Church of the Churchless

David Chapman: "There are no spiritual problems"

I knew I'd like David Chapman's most recent blog post when I saw the title. There are no spiritual problems. 

Amen to that, brother David. 

I don't usually say "brother," but it seems fitting here. Recently I was thinking bloggishly along the same lines in My new Major Life Project: don't have one.

Except, as noted before after I first came across Chapman's writings...

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. 

So when I read there are no spiritual problems, once again I felt like I was being exposed to how I'd look upon the world if I could just see and describe things as well as Chapman can.

Not that we're philosophical clones. He's very much into Tantra and a form of Tibetan Buddhism (which may be the same thing). I'm not much into anything these days, finding organized whatever unappealing in my current churchlessness.

But Chapman's Buddhism is so barely Buddhist (compared to traditional Buddhism), I hardly noticed it when I read his post -- which energized and delighted me. Maybe you'll feel the same.

Here's some passages that I especially liked.

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

Many religions start with the idea that there is some hideous problem with all of existence.

The problem might not be obvious. The job of the religion is to convince you that:

• you’ve got this problem (and so does everyone)
• it is really, really bad—much worse than it appears
• it affects everything in the whole universe, so there’s no escaping it
• it’s so vast and awful and incomprehensible that there’s no practical way of solving it
• so you’d better buy our brand of magic instead.

For example:

• After you die, demons will torture you forever, because someone ate a magic apple.
• All of existence is pervaded by impermanence, suffering, and non-self.
• Life is inherently meaningless, so it is impossible to act.

(These are, of course, the cosmic defects proposed by Christianity, Buddhism, and existentialism.)

According to tantra, there are no such problems.

...A spiritual problem, according to religions that believe in them, requires a spiritual solution. But there are none. This belief diverts your energy into attempting to solve an imaginary spiritual problem, and away from practical solutions to real, practical problems.

...If the universe were about us, the world would be wrong. We don’t like suffering, and there’s quite a bit of it going around.

If there were a God, the world would be wrong. If someone designed the world, he did a piss-poor job. We should fire him. Or maybe he’s a bastard, and we should kill him.

If the world were supposed to be some way it is not, it would be wrong. But “supposed” supposes a supposer. According to whose criteria could the world be judged?

There is no God; the world was not designed; it was not meant to be some way; there is no cosmic plan to compare it against.

Therefore, there can be no fundamental problem with it. We have no grounds for complaint.

Stuff happens, mostly for no particular reason. Some of it, we like; some of it, we don’t.

...There are no spiritual problems; but there are real problems. Small ones like dirty dishes in the sink, and big ones like global warming.

Spaciousness and passion both lead you to regard all situations as workable. Nothing is cosmically awful; practical problems do not prove the world is wrong.

“Workable” does not guarantee that there is a solution. “Nothing is fundamentally wrong with the world” does not mean that everything can be fixed, or that life can be made perfect. Catastrophe is always possible. Death is always certain.

Passion and spaciousness together imply that you care deeply about the world, that you urgently want to fix problems, that you always do your best—and you are unruffled when you fail.

...According to mainstream Buddhism, it is critical to avoid indulging in sense pleasures. Those tie you to the world, and the world is bad.

According to tantra, the world is fantastic. According to tantra, tantrikas should enjoy sensual pleasures as thoroughly and often as possible. There is no problem with that—if it has no negative practical consequences.

According to tantra, it is possible to enjoy everything.

Nothing in the world can be objectively bad, because there is no external standard to measure it against. “Good” and “bad” are judgements based only on what you happen to like and dislike. Tantra trains you to suspend such judgement.

According to mainstream Buddhism, mundane reality is utterly impure and defiled. The sacred is found only elsewhere.

According to tantra, everything in the world is sacred. Enjoyment should be inseparable from reverence.

Surfer on giant wave shows what life is all about

Beautiful. 
Spine-tingling.
Inspiring.

This is what life is all about.

Going with the flow.
Keeping your balance, as best you can.
Embracing mystery.

Love it.

 

What if Jesus had acted like a rich Indian guru?

A few days ago "Jimi" left a comment on my blog post, Radha Soami Satsang Beas guru makes $254 million. He/she said, in part:

I've been reading this article and comments and I'm not sure what the issue is... It looks like BJ [Baba Gurinder Singh Ji, the guru] and family bought some shares and sold them and made a profit. What's wrong with that? Am I missing something? Is there something wrong with him being wealthy?

I replied:

Jimi, you are indeed missing something. Gurinder Singh got a special insider deal on the shares. He didn't buy them as a regular investor. The RSSB guru used his connections as God in Human Form to become rich.

The shares were essentially gifted to him by a disciple who also was a relative. RSSB initiates dominate the management of Religare, so there are inherent conflicts between Gurinder Singh's "spiritual" life and "personal" life.

Soon I might write a blog post about how the New Testament would look a lot different if Jesus had acted like Gurinder Singh has. That'll give you more insights into the weirdness of a "saint" using his sainthood to become hugely rich, which preaching the importance of returning to God and detaching from the illusion of this world.

Well, here's my take on how the New Testament might sound if Jesus acted like Gurinder Singh. I'm not very familiar with the Gospels, never having been much interested in Christianity.

So if I don't sound like the King James version, there's good reasons.

I think it's instructive to undertake this exercise (in addition to the fun I'll have doing it). After all, the gurus of Radha Soami Satsang Beas are considered to be God in Human Form, just as Jesus was. And the RSSB literature says Jesus was the "perfect living guru" of his time.

(Though Jesus might have married and had children, I'll assume his earthly relations included a mother, father, and siblings; thus the money that went to Gurinder Singh's sons will go to Jesus' parents in my Gospel story.)

So seemingly Gurinder Singh should have a similar attitude toward money and worldly pursuits as Jesus did. If so, an updated version of the Gospels would have included a passage somewhat like this...

And it came to pass that Jesus' ministry bore fruit, with multitudes gathering around him to hear how God, the Father, loved them. God especially loved his Son, for blessings were showered upon Jesus: he became vastly rich not only in the spirit, but also in money.

Through the grace of the Lord, two of Jesus' nephews became successful merchants. Their business prospered even as they came to look upon their uncle as God's messenger, not a mere relative. So the nephews bestowed upon Jesus' earthly mother and father a hundredfold gift of riches, returning unto them a dollar for each penny they had given to the nephews.

Which returneth unto Jesus, for his mother and father shared with him the riches that they had gained, making him one of the wealthiest men in Galilee. Jesus chose not to share his riches with the poor who flocked around him, preaching that they should find their treasure in heaven even as the Son of God traveled in great comfort and slept in luxurious homes.

His intimate disciples were pleased to be the servants of Jesus as much in his money-making work as in his ministry.

They became trusted advisors to Jesus' nephews, helping to make their business prosper even more greatly, adding to Jesus' wealth. The Son of God and his family became billionaires, even as those who flocked around him remained both poor in spirit and poor in money.

And when they heard Jesus proclaim, "Again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God," looking upon him quizzically, the Son of God would say:

Dudes, don't take me so literally! Irony. Think irony. Anyway, do what I say, not what I do.

They would struggle to understandeth, knowing that the ways of God are dark, mysterious, and beyond comprehension. Especially that word, "dudes," which none in Galilee had heard before.

My "Gospel story" is pretty darn close to the truth of how Gurinder Singh and his family became Indian billionaires. To learn the details, see here, here, and here.

My new Major Life Project: don't have one

For most of my 63 year-old life I've had what could be called a Major Life Project. Meaning, an overarching ambition aimed at transforming not just part of my life, but all of it. 

"Mystical enlightenment." "God realization." "Knowledge of ultimate reality." "Soul travel." "Salvation."

These are ways of saying what I aspired toward, though it's difficult to put into words. What propelled my Major Life Project since my college years was a feeling, an intuition, a drive. 

I wanted to know... I wanted to experience... I wanted to be...

What followed those ellipses...? I wasn't sure. I had some expectations, some guesses, some theories. But all I knew, or more accurately, believed, was that it was possible for my life to change direction massively.

From illusion to enlightenment. From separateness to unity. From ignorance to knowledge. The Truth (with a capital "T") was Out There, or In Here, and damn it, I was going to find it! 

Even better: to become it!

Now that I've embraced churchlessness after my spiritual deconversion, I've changed a lot. My current Major Life Project is to not have one. That feels oh so right. Yet can I prove that I've evolved, become wiser, more attuned to the cosmos?

No. And that's my point. I no longer have a desire to be truthier than thou. My life projects are different now, not nearly as grandiose.

I still have goals.

There's stuff I want to learn and things I want to do. I'm energized every day to improve -- though one of my top priority daily "to-do's" is Appreciate more fully what's right in front of you. That is, in addition to my substantive Minor LIfe Projects, I've got an empty one, a non-project. 

Embracing what is. Turning away from should-be's and has-been's. Experiencing the present.

That non-project is completely compatible with my other projects, because I'm no longer interested in some distant divine goal. Talk of enlightened states of consciousness for which there's no demonstrable evidence... boring.

Life is short. Eternity is a fantasy. Infinity is an abstraction. Here and now strikes me as hugely more real than there and then.

I realize this sort of talk will strike those who believe in a Major Life Project as backsliding, giving up, turning away from an awesome pursuit of ultimate reality. Fine. I used to look upon people like me in that way also.

But now that I've become the me that I am, I see life from a different vantage point. Again, I'm not claiming objectively better. Just better for me. 

At the moment one of the Minor Life Projects that's giving me (and my wife) a lot of satisfaction is learning West Coast Swing. Again. We've taken several series of West Coast Swing classes, most recently in 2009. 

They didn't stick.

This dance style is pretty complicated, compared to other swing styles. Laurel and I had forgotten almost everything we'd learned. A few weeks ago we decided to dive back into West Coast Swing. We've had three private lessons and a group lesson. We're going to have more of each.

Is dancing West Coast Swing enlightening? Will it merge me with the essence of the cosmos? Don't know. Can't say. Most importantly: don't care.

I feel really good while learning and dancing West Coast Swing. My wife and I are enjoying ourselves. I watch dancers better than us and want to be able to come closer to doing what they can do. Which I can see, as contrasted with those airy-fairy claims of divinity that used to interest me so much.

After our first private lesson, the instructor suggested a couple of Canadian West Coast Swing champions as dancers to learn from. As soon as I got home I Googled "Myles Munroe Tessa Cunningham." 

Watching them for just a minute or so, I realized that West Coast Swing was going to become one of my Minor Life Projects. (Minor just means not Major; actually, I'm much less inclined to divide the stuff I do into "minor" and "major" now; working in the garden feels about the same as getting a book back in publication.)

Here's the video that helped draw me to learn West Coast Swing. I get chills when I watch it. Are Myles and Tessa enlightened beings? Perhaps. In their own way. The only way that matters.

 

I also really like the video below of Myles dancing with a different partner. This is what life, truly lived, is: spontaneous, joyful, playful. (The dancing is improvised, led and followed without choreography.)

 

Boxing up books reminds me of a beautiful book, freely-given

I just finished mailing off 87 pounds of books I once was deeply attached to.

As related in my previous blog post, "Break free of the religious merry-go-round," I got an email from a woman in India who was looking for early editions of books published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB). I told her that I had plenty of them. 

After a few additional rounds of messaging, it was decided that I should send the books to her two daughters, who live in the United States. They'll find ways to get the books over to her in New Delhi, such as by carrying a few at a time in their luggage when they make a family visit.

Getting the three 12 inch square boxes ready for mailing brought to mind several thoughts, all pleasant, though accompanied by some deep poignant feelings.

Books mean a lot to me. As they did to my mother, an avid reader.

These RSSB books were especially meaningful for many years. After all, they reflected my philosophy of life, how I viewed ultimate reality, what I assumed the purpose of human existence to be. Yet that was then; now I feel differently.

Still, I wanted someone else to get his/her own meaning from the RSSB books. As soon as I got the first email from the woman in New Delhi, I realized that no longer did I want the books to sit in storage containers in our garage attic. 

I wanted to give my books away.

I had no idea what they were worth to a used book dealer. I didn't care. I much preferred giving them to someone who would appreciate them, than get some money for them from someone who saw the books as a commodity.

Here are the three book boxes, ready to be taken to the post office. Against the middle box I propped a beautiful book that was freely-given to me in 1969 by Curt Siodmak, a man I barely knew, but who I've fondly remembered every time I've looked at the book over the past 43 years.

The book is a 1934 edition (first edition, I assume) of "The Song Celestial," Sir Edwin Arnold's translation of the Bhagavad Gita. It's got some marvelous illustrations by Willy Pogany.

Curt Siodmak lived in Three Rivers, California, where I grew up. His house was on the south fork of the Kaweah River. My mother and I resided on the middle fork. One of my best friends, Todd Wells, was a fellow south forker. In 1969 he took me to meet Mr. Siodmak when I'd come home from college on a visit. 

At that time I was big into hatha yoga and meditation. And looked like Jesus. (Or at least, what I like to think Jesus would have looked like, if he looked a lot like me.)

I was studying yoga with a crazed/crazy Greek yogi who had started a Christananda Ashram in San Jose, where I was going to college at San Jose State. That's a whole other story...

Curt Siodmak was a creative guy, a writer who wrote the screenplay for "The Wolfman" that starred Lon Chaney. He also wrote "Donovan's Brain," which was made into a '50s movie by the same name that I dimly remember watching in my childhood.

I can't remember exactly what we talked about at Siodmak's house. Indian philosophy certainly came up, because I do recall the moment when, without a word, he walked over to a bookcase, pulled something down, and handed it to me.

"Here. I want you to have this," Siodmak said.

I was shocked. College student that I was, my books were bought on the cheap, usually used and worn. Curt Siodmak had given me a beautiful hard cover book in a rather fancy slip-in box (which I've lost). The publication date was 1934. It looked like a collector's item. And Siodmak barely knew me.

I've never forgotten that moment. That wonderful spontaneous, natural moment.

No artifice. No speech about the book. I have no idea whether it meant a lot, a little, or nothing to him. I simply remember the casual ease with which Curt Siodmak gave me a book in the space of fifteen seconds that I've treasured for 43 years.

When my mother's long time live-in companion, Bill, died (it felt sort of strange to be a liberal all legally married while my conservative mother was "shacking up" with a man), I gave her "The Song Celestial," pointing her to Krishna's words:

Nay, but as when one layeth
His worn-out robes away,
And, taking new ones, sayeth,
"These will I wear today!"
So putteth by the spirit
Lightly its garb of flesh,
And passeth to inherit
A residence afresh. 

After my mother died from a stroke a few years later, I found the book Curt Siodmak had given me on her bedside table. A piece of note paper marked the page with the words I quoted. My mother had penciled in some brackets to mark that passage and another that begins with:

Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never;
Never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams!
Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the spirit for ever
Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems! 

I don't believe in those words any more. I don't know if my mother ever really did. Maybe. Maybe not. Doesn't matter. 

What matters is how Curt Siodmak's freely-given book became such a big part of my life. And still is.

I have no interest in the content of "The Song Celestial" now, the Bhagavad Gita having come to seem to me nearly as truth-lacking as the Bible or Koran. But the way the book was given to me, so naturally and, yes, so irreligiously -- that has stuck in my mind all these years. And it reminds me of my mother.

After 1971, when I was initiated by the Radha Soami Satsang Beas guru into this Indian spiritual/mystical organization, I saw a lot of giving going on. The guru would give out parshad, blessed food akin to a sacrament. Disciples would give time and energy to their volunteering. Giving was all over the place.

But none of it ever struck me as being so real as Curt Siodmak's walking over to his bookcase, pulling out "The Song Celestial," and handing it to me. It was an unforced, intuitive, natural moment which reflected Siodmak's artistic nature. I didn't sense anything behind his action, just the action itself.

So when I left the post office after mailing the three boxes of books, I felt good. I thought of Curt Siodmak. I have no idea whether the Indian woman who is getting my 87 pounds of books will find them meaningful, or even if she'll read most of them.

They're a gift. I felt like giving them away. The woman felt like taking them. Simple. Which is how life is, when religious morality, dogmatism, and holier-than-thou'ness is abjured. 

Books come. Books go. Life comes. Life goes. No big deal. Just the only deal -- doing what comes naturally.

Break free of the religious merry-go-round

I liked this image as soon as I saw it shared by someone in my Facebook feed.

Horses running free, coming vibrantly alive after they escape from their wooden attachment to a merry-go-round (or carousel). It resonated with my irreligious non-soul. 

Interestingly, Anne Wipf, the artist who created "Freedom - the Carousel," is big into fantasy. The image is posted on Elfwood, described as the world's largest sci-fi and fantasy community.

Well, each to his/her own.

I saw this image and thought free of fantastical religion!. Others look upon it and think free of restrictive reality! Fine. We're on the same wavelength of Free!

Which I look upon as meaning "open to changing," rather than unfettered from all outside influences.

I don't believe in free will (see here, here, here, and here). As a non-card-carrying Taoist, I do believe in the inevitability of change. There may be some invarying aspects to the cosmos, but as life is lived by us humans, constant changing is the only constant.

Browsing through "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Taoism" this morning, I came across:

Ch-Ch-Changes
In the following quote, is it the man or the river that changes?

"No man ever steps in the same river twice."
-- Heraclitus 

Great question. Both seems like a good answer. But I might change my mind about that. 

Today I boxed up most of the books published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas that have been part of my life since 1970. I was an active member of this Indian spiritual/mystical organization for over thirty years.

Even though I'm no longer involved with the group, and don't subscribe to most of RSSB's "Sant Mat" dogmas any more, for quite a few years I stored the books away in the attic of our garage rather than giving them away or selling them.

Then, recently, I heard from someone in India who was looking for early editions of the RSSB books.

I emailed him back that most of mine were early editions. She isn't a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas; she just enjoys reading Indian philosophy and doesn't like how RSSB has edited some of its books over time.

I realized that the time had come to take another step off of the religious merry-go-round. Those books had meant a lot to me. That's why I'd stored them, rather than getting rid of them. Some I'd read many times, highlighting passages in various colors over decades of re-reading.

Binders had come loose of some books that I'd had for over forty years. Handwritten notes were inserted in many pages, as I'd used the books as references for talks ("satsangs") that I'd given many times at RSSB meetings.

The Indian woman and I are trying to figure out how to get 87 pounds of books to New Delhi in the least expensive way. Any ideas would be appreciated (leave a comment). Surface shipping seems to have mostly disappeared, with the modern emphasis on air transport.

This morning I decided to figure out how many boxes it would take to ship the books. Answer: three 12 inch by 12 inch boxes. Not many. 

Seeing them on the kitchen floor, I thought about how much of my previous spiritual life was reflected in those three boxes, those 87 pounds of pages.

When I had gone through the books a few days before, determining the publication date and edition of each so the Indian woman could decide if he wanted a particular book, there were moments when I started to become emotional. I was remembering how much a certain book had meant to me.

But almost instantly I realized, that was then, this is now. I've changed. Change happens. Change is good. Also, inevitable. 

I've given up some beliefs. I've embraced others. That's how life goes, for as long as we're alive. I'm glad my books will be going to someone who appreciates them (assuming we figure out how to ship them). They used to be important to me.

Now, they're not.

How to live happily until you die

Religious believers have dogmas that comfort when death stares them in the face. Resurrection of the body. Eternal survival of the soul.

Some secular "survivalists" hold onto equally unfounded hypotheses: that their body can be kept alive for a really long time through a health/medical breakthrough, or kept frozen and reanimated in some advanced technological future. 

(Uploading of one's brain contents to a back-up brain or computerized alternative is another dream of those who desire immortality outside of religion.)

In his "Immortality," a book I've blogged about recently here and here, Stephen Cave persuasively demolishes the efficacy of these three approaches to immortality -- Staying Alive, Resurrection, Soul.

He also is skeptical, though not to the same degree, of the Legacy approach: continuing on through children, creative works, professional achievements, social/scientific accomplishments, positive memories in the minds of family and friends, etc. etc. 

Yes, we can sort of live on through the legacy we leave behind. But not really. We're dead and gone, so we don't know how our legacies are being treated. Cave asks the reader, do you even know the names of your great-grandparents, much less the details of their lives?

(My answer: no.)

So how do we deal with what Cave calls the Mortality Paradox, without fooling ourselves that we've cheated death via the unworkable approaches of Staying Alive, Resurrection, Soul, and Legacy? The Mortality Paradox is simply stated:

Awareness of your mortality and an inability to conceive of ourselves as not existing.

ln a concluding chapter, Cave turns positive. Here, he says, is what can actually work to relieve our fear of death. 

First, "unending life would most likely be a terrible curse." He offers up good reasons for this statement, but it won't convince believers in an eternal, or timeless, heavenly realm where the soul or resurrected body never tires of divine delights.

The second step, then, is to accept "that the fear of actually being dead is nonsensical." Why? Because that fear is only present while we're alive. When we're dead, we're not conscious of anything, naturally including fear.

To talk of "being dead" is just a shorthand for saying they have ceased to exist. ..."Life has no end." That is, we can never be aware of it having an end -- we can never know anything but life.

This may seem obvious. However, now that I've finished Cave's book I realize that while my inescapable inability to know what it is like to be dead is just that, obvious, I hadn't fully embraced the meaning of this understanding.

Reading about Cave's third step, "to cultivate virtues that undermine those aspects of our nature that lead to both the will to persist forever and the corresponding existential angst," pointed me in a direction that fits with where my ever-increasing churchlessness has been leading me.

Here they are, The Three Virtues. I like them.

Naturally Cave says more about The Three Virtues than I've been able to share here. But this will give you a good idea of how secular wisdom concerning how to deal with death is akin to aspects of various spiritual "wisdom traditions," such as Buddhism and Taoism.

Identifying With Others.

Awareness of self might be important, but excessive concern with the self only exacerbates the fear of death, or loss of self, and leads some to a life of self-absorption. In order to combat this, we should cultivate selflessness, or identifying with others.

...This obsession with the self grew out of the doctrine of the immortal soul.

...We have seen that by taking the fear of death at face value, all four immortality narratives exacerbate the very attitudes that underpin that fear. By encouraging people to obsess about their own health, or the state of their own soul, or their particular legacy, they encourage the very self-centered, future-oriented and negative view that caused the fear in the first place.

...Bertrand Russell put it well: "The fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble. The best way to overcome it -- so at least it seems to me -- is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life."

Focus on the Present.

Similarly, picturing the future helps us to plan a successful life, but excessive concern with the future causes us to focus on the tribulations that lie ahead of us -- and we forget to live now. Therefore we should learn to live more in the present moment.

...When left to their own devices, our minds busy themselves with plans, plots, worries and idle speculation -- much of it about things that might go badly for us... By dwelling on all manner of possible threats, we bring death into life, only then to die without having truly lived.

...If you are happy now, then you are happy always, as there is only now. But equally, if you spend each moment worrying about your future happiness, then happiness will always elude you, and your life will be one of anxiety. And, as we have seen, worrying about death -- something we can never experience -- is the most foolish worry of all.

Gratitude.

Imagining all the things that could threaten our existence might help us to avoid them, but in excess it leads us only to worry about what we might lose rather than appreciate what we have. Therefore we should cultivate gratitude.

...That an unbroken chain of many millions of ancestors over billions of years all managed to do their bit to bring us into existence, that is our blessing. And it is an extraordinary one, involving more strokes of luck and cosmic coincidences than are possibly countable.

We can barely begin to measure the good fortune that led to the development first of life, then of animals, of mammals, of humans, of your family, and, finally, of you. Complex life -- and in particular the life of any individual -- is remarkable.

...And what these facts suggest is that before we rue our plight of a short life overshadowed by death, we should be grateful -- very, very grateful -- that we have a shot at life at all, and with a brain capable of appreciating and creating so much wonder.

...We have evolved to focus on what we stand to lose -- ultimately on the threat of death -- causing us to live in fear instead of reveling in the extraordinary good fortune of being.

...It is no coincidence that gratitude is one of the common themes throughout the world's wisdom literature and a powerful antidote to the fear of death. As the Greek Stoic Epicurus put it, "He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has."

Cells, common ancestors, and Gaia -- suggestions of immortality

Like I said in my post "We can never be dead (but we're not immortal," in his book Stephen Cave does an excellent job of describing ways we humans attempt to achieve immortality -- then showing why they aren't up to the job.

Staying alive... we can try to make our years on Earth as many as possible, but it's obvious that everybody dies eventually.

Resurrection... Jesus supposedly did it, but there's no solid evidence of this, and no proof anyone else has pulled off the trick either.

Soul... nice idea, that a conscious non-physical aspect of us continues on after the body dies, but the getting-hit-on-the-head argument effectively demolishes the notion that consciousness isn't dependent on the brain.

Which leaves Legacy, the approach to immortality I've been reading about the past few days.

I've always been skeptical of relying on some legacy to make sure that I exist forever ever since I heard Woody Allen's apt "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying."

Yeah, me too.

That's why I believed in soul, reincarnation, and such for over thirty years. I much preferred the idea of me living on as me, compared to me living on through blog posts, books, professional achievements, tree plantings, child/grandchild, memories in the heads of others, and so on.

In that last sentence I mixed together several sorts of Legacy, symbolic aspects like writings that came from my brain, and biological aspects that came, um, from lower down in my body.

Regarding the latter, my child and grandchild, Case talks about how we humans are related to other living things and arguably can't be considered as separate from the Life that permeates our planet.

In evolutionary terms, it is not long ago that all humans had a common ancestor -- a mere two hundred thousand years. A more positive ideology based on the biological Legacy Narrative would encompass the whole human race as our immortality vehicle. And indeed there are idealists, such as Einstein and Linus Pauling, who advocated just this.

But why stop at humans?

... A few simple creatures that started replicating a very long time ago have covered the earth with a tissue of life -- the biosphere -- all of which is profoundly interconnected. The question is, can any of these super-macro perspectives of nation, species, or biosphere provide a plausible immortality vehicle -- one that might even solve the problem of consciousness?

...The Gaia hypothesis is the claim that our entire planet is an integrated system that regulates itself in a way that is conductive to life.

...From this super-macro perspective, the human quest for personal immortality looks increasingly like a kind of mix-up. Individual humans are merely temporary forms taken by the single, shifting web of life on earth. To suggest one should live forever is like trying to preserve the shape of a particular dune in the shifting sands of a desert.

If humans are not really separate things, then their births and deaths are also not real, but simply one way of seeing the rhythms of life.

[Lynn] Margulis thinks so: "Death is illusory in quite a real sense," she writes. "As sheer persistence of biochemistry, 'we' have never died during the passage of three thousand million years. Mountains and seas and even supercontinents have come and gone, but we have persisted."

I like this way of looking upon life. My life isn't mine. Never was, isn't now, never will be. I'm an integral part of a much greater Life from which I bloomed, and which will live on long after I'm gone.

Cave says that the biological Legacy Narrative "dissolves you into a greater whole; it releases you from the struggle to become someone special, emphasizing instead the natural connectedness and continuity of being."

This strikes me as a naturalistic, non-mystical sort of enlightenment: an existential realization that nobody is an island, an isolated part that is born, lives, and dies alone, disconnected from all the life that has come before and will live on after.

It's a form of family consciousness described by Cave in an earlier section of his book. Except, the family with which we identify isn't just our recent human relatives, but the entire spectrum of life on Earth.

This is a worldview that would also be instantly recognizable to people from China, Japan, Korea, and many parts of Africa. ...It offers a strong sense of collective immortality, in which the particular person recognizes that he or she is a part of an ancient and continuing whole. For people in such societies the conclusion that we are a mere link in a chain of life would not have come as a surprise at all, but rather reflected a deep, lived reality.

Sure, this isn't the sort of immortality most people visualize when they imagine themselves living forever. But hey, likely it's the best we're going to be able to do if we've got a craving for eternal life. Or at least, super long life (life on Earth has been around for over four billion years).

We like to think of ourselves as a separate self. However, what if each of the cells that make up my body thought this way? Would that make any sense? Maybe just as much as me thinking that I'm an individual entity who is born, lives, and dies.

Stephen Cave writes:

It might seem obvious that a human is something over and above a lump of individual cells. But if this seems obvious when looking at a fully grown human being, it is much less obvious when looking at a newly conceived one.

The fact is, you were quite literally once a single cell: you started out as the fusion of an egg cell produced by your mother and a (much smaller) sperm cell from your father.

...As it grew, this clump of cells slowly acquired new abilities as a collective, over and above what an individual cell could do alone -- such as the capacities to do math and make music. This clump can also produce further cells -- eggs or sperm -- that are capable of fusing with another cell to produce a whole new clump carrying 50 percent of the first clump's genes.

...Therefore from the point of view of your genes, traveling the world in their little cells, the chain of life looks unbroken from generation to generation.

...From this perspective the history of life does not look like a series of discrete organisms that live and die but rather an unbroken chain of splitting and fusing cells, driven by busily replicating genes. 

...You live on in your children because you are not really the distinct individual that you think you are; you are just a widening of a chain of life that is billions of years old and has no end in sight. Talk of you as a particular person with a date of birth and one day a date of death is therefore just a convenient shorthand.

We can never be dead (but we're not immortal)

I've got some bad news and some good news for those who believe they have, or are, a soul. Bad news is, almost certainly the soul doesn't exist. 

The good news is, no matter. Because we can never be dead.

However, the good news doesn't mean we're immortal, which is the promise of soul. It just means, as Stephen Cave says in his fascinating book, "Immortality," that it is impossible for us humans to imagine our own nonexistence -- because whenever we try to do this, we're still alive.

That's what I learned from a quote in the leadoff reader review of Cave's book on Amazon, which made me buy it.

We do not linger like uninvited guests at our own funeral, nor are we plunged into the lonely void. We stop. The conscious experiences we have had are the totality of our lives; death, like birth, is just a term that defines the bounds of those experiences...The second step along the path of wisdom is therefore this realization that we can never be dead, that fearing being dead is therefore a nonsense. 

l'm enjoying "Immortality" a lot. It's going to be the book that I talk about next weekend at a meeting of a book discussion group, where the theme is History. That's because the subtitle of "Immortality"  is the quest to live forever and how it drives civilization.

Cave convincingly argues that the only four possible approaches to immortality, Staying Alive, Resurrection, Soul, and Legacy, are at the root of almost everything humans do. Or at least, the important stuff.

So far I've read the Staying Alive, Resurrection, and Soul sections. At the end of each, Cave discusses why this scheme for achieving immortality doesn't work. Because so many people believe in soul (I did, for over thirty years), I was particularly interested in the reasons he cites for why souls don't exist.

Here's some excerpts from "The Lost Soul" chapter. 

There is one big problem with the idea that your consciousness or "awareness" can in some form survive the death of your body. It is something with which we are all in fact very familiar, not least from countless Hollywood films: simply that if you get hit on the head with sufficient force, you will be knocked unconscious. Your awareness of the world ceases; your lights go out.

...Similarly, if you are injected with general anesthetic -- a syringe full of chemicals -- your awareness will be extinguished. For anyone who thinks consciousness can survive bodily death, this is an embarassment. 

The reason is this: the soul, which even in its pared-down form is supposed to maintain some minimum degree of consciousness, is supposed to be an entirely nonmaterial thing independent of the body -- only thus can it survive the body's death.

Now it is natural to suppose that a hard blow to the head would stop your body from working -- we might expect you to collapse to the ground and even to seem, from the outside, unconscious. But if consciousness were being maintained by an entirely nonmaterial thing, we would expect your consciousness to continue regardless. 

...The crux of the challenge is this: those who believe that the soul could preserve these abilities after the total destruction of the brain in death must explain why the soul cannot preserve these abilities when only a small portion of the brain is destroyed. 

How humans perceive the cosmos isn't how it really is

Really. A great word. It can be used, or said, so many ways. 

Put a question mark on the end; add a note of sarcasm; and you've got an ironic Really? Or... Finish with an exclamation mark; make your tone confident; and you've got a declarative Really!

I find it easy to swing both ways.

To me, the scientific method is our best way of defending a Really! However, this only applies what can really be known by us humans. And what we can know is determined/limited by how we know -- using the human brain and sense organs.

So when it comes to defending how the 21st century version of Homo sapiens (that inhabits one of 100 billion or so star systems in a single galaxy among 100 billion or so other galaxies) looks upon the cosmos, I'm inclined to a Really?

Meaning, it seems to be extremely likely, if not virtually certain, that beings with other forms of consciousness exist elsewhere in the universe. Also, that these beings would perceive reality in a considerably different way from how humans do.

In part, I base that conclusion on countless dog walks where I observe our dog (now, dogs) experiencing the world with sense organs and cognition that vary a lot from mine. If I extrapolate to a being from an advanced alien civilization whose consciousness is as different from mine as mine is from our dog's, I can imagine how limited (or at least different) our understanding of the cosmos could appear to this being.

This is one of the points that frequent Church of the Churchless visitor Jon made in some interesting comments on a recent post, "Taoism isn't mystical. It is natural."

Jon engaged in a comment conversation with George, who raised some valid questions about the nature of consciousness and how science is the best approach to understanding objective reality. Below I've shared some of Jon's comments. They make sense as is, but you might want to read additional comments on the post from George and others (including me) that stimulated these thoughts from Jon.

As noted above, along with Jon I believe in science's ability to know objective reality. With the caveat, though, that what is known is human knowledge. Beyond the bounds of what we Homo sapiens are capable of knowing... there lies what ancient cartographers termed Terra Incognita, unmapped regions of reality.

Here are Jon's comments:

I too do not find the notion of consciousness preceding matter in any way coherent. But I also find that the materialist version of events as it stands, sorely lacking. I'm not alone in this view, the mind-body problem has been raging for over 2000 years and doesn't look as if it is about to be solved any time soon.

That a solution has evaded the best minds for centuries points to the probability that it's not solvable by the cognitive capabilities of humans (at least at this stage of evolution.) Just as the comprehension of Shakespeare is cognitively closed to a rat, there may be problems that are out of the reach of the biology of humans.

What is plainly evident is that something is going on - there is a momentum that is disclosed at all points and at all scales of the cosmos. Again, this momentum is quite mysterious to human cognition - not because there is anything supernatural about it - it's all wholly natural, it's just that its deepest nature is beyond human comprehension.

It seems that there is a form of power, order and intelligence* at work. We could just call this nature - or to distinguish its scale from what we ordinarily think of nature, we could call it cosmic nature. This cosmic nature that produces black holes, effortlessly repairs cells and DNA, coverts photons into sugars, creates the orbital energy of the electron and so on... this momentum or nature is what I understand as Tao.

*Our problem is that when we think of intelligence we posit a supernatural designer - this is part of our ignorance due to our cognitive limitations.

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

I completely agree that the evolution of a brain and nervous system is absolutely necessary for consciousness *as we know it* to arise.

Whether there is a basic form of proto-consciousness or proto-presence in subatomic activity (and therefore all matter/energy) is debatable - although credible minds such as David Chalmers and Galen Strawson do not completely rule this out.

Of course Tao - or Nature or the Cosmos for that matter - is vague or ill-defined. That was the point of my comment. I believe that we don't - and possibly CAN'T - have a total grasp on these things. When we (sensibly) reject religion we naturally look to science for our answers. And science successfully provides us with a map of the known. It's as if we are looking through a keyhole and science more or less explains (or describes) what's on view. But it's more than reasonable to deduce that the view through the keyhole is not the full extent of reality itself.

The keyhole view represents the frequencies of reality available to the evolved biology of the human organism. There is no evolutionary necessity to have a view that goes beyond these frequencies. Science does a fine job at accounting for what is available. But it might become clear that it would be a wholly anthropocentric conceit to assume that this represents the full (and to some degree, accurate) picture.

If the spiritual traditions have any value, it's that they intuit this vaster potential. It's just that their science is dismal - primitive, magical and thoroughly anthropomorphic.

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

As it stands, the universe can be viewed naturally or supernaturally. Science favors the former and religion is quite partial to the latter.

There is a third possibility. Due to evolutionary limitations, the natural world (the natural cosmos) is only partially (fractionally) comprehended and understood.

And this might always be the case since evolution may have no 'reason' to advance our comprehension to frequencies that have no fitness value. Or it may simply be the case that Homo sapiens or the planet will be wiped out before our biology is equipped to understand certain things.

This undisclosed naturalism is not the supernatural - although it may be lazily taken to be so.

You use the word metaphysical often. Metaphysical can mean speculative/theoretical or it could mean supernatural. I'm arguing that there is nothing supernatural about the undisclosed cosmos - its hidden nature is due to OUR limitations. Of course by its very nature, there has to be a theoretical element to an undisclosed cosmos.

And hey, the edges of the disclosed cosmos are INCREASINGLY dependent on theory and speculation. No one has evidence of dark matter for instance - dark matter 'exists' only by virtue of mathematics.

Science might show us that angels don't exist, that mediums are fakes, that gurus and sages are embellishing simple, natural truths. But it can't fully account for the undisclosed cosmos for the reasons argued above.

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

I wouldn't call it [Taoism] a middle way, I'd say that it's a more encompassing outlook. It accords totally with science - without compromise. And yet it takes into account the 'impulse' at the core of spirituality.

I'm not sure that my characterisation of science is a 'bit off'. The reason I mentioned those particular things was to highlight a difference between the supernatural and what I referred to as the undisclosed. And of course you are right, we shouldn't try to impose limits on science, but we might recognize that science is ultimately limited by biology.

Imagine a monkey. It's wearing blinkers. And tinted sunglasses that only let in certain frequencies. It has a hearing aid that picks up a limited band of frequencies. The monkey is wearing thick gloves that limit its tactile perception. The capacities of its brain have been determined by genes and adaption to its specific environment... and so on.

It thinks that it more or less has a grasp or overview of reality.

1. What it actually has a grasp on, is the perception of reality that is AVAILABLE to it.

2. The monkey's comprehension of reality (and all else) is determined therefore by principles or 'forces' that must ultimately lie outside of its grasp.

They are mysterious not because they are supernatural/metaphysical, but because of the limitations of the monkey's predicament.

And so our knowledge of the undisclosed is simply that it IS. Knowledge ABOUT the unknown would be an oxymoron - and you are quite right to demand evidence for this sort of (insider knowledge) claim.

Anne Rice's Christian deconversion

Even though several years ago I'd blogged about vampire author Anne Rice's rejection of organized Christianity, I'd forgotten about this until recently -- when I saw her interviewed on The Colbert Report.

The Colbert Report
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In the interview it sounded to me like Rice had gone all atheist/agnostic. Maybe she has...now.

Back in 2010 she was still professing a commitment to Jesus, but not to Christianity as practiced by many, if not most, people these days.

This is what she said on her Facebook page, when she announced her denouncement of organized religion.

For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being “Christian” or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to “belong” to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.

As I said below, I quit being a Christian. I’m out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of …Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.

 

 

Inner planes of creation... revealed (on a poster)

Impressively artistically cool. True? That's a whole other question. 

This arrived in my email inbox today. Could have come from God. If She uses a pseudonym email account.

Which seems to belong to Tassos Z. Who adapted the image from the Way of Mystics site. 

Uh-oh. God in Human Form doesn't like this blog.

Guess I'm doomed, salvation-wise. (Of course, I already knew that, having denied the Holy Spirit and embraced eternal damnation in exchange for a free DVD.)

Someone sent me some copies of Australian "Science of the Soul" newsletters, figuring that I might be interested in news about Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) -- the India based religious organization I was an active member of for over thirty years.

RSSB is led by a guru. The guru is believed to be God in Human Form.

So not surprisingly, whatever the guru says is taken very seriously by his devotees. Me, not so much. In fact, not at all any more.

Nonetheless, I was interested to read in the February 2012 newsletter that social networking sites and blogs have attracted the attention of God in Human Form.
Download Science of the Soul February 2012 

This how a newsletter item, "Correspondence Received from Dera" (RSSB headquarters), starts out:

With the increasing popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as personal blogs and personal websites, the RSSB organization and the Master have been unwillingly drawn into an arena of endless chatter and frequent misinformation. Most of the individuals who actively participate in these discussions are innocent in their intentions.

They believe that these online discussions are somehow beneficial and that they can receive spiritual motivation, clarification, and inspiration through these chats. However we should not confuse these outside distractions with something of spiritual value. Such spiritual ideals are gained only through satsang, the reading of spiritual literature, simran, and meditation.

Interesting. 

Since 2004 I've written from time to time about my experiences with Radha Soami Satsang Beas. Not "endlessly," but fairly frequently. I'm not sure how the RSSB powers-that-be define "spiritual value." All I know is that I've gained a lot from writing about different approaches to spirituality, and learning how other people look upon these subjects.

RSSB publishes lots of books that are filled with lots of words. The RSSB guru gives lots of talks ("satsangs") that also are filled with lots of words. If you visit the Dera, headquarters of RSSB in the Punjab, you'll find people from both India and all over the world engaged in lots of conversations involving lots of words.

Yet somehow engaging in discussions, or reading, about spirituality on social networking sites and blogs is a no-no to the Radha Soami Satsang Beas organization.

Oh, except when the sites are run by RSSB. The last paragraph of this newsletter item says:

In order to inform people of Master's views on this matter, a decision was taken to put up official pages for RSSB, SOS/SSRC, SMRF, and Baba Gurinder Singh [the guru] on Facebook and other social networking sites. In this way, individuals participating in online discussions on Sant Mat and the Master will have an opportunity to view offically sponsored pages rather than become confused by sites which appear official but are not.

So the message is, online discussions aren't spiritually helpful, but if you're going to use the Internet in an attempt to juice up your spirituality, head to the official social networking RSSB sites (which don't seem to be active yet).

Thus if you're reading this, and are a RSSB disciple who believes the guru is God in Human Form, you'd better click your way elsewhere. However, if you want to live dangerously and risk damnation, read on.

What I disagreed most with is the statement that "spiritual ideals are gained only through satsang, the reading of spiritual literature, simran, and meditation." This is an other-worldly attitude that bothered me even when I was active in the RSSB organization.

("Simran" basically is mantra meditation, the repeating of a word or words to the exclusion of other thoughts.)

I no longer believe that spirituality, whatever that word means, can be separated from everyday life. Now I reasonate much more with the chop wood, carry water philosophy of Buddhism and Taoism. Anything, anywhere, at any time can be a "spiritual ideal" -- again, whatever those two words mean.

I've known RSSB disciples who paid little attention to their family (spouse and/or children), yet considered themselves to be saint-like when they headed off to India to spend weeks with the guru, doing what they thought was "selfless service" via volunteer work and meditation.

Well, selflessness and service begin right at home.

If we can't be decent with our family and friends in everyday life, or while interacting with other people on the Internet, what makes us think we're gaining anything from the "spiritual value" the newsletter says can only be gained through religious talks, reading of spiritual literature, and meditation?

But, hey, this is just my opinion, expressed on my blog. If you trust in the RSSB guru, you won't find anything of value in what I've said here, or in any comments left by other people. 

On the other hand, you might want to make up your own mind about what provides spiritual value, and what doesn't. Just a suggestion.

Resurrection has some problems. Like cannibalism.

Today I celebrated Easter in a churchless fashion.

To commemorate the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, I read a fascinating chapter in Steven Cave's book, "Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization."

The chapter, St. Paul and the Cannibals, dealt with one of the four paths by which immortality is sought: Resurrection. Cave describes it as, "Although we must physically die, nonetheless we can physically rise again with the bodies we knew in life."

(The other three paths are Staying Alive, Soul, and Legacy.)

Cave related the familiar Biblical tale of Christian-hating Saul becoming Jesus-loving Paul after he had a divine vision on the road to Damascus. Paul then spent the rest of his days preaching the glory of "Christ is risen!" even though he never met Christ.

For believers back then, resurrection was entirely bodily.

There's nothing in the Bible that suggests we have souls which go to heaven. This is a new-fangled belief, made necessary by the two thousand year wait for the Second Coming, which never comes, notwithstanding all the predictions that it's right around the corner.

Cave points out that Jesus was afraid of dying. The Bible says he was "agitated and distressed," "deeply grieved," and cried out on the cross "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Not the behavior of someone who knows that he has an immortal soul.

Indeed, it is only if death ordinarily means dread and extinction that we can make sense of the Jesus story at all. If we all have immortal souls that by nature live on after our deaths, then there would have been nothing special about Christ subsequently appearing to his apostles. The belief that people live on as spirits was common in the time.

...In other words, in its early days Christianity needed a belief in death and resurrection -- as opposed to belief in an immortal soul. That was, in modern marketing parlance, it's unique selling point.

Of course, there's no demonstrable evidence that Jesus, or anybody else, ever has come back from the dead in a bodily form (or a soul form, for that matter). So Christian theologians have spent a lot of time and effort in trying to make the evident absurdity of resurrection seem less absurd.

A basic problem is that once dead, the human body soon disintegrates. Possibly, though, God gathers up all the bits and pieces (atoms) of which you're made and reconstitutes them like gluing together a broken statue. 

This, says Cave, is the Reassembly View of resurrection. It has at least three major challenges:

The first of these is what I will call the Cannibal Problem. Imagine that before you had a chance to repair your broken statue, I grabbed a bit and used it for a statue that I was making. If you wanted to make your statue whole again, you could only do it by breaking mine and taking your bit back.

...during the Roman persecution, many Christians were fed to wild beasts in the arenas. Some of those beasts -- wild boars for example -- might then have been served up for the post-circus feast. So people would have been eating animal flesh that was in part made of human flesh and that in turn became part of their flesh.

Or simpler still is cannibalism. If a cannibal comes to be made up of bits that once belonged to another human, then even God could not re-create them both whole on the day of the resurrection.

Here's the next challenge.

I will call this the Transformation Problem; like the Cannibal Problem, it is almost as old as Christianity itself. The argument runs like this: on the one hand, resurrectionists claim that your resurrected body is made of the same bits as you, put together in the same way. This, after all, is what makes the old you and the new you one and the person.

But on the other hand, when you die, you might be old, withered, arthritic, senile, and riddled with cancer. Yet this is not how believers imagine the inhabitants of the resurrection paradise... Indeed, most Christian resurrectionists are convinced there will be no sickness in paradise, nor any need for eating and drinking, and everyone will be beautiful and perfect.

Lastly, there's the Duplication Problem. 

We have just seen that we replace roughtly 98 percent of our atoms every year. It is indeed entirely possible that, through this process of replacement and renewal, you now do not have a single atom in common with yourself as a five-year-old.

But if that is so, then God could not only reassemble the current you, were you now to die, but he could also simultaneously reassemble the five-year-old you. And the reassembled five-year-old you would have just as much claim to be you as the reassembled adult version: both would be made of atoms that composed you at a certain time and would be put together just as you were.

Well, these problems don't bother me, because I don't believe in bodily resurrection. Or any kind of resurrection. If I die and find that somehow I'm still me, then I'll believe. 

Until then (and "then" is extremely unlikely) resurrection strikes me as just a weird religious notion. Interestingly, Stephen Cave says that most Christians in this country agree.

One 2006 survey showed that, although 80 percent of Americans belong to one of the three Abrahamic religions, only just over 30 percent of Americans believe they will be resurrected. This means a majority of believers -- totaling half of all Americans -- do not believe one of the core dogmas of their faith. 

Jet crash "miracle" shows absurdity of religion

Last night my wife and I couldn't believe what we heard while watching the evening news. "It's a miracle," several people said, referring to the Navy jet that crashed into Virginia Beach apartment buildings without killing anybody.

A U.S. Navy admiral said Saturday that the fiery crash of a fighter jet into apartment buildings in the military community of Virginia Beach matches his definition of a miracle.

No one was killed and everyone was accounted for one day after the accident.

"I don't speak for anybody's religious beliefs, but the mayor and I both agreed that if you want to define a miracle, what happened here yesterday meets that definition for me," Adm. John Harvey, the four-star head of the U.S. Fleet Forces Command, told reporters.

Give me a break.

Laurel and I both had the same reaction to the 11 pm news. A real miracle would be if God stopped the jet from crashing. Of course, there's no way anybody could know if this happened, because nobody knows anything about God except for what is imagined.

As it was, seven people were injured. Some apartment owners lost everything. A hugely expensive plane was lost. And this is supposed to be a miracle? A disaster not being as disastrous as it might have been.

Religious true believers play this absurd game often. Ninety-nine out of one hundred people are killed when a boat sinks. A child is found alive, floating in a life preserver. "It's a miracle!"

No, it's a disaster. Horrible things happened. If God stood by and let 99 people die so one could survive, God is a giant asshole. Likewise, if God stood by and let the jet crash into the apartment buildings.

Gosh, there wasn't a 9.0 earthquake here in Oregon today. It's a miracle! Life could have been worse, but it wasn't. Praise God! Get real. In the case of the jet crash, there were good reasons why nobody died.

Investigators, witnesses and experts said multiple factors were at play:

— Most of the F/A-18D jet's fuel was dumped before the crash, causing less of an explosion.

— The Navy credited neighbors and citizens with pulling pilots away from the flames after they safely ejected.

— The plane crashed into the apartment complex's empty courtyard, and two days before Easter in the middle of the day, most residents weren't home.

There are reasons for what happens. God and miracles aren't part of them.

Self-consciousness comes and goes. Like the self.

Everybody has had this sort of experience:

Walking into the house after driving home, I'm carrying the car keys in my hand. A few minutes later I'm wandering around the living room, kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom, muttering Where the hell are my damn car keys?!

I was conscious the entire time after I came in the front door. I didn't black out. I didn't suffer amnesia. At every moment I was aware of where I was. Yet at some point I became divided into a "me" who had put down the keys somewhere, and a "me" who had no idea where the keys are.

Today I listened to a Point of Inquiry podcast about consciousness and near-death experiences which featured an interview with psychologist Susan Blackmore. 

I've read several of Blackmore's books. I've enjoyed them. Listening to her talk with the host, Indre Viskontas, helped me to understand some points Blackmore has emphasized in her books which I didn't grasp very clearly before. 

She asked Viskontas, "Are you conscious right now?" The answer, "Yes... I think so." Blackmore said she's asked this question of many hundreds, even thousands, of people. That's the typical answer. 

Seems straightforward.

But the interesting thing is, what happens when the question is asked? What shift in consciousness occurs when we hear, "Are you conscious?" Basically, we shift from being simply conscious to being more complexly self-conscious.

Yet that word "self"...

Blackmore doesn't believe we humans have a self, or are a self. Rather, what we refer to as "self" pops in and out of existence many times a day as we shift from just doing what we're doing to being aware of "This is what I'm doing."

(For sure, I'm mangling the finer points of what Blackmore said, since I'm writing from my fallible memory. Still, I think I'm conveying her basic message.)

She said that when we're asked to recollect what we were doing/thinking a minute, five minutes, an hour, or whenever ago, we have no idea whether what we remember is close to what we actually were conscious of.

This seems to be akin to my experience after a colonoscopy, when I was given an anesthetic that I was told could produce some memory loss. I came home and did some things on my to-do list. I was awake, aware, and conscious the entire time. However, a few days later, when I called someone to order a vegetarian meal for a lunch meeting I planned to attend, the woman who answered the phone said, "You've already ordered one."

On the afternoon of my colonoscopy.

Yet I have no recollection, none at all, of doing that. This is a lot like what happens when I put my car keys down while being awake, aware, and conscious of what I'm doing, then wander around for a long time looking for them.

Blackmore said that our "self" is a transitory, ever-changing phenomenon which basically comes into existence when we look for it. It doesn't exist, though it seems real. Someone asks me, "Are you conscious?" and I say, "Yes, I am." 

At that moment there's an "I" who feels distinct from my "am." Later, that "I" can disappear and the "am" lays my car keys on a refrigerator shelf next to the milk carton that I brought home from the store. "I'm" clueless about that, because there was no I/self in existence when I did the absent-minded deed.

Near the end of the interview Blackmore said that realizing there's nobody home in the brain, so to speak, can feel scary to many people. On the other hand, this can be a liberating, even enlightening, realization. 

All there is, is a single cosmos with countless interconnected parts, she said (more or less). No independent selves. Each of us is part of the whole, not a distinct part.

The interviewer then commented that this can be reassuring to people. It gives them a sense that after they die, something of them will carry on. Blackmore responded as I intuitively thought she would, after I heard Viskontas say what struck me as a discordant observation.

That's a wrong view, Blackmore said.

This is what religions want us to believe, that there's some sort of soul which continues to exist after death. No-self doesn't imply yes-soul. Realizing there's no distinct "me" doesn't mean "I" am everything. 

How could there be, if there's no "I"?

Everything is appearance in mind

"Tucson" is a frequent commenter on this blog. I like his style. Which doesn't mean that I always understand what he is saying. 

That might mean that I do understand it.

Because if I understand anything about Tucson's way of looking at the world, it's that every attempt to divide reality into (1) an understander, and (2) what is understood, results in a human conception of the cosmos which misses (3) what's really going on.

Not that (3) ever can be known. There's actually no knower and nothing to be known. And now I've probably demonstrated that I don't know anything about what Tucson is pointing toward. 

His comments, like all comments, often go unnoticed by blog post readers. So below I've fused together three recent Tucsonian comment sharings to bring them more out into the open. They're interesting. Might even be true. (If there's any such thing as conventional "truth" in the Tucsonian world.)

Re-reading Tucson's comments, I was struck by how they reminded me of some remarks made by psychologist Susan Blackmore in a podcast interview I listened to today. I'll share what I remember of what she said in my next post.

Here is a view that defies convention and reason... I do not believe in the factual existence of anything whatsoever that can be sensorially perceived and conceptually interpreted as an object. I do not believe in the existence of any objective entity that may be writing these lines, nor the words themselves.

This is because anything that appears to extend in space and time is nothing other than an appearance in mind. So, one may ask, "Who is responsible for this writing?" I am. I am responsible for every appearance, and all conscious beings can say the same whether it be bird, hippo or tulip. Because in the voidness of Intrinsic Basic Nature it is so...and I, whoever says it, am the immanence phenomenally whose transcendence noumenally is all that is.

(Noumenon is a word rarely used and for good reason. What it denotes is impossible to conceive. Noumenon could be said to symbolize the Principle of potential appearance having no conceptual or objective existence, neither presence nor absence of its own.)

There is no objective evidence of noumenon which has neither objectivity or non-objectivity or the absence of either or both. As noumenon: Only I can speak, but what is said by me as an object I can't say. Only I can look, but what is seen by me as an object I do not see. I do everything but what is done by a 'me' I do not do.

I am neither a being or not a being, the source of all doing but not the performer of any act. I am the source of all thoughts but not the thinker of any. I am, but there is no I but I -- but there is no me at all, no you, no bird, no hippo, no tulip, no us or them. And every living thing is no thing because all a thing is--is I and I am not.

What is said here can be said by any entity because every entity is I. There is nothing else whatsoever to be said and this already is too much.

If I am aware of what I am, then what I am is the object of a subject that is aware of an object, and it is then an object of which a subject is aware, and so on, ad infinitum in a perpetual regression. This also applies to a term such as 'consciousness'.

It is impossible to be aware of what is being aware, or to be conscious of what is being conscious. Therefore, as far as dialectic thought is concerned, there can't be any objective thing that is conscious or aware. Being conscious or aware is only a concept. It can be referred to symbolically with the term 'noumenon' that I mentioned above, but it does not phenomenally exist.

This is why dualistically I am not and why I can't possibly be. This implies that we can't not-exist either for the same reason. Absence of positive existence implies also absence of its counterpart, negative existence which is a kind of non-existence consisting of total absence of both positive and negative concepts.

I'm getting a headache.

What we are, then, is total absence of the presence of both positive and negative awareness, which is total absence of the presence of both positive and negative existence, which is total absence of positive and negative presence, which is absence of absence as well as of presence.

Whew!

Dialectically this establishes the fact that we can't be anything that we could ever imagine ourselves to be, singular or plural, because what we are can't be anything that could be objectively visualised by the split mind of dialectic reasoning.

So, what is this Great and Obscure Mystery that we neither are nor are not conceptually? No mystery at all!

It is what divided mind can't know because it is divided into subject and object. Divided this way it can reason, but it can't intuit its own indivision, its own wholeness, which is all that it is and all that we can be.

Catholic woman is offended by McDonald's

Recently our local newspaper here in Salem, Oregon had a column by Carol McAlice Currie that resonated with my long-time experience of being a vegetarian. 
Download Fast food offends religious woman 

Since I've shunned meat and fish since 1970, and raised a daughter born in 1972 as a vegetarian, I know what it's like to ask servers in a restaurant to substitute something animal'ish for something vegetable'ish. 

Many times I walked into a McDonald's with my daughter and said to the person behind the counter, "Could you make us a Big Mac without the hamburger?" Or at Taco Bell, "We'd like a taco with no meat, just cheese, lettuce, and tomatoes."

Almost always the restaurant would make the substitution. I'd think, Why not? Meat has to be more expensive than what we want instead.

However, we never felt entitled.

Meaning, when a restaurant employee resisted our vegetarian entreaties, we didn't feel discriminated against. My wife, daughter, and I realized that we were members of a distinct dietary minority. We didn't expect that McDonald's, or anybody else, was required to fulfil our unmeaty desires.

Kathy Duncan, the woman Currie writes about, had a different attitude.

Duncan said she was buzzing through the drive-through with her son, Matthew, now 6, when her Catholicism was insulted.

She ordered Matthew a Happy Meal (the McDonald’s children’s meal) and asked that the chain substitute a Filet-O-Fish sandwich for the hamburger, cheeseburger or chicken nuggets option because she and her family didn’t eat beef or chicken on Fridays during the 40-day Lenten season (this year from Feb. 22 through April 7).

Duncan said she was stunned when the McDonald’s employee told her that the substitution wasn’t “allowed.”

...Duncan said she tried to explain why her son couldn’t eat meat or chicken, but she said that her explanation was ignored and that the employee repeated it wasn’t going to happen.

Outraged, Duncan drove off without any food and said in a message to the newspaper that she was calling for a boycott of McDonald’s on Fridays.

Hey, Kathy: just because you're Catholic and possibly believe that you're a member of the One True Faith, you don't get to have the world revolve around you. 

Being Christian, you're used to being part of a decisive majority of United States citizens. Everywhere you look, there are churches, Jesus figures, Bibles, preachers, politicians saying "God bless America" and "This is a Christian nation."

Imagine what it's like to be part of a tiny minority. Imagine what it's like to be some of the 3-4% of Americans who are strict vegetarians for moral, ethical, and/or health reasons. Imagine living in a culture awash in meatiness, while trying to stay dry.

Currie gets it right:

“I want to get the word out that McDonald’s doesn’t respect our religion and doesn’t deserve our business,” Duncan said. “We live with different cultures, and I think they should be more accommodating to other cultures and beliefs. I think it would be wonderful if they accommodated all beliefs.”

But part of this nation’s freedom of religion is the option to embrace any religion such as Judaism, Buddhism, Muslim, Hinduism, Unitarian, Native American faith (about 5 percent of the population) to name a few. There also is the freedom to be unaffiliated as evidenced by about 16 percent of the population that considers itself agnostic or atheist, according to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Corporations tend to operate secularly to avoid catering to any one religion. To use Duncan’s religious-accommodation logic, McDonald’s would not be serving hamburger at all in the U.S.

...In the United States, Americans of many descents love their beef. McDonald’s has fish on the menu. Should it also be expected to customize its menu further to accommodate all of the faiths that seek freedom under the U.S.’s equal-religious opportunity umbrella?

Julie Edwards, a local spokeswoman for McDonald’s, said Duncan could have ordered her son a hamburger without the patty in his Happy Meal, and he would have gotten a melted, processed cheese-food sandwich.

Yes! Just like my vegetarian daughter ate for many years. 

What science says will make you happy

I'm a bit suspicious of "top ten" lists.

Seems to be too much of a coincidence that the number of fingers we humans have is the same number of important things. Why aren't there more "top eight" or "top twelve" lists?

Regardless...

Yes magazine's "10 Things Science Says Will Make You Happy" seems eminently believable, by and large. I note there's no mention of God or religion.

My favorite is numero uno:

Savor Everyday Moments

Pause now and then to smell a rose or watch children at play. Study participants who took time to “savor” ordinary events that they normally hurried through, or to think back on pleasant moments from their day, “showed significant increases in happiness and reductions in depression,” says psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky.

Along with:

Get Out and Exercise

A Duke University study shows that exercise may be just as effective as drugs in treating depression, without all the side effects and expense. Other research shows that in addition to health benefits, regular exercise offers a sense of accomplishment and opportunity for social interaction, releases feel-good endorphins, and boosts self-esteem.

How I deprogrammed fundamentalism out of my brain

I got some great questions in an email today, boldfaced below.

Brian, out of curiosity.... I was wondering after you left RS [Radha Soami Satsang Beas]... How did you deprogram all the fundamentalism out of your brain?

The whole "The world is a bad place, don't get "involved" in worldly things....  and pursuing things in the world to find happiness is bad...

How did you start to finally pursue your own happiness, without the fundamental programming snake coming in and poisoning your progress?

I told the person who wrote me I'd reply via a blog post tonight, adding that I'd been planning to write about something else, but found these questions more enticing.

However, on my evening dog walk a little while ago it struck me that my previously envisioned theme actually fit in nicely with How did you deprogram fundamentalism and pursue your own happiness? 

Our older dog, Serena, is almost twelve and a half. That's old in dog years, especially for a larger dog (she's a 70 pound Shepherd/Lab mix). Serena seems to really enjoy our daily two-mile loop walk along a little used two lane road in our rural neighborhood. 

She used to walk really fast, almost trotting, the sights and smells were so enticing. Now, for much of the walk, I feel like I'm almost in slow motion. My wife, who is a habitually fast walker, asks me, "How do you handle Serena walking so slowly."

My answer:

"Because this walk is one of her joys in life. She's old. She isn't going to live much longer. Being a dog, Serena doesn't know she will die fairly soon, but I do. I want to make her moments as enjoyable as possible, since after she's dead, almost certainly our dog won't experience anything. For forever. She'll be dead.

So for as long as Serena is alive, and can walk even haltingly, or limpingly, I'm going with her on our evening walk around the loop. If it eventually takes us hours, that's fine. I'll walk as slow as she can go. Serena deserves to drink in the smells and sights -- deer...another dog...squirrel...ooh, ooh! cat! -- because this is her one and only life. For forever."

Somewhat strangely, when I was a religious true believer and accepted the dogmas of reincarnation, soul survival after death, and the prospect of eternal life in a heavenly realm, I was much more afraid of death than I am now.

I'm pretty sure that I never actually believed what I thought I did. It was more that I wanted those things to be true.

My fear of death testified to that: fundamentalism tries to push truth out of sight where it can't conflict with dogma. But truth has a way of making itself known... through feelings, emotions, intuitions, inner voices that speak honestly to us when we open ourselves up to what they have to say.

Eventually I got tired of lying to myself.

I grew weary of being two people, one who had fantasies of being chosen by God and the guru to experience eternal life in divine realms unattainable by the vast majority of humanity (including my non-initiated wife), the other a decidedly imperfect, average, often-confused man who was doing his best to live life as happily and wisely as possible, but with mixed success.

Accepting that I was nobody special... what a relief! To once again feel that I was simply a normal person with a mix of virtues and vices, good and bad qualities, positive and negative habits... what a joy!

Our dog, Serena, can spend several minutes sniffing a particularly sniffable clump of grass. This used to irritate me a bit, because while she did her dog-thing, I'd be standing there holding the leash, thinking about all the important human stuff I planned to do when the dog walk was over. 

Now, I'm happy to watch Serena sniff away.

I no longer find it easy to divide life into important and unimportant aspects, into meaningful and unmeaningful activities. I used to think that several hours of meditation was the most important thing I could do each day. Today, observing Serena gorge her highly sensitive dog nose with scents only she could appreciate, I was happy doing what I was doing.

Walking with my dog on a country road, both of us experiencing moments of everyday life that now strike me as being the infinitely precious reality which I used to believe lay in a transcendent realm.

Not true. It's right here. Right now.

That's what I know. For myself. Can't prove it to anybody else. Have no desire to. I'm just telling the truth as I see it, as I experience it, as I live it. It's a fundamentalism-destroying truth, because religious dogma can survive only in a there and then, not a here and now.

I just poured myself what was left of a bottle of Trader Joes' Green Fin organic red wine. I like the taste. After I finish this blog post I'm going to watch a West Coast Swing dance instruction DVD. My wife and I have forgotten most of what we learned about West Coast Swing in a beginning class, and we want to take a "Level 2" class this month, so we need to do some brushing-up.

Simple stuff. Real stuff. It's enough for me now. Plenty enough. 

What permeates my consciousness now isn't abstract, conceptual, theological, dogmatic notions about what some divine reality might be like. It's the realization that every moment is infinitely precious, because before my birth and after my death stretches an infinity of me-not-being-me.

Unconscious. Not existing.

I'll be talking to someone at a coffee shop. Suddenly -- unbidden, uncontrollably -- a strong feeling will wash over me of this moment never will come again; in fact, one day no moments ever will come again. This feeling makes everything more vibrant, more lively, more real.

The feeling reminds me of the familiar Zen story about a man, two tigers, and a strawberry. How sweet it tasted! That's how life is for me much of the time now. After giving up religion and a belief in an afterlife, I've vastly deepened my appreciation for presentlife.

That West Coast Swing DVD beckons. I have no idea if this answer to the emailed questions will make any sense to anybody. No matter. Life isn't a question, and it isn't an answer. Life is just what it is. Don't miss it by looking beyond to a fantasized other life.

Better to be a dog sniffing a pile of poop, in the really real world, than a saint imagining himself or herself in a realm that doesn't exist.