Church of the Churchless

Meditation: nothing special, whatever is going on

Cosmic. Earthy.

Whichever, or neither, the day after I asked (and answered) "Is meditation different from simply living life?" I came across a great little book by Steve Hagen that addressed the same question.

I found "Meditation: Now or Never" in a Malibu metaphysical bookstore. My wife and I were spending a few last hours shopping in the Malibu Country Mart after a pleasant weekend of granddaughter-visiting and beautiful people-watching. (See here.)

I've enjoyed Hagen's other books, "Buddhism Plain and Simple" and "Buddhism is Not What You Think." When religiosity is stripped away from Buddhism, I find it pretty darn appealing.

We experience the world through our minds, not directly. Sometimes our experiences are pleasant; sometimes our experiences are miserable. It makes sense to figure out what mental states produce our better and worse moments. 

Yesterday our plane home was supposed to leave at 4:50 pm from Burbank. We arrived at the airport with plenty of time to spare. Way plenty, it turned out. 

Because twenty minutes after we'd checked our bags, an email notice from Alaska Airlines popped up on my iPhone. The flight had been delayed an hour. Which turned into an hour and a half.

At first I thought, "Damn. I want to get back home to Oregon. Waiting around an airport sucks." But then I settled into: "Delays happen. It's no big deal. Anyway, there's nothing to do about it. Might as well relax and go with the late flight flow."

When I was thumbing through Hagen's book in the bookstore, this was one of the passages that led me to buy it:

"Quiet, please, I'm meditating" is a contradiction in terms. In meditation, we allow, without judgment or control, whatever appears, whether it boils up in our thoughts or wafts in through the window. If, as you sit in meditation, a car alarm goes off, a lawn mower starts up, or a crowd of loud boisterous people decide to have a conference outside your window, simply let it all be part of the experience.

Don't try to block it out. Don't get all worked up about it. Don't even think about it. It's not necessary to leave off with meditation as if you're supposed to do something about it. What is there to do?

This morning, back at home, before I meditated I read the first few chapters of "Meditation: Now or Never" and found that when Hagen talked about things mistaken for meditation, he had my past approach to meditating nailed. 

For example:

In most trance meditations, you turn inward and tune out awareness of your surroundings, your body, and your mind. Your attention becomes filed down to a very narrow, still point, which can feel temporarily blissful.

But every trance is itself temporary. When you come out of it, you're back to all of the problems and confusion that were there when you went into it. There's no transformation.

Gotama, the historical Buddha, mastered various trances in his early spiritual training and came to this same conclusion. He realized that if he entered into a trance while confused, he'd come out of the trance still confused. He realized that if he was going to wake up, trance meditation was not going to help.

So what would help? Well, I need to finish the book to learn Hagen's take on this. Here's some hints from his first chapter.

As long as we insist that meditation must have some use or purpose or meaning, or fulfill us in certain ways, we fail to understand it. As my teacher (and many other teachers before him) used to say, meditation is useless.

...Here is why meditation is useless: meditation is, finally, just to be here. Not over there, in some other place called peace or freedom or enlightenment. Not longing for something else. Not trying to be, or to acquire, something new or different. Not seeking benefit.

...Meditation doesn't mean anything but itself -- full engagement in whatever is going on.

Is meditation different from simply living life?

For about two-thirds of my life -- from the age of 21 to my current 61 -- I've meditated almost every day.

By "almost," I mean that during those forty years I can recall only a couple of times I didn't put in at least twenty minutes of meditation time. And usually it was more like a couple of hours.

I've been a big believer in the benefits of meditation.

But I've begun to wonder whether my dedication to sitting still with eyes closed, usually concentrating on a mantra (or simply doing as little as possible mentally), makes as much sense as I've assumed it did.

The past few days I've experimented with not meditating in my usual fashion: making it a sort of morning pre-breakfast ritual. I brew a cup of coffee; retreat to a quiet corner; read some vaguely "spiritual" literature (broadly defined, could be Scientific American); and then focus on observing what is within my psyche, as opposed to what is without.

I haven't found that I feel any different. My day seems to proceed in the same fashion, neither more or less harmonious, nor more or less happy, when I don't meditate.

Of course, maybe abstaining from meditating for a longer time will cause me to observe different effects. Maybe some sort of meditative hunger will start gnawing at me. Maybe I'll find that bit by bit I'm losing a centeredness or balance that meditation produced, which I didn't appreciate until it was lost.

Maybe.

I'm starting to question, though, whether viewing meditation as a practice is preferable to seeing meditation as inseparable from living. After all, I've always looked on meditation as a way of coming into closer contact with reality, with what's real.

For a long time I favored a dualistic conception of life, in line with most spiritual, mystical, and religious teachings. Mind or soul was something different from body or matter.

Thus meditation, the way I practiced it, was aimed at experiencing a higher form of consciousness that transcended everyday physical existence. The goal was to flip some sort of enlightenment switch, eliminating shadows and darkness that were illusory in comparison to a much more radiant transcendent reality.

But what if all the realness we'll ever know is right here, right now, as whatever we're experiencing moment to moment? Then meditation, if it isn't simply mindful awareness, would be an effort to escape reality, rather than to embrace it.

My understanding is that Buddhists often (or usually) meditate with their eyes open, rather than with them closed. They also meditate while walking, rather than only when sitting still.

This used to seem rather crazy to me.

It didn't seem like genuine meditation, because it wasn't the sort of meditating that I'd been taught was the highest and best. However, now I'm coming to see that viewing meditation as something separate from life, instead as how life is lived most fully during every waking moment, is counterproductive.

I'll probably go back to meditating in the morning. From now on, though, likely I won't view meditation as a special time of the day. Just as something I do after I wake up, no different from everything else that I do.

What's wrong with change and concepts?

After I put up a post about Deepak Chopra's misunderstanding of quantum theory, Suzanne left a comment pointing me to Stanley Sobottka's website, "A Course in Consciousness."

Sobottka is an emeritus (retired) professor of physics. I enjoyed reading the short version of his course, a 75-slide Power Point presentation. I was curious to see whether his philosophical/spiritual take on quantum physics made more sense than Chopra's.

The jury inside my head is still out on that question. After I finished reading the slides, my impression was interesting, but not persuasive. Meaning, I didn't come across any grand insights that weren't already pretty familiar to me.

Sobottka is big into nondualism.

He regularly refers to sages like Ramana and Nisargadatta. Having read several books by these gurus, I wasn't surprised to find that parts of Sobottka's presentation produced the same question marks in my head as those books did.

Here's some examples.

Now, at first glance this slide elicited a "yes" from me. But on further reflection I agreed a lot more with the first two points than with the last two.

What is, is. It's difficult, if not impossible, to disagree with that.

If I stumble on the dance floor, or during my Tai Chi class, that's a fact. It's reality, what happened. But the next time I attempt the same move, I find nothing wrong in learning from my experience and changing what seemed to produce the stumble.

I don't feel separate from my "body sensation" when I try to change a bodily action. Nor do I feel separate from my thoughts when I decide to think about something different than what is currently in my mind.

Change happens. Change is part of life.

Heck, it's reasonable to say, change is life. A lifeless rock is much different from a living flower. Resisting change, including our natural desires and intentions, doesn't seem like a healthy or wise way to live.

This slide makes the same point. Again, I don't find that trying to change something -- whether inside or outside of me -- produces an increased sense of separation. As dishes pile up in our sink, there comes a point when I think, "I should put them in the dishwasher."

Doing so, I neither feel more or less separate from the world. I don't feel that something is wrong when dishes get dirty. That's what dishes are for: to put food on them, some of which sticks to the surface.

So I don't see how taking action to produce a change is a problem. This is the way of nature, including the laws of nature that Sobottka studied as a physicist.

Another part of the presentation that produced a "huh?" in my psyche concerned concepts. This slide makes some good points. We don't perceive reality as it is, but as our human perception makes it out to be.

The same holds true for dogs, cats, bats, goldfish, and every other conscious entity. We don't know what the cosmos is like from a detached "God's Eye" perspective. What would that perspective consist of? It'd just be another way of perceiving, not reality as it is absent perception.

Sobottka appears to accept an interpretation of quantum theory which posits that an act of observation leads to possibilities/probabilities becoming actualities. I guess this is what he means when he says "if there are no mental images, there are no objects."

This is questionable. I find it hard to believe that the 14 billion year old universe didn't exist until conscious beings with minds came along.

How is it that physicists and cosmologists have been able to trace the history of the universe so persuasively, including deep space images of galaxies that formed soon after the big bang, if there were no objects? (Since "mental images" weren't part of the cosmos until minds evolved.)

Along the same line, Sobottka says that objects are nothing but concepts. Well, I can sort of see what he is getting at. Physical reality, nature, doesn't come with labels attached.

Trees, stars, stones, water, grass, and what-not are defined and delimited by human cognition, even though ecologists, environmentalists, and systems theorists point out the interconnectedness of everything.

But to say that an object is nothing but a concept...hmmmmm. Maybe, maybe not. This seems to be a philosophical notion that could be debated endlessly, like so many other, well, concepts.

Yes, Sobottka uses lots of concepts in his "A Course of Consciousness." What else can he do? He is a human being with a mind/brain, who wants to communicate with other people.

What's wrong with that? What's wrong with concepts? Or, change?

Nondualism, as with most other mystical, religious, and spiritual teachings, sees big problems at the heart of life and living. We're screwed up, seeing things wrongly, enmeshed in illusion, deceived by the human psyche.

Well, as I so often say: maybe; maybe not. I now lean toward the latter. And in that regard, Sobottka agrees with me in the first part of the first slide I shared in this post. We feel things should be different from the way they are, but how could they be?

So there's the big contradiction I see in my admittedly brief foray into "A Course of Consciousness." It teaches that on the one hand, reality is what it is. On the other hand, we humans need to overcome our inability to comprehend reality as it really is. 

This presumes that some person knows what reality really is, that nondualism, or monotheism, or materialism, or idealism, or some other "ism" can capture the essence of the cosmos. Or at least point us toward our own experience of that essence.

Maybe. Maybe not. Again, I lean toward "not." And I also lean toward accepting human experience for what it is, not for what some sage, guru, or philosopher says it might be. 

Change happens. Concepts happen. What's wrong with that?

Deepak Chopra challenged by quantum physicist

I used to enjoy Deepak Chopra a lot more than I do now. I don't know whether he has changed, or whether I've changed. Probably it's both.

My impression of him used to be that he was a spiritual maverick, someone who sifted out the crap from religiosity and rejected just have faith dogma. But I've come to see him as a New Age entrepreneur who makes big bucks by peddling his own brand of irrational, unbelievable pseudoscience.

This view was strengthened by watching Nightline's most recent "face off," Does God Have a Future?

Chopra was the champion of the "yes" side. Michael Shermer, a well-known religious skeptic, headed up the "no" side. Each got to pick a sidekick to help them in the debate. Chopra's was Jean Houston; Shermer's was Sam Harris.

A summary of the debate makes for interesting reading. It says that Chopra and Shermer have feuded repeatedly, but this was the first time they'd gotten it on face to face. The antagonism between them is obvious from Nightline's videos of the debate.

Shermer doesn't like Chopra's attempts to found his spirituality on findings of modern science. Shermer sees Chopra as engaging in "woo-woo" when he uses quantum physics inappropriately to bolster New Age'y all is one notions.

I read a lot of books about quantum physics back when I was researching my first book, "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder." At that time I was much more of a true believer, but even then I did my best to keep my interpretations of quantum phenomena as scientifically true as possible.

Aspects of quantum physics are rather mysterious, for sure. Nonlocality is an example. Also, how a decision to measure a subatomic entity in a certain way -- as a particle or wave -- manifests the seeming strangeness of wave-particle duality.

But this doesn't mean that God exists as a universal creative consciousness, which is Chopra's unfounded conclusion from his shallow understanding of quantum physics. So I enjoyed seeing a member of the Cal Tech audience challenge Chopra in the Q & A portion of the debate.

(Click on "scientist takes on Deepak's science" in left column.)

The guy is a quantum physicist who says he is writing a book in collaboration with Stephen Hawking -- and obviously disagrees with Chopra's contention that Hawking believes in God.

He tells Chopra that he has some misunderstandings of quantum physics. Chopra gets defensive and says that he disagrees with the criticism. Looks like humility and open-mindedness haven't been qualities that Chopra has developed during his many years of spiritual "development."

Here's a few articles that debunk Chopra's brand of quantum spirituality. Check them out here and here. Some excerpts:

This non-local connection is what quantum mystics have latched onto offering it as scientific evidence that everything everywhere is intimately and instantly connected or holistic. Ostensibly this might seem to be a reasonable mechanism for telepathy, assuming that it even exists, but this belief stems from a misunderstanding. Quantum Mechanics does not imply that information can travel instantly, in fact superluminal information transfer has been proven impossible in any theory consistent with relativity or quantum mechanics. (Eberhard and Ross 1989)

It has been shown that if a faster than light communication device were setup using non-locality, each isolated observer would only see a random fluctuation of signals, nothing comprehensible could be interpreted. Therefore, even if our brains could operate nonlocally they would not receive any usable information. The violation of locality only occurs within our macrosopic description of the quantum event. So even in the strange world of Quantum Mechanics psychics and mystics cannot find scientific sanctuary.

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

Quantum mechanics, the centerpiece of modern physics, is misinterpreted as implying that the human mind controls reality and that the universe is one connected whole that cannot be understood by the usual reduction to parts.

However, no compelling argument or evidence requires that quantum mechanics plays a central role in human consciousness or provides instantaneous, holistic connections across the universe. Modern physics, including quantum mechanics, remains completely materialistic and reductionistic while being consistent with all scientific observations.

The apparent holistic, nonlocal behavior of quantum phenomena, as exemplified by a particle’s appearing to be in two places at once, can be understood without discarding the commonsense notion of particles following definite paths in space and time or requiring that signals travel faster than the speed of light.

No superluminal motion or signalling has ever been observed, in agreement with the limit set by the theory of relativity. Furthermore, interpretations of quantum effects need not so uproot classical physics, or common sense, as to render them inoperable on all scales-especially the macroscopic scale on which humans function. Newtonian physics, which successfully describes virtually all macroscopic phenomena, follows smoothly as the many-particle limit of quantum mechanics. And common sense continues to apply on the human scale.

The craziest thing I've ever believed

Recently I asked myself, "Brian, what's the craziest thing you've ever believed?"

Since I was an active member of an Indian mystical guru-based meditation organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), for over thirty years, quite a few candidate beliefs came to mind. 

Here's the winner: I used to accept the distinct possibility, if not likelihood, that when I was initiated by the RSSB guru back in 1971, Master Charan Singh placed a metaphysical "double" of himself, a radiant form, within my consciousness.

Or being. Or soul. Or something like that.

It wasn't very clear where or how this magic act was performed. But this was a central aspect of the belief system that I subscribed to for a long time, until I couldn't believe in it any more.

I give this my uber-crazy award because some other RSSB teachings, which fall under the general rubric of Sant Mat, continue to strike me as being relatively plausible -- though not probable.

It's possible there are realms of reality beyond the physical universe. It's possible that human consciousness can extend beyond the brain's confines. It's possible that ultimate reality is a nameless, formless, mysterious all-pervading energy.

And I suppose it's possible that a guru could have the power to place a doppelgänger of himself in each of a million or so disciples. But now this seems like a deeply weird and exceedingly unlikely possibility.

We initiates were told that the guru's radiant form could communicate with the physically embodied guru. So Charan Singh supposedly could tune into what was going on with me whenever he wanted.

The radiant form knew what I was thinking and feeling. The radiant form knew what I was doing and perceiving. The situation was a lot like the Christmas song about Santa Claus:

He sees you when you're sleeping
He knows when you're awake
He knows if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake!

I never thought much about how this whole radiant form thing worked, maybe because it's difficult (if not impossible) to come up with a coherent explanation of how a human being, the RSSB guru, could manufacture non-physical carbon copies of himself at will and place them within selected other people.

Many disciples believed that when they had an intention or intuition to do this rather than that, such was the prompting of the guru's radiant form. Except when the prompting didn't turn out to be a good decision; then it must have come from the devilish ego-mind.

I've never heard of anyone who experienced conclusive evidence that he or she had come in contact with the radiant form. I sure didn't. I still invite the guru to show himself inwardly, though.

To date he continues to be a no-show.

Here's how Julian Johnson describes the radiant form in his "The Path of the Masters." It's an appealing notion, this idea that you can have an inner friend who is always with you and accompanies you back to God.

But it's also crazy.

At a point between the "sun-worlds" and the "moon-worlds" and the pure astral zone, the disciple of the Master enters a zone called Ashta-dal-Kanwal. At that place something happens which changes the whole course of his life and also his method of proceeding from that point on.

It is the meeting with his own Master in his "Radiant Form." This is the Master's Nuri sarup or light form. It is the Master, his own Master appearing just as he does in physical life, except that his body is now much more beautiful and full of light, brilliantly illumined.

The Radiant Master then and there receives his disciple with much love, to the great joy of the disciple. From that moment on, the two are never separated throughout the journey to still higher regions.

Of course, the form is always with the disciple form the moment of his Initiation, but the disciple cannot see him. But from here on, the disciple can see the Master on the inner planes as well as the outer.

Our "hidden brain" casts new light on religious certainty

Shankar Vedantam's book "The Hidden Brain" is subtitled how our unconscious minds elect presidents, control markets, wage wars, and save our lives.

I'd add: and choose our favored form of spirituality or religion (or lack thereof).

I've only read the first few chapters of The Hidden Brain. But my wife, a retired psychotherapist, has listened to the audio book in its entirety. She gave it high marks, so I decided to order a hardcover copy.

Vedantam's basic premise is solid. It's backed up by lots of scientific research. (Vedantam writes the Washington Post's "Department of Human Behavior" column, so he knows his science stuff.) He writes in the introduction:

I saw that a vast gulf had grown between what experts were learning about the mind and what most people believed. Important institutions in our society were oblivious to this new research... All these theories [to solve social problems] were based on an assumption -- that human behavior was the product of knowledge and conscious intention.

We believed that if you educated people, and provided them with accurate information, and offered them the right incentives, and threatened them with suitable punishments, and appealed to their better natures, and marked the exits clearly, the errors would vanish. Bad outcomes had to be the product of stupidity, ignorance, and bad intentions.

...I made a deliberate decision to personify the hidden forces that influence us in everyday life. I coined a term: the hidden brain. It did not refer to a secret agent inside our skulls or some recently unearthed brain module. The "hidden brain" was shorthand for a range of influences that manipulated us without our awareness.

... Unconscious bias was not caused by a secret puppeteer who sat inside our heads, but the effects of bias were as though such a puppeteer existed.

Now, I'm not saying that somehow we agnostics, atheists, spiritual skeptics, and free thinkers aren't also under the sway of the hidden brain.

But since we're more respectful of modern science than religious true believers, we have a better chance of understanding how our views are influenced by our neurology -- rather than God-designed theology.

Which means, we know that what we consider to be true may not be. Nothing is 100% certain.

Vedantam's first chapter tells the harrowing tale of a woman, Toni Gustus, who had been raped. During the hour long ordeal she concentrated on memorizing the features of her attacker.

Police officers administered a rape kit and asked her to tell them everything distinctive about the rapist. Eventually she was able to pick out a man, Eric Sarsfield, from photos, seeing him directly at the police station, and hearing his voice.

Gustus said she was 95% sure that the man in custody was the rapist. Still, she worried about the remaining 5% doubt. Had she identified the right man? Then...

There was a Presbyterian church in town that Gustus had long known; it was a place of refuge and comfort. She was a person of faith, and the church always renewed her. She used to sing in the choir, and the choir director had been her voice teacher.

Sitting in the safe space of the church, ensconced by family, Gustus suddenly felt the burden of doubt lift from her shoulders. She was not 95 percent sure that Eric Sarsfield was the rapist; she was 100 percent certain.

Remember: the woman had seen her attacker clearly. This wasn't a case of blind faith, like someone coming to accept Jesus as her savior even though she obviously had never been in the company of someone who died two thousand years ago.

Sarsfield was convicted of rape. He spent thirteen years in prison. Then Gustus heard from the district attorney. A DNA test had been conducted. It showed that Sarsfield couldn't have been the rapist.

There is abundant research showing that our mood states -- comfort and peace, anger and envy -- influence our memory and judgment. Gustus's doubt about Sarsfield was a source of discomfort; the church offered Gustus comfort.

The two things had nothing to do with each other -- except that it is impossible to feel both comfort and discomfort at the same time. Discomfort, not comfort, was Gustus's real friend in the situation.

By soothing it away, she erased the signal she had that something was wrong. Instead of attending to the fire, she unintentionally disabled the fire alarm.

Fascinating.

And marvelously illustrative of how doubt often is a pointer to truth, a fact that religions do their best to sweep under the have faith! rug. Uncertainty makes us uncomfortable.

But the hidden brain, says Vedantam, "is designed to be fast, to make quick approximations and instant adjustments." It values speed over accuracy. It smooths over exceptions to rules, leading us to wrongly believe that we are absolutely right and others are absolutely wrong.

Humility before the mysteries of the hidden brain is in order. Vedantam says that we will never figure out the hidden brain's workings, as Keanu Reeves was able to do in The Matrix. 

Pure awareness is a fantasy. Enlightenment, if this means seeing things as they really are, is a fantasy. Freedom from mental bias is a fantasy.

However, we can realize that we're living in a magic show of our own making, and that we'll never learn how the tricks are performed -- nor even when a trick is occurring.

When a magician performs an illusion, people strain to see through the deception. Implicit in this effort is the belief that illusions are always out there. You enjoy a magic show because illusions are supposed to be different from the stuff of reality.

But what if they aren't?

What if we are being constantly fooled, tricked, and hoodwinked -- not by some actor dressed in a cape but by our own brains? And which is the more successful illusion, the one that ends with a bow and applause, or the one that feels so real we never stop to think about it?

Doing nothing is the best meditation

The title above is my theory, at least, as discussed in my marvelously cogent, persuasive, and uplifting post "Nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to become."

Well, let's make that cogent, persuasive, and uplifting to me. Who is the person I'm most concerned with making sense to.

That said, I'm always interested in learning the specifics of how other people approach meditation or some other form of spiritual practice. "Specifics," as noted in that previous writing, is the watchword.

More and more, I'm into specifics when it comes to spirituality. I've spent a lifetime floating in the philosophical, theological, and metaphysical heavens. Now, show me the meat! (or, tofu)

I still enjoy airy-fairy speculation. Heck, what would this blog be without it? Both the posts and comments would be exceedingly brief, that's for sure.

But whenever I get a new spiritual, religious, or philosophical book these days, I thumb through it right off the bat, looking for details. Especially if it deals at all with meditation.

What does the author say we (or even just he/she) should do in an attempt to understand what It Is All About?

Don't give me elevated abstractions. I want down to earth instructions. Absent that, a writing is just a bunch of speculative blah, blah, blah.

Entertaining. But not scientifically or practically persuasive.

So I figured that I should take an I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours approach. (Heck, I recall that working with a neighborhood girl when I was a preschooler, and we were both interested in figuring out the differences between males and females.)

Actually, there isn't much to add to how I described my morning meditation about two and a half years ago. I'm still into doing as little as possible, since this seems to make my meditating as unproductive as possible.

Which is my goal. (Oops... guess I haven't left behind my Protestant ethic entirely.)

The rest of my waking moments, pretty much, I'm trying to do something. Physically, mentally, emotionally. Maybe trying isn't the right word, because much of the time the doing just seems to happen on its own.

Regardless, movement -- voluntary or not -- pervades my day (and night) outside of meditation. Thus if I want to bring something new, fresh, and unexpected into my psyche during my morning meditation time, that would be...

Nothing.

Naturally there's plenty of mystical philosophizing supporting this simple notion to be found in writings from Rumi, Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, Ramana, Chuang Tzu, and many other sages.

But I prefer to leave philosophy aside when I'm unbusily engaged in nothing, which I like to call my Wu Project.

Wu, wu, wu. This Chinese word also is a sound, as all words are. I use it as a meditation mantra. I like how "wu" sounds just like "woo," as in "woo-woo," which I consider religions and metaphysical belief systems to be.

Meditation, though, isn't fantastical -- not when it is stripped of blind faith and dogmatism. The brain is real. The mind is real. What goes on in the mind/brain is real.

I don't believe that pure awareness, consciousness without any content, is possible. However, each of us certainly can become more aware of what's present in our psyche. And we have some control over the thoughts, emotions, and what not that appear in our stream of consciousness.

I enjoy settling down into what I call a "base" mental state. Eyes closed, earplugs in, I sit in my quiet, dark meditation area. I repeat my wu mantra. I don't expect anything spiritual, mystical, or magical to happen.

I simply am out to experience what it is like for me to experience as little as possible. This feels like a foundation that the rest of my much more active day is built on. Meditation seems to help me become more aware of this calm base that I can return to, more or less, when my mind gets excessively frazzled and overactive.

Today I read another chapter, "Equanimity," in Buddha's Brain, a book about neuroscience and contemplative practice. These passages resonated with my approach to meditation:

As your mind grows steadier, pay particular attention to the neutral feeling tone. Stimuli that evoke a pleasant or unpleasant feeling tone stir up more brain activity than neutral tones do, because there is more to think about and respond to. Since your brain doesn't naturally stay engaged with neutral stimuli, you must make a conscious effort to sustain attention to them.

...When you are equanimous, you don't grasp after enjoyable experiences or push against disagreeable ones. Rather, you have a kind of space around experiences -- a buffer between you and their feeling tones. This state of being is not based on standard prefrontal control of emotions, in which there is inhibition and direction of limbic activity.

Instead, with equanimity, the limbic system can fire however it "wants." The primary point of equanimity is not to reduce or channel that activation, but simply not to respond to it. This is very unusual behavior for the brain, which is designed by evolution to respond to limbic signals, particularly to pulses of pleasant and unpleasant feeling tones.

...The space of awareness allows every content of mind to be or not to be, to come and to go. Thoughts are just thoughts, sounds are just sounds, situations are just situations, and people are just being themselves.

Deep dreamless sleep isn't my mystical goal

I've often wondered why the state of deep dreamless sleep is so appealing to some mystically-inclined people.

Since we're dead to the world -- both inner and outer -- seemingly the only difference between deep dreamless sleep and death is that we wake up from sleeping. I can understand wanting to experience a mystical super-consciousness, but why aspire to unconsciousness?

The Indian Upanishads probably are largely responsible for the high marks given to deep dreamless sleep. For example:

The third quarter is prājña, where one asleep neither desires anything nor beholds any dream: that is deep sleep. In this field of dreamless sleep, one becomes undivided, an undifferentiated mass of consciousness, consisting of bliss and feeding on bliss. His mouth is consciousness.

And a commentator on the Upanishads says about a high mystical state:

It is like the state of a deep dreamless sleep, like the feeling of intense bliss where neither the knower nor the known can be distinctly felt but where there is only the infinitude of blissful experience.

Well, this sure isn't my experience of deep dreamless sleep. Nor that of anyone I know. I'm conscious when awake, and I'm conscious when I dream (I often remember my dreams), but I'm completely unconscious and unaware during deep dreamless sleep.

So if this is what I'm supposed to aspire to, enlightenment-wise, no thanks. I'm just not attracted to existing in a condition where I don't know that I exist, or that anything exists. 

Yet the quotations above claim that deep dreamless sleep is super blissful. How can this be? Skepticism is warranted, because religions are fond of making dogmatic statements at odds with common sense, direct experience, and scientific knowledge.

That said, I'll be the first to admit that the nature of consciousness still is a mystery. How the brain works is becoming increasingly well understood, but the relation of all those neurons firing to our felt conscious experience basically is a big question mark.

When I have more time, I'd like to peruse a lengthy article on "Deep Sleep Awareness" that I found on the Rational Vedanta site. It discusses a debate in Vedanta about the meaning of deep dreamless sleep. Some quotes:

Sankara declares that the experience of the state of deep-sleep is a glimpse of the self's real nature, where there exists no 'I', no ego.

If there were not 'I', the same subject in pre-sleep, during sleep and post-sleep, the individual would not recognize the things after sleep that those are experienced earlier i.e., before sleep. Therefore the awareness of 'I' as particularized awareness exists even during the deep sleep, for self-luminous atman persists in deep sleep in the form of 'I'.

Again, I don't get this, or agree with it.

Sankara (or Shankara) is the leading Vedanta philosopher. But back in 800 C.E. modern neuroscience didn't exist. Plus, people slept then just like they do now: deep dreamless sleep isn't an experience, but the absence of experience.

To my mind, this shows how Eastern metaphysics can be as faith-based as Western monotheism.

Just because we wake up from a good night's sleep, which included periods of dreamlessness, and still have a sense of who we are -- how does this prove that a "self-luminous atman" (soul) persists in deep sleep?

The only thing it shows, which already is obvious to all of us, is that when we sleep our brain continues to function. Memories are retained. Our sense of self remains intact.

In the same fashion, last year I had a colonoscopy. The only thing I remember about the procedure is that I don't remember anything about it. I heard the doctor say, "I'll start the sedation." Then I woke up in the recovery area.

Just as with deep dreamless sleep, I was gone. And then I came back. I don't see what is mystical or spiritual about this. Neuroscientists have found that a brain signal persists even in deep dreamless sleep.

Neuroscientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have taken one of the first direct looks at one of the human brain's most fundamental "foundations": a brain signal that never switches off and may support many cognitive functions... This signal doesn't switch off even in dreamless sleep, possibly to help maintain basic structure and facilitate offline housekeeping activities.

It isn't at all surprising that brains preserve their structure and functionality after a period of sleep. If this didn't happen, every creature that sleeps would survive for one wakeful state.

Yet the Vedantic extolling of deep dreamless sleep continues into modern times. In his "The Transparency of Things," Rupert Spira writes:

Deep sleep is in fact simply the presence of Consciousness shining by itself. That is why it is so peaceful and enjoyable!

...Therefore, if Peace is identical to deep sleep and, as we have seen, deep sleep is the presence of Consciousness without objectivity, it follows that Peace is inherent in Consciousness, that Peace and Consciousness are one.

Wow.

Who knew that so many unfounded conclusions could be drawn from waking up from deep dreamless sleep? I guess my colonoscopy sedation also should qualify as an enlightenment experience.

Except, as noted above, I didn't experience anything while I was out. Nor does anyone experience anything in deep dreamless sleep, so far as we know (if they did, it wouldn't be "deep," or "dreamless").

Thus I don't see deep dreamless sleep as being a state I should aspire to, since I'm already highly competent at it. And if unconsciousness is divine, each of us is poised to become godlike when we die.

While I'm alive, I prefer consciousness to unconsciousness whenever possible.

(Ken Wilber, however, claims that somehow it is possible to remain conscious in deep dreamless sleep. This strikes me as an example of Wilber's propensity to make dogmatic statements that aren't backed up by evidence. There must be a way for neuroscientists to test whether someone in that brain state is aware of his or her surroundings. If Wilber, or anyone else, can prove that conscious awareness continues in deep dreamless sleep, that would be most interesting.)

One wild and precious life

Thanks to fellow Oregon blogger Rain, I came across this image and adapted excerpt from Mary Oliver's poem, "The Summer Day."

Nice. Read the short poem, which a poetry blog says is about the act of attention being a form of prayer.

I liked the poem's ending -- a bit different from the words in the wave-tossed image:

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Texas dismisses Thomas Jefferson from schools

We didn't need more evidence that religious fundamentalists are dangerous wackos who seek to undermine American freedom and independence -- but, sadly, here it is:

The Texas State Board of Education removed Thomas Jefferson from the school curriculum, replacing him with John Calvin, who, not surprisingly, also was a religious wacko.

Jefferson, on the other hand, held unconventional Christian beliefs and strongly argued for the separation of church and state. He also, of course, was the third president of the United States, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, and one of the most influential Founding Fathers of the United States.

But in Texas he doesn't exist. Not according to the conservative-dominated state school board. A live blog report shows it only took twenty-one minutes to erase Jefferson.

9:30 – Board member Cynthia Dunbar wants to change a standard having students study the impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from 1750 to the present. She wants to drop the reference to Enlightenment ideas (replacing with “the writings of”) and to Thomas Jefferson. She adds Thomas Aquinas and others. Jefferson’s ideas, she argues, were based on other political philosophers listed in the standards. We don’t buy her argument at all. Board member Bob Craig of Lubbock points out that the curriculum writers clearly wanted students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson. Could Dunbar’s problem be that Jefferson was a Deist? The board approves the amendment, taking Thomas Jefferson OUT of the world history standards.

9:40 – We’re just picking ourselves up off the floor. The board’s far-right faction has spent months now proclaiming the importance of emphasizing America’s exceptionalism in social studies classrooms. But today they voted to remove one of the greatest of America’s Founders, Thomas Jefferson, from a standard about the influence of great political philosophers on political revolutions from 1750 to today.

9:45 – Here’s the amendment Dunbar changed: “explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present.” Here’s Dunbar’s replacement standard, which passed: “explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau,  Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone.” Not only does Dunbar’s amendment completely change the thrust of the standard. It also appalling drops one of the most influential political philosophers in American history — Thomas Jefferson.

9:51 – Dunbar’s amendment striking Jefferson passed with the votes of the board’s far-right members and board member Geraldine “Tincy” Miller of Dallas.

Is this un-American, unpatriotic, and incredibly stupid? Yes.

Republicans on the Texas State Board of Education also don't want school children to know about the prohibition of a government-sponsored religion in the Bill of Rights, since they clearly are out to make their brand of fundamentalist Christianity into just that.

To hell with the Constitution. To hell with Thomas Jefferson. To hell with academic standards. (Amazingly, the board revised the curriculum without any input from scholars, classroom teachers, or experts in the social sciences.)

On the plus side, this outrage against history probably is leading many people to dig into why Thomas Jefferson is so threatening to religious true believers. I'm one of them.

This morning I found my copy of "The Godless Constitution" and turned to the chapter, The "Infidel" Mr. Jefferson. I learned that in the 1800 presidential race between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams:

The floodgates of Christian anger opened upon Jefferson in a concerted effort to paint him as a "French infidel" and a "howling atheist." The Reverend William Linn, a Dutch Reformed minister in New York, wrote a pamphlet opposing Jefferson because of "his disbelief of the Holy Scriptures; or in other words his rejection of the Christian Religion and open profession of Deism."

Jefferson had plenty of company among our nation's Founding Fathers (sorry for the sexist language, but this is what the founders almost always are called; I guess there weren't any Founding Mothers).

This is a first for me -- quoting from an Ayn Rand web site -- but it speaks the truth.

As the quotes on this page illustrate, the claim that America was founded on Christianity is a myth. Many of the Founding Fathers and Revolutionary War leaders were Deists, and upheld a firm separation of church and state.

Here's some additional quotes from "The Godless Constitution" that point to Thomas Jefferson's Enlightenment values. He'd never be able to be elected to high office today, even though Jefferson is considered one of our greatest presidents.

Jefferson had suggested (as we noted in the last chapter) that it was not of interest to the state whether his neighbor believed in twenty gods or no God, since "it neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket."

The second offensive passage appears in Jefferson's argument that only reason, persuasion, and free inquiry, not governmental coercion, find and advance truth.

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It was this strident Enlightenment rationalism, his constant juxtaposition of reason and superstition, free inquiry and religious coercion, that made Jefferson seem so dangerous a threat to his Christian enemies.

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[To Jefferson] Priests were the subverters of reason and enlightenment, for centuries duping decent Christians into "burning and torturing one another for abstractions which no one of them understand." They weave "spells" for their flocks, "moulding their minds as wax in the hollows of their hands." All priests, Jefferson claimed, "dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight."

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Outspokenly anticlerical and vigilant to exclude religion from public life as he may have been, Jefferson was, it must be emphasized, not himself a godless man. He was in fact living proof of his own argument that religion as private conviction could flourish without public endorsement.

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He believed fervently in the one God who had created all men equal. While never formally abandoning the Episcopalianism of his Virginia youth, he usually identified himself as a Unitarian. In this respect he was deeply influenced by the writings of his scientific friend the Reverend Joseph Priestley.

They both rejected the Trinity as a "metaphysical insanity" and shared the general deistic rejection of the miracles of the Bible, the divinity of Christ, and the doctrines of original sin and blood atonement. Jefferson, in fact, predicted that one day in a rational America everyone would be a Unitarian.

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Far from being one of "the bitterest enemies of Christ," as the Reverend Mason claimed in 1800, Jefferson embraced a personal religion shaped by the life and teachings of Jesus. He called his own creed "the philosophy of Jesus" and referred often to "the purity and sublimity of his moral precepts."

Thomas Jefferson said, ""I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know." He made up his own Bible, leaving out the unbelievable stuff. (You can read it here.) For his churchlessness alone, not to mention his other accomplishments, Jefferson deserves better than being disrespected by the Texas State Board of Education.

I shall honor his contributions to the United States and the world by vowing to never set foot in Texas (unless absolutely necessary) or watch a Dallas Cowboys football game (only the cheerleaders).

Life without God is more meaningful

Bart Ehrman once was a devout evangelical Christian. Now he's an agnostic scholar who debunks religious myths. Today on my car radio I heard a snippet of an NPR interview with him.

Ehrman was asked how his life had changed now that he doesn't believe in heaven, hell, and life after death any more. He answered that it had become much more meaningful. Ehrman no longer expects to enjoy (or fear) another life after this one.

This is it. One chance. Enjoy it while you can. Make the most of every moment.

That's how I've come to feel also. But for a while, like Ehrman, I was worried about what would take the place of religiosity. He told the interviewer that as he was losing his faith in Christianity, he wondered if he'd become an amoral anything goes libertine (or words to that effect).

Such didn't happen, Ehrman went on to say. Apparently what changed the most was the meaning life had for him, not what he felt drawn to do. 

My experience also.

I was into an Eastern guru-based faith, not Jesus, but for many years I had a similar expectation that my current earthly existence was just a way station leading to an afterlife.

Either a rebirth as another sentient being, or release from the supposed confines of being a soul conjoined with a physical body. Whichever happened after death, I'd have another chance to get things right. Or, wrong.

Like Ehrman I believed that I'd live on after I died. This was undeniably comforting. However, I now realize that I was trading quality for quantity. 

Meaning, I was living with reduced intensity, passion, and awareness of the present moment (quality) because in both the back and front of my mind there was an expectation that this life was just a stepping stone to another one.

And eventually, if paradoxically: eternity (quantity).

I used to read a lot of science fiction, including Philip Jose Farmer's marvelous "Riverworld" series. The main character is trying to reach the source of a mysterious river. After some trial and error, he learns that when he dies he'll be instantly reborn -- sometimes farther up the river.

Cool. Death becomes a means to an end, not the end. So the guy becomes cavalier toward dying. Bring it on, dude. Shoot me. Stab me. Drown me.

I've known religious believers who claimed to have a similar attitude. They'd talk about how they were looking forward to death, because then they'd meet the divinity that wasn't with them now.

Well, that's doubtful. Highly doubtful.

Yet I could see these people sort of sleepwalking through their current (and likely only) life, not taking it all that seriously, anticipating a much better life to come that would make this one seem like shit on a stick compared to ever-so-tasty cotton candy.

Problem is, this life is real. Any afterlife is imaginary, no matter how appealing some concept of it might be. In "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist," Stephen Bachelor says: 

What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? I suppose some of it has to do with fear of death, the terror that you and your loved ones will disappear and become nothing.

But I suspect that for such people, the world as presented to their senses and reason appears intrinsically inadequate, incapable of fulfilling their deepest longings for meaning, truth, justice, or goodness.

Sad, if true. Nothing prevents us from finding tremendous meaning in this life, this moment, this action, this awareness.

In fact, I don't see how genuine meaning could be found otherwise. Putting real living off for another life, where is the meaning in that?

If our central purpose in life is to pursue a religiosity that supposedly will lead to another really real life, distinct from the half-baked living we're doing now, aren't we forgetting the wisdom of the adage "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush"? 

Especially since we've never seen the bush, much less the birds in them. In his book Bachelor says about the Buddha:

He then compared a passionate believer in God to a man who declares that he is in love with the most beautiful girl in the land, but on being asked what she looks like is forced to admit that he has never once set eyes on her.

Here we are. Living on Earth. As a body (not in a body; immateriality of mind or soul is a belief, not reality).

If there is an afterlife, we don't know about it, since we're alive -- not dead. The meaning of our existence is founded on our actual life after birth, not our imagined life after death. 

Look around. This is it.

This. Is. It.

Drink in that reality. More: get drunk on it. It's intoxicating. What's happening never will happen to you again. Not ever. Never.

Miss it, and it's missed forever. Fail to pay attention to it, and that awareness is gone forever. Neglect to fully appreciate any priceless unrepeatable moment, and we have lost that meaning-richness.

Forever.

Become a better person first, a perfect divine being second

Often people attracted to spirituality want to skip the whole human being thing and jump directly into some supposed metaphysical realm.

Christians base their lives on being saved and getting a pass to enter heaven after death; Buddhists, Hindus, and other "Eastern" practitioners envision enlightenment, nirvana, god realization, or whatever as being an escape from the illusions of the material universe.

Well, there might be a transcendental reality, despite the lack of evidence. But for sure there is a physical world, which we all are living in now, doing our best to deal with the difficulties of being human.

Sickness and health. Sorrows and joys. Pains and pleasures. Sadness and happiness. Hatred and love. Anger and compassion. Depression and vitality. Death and life.

Every day, every hour, every minute, every second we're faced with wild wonderful ever-changing circumstances, choices, conditions -- both inside and outside of us. One moment we feel centered, harmonious, and peaceful; the next moment, off-kilter, jangled, and unsettled.

In my life experience, which includes thirty-five years of active involvement with a group pursuing spiritual development, I've found that people can devote themselves whole-heartedly to becoming a perfect divine being while making essentially zero progress toward becoming a better human person.

Often religious believers are so imbued with the goal (or fantasy) of detaching from their fallen, sinful, imperfect, maya-saturated bodily existence, they don't notice (or care) that they're acting like jerks.

Fairly frequently I get emails from someone who wants to tell me about how a follower of some faith, or a guru of some sort, acted inhumanely. I shouldn't be surprised by these stories, but I am.

It just seems strange that a person who is striving for spiritual elevation wouldn't begin by making sure that his or her bodily humanity is on firm ground -- that he or she has become as good a human being as possible before attempting some sort of metaphysical transformation.

Egotism. Authoritarianism. Lack of compassion. Ignoring common courtesies. Excessive pride. Prejudice against unbelievers. I've seen this, and much more, during the many years I spent with devotees of a supposedly advanced spiritual practice.

I remember hearing a leader of this organization advise, "Never thank someone who gives an inspirational talk at a meeting. It will inflate their ego."

I thought, "That's ridiculous. I thank my wife all the time. Along with clerks in stores. The coffee house barista. Our UPS delivery guy. What good is a spiritual path if I'm supposed to go down a road that is dehumanizing?"

I've been on a get humanly/mentally real reading kick recently. In my morning meditation area sit "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist," "Good Without God," "Buddha's Brain," "The Plastic Mind," "The Hidden Brain." 

Their common theme is that spirituality begins (and likely ends, in my view) with altering our human ways of acting, reacting, thinking, perceiving, and such. The brain causes the mind which causes the brain which causes the mind in a continuous looping interchange.

Each of us can change. We can alter ways of living and being that we don't like. Meditation, mindfulness, and other approaches meld the best of ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience.

Little things are important. Rather than feeling that soaring to the heavens is necessary to find truth, peace, and satisfaction, we might want to become more aware of what is right in front of us.

Drinking a cup of coffee. Patting our dog or cat. Watching tree branches blow in the wind. Observing the mind flow in well-worn channels.

This morning my wife said, "Should I go to the hardware store for the longer door bell screws you said we needed, but haven't gotten yet?" The question jarred my pre-coffee consciousness.

I thought in a flash: I got the screws yesterday. They're lying in an Ace Hardware plastic bag on top of the kitchen counter. I was planning to put them in today. I don't need reminding! I don't need nagging! Damn it, I...

Thankfully, at this point I became aware of the ridiculous over-reactive irritation that was starting to course through my brain. I stopped the inner talk. I simply said, "I got the screws. There they are."

Of such moments is spirituality (or self-development) made, in my current churchless understanding.

If I can't get along with other people, if I can't act like a decent human being most of the time, if I can't become aware of my failings, weaknesses, blind spots, and other habits that prevent me from harmoniously interacting with others, then I've got no business believing that I'm on a religious path that leads to perfection.

First things first, second things second -- if we ever get past the first.

Best reason why God doesn't exist

Does God exist?

People have been trying to answer this question for thousands of years. As I wrote about in this post, a philosophical novel sets out 36 arguments for the existence of God (listed here; scroll down to read them).

Arguments for the non-existence of God aren't as common. It's tough to prove that something doesn't exist, especially when that entity is supposed to be metaphysical, mysterious, and not particularly eager to reveal itself in an obvious fashion.

I usually argue that it isn't possible to prove that God is non-existent.

Instead, we agnostics and atheists are justified in asking for demonstrable proof that God does exist, since the burden of proof is on someone making a truth claim, not on the skeptic. 

But during my evening dog walk today -- when I often ponder deep questions about the nature of the cosmos, not to mention puzzling canine behavior -- I intuited a possible foolproof reason for why God can't exist.

At least not as the entity most people consider "God" to be: the creator of everything (Western monotheism) or the all-pervading essence of everything (Eastern monism).

I say this because Sartre and other existentialists got it right.

Existence precedes essence, though this usually is discussed in a human rather than cosmic sense. Sartre said: "Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards."

Makes sense.

Along the same line, how could God create or pervade if existence didn't exist? For God to be, there had to be being. Religious believers imagine God existing in some fashion. They usually don't try to imagine existence itself, which is a hell of a lot more mysterious, inexplicable and intriguing than a God with comprehensible qualities.

When I try to project my consciousness into the mystery of existence, a mind-blowing chill of not-knowing sends tingles up my psyche's spine. See here, here, and here.

My head hurts when I think too much about existence. But I get an enjoyable chill up my spiritual spine when I simply try to wrap my psyche around existence. Not in a wordy way. In, well, an existential way. This happens when I try to let the stark reality of existence blow the roof off all my notions about what exists, when I try to strip away thoughts about all that is until the skeleton of a bare is remains.

For the sake of argument, let's say that God exists. In other words, God exists within existence, just like you and I do. This means that God isn't the creator or essence of everything, because something -- existence -- is more fundamental than God.

A religious believer might respond, "No, you don't understand. God is everything in existence, including existence itself. There is nothing other than God, never has been, never will be."

And I'd reply, "Great. You agree with me. There's no such thing as God. Only existence. What people call God is an anthropomorphic misconception. They should be worshiping the unfathomable mystery of existence."

All we know is that something's happening here: existence. Those who are comfortable with leaving mystery mysterious remain churchless. Others need the warm blanket of religion, because not-knowing gives them a chill.

Something which isn't a thing must have always existed: existence. Otherwise, there would be no place for things to be. How things came to be is an interesting question, one which science is well-suited to explore.

Religions offer up nonsensical answers to this question, such as "God made all things to be, including you and me." Not only is there no demonstrable evidence of this, but using God as an explanation for how things came into existence ignores the Really Big Question:

Where, how, or why did existence itself come to exist, so there could be an existent God?

There's no answer. Never was, never will be. It's impossible to get outside of existence and study it. No one can ever know what might have been if nothing ever came to be. Existence simply is a given.

It is. End of story. Which also brings an end to fantasies about God being ultimate reality. Nope. Existence is.

Our notions about "God" fall to pieces before the concept-shattering mystery of existence. I enjoy this befuddlement. Having my mind blown is a lot more pleasurable and honest than clinging to dogmatic thoughts.

God doesn't exist. Existence exists. That reality is good enough for me.

So many arguments for God's existence; all flawed

Here's a mini-miracle that happened to me yesterday: I'm in a Barnes & Noble store and see a new hardcover book: "36 Arguments for the Existence of God -- a work of fiction."

I'm attracted to buy it. Handing it to the checkout clerk, I hear him say: "Hey, a friend of mind is reading this. He loves it." Cosmic! What are the chances...

Actually, quite good.

I suspect that people who work in book stores tend to read more books than the average person. And it figures that their friends would also. I'm buying a philosophical novel whose central character is a best-selling writer known as "the atheist with a soul," and the bookstore I'm in is located in one of the least religious areas in the country, Portland, Oregon.

So I don't think God impelled me to buy a book that questions God's existence (though it'd be cool if that were true, because I'd be attracted to a divine being with such an ironic sense of humor).

Nor do I think that God was behind another mini-miracle that occurred just before I sat down to write this post. Putting a salad bowl in the dishwasher, I dropped the fork that I was holding in the same hand.

Instead of dropping on the kitchen floor, or into the bottom of the dishwasher, the fork somehow flipped over perfectly and landed handle-side down in the utensil holder, which has narrow slots. Cosmic! What are the chances...

I have no idea. Fairly small, for one fork drop.

But the odds of winning a megabucks lottery are extremely miniscule, and regularly someone does just that: beat the odds. Having a fork randomly bounce handle first into a utensil slot is unusual. However, it isn't an act of God.

Thinking like this is what Rebecca Newberger Goldstein does in a marvelous appendix to her "36 Arguments for the Existence of God," which contains -- no big surprise -- those 36 arguments.

[You can read all of them, courtesy of Goldstein, on the Edge web site. Thanks, Rebecca -- who is married to noted cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. Much appreciated.]

Each argument is stated in a clear step by step fashion. Then the flaws in the argument are discussed. A comment ends the examination of the argument's validity.

The Barnes & Noble clerk said that his friend thought the 52-page appendix was worth the price of the whole 400-page book. I agree. I couldn't resist heading right to the final pages to read some of the arguments.

Many of them have been brought up by visitors to this blog who are still true believers in some faith, rather than godless heathen infidels like others who comment on my blog posts.

Here's a simplified and shortened summary of a few of the Goldstein arguments that come up frequently here on the Church of the Churchless.

(1) The Cosmological Argument. Everything that exists must have a cause. The universe cannot be the cause of itself. Something outside the universe must have caused it. God caused the universe. God exists.

Flaws: Who caused God? If God doesn't have a cause, or is self-caused, then the universe is able to exist without a cause, or be self-caused. Further, applying the concept of "cause" to everything in existence misuses the concept.

(2) The Argument from Personal Coincidences. People experience uncanny coincidences. These can't be explained by the laws of probability. Only a being who has the power to effect these coincidences could arrange for them to happen. God exists.

Flaws: A large number of experiences make "uncanny" coincidences probable, not improbable. And people are prone to an illusion called Confirmation Bias. When they have a hypothesis (daydreams predict the future), they notice the instances that confirm it (when they think of a friend and he calls), forgetting the times this doesn't happen.

(3) The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Currently science can't explain why we have a subjective feeling of conscious awareness. Science will never solve this problem, because the explanation must lie beyond physical laws. Thus consciousness is immaterial. God also is immaterial. God inserted a conscious spark of the divine into us. God exists.

Flaws: Drawing theological conclusions from the currently incomplete state of scientific knowledge is to commit the Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance. It may turn out that consciousness (or "proto-consciousness") is inherent in matter, which would make it materialistic. And the human brain simply may lack the capacity to understand human consciousness.

(4) The Argument from the Consensus of Mystics.  Mystics go into a special state in which they seem to see aspects of reality that elude everyday experience. There is unanimity among mystics as to what they experience. They can't all be deluded in the same way. Their experiences testify to the transcendent experience of God. God exists.

Flaws: Mystics may indeed be deluded in similar ways. Human nature is universal, and thus prone to universal illusions and shortcomings of perception, memory, reasoning, and objectivity. The temporal lobes of non-mystics can be stimulated to induce "mystical" experiences, as can certain drugs. 

There are quite a few more interesting arguments for the existence of God in Goldstein's appendix. But like the four I've shared, they all have serious flaws.

Thus to me one of the best arguments for the non-existence of God is how many arguments there are for God. This is the flip side of Argument #36 in the book: "The Argument from the Abundance of Arguments."

You'd think that the creator of the universe, the most important dude (or dudette) in the cosmos, the ultimate reality behind all other realities, would be just a bit more obvious and not need so many abstract conceptions to argue for his existence.

If soul is real, we'll never know

Lots of people believe in what philosophers call "mind-body dualism." Or if they're mystically or religiously inclined, they'll say that the soul is the non-physical side of who we are.

Regardless, this is a dualistic view of life. It's nothing new. Plato was a dualist, as was Descartes.

Nowadays, science has discredited the notion that human consciousness has a metaphysical aspect. Mind states clearly are related to brain states. There's no convincing evidence that consciousness exists separate from a body.

Yet belief in an immaterial soul or mind that survives physical death is still widespread. Most Christians believe this. So do most Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and other followers of a religious faith (including eclectic New Ager's).

One is simpler than two. So a dualistic outlook on life is going to be more complex than a unitary viewpoint.

For example, believers in mind/soul-body dualism have to explain how it is that something immaterial could interact with something material. How can a ghost pass through walls, yet also knock over a lamp? How can the soul be unaffected by the body, yet also inhabit a physical form?

In Stephen Bachelor's new book, "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist," he tackles these questions -- finding Buddhist (and other) notions of an immaterial mind/soul to be highly problematical.

I've only read a few chapters of the book, so Bachelor probably expands upon these ideas. But here's the way he explains the issue so far.

First, "emptiness" is a key Buddhist concept. This doesn't mean nothingness. Rather, it is that nothing has a fixed identity.

An empty self is a changing, evolving, functional, and moral self. In fact -- and this is the twist -- if the self were not empty in this way, it would be unable to do anything. For such a hypothetical self would be utterly disassociated from everything in the living world, existing in a purely metaphysical sphere, incapable of either acting or being acted upon.

Pretty dismal notion.

But this is what the idea of an immortal, immaterial, unchanging soul utterly divorced from the body points toward. We would have no idea that the soul existed, because the soul would have no connection with human cognition, experience, perception, or anything else. 

Stephen Bachelor writes:

How can such an immaterial mind [or soul] ever connect with a material body? Being immaterial, it cannot be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched. If it is untouchable, how can it "touch" or have any contact with a brain?

...I rebelled against the very idea of body-mind dualism. I could not accept that my experience was ontologically divided into two incommensurable spheres: one material, the other mental. Rationally, I found the idea incoherent.

Yet this is what I was being asked (told) to believe. I could not accept that, in order to be a Buddhist, I had to take on trust a truth-claim about the nature of the empirical world, and, having adopted such a belief, that I had to hold on to it regardless of whatever further evidence came to light about the relation of the brain to the mind.

Belief in the existence of a non-physical mental agent, I realized, was the Buddhist equivalent of belief in a transcendent God.

Exactly.

If God is transcendent, there is no way for a living, breathing, bodily-existing human being to know God. Likewise, if soul is transcendent, there also is no way to have a soulful or spiritual experience while alive.

So blind faith is required to believe in either an immaterial God or soul. Many people are comfortable with this sort of dogmatic religiosity. Bachelor isn't. Neither am I.

I'd rather live in reality than illusion. "Soul" and "God" are enticing ideas, to be sure. However, just as it isn't possible to relieve hunger from imaginary food, genuine meaning in life can't be founded on imaginary concepts.

The sheer strangeness of everything

Sanity is consensual.

If there's someone else who sees the world in the same way I do, that gives me at least a little bit of confidence that I'm not way out in weirdo-world -- though I'm not saying that would be a bad thing.

This morning I came across a passage in Stephen Bachelor's new book, "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist," that echoed sensations I have frequently these churchless days, and tried to describe at the end of my "Mysticism doesn't have to be mystical" post.

Here's how Bachelor says it:

One evening at dusk, as I was returning to my room along a narrow path through the pine forest, carrying a blue plastic bucket slopping with water that I had just collected from a nearby source, I was abruptly brought to a halt by the upsurge of an overpowering sense of the sheer strangeness of everything.

It was as though I had been lifted onto the crest of a great wave that rose from the ocean of life itself, allowing me for the first time to be struck by how mysterious it was that anything existed at all rather than nothing.

"How," I asked myself, can a person be unaware of this? How can anyone pass their life without responding to this? Why have I not noticed this until now?" I remember standing still, trembling and dumb, with tears in my eyes. Then I continued on my way before night fell.

This experience made me uncomfortably aware of a chasm between what I was studying and something that had happened to me in my own life that struck me as vitally important. The Buddhist texts with which I was familiar did not seem to speak about, let alone value, such experiences as the one that had just shuddered through me.

"This Too Shall Pass" could be secret of universe

I can't explain why, but I'm pretty sure this You Tube video contains the secret of the universe.

Watching it, I had an overwhelming feeling of "Yes! That's exactly what life is all about!"

However, I still have no idea what life is all about. Just that whatever it is, this is how it works.

Mysticism doesn't have to be mystical

For most of my life -- age 18 to 55, or thereabouts -- I've been an avid embracer of mysticism.

During my psychedelic period, I wasn't only aiming at getting high via LSD, mescaline, and such. Along with many other flower children, I also was trying to experience a higher form of consciousness.

We'd ponder the Tibetan Book of the Dead, then see if we could experience some of the bardos via a pill rather than meditation.

After a few years I stopped using drugs and devoted myself to meditating several hours a day with the same intent: learning whether our everyday way of viewing reality was truly "normal," or whether consciousness could be enlightened and perceive the cosmos from a more elevated perspective.

Looking back at those many years of mystic practice, I've come to realize how confining a mystical belief system can be -- even one that called itself a "science of the soul," supposedly far different from dogma-ridden religions. 

"Belief" and "mystical" are notions that don't get along very well. At least, not the way I've come to look upon mysticism.

Words, concepts, ideas, beliefs, and other thought-based forms of cognition are a big part of being human. But we Homo sapiens also are able to intuit, grok, commune, directly experience, and otherwise relate to reality suddenly, immediately, at one fell swoop, rather than bit by bit, step by step, understanding by understanding.

Mystics are out to find something hidden.

But if you presuppose what that "something" is, if you believe you know what the mystery is that a mystic practice supposedly will reveal, how mystical is that? Sure sounds a lot more like a religion than mysticism to me.

As the Grand Exalted Wikipedia proclaims, mysticism has many different meanings. I'm not saying that I have a better one. In fact, I'm mainly saying that I don't have any one.

And that's why I feel that I'm much more of a mystic now that I'm churchless. I've stopped believing. I still meditate, but I have no (or little) idea why I'm doing it or what I'm going to gain from it, if anything.

I just meditate because I like meditation, in pretty much the same way I eat strawberries because I like strawberries. Intellectually I understand that both things -- meditation and stawberries -- are good for me in certain ways.

However, the taste of each is what I enjoy, not the thinking about them.

When I believed in a supposedly mystical set of spiritual teachings, I never genuinely felt like a mystic. There always was a big bunch of expectations, suppositions, do's and don'ts, injunctions, rules, and rituals standing between me and the Great Unknown.

Dropping that stuff brought me closer to whatever it is I am, but don't know; to whatever it is the cosmos may be, but I'm clueless about.

I no longer believe that I have to look within myself, closed-eye inwardness, for mystic inspiration. The outside world is just as mysterious to me as my unknowing consciousness.

Much of the time while I'm bustling around doing my daily stuff, I have a feeling that seems deeply mystical to me -- much more so than the pseudo-mysticism I used to embrace, which actually was highly conceptual since it required an acceptance of teachings far divorced from immediate experience.

Mysticism doesn't have to be mystical.

By which I mean, mysticism doesn't have to be viewed as a voyage to some far-off hidden level of reality that lies way beyond the horizon of everyday life.

Yes, some people look upon mysticism that way. Which is fine. As the Wikipedia article says, some forms of mysticism are dualistic, while others aren't. There's a lot of choices:

• Nullification and absorption within God's Infinite Light (Hassidic schools of Judaism)
• Complete non-identification with the world (Kaivalya in some schools of Hinduism, including Sankhya and Yoga; Jhana in Buddhism)
• Liberation from the cycles of Karma (Moksha in Jainism and Hinduism, Nirvana in Buddhism)
• Deep intrinsic connection to the world (Satori in Mahayana Buddhism, Te in Taoism)
• Union with God (Henosis in Neoplatonism and Brahma-Prapti or Brahma-Nirvana in Hinduism, fana in Sufism)
• Theosis or Divinization, union with God and a participation of the divine nature (in Catholic Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy)
• Innate Knowledge (Irfan and Sufism in Islam)
• Experience of one's true blissful nature (Samadhi Svarupa-Avirbhava in Hinduism and Buddhism)
• Seeing the Light, or "that of God", in everyone (Quakerism)

My personal mystic experience has been along the lines of Taoism: "deep intrinsic connection to the world," though those words naturally don't reflect whatever the heck it is I feel whenever I feel whatever I'm feeling.

The best way I can express it is... gratitude... awe... wonder... bemusement... at the marvelous fact that for the moment I'm existing as part of an existence that every other existent person and thing shares.

Here I am. Here we are. Here it is.

For me, that's mysticism. And it isn't at all mystical. I simply have come to see the same world with different eyes. Unknowing eyes. Unbelieving eyes. Unreligious eyes.

If you're attracted to another form of mysticism, like the "complete non-identification with the world" mentioned above, that's great. Let's just agree that mystics come in all varieties -- including those who don't feel that mysticism is mystical.