Church of the Churchless

God doesn't appear at Rally to Restore Sanity

Well, what a non-surprise. At today's Rally to Restore Sanity on the National Mall in Washington, DC, God didn't make an appearance -- despite the implorings of not-exactly a Father Guido Sarducci.

I watched the first half of the rally on C-Span, so got to see Father Sarducci's benediction. It was appealingly comedic, though not without some fairly serious philosophising at the expense of true believers.

Noting that there lots of religions in the world, each of which believes that it knows the truth about God while the rest are mistaken, Sarducci asked God to send a sign to the massive crowd: let us know which religion is right in some unmistakable fashion.

So he called out the names of various Christian denominations and other religions, then waited for a miracle to materialize in the sunny, clear October sky, or on ground level. I can't remember all the choices -- Baptist, Catholic, Judaism, Islam, Rastafarianism, Buddhism, these come to mind.

Nothing. Nada.

Cleverly (I bet most people didn't get the joke), after saying "Buddhism" and waiting a few seconds before saying "nothing," Sarducci added "But that could be the sign." After all, Buddhism is big on nothing.

Since there was no evident sign of God at the rally, just as there is no evident sign of God anywhere else, nor has there been at any time in the past, it makes sense to worship Nothing -- if someone feels a need to worship anything.

As would be expected, when Father Sarducci called out the names of the denominations and religions he'd get cheers from people in the crowd. (As might also have been expected, given the seemingly youthful tilt of the attendees, Rastafarian supporters seemed to outnumber Buddhists.)

After the first cheer, Sarducci told the crowd that these displays didn't count as signs of God, since God wouldn't show him/her/itself in that fashion.

Great point. But that's the only evidence religions have for God: human "cheering" of various varieties. "God spoke to me!" "I had a vision of God!" "These are God's commandments!"

There's never any objective, unarguable, super-persuasive sign of God's presence. Like another Sarducci request to God during his benediction:

Since you haven't responded when the names of the various denominations and religions were called out, could you annoint a person in the crowd with a halo, or an instant tattoo on their face? Then we can ask that person, "What religion are you?" That'll tell us which faith God favors.

Sarducci asked rally attendees to make friends with those around them, given that no one can see his or her own face and would need to be told if they have a miracle halo or miracle tattoo.

He waited for responses. Again, nothing. God continued to be a no-show. Which means that churchlessness is still the best unfaith for those who seek truthful sanity.

(Here's some excerpts from Sarducci's talk. Better yet, I just found a video of his entire benediction. Watch and laugh.)

Exploring the moral landscape with Sam Harris

This morning I finished reading Sam Harris' newest book, "The Moral Landscape." After blogging favorably about the first two chapters, I continued to enjoy Harris' neuroscientific, yet eminently readable, take on how human wellbeing can be expanded via facts rather than faith.

Events in the world, and the brain, affect how we experience life. If we study the relationship between those events and our experiences, we stand a good chance of being able to climb higher on the "moral landscape" (individually and collectively). Harris says:

Throughout this book I make reference to a hypothetical space that I call "the moral landscape" -- a space of real and potential outcomes whose peaks correspond to the heights of potential well-being and whose valleys represent the deepest possible suffering.

Different ways of thinking and behaving -- different cultural practices, ethical codes, modes of government, etc. -- will translate into movements across this landscape and, therefore, into different degrees of human flourishing.

Flourishing. That's an appealing term for what life is all about.

There can be many ways to flourish, just as there are many foods to eat. Yet Harris points out that healthy food and poison are different. It won't be easy, but his hypothesis is that bit by bit humankind will be able to understand what leads to flourishing and what doesn't -- no faith-based religious "Thou shalt..." required.

Per my habit, as I read "The Moral Landscape" I stuck slips of paper into pages that struck me as containing a particularly interesting bit of writing (which is one reason I'm resisting going to an e-reader).

Here's some examples of Harris' provocative thinking (some are direct quotes; some are paraphrases):

(1) He asks what the world would be like if we stopped worrying about "right" and "wrong," or "good" and "evil," and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others. In my opinion, as his, we'd have a better world.

(2) Being uncertain about what the consequences of our thoughts and actions will be doesn't mean there's some other basis for human values, such as religious dogma, worth worrying about.

(3) Brain scanners show that believing a mathematical equation and believing an ethical proposition produce the same changes in neurophysiolology, so it's difficult to make a distinction between scientific dispassion and judgments of value.

(4) Some people say that believing in religion, higher powers, an afterlife, soul, and such always will be with us. Yet at one time a belief in magic, witches, demons and such was rampant in the developed world. Won't reason make further progress?

(5) On almost every measure of societal health, the least religious countries are better off than the most religious. This shows that religion isn't the most important guarantor of societal health, and that unbelief doesn't lead to the downfall of civilization.

(6) Religious believers go around in circles: Adherents generally believe that they possess knowledge of sacred truths, and every faith provides a framework for interpreting experience so as to lend further support to its doctrine.

(7) If we have (or are) an immortal soul, why is our consciousness so obviously altered by brain damage? This is like saying the soul of a diabetic produces abundant insulin. Sure, you can say anything. But where's the evidence?

(8) Atheists have a lot of confidence in their fellow humans. They assume people have enough intelligence and maturity to respond to rational argument, satire, and ridicule on the subject of religion, just as they respond to such discursive pressures on other subjects.

(9) The vast majority of our life experiences never get recalled, and the time we spend remembering the past is brief. So the quality of most of our lives can be assessed only in terms of what fleeting character it has as it occurs -- which includes recalling the past.

(10) There is no more important source of value than the well-being of conscious creatures. If someone claimed to find such a source somewhere, it would be of no possible interest to anyone, by definition. (Ooh, good thinking, Sam Harris.)

(11) "Science" is a specialized branch of a larger effort to form true beliefs about events in the world. It is a fact that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. This is a "scientific" fact, being part of our best effort to form a rational account of empirical reality.

(12) No framework of knowledge can withstand utter skepticism, for none is perfectly self-justifying. It is impossible to stand entirely outside of a framework. So someone can spout stuff like "What if the worst possible misery for everyone is actually good?" or "What if all true statements are actually false?" But we don't have to take that person seriously.

(13) Conscious actions arise on the basis of neural events of which we are not conscious. Whether they are predictable or not, we do not cause our causes.

(14) The moment one grants there is a difference between the Bad Life and the Good Life that lawfully relates to states of the human brain, to human behavior, and to states of the world, one has admitted that there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.

Raptitude is an inspiring Buddhist'ish blog

When I scanned through the Twitter tweets put up by the people I follow, a few days ago I saw a link to "9 Mind-Bending Epiphanies That Turned My World Upside-Down."

Great title.

I had to see what that piece said. Reading it on the Raptitude site, I was introduced to some excellent writing by David Cain. Here he describes how Raptitude came to be.

I am a regular guy who has beat up his biggest demon. To make a long story short, I used to find life very difficult and now I don’t. For a while I was having such a rough go at it, I scrounged deep and hard for anyone who could tell me what I was doing wrong.

I experimented. I sought peace and ease through all the traditional means: piles of self-help material, religion, overindulgence in drugs and food, sheer hoping and wishing, even misanthropy. I tossed out what didn’t work and kept what did, and the result has been something of a Frankenstein of different life skills, philosophies, and goals.

Somewhere along the way, something clicked, and life got about ten times easier. I started sharing what I’ve discovered with other people on online message boards, and people kept telling me how much I’ve helped them. I began to gather that I have things to say that people want to hear, and so I started Raptitude.

The best way to understand where I’m coming from is to read my articles here on Raptitude, and my philosophy will become apparent, but the essential themes are:    
    Appreciating humanity in spite of its faults
    Taking responsibility for the quality of your experience in life
    Learning what humans are not so good at, and getting better at those things
    Self-examination and self-improvement

I resonated with most of Cain's epiphanies, though I felt a bit jealous that the guy had been able to suck so much wisdom out of life before he was thirty. When I was his age, I was largely clueless.

(Which isn't so different from how I am now, twice thirty and then some.)

Browsing through some Raptitude posts, it's pretty obvious that Cain tilts toward a Buddha'ish outlook on life. I don't get a sense that he's doctrinaire in any way, though, which is appealing.

Epiphany #4 pointed me in the direction of a Raptitude mindfulness post, which I enjoyed.

4. Most of life is imaginary

Human beings have a habit of compulsive thinking that is so pervasive that we lose sight of the fact that we are nearly always thinking. Most of what we interact with is not the world itself, but our beliefs about it, our expectations of it, and our personal interests in it. We have a very difficult time observing something without confusing it with the thoughts we have about it, and so the bulk of what we experience in life is imaginary things. As Mark Twain said: “I’ve been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” The best treatment I’ve found? Cultivating mindfulness.

As noted before in my criticisms of notions about "pure awareness," neuroscience tells us that it is impossible to perceive something just as it is, because there is no such thing as "just as it is."

Our human brains filter reality, just as the brain of my dog does. While I'm focused on a beautiful sunset during our evening dog walk, she's got her nose to the ground, fully engaged in sniffing some fantastically enticing scent.

But I definitely agree with Cain that life is more satisfying when experienced as directly as possible.

I can simply see that someone ahead of me is driving slowly on the five mile no-passing-allowed stretch of rural road that leads to town, without thinking "That jerk is going to make me late for my Tai Chi class... don't they know the speed limit is 55... pull over, pull over... let me get by!"

There are lots of ways, including mindfulness, to make our steadily shrinking supply of life-moments as pleasurable and productive as possible. Cain is into experimenting in a fairly organized fashion, whereas I'm quite a bit looser.

What's important, though, is trying out new ways of thinking, doing, and being, no matter how we go about this. Life is short, and getting shorter all the time.

My brother-in-law died last weekend. The Tuesday before he was an hour late for an appointment with his attorney. They needed to handle some final legal issues associated with the death of my sister (his wife) last December.

The attorney said that he arrived all agitated, because he'd gotten lost and couldn't remember where the attorney's office was. She strongly urged him to see a doctor right away. I don't know if he did. A few days later he had a massive stroke. Getting lost almost certainly was an early sign of the much bigger brain trauma that was to come.

His death got me to thinking. Eventually I'll be living my last week, and then my last day. Like my brother-in-law, I probably won't know when that will be. It'll only be obvious in retrospect to the living, which won't include me.

Every moment is precious.

I'm thankful that David Cain is sharing ideas about how we can make better use of the ones we have left. Religiosity isn't the answer, at least not for me. I don't want to be distracted from experiencing what is real right now by fantasizing about what might await me after death or in another life.

Another interesting Raptitude post is "Who We Really Are" (which has a Part 2). I'm not sure if Cain's musings are correct. That's not really important though. He's doing his own diving into what life is all about, as am I, as is each of us.

As Cain says in "This Is Your Life's Work" (another great post):

Throughout life you will move blocks around, and once you die your last contributions have been made. Why did you move the blocks you did? Were they meaningful to you? If you lived life as a carpenter, having left hundreds or thousands of houses in your wake — did you do it just to get paid and buy a bigger TV, or does your legacy of bungalows mean something to you?

Do you spend your energy heaving around blocks that don’t matter to you? Are you just doing what you feel like you’d better do in the moment, or is there a discernible purpose behind it? Is your life a project, or is it more of an endless laundry list? Will those who follow you be thankful, resentful, or indifferent towards your life’s work? Do you care?

You may not — there is another school of thought here. Some might argue that all they want to do is make this block-moving period (maybe 70-80 years if one is lucky) as fulfilling as possible, and it doesn’t matter what they leave in their wake.

If that sounds like you, fair enough, but perhaps the block-pushing part is most fulfilling for those who care where they all end up.

Don’t forget: No matter what you’ve been up to, you’ve been doing your life’s work.

People aren't free to believe

Here in the United States, you often hear "It's a free country, so...[I can do such and such.]" Reflecting this attitude, I frequently say on this blog that people are free to believe whatever they want to, so long as they don't try to force those beliefs on others.

But Sam Harris has caused me to see the caveats in this. In his new book, The Moral Landscape, a section in the "Belief" chapter is called Do We Have Freedom of Belief?

Short answer: No.

If you ask me to raise a hand, I can choose either my right or my left. Since I'm right-handed, I might expect that you think I'll raise my right, so I could decide to fool you by raising my left.

Or, I could just do whatever I felt like doing at the moment. Right, left -- the decision seemingly is up to me.

On the other hand, if you ask me to either believe that Jesus died for our sins, or to reject this belief, I'm not free to do this. Sure, I could say that I believe in this central tenet of Christianity, but it wouldn't be true. I'd just do it, for example, in an attempt to win a new car, if Christians were the only people able to enter the contest.

Likewise, commenters on this blog have asked why I no longer believe in the guru that I once followed -- apparently assuming that I have a choice in the matter, that I could willingly revert to how I previously felt if I wanted to.

Harris, a neuroscientist, challenges this assumption.

While belief might prove difficult to pinpoint in the brain, many of its mental properties are plain to see. For instance, people do not knowingly believe propositions for bad reasons.

...A belief -- to be actually believed -- entails the corollary belief that we have accepted it because it seems to be true. To really believe a proposition -- whether about facts or values -- we must also believe that we are in touch with reality in such a way that if it were not true, one would not believe it.

We must believe, therefore, that we are not flagrantly in error, deluded, insane, self-deceived, etc... Choosing beliefs freely is not what rational minds do.

Of course, human minds are not always rational, nor are they always privy to all the facts about a situation. So we can choose to believe in something that isn't true.

Today I went back to an auto parts store, a replacement wiper blade in hand, because I was sure that it needed the connector that was on the old blade and this connector didn't seem to snap properly into the new blade.

Three of the four new wiper blades that I'd bought for our two cars had a connector that was the same as what was on the blades I'd gotten last year. I'd tried to snap the fourth connector on, but it didn't seem like it'd fit. So I asked the auto parts guy for help.

He simply walked out to the car and snapped the blade on, saying "It looks like they went to a new connector on this particular size." OK. Instantly I knew that my belief was wrong: there was no need to change the connector; I just hadn't fiddled with it enough.

But before that moment it wasn't possible for me to freely choose that belief. The evidence seemed to point to the 26 inch blade having the wrong connector, since the 18, 19, and 22 inch blades that I'd bought had different shorter connectors.

I was pleased to alter my belief, though, since I didn't want to spend any more time at the auto parts store than was necessary. Such is the way of "science," taking this word to mean what we all do when we're open to fresh facts.

The answer to the question "What should I believe, and why should I believe it?" is generally a scientific one.

Believe a proposition because it is well supported by theory and evidence; believe it because it has been experimentally verified; believe it because a generation of smart people have tried their best to falsify it and failed; believe it because it is true (or seems so).

This is a norm of cognition as well as the core of any scientific mission statement. As far as our understanding of the world is concerned -- there are no facts without values.

Meaning, in part, because that last italicized statement is meaty tofuy, "every effort we make to discuss facts depends upon principles that we must first value (e.g., logical consistency, reliance on evidence, parsimony, etc.)" and "beliefs about facts and beliefs about values seem to arise from similar processes at the level of the brain."

So we believe what we believe until we no longer believe it. Then we can't go back to believing, just because we may want to.

Have you ever been in love with someone, then fallen out of love? You may remember how nice it was when your relationship was lovey-dovey instead of filled with irritation, harsh words, distance, and tenseness.

It doesn't work, though, to simply tell yourself "I still love _____," because you don't. Your emotions belie that statement. You know it isn't true.

This is why you're going to have to be duplicious if you want to start a new religion even though you're not religious. You might be thinking, "Why would I want to do that?" Well, lots of reasons.

Do you want people to bow down to you whenever they see you? Do you want people to worship you, and think you're God? If they don’t think that you’re God, being God’s Chosen One is almost as good. People should trust God you completely. People should hand control of their lives over to God you. Otherwise you’re not doing it properly.

I enjoyed this Wiki web page, a link to which was emailed to me by a Church of the Churchless visitor (thanks, Robert). But in light of the above evidence about belief not being under our control, I question whether this advice makes sense.

First convince yourself that you have a special relationship with God, the gods, the Aliens, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the Other World, Chuck Norris, something wonderful and holy.

If I know that I'm convincing myself to believe something that isn't true, that takes the truthfulness out of my believing -- which makes the belief unbelievable, since I like to believe that my beliefs are actually true.

There's another way, however.

You don't have to convince yourself provided you can convince your followers [see above], but it helps. Anyone can be a self-proclaimed prophet; you just have to proclaim yourself to be a prophet. Then convince your followers that you have a special relationship with God, the gods, the Aliens, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc, something special.

I like the idea of founding my own religion. Being a revered prophet sounds cool to me. I've pretty much given up on the prospects of such reverence coming from anywhere outside of my own psyche, though.

Along this line, Harris speaks of what he really means when he says that his daughter is the "loveliest in the world."

I believe that I have a special attachment to my daughter that largely determines my view of her (which is as it should be). I fully expect other fathers to have a similar bias toward their own daughters. Therefore, I do not believe that my daughter is the loveliest girl in the world in any objective sense.

...What I really believe is that my daughter is the loveliest girl in the world for me.

We all may be living selflessly

Usually we consider that being "selfless" means acting altruistically. This casts the word in a moral sense, which is how most religions see it. We're supposed to put God and others before ourselves.

But there's a scientific side to selflessness that I'm finding increasingly intriguing: the notion that nobody has a self, so we're all selfless -- including the greediest, most egotistical, and me-centered among us.

Recently I wrote about a book where noted thinkers talk about what they believe, but cannot prove. I quoted psychologist Susan Blackmore:

It is possible to live happily and morally without believing in free will. As Samuel Johnson said "All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience is for it." With recent developments in neuroscience and theories of consciousness, theory is even more against it than it was in his time, more than 200 years ago. So I long ago set about systematically changing the experience. I now have no feeling of acting with free will, although the feeling took many years to ebb away.

...When the feeling is gone, decisions just happen with no sense of anyone making them, but then a new question arises—will the decisions be morally acceptable? Here I have made a great leap of faith (or the memes and genes and world have done so). It seems that when people throw out the illusion of an inner self who acts, as many mystics and Buddhist practitioners have done, they generally do behave in ways that we think of as moral or good. So perhaps giving up free will is not as dangerous as it sounds—but this too I cannot prove.

Free will is closely connected with having (or being) a self that is unchanging. Where, though, is the evidence for a self, soul, or whatever which stands apart from all of the ever-altering processes in the brain and nervous system?

There isn't any.

So I agree with Blackmore that recognizing or realizing the absence of a self is something that may not ever be able to be proven, yet is perhaps an absolutely real experiential phenomenon.

In another book by Blackmore, "Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction," she delves more into this fascinating scientific and philosophical subject.

Blackmore shows one of those familiar optical "illusions" (not quite the right word) where a drawing of a three-dimensional box looks at first glance like it is facing one way. However, if you stare at it for a while, the box will suddenly look like it is facing another way.

Nothing has changed, except the brain's interpretation of the drawing. In my experience, the jump from one appearance to another can't be forced.

It seems to happen on its own. Even when I know there is another way of perceiving the box, because I've seen it before, I can't will my brain to shift into another way of seeing. It just happens, which is how Buddhism and other like-minded spiritual traditions say enlightenment occurs.

If Blackmore is correct about us being selfless, and neuroscience points to the fact that she is, then enlightenment may be nothing more than seeing through the illusion of "I" created by the brain/mind for evolutionary reasons we may never be able to fully grasp.

This morning my wife either did, or didn't, take some medication that she's supposed to swallow twice a day. She'd opened the refrigerator where it is kept, rummaged around in the contents, and then, a few minutes later, couldn't remember whether she'd taken the pill.

Whether she did, or didn't, some fairly complex brain-body activities were going on. These are akin to an example Blackmore talks about in her "Consciousness" book: driving along in a car and finding yourself at your destination without much, if any, memory of having driven there.

The driving just happened automatically, while the driver's attention was occupied elsewhere. Thinking about other stuff, listening to music, a host of possibilities.

This shows that consciousness, and conscious actions, can occur just fine without a "self" being aware of them. I can't tell you how many times I've driven halfway to town (about ten minutes from our house) and suddenly thought, "Geez, did I turn off the burner after I cooked the vegiburger?"

I can't recall rotating the switch. But having gotten older and wiser, after turning around several times and always finding the burner off, I've learned that I do many things correctly during a typical day without being aware that I'm doing them.

Where am "I" at these moments? Somebody is taking the medication, driving along, or turning the burner off. However, this likely isn't an enduring "self" -- just a collection of brain processes.

Blackmore says:

It seems we have some tough choices in thinking about our own precious self. We can hang on to the way it feels and assume that a persisting self or soul or spirit exists, even though it cannot be found and leads to deep philosophical troubles.

We can equate it with some kind of brain process and shelve the problem of why this brain process should have conscious experiences at all, or we can reject any persistihg entity that corresponds to our feeling of being a self.

I think that intellectually we have to take this last path. The trouble is that it is very hard to accept in one's personal life. It means taking a radically different view of every experience. It means accepting that there is no one who is having these experiences.

It means accepting that every time I seem to exist, this is just a temporary fiction and not the same "me" who seemed to exist a moment before, or last week, or last year. This is tough, but I think it gets easier with practice.

Sam Harris doesn't really believe in God

Wow, that was scary for a moment. I open up Newsweek and find an article with the headline, "Sam Harris Believes in God."

My churchless brain started to scream, Noooooooo! Sam, how could you become a believer?!

After all, Harris wrote a couple of great anti-religious books, "The End of Faith" and "Letter to a Christian Nation." It would have been disappointing for me to find that he had gone over to the dark side of blind belief.

Fortunately, the very first paragraph of the story started to relieve my anxiety.

Sam Harris, a member of the tribe known as “the new atheists,” wishes the headline to this story said something else. How about “Sam Harris Believes in Spirituality,” he suggests over lunch. Or “Sam Harris Believes in ‘God,’ ” with scare quotes?

It turns out that Harris doesn't believe in God as that word is commonly understood. Namely, as a supernatural power or a personal deity who takes an interest in how people live. Rather...

What Sam Harris believes in—rationality, morality, transcendence, humility, awe, community, selflessness, and love—meets a fairly common definition of God.

Hmmmm.

I don't think that definition is fairly common. Sure, people often say "God is love." But this is different from saying that love (or any other quality of the human brain) is God.

Sure, we can speak of anything as our "God." I often refer to the Great God Google, because it is all-knowing, responds to my requests, and makes my life more fulfilling. I don't take Google's divinity seriously, though.

Along with Harris, I do embrace transcendence as a serious (though also light-hearted) possibility.

Harris’s true obsession, then, is not God but consciousness, the idea that the human mind can be taught—trained, rationally—to be more loving, more generous, less egocentric than it is in its natural state.

This doesn't mean transcending the world and floating into some sort of ethereal immaterial "heaven." Rather, Harris (who has a Ph.D. in neuroscience) considers that selflessness likely is our true nature, since there is no scientific evidence of a enduring self or soul.

He talked about this in a concluding chapter (Experiments in Consciousness) of his first book, "The End of Faith," showing that it is eminently possible to be spiritual -- in a non-supernatural sense -- without crossing over into dogmatic faith-based religiosity.

Investigating the nature of consciousness directly, through sustained introspection, is simply another name for spiritual practice.

It should be clear that whatever transformations of your experience are possible -- after forty days and forty nights in the desert, after twenty years in a cave, or after some new serotonin agonist has been delivered to your synapses -- there will be a matter of changes occurring in the contents of your consciousness.

...It is not so much what they are but what they do that makes neurons see, hear, smell, taste, touch, think, and feel. Like any other function that emerges from the activity of the brain, the feeling of self is best thought of a process.

...In subjective terms, the search for the self seems to entail a paradox: we are, after all, looking for the very thing that is doing the looking. Thousands of years of human experience suggests, however, that the paradox here is only apparent: it is not merely that the component of our experience that we call "I" cannot be found; it is that it actually disappears when looked for in a rigorous way.

..."Meditation," in the sense that I use it here, refers to any means whereby our sense of "self" -- of subject/object dualism in perception and cognition -- can be made to vanish, while consciousness remains vividly aware of the continuum of experience.

Inevitably, the primary obstacle to meditation is thinking. This leads many people to assume that the goal of meditation is to produce a thought-free state.

It is true that some experiences entail the temporary cessation of thought, but meditation is less a matter of suppressing thoughts than of breaking our identification with them, so that we can recognize the condition in which thoughts themselves arise.

...It is on this front that the practice of meditation reveals itself to be both intellectually serious and indispensable. There is something to realize about the nature of consciousness, and its realization does not entail thinking new thoughts.

Buddhism's consensual core isn't supernatural

What is the essence of a religion? That is, how can we tell whether someone is a "real" Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, or whatever? What degree of supposed heresy is beyond the bounds of a belief system?

These are tough questions to answer, in part because they are religion-specific.

Hinduism seems to be a lot more accomodating of alternative viewpoints than Christianity is. Yet Mormons usually are considered to be Christian, even though they stretch the gospel truth (so to speak) in some far-out directions.

I got to thinking about this after having a comment interchange with Todd on my "Buddhist atheism irks B. Alan Wallace" post. In his last comment, Todd claimed that there is a consensual core to Buddhist teachings on which all real Buddhists agree.

Brian, you wrote, "....Bachelor's position is as defensible as Wallace's."

Again, this seems to evade Wallace's main issue, which is simply this: "There would be nothing wrong if Batchelor simply rejected the authenticity of the Buddha’s enlightenment and the core of his teachings, but instead he rejects the most reliable accounts of the Buddha’s vision and replaces it with his own, while then projecting it on the Buddha of his imagination."

Wallace is simply citing "the most reliable" accounts, those accounts on which there is complete consensus in Buddhism.

On what does Batchelor base his revisionisms?

"Since there is no evidence that Buddhism was ever agnostic, any assertions about how it lost this status are nothing but groundless speculations, driven by the philosophical bias that he brings to Buddhism."

Well, I'm not a Buddhist scholar. I just enjoy reading Buddhist literature (mostly of the agnostic/atheist variety, such as "Buddhism Without Beliefs," "Land of No Buddha," and Zen'ish writings).

My impression is that there's a heck of a lot of room under the Buddhist tent.

After all, to me the essence of Buddhism is finding a way to deal with the downsides of the human condition, a.k.a. suffering, unfulfilled desires, and other causes of us saying "Ouch!"

This also is how Stephen Bachelor sees Buddhism. Here's some quotes from his "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist" (namely, him).

Gotama's awakening involved a radical shift of perspective rather than the gaining of privileged knowledge into some higher truth. He did not use the words know and truth to describe it. He spoke only of waking up to a contingent ground -- "this-conditionality, conditioned arising" -- that until then had been obscured by his attachment to a fixed position.

While such an awakening is bound to lead to a reconsideration of what one "knows," the awakening itself is not primarily a cognitive act. It is an existential readjustment, a seismic shift in the core of oneself and one's relations to others and the world. Rather than providing Gotama with a set of ready-made answers to life's big questions, it allowed him to respond to those questions from an entirely new perspective.

To live on this shifting ground, one first needs to stop obsessing about what has happened before and what might happen later. One needs to be more vitally conscious of what is happening now. This is not to deny the reality of past and future. It is about embarking on a new relationship with the impermanence and temporality of life.

Instead of hankering after the past and speculating about the future, one sees the present as the fruit of what has been and the germ of what will be. Gotama did not encourage withdrawal to a timeless, mystical now, but an unflinching encounter with the contingent world as it unravels moment to moment.

This sure sounds Buddha-like to me.

Recently I started using the Zen Timer iPhone app during my morning meditation and I feel more enlightened already. Every minute or two I enjoy moving from head-phoned silence to a marvelously realistic bell sound of a Tibetan singing bowl.

There is the bell. Then there isn't. Then there is. And so the meditation goes, just as life goes. Stuff coming and going. Experiences arriving and leaving.

If this isn't Buddhism 101, I've just spent $1.99 on an iPhone app that should have "Zen" stricken from its name. Yet many Buddhists persist in believing that the Buddha's focus was on a supernatural realm, just as other religions teach.

Bachelor has a different take on the Buddha's teachings which resonates well with me.

Gotama declared that his awakening to the contingent ground of life went "against the stream." It was counterintuitive. It went against the instinctive sense of being a timeless witness of one's experience. It contradicted the belief in an eternal soul and, by implication, in the transcendent reality of God.

Rather than disassociating oneself from the world in order to achieve union with God, Gotama encouraged his followers to pay close, penetrating attention to the rise and fall of the phenomenal world itself. The way in which he presented the practice of meditation turned the received wisdom of the day on its head.

Instead of instructing his students to turn their attention inward to contemplate the nature of their soul, he told them to be acutely aware of their bodies, to be calmly mindful of whatever was impacting one's senses in that very moment, noticing its emergence and disappearance, its ephemerality, its impersonality, its joy and its tragedy, its allure, its terror.

There's nothing here about karma that extends over multiple lives, rebirth, and the survival of consciousness in some form after one's death. Yet some Buddhists consider these supernatural notions as essential to their faith, which leads them to view Bachelor -- who doesn't believe in them -- with deep suspicion as an "unreal" Buddhist.

He talks in his most recent book about what happened when "Buddhism Without Beliefs" was published in 1997.

Instead of being the non-contentious introduction to Buddhism that was initially conceived, Buddhism Without Beliefs triggered what Time magazine, in its cover issue on Buddhism in America the following October, called "a civil but ferociously felt argument" about whether it was necessary for Buddhists to believe in karma and rebirth.

I had proposed in the book that one could hold an agnostic position on these points, i.e., keep an open mind without either affirming or denying them. Naively perhaps, I had not anticipated the furor that this suggestion would create.

The ensuing controversy showed that Buddhists could be as fervent and irrational in their views about karma and rebirth as Christians and Muslims could be in their convictions about the existence of God. For some Western converts, Buddhism became a substitute religion every bit as inflexible and intolerant as the religions they rejected before becoming Buddhists.

Strange. Paradoxical. Illogical. Yet not surprising.

The essence of Buddhism is recognizing the contingency, interrelatedness, and ever-changing nature of life. But the human desire to survive as an ego-encapsulated being is strong.

Just because someone says "I'm a Buddhist" doesn't mean they've left behind the supernatural fantasies that the Buddha warned against embracing.

Bachelor writes:

I feel strangely elated the next morning as I visit the shrine in Kushinagar that marks the place where Gotama died. A black stone statue of the reclining Buddha, draped with a yellow robe, lies along the length of the somber room.

...This is where Gotama would have lain down between the sal trees, received Subhadda, and uttered his last words. And this is where those who had not yet achieved freedom of mind "wept and tore their hair, raising their arms, throwing themselves down, twisting and turning, crying 'All too soon! All too soon! The Buddha has passed away!'

While others endured it mindfully and said, 'All compounded things are impermanent -- what is the use of all this fuss?'"

 

Here's a tale from the afterlives

I'm hugely enjoying David Eagleman's "Sum: forty tales from the afterlives." This is a marvelously creative and thought-provoking book, unlike anything I've ever read before.

Sum is a work of fiction (maybe). The back cover says:

With a probing imagination and deep understanding of the human condition, acclaimed neuroscientist David Eagleman offers wonderfully imagined tales that shine a brilliant light on the here and now.

There's no way to explain the book. So I'll simply share one of the tales that I especially enjoyed. Read on.

Buddhist atheism irks B. Alan Wallace

Wow, I thought serious Buddhists were supposed to be full of compassion, empathy, and oneness with all sentient beings. Guess not.

Because I just quickly read through a scathing critique of Stephen Bachelor's "Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist," which B. Alan Wallace hates. (Thanks to Ira for an email that turned me on to this essay in Mandala, a Buddhist magazine.)

Wallace is a leading Buddhist thinker who tries to meld science and spirituality. According to Wikipedia:

His life's work focuses on a deep engagement between Buddhist philosophical and contemplative inquiry and modern science and philosophy, with a special emphasis on exploring the nature and potentials of the mind in a radically empirical manner, as free as possible from the dogmas of religion and materialism.

Calling materialism a "dogma" offers up a clue to what bothers Wallace so much about Bachelor's book, which I've read and enjoyed (mentioned it in a few blog posts, here and here).

Wallace is very much into the supernatural side of Buddhism.

He believes in past lives and reincarnation. These are religious beliefs, since there is no proof for them. But if the Buddha supposedly taught something, no matter how little evidence there is for it, this is good enough for Wallace.

Since Batchelor dismisses all talk of rebirth as a waste of time, he projects this view onto his image of the Buddha, declaring that he regarded “speculation about future and past lives to be just another distraction.” This claim flies in the face of the countless times the Buddha spoke of the immense importance of rebirth and karma, which lie at the core of his teachings as they are recorded in Pali suttas. Batchelor is one of many Zen teachers nowadays who regard future and past lives as a mere distraction.

Well, I'm no Zen teacher, but I'm on Batchelor's side.

I used to believe in reincarnation. Now I'm thoroughly agnostic, with a tilt toward atheistic, on this possibility. Sure, it'd be nice to have another chance at life. It strikes me as more important, though, to live this life as fully as possible.

If Buddhism is as religiously dogmatic as B. Alan Wallace makes it out to be, it's no wonder why secular Buddhist writers such as Stephen Bachelor are so popular nowadays. A commenter on Wallace's essay says:

This attack of atheists is unwarranted. Most atheists I know don’t believe in a God and as far as I know the Buddha did not believe in a God. If he did, I probably would not be a Buddhist. As such, someone who doesn’t believe in God is an atheist. Likewise, I admit that I do not believe in the Virgin Birth of either the Virgin Mary, or Achi Drolma, the Tibetan Buddhist deity. I do however, believe in parallel universes, simply because there is some evidence of that!

...Whatever our beliefs, whether we are Buddhists who believe in God, or flying saucers, or not, to say atheists and agnostics are individuals who are not concerned with awakening or “reality” as Mr. Wallace implies is an egregious error.

What do you believe but cannot prove?

This is a great question.

Seeing it on the cover of a book in Sisters' (Oregon) Paulina Springs Books made me instantly believe, "I'll be standing at the cash register soon with my VISA card in hand."

I couldn't have proven that I'd end up buying What We Believe But Cannot Prove, yet I believed it. And it turned out that I was right.

What I didn't know at the time, though, was that all of the mini-essays in the book are available for free online at Edge. So if you want to learn how some of the most brilliant minds in the world answered this question, you don't need a credit card.

I'm scientifically minded, though not a scientist (I did spend two years in a Systems Science Ph.D. program and finished all the coursework, but never got the degree). Like the people who contributed to this Edge project, I'm also very much into looking past the Known into the vast reaches of Possibly True.

This isn't the same as holding a religious belief, though, as planetary scientist Carolyn Porco makes clear in her essay.

This is a treacherous question to ask, and a trivial one to answer. Treacherous because the shoals between the written lines can be navigated by some to the conclusion that truth and religious belief develop by the same means and are therefore equivalent. To those unfamiliar with the process by which scientific hunches and hypotheses are advanced to the level of verifiable fact, and the exacting standards applied in that process, the impression may be left that the work of the scientist is no different than that of the prophet or the priest.

Of course, nothing could be further from reality.

The whole scientific method relies on the deliberate, high magnification scrutiny and criticism by other scientists of any mechanisms proposed by any individual to explain the natural world. No matter how fervently a scientist may "believe'"something to be true, and unlike religious dogma, his or her belief is not accepted as a true description or even approximation of reality until it passes every test conceivable, executable and reproducible. Nature is the final arbiter, and great minds are great only in so far as they can intuit the way nature works and are shown by subsequent examination and proof to be right.

There's a humility, openness, and willing embrace of uncertainty in these essays which is noticeably missing in religious holy books.

Priests, imams, gurus, rabbis, yogis, and such also believe a lot of stuff that they don't know to be true. However, they're usually not willing to admit that their faith isn't founded on demonstrable facts.

Leon Lederman, who won the Nobel Prize in physics, says in his essay:

To believe something while knowing that it cannot be proved (yet) is the essence of physics.

This shows that those who claim that embracing science means casting aside mystery, imagination, and creativity are talking nonsense. My interest in exploring the nature of human consciousness -- especially the possibility that it survives bodily death in some fashion -- is just as strong now in my churchless phase as when I was a true believer.

The only difference is that I no longer consider that what I want to believe really is true. It's just a hypothesis, a possibility, a wish.

Psychologist Jesse Bering speaks of this almost universal yearning to live on after we die in his essay:

In the United States alone, as much as 95% of the population reportedly believes in life after death. How can so many people be wrong? Quite easily, if you consider that we're all operating with the same standard, blemished psychological hardware.

...It seems that the default cognitive stance is reasoning that human minds are immortal; the steady accretion of scientific facts may throw off this stance a bit, but, as Unamuno found out, even science cannot answer the "big" question. Don't get me wrong. Like Unamuno, I don't believe in the afterlife. Recent findings have led me to believe that it's all a cognitive illusion churned up by a psychological system specially designed to think about unobservable minds. The soul is distinctly human all right. Without our evolved capacity to reason about minds, the soul would never have been. But in this case, the proof isn't in the empirical pudding. It can't be. It's death we're talking about, after all.

Susan Blackmore, also a psychologist, talks in a somewhat similar vein. I share Blackmore's unproven belief: that while I certainly show every sign of being a separate and distinct "Me," this likely is an illusion -- and that what Buddhists call enlightenment is seeing through this charade.

It is possible to live happily and morally without believing in free will. As Samuel Johnson said "All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience is for it." With recent developments in neuroscience and theories of consciousness, theory is even more against it than it was in his time, more than 200 years ago. So I long ago set about systematically changing the experience. I now have no feeling of acting with free will, although the feeling took many years to ebb away.

...When the feeling is gone, decisions just happen with no sense of anyone making them, but then a new question arises—will the decisions be morally acceptable? Here I have made a great leap of faith (or the memes and genes and world have done so). It seems that when people throw out the illusion of an inner self who acts, as many mystics and Buddhist practitioners have done, they generally do behave in ways that we think of as moral or good. So perhaps giving up free will is not as dangerous as it sounds—but this too I cannot prove.

As for giving up the sense of an inner conscious self altogether—this is very much harder. I just keep on seeming to exist. But though I cannot prove it—I think it is true that I don't.

Open Thread 8

It's been a while, but Open Thread has been resurrected. I got a few comments that didn't fit with a recent existing post, so it seemed fitting to give them a home here to start the OT 8 off.

Here's another Open Thread (previous OTs are still open, of course). Leave a comment about anything you want to talk about.

Comments on other posts need to be related to the subject of the post, or they will be candidates for deletion. So an Open Thread is the place for miscellany and whatever. Feel free. Just observe the comment policies (click on "comment policy" above).

Mental "avalanche" can cascade you to a better place

If we're on the slope of a steep snowy mountain, it makes sense to be afraid of an avalanche. Bodies usually don't fare well by suddenly being ripped from their moorings in a violent manner.

But minds/brains, they're different. Having our psyche turned upside down, twisted around, mixed up topsy-turvy... this can be marvelously interesting, productive, creative, truthful -- maybe even enlightening.

A New Scientist article, "Disorderly Genius," describes how the brain operates on the edge of chaos.

Have you ever experienced that eerie feeling of a thought popping into your head as if from nowhere, with no clue as to why you had that particular idea at that particular time? You may think that such fleeting thoughts, however random they seem, must be the product of predictable and rational processes. After all, the brain cannot be random, can it? Surely it processes information using ordered, logical operations, like a powerful computer?

Actually, no. In reality, your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Though much of the time it runs in an orderly and stable way, every now and again it suddenly and unpredictably lurches into a blizzard of noise.

...In technical terms, systems on the edge of chaos are said to be in a state of "self-organised criticality". These systems are right on the boundary between stable, orderly behaviour - such as a swinging pendulum - and the unpredictable world of chaos, as exemplified by turbulence.

This sounds kind of geeky, and it is. The basic notion is simple, though.

As the article's author, David Robson, goes on to explain, almost everyone is familiar with sand piles. Sitting on the beach, we idly pick up handfuls of sand and let them slip between our fingers, forming a pile. The pile gets higher and higher as more sand flows on top.

As grains build up, the pile grows in a predictable way until, suddenly and without warning, it hits a critical point and collapses. These "sand avalanches" occur spontaneously and are almost impossible to predict, so the system is said to be both critical and self-organising. Earthquakes, avalanches and wildfires are also thought to behave like this, with periods of stability followed by catastrophic periods of instability that rearrange the system into a new, temporarily stable state.

Why do some people suddenly de-convert from a religion? Why do others embrace a faith, seemingly impulsively? Who knows?

We can sense the mental avalanche that decisively impels us in a new direction, but the grains of psychological sand build up in an area outside our conscious awareness. "Faith," for me now, means trusting that whatever my mind/brain is up to behind the scenes, by and large it knows what it's doing -- being the product of billions of years of evolution where useful characteristics tend to survive.

I said "by and large" because a psychotic break also is an avalanche of sorts. Every sudden rearrangement of our viewpoint on life won't be worthy of being heartily embraced. Sometimes we need to lean back and say, "Whoa...what's happening here?"

On the whole, though, I love the notion that all the separate itty-bitty experiences I'm having are forming a sandpile of understanding which can transform itself in a Wow! flash. Unpredictability is beautiful. It's a big part of what makes life so lively.

Many years ago, I used to be addicted to a computer game, Loony Labyrinth. In this post I described how, all of a sudden, I shifted from an intense desire to play the game into utter disinterest.

So I know that mental avalanches are possible.

Pretty much the same thing happened after I'd worked in the health planning/policy arena for quite a few years, devoted to improving our nation's crappy health care non-system. Then, almost overnight... I simply didn't care any more. Intellectually I had the same understanding of our health care problems, yet my mind had flipped in how I looked at them.

Since I started this churchless blog I've had many people leave comments along the lines of, "What happened to you? How could you have forsaken a faith that you believed so strongly in for so many years?"

Well, ask a sand pile why it suddenly transforms itself into a different shape. Ask a snowy slope why a small disturbance creates a massive avalanche.

This is how the world works, how nature operates. Change happens. Often chaotically. Meaning, unpredictably. A butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil might set off a tornado in Texas (the "butterfly effect"). Who knew? Who could know? No one.

Being human, as if we had a choice, we tend to cling to the way things have been, fearing change. If we're religious, we erect barriers in an attempt to shore up the foundations of our faith. This may keep the grains of belief-sand in place for a bit longer, but eventually an avalanche of doubt will roll through our psyche, if such is bound to happen.

I like Susan Blackmore's description of how she switched from being a fervent believer in paranormal psychic phenomena to a firm skeptic. Her tale is honest and direct. I relate to the process she went through, though naturally the content of her mental discarding was different for her and me.

At last, I've done it. I've thrown in the towel, kicked the habit and gone on the wagon. After thirty years, I have escaped from a fearsome addiction.

To be truthful, I'm not really sure I've gone cold turkey yet. Only last month I was at a psychical research conference. Only days ago, I emptied the last of those meticulously organised filing cabinets, fighting the little voice that warned: "Don't do it, you might want to read that again" with a stronger one that urged: "You've given up!" as I threw paper after paper on ESP, psychokinesis, psychic pets, aromatherapy and haunted houses into the recycling sack. If cold turkey does strike, the dustbin men will have taken away my fix.

Come to think of it, I feel slightly sad. It was just over thirty years ago that I had the dramatic out-of-body experience that convinced me of the reality of psychic phenomena and launched me on a crusade to show those closed-minded scientists that consciousness could reach beyond the body and that death was not the end. Just a few years of careful experiments changed all that. I found no psychic phenomena - only wishful thinking, self-deception, experimental error and, occasionally, fraud. I became a sceptic.

Which was fine. Gloriously fine.

Now Blackmore is on to other areas of discovery. Her personal avalanche propelled her in a new meaning-of-life direction. We shouldn't fear such sudden mental changes of perception, but rather embrace them.

Sam Harris says morality can be scientific

I love Sam Harris' books.

His "The End of Faith" came out about a year after I started this churchless blog in the fall of 2004. It provided me with a surge of faithless energy, validating my decision to do what I could to help rid the world of destructive religious dogma.

"Letter to a Christian Nation" (2008) also was a winner, but didn't appeal to me quite as much. Never having been a Christian (aside from pretending to be one in my early elementary school years), I guess his focus on the ridiculousness of Christianity seemed self-evident to me.

Now, though, I'm fully fired up about "The Moral Landscape," which I've just begun to read.

Two chapters into it, I'm freshly impressed with Harris' ability to blend rigorous logic and a scientific outlook (he has a Ph.D. in neuroscience) with an earthy attack-dog sensibility. In his newest book what he's attacking is the oft-heard notion that science deals with facts and religion with meanings.

Given this assumption, much of the moral battlefield is ceded to armies of warring combatants brandishing competing holy scriptures and sacred sayings. Those of us who value reason, reality, logic, and the scientific method are relegated to the sidelines.

Harris writes:

The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume famously argued that no description of the way the world is (facts) can tell us how we ought to behave (morality). Following Hume, the philosopher G. E. Moore declared that any attempt to locate moral truths in the natural world was to commit a "naturalistic fallacy."

... Other influential philosophers, including Karl Popper, have echoed Hume and Moore on this point, and the effect has been to create a firewall between facts and values throughout our intellectual discourse.

However, the central point of "The Moral Landscape" is that human knowledge and human values can no longer be kept apart.

As we learn more about what contributes to the well-being of us Homo sapiens, and what doesn't, it would be crazy to set aside our sapience and blindly follow the moral advice of religious pre-scientific magical-thinkers who were (and sadly, still are) mired in supernatural superstitions and fantasies.

Even though I was never a crazy Christian, for many years I was a crazy follower of an Eastern system of religious thought. Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a form of Sant Mat, accepted the reality of karma accrued over countless births in myriad forms of life.

So, for example, it was thought that someone born blind might have poked out the eyes of a dog in a previous incarnation. And in general, that if something bad happens to a person, this is a justice-balancing act of the cosmos (personified as "Kal," the Lord of Karma).

This is an example of how religiosity prevents us from seeing moral truths clearly. Good becomes bad, and bad becomes good, when people overlay what is actually happening in the world with imagined desires, wishes, laws, or commandments of an unseen "higher power."

Here is our situation: if the basic claims of religion are true, the scientific worldview is so blinkered and susceptible to supernatural modification as to be rendered nearly ridiculous; if the basic claims of religion are false, most people are profoundly confused about the nature of reality, confounded by irrational hopes and fears, and tending to waste precious time and attention -- often with tragic results.

...It makes no sense at all to have the most important features of our lives anchored to divisive claims about the unique sanctity of ancient books or to rumors of ancient miracles. There is simply no question that how we speak about human values -- and how we study or fail to study the relevant phenomena at the level of the brain -- will profoundly influence our collective future.

After picking up "The Moral Landscape" in the morning, yesterday I bookended my reading day with TIME magazine. I found an article about the Westboro Baptist Church right in line with what Harris is talking about.

The 70 members of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas stage protests at military funerals around the country because they believe God is punishing troops for America's tolerance of homosexuality -- even when those killed, like Matt [Snyder] were not gay -- and that all of God's judgments must be celebrated.

In a reasonable reality-based world, judgments about the morality of homosexuality (including the appropriateness of the U.S. armed forces' "don't ask, don't tell" policy) would be based on evidence about gays: how homosexuality arises; how, if at all, gays differ from straights in areas other than who they are sexually attracted to; and so on.

But once religiosity enters into the moral debate, facts make an exit.

The TIME article says that a Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion on the lawsuit filed by the Snyders against the Westboro Baptist Church said that the First Amendment protects statements that fail to contain a "provably false factual connotation."

The Westboro signs were hurtful and wildly inappropriate -- "God hates you," for example -- but you can't disprove God's hate.

No, you can't. And you can't prove it either.

Thus this sort of claim, along with every other faith-based assertion, has no place in societal discussions about what is moral and what isn't. Harris is absolutely correct when he says:

There are surely physical, chemical, and biological facts about which we may be ignorant or mistaken. In speaking of "moral truth," I am saying that there must be facts regarding human and animal well-being about which we can also be ignorant or mistaken. In both cases, science -- and rational thought generally -- is the tool we can use to uncover these facts.

...Meaning, values, morality, and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures -- and, in our case, must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain. Rational, open-ended inquiry has always been the true souce of insight into such processes. Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident.

Religion doesn't add anything to human experience

Here's a big misunderstanding that most religious people make: when they feel good, they attribute those positive feelings to their religiosity -- not realizing that if they didn't have faith in God, Guru, Brahman, Allah, or whatever, they'd feel just about the same.

I say this because I used to be such a person.

For the thirty-five or so years I was an active member of an India-based religious organization I was almost always in a positive frame of mind. I was energetic, confident, productive, and happy.

But this also describes how I was before and after my immersion in the teachings and lifestyle of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

When I was working on a book project that began under the auspices of RSSB, I got into a bit of an argument with one of the senior disciples in the publishing department.

We were emailing back and forth about the introduction to Return to the One that I'd written. The senior RSSB staff member wanted me to say something about how my guru, Charan Singh, had inspired my literary abilities.

I told her that I'd done a lot of writing before I was initiated by Charan Singh. I was a good thinker before I got involved with Radha Soami Satsang Beas. I was able to take complex ideas and communicate them fairly simply before I had anything to do with the RSSB teachings.

So I refused to give credit to somebody who hadn't had any effect on my ability to write a book about a Neoplatonist Greek philosopher, Plotinus. I simply didn't see how my involvement with the guru and the RSSB organization had made me a different person.

Sure, I'd done different things than if I had taken another spiritual route, or forsaken faith altogether. But I felt that my basic nature -- how I generally experience life -- would have been the same no matter what I'd done during the previous decades.

The longer I've been churchless, the more I've become aware how all of the so-called religious "virtues" have exact secular counterparts. This includes faith, and its virtue cousin, acceptance.

For a long time I had faith that my life was being guided in some fashion by a higher power: God, karma, destiny, the guru's will. I wasn't really sure who or what was doing the guiding. I just felt comforted by a feeling that whatever happened in my life, it was meant to be and needed to be accepted.

I suspect that Christians say "thank you, Jesus" a lot.

I know that I used to do the same thing, substituting "guru" for "Jesus." If I easily found a parking space in a busy downtown area my magical thinking would take over and I'd praise my conception of The Lord for obviating the need to drive around the block several times.

But now I'm realizing that whatever made me feel good, thankful, or positive during my religious phase is still operative in a secular guise.

My wife and I are leading our neighborhood's fight against a 43-lot, 217-acre subdivision that threatens to dry up existing wells and threaten surface water rights. The battle has been going on for about five years.

After some setbacks, we got a favorable circuit court ruling on our appeal of a decision to let the subdivison move forward. Yesterday the judge had scheduled a conference call to tell the attorneys on both sides how she was going to handle a motion by the would-be developer to reconsider her decision.

I was sort of nervous.

We and our neighbors had put a lot of money and much effort into stopping the subdivision. I was pretty sure the judge wouldn't change her mind, but there was a possibility she could weaken or even overturn her original ruling.

However, calm acceptance was more in evidence in my psyche than nervousness. During the morning I occupied myself with mowing the lawn, staining a tree house, cleaning the gutters, and other chores.

I thought, Whatever will be, will be. It's not in my hands. However the judge rules, I can deal with it. We'll move forward no matter what.

No longer did I have any notions about the ruling being a life-lesson, God's grace, karma, or whatever. i simply knew that sometime after 1:00 pm I'd learn from our attorneys what the judge said, but until then I'd be in a state of not-knowing.

Which was absolutely fine with me. I'd been able to deal with difficult circumstances before I joined the religious organization. Ditto with during and, now, after my RSSB involvement.

All that varied was that during the different phases of my life I used different words and concepts to explain to myself how I was able to handle a problem with more than a modicum of aplomb.

So don't be afraid of losing any of your good qualities if you forsake religion. They still will be with you, maybe even stronger than before. You just won't feel the need to thank an unseen power for what comes your way.

(I do still say "thank you" to the cosmos now and then, but this is gratitude for being able to experience existence itself -- not any specific experience. That said, I was more than a little happy when I heard that the judge ruled in our favor.)

Relationship is the essential nature of reality

Some people are attracted to an "Eastern" holistic outlook on life. Others, to a "Western" analytical viewpoint. I've always thought that these were just two different ways of looking at reality, with each having its strengths and weaknesses.

But some passages in Winifred Gallagher's Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life present another possibility.

She describes research by psychologist Richard Nisbett about how Americans and Japanese describe an underwater scene quite differently. Americans focus on the largest and most colorful fish, while the Japanese would say things such as "It looked like a stream. The water was green. There were rocks on the bottom, and some plants and fish."

Then Gallagher writes:

After a dozen years of investigation, Nisbett is convinced that Homo sapiens' natural inclination is to attend to and think about the world in a holistic way, as East Asians do. Instead of focusing in on the environment's most significant feature, such as those three bright, centrally located tropical fish, in the Western fashion, our species evolved to take in the big picture: the entire aquatic context, of which the fish are just a part.

By nature, human beings are also inclined to consider each situation on a case-by-case basis, as Asians do, rather than to sort things according to the laws of logic and categorization, like Westerners. As Nisbett puts it simply, "In most of the world, people's range of focus is much broader than ours."

This relates to my previous post where I engaged in one of my favorite Western-mind activities: dividing things into logical categories. I brilliantly simplified (the way I see it), or absurdly simplified (as some others will say), the entire history of human religiosity into three sentences.

There are two kinds of religious, spiritual, and mystical pursuits. One aims at bringing individuals into harmony with some sort of divinity. The other denies that individuals really exist, so there is no entity to be brought into harmony.

Religiosity #1 is a Wow! Big fish! perspective.

The "big fish" usually are an eternal soul and an eternal God. These become the central focus of a person's spiritual endeavor. Everything else in the cosmos fades into the background. Salvation, union with God, God-realization -- this is the individual's prime concern and what gives life meaning.

Religiosity #2 is a Look! A stream! perspective.

Fish can't exist without water. Likewise, the "stream" of reality contains countless entities, all connected in some fashion. It's impossible to carve out anything from the universe and claim that it stands alone: everlasting, unchanging, utterly separate and distinct.

Thanks to commenter Jon, who shared a link to an essay called "Is There a Soul in Buddhism?," I learned more about why Buddhism is very much in the Religiosity #2 category.

To recap the argument so far, we can divide the world of metaphysical thought into that camp which believes that sentient beings are possessed of an immortal soul created by the arbitrary will of a God and those who believe sentient beings are nothing more than a complex arrangement of molecules arisen in the last analysis by pure chance. In the middle of these extremes, we have the third camp, the Buddhists who believe that beings arise according to laws of cause-and-effect and deny that there is any arbitrary or random aspect whatsoever.

Well, in his effort to portray Buddhism as the Middle Path I think the author misstates the scientific viewpoint on sentient beings, which seems to be his "arose by pure chance" camp.

Evolution is anything but random, just as quantum mechanics is anything but random. Yes, randomness is present in the unpredictable nature of mutations and sub-atomic goings-on, but the overall evolution of life and the behavior of quantum phenomena are well understood by modern science.

Science, and life as a whole, is all about cause and effect. Which is another way of saying, "relationships."

Equations like E = MC² express the relationship between this (energy) and that (mass and the speed of light). Without relationships the cosmos would be a formless mess of mush, a chaotic featureless soup.

So this is why I tend to agree with Nisbett that holism is the most natural way of looking upon the world, because it is a more accurate reflection of reality.

This also is why I'm now attracted much more strongly to Buddhism and Taoism, exemplars of Religiosity #2, rather than faiths which claim that an individual's soul is separate and distinct from everything else in the universe, being a sort of "stranger in a strange land" whose destiny is to return to an unchanging eternal heaven, paradise, or whatever.

I used to believe that some part of me -- "soul" -- would exist forever. This can be a comforting thought. The older I get, the more obvious it becomes that my body and brain are changing, and unfortunately not in the direction of everlastingness.

(This morning I picked up a table with a bunch of books on it. I could easily lift it over an obstruction, but felt a twinge in my lower back after I did so. That's new to me, these nonverbal bodily speakings of "take it easier on me, dude." But I take comfort in the fact that if I wasn't changing, I'd be dead.)

What's wrong with this? Nothing. It's the nature of reality. I'm the result of countless causes and conditions, a central Buddhist notion. Also, an eminently scientific one.

Why should I expect that only I, me, myself should remain unchanged, unaltered, unaffected out of the countless entities in the cosmos? Where does the idea come from that my true nature is eternal soul, separate and distinct from the ever-varying phenomena of this universe?

Ego. Selfhood. Self-centered self-awareness. I can think of myself existing forever, so therefore I am eternal.

To hell with relationships. To hell with recognizing that I'm nothing special, nothing which will last, nothing unchangingly unique. I want to be Me, Me, Me forever and ever, just like the vast majority of people on Earth who embrace Religiosity #1.

The only difference between me and them is that I'm coming to a ever-clearer realization of how unrealistic my desire for eternal unchangingness is. My nature lies in relationships, just as the nature of Nature itself is.

Rumi, a Sufi mystic, said it well:

Fear the existence in which you are now!
Your imagination is nothing, and you are nothing.
A nothing has fallen in love with a nothing,
a nothing-at-all has waylaid a nothing-at-all.
When these images have departed,
your misunderstanding will become clear to you.

Are Buddhism and Taoism akin to Sant Mat?

People here in the West often speak of "Eastern religions" as if they were all alike. This shows how little understanding citizens of predominantly Christian nations have of other cultures.

Actually, some Eastern faiths have as much, or even more, in common with the Big Monotheistic Three (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) as they do with monistic/atheistic teachings such as Buddhism and Taoism.

Case in point: Sant Mat, which means the "path of saints." For about thirty-five years I was an active member of an India-based Sant Mat organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, so I know whereof I speak.

That's why I disagreed with a comment that David Hedges left yesterday on a Church of the Churchless blog post, "What if a 'guru' is no different from us?"

Brian, Sant Mat is a path of meditation, nothing more, nothing less. The outer Master puts us on the path of meditation to discover the inner Master, who is the Shabd or Tao or Nam or God. You totally missed the whole point of Sant Mat, which is meditation to discover the truth. Buddha taught the same thing, the path of meditation. David

David equated "Tao" with the Sant Mat "God," and said that Buddhist meditation is the same as Sant Mat meditation. No, neither statement is true.

I'm well acquainted with Taoism through a lot of reading, and five years of Tai Chi practice with a thoroughly Taoist instructor. Ditto with Buddhism on the reading front. And over the years I've had quite a few talks with people who were very much into Buddhist meditation.

The easiest way to explain the central difference between Sant Mat and Buddhism/Taoism is to generalize this distinction. Sure, saying "there are two kinds of..." frequently is simplistic.

But in this case I think it is pretty darn true. So I'll say it.

There are two kinds of religious, spiritual, and mystical pursuits. One aims at bringing individuals into harmony with some sort of divinity. The other denies that individuals really exist, so there is no entity to be brought into harmony.

Christianity is an obvious example of Religiosity #1. Humans are considered to need salvation, because we are sinners who have fallen from an original state of purity. Buddhism is an equally obvious example of Religiosity #2. Our sense of self is a falsity, because Anatta is our nature -- no-self, no-soul.

Here's where the Eastern/Western religious split falls apart (an unpictureable turn of phrase, but I like it).

Hinduism is akin to Christianity in its positing of an enduring individual soul, or atman. So is Sant Mat, which has strong ties to Hinduism. Sure, in these Eastern forms of Relgiosity #1, souls get reincarnated and generate karma, whereas in Christianity they don't.

But the emphasis in Christianity, Hinduism, and Sant Mat is on individual salvation.

Meditative practices, including prayer, are aimed at connecting the soul with God. Salvation is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve on one's own. A savior is needed who serves as a link between God and Man/Woman. This is Jesus in Christianity, and a guru in Hinduism and Sant Mat.

By contrast, Buddhist and Taoist practices -- meditative or otherwise -- are focused on realizing that there is no "me" who needs to be saved. Enlightenment basically is realization of the emptiness, or sunyata, of all things. ("Emptiness" isn't nothingness, but rather interdependence.)

Here's a description of what this means:

To some extent, sunyata is an extension of the concepts made explicit in The Three Flaws. All things being impermanant, nothing can be seen as having an independent, lasting form of existence. And this is, in essence, what sunyata is all about. Strictly speaking, sunyata can be defined as "not svabhava".

The concept svabhava means "own being", and means something like "substance" or "essence" in Western philosophy. Svabhava has to do with the notion that there is a form of being which "is" and "exists" in a form that is not dependent on context, is not subject to variation, and has a form of permanent existence.

As such, the "soul" as understood in Abrahamic religions would have svabhava. God would certainly have svabhava. The Platonic forms (such as those described in the allegory of the Cave) would have svabhava. Certain abhidharma teachings conclude that the building blocks of reality have such svabhava.

But Mahayana philosophers like Nagarjuna concluded that sunyata is the fundamental characteristic of reality, and that svabhava could be found absolutely nowhere.

Pretty deep philosophizing. But the basic notion is simple.

If we are part and parcel of the cosmos, there's nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no one to become. Any effort aimed at some religious, spiritual, or mystical attainment -- of going somewhere, doing something, or becoming someone -- is misguided. Any such practice is valuable only insofar as it enables us to realize how useless it is.

That's the essence of Religiosity #2, which is very different from Religiosity #1. As noted above, faiths such as Christianity, Hinduism, and Sant Mat all assume the existence of an enduring soul which needs saving or self-realization.

In Buddhism and Taoism, there's no soul and no self, so relaxing into an embrace of ever-flowing, ever-changing reality where there are no hard and fast distinctions is the Way to go.

The Taoist sage Chuang Tzu puts it nicely:

The true men of old knew nothing of the love of life or of the hatred of death. Entrance into life occasioned no joy; exit from it awakened no resistance. Composedly they came and went.

They did not forget what their beginning had been, and they did not inquire into what their end would be.

They accepted life and rejoiced in it; they forgot all fear of death and returned to their state before life. Thus there was in them what is called the want of any mind to resist the Tao, and attempts by means of the human to assist the Heavenly.

Such were they who are called the true men.

Vastness might be us, not a separate self

Somebody in my house picked up Suzanne Segal's book, "Collision With the Infinite, " this morning. Outwardly, it seemed to be me. But inwardly, it didn't feel that way.

Even though I've got a bunch of books in my meditation area that were ripe for reading, I was drawn to move into an adjoining bedroom and look over the contents of a couple of bookcases. My right hand followed my eyes after I spotted the book.

Holding it, I didn't have a sense either that I'd made a decision, or that a decision had made me. Something simply had happened.

A few seconds later I was thumbing through "Collision With the Infinite," reacquainting myself with Segal's description of how, while waiting for a bus, she experienced a sudden sense of emptiness -- that the self she'd considered herself to be didn't really exist.

Back in 2007 I wrote about the book in Consider a cosmos that is only consciousness. It was nice to make friends with Segal's thoughts again -- and my own highlightings of favorite passages.

She writes lucidly, honestly, and refreshingly non-dogmatically. I suppose she could be called a "non-dualist," but if this word is used in her book, it isn't often. "Vastness" is her preferred term for what she now feels connected with.

At the bus stop in Paris, the "me" was annihilated, and it has never reappeared in any form. With this annihilation, there occurred the realization that a "me" has never existed who is the doer behind what has appeared to be "my" life. In recent years, it has also become clear that not only is there no "me," there is also no "other."

The "no other-ness" is now so dominant that nothing else is perceived. Life is being lived out of the infinite substance of which it is made, and this substance -- which is what and who we all are -- is constantly aware of itself out of itself. What an extraordinary way to live!

The vastness never requires that something must go away for it to be the vastness. After all, where could anything go in this vastness? ... Nothing has to change, go away, or transform itself into something else for the vastness to be the vastness. The vastness is always who and what everything is.

Now, this outlook is pretty darn close to a bunch of philosophies. Advaita Vedanta. Buddhism. Taoism. Other forms of monism and non-dualism. However, Segal almost entirely writes from her own experience, not from concepts.

For a long time her feeling of emptiness was accompanied by fear. She went to quite a few therapists and spiritual types in an attempt to understand what was going on. A Zen practitioner gave her advice. Then she asked him, "Have you experienced what I'm talking about?"

He admits that he hasn't. She moves on, eventually coming to some conclusions on her own:

This raises questions about the value of performing spiritual practices, studying ancient texts or even living a "spiritual" life. Most practices imply the existence of a "me" who can do the practice and eventually accomplish a particular goal.

But if a practice is undertaken by such a "me" in order to attain the non-locatable vastness of no personal self, then a conundrum or paradox presents itself. A personal doer is presumed to exist who must do the practices properly in order to achieve the realization that there is no personal doer.

...Further, most spiritual practices presume that awakening is someplace else and must be reached or attained. But we are always the vastness -- always! It is the naturally occurring human state.

Where would the vastness go? Where could the infinite hide? What could we possibly need to do to become the vastness, when we already are it?

I liked Segal's contention that any supposedly "spiritual" practice requiring the giving up, elimination, stopping, or purification of something (mind, desires, thoughts, etc.) is misguided.

This fits with my own lengthy experience, thirty-plus years, of practicing a meditation system that emphasized the negativity of Mind -- which earns a capital "M" because it was considered to be not only what goes on inside the human cranium, but also a universal "negative power" that misleads the spiritual aspirant and keeps him/her from entering the realms of Soul.

You can't get much more dualistic than that, which helps explain why the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) teachings, a.k.a. Science of the Soul, frequently cited quotations from the Bible.

Just as Christianity posits a Devil or Satan who stands between us and God, so did RSSB claim that Kal or the Negative Power operates through the human mind, which therefore can't be trusted.

Of course, this teaching was communicated by gurus who had a human mind and used it to share their thoughts about spirituality with disciples who received those ideas through their own minds.

Which is a paradox. And points to a way out of these sorts of contradictions: Segal's hypothesis (for her, a certainty) that the individual self/soul/ego or whatever doesn't really exist, but only appears to.

She speaks of how crazy it would be for someone to decry all the seaweed in the ocean. Hey, oceans have seaweed! That's part of what makes them oceans, and not purified water.

Segal also talks of the cosmos as being akin to sand. A finger made of sand draws figures in the sand. It's all sand! Nothing else. To say "the finger, and the forms drawn by it, interferes with the oneness of Sandness" is misguided. There's only sand, no matter how it appears.

Is Segal right? I don't know. Is there such a thing as right and wrong when talking about the ultimate nature of the cosmos? I don't know that either. I simply resonate with what she says.

All ideas about accomplishing spiritual awakening are based on the assumption that there is a someone, a you, who can perform the practices and accomplish the goal. But this someone doesn't exist.

Take, for example, the popular spiritual notion that we need to "get out of the way so the infinite can just flow through us." It is predicated on a non-existent someone who can figure out how to surrender. We need to see that spiritual and psychological practices, every single one of them, are based on taking ideas about who we are to be the truth of who we are.

The idea that we are the doer behind our actions does not make us the doer, no matter how often we get hoodwinked into taking this idea to be truth.

Then there is the notion that we must stop the mind in order to be free. But who will stop the mind? Like everything else, the mind is just what it is. A mind that generates thoughts is not a problem; it is simply doing what minds do. The mind is made of the same vast emptiness as everything.

Whether the mind is active or quiet, this emptiness never changes. Nor does the infinite wait for the mind to do or stop doing something in order for the vastness to reveal itself to itself. If the mind should stop, it simply does so as part of the unfathomable mystery.