Church of the Churchless

In spiritual science, discussing and debating beats blind faith

I'm amused at the advice I frequently get in comments on blog posts and emails: "Stop thinking so much, Brian. Believe in God. Have faith in your guru. Meditate and experience the truth that has eluded you."

These people don't understand that I view spirituality and mysticism as a science. Always have. Likely always will. If I wanted a religion, I had one in my brief career as a Catholic.

I was attracted to the Sant Mat teachings, Radha Soami Satsang Beas version, because they were billed as a "science of the soul." Cool.

Spirituality and science wrapped up in a nice tidy package. No need to leave your logic, reason, love of facts, respect for evidence, and such at the religious door. I could have the best of both worlds, material science and spiritual mysticism.

That desire hasn't changed.

What evolved over the forty-plus years I've been engaged in daily meditation and devotion to various spiritual teachers was a clearer understanding of what science is and isn't, when applied to the investigation of what, if anything, lies beyond everyday reality.

I found that even though many people talk about making spirituality into a science, they don't really mean it. This is just a marketing tool aimed at enticing scientifically-minded seekers of truth into what is really a faith-based religion. Or perhaps even a cult. 

In science, questioning is good; skepticism is good; demand for evidence is good; investigating shaky assertions is good; challenging authority is good. In religion, by and large, these things are bad. 

Consider what happened recently when some researchers claimed they'd found evidence of a particle going faster than light, something forbidden by Einstein's theory of relativity. Other scientists didn't immediately bow down at their feet and worship this new revelation about how nature operates.

Quite the opposite.

Potential flaws in the experimental design began to be pointed out. Doubting questions were directed at the researchers, who addressed them. Eventually the skeptics were proven right. The faster than light discovery was found to be spurious. Science progressed by not wrongly moving forward.

This is also how I look upon spiritual science.

Claims regarding this or that being true about God, soul, spirit, heaven, or whatever, can't be accepted as true without a lot of questions being asked, a lot of evidence being provided, a lot of give-and-take happening between the person claiming to know something about a supernatural realm and others wondering whether what he or she says is credible.

Now, some supposed experiencers of the divine consider that whatever they've experienced must be true, because, gosh, they experienced it! They're wrong.

Those researchers who claimed to have discovered particles moving faster than light also had an experience: of evidence that seemed to prove that they'd made an astonishing discovery. But their experience was mistaken. Without all the skeptical questioning, the flaws in their experiment wouldn't have been found.

Same applies to spiritual science, to spiritual experiments.

While its true that the results of meditation, miracles, visions, and such can't be quantified or as precisely described, those claiming to have discovered a spiritual truth still can have their claims put to the test. Questioned. Discussed. Verified. Investigated. Delved into.

When someone who has had a supposed spiritual or mystical experience shuts up and refuses to talk about it, that's a strong sign that skepticism is deserved. Truth isn't something to be ashamed of, to be hidden. When I hear "I can't tell you what happened to me; it's personal," my bullshit detector starts ringing, loudly. 

Understand: naturally I agree that personal subjective experiences can't be accurately described. Each of us knows this, because how we perceive the world is ours, not anyone else's. There's no compulsion to provide evidence of love, hate, awe, anger, happiness, or any other human experience.

But if you claim that your experience is of a spiritual realm that is objectively real, this changes things. Now you had better come up with some convincing evidence that what you're saying is true. That's how science works, and I'm a strong believer in spiritual science.

Phi, integrated information, the fountain of phenomena

I've read a lot of neuroscience/neurophilosophy books. But none like "Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul," by psychiatrist Giulio Tononi.

It's amazingly creative, filled with literary, historical, artistic, philosophical, and scientific allusions that made me feel like a Neanderthal. How the heck does Tononi know all this stuff? Guess I spend way more time watching The Daily Show and Survivor than he does.

In the lavishly illustrated book, a blend of theory, fact and fiction, Galileo meets Francis Crick, Alan Turing, Charles Darwin, and other great thinkers. It's pleasingly entertaining, yet left me feeling like I'd eaten only the frosting on a cake of consciousness explanation, not the substantial part.

That's to be expected, though. Nobody can explain what consciousness is.

Much is known about how the brain functions, but what philosophers call the "hard problem" of consciousness, how and why we have phenomenal experiences, remains a mystery. The mechanism of sight is well understood; about all that can be said about the subjective experience of seeing is Wow.

Tononi argues that consciousness is integrated information. 

Integrated information is the information generated by a system above its parts, where the parts are those that, taken independently, generate the most information... Consciousness lives within a system where integrated information reaches a maximum, inside its own drop.

...Integrated information measures how much can be distinguished by the whole above and beyond its parts, and phi is its symbol. A complex is when phi reaches its maximum, and therein lies one consciousness -- a single entity of experience.

If that doesn't make a lot of sense to you, join the club. I struggled with the ideas also. But the gist of what Tononi is saying resonates with me.

Consciousness is a continuum. A thermostat is extremely minimally conscious, in that it processes basic information. So is a diode, frequently mentioned by Tononi, which can only distinguish light from dark (one bit of information).

The human brain is vastly more complex. Clusters of neurons, billions upon billions, are constantly talking with each other, exchanging information. Thus people have a very high "phi" compared to a thermostat. The exact ratio can't be calculated, as this is way beyond current neuroscientific capabilities.

A short review of the book provides a good overview of Tononi's ideas. So does a New York Times story, "Sizing Up Consciousness By Its Bits." 

Our neurons are basically fancy photodiodes, producing electric bursts in response to incoming signals. But the conscious experiences they produce contain far more information than in a single diode. In other words, they reduce much more uncertainty. While a photodiode can be in one of two states, our brains can be in one of trillions of states. Not only can we tell the difference between a Chaplin movie and a potato chip, but our brains can go into a different state from one frame of the movie to the next.

“One out of two isn’t a lot of information, but if it’s one out of trillions, then there’s a lot,” Dr. Tononi said.

Consciousness is not simply about quantity of information, he says. Simply combining a lot of photodiodes is not enough to create human consciousness. In our brains, neurons talk to one another, merging information into a unified whole. A grid made up of a million photodiodes in a camera can take a picture, but the information in each diode is independent from all the others. You could cut the grid into two pieces and they would still take the same picture.

Consciousness, Dr. Tononi says, is nothing more than integrated information. Information theorists measure the amount of information in a computer file or a cellphone call in bits, and Dr. Tononi argues that we could, in theory, measure consciousness in bits as well. When we are wide awake, our consciousness contains more bits than when we are asleep.

Tononi's phi theory doesn't offer any support for the existence of an immaterial soul. He's clear that when the integrated information in a brain disappears upon a person's death, so does consciousness.

By contrast, most religions seem to view soul as something exceedingly simple: partless, whole, a conscious drop with an affinity for god's ocean. Well, maybe. There's just no evidence for this. Tononi writes:

They all had thought there was the body, and then there was the soul. And consciousness could not but side with soul. Oh yes, his body may perish for eternity -- burdened with age and broken in its joints -- damaged goods already, it had betrayed his soul. But the soul, how could it rot?

A consolation unworthy of a thinking man. For when the earthly Galileo would die, which Galileo should have survived in spirit?

...He thought back to what he had seen. Experience vanished with a mere blow to the head: one day Copernicus's soul had dissolved together with his brain. Every day his own soul ebbed and flowed with sleep and wake in his own brain.

...So consciousness was born with the brain, flourished when the brain grew its green connections, pruned and refined them to build the scaffold through which the shape of qualia bloomed, and then had aged with it, the green canopy wilting, and soon enough the soul would die when the brain went dry.

Yes, consciousness did not reduce to matter -- phi was the most intrinsically irreducible thing there is, the only thing that's really real. But consciousness did rely on matter, and if the brain was undercut, the soul too would collapse.

So why had he believed that the soul could escape death? Why had Dante believed it, conjuring clouds of spirits to yawn incurious sameness where all was stale eternally? Why Newton -- born the year of his death, to enchain the universe to laws of his devising?

Not faith, but lack of imagination. Unable to imagine how the perfection of the body could be built out of random variation and selection, they fancied a dexterous demiurge. Unable to imagine how the lute's ethereal sound could spring forth from the brain's dull matter, they fancied a transcendent soul, a soul set there to listen, a soul that would spring free with death.

...Perhaps as long as no explanation could be imagined, as long as science was unequal to the task, the soul could still survive in its secret sanctuary. But if consciousness too yielded to reason, then, like a fog swept by a cold wind, the mystery would dissolve, and death was certain. 

Perhaps. Because he had been wrong before. Tides proved the earth revolves around the sun, he thought then, but he was wrong. Perhaps the soul divorced the body when it was betrayed. And pehaps the sun revolved around the earth. 

So Tononi's theory of phi doesn't provide the pleasing consolation of eternal life that a religious belief in soul, spirit, and god does. On the plus side, Tononi offers up a much more likely explanation for conscious experience.

Then what is integrated information, a fundamental property of the world? 

"As fundamental as matter, perhaps more," said Alturi, "and perhaps the same thing -- it from bit. For phi is the fountain of phenomena."

...I will tell you what I think I have learned, said Galileo. I have learned that information only exists if there is a difference that makes a difference. For how would anything exist, if nothing can make a difference to it? How could it exist, if it has no choice -- an element with only one probable state?

I have learned that information and causation are one and the same thing, and that is all there is: what exists must be a difference that makes a difference, a choice that's causal.

..."To know how much the world is in the image and likeness of our brain, it is enough to carry out your first experiment, to fall asleep and dream. What we dream of is what we know, what we can know is that of which we dream.

The world can be imagined within, but not seen naked from without. And yet without the inner glow of consciousness, there would be no sight. What we must do is go and seek the light, the light that unifies." 

(If you want a lot more detail, and less poetry, check out this paper by Tononi.)

Do you believe that God exists? 100%? Absolutely? No doubts?

Usually on this blog I say what I think, and other people comment. Tonight I'm going to do something different. 

I want to ask you, whoever you are, whoever might read this post, whether you are absolutely confident that God exists. 

Meaning, you don't just believe, hope, suspect, hypothesize, have faith that God exists. You're sure. And not just pretty sure. You're 100% sure. You've got no doubts about the reality of God.

If that describes you, leave a comment on this post.

Explain the reasons for your absolute surety about God's existence. And while you're at it, tell us about the God that you know exists. What is he/she/it like? Describe his/her/its characteristics. Enlighten me.

I'm serious about this. I'm a skeptic about God. I haven't come across any demonstrable evidence that God is real. But often religious believers argue with me. They say, "Brian, you're wrong about God." 

OK. I want to give those people a chance to explain why they are so sure God exists. Again, not in the sense of a belief, or of faith. Why are you certain that God is real? 

Please, no quotations from holy books. I'm interested in your personal conviction, your personal certainty, your personal evidence for God's indisputable existence. 

I'm listening. Talk to me, religious believers.

If rape and life is God's will, why isn't everything?

In addition to increasing the chance that Democrats will maintain control of the United States Senate by winning an open seat in Indiana, Republican senatorial candidate Richard Mourdock opened up an interesting line of theological questioning with his instantly infamous rape comment.

In a Senate debate Tuesday night, Richard Mourdock, the Indiana state treasurer, tried to distinguish himself from two opponents who also oppose abortion, explaining why he does not accept an exception for pregnancies conceived by rape.

“I’ve struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God,” Mr. Mourdock said. “And even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

Hmmmmm. Let's agree with Mourdock that life is a gift from God. And that if life is conceived after a rape, God intended this to happen. 

The big theological questions then become: What isn't a gift from God? What isn't intended by God to happen? 

If the answer is "nothing," this really is the same as "everything."

Meaning, if there's never any difference between what happens and what God wants to have happen, there's no point in bringing God into the cause and effect equation. Stuff would happen, or not happen, in the cosmos exactly the same whether or not God is viewed as the intentional cause.

Humorist/satirist Stephen Colbert made a similar point on his show last night. 

Now sadly, it's too late for Richard Mourdock.  These comments have left his campaign in shambles. But you know what?  Don't shed a tear, folks.  Because I've come to realize that this is just something that God intended to happen. 

Sure. Makes sense. If conception after a rape is God's will, why isn't Mourdock's political embarassment after saying "conception after a rape is God's will" also God's will? 

Since nobody knows what God wills or doesn't will (assuming God exists, an assumption I strongly doubt), guessing God's intentions seems absurdly misguided. Anyone who claims to know what's in God's mind is either so delusional or gullible (at one time I was probably in this camp), they deserve to be as soundly ridiculed as Mourdock has been the past few days.

If someone believes in God, he or she should either consider that God is utterly uninvolved with the world, or completely in control of everything. Anything inbetween, where God wills some events but not others, strikes me as theologically absurd.

I'm fond of quoting the medieval mystical theologian Meister Eckhart on this subject.

“Now I hear you ask, ‘How do I know that it is God’s will? My answer is that if it were not God’s will even for a moment, then it would not exist. Whatever is must be his will. If God’s will is pleasing to you, then whatever happens to you, or does not happen to you, will be heaven.”

So abortion is God's will. Not having an abortion is God's will. Homosexuality is God's will. Heterosexuality is God's will. Life is God's will. Death is God's will. Freaking everything is God's will.

Which, as noted above, basically says nothing.

God is irrelevant if God is responsible for everything that happens. We're left with a pantheist abstraction in which we call "God" the entire cosmos, and "God's will" whatever happens in the cosmos.

Personally, I'd rather leave God out of the answer to Why does stuff happen? But if believers want to include God as a cause of earthly happenings, it makes more sense to go all the way: assume that everything which happens is God's will. 

That way, at least, encourages humility, acceptance, gratitude, flexibility, and non-judgmentalism. Go the other way, and you get guys like Richard Mourdock.

Why mindfulness is better than concentration

After more than thirty years of focusing on concentration in my meditation practice, I've become a believer of broadening into mindfulness.

That is, being aware of whatever is there -- the point of my previous post about my can't-miss meditation approach. 

Repeating a mantra is a common concentrative technique. So is following the sensation of one's breathing. Nothing wrong with this. Concentration is good. It's how I'm able to focus on writing this blog post on my laptop while distracting sights and sounds abound in our kitchen as my wife putters around.

But here's the thing: I know what I need to do with my laptop. I have a clear goal, and a clear means of attaining it. Thinking thoughts, then typing them out on a keyboard while viewing a computer screen.

As noted in my whatever... post, looking for the big picture truth about ultimate reality, or even regular reality, is a very different proposition. If we're honest, we have to admit that we don't know what we're looking for. Nor what we might find.

Theories abound concerning the nature of god, highest truth, the foundation of existence, buddha nature, divinity, or whatever other name we might give to what, if anything, lies beyond everyday awareness.

Nobody knows for sure, though, which of these hypotheses are correct. Or if any are. Religious believers typically assume that some dogma is The Final Truth, then follow whatever practice their chosen religion enjoins. However, they can't be sure they're on the correct road to ultimate reality.

In their meditation they might keep their eye out for Jesus accompanied by a host of angels. Or for a turbaned guru sparkling with mystical beams of light. Meanwhile, who knows what they might be missing? Such as, reality.

In "Mindfulness in Plain English," Bhante Henepola Gunaratana explains why Buddhism considers broad-minded openness to be better than narrowly focused concentration.

Meditating your way through the ups and downs of daily life is the whole point of vipassana. This kind of practice is extremely rigorous and demanding, but it engenders a state of mental flexibility that is beyond comparison. 

A meditator keeps his mind open every second. He is constantly investigating life, inspecting his own experience, viewing experience in a detached and inquisitive way. Thus, he is constantly open to truth in any form, from any source, and at any time. This is the state of mind you need for liberation.

...Mindfulness is a broader and larger function than concentration. It is an all-encompassing function. Concentration is exclusive. It settles down on one item and ignores everything else. Mindfulness is inclusive. It stands back from the focus of attention and watches with a broad focus, quick to notice any change that occurs. 

...Mindfulness is more difficult to cultivate than concentration because it is a deeper-reaching function. Concentration is merely focusing the mind, rather like a laser beam. It has the power to burn its way deep into the mind and illuminate what is there. But it does not understand what it sees... Mindfulness can make you free.

This fits with what neuroscientists have learned about the right and left hemispheres of the brain.

The right hemisphere looks broadly at the world, aware of what is actually there. The left hemisphere takes that right hemisphere awareness and zeroes in on specifics, analyzing, breaking into parts, focusing on certain things while ignoring other things.

Both mindfulness (right brain) and concentration (left brain) go hand-in-hand in everyday life. For animals as well as humans.

For example, a bird searching for seeds on the ground keeps one eye broadly mindful of approaching predators, who could come from any direction (hawk from on high; cat from behind a bush), while the other eye focuses on food right beneath its beak.

When it comes to a sought-for ultimate reality, though, we really don't know what we're looking for. So mindfulness of whatever is a better approach than prematurely assuming that we can be sure in what direction we need to look, and what we'll find there.

For me -- and, yeah, I readily admit that this may sound weird -- there's a certain delicious sense of eroticism to this whole mindfulness thing. Being much more of a sensual feeling than a logical thought, it's hard for me to describe what I mean.

A metaphorical image comes to mind... feel free to substitute your own object of desire for my female example.

She's there. Somewhere. At least, I'm pretty sure she is. Can't know for certain. It's just a hunch. Supported by some free-floating evidence.

Tales abound of a beauty who frequents these woods. Nobody has seen her up close. Nobody has captured her with a photograph, much less taken her by the hand and brought her into town for all to see.

Yet the stories are alluring, albeit with few commonalities. There's no agreement on what she looks like, where she lives, how old she is, how she moves through the forest without being seen. 

But she is said to be more beautiful, more desirable, more ravishing than any other woman. One touch from her, one embrace, and you will never be satisfied with anyone else. One night with her... ecstacy beyond imagining.

So she's worth the search. A lifetime of searching. 

Problem is, the search is complicated by additional tales that have the ring of truth, given her elusiveness -- even after so many have sought her in so many ways during so many years.

She can be... whatever, whoever, wherever, whenever, however she wants to be. If you look for her as "this," it's said that you can walk right by her, because her guise at the moment is actually "that."

Further, even if you catch a glimpse of this captivating creature, she can alter her appearance in an instant. She can tease with a distant vision of an unclothed curvaceous female beauty, then become a dry leaf beneath your feet.

Or, not. It's up to her.

Or possibly to you, though nobody knows for sure what draws her to become the lover of someone who pursues her. Assuming this has ever happened. Again, we're talking about tales, not truth.

There's no right or wrong way of searching for such a beauty who has never been found.

(Rather, we should say, "proven to be found," because what happens in that boundless forest stays in that boundless forest, which is why the tales of her incomparable eroticism are both so tantalizingly believable and so ridiculously unbelievable.)

Seekers of her argue interminably about her nature. Forays into the wilderness where she is said to roam are never-ending. Everyone has their own favored paths, viewing platforms, blinds from where she might be seen. 

Me, I have my own way. I wander through the forest, enjoying myself, looking around just as I would if I were on a casual stroll. Yes, I have her in mind, but mostly out of mind. If she appears, I'll be joyful. If not, I'll still be happy.

It isn't in my hands to lay hold of someone so difficult to embrace. Likely, if I'm ever to become her lover, it will be on her terms, not mine. All I can do is show her that I'm in the forest, pleased to make her acquaintance if she chooses to befriend me. 

Assuming she exists. I'm not sure of that. It simply pleases me to think that maybe, just maybe, she is aware of me seeking to be aware of her. If that's as far as our relationship ever will progress, well, that's good enough for me.

Because I enjoy wandering aimlessly in the forest more than sitting purposefully at home. The searching is the thing, not the finding.

 

Oxytocin and the soul

This probably is my one and only chance for a blog post with the title above. Can't pass up the opportunity.

As I was going through my pile of undone/unread stuff, I came across this letter in the October 6, 2012 issue of New Scientist that struck me as interesting.

From Felix Dux
No doubt some will feel uncomfortable, as your reviewer Kayt Sukel suggests, at Larry Young and Brian Alexander's idea that the release of oxytocin during sex "tricks" women into nurturing their partners (22 September, p 46).

Unless you believe in a non-physical soul - which I'm sure Young and Alexander don't - then everything that makes up your sense of self must result from your neurobiology, including the release of oxytocin. There is no rational basis for separating it as an independent agent with its own agenda.

Perhaps they don't really mean it, and the image of being "tricked" by your own body's chemistry is just meant to be an arresting metaphor, but a metaphor for what? It's a choice of language which suggests an emotional attachment to the idea that somewhere there is a "real" self, whose aims get subverted by all those annoying distractions like love and parenthood.
Bishops Waltham, Hampshire, UK 

My can't-miss meditation approach: "Whatever..."

So what do you do when you're scientifically minded, deeply skeptical about religiosity, and mistrustful of holy books, gurus, and other pretenders who unbelievably claim to know all about ultimate divine truth, yet are open to the possibility that reality may consist of more than is evident to our everyday perceptions?

Well, here's what I do. Works for me. Your results may differ. 

Before I meditate every morning, I utter my unsacred mantra.

I'm open to:

Whatever...
Whoever...
Wherever...
Whenever...
However.... 

It's my can't-miss meditation system. I've got all the options covered. No matter what ultimate reality consists of, I've opened the door to it.

Come on in! Or I'll come to it. Whatever...

Which is the first of my open door invitations.

My unsacred mantra is so profound, so deep, so all-encompassing, there's no way I can describe its marvelous nature in a brief blog post. All I can do is scratch the surface of the five unsacred ___ever's through some brief descriptions. 

Whatever... Ultimate reality could be a "what." A thing. Like a superstring. Or who knows what? Taoism and like-minded philosophies see the ultimate as impersonal. Could be. That's why I open myself to whatever.

Whoever... Ultimate reality could be a "who." A being. Like god. Or who knows who? Christianity, along with other theistic religions, views the ultimate in personal terms. Could be. That's why I open myself to whoever.

Wherever... Ultimate reality could be anywhere. Right here. Far away. Some place inbetween. Or nowhere. I don't know. Some mystics want to journey to an ethereal spiritual realm. Others find the ultimate in a cup of coffee. Unsure, I open myself to wherever.

Whenever... Ultimate reality could be revealed at any time. After death. In the next moment. Never. There's tales of distant Second Comings and the Power of Now. Me, I enjoy the uncertainty of whenever.

However... Ultimate reality could manifest in various ways. By effort/hard work. By grace/letting go. By some other "how" entirely. Looking within might reveal it. Or looking without. Or not doing anything at all. Being clueless, I embrace however.

Now, I readily admit that my meditation approach lacks any sort of structure.

It's so loosey-goosey, there's no way I'll be able to write a best-selling book about it, go on speaking tours, be admired as a spiritual sage. Which is OK by me.

I'd rather have a 360 degree perspective on ultimate reality walking up to me and saying "hello," or me encountering it, than do what I did for so many years: focus on ultimate reality being a certain way, while ignoring all the other possibilities. 

Indian cultural attitudes help explain guru devotion

"Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet."

Well, back in 1892 Rudyard Kipling might have been right about the relationship between Britain and India, but obviously since then the world has become, in Thomas Friedman's jargon, a lot flatter. Meaning, a lot more interconnected, alike, accessible.

Yet there still is a cultural gulf between East and West. A question I got from an Indian in an email today reminded me of this.

I was a member of an India-based spiritual organization (Radha Soami Satsang Beas, or RSSB) for over thirty-five years. I've been to India twice. I've spent a lot of time with Indians who were fellow RSSB members. I wrote a book about vegetarianism from a karmic perspective that was published in India by RSSB.

Even so, my Western/American heritage led me to puzzle over the question:

How can you still defend or claim to love someone who you know now was the leader (or part of the leadership) of a organisation deliberately misleading people with false promises of spirituality and enlightenment?

Now that question, taken on its own, seemingly is pretty straightforward. However, when I first read it I immediately thought of many other queries I've gotten from Indians about how I could be devoted to Charan Singh, a RSSB guru who now is dead, for so many years, and then go off in a different spiritual direction.

The question I got today may seem to be opposite, since it asks how I still can have a fondness for Charan Singh now that my view of the RSSB teachings has changed so much. Here's the commonality, though: 

In each case there's an underlying assumption that I should stay constant. Either I should be as devoted to my guru now as I was during those thirty-five years, or I should disavow the devotion I felt before and retroactively "de-love" Charan Singh.

During my evening dog walk today, when marvelous insights often come to me, a thought came to mind: India still has lots of arranged marriages, whereas the United States doesn't; divorce is rare in India (1%, supposedly), whereas it is common in the United States (40%).

So falling in and out of love, along with getting together and splitting up with a loved one -- these are taken for granted in my culture. Which helps explain why an increasing percentage of Americans don't belong to any organized religion, yet still are committed to some form of spirituality.

Constancy isn't our thing.

I can't recall a single person from my country ever asking me how it was possible that I could fall out of love with the RSSB teachings, just as no one has ever questioned how my first wife and I could have gotten a divorce. Americans are used to repeated marriages and divorces, both theological and matrimonial.

We may pay lip service to "until death do us part," but we certainly aren't surprised when someone changes course and pursues a different spiritual or romantic path. My impression is that Indians are more devoted to tradition (if that's the right word), feeling that a commitment to either a religion or a person should be taken more seriously than we Americans do.

Which brings to mind another cultural difference between India and the United States: our openness to strong criticism of spirituality or religiosity.

Free speech in the United States is guaranteed by the First Amendment to our Constitution. In Oregon, where I live, the state constitution provides for even greater protection of free speech. So here again, we Americans are accustomed to a more free-wheeling culture than is common in much of the rest of the world.

Like, India.

I was astounded to read in a June 30, 2012 New Scientist article that the head of the Indian Rationalist Association faced possible arrest after debunking a purported "miracle" at a Catholic church in Mumbai. Sanal Edamaruku said in the article:

Leaders of two Catholic laity organisations have launched charges against me under section 295A of the Indian penal code. This charges a person with "deliberately hurting religious feelings and attempting malicious acts intended to outrage the religious sentiments of any class or community." It is absurd to claim that I did anything of the sort.

Wow. 

From my American perspective, what's absurd is that Edamaruku feels he has to deny hurting religious feelings or outraging religious sentiments. In this country we don't worry about that at all. Free speech is more important than hurt feelings. 

After reading about Edamaruku's legal problem I better understand why people from other countries occasionally email me, or leave a comment on this blog, expressing a "how can you say that?" sentiment. Probably their country doesn't have such a strong commitment to free speech as the United States does.

On the flip side, hopefully this post will help people in other cultures understand how "wild and crazy" the United States is compared to countries with a more settled/traditional way of looking at the world.

Embracing and then discarding a religion or spiritual teaching -- no big deal for us. Vigorously criticizing a belief system -- also no big deal for us. We may put a guru up on an elevated platform, but we have no problem knocking him or her off it.

Spirituality is experienced, not proven

What does it mean to be "spiritual"? Is there any way to prove that spirituality is true? How should someone look upon his or her spiritual experiences?

Great questions. Glad I asked them of myself. The answers I'm about to give won't surprise those who are regular readers of this blog. But maybe I can say what I've said before in a fresh fashion.

Let's start with an experience that I'd call "spiritual" which I had during a dog walk not long ago. Passing by the shore of Spring Lake, I was stopped in my tracks by a crescent moon, geese on the lake and in the sky, a beautiful mid-October Oregon sunset -- clear sky and fairly warm.

l'm not even going to try to describe what I felt before and after I took this photo with my iPhone. I don't think I could put it into words. Yet that feeling was undeniably real. 

For me. And only me. 

You'll also have some sort of feeling when you look at the photo. However, it won't come close to mine. Why? In part because I'm me and you're you. In part because I was experiencing this natural scene directly, and you're only able to perceive it through a photograph on your computer.

And this is the core of what I want to get across in this post.

Something obvious. Yet frequently forgotten. If spirituality has to do with the subtler, deeper, most meaningful side of life, and here I'm talking about something distinct from organized religion, it can only be experienced, never proven.

Assuming I could accurately describe what I felt about life, nature, and my place in the cosmos while standing on the bank of the lake a few hours ago, what proof would there be that what I conveyed was truthful?

I could be a masterful storyteller. I could be engaging in irony. I could be pretending that I'm someone I'm not, with feelings I don't really have. 

There's absolutely no way to prove that someone's description of a "spiritual" experience reflects the subjective feeling of what it was like for that person, at that moment. Understand: I'm not talking about the objective aspects of that experience.

If you doubt the veracity of the photograph I shared above, you could check the weather report for south Salem, Oregon near sunset on October 17, 2012. You could talk with homeowners who live near Spring Lake and ask them their recollection of what early evening was like on that day. 

But no matter how much you check into the outward circumstances of my spiritual experience, you'll never be able to assess the accuracy of my internal feelings. And isn't that what spirituality is all about? Or at least the essence of what it is about?

Something meaningful stirring within our consciousness; a profound sensation of our place and purpose in the cosmos; a diving beneath the surface of everyday life into a deeper appreciation of human existence.

When people look upon spirituality, or even religion, in this fashion, I have no problem embracing whatever they have to say (which could be nothing) about their spiritual experiences. After all, it would be absurd for someone to aggressively challenge the validity of whatever I felt on this evening's dog walk.

How the hell does anyone else know what I felt? And why should they care how I felt looking at the lake, when they shouldn't care how I feel looking at The Colbert Report, my iPhone, stoplights when I drive into town, or any other of the countless perceptions I have every day?

The only reason someone should care about my spiritual experience on the shore of Spring Lake if this: if I claim that what I felt at that moment reflects some objective truth which everybody should accept. Then I'd be treading onto common ground that belongs to everyone -- shared reality.

Other people would be justified in challenging the validity of my spiritual experience if I asserted, or even strongly implied, that what I felt is what everybody should feel. If I went further and said I've had a spiritual experience that wasn't just a feeling, but a knowledge of objectively true realms beyond the physical, they'd be even more justified in demanding "Prove it!"

Which is what the guy who claims he almost died and went to heaven should do. Prove it. If he simply said "I felt..." about his spiritual experience, who could argue with him? Feelings are immune to proof or disproof. 

However, if anyone asserts that they've come to know something objectively true about God, heaven, life after death, or some other supposed supernatural fact, they should be prepared for strong skeptical questioning.

Everyone is entitled to their own subjective experiences, but not to their own objective reality. 

The way I see it, spirituality is an experiential affair. It's a feeling, not a knowing. It's what lies within, not without. It's personal, not universal. There's no need to prove this sort of spirituality, because it's outside of the realm of proof.

I love spirituality when it is someone's personal experience. But I hate spirituality when someone claims that a personal experience should be taken as absolute truth.

That's when it turns into dogmatic, unscientific, unbelievable religion. 

Brain damage can convince you of Christian bullshit

Recently someone emailed me about my "Heaven is NOT real, no matter what Eben Alexander says" post. She wondered why I thought his heaven seemed so Christian. To her, Alexander's account of the afterlife sounded more Hindu.

Well, I'm no expert on Hinduism, but that assertion seems dubious to me. A quick check-in with the Great God Google taught me some things about Hindu notions of the afterlife.

A Wikipedia article on the subject emphasizes Hindu belief in karma and reincarnation. We keep coming back to life on Earth, not an eternal life in "heaven." Heaven and hell are temporary resting places where the soul/atman gets its temporary rewards or punishments for a life well or crappily lived.

Another web site noted the same concepts, focusing a bit more on how one gets out of the cycle of birth-death-rebirth. Liberation comes when the soul drop merges with the god ocean. But this actually is how the way things always are. Moksha or liberation is simply waking up from the dream of separateness.

With these ideas in mind, let's look at how Eben Alexander described his vision of "heaven" in the Newsweek cover story. Here's some pertinent quotes.
------------------------------------- 
Although I considered myself a faithful Christian...

I was in a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky.

Higher than the clouds—immeasurably higher—flocks of transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamerlike lines behind them. Birds? Angels?

...I could see the surging, joyful perfection of what they sang.

For most of my journey, someone else was with me. A woman. ...Without using any words, she spoke to me. ... “You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.” “You have nothing to fear.” “There is nothing you can do wrong.”

Later, when I was back, I found a quotation by the 17th-century Christian poet Henry Vaughan that came close to describing this magical place, this vast, inky-black core that was the home of the Divine itself. “There is, some say, in God a deep but dazzling darkness ...”

...the unconditional love that I now know God and the universe have toward us. 

One of the few places I didn’t have trouble getting my story across was a place I’d seen fairly little of before my experience: church.

And, most important, a painting of Jesus breaking bread with his disciples evoked the message that lay at the very heart of my journey: that we are loved and accepted unconditionally by a God even more grand and unfathomably glorious than the one I’d learned of as a child in Sunday school.
------------------------------------- 
So, yeah, I do indeed feel that Eben Alexander's vision of heaven is a heck of a lot closer to Christian notions of the afterlife than that of Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, or other non-monotheistic religions.

He believes that God loves and accepts us unconditionally. That sure sounds like a personal creator God to me, not an impersonal Brahman, Buddha-nature, or Tao. God supposedly cherishes us deeply, forever. No mention of karma, rebirth, illusion of individuality, or any other "Eastern" concepts at odds with Christianity.

But regardless of how Christian'y Alexander's tale is, the Big Question is: should we believe it? Short answer: no. 

There are countless stories told by people about almost-dying-and-going-to-heaven. Now we have one more. Like I said in my initial post, I'm not aware of anybody who, say, was a Christian before their near-death experience of "heaven" and then recanted, becoming, say, a Buddhist. 

Virtually everybody (and maybe I can eliminate the "virtually") sees what they expect to see. Or at least what their brain has conditioned them to see. Neuroscience knows that expectations, framing, prior experiences, and such affect what a person experiences.

Awareness isn't like a shiny clear mirror that reflects only what is really there. Prior awarenesses lead the brain in previously trod directions. So a Christian believer has visions of a Christian heaven. No surprise there.

I've come across several additional thoughtful critiques of Alexander's fantastical tale of the afterlife. I only wish that Alexander himself had thought about alternative explanations of his vision rather than taking it to be a true view of what happens after death.

Oh, but then he wouldn't have been able to write a book that, almost certainly, will be a best-seller. And put up a snazzy web site marketing it.

Those who prefer to think for themselves, rather than accept illusions of heaven, are invited to read PZ Myer's hard-hitting "Newsweek panders to the deluded again."

Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that line of crap before. “I’m a serious, hard-nosed scientist, I wouldn’t believe in that Christian stuff unless it was really true!” It’s a common trope. This guy was soaking in Christianity, wanted to believe in Christianity, and I don’t care if he was a Harvard neuroscientist, he was still vulnerable to self-delusion.

But here’s the real killer for me. People who go through these fantasies often tell of awe-inspiring insights that they receive and are quick to tell us how brilliant they were in Heaven. Alexander is no exception.

What were these concepts, you might wonder. He’s a neuroscientist; shouldn’t we expect some great “A-ha!” moments, some new powerful revelations about how the brain works that would revolutionize his field of study?

But of course not. He returns from his mind-expanding experience and does not sit down to write a revolutionary new paper on the science of the mind, but instead, as usual, writes a bunch of banal drivel about angels. This is the deep message that he shares with us that would have taken years to fully grasp, he claims.

“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”

“You have nothing to fear.”

“There is nothing you can do wrong.”

Here’s a deep message for you: brain damage can persuade you of the truth of some real bullshit.

l also enjoyed neuroscientist Colin Blakemore's "Is the afterlife full of fluffy clouds and angels?"

Dr Peter Fenwick, senior lecturer at King’s College, London, consultant at the Institute of Psychiatry, and president of the British branch of The International Association for Near Death Studies, acknowledges that there are deep problems in interpreting first-person memories of experiences that are supposed to have happened when the brain was out of action. Since the lucky survivor can only tell you about them after the event, how can we be sure that these things were perceived and felt at the time that their brains were messed up, rather than being invented afterwards?

The same problem applies to dreams, indeed to any memory. Memory is notoriously fallible, and is treacherously easily misled by expectation. The cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has done brilliant experiments showing how the recall of real experiences can be transformed by what people think should have happened, and by what they are told might have happened.

In 150 years the science of perception has taught us that the way we appreciate the world around us is as much dependent on our expectations, our experiences, our inferences, as it is on the hard evidence of images on our retinas or vibrations in our ears. Remember the occasions when you have seen a face in the flickering flames of a fire, or been certain that you saw a person in the distance as you walked along at night – only to discover that the face in the fire disappears with the next burst of flame and the person in the dark is just a letterbox.

Is it not significant that the NDEs of Christians are full of Biblical metaphor? Either this confirms the correctness of their particular faith or it says that NDEs, like normal perception and memory, are redolent of culture, personal prejudice and past experience. Perhaps if Eben Alexander were a Muslim, there would have been the mythical 72 virgins on the butterfly wing, rather than the bucolic one. If he were a Buddhist he would be called a de-lok, a person who has seemingly died, but who travels into bardo – an afterlife state – guided by a Buddhist deity.

Have faith in reality, not religion

I feel a sermon coming on... can't help myself... spirit is moving me... reality must be praised... glory be! I'm happy to be your not-so-humble servant, Almighty Reality.

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

Fellow humans, stand strong for what is real. Believe this: a single grain of sand is more worthy of your worship than any holy book, any religious theology, any supernatural theorizing. You can feel that grain of sand, taste it, see it. 

Where's God? Where's soul? Where's spirit? Where's angels, heaven, reincarnation, Buddha nature, enlightenment, or any other abstraction lacking concrete this-ness and that-ness?

Nowhere, reality worshipping brothers and sisters. Nowhere. 

Well, let's make that somewhere... but barely. Because these ideas, these notions, these thoughts, they do exist. Absolutely, they do. But where they exist is solely in the unfounded belief systems of some Homo sapiens'. 

Who are sapient, yet not all that smart. 

And I include myself, Pastor Brian of this here Church of the Churchless, among those who have fallen away from faith in the only entity in the cosmos which deserves our worship, Almighty Reality. For I too once prayed at the false altar of religious bullshit. 

Until I saw the light. The light of godless reality. To my credit, though, during those many years of religiosity I gave lots of talks, which in the organization I belonged to were called satsangs. 

I'm proud to say that even back then Almighty Reality was starting to speak through me. For one of the most oft-repeated quotations that I cited in my talks came from a great sage, Philip K. Dick. May his words thrill your reality-seeking heart just as they have thrilled mine, time and time again.

It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question "What is reality?", to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real.

One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." That's all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly.

Oh, I so love those words. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. Thirteen words. And two commas. Plus a period. What more do you need for a philosophy of life? 

Hold a grain of sand in the palm of your hand. Close your eyes. Think to yourself, "I don't believe in you, grain of sand." Open your eyes. Ha-ha! The grain of sand is still there. Your belief in it or disbelief in it had zero effect on the grain's reality.

But what happens to God, the Devil, heaven, or any other supernatural entity you might believe in? When you stop believing in them, thinking about them, assuming their existence -- they do go away.

That's because they're not really real.

They're just a teeny-tiny bit real, as real as the dreams that pass through your mind while asleep, as real as the ideas that float through your consciousness while awake, as real as the neurochemical connections between the neurons in your brain which brought those imaginary supernatural notions into being -- which means that when you are no longer alive, your unfounded religious, spiritual, and mystical imaginings die with you.

And the grain of sand? It still exists. Because it is real, and any religious ideas you embrace are not.

Oh, I know how good it feels to hold onto religious beliefs. I clung to them myself for thirty-five years. But now I have seen the light, the light of Almighty Reality, the divinity that I sought in an imagined realm beyond the physical for so long, until it dawned on me to look right where I was standing.

On solid ground.

Where marvelous creatures great and small wordlessly sing the praises of what is real, because each of them, every one, from a grain of sand to a cluster of galaxies, is more worthy of reverence than any notion of a distant divinity promulgated by a religion.

I understand, though, how addictive the idea of God is, how seductive the fantasy that a supernatural Creator brought this world into being is. So to those who are unable to break the chains which bind you to religiosity, I offer this way of looking upon your Creator God:

He/She/It is not shy.

God would not be godly if the ultimate power hid away like a frightened bunny rabbit in the tall grasses of the cosmos. No, brothers and sisters, God stands tall, proud to reveal the divine nature in every atom of creation.

So religions tell you a lie. Gurus tell you a lie. Holy books tell you a lie. This lie is...

That God is to be found in a heavenly supernatural realm. Or in the dark silent recesses of your meditative psyche. Or after death, in some sort of resurrection, rebirth, or re-whatever that offers a second chance at knowing reality after you missed your chance in this life.

But this life is your chance. God is not hiding. God is not distant. God is not separate from creation. However, it does take a bit of work to identify the most godly aspect of God. Which is, the most really real reality:

That which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

Thus even if you believe in God (I don't), the best way to worship Him/Her/It is to stop believing in what isn't real. What remains, grains of sand, trees, dogs, coffee, iPhones -- everything that doesn't require belief to maintain it in a state of demonstrable existence -- is God. Or God's creation.

Do not, repeat do not, falter in your embrace of reality. It's both the easiest thing to do, and the hardest. Easy, because reality doesn't hide. It dances right in front of you, waving its hands, screaming "Here I am, here I am!"

But we human beings, and only we human beings, because animals are smarter than us in this regard, have evolved a desire for religious fantasy. It's an unhealthy artifact of our evolutionary heritage, much as the desire for sweets and fats is, which made sense when we were scavengers on a savannah but not now, when so many people can barely fit in an airplane seat.

Religiosity turns us away from what is real. It pushes us into an addiction, a belief-addiction. We end up consuming empty reality-calories, abstract dogmas and theologies rather than the genuine healthy fare of the natural world. 

Weed your garden. Walk in the park. Sip a glass of wine. Hug a loved one. Smile at a stranger. No beliefs required. There's an infinity of reality surrounding you in every direction. It's all yours, as soon as you turn away from the falsities of religion and have faith in the only thing that can support you.

What is real.

Like, this wrinkled t-shirt of mine. 

Heaven is NOT real, no matter what Eben Alexander says

I'm impressed with myself. (And not for the first time, nor the last.)

Noted religious skeptic and neuroscientist Sam Harris has much the same reaction as I did, albeit more fully and cogently stated, to Eben Alexander's ridiculous claim that while in a coma, when his cortex supposedly was "completely shut down," he had an experience of heaven that must have been separate from brain activity.

Hence, a soul travel of some sort to God's realm. Here's what I said about the guy's story three days ago, in response to a comment on this post.

Rain, I'm not much impressed with near death experiences, especially where the person having one experiences things that fit with their religious beliefs. Gosh, what a coincidence. Out of all the many religious beliefs existing among humans, it turns out that this Christian believer finds out that the one he accepts is true.

If he'd realized that Buddhism was correct, or Hinduism, rather than Christianity, I'd be more inclined to accept that his tale was something more than his own brain speaking to him. Note that he apparently came back with zero information about our physical reality that wasn't already known to him. Another sign that he didn't really have a genuine out of body experience.

He wants to claim that his brain was completely shut down, but how can he know this? CT scans don't show the functioning of the brain, to my understanding. And even fMRI scans aren't sophisticated enough to show what really is going on in every corner of the brain. The guy has gotten a book and publicity out of his experience. Good for him. That's how I feel about the Newsweek story.

Today, being a subscriber to Harris' email alerts, I learned about his own informed response to the Newsweek cover story. (I cancelled my subscription to Newsweek several months ago; this newest crap from the magazine makes me glad I did so.)

I encourage you to read Harris' "This Must Be Heaven." He's open-minded about what might lie beneath the mystery of consciousness, including the possibility that consciousness has a non-physical foundation. So am I.

But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And Alexander doesn't offer up any.

This current tale of almost-dying and going to heaven really is no different from countless others. All it proves is that the brain is capable of conjuring up some marvelous fanatasies, something anybody who dreams or has imbibed a psychedelic has experienced.

It'd be nice if heaven was real.

But it's blasphemous, really, to assert that such-and-such is true about God when someone doesn't have any proof. If I were God -- and who can say that I'm not? -- I'd be pissed at people who spout off about my nature and realm when they don't know what they're talking about.

Below are some excerpts from Sam Harris' piece. He makes a lot of sense.

Once upon a time, a neurosurgeon named Eben Alexander contracted a bad case of bacterial meningitis and fell into a coma. While immobile in his hospital bed, he experienced visions of such intense beauty that they changed everything—not just for him, but for all of us, and for science as a whole.

According to Newsweek, Alexander’s experience proves that consciousness is independent of the brain, that death is an illusion, and that an eternity of perfect splendor awaits us beyond the grave—complete with the usual angels, clouds, and departed relatives, but also butterflies and beautiful girls in peasant dress. 

...Everything—absolutely everything—in Alexander’s account rests on repeated assertions that his visions of heaven occurred while his cerebral cortex was “shut down,” “inactivated,” “completely shut down,” “totally offline,” and “stunned to complete inactivity.” The evidence he provides for this claim is not only inadequate—it suggests that he doesn’t know anything about the relevant brain science.

Perhaps he has saved a more persuasive account for his book—though now that I’ve listened to an hour-long interview with him online, I very much doubt it. In his Newsweek article, Alexander asserts that the cessation of cortical activity was “clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations.” To his editors, this presumably sounded like neuroscience.

The problem, however, is that “CT scans and neurological examinations” can’t determine neuronal inactivity—in the cortex or anywhere else. And Alexander makes no reference to functional data that might have been acquired by fMRI, PET, or EEG—nor does he seem to realize that only this sort of evidence could support his case.

Obviously, the man’s cortex is functioning now—he has, after all, written a book—so whatever structural damage appeared on CT could not have been “global.” (Otherwise, he would be claiming that his entire cortex was destroyed and then grew back.) Coma is not associated with the complete cessation of cortical activity, in any case. And to my knowledge, almost no one thinks that consciousness is purely a matter of cortical activity. Alexander’s unwarranted assumptions are proliferating rather quickly.

Why doesn’t he know these things? He is, after all, a neurosurgeon who survived a coma and now claims to be upending the scientific worldview on the basis of the fact that his cortex was totally quiescent at the precise moment he was enjoying the best day of his life in the company of angels. Even if his entire cortex had truly shut down (again, an incredible claim), how can he know that his visions didn’t occur in the minutes and hours during which its functions returned?

...Everything that Alexander describes here and in his Newsweek article, including the parts I have left out, has been reported by DMT users. The similarity is uncanny.

...Does Alexander know that DMT already exists in the brain as a neurotransmitter? Did his brain experience a surge of DMT release during his coma? This is pure speculation, of course, but it is a far more credible hypothesis than that his cortex “shut down,” freeing his soul to travel to another dimension.

...Let me suggest that, whether or not heaven exists, Alexander sounds precisely how a scientist should not sound when he doesn’t know what he is talking about. And his article is not the sort of thing that the editors of a once-important magazine should publish if they hope to reclaim some measure of respect for their battered brand.

Dude, where's my soul? Can't find it anywhere.

I've been looking for my soul everywhere I can think it might be. No sign of it.

I've gone through the drawer where I put stuff that I figure I might need someday, but don't want to throw away. Nope. No soul. Our garage is filled with places it might be, lots of boxes filled with long-forgotten crap. But I don't remember putting my soul into storage there. 

So I'm left with talking to myself. Or to whoever might be listening who could help me out. Dude, where's my soul? (If this allusion doesn't make sense to you, your taste in movies is too elevated. Lower it, dude.)

For a long time I've been on a soul search.

After all, back in 1971 I was initiated into a mystical/religious practice called Sant Mat which promises to unite soul drops with the ocean of God. There was a lot of talk about "soul" and "spirit" (universal side of soul, basically) in the teachings. But not much guidance about how soul could be recognized.

Eventually I gave up soul-searching, as evidenced by this and this, among other soulless blog posts.

My previous post, though, got me to pondering this whole soul-business in a fresh fashion. Here's part of what I quoted from Jan Westerhoff's book about the nature of reality.

To put the point in a different way, suppose someone offered you a drug that completely destroyed your self while leaving all your beliefs, desires, preferences, and so on intact. Would there be anything wrong with taking it? It would certainly be preferable to a drug that destroyed all our beliefs, desires, preferences etc. and left our self intact.

Substitute "soul" for "self" in that quotation and you'll see why I'm having so much difficulty finding my soul. By many accounts (especially of the Eastern philosophy variety), it's supposed to be something different from mind and matter, something spiritual, ethereal, pure.

Christians seem to look upon soul a bit differently, but there's a problem with every notion of "soul" that I'm aware of. Westerhoff described it nicely through his thought experiment.

If soul is different from mind and matter, would you be willing to trade everything mental and material that you're conscious of now for whatever might be left over once you're "soul"? (Note: I'm not implying a strict divide between mental and material; my view of mind is that it's what the physical brain does.)

Let's say you're deeply religious. You love God. Or you love your guru. Or you love Jesus, along with the angels which accompany him. Regardless, you love something divine. That love is precious to you. It's a big part of what makes life so satisfying.

Your mental life. Your emotional life. Your thoughtful life.

So if soul is different from mind, and you choose to discard mind and matter for whatever "soul" might be, say goodbye to those love-feelings. Also, goodbye to your perceptions of whatever/whoever you love. And goodbye to being able to know their presence in any sort of material way also, since soul is supposed to be something non-physical.

Do you see the problem with believing that you are, or have, a soul?

There's absolutely no evidence that it exists, apart from abstract concepts in holy books and theological teachings. The life you actually live is filled with mental and physical experiences -- perceptions, feelings, thoughts, intuitions, sensations, etc.

Subtract all that out and what are you left with? Do you know?

Have you any experience of being conscious without any experience? (If you believe you have, I'd like to ask how you can know what something is like that has no qualities, and thus nothing to like. Or, dislike.)

Soul is a fantasy. Soul is a concept dreamed up by religious authorities who want to control people by making them afraid that if they don't follow the precepts of a certain religion, they'll lose their soul.

To which I say, I can't lose what I don't have. No one can. But if you believe you have, or are, a soul, feel free to show it to me. If I know how to recognize it, I'll take another look in my garage. 

Happy birthday to me. But is there really a "me"?

Geez, I'm so philosophically minded, I can't even enjoy a birthday without questioning whether "I" am having one.

Over on my other blog I mused yesterday about the Beatles' When I'm 64 and the positive side of craziness. Hopefully this will shut up the folks who, after reading my thoughtful ponderings about religion/spirituality, accuse me of being a left-brained rationalist who only lives in my big fat intellectual cranium. 

Fire up your skateboard, accustory dudes, and join me on a four mile longboarding jaunt up and down (mild) hills here in Salem's Minto Brown Island Park. Then you'll see another side of me.

But... 

Is there really a "me"? If you've been reading my churchless blog posts the past few months, you know this is my current Big Question. 

Heck, maybe it always has been. I just haven't been so aware of the Big Question as I am now.

After all, a whole lot of religious, spiritual, mystical, and philosophical thinking/beliefs/dogmas get flushed down the reality toilet if there's no such thing as an enduring soul, self, atman, or whatever else we might call an "I" which exists apart from the goings-on in the human brain.

This morning I read another chapter in one of the birthday gifts I gave myself, Jan Westerhoff's "Reality: A Very Short Introduction." This is the book that echoes what Westerhoff said in his New Scientist cover story about the nature of reality that I blogged about recently.

His "Are persons real?" chapter is a creatively fresh overview of arguments I've read about before in both the neuroscientific and Buddhist'y literature.

Interestingly -- since for most of my life I've really hated the prospect of not existing after I die -- I'm becoming not only comfortable with this whole "there is no self" thing, I'm actually beginning to embrace it with gusto.

I think the reason has something to do with this:

If I feel that I've lost something important to me, that's deeply troubling. But if I were to learn that the thing never was mine, and indeed never even existed in the way I thought it did, then the "loss" is no big deal, because I really haven't lost anything.

Westerhoff makes a number of fascinating observations which undermine a persons are real assumption. Here's several which I found particularly persusasive and interesting. The first involves a thought experiment; the second, a "flight simulator" in which not only the flight but also the pilot are simulated.

Thought experiment:

We can address this problem by assuming that our self is something more fundamental, something constant that has all these changing properties but remains itself what it is. Like a thread running through every single one of a string of pearls, our self runs through every single moment of our lives, providing a core and a unity for them. 

The difficulty with this view of the self is that it cannot have most of the properties we usually think make me me. Being happy or sad, being able to speak Chinese, preferring cherries to strawberries, even being conscious -- all these are changeable states the disappearance of which should not affect the self, as a disappearance of individual pearls should not affect the thread.

But it then becomes unclear why such a minimal self should have the central status in our lives we usually accord to our self. If practically everything that is going on in our mental lives leaves the self untouched, what is the use of such a self?' 

To put the point in a different way, suppose someone offered you a drug that completely destroyed your self while leaving all your beliefs, desires, preferences, and so on intact. Would there be anything wrong with taking it? It would certainly be preferable to a drug that destroyed all our beliefs, desires, preferences etc. and left our self intact.

This might give rise to the suspicion that the self understood in this way is not what we care about, but the content of our mental lives is. Furthermore, given that you cannot tell the difference between having taken the drug and not having taken the drug from the inside, could it be the case that you have actually been given the drug and so don't have any self any more. Should you worry about this?

Flight/life simulator:

According to this [Buddhist] theory, we consist of a body and four psychological components, corresponding to different cognitive functions. The self cannot be identified with any one of them (since all of them change frequently, while the self is supposed to be continuous), nor can it just be the collection of all of them (since the self is a unified, single thing, not a coalition of shifting elements).

Nor is the self a separately existent thing, distinct from the four components. This does not imply that talk of selves and persons should be eliminated; these form an important part of how we conceptualize the world. But the self has nothing more than a strictly nominal existence. It is superimposed on our physical and mental constituents for purely practical purposes.

It allows us to locate ourselves in the world, rather like the pointer of our mouse allows us to locate ourselves within the interface of our computer. But like the pointer that is neither "in" the computer, nor a continuous object (when we switch off the computer, there is no pointer), nor constituting the substantial centre of the computer's workings, the self is not what it appears to be.

When we say that the self is superimposed on the constituents, the question arises: 'Who does the superimposing?' When considering the self as the unifier of our experiential world, it makes sense to understand it along the lines of a pilot in a flight simulator. 

From a range of perceptual input, our brain creates the image of the world in which the self operates. We cannot step outside of our brain, so we have no way of finding out what the world beyond the intracranial simulation is like. To us, it does not even feel like a simulation.

But the problems with the Cartesian theatre suggest that there is no pilot, no self, for whose benefit the simulation is put on. Rather, the collection of our physical and mental constituents acts like a total flight simulator that not only simulates the information received in the cockpit, but simulates the pilot as well.

The self as the unifier of our perceptual input is a simulation or illusion, yet there is no non-simulated or non-illusory someone experiencing the simulation or having the illusion.

Like I said, this notion -- which to both neuroscience and Buddhism is darn close to fact -- is strangely pleasing to me. 

Of course, there's no "me" to be pleased.

Just a simulated me who is having a simulated sense of pleasure from reading the simulated words I just copied from Westerhoff's book. But since this is what reality is, it's good enough for me. Whoever I am, or am not.

 

Give up on making life itself a project

I enjoy projects.

Meaning, I like to try something new, something I've never done before, which entails finding out what the thing is all about, how it works, what's necessary to do it, and then learning from my doing. I might find that I don't enjoy this new activity as much as I thought I would. Or, that it's even more satisfying than I expected.

For example, early in the summer I decided to try longboarding, skateboarding without the tricks, basically.

My longboarding has been the subject of various posts in a "skateboarding" section of my other blog.) I really enjoy this new life project. It's fun, great exercise, pleasingly challenging, and risky without being death-defying.

Much earlier in my life, graduating from college was a central project. Then, raising a child. LIke everybody, I had numerous projects going on at one time, such as "succeed at career," "stay healthy," "be a good husband and father."

Plus, for most of my life, "understand what life is all about." This was the spiritual side of me, the mystical side, the ultimate-reality revealing side. 

I wanted to know.

Not just about something. About everything. I also wanted to be. Not just myself. But some form of all-pervading cosmic consciousness. These goals sound grandiose to me now. For many years, though -- over thirty-five -- they were my overarching life project.

Overarching, because religious, spiritual, and mystical pursuits often are viewed as the most important aspect in a practitioner's life. After all, they promise to transform life, perhaps along with a hypothesized afterlife, through salvation, enlightenment, self/god realization, or whatever other super-goal a person embraces.

I don't have that sort of project anymore. Sometimes this feels like a loss. Even after I entered my churchless phase (I began this blog in 2004), I kept on searching for a non-dogmatic path to higher truth and understanding.

I'd experiment with different meditation approaches, look into different philosophies, ponder different ways of looking upon ultimate reality. I still was attracted, maybe even addicted, to having a life project that was capable of transforming not just part of my life, but the whole damn thing.

It was kind of like one part of me was building a house, doing all the little things necessary to accomplish this, cutting wood, hammering nails, putting in plumbing, etc., while another part was looking for a way to live without a house -- or to live in a completely different sort of house.

For me, and I think this is a common flaw of overarching life projects, the end result was a split in my energy and attention. I didn't recognize this for most of the thirty-plus years I was focused on my Grand Spiritual Project That Would Completely Change Everything (GSPTWCCE).

But now that I've given up on that GSPTWCCE, I realize that simply living life is much more satisfying and wiser than living life at the same time as you're trying to find a whole different sort of life, a hypothesized enlightened life, god-realized life, or salvific (saved/redeemed) life.

Enjoying my longboard is good enough for me now. Maintaining our property is good enough for me now. Spending time with friends, family, and our dogs is good enough for me now. Blogging is good enough for me now.

In short, I'm content with having lots of little projects which comprise my life. What I do each day, what my goals are for each day, what gives meaning to me each day. 

I'm no longer trying to make my life as a whole into something other than what it is. I don't feel a need for a Life Improvement Project that encompasses my entire life, just as I'm no longer interested in knowing what a supposed ultimate reality is which encompasses the entire cosmos.

I guess I now worship a god of small things.

Except I don't believe in god. Or that anything is really small. I get huge enjoyment from doing things I used to think were insignificant. Like reading the newest issue of People magazine in a hot bath while sipping a glass of red wine.

Ooh, great idea. Got to go...  

Reality is a circle: nothing is fundamental

Ooh, ooh! It came, it came! I felt like a kid who'd just gotten a long-awaited toy in the mail when I opened our mailbox and saw the New Scientist cover:

What is Reality? A User's Guide to the Ultimate Question of Existence.

Finally. I'd know. What reality is all about.

I stretched out the suspense by waiting until evening to read the cover story. In the bathtub, immersed in relaxingly hot water, a glass of red wine and highlighter in hand (not at the same time).

I wasn't disappointed. Right away I liked the concise focus of the "Defining Reality" section. What do we mean by reality? Jan Westerhoff makes some reasonable suggestions, after discussing less plausible options.

There are two definitions of reality that are much more successful. The first equates reality with a world without us, a world untouched by human desires and intentions. By this definition, a lot of things we usually regard as real - languages, wars, the financial crisis - are nothing of the sort. Still, it is the most solid one so far because it removes human subjectivity from the picture.

The second equates reality with the most fundamental things that everything else depends on. In the material world, molecules depend on their constituent atoms, atoms on electrons and a nucleus, which in turn depends on protons and neutrons, and so on. In this hierarchy, every level depends on the one below it, so we might define reality as made up of whatever entities stand at the bottom of the chain of dependence, and thus depend on nothing else.

This definition is even more restrictive than "the world without us" since things like Mount Everest would not count as part of reality; reality is confined to the unknown foundation on which the entire world depends. Even so, when we investigate whether something is real or not, these final two definitions are what we should have in mind.

Delving deeper into the implications of these definitions, the New Scientist cover story asks such questions as:

Is matter real?
Is everything made of numbers?
How do we know reality isn't an illusion?
Are we in a simulation, not "base" reality?

Quantum theory seems to show that probability waves don't turn into real objects until an observation occurs. This introduces consciousness into the what is reality? equation. However, Westerhoff points out that some aspects of particles are dependent on measurement, and some aren't.

Yet if we accept that the wave function must collapse as soon as consciousness enters the measurement, the consequences are even more curious. If we decide to break off the chain at this point, it follows that, according to one of our definitions of reality, matter cannot be regarded as real. If consciousness is required to turn ghostly probability waves into things that are more or less like the objects we meet in everyday life, how can we say that matter is what would be there anyway, whether or not human minds were around?

But perhaps this is a bit too hasty. Even if we agree with the idea that consciousness is required to break the chain, all that follows is that the dynamic attributes of matter such as position, momentum and spin orientation are mind-dependent. It does not follow that its static attributes, including mass and charge, are dependent on in this. The static attributes are there whether we look or not.

Nevertheless, we have to ask ourselves whether redefining matter as "a set of static attributes" preserves enough of its content to allow us to regard matter as real. In a world without minds, there would still be attributes such as mass and charge, but things would not be at any particular location or travel in any particular direction. Such a world has virtually nothing in common with the world as it appears to us. 

...It seems that the best we are going to get at this point is the claim that some things are there independent of whether we, as human observers, are there, even though they might have very little to do with our ordinary understanding of matter.

So what about the other strong definition of reality, the foundation for everything else? Consciousness apparently isn't that foundation, since some things (such as the mass and charge of particles) would exist whether or not a conscious observer is aware of them.

This was the most interesting part of the article for me.

When I was researching my first book about mysticism and the new physics (I'm slowly working on finishing up a rewrite and getting it back in print), I read a lot about how various scientists and philosophers interpret quantum theory.

There's no agreement about what quantum theory tells us about the foundation of reality, even though it is able to make marvelously precise predictions of goings-on in the atomic and subatomic world. Thus the meaning of quantum theory is open to question, while the mechanics are pretty well settled.

Offering an example of the traditional Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, says Westerhoff, particles pop into a definite existence "when the system to be measured (the electron) interacts with the measuring device (the phosphor screen. For this reason, it has to be assumed that the phosphor screen will not itself exhibit the particular quantum behaviour shown by the electron."

This is where weirdness starts to creep in. Well, actually weirdness is all-encompassing in quantum theory, because it so far removed from how the everyday world appears to us. So let's say increasing weirdness starts to creep in.

Measuring devices, whether a machine or the human mind, are medium-sized material things. These things are made out of the tiny subatomic particles which, says the traditional interpretation, come into being when measured by a medium-sized material thing. 

Weird! This is how Westerhoff's article ends.

And this is where the circularity comes in. We analyse the everyday world of medium-sized material things in terms of smaller and smaller constituents until we deal with parts that are so small that quantum effects become relevant for describing them. But when it comes to spelling out what is really going on when a wave function collapses into an electron hitting a phosphor screen, we don't ground our explanation in some yet more minute micro-level structures; we ground it in terms of readings made by non-quantum material things.

What this means is that instead of going further down, we instead jump right back up to the level of concrete phenomena of sensory perception, namely measuring devices such as phosphor screens and cameras. Once more, we are in a situation where we cannot say that the world of quantum objects is fundamental. Nor can we say that the world of measuring devices is fundamental since these devices are themselves nothing but large conglomerations of quantum objects.

We therefore have a circle of things depending on each other, even though, unlike in the previous case, mental objects are no longer part of this circle. As a result, neither the phosphor screen nor the minute electron can be regarded as real in any fundamental sense, since neither constitutes a class of objects that everything depends on. What we thought we should take to be the most fundamental turns out to involve essentially what we regarded as the least fundamental.

In our search for foundations, we have gone round in a circle, from the mind, via various components of matter, back to the mind - or, in the case of the Copenhagen interpretation, from the macroscopic to the microscopic, and then back to the macroscopic. But this just means that nothing is fundamental, in the same way there is no first or last stop on London Underground's Circle Line. The moral to draw from the reductionist scenario seems to be that either what is fundamental is not material, or that nothing at all is fundamental.

So there you are, believers in something supernatural: some scientific hope. Either what is fundamental is not material...

Yes, that's a possibility. But it requires a belief in an unobserved reality for which there's no demonstrable evidence. This world, on the other hand, is clearly evident -- albeit mysterious. 

Which leads to the other possibility: Nothing at all is fundamental.

Buddhists are smiling at that statement. Emptily.  

"No-self" isn't a spiritual goal -- it's what we already are

Many religions and spiritual traditions venerate selflessness, ego-loss, transcending individuality. Here's the problem with that notion, according to both Buddhist philosophy and neuroscientific evidence:

There's no such thing as a "self."

So getting rid of one not only is impossible, but the belief that we have such a thing that needs to be done away with, or markedly reduced, perpetuates the delusion -- in much the same way that an obsessive attempt to rid one's garden of fairies feeds this fantasy by all the attention given to it.

Another aspect to this problem is the widespread belief in an enduring soul or true self which only becomes apparent when a supposed false self fades away. 

For example, lots of people believe in the oft-heard adage, "we have thoughts and feelings, but we aren't those thoughts and feelings." Which implies that we are something more permanent than the passing show of experiences in our psyche.

However, it's more accurate to say, "we aren't our thoughts and feelings, but we also aren't anything else."

This is the Buddhist and neuroscientific view of psychological reality. No-self is what we always have been from birth, are now, and will be until we die. Understanding this -- or at least seriously considering that it is true -- is key to understanding what it means to be "spiritual."

For many years, over three decades, I believed that my spiritual goal was to become self-realized, which would open the door to god-realization. In other words, the whole atman/brahman, soul/spirit, drop/ocean thing.

But countless (almost) hours of daily meditation, combined with just living life in an eyes wide open as much as possible attitude, have brought me to a different way of seeing what spirituality is all about.

I don't claim to fully grasp the following classic Buddhist verses. However, in the past I found the first much more reasonable. Now, the second resonates with me. Here's an excerpt from Mark Epstein's book, "Thoughts Without a Thinker," where he describes some Buddhist seventh-century happenings.

The foremost disciple, Shen-hsiu, who was expecting to assume the role of the master, presented the following.

The body is the Bodhi tree,
The mind is like a clear mirror standing.
Take care to wipe it all the time,
Allow no grain of dust to cling.

A perfectly acceptable resonse, Shen-hsiu's verse made a virtue of the empty and reflecting mind, a recurrent motif in Buddhist literature. But the clear mirror, like the true self, too easily becomes an object of veneration. Such a view merely replaces the concrete self with a more rarefied version that is then thought to be even more real than the original.

An illiterate kitchen boy, Hui-neng, grasped the imperfection of Shen-hsiu's response and presented the following alternative:

The Bodhi is not a tree,
The clear mirror is nowhere standing,
Fundamentally not one thing exists,
Where then is a grain of dust to cling? 

...Hui-neng avoided the common misconception of liberation as a mind emptied of its contents or a body emptied of its emotions. The mind, or self, that we conceive of does not exist in the way we imagine, said Hui-neng; if all things are empty, to what can we cling? If the mind itself is already empty, why should it have to be cleansed? If the emotions are empty, why do they have to be eliminated?

Again, spiritual seekers are faced with some clear (though not always easy to discern) alternatives. Having been a "wipe the mirror" meditation-guy for many, many years, I realize how difficult it is for people who've embraced a self-realization path to recognize the validity of another way.

I urge you, though, to open yourself to the notion that you are not a self. Nor a soul. Nor a drop of the divine ocean. You're as empty of intrinsic being as anything or anyone else in this vast, mysterious cosmos.

Here's some more quotes from Epstein's book that I like a lot. They're well worth pondering.

For both sexes, something similar can seem the only option in spiritual circles: the need to see some one as embodying the idealized qualities of the awakened compassionate mind can be very strong. The wish, in this case, is (again) for some object, person, or place to completely represent the sought-after qualities of mind.

Meditators with this misunderstanding are vulnerable to a kind of eroticized attachment to teachers, gurus, or other intimates toward whom they direct their desire to be released into abandon. More often than not, they also remain masochistically entwined with these figures to whom they are trying to surrender. 

...This approach implies that the ego, while important developmentally, can in some sense be transcended or left behind. Here we run into an unfortunate mix of vocabulary. Yet listen to the Dalai Lama on this point:

Selflessness is not a case of something that existed in the past becoming nonexistent. Rather, this sort of "self" is something that never did exist. What is needed is to identify as nonexistent something that always was nonexistent.

It is not ego, in the Freudian sense, that is the actual target of Buddhist insight, it is, rather, the self-concept, the representational component of the ego, the actual internal experience of one's self that is targeted.

The point is that the entire ego is not transcended; the self-representation is revealed as lacking concrete existence. It is not the case of something real being eliminated, but of the essential groundlessness being realized for what it has always been.

Meditators who have trouble grasping this difficult point often feel under pressure to disavow critical aspects of their being that are identified with the unwholesome "ego." Most commonly, sexuality, aggression, critical thinking, or even the active use of the first person pronoun I are relinquished, the general idea being that to give these things up or let these things go is to achieve egolessness.

Meditators set up aspects of the self as the enemy and then attempt to distance themselves from them. The problem is that the qualities that are identified as unwholesome are actually empowered by the attempts to repudiate them.

...Rather than adopting an attitude of nonjudgmental awareness, these meditators are so concerned with letting it (their unwholesome feelings) go that they never have the experience of the insubstantiality of their own feelings. They remain identified with them through the action of disavowal.

In a similar way, those with this misunderstanding of selflessness tend to overvalue the idea of the "empty mind" free of thoughts. In this case, thought itself is identified with ego, and such persons seem to be cultivating a kind of intellectual vacuity in which the absence of critical thought is seen as an ultimate achievement.

...Contrary to this way of thinking, conceptual thought does not disappear as a result of meditative insight. Only the belief in the ego's solidity is lost.