Church of the Churchless

Be selflessly selfish (as if you had a choice)

A few nights ago my wife traumatized me.

She shook the foundation of my existence, which in no small part rests on a weekly filling up of our bathtub with steaming hot water, pouring a glass of red wine, and having a pleasant soak while reading the latest issue of People magazine. (How else am I going to keep up on celebrity weddings?)

"Where's the People magazine?" I asked Laurel, wine in hand. "I left it at the athletic club," she told me. "I thought you'd read it."

Instantly the bottom dropped out of my envisioned future. I couldn't believe that People had been discarded. Our rule -- an ironclad rule! -- was that if I hadn't marked an "X" across the magazine's address label, this meant that People was unread by me.

I moped around for a while, trying to generate as much pity from my wife as possible. Eventually, though, I realized that the bathtub water was steadily growing cooler, so I was shooting my own high temp soaking in the foot.

I then grabbed a thin book from a living room shelf that struck me as philosophically appropriate for this hugely distressing moment, Julian Baggini's "What's It All About?." I flipped through the pages and decided to re-read his Lose your self chapter, figuring that this might offer some perspective on my deliciously irritated sense of self-pity.

Since I wasn't feeling particularly Buddha-like at the moment, being still pissed off at having my People magazine thrown to the athletic club winds, where I envisioned someone -- but definitely not me -- catching up on the latest frothy news, I was reassured to read that:

Permanently losing a sense of self is known as death.

A few years ago I'd written about this very chapter in Baggini's book, blogging "Losing your self is so egotistical." Reading the chapter again, I found Baggini's argument just as persuasive the second time around.

The reason I am being a little brutal here is that I think there is a terrible dishonesty among some of those who claim that what they are trying to achieve is a lessening of attachment to ego. The clear truth is that people who find this path satisfying are living contented lives.

In other words, they like their "spiritual practices" because they make them feel more content, at peace, or whatever, than alternatives they have tried. So despite all the fine words about losing their egos, they are in fact simply engaging in another form of self-gratification. This isn't materialistic or harmful to others, so we tend to look upon it quite kindly. But it is not in any sense a way of life which shows disregard for self-interest.

Right on.

I have no idea what a self-willed (meaning, voluntary) selfless act would consist of. A soldier throws himself on a live grenade in order to save the lives of his comrades -- an undeniably admirable courageous act.

Yet he gives up his own life in a selflessly selfish fashion.

The soldier's impulse to do what he does may derive from many complex (and ultimately impossible to discern) psychological factors. Their root, however, is simple: doing this is preferable to that.

Death is preferable to shame. Death is preferable to letting down one's fellow soldiers. Death is preferable to shirking a warrior's duty.

This is an extreme example of selfless selfishness, with an emphasis on selfless. However, there still is selfishness present, using that term as synonymous with Baggini's self-gratification. Similarly, a martyr derives gratification from his or her sacrifice, as does a masochist from his or her pain.

In my true believing days, when I aspired to an unreachable spiritual ideal, I'd chastise myself for not being as egoless as I considered I could be. Now, I realize that everyone is swimming in the same waters of Self; all that differs is the depth to which we're immersed in self-centeredness.

Baggini ends his "Lose your self" chapter by concluding that this neither is possible, nor the route to a meaningful life.

To return to the main theme of this chapter, freeing your mind by losing your self does not seem a fruitful path to finding meaning in life. Even if it is true that in one sense the self is an illusion, this gives us no reason to try and dismantle the apparatus that makes the existence of the self possible.

Temporarily losing a sense of self also seems to be, ultimately, a way of satisfying the self, and so any technique that delivers this loss of ego has to be judged on whether its effects are a desirable part of a meaningful life. Permanently losing a sense of self is otherwise known as death.

Lessening our attachment to self can help free us from a narcissistic concern for our own well-being and this would be a good thing. But it is at best a means of removing an obstacle to fulfilment, rather than a source of meaning in itself. Certain meditative techniques may help us feel attached to the wider universe, but this doesn't mean we are so attached or that all things are one.

Reality isn't what we imagine, or remember

Most forms of religion, mysticism, spirituality, and philosophizing have a big drawback: they're wildly out of touch with reality.

Of course, for those who don't care about living a truthful life, imagining an illusory world where Jesus saves, a guru enlightens, karma bites you in the butt during your next incarnation, or whatever, can be appealing -- since a believer can substitute warm and fuzzy concepts for whatever hard realities he or she wishes to deny.

Those of us who are committed to experiencing life as honestly as possible have our own sources of solace, though. Since I'm a long-time meditator (over forty years) I was encouraged to read "How Meditation May Change the Brain" in today's New York Times.

The researchers report that those who meditated for about 30 minutes a day for eight weeks had measurable changes in gray-matter density in parts of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. The findings will appear in the Jan. 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.

M.R.I. brain scans taken before and after the participants’ meditation regimen found increased gray matter in the hippocampus, an area important for learning and memory. The images also showed a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, a region connected to anxiety and stress. A control group that did not practice meditation showed no such changes.

What kind of meditation produced these benefits? Focusing on the here-and-now, not the there-and-then that is the Promised Land of religions and other sorts of other-worldly paths.

Britta Hölzel, a psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School and the study’s lead author, said the participants practiced mindfulness meditation, a form of meditation that was introduced in the United States in the late 1970s. It traces its roots to the same ancient Buddhist techniques that my husband follows.

“The main idea is to use different objects to focus one’s attention, and it could be a focus on sensations of breathing, or emotions or thoughts, or observing any type of body sensations,” she said. “But it’s about bringing the mind back to the here and now, as opposed to letting the mind drift.”

Now, it might seem that focusing on thoughts or emotions in mindfulness meditation isn't much different from contemplating God, heaven, spirit, or some other supernatural concept in a religious practice.

But here's the difference: mindfulness involves being aware of the distinction between what mental flotsam and jetsam is floating through our psyches, and what is actually out there in the world.

Sure, its possible to argue about what "actually out there" means. I'm not claiming that reality is solidly objective, with no inputs from subjective human cognition affecting our understanding of the cosmos. Clearly this isn't true.

My point is along the lines of what I see Hubert Benoit talking about, as described in my previous post. There is clear and present awareness of the present moment (Benoit's open door), and also there is our imagining, conceptualizing, abstracting, and fantasizing of what life is all about (Benoit's bars on the window).

Each has its place, the open door and barred window. We just should know the difference between them, not mistaking one for the other. Likewise, philosophical linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson say in their book "Philosophy in the Flesh:"

We experience only the present. We have to conceptualize past and future.

Winifred Gallagher elaborates on this important fact of human awareness in her own book, "Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life," which I'm reading and enjoying. She speaks of the distinction between what we experience in the here and now, and what we remember about those experiences.

(Religiosity, of course, goes even further into Nowhere Land, because believers don't have actual experiences of the supernatural, only fantasies about what divine delights await them.)

How you decide to spend your time and make other choices that affect your quality of life is closely bound up with attention, which "governs how people think about well-being," [Daniel] Kahneman says, "and also governs the experience." To illustrate, he points out two ways in which focusing on the wrong thing can skew your choices about how best to live.

First, there's a gap between your real life and the stories you tell yourself about it, and you're apt to fixate on the latter. Stressing the importance of this divide, Kahneman says, "Attention both to what you choose to experience and what you choose to think about it is at the very core of how I approach questions of well-being." He traces this disconnect between reality and your thoughts about it to two different selves that pay attention to different kinds of things.

Your hands-on "experiencing self," which concentrates on just plain being in the here and now, is absorbed in whatever is going on and how you feel about it without much analysis. Your evaluative "remembering self," however looks back on an experience, focuses on its emotional high points and outcomes, then formulates thoughts about it, not always accurately.

...The key to understanding why you pay more attention to your thoughts about living than to life itself is neatly summed up by what Kahneman proudly calls his "fortune cookie maxim" (a.k.a. the focusing illusion): "Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it." Why? "Because you're thinking about it!"

If you want to better understand the distinction between our experiencing self, and our remembering self, including how happiness is related to these aspects of us, spend twenty minutes watching a TED video of Kaneman explaining this stuff.

I found it most interesting.

"Story of Suzie" shows absurdity of Jesus

Thanks to one of my favorite blasphemous blogs, Pharyngula, I got to watch the new version of the Story of Suzie. I found it especially enjoyable because Christians are upset that the video depicts them as delusional.

Well, to me Suzie accurately reflects the craziness of Christianity. Have a look and see if you agree.

Zen says the door is wide open (while we cling to bars)

As noted before, I keep re-reading Hubert Benoit's brilliant book about Zen, "The Supreme Doctrine." No matter how many times I ponder a page, a fresh understanding (or productive non-understanding) almost always pops into my psyche upon another perusal.

This morning I re-read Benoit's chapter on The Immediate Presence of Satori. In the first few paragraphs he accurately captures the psychology of both spiritual seekers and humanity at large.

My primordial demand to be a distinct being conditions all my desires and, by my desires, my hopes and my beliefs. Bearing this claim, I am the bearer of an aspiration, of an expectation: believing myself to lack something, I await that which will be able to fulfil my need.

This general aspiration manifests itself in the fact that I await a "true life," different from my actual life in that I shall then be totally, perfectly affirmed, no longer in a partial and imperfect manner. Every human being lives, whether he realises it or not, in the expectation that there shall begin at last the "true life" from which all negation will have disappeared.

What this "true life" may be each of us represents to himself differently, according to his structure and the moment. More exactly, each man represents to himself that which, accoring to him, might inaugurate a new era in which the imperfections of his present life would be abolished.

Voices arise in me in order to tell me that it would definitely be marvellous if at last I had this... or if at last I were like that... or if such and such a thing were to happen. Sometimes I think I see very clearly what could inaugurate the "true life"; sometimes it remains vague, I merely await "something" which, I am persuaded, would settle everything.

Sometimes this expectation remains dumb in me, but it is only a passing drowsiness from which there will arise again very soon my aspiration for a life at last perfectly satisfying.

Everything happens in me as if I believed myself exiled from a paradise which exists somewhere and as if I saw in such and such a modification of the outside world or of myself, the key capable of opening the door of this lost paradise. And I live in the quest of this key.

Some of those who seek this paradise through religion, spirituality, or mysticism believe that a holy book is the key. Others, a guru, savior, master, yogi, or other human being, alive or dead. Still others search for a ritual, lifestyle, practice, meditation, or such that will open the door to the "true life."

But Benoit says that while our aspiration is worthy -- to find a way out of the suffering, disappointments, and sense of unfulfilment that Buddhism (along with countless other philosophies) teaches is our ordinary lot in life -- we shouldn't expect that we know what to expect.

In my old expectation I awaited something which was not given me at the time but which nevertheless existed for me in the world of possibilities. In my new expectation I await something which does not exist at all for me since it is unimaginable.

...Besides, my expectation ceases to be an expectation since that which I await is separated from me neither by space nor by time. I understand then the mistake that I made when I pictured to myself the state of satori as a future state; my effective becoming-conscious of the state of satori can be seen as a future eventuality, but not the state of satori itself which is from the present moment my state, has always been my state, and is my eternal "being."

OK, maybe you feel this description of what Zen says can't be described is too abstractly conceptual. Benoit then takes another stab at the subject, offering up one of the best images I've ever come across of what Zen (and I'd say, life itself) is all about.

I am comparable with a man in a room, where the door is wide open whereas the window is protected by bars; since my birth I have been fascinated by the outside world and have been clutching the bars of the window; and my keenness for the images outside makes my two hands violently contract.

In a sense I am not free since this contraction prevents me from going out of the room. But in reality nothing else shuts me in but this ignorance which makes me take the imaginative vision of life for life itself; nothing shuts me in but the crispation of my own hands. I am free; I always have been; I will realise it as soon as I "let go."

Of religion. Of spirituality. Of mysticism.
Of searching. Of not searching.
Of myself. Of the outside world.
Of everything. Of nothing.

"Selfless Insight" -- intriguing, yet disappointing, Zen book

I didn't enjoy neurologist James Austin's book about Zen and neuroscience as much as I thought I would.

My reading of "Selfless Insight: Zen and the Meditative Transformations of Consciousness" may show, of course, that I'm neither selfless nor imbued with enlightened (or kensho'ened) insight -- both of which I plead guilty to.

Regardless, I expected that Austin would provide a clearer and simpler analysis of how Zen meditation and brain science relate. He's written two other books on this subject, this being the most recent, so perhaps "Selfless Insight" is more complicated than his earlier works.

I was left with just a few Memorable Impressions after reading each of the book's often-dense 269 pages.

The detailed descriptions of brain functioning and anatomy didn't resonate much with me, as I was looking for something other than a neurology text for the layman. Ditto with the many summaries of research on how this or that in the brain results in X sorts of awareness under condition Y.

Eventually the stylistic medium of the book became a main message for me, albeit a familiar one. Namely, whatever we experience in (or as) our consciousness is produced by certain states in the physical brain.

I like Zen philosophy and literature because it is grounded. Heaven, the supernatural, God, soul, spirit -- all this airy-fairy stuff is meaningless to a Zen Buddhist like Austin, which enables him to easily meld his scientific bent with his meditative practice.

Early on (page 11), I came across his "home remedy" for how to empty the personal Self of its egocentric preoccupations:

Its first stage exemplifies intention: it involves saying the word "JUST" silently, during each inbreath. Then, during each successive breathing out, the numbers from one to ten are counted silently. This process continues for a variable period.

In the background, down in the lower abdoment, is a simple awareness of the in-and-out movements of breathing.

The next stage involves saying the word "THIS," while breathing in. It is again followed by each silent number from one to ten while breathing out. Later, all the number counting fades and drops out.

At this point, "JUST" returns to reoccupy the whole inbreath, leaving "THIS" to shift over to occupy the entire outbreath. Now, a silent "JUST THIS" remains throughout each in-and-out cycle of breathing. Later, it, too, dissolves into the breathing movements of the lower abdomen and vanishes just like any other concept.

Of course, "JUST THIS" is a temporary expedient. It signifies that only this precious moment exists, within the whole world of awareness. At this moment, there's nothing more to strive for, nothing more to attain. This is it, right now.

Nicely said. I've experimented with this technique, finding it easy to do, relaxing, and centering.

But Austin's Zen involves a lot more than being present with the here-and-now. He describes the intense efforts that practitioners put into their attempts to achieve a state of kensho, an enlightenment experience.

This basically is an other-referential state. In contrast with other spiritual and mystical paths that enjoin the necessity of "self-realization," Austin says that Zen is out to leave the illusion of the Self behind.

Now, instead of an attitude that points all messages inwardly, into a Self-centered awareness, the new mental field could open out into a seemingly new dimension of OTHER-consciousness.

Why does perception now seem to register so clearly and directly inside this novel state of consciousness? Because it has been emptied out of all prior maladaptive limbic associations linked to the old, overconditioned I-Me-Mine.

Passages like these in "Selfless Insight" gave me some aha! moments.

Now I better understand why students of Zen, and the masters they study with, seem to pay a lot more attention to washing dishes, eating rice, watching the moon rise, seeing a shadow of a bird pass over still water, and such, than what transpires in closed-eyed, introspective meditation.

Becoming totally immersed in what is other than us reveals the insubstantiality of the I-Me-Mine Austin speaks of above.

The Zen phrase "No-Self" is a term that needs to be interpreted with care. No-Self does not mean that the person stops witnessing. It does not mean that kensho's open mental field beholds "nothing" at all in some "empty" world outside.

It means that witnessing happens with none of the old intrusive, Self-conscious I-Me-Mine standing in the way. It means that no former veils of Self obscure or distort everything in that outside environment.

Once these old concepts drop off, the anonymous observer is finally graced by the glimpse of an unimaginably "objective vision." This fresh reality sees clearly into the eternal perfection of "all things as THEY really are."

Well, it makes sense that enlightenment, or kensho, would be other-directed -- allocentric rather than egocentric. Trying to find your true self obviously is stupid if no such self exists.

Austin persuasively shows how various centers and processes in the brain could be tipped into a super-allocentric, other-focused state of awareness with the aid of Zen meditative practices.

Bingo! Kensho! Satori! All entirely scientific, practical, physical, worldly.

Where "Selfless Insight" is focused in this fashion, I found myself being drawn into a pleasingly naturalistic conception of Zen Buddhism. But Austin seemingly also embraces traditional Zen views of perfect enlightenment which border (or cross over into) incredulity for me.

For example, he writes:

After a long preamble of meditative training within an enriched cultural setting, what happens when kensho happens to strike off the roots of the Self? The impression of errorless rectitude unfolds automatically. It is the brief realization that no evil conduct could possibly arise in a world so ideal, a domain so shorn of perjorative subjectivities.

Well, Austin is free to believe in the possibility of perfection, and the leaving behind of all subjectivity. To me, though, this is at odds with both neuroscience and the sort of philosophical naturalism that Austin's Zen supposedly is founded on.

(Here's a fairly detailed review of "Selfless Insight" for those who want another perspective on the book.)

Sober or drunk? Sacred or profane?

I've rarely gotten drunk. But I love the notion of drunkenness. I don't swear a whole lot in public. But profanity springs from my lips much more freely than prayer does.

Reality just seems more, well, real when it is lived on an intoxicated blasphemous edge -- whether this be conceptually philosophical or crudely physical. Neat and tidy sobriety isn't congruent with the cosmos' natural wildness, though we humans do our best to smooth rough edges and tame savage beasts.

At the end of this post I've included an excerpt from a chapter in Daniele Bolelli's terrific book, "On the Warrior's Path: Philosophy, Fighting, and Martial Arts Mythology (second edition)."

Now, if you're tempted to stop reading because your interest in martial arts is slim to nonexistent, give this post a chance.What we're talking about here is an issue that goes way beyond martial arts: is the straight and narrow a more productive path than a curving and unrestricted way?

If you read the excerpt from Bolelli's "Sacred and Profane: Combat Sports as Athletic Philosophy" chapter -- and I hope that you do -- be aware of your reaction to the two contrasting instructional styles he describes in such an entertaining fashion.

This likely will be an indication of what sort of spiritual, religious, moral, mystical, or philosophical teachings and practices you're most attracted to.

Admittedly, Bolelli features some extremes. But few of us are precisely balanced at a mid-point; it's natural to tilt one way or the other (for example, how many people are so perfectly bi-sexual, they're equally attracted to both sexes?).

I bought the second edition of Bolelli's book, even though I'd already read the first edition (and blogged about it in "Bruce Lee's Taoist life lessons") because two new chapters sounded intriguing to me.

I'm glad I did the Amazon deed. Bolelli is much more into martial arts than I ever was, but we share some common experiences and attitudes on both the philosophical and fighting fronts.

I talked about this in a 2004 post where I congratulated my martial arts friend, Dave, on his black belt accomplishment. (I'm in a black gi on the right; Dave is next to me, in blue; Warren Allen, our instructor, is in the middle, in back.)

After almost nine years of traditional Shotokan karate training where everyone had to wear a plain white gi (and only females wore a t-shirt under it, which helps explain my habitual t-shirtless look), I much appreciate Warren’s hang-loose Taoist attitude toward the dojo dress code. Discipline is needed in the martial arts, but dressing exactly alike doesn’t teach anything except rigidity.

It’s interesting that my changeover from the linear, dogmatic, structured Shotokan training to the Pacific Martial Arts circular, eclectic, flowing style has pretty much paralleled a similar change in how I approach meditation and spirituality. I’ve become much less rigid in my philosophical/metaphysical beliefs during the years I’ve been trying to achieve a similar openness in my martial arts training.

My new Church of the Churchless site reflects this creedless creed mentality.

Daniele Bolelli's comparison of contrasting uptight Shotokan and hang-loose Jujitsu classes rang true to me. I trained for nine years in a traditional Shotokan dojo where we practiced the sort of rigid discipline you can read about in the extension to this post.

When I switched to the eclectic Pacific Martial Arts style, the training was just as tough and demanding -- more so, in fact -- but not as anal. This meshes with Bolelli's description of the Brazilian Jujitsu class he observed, a martial arts style that I learned just enough of to know how much more I had to learn about it.

Anyway, read on for an interesting take on whether sober is better than drunk, and sacred better than profane.

(If you'd rather watch than read, check out Jackie Chan's classic "Drunken Master" on Netflix; it can be watched instantly for free if you have a Netflix account; from about 1:20 to 1:27 is a generally comedy-less look at drunken-style kung fu.)

If the Bible permits it, why can't I own a Canadian?

Here's a classic (all the way from 2002) expose of the ridiculousness of some entities that deserve to be ridiculed: the Old Testament and Dr. Laura Schlessinger.

Dear Dr. Laura:

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination.

End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the other specific laws and how to follow them: [here's one of many]

...Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?

Thanks to Brook, my wife's churchless niece, for passing on this link. And to the Humanists of Utah for hosting it. Being a humanist in Utah must be as challenging as being a vegetarian in an Eskimo village.

Lessening thinking is beneficial, but not religious

Every day, in so many ways, our brains produce lots of thoughts. Estimates vary as to the average number. When I asked Google, widely disparate answers popped up. None seemed to be based on solid scientific research.

Regardless, most people -- certainly me included -- feel that much, if not most, of the thinking that goes on inside their heads is unproductive, useless, unnecessary, and even unpleasant.

Yet the thought-beat goes on... boom, boom, boom, one after the other, much of the time with little rhyme or reason.

Often this is called "monkey mind," since left to its own devices the brain tends to jump around from one idea branch to another, not hanging onto any notion for very long unless something grabs our attention -- either involuntarily or via conscious effort.

Neuroscientist (and noted religion-basher) Sam Harris has some interesting thoughts about thinking in his response to a 2011 Edge question, "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?"

In We are lost in thought, Harris starts off with:

I invite you to pay attention to anything — the sight of this text, the sensation of breathing, the feeling of your body resting against your chair — for a mere sixty seconds without getting distracted by discursive thought. It sounds simple enough: Just pay attention.

The truth, however, is that you will find the task impossible. If the lives of your children depended on it, you could not focus on anything — even the feeling of a knife at your throat — for more than a few seconds, before your awareness would be submerged again by the flow of thought.

This forced plunge into unreality is a problem. In fact, it is the problem from which every other problem in human life appears to be made.

Interesting thesis, that last statement. Harris might be right, but he doesn't elaborate on why an inability to pay attention to here-and-now reality is the cause of all of our other problems.

I suspect it has to do with the creation of a feeling of separate selfhood.

Thinking about the past, present, and future, as contrasted with simply paying attention to what is happening now, conjures up the illusion of a distinct "Me" who persists through time and is a free agent capable of manipulating reality to our own ego-centered ends.

This morning I was reading Kevin Nelson's book, "The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist's Search for the God Experience." He says:

The neurologist's world routinely strips away the illusion that self-identity is a seamless, integrated whole. Instead, neurologists are confronted with overwhelming spectacles of subjective experience often fragmented into contradictory components.

...the brain makes us who we are from a jumble of components that are fragmented and distributed through the cortex and thalamus in a way that is analogous to the way Picasso sometimes painted.

So it makes sense that if we could lessen the number of monkey-mind thoughts generated by our jumbled-up mind, life would seem more coherent, integrated, and balanced -- possibly even leading to a dimunition of the unsubstantiated belief that we are an isolated island of Self in the midst of a vast Other ocean.

Harris notes how almost every religion, spirtual path, and mystic tradition has its own way of focusing attention and controlling unwanted thoughts.

While most of us go through life feeling that we are the thinker of our thoughts and the experiencer of our experience, from the perspective of science we know that this is a distorted view. There is no discrete self or ego lurking like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain.

There is no region of cortex or pathway of neural processing that occupies a privileged position with respect to our personhood. There is no unchanging "center of narrative gravity" (to use Daniel Dennett's phrase). In subjective terms, however, there seems to be one — to most of us, most of the time.

Our contemplative traditions (Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, etc.) also suggest, to varying degrees and with greater or lesser precision, that we live in the grip of a cognitive illusion. But the alternative to our captivity is almost always viewed through the lens of religious dogma.

A Christian will recite the Lord's Prayer continuously over a weekend, experience a profound sense of clarity and peace, and judge this mental state to be fully corroborative of the doctrine of Christianity; A Hindu will spend an evening singing devotional songs to Krishna, feel suddenly free of his conventional sense of self, and conclude that his chosen deity has showered him with grace; a Sufi will spend hours whirling in circles, pierce the veil of thought for a time, and believe that he has established a direct connection to Allah.

This is like thinking that eating a steak is the only way to feel like one's stomach is full. Or that eating a fruit salad is. It's food that satiates our appetite, not any particular source of nutrition.

Yet religions erroneously believe that their own particular rituals, prayers, mantras, ceremonies, or whatever possess a unique ability to sooth the soul -- which more accurately should be called the mind/brain.

Thus Harris concludes with:

The universality of these phenomena refutes the sectarian claims of any one religion. And, given that contemplatives generally present their experiences of self-transcendence as inseparable from their associated theology, mythology, and metaphysics, it is no surprise that scientists and nonbelievers tend to view their reports as the product of disordered minds, or as exaggerated accounts of far more common mental states — like scientific awe, aesthetic enjoyment, artistic inspiration, etc.

Our religions are clearly false, even if certain classically religious experiences are worth having. If we want to actually understand the mind, and overcome some of the most dangerous and enduring sources of conflict in our world, we must begin thinking about the full spectrum of human experience in the context of science.

But we must first realize that we are lost in thought.

Vatican supports Parkinson's disease "miracle," but not a cure

To become a saint in the Catholic Church you've got to manifest at least two miracles. (Only after the person's death -- sainthood now is purely a posthumous possibility in Catholicism, though things were different in the Middle Ages.)

John Paul II is halfway there, as this dead-and-gone Pope has been credited with a cure of Sister Marie Simon-Pierre's Parkinson's disease, which gets him to the beatification level. Failing to investigate many cases of sexual abuse apparently isn't a black mark for a would-be beatified.

The global lay Catholic group We Are Church responded this weekend with dismay. In a press release, it calls John Paul a "spiritual authoritarian."

Their case is that he failed to confront the abuse scandal, that he squashed the Liberation Theology movement, that he shut off discussion on gender equality and that he did not recognize, as Pope Benedict XVI did recently, that use of condoms can be a moral choice for preventing the transmission of of HIV/AIDS.

Michael Kinsley, who has Parkinson's himself, wrote an excellent analysis of this ridiculous attempt to make a miracle out of a questionable case of medical remission. In "Don't let 'miracles' trump science," he said:

Congratulations to Simon-Pierre. It’s miraculous what a miracle can do. But I could use a miraculous cure for Parkinson’s, too, as could millions of others around the world who have the disease or will develop it.

And the main force preventing such a miracle is the Roman Catholic Church. The most likely source of miraculous cures for all sorts of diseases, with Parkinson’s foremost among them, is stem cell research. The Church opposes stem cell research on the grounds that it uses, and in the process, destroys human embryos.

These are surplus embryos from fertilization clinics that will be destroyed, or permanently frozen, anyway. They are not fetuses; they are clumps of a few dozen cells. But of course, none of this matters if you believe they are human beings.

The famous test of that belief goes something like this: Suppose there was a fire destroying your house and you had the choice of rescuing either a real one-year-old baby or two test tubes, each containing an embryo. Would you really go for the test tubes and let the baby die?

It seems more than a little unfair — not characteristic of John Paul II at all — that he would cure Simon-Pierre but leave the rest of us hanging out to dry. I hope that, in his next miracle, John Paul II will do something to rectify this situation. After all, it might be his last one.

Christian governor of Alabama practices non-brotherly love

I sure am glad that I don't live in Alabama. It'd drive me crazier than I already am if I had to listen regularly to the fundamentalist crap spouted by recently elected Governor Robert Bentley.

"Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister, and I want to be your brother."

Hmmmm. So non-Christians in Alabama aren't going to be fully represented or respected  by the governor of their state?

Here's a great argument for keeping religion out of politics -- the bigotry practiced by those who consider that anyone who doesn't share their faith isn't worthy of being embraced.

"We live in a country that is hugely diverse," said David Silverman, president of American Atheists, the country's oldest atheist civil rights group. "The governor basically said: 'If you're not like me, you're second class.'

This is a man [who] puts the Bible above the Constitution and his preacher above the president. His words are disgusting and bigoted and reinforce Alabama's reputation for being backward and bigoted."

I've never had a reason to go to Alabama. But now I have an excellent reason for not going to that state: if you're not a Christian, you're a second-class citizen.

"The Best Spiritual Writing 2011" -- a religious Rorschach test

I usually find a collection of essays to be too diffuse and disconnected for my taste. I prefer a book with a unifying theme, something that either grabs me or repels me -- but at least touches me forthrightly.

However, I enjoyed "The Best Spiritual Writing 2011" more than I expected. [Note: I got this book free from the publisher, who said I could have a copy if I considered writing a review of it, which I'm doing here.]

The thirty essays are well-written, some more so than others, naturally. Good writing always is pleasurable, even if I don't agree with the author's point of view. And that happened frequently, given that the essays ranged from full-on God-embracing to quasi-atheistic.

Not surprisingly, I resonated with the skeptical more than the faithful. I read every essay, though, finding it interesting to see what my reaction was to each literary Rorschach "inkblot."

Poet Billy Collins wrote the introduction. I liked how a book of spiritual writings started out with a tale of how a guy lost his Catholic faith.

But gradually, through a number of influences both literary and natural, I came to sense that a spiritual realm could be accessed, not through the recommended roads of religion leading to portals guarded by priests, rabbis, imams, and religious leaders of other stripes, but instead, directly through actual daily experience.

Along that line, Rick Bass wrote about the regularities of the changing natural seasons in the wildness where he lives.

In a way that I haven't figured out how to fully articulate, I believe that children who get to see bald eagles, coyotes, deer, moose, grouse, and other similar sights each morning will have a certain kind of matrix or fabric or foundation of childhood, the nature and quality of which will be increasingly rare and valuable as time goes on, and which will be cherished into adulthood, as well as becoming -- and this is a leap of faith by me -- a source of strength and knowledge to them somehow.

That the daily witnessing of the natural wonders is a kind of education of logic and assurance that cannot be duplicated by other means, or in other places: unique and significant, and by God, still somehow relevant, even now, in the twenty-first century.

I enjoyed Joseph Bottum's essay about E.M. Cioran, having fairly recently read Cioran's "A Brief History of Decay" (not the cheeriest reading, as can be surmised from the title, but indisputably real).

But until we recognize the darkness, we cannot see the light; philosophy's candle matters only if we realize that genuine shadows lurk beyond reason's small illuminated circle. "There is no limit to suffering." E.M. Cioran insists we remember, and so he posted himself like a sentry on the edge of reason, refusing to turn away from the night.

Billy Collins also has a poem in the book. I was intrigued by the mention of "one hundred kinds of silence." Googling the term, it looks like this is an original thought of Collins. Nonetheless, it seems so true, and perhaps it is.

What do you think of my new glasses
I asked as I stood under a shade tree
before the joined grave of my parents,
and what followed was a long silence
that descended on the rows of the dead
and on the fields and the woods beyond,
one of the one hundred kinds of silence
according to the Chinese belief,
each one distinct from the others,
but the differences being so faint
that only a few special monks
were able to tell one from another.

From Robert D. Kaplan I learned about the warring between Buddhists and Hindus in Sri Lanka (formerly known as Ceylon). This was a useful reminder to me that Buddhists aren't always Buddha-like, filled with compassion and peacefulness.

Yet Buddhism, as Kandy demonstrates, is deeply materialistic and demands worship of solid objects, in a secure and sacred landscape that has required the protection of a military. There have been Buddhist military kingdoms -- notably Kandy's -- just as there have been Christian and Islamic kingdoms of the sword. Buddhism can be, under the right circumstances, a blood-and-soil faith.

Jewish rituals and customs make as little sense to me as those of any other religion. After reading Jesse Kellerman's "Let My People Go to the Buffet" I'm inclined to raise Judaism a notch up my Ridiculous Religion list. This essay is about recollections of his family heading to kosher resorts at Passover time, so they wouldn't have to deal with the dietary difficulty of excluding all leaven, grains, and legumes from the food they eat.

Nowadays, when virtually every commercial food contians some form of corn syrup, the ordinary supermarket is transformed into a religious House of Horrors. In preparation for the holiday, homes must be scrubbed and scoured until no trace of chametz remains, in a ritual that resembles spring cleaning for the obsessive-compulsive.

...People say that the easiest way to understand a cruise is to think of it as a giant floating hotel. The easiest way to understand a Passover hotel program is to think of it as a land cruise.

Here's some nice writing by Anita Sullivan, who taught me a lot about scordatura piano tuning, a subject I started with zero knowledge of prior to reading "Scordatura: Upon Listening to Biber's Rosary Sonatas."

But then, with so much infinity expressly, if fleetingly available, might this not suggest more than one essential way through the world? Perhaps if beauty arises out of the Is-ness of things, spontaneously, irrevocably, and if this Is-ness exists hugely, obliviously but all around us at all times, we need only a tiny shift in the magnification of our seeing or hearing, a miniscule twitch of angle, and it will explode into us: a series of caverns inside the veins of each leaf, the lavish turquoise bleedings from the under-surface of the sea. If this is so, then how can suffering be merely what it seems?

Klondike solitaire -- a fine philosophy of life

My churchlessness has evolved to the point where playing an iPhone game app is my last sacred gesture before I meditate each morning.

I go with a classic, Klondike, the Mobility Ware version of which is generically called "Solitaire" (for many people, including myself, Klondike is the beginning and end of solitaire games).

It'd be a short book, but I could easily write Everything I Learned About Life Came From Playing Solitaire. Well, I might be doing that right now.

Just before I meditate, I fire up my iPhone and click on the Solitaire app after reading for a while, usually some pretty dense philosophical, scientific, or spiritual sorts of books. Instantly Klondike grounds me in what feels like a solid reflection of non-solitaire reality.

Life deals you a certain situation. Clicking on "new game," the cards smoothly riffle onto the virtual playing surface (I choose green felt for its classic look). Whatever I'm dealt, that's what I have to deal with.

Just like life. I didn't choose my genetics, parents, place of birth, or family circumstances. Nor the cultural, societal, or other environmental characteristics of the world in which I uttered my first baby cry and started to make my way in.

Choices are possible, within limits. Still, right from the beginning of a Klondike game I've got decisions to make. Are there aces visible which can be dragged to the foundation pile? Can other cards be played which will move the game along to a possible win?There's some strategizing and forethought involved in playing solitaire. But I've found that mindfulness is key.

Sometimes I'll realize that I've been staring at a good move yet didn't see what was right before me. And it's quite helpful to remember what cards are available in the deck that haven't been played, so I can choose the one that will lead in the most fruitful direction -- a red king rather a black one, for example, if a black queen is showing on a tableau pile.

Getting emotional doesn't change the outcome. I'm fascinated by how my mood can change during a Klondike game. If the iPhone app deals me aces and kings right off the bat, I'll instantly think "This could be my fastest win ever!" (The app keeps track of quickest time for a win, along with fewest cards played in a win.)

However, my Buddha-like goal is to pay attention to those mood swings without getting carried away by them.

Often a great beginning to a game leads to a lousy end, and vice versa. I can't stop myself from feeling happy when I win, and disappointed when I lose, but after playing 611 games with this app I've learned to stay focused on enjoying each play in the game rather than looking ahead to a victory or defeat -- because the outcome of solitaire really can't be predicted.

Playing one card can change the whole game. Along that line, a Klondike game can turn on a dime. Many, many times I've felt that a game was hopeless; the cards just weren't breaking in my favor.

Then, I'd turn one card over, find that another card could be played now, and be amazed at how the game went in a completely different direction. Again, just like life.

We tend to think that only a big event will bring big changes in our life. ("I've got to win the mega-bucks lottery!") This isn't true. Taking a few small steps can lead us down a markedly altered path.

There's no outside influences. I'll confess, in a churchless fashion. I used to look upon Klondike in a rather superstitious fashion at times. I'd ask a question of the cosmos like "Is there a god?" and then play a game of solitaire on my computer. (This was pre-iPhone).

If I won, I'd take that as an affirmative sign. If I won easily, I'd feel that the cosmos really was giving me a message. Yeah, I know that sounds crazy -- but no crazier than astrology, prayer, or other sorts of ways people believe they're communicating with some unseen divinity.

Now I realize that the Klondike app is shuffling the cards in a lawful fashion by using some sort of random number generator, likely. Winning or losing a game is solely a product of how the iPhone was made and the decisions I make while playing the app. The game, like life, is simply what it is.

It's just a game. "Just" doesn't capture the depth of Klondike or life as a whole. But it reflects how we should enjoy each and every moment to the greatest extent possible. When I take solitaire too seriously, the fun goes out of it. Ditto with life.

Play on. That's what we should do, with a smile on our face.

[Note: Given how much philosophical depth I find in Klondike, I was surprised to find via a Google search that few other people on the Internet have pondered the deeper meaning of solitaire. Kudos to an Indonesian who wrote "Klondike Philosophy," which made considerable -- but not perfect -- sense to me after Google kindly translated the page.]

Ken Wilber's creationism is pseudo-science

I used to enjoy reading Ken Wilber's take on reality, a.k.a. Integral Theory. But eventually it dawned on me that Wilber takes a lot of liberties with facts about nature (human and otherwise), so much of his integrating involves untruths.

Case in point: David Christopher Lane's short, easy-to-read pictorial essay, "Frisky Dirt: Why Ken Wilber's New Creationism is Pseudoscience."

Lane persuasively argues that supposedly super-brilliant Ken Wilber actually is clueless about how evolution works. Chance plays a role, but natural selection is anything but random (that's why it's called selection, Ken).

Wilber has come to sound like a creationist with his talk about how the universe is driven by love, Eros. Notions like that are fine so long as they remain in the realm of poetry and mythology, but are utterly ridiculous when contrasted with modern scientific understanding.

Anyway, have a read and make up your own mind about Wilber. There's more interesting spiritual-mystical-philosophical stuff on MSAC Magazine's web page.

Toward a more civil and honest discourse

President Obama's speech at yesterday's memorial service for the victims of the Tucson shooting inspired me. So I wanted to share some excerpts from his remarks which bear on any sort of discourse -- including "conversations" on this blog and elsewhere on the Internet.

(Since quite a few visitors here live overseas, a brief background on the events that have shaken up the United States: last Saturday a Congresswoman, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, was shot in the head by a young man, Jared Loughner, as she was speaking with constituents in Tucson, Arizona. Giffords survived, but six other people were killed by Loughner and many others were hurt.)

Obama said:

You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations –- to try and pose some order on the chaos and make sense out of that which seems senseless.  Already we’ve seen a national conversation commence, not only about the motivations behind these killings, but about everything from the merits of gun safety laws to the adequacy of our mental health system.  And much of this process, of debating what might be done to prevent such tragedies in the future, is an essential ingredient in our exercise of self-government.

But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized -– at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do -– it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.

These are nicely nuanced thoughts. I get passionate about the dangers of religiosity. Other people are avid defenders of their faith. Spiritual beliefs, or the lack thereof, are akin to the Tucson shootings in this regard: they aren't easily explained.

In fact, I'll go further and say neither can be explained.

The human mind/brain is way too complex and mysterious to be reduced in a simplistic fashion. Thoughts, motivations, emotions, desires, yearnings -- all these and so much more are beyond the ability of anyone, including the individual in whose head all these transpire, to comprehend.

So when some commentators say, "Jared Loughner certainly wasn't affected by hateful, violent political speech," they're just guessing. And when other commentators say that Loughner definitely was spurred on by talk radio or cable TV, they're also guessing.

Likewise, I do my best on this blog to stay away from making inferences about what is, or was, in someone else's mind, since even that person isn't capable of figuring out how unconscious processes in his or her brain end up producing thoughts, emotions, or actions.

All we can do, really, is speak about how we see the world and ourselves.

Yes, it's important that we learn how to talk with each other. But I see this talking as akin to laying our conversational cards on the table in a shared, open space. We shouldn't try to force our own cards into the hand (or mind) of someone else. That, as Obama said, is a way that wounds.

He went on to observe:

As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility.  Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let’s use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy and remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together.

Absolutely.

However, I don't take those two sentences as reflecting any sort of passivity in the face of social, cultural, environmental, political, or other sorts of problems that need to be dealt with.

We are still entitled to hold strong opinions and passionate views. We just should recognize that everybody, including our opponents, are trying to deal with life in the best way they know how. It's important to remember that humans have a lot more in common, than in difference.

Like, how we deal with grief:

So sudden loss causes us to look backward -– but it also forces us to look forward; to reflect on the present and the future, on the manner in which we live our lives and nurture our relationships with those who are still with us.

We may ask ourselves if we’ve shown enough kindness and generosity and compassion to the people in our lives.  Perhaps we question whether we're doing right by our children, or our community, whether our priorities are in order.

We recognize our own mortality, and we are reminded that in the fleeting time we have on this Earth, what matters is not wealth, or status, or power, or fame -– but rather, how well we have loved -- and what small part we have played in making the lives of other people better. 

And that process -- that process of reflection, of making sure we align our values with our actions –- that, I believe, is what a tragedy like this requires.

Each of us is the meaning-maker of our own life.

Yes, we are affected by other people, influenced by natural events, constrained by our predispositions (genetic and otherwise), mystified by unconscious neurological processes over which we have little or no control.

But in the end, we are still responsible for how our unique human consciousness makes sense of all this, and how we treat other people and sentient creatures who are trying to figure out life in their own fashion.

This final excerpt from Obama's speech is my favorite:

If this tragedy prompts reflection and debate -- as it should -- let’s make sure it’s worthy of those we have lost. Let’s make sure it’s not on the usual plane of politics and point-scoring and pettiness that drifts away in the next news cycle.

The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better.  To be better in our private lives, to be better friends and neighbors and coworkers and parents.  And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy -- it did not -- but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud.

As I'vee observed numerous times during the six-plus years since I started this Church of the Churchless blog, we should talk with each other on the Internet no differently than if we were sitting face to face in a coffehouse.

Yet just as "talking heads" on the radio or TV can be astoundingly vitriolic, insulting, and hateful toward people with whom they disagree, so can the distancing anonymity of the Internet foster speech which makes me go "Wow! If this person was in the same room with those he's ranting to, he or she wouldn't be talking that way."

I enjoy conversing on the Internet for the same reason I like talking with people in person: learning, sharing, entertainment, friendship-making, exposure to fresh ideas. May this blog continue to bring enjoyment to me and to others who visit it.

And may our discourse here, as elsewhere, be as civil and honest as possible.

Did Buddha have a stroke?

Maybe Buddha's enlightenment was caused by a lack of oxygen in his brain -- a stroke. It's a hypothesis that makes some sense. (Thanks, Mike, for sending me a link to this article.)

Reality is what works for us

What is real? This is one of the toughest questions. Ordinarily we don't pay much attention to it. We just go on with our lives.

But sometimes it's necessary to ponder whether something is really there -- a human-like shadowy shape moving in the woods as we take an evening walk, say (if a serial killer is on the loose, we'll be seriously motivated to ponder that question).

Philosophers are interested in this issue for other less concrete reasons. They wonder about topics such as "Realism and Truth," the title of a chapter in Philosophy in the Flesh, a thick meaty tofuy book that I'm slowly making my way through and have blogged about before here and here.

The authors, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, do a good job of summarizing the basic problem of "what is real?" and their persuasive solution.

Common sense argues that the world is known directly. I see and feel my laptop. If my wife walked over to the kitchen counter where I'm typing away, she'd see my computer in the same way. Silver and black. Thirteen inch screen. And so on.

The ancient Greeks, along with most non-philosophically and non-scientifically minded people nowadays, had a simple explanation for this congruence.

For them, knowledge that worked was knowledge of Being. Aristotle, for example, saw an identity between ideas in the mind and the essences of things in the world. That identity answered the problem of knowledge. Aristotle concluded that we could know because our minds could directly grasp the essences of things in the world.

This was ultimate metaphysical realism. There was no split between ontology (what there is) and epistemology (what you could know), because the mind was in direct touch with the world.

However, we now understand that this isn't true.

For example, science tells us that objectively there is no green in grass, or blue in the sky. Colors are a product of how the human eye and brain processes electromagnetic radiation of a certain wavelength.

Yet in the morning I'll look out a window and see our green lawn. And I might even see blue sky, though during January in western Oregon, gray clouds are a lot more likely.

So what is real? My subjective direct perception of green grass, the objective scientific knowledge of how light works, or an understanding of how the brain converts colorless photons into greenness through unconscious cognitive processes?

Comments and posts on this blog often touch on this question, albeit usually not explicitly.

I remember a recent exchange where someone argued that to him, his only genuine reality was what he could experience directly. I replied that my direct experience is of the sun rising and setting, whereas actually this effect is produced by the rotating earth. Thus scientific understanding enlarges and affects my understanding of certain direct perceptions.

Lakoff and Johnson take an "all of the above" approach to reality. It isn't possible to settle on a fixed notion of truth, because such doesn't exist.

In much of the Western philosophical tradition, truth is taken to be absolute and scientific truth claims take priority over nonscientific truth claims. We know from the neurophysiology of color vision that colors do not inhere in objects themselves. They are created by our color cones and neural circuitry together with the wavelength reflectances of objects and local light conditions.

...Here is the dilemma: A scientific truth claim based on knowledge about the neural level is contradicting a truth claim at the phenomenological level. The dilemma arises because the philosophical theory of truth as correspondence [between symbols and the world] does not distinguish such levels and assumes that all truths can be stated at once from a neutral perspective. Yet there are distinct "truths" at different levels; and there is no perspective that is neutral between these levels.

In other words, I can truly say "the grass is green" while also recognizing the truth of how neuroscience understands color vision in humans.

These separate truths aren't going to combine into a mega-truth. The way I subjectively see the world is always going to be different from what science tells me about photons and neurological goings-on.

Yet because we humans are embodied beings, the way other people perceive reality is going to be pretty much like how I do -- assuming our brains and other bodily functions are in decent working order. (Someone colorblind, of course, won't see grass the same way I do.)

In the end, whatever works is the only viable criterion for truth, according to Lakoff and Johnson.

We need to recognize that it isn't possible to know things as they are, separate and distinct from human cognition. All we can do is honor different valid ways of knowing. An audiologist can shed tears at the beauty of a Beethoven symphony while understanding how what is heard are "merely" sound waves of various frequencies propagating through the concert hall.

So religion's quest for a detached, objective Perfect Truth is a fool's errand. Forget about it.

In sum, embodied truth requires us to give up the illusion that there exists a unique correct description of any situation. Because of the multiple levels of our embodiment, there is no one level at which one can express all the truths we can know about a given subject matter.

But even if there is no one correct description, there can still be many correct descriptions, depending on our embodied understandings at different levels or from different perspectives.

Each different understanding of a situation provides a commitment to what is real about that situation. Each such reality commitment is a version of a commitment to truth.

What we mean by "real" is what we need to posit conceptually in order to be realistic, that is, in order to function successfully to survive, to achieve ends, and to arrive at workable understandings of the situations we are in.

(Here's a short and simple review of "Philosophy in the Flesh." This one is more involved.)

Prayers are urged for a most worthy recipient

I'm not at all into praying, but will make an exception today.

Someone dearly beloved to me is facing a difficult challenge. And even though I don't believe that God or any other higher power exists -- hey, there's a slight chance she/he/it does and can help my friend.

Who is the University of Oregon football team that's playing for the national championship this afternoon.

A simple loving, compassionate, heartfelt prayer is all that's needed. Like...

May the blessed Oregon Ducks stomp the unholy crap out of the despicable Auburn Tigers, and may Auburn's Cam Newton & Nick Fairley have the worst stinking game of their football lives. Amen.

This is virtually a state holiday here in Oregon. My wife and I went shopping in Eugene Saturday (home of the University of Oregon). At the Fifth Street Mall, Laurel noticed that a sign said "closing at 4 pm Monday."

Not being a football fan, she wondered if the mall was doing some remodeling. "No," I told her, "The game starts at 5:30 pm, so probably they realized that hardly anybody in Eugene would either be working or shopping around then."

Such is the holy status of football in Oregon on this sacred BCS Championship day. May the best dressed team win.

Religions (and RSSB) should come with a guarantee

If a product lets buyers down, consumer advocates -- along with plain consumers -- jump into aggrieved action. Sometimes excessively.

I'm amazed that Consumer Reports, a magazine I love and have subscribed to for as long I can remember, still isn't recommending purchase of the iPhone 4 because of a minor antenna reception problem that really wasn't that big of a deal. However, it was a defect that Consumer Reports felt should have been fixed by Apple before the iPhone 4 was released.

This makes me wonder: Wouldn't it be great if religions came with a guarantee that salvation, enlightenment, or whatever, will be produced as promised to those who buy-in to the faith?

And if the spiritual goods aren't delivered on time and in working order, it'd also be wonderful if those who joined the religion after being lured by a fraudulent bait and switch deal could be compensated for the time, money, and devotion they contributed.

The problem, of course, is that Consumer Reports is able to put products through a rigorous testing process. If they don't work properly, such is fairly easy to determine.

With religosity, mysticism, and spirituality though, the purveyors of organized products (religions, cults, meditation systems, etc.) usually promise vague benefits and/or a vague delivery time -- such as after the user's death, at which point it's damn difficult to complain about the product.

Today I enjoyed reading an entertaining and insightful comment from Sunny Jay on a post that I wrote last month. The comment resonated with me and stimulated these thoughts, as Sunny Jay and I both have been members of the same India-based religious group, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

Here's the comment, with a few typos fixed:

Hello everybody. All this reading is very entertaining, to say the least, and I have laughed alot but on a serious note...Walking away from RSSB was really psychologically damaging for me. For a long time there was much guilt and remnants of it still swirl in my mind.

Part of me wants to believe but let's face it...I have never met one satsangi [RSSB initiate] who has ever crossed the threshold of the third eye...all this talk in Science of the Soul and other books about riddhis and siddhis and spiritual powers and astral travelling to other regions. Has anyone actually had these experiences? Was all that stuff made up?

I have my own stories about RSSB too and how I got in and what made me leave....but I tend to find it is the promise of a spiritual experience that lures one into asking for initiation. The chance to "die whilst living" and see the "macrocosm in the microcosm". Walt Disney should make a movie about it. Can you imagine the special effects?!

Then I read about this thing called Kundalini. Most satsangis don't utter the "K" word at Haynes Park [RSSB center in England]. It's taboo...dark side stuff...like Lord Vader. What are your thoughts on that? Can anyone testify to a Kundalini awakening besides David Blaine? Probably not.

After being initiated for 4 years and practicing day in day out with all my gusto...saw nothing. I spoke to satsangis about it. The response I got was a joke. Anyway, it's reached the point where I scour the Earth for the Lament Configuration Box from the movie Hellraiser in order to unlock the realms of pleasure and pain...am I on the right path?

I'd say so, Sunny Jay.

(Never having watched a Hellraiser movie, I had to head to Wikipedia to learn what a Lament Configuration Box was. It sounds pretty neat, aside from the possibly undesirable fact that unlocking it leads to hell. Still, you'll end up somewhere interesting, which is more than can be said for the RSSB meditation you practiced.)

Now, I can anticipate the reaction of true believers to this comment. Which would be along the lines of what fervent devotees of any faith say to those who have tried that particular religious product, found it wanting, and moved on to sample other wares.

You weren't committed enough.
You didn't have enough love/devotion/energy/other quality.
You needed to stay with the faith longer.
You got the results you needed, not the results you wanted.
You didn't surrender your ego.
You wanted results, so you didn't get them.
You can't expect to sense the ineffable.
You forgot that God works in mysterious ways.

Well, I suppose the purveyor of any consumer product could come up with similar sorts of excuses. But they wouldn't go over any better than they did with Sunny Jay and me.

Sure, maybe that TV you bought which never showed a picture or sound will start working one day. Maybe.

And maybe God, in his/her/its unfathomable fashion, has a plan for you: to spend $1,000 on a new television and then sit in front of it for the next five, ten, or twenty years, staring at a blank screen. Maybe.

I just believe that when you're promised X if you get Y, and X doesn't materialize -- not only for you, but for everybody you talk to who got Y -- that's persuasive evidence that Y is defective and isn't worth keeping anymore.

The self as illusion

For a long time I wanted to find my "true self." Then I got all enthused about calling off the search.

The Buddhist notion of neither-this-nor-that fascinates me. Something else. None of the above. Think outside the box. Even more, blow the fucking box to smithereens.

Searching. Finding. Real self. False self. God. Devil. Masters. Disciples. Wisdom. Ignorance. Good. Bad. Right. Wrong.

More and more, I have the sense that It is something else entirely. By “It” I mean the root, the core, the kernel, the center that we’re all spinning around and never finding.

Now, though, I'm beginning to suspect that there's no root, no core, no kernel, no center to me. I've never been able to locate one. And neuroscience has come to a pretty firm conclusion that such couldn't exist.

Here's what Kevin Nelson, M.D., has to say in his book, "The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist's Search for the God Experience."

Through localizing brain function, the behavioral neurologists had shown that who we think we are is a complicated and rather fragile synthetic process orchestrated by our brains. When something interferes with that process our reality and sense of self quickly and dramatically fragment.

While most of us view our "self" as concrete and coherent, akin to, say, Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of the Mona Lisa, to a neurologist the self is more like Picasso's cubist portrait of Dora Maar, his lover and muse: a fragmented amalgam of fractured planes.

Or, if you prefer Impressionism, our view of the self is a little like a water lily by Monet: at a glance it appears coherent, but up close you realize its harmonious appearance is an illusion, that the object you saw at a distance is actually a bundle of discrete and unconnected parts.

This conception of self is both disturbing and exhilarating.

I don't particularly like the idea that I don't exist -- at least, not in the way that I've become accustomed to thinking was true. Meaning, the entity that I feel myself to be, "Brian," isn't as distinctly solid and real as my sensing of myself from the inside of me.

But there's a positive side to being a shape-shifting, insubstantial, ever-changing conglomeration: like Janis Joplin sang, freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. If self is an illusion, I've got no self that'll be lost when I die, or any reason to worry that my self might have an unpleasant afterlife if I don't embrace some form of religiosity now.

Thanks to a Twitter tweet by someone I follow, this morning I came across a Nour Foundation video of a panel discussion on "To Be or Not to Be: The Self as Illusion."

I watched the first 10:30, most of which featured Thomas Metzinger -- who wrote "The Ego Tunnel," a book I gave 5 stars to (that link contains pointers to five other posts I wrote about The Ego Tunnel).

Metzinger says that the brain/mind is not an entity, but a process.  He responds to the moderator's introductory comment about the self being an illusion in an interesting fashion. The big question, he says, is "who has all these states of consciousness?"

In other words (so far as I understand Metzinger), there is no one at home inside our heads to realize the self is an illusion.

At about the 8:30 mark, Metzinger speaks about our ancestors' primal urge that can be expressed as You Must Not Die! Of course, that powerful emotion would have been felt wordlessly by virtually all of the species which preceded the evolution of Homo sapiens.

Now, though, the cerebral cortex enables us to anticipate and articulate the prospect of our death even when we're not in mortal danger. This, says Metzinger, creates a chasm between we feel should not happen, our dying, and what we know will happen, our dying. We humans are the first animal to understand that we will die.

And thus springs one of the roots of religion. A tap root, in my opinion, because it supports and nourishes a central tenet of virtually every faith: continued existence of the self, or soul, in an afterlife.

This is a comforting belief.

However, comfort isn't a reliable guide to reality. Such is the quandary of the human condition -- when it is fitting to embrace what makes us feel good, even if it isn't true, and when truth should be faced head-on no matter the emotional consequences.

Take a look at Best of Raptitude 2010

As noted before, I enjoy the Raptitude blog. Blogger David has listed his top 10 posts of last year, so that makes it easy to hit the 2010 Raptitude highlights.

"Die on Purpose" is intriguing. Excerpt:

I think it’s really helpful to forget you exist, and often. It sounds impossible, but it can be done. Here’s an exercise I do sometimes to achieve that perspective:

Wherever I am, whatever location I am in, I picture the situation exactly as it would be if I wasn’t there. I just watch it like it’s a movie, and the people still in the scene are the actors. Or maybe there’s nobody around at all, it’s just an empty corner of the world sharing a moment with itself. Whatever the scene, it feels like I’m watching it remotely from some far-off theater. It’s all still happening, but I’m not there.

Life lesson from a Zen flute master

I gave myself John Daido Loori's "The Zen of Creativity" for Christmas (also bought an extra copy to give to some friends who are artistic types).

This morning I came across a story in the book about a Zen flute master that appealed to me. Here's how Loori tells it:

When Watazumi Doso came to visit Zen Mountain Monastery, I gave him a tour of the grounds. We came across a plumber who was working on our new bathhouse. Cast-iron piping lay outside the building.

Doso playfully picked up a three-foot-long piece and began to play it as though it was a shakuhachi flute. Although the pipe had no holes in it, he was able to create a surprisingly wide range of sounds and a haunting melody.

Doso gave a concert at the Zen Center of Los Angeles and soon after the performance started, an LAPD helicopter flew into the area and hovered overhead. TUM! TUM! TUM! TUM! Doso's flute immediately picked up the rhythm and developed a counterpoint.

An infant cried. Doso's flute responded. A car drove by at high speed. The flute whizzed with it. Doso's concert included the totality of all the sounds that were happening around us. He blended, merged, answered everything he heard, incorporating it into his experience and expression, rather than being distracted by it.

...Doso didn't use the highly polished lacquered and well-tuned flutes that were common in the Japanese shakuhachi tradition. His flute was much less processed and far closer to its natural state. The inside of the section he used still revealed the bamboo guts.

Most people, even experienced masters, considered that type of instrument unplayable. Doso's music proved that wrong. HIs playing always touched the very core of one's being.

Sometimes the sound had a tremendous strength, like the driving force of a cascading waterfall. Sometimes it roared like thunder. At other times it was gentle and sweet like birdsong at sunrise. It always seemed to reach me, but not through my ears: It entered my body through the base of my spine, moved upward, and spread through my being.

I gave Doso a listen myself, thanks to some MySpace sharing of his music. At first I thought, "what the heck..." But then the sounds grew on me. They're raw, real, from the depths of breath.

An old friend of mine plays the shakuhachi. I've been told that it's a difficult instrument to even get sound out of, much less play melodically.

Muslims shouldn't be afraid of modernity

Every religion is crazy in its own peculiar ways. It's difficult for me to decide which deserves to win the Looniest of Them All award.

Christianity deserves consideration for its "born of a virgin" and "walked on water" weirdnesses (among others). Judaism's rituals and requirements are beyond strange (such as the Sabbath Feature on our oven). Hindus are into all kinds of bizarre stuff, including Tantric sexual fluid transactions.

But whenever I read about how scared Muslims are of the modern world, I'm struck by how dangerously crazy this attitude is.

After all, Islam is the controlling force in many important nations. When a large portion of humanity is stuck in a fondness for the past, it's tough for Muslim cultures to make much progress.

This leaves them as outliers in our increasingly global civilization, cursing the Western world for leaving behind an Islamic fantasy of how great things were in the Middle Ages when organized religion ruled the roost.

I bemoaned Muslim's fear of modernity on my other blog back in 2004, when I told the tale of how I labored hard and long on a paper that was submitted to a "Traditionalist" journal whose editor was a fan of Fritjof Schuon, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and other bashers of modern times -- when God took a well-deserved back seat to science.

And the more I learned about Traditionalism, the more I became wary of this approach to religion and spirituality (the intellectually voracious can read an extensive critique by a Muslim here; I agree with his basic points about Traditionalism, but disagree that Islam is the one true religion). For example, Traditionalists have a strange fondness for medieval times, when the Church ruled every aspect of society.

Since Traditionalism has a close connection to Sufism, and thus to Islam, any philosophy that longs for the good old days when fundamentalist religion ruled the cultural roost has to be looked at with a wary eye after 9/11/2001. Especially after 11/2/2004, because the American religious right would exchange hearty high-fives with most of the tenets of Traditionalism—leaving aside the minor detail of whether Islam or Christianity is the traditional religion that we bow down to.

Anyway, the essay wasn’t at all what “Sacred Web” wanted, as I ended up being much more supportive of science than the editor had anticipated. That was rejection #1. I then sent a shorter version of the essay off to “Science and Spirit” magazine, figuring that my title was right up their alley. That was rejection #2.

So now I say, screw this one at a time rejection business, I’ll put the piece up on the Internet for everyone in the whole world to ignore simultaneously.

Heck, I'll do it again, six years later.
Download Science, Spirit, and the Wisdom of Not-Knowing

I was reminded of this strange Islamic modernity sucks! attitude when I came across an essay by Seyved Hossein Nasr this morning. "We and You -- Let Us Meet in God's Love" was submitted to the Catholic-Muslim Forum held at the Vatican in 2008.
Download We and You -- Let Us Meet in God's Love

It has a warm and fuzzy ecumenical title, and tries to argue that Islam and Christianity have a lot in common, so they should get along. But Nasr lapses into his fear of modernity, which pretty much destroys his thesis that we're all one big happy world family.

There are also significant differences between Islam and Christianity due to their very different encounters with modernism and secularism. Obviously in dealing with Christianity today, we Muslims are not confronted with St Thomas Aquinas, Dante, and the builders of the Cologne Cathedral, however real these dimensions of traditional Western Christianity might still be.

Rather, we face a Christianity that bears the deep wounds of five centuries of battle with forces opposed to religion, from the secular humanism and skepticism of the Renaissance to the materialism associated with the 17th century Scientific Revolution and the subsequent secularization of the cosmos to the rationalism of the Age of Enlightenment, to the historicism and evolutionism of the 19th century to the current post-modern critique of religious texts and the virulent atheistic attacks being made recently in the West against religion as such.

...Of course there are those in the West who claim that the problem is precisely that Islam did not experience in depth modernism and especially the Enlightenment to which Muslims would respond, thank God that this did not happen to us.

Wow.

What must be remembered is that these Dark Ages-adoring thoughts are coming from a moderate Muslim, not an extremist. Nasr longs for the not-so-good old days when a fundamentalist religiosity permeated every aspect of society and culture, preventing the free expression of ideas and open scientific study of nature's laws.

In my "Science, Spirit, and the Wisdom of Not-Knowing" essay, I wrote:

William Quinn, in his book The Only Tradition, discusses what he considers to be the last truly “traditional” culture, medieval Christendom. Maybe I’m missing something, but this description of the times doesn’t strike me as particularly appealing, or even genuinely spiritual:

The cultural norm was to imbue and perceive in the most trivial and seemingly insignificant task a link to the sacred whole, "God’s plan," thus transforming that task into something significant of the great (hieratic) chain of being (and becoming). Barbara Tuchman writes that "Christianity was the matrix of medieval life: even cooking instructions called for boiling an egg ‘during the time you can say a Miserere.’" It governed birth, marriage, and death, sex, and eating, made rules for law and medicine, gave philosophy and scholarship their subject matter.

This bears an uncomfortably close resemblance to the vision of Christian fundamentalists in the United States, who write frequent letters to my local newspaper calling for a return to the “values on which this country was founded” (translation: they want everyone to believe just the way they do, and government should make sure that those beliefs become the law of the land).

I agree, with Wilber, that while modernity has created many problems, it also has brought many benefits: democracy, scientific advances, the end of slavery, freedom of artistic expression. How many readers truly would prefer to live in 12th century France (as a serf, not a noble) rather than 20th century America, Canada, England, or any other modern culture?

Well, Seyyed Hossein Nasr apparently would, along with many -- hopefully not most -- of his fellow Muslims.

Until they decide to join modern times, it's going to be difficult for Islam to fit in with the world as it is, most of which, thankfully, is a lot different from the religion-dominated world backward-looking Muslims reverence.

Don't make resolutions for the New Year -- just live it

When I was in my lengthy religious phase -- three decades plus a few years -- periodically I used to vow to do better.

Meditate more concentratively. Follow the precepts of my faith even more attentively. Love God and his earthly emissary, the guru (the non-Christian equivalent of Jesus) more devotedly.

The start of every New Year was an opportunity for me to rev up my resolution engine. I'd get all enthusiastic about making great spiritual progress through the energetic efforts I was going to put in.

Now, I'm just about at a standstill when it comes to self-improvement vows. Not because I'm perfect; just the opposite.

I'm content with imperfection, both personal and cosmic. Yes, evolution happens. Individuals, species, cultures, and universes live, grow, learn, progress. Yet they also die, shrink, forget, and regress.

It's natural to want to stay on the upward sloping curve of life for as long and often as possible. I'm continually seeking ways to be a bit healthier, happier, wiser, and kinder.

But I no longer view the years, months, days, hours, minutes, and moments I have left as following a track that is destined, or desired, to end up in a certain place. Life feels a lot more like a circular roller coaster, and less like a rail line heading from here to there.

I'm up; I"m down. Then up, then down. There are brief moments of stillness, followed by a rapid free fall and a slower ascent.

No problem.

If I vowed to work hard at eliminating all the down's, I'd be at odds with the nature of, well, nature. And winning that contest is way beyond my abilities. Way beyond anyone's abilities.

Today I spent some pleasant hours outside in our yard, continuing with what began a few months ago as the Tao of Leaf Raking and now has become mostly leaf picking... out of rock crevices, ground cover, brushy branches, still-blooming heather.

I enjoy picking up leaves. Which is good, because our rural western Oregon home has lots of them. I've learned quite a bit from leaves during the twenty years we've lived here. Such as...

They appear on trees in the spring, and they fall off trees in autumn. Whether or not I want them to. Whether or not anyone wants them to.

Near the end of my leaf picking-up stint this afternoon, my chilled (albeit gloved) hands telling me it was about time to get out of the 35 degree weather, I was on my knees -- reaching under a shrub to sweep out a bunch of oak leaves that had blown against the trunk during a windy storm.

Unbidden, a feeling of humble obeisance came over me.

No words or deity were involved. I was simply bowing before reality, before nature. Leaves needed to be picked up. I was picking up leaves. On my hands and knees. Plain and simple.

Resolutions can be part of life. But they aren't really living. I didn't need to vow to pick up those leaves. All I had to do was reach out and grab them.

Happy New Year. Grab it. Or let it grab you. Same difference.