Church of the Churchless

In living, focus on "differences that make a difference"

I've come across this phrase quite frequently in philosphical and scientific writings: a difference that makes a difference. It's appealing. 

What good is a difference that doesn't make a difference? In fact, is it even really a difference, if nothing about it makes a difference?

These are deep epistemological waters.

I'm not competent to dive into them. I just enjoy pondering Gregory Bateson's definition of information, which seems to apply more generally to other areas (of course, it could be reasonably argued that information is the essence of everything).

Consider the mind-body problem. Or in some religious circles, the mind/soul-body problem. Is there really a dualism here? If so, one would expect that the difference between mind and body, or soul and body, would make a difference.

Question is, what difference does the supposed difference make?

People have tried for many centuries to definitively answer this question. Not much, if any, progress has been made. In fact, as noted in a previous post, neuroscientific research has been steadily chipping away at purported reasons for believing that the mind/soul is anything different than what the bodily brain does.

But let's imagine that science is wrong. Each of us does have, or is, an immaterial mind and/or soul in addition to the physical brain. 

What difference does this dualistic difference make?

So far, there's no demonstrable convincing evidence of any difference. Meaning, whoever we humans are and whatever we humans do can be understood without invoking the hypothesis of something invisibly immaterial being added onto our evident physicality.

This doesn't prove that an immaterial mind/soul doesn't exist. Just that if it does, there's no evidence of it making any difference to our human lives.

Well, except in this way: believing in the existence of an immaterial mind/soul does indeed make a difference to people who hold that belief. Even though almost certainly it isn't true, truth isn't related to certainty.

For many centuries lots of people were certain that the Sun revolved around the Earth, the Earth was flat, heavier objects fell faster than lighter objects, an ether made possible the transmission of light, creation of life occurred all at once, and other things we now know are false.

Actually, though, these beliefs didn't reflect differences that made a genuine difference in the world. The only difference these beliefs made was in the minds of those who believed in them.

Which, of course, led to secondary effects in the world -- such as the Catholic Church torturing people who doubted the veracity of an Earth-centered cosmos. 

In this sense, everything that goes on in the brain makes some sort of difference. It requires some expenditure of neuronal energy, some physical connections between various areas of the brain, and such. But this is a pale reflection of differences which really make a difference. 

One reason I've become so enthused about land paddling my longboard (pushing an elongated skateboard with a stick) is how marvelously transparent to differences physical activities are.

When I adjust bolts that determine how easily the board turns from side to side, I feel the difference. When I stand at the top of a hill after loosening the bolts, I know that the board is going to behave differently as I pick up speed. Rolling down the hill, I understand that either I'm going to be able to adjust to the difference I've made to my longboard, or I'm going to have a problem with wheel wobble.

There's little or no ability to hide from the reality of the real world when you're doing something physical. Gravity doesn't lie. Physics doesn't lie. Muscles and balancing ability don't lie. I either can do something on my longboard or I can't. 

I'm not able to say to myself, "My soul is able to carve its way on this longboard down a steep hill, even if my body can't." Immaterial entities make no difference to how I'm able to ride differently on my board. Nor do they do so if life as a whole.

You might disagree.

If so, I assume you've got a reason for believing as you do. You must have found evidence that things unseen and unsensed make a difference in this visible sensible world. Well, if this is true, please share that evidence.

A Nobel prize might await. Make me your co-discoverer, and we'll share the prize. Now that would really make a difference in my life.

Spiritual sages were clueless about how the brain works

Almost every religious prophet, mystic guru, spiritual sage, revered master, elevated yogi, or other supposed knower of what lies beyond everyday appearances shares a common denominator: 

They were essentially clueless about the human brain with which they made their pronouncements about divine reality. 

So they had no idea about how the knower of their purported knowledge works.

I'd realized this before, but the factiness of this fact hadn't really hit me until I started reading Patricia Smith Churchland's "Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy." 

In the Introduction, Churchland reminds us how neuroscience has only come into its own very recently. By contrast, advances in physics, astronomy, and such were able to be made much earlier.

By the end of the nineteenth century, physics, chemistry, astonomy, geology, and physiology were established, advanced scientific systems. The science of nervous systems, however, was a much slower affair.

...The crux of the problem is that brains are exceedingly difficult to study. Imagine Hippocrates observing a dying gladiator with a sword wound to the head.

...Remember, in 400 B.C. nothing was understood about the nature of the cells that make up the body, let alone the special nature of cells that make up the brain. That cells are the basic building blocks of the body was not really appreciated until the seventeenth century, and neurons were not seen until 1837 when Purkyne, using a microscope, first saw cell bodies in a section of brain tissue.

...Figuring out how neurons do what they do requires very high-level technology. And that, needless to say, depends on an immense scientific infrastructure: cell biology, advanced physics, twentieth-century chemistry, and post-1953 molecular biology. 

...Bit by experimental bit, neuroscience is morphing our conception of what we are. The weight of evidence now implies that it is the brain, rather than some nonphysical stuff, that feels, thinks, and decides.

That means there is no soul to fall in love. We do still fall in love, certainly, and passion is as real as it ever was. The difference is that now we understand those important feelings to be events happening in the physical brain.

It means there is no soul to spend its postmortem eternity blissful in Heaven or miserable in Hell. Stranger yet, it means that the introspective inside -- one's own subjectivity -- is itself a brain-dependent way of making sense of neural events.

The ancients did as well as they could with the knowledge they had.

Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Taoist sages, Hindu seers -- everybody who sought to understand reality before the advent of neuroscience did so with a big handicap:

Not knowing the nature of the knower, the human brain.

So we live in exciting times. We're nowhere near the end of the path that leads to full knowledge of the knower. Heck, we may have barely taken a few steps along that path.

But we're vastly more knowledgeable than everyone who has lived before these modern times. Including those revered as spiritual, religious, and mystic adepts. Many of them left us marvelous inspiring insights into the nature of life, living, and the cosmos. 

However, we mustn't forget that those accomplishments lacked one important bit of understanding: how the human brain works.

Scott Adams: "We're living in a computer simulation"

Makes sense to me. Of course, that's what I've been programmed to think. By whoever is running the simulation we call "life."

Scott Adams, the simulated human which believes it created the comic strip "Dilbert," also believes that it is highly likely we're living in a computer simulation. 

I like his reasoning.

One feature of our so-called reality that makes me scratch my head is the consistency of the rules of physics. One might expect a "natural" universe - one that came from an explosion - to be nothing but randomness on every dimension, including the rules of physics themselves. Any sort of consistency to our perceived reality feels like a "tell" from the simulation creators.

If you were the designer of this simulation you would need to strike a delicate balance. You want the characters to have your curiosity and intelligence but you also need to prevent them from realizing their true nature within the simulation. That means creating boundaries that don't look like boundaries. For example, you might program the simulation to have an infinite size (as if that even makes sense), but limit the maximum speed of things to the speed of light, making it impossible for the simulated people to examine the edges of their universe.

As a designer, you'd also need to make the quantum world totally freaky and endlessly puzzling. What are the tiniest particles in the universe made of? Answer: waves. What is a wave? Answer: Something that makes sense only in the realm of math. When you look for the boundaries of reality you always bump into a wall that defies common sense so aggressively that it looks intentional.

Another hint that we are simulations modeled after our programmers is that we are suspicious about the possibility. If the creators modeled us after themselves, they created simulations that could imagine someday creating their own simulations. That means we might be - wait for it - the simulations of other simulations.

As I blogged about before, physicist Brian Greene also talks about the possibility of the universe being a simulation.  

Noted comic strip artist and noted physicist saying the same thing... not a coincidence. They're on to something. Of course, that's only what the creator of the simulation wants us to know about. 

(Thanks, Steve, for sharing a link to Adam's revelation in your email to me.)

The self: a trick your mind plays on not-you

Here's some good news, and some even better news, from the current special issue of New Scientist: "The Great Illusion of the Self."

You're being tricked by an expert! And who doesn't like amazing tricks? Even better, the trickster is your own mind! You're your own magician. 

Well, you would be if you existed. But almost certainly you don't. At least, not in any way close to how you feel that you do.

In 10 pages, several New Scientist stories -- "Who Are You?," What Are You?," "When Are You?," "Where Are You?," "Why Are You?" -- persuasively present evidence that an enduring detached self isn't who we are, even though this is how it seems to us.

Here's an excerpt from Jan Westerhoff's What Are You?

THERE appear to be few things more certain to us than the existence of our selves. We might be sceptical about the existence of the world around us, but how could we be in doubt about the existence of us? Isn't doubt made impossible by the fact that there is somebody who is doubting something? Who, if not us, would this somebody be?

While it seems irrefutable that we must exist in some sense, things get a lot more puzzling once we try to get a better grip of what having a self actually amounts to.

Three beliefs about the self are absolutely fundamental for our belief of who we are. First, we regard ourselves as unchanging and continuous. This is not to say that we remain forever the same, but that among all this change there is something that remains constant and that makes the "me" today the same person I was five years ago and will be five years in the future.

Second, we see our self as the unifier that brings it all together. The world presents itself to us as a cacophony of sights, sounds, smells, mental images, recollections and so forth. In the self, these are all integrated and an image of a single, unified world emerges.

Finally, the self is an agent. It is the thinker of our thoughts and the doer of our deeds. It is where the representation of the world, unified into one coherent whole, is used so we can act on this world.

All of these beliefs appear to be blindingly obvious and as certain as can be. But as we look at them more closely, they become less and less self-evident.

It would seem obvious that we exist continuously from our first moments in our mother's womb up to our death. Yet during the time that our self exists, it undergoes substantial changes in beliefs, abilities, desires and moods. The happy self of yesterday cannot be exactly the same as the grief-stricken self of today, for example. But we surely still have the same self today that we had yesterday.

There are two different models of the self we can use to explore this issue: a string of pearls and a rope. According to the first model, our self is something constant that has all the changing properties but remains itself unchanged. Like a thread running through every pearl on a string, 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 be most of the things we usually think define us. 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 that we usually accord to it.

The second model is based on the fact that a rope holds together even though there is no single fibre running through the entire rope, just a sequence of overlapping shorter fibres. Similarly, our self might just be the continuity of overlapping mental events. While this view has a certain plausibility, it has problems of its own. We usually assume that when we think of something or make a decision, it is the whole of us doing it, not just some specific part. Yet, according to the rope view, our self is never completely present at any point, just like a rope's threads do not run its entire length.

It seems then as if we are left with the unattractive choice between a continuous self so far removed from everything constituting us that its absence would scarcely be noticeable, and a self that actually consists of components of our mental life, but contains no constant part we could identify with. The empirical evidence we have so far points towards the rope view, but it is by no means settled.

Here's the introduction to the special issue:

As you wake up each morning, hazy and disoriented, you gradually become aware of the rustling of the sheets, sense their texture and squint at the light. One aspect of your self has reassembled: the first-person observer of reality, inhabiting a human body.

As wakefulness grows, so does your sense of having a past, a personality and motivations. Your self is complete, as both witness of the world and bearer of your consciousness and identity. You.

This intuitive sense of self is an effortless and fundamental human experience. But it is nothing more than an elaborate illusion. Under scrutiny, many common-sense beliefs about selfhood begin to unravel. Some thinkers even go so far as claiming that there is no such thing as the self.

Not only neuroscientific thinkers. Philosophical and spiritual thinkers also. Psychologist Susan Blackmore does a good job of presenting this selfless perspective in her book, "Ten Zen Questions." I'm fine with it. Actually, more than fine.

I love the notion that "I" don't exist. Takes the pressure off me to know that I'm an illusion. Like Janis Joplin sang, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." Like salvation. Life after death. Hell or heaven.

Blackmore writes:

But what about me and my conscious experiences? Where do I fit into this integrated system of inputs, outputs and multiple parallel processing systems? 

The strange thing is that I feel as if I am in the middle of all this activity, experiencing what comes in through the senses, and deciding what to do in response, when in fact the brain seems to have no need of me.

There is no central place or process where I could be, and the brain seems capable of doing everything it does without any supervisor, decider or inner experiencer. 

...The temptation to fall into dualism is so strong that escaping from it, and from the popular idea that we have a spirit or soul, has been a rare insight in human history. This insight is not confined to modern science and philosophy, but can be found at the heart of Christian mysticism, Sufism, Advaita, Taoism, and Buddhism.

All these traditions claim that the apparent duality of the world is an illusion, and that underlying the illusion everything is one. 

Along with this often goes the idea that there is no separate self who acts, so that realizing nonduality also means giving up the sense of personal action or of being the "doer" of what happens. This is rather hard to accept, which is probably why such traditions are so much less popular than the great theistic religions, or those that promise heaven and hell to reward the actions of individual souls.

...There's some stupid bastard doing a U-turn in the middle of the road right in front of my bike. I am angry and want to shout "You idiot -- what do you think you're doing? You nearly knocked me off!" Can the sight of that idiotic man be me?

Yes. Of course.

If I stop, calm down, and search for the me who is looking at him I will find only him, and his car, and the road. If I search for the me who is angry with him I will find only the anger bubbling up. It's the same with everything I experience; there is not a separate me as well as the experience.

It is hard to accept that I am all those people walking down the street; that I am, at least in this fleeting moment, that Muslim woman with her stupid veil, that annoying child with the ice cream, that crowd of giggling school girls. 

Yet somehow or other this way of looking makes it easier to be kind.

Alan Watts in a nutshell: each present moment is eternity

Man, I dig Alan Watts.

I just finished re-reading my favorite Watts book, "The Wisdom of Insecurity." He wrote it at a time, 1951, when "dig" was becoming part of the lexicon of the Beat Generation. But Watts' cogent understanding of what genuine spirituality -- for lack of a better term -- is all about: timeless.

And so simple. Here's how the basic message of the book, as summarized in the final chapter, Religion Reviewed, flows. Watts' quotations are indented. My words precede the quotes.

We long for security. For absoluteness. For something unchanging. But reality isn't like that. Living isn't like that. Movement is the stuff of life. Religions offer false promises.

We adopted the prevalent view that the existence of God, of any absolutes, and of an eternal order beyond this world is without logical support or meaning. We accepted the notion that such ideas are of no value for scientific prediction, and that all known events can be explained more simply without them. At the same time, we said that religion had no need to oppose this view, for almost all the spiritual traditions recognize that there is a stage in man's development when belief -- in contrast to faith -- and its securities have to be left behind.

When religion makes statements about the past or future, such as historical events or life after death, it enters the realm of science. Challenging those statements is fair game.

It states that this world was made by God, and that he made it for a purpose which will be fulfilled in the distant future, in "the life of the world to come." It insists, furthermore, that man has an immortal soul, and prophesies that it will survive his physical death and live everlastingly. The scientist therefore seems justified in saying that such predictions cannot be verified, and that they are made with precious little reference to past events known to have happened... Religious people hope or believe that these things will be true.

But there is another way of looking upon religion, upon spirituality, upon wise compassionate meaningful living: a way that focuses on what experientially is -- the present moment -- not what supposedly was or will be.

Nevertheless, in the history of every important religion, there have been those who understood religious ideas and statements in a very different way... From this other and, we think, deeper point of view, religion is not a system of predictions. Its doctrines have to do, not with the future and the everlasting, but with the present and the eternal. They are not a set of beliefs and hopes but, on the contrary, a set of graphic symbols about present experience. 

This here-and-now reality can be described by words and other symbols, yet is not captured by them. Religious believers call it "God." Better to call it nothing, or if some term is desired, boundless mystery. 

Metaphysical language is negative because it is trying to say that words and ideas do not explain reality. It is not trying to persuade us that reality is something like a boundless mass of transparent jelly. It does not speak of some impalpable abstraction, but of this very world in which we live. This experience which we call things, colors, sounds, smells, tastes, forms, and weights is, in itself, no thing, no form, no number, no nothing -- but at this moment we behold it. We are, then, beholding the God which traditional doctrines call the boundless, formless, infinite, eternal, undivided, unmoved, and unchanging Reality -- the Absolute behind the relative, the Meaning behind thoughts and words.

We need to be cautious, though, about getting carried away with metaphysical notions. They can be useful insofar as they point us toward the present moment; however, when they divide reality (and us) into unreal abstractions, those notions feed our unrealistic desire for a realm of security separate from the here-and-now.

It is easy to see that this kind of language, whether in its religious or metaphysical forms, can lead to all manner of misunderstanding. For when the mind is divided, and "I" wants to get away from present experience, the whole notion of a supernatural world is its happy hide-out. The "I" is resisting an unhappy change, and so clings to the "unchanging" Absolute, forgetting that this Absolute is also the "unfixed." When life provides some bitter experience, the "I" can only support it with the guarantee that it is part of the plan of a loving Father God. But this very guarantee makes it impossible to realize the "love of God," which, as is well known, requires the giving up of "I."

Our longing for eternal life is fine. That longing is easily fulfilled. The mistake lies in believing that eternity is endless individual existence, rather than the everlasting present moment.

The misunderstanding of religious ideas is vividly illustrated in what men have made of the doctrine of immortality, heaven, and hell. But now it should be clear that eternal life is the realization that the present is the only reality, and that past and future can be distinguished from it in a conventional sense alone. The moment is the "door of heaven," the "straight and narrow way that leadeth unto life," because there is no room in it for the separate "I." In this experience there is no one experiencing the experience. The "rich man" cannot get through this door because he carries too much baggage: he is clinging to the past and the future. 

All that we really want, and will ever really have, is... each present moment. Grab it! Now!

When you are dying and coming to life in each moment, would-be scientific predictions about what will happen after death are of little consequence. The whole glory of it is that we do not know. Ideas of survival and annhiliation are alike based on the past, on memories of waking and sleeping, and, in their different ways, the notions of everlasting continuity and everlasting nothingness are without meaning... For there is no joy in continuity, in the perpetual. We desire it only because the present is empty... We do not really want continuity, but rather a present experience of total happiness. The thought of wanting such an experience to go on and on is the result of being self-conscious in the experience, and thus incompletely aware of it.

Genuine contentment, genuine happiness, genuine peace of mind -- it is blocked by feeling "I am content," "I am happy," "I am at peace." Feelings like these make us anxiously long for more of what the illusory "I" believes it possesses, and should possess in the future. 

So long as there is the feeling of an "I" having this experience, the moment is not all. Eternal life is realized when the last trace of difference between "I" and "now" has vanished -- when there is just the "now" and nothing else. By contrast, hell or "everlasting damnation" is not the everlastingness of time going on forever, but of the unbroken circle, the continuity and frustration of going round and round in pursuit of something which can never be attained. Hell is the fatuity, the everlasting impossibility, of self-love, self-consciousness, and self-possession. It is trying to see one's own eyes, hear one's own ears, and kiss one's own lips.

There's nothing preventing us from experiencing the heaven of here-and-now. Just be here. Now. Not as two. As one: the experience of here-and-now.

If there is any problem at all, it is to see that in this instant you have no "I" to surrender. You are completely free to do this at any moment, and nothing whatever is stopping you. This is our freedom We are not, however, free to improve ourselves, to surrender ourselves, to lay ourselves open to grace, for all such split-mindedness is the denial and postponement of our freedom. It is trying to eat your mouth instead of bread.

...If, still thinking that there is an isolated "I," you identify it with God, you become the insufferable ego-maniac who thinks himself successful in attaining the impossible, in dominating experience, and in pursuing all vicious circles to satisfactory conclusions. When the snake swallows his tail he has a swelled head. It is quite another thing to see that you are your "fate," and that there is no one either to master it or to be mastered, to rule or to surrender.

...Discovering this the mind becomes whole: the split between I and me, man and the world, the ideal and the real, comes to an end. Paranoia, the mind beside itself, becomes metanoia, the mind with itself and so free from itself. Free from clutching at themselves the hands can handle; free from looking after themselves the eyes can see; free from trying to understand itself thought can think. In such feeling, seeing, and thinking life requires no future to complete itself nor explanation to justify itself.

In this moment it is finished.

Mindful equals moral. And I'm a 4/10 Hipster.

I'm not a big fan of rigid commandments.

So when I came across "Ten Things that are Bad for Us that Can be Good for You if Practiced Mindfully," I figured it would fit with my loose moral inclinations. I was right. Nothing astounding here; just a good reminder that Buddha got it right about that "middle way" stuff.

Here's what the author, Waylon Lewis, said about mindfulness itself:

Spirituality and religion can help us to be kind, and patient, to learn, to connect with community—or they can become fixed, dividing, materialistic dogma. Mindfulness itself can be meditation, at its root—training us to connect with our own basically good human nature—or it can be a spiritual shawl, self-serious religious veil we draw around us to look and pretend and busy ourselves with the act of “being spiritual.” The difference?

Mindfulness, at its root, is meditation: in Buddhism, it’s called a self-burning flame. Or a self-cutting sword. So remember: we’re doing all this not to look or act serious and cool. But to lighten up, ground down, stand tall and smile sadly—acknowledging the sadness and weight of the suffering and confusion of this world, and at the same time appreciating the elegance, joy, compassion and fun that is our human birthright, if only we choose to claim it.

So meditate. Don’t do it as a religious act, but as a practical one—like brushing your teeth, you can do it twice a day, just after we wake, and when we prepare to go to bed.

I wasn't aware of the Elephant Journal before reading this post. There's a lot to peruse on the site, which is focused on mindful organic non-religious Buddhist'y spirituality -- or something like that. 

Browsing around a bit, naturally I had to click on "10 Signs you're a true Hipster." Given my age, 64, I was pretty sure that I wasn't going to qualify as one. But I did OK, scoring nicely on...

2. You read labels. Your eyes dilate when you see an organic certification, and narrow when you see “all natural!”

3. You don’t count calories. You count how many days a week you work out. And by working out, you mean “climbing” or “yoga” or “mountain biking” or “road biking” or “hiking”* or “kayaking” or “snowshoeing” or “skiing” or “snowboarding” or something human-powered, generally. You don’t like plugging in your bicycle and walking in the same place in sweatified, toxic, un-cocooned air.

5. You drink coffee. You drink more coffee. You drink more coffee. You drink tea. You drink pu-erh. You don’t drink mate anymore. You don’t drink kombucha anymore. You don’t drink bubble tea. You do drink smoothies, and instagram them.

9. You rescue dogs and cats and are vegan or vegetarian... [rest of this item didn't fit very well, but, hey, my wife is a volunteer at the local Humane Society and we're both ardent vegetarians].

So I'm 4/10 of a perfect hipster. Cool! But I don't really consider myself a hipster.

10. You deny being a hipster.

Which gets me to 5/10. Halfway. 50 percento. Super cool!!!

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

Shifting gears, but still sticking with the mindful moral theme, I re-read Alan Watts' "Creative Morality" chapter in his The Wisdom of Insecurity this morning. Good stuff. Here's some quotes:

The urge is ever to make "I" amount to something. I must be right, good, a real person, heroic, loving, self-effacing. I efface myself in order to assert myself, and give myself away in order to keep myself. The whole thing is a contradiction.

...The would-be saint walks straight into the meshes of this web because he would become a saint. His "I" finds the deepest security in a satisfaction which is the more intense for being so cleverly hidden -- the satisfaction of being contrite for his sins, and contrite for taking pride in his contrition. In such an involved vicious circle the masks behind masks are infinite.

...Released from the circle of attempted self-love, the mind of man draws the whole universe into its own unity as a single dewdrop seems to contain the entire sky. This, rather than any mere emotion, is the power and principle of free action and creative morality.

...Its interest is not in itself, but in the people and problems of which it is aware; these are "itself." It acts, not according to the rules, but according to the circumstances of the moment, and the "well" it wishes to others is not security but liberty. 

...Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come about through condemnations, through hating himself, through calling self-love all the bad names in the universe.

It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.

Don't understand the brain? You can't understand spirituality.

Here's a follow-up to my "Spirituality without neuroscience is bullshit" post.

Since I wrote it I've been pondering ways to convert religious believers to what seems to me to be an obvious truth: if you don't understand the brain with which you do your understanding, your understandings are going to be shallow.

I'm not saying that everybody has to be expert in the anatomy and functioning of the brain.

But without basic knowledge of what lies within the cranium of each of us, how we look upon the world is going to be skewed by our ignorance.

Let's consider an automotive analogy. It'd be possible for someone to drive a car without knowing what "lies under the hood." (Also, under the chassis, wheels, dashboard, etc.)

They'd probably think that it was magical, how a turn of the key produces a roaring sound, how shifting a lever and pushing on a pedal makes the car move forward or backward; how adjusting the position of a round object causes the car to turn in that direction.

Again, magic! 

The person behind the wheel, who, remember, knows nothing about the mechanisms which link her actions with the behavior of the car, would find it easy to believe that she is doing it all herself. Wow, a small press of my foot and I zoom ahead! A minute motion of my hands, and this massive object turns in accord with my intention!

This is pretty much how the ancient prophets, sages, gurus, mystics, yogis, meditators, and such mentioned in my previous post viewed human consciousness.

Knowledge of how the brain worked amounted essentially to zero. Ethereal entities like the soul were believed to be the source of awareness and other cognitive functions, not the 100 billion or so neurons in the brain.

Now, we 21st century humans know better. At least, we should.

I'll readily admit that neuroscience is a difficult subject to grasp. I've read quite a few books on the subject, and still feel like I understand little about the brain. But I've learned the most important thing: the human brain is marvelously complex, with most of its goings-on occurring outside of conscious awareness.

Just like a car. 

Here's an example from "The Ravenous Brain : How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning" by Daniel Bor, a neuroscientist. He explains how few objects our attention can be conscious of at one time.

In fact, routinely, attention filters the billions of pieces of information streaming into our senses, or bouncing around our unconscious minds, into a maximum of three or four conscious items. So the filtering process is about as aggressive as one could imagine.

But the boosting process can compensate for this limitation just as aggressively: Each of the mere handful of items can be an immensely complex mental object, and although their number is painfully finite, these conscious objects can be assessed, compared, and manipulated in virtually any way imaginable.

...If our consciousness is really limited to a small handful of highly processed items, then how can we at least appear to see many more objects at once? It certainly seems that if I gaze up at the sky, I can make out more than four objects -- maybe hundreds more in one go, and I can see them all clearly.

But I would argue that in this situation, attention is spread wide and thin, like an overblown balloon. Its thinness means that we are indeed aware of these hundreds of objects, but in a minimal, approximate way. Gazing up at the sky without any knowledge of star charts is akin to seeing the whole collection of stars as one fuzzy, complex object.

Interesting stuff.

It make me think about all those mystics, meditators, masters, and Zen types who come to feel at one with everything.

Perhaps all that is going on with them, and this doesn't discount their feeling of unity, just being an attempt to explain it, is that their "chunking" of reality leads them to view everything as one thing, much as the brain filters the entire night sky into a single entity called "stars."

Bor's words also seemingly provide an insight into the chop wood, carry water sort of mindfulness extolled by Buddhist sorts of practices. If wide and thin attention leads to minimal awareness, then narrow and thick attention leads to maximal awareness. 

Again, nothing supernatural or mystical is going on here. Just the brain doing its thing. Which is magical enough.

Spirituality without neuroscience is bullshit

For most of my life I've been an avid reader of philosophical, spiritual, mystical, religious, and otherwise what's it all about? books. 

I've mentally devoured ideas that were way out there.

Well, usually they also were way in here. Meaning, those notions concerned our innermost core being: soul, pure consciousness, Buddha-nature, atman... that thingless thing goes by lots of names.

My evolution into churchlessness has changed my appetite for books that I once found delicously tasty. I'm much more attracted now to readings which accept reality as known to modern science, while delving further into the many mysteries lying beyond the horizon of current human knowledge.

There's a lot of wisdom in ancient writings.

For example, early Buddhists and Taoists were sensitively attuned to both the world outside and inside themselves. A lot of what they said many centuries ago resonates with me today.

Increasingly, though, I get irritated when a modern author writes about spirituality without considering any facts about 21st century neuroscience. None. Zilch. Nada.

(Confession time: I was somewhat guilty of this myself before the light of scientific reality beamed more strongly within my 100 billion or so neurons, connected with several hundred trillion synapses.) 

After all, those ancient prophets, sages, gurus, mystics, yogis, meditators, and such were pretty much clueless about how the brain worked. Taking what they said about human consciousness literally would be as absurd as someone accepting the world's flatness in a treatise on geography, just because this was taught by respected seers long ago.

This morning I stopped reading a book about nonduality when I came across this sentence:

In nondual thinking each thought is experienced as arising and passing away by itself, not "determined" by previous thoughts but "springing up" spontaneously.

That, of course, is complete bullshit. There's reams of neuroscientific evidence showing that present awareness and thinking is strongly affected by prior experiences. It may seem otherwise to us, but for most of recorded history it also seemed obvious that the sun revolved around the earth.

I'll keep on reading the book, most likely. I just needed to put it down after noting that nowhere in the table of contents of this book about human perception is there an entry for "brain" or "neuroscience." 

Realizing how much I enjoy descriptions of reality that are grounded in, duh, reality, I headed to Amazon and perused titles dealing with the interface of neuroscience and philosophy/spirituality. I've already read quite a few books in this genre, but, hey, there's room in my hundred billion neurons for more.

I discovered "Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy" by Patricia Churchland. The book's description enticed me.

Progress in the neurosciences is profoundly changing our conception of ourselves. Contrary to time-honored intuition, the mind turns out to be a complex of brain functions. And contrary to the wishful thinking of some philosophers, there is no stemming the revolutionary impact that brain research will have on our understanding of how the mind works.

Brain-Wise is the sequel to Patricia Smith Churchland's Neurophilosophy, the book that launched a subfield. In a clear, conversational manner, this book examines old questions about the nature of the mind within the new framework of the brain sciences.

What, it asks, is the neurobiological basis of consciousness, the self, and free choice? How does the brain learn about the external world and about its own introspective world? What can neurophilosophy tell us about the basis and significance of religious and moral experiences? Drawing on results from research at the neuronal, neurochemical, system, and whole-brain levels, the book gives an up-to-date perspective on the state of neurophilosophy--what we know, what we do not know, and where things may go from here.

A book by Andrew Newberg also intrigued me, "Principles of Neurotheology." Newberg talks about the subject here.

Neurotheology is still very early in its development. Truly combining neuroscience with religious and spiritual phenomena was only possible with the advent of modern brain imaging techniques.

Before the development of these techniques, the rudiments of neurotheology were developed based primarily on animal models and speculation. Today, we have begun to uncover substantial information regarding the relationship between the human brain and religious and spiritual practices and experiences

In the next five years, neurotheology will likely continue to advance our understanding of how the brain is associated with religious and spiritual phenomena. Most likely, the brain imaging studies that have become an important aspect of neurotheology will continue to expand. There are many types of practices and experiences that remain to be evaluated using brain imaging techniques.

Traditions might be compared, as well as the wide variety of practices within each tradition. Imaging studies, along with other clinical studies, will help us better understand not only what happens in the brain at the time of a particular practice, such as meditation or prayer, but also how such practices affect us over time.

There's plenty of mystery left to explore in the cosmos. I just feel that the journey needs to be undertaken with a solid understanding of the vehicle we're traveling on: the human brain.

Eyes shut spiritual escapism: the trap of "going within"

For many years, decades actually, I practiced a form of meditation aimed at "going within." Meaning, within some supposed realms of consciousness distinct, and higher than, the physical world.

This practice was part of a Sant Mat teaching. As Wikipedia says:

The basic teaching of contemporary Sant Mat, as described by its Masters, is that everything lies inside us and that God is within. The outside world is only an image or a reflection of the inner reality.

So, in pithier terms, what's outside of us is worthless crap; what's inside of us is precious divinity. This world-denying notion is found in many other religious, mystical, and philosophical systems. 

The big question is whether seeking reality "within" makes sense.

If this life here on Earth is the only living we're ever going to do, then ignoring the Big Wide World outside for a Tiny Narrow World inside our head is pretty damn stupid.

Regardless of how you feel about this question, you should read Shyam Dodge's "Excerpt Mine Eyes: Contemplating the Roots of Spiritual Escapism." Great writing, and great analysis of inner-directed truth seeking. Likely I'll be returning to the Yoga Brains site.

Here's some excerpts:

This reverence for the human capacity to see with the eyes closed may be the root contemplative experience underpinning the vast web of ontology, cosmology, and epistemology spun by philosophical systems like Vedanta. The Vedantin trusted experience and therefore used it as the ground for philosophical analysis; elaborating from such subjective experience he (for it was always a he in Vedanta) crystallized truths about the nature of consciousness and objective reality.

...When Socrates closed his eyes awareness did not go away. More importantly, he still saw. This was a mystery to him. As it was a mystery to the Vedantins. They imagined that there must be more than one world—a deceptive world of the eyes and another (truer) internal one. The invention of the soul may have its origins in our capacity for self-reflection, and even more significantly our ability to dream with our eyes closed.

Rendering themselves ostracized by both Hindus and Buddhists the Carvakans maintained that inferences based upon self-reflection were shoddy at best when it came to synthesizing ontologies. We now know that even in dreamless sleep the brain is still operating, it is still alive. When we sleep the body does not enter a state of complete suspended animation. When we dream it is a function of the brain, not an action of consciousness independent of biology. In fact, our capacity for awareness is not isolatable from body, world, or brain. It appears that the Carvakans, after all, were correct. (I discuss many of these ideas in greater depth here.)

...But there is another question nagging me at the edges of this reimagining (a feeble attempt to reconstruct the origins of our ocular-distrust): Why this valuation? Why choose to believe that the world experienced inside is the realer one?

A cursory review might say that we are natural solipsists, that our own experience of the world is more real to us than the world itself. Psychologically it is easier to believe than the alternative—the world is bigger, badder, and stronger than us and we are at its disposal rather than the other way around. There are reams of psychological speculations about this very quality of the human animal that could support this assertion. Attending this tentative observation is another, simpler explanation: in one version we are saved from death, in the other we are doomed to it. Most of us will choose the former, the one that says our dreams are reality.

...The world behind our eyes is just as valid–and much more comfortably numb than the world of our everyday life. It is to die before you die and become, for all intents and purposes, a Buddhist zombie. Detachment is a recipe for the Walking Dead—or at the very least a world of the blind. The modern meditator, then, is very close to the classic dissociative who finds internal means for isolating themself from pain (psychically one must become a blind-orphan to do this—without a father or a mother, simply awitness who has inverted their gaze).

How far down the rabbit hole can an unbeliever go?

I know something about rabbit holes. I've been down quite a few -- of the psychedelic variety and otherwise. 

Graduating from high school in 1966, I headed to college in the San Francisco Bay area just at the time Grace Slick of the Jefferson Airplane wrote "White Rabbit." I still get a chill up my spine (tiny LSD flashback?) when I watch a video of her singing it.

Speaking as a proud Flower Child babyboomer, Man, they don't make music like this anymore. Suffer through the brief ad at the start. Two and a half minutes of Jefferson Airplane are worth it.

 

This morning I got to thinking about how far down the rabbit hole it is possible to go while reading a terrific chapter in David E. Cooper's "The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility, and Mystery," a book I blogged about several days ago.

Cooper's philosophically dense, but always stimulating, book examines the extreme humanistic notion that man is the measure of all things. Extreme, because taken literally it posits that "there is no discurable way the world anyway is, independently of human perspective and interest."

Existentialism takes this idea and runs with it. Sometimes a long ways down the rabbit hole. 

If it is up to us to choose what life is all about, if existence precedes essence, if there is no solid objectively real foundation to the cosmos we can stand on, then seemingly we enter a whirlpool realm of absurdity, nausea, no exit's, angst, and a lot of strong coffee consumed while smoking filterless cigarettes in Paris coffee houses, talking about the meaningful meaninglessness of life.

And yet... Cooper says that it really isn't possible to live that far down the rabbit hole. At least, not without going certifiably insane.

Almost all humanists, along with non-monotheistic "faiths" like Advaita and Buddhism, embrace compensations that stop them from falling all the way down into the depths of nothing matters because there is nothing to lean on, not even Nothing.

Cooper argues for the near-necessity of compensations in various ways. Here's how he speaks about one way non-believers in an absolute objective reality, religious or scientific, compensate for the loss of being sure about the world "anyway is."

As inveterately teleological creatures, human beings need to view substantial stretches of their activity as having significance. (I use 'significance' as a portmanteau term for what we want such stretches to possess -- point, worth, meaning, importance, the distinction of mattering, and so on.)

Typically, at least, to assign significance to an activity is to display its appropriate connection with -- say its contribution to -- something beyond itself that then serves as a source of its significance: a wider project, perhaps, that provides measure for the activity.

This is why activity is typically regarded as devoid of significance when perceived as so limited and enclosed as to fail appropriately to connect up with anything beyond itself. 

...There is little doubt, surely, that a final source is sought, or simply assumed to reside, 'beyond the human' -- in , say, an independent, discursable order of facts. 

...The thesis of 'the human world', once 'deeply cultivated', turns out to be one with which human beings cannot live. If our need for answerability is to be satisfied, human life must indeed answer to something beyond itself.

l agree. I'm reminded of my first LSD trip, circa 1968.

A friend experienced in "tripping" took LSD along with me, to be my guide down the rabbit hole where reality As We Know It fades away. Soon, though, I'd convinced him that we had gone crazy.

Not just temporarily. Permanently.

After discussing what life for us was going to be like from now on (we remembered taking LSD, but couldn't fathom ever not being in our current state of consciousness), we reached a fairly satisfying conclusion:

Crazy is good. Yes, we had gone off the deep end. But, hey, it's nice paddling around in those weird waters.

This fits with Cooper's thesis. My friend and I had entered a LSD-created mental world where anything was possible; what we were experiencing was what there was; like Grace Slick sang, "logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead."

And yet... we couldn't handle the idea that we'd entered a completely topsy-turvy world. Our strong inclination was to talk things out and arrive at an understanding that we weren't in a genuine Nowhere Land, we had just entered a realm where things were going to be crazily dependably good. 

Cooper gives examples of how "Asian" traditions (not always literally Asian, but within that philosophical framework) compensate for the lack of absolutism found in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and other "this is how things are" traditions.

For example:

If humanism is the thesis that there is no discurable way the world anyway is, independently of human perspective and interest, then Samkara was a humanist. For while he thinks there is an independent, absolute reality, brahman, this is not discursable. 

...The important point in the present context is that the doctrine of brahman is a good example of one that 'compensates' for the thesis of 'the human world'. Samkara's view is that that thesis would be unendurable without the further compensating doctrine. 

...In the Advaitin case, as we know, compensation comes in the shape of the doctrine of brahman. In appreciating that 'all that we can see...is not real in itself', the enlightened person also enjoys a sense of 'the reality behind everything'.

While this reality is strictly ineffable, he or she knows it to be, if only in extended senses of the terms, 'truth, consciousness and bliss (satchitananda). Life then has its point -- the effort to identify with this reality -- and the world is saved from being merely a dream that passes us by.

Beliefs are not a substitute for seeing

Reading today's Sunday Oregonian, I came across a nice Q & A in an interview with poet Mary Szybist.

What do you believe about the world? 

I like what Flannery O'Connor has to say about beliefs. She advises writers: "Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing." I am wary of fixed beliefs because they can and sometimes do become "substitute[s] for seeing." I'm also wary of cynicism.

Perhaps a belief can be a "light by which you see." I begin "Incarnadine" with an epigraph from Simone Weil: "The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation." I tend to believe that too. 

When you die, that's it: no heaven, hell, or rebirth

I love to get straight-talking churchless email. Here's a message that recently zoomed in from cyberspace. Thanks, Nancy, for letting me share it.

Hi Brian,

Came across your website "Church Of The Churchless" and I give it 2 thumbs up! Yes, religion is all man-made bullshit trying to give meaning and purpose to human existence.

I have delved into Hinduism and meditation and honestly, Hindus are way offtrack with such nonsense as reincarnation. No person comes back as another human to work out past karmas nor are they sent to planet earth to suffer in the next life. This I know from my own experience of searching for the atman or soul which is not present.

It's all freakin' fiction!

Hey, I recall a friend of mine, who practices the same yoga meditation technique, blurting out that he perceived only a thin layer of personality and no atman. He was a bit frantic and said if there's no atman than the whole concept of reincarnation is false.

Yep,I said, no atman, no reincarnation. 

Like the name of that soap opera, "You've got one life to live, baby, and that's that!" So, I guess this is what is termed enlightenment, when one sees the real nature of how things are.

Isn't it funny how people cannot accept the fact that when you die that's it, there is no heaven, hell, reincarnation or afterlife to go to.

The body just left to decay would serve a purpose as food for wild animals or vultures, the rest would eventually disintegrate over time. It always baffled me why so many people waste money on a corpse and pay outrageous fees for embalming, and burying a dead body.

The cheaper alternative is cremation, yet they try to sell you an elaborate, expensive urn when an empty coffee can will do just fine!

They can put me in a coffee can when the time comes! 

Kind Regards,
Nancy

Beyond humanism and absolutism... mystery

What is real? Great question. Just the sort of question to tackle in a blog post. Such is the hubris of bloggers. 

Hubris is a word that's used a lot in David E. Cooper's "The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility, and Mystery." Wikipedia clues us in to the meaning of hubris. Not a good quality to have if you seek to know the nature of reality.

Hubris (pron.: /ˈhjuːbrɪs/), also hybris, from ancient Greek ὕβρις, means extreme pride or arrogance. Hubris often indicates a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one's own competence or capabilities, especially when the person exhibiting it is in a position of power.

I'm enjoying Cooper's book.

Can't remember how I came across it. But I recall that the ending of a description in the Amazon listing made me think "right on, brother!", after which I bought the cheapest used copy Amazon had.

Philosophers, both western and eastern, have long been divided between "humanists", for whom "man is the measure of things", and their opponents, who claim that there is a way, in principle knowable and describable, that the world anyway is, independent of human perspectives and interests. 

The early chapters of The Measure of Things chart the development of humanism from medieval times, through the Renaissance, Enlightenment and Romantic periods, to its most sophisticated, twentieth-century form, "existential humanism".

Cooper does not identify this final position with that of any particular philosopher, though it is closely related to those of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and the later Wittgenstein. Among the earlier figures discussed are William of Ockham, Kant, Herder, Nietzsche and William James. 

Having rejected attempts by contemporary advocates of modest or non-metaphysical realism to dissolve the opposition between humanism and its "absolutist" rival, Cooper moves on to an adjudication of that rivality. Prompted by the pervasive rhetoric of hubris that the rivals direct against one another, he argues, in an original manner, that the rival positions are indeed guilty of lack of humility.

Absolutists - whether defenders of "The Given" or scientific realists - exaggerate our capacity to ascend out of our "engaged" perspectives to an objective account of the world. Humanists, conversely, exaggerate our capacity to live without a sense of our subjection to a measure independent of our own perspectives. 

The only escape, Cooper maintains, from the impasse reached when humanism and absolutism are both rejected, lies in a doctrine of mystery. There is a reality independent of "the human contribution", but it is necessarily ineffable.

Drawing in a novel way upon the Buddhist conception of "emptiness" and Heidegger's later writings, the final chapters defend the notion of mystery, distinguish the doctrine advanced from that of transcendental idealism, and propose that it is only through appreciation of mystery that measure and warrant may be provided for our beliefs and conduct.

Beautiful.

I love mystery. A Google search of "mystery" on my blogs reveals a large number of postings about what can't be talked about. Seems contradictory, but a reviewer of Cooper's book, A.W. Moore, explains the difference between talking about ineffability and talking about what is ineffable.

Cooper defends a version of 'humanism': the view, roughly, that man is the measure of things. But 'a version of' is the operative phrase. Cooper is as keen to distance what he defends from 'raw' humanism, the view that man is the measure of everything, as he is to distance it from 'absolutism', the view that man is the measure, ultimately, of nothing. 

What man is the measure of, on Cooper's conception, is what can be described. (This is equivalent to saying that what can be described can be described only from a human point of view.) Not everything.

...Cooper draws a basic distinction between talking about what is ineffable and talking about ineffability; and he insists that there is no obstacle to our doing the latter, even though it is impossible for us to do the former.

Science deals in what can be talked about. Not everything. And even the something that can be talked about necessarily is described in human terms. To believe otherwise is to fall into an unwarranted scientific absolutism.

However, religion, mysticism, and other forms of spirituality also suffer from their own variety of absolutism: the claim that it is not only possible for us humans to know ultimate reality, but that this reality can be described by holy people.

And that, to use an apt non-philosophical term, is bullshit. 

In a chapter I finished reading this morning, "The Hubris of Absolutism," Cooper notes the extreme hubris of someone claiming that, of all the possible ways there are to understand reality -- not only human and animal ways, but ways that might exist elsewhere in galaxies far, far away in the unimaginably vast cosmos -- some person believes that he or she not only has grasped ultimate truth, but understands why that mode of grasping is superior to all the other possible ways of knowing that could exist.

No human being could be warranted in thinking that he or his fellows possess the cognitive capacity to exclude the possibilities that must be excluded if some one candidate account of the world, whatever that is, is reasonably to be regarded as an absolute account.

...In order to win immunity from the charges of hubris, the absolutist must make the greater retreat to the position that, while there is a discursable way the world anyway is, it is impossible for human beings to arrive at an account of this way. 

...What is common to those who urge the greater retreat is the conviction that there is an independent, discursable reality combined with a refusal, whether firm or tentative, to regard this reality as within our compass. 

...Relatedly, once an absolutist account is held to be forever and necessarily out of our reach, it cannot play the role that made it seem an attractive prospect -- that of enabling us to explain (away) our competing perspectives on the world.

Yes. The teachings of absolutist prophets, gurus, masters, enlightened beings, and such attract us for several reasons.

First, they claim to know ultimate reality in an absolute way. The cosmos isn't mysteriously ineffable. Theyve eff'ed it! And they're more than happy to tell us about what they've found via books, discourses, Q and A sessions, retreats, seminars, and such. 

Second, they claim that their way of knowing ultimate reality is better than all those other false prophets, gurus, masters, enlightened beings, and such who claim to know Truth with a capital "T." So not only are they privy to absolute knowing, that knowledge includes knowing why all other ways of knowing are crap compared to theirs.

Hubris! 

The height of ego. Amazingly, they and their followers usually claim that the Knowing One is the most humble of all humans, as well as the most knowledgeable. Again, bullshit. 

Cooper reminds us that true humility is saying "I don't know" when faced with the question of what lies at the heart of the awesome mystery of the cosmos.

I agree with him that there is some heart independent of human consciousness. But what it is... no one knows.

Experience is all we are -- no "experiencer" inside our head

Showing my age, I'm digging a re-reading of Alan Watts' "The Wisdom of Insecurity." I'm on a blogging triple-play with the book, previous posts being here and here.

What Watts did masterfully, way back in 1951, was bring a sort of core spirituality down to earth, shorn of superfluous lofty religious, mystical, and supernatural abstractions. It's a purified philosophy of living -- ageless wisdom trimmed of dogmatic theologies.

So simple. So, so simple. What we're looking for has always been right before our eyes. Also, our nose, mouth, ears, hands, and every other part of us. 

Here's how I'd encapsulate the basic message of the first five (of nine) chapters I've re-read so far:

Life is change. Take away the change in life and you've got death. No change, no life. But all that changing is scary. Also, wonderful. The same growing that enables us to mature from babies to adults also leads to old age, disability, disease, and death.

Observing this with our peculiarly human ability to cognize, we understandably, yet wrongly, conclude that the solution to all the problems that come with change is to stop the changing. 

This arresting of change has external and internal aspects. Meaning, we want to find something unchangeable in the world outside of us, and we also want ourselves to be something unchangeable that's capable of enjoying an unchangeable world.

Religions, mystics, and other purveyors of eternal'ness give us what we're asking for.

Great example of free enterprise. Satisfy a demand. The market has spoken. People desire to be free of fearful change. So give them the promise (not the reality) of unchanging life in an unchanging world.

Heaven is such a world. So is nirvana, paradise, God's mansion, and all the other imagined eternal places that are thought to exist apart from our ever-changing everyday existence. But as noted before, an eternal abode isn't any good if there is no part of us equally eternal which can live on in eternity.

Our bodies, which includes our brains, which includes the minds that are brains in motion -- they clearly aren't unchangeable. Thus the human mind has come up with abstract concepts that offer a promise of the eternal existence which isn't evident in reality.

Soul. Spirit. God-consciousness. Atman. Astral form. Pure awareness. These are some of the many ways people have conceptualized an entity for which there is no evidence of, but it sure would be nice if it existed. 

Because then the "me" which is my body could change and die, while the "I' which is my really real nature would live on... and on... and on, forever and ever, eternally. In that eternal abode which so pleasingly fits with my own eternal aspect.

Sounds great. Just like every other too-good-to-be-true scam. No down payment, no payments for eternity! Wow, what a deal! 

Throughout "The Wisdom of Insecurity," Alan Watts points out the problems with this whole assumption that eternal I is going to spend eternity with eternal God, or whatever we want to call the Great Unchanging Essence of the Cosmos.

In the chapter I re-read this morning, On Being Aware, Watts presents the essence of Zen and other more-or-less non-bullshit forms of spirituality: there is no "I" that can be eternal, or even can be anything else. The "I" we consider ourselves to be doesn't exist.

All there is, is experience.

Ever-changing experience. No experiencer. Just experience. To paraphrase Zen masters, deal with it, dude. Show me your Buddha-mind, your Buddha-nature! Ha, you can't! You are your mind, your nature! Gotcha!

Here's some quotes from the chapter:

When you were thinking, "I am reading this sentence" you were not reading it. In other words, in each present experience you were only aware of that experience. You were never aware of being aware. You were never able to separate the thinker from the thought, the knower from the known. All you ever found was a new thought, a new experience.

To be aware, then, is to be aware of thoughts, feelings, sensations, desires, and all other forms of experience. Never at any time are you aware of anything which is not experience, not a thought or feeling, but instead an experiencer, thinker, or feeler. If this is so, what makes us think that any such thing exists?

...When you see clearly that memory is a form of present experience, it will be obvious that trying to separate yourself from this experience is as impossible as trying to make your teeth bite themselves. There is simply experience.

There is not something or someone experiencing experience! You do not feel feelings, think thoughts, or sense sensations any more than you hear hearing, see sight, or smell smelling.

"I feel fine" means that a fine feeling is present. It does not mean that there is one thing called an "I" and another separate thing called a feeling, so that when you bring them together this "I" feels the fine feeling. There are no feelings but present feelings, and whatever feeling is present is "I."

No one ever found an "I" apart from some present experience, or some experience apart from an "I" -- which is only to say that the two are the same thing. 

...The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the "I" out of the experience.

We pretend that we are amoebas, and try to protect ourselves from life by splitting ourselves into two. Sanity, wholeness, and integration lie in the realization that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate "I" or mind can be found.

Alan Watts on "I" versus "Me" -- a crazy battle

Sometimes -- well, more often than that -- I wonder whether our dogs are considerably more enlightened than I am. 

After all, I never catch them wondering whether they're doing, thinking, or feeling the right thing. But I question myself a lot. Our dogs don't. Whatever they're up to, they seem to experience it unhesitatingly.

Even if that "it" is hesitating before an open door, wondering whether they should go out on an upstairs deck on a cold, rainy night. They don't worry about indecision; they just stand there, thoroughly indecisive.

Like I said in my previous post, I'm a big fan of Alan Watts.

Especially one of his first books, "The Wisdom of Insecurity." I've read the book several times. Now I'm re-re-reading it, enjoying one short chapter a day during my morning meditation/meditative time.

Here's what Watts has to say about our peculiarly human ability to divide ourselves into two, which is the source of most of our psychological troubles. This is from The Great Stream chapter, which I read today.

We seem to be like flies caught in honey. Because life is sweet we do not want to give it up, and yet the more we become involved in it, the more we are trapped, limited, and frustrated. We love it and hate it at the same time. We fall in love with people and possessions only to be tortured by anxiety for them.

The conflict is not only between ourselves and the surrounding universe; it is between ourselves and ourselves. For intractable nature is both around and within us. The exasperating "life" which is at once lovable and perishable, a blessing and a curse, is also the life of our own bodies.

It is as if we were divided into two parts. On the one hand there is the conscious "I," at once intrigued and baffled, the creature who is caught in the trap. On the other hand there is "me," and "me" is a part of nature --- the wayward flesh with all its concurrently beautiful and frustrating limitations.

"I" fancies itself as a reasonable fellow, and is forever criticizing "me" for its perversity -- for having passions which get "I" into trouble, for being so easily subject to painful and irritating diseases, for having organs that wear out, and for having appetites which can never be satisfied -- so designed that if you try to allay them finally and fully in one big "bust," you get sick.

...Is it not, then, a strange inconsistency and an unnatural paradox that "I" resists change in "me" and in the surrounding universe? 

...In thinking of ourselves as divided into "I" and "me," we easily forget that consciousness also lives because it is moving. It is as much a part and product of the stream of change as the body and the whole natural world.

If you look at it carefully, you will see that consciousness -- the thing you call "I" -- is really a stream of experiences, of sensations, thoughts, and feelings in constant motion. But because these experiences include memories, we have the impression that "I" is something solid and still, like a tablet upon which life is writing a record. 

...The difference between "I" and "me" is largely an illusion of memory. In truth, "I" is of the same nature as "me." It is part of our whole being, just as the head is part of the body. But if this is not realized, "I" and "me," the head and the body, will feel at odds with each other.

"I," not understanding that it too is part of the stream of change, will try to make sense of the world and experience by attempting to fix it.

...Conscious thinking has gone ahead and created its own world, and, when this is found to conflict with the real world, we have the sense of a profound discord between "I," the conscious thinker, and nature. 

...Almost every spiritual tradition recognizes that a point comes when two things must happen: man must surrender his separate feeling "I," and must face the fact that he cannot know, that is, define the ultimate. 

I love Alan Watts' "The Wisdom of Insecurity." Here's my love notes.

Some books I read once, and never look at again. Others become frequent companions, picked up whenever I need a, well, pick-me-up (non-liquid variety). 

Alan Watts' wonderful "The Wisdom of Insecurity" is one of those books. It's my favorite Watts writing. Every time I read it, the book speaks something fresh to me. Not because the words between the covers have changed.

Because I have. 

Which is the central message of the book. Life is nothing but change. Scary! We don't know what's going to happen! Things could spiral out of control! Death... disease... disability... despair. And that's just some of the nasty stuff starting with "D." There's 25 more letters in the English alphabet!

This morning I re-read the first chapter, The Age of Anxiety. This book was published in 1951; I think we've gotten way more anxious during the intervening sixty-some years.

Watts nails the core problem of life in his first paragraph. (I've divided it into several paragraphs for easier reading.)

By all outward appearances our life is a spark of light between one eternal darkness and another. Nor is the interval between these two nights an unclouded day, for the more we are able to feel pleasure, the more we are vulnerable to pain -- and, whether in background or foreground, the pain is always with us.

We have been accustomed to make this existence worth-while by the belief that there is more than the outward appearance -- that we live for a future beyond this life here. For the outward appearance does not seem to make much sense.

If living is to end in pain, incompleteness, and nothingness, it seems a cruel and futile experience for beings who are born to reason, hope, create, and love. 

Man, as a being of sense, wants his life to make sense, and he has found it hard to believe that it does so unless there is more than what he sees -- unless there is an external order and an eternal life behind the uncertain and momentary experience of life-and-death.

But that approach, believing in a supernatural realm beyond everyday life, is doomed to failure. It's just another manifestation of the problem: desiring that reality is different from what it is. We keep on splitting ourselves into two, then asking "Why do I feel so divided?"

I've written several love notes about "The Wisdom of Insecurity" over my Church of the Churchless years. They're not as good as reading the book. But maybe I can whet your appetite for the book through these blog posts.

Don't believe, just have faith
Insecurity: the only safe place
Real and false faith
Best reason for why you don't exist