Church of the Churchless

Buddhism can help silence your inner critic

I enjoy reading movie reviews. The people who write them are called critics.

When they criticize a movie, or streaming show, that I was considering watching, often I'll decide to see something else instead. So critics can be wonderful.

However, there's also a critic who is uncomfortably close to me. In fact, it is me.

Or at least, a part of me who isn't shy about pointing out my screw-ups, mistakes, and such -- often in a caustic manner that leaves me feeling bad about myself.

I don't mind getting feedback about things I could have done better, whether from myself or anybody else.

But that inner critic often goes overboard, constantly reminding me of mistakes from long ago that I'm already well aware of and which can't be undone because they're in the distant past.

So I perked up when I came to a section in Robert Wright's book, "Why Buddhism is True," that talks about how Wright was able to deal with his own inner critic through mindfulness meditation. 

Here's what Wright said about this.

I've always been good at convincing myself I've made a mistake, at chastising myself for it, and sometimes at pretty literally hating myself for it. For decades people have told me I shouldn't be like this.

They've said things like, "Don't beat yourself up about it." 

This has always annoyed me. My feeling has been that you should beat yourself up about things you do wrong. Otherwise you may keep doing them!

And let's be honest, isn't one of the big problems with the world how many people do bad things and then don't feel any need for self-chastisement?

...The experience I had that night wasn't a full-fledged hallucination. As I entered that weird visual space, I didn't lose contact with the real world. I was aware that I was sitting in a meditation hall and that intense concentration had put my mind in a place it had never been.

But where was this place? Only after looking around a bit did I realize that the place my mind had entered was my mind -- or, at least, my mind's representation of my mind.

The tipoff was that I "saw" -- and, I guess, "heard" -- a particular thought I've had many times after doing something arguably stupid or inept or wrong. 

The thought was "You screwed up."

Actually, "screwed up" is a sanitized version of the phrase I tend to use and of the phrase that constituted the thought I observed that night. Anyway, the main thing is this: I now saw this thought assume a form I had never seen it assume before.

Come to think of it, I had never seen this thought assume any form at all. But it now looked as if -- literally looked as if -- one part of my mind was speaking the thought to another part.

There was even a kind of line tracing the path of the message, like an arrow on a diagram indicating the direction of communication.

I watched this intracranial conversation, watched the message travel from sender to recipient, as a kind of outside observer, even though I thought of the recipient as in some sense being me.

It's almost impossible to convey in words the power of this experience and its aura of significance.

...And what was the truth I was seeing? What struck me at the time was that, for the first time ever, this standard thought of mine -- "You screwed up" -- didn't seem to be coming from me.

It was just some guy in my head doing the talking. And it wasn't clear that he was worth paying attention to. Who the hell was he, anyway?

Now, more than a decade later, having thought about this stuff more and written this book, I might answer, "He was a module in my mind."

But at the time I was thinking less academically, and the lesson seemed to be that in the future I could treat my inner critic with some critical distance, if not outright disdain.

As much as I had resisted efforts to quit beating myself up, as much as I had minimized the toll it took on me, the prospect of living without this self-torture now seemed powerfully appealing. I'm not much of a crier, but I started crying. I tried to do it quietly, but I did it fully.

...And then I lived happily ever after.

Actually, no. Another line in that Foreigner song, right after "feels like the very first time" is "like it never will again." And, indeed, I haven't had a meditative experience that joltingly powerful since then.

My belief that I would be able to access this plane again and again and use it to orchestrate my own personal spiritual renaissance was naive.

So was my belief that I would quit beating up on myself, though the frequency and severity of the beatings seems to have fallen off a bit.

OK, Wright's meditation experience wasn't truly mind changing. Still, it benefitted him. Here's another excerpt from his book that's an overview of his attitude toward meditation.

In case all this sounds too abstractly philosophical, let me try to put it in more practical form, as the answer to this oft-asked question: Will meditation make me happier? And, if so, how much happier?

Well, in my case -- as  you will recall, I'm a particularly hard case -- the answer is yes, it's made me a little happier. That's good, because I'm in favor of happiness, especially my own.

At the same time, the argument I'd make to people about why they should meditate is less about the quantity of happiness than about the quality of the happiness.

The happiness I now have involves, on balance, a truer view of the world that the happiness I had before.

And a boost in happiness that rests on truth, I would argue, is better than a boost in happiness that doesn't -- not just because things that rest on truth have a more secure footing than things that don't, but because, as it happens, acting in accordance with this truth means behaving better toward your fellow beings.

So that's why I'd say that increments of happiness that insight meditation may add to your life are especially worth working for: because these are increments of valid happiness.

This is a happiness that is based on a multifaceted clarity -- on a truer view of the world, a truer view of other people, a truer view of yourself, and, I believe, a closer approximation to moral truth.

Motive of a mass murderer wrongly assumes conscious will

One of the things that comes through loud and clear in the many modern neuroscience and psychology books I've read is that we humans are lousy at knowing why we act a certain way.

Experiments on split-brain patients, for example, where the connection between the two brain hemispheres has been severed, shows that even when the left side of the brain (which controls language) is unaware of the reason the right side did something, the patient will make up a "why" story that has no basis in fact.

We don't like to admit that we don't know. So the brain makes up reasons in an effort to make sense of the world, even when those reasons lack a connection to reality.

The legal system is behind the times in this regard, as evidenced by the talk after every mass shooting in the United States about it being important to learn the killer's motive.

This assumes a direct link between (1) what we do, and (2) a preceding conscious thought or emotion that impels us to engage in that action. This assumption is highly suspect, since there's a lot of evidence that conscious awareness is a caboose at the end of an Action Train, not the locomotive that leads the way.

After Robert Aaron Long killed eight people in Atlanta, six of them Asian women who worked at massage parlors, many commentators saw the murders as racially motivated. But police reported that after they talked with Long, he said that his killings stemmed from a sex addiction, not racial hatred.

Well, the plain scientific fact seems to be that Long can't accurately say why he killed those people, just as nobody else can accurately say why they did this or that -- except, perhaps, for the simplest of actions.

Here's an excerpt from the book I've been writing about recently, Robert Wright's "Why Buddhism is True."

The split-brain experiments powerfully demonstrated the capacity of the conscious self to convince itself that it's calling the shots when it's not. However, this demonstration was done with people who don't have normal brains. How about the rest of us, whose two hemispheres aren't separated? Do our brains actually make use of this capacity for self-deception?

There is good reason to believe the answer is yes.

In one much-cited experiment, the psychologists Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson asked shoppers to appraise four pairs of pantyhose and choose the best pair. It turned out people had a strong tendency to choose the pair on the far right.

But when asked why they had chosen the pair, they didn't say, "Because it's on the far right." They tended to explain their choices in terms of the quality of the pantyhose, sometimes going into detail about the fabric, the feel, and so on.

Unfortunately for these explanations, the four pairs of pantyhose were identical.

...At a minimum, it seems fair to say that the role of our conscious selves in guiding behavior is not nearly as big as was long thought. And the reason this role was exaggerated is that the conscious mind feels so powerful; in other words, the conscious mind is naturally deluded about its own nature.

...From natural selection's point of view, it's good for you to tell a coherent story about yourself, to depict yourself as a rational self-aware actor. So whenever your actual motivations aren't accessible to the part of your brain that communicates with the world, it would make sense for that part of your brain to generate stories about your motivation.

There's good reason why the terms "implicit bias" and "systemic racism" are used so often in discussions of racial discrimination. People may consciously believe that they aren't racially biased, while actually they are.

Sometimes racism is subtle. Sometimes racism is so much a part of society that it goes unnoticed, being so familiar.

And sometimes, maybe most of the time, a mass shooter who kills a number of people of some race is unaware of why he did this. So I don't think investigators of the Atlanta shootings should put much credence in how Robert Aaron Long explains his murders.

Perhaps the law requires that a conscious motive be present for there to be a hate crime. But neuroscience and psychology don't require this -- quite the opposite, in fact.

There are no essences, just interpretations

We humans want to make more of reality than is actually there. We believe that things have more substance, more independence, and more of an unchanging essence than is justified.

This is the message of my previous post about the relative nature of the quantum world. And as I noted in that post, it fits with a core tenet of Buddhism -- emptiness.

Buddhism emptiness doesn't mean a void, or nothingness. 

It refers to the fact that nothing has inherent existence. Nothing has an unchanging essence. Nothing stands alone, complete in and by itself.

In the book I've been writing about recently, "Why Buddhism is True," Robert Wright, the author, says that essence is closely linked to emptiness.

Essence, as we've seen, is central to the Buddhist concept of emptiness. At least its absence is central to the concept of emptiness. The idea of emptiness is that, while the things we perceive out there in the world do in some sense exist, they lack this thing called "essence."

Essence appears in quite a few of the neuroscience books I've read. Often the example used is of, say, someone being told that they could have a nice used sweater at no cost.

The person is delighted.

Then they're told that the sweater belonged to a murderer who killed his victims in a grisly fashion. Learning that, often the sweater offer is refused, because somehow the essence of the murderer is felt to be part of it.

More positively, Wright cites the true example of someone who paid $48,875 for a tape measure owned by John F. Kennedy, "apparently motivated by a sense that it was imbued with some sort of presidential 'essence.'"

He then wonders what would have happened if the successful bidder was told that a mistake was made, and the tape measure actually belonged to a plumber.

The bidder's altered facial expression would leave no doubt that there had been an alteration of feeling. A tape measure that moments ago inspired awe and adoration would now inspire nothing of the kind. A precious relic had turned into a mere object, emptied of the essence it possessed only moments before.

What this points to is another subject discussed by Wright, how perceptions and feelings are intimately related. In fact, they are virtually inseparable. 

Meaning, how we look upon something or someone is deeply affected by our prior experience and emotional attitude. 

I've talked about this sort of thing in reference to how devotees of a guru typically view his qualities in absolute terms, whereas actually they're relative.

I had personal experience of this when my wife went with me to see the guru who led the religious organization I belonged to at the time, Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

Well, actually my wife went to Palm Springs for shopping and sightseeing. But she was able to see the guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, at a small group session where she got to sit in the front row.

She wasn't at all impressed. To her, Dhillon just seemed like a regular guy.

But to his devotees, the guru was imbued with marvelous qualities: love, wisdom, charm, and so on. This shows something obvious: beauty, or any other quality, is in the eye of the beholder, not anywhere outside.

Essence also is tied into stories, as Wright describes.

The stories we are told about things, and the stories we tell ourselves about things, influence how we feel about those things and, presumably, thus shape the essence that we sense in them. 

If the story behind a tape measure is that it belonged to JFK, that implies a different feeling -- and a different essence -- than the story that the tape measure belongs to a plumber.

If we think of ourselves as having a successful marriage and wonderful, thriving children, then the sight of our home probably gives off more positive vibes than if we think of ourselves as trapped in an obsessive marriage that has bred ne'er-do-well kids. And so on.

...But that's just one example of a more general illusion: that the "essences" we sense in things really exist, that they inhabit the things we perceive, when in fact they are constructions of our minds, with no necessary correspondence to reality.

Things come with stories, and the stories, whether true or false, shape how we feel about the things and thus shape the things themselves, giving them the full form we perceive.

Why quantum is relative, as Buddhism surmises

For many years I've had a strong interest in quantum physics -- from the perspective of someone who knows next to nothing about its mathematics, but is fascinated by the philosophical side of it.

There's a "shut up and calculate" position that most quantum physicists embrace. 

The theory works. Spectacularly. If it didn't, our technological modern world would be much different.

So lots of scientists don't worry about the philosophical foundation of quantum physics. They're just interested in applying the mathematical underpinning to practical problems and applications. 

Then there are physicists like Carlo Rovelli.

He wrote a fascinating piece in the March 13 issue of New Scientist, "Why quantum is relative." The online version has a different title. Here's a PDF file.
Download Quantum weirdness isn’t weird – if we accept objects don’t exist | New Scientist

Rovelli has written a book about his take on quantum physics, Helgoland. It's to be released in the United States in May. Naturally I've put in a pre-order.

Here's the Amazon description of the book, which sums up Rovelli's approach.

One of the world's most renowned theoretical physicists, Carlo Rovelli has entranced millions of readers with his singular perspective on the cosmos. In Helgoland, he examines the enduring enigma of quantum theory. The quantum world Rovelli describes is as beautiful as it is unnerving.

Helgoland is a treeless island in the North Sea where the twenty-three-year-old Werner Heisenberg made the crucial breakthrough for the creation of quantum mechanics, setting off a century of scientific revolution. Full of alarming ideas (ghost waves, distant objects that seem to be magically connected, cats that appear both dead and alive), quantum physics has led to countless discoveries and technological advancements. Today our understanding of the world is based on this theory, yet it is still profoundly mysterious.

As scientists and philosophers continue to fiercely debate the meaning of the theory, Rovelli argues that its most unsettling contradictions can be explained by seeing the world as fundamentally made of relationships rather than substances. We and everything around us exist only in our interactions with one another. This bold idea suggests new directions for thinking about the structure of reality and even the nature of consciousness.

Rovelli makes learning about quantum mechanics an almost psychedelic experience. Shifting our perspective once again, he takes us on a riveting journey through the universe so we can better comprehend our place in it.

Since I'm supremely confident that if I tried to sum up the New Scientist article on my own, I'd screw it up, I'm sharing some excerpts from it that I found particularly compelling.

Read the whole piece via the PDF file above to get a fuller picture of Rovelli's quantum philosophizing. It sure seems like Buddhist notions of reality are extremely close to Rovelli's viewpoint.

Dig down deep enough, and things have properties that are independent of anything else, right?

Perhaps not. Quantum physics, which describes the bizarre behaviour of the physical world at the most elementary level we know, may be telling us the opposite.

Things don’t have properties exclusive to themselves: their properties only exist by virtue of their relationship to other things, just like there are really no “chairs” without someone around to interact with them and see them as such.

Coming to terms with this idea may clarify the persistently mysterious nature of the quantum world. It might even help make other mysteries, such as the nature of our conscious experience, a little bit less mysterious.

...A chair is the way it interacts with its surroundings. To talk about the properties of the chair by itself, when it isn’t interacting with anything, is meaningless.

All of the properties we commonly use to characterise a chair – its colour, its comfort, its weight – are defined through interactions with something else. And so it is for the properties of the single atoms or elementary particles forming the chair.

...As hinted at in the opening of this article, it isn’t a novelty to realise that aspects of the world are relational. Biology, psychology, economics and many other sciences focus on relations more than entities.

Physics itself is already full of relational notions: velocity is only defined with respect to something else, as are electric or gravitational potential and orientation, to name just some examples. The physical world seemed to provide a non-relational substratum formed by substances with absolute properties.

Quantum mechanics, I think, is the discovery that this isn’t the case: the world is woven by relationships that go all the way down to the smallest physical entities.

An understanding of the world in terms of relations rather than entities might even help us disentangle other thorny issues, for instance the nature of consciousness. If we think of the physical world as if it were made by little stones each with its own properties, the jump from this picture to the subjective experience of mental phenomena is huge.

But if the physical nature of the world is better described in terms of how physical systems, simple as well as complex ones, affect one another, perhaps the disjoint will appear less dramatic: products of the mind are just the complex phenomenon formed by the tangled and richly interwoven interactions between the world and the brain.

Our old metaphysical prejudice was that physical reality is made by some fundamental substance with absolute properties. Quantum theory questions this.

I think this is fine: our metaphysical prejudices have formed and evolved within the restricted domain of our everyday experience. We are used to thinking about the world in terms of things with absolute properties because this is what we experience, thanks to the stability generated by decoherence.

But we shouldn’t force what we have discovered about nature to align with these prejudices: rather, our prejudices should be modified by our discoveries about nature.

Quantum theory has altered our understanding of physical reality in ways that are even more profound than the Copernican revolution, when we learned that we live on a madly spinning rock. Digesting the full implications of Nicolaus Copernicus’s work has taken centuries.

We are only beginning to digest the full implications of the quantum revolution.

 

Not having an illusory self has some real benefits

I'm continuing to enjoy my re-reading of Robert Wright's "Why Buddhism is True," a book that I neglected to write about after I first read it several years ago. My first post about it is here.

In his The Alleged Nonexistence of the Self chapter, Wright offers some advice.

Continue to entertain the proposition you've probably been entertaining your whole life, that somewhere within you there's something that deserves the name I.

And don't feel like you're committing a felony-level violation of Buddhist dogma just because you think of yourself as being a self.

But be open to the radical possibility that your self, at the deepest level, is not at all what you've always thought of as it being.

If you followed the Buddha's guidance and abandoned the massive chunks of psychological landscape you've always thought of as belonging to you, you would undergo a breathtaking shift in what it means to be a human.

If you attained the state he's recommending, this would be very different from having a self in the sense in which you've always had one before.

Basically, what Wright means by this is that it's possible to look upon our emotions, thoughts, perceptions, and such as not being in the realm of good and bad, nor as being lasting parts of who we are.

Nothing lasts. Nothing stands alone. Everything changes. Everything is interdependent, connected to other things.

Wright says:

Think of yourself as having, in principle, the power to establish a different relationship with your feelings and thoughts and impulses and perceptions -- the power to disengage from some of them; the power to, in a sense, disown them, to define the bounds of your self in a way that excludes them.

Think of some degree of liberation being possible -- and don't worry about the fact that this would seem to imply that there's a self to be liberated. There are worse things than being a self that gets liberated. 

One aspect of this liberation is being free of two illusions. Wright describes them clearly. 

So, all told, we're under at least two kinds of illusions. One is about the nature of the conscious self, which we see as more in control of things than it actually is. The other illusion is about exactly what kind of people we are -- namely, capable and upstanding.

You might call these two misconceptions the illusion about our selves and the illusion about ourselves. They work in synergy.

The first illusion helps us convince the world that we are coherent, consistent actors: we don't do things for no reason, and the reasons we do them make sense; if our behaviors merit credit or blame, there is an inner us that deserves that credit or blame.

The second illusion convinces the world that what we deserve is credit, not blame; we're more ethical than the average person, and we're more productive than the average teammate. We have beneffectance.

[Defined as the way people naturally present themselves to the world, as beneficial and effective.]

In other words, if you were to build into the brain a component in charge of public relations, it would look something like the conscious self.

In the next chapter, The Mental Modules That Run Your Life, Wright shares this compelling passage.

Indeed, if there is something that qualifies as a constant amid the flux, something that really does endure, essentially unchanged, through time, that something is an illusion: the illusion that there is a CEO, a king, and that "I" -- the conscious I -- am it.

We saw in the previous chapter that this illusion makes sense in evolutionary terms. The conscious I is the I that speaks, the I that communicates with the world, so it gets access to perspectives whose purpose is to be shared with the world.

These perspectives include the sense that there is an executive self, and that it is a pretty damn effective and upstanding executive self at that!

Now, this might seem kind of depressing. I, and you, and everybody else, we wrongly believe that our conscious self is much more in control of what we do than is actually the case.

Plus, we wrongly believe that this illusory CEO or king/queeen is much more loving, effective, competent, and so on than it actually is. (Again, ignore the paradox of an illusion having qualities; this is just the way Buddhism puts things.)

I like what Wright is saying, though. 

Because we think we're better people, a better self, than we truly are, most of us are harder on ourselves than we should be.

Mistakes, screw-ups, failures -- these challenge our sense of ourselves. We can't understand how someone so caring and competent could mess up so badly. 

Well, this assumes that there's a caring and competent self inside our head. It's akin to a general taking responsibility for a battlefield defeat because he's in charge and should have known better than the failed strategy that his troops followed.

But what if there's no general, no CEO, no king, no one in charge? What if our brains are just highly complex entities with many different modules, or states, that come into play as different circumstances arise? 

Then there would be little reason to engage in regret or recriminations for something poorly done. 

We simply do the best we can with what evolution has given us. No one is in charge of our life, of all our doings. There's just things going on inside and outside our psyches. 

Wright says:

Buddhist thought and modern psychology converge on this point: in human life as it's ordinarily lived, there is no one self, no conscious CEO, that runs the show; rather, there seem to be a series of selves that take turns running the show -- and in a sense, seizing control of the show.

If the way they seize control of the show is through feelings, it stands to reason that one way to change the show is to change the role feelings play in everyday life. I'm not aware of a better way to do that than mindfulness meditation.

Religions are sort of like conspiracy theories

Conspiracy theories always have been around. But they've proliferated, in the United States, at least, in recent years.

Donald Trump deserves much of the credit, better termed blame. 

Trump never saw a fact that he didn't like to denigrate, calling every media story which irritated him "fake news." 

Of course, almost always there wasn't anything fake about the news. However, Trump's devotees came to feel like they were in a special club of People in the Know.

Meaning, people who think they know what is really going on in the world. Which is much different from actually knowing.

At the moment, QAnon is the craziest conspiracy theory, though it has lots of competition. 

What gives QAnon its special wacko flavor is that supposedly there's someone who goes by "Q" who's privy to deep dark astounding secrets, such as that Democratic politicians and other liberals are part of a pedophile ring.

More specifically, a ring "devoted to the abduction, trafficking, torture, sexual abuse and cannibalization of children, all with the purpose of fulfilling the rituals of their Satanic faith."

That's absurd. No one should believe it. But a great many people do.

Likewise, every world religion makes other sorts of absurd claims. And billions of people believe those claims -- such as that Jesus was born of a virgin birth and Muhammed had the Koran dictated to him by an angel.

Recently I came across two stories in The Atlantic about conspiracy theories that got me thinking about their relation to religious belief. 

"What Conspiracy Theorists Don't Believe" starts out this way. 

Some people believe the most extraordinary things. Earth is flat, and airplane GPS is rigged to fool pilots into thinking otherwise. COVID-19 vaccines are a pretext to inject thought-controlling microchips into us all. The true president of the United States is Donald Trump; his inauguration will happen on January 20, make that March 4, make that a date to be arranged very soon.

The question “How could anybody believe this stuff?” comes naturally enough. That may not be the most helpful question, however. Conspiracy theorists believe strange ideas, yes. But these outlandish beliefs rest on a solid foundation of disbelief.

To think that Trump is actually still the president, as some in the QAnon movement do, you first have to doubt.

You have to doubt the journalism practiced by any mainstream media outlet of any political persuasion; you have to doubt all the experts and the political elites; you have to doubt the judiciary, the military, and every other American institution. Once you have thoroughly disbelieved all of them, only then can you start to believe in Trump’s ascension being just around the corner—or in lizard overlords or alien prophets.

Religious fundamentalists also doubt. Notably, they doubt science and the scientists who produce scientific research. 

Without doubting evolution, for example, it is much more difficult to embrace Godly creation stories. Yet it doesn't really work to make believers in something unbelievable accept evident facts. Typically that just makes them harden their stance in favor of what they already believe. 

Instead, says the story:

When someone has dismissed the obvious facts, repeating them will not persuade him to see sense. But when people are given time and space to explain themselves, they may start to spot the gaps in their own knowledge or arguments. The psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil coined the phrase “the illusion of explanatory depth” to refer to the way our self-assurance crumples when we are invited to explain apparently simple ideas.

I like to do this when someone asserts that human consciousness isn't produced by the brain.

OK, then explain why anesthesia makes people lose consciousness? Or being hit in the head with a baseball bat? If consciousness isn't physical, why does Alzheimers change consciousness so much? Or a brain tumor?

The other story is "The Truth Seekers Are Coming." It talks about the people who claim to be devoted to truth, yet what they consider to be true is decidedly weird -- just like religious truth seekers.

Sometime in the middle of the pandemic year, and sometime in the middle of a prolonged and compulsive scroll through Instagram, the “truth seekers” came into my life. The term was showing up over and over in the bios and captions of the women I followed, so often that I was starting to feel as if I were seeing things.

The lockdowns seemed to have inspired a new kind of internet identity: There were truth-seeking fashion bloggers, truth-seeking travel influencers, and truth-seeking expectant moms who prayed that their daughters would be truth seekers too.

Some would even seek the truth across platforms, beckoning their followers to new podcasts about the truth, new Telegram group chats in which the truth was up for discussion, or new lines of truth-related merchandise.

“If Jesus were walking the Earth today, do you think you’d see him for his miracles?” a QAnon-obsessed fashion blogger and “relentless truth seeker” asked several weeks ago. “Or would you label him a conspiracy theorist?” I knew why she was asking, and it was not because she was leading Bible study.

It didn’t take me long to realize that the “truths” these women had in mind were highly suspect and disturbing ones.

They wanted all the facts about the Democrats’ scheme to harvest the blood of children, and all the evidence proving that the COVID-19 vaccines have microchips in them. The stress of that pursuit frequently culminated in angry speeches, delivered to a front-facing camera, about how Instagram was trying to silence their unpopular opinions and original perspectives.

Like-minded Instagrammers may refer to themselves as “critical thinkers” or “true journalists,” among other coded phrases, but the term I saw most often—the succinct and pretty hook that has pulled so many women down the rabbit hole—was truth seeker.

It's our 31st anniversary today. Here's some wedding photos.

Easy to remember our anniversary when it is St. Patrick's Day.

I shared some photos of our 1990 wedding and my ghastly-botched attempt at a marriage proposal in a HinesSight blog post, "Been married for 31 years today. But I'm not great at proposing."

From the photos you'll see how much marriage has aged me. Or...wait, maybe it is aging that has aged me. 

Buddhism can free us from evolution's delusion

It happened again this morning, a sign from the non-God. 

I'd tried to continue reading a couple of Buddhist books that appealed to me, aside from occasional mentions of supposed supernatural phenomena, which had been bothering me.

Today the bothering overcame my liking of the books. 

In the course of returning them to the Buddhism section of my bookcase, my eye hit upon a book by Robert Wright, "Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment."

Highlighting indicated that I'd read the entire book. But so far as I can tell, I never wrote a blog post about it. Well, that changes with today. And I'm sure I'll write more posts as I re-read the book.

Here's an excerpt from the first chapter of the book that I got through this morning. I really like Wright's writing style and his approach to Buddhist meditation.

Evolutionary psychology can be described in various ways, and here's one way I had described it in my book [The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life]: It is the study of how the human brain was designed -- by natural selection -- to mislead us, even enslave us.

Don't get me wrong: natural selection has its virtues, and I'd rather be created by it than not be created at all -- which, so far as I can tell, are the two options this universe offers. 

Being a product of evolution is by no means entirely a story of enslavement and delusion. Our evolved brains empower us in many ways, and they often bless us with a basically accurate view of reality.

Still, ultimately, natural selection cares about only one thing (or, I should say, "cares" -- in quotes -- about only one thing, since natural selection is just a blind process, not a conscious designer). And that one thing is getting genes into the next generation. 

Genetically based traits that in the past contributed to genetic proliferation have flourished, while traits that didn't have fallen by the wayside. 

And the traits that have survived this test include mental traits -- structures and algorithms that are built into the brain and shape our everyday experience.

So if you ask the question "What kinds of perceptions and thoughts and feelings guide us through life each day?" the answer, at the most basic level, isn't "The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that give us an accurate picture of reality."

No, at the most basic level the answer is "The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that helped our ancestors get genes into the next generation."

Whether those thoughts and feelings and perceptions give us a true view of reality is, strictly speaking, beside the point. As a result, they sometimes don't. Our brains are designed to, among other things, delude us.

In the rest of his book, Wright describes his exploration of Buddhist meditation and how it can lead us to a less deluded view of reality.

One reason I like non-supernatural Buddhism so much is that it flips around the Hindu conception of maya, the illusory nature of this world. 

In Buddhism the world is simply what it is, the world.  

There's no problem with the world. The problem lies with the human mind that is trying to comprehend the world, to find the world satisfying, to treat other people compassionately. 

This is one reason why the Buddha reportedly wasn't much interested in abstract discussions of how the world is. His focus was on how a correct view of the world can lead to much reduced suffering, which Wright suggests is better termed "unsatisfactoriness."

At the end of his second chapter, Paradoxes of Meditation, Wright cites the questions he's going to explore via the scientific foundation of a Buddhist worldview.

Why, and in what particular ways, are human beings naturally deluded? How exactly does the delusion work? How does delusion make us suffer? How does it make us make other people suffer? Why would the Buddhist prescription for dispelling the delusion -- in particular, the meditative part of that prescription -- work?

And what would it mean for it to work fully? In other words, does the elusive state that is said to lie at the culmination of the meditative path -- sometimes called enlightenment -- really qualify for that term? What would it be like to see the world with perfect clarity?

Great questions.

I look forward to learning the answers through a second reading of "Why Buddhism is True." I'm a different person than I was almost four years ago, when I bought the book in August 2017.

So my comprehension of what Wright has to say also will be different now.

"Nothing special" explains a lot about human nature

A few days ago I'd woken up in the middle of the night. In the course of lying in bed, waiting to get back to sleep, the thought of "nothing special" suddenly came to mind.

I then pondered the fact that I'm nothing special; that all of humanity is nothing special given the vastness of the cosmos; that, nonetheless, religions try to make their followers feel very special by supposedly enjoying a special relationship with God; that if people could somehow have a sense that they're nothing special, along with everybody else, the world would be a better place.

Since, I've been enjoying playing around with this "nothing special" idea. 

It seems to go a long way toward explaining the gap between how reality actually is, and how we humans typically consider it to be.

Meaning, we're really good at deluding ourselves.

And one reason this happens is our failure to look upon ourselves as nothing special. Instead, we have a strong tendency to see ourselves as being in a spotlight on the Stage of Life, while other people play supporting roles in the shadows.

This is to be expected, I guess. The only person we are in an intimate subjective relationship with is our own self. Everybody else we view from the outside, while we know ourselves from the inside.

So it takes some effort, some spiritual work, to alter that I-centered point of view into a more realistic I'm-nothing-special perspective.

For example, we see death all around us and know that no one is able to escape being dead at some point. Yet most people believe in life after death -- because their religion tells them that they're going to have a nice afterlife, while non-believers in that religion won't.

Today I wondered if Amazon had any books with the title Nothing Special. I found several, but only one book that had a similar philosophical perspective on how I viewed that term, Charlotte Joko Beck's book with the subtitle "Living Zen."

Amazon informed me that I'd bought this book on June 24, 2012.

Indeed, I found it in the Buddhist section of my bookcase. Interesting. Maybe my mind popped up with that nighttime "nothing special" thought on its own, but it seemed entirely possible that a memory of the title of Beck's book surfaced out of the depths of my unconscious.

I'd written a couple of blog posts about Nothing Special. 
What zen practice is... so simple...
Anxiety stretches between real and unreal

I've started to re-read Nothing Special, or at least parts of it. Here's how the book starts out. I like this imagery.

We are rather like whirlpools in the river of life. In flowing forward, a river or stream may hit rocks, branches, or irregularities in the ground, causing whirlpools to spring up spontaneously here and there.

Water entering one whirlpool quickly passes through and rejoins the river, eventually joining another whirlpool and moving on. Though for short periods it seems to be distinguishable as a separate event, the water in the whirlpools is just the river itself. 

The stability of a whirlpool is only temporary.

The energy of the river of life forms living things -- a human being, a cat or dog, trees and plants -- then what held the whirlpool in place is itself altered, and the whirlpool is swept away, reentering the larger flow. 

The energy that was a a particular whirlpool fades out and the water passes on, perhaps to be caught again and turned for a moment into another whirlpool.

We'd rather not think of our lives in this way, however. We don't want to see ourselves as simply a temporary formation, a whirlpool in the river of life. The fact is, we take form for a while; then when conditions are appropriate, we fade out.

There's nothing wrong with fading out; it's a natural part of the process.

However, we want to think that this little whirlpool that we are isn't a part of the stream. We want to see ourselves as permanent and stable. Our whole energy goes into trying to protect our supposed separateness.

"Unique" -- fascinating book about the science of human individuality

I love science. So I love scientific books.

Since I'm also fascinated by what makes us into the person that we are, David Linden's "Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality" hits the sweet spot for me of reading pleasure. 

Linden is a professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute.

Impressive credentials. Plus, Linden is an excellent writer with a sense of humor. 

Here's some excerpts from the three-fourths of the book that I've read so far. These will give you a flavor of the fascinating facts that Linden shares on every page.

Heritability of human traits. One main conclusion of MISTRA [Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart] and related studies was that most human traits, regardless of whether they are physical or behavioral, have a significant heritable component, usually ranging from 30 to 80 percent.

...For decades, the dominant thinking in the field of psychology, and in society at large, was that the most important determinant of one's adult personality was the influence of immediate family, particularly the parents.

This idea came from the twentieth-century psychological movement called behaviorism, which held that humans come into the world as blank slates, ready to be molded by social experience. 

As a result, it was quite a shock when the MISTRA experiments showed significantly higher correlations in personality measures in identical twin pairs than in fraternal ones. The main result was that about 50 percent of the variation in personality can be accounted for by heritability. 

...Importantly, while one's likelihood of having religious beliefs is influenced by both heredity and shared environment, the specific religion you choose has no hereditary component. 

Your genes might contribute to making you religious, but they will not specify a Hindu or Wiccan or Roman Catholic faith -- that's mostly a family and community affair.

Human genome. On average, considering the entire DNA sequence (both the genes and the stretches of other DNA between them), each human is about 99.8 percent similar to any other human, 98 percent similar to a chimpanzee, and 50 percent similar to a fruit fly.

This is because, if you go back far enough in evolutionary time, about eight hundred million years, humans, chimps, and fruit flies al share a common ancestor.

If only a 2 percent difference separates us from chimps, then it follows that small differences in the DNA sequence have a big effect on traits.

...The genome is not a detailed cell-by-cell blueprint for the development of the body and brain, but rather a vague recipe jotted down on the back of an envelope.

...The key point is that the genetic instructions for development are not precise.

...That's the main reason why identical twins, who share the same DNA sequence and nearly the same uterine environment, are not born with wholly identical bodies, brains, or temperaments.

This means that your individuality is not a matter of "nature versus nurture" but rather "heredity interacting with experience, filtered through the inherent randomness of development."

Free will. We like to imagine that we are fundamentally creatures of free will. We reliably call certain facts, events, and concepts to mind. We make conscious decisions and act volitionally. Our individuality is inextricably bound up with a deep sense of agency and autonomy.

To a large degree, this is a trick our brain plays on us. Most of our behavior is subconscious and automatic. In the words of neuroscientist Adrian Haith: "Almost everything you do is a habit." 

...Almost all of our instincts about memory are wrong. We feel like creatures of free will, with detailed and unlimited recall of those events that have helped to form us as individuals.

In reality, most of our behavior is composed of learned, subconscious habits and skills with only a thin veneer of decision-making at the surface.

Our recollection of specific events is unreliable and subject to further distortion every time we recall them. Our memories of facts and concepts are only marginally better. When asked about how confident we are about the veracity of a particular memory, our estimation bears no relationship to the truth.

We feel like we can learn more and more with no limit, yet intensive training in one type of memory seems to degrade our ability to store some other forms of memory.

Our memories are suboptimal, and yet we hold them close. They feel true and important. They are central to our sense of individuality and agency. The mismatch between how we revere our memories and how often they fail is striking.

Why we should feel more agency than we really have is an interesting and open question. I tend to see it as more of a feature than a bug.

When we feel that we are in charge of our behavior, that we are making decisions based on accurate recollection, this allows for more rapid decision-making in those cases of the "thin sliver of cognitive deliberation" where it is truly required.

In other words, when we don't have to stop and second-guess whether we are in charge, we can be decisive when it really matters.

Sexual orientation. There have now been several large-scale anonymous surveys of sexual orientation performed using random sampling in the United States and Europe.

They indicate that approximately 3 percent of men and 1 percent of women identify as consistently homosexual, about 0.5 percent of men and 1 percent of women as bisexual, and the remainder heterosexual.

...Ask a straight man, "When did you decide to be straight?" and he'll likely answer that it didn't feel like a decision at all, but rather like a deep compulsion that became evident around puberty or before.

Gay and bi men will give the same answer: in one survey in the United States, only about 4 percent of all gay and bi men reported that they chose their sexual orientation -- the rest felt that they were "born that way."

...If sexual orientation had no heritable component, we'd expect that the percentage of twin pairs where both are gay would be roughly the same for fraternal and identical twins. 

Conversely, if sexual orientation were entirely determined by genes, then every gay identical twin would have a gay twin sibling.

The best estimates to date, from a population of 3,826 randomly selected twin pairs in Sweden, indicate that about 20 percent of the variance in sexual orientation in women is determined by genes; in men, it's about 40 percent.

...The conclusion is that genetic variation is one factor in determining sexual orientation, but it is far from the whole story and it is a somewhat stronger effect in men than in women.

As always, it's important to remind ourselves that these estimates of heritability are measures for populations, not individuals. 

It may be that there are some individual women and men who carry gene variants such that their sexual orientation is entirely genetically determined, and others for whom their sexual orientation has no genetic contribution whatsoever.

As with all behavioral traits, there is no single gene that determines human sexual orientation. Rather, many different genes each appear to make a small contribution, and at present we do not have a useful list of these genes. 

I get a flash of churchless insight: "Stop. Just stop."

For many years, at least seventeen, but really even longer, I've been steadily discarding bits and pieces of the religious beliefs (Eastern variety) that held sway in my mind for thirty-five years.

I've done away with overt religiosity, but subtle remnants remain. 

For example, at times during the day for a short period I like to repeat a Buddhist mantra, Namu Amida Butsu. 

And while mindfulness doesn't strike me as being at all religious, sometimes I go beyond simply paying close attention to what I'm doing and imagine that mindfulness can lead to benefits such as fewer problems in my life.

That might be the case. However, that sort of imagining can edge mindfulness into prayer territory, a hope for what might be rather than focusing on what is in the present moment.

Last night I had an interesting experience.

It was one of those times where I feel like something that's been churning away in my unconscious suddenly bursts through into conscious awareness -- unexpectedly, strongly, clearly.

The experience only lasted a second or two.

What flashed brightly in my mind was a message that wasn't expressed in words, but via an intuition. Stop. Just stop. 

Instantly, without thought, I knew what the "stop" meant.

Stop finding problems in your life when they don't actually exist.
Stop trying to improve yourself, since you don't have a self.
Stop trying to control what can't be controlled.
Stop adding an unnecessary "spiritual" dimension to reality.

The flip side of that "stop" was equally vivid. 

Relax.
Let go.
Worry less.
Enjoy more.
Embrace not knowing.

Today I still had a feeling along the lines I've just described. I had a lot of chores to do. I did them. All of them. I didn't make more out of them than was necessary.

Here and now physical reality seemed just fine to me. 

Yes, things weren't perfect. I didn't need them to be. I didn't even need them to be any different than what they were.

That included my mind, my awareness, my focus, my emotions, my thoughts. 

I felt like a psychological weight had been released from my psyche, a burden consisting of should's left over from the many years when my mind was filled with religious rules, vows, commandments, aspirations, and such.

Of course, this isn't the first time I've had that sort of "Stop. Just stop." message appear in my mind. Here's some blog posts along that line.

Believing in problems may be our only problem
What is the problem religions are trying to solve?
My meditation evolves to an exalted state of doing nothing

I talk chakras and meridians with a churchless visitor

Following on the heels of a previous email exchange of views that I fashioned into a blog post, here's another one.

This time I was asked about a relative of a Church of the Churchless reader who surprised this person by embracing a yogic view of chakras that was "woo-woo." 

Here's the message that I got, followed by my response.

Dear Brian,

 

You might remember, a while back, you were kind enough to send me that lovely killer list of books that I'd requested for a cousin of mine who was working on her thesis.

 

Well, she finished that course of hers, and ended up starting a Yoga retreat of her own, and then ended up losing her fledgling entrepreneurial venture to the Covid thing. 

 

Which is sad, of course, but the other day I happened to meet her, after ages, and when I asked her why she wanted to start such a woo-woo venture in the first place (it doesn't -- didn't -- just teach you physical exercises and stuff, it claimed to clean your chakras and whatnot), we had a falling-out of sorts. 

 

No doubt we'll get over this, we're generally pretty close, and blood is thicker than water, et cetera, but the reason I thought to write about this to you is because this thought, this idea, it occurred to me, that probably there are people who instinctively shun the dodgy woo, and people who lack that instinct. 

 

My cousin, bless her soul, she's a good enough girl otherwise, probably is of the latter bent. I myself wouldn't dream of touching a woo retreat with a barge pole, ever, no matter how lucrative, but apparently this cousin of mine is open to that kind of deal.

 

I mean, it's weird.

 

First, because my cousin isn't the gullible kind that swallows this kind of nonsense.  And two, because she isn't the venal kind, the greedy get-rich-at-all-costs kind who is amoral about how she makes her money: exactly the opposite, in fact, she gave up a lucrative corporate career to shift to more "spiritual" vistas (and in general minus the superstition that sometimes comes with this hankering after the "spiritual").

 

My point is, I find it so weird, someone like my cousin going down this path. The setting up of this woo shop, I mean. 

 

And yet of my kin and my friends, that I discussed this with, not one found her "career decision" odd or unbecoming, not one. On the contrary, it was my criticism that came to be criticized, without exception. 

 

And when I find I'm the only guy who's seemingly thinking straight, in the midst of heaps and heaps of folks who're seemingly deluded, I generally pause and think, hard, whether I haven't somehow hit some blind spot of mine own, if I'm not missing something. And I really don't know whom else to ask!  Hence this email.

 

I'd welcome your views on this, well, on what is after all a non-issue, in the sense that this is nothing to do with me really,but which troubles me, nevertheless, on general principles.

 

With my good wishes, ________

 

This was my response.

 

_______, good to hear from you again. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to say anything wise, or even cogent, about your cousin’s embrace of woo-woo. Meaning, so-called “spiritual” stuff with no grounding in fact or reason.

 

Well, let’s make that a certain kind of reason — one that is founded on science, demonstrable chains of causes and effects, open to debate and questioning.

 

Chakra theory is reasonable within its own yoga context.

 

In my college days I got quite intense about yoga for a while, even teaching it under the auspices of the Greek-Christian yoga instructor who managed to cram together aspects of Christianity and Eastern religions into an approach that appealed to me at first, but later struck me as too damn weird.

 

Anyway, back then I accepted the notion of chakras, kundalini, all that stuff. Of course, I also accepted a lot of other stuff that now strikes me as, to not coin a term, overly woo-woo.

 

Bringing things more toward the present, for seventeen years I’ve been practicing Tai Chi with a nice group of people. I enjoy Tai Chi for a number of reasons, none of which have anything to do with the Chinese concepts of meridians and subtle energy channels that my instructor embraces, along with some members of my Tai Chi class.

 

I’ve learned to keep a faint smile on my face when the instructor, or anyone else, talks about how they feel the energy of Chi/Ki coursing through their body. I believe in energy, and I feel the energy of my body. I just don’t look upon that energy in the same fashion that they do.

 

Yet this has no bearing on my Tai Chi practice, in the same way that not believing in chakras would have no, or very little, bearing on the benefits someone gets from yoga practice. In these cases the extra topping of woo-woo doesn’t really change the character of the main dish of Tai Chi or Yoga.

 

So I can understand why most of your relatives and friends look upon your criticism of your cousin as being largely unjustified. After all, almost everybody believes in some weird stuff, whether supernatural (God/miracles) or natural (Big Foot/space aliens). 

 

I mean, woo-woo is a continuum, not a dichotomy.

 

I’m pretty sure that if the most scientific, reasoned, fact-based person in the entire world were pressed to disclose everything they believed in, deep down, and probably hidden from the outside world, would be some beliefs about objective reality that can’t be defended.

 

Many top-notch scientists, like Francis Collins, director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, are deeply religious. By and large they don’t try to justify their religious belief by recourse to rational arguments. It is a matter of faith that offers meaning to them.

 

The way I see it, and the way I’ve argued it on this blog for seventeen years, is that someone’s religiosity or embrace of the supernatural is no one else’s business unless that someone attempts to force their beliefs onto others, or presents those beliefs on an open forum (like this blog, via comments) that invite a skeptical response.

 

If your cousin enjoys believing that chakras are true, fine. That isn’t your cup of tea, as the saying goes, but she enjoys sipping from it. 

 

Again, we’re talking about a continuum here. In the grand scheme of religious beliefs, ranging from least dangerous to most dangerous, I view a belief in chakras or meridians/energy channels as being way down on the “barely bad” side of things.

 

I doubt that anyone has ever gone to war over chakras, burned someone at the stake over chakras, or hurled threats of divine retribution if someone doesn’t believe in chakras. 

 

One thing that I find helpful is to physicalize woo-woo notions. Here’s what I mean by that. Chakras refer to different parts of the body. Those parts definitely exist. For example, we have a head. We have an abdomen. We have genitals. 

 

Our attention can be focused on different parts of our body. When I’m thinking intensely, I feel like I’m in my head. When I’m hungry, I feel like I’m in my abdomen. When I crave sex, I feel like I’m in my genitals. 

 

This isn’t what chakra theory is about, but it is some of what it’s about. Thus there is a bridge from a purely physical view of “chakras” to a yogic spiritual view of them. 

 

In a similar sense, I feel energy within my body when I’m doing Tai Chi.

 

I don’t know if that is the same feeling other people refer to when they speak of Chi/Ki. I look upon the energy as physical. They look upon it as spiritual or supernatural. Again, though, there’s a bridge between these ways of looking at energy meridians, because we’re speaking of a continuum, not a dichotomy. 

 

And it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that acupuncture, say, one day will be found to have a foundation in solid science. I’m unsure if this will happen, but I’m open to it. 

 

Thus you might find it interesting to speak with your cousin in more depth about her embrace of yoga, including what she finds appealing about chakra theory. There might be common ground between you and her in this regard. Or, maybe not. Regardless, it’s worth exploring. 

 

      — Brian