Church of the Churchless

Don't be Big Brother to yourself, "I" watching "me"

Non-religious Buddhism and neuroscience agree on this: there is no such thing as a "self." Meaning, there isn't an "I" who is separate from "me," a soul separate from body, a mind separate from brain.

Understanding this -- no, more, intuitively experiencing the truth of this -- cuts through mountains of religious, spiritual, mystical, and philosophical crap. It also makes life way simpler. 

It's crazy that we humans look upon ourselves as if we are an object to be manipulated, like a smart phone or chainsaw. We're always asking ridiculous questions like, "Why don't I feel better about myself?" 

There is just feeling. This is Buddhism 101. Also Neuroscience 101.

Nobody is sitting inside your head watching your brain do its thing. You are your brain doing its thing. Part of that thing it does is generate self-reflective complexity. (See my post, "What we are: a strange loop in an ego tunnel.")

Thus spirituality, a word that should be done away with but won't be anytime soon, has two basic directions -- one truthful and one imaginary.

The truthful way to go is founded on a recognition of no-self, thereby melding the best of ancient traditions like Buddhism and Taoism with findings of modern neuroscience. The imaginary spiritual path envisions an enduring self at the end of the road, an eternal soul, a timeless drop in a divine ocean.

Such is what Chögyam Trungpa critiques as spiritual materialism. Or spiritual egoism. Most religions, whether of the Eastern or Western variety, fall prey to this. They teach that we humans aren't our bodies, nor our brains. 

Rather, our essence is something indestructible and eternal, not subject to the laws of nature that govern the observable cosmos.

This leads to the mistaken belief that "I" am separate from "me." Some ethereal consciousness, my deepest reality, is able to look upon other aspects of me as if it were a mountain top observatory studying far-off stars.

Not true, says Trungpa. Here are some passages from his book, "Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism."

This is the self-consciousness of watching yourself, observing yourself unnecessarily. Whatever we do is constantly being watched and censored. Actually it is not Big Brother who is watching; it is Big Me! Another aspect of me is watching me, behind me, just about to strike, just about to pinpoint my failure. There is no joy in this approach, no sense of humor at all.

...There is a sense of seeing oneself as an external object, which leads to the first notion of "other." One is beginning to have a relationship with a so-called "external" world.

...Once we have taken away this preconception of the existence of mind and reality, then situations emerge clearly, as they are. There is no one to watch, no one to know anything. Reality just is, and this is what is meant by the term "shunyata." Through this insight the watcher which separates us from the world is removed.

...When we experience shunyata, we are completely involved, without the subject-object division of duality. We are also free from confusion.

This sounds a lot like the flow so beloved of athletes, dancers, musicians, and indeed, all of us. In our most joyous and productive moments we aren't aware of our awareness, of acting out our actions, of being mindful of our mindfulness.

We're just doing and feeling whatever is being done and felt. Pretty damn simple. 

I'm liking Chögyam Trungpa's take on spiritual materialism

Somehow I'd read a lot of books on Buddhism without ever becoming familiar with Chögyam Trungpa. I'd heard the name before, but had no idea who the guy was.

Recently one thing led to another, which led me to buy his "Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism." I'd read a short essay of his in a book on mindfulness.

That spurred me to Google him, where I found that Trungpa was a Buddhist meditation master who, among other things, had sex with students, abused alcohol and cocaine, and had other endearing qualities (to someone irreligious like me).

So I bought the above-mentioned book. I'm liking it, though parts of it don't appeal to me.

Trungpa, though dismissive of many aspects of traditional Buddhism, still believes that a guru is necessary for spiritual development. Not in any esoteric supernatural sense; the guru simply is a "spiritual friend" with no special qualities other than an ability and willingness to help someone realize that, basically, there is nothing to realize.

The meeting of the two minds really takes place very naturally. Both the instructor and the student meet in a state of openness in which they both realize that openness is the most insignificant thing in the whole world. It is completely insignificant, truly ordinary, absolutely nothing.

OK. Having a spiritual friend sounds fine.

It just seems to me that in this instance, Trungpa is a captive of the Tibetan Buddhism teachings. He had a teacher; he acted as a teacher himself; so he feels it is necessary to have a spiritual friend. I don't agree. And other themes in Trungpa's book argue against his "must have guru" advice.

For example, here is a Q and A where Trungpa does the answering.

Q: What guides you on the path?

A: Actually, there does not seem to be any particular guidance. In fact, if someone is guiding you, that is suspicious, because you are relying on something external. Being fully what you are in yourself becomes guidance, but not in the sense of vanguard, because you do not have a guide to follow. You do not have to follow someone's tail, but you sail along. In other words, the guide does not walk ahead of you, but walks with you.

ln another place Trungpa says:

Reinforcement is provided by the situation automatically. When things must be conducted in a tough manner, you just do it because the situation demands your response. You do not impose toughness; you are an instrument of the situation.

Now, this probably sounds like just common sense, and it is. For those sucked into strange Buddhist beliefs though, or esoteric religious beliefs of any sort, Trungpa offers up some antidotes to what he calls "spiritual materialism."

We have many expectations, especially if we seek a spirtual path and involve ourselves with spiritual materialism. We have the expectation that spirituality will bring us happiness and comfort, wisdom and salvation. This literal, egocentric way of regarding spirituality must be turned completely upside down. Finally, if we give up all hope of attaining any sort of enlightenment, then at that moment the path begins to open.

...Self-deception is a constant problem as we progress along a spiritual path. Ego is always wanting to achieve spirituality. It is rather like wanting to witness your own funeral.

...Self-deception seems always to depend upon the dream world, because you would like to see what you have not yet seen, rather than what you now are seeing. You will not accept that whatever is here now is what is, nor are you willing to go on with the situation as it is. 

Thus self-deception always manifests itself in terms of trying to create or recreate a dream world, the nostalgia of the dream experience. And the opposite of self-deception is just working with the facts of life. 

If one searches for any kind of bliss or joy, the realization of one's imagination and dream, then, equally, one is going to suffer failure and depression. This is the whole point: a fear of separation, the hope of attaining union, these are not just manifestations of or the actions of ego or self-deception, as if ego were somehow a real thing which performed certain actions.

...So the real experience, beyond the dream world, is the beauty and color and excitement of the real experience of now in everyday life. When we face things as they are, we give up the hope of something better. 

...You drop searching for anything altogether, drop trying to discover anything, trying to prove yourself. 

Believing in God is hard work (since God isn't real)

Thanks to a David Chapman tweet, I came across an academic article about religious belief. Interesting stuff. Below I've chosen some excerpts from Pascal Boyer's piece which capture, pretty much, the gist of his commentary on another scholar's book, "When God Talks Back."

Since for many years I was a member of an India-based organization, led by a guru, which believed it was possible to communicate with God in a supernatural fashion, I was intrigued by how similar the basic process used by Christian evangelicals is -- when they try to convert their "reflective" beliefs into "intuitive" experiences of God's presence.

Yes, belief is hard work.

Not so much a conceptual belief that God exists and cares about us, but a belief founded on some sort of experiential evidence that God is communicating with us. This requires cultivating a conviction that a thought (or sensory perception) isn't "ours." It is a message from God. Read on...

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Excerpts from Pascal Boyer's "Why 'Belief' is Hard Work: Implications of Tanya Luhrmann's When God Talks Back":
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The London practitioners of “witchcraft” among whom Tanya Luhrmann did her first fieldwork engaged in practices widely perceived as ridiculous, indeed preposterous. Their stated beliefs were eclectic and generally couched in rather inchoate metaphors. By contrast, American evangelicals practice a respected version of mainstream Christianity. What makes them special is a clearly articulated belief that God can, precisely, talk back.

But the rub is, he does not. Or, to be more specific, the definite intuition that an agent is around, that this agent really is the god, that the god is talking, requires a lot of work, and is rather rare and frustratingly elusive. Even among the most accomplished of believers, a few islands of intuition are surrounded by oceans of doubt and disbelief. 

...As Luhrmann’s book demonstrates at length, it takes a considerable amount of work to reach some degree of intuitive belief that “God” is around, that “He” is listening and talking back. From the outside, Evangelicals are often perceived as people with certainties: they know there is a god, they know what he is like, they communicate with him.

Inside the group, we find more or less the opposite. Christian beliefs are of course held with fervor, but the crucial element, the presence of and communication with a superhuman agent, are described as goals to achieve rather than a starting point. Many Evangelicals readily admit that they have not (or not yet) reached that point. 

...Practice works—somewhat, sometimes. Many members of the group have experienced the “breakthrough” when inchoate thoughts or images seem to organize themselves into a coherent feeling of presence and a clear message from the imagined agent. Personality variables clearly help in the process, as Luhrmann’s data on interpersonal differences demonstrates, but the main factor remains dedicated practice—one is led to the intuition of a god’s presence through sustained practice.

But why on earth is it that difficult? 

......In the spirit of Lurhmann’s ethnography, one should generalize the observation. Many religious practices seem exceedingly odd if we see them as based on preexisting unproblematic beliefs. Once we realize that the belief is a conjecture, these activities make more cognitive (and existential) sense.

Initially, spirits may or may not be around. But after the whole night of ritual and the 10,000 verses, to some people at some junctures this conjectural representation becomes more vivid, more accessible, is associated with actual experience, is given some explanatory power—in other words is potentially turned into what we commonly call a belief. It is highly doubtful that shamanistic songs ever helped deliver infants—but making people think that might be the case is the real “symbolic efficacy.” 

...The distinction is relevant to the question at hand, because in most places, at most times, most people’s representations of superhuman agents (gods, spirits, etc.) are of the reflective type. People entertain deliberate thoughts to the effect that, for example, “So-and-so’s illness had to do with the spirits” or “God has a plan for me.” These are the metarepresentational “beliefs” that we anthropologists elicit or infer from people’s statements and behaviors.

But such reflective thoughts can, sometimes, be associated with specific intuitions. This happens for instance when a magician announces that his “mystical force” will “annihilate” the object placed on the table (such statements create reflective, explicit representations in the minds of the audience), and, indeed, touching the object makes it disappear, or so it seems. The reflective thoughts about “mystical force” are now associated with intuitions (remembered perceptions), which of course makes them vastly more attention-grabbing, and potentially more plausible.

One should not look down on such cheap tricks. They are important, if not essential, in many religious traditions. Getting to see an image of a god in a piece of toast may not seem to us the most profound instance of religious experience, but that is because we are used to highly intellectualized, institutionalized forms of religious activity. In many places the world over, conjuring tricks and manufactured illusions are perfectly respectable adjuncts to more sober myth and ritual.  

...The Evangelicals in Tanya Luhrmann’s group have set themselves the Herculean task of associating reflective beliefs with intuitions without ever resorting to cheap tricks. Instead, the process requires gradual changes to their conscious appraisal of their own thoughts. Starting with material that most Christians would agree with, for example, that “God is everywhere, can hear all our thoughts and talk to us,” they endeavor to calibrate their own mental systems until this conceptual description fools, so to speak, their perceptual systems.

How can one achieve that? The techniques used are all “empirical,” fashioned though trial and error in the various Evangelical communities, and taught largely through individual testimonials. I cited above the various domains of training—imagination, sensory imagery, emotion. But how does this lead to the intuition of superhuman presence? Given a variety of specific thoughts and experiences, some more coherent or vivid than others, how is one to judge that a particular one is the real thing?

This is indeed the pivotal question in the Evangelical’s progress. A crucial element here is the ownership of thoughts. To become (somewhat more) convinced that a thought of yours is a direct message from the god, you have to feel that it is not yours.

More accurately, once you feel that a particular thought did not come from your own cogitations, the conjectural reflective interpretation, that it came from another agent, is considerably strengthened. This is why believers train themselves to identify and monitor those thoughts, the ownership of which is not certain. They are told about and pay special attention to various diagnostic signs.

First, pay attention to emergent thoughts that seem too odd or unexpected to feel like “yours.” Second, check that the thoughts in question “fit” what you would imagine the god might tell you. Third, most important, others around you should agree that the thought may be of divine origin. Fourth, the thought should trigger a unique feeling of peace, the emotional signature of an experience that supposedly cannot be self-generated. 

...At the beginning of the book, Luhrmann comments that evolutionary psychology (so far) does not explain why many people think of their gods as real. That is quite true. In fact one could go further. The more we know about our evolved psychology, the more we understand why most people, at most times, in most situations will not consider their gods real, in the sense of having a definite intuition that the gods are actually there.

Our agency-detection and behavior-interpretation mechanisms were tailored to allow the smooth operation of human communication and coordination. Getting ownership right is part of the design of the system, so we should expect that, barring severe pathology, intuitions of nonownership will remain exceptional and difficult to cultivate.

This of course may seem surprising, as a reflective notion of superhuman agency, and its involvement in human affairs, is so pervasive in human cultures, indeed probably one of the most easily acquired pieces of socially transmitted information. But, as I indicated above, the paradox is mostly an artifact of our folk understanding of “belief,” which gets in the way of a proper understanding of mental states.

We cannot really understand why a successful cultural notion describes an exceedingly rare intuition as long as we confuse intuitive mental content with explicit reflections, as is very generally the case in anthropology, but also, sad to report, in many areas of cognitive psychology. Sometimes ethnographers have to step in where cognitive scientists got it all muddled up. We should be grateful to the rare anthropologist who, like Tanya Luhrmann, does just that.  

I don't believe in God, but I am SO saved

I'm feeling pretty damn good about my afterlife. Mostly because I don't think I'll have one. So almost certainly I won't be feeling anything at all after I die, which takes away worries about what will happen.

Notice that almost certainly, though. I'm open both to the possibility that my consciousness could survive bodily death, and God could be waiting to greet the soul I don't believe I have.

In that event, no problem. I'm confident that my encounter with divinity will go just fine. Here's why I'm so sanguine.

Nobody knows which sort of God, if any, exists.

Broadly speaking, us humans have conceived of God in two general ways: Western (personal, anthropomorphic, involved with the world) and Eastern (universal, beyond conception, above it all while also being all).

I was baptized Catholic. Also had my first communion. Christianity-wise, I'm saved! My salvation ticket is in hand! Well, sort of, theologically speaking. But I only paid attention to the good parts in this article about baptism.

That covers the Western front. I'm even better off if God has an Eastern character.

I was initiated by an Indian guru who is considered to be God in human form. I meditated diligently as instructed for about thirty-five years. A central promise of the guru's teachings, a form of Sant Mat, was that union with God was guaranteed within four lifetimes.

Meaning, three rebirths max, and I'm connected with The Source! Even if my faith faltered in this incarnation, as it did with Catholicism when I was a kid. 

But like I said, it's impossible to know what kind of God might exist. The dude could be completely different from the Catholic and Sant Mat conceptions. Recognizing this, eight years ago I founded a new all-encompassing religion, Galobet.

Everything was becoming crystal clear, in much the same way as I remember my college statistics textbook becoming so much more interesting after a Benzedrine or two. Except, this natural high came from organic Fair Trade beans. And Galobet was directing my thoughts. He wanted to be known. I was to be his messenger.

I started jotting down the names of God associated with the major religions. I threw in Neoplatonism, even though it isn’t really a religion, because it is a philosophy that forms the root of many faiths. Not that I need to explain myself. Galobet can do whatever he wants; I am simply a tool in his mighty hand.

God—Christianity
Allah—Islam
Lord—Judaism
Brahman—Hinduism
Tao—Taoism
One—Neoplatonism
Emptiness—Buddhism

There was something here. I knew it. But Galobet wanted me to struggle with his revelation a bit. I wrote down the first letter of each name of God. I rearranged them in various ways. At first I had “Jehovah” for Judaism, but suddenly “Lord” struck me as a better choice.

I went from JAGBEOT to JAGOBET to LAGOBET. And then came the divine inspiration:

GALOBET. Right away it just seemed so…right. I had revealed the name of God, the God who encompasses all other gods, the God who was using my caffeine-soaked brain as his revelatory blackboard.

Thus if any of the major earthly religions have got God's nature roughly correct, I can confidently give God a cosmic high-five in the afterlife and say, "I was your devotee. Shower me with divine delights, the spiritual rewards I so richly deserve."

Ah, but what if God is completely, absolutely, unimaginably different from any conception a human being could have of the dude? (I will continue to refer to God as "dude," since the word is so marvelously all-encompassing).

No problem with this either! Every day I engage in an atheist meditation that pleases God.

What I say is: I open myself to reality, however it may appear.

Though I don't believe in God, just the possibility of God, I like to picture God smiling when she/he/it hears this. If I were God, that's exactly the sort of "prayer" which would please me. I wouldn't want people to guess about the sort of God I am, which is what religions do.

I'd want people to say "Great Dude God, whatever you're like, whatever you're all about, we're cool with that. Just show us your stuff and we'll go Yeah... nice!"

No egocentric guessamatic expectations. Reality welcomed, godly or otherwise, in whatever form is, well, real.

Bottom line: I am SO saved. Without believing in God.

Physics and religion are both weird, but in different ways

I'm an avid consumer of physics books aimed at the general public. "Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn" and "The Island of Knowledge" are my most recent reads. 

What comes through loud and clear in both books is how freaking far out modern physics and cosmology have become. Believe me, this isn't the sort of science I remember from high school, where the teacher had a model of an atom that looked like a miniature solar system.

That way of looking at the atomic realm was recognized to be wrong even back then, of course. Quantum mechanics demolished the old way of looking at reality early on in the 20th century. 

The standard (Copenhagen) interpretation of looking at the quantum realm considers that measurement somehow brings potentiality into actuality. Nonlocality, quantum entities being connected across any distance, also is a recognized feature of reality.

This barely scratches the surface of the weirdness being posited by physicists these days. Many of their notions are by no means proven, yet each makes sense in its own strange way. 

A story in The Telegraph, "The 10 weirdest physics facts, from relativity to quantum physics," is a pretty good Wow! list. Here's some of them, minus the explanations.

All the matter that makes up the human race could fit in a sugar cube
Events in the future can affect what happened in the past
Almost all of the Universe is missing
There are an infinite number of mes writing this, and an infinite number of yous reading it
A particle here can affect one on the other side of the universe, instantaneously

"5 Reasons We May Live in a Multiverse" is also mind-blowing. (And related to the infinite number of mes and yous item above.) As vast and mysterious as our universe appears, with its 100 billion or so galaxies, each with 100 billion or more stars, all this may be just a minute bubble in an ever-bubbling infinite ocean of universes.

Thus religions don't have a monopoly on weird ideas. Not at all.

In fact, religious theologies typically are quite blandly traditional, being an outgrowth of decidedly human ways of being. God, for example, usually is depicted as being a lot like us -- creating, loving, judging, acting, knowing. 

God's powers are just vastly expanded versions of human ones. However, modern physics is exploring ideas that, so far at least, are beyond our capacity to comprehend. Fitting together quantum mechanics and relativity theory has baffled the best minds on Earth for almost a hundred years.

I like weirdness of all varieties. But between physics' weirdness and religion's weirdness, I prefer the former. 

Physicists take off from what is known to be true (understanding that all scientific truths are subject to change) and make leaps into what may lie beyond. Religious believers just leap. In all directions. Willy-nilly. 

Further, by and large scientists are appropriately uncertain. When they don't have solid evidence to support a hypothesis, they'll admit this is just a blue sky idea meriting exploration. Religions, by contrast, will defend to the death -- sometimes literally -- unproven fantastical ideas. 

Here's a passage that I liked from a concluding chapter of Marcelo Gleiser's book about physics and cosmology, "The Island of Knowledge."

If, up to the early twentieth century, the doctrines of religious faith dictated to a large extent how people lived their lives, and thus had an enormous emotional and existential impact on society as a whole, in our times it is science that increasingly plays this role.

At the most fundamental level, our scientific discoveries define what we call reality. And here comes the twist. We have explored how science, in its effort to explain the workings of Nature, has intrinsic limitations in its precision and in the formulation of natural laws.

As these necessarily change in time due to the methodic advancement of human inquiry, the arena we call reality is always shifting. New concepts of space and time, of what a field is and how it shapes how matter interacts; the very concept of what matter is; even the uniqueness of our Universe: all of these foundational stones of what philosophers call our ontology, the conceptual entities by which we describe reality, are always transitional.

The very nature of scientific inquiry, always ongoing and always under revision, necessarily implies the notion of a changing understanding of reality.

As a consequence, we can't ever state what reality is. The best that we can do is to state what we know of the nature of reality today. Those who cling to the notion that one day we will arrive at the very fundamental essence of reality are victims of what I call The Fallacy of Final Answers, which have plagued human knowledge since Thales first asked what the world was made of. 

I'm asked about my RSSB meditation experience

Today I heard from someone who discovered this blog by accident and has been enjoying my early posts. (The person is starting from the beginning, in 2004, and reading onwards.)

At the end of the email message I was asked a question.

Apart from generally saying hello, I thought I'd ask you something as well.  You've been following the RSSB system quite a few years (quite a few decades, more like).  You haven't found your "answer" there, as you've made clear in your blog : but I was wondering if you'd be comfortable sharing what, if anything, you've experienced in the course of your meditation as prescribed by them. 

I ask because you seem to have invested a very great deal of time on this, so presumably at least the basics of anything there is to experience within that particular system you would have already had at least a glimpse of.  With other traditions, your musings can be no more than ruminations and analyses, but you will have concrete, experiential things to say about that particular meditation technique.  So, was it a big fat zero, nothing at all, or what?  
 
Or, if you've already answered this question in one of your articles that I haven't yet read, perhaps you could just link to it in reply?

Well, after writing almost two thousand Church of the Churchless posts over the past decade, I have to use Google to find my musings about a particular subject, just as anyone else would. I did some searching via the Google box in the right sidebar and came up with a few pertinent posts.

In "Why I'm justified in complaining about Sant Mat" I wrote:

I was initiated in the spring of 1971. For over thirty years—until 2002 or so—I was damn near a model satsangi (disciple).

I never missed a day of meditation. Mostly it was for the full proscribed two and a half hours. Sometimes less. One and a half hours was a minimum, such as when my daughter needed after-work attention and I was working full time. I followed the other vows perfectly, aside from having a single drink at my ten year high school reunion, which was just too freaking weird to endure without a dose of alcohol.

So don't tell me that I can't complain about Sant Mat and Radha Soami Satsang Beas. I'm totally justified in doing so. Because I know more about this philosophy and this organization than most initiates. Not just book knowledge—direct experience also.

Or, lack of experience, when it comes to meditation. I'm typical in this regard. Over those three decades I talked with hundreds, maybe thousands, of RSSB meditators. Very few, perhaps none, had experienced what they were told to expect. Those flights to inner mystical regions and the meeting with their guru's radiant astral form.

With me, it wasn't for lack of effort. Again, I did everything right. And the results were wrong. Now, many of the faithful would say, "Brian, you expected too much, too soon." Give me a break.

Thirty years isn't too soon. A glimpse of the promised spiritual land isn't too much.

In "Q and A about me and Sant Mat" I wrote this in response to another question that I'd gotten:

(2) Why do you think you never had a spiritual experience despite 30 years of devoted meditation?

Like I've been saying in several posts lately, including here, I'm not sure what "spiritual" means anymore. I had plenty of experiences in meditation.

What I didn't have was the sort of out-of-body, astral projecting, soul-flying, blasts of cosmic light and sound experiences that the Radha Soami Satsang Beas version of Sant Mat tells disciples to expect in meditation.

A few days after I was initiated I heard loud bell sounds inside my head while I was meditating. These never came back. I've had other glimpses of inner light and hearings of inner sound, but these could be (and probably are) produced by the brain, not immaterial soul or spirit.

Over more than three decades I've talked with lots of fellow RSSB initiates about their experiences in meditation. More accurately, their lack thereof.

When these people spoke honestly and openly (which usually isn't done in the formal satsangs, or talks), I learned that my lack of mind-blowing meditation experiences was par for the course in Sant Mat.

So there you have it.

Naturally I had lots of experiences in meditation. It was impossible not to have them, since I was awake and aware for most of the 1.5 to 2.5 hours of meditation I did each day for over thirty years. (Yeah, I'd fall asleep occasionally.)

I feel like I gained a lot from all that meditating.

It was a mix of "mantra meditation" (repeating a word or words to concentrate the mind) and "open awareness" meditation (trying to be still, mentally and physically, and being aware of what passes through consciousness).

Thus even though Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) views its meditation technique as something special, actually it is very much in the meditation mainstream. Mantras and open awareness are used in many other meditative practices.

The RSSB meditation did focus on "going within," though, to a much greater extent than mindfulness practices do. That is, the initiate was supposed to direct his/her attention to the third eye, or eye center, which supposedly was a gateway to higher realms of consciousness.

Now my daily meditation usually involves more of a balanced approach.

I like to follow my breathing for part of the time, either counting breaths or simply being aware of my breathing body doing its thing. I also enjoy mantra meditation. Usually I choose different words than the Five Holy Names taught by RSSB, but for old time's sake I'll occasionally return to the mantra I repeated for so many years.

It's difficult for me to describe what I experienced during my RSSB meditation years. As noted before, I've sat for tens of thousands of hours in meditation. How is it possible to sum that up in a few words? 

I laughed; I cried; I was joyful; I was sad; I was peaceful; I was restless; I felt at one with the cosmos; I felt alone. And so much more.

One of the key things I learned was the difference between what my conscious mind does, and what the rest of my mind does. Well, let me rephrase that, because I no longer believe there are two entities inside my head: me, and my mind. 

There is just one: brain/mind, or whatever you want to call it.

I used to enjoy, and still do, the sensation of either repeating a mantra, or doing nothing, and being aware of what happens inside my head when the brain/mind aspect called "I" isn't trying to direct the show of consciousness.

As anyone who meditates knows (or anyone who is alive knows)... a lot happens.

The brain/mind, like an iceberg, consists of a whole lot more than our conscious awareness, will, intention, and such. Dualistic forms of meditation, which see a distinction between soul and mind, or pure consciousness and impure consciousness, consider those unintended goings-on to be a distraction. Non-dual forms of meditation, such as mindfulness and Zen, don't.

To them, as to me these days, what happens in the brain/mind is what is happening. To deny it is to deny reality. Thoughts come and go. So do emotions, perceptions, intuitions, and much else. 

Thus whereas I used to believe that God and the guru were responsible for what happened within my consciousness when I wasn't trying to make anything happen, now I realize that the part of brain/mind outside of conscious awareness is responsible.

I still feel that I'm part of something much larger than myself. I just don't call it God, or divine. It is me. And the world, which really isn't different from me. 

Religious freedom in the name of discrimination is crap

Let's do away with religious freedom. There's no need for it. For lots of reasons it makes no sense. Let me explain.

I'm fine with people being free to believe whatever they want to. So let's simply have believing freedom. After all, religious belief is just one form of believing.

Some people believe in God. Others believe in playing golf, in listening to rap music, in eating meat -- none of which I believe in.

So be it. Each to his own. Beliefs, that is. If we all looked upon life the same way, we'd be identically programmed robots. Boring.

What irks me is when religious believing gets elevated above other forms of believing.

Actually, a belief is a belief. A belief is different from a fact because there is no demonstrable evidence for it, nothing that justifies saying "This is" rather than "I believe."

Gravity is a fact. Considering that using certain forms of contraception or having sex with a person of the same gender is evil -- that's a belief.

You and I are each entitled to our own beliefs. But not to our own facts.

Yet in the Hobby Lobby decision, the United States Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that closely-held corporations can deny contraceptive coverage to their employees in the name of religious freedom.

In other words, a belief was considered (by five Catholic male members of the Court) to be higher than the law of the land. Well, if this is so, why aren't people with other sorts of strongly held beliefs able to ignore laws?

I've blogged about this before. For example, here and here. From the first post:

A "religious conscience exemption" argument usually is a load of crap. Religious believers shouldn't be able to avoid laws just because they have a strongly held personal belief. Hey! We all have strongly held personal beliefs.

I haven't had a single bite of meat or fish since I became a vegetarian in 1970, forty-one years ago. I strongly believe in both the morality of not killing animals for food, and in the health benefits of vegetarianism.

But if a bunch of other vegetarians and me started a college which espoused our dietary beliefs, yet enrolled meat-eaters also, would it be fair if we required that anyone who got a student loan from the federal government couldn't buy a hamburger -- or any other animal flesh -- while they were associated with our college?

Most people would think that'd be ridiculous. But it's no more ridiculous than a Catholic hospital saying "We shouldn't have to provide our employees with birth control coverage under their health insurance plan."

Today the New York Times reported that President Obama plans to sign an executive order that doesn't allow religious believers to discriminate against their fellow human beings.

President Obama plans to sign an executive order on Monday that protects gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender employees from discrimination by companies that do federal government work, fulfilling a promise to a crucial Democratic constituency, White House officials said on Friday. But the directive will not exempt religious groups, as many of them had sought.

The order will also, for the first time, explicitly protect federal employees from discrimination on the basis of gender identity, officials said. Gay men, lesbians and bisexuals who work for the federal government already have such protections.

Excellent. But not surprisingly, bigots want to use religion as an excuse to keep on with their unjust discriminating.

Religious groups had sought the exemption to ensure that they would not lose federal money or contracts if they could not meet the new guidelines because of their beliefs.

Because of their beliefs. Ah, what a screwed-up country we would live in if everybody could ignore any law they chose because of their beliefs. 

"You can't arrest me for drunk driving, officer. I believe it is OK to chug a couple of six packs and then drive home from the bar."

"I don't have to pay my taxes because I don't believe in government."

"I'm innocent of murder because I believed that asshole deserved to die."

Hey, these are all beliefs.

They have exactly the same validity as an equally subjective religious belief that contraception is evil or homosexuality is wrong. The only difference is that religions are collections of people with similar beliefs who have managed to get the government to give them special treatment under the law. 

The absurdity of this is clear when we take out the word "religious" from religious beliefs, as in the quote above. Should anyone be able to ignore regulations or laws "because of their beliefs"? I say, no. That way leads to anarchy.

In a sane, reasonable, rational, fair world, religious beliefs wouldn't be treated any differently than other sorts of beliefs. Eventually, I hope, that world will come. Until then, we'll have to put up with bigoted people wanting to discriminate in the name of a belief that they call "religious."

 

 

 

A desire for something, infinity, doesn't prove it exists

I used to think that my intense longing for God, heaven, divinity, higher regions of reality -- whatever you want to call it -- meant that such existed.

After all, I feel thirsty because water exists; desirous because sexuality exists; hungry because food exists; sleepy because sleep exists.

So if I have a craving for the supernatural, doesn't this prove (or at least strongly imply) that something beyond the physical exists?

Actually, no. Alan Watts does a good job of explaining why in his marvelous book, "The Wisdom of Insecurity." 

Under these circumstances we feel in conflict with our own bodies and the world around them, and it is consoling to be able to think that in this contradictory world we are but "strangers and pilgrims."

For if our desires are out of accord with anything that the finite world can offer, it might seem that our nature is not of this world, that our hearts are made, not for the finite, but for infinity. The discontent of our souls would appear to be the sign and seal of their divinity.

But does the desire for something prove that the thing exists? We know that it does not necessarily do so at all.

It may be consoling to think that we are citizens of another world than this, and that after our exile upon earth we may return to the true home of our heart's desire. But if we are citizens of this world, and if there can be no final satisfaction of the soul's discontent, has not nature, in bringing forth man, made a serious mistake?

For it would seem that, in man, life is in hopeless conflict with itself. To be happy, we must have what we cannot have. In man, nature has conceived desires which it is impossible to satisfy.

Sounds dismal. Thankfully, in the rest of the book Watts persuasively explains how it is possible to be satisfied with what the world has to offer without substituting religious fantasies for reality. (See here.)

My own view of the situation, which is similar to Watts', is that our highly evolved human capacity for conceptualization is a double-edged sword. It enables us to envision and accomplish amazing things beyond the ability of other animals, yet also sets us up for disappointment when we conceive of entities that are marvelously appealing, yet don't exist.

Like a loving God who will take care of us for eternity in a heaven where nothing is lacking. Like eternal life. Like being reunited with loved ones after we die. Like having all of the mysteries of the cosmos revealed to us once we achieve a state of divine consciousness.

Last night my wife and I attended a benefit screening of "OR7 - The Journey" here in Salem. The movie is about a famous Oregon wolf, OR7, who acquired the name Journey in a contest organized by Oregon Wild.

Journey/OR7 (who had a radio collar that made it possible to track him) made an amazing trek from northeast Oregon, near the Idaho border, into western Oregon, then into northern California and back to Oregon.

By most accounts he was looking for a mate. Pretty damn strong desire, which took him two thousand miles. Amazingly, it appears that he found one. This wasn't a miracle, because female wolves exist -- though it wasn't known that any were in western Oregon.

Rare events do happen. However, impossible events don't.

Wisdom is knowing what, to the best of our knowledge, is possible, and what isn't. Spending what almost certainly is our one and only life chasing a fantasy... is that wise?

Here's the OR7 movie trailer. Oregon is beautiful, for real. Last night the movie maker, who was at the screening, pointed out the obvious: the wolf shown in his film isn't actually OR7/Journey, but a stand-in. 

 

"Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen" -- great Alan Watts essay

Back in 1958 Alan Watts wrote a classic essay, "Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen." Beat and square, back in the 50's, were words roughly equivalent to our "cool" and "lame." Or "hip" and "traditional."

A beatnik bore some resemblance to today's hipster. I was just ten years old in 1958, so wasn't able to embrace the beat generation thing. Had to wait until the 60's to dive into the next counter-cultural evolution: hippies.

A few days ago I came across Watts' essay in a compilation of three of his writings, "The Wisdom of Insecurity" (one of my all-time favorite books; see here and here), "The Way of Zen," and "Tao: The Watercourse Way."

It was a pleasure to rediscover it after a cursory reading years ago. The version of the essay I read is considerably expanded and amended from the original.

I've never done any formal Zen training (Square Zen), but from my college days on I've enjoyed paddling around the edges of the Beat Zen pond. This essay helped me realize the difference between the two, and what plain Zen is all about.

Here's some passages from the essay on interesting subjects:

Chinese humanism vs. Indian supernaturalism.
Here is a view of the world imparting a profoundly refreshing sense of wholeness to a culture in which the spiritual and the material, the conscious and the unconscious, have been cataclysmically split. For this reason the Chinese humanism and naturalism of Zen intrigue us much more strongly than Indian Buddhism or Vedanta.

These, too, have their students in the West, but their followers seem for the most part to be displaced Christians -- people in search of a more plausible philosophy than Christian supernaturalism to carry on the essentially Christian search for the miraculous.

The ideal man of Christian Buddhism is clearly a superman, a yogi with absolute mastery of his own nature, according perfectly with the science-fiction ideal of "men beyond mankind." But the Buddha or awakened man of Chinese Zen is "ordinary and nothing special"; he is humorously human like the Zen tramps portrayed by Mu-ch'i and Liang-k'ai. 

We like this because here, for the first time, is a conception of the holy man and sage who is not impossibly remote, not superhuman but fully human, and, above all, not a solemn and sexless ascetic... They are just like us, and yet much more at home in the world, floating much more easily upon the ocean of transience and insecurity.

Human life no different from great universe.
For there is a standpoint from which human affairs are as much beyond right and wrong as the stars, and from which our deeds, experiences, and feelings can no more be judged than the ups and downs of a range of mountains. 

Though beyond moral and social valuation, this level of human life may also be seen to be just as marvelous and uncanny as the great universe itself. This feeling may become particularly acute when the individual ego tries to fathom its own nature, to plumb the inner sources of its own actions and consciousness.

For here it discovers a part of itself -- the inmost and greatest part -- which is strange to itself and beyond its understanding and control. Odd as it may sound, the ego finds that its own center and nature is beyond itself. The more deeply I go into myself, the more I am not myself, and yet this is the very heart of me.

Here I find my own inner workings functioning of themselves, spontaneously, like the rotation of the heavenly bodies and the drifting of the clouds. Strange and foreign as this aspect of myself at first seems to be, I soon realize that it is me, and much more me than my superficial ego.

Beat Zen and Square Zen.
But the Westerner who is attracted to Zen and who would understand it deeply must have one indispensable qualification: he must understand his own culture so thoroughly that he is no longer swayed by its premises unconsciously.

He must really have come to terms with the Lord God Jehovah and with his Hebrew-Christian conscience so that he can take it or leave it without fear or rebellion. He must be free of the itch to justify himself

Lacking this, his Zen will be either "beat" or "square," either a revolt from the culture and social order or a new form of stuffiness and respectability. For Zen is above all the liberation of the mind from conventional thought, and this is something different from rebellion against convention, on the one hand, or adapting foreign conventions, on the other.

Living beyond anxiety.
At this level, human life is beyond anxiety, for it can never make a mistake. If we live, we live; if we die, we die; if we suffer, we suffer.; if we are terrified, we are terrified. There is no problem about it.

A Zen master was once asked, "It is terribly hot, and how shall we escape the heat?" "Why not," he answered, "go to the place where it is neither hot nor cold?" "Where is that place?" "In summer we sweat; in winter we shiver."

In Zen one does not feel guilty about dying, or being afraid, or disliking the heat. At the same time, Zen does not insist upon this point of view as something which one ought to adopt; it does not preach it as an ideal. 

For if you don't understand it, your very not-understanding is also IT. There would be no bright stars without dim stars, and, without the surrounding darkness, no stars at all.

Faults of Square Zen.
For square Zen is the Zen of established tradition in Japan with its clearly defined hierarchy, its rigid discipline, and its specific tests of satori... it is still square because it is a quest for the right spiritual experience, for a satori which will receive the stamp (inka) of approval and established authority.

...The faults of square Zen are the faults of any spiritual in-group with an esoteric discipline and degrees of initiation. Students in the lower ranks can get unpleasantly uppity about inside knowledge which they are not at liberty to divulge -- "and you wouldn't understand even if I could tell you" -- and are apt to dwell rather sickeningly on the immense difficulities and iron disciplines of their task. 

...Thus for beat Zen there must be no effort, no discipline, no artificial striving to attain satori or to be anything but what one is. But for square Zen there can be no true satori without years of meditation-practice under the stern supervision of a qualified master. 

...Foreign religions can be immensely attractive and highly overrated by those who know little of their own, and especially by those who have not worked through and grown out of their own. This is why the displaced or unconscious Christian can so easily use either beat or square Zen to justify himself.

The one wants a philosophy to justify him in doing what he pleases. The other wants a more plausible authoritative salvation than the Church or the psychiatrists seem to be able to provide.... But the true character of Zen remains almost incomprehensible to those who have not surpassed the immaturity of needing to be justified, whether before the Lord God or before a paternalistic society.

Zen without fuss.
The old Chinese Zen masters were steeped in Taoism. They saw nature in its total interrelatedness, and saw that every creature and every experience is in accord with the Tao of nature just as it is. This enabled them to accept themselves as they were, moment by moment, without the least need to justify anything.

They didn't do it to defend themselves or to find an excuse for getting away with murder. They didn't brag about it and set themselves apart as rather special. On the contrary, their Zen was wu-shih, which means approximately "nothing special" or "no fuss."

But Zen is "fuss" when it is mixed up with Bohemian affectations, and "fuss" when it is imagined that the only proper way to find it is to run off to a monastery in Japan or to do special exercises in the lotus posture for five hours a day. And I will admit that the very hullabaloo about Zen, even in such an essay as this, is also fuss -- but a little less so.

Having said that, I would like to say something for all Zen fussers, beat or square.

Fuss is all right, too. If you are hung on Zen, there's no need to pretend that you are not. If you really want to spend some years in a Japanese monastery, there is no earthly reason why you shouldn't. Or if you want to spend your time hopping freight cars and digging Charlie Parker, it's a free country.

In the landscape of Spring there is neither better nor worse;
The flowering branches grown naturally, some long, some short.

     -- Alan Watts

Get wonderful strangeness! Fast. Free. Fun.

Behold: my "Four Recipes for Instant Strangeness." This is my most recent Strange Up Salem column in our town's alternative paper, Salem Weekly.

It's got some churchless aspects to it, for sure.

Strangeness is what we want, even if this isn't obvious. No need to look for it in some esoteric, unbelievable, supernatural religion. Embrace it close at home, wherever you are. Here's my tips.

Four recipes for instant strangeness

It’s summer. Living is easy. Who wants to work hard at making Salem stranger? Instead of laboring to cook up a stew of strangeness, here’s four ways of making our town seem tastier instantly.

(1) Observe like an alien. There’s several hundred billion stars in our galaxy and about a hundred billion galaxies. Imagine what unknown marvels exist in the cosmos.

Now, look around. Picture yourself having just arrived here from a star system far, far away. Can you freaking believe what you’re seeing!? Earth is so weird!

Every bit of it. Utterly unlike anything you’ve known before. These beings get in metal containers and buzz about on the planet’s surface. Wow! They ingest solid and liquid matter through a bodily orifice. Double wow!!

We really do live in a strange land like none other in the universe. Behold with wonder.

(2) Marvel at what life has wrought. The big bang brought everything into being 13.7 billion years ago. Earth came into existence 4.5 billion years ago; life a billion years later.

Now we have Lancaster Drive, south Commercial Street, Keizer Station, and other monuments to the ugliness us Homo sapiens’ can construct. A bowerbird creates beauty; it takes people to fashion crap.

But it is our crap. More than three billion years of evolution have made us what we are, along with what we make. Salem is us.

That evolutionary process resulted in you — a being who wouldn’t exist today if any link in the chain of your countless descendants had been broken. One missed sexual coupling in the treetops of ancient Africa and you’d be a goner.

So look around with amazement. That all this is. That you are.

(3) Imagine this is your last day. Yes, we hear this often, “Live for today.”Do we really get the message, though?

News flash from Reality Central: everybody dies. It’s natural to visualize the trajectory of our lives making a gradual descent into an 80-90 year landing zone.

However, frequently unexpected crashes happen. The good (and bad) can die young. Accept this possibility. Not fearfully, gratefully. Everlasting life would dilute the preciousness of every passing moment.

Eventually there will be a last time for everything. Problem is, chances are we won’t know when that is. Last buying of a latte at a downtown coffeehouse. Last hug of a loved one. Last mowing of the lawn.

If you knew this was a Last Time, how precious would it seem? Since it might be, why not enjoy the treasure of each moment now?

(4) Get out of your mind. The inside of our heads is undeniably strange. Yet the strangeness has a boring sameness to it. Habitual ways of looking at the world keep us from seeing things freshly.

Recreational drugs and alcohol, in moderation, can open the doors of perception pleasingly. So can thinking less while sensing more.

Smell. Hear. Touch. Taste. See. Strangeness is being broadcast 24/7. We just need to tune ourselves to its thoughtless frequency.

Strange Up Salem seeks to lift our city’s Blah Curse. Give us a Facebook like. Brian Hines blogs at hinesblog.com

Best explanation of Schrödinger's cat I've ever seen

Schrödinger's cat is a perplexing animal that seemingly is both alive and dead before an observation is made of it.

This thought experiment was intended to show how the weirdness of quantum mechanics could be applied to everyday objects.

It's always bothered me that a human, or some other observer, was needed to make the twin potentiality of "dead" and "alive" become a single actuality. Why couldn't the cat observe itself?

In Amanda Gefter's book, "Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn," she has the best explanation of the Schrödinger's cat paradox I've ever come across. The implications of this are huge -- a subject I'll leave for another blog post.

I've finished the book, which has a central theme of observer-dependent reality, as I blogged about here and here. 

These passages from near the end of the book carry on in that vein. Great writing, Ms. Gefter.

If an elephant could measure itself, collapsing its own wavefunction, then it needn't exist relative to anything outside itself -- in other words, it would simply, inherently exist. It wouldn't be observer-dependent. It would just be. 

In an act of self-affirmation or quite possibly suicide, Schrödinger's cat would collapse its own wavefunction before anyone opened the box. But quantum mechanics -- through the uncertainty relations, complementarity, EPR -- has already proven that if we assume that elephants inherently exist in some objective, observer-independent way, we get the wrong answers. 

By relativizing everything, [Carlo] Rovelli had rejected any kind of ontological distinction between observer and observed, leveling the playing field to a quantum monism where every perspective is a possible reference frame, none of them any better than the next.

That did away with the seeming paradox that an observer can't be a subject and object simultaneously, and yet somehow the observer is a subject and object simultaneously. I am the subject relative to me. I am an object relative to my father. 

There's no God's-eye view from which both would appear true at the same time. But again, that hinged on the impossibility of self-measurement. If I could measure myself, I'd be both subject and object and quantum physics would fall apart. The prohibition on self-measurement upheld Wittgenstein's intuition that "the subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world."

Rovelli had shown that quantum mechanics seems bat-shit crazy as long as we assume the existence of a single reality shared by multiple observers. Give up that notion and all the quantum weirdness begins to make perfect, non-spooky sense. We can dissolve the problem of the second observer by embracing the cosmic solipsisms that physics demands.

It's not the brand of solipsism that Everett or Wigner momentarily considered, in which there is just one absolute observer. The solipsism that radical observer-dependence implies is itself observer-dependent -- as Rovelli emphasized, observer in one frame is observed in another.

...Boolean logic was just the ordinary logic we usually assume holds true, with its basic rules, like if p is true then not-p is false, or if p implies q and p is true then q is true. There was also the crucial law of the excluded middle: a proposition, p, is either true or false; there's no third option. Non-Boolean logic -- quantum logic -- openly defies the law of the excluded middle. A proposition p can be true and false, depending on who you ask. 

But I now saw that logic becomes non-Boolean only when you compare the perspectives of two or more observers. According to any one observer, p is either true or false. We only violate the law of the excluded middle when we try to view p from more than one reference frame at the same time.

Classical logic tells us that the particle passed through one slit or the other. Non-Boolean logic offers a third option: it went through both. But the point is, there's no observer who can see it go through both. That would require an impossible God's-eye view, akin to seeing inside and outside a black hole's horizon.

No observer sees both elephants. Look at the slits and you'll see that it only goes through one. The phrase "both elephants" is totally misleading. Statements such as "The photon travels two paths simultaneously" are wrong. They assume there's some singular reality, a way things "actually are." There isn't. Nature has shown us otherwise.

...We never see simultaneously-alive-and-dead cats because superpositions represent a multiplicity of points of view, and, by definition, a given observer has only one.

...If, however, reality is radically observer-dependent -- if, that is, the universe is nothing, then we need interference to literally cancel out the diagreements between our perspectives. Interference -- the physical manifestation of non-Boolean logic -- exists because nothing is real. Or because reality is nothing. With this "many frames" interpretation of quantum mechanics, that bat-shit experiment was actually starting to make sense.

...But non-Boolean logic, I now knew, was a fictitious logic, the logic that crops up when you cut across horizons, when you try to describe reality from multiple points of view simultaneously. Quantum logic is non-Boolean because reality is radically observer-dependent. Because there's no way things "really are." There was my "really" and my father's "really," but never both.

Is seva, selfless service, possible? Why direct it toward God?

During my thirty-five years as an active member of an Indian spiritual organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, I heard a lot about seva, selfless service. 

Sikhs are big on seva and Radha Soami Satsang Beas' (RSSB) teachings, a form of Sant Mat, are closely aligned with Sikhism. 

The way I was taught, the highest form of seva is service to God.

Since the guru was considered to be God in human form, service to the guru was the next best thing to performing service to God directly. Who, since there was no sign of this divine being, wasn't available to be served anyway. Plus, if God is all-powerful and perfect, why would God need anything from us measly humans?

So disciples of the guru were eager to do anything and everything the guru, or his designee, wanted done. People would travel long distances to a regional RSSB center, or even to India, in order to clean bathrooms, make food, move dirt, or whatever.

After a while I began to wonder what this whole seva thing was all about. It seemed to me that opportunities for selfless service abound everywhere. 

Why not volunteer for some charity close to home, rather than feeling that service to a guru or his religious organization was the only kind of volunteering that really counted? I was perplexed by disciples who would take a month off to go to India, where they happily did lots of seva, yet seemingly engaged in few, if any, local community volunteer activities.

John Johnson, a psychologist, wrote a two part series about seva in a Psychology Today web site: "Is Selfless Service Possible?" and "Different Types of Seva."

I agree with him that even if someone doesn't consciously expect some reward for seva, is isn't possible to be totally selfless. Feeling good about volunteering is a benefit to the sevadar (volunteer). Plus, most religiously minded sevadars expect that God will be pleased by their service. 

Johnson writes:

I am skeptical about whether most of us can help others consistently without expecting some kind of reward. I'm not saying that we necessarily need a return favor from the person we help or recognition from society. All I am saying is that, at the very least, we expect to feel good about ourselves after helping someone. I think that expecting to feel good (or to avoid feeling bad) is the anticipated reward that that motivates most charitable acts. Consider the following example.

You are walking down the street and notice that a stranger’s parking meter has expired. You decide to put some change in the meter so the person doesn’t get a parking fine, and then you walk away. Because the owner of the car does not know you, he or she will not be able to thank you or return the favor in any way. But, did you really receive no reward for your random act of kindness? Didn’t you feel good about yourself for helping the stranger? Wasn't feeling good a rewarding experience? Let me put it another way. If you did not expect to feel good after putting the change in the meter, would you have helped the stranger to avoid the parking fine?

I question the notion of pure altruism—of doing something to benefit another person without expecting anything in return. As I said, at the very least, when we do good deeds we expect to feel good about ourselves, or to avoid negative feelings like guilt or shame. Often, we actually expect more. We usually expect in return at least a smile, a “thank you,” or other token of appreciation. Think about it: How long would you keep giving to a friend if he or she never showed appreciation? How long would that friendship last?

Regarding Johnson's other article about the different types of seva, he makes sense here also. Service to others comes in a lot of different guises. The sort of seva espoused by religious organizations isn't the only kind.

So, how is it that religious and spiritual traditions extol the virtues of selfless service over anything else a person might do in this lifetime? In what sense does volunteering to comfort a few sick individuals buy more spiritual currency than any other Holland-type [a schema of personality types] activity?

Realistic types build hospitals and medical equipment that serve thousands of individuals. Investigative types discover cures for diseases that reduce the suffering of millions of people. Artists write stories, perform music, and produce movies that bring joy to countless people who might otherwise be living drab, depressing lives. Enterprising types provide the leadership that directs the activities of all the other types.

And the Conventional types are unsung heroes, gladly engaging in routines and repetitive activities that non-Conventionals might find boring, but are absolutely necessary to maintain everyday life. They are the custodians who take care of us all.

I first thought that religious people who say that selfless service is more spiritual, more important than any other activity, are simply myopically asserting that what they like to do is more important than what others like to do. As Social types, they glorify the value of selfless service, just as the intellectual Abraham Maslow glorified the value of truth and beauty. Then again, maybe I was just being defensive and envious.

What I finally decided that the work of any of the six Holland types can be seva, as long as the work is offered with intent of improving the human condition, without expectation of any kind of compensation or remuneration.

Folk theory of enlightenment: sophisticated B.S.

"I am nothing." "I am God, or all."

Somehow these seemingly contradictory hypotheses coexist within what the Shimmering Dead End blog calls the folk theory of enlightenment. Here's a diagram of the whole confusing thing.

(click to enlarge)

Pretty darn interesting. There's a slide show that explains this schema. 

From my quick perusual of his/her writings, The Shimmering Dead End guy/gal appears to believe in some sort of immediate experiential non-dual awareness (whatever that means), but considers that the conceptualizations underlying "I am nothing" and "I am God, or all" are, basically, bullshit. 

Popular bullshit, to be sure. I've bought and read lots of books in both spiritual genres -- nothing and everything. I used to think that realizing either possibility via some form of enlightenment was better than the mere something I feel myself to be now. 

In recent years, though, my current existence seems fine to me. (As if I had a choice in being anything other than what I am here and now.)

From the above-mentioned quick perusual of this blog, I get the impression that Mr./Ms. Shimmering Dead End feels pretty much the same way.

I say "pretty much," because enlightenment still seems to be his/her goal. But this isn't a transcendent, supernatural, or elevated type of enlightenment. Maybe more like giving up ideas about enlightenment, which enables the thing itself to shine forth in all of its non-ideational glory.

The post "Making the mountain an inner forest may ease your way" reminded me of someone who emailed me after my book about Plotinus, a Neoplatonist Greek philosopher, was published. It is called Return to the One, so there's a lot of non-dual stuff in the book. 

The first message this person sent me was positive. The second message wasn't. He'd read a concluding chapter where I used a metaphor about ascending a mountain as a reflection of Plotinus' teachings. 

That really rubbed the guy the wrong way. He said that spirituality isn't about reaching a summit of consciousness. Rather, it is about embracing the center of what we already are. Back then, I resisted that notion. Now, it makes a lot more sense to me.

Here's an excerpt from the Shimmering Dead End post along that same line.

I’ve found there to be two main schools of thought which attempt to describe the realization of nondual, or primordial consciousness: the ‘glorious mountaintop’ school and the ‘chop wood, carry water’ school. These denote the metaphor systems employed to make the description. The first makes heavy use the attributes “up,” “higher,” “greater,” “perfected,” “pure,” “chaiste,” and “divine.”

...The ‘chop wood, carry water’ school is quite the opposite in terms of its use of superlatives and attributes. We merely see what has always been present, as the Rinpoche describes. When this moment occurs, there is a recognition of what has been ongoing in our awareness, albeit seemingly overlooked.

...The ‘glorious mountaintop’ is the defacto home of the folk theory of enlightenment. Most of the Vedic-based systems of thought are saturated with it, as well as their Western deriviates, the neo-Advaita schools. ‘Chop wood, carry water’ finds its purview in Zen, Ch’an, and Dzogchen Buddhism, as well as with just about every individual I have met personally who I regard to be a jnani, or knower of nondual consciousness.

I’d like to suggest that the main problem is simply that our embodied mindstake these metaphors too literally. Thus, to make enlightenment something that is higher, greater, more perfect and/or more pure, is to remove it from ourselves in the moment, resulting in the occluding effect of the folk theory of enlightenment.

I also liked another post, "The fantasy known as 'no ego'".

Referencing the map for a moment, we can see that the entire constellation of ideas I’m calling the folk theory of enlightenment find their center of gravity in the notion of “no ego.” There are millions of people around the world fervently and sincerely trying to destroy their own sense of themselves as a path to nondual enlightenment.

Our sense of ourselves is our social nav system. Nondual enlightenment does not affect the nav system, as it’s always shining within the nav system’s functional awareness. Every enlightened person on the planet has a nav system. We experience our nav system, our sense of self and place in the world, as our personality.