Church of the Churchless

Reality is real, but brains construct knowledge

When Amazon delivered Paul Thagard's "The Brain and the Meaning of Life," I knew I was going to enjoy the book after I perused some chapter titles -- the first four being We All Need Wisdom, Evidence Beats Faith, Minds are Brains, and How Brains Know Reality. 

Ah, inspiration for my churchless non-soul. 

I'm one chapter away from finishing the book. Probably I'll write another post about it after I read Making Sense of It All. (I can only hope; that's a pretty confident claim for a chapter.)

Here I'll focus on some key concepts in How Brains Know Reality. This subject naturally is interesting to me, along with everyone else, since obviously we all have brains that are engaged in knowing reality.

Once in a while on this blog I get a comment from someone who questions whether this is possible. Specifically, whether the scientific method is any better than mysticism or religion as a means for understanding what the cosmos is all about.

This attitude surprises me.

After all, that person is using a computer to access the Internet so he or she can express an opinion that science is useless. Huh? A whole lot of scientific knowledge is backing up the technology that made it possible for someone to say, "It isn't possible to know reality by means of science."

I also hear from people who seem to believe that direct experience through some sort of "pure awareness" is the sine qua non of genuine knowledge. This notion also surprises me, given what is known about the many unconscious processes in the human brain.

Thagard's approach to knowing reality makes much more sense to me.

I think that lions and mountains are real, and so are clouds and electrons. But the hypothesis that minds are brains does not support a kind of naive realism according to which things are just as we perceive or conceive them to be. We know enough about how brains work to show that both perceiving and theorizing are highly constructive processes involving complex inferences.

Nevertheless, there are good reasons to believe that, when the brain is working well, it achieves knowledge about the reality of both everyday objects like mountains and theoretical scientific entities like electrons. This chapter shows how brain science and philosophical reflection together support a kind of constructive realism, the view that reality exists independent of minds, but that our knowledge of it is constructed by brain processes.

Hard to argue with.

When we go on our evening walk, my dog has a very different experience of reality than I do, given her vastly superior sense of smell. As I stand holding the leash, waiting for her to finish a comprehensive sniffing of a clump of grass that looks to me just like all the other clumps along the road, she is engaged in tasting an odor feast that's beyond my comprehension.

So we Homo sapiens do indeed construct our knowledge of reality through the only means available to us: the human brain. Thagard reviews some hypotheses about how we do this, and arrives at a favored theory: inference to the best explanation.

Don't be thrown off by this fancy phrase.

It's what we all do every day of our lives. Recently my wife excitedly told me that I had to come and see what was being done to a cherished twenty year old vine maple tree that is a centerpiece of our landscaping.

Bark was being chewed off. Not just a little. A lot. Some large branches were almost girdled, which could kill them. We talked about what animal could be the culprit. Deer? Raccoons? Ground squirrels?

We immediately suspected the latter, as they've been causing us other problems.

Some Googling revealed that they do indeed like to eat bark, something we hadn't noticed before. So ground squirrels became our inference to the best explanation and we've been acting accordingly to deal with the little furry irritants.

Thagard says:

Inference to the best explanation in science has the same basic structure as does reasoning in law, medicine, and everyday life. In all these domains, you should collect as much relevant evidence as you can, consider higher-level hypotheses and alternative ones, and accept the ones that provide the best overall explanation of the evidence.

This evidence doesn't have to be only direct perceptions.

In science and in everyday life, many of our concepts go beyond sensory experience. For example, our talk about the minds of other people frequently refer to their beliefs, wants, and emotions even though we cannot directly experience them. Scientific theories evoke many kinds of entities that cannot be directly observed -- among them, atoms, electrons, quarks, black holes, genes, biochemical pathways, viruses, personalities, and mental representations.

Our knowledge of the world would be desperately limited if we had to follow the injunction of strict empiricists that our knowledge be confined to what human senses can experience. Other animals have superior senses: birds can see ultraviolet light, dogs have more sensitive noses, bats can use echolocation, and so on.

The particular range of sensory experience open to humans is a coincidence of biological evolution, not a perfect guide to the nature of reality. Where humans far exceed other animals is in our ability to construct and evaluate brain representations that transcend our sensory limitations.

Problem is, some of these brain representations don't correspond to any sort of meaningful demonstrable reality.

Like unicorn, angel, god, and soul. Scientific theories aren't immune from this. Thagard notes that the concept of phlogiston once was used to explain combustion. Now we know better.

So some scientific skeptics argue that everything science currently knows through its inferences to the best explanations will be overturned one day. Thagard disagrees.

I don't know of a single broadened and deepened scientific theory that has turned out to be false. Of course, inference to the best explanation and any other kind of evidence-based thinking is fallible. There is always the possibility that new evidence will be gathered or new hypotheses will be generated showing that our current ideas are wrong... Concepts such as electron and gene that go well beyond sensory experience can nevertheless be judged to refer to real objects, as long as they are parts of theories that provide the best explanation of the available evidence.

OK, this makes sense for "real objects." But how about what can loosely be called "meaning of life objects"? In other words, goals, desires, intentions, longings, and such that aren't objectively real to others, but are definitely subjectively real for us.

Thagard talks a lot about the meaning of life in other parts of his book -- too big a subject for this blog post. I liked how he showed that inference to the best explanation works well for personal/meaning issues, just as it does for universal/knowledge issues.

Our brains construct reality when we infer what is true about the world using the scientific method summarized above. Likewise, we construct a meaningful life when we infer how best to achieve our goals using similar sorts of methods. 

Distinguishing these separate sorts of constructions is important, though. Thagard, in my opinion, doesn't focus enough on this (maybe he will in the final chapter that I haven't read yet).

As I often say on this blog, I've got no problem with people being attracted to whatever wild and crazy religious, spiritual, mystical, or philosophical beliefs they find useful in fulfilling their meaning of life goals.

Just don't expect me to believe like you. Or expect social policies to reflect your concepts without offering up some good reasons beyond "just have faith."

I also have no problem with people being attracted to whatever sorts of sexual activities turn them on (so long as children, or other innocents, aren't harmed). Nor do I have a problem with people being attracted to all sorts of artistic, musical, literary, athletic, culinary, and other pursuits.

Browsing an art gallery, my wife and I often say, "Jeez, who would want to buy that?" Well, the person at the cash register who we notice paying for the item as we walk out the door. Vive le difference.

We need to respect personal choices, whether they be religious, sexual, artistic, philosophical, or whatever. This is a big part of what makes life so interesting: variety.

I used to belong to the downtown Salem Rotary Club. For a number of years I enjoyed going to the weekly lunch meetings where a speaker would hold forth on some subject that interested him or her (some day I'll put up a post about my own "Quantum Barbie" talk, where I used a doll to illustrate principles of quantum physics).

I distinctly remember a guy who was into a Civil War battle, Pickett's Charge, big time. I mean, really big time. He seemed to know everything about it. I was mesmerized by how enthusiastic the guy was as he shared high points about his obsession in a 20 minute presentation.

It struck me as akin to a work of art created with tremendous passion. Myself, I couldn't care less about Pickett's Charge. But I enjoyed the guy's enjoyment (through mirror neurons, probably, another subject Thagard talks about quite a bit). 

So it's possible to come to a consensus about the "outside" reality that we all share. This is a marvelous accomplishment of the scientific method, using the inference to the best explanation approach. 

However, when it comes to constructing a meaningful life, people are always going to differ about what is most important, valuable, and worthy of being pursued.

Thankfully.

Divinity isn't necessary to make life meaningful

I was planning to write about another subject today, but a commenter on this post (Brian from Colorado) pushed my meaning-of-life button when he wrote:

If I have this right, Blogger Brian, you're hope is that others will hear your message of hopelessness, and deem it worthy of belief?

You would characterize the whole of existence as an accidental soup of random particles bouncing about in meaningless fashion, and then seek some modicum of consolation in having mastered the one true way of unblinking, tough-minded knowledge about "The Way Things Really Are." (or, at least that's what I seem to be getting out of of this)

In a world devoid of all divinity, where the total sum of your personal being is really no more than pointless dust, what could possibly be worth wanting? In keeping with the model that we're just auto-programmed meat machines, wouldn't gratification of our most base animal desires, a modest sense of social membership and that good ole' chimp-conferred drive for alpha status/prestige suffice?

Wow, this is so far from what I feel -- and have blogged about here, here, here, and here -- that I have to respectfully say to my Coloradoan namesake, "No, Brian, you don't have it right."

What Brian did in his comment was draw conclusions from some observations about the universe and life on Earth. He considered that matter/energy is "pointless dust," that the human brain is "auto-programmed," and that we are naturally drawn to gratify "our most base animal desires."

Each of these conclusions can be challenged.

They aren't scientific facts, but rather assumptions drawn from a personal interpretation of evidence about reality. This is how meanings are made according to Paul Thagard (a professor of philosophy, psychology, and computer science) in a book I'm reading, "The Brain and the Meaning of Life."

This very morning I read the chapter "why life is worth living." Here's the beginning of his chapter conclusion.

If you want to reduce my book to a slogan, it could be this: The meaning of life is love, work, and play. A more nuanced summary would be better: People's lives have meaning to the extent that love, work, and play provide coherent and valuable goals that they can strive for and at least partially accomplish, yielding brain-based emotional consciousness of satisfaction and happiness.

I have tried to develop a naturalistic theory of the meaning of life, as constituted largely by love, work, and play. Each of these provides rewarding goals, which are brain representations of possible states of affairs imbued with emotional significance through a mixture of neural activities.

Observations of the pursuits and happiness of most people provide good reason to reject nihilism, the view that life is meaningless or absurd. There is more to meaning than happiness which is the result of satisfaction of more basic goals whose pursuit and accomplishment enable human lives to flourish.

The meaning of life is multidimensional, requiring the combination and integration of various kinds of goals, the most importance of which concern love, work, and play. Support for the importance of these realms comes from psychological and sociological evidence about their contributions to human well-being, and also from emerging neurological understanding of how they operate in our brains.

There's a lot of philosophical and scientific tofu (I'm a vegetarian, so don't want to say "meat") packed into those four paragraphs. I'll focus on one subject: goals.

Thagard says, and I agree, that "a meaningful life is one where you still have something to do, even if doing it may not make you happy that day, week, or year." Life isn't only about happiness, though that is a result of having goals satisfied.

You can have happiness without much meaning, and meaning without much happiness, so happiness is not the meaning of life.

We all (or almost all) do things that are satisfying, but don't necessarily make us happy. Raising a child, for example. Or pursuing a challenging educational degree requiring long hours of study. Or climbing Mt. Everest in a blizzard.

Seeking truth about the universe can be one of those things.

Religious dogmas almost always have "good news" for us. We're immortal souls. We're going to heaven after we die. God has a plan for us, so there's nothing to worry about. And so on. Yet many people find more meaning in life through scientific truth-seeking than religious belief-embracing.

But each to his own. This is one of the themes in my previous meaning-of-life posts.

Now I see that objective reality is one thing, and the meaning I attribute to it and my life is another thing. Nobody else can create that meaning for me.

...Each individual must determine, or choose, his or her own meaning of life, because life's meaning isn't a given like gravity or electromagnetism.

... find that some commenters on this blog, including me from time to time, fail to make a distinction between (1) a statement of collective religious belief and (2) a description of what an individual finds spiritually or philosophically meaningful.

There isn't a hard and fast distinction between (1) and (2), but they clearly are different.

Example: someone leaves a comment on a post that says Christianity, Islam, Sant Mat, Hinduism, or another religion is true, and I'm an idiot for not recognizing this. I'll respond along the lines of Oh, yeah, who says? Show me the evidence.

However, if someone comments, "I really enjoy meditating in the morning as [fill in a spiritual practice] teaches," what goes through my mind is That's great. I'm glad this person has found something that is so meaningful to him or her.

Likewise, it doesn't bother me to hear, "I don't know if my religion is true, but I get a lot of satisfaction from believing in it." This is humble, non-dogmatic, personal.

Whatever people want to believe, that's their right. They just shouldn't demand that anyone else accept beliefs that have no demonstrable convincing evidence behind them.

So this is one way Brian from Colorado misconstrued me: I'm not out to tell people what they should believe.

What I object to are religious believers who claim they have knowledge about objective reality (including a hypothesized metaphysical realm) that isn't backed up with demonstrable evidence.

I support what could loosely be called the "scientific method." Or, as Thagard puts it, "inference to the best explanation." This is the best way to arrive at both personal goals and universal knowledge.

Inference to the best explanation in science has the same basic structure as does reasoning in law, medicine, and everyday life. In all these domains, you should collect as much relevant evidence as you can, consider higher-level hypotheses and alternative ones, and accept the ones that provide the best overall explanation of the evidence.

100% proof isn't possible, plausibility is

Nice offering on the Atheist Meme front from Greta Christina today.

Very few claims can be proven or disproven with 100% certainty. But we can still assess whether those claims are more or less likely to be true. And that includes religion. Atheism doesn't mean 100% certainty that there is no God: it's the conclusion that the God hypothesis is not plausible. Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get across.

We can only hope.

Can you be spiritual without being scientific?

Short answer to my blog post title: No. Absolutely not. Especially in these 21st century times. Maybe back in the Dark Ages, when accurate scientific knowledge was extremely limited.

Today we know with considerable certainty that the universe is some 13.7 billion years old, having begun in a big bang that is still banging (and indeed, accelerating).

And that life has evolved on Earth from humble unicellular beginnings to we Homo sapiens who are able to contemplate our origins.

And that the "mind" is a product of the "brain," an amazingly complex agglomeration of neural processes which enable us to perceive, feel, intuit, and understand all that science has come to know.

Science has not found any convincing evidence that a spiritual side to reality exists. By "spiritual," I mean metaphysical, non-material, something other than the matter/energy that the countless entities in our universe are fashioned out of.

I'm not talking about a philosophical, soulful, or religious attitude, nor an attempt to comprehend what is most meaningful in one's life.

All of this is part of materiality, since it transpires by means of a physical body/brain/mind living within the physical time/space continuum. So if there is something genuinely spiritual, the word something points us in the wrong direction.

Some thing in the material universe won't be spiritual. In addition to obvious thing-like objects, this includes thoughts, emotions, concepts, beliefs, and imaginings, since all of these are manifestations of the brain.

Thus anyone who seriously seeks "spirit" has to be reasonably well acquainted with modern science, since so much of what once was considered metaphysical now is  recognized as almost certainly being within the bounds of materiality.

Notably, the consciousness of people who are seriously seeking spirit. If you don't believe this, educate yourself on modern neuroscience. I can recommend Paul Thagard's "The Brain and the Meaning of Life," a recently published book that I'm currently reading. Excerpt:

Some philosophers think that ascription to the brain of psychological properties such as consciousness is incoherent -- it simply makes no sense. Well, it may not make sense if your conceptual scheme is mired in dualism, but understanding the mind requires willingness to develop and consider the evidence for new conceptual schemes.

Just as the Copernican, Darwinian, and other scientific revolutions required gradual appreciation of the explanatory force of new conceptual schemes, so the Brain Revolution requires recognition of the explanatory gains that become available when the neural mechanisms for neural processes such as perception are identified.

The best response to people who say that they just can't imagine how the mind could be the brain is: try harder. Overcoming the compelling illusion that the mind is nonmaterial is not easy, but one can succeed in doing so by acquiring sufficient understanding of neural mechanisms for thought and behavior.

If "spiritual" isn't something physical, respect for the truthfulness of a hypothesized metaphysical entity -- whether this be a personal God or some impersonal cosmic force -- demands that a spiritual aspirant not mistake a worldly phenomenon for what he or she is seeking.

Without understanding what science has learned about the nature of physical reality, how is it possible to be sure that one has gone beyond the bounds of materiality?

For example, neuroscientists have found that perceptions aren't a mirror of what is "really" there to be perceived. Expectations, previous experiences, and other factors influence how the mind/brain views reality.

Without taking this into account, an attitude of "I had a divine vision of X, so it must be true" is highly naive. Most of what our brains present to our conscious awareness springs from hidden neural processes.

The scientific method recognizes the fallibility of human cognition, perception, and emotion. It systematically tests possible hypotheses concerning the nature of reality to sort out the likely true from the likely false (absolute certainty isn't an attribute of science).

Spiritual seekers need to do the same -- a tough job. Indeed, a really tough job. I have no idea how someone alive as a physical body/brain could ever know that they've transcended the bounds of materiality.

But they can recognize when they haven't.

Which will keep them humble, open-minded, and respectful of how science is the best friend of spirituality, since it is the only way of distinguishing what is material from what is possibly spiritual.

Cirque du Soleil reflects great philosophy of life: openness

Usually I don't come away from a theatrical performance feeling that I've just been exposed to a marvelous philosophy of life. But usual and Cirque du Soleil aren't words that belong next to each other.

Last Friday my wife and I journeyed up to Portland (Oregon) to see Kooza. It was our first Cirque du Soleil experience. And surely not the last. We loved the show, including the Tapis Rouge pampering that we ended up getting at no additional cost.

I found Kooza deeply moving.

Always eager to fire up my philosophical neurons, I've spent the past few days musing about what I enjoyed so much about Kooza's amazing blend of acrobatics, clown'ing, artistry, music, and -- as one of its creators emphasizes in a video -- fun.

Watching Kooza, I was inspired by men and woman who were able to make their bodies do amazing things at the edge of human capabilities. Yet there also were clowns who represented the commonplace, albeit with an appealing edge of a different sort.

They made fun of themselves. They made fun of other clowns. They made fun of people in the audience. The clowns were equal opportunity debunkers of seriousness.

Religions, of course, are deeply serious.

They don't like to be laughed at, because they've got important dogmas to defend. Popes, imams, preachers, rabbis, gurus, and the like rarely are seen laughing uproariously at their own pretentiousness.

In the world of Kooza, though, there are no sacred cows. Good-natured clownish teasing is interspersed between the Oh, my god! acts of physical prowess.

I came across a good description of the Cirque du Soleil philosophy in a newspaper article, "What makes Cirque Worque? Unlocking the enduring phenomenon of Cirque du Soleil."

It's all about openness, diversity, willingness to change, flexibility, creativity, individualism -- polar opposites of religious fundamentalism.

But Naum notes the longstanding importance of openness to difference and diversity in the company's philosophy. "It's part of what made Cirque du Soleil what Cirque du Soleil is. It's part of what circuses are," she says. The unusual, the offbeat, the strange, has traditionally been valued in the circus; it's what keeps the audiences coming in, that thing that they've never seen before.

Cirque extends that concept beyond the novelty of an act to an appreciation of what every individual, every culture, every creative idea, can contribute to the whole. "Learning to be open to difference is part of the process" of becoming a member of this circus community and one of the ways in which "Cirque really takes good care of its people."

That openness may be the single most significant key to the Cirque phenomenon. You see it informing the operation of the organization on all levels and at all points in the life of a production. When a new show is being conceived, the Cirque creative teams are supposed to open their imaginations to new ideas, new visions, new approaches.

You might think that the larger Cirque du Soleil gets, the more it has at stake and thus the more inclined it would be to stick with what works and just recycle its successes. But Cirque resists that kind of repetition, Naum insists. "For sure, when you look at the different shows of Cirque du Soleil, there is a signature," she says, "but I cannot say it's a formula."

Each show is driven by its own distinct creative vision, and whether it's water as in "O", birds as in Alegría, gypsies as in Varekai, or the Beatles, it's that vision that opens up the possibilities for the artists on the production to explore new concepts, move in new directions. Cirque's openness to reinventing the form has always been at the foundation of its success, and each new production shows that it continues to be.

The principle of openness extends through the life of a production. It's integral to the development phase as the members of the creative team discuss, debate, and occasionally fight over the ideas being brought to the table. Every contribution must be carefully considered in the context of the whole.

That's a process that requires time, and Cirque is open there, too: allowing for dozens of months to work out all the details of a production and to train the performers and fully integrate them into this imagined universe. And even when a production has proven successful and been on the road for years, Cirque is open to change in it.

Beautiful.

It's no wonder that my churchless psyche was so attracted to Cirque du Soleil. After many years of treading a straight and narrow religious path, I'm now attracted to exploring fresh territory where the wild things roam.

Here's videos of some of my favorite Kooza acts. The three female contortionists were breathtaking.

These Wheel of Death performers were way over on the macho side of the yang/yin scale.

And for some feminine yin'ness, I loved this sensual hoop dancer.

Nothing metaphysical here. Nothing other worldly. Just magical. In the most natural sense of the word.

Radha Soami Satsang Beas rakes in cash (and a river bank)

Thanks to David Lane (a.k.a "Neural Surfer") I came across a link to a news story about a big real estate deal involving land owned by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a Indian religious/spiritual organization headquartered in the Punjab.

A commenter points out that the sale is for about $108 million, with houses on the property slated to sell for around $2 million. Wow. Parts of India must be imitating Beverly Hills.

I also was emailed a link to another story about RSSB: "Dera raising embankment to change course of river; farmers complain."

Hundred million dollar deals and questionably legal construction aren't uncommon in the world of big business. But as David Lane said, they seem incongruent with the values RSSB purports to hold.

How to tell science from pseudoscience

Since religious believers often put down science as an inadequate means of knowing reality, it's interesting that science pops up so often in the names of metaphysical belief systems.

For example, there's Science of the Soul, Christian Science, Religious Science, and Scientology.

How, then, can we tell the difference between genuine science and pseudoscience? Last night I read a review in New Scientist of "Nonsense on Stilts: How to tell science from bunk," by Massimo Pigliucci.

Naturally I had to fire up Amazon and order the book. It sounds right up my churchless alley. The review by Amanda Gefter says:

Pigliucci, a philosopher of science at City University of New York, begins by arguing that science is not one thing - it is a mixed bag of practices ranging from physics and chemistry in the "hard sciences" to sociology and anthropology in the "soft". What they all have in common, he says, is the construction and testing of hypotheses with systematic observations or experiments.

It quickly becomes apparent, however, that this definition isn't enough. For something to count as science, it also needs some kind of explanatory framework. General relativity is science not only because it makes predictions that have been confirmed by observations, but also because it has a beautiful internal consistency: it explains not only how gravity should behave but what it is.

Right on.

Without an explanatory framework we're left with disconnected facts (or pseudo facts) floating around aimlessly in a cosmos that is demonstrably highly interrelated. 

Fairly frequently on this blog someone will accuse me of being closed-minded because I won't take seriously some metaphysical claim -- such as a vision of a divine being, or a miraculous event that can't be explained by currently accepted laws of nature.

Well, as Pigliucci says (according to the reviewer), science demands testing of hypotheses with systematic observations or experiments. A claim isn't valid by virtue of "just have faith" or "believe in what I say." You've got to back up a claim with more than that.

Part of that more is putting a purported fact in a broader explanatory framework. After all, any metaphysical claim is pretty darn significant -- to put it mildly. For an isolated divine vision or miraculous event to be true, almost certainly a whole otherworldly realm must exist.

Where? What is it made of? What connects it with material existence? How is human consciousness aware of it? These are just a few of the questions that need to be answered convincingly to provide an explanatory framework.

Admittedly, science doesn't know how everything in the physical universe fits together. Quantum mechanics and relativity theory still are disconnected aspects of a broader "theory of everything." But theorists are coming closer to reconciling these fundamental laws of nature.

Many religious believers fall back on it's a mystery when asked to explain some metaphysical phenomenon. OK, that's a valid response. But this is the same as saying "I don't know." 

How is not-knowing a metaphysical proof? Many mysteries have turned out to have physical explanations as science has made progress in revealing the laws of the universe.

So the next time someone asks you to believe in something unbelievable, follow Amanda Gefter's lead: ask them how this something works. She uses Intelligent Design (ID) as an example.

A contrived dualism is a false dichotomy - if evolution is wrong then ID must be right - and it highlights ID's lack of explanatory power. ID is nothing more than an attack on evolution; in and of itself it is nothing more than a belief in God.

To see what I mean, try this experiment if you ever find yourself talking to a proponent of ID. Say, "OK, for the sake of argument let's say evolution is wrong and let's forget about it. Now tell me how intelligent design works."

Having tried this a few times myself, I am confident that you will be met with nothing but an awkward silence.

Nice simple description of Zen

I've read lots of books about Buddhism and Zen. Often the core teachings get submerged under a bunch of confusing verbiage.

So it was refreshing to pick up "The Zen Teachings of Master Lin-chi" and find a wonderfully clear introduction by the translator, Burton Watson.

Of all the world's "spiritual" faiths (using that term loosely), Zen Buddhism and it's iconoclastic cousin, Taoism, strike me as being the least religious'y. Burton makes this clear.

I'm not endorsing what he says as the gospel truth -- that'd be opposed to what he says, even if I heartily believed in it. I just wanted to share some passages from Watson's introduction because they seemed to describe Buddhism/Zen/nonduality so well.

(headings in italics are mine; rest of the words are Watson's)

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The highest truth of Buddhism, emptiness

When Mahayana texts designate the absolute, or highest truth, as emptiness, they mean that it is empty of any characteristics by which we might describe it. This is because it is a single, undifferentiated whole, and the moment we begin applying terms to it, we create dualisms that immediately do violence to that unity. Hence, even the term emptiness itself must in the end be rejected, since it implies that there is something outside of emptiness that is not empty.

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The phenomenal world and the absolute

If reality is a single, all-embracing oneness, with nothing whatsoever outside it, then the entire phenomenal world as we know and perceive it, all time and all space, must be included within that unity. In the end, then, the absolute must be synonymous with the relative or phenomenal world; or, as the Heart Sutra puts it, "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form."

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How the mind "creates" the phenomenal world

Buddhism declares that the mind in a sense creates the whole phenomenal world, as a painter creates a painting with lines and colors. ...The mind, in its unenlightened state, when it perceives the phenomenal world through the senses, inevitably identifies certain phenomena as desirable and others as hateful or frightening, and this gives rise to the craving and repulsion that are the source of all our sufferings. The mind thus "creates" the world in the sense that it invests the phenomenal world with value.

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A remedy for our problems

The remedy to this situation, according to Buddhism, is to still the mind, to stop it from making discriminations and nurturing attachments toward certain phenomena and feelings of aversion toward others. When this state of calmness of mind is achieved, the darkness of ignorance and passion will be dispelled and the mind can perceive the underlying unity of the absolute.

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Which doesn't mean stopping the mind completely

This is the state of understanding or awakening to which Lin-chi in his sermons is attempting to lead his listeners. He talks constantly about stilling the thoughts or of preventing thoughts from arising. He of course does not mean that one should attempt to halt the activity of the mind entirely -- such a state would be attainable only in profound sleep or death. What he means is that one should try to stop the mind from making the kinds of discrimination that lead to craving or attachment.

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Where traditional Buddhism goes wrong

Mahayana, basing itself on the doctrine of emptiness, or nondualism, argued that, since all beings are part of a single underlying unity, they must interpenetrate one another and share each other's identity. Thus all beings must partake of the Buddha-nature and contain within themselves the "seeds" or potential for full enlightenment.

But the Mahayana sutras tended to take over much of the language of earlier Buddhism and to imply that most individuals will require great effort and many lifetimes of dedication to the religious life before they can hope to reach the highest goal. A person who pursues the religious life, we are led to understand, advances by gradual stages, and though the final breakthrough to enlightenment may be sudden, it requires vast years of preparation.

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Antidote: look to yourself! Not to others.

The message of Lin-chi's sermons, reiterated with almost wearisome persistence, is that his followers are allowing all this talk of goals and striving, of buddhas and patriarchs, to cloud their outlook and to block the path of understanding. All such words and concepts are external and extraneous postulations, attachment to which is just as much a delusion and impediment as attachment to any crasser objective, such as sensual gratification or material gain. Again and again he exhorts them to put aside all such external concerns and to turn their gaze within, where the Buddha-nature inherent in all beings is to be found.

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No goal, no place to reach, no one to become

What he is saying, and what the Ch'an [Zen] masters all say in the end, is that one should not become unduly preoccupied with the scriptures and tenets of Buddhism, nor with the rules of conduct and devotional practices that are believed to lead one step by step along the path of spiritual advancement.

Nor, for that matter, is one to become preoccupied with the teachings of the Ch'an sect itself, with the words that Lin-chi is speaking at the moment... All such "words and phrases" are to be put aside, and the student is to look within and to understand, once and for all, that there is no goal to be striven for because it has been won already, no place to be journeyed to because one is there right now.

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We're all the "True Man without rank"

It ["True Man with no rank"] designates a person with genuine understanding of the Tao, or the Way, and here stands for the Buddha-nature inherent in all...who is within reach of them right now. Once they have done that, once they have experienced true enlightenment and broken through the barrier of ignorance into the undifferentiated realm of Emptiness, then nothing more will be required of them.

They will be persons with "nothing to do," not idle, of course, since daily activities never cease, but pursuing no purposive goal, reaching out for no distant ideal, accepting all experience as it comes to them and no longer being pushed around or led astray by their surroundings.

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Religion is the problem

Lin-chi seems to imply that the only thing preventing his students from attaining immediate enlightenment is their own lack of faith in their ability to do so, and their mistaken preoccupation with the externals of their religion.

...Sitting in meditation is of course one of the most important practices of Ch'an school, and in the Lin-chi lu we catch glimpses of Lin-chi and other figures in the narrative thus engaged. Indeed, the Chinese name of the school, Ch'an, is a transcription of dhyana, the Sanskrit word for meditation.

It should be noted, however, that Lin-chi at one point implies that meditation as well, if too earnestly pursued with an objective in mind, can become as much an impediment as inordinate attention to any of the other external trappings of the religion.

Crazy or religious? Tough to tell the difference.

After putting up my post about Muslims in Pakistan going batshit crazy over a Facebook page that celebrates Everybody Draw Muhammed Day!, I got to thinking about how religious believers would be considered certifiably insane (or at least seriously out of touch with reality) if society didn't look upon collective delusions more favorably than individual wacked-out'ness.

I mean, let's imagine that there aren't any religions on Earth.

So...no unproven metaphysical dogmas. No faith-based theologies. No imagined heavens/hells, astral planes, or soul-traveling destinations. No hypothesized divine beings with miraculous powers. No hidden system of godly rewards and punishments.

But people still have minds that can be in touch with reality to a greater or lesser extent. We still have mental hospitals, counselors, psychotherapists, and other means of assessing/treating those who appear to be way out there on the Got It Together horizon.

It just isn't possible for someone to use the "my religion made me believe it" excuse when some weird notion takes root in his or her psyche. I imagine a psychiatrist sitting in a room with a guy or gal, notebook in hand, listening to the patient say things like...

"If I draw a picture of this man who lived a long time ago in what is now Saudi Arabia, that's really, really wrong, and I should be punished for it."

"Someone was nailed to a cross. His blood washed away my bad qualities. I feel so much better knowing that he suffered a horrible death -- all for me!"

"I can't use electricity one day a week. Or eat meat along with a dairy product. Or use a dishwasher for plates that have touched both meat and dairy. I'd be a bad person if I did these things."

"Somebody invisible and super-powerful knows my thoughts. So not only do I have to do what he wants, but I also can't even think about going against his commands."

"Everything that is going to happen to me was planned out before I was born. I can't do anything about it now."

"What you see of me isn't really real. My body is an illusion, like yours is. What I really am can't be seen, even by me. My goal in life is to discard my fake physical form."

"Sex is bad. People are supposed to be celibate. When I have lustful thoughts, I know it is the bad part of me coming out."

Crazy or religious? Tough to tell in our actual world. But if religiosity didn't exist, the diagnosis would be easy to make.

Draw Mohammed Day freaks out fundamentalist Muslims

Example #[infinity] of why religions are so ridiculous: Pakistan shuts down Facebook over a page that promotes "Draw Mohammed Day."

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority issued the order a day before "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day," scheduled by a Facebook group with the same name. "Obviously it (the blocking of Facebook) is related to the objectionable material that was placed on Facebook. That is why it is blocked," said Khoram Ali Mehran of the telecommunication authority.

Check out Everybody Draw Mohammed Day! on Facebook. No reason not to -- aside from defying the will of Allah and being damned for eternity, along with having your throat slit as a godless infidel. (Seriously...death threats have been made by Islamic crazies._

I thought of submitting my own caricature of Mohammed, since this is prohibited by a few supposed hadiths (sayings) of the prophet, and I like defying religious conventions. 

But I'm a lousy artist.

And on the Facebook page I found a drawing by someone who shares my artistic sensibilities. So I'll share this drawing of Mohammed as my contribution to the cause of laughing at religious fundamentalism.

Cool new sharing/search bar

When you scroll down the page, you'll see an Apture site bar appear. It's pretty cool. Highlight a word or words. Click on "search." You'll get results from my blogs, Wikipedia, Google, You Tube, Amazon, and more. Web sites found via a search can be browsed from within this blog (though other blog posts on the subject open in a new tab; also in Firefox for some reason). Close the browsing window by clicking the "x" and return to the post you were reading. Share a post via Facebook, Twitter, or email by clicking on the site bar icons. Enjoy.

Take baby steps into "spiritual" mystery

There's nothing inherently wrong with grandiosity. Dreaming big can lead to significant realities: art, literature, money, political power, athletic accomplishment, whatever.

But a large part of wisdom is distinguishing between what is less and more possible.

This is a subject of more than academic or abstract interest to me, because for much of my life I've been way out there on a grandiosity branch when it comes to knowing the mysteries of the cosmos. 

Maybe I can blame, or thank, my mother. She was a woman who loved learning. We were able to move into a new house when I was about ten. My mother had a bookshelf made that exactly fit the length of the Great Books of the Western World, a prized possession (which I now have). 

She wanted to know the truth.

More than that: The Truth, with a capital "T." My mother read P.D. Ouspensky. She was interested in spirituality and mysticism. She died in possession of a lot of truths. But not The Truth.

I came to share her goal.

For over thirty-five years I considered that I was on a path leading to knowledge of ultimate reality, a revealing of the cosmic mysteries. It didn't enter my mind that I could be wrong, that like so many others (now I'd say everyone) who sought The Truth, the search is bound to fail.

Because there is no end to mystery. Or let's say Mystery, to get the capitalization consistent with The Truth.

No end, at least, for we humans living now, here on Earth.

Who knows what will be possible a thousand, million, or billion years in the future? We can't put a limit on knowledge. Maybe with the aid of computers that vastly surpass the abilities of the human brain, eventually Homo sapiens, or a succeeding species, will be able to approach the end of the cosmos' knowledge trail.

Until then, we have to be content with expanding our understanding of reality bit by bit. Humility is called for. Scientists realize how little we know about the universe, compared to its almost unimaginable vastness and complexity.

Strangely, though, metaphysicians (and I once was among them) glibly speak of knowing an ultimate reality that not only encompasses the laws of physical nature, but also hypothesized spiritual realms.

Well, anything is possible. However, only some things are probable.

And I'd put knowledge of ultimate reality into the exceedingly improbable category. In part, because I doubt that we could recognize such a creature -- Ultimate Reality -- if it crawled by right in front of us.

Baby steps are a more reasonable expectation, whether we're speaking of collective human understanding of the cosmos, or our personal insights into what reality is all about.

In "God and His Demons," author Michael Parenti tears religion to shreds. Yet Parenti recognizes that humanity has a lot to learn about all kinds of different things -- including what might be called "spiritual" if this word is used correctly.

The way I see it, which fits with the following passage from Parenti's book, "spiritual" can mean phenomena that lie beyond our current understanding, yet are still part of what we call physical reality.

Just because there is much more truth to be discovered in the darkness that lies beyond the light of current human knowledge doesn't mean that this realm of mystery is metaphysical. 

Here's how Parenti puts it, speaking at first of when he was interested in religious studies:

In those days I also wondered whether the universe might harbor secrets and meanings of a transcendent nature, offering an escape from the confines of the skin-encapsulated ego, a mystical experience of the Great Ineffable that some people like to label God.

To this day I sometimes meditate and find myself contemplating the empyrean mysteries. Do my occasional feelings of near transcendence descend from a cosmic source? I rather doubt it. More inclined am I to suspect that "spiritual experience" originates someplace closer to home, being auto-induced, even if it feels splendidly otherwise.

Still, it is not settled in my mind. In regard to what is broadly called the "spiritual" realm, I remain agnostic about certain things and disbelieve most everything else. What I do believe is that -- beyond the thermal, solar, gravitational, nuclear, and other familiar energies -- there may be forms of energy that are subjected in extraordinary ways to laws of nature not yet comprehended or even imagined by us.

Such an unfinished thought should not ignite furious objections in anyone's heart, except perhaps the most orthodox scientists and religionists.

Yes, we can resonate with the famous quote from "Hamlet" (and one of my favorite movies, "L.A. Story") without believing that any philosophy encompasses knowledge of everything in existence.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Great logical argument for not believing in God

Why should someone believe in God? Any god. Or gods. Going further: why should someone believe in any metaphysical, spiritual, mystical, or other-worldly hypothesis?

Usually people don't give much thought to these questions.

Most of humanity is religious in one way or another. They've fallen into some faith by virtue of birth, culture, conversion, or a leap that was taken without much (or any) of a logical underpinning.

Yesterday I started reading a book by Greg Craven, "What's the Worst That Could Happen?" It's subtitled A rational response to the climate change debate. Which it is, judging from the four chapters that I've read so far.

Craven's approach also holds promise for being a rational response to the religious debate. This image is from his web site. 

On the left, we see rows for "false" and "true." At the top, columns for "yes" and "no" -- whether to take action on the issue, which in this case is global warming.

The beauty of this grid is that someone doesn't have to put all of his or her decision eggs into one truth basket. As it should be, because nothing is certain. Not in science, not in religion, not in anything.

We have to make decisions based on imperfect and uncertain information. For example, should I follow a particular religious or spiritual path? What are the consequences of doing so, or not?

Here's how Craven describes the marvel of discovering this decision grid:

It was suddenly clear that we were deadlocked because we had been asking the wrong question, one that relied on eliminating the uncertainty about whether dangerous human-caused global warming is real or not before making a decision about what (if anything) we should do about it. The amazing thing is that the grid allows the issue to be decided despite the uncertainties. 

I was stunned. It was a weird "How come I've never heard of this?" sort of moment, because with the grid there was simply no need to decide which side of the debate to believe. It was like a Magical Grid Machine that took uncertainty and turned it into confidence almost effortlessly.

The debate was over not because I'd found a way to show which side was right but because I'd found a way to show that the debate itself was moot. The real question about dangerous global warming is not, Is it true? but, Is it worth doing anything about, just in case it's true?

Substitute "a religious belief" or "belief in God" for "dangerous global warming" and the decision grid works just the same. This is what Pascal tried to do in his famous wager.

He argued that if eternal damnation is the consequence of not believing in God, and heaven is the reward of believing, then a person should bet that God exists. Acting like a true believer isn't that tough, so the possible rewards way exceed the nasty consequence of hellfire, forever.

However, Pascal's approach suffers from the same problem that Greg Craven's students (and others) pointed out to him after he unveiled version 1.0 of his decision grid: if the bottom right box -- "true" and "no action" contains a horrible consequence, then as he says, this argues "for action to guard against any potential danger, no matter how ridiculous the threat or how expensive the action."

Craven uses the example of giant mutant space hamsters. They could destroy the Earth! So we need to put orbiting rodent traps into space!

Obviously that's ridiculous. The reason is why religious belief is ridiculous. Craven says there are two factors that determine which column ("action," "no action") is preferable:

The likelihood of the rows (probabilities)
The contents of the boxes (consequences or risks)

These factors are difficult to estimate with most worldly problems. They're impossible to come up with for religious problems, because there is no demonstrable evidence to back up estimates of either the probability that a metaphysical belief is true, or what the consequence is of not acting in accord with the belief.

Who knows whether Jesus is the Son of God? Who knows whether Muhammad is God's messenger? Who knows whether this guru or that guru is God in human form? Who knows whether yogic meditation will lead to a merging with God?

Pascal assumed that there is only one choice: whether to believe that God exists. But which God? God comes in hundreds, if not thousands, of different forms -- many of them mutually contradictory.

Some religious (or quasi-religious) faiths don't believe in God at all, Buddhism and Taoism, for example. I talked about this in a post about my Anti-Pascal's Wager.

One refutation is that even if God exists, we have no idea what God's nature is. So how is it possible to believe in an entity about which, or whom, nothing is known? The belief would have to be without content – an acceptance of raw existence without attributes. 

Thus the probability of any metaphysical belief system being correct obviously rests on the existence of a realm of reality beyond the physical. What are the odds of this?

Whatever you think the probability is, the next question is more important: What are the odds that your particular metaphysical, religious, spiritual, or mystical belief system is true?

Remember: there are thousands of these belief systems. And as I said in "You're religious, but are you right?" something else entirely and none of the above are two additional choices that must be seriously considered. 

By “something else entirely,” I mean that God—using this term in the most inclusive and open-ended fashion—does exist, but is utterly unlike any conception found within the teachings of any religion or spiritual practice. By “none of the above,” I mean that the cosmos contains no God—again, extending this term to encompass any possible form of spiritual reality—so there is nothing more to life and existence than what materialists claim: matter/energy and impersonal laws of nature.

So our focus should be on the consequence of believing in God (or some other divinity) if, as seems to be most likely, none of the world's metaphysical belief systems is true. The way I see it, there is everything to gain and nothing to lose by being an atheist or agnostic.

If our human life on this physical planet Earth is all there is, it's crazy to waste our one and only existence on the pursuit of what doesn't exist: God, spirit, soul, heaven.

Yes, we can't know this for sure. All we have are likelihoods, probabilities, best guesses.

We need to weigh the probability that a particular metaphysical belief system is true, and the consequences of not acting in accord with it, with what is gained by preserving an open mind and accepting that evidence is lacking for the truth of any religion.

As I said before, and am pleased to say again:

A big benefit of living life without religion is that it commits you to living in the here and now, rather than the there and then. You don't have one mental foot in an imaginary after life, which causes believers to be unbalanced in earthly reality.

...Pascal's Wager is founded on a belief that we can know God's payoff. The anti-Wager is a more honest bet: nobody knows what will occur in the next life, so we need to make the most of this one.

Religious believers: Drop the similes and state the facts

The first job I had when I left graduate school was research associate at a medical school's Family Practice Department. I used to sit in on some training sessions for the residents who were on their way to becoming family doctors.

One of the faculty members had a favorite saying: "Say it so your grandmother could understand it." Meaning, talk to your patients simply and directly. Don't use big words. No jargon.

That was good advice -- leaving aside the mildly sexist grandmother reference. (Hey, it was 1973; we weren't so culturally correct back then.)

I wish religious believers, including those who leave comments on this blog, would speak as plainly as that experienced physician was urging the doctors-to-be to do. Though I've been fond of indirect spiritual references in the past, now I find metaphysical similes to be more annoying than poetic.

"God is like..." "The guru is like..." "Soul is like..." "Heaven is like..." Stop! Shut up! Lose the "like"! Follow Jack Webb of Dragnet (I'm showing my age): "All we want are the facts, ma'am." (or sir) 

The past few days I've been engaged in a comment conversation on this post. I keep saying, there's no evidence that a guru is able to put copies of himself (his "radiant form") into the psyches of millions of disciples.

In response, a defender of the faith speaks of how the sun can be reflected in many buckets of water. Well, that's nice. But am I supposed to believe in the radiant form just because it's possible to say "the guru is like the sun" and "his radiant form is like a reflection"?

Where's the facts? No similes, just the facts. I'm not typing this post on a simile. I'm not sitting on a simile. I'm not drinking a cup of simile. A laptop, chair, and coffee are directly evident to me. 

I'm reading a book where Ludwig Wittgenstein's "Lecture on Ethics" was mentioned. It's fairly short and can be read here. I resonated with this passage:

Thus in ethical and religious language we seem constantly to be using similes. But a simile must be the simile for something. And if I can describe a fact by means of a simile I must also be able to drop the simile and to describe the facts without it. Now in our case as soon as we try to drop the simile and simply to state the facts which stand behind it, we find that there are no such facts. And so, what at first appeared to be simile now seems to be mere nonsense.

Absolutely. That's what religiosity is without similes: nonsense.

Well, actually religion is non-sensical with or without similes, but the emptiness of blind faith talk becomes a lot more obvious when the similes and metaphors are removed.

Everything in life isn't factual. In fact, it can be argued that the most important aspects of living aren't capable of being captured by facts.

Love. Beauty. Happiness. Awareness. Meaning. Joy. Excitement.

But religions aren't founded on such subjectivities. They're based on purported facts. However, since there never is any demonstrable evidence for the most crucial metaphysical facts, true believers have to resort to similes to defend their faith.

We defenders of truth have to respond with: Just the facts. Drop the similes.

Let's put the mystery back into mysticism

I love mystery. It's something that can't be explained and isn't understood. I also love mysteries, books that center on a mystery which -- almost always -- is explained.

But until it is, it isn't. A mystery remains mysterious until it is understood.

"Mysticism" sort of sounds like "mystery." However, according to the Great God Wikipedia, it's more about communing with or being aware of an ultimate reality/truth. So a mystic supposedly understands a mystery of some cosmic significance.

Like...

Whether metaphysical realities exist. What happens after we die. If consciousness is possible without a physical body. How the universe began. Whether there is a master plan to human life, or if it is unguided.

Since Homo sapiens is still debating and discussing such queries with as much Who knows? as our species did thousands of years ago, it's obvious that the Big Questions of Life are as much a mystery now as they ever were.

So let's be honest. Let's allow mysteries to be what they are: mysterious. When a mystery is explained, when it is understood, it becomes something else: knowledge.

Not just private knowledge, since this doesn't unravel a mystery. We all have subjective intuitions where the nature of the cosmos becomes absolutely crystal clear to us.

For a moment. And usually unexplainably.

To dissolve a mystery, it must be explained as well as understood. There are lots of prophets who only are acclaimed in their own minds. You can hear them muttering on downtown street corners and find them in mental hospitals.

Or being worshiped by devoted followers. False purveyors of answers to life's mysteries are commonplace. Frequently they're called "mystics" who supposedly have understood what the rest of us haven't.

OK. Then show us the goods. Lay out the explanations for those Big Questions of Life. Let's see how persuasive they are, how much demonstrable evidence there is for them.

If this is done -- and my book shelves are filled with many of those answers -- it becomes clear that the explanations are all over the philosophical and metaphysical map. Christians don't agree with Hindus who don't agree with Muslims who don't agree with Buddhists.

Mystery wins out. As it always has. As it likely always will, to some degree. We're not ever going to be able to explain everything in existence, especially existence itself.

Beyond the knowledge space illuminated by human understanding lies darkness. Mystery. I used to be fearful of it. So I grabbed onto answers, even if they didn't really answer the questions I was asking (and still am asking).

As Socrates taught, knowing that you don't know is a big part of wisdom. Maybe the most important part. Empty minds can be filled. Minds who think they are already crammed with knowledge can't be.

Yesterday I came across a blog post about "Scientility." This awkward word has been proposed as a science-friendly substitute for "spirituality," as when someone says, "Wow. I just had the most amazing spiritual experience."

Almost always, it is anything but. Not spiritual, not other worldly. Physical. Yet on-the-edge physical, out there closer to Mystery, where the unknowings roam.

Francois Choquette came up with scientility. Good for him. I like his intention, though his new word doesn't wow me. Here's part of how he describes it. (Go here for the full description.)

Scientility: Describes the sensation that a scientist or amateur of science experiences when he/she observes an amazing phenomenon, for which his/her qualifications or knowledge makes them experience it [with] a greater degree of appreciation and joy than people without that knowledge.

...Richard Feynman said it best, but didn't have the word scientility to describe it:
"I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull."

I think he's kind of nutty. [...] There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts."

Mystery always is with us. The more we know, we more we know we don't know. As the saying goes, “The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.”

It's lovely to stand on the edge of what we understand and look toward what we don't. There's nothing to see, of course. Which is the beauty of it. Mystery is the open vista that lies beyond our fenced-in bits of knowledge.

When mysteries are falsely believed to have been understood -- the bane of religiosity, sprituality, and mysticism -- we close ourselves up in a cage of our own making. Free yourself.

Eastern brains are different from Western brains

The differences between Eastern and Western philosophy -- which includes religions with a corresponding bent -- are clear.

Most people tilt one way or the other philosophically. I certainly have many more Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu/Vedanta books in my library than titles with a Western bent.

However, I did write a book about a Greek philosopher, Plotinus. He didn't believe in a personal God, though, viewing reality in a rather "Eastern" fashion, yet generally expressing himself in an analytical "Western" manner.

In an introductory chapter I talked about what I saw as the difference between a Western and an Eastern mind.

Eight years ago I got some grief from a few people who were reviewing the manuscript prior to publication. They thought it was culturally incorrect (in the sense of politically incorrect) to posit such differences.

Well, now there's increasing evidence showing that culture affects the brain, just as the brain affects culture. Sharon Begley discusses this in a Newsweek article, "West Brain, East Brain." 

Still, scientists have been surprised at how deeply culture—the language we speak, the values we absorb—shapes the brain, and are rethinking findings derived from studies of Westerners. To take one recent example, a region behind the forehead called the medial prefrontal cortex supposedly represents the self: it is active when we ("we" being the Americans in the study) think of our own identity and traits. But with Chinese volunteers, the results were strikingly different.

The "me" circuit hummed not only when they thought whether a particular adjective described themselves, but also when they considered whether it described their mother. The Westerners showed no such overlap between self and mom. Depending whether one lives in a culture that views the self as autonomous and unique or as connected to and part of a larger whole, this neural circuit takes on quite different functions.

Cultural neuroscience is the field that studies how cultural values, practices, and beliefs shape, and are shaped by, the mind, brain, and genes. Religions obviously are no exception.

Begley says that Asian-Americans and non-Asian-Americans activated different brain regions when shown complex, busy scenes: "The Asians showed more activity in areas that process figure-ground relations—holistic context—while the Americans showed more activity in regions that recognize objects."

So is reality One or Many?

This is a central philosophical debate between the monotheistic religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) and Eastern faiths. Maybe it all comes down to cultural differences, how the brains of people in different parts of the world process perceptions, not to any objective characteristic of the cosmos.

I've become a big fan of Taoism, which to me has a pleasingly harmonious way of looking at polarities of every sort: East/West, male/female, Liberal/Conservative, good/bad, positive/negative, and such.

Namely, you can't have one without the other. Is the Eastern view of reality correct? Yes. Is the Western view of reality correct? Yes.

Thinking about the Earth, it'd be ridiculous to claim that only East or West was a valid direction. Standing anywhere, if you face one way that's called "East." Turn 180 degrees, and that's "West."

Similarly, there's always both objects and a background. How could you perceive something if it was indistinguishable from everything else? Where could things exist if there wasn't time and space (the space-time continuum)?

I found a blog post about "Cultural Neuroscience" that included an abstract of an academic article:

Our brains and minds are shaped by our experiences, which mainly occur in the context of the culture in which we develop and live. Although psychologists have provided abundant evidence for diversity of human cognition and behaviour across cultures, the question of whether the neural correlates of human cognition are also culture-dependent is often not considered by neuroscientists.

However, recent transcultural neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that one’s cultural background can influence the neural activity that underlies both high- and low-level cognitive functions. The findings provide a novel approach by which to distinguish culture-sensitive from culture-invariant neural mechanisms of human cognition.

I take this to mean that to some extent culture determines how we experience reality -- including what people call spiritual, religious, or mystical experiences. Other aspects of human cognition aren't dependent on culture. They are common to all.

Science aims to understand reality from a culture-invariant perspective. There no longer is a Western science and an Eastern science. There is only science.

The fact that people are still arguing over whether Western philosophy/religiosity or Eastern philosophy/religiosity is more valid shows that culture plays a dominant role in this debate, not objective reality.

Today, thanks to Pharyngula,  I came across a great video of Richard Dawkins making this very point.

He points out how absurd it would be if science had the same geographic divisions as religions do -- if Saudi Arabia, India, and the United States had different dominant scientific theories, just as they have different dominant religions.

Lesson: objective truth as we humans know it isn't Eastern or Western. It just is what it is.

Atheists and agnostics are open-minded

I'm open to the possibility that god or some other manifestation of the supernatural exists. I just don't see any convincing evidence of this. Being open-minded isn't the same as being gullible, as Greta Christina says in a great blog post, "Are Atheists Open-Minded?"

For starters: "You have to have an open mind" is not the same as "Here's some good evidence for why my idea is right."

Yes, it's good to have an open mind. How is that an argument for religion or spirituality being correct? I mean, if someone insisted that they had a three- inch- tall pink pony behind their sofa who teleported to Guam every time anyone looked back there -- and, when faced with people who were skeptical about this hypothesis and asked for some evidence in support of it, merely said, "You have to keep an open mind"... would you consider that a good argument for the pink pony hypothesis?

And if not -- then why is it a good argument for religion or spirituality?

The fact that a hypothesis can't absolutely be disproven with 100% certainty doesn't make it likely or plausible. And not all hypotheses are equally likely to be true. To persuade me to accept an idea -- heck, to persuade me to seriously consider it, or even to respect it as a reasonable possibility -- you have to do more than show me that it hasn't been absolutely disproven, and then scold me about having an open mind. You have to show me some good, solid, positive evidence supporting your idea. And you have to use good logic to show why this evidence supports your idea better than any other idea.

Absolutely. I urge you to read the whole thing. 

Like Christina, I frequently get comments on this blog accusing me of being closed-minded, of not embracing religious, spiritual, metaphysical, and mystical possibilities. And also like her, I find that people like me who know that they don't know for certain are a lot more humbly open to all kinds of possibilities than religious believers are.

Ask most atheists, "What would convince you that you were mistaken? What evidence would make you change your mind about God or the supernatural world?" Most of us can answer that question. (Or, if we're too busy/lazy to answer it ourselves, we'll point you to someone else who answered that question really thoroughly, and whose answers pretty closely dovetail with our own.)

Ask most believers the same question... and they'll say, "Nothing could persuade me that I'm mistaken about my God. That's what it means to have faith." Either that -- or they'll dither. They'll say that their beliefs are too complicated and subtle to summarize. They'll say that they don't want to proselytize... even though they've been directly asked to explain what they believe and why.

Back in 2006 I wrote a post with a title that still really appeals to me: "If a religion can't be wrong, it surely is." I readily admit that I could be wrong about god. And my actions testify to this.

Every morning I meditate for a while. I sit down on my cushion, close my eyes, and wordlessly utter an invitation to whoever/whatever to have a visit. Gods. Angels. Alien beings. Ascended masters. Gurus. Buddha-nature. Even demonic forces (so long as they're nice).

I wonder how many religious true believers do the same -- pray to Secular Reality to enlighten them from their ignorance, to take away their blind faith, to open their eyes to the supremacy of natural laws and forces.

An interesting piece, "The Theist's Guide to Converting Atheists," (linked to above) describes what it would take to convince the atheist author that theism is true. So far I haven't come across a corresponding guide from a religious believer that lays out how he or she could be deconverted.

I'll let Christina have the last word, because her words make so much sense.

Atheism doesn't mean we've absolutely made up our minds, without the possibility of ever reconsidering. Atheism means we've provisionally made up our minds. That doesn't make us close-minded. Being close-minded doesn't mean reaching a conclusion; it means being unwilling to reconsider that conclusion even when new evidence contradicts it. And that doesn't describe most atheists. Atheists understand that we're not perfect and that we might be mistaken. If you give us some good evidence showing that we're mistaken, we'll reconsider.

But -- to repeat my first argument -- you have to actually show us some freaking evidence already. Just repeating "Have an open mind" -- that does not qualify as evidence. That just qualifies as annoying.

If there's no "me," I don't have any problems

Following up on "My best guess about God" musings, I wanted to take another crack of getting down to the core of a whole lot of religiosity, spirituality, mysticism, and philosophy.

My inspiration is Wei Wu Wei's "Open Secret," which I finished today. Like many books with a Zen, Buddhist, Taoist, Advaita, or non-dual slant, I passed through many stages of literary emotion while reading it.

Interest. Irritation. Confusion. Agreement. Contentment. Bewilderment. To name a few.

What kept me turning the pages were the glimpses of something intriguingly simple that the author, a.k.a. Terence Gray, was trying to communicate. It isn't an original notion, not by any means, but Wei Wu Wei -- at times -- says it more clearly than most.

From page 143:

Bondage, and the consecutive suffering -- which is all suffering -- is entirely dependent on the idea of an objective I, that is "a me." But no such contradiction-in-terms has ever existed, exists, or could ever be.

...To be an object is just to be perceptible, which is to appear.
To appear to whom? To be perceptible to what?

Only I can perceive. What else could there be to perceive, which could perceive? And whatever I perceive must be my object.

My object is an objectivisation of what I am. What else could there be for it to be?

Therefore every object is myself. There can be no thing which is not myself. I am no thing but my objects, and my objects are nothing but I.

Another try at saying it, from page 88:

The perceiver in fact has arrived at a point in his investigation at which he is looking at what he is himself; he has reached a dead-end in his analysis and finds himself face to face with his own nature, but, instead of recognizing it as such and realizing that the void is what an eye sees when it looks at itself, he goes on trying to objectify what he does not see, what he can never see, by turning it into an objective concept, like the good and well-trained philosopher he usually is.

...But there is, has always been, an alternative, when the dead-end, the Ultima Thule of conceptualisation has been reached, and that is just to turn round and wake up to the truth. Having arrived at the gate they tried to prise it open, not realizing that they were already on the right side of it.

And how is this realized? By doing nothing. From page 135 and 139:

All practice must necessarily be futile, and why the exercise of volition must necessarily defeat its own ends.

It is vain for an object to seek the subject which it is -- for only the subject could seek, and it cannot find itself by seeking -- for the sought is necessarily elsewhere than that which seeks it, is in a different moment of time and in a different area of space from those of that which is seeking. 

...It is from the illusion of autonomy that a pseudoidentity awakens, and it is the condition that then obtains, a state of universality, which has been given the name "enlightenment," for an apparent identity has become aware of its universality, and has returned to full consciousness of the totality that it is.

Now, maybe this doesn't sound so clear to you. So I'll express my own understanding of what Wei Wu Wei is getting at in some (hopefully) simple words.

We try to know who we really are. Why?

Because we feel that if we knew, we'd be better off. Happier. More at peace with ourselves and the world. And religiously speaking, we'd be saved, enlightened, God-realized, whatever you want to call it.

We presume that there is a self, a soul, a psyche, a "me" -- something objectively real -- which is going to be known by us. So we search for it via meditation, prayer, contemplation, drugs, psychotherapy, walks on the beach, studying books, and many other sorts of ways.

But wait! Who is doing the searching?

Why, it must be...me. Who else could be doing it? Hmmmmm. This means that if I find myself, it won't be me, because I'm the subjectivity doing the looking, not the object that is found.

There's a spiritual/philosophical and a scientific/logical way of looking at this. Both end up in the same place: There's no "self" in myself. No "ego" in my egocentricity. No "soul" in my soulful searching.

Mystics, like Rumi, say that what we're looking for is so close, we don't recognize it. Here's how I expressed a Rumi story in my book about the Greek Neoplatonist philosopher, Plotinus: "Return to the One." 

Rumi, a Persian mystic, speaks of a sage who told a man how to unearth a buried treasure. Paraphrased, the story goes like this: "Stand here," the sage says, "and shoot an arrow in that direction. Where the arrow lands, there the treasure will be found." The man gets a bow and enthusiastically does as instructed, carefully watching the high arc of the arrow as it flies away.

After digging where it landed, he is dismayed at not finding any treasure. "I'll keep trying," he vows. More arrows are shot, and soon the ground is cratered with holes. But still no treasure. Exhausted, he goes back to the sage and complains that all his work has gone for naught.

"I didn't tell you to shoot with all your strength," the sage tells him. "Simply let the arrow drop from your bow." The treasure, it turns out, was right beneath the man's feet.

Similarly, Plotinus says that our spiritual wealth is so close we are unable to find it. What separates us from what we seek isn't physical distance but rather the mistaken notion that we are separated at all. For it is by running outside ourselves that we distance ourselves from the One. A spiritual seeker's first step, then, is to stop moving and realize his or her true self.

Which, according to Wei Wu Wei, doesn't exist. So there is nothing for the non-existent self to do. Only to be.

There is no need to read books, chant Sutras, recite Scriptures, perform any antics; there is nothing whatever to discuss, argue about, or explain. There is nothing whatever to teach or to be learned... No volitional action whatsoever is possible that could "liberate" from "bondage," since there is no entity to be bound or to be free.

And from a scientific perspective, here's how Thomas Metzinger starts off his book about modern neuroscience, "The Ego Tunnel."

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. But it is not just that the modern philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience together are just about to shatter the myth of the self.

It has now become clear that we will never solve the philosophical puzzle 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 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 the world. So when we speak of conscious experience as a subjective phenomenon, what is the entity having these experiences?

Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter has an answer in his book, "I Am a Strange Loop."

The strange loop making up an "I" is no more a pinpointable, extractable physical object than an audio feedback loop is a tangible object possessing a mass and a diameter. Such a loop may exist "inside" an auditorium, but the fact that it is physically localized doesn't mean that one can pick it up and heft it, let alone measure such things as its temperature and thickness!

...And thus the current "I" -- the most up-to-date set of recollections and aspirations and passions and confusions -- by tampering with the vast, unpredictable world of objects and other people, has sparked some rapid feedback, which, once absorbed in the form of symbol activations, gives rise to an infinitesimally modified "I"; thus round and round it goes, moment after moment, year after year.

In this fashion, via the loop of symbols sparking actions and repercussions triggering symbols, the abstract structure serving as our innermost essence evolves slowly but surely, and in so doing it locks itself ever more rigidly into our mind.

Interesting. Good stuff. But we're back to some complexity. I'd better end with some simpler Wei Wu Wei.

In this process of personalizing "mind" and thinking of it as "I," we thereby make it, which is subject, into an object, whereas "I" in fact can never be such, for there is nothing objective in "I," which is essentially a direct expression of subjectivity.

This objectivising of pure subjectivity, calling it "me" or calling it "mind," is precisely what constitutes "bondage." It is this concept, termed the I-concept or ego or self, which is the supposed bondage from which we all suffer and from which we seek "liberation."

...There cannot be any such thing as bondage at all, but only the idea of such. There is no liberation, for there is no "thing" from which to be freed. If the whole conceptual structure is seen as what it is, it must necessarily collapse, and the bondage-enlightenment nonsense with it.

Along with religion. Spirituality. Mysticism. Self-development.

Bye-bye. All gone. Good riddance.

My best guess about God

Nobody knows what ultimate reality is, which religious believers call "God." All we have are guesses, some more defensible than others.

Here's mine -- after some forty years of delving into mysticism, spirituality, religiosity, and philosophy.

Subject to change, of course. If I've learned anything, it's that there's always more to learn. Or guess about.

I'll be as pithy as possible, a shift from my usual wordiness.

(1) God doesn't exist. Not in the sense of an all-knowing, all-powerful personal or individual consciousness. Or even a universal consciousness, though this is more likely than an anthropomorphic God.

(2) The cosmos is, always has been, always will be. In some form or another. Existence always has existed. If you want an eternal "God" to worship, there it is: existence.

(3) It may well be that our universe is just a very small part of the cosmos. But reality is thoroughly natural, not supernatural. Other universes, if they exist, are as natural as ours.

(4) We'll never understand the ultimate laws of nature. Or even know whether they exist. "Ultimate laws" probably is a human conception, not the way things really are.

(5) The biggest problem with being a member of Homo sapiens also is our biggest evolutionary advance: self-awareness. We are aware of being aware. Unlike other animals, we construct an ego, I-ness, by looping our awareness back onto ourselves.

(6) This creates a fear of death, because we know we're going to die. This creates a desire to exist forever, because we can ponder our non-existence.

(7) Thus springs up religion. Along with notions of God, soul, spirit, eternal life, heaven, and such. All are products of a self-created "self," which actually doesn't exist in the sense a stone, sunflower, star, or snake does. It is conceptual, not physical.

(8) Enlightenment -- seeing reality as clearly as possible -- is recognizing that ego, I-ness, selfhood, individuality, or whatever you want to call it doesn't exist.

(9) We're part of the cosmos. And the cosmos is part of us. We just happen to be beings who can conceptualize ourselves as separate from everything else, which we really aren't.

(10) So when we die, we're dead, inasmuch as "I" consider myself to be a "Me." But the cosmos continues. And so will I. Just not as me. Whether this is a chilling or reassuring realization depends on how much "Me" is attached to my "I."

Truth is greater than God

What should we choose, reality or belief? This was the theme of one of my first Church of the Churchless posts almost six years ago, "Just have faith."

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?

Terrific question, if I say so myself. Which, of course, I did. And still am.

There isn't an easy answer. Sure, most of us churchless types probably would offer up the "politically correct" response: Reality. But would we, really?

Speaking for myself -- the only person I can speak for -- I'm pretty sure I'd choose the door of reality. After all, I no longer hold many faith-based beliefs about God, creation, life, death, and the purpose of human existence.

So I wouldn't have much to lose, belief-wise, if reality turns out to be a lot different from how I currently consider it to be.

Now, if I learned that Mohammad truly was Allah's messenger, and the Koran was the true word of God (or that some other religious revelation actually was right about the nature of the cosmos), this would be a shock to my churchless psyche.

But I could handle it. With my GPS receiver I'd have no problem figuring out which way I needed to face to pray in the direction of Mecca.

Whatever truth is, it's greater than our blind beliefs. I believe this. Which isn't really a paradox, or contradiction, because positing the existence of "truth" is necessary for any sort of satisfying and workable life.

Taking a single step, doing or thinking anything, presumes that reality isn't a shape-shifting mass of slippery near-nothingness that could be anything at all in the next instant other than what it is now.

There are regularities to the universe. This is truth. Always imperfectly recognized. Never completely perceived. Inevitably filtered through the lens of human consciousness.

Yet truth nonetheless. Superior to passing ideas, concepts, fancies, beliefs, imaginings, hypotheses.

Such is the message of Evid3nc3, who has made an interesting and entertaining series of You Tube videos explaining his deconversion from Christianity to atheism. His latest is "3.0 Atheism: A New Way of Seeing God."

I like the first 1:15 of this video the best. When the guy gets into his embrace of Pantheism, this strikes me as unduly belief-based -- given my newfound skepticism about unity or oneness being the hallmark of the cosmos.

Nonetheless, I'm cool with Pantheism, especially compared to Theism. And the notion that truth is greater than God definitely appeals to my churchless non-soul.

As the video says, it is possible (let's say highly probable) that God doesn't exist. But it isn't possible that truth doesn't exist.

So we need to aim for truth, not God.

If God is found along the way, great. And if we change our view of "God" to essentially be identical with "Truth" (as Pantheism does), this is fine -- though Truth still is greater than God.