Church of the Churchless

Buddhists are wrong about a "witnessing mind"

OK, admitted: my previous post about a Speculative Non-Buddhism essay was pretty damn intellectually intense for summer reading. 

I thought of writing about something lighter today, but decided to make another attempt at conveying what I like about what little I know about what those guys at Speculative Non-Buddhism seem to be up to.

(Hope that last sentence conveys my uncertainty about what their goal is; these are the most articulate, deep, philosophically-sophisticated Buddhists-who-aren't-really- Buddhists I've ever come across; hard to fathom them after just a little reading.)

First, a note about my own split personality toward Buddhism. Part of me loves it; part of me hates it. Sometimes I think Buddhism is the best non-religious religion there is. Other times, it strikes me as just as supernaturally deluded as other religions are.

I've put up numerous posts here concerning how unlikely it is that something like "pure awareness" exists. The brain is a highly sophisticated collection of 100 billion or so neurons, all connected in vastly complex ways. 

Out of this, almost certainly, human consciousness emerges. Where and how the notion of "pure awareness" fits into neuroscientific reality is beyond me. 

Though I used to believe that it was possible for consciousness (or soul) to be a detached observer from above, so to speak, this now strikes me as religious dogma. So I resonate with another Speculative Non-Buddhism post, "The Myth of the Witnessing Mind, Or: It's Thinking all the Way Down."

This is an easier to understand take on the same general subject addressed in my previous post: there is no getting outside socially, culturally, and I guess, genetically conditioned ways of looking at the world. 

What we see is what we've learned to see; been guided to see; evolved to see from among countless alternative ways of seeing. There is no absolute vision; no objective perception of reality; no mountaintop of consciousness from which the varying slopes of awareness can be discerned at a glance.

Before sharing some excerpts from "The Myth of the Witnessing Mind," here's an explanation of x-Buddhism:

“Buddhism” suggests an abstract, and abstractly static, One.  A study of this One would show it to be of the (abstract) type of cultural-doctrinal systems (religion, philosophy, mythology) that claim grand authority concerning human knowledge. “X-buddhism” means to capture a crucial fact about “Buddhism,” the abstract One: it loops incessantly.

We could study the x. Such a study would be historical and comparative.

We could compile a descriptive catalogue of Buddhist schools from a (atheist) through m (Mahayana) to z (Zen), graphing their relations and tracing their divergences. In so doing, we would discover differences concerning, for instance, each x‘s version of the means and end of the One’s grand authority. From such a study we would begin to see that the One, Buddhism, breeds infinite interpretation not only of the world, but of itself. Hence, Buddhism splinters into unending modifiers, x.

With that background, here's the excerpts -- which actually amount to most of the essay. Or, jump to the full essay. 

I want to present a comment that Tom Pepper made in response to questions posed by Matthias Steingass. I think that both the questions and the response constitute a brilliant crystallization of recurring, and quite stubborn, issues in contemporary x-buddhism. The issues hover around the interplay of self, no-self, person-formation, ideology, and meditation. But first, some background.

Perhaps the gravest criticism of contemporary x-buddhism we make on this blog is that its proponents refuse to adequately think through the very postulates that comprise their x-buddhism. Sometimes this refusal manifests as blatant hypocrisy.

Patricia Ivan’s previous post on the shunning practices of x-buddhist figures is a good example of this. The people she mentions there are typical x-buddhist examples in that they preach values such as compassionate engagement, the wisdom of doubting, and having the courage to be proven wrong, yet routinely shut down dialogue that genuinely and robustly tests their commitment to those values.

While such hypocrisy is unconscionable, it is at least correctable. Even darker consequences follow from the x-buddhists’ refusal to think through their premises. I am speaking of the x-buddhist penchant for reacting against and obscuring the very teachings they aim to disseminate.

One such teaching is the sine qua non Buddhist principle of anatman. This principle holds that there exist no self-entity over and above the socially-linguistically-constructed networks of discourse within which we are embedded. This principle has extraordinary and far-reaching implications for the ways “Buddhism” might contribute to a clear-eyed assessment of what it is to be human.

And yet, as many essays on this blog and at non + x have shown, x-buddhists refuse to dispense with atman, positing at every turn some version of a transcendent self. These essays have typically been met with (i) confused, convoluted, and desperate “arguments” to the contrary, (ii) hostility, or (iii) silence (see above). You can see for yourself that the beating heart of atman is being well-preserved by x-buddhist figures.

It’s all over the place–as mindfulness, non-judgemental awareness, the silent observer, the witnessing mind, pure awareness, Buddha mind, not to mention the traditional formulations of rig pa, tathagathagarba, mahamudra, and so on ad nauseum. It’s one of the places where the conservative-traditional forms of x-buddhism join at the hip of the liberal-secular varieties.

...Tom Pepper. Matthias: I’ll offer my thoughts on this problem. When you say “I know that I think,” you are reproducing the error that produces belief in the atman. If you think you are attending to the content of your thoughts, you are, of course, attending to some of them, but not to the thoughts about that content.

These thoughts – the belief that I can passively “watch” my thoughts arise and dissolve – is just another set of thoughts produced in a discourse, socially produced, but which we are taught to mistake for an unproduced “true self.” In the “mindfulness” practice of watching your thoughts with detachment, you are actually participating in a socially produced discourse of “mindfulness” and not realizing it.

The mind always and only thinks, and consciousness is always and only in socially produced symbolic systems produced between multiple individuals.

Can the body act without thought? Sure it can – have you ever seen a chicken with its head cut off? Sometimes they can walk about and respond to stimuli for hours. But there is no mind there. Even a brain-dead body can be stimulated to orgasm, but there is not mind that “has” the orgasm, except in a symbolic system which gives the bodily response meaning.

...My original understanding of Vipassana meditation, years ago, was that it was an attempt to recognize exactly this – the real causes and conditions of all the thoughts we believe “we” are having. We then realize, like Hume when he “looks within,” that there is no self, only another discourse (not the term Hume would use, but..) which is always produced socially.

Even the “looking within” is just a socially produced discourse. Then we lose the need to find the directing “will” deep within. Instead, we see that the “self” is socially constructed, and we can begin, also in “sati” meditation, to examine the causes and the effects of this particular construction of conventional self, and determine (again, in a collectively produced discourse) what actions might produce a better “self.”

Of course, Vipassana as I’ve encountered it over the last couple of years has become the opposite of this – it is now an attempt to produce a discourse in which we are fooled into believing we DO have a core transcendent mind that is undetermined by discourse and social formations, and this is what they now call “anatman”: the mistaken belief that this “witnessing mind” is NOT created by the discourse/practice of retreat buddhism. 

Interesting take on how Shin Buddhism supports social activism

I don't claim to fully understand Tom Pepper's "The Radical Potential of Shin Buddhism." But then, I don't claim to fully understand anything. 

The vestiges of other-worldly mysticism remaining in my mind have found Pure Land Buddhism both utterly unbelievable and also strangely compelling. After all, what's not to like about reciting Namu Amida Butsu and earning a ticket to Nirvana Land?

Sure beats other forms of Buddhism that require you to engage in all sorts of arduous practices, including back-breaking, mind-numbing meditation for ever and ever (almost). 

But Pepper presents a view of Shin/Shinran Buddhism that tosses out its unbelievable aspects and leaves a philosophical system that makes pretty good sense. That said, his essay is sufficiently intellectually dense that I found it difficult to understand much of it on a first reading.

Here, though, are excerpts that will give you the gist of Pepper's activist-friendly take on what Shin Buddhism can be all about. A seemingly mostly-compatible view, and much simpler view, of Namu Amida Butsu can be found here.

What I find in Shinran that I believe is absolutely worth recovering is his insistence that we are all completely dependently arisen, that we are constructed by our culture and our age, and so in any culture in which some members are excluded from achieving liberation, nobody can achieve liberation.  We must all achieve liberation together, as a collective, with no exception, or we will only be achieving an illusory liberation, a distorted image of liberation. 

The attempt, by any individual, to achieve complete awakening in the midst of a degenerate world cannot succeed, and even the idea of what awakening is will be a false one, defined only by its contrast to the corrupt and oppressive social system it seeks to escape. It will be, that is, only a negative liberation, a negative freedom, the freedom to do nothing at all instead of the freedom to make use of our human potential in the world.

...Shinran’s great insight, the universal truth he recovers for Buddhism, is that we must accept that we cannot have any true liberation that depends at all on the oppression of others.  We must abandon our attempts at self-perfection, which are anyway only attempts at self-perversion, until we produce a world in which everyone has the conditions to achieve full use of all their potential.

Until this time, we must accept our “blind passions,” we must accept that we are, as Shin Buddhists are fond of saying, “foolish beings.”  But this is not a matter of being resigned to our flaws, of accepting passively whatever thoughts or actions may occur, as if they were not really our “true selves,” as the “mindfulness” crowd would put it; instead, we must recognize that these flaws, these “blind passions,” are structurally produced, are the product of the social system we are a part of. The goal is not to suppress these impulses, but to understand their structural causes and work to eliminate those causes, using the very energy of our blind passions to motivate our social activism.

...The goal of dialectical thought, then, is not the Western Buddhist goal of suspending all judgment; rather, the goal is to relentlessly make better judgments.  We must be judgmental in all things, at all times.  I’ll come back to this point at the end, with some examples that I hope will make it clearer.

First, though, I want to address what I suspect will be the common objection to my explanation of Shin Buddhism.  Because as Shin became popular in the West, it became popular exactly as a kind of anti-intellectual postmodern ideology of passive acceptance of everything “just as it is,” and retreated into thought-free comfort of purely emotional and mindless devotion.  I expect that it may appear that my interpretation of Shin is simply the wishful projection of a Western leftist. 

...I will begin with Dennis Hirota, a professor of Shin Buddhism at Ryukoku University in Kyoto, and the head translator on for the Jodo Shinsu Hongwanji-Ha translation into English of the Collected Works of Shinran.   In Asura’s Harp: Engagement with Language as Buddhist Path, Hirota offers his account of what the practice of Shin Buddhism should look like. 

As Hirota explains it, “for Shinran, truth might be characterized as a fundamental shift in stance, a transformative event in which the self is dislodged from an absolute standpoint and made aware of its conditionedness.”  This radical decentering of the self occurs in thought, language, discourse, and practice—it cannot occur in silent introspection, because it depends on the collective nature of subjectivity, on what in Shin terminology is called “Other Power.”

...The meaning of saying Namu Amida Butsu, then, is simply the reminder, the acknowledgement, of the possibility of dialectical thought, a possibility that only exists because of the collective nature of the mind, because of Other Power. 

The goal of the “Nembutsu Practicer,” then, is less the acceptance of certain metaphysical assertions than the nature of the conceptual constructions of the world…[t]he problem is to come to a coherent and intelligible understanding of oneself and the world that ignores neither the historical and emotional boundedness of the self nor the variety and worth of experience…[that] allows for the growth of awareness, which ceases to be repetition of prior attachments and become genuinely creative activity in the world. (121-122, emphases added)

This approach may not be the dominant form of Shin Buddhism today, but certainly Hiroata’s work demonstrates that it has warrant in Shinran’s writing, and that it is understood as a viable interpretation by Japanese scholars of Zen.

...To borrow a metaphor from Marx, the contradiction between the centrifugal force produced by the Earth’s momentum and the centripetal force produced by the enormous gravity of the sun is resolved only in a practice, the elliptical orbit that keeps both forces alive and active, and produces, as a result, the capacity of our planet to produce and sustain life. 

Contradictions are inevitable, serving as the structuring gap between the abstract universal and the concrete particular which allows us to make sense of the excessive information of the world and to produce potentialities for action, to escape the sheer determination of our natural history and live as human beings.

The problem is that there is always a tendency to reify a particular set of abstract categories or concepts, to mystify a particular contradiction as the eternal and ineffable limit.  And when this occurs, it all too often occurs in the service of an ideology which functions to reduce, rather than increase, our capacity for creative interaction with the world.  The practice of shinjin is the practice of producing, propagating and strengthening the collective dialectical mind.

...As individuals, we are foolish beings, trapped in ideologies we mistake for natural truths. To reach the Pure Land, then, would consist simply of being born into a culture that does not reify its ideologies, a collective mind already aware of its constructedness and dependent origination. 

While Western philosophy has long emphasized the individual achievement of philosophical wisdom, Shin Buddhism recognizes that this is only possible as a collective project.  Liberation is collective, and the collective mind is Other Power.

Recollections of Sant Mat and Charan Singh

Here's a mildly edited email message that I received recently from someone whose connection with Master Charan Singh, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), and Sant Mat started about the same time mine did. I added some links and bracketed explanations of terms.

His thoughts brought back memories, and stimulated some new ideas. He gave me the OK to share his message in a blog post. It's an interesting rendition of how someone can be converted to a faith, and then deconverted.

Dear Brian:

Reading your blog evokes recollections that have long been dormant. What a compendium of experience I long since left on the processing heap to decompose on its own!

What a saga of my youthful ignorance which commenced in Los Angeles in 1968 (I was 22) with my initiation by Charan Singh's stuffed shirt proxy and ended with a thud in 1975 in the living room in my Greenwich Village, Manhattan, apartment when, in merely a moment -- what could be called a mystical moment -- I experienced all of Sant Mat as pure evil.

I am sure I wrote at length about that experience in my journals as well as my self-created deprogramming which commenced at a brisk pace, but I currently do not possess the patience to revisit those ramblings found in my bound diaries on the top shelf of my wall of personal archives and books.

In short, I recall visiting long gone Wiser's metaphysical book store on Broadway seeking materials that might heal my damaged constitution, and I did. (Later I sold all my Sant Mat books to Wiser's which provided me lunch money and then some.)

In August of the year of my recovery I did Werner Erhard's est and had a great time with it all, and for Thanksgiving of that year I attended an est Thanksgiving dinner, and dined on turkey as strident indication that my "spiritual" vegetarianism had ceased. (It was an odd experience, as if someone other than "me" was consuming forbidden flesh.)

This barebones telling omits a exceedingly colorful story which could grace the multiple pages of a personal memoir. The cast of Sant Mat characters and my perception of them at the time contrasted with my contemporary observations might indeed prove an interesting read. Not sure I am up to such a task, but you might find my writings posted on what was then Yahoo Groups' "ExSatsangi Support Group" etc., amusing. Below this message are some of those postings.

Again, I truly enjoyed perusing your blog, and look forward to doing so again.

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

My inner child speaks: I tried, I really tried to love Mr. C. Singh, but alas I never did. Love to me comes out of heritage over time with another. He and I had no heritage of knowing one another, despite the lore. He offered no heritage. We never exchanged one word. I didn't even get to shake his hand because I was obedient. 

At the reception in Pasadena about 1969, we were told not to approach him, and only respond if he approached us. Others just walked up to him and introduced themselves. But, oh, no. Not me. I abided by the edict. 

I recall standing 6 feet from him and our eyes met. I waited. He didn't move, and then he moved on. That was my one chance, only if I were up to being disobedient. So you vow all sorts of things to this guy and he doesn't have the decency to introduce himself. 

That was that. I put a picture of him in my journal. I closed my journal entries with Radha Soami. I was supposed to acknowledge what a miraculous service he'd done for me. I did my meditation in my cabin in the woods north of Santa Cruz in the San Lorenzo valley, and he didn't show up astrally either. 

Ho hum! What a friend we have in Charan!

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

My outer adult: This was really lousy. Hell, I wasn't going to arm myself with paregoric and lomatil and pay thousands for airfare and head to the sub-continent, after that! Why there's plenty of Indian restaurants right here, amoeba free. Never made it to the Dera [headquarters of RSSB in India], just saw the PLM [Perfect Living Master] on stage talking.

The first night he didn't even talk. He just sat here surveying us! Paid for my ticket like everyone else and the guy just sits. No rapture, no lights, no fireworks. He just sits there [darshan]. 

When he did talk on the two subsequent nights there was a lot about the terribleness of sensuous pleasures, but unfortunately he didn't go into any puerile details. I tried to be in awe. It didn't happen. I suppose I mocked up being in awe just to go with the flow. 

Later I whipped up a Parshad Pillaf. It was tasty but I think eating it was giving me "sensuous pleasure" with the commensurate guilt. I suppose I should have gotten the message then and there, but I didn't until several years later, when I dined on Thanksgiving turkey with Werner Erhard and the gang. 

Werner shook my hand. Werner talked to me. He might not have been a PLM but he sure was damn good company.

And so ends the tale, inner and outer of "Charan Singh in Front of Me.”

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

Starting off with my Sant Mat story and trying to keep it brief, for openers.

In Los Angeles, when I was about 19, I began having out of body experiences, extreme ones, extreme in their visual vividness and sound. These experiences involved high speed traveling, and I was curious to follow these travels to a destination point, for it seemed, while traveling I was on the way to "somewhere." 

I had questions. Was there a final destination of such travel, was the final destination a place I'd want to experience, what was this all about? I was not on a spiritual quest but the quest for some answers.

And it was near that time in 1967 that I met two young men through fellow UCLA students, both later it turned out were initiates of Charan Singh (and both homosexual). 

One named Danny was a dreamy bearded young man who was as I was told "very spiritual" and who talked very little. The other was a chatty singer who was once a groupie of Ella Fitzgerald.

One way or another, I ended up in the Silverlake area of Los Angeles at the apartment of a somewhat dour, but not unlikable, woman named Mary Blakemore at a local "satsang." It was the first time I'd heard the word "satsang" and I sat in her living room listening to her wax on and on about her Master and trips to a place called The Dera. 

At some point I broached the topic of my out of body experiences and described them.

As I spoke they seemed to be somewhat startled and their eyes got wider and wider, dreamier and dreamier. Only later did I come to understand the root of their reaction when I learned that it was clear to them from my descriptions that I had been travelling in the 3rd and 4th realms according to Sant Mat cosmology, realms that they been earnestly (perhaps) meditating to reach and never got near. 

I was told that such high grand experiences were "unearned" ones, gifts from a past life time, and that when and if I was initiated I would be starting from the scratch level at which, I came to understand, was the level of sound and vision that they were experiencing (if any). 

I merely wanted to find out where the journeys I was experiencing were leading and would perhaps take me, and thus I began to buy into the Sant Mat interpretation of such experiences. 

I was initiated in Los Angeles in 1968 by proxy by a man whose name I do not recall, who looked like a Methodist minister. There was absolutely nothing commanding about this gentleman upon whose face I never saw a smile or any affability or warmth. For several years I attempted to be a good Satsangi and failed.

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

A grand factor in that failure was that meditation never brought forth the profound, overpowering and spectacular sound and light experiences that brought me to Sant Mat in the first place. 

Oddly, the experiences which precipitated my interest in Sant Mat continued intermittently and spontaneously but never during meditation. Meditation did provide an occasional buzz, some minimal sound, and once, just once, the alleged astral form of Charan Singh himself.

I dragged on for several years being a guilty and bad satsangi, trying to love The Master etc. and so on, then sometime about 1975, now living in New York City, another kind of experience occurred. 

Standing in my living room, I felt an overwhelming wave of evil and that evil was associated with Radhasoami; I experienced the entire RS Master/Initiate relationship as sinister and manipulative.

From that point on I began deprogramming myself from the superstition and threats etc. that previous posts have clearly outlined. I was unaware of any support groups at that time in 1975, and went it alone, and withdrew. 

My involvement was limited in its duration and I'd not formed any close friendships with other RS people, so I suppose it was not the wrenching withdrawal from RS other have experienced. I consider myself extremely fortunate for having ended the association when I did at the age of 28, with a very rich life still to be lived.

And despite the "threats" such a rich life was lived and continues to be lived. 

I am indeed grateful to those who have contributed so abundantly of themselves in this and the other ex-satsangi groups, for the sharings have allowed me to confirm the appropriateness of my curtailment of my RS connection, and have allowed me to sever long forgotten loose ends.

Embrace with joy life's "one damn thing after another"

A few days ago I revealed the meaning of life: one damn thing after another.

(Note: I agreed with a commenter that "damn" sounds negative; however, I am using it in the sense of wow, as in damn! she's a fine-looking babe!)

With several dog walks and even more cups of coffee having stimulated my psyche since that post, I've delved more deeply into the astounding richness of that five-word encapsulation of what life is all about. 

I'm nowhere near the end of grokking the nuances of one damn thing after another. But with every damn thing that passes through my mind when I think about one damn thing after another, I come closer to realizing the essence of life:

There's no place to stand outside of it. 

No perch from which we can look down on life and see how it appears from above. No gate that allows us to stand outside the boundary of life and gain a detached perspective. No "stop" button which halts life in its tracks, freezing it in place so we can study it closely as a still-life.

I used to believe such was possible.

Most religions, spiritual paths, and mystical teachings do also. They claim that some people -- prophets, saints, enlightened beings, ascended masters, gurus, whoever -- have been able to gain a Gods-eye view of reality (using "God" to mean an ultimate truth normally inaccessible to humans).

In other words, these folks were able to step outside of one damn thing after another.

The wheel of life stopped turning for them. Their karmic cycles were interrupted. God intervened on their behalf with a dose of divine grace. Through meditation their consciousness became absolutely still and clear. 

However it happened, supposedly life here on Earth was seen from the outside, rather than being experienced from the inside. This, of course, leads religiously-minded people into all sorts of dangerous and destructive points of view.

Human life often is considered a way-station on the road to Something Better. Or an illusion, not worth much compared to a higher reality.

Everyday life thus is diminished in importance. I've known true believers who couldn't wait to die, either figuratively or literally, so they could be ushered into the presence of the Almighty -- compared to which whatever life as we know it has to offer is a meaningless speck of barely-there.

In fact, for quite a few years I felt much the same way. So I can understand the appeal of believing that one day one damn thing after another will be transformed into One, forever and ever.

Never-ending existence in unchanging heaven, paradise, nirvana, or such. 

Well, if that happens, it happens. It would be the last damn thing, with no after another.

I admit that this is theoretically possible. Yet who wants to live life theoretically? If, as is likely, this is the one and only life each of us ever will experience, why not embrace life in all of its fullness, rather than trying to shrink it down to a bare-bones skeleton?

I don't think there is any way to escape the constant changings of life. Except death. Which isn't life.

Death will come to each of us eventually. Why mimic its approach by trying to deny the reality of one damn thing after another? Embrace each moment. Then the next. And the next. Life becomes wonderfully simple and, mostly, joyful when we stop trying to avoid it.

Meaning of life: one damn thing after another

Beginning at age 13, when I wrote my first philosophically-minded poem, until today, age 64, I've been searching for the meaning of life.

I've delved into psychedelics (LSD and mescaline); pondered existentialism (Sartre, Camus, etc.); for over 35 years meditated hours a day under the guidance of an Indian mystic; done the marital arts and Tai Chi thing; read countless philosophical, religious, mystical, scientific, and spiritual books; explored Argentine Tango and ballroom dancing; walked at night under Oregon stars (and rain) looking into the vastness of the universe -- just as I did at 13; written books about physics & mysticism, karma & vegetarianism, and a Neoplatonist philosopher, Plotinus; married a psychotherapist who knows a lot about human nature.

So, yeah, I'm well qualified to speak about the ever-fascinating subject: The Meaning of Life. Today, tonight, right now, I'm going to reveal the answer. (Well, I already did, in the title of the post.)

It's... one damn thing after another. 

Here's two guesses about your snap reaction to this revelation. (1) That is so fucking obvious! (2) That is so fucking ridiculous! Be assured: I agree with both points of view. And with any other opinion you might hold about my five-word summation of what life is all about.

That's the beauty of it!

One damn thing after another encompasses every possible criticism of my philosophical proclamation, as well as every possible praise. Also, anything else that can be expressed about anything, including silence. 

So even though there is a lot to be said about what I've just said, I'm going to resist the temptation to elaborate in much more explanatory detail. For now, at least. Because I want to assure my well-deserved place in the Pseudo-Philosophical Platitudinous Hall of Fame (I have lots of company), stay tuned for additional posts about the underlying brilliance of one damn thing after another.  

For I have managed to encapsulate the essence of cosmology, quantum physics, Buddhism, evolution, You Tube, Facebook, athletics, art, dance, and so much more (no, screw false humility!) really everything in what can be aptly termed an all-encompassing Theory of Everything.

One damn thing after another.

Philosophical Nobel Prize, please!

I sense some skepticism arising in cyberspace, even before I've pushed the "publish" button on this post. Well, test out my foundational Law of Nature, both human and otherwise. Observe your life, along with that of other sentient beings.

Throw in non-sentient beings too. Plus inanimate objects.

Let me know if you find any which are not subject to the inescapable law of the cosmos: one damn thing after another. (Note: I will admit that "damn" is not an absolutely essential descriptive part of my five-word philosophical masterpiece; however, I think it adds a lot of emotional weight, so am reluctant to discard it.)

I am confident in the objective validity of my statement. Its subjective attractiveness may be less easy to appreciate. However, if you keep on pondering Life is just one damn thing after another, I believe you will find yourself loving that sentiment as much as I do.

Takes the pressure off.

Allows you to stop searching for anything more than the next damn thing, which doesn't have to be searched for, because it will come to you all by itself. Stops anxiety, judgmentalism, egocentricity, and holier-than-thou'ness in its tracks (or... allows your train of thought to proceed with them worry-free). 

Now, I purposely avoided Googling "one damn thing after another" until I reached this point of my post. I didn't want my stupendously original thoughts about this phrase to be blemished by any extraneous influences -- such as the fact that other people had said the same thing before me.

Yes, some have. Such as:

Elbert Hubbard. "Life is just one damn thing after another." The guy was an American writer, publisher, artist, businessman, anarchist, and libertarian socialist philosopher. Way to go, dude! Proud to be in your company.

Frank Arntzenius. A philosopher specializing in the philosophy of physics who wrote a paper with this title.

John Masefield. An author who, bless him, wrote a book titled "ODTAA." One Damn Thing After Another. Amazon tells me other writers have used the same title. 

Proves my point. Life is just one damn thing after another. Which includes people saying, in different ways, "life is just one damn thing after another."

"Heterophenomenology." Not a sex act. Way of studying consciousness.

I've learned a new word: heterophenomenology. Was immediately attracted to it, even before I knew what it meant. Had an exotic sensuous ring. 

"Hey, hot thing, I'd really like to do some heterophenomenology with you. Are you up for it?"

Turns out, though, that what Daniel Dennet is talking about in his new book, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, isn't a sex act, but a means of investigating subjective consciousness. 

Or at least, what people usually think of as subjective consciousness. Dennett has an interesting take on how it is possible to investigate experiences that are usually regarded as utterly personal.

Like a mystical experience. Like an experience of God's presence. Like an experience of feeling one with the cosmos. Dennett writes:

Heterophenomenology is the study of first-person phenomena from the third person point of view of objective science.

Obviously the key difference between experiments with rocks, roses, and rats on the one hand, and experiments with awake, cooperative human subjects on the other, is that the latter can communicate in language and hence can collaborate with experimenters, by making suggestions, interacting verbally, and telling them what it is like under various controlled conditions.

That is the core of heterophenomenology: it exploits our capacity to perform and interpret speech acts, yielding a catalogue of what the subject believes to be true about his or her conscious experience. This catalogue of beliefs fleshes out the subject's heterophenomenological world, the world according to S, the subjective world of one subject.

I think Dennett is on to something here. He has systematized a way of thinking about issues that come up all the time on this blog. 

Meaning, someone makes a claim about something they have experienced. "I have seen the light and sound of God, so I know God exists." I always think, OK, I accept that you believe you have had that experience. However, this is different from actually having the sort of experience you are claiming to have had.

Dennett lists four kinds of evidence, or interpretations of experience:

(a) Conscious experiences themselves
(b) Beliefs about these conscious experiences
(c) Verbal judgments people make about conscious experiences
(d) Utterances that express those verbal judgments.

I'm not sure what the difference between (c) and (d) is. Doesn't matter. The most interesting thing is the difference between (a) and (b).

First, if (a) outruns (b) -- if you have conscious experiences you don't believe you have, then those extra conscious experiences are jiust as inaccessible to you as to the external observers.

Second, if (b) outruns (a) -- if you believe you have conscious experiences that you don't in fact have, then it is your beliefs that we need to explain, not the nonexistent experiences.

...Mermaid sightings are real events, however misdescribed, whereas mermaids don't exist. Similarly, a catalogue of beliefs about experience is not the same as a catalogue of experiences themselves.

Well, after reading this I still didn't understand how it is possible to tell whether a conscious experience actually exists, or whether only a belief about a conscious experience exists.

Wikipedia helped me out. I'm sure many philosophers and neuroscientists consider heterophenomenology to be a meaningless approach to consciousness research, but it seems on the right track to me.

Heterophenomenology ("phenomenology of another not oneself") is a term coined by Daniel Dennett to describe an explicitly third-person, scientific approach to the study of consciousness and other mental phenomena. It consists of applying the scientific method with an anthropological bent, combining the subject's self-reports with all other available evidence to determine their mental state. The goal is to discover how the subject sees the world him- or herself, without taking the accuracy of the subject's view for granted.

Heterophenomenology is put forth as the alternative to traditional Cartesian phenomenology, which Dennett calls "lone-wolf autophenomenology" to emphasize the fact that it accepts the subject's self-reports as being authoritative. In contrast, heterophenomenology considers the subjects authoritative only about how things seem to them. It does not dismiss the Cartesian first-person perspective, but rather brackets it so that it can be intersubjectively verified by empirical means, allowing it to be submitted as scientific evidence.

The method requires a researcher to listen to the subjects and take what they say seriously, but to also look at everything else available to them, including the subject's bodily responses and environment, evidence provided by relevant neurological or psychological studies, the researcher's memories of their own experiences, and any other scientific data that might help to interpret what the subject has reported.

Dennett notes this method is actually the normal way that anyone will choose to investigate aspects of the mind. He writes: "heterophenomenology is nothing new; it is nothing other than the method that has been used by psychophysicists, cognitive psychologists, clinical neuropsychologists, and just about everybody who has ever purported to study human consciousness in a serious, scientific way."

The key role of heterophenomenology in Dennett's philosophy of consciousness is that it defines all that can or needs to be known about the mind. For any phenomenological question "why do I experience X", there is a corresponding heterophenomenological question "why does the subject say 'I experience X'". To quote Dennett, "The total set of details of heterophenomenology, plus all the data we can gather about concurrent events in the brains of subjects and in the surrounding environment, comprise the total data set for a theory of human consciousness. It leaves out no objective phenomena and no subjective phenomena of consciousness."

Sam Harris on dangers of religious ecstasy

Reading "Islam and the Misuses of Ecstasy" by Sam Harris brought back some memories. I wouldn't call them exactly religiously ecstatic, but they were damn close.

The first time I went to India, for two weeks in 1977, I was able to experience one of the large "bhandaras" held at the headquarters of Radha Soami Satsang Beas in the Punjab. This is a photo I took, showing just a portion of the gigantic crowd that had come to hear and see the RSSB guru.

(I wrote in "God's here, but I've got to go" about the decidedly non-ecstatic experience of desperately having to pee while the guru was giving a lengthy discourse and everyone was sitting spellbound.)

Since Radha Soami Satsang Beas is an offshoot of the Sikh tradition, before the guru would appear chanters sang, if that's the right word, passages from the Adi Granth. This was deeply moving to me, even though I couldn't understand what was being said.

Believing is powerful.

Most of the tens of thousands at the bhandara believed that the guru was God in human form, a modern-day Jesus. I did also, though likely not as fervently -- having a more skeptical Western mind.

The atmosphere at a religious gathering like this is almost impossible to describe to someone who hasn't been devoted to an other-worldly belief system. It isn't like being at a football ("soccer," as we Americans say) match where 70,000 people are cheering for their team.

There's some resemblance to the empassioned communal frenzy of a sports event, but religious ecstasy flows in much deeper waters. After all, we're talking eternal salvation here, not a temporary win-loss record.

Sam Harris speaks eloquently of the appeal that such religious experiences have.

First, by way of putting my own empathy on my sleeve, let me say a few things that will most likely surprise many of my readers. Despite my antipathy for the doctrine of Islam, I think the Muslim call to prayer is one of the most beautiful sounds on earth. 

...I find this ritual deeply moving—and I am prepared to say that if you don’t, you are missing something. At a minimum, you are failing to understand how devout Muslims feel when they hear this. I think everything about the call to prayer is glorious—apart from the fact that, judging by the contents of the Koran, the God we are being asked to supplicate is evil and almost surely fictional.

Nevertheless, if this same mode of worship were directed at the beauty of the cosmos and the mystery of consciousness, few things would please me more than a minaret at dawn. 

However, there are dangers in religious ecstasy -- particularly, for Harris, the Muslim variety. 

 

This video has everything: the power of ritual and the power of the crowd; tears of devotion and a lust for vengeance. How many of the people in that mosque are jihadists? I have no idea—perhaps none. But their spiritual aspirations and deepest positive emotions—love, devotion, compassion, bliss, awe—are being focused through the lens of sectarian hatred and humiliation.

Read every word of the translation so that you understand what these devout people are weeping over. Their ecstasy is inseparable from the desire to see nonbelievers punished in hellfire. Is this some weird distortion of the true teachings of Islam? No. This is a recitation from the Koran articulating itscentral message. The video has over 2 million views on YouTube. It was posted by someone who promised his fellow Muslims that they, too, would weep tears of devotion upon seeing it.

The reciter is Sheikh Mishary bin Rashid Alafasy of Kuwait. He has as many Twitter followers as Jerry Seinfeld and J.K. Rowling (2 million). In doctrinal terms, this is not the fringe of Islam. It is the center.

I only watched the first four minutes or so of the eight minute video. That was enough to get the "infidels will burn in hellfire" message. 

And to be reminded of how beautiful chanting of sacred scripture can be. I hadn't realized how much Islamic chanting sounds like Sikh chanting. 

As Harris reminds us, though, there is an ugly message being carried by the beautiful sound. 

Islam marries religious ecstasy and sectarian hatred in a way that other religions do not. Secular liberals who worry more about “Islamophobia” than about the actual doctrine of Islam are guilty of a failure of empathy. They fail not just with respect to the experience of innocent Muslims who are treated like slaves and criminals by this religion, but with respect to the inner lives of its true believers.

Most secular people cannot begin to imagine what a (truly) devout Muslim feels. They are blind to the range of experiences that would cause an otherwise intelligent and psychologically healthy person to say, “I will happily die for this.” Unless you have tasted religious ecstasy, you cannot understand the danger of its being pointed in the wrong direction.

White's "The Science Delusion" is deluded about science

I admit it. I haven't read Curtis White's "The Science Delusion."

But I've read reviews of the book. I considered buying it to see what a skeptic about science has to say. However, White seems so off-base in his claim that science is determined to supplant the humanities as well as religion, I figured it would be a waste of money.

Slate has a fairly favorable review. Some comments on the review make a lot more sense to me, though.

No scientist is saying that physics or chemistry or biology can explain a Dylan song or Dickinson poem. But science can explain the world around us. If you want to get at what the universe is and what we are, science is the only method to get answers. Why? Because it requires experiment and hypothesis testing.  
 
That doesn't mean the arts are useless. Art allows people to tell their own personal experience. Science can't and doesn't try to do that.  
 
Biology can explain that we evolved as social creatures and have brains fine tuned to pick up social information from friends, family, and strangers. But it of course doesn't truly explain the joy of winning your town's Little League world series when you were 12, or the joy and sadness of your relationship of your estranged best friend from college. Only art can do that. 
 
The two don't do the same thing. But if we want to know what the world is and how we work, science is the only means. The arts can explain our experiences in the world but it can't tell us how the world works at a fundamental level. 

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

"In spite of its obsession with Jews"--that was not a minor feature of Nazism, wouldn't you say, Mr. White? These anti-science guys will try to tar science with anything, not even refraining from conforming to Godwin's Law. 
 
Yes, indeed: science (like atheism, in many people's minds) did in fact cause the Holocaust. All scientists should immediately fall on their knees, repent, and swear never to commit the crime of scientific research again. 
 
Yes, indeed (and without the sarcasm now), scientific discoveries can be used for harm, but--believe it or not--so can religion, and just about everything else humans come up with. What White is missing is Feynman's crucial principle, discussed in his Cal Tech commencement talk about "cargo cult science," that if you want to discover anything about reality, you have to use a method that will keep you from fooling yourself. And that, in the long run, is the method science uses.  
 
Poets and artists can give us insight into a lot of things, but how do we know that the insights they offer are in fact true? That's what science is for. Certainly neuroscience has a very long road ahead of it, given the enormous complexity of the human brain. And the little knowledge it has produced so far has been hugely oversold, especially in the popular news media. But that's a reason for getting a better understanding of just what science is and how it works, which is a difficult intellectual task. Unfortunately, something that the popular news media is just not up to.

I completed the course requirements for a Ph.D. in Systems Science (sort of the "science of sciences"). I've known a lot of scientifically-minded people, including some professional scientists. I've read many books about scientific subjects, some by the supposedly anti-humanities people White cites in his book: Daniel Dennett, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens.

What the heck is White so offended about? I've seen no evidence that any of these guys, nor any other scientist, for that matter, denigrates poetry, philosophy, literature, music, art, or any other pursuit included under the term "humanities."

Science and the humanities are different ways of knowing and of experiencing life.

I love science, and I love philosophy. I love facts, and I love feelings. I love the scientific method and I love intuitive aha's (which, of course, are a big part of the scientific method). I love thinking and I love not-thinking. I love non-fiction books and I love literary novels.

Here's the last part of a New York Times review of "The Science Delusion." It made me feel good about my decision to not buy the book.

But where “The Science Delusion” is long on invective, it is short on argument.

White attempts to make a case for a rediscovery of Romanticism and the edgy danger of art as an antidote to a faith in science, but his approach is so scattershot and his tone so grouchy — Camille Paglia meets Andy Rooney — that he never succeeds in convincing the reader that science indeed operates as a matter of faith.

(And for all his complaints about the lack of interest in contemporary philosophy among scientists, his own preference for the early-19th-century German idealist philosophy of Friedrich Schelling, to which he devotes a far-too-slight section, doesn’t exactly give you much confidence that they are missing much.)

I don’t know how “easy” the answers are to the “big questions” raised in “The Science Delusion,” but I am sure that they’re a lot more daunting than anything White has to offer.

Check out "25 Ways To Feel Totally Fucking Awesome"

Most of the time I do feel totally fucking awesome. Now I know why. I'm into almost all of the awesome-feeling ways listed by Chris McCombs on his Hardcore Happiness site.

Some, though, I suck at. Like #20, Sleep. Chris advises 8-9 hours a night. My owl'ish wife and I usually only get about seven, often less. 

I'm also not so great at #17, Minimize. I've got too much crap. But I enjoy buying more. Books. Longboards. Crazy Shirts apparel. Sandals. I figure it's better than buying crystal meth, hookers, or fast food.

Here's some of my favorite tips for feeling totally fucking awesome. Read them all. The guy has an appealing writing style. Peruse his home page for more Hardcore Happiness musings.

22. Don’t Know

The deepest knowing, is the knowing of “I don’t know”

Ever noticed there’s no such thing as a happy Know-it-All?

Thinking we know everything, and trying to make other people realize just how much more we know than they do, is nothing but the miserable little ego trying to make itself all big and puffy. It’s a direct line to complete fucking misery.

True joy comes from living in the wonderment of it all, having the mind of a newborn, taking things in and staying away from labels, judgements and the dubious feeling of somehow being more of a person because of the shit you know.

To fully live and experience life in all it’s wonders is to slice open the filter of what we “think” we know, and come at life in each moment completely open to what the moment brings.

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” 

Socrates

5. Accept

What Is IS. When we argue with IS we get our asses kicked, but only 100% of the time

Everyone’s life is crazy, chaotic and loaded with problems. EVERYONE’S LIFE

The circumstances of our life are never gonna be perfectly harmonious and chaos-free, with every duck in a row, every dollar in the bank, full of perfect health, happy relationships, kids all acting like little angels in the backseat as we hit every green light on Eutopia Highway. That’s just not reality.

If we wait for things to be awesome for us to feel awesome, we are fucked. We are all guaranteed our daily recommended dosage of chaos. To resist the circumstances of our lives and internally argue against things, brings massive amounts of stress and suffering

If we don’t like something about reality, the best thing we can do is accept it and either move on, or work towards creating circumstances more to our liking

Nothing outside of ourselves can make us happy, even Reality.

The way to true joy is through acceptance of What Is. To feel awesome on the reg, it is highly recommend you become an avid fan of Reality, even when it sucks

“Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.”

Henry Adams

2. Move

Our bodies are meant to move, our pores meant to sweat, our muscles meant to contract and stretch, and our blood meant to flow.

Plain and simply, we were meant to mother fucking train.

I don’t care if it’s power-walking with fun loving Mabel, Gertrude and Marge; sweating to the oldies with Richard Simmons, bodyweight workouts at the park, yoga with a bunch of sweaty vegetarians, mountain biking, Crossfit, Jazzercise or heavy powerlifting sessions surrounded by guys with shaved heads, goatees and giant stomachs in a warehouse-style dungeon gyms full of all things heavy and gnarly

If you enjoy it, do it. If you hate it all, find the one you hate the least.

Due to injuries and just bouts of laziness, in the last 20 years I’ve probably been training for 16 or 17 of it and spent a total of 3 or 4 of it not doing any sort of training at all. A year here, six months there, that sorta thing. For the rest of it, I have trained.

During times of no training, I absolutely, categorically felt like shit. Agitated, sluggish and moody.

I realize sometimes it’s hard to pick up anything heavier than the television remote, the big one, ya know, the one that works for your TV, DVD player, Blue Ray, Nintendo and garage door

But if you just get up and get your ass to the gym, the workout WILL get done. You’ll feel a million times better, actually 1.38729 million times better, but I rounded down for the sake of simplicity

If you wanna train, but have trouble actually getting out the door and doing it, Do what I do, lie to yourself. And not just any lie, tell yourself ‘Big Chris’s Favorite Lie’

It goes like this: “I’ll just go do a few quick little light sets today, that’s all”

It works awesome! In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever ended up actually just done a few quick little light sets. Typically after the first few sets I’m fired up and gunnin’ hard. Many of my best workouts have been on the days I’ve told myself that little fib

And guess what? Almost everyone who trains has days they don’t wanna train, and many of them, just like me, rely on that little lie to get them into gear. And just like me, they have some of their best workouts on those days

Do whatever you need to make it happen

I don’t know how people go through their life without some sort of regular training. They’re a strange species, one which can easily be observed in any middle America town. Just go and have a seat at any mall or place where the Mid-West Beings gather and you’ll see what I’m talking about

Mounds of body fat concealing what can best be described as dead muscle tissue . Shoulders rounded forward, palms facing backward. They look like they’re headed off to a Star Trek convention.

Add in the look on their face of “If shit went down right now, I would not know how to defend myself from being eaten, so I better look as ugly and unhealthy to consume as possible” … filled with sloth meat, bitter depression and sour discontent.

That image right there keeps me training my ass off. That, and knowing how shitty it feels not to train.

Now I’m not always in great shape, in fact, I’m known to carry the extra pounds from time to time, like right now actually. But even when I’m drilling new holes near the end of my belt, I’m also training my ass off

Because I KNOW where sitting on it gets me, and that ain’t no fun

There’s something magical that happens at the end of a workout that can carry you through the entire day. Endorphins, serotonin, worked muscles, a clear mind and an unbreakable feeling of accomplishment.

“The Iron is the best antidepressant I have ever found. There is no better way to fight weakness than with strength. Once the mind and body have been awakened to their true potential, it’s impossible to turn back.”

Henry Rollins

 

Jesus appears in a pug's butthole. Praise Dog!

There's really nothing to say about this awesome (or ass-some) miracle: an obvious image of Jesus appearing in, or as, a dog's butthole.

A picture is worth more than any amount of words I could utter in praise of Almighty Dog. (click to enlargenfy)

This explains why dogs spend so much time with their noses up each other's asses. They're looking for Jesus!

Religion: believing we know more than we really do

My wife and I are enjoying "Brain Games," a National Geographic channel program about how the brain works. 

Every episode features exercises that viewers can take part in. An episode we watched a few nights ago was called What You Don't Know. Short answer: a lot. 

But most of us mistakenly believe that we know more than we really do. So says a summary of that episode:

Bet you could explain something as basic as how a zipper works? Or correctly draw something as simple as a bicycle? If you said yes, you likely bet wrong... but don’t worry it’s not just you! When you stop and think about it, you’re probably not that aware of all of the things you don’t understand.

The fact is we go through our daily lives feeling pretty confident in our knowledge and understanding of the world, but that confidence is mostly an illusion. In this episode of Brain Games, we’ll show you firsthand just how the "illusion of knowledge" plagues the human brain and why we fall victim, again and again, to the notion that we understand more than we actually do.

Seemingly evolutionary pressures have been a balancing act. Early humans who weren't sufficiently in touch with reality didn't live long enough to reproduce. So their reality-denying genes were lost. 

However, too much pondering -- "Hmmmm... what is true and what is false?... is that really a tiger in the bushes or a rabbit rustling around?... I feel like running away, but I'm not sure if this factually is the right thing to do..." -- that can be a ticket to an early grave also.

The Brain Games host explained that we need to feel sure about our knowledge, or we wouldn't have the confidence to act decisively. Doing something often is preferable to analysis paralysis. 

Still, the point of What You Don't Know was to provide research-based insights into our tendency to be overly confident that what we think we know, truly is true. Sure, it's good to act decisively.

Davy Crockett famously said, "Be always sure you're right, then go ahead!" Problem is, usually we aren't sure that we're right, yet we still go ahead. This, of course, explains why religions are so appealing.

They feed into our craving for illusory certainty. We're much more bothered by feeling "I don't know," than by feeling "I could be wrong." So when in doubt we choose, "Don't doubt."

Again, this is natural. Probably can't be avoided. It's just good to recognize that even in the midst of acting with a feeling I know what I'm doing, we might be wrong. Maybe really wrong. 

David Chapman, one of my favorite writers/bloggers, addresses a similar subject in "I get duped by eternalism in a casino." Well worth a read. Here's some excerpts:

I upped my bet from one to five cents—and won again.

As I consistently won more than I lost, I was gradually suffused with a warm glow. I felt safe and at home in the world. What a blessed relief!

I realized that the universe loved me, and that everything was going to come out well after all. My ever-present nagging sense of vague wrongness disappeared, and I recognized that it had always been a misunderstanding. Everything is as it should be; everything is connected; everything makes sense; everything is benevolently watched over by the eternal ordering principle.

This was eternalism straight-up, purely at a bodily, felt level.

I’m disposed to nihilism; so, at the same time, I was running a sardonic mental commentary. The cognitive dissonance between feeling unquestioned confidence in the All-Good Cosmic Plan, and my intellectual confidence that casino operators ensure that their slot machines are a losing bet, was extremely funny. That humorousness fed back into my bodily enjoyment.

It didn’t take long to conclude that I had gained all the knowledge I had asked for, and far more. The universe, in its infinite generosity, had gifted me with profound insight. 

...Actually, winning thirty-seven cents was not going to make a such a big difference in my life.

Discovering universal love would. That was a really great feeling. Experiencing that all the time—the way some mystics supposedly do—would be fabulous.

That sense of safety, understanding, and certainty could be addictive. I think that’s part of why we all frequently fall into the eternalist stance—even when we know better.

Eternalism feels right—absolutely right. And when we lose it, we’ll do almost anything to get it back. We’ll pretend not to see obvious randomness, and take up arms to destroy evidence of it.

“Patternicity” is the brain’s built-in tendency to perceive patterns that don’t exist. An example is the experience of seeing a face in the light and dark patches on a rock, or splotch of paint, or piece of toast. It’s often impossible to not-see them, even when you are undeceived, and know perfectly well there’s no face there.

Eternalism is patternicity for broad dimensions of meaning—purpose, value, ethics—rather than physical objects.

Our brains seem to have evolved to find patterns of meaning, too. In the casino, the intellectual understanding that my feelings were ridiculous did not make them any less profound. Runs of unexpected good or bad luck trigger the eternalist stance automatically.

Jay Lake is dying. Honestly. Bravely. Read his blog!

Jay Lake has a terminal cancer diagnosis. He expects to die within a year.

I love Jay Lake. Yet I've never met Jay Lake. I probably never will meet Jay Lake. I only heard of Jay Lake yesterday, from a story about him in the Portland Oregonian. 

Last night I wrote about him on my other blog. I donated $10 to the Jay Wake pre-mortem celebration of his life/roast that is happening next month. I left a comment on the Oregonian story. I can't believe my comment was, and is, just one of two readers of the story have written.

Because already Jay has changed my life. People need to read what he has been writing. It is damn good. More, fucking good. 

The guy is an excellent writer. But what makes his blog posts so fascinating and inspiring to me is Jay's brutal honesty. He is facing terminal cancer head-on. He is facing death head-on. 

Tonight I read some of Jay's blog posts to my wife. She said, "Why are you so engrossed in this? I thought you were afraid of death and didn't like to think about it." Both are true.

I'm afraid of dying. I don't like to think about my death. 

However, I used to be more afraid, more avoidant. Aging has a way of bringing me closer to reality.

My Medicare card came in the mail today. I'm not eligible yet, but the card is stamped with the date when I am -- not many months away. Soon I will be an official freaking Senior Citizen.

And that much closer to death. 

When I get right to the edge of death's door, I want to be like Jay Lake. Laughing at death as much as I can; crying honestly when I can't laugh.

Anyway, enough about me. Now read Jay's writing. Here's some places to start:

His blog's home page.

A post about hope and despair. So real, so honest.

Over the past few years, hope has been frankly poisonous to me. Every time I’ve started to have serious hope, I’ve been shot down by another round of cancer, another round of bad news, to the point where even proudly logical me has become immersed in that species of magical thinking that says, “If you hope, you’ll just lose what you hope for, so better to despair and have the potential to be pleasantly surprised, than to hope and be shot down yet again.” I can only stand to have my head pounded into the metaphorical concrete so many times, and I’m past my limit.

The "religion" category of Jay's blog. He's a truth-telling atheist.

A post about what a bad Buddhist he would be. Me too, Jay.

I would be a terrible Buddhist these days because the literalized metaphor of my suffering is written in scars across my body, in the daily convulsions of my stomach and my bowels, in the despair and fear and occasional triumph of my thoughts. I live in the valley of the shadow of death, and there is no one here to succor me except myself, and those whose hands reach back from the light beyond.

This suffering would make me a terrible Buddhist, because it keeps me too focused on my sense of self and my narrative in this world. But it might be making me a better human being. At least I love more thoughtfully and live more carefully than I used to. If I am coming to believe in anything in the faith-holding sense, it is that I have come to believe in my own death. Which is of course the least surprising aspect of life.

The narrative? She keeps changing.

Beautiful concentration: expressed in words and an amazing video

This morning I picked up a slender book I hadn't looked at for a while, "Practical Taoism" (translated by Thomas Cleary). 

I liked how the translator's preface started out.

Taoism, the original wisdom tradition of ancient China, may be rendered in English as "Wayfaring." In this manner of usage, the Way is classically defined in these terms: "Humanity follows earth, earth follows heaven, heaven follows the Way, the Way follows Nature." In the final sense, therefore, Taoism, or Wayfaring, refers to the pursuit of natural laws.

These natural laws are reflected in the body (earth), the mind (heaven), and in the order of the universe (the Way of Nature). The practice of Taoism, therefore, takes place in the cultivation and refinement of the natural capacities of the human body-mind continuum and its relationship with the social milieu and the natural world.

Then I read:

When there is something to strive for, don't give rise to ideas of gain and loss. Whether there is something to do, or nothing to do, let the mind always be at rest.

...When there is no intention to concentrate and yet one is never unconcentrated, that is called stable concentration. 

Control without obsession, relaxation without indulgence, no aversion in the midst of clamor, no vexation in the midst of events -- this is true concentration.

...Since ancient times, those who forgot the concrete have been many, while those who forgot the abstract have been few. To be insightful but not exploit it is forgetting the abstract.

...The Way of absolute nonresistance has power that may be shallow or deep. When it is deep, its effect includes the physical body; when shallow, it only extends to the mind. Those whose bodies are affected are spiritual people.

...Just go on responding to what is most immediately urgent, peacefully and calmly, without agitation or ignorance. This is what is called always being responsive while always being serene.

After reading those words I watched an amazing, inspiring, beautiful You Tube video called "The Incredible Power of Concentration -- Miyoko Shida." I came across it somehow or other: Facebook or Twitter's naturalistic grace.

Wow. This woman has true concentration. She is spiritual, because her Way is bodily. Also of the mind; I loved a scene near the end where she looks calmly and concentratedly directly into the camera. 

Keep your scriptures. Keep your holy places. Keep your godly saints. I'll take whatever Miyoko Shida has. Here's the inpiring video.

 

Here I learned that her performance was on a Spanish television program called "Tú Sí Que Vales" ("You Can Do It"). 

For sure. She can do it. 

Whatever "it" is. Seems like we all have it. It just shines more evidently in some people, places, and things than others. And within each of us, it waxes and wanes mysteriously.

The Taoism book I read this morning says:

But even though you cannot see it when you look, never are you not seeing it; even though you cannot hear it when you listen for it, never are you not hearing it. 

It is like the wind shaking trees and raising waves -- you can hardly call it nonexistent, but when you look at it you cannot see it, and when you grasp for it you cannot apprehend it, so you can hardly call it existent.

I find my fundamentalism-mocking blog post hilarious also

One of the joys of writing thousands of blog posts is reuniting with one of my long-forgotten creations. 

Today I saw that a new comment had been submitted on a post.

This is hilarious! Love it!

Naturally I had to check out what was so hilarious and lovable. Unsurprisingly, after I read what I'd written seven years ago I thought to myself: This is hilarious! Love it!

Check out "Top ten signs you're a fundamentalist Satsangi." It will make more sense if you know something about the Indian religious organization I used to be a member of.

But the inspiration for this post is religious hypocrisy. And that's a virtually universal phenomenon among faiths, whether of East or West.

Here's a sampling of the ten signs:

(4) You have worked diligently for years toward merging your soul with God’s spirit, establishing a direct personal relationship with the divine. However, if an impulse or intuition comes to you that isn’t given a thumbs-up by the Sant Mat books, you’re afraid it’s a trick of the “negative power.”

(3) You are grateful that you’ve broken free of traditional religious dogma that required you, without evidence, to have faith that a dead Son of God will save your soul after you die. Yet the only difference is, now you have the same unfounded faith in a living Son of God.

We will bury you!

Here's another churchless guest post from regular commenter "cc." I titled this post as he named his short essay.

Hope he's right... that science and evidence-based rationality will supplant religiosity. It's a slow process, though.

The United States is highly developed in many regards. But we have a seemingly never-ending supply of religious nutheads.

Under certain conditions, science undermines religion and eventually supplants it.

This is demonstrated in the developed world  where the scientific method is held in higher esteem than religious faith. In the most highly developed countries, only a minority of knuckleheads revere and refer to holy scriptures, the mumbo-jumbo of a spiritual leader, and anecdotal evidence. 

But,  despite this trend in some places, what we're seeing world-wide is more faith-based religious nuts and maniacs than ever before. 

As a species, we're reproducing faster than we can reduce the number of numbskulls we're tossing into the gene pool. It seems that if we can't develop faster than we can reproduce, our development is bound to be overtaken by the very brutishness it is fleeing. 

This is not to say that I have no hope, but to say that I have no faith, and, if I may say, it's a tremendous relief. You can't believe what a burden belief is until you lose your faith.

Inner speech: who am I talking to inside my head?

I talk to myself a lot. I'm doing that now.

I don't really know what I'm going to say in this blog post until a voice speaks inside my head. It seems to speak simultaneously with both my thinking and my typing -- inner speech, thought, and communication all happening together in some mysterious fashion.

This feels normal to me. And according to an article in this week's issue of New Scientist, "LIfe in the Chatter Box," most people do the same thing. Here's how the article starts out:

Our inner speech turns out to shape our thoughts and decisions in more ways than you might have imagined

IT CAN happen anywhere. I can be driving, walking by the river or sitting quietly in front of a blank screen. Sometimes suddenly, sometimes gradually and imperceptibly, I become conscious of words that no one else can hear, telling me things, guiding me, evaluating my actions. I am doing something perfectly ordinary – I am thinking– and it takes the form of a voice in my head.

If you ask people to reflect on their own stream of consciousness, they often describe experiences like this. Usually termed inner speech, it is also referred to as the inner voice, internal monologue or dialogue, or verbal thought. But although philosophers have long been interested in the relationship between language and thought, many believed that inner speech lay outside the realms of science.

That is now changing, with new experimental designs for encouraging it, interfering with it and neuroimaging it. We are beginning to understand how the experience is created in the brain; its subjective qualities – essentially, what the words "sound" like; and its role in processes such as self-control and self-awareness. The voice in our head is finally revealing its secrets, and it is just as powerful as you might have imagined.

Fascinating.

I looked around the Hearing the Voice web site referenced in the article, but came away disappointed. Mostly the project seems to be focused on inner voices related to schizophrenia and other mental illnesses.

Yet the author, Charles Fernyhough (director of Hearing the Voice), does a good job in his article of discussing the pros and cons of inner speech for those of us who seem to be mentally OK, more or less. I'd hoped to find more on the web site along these lines:

Quite how much our inner and outer speech overlap remains a matter of debate. According to one view, inner speech is just external speech without articulation: the brain plans an utterance, but stops short of kicking our muscles into action. If that is the case, our internal voice should resonate with the same qualities of tone, timbre and accent as our ordinary external speech.

There are some hints that this may be the case. In their lab at the University of Nottingham, UK, psychologists Ruth Filik and Emma Barber recently asked participants to read limericks silently in their heads. One was: There was a young runner from Bath, Who stumbled and fell on the path; She didn't get picked, As the coach was quite strict, So he gave the position to Kath.

The other limerick read: There was an old lady from Bath, Who waved to her son down the path; He opened the gates, And bumped into his mates, Who were Gerry, and Simon, and Garth.

Importantly, some of the participants had northern English accents, with short vowels (pronouncing "Bath" to rhyme with "Kath"), while the others had the long vowels of a southern accent ("Bath" rhyming with "Garth"). By tracking the volunteers' eye-movements, the researchers showed that reading was disrupted when the final word of the limerick did not rhyme in that volunteer's accent – when a southerner read "Bath" then "Kath", for instance.

Although this study suggests that inner speech does indeed have an accent – and presumably other qualities of our spoken voice – one concern is that the inner speech we produce when reading is not necessarily the same thing as our everyday, spontaneous inner speech, which means that more naturalistic studies are needed.

So much for the subjective qualities of inner speech. What, if anything, does it actually do? Vygotsky proposed that words in inner speech function as psychological tools that transform the task in question, just as the use of a screwdriver transforms the task of assembling a shed. Putting our thoughts into words gives them a more tangible form which makes them easier to use. It may also be that verbal thought can allow communication between other cognitive systems, effectively providing a common language for the brain.

One of Vygotsky's most enticing predictions was that private and inner speech give us a way of taking control of our own behaviour, by using words to direct our actions. While driving up to a roundabout in busy traffic, for example, I'll still tell myself, "Give way to the right", especially if I've just been driving overseas. Knocking out the systems responsible for inner speech should therefore impede our performance on certain tasks that require planning and control, offering a powerful test of the hypothesis.

For many years I was an avid mantra meditator. Meaning, I repeated a mantra both during an hour or two of morning meditation, and also during the rest of the day as much as I could. 

The basic underlying hypothesis, though not exactly expressed as such, was that speaking less to myself with my inner voice was better than speaking more to myself -- the whole "monkey mind" thing. However, experiments have shown that inner speech enables us to do some things better.

Not surprising, really.

Such experiments typically require participants to repeat a word to themselves out loud to suppress their verbal thoughts while they perform a task (a technique known as articulatory suppression). Using this set-up, Jane Lidstone, one of my colleagues at Durham University, looked at the performance of children aged 7 to 10 on a planning task known as the Tower of London, which involves moving coloured balls around between three sticks of differing lengths in order to match a given pattern.

Lidstone found that children performed worse if they had to repeat a word out loud, compared with trials in which they instead tapped repetitively with one of their feet. Similar findings have emerged from studies with adults. Alexa Tullett and Michael Inzlicht of the University of Toronto in Canada gave student participants aclassic test of control known as the Go/No-Go task, which required them to press a button the moment they saw a yellow square pop up on the screen, but to remain still when they saw a purple square. It is a considerable test of impulse control, and, as predicted, the students were less accurate during articulatory suppression, compared with when they were doing a spatial task.

Although experiments like these seem artificial, they allow researchers the kind of control over conditions that good science demands to test something like self-control.

So we know that inner speech has a role in regulating behaviour, but could it also have a role in motivating it? The research on children's private speech (Vygotsky's precursor of inner speech, remember) shows that it frequently has an emotional or motivational flavour. Athletes often give themselves pep talks before, during and after performances. In our study of the quality of inner speech, McCarthy-Jones and I found that two-thirds of students reported using internal speech that either evaluated their behaviour or served to motivate it.

Inner speech may even help us to become aware of who we are as individuals. Some philosophers have proposed that awareness of inner speech is important for understanding our own mental processes, an aspect of what psychologists call metacognition.

Children typically do not become aware of their own inner speech until around age 4, although it is uncertain whether that reflects their inability to reflect on their own thought processes, or the fact that inner speech is not yet fully internalised by that age.

At Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada, psychologist Alain Morin has found that people who use inner speech more often show better self-understanding. "Inner speech allows us to verbally analyse our emotions, motives, thoughts and behavioural patterns," he says. "It puts to the forefront of consciousness what would otherwise remain mostly subconscious."

In my current churchless frame of mind I'm considerably less concerned about shutting up my inner speech via a mantra or some other means.

The New Scientist article provided some reasons for being skeptical about the oft-heard meditative claim that a silent mind is a wise mind. Sometimes, it seems. Sometimes not. It all depends.

Inner speech must be good for something, or many things. Otherwise us humans wouldn't have evolved to have it.

Separating numinous from supernatural

Occasionally "cc," a regular commenter on this blog, sends me email messages. They're as cogent, interesting, and well-written as his comments. 

Below is a recently-received message that deserves sharing. One of the things I like most about cc's style is the open-endedness of his thoughts. Usually what he says leaves me with more questions, rather than answers.

Or questions about answers.

Reading the following message, I was struck by the words numinous and numinosity. "Numinous" usually is considered to belong in the realm of religion, referring to some sort of divine experience. 

But the Wikipedia article notes that numinous can be separated from religion and the supernatural.

For example, when one experiences awe and fascination with natural phenomenon such as majestic landscapes, night sky or deep appreciation of fellow human creations such as art and engineering marvels. At times like these a feeling of the numinous can overwhelm the mind and body, yet in no way is this interpreted to be supernatural or of divine origin. The very fact that one feels inspired by such encounters extends the depth of feeling of the numinous and makes accessible a real sense of humane solidarity with ourselves and with our natural world.

A You Tube video is referenced that consists of a discussion between Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens. I'll embed it after cc's message. Well worth watching. We can have a non-supernatural sense of the "divine," for sure.

Here's what "cc" had to say:

The more you know about mistakes, the less likely you are to make them. Sometimes it's reasonable to assume that someone knows better than you, and sometimes it's foolish. 

It's best to find out what someone claims to know before believing them, and if what they know is too abstruse or recondite for you to verify or deny, it's best to be skeptical. 

Some people  know a lot about some things and a lot of people just think they know things, and this is because most people can't really think. If they could, they would see the error of accepting anything that can't be tested for veracity or be logically explained without allowing for the numinous. 

Pascal's wager was that it's better to assume the existence of God than to doubt or deny it because, should it turn out that God does exist, the doubter/disbeliever is worse off. But what about the self? Do I, me, you, as persons really exist, or are we as fictitious as God? 

If you found out that you are no more than an improvised character constantly adapting or constantly justifying its intransigence, would that have a liberating and innoculating effect, or would it compel you to launch a new religion? 

You might do the latter if you'd lived a hundred years ago when the realization of what self is/isn't was big news to people who hadn't made a religion of it yet.

The truth is that most people are dreadfully confused about the self because, as much as they want themselves to be found non-existent, they don't want to lose the numinous. They want it both ways, and they go about having it by using magic words - words for which the meanings can't be pinned down. 

The words "love" and "self" are so uncertain in their meanings that they can mean what you want them to mean. Religion is built on what can't be grasped, and science, on what can. 

The scientist looks down on the religionist because all he really does is play with words, and the religionist looks down on the scientist because he views the numinous skeptically. 

How can we talk meaningfully about love if we can't live lovingly on this planet? How can we talk meaningfully about the self if we can't acknowledge its appointed numinosity?