Church of the Churchless

Letting go -- the essence of Zen

Ah, I love the title of this blog post. It sounds so assured, so confident, so Zen-master'ish. Yet I'm not sure if what I wrote is accurate.

No big deal. Because if Zen actually isn't about letting go, we can let go of that notion. And if it is about letting go, then I've hit the Zen nail on the head.

As should be obvious, I'm a big admirer of Zen who doesn't want to put in any serious work toward satori, enlightenment, or whatever it is Zen students aspire to. This makes me a Zen dilettante -- proudly so, because I'm most attracted to the Taoist side of Zen where self-development (or self-de-development) isn't taken all that seriously.

Nonetheless, my all-time favorite Zen book is Hubert Benoit's decidedly serious "The Supreme Doctrine." (My copy was stolen, by me, from the San Jose Public Library in 1969; the book now is published under a different name.)

I've recommended "The Supreme Doctrine" to several people who I thought would love it as much as I do. I was wrong. They found it confusing and difficult to understand, which admittedly it is.

Having written quite a few blog posts about Benoit's book which contained lengthy quotations, I'm going to take a different approach this time. (Type "Hubert Benoit" into the Google Search box in the right sidebar if you want to subject yourself to my previous pseudo-Zen ponderings.)

This morning I re-read the On the Idea of 'Discipline' chapter, liking it even more than the other ten times or so I've read it.

Instead of trying to reflect Benoit's precise arguments about why discipline, as usually understood, is counter-productive in Zen practice, I'll simply talk in my own words about what's stuck in my mind from what I read some twelve hours ago.

In short, it's my title: letting go is the essence of Zen. And since Zen is just another word for life, letting go is the essence of living.

Hmmmm. Seems like another word is needed.

Let's say "living wisely." Or "living authentically." Or maybe best of all: "living contentedly."

Whatever, I think Benoit (a practicing psychoanalyst) was right on in accepting the basic Buddhist assumption that life doesn't have to be as crappy and pain-filled as it often seems to be.

Seems to be. Not "is."

Benoit says that everything is just fine; however, we don't recognize this. So we look for practices, disciplines, dogmas, religions, therapies, and such which promise to assuage our discontent.

However, these things don't work. They can't work.

Why? Because they perpetuate our current condition where we're continually viewing life dualistically: right/wrong, good/bad, happy/sad, higher/lower, better/worse, etc. etc.

Benoit says that seeing self-improvement in this fashion is like two men pulling on the ends of the same rope. Except the two men are both us. For example, if I want to lose weight, I see this as a struggle between the "me" who enjoys eating tasty food and the "me" who wants to be healthily slim.

No matter who comes out on top in this struggle, the tension that comes from clinging to the dualistic psychological rope doesn't go away.

Indeed, every effort to make myself into a preferred version of Me -- wiser, enlightened, more spiritual, virtuous, whatever -- leaves my essential inner condition unchanged, while altering some specifics of my life. I might lose weight, but I'm still faced with a never-ending tension between what is and what (to me) should be.

So Benoit advocates a kind of spiritual non-practice: letting go and basically doing nothing.

Obviously you can't do this all of the time, since everyday life requires making choices, acting on preferred options, and otherwise pulling one way or the other on dualistic "ropes." However, we can experience moments of non-clinging, simply being, relaxing our hold on reality.

Eventually, he says, these letting-go moments prepare the way for a full-blown satori, which Benoit calls "a letting go that lasts."

Benoit offers up a nifty metaphor/analogy that meshes with my recent post, "Know when reality should look fuzzy or sharp." It involves some 1950'ish (when he wrote his book) high technology: the projection of a cinematographic film comprising a projector, a screen, and the luminous cone which connects them.

The projector stands for Zen's No-Mind, source of our consciousness. The luminous beam is our subconscious. The screen is our consciousness.

When the screen is a suitable distance from the projector, images look sharp and distinct. But as the screen is brought closer to the projector, blurriness increases. Eventually there is just bright white light, when the screen is almost touching the projector.

Our letting go of usual understandings thus brings us toward a state of "who knows?" ignorance. As we stop trying to control how life should appear, moments of blooming, buzzing confusion signify that consciousness is allowing subconscious processes to more fully embrace No-Mind.

Have I done justice to Hubert Benoit's discussion of "discipline" in The Supreme Doctrine? No, not at all. Have I made any sense in this blog post? Probably not, not even to me.

Which is as it should be.

Consciousness is the Big Mystery. Nobody knows what it is or how it arises. It's the secular equivalent of God: ineffable, ungraspable, everpresent (so long as we're aware).

When we think we understand what life is all about, we don't. So the saying "let go and let God" makes a certain sense -- so long as we realize that "God" is the Ultimate Question Mark.

Meaning, when we let go we'll have no idea what, if anything, is going to catch us. (Maybe it's letting go.)

 

Know when reality should look fuzzy or sharp

People are strange, and I certainly include moi in this overarching statement. Here's one of the weird things that we do:

Trying our best to make inherently fuzzy aspects of reality all crisp, clear, and coherent, while blurring up inherently sharp facts about the way things are.

Now, I realize that what I've just said is open to challenge. And I'll agree that "What's up with this inherently business?" is an entirely appropriate question. Am I justified in viewing reality in such a black and white (or rather, fuzzy and sharp) manner?

Sure, I answer. It seems obvious that we humans know quite a bit about some things, and we're decidedly ignorant about other things.

The trick is knowing the difference between what is known, and what isn't.

Unfortunately, people often confuse what belongs in each category, believing that truth is firmly in hand when it really is up for grabs, while simultaneously tossing away facts which should be grasped.

Religion is largely to blame for this. But the modern embrace of truthiness also is at fault. Stephen Colbert, who came up with this word, explained it:

Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don't mean the argument over who came up with the word…

It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty. People love the President [George W. Bush] because he's certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don't seem to exist. It's the fact that he's certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?…

Truthiness is 'What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.' It's not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There's not only an emotional quality, but there's a selfish quality.

Recently I was reading about how fuzzy the concept of "life" is.

There's no agreement about what makes something "alive." Is a virus a living entity? It can't exist apart from its host, which it requires for reproduction. Yet some scientists consider viruses to be living organisms, while others don't. Likewise, nanobes currently can't be definitively classified as living, or not-living.

But when people debate the morality of abortion, hard and fast rules about the nature of life are thrown about with undue confidence. Such as, "Life begins at conception." That's a truthiness masquerading as a truth, a fuzzy question costumed as a sharp answer.

However, at least we know that a human being begins as a fertilized egg. When it comes to God, spirit, soul, heaven, afterlife, and other supernatural notions, we're way beyond ordinary fuzziness.

We're in the farthest reaches of woo-woo land. Yet true believers will make amazingly dogmatic assertions about entities which (1) probably don't even exist, and (2) are exceedingly poorly known, even if they do possess some inherent reality.

On the flip side, these same religious true believers (plus their secular counterparts) will ignore evident facts about some well-defined issue, choosing to blur their vision rather than see a truth clearly.

Anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming is an example, as is evolution. Another is the effectiveness of vaccines in preventing disease, death, and disability. The January 15, 2011 issue of New Scientist had an excellent article on this subject, "Irrationality vs. Vaccines: Fighting for Reality."

After discussing how clueless parents mistakenly came to believe that various vaccines were more dangerous than the problems they prevent, science writer Chris Mooney says at the end of his review of three books about the anti-vaccine movement:

This isn't a game anymore. Children are dying out there because of anti-vaccine misinformation and those who act on it. Offit states the matter starkly, referring to "the breakdown of herd immunity in the US at the beginning of the 21st century". It is a phrase that carries with it a terrifying implication: the body count is going to grow.

..."Cognitive relativism", or "truthiness", as US talk-show host Stephen Colbert termed it, "has become the defining intellectual trend of our time", writes Mnookin. The most profound problem underscored by the anti-vaccine movement today is the terrifying implication that there is no longer any truth out there that we can all agree and act on - that in the end, subjectivity wins.

Thanks to the modern media, the internet and the quirky architecture of our minds, writes Mnookin, we live in a world with "increasingly porous boundaries between facts and beliefs, a world in which individualised notions of reality, no matter how bizarre and irrational, are repeatedly validated".

For that, these three books are a wake-up call indeed, and not just regarding vaccine deniers and their threat to public health. Rather, they are a call to arms against the broader phenomenon of tilting against reality, or making up one's own version of it, and clinging to it fiercely despite all evidence and consequences - a condition also referred to as human nature.

Irrationality can be a very dangerous and communicable disease - and we still don't know how to adequately inoculate against it.

Sadly, that's true.

But those of us who are committed to seeing reality as it is, rather than as how we'd like it to be, or believe it to be, can keep on pointing out when fuzzy viewpoints are missing a sharp truth, and also when crisp dogmas are mistakenly embraced rather than a hazy "who knows?"

 

 

 

 

If everything is perfect as it is, so is feeling it isn't

I learned about Vincent Horn, "Buddhist Geek," via one of those marvelous Twitter tweets from someone you follow for a reason long forgotten.

Yet you're happy you do, because now and then they share a link that clues you in to a interesting perspective.

Such as Horn's "The Place of Practice: Integrating Perspectives and Clinging to Nothing." He addresses a question that has often come to my mind as I've pondered non-dual philosophies which claim that everything is absolutely as it should be, just as it is.

(Obviously there's a lot more to nondualism. But if things aren't two -- nondual -- then they're pretty damn close to being one, if not exactly that. And in oneness there's no possiblility of something being other than the unity that it is.)

The Buddhist Geek says:

From one perspective there is absolutely no need to practice. From another perspective, practice is essential. Why is it that both are true, and how do we keep from not deluding ourselves as to which is helpful at any given time?

So, let’s take the first perspective, which we could call the non-dual perspective. In any given moment we may really get—or “understand,” or “know,” or “experience”—that this is it. “This is it” simply means that this moment is already as complete, full, & sacred as it will ever be, no matter the content or intensity of the experience.

...But the fact is, we don’t always get that. It may always be available as a potential understanding, or as some non-dual teachers propose may always be the case (though I don’t like to speculate on what is ALWAYS the case). But if it isn’t the case in this moment, then the other perspective, that “practice is essential” must be honored.

By the end of his short essay I think Horn comes to about the same conclusion that popped into my own psyche when I read about his two perspectives. Namely, that if everything is fine just as it is, then feeling this isn't fine also is fine.

As is engaging in spiritual practices aimed at bringing about a realization that there's no need to engage in any spiritual practice. Hey, if this wasn't fine, a whole lot of gurus, masters, meditation teachers, and the like would be out of jobs.

Though that would be fine too.

Overcoming the fear of non-existence

So far I've written 1,228 posts for this blog. Like a proud parent, I'm tempted to say that I don't have a favorite, that I love all of my writings equally.

But that wouldn't be true. Some posts resonate with me more than others, because they spring from a deeper meaning-place.

Notably, "Death and the primal fear of non-existence." The day I wrote it, back in 2006, I didn't have much time for blogging. For me, that post was unusually short and to the point.

Which was how it had to be.

There isn't anything complex or subtle about the fear I described. It's scarier than death, because for most people dying isn't considered to be "The End," but the beginning of "Next Chapter."

Since, I've mused about the fear of non-existence here, here, and here (plus, I'm sure, elsewhere).

Today, Chris left a comment on the last-linked "here," saying:

Brian, five years on I wonder if you ever conquered your fear of non existence? Perhaps you found some particular words of wisdom of perhaps you have put it to the back of your mind?

A penny for your thoughts. Oh, and thanks for creating this site. It has been a useful outlet.

Excellent question. Yet a tough one for me to answer -- especially succinctly. But I'll do my best to respond in the same style I used in my original post on this subject: pithily and honestly.

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

Chris, I'm still afraid of dying and never again existing in any conscious form.

A few weeks ago I had a dream, or barely conscious sleep state, where I remember waking up abruptly, scared shitless at the prospect (actually, almost 100% certainty) of this life being my one and only opportunity of existing.

Yet this fear isn't as strong as it was before. I'm thankful for that.

I don't know the reason.

My suspicion is that facing my fear of non-existence, of writing about it, of talking with other people about it, of reading about how other people deal with it -- all of this has resulted in some shifts within my psyche's unconscious, where the brain's real work takes place outside of our awareness.

So I don't worry much any more about trying to rationally come to grips with what it means to die, forever. Animals that we are, we humans naturally are afraid of death. If our ancestors hadn't fought for life, we wouldn't have come out winners in the Evolution Game.

However, I do believe that us Homo sapiens are capable of implanting some notions in our unconscious which can ameliorate instinctual fears. After being startled by a snake, I can tell myself "it isn't poisonous." And "it's good for our garden."

SImilarly, I do my best to think about non-existence in ways which are both truthful, so far as I can tell, and emotionally pleasing to me. I guess you could call these my philosophical comfort blanket -- what I cling to when the Dead and Gone Forever heebie-jeebies send a chill up my spine.

For me, the warmest, coziest, most reassuring thought-blankie is this: there's really no "me."

If I don't exist in the fashion that I have assumed to be true for most of my life, then not-existing after I die takes on a different meaning. This is hard to explain in words, because what I'm getting at is as much emotional as thoughtful.

It's sort of akin to worrying about losing a precious ring that you've always believed was a family heirloom, then having an older relative tell you, "It's not really worth much; we had it appraised a long time ago."

Chris, if you haven't done this already, I encourage you to delve into what I look upon as "neuroscientific Buddhism." Or, "Buddhist neuroscience."

Namely, writers and researchers who are trying to make sense of the apparently solid fact that the self (or soul) doesn't exist as a separate, distinct, independent entity. Currently I'm reading, and enjoying, "Living as a River" -- a book I've blogged about recently.

I think the approach Bodhipaksa, the author, takes is right on for dealing with a fear of non-existence. HIs subtitle is fearlessness in the face of change. Well, what's a bigger change than death?

Fear, of anything, usually doesn't disappear suddenly.

The Six Element Practice described in "Living as a River" is traditional Buddhism, yet pleasingly updated with modern scientific insights and stripped of unnecessary religious dogma (such as rebirth).

Again, it seems to be that the best way to deal with a fear of not-existing is to undertand -- really understand, intutively, emotionally, in your gut -- that you have never existed as the self that is afraid of non-existence.

I used to enjoy Rumi a lot. I still do, but in a different way. I can read Rumi quotes about non-existence and view them in a much more scientific and less spiritual fashion now.

Here's my favorite Rumi passage. Understand these words, and a lot is understood.

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

Leonard Pitts is wrong about atheism being "fundamentalist"

Glancing at the title of a Leonard Pitts column in our local newspaper yesterday, I had a feeling that my emotional blood pressure soon would be surging.

My premonition was correct.

Parts of "Belief in what cannot be proved requires humility" (originally called "Atheists, I believe in God because I do") irritated me mightily -- because Pitts failed to grasp some basic facts about religious belief and atheism that get harped on regularly here at the Church of the Churchless.

Fact one: Not believing in God isn't a fundamentalist belief system, just as not believing in Santa Claus isn't.

Atheism isn't a religion, nor is albino a suntan. Recognizing the absence of evidence for God isn't equivalent to believing that God exists, no matter the absence of evidence. This is basic logic and how the scientific method almost always works.

Yet Pitts wrote:

Indeed, I find myself struck by the similarity between certain atheists and fundamentalists. Meaning the ones who can always tell you exactly what’s on God’s mind and even what He had for breakfast this morning. God did this, they say, because He didn’t like those people, did that because that country ticked Him off. Funnily enough, God’s likes and dislikes always seem to exactly match theirs.

There is a certain hubris in them that is mirrored in the declaration that God does not exist because our telescopes cannot see Him nor our equations prove Him. It was only a minute ago, as the universe measures time, that our kind was scared of fire, so our faith in our tools to now definitively disprove God is as arrogant as it is amusing.

No, it's wrong to equate religious fundamentalists and skeptics. Very few atheists or agnostics are absolutely certain that God does not exist. Rather, they're confident in their conclusion that demonstrative evidence for God doesn't exist -- a big difference.

So Pitts sets up a straw man argument by misrepresenting the position of atheists.

As was noted in a previous blog post, calling not-believing a belief is like saying that someone who doesn't believe in the existence of unicorns is a member of the "No Unicorns" religion.

I don't see any sign of an elephant in our house. Am I a fundamentalist believer in the absence of elephants at our Oregon address, or do I simply fail to observe any evidence of an elephant presence?

Fact two: Everybody has feelings, but only some people feel that God exists.

Leonard Pitts says that God is not proven, but felt. Well, that's fine. Such is the nature of subjective feelings. I can't prove that I love my wife, the taste of strawberries, or debunking shaky arguments for the existence of God. But I do.

So, to quote Pitts:

Deal with it.

Once again, Pitts does his straw man thing. He says that writer Marilynne Robinson "took issue with the notion that because what is felt cannot be quantified, it is somehow invalid."

Who has that notion?

I've read lots of science books. I spent two years completing all of the coursework for a Ph.D. in Systems Science. I subscribe to Scientific American and New Scientist, looking at every issue.

I have never, not once, come across a scientist -- or a philosopher, or anyone, for that matter -- who claims that feelings are invalid because they are non-quantifiable. Atheists, agnostics, and religious skeptics have just as rich an emotional, artistic, and feeling life as true believers do.

We simply feel differently about God. My intuition speaks to me just as clearly as Pitts' inner voice does. Where he hears whispers of divinity I sense a naturalistic cosmos.

It doesn't bother me at all if Pitts, or any other religiously inclined person, wants to feel that God exists. I also have no objection to anyone feeling that rap is the highest form of contemporary musicality.

Feel away, fellow humans. But don't expect me to consider that your feelings are anything more than subjective sensations.

Leonard Pitts ends his column with:

One of my favorite gospel songs says, “Over my head, I hear music in the air. There must be a God somewhere.”

I believe that. If that belief offends someone, I’m sorry.

But not really.

Once more, Pitts plays straw man make-believe. I know a lot of atheists and agnostics. None are offended by someone having a private belief in God. What bothers them, and me, is when a subjective feeling is elevated to a supposedly objective truth.

Christianity, like the other major world religions, isn't founded on "God is just a feeling." Rather, the faithful are convinced that their personal feelings are reflections of God's actual existence.

When I enjoy the taste of a strawberry, I don't claim that everybody should feel the way I do, or they will go to culinary hell. Yet religions do this, elevating what is personal into something that's supposedly universal.

This is wrong. Leonard Pitts can feel as strongly as he wants that God exists, but feelings don't determine objective reality. Anyway, that's how I feel.

Thinking and meditation go hand in hand

For a long time I thought that I shouldn't think during my meditation time.

I'd been taught to either (1) repeat a mantra, thereby keeping thoughts away, or (2) rest in a thoughtless state where the meditator gazes into inner darkness and listens to inner silence, waiting for divine light/sound to appear.

Now, though, I've expanded my meditative horizons, questioning assumptions that I used to accept, well, unquestioningly. Such as, whether it's really desirable to stop thinking while meditating.

Here's my pithy current answer: no. But it's up to the meditator. That's my answer, nobody else's.

I think (there I go again!) it comes down to one's goals.

These are going to be founded on a vision of what life in general, and meditation in particular, are all about. Some religions, mystical practices, and spiritual paths believe that we humans have (or are) a soul that's trapped by our bodies and minds.

So the goal of meditation is to release our pure consciousness from the muck and mire of materiality and mentality, things and thoughts. Detachment from this world supposedly enables the soul to become attached to God, or ethereal divinity.

However, there's another basic way of looking at what meditation is all about: becoming aware that there's no enduring separate entity which can be released from anything.

No soul, no pure consciousness, no Atman that yearns to be united with Brahman. There's only stuff happening, Thoughts are part of that stuff. As is not-thinking and doing other stuff.

So from this perspective it doesn't really matter whether we think during meditation or become thoughtless. If we continue to believe "I'm distinct and separate," the illusion of Enduring Me carries on -- bringing with it the distress of viewing ourselves and life as at odds to some degree or another.

Buddhism is big on this second way of looking at the world. Yet lots of people, me certainly included until recently, feel that thinking is a no-no (or at least to be discouraged) in Buddhist meditation.

In Bodhispaksa's engaging book, "Living as a River," which is based on the Buddhist Six Element Practice tradition, he dispels this notion.

In contemporary insight meditation, when thoughts and images come up, they are to be observed without interference and allowed to pass. The impermanence of thoughts and images is noted, but thoughts and images are not actively cultivated.

...In the Six Element Practice, in contrast to Goenka-style vipassana [insight meditation], we do in fact consciously cultivate the arising of thoughts and images. In other words, we reflect and imagine.

...All this, however, goes against a certain idea of mindfulness, which is that mindfulness involves being aware only of what arises in our present-moment experience, such as the sensations presented to our bodies and any thoughts and feelings that arise naturally.

In the Buddhist tradition, however, the mind is considered to be a sixth sense, so that when we reflect on our internal organs or on the solidity of the earth we are simply paying attention to the present-moment experience of our visual and tactile imagination. Mindfulness can include these things.

...As part of the Six Element Practice, for example, we may repeat the phrase, "This is not me; this is not mine; I am not this." A verse such as this is, as it were, dropped into the mind.

Often when teaching students a technique like this I'll suggest that they imagine they're dropping a stone into a deep well. The verse is released into the depths of the mind, plunging into the waters of the subconscious. Then we simply "listen" for a response.

The verbal thought is simply the first step in a process of reflection that begins in conscious awareness, affects our unconscious mind, and then returns to consciousness in the form of sensations, images, etc.

This makes a lot of scientific sense.

It's well known that most of our brain activity occurs behind the curtain of conscious awareness. So dropping thoughts into the well of our unconscious increases the raw material available for processing into insights, transformations, even "enlightenment."

Thinking about what appears to be real and unreal is going to guide the mind in the direction of reality. It has to. This is how Einstein said he arrived at the general theory of relativity. If it worked for him, I'm more than willing to give it a try.

Having gone to bed in a deep depression, convinced that a coherent theory was forever beyond his grasp, Einstein suddenly had the solution appear "with infinite precision, and with its underlying unity of size, structure, distance, time, space, slowly falling into place piece by piece...[until] like a giant die making an indelible impress, a huge map of the universe outlined itself in one celar vision."

His insights were subsequently expressed in mathematical and verbal form, but they began on a more visceral level. Again, the conscious mind struggles, and the subconscious delivers. Both parts of the process are crucial to the final insight that arises.

(Here's an interesting Seed Magazine article with a lengthy all caps title: "MANY OF BUDDHISM’S CORE TENETS SIGNIFICANTLY OVERLAP WITH FINDINGS FROM MODERN NEUROLOGY AND NEUROSCIENCE. SO HOW DID BUDDHISM COME CLOSE TO GETTING THE BRAIN RIGHT?")

Last thought before death -- what it says about us

A few nights ago, as I was going to sleep, an idea popped into my mind: "There'll be a moment when I have my last thought before I die. What would I want it to be?"

Intuitively, this struck me as an important question.

That last thought would be infinitely precious, in a way. It'd reflect what I considered to be most important to focus on an instant before earthly existence and I parted company.

(Note: I don't believe in an unearthly existence. And I realize that probably I won't know when my last thought is happening. But there's a good chance I'll realize that I'm at death's door, even if the exact moment I step through is a mystery.)

I ran through several options. None felt right.

I wanted my last thought to be meaningful, not "did I remember to turn the stove off?" I appreciate the final submission on this "last thoughts" discussion thread -- that final joint was awesome -- but I was looking for something with a bit more gravitas.

Before too long three words came to mind. I imagined saying them to myself. Then I envisioned saying them out loud to whoever was with me when I died. In either scenario, they worked for me.

"I love you."

Hope you're not disappointed. But, hey, this is my last thought, so I get to pick it, no matter how clichéd it might seem to anyone else.

Now, our 21st wedding anniversary was yesterday, so love has been on my mind. (Every year I'm grateful that my wife and I got married on St. Patrick's day, because this makes it almost impossible for me to forget our anniversary.)

When I wrote a message on a card for Laurel, which I left next to a bouquet of hand-picked flowers from our garden, I told her about my last thought. When I started writing (actually, printing, as my handwriting is so bad even my wife can't read it) about how I wanted "I love you" to be the final words in my dying brain, tears started flowing.

That told me I had picked a pretty damn right-on last thought.

Emotionally, saying "I love you" as death's darkness faded in seemed absolutely perfect. I've done a lot of good and bad, acted like a saint and a sinner, screwed up and made amends, been a jerk and a decent guy.

But in the end -- and there will be one, for sure -- all of that stuff seemed to fade into insignificance next to "I love you."

I was mainly thinking of my wife with that you. However, when I let my mind run free, images of so many other "you's" appear almost unbidden. They're all included in the final word of my last thought.

You too, you who are reading this blog post, whether or not you're a regular visitor to this here Church of the Churchless. I've gotten so much meaning, satisfaction, and happiness from writing my irreligious musings the past six-plus years, and from reading the comments of other people.

I guess I have an expansive view of love. I love the coffee I'm sipping right now at a downtown Salem coffee house. I love the lighted keys on my MacBook Pro. I love the cheese ravioli that I chowed down before starting to compose this post.

There's no limit to love.

Ultimately -- and why not go there in my last thought? -- I'm talking to the entire cosmos when I say "I love you." Meaning, I don't envision a personal Cosmic You who could hear those words.

No God. No divine consciousness. No savior of humanity. Still, I feel that telling everything in existence "I love you" is entirely appropriate, just as saying "Thank you" is.

But I'm me, nobody else. Everybody is going to have a different way of envisioning his or her last thought. So if you want to share what yours might be, comment away, recognizing that what actually passes through my or your mind at our last moment could be very different from what we expect.

(Shit! Truck! Fuck! I can't believe... are all distinct possibilities, along with countless others.)

Live as a river -- fluid, dynamic, interconnected

I was pretty sure that I was going to like Bodhipaksa's book as soon as I saw the title: "Living as a River." The subtitle was appealing also, Finding Fearlessness in the Face of Change.

Having grown up in Three Rivers, California (which lives up to its name, being at the confluence of three forks of the Kaweah River), I spent a lot of time in my boyhood years swimming, inner-tubing, and otherwise frolicking in the cold snowmelt from the high Sierras.

Me and my friends learned that an untamed mountain river is both a lot of fun and a creature to be respected. When the Kaweah flooded, giant boulders moved. If you got caught in a strong current, you could drown.

Eventually the river and I became good friends.

I learned that rapids which looked scary to tourists and flatlanders were easily navigable, with or without an inner tube, to someone who knew how to read the river -- which path to take in whitewater, what to do in the face of an unexpected waterfall, how to handle a rough rocky ride (feet first, head up).

I've learned the same sorts of lessons after spending many happy days boogie boarding in Hawaii.

Rivers and oceans aren't scary when you become part of the current, or wave. Usually you get hurt only when you hit a rock, reef, or beach. Or when you get stuck (underwater is a particularly bad spot for this).

This morning I read the introduction to Living as a River. It's great, better than anything I can write about it. The author has an appealing non-preachy unreligious Buddhist'y style.

Bodhipaksa generously makes his introduction available on the book's web site. Here's the PDF download.
Download Living As A River Intro

I highlighted lots of passages. These are some which I particularly liked. I'll string them together in a fashion that conveys the book's central themes.

We live in a world marked by constant change and impermanence. The things we love decay and perish. The people we love will pass away, or we ourselves will pass away, leaving them behind.

...We frequently try to find something unchanging and reliable with which to identify, something that acts like a secure island amidst a river of change. Often what we cling to is an ideology, or a religious identity, or a sense of belonging to a group or nation.

This response is one of fear and clinging. We see change around us and we're afraid. And so we try to find something to cling to -- something more permanent and stable than ourselves.

Another strategy we all employ is to imagine that we ourselves are small islands of stability in the river of life. We cling to the idea that we have this "thing" called a self. And we imagine this self to be separate and permanent. We become the thing we cling to.

...The self is, in a simile I'll return to frequently, like an eddy in a stream. It has the appearance of being a separate thing and of having permanence, but in what sense can an eddy be permanent? There's no borderline we can say for sure marks where the eddy stops and the river begins.

...We are not separate from the world around us; we instead exist as the sum total of our relationships with a vast web of interconnected processes.

...Consciousness is not an entity that sits within us, awaiting contact with the outside world; rather it's a series of activities that arise in dependence upon contact with the world.

...I will not be suggesting to you that you do not have a self. I will simply try to demonstrate that the self is not what you take it to be, and that it's our idea of having a definable self we must let go of.

...I'll suggest that we cease clinging to the idea of having a self so we can embrace a life that is spontaneous and flowing, like an athlete "in the zone," with a mind clear, focused, and non-grasping.

...You may think that you, in some sense, existed before your conception and will continue to exist in some form after the death of your body. (Even committed atheists often fall into this kind of thinking, as we'll see later.)

You probably think of yourself as an agent endowed with free will, freely and consciously making choices that steer you through life. That's how we like to think of ourselves. Our ultimate layer of security comes from holding on to a view of ourselves: separate, enduring, self-owning.

...I hope that as a result of engaging with this book you will start to see yourself differently -- start to see yourself, even if just for brief periods, as more fluid and dynamic than you normally think you are. I hope you will start to appreciate yourself as more expansive -- as part of an interconnected whole.

Nicely said. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of Living as a River. Sometimes I'm disappointed after getting excited by a great first chapter, when the rest of a book heads downhill, fast.

I don't think this will happen here. Bodhipaksa says that he resonates with both science and Buddhism. He ignores the difficult-to-believe supernatural side of Buddhist teachings, such as dogmas about past lives and survival of consciousness after death.

This looks like a good book to paddle along with for a while during my pre-meditation reading period. I'm sure I'll be sharing additional ideas from it after more words flow through my psyche.

Looking for "God" in the smallest things

I don't believe in God.

But I'm constantly looking for the Big Guy (actually, for spiritual-erotic reasons I'd prefer that God were a Big Gal, so I'm open to God appearing in any form -- curvaceous, feminine, and gorgeous being my dream divinity).

Just because I've ranted about the evils of religiosity for six and a half years on this here blog doesnt' mean that I'm closed to the notion of a higher power transcending our everyday understanding of reality.

After all, science is continually expanding humankind's knowledge of the cosmos.

In less than a hundred years we've gone from believing that the stars in our Milky Way galaxy comprise the entire universe, to a realization that there are some 100 billion galaxies with an average size about the same as our own.

Current scientific conceptions of a multiverse, in which an infinity of universes could exist, are even more mind-blowing.

So I've got no disagreement with anyone who thinks that ultimate reality must be vastly stranger, wilder, and mysterious than how it appears from our 21st century earthly perspective.

However, I do take issue with religious devotees who would have us ignore what is within our immediate vision, considering the evident here and now to be an impediment to some hypothesized there and then -- heaven, salvation, God-realization.

My guess is that if God exists (blessed be her Hotness), She hasn't divorced herself from the physical universe.

Divine oneness strikes me as being more plausible than twoness or manyness, since scientific study of materiality points toward unified laws of nature that may culminate in a single Theory of Everything.

How do I know this? I don't. That's why I said this is my guess.

But I'm as entitled to my own blue-sky thinking as anyone else is, such as the founders of the world's religions. Lack of demonstrable evidence for the thought-castles we all place in our personal blue skies shows that we're all standing on the same don't know ground.

I just prefer to open my eyes to what is right in front of me, figuring that if more reality is to be found, it'll be connected somehow to everyday experience -- not utterly alien to the small things I'm aware of now.

I look around.

There's my dog, dozing on the rug. A can of Zevia Cola rests near my left hand, fueling my caffeinated blogging. Some squash has just come out of the oven, my wife's contribution to our evening meal.

Yes, small things. Which perhaps contain everything.

Countless mystics, poets, and other worshippers of What is Right in Front of Us have said (or screamed) that we should stop looking for God in distant times and places.

Here! This! Now! Look!

Maybe I'm finally starting to take their advice seriously. Or even better, laughingly. How amazing it would be, how utterly ridiculous, how marvelously absurd, if the grand secret of the cosmos were to be staring back at us through every glance we make at the world.

Yet we don't recognize it. Not an original idea, of course.

Meister Eckhart, for example, famously said, "The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love."

So here we are. And there God is. Together. In the smallest things. As in the biggest things. Yet it seems easier for me to feel my connection with the cosmos through stuff that I can wrap my eyes, skin, nose, ears, and taste buds around.

That's how I visualize my Dream Girl God embracing me: through my here-and-now body/brain, not some ethereal soul or abstracted consciousness. And even if there's no God, attending to the small things that surround me, and indeed are me, feels deliciously divine.

Which reminds me. Time for a glass of wine.

Religious obedience: pros and (mostly) cons

When it comes to the subject of obedience, South Park's Eric Cartman pops naturally into my mind. I'm a big fan of his classic Respect my authoritah! (authority, pronounced au-thor-i-TAH)

For quite a while I used that line a lot with my wife and dog, until I realized that it wasn't having any effect. Still, it worked for Cartman in the scene below. And religions are able to get people to believe it.

(Click on the video to start it playing.)

Chickenlover
Tags: SOUTH
PARKmore...

 

In a synchronistic moment this morning, shortly after I finished reading the Just Following Orders chapter in Margaret Heffernan's "Willful Blindness," I saw that Jon Weiss had left this comment on an earlier post:

I have talked to many Western satsangi's who admit to being deeply divided. On the one hand they have such loving experiences around the guru (esp. at the Dera and the sangat in India). This is felt deeply. I have had that experience as well. It is extraordinarily loving and positive --- so much so many disciples find little to nothing to replace that feeling of love. On the other hand for many there are things they feel deeply uneasy about. Think the reason this blog, and David Lane's RSS Yahoo, is so widely read is that there are many disciples that want to find a way to resolve that tension.

This is an interesting insight. I think the tension Jon speaks of is largely the result of obedience and love pulling in opposite, yet related, directions.

Meaning, when we love someone, we're inclined to do what they want. But when this desire to please edges into blind obedience territory, the positivity of love morphs into something negative that can be decidedly harmful.

Obedience, of course, isn't always founded on love. The guy Cartman pulls over for speeding doesn't stop his car because he loves an (assumed) motorcycle policeman he sees in his rear view mirror. He's afraid of the consequences if he keeps on driving.

In like fashion, religions put the Fear of God into believers when they demand obedience to commandments, rules, rituals, and such.

Jon's comment is referring to disciples ("satsangis") of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) guru, whose headquarters is at the Dera Baba Jaimal Singh religious community in the Punjab, India. For over thirty-five years I was an active RSSB member, so I know whereof I speak when it comes to the obedience-love connection.

As Jon said, devotion to a guru or God can feel wonderful, in much the same way romantic love does.

I've seen disciples staring at the guru in rapt, teary-eyed attention. I've watched them ooh and ah when the guru looked their way. I've heard lengthy conversations after the guru gave a talk where almost every word he spoke, and gesture he made, was excitedly recollected by devotees in a high school crush manner. "Do you remember when he answered that blond lady's question? It was so cool!"

But... (there's always a "but") anything taken to extremes has a down side.

In a religious organization, hierarchy usually rules. This is especially true in a guru-centered group, where the supposedly divine guy or gal at the top has almost unlimited authority, since he or she is considered to be directly connected to God.

There are lots of examples of people doing crazy things because a cult leader commanded it. In the case of Jonestown, over 900 people belonging to the People's Temple committed suicide. Obedience led to death.

In the above-mentioned Just Following Orders chapter, Heffernan writes about psychologist Stanley Milgram's groundbreaking experiments on obedience, which found that people are willing to inflict a lot of harm when told to do so.

Milgram struggled long and hard to understand his own highly disturbing findings. He concluded that when we are part of a group, or an organization, we change our focus.

"Although," he wrote, "a person acting under authority performs actions that seem to violate standards of conscience, it would not be true to say that he loses his moral sense. Instead, it acquires a radically different focus. HIs moral concern now shifts to a consideration of how well he is living up to the expectations that the authority has of him. In wartime, a soldier does not ask whether it is good or bad to bomb a hamlet; he does not experience shame or guilt in the destruction of a village: rather he feels pride or shame depending on how well he has performed the mission assigned to him."

...Milgram concluded that this shift of focus wasn't a personal failing and the problem of obedience wasn't wholly psychological. It was an inescapable aspect of belonging to a group. When the individual is working alone, conscience is brought into play.

But when working within a hierarchy, authority replaces individual conscience. This is inevitable, because otherwise the hierarchy just doesn't work: too many consciences and the advantage of being in a group disappears. Conscience, it seems, doesn't scale.

So here's another way to look at the tension Jon mentioned -- as the inevitable conflict between someone's individual conscience, and the dictates of a group. If the group is religious, led by a must-be-obeyed guru, Pope, master, or other authority figure, the tension can become extreme.

Why?

Because following one's conscience may mean deviating from the group's path. If we can't do this comfortably, that's a sign we've fallen into a form of groupthink. We've surrendered our own way of looking at reality to a religious vision that requires blinders be put on.

A commenter on this blog recently asked what I meant by spiritual independence. Well, this is one aspect of it: feeling free to do what you think is right, rather than what is commanded by an outside authority.

I belong to a political party. But I certainly don't feel like I have to agree with the Democratic party line (assuming there is one; Democrats are notoriously hard to herd). Many devotees of a guru, though, find it extremely difficult to go against a Divine Dictate.

If you can't say "no way; I'm not going there" to some commandment issued by a religious authority figure, you've gone over the edge of the obedience cliff.

Climb back onto the ground of your own conscience, because it's better to risk being ostracized by an overly obedient group than to lose your sense of what's right and wrong.

Behold the glorious mystery of your brain

Traditionally, people have looked outward toward mystery.

For a long time maps of the world had large sections labeled "terra incognita" (unknown land). Now Earth is almost entirely explored, but the vast universe beyond attracts those who are lured by the unknown (witness the popularity of Star Trek and other forms of science fiction).

Religions have capitalized upon our human fascination for mystery. God often is viewed as unknowable, unfathomable, beyond being -- leading apophatic theology and mysticism to emphasize what God is not, rather than what God is.

Searching the (almost) omniscient Google for what I've written about mystery on my blogs, I find the search results span 10 pages.

Mystery and me are old friends. Inspired by my ever-questioning mother, for as long as I can remember I've been drawn to the alluring borderland where we stand on familiar ground and gaze outward into the hazy darkness of... who knows?

Now, though, my looking is trending in a different direction. Well, it'd be more accurate to say in no direction, because my current fascination is with the brain that is me.

(So the title of this post is epistemically inaccurate, the "your" in it actually being identical with "brain," since there is no evidence that the me who is so fascinated by the mystery of my brain is in any way different from what I'm mystified about.)

My meditation area used to be filled with inspirational reading on Buddhism, Zen, Taoism, and various forms of mysticism. Popular books on neuroscience now are more common, along with scientific inquiries into the ultimate nature of physical reality -- which also turns my attention towards Material Me.

I'm still inspired by mystery. I'm still committed to digging as deep into reality as possible before I die. The only difference between my churched and churchless self is what turns me on, inspiration-wise, and where the focus of my truth-excavating is.

What never fails to amaze me is the source of amazement: the amazing human brain.

Our conscious awareness is the small tip of a vast neurological iceberg. Our sense of who we are is terribly restricted, the equivalent of a medieval monk believing that Earth is the end-all and be-all of physical existence.

In his new book, "The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement," David Brooks shares core insights of modern neuroscience and psychology in a style that, so far in my early reading, I find engaging -- though some readers are irritated by.

Over the centuries, zillions of books have been written about how to succeed. But these tales are usually told on the surface level of life.

...This story is told one level down. This success story emphasizes the role of the inner mind -- the unconscious realm of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, character traits, and social norms. This is the realm where character is formed and street smarts grow.

We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few years, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and others have made great strides in understanding the building blocks of human flourishing.

And a core finding of their work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness.

The subconscious parts of the mind are not primitive vestiges that need to be conquered in order to make wise decisions. They are not dark caverns of repressed sexual urges. Instead, the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind -- where most of the decisions and many of the most impressive acts of thinking take place.

...So this intellectual revolution removes the conscious mind from its privileged place at the center of everyday life. It points to a deeper way of flourishing and a different definition of success.

...The conscious mind merely confabulates stories that try to make sense of what the unconscious mind is doing of its own accord.

Yes, indeed. Someone has an intuition, a vision, a sudden sense of what life is all about. They make up a story that explains what happened: Wow! God is speaking to me!

No, most likely their brain, working away behind the curtain of consciousness, produced this seemingly "miraculous" experience.

It seemed to come out of nowhere because the unconscious aspect of the mind is, by definition, not part of our awareness until something produced in the psyche's depths pops to the conscious surface.

So mystery remains, since we can't know how the universe within our skull functions with such astounding complexity, creativity, and connectivity. But with scientific understanding the need for God-stories vanishes.

The brain's mysteries are left as is: mysterious. Wonder and awe remain when imagined myths and theologies depart.

Judgment precedes reason -- in religion and elsewhere

Most of us like to think of ourselves as being reasonable creatures. Our decisions, choices, beliefs, values, morality, philosophy of life, political orientation, and such make great good sense.

It's the other guy who is whacked-out, irrational, out of touch with reality, a nut job. Of course, for him or her, we're the one who has embraced some far-out crazy shit.

How to make sense of all this?

After all, people manage to get around in the world just fine together. Almost always we agree to obey the same traffic laws, stopping on red and going on green. We courteously wait in line at the checkout counter. How is it that we generally seem to agree on the nature of external reality, but have such different inner lives?

That's a big question.

Jonathan Haidt points in the direction of some answers. He's a psychologist who studies the bases of morality and political ideology across cultures. My wife came across an interview with him which she found so interesting, she kept sharing parts of it with me until I decided to read the whole thing myself.

I also liked his thoughts. Though he wasn't speaking explicitly about religious, spiritual, and mystical beliefs, the same principles seem to apply here as in moral and other sorts of decision-making.

Here's his basic thesis, according to the interviewer:

We tend to think of ourselves as arriving at our moral judgments after painstaking rational deliberation, or at least some sort of deliberation anyhow. According to Haidt's model -- which he calls "the social intuitionist model" -- the process is just the reverse. We judge and then we reason. What, then, is the point of reasoning if the judgment has already been made? To convince other people (and also ourselves) that we're right.

Sounds correct to me.

And I'll readily admit that the first time I read this paragraph, I intuitively thought right on. Only later did I do some pondering about why I agree with Haidt -- basically, because of (1) my own personal experience, and (2) its consonance with other writings I've come across on this subject.

Walking across the San Jose State College campus back in 1969, when I was a junior, my girlfriend and I came across a wiry bearded Greek guy standing on his head while wearing a white Speedo. We paused to watch his yoga demonstration, which led us to pick up a flyer about his Christananda ashram.

And the rest is history (part of which I've blogged about in "My strange RSSB initiation story"). I can't recall any point when I consciously set out my reasons for embarking on an almost forty-year path of meditation, other spiritual practices, and devotion to gurus.

This all just felt right at the times. Just as now, it doesn't.

As Haidt says, first I judged that such-and-such was the meaning-of-life direction I wanted to go; then I came up with a bunch of reasons that I could use when someone asked me, "Why do you believe _______?"

In the interview, Haidt talks about an experiment where people are asked how they react to this scenario: A brother and sister have some wine. They decide to have sex. They use two different kinds of contraception but decide to never do it again.

People almost always start out by saying its wrong. Then they start to give reasons... So what's really clear, you can see it in the videotapes of the experiment, is: people give a reason. When that reason is stripped from them, they give another reason. When the new reason is stripped from them, they reach for another reason.

And it's only when they reach deep into their pocket for another reason, and come up empty-handed, that they enter the state we call "moral dumbfounding." Because they fully expect to find reasons. They're surprised when they don't find reasons.

...So it's a cognitive state where you "know" that something is morally wrong, but you can't find reasons to justify your belief. Instead of changing your mind about what's wrong, you just say: "I don't know, I can't explain it. I just know it's wrong."

So the fact that this state exists indicates that people hold beliefs separate from, or with no need of support from, the justifications that they give. Or another way of saying it is that the knowing that something is wrong and the explaining why are completely separate processes.

I used to think that a "spiritual science" was possible. Now I don't, because in science explanations have to support knowings. You can't say "I know..." without adding in "because..."

However, just as with moral judgments, religious believers feel entirely comfortable saying "I don't know; I can't explain it; I just know that ______ is true." Their supposed knowing really is an intuition that may or may not be correct. But since it feels so right, the intuition remains even when spurious reasons supporting it are demolished.

Occasionally I get an email from someone concerned about a loved one who has embraced a cultish belief system. "What can I do?" they ask. I'll offer some advice, yet always end up saying, "There really isn't much you can do to change their mind. This will have to come from them, in their own time."

The interviewer says to Haidt:

So your conclusion is that while we might think that Reason or reasons are playing a big causal role in how we arrive at moral judgments, it's actually our intuitions -- fueled by our emotions -- that are doing most of the work. You say in your paper that reason is the press secretary of the emotions, the ex post facto spin doctor.

Great line, reason is the press secretary of the emotions.

After quite a few years of car-lusting, I've ordered a 2011 Mini Cooper S which is a week or two away from finding its way to Portland, Oregon after being made in Oxford, England. (I'm selling my beloved Burgman 650 scooter; 5% discount if a buyer says "I heard about the bike on Church of the Churchless.")

I can offer up all kinds of reasons for why the Mini makes so much sense for me to buy at this time. But the truth is that one day my psyche urged me to drive to Portland and take a test drive, thirty seconds into which I knew I had to own the car.

Reasons came later, in exactly the same way, forty-two years ago, I knew that yoga and meditation were for me.

This is why I've come to see religiosity and spirituality as Art rather than Science. There's no reason why we have to come up with a reason for liking a certain painting, song, dance style, poem, or other form of artistic expression. If it appeals to us, end of story.

Which means, we can't expect that other people should agree with our religious choices, just as we don't get upset when they prefer to listen to different sorts of music than we enjoy.

Rather strangely, though, reasons tend to be expected for moral and religious judgments, whereas they usually aren't for aesthetic judgments. Go figure (except, this isn't possible.) Haidt says:

As we walk around the world we see many beautiful and ugly things. But we don't deliberate about them. We just see things as beautiful or ugly. My claim is that moral judgment is very much like aesthetic judgment.

In fact, whenever I'm talking with philosophers who are trying to get me to clarify what I'm saying, if I ever feel confused, I just return to aesthetic judgment, and that saves me.

I think whatever is true of aesthetic judgment is true of moral judgment, except that in our moral [and I'd add, religious] judgment we do need to justify, whereas we don't generally ask others for justifications of aesthetic judgments.

...We can tolerate great diversity in our aesthetic beliefs, but we can't tolerate much diversity in our moral beliefs. We tend to split and dislike each other.

That's too bad.

Hopefully we'll reach a point in human history where people look upon someone saying "I love Jesus" or "I love Mohammed" in the same way we look upon them saying "I love rap music" or "I love rhythm and blues."

Of course, for this to happen we'll also have to evolve into an understanding that religious belief is as subjective as musical likings, and it's equally distasteful for anyone to force a religious belief onto someone else as to force a certain musical taste onto them.

(Here's Haidt's web page, if you want to learn more about his ideas.)

Physicists are becoming mystics (sort of)

Unseen dimensions of reality. Trillion year cycles of cosmic birth and rebirth. Laws of nature utterly unlike ours. Mysterious connections between the physical universe and other realms.

These sound like the airy-fairy notions of mystics who have been smoking something stronger than tobacco in their hookas.

But they're all serious hypotheses of modern physics.

Their cosmological implications are described by noted physicist Brian Greene, author of "The Hidden Reality," in a Hovering Universes in Nearby Dimensions chapter I read this morning before meditating.

Inspirational stuff for my churchless non-soul. Having written (plug alert!) a book about mysticism and the new physics back in 1995 -- "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder" -- I've kept up my interest in what science can tell us about The Big Questions of Life.

However, there's a big difference between the 1995 me and the 2011 me: now I'm much more inclined to stick with the science and not infer far-out mystical conclusions from scientific theories.

After all, physics and cosmology are plenty way out there all on their own. If someone is longing for a big dose of blow-your-mind conjectures about the nature of ultimate reality, modern science has the goods.

Here's some Greene quotes from the above-mentioned chapter:

-- "The more precise methods rectified this failing, revealing a string/M-theory universe with ten dimensions of space and one of time, for a total of eleven spacetime dimensions."

-- "Like strings, higher-dimensional branes can be big...To grasp what I mean, picture first a long string, as long as an overhead electric cable that runs as far as the eye can see. Next, picture a large two-brane, like an enormous tablecloth or a gargantuan flag, whose surface extends indefinitely."

-- "If a three-brane is enormous, perhaps infinitely big, the situation changes. A three-brane of this sort would fill the space we occupy, like water filling a huge fish tank."

-- "Space, at least the space we directly inhabit, would be far more corporeal than generally imagined. Space would be a thing, an object, an entity -- a three-brane. As we run and walk, as we live and breathe, we move in and through a three-brane. String theorists call this the braneworld scenario."

-- "Some braneworlds might be much like our own, filled with galaxies, stars and planets, while others might be very different. On one or more of those branes there might be self-aware beings who, like us, once thought that their slice -- their expanse of space -- was the entirety of the cosmos."

-- "In string theory's braneworld scenario, we would now recognize this as a parochial perspective. In the braneworld scenario, our universe is just one of many that populate the Brane Multiverse."

-- "Our reality could be a floating slab in a higher-dimensional expanse, but we'd be permanently imprisoned, unable to venture out and explore the grander cosmos... Another braneworld could be hovering millimeters away, but because light can't travel across the gap, we would never see the slightest hint of its presence."

-- "In a braneworld scenario, then, gravity provides our only means of probing beyond our three-dimensional spatial expanse."

-- "Like particles and strings, branes can surely move through the surrounding environment they inhabit. And so, if the universe we observe and experience is a three-brane, we could very well be gliding through a higher-dimensional spatial expanse."

-- "Perhaps, then, when two branes collide they wipe out whatever structures may have coalesced during either of their histories, from galaxies to planets to people, while setting the stage for a cosmic rebirth."

-- "The essence of this cosmology thus involves worlds that repeatedly cycle through time, generating a new variety of parallel universes called the Cyclic Multiverse."

-- "Steinhardt and his co-workers estimated the time scale for a full cycle of the colliding cosmic tango -- birth, evolution, and death -- and came up with about a trillion years. In this scenario, the universe as we know it would merely be the latest in a temporal series, some of which may have contained intelligent life and the culture they created, but are now long ago extinguished."

-- "In this scenario, all of our contributions and those of any other life-forms our universe supports would be similarly erased."

-- "And if you ask about the beginning of the entire cycle of universes, the answer is simply that there was no such beginning, because the cycles have been repeating for eternity."

-- "The braneworld scenario, and the multiverses to which it gives rise, is one resulting area of investigation with the capacity to profoundly remake our perspective on reality."

Well, that's for sure.

Currently there's no experimental or observational evidence that substantiates the existence of braneworlds. Scientists are searching, though. If gravity is found to subtly leak away beyond our universe, this would point to a higher-dimensional space where it leaked to.

Regardless, I love how physics is coming up with theories that are as "out of the box" as any mind-expanding mystical musings. Even nicer: science has reasonable reasons for its far-out hypotheses, whereas mystics, by and large, don't.

Since love is blind, so is love for God and gurus

Shakespeare may have been the first to say it: "love is blind." Everyone who has fallen in love knows what this means. When we're infatuated with someone, we focus on what we like about them, ignoring their faults.

Speaking from experience (I've been married twice, once for 18 years and currently for almost 21 years, giving me 39 years of marital knowledge), this honeymoon period starts to fade not too long after the "I do's" are said.

Then traits that previously seemed endearing -- he's so wonderfully casual and carefree! -- start to be annoying: why doesn't he put the towel back neatly on the rack?

There are biological reasons for the blindness in early stages of romantic love.

Brain chemicals, notably dopamine, produce a "high" in lovers which isn't all that different from a drug-induced state. We get addicted to being with our beloved; when we're apart, about all we can think about is our next get-together.

A few days ago Amazon delivered a new book to my doorstep, a frequent occurrence. I can't remember how I heard of her (the author, Margaret Heffernan, is a woman, so I'll give the book a feminine persona). But already I'm infatuated.

"Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril" is well-written and clearly argued. Heffernan's theme, so says the inside flap, is:

The biggest threats and dangers we face aren't secret or hidden. They're the ones we overlook... What is it that makes us prefer ignorance? Why, after every major accident and blunder, do we look back and say, How could we have been so blind? Why do some people see more than others? And how can we change?

Since I'm only two chapters into "WIllful Blindness," I don't have all the answers yet. The Love is Blind chapter, which I read this morning, is more about delimiting the problem -- which does have some positive aspects to it.

Indeed, there seems to be some evidence not only that all love is based on illusion -- but that love positively requires illusion in order to endure... Individuals were more satisfied in their relationships when they saw virtues in their partners that their partners did not see in themselves. In other words, idealizing the loved one helped the relationship endure.

Makes sense.

Heffernan goes on to say that "when you love someone, he or she may even start to adapt to your illusion of him or her." That's great. There's a transforming magic to love. Nobody wants to make this disappear through excessive hard-headed analysis.

However, I see a big difference between the everyday sorts of love for a spouse, partner, child, parent, friend or whoever, and a religious love for a God, guru, saint, or other supposedly divine being.

In both cases, intense love is blind.

But the lack of clear vision occurs over a vastly larger territory when religiosity is involved. If a boyfriend or girlfriend is idealized, the smitten lover rarely goes so far as to claim that the beloved is the absolute most wonderful, perfect, and marvelous person in the world.

In his or her eyes, that may be true. Yet when asked whether their evaluation of the beloved is objectively accurate, if he or she really is the best person on the face of the Earth, most people would reply, "No, I guess not. That's just how I feel."

Yet when it comes to God, guru, or some other being to whom divine qualities are attributed, love's blindness often becomes extreme. Zero faults are discerned. Any skepticism about the beloved's perfection is scorned. Shortcomings are ignored or fatuously explained away.

I used to do this myself, so I know whereof I speak. For over thirty-five years I seriously entertained the hypothesis of a "perfect living master," someone who, though human, had no negative qualities despite appearances to the contrary.

So if the master/guru got angry, this was part of an unseen divine plan, not a symptom of human frailty. If he made a mistake, this was a test of the disciple's love and faith.

Heffernan describes some reasons why it is so difficult to break out of this blindness and see clearly. Here she quotes a researcher who is alluding to women who don't recognize that their husbands are child abusers.

For many of the moms I've worked with, their identity is so tied into the role of being a good mother or a good wife that they have very little sense of self. Putting on an identity like a coat becomes very important to them. And they cannot take that coat off, it would leave them too vulnerable.

It is like they have invested themselves in this role and they simply cannot afford to challenge their illusion. It is such an invested process. So when it turns out that it was an illusion, they often feel that they have absolutely nothing left.

Same phenomenon occurs in religious groups. True believers ignore evidence of imperfection in a spiritual leader (think of the many Catholic priests who abused children) because their sense of self is so closely linked with their faith. Who would I be, they think, if I wasn't a member of my religious organization?

Here's another reason for love's blindness:

The chemical processes of our brain that are stimulated by love disable much of our critical thinking about the loved one. Our illusions persist because our brains don't challenge them. Like much neuroscience, this gives a concrete reality to what the poets have always known: love does not judge.

Well, often this is admirable.

But when it comes to someone making claims about the nature of ultimate reality, and universal moral valuations, we should judge them.

Love's blindness can be embraced in romantic relationships. When it comes to religious beliefs which supposedly reflect objective reality, though, clear vision should be our goal.

Keith Moon's spontaneity vs. George Bush's certainty

I don't know whether The New Yorker does this on purpose (probably not), but sometimes an issue has a marvelous juxtaposition of articles that casts a spotlight on a Big Important Question.

Like, how best to live one's life.

After belatedly reading the November 29, 2010 issue, one approach to charting our general life course is to ask, "Would I rather be like Keith Moon or George W. Bush?" Moon was the drummer for the Who. Bush was the president of the United States.

Wildly different professions. Also, wildly different personalities -- which is my focus.

Moon, as befits his last name, was way out there. Bush, solidly down to earth. Moon was highly spontaneous in his drumming. Bush, on the other hand, hardly ever changed course after he made a decision.

Reading James Wood's "The Fun Stuff: my life as Keith Moon" made me realize that while I wouldn't want to die at thirty-two from a drug overdose like Moon did, in other respects his attitude toward music and living is pretty damn appealing to my churchless non-soul.

Some excerpts from this interesting article:

The drummer who was the drums, when I was a boy, was Keith Moon, though he was dead by the time I first heard him. He was the drums not because he was the most technically accomplished of drummers but because his joyous, semaphoring lunacy suggested a man possessed by the antic spirit of drumming. He was pure, irresponsible, restless childishness.

...There is no time-out in his drumming, because there is no time-in. It is all fun stuff. The first principle of Moon's drumming was that drummers do not exist to keep the beat. He did keep the beat, and very well, but he did it by every method except the traditional one.

Drumming is repetition, as is rock music generally, and Moon clearly found repetition dull. So he played the drums like no one else -- and not even like himself. No two bars of Moon's playing ever sound the same; he is in revolt against consistency. Everyone else in the band gets to improvise, so why should the drummer be nothing more than a condemned metronome?

...His merry way of conceding this was his now-famouis remark "I'm the best Keith Moon-style drummer in the world."

...From this exuberance emerges the second great principle of Moon's drumming; namely, that one is always performing, not recording, and that making mistakes is simply part of the locomotion of vitality.

Sure, there are rules in music, as there are rules in life. If Moon had played entirely in accord with his own inner drummer, he never could have been part of one of the greatest rock bands ever.

Likewise, doing whatever, whenever, however we want to will lead us into jail, a mental hospital, or the poor house (maybe all three). But I see Keith Moon as pointing in the direction of a truth that religions don't want us to recognize, because it threatens their existence:

Rules are made to be broken. Living life fully means sometimes going over the edge, because that's where fullness takes us.

A few pages further on in the same issue, there's a book review of George W. Bush's Presidential memoirs. George Packer's article is called "Dead Certain," for good reasons.

Bush has no tolerance for ambiguity; he can't revere his father and, on occasion, want to defy him, or lose charge of his White House for a minute, or allow himself to wonder if Iraq might ultimately fail.

...Here is another feature of the non-decision: once his own belief became known to him, Bush immediately caricatured opposing views and impugned the motives of those who held them.

If there was an honest and legitimate argument on the other side, then the President would have to defend his non-decision, taking it out of the redoubt of personal belief and into the messy emprical realm of contingency and uncertainty.

...During the war years, Bush fell in love with his own resolve, his refusal to waver, and this flaw cost Iraqis and Americans dearly. For him, the war remains "eternally right," a success with unfortunate footnotes.

Each of us has a bit of Keith Moon and George Bush within ourselves.

We seek to find a balance between our spontaneous wild child and our disciplined sober adult. Religiosity, by and large, casts its lot with the sort of steadiness, unchangingness, and certitude that Moon disdained and Bush embraced.

Day by day, moment by moment, we can choose which aspect to cultivate. All I can say is that I'm drawn to Keith Moon's archetypal manic energy much more than George Bush's "stay the course" steadfastness.

Have a look and listen. See if you feel the same. This is Moon on an isolated drum track.

 

And here he is with his fellow rockers on the classic "Who Are You?"