Church of the Churchless

Comments on Gurinder Singh's "earthquake" letter to Japan

Since Gurinder Singh Dhillon is the guru of India's Radha Soami Satsang Beas, and is considered to be "God in human form" by devotees, perhaps it's presumptuous of me to comment on a letter he wrote to disciples in Japan following the disastrous earthquake and tsunami there.

But what the heck!

I'll gamble that if God exists, and if Gurinder Singh is God's representative here on Earth (two big "if's"), the Supreme Being enjoys commentary on his missives to humanity.

The letter can be read in PDF form:
Download Gurinder Singh message to Japan

Copying and pasting the text into this blog post resulted in a garbled PDF file mess, so I'll simply quote a few passages that seemed to deserve some commenting.

"We pray to the Lord that the worst is over and life for so many people can return to some semblance of normalcy."

This shows how an Eastern spirituality can sound an awful lot like a Western religion. It isn't true that "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." Some Indian mystics view God as almost exactly like Christianity does: granting favors in response to prayers.

To me, this is ridiculous.

If God is in control of the world, then God allowed the 9.0 earthquake to happen. What sense is there in praying to the Big Guy Upstairs who was responsible for the disaster to now ameliorate it? This seems akin to a battered wife begging her husband to be nice after he beat her up.

"Our life in this world is short and uncertain. We need to stay ever vigilant and keep focused on the real purpose of life; to regain our conscious contact, through our meditation, with the Shabd [spirit} within."

Well, I can't disagree with the first sentence. But though I used to agree with the sentiments expressed in the second, they now sound strange to me.

Gurinder Singh is saying to disciples in Japan, many of whom probably are still engaged in getting their lives back in order after the earthquake/tsunami, that they should be focused on putting in 2 1/2 hours of meditation every day -- not on helping to rebuild their homes, community, and nation.

I realize that this world is considered to be the realm of the "Negative Power" in the Sant Mat teachings followed by Radha Soami Satsang Beas. Supposedly we humans are enmeshed behind the veil of karma, maya, illusion. Returning to a realm of pure spirit is the only way out.

But this has come to feel deeply selfish and self-centered to me. There's no mention in Gurinder Singh's letter of relief donations being sent to Japan, nor of the necessity for Japanese disciples to help disaster victims.

"It is our meditation alone that will be of any real help to us, nothing else provides any lasting benefit. In the face of these recent events, please continue your spiritual practice with a renewed sense of purpose and commitment."

Again, no mention of helping others. Just sit on your meditation cushion, close your eyes, ignore the physical world, and try to elevate your soul to a spiritual region where earthquakes and tsunamis don't happen.

OK. Good luck with that.

Where's the compassion, though, for those who are suffering through earthly problems and need a non-divine shoulder to lean on? A real shoulder, a physical shoulder: food, shelter, medical supplies.

It seems to me that until we are decent human beings, filled with concern for those less fortunate than us, it's premature to envision ourselves as worthy of godliness.

Jiddu Krishnamurti leaves me lukewarm

Some books leave me cold -- turned off, bored, irritated. Other books get me hot -- excited, enthused, pleasured. Then there's books I find lukewarm, like Jiddu Krishnamurti's "Freedom from the Known."

I thought I'd like it more than I did, knowing that J. Krishnamurti was a spiritual iconoclast who decried all forms of organized religiosity. The Amazon reviews of this short 124 page book were almost all positive.

One reader's endorsement got me to click the "buy" button.

I've read (and re-read) about 15 of K's books. This is the single best, most concise, most thorough of the them all, in my humble opinion. I bought 20 copies of it and gave them all to friends, family, co-workers, and some of my students (I teach at a college). I probably will buy 20 more (at least) of this book to give to others.

But maybe I should have paid more Amazon review attention to this J. Krishnamurti skeptic.

After finishing "Freedom from the Known," I agree with this guy that Krishnamurti sounds like one of those anti-gurus who, notwithstanding a lot of don't believe what I say talk, sure ends up sounding like he's promoting his vision of Ultimate Truth.

Still, I resonated with Krishnamurti's bashing of dogma, gurus, and holy books. That's what left me with a mildly positive reaction to him.

For centuries we have been spoon-fed by our teachers, by our authorities, by our books, by our saints. We say, 'Tell me all about it -- what lies beyond the hills and the mountains and the earth?' and we are satisfied with their descriptions, which means that we live on words and our life is shallow and empty.

We are second-hand people...We are the result of all kinds of influences and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves; nothing original, pristine, clear.

OK, that makes sense. I'm all for spiritual independence. Heck, since I started this here Church of the Churchless in 2004 that's been my blog's tagline. 

It bothered me, though, that Krishnamurti doesn't simply say, "This is what I've experienced; take that for what it's worth, which may be nothing." Now, fans of his teachings would probably argue that this is what he says.

In a sense, that's true.

So if we completely reject, not intellectually but actually, all so-called spiritual authority, all ceremonies, rituals and dogmas, it means that we stand alone and are already in conflict with society; we cease to be respectable human beings. A respectable human being cannot possibly come near to that infinite, immeasurable reality.

This is what bothered me about "Freedom from the Known." Krishnamurti believes that it's possible to experience things as they are, not as how they seem.

When he speaks of "that infinite, immeasurable reality," it's clear that this is the reality J. Krishnamurti has experienced, and he seeks to tell us -- as best he can -- how what can't be described can be brought within the awareness of other people.

Thus Krishnamurti strikes me as a sort of Zen master. If he didn't have anything at all to teach, why would he write so many books? And why would there be a repository of his writings online?

Zen masters are authorities. Like J. Krishnamurti, they just claim not to be. But their actions belie their words. There's nothing wrong with this. We all are hypocrites to some extent, because it isn't possible for us to be completely consistent.

Meaning, we humans are divided beings.

Our conscious awareness is just the tip of a vast unconscious iceberg where most of the brain's neurological goings-on takes place. Modern neuroscience knows this. And to his credit, sometimes J. Krishnamurti sounds like he does too.

Now, when I build an image about you or about anything, I am able to watch that image, so there is the image and the observer of the image. I see someone, say, with a red shirt on and my immediate reaction is that I like it or I don't like it.

The like or dislike is the result of my culture, my training, my associations, my inclinations, my acquired and inherited characteristics. It is from that centre that I observe and make my judgement, and thus the observer is separate from the thing he observes.

I would have liked "Freedom from the Known" more if Krishnamurti had left it at that. Each of us views reality through our own personal lens. All we can do is be as aware as possible of how we're looking upon things, accepting that other people will see things in their own fashion.

Indeed, in one passage he says exactly that:

Meditation is to be aware of every thought and every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong but just to watch it and move with it.

But in the next sentences Krishnamurti veers into his own form of absolutism.

In that watching you will begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence. Silence put together by thought is stagnation, is dead, but the silence that comes when thought has understood its own beginning, the nature of itself, understood how all thought is never free but always old -- this silence is meditation in which the meditator is entirely absent, for the mind has emptied itself of the past.

Well, that'd be a good trick if anyone could do it. And stay out of a mental hospital. Krishnamurti is fooling himself, and us, when he says that the mind can empty itself of the past.

It simply isn't possible to erase the "hard drive" of the brain without either being dead, or in a comatose vegetative state. Those like Krishnamurti who claim to be able to enter into a state of pure awareness where things are seen exactly as they are (whatever this means; a bee, bat, or dog each sees things very differently) -- they're deluding themselves.

Have you ever experimented with looking at an objective thing like a tree without any of the associations, any of the knowledge you have acquired about it, without any prejudice, any judgement, any words forming a screen between you and the tree and preventing you from seeing it as it actually is?

No, Jiddu, I haven't.

And while you may have experimented with this while you were alive, you never were able to see anything "as it actually is." Because there's no such thing as "actually is."

Human consciousness is a filter of reality.

This is a undisputed neuroscientific fact, well known even in the 20th century, Krishnamurti's time. So I give him credit for being deeply skeptical of religion. I just wish he had been more skeptical of his own ability to see reality as it supposedly "actually is."

Life is plenty good without God

"This is good enough, plenty good enough."

That's what went through my mind as I was digesting one of those magical experiences which many people attribute to God. Good enough meant no need to add anything divine to what nature has wrought.

I was walking along Maui's Kapalua Coastal Trail late in the day. No one else was around as I moved off a paved path onto a dirt stretch of the trail that wound across a rocky volcanic headland.

The sun was setting in front of me. The sea was calm. Until I saw a tell-tale spray of water. Whale! It was late in the year to spot one. February and March are peak whale-watching months, though they're around until mid-May or so.

Then the whale breached, leaping part way out of the water, coming down with a big splash. Just once. I didn't see it again.

Yeah, it was magical. There I was, all by myself, companioned only with the vista before me, bird sounds, and the wind whistling by.

I was alone. The whale seemed to be alone. The barely visible trail meandered toward cliffs which drop into the sea. I was struck by how life is made of moments which lead... nowhere.

Nowhere we can tell, I mean. Life is full of surprises.

Whales unexpectedly jump out of the ocean. What's around the next bend of time is impossible to completely predict -- including when our personal string of moments will reach their end.

Yet, that's enough. Plenty good enough.

To be able to experience whatever we have, are, and will. There's nothing special about any particular moment; they all are unmiraculous miracles. Wherever you are right now is as full of unmagical magic as my Maui whale-sighting moment was.

As I often do, I said "thank you" before turning away from the channel between Maui and Molokai. Those words weren't addressed to God. Or to the whale. Or to anybody/anything in particular. They were aimed at Everything. The cosmos. Existence. My capacity for awareness.


Returning to Napili Bay, I saw that one of those marvelous Maui weddings was taking place on a beachfront rock. This couple clearly was enjoying a special moment. Aside from some tourist'y onlookers like me, the only people with them were a guitar-strumming minister and two photographer-types.

Simple is good. Natural is good. These newlyweds had Napili Bay for their "church." It looked plenty good enough to me.

(Today Mike Williams shared an interesting comment on another post about his own almost-miraculous nature moment. His involved a hawk that looked like an eagle, not a whale. Check it out.)

Texas governor calls for prayer to end drought

Well, good luck Texas. Your governor, Rick Perry, has decided that the way to solve the state's exceptional drought is with three days of prayer for rain.

Suggestion: it would have made a lot more sense for Governor Perry to call for three days (or better, three weeks) of study by Texas citizens into the nature of global climate change, which is causing climate extremes to become more common.

Climate is defined not simply as average temperature and precipitation but also by the type, frequency and intensity of weather events. Human-induced climate change has the potential to alter the prevalence and severity of extremes such as heat waves, cold waves, storms, floods and droughts. Though predicting changes in these types of events under a changing climate is difficult, understanding vulnerabilities to such changes is a critical part of estimating vulnerabilities and future climate change impacts on human health, society and the environment.

But science takes time and effort to understand. Religion is easy. All you need is blind faith.

I have to wonder, though: if God is in charge of everything, then He sent Texas the drought. So why would you want to ask the Big Guy who caused the problem to solve it?

Simple truth: our brains are us

Last night I had an all-too-familiar experience:

Sitting back and listening to a discussion, pondering the deeper meaning of what was being said, jumping in with some comments that were So Absolutely Correct they deserve to be capitalized -- and then seeing looks of what the #$%! is Brian talking about?, after which the conversation went on its merry way, barely missing a step notwithstanding that my brilliant remarks should have made people pause to digest their awesomeness.

Oh, well, often a prophet is recognized only inside his own head.

But if he has a blog, this allows him to have a second chance at pursuing the So Absolutely Correct acclaim that eluded him the first time. And to find some quotes from a respected authority that express in a different way what he was trying to say.

In brief: Brains R Us.

The monthly Salon discussion group that my wife and I founded quite a few years ago had started to talk about memories. Why do we remember certain things and forget other things? How is it possible to pay more attention to what's happening? Like when you're introduced to someone and instantly "forget" her name -- because you never really heard it.

Listening to the conversation, I began to focus as much on the grammar of what was being said as on the content. "We can help the brain..." "I'd like to know how my brain..." "When my brain does..."

Eventually there was a brief break in the back and forth. (We're a talkative group.)

I said, "Yes, it's amazing how the brain works. But there's something even more amazing that we've been missing. Each of us is our brain. I've been hearing people talk as if they were some sort of disembodied self who is separate and distinct from the brain. Neuroscience, though, says that we are the brain; there's no difference between the brain and us."

To me, this is an earthshaking realization, something I've been trying to come to grips with for quite a while. For the other members of the discussion group, though, I could tell that what I'd said was a minimal mental tremor.

Nobody had much of a reaction. My comments were shrugged off. Talk turned in a different direction.

Well, I still find the notion of Brains R Us to be deeply fascinating. It gets to the core of who we are. If we don't understand our own nature, how confident can we be in making pronouncements and rendering opinions about the outside world?

Religions say that we are an immaterial soul. Nobody in our discussion group is very religious, yet from the way people were speaking I could tell that everyone intuited that the brain was something different from the "self."

I ended my observations about Brains R Us with a brief description of the article about free will in New Scientist that I talked about in a previous post.

"Even if sometime in the future scientists can prove that what we do is totally determined by physical brain processes, people will still believe they're free to do what they want. This shows how powerful the illusion of a immaterial self is."

Here's what Alan Watts has to say about this stuff in his "The Way of Zen." Maybe if Watts had been by my side last night, chiming in with his unique way of looking upon reality, my fellow conversers would have been more impressed with my own comments.

To put it less poetically -- human experience is determined as much by the nature of the mind and the structure of its senses as by the external objects whose presence the mind reveals.

Men feel themselves to be victims or puppets of their experience because they separate "themselves" from their minds, thinking that the nature of the mind-body is something involuntarily thrust upon "them."

...Thence it appears that the entire sense of subjective isolation, of being the one who was "given" a mind and to whom experience happens, is an illusion of bad semantics -- the hypnotic suggestion of repeated wrong thinking. For there is no "myself" apart from the mind-body which gives structure to my experience.

It is likewise ridiculous to talk of this mind-body as something which was passively and involuntarily "given" a certain structure. It is that structure, and before the structure arose there was no mind-body.

Our problem is that the power of thought enables us to construct symbols of things apart from the things themselves. This includes the ability to make a symbol, an idea of ourselves apart from ourselves. Because the idea is so much more comprehensible than the reality, the symbol so much more stable than the fact, we learn to identify ourselves with our idea of ourselves.

Hence, the subjective feeling of a "self" which "has" a mind, of an inwardly isolated subject to whom experiences involuntarily happen.

My further descent (or ascent) into strangeness

My newest passion -- to Strange Up Salem (Oregon) -- nicely harmonizes with this here blog's churchless theme of spiritual independence. So you're invited to peruse the Strange Up blog post I wrote today.

At the risk of sounding like a phone sex line... I know what you want. You’re hungry for it. You’re hot for it. You’ve gotten tantalizing glimpses of what you lust for, but it’s been frustratingly out of reach.

Not God. Not religion. Not enlightenment. Strangeness.

Along that line, during the past few days I've been amazed to see myself turning from Facebook-apathetic to a Facebook "whore" who will do anything (almost) for likes on my Strange Up Salem page.

That's why I put the like button in the right column. Click it! I'm an old man, and getting older all the time. I want to get to a hundred "likes" before I die. Give me that. Well, after that a thousand. Then ten thousand. Then...a jillion trillion!

My desires are limitless. But you can start to fulfill one of them with a "like."

What does "going inside" in meditation really mean?

I'm a long-time daily meditator. I did the closed-eyes introspecting thing almost every morning for over forty years. During that time my practice was focused on "going inside."

Inside what?

Good question, one which I never gave much thought to during my true-believing spiritual phase. The guru I followed used those words going inside a lot, so I assumed they meant something.

Now it seems to me that reality doesn't have an inside and an outside.

I've given up the goal of concentrating on the interior of my cranium, which many meditators believe leads to an experience of wholly other-worldly phenomena -- divine lights and sounds, that sort of thing.

Over on the Yahoo RadhaSoami Studies Group (I used to be a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas), I came across a posting called "How deep inside your self can you go." It starts out by conveying the standard dogma of what it means to go inside.

How deep within can you go is the fundamental question to all who do meditation. It means how deep have you gone. To what level have you transcended your mind from your body. Do you know your own Soul. or after years of trying you can only guess!

When we ask these simple questions the forum wall goes mute! Why? It is because no one ventures that deep within them self. And no one knows how deep anyone can go. There is no way of knowing even with intuition how deep a person has achieved and how much a person has uncovered at all. WE cannot tell from any outside means who has and who has not.

Well, I have several disagreements with what's been said here.

First, it isn't true that "all who do meditation" seek to go deep inside their own self or consciousness, transcending the body.

Buddhist meditation usually involves paying attention to one's body and/or the outside world. Following the breath, either by mindfully observing inbreaths and outbreaths, or counting breaths, is a core Buddhist meditative practice.

Second, the soul is a hypothesis of only certain religions and spiritual philosophies. Most Buddhists and Taoists don't believe in a disembodied soul -- an immaterial drop of consciousness, or whatever, that is separate and distinct from our physical nature.

Third, the author of this piece assumes that it is possible to "go inside" even though he/she admits there's no way of knowing whether anyone has been able to do this. How could there be, if the deepest inside of us is totally transcendent from the outside?

The notion of going inside is strongly dualistic. As noted above, it presumes that some part of us is capable of experiencing a level of reality that is utterly detached from the physical body and material world.

Neuroscience tells us that there is no distinction between "inside" and "outside" in human consciousness. Meaning, we have no direct contact with reality. All of our experiencing occurs through the brain, which filters, processes, and otherwise manipulates raw sensory perceptions in complex unconscious ways.

So the idea that it's possible to detach one's consciousness from the brain is just that: an idea. And ideas are produced by the brain.

I like how Alan Watts looks upon our human situation in his book,"The Wisdom of Insecurity."

For among the things that give man pleasure are relations with other human beings -- conversation, eating together, singing, dancing, having children, and cooperation in work which "many hands make light."

Indeed, one of the highest pleasures is to be more or less unconscious of one's own existence, to be absorbed in interesting sights, sounds, places, and people. Conversely, one of the greatest pains is to be self-conscious, to feel unabsorbed and cut off from the community and the surrounding world.

...The meaning of freedom can never be grasped by the divided mind. If I feel separate from my experience, and from the world, freedom will seem to be the extent to which I can push the world around, and fate the extent to which the world pushes me around.

But to the whole mind there is no contrast of "I" and the world. There is just one process acting, and it does everything that happens. It raises my little finger and it creates earthquakes. Or, if you want to put it that way, I raise my little finger and also make earthquakes. No one fates and no one is being fated.

...For the mind must be interested or absorbed in something, just as a mirror must always be reflecting something. When it is not trying to be interested in itself -- as if a mirror would reflect itself -- it must be interested or absorbed in other people and things.

There is no problem of how to love. We love. We are love, and the only problem is the direction of love, whether it is to go straight out like sunlight, or to try to turn back on itself like a "candle under a bushel."

I'm certainly no Christian, but I think this supposed saying of Jesus contains quite a bit of wisdom. Our "enlightenment," whatever that may mean, is to be directed outward -- toward other people and the world.

We shouldn't hide away within ourselves, which isn't even possible, because there is no "within" and no "without." It's all one. Whatever the heck it is.

Free will may be an illusion, but it feels real

Over the years, and decades, I've had lots of intense discussions with other people about free will.

Partly this is because my first book about physics and mysticism had a chapter called "Laws of cause and effect govern lower levels of creation." Then my second book, "Life is Fair," argued in a different fashion that karma rules the universe, and karma is basically a spiritualized form of cause and effect.

My view of reality is much different now. I don't agree with myself about a lot of stuff that used to make sense to me, but doesn't from my current perspective.

I'm still fascinated by the notion of free will, though.

So I was excited to see that the most recent issue of New Scientist had an article called "The free will delusion." Here's some excerpts, some of which refer to a thought experiment described in a short video that you can watch here.

Neuroscientists increasingly describe our behaviour as the result of a chain of cause-and-effect, in which one physical brain state or pattern of neural activity inexorably leads to the next, culminating in a particular action or decision. With little space for free choice in this chain of causation, the conscious, deliberating self seems to be a fiction.

From this perspective, all the real action is occurring at the level of synapses and neurotransmitters - putting us a lot closer to that deterministic world of 2500 than most people think.

For now most of us are content to believe that we have control over our own lives, but what would happen if we lost our faith in free will?

...People whose belief in free will was challenged were, on average, less altruistic than the other group. The researchers also found that priming people with anti-free will statements made them behave more aggressively towards strangers, as measured by how much chilli sauce they added to a dish destined to be eaten by someone who had expressed a dislike of hot foods

...When Stillman and colleagues asked supervisors to rate the work of their employees, those with a greater belief in their own free will were generally rated as performing better than those with weaker beliefs.

...All the evidence indicates that our sense of free will is deeply ingrained. In 1998, the International Social Survey Programme asked around 40,000 people from 34 countries: "Do we make our own fate?" More than 70 per cent answered in the affirmative. And people don't just believe they have free will, they also believe they have more of it than others.

...Alfred Mele, a philosopher at Florida State University, suggests that when scientists talk about the brain and free will, they need to tread carefully. "Neuroscientists often talk as if our conception of free will depends on having non-physical minds or souls," says Mele, and as modern neuroscience pretty much rules these out, free will seems to fall too.

But this needn't follow. As Nahmias's studies show, belief in free will doesn't depend on having a soul, but on feeling in control of "your" actions. So long as the citizens of 2500 do not lose that perception, the reality of determinism should have little effect on their behaviour. And if the recent studies prove anything, it's that this feeling of controlling our own destiny is very robust.

Well, it should be.

Neuroscientists understand that we humans aren't capable of knowing how our brain is working behind the conscious scenes. An intention pops into our awareness and we think, "Ah, this is what I want to do."

So our direct experience is of free will, just as we intuitively believe that we have (or are) a "self" separate and distinct from the physical body. It's sort of like no matter how well we cognize that the earth's rotation makes the sun appear to move through the sky, it still seems to us that the sun rises and sets while the earth stands still.

Personally, I can't understand how our will could be "free."

How could this be? What does free even mean? Completely unaffected by outside influences? This isn't possible, given what is known about the laws of nature, heredity, how the brain works, culture, and our social nature.

I think the closing conclusion in the excerpts above that I quoted from the New Scientist article gets it about right. If I view myself as someone who can control "my" actions, then I'll feel like I've got free will (even though I don't).

But if I recognize that I'm part of a marvelous interconnected web of relationships and exchanges of energy with entities both living (such as my friends and relatives) and insentient (such as the sun and earth's atmosphere), then I won't regard myself as being isolated from the effects of influences beyond my skin.

 

Yes, certainly hell is dead. Along with heaven.

When the new issue of TIME magazine arrived a few days ago, my wife noted the cover story blurb -- "What if there's no Hell?" -- and said, I can't understand how anybody can believe in hell.

My reply to her: I can't understand how anybody can believe in Christianity, yet lots of people do.

Well, actually I do understand, because I've also believed weird spiritual stuff that now seems untrue to me. So I was speaking from my current churchless perspective.

For many years I entertained a belief that the only way back to God was to become a disciple of a "perfect living guru," so if hell is being separated from God, then I guess I was a believer in a sort of Christian'ish damnation: some are saved, and some aren't; if you haven't chosen to get on the Salvation Train, tough luck, because you're going to be left at the Bad Karma station.

Still, Christianity's hell is stranger than the maya of Eastern religions. Unquenchable fire. Torment. Damnation for eternity. That's truly hellish.

So I was pleased to read Jon Meacham's "Is Hell dead?" and learn that Rob Bell, an evangelical pastor, is urging Christians to adopt I don't know as a core tenet of their faith. Here's how the cover story starts out:

As part of a series on peacemaking, in late 2007, Pastor Rob Bell's Mars Hill Bible Church put on an art exhibit about the search for peace in a broken world. It was just the kind of avant-garde project that had helped power Mars Hill's growth (the Michigan church attracts 7,000 people each Sunday) as a nontraditional congregation that emphasizes discussion rather than dogmatic teaching. An artist in the show had included a quotation from Mohandas Gandhi. Hardly a controversial touch, one would have thought. But one would have been wrong.

A visitor to the exhibit had stuck a note next to the Gandhi quotation: "Reality check: He's in hell." Bell was struck.

Really? he recalls thinking.

Gandhi's in hell?

He is?

We have confirmation of this?

Somebody knows this?

Without a doubt?

And that somebody decided to take on the responsibility of letting the rest of us know?

So begins Bell's controversial new best seller, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.

And here's a few more excerpts:

Bell insists he is only raising the possibility that theological rigidity — and thus a faith of exclusion — is a dangerous thing. He believes in Jesus' atonement; he says he is just unclear on whether the redemption promised in Christian tradition is limited to those who meet the tests of the church. It is a case for living with mystery rather than demanding certitude.

...Belief in Jesus, he says, should lead human beings to work for the good of this world. What comes next has to wait. "When we get to what happens when we die, we don't have any video footage," says Bell. "So let's at least be honest that we are speculating, because we are."

Fundamentalists are irked at Bell. For good reason: if the existence of hell is uncertain, then why isn't heaven also merely a speculation? (A 1997 TIME cover story addressed this very question.)

Going further, how about Jesus' resurrection? And his being the Son of God? Heck, why not question the very existence of God? Isn't God as mysterious, uncertain, and speculative as hell?

I say, absolutely.

If that sounds, well, absolutist, that's how I intended my "absolutely." Uncertainty when it comes to the nature of ultimate reality is the only thing we can be certain of.

So it's great that more Christians are joining the Uncertain Club. Welcome! Us members enjoy not knowing what happens after death. That keeps us focused on living life, now.

(If you're not certain that my uncertain view of certainty is correct, read my blog posts on this subject here, here, here, here, and here.)

If we're an alien computer simulation, could we ever know this?

Religions turn me off. Science turns me on.

And in the science books I read, the notion that we could be living as artificial intelligences within a computer simulation keeps popping up. I'm fascinated by this possibility (see previous blog posts here and here).

I've finished physicist Brian Greene's new book, "The Hidden Reality." He talks about simulated universes in a Universes, Computers, and Mathematical Reality chapter.

My interest here is in those who would be drawn by the purity of electrical impulses to program simulated environments populated by simulated beings that would exist within a computer's hardware; instead of C-3PO or Data, think Sims or Second Life, but with inhabitants who have self-aware and responsive minds.

The history of technological innovation suggests that iteration by iteration, the simulations would gain verisimilitude, allowing the physical and experimental characteristics of the artificial worlds to reach convincing levels of nuance and realism.

Whoever was running a given simulation would decide whether the simulated beings knew that they existed within a computer; simulated humans who surmised that their world was an elaborate computer program might find themselves taken away by simulated technicians in white coats and confined to simulated locked wards. But probably the vast majority of simulated beings would consider the possibility that they're in a computer simulation too silly to warrant attention.

Ah, not me. So I could be blogging on dangerous ground here.

Will my alien creators be disturbed to learn that I'm so close to understanding I'm a simulation? Could there be negative corrective consequences in store for me? Or as is more likely, am I thinking exactly the way that my programmers intended -- getting close to the truth but never quite penetrating the illusion?

(Along this line, Greene suggests that whoever is running this simulation likely enjoys colorful characters and wants to keep them around. So spicing up your life to make it more interesting to the Simulator would be a key to longevity. This implies, though, that Charlie Sheen and Lady Gaga should live into their 100's, which I doubt will happen.)

In any computer simulation, programming errors probably will creep in. Greene says that rounding errors and other approximations which permeate mathematical equations could accumulate over time, yielding inconsistencies.

After reading this, it struck me that maybe this is why the Simulator included religion in our reality. Miracles, supernatural phenomena, and such could be the programming glitches which cause things to appear out of the ordinary.

To keep us simulated beings from catching on, the Simulator has most people believe in God. Then those anomalies are explained away as manifestations of divinity rather than understood as what they are: computer malfunctions.

I also had another insight that could be taking me dangerously close to "Terminate! Terminate!" territory. (If my simulated brain is wiped clean as I sleep tonight, you'll know that my supposed massive stroke actually was programmed by an irritated Simulator.)

Our simulated quantum physicists have learned that particles, and hence physical reality, only seem to take on a definite non-probabilistic character when an observation is made. Scientists are mystified by how consciousness appears to be so intimately intertwined with measurements of matter and energy.

But I've figured out what's going on, with the help of these passages from Brian Greene, which come after his conclusion that "the collective computational capacity of the human species could be achieved with a run of less than two minutes on an earth-sized computer."

To simulate not just individual minds but also their interactions among themselves and with an evolving environment, the computational load would grow orders of magnitude larger. But a sophisticated simulation could cut computational corners with minimal impact on quality.

Simulated humans on a simulated earth won't be bothered if the computer simulates only things lying within the cosmic horizon. We can't see beyond that range, so the computer can safely ignore it.

More boldly, the simulation might simulate stars beyond the sun only during simulated nights, and then only when the simulated local weather resulted in clear skies... A sufficiently well-structured program would keep track of the mental states and intentions of its simulated inhabitants, and so would anticipate, and appropriately respond to, any impending stargazing.

The same goes for simulating cells, molecules, and atoms. For the most part, they'd be necessary only for simulated specialists of one scientific persuasion or another, and then only when such specialists were in the act of studying these exotic realms.

A computationally cheaper replica of familiar reality that adjusts the simulation's degree of detail on an as-needed basis would be adequate.

Exactly.

This is why I spend so much time whipping my head around as quickly as possible to see if I can catch the Simulator creating the world behind me before it bursts into existence.

That keeps my chiropractor happy, but so far I've been unable to get definitive evidence of how the detail of our universe's simulation is manipulated to match what is being observed by conscious (simulated) observers.

However, it's obvious to my newly alien-enlightened mind that the so-called observer created reality in quantum physics can be traced back to the programming of the alien Simulator -- who doesn't have enough computer power to simulate everything in our universe all of the time, so he/she/it only brings stuff into existence when a conscious simulated entity is observing something.

I'm on to you, Simulator. Of course, as noted above, you probably know that. Damn! There's no way out of your illusion! Except, maybe, to take the red pill.

Religion is a joke which some take seriously

If you've followed my musings on this blog since I started it in November 2004 -- and shame on you, you churchless sinner, if you haven't! -- I can see why you might think that I've mellowed out, anti-religion wise.

Indeed, it's true that my most rabid rants against religiosity were written in the early Church of the Churchless years. Now I'm more inclined to ignore dogmas than to foam at the mouth about how ridiculous they are.

In short, I don't take religions as seriously as I used to.

What irritates me the most are the effects of fundamentalism and blind faith -- such as prejudice against gays because the Bible supposedly says that homosexuality is an abomination.

(Of course, the Bible also says that slavery is fine, so it's absurd that Christians selectively pick and choose their scripturally-based morality.)

Religion is a joke. Yet since billions of people take it seriously, I do too.

Every day countless atrocities and injustices are committed in the name of an imaginary divinity. Until the world is rid of make-believe gods, those of us who worship at the altar of reality have to be cognizant of the dangers lurking in the faith-based shadows.

Laughter, though, is an entirely appropriate response to true believers who prance about pompously, proclaiming how superior they are because of their special relationship with some invisible supernatural entity.

Mental hospitals are filled with people who harbor similar delusions. However, when a delusion is shared widely, cultures call it "religion" and offer up a free pass against accusations of insanity.

The ridiculousness of religion can be seen more clearly through the lenses of the many parody religions.

With some parody religions, only ex-members of the specific group being parodied may understand it or be interested in it. Other parody religions are aimed at highlighting deficiencies in particular pro-religious arguments — the thinking being that if a given argument can also be used to support a clear parody, then the original argument is clearly flawed (an example of this is the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which parodies the equal time argument employed by intelligent design creationism).

Several religions that are classified as parody religions have a number of relatively serious followers who embrace the perceived absurdity of these religions as spiritually significant, a decidedy post-modern approach to religion. For instance, in Discordianism, it may be hard to tell if even these "serious" followers are not just taking part in an even bigger joke. This joke, in turn, may be part of a greater path to enlightenment, and so on ad infinitum.

Before coming across this Wikipedia article, I'd never heard of Discordianism. Naturally my first stop to learn more about it was another Wikipedia article.

Discordianism is a "Ha Ha, Only Serious" 'joke', using humor to subversively spread what its members regard as a valid philosophy. To keep said beliefs from becoming dangerous fanaticism, they rely on self-subverting Dada-Zen humor, with varying degrees of success. It is regarded as a joke religion, though to what degree is disputed.

It has been likened to Zen, based on similarities with absurdist interpretations of the Rinzai school. Discordianism is centered on the idea that chaos is all that there is, and that disorder and order are both illusions that are imposed on chaos. These are referred to, respectively, as the "Eristic" and "Aneristic" illusions. Discordianism recognizes the positive aspects of chaos, discord, and dissent as valid and desirable qualities, in contrast with most religions, which idealize harmony and order.

Not surprisingly, the home page of the Discordian Society doesn't offer much evident help in understanding what Discordianism is all about. I was met with "There is no definition" and "As you learn more you will understand less."

Delving on, I learned (but didn't understand) that Robert Anton Wilson is a saint of Discordianism, and apparently the author of Principia Discordia.

Reading a few pages in the unholy scripture of Discordianism, I liked what I saw. Heck, what's not to like about these opening paragraphs:

You hold in your hands one the Great Books of our century fnord.

Some Great Books are recognized at once with a fusillade of critical huzzahs and gonfolons, like Joyce's Ulysses. Others appear almost furtively and are only discovered 50 years later, like Moby Dick or Mendel's great essay on genetics. The Principia Discordia entered our space-time continuum almost as unobtrusively as a cat-burglar creeping over a windowsill.

In 1968, virtually nobody had heard of this wonderful book. In 1970, hundreds of people coast to coast were talking about it and asking the identity of the mysterious author, Malaclypse the Younger. Rumors swept across the continent, from New York to Los Angeles, from Seattle to St. Joe. Malaclypse was actually Alan Watts, one heard. No, said another legend -- the Principia was actually the work of the Sufi Order. A third, very intriguing myth held that Malaclypse was a pen-name for Richard M. Nixon, who had allegedly composed the Principia during a few moments of lucidity. I enjoyed each of these yarns and did my part to help spread them. I was also careful never to contradict the occasional rumors that I had actually written the whole thing myself during an acid trip.

Wanting to learn (but not understand) the ultimate secret of the cosmos as quickly as possible, I clicked on the final chapter in the table of contents: Salvation. Hey, sounds good to me.

The human race will begin solving it's problems on the day that it ceases taking itself so seriously.

Life lessons from a neuroscience discussion

As noted in my previous post about two of my favorite books on neuroscience, a few nights ago my wife and I had four other people over for an interesting discussion about what modern brain research has to say about the human condition.

Each of us took a turn summarizing what we'd read (book or article) about a neuroscientific topic. Then questions were asked and topics debated. Here's some recollections and impressions from the evening.

The brain is a bunch of meat.

That's obvious, but we humans often fail to grasp that our feelings, perceptions, memories, thoughts, dreams, intuitions, and such all are the result of biological goings-on within the brain.

One member of our group explained what a researcher has learned about memory. It was pretty technical, so I can't remember the details of what he said (appropriately, I guess). I just recall the disconnect I felt between the emotional tone of some cherished memory from my childhood, and the dryly scientific facts about chemical neurotransmitters, electrical impulses, etc.

This was a general theme that carried through much of our three hour-plus discussion. Our subjective experience of the world seems like this, while science tells us that the objective reality of how the brain functions is different.

For example, I talked about the "transparency" of how our individual ego tunnels are constructed.

Evolution hasn't made us aware of the filtering/processing within the brain that leads us to have a decidedly subjective view of the world. Thus we have the impression that we're seeing things as they actually are, which isn't true.

There isn't any such thing as "actually are."

All we know is what human cognition enables us to perceive and understand. I mentioned that color doesn't exist at the atomic or quantum level. Electromagnetic waves don't come with color. Color is produced by our eyes and brain; it isn't a quality of objective reality.

Then, each person perceives and understands in his or her own unique way, adding another level of subjectivity. Yet each of us feels that how we look upon the world is the normal way of seeing, because all we know is our own experiencing.

We can get glimpses of other people's experiencing, though.

One member of our book club talked about Jill Bolte Taylor's "stroke of insight." Taylor is a brain scientist who got to experience a stroke from the inside of her own cranium when she had one. It only affected the left side of her brain, I believe.

This made her a right-brained person who couldn't speak or think logically. However, after she recovered most of her faculties Taylor described how blissful it was in her stroke-altered experiential world.

Boundaries broke down. Reality became here and now, flowing, interconnected. At times she wondered if she wanted to become her old self again. (Of course, neuroscience tells us the self doesn't exist, but that's a subject I've already covered.)

So even though the brain is physical, and almost certainly consciousness is also, this doesn't take away from the amazing complexity, plasticity, and myriad experiential possibilities inherent in the matter that lies within our skulls.

We talked about research done on long-time meditators which showed how they are able to enter into highly unusual brain states. A woman in our group avidly followed a "devotional" meditation practice (I didn't learn the specifics of it). She spoke about how it had altered how she views life, helping make her calmer and more centered.

I resonated with her statement, "I haven't yet experienced the truth, but I'm looking forward to getting there." That's how I felt for many years, several decades, actually, during which I engaged in a seemingly similar form of mystical meditation practice.

At one point I asked her a semi-challenging question, noting that I felt OK with asking her this because I often challenge myself in this fashion.

"If you reached a point where you felt that truth lay in a direction that was different from the group (or teacher) to whom you're devoted now, would you choose to stick with truth or with your spiritual group?"

She didn't directly answer, which was fine with me. It's a tough question, filled with subtleties. What is ultimate truth? Can we know it if we see it? Does it even exist?

By the end of the evening I had a better appreciation for how she looked upon her meditation practice, which she described as being aimed at "pure awareness."

Several of us told her that we doubted this was possible, given what is known about how unconscious brain processes come between our conscious experience of reality, and our sensory perceptions of reality.

Eventually I grasped that what this woman meant by pure awareness was an experience of the world that wasn't heavily tainted by left-brain "monkey mind" thinking. It wasn't an other-worldly supernatural state, but a sort of natural, immediate, here-and-now, non-intellectual perceiving.

I told the group that something like this happened to me earlier that day during some garden work. I spread ten 40 pound bags of organic fertilizer around our large yard, scattering the pellets under the drip line of our many plantings.

For most of the time it took me to do this, I was in my usual Me-centered state.

I was enjoying what I was doing, yet kept having thoughts and feelings along the lines of "How many bags are left... why did we ever plant so many bushes with low-hanging branches... what are those holes... probably voles... hope I don't run out of fertilizer before I'm done..."

Then, when I was on the last bag, my frame of reference felt like it suddenly flipped. Now "Me" was in the background, not the foreground. Nature was much more my focus. I realized that the vegetation I was fertilizing lived because of countless creatures in the soil, rain, sunlight, and such.

I was merely playing my small part in a plant-life story that would continue long after I ceased to be.

The trees, shrubs, and what-not that we've added to our landscaping over the past twenty years we've lived at our current house would carry on for a long time. Other people eventually would be spreading their own fertilizer around this same vegetation. It was a nice feeling, this me-diminished way of being.

Neuroscience puts bounds around what is possible for us to experience, but it certainly leaves lots of room for exploring new and better ways of living. We can enlarge our personal ego tunnel. We can realize that our "self" is much more expansive, flowing, and full of creative potential than we normally consider it to be.

Early on in our discussion someone spoke about how to make time slow down. New experiences are one way, as these grab our attention, preventing us from zipping through our day in a habitual fashion.

Mindfulness, I noted, is another way.

I think this is part of what happened during my fertilizer-speading mini (or micro) satori. Paying close attention to a simple physical activity eventually put me into a mildly altered state of consciousness where "I" faded away in a pleasurable fashion.

There's lots of mystery to delve into within our brains, even if they are just a bunch of meat.

What we are: a strange loop in an ego tunnel

If there's one thing I know after 62 years of living, it's I don't know who or what I am.

(Of course, I could be wrong about that also -- but I'd still be right about not knowing whether I was or wasn't.)

Now, this isn't so different from what I used to believe in my religious days. When I embraced a mystical meditation system known as Sant Mat, I assumed that some sort of maya/illusion stood between me and reality.

So I couldn't know myself or the cosmos as it really is until the veils were removed. However, the Sant Mat gurus assured their students that ultimate truth was out there to be caught. It was just a matter of finding the correct hunting procedure.

Over the years and decades my admiration for science kept bumping into my devotion to this supposedly "spiritual" practice. Eventually I realized that I had to make a choice: hard truth or comfortable belief?

Since my goal all along had been truth, this wasn't a tough decision. I traded in dogma for facts, blind faith for demonstrable experience, imagination for reality.

I've never regretted making this trade. Interestingly, what I used to look upon as "hard" truth has become a lot softer. More and more I'm able to cozy up to scientific findings which I used to push away.

Such as the pretty damn firm neuroscientific conclusion that our feeling of being a "self," a separate and distinct "I," a discrete conscious entity ("soul") inhabiting a physical body -- this is the central illusion which prevents us from knowing reality more fully.

I'll say it differently: believing that it's possible to know reality as it truly is keeps us from realizing that this isn't true.

Tonight my wife and I are going to host a get-together with some friends where we'll talk about recent advances in neuroscience. I didn't have to do much to prepare, since I've both read and written a lot on this subject.

I looked over my bookshelf and chose two favorites to talk about: "I Am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter and "The Ego Tunnel" by Thomas Metzinger. My one sentence summary of what neuroscience says we are: a strange loop in an ego tunnel.

If that sounds disorienting, weird, and more than a little crazy -- it is! Our everyday sensation that a dependable "I" is in touch with objective reality is misguided, because evolution didn't care if we humans understood how our mind/brain works behind the scenes.

(Of course, evolution doesn't "care" about anything, just as gravity and other laws of nature don't; it's just a manner of speaking.)

Primeval humans who could see a tiger stalking them and take action to escape survived, passing on their genes. Daydreamers didn't. Being aware of the complex neurological processing that culminates in a wordless "Holy fuck! TIGER!" actually impedes one's ability to get away.

So the ego tunnel Metzinger describes is, in his words, transparent. Meaning, we have no sense that we view reality from within the confines of our brain, neurological processes, past experiences/conditioning, and such.

The world simply seems... as it should, from the perspective of Me. (Of course, other people have their own ego tunnels, from which mine often will appear amazingly deluded.)

Echoing Buddhist notions, Metzinger says there is nobody in the ego tunnel. So there's no need to get rid of the ego, because such doesn't exist. All we need to do is realize the neuroscientific reality: the self is an epiphenomenon -- something illusory that appears in the presence of something else that is real.

Douglas Hofstadter talks about this in his "I Am a Strange Loop" book. He wondered how a marble could be stuck inside a stack of envelopes, then discovered how the "marble" (like the self or soul) was an appearance, not reality.

Strange loops. Ego tunnels. That's what we are. Here's how Hofstadter ends his fascinating book:

In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference. We believe in marbles that disintegrate when we search for them but that are as real as any genuine marble when we're not looking for them. Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature.

Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems -- vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful.

To see ourselves in this way is probably not as comforting as believing in ineffable other-worldly wisps endowed with eternal existence, but it has its compensations. What one gives up is a childlike sense that things are exactly as they appear, and that our solid-seeming marble-like "I" is the realest thing in the world; what one acquires is an appreciation of how tenuous we are at our cores, and how wildly different we are from what we seem to be.

As Kurt Godel with his unexpected strange loops gave us a deeper and subtler vision of what mathematics is all about, so the strange-loop characterization of our essences gives us a deeper and subtler vision of what it is to be human. And to my mind, the loss is worth the gain.

(If you want to know more about ego tunnels and strange loops, check out my previous posts on these subjects here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

This is the truth about life: it will end

It will end. That's the truest thing I can say about life. It will end.

Everybody has a unique perspective. Each person finds a special meaning. This is mine. I feel it deeply in my gut, in my mind, in every cell of my body, in each neuron of my brain.

Sometimes -- like now, I guess -- I want to scream out this truth that seems so freaking obvious, yet is ignored by most of us who aren't on death's doorstep.

Whether or not we're religious, we have a sense of personal immortality. Life seems like it will go on forever. Our tomorrows appear endless. What isn't experienced today is envisioned as being on a manana to-do list.

Let's wake up. I'm speaking mostly to myself, of course. Brian, wake up! But I hope that my words will also resonate with you.

Because there's nothing more important than remaining aware of this truth: life will end. Without this realization we'll sleepwalk through our days and nights, failing to gaze at existence with a wide-eyed ever-so-grateful consciousness that every single moment is a fucking miracle.

Not in a supernatural sense. In a reality sense.

Some fourteen billion years ago the universe came into existence. Now, here we are, aware of it. This seems utterly amazing to me, though it's also completely matter-of-fact. I am; the cosmos is. What's the big deal about that?

Well, the big deal is that while life and consciousness almost certainly will continue on for many, many years -- millions or billions, likely -- my life and consciousness, and yours too, won't.

Look around outside of you. Sense what is being experienced inside of you. Realize that in the eternity of the cosmos, these momentary awarenesses are your precious pitifully brief passing pieces of infinity.

Treasure them. Honor them. Don't let those moments pass by carelessly, barely noticed, unappreciated. None of us knows how many of them are left to us. And when they're gone... they're really gone.

Last year I shared some lines from a Mary Oliver poem.

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Yes, what?

When we're young, there doesn't seem to be much urgency to our plans. Plenty of time. Lots of years left. No rush.

The older I get, life cries out to me "more intensity!" Not in a frantic sense; a pay attention sense. Seeing things, whether they appear mundane or magical, as ephemeral gifts bestowed upon us by existence.

We don't need to consciously say thank you as we go about our daily lives. However, a wordless sensation of thankfulness is with me more and more. It springs from it will end.

So even though I'd like to live forever, I'm thankful for death. Those who don't know, really know, that one day they're going to die and be gone forever aren't able to really live.

Wisdom from Alan Watts' "Nature, Man and Woman"

I love Alan Watts.

Browsing through the Taoism section of my book collection this morning, I noticed an early edition of his "Nature, Man, and Woman" that I got way back in my college days but hadn't looked at for a long time.

During today's pre-meditation reading I made it through the Introduction. Just reading this one chapter reminded me what a creative, insightful writer and thinker Watts was.

I don't agree with everything he says, but Watts has a knack for taking familiar subjects and looking at them in a fresh fashion.

Here's some quotations that I resonated with:

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

Excerpts from the Introduction to "Nature, Man and Woman" by Alan Watts.

In practice, the technical, rational consciousness is as alien to the natural man as was the supernatural soul. For both alike, nature and the natural man is an object, studied always by a technique which makes it external and therefore different from the subjective observer.

For when no knowledge is held to be respectable which is not objective knowledge, what we know will always seem to be not ourselves, not the subject. Thus we have the feeling of knowing things only from the outside, never from within, of being confronted eternally with a world of impenetrable surfaces within surfaces within surfaces.

No wonder, then, that our ideas of what nature is like on the inside are guesses at the mercy of fashion.

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

The harsh divisions of spirit and nature, mind and body, subject and object, controller and controlled are seen more and more to be awkward conventions of language. These are misleading and clumsy terms for describing a world in which all events seem to be mutually interdependent -- an immense complexity of subtly balanced relationships which, like an endless knot, has no loose end from which it can be untangled and put in supposed order.

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

In such a world it is impossible to consider man apart from nature, as an exiled spirit which controls this world by having its roots in another. Man is himself a loop in the endless knot, and as he pulls in one direction he finds that he is pulled from another and cannot find the origin of the impulse.

For the mold of his thoughts prevents him. He has an idea of himself, the subject, and of nature, the object. If he cannot find the source of the impulse in either, he is confused. He cannot settle for voluntarism and he cannot settle for determinism. But the confusion lies in the tangle of his thoughts rather than the convolutions of the knot.

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

Purpose is a pre-eminently human attribute. To say that the world has no purpose is to say that it is not human, or, as the Tao Te Ching puts it:

Heaven and earth are not human-hearted [jen].

But it continues:

The sage is not human-hearted.

For what is not human appears to be inhuman only when man sets himself over against nature, for then the inhumanity of nature seems to deny man, and its purposelessness to deny his purposes. But to say that nature is not human and has no purpose is not to say what it has instead. The human body as a whole is not a hand, but it does not for this reason deny the hand.

It is obviously the purest anthropomorphism to assume that the absence of a human quality in bird, cloud, or star is the presence of a total blank, or to assume that what is not conscious is merely unconscious.

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

Furthermore, may it not be that when we speak of nature as blind, and of matter-energy as unintelligent, we are simply projecting upon them the blankness which we feel when we try to to know our own consciousness as an object, when we try to see our own eyes or taste our own tongues?

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The Taoist idea of naturalness goes far beyond the merely normal, or the realization that all our experiences and actions are movements of the Tao, the way of nature, the endless knot, including the very experience of being an individual, a knowing subject.

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When the mutual interdependence of the opposites is not seen, it becomes possible to dream of a state of affairs in which life exists without death, good without evil, pleasure without pain, and light without darkness. The subject, the soul, can be set free from the concrete limitations of the object, the body.

Thus in the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body, the body is usually considered to be so transformed by the spirit that it is no longer in any real sense a body. It is rather a fantasy-body from which all the really earthy qualities have been taken away -- weightless, sexless, and ageless.

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

Enjoyment is always gratuitous and can come no other way than of itself, spontaneously. To try to force it is, furthermore, to try to experience the future before it has arrived, to seek the psychological result of attending to the present experience and thus short-circuiting or cutting out the experience itself.

Obviously, however, the person who attempts to get something from his present experience feels divided from it. He is the subject and it is the object. He does not see that he is that experience, and that trying to get something from it is merely self-pursuit.

Ordinarily we think of self-consciousness as the subject's awareness of itself. We would be far less confused if we saw that it is the subject-object's awareness of itself.

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

For the point is not, in our accustomed egocentric mode of thinking, that it would be good to return to our original integrity with nature. The point is that it is simply impossible to get away from it. Similarly, it is impossible to experience the future and not to experience the present. But trying to realize this is another attempt to experience the future.

Koran burners and murdering Muslim protesters: two of a kind

It's tough for me to decide which brand of fundamentalist religious craziness is most appalling:

(1) Christian pastor Terry Jones holding a mock trial of the Koran, then burning it, or (2) Islamic Afghan protesters of the Koran incineration who have killed 24 people in the past few days.

What I do know is that believing in some unseen supernatural being who supposedly commands devotees to fight affronts to its honor is just about the stupidest thing humans do.

Scarily, billions of people subscribe to Christianity, Islam, and Judaism -- the main monotheistic religions. Each religion considers that God/Allah/Jehovah is on its side, so whatever true believers do in the name of their imaginary deity must be perfectly justified.

News reports are fine, but there's nothing like looking at religious wackiness face-to-face. So I recommend watching at least part of Pastor Jones' rant where he issues a "guilty" verdict on the Koran.

(I made it through 5:27 of the twenty-four minute video until I couldn't stand the idiocy anymore.)

 

Jesus fucking Christ! The Koran is just a book! How the hell can you put a book on trial?

At the end of the part of the video that I watched, Jones (at least, that's who I assume is talking) says that the "public" was asked what punishment the Koran should receive if it was found guilty -- of what, I'm not sure.

The choices were to be burned, drowned, shredded, or face a firing squad. Burning got the most votes.

Insane.

These Christians look upon the Koran as ungodly, yet they confer personhood upon it. Hey, if the Koran can be punished by being drowned or stood in front of a firing squad, it sure seems like this book has a lot of life to it.

The Muslim Afghan protesters are equally wacked out, and in a decidedly more murderous fashion. 

Afghan protests over the burning of a Koran in Florida continued Sunday for a third day, with three more people killed here.

That brought to 24 the number of people killed in Afghanistan since Friday, when a mob overran United Nations offices in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, killing seven United Nations international staff members.

So just as Pastor Jones considers the Koran to be a "person" who can be put on trial, fundamentalist Muslims must also view the Koran similarly. Otherwise, why would they get so seriously bent out of shape by the burning of a freaking book?

I don't get it.

How can killing seven human beings in the name of defending a paper product be a holy act? Actions like these make me super-grateful that I've walked away from religion.

Also, Muslims are against worshipping any image of God, who is considered to be beyond comprehension or representation. That's why even cartoons of Muhammad were seen as so offensive.

Yet somehow the images of God contained in the Koran are so holy as to warrant murdering innocent people if some wacked-out pastor thousands of miles away burns a single copy of Islam's scripture.

Senseless.

Which sums up religious belief in one word.

Senseless.

 

What, I'm not the center of the universe??!!

Copernicus may have demoted us humans from an objectively real position at the center of the cosmos, but most people continue to believe that everything revolves around them.

Why else would we get so upset when life doesn't give us what we feel we deserve, even though much of the time what doesn't come to me benefits someone else? (Like the guy who darts ahead of my car and takes a choice parking space that I'd been lusting after.)

The crazy thing is, being the center of the universe really isn't much fun.

It's exhausting trying to keep reality revolving as it should. It's anxiety-producing to feel that if I don't get my way, life has gone seriously awry. It's stressful to keep defending my position against other people who don't have the good sense to see that I'm right and they're wrong.

So it's wise to extend the Copernican principle by also demoting ourselves from a subjective sense of cosmic centrality. I'm attracted to Taoism and Buddhism because these philosophies do just that, often in a light-hearted fashion.

As noted in my previous blog post, "Letting go -- the essence of Zen," my favorite Zen'ish writing is Hubert Benoit's "The Supreme Doctrine." I like how he psychologizes Zen teachings, making them more down to earth and less esoterically Buddhist'y.

Benoit says there's no reason for us to give up our likes and dislikes, our passions and preferences, our ooh's and ah's that make life so pleasingly zesty.

But we should realize that our positive is someone else's negative; what we're attracted to will repel another person; our notion of "good" will be viewed by others as "bad." In short, we need to give up the exclusivity of our perspectives, while otherwise holding onto our subjectivity (as if we had a choice).

The importance that we attach to certain aspects of the world is not false, it is not illusory; what is illusory resides in the exclusive character of this vision, in the fact that it denies the same importance to the rest of the world.

The vision of things as they are would attribute an equal importance to all aspects of the Universe; everything would be important and in consequence nothing would be important in the preferential sense that we usually give to this word "important."

It is only in the partiality of our imaginary vision that the illusion resides, not in the vision itself... the idol is not an obstacle to Reality; the reality that we see in the idol is not opposed to our reunion with Reality.

The obstacle is only the ignorance through which we deny to that which is not the idol the same reality that we see in the idol. The only obstacle is ignorance, and ignorance is partiality.

...Subjection does not lie in seeing Reality in the evocation of Jesus or of the Buddha, but in only seeing it there by denying it to the rest of creation.

This is why Benoit says that "spirituality" should be shunned. Why? Because spirit almost always is considered to be higher and better than matter; God is elevated above Satan; supernatural phenomena are viewed as more desirable than worldly perceptions.

Religious spirituality is partiality raised to the extreme cosmic level. It masquerades as unity, yet is dualistic through and through. It makes personal dogmatic beliefs the measure of all things, perpetuating the illusion that the human psyche is cosmically central.

I like these thoughts which conclude a chapter in Benoit's book (the capital letters are his, so I've left them as they appear in "The Supreme Doctrine").

Zen is categoric on this point and could not in any way be considered as a "spiritual" doctrine. It is radically atheist if, by the word God, one means Reality assumed to be conceivable by our mind.

"From the beginning not a thing is." Rinzai said also:

"IF ON YOUR WAY YOU MEET THE BUDDHA, KILL HIM... O YOU, DISCIPLES OF THE TRUTH, MAKE AN EFFORT TO FREE YOURSELVES FROM EVERY OBJECT... O YOU, WITH THE EYES OF MOLES!

I SAY TO YOU: NO BUDDHA, NO TEACHING, NO DISCIPLINE! WHAT ARE YOU CEASELESSLY LOOKING FOR IN YOUR NEIGHBOUR'S HOUSE? DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND THAT YOU ARE PUTTING A HEAD HIGHER THAN YOUR OWN?

WHAT THEN IS LACKING TO YOU IN YOURSELVES? THAT WHICH YOU HAVE AT THIS MOMENT DOES NOT DIFFER FROM THAT OF WHICH THE BUDDHA IS MADE."