Church of the Churchless

Advice about marijuana "paranoia" from an ex-hippie pothead

In case you're wondering... sure, this post does indeed belong on this here Church of the Churchless. After all, I've written at some length about why "Marijuana is my secular sacrament." Excerpt:

I’m grateful to Mother Nature for bringing forth a substance that elevates the spirit.

There’s a reason we speak of getting high.

Cannabis has a way of making my usual worries and anxieties appear much smaller, as if I were standing on top of a mountain, looking at them from a distance rather than close-up.

At the same time, I don’t feel like I’ve lost touch with reality. Rather, marijuana stimulates a sensation of This is how life really is.

Meaning, my supposedly “normal” perception of having to make my way through a world filled with obstacles, problems, barriers, irritations, and what-not is supplanted by a flowing feeling where stuff happens, but not really to me.

Both modern neuroscience and ancient forms of spirituality such as Buddhism agree that this cannabis-caused diminishing of self is closer to how things truly are than everyday waking consciousness.

Read the entire post for a fuller understanding of why I consider cannabis to be such a positive contribution for most adult lives. 

(Note: I've changed my mind about grinding buds, having embraced the Santa Cruz Shredder.)

Here I want to speak a bit about a subject that came up in comments on a recent post on my other blog, "How to make Crock Pot Pot with coconut oil." Namely, paranoia.

Personally, it's kind of difficult for me to understand how paranoia is associated with marijuana use in a state like Oregon, where I live. Marijuana is legal for adults to use, grow, purchase, and give away. So any anxiety about it, a.k.a. paranoia, must have a reason other than fear of being busted.

Which was a real fear back in my hippie college days at San Jose State College in the late 1960's.

Then us potheads had good reason to worry about smoking weed -- even when we weren't driving around, or otherwise out and about in the "straight world." At that time, being stopped by a police officer for possession of marijuana had more dire consequences than it usually does today.

But I do understand another cause of paranoia: a fear of losing touch with who we are. Or more accurately, with who we feel we are.  During my first LSD experience, I was convinced that I'd gone insane.

Not temporarily. Permanently. 

The friend who had also dropped acid (LSD)  had the job of looking after newbie me. However, it didn't take long for my take on reality to be embraced by him also: Sure, we've gone crazy. But this isn't a bad thing. We'll just have to get used to this new way of being.

Which gets me to my advice for people who are worried about losing their sense of self after imbibing marijuana. Again, read my secular sacrament post to get a fuller philosophical/neuroscientific take on this. 

Here's another excerpt (which came from a column I wrote for my town's alternative paper):

Apparently an underlying assumption of legal pot opponents is that human consciousness is some sort of pristine, pure pool of unsullied awareness which shouldn’t be contaminated by chemical substances like THC, the major psychoactive ingredient in marijuana.

Here’s another science news flash: the brain produces conscious awareness, and it is filled with over 100 chemical neurotransmitters.

They make us happy, horny, hungry, and so much more. Including, high.

I’m writing these words buzzed on a chemical my brain adores: caffeine. Is this wrong? Should caffeine be illegal because it alters my consciousness, increasing alertness and improving my mood?

Of course not. It’s beautiful, really, how humans can bring parts of the world into their brains, then those substances enable them to view the world differently.

We are the world. The world is us. There is no immaterial self standing apart from materiality.

So it isn’t a big deal to add marijuana to the long list of ways human brains are legally altered chemically in Oregon. Marijuana is safer than alcohol, tobacco, and prescription drugs. Informed adults should be able to choose their preferred consciousness-changing substance.

After all, there’s no such thing as a normal state of consciousness.

Each of us already creates our own reality. That's what the human brain does. It's a scientific fact. There's no "real world" outside our heads which can be compared with a certain state of human awareness. What we're conscious of, what we're aware of -- that is reality.

So when someone worries about losing their sense of self if they use marijuana, which can be given the term "paranoia," I'd like to offer these suggestions.

Don't dive headlong into cannabis consumption, especially if you've never tried it, or it has been a long time since you have. Start small. If you live where marijuana is legal and clearly packaged, get a variety with low THC.

An indica strain might be better for new users than a sativa strain. (Descriptions here.) Indica provides more of a body high, while sativa is more of a head high. Or go with a hybrid, for a bit of each.

Importantly, relax.

You're not going to lose control of yourself. Probably you won't experience any loss of bodily coordination, like people do with alcohol. (In my college days I did a heck of a lot of pool-playing and frisbee-tossing just fine while stoned out of my mind.)

Flow with whatever you're feeling.

Say to yourself, "It's all good." Because most likely, it will be. Embrace this temporary change of consciousness. Like I said in my essay, there's no Real You anyway. There's just the habitual you, the you you're most familiar with being.

I won't argue with those who worry about marijuana causing impaired driving. Sure, it's advisable not to drive under the influence -- of alcohol, cannabis, or other mind-altering substances (such as prescription drugs).

However, there's also what I like to call impaired living.

This is way more common than impaired driving. Symptoms include: excessive worrying, being uptight, inability to relax and let loose, thinking too much about the past and future, failure to laugh at funny things -- which, in the right frame of mind, includes just about everything.

So I look upon marijuana not so much as a mind-altering drug, but as a mind-enhancing herb. To quote myself (a favorite activity):

I don’t see this as a drive to escape reality.

Rather, marijuana and other psychedelic drugs propel human consciousness into a less ego-centered state that more accurately reflects neuroscientific understanding of the brain’s inherent selflessness.

Worst and best part of being human: imagining what doesn't exist

Imagination is wonderful. Except when it isn't. 

That's one of the core messages of psychologist Daniel Gilbert's marvelous book, "Stumbling on Happiness." 

I'm re-reading the book after first discovering it in 2006, when I wrote "Happiness is a new mountain bike. Maybe."

On the same day I bought myself this present, I received a few other gifts from myself after a visit to my other favorite Sisters store, Paulina Springs Books.

I saw “Stumbling on Happiness” by Daniel Gilbert on the new non-fiction table. At first I figured that the book would tell me how to do just that. But as I thumbed through it I realized that Gilbert had a more tasty fish to fry. He’s out to explain why what we think will make us happy usually doesn’t. At least not in the way we thought it would.

Four chapters into my second reading, I'm enjoying Gilbert's book even more this time around. He's a marvelous writer, along with being a skilled interpreter of what psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and such tell us about the human condition.

Basically, we've been screwed by evolution. But in a good way. Which also is a bad way. C'est la vie. 

We humans apparently are the only species that can imagine something which doesn't exist. Not in a short-term way or instinctively. Many animals can do that. A cat can envision killing a mouse if it does this, then that. 

Gilbert calls this sort of thing "nexting" to distinguish it from "predicting." Nexting happens automatically. He says:

Brains are continuously making predictions about the immediate, local, personal future of their owners without their owners' awareness. Rather than saying such brains are predicting, let's say that they are nexting. 

But people can go way beyond this. We can imagine ourselves living in a different place, having a different job, being involved with a different person, living a very different life. 

Because imagining is so easy for us -- this is pretty much what daydreaming is all about -- we tend to lose sight of how poorly imagination predicts reality. Such as, how happy we will be if something occurs, or we find ourselves in a certain situation.

Gilbert presents highly persuasive evidence and arguments for a disturbing conclusion. Here's a quote I included in my previous post about his book:

In fact, just about any time we want something—a promotion, a marriage, an automobile, a cheeseburger—we are expecting that if we get it, then the person who has our fingerprints a second, minute, day, or decade from now will enjoy the world they inherit from us, honoring our sacrifices as they reap the harvest of our shrewd investment decisions and dietary forebearance.

Yeah, yeah. Don’t hold your breath. Like the fruits of our loins, our temporal progeny are often thankless….How can this happen? Shouldn’t we know the tastes, preferences, needs, and desires of the people we will be next year—or at least later this afternoon?

Answer: no. The human brain really isn't set up for this to happen.

Evolution has brought us the gift (and curse) of imagination because it has a lot of survival value. Happiness is a secondary benefit. When it occurs. Which isn't nearly as often as we imagine it will.

One problem, of course, is that it's difficult to predict the future. Another problem is that even if we get an imagined future right, we're lousy at predicting how happy we'll feel in this state of affairs.

Religions are a product of the human capacity to imagine things that don't exist.

There's no demonstrable evidence that God, spirit, soul, heaven, hell, or any other of the myriad supposed denizens of hypothesized supernatural realms actually exist in reality, outside of people's imagination. 

Yet not only do billions of people fervently believe in these imagined entities, they base important aspects of their lives on how happy they will be in a predicted future involving God, spirit, soul, heaven, hell, and such.

Thus religion hits people with a double dose of off-kilter imagination: they imagine a supernatural reality that almost certainly doesn't exist, then imagine themselves feeling all happy in this imagined supernatural reality. 

This comes at a cost. 

Sure, it can feel good to believe that something is coming which will make us happy. Heaven! Eternal life in the lap of God! Existing joyfully without the burden of a body!

But continually looking around the corner for the Something Is Coming distracts us from the What Is Already Here.

What sense does it make to keep on anticipating the arrival of future happiness if we never fully enjoy the present moment? Imagination definitely has its benefits. Here-and-now can be a trap, a cage, a prison. Imagination can be a key that unlocks the door leading to attainable vistas beyond our immediate horizon.

Sometimes. 

Other times, we imagine a future that can't possibly exist, because the entities populating this future world are non-existent. Such as the gods people sacrifice so much time and energy to. And the lives they hope to lead after death, while failing to fully live their all-too-human lives now. 

A Sant Mat follower returns to Jesus (and wants to hear from others who have done this)

Here's a message I got from someone who tried to follow both Sant Mat and Christianity. After developing doubts about the Science of Spirituality branch of Sant Mat (led by guru Rajinder Singh), she returned to her faith in Jesus.

Below the woman says, "If anyone has any information about Science of the Soul that is not commonly known or discussed, I would be interested in hearing their stories. Especially from those that have chosen to leave the path for Christianity."

Even if this doesn't describe you, the woman is interested in comments -- whether positive or negative -- from anyone who reads her story. Here it is:

I have been following the posts about Science of the Soul and Radhasoami at this website for a few months trying to glean information about aspects of Sant Mat that are not discussed in Satsang. I was initiated by Darshan Singh in the early 80s and was a devoted follower for many years---but after time I started having niggling doubts which caused me great anguish and soul searching.

I was a Christian before I started following Sant Mat, and for a time, I tried to follow both paths, as Sant Mat always stresses that it is not a religion, but a scientific method for experiencing God. I found this to be totally unrealistic, and one day I found myself weeping because I thought I would have to abandon my first love which was Jesus.

People on the Path had told me that Jesus was a "lesser" Master, and certainly was of absolutely no use in this lifetime due to the need for a living Master. I can't remember when I was more depressed.

Finally I read Sar Bachan, and that book so appalled me, that I began to slowly disentangle myself from Sant Mat. This was difficult as my husband was a group leader, and was dismayed by my increasing doubts about the Path. I found that I could not live without faith in Jesus Christ, and became more and more depressed. Finally, I made the break and left Sant Mat, and returned to my faith in Jesus.

Do I think Jesus is the ONLY way?---I put that thought on the shelf of "things-I-leave-to-God-to-sort", but given the number of holy people in other paths, I have a hard time believing that.

One of the minor things that began to trouble me about Science of Spirituality, was the extravagant wealth of the Master (Rajinder Singh.) Although the preaching is about letting go of material things and focusing on the spiritual, he was living in a mansion, driving expensive cars, and draping his wife in diamonds, while many of his followers suffer in want.

Followers rationalize that he earned this money, but why is he living such a blatantly materialistic life style while espousing non-materialism? I heard him once say that one did not need to worry about trashing the environment, because the quicker it was destroyed, the sooner the cycle of births and deaths could end, and the Golden Age could be ushered in (this is NOT an exact quote, but the gist of what was said during Satsang.)

There seems to be a rationalization for any behavior or comment that is uncomfortable, and this troubles me. It also appears that Rajinder's son is slated to become the next Master which goes against Kirpal's own words that the mastership cannot be inherited. As of now, the succession has gone from Kirpal to his son, to his grandson, and perhaps in the future his great-grandson.

If anyone has any information about Science of the Soul that is not commonly known or discussed, I would be interested in hearing their stories. Especially from those that have chosen to leave the path for Christianity.

I still have a great love and respect for the followers of Sant Mat (my husband is still very devoted, but has reluctantly come to terms with my change of heart), but I wonder how honest they are about their "inner experiences." I never had any that were anything spectacular (although the few ones I had were Christian in nature), but perhaps that is the reason for all the secrecy?

Oh, and the teachings about chastity, even in marriage. They nearly ruined my relationship with my husband. How can they be healthy.

Anyway, I welcome any comments, positive or negative. I have found my home with Jesus. I am not "religious', but merely want to follow Christ and surrender all to Him. As far as what others want to do, I leave all that in God's hands. Those hands are compassionate and loving.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's absurd radical Islamist theology

By their very nature, all religious theologies based on irrational supernaturalism don't make sense.

But some theologies are more non-sensical than others -- particularly destructive ones which call for violence and killing in the name of God. Like that preached by the head of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

He was on TIME magazine's Shortlist for 2015 Person of the Year, losing out to Angela Merkel. In the Person of the Year issue, al-Baghdadi got a two-page writeup. 

The Quran, Islam's holy book, was a big part of his life from an early age.

Born into a religiously devout lower-middle-class Sunni Muslim family in Iraq in 1971, Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim al-Badri, who years later adopted the nom de guerre al-Baghdadi, was an unexceptional, shy child, according to recent biographies based on interviews with those who knew him. He never excelled at religious scholarship but was talented at the recitation of Quranic verse. In college and graduate school, he studied the style and technique of reciting the Quran, and he wrote a master’s thesis on a medieval commentary on the subject.

Then al-Baghdadi developed his own bizarre take on Islam.

Baghdadi has elaborated an apocalyptic vision of a final battle between the forces of radical Islam and the West. In a Ramadan sermon delivered in mid-2014, he declared slavery to be the universal human condition: Muslim believers are indentured to Allah, while nonbelievers are the rightful property of Muslims. He also said the time of death for each man and woman is pre-ordained, implying that all killings must be the will of Allah. This teaching paved the way for his chief spokesman to deliver the following message to ISIS supporters everywhere a few months later: “If you can kill a disbelieving American or European,” the spokesman said, “kill the disbeliever whether he is civilian or military.”

There's obviously a whole lot not-to-like here.

Slavery is the universal human condition? Well, I can sort of understand the notion of Muslim believers being "indentured to Allah," since religious people often consider that God is the master and they are obedient servants of the Almighty. 

Followers of a guru often look upon him/her in a similar fashion: being an embodiment of divinity, the guru's teachings and orders are to be accepted in an unquestioning manner. 

This is weird enough, but al-Baghdadi's contention that "nonbelievers are the rightful property of Muslims" goes way further into Wacked Out territory. It's one thing to surrender oneself to Allah; it's a whole other thing to believe that Allah wants all non-Muslims to be subject to Islamic believers.

Which includes killing the disbeliever "whether he is civilian or military." I usually can find some tiny bit of reasonableness buried in theological doctrines, but it is impossible for me to do so in this case. Unless Allah is a total psychopath.

Then there's al-Baghdadi's take on destiny and free will. 

It isn't out of the ordinary for a religious believer to consider that a person's time of death is pre-ordained.

We often hear statements like, "His time had come" or "God called her home" at someone's passing. Also, one way of looking at Einstein's theory of relativity is that everything in the space-time continuum is just there. In a sense, everything has already happened, though it doesn't seem that way to us.

So I can accept the possibility (if not probability) of determinism -- a secular variety, at least. 

However, positing that "all killings must be the will of Allah" clearly is an effort to evade responsibility for ISIS' despicable acts. Anybody could use this sort of justification. After murdering someone, a Christian could say "The Devil made me do it."

Sure, it is what it is, as simplistic as this saying is, makes sense to me. But it is what it is, because Allah wants it to be that way-- gibberish.

Nobody knows whether Allah even exists, including al-Baghdadi. Discerning what the non-existent Allah wants obviously is even more problematic. So there's no defensible reason for any Muslim, or indeed any believer in some other religion, to consider that what happens in the world is the will of a supernatural being.

I assume that al-Baghdadi must also consider that all killings of ISIS followers also is the will of Allah, as is happening right now in the fighting for control of Ramadi. 

Six hundred to 1,000 Islamic State fighters were said to have been in Ramadi when the overall offensive began two weeks ago, but several hundred of them have been killed in fighting and airstrikes since then, according to Iraqi and Western officials.

So I'm wondering how al-Baghdadi will spin the ISIS defeat if Ramadi is taken over by Iraqi forces.

This must be the will of Allah, right? Or does Allah only will the deaths of non-believers? If the latter is true, then some force greater than Allah must be at work in Ramadi, making al-Baghdadi's Almighty not very mighty.

Of course, any attempt to make sense of al-Baghdadi's ridiculous theology is bound to fail, since it is non-sensical, like the foundation of every religion. It's just that al-Baghdadi's irrational beliefs are way more dangerous than most theologies, leading as they do to so much death and destruction. 

Profound philosophical implications of our 2015 Christmas letter

Sure, it may look like just a Christmas letter, but our "2015 Holiday Greetings from Laurel and Brian" has a lot of deep philosophy beneath the surface.

I'll share the Christmas letter below. A central theme is...

Who knows? Who can tell? What's good or bad? How do we decide? 

Well, at least I think that's a central theme. The Christmas letter I wrote is so profound beneath the obvious surface, that it defies even my attempts to comprehend the depths of its philosophical meaning.

All I know is that when I read the final chapter in Jamie Holmes' book, "Nonsense: the Power of Not-Knowing," this morning, these passages reminded me of what I'd written in our Christmas letter the day before.

We're inclined to conceive of the past as a story, as some plot that's heading inevitably in one direction. The problem is that thinking this way robs the past, present, and future of their mystery. It treats the "us" of ten years ago as evolving and the "us" of now as finally developed, and it loses sight of how wonderful and frightening both the present and future are in their potential. Our impulse to deny the unpredictability of the future favors neatening the past into a tidy narrative.

... All of the remarkable men and women we've followed in this book found ways to unshackle themselves from the mind's compulsive desire to eliminate ambiguity. They resisted simple, edifying stories that suggested a neatly categorized world. even within psychological science, we've seen that progress is not necessarily neat and linear.

The heroes of this book are all protestors, and what they are protesting is the premature destruction of the world's mystery.

I didn't speak so elegantly in our Christmas letter. But I did start off by talking about how every stage of life is an Awkward Age. 

Meaning, we never really feel like we know what's going on with our life. Which is great, since an unjustified sense of knowing destroys the reality of mystery -- as Holmes said.

Here's our Christmas letter. I'll also copy in the content for easier non-PDF file reading.
Download 2015 Christmas Letter PDF

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

2015 Holiday Greetings from Laurel and Brian

This year we had trouble dealing with someone in our household who is at an “awkward age.” Namely, ourselves — since it’s become clear to us that Awkward Age is the entire period between birth and death.

With Brian being 67, and Laurel, um, younger, we’ve started looking at retirement communities. After all, at some point the insanity of maintaining our non-easy-care ten acres will settle into our steadily aging brains and bodies.

Unless the boundary between crazy and sane becomes blurred. Or maybe, doesn’t even exist. We’re talking state-of-mind here, not objective reality. 

We remember a woman telling us a supposedly true tale of a man who had a terminal tumor that affected the part of his brain which enabled him to know that he was going to die. So he’d walk out of a bad-news doctor visit all happy!

Crazy or sane? We don’t know. Just seems like a good way to go.

Here’s the thing that bothers us about retirement communities: we’ve found they’re full ofold people! Creeps us out. Maybe we both have a brain tumor that prevents us from feeling we’re old. If so, that’s great.

For a long time we thought our rural house and property eventually would (1) crush us, or (2) make us happy. But why not ditch the “or” for “and”? 

Some retirement communities we’ve visited do just about everything for you. “To hell with that,” we say. 

Brian enjoys walking on the edge of our roof with a backpack blower, getting leaves out of the gutters. Laurel likes to creep through the trees and brush, looking for poison oak and blackberry starts. 

Recently we were talking with a neighbor guy who had an attitude like Brian’s: “I don’t want to live in a place where I can’t pee in my front yard.” Right on, brother! Spoken like a true lover of country living. 

Of course, it’s socially acceptable for dogs to pee pretty much wherever they want outside. But not to be off-leash, another reason we’re reluctant to move. ZuZu runs free on most of her dog walks: a joy for her, though not for the squirrels.

ZuZu has been getting all trained-up via classes Laurel has been taking at the Willamette Humane Society, where she still volunteers as a dog walker. Many tricks are in her canine repertoire, though our Talented Furry Child sucks at item recognition. Like between three dog toys — ball, bone, ring. 

Most mornings our living room echoes with Laurel saying, “Bring the ball, ZuZu… No, theball… the ball… Yes! … Good dog!… You brought the ball!”

Mommy is so proud. While Brian sips his coffee, thinking, “If a monkey typing randomly can produce the works of Shakespeare in an infinite time, ZuZu can fetch the right one of three items in a minute.” (However, ZuZu excels at searching the house for a vanilla-scented toy!)

Our citizen activism is still at a high level. Cranky Old People like us are helping to change the world, one shaky, drooling step at a time.

Brian had a logo made for his Strange Up Salem Facebook page, which has gotten almost 2,200 “likes” from people who realize how desperately their town needs a big dose of strangeness. (There’s good reasons Oregon’s capital is referred to as So-Lame.) 

Now he can wear a Strange Up Salem t-shirt and cap, and drink coffee from a Strange Up Salem mug, when he writes his rants against the irritating imbecilic idiocy of what the right-wing Mayor and City Council are doing now. Naturally, given his 45 years of daily meditation and commitment to all-accepting mindfulness, Brian does this with a loving intention.

Likewise, Laurel doesn’t dislike religious people. Especially those who are reading this Holiday Letter. Love you! 

But she’s gone on a secular scientific crusade (oops, awkward word) this year. Laurel started a discussion group called Freethinkers/Skeptics of Salem, which meets monthly. They dance naked around a fire in the moonlight, drunkenly singing pagan chants. 

Well, not really. (The group would have more members if this happened.) 

They just talk about what it is like to be an unbeliever in a society where religiosity is all-pervasive. After all, this country would be much more likely to elect a Muslim as president than an atheist (disturbingly, a large number of Americans think we already have).

Celeste, Brian’s daughter, and her family have moved from the Studio City area south to Laguna Niguel in Orange County. Yes, Orange County, the place where progressives like Celeste are loathe to live. 

Except when they move there and love it! 

During our visit to see them in their new spiffy suburban house, we were struck by how perfect everything seems to be in their area. No litter. No ugly signs. No homeless people on the streets. Just neat, tidy, and clean almost everyplace the eye alights. 

“Come live down here,” Celeste said to us, semi-seriously. “You can baby-sit Evelyn whenever you want.” 

Evelyn being our eight year-old granddaughter who, like most kids these days, strikes us as mature beyond her years, especially regarding her ability to use an iPad and iPhone, and soon will be fully capable of grandparent-sitting.

Which would sound pretty damn good — if we weren’t so insanely attached to where we are: rainy, boring, messy Salem, and our challenging rural life on ten overgrown acres.

Where a man can pee in the front yard, a woman can roam the woods, and a dog can run free. Sweet! May your life be as crazily enjoyable, in 2016 and beyond. 

So many gods, so many creeds.
So many paths that wind and wind.
When just the art of being kind
Is all this sad world needs.

 — Ellen Wheeler Wilcox —

 

2015 Holiday Greetings from Laurel and Brian

This year we had trouble dealing with someone in our household who is at an “awkward age.” Namely, ourselves — since it’s become clear to us that Awkward Age is the entire period between birth and death.

With Brian being 67, and Laurel, um, younger, we’ve started looking at retirement communities. After all, at some point the insanity of maintaining our non-easy-care ten acres will settle into our steadily aging brains and bodies.

Unless the boundary between crazy and sane becomes blurred. Or maybe, doesn’t even exist. We’re talking state-of-mind here, not objective reality. 

We remember a woman telling us a supposedly true tale of a man who had a terminal tumor that affected the part of his brain which enabled him to know that he was going to die. So he’d walk out of a bad-news doctor visit all happy!

Crazy or sane? We don’t know. Just seems like a good way to go.

Here’s the thing that bothers us about retirement communities: we’ve found they’re full ofold people! Creeps us out. Maybe we both have a brain tumor that prevents us from feeling we’re old. If so, that’s great.

For a long time we thought our rural house and property eventually would (1) crush us, or (2) make us happy. But why not ditch the “or” for “and”? 

Some retirement communities we’ve visited do just about everything for you. “To hell with that,” we say. 

Brian enjoys walking on the edge of our roof with a backpack blower, getting leaves out of the gutters. Laurel likes to creep through the trees and brush, looking for poison oak and blackberry starts. 

Recently we were talking with a neighbor guy who had an attitude like Brian’s: “I don’t want to live in a place where I can’t pee in my front yard.” Right on, brother! Spoken like a true lover of country living. 

Of course, it’s socially acceptable for dogs to pee pretty much wherever they want outside. But not to be off-leash, another reason we’re reluctant to move. ZuZu runs free on most of her dog walks: a joy for her, though not for the squirrels.

ZuZu has been getting all trained-up via classes Laurel has been taking at the Willamette Humane Society, where she still volunteers as a dog walker. Many tricks are in her canine repertoire, though our Talented Furry Child sucks at item recognition. Like between three dog toys — ball, bone, ring. 

Most mornings our living room echoes with Laurel saying, “Bring the ball, ZuZu… No, theball… the ball… Yes! … Good dog!… You brought the ball!”

Mommy is so proud. While Brian sips his coffee, thinking, “If a monkey typing randomly can produce the works of Shakespeare in an infinite time, ZuZu can fetch the right one of three items in a minute.” (However, ZuZu excels at searching the house for a vanilla-scented toy!)

Our citizen activism is still at a high level. Cranky Old People like us are helping to change the world, one shaky, drooling step at a time.

Brian had a logo made for his Strange Up Salem Facebook page, which has gotten almost 2,200 “likes” from people who realize how desperately their town needs a big dose of strangeness. (There’s good reasons Oregon’s capital is referred to as So-Lame.) 

Now he can wear a Strange Up Salem t-shirt and cap, and drink coffee from a Strange Up Salem mug, when he writes his rants against the irritating imbecilic idiocy of what the right-wing Mayor and City Council are doing now. Naturally, given his 45 years of daily meditation and commitment to all-accepting mindfulness, Brian does this with a loving intention.

Likewise, Laurel doesn’t dislike religious people. Especially those who are reading this Holiday Letter. Love you! 

But she’s gone on a secular scientific crusade (oops, awkward word) this year. Laurel started a discussion group called Freethinkers/Skeptics of Salem, which meets monthly. They dance naked around a fire in the moonlight, drunkenly singing pagan chants. 

Well, not really. (The group would have more members if this happened.) 

They just talk about what it is like to be an unbeliever in a society where religiosity is all-pervasive. After all, this country would be much more likely to elect a Muslim as president than an atheist (disturbingly, a large number of Americans think we already have).

Celeste, Brian’s daughter, and her family have moved from the Studio City area south to Laguna Niguel in Orange County. Yes, Orange County, the place where progressives like Celeste are loathe to live. 

Except when they move there and love it! 

During our visit to see them in their new spiffy suburban house, we were struck by how perfect everything seems to be in their area. No litter. No ugly signs. No homeless people on the streets. Just neat, tidy, and clean almost everyplace the eye alights. 

“Come live down here,” Celeste said to us, semi-seriously. “You can baby-sit Evelyn whenever you want.” 

Evelyn being our eight year-old granddaughter who, like most kids these days, strikes us as mature beyond her years, especially regarding her ability to use an iPad and iPhone, and soon will be fully capable of grandparent-sitting.

Which would sound pretty damn good — if we weren’t so insanely attached to where we are: rainy, boring, messy Salem, and our challenging rural life on ten overgrown acres.

Where a man can pee in the front yard, a woman can roam the woods, and a dog can run free. Sweet! May your life be as crazily enjoyable, in 2016 and beyond. 

So many gods, so many creeds.
So many paths that wind and wind.
When just the art of being kind
Is all this sad world needs.

 — Ellen Wheeler Wilcox —

Live happy and healthy -- die soon anyway

A Mark Morford piece, "Study: Live happy and healthy and die soon anyway," appeals to my basic cranky old man sense of WTF.

Sure, I'm happy most of the time. Especially when I'm complaining about something. Which includes religion. 

But I don't enjoy feeling that happiness is a must, that if I'm not happy bad things are going to happen to me. (Aside from being unhappy, of course.)

This is, though, how in the past I've looked upon supposed scientific findings that a positive outlook is good for your health. And, if one believes in religiosity, for your soul.

Thankfully, according to the New York Times, "Happiness doesn't bring good health, study finds."

Go ahead and sulk. Unhappiness won’t kill you.

A study published on Wednesday in The Lancet, following one million middle-aged women in Britain for 10 years, finds that the widely held view that happiness enhances health and longevity is unfounded.

“Happiness and related measures of well-being do not appear to have any direct effect on mortality,” the researchers concluded.

“Good news for the grumpy” is one way to interpret the findings, said Sir Richard Peto, an author of the study and a professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at the University of Oxford.

He and his fellow researchers decided to look into the subject because, he said, there is a widespread belief that stress and unhappiness cause disease.

Such beliefs can fuel a tendency to blame the sick for bringing ailments on themselves by being negative, and to warn the well to cheer up or else.

“Believing things that aren’t true isn’t a good idea,” Professor Peto said in an interview. “There are enough scare stories about health.”

Morford took these findings and ran with them in his column. Here's how he ended his piece.

For the apocalyptically religious, for the devoutly nihilistic, for those convinced life is a hellhole sinbucket merely to be “survived”? This is surely terrible news indeed.

After all,  millions of us are taught and trained to be addicted to stress and unhappiness. It’s the norm. It’s just what modern humans do.

How many people do you know who, every single day, actively (and masochistically) seek out things to make them more bitter, scared and resentful? How many among us love seeing the world as an relentlessly offensive riot of debauchery, suffering, and corruption? How many are convinced if they’re not working to exhaustion and sleeping horribly and never getting enough “done,” they’re just not trying hard enough? How many feel, deep down, morbidly reassured that at least they’ll die soon anyway, so who cares?

Alas, their sour antipathy will linger, on and on, like a rash. Fun!

But what about the alternative? What of the elusive “happiness” thing? Is there really no proven health benefit if you flip it all around and try to do as the wise ones suggest, and practice, say, releasing your death-grip on your made-up convictions, chill out on the relentless striving and maybe dissolve, just a little, your ego’s furious insistence that you have some sort of clue as to what’s really going on?

Put another way: What happens when you forgo your poisonous insistence that something, somewhere is always wrong, broken, flawed and goddammit why can’t life be the way it’s supposed to be, and why won’t someone fix it for me?

As the marvelous spiritual teacher Adyashanti put it, “There is a very simple secret to being happy. Just let go of your demand on the present moment.” What might happen if you do? Have you ever tried it?

Science shrugs. You probably won’t live longer. You might not prevent illness, though a billion years of empirical evidence – not to mention common sense – seems to suggest otherwise.

But you might, just might, uncover a life of surreptitious, messy, imperfect bliss, shocking and weird, still full of pain and loss, but no longer tormented by it all, no longer endlessly, numbly disappointed for reasons that have no true basis in reality.

The panic might subside. The veil might lift. You might just become, as they say, more fully awake to the moments of your life, free of the toxic overlay, the karmically lethal undercurrent of bogus dissatisfaction telling you, every moment of every day, that something is always wrong and that things should, somehow, be different. In short: You won’t live longer, you’ll simply live much, much better. Can you imagine?

Same blog, new look

Hey, it's almost the end of 2015. New Year's is coming. Seemed like a good time to try out a new look for Church of the Churchless.

I've been wanting a design that was mobile friendly, since lots of people nowadays read blogs and such on their smart phones, tablets, and such.

I deleted a bunch of extraneous content, which makes for a cleaner look in my utterly personal opinion. I'll probably make some adjustments to the design, but it seems appealing to me. 

Diogenes the Cynic: there's no such thing as miracles

I've started to read a book by Tim Whitmarsh, "Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World." Its central theme is stated in the introduction.

We are still, in the twenty-first century, grappling with issues that are at least two and a half millennia old... Disbelief in the supernatural is as old as the hills.

...Too often religious practice is imagined to be the regular state of affairs, needing no explanation, whereas any kind of deviation is seen as weird and remarkable. 

This view underpins the modernist mythology: the post-Enlightenment West is seen as exceptional, completely unlike anything else that has preceded it and unlike anything elsewhere in the world.

...Religious universalism -- the idea that belief in gods is the default setting for human beings -- is everywhere in the modern world.

...The notion that a human is an essentially religious being, however, is no more cogent that the notion that apples are essentially red.

...And indeed it is true enough that many apples are tinctured with red. But it would be ludicrous to see a Golden Delicious as less than "appley" just because it is pure green. 

Yet this is in effect what we do to atheists in acquiescing to the modernist mythology: we treat them as human beings who are not somehow complete in their humanity, even though they are genetically indistinct from their peers.

...It is not strange or exceptional to adopt a skeptical approach toward the supernatural: anyone in any culture at any time can do so. 

...If religious belief is treated as deep and ancient and disbelief as recent, then atheism can readily be dismissed as faddish and inconsequential. Perhaps, even, the persecution of atheists can be seen as a less serious problem than the persecution of religious minorities.

The deep history of atheism is then in part a human rights issue: it is about recognizing atheists as real people deserving of respect, tolerance, and the opportunity to live their lives unmolested. 

...This book thus represents a kind of archaeology of religious skepticism. It is in part an attempt to excavate ancient atheism from underneath the rubble heaped on it by millennia of Christian opprobrium [harsh criticism or censure].

The introduction contains a story about Diogenes, who died in 323 BCE. Most people just know that he walked around with a lantern in daylight looking for an honest man. Or, a human, depending on the translation. 

But there's a lot more to Diogenes. Whitmarsh writes:

It does not require a post-Enlightenment mentality to come up with the idea that miraculous stories of divine salvation are open to suspicion. Miracles, by their very nature, test the limits of plausibility. Greeks could see that just as well as Evans-Pritchard's Azande. 

There is a comparable story told of Diogenes the Cynic, Greek philosophy's most subversive wit. 

It is said that while another man was marveling at a series of temple dedications put up by survivors of sea storms, Diogenes retorted that there would have been many more if the nonsurvivors had also left dedications. 

The one-liner's subtext is that "miraculous" experiences have nothing to do with divine intervention and the power of prayer and everything to do with the normal laws of statistical probability. Like Apistos (before his dream), Diogenes disbelieves the miracle stories.

Indeed, Diogenes's central point is in effect the same as mine: that officially sanctioned religious records only tell you when worship seems to work and excise all evidence to the contrary.

Horrible: Guru Gurinder Singh opposed to abortion after a rape

Here in the United States, only the most extreme opponents of abortion (which is legal in this country) want to prevent women who have been raped, and get pregnant with the rapist's child, from terminating the pregnancy.

So I was shocked when someone emailed me the message below. She describes a satsang (public talk) given by an Indian guru, Gurinder Singh, last summer. The guru took a hard line with a woman who asked if a woman who had been raped should have the child.

I used to be a member of the religious/spiritual organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, the guru leads. After reading the following, I felt really good about leaving RSSB. The lack of compassion shown by Gurinder Singh is abhorrent to me.

National Satsang in the United Kingdom this year was on 14th 15th and 16th August 2015.  You may be familiar with the layout - a public lecture followed by a public interactive Q&A forum. On the last day, the 16th August, one of the questions came from a young Indian woman. 

 

She asked if a woman had been raped, and then found out she had become pregnant, what should she do? Should she have an abortion or should she have the child? She also stated that there was a lot of stigma against single mothers in India.

 

The Guru's response was that it was a difficult situation. However, he then asked a rhetorical question - whether the child had done anything wrong. 

 

She then asked him to confirm whether he was advising not to have an abortion after rape.

 

He then said he could understand why she would want to, but then said VERBATIM "If it were me, I would not have the abortion, I would not do it". 

 

He then spoke at length about why the child should suffer, when the child had done nothing wrong, the child was innocent.

 

The response from the people around me was sympathetic tutting in agreement.

 

I was mortified to have to sit there and listen to this. I was mortified to see hoardes of (presumably) literate educated followers agreeing with him, nodding in blind obedience with this man, placed high on a pristine white podium. A man who had no idea of what this experience would be like.

 

I was horrified for the poor woman who had opened up publicly about what was obviously her personal tragedy, and because of the callous response of these people (men AND other women) who did not question the response, did not question the source, would not empathise with her, could not understand her plight. 

 

Please bear in mind that abortion is legal in the United Kingdom and is recommended if the woman's health, including her emotional health, is at stake. In practice two doctors are required to sign off. The reality is no doctor will turn you down for an abortion if you request it. UK medical law puts the woman as the priority.

 

The evident response from the Guru, and I'm assuming RSSB community that did not question this, was that the welfare of the child (unborn) was more important than the woman.

 

More important than having to live with a daily reminder of your rapist. More important than having to raise your rapist's child, which could give him rights to access his biological child, and therefore access to you, his victim. More important than your future hopes and dreams and plans. Your future career, your travel plans, your hopes of settling down. Your ability to choose the man whose child you would bear. Your choice to pick the timing for bearing a child. More important than financial/social considerations. More important than your wishes and thoughts. More important than your life. More important than you.

 

As a young woman who was in this position myself, I was mortified.

 

I was fortunate that I did not end up pregnant, however if i had been, I very likely would have felt pressured to keep it and I would have done so out of a sense of religious/ spiritual/ karmic/ radhasoami guilt. Needless to say the experience itself shattered every shred of faith I have, but nonetheless, I am sure there were many more women in that crowd who are just like me with the same experience, and I am sure some of them would still listen to the Guru - like the young woman who asked the question in the first place. 

 

The young woman's second question was whether individuals should stand up for their rights. He said to avoid this use of rights because it sounds aggressive and confrontational but definitely stand up for yourself. The sheer contradiction just made me confused. The woman just left, her voice trailing off, and I felt even worse for her. She had turned to this Guru, this apparent Perfect Living Saint for comfort and clarity, and left with nothing but confusion.

 

I muttered (a little too loudly perhaps) "I would love to see what he says if this actually happened to him".

 

DO NOT give me a rant on how "men can get raped too". Men, including the Guru, Perfect Living Saint or not, will NEVER face the worry, fear, shame, anxiety, dread, hopelessness, stress of pregnancy after a sexual assault since this is NOT a physical possibility for them. Yet the people in the row in front of me and the people on both sides turned to look at me with looks of disgust, as if I were the one making outrageous statements. 

 

I was fighting back tears. I got up and left.

 

I felt betrayed by the community. I felt disappointed in my old Guru who I used to believe in. I felt rejected in the space that I once felt welcomed in. I have never felt so worthless in my entire life - save for when the incident itself took place. 

 

I have tried to be as dispassionate as possible but of course my views/experiences may come through. I am not perfect. Just wanted to share my story with someone who might understand. If you use this in any way, my humble request is that you keep me anonymous as some of my family members look at your site too, and I am not open about my sexual assault. As the young woman rightly said, there is a stigma in place, and RSSB is all too familiar with it.

 

Regards, _________

 

Neuroscientist David Eagleman: the brain creates our reality

Somehow my wife and I missed most of the original showing of the 6-part PBS series, "The Brain - With David Eagleman." We saw the final episode, and wanted to catch up on the rest.

So last night we streamed What is Reality?, the first episode. It's available on iTunes and Amazon Prime, with clips on the PBS web site. Here's one of the clips:

Really interesting.

The basic neuroscientific message of this episode is that reality doesn't directly stream into consciousness through our senses, or by any other means. Instead, the brain does all sorts of processing of raw sensual data (photons, sound waves, scent molecules, etc.) before it reaches awareness.

So this supports a point I make frequently on this blog: there is no such thing as "reality as it is."

Sure, this phrase, and others like it, often is found in Buddhist and nondual writings, along with other spiritual, mystical, and meditation literature.

It doesn't have any foundation in fact, though. Eagleman shows quite a few experimental examples of how the brain selectively makes sense of the world by comparing incoming information with previous experiences.  

This explains why we don't see a mysterious shape supported by round thingies. We see a car. The brain's processing of sense data occurs automatically, so usually it goes unnoticed. But Eagleman describes what happened when a man who became blind when he was three years old was able to see again late in life.

His eyes functioned perfectly, but he hasn't been able to see normally. One reason is that parts of his brain devoted to vision were converted to areas that process touch, sound, and other senses during his lengthy blindness.

Even for those of us with normal sensory inputs from birth, it doesn't matter how mindful or attentive we are to the world. We humans, along with every other sentient being, only are aware of a small fraction of reality.

And like I said, the portion we are conscious of gets heavily interpreted by the brain before we're aware of it. I recall Eagleman saying that more information flows from the cortex to a sensory area (thalamus, I believe) than the other way around.

Meaning, our awareness of reality is more dependent on previous experiences, than on what is being perceived by the senses here and now. The brain, Eagleman said, is continually updating its understanding of reality by processing mismatches between past and current experiences.

Another fascinating part of the What is Reality? episode was a description of what happened to a man imprisoned in Alcatraz who was put in a sensory deprivation "hole" part of the prison as a punishment. He was there for about three weeks, I recall.

No light. No sound. No contact with other people. 

Soon he was seeing things. His brain, Eagleman explained, dealt with the lack of sense data coming in from outside by producing it from the inside. 

And it wasn't just that he hallucinated sights and sounds. Rather, the man said, he began to experience a whole other reality. He was immersed in this new world, not just experiencing hallucinations in his jail cell. 

Or, rather, he was, but the prisoner wasn't aware of this.

Just as a dream seems real while we're sleeping, the man entered another reality of his brain's own making during much of the time he was in the "hole." This reminded me of stories about mystics who spend months or years meditating in a dark room, cave, or wherever.

Given Eagleman's explanation of what the brain does when it is deprived of sensory input, it sure seems very possible, if not likely, that when these mystics describe other realms of reality that they supposedly entered, the "realms" actually were produced by processes within their own brains.

This hypothesis is supported by the fact that no one who claims to have experienced some sort of ethereal "heaven" has come back with verifiable knowledge of some previously unknown fact about our reality -- or any other evidence that what they experienced was objectively, rather than subjectively, real.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing the other episodes of the PBS series that we missed. I've also ordered a copy of David Eagleman's companion book, "The Brain: The Story of You."

On a bike ride, I embrace natural reality and ignore a manmade rule

Philosophically-inclined guy that I am, I can find profound meanings in just about any everyday experience.

Today I rode my Streetstrider outdoor elliptical bike at Salem's Minto Brown Island Park during a (partial) break in the heavy rains that have been hitting the Pacific Northwest all week. 

I'm a big believer in the adage I expressed in a 2009 blog post, "There are no rules (including this one)."

Now, there are no rules points back at itself. Meaning, there are no rules. Unless you want to follow a rule. Feel free. There's no rule that says "never follow a rule."

We all do this: follow rules. Life would be unlivable without them. 

How could I turn on my TV if I didn't press the right button on the remote control? The important thing is to remember that rules are made to be broken when they need to be.

I saw this sign only after I'd already broken the implied rule -- having ridden my bike down the trail from the other direction, where I'm pretty sure there wasn't any Trail Closed Ahead sign posted.

Which shows the difference between natural reality and manmade rules. Because the trail wasn't closed. Not physically. Just in the mind of whoever, with the best of intentions, put up the sign.

Which did make quite a bit of sense for most people. Because the wooden bridge across a low area in the park was indeed flooded. Several inches of water covered the boards. 

However, when I rode down the slope from the other direction and saw the water, I made a quick decision: Ride through it, dude! (At my age, I like to call myself "dude"; it makes me feel younger.)

Standing on my trusty Streetstrider -- no seat on an elliptical bike -- my feet are quite a ways off the ground. The rest of me, even more. My wallet and iPhone etc. were drily packed away in the yellow waterproof pack. 

So what the heck, I thought. What's the worse that could happen?

I get stuck halfway across and have to push my bike the rest of the way. My feet get wet. I can survive that. I didn't want to reverse course and ride back the way I'd come.

Try something new! I'd never ridden the StreetStrider through standing water this deep. 

Upon reaching the other side, I felt good. Which is how I always feel when I ride my bike at the park.

After using the elliptical machines for many years at the nearby Courthouse Athletic Club on River Road, I now hate to do my aerobic exercising indoors. 

Today, like every day at Minto Brown Island Park, I encountered nature doing its natural thing: wind, rain, sun, rain-and-sun, a rainbow. Branches had fallen on the trails. Pools of water had accumulated. Per usual, it felt like whichever direction I was riding, a strong wind was pushing at me as I pedaled.

In other words, I was in a secular heaven.

Natural reality, mostly, intermixed with the asphalt trails and wooden bridges that made it possible for me to bike along through the park. 

Unless the weather is really bad, I much prefer exercising, even while cold and wet, in what I view as The Real World, rather than being warm and dry inside. I amend the fishing saying to "The worst day riding my bike in nature is better than the best day on an elliptical machine in an athletic club."

I love how nature just does what it does, uncaring of what I prefer. At Minto Brown I have to flow what with nature gives me -- heat, cold, rain, wind, whatever.  

I've got a bunch of stuff in the backseat of my car that lets me adjust to conditions.

Heavy and light jackets. Waterproof gear. Hats for all seasons. Several types of gloves. There's something deeply satisfying -- in this age of human domination over our planet -- to fully embrace what nature produces on any particular day. 

Sure, I still get irritated when I was expecting dry, and cold rain starts hitting me in the face as I ride. But it doesn't take along for me to realize that what I want natural reality to be has exactly zero effect on what it actually is. 

Similarly, I've learned that a manmade sign saying "Trail Closed Ahead - Flooding" may or may not comport with reality. It only may be closed to people on foot who don't want to get their feet wet. Or the sign may have been left up even though water has receded.

Again, natural reality is what it is. Human ideas about this reality may be right, or they may be wrong.

Experimentation, testing, observation, experience -- getting out on a park trail and seeing for myself what is there -- that's the best way to know what nature has wrought.

We have so many ideas... about so many things.

I love ideas, just as I love nature.

But there's a time and place for thinking about what is real, and there's a time and place for experiencing what is real. Riding my StreetStrider at Minto Brown Island Park reminds me of the difference between the two, thinking and experiencing. 

I can read a sign and think, "The trail is closed," when it actually isn't.

Conversely, I don't remember seeing a sign before I encountered this flooding on the south side of the dog park.

Yeah, I realized, this trail is really closed. Ducks could use it. Walkers could probably hike around it. But me and my elliptical bike weren't going to get through the water. 

So I turned around, rode to a bark path leading to the dog park, and walked my bike to an unflooded trail. Natural reality. You've got to go along with it. 

Human rules, not so much. Only when they make sense. 

Does Santa Claus exist? Depends on the nature of belief.

With Christmas coming in a few weeks, it seemed just the right time to read a book by Eric Kaplan called "Does Santa Exist? A Philosophical Investigation."

Now, I'm not quite done with the book, and I also don't want to give away what I suspect Kaplan's ending will be. So I'll focus on the existence of Santa Claus in another post.

Here I'll zero in on a thought-provoking thought experiment about beliefs and reality that Kaplan throws out in the introductory chapter. It's a good example of what I like most about the book: a pleasing blend of quirky humor and pretty darn sophisticated philosophizing. 

Which isn't surprising, since Kaplan had five years of philosophy graduate school at Columbia and UC Berkeley. He's becoming a bit irritating with his emphasis on Kabbalah near the end of the book, but I'm hoping he'll bounce back from this semi-religious detour in the final chapters.

Anyway, here's the thought experiment.

Imagine a field so big we can play the biggest game of red rover in history in it. Imagine we could open up our skull and have all the beliefs get out and stand on one side of the field, holding arms. On the other side of the field stand all the things. One by one, the beliefs call out what they are all about.

When the belief in Africa calls out his name, "I'm a belief in Africa!" the actual object -- Africa -- raises its hand, and they go off to a side field labeled TRUE BELIEFS. "Bees! I'm a belief in bees!" "Great! We are bees!" And they go off together. "I'm a belief in the planet Neptune!" "I am the planet Neptune! Let's get a drink!" And off they would go paired up.

At the end of the day, a few beliefs would be left standing on their side of the field. They raise their hands: "I'm a belief in the lost continent of Atlantis!" And nothing answers on the other side. There is no lost continent of Atlantis. "I'm a belief in pixies!" No answer. There are no pixies. "I'm a belief in Santa Claus!" No answer because there is no Santa Claus. The belief in Santa Claus is wrong because there is no Santa Claus to correspond to it.

When I got this far in Kaplan's description of the thought experiment, I almost thought that the book had reached a conclusion.

That didn't make much sense, of course, since I was on page 11 of a 255 page book. And an almost-professional philosopher like Kaplan (he also is a comedy writer) isn't going to come to a conclusion on such an important question as "Does Santa Exist?" so quickly.

But I'll admit that the notion of beliefs calling out and not getting a response from the things that actually exist appealed to me. This fit with my basic world view, as cogently summarized in one of my favorite quotations. It was written by Philip K. Dick.

        Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

In Kaplan's thought experiment, a belief without an actual thing corresponding to it ends up lonely. The thing indeed goes away when called by the belief.

Well, more accurately the thing can't go away, because it doesn't exist. The belief just stands there by itself, not getting an answer from the thing because reality doesn't contain the actuality of the thing -- just the belief in it.

Kaplan went on, though, making me realize that beliefs and things aren't related in a simplistic fashion.

The first problem is that our beliefs don't separate themselves into little bits. How would we count beliefs? Is my belief that Africa exists a super-belief made up of beliefs in all the people, countries, and animals that I believe are in Africa?

Or is it part of a larger belief that the world is divided into land masses? Or a still larger belief that there are such things as physical objects of which Africa is an instance? All and none.

My beliefs form a web or, better yet, a world. If anything corresponds to anything, it is the assemblage of beliefs, all linking arms, who correspond to the whole assemblage of facts, all linking arms. My mind corresponds to the world as a whole.

OK, a bit of pondering led me to believe that this take on beliefs made sense. The human mind does indeed operate with a world view, not a view of isolated individual things. I've read lots of neuroscience books, and they all say this in one way or another. 

Our previous experiences, memories, thoughts, emotions, and such influence how we perceive reality in the present moment. We try to fit new things into our understanding of old things. If this wasn't the case, we wouldn't have cognitive dissonance, described by Wikipedia as:

The mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, performs an action that is contradictory to one or more beliefs, ideas or values, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values.

For example, I believe in human-caused global warming.

But my belief in this is connected to many other beliefs, such as the efficacy of science, the accuracy of historical accounts of industrialization, basic principles of chemistry and physics, and so on.

If in Kaplan's thought experiment, a belief called out "Global warming! I'm a belief in global warming!" and got no answer from an actual thing, this would call into question a lot more than just the reality of global warming. A whole world view would be on shaky philosophical ground.

(Fortunately for science-minded folks like me, there is very little chance of this happening.)

Here's the final part of the thought experiment.

But there's a much more serious problem. When we imagine playing our game, we imagine that we ourselves are standing in the field somehow adjudicating the game. We are looking at the beliefs on one side and the things on the other. 

But when we look at a thing and see it, that is just another way of saying we believe that that thing exists. There is no way to step outside ourselves and examine the world and our beliefs from the side.

Consider this classic sketch that illustrates epistemology: [picture of a man with an apple inside his head looking at an outside apple] 

What is inside that head that looks like an apple? It's just a bunch of atoms, or if you prefer, neurons and glial cells, or if you prefer, an organ consisting of a prefrontal cortex, a cerebellum, the periaqueductal gray, the hippocampus, and so forth; but there is nothing in there that looks like an apple.

And when can we stand where the picture invites us to stand -- looking at the belief and the apple from the side? Never. We have to be within our beliefs, developing them.

We can't examine apples and beliefs separately and figure out if the beliefs match the apples, because the beliefs and the apples are part of a single phenomenon. They evolve together, much as flowers and bees' eyes do.

Yes, I was on board with this perspective also. After all, I'd written this in a 2014 post, "In a God's eye view, who does the seeing?"

I've heard the term, "God's eye view," before. But I haven't given it much thought. Maybe it was because I believed in God for so many years.

I never questioned the notion that there could be a way of looking upon reality that was godlike. After all, even scientists -- not just religious believers -- assume the cosmos can be viewed from some sort of detached objective transcendent perspective.

This is the way things are. 

OK. But says who? And where is that entity?

If inside the cosmos (which I define as everything that exists), then this being with a supposed God's eye view isn't seeing everything, since it is within everything. It is a part of reality, of existence, of the cosmos.

Thus this being not only can't see itself, it has its own perspective. It is situated within some aspect of the cosmos. For us this means time and space. Or more accurately, the space-time continuum.

This isn't nowhere. It is somewhere. 

When we imagine God being aware of everything, what does the vision consist of? For me, I either picture myself looking through God's consciousness (a fantasy, for sure) or see God as if from the outside, gazing upon everything (another fantasy).

In the latter case, I'm definitely taking a God's eye view of God.

Yet also in the first case, more subtly. Because I am picturing myself looking through God's consciousness, which is a perspective on God's perspective.

The Big Question is whether a God's eye view makes any sense.

Can any being really understand reality as it is -- detachedly objectified -- or is reality always a matter of subjective perspective?

Well, I'd answer my own question this way: it's a bit of both.

We can never detach ourselves from reality and view it as an object. There always is a strong element of subjectivity in our perspective. However, even though objectivity and subjectivity are inextricably linked, this object/subject mashup ranges from highly-subjective (dreams) to highly-objective (physics). 

It'll be interesting to see how Kaplan looks at the question, Does Santa Exist?, in his book's final chapters. Like I said, his excursion into Jewish mysticism seems like a detour to me. But it could very well be an essential foundation to his final philosophical conclusions.

Which I'll relate in a follow-up post.

Max Tegmark: "Consciousness is the way information feels"

I felt unsatisfied after reading Margaret Wertheim's "I feel therefore I am: How exactly did consciousness become a problem?" 

Wertheim, a talented science writer, ably reviewed philosophical and scientific conceptions of consciousness.

But she ended up favoring a mysterian view where subjectivity supposedly is just too different from physical matter to have consciousness explained by particles.

This is all thrilling science, yet a question remains: will any of it explain subjective experience? 

Chalmers, the philosopher, claims that the problem of experience is not mechanistically reducible and he argues that it will ‘persist even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained’.

In other words, he says, no amount of detail about neuronal potentials and interconnection is going to get us to the essence of subjectivity.

Plenty of neuroscientists, physicists and philosophers disagree with him, but I’m on his side.

She might be right. However, I'm bothered by the insistence by many that the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness -- the nature of subjective experience -- can't be resolved by the currently understood methods of science.

So I did some exploring into the views of one of the non-mysterians Wertheim cited, physicist Max Tegmark.

Some physicists want to be rid of the problem of consciousness altogether, while others are attempting to treat it as a core material phenomenon.

Max Tegmark, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, hopes that consciousness will turn out to be another state of matter, like a solid, liquid or gas, and he’s calling for physicists to begin exploring the ‘physical correlates of consciousness’.

What, he asks, are the physical conditions that pertain when consciousness is present?

Below is a video of a 16-minute TedX talk Tedmark gave in 2014. It's interesting and understandable.

As he says near the end of his talk, many people won't like his hypothesis: consciousness is the way information feels when it is being processed by particles moving about in various ways.

Those ways require a certain independence and integration of the conscious entity. Thus consciousness is a result of the structure of information processing, the pattern of particles. 

Tegmark argues that nothing additional is needed to explain consciousness, no "secret scientific sauce." You may not agree, but he makes a persuasive case. Have a look:

 

No surprise: Planned Parenthood shooter is a religious fanatic

I don't believe in ESP.

But it didn't take any supernatural powers of perception for me, and many others, to accurately predict that the man who entered a Planned Parenthood clinic, killing three and wounding nine, was religiously motivated.

A well-researched New York Times piece, "For Robert Dear, Religion and Rage Before Planned Parenthood Attack," describes Dear's religious sensibilities. Excerpts:

He found excuses for his transgressions, she said, in his idiosyncratic views on Christian eschatology and the nature of salvation.

“He claims to be a Christian and is extremely evangelistic, but does not follow the Bible in his actions,” Ms. Micheau said in the court document. “He says that as long as he believes he will be saved, he can do whatever he pleases. He is obsessed with the world coming to an end.”

...He was a man of religious conviction who sinned openly, a man who craved both extreme solitude and near-constant female company, a man who successfully wooed women but, some of them say, also abused them. He frequented marijuana websites, then argued with other posters, often through heated religious screeds.

“Turn to JESUS or burn in hell,” he wrote on one site on Oct. 7, 2005. “WAKE UP SINNERS U CANT SAVE YOURSELF U WILL DIE AN WORMS SHALL EAT YOUR FLESH, NOW YOUR SOUL IS GOING SOMEWHERE.”

A number of people who knew Mr. Dear said he was a staunch abortion opponent. Ms. Micheau, 60, said in a brief interview Tuesday that late in her marriage to Mr. Dear, he told her that he had put glue in the locks of a Planned Parenthood location in Charleston.

...One person who spoke with him extensively about his religious views said Mr. Dear, who is 57, had praised people who attacked abortion providers, saying they were doing “God’s work.” In 2009, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concerns for the privacy of the family, Mr. Dear described as “heroes” members of the Army of God, a loosely organized group of anti-abortion extremists that has claimed responsibility for a number of killings and bombings.

...He argued with users of the site who disagreed with his religious posts, deriding them as “slaves” and “demons” who would suffer at the end of the world. On Oct. 7, 2005, he wrote, “Every knee shall bow an every tongue will confess that JESUS IS LORD.”

...“She says she can’t believe he was capable of such things, and I think that’s what’s upsetting her most,” the relative said about Ms. Bragg. “He believed he was doing God’s will, and I’m sure he probably wanted to die in the process of carrying out what I’m sure he thought was right.”

So Robert Dear was a Christian terrorist.

Even though abortion is legal in the United States, and there is no evidence that Planned Parenthood did anything illegal when it was paid small sums for providing fetal tissue for medical research purposes, Dear's religious beliefs led him to believe that he was doing the godly thing when he attacked the clinic.

Dear didn't act alone, of course.

Though he apparently didn't have any direct accomplices, Dear was aided and abetted by all of the lies spouted about Planned Parenthood by many Right to Life zealots, including several GOP presidential candidates (notably Carly Fiorina). 

I liked this reader comment on the NYT story by "Ami." Speaking about Dear, Ami said:

So he's the American Christian version of ISIS, but the muslims are terrorists and he is a what exactly?

And the yapping heads he listens to happen to be significant political figures, instead of radicalized Imams, And if the Imams are stirring up extremism as so many red politicians so adamantly vocalize, and fueling Islamic terrorism, then what are these politicians themselves? Seems they're fueling a fanatical base of extremists to incite acts of violence.

At least both sides are carrying out god's will. I'm glad I don't pray to either of those gods.

Me too.

In fact, I don't pray to any god. I find that it is much easier to be a good person by forsaking religious approaches to morality, since these almost invariably lead to an overblown sense of self-righteousness and entitlement.

Religious believers don't just think they are doing the right thing when they act in accord with some made-up set of theological superstitions. They believe they are doing the divine thing, the godly thing. 

This makes religious fanatics dangerous in a different way than secular fanatics. Secular extremists typically are seeking to achieve some worldly end. While they might be crazily wrong, their motivations have at least a tenuous connection with everyday physical reality. 

But when a religious fanatic considers that the future of his immortal soul demands killing in God's name, this is a supersized motivation. It appears that Dear wasn't simply angry at Planned Parenthood for providing abortion services; he thought that those who attacked Planned Parenthood clinics were doing "God's work."

Of course, no one will ever know what made Robert Dear do what he did. Not even Dear himself.

The oft-heard search for motive in attacks like this one rests on an extremely dubious neuroscientific assumption: that a person's conscious will determines what he or she does.

Actually, decision-making is much more complicated, being highly influenced by unconscious factors. Out into consciousness pops an intention to do something. From where it came, nobody knows. 

Imagine asking a married person, "What caused you to marry your spouse?" How believable would the answer be? Is it really possible to ascertain someone's motive for marrying a particular person? Can even that person accurately say why he or she decided to commit to their spouse?

Likewise, why does someone like Robert Dear decide to kill other people? The causes are numerous, mysterious, complex, largely hidden. Dear's trial will be much more successful at bringing out what he did, than why he did it. 

Yet in one way or another, we all fall prey to the illusion that we know. 

We know what is right and wrong. We know what is good and bad. We know what needs to be done to make the world a better place. We know why we're drawn to do this rather than that. We know that inside our head there is a distinct self called "me" who is in control of our thoughts and actions.

Robert Dear also thought, "I know." So what made him so dangerous compared to most other people?

I'd suggest, Dear's religiously-inspired conviction that his knowledge was divinely inspired. Like I said before, religiosity supercharges/supersizes an ordinary belief that we know what is best, what needs doing. A fanatic religious believer has no doubts. 

Yet doubting is a sign that one is in touch with reality.

Nothing is absolutely certain. Every truth is provisional. Such is the way of science. Dialogue, discussion, debate -- this is the way we should resolve differences over what is true or false, right or wrong, moral or immoral.

Not by taking a rifle into a Planned Parenthood clinic and shooting people. Not by Carly Fiorina lying about Planned Parenthood and refusing to admit that what she said on a presidential debate stage wasn't true. 

Fiorina spoke straight into the camera. “Anyone who has watched this videotape—I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, to watch these tapes,” she said referring to undercover videos first circulated in July. “Watch a fully-formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says, ‘We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.’ This is about the character of our nation, and if we do not stand up and force President Obama to veto this bill, shame on us.”

...To be clear, Fiorina, like the other Republicans attacking Planned Parenthood, doesn’t have her facts straight. 

Absolute faith in one's infallibility often leads to hurting others in the name of a fanatically-held erroneous belief. 

It appears that Robert Dear wrongly felt that he was following God's will by shooting up a Planned Parenthood clinic. It appears that Carly Fiorina wrongly felt that speaking falsely about Planned Parenthood in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary was justified somehow.

Dear God Who Doesn't Exist, deliver us from the evil of religious fanaticism. 

Such is my secular prayer.