Church of the Churchless

Watts: wanting to clean up the messiness of life IS the mess

I don't believe life is a problem. Sure, there are problems in life, lots of them. Each of us is continually dealing with differences between the way we want something to be, and the way it is.

But this is much different from considering that there is something wrong with life itself or with ourselves as a whole. 

I've talked about this before.

Believing in problems may be our only problem
Is there anything wrong with life?
When did humans start making life itself into a problem?

A few days ago I discovered an Alan Watts book sitting on a shelf that, shock!, I realized I hadn't read. Here's some excerpts from "Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation." It consists of transcriptions from talks Watts gave in his later years.

After giving examples of life's problems, Watts says:

Over the years I have begun to wonder if there is another way around these problems. Perhaps instead of resolving these issues at the technical level, we could solve them at the psychological and spiritual levels by disciplining ourselves so that we wouldn't be afraid of them anymore. 

And so, in accord with that motivation, we seek out spiritual and psychological teachers.

We wonder if we could somehow be made over so that we would not have to worry about our problems. But if you examine the desire to overcome this mess through a spiritual discipline, you will see that this wanting to overcome the mess and not to have it anymore is precisely the mess.

The thing that we object to about ourselves is precisely what we continue to do in our attempts to overcome it; in other words, the activity that we employ in overcoming the mess is the mess that we object to.

It is very important to realize this, and if you do realize it, it raises the question "Then what can I do? What can I do to transform this quaking mess into the state of mind of the true mystic?"

Now, if you are the mess, there is obviously nothing that you can do to transform yourself into the state of mind you idealize as that of a true mystic, a saint, or even the Christ. But by pursuing this line of thought you may realize that all your ideals are simply manifestations of the mess trying to get away from itself.

You are put in the position of feeling that it is absolutely necessary to be different from the way you are, but there is absolutely nothing you can do about it because being the way you are, you can't be different from your self.

It's as if one were to say, "I know that I shouldn't be selfish, and I would very much like to be an unselfish person, but the reason why I want to be an unselfish person is that I am very selfish. And really, I would love myself far more and respect myself far more if I were unselfish."

...Sometimes life is telling you that the course you are on is not the way to go, and the message underlying all of this is that you cannot transform yourself. Life is giving you the message that the "you" that you imagine to be capable of transforming yourself does not exist.

In other words, as an ego, I am separate from my emotions, my thoughts, my feelings, my experiences. So the one who is supposed to be in control of them cannot control them because it isn't there. 

And as soon as you understand that, things will be greatly improved.

There was no first human. Which explains a lot.

Today I watched a video called "There was no first human." I found it here. It makes a lot of sense. Also a lot of nonsense.

 

By "nonsense," I don't mean that this explanation of evolution isn't true. Because it is.

The thought experiment described in the video came from Richard Dawkins, someone who knows what he is talking about when it comes to the origins of life on Earth. Here he describes the thought experiment in words.

The nonsense reference flows out of the difficulty I have understanding how there can be completely different species along an evolutionary branch of the tree of life, but at no time was there one individual who was this species followed by a relative who was an individual of another species.

Yet here we are today, Homo sapiens, a specific species.

It seems clear to me that the problem lies in how the human brain works -- mine, yours, everybody's -- rather than in how reality is.

We're prone to making firm distinctions. 

Hot/cold. Man/woman. Atheist/believer. Liberal/conservative. Dead/alive. Conscious/unconscious. And so on.

Dawkin's thought experiment challenges this way of thinking. He says that every single creature you are related to in a 185 million generation ancestry was the same species as its parent. Yet way back you were related to a fish, and now you are a human.

Go figure. (It's tough.) 

Evolution is incredibly slow. Also, gradual. Dawkins says it is like you growing from a baby to a toddler. At no time were you a baby at one moment and a toddler at the next. Yet you became a toddler after being a baby.

Likewise, in his talk Dawkins says you can't see the hour hand of a (traditional) clock moving. But wait an hour, and you'll see that it has moved quite a bit.

There's something really important here about how we understand and misunderstand reality. I just wish I better understood what it is.

Buddhist "emptiness" appeals to my churchless non-soul

When true believers (as I was at one time) start to give up religiosity, often they pass through various stages of withdrawal from their addiction to dogma.

For me, one stage is an admiration of Buddhism and Taoism, spiritual philosophies which have an affinity with modern science and secular ways of looking upon the world. I'm still in that stage. I may never leave it.

Yesterday I picked up Stephen Bachelor's "Verses from the Center: A Buddhist VIsion of the Sublime," after a long absence. It's Bachelor's interpretation of Nagarjuna's teachings about emptiness, a core Buddhist concept. 

Well, non-concept. Because if you think you know what emptiness is all about, you don't. (I have another Buddhist book aptly titled "The Emptiness of Emptiness."

I must have first read Bachelor's book in 2005, since I mentioned it in a blog post I wrote that year, "Search for self called off." It was stimulated by a classic Onion piece -- which I bet Nagarjuana would have liked a lot.

Talking about what emptiness is and isn't gets us into some pretty damn deep, as well as shallow, philosophical, spiritual, and scientific thought-waters.

Rather than run the risk of getting readers of this post lost in my own meanderings about what Bachelor says, I'll simply share some excerpts from his book that resonate with me. 

That which is negated by emptiness is an instinctive sense of selves and things existing in their own right. From the point of view of common sense, a thing such as a vase appears to stand out vividly on its own, apparently independent of its causal conditions and components, not to mention the various conceptual and linguistic conventions that humans use to identify vases.

Tsongkhapha [an Indian commentator on Nagarjuna's Verses from the Center] insisted that emptiness was simply the absence of such a sense of "inherent existence." Rather than representing a doorway that opens to a mystical, transcendent sphere hidden beneath the surface of everyday reality, emptiness merely removes the false veneer of inherent existence, thereby enabling a vision of the essential contingency of life.

...Nagarjuna's vision is one of uncompromising immanence. What keeps one locked in repetitive cycles of anguish has nothing to do with being cut off from a transcendent God or Absolute or Mind. The classical Buddhist notions of buddhanature and nirvana are treated as metaphors for a freedom that occurs in the very world of sense and reason.

...To elevate anything, however noble or exalted, to the status of a transcendent reality beyond this world is fixation's final and yet perhaps most seductive strategy of all. 

...Just as a path is nothing but a space that has been cleared of those obstacles that prevent freedom of movement across a terrain, so emptiness is nothing but a space cleared of those fixations that prevent freedom of movement through the dilemmas and ambiguities of life. To follow the track of emptiness is to discern the living contours of contingency as they unfold from moment to moment. 

...Fixations imbue self and things with a tightness, solidity, and opacity. Instead of experiencing the world as an uncertain play of conditions, we prefer the safety of one that appears to be clearcut, predictable, and manageable. 

Yet the price to pay for this preference is that life is rendered dull and repetitive. To reduce the tedium, we find ourselves driven to ever more intense moments of experience (food, shopping, drugs, sex, vacations, movies, religion). For Nagarjuna, the problem lies not in the way the world is but in the way we have construed it.

...To recognize that things are contingent is the key to understanding what it means for them to be empty. A self, a plant, a body or a time is empty because it is incapable of being neatly circumscribed as a thing cut off from other things.

Selves, plants, bodies and times are utterly contingent on the complex interplay of conditions, attributes and language with which they are not identical and from which they are not different. To know emptiness is not to negate these things but to be dumbfounded by the sheer fecundity of life.

...You are unique not because you possess an essential metaphysical quality that differs from the essential metaphysical quality of everyone else, but because you have emerged from a unique and unrepeatable set of conditions.

The Amazon reader reviews of Bachelor's book are worth reading, whether or not you buy "Verses from the Center." Most are quite perceptive. This reviewer hit upon something that bothered me: Bachelor's seeming contention that freedom is possible for humans.

Given the interdependence of everything, this seems at odds with Buddhism and Nagarjuna. Here's what Norman Bearrentine said in his review. I like the last part.

Nagarjuna, Batchelor, the other reviewers and I share a common problem: our grasp of reality is hampered by our brains' conceptual and perceptual limitations. Nagarjuna's attempts to deal with those limitations have affected millions of people through various translations and interpretations, and Batchelor's version will no doubt affect many who would be untouched by the others.

His comparison of Nagarjuna to thinkers from different times and cultures serves to show that all have struggled with the limitations that are common to all human beings--the brains in which we live are quite similar.

In one review, Batchelor is faulted for failing to note the implications of Nagarjuna's writing for "realization of the unconditioned (absolute)... that which does not arise and pass away." Indeed, Batchelor proclaims that Nagarjuna's key insight was that emptiness is "inseparable from the utter contingency of life itself," it is "contingently configured" rather than absolute.

Whether this interpretation is consistent with Nagarjuna's thought in the context of Buddhism as it was in his time or not, it is certainly consistent with the human condition: we are constitutionally incapable of apprehending anything that might be called "absolute." It seems that space itself, used for thousands of years as a metaphor for emptiness, is not empty at all, but chock-a-block full of dark energy, dark matter, and who knows what else.

The absolute, the unconditioned, the other shore, emptiness, the self, the soul, etc. are all human conceptions, and all human conceptions arise from our perceptions. As instruments expand our perceptions, our conceptions try to keep pace, but in many cases we have come to the point that the only way to express reality is through mathematical formulas--none of our perceptual metaphors can be stretched to fit: light seems to be neither a wave nor a particle, leaving us with something inconceivable. The only adequate response to this predicament is, as Batchelor says, "to be dumbfounded by the sheer fecundity of life."

Unfortunately, Batchelor cannot sit content with being dumbfounded, but somehow finds in emptiness, "the freedom to configure oneself..." as if one's self could somehow act independently of the contingencies that created it. The only freedom we have is to gaze in amazement at the things we think, say, and do, and it's quite enough, really.

Subjective and objective: the key to understanding everything!

"Ah, it's all becoming clear to me... so clear... I'm on the verge of grasping The Meaning of It All!"

(Mentally insert the sound of cackling laughter, and a vision of a crazed man rubbing his hands together with glee).

This is how I've been feeling lately.

After fifty years of so of searching for the big "T" Truth through science, spirituality, mysticism, psychedelic drugs, philosophy, dog walks in nature, prayer, pleading, meditation, pondering, athletics, caffeine, and more, it's dawning on me that two words pretty much sum up both the Question and the Answer.

Subjective. Objective. 

This blog post will just scratch the surface of my personal Theory of Everything. It's too late in the day, and I'm not caffeinated enough, for my writing mind to convey the depth of what I'm coming to realize after all these years.

Here's a teaser, a hint, an outline.

Our conscious experience is ours alone. Nobody and nothing else has access to it. I am the only one who knows what it is like to be me. Same is true for you. Our subjectivity is totally personal. The experiential feeling I have at this moment is entirely mine.

But even those words are misleading. Because in order to say anything about my subjectivity I had to view it as an object. Which, of course, destroys the essence of what I'm talking about.

(This obviously isn't an original idea; Alan Watts and many others have said it before, and better.)

I simply "am." Moment by moment, I'm immersed in being an experiencing consciousness. There's no gap between me and my experiencing. Like Popeye, I am what I am, and that's all that I am. 

Until I objectify myself.

Through language, gestures, concepts, emotions, and so many other ways, I can attempt to describe my subjective ineffable experiencing as if it was happening to someone other than me. Thus we end up saying things like, "I found myself thinking...," "It occurred to me that...," "I had a feeling about..."

There is indeed an objective world. But it arises from the intersubjective agreement of more than one person. Such is the domain of science. Also of everyday life. 

I cruise through an intersection where I have a green light because i'm confident that other drivers both see green and red as I do, and understand that green means "go" and red means "stop." However, I have no way of knowing whether anyone experiences green and red exactly as I do.

Subjectivity and objectivity thus are two complementary ways of living in the world. At each instant our attention is somewhere along a sliding scale whose endpoints are "HIghly Subjective" and "Highly Objective."

I said highly because there is no such thing as total subjectivity or total objectivity. There are degrees of each, varying balances of each.

If someone possessed 100% subjectivity they would have no way of knowing this.

So no way of telling anyone else, or even themself, about the 100% subjective experience. There has to be an observer separate from an observation for it to be an object of experience.

Conversely, if someone possessed 100% objectivity, they would be incapable of knowing this.

So no way of telling anyone else, or even themself, about the 100% objective experience. There has to be a subjective consciousness capable of observing something separate from itself for that thing to be an object of experience.

Thus inevitably there is a duality to human experience. We live life subjectively, then look upon it as if from the outside, making sharable objects out of what first arises as ours alone.

This is true for religious believers and scientists alike.

But it seems to me that religions make a larger error than science. For they take something inherently subjective -- a mystical experience, a vision, a voice of God -- and try to pass it off as an objective fact about reality. 

That is, the personal and subjective is elevated into something universal and objective. If a subjective experience is left as it is, something that belongs only to a single individual, there'd be no problem.

Also no religions, no holy books, no theologies, no dogmas.

Each of these requires a large dose of objectivity, a claim that some personal experience is true for others, that the experience can be had by multitudes, not just one individual.

Scientists naturally also have subjective experiences. After all, they are human, just as religious believers are. But rarely, if ever, do scientists focus on their subjectivity when discussing their work. They are just as passionate, just as emotional, just as awe-struck by their experiences as religious people are.

But they realize that in the realm of science, the emphasis is on what can be experienced inter-subjectively, by others as well as the scientist making the discovery. Scientists don't say "I experienced this, so it is true." Rather, they say "This is what was experienced, so it may be true." 

Others then attempt to reproduce the experience, to test whether it actually is true. This is how subjectivity moves along the sliding scale toward objectivity: by intersubjective agreement that such-and-such is so.

Well, there's quite a bit more to my personal revelation that Subjective and Objective are the key to understanding everything. After all, everything is a lot!

Fortunately, additional blog posts await.

Core and extended consciousness. Here and now, there and then.

Today I came to an interesting chapter, Mind and consciousness, in "The Systems View of Life," a book I blogged about a few days ago.

One of the main conclusions is an unsurprising one: mind is the brain in action, not something transcendent.

Let us now summarize the recent advances in cognitive science discussed in this chapter. The main achievement, in our view, has been the gradual but consistent healing of the Cartesian split between mind and matter.

In the 1970's, a few cognitive scientists recognized that mind and consciousness are not "things" but cognitive processes, and they took the radical step of identifying these processes of cognition with the very process of life.

Thus cognition bcame associated with all levels of life. This means that mind and body are not separate entities, as Descartes believed, but are two complementary aspects of life -- its process and its structure.

...In this new science of cognition, mind and matter no longer appear to belong to two separate categories, but can be seen as representing two complementary aspects of the phenomenon of life -- process and structure.

I also resonated with the description of Antonio Damasio's theory of consciousness.

The book speaks about primary (or core) consciousness, and another level, reflective (or autobiographical) consciousness. The Wikipedia article calls these core and extended consciousness.

Regardless, the basic notion that human consciousness includes these different levels/processes makes a lot of sense to me. 

It's crazy, as many people do, to elevate one level above the other. Both are part of being human. We are immersed in a largely non-conceptual here-and-now, and also in a largely conceptual there-and-then.

Obviously core consciousness and extended consciousness are linked. Everything I can remember or anticipate is based upon experiences I've had in a present moment. Everything I experience in a present moment is given meaning and significance by my memories and anticipations.

This is a very crude way of explaining Damasio's theory. But I think I've got the main elements more or less correct.

I like how it does away with the ridiculous this-or-that many spiritual teachings put forth. They denigrate conceptualization in favor of direct non-verbal experience. But as I noted semi-humorously in this post, our humanity requires both the primary and reflective levels of consciousness. 

Recently the dog and I were crossing a small creek on our property. I heard a rustling sound, then saw a dark shape zooming off a few feet above the water, heading downstream. At that moment I was in my elevated state of non-dual awareness, which I like to call "enlightenment" but my wife persists in calling "spacing out." 

Almost instantly, alas, my analytical, Western, dualistic, conceptual, abstract mind thought "Duck!" That destroyed the pure unfiltered awareness I had enjoyed a mere second before. However, it really was a duck. Regardless, this shows that my enlightenment has a few wrinkles to iron out before I can call myself Totally Nonconceptual Dude. 

This, undoubtedly, also will be what my colleagues in the mental hospital call me when I am unable to utter coherent sentences. "Tall. Round. Sweet. Metal. Yum-Yum" "Nurse, I think the Totally Nonconceptual Dude is asking again for a Mike's Harder Margarita."

Today I engaged in my favorite (well, second favorite) physical activity, riding on my StreetStrider outdoor elliptical bike.

When I started off on a multiuse trail in Salem's Minto Brown Island Park, I instantly fell into a non-thinking frame of mind. My consciousness was almost totally in primary mode -- feeling my muscles, especially my core, propel the bike.

Arms and legs worked together. Bike and path flowed together. The world inside and outside my head were as one as, pretty much, they ever are.

After ten minutes or so, I realized that I'd started thinking more. I was in reflective mode. I was remembering stuff I'd done in the past and pondering things I needed to do in the future.

I wasn't out of touch with the physicality of riding the StreetStrider. Those feelings were just sharing my mental space with reflective thoughts.

So it went for my 45 minute ride. It was sort of like a figure/ground thing. Or a see-saw. As one mode of consciousness went up, the other went down. When I thought more about the there-and-then, I was less in touch with the here-and-now.

And vice versa.

It all felt perfectly natural. At times in my life I was wary of thinking too much, so I'd try to stop thoughts with a mantra, or by exerting some effort: Be here now, Brian! 

Which came to seem forced to me. Now I'm comfortable with doing whatever I feel like doing. Think more, then think less. Perceive more, then perceive less. There aren't any rules here, no right or wrong, no strict dividing lines.

Primary and reflective consciousness build on each other, relate to each other, interact with each other. There's a proper time, and a proper balance, to engage in each.

I'd have nothing to think about without non-conceptual experiences. Those exeriences would be meaningless, by and large, without my reflective consciousness that allows me to place them within the context of my larger life.

I am in the here and now. I am in the there and then. Such is being human.  

No need to choose between Wonder and Science

For about a week I've been reading two books during my morning pre-meditation time. To most people they'd seem incompatible. Or at least, pointers in divergent directions of reality. 

But I happily read some of each, using a highlighter and pen (thanks for blank back pages, publishers) to note what I like, and sometimes don't like, about "The Way of Wonder" and "The Systems View of LIfe." 

Here's a blog post that includes links to other posts I've written about Haas' books; I haven't finished The Systems View of Life, which is a fascinating, but quite technical, undergraduate textbook that covers a lot of different topics -- as befits its title.

As I put one of the books down and pick up the other, sometimes I do wonder about how I can like the very poetic and mystical "The Way of Wonder" while also enjoying Fritjof Capra's and Pier Luigi Luisi's scientific exploration of the meaning of it all.

Well, for me it relates to what knowing means. 

Superficially, Haas is really down on knowing. His book is filled with paeans to wonder, not-knowing, mystery, darkness, giving up words, concepts, abstractions. That stuff can get annoying, especially since Haas is using well-written words and sophisticated concepts to get across his point.

One would think that if he really meant what he says, he'd just do a dance, grunt a lot, or otherwise communicate his message non-verbally and non-conceptually. 

But I see Haas as downplaying the ordinary sense of knowing in two ways that are compatible with some central themes in "The Systems View of Life." I'll know more about this, of course, after I finish that book.

First, wonder is an entirely appropriate -- inescapable, even -- response when we ponder the limits of existence. The very small of the quantum world. The very large of the cosmos. The beginning and end of the universe. Where everything in reality came from and where it is going.

Nobody knows the answers to these enigmas.

Not science, not spirituality, not religion, not mysticism, not philosophy. So I read Haas as mainly denigrating false knowing such as religions thrust upon us, the offering up of answers which please us, even though they are untrue, because not-knowing is uncomfortable. 

For example, Haas writes:

What generally happens, however, is that when finally we begin to courageously divorce ourselves from the habit of interpretation, and we stick our heads out of our limited understanding, we suddenly see what we should have been seeing all along -- the great Enigma waiting to engulf us.

And because we have hidden behind the cowardly walls of interpretation for so long, we cannot now bear the vision of infinite mystery, and therefore we quickly spin about on our heels and crawl back into understanding.

...Interpretation, then, is a covering over the great bewildering immensity; a shell the turtle constructs around itself, to hide and blind within; a blanket, pulled between the child and darkness, blocking out the ubiquitous unknown.

These words are a much more powerful indictment of conceptualizing than a passage in "The Systems View of Life," but connections can be drawn between them.

As human beings, we not only experience the transient states of primary consciousness; we also think and reflect, communicate with symbolic language, make value judgments, hold beliefs, and act intentionally with self-awareness and an experience of personal freedom.

...The "inner world" of our reflective consciousness emerged in evolution together with the evolution of language and of organized social relations. This means that human consciousness is inextricably linked to language and to our social world of interpersonal relationships and culture. In other words, our consciousness is not only a biological but also a social phenomenon.

So not only are we unable to look into the mystery of what lies beyond our capacity to know, our view of what we can comprehend occurs through the limited lens of human language and consciousness. This is just how things are, not a problem.

Thus a love of Wonder and Science both support a realization that what we know is not all there is, or exactly how reality is. Human knowledge is in part a human invention, while also in part an accurate reflection of the world that is not us.

I'm reminded of Ken Wilber's pre-trans fallacy. 

There is a difference between an infantile pre-rational, pre-language state, and a trans-rational, trans-language state. Meaning, as I said in a recent semi-serious post, I can instantly and intuitively marvel at a dark small shape zooming just above a creek bed and also soon after think "duck." 

The wonder of the experience, which I'd never had before in my 24 years of living on our rural Oregon property, wasn't at all diminished by the subsequent cognition that what our dog had startled out of a muddly pool of water was, indeed, a duck.

So when Haas decries "knowing," I take this to mean a certain kind of knowing to the exclusion of all other kinds. I can know all kinds of things about the world, while also knowing that I don't know about a whole lot of other things.

My knowing and not-knowing are two sides of the same experiential coin of consicousness. I can appreciate what I know through science, reason, experience, and language, while embracing the mysteries that lie beyond both my ability to know, and the ability of every other human being.

I'll briefly mention another commonality between these two books. Each stresses that knowing in isolation isn't genuine knowledge. Nothing in existence stands alone, separate unto itself. A duck would be nothing without the world in which it is born, lives, and dies.

Neither would we. This is the essence of a systems approach to life, according to Capra and Luisi.

Systems thinking means a shift from material objects and structures to the nonmaterial processes and patterns of organization that represent the very essence of life. We should also add that the emphasis on relationships, qualities, and processes does not mean that objects, quantities, and structures are no longer important.

When we talk of shifts of perspective, we do not imply that systems thinking completely eliminates one perspective in favor of the other, but rather that there is a complementary interplay between the two perspectives, a figure/ground shift.

...The first, and most general, characteristic of systems thinking is the shift of perspective from the parts to the whole. Living systems are integrated wholes whose properties cannot be reduced to those of smaller parts.

...The systemic conception of reality as an inescapable network of relationships has important implications not only for our view of nature, but also for our understanding of scientific knowledge. In Cartesian science, scientific descriptions were believed to be objective -- that is, independent of the human observer and the process of knowing. 

Systems science, by contrast, implies that epistemology -- the understanding of the process of knowing -- has to be included in the description of natural phenomena.

Which isn't all that different from what Haas says in a different way in his book.

Which is to say -- what happens to 'what is,' when we tangle our multifarious verse into the uni-verse, creating a multi-verse, and then attempt to collate our manifold symbols (which are not reality) into a 'way' of seeing -- what happens is that we end up with a version of life 'veiled' through lifeless symbols; life becomes a collage of dead, separate, 'things,' instead of a singular, flowing, living, wholeness.

This is why our term 'cata-logue' ('cata-': destruction, and 'logos': the 'word) literally refers to the disaster that arises from collecting and organizing symbols, which is what happens when we compart-mentalize our understandings, and make closed, separate boxes, and so destroy the natural whole.

Scattered thoughts about mindfulness

These thoughts are powered by (1) a 16 ounce can of Mike's Harder Margarita, which I've never tried before, but surely will again, and (2) a 16 ounce serving of the Sisters blend from the Sisters Coffee Company in central Oregon.  

This blend of alcohol and caffeine is guaranteed to produce a magnificently coherent amalgamation of scattered thoughts about this evening's chosen blog topic: mindfulness.

In my own mind at least, the only mind I really give a shit about, being clueless about all others.

Regarding mindfulness, I started meditating in 1969, so I've got 45 years of daily experience in observing the intricacies of what goes on inside my head. After all this time, I am pleased to report that I am now working on the greatest koan known to Zen pseudo-practitioners like me: What the fuck is going on? 

Beyond this non-realization, there is nothing more to be known.

Thank you for your adoration. Email me for instructions about how to contribute to my Dharma Fund, which, after today's shopping experience, will mostly go to buying more of Mike's Harder Margarita.

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Recently the dog and I were crossing a small creek on our property. I heard a rustling sound, then saw a dark shape zooming off a few feet above the water, heading downstream. At that moment I was in my elevated state of non-dual awareness, which I like to call "enlightenment" but my wife persists in calling "spacing out." 

Almost instantly, alas, my analytical, Western, dualistic, conceptual, abstract mind thought "Duck!" That destroyed the pure unfiltered awareness I had enjoyed a mere second before. However, it really was a duck. Regardless, this shows that my enlightenment has a few wrinkles to iron out before I can call myself Totally Nonconceptual Dude. 

This, undoubtedly, also will be what my colleagues in the mental hospital call me when I am unable to utter coherent sentences. "Tall. Round. Sweet. Metal. Yum-Yum" "Nurse, I think the Totally Nonconceptual Dude is asking again for a Mike's Harder Margarita."

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I have become adept at being mindful of what I am doing. Like, I am typing these words on the keyboard of my MacBook Pro. But I am not the typing of those words. I am the mindful observer of those words being typed.

More than that: having written that last sentence, it is clear that I also am mindful of myself being the mindful observer of typing these words on the keyboard of my MacBook Pro. Yet I am not the mindful observer of a mindful observer. I am more than that.

For I also am mindful of myself being mindful of being the mindful observer...

Oh, fuck. Where does it all end! At the bottom of the can of Mike's Harder Margarita, I can only hope.

Or maybe this mindfulness crap is just the same as my 1967 hippie pothead days (and nights), when we'd sit around blowing smoke rings, musing about how this whole universe could be a speck in the joint of a stoned dude, who lives in a universe that is just a speck in the joint of another stoned dude, who is... 

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In my happiest moments, to which I can now add while drinking Mike's Harder Margarita, I don't really know what the fuck it is I'm doing because I've just doing it, not being mindful of me having a happy moment. 

Like, when I first jump on my much-beloved StreetStrider (outdoor elliptical bike) and head off down a multi-use trail in Salem's beautiful Minto Brown Island Park. I'm just doing it. I'm doing what I've done since mid-December, three times a week, 7-8 miles at a time, so I'm in the StreetStrider groove, flowing along with my body moving the StreetStrider and the StreetStrider moving me.

Am I mindful? Hell if I know.

I'm not mindful of what I'm doing, because I'm just doing it. Once I start being mindful of doing my StreetStrider thing, I'm doing two things: StreetStriding and being mindful of StreetStriding.

Now I don't claim to be some non-dual Zen enlightened sage -- just someone who is one sip of Mike's Harder Margarita from fucking being sure that I am. (brief pause... done! I'm there!) But it seems to me that awareness of my StreetStriding awareness is one step removed from my actual experience.

So what's the point in me washing the dishes, while being aware of "I'm washing the dishes"?

Have I wasted my freaking time reading all those goddamn Zen books urging me to simply chop wood and carry water? Or simply update my Facebook feed and Twitter account with a link to another marvelous Church of the Churchless blog post?

Which, come to think of it, is the most enlightened thing for an enlightened being like me to do right now. 

Oh, after saying this to the guy who stole my idea for this blog post title from an advance look at the space/time continuum back in 2012. 

Dude, you think too much. You are too conceptual. You are too wordy. You need to be more like me. Your own "scattered thoughts about mindfulness meditation" clearly do not possess the pristine cosmic wisdom mine do.

And, yeah, that's the Mike's Harder Margarita speaking.

Readers of this blog post are just fortunate that I've stopped writing before finishing the last third of the can. Remember the Total Perspective Vortex? Man, that's what you'd have been sucked into if I had written anything after drinking the whole 16 ounces. 

TOO MUCH TRUTH! 

Will Sam Harris' "Waking Up" do that for me? Probably not.

When I visit the Amazon page for a forthcoming book by Sam Harris, "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion," Amazon helpfully reminds me that I pre-ordered way back on March 7. 

Ooh, ooh! Release date is September 9! Just 25 days and I'll be on my way to waking up!

Maybe. But I doubt it.

I admire Harris, because he is a noted atheist critic of religion who also is expert in neuroscience and has a fondness for meditation, Buddhist variety.

So I'm confident that I'm going to resonate with his new book. It should sell well, given Harris' reputation and his extensive marketing strategy -- which includes three lectures in major cities where attendees will get some bonus waking up.

In these public talks, I will discuss a range of psychological insights that have traditionally been considered “spiritual.” Although they tell us nothing about the origins of the cosmos, these experiences confirm some well-established truths about the human mind: Our conventional sense of self is an illusion; positive emotions, such as compassion and serenity, are teachable skills; and the way we think can profoundly influence our lives and the lives of others.

There is no discrete “I” or ego living like a Minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. And the feeling that there is—the sense of being perched somewhere behind your eyes, looking out at a world that is separate from yourself—can be altered or entirely extinguished. Although such experiences of “self-transcendence” are generally thought about in religious terms, there is nothing, in principle, irrational about them. From both a scientific and a philosophical point of view, they represent a clearer understanding of the way things are.

A rational approach to spirituality seems to be what is missing from secularism—and from the lives of most people I meet. My goal in these talks will be to offer a compelling and useful investigation of the human mind and to show how deepening our understanding of it can transform our experience of the world and our relationships with other human beings.

Sounds good. Difficult to disagree with much, if anything, Harris says. 

Well, unless you're a Christian with a fundamentalist view of your religion. This guy thinks Harris is lying when he puts "spirituality" in his book title, because naturally any conception that differs from the traditional Biblical notion just has to be wrong.

Thus it's a good sign that religious types are criticizing "Waking Up" already. That makes me more confident I'll enjoy it.

Reading a few reviews, though, made me more uncertain. This one, by a member of the Spiritual Naturalist Society, says that Harris is big on Dzogchen meditation. Now I've only read some books about Dzogchen; I've never practiced it.

But my impression is that Dzogchen is just about as filled with unnecessary mumbo-jumbo as other forms of Buddhist meditation.

I could be wrong about this, though. Hopefully Harris is able to show how Dzogchen and modern neuroscience are both pointed at the same secular realization of, as Harris says, no "I" perched behind our eyes.

Another review is quite a bit more scholarly. I didn't feel like reading it closely enough to figure out the reviewer's problem with the book. Harris doesn't agree with Hegel is one complaint. Seems to me this would be a good thing.

On the plus side, it sounds like Harris does his usually great job of making an esoteric subject understandable to a general reader. He did this with "Free Will," a book I liked a lot. Also, of course, in his widely read "The End of Faith." 

If more people understand why the notion of a self or soul makes no sense, Harris will have done the world a service. Whether they really "wake up" after reading his book, that's another question.

Still profoundly funny: MonkMojo who is now 2020mojo

Back in 2010 I put up a post called "Non-dual cartoons point way to enlightenment (or not)." It started off with...

One of the favorite people crazed cartoon characters I follow on Twitter is MonkMojo. I've learned a lot about non-dualism and Zen from reading his clever tweets.

Saying that, of course, means that I haven't learned a thing. But who gives a shit? A smile is close to enlightenment, which is one of the idiotic cliches that MonkMojo enjoys demolishing.

Here's some sample MonkMojo tweets. (RT means a re-tweet; what follows the || is MonkMojo's add-on).

RT @Yojinbo: wasn't impressed w/ the response I got from Houston Zen Center when I was in prison: no response. || Sounds pretty Zen 2 me ;)

Me to wife: While you're out there doing all your "important" stuff, I'm tweeting the fuckin' answers to life!

RT @TaoTeaKing: @MonkMojo i don`t believe that you got "the point" . Believe me ... :-) || Pretty much sums up my life. ;)

All I want to do is hang on to my stories and die bitter. Is that too much to fuckin' ask?

RT @amoz1939: Being excluded / Agony undergoing / The loss of good friends #haiku || Fuck'em ~#itiswhatitis

RT @ookiee: What's more important: that you believe in God, or believe in yourself?|| Which hot coal should one grasp more tightly? Neither.

Kindness happens, then a me swoops in and kills it with a my. 

MonkMojo morphed into Mojo1000, who morphed into 2020mojo. The dude (anyone called 2020Mojo clearly deserves that appellation) is a master of pseudo-spiritual aphorisms.


Except I'm not sure why I added "pseudo," since I like 2020mojo's pithy Twitterisms more than most of the spiritual crap that litters my bookcases.

You can read them by clicking on the link. Here's a sample of some recent tweets that I like.

I’m not sure if I'm here now, but I'm certain I wasn't there then.

You gave up your truth to help maintain balance in the system. Fuck the system.

Becoming demystified is a mystical experience.

Do we have a lot in common or are our delusional trances just overlapping at the moment?

You people mean a lot to me, so I just wanted to pause for a moment and send all of you a hug and some inappropriate touching.

Goddamnit, I left all the cool shit in my repressed unconsciousness.

Hey fuckers, I'm learning about respecting emotional boundaries.

I’m not looking for answers here, I’m looking for fellow explorers.

What does it mean when your wife keeps saying words at you?

“We're fucked.” - The first human conscious thought.

You can’t hide in the now forever, the past is on your heels and the future is coming for you.

I'm all in on this present moment stuff, but it’s helpful to understand what the fuck happened.

I used to be anti blame-it-on-your-childhood, then I finally took a look at mine. There’s gold in them thar hills!

I remember when God used to watch me masturbate. It was weird, but it made me feel important.

There is nothing special about awakening, it is your natural state. An absence of drama may be the only sign.

They tried to beat the me-ness out of me. What the fuck were they thinking?

That broken feeling you have deep down inside is what having a soul feels like, or it could just be gas.

I couldn't live in the truth, it’s way too uncomfortable, but I usually feel better after a visit.

Super nice people don’t give or receive honest feedback, that’s why you want to choke them to death.

Western psychology helps me to identify the issue, Eastern philosophy helps me to loosen my grip on it.

The multi-billion dollar spiritual business is becoming about as bad as religion.

Yet, in spite of it all, here you are, inexplicably triumphant over nothingness.

All the scientific hard evidence we discover is within a mystical realm we call consciousness.

Deep down inside I have an inner life coach that must be on acid or something.

What you refuse to accept, the world will creatively find a way to shove up your ass.

“I'm spiritual but not religious.” is code for “I’m confused but not super cluster mega fucking confused.”

Personal growth consists of your angry “I don't give a fuck.” becoming a peaceful “I don't give a fuck.”

I'm asked a great question. Hope my answer is as good.

Below is an email message from a Church of the Churchless reader. My replies are indented further, in italics. Interesting questions and observations from this person. I tried to make my responses in kind.

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

Brian, just a few quick lines to let you know how much I (continue to) enjoy reading your blog.

Hey, back at you. I enjoy reading your messages and comments. You write very clearly and make a lot of sense. In short, you remind me of me!

I’m slowly, very slowly making my way through your archives, as well as reading your more current articles as you write them (plus some random articles in between).  Yes, it’s slow going, and I’ve just passed the 2005 mark in your archives.  It’s slow going because much of what you write about cannot really be speed-read, and besides I find it rewarding to go all out reading all enclosed links and comments, as well researching myself on the ‘Net various references in your posts (and sometimes in the comments), many of which I am quite ignorant about.

Wow. You win the Church of the Churchless Reader of the Year Award. Heck, Reader of the DECADE. Congratulations. I suspect you are more familiar with my older blog posts than I am.

You were right : I can clearly discern your evolution from a recovering ideologue (religio-logue?) to a clear-thinking and very open-minded agnostic.

Well, thanks. My thinking (and feeling) naturally are biased by my upbringing, experiences, genetics, and other influences. I try to be open-minded, but it's tough to tell the difference between a reasoned preference for this or that, and a habitual irrational liking/disliking of this or that. I do change my mind frequently about philosophical and spiritual matters, which strikes me as a good thing.

Apart from the actual quality of the stuff we read, perhaps we best like and enjoy those writers whose writings resonate well with our own line of thinking.  Well, in your blog I find a whole wealth of very well-reasoned-out ideas and thoughts exactly along the way my own mind seems to be running these days.  And it’s great to have this huge mass of articles—far more and varied than any single book or set of books could have given me—to have to dip into, time and again.

I appreciate your appreciation. There have been times when I wondered whether it was worth writing the thousands of blog posts on this here Church of the Churchless. Hearing from someone like you makes me feel, "Yeah, it was."

As I had mentioned in my last comment to your blog, which you may perhaps have seen, your writings are extremely thought-provoking.  (And the comments too : though sometimes downright asinine, at times they are thought-provoking too.)  I have this whole list of questions that keep on bubbling up as I read on, but many of them I can myself find answers to on some thought, and sometimes your own further posts seem to address them.  So I’ve stuck to my original resolve, expressed in my last comment, not to go shooting off further comments and questions without first reading up a good bit more of what is already there.

Yes, I saw the comment. You are "New Reader" in the comments on a post where I replied to a previous equally thoughtful message from you. I don't mind questions and comments; I just sort of feel that, given everything I've written on this blog over the past ten years, just about everything I could say, I've said. But since I'm still saying new stuff, I guess that feeling isn't true.

Perhaps I could shoot off just one question, though, at this time?  (Please feel free to not answer : I’m sure you get too many similar emails and questions from readers to be able to address each one individually!) 

Actually, I don't get a large number of emails and questions. I'm just really good at procrastinating and failing to answer the ones I don't get for a while. I almost always get to them eventually. It's just that I'm also a citizen activist in my home town, have another HinesSight blog, and also live in a non-easy-care house and ten acres that need maintaining, so those things pull me away from churchless blogging.

My question:

Given the whole uncertainty here, mightn’t the whole spiritual endeavour be thought of as a very uncertain bet—much too uncertain to be even undertaken in the first place?  I mean, buying a lottery ticket can be seen as safe investment in comparison to the uncertainty of the spiritual quest! 

I agree. 

Your own more informed ruminations have only strengthened my own more tentative thoughts on this: that buying into some particular religion is very dicey, and plain idiotic: and an open-minded spiritual quest is best.  However, as regards the open-minded spiritual quest:

1.  We do not know if there is any such thing as enlightenment or spiritual progress at all.  Just perhaps there is: but quite likely there isn’t.

I agree about this also. I think there is something called personal development. That seems obvious. Each of us changes throughout our lifetime in various ways. There seem to be better and worse ways of changing. Whether some ways people change reasonably can be called "enlightenment" or "spiritual progress," that's another question.

2.  Should there be something in all this, even then, should past record of such efforts be any general indication, the chances of my/your personally getting an unequivocal answer one way or the other seem slim indeed!

If you mean an answer to the Nature of the Cosmos, the Meaning of It All, Whether God Exists, and similar Big Questions, I agree that the chance of getting an objectively true answer is very slim. However lots of people arrive at subjectively persuasive answers that have a lot of meaning to themselves. I suspect this is the best we can do: feel that our answers to the Big Questions make sense to us, whether or not they do to anyone else. If we don't pretend that we have an objective answer that applies to everybody, just a subjective answer that applies only to us, where's the problem?

3.  And finally, should one actually arrive at an answer, then there is nothing to suggest that that answer will have been worth these years of search.  (It seems like that the truth may well be along the lines of the Buddha’s anatta, no-self.  That there is nothing and no one at home.  Or, of course, not—but that seems most likely to me.  Should that be the case, well then, what on earth have I achieved with my hours and years of search?  Why not just kick the whole thing aside, and instead simply concentrate fully and unreservedly on a hedonistic / material existence, making the most of this life, and seeking only pleasure and material happiness—one’s own, and others’?)

Hmmmmm. Personally, I feel that if I can come to a full intuitive experiential understanding that the "self" I've been trying to look for and realize my whole life doesn't exist, this would be marvelous. After all, almost all (maybe every one) of my problems stems from a feeling of "this shouldn't be happening to me." If there is no "me," yay! The existential aspect of my problems is solved. I'm just left with the here and now physical reality of them, not a lingering sensation of "why me?" and "could this have been avoided?"

Also, you are assuming the reality of what philosophers call "counterfactuals." Namely, alternatives to events that have already happened, so they can't happen in reality since they pertain only to the past. Your question also seems to assume that free will exists, which implies a concurrent assumption that a "self" capable of freely willing also exists. 

How do you know that a personal answer to a search regarding life's meaning isn't worth all the searching? Wouldn't you need to have experienced both the answer and the searching to know this, along with the impossible counterfactual alternative: what your life would have been like absent that answer and that searching?

I don't believe in either the "self" or free will. So I don't consider that I could have done anything different with my life than what has actually happened in my life. Same applies to you and everybody else, in my opinion. Thus I don't accept the premise of your question. If someone is drawn to seek an answer to the Meaning of It All, and someone else finds satisfaction in the pursuit of worldly pleasures, this simply means that they are different people doing different things in life. 

I think everybody is seeking happiness. I enjoy pondering philosophical, scientific, and spiritual subjects. Other people enjoy pondering how to grow a fruitful garden, or take strokes off of their golf handicap, or a myriad of different goals. Each of us is doing what we have been determined to do -- that word "determined" meaning an absence of free will in the matter. Also, I obviously haven't spent my entire life on the sort of searching you describe. I've done many other things: gotten married (twice), raised a family, had a career, pursued athletic skills, learned ballroom dancing, etc. etc. etc.

That is my question, should you care to address it.  Basis your own extensive experience and thoughts along these lines (since what else do we have after all to base our answers on?), would you say this is an effort really worth taking? 

Well, see above. There's my answer. I don't believe we have a choice in deciding whether "really worth taking" applies to us. For me, and I assume most readers of this blog, it did. For the many people who find what I've blogged about over the years totally uninteresting, it didn't. Thus whatever I say to you on this subject is just one more influence that gets dropped into your mind/brain. I doubt that my answer, "Yes, it is an effort really worth taking," will be the deciding influence on you or anyone else. 

I suspect that you already know the answer to your question, the answer for yourself. That is the most importamt answer. Indeed the only answer, since I don't believe there are objective answers to the Big Questions of life, only subjective personal answers. We feel better when someone else comes up with our own answer, but that doesn't make the answer any more objectively true.

Again, perhaps it is not right to ask that question in those general terms, since how can you decide what is worth doing and what is not worth doing for another person, far less for people in general?  So let me rephrase that question for you particularly, in personal terms, in two parts:

First, given your current level of life-long experience, if you could go back to your 18-year-old self with this knowledge and experience and thoughts (your own future self’s knowledge and experience and thoughts, not someone else’s)—well, would you still have spent such a large chunk of your life in this quest?

Not a valid question, since I don't believe in the reality of counterfactuals, of events that could have happened, but didn't. If they could have happened, they would have. And maybe in an another part of the multiverse (if such exists), I did live my life differently. But in this life, the other one I know, the only experiences I am aware of are those that actually happened. I really spend zero time wondering whether I did the right thing about anything in my life. Everything I have done was the only thing I could have done. 

And second : looking now at your current, 60-year-old self : given your life-long experience, why do you still persist with your daily meditation, your “spiritual” readings, and your “spiritual” ruminations?  Is it plain habit?  Is it a case of not wanting to write off large amounts of sunk costs (in terms of time and effort already put in)?  Is it because you simply do this unthinkingly?  And having now thought about it consciously, would you still continue doing it?  Why exactly—can you spell it out?

Because I want to. Because I enjoy doing what I'm doing. Because my wanting and enjoying aren't in my control, nor is writing the three sentences in this paragraph.

Needless to say, I’m not challenging your position in any way, nor am I questioning (as in challenging) your personal private beliefs and thoughts and actions.  Just seeking your particular answer to a question I ask myself, in the hope and expectation that your own thoughts may go at least some small way in facilitating the answer I seek for my own self (and must ultimately arrive at myself, for myself). 

"At myself, for myself." Very true.

Thanks again for the lovely blog you’ve got going.  (And thanks to Google—and serendipity—for having led me, unsought and quite by accident, to your Churchless website!)

The Embodied Mind -- interesting interview with Evan Thompson

Neuroscience. Buddhism. Meaning. Consciousness. Brain. Body. Culture.

There's a lot of threads woven into a pretty persuasive view of things in a Tricycle interview with Evan Thompson:

Thoroughly grounded in Western and Buddhist philosophy and learned in science, Thompson has been dedicated to cross-cultural and interdisciplinary dialogue between Buddhism and cognitive science for over two decades.

Give it a read. The piece is just the right length. Not too long. Not too short. Readable in a single spiritual philosophical sitting. The only reader comment (at the moment) also is perceptive.

I liked how Thompson is skeptical about the whole Buddhist "as it is" thing, the mistaken notion that somehow it is possible to look upon our own mind as if we were peering through a microscope at something outside of ourselves.

It was early in your career—you were a doctoral student—when you cowrote The Embodied Mind. Looking back, do you have any regrets—things you would have changed, knowing now what you didn’t know then? There was a certain way we talked about mindfulness that I now think is wrong. Sometimes we described it as a special kind of inner observation that lets you see the way your mind really is apart from being mindful—as if your mind were a box and your looking into it revealed what was there all along.

...I object when people reduce practice in this rich sense to a tool or instrument. Some people use the analogy that meditation is like an inner telescope: Outer science uses physical telescopes for looking at the stars, and inner science uses meditation for looking at the mind. I don’t like that analogy. It makes you think of your relationship to your own mind in an instrumental way.

Your relationship to yourself is precisely not an instrumental one. A telescope is a tool for looking at something separate and distant. Meditation isn’t like that. If you think that awareness is an instrument that enables you to look within, on that analogy you’re thinking of the inner realm as one of objectivity—except it’s not, because it’s subjectivity.

If you think of meditation that way, you can’t help turning your mind into an object, which is precisely what the mind is not. So here I think there is an important difference between meditation and scientific observation, despite the importance of concepts for making sense of both. Meditation can be very powerful and transformative: it can be very generative of insight, deep understanding, and connectedness. But not because it’s an instrument or tool that enables you to see a hidden inner realm.

Thompson also scoffs at the possibility of always, or maybe ever, experiencing reality without concepts or mental frameworks. That idea, of course, itself is a concept, a mental framework. There's no getting outside culture, upbringing, prior experiences, habits, learning.

Is the problem you are getting at the widespread assumption that mindfulness meditation is not mediated by concepts? Experience and concepts are interdependent. Whether there are nonconceptual modes of experience is a complicated matter that both Buddhist and Western philosophers have argued about a lot. But in most cases of human experience you can’t have one without the other.

Take science. Here you observe things, of course, but you can’t see them properly unless you have the right concepts. If you just look through a microscope with no guidance on how to look at what you see, you have no clue what you’re looking at. Even if you’re doing high school biology, you need to have concepts like “cell wall” or “organelle”—to say nothing of what’s happening at the edge of scientific discovery, where you’re using new imaging technologies and learning to see things. So observation is happening there, of course. But also a lot of conceptualizing.

Similarly, if you go on a Vipassana retreat, you may spend the first day or so watching your breath, but then you’re given a system of concepts for practicing mindfulness—concepts like “moment-to-moment arising,” “pleasant versus unpleasant,” “sensation,” “intention,” “attention,” and maybe some categories from the list of elements, or dhammas, in Theravada Buddhist philosophy.

It’s a silent retreat, so this is the only thing you hear, and everyone else around you is doing the same thing, so this shapes how and what you experience. You get a powerful and socially reinforced conceptual system for making sense of what you experience. That system in that context may help to bring about certain nonconceptual experiences, but the minute you start thinking about them—which there’s no way to avoid doing—you’re back in the land of concepts.

What if reality is completely different from how you think it is?

I'm not sure whether ultimate reality can be known. Heck, I'm not even sure whether limited reality can be known. 

Meaning, there may be no such thing as reality.

This might just be a word we humans use for our way of looking upon the world, a subjective viewpoint which has no resemblance to the way the world really is, because there is no really beyond the subjective viewpoint. 

Alternatively, perhaps reality really exists, but it is nothing like our thoughts about it.

Religious dogmas have it wrong. Mystical teachings have it wrong. Philosophical notions have it wrong. Scientific theories have it wrong. This is what I was thinking of when I wrote one of my first Church of the Churchless posts ten years ago, "Just have faith."

Here's how to tell the difference between true faith and false faith: Imagine that you are standing in the middle of a bare windowless room. Two doors lead out of the room. Both are closed, but can be opened with a turn of the doorknob. The doors are marked with signs that describe what awaits on the other side: (A) Reality, (B) Belief

After you open a door, you have to walk through it. The door then will shut and you never will be able to leave the place you have entered. Choose Reality and you will know things as they really are, from top to bottom of the cosmos. You will know whether or not God exists and, if so, the nature of this ultimate divinity. You will know whether death is the final end of your existence or if it is the beginning of another form of life. You will know whether there is a meaning to the universe beyond what human beings ascribe to it.

Or, choose Belief and you will know only what lies within the confines of your current suppositions about the nature of the cosmos. For the rest of your life you will be confident that what you believe to be true, really is. Any evidence to the contrary will not make an impact on your mind. You will remain doubt-free, faithful to the beliefs you now hold about God, creation, life, death, and the purpose of human existence.

Which door would you choose to walk through?

Before answering, consider carefully the potential ramifications of your choice. Reality is an unknown, a mystery. It could be frightening or fabulous, painful or pleasurable, warmly loving or coldly uncaring. Do you want to embrace absolutely real reality? Or would you rather hold on to your beliefs about what is real?

Great questions. I'm not sure how I'd answer them if the doors I described actually existed. I like to think I'd choose Reality, but this might be so mind-blowing, my brain would never recover from the shock of it. 

Last night I was reading a recent issue of New Scientist. A lead piece by the editors caught my eye, "The beautiful, ugly truth. Better to see the cosmos as it is, rather than how we'd like it to be." It began with:

"The great tragedy of science," as Victorian biologist Thomas Huxley observed, is "the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."

The piece went on to talk about a story in the issue that describes the possibility of the universe not being symmetrical or homogeneous at very large scales.

Symmetry is pleasing to scientists. Much of modern cosmology is founded on the assumption that there is no special place in the universe. For example, if the expansion of the universe is accelerating, this is occurring everywhere. 

Such may not be the case. Which leads to the editor's final paragraph:

A less-ordered universe might be less pleasing to the mind's eye, and in some cases less tractable. But perhaps it's time we stopped trying so hard to find the truth through beauty, and instead try a bit harder to find beauty in the truth of ugly facts.

Religions prosper by preying on the human propensity to shy away from ugly facts.

Like the inevitabilty of death, consciousness being dependent on the physical brain, the absence of demonstrable evidence for God, a dearth of reasons to believe in miracles or the effectiveness of prayer, our insignificance in an unimaginably vast and ancient universe.

We make up stories about how the world is because this comforts us. This is obvious in religiosity.

Yet scientifically-minded people also cling to explanations that attempt to bridge the unbridgable gap between the little we know and the vast amount that remains unknown to humanity -- possibly forever. Our natural tendency is to shy away from uncertainty, not-knowing, cluelessness.

We believe we're making progress toward fathoming the mystery of the cosmos. Perhaps personally; certainly as a species. Rarely do we seriously consider that questioning the Meaning of It All without finding answers might be our fate.

Both individually and collectively. Is this so distressing, though?

Consider: if the nature of reality (ultimate or otherwise) is beyond the ability of we Homo sapiens' to comprehend, then embracing a gigantic existential question mark is the closest we'll be able to come to any sort of final knowledge.

"I don't know" would be the wisest understanding; "I have no idea," the most profound thought.

A quotation in Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost has some attribution problems. Regardless, along with Don Anderson I love the quote.

“How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?”

-– Rebecca Solnit, reinterpreting someone else, who was misquoting Plato, who was quoting Meno, who was losing an argument to Socrates 

Modern science demolishes archaic "as it is" views

Whenever I read a book about Buddhism or mindfulness, I've got my highlighter poised to make a skeptical marginal question mark when (usually not if) I come across mention of perceiving reality "as it is."

This is an absurd pre-scientific notion, as I've discussed here and here.

With so many interesting ideas to choose from, I'll take the easy way out in this post and share some of what I read this morning about how humans attribute what actually is within to without -- the world outside our craniums. 

Frequently I take issue with those who claim it is possible to know reality "as it is."

Huh?

First, we Homo sapiens' know reality as it is possible to be known by the unique capabilities of the human brain/body. Second, every person experiences reality in his or her own unique fashion.

My "first" is evident to anyone who goes on a walk with a dog, which posseses a vastly different sense of smell. My "second" is evident to anyone who is married or otherwise knows another person intimately.

Vive la différence, as they say. 

It isn't possible to view something without the brain doing a lot of unconscious processing before the perception pops into awareness. Just because a person isn't consciously thinking doesn't mean that his or her brain isn't chugging away on an unconscious level, bringing in personal past experiences and such.

Even though mindfulness advocates claim to bring a scientific perspective to this trendy meditation approach, rarely do I find them addressing the neuroscientific facts that undermine the notion of it being possible to perceive the world "as it is."

The best we can do, seemingly, is reduce obvious distractions and prejudices that prevent us from accurately perceiving what is happening in the present moment.

For example, if I'm daydreaming while driving, or rocking along to a song I like on the radio, I'm going to be less aware of what is happening on and along the road I'm on. I may not notice a bicyclist on a side street or a ball rolling onto the pavement.

Likewise, if I detest the politics of an elected official, my emotional distaste for them may make it impossible for me to understand their policy positions in a speech they're making. My mental screaming at the television screen drowns out the coherence of their message.

So there is a continuum of "as it is." It is possible to be more, or less, in touch with the reality of what is happening in the world. 

However, there is no absolutely objective reality, no perspective from above, no God's eye view. No as-it-is.

What's interesting is that traditional religious perspectives have switched philosophical places with the view of modern science in this regard. Usually we think of religions and spiritual practices as championing subjectivity, while scientists are hooked on objectivity.

To some extent this is true. But not when it comes to "as it is." Observer-dependent reality is a central concept in modern physics, as blogged about here and here. It also is a core tenet of a systems view of life, as discussed by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi in a book with that title. 

To quote Heisenberg once more, "What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." Thus systems thinking involves a shift from objective to "epistemic" science, to a framework in which epistemology -- "the method of questioning" -- becomes a central part of scientific theories. 

The realization that the subjective dimension is always implicit in the practice of science does not mean that we have to give up scientific rigor. When we speak of an "objective" description in science, we mean first and foremost a body of knowledge that is shaped, constrained, and regulated by the collective scientific enterprise, rather than being merely a collection of individual accounts. Such intersubjective validation is standard practice in science and need not be abandoned.

In the epistemic approach to science, nature is seen as an interconnected web of relationships, in which the identification of specific patterns as "objects" depends on the human observer and the process of knowing.

...What makes it possible to turn the systems approach into a proper science is the discovery that there is approximate knowledge. This insight is crucial to all of contemporary science. The mechanistic paradigm is based on the Cartesian belief in the certainty of scientific knowledge. 

In the systems paradigm it is recognized that all scientific concepts and theories are limited and approximate. Science can never provide any complete and definitive understanding. In science, to put it bluntly, we never deal with truth, in the sense of a precise correspondence between our description and the described phenomenon. We always deal with limited and approximate knowledge.

Fascinating. 

Religious believers often talk about the arrogance of science, of scientists supposedly considering they have all the answers.

Not at all.

As Capra says, modern science recognizes that knowledge of reality always is from a certain point of view. There is no such thing as an exact match between a description of something, and the nature of that thing.

So it is those who hold to the possibility of an "as it is" understanding of reality -- via enlightenment, elevated consciousness, high level of mindfulness, whatever -- who are being arrogant.

Humility is the hallmark of science, not of religions and other practices which claim to possess a special knowledge of the true nature of reality.

We will die one day. Good or bad news?

Religions thrive because people are afraid of dying and not being alive anymore. If death didn't exist, I doubt religions would either. 

People can deal with other problems without religion. What gives life meaning? What is right and wrong? Is there an inherent purpose to the cosmos?

But death... that's a problem with no solution. Everybody dies. Everybody. No exceptions. 

So those who want to live on after their body dies have only one choice: fantasy, imagination, wishful thinking. Religions fulfil a desire for immortality which can't be met in any other way.

Well, it can't be met through religiosity either.

But just as people are easily lured to buy into other schemes that promise a lot more than they can deliver (lotteries, for example), religions easily attract converts through the wares they offer.

Notably, eternal life.

The big question, though, is whether trading reality for illusion is worth the reassurance religious dogma provides to true believers. 

Christianity, for example, likes to talk about the "good news" it brings. Basically, salvation. Death isn't the end! Jesus saves. God will be our best friend for eternity.

Sounds nice. But only if all this is true. If the good news is false news, then Christians are living a lie in what will be their one and only life. So are believers in every other religion.

August is blackberry time here in western Oregon. Luther Burbank, curse his non-existent soul, brought the Himalayan Blackberry to the northwest.

Now it is an invasive thorny plant-pest that grows everywhere. My wife and I labored for years to clear large patches of blackberries from our ten-acre property. We've succeeded so well, I have to pick and eat blackberries when I go for an evening dog walk around a nearby community lake.

Recently I was munching away on the tasty moist berries and suddenly realized, "One day there will be no more blackberry eating for me. In fact, no anything for me."

This wasn't as stark and startling a sensation as my fear of non-existence feeling. It was gentler, though no less intuitively truthful. 

I was grateful for it.

The berries I was eating began to taste even better. Life seemed more vivid, more precious, more worth living. Walking home, I thought about what life would be without death. Could we even call it life, in the sense of how we look upon living now?

Seemingly it would be more akin to "existing," a word which connotes something other than the energetic, flowing, ever-changing, unpredictable nature of "living."

Not that I have a choice, but I prefer living over existing. This is the downside of religiosity: it injects a big dose of fantastical eternal existence into the reality of ephemeral life. Thus it dilutes actual living with the promise of eternal life.

"Sure, those blackberries taste good now. But just wait until you taste heavenly fruit! No comparison."

Well, of course not.

It is impossible to compare something real with something imaginary. The car in my driveway can't begin to compare with my fantasy car. However, I can drive and enjoy the car I actually have, which makes it incomparably superior to my fantasy.

Several days ago a rare summer thunderstorm journeyed up the Willamette Valley. Before the storm hit, hints of its arrival were in the sunset. Sitting on our deck, I had to grab my iPhone with an unbidden thought of "heavenly."

Not in the sense of supernatural, of course. Nature was producing the divine light show without any help from God. It was a special moment. But then, all moments are when we realize there will come an end to our experiencing of them.

This is the grace, so to speak, of not being a religious believer. We trade an abstract conceptual fantasy of eternal life for a more vibrant direct experience of living here and now. I'm happy that I've made that trade.

I'll end with a few quotes from John Gray's "The Silence of Animals."

Simenon's tales carry no moral lesson. But if there is an idea at work in them, it is that the impressions through which we pass are more real than the selves we think are authors of our lives.

...The world in which you live from day to day is made from habit and memory. The perilous zones are the times when the self, also made from habit and memory, gives way. Then, if only for a moment, you may become something other than you have been.

...He breaks out from the prison of his ordinary self not into a great oneness but into an outward world he had not seen before.

...The willful opening of the mind to the senses is a prelude to events that cannot be made to happen. Like that of religious mystics, contemplation of this kind involves nullifying the self. But not with the aim of entering any higher self -- a figment left behind by an animal mind.

God-seeking mystics want this figment to guide them to a new way of living. They are right in thinking that a life made up only of action is the pursuit of phantoms; but so is life passed on a fictive frontier between two worlds. 

The needy animal that invented the other world does not go away, and the result of trying to leave the creature behind is to live instead with its ghost.

Godless contemplation is a more radical and transient condition: a temporary respite from the all-too-human world, with nothing particular in mind.

...Godless mysticism cannot escape the finality of tragedy, or make beauty eternal. It does not dissolve inner conflict into the false quietude of any oceanic calm. All it offers is mere being. There is no redemption from being human.

But no redemption is needed.