Church of the Churchless

No evidence that near-death experiences are spiritual

Recently I was being my usual sceptical self in a coffeehouse conversation, saying "Everything we humans are aware of is processed by the physical brain, so nobody has ever had a purely spiritual experience."

My companion replied, "But what about near-death experiences? Sometimes people leave their bodies and view them from the outside."

Well, not really, according to a neurophysiologist, Kevin Nelson, who is a leading researcher on NDE's (near-death experiences). A recent issue of New Scientist has an interview with him -- attached as a continuation to this post -- where he states that NDE's are akin to lucid dreaming.

Lucid dreams are among the closest things we know of to an NDE. They are very similar. Brainwave measurements show that lucid dreaming is a conscious state between REM and waking. During REM consciousness, the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex is turned off. As that's the executive, rational part of the brain, this explains why dreams are so bizarre. But if the dorso-lateral cortex turns on inside a dream, you become aware that you are dreaming. It is like waking up in your dream. When the body is in crisis during an NDE and the brain is slipping from consciousness to unconsciousness, it can get momentarily stuck in a borderland between REM and waking, just like a lucid dream.

Near the end of the interview Nelson talks about the evidence, or rather lack thereof, that consciousness is separable from the physical brain.

You often hear people claim that these experiences happened during minutes when they were declared clinically dead. How could that be?

This is an incredible misconception that has arisen because people use the term "clinical death" when they really mean cardiac arrest. When your heart stops and you lose blood flow, you don't lose consciousness for another 10 seconds and brain damage doesn't occur until 30 minutes after blood flow is reduced by 90 per cent or more. So when experiencing an NDE, you are not dead.

People like to say that these experiences are proof that consciousness can exist outside the brain, like a soul that lives after death. I hope that is true, but it is a matter of faith; there is no evidence for that. People who claim otherwise are using false science to engender false hope and I think that is misleading and ultimately cruel.

Absolutely. And if it is misleading and cruel to use false science to engender false hope, doesn't this also apply to false spirituality, false religion, and false mysticism?

Like Nelson, I too hope that some part of us lives on after death. However, hope isn't reality; belief isn't truth. While I'm alive I'd rather live honestly, facing facts as we humans currently best understand them, instead of taking refuge in a fantasy realm.

I've ordered Nelson's book, "The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist's Search for the God Experience." The way I see it, if there truly is a domain of consciousness beyond the material, it won't be found through means that are demonstrably physical.

So even if someone believes in an other-worldly spirit, soul, heaven, god, or whatever, they should pay attention to what science is learning about so-called "spiritual" experiences -- since if these are produced by the brain, as Nelson considers NDE's to be, they aren't what a seeker of spirit is looking for.

I came across another interview with Nelson that looks to be even more interesting, from a quick read-through of the first part of it. Early on he skillfully defends the following point of view against the interviewer's challenges.

Sure. I think near-death experiences are in the brain and I think that the only experience we can really know about comes from the brain and so I think that my emphasis as a neurologist, of course, is just that. It’s the brain.

Read on for the complete New Scientist interview.

Corny but inspiring: "Seven Wonders of the World" video

Thanks to Clare, who emailed me a link to this video.

Usually I don't have much of a tolerance for super-heartwarming messages (I prefer a dash of cynicism mixed in with sweetness and light), but I enjoyed the concluding mindfulness theme.

Here's Clare's accurate take on "Seven Wonders of the World":

Hey, this is a bit corny and I'm dubious about the class/kid origin, but nonetheless points to a churchless way of appreciating ourselves and life. Happy New Year.

Enjoy. And I'll also say, Happy New Year.

Precognition may be real (did you already know that?)

Take heart, religious believers: recent research isn't evidence of God, heaven, soul, or the afterlife, but it could point to something similarly mysterious.

Or, not.

There's a lot of controversy surrounding Daryl Bem's claim that precognition is real. But his paper is going to be published in the respected Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. An article in New Scientist says:

Extraordinary claims don't come much more extraordinary than this: events that haven't yet happened can influence our behaviour.

Parapsychologists have made outlandish claims about precognition – knowledge of unpredictable future events – for years. But the fringe phenomenon is about to get a mainstream airing: a paper providing evidence for its existence has been accepted for publication by the leading social psychology journal.

What's more, sceptical psychologists who have pored over a preprint of the paper say they can't find any significant flaws. "My personal view is that this is ridiculous and can't be true," says Joachim Krueger of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who has blogged about the work on the Psychology Today website. "Going after the methodology and the experimental design is the first line of attack. But frankly, I didn't see anything. Everything seemed to be in good order."

However, good order is in the eye of the scientific beholder.

Some Dutch researchers argue that Bem's work reflects weaknesses in how findings are analyzed statistically. Their Bayesian approach, which I don't claim to understand, showed no evidence of precognition.

Regardless, the effect wasn't huge, just a few percent above the 50-50 that would have been expected by chance. It's cool, though, that Bem's first experiment used erotic images.

In his first experiment, Bem explored the effects of erotic stimuli on perceiving the future. After being shown an image, one hundred Cornell students — 50 male and 50 female — were each shown pictures of two curtained screens on computer monitors, one covering a blank wall, the other covering the image. Many but not all of the pictures behind the curtains were erotic images, such as those of  “couples engaged in nonviolent but explicit consensual sexual acts,” according to Bem’s paper. Each participant was to click on the curtain which he or she thought had the picture behind it.

Bem hypothesized that 50 percent of those who were shown erotic stimuli would identify the correct curtain, and that those shown erotic pictures would have a higher “hit rate” — the number of times that the correct curtain was identified — than participants that were shown non-erotic pictures.

In the 100 sessions, the hit rate for those shown erotic stimuli was 53.1 percent, while the 49.8 percent hit rate of those shown non-erotic pictures did not deviate from chance. This shows that on average, given that the erotic image shown to the participant made a considerable impression, that participant’s ability to foresee the future is statistically higher than chance, according to Bem.

“The remarkable finding [we made] is that their physiological responses are observed to occur about 2-3 seconds prior to the appearance of the picture, even before the computer has decided whether to present a non-arousing or an arousing picture,” Bem said.

Well, I'm open to the possibility that something outside of our current understanding of the laws of nature and causation is going on here. But Bem admits that he doesn't have any firm hypotheses about what that might be, a fact that disturbs the above-mentioned Joachim Kreuger.

The whole point of psi experiments is to demonstrate the existence of something that is inexplicable by ordinary lights. If it were explicable, it would not longer be anomalous; it would not be psi.

That's the paradox. Psi research seeks to establish the existence of weird phenomena while at the same time refusing to offer a positive theory of why and how these phenomena come into being. This must be so because once you have a positive (i.e., intelligible) theory about the process underlying the phenomenon, the mystique is gone.

If you want to dig deeper into Bem's research, a preprint of his journal paper is the place to go. I browsed through "Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect," skipping the numbers and focusing on conclusions.

Such as:

If psi exists, then it is not unreasonable to suppose that it might have been acquired through evolution by conferring survival and reproductive advantage on the species (for a discussion, see Broughton, 1991, pp. 347–352).

For example, the ability to anticipate and thereby to avoid danger confers an obvious evolutionary advantage that would be greatly enhanced by the ability to anticipate danger precognitively. It was this reasoning that motivated Experiment 2 on the precognitive avoidance of negative stimuli.

Similarly, the possibility of an evolved precognitive ability to anticipate sexual opportunities motivated Experiment 1 on the precognitive detection of erotic stimuli. The presentiment experiments were probably inspired by similar reasoning.

And after attempting (more accurately, in my opinion,straining) to invoke quantum mechanics as an explanation of precognition, Bem says:

Unfortunately, even if quantum-based theories eventually mature from metaphor to genuine models of psi, they are still unlikely to provide intuitively satisfying mechanisms for psi because quantum theory fails to provide intuitively satisfying mechanisms for physical reality itself.

Physicists have learned to live with that conundrum but most non-physicists are simply unaware of it; they presume that they don’t understand quantum physics only because they lack the necessary technical and mathematical expertise. They need to be reassured.

Richard Feynman (1994), one of the most distinguished physicists of the twentieth century and winner of the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics, put it this way:

"The difficulty really is psychological and exists in the perpetual torment that results from your saying to yourself, ‘But how can it be like that?’ which is a reflection of uncontrolled but utterly vain desire to see it in terms of something familiar....Do not keep saying to yourself...‘But how can it be like that?’ because you will get...into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that [emphasis added]. (p. 123)"

Comments on Kreuger's Psychology Today skeptical blog post about the research also are interesting (if sometimes technical) reading. This one hits on a point that was on my mind:

Psychology is such a joke. A demonstration of future events influencing present events would be one of the most important (if not *the* most important) findings in the history of mankind. Yet this demonstration doesn't end up in Science or Nature, but is published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology? And some wonder why psychology is still considered pseudoscience....

Muhammad actually is a beautiful blonde girl!

Wow, who knew? I had no idea that Muhammad was this good looking. And that he was a woman. Plus, alive!

Check out what she has to say in a You Tube video, "Muhammad tells it like it is." It's a whole new Sharia law, Muslims.

 

I'm churchless. And as "spiritual" as ever.

Today a friend asked me to explain my current attitude toward spirituality.

We haven't talked as much about godly, mystical, and meditational matters as we did back when I was an active member of an India-based religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

It's always interesting for me to hear what I have to say in response to such a query. I didn't have to think much, if at all, before answering him. After all, writing posts for this blog keeps me attuned to how I feel about spirituality now, as opposed to my previous true-believing past.

But talking face to face is different from communicating blogishly. I wanted to be as direct and simple as possible with my friend. We were having a coffee house conversation, and I didn't want it to turn into an one-sided soliloquy.

"I guess the biggest change is that I'm much more into the here and now," I said. "When I meditate I'm focused on my breath, my body, and what is right around me. I'm no longer seeking some hypothesized other-worldly reality."

My friend wondered if I'd given up on exploring the possibility that consciousness can contact realms beyond the physical.

"Not at all," I told him. "But I no longer believe that this is likely. And even if it is possible, I don't think it would come about through active effort -- rather, through a relaxed letting go."

We continued on with our conversation for quite a bit longer.

My main intention was to get across a basic fact: ending my involvement with an organized religious faith -- complete with a guru, holy books, rituals, and lifestyle commandments -- certainly didn't mark an end to my commitment to spirituality.

Indeed, that commitment has gotten considerably stronger now that I've entered my churchless phase.

I simply have a much broader view of what "spiritual" means. To me, this word points to how I experience reality subjectively, the inner sense of how I experience life as contrasted with how others perceive me outwardly.

"What if this life is all there is?" I asked my friend. "We die, and that's it. Wouldn't it be a waste to always keep on looking for ultimate truth and meaning around the next corner, and never get there? Why not accept that all we can ever be aware of is here and now, not there and then?"

I told him that a big part of the RSSB meditation system was, essentially, doing nothing: merely being aware of what was present within one's consciousness, which might include spiritual sights and sounds.

Well, that's still what I do now in my morning meditation.

But I no longer have conceptual or intellectual expectations about what I'll experience when I close my eyes and settle onto my meditation cushion. I just aim at being as mindful and aware as possible of what actually passes through my consciousness.

If God, angels, heavenly beings, Buddha-nature, Spirit, astral realms, or any other divine entity make an appearance, I'll welcome them. If they stay away, I'm content.

Another friend chimed in to the conversation at one point. He said, "Brian spent many years looking for evidence of the supernatural and never found any. So now he's looking for truth in other directions."

Absolutely.

If after thirty-five years you haven't come across what you've been looking for, does it make sense to keep on searching in the same place, and in the same fashion? No. I came to the conclusion that this would be crazy.

Maybe it doesn't exist. Or maybe the object of your desire is elsewhere.

Like, right here. Haven't you ever wandered around looking for your car keys, only to finally notice that you were holding them?

I have. And that moment of astonished relief when I realized my searching had been senseless... that wordless sensation is what I was trying to communicate to my friend today in quite a few words.

Rumi spoke of how buried treasure of the spiritual sort can be found: not by searching in distant places, but by looking right beneath your feet. Excellent advice, which I've taken to heart.

Why I don't like to say "Merry Christmas"

It's Christmas Eve, 2010. This is the day when exclamations of "Merry Christmas!" become even more common than before December 24.

But I haven't uttered those words once, even though my wife and I were out and about in several stores earlier today. My preference is to reply "Same to you" when someone says "Merry Christmas" to me.

Understand: I'm not a Christmas grinch. I enjoy the holiday season. Occasionally I even will pop out with a Merry Christmas myself. I just have a good reason for saying those words as infrequently as possible.

Christ.

I don't believe in him. I suspect he may not even have existed. And if so, almost certainly not as the Son of God. That's a ridiculous notion -- superstitious, blind-faith based, unscientific, and divisive (we Christians are saved and you're going to hell, hah-hah!)

So I don't like to say Merry Christmas because in doing so, I'm endorsing Christ and Christianity.

Since I think the world would be a better place without religion, why would I want to go around speaking of how merry a Christ-filled day is? For my wife and me -- along with countless other non-Christians, there is nothing Christ'y about December 25.

It's just another day, albeit one that does a lot to boost the economy with all the gift-giving that surrounds it.

That's good, but the religious side of Christmas is meaningless to me. As it would be to Christians, if the godly shoe was on another foot. Consider, Jesus lovers: what if you lived in an English-speaking country where most people believed in Allah, as revealed by Muhammad?

The custom is to say "Merry Allahday" at certain holy times of the year. Yet you don't believe in Allah. You're a devout Christian. Wouldn't you feel funny wishing store clerks "Merry Allahday" when you reject Allah and this God-hypothesis?

Bingo. Now you know how us churchless folks feel.

So if you're into saying "Merry Christmas" and you get a "Happy Holidays" or "Same to you" in response from someone like me, hopefully now you better understand why.

It isn't the holiday of Christmas that I'm opposed to, it's Christ.

Scary: 40% of Americans are strict creationists

How the hell is the United States going to compete with the rest of the world -- scientifically, economically, technologically -- when 4 in 10 of our citizens believe God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago?

Read the Gallup poll. And weep for the future of our country if more Americans don't start embracing reality rather than superstition.

Most Americans believe in God, and about 85% have a religious identity. It is not surprising as a result to find that about 8 in 10 Americans hold a view of human origins that involves actions by God -- that he either created humans as depicted in the book of Genesis, or guided a process of evolution. What no doubt continues to surprise many scientists is that 4 out of 10 Americans believe in the first of these explanations.

...Americans' attitudes about almost anything can and often do have political consequences. Views on the origins of humans are no exception.

For sure. Amazingly, 52% of Republicans are strict creationists, while "only" 34% of Independents and Democrats are.

Oregonians debate existence of God

The past two Mondays, our local newspaper -- the Salem Statesman Journal -- has run comments from readers about the existence, or lack thereof, of God. I've enjoyed this change of pace for the editorial page.

Since Oregon is one of the least religious states, it isn't surprising that many opinions on this subject were pleasingly churchless.

I've shared them below. I didn't include any comments from true believers, but you can see the entire slate of opinions here and here.

(Or download these PDF files.)
Download SJ1 existence of God
Download SJ2 existence of God

"Simple question that deserves a simple answer: nope."

"If by god you mean an invisible, supernatural being with magic powers capable of suspending the physical laws of the universe, the answer is no."

"I do not believe in God as a man that created Earth. I believe in God as a philosophy — as an idea that we are flawed human beings that make mistakes. I believe that we should treat each other with respect, help our neighbors."

"... It may seem unlikely that the conditions for life came together here on Earth without some intelligent guidance until you factor in the billions of galaxies and the billions upon billions of planets, and the billions of years this universe has been here.

Given the science we have now, the existence of many planets similar to Earth is all but a mathematical certainty, not to mention all of the possibilities for other types of life, with no need for supernatural intervention.

Recent work in physics has offered an explanation for what came before the Big Bang, the possibility that there are an infinite number of universes, spawned by an infinite number of Big Bangs, and that time itself may be infinite. So, the existence of the Earth, and the universe, is not evidence for God. God is simply one possible explanation, for which there is no empirical evidence."

"The simple, direct answer to the question is 'Yes,' 'No', or 'I don't know.' Belief, or lack of it, demands no evidence. For me, science is so much more compelling than the supernatural explanation. If God is responsible, where has she been for the last few billion years? I have some questions and complaints."

"I'd have to qualify myself as an agnostic. ... After many years of unanswered prayers, I began to question. At first, the question was not, 'Do I believe in God?' Rather it was, 'Does God believe in me?'"

"... we can't even begin to know how or why the universe — or dirt — exists. To pretend to know is arrogance of the highest order and is the root cause of war and hatred in this world. There is nothing wrong with 'I don't know' as an answer to the question. After all, the mysterious is beautiful and wondrous, and needs no 'God' to make it so."

"I believe science has done an adequate job explaining the seasons. So, now please do the same. Give me one shred of scientific evidence of 'god.' I'll wait."

"Religion is made up nonsense, a crutch for the weak-minded among us. If one person initiated a religion today based on the myths contained in any of the three dominant monotheisms' books, s/he would be considered insane. Just because there are a multitude that say they believe, then society accepts the fictions. ...

Humans would be better off without organized religions tainting our societies. Most of the mayhem during wars stems from religion, even in WW2 due to the Nazis' attempt to exterminate Jews, a religious-based classification of people. Muslim terrorists today use their fictitious beliefs to blow up people. Religion is the bane of humanity."

"I do not believe in supernatural beings of any kind and I do not believe in magic. I have no idea how or why the universe was created. I have no idea how or why life began. However, I would wager it all happened in accordance with the laws of physics. To suggest that some magical being simply willed it into existence seems ludicrous to me. To suggest that an all-powerful being sat down at the drawing board, planned out everyday detail, and then actually constructed the universe is equally ridiculous. ..."

"If some 'god' really does exist, you and I and all of those who question its existence will suffer no consequences for our lack of belief. What we will get, however, if this schizoid god turns out to be real, is an explanation for why this god chose to put we hapless humans through a metaphysical waterboarding. This god better have a ... good reason!"

"A more important question is, how do we conduct our lives? Since life is only for a short time and goes only one way — from birth to death — are we making the most of this time? And secondary to our own enjoyment of this experience, and probably the most important question of all is: Are we good to others or least not doing them any harm?"

"There is no way there can be a god. I don't believe in a book created by man."

Be a centaur, not a horseman and horse

"The Supreme Doctrine" by Hubert Benoit is a book that I keep re-reading, because every time I pick it up, fresh insights pop out of the pages. I've highlighted so much of it, in several different colors, that now the words mostly are shaded in yellow and green.

This morning I re-perused The Horseman and the Horse chapter.

The basic notion is that we usually consider that "I" am a horseman (thoughts, will, mind, soul, spirit) who needs to keep control of my horse (body, desires, actions, lower self, emotions).

The belief in this biparite composition expresses itself in all sorts of common sayings: 'I am master of "myself"', 'I cannot prevent myself from...', 'I am pleased with myself', 'I am annoyed with myself', etc....

...The error of our dualistic conception does not lie in the discrimination between two aspects of us -- for there are indeed two aspects -- but in considering that these two aspects are two different entities, of whom one, for example, may be perishable while the other is eternal.

Benoit's Zen analysis of this situation makes psychological sense. Well, it should, as he was a practicing psychoanalyst. He says that the rider never guides the movement of the horse while this movement is taking place.

Meaning, insofar as I understand what he is getting at (Benoit is not always crystal clear), each of us is a single being who becomes divided into two through our capacity to reflect upon our actions -- both inner and outer.

At the moment at which the rider is awakened (and at which the attention which animates him cannot be upon the horse), he sees, thanks to memory, how the horse has functioned the moment before and evaluates this functioning in relation to the ideal norm which he is able to conceive.

This judgement, favourable or unfavourable, constitutes an image, affirming or negating, which flatters or wounds the horse in his need of affirmation. Thereafter, when the attention comes back to the horse, his functioning will be affected by this judgement, by the caress or the blow that it constituted; the horse preserves the memory of it marked in him as a conditioning factor of his reflexes.

This is a pretty crazy state of affairs.

Here I am, trying to control me. Here I am, trying to make myself behave in a certain way. But I'm not two people, I'm really only me! (And maybe not even that one entity, but this is a different subject.)

What's the way out? Benoit says that continued training can't be the ultimate goal, because this is the problem, not the solution. There's a subtlety here, though...

But this advice is hard to understand in the right way. If I see in it a condemnation of training I am mistaken, for this condemnation does not free me from evaluation; it only results in an inversion of training.

In this false understanding I would train myself to train myself no longer, which would change nothing; I would be believing, without escaping from my error, in the efficacy for realisation of a counter-training which would still be a training.

Zen tells us not to lay a finger on life: 'Leave things as they may be.' It is not for me to modify directly my habits of training myself.

So how it is possible to stop being an anxious divided self, a horseman and horse always at odds with each other to some extent, and enjoy the pleasurable simplicity of being a centaur?

(Traditionally centaurs have a male human aspect, but I find this imaginative rendering more attractive.)

It happens naturally. This is how churchlessness evolves out of religiosity: we try various sorts of spiritual disciplines, find that they fail to deliver the promised goods, and reach a dead end.

Which, it turns out, is exactly the place we want to be.

The consciousness of always having been free appears in us when we have exhausted all the attempts, all the training, that we believe may be capable of liberating us.

If the disciplines could not be 'paths' resulting in satori, that does not mean that they may not be paths to be followed; they are paths leading to blind-alleys, all leading to a unique and ultimate blind-alley; but they are to be followed just because satori cannot be obtained unless we have come up against the end of this last blind-alley.

They are to be followed with the theoretical understanding that they lead nowhere, so that experience may transform this theoretical understanding into total understanding, into this clear vision which is the arrival in the blind-alley and which lays us open to satori.

...Little does it matter to me in reality that my horse is schooled to be a 'saint' or a yogi with spectacular powers, or to experience inner states felt as transcendent; my true nature is not there, it consists in no longer being other than one with my horse; then the smallest gesture of my life, however apparently banal one may suppose it, will participate in Reality.

Dance, and live, like nobody (even God) is watching

Last night my wife and I went dancing. It was a Salem Big Band night at Mission Mill Museum, a beautifully restored woolen mill dating from the late 1800's.

When we walked in, about half an hour after the festivities had started, I could tell that my thoroughly intermediate dancing skills were going to be stretched. The piece being played was energetically cool, but I couldn't place it in my stylistic repertoire.

Foxtrot? No. Waltz? Definitely no. Latin style? Absolutely not. Swing? Sort of, but not really.

Yet couples (and some uninhibited child singles) were dancing away with abandon, clearly having a good time. People were doing... whatever. I suppose the music was supposed to be a jive, lindy hop, or such -- styles I know next to nothing about.

That didn't matter, though. Skilled dancers looked more accomplished than the "cludgers," but everybody was doing their thing happily, even if I couldn't put a name to whatever dance style was reflected by the live music being played.

We were seated at a table with a guy and his partner who are pretty darn good dancers. They come to practices at the dance studio where we've been taking lessons for several years.

When Laurel said, "Sometimes we can't figure out what style is supposed to be danced with a song," the guy told us that this is common with Big Band music. You just have to improvise, move with the beat, do what comes naturally.

HIs partner added, "I like that. I don't have to think about what to do, just follow his lead."

Well, if you're the lead (the man, usually), dancing to an unfamiliar style of music isn't so easy. You've got to take steps -- literally -- without hesitation, even when you aren't really sure where you're going on the dance floor.

Which is a lot like life. More than that: it is life.

Sometimes in our living we feel entirely confident about what to do; sometimes we don't. Each day every person is alive, there will be a blend of actions and thoughts which span a large section of the confident/unconfident continuum.

Last night I started out on the unconfident side of the scale. I wasn't sure how to dance to unfamiliar music. I looked around to see what other couples were doing, which didn't help much since free expression was being played out on the dance floor.

I watched with envy as a twenty-something guy and gal glided around in sneakers and other decidedly casual attire, showing a rare combination of great ballroom technique and creative youthful style. When they danced next to us I'd feel like a 12 inch black and white TV being displayed next to a 3-D technicolor movie screen.

Then something changed. A voice inside my head started to say Screw it, just do whatever feels right. Driving home, after telling my wife "I had a great time tonight," I recalled the words "Dance like there's nobody watching."

You've gotta' dance like there's nobody watching,
Love like you'll never be hurt.
Sing like there's nobody listening,
And live like it's heaven on earth.

That's what made the difference for me as the Salem Big Band wound its way through their song list. When I couldn't tell whether the music was Foxtrot, Waltz, Swing, or Cha-cha-cha, I stopped comparing myself with what other people were doing.

Which made the evening a lot more fun, even before the bar lady poured me an extra-large glass of Oregon Pinot Noir for $4. (I have to also give due credit to the wine, though.)

Sure, sometimes it's good to know that other people are watching what you're doing. We're social creatures. It's important to get along with our fellow Homo sapiens. Failing to care about how we look to others can be a sign of sociopathy.

But most of us err on the side of being overly worried about how we're coming across to other sentient beings. We're excessively conscientous. And when it comes to God and religion, overly scrupulous.

Lots of people believe that God or some other higher power is watching everything they do, along with knowing all that they think and feel. This is much more anxiety-producing than wondering if other dancers are dissing your moves. But there's a commonality between secular and religious "dancing."

In both cases, there's no need to worry about what you look like to someone else. What's important is how you look (or feel) to yourself. You can't dance well, in life as a whole or on the hardwood, if you aren't confidently enjoying what you're doing.

Dance. Like nobody is watching.

 

 

Get real: give up religious and mystical concepts

Religious believers who make a pilgrimage to this blog often amuse me. They'll say, "Brian, you live in your head; you need to give up your concepts about reality and embrace God's truth."

Ha ha ha. What a joke. These guys and gals are deluded. They've got things completely backward.

I just rode my Burgman 650 maxi-scooter to a coffeehouse in downtown Salem. It's 45 degrees here in Oregon. I was cold, but comfortably not freezing, thanks to warm gloves/gear and a large cozy windscreen.

I didn't think about anything supernatural once on my 25 minute drive. Here and now reality was all I needed, or wanted.

So tell me, supposed concept-giver-up'ers, how often do you have thoughts about your God, divine ideal, soul, spiritual essence, heaven, paradise, other-worldly ultimate reality, or whatever else you believe in?

Much more often than I do, for sure, because I've almost entirely given up ponderings about imaginary things that are conceived as existing somewhere beyond the physical. Thus I win the Concept Game, if points are scored by living as close as possible to thoughtless reality.

In my last post about "Philosophy in the Flesh" I said that I'd share how a final chapter in this book speaks about religiosity and spirituality. Well, I already have -- in my own words.

But here's how George Lakoff and Mark Johnson put it.

Your body is not, and could not be, a mere vessel for a disembodied mind. THe concept of a mind separate from the body is a metaphorical concept... In short, our very concept of a disembodied mind arises from embodied experiences that every one of us has throughout our life.

Consider: every holy book, every holy person, every holy vision -- these all are part of someone's bodily awareness. This isn't a conjecture. It's a neurological fact. Show me one human being who has ever had an experience without a physical body.

You can't. Because it has never happened. Being human means being embodied.

Why, then, is it so easy for people to believe that they are, or have, a disembodied soul or spirit? This gets us into the roots of religious belief, a big subject that I don't have time or inclination to address here (my coffee cup is already half empty, and my writing is fueled by caffeine).

I'll simply share a cogent observation by Lakoff and Johnson that's related to a basic fact about the brain.

The bodily organ that makes it possible for us to be aware, isn't capable of being directly perceived. This is why neurosurgery can performed without anesthesia. Such makes sense, of course, from an evolutionary standpoint. If our perceptions of outer reality were mixed up with perceptions of the brain's perceiving, things would get real confusing, real fast.

In virtually all of our acts of perception, the bodily organs of perception (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin) are not what we are attending to. For example, when we walk down the street and look at a house, we are normally not attending to our eyes, much less to the visual system of our brains.

The fact that what we attend to is rarely what we perceive with gives the illusion that mental acts occur independently of the unnoticed body. In summary, we all have a metaphor system that conceptualizes our minds as disembodied.

This can't be helped. It's just the way that we've evolved to experience the world.

However, us Homo sapiens are capable of minimizing the illusion of disembodiment. We don't have to add to this conceptualizing by imagining a supernatural realm that is separate and distinct from earthly existence.

Doing that further distances us from reality. Now we've come to not only view ourselves as somehow divorced from the physical world, we've also embraced a concept of an entirely other world to which we aspire.

Again: "God," "soul," "spirit," "heaven," "paradise," and so on are concepts.

More: insofar as these notions are viewed in a supernatural sense, they are conceptualizations which don't relate to anything real -- since every human experience is embodied.

Lakoff and Johnson do not dismiss spirituality entirely, though. It is possible to live in this world and be of it.

The environment is not an "other" to us. It is not a collection of things that we encounter. Rather, it is part of our being. It is the locus of our existence and identity. We cannot and do not exist apart from it.

...An embodied spirituality requires an aesthetic attitude toward the world that is central to self-nurturance, to the nurturance of others, and to the nurturance of the world itself.

Embodied spirituality requires an understanding that nature is not inanimate and less than human, but animated and more than human.

It requires pleasure, joy in the bodily connection with earth and air, sea and sky, plants and animals -- and the recognition that they are all more than human, more than any human beings could ever achieve.

Embodied spirituality is more than spiritual experience. It is an ethical relationship to the physical world.

A "miracle" happens monthly in your life

Here's an interesting take on supposed miracles -- which likely actually are a manifestation of what could be called "the law of really large numbers."

Check out Desultory Decussation: Where Littlewood’s Law of Miracles meets Jung’s Synchronicity by David Lane and Andrea Diem Lane.

If there are thousands, nay millions, of events in our lives (measured in transparently fractal ways), then it should be expected that for every 10,000 plus events, there may be two or more events which intersect. Notice that intersection and you will be aware of a meaningful coincidence--the meaning being that two disparate parts have something in common (whatever that intersection may entail).

How is it that "I" have a "self"?

I've never met the other person who seemingly inhabits my head along with me. Have you?

Yet everyday language, the way we talk to ourselves (there he is again!) and others, appears to point to the existence of someone other than "I" within our psyches.

I dragged myself out of bed.
I held myself back from hitting him.
I was beside myself.
You should take a good look at yourself.
He's at war with himself over who to marry.
Stop being so mean to yourself.
I like myself.
I need to be a better friend to myself.
I was debating with myself whether to leave.
I'm disappointed in myself.
He's still searching for his true self.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson offer up these examples in their fascinating book, "Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought."

It's thick, and sometimes densely written, so I've been skipping around some in the book in order to focus on what I find most interesting. Naturally "The Self" chapter grabbed my attention, because the older I get, the more I question whether I have one.

(See here, here, and here -- some of the posts where I've pondered this.)

Lakoff is a linguist who is known for his theory of embodied cognition. Basically, this is the entirely reasonable thesis that the body and mind aren't distinct. Reasoning, perceptions, emotions, and other psychological goings-on are intimately connected with bodily experience.

Reason is not disembodied, as the tradition has largely held, but arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experience. This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment.

Metaphors thus come to dominate our discourse, both inner and outer. I just grasped a coffee cup to ingest another jolt of caffeine; likewise I can say, "It took me a while to grasp what he was saying, but I finally did."

Yet what the heck am I talking about? What was grasped? What did the grasping? I've used a bodily metaphor to speak about a psychological state of understanding. Our talk about the "self" is similarly metaphorical.

Consider the common experience of struggling to gain control over ourselves. We not only feel this struggle within us, but conceptualize the "struggle" as being between two distinct parts of our self, each with different values. Sometimes we think of our "higher" (moral and rational) self struggling to get control over our "lower" (irrational and immoral) self.

Our conception of the self, in such cases, is fundamentally metaphoric. We conceptualize ourselves as being split into two distinct entities that can be at war, locked in a struggle for control over our bodily behavior. This metaphoric conception is rooted deep in our unconscious conceptual systems, so much so that it takes considerable effort and insight to see how it functions as the basis for reasoning about ourselves.

Similarly, when you try to find your "true self," you are using another, usually unconscious metaphorical conceptualization... When we consciously reason over how to gain mastery over ourselves, or how to protect our vulnerable "inner self," or how to find our "true self," it is the hidden hand of the unconscious conceptual system that makes such reasoning "common sense."

In another post I'll describe how Lakoff and Johnson see all this relating to spirituality and religiosity. There's a close connection, since most religious teachings consider that we have a true self or soul which is at odds with the false embodied nature with which we usually identify.

Religions wouldn't be so successful if this dualistic way of looking at the world didn't strike most people as being how things really are. Indeed...

These metaphors do seem to ring true. They appear to be about real inner experiences, and we use them to make statements that to us are true of our inner lives, statements like, "I'm struggling with myself over whom to marry," "I lost myself in dancing," or "I wasn't really myself yesterday."

...We are, of course, acutely aware that these modes of conceptualizing our phenomenological experience of the Self do not entail that the structures imposed by these metaphors are ontologically real. They do not entail that we really are divided up into a Subject, an Essence, and one or more Selves.

Yes, we're living a neurological fiction. Us Homo sapiens have become so sapient, our brains are adept at fashioning metaphors and concepts into what appears as really real reality.

Except, it isn't. Not in any objective sense. Where's this "self" that we keep referring to?

I love my wife. I've been married to her for over twenty years. Not once have I thought that I love Laurel, and also her Self. She's simply one person to me. However, for her, she feels (as we all do, or almost all) that there's her "I" and also her "self."

At the end of their "The Self" chapter, Lakoff and Johnson ask an excellent question. Is our divided sense of who we are a result of direct experience, or does that sense arise from the concepts and metaphors we habitually use to make sense of the world?

When we do something we shouldn't have done and bawl ourselves out, many of us experience a sense of shame. And when we betray ourselves, we can experience a sense of guilt. Such phenomena raise a chicken-egg question: Does the metaphor fit a preexisting qualitative experience, or does the qualitative experience come from conceptualizing what we have done via that metaphor?

In a follow-up post I'll talk about how this question has spiritual/religious implications.

Namely, does the common belief in a "soul" similarly depend upon metaphorical concepts that are essentially hardwired into the human brain, and not upon the reality of an other-worldly form of consciousness?

If a God-man is just like us, what's the point?

So what if God was one of us? That's a question Joan Osborne asked in the lyrics of her song, "One of us."

That thought came to mind after I wrote about an Indian guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, bringing in over $250 million for himself and his family through insider transactions of Religare stock.

Since the shares essentially were gifted to the guru and his sons (the 2006 purchase price was very low, about 1% of the current market value) by businessman relatives who also are disciples of Gurinder Singh, it can be argued that this is nothing unusual.

It's commonplace for people to use their influence and connections to make big money. Politicians do it. Business tycoons do it. Wall Street wheelers and dealers do it.

But this guru is considered by devotees to be God in human form. He's living and breathing in the Punjab. So to true believers he's exactly what Osborne was referring to: God as one of us.

Though I used to think this was possible -- God in human form -- here's what bothers me about this GIHF hypothesis now: if God is one of us, just like one of us, there's nothing special about God or God in human form.

I've talked about this before in What if a "guru" is no different from us?

How do we know that anyone has special expertise in some field? We can confirm that a mountain climber knows how to scale difficult peaks. We can document that a computer technician is able to get balky machines running smoothly again.

Yet where's the evidence that a guru is any different from you or me when it comes to knowing what, if anything, lies beyond the physical reality that we experience now? How could we tell that a guru is able to get one's mind/soul in good working order?

I like to visualize a "Who's the Guru?"  game show, somewhat akin to the 1950s-60s " What's My Line?" The goal would be to pick the satguru ("true guru") out of a bunch of impostors.

How could this be done? What questions would be asked? Of course, the biggest question is whether the game even is possible, since the producers of the show would have to find a genuine true guru themselves.

This isn't a fantasy game. It is being played by millions of people in every corner of the world.

Heck, make that billions if we have a expansive definition of "guru," one that includes ministers, imams, rabbis, priests, yogis, and others who claim some special knowledge of a divine aspect to reality.

Skepticism is called for.

For sure. Disciples of a guru such as Gurinder Singh love to talk about how human he is. "Wow, he kicks a soccer ball, wears blue jeans, gets angry, makes mistakes, falls sick."

Yes. That's true. So what?

Everybody can do these things. Along with making money. How does this point to a guru's divinity? Shouldn't showing every sign of being a normal human being lead to an obvious conclusion?

The guru is a normal human being.

Once someone told me a story about walking into a room where Gurinder Singh was having a meeting. The guru had been reviewing a book manuscript written by this person.

Seeing the visitor come in, he picked up the manuscript and threw it at his visitor, pages scattering over the floor. After uttering a dismissive comment about how bad the manuscript was, he went back to his meeting.

Most people would consider this a typical "bad boss" episode, a superior acting like a jerk. But the disciple who told me the story considered the guru's actions to be as perfect as a God in human form always is.

We just can't recognize the perfection when it appears as anger or some other normal human attribute.

Well, if God can't be recognized, if God acts no different from us, if it is impossible for a God-realized person to be differentiated from everyone else, what's the point of believing that someone is God in human form?

Great response to an irritating Christian email

I love it.

Radha Soami Satsang Beas guru makes $254 million

Wow, it really pays to be an Indian guru with the right connections. Check out this story, "SEBI nod for Radha Soami Satsang Beas." (SEBI is the Securities and Exchange Board of India.)

The capital market regulator has granted exemption to Logos Holding Company from making an open offer to the shareholders of Religare Enterprises for its acquisition of 19.53% stake in the company. Logos Holding is an investment arm of the Gurinder Singh Dhillon family.

Gurinder Singh is the current head of one of India's largest religious sect – Radha Soami Satsang Beas. At Thursday's closing price of Rs 460.95, the value of Logos Holding's stake is about Rs 1,163 crore. The Dhillons had acquired the shares at just over Rs 13 crore in 2006.

After someone emailed me a link to this story, naturally I had to grab my calculator, find a rupee to dollar currency converter web site, and figure out how much Rs 1,163 crore and Rs 13 crore are in understandable American dollars. (A crore rupee is 10 million rupees.)

Others can check my work, but I'm pretty sure the Gurinder Singh Dhillon family is the proud possessor of Religare Enterprises shares worth $257,187,507. Let's round it off and say... a quarter of a billion dollars.

That's a lot of money.

Especially compared to what the story says the guru's family paid for the shares: $2,874,839 (Rs 13 crore). Last April I wrote about this in "Religare's money connections with the Radha Soami guru."

Malvinder Singh, an initiate of RSSB, is deeply involved in the Radha Soami Satsang Beas organization, as is the rest of his family.

This helps explain why the RSSB guru's sons, Gurpreet and Gurkirat, each ended up with about 10% of the shares in Religare according to a 2007  prospectus. On page 25 it says that Malvinder Singh and Shivinder Singh were allotted 49,575,000 equity shares in Religare at 10 rupees (about 23 cents) a share.

Malvinder then transferred 6,250,000 shares to Gurpreet Singh, and Shivinder transferred 6,250,000 shares to Gurkirat Singh under guardianship of Ms. Shabnam Dhillon -- almost certainly because Gurkirat is only twenty years old.

The cost also was 10 rupees a share. So the guru's sons each got 6,250,000 shares of Religare for $1,437,500 or thereabouts through an insider deal.

Multiply $1,437,500 by two and we get $2,875,000. Which is almost exactly what the indianexpress.com story says the guru's family acquired the shares for in 2006.

So this shows that an insider deal (which is legal, and not to be confused with stock trading that involves the illegal use of insider information) resulted in a quick profit for the Gurinder Singh Dhillon family of about $254 million over four years or so.

These financial deals can be viewed in different ways.

Some people see nothing wrong with a guru who is considered to be "God in human form" raking in massive amounts of money from his involvement with Religare, a large Indian financial services group managed in large part by RSSB disciples.

Others resonate with the message of my post, "RSSB's ties to Religare mix money and spirituality."

What I've learned about the dealings between Radha Soami Satsang Beas and Religare doesn't feel right to me.

It definitely goes against the grain of what I used to enjoy about being a member of RSSB: the focus on meditation, mysticism, charitable giving, and service to a spiritual community where everybody did their share, and nobody (seemingly) tried to get more than their share.

That said, maybe I'm old-fashioned.

Maybe I don't understand how modern-day gurus and their relatives can engage in insider trading deals with disciples while still remaining true to their philosophical principles. Maybe I'm missing the benefit to RSSB of having an inner circle derive large financial benefits that aren't available to other initiates.

All I know is that philosophically and ethically, there are reasons for concern here.

Scientific quasi-remedies for a fear of death

I don't like the notion that I'll die one day.

More than the notion, it's the reality of death that produces a sense of unease which varies from mild mostly unconscious anxiety to a strong fearful awareness of impending non-existence.

So I wanted to provide a blog post addendum to my previous "This is it" ponderings. Not really a counterpoint; more like a therapeutic sidebar for those who, like me, enjoy life and don't relish the prospect of losing all trace of conscious existence for eternity.

There's good reason to argue that I can't help myself. No one can. Such is the position of Jesse Bering in his book, "The God Instinct." I just read a positive review in New Scientist which begins and ends with:

Thanks to evolution we naturally expect there to be a god -- or gods -- watching over us. Our brains interpret the world around us in ways that created God; the notion of the divine is "a scratch on our psychological lenses," says psychologist Jesse Bering.

...This fascinating book presents gentle, nuanced but convincing arguments for atheism. Bering knows he can't change the world, though. Thoroughly and permanently removing God from our heads "would require a neurosurgeon not a science teacher," he says.

Well, in my personal evolution I've reached a churchless state where an expectation that god is watching over me has shrunk to near-nothingness.

However, as I just said, there's still a lingering sense (or wish) in me that something conscious and aware exists beyond our commonplace understanding of the physical. Since I now find it extremely difficult to accept that this is a supernatural divine being, I'm left with exploring the furthest reaches of scientific speculation.

Furthest reaches is a big subject. By nature, almost boundless.

So I'll simply throw out a few approaches for allaying a fear of absolute extinction at death that scientifically-minded folks like me can look into. If anyone has additional suggestions, feel free to share them in a comment.

(These approaches are interrelated, but I'll list them discretely.)

Panpsychism. This philosophy posits that "mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe."

Hmmmm.... sounds good. My personal mind doesn't even seem to inhabit the inside of my head all of the time, such as when I absent-mindedly lose a glove.

But given that the laws of nature are ubiquitous and seem to require some sort of awareness among particles of dumb matter/energy to work, panpsychism holds out the hope that whatever my conscious nature is, the universe shares it in some sense.

Against the backdrop of our immense scientific knowledge of the physical world, and the corresponding widespread desire to explain everything ultimately in physical terms, panpsychism has come to seem an implausible view. Nonetheless, the doctrine retains some attractive and interesting features. The recalcitrance of the mind, and especially consciousness, to fit smoothly into the scientific picture recommends our consideration of them.

Along this line, David Chalmers' philosophically sophisticated conception of naturalistic dualism holds that consciousness is an immaterial aspect of the universe which, however, requires physicality to manifest.

This leaves open the possibility that some form of unmanifested consciousness could pervade the cosmos. Not much to hang an awareness continues after death hat on, but it's a lot more likely than a God in heaven.

Consciousness is fundamental. Some aspects of the universe seemingly are irreducible. For example, space and time (or spacetime, as Einstein realized). Consciousness could be another. There's been increasing discussion of the possibility that it is a fundamental property of the universe.

Due to all these difficult problems in studying consciousness, more and more people in the fields of philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and physics began to realize that, just like time, space, mass, and energy, consciousness is a basic property of matter and it is an inseparable part of the universe. Recently, there have been serious discussions on this topic by researchers in mainstream research journals and research conferences. It is a developing trend in research.

Of course, it isn't comforting to me that space as a whole continues even though the space that my body currently takes up becomes available again, or that time as a whole carries on even though my time on Earth ends with my last breath.

The difference, though, is that I am conscious, while I can't say "I am space" or "I am time."

So there's a slight chance that a fundamental aspect of my consciousness still exists after I die, even if the individual aspect disappears when I do. This would be in the philosophical ballpark of Vedanta, which teaches that the personal self is an illusion while the universal Self is all-pervading.

(I haven't read "Implications of a Fundamental Consciousness," but it looks to be a serious discussion of this hypothesis. And here's a bunch of videos on this subject.)

Digital universe. Physicist John Wheeler is famous for his pithy it from bit hypothesis about the ultimate nature of reality. He wrote:

'It from bit' symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom—a very deep bottom, in most instances—an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes–no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.

This mild version of digital physics isn't as enticingly interesting as farther-out speculations. My favorite is that our universe, naturally including us, is a simulated reality.

Specifically, an alien's simulation.

I'm attracted to the idea that my typing I'm attracted to the idea is the result of an amazingly sophisticated (from our technologically crude 21st century earthly viewpoint) digital simulation being run by a highly advanced lifeform.

I almost added "in our universe," but if our universe is a digital simulation, the creator of it likely exists somewhere completely beyond our understanding.

In the October 2010 issue of Scientific American magazine, the article The (Elusive) Theory of Everything by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow tells us that ”If aliens did enforce consistent laws, we would have no way to tell that another reality stood behind the simulated one”.

I guess the appeal of this notion is similar to that of a central Buddhist tenet: what we call "me" doesn't really exist.

In Buddhism believing in an independent self is considered to be a wrong view of reality. But if the entire universe has been fabricated by an alien civilization, then all of our understandings about ourselves and the cosmos are widely off the mark.

So if it happens that I don't really exist as the entity I consider myself to be, what am I losing when I die? Instead of ashes to ashes, dust to dust, it's bits of information to bits of information.

Though this notion may seem strange, it is being seriously considered by some very sharp people. Theoretical physicist John Barrow, for one:
Download Living in a Simulated Universe

It has long been recognised that technical civilisations, only a little more advanced than ourselves, will have the capability to simulate universes in which self-conscious entities can emerge and communicate with one another.

They would have computer power that differed from ours by a vast factor. Instead of merely simulating their weather or the formation of galaxies, like we do, they would be able to go further and watch the appearance of stars and planetary systems.

Then, having coupled the rules of biochemistry into their astronomical simulations they would be able to watch the evolution of life and consciousness (all speeded up to occur on whatever timescale was convenient for them).

Just as we watch the life cycles of fruit flies they would be able to follow the evolution of life, watch civilisations grow and communicate with each other, argue about whether there existed a Great Programmer in the Sky who created their Universe and who could intervene at will in defiance of the laws of Nature they habitually observed.

Well, if this is true, the bad news is that I've never actually lived. But the good news is that I'll never actually die -- given that I've never been truly alive.

Eternity is mine!

Live like this is your last moment (because it is)

Most of my life I've been searching for What Life is All About.

A poem I wrote when I was thirteen is my earliest recorded pondering about the cosmos, but I'm sure my pre-teen mind also was looking for answer's to life's big questions.

Having come to an age when my first Social Security payment is due to be deposited in our checking account this month, I can report that some fifty years of philosophical, religious, mystical, scientific, and spiritual inquiring has led me to a simple three word conclusion:

This is it.

You're free to disagree. I can understand why you would.

Heck, I've disagreed with me -- the current version -- for most of my life. Believing in an afterlife, reincarnation, eternal soul, and transcendent realms of unchanging supernatural bliss provided me with a lot of satisfaction for many years.

But if you're honest with yourself, as I've tried to be with myself, you'll have to admit that your hope in a life after death is just that: hope. Reality is something different.

Human reality is that we live, and eventually we die. In the past year my sister and brother-in-law have died. I have no close blood relatives who are alive, other than my daughter and granddaughter. One day I'll join the departed, who almost certainly haven't arrived at any other destination.

They're just gone. Because...

This is it.

Those three words say a lot, but also almost nothing. My experience that leads me to speak them is exceedingly different, richer, more profound, and life-altering than what I've emphasized with italics twice now.

I don't know what it is about my evening dog walks. Maybe the universe seems more transparent when I set out with the family pet on a leash for a jaunt through the Oregon countryside because my mind is released from its usual concerns.

Tonight it happened again. On its own. Unbidden. An unspoken message that screamed silently within my consciousness.

This is it.

The mist that shrouded fir trees barely visible in the near-darkness. Serena sniffing her way from one fascinating roadside scent to another. The sound of my LL Bean shoes striking the pavement, beloved yellow shoelaces glinting in the light of a flashlight beam.

At that moment I knew, though I can't prove that what I know is true. So I guess you could call my knowing a variety of faith. However, it is a faith backed up by some pretty damn convincing evidence.

We live. And eventually we die.

What I knew on the dog walk, and still know, is that this moment, whatever it consists of, never will come again.

Standing on the road, leash in hand, I knew that so deeply I was almost afraid to embrace the realization wholeheartedly, because it seemed that if I ever fully fathomed the depths of what I can only call IT, I'd run the risk of never coming to the surface of my everyday life again.

Which could be a good thing. OK, it probably would be a good thing. I just didn't feel like a dog walk was the right time to dive deeper into IT -- the experience that arguably underlies all other experiences.

Namely, the existential in-your-gut realization of life's finitude, ephemeralness, and above all, preciousness.

Never again will I experience what I am right now. This moment will never come again. (A cliche, but cliches can be absolutely true.)

And not only will this particular moment never come again, there will come a time when no moments will. That time is the moment before we die.

When I compare the spiritual and religious dogmas I used to believe in with the realization that came to me on the dog walk (which I have frequently these days, almost always at unexpected moments), I'm struck by how much more real "This is it" is.

That brings a smile.

I have a glimpse of even more: the bliss, peace, and contentment that I used to think would only come from pursuing some sort of other-worldly experience.

Knowing that this world, here and now, is it... what could be more satisfying than that? Dissatisfaction only arises when we feel that what is happening is different from what should be happening.

I could be wrong about death being The End rather than a transition to another chapter of life, of existence. It's unlikely, but possible.

However, that this moment will never come again: virtually 100% certain. Whatever you're doing right now -- and my amazing powers tell me it is reading a blog post -- this is the last time you'll ever have this experience.

Enjoy. That. Strawberry. 

Can one half of a brain achieve salvation?

Those who believe in the unity of consciousness or the oneness of "soul" need to watch a short You Tube video, "Split brain with one half atheist and one half theist."

The neurologist making the presentation ends by saying If the person dies, does one hemisphere go to heaven and the other go to hell? I don't have the answer to that. Watch and see if you do.

 

Mindfulness is better than "spiritual" meditation

I used to believe that through meditation, I could realize ultimate reality/God. Now, having lowered my unrealistic expectations, I'd be happy if I could go through the rest of my life without losing another glove.

A much-beloved glove, insofar as apparel can be loved. LIghtweight, waterproof, comfortable, thin. I'd been wearing it on rainy day dog walks here in Oregon (so I wore them a lot).

Headed to the recycling center on a cold, wet, windy afternoon, I decided to take the gloves along. I walked to the car, tossed them on the front seat, and drove into town with our recyclables. After depositing stuff in the proper bins I took my gloves off, opened the driver's side door, and tossed the gloves back onto the passenger seat.

Or so I thought.

After a few more errands I glanced at the seat and saw only one glove. Searching under the seats and everywhere else I could think to look, still only one glove. I drove back to the recycling center in the dark, pointed the headlights where I'd parked the car, and found... no glove.

I spent a lot of time dealing with a lack of mindfulness.

Thinking back, I couldn't really remember much about taking the gloves off. I was focused on the next to-do, grocery shopping. When I tossed the "pair" on the seat, I must not have noticed that one glove had dropped to the ground.

A few days later I ordered two things from REI and Amazon: another pair of Manzella gloves, and "Fully Present: The Science, Art, and Practice of Mindfulness."

I'm enjoying the book (haven't received the gloves yet). I've read a lot about mindfulness from the Buddhist perspective, but obviously it hasn't sunk in sufficiently to make me aware of where my gloves are at all times.

The authors of "Fully Present" are Susan Smalley, Ph.D., a behavior geneticist, and Diana Winston, a woman with twenty years of mindfulness training under her Buddhist belt, including a year as a Buddhist nun. They run the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, so approach mindfulness with a pleasing blend of science and artistry.

I've been headed in the mindful direction ever since I realized that my other-worldly focus in meditation wasn't taking me where I wanted to go.

The India-based teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas that I'd been following emphasized detaching one's consciousness from the physical world, thereby "liberating the soul." The body and its senses were conceived as detrimental to spiritual progress.

For example, a mantra was prescribed to turn the meditator's awareness away from thoughts, sensations, emotions, and such, as these are believed to prevent entry into the third eye or "eye center" in the middle of the forehead. Repetition of the mantra wasn't supposed to be done in harmony with the breath -- which would bring attention to the body.

Problem is, we humans have bodies. In fact, the overwhelming evidence is that we are bodies, not anything supernatural, like "soul" or "spirit."

So I've decided to throw in my bet with the anti-Pascal's wager. Meaning, that since it is much more likely that this is my one and only life, it makes sense to live it as fully as possible in the here and now rather than the there and then of either an imagined afterlife or earthly future. As I said a few years ago, and still believe now:

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.

Hence, mindfulness is my focus now, not a form of meditation that distances me from the world, my body, and physical sensations. In their book, Smalley and Winston say:

Mindfulness is the art of observing your physical, emotional, and mental exeriences with deliberate, open, and curious attention. And although it is an "art" that can be cultivated through a daily formal meditation practice (which we talk about throughout the book), you can easily practice it instantaneously to be aware of your present-moment experience anytime in the course of a day.

Sounds good.

Yesterday I engaged in Phase 2 of my annual Tao of Leaf Raking. After I've used a backpack blower and rake to deal with the prodigious amount of leaves that fall on our rural property every autumn, I move to hand-picking the remainder that lodge in bushes, heather, rocks, ground cover, and such that are unblowable/unrakable.

The task is highly enjoyable for me.

Minimal thinking involved. I get a close-up look at almost every corner of our extensive yard. Results are instantaneous and pleasing as a flowering heather with a bunch of discordant oak leaves scattered through it is transformed into simply what it is.

That's what "Fully Present" says mindfulness mainly consists of.

Becoming aware of what actually is happening in the world, and the life we're living -- as contrasted with being excessively distracted by concepts, imaginings, anxieties, and other cogitations that aren't really necessary for here-and-now experiencing.

Our bodies simply function as they always do: pumping blood, taking in information from the senses, and experiencing sensory and emotional responses to stimuli. Our minds interpret these direct physical experiences -- and often create stories around them -- in ways that may increase discomfort or suffering and create more reactivity in our minds. We can short-circuit this reactivity by returning our attention to the felt experience of our bodies.

From the book's "video" page, I found this You Tube'd overview of mindfulness by Susan Smalley. If you watch it, be sure to pay attention.

 

Hallucinogens induce profound mystical experiences

Want a mystical experience? Got no time or inclination for meditation, austerities, guru-worship, or rituals? A shortcut is available: hallucinogens, such as psilocybin.

This is no surprise to baby boomers like me who experimented with LSD, mescaline, and "magic mushrooms" back in the 60's. I was searching for the Meaning Of It All, so I was part of the flower children subset who looked upon hallucinogens not only as a good time, but as a doorway to higher consciousness.

I figured that these trippy drugs had pretty much gone out of fashion. However, an article in the December 2010 issue of Scientific American informed me that research is demonstrating the promise of hallucinogens for resolving serious psychological problems.

Also, inducing profound mystical experiences. Here's one person's description of her encounter with the Light. An excerpt:

With my eyes closed I was overwhelmed with glorious golden light, suffused with every color, prisms and rainbows everywhere like a shining hologram. The Light itself was alive, a radiant consciousness of ultimate intelligence, perfect integrity, singularity and purity. The Light pervaded everything. It composed everything. Its presence was benevolent, calm, and intense.

It was as if the Light were revealing to me the innermost workings of the universe. Without words, It informed me that It, as the Light, was the source of every physical manifestation and that each had its purpose: "Everything is in my perfect control. With this as Cause, there can be no mistakes." I knew It to be the substance of every particle in the microcosm and the overarching essence of the macrocosm. In that moment I intuitively understood how everything is being created anew each instant from Its emanation. Why, then, could we not see the Light completely composing and permeating all of creation? How could the shining substance of all things be hidden? Later I remembered what the sages have always told us. The only possible answer is that our sense perceptions are an illusion.

Faced with the reality and the glory of the Light, there is nothing to do but gape with the greatest reverence. There are no questions in its Presence, no desires, no resistance. I felt suspended in a clear and peaceful state and enjoyed a weightless sense of free-fall, without time and space, though I remembered that they existed elsewhere. Even my physical surges abated, as if their purpose had been accomplished. Occasionally I still felt a faint muscle spasm, like the echo of receding thunder.

Only the first part of the Scientific American article, "Hallucinogens as Medicine," is available online. Below I'll share some passages from the piece that relate to mystical experiences which are similar, if not identical, to those reported by meditators and other non-drugged seekers of higher consciousness.

If a hallucinogen can stimulate the brain to have these experiences, this calls into question whether they are truly "spiritual" in a nonphysical sense -- as believers in the supernatural usually assume.

The experiences may point to a valid understanding of reality, though. Alternative ways of comprehending the cosmos are commonplace in human history. Logic, objectivity, and detached analyses tell us a lot about the universe, but certainly not everything.

From the article:

At the end of the session, when the psilocybin effects had dissipated, Lundhal, who had never before taken a hallucinogen, completed more questionnaires. Her responses indicated that during the time spent in the session room she had gone through a profound mystical-like experience similar to those reported by spiritual seekers in many cultures and across the ages -- one characterized by a sense of interconnectedness with all people and things, accompanied by the feeling of transcending time and space, and of sacredness and joy.

At a follow-up more than a year later, she said she continued to think about the experience every day and -- most remarkably -- that she regarded it as the most personally meaningful and spiritually significant event in her life. She felt it had brought on positive changes in her moods, attitudes and behaviors, as well as a noticeable increase in overall life satisfaction.

...The mystical-like experiences brought about by hallucinogens interest researchers particularly because such experiences have the potential to produce rapid and enduring positive changes in moods and behavior -- changes that might take years of effort to achieve with conventional psychological therapy.

...One typical comment from a subject: "The sense that all is One, that I experienced the essence of the universe and the knowing that God asks nothing of us except to receive love. I am not alone. I do not fear death. I am more patient with myself."

...In 1964 Eric Kast of Chicago Medical School, who administered LSD to terminal patients with severe pain, reported that the patients developed "a peculiar disregard for the gravity of their situations and talked freely about their impending death with an affect considered inappropriate in our Western civilization but most beneficial to their psychic states."

...Imaging of the brain areas involved in the intense emotions and thoughts people have under the drugs' influence will provide a window into the underlying physiology of mystical-type experiences produced by hallucinogens. Further research may also yield non-pharmacological approaches that work more quickly and effectively than traditional spiritual practices such as meditation or fasting to produce mystical experiences and desired behavioral changes.

...Understanding how mystical experiences can engender benevolent attitudes toward oneself and others will, in turn, aid in explaining the well-documented protective role of spirituality in psychological well-being and health. Mystical experiences can bring about a profound and enduring sense of the interconnectedness of all people and things -- a perspective that underlies the ethical teachings of the world's religious and spiritual traditions.

A grasp of the biology of the classic hallucinogens, then, could help clarify the mechanisms underlying human ethical and cooperative behavior -- knowledge that, we believe, may ultimately be crucial to the survival of the human species.

Unconscious zombies and conscious thermostats

Comments on my previous post about David Chalmers' consciousness theories got me doing more pondering about zombies -- the philosophical variety.

Personally, I resonate with Chalmers' notion that it is logically possible to conceive of beings who are identical to us down to the most minute subatomic particle, and behave exactly like us in even the most subtle fashion.

The only difference betweeen zombie and human would be this: humans experience what it is like to be what we are; zombies don't.

Admittedly this is a strange notion to wrap our minds around. For each of us, our entire life has been lived as a conscious being with a phemomenal, as well as psychological, awareness (which for Chalmers is virtually the same thing as consciousness).

"Phenomenal" is subjective.

Our awareness/consciousness is accessible only to ourselves. No one else knows what it like to be me, just as I have no knowledge of what it is like to be someone else. For example, even though I've been married to my wife for over twenty years, and understand her very well, I don't really know what it is like to be her.

"Psychological" is objective.

This is the realm of goings-on within the brain that can be studied scientifically. Perceptions, sensations, thoughts, emotions -- all this stuff can be tracked, measured, analyzed, and such through modern imaging technology, sophisticated modeling techniques, etc.

Zombies have all that psychological stuff, but not phenomenal awareness. (Chalmers recognizes that probably no real zombie ever will exist, though science fiction stories are getting closer to reality all the time; I'm thinking The Terminator here, since cyborgs are a bit like philosophical zombies.)

They're difficult to visualize. Chalmers says:

I confess that the logical possibility of zombies seems equally obvious to me. A zombie is just something physically identical to me, but which has no conscious experience -- all is dark inside.

While this is probably empirically impossible, it certainly seems that a coherent situation is described: I can discern no contradiction in the description. In some ways an assertion of this logical possibility comes down to a brute intuition, but no more so than with the [mile-high] unicycle.

Almost everybody, it seems to me, is capable of conceiving of this possibility... At the global level, we can consider the possibility of a zombie world: a world physically identical to ours, but in which there are no conscious experiences at all. In such a world, everybody is a zombie.

Thankfully, our world is different.

As Descartes realized, the one thing we can be certain of is that we're conscious. We can be mistaken about everything else -- reality, including us, could be a super-sophisticated simulation generated by some bored galactic teenager -- but not that we're aware of something or other happening here.

Like Bob Dylan said, we just don't know what it is. Not really. Not for sure.

In some ways, and I hate to disrespect Star Trek but this is how I see it, consciousness is more of a final frontier than space exploration. In large part that's because it is both what we're most intimately acquainted with, and also what is most mysterious to us.

As noted before, there is no way to tell whether some person, animal, or plant is conscious/aware. Chalmers believes, as I do, that dogs, cats, mice, monkeys and other mammals have that what it is like to be them experience of consciousness.

Again, we just don't know what it is.

This supports the logicalness of Chalmers' zombie thought experiment. If I can't tell for sure whether my dog or wife are conscious, how can I be 100% confident that human-appearing zombies with no conscious experience aren't standing in the line with me at Starbucks?

Now, I realize that some readers of this post probably are thinking, "Who cares about all this philosophizing?" (especially those who stopped reading before they got to this paragraph).

Well, I care.

I find nothing more mysteriously marvelous than the fact that I'm aware of the world. As I've said before, I really dislike the prospect of my non-existence. But in my possibly saner moments I'm filled with gratitude (to no one in particular) that I'm able to experience life from the moment of my birth some sixty-two years ago to however long I have left before I die.

We can quibble with the fine points of David Chalmers' philosophy of consciousness. What is most important, though, is that he directs our attention to an astounding mystery which we usually take for granted: our capacity to pay attention, a.k.a. "awareness."

Which brings me to conscious thermostats, a fascinating subject that I'll have to treat more briefly than zombies, given the lateness of my blogging evening and the length of this post.

Chalmers takes seriously the possibility that the thermostat which just made our heat pump go on is conscious (in a limited, but real, sense). And not only thermostats, possibly almost everything.

To make the view seem less crazy, we can think about what might happen to experience as we move down the scale of complexity. We start with the familiar cases of humans, in which very complex information-processing gives rise to our familiar complex experiences.

...Moving down the scale through lizards and fish to slugs, similar considerations apply. There does not seem to be much reason to suppose that phenomenology should wink out while a reasonably complex perceptual psychology persists.

...As we move along the scale from fish and slugs through simple neural networks all the way to thermostats, where should consciousness wink out? ... Before phenomenology winks out altogether, we presumably will get to some sort of maximally simple phenomenology.

It seems to me that the most natural place for this to occur is in a system with a corresponding simple "perceptual psychology," such as a thermostat. The thermostat seems to realize the sort of information processing in a fish or slug stripped down to its simplest form, so perhaps it might also have the corresponding sort of phenomenology in its most stripped-down form.

As is evident from these quotations, Chalmers believes that information may be intimately related to consciousness. This leaves open the possibility of some form of "panpsychism," the view that everything has a mind. Chalmers doesn't embrace panpsychism, but he says that we need to take the possibility seriously.

If there is experience associated with thermostats, there is probably experience everywhere: wherever there is a causal interaction, there is information, and wherever there is information, there is experience. One can find information states in a rock -- when it expands and contracts, for example -- or even in the different states of an electron.

...The view that there is experience wherever there is causal intreraction is counterintuitive. But is a view that can grow surprisingly satisfying with reflection, making consciousness better integrated into the natural order. If this view is correct, consciousness does not come in sudden jagged spikes, with isolated complex systems arbitrarily producing rich conscious experiences.

Rather, it is a more uniform property of the universe, with very simple systems having very simple phenomenology, and complex systems having complex phenomenology. This makes consciousness less "special" in some ways, and so more reasonable.

It also leaves open the possibility, no matter how remote, that when I die, my consciousness isn't absolutely or completely extinguished. Perhaps some aspect of human awareness partakes in a cosmic, universal, all-pervasive consciousness.

I'm not speaking of anything other-worldly, just an expanded view of the laws of nature. As I related in my previous post about Chalmers' book, "The Conscious Mind," he sees consciousness as entirely natural (as contrasted with supernatural or mystical), yet essentially nonmaterial.

As weird as this may sound, consider...

Where do the laws of nature reside?

How does matter/energy know how to behave in accord with those laws?

What does "material" mean at the farthest reaches of quantum phenomena and the earliest instant of the big bang?

If zombies physically indistinguishable from us are logically possible, what makes us conscious, experiencing beings different from them?

Currently there aren't answers to these questions. Maybe there never will be. All we can do is keep exploring the mysteries of consciousness, which are as close to us as whatever you and I are aware of at this very moment.

Talking trash with Almighty God

Ah, another enjoyable blasphemous Mark Morford column, "How to talk trash with Almighty God."

I like the ending, after Morford blasts God for all the crap life continues to be filled with after many millenia of worship, reverence, bowing and scraping, and all that.

But you know what? It doesn't seem to matter. Mock or no mock, praise or no praise, we get nailed, over and over again, no matter what. Sickened, crushed, bloodied, heartbroken, ruined, revived and rejuvenated, only to be ruined once again. We drop that damn ball, over and over again, every single day. So much for praise.

Unless ... wait, unless we've been going about this God thing all wrong? Unless you're actually not some sort of scowling robe-clad deity hanging out right there in the end zone, the political rally, the mosque or temple or shrine, but are rather this sort of indefinable hum and thrust and pulse, constant and forever, emanating from and penetrating into everything at all times everywhere? Because that would be weird.

That would mean everything, all the noise and death and joy, all the bliss and sickness and grief throughout time and eternity, they are all just myriad expressions, facets, faces of the divine pulse. How could that possibly be right? How can we possibly get our angry, needful, aching minds and hearts around that? And what are we gonna do with all this goddamn brimstone?