Church of the Churchless

Commenting quandary

Between my two blogs, I've accumulated about two million page views over the years. That's a lot.

With all of this activity, only a few people have been persistent obnoxious commenters. Most blog visitors understand that leaving a comment on a blog post is a privilege, not a right.

They respect the purpose of a blog, are appropriately courteous to other commenters, and don't abuse the complimentary free speech offered to them (meaning, I pay money, and put quite a bit of time, into maintaining this blog so that visitors can freely share ideas).

It's a quandary when some commenter acts like a jerk. Many, if not most, blogs face this problem at some point. Some bloggers moderate comments, not posting them until they've been reviewed.

I've been reluctant to do that, because it interferes with the free flow of communication. Plus, when I visit a blog, I like to see my comment posted immediately -- and I assume most other people feel the same way.

However, it also concerns me when people get bothered by an obnoxious commenter. Often I'm not able to delete unacceptable comments immediately. So they may stay up a while, hate-filled, profane, and insulting as they may be.

Recently Obnoxious Commenter #1 has been Ashy Heller of Cape Town, South Africa, who posts under other names, such as Joshilan. He is a long-time initiate of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, and apparently feels that he is honoring his guru (who I assume is Charan Singh) with his often obscene "defenses" of Sant Mat principles.

I believe in free speech. But not in unfettered hate speech. So I'm curious about how other people would prefer to handle comment abusers like Ashy Heller. Here's my suggestion (if you don't agree, leave a comment with your own ideas):

Ignore him, if you come across a comment that hasn't been deleted yet. I'd rather preserve free commenting speech for other blog visitors, than control Ashy's rants 100% by moderating all comments.

As I've noted before, my feeling is that when someone spews hate-filled language and insults, they are censoring themselves -- because no one takes them seriously. What people like Ashy want is to be noticed, and unfortunately I'm having to do just that at the moment in talking about my commenting quandary.

But if people don't respond to Ashy's rants -- or those of anyone else who spews non-sensical garbage rather than engaging in forthright discussion -- this is the most appropriate reaction to inappropriate behavior.

Anyway, I'm with those who like open courteous discussion of interesting subjects. I'll keep on doing my best to keep habitual obnoxious commenters from using this blog as their soapbox.

If you come across comments you don't like, there's a simple solution: ignore them. Then light a candle of considered discourse rather than cursing the ranting darkness. That's how I see things, at least.

"Cosmic Connection" review: a fresh take on channeling

I'm not a believer in mediums or channeling. But I'm open to the possibility of tapping into some sort of cosmic consciousness that is way beyond the bounds of everyday human awareness.

So when a publicist for Carole Lynne, who wrote "Cosmic Connection: Messages for a Better World," asked me in an email if I'd be willing to read the book and write a review, I replied "sure."

Free books attract me. Plus, an overview of Cosmic Connection said that Lynne felt that she was tapping into an impersonal consciousness, not the psyches of departed souls.

That makes more sense to me than the typical claims of mediums.

I've been to one medium, an experience I blogged about here. I came away with some insights, particularly about how I deal with the genetic and psychological influences of my father's strong "dark side" (a.k.a. Darth Vader'dom).  But I didn't end up believing that any dead relatives had been communicating with me.

I enjoyed Cosmic Connection, though my skeptical side kept wondering, as I read transcripts of Lynne's channeling sessions, "What evidence is there that this is true?"

A big plus for me, though, is that Lynne repeatedly asks the same question. In her introduction she says:

The spiritual experiences I write about in this book are personal, and there is no way to verify them. ... As a teacher of spirituality and spirit communication, I make it very clear to my students that no matter what I say at any given moment, I may change my mind in the future.

The doubts and questions that I have about my spiritual experiences are the same feelings that my students and many readers may have.

Nice. I also liked:

We have been brainwashed to disbelieve our spiritual experiences. We have been taught that the only way to have spiritual experiences is through the guidance of a religious authority figure, such as a minister, priest, or guru.

My wife, an eminently sensible and grounded person, believes in the possibility of channeling disembodied souls. She is a member of Ron Scolastico's study group. Scolastico goes into a receptive state, is asked questions, and then answers as a higher consciousness -- all of which is shared with members via CDs.

Lynne's book mostly is a description of similar sessions. At first she calls the source of what comes through her, My Guidance.

Eventually it manifested to her in a form that made her change the name to My Energy. Here's some of what it said to her/through her.

We are an energy. We are a stream of light. We are a speck of energy that then explodes and becomes many more. We are not people. We are not creatures. We are energy, vibration. To use the word we does not really work. 

...We are not just with her [Lynne]. We are everywhere. We are creative energy; we are sustained imagination and creativity.

...We are not spirit guides in the way that you think of it.

...If you can try not to personify the Energy, you will be closer to what it is.

...There are many great spiritual leaders that have lived that were people who survive in spirit. But that is not who we are. We are not Jesus. We are not Mohammad. We are not any of those spiritual leaders because we have never lived a human life. And yet you know that we are there when you open to the presence.

The Energy gave Lynne and her channeling associates some lessons in grammar and proper word usage: no pronouns!

So before we can really proceed, the idea of a "you," of a "we," of an "I," of a "me," as any kind of personified being has to be let go of as it is very difficult for us to converse.

...If this energy flows through the channel, she has to put into her own words because we do not even speak in words. We do not speak; we are not "we."

I give Carole Lynne a big thumbs-up for her ability and willingness to examine her mediumship through fresh eyes. Summing up a session with The Energy, she writes:

But it was extremely disconcerting for all of us attending the session to hear that sometimes when we feel we are communicating with individual guides, we are actually creating their images with our imagination. Those of us in the room were faced with a deep fear that we had had for many years: "Are we imagining our guides?"

Having written a couple of books that fall into the narrow non-best-selling category of "too scholarly to be popular, and too popular to be scholarly," I resonate with Lynne's Cosmic Connection -- which struck me as too questioning to be loved by true believers in channeling, yet also reflects a strong belief in channeling that won't be loved by questioning types.

Well, it's better to be honest than to sell lots of books (best of all, of course, is to do both).

If someone is open to the possibility of connecting with a wordless cosmic consciousness that speaks (imprecisely) through people, he or she likely will enjoy this book.

There's no doubt in my mind that Carole Lynne is a sincere, open, generous seeker of truth. That comes through on every page of her book. And, her You Tube video.

Her main message: find your own truth. I heartily endorse that advice.

While many equally useful spiritual paths have teachers who give initiations to their students, not every soul on earth is meant to join a spiritual organization or follow a guru. Some souls are in need of another kind of path.

...On the Path of Direct Initiation there is no authority figure to make decisions about when the student is ready to receive an initiation and take the next step on the spiritual path. The student has to develop an inner knowing and a relationship with the Divine Consciousness that allows him or her to know when a direct initiation has occurred.

In fact, the student may not even call this spiritual event an initiation. No label is necessary. The student will just know that he or she has walked through another spiritual door and is closer to Divine Consciousness than before.

Atheists coming out of the skeptical closet

Good news. We need counterweights to this country's out-of-balance religiosity.

Why we believe in God

Thanks to Pharyngula, I've got a better understanding of the neurological and psychological reasons people believe in gods. (And it isn't because God is real, that's for sure.)

The preceding link will lead you to a 54 minute You Tube video by Andy Thompson, a psychiatrist who is knowledgeable about how our evolutionary origins are reflected in modern psyches.

I'll also embed the video at the end of this post. I watched/listened to it in pieces over the past few days, turning the volume up on my laptop as I made a meal in the kitchen. Here's a couple of my favorite lines (probably not quoted exactly):

We are risen apes, not fallen angels.
Secular morality means doing what's right regardless of what we've been told; religious morality means doing what we've been told regardless of whether it's right.

Thompson PowerPoints his way through some fascinating research, which I won't try to describe in any detail. His basic notion, which is well supported by facts, is that religious belief is a byproduct of evolutionary adaptations.

This makes more sense than the theory that humans somehow are "hard-wired" to believe in God, in the same sense that we have an inherent desire for fats, sugars, and such -- which are needed for survival (and as Thompson notes, now makes people lust for a Big Mac rather than lean game meat).

Instead, adaptations that offered up an evolutionary advantage naturally predispose people to believe in metaphysical beings. For example, the capacity to know that other humans have intentions, just as we do.

This allows us to think, "If I do this, probably Joe will do that." We don't need to be in direct contact with Joe to have a sense of him, including his willfulness.

It's then not much of a leap to imagine that a being we've imagined, God, also has desires, intentions, and such -- just like us. Thompson says that God's humanness is evident in the dogmas of every theistic religion, which attribute the mental states of Homo sapiens to divinity.

For this reason, and others described in the video, religious belief is the default human condition. It is cognitively harder to reach a state of disbelief, which explains why most people embrace some form of religion.

In a Q and A session, Thompson was asked why some -- including the people who were drawn to attend his presentation -- are able to avoid falling into the default "I believe in God" mode.

His answer will please the churchless: the more educated and intelligent someone is, the more likely it is that he or she will be able to overcome the cognitive biases that most people take for granted.

Makes sense.

I've always wondered why religions so often say that "simple folks" are more attuned to God. What this really means is that uneducated gullible people are more likely to accept dogmas uncritically than question them.

I blogged so much about a book I liked a lot, "The Ego Tunnel," because it also showed how science is casting new light on how the human mind creates its own realities -- including a belief in God.

Thompson said that we are on the threshold of a comprehensive neuroscience of religion. He feels that this will deepen the conflict between science and religion.

That's fine. Reality has got to win out in the end.

Truth is more powerful than fiction, even though the Dark Ages -- along with much else in human history -- showed that religious belief is capable of holding back progress in our understanding of ourselves and the cosmos.

What's exciting now is how much we're learning about how the brain learns, including our inherent tendencies to believe in unrealities. Like, a personal God who is us writ large.

Gazing over the edge of reality

Yesterday I got a request emailed to me:

I was wondering if you could perhaps write one of your essays about "impermanence" or "nothingness" to stimulate some more positive and philosophical responses and discussions.

Glad to oblige.

When I read this I thought of Anaïs Nin, who wrote erotic and pornographic narratives in the 1940s for a dollar a page. The difference between her and me is that I pay for the privilege of writing on this blog. And my musings aren't nearly as stimulating.

Anyway, since I was thirteen I've loved to ponder nothingness. What we don't know, the vast darkness between the scattered stars of knowledge, exerts a powerful pull.

Last night I was in bed reading The New Yorker before going to sleep. Coming across this cartoon, I knew it had to be part of the next day's blog post.

A guy sits in his chair on the edge of a cliff. His wife (I assume) says, "If you want a positive outlook, you're going to have to turn your chair around, Walter."

No Walter, don't do it! Stay where you are!

That void you're staring into is where it's at. (Don't pin me down as to what "it's" and "at" mean -- they're part of the void, so who knows?)

So much of everyday life is devoted to stepping back from the edge of existence. Religions encourage this, even though lots of people mistakenly consider that religiosity involves jumping into the unknown.

Not true.

If someone claims to know what happens after we die, don't believe them. If they're alive and able to engage in claiming, they're not dead. So they've got no experience of what they're talking about.

Death is the deepest and most mysterious void each of us is going to dive into one day. Religious dogmas, like the guy's wife, do their best to turn us around from it.

They promise salvation, resurrection, reincarnation, soul travels, heaven -- all sorts of afterlife goodies to make us forget the empty plate that will stare us in the face at our last breath.

I used to eagerly imbibe those promises that this life is but a foretaste of eternity yet to come. But now I'm a lot like Walter: I enjoy looking into the void. I don't have much of a desire to fill it with imaginings anymore.

Death is real. Keeping this in mind doesn't feel negative to me; if I turned my chair around I don't see how that would produce a positive outlook.

Because the older I get, and the more churchless I become, the greater is my wonder, appreciation, and sense of awe that I'm anything at all.

So far as I know, I was Nothing before I was born and I'll be Nothing after I'm dead (nothing conscious or aware, at least). Yet here I am, in between a huge freaking mass of nothingness, Something!

It hardly matters what I am, or what I'm doing, or how I feel about my being and doings. Whenever I want to, and also sometimes unbidden, I'm struck by a feeling that this moment, right here and right now, never will come again.

Thus, it is infinitely precious. I've traded a promise of infinite life for the reality of experiencing this moment as infinity.

Which wouldn't be possible if I'd continued to step back from the edge of death's cliff and believed that I had plenty of time to experience life, because I wasn't going to die when my body did.

This is hard to put into words. If I wasn't me, I'd have trouble understanding what I'm saying. I don't expect you to. What I feel directly can't be transported through verbiage into someone else's psyche.

All I'm doing is pointing to something that seems not at all unique to me, because I've read many descriptions of similar sentiments in mystic, philosophical, and spiritual writings (Taoism and Zen being my current favorites).

This. Now. 

It's astounding. Incomparable. Priceless. Fleeting. Never to be had again.

Don't look away from it. The seeing draws you to the edge of existence, where loose pebbles of so many kinds (head-on car crash, runaway cancer, sudden heart attack) could cast us into the void.

For now, we're in the easy chair of bodily existence. Staring at every moment at what won't be visible when our moments here on Earth end.

What a gift. There's no need to believe in a Giver to whom we extend our appreciation. Saying Yes! to each instant is thanks enough: to nothing.

Enlightenment through sex

Sex and spirit start (in English) with the same sinuous letter. But otherwise most people feel that they aren't, well, bedfellows.

Spirituality usually is considered to have something to do with rising above, or beyond, carnal desires, while sexuality is all about down and dirty bodily goings on (and pumpings out).

But the current issue of EnlightenNext magazine focused on the relationship between sex and spirituality. Per usual, the articles came to a predictable conclusion that nonduality is the key to understanding (the magazine is a sometimes annoying mouthpiece for Ken Wilber's philosophy).

I enjoyed learning what's happening in the world of sexual enlightenment. The One Taste movement is on the cutting edge of orgasmic satori.

In a world of separation, OneTaste is about connection. We provide tools for intimacy in everyday life. Going to the root of experience, OneTaste integrates the principles of mindfulness with the practice of sexuality: mindful sexuality. By nourishing and including this basic and essential part of life, we discover richer relationships, an embodied sense of self and the uncompromised feeling of wholeness.

Orgasmic meditation sounds a whole lot more fun that the variety I've been practicing (meditation, I mean).

Orgasmic meditation is a technique that develops mindfulness, concentration, connectedness and insight in a paired practice that focuses on sensation generated through manual stimulation of the genitals. Core orgasmic meditation techniques are simple forms within a timed framework that allow practitioners to extend the deep interior states associated with meditation into the arena of human connection. This can facilitate greater physical and mental health, deeper connection to relationship and for some, a method for spiritual aims.

A New Age pickup line can't be far away: "Hey, baby, want to come back to my place and help me achieve enlightenment?"

The most intriguing article in the issue was about David Deida, though. Some feel he is a disturbing guy who encourages pick-up artists in the "seduction community." I don't know if that is true. I did find quite a bit to like in his philosophizing.

Here's an excerpt from Ross Robertson's piece in EnlightenNext:

Consciousness, as Deida describes throughout his work, is the masculine pole -- stoic, penetrating, unperturbable, and instinctually capable of ripping the feminine open to God. Light, on the other hand, is the feminine -- hot, passionate, beguiling, ultimately desirous of being ravished open to the brink of ecstatic madness.

Men tend to have a stronger masculine essence, he explains, and women a stronger feminine, but it doesn't really matter which partner assumes which side of the polarity in the end.

The main thing, according to him, is not to suppress this masculine-feminine, ravisher-ravishee dynamic for the sake of equality but to embrace it as the root a relationship's authenticity and interpersonal magnetism.

This rings true to me. Integrating male and female energies is a foundation of ballroom dance, as I wrote about in a Tao of Tango post.

It also is the essence of Tai Chi, which blends yin and yang throughout its movements (here's a photo I took yesterday of my instructor, Warren, and a classmate, Dave, playing at push hands).

But there's a difference between "masculine/feminine" and "dominance/submission." In ballroom dance men lead and women follow. However, this is entirely voluntary, unforced, natural (mostly, at least).

In a guru-disciple relationship, by contrast, often there is more than a little tinge of master-slave roles, as I showed in this post. This is part of the reason why I didn't feel comfortable with all the talk of "surrendering to the beloved guru" when I was an active member of an Indian spiritual organization.

The guru even is called "Master." Admittedly, this also is done in martial arts schools, among other places. But not with the same fawning submission or uncritical acceptance of someone else's orders.

David Deida seems to recognize the inherent powerful polarity of masculine/feminine energies that can be experienced outside of conventional religiosity. Having a decided existential streak myself, I resonated with this passage in the article.

If you're not yet familiar with his work, his irreverence and immodesty are part of what of what has made his voice so fashionable within the growing community of seekers looking to transcend both the taboos and formalities of traditional religious worldviews and the bland sensitivity of your average politically correct, spiritual nice guy.

His basic philosophy -- that God and sex, death and life, consciousness and energy are all part of one divine play, and you never know when you might be run over by a truck or struck down by lightning, so now is the time to worship at the altar of life, love, and orgasm as if this was your last day on earth -- has garnered him a great deal of attention over the last decade.

On his website I browsed through some free chapters from Deida's books, including "Stop hoping for a completion of anything in life." Right on.

It's never going to be over, so stop waiting for the good stuff. As of now, spend a minimum of one hour a day doing whatever you are waiting to do until your finances are more secure, or until the children have grown and left home, or until you have finished your obligations and you feel free to do what you really want to do. Don't wait any longer. Don't believe in the myth of "one day when everything will be different." Do what you love to do, what you are waiting to do, what you've been born to do, now.

I also enjoyed "Unclench as if asleep," where Deida talks about the fear that underlies, to one degree or another, most people's lives. Then I listened to "How to party," an important subject that gets short shrift in most religions.

At the end of that talk he says that nothing matters is masculine, and everything matters is feminine. Yet masculinity also is presence (heaviness, mass), while femininity is love (opening to the universe).

In the end, there's no end. To sex, spirituality, exploring the mysteries. Just jump in. And do it.

Laying bare how the ego tunnel is dug

Nobody is directly in touch with reality. Every human digs his or her own ego tunnel through the experiential world.

This is one of the central messages of Thomas Metzinger's fascinating book, "The Ego Tunnel." A blend of philosophy and neuroscience, I finished reading it a few days ago. Liked the book a lot. Haven't been able to blog much about anything else since I started it.

Being a big Stephen Colbert fan, understanding how the ego tunnel works puts a new spin on "truthiness."

Things that a person claims to know intuitively or "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.

Religious beliefs, of course, are truthiness writ large. Dogmas are held to be true because they feel so right, so real, so directly experienced.

Such is the illusion of the ego tunnel.

Metzinger lays bare how evolution has made the processes by which the tunnel is constructed transparent to us, in somewhat the same way as the brain is how we sense reality, but we can't subjectively sense the brain itself (surgeons can operate on it without anesthesia since neurons don't sense pain).

What's new now are the breakthroughs in human understanding of how humans understand. The walls of the ego tunnel are beginning to include scientific pictures of the walls of the ego tunnel.

Our inherent bias toward truthiness is being reflected back upon itself, providing a truer image of reality. Not completely undistorted -- such likely is impossible, ontologically -- but much clearer.

Neuroscience is linking up with philosophy. We're getting intriguing glimpses into what the meaning of human life could be like when it's stripped of egregious religious, metaphysical, mystical, and other-worldly fantasies.

Again, almost certainly we can't ever get down to the bare bedrock of reality. But standing on firm ground is much preferable to wallowing around in the muck of unchallenged truthiness.

Belief, religious or otherwise, is fine. We just need to recognize that beliefs are part of the ego tunnel, as is every sort of experience, and aren't unvarnished truth.

No one gets all that excited over a debate about whether vanilla ice cream is better than chocolate. We recognize that this is a personal preference, a question best left to the arbiter of individual taste buds.

If religious preferences were looked at in the same way, the world would be a lot more accommodating, non-fundamentalist, non-judgmental, and relaxed about the Big Questions of Life.

Wars, real or cultural, aren't fought over what sort of ice cream people like.

The problem, Metzinger points out, is that the neuroscientific workings of the ego tunnel aren't understood by most people -- not even those in "advanced" countries like the United States.

Our science is 21st century. Our everyday experience of the world is still 1st century, by and large.

Meaning, most of us believe, as did most of the ancients, that how we see the world is how the world is. We uncritically accept what appears on the walls of our own ego tunnel as being True, god damn it, and if anyone disagrees with that, well, they're mistaken!

Facing facts can be difficult. Even scary. What if this physical life is all there is? What if God is just an idea in people's brains? What if when we die, that's it? Finito.

I like what Metzinger had to say in his closing pages:

Many fear that through the naturalistic turn in our image of mind, we will lose our dignity. "Dignity" is a term that is notoriously hard to define -- and usually it appears when its proponents have run out of arguments.

However, there is one clear sense, which has to do with respecting oneself and others -- namely the unconditional will to self-knowledge, veracity, and facing the facts. Dignity is the refusal to humiliate oneself by simply looking the other way or escaping to some metaphysical Disneyland.

If we do have something like dignity, we can demonstrate this fact by the way we confront the challenges to come, some of which have been sketched out in this book.

We could face the historical transition in our image of ourselves creatively and with a will to clarity. It is also clear how we could lose our dignity: by clinging to the past, by developing a culture of denial, and by sliding back into the various forms of irrationalism and fundamentalism.

...Unless the interests of others are directly threatened, people ought to be free to explore their own minds and design their own conscious reality-models according to their wishes, needs, and beliefs.

Developing a consciousness culture has nothing to do with establishing a religion or a particular political agenda. On the contrary, a true consciousness culture will always be subversive, by encouraging individuals to take responsibility for their own lives.

The current lack of a genuine consciousness culture is a social expression of the fact that the philosophical project of enlightenment has become stuck: What we lack is not faith but knowledge.

"I Hate Church of the Churchless!" blog

Wow, I"d be really upset with the jerk who just started up an I Hate Church of the Churchless! blog...if that guy wasn't me.

I spent as much time, effort, and money on this new anti-blog as it seemed to demand. Namely, about 30 minutes, not much, and zero (respectively).

I'm expecting -- no, demanding -- that those who want to rant about the uselessness of churchless discussions, and/or insult me, post their comments over on I Hate Church of the Churchless!

There's no reason to clog up comment conversations on this blog with that stuff.

I can't understand why someone takes the time to visit a blog, read what's on it, and then write a complaint that says, basically: "This blog is stupid!"

I always think: Well, if it is so stupid, what are you doing visiting it, reading it, and commenting on it? Isn't it stupid to pay so much attention to stupidity?

Anyway...I feel bad when a Church of the Churchless hater uses up their store of creative insults on a lengthy comment that ends up being deleted. I've rescued some of these and started I Hate Church of the Churchless! off with a good sampling of rants.

From now on, unhappy fundamentalists, use that blog for your complaints. Click on the link in the right sidebar, in the "Welcome" section, and you'll be transported to hateful heaven.

Thanks in advance from your churchless unpastor.

Choose reality, not religion

If you could be hooked up to an "Experience Machine" that keeps you in a state of permanent happiness (or take a drug with the same effect) would you do it?

I came across this intriguing question in Thomas Metzinger's "The Ego Tunnel," a book that I've been blogging about recently. This thought experiment was suggested by Robert Nozick.

Metzinger says:

Interestingly, Nozick found that most people would not opt to spend the rest of their lives hooked up to such a machine. The reason is that most of us do not value bliss as such, but want it grounded in truth, virtue, artistic achievement, or some sort of higher good. That is, we would want our bliss to be justified.

...He [Nozick] insisted that we would not want sheer happiness alone if there no actual contact with a deeper reality -- even though the subjective experience of it can in principle be simulated.

When I first read this, I wasn't sure what my choice would be. I took a lot of psychedelic drugs in my youth, being the baby boomer that I am (as the saying goes, "if you remember the '60s, you weren't there").

So, like most of us, I've got a strong leaning toward if it feels good, do it.

On the other hand, I enjoyed those psychedelic experiences because they weren't permanent. The first time I took LSD, another guy and I became convinced that we were permanently crazy. It wasn't a pleasant feeling. The best spin we could put on it was, "Crazy isn't so bad."

But what if we were in a permanent blissed-out state and didn't have any way of remembering what had gotten us into it? This would be the Experience Machine.

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want that. I can't say for sure, because some circumstances -- like being in severe intractable pain -- probably would make me want the suffering to go away, no matter the existential cost.

On the whole, though, I think Nozick is correct.

We humans are meaning-seeking creatures. We want our happiness to be grounded in reality, though we're perfectly willing to take temporary excursions into la-la land via drugs, alcohol, imaginings, movies, fictional books, and such.

Religion also. There's no problem with embracing religious fantasies that make us feel good, so long as we keep in mind what opiate we imbibed.

However, many true believers end up plugging themselves so strongly into the Experience Machine of religious dogma that they forget a crucial fact: their blissful feelings of divinity are being cranked out by their brain's fantasy generator.

Nothing wrong with this. Like Janis Joplin sang, "Feeling good was good enough for me."

But is feeling good good enough, when it isn't grounded in reality? This was one of the first questions I asked myself when I started this blog in 2004. Then, as now, for me genuine faith isn't blind at all.

Which is why I prefer reality over religion. This is some of what I said back then -- pretty much the same conclusion Robert Novick came to.

Here's how to tell the difference between true faith and false faith: Imagine that you are standing in the middle of a bare windowless room. Two doors lead out of the room. Both are closed, but can be opened with a turn of the doorknob. The doors are marked with signs that describe what awaits on the other side: (A) Reality, (B) Belief

After you open a door, you have to walk through it. The door then will shut and you never will be able to leave the place you have entered. Choose Reality and you will know things as they really are, from top to bottom of the cosmos. You will know whether or not God exists and, if so, the nature of this ultimate divinity. You will know whether death is the final end of your existence or if it is the beginning of another form of life. You will know whether there is a meaning to the universe beyond what human beings ascribe to it.

Or, choose Belief and you will know only what lies within the confines of your current suppositions about the nature of the cosmos. For the rest of your life you will be confident that what you believe to be true, really is. Any evidence to the contrary will not make an impact on your mind. You will remain doubt-free, faithful to the beliefs you now hold about God, creation, life, death, and the purpose of human existence.

Which door would you choose to walk through?

Before answering, consider carefully the potential ramifications of your choice. Reality is an unknown, a mystery. It could be frightening or fabulous, painful or pleasurable, warmly loving or coldly uncaring. Do you want to embrace absolutely real reality? Or would you rather hold on to your beliefs about what is real?

Someone with the type of faith extolled by the Church of the Churchless would unhesitatingly choose Door A and boldly stride into Reality. For their faith is not in anything particular, but is a faith that truth can be known, should be known, and, indeed, must be known.

Maybe "Is" is all there really is

Everybody has a different idea about what reality is really like. Religions, philosophies, mystical teachings, belief systems -- the only thing universally agreed upon is that something is real.

Yet what if every experience of reality, including every conception of reality, leads us in a direction that isn't real?

Like many people, I have a fondness for "Holy fuck!!!" movies. (Example: The Sixth Sense)

I call them that because this is what I say when the ending is so shocking, so upside down from what has come before, so mind-blowing, that the cozy world of understanding that I've created inside my brain is blown to bits.

My bet -- and naturally this is all it is, an intuitive hunch -- is that if humans are capable of comprehending ultimate reality, the realization would turn out to be a lot more like a wild Holy fuck!!! than a calm As I suspected.

I termed this "something else entirely" in a "You're religious, but are you right?" post. Lots of belief systems assert that final truth is mysterious, ineffable, beyond words, incapable of being captured by human cognition.

Yet I don't get from them that disorienting, yet strangely exhilarating, feeling that a genuine something else entirely experience blasts into my psyche.

The following excerpt from Thomas Metzinger's "The Ego Tunnel" had that quality for me. Of course, I'm me and you're you. (Or so it seems...) So you might yawn at what elicits a Wow! from me.

This is good writing. And good philosophizing. Metzinger's eliminative phenomenalism seemingly is akin, if not identical, to other similar notions in Eastern and Western philosophies.

But the way he expressed himself here gave me a fresh Holy fuck!!! experience of the notion that pure consciousness is all there is.

Which means that Is could be what really is.

Read on.

On waking up twice

How do we know the difference between dreaming and waking life? Dreams seem real while we're immersed in them. So does everyday existence.

When we wake up from a dream, how do we know this isn't still part of the dream? I love Thomas Metzinger's telling of a twice-waking tale in his book, "The Ego Tunnel," which I blogged about before.

But before getting to that... a tale of my own.

Yesterday I sat down in Salem's Court Street Starbucks with a grande Pike Place in one hand and my laptop knapsack in the other. I fired up my MacBook and checked email, listening with half my attention to eight or so guys having a coffee house meeting.

"God" kept floating into my ear canal. Pretty soon it became evident that this was some sort of Christian men's group. The leader asked a new member to speak his mind.

Which had to do with how he was sure that God was giving him messages to do this or that -- join the group was part of it, I believe. He was convinced that these divine signs weren't coincidences. I couldn't follow the details and still peruse my emails.

The men were just a few feet away from me. I was the only other person in that section of the Starbucks store. I felt like an alien visitor to Earth listening to a conversation that would sound freakily weird on my world.

Except, when I got in my car and drove away I started to think about all the weird coffee house conversations that I've had over many years.

I've sat around with friends who believed as I did -- that we were initiated by a guru, God in human form, who now resides within our head in his subtle spiritual form and is going to accompany us through vast mysterious higher realms of consciousness, taking care of our karmas along the way, bringing into our lives exactly what is needed to break the cycle of reincarnations that have kept us being reborn as animals, plants, insects, and god knows what else for countless eons.

Yet I had just been sipping my coffee and typing away on my laptop, feeling a sense of relief (and also, I have to admit, superiority) that now I wasn't enchained by ridiculous dogmas like those Christian guys were.

As if I, or they, have any choice in what we believe. Or not believe. Metzinger writes:

Probably most professional philosophers in the field [of physical underpinnings of actions and of conscious free will] would hold that given your body, the state of your brain, and your specific environment, you could not act differently from the way you're acting now -- that your actions are predetermined, as it were.

...This is a widely shared view: It is, simply, the scientific worldview. The current state of the physical universe always determines the next state of the universe, and your brain is a part of this universe.

Sure, I've been doing some waking up. Not because I stood outside of myself, watching my brain dream religious fantasies, and then turning on some sort of Enlightenment Alarm Clock.

No, I've just been cruising along inside my ego tunnel, as we all are, doing whatever, however, whenever.

I feel more awake now. But how do I know what is "waking"? How does anybody?

Here's Metzinger's story about waking up twice. A lot of food for thought here. (And another blog post, I'm pretty sure.) OBE stands for "out-of-body experience."

---------------------------
"During the night of May 6, 1986, I became consciously aware that I was sleeping and also spiraling out of my physical body, in the typical manner described by Swiss biochemist Ernst Waelti (see chapter 3). Here is my 'case study'.

Standing in front of my bed, I immediately realized that, for the first time in two years, I had entered the OBE state again. The clarity, the same electrified sense of lightness in my double body, made me excited and extremely happy, and I immediately began to experiment.

I moved toward the closed glass door of the second-floor balcony in my parents' house. I touched the door, gently pushing it until I penetrated it and slid out onto the balcony. I flew down into the garden and landed on the lawn, where I moved about in the dim moonlight and looked at things. Again, the whole experience was crystal clear.

When I became afraid of not being able to sustain the condition much longer, I flew back up, somehow returned to my physical body, and awoke with a mixture of great pride and joy. I had not managed to make any verifiable observations, but I had had another OBE, in a clear, cognitively lucid way, fully controlled and without any intermediary blackouts. I sat up, wanting to take notes as long as everything was still fresh, but couldn't find a pencil.

I jumped out of bed and went over to my sister (who slept in the same room), woke her up, and told her, with great excitement, that I had just managed to do it again, that I had just been down in the garden, bouncing around on the lawn a minute ago.

My sister looked at her alarm clock and said, "Man, it's quarter to three! Why did you have to wake me up? Can't this wait until breakfast? Turn out the light and leave me alone!" She turned over and went back to sleep. I was a bit disappointed at this lack of interest.

I also noticed that while fumbling with the alarm clock, she had accidentally set it off. It was beeping away and I hoped it hadn't wakened anybody else. Too late! I could hear someone approaching.

At that moment, I woke up. I was not upstairs in my parents' house in Frankfurt but in my basement room, in the house I shared with four friends about thirty-five kilometers away. It was not quarter to three at night; the sun was shining and I had obviously been taking a short afternoon nap.

For more than five minutes, I sat on the edge of my bed almost frozen, not daring to move. I was unsure how real this situation was. I did not understand what had just happened to me. I didn't dare move, because I was afraid I might wake up again, into yet another ultrarealistic environment.

In dream research, this is a well-known phenomenon called false awakening."
---------------------------

Stuck in "The Ego Tunnel" without a self

Take a guess: was the following written by (A) a Zen master, or (B) a philosopher of neuroscience?

In this book, I will try to convince you that there is no such thing as a self. Contrary to what most people believe, nobody has ever been or had a self.

Here's the answer.

Thomas Metzinger has a great title, "Director of the Theoretical Philosophy Group at the Department of Philosophy of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany." He's also head of a Neurophilosophy Section there.

Not surprisingly, Metzinger is capable of writing some pretty involved stuff -- such as this summary of a previous book, "Being No One."
Download Being No One

I browsed that precis until I got to some lines that I could understand. Or at least, believe that I understood. (SMT stands for Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity.)

First, it is important to understand the central ontological claim put forward by SMT: No such things as selves exist in the world. For all scientific and philosophical purposes, the notion of a self – as a theoretical entity – can be safely eliminated. What we have been calling "the" self in the past is not a substance, an unchangeable essence or a thing (i.e., an "individual" in the sense of philosophical metaphysics), but a very special kind of representational content: The content of a self-model that cannot be recognized as a model by the system using it.

Metzinger's new book is "The Ego Tunnel." Thankfully, it makes the same basic points as "Being No One," but in a more readable fashion (it's billed as his first popular book aimed at general readers).

A few chapters in, I'm enjoying it.

I hesitated before ordering "The Ego Tunnel" from Amazon after reading a review in New Scientist. The reviewer's big criticism was that no reputable neuroscientist believes in the "self," so Metzinger was tearing down a straw man.

OK. But most people do believe they have a self -- some mysterious ineffable essence, often termed soul, that inhabits their bodies and survives physical death.

Metzinger debunks this notion with philosophical precision, grounding his arguments in solid neuroscience. After the sentences I began with, he goes on to say:

But it is not just that the modern philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience together are about to shatter the myth of the self. It has now become clear that we will never solve the philosophical problem of consciousness -- that is, how it can arise in the brain, which is a purely physical object -- if we don't come to terms with this simple proposition: that to the best of our current knowledge there is no thing, no indivisible entity, that is us, neither in the brain nor in some metaphysical realm beyond this world. So when we speak of conscious experience as a subjective phenomenon, what is the entity having these experiences?

I haven't read far enough to fully understand Metzinger's answer to that question.

Since elsewhere he's said, "Strictly speaking, nobody is ever born and nobody ever dies," I'm pretty sure he's going to say that the entity I call me is No One (good guess, since that's in the title of his previous book).

The New Scientist reviewer thought the ego tunnel is a "forgetable metaphor." Well, I like it. This isn't a new idea, that our brains selectively pick out bits and pieces of information which become conscious experience, but Metzinger explains it clearly:

This is why it is a tunnel: What we see and hear, or what we feel and smell and taste, is only a small fraction of what actually exists out there. Our conscious model of reality is a low-dimensional projection of the inconceivably richer physical reality surrounding and sustaining us... Therefore, the ongoing process of conscious experience is not so much an image of reality as a tunnel through reality.

Humbling. 

Yet we have excessive self-confidence in what appears on the walls of our ego tunnel (including the mistaken notion that a "self" is doing the observing) because it isn't possible to recognize the process by which the tunnel is being dug.

So my ego tunnel seems absolutely real to me, as does yours to you, and we end up arguing about our subjective representations of reality, each of us wanting our own ego tunnel to be considered as really real -- failing to understand that, in Metzinger's words, "We see only what our reality tunnel allows us to see, and most of us are completely unaware of this fact."

This doesn't mean, though, that reality is entirely subjective. I can't claim that I grasp everything Metzinger is saying here, but I like his concluding simple idea.

To form a successful theory of consciousness, we must match first-person phenomenal content to third-person brain content. We must somehow reconcile the inner perspective of the experiencing self with the outside perspective of science.

And there will always be many of us who intuitively think this can never be done. Many people think consciousness is ontologically irreducible (as philosophers say), because first-person facts cannot be reduced to third-person facts. It is more likely, however, that consciousness is epistemically irreducible (as philosophers say).

The idea is simple: One reality, one kind of fact, but two kinds of knowledge: first-person knowledge and third-person knowledge. Even though consciousness is a physical process, these two different forms of knowing can never be conflated.

Knowing every last thing about a person's brain states will never allow us to know what they are like for the person herself.

Reality is subjective. Reality is objective. One reality, two ways of knowing it. That idea resolves a lot of knotty philosophical and metaphysical problems.

As does the idea that there is no self. My self, or soul, doesn't have to be saved if it doesn't exist. Nor do I have to worry about self-realization, self-understanding, or self-actualization.

I can simply merrily burrow along in my ego tunnel, along with everyone else in the world -- who are doing their own burrowing. We can share the third-person knowledge Metzinger speaks of (2 + 2 = 4; July 4 is Independence Day) but not what it is like for us to know.

Difference and similarity. Togetherness and separateness. Unity and duality. One reality, several ways of knowing it.

Great news: Christian America is on a decline

Maybe there is a churchless God after all, because my prayers are being answered: Christianity is becoming less influential in American culture and politics.

So argues Jon Meacham persuasively in Newsweek's "The End of Christian America" -- just in time for Easter weekend.

The percentage of self-identified Christians has dropped 10 points since 1990, from 86 to 76 percent. People unaffiliated with any faith have doubled to 16 percent. The number of agnostics and atheists has quadrupled.

As if this wasn't enough to throw Christian fundamentalists into a frenzy, this week they also had to deal with President Obama's remarks in Turkey.

And I've said before that one of the great strengths of the United States is -- although as I mentioned, we have a very large Christian population, we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation; we consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.

It's difficult for me to see how anyone could disagree with those sentiments. But folks on Fox News managed it.

Optimist that I am, I'm confident that one day in the not-hugely-distant future fundamentalist religious beliefs are going to be looked upon like racism is now: as a deluded thought process.

People used to view some races as superior. Most humans have moved to a higher level of understanding now. Yet a majority of people still see certain religious beliefs (namely, their own) as being superior to other dogmas.

So this is why it makes sense to say that "fundamentalism is religious racism." For a long time the United States condoned slavery and overt racism.

Eventually a belief that certain people are favored by God, while others are doomed to an inferior life (and afterlife) will be viewed as equally ignorant and uncivilized. The decline in Christian fervor is a positive step in that direction, but we still have a long ways to go.

New Age leader sees the skeptical light

This is Skeptical Inquirer news from 2004, but it's still interesting:

A former leader in the New Age culture - author of nine titles on auras, chakras, "energy," and so on - chronicles her difficult and painful transition to skepticism. She thanks the skeptical community and agonizes over how the messages of scientific and critical thinking could be made more effective in communicating with her former New Age colleagues.

Karla McLaren, the convert to skepticism, rambles on a bit in her essay (a writing quality that I have considerable personal experience with myself), but ends on a clear and convincing note.

One of the biggest falsehoods I've encountered is that skeptics can't tolerate mystery, while New Age people can. This is completely wrong, because it is actually the people in my culture who can't handle mystery - not even a tiny bit of it. Everything in my New Age culture comes complete with an answer, a reason, and a source. Every action, emotion, health symptom, dream, accident, birth, death, or idea here has a direct link to the influence of the stars, chi, past lives, ancestors, energy fields, interdimensional beings, enneagrams, devas, fairies, spirit guides, angels, aliens, karma, God, or the Goddess.

We love to say that we embrace mystery in the New Age culture, but that's a cultural conceit and it's utterly wrong. In actual fact, we have no tolerance whatsoever for mystery. Everything from the smallest individual action to the largest movements in the evolution of the planet has a specific metaphysical or mystical cause. In my opinion, this incapacity to tolerate mystery is a direct result of my culture's disavowal of the intellect. One of the most frightening things about attaining the capacity to think skeptically and critically is that so many things don't have clear answers. Critical thinkers and skeptics don't create answers just to manage their anxiety.

Good reminder that believers in traditional religious dogmas aren't the only ones prone to closed-mindedness and gullibility. There's a lot of that in some New Age'ers also.

"The guru is coming!" Strange things disciples do.

Here are some interesting observations about Gurinder Singh's apparent upcoming visit to the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) center in England, Haynes Park.

Singh is the "perfect living master" of the organization and is considered by the faithful to be God in Human Form (GIHF). So, not surprisingly, a visit from God creates a lot of excitement.

Some of which I used to share, when I was an active member of RSSB. But I passed up quite a few chances to drop everything and make a frantic dash to see the guru when he made one of his surprise trips to the western United States.

My attitude, which is echoed in some thoughts below, was that if seeing the guru had salutary effects on people, you'd expect that frequent GIHF-observers would have gotten some benefits from all their devotion.

This wasn't evident to me. Not that this should be expected. People go to see a rock band that they're big fans of and don't come away changed either. They simply have a good time.

Which also seems to be the goal of many, if not most, of those who are looking forward to the guru's Haynes Park visit. Nothing wrong with that.

What's strange, though, is how strange disciples act when word gets out that "the guru is coming!" Read on...

Does consciousness age?

Got philosophical on my other blog, pondering the feeling of agelessness within that seems so different from the evident aging of my sixty year old body without.

Open-mindedness demands evidence, not gullibility

Ooh, I just love it when someone says something so brilliantly, it makes me think, "I could have said that myself!" (if I was that brilliant)

Case in point: a wonderful YouTube video about open-mindedness that I learned about via Pharyngula, where blogger PZ Myers titled his post "Something a few of our commenters ought to watch."

My sentiments exactly.

It amuses me when fundamentalists wander onto this blog and start preaching, "Your skepticism is the real fundamentalism!"

That doesn't make any sense, except in their twisted, tortured, thought-disordered illogic. I try to respond with reasonable statements like "not believing isn't a belief system."

But like they say, a picture can be worth a thousand words.

So maybe the YouTube video on open-mindedness will bring some fresh air to shuttered psyches. I'll embed it at the end of this post -- after sharing ten images from the video that appealed to me.

(click to enlarge)

Here's the basic fallacy: that not believing in pseudo-science or unproven metaphysics shows that the skeptic is closed-minded.

  If supernatural is jumped to as the reason for something unexplained, this closes off other explanations prematurely. Plus, it really isn't an explanation.

The unexplained simply is unexplained. It isn't "spiritual," "God," "quantum phenomena," or anything else. Just a question mark.

If you don't believe something because there's no evidence for it, you aren't saying that thing can't ever be proven to be true. For now, though, you've a skeptic.

Those who are skeptical about science's skepticism are indeed two-faced. They're prone to gullible belief in really weird stuff, but won't believe in the scientific method -- which is a lot more believable.

Great point: if you let all kinds of fanciful crap into your mind, there isn't going to be any way to sort out reality from illusion. People in mental hospitals are open-minded in that sense. They're also insane.

People are free to believe whatever they like. But other people are equally free to challenge reasons for those beliefs. That's what happens on this blog. If you don't like to be challenged, don't spout unproven beliefs.

If someone expects that their beliefs will be accepted on a just because, that indeed is the height of arrogance. Strangely, often these people claim to be humbly religious.

Right on: someone with an unproven notion should be trying to find demonstrable evidence for it, not demanding that others accept it uncritically.

Final image says it all... "An open mind that demands no evidence will let in an awful lot of rubbish." So to be a productively open-minded person, you've got to filter what's allowed into your belief system.

Here's the video:

Roll with life like a ball, not a brittle teacup

I love Tai Chi. So far as I know, it's the only philosophy of life that you can express in movement. (Unless expressive movement -- such as dancing -- is philosophy also, a non-verbal variety.)

One of the first things a Tai Chi student learns is circularity. Also, one of the last things. Letting go of rigidity is a never-ending process, like life itself.

There are no straight lines in the yin-yang symbol. Most of the physical movements in Tai Chi have the same curving feel. Ditto with the philosophical precepts. Taoist sages don't point directly at truth.

The intimate blend of physicality and philosophy in Tai Chi appeals to me. I used to be much more of a dualist, believing that matter and spirit are worlds apart.

Until I'd done enough looking around, both inside and outside of me, and realized that this world is all there is. And that's true for everybody else also.

As I've said before, and am about to say again, not one single person in all of human history has ever had a spiritual experience -- if "spirit" is taken to mean non-physical.

When you're not physical, you're dead. Maybe dead people have experiences, but nobody alive has direct knowledge of that. (Q. "Why?" A. "Because they're alive.")

So spirituality is materiality is living is being a human is meditating is dancing is Tai Chi is having sex is drinking wine is chanting sutras is studying science... and is everything else also.

What works for you, works. What doesn't, doesn't.

In Tai Chi, I've found that flowing relaxed circularity works. Better, in my opinion (based on fourteen years of previous traditional and semi-traditional karate training) than rigid tense linearity.

An oft-heard adage in spiritual circles is to make the mind like an empty teacup. Only then can it be filled with wisdom -- not when it's already full to the brim with existing notions.

OK. Sort of makes sense. 

But what happens when the tea cup has been filled after being emptied? Isn't it time to empty it again? How are we supposed to know when the perfect cup of wisdom has been poured? And is there any end to the pouring? Does life ever stop teaching us new lessons?

I smile when people email me, or leave a comment on this blog, saying "Brian, how could you forsake what you used to believe in?"

They should know the answer: life is nothing but change. Each of us is changing continually. Our bodies change. Our beliefs change. Our experiences change. It's crazy to think that we can stop change in its tracks.

Or that we should. Dead people don't change. Living people do. Why would we want to be dead when we're still alive? There will be plenty of time to be dead later.

In the Spring 2009 issue of Tai Chi magazine there's a nice article about "The Intrinsic Qualities of Taijiquan." Even if you don't know much about Tai Chi, including what root means, the authors' message should come through.

The moment you struggle to stay firm, you will stiffen up, and then your weakness (your root) is exposed. In fact, the stronger your root, the more you are giving your opponent a target and a leverage to attack.

..."No root" in Taijiquan is really about having a moving root, not a fixed root. This is like an object floating on water or a ball rolling on the ground.

Compare a tea cup with a ball. You might say the cup has "root" because it is stationary while the ball has "no root" because it rolls around.

However, the tea cup is stable only within a limited range, beyond which it will topple and break. On the other hand, a ball always has a point touching the ground, which is its root. When it starts rolling, that point changes with its movement.

If the function of a root is to stablilize an object, then a ball rolling around in all directions "without falling over" is like having root and not having root at the same time.

You say it has root, yet it rolls around; you say it has no root, yet it never topples. The root of a ball is everywhere, but is also nowhere.

Back in my youth Bob Dylan asked a question. Taoists would answer, "just fine."

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
A complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

Search for happiness (and self) called off

A few years ago I laughed my way through an Onion piece, "Search for Self Called Off After 38 Years." Then I wrote a blog post about the notion, saying that some friends and I had just been talking along the same lines.

I told them that when I peruse my extensive personal library, searching for some spiritual inspiration, usually the only books I can stand to read have Buddhist, Zen, or Taoist themes. All the rest seem too damn dogmatic now.

Buddhists and Taoists don’t waste much energy searching for a true self because they don’t believe that it exists. At least, they’re not sure whether it does. If it pops up and says “Hi!” one day, they’ll welcome the company. But they don’t agonize over finding a self that is different from the self that would be doing any finding.

This relates to the question we've been talking about here of whether there are universal mystical principles. I argued, "No," because there's a big divide between teachings that posit a soul or self and those like Taoism and Buddhism that don't.

If we have a real self that has been covered up by gobs of illusory ego-crap, then our goal should be to restore that divine cosmic gem to its original shining glory.

However, what if our problem is believing there's a problem with our self? This kicks our spiritual pursuit up into another philosophical or epistemological level, as Barry Magid talks about in his marvelous book, "Ending the Pursuit of Happiness."

Magid is a Zen teacher, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst. I'm only a few chapters into his book, but already have found a whole lot to wrap my churchless non-self around. Here he relates the idea of "self" to that of "time."

I owe this example to the early twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who cited Augustine's puzzlement about time as highlighting a very basic problem in philosophy, a problem that also emerges when we imagine that there is something somehow hidden from us about the "true nature" of anything.

...Adding to Wittgenstein's list of misleading substantives [like "the secret of consciousness" or "the essence of truth"], it seems to me that the Buddha was telling us that the most important and misleading of all is the word "self."

...Which is the "true" self? That question, the basis for so many Zen koans, immediately leads us astray. Instead of fully experiencing ourselves in the very act of asking the question, we imagine there's another more real, truer, more essential self hiding somewhere out of sight that we have to go search for.

Maybe there is.

But if there isn't, then our "spiritual" practice (Magid, like me, doesn't find this word very useful) should consist of dissolving the framework where the question -- Which is our true self? -- has been posed.

From my reading of Magid's book so far, this also is the key to solving the happiness conundrum. We believe that something, someday, somehow, is going to get us to the end of life's vexing problems.

Religions call this nebulous but oh-so-enticing condition by various names: salvation, heaven, enlightenment, satori, nirvana, god-realization, and such. Non-religious people see it more as self-awareness, inner understanding, or a psychological breakthrough.

In both cases, these are what Magid terms "curative fantasies."

A curative fantasy is a personal myth that we use to explain what we think is wrong with us and our lives and what we imagine is going to make it all better.

This is common, he says, even in Buddhism.

If we practice Buddhism, we are tempted to blame our desires or our self-centeredness for our suffering -- that's what Buddha said we are doing wrong, isn't it?

We imagine: "If only I could get rid of those bad parts of my self, everything would be OK." Or maybe I have to get rid of my "self" entirely! Then "I" get entangled in the paradox of wanting to get rid of "me."

"I"? "Me"? "My "self"? How many of us are in there, and which side am I on? How did I end up in so many pieces?

I don't know whether the Zen response to these questions is correct. But it sure generates a resounding Oh yeah! in me.

In a way, we allow our life to become much more superficial. We are no longer so preoccupied with our important thoughts and deep feelings that we don't see what is right in front of us. Practice allows us to actually pay attention to all these nice trivial things that are happening around us.

We don't have to make our preoccupations go away either, they become just one of many things happening -- no longer the only things that count. They are just things hanging around in the corners of our minds; they don't stand in the center of our universe any more.

After all our futile efforts to transform our ordinary minds into idealized, spiritual minds, we discover the fundamental paradox of practice is that leaving everything alone is itself what is ultimately transformative. We're not here to fix or improve ourselves -- I like to say practice actually puts an end to self-improvement.

But it's very hard to stay with that sense of not needing to do anything, not to turn the zendo into a spiritual gymnasium where we get ourselves mentally in shape. It's hard to really do nothing at all. Over and over, we watch our mind trying to avoid or fix, fix or avoid; to either not look at it or change it.

Leaving that mind just as it is is the hardest thing to do.

Big news: I've embraced religion again!

I figured that today would be an auspicious time to make a momentous announcement: by the grace of God, I've realized that my churchlessness has been a dreadful mistake -- the result of egotistical delusion.

So I've decided to simultaneously embrace evangelical Christianity and return to the Sant Mat fold. May my heretical sins and karmas be forgiven by Jesus and the Guru, who I hope will get along as my co-spiritual guides, notwithstanding their doctrinal differences.

In an astounding calendarical synchronicity, today Google also announced an amazing development. We are on the same enlightened wavelength, mine religious, Google's being artificial intelligentish.

So cute! Almost as adorable as Jesus!