Church of the Churchless

Free readings from Swami Abhayananda

Someone sent me an email that says:

A brief Message from Swami Abhayananda:

I am making all my books, proems, and articles available for free download for the benefit of all interested spiritual seekers. To download any of the books, proems, or articles listed on my website, please click on this link: http://themysticsvision.weebly.com/downloads.

Yes, "proem" is a word. It means introduction/preface. I've learned a new word. 

Don't know anything about the Swami. By chance I clicked on one of his essays, "The Ascent of the Soul," that focused on Plotinus, the Greek philosopher I wrote a book about.

So, hey, we've got something in common. 

New book by Dennett looks like an anti-religion winner

Fortunately, our house has a strong foundation.

Even though my wife thinks I'm in danger of collapsing our home via the weight of all the books I bring into it, I'm confident that it will survive even after Daniel Dennett's new 512 page tome is delivered.

I ordered "Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking" after learning about the book in a NY TImes story, Philosophy That Stirs the Waters.

These days, Mr. Dennett, 71, is most famous for his blunt-talking atheist activism. “There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion,” he said flatly.

But for decades, he has presented himself among his fellow philosophers as a ruthless slayer of metaphysical fancy.

...The mind? A collection of computerlike information processes, which happen to take place in carbon-based rather than silicon-based hardware.

The self? Simply a “center of narrative gravity,” a convenient fiction that allows us to integrate various neuronal data streams.

The elusive subjective conscious experience — the redness of red, the painfulness of pain — that philosophers call qualia? Sheer illusion.

Human beings, Mr. Dennett said, quoting a favorite pop philosopher, Dilbert, are “moist robots.”

“I’m a robot, and you’re a robot, but that doesn’t make us any less dignified or wonderful or lovable or responsible for our actions,” he said. “Why does our dignity depend on our being scientifically inexplicable?”

Great question. I find a lot of inexplicable mystery in the cosmos. I tend to feel that the Ultimate Mystery of Existence always will remain mysterious, because existence just is. 

Period. There's nothing after that "is." Existence is. If that bothers you, I've got more disturbing news: you just are. 

Ultimately.

If we could trace you and me and everyone and everything back, and back, and back some more, we'd eventually zoom through or past the big bang and likely much more besides, ending (if that word has any meaning here) at mind-blowing is.

The is that simultaneously is, was, and always will be, even though everything in existence other than existence itself (not that it is an "it") won't always be.

I'm pretty sure that when I read Dennett's new book I'll agree with him that we humans are scientifically explicable. Insofar as the extent to which the human brain can understand other things in the cosmos, it should be able to understand itself.

On that note, today I read a passage in Patricia Smith Churchland's "Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy" bearing on that assertion.

Our brains -- using whatever equipment is available: conceptual, technological, linguistic, etc. -- drum up increasingly adequate models of reality, where the brain, among other things, is part of the reality modeled. 

We keep questioning, and we build the next generation of theories upon the scaffolding of the last. How do we know the models are increasingly adequate? Only by their relative success in predicting and explaining. We cannot doff all lenses -- perceptual, conceptual, technological -- and make a direct comparison between hypothesis and reality.

Does this mean that there is a fatal circularity in neuroscience -- the brain uses itself to study itself? Not if you think about it. I use my eyes to study the eye, but nothing very troubling results from this necessity, since I can study the eyes of others and reliably generalize to my own case.

The brain I study is seldom my own, but usually that of other animals, and I can reliably generalize to my own case. The enterprise of naturalized epistemology involves many brains -- correcting each other, testing each other, and building models that can be rated as better or worse in characterizing the world.

If an hypothesis says that no new neurons are made in the adult human brain, that hypothesis can be tested and falsified. If a hypothesis says that memories are one and all stored in the hippocampus, that can be tested and falsified. 

Figuring out what is not true helps us get closer to what is true, whether the subject matter is brains or the origin of the Earth.

Check out my marvelously persuasive (in my non-humble opinion) "Boxing up varieties of belief." In that post, as in many others, I explain why science is so much more appealing than religion. On that, for sure, Dennett and I completely agree.

Aimless wanderers, here's a Taoist essay aimed at you

Admirer of philosophical Taoism (especially Chuang Tzu) that I am, I enjoyed these reflections by Hakim Bey. Hope you do also. 

Aimless wanderers of the world, disunite! We never could get organized enough to agree on uniting, anyway.

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

Aimless Wandering: Chuang Tzu's Chaos Linguistics
by Hakim Bey 

The bait is the means to get the fish where you want it, catch the fish and you forget the bait. The snare is the means to get the rabbit where you want it, catch the rabbit and forget the snare. Words are the means to get the idea where you want it, catch on to the idea and you forget about the words. Where shall I find a man who forgets about words, and have a word with him?
      -- Chuang Tzu

Does Taoism have a "metaphysics"?

Certainly later Taoism, influenced by Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism, developed elaborate cosmology, ontology, theology, teleology, and eschatology - but can these "medieval accretions" be read back into the classic texts, the Tao Te Ching, the Chuang Tzu, or the Lieh Tzu?

Well, yes and no. Religious Taoism certainly established such a back-reading. But, as J. Needham pointed out, the Maoists of our century were able to evolve a Marxist reading of Taoism, or at least of the Tao Te Ching. No doubt any reading of a "spiritual" text may have some validity (since the spirit is by definition indefinable); the Tao Te Ching has proved especially malleable.

But Chuang Tzu not only has no metaphysics, he actually condemns and derides metaphysics. Supernaturalism and materialism both appear equally funny to him. His only cosmogonic principle is "chaos". Oddly enough the only philosophical tool he uses is logic - although it is the logic of dream. He makes no mention of divine principle, of the purpose of being, or personal immortality. He is beyond Good and Evil, sneers at ethics, and even makes fun of yoga.

The Chuang Tzu must surely be unique amongst all religious scripture for its remarkable ANTI-metaphysics. It qualifies as "revelation" not because it unveils hidden knowledge from "outside" the self - as other scriptures claim to do - but because it transmits a sure way to "spiritual realization", SELF-realization, in this lifetime, in this body, in this daily life. If this way or method can be summed up in one word, one might say spontaneity; and if this term were to be "defined", one might mention the phrase wei wu wei, "action/non-action".

The universe comes into being spontaneously; as Kuo Hsiang points out, the search for a "lord" (or agens) of this creation is an exercise in infinite regress toward emptiness. The Tao is not "God", as some Christian translators still believe. The Tao just happens. On the human scale misery arises solely from the uniquely human ability to fall out of harmony with this Tao - to not be spontaneous.

Chuang Tzu has no interest in why humans are so inept (no concept of "sin"); his only concern is to reverse the process and "return" to the flow. The "return" is an action; the flow itself is not an action but a state - hence the paradox "action/non-action". The concept wu wei plays such a central role in Taoism that it survives even in modern religious Taoism as the truth BEHIND all metaphysics and ritual.

In the great expianatory and communal rites of cultic Taoism as practiced in Taiwan or Honolulu today, at least one person - the priest - must attain union with the Tao, and must do so by a process of voiding his consciousness of all "deities", all metaphysical principles. As for so-called ancient "philosophical" Taoism, we might say that it has wu wei instead of a metaphysics.

Lao Tzu's goal seems to have been the conversion of the Emperor to Taoism, on the assumption that if the ruler does nothing (wu wei) the empire will run itself spontaneously. Chuang Tzu however shows almost no interest in advising rulers (except to leave him alone!), and his examples of "real humans" are almost always workmen (butchers, cobblers, cooks), or drop-out hermits, or bandits. If Chuang Tzu can be said to advocate a social program - and I'm not sure he does - it certainly has nothing to do with any imperial/bureaucratic/Confucian values or structures.

His "program" could be summed up in the phrase AIMLESS WANDERING.

[Read on...]

Hume ridicules religious imagination

David Hume, the 18th century Scottish philosopher (1711-1776), is a favorite of modern day scientists and scientifically-minded philosophers.

Somehow I'd reached the age of 64 without reading all of his "Concerning Human Understanding," even though my mother bought the Great Books of the Western World series when I was about nine -- and I inherited the collection when she died.

I'm getting to know Hume now. And am liking him a lot. Sure, he writes in a style that seems stilted. But his ideas about experience, cause and effect, religious belief, and such are wonderfully up to date.

I'm most of the way through "Concerning Human Understanding." Today I read a section where Hume talks about how much we can infer an intelligent designer, a.k.a. God, from what can be observed in nature. 

Here he writes in the fictional voice of Epicurus, who is addressing Athenians concerning about Epicurus' denial of a divine existence.

You then, who are my accusers, have acknowledged that the chief or sole argument for a divine existence (which I never questioned) is derived from the order of nature; where there appear such marks of intelligence and design, that you think it extravagant to assign for its cause, either chance, or the blind and unguided force of matter. You allow, that this is an argument drawn from effects to causes.

Hume is big on cause and effect. He points out that a single instance of something leaves us mystified. It's like a baby who sees his mother disappear when she puts a blanket over her head, then reappears when the blanket is removed.

Repeated experience of a phenomenon creates what Hume calls "habit." Nature comes to reveal her tricks. Eventually we expect that when dropped, a ball falls to the ground. When a billiard ball rolls on a table and hits another ball, the other ball is impelled to move also.

Cause and effect is what we know of the world, basically. 

Even after one instance or experiment where we have observed a particular event to follow upon another, we are not entitled to form a general rule, or foretell what will happen in like cases; it being justly esteemed an unpardonable temerity to judge of the whole course of nature from one single experiment, however accurate or certain.

But when one particular species of event has always, in all instances, been conjoined with another, we make no longer any scruple of foretelling one upon the appearance of the other, and of employing that reasoning, which can alone assure us any matter of fact or existence.

We then call the one object, Cause; the other, Effect. We suppose that there is some connexion between them; some power in the one, by which it infallibly produces the other, and operates with the greatest certainty and strongest necessity.

This is one reason Hume is so skeptical about miracles. They are one-off "experiments."

It isn't possible to examine whether natural causes explain supposedly supernatural events. Of course, if it can be shown that This always results in That, we now are in the realm of science, not religion -- even if the This and That are spookily unfamiliar. (Quantum physics is a good example.)

In what I read today, Hume cautions against reading more into a hypothesized cause than is evident in the effect. 

When we infer any particular cause from an effect, we must proportion the one to the other, and can never be allowed to ascribe to the cause any qualities, but what are exactly sufficient to produce the effect. A body of ten ounces raised in any scale may serve as a proof, that the counterbalancing weight exceeds ten ounces; but can never afford a reason that it exceeds a hundred.

If the cause, assigned for any effect, be not sufficient to produce it, we must either reject that cause, or add to it such qualities as will give it a just proportion to the effect.

But if we ascribe to it farther qualities, or affirm it capable of producing other effects, we can only indulge the license of conjecture, and arbitrarily suppose the existence of qualities and energies, without reason or authority.

Philosophical language, to be sure. Yet a devastating putdown to religious belief. 

What are the effects evident in the world which lead adherents of any religion to believe in a divine, supernatural, godly, or heavenly cause? Can those effects be explained without recourse to the excessively imagined Cause that can't be experientially related to them? 

For example, a holy book, the Bible, contains a story that long ago a man, Jesus, died on the cross and was resurrected in a bodily form. There is no demonstrable evidence of the one-time event. It has never been observed again. There is no reasonable link betweeen the purported cause of a godly nature and the supposed effect, life after death for Jesus.

Yet a billion plus people in the world found their Christian faith on some exceedingly shaky cause and effect assumptions. These aren't based on repeated experience, which is how people learn in their everyday lives, but on imaginations/concepts produced in their own minds.

I like these parts of Hume's Section XI.

You find certain phenomena in nature. You seek a cause or author. You imagine that you have found him. You afterwards become so enamoured of this offspring of your brain, that you imagine it impossible, but he must produce something greater and more perfect than the present scene of things, which is so full of ill and disorder.

You forget, that this superlative intelligence and benevolence are entirely imaginary, or at least, without any foundation in reason; and that you have no ground to ascribe to him any qualities, but what you see he has actually exerted and displayed in his productions.

Let your gods, therefore, O philosophers, be suited to the present appearances of nature: and presume not to alter these appearances by arbitrary suppositions, in order to suit them to the attributes, which you so fondly ascribe to your deities.

...But what must a philosopher think of those vain reasoners, who, instead of regarding the present scene of things as the sole object of their contemplation, so far reverse the whole course of nature, as to render this life merely a passage to something farther; a porch, which leads to a greater, and vastly different, building; a prologue, which serves only to introduce the piece, and give it more grace and propriety?

Whence, do you think, can such philosophers derive their idea of the gods? From their own conceit and imagination surely. For if they derived it from the present phenomena, it would never point to anything farther, but must be exactly suited to them.

That the divinity may possibly be endowed with attributes, which we have never seen exerted; may be governed by principles of action, which we cannot discover to be satisfied; all this will freely be allowed. But all this is mere possibility and hypothesis.

The morality of recognizing "we are mortal"

It's late in the evening, and I don't have enough caffeine in my body to do writing-justice to the title of this post.

So consider this a blog down payment on addressing a question that I've been pondering more and more, as I get older and older. (Sixty-four is my chronological age; some days I feel twenty-four; others, 104.)

How much of morality, ethics, right/wrong judgments, and such are predicated on assumptions about what happens after we die? Meaning, would our choices about how to live a fulfilling life be markedly different if we believe in (1) life after death or (2) death after death?

I'm not sure. There's a lot to ponder in this pondering.

Intuitively, I feel that even people who aren't explicitly religious have a sense that the end of life isn't really The End. They often have a vague sense that consciousness continues after death in some form or another; that we get another chance at getting life right.

This attitude is much more obvious in true believers. Often on the nightly news I'll hear a parent of someone who died tragically say something like, "My daughter has gone to a better place."

Well, maybe, as I like to say. But probably not. 

Today a new longboard was delivered by UPS to feed my land padding addiction. Eyeing the suspiciously lengthy box, a giveaway to my wife's astute eyes, she asked me "How many longboards do you have now?"

The thought that instantly came to mind was, "One more than I had yesterday, but still not enough." However, knowing how my wife feels about the longboards occupying space in our cramped garage, I told her, "Four or five; can't remember exactly."

If I was fourteen rather than sixty-four I wouldn't feel the same pressure to experience the pleasures of longboarding by trying out so many different boards so rapidly. However, mortality is staring me in the face increasingly intently as friends and relatives die more frequently.

For many years I half-heartedly believed in reincarnation.

Either back on Earth in another bodily form, or as some ethereal soul-creature in another cosmic realm. I liked envisioning the prospect that whatever I couldn't experience in this life had a chance of being experienced in another one.

The grieving parent I saw on TV has a similar feeling, believing that his child is carrying on in heaven much as she did here. Even more happily, in fact, since Jesus and angels are looking after her.

What if, though, death truly is the end? Of life. Of existence. Of consciousness. Forever.

That "what if" encompasses a lot of moral consequences. Wouldn't a society put much more emphasis on enhancing both the quality and quantity of life of its citizens if every person believed that this is the one and only life each of us ever will experience?

It sure seems to me that preventing premature dying through better health care, not engaging in unnecessary wars, reducing gun violence, and such would be higher priorities if all of the members of a society viewed life as being almost infinitely precious -- because an infinity of non-life awaits after death.

To me, we'd make better moral decisions if we embraced our mortality more strongly. Religion arguably undermines present-day morality by assuming that whatever wasn't able to be experienced in this life, can be in the next one. 

Max Baucus, a Senator from Montana, announced today that he won't seek re-election in 2014. I often disagree with Baucas' political positions. But I like his reason for retiring.

Baucus, 71, has spent most of his adult life in Washington, having been elected to the House in 1974 and to the Senate in 1978. He explained his decision to retire in squarely personal terms, saying he had been wrestling with the idea since his mother died just over a year ago.

“It made me realize I’m not immortal. We’re all mortals,” Baucus said. “I don’t want to leave here when I’m 80 years old. There are things I want to do. . . . I want to see what life is like outside the United States Senate.” 

Criticizing Islam isn't racist

I enjoy getting comments on my blog posts. Many add informative extras to what I was writing about. But sometimes I read a comment that makes so little sense, my only reaction is a bewildered "huh?"

Such as this one, submitted in response to "Of all the crazy religions, is Islam the most dangerous?"

I was a big fan, but now you lost me. Now you just seem racist to me. Sorry. I'm no fan of religions, any of them, but it's fundamentalists that are the problem. I don't like it when people target any particular group. The Muslims I know would completely disagree with your interpretation of their faith. Sorry.

First, how is it possible to be racist when Islam isn't a race? Islam is a religion. Devotees of Islam belong to various races. I criticize Christianity a lot. Does it make sense to call me a racist for doing so?

Second, the commenter failed to address my question. Which is a fair one.

Sure, most Muslims don't engage in violence in the name of their religion. But neither do most adherents of any other religion. However, it's reasonable to ask why those who kill others in the name of their religion so often are Muslims.

Yes, it can be argued that these terrorists are simply using their religion as an excuse to carry out violent politically-motivated acts. 

This doesn't explain the special proclivity of Muslims to engage in violence when it clearly is motivated by religious belief, though. As noted in my previous post, members of no other religion riot if someone burns their holy book or draws insulting cartoons of the religion's founder.

Andrew Zak Williams does a good job of addressing the "racist" charge in his New Atheism should be able to criticize Islam without being accused of Islamophobia.

Surely, rational discourse should be permitted to tiptoe cautiously along the hallowed corridors of the house of Islam without the guards frogmarching it out, bellowing allegations of racism and bigotry. Cannot we not agree that the real issue is whether the critiques of Islam proffered by today’s prominent atheists are correct?

For instance, does Islam fall short when it comes to women’s rights? Does it trample free speech while enforcing its own precepts, by the sword if necessary? By all means, apologists may disagree with the likes of Harris and biologist Jerry Coyne. But what signal is sent by a refusal to permit the issues to be even debated?

One can dream up allegations about any religion that are so obscene that no beliver should be expected to respond. But take the suggestion that Islam has some way to go before it promotes gay rights beyond the level of a misnomer. Or that its holy book, taken literally, demands an embrace of violence and reprisals that wouldn’t be tolerated by any humanist ethos.

These allegations, on their face, are wholly consistent with observation. What’s more, its tenets and precepts have real consequences and repercussions for all of us. What is it that leads apologists and liberal writers to nevertheless consider that Islam shouldn’t have to answer these charges, and that those who bring them are merely dressing their bigotry in a cloak of intellectualism?

I'll feel a lot better about Islam when Muslim leaders around the world overwhelmingly denounce violence in the name of their faith whenever and wherever it occurs. So far, they haven't.

This tells me that we need to keep asking whether Islam is a particularly dangerous religion.

Of all the crazy religions, is Islam the most dangerous?

Reportedly one of the Boston Marathon bombers, Tamerlan, the older brother, became much more fundamentalist in his Islamic beliefs before he and his younger brother killed and injured so many people.

[Note: what follows is a great argument for encouraging young men to embrace marijuana, girls, and alcohol rather than strict religiosity.]

Once known as a quiet teenager who aspired to be a boxer, Tamerlan Tsarnaev delved deeply into religion in recent years at the urging of his mother, who feared he was slipping into a life of marijuana, girls and alcohol. Tamerlan quit drinking and smoking, gave up boxing because he thought it was in opposition to his religion, and began pushing the rest of his family to pursue stricter ways, his mother recalled.

"You know how Islam has changed me," his mother, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in Makhachkala, Dagestan, says he told her.

...Anzor Tsarnaev said he was "outraged" by his son's decision to drop boxing. He said Tamerlan told him that a Muslim must not punch another man in the face.

Anzor said he grew up in Soviet times, when it was taken for granted that Muslims didn't have to follow such strict rules. "I told him I trained him all his life so that he could accomplish something, so that he could be a champion at something," Anzor said. "He discarded it."

He said the tensions over Tamerlan's strict adherence to religion, along with his own health problems, weighed on him and his marriage. 

Now, we may never be able to figure out the extent to which religion played a role in Tamerlan's conversion to terrorism, and how other influences -- psychological, cultural, political, etc.-- factored in.

But it's reasonable to wonder why, among all the world's religions, each of which is irrational in its own way, Islam seems to be the most dangerously prone to crazy violence. 

On Bill Maher's most recent Real Time show, he correctly pointed out that only Islamic believers are going to get seriously pissed if you draw a cartoon ridiculing their faith. I recall that Maher asked if anything similar to The Book of Mormon broadway show could be staged that makes fun of Islam.

Almost certainly not. Muslims don't seem to have much of a sense of humor when it comes to their religion. Ask Salman Rushdie, one of Maher's guests, who had a fatwa requiring his execution issued against him after he wrote "The Satanic Verses."

So I tend to agree with Sam Harris' views about Islam. Harris has been criticized by Glenn Greenwald and others who, wrongly in my view, contend that Harris is an Islamophobe. Whatever that means. Harris explains his perspective regarding Islam on his website. 

It's fairly long. By and large what he says makes sense to me. However, I don't agree that the most violent Muslims represent the teachings of Islam most truly. This seems wrong to me. But I'm no expert on Islam, for sure. I've read a lot of Rumi, yet the mystical side of Islam, Sufism, isn't mainstream.

Here's some excerpts from what Harris wrote.

My criticism of faith-based religion focuses on what I consider to be bad ideas, held for bad reasons, leading to bad behavior. Because I am concerned about the logical and behavioral consequences of specific beliefs, I do not treat all religions the same. Not all religious doctrines are mistaken to the same degree, intellectually or ethically, and it would be dishonest and ultimately dangerous to pretend otherwise.

People in every tradition can be seen making the same errors, of course—e.g. relying on faith instead of evidence in matters of great personal and public concern—but the doctrines and authorities in which they place their faith run the gamut from the quaint to the psychopathic.

For instance, a dogmatic belief in the spiritual and ethical necessity of complete nonviolence lies at the very core of Jainism, whereas an equally dogmatic commitment to using violence to defend one’s faith, both from within and without, is similarly central to the doctrine of Islam. These beliefs, though held for identical reasons (faith) and in varying degrees by individual practitioners of these religions, could not be more different. 

And this difference has consequences in the real world. 

(Let that be the first barrier to entry into this conversation: If you will not concede this point, you will not understand anything I say about Islam. Unfortunately, many of my most voluble critics cannot clear this bar—and no amount of quotation from the Koran, the hadith, the ravings of modern Islamists, or from the plaints of their victims, makes a bit of difference.)

...So, imagine: A copy of the Koran gets burned tomorrow—or is merely rumored to have been burned. What will happen if this act of desecration is widely publicized? Well, we can be sure that Muslims by the thousands, or even the tens of thousands, will riot—perhaps in a dozen countries. Scores of people may die as a result.

Who can be counted upon to defend free speech in the face of this pious madness? Will the editorial page of The New York Times remind the world that free people should be free to burn the Koran, or any other book, without fear of being murdered? Probably not.

But the secular Left will surely denounce the bigot who burned the book for his “religious insensitivity” and hold him largely (if not entirely) responsible for the resulting mayhem and loss of life. It will be left to crackpot pastors, white supremacists, and other jingoists on the far Right—and, of course, “Islamophobes” like me—to remind us that the First Amendment exists, that books don’t feel pain, and that the sensitivities of every other faith are regularly traduced without similar uprisings.

...Contrary to Greenwald’s assertion, my condemnation of Islam does not apply to “all members of a group or the group itself based on the bad acts of specific individuals in that group.” My condemnation applies to the doctrines of Islam and to the ways in which they reliably produce these “bad acts.”

Unfortunately, in the case of Islam, the bad acts of the worst individuals—the jihadists, the murderers of apostates, and the men who treat their wives and daughters like chattel—are the best examples of the doctrine in practice. Those who adhere most strictly to the actual teachings of Islam, those who expound its timeless dogma most honestly, are precisely the people whom Greenwald and other obscurantists want us to believe least represent the faith.

Well, this is a very easy difference of opinion to resolve: One need only study the doctrine of Islam—not merely as it existed in the 7th century, but as it exists today—and ask some very basic questions. What, for instance, is the penalty for apostasy?

Interestingly, it isn’t spelled out in the Koran—there, apostates are merely promised their just deserts in hell—but it is made painfully clear in the hadith, and in the opinions of Muslim jurists and Muslim mobs everywhere. The year is 2013, and the penalty for apostasy, everywhere under Islam, is death.

I have yet to meet an apologist for the religion, however evasive, who could lie about this fact with a straight face. (Perhaps Greenwald would like to be the first.) Needless to say, I receive emails from former Muslims who are all too aware of what it means to be a former Muslim. Depending on where they live, these people run a real risk of being murdered, perhaps even by members of their own families, for having lost their faith. 

Wow. Makes me glad that I didn't become unchurched after being a Muslim. 

Don't tame your wild horse nature. Let it run wild.

It's simplistic to divide spiritually-inclined people into two types. But I love to do it! So I will!

There, I embraced my wild horse nature. I thought of a rule that seemed to make sense. I considered throttling my inclination to do something. Then...

Screw it. I'll do what I feel like doing. 

I don't want to be a well-trained horse. That's a familiar image in some spiritual, religious, meditation, and philosophical circles.

The horse is our untamed sensous, craving, lustful, thought-obsessed self. The trainer or the rider is...

Well, that's a good question. If the wild horse is one part of me, who is the part that controls the wild horse? How many of me are there, anyway?

And why do I want to be controlled, if I'm the one who is both the controlled and the controller? Seems like this introduces more confusing complexity to my psyche than I need, or want.

Such is the quandary nicely talked about by Will Buckingham in a post on his blog, The Myriad Things. I liked "Two Tales of Horse-Training" a lot. 

Read Will's essay in its entirety. Probably one of the two horse-training approaches (one being the lack thereof) will appeal to you more than the other.

Which will tell you quite a bit about yourself. (And if what I just said makes sense, it probably shouldn't, because who are you to tell yourself about something anyway!?)

Here's some Buddhism vs. Taoism morsels to whet your appetite for a full devouring of the essay.

The moral is clear: the Buddha goes on to liken the well-trained horse to the well-trained monk, who is “worthy of gifts, worthy of hospitality, worthy of offerings, worthy of reverential salutation, an unsurpassed field of merit for the world.” If you want to have those kingly qualities, if you want to prance and gallop, then you have to suffer a bit of contortion and writhing and vacillation. Bhaddāli is convinced by this argument, and goes away “satisfied and delighted in the Blessed One’s words.”

In many ways, this rings true. Certainly when I first learned to practice Buddhist meditation, I writhed and vacillated and contorted myself a whole load; but—having said this—over time found that I became “peaceful in that action.” And many of the things I have done in my life that have required a degree of training, or that have involved learning new things, have sometimes felt rather like this, involving a measure of writhing or vacillation or contortion in the process of learning to prance and gallop and charge with the highest fleetness and highest gentleness.

But I also can’t help wondering: are writhing, contortion and vacillation always necessary or desirable? Can one do pretty much the same thing, but without all this writhing about? Or—to go further—is this obsession with kingly heritage and fleetness something that should be resisted, precisely because of the writhing and vacillation that it involves? Let me try a counter-thought, moving from India to China, which I rediscovered the other day as I was rambling through the Zhuangzi. 

...Then along comes the sage, huffing and puffing after benevolence, reaching on tiptoe for righteousness, and the world for the first time has doubts; mooning and mouthing over his music, snipping and stitching away at his rites, and the world for the first time is divided… When horses live on the plain, they eat grass and drink from the streams. Pleased, they twine their necks together and rub; angry, they turn back to back and kick. This is all horses know how to do. But if you pile poles and yokes on them and line them up in crossbars and shafts, then they will learn to snap the crossbars, break the yoke, rip the carriage top, champ the bit, and chew the reins. Thus horses learn how to commit the worst kinds of mischief. This is the crime of Bo Le.

I love this passage from the Zhuangzi. I love the image of the sage “huffing and puffing after benevolence, reaching on tiptoe for righteousness”, because it is both funny and, I think, insightful. And whilst I recognise some truth in the Buddhist story, at the same time I can’t help thinking that when it is held up to scrutiny in the light of the Daoist story, there is a case to answer here. Indeed, I can’t help reflecting that I, too, have been guilty of “huffing and puffing after benevolence”, and that the results of this huffing and puffing have not always been very pretty.

...I don’t have any firm conclusion to offer here; but I wonder if, between the two stories, it might be possible to navigate a path in which training and education become matters of delight and fascination rather than the burden of the pole, yoke, crossbar and shaft. I wonder if it might be possible to think about a form of learning that harnesses our proclivities and tendencies, rather than one that attempts to supersede them. I wonder if we are too in love with the habit of difficulty when it comes to learning.

And here—because it might seem that the Buddhists are coming off somewhat for the worse in this tale of two conflicting tales—let me finish with another story. Back when I was attending classes on elementary Pāli language, I studied with a monk in Birmingham. A small group of us would meet every week to get our heads around Pāli grammar. We’d practice our conjugation of Pāli verbs out loud, reciting together. And before we started our recitations, the monk in question would give a grin and say, ‘OK, let’s play…’

Why I don't like "Our thoughts and prayers are with you"

No, they're not. Not mine at least. 

That's what goes through my mind whenever I hear someone say, "Our thoughts and prayers are with you." Which has happened a lot after the bombing attack at the Boston Marathon.

I can understand why people say this. But it grates on me. 

For one thing, that "our" seems to imply that anyone within reach of the speaker's voice, such as those listening to President Obama on radio or TV, share those sentiments. And if you don't...

Well, you must not care about the dead and injured. Not true. Actually, I do. 

Yet I haven't prayed at all for the victims, because I don't pray in the way "Our thoughts and prayers are with you" implies. I don't ask God for favors, blessings, help, or whatever, because I don't believe God exists.

Now, if "prayers" mean something else than an entreaty to God, I guess that's another thing. Yet then we're in the realm of thoughts.

Of course, a prayer is a special kind of thought.

So saying "Our thoughts are with you" strikes my atheist/agnostic self as more appealing. That would include prayers by the prayerful, and other thoughts by non-praying people like me.

Yet if a public figure like Obama started using that language, there would be a massive outcry from the hyper-religious citizenry in these overly God-fearing United States. Not nearly so much if this happened in Europe, from what I understand.

I've also got a problem with the "are with you" language. What does that mean? It implies some sort of magical telepathy between one human mind and another. I'm in Oregon. The victims of the Boston bombing are in Massachusetts.

My thoughts aren't with them. They're with me. So it would be more accurate to say, "Our thoughts are about you." Which probably is what people mean when they say "with you." If so, let's say what we mean.

i realize that many people feel comforted by the idea that someone is thinking about them, or praying for them. Me, not so much. If at all.

Really, I only care if someone I know well is thinking about me.

Why? Because there's an excellent chance I'll see them in person one day soon. Then their thoughts about me likely will translate into actions directed toward me. Hopefully, kind words, behavior, whatever.

After the bombing I came across a Twitter Tweet by someone I follow, "scriptdave" here in Salem. He's a screenwriter with a great sense of humor. Also, some wise observations. He tweeted:

I respect the need people have to pray. But that prayer is meaningless unless you get off your knees and do something.

To which I Twitter-replied, "Amen." Later someone else commented on scriptdave's tweet. He told them:

I hear you. People need to reflect, meditate, process tragedy. But prayer being the end all is ludicrous. Do something real.

A double Amen to that.

Doing Nothing. Sounds like my sort of anti-religion.

Here's a tip for authors of books in the spirituality, religion, mysticism, and meditation genres:

If you want readers to finish your book, don't include a mention of another title like "Doing Nothing: Coming to the End of the Spritual Search."

I stopped reading during my pre-meditation quiet time when I came to that mention.

I wrote down the name of the book for future inspection, then turned to another book that didn't have anything to do with spirituality. Must obey...

When I fired up Amazon on my MacBook Pro, "Doing Nothing" seemed sufficiently interesting to justify a buy. Heck, if author Steven Harrison is persuasive, maybe this will be the last book about spirituality I'll ever purchase. 

(Not likely, but hey, its possible.)

It does bother me a bit that Harrison has a pretty extensive web site devoted to doing nothing. How much explaining does it take to back up the simple assertion, nothing needs to be done?

But I suppose that's justified.

Many people have built up so much momentum in their search for the meaning of life, recognizing that IT is right here, right now can require some active braking before the present moment is seen for what IT is.

I took a look at several essays/talks on Harrison's web site.

On the whole, I like his style. Came across a mention of quantum consciousness something-or-other, which usually is a red flag for me for New Age Bullshit. But I'll give the guy a pass on that.

(Let he who has never written anything containing New Age Bullshit cast the first critical stone... that guy isn't me.)

Nice title: To Seek Enlightenment is Passe. Cool. I want to be on the cutting edge of non-enlightenment. Some excerpts:

Steven Harrison, U.S. author and international speaker on consciousness, relationships and alternative education, tells Prema Manmadhan that there is no need for gurus or self help books in one's life.

He's been there, done that, experimented with spirituality, studied Buddhism, Hinduism, yoga, written books on a couple of subjects, one of which is Doing Nothing - Coming To the End of the Spiritual Search. And now, Steven Harrison, US author and international speaker on consciousness, relationships and alternative education, has written a book called What's Next after Now? Post-spirituality and the Creative Life.

Think out of the box, chant management gurus. But there are probably not many who think as much out-of-the-box as Steven Harrison.

He has been up the spiritual path, and back, and feels there is really no need for gurus or self help books in your life. Seeking enlightenment is also passé, he holds.

...Harrison, in this book, tells you to be yourself, truthfully and stop searching for any answers outside.

He speaks about a post-spirituality condition, in which spirituality becomes `much like a reference to the weather last year, which occurred but has no specific reflection in our life today'. He elaborates, `The monk who has meditated for 50 years and the average person on the street are essentially the same, although their behaviour may be relatively different'. Harrison has an aversion to self help books, for he says, eventually, you will be yourself, not something that the book says you can be.

"Spirituality builds itself around self location... ... while post-spirituality `abandons the myth of self in all its forms and deals directly with the actual self, the manifest self, just as it is, giving up all sense of improvement'.

Benefits of meditation being proven by science

There's little or no evidence of God or the supernatural. But there's increasing evidence that meditating and being mindful of the here and now can have positive effects.

So my feeling is, why not start (and, likely, end) our spiritual journey by focusing on what we know exists, physical reality. Which, of course, includes the physical brain.

The brain's activity results in what is called "mind." Mind then can influence the rest of physical reality, including the body integrated with the brain, along with the brain itself. 

Pretty cool.

Nothing mystical here. Nothing airy-fairy. Nothing beyond the bounds of common sense.

It's only if we make a wild jump into believing that the mind, or soul, is something non-physical, yet somehow is able to influence physical stuff, that incredulity is justified. Matter affecting other matter: entirely believable.

My Tai Chi instructor has spoken about how Tibetan Buddhists are able to almost totally undress in very cold temperatures, wrap a wet sheet around themselves (which seemingly should quickly freeze), and then dry the sheet by raising their body temperature.

Science Daily reports, "Mind Over Matter? Core Body Temperature Controlled by the Brain." 

A team of researchers led by Associate Professor Maria Kozhevnikov from the Department of Psychology at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences showed, for the first time, that it is possible for core body temperature to be controlled by the brain. The scientists found that core body temperature increases can be achieved using certain meditation techniques (g-tummo) which could help in boosting immunity to fight infectious diseases or immunodeficiency.

...The researchers collected data during the unique ceremony in Tibet, where nuns were able to raise their core body temperature and dry up wet sheets wrapped around their bodies in the cold Himalayan weather (-25 degree Celsius) while meditating. Using electroencephalography (EEG) recordings and temperature measures, the team observed increases in core body temperature up to 38.3 degree Celsius. A second study was conducted with Western participants who used a breathing technique of the g-tummo meditative practice and they were also able to increase their core body temperature, within limits.

I think my wife needs some g-tummo training. I'll be sitting around, watching TV in a t-shirt, while Laurel is wrapped in a blanket saying "It's freezing in here. Did you turn the heat down?" 

I'd like to believe that my seemingly warmer core temperature is a result of more than 40 years of daily meditation. However, more likely it's a matter of genetics, body type, and basic physiology. 

Coincidentally, assuming anything is a coincidence, this morning I was reading in my new favorite book (check out my Amazon review by clicking that link) "The Harvard Medical School Guide to Tai Chi," about how intention is a central aspect of Tai Chi practice.

This fits with what the Science Daily story says about the Tibetan meditators.

The two aspects of g-tummo meditation that lead to temperature increases are "vase breath" and concentrative visualisation. "Vase breath" is a specific breathing technique which causes thermogenesis, which is a process of heat production. The other technique, concentrative visualisation, involves focusing on a mental imagery of flames along the spinal cord in order to prevent heat losses. Both techniques work in conjunction leading to elevated temperatures up to the moderate fever zone.

Again, I don't see visualization, intention, or mental imagery as reflecting any sort of other-worldly powers. One aspect of our material being is influencing another aspect. Peter Wayne, the author of the Tai Chi book, writes:

In sharp contrast to conventional biomedicine where the active ingredient (for example, ibuprofen) is believed to do nearly all the work, in Tai Chi, intention and belief are considered highly active and specific ingredients.

In fact, Tai Chi classics emphasize that all embodied movement begins with belief, thought, or intention. The mind (yi, intention) leads the Qi, and the Qi moves the body. 

...Our research supports the Tai Chi principle that what you think and believe affects your physiology and how you feel. As asthma patients believe they are breathing in ragweed (but actually, it is just saline mist), the majority have an asthma attack, and if they believe they are breathing in a rescue medication (again saline mist), they quickly recover.

So instead of praying to God, we can pray to ourselves. Much better chance of having the desired effect. The mind/brain is a marvelous being. Most marvelous of all, it is us!

Integrating reason and intuition in Tai Chi (plus rest of life)

I'm a churchless non-soul. I love reason, science, demonstrable proofs.

Yet I enjoy practicing Tai Chi, with all its talk of qi, meridians, subtle energy flows, and such, most of which isn't within the realm of proven fact.

No contradiction. When talk in my Tai Chi class turns to a word I can't readily grasp with my hand of reason, such as qi, I mentally translate it into a more accessible term for me, such as "internal energy."

I feel that energy. I'm not sure if I feel qi. Maybe they are the same thing. Maybe not.

Regardless, I've never considered that it was necessary to be sure of the truthfulness of everything Tai Chi teaches in order to practice this art, which has been called meditation-in-motion. I can set aside my skeptical scientific side and still embrace Tai Chi to the extent I'm able to grasp it.

A few days ago Amazon sent me the newly released "The Harvard Medical School Guide to Tai Chi," by Peter M. Wayne. I learned about it from my Tai Chi instructor, who, like Wayne, teaches about integrative medicine at the college level.

Wayne is both a researcher and a practitioner of Tai Chi. I'm not far into his book, but already I'm impressed with how he is able to reflect the together-yet-apart nature of Tai Chi, as expressed in the familiar Taoism symbol (several hang on the walls of our Tai Chi studio).

Here's what Wayne has to say about blending scientific reason and spiritual intuition in Tai Chi.

Working by day as a medical researcher objectively studying the science of Tai Chi and at night as a community-based Tai Chi instructor, for many years I have walked the metaphorical S-shaped line dividing the more rational and intuitive halves of the Tai Chi yin and yang symbol.

Both as a scientist and a teacher/practitioner, I have explored how best to bridge the wisdom underlying my two vocations, or in the lingo of Tai Chi, how the yin and yang can inform one another.

...In my own Tai Chi practice and when teaching Tai Chi classes, my research informs my experience and teaching, but sometimes I need to abandon the framework of science. Part of the practice of Tai Chi and other meditative arts requires turning off rational thinking and tapping into other, less developed processes, like intuition and imagination.

For example, Tai Chi classics say, "Belief or mind moves internal energy (Qi) and Qi moves the body." At this point in my Tai Chi training, on a good day, this idea is very clear to me. I can readily shift into a meditative Tai Chi flow.

But the scientific community is still far from defining or quantifying Qi, or knowing all the neurophysiological pathways involved in mind-body-energy connections.

My primary goal as a teacher is to use whatever tools I can to help students have meaningful experiences, so to teach only from pure science would be inefficient and unethical. The practitioner half of me remains skeptical of science and thinks maybe science can never address some issues.

Nevertheless, my two jobs, one as a daytime researcher and the other as an evening Tai Chi teacher, involve a delicate dance between yin and yang, both informing one another and incubating rich thoughts, and they have led to my unique style of teaching and practicing Tai Chi. 

Throughout this book, I will be clear which half of me is talking. When scientific evidence exists, I will provide the link to published research. I will distinguish this evidence from my personal experiences or experiences my students share, or principles that Tai Chi classics purport or my teachers and other masters espouse.

Refreshing. Illuminating. Nice model for anyone who wants to blend science and spirituality, reason and intuition, explanation and mystery.

Taoism, the philosophical foundation of Tai Chi, doesn't see things in black and white.

The yin-yang symbol has a bit of white in the black area, and a bit of black in the white area. Yin and yang seamlessly flow into and out of each other. 

Rigid dichotomies are mostly an invention of the human mind. Nature doesn't work that way. Neither should we, as natural beings. 

Are you scientific or spiritual? How about both.
Are you reasonable or intuitive? How about both.
Are you mechanical or artistic? How about both.
Are you a lover or a fighter? How about both.
Are you cautious or a risk taker? How about both.
Are you generous or selfish? How about both. 

We limit ourselves by failing to embrace both the yin and yang of life. Tai Chi and Taoism can help us remember that white and black can blend, and also remain apart.

I still have my "There are no rules" t-shirt. It's getting faded, but I don't want to stop wearing it. I like the message. There are no rules is a rule. Yet it is sort of a ruleless rule. Neither a rule nor not a rule. My sort of rule.

To be "spiritual," get physical

Back in my churched days, I believed that being spiritual meant going beyond the physical. So I meditated countless hours with eyes shut and ears closed off from the material world.

In other words, the world. 

The only world. 

Many would disagree with those italicized emphases, of course. Heck, I would have disagreed with myself not many years ago. 

They, which included me for about thirty-five years, believe that God, or whatever divine entity undergirds existence, is only loosely connected with physical reality.

Some religions view this world as maya, illusion. Others, as a temporary way station that we pass through on our journey back to heaven. Still others, as a trap for the ethereal soul from which we must escape in order to be the free spirit that is our true nature.

Well, as I like to say, maybe. But "maybe" and two dollars will get you a Grande Pike Place at Starbucks. So will just two dollars, of course. Maybe is utterly unnecessary for living.

Over on my other blog, yesterday I mused about how nature shows that perceptions are more lively than ideas. This unoriginal notion was inspired by some reading of philosopher David Hume.

This morning I read onward in Hume's "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding." I like how he reminds us that ideas about God, or ideas about anything for that matter, are feeble in comparison to the direct physical impressions or sensations those ideas are based on.

Ideas naturally also are physical, being the result of brain processes.

However, ideas strike us as being more ethereal than supposedly crude emotions, perceptions, and the like. We forget that physicality is the mother (and father) of everything we call "spiritual."

Hume writes:

...All our ideas or more feeble perceptions are copies of our impressions or more lively ones.

...When we analyze our thoughts or ideas, however compounded or sublime, we always find that they resolve themselves into such simple ideas as were copied from a precedent feeling or sentiment. Even those ideas which, at first view, seem most wide of this origin, are found, upon a nearer scrutiny, to be derived from it.

The idea of God, as meaning an infinitely intelligent, wise, and good Being, arises from reflecting on the operations of our own mind, and augmenting, without limit, those qualities of goodness and wisdom. 

We may prosecute this enquiry to what length we please; where we shall always find, that every idea which we examine is copied from a similar impression. 

In other words, all our notions about divinity, spirituality, the supernatural, soul, spirit, angels, and such derive from our experience as physical beings in a physical world. 

If someone has a vision of God, that vision was processed through a physical brain and body. If someone writes a holy book, that writing was produced by a physical brain and body. If someone speaks about what lies beyond the material world, their speaking came from a physical brain and body.

Religious people are physical beings pretending to have a spiritual experience. Wisdom lies in seeing through this pretension. Genuine "spirituality" is achieved by being honestly physical.

Though Zen often strikes me as annoyingly Buddhist'y and preachy, I like how Zen masters are always saying to their students stuff like, "Show me your mind!" "What is your original face?" "Is there Buddha-nature in this sack of rice?" (or piece of shit)

Get real, is the message. Which, if I've learned anything in my churchless evolution, is the essence of my faithless faith. 

I still meditate every morning. Usually by focusing on my breathing in some fashion, and on other bodily sensations. I also meditate during much of the rest of the day -- by going about my life in as lively a way as posssible.

As Hume said, by paying less attention to ideas inside my head, and more attention to sensations, perceptions, emotions, feelings, and other direct communications between my body/brain and the rest of the world.

To those who would view me as having departed from a so-called "spiritual path," I fire up my Zen master persona and say to them...

Show me your freaking spiritual path! Place before me, or anyone else, evidence that you have journeyed in a realm beyond the physical! 

Whatever feeble, lifeless responses I might receive would be, of course, reflections of their physical experiences. As noted before, the only way we know about supernatural claims is through the utterances of people with physical bodies/brains.

So let's flip around De Chardin's quotation and make it true:

We are not spiritual beings having a human experience; we are human beings having a spiritual experience.

There's no "nothing" to compare with the cosmos' "something"

Like I said a few days ago, it's absolutely awesome that existence exists. Oh, guess I should add, "awesome, dude... ."

Which reflects how marvelously meaningful what I said is. And also how meaningless. 

It happened again today. That sudden "bottom falling out from under me" feeling, sort of the mental equivalent of being startled by an elevator going into free fall.

I like the feeling. It's the most genuine sensation of spirituality, not really an apt word, but best I can come up with, that comes over me in my churchless way of looking at the world.

What it is -- and I'm also struggling to find the right words here -- is awe that existence exists. 

Haven't changed my mind about that. But after finishing re-reading P.W. Atkins' fascinating "Creation Revisited," I had some additional insights into my awesome feeling. 

(Let's make that a re-re-reading; just realized that I'd blogged before about a re-reading.)

Atkins, a distinguished chemist, does a good job of arguing that there's no need to posit a creator of the universe. In his view, the universe didn't need any assistance in creating everything that exists. That everything springs neatly from..

Nothing. 

Let's leave aside the details of his argument in this post and jump right to Atkins' final chapter, the money shot of his book, so to speak. 

In the beginning there was nothing. Absolute void, not merely empty space. There was no space; nor was there time, for this was before time. The universe was without form and void.

By chance there was a fluctuation, and a set of points, emerging from nothing and taking their existence from the pattern they formed, defined a time. The chance formation of a pattern resulted in the emergence of time from coalesced opposites, its emergence from nothing.

From absolute nothing, absolutely without intervention, there came into being rudimentary existence. The emergence of the dust of points and their chance organization into time was the haphazard, unmotivated action that brought them into being. 

Extreme simplicities, emerged from nothing.

Though I liked the godlessness of this passage, I highlighted in three question marks in the margin of the page on which these lines appeared.

I was bothered by Atkins' assertion that absolute nothing could be jolted into producing rudimentary existence by "chance."

Isn't chance something? How can this guy assert that absolutely nothing co-exists with chance? Didn't he say nothing existed prior to chance acting on an absolute void? Wouldn't chance have to come into being before chance brought everything else into being?

From one point of view, those are good questions. From another, they aren't. I talked about this in Science's "nothing" different from religion's "nothing."

It was like I was some sort of Godlike being looking upon existence from a transcendent realm, contemplating two cosmic possibilities: one where "nothing" prevailed eternally; another where the "something" we are aware of is existent.

I'd wonder why there's something rather than nothing. It just seemed so mysterious, so awesome, so marvelous, that instead of nothing, there was something, and I'm a part of it! 

My mistake, as Lawrence Krauss points out, was in assuming that nothing and something are both realistic possibilities. Actually, there's no such thing as nothing, in the sense of nonbeing. Material existence is what there is. The opposite of reality isn't nothing, nonbeing, or nonexistence. Such is a theological or philosophical idea, an abstraction, present only in the human brain/imagination.

Religions, particularly of the Western monotheisitic variety, adore the idea ofcreatio ex nihilo, "creation out of nothing."

But that's all it is: an idea. There's no evidence of the absolute "nothing" so loved by the religionists who take issue with Krauss's scientific view of a quantum nothing that creates universes instead of God. The quantum nothingness of empty space is filled with energy, potential, possibility.

So the everlasting God of religion, which is nowhere to be observed, is replaced by the everlasting quantum nothing which has been proven to exist even in seemingly absolutely empty spacetime.

Thus those question marks I put in the margins, and even my feeling of awe that wow, existence exists, strikes me as betraying a lingering quasi-religious philosophical attitude that appears and disappears in my psyche.

I find it really difficult to totally set aside the notion that "nothing" is a viable alternative to "something." I can't get my head fully around the notion that an absolute void, non-existence without any trace of something existing, is a human abstraction, a concept, a mental hypothesis with no basis in reality.

Saying any more would probably result in me saying less.

Sit back. Have a glass of wine. Smoke a joint. Meditate on Om. Whatever... dude. Contemplate how I ended my previous post.

As Krauss says, religious true believers argue with this scientific godless understanding of the cosmos. "But the quantum vacuum isn't really nothing," they say. "It is governed by the laws of nature." Well, who says that reality has to conform with how God-crazy humans want things to be?

Reality is what it is. Nothing isn't really nothing. Deal with it, religionists.

Roger Ebert: "I do not fear death"

Roger Ebert died yesterday. When I heard the news, I was a lot sadder than I usually am when I learn someone famous has died.

Ebert meant a lot to me, though I never saw him in person. He was a noted movie reviewer here in the United States. For many years watching "Siskel and Ebert" every week was a TV must.

Back in those pre-Internet days this was how I learned what movies were worth watching and which weren't. Their "two thumbs up" was all I needed to buy a ticket when a film came to town.

Ever since, Roger Ebert has been the movie reviewer I read first among the "top critics" on a Rotten Tomatoes listing. (Gene Siskel, died in 1999.) I always enjoyed how Ebert wrote reviews with such thoughtfulness and sensitivity. 

He died in the same way, apparently. 

“We were getting ready to go home today for hospice care, when he looked at us, smiled, and passed away,” said his wife, Chaz Ebert. “No struggle, no pain, just a quiet, dignified transition.”

Ebert was a noted secular humanist. Yet he didn't call himself an atheist, or even an agnostic. He didn't want any label attached to him. 

Over the high school years, my belief in the likelihood of a God continued to lessen. I kept this to myself...

Did I start calling myself an agnostic or an atheist? No, and I still don't. I avoid that because I don't want to provide a category for people to apply to me. I would not want my convictions reduced to a word. Chaz, who has a firm faith, leaves me to my beliefs. "But you know you're one or the other," she says. "I have never told you that," I say. "Maybe not in so many words, but you are," she says.

But I persist in believing I am not. During in all the endless discussions on several threads of this blog about evolution, intelligent design, God and the afterworld, now numbering altogether around 3,500 comments, I have never said, although readers have freely informed me I am an atheist, an agnostic, or at the very least a secular humanist--which I am. If I were to say I don't believe God exists, that wouldn't mean I believe God doesn'texist. Nor does it mean I don't know, which implies that I could know.

Let me rule out at once any God who has personally spoken to anyone or issued instructions to men. That some men believe they have been spoken to by God, I am certain. I do not believe Moses came down from the mountain with any tablets he did not go up with. I believe mankind in general evidently has a need to believe in higher powers and an existence not limited to the physical duration of the body. But these needs are hopes, and believing them doesn't make them true. I believe mankind feels a need to gather in churches, whether physical or social.

...No, I am not a Buddhist. I am not a believer, not an atheist, not an agnostic. I am still awake at night, asking how? I am more content with the question than I would be with an answer.

I really like Ebert's "I do not fear death" essay. Read the whole thing. It isn't very long. Ebert was (he wouldn't want me to say is) one fine wonderfully-human man. Some excerpts:

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

...Many readers have informed me that it is a tragic and dreary business to go into death without faith. I don’t feel that way. “Faith” is neutral. All depends on what is believed in. I have no desire to live forever. The concept frightens me. I am 69, have had cancer, will die sooner than most of those reading this. That is in the nature of things. In my plans for life after death, I say, again with Whitman:

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

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

And with Will, the brother in Saul Bellow’s “Herzog,” I say, “Look for me in the weather reports.”

...Someday I will no longer call out, and there will be no heartbeat. I will be dead. What happens then? From my point of view, nothing. Absolutely nothing. All the same, as I wrote to Monica Eng, whom I have known since she was six, “You’d better cry at my memorial service.”

Embrace awe that existence exists, not religion

It happened again today. That sudden "bottom falling out from under me" feeling, sort of the mental equivalent of being startled by an elevator going into free fall.

I like the feeling. It's the most genuine sensation of spirituality, not really an apt word, but best I can come up with, that comes over me in my churchless way of looking at the world.

What it is -- and I'm also struggling to find the right words here -- is awe that existence exists. 

(Other attempts I've made to describe that marvelous mystery can be found scattered through this search, by the grace of Google.)

I was walking along with one of our dogs on a pleasant rainless mild Oregon day, enjoying the early spring sprouting greenness on a trail that leads through woods to a nearby lake. 

I'd been thinking about how nature has no straight lines, no obvious rigid order, no firm demarcations between this and that. Only the human-built structures along my way possessed those features.

Then my vision of nature became much more cosmic. In an instant I was swept past all the various manifestations of nature into a void of mystery which was as much an ultimate fullness as an absolute emptiness.

Down the rabbit hole. Cut the elevator cable. Dive out of the balloon with no parachute. Exhilarating. 

Time stood still. Or rather, time no longer existed. I was face to face with what is for me the only unarguably true spiritual sensation:

Existence exists. Always has. Always will. Is now. 

I've also been fascinated with the seemingly related question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" But this strikes me as a conceptual notion, one that fires up a less primal feeling of awe.

When I'm in my existence exists state of wonder, I feel a kinship with every member of Homo sapiens who has ever marveled at the simple truth that things exist to marvel at.

This morning Netflix informed me that "The Tree of Life" has reached the top of our queue and the DVD will be in our hands shortly. That spurred me to read what Roger Ebert had to say about the movie. His blog post was called A Prayer Beneath the Tree of Life.

His words, though not consciously remembered during my dog walk, probably helped spur the sensation of cosmic mystery I felt later in the day.

Terrence Malick's new film is a form of prayer. It created within me a spiritual awareness, and made me more alert to the awe of existence. I believe it stands free from conventional theologies, although at its end it has images that will evoke them for some people. It functions to pull us back from the distractions of the moment, and focus us on mystery and gratitude.

Not long after its beginning we apparently see the singularity of the Big Bang, when the universe came into existence. It hurtles through space and time, until it comes gently to a halt in a small Texas town in the 1950s. Here we will gradually learn who some of the people were as the film first opened.

In Texas we meet the O'Brien family. Bad news comes in the form of a telegram, as it always did in those days. Mrs. O'Brien (Jessica Chastain) reads it in her home, and gives vent to grief. Mr. O'Brien (Brad Pitt) gets the news at work. We gather a child has died. It is after that when we see the universe coming into being, and Hubble photographs of the far reaches.

This had an uncanny effect on me, because Malick sees the time spans of the universe and a human life a lot like I always have. As a child I lay awake obsessed with the idea of infinity and the idea of God, who we were told had no beginning and no end. How could that be? And if you traveled and traveled and traveled through the stars, would you ever get to the last one? Wouldn't there always be one more?

In my mind there has always been this conceptual time travel, in which the universe has been in existence for untold aeons, and then a speck appeared that was Earth, and on that speck evolved life, and among those specks of life were you and me. In the span of the universe, we inhabit an unimaginably small space and time, and yet we think we are so important. It is restful sometimes to pull back and change the scale, to be grateful that we have minds that can begin to understand who we are, and where are in the vastness.

Many films diminish us. They cheapen us, masturbate our senses, hammer us with shabby thrills, diminish the value of life. Some few films evoke the wonderment of life's experience, and those I consider a form of prayer. Not prayer "to" anyone or anything, but prayer "about" everyone and everything. I believe prayer that makes requests is pointless. What will be, will be. But I value the kind of prayer when you stand at the edge of the sea, or beneath a tree, or smell a flower, or love someone, or do a good thing. Those prayers validate existence and snatch it away from meaningless routine.

Yes. This is the only sort of religion we really need. A sense of awe at what surrounds us, and is us. Eyes wide open before the mystery of existence. 

Explaining that mystery away through made-up human fantasies is the business of religion. Standing before that mystery with the "prayerful" attitude Ebert talks about -- that's genuine spirituality.

This is what one of the commenters on Ebert's post said. Wise words. 

"We are born in mystery, live in mystery and die in mystery" is a quote I came across years ago and it has stuck with me.

More reasons to doubt Eben Alexander's heaven and God claims

Eben Alexander's book, "Proof of Heaven," is a best-seller. But that doesn't prove that heaven and God are real. 

Alexander has done a great job of cashing in on his claim that while in a coma, he had a vision of heaven that supposedly must have resulted from his consciousness being completely separate from his physical brain. 

Only problem is, as I've blogged about before (see here, here, and here), there are excellent reasons to doubt Alexander.

Today I got an email from someone who had finished reading "Proof of Heaven." In response to one of my posts, he said:

Of course neither you nor I (nor Sam Harris, as he allows in his quoted comments) can prove that heaven is or is not real or that there is or is not a God. In that regard, it seems, the believer and non-believer are even-steven in the burden-of-proof department. (I agree with you, however, that Alexander certainly didn't "prove" his case.)

Hmmmm. I don't understand the rationale for considering believers in God and non-believers in God to be "even-steven" in the burden-of-proof department. This seems to demonstrate a lack of understanding of how proof operates.

In everyday life, as in the scientific method, conclusions concerning whether something is true or false rest on a preponderance of evidence. Nothing is 100% certain (not even what I just said).

Yet almost always, there are good reasons to favor "true" or "false" in regard to something, rather than considering this is just a 50-50 coin toss.

Also, the burden of proof rests on the person claiming that X is true. Otherwise we'd be in a ridiculously impractical situation, having to consider claims that space aliens, Bigfoot, fairies, gnomes, angels, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and other unproven entities are just as real as rocks, dogs, starfish, baseballs, and other stuff that can be demonstrably shown to exist.

So the question is: are there good explanations for what Alexander says he experienced, other than his claim that his consciousness became completely separated from his body, and he was able to be in the presence of God?

In the April issue of Scientific American Michael Shermer says yes in his Skeptic column, "Why a Near-Death Experience Isn't Proof of Heaven." After discussing several reasonable naturalistic explanations for Alexander's visions/hallucinations, Shermer says:

The reason people turn to supernatural explanations is that the mind abhors a vacuum of explanation. Because we do not yet have a fully natural explanation for mind and consciousness, people turn to supernatural explanations to fill the void. But what is more likely: That Alexander's NDE was a real trip to heaven and all these other hallucinations are the product of neural activity only? Or that all such experiences are mediated by the brain but seem real to each experiencer? To me, this evidence is proof of hallucination, not heaven.

In an excerpt from a Larry King show, you can see Shermer explain why he doubts that Alexander's brain was completely inoperative. Alexander believes the mind can operate separately from the brain. Yet he has no proof of this. 

In this other excerpt from the show, Alexander says he is absolutely certain that God exists. Well, that's what I'd expect from someone who has written a book which claims that heaven and God exist. Sales aren't going to be as strong with a "maybe..." or "I believe so."

Alexander has faith that his supposedly supernatural experience was true, a vision of a non-material realm that is objectively real, not a subjective projection of his human brain.

Well, he joins countless others who have made similar claims. One of the first spiritual books I read was "Autobiography of a Yogi" by Yogananda. It's filled with tales that are even more miraculous than Alexander's.

And possibly more believable, since they supposedly occurred in a more awake-and-aware state of consciousness than a coma. So why not believe that the visions of "heaven" described by Yogananda are also real?

Along with the myriads of other supernatural visions contained in innumerable other religious, spiritual, and mystical writings. Once "believe whatever I say" is accepted on blind faith, we've entered a realm where reality becomes almost completely subjective.

Read the comments on Shermer's Skeptic column. Most are quite thoughtful and persuasive. For example:

When I read this article in the LA Times, I went a'Googling on NDEs, and found that they are common around the world, and.. the experience of each person is to see what they expect to be, in their culture. Christians see one, Hindus another, Muslims another. Mohammed says he visited the 7 levels of Paradise in his NDE. The vast variety of experiences really indicates they are physiological, and unique to the person, and not any indication of any paradise, or even a life after death. There would need to be an enormous number of Heavens to suit all the beliefs about the hereafter.

...Why do we consider personal individual experience to prove or disprove life after death? I have a schizophrenic daughter who constantly hears auditory hallucination. The voices that she hears are real to her. The conversations with those voices are real to her. They of course are not heard by anyone else. Therefore, how can someone’s near death experience proof or disprove the existence of life after death?

...I have a friend who has localized brain damage from a tumor. We were out in a boat one day with one other person, and my friend said that she was having a visual hallucination. I asked if she felt ok about it and she said yes, that it was very pleasant (fortunately all of hers are so far; she gets a bit of euphoria rather than fear). What are you seeing? I asked, and she said, I am floating above you (looking down on the boat). I thought this was interesting, in that many of the visions I've seen or heard reported in the press by people 'near death' are about floating up and looking down on the hospital room.