Church of the Churchless

"Pascal's Wager 2.0" -- an interesting read

Most people are familiar with Pascals' Wager. (If you aren't, I've written about it here and here.)


Pascal's basic idea was that it makes sense to believe in God, because if you're right the benefits are eternal and unlimited, while if you're wrong you lose nothing.

(Or very little. Such as listening to a bunch of boring sermons and not eating meat on Fridays.)

Over on the New York Times web site, there's an interesting piece by a philosophy professor, Gary Gutting. In "Pascal's Wager 2.0" he argues that doubting God is a better bet than denying God.

The wager requires a choice between believing and not believing. But there are two ways of not believing. I can either deny that God exists or doubt that God exists. Discussions of the wager usually follow Pascal and lump these two together in the single option of not believing in God.

They don’t distinguish denying from doubting because both are ways of not believing. The argument then is about whether believing is a better option than not believing. My formulation of the argument will focus instead on the choice between denying and doubting God.

Denial of God means that I simply close the door on the hope that there is something beyond the natural world; doubt may keep that door open. I say “may” because doubt can express indifference to what is doubted. I don’t know and I don’t care whether there is an even number of stars or whether there are planets made of purple rock.

Indifferent doubt is the practical equivalent of denial, since both refuse to take a given belief as a viable possibility — neither sees it as what William James called a “live option.” But doubt may also be open to and even desirous of what it doubts. I may doubt that I will ever understand and appreciate Pierre Boulez’s music, but still hope that I someday will.

Well, at first I was pretty much on board with Gutting. But after reading his entire essay, and some of the intelligent reader comments (check out the "reader's picks"), his arguments came to seem weaker to me.

Gutting's distinction between atheism and agnosticism, which seems to basically line up with denying and doubting -- atheists deny, agnostics doubt -- is spurious.

As I've noted many times before on this blog, I don't know any atheist who wouldn't be convinced of God's existence if there was highly persuasive demonstrable evidence of this. Atheists like me aren't 100% sure that God doesn't exist. We're just highly confident, given the lack of positive evidence that God is real.

So I'd say that virtually every atheist is a doubter, not a denier. Meaning, atheists don't deny that there is some possibility that God exists. They simply strongly doubt this is true.

Further, I'd be overjoyed to learn that God is real and I'm going to spend eternity in a really nice heaven. So nice, I won't be bored with it, even if I'm there for forever. 

I'm pretty sure most atheists feel the same way.

Who wouldn't like to be proven wrong about God, if this means both life and the afterlife are going to take on a much more pleasurable appearance? This assumes, of course, that God is a good guy/gal/sexless being. 

If God is a nasty piece of shit who enjoys seeing people suffer -- not a bad hypothesis, actually, given the way the world is -- then it is great news that this God doesn't exist. 

Anyway, give "Pascal's Wager 2.0" a read. Make up your own mind about Gutting's arguments. Then scan the reader's picks comments. New York Times subscribers always leave thoughtful comments that often are better than the piece being commented on.

Here's a few comment samples:

Professor Gutting writes that belief in God's existence enables people to "find a higher meaning and value to their existence by making contact with a beneficent power beyond the natural world." What is his evidence that God is beneficent? He is ignoring the evil in the world. Even if God were beneficent, what is Professor Gutting's evidence that believing in God provides people with a higher meaning and value to their existence? It may for some people, but not for others.

Professor Gutting adds that "we have good reason to expect much greater happiness if there is a beneficent power we could contact." What is his evidence for that? Maybe God's beneficence won't affect me personally. Or maybe it would increase my happiness just a little and not make it "much greater."

Professor Gutting, like all believers, is just making stuff up.

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More nonsense from Gutting.

We should "hope" that there's a god? Why? God, based on man's made-up descriptions of him, is cruel, capricious, arbitrary, violent, and perverse. We should "hope" that there's NO god. And that's before even factoring in the evils of self-interest and self-indulgence inherent in the concept of "heaven" and "god's goodness."

If Gutting wants "meaning," there is plenty of it in the real world; we do not need fantasies and fairy tales to create meaning. People need help and care, communities need development, the natural world needs protection, human relationships need improvement; and the world needs progress and enlightenment. There can be found enough "meaning" in seeking these paths as would fill a million million lifetimes.

Let's just drop the supernatural, superstitious pablum once and for all, and deal with what actually exists in reality: an often terrible, often beautiful, always imperfect world.

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Atheism is not a form of belief. It is the absence of belief. I think it was Sam Harris that said calling atheism a belief is like calling not collecting stamps a hobby. Also, I fail to see how agnosticism is closer to science than atheism. We all acknowledge that there could be a God since the concept is not falsifiable. If simply believing makes it so, than anything I believe in can become real, whether or not it is so. So how is this more like science?

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Aside from the fact that God appears to be a psychotic monster in his disregard for human suffering, the evidence for his existence is entirely apocryphal. This raises several issues. First, who would want to make contact with such a creature? The ways in which he works are supposed to be mysterious, but they're mysterious in the same way that randomness is mysterious. Further, the "evidence" for god appears to come from some misfiring of our human presumption that there is a human-like cause behind all phenomena.

There is no good reason for engaging in any wager about the benefits or even the physical reality of such a being. When there are sightings of Elvis we don't make such wagers. We dismiss the claimants as deluded and get on with our lives.

God belief says nothing about reality, but it says a lot about our psychology. We've only recently evolved from creatures who instinctively revere the alpha male. He's the smartest and the strongest. He doles out rewards for good behavior and punishes transgressors. We're careful not to challenge him, so we abase ourselves before him and tell him that we are unworthy. These tendencies are in our DNA, shared by our ape cousins to this day. They don't have the language to create metaphors and poetry to personify this instinctive imperative, but we do, and we call it God.

It's one thing to lose money on a bad bet. It's quite another to wager your intellectual integrity on a chimp's fantasy.

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I understand from whence cometh Gutting's argument. I long ago gave up on God, but I find value in the teachings of Jesus and Buddha: values for living a worthwhile life, and values that increase my spiritual connection with the universe. People often mistake me for a Christian, but I tell them "No, I'm not. I know too much to believe the fairy tales of that religion; however, I do assess my life by the words of Jesus and Buddha, both of whom tell us to eschew a material-centered life and care for our fellow humans and refrain from activities that might soil our being and reduce our ability to be a good person." I try, not always successfully, to do that.

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Atheism derives from what one knows: One knows that no evidence of God's existence has been found. An atheist does not assert definitively that God does not exist, because to assert it definitively would require a leap of faith. We cannot prove the non-existence of God. But an atheist will not take seriously the possibility that God exists until evidence turns up.

We cannot prove the non-existence of unicorns, flying pigs, or the tooth fairy either. Therefore, we should not deny their existence. But that doesn't mean we should be agnostic about them. Agnosticism implies that we take their existence seriously.

 

Traditional Buddhist morality is worse than modern secular morality

Buddhism often is embraced by people who reject other forms of religion. It's sort of like a spiritual security blanket for those who no longer feel comfortable taking shelter under theistic theologies like Christianity.

Something to hold on if it is just too scary to let go of religion entirely.

I've used Buddhism in this way, being attracted to its non-supernatural aspects while rejecting rebirth, karma extending over multiple lives, and such.

I don't see anything wrong with this.

But there's a decent argument to be made that when the unappealing side of Buddhism is discarded, what's left isn't really Buddhism -- sort of like when avant garde Christians say, "I respect Jesus as a wise teacher, yet not as the Son of God."

Is that Christianity, making Jesus into just another human being like you and me, rather than a sin-absolving divine being? Somewhat similarly, if we reject traditional Buddhist morality, can we really call what's left "Buddhism"?

David Chapman delves into this question in "Buddhist Morality is Medieval."

Since I don't know much about traditional Buddhist moral teachings, his essay made me realize how unappealing old-time Buddhism was (and is) compared to modern secular morality.

Traditional Buddhist morality developed in feudal theocratic cultures. Mostly, it is typical for such societies: similar to what you’d find in Medieval Europe or the nastier parts of the contemporary Islamic world. It is crude, arbitrary, patriarchal, and often cruel.

In Europe, Enlightenment rationalism enabled smart people to say “wait, that’s nasty and stupid.” Christian morality gradually became less barbarous, and evolved into secular ethics.

Buddhist modernizers replaced traditional morality with Victorian Christian morality in the late 1800s, and with leftish secular morality in the the 1980s. (The two pages after this one discuss that.) The result is that modern “Buddhist ethics” has no similarity to traditional Buddhist morality, much of which would horrify Western Buddhists.

You’d find, for most current hot-button Western moral conflicts, that traditional Buddhism has nothing to say, or comes down on the side of Western conservatives, or advocates positions so regressive that even no conservative would agree.

Sure sounds like it. Here's a few excerpts from Chapman's piece that deal with some particular topics in traditional Buddhism.

Sex. 
Buddhism is extraordinarily anti-sexual. Rejection of sex is the first and most important aspect of its central principle, renunciation. Buddhism recommends complete celibacy for lay people as well as monastics. Actual Buddhist practice is completely incompatible with any sexual activity, and even with the slightest twinge of desire.

Gender Equality
Peter Harvey’s Introduction to Buddhist Ethics devotes an entire chapter, 56 pages long, to “Sexual Equality.” This simply does not exist in Buddhism.

Harvey really, really wants it to exist, but in the end he doesn’t say it does, because it doesn’t. Most of the chapter shows instead that women are inferior according to virtually all Buddhist texts and cultural traditions.

Slavery
Slavery is explicitly approved in many Buddhist scriptures... Not surprisingly, many modern Buddhists want to deny the facts. When that fails, they want to find excuses. This prevarication deserves contempt.

War
In practice, Buddhist authorities have enthusiastically supported many wars, including purely aggressive land-grabs, throughout history. They have used specifically Buddhist moral arguments to justify these.

Chapman correctly says that contemporary secular ethics is better than traditional Buddhist morality. More generally, contemporary secular ethics is better than the moral teachings of any traditional religion -- which are filled with archaic visions of what the "good life" is.

Pope Francis' recent visit to the United States is a good example.

Sure, Francis spoke persuasively of the need to save the Earth from global warming pollution and to dial down the excesses of capitalism, along with acting compassionately toward immigrants. These are in line with mainstream secular morality.

Yet at the same time, the Catholic Church is wedded to outmoded views of same-sex marriage, women's rights, contraception, abortion, and other issues. So there's still a lot not to like about traditional Catholic morality, just as is true of traditional Buddhist morality.

Wow. My wife convinces me she's enlightened.

If you think I'm churchless and irreligious, you haven't met my wife, Laurel -- who is now surpassing me in skepticism about all things godly. 

She's even enlightening me about enlightenment. 

Driving home from central Oregon this afternoon, with plenty of time to converse during the two hour trip, Laurel said:

Why are so many people concerned about being enlightened? It's just about embracing reality. Which is right here, right now. So understanding there's no such thing as enlightenment, just reality, is true enlightenment. 

I couldn't add much to this bit of wisdom.

Mostly I just marveled at Laurel's evident enlightenment. Perhaps even more than me, she's come to understand that searching for an illusory SuperSized Consciousness is a recipe for wasting one's time.

Now, I realize that many people disagree with this. I would have disagreed with Laurel myself a decade or so ago, when I still believed it was possible to dissolve the illusion of everyday reality. 

Today, like my wife, I consider that the illusion is believing there is any illusion to dissolve. Sure, there's a lot to learn about the world -- both on a personal and communal level. 

But there's no convincing evidence that anything other than one's ordinary mind is needed to gain increased knowledge and understanding of what life is all about, a notion shared by John Gray in his new book, as I wrote about in my previous post.

I quoted Gray:

We do not know how matter came to dream our world into being: we do not know what, if anything, happens when the dream ends for us and we die. We yearn for a type of knowledge that would make us other than we are -- though what we would like to be, we cannot say. Why try to escape from yourself?

Accepting the fact of unknowing makes possible an inner freedom very different from that pursued by Gnostics. If you have this negative capability, you will not want a higher form of consciousness; your ordinary mind will give you all you need.

Today I came across a piece, "Alan Watts on What Reality Is and How to Become What You Are." Watts, of course, also was big on living an ordinary life without making it into anything other than what it naturally is.

The piece has a quote from Watts' book, Become What You Are.

Some time ago a group of people were sitting in a restaurant, and one of them asked the others to say what they meant by Reality. There was much vague discussion, much talk of metaphysics and psychology, but one of those present, when asked his opinion, simply shrugged his shoulders and pointed at the saltshaker.

He was amazed to find that no one understood him, yet he had intended to be neither clever nor obscure. His idea was just to give a commonsense answer to the question, on the ordinary assumption that Reality is whatever exists.

He was not understood because his friends, in common with many others, regarded Reality as a special kind of existence and Life (with a capital L) as a particular way of living. Thus we often meet those who talk about the difference between being a mere clod, a mere “animated stomach,” and a real person; between those who simply exist and those who really live.

Which is followed by another quote:

We have all met those who are trying very hard to be real persons, to give their lives Reality (or meaning) and to live as distinct from existing. These seekers are of many kinds, highbrow and lowbrow, ranging from students of arcane wisdom to the audiences of popular speakers on pep and personality, selling yourself and making your life a success.

I have never yet met anyone who tried to become a real person with success. The result of such attempts is invariably loss of personality, for there is an ancient paradox of the spiritual life whereby those who try to make themselves great become small.

The paradox is even a bit more complicated than this; it also means that if you try, indirectly, to make yourself great by making yourself small, you succeed only in remaining small. It is all a question of motive, of what you want. Motives may be subtly concealed, and we may not call the desire to be a real person the desire to be great; but that is just a matter of words.

John Gray's "The Soul of the Marionette" -- perplexing and persuasive

I enjoy books that present familiar ideas in a fresh way. I also enjoy books that, when I read the last page, leave me with as many questions as answers.

John Gray's "The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry Into Human Freedom" is such a book. 

I finished it last night, having read the 168 pages in just a day and a half. Once I started Gray's book, I found it so fascinating, I felt compelled to get to the end as soon as possible -- so I could grasp its conclusions.

Problem was (if it is a problem, and I suspect it isn't), I read the final pages, closed the cover, and then felt a big ???????????... settle over my mind. 

Meaning, I wasn't sure what the meaning of the book was. 

But my next thought was: Gray's lack of evident meaning was the meaning of "The Soul of the Marionette." This fit with my reading of his previous "The Silence of Animals," which I blogged about here.

I'm tempted to share some quotes from his new book and leave blog visitors to figure out what they mean.

Resisting that temptation, I'm going to share my intuitions about "The Soul of the Marionette" in my own words -- which might, or might not, reflect Gray's intentions.

Gray starts out with a compelling tale of someone who wrote a story about marionettes, puppets. Puppets can dance about with amazing grace because they aren't bound by gravity as we are. They are controlled by the puppeteer, a "higher power" so to speak.

Likewise, humans have a strong desire to surrender themselves to some force greater than themselves. Gray speaks of how theists seek to know the will of God; Taoists seek to act in harmony with Tao; scientists seek to know the Theory of Everything that explains why things are as they are.

So the most intriguing aspect of Gray's book for me is how he persuasively argues that seemingly disparate aspects of human culture, such as religion and science, actually are bowing down to the same belief: that it is possible to eradicate mystery and ignorance, revealing the nature of the cosmos through a form of Gnosticism.

The original Gnostics held a view common to many religions and mystical teachings. This world is a reflection or shadow of a much more vibrant and real higher realm.

Either some malevolent force, such as the Devil, actively prevents us from knowing that reality, or ignorance is a passive block to this knowledge, or gnosis. Regardless, both ancient and modern forms of Gnosticism hold out the promise that we can know the puppeteer, so to speak. 

This knowledge can bring us to a state where we willingly surrender our belief that we have free will, that we are independent actors on the stage of life, and accept that some power greater than ourselves is making us speak, dance, and do.

Again, this doesn't have to be a supernatural or divine power.

It can be nature as known by an all-knowing science that has revealed what lies behind the apparent reality of this world. Thus Gray argues that a form of Platonism, an assumption that it is possible to turn our gaze away from illusory shadows and see the light of Truth, pervades both theistic religiosity and secular humanism.

Scientifically-minded atheistic progressives like me, for example, consider that it will be possible to have a much better nation and world once certain political/cultural obstacles are removed. Progressives, not surprisingly, believe in progress.

So do Christians, who believe in salvation through adherence to Jesus' message. So do religious people of many other faiths, who similarly believe that following certain practices can elevate humanity to a higher level of, dare I say it, evolution. 

Gray challenges these beliefs. He does so, though, not in a philosophical way, but in more of a literary manner. In most of his book he shares erudite descriptions of writings most people (certainly me) have never heard of.

The authors of these writings either share Gray's basic skepticism that humanity is on the upswing, and will remain on that elevated cultural platform, or are used to show the folly that it ever will be possible -- or even is desirable -- to "know the puppeteer."

In his closing pages Gray returns to the puppet analogy after a long absence. He speaks of the uber-marionette, "The human being that knows it is a machine. Must it envy the graceful automatism of the puppet?"

I now feel that I should break my previously mentioned intention of not sharing quotations from Gray's book. After all, I just did. Might as well dive deeper into the Quote Pool. 

This passage is one of my favorites in the book, especially the final sentence. 

In Kleist's essay humans are caught between the graceful automatism of the puppet and the conscious freedom of a god. The jerky, stuttering quality of their actions comes from their feeling that they must determine the course of their lives. Other animals live without having to choose their path through life.

Whatever uncertainty they may feel sniffing their way through the world is not a permanent condition; once they reach a place of safety, they are at rest. In contrast, human life is spent anxiously deciding how to live.

So true: Human life is spent anxiously deciding how to live. 

We doubt ourselves. We doubt others. We doubt religion. We doubt science. We doubt government. We doubt nihilism. We doubt the wisdom of the ages. We doubt the newest knowledge. 

We're continuously trying to find the Better, if not the Best. Even if we aren't hungry for material goodies, we're ravenous for other sorts of Goods -- political, cultural, philosophical, whatever. 

Gray describes how the science fiction author, Philip K. Dick, came to believe in a paranoid form of  Gnosticism.

Though it was marked out by his own traumas, Dick trod a path that has been followed by many before him. Like human beings in every age he wanted to believe that events of his life formed part of a pattern. So he created a story in which his life was shaped by secret agencies, some of them from beyond the human world.

But a world in which nothing happens by chance is an enclosed space that soon proves maddening. Dick found himself stuck in such a place -- not the radiant, meaning-filled cosmos he was looking for, but a dark prison.

...Dick summarized what his experiences had led him to believe:

1. the empirical world is not quite real, but only seemingly real;
2. its creator cannot be appealed to for a rectification of redress of these evils and imperfections;
3. the world is moving toward some kind of end state or goal, the nature of which is obscure, but the evolutionary aspect of the change states suggests a good and purposeful end state that has been designed by a sentient and benign photo-entity.

DIck, by Gray's account, was pretty much off his rocker psychologically when he wrote those words. But isn't this close to how most people view the world? 

As having all sorts of problems at the moment, but moving toward a much more desirable end state -- perhaps not with certainty, but with a high degree of probability. 

Again, most of us have an underlying, and largely unconscious, assumption that some "puppet master" is at work behind the scenes. Could be God. Could be Gaia. Could be self-balancing Laws of Nature that will restore equilibrium to a world gone bad.

Regardless, we like to tell ourselves stories about our own life, and the life of humanity as a whole, that make sense and have a happy ending. Underlying these stories is a belief that we know what is going on, and will steadily know more and more as time goes on.

Well, here's how Gray ends his book. Hang on for a wild ride, persuasive while perplexing.

In the story told by Herr C., human beings become free when they become fully conscious. For these godlike creatures, there can be nothing that is mysterious. Mystery fades away with ever greater conscious awareness, and true freedom means living by that inner light.

This is, of course, a very old faith -- the faith of the Gnostics, and also of Socrates. Both believed that freedom was achieved by the possession of a special kind of knowledge. Modern rationalism is another version of this religion.

Contemporary evangelists for evolution, trans-humanists and techno-futurists are also followers of this creed. All of them promote the project of expelling mystery from the mind.

The trouble with this project is that it has the effect of confining the mind within itself. In a world where there is nothing that cannot be explained, everything that happens fits into a hidden scheme. 

In Gnosticism, the world is the plaything of a demiurge. For conspiracy theorists, history is scripted by occult agencies. For secular rationalists, enlightenment is thwarted by the sinister forces of superstition and reaction. 

There is a pattern here: if you aim to exorcize mystery from your mind, you end up -- like Philip K. Dick -- locked in a paranoid universe and possessed by demons.

From being seemingly annihilated by Christianity, Gnosticism has conquered the world. Belief in the liberating power of knowledge has become the ruling illusion of modern humankind. Most want to believe that some kind of explanation or understanding will deliver them from their conflicts.

Yet being divided from yourself goes with being self-aware. This is the truth in the Genesis myth: the Fall is not an event at the beginning of history but the intrinsic condition of self-conscious beings.

Only creatures that are as flawed and ignorant as humans can be free in the way humans are free. 

We do not know how matter came to dream our world into being: we do not know what, if anything, happens when the dream ends for us and we die. We yearn for a type of knowledge that would make us other than we are -- though what we would like to be, we cannot say. Why try to escape from yourself?

Accepting the fact of unknowing makes possible an inner freedom very different from that pursued by Gnostics. If you have this negative capability, you will not want a higher form of consciousness; your ordinary mind will give you all you need.

Rather than trying to impose sense on your life, you will be content to let meaning come and go. Instead of becoming an unfaltering puppet, you will make your way in the stumbling human world. Uber-marionettes do not have to wait until they can fly before they can be free.

Not looking to ascend into the heavens, they can find freedom in falling to earth. 

Tough talk about Rajinder Singh from a disillusioned ex-disciple

Recently I got an email from someone who was initiated by an Indian Sant Mat guru, Rajinder Singh, and now realizes that this supposed divine being isn't really what he claims to be.


This person gave me permission to share the message, which I've done below with some mild editing in line with the person's wish to remain anonymous.

I'm always pleased to hear about someone's disillusioned experience with a religion or religious teacher. This is a wonderful thing, waking up from an illusion. 

Feel free to share your thoughts about what this person says in a comment, as my correspondent would like readers of the following message to do.

Hi Brian, I’m glad I found your blog. I also contacted the ex satsangi group but did not get a reply. 

You can post my message on your blog if you like, I’d like people to comment, but please leave out the information about where I am from and my name. This posting may be interesting because there is a lot about other Sant Mat Gurus here but not so many from the Darshan-Rajinder line.

I have been initiated by Sant Rajinder Singh Ji Maharaja in 2013 - long distance initiation, did I really believe that?! I saw him for the first time in the last two weeks. Seeing him in reality after watching his videos for 2 years was nice at first, but I had a very bad experience when my son was initiated.

I took part on the initiation together with my son, who was taken away from me and made to listen to the sound current for 40 mins. until he started to cry. The satsangi told me later he was having experiences! How ignorant is that?! He was simply in pain from fingers stuffed in his ears!

Also, the person responsible for the foreigners here is starting to push us around. This made me realize after 2.5 years of daily up to 2.5 hrs meditation and more in workshops, that I do not want to follow guru god Sant Rajinder Singh Ji any more. 

I am quite confused now - my poor boy has to watch as I have to explain to him what happened and why I misbelieved so much before. All the questions that Sant Mat has answered: Who am I? Why is there suffering? Where do we go after death? are now wide open again for me and I think I have to be very careful to not stuff that hole with another scam.

From my Satsang friends I hear all the "It was Karma", "You have to overcome it“, "This was best for your son", "Stand up during Darshan and talk to the Master" - shit and I can’t believe it.

If I stand up during Darshan, the first thing that will happen is that everyone around me will get annoyed and angry because they think after 3 hours of waiting it’s them who should be close to him. The second thing to happen is that I can’t speak calmly in such a situation and english is not my mother tongue. And I am quite sure the third thing will be a response like "Your son will be fine" or "Have faith" and I’m not sure I can control my anger when that happens.

There are many thoughts in my head now, also emotions, and sometimes I catch myself doing Simran without wanting it.

There are so many things I give myself permission to think now.

Kirpal, Darshan, and Rajinder, these were/are the current godmen, and it JUST SO HAPPENS that they are one family? Please. Also, you would think that there is a woman in that line somewhere - for god, gender is nothing, right? Then why are all of the Masters men? Yes there is Mira Bai but women are really under-represented.

I never had experiences of any kind, never even felt the "sense currents" collect at my third eye, even after 2 hours of perfectly sitting still and being totally concentrated. During initiation Rajinder asked who saw a sun, the moon, a Master within, and we only meditated 25 mins. half of the Indians raised their hands.

What?! I am sure there are so many not meditating properly, and they saw the radiant form of the Master, and me, after two years of meditating everyday, nothing? Not even a flash of light? No, not even as HE touched my third eye.

Also, this science thing - it’s like Freud, and I never liked Freud's way of forcing people to believe him. If you say anything against it, you just have to develop further "in the right direction", otherwise you are "in denial". One way or another, it’s your responsibility. But at the same time "we are nothing" and "Master is everything".

I am mild in judgement to myself because I only needed this one week in his presence to realize he is just a man like everyone else. He might even be a saint. But he is not God. He does not know what is going on in our minds.

Well, I can’t prove that. But as you are allowed to have a hypothesis and check it, my hypothesis was that my son would feel at least in peace during meditation, that he would be appreciated and taken good care of. But Master ignored him and the Satsangis around him made him cry. For me, this is enough proof that there is something wrong in this Satsang and I don’t want to go there any more.

The next problem I have to deal with is what will I believe in in this life.

I know many readers think, you don’t have to believe in anything, you have yourself. I did not write this to get an answer. I write this, because I am in that state now where you are kind of lonely and insecure and you don’t have a mass of sheep around you assuring you that you are doing the right thing, and this feels new and a bit sad. But I’ll get through it, because I’m a grown person and 2 years of being wrong is something that I can overcome.

One thought for SEVA: I was always wondering how holding a satsang is better and holier SEVA then feeding the hungry or playing with orphans. Even working in the SEVA kitchen is basically just feeding yourself.

Maybe I will write some words for my own comfort, hoping that it will help someone else, too: you don’t need to spend your whole money traveling the world and sitting and waiting for hours for a Master to be close to god. By the way, before I joined Sant Mat, I was wondering how all this flying is ok?! It is very harmful for the environment that all the Satangis fly all the time!!

And also, I am vegan and never understood how Master can promote dairy. If you know a little bit about milk production: you can be sure that cows and baby cows are exploited and killed. And then the Satsangi answer: well, if Master blesses a dairy, the cow will sure be reborn at his Lotus feet in the next life! - yeah. you be sure of that.

Sitting in a chair in an atmosphere that you like is enough. You don’t need to sit in meditation for hours to be at peace and know that you are a good being. It is enough to just scan your system, ask yourself how you feel, what you think, and what would serve you right now. Sleep? Talking to a good friend? Writing down some thoughts? You don’t need hours of studying holy scriptures.

You already know what is present in your life, where you want to put time in and where you don’t want to put time in. There is a reason why there are so many people on earth (if you believe that god created us). Wanting to make them all equal and making them do the same thing is ignoring an important trait of human nature.

We are all different children of god, we are all equal, and Masters are not above or below us. And: it is me who has the responsibility and the power to build my life. Nobody else. That I can control only very little in this life is a fact that I have to deal with on my own. Everything else is denying my personal responsibility. This might be scary, but again, is another thing that sane grown-ups are capable of handling.

Warm ex satsangi greetings, _________

Why religious Personal Beliefs are usually Personal Delusions

A few days ago astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted out something so-true:

If your Personal Beliefs deny what's objectively true about the world, then they're more accurately called Personal Delusions.

Beautifully said. 

This makes most religious dogma delusional. In fact, I probably should have said all religious dogma, since if something is objectively true it belongs in the realm of science and other forms of generally accepted knowledge, not the realm of religion.

Now, in a reply to someone who commented on this tweet, Tyson clarified what he meant. He was asked, "What if your personal delusions don't deny what's objectively true about the world?" Tyson's reply:

Then they're not Delusions. They're just Beliefs. My Tweet does not reference these.

This gets us to the question of what is objectively true.

If there is positive demonstrable evidence for some fact, such as that the big bang brought the universe into being some 13.7 billion years ago, then clearly a belief that the universe was created by God a few thousand years ago is delusional.

But what about accepting the existence of God? Or heaven and hell? Or eternal soul? Would this be a delusion or a belief?

I strongly lean toward Personal Delusion. After all, this is an objective truth about the world: there is no convincing demonstrable evidence that God, heaven, hell, or eternal soul exist.

Speaking more broadly, lack of evidence that something exists is a fact about the universe. Yes, a provisional fact, because evidence could always pop up in favor of that thing existing.

If clear and convincing evidence of God appeared tomorrow -- some observable cosmic event or miracle that scientists couldn't explain any other way -- then I and almost all other atheists would be pleased to admit, "We were wrong. God is real."

Until this happens, though, it is justified to call someone delusional who embraces the notion that God exists. Not delusional in most regards, as a deeply psychotic person might be -- just delusional in this regard.

Tyson's distinction between Personal Belief and Personal Delusion enters into the fervent current national discussion about what sorts of religious beliefs deserve to be accommodated in a society governed by secular laws, such as the United States.

I say, very few, if any. 

For one thing, when dug into usually these beliefs are at odds with objective truth, which make them delusions. 

Kim Davis, for example, is a county clerk who wants her religious belief that same-sex marriage is against God's will to be accommodated under a federal religious liberty law. Davis claims that she is acting under "God's authority," which supersedes the Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage.

Well, this only makes sense if it is objectively true that (1) God exists, (2) God rules over human affairs, and (3) God has decreed that same-sex marriage is wrong.

Since all three statements are at odds with what is known about objective reality -- there's no evidence for 1, 2, or 3 -- Kim Davis is embracing a Personal Delusion. 

I'd argue that even if it was viewed as a Personal Belief, she still doesn't have the right to ignore the law of the land, as Jeffrey Toobin says in the above-linked piece, "Kim Davis's Cafeteria Government."

Now Davis is seeking to extend the concept of accommodation even more—to government officials, like her, who want to pick and choose which legal obligations to honor. It’s one thing to allow cafeteria citizenship; Davis wants cafeteria government.

The problem, as Scalia recognized more than two decades ago, is that there is no logical stopping point for the accommodation principle. People have sincere religious beliefs that obligate them to engage in, or refrain from, all kinds of behaviors that the law allows (like same-sex marriage) or requires (like paying taxes).

So while people are free to hold both Personal Beliefs and Personal Delusions, these shouldn't be confused with Objective Truth. As the saying goes, you're entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.  

The weird interwoven world of general relativity

Let's get this straight right away: I don't really understand general relativity. 

I've read a lot of explanations about it. Briefly I'll feel like I grasp what general relativity is all about in a non-mathematical sense. 

A few days later, or even sooner, that understanding has slipped away and I'm basically as clueless as I was before. Which is strange, because usually I can conceptually grasp scientific truths much more fully. 

So there's something weird for me about general relativity. Which probably is best explained by the fact that almost everybody feels the same way. 

Spend two minutes watching this video of Neil deGrasse Tyson trying to explain gravity, which is the centerpiece of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Even Tyson starts off his explanation in a quizzical fashion.

 

Now, while Tyson says that Einstein said the following, actually it was theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler.

Spacetime tells matter how to move;
Matter tells spacetime how to curve.

It doesn't matter who was the source of this quote. As Tyson's interviewer says, that's poetic. It's my favorite explanation of general relativity, because I can grasp these two sentences even as I don't understand them.

A recent special issue of Scientific American is devoted to "100 Years of General Relativity." Here's a passage from one of the articles in the issue that says much the same thing.

Einstein's goal as he pursued his general theory of relativity was to find the mathematical equations describing two interwoven processes: how a gravitational field acts on matter, telling it how to move, and how matter generates gravitational fields in spacetime, telling spacetime how to curve.

So even though I don't begin to grasp the mathematics of general relativity, I have an, um, general conceptual feeling for it -- at least as it pertains to gravity.

It's that word, "interwoven," that seems key here. We're used to hierarchies, since human life and culture is full of them. This rules that. This causes that. This is above that. 

Yet nature rarely, if ever, works that way.

Like gravity in general relativity, this causes that and that causes this. Interwoven loops abound. Nature is much more of a circle than a straight line. Everything is interconnected, even though we humans do our best to break things apart and view them as discrete entities.

This is one reason why the concept of God no longer appeals to me. Like most religiously-minded people, I used to look upon God as The Big Man Upstairs, the cosmos' CEO who occupies the coolest office on the top floor. 

But this doesn't mesh with either common sense or scientific understanding.

For example, if God created the cosmos and now rules over it, who or what created God? If the supposed answer is no one, because God has always existed, then why can't the cosmos always have existed without a God?

An interwoven cosmos, or universe, seems considerably more likely than a hierarchical one. I've talked about this sort of thing before in posts such as:

"No beginning, no end. The universe simply is."
"Enlightenment made simple: it's reality."
"Relationship is the essential nature of reality."

I'm obviously not capable of capturing the essence of the cosmos in a few pithy sentences, as Wheeler did with gravity. About the best I can do is...

The universe causes me to do things; the things I do change the universe.

David Lane explains why he meditates

Here's a link to a fascinating essay by David Lane, "Why I Meditate." It starts off with:

Recently there was an intense discussion on spiritual matters on Brian Hines’ widely read blog, The Church of the Churchless, and an Indian gentleman wrote to me via email providing a link to it, primarily because there was a question about why I still meditate given my skeptical outlook on most things religious. He too was curious and wanted to know more about my daily practice and my reasoning behind it. The following is my response.

At this point I don't really want to comment on what Lane says. After all, this piece is very personal. It's about why he meditates, even though he isn't religious in any traditional sense.

David Lane in India

So, read it. Feel free to leave your own comments if you like. 

I'll just say (OK, I couldn't resist commenting, at least a little bit) that my main question after my own quick read involves whether Lane considers that his meditation experiences reflect, at least in part, an objective transcendent reality beyond his own mind, or whether those experiences are brain-states reflecting goings-on within his own cranium.

"I don't believe in conscious decisions"

Here's a brilliant letter to the editor in a recent issue of New Scientist. I've read Castaldo's letter several times.

Don't claim to understand it fully. But I love this sentence, particularly: 

I believe that what we call a conscious decision is just an awareness that our myriad subconscious systems have collectively resolved a course of action or state of belief.

This makes a lot of sense. 

Like... yesterday I noticed that my wife had left a page in our local newspaper open to a Best Buy ad. A Labor Day sale was on for televisions. We'd talked a bit about getting a new television, but hadn't made any decision about this.

Suddenly I felt, this is the time. It wasn't like I consciously reasoned my way to this conclusion. It just popped into my mind, seemingly full-grown. Where did it come from?

Obviously from my brain. But what part of my brain?

That's what this letter is getting at. It really isn't talking about anything new, neuroscience-wise. Like I said, I just think this guy has a fresh and interesting take on the relation of conscious and subconscious.

We ended up buying a TV at Video Only, by the way. The process went smoothly, as if it was meant to be. According to my subconscious, I guess it was.

Responsibility and Consciousness
From Anthony Castaldo

David Amodio discusses how unconscious bias can determine our actions in some situations (18 July, p 26). But I believe that every conscious thought is supported by hundreds or thousands of subconscious systems. If I type “insulation” when I meant to type “insolation”, I think the word “no” and correct it: but what neural structure triggered the word “no”? What structure beneath that knows my text is related to solar radiation and did a check in that context?

It is silly to speak about my subconscious as if my conscious mind is independent of it. I don’t believe in conscious decisions; I believe that what we call a conscious decision is just an awareness that our myriad subconscious systems have collectively resolved a course of action or state of belief.

That does leave the possibility that one subsystem might hijack the whole and execute an action, such as shooting a child, that the collective of systems would reject if given time to reach a consensus. But the subsystem is not some alien: if it can seize control of a person then it is that person.
San Antonio, Texas, US

Letting the mind be free is a good way to control it

Ooh, ooh! I wrote a Zen koan blog post title. And I don't even practice Zen. 

How does one control the mind? By letting the mind do whatever it wants.

This could be the key to... everything! Or maybe... nothing. Which could be the same thing.

Whatever, it's one of the main things I've learned since I signed up for Headspace, the trendy meditation app/approach that I started trying out a few months ago and wrote about here and here.

Since, I've done Andy Puddicombe's guided meditation thing every morning. I've worked my way into Day 28 of the Self-Esteem series, which involves 20-minute meditations that get increasingly silent and on-your-own'ish as Andy does less verbal guiding.

At several points in each session he says something like he wrote here: 

Just allow the mind to be free. Without any sense of control or effort, just let it do whatever it wants to do.

This reminds me of a tweet by _2020mojo_ I came across today in my Twitter feed.

Clinging to "letting go".

During most of the guided meditation sessions, I'm doing something or other.

Feeling my bodily presence. Following my breath. Scanning through my body from head to toe, becoming aware of sensations. Counting breaths. Returning to present moment awareness when my attention wanders.

All this is pleasingly relaxing. But there's some effort involved, even in letting go. 

However, I've found that when Puddicombe says, "Now, just let your mind do whatever it wants," my mind doesn't want to do anything.

Well, at least not much of anything; less than what it wanted to do before, when I was trying to be mindful and not be captured by thoughts.

A bit of Googling led me to someone else who had the same Headspace experience. 

With the aim of ‘demystifying meditation’, Headspace cuts through all the usual myths – that there’s not enough time, it’s impossible to stop thoughts etc. The focus is on the concept of short periods of mindfulness – simply becoming aware of your own thoughts and feelings – rather than having to shut your mind off in any way.

At one point in the meditation, Andy instructs you to let go of any focus and ‘let your mind do whatever it wants to do’, and bizarrely it’s at this point that my hyperactive mind stops trying to leap and vault into a thousand different thoughts at once, and can’t seem to think about anything at all. I’m positively blank, and perhaps that’s the point.

Alan Watts speaks similarly in his books. Our attempts to control ourselves lead us into a bizarre mental maze where "I" try to make "me" do something, even though we're the same entity.

Even more strange is when I try to make me do nothing -- to be calm, relaxed, mentally motionless. Trying to let go of tension and effort introduces, duh..., a bit of tension and effort.

So when Puddicombe says "Let your mind do whatever it wants to do," I'm thrown into an intriguing state of mind. I can think, or not think. I can imagine, or not imagine. I can worry, or not worry. 

Somehow that or, that freedom, brings me to a difficult-to-describe sense of peace. I'm more peaceful when I'm not trying to be peaceful. 

The same principle probably applies to other areas of life.

Likely I'm more moral when I don't try to be moralistic. Likely I'm a better dancer when I don't try to be a good dancer. Likely I'm more humble when I don't try to lose my ego.

But I don't want to think too much about this. Likely this will be a better blog post if I don't try to improve it any more.