Church of the Churchless

Get loopy! Feel better fast with feedback loops

Old religious habits can take a long time to die. As churchless as I am these days, sometimes I long for a "revival."

The faith to which I previously subscribed was Eastern rather than Western, so my notion of a revival was to attend a weekend meeting where speakers (maybe even the guru himself) would urge devotees to apply themselves to meditation and other spiritual practices/vows more assiduously.

I enjoyed feeling that I had a clear-cut spiritual goal, and that if I did this-and-that, such-and-such results could be expected. Maybe not soon; maybe not even in this lifetime; but someday -- after I died, or in another life.

So what do I do now when an urge for a revival, a rejuvenation of purpose, strikes me? I get loopy.

Meaning, I remind myself that reality is right here, right now. When I feel like something is missing from my life, almost always the cure for my Lack Sickness is to pay better attention to what is in my life.

Every waking moment, and also in dreams, we're experiencing a lot. Reality is speaking to us in countless ways. The question is, "Are we listening?" And then, "What do we do with what we've heard?"

Today I came across a Wired article, "The Mental Machine: Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops." Have a read. It's focused on using technology to give us feedback on what's happening in our world, but the basic principles apply to life in general, including spiritual pursuits.

A feedback loop involves four distinct stages. First comes the data: A behavior must be measured, captured, and stored. This is the evidence stage. Second, the information must be relayed to the individual, not in the raw-data form in which it was captured but in a context that makes it emotionally resonant. This is the relevance stage. But even compelling information is useless if we don’t know what to make of it, so we need a third stage: consequence.

The information must illuminate one or more paths ahead. And finally, the fourth stage: action. There must be a clear moment when the individual can recalibrate a behavior, make a choice, and act. Then that action is measured, and the feedback loop can run once more, every action stimulating new behaviors that inch us closer to our goals.

Or alter our goals. Every morning I start off with some intentions in mind of what I'll do that day. Invariably experiential feedback leads me to change course, often many times.

My wife will add something to my chore list. An activity will take less or more time than I expected. Suddenly a to-do idea will pop into my head. I'll feel that this isn't the right moment to do X, with Y appearing a lot more appealing.

The Wired story goes on to say:

So feedback loops work. Why? Why does putting our own data in front of us somehow compel us to act? In part, it’s that feedback taps into something core to the human experience, even to our biological origins.

Like any organism, humans are self-regulating creatures, with a multitude of systems working to achieve homeostasis. Evolution itself, after all, is a feedback loop, albeit one so elongated as to be imperceptible by an individual.

Feedback loops are how we learn, whether we call it trial and error or course correction. In so many areas of life, we succeed when we have some sense of where we stand and some evaluation of our progress.

This may sound complex, but it isn't. Much (or most) of the feedback we get from life is direct, immediate, sensory, intuitive, unmistakable. However, all too often we don't pay sufficient attention to what experience is telling us.

Religions and rigid spiritual systems are notoriously big on commandments.

This is the goal aspect of a feedback loop -- as when you enter "70" into an electronic thermostat, and thereafter heat comes on if it is cooler than that, and air conditioning comes on if it is hotter than that.

Problem is, with religion commandments become ends in themselves rather than means to other ends. If I'm not comfortable with the thermostat set at "70," I change it. My goal isn't to keep the house at 70 degrees F, it's to be comfortable (and maybe also to save energy, enjoy fresh air, or other goals).

I used to look upon a "revival" in a decidedly rigid and limited fashion.

I was almost entirely focused on the goals, a.k.a. commandments/vows, of a religious institution. Even though I was getting a lot of experiential feedback about how those commandments/vows were affecting me, I wasn't allowing all that feedback to "get loopy" -- to change my behavior, my beliefs, my attitudes, my goals.

If I'm trying to assemble something, and a part isn't fitting together correctly, I don't keep on forcing it in accord with what the instructions seem to say. I figure that either the instructions are incorrect or (more likely) that I'm doing something wrong.

Religious true believers consider that if they're getting feedback at odds with their faith ("I'm starting to feel that Jesus really isn't the Son of God") then they're doing something wrong.

I've heard from lots of people who are still devoted to the spiritual practice I used to follow, "Brian, you didn't meditate correctly." Or "You shouldn't have expected any results, but just kept on following your vows."

That's crazy. Such attitudes ignore the loopiness of life.

When we stop paying attention to what we're experiencing; when we shut off the information we're getting from sensations, perceptions, actions, emotions, thoughts, and other contents of our consciousness; when we consider ourselves to be robots who must follow the commands of an outside authority -- that's when the liveliness of life fades and rote routine takes over.

It doesn't take much for me to feel revived in my current "loopy" approach to life. I simply pay more attention to what I'm experiencing, right now, right here.

I'm typing this blog post on my laptop outside, on a wonderfully warm, dry, and clear Oregon day.

I've been focused on my thoughts. But the wind also is blowing across my bare arms. The setting sun is illuminating the upper branches of tall trees, leaving the rest in shadow. A distant jet is making a low rumble.

Life always is communicating a lot more to me than what I am aware of at any moment. I'm able to tune in to different experience channels, broadening the feedback I'm getting from both the world outside of me and inside my own head.

I can change course, alter my actions, pursue different goals, cast aside once-cherished beliefs in the light of what I've learned. When I embrace the loopiness of life, straight and narrow dogma becomes a boring artificial path. Following a natural way with lots of twists and turns is much more appealing.

Graphic proof of America's unusual religious craziness

This graph says a lot: Belief in evolution versus national wealth. Yeah, the United States is weird.

We're an advanced industrialized nation with an unusually high proportion of religious wackos.

Brilliant academics talk about God

Thanks to Pharyngula, I just made a start on watching an interesting You Tube video that features fifty super-smart people talking about why they don't believe in God.

So far I've only listened to ten of the fifty academics. I like what I've heard. Some Pharyngula commenters noted that almost all of the people in the video are older white guys.

For some reason I'm not offended by this at all.

Anyway, they make great good sense. There's so much religious crap being spread around the world these days, it's nice to be exposed to some intelligent, reasonable, rational talk about God.

Have a look and listen.

 

For me, "getting real" means getting rid of religion

What are you doing when you feel the most real? What makes you exclaim, "Wow, that was real!" What circumstances lead you to feel, If I were to die now, I'd die content?

Obviously only you can answer those questions. All I want to do is raise them,  because I think they're well worth pondering. If life isn't filled with really real moments, are we truly living?

For me, reality seems most vibrant, clear, energetic, and alluring when I'm engaged in a physical activity that has an edgy aspect to it.

"Edgy" is a term that's hard to pin down.

There's an element of dangerousness, though not always in a life-threatening sense. It's like I'm being pushed to do something bodily that takes me closer to some sort of limit, as if what's most real isn't perceived unless I'm jolted out of my usual comfort zone.

Which involves getting rid of concepts, thoughts, beliefs, imaginings, anticipations, conjectures -- all of that abstract stuff which is the heart and soul of religion.

Believe! says religion. Have faith! says religion. Embrace mystery! says religion.

Screw all that! says reality in my "getting real" moments. This is it, dude! Right here, right now, no intellectualizing required.

A few days ago my wife and I went on a pretty adventurous horse ride on some beautiful mountainside trails in the Cascade Range of western Oregon. Trotting and cantering in this environment brings me face-to-face with reality in a marvelously unmistakable way.

Elijah, a young wrangler whom I'd just met for the first time, and I were at the end of a six-horse single file line. During some walking portions of the ride we chatted about the joys of riding horses and certain motorized "steeds": a big scooter, like I have; four wheelers, which Elijah's family has.

When I said that getting on my scooter and getting on a horse both made me feel real, Elijah knew what I was talking about. "I love to ride horses," he told me. "Yeah, like you said, it's just so real."

We didn't need a philosopher to define "real" for us. We didn't need a holy book to tell us what life was all about.

Sitting on our horses, making our way through a lush Oregon forest, we weren't wondering what life was all about. We were living it -- directly, bodily, non-conceptually.

After a couple of hours, as we were nearing the end of our ride, I felt that if I died in the next instant, it'd be all right. I also often feel this when I'm riding my Burgman scooter or dancing with my wife, two activities that, like horse riding, have an appealing "getting real" edginess to them.

I've sat at the feet of gurus. I've meditated several hours a day for many years. I've been part of a multitude -- many tens of thousands -- filled with intense mystical devotion.

But none of that felt as real as does cantering up a narrow muddy trail between the trunks of large fir trees, or leading a woman unhesitatingly through salsa moves, or guiding a powerful scooter through linked two-lane turns on a warm sunny day.

I realize that religious true believers will tell me, "God and other aspects of divinity are even more real, my friend. You just need to open yourself to them."

Well, I've been there and tried that. Yet I'm not claiming that getting real requires doing what I do. I'm simply asking a question which I've answered for myself: when do you feel most real?

Mathematics is both invented and discovered

I'm fascinated by the question of whether the laws of nature are "out there" in an objective external world, or "in here" within the subjective confines of the human brain.

A recent post on my other blog about male/female conversation styles mentions how I'd talk about this topic with another philosophically-minded man.

When men talk, most of the time they aren't trying to either reveal, or gain access to, inner feelings. My wife and I used to get another with another couple. The other guy and I would converse in one corner of our living room, while the wives huddled on the couch.

Our male conversation always focused on Grand Cosmic Subjects, like whether the laws of nature are actually "out there," or whether they're a manifestation of the human mind. We'd learn a lot about each other in this fashion.

Just not the same things the women would learn about.

After the other couple left, my wife would say something like, "How is Michael handling the death of his father?" I'd say, "He never mentioned anything about it. I didn't even know his father died."

This would astound Laurel. It seemed perfectly natural to me.

I bring up this personal vignette because it mirrors a long-standing debate among mathematicians: is their field of study invented or discovered? If invented, there's a subjective aspect to the laws of nature -- many of which, especially in physics, can be accurately modeled by mathematical equations.

This would be like my wife and her friend choosing to talk about one topic, while my friend and I choose to talk about a different topic. The content of our conversations would flow from what we wanted to focus on, not on an immutable Law of Living Room Discussions.

But many mathematicians are Platonists, believing that they are discovering numerical truths independent of the human mind. Here's how theoretical astrophysicist Mario Livio puts it in a fascinating Scientific American article, "Why Math Works."

At the core of this mystery [how math captures the natural world] lies an argument that mathematicians, physicists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists have had for centuries: Is math an invented set of tools, as Einstein believed? Or does it actually exist in some abstract realm, with humans merely discovering its truths?

Many great mathematicians -- including David Hilbert, Georg Cantor and the group known as Nicolas Bourbaki -- have shared Einstein's view, associated with a school of thought called Formalism. But other illustrious thinkers -- among them Godfrey Harold Hardy, Roger Penrose, and Kurt Godel -- have held the opposite view, Platonism.

So in a way the debate over the nature of mathematics is sort of like arguments about God. Is there really something we call "God" out there in some hidden sphere of existence, or is this notion a fabrication of the human mind?

Of course, there's a big difference between mathematics and God: the mathematical laws of nature accurately model many aspects of the natural world, while hypothesizing "God" doesn't add anything to our understanding of phenomena experienced in everyday life.

Still, I think those of us interested in the God-question can learn something from how Livio considers the issue of whether mathematics is invented or discovered. First I'll share his conclusion:

This debate about the nature of mathematics rages on today and seems to elude an answer. I believe that by asking simply whether mathematics is invented or discovered, we ignore the possibility of a more intricate answer: both invention and discovery play a crucial role.

I posit that together they account for why math works so well. Although eliminating the dichotomy between invention and discovery does not fully explain the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, the problem is so profound that even a partial step toward solving it is progress.

Let's be clear: as noted above I don't see any evidence that adding God or any other divinity into a description of non-human reality works at all, much less "so well." I just want to point out how even mathematics, the foundation of our most successful scientific discoveries, arguably has a subjective, invented component.

In that regard, I found this paragraph in Livio's article to be deeply thought-provoking.

Michael Atiyah, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, has presented an elegant thought experiment that reveals just how perception colors which mathematical concepts we embrace -- even ones as seemingly fundamental as numbers.

German mathematician Leopold Kronecker famously declared, "God created the natural numbers, all else is the work of man." But imagine if the intelligence in our world resided not with humankind but rather with a singular, isolated jellyfish, floating deep in the Pacific Ocean.

Everything in its experience would be continous, from the flow of the surrounding water to its fluctuating temperature and pressure. In such an environment, lacking individual objects or indeed anything discrete ,would the concept of number arise? If there were nothing to count, would numbers exist?

A few years ago I conducted my own thought experiment that went even further than reducing our world's consciousness to that of an isolated jellyfish. I said, Consider a cosmos with no consciousness.

When I pondered this, I had the same problem that popped up when I read about Kronecker's thought experiment. Mention of the jellyfish made me think, "Wow, what a stupid creature that would be. It wouldn't know what exists beyond the ocean. It wouldn't be able to perceive all the sights, sounds, smells, and such on land, in the air -- everything we humans experience."

But then I realized that my perspective was just that: mine. I was looking upon the jellyfish from my concious human point of view, even though the thought experiment was to envision all of the world's consciousness being embedded in a jellyfish.

In my blog post about a cosmos with no consciousness, I said:

Still, my thought experiment has led me somewhere, though not to my intended destination of an imagined cosmos with no consciousness. I’ve understood that different sorts of consciousnesses are aware of the cosmos in different ways. We may not create reality, but our own unique perception of it is indeed created.

This is pretty much the same conclusion that Mario Livio arrived at in considering the question of why math works.

Mathematics is an intricate fusion of inventions and discoveries. Concepts are generally invented, and even though all the correct relations among them existed before their discovery, humans still chose which ones to study.

Ditto with God, though to a much greater degree.

Notions of God, supernaturalism, spirit, soul, enlightenment, salvation, heaven, and such are all conceptual. They're invented by people. There is no evidence, in contrast with mathematics, that seekers of the divine ever come into contact with anything but mental inventions.

So if even mathematics is a fusion of subjectivity and objectivity, religions are vastly more so. In fact, religiosity may be entirely invented by humans, with not a bit of discovery thrown into the dogma recipe.

I could be wrong about this. That's the beauty of a scientific outlook on life. You're always willing to say, "I could be wrong."

How Zen's nonduality is confirmed by neuroscience

Every morning I experience in a concrete fashion the tension between science and spirituality.

In my meditation area I always have several books available for my morning caffeinated reading. Some are scientific -- about neuroscience, evolution, global warming. Others are spiritual -- mostly books on Buddhism, Taoism, mindfulness.

There are days when I start reading a science book and it seems too dryly factual. Others days I'll pick up a spiritual book and find it annoyingly airy-fairy, dogmatic, or preachy.

So often I'll bounce back and forth between several titles, searching for science with a poetic soul and for spirituality that is grounded in demonstrable facts about reality. Recently some passages in a Zen book, "The Wholehearted Way," hit the mark in the factual spirituality category.

(I'm pretty sure this book was recommended by a regular commenter, perhaps tAo. Whoever it was, thanks; I'm enjoying it.)

"The Wholehearted Way" is a translation of Dogen's Bendowa, which to me is almost impossible to understand without the helpful accompanying commentary by a contemporary Zen practitioner, Kosho Uchiyama Roshi.

Modern neuroscience has learned that our conscious perceptions, thoughts, emotions, and so on are but the tip of the brain's much vaster unconscious "iceberg." We never experience reality as it is, but as our brains have processed countless bits of incoming information.

So I could heartily agree with what Roshi wrote (apparently this is a transcription of a talk to an audience):

This cup I am looking at now is not the same one that I will be looking at in the next moment. Each of you is also looking at it from your own angle, with your own feelings, and these also are constantly changing.

This is the way actual life experience is. However, if use our common-sense way of thinking, we think we are looking at the very same cup. This is an abstraction and not the reality of life. Abstract concepts and living reality are entirely different. The Buddhist view is completely different from our ordinary thinking.

...What Buddhism is concerned about is not something abstract, but the very concrete and actual reality of life. All beings exist through life experience of the self.

...That which experiences and that which is experienced cannot be divided into two. This reality that cannot be differentiated into two is called dharma or mind, and it is the meaning of the expression "dharma and mind are one reality."

Therefore, we cannot say that we appear on the world's stage when we are born, and leave it when we die. We were born with this world in which we live out our lives as life experience. We live with this whole world. When we die, our whole world will die with us also.

...Dharma is the reality of life, and each and every one of us is living out absolute life, no matter what situation we find ourselves in. We live out the self that is only the self. No one can become a different person. In a sense, from birth to death, we are completely alone.

Even if you think that you have good friends, family, or a loving wife, the fact is that your wife can never be you. You and your wife have different dreams and think differently.

We sometimes say that we know everything about an intimate friend, but that is really just something that we have thought up. It is impossible to really understand another person. In this sense, every one of us is living out the self that is only the self, and living out the present that is only the present. This is an absolute truth.

Then, a few pages further on, I came to what was for me a fresh explanation of "nonduality." I've read a lot of books about nonduality. I like the notion of reality being "not two," because this seems like a nice compromise between Oneness and Manyness.

However, I'd been under an impression that nonduality referred to some sort of cosmic interconnectedness, a unity that manifested as separate stuff -- something like that. Here Uchiyama Roshi offered up a way of looking upon nonduality that struck me as wonderfully scientific and experientially unarguable.

How do we live on the ground of the reality of life in a concrete way, rather than living with our heads in the clouds of concepts? We see a cup, society, and money in our own particular world.

In this whole world, north, east, south, and west, no matter where we look we see nothing but our self. Instead of living in the world that is shared by all of us, the self lives in a world in which there is nothing but the self.

The oneness of this world is dharma. Both "wondrous dharma" and buddha-dharma" refer to this.

Seen from the point of view of absolute reality, every one of us was born holding our own world. As soon as we are born, we have a world in which there is nothing but our own self. We are born and live holding our own world. When we die, the world in which there is nothing but our self also dies with us.

In Buddhism, life like this, which is only self, is called shin. Therefore, mind (shin) and dharma are never divided into two. The world that we experience (dharma) and our life experience (mind) are not two, nondual. Mind or subject and dharma or object are one reality. In other words, one mind is all dharma and all dharma is one mind.

...In other words, by living my own life, all things come to exist in my own world. By living my life, all things are able to exist, and I create a world in which I live.

A final comment: what he's talking about here isn't idealism. Reality isn't created by our minds. It exists independent of us. But for us, there is no difference between our subjective experience of life and the objective existence of life.

We live with this whole world. When we die, our whole world will die with us also. If you interpret this incorrectly, it might be mistaken for experiential idealism [the idea of experience as produced by our consciousness.]...Yet what I am talking about is totally different.

People involved in Seicho no ie think that material existence is the shadow of our mind. They say that if we think there is no sickness, it won't exist. Then what will happen if a dump truck is coming toward you? If you think that the truck is a shadow of your mind, will the truck disappear?

If you are lucky, the truck driver will yell, "You idiot! WHere are your eyes?" If you are not lucky, you will be run over and killed. This is reality.

Touching is sacred, in an ungodly sense

Religious believers often are distrustful of getting too touchie-feelie.

Ooh, bodies meeting, melding, melting into each other! That's so, um, bodily. God is all ethereal, otherworldly, spiritual. Bodies, bad. God, good.

That's a thoroughly dualistic attitude, of course. Which is more than a little strange, since most religions spout stuff like "God is one," "All is God," and "God is everywhere."

I've known true believers who said they couldn't wait to be rid of their body. They imagined that life in a heavenly realm would be so much better than existence in this crude physical world. Even when I was deep into dogma, that struck me as sad. 

Why pass up bodily delights? If there's more and better to enjoy after death, great. Delight in life while living, then delight in your afterlife (if there is one). 

This week SF Gate columnist Mark Morford wrote "Get over here and touch me now." He praises the glory of godless sacred touching in his unique writing style.

Here's what I think. I think human touch is surely the most sublime sensation/activity ever invented by ecstatically drunken gods as they gently and ever so briefly encased us in these slippery filthy gorgeous mortal fleshforms.

I think human touch, done with calm intention and conscious ease, is a total life-affirming blessing of the most spiritually orgasmic kind, healing and restorative and achingly transcendent in quiet but thoroughly kaleidoscopic ways.

...It is perhaps the greatest myth, the most brutal lie ever foisted upon mankind: that of separation. You are there and I am here and "god" is way, way over there and no matter how hard we try and strive, we'll never fully meet. We can never fully connect. Just the way it is.

What horses--t. In fact, it's exactly the other way around. We are already deeply connected, de facto and a priori. We are of the same divine source material. Disconnection, fracturing and disassociation is a learned affliction. A disease. Chronic, epidemic, global.

But maybe with the right touch, at the right time, in the right moment, the pandemic can dissolve in an instant. Touch me just that way, and suddenly everything makes sense. All is right with the world. We are one.

Yes, Morford speaks of god. But not with a capital "G." And not in any sort of traditional dualistic sense. The divinity he exalts is the god of poets, not of preachers.

He ends his column with: "Really, what else is there? (What is less or more than a touch?)" Curious, I clicked on that link. Which led me to a strange and wonderful place that I'd never been to before: the last part of Walt Whitman's free verse poem, "Song of Myself."

Wow. I liked what I read so much, I sought out the entire poem. It begins in perfect summertime fashion.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

"Song of Myself" is long. Also, poetic (duh...). So I found a study guide which gave me some almost-instant insights into Whitman's thoroughly embodied philosophy of life. 

These chants express various stages of the poet’s mystical experience of his self. The first stage may be termed the “Awakening of Self”; the second, the “Purification of Self.” Purification involves an acceptance of the body and all its functions. This acceptance reflects the poet’s goal to achieve mystical experience through physical reality.

This is in opposition to the puritanical view of purification through mortification of the flesh. In Whitman’s philosophy, the self is purified not through purgation but through acceptance of the physical. Man should free himself from his traditional sense of sin. The mystical experience paves the way for the merging of physical reality with a universal reality.

The study guide told me that the end of the poem, section 46 onward, is where Whitman launches himself on the "perpetual journey." Have a read; this part isn't very long, and it appealed to my churchless spirit. Here's some excerpts:

I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)

My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,

No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,

I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,

I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,

But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,

My left hand hooking you round the waist,

My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,

You must travel it for yourself.

It is not far, it is within reach,

Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,

Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.

In section 48 Whitman speaks of God in a way that I can relate to -- because his God isn't that of any theistic religion.

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,

For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,

(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.)

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,

Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?

I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,

In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,

I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name,

And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go,

Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

I can't say that I understand the ending of "Song to Myself." But I like it.

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,

It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,

It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,

I stop somewhere waiting for you.

 

India's "godmen" face questions about their wealth

Interesting story in the Washington Post about how spirituality has become a lucrative profession for Indian gurus and yogis. 

For centuries, their image was as barefoot ascetics who spent their lives in solitary Himalayan meditation.

But now India’s gurus, “miracle workers” and spiritual leaders, often collectively known as “godmen,” have become savvy, powerful figures who control vast philanthropic and business empires, dabble in politics and manipulate the media.

There's no mention of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas. But he's another good example of the trend toward making lots of money while preaching detachment from material pursuits. (See here, here, and here.)

Atheism promotes human dignity and truth-seeking

While exercising today I listened to a podcast of the Philosophy Talk program, "Atheism and the Well-Lived Life." The guest philosopher was Louise Antony, who edited Philosophers Without Gods -- one of whom is Ken Taylor, a regular host of the program.

For me the most interesting comment of the program came from Antony. She was asked a question by a woman in the audience that went something like this:

As an atheist, what would you say to someone who is suffering, who has serious problems?

Excellent question.

Religion offers consolations for people who aren't having a pleasant life. Most obviously, the promise of a much better afterlife. Believe in Jesus, Allah, a guru, or some other divine being, and heaven, paradise, union with God, or such awaits you after death.

Another form of religious consolation comes from being told that there's a reason for your suffering. And not just a scientific, materialistic, cause-and-effect reason, but a supernatural, moralistic reason.

"God has a plan for you." "You're getting clear of karmas from past lives." "What you're going through has been reduced, by grace, from a sword thrust to a pinprick."

Neither form of consolation changes the actual problematic situation.

However, believing that better times await us in an afterlife, or there's a divine plan/reason behind what's happening to us, can go a long way toward making us feel more positively about the crap that we're experiencing.

This is one reason why religion is so appealing to poor, downtrodden people with little hope for betterment. It's no accident that religious belief is low in successful Western European democracies and high in poverty-stricken areas of the world.

I was curious how Louise Antony was going to answer the woman. I liked what I heard.

Anthony made a couple of excellent points. One was that living truly is better than living falsely. Suffering is real. To deny suffering is to deny reality. When we hurt, we hurt -- plain and simple.

Her other point, related to the first, was that atheism supports the dignity of suffering people. I don't recall Antony elaborating much on this thought, but here's what I think she was getting at.

To discount the reality of suffering, to explain away what suffering means to someone via some sort of religious bullshit, to comfort a person with fairy tales of how everything will be all right once he or she gets to heaven -- this undermines human dignity.

Dignity is to stand tall. Dignity is to be courageous during tough times. Dignity is to face facts. Dignity is to look at reality square in the eye and say, "Yes, I see you. And here's how I'm going to relate to you."

It isn't dignified to run away from a truth. Poverty is true. Ill health is true. Feeling bad is true.

There are ways to deal with suffering, with problems, that don't require us to ignore what is real. We don't need to embrace religious fantasies to cope with hard facts.We don't have to fall on our knees or prostrate ourselves before an imaginary God to deal with what we're experiencing in life.

One of my best friends in elementary and high school, Todd, grew up on a ranch. I remember him telling me about some advice that he got from his father.

When you're facing an emergency, some serious problem, look around. What you need to deal with it will be within your reach. That might not be obvious at first, but keep looking. Be creative. Be confident you've got the resources to handle the problem.

No God required. No praying required. Simply deal with a situation with your own capacities. Good advice.

Go on a belief diet. You'll feel lighter and happier.

Most of us are concerned about putting on a few (or many) physical pounds. We correctly recognize that carrying around extra unnecessary weight is unhealthy, unattractive, and unpleasant.

But when it comes to psychological excess baggage, such as unneeded religious, spiritual, philosophical, mystical, or New Age'y beliefs, we aren't as worried about how all that "fat" is affecting us.

Well, it does. So I'm recommending a belief diet -- paring down our craving for what Michael Shermer terms "patternicity" and "agenticity," two strong appetites in every human brain.

The brain is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses these patterns with meaning.

The first process I call patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. The second process I call agenticity: the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency.

These are natural appetites. But so are our cravings for fat, protein, and carbohydrates, which can become unhealthily morphed into a fast food addiction. Yum! Got to have that big burger, large fries, and a 24 ounce coke!

Likewise, it's easy to become hooked on finding meaningful patterns in just about every aspect of life, leading to belief obesity.

Meaning, our minds get crammed with unfounded assumptions about how special and important we are. Our egos get expanded with delusions of religious/spiritual grandiosity. Whatever happens in our lives is meant to be; it's God's (or guru's) will; it's the universe (or karma) leading us in a destined direction; it's a lesson for us.

Here's another much more likely possibility. Whatever is happening is simply what's happening. Flowers, birds, whales, and dogs don't wake up in the morning and return to believing that the world revolves around them.

They just get on with their living. Only the human brain, with its evolved capacity for patternicity and agenticity, considers that finding a parking space, looking at a beautiful sunset, or holding a baby in our arms is a message from the cosmos.

More and more I'm learning how pleasant it is to let go of that unnecessary mental crap.

Sure, it's impossible to do this completely, just as it's impossible to go entirely without food. But we can reduce our belief intake in the same way as we can lessen our caloric intake. Mindfulness is one approach to shedding excess psychological believing pounds.

If I simply focus on what my body and brain (which is the conscious aspect of my body) is doing at any given moment, there's much less of an opportunity for belief birds to take wing and fly off in all sorts of strange directions.

The driver of that car must have seen me coming. Why did she pull out right in front of me on this curvy two-lane road? She must want to slow me down on my way into town. What a jerk!

That's option #1. Option #2 is to simply be aware that a car pulled out ahead of me in my lane and I need to slow down.

Likewise, we can either go through life believing that a God, guru, angel, fate, or some other supernatural power is guiding events and giving us lessons, or we can simply go through life.

It isn't unpleasant to dethrone yourself from being the King or Queen of the World, the center of the universe, the reason why everything happens the way it does. Actually, believing this is exhausting. It's stressful. It requires a lot of mental effort to keep unfounded concepts alive and well in the brain.

Let them go. Feel what it is like to be leaner, belief-wise. Once you try it, I bet you'll like it.

Believing comes first, reasons and evidence follow

Most of us like to believe that our beliefs are well-founded. It's the other guy who isn't looking at the evidence, is drawing false conclusions, has his or her head in the sand while we're staring straight at reality.

Well, that's an unfounded belief.

Each of us, everyone on Earth, is prone to making wrong conclusions. Michael Shermer explains why in his new book, "The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and God to Politics and Conspiracies -- How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths."

The brain is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses these patterns with meaning.

The first process I call patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. The second process I call agenticity: the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency.

We can't help it. Our brains evolved to connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen. These meaningful patterns become beliefs, and these beliefs shape our understanding of reality.

Once beliefs are formed, the brain begins to look for and find confirming evidence in support of those beliefs, which adds an emotional boost of further confidence in the beliefs and thereby accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive feedback loop of belief confirmation.

I'm fond of calling religious people "true believers." But actually we all are. Even scientists.

...scientists are people too, no less subject to the whims of emotion and the pull of cognitive biases to shape and reinforce beliefs.

However, scientists and the scientifically-minded, of whom I consider myself to be one, recognize the siren song of true belief: how alluring it is, how easy it is to fall into the arms of a beautiful belief, how difficult it is to pull away from falsehood's warm embrace.

Even though I'm only a few chapters into Shermer's book, I've already learned the broad outline of how we navigate the treacherous waters of blind belief. 

In the final chapters we will consider how we know any of our beliefs are believable, which patterns are true and which are false, which agents are real and which are not, and how science works as the ultimate pattern detection device that allows us a few degrees of freedom within belief-dependent realism, and some measurable progress away from its psychological trappings.

There's a good short summary of "The Believing Brain" by Shermer in Scientific American. He ends with:

This dependency on belief and its host of psychological biases is why, in science, we have built-in self-correcting machinery. Strict double-blind controls are required, in which neither the subjects nor the experimenters know the conditions during data collection.

Collaboration with colleagues is vital. Results are vetted at conferences and in peer-reviewed journals. Research is replicated in other laboratories. Disconfirming evidence and contradictory interpretations of data are included in the analysis. If you don’t seek data and arguments against your theory, someone else will, usually with great glee and in a public forum.

This is why skepticism is a sine qua non of science, the only escape we have from the belief-dependent realism trap created by our believing brains.

How to be happy without a soul

I'm pretty much convinced that I don't have a soul. If it shows up one day like a lost puppy that managed to find its way home, I'll be pleasantly surprised. (At least, if it wags its tail and licks my face.)

Quite a while ago I gave up the search for my self, impelled in part by a source of great spiritual wisdom, The Onion, which told the tale of another guy who did the same thing.

As neuroscience learns more and more about how the brain functions, my decision appears increasingly wise to me. Of course, what else would I expect? Most of my decisions make a lot of sense to me.

After all, I'm me.

But is this really true? Is there actually an "I" and a "me"? Is there more than one entity lurking inside my cranium? Heck, is anyone there? And regardless of who or what my brain is, how different is the inside of my head from the outside?

These are great questions. I have no intention of answering them with any degree of certainty. I'm simply going to share a passage from Julian Baggini's "The Ego Trick" that I liked a lot.

(Here's a previous post about the book.)

Here Derek Parfit and Baggini express some sentiments that I've felt myself, but haven't been able to speak about anywhere near so clearly. They point out the upside of not having an immortal soul or an unchanging distinct self.

What we lose in uniqueness and everlastingness, we gain in communion, in commonality, in connection.

This is from the chapter, Living Without a Soul.

'My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air.'

These are not the kinds of words you typically read in contemporary anglophone analytic philosophy. But there they are, in Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons, describing the effect of adopting his version of the bundle theory. And why shouldn't such a shift of philosophical theory be life changing?

On the pearl view, life can indeed seem like a narrow tube down which we are dropped, accelerating all the time as the years shorten with age, the end approaching with alarming rapidity. But on the bundle view, the hardness of both tube and pearl disappear.

The boundaries of the self appear vaguer. 'There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people,' writes Parfit. 'But the difference is less.'

...It sounds strange, but the logic behind the claim is clear and compelling. For Parfit, a person is simply a highly ordered and complex network of psychological connections and continuities. But if you ask yourself what we are connected to and continuous with, the answer includes many things that are not inside our own bodies. These include not only other people, but other things.

...Getting used to the idea that I am a process, never remaining the same, helps me to accept how life too is forever in flux, never settled for too long. Accepting the impermanence of self is part of accepting the impermanence of all things.

Parfit is right: there is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people as there is between land and sea. That difference, however, is now more like a tidal beach, and less like a cliff edge.

Roseanne Barr's meditation approach sounds good to me

In a Newsweek story, "Roseanne Mouths Off (Again)," Roseanne Barr's rather untraditional Judaic approach to meditation is described.

Barr’s hair has gone gray and she has feather hair extensions—she looks like a hippie (check), grandma (check), stoner (check: every Friday night for Shabbat from sundown until 2 a.m., she gets high, drinks red wine, and does a meditation Rav Berg taught her).

Nice. My only question is what proportion of time each activity takes from sundown until 2 am.

I could follow this form of Kabbalah if, say, sundown was at 8 pm and the pot-smoking/wine-drinking lasts until 1:40 am, at which point I'd do my usual twenty minutes of meditation. Any longer than that would be a disproportionate amount of meditation.

Unless the meditation is getting high and drinking red wine. That could make me convert to Kabbalah.

Shun extremes. Usually. (Be moderate in shunning also.)

The past few days I've made my way through all of David Chapman's "Meaningness" online book, which I first blogged about here.

Since I'm a habitual highlighter of print books, it's been an interesting change of pace to page through screen after screen on my laptop without making any important!, I like!, or hmmmmm... marks.

All of the markings have been in my mind. So I'll consult my memory and share what has struck me the most about what Chapman says in his scientifically Buddhist'y fashion:

Life is best lived between extremes. But let's not make that adage into something extreme, since there are times when getting way out on an edge is fitting.

This may sound like the traditional Buddhist "middle way." And, well, in some ways it is. However, Chapman has a refreshing approach to discerning the proper course between two opposing poles, like eternalism and nihilism. He doesn't promote a middle way, preferring nebulosity.

Wrong ideas about meaningness show up as pairs of polarized, opposite stances. These appear to be extreme views. Surely the truth can be found somewhere between?

Unfortunately, no. The error underlying all confused stances is their refusal to allow nebulosity. Even if some middle ground could be found, it too would reject nebulosity, and so would also be unworkable.

In fact, it’s usually impossible to find a “middle” position anyway. In each pair of confused stances, one categorically denies what the other fixates.

For instance, the stance of true self holds that there is a mysterious essence of the person; the stance of selflessness holds that there is none. The reality of selfness might be described as “between” these extremes, once it is found. But “in the middle” is not a helpful hint for where to look. What is halfway between existence and non-existence?

To resolve confusions about meaningness, the helpful instruction is to head in the direction of nebulosity. Since both true self and selflessness are evasions of nebulosity, that direction is at right angles to the line between them.

OK, maybe this passage doesn't help you understand what nebulosity is all about. If so, I guess that's good. If "nebulous" is made all clear, crisp, and coherent, we'd be sacrificing the experiential meaning of it for a satisfyingly unambiguous definition.

Satisfying isn't the same as true, real, or workable.

Chapman correctly points out that we're drawn to extreme philosophical, political, or meaning-of-life positions because it feels comfortable there. We know where we stand. Other true believers in that position are with us. We are special, distinct, so much better off than those fools way over there on the opposite side from us.

Those fools, of course, look upon our position in the same way as we do theirs: as wrong, misguided, blind to oh-so-evident realities.

And so it goes. Religions, political parties, moralists, and such believing that they're 100% right while people with an opposing view are 100% wrong. Usually, though, the wisest stance is to embrace a more nebulous viewpoint that captures the best of both sides.

If I'd gotten a dollar every time my Tai Chi instructor has said, "there's no one right way," I'd have... um, a lot of dollars.

He's right. About there being many ways of being right. Doing what's right depends on the situation -- both inside and outside of us. Life isn't a cookbook or a lab experiment where doing A, B, and C always produces X, Y, and Z.

Chapman says:

Ethical situations are unboundedly complex and variable. Any finite, fixed set of rules will sometimes require actions that are obviously harmful, for no reason beyond “that’s the rule.” In such cases, you are faced with the horrible choice of violating rules you believed sacred, or creating needless suffering by obeying them.

...If ethics are unavoidably nebulous, in many situations there is no one “right thing” to do. Instead, there are alternatives with subtle trade-offs. We have the duty to pay close attention to the details, while also maintaining openness to the situation as a whole.

We also often have the privilege of choice. Where there is no definite right answer, we are free. We can choose at will. We also have room for creative improvisation: finding ethical solutions that are not applications of general principles.

This stance requires letting go of the fantasy that we could always avoid culpability. We have to accept that, inevitably, we will sometimes make ethical mistakes.

Regretting ethical mistakes makes us less likely to repeat them. However, acknowledging their inevitability means that we can let go of ethical anxiety. Ethical maturity is measured by the ability to find good-enough solutions to ethical problems, not by the amount you punish yourself.

 

David Chapman's dizzying writings on Meaningness and Buddhism

I don't often use the word "dizzying." Especially in the title of a blog post. Here, I mean it as a compliment, in the sense of... giddy, bewildering.

Those are good things when it comes to writings that attempt to get at What Life is All About. Because if we think we understand what life is all about, we don't.

Today someone sent me an email.

Wanted to make sure you've seen this one:

http://meaningness.wordpress.com

as he is a wonderful writer *and* touches on subjects that seem to be dear to your heart.

Instead of reading a book during my pre-meditation time this morning, I perused that link on my laptop.

Wow. Dizzying.

I later thanked my correspondent for turning me on to David Chapman, saying:

Thanks a lot for the link. I've read several posts/chapters and am blown away by this guy. He's like a more intelligent, more scientific, more coherent, more wise version of me who also can write a heck of a lot better. And has a great sense of humor. I'm an instant David Chapman fan. I'll probably put up a blog post tonight about his writings.

The more I delved into Chapman's web sites, the more I realized that trying to summarize his view of the world, and of reality, would be absurd. So I'll simply point to some writings that I've read, along with some others that I've quickly perused.

A good place to start is Chapman's starting point, an overview of his blogs and web sites.

From there I headed to his online Meaningness book. And nibbled on an Appetizer. I liked Chapman's central thesis. I couldn't really understand it. But it made me feel pleasingly dizzy.

The central message of this book is that meaning is real (and cannot be denied), but is fluid (so it cannot be fixed). It is neither objective (given by God) nor subjective (chosen by individuals).

The book offers resolutions to problems of meaning that avoid denial, fixation, and the impossibility of total self-determination. These resolutions are non-obvious, and sometimes unattractive; but they are workable in ways the alternatives are not.

"I seem to be a fiction" on Chapman's metablog about the book was my next quasi-randomly chosen stop.

There I learned that Chapman used to be (maybe he still is?) an artificial intelligence researcher at M.I.T. This piece is a highly entertaining "review" of Ken Wilber's Boomeritis, which I haven't read.

But I've read quite a few other Wilber books.

Pleasingly, because I like it when brilliant scientifically competent guys who write really well have the same attitude toward someone that I do, Chapman appears to be hot-and-cold toward Wilber in much the same way as I am.

He writes:

Although I admire Boomeritis, I oppose much of Wilber’s other work. Mainly he advocates monist eternalism, which I think is disastrously wrong.

In fact, Wilber (together with Eckhart Tolle) seems to be the main source for a new form of pop spirituality. This movement repackages the German Idealist philosophy Wilber loves, in a glossy new “spiritual but not religious” form that particularly appeals to younger generations.

The key ideas here are eternalism and monism:

Eternalism: there is a God (but sometimes we’ll call it something else, like “The Absolute,” to deflect the arguments for atheism).

Monism: you, God, and The Entire Universe are All One.

...This is hokum. There is no Absolute, you are not the entire universe, and there is no “true self.” This stuff is simple wish-fulfillment; a fantasy of personal omnipotence and immortality. (As I will explain in plodding detail in the book.)

I also offered up some mental right on's when I found my way to a "The essence of all religions?" piece. I'll share a fairly lengthy David Chapman passage, hoping that you'll either applaud it as much as I did or get offended because he mocks your own spiritual beliefs.

Some people think it [the essence of all religions] goes something like this:

“Through social and cultural conditioning, we each build a false self—an ego—and imagine that is who we really are.

This ego is a harmful illusion that prevents us from perceiving reality as it truly is.

Meditation gradually strips away the layers of ego. Buried deep within, we find our true selves.

This true self is radiant, pure, undivided, perfectly simple.

Our true self is none other than Ultimate Reality itself—or is directly, intimately, organically connected with that Eternal Absolute Infinite, which is the entire universe.

The essence of all religions is the transformative perception of that magical connection to all beings. It is the profound, non-conceptual experience of the Oneness of the universe.

This is heart and the path and the goal of Buddhism: the mystical experience of enlightenment.”

This is an attractive story, with a compelling logic. It is accepted without question in “Consensus Buddhism.”

I think it’s entirely wrong. It’s also almost right—so it’s a bit hard to see how wrong it is.

I think it matters that it is wrong. This is not just a matter of definitions, or sterile intellectual debate.

Here’s a really short version of why it’s wrong:

• There isn’t a true self. (This is as close to an essence as most versions of Buddhism have got…)
• There isn’t an Absolute Infinite, either. (That’s not what emptiness, or nirvana, or other Buddhist abstractions are.)
• Most Buddhists, for the past couple thousand years, would have disagreed that mystical experience is the essence of Buddhism. Most would probably not have recognized it as being Buddhist at all.

Here’s a really short version of why it matters:

• This story leads to meditating in a particular way. Other stories lead to other ways of meditating.
• If your meditation aims at perceiving and unifying two things that don’t exist, you’ll be disappointed.
• Worse, you are likely to miss what meditation actually can provide.
• And, this misunderstanding leads you to dismiss valuable parts of Buddhism because they don’t produce mystical experiences.

In the quickly perused category, I browsed Chapman's intriguingly titled introduction to "Buddhism for Vampires," a piece on Dzogchen (which Chapman is big on), "No holiness -- vastness!," and "Approaches to religion."

Blind faith takes many forms

Having started this churchless blog way back (in Internet time) in 2004, I've been able to follow a lot of interesting comment conversations about many subjects related to God, soul, spirit, consciousness, life after death, and such.

Naturally I've also been able to follow the continuing progress of my own irreligious evolution. In both cases -- looking at how other people regard supernaturalism, and how I do -- I'm struck by how difficult it is for us humans to let go of blind faith.

Religious true believers who come to embrace agnosticism or atheism find it fairly easy to discard traditional dogma -- such as that God is a being with person-like characteristics who resides in heaven and intervenes in worldly affairs.

But it's a lot tougher to go completely cold-turkey on blind faith. Or, to give the benefit of the doubt to supernaturalists, extremely-limited-vision faith.

Meaning, they continue to believe in some sort of enduring soul that is separate from the brain, a universal consciousness, unseen powers distinct from the laws of nature which affect the world, and other sorts of unproven supernatural phenomena.

Today a Church of the Churchless commenter, "cc," left these cogent thoughts on a recent blog post:

If there does exist a soul or unified consciousness, it doesn't need anyone testifying on its behalf. Denied or acknowledged, it would remain untouched, unphased [sic] by everything said about it, so why speak of such things at all? Stay within the realm of what can be verified or hypothesized and you approach the unknown with respect. But speak knowingly of what you can provide no evidence of and you're a religious nut.

l responded with my own comment:

cc, that's just how I see it. I can understand why people hang onto notions of "soul," "spirit," "life after death," "universal consciousness" and such after they supposedly have given up a belief in some traditional form of God.

However, those other notions are founded on the same blind faith as a belief in God is. It reminds me of Christians I've known who thought that they were discarding rigid dogma by embracing an Indian guru.

But then they'd look upon the guru almost exactly as they did Jesus. They simply transferred their blind faith into another form.

Where's the evidence? Like you said, without that, someone is a religious nut even if they don't belong to an organized religion. They've formed their own faith-based Religion of Me.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that. We all have unproven subjective beliefs. What I object to is when people say that scientific facts are wrong, even though they can't provide any more convincing alternative facts.

Meaning, they want other people to believe that their subjectivity is objective fact.

It's like telling me, "Dude, you've got a beautiful garden. But you've got to start believing that fairies are making the flowers grow."

I reply, "I don't believe in fairies. My flowers grow just fine with water, earth, air, all that natural stuff."

But the true believer persists. "No, man, you don't get it. Behind all that are FAIRIES!. I know they're real. You need to believe in them too!"

I'd respond with: "Hey, if you want to believe in fairies, go ahead. But unless you can show me evidence that is more convincing than what botanists tell me about how flowers grow, I'm going to ignore what you say."

When I told my wife about this comment conversation, she said:

"What's even crazier is that people will start to believe that the fairies want us to act in certain ways. They'll make up fairy commandments which people are supposed to follow, and claim that we need to pray to the fairies so our flowers will grow. If it's pointed out that flowers grow with or without prayers, then the believers will reply, It's the Will of Fairies that this be so. And if the flowers die, they'll also say that it was the will of fairies."

The way I see it, what's going on here is akin to the Zen adage, "First there is a mountain, then there isn't, then there is."

Many people get stuck in "isn't," even if they cease being traditionally religious. Meaning, they continue to believe that really real reality isn't this world; a meaningful life isn't achieved by living normally and naturally; how science understands the laws of nature isn't how things genuinely are.

I'm not saying that I know for certain this viewpoint is wrong. I've just come to see it as being less likely to be right than the "is" viewpoint.

Why?

Because "is" is where we live right now. "Is" is the reality we experience right now. "Is" is directly known right now. "Isn't" is a hypothesis, a conjecture, a concept. There's no evidence of "isn't," no proof of a mountain that isn't there.

I'm not saying that I'm an enlightened Zen master. (Though if you want to say that I am, that'd be cool.)

My claim simply is that realizing there's no such thing as enlightenment; there's no such thing as a supernatural world apart from this one; there's no such thing as a meaningful life different from the one each of us is living now -- this is what spiritual realization is all about.

"The Ego Trick" -- selves exist, but not as we believe

Who are we? Is there an essential "me"? Am I an unchanging self? I'm fascinated by these sorts of questions. Ever since I started practicing yoga and meditation more than forty years ago, I've been trying to understand who or what I am.

For much of that time I believed in the adage, "self-realization before God-realization." Yet as I said in a blog post, Religions are wrong about self-realization:

But the fact remains that whatever our "self" may be, it isn't something simple, obvious, supernatural, or transparently evident to awareness.

So this makes traditional religious/spiritual notions of self-realization laughably out of touch with reality. Whatever we are, it isn't what we intuitively consider ourselves to be -- often with ridiculously excessive confidence.

If somebody claims to be self-realized, or says he knows how this can be achieved, ask him to show you a "self." He won't be able to do it, just as no supposedly God-realized person ever has been able to demonstrate the existence of a "God."

Julian Baggini's new book, "The Ego Trick," casts fresh philosophical and neuroscientific light on the nature of our human self. It's very much in line with what I wrote above. Our sense of being, or having, an unchanging self isn't supported by an ever-increasing body of evidence.

Yet, Baggini says, the self isn't an illusion. It just isn't what most people believe it to be: a solid pearl of consciousness which remains unaltered as we go through the many changes of life.

The Ego Trick should be seen in this way. There is no single thing which comprises the self, but we need to function as if there were. As it happens, the mind, thanks to the brain and body, has all sorts of tricks up its sleeve that enable us to do this.

Because it succeeds, selves really do exist. We only go wrong if we're too impressed by this unity and assume that it means that underlying it is a single thing. But the self is not a substance or thing. It is a function of what a certain collection of stuff does.

I'll be saying more about how and why the bundle theory is true in the rest of this chapter. But if it does seem a strange, implausible idea, it's worth remembering just how much of reality is bundle-like.

Atoms are not solid objects but bundles of electrons, neutrons and protons. A planet is a complicated system, not a simple thing. Cars only exist as an assemblage of parts. The internet is a network, not an object that can be pinned down in time and space.

If it seems odd to think of ourselves as 'bundles' then perhaps that is only because we do not notice the extent to which all other entities are bundles too.

...The unity of experience does not therefore demonstrate that there is a unified thing having those experiences. Indeed, the evidence is that there is no such thing. There is no place in the brain where it all comes together and there is no immaterial soul which is the seat of consciousness.

The unity we experience, which allows us legitimately to talk of 'I', is a result of the Ego Trick -- the remarkable way in which a complicated bundle of mental events, made possible by the brain, creates a singular self, without there being a singular thing underlying it.

It seems as though there is some pearl at the self's core, but in fact there is no core at all. Generations of thinkers have gone wrong in thinking that we need to postulate a unified core self to account for the unity of self-experience.

In fact, unity is not a cause: it is an effect of a remarkably disunified, bundle-like system.

Wow. There's a lot to mentally digest in these passages from Baggini's book. His last sentence is particularly striking to me. Unity is not a cause: it is an effect.

I've read a lot of writings about Buddhism, Vedanta, Advaita, Nondualism, and other mystical teachings. Most, if not all, assume that our intuition of some sort of "pure awareness," "core consciousness," "elemental I-ness," or such is the real us.

But here comes neuroscience, ably popularized and explained by philosopher Julian Baggini, saying that this sense of an unchanging self, which perhaps is part of some sort of cosmic consciousness ("Atman is Brahman"), is an ego trick.

I love it. And it rings true to me.

All those gurus, mystics, yogis, masters, and so on who have taught that one's divine Self is beyond the Ego -- they've been captivated by a trick of the ego. This idea that there is an unchanging essence or "pearl" within us, something which isn't affected by mind or matter -- that's the ego trick.

Beautiful.

For me, there's nothing better than a movie which, right at the end, overturns all of our assumptions about what's been going on in a dramatic fashion. This is what modern research about how the brain works is doing: overturning the most cherished assumptions of ancient spiritual wisdom.

Or rather, supposed spiritual wisdom. I'll probably share more insights from "The Ego Trick" in other blog posts.

Here's a good summary of Baggini's views. Here's a link to a page on Baggini's web site about his book. And here's a You Tube video where he talks about the book. (The first seven minutes or so are the most interesting.)

 

 

 

Independence is impossible

So here we are in the United States, celebrating Independence Day this July 4, and my philosophical mind is thinking independence is impossible. And who would want it, anyway?

But lest my fellow citizens accuse me of wishing that the colonies had never broken away from Britain (ugh! what a horrible idea; I'd have to watch boring soccer rather than exciting football), I'm talking about a much more cosmic level of reality than political.

Religions are big on independence, though the concept almost always is expressed using different terms, such as salvation and liberation. Whether Eastern or Western, dualistic sorts of faiths consider that humans are trapped: by sin, karmas, maya, illusion, ignorance, the Devil, and other imprisoning forces.

I used to belong to an Indian spiritual organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, which published a book called "Liberation of the Soul." Christians and HIndus differ a lot theologically, but this title reflects a point of agreement -- people are spiritually enchained and need freeing.

Jesus is the key to liberation or salvation in Christianity. A guru performs this role in Radha Soami Satsang Beas and other Eastern belief systems.

When I embraced churchlessness, quite a few people told me that I'd given up on the spiritual search, on finding meaning in life, on delving into the essence of what reality is all about.

Hearing those accusations, my reaction was "What the hell are they talking about?" I didn't feel that way at all. I'd simply headed in a different truth-seeking direction, one which made a lot more sense to me.

There's another way of looking at independence: as an impossibility.

We can't be liberated from the world, because we're a part of it. We can't float free in some ethereal realm, because we're embodied beings. We can't detach ourselves from emotions, desires, memories, and thoughts, because these are integral aspects of our humanity.

I used to believe that my spiritual goal was to rise above this world. Now, I consider that to have a meaningful life I need to fully embrace my interconnectedness with other people, nature, and the rest of reality.

I, you, every person alive and every person who has ever lived: we breathe, we eat, we drink, we urinate, we defecate, we sense, we experience, we communicate. Each of these activities involves interchanges, sharings, givings and takings between us and what is other than us.

Who wants to be independent of all this? Who wants to be a drop isolated from reality's ocean? How lonely this would be, how depressing.

Yes, I'm fully familiar with the spiritual/religious platitudes about oneness, merging, and all that. Supposedly if we detach ourselves from this world, we'll gain a better one. However, that other world is nowhere in evidence, while this world is.

Heaven is imaginary. Earth is here, now.

Today, Independence Day, I went for a walk with our dog in central Oregon. We ambled along the banks of the Metolius River. I'm not saying that nature, especially wild and scenic rivers like the Metolius, is a cure for religious believers who are afflicted with a urge to free themselves from the confines of material existence.

But I sure feel much more satisfied with simply being who and what I am when I'm embraced by the natural world.


Stretched out on a log, keeping my toes out of the frigid water of the spring-fed Metolius, I saw lots of bees and butterflies doing their thing around these flowers. They live. They die. Just like us. What's the problem?

Our dog, Serena, sure doesn't have a problem with diving into the physical world. Especially when a watery aspect of it is wet and cold on a hot July day. Is this unreal, illusory, maya? Not to me, not when I got off the log and waded back to shore in my Teva sandals.

I understand the appeal of philosophies and religions which view this world as a pale reflection of more vibrant higher planes of reality. But look! Look! Don't miss what's right in front of you because you're in love with a concept.

There's amazing beauty and wonder everywhere on Earth, in small things and large, in crowded cities and unspoiled countryside, in the living faces of people and inanimate scenes of nature.

Yes, some places are more striking than others, the Metolius being where I regularly get struck with a big reality stick that bonks this realization into my psyche: there's nothing I need to be liberated from; what I need is to be freed from is the notion that independence from the world is desirable.


Eventually each of us will reach the end of life's path. We'll be swept up by the river of death. No one knows where it leads. Somewhere. Nowhere. No one knows. Why not walk on the path as happily, joyfully, meaningfully, and productively as possible? Until... it ends.

Life is pretty damn simple. When we don't make it complicated. How does water know where to go? Stupid question. There's no knowing required.

I'm not our dog. I don't want to be our dog. Anyway, I can't be our dog. Still, when I look at her, I often feel like she naturally understands something that most humans don't: the virtue of not trying to understand what doesn't need to be understood.

Sun. River. Walk. Stuff to smell. Cold water to lay in. Who wants to be independent of all that good stuff?

Religion, like fast food, makes you unnaturally large

Since I've given up religion, I've become a lot more content with my smallness. As noted before, I'm no longer obsessed with expanding my consciousness, enlarging my connection with God, or growing my spiritual understanding.

Small things please me now much more than they did before. I guess you could say I've lost a lot of ego-weight after discarding a religious belief system that had grandiose goals and taught that human beings could attain perfection.

This morning I forgot to put the canned dog food back in the refrigerator. There goes my claim to perfection. To which I say, good riddance. The more imperfectly natural I feel, the more I feel in tune with reality.

The way I see it, I'm much closer to being nothing than everything. The obervable universe extends about 47 billion light years. I'm about six feet tall, and likely still shrinking. So I should feel small.

When I die, likely I'll be really nothing.

Can't know for sure, but those who say I'll become One With Everything don't know either. All we can be sure of is that when people die, there's no longer any sign of the living, breathing beings they once were.

(HInt: if you ever meet the Dalai Lama, don't tell him the "make me one with everything" joke. A TV guy didn't have much success with it.)

Religions, though, play to our craving to have our selves carry on forever. Some faiths say that the body dies, but the soul spends eternity with God. Other faiths promise that if we do such and such, we'll merge with allness, oneness, everythingness.

Supposed result: we get bigger rather than smaller. More wise, more spiritual, more conscious, more loving, more radiant, more blissful, more..., more..., more....

Sounds good, doesn't it? What could be wrong with more? Isn't there an almost universal craving for the goodies that religions offer up on their dogma menu? Yes, there is. But cravings aren't necessarily beneficial for us. Consider fast food.

In his fascinating little (144 pages) book, "Why We Believe in God(s)," psychiatrist and evolutionary psychologist J. Anderson Thomson likens religious belief to fast food. People are attracted to both for reasons that are by-products of evolution's adaptations.

Religion utilizes and piggybacks onto everyday social-thought processes, adaptive psychological mechanisms that evolved to help us negotiate our relationships with other people, to detect agency and intent, and to generate a sense of safety. These mechanisms were forged in the not-too-distant world of our African homeland. They are why we survived.

While not an adaptation in its own right, religious belief is a by-product of those psychological mechanisms that allowed us to imagine other people and other social worlds, abilities crucial to human survival. Because religion only slightly alters those adaptations, it can be equally powerful.

Let's look at the workings of adaptive by-products another way: do you like fast food -- say, a big, juicy burger with cheese, a large side of crisp, salted fries, and an icy cola or shake?... You may avoid them for dietary or health reasons, but odds are that you at least occasionally break down and buy such meals even against your better judgment.

Why does this matter? If you understand the psychology of craving fast food, a savory slice of prime rib, or a decadent chocolate sundae, you can fully comprehend the psychology of religion.

We evolved in harsh, dangerous environments. We evolved cravings for foods that were rare and crucial to our physical well-being. Nobody craves Brussels sprouts. Certain types of greens and tubers were an available source of food in the ancient world. But we all crave fat, and we all crave sweets.

...Craving is an adaptation. It solves the problem of securing crucial but rare life-sustaining foods.

...But today, in most areas of the developed world, food is plentiful and human culture has created new ways of responding to those cravings. Now we have fast food, high in unhealthy fat that plugs our arteries and expands our waistlines, a far cry from the lean game meat our ancestors sought out. Instead of ripe fruits we have sodas and candy bars.

Even knowing the harm eating fat, salt, and sugar can do to us, we still crave them, and unless disciplined, we will choose them over lean meat and ripe fruit. Why?

Because they pack supernormal stimuli. Our brains react to this relatively recent rise of excessive calories on demand as if it's a good thing, as though we still need to behave as our ancestors did. Our brains reward us. When we eat our favorite food, the pleasure centers in our brain explode with delight. What we experience is not just slight satisfaction, but an intense pleasure released by brain chemicals.

...This is why it is not a joke to say that if you understand the psychology of fast food, you understand the psychology of religion.

In the rest of his book, Thomson describes the specifics of how the craving for religion, like a craving for fast food, is a by-product of evolutionary adaptations that helped humans survive.

But now religion and fast food are dysfunctional. We don't really need them, but our brains are hard-wired to desire them.

So true believers will say "My religion feels so right and true to me," just as diners at a fast food restaurant will say, "My burger and fries are so tasty and fulfilling for me. Well, yeah, that's what their brain chemicals are saying, Yum!, and so people keep getting physically and spiritually fatter.

Leaner is better. Smaller is better. Excess weight, whether physical or egotistical, is a burden to carry around. Sure, it may feel good to imagine that you're part of God's chosen band of souls who are destined to feast on divine grace forever.

But consider the benefits of an alternative feeling: that you're nobody special. You're not a big deal. You're not a technicolor being in a black and white world. You're simply a small part of a gigantic universe, a tiny piece of an immeasurably vast jigsaw puzzle of reality -- the whole picture of which can't be known.

Small takes some getting used to. It's a more natural place to be, though. Try it. You might find that you like it.