Church of the Churchless

Religion places bad bets on the left brain

Sometimes you hear, "He's a left brain person" or "Creativity comes from the right brain."

Neuroscience is a lot more complicated than that, but it's still fascinating to read descriptions of the specialized functions in the two sides of the brain.

Such as Michael Gazzaniga's "Spheres of Influence" in the June/July issue of Scientific American Mind. He describes research on split-brain patients where the major connection between the two hemispheres, the corpus collusum, is severed in order to treat intractable epilepsy.

This allowed Gazzaniga and his collegues to study how the two hemispheres dealt with a problem that has a lot of relevance to religion.

We have subjects try to guess which of two events will happen next: Will it be a red light or a green light? Each event has a different probability of occurrence (for example, a red light appears 75 percent of the time, and a green 25 percent of the time), but the order of occurrence of the events is entirely random.

There are two strategies that can be used here.

Frequency matching involves guessing red 75 percent of the time and green 25 percent. But since you don't know what color is coming up next, there's a high propensity for error that lowers the success rate below 75 percent.

It turns out that maximizing is a better strategy. Here you simply guess red every time, which ensures an accuracy rate of 75 percent -- since that is how frequently red appears.

Animals such as rats and goldfish maximize. The "house" in Las Vegas maximizes. Humans, on the other hand, match. The result is that nonhuman animals perform better than humans in this task.

Use of this suboptimal strategy by people has been attributed to a propensity to try to find patterns in sequences of events even when they are told the sequences are random.

That's what the left brain does: try to produce order out of perceptions. It analyzes, makes stories out of sequences of events, comes up with elaborate hypotheses.

Just like religion.

"Miracles" are woven out of the cloth of rarely observed, but entirely natural, phenomena. Destiny or karma is fashioned by interpreting everyday events in an other-worldly fashion. Instead of simply seeing things as they are, left-brain religiosity makes a whole lot more out of them than is actually there.

By going beyond simply observing events to asking why they happened, a brain can cope with such events more effectively should they happen again. In doing so, however, the process of elaborating (story-making) has a deleterious effect on the accuracy of perceptual recognition, as it does with verbal and visual material. Accuracy remains high in the right hemisphere, however, because it does not engage in these interpretative processes.

We need both sides of our brains. Each hemisphere has its own role to play in producing a unified consciousness of reality.

It's important to keep in mind, though, what is happening in our minds when we look at simple things in a complicated left-brain way.

An Indian man in a turban giving a talk on a stage becomes God in human form, divinely inspired. In similar fashion, a Catholic elected to a high office by his peers comes to be seen as infallible in certain circumstances.

The right brain just sees. The left brain sees and then makes up a story about it.

Sometimes that is useful. But not when there's no substance behind the story -- just a desire to tell tales.

Be thankful you're not dead

It's Thanksgiving Day in the United States. In the rest of the world, I gather, it's a regular day.

The real point of Thanksgiving seems to be to overeat, spend time with family members, and rest up for shopping tomorrow (big sales start in a few hours).

My wife has made a couple of pumpkin pies. I've got a vegan Tofurky cooking in the oven. There's thankfulness pouring out of every pore of our daily newspapers and Internet news sites.

I'm not big on holidays. I don't like following a societal script. Be thankful on Thanksgiving. Be worshipful on Christmas. Be patriotic on the Fourth of July.

Well, maybe I don't feel like it.

Today, though, it happens that I was planning to write about a subject that can be easily fitted into the thankfulness theme. To me, it's the ultimate -- and foundational -- "thank you." Because without it no other appreciation can be offered.

Be thankful you're not dead. Or, put more positively, Be thankful you're alive.

Any other sort of thanks fades into insignificance compared to this. I've harped on this theme in other blog posts. I'll almost certainly do so again. The reason:

Many times a day now, not continuously but frequently, I'm struck by a sensation that isn't a feeling, or a thought, or a perception, or an understanding, or any other categorizable content of my consciousness.

Rather, it's more an overarching knowing about what awaits my consciousness. And everybody else's.

Death.

Which, given my churchlessness, is a word that carries with it a big fat series of question marks, extending into infinity.

??????????????????????????????????... No comforting assurance of continued aliveness anywhere along the line.

I used to shun this honest assessment of what likely awaits me after my last breath and heartbeat. Namely, nothing.

Instead, I clung onto conceptions that told me, "Reincarnation is real. Or you might hit the karmic jackpot and do some soul-soaring after death, rising to a higher sphere where peachy-keen life will be yours forever."

Well, that'd be cool. But I'm not counting on it. And it's not what my existential gut is telling me -- the "this is it, dude, all there is" intuitive knowing.

For which I'm grateful.

Because if there's life after death, I'll take it. Gladly (more accurately, ecstatically). However, there's no way to know this will happen. And believing that it will dilutes the probably one-and-only life that each of us is living now.

Religious believers frequently say that life is meaningless if there is no God. Bullshit.

Actually, life is much more meaningful with no God, no belief in life after death, no expectation that heaven and hell are anything other than what is here and now.

This is hard to put into words.

What I experience in those knowing moments is a sense of wonder, of awe, of unimaginably deep appreciation for being alive -- because I realize that there won't be any more living for me to do, ever, than this lifetime.

Sometimes this makes me feel a sense of urgency to get going on important, significant, legacy-like things before death comes and they can't be done. Usually, though, I simply feel thankful that I'm able to do whatever I'm doing at the moment.

I just took the Tofurky out of the oven. I forgetfully tried to lift the glass cover off of the casserole with my bare fingers. Ouch!

The pain, however, was part of life. Ever so much existentially better than not existing at all.

And now I'm about to eat what appears to be a delicious vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner (though I didn't read the fine print on the Tofurky box and defrosted the dumplings before boiling them, so add another adjective, "misshapen," to "delicious" and "vegetarian").

There's a lot to be thankful for, no matter our life situation. The heartiest thanks should go to Life itself, however.

No need to posit a giver of life, such as God. No need to assume a continuation of life, such as reincarnation or salvation. No need to know our condition before we were born or after we are dead.

Now. Life. Living. Gratitude. That's it.

And it's plenty. In fact, perfect.

Why EnlightenNext is so irritating

Dear God, deliver me from New Agey, Ken Wilber'ish, pseudo-evolutionary, integral philosophy B.S. like what just popped into my email inbox, courtesy of Andrew Cohen and his EnlightenNext crew.

I just said that I had mixed feelings about Ken Wilber. Cohen's YouTube video adds quite a bit of weight to the absurd side of my attitude.

If you've got eight minutes you want to waste, take a look. I can see why Cohen changed the name of his magazine from "What is Enlightenment?"

Because talk like I heard on the video sure would earn a big fat "Not this!" from any reasonable person.

So much blather about how God thinks and what God wants, as if Cohen or anyone else has a clue. And as if God exists at all.

Just goes to show that you don't need to go to a church, temple, or mosque to hear ridiculous dogma. You can also attend an Andrew Cohen or Ken Wilber seminar.

No need to live life fully. Just live.

"Living life to the fullest" is an adage that used to mean much more to me than it does now. In my true believing days I'd be anxious that I was missing out on the purpose of earthly existence.

Which I took to be: pursuing a spiritual path that would lead me out of the illusion of earthly existence.

So, in accord with the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (an Indian organization led by a guru), I diligently meditated for several hours a day and did my best to not get attached to worldly entanglements.

I failed, of course. Thankfully.

Because a religiosity which judgmentally divides life experiences -- worldly/spiritual, meaningless/meaningful, empty/full -- not surprisingly leads to a divisive and psychologically unhealthy outlook.

If someone is continually wondering, "Am I living my life to the fullest at this moment?" all that questioning is going to suck the joy out of the moments.

I'm still enjoying re-reading Alan Watts' "Become What You Are." Here's some passages from the Tomorrow Never Comes chapter.

When we say that all things in the universe are the creative activity of God, this is really like putting legs on a snake or painting the reflection in a mirror. It is not to be compared to seeing that activity as it is, although we say that it is God's activity to draw attention to it in a particular way.

But the trouble is, people spend so much energy looking for the God that they fail to see the activity, which is surely a sad state of affairs. What is this activity? The rivers flow; the flowers bloom; you walk down the street.

...The idea of God is a finger pointing the way to Reality, but when people try to join God and Reality, to identify the one with the other, to find the former in the latter, they are trying to join together two things that were never in need of being joined. This is like trying to make the eyes see themselves.

Yet how do we arrive at the state where to watch the snow falling is so much one with God that we need no more introduce God than put red paint on the roses?

Whence all this hurry to arrive at a state? Are you not already watching the snow? Are you not already face-to-face with the eternal mystery? Take it easy for a while; just watch the snow falling or the kettle boiling, and not so much hurry.

...But you are free to abandon yourself to actual life and to know that living in God is another name for this abandonment, for watching the snow and walking down the street.

...You say you do not feel this abandonment right now. What do you expect to feel? It is not a feeling; it is feeling. It is not a thought; it is thinking. If it were a particular thought or feeling there could be coming into it and going out of it; but God is One and all-inclusive, and here there can be neither coming nor going, inside or outside.

...As the verse says:

This you can not describe, nor paint,
Nor yet admire, nor feel.

Trapped in the goal of having no goal

One of my pet peeves is how often I hear, "Brian, you think too much!" Almost always I'm told this by a true believer (generally in Sant Mat, my previous faith) who is using his or her mind to express that thought.

So obviously that person isn't opposed to thinking, because they're doing it when they tell me "You think too much." What they really are saying is that they don't like what I'm thinking.

Which, when expressed in a Church of the Churchless blog post, often has to do with the futility of religious believing. Those beliefs, whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Sant Mat'ish, or whatever, are thoughts.

Thus actually I spend a good part of my blogging life urging people, "Don't think so much!"

About what can't be thought, at least -- a category that includes concepts involving God, existence, being, consciousness, oneness, and other notions pointing at the ultimate.

By "ultimate," I mean something that can't be divided up. Rock bottom reality, if you like. It isn't possible to stand outside of it and point toward it with a meaningful thought.

If you do, your pointing is in the wrong direction.

You can't think about your thinking, because what you're doing is your thinking.
You can't be conscious of consciousness, since you can't be aware outside of consciousness.
You can't exist separate from existence, given that existing and existence are one.

This is simple stuff. Mysticism 101.

And believe me, I'm well acquainted with that course of study. I've dived deep into the teachings of Rumi, Eckhart, Plotinus, Kabir, St. John of the Cross, Ramana, Zen masters, and many others.

They all say, in one fashion or another, that whatever ultimate reality is, there's no way to it. No path. No technique. No method.

How could there be? It's ultimate reality. It's what is. It's what we and everything else in existence are.

"Closer than your jugular vein." "Right beneath your feet." "The light with which you're searching is what you seek." "Chop wood, carry water."

There's lots of ways to express how close at hand -- so close, there's no place to go -- ultimate reality is. Yet somehow we keep missing it.

Because we're looking for it. And it can't be seen.

Alan Watts expresses this nicely in his "Become What You Are." He speaks of Tao. But he might as well say "God," "Final Truth," "Meaning of Life" or any other synonym for the way things really are.

There is no way, no method, no technique which you or I can use to come into accord with the Tao, the Way of Nature, because every how, every method implies a goal. And we cannot make the Tao a goal any more than we can aim an arrow at itself.

If we once get into the tangled state of the arrow which is trying to shoot itself, the self trying to change itself, we can't do anything to stop it. So long as we think or feel that perhaps we can stop it, that there is some way, violent or subtle, difficult or easy, to make ourselves unselfish, the contradiction will continue or get worse.

...We cannot find release until we have known the real extremity of our situation, and see that all striving for spiritual ideals is completely futile -- since the very seeking thrusts them away.

...Of course, this doesn't mean that a Taoist comes to the table without expecting dinner, or gets on a bus to go nowhere special. I am talking of results in the moral and spiritual sphere -- such things as goodness, peace of mind, sanity, happiness, personality, courage, and so forth.

...The goal in question was some sort of image, some mental picture, some vague feeling, of an ideal, of a state in accord with the Tao, of harmony with the Way of Nature. But it was precisely in relation to such notions and ideals that Lao Tzu said: "Get rid of knowledge; eject wisdom, and the people will be benefited a hundredfold."

He was talking about supposed knowledge of what the ideal way of life is. As I said at the beginning, there is simply no way of knowing what the Tao is. If we cannot possibly define the Tao, we certainly cannot define what it is to be in harmony with the Tao. We have simply no idea of what the goal ought to be.

If then, we act, or refrain from action, with a result in mind -- that result is not the Tao.

...Now this is an immensely important discovery. For it means that I have found out what I, what my ego, actually is -- a result-seeking mechanism. Such a mechanism is a rather a useful gadget when the results in question are things like food or shelter for the organism.

But when the results which the mechanism seeks are not external objects but states of itself, such as happiness, the mechanism is all clutched up. It is trying to lift itself up by its own bootstraps. It is working purposefully, as it must, but to no purpose.

It is looking for results in terms of itself. It wants to get results from the process of looking for results. This is a hopelessly and wildly fouled-up feedback mechanism. There is, however, just this one possibility.

It can realize the whole round circuit of the trap in which it lies. It can see the entire futility and self-contradiction of its position. And it can see that it can do nothing whatsoever to get itself out of it. And this realization of "I can do nothing" is precisely mui.

One has mysteriously succeeded in doing nothing.

And, everything.

Spiritual ego worse than worldly ego

Losing the ego... what's up with that? In most religions, particularly Eastern ones, this is supposed to be a supreme goal of spirituality. Yet no one has ever seen an "ego," much less the absence of one.

I've come to feel that "losing the ego" is one of those phrases that sounds like it means something -- and gets repeated in sermons, satsangs, and such as if it did -- but actually points to an absurdity.

How would a person without an ego, a sense of "I," personal desire, look? How would he or she be different from other people? Could we distinguish a no-ego person from an ego person?

Anthony de Mello, a Jesuit priest who I've praised as a spiritual rebel, addresses these questions in "Awareness." I started to re-read this book in a fashion that, in my old true believing days, I would have called miraculous.

Now, the word I'd use is curious. Meaning, interesting in an I'm clueless about what it means fashion.

The day after I wrote my "The Meaning of Life? Life" post, I was drawn to peruse my bookcase for some fresh pre-meditation reading. Scanning the many spiritual, philosophical, and mystical titles, I picked up de Mello's "Taking Flight" -- which I hadn't looked at in a long time.

Flipping to a page at random, I saw one highlighted passage:

For the secret of life is to be found in life itself -- not in doctrines about it.

"Well, far out!" I thought. "A message from God. But wait! I don't believe in God. So, I guess it's just a message."

I put the book back. I chose "Awareness" instead. Here's some quotes on the ego question:

I said there were two types of selfishness; maybe I should have said three. First, when I do something, or rather, when I give myself the pleasure of pleasing myself; second, when I give myself the pleasure of pleasing others. Don't take pride in that. Don't think you're a great person. You're a very ordinary person, but you've got refined tastes.

Then you've got the third type, which is the worst: when you do something good so that you won't get a bad feeling. It doesn't give you a good feeling to do it; it gives you a bad feeling to do it. You've making loving sacrifices but you're grumbling... That's the worst kind of charity, when you're doing something so you won't get a bad feeling.

...Say this scrap of paper is a billion-dollar check. Ah, I must renounce it, the gospel says, I must give it up if I want eternal life. Are you going to substitute one greed -- a spiritual greed -- for the other greed?

Before, you had a worldly ego and now you've got a spiritual ego, but you've got an ego all the same, a refined one and one more difficult to cope with.

Right on. I much prefer worldly assholes to spiritual assholes.

If you're going to be a jerk, and we all are in varying degrees of jerkiosity, why not be a straightforward Yes, I am jerk? That's so much more honest than being an I'm just a humble servant of God (or guru) jerk.

De Mello says, and I agree, that everybody without exception does what they do because it makes them feel better than doing something else. Like an old friend used to say, "We're pleasure-seeking missiles." We lock on to the goal of happiness and fly in that direction.

Self-sacrifice, love, charity. These are all ways people use to feel happy. Some other ways are self-assertion, hatred, possessiveness. Different strokes for different folks, all directed toward feeling good.

Ego is there in every case. With true believers, it just gets covered up under a layer of holier-than-thouness.

Not to mention names, but one of them is mine, I came to see the truth of this when I worked with high-ranking sevadars in the Radha Soami Satsang Beas organization. I'd always believed that decades of spiritual practice, meditating with love and devotion just as the guru instructed, would cause someone to be a better person.

What I found, though, was that big egos, controlling natures, and selfish desires simply were transmuted into a subtler form. Like De Mello says, this made someone's jerkiosity more difficult to discern -- but it was still there.

Think of all the good deeds you've done, or of some of them (because I'm only giving you a few seconds). Now understand that they really sprang from self-interest, whether you knew it or not. What happens to your pride? What happens to your vanity?

What happens to that good feeling you gave yourself, that pat on the back every time you did something that you thought was so charitable? It gets flattened out, doesn't it?

What happens to that looking down at your neighbor who you thought was so selfish? The whole thing changes, doesn't it?

"Well," you say, "my neighbor has coarser tastes than I do."

You're the more dangerous person, you really are. Jesus Christ seems to have had less trouble with the other type than with your type. Much less trouble. He ran into trouble with people who were really convinced they were good.

Other types didn't seem to give him much trouble at all, the ones who were openly selfish and knew it.

Yes, that's me. Now that you've read this post, leave me a comment. Tell me how much you love what I wrote! Make me feel good!

If you do, you'll feel good too. And that's what life is all about.

Beyond Ken Wilber's bounded reality

I've got mixed feelings about Ken Wilber.

Sometimes he strikes me as a self-absorbed guy who's fervently marketing his Integral Philosophy as the answer to every question, even though it strikes me as a conceptual exercise without much reality meat behind it.

Then I read something Wilber has written and resonate with it. (A sampling of my divided opinions toward Wilber is here, here, and here.)

I wasn't planning to renew my subscription to "What Is Enlightenment?" when the magazine changed it's question mark spots and became EnlightenNext, an even more brazen vanity massager for Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen -- who call themselves the "guru" (Cohen) and the "pandit" (Wilber).

But the sample issue that came in the mail had an interesting guru-pandit dialogue on "The Interdynamics of Culture + Consciousness." This is an area where Wilber makes pretty good sense.

When it comes to consciousness, we can talk about absolute consciousness and we can talk about relative consciousness... so absolute consciousness is indeed pure consciousness. It's not a thing; it's not an object; it's not a mist. If you have to think about it at all, it's a vast open emptiness in which all objects arise.

...But that's just the absolute component. What have become so important, as we have started to create an East-West integration, are the relative aspects of consciousness. And these relative aspects have to do with how you interpret that absolute experience of consciousness.

...So you can have a full-blown satori, or consciousness experience, but depending on where you are in this developmental scale, you'll interpret it according to different values.

You can interpret it in a magical, or egocentric, fashion: "I and I alone have this pure consciousness." You can interpret it in a mythic, or traditional, value structure, which is the next major stage, and believe that this experience is given just to one group, one people, or one chosen tribe.

And so on, with other stages providing the foundation for other interpretations.

Which leaves us with the crazy multiplicity of religions, each taking what likely is the same experience of love and connectedness with the cosmos, and framing it in a unique conceptual fashion.

Christians ascribe their uplifted feelings to Jesus. Followers of a mystical meditation system consider that the guru's grace is responsible. New Age types sense the presence of an angel or spirit guide working behind the scenes.

Wilber says:

The interpretation of a spiritual experience is as important, or more important, than the spiritual experience itself. That sounds kind of shocking at first, but the more you think it through, the more you realize it is exactly right on the money.

I believe Wilber is correct up to this point. But then he goes further: arguing that there is a highest and best way of interpreting spiritual experiences, and -- no big surprise -- it happens to be his very own Integral Philosophy.

The integral structure is the value structure that is basically the truest to the real nature of absolute consciousness.

Well, I doubt it.

How likely is it that the universe, which Wilber likes to call Kosmos, is arranged or structured in exactly the fashion that a 21st century Homo sapiens named Ken Wilber has intellectualized it to be? Not very.

Of course, any description of How Things Really Are is going to fall short of how things really are. Words aren't reality. Nobody, including Wilber, seriously disagrees about that.

But some conceptual models come closer than others to reflecting the universe as it is (in contrast to how a human mind would like it to be, or imagines it to be). This is the goal of science: to describe as accurately as possible how the natural world works.

It's also the goal of Rolf Sattler, who emailed me recently. He said:

I would like to let you know that on my website www.beyondWilber.ca I published a book entitled Wilber’s AQAL Map and Beyond. In the first part of this book I discuss some of the most fundamental limitations of Wilber’s map, and in the second part I present a dynamic mandala that overcomes them.

Sattler is an interesting guy. For some (obvious) reason I like his silver-haired bearded appearance. He's a retired botany and biology professor who is very much into Taoism, Yoga, and such-ness.

His overview of why it's necessary to go beyond Wilber's model of the cosmos makes good sense to me.

Wilber loves organized hierarchies where things are neatly nestled in tidy relationships with other things. This may capture the mechanical aspect of the universe, but life, consciousness, and ultimate reality (whatever the heck it might be, or not be) seem much less amenable to Wilber's conceptualizing.

So Sattler's summary of his downloadable book strikes me as a better reflection of the cosmos, in all of its mysterious glory, than Wilber's often dry-as-dust model of quadrants, levels, holons, and whatnot.

I haven't done more than skim through the book. What I've read about Sattler's "mandala" approach to modeling reality sounds good, though.

Contemplating the mandala does not only provide insight into reality, the Kosmos, but also communion with it. As we become aware of the source in the empty center of the mandala, we can realize that this center is the center of the Kosmos and ourselves. Thus, the centers of the mandala, the Kosmos, and ourselves coincide—they are one center, not in a spatial or temporal sense, but in the sense of the unnamable mystery that pervades all existence. 

Contemplating the mandala can also be liberating in several ways: instead of being caught in only one meaning of each concept, we can move freely to other complementary meanings; instead of being caught in only one way of relating the circles of concepts, we can entertain other complementary relations; and instead of being caught only in the manifest world cut off from its source, the empty center, we can see everything in relations to the source which bestows sacredness on the Kosmos including ourselves. 

Seven days of sex -- religion I can get behind

Or, on top of. That's one of the great things about this story of a mega-church pastor urging his congregation (married only, please) to have sex for seven days straight.

It lends itself to double entendres.

I watched a story about "Thou Shalt Not Abstain" on CNN and couldn't resist getting out my Flip VIdeo camera and beaming it up to You Tube.

My favorite part is about 1:10 in, when a woman says that the pastor hadn't touched on this subject before. At least, "not in so much depth."

Giggle, giggle.

It's refreshing to see religion addressing down-to-earth human needs in such a fine fashion. Now I just have to find a way to talk my wife into joining this church.

For a week, at least. I love God so much (all of a sudden, for some reason), I'd be willing to follow the lead of another pastor and quadruple my devotion.

Earlier this year, a southwest Florida pastor, perhaps having more faith in his congregants' stamina, issued a 30-day sex challenge.

The meaning of life? Life.

Pretty obviously, I'm entering the simple phase of my philosophical trajectory. In my life I've thought a lot of complex thoughts. I've written some complex books.

I've followed a complex spiritual path (Sant Mat, which has lots of rules and posits a dazzlingly involved cosmology). I've embraced the teachings of a guru, Charan Singh, who had advice on countless subjects associated with the inner and outer life of his disciples.

Now, all this strikes me as way too much. As do the intricacies of every religion.

Most scientists suspect that simplicity lies at the heart of reality, notwithstanding the seeming complexity of the material manifestation.

What's good enough for the cosmos is also fine with me. I'm ready to bow at the altar of just enough. And seriously consider that it's time to end my spiritual search.

An image keeps popping into my head of people setting off from a jungle clearing into unknown territory, bent on searching for the ultimate treasure trove. Everybody follows a path in a different direction. Nobody returns with what they're looking for.

Then there's the fools who sit on their butts in the middle of the clearing, drinking and eating and chatting and having a good time.

They're the only ones not going anywhere. But they sure seem to be richer than the treasure-seekers.

From an early age I've assumed that the most important purpose of life is to find the meaning of life. It appeared so obvious that there's more to being human than just living as a human being.

I desperately wanted to find the secret sauce that made everyday existence genuinely tasty. I deeply desired the key that unlocked the door leading to the hidden chamber of How Things Really Are.

Now, there's another feeling that won't leave me: the sensation that every moment I'm alive is stupendously, unimaginably, indescribably precious -- because likely my life is a volume of awareness set between the bookends of not yet existent and gone forever.

If this life is the only one we'll ever live (admit it: even if you're a true believer, you know this is highly probable), each instant of experience possesses a value that can't be valued.

And yet... so often we fritter those moments away.

I'm not suggesting that one moment is more valuable than another. Or that one sort of experience is more valuable than another.

Just that the meaning of life is the living of it. Fully. Consciously. With gratitude.

Frequently I say "thank you" when I stagger out of bed in the morning, make coffee, and walk up the driveway to get the newspaper.

I have no idea who I'm talking to. I doubt that anyone besides me can hear what I say. I simply feel like thanking reality, existence, the universe, whatever, for making life possible. My life. At this moment.

I hesitate to call this feeling "spiritual." Yet it is the most honest spiritual sensation I've ever had.

End of the spiritual search

Given how many mystical, spiritual, and philosophical books I buy from Amazon, my favorite online book store should be cautious about carrying this title:

"Beyond Awakening: The End of the Spiritual Search," by Jeff Foster

Indeed, since I read this slim book (141 pages, whose message could be encapsulated on one or two) I haven't bought anything in the What's It All About genre.

But give me time. I doubt that I'm really at the end of my spiritual search. Could be, though.

I like a lot of what Foster has to say, which is supremely simple. He ends the book with...

Yes, at last, here's the secret: this moment is life's only meaning.

New Age'y? Yes. Non-dual teaching cliche? Yes. Something I've heard jillions of times before? Yes.

However, this doesn't take away from the fact that, while I was reading the book, I'd frequently feel "Yes! That's how I see things too!"

For example, during the thirty plus years I was in my true believing phase my generally faithful psyche still would wonder about such things as:

-- if a guru supposedly has lost the drop of his ego in the ocean of God, why does he allow himself to be set up high on a pedestal (both literally and figuratively) by followers who lavishly worship his personality?

-- if a disciple is bent on pursuing a path that leads to loss of self, how is it that so much attention needs to be paid to what this person does and doesn't do, given that supposedly that "self" is an illusion?

-- if a spiritual seeker is supposed to devote himself wholeheartedly to traveling the road that leads to God or ultimate reality, what guarantee is there that the traveling ever will end, since this is the point of being on a path?

Here's some quotes from Foster's book. See how they strike you.

This is the only miracle: that you are here (however or whatever you are) and it is now.

This is not about following a path; there is no path, although there may be the idea of "a path."

This is certainly not about "putting an end to the I." Only an "I" would want that.

Oh, the mind loves that story: "If I could just see the fiction as a fiction, I would be in liberation!" And the search for liberation goes on, and the mind has saved itself again.

The spiritual search can only ever end in frustration, because what is sought is identical with that which is doing the seeking.

"My past and my future" are thoughts arising now. What you take to be yourself has no more reality than that.

Here's what to do with your life: do what you do. That is all.

So yes, this message is really about living in the moment! This moment is all there is. It's all we have! This is your last moment!

Oh sure, make plans, of course! But they're just assumptions! We never know what's going to happen... We just don't know.

Whatever happens, happens. But the mind will not accept that. The mind wants to know, wants to choose, wants to plan! It wants to be in control. It wants to think it's in control, wants to play God.

You cannot have what you want, ever... What we really want is an end to our wanting, but even the wanting of an end to wanting is another want, perhaps the biggest want of them all.

How to point to the absolute miracle of existence, the awesome gift that is each and every single moment?

There is only ever this -- what is presently happening. And stories about awakening and liberation and enlightenment may arise in this, but they are only ever stories, and have no deeper reality.

Tonight I walked by myself for a few blocks through downtown Salem. After a rainy spell, now we're enjoying crisp clear November air.

A low-lying full moon hung not far above the city. Streetlights partially illuminated mostly deserted sidewalks. Trees were still full of fall color.

I looked through my sixty year-old eyes and thought (or, more accurately, felt) "This is all there is. This is all there needs to be. This is all there will ever be."

Like Foster said, life is mind-blowing amazing at every moment -- just because it is. Someday it won't be for me. And for all of us. The "is" won't be an "isn't." Most likely it'll be...nothing.

Except, not even that.  Because nothing is a lot more of a something than death promises to be.

So I had the urge -- the necessity -- to suck in life in all its downtown Salem glory, right then and there, knowing that there won't ever be any other knowing than what was going on in that moment.

Which is this moment. And this one ... and this one ...

Boxing up varieties of belief

Most people don't like to be put in boxes. Meaning, categories. Hey, I'm an individual, unlike anyone else! we like to believe.

Fair enough.

But I see nothing wrong with putting how we believe into boxes. So I've done just that -- stimulated into belief-categorizing action by a question that's been running through my mind recently:

Why do some people's proclamations irritate or please me more than other proclamations?

I'm speaking generally here, about all sorts of utterances. Verbal sayings. Blog posts and comments. Books. Magazine articles. Any way that someone communicates a belief from their brain into mine.

Sometimes I get an instant emotional rush of What the @#$%&! as soon as I register a communication that rates high on my irritation scale. Other belief messages produce a pleasant smile, and not just because I agree with what I've heard.

So what's going on here? What are the varieties of belief that generate such different reactions in me?

Here's how I've put believing into boxes. (click to enlarge the image) This isn't terribly sophisticated, but it reflects the basics of how I see people -- me included, naturally -- and their beliefs.

First, I'm assuming that everything anyone is aware of, or communicates to others, is a belief. Meaning, it isn't 100%, guaranteed, no doubt about it, Truth with a capital "T." There's always a possibility of being wrong, or at least not totally correct.

For example, our basic assumptions about reality could be off-base. This could be a computer simulation. We all could be part of a dream. Or dead and in an afterlife that seems like living. Whatever.

Regardless, we feel like we know something about what's going on. That's a belief. Which we have some reasons for believing -- as shown on the "Good Reasons for Belief" heading. I've divided those reasons into just two categories: "Few" and "A Lot."

I could discuss what a good reason is. But I won't. I think most people know the difference between a good and bad reason for believing something. Evidence is key, just like in a trial.

However, some beliefs don't require evidence. Subjective opinion is a perfectly fine manner of believing. I don't need a reason for saying "I prefer vanilla ice cream to chocolate." Or, "I can't stand to listen to rap music."

Recognizing that reason-light opinions of this sort are subjective, most people don't try to push them onto others. That's where my "Insistence on Belief" heading comes in: it divides beliefs into how strongly they're forced onto people who may not hold them.

If you don't have good reasons for a belief, as is the case with religions, yet you want it to be accepted by others, I call this a "Dogmatic Assertion." Take it or leave it; but you'd better take it.

On the other hand, well-founded beliefs that should be accepted by everyone are "Objective Facts." Like gravity and electromagnetism. Or 2 +2 = 4. Societies can't function without a general consensus about facts of this sort.

If you've got a lot of good reasons for believing something, yet you aren't out to push the belief onto other people, I call that a "Non-assertive Truth."

Examples: a talented musician who knows he can play the piano well, but doesn't rush to show off on every keyboard he comes across. Or a well-read person who could correct a misquote he hears in a conversation, but chooses to let the error go.

Here I've shown some typical language used by people operating in each belief box. Three of the four are rarely irritating.

The only one which is almost guaranteed to gall me, now that I've embraced churchlessness, is "Thou shalt..." -- frequently used by those who don't have good reasons for what they believe, but want other people to accept their beliefs nonetheless.

Lastly, this shows the types of people who frequent each category of belief. I had some trouble coming up with a term to put in the upper left corner. "Liker/disliker" is kind of lame. Suggestions welcomed.

Whatever this box is called, we all spend much time in it. Life is largely about liking and disliking, minimal reasons required.

Republican or Democrat. Football or baseball. Cats or dogs. Pickup or sports car. Blond or brunette. PBS or MTV. Christian or Buddhist. Vegetarian or meat-eater.

Make your choice. Feel free. Go for it.

Just don't claim that I need to follow in your footsteps, if all you've got is "I like" or "I dislike" to back you up. Reasons please! Good ones. If you don't have them, you're a fundamentalist who is wasting my time.

However, I'm always ready to listen to those in the "Scientist" category. I use this term loosely, meaning anyone whose beliefs are founded on solid evidence and experience. A dance instructor can be a scientist in this sense, because what they're teaching is demonstrably true.

I was thinking of "Humble sage" in a similarly broad sense. Many people know a lot yet don't broadcast it to the world. Content to tend a productive tasty garden, they don't feel a need to open up a vegetable stand.

Well, my goal here was to both better understand how I see different varieties of believing, and explain to myself and others why I react the way I do to people who come across as being in the various belief boxes.

Like I said, I rarely have a problem with anybody who isn't acting from the fundamentalist mindset. If someone says to me, "I love feeling that Jesus is by my side," I'll respond with "That's wonderful."

That statement doesn't need a reason. Love and feeling stand on their own. It's only when the sentiment is rephrased as "If you don't accept Jesus, you're headed to hell" that we have a problem.

Now you'd better come up with some damn good reasons why I should believe in my eternal damnation. So far, I haven't heard any.

Shared reality is better than private reality

Sometimes you hear people say, "He's off in his own private world."

Now, this may not be such a bad thing. But few of us would want to be in a totally closed off fragment of reality, because that would be exceedingly lonely.

Comments on a recent post got me thinking about shared (or "intersubjective," as one person put it) realities, versus private realities.

In my experience, the most satisfying moments in life are when I feel connected with other people. Or with nature. Or with some other animate or inaminate entity, such as our dog -- or my newly beloved MacBook computer.

At these times I feel that the world is more one than many, more united than divided, more loving than hateful, more cooperative than competitive.

I've got a sensation of being part of something bigger than myself. In some small (or large) way, I've escaped the bounds of an ego-encapsulated existence where it's all about me, me, me.

For this to happen, there's got to be some sort of shared experience of reality going on. If the sharing is with a person, such as my wife, we both have to be tuned in to a similar sensory and cognitive wavelength.

We can't mutually resonate with the glory of a sunset if one of us has our eyes closed. We can't both have a intimate understanding if one of us isn't listening to what the other is saying with an open mind.

Applying this to spirituality, I've come to feel that my goal is to try to break down the barriers that keep me in a private world where the meaning of life is limited to what I believe it to be. I want to be inclusive rather than exclusive, a resident of a psychological habitat without many fences rather than a gated community.

I recall standing in line at a movie theater back in my true believing days. There I was, like everybody else, waiting to buy a ticket.

Suddenly I thought: Wow! I'm a disciple of a great Indian guru, a god-realized soul. I've been taught a mantra and meditation approach that will take me to the highest regions of reality. I'm so fortunate!

Now I saw my fellow movie-goers differently. I stood straighter, feeling apart from them. I was on the way to knowing the truth of the cosmos, and they weren't. Lucky me. Poor them. I enjoyed the feeling.

At the time I didn't recognize it as a feeling of superiority. But that's what it was. And it was founded on a belief system that encouraged me to split myself off from a shared reality.

I wasn't just another person in line at a movie theater. I was an initiate of a perfect satguru! I was someone who could repeat a secret mantra that mystically connected me with God! I was so cool!

This is what a dogmatic belief system can do: provide a lens through which experience is distorted, so that the believer is seen to stand on higher ground, reality-wise. Cinemagraphically, religious believers see themselves as full color people in a gray-scale world.

Reading Jon Kabat-Zinn's "Wherever You Go, There You Are" this morning, I came across some quotes that blended with my own ponderings.

We all carry around ideas and images of reality, frequently garnered from other people or from courses we have taken, books we have read, or from television, the radio, newspapers, the culture in general, which give us pictures of how things are and what is occurring. As a result, we often see our thoughts, or someone else's, instead of seeing what is right of front of us or inside of us.

...We can live in a dream reality of our own making without even a sense of the loss, the gulf, the unnecessary distance we place between ourselves and experience.

...We can all be imprisoned by incessant wanting, by a mind clouded with ideas and opinions it clings to as if they were truths.

...Perhaps ultimately, spiritual simply means experiencing wholeness and interconnectedness directly, a seeing that individuality and the totality are interwoven, that nothing is separate or extraneous.

If you see in this way, then everything becomes spiritual in its deepest sense. Doing science is spiritual. So is washing the dishes. It is the inner experience which counts. And you have to be there for it. All else is mere thinking.

At the same time, you have to be on the lookout for tendencies toward self-deception, deluded thinking, grandiosity, self-inflation, and impulses toward exploitation and cruelty directed at other beings. A lot of harm has come in all eras from people attached to one view of spiritual "truth."

...Moreover, our ideas of spirituality frequently ring with a slightly holier-than-thou resonance to the attuned ear. Narrow, literalist views of spirit often place it above the "gross," "polluted," "deluded" domain of body, mind, and matter. Falling into such views, people can use ideas of spirit to run from life.

And split themselves off from other people.

Belief is in the brain, so beware

Believing in the supernatural is easy: our brains lead us down the belief road without our knowledge. So there's good reason to be skeptical of religious, mystical, or spiritual experiences.

Much, most, or all of the time (depending on your level of skepticism) your brain is fooling you.

Such is the fascinating message of Sharon Begley's "Why We Believe" in a recent issue of Newsweek. I read her piece the day after my wife and I believed we were at the right election night party place, but really weren't.

We weren't in a supernatural frame of mind, but some of Begley's believing findings sure seemed to apply to us. Such as:

As scientists began studying belief in the paranormal, it quickly became clear that belief requires an open mind -- one not bound by the evidence of the senses, but in which emotions such as hope and despair can trump that evidence. ... The idea that the brain constructs reality from the bottom up, starting with perceptions, is woefully wrong, new evidence shows.

If we really want something to be true (like being an elevator ride away from an Obama victory party), our perceptions and thoughts likely are going to be tilted in the direction of our feelings and emotions.

Ambiguous evidence will be construed as Yes, we're on the right track! In the same way, religious believers see what they want to see in a holy book, holy person, or holy place. If your mind is deeply attached to a religious symbol, it may conjure up sensations that seem real, but actually aren't.

Brain imaging shows that the regions that become active when people imagine seeing or hearing something are identical to those that become active when they really do see or hear something in the outside world. ...It is not too far a step for mentally healthy people to see or hear what they are thinking intensely about.

I'm reminded of stories told by disciples about gurus to whom they're devoted.

After being told by the guru that it is possible to be in touch with his astral (or "radiant") form, and spending many hours in meditation visualizing the guru's presence, one day the guru appears and talks to them. Well, maybe. Or, not.

Christina Puchalski, director of the George Washington Institute for Spirituality and Health, felt her dead mother's presence "with me in a very deep and profound way, emanating from a certain direction," she says. "Maybe if you're thinking very strongly about that person, your mind is creating the sense that he is there."

Believing that there is more to life than what is apparent here on Earth can be comforting. I certainly got a lot of satisfaction from my true believing days. It was wonderful to feel so special, so cared for, so clearly guaranteed a better life after this one ended.

I'd still like this to be true. However, I've reached a point where truth is more important to me than feeling wonderful. Sure, I want both.

However, I also want my reality to be as real as possible.

The universal human need to find meaning and purpose in life is stronger and more basic than any attachment to empiricism, logic, or objective reality.

Well, that may be. However, I'm still optimisic that people -- me included -- can find meaning and purpose in attuning themselves to how the world is, in contrast to how they'd wish it to be.

If you can't find the party, try another place

I want to suck as much meaning as possible out of yesterday’s marvelous election results.

So I’ll keep the party going (sorry, Republicans) with a story about how I couldn’t find the party.

Which bears quite a bit of resemblance to how I wasn’t able to locate the spiritual extravaganza that supposedly was rocking on a level of higher consciousness, according to the meditation system that I followed for many years.

In both cases, it eventually became obvious that I wasn’t in the right place. But the interesting thing is how non-obvious obviousness can be, if you’ve got your mind made up in a certain direction.

As noted on my other blog, my wife and I planned to go to a Democratic election night party after our Tango class.

I’d read an email invitation from the Marion County Dems. So had my wife.

We both recalled that the party was at a ballroom in the Reed Opera House, a three story brick building in downtown Salem.

We confidently pulled up outside, surprised and pleased that with a large party happening upstairs, there were so many parking spaces available. (First lesson: pay attention to the unexpected, since it may have a message for you.)

All we needed to do was reach the top floor. I pushed the “up” button on an elevator. The door opened. Laurel and I stepped inside.

I hit “3.” Nothing happened. The elevator didn’t move. We looked at each other, wondering if we were stuck. (Sort of reminds me of my meditation.)

I lowered my expectations and pressed “2.” That got us to the second floor, where we searched for stairs that would take us higher. No luck. One stairwell was locked with a gate. The other had a door, but no knob, and wouldn’t open.

We were determined to get to the third floor, where we were confident a jubilant election night party awaited us. Retracing our steps back to ground level, we even believed that we could hear the crowd in the ballroom cheering.

(In retrospect, I now realize that we were standing by a wall that separated us from a bar next door, which must have been filled with progressives -- or people who’d been drinking enough to cheer for anything.)

So there we are, wandering up and down the bottom floors of a building where we had a lot of faith -- for no good reason, but that’s how faith works, irrationally -- that we were so close to a wonderful experience.

Given how long we’d waited to celebrate a Democrat winning the presidency again, the party we were looking for was the political equivalent of heaven for us.

We damn well weren’t going to give up on this dream easily. Eventually, though, reality began to break through. It dawned on us that not only was there no way to the third floor, we might not have remembered where the party was.

Back to the car. Off to another location, a few blocks away. The Grand Theatre building, which also has a ballroom on the third floor.

Unlocked doors. Music and cheering definitely coming from above. We walked in just in time to see Obama’s acceptance speech projected on a large screen. Deeply moving. It was great to share the moment with like-minded people.

Here’s the lesson I learned from the evening, which naturally wasn’t the first time life had taught me this: when you’re really, really sure you’re right, but there’s no solid evidence of it, stop and ask yourself, “Why am I so sure about my belief?”

Laurel and I kept on looking for a party in the wrong place for a lot longer than a reasonable person would have.

The reason: each of us had faith that we knew where to go, and since we agreed that it was the place we were at, our erroneous beliefs supported each other -- even when we began to have some doubts.

“Are you sure the invitation said Reed Opera House?”

“Yeah, I am. I read the email just this afternoon.”
“OK. That’s what I remember also. Let’s keep looking for an unlocked door.”

If we’d been on a religious quest, our commitment to what we thought was true would have earned us high faith marks.

We didn’t let minor details like no evidence of an election night party, which would have attracted hundreds of noisy, enthusiastic progressives, stand in the way of our repeatedly trying to get past locked doors that led to the third floor.

For quite a while we banished any thought of “I could be wrong” from our minds. We were reluctant to stop searching and ask a simple question: What makes us think we’re right?

We believed we were right! A firm belief repels skeptical questioning.

In the end, we ended up at the party we’d been looking for. It just turned out to be in a different location from where we first confidently thought it was.

If we hadn’t changed our minds, acknowledging the crystal clear evidence of No Party Here, we’d still be wandering floors that led nowhere.

Moral: if following your religion or philosophy hasn’t gotten you to the place you want to be, change direction. The party could be next door, and you shouldn’t miss it.

Make life more of a silent movie

I'm fond of encapsulating the meaning of life in a pithy phrase. Only problem is, I keep coming up with different capsules.

Back in my psychedelic-fueled youth, it was "the universe is a paper bag turned inside out." Recently, I realized that it was folly to "overlay the actuality of my day with an idealized version of it."

Today, it's "make life more of a silent movie." This thought came to me, and it seemed so enormously profound I instantly knew it must be the key to understanding everything.

I only wish I understood what I said to myself.

But, ooh! -- that's it! Not understanding my own mental speaking is exactly what I need to know. So I've got it! By not having it.

I seem to be telling myself something along the lines of my previous, "Hey God, shut up! No more conversations." However, since it isn't possible to step into the same thought-river twice, that can't be true.

Whatever.

I just enjoy the image of life being a silent movie. I don't mean totally silent, because there still are sounds in it.

At the moment I'm blogging away on my laptop in a coffee house. People are talking. The expresso machine is making whooshing sounds. Music is playing in the background. I can hear a teeny-tiny click as each of my new MacBook's keys are pressed.

Someone could make a movie of this scene right now, and they'd capture all that I just mentioned. Because it's real. Everybody in Salem's Blue Pepper could experience what I am, if they paid attention (and borrowed my computer for a while).

What's missing from this silent movie reality is the overlay of voices within my head. You know these voices. We're all familiar with them.

"Am I going to be able to finish this post before my dance lesson? ... only got ten minutes ... That woman has an annoying laugh ... wish they'd play better music ... hey, dude, turn down your computer's speaker, can't concentrate with a You Tube video blaring in my ear."

These voices -- they're with us almost everywhere we go. Yes, they're a part of reality. But they're my reality, and your reality, not our shared reality.

This is the beauty of a silent movie. It just is what it is, no narration or interpretation required. Life is a lot simpler when the screen of consciousness we're viewing it on isn't filled with unnecessary verbiage.

Voiceovers supplied by us aren't required.

Such is the province of religion: supplying concepts and beliefs that become a obtrusive dogmatic soundtrack playing over the silent movie of unadorned reality.

Parking places downtown are scant. Ah, a car just pulled out -- right in front of the place I want to go. Praise the Lord! Or Jesus, the guru, Allah, a guardian angel. Inside his or her mind a true believer narrates an imaginative metaphysical story about a down to earth event.

I am being taken care of. How blessed it is to have a friend in _____ [fill in name of favorite divine being].

I used to enjoy hearing those sorts of voices inside my true believing head. Now, silence is more appealing.

Then I'm better able to hear reality say, What's happening is what's happening.

Getting down to rock bottom reality

I've never understood why science isn't worshiped by religious believers. After all, most religions believe that God or a higher power created the cosmos.

So seemingly the next best thing to knowing God would be knowing how our universe works, since it stands to reason that the consciousness of the creator would be reflected in the creation -- in the same way as the psyche of an artist shines through his or her paintings.

Normally my meditation nook's reading corner has several science books nestled comfortably next to spiritual and philosophical titles. I jump back and forth between them most mornings, finding each genre inspiring in its own fashion.

Recently I've been making my way through Frank Wilczek's "The Lightness of Being." He's got a Nobel Prize in Physics, a fact prominently displayed on the book's cover (can't blame him).

This was a book that sold itself via the front cover flap. I noticed it at a Salem bookstore and wondered if Wilczek had anything new to say about his subtitled subject: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces. Reading this on the flap made me get out my VISA card:

Matter is built from almost weightless units, and pure energy is the ultimate source of mass. Wilczek calls this discovery "The Lightness of Being." But he also shows us much more. Space is no mere container, empty and passive. It is a dynamic Grid -- a modern ether.

The Grid is more fundamental than any "fundamental" particle; its spontaneous activity creates and destroys particles. This new understanding of mass and "empty space" explains the puzzling feebleness of gravity and brings a gorgeous unification of all the forces of nature into sharp focus.

God! That's so beautiful. Such was my thought as I walked up to the cashier.

I was carrying a holy book. "Holy," because it was founded in reality, not dogma or superstition. Sure, science doesn't have all the answers to what the universe is made of. Wilczek makes this clear, repeatedly.

But in "The Lightness of Being" I've been learning about what is known, or at least strongly suspected, about the nature of rock bottom reality. Whether you believe that the universe came from God, the Tao, Brahma, Allah, the Big Bang, or some other source, here's the latest word on how the creative power fashioned our home.

To me, this is deeply significant.

Again, I don't see how any person of faith would want to ignore the findings of modern science, particularly physics and cosmology -- which are delving into the foundation of time, space, energy, and matter.

Namely, the basic stuff of creation. Which, as the quote above says, turns out to be energetic "nothing" that morphs into more materialistic "something," the subatomic particles that we and everything else are made of.

This isn't an easy book to read. The cover copy is the least complex writing in it. Smattered here and there, though, are observations that point to some aha's for anyone (like me) who resonates with the scientific side of Taoism and Buddhism.

For example:

Philosophical and scientific ideas about what the world is made of continue to change. Many loose ends remain in today's best world-models, and some big mysteries. Clearly the last word has not been spoken. But we know a lot too -- enough to draw some surprising conclusions that go beyond piecemeal facts.

They address, and offer some answers to, questions that have traditionally been regarded as belonging to philosophy or even theology.

For natural philosophy, the most important lesson we learn from QCD [quantum chromodynamics] is that what we perceive as empty space is in reality a powerful medium whose activity molds the world.

...So: What is the world made of? Subject, as ever, to addition and correction, here is the multifaceted answer that modern physics provides:

--The primary ingredient of physical reality, from which all else is formed, fills space and time.
--Every fragment, each space-time element, has the same basic properties as every other fragment.
--The primary ingredient of reality is alive with quantum activity. Quantum activity has special characteristics. It is spontaneous and unpredictable. And to observe quantum activity, you must disturb it.
--The primary ingredient of reality also contains enduring material components. These make the cosmos a multilayered, multicolored superconductor.
--The primary ingredient of reality contains a metric field that gives space-time rigidity and causes gravity.
--The primary ingredient of reality weighs, with a universal density.

OK, I admit it: not many people are going to find those words as inspiring as what leaves the mouth of their preacher, rabbi, guru, or other religious teacher.

But they are to me. In fact, they're even more inspirational. Because they're based on reality, not imagination.

Emptiness is fine with me as the "primary ingredient of reality." (Not that I have any choice in the matter, or non-matter.) There's no warm and fuzzy personal God in science's foundational view of the cosmos.

But there's beauty. Here's Wilczek in one of his more poetic moments:

Beneath the familiar, sober appearances of enduring matter in empty space, our minds envision the dance of intricate patterns within a pervasive, ever-present, effervescent medium...Our substance is the hum of a strange music, a mathematical music more precise and complex than a Bach fugue, the Music of the Grid.

Through patchy clouds, off in the distance, we seem to glimpse a mathematical Paradise, where the elements that build reality shed their dross. Correcting for the distortions of our everyday vision, we create in our minds a vision of what they might really be: pure and ideal, symmetric, equal, and perfect.

Or have our imaginations made too much of a wispy chimera? We point our telescope, and wait for the clouds to clear.