Church of the Churchless

Key to self-knowledge: knowing you don't have a "self"

I love the idea that "I" don't exist.

Life sure seems like it'd be a lot simpler without a "me" around. Most of my problems aren't physical, but psychological. So if my body is real, but my self isn't, potentially that removes a large source of difficulties.

Fortunately for the "me" who I don't want to be, modern neuroscience has come to a pretty firm conclusion that, indeed, the self is an illusion. 

Such is the central theme of a book by Bruce Hood I've started to read, "The Self Illusion." I blogged about an interview Sam Harris did with Hood here. (Where I mistakenly called the book "Illusion of the Self," mixing up the title of Harris' blog post with the title of the book.)

In his introductory chapter, Hood offers props to Buddhism for getting right many hundreds of years ago what science has confirmed only recently: that who we are isn't a solid "pearl" of identity, but a complex "bundle" of processes, interrelationships, networked connections.

Still, we have to remember that Buddhist/Zen practices evolved during a pre-scientific phase of human culture. Some of those practices may still make sense today; others may not.

Thumbing through The Self Illusion, I could see (spoiler alert!) that Hood ends up saying that even though the self doesn't really exist as almost everybody feels it does -- as an entity separate and distinct from the goings-on of the brain -- there are good reasons why evolution has left us with a sense of "me."

So this implies that two significant goals of traditional spirituality, especially those of the Eastern variety, aren't worth pursuing.

(1) Self-knowledge or self-realization is out, because there is no self to know or realize.
(2) Losing or doing away with the self is out, because there is no self to lose or do away with (and also, because we need some sort of sense of self to function, even if that sense is illusory).

If early Buddhists had access to the findings of modern neuroscience, I suspect Buddhism would have turned out quite differently. Could be wrong about this, of course, since there's no way to redo history.

For us today, though, we can take books like The Self Illusion to heart. We can imbibe knowledge that wasn't available to all of those devoted Buddhists who have meditated and koan'd away for many years in attempts to know that the self which seems to be so real, isn't.

Now, traditional Buddhists would argue that reading a book about the self illusion isn't the same as actually seeing through the illusion.

Well, I need to finish reading The Self Illusion before deciding to what extent I agree.

But at the moment I'm inclined to argue with that traditional argument. Yes, Hood does say that it very difficult for anyone (Buddhists included) to deeply understand that conscious human experience is solely the product of brain processes, no "self" required.

Yet who gets to decide the extent to which someone does realize the self illusion? In the Zen tradition, a lineage of masters has the franchise on this deciding. If a Zen master declares you "enlightened," then, bingo, you are.

Absent such a declaration, you're a pretender. (Unless you're a Taoist, Hindu, or whatever, with different standards of enlightenment.)

As I've noted before, to me it's a lot like knowing that the Earth revolves around the Sun.

People who know this may say "that's a beautiful sunset," but if you asked them to explain those words, they'd add that this was just a way of speaking, since they know that the Sun stays put while the Earth revolves and rotates.

Who has the right to declare that one person really knows what produces a sunset, while another only has an intellectual knowledge? It'd be tough to get inside someone's head and figure out what they're experiencing when they watch a sunset. 

Is an astronomer more sunset-enlightened than a poet? Is the author of The Self Illusion more cognizant of how the self is illusory than a Zen master? Could we ever tell? And... who cares?

Surrender to a lower power. Or equal. Not higher.

I used to believe in surrendering to a higher power. And not only to my wife -- but also to a spiritual, supernatural, metaphysical higher power.

No more. Don't see any reason to.

Now I'm much more comfortable with surrendering to lower and equal powers. Which, I suspect, actually are the only varieties powers come in. In fact, we could be talking singular here.

Power. Not powers. There's no higher or lower. Just varying manifestations of One Energy, One Nature, One Cosmos, One Reality.

But religions, spiritual systems, mystical philosophies, and other advocates of surrendering to a higher power would have us believe that life can't be fully lived without imagining some "sky god" is looking down, guiding our steps, inspiring our positive motivations, leading us out of darkness and into the light.

Bullshit. Crap. Fantasy. And self-serving.

Because almost always, somebody gains from all this higher power surrendering. Not the higher power, since there's no evidence of one, but the holier-than-thou men and women who run the organizations which claim to point the way to Higher Power'ness.

Groupies, syncophants, and hangers-on get pleasure from associating with powerful people, even at a distance. That's sort of strange.

But at least those objects of adoration are real. Surrendering to higher powers which are undetectable, even if supposedly manifested in a living saint, guru, master, prophet, or whoever, is even more ridiculous. 

I speak from experience.

For more than thirty years I sought to follow the will of what the Indian Sant Mat teachings variously call God, Spirit, Shabd, Satguru, and other high-pointing terms. I got a lot of pleasure from obeying rules, performing volunteer services, giving talks, writing books, opening my mind, heart, and soul to whatever the higher power I believed in wanted me to do.

Not surprisingly, the more I identified with this higher power, the more elevated above other human beings I felt myself to be. 

Sure, I knew how to appear all humble and selfless. That's the first thing you learn in Higher Power School: how to say stuff like "It's not me doing it; it's Him," or "I'm the dust beneath the feet of the Master, nothing more."

But lurking just below the surface of every surrender to a higher power is a feeling of "I'm so cool! So blessed! So special! I'm the Higher Power's best buddy!"

Meaning, other people aren't so cool, so blessed, so special, so befriended. Eventually I got tired of feeling humbly superior. It annoyed me when fellow Surrenderers to a Higher Power would look upon my non-believing wife with pity.

"Poor woman. She doesn't have a direct connection to God like we do. Maybe in another life."

Actually, my wife wasn't deprived. She felt totally content. Just as I feel now, having given up the conceit of knowing Mr. or Ms. Higher Power more intimately than those poor souls who can't get in the door of the exclusive spirituality club I once belonged to.

Our twelve year old dog, Serena, doesn't move as well as she used to. No matter. Almost every afternoon I still take her on our traditional dog walk, a two mile loop around our rural neighborhood. 

Serena used to pull me along at the end of the leash, she was so eager and energetic to explore sights and smells that beckoned around the next corner. Now, we plod along at a speed considerably slower than I'd walk at if I were by myself.

So slow, my habitually fast-walking wife finds it frustrating to accompany Serena and me. Usually she takes our younger dog, Zu Zu, on a much more aerobic walk. I understand her attitude, but I've surrendered to my commitment to walk with Serena for as long as she can, at the speed Serena is comfortable going at.

If Serena were to stop, lie down, and take her last breath on our afternoon dog walk, I'd be happy. Not that Serena died -- that I was with her at the end, while she was enjoying one of her favorite activities. 

Given the "dog years" thing, it's unlikely that Serena and I are going to die simultaneously on our dog walk.

However, every time I'm out with Serena, watching her sniff those marvelously interesting smells left by passers-by (canines, humans, deer, squirrels, whatever captures her nose fancy), I think It wouldn't be the worst way to go, holding the leash of the dog I love so much, out on the road we each have come to know so well.

That's my surrender. Not to a higher power called God. To a lower or equal power named Dog. It feels precisely, exactly, 100% the same as my previous surrendering to a imagined higher power. Well, actually better.

Because I'm no longer looking upward and outward for the power that I've surrendered to. Sideways and inward -- those are the directions which now point to where I want to go.

The natural world and me; we're connected in a way that seems a whole lot more genuine than the subservient posturing I used to engage in during my Surrender to a Higher Power days. Everyday life always is guiding me.

There's no need to look outside of nature, or ourselves, for some mythical guidance mechanism.

Skeptical look at mantras and Transcendental Meditation

I've never practiced Transcendental Meditation (TM). But for over forty years I've meditated daily, mostly using a mantra (a word or words repeated over and over) just as TM does.

So I resonated with a "Mantras" post on the TM-Free blog, which describes itself as:

Insider information about the Transcendental Meditation™ techniques, the TM movement and its late founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Our bloggers take independent, skeptical and critical views of TM claims and research. We report allegations of deception by TM organizations and reports that some individuals experience harm from involvement.

For most of those forty years I used a mantra taught by a Sant Mat organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, that was known as the Five Holy Names. The mantra bore some resemblance to the ones used by the Transcendental Meditation folks. 

Sudarsha, the author of the post, says:

My question is this: why are the results in activity so much more rewarding for me using the breath as an object than using a "meaningless sound".

The “method” is useful, but what about the “mantra”?

The mantra (a.k.a. meaningless thought, meaningless sound): Let’s look at what Mahesh said at the beginning:

We do not select any sound like mike, flower, table, pen, wall etc. because such ordinary sounds can do nothing more than merely sharpening the mind; whereas there are some special sounds which have the additional efficacy of producing vibrations whose effects are found to be congenial to our way of life. This is the scientific reason why we do not select any word at random. For our practice we select only the suitable mantras of personal Gods. Such mantras fetch to us the grace of personal Gods and make us happier in every walk of life.***

So, first we don’t want sounds that just do nothing more than merely sharpening the mind. Isn’t this in and of itself a red flag? Why wouldn’t we want sharp minds? If we had sharp minds might we detect something not in Mahesh’s best interests? That was my thought when I read this remark by Mahesh.

Like any totalitarian thinker, Mahesh would only want sharp minds from which he could cull information. Then, as he has done so often when finished with someone providing him with answers, he could send them to round and do the ‘sidhi’ program until they were no longer sharp enough to realize they were being blindsided and their work siphoned off to the credit of someone else. 

Later in the blog post Sudarsha talks about the dulling effect of a mantra. 

A simple experiment:

(after you read this)

Sit and close your eyes and say/think/ponder some word over and over; just that word, over and over, some word you understand, some particular word you know the meaning of. Pick a simple word like house or flower or chair.

What happens?

If you keep doing it you notice that it becomes nonsense. The sound and the meaning detach from one another. There’s just this very strange sound that does not have the sense it had when you started. It’s even funnier if you do it again and pick a complex word like hypothalamus or train station. After a while you begin to hear what someone who known no English hears.

Now notice: do you get intellectually sharper doing this, or do you feel slightly spacey? – Ask yourself very carefully how different is “just any word” and your personally selected meaningless sound? Do different words bring different experiences of silliness? Is this a beneficial experience of altered alertness? Is this experience of altered alertness beneficial?

Good questions. I started asking similar ones myself after many years of repeating a mantra for at least ninety minutes during a morning meditation session, and then as much as possible throughout the rest of the day.

I've come to much the same concluson as Sudarsha has: following the breath mindfully is a better meditation approach than is repeating a mantra mindlessly. 

In some way, I knew I was in the darkened house of ignorance and TM really had the feel of gold. Maybe it might have been just that; but much later I discovered that Mahesh was corrupted by his own greed and narcissism subsequently corrupting not only what he had purloined from his tradition and teacher, but those he taught as well. This is my perception to this day, based upon my interaction with Mahesh and observing his interaction with others.

But just because I had been hoodwinked by a charlatan whose motives I felt were highly suspicious, I did not cease seeking. I kept looking for the gold and now I feel I have found that gold and have been examining it in the broad daylight, questioning practitioners and teachers alike, watching, observing, certainly looking for the behaviours and attitudes with which TM allowed me to be familiar. I am also looking at criteria such as Lifton’s to see if I am being cheated. I wish I could have done this from the beginning with TM.

I have continued the search that began in the spring of 1964. I can only conclude at this time that there is much more to life than TM. There is more than imagining that if you believe something good is happening long enough something good will happen. There is more to life than imagining you have been spiritually endowed by using the suitable mantras for personal gods.

I am a Buddhist presently practicing in the Thai Forest Tradition of Theravāda Buddhism. I have no intention of suggesting that this is better than or superior to what Mahesh or Guru Dev is teaching/taught. However, if you are or feel you might be or might have been a TM casualty, you might want to look at “feeling the body” as explained in the Buddhist teachings.

...I am suggesting nothing easy, but I am suggesting something very do-able and uncomplicated. But, if you will, notice that the teaching begins with following the breath and letting mind and body become calm. Do you remember from the checking procedure how, before any mention of mantra, after opening and closing the eyes, you felt some quiet and calm, just naturally?

Did you realize anything or ever think about this?

You already knew how to be calm and quiet. It is my opinion that Mahesh’s teachings beyond establishing this insight is nothing more than a distraction from that calm and quiet, sidestepping the only meaningful reality, your own innate, knowable reality.

How can there possibly be any other basis for happiness in the world than knowing your own specific reality (your own colour)?

Cultivating this calm-and-quiet is the object of the Anapanasati Sutta. The method and teaching above (A Practical Guide) has been extremely helpful for me and I feel that if it is only read as an explanation it is helpful to understand the concept of mindfulness in the Buddhist tradition.

Further, in the The Satipatthana Sutta, we read how the Buddha established mindfulness in four REALITIES, the primary four realities of the individual, the person, YOU.

Lastly, I'll end with some cogent thoughts from Tucson, a regular commenter on this blog. Back in 2007 I shared what he said in a comment.

I will say that Sant Mat meditation, at least the basic technique of simran (mantra repetition), seems to me to have a dulling, dumbing-down effect that seems to interfere with intuitive perception.

Imagine you are in a wilderness at night. It is pitch black and you know there is a predator out there. All your being, all your senses are fully in the moment listening for some sound or movement to indicate where that predator is. You are fully absorbed in the present situation, in the immediacy of your current reality. No simran is necessary at this time and would actually be a hinderance to full awareness of what is. Your mind is totally quiet absorbing the sounds of the night because of the urgency of the situation. It is alert, ready.

This is a good non-meditation. Be fully present in whatever you are doing. The mind will wander off. No matter, it can't be helped. When you are fully aware again, just be that way.

Great advice from Tucson. Why would you repeat a mantra in your mind when your goal is to be aware of what exists in what I like to call really real reality?

It'd be ridiculous to remain focused on mentally repeating sex, sex, sex, sex, sex when a beautiful willing partner is lying next to you on a bed, arms outstretched for your embrace. 

Likewise, it'd be ridiculous to keep saying sunset, sunset, sunset, sunset, sunset as the REAL sun is dipping below the horizon, displaying gorgeous colors across the sky.

And even if your aim is religious, does it make any sense to utter God, God, God, God, God (or other supposed names of divinity) instead of being receptively open to whatever divine presence might be capable of being experienced at the moment?

Occasionally I still use a mantra, but more and more it seems pointless to speak repeated words inside my head. Life is going on all the time I'm awake and aware; experience is happening all the time I'm awake and aware.

A mantra now seems like an unnecessary distraction from life and experience. When I'm ballroom dancing, I don't think to myself dance, dance, dance, dance, dance. I just dance. 

 

High-resolution perception brings mindful clarity

I've finished Chade-Meng Tan's "Search Inside Yourself," after calling the book compassionate, scientific, businesslike in my first post about it -- written after I'd only read a few chapters.

The book turned out to be more Buddhist'y than I'd expected, but since the author is a Buddhist (as well as an engineer who was one of the first Google employees), that shouldn't have been a big surprise. 

Still, Chade-Meng has a pleasingly non-religious, non-metaphysical, non-mystical approach to mindfulness. Which also isn't a big surprise, given that mindfulness is about paying attention to what is here and now, not there and then.

Like heaven, God, saintliness, or any other hypothesized, anticipated, or wished-for reality.

There's a lot to like about "it is what it is" attitude, notwithstanding the seeming bumper-sticker superficiality of this oft-heard phrase.

Chade-Meng says that given how smart and scientific people who work at Google are, when he offers his Search Inside Yourself workshops to employees he needs to convey traditional Buddhist descriptions of mindfulness in a modern fashion.

Thus he talks about "high resolution perception," since computer geeks are familiar with high definition monitors, televisions, and such. Nice. 

If this is the only life we're going to live -- the most probable afterdeath eventuality, in my churchless opinion -- then it makes sense to experience our limited life moments with as much clarity as possible. Sinc what I'm experiencing now will never happen again, and my happenings are decidedly finite rather than everlasting, I should damn well pay rapt attention to my moments.

No price can be put on them. However, intuitively they seem priceless to me.

Here's some excerpts from what Chade-Meng says about high resolution perception. He focuses on perceiving emotional states within ourselves, but the same principles seem to apply (albeit a bit differently) to cognitive states, as well as sensations such as seeing, hearing, tasting, etc.

We can usually experience emotions more vividly in the body than in the mind. Therefore, when we are trying to perceive an emotion, we usually get more bang for the buck if we bring our attention to the body rather than the mind.

More importantly, bringing the attention to the body enables a high-resolution perception of emotions. HIgh-resolution perception means your perception becomes so refined across both time and space that you can watch an emotion the moment it is arising, you can perceive its subtle changes as it waxes and wanes, and you can watch it the moment it ceases.

This ability is important because the better we can perceive our emotions, the better we can manage them. When we are able to perceive emotions arising and changing in slow motion, we can become so skilful at managing them, it is almost like living that cool scene in the movie The Matrix, in which Keanu Reeves's character, Neo, dodges bullets after he become able to perceive the moments the bullets are fired and see their trajectory in slow motion.

Well, maybe we're not that cool, but you get the point. Unlike Neo, we're accomplishing our feat not by slowing down time,  but by vastly upgrading our ability to perceive the experience of emotion. 

Along with everything else we experience during the course of our lives. What isn't experienced isn't real for us. Might as well suck as much reality as possible out of this One and Only Drink of LIfe. 

Sam Harris interview with author of "Illusion of the Self"

Damn! (but actually I'm happy)

Another $19.57 has found its way from my VISA account into Amazon's accounts receivable, thanks to Sam Harris' interview with the author of Illusion of the Self -- another neuroscience book that the "I" who isn't me was led to order by largely unconscious brain processes over which the "I" who isn't me has no control.

If you're interested in this stuff, but not twenty bucks worth of interested, it'll cost you nothing to read the interview.

I'm fascinated by the increasingly evident neuroscientific conclusion that there's no such thing as a Self to be found within the human cranium. Buddhism and other like-minded philosophies are being proven right, yet also wrong. 

Meaning, since we humans don't have a Self, there's no need to undergo an arduous enlightenment process aimed at understanding that we don't have one. Also, there's no need to engage in a pursuit of Self-Realization, since there's no Self to realize. 

Here's some excerpts from the interview: 

In what sense is the self an illusion?

For me, an illusion is a subjective experience that is not what it seems. Illusions are experiences in the mind, but they are not out there in nature. Rather, they are events generated by the brain. Most of us have an experience of a self. I certainly have one, and I do not doubt that others do as well – an autonomous individual with a coherent identity and sense of free will. But that experience is an illusion – it does not exist independently of the person having the experience, and it is certainly not what it seems. That’s not to say that the illusion is pointless. Experiencing a self illusion may have tangible functional benefits in the way we think and act, but that does not mean that it exists as an entity. 

...Answering the question of who is experiencing the illusion or interpreting the story is much more problematic. This is partly a conceptual problem and partly a problem of dualism. It is almost impossible to discuss the self without a referent in the same way that is difficult to think about a play without any players. Second, as the philosopher Gilbert Ryle pointed out, in searching for the self, one cannot simultaneously be the hunter and the hunted, and I think that is a dualistic problem if we think we can objectively examine our own minds independently, because our mind and self are both generated by the brain. So while the self illusion suggests an illogical tautology, I think this is only a superficial problem.

12 Symptoms of a Spiritual Awakening

This morning I came across 12 Symptoms of a Spiritual Awakening on a friend's Facebook feed. I liked them, even though I noticed that they came from a recovery web site.

No mention of a higher power or God in the twelve, thankfully. 

1. An increased tendency to let things happen rather than make them happen.

2. Frequent attacks of smiling.

3. Feelings of being connected with others and nature.

4. Frequent overwhelming episodes of appreciation.

5. A tendency to think and act spontaneously rather than from fears based on past experience.

6. An unmistakable ability to enjoy each moment.

7. A loss of ability to worry.

8. A loss of interest in conflict.

9. A loss of interest in interpreting the actions of others.

10. A loss of interest in judging others.

11. A loss of interest in judging self.

12. Gaining the ability to love without expecting anything in return.

Here's a graphic version:

A sign that maybe I'm part Jewish

The Western monotheistic religions -- Judaism, Christianity, Islam -- interest me considerably less than Eastern religions, since I've got some fondness for Buddhism and Taoism. 

But a passage in a recent TIME magazine story about Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, makes me think that maybe there's some Jewishness in my churchless non-soul.

For Netanyahu, the Jews are not so much God's chosen people as his argumentative ones. They don't take things on faith. Abraham, Moses, and Job, he notes, all argued with God. And sometimes won. Like Bibi, they were ornery and maybe had a chip on their shoulder. You can imagine Bibi arguing with God, and he probably does.

Israeli society hums with contest and grievance. The name Israel derives from Jacob's wrestling with the angel. Islam, Bibi has suggested, is about submission, Judaism about arguing. And if you disagree, he will argue with you. Just because everyone thinks something, he says, doesn't mean it's right.

Religious weirdness: treasures worth billions found in Hindu temple

Every religion is weird, but there are degrees of weirdness.

For example, I'm not at all attracted to fundamentalist Christianity. Yet I used to enjoy reading the mystical philosophizing of Meister Eckhart, a medieval Christian who, pleasingly, was decried as a heretic.

And I also have enjoyed learning about the less religious side of Hinduism, Vedanta, which focuses on meditation, the nature of consciousness, and other esoteric subjects rather than rituals.

However, a fascinating article in the April 30, 2012 issue of The New Yorker reminded me that Hinduism also has its more weird religious side. "The Secret of the Temple," by Jake Halperin, tells the tale of how treasures likely worth at least twenty billion dollars have been found in the Sri Padmanabbaswamy temple in Trivandrum, India.

The full article is only available to subscribers, but on his web site Halperin has shared a PDF file of the piece he wrote. He notes: 

April 30th: Secrets of the Temple (The New Yorker): Life at this temple in Southern India was quiet until two secret vaults were discovered.  One vault contained $20 billion dollars worth of treasure.  The other vault, which is supposedly cursed, remains unopened.  So what lies inside?  My ten-page article is in the April 30th edition of the magazine. Click here to read -- but please note that the last line of the article is cut off -- it should read: "No, let it be." You can also view story in pictures: Click here to view a slideshow.

Below are some excerpts from Halperin's article.

I was a member of an India-based spiritual organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, for many years. So I'm generally familiar with the aspects of Hindu culture mentioned in the excerpts. Heck, I even subscribed to some of them myself in my true-believing days.

They sure sound weird to me now, though. Deities needing a legal guardian. Devotees considering themselves slaves of deities. Poor people happy to give money to deities who accumulate vast treasures. 

After several minutes, Padmanabhan looked at me, smiled, and explained that he had been praying. There was a festival that day, and the temple's custodians had removed an idol from the sanctum sanctorum and were parading it around a courtyard. He was hoping to get a glimpse of it. The idol, he told me, "is like an incarnation of God, so it is as if God himself is coming out of the temple."

Like many observant Hindus, Padmanabhan believes that a temple's deity -- in this case, the supreme god Vishnu -- resides within its walls. Worshippers come to make offerings of flowers, incense, silver, and gold. Whatever wealth accumulates belongs to the deity. 

Padmanabhan told me that it had become his driving purpose in life to serve Vishnu and, in so doing, protect the deity's hoard. He explained, "In Lord Krishna's Bhagavad Gita, he says we are only small things before the great lord. So if he says, 'Dance,' we dance, and if he says 'Sit,' we sit. I am just a mosquito before him."

Deities can actually own property in India, though the law treats them as minors and they must be represented by an official guardian.

...On the walls were black-and-white photographs of his deceased relatives. Several photographs were adorned with flowers. Nair, like many Hindus, reveres his ancestors almost as deities; one of his grandfathers, he said, had kept his most valuable possession in a small wooden box, which Nair had inherited. "I've never ventured to open it," he said. Why not?

"Probably it contains wealth, probably it contains a diary and some letters written by him," he said. Many people in India had boxes like this. "Sometimes these boxes contain valuables and sometimes nothing -- but, because of our belief in ancestors, we don't care to open it. We keep them as something almost divine."

...Like Nair, most residents of Trivandrum had not been clamoring for the temple's vaults to be searched... in India the wealth stored in the vaults of Hindu temples is viewed largely in spiritual, not monetary, terms. William Harman, a scholar of Hinduism at the University of Tennessee, told me, "People make deals with deities, and if they receive what they want they pay up."

...For centuries, a maharaja from the family had led processions to the temple, and had escorted the idol when it was marched to the sea, twice a year, for a ritual bathing. By custom, the maharaja even had to ask the deity for permission to leave town.

...The Princess, who is petite and middle-aged, was dressed in a simple cotton sari. She described herself as not a "servant" of the deity but his "slave." 

A servant has the right to leave his master," she said. "If I don't like to work with you, I walk out and I say goodbye, but a slave has no option of independent action. He is forever bound to his master's feet. So we prefer that."

...Ganesh firmly opposed taking any wealth out of the temple, and said that he avoided discussing the matter with his father: "As a Hindu, I see my father and mother as gods. We won't raise our voice against them."

...Ganesh said that he gave the deity whatever money he could spare, which was sometimes as little as one rupee -- roughly two cents. Everything in the temple, Ganesh said, came from devotees like him, and he added, "So of course it belongs to God!"

Wouldn't it be a good thing, I asked, if the deity's wealth were used to help people? By that logic, Ganesh said, valuable objects should also be removed from churches and mosques. ...It was surprising that, in a place with rampant poverty, there wasn't a greater demand to nationalize the treasure.

"Buddha in Blue Jeans." Kindle cost: $0.00. Worth much more.

If you've got a Kindle, or a Kindle reader, you'll definitely get your money's worth out of a 26 page e-book, Buddha in Blue Jeans: An Extremely Short Zen Guide to Sitting Quietly and Being Buddha.

The cost is zero, nothing. $0.00, nada, zilch. 

The message is valuable: sit quietly every day.

I've been doing that for 43 years. Can't say that I'm a Buddha, but hey, maybe I am. Regardless, my morning meditation seems to have helped keep me from becoming any crazier than I already am.

Maybe even a little saner.

(Alternative equally valid rendering: My morning meditation seems to have helped keep me from becoming any saner than I already am. Maybe even a little crazier.)

Your spiritual experience means nothing to me

Experience. A wonderful word. So important. It's all that we have, really. Experience. Without it, we're nothing. Dead. Unconscious. 

So saith the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

1 a : direct observation of or participation in events as a basis of knowledge

   b : the fact or state of having been affected by or gained knowledge through direct observation or participation

2 a : practical knowledge, skill, or practice derived from direct observation of or participation in events or in a particular activity

   b : the length of such participation <has 10 years'experience in the job>

3 a : the conscious events that make up an individual life

   b : the events that make up the conscious past of a community or nation or humankind generally

 

4: something personally encountered, undergone, or lived through

5: the act or process of directly perceiving events or reality

But note key words in the various definitions of "experience" above. Direct. Conscious. Individual. Personally.

Experience isn't communal.

The only experience each of us will ever know is our own. In my 63 years of experiencing, I've never directly, consciously, personally known another individual's experience. Not another human's. Not another animal's. Not another anything's.

And neither has anyone else. The only clues we get to someone else's experience are those which enter our own experience.

Spouses talk to each other about how their days went. People write autobiographies which attempt to convey what it's been like to live their life. Movies give us insights into how other individuals, often utterly unlike us, experience the world. Intimate conversations are attempts to bridge the ultimately unbridgeable gap between I and other.

I'm interested in other people's experiences. We all are. It's lonely existing solely inside our own heads. We long for the expanded vistas that can be seen through descriptions and depictions of how others view reality.

Here's the thing, though:

If there's essentially a zero possibility that I could ever experience what you've experienced; if your experience is so subjective, so personal, so individual that it has essentially no connection with any experience I could possibly have, it means essentially nothing to me.

I'm not saying you mean nothing to me. Just that your utterly subjective, personal, individual experience means nothing to me.

For example... the dreams that my wife often tells me about when she wakes up in the morning. I care about them because I care about my wife. But I know that what she experienced in her dream never will be experienced by me. 

Likewise... the descriptions of spiritual experiences that people share in comments on this blog, or in so many other ways elsewhere. (There's a whole publishing genre of books about experiencing the presence of God, Jesus, angels, heaven, and other divine presences.)

I'm interested in these descriptions of spiritual experiences to just about the same extent I'm interested in descriptions of other people's dreams.

I enjoy learning about how other people describe their subjective inner world. However, since that world is completely different from my own experience, otherwise it doesn't hold any interest for me. I'll never experience someone else's dream, and I'll never experience what someone else considers to be "spritual" -- if it is supernatural.

Of course, the difference between dreams and spiritual experiences is that many people feel the latter point to an objective truth. God, heaven, a higher dimension of reality, whatever.

OK. Some people (like Jungians) also feel that dreams can be pointers toward universal archetypes, or clues about truths lying beyond everyday waking awareness. I'm open to the possibility that both dreams and spiritual experiences are something more than the result of subjective brain processes.

Without evidence of this, though, I have to assume that someone else's heartfelt vision of divinity means as much to me as the dream they had last night. Which is, nothing.

Again: if there's essentially zero connection between what you're experiencing, and what it's possible for me to experience, why should I care about your experience? Remember, I can care about you, because your obvious physical nature is part of my own experience; but your purely subjective experiences are closed off from me. 

This morning I came across an inspiring, interesting, intriguing You Tube video called "Make It Count." It shows two guys racing around the world, having all sorts of experiences that, almost certainly, I never will have myself.

Nor, mostly, would I want to have. (One exception: taking photos of lovely bikini-clad girls on a beach.)

 

Yet nothing prevents me from going to the places these guys went to. If I did that, naturally I wouldn't have the same experiences they did. After all, they are themselves, and I am me. However, there would be a connection between their experiences and my own. 

I could stand on the edge of the high cliff shown in the video, wondering if I could survive a jump into the water. I'd see the rocks, hear the sound of the ocean, feel the sea breeze brush across my face. 

That's a lot more connection between their experiences and my own, compared to someone's utterly subjective experience of sensing the presence of Jesus while in a church, or of divine light/sound while in a guru's meditation session.

In one case there is a there for me to experience; in the other, there isn't. 

So if you share a personal spiritual experience in a comment on this blog, or in some other fashion, please realize that I understand how meaningful that experience probably was to you. In return, you should realize that I'm not you, nor you me. 

And when it comes to dreams or spiritual experiences, never will the twains of you and me meet. With other sorts of experiences we can look at each other and say, "Wow, did you see that?" Not with purely subjective experiences, though. 

Which is why they mean nothing to me, if those experiences aren't mine.

Life lessons learned on a Maui beach

I always feel pleasantly alive when my wife and I visit our favorite Maui beach, Napili. There's just something about a tropical beach that screams (or rather, murmurs) this is what life is all about. 

It isn't just the warm air and water speaking. There's also something else. Elemental. Honest. Real. No need to try to name it. But I enjoy trying to talk about it.

Last year I blogged about some life lessons I've learned boogie boarding. 

-- You can't control the big things.
-- You can control how you relate to big things.
-- Change is the only constant.
-- Don't be afraid of being the only one.
-- Rushing isn't necessary.
-- Missing an opportunity is no big deal.
-- Patience. Acceptance. Mindfulness.
-- Not knowing what you're doing is really doing it.
-- Get out of your mind! Go a little (or a lot) crazy! 

During this year's Maui vacation I re-experienced these same life lessons. Heraclitus was right, though. Can't swim in the same ocean twice. So I'll share some 2012 Napili photos with fresh what life is all about observations.

Lots of footsteps on a now-empty beach. Can't tell which came from a rich person, or a poor one; from a black person, or a white one; from a sad person, or a happy one. Big waves will wash them away today, or tomorrow, or for sure, someday. We're all footsteps on a beach.

Islands on the horizon are real. So is the empty ocean. But there's a difference between them. Seeing a distant shore that doesn't exist... mirage! Such is the supernatural, religiosity, mysticism, spirituality -- when these aren't grounded.

Make room for two. Or three. Or however many people there are to like, love, and lust for in your life. 

Looking up... a different perspective. There's always so much more... skyward. Condos, people, sidewalks... yes. Also say yes to blue sky, passing clouds, palm fronds waving in the breeze. 

Keeping our balance, the best we can, as the waves of life pass by. But falling down, splash, into the water, that's enjoyable also. No standing without falling. No such thing as the perfect surfer. Everyone falls. (Yes, it's possible to surf waves on stand-up paddle boards).

Being part of the wave... that's the key to riding a wave. Too early or too late; too left or too right. Not quite. There's a sweet spot which can be felt, yet not described. You know it when you're in it. Thinking not required.

Beaches erase inhibitions. Adults act like kids. Why can't we do this all of the time? Or at least, all the times the boss isn't watching. More silly, more crazy, more no reason not to. That's a great gift of beaches.

It's really easy to do nothing. Especially on a beach. Every life needs a beach, where nothing is the job to be done. I've learned more from nothing than from something. Got to keep up my learning, though. Always more to learn.

I can't make large waves come. Believe me, I've tried. Really tried. Doesn't work. No boogie-boardable waves, I sit on the beach. When there's big enough waves, I go in the water. Simple. Just flow with what is really happening, not with what I want to have happen.

There's a sunset at the end of every day. Always beautiful, even when we can't appreciate the loveliness. No sunset, no sunrise. Perpetual dark or light... not the way the Earth turns. Or life lives and dies.

Even Hardcore Zen is too softcore for me

I've come across Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen site several times. I know this, despite my sometimes bad memory, because I always look at the t-shirts for sale.

So I remember a repeated feeling of "Seems like I should be the sort of guy to wear a Hardcore Zen t-shirt, but they don't appeal to me." Too Buddhist'y, even with the Buddhist dogmatism and religiosity supposedly removed.

I have the same reaction to Warner's recent post, When You Reach Pure Awareness You Will Have No Problems. 

He makes fun of Deepak Chopra, which I like. Chopra tweeted "When you reach pure awareness you will have no problems, therefore there will be no need for solutions." Warner, appropriately, deconstructed Chopra's self-serving B.S.

Let's analyze that for a minute.

When (in the future, not now) you (who exist now and will continue to exist in the future) reach (whatever you imagine to be) pure awareness you (who exist now and will continue to exist in the future) will have (in the future) no problems (for your self), therefore there will be (in the future, not now) no need for (you to have) solutions (and won't that be wonderful, over there, past that hill, just out of sight, let me sell you a way to get there).

If it were only Deepak Chopra who believed this, it wouldn't really matter much. But this is how pretty much everyone approaches meditation practice and it's why meditation practice seems to fail those people. It is certainly how I myself thought of practice for a very long time. I wanted something for myself. I might have even thought of what I wanted to get in terms of "pure awareness." I read enough shitty books that used shitty phrases like that.

There is no pure awareness for you.

OK. Agreed. Granted. 

But if this is true, I don't get how Warner -- and other "hardcore Zen" types who take an iconoclastic view of Buddhism -- can still believe in pursuing meditative practices which they say aren't needed and get the practitioner nothing, yet are still recommended.

Even though I've liked the Zen approach to life for a long time (started reading Zen books over forty years ago), more and more this strikes me as a less obvious form of a religious come-on.

"Something is wrong with you. You can't fix it yourself. You need help. I can give it to you. But you'll need to put yourself under my guidance and do what I say."

How is a Zen master (which Brad Warner is) all that different from a Christian minister? Both offer up solutions to life's problems, even though each admits there's really no problem to be solved. After all, there's no such thing as enlightenment or pure awareness, and Jesus died for our sins.

Just by embracing... something or other... done! Enlightenment. Salvation.

If it's that simple, if Zen is just everyday life, nothing extra added, then why is it necessary to engage in so much Zen practice in order to realize there's nothing to be done? Warner ends his post with:

The attitude expressed in Mr. Chopra's tweet sits right at the very epicenter of where things have gone wrong for mankind. It is the source of all of our troubles. The solution to what's wrong in the world is not some distant dream of pure awareness. It's the understanding that what exists right now is pure awareness, is God, whether you know it or not. We, who seek to know it and possess it, are the very thing that makes it so hard to understand that.

A couple of blogs ago Broken Yogi made a comment that, "Brad is mixing categories. I can't pole vault 18 feet like a top Olympic athlete, but I doubt that athlete would call me physically ill because I can't do that... Likewise, I'm not enlightened, but I'm not spiritually lame either."

In response I said something like, "Enlightenment (I hate that word) isn't like pole vaulting 18 feet. It's more like walking to the bathroom, if we were to continue that analogy. Most people, instead of walking to the bathroom, which (let's say) just happens to be 18 feet away instead try to pole vault to the bathroom. And they can't do it because the ceiling is too low. Yet they try anyway and keep injuring themselves. The pole keeps breaking, they keep hitting their heads, they keep beating themselves up over not being able to do it, and they still have to pee. The only thing an enlightened person (I hate that term) does differently is that she walks straight to the bathroom, does her business and then goes back to bed."

Enlightenment or pure awareness or God or whatever isn't some complicated thing we have to chase after far, far away. It's the chasing itself that gets in our way. We wear ourselves out running in circles to try to arrive at the place we already are.

So why Zen? Why all the books about Zen being sold by Warner and so many others? Why all the retreats, workshops, talks, group meditation sessions, etc. etc.?

Wouldn't truly hardcore Zen simply say this is all bullshit?

And give it up. Go back to just being at the place we already are.

Walking straight to the bathroom, doing our business, and then going back to bed. Unless it's enjoyable doing more than that, which I can understand, being a blogger who likes circling around the place that I am, looking at it from different angles.

I just don't think having fun going around in circles should be made into a spiritual practice. That's my problem with Zen. Its become an organized system, with a priestly hierarchy, for not getting anywhere.

Mitt Romney, you're wrong: this isn't a Christian nation

There are lots of reasons for people in the United States to vote for President Obama rather than Mitt Romney in November. Romney's sucking up to evangelical Christians is just one reason -- but an important one.

In a recent speech at a hotbed of Christian'ist fundamentalism, Liberty University, Romney told the assembled believers in an imaginary God the untruths they wanted to hear.

In the same week that President Obama galvanized his base by endorsing same-sex marriage, Mr. Romney’s message was that evangelicals could count on him to operate as president under “a common worldview,” including his position that marriage should be between only a man and a woman.

...Repeatedly invoking God and citing an array of Christian leaders and thinkers, from Pope John Paul II to the novelist C. S. Lewis, Mr. Romney spoke of the centrality of family and service and the tradition from America’s beginnings of trusting “in God, not man.”

Only problem, and it's a big one, is that this country never has been a Christian nation. Our founding fathers (and mothers, I assume) were appropriately skeptical of the sort of dogmatism that Romney mistakenly considers to be part of this nation's early history.

Check out the quotes in "The 12 Best Reasons Why The U.S. Is Not Now, and Never Should Be, a Christian Nation." Here's a couple of my favorites:

3) “But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed.”–John Adams, letter to F.A. Van der Kamp, Dec. 27, 1816

6) “History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose.” –Thomas Jefferson to Baron von Humboldt, 1813

7) “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.” –James Madison, letter to William Bradford, April 1, 1774

10) “During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.” –James Madison, A Memorial and Remonstrance

Sam Harris' great little book, "Letter to a Christian Nation," offers up a blunt modern perspective about why Romney is so wrong.

There is, in fact, no worldview more reprehensible in its arrogance than that of a religious believer: the creator of the universe takes an interest in me, approves of me, loves me, and will reward me after death; my current beliefs, drawn from scripture, will remain the best statement of the truth until the end of the world; everyone who disagrees with me will spend eternity in hell.

…An average Christian, in an average church, listening to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse—and there have been some extraordinarily arrogant scientists.

Physics knows more about "nothing" than theology or philosophy

It's amazing, how much can be said about nothing.

Nothing always has been a favorite topic of theologians and philosophers. Now physicists are getting into the Nothing Game, big time (see here and here).

There's a basic dispute between fact-focused scientists on one side, and concept-obsessed thinkers on the other: is "nothing" a something that can be investigated, or an absolute absence of anything? (including "absence")

I've read a bunch of books and articles that argue both sides of this question, which is central to the classic Why is there something rather than nothing? question. More and more I favor how physicists such as Lawrence Krauss look upon nothing.

"Intelligent design" is simply a unifying umbrella for opposing evolution. Similarly, some philosophers and many theologians define and redefine "nothing" as not being any of the versions of nothing that scientists currently describe.

But therein, in my opinion, lies the intellectual bankruptcy of much of theology and some of modern philosophy. For surely "nothing" is every bit as physical as "something." It then behooves us to understand precisely the physical nature of both these quantities. And without science, any definition is just words.

A century ago, had one described "nothing" as referring to purely empty space, possessing no real material entity, this might have received little argument. But the results of the past century have taught us that empty space is in fact far from the inviolate nothingness that we presupposed before we learned more about how nature works.

Now, I am told by religious critics that I cannot refer to empty space as "nothing," but rather as a "quantum vacuum," to distinguish it from the philosopher's or theologian's idealized "nothing." ... And we're told that the escape from the "real" nothing requires divinity, with "nothing" thus defined by fiat to be "that from which only God can create something."

In the New York Times, philosopher Gary Gutting asks "Can Physics and Philosophy Get Along?" He doesn't like how Krauss disparages the usefulness of philosophy in understanding the ultimate nature of the universe.

Well, get real, Professor Gutting. That's what science is all about: reality.

If there isn't a way to study the nature of something, either directly or through systematic theoretical models (often mathematical), science isn't interested in it. This doesn't mean that science knows about everything that exists in the cosmos.

Far from it. Science embraces not-knowing. (See "Ignorance: How it Drives Science." Fascinating book.)

However, if there's no sign of something, no way to sense anything about it, no ability to come up with any evidence concerning it, that "something" is a conceptual abstraction which only exists for us humans within the brains that conjured up the notion of it.

This is why most scientists, along with me, reject the astounding statement Gutting makes at the end of his essay.

Precisely because science deals with only what can be known, direct or indirectly, by sense experience, it cannot answer the question of whether there is anything — for example, consciousness, morality, beauty or God — that is not entirely knowable by sense experience. To show that there is nothing beyond sense experience, we would need philosophical arguments, not scientific experiments.

Krauss may well be right that philosophers should leave questions about the nature of the world to scientists. But, without philosophy, his claim can only be a matter of faith, not knowledge.

Huh?

How could philosophical arguments show there is nothing beyond sense experience? And what makes Gutting think that scientists are interested in proving the absence of anything beyond sense experience through experimentation?

The results of experiments must be sensed by an experimenter. This holds true whether one is talking about "external" science or "internal" science. Meditation could be (and often is) viewed as a means of investigating realms of reality beyond the physical. But any sign of these realms would have to be sensed by the meditator.

So there's no way to get around the need for sensory experience in knowing reality. I have no idea how philosophy or theology can claim to possess knowledge of what lies beyond sensation, such as an ultimate "nothing" about which nothing can be said or experienced because it's, duh..., nothing.

Krauss updates his views about philosophy in a recent Scientific American article, "The Consolation of Philosophy."

It's well worth reading. Krauss is courteous to those he disagrees with about the nature of nothing, yet firm in his conviction: if there's no way to discern nothing, it's a human abstraction, not really real reality.

What I tried to do in my writing on this subject is carefully attempt to define precisely what scientists operationally mean by nothing, and to differentiate between what we know, and what is merely plausible, and what we might be able to probe in the future, and what we cannot.  The rest is, to me, just noise.

So, to those philosophers I may have unjustly offended by seemingly blanket statements about the field, I apologize.  I value your intelligent conversation and the insights of anyone who thinks carefully about our universe and who is willing to guide their thinking based on the evidence of reality.  

To those who wish to impose their definition of reality abstractly, independent of emerging empirical knowledge and the changing questions that go with it, and call that either philosophy or theology, I would say this:  Please go on talking to each other, and let the rest of us get on with the goal of learning more about nature.

"Magic" of Sant Mat guru-hypnotists explained

Hypnotism works. Sadly. Otherwise I would have spent the past forty-two years believing that I looked just like a young Paul Newman.

Below you'll find an email message I received a few days ago from someon who persuasively argues that what Sant Mat gurus do is take advantage of quasi-hypnotic suggestibility. Devoted disciples are told, over and over, that the guru has divine powers. They're also told, over and over, that they will experience certain mystical lights and sounds under the guru's direction.

Not surprisingly, some disciples say they've had such experiences. Then those tales get added to the store of Guru is God teachings, which are taught to more disciples. And the game goes on.

I say "game" because there is no demonstrable proof that either the guru is divine, or meditation experiences of his disciples truly reflect knowledge of higher realms of reality. Such proof would be necessary for Sant Mat to deserve the title of "Science of the Soul" that it wishes to claim.

Genuine science isn't certain of outcomes. Genuine science, in fact, is uncertain, open to unexpected findings, doubtful of dogmatism and just have faith. Yet faith in the guru usually is considered to be essential if a disciple is to have mystical experiences of the guru's divinity.

A form of hypnotism could be at work here. As it was during an assembly at Santa Clara High School, where I had a job as a counselor's aide for a few months after graduating with my B.A. in Psychology from San Jose State College.

The gym was filled with students watching a hypnotist do his thing. He brought a female student up on stage and hypnotized her. Then she was instructed, "Go find Paul Newman in the audience." She wandered down the gym floor, gazing up into the bleachers as she walked.

I was in the second or third row. She paused when she reached my section of the gym, then stepped onto the bleachers that separated us, put her arms around my neck, and hugged me. Made my day! (More than that, actually, since I still have such fond memories of the event.)

Maybe I was as good-looking as a youthful Paul Newman was back then. Or, more likely, I was one of the older looking males in the audience who the girl wasn't already familiar with (teachers, administrators). Whatever... I wasn't Paul Newman, but the girl gave every sign of believing that I was.

Here's the message from someone who is familiar with devoted disciples believing their guru is God. Seemingly equally mistakenly.

Hey Brian,

Every year or so I find myself reading a few articles on your church of the churchless. And every year or so I always feel like sending you an email straight away to thank you for your time and energy in sharing your analysis of the situation.

I resonate 100% with everything you say. I like honesty at all costs.

I just wanted to ask whether you have covered – what I feel is the key concept of the trickery – the fact that one’s subconscious will provide whatever we secretly desperately wish for as an inner light show – as admitted by Baba Faqir Chand.

I myself have had direct experience of a lucid dream with spectacular affects involving a sikh gentleman (provided by my subconscious half heartedly at first) which my subconscious (knowing my prior programming with the Sant mat long (philosophical) induction script quickly turned into “Gurinder Singh” for me.

However, my dedication to truth caused me to take another look at what was going on behind my desperation and I quickly but reluctantly realised that I was being played by myself and the Sant Mat Hypnotists. Not many have the honesty to turn down the ego gratification of “a self centered inner visual experience” for the scientific/psychological reality of the phenomena – there is not as much happy hormones released at the truth behind the phenomena in relation to the scenario that one might actually be one of the chosen ones!

Hence when I read the “How do you know I am a guru” article, the key deception will work something like this. You would need to meditate to see me inside to know that I am the true guru.

Now knowing how the subconscious works, the Fake guru who has been handed down the secret of the subconscious from his cohorts in crime (previous gurus) knows full well that after some time the more hypnotic of his followers will start seeing him inside and due to word of mouth the rest of the sheep (who literally see nothing) will blindly follow out of peer pressure and desperation.

So that’s it in a nut shell. No big deal. Guru spell (God’s Spell – Gospel) broken by logical analysis. I feel this needs to be the “Headline article”.

I have been meaning to get onto pub med and finding if the psychology community have done any research into the subconscious in relation to these inner visions. I have also wanted to see if pub med can deliver any research on the phenomena of hypnosis – as I feel this is the key to dispelling a lot of the trickery that has existed since the dawn of time.

In fact part of me seems to suspect that the psychology people have not spent as much time on this hypnosis phenomena as they should have due to conspiratorial reasons. E.g. black ops, taking all such work into secret study, as such knowledge is useful for controlling large masses of people in national politics via the media etc. etc. etc. The ugliness has no end to it!

Once again wishing you well. Stay healthy – it makes life so much less painful and good luck with that gum graft! [Note: that was three and a half years ago, my gums are all better now -- Brian]

P.S. It takes chains of steel to enslave a rational human, but all the rest may be enslaved by a belief.

(I told my email correspondent that "priming" is another psychological process that could explain how disciples believe they are experiencing something that isn't really there. Here's an article about it.)

"Search Inside Yourself" -- compassionate, scientific, businesslike

I've got a new favorite book: Chade-Meng Tan's Search Inside Yourself -- the unexpected path to achieving success, happiness (and world peace).

It didn't take much searching inside myself to realize that I liked Tan's approach to mindfulness, meditation, and all that stuff. Just reading the forewords by Daniel Goldman and Jon Kabat-Zinn, along with Tan's first two chapters, had my inner self saying "Yes, yes, yes" this morning.

Here's one Yes passage:

In learning and teaching meditation, the good news is that mindfulness is embarassingly easy. It is easy because we already know what it's like, and it's something we already experience from time to time. Remember that Jon Kabat-Zinn skillfully defined mindfulness as "paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally."

Put most simply, I think mindfulness is the mind of just being. All you really need to do is pay attention moment-to-moment without judging. It is that simple.

My initial Yes, which led me to buy the book, came from reading a story in the New York TImes, "OK, Google, Take a Deep Breath."

Employees coming from fast-paced fields, already accustomed to demanding bosses and long hours, say Google pushes them to produce at a pace even faster than they could have imagined. Google’s co-founder and chief executive, Larry Page, recently promised on the company Web site to maintain “a healthy disregard for the impossible.”

Little wonder, then, that among the hundreds of free classes that Google offers to employees here, one of the most popular is called S.I.Y., for “Search Inside Yourself.” It is the brainchild of Chade-Meng Tan, 41, a tall, thin, soft-spoken engineer who arrived at Google in 2000 as Employee No. 107.

Think of S.I.Y. as the Zen of Google. Mr. Tan dreamed up the course and refined it with the help of nine experts in the use of mindfulness at work. And in a time when Google has come under new scrutiny from European and United States regulators over privacy and other issues, a class in mindfulness might be a very good thing.

The class has three steps: attention training, self-knowledge and self-mastery, and the creation of useful mental habits.

Tan is an engineer. He's got a scientific, systematic, non-religious approach to mindfulness/meditation which resonates with my churchless non-soul.

(Also with the aspect of me that spent two years in a Systems Science Ph.D. program back in the 70's; I still mow our large, convoluted lawn with great precision, always searching for an improved mowing pattern that minimizes my time and maximizes cutting criteria, such as least amount of clumped clippings when the grass is tall.)

I was pleased to find that according to his book's index, Tan only has two references to Buddha in the 247 pages. Both are brief quotes. Excellent.

And understandable, given Tan's engineering attitude toward mindfulness, and the fact that he has been teaching Search Inside Yourself in a corporate setting, Google, comprised of a large number of diverse, highly intelligent, and similarly scientifically-minded employees. 

Still, compassion is a key concept in both his book and the course. Compassion is fun. It leads to happiness. Importantly, compassion also is profitable. Here's a Tan TED video where he speaks about "Everyday compassion at Google."

  

In the first five minutes he gives several examples of how Google employees initiated charitable projects on their own. Only later did they become official Google initiatives. 

This demonstrates the obvious: compassion, mindfulness, meditation, self-awareness, charity, serenity, peace -- "religious" or "spiritual" people don't possess these things in any greater measure than the rest of us. 

In fact, positive qualities (like negative qualities) can't be possessed, because they aren't ours. In fact, neuroscience is pretty sure there's no such thing as an "ours," since there is no such thing as a "me." 

Chade-Meng Tan has a quirky, appealing sense of humor. His book is filled with light-hearted illustrations. Thumbing through it, I didn't see any religious'y images. Nice.

Still, Tan says he is a practicing Buddhist. Check out his personal website about Buddhism, where Tan tells us:

Welcome to "What do you think, my friend?". This site contains a selection of writings on Buddhism.

This site takes a highly personal and practical approach towards Buddhism. Here, there are no deep philosophical discussions on Anatta or Sunnata. Just ordinary people like myself sharing insights and experiences on how Buddhism had benefitted us, and exchanging some nice stories and a few good jokes about Buddhism.

This is why I named my website "What do you think, my friend?". In this little corner of cyberspace, there is no Great Master. There is no, "Please enlighten me, Venerable Sir". There is only a funny guy living his life and sharing it. There is only, "What do you think, my friend?".

Launched in May 1995, this site is one of the oldest Buddhist sites on the web.

Neuroscience says people aren't things. We're processes.

Who am I?

That's a big question. For the ancient Greeks, and many others, it's the biggest question. "Know yourself." An imperative.

Modern neuroscience is casting factual light on this philosophical issue. Well, not only philosophical. Religon, spirituality, mysticism -- they also have explanations of what essential human nature is.

Usually, dualistic.

Meaning, supposedly there's the human body, which includes the brain. Then there's a mysterious something else. Soul, mind, psyche, spirit, some thing which inhabits, connects with, or otherwise associates with the body while we're physically alive.

But since that thing isn't physical, usually it is believed to survive bodily death. Bingo! After our last breath we find ourselves in heaven, hell, paradise, a bardo, or a host of alternative supernatural hypotheses.

As I often say on this blog, maybe.

Personally, I'd rather keep on surviving as something. Turning into nothing (nothing conscious, at least) after death isn't wildly appealing to me, to put it mildly. However, as noted in a previous post, Who am I? has the same presupposition as Do I have free will?

An "I." 

If there's no me, no thing which could become nothing, no thing which has a will (free or otherwise), then two gigantic Big Questions of Life shrink away into meaninglessness, in much the same way as Unicorn Behavioral Studies isn't a great field of study for a factually-inclined biologist.

These days I devour neuroscience books with the same zeal I used to read books about spirituality, mysticism, and esoteric philosophy. 

My current meal has been Michael Gazzaniga's "Who's in Charge? Free will and the science of the brain." It follows along in the familiar current of other neuroscience books, but Gazzaniga has a fresh and appealing way of conveying what has been learned about human nature.

Basically...

There's no evidence of the dualism so beloved by religions and mystics. No sign of the soul or any other form of consciousness separate from the brain. Nor is there a central controller, a top dog, a CEO, a boss, within the physical brain.

What scientists find there are processes, not things.

Yes, we humans feel like someone ("me") is in control, but this is an illusion caused by left-brain processes devoted to creating narratives about why things happen and what's going on in the world. Which often are wrong. Hey, that jerk at the end of the bar is laughing, at me! Asshole.

Gazzaniga writes:

A complex system is composed of many different systems that interact and produce emergent properties that are greater than the sum of their parts and cannot be reduced to the properties of the constituent parts.

...Relevant to our current question about feeling unified and in control is an important point that Northwestern University's physicist Luis Amaral and chemical engineer Julio Ottino make: "The common characteristic of all complex systems is that they display organization without any external organizing principle being applied." That means no head honcho, no homunculus. 

In his final chapter, Gazzaniga shares what John Doyle, a Cal Tech engineer, said to him:

Somehow we got used to the idea that when a system appears to exhibit coherent, integrated function and behavior, there must be some "essential" and, importantly, central or centralized controlling element that is responsible. We are deeply essentialist, and our left brain will find it.

And as you point out, we'll make up something if we can't find it. We call it a homunculus, mind, soul, gene, etc... But it is rarely there in the usual reductionist sense... That doesn't mean there isn't in fact some "essence" that is responsible, it's just distributed.

It's in the protocols, the rules, the algorithms, the software. It's how cells, ant hills, Internets, armies, brains, really work. 

It's difficult for us because it doesn't reside in some box somewhere, indeed it would be a design flaw if it did because that box would be a single point of failure. It's, in fact, important that it not be in the modules but in the rules that they must obey.

Love it.

There's more "spiritual" wisdom in this scientist's words than in the stacks of religious'y books I've read in my lifetime. It isn't different from what the wisest of sages have always said. Doyle just has solid reasons for his statements above.

Gazzaniga recognizes that we lack the proper framework for understanding who we humans really are. We're used to dealing with things, so we view ourselves as a thing that deals with other things. In a limited sense this is true, but mostly it is false.

What we are is... there's no is. At least, not in the way we usually think of things that are.

We are people, not brains. We are that abstraction that occurs when a mind, which emerges from a brain, interacts with that brain. It is in that abstraction that we exist and in the face of science seeming to chip away at it, we are desperately seeking a vocabulary to describe what it is we truly are.

...While reviewing material for this book, I realized that a unique language, which has yet to be developed, is needed to capture the thing that happens when mental processes constrain the brain and vice versa.

The action is at the interface of those layers.

In one kind of vocabulary it is where downward causation meets upward causation. In another vocabulary it is not there at all but in the space between brains that are interacting with each other. It is what happens at the interface of our layered hierarchical existence that holds the answer to our quest for understanding mind/brain realationships.

Those words probably don't make complete, or even much, sense to you. If so, I share your feeling. Even Gazzaniga, I suspect, doesn't fully understand what he wrote in the passages I just quoted. 

The brain still is largely a mystery. So are we humans. We're trying to comprehend what we are through the only tool we have: what we are.

Confusion is to be expected. Welcomed, even. I liked this quote on the next to last page.

No one knows more about the weaknesses in one's idea than the person proposing it, and as a consequence, one is always on the lookout. 

This is not a particularly easy state to be in, and I once asked Leon Festinger, one of the smartest men in the world, whether or not he ever felt inept. He replied, "Of course! That is what keeps you ept."

Great free will question: What do we want to be free from?

Having given up a belief in resurrection, physical immortality, eternal soul, or living on through my works, I've settled on another approach for dealing with my eventual demise:

Not being me. 

Now, some will say, "That's Buddhism 101." Sort of true. Anatta, not-self, is indeed a core Buddhist concept. But I'm lazy.

Buddhists, including those of the Zen variety, go through a heck of a lot of effort to realize that the entity striving to become enlightened doesn't exist. My feeling is, why not simply begin and end with the nothing-much-of-anything that I am? 

Done. Finis. Enlightenment trophy, please.

There's no me who is living, so there's no me who is going to die. Or, to become immortal. So the whole problem of What Happens to Me after Death is irrelevant, since there is no me (or you, of course) before death.

Neuroscience is a great way of overcoming the illusion of me-ness. We humans certainly feel we're in charge of ourselves, which implies there are selves we can be in charge of.

However, neuroscientific evidence strongly points to no "ghost in the machine," as Gilbert Ryle famously put it.

Meaning, each of us is deterministically connected with the world, including other people. This doesn't mean we are machines. Just that we're not free-floating, freely-willing soul "ghosts" separate from the physical body.

In his book Who's in Charge? (subtitle: free will and the science of the brain), neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga asks an excellent question. "What do we want to be free from?"

Again, we feel like we have free will. It seems like I can freely choose what I'm going to write in the next moment. It seems like you can freely choose to continue reading this post, or to head off to another corner of cyberspace. 

Questioning the reality of free will is threatening to most people.

Something bothers us about the notion (which almost certainly happens to be reality) that goings-on in the brain are determined by processes outside our conscious control, and that mind/brain are different aspects of the same physical entity, both governed by the laws of nature.

Yet Gazzinaga says, persuasively:

What does it mean to really talk about free will? "Ah, well, we want to be free to make our own decisions." Yes, but what do we want to be free from?

We don't want to be free from our experience of life, we need that for our decisions. We don't want to be free from our temperament because that also guides our decisions. We actually don't want to be free from causation, we use that for predictions.

A receiver trying to catch a football does not want to be free from all the automatic adjustments his body is making to maintain his speed and trajectory as he dodges tackles. We don't want to be free from our successfully evolved decision-making device.

What do we want to be free from?

How about... nothing.

The nothing-separate that is "me" doesn't want to be free of all that I'm connected with. Not that I have a choice in the matter. Life depends on others: energy, food, water, shelter, love, friendships, giving, taking, relating.

Yet mind-body dualists in general, and religious believers specifically, view this world as constraining us, enslaving us, restricting us. This is how the notion of a hideous problem with all existence arises, the subject of a previous post.

Religions want us to believe that something or someone is keeping us from an ideal state of divine freedom. "The Devil made me do it." 

Or if not the Devil...

Original sin
Karma
Maya/illusion
A fall from heaven
Un-enlightenment

Since we're supposedly trapped, we need someone to save us. A...

Savior
Prophet
Guru
Master
Spiritual guide

But then we come back to Gazzinaga's question: What do we want to be free of? 

I haven't finished his book, so I can't confidently relate his answer. However, some reviewers have given me a peek into the final chapters, as have clues in what I've read so far. 

Gazzinaga doesn't think we're looking upon "free will" in the correct fashion. The way we're looking at this issue is preventing us from understanding what reality really is. It's sort of like understanding that the Earth is round, not flat.

Everyday personal experience isn't going to do us much, if any, good. We can walk to the ends of the Earth. It still will look flat to our eyes. Not long ago, people were afraid they'd fall off the edge of the flat Earth if they went too far. 

No amount of introspection (looking within) or extrospection (looking without) will lead to genuine understanding if we're looking in the wrong way with a limited perspective.

The scientific method -- in this case, the methods of neuroscience -- are able to correct individual misunderstandings through careful experiments and explanations. Reading Gazzaniga's book, along with others, I can realize how faulty my feelings about free will are. I can see through the illusions of everyday life, where I believe that a single entity, mysteriously named Me, is controlling what I do with my body/brain.

I seek to be free of... what? For most of my life I never seriously considered that question. I just assumed that something was holding me back from being all that I could be.

With age, and hopefully a bit more wisdom, I've come to understand that the whole notion of a Search for Freedom/Liberation was off the mark. I never was enslaved. Religions want us to believe that we are because they're in the business of selling Get Out of Jail permission slips.

Religions are excellent at marketing. They help create a demand for an illusory product aimed at solving a non-existent problem. Unfettered free will isn't possible, nor is it desirable. Neither is separating mind from body, or soul from materiality.

The key is understanding that the me each of us wants to be free doesn't exist.

This is the illusion that humans daily entertain: we are the masters of our domain, aware of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.

In fact, the illusion that we’ve got a unified operation inside our heads, running the show, is so thorough-going that  “even the most strident determinists and fatalists at the personal psychological level do not actually believe they are pawns in the brain’s chess game.”

So it’s not that Gazzaniga denies the unseen forces that influence all of our actions and moods and impulses. Instead, he challenges the concept of free will as we know it.

“In traditional philosophy, free will is the belief that human behavior is an expression of personal choice that is not determined by physical forces, fate or God,” he reminds us.

In this view, implicitly, it’s possible to subtract away these external factors—"physical forces, fate and God"—and be left with an essential self, a free-wheeling agent.

But, Gazzaniga argues, neuroscience has dispelled the myth of such a self, of such a “you.” The brain, composed of all kinds of decentralized circuits that work in tandem, has no central command center.

“There is no ghost in the machine, no secret stuff that is YOU.”

“Prior to the startling advances of neuroscience, explanations of mechanisms were unknown. Today they are. Today we know we are evolved entities that work like a Swiss clock.”

It’s no longer useful to ponder the question of free will as such because neuroscience has changed the very meaning of the question. Accordingly, the mind develops ideas and beliefs that then influence the brain, which in turn influences the mind. It’s a constant back and forth. It’s dynamic.

Profound significance of "blowing Willie Nelson" joke

Last night my wife and I saw humorist David Sedaris at Salem's oh-so-cool historic Elsinore Theatre. There's a lot to like about Sedaris. He's gay, liberal, funny, ironic, cynical, profane, and a really good writer.

Also, thoughtful. Many of his jokes make you think. They've got layers of meaning. Here's my favorite joke, which I tweeted after the show, minus Sedaris' entertaining set-up to it.

What's the last thing you want to hear while blowing Willie Nelson? "I'm not Willie Nelson."

(Note to those who aren't conversant in American slang: "blowing" is synonomous with "giving a blow job," which is synonymous with oral sex performed on a male, a.k.a. fellatio. That Wikipedia link has some charming illustrative artwork, plus fascinating facts. Who knew that female bats perform fellatio to increase copulation time? "Blowing," of course, is sort of a strange term for this sex act, since it involves more sucking than blowing. Wikipedia: "The English noun fellatio comes from fellātus, which in Latin is the past participle of the verb fellāre, meaning to suck.")

I really liked this joke as soon as I heard it. So did my wife.

From the laughter in the packed audiorium, so did the rest of Sedaris' appreciative audience. But why? Well, why? isn't a question that usually should be asked after a joke is told.

Funny is funny. Period.

Sedaris himself, though, made some follow-up comments about the joke. He'd told it to a female employee at an airline check-in counter. When her reaction was more bemused than smiling, Sedaris said he pressed onward.

"Um, see, you'd be disappointed if you thought you were giving a blow job to Willie Nelson, and then the guy just turns out to be someone old with a bandana." 

(Nelson is 79; I'm a comparatively youthful 63; so I decided not to get seriously offended at this ageist joke, especially since I never wear a bandana, though I do share Nelson's short gray beard.)

Unlike the woman at the airline counter, I didn't need to have the joke explained to me.

I got it right away, in part because the joke has some universal qualities to it. Meaning, our attitude toward someone isn't based just on what we're directly experiencing about them at the moment, but also on the story that our mind is telling us about the person.

Willie Nelson is a cool dude. If you gave him a blowjob, it'd be something to talk about. "Do you want to hear about the time I blew Willie Nelson?" would elicit a much more positive reaction than "Do you want to hear about the time I blew an old gray-haired geezer wearing a bandana?" 

Likewise, "I'm devoted to the Pope, the emissary of Jesus, who is the Son of God and died for our sins so that we may enjoy eternal joy with our heavenly Father" is a lot more appealing than "I'm devoted to a well-off German guy who wears funny clothes and lords it over lots of people from his lavish palace in Italy."

Not long after I started this blog, I wrote Did I see God in first class? 

That post told the tale of how the mood in an airplane's coach section, where I and a bunch of other members of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (an Indian spiritual organization) were sitting, changed markedly upon the arrival in first class of the group's guru -- who is considered to be God in Human Form.

Except, at first I didn't recognize the Indian man who was wearing a white turban and blue jeans. He sat down in the row just ahead of my coach seat. I nodded politely, then went back to perusing the Alaska Airlines shopping magazine, or whatever else I was reading.

For me, the man was the equivalent of Sedaris' old gray-haired geezer wearing a bandana, aside from the fact that he was a dark-haired middle-aged man wearing a turban. He wasn't anybody special. I had no interest in, so to speak, getting down on my knees and giving him a devotional blow job.

But when the murmuring of lovestruck disciples around me caused me to realize who was sitting in first class, suddenly my attitude changed. Oh, my God! It's God! Well, back then I wasn't quite that enthusiastic and emotional toward the guru. I did view him as a spiritual celebrity though. 

So the blowing Willie Nelson joke points toward some important questions.

Since there's no convincing proof of any human's divine status, whether the person be alive or dead, wouldn't it be funny if religious believers are "servicing" supposed saints, prophets, gurus, masters, and sages who are really just ordinary people who'd say, if they were honest, "I'm not who you think I am."

Indeed, that'd be funny. Not ha-ha funny to most religious people, but I'd laugh. That's the nightmare of a devotee who believes their supposedly divine beloved is worthy of the slavish attention they've been giving to him or her.

What's the last thing you want to hear while surrendering your life to someone you believe is God? "I'm not God."

Hilarious.  

Analytical thinking weakens religious belief

This is one of those scientific findings that cause me to say, "Well, yeah, of course!": analytical thinking leads people away from religious believing.

TIME magazine has a good summary of the not-unexpected research conclusions.

We all fly both ways, on the complementary wings of intuition and analysis. These basically correspond to "fast thinking" and "slow thinking," the brain's System 1 and System 2 in the parlance of Daniel Kahneman (see my blog post, Don't mistake God for your intuitive brain speaking.

Sometimes it makes sense to intuit; other times, to analyze. As the TIME article says, both brain capabilities are valuable. We just need to know when each should be utilized. Our intuition may say, "God is real." However, then we should ask "How do I know this is true?"

Most of the world’s population believes in God, or gods, but alongside them there are also hundreds of millions of nonbelievers. What makes one a believer or not?

Religious faith is likely a complex phenomenon, shaped by multiple aspects of psychology and culture, say the authors of a new study. But the researchers, Ara Norenzayan and Will Gervais of the University of British Columbia in Canada, showed in a series of clever studies that at least one factor consistently appears to decrease the strength of people’s religious belief: analytic thinking.

...There are surely many factors at play here, but the researchers say their results suggest that one’s style of thought may be a crucial contributor to religious belief. Intuitive thinkers are more likely to be religious; analytical types, less so. “One explanation for belief is that it is based on a number of intuitions we have about the world around us. People don’t necessarily come to belief because they reason into it. Intuition helps us,” says Norenzayan.

For instance, the commonly held belief that the mind and soul are distinct from the body stems from intuition. “It is not based in logic or reason. That’s not why people find this compelling,” says Norenzayan.

That’s not to say that one way of thinking is more valuable than the other, only that the friction between intuitive and analytical thinking may help explain the origins of religious belief — or disbelief. “We know that in human psychology there are two systems of thinking. System one is intuitive; it is rapid and effortless. System two is analytical, and is more reasoned and thoughtful. Our study supports the idea that analytic thinking can push people away from intuitive thinking,” says Norenzayan.