyone else, my world picture always will determine the lens through which I view reality.

But I can see through the glass more darkly, or less darkly. Pulling into a parking space can just mean that I'm pulling into a parking space.

As noted in a previous post, I like the world picture of David Ignatow, a poet:

I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment on my life.

Puppetji gives a YouTube socksang

When a puppet on YouTube makes just about as much sense as any spiritual book I've read, or any mystical guru I've heard, that says a lot.

About what, I've got no idea. But whatever it is, The Truth According to Puppetji vaguely gestures in its direction, insofar as a puppet with arms stuck to rods is able.

I browsed through several of Puppetji's video socksangs. The first one I saw, the most recent, was my favorite. "Puppetji vs. The Secret."

No contest, really. Puppetji wins. And it won't cost you $29.95 to learn his take on The Truth.

You can have anything you want. But I ask, "Who is wanting?"

Who desires the need to want?

Who wants and desires the need to want to be needed and to desire to want to need something it only thinks it desires to want? [a rough transcription; Puppetji talks damn fast]

The ego.

The truth of who you are is…nothing.

So getting the necklace, or the new car, or the house, or the hot crazy Tantric sexual relationship—all merely feeding the ego. And will not bring you happiness.

The desire to have more things and more stuff just perpetuates the grand illusion.

Therefore creating the desire to want more and more desire, and more and more things, and more and more stuff, ultimately leading to…bankruptcy.

And then more suffering. And more desire. And more and more desire not to suffer. Therefore creating more suffering.

Pretty good. For a puppet, or indeed for anybody, the little guy makes more than a little sense.

Puppetji would suggest to you that peace lies not in our past or future, for they are illusions created by the mind. Peace, true freedom and LOVE are not found by following our addictive patterns, for they are but temporary remedies for that which has no meaning and needs no cure.

You will never find that which you seek in any thing outside your temple...or someone else's temple, or Shirley Temple. YOU are that which you seek. Stop the search and remember this... You are not special, you are not important. You are LOVE and Love is all.

Here's his "The Secret" video.

Being fuzzy is fine

Most people have a strong tendency toward drawing distinct lines. Between belief and unbelief. Between right and wrong. Between all sorts of false dichotomies.

False, because life generally is a lot fuzzier than our "got to be this or that" minds take it to be. Today's Dilbert comic gets it right.

I've been pondering fuzziness recently because my wife and I are preparing for an appeal hearing on a nearby proposed 217 acre subdivision. We and our neighbors are fighting the development because we don't believe there is enough groundwater for additional wells in the area.

The developer does. So there we are. We say "no." He says "yes."

What we're going to argue before the county commissioners next Wednesday is that there's also "maybe." Nobody knows for sure how much water is in the aquifer now, nor how much will be available in the future.

So let's admit our mutual uncertainty. Until we're more certain. Test wells and some hydrogeologic experiments would cast a crisper light on the current fuzzy shadows. Maybe. But it's worth a try.

When it comes to God, testing and experimenting is tougher. Real tough. I've been at it for many years. My meditation cushion, if it could speak, would testify to the countless hours I've spent searching for some sign of certainty one way or another.

God/no-God. Death/no-death. Spirit/no-spirit. Soul/no-soul. I'm still on the borderline, the land of question marks. More and more, I'm finding it a comfortable place to be.

The Oregon legislature is considering changes to Measure 37, the initiative that trashed our state's land use laws. An outline of the proposal was revealed last week. In some ways it looks good for our subdivision fight; in other ways, not so good.

We're so involved in this battle, for a while it was driving me crazy, thinking about what the final legislation would look like. "It could be this—yay! Or, oh no, it could be that—terrible!" I was oscillating between this's and that's, desperate to get a firm grasp on a political situation that was extremely fluid.

Thankfully, the ridiculousness of my mental machinations soon hit home. I was trying to put the reform proposal into a "good for us" or "bad for us" box, even though at the moment it's so malleable and changeable there's no way to predict its final form.

It felt good to relax into the reality of not-knowing. We and our neighbors will flow along and adjust to whatever happens. The future will be fuzzy until it's right here and now. And even then it may still be somewhat indistinct.

That's the nature of fuzzy logic. Which is the only way of dealing with religiosity, really. Nobody is a true 100% believer in God, or a 100% non-believer. We all have degrees of belief and disbelief in something beyond the physical.

As the Wikipedia entry says, even a question such as "Is Bob in the kitchen? Or not in the kitchen?" isn't so binarily straightforward. Bob could be in the doorway, with just one toe in the kitchen. Where is he? The Land of Fuzzy.

A fine locale, especially if you're scientifically minded. In The Science of Good & Evil Michael Shermer praises fuzziness.

Moral and political decisions are grounded in binary logic in which unambiguous yeses and noes determine Truth. Science is grounded in fuzzy logic in which ambiguous probabilities determine provisional truths.

…In science, claims are not true or false, right or wrong in any absolute sense. Instead, we accumulate evidence and assign a probability of truth to a claim. A claim is probably true or probably false, possibly right or possibly wrong.

…Stephen Jay Gould put it well: "In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent."

With all matters divine, it's perverse to do anything but just that: withhold provisional assent. Staying fuzzy until God's shape is crisp and clear.

Even if that never happens, a fuzzy truth is to be much preferred to a well-defined fiction.