Church of the Churchless

Mystery of existence is a chill up the spine, not a concept

For many years I've gotten a thrill out of the mystery of existence. 

This has nothing to do with what exists. It's all about the brute fact that something exists. Now, that something might well be infinite.

For sure it's huge -- countless billions of light years huge. And it's old -- at least 13.8 billion years old and possibly infinitely old.

All that is irrelevant when talking about the mystery of existence. 

What blows my mind with marvelous regularity is the chill-up-the-spine realization that all this, no matter what it consists of -- is equally present at the tips of my fingers typing these words and a galaxy at the farthest reaches of the universe.

There's no why at question here.

Why's have to do with stuff that exists. Why won't my car start? The answer is found in a chain of causes and effects. 

But existence must always have existed. At least, this is the inescapable conclusion of a human consciousness. Maybe a different form of consciousness would see things differently.

We humans have no acquaintance with existence. All we understand are things that exist. (Arguably, existence doesn't actually exist, but it makes sense to speak as if it does.)

Each of those things comes and goes. Even the universe, which arose in a big bang, according to modern science, and may depart at some point, according to some theories.

However, existence stands apart from comings and goings.

If existence hadn't always existed, nothing could have arisen within existence. Positing a god doesn't help, since an eternal god is just another way of saying eternal existence. Anyway, there's no proof of any god, while there's plenty of evidence for existence.

Whenever I write about this, it doesn't take long for me to feel like words are a very poor substitute for the feeling that leads me to search for those words.

Which basically can be expressed as simply Wow. Though those three letters -- W...o...w -- don't capture the feeling either.

Here's some of the blog posts I've written that attempt to describe that Wow in a much greater number of words.

Grappling with the fact that existence has always existed
Wow. Existence has always existed.
Existence exists. Amazing!
"Existence exists" -- the cosmic lock to which humans have no key
Existence is the only unchanging thing. If it exists.
Robert Kuhn's nine levels of nothing: mind-blowing
The beauty of boundless existence
Boundless existence--the backdrop to life's meaning

Is a mechanism required for realizing Oneness?

Below I've shared a lengthy comment from "Appreciative Reader" that deserved to be made into a blog post. Why?

Because the comment is nicely thought out and well written.

It addresses an interesting question: whether someone's experience of Oneness just happened, and can't be described in a step-by-step fashion, or whether a mechanism that leads to an experience like this can be communicated to others.

I tend to agree with Appreciative Reader that in general, someone's spiritual realization is capable of being analyzed and critiqued to a significant degree.

As I've noted before, dreams are highly personal and unlike everyday experiences. Yet if I remember my dream, I can describe it to another person -- albeit with that description including language like "It was sort of like this" and "Hard to describe, but this is the best I can do." 

Of course, dreams aren't considered to be a reflection of a reality existing outside of the mind of the dreamer, while many, if not most, people view their spiritual experiences as reflecting something true about the world/universe/cosmos.

I'm assuming that an experience of Oneness is more like that, and less like a dream.

So while it doesn't make sense to challenge the veracity of a dream -- this is just what the brain does while we sleep -- it does make sense to question the nature of a spiritual experience, if the person who had the experience claims that it points to a truth about our shared reality.

As a final observation, I agree with Appreciative Reader that Oneness isn't what the Buddhist notion of emptiness is all about. Emptiness concerns the lack of a lasting essence or permanence in objects, including us.

The emptiness of existence is characterized by interdependence, interrelationships, dependent arising based on causes and conditions. Superficially this has to do with unity or oneness, but not in a deeper sense. 

Oneness implies a foundation to reality. Buddhism teaches that actually there is no such thing. Even emptiness is empty, not standing by itself as an independent metaphysical principle.

Here's what Appreciative Reader said in the comment. I've corrected a few typos and broken up some paragraphs to make them easier to read.

=========================================

Osho Robbins, I just read the seven posts you’ve addressed to me. Thanks for the detailed response.

I’ll compose this response to you in two parts. In the first part, I’ll touch on all of the points you raise, in those six posts of yours, in the order you’ve raised them ; but I’ll do that very briefly. I’ll number these out, and if you wish me to expand on any of these, then I’ll be happy to if you ask. And in the second part, I’ll concentrate on one specific part of your comment ; and I’ll do that at some length, because I think this might be crucial to our discussion, and will, or at least I hope it will, settle this might-there-or-might-there-not-be-a-specific-mechanism-for-Oneness issue once and for all.

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(1) I’m afraid your Oneness is nothing at all like Nothingness, nor Buddha’s Emptiness. Do you remember, in our original discussion I’d clearly demonstrated exactly this to you, beyond all doubt, by quoting your own words back to you? I can do that here as well, if you want me to.

No, it isn’t, at all, a matter of semantics. Your Oneness, or Non-Duality, is very different from Nothingness, and no, it does not comport with the Buddha’s teachings.

(2) Your invoking the Buddha at that point was exactly and entirely a case of fallacious appeal to authority. We refer to Einstein or Newton as authorities when speaking of reality, because it is established that what they published, within their core field, is descriptive of reality.

That isn’t something we can say about the Buddha’s teachings, any more than we can say that about the Bible or the Quran. The only thing that the Buddha is a bona fide authority on, are his own teachings (just like the only thing that Tolkien is a bona fide authority on, is Middle Earth).

To invoke the Buddha’s words as an argument on actual reality is as fallacious as invoking LotR as an argument on actual reality : to do that you’d first have to show that what you’re referring does comport with reality in the first place.

(3) You’ve gone into great detail discussing your experiences. Despite not buying into the core arguments you present, nevertheless I do find your core experience fascinating, and your account of your broader experiences very appealing.

Please do not let my repeated refutation of such of your arguments as I find fallacious stand in the way of your sharing more of these, because I find them both enjoyable and instructive; and, like I’d said, in some odd way I find myself empathizing very closely.

(4) You’ve discussed at some length, across three posts, why you believe your Oneness is neither perception nor knowledge, and why asking for a mechanism is meaningless. I intend to focus on one particular example you’ve presented to illustrate your point, and address that particular example at some length ; and hopefully show you thereby, once and for all, what exactly I mean when I keep demanding that you discuss the mechanism of this knowledge, and why your claim that such demands are pointless is mistaken. I’ll do that in the next section of this post of mine.

(5) The video you’ve referenced, on the Multiverses, seems fascinating. (Watched a short portion of it for now.) As with the earlier one of Brian Greene’s that you’d linked, I’ve bookmarked it. Bears listening to, absolutely. One keeps putting these things off, time constraints I’m afraid, but thanks for posting the link. I’ll get to watching all of it when I can.

(6) You’ve asked me about the origin of thoughts, et cetera. That question is actually very much like that other question you’d asked me (Who am I?). Both questions are seemingly very deep, and people of earlier ages clearly had a blast faffing around with those questions, but modern neuroscience has very clearly and simply answered both questions.

The answer to the earlier question I’ve already given you. And the answer to the latter question is, apparently our thoughts arise in our brain before we even become aware of it. So that we are, in effect, no more than witnesses of our consciousness.

(Mind you, the above does not present you with a get-out-of-jail-free card. To answer the question you’d asked of Spence in a subsequent post : Even if, as it appears, the narrative we build around our actions and our lives is a post-facto construct, nevertheless that construct is still a fact, so that for all practical purposes that makes no difference.

Although sure, knowledge of this mechanism might nudge us to be more consequential in our evaluation rather than purely judgmental, but that’s about it, as far as what difference this makes.

You still need to produce the narrative explaining your thoughts and your actions, or else admit to ignorance of it. This last won’t help you in this particular discussion we’re having, because this is simply a broad outlay underlying all of our thoughts and actions, not just that particular realization of yours.)

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And now, here’s the portion I wanted to focus on in some detail in this comment of mine.

In discussing why you think asking for a mechanism isn’t really applicable to your realization of Oneness / Non-duality, you present this example, that I’ll first quote here in full :

This is my answer. There is no mechanism because the thing you are asking about (How the oneness communicated) didn't happen.
It is like this:
Person A - sitting at home.
He does not realise he is at home.
He thinks he is somewhere else.
He now decides it is time to go home. He puts on his coat to leave the house to go home.
"where are you going?" asks his friend.
"I am going home" he replies.
His friend takes him outside the house.
"Take a good look: is that your house?
Look at the garden - it's your garden.
Look at the front door and the door number and the street name"
"Oh yes - you are right - I am already at home.
I was just mistaken for a while when I was sitting the settee" he says
He then re-enters his house and sits on the same settee.
Nothing has changed. He is sitting in the same place.
He has not gone anywhere.
His mistaken idea that he is not at home has been corrected,
He now KNOWS he is at home and does not seek to go home anymore.
What is the mechanism by which the home communicated to him that
this is his home? How does he know he is not mistaken again?
There has been no communication and no mechanism is needed.
He simply was mistaken when he thought he was not at home.
That mistake has been corrected and he can now see clearly that in fact he was ALWAYS at home.
He didn't go anywhere, and nothing has changed.
Only his mistaken notion (that he is far away from home) has been removed.
This is what it is like. ONENESS is already the case - always was and always will be. ONENESS did not suddenly happen. It always was. no mechanism is needed.”

In that example of yours, here’s how I’d describe the mechanism of how Person A, who had hitherto believed he was not at home, has now come to believe (or has come to know, if you prefer that latter word) that he is at home after all and in fact has been at home all along.

I think we can split up that process, or that mechanism if you will, into four distinct parts:

Step 1 : Person A, on being directed by friend, clearly sees his house and garden and neighborhood and door number and street name. Direct perception, if you will.

Step 2 : Person A then brings up the conception that he has of his own home.

(And what does that conception comprise of? We don’t know, in this case, because you haven’t detailed that. It’s probably his own memory, And it might, possibly, also include other ideas he’s gleaned about his home from other sources, including his friend’s words. If we are to study Person A’s identification of his present locale as his original home, then it becomes imperative that we do find out what exactly this conception of his own home comprises of, that is, how exactly he’s come by this conception.)

Step 3 : Person A then compares his direct perception of what he’s seen just now, with the conception that he has of his own home.

Step 4 : Having compared his immediate perception with his conception of his home, Person A then decides that his perception coincides with his conception of home (that is, his perception is either exactly identical to his conception, or else it is sufficiently close).

Therefore, he concludes that he is, indeed, sitting in his own home. As a result, he replaces his old belief (or old knowledge, if you will), that he’s NOT in his home, with this new belief (or new knowledge, if you will) that he IS, indeed, in his own home.

As you say, this is indeed a paradigm shift. That is, it is an outright overhauling of Person A’s worldview.

However, to say that no mechanism is applicable here is clearly entirely erroneous. There is a very definite mechanism at play here, that you yourself have not been aware of, because you hadn’t been watching out for it.

Now that I’ve clearly spelt this out, using your own detailed example that you yourself had presented to explain your POV, I hope you do understand what I’m asking for? I hope you now get what I mean by “mechanism”? And I hope you see how a demand that you clearly discuss that mechanism is entirely reasonable in a discussion on how Person A came to believe (or know, if you prefer the word “know”) he’s now at home?

And also, why I’m insisting that you discuss this mechanism also is probably obvious now. First, in order to clearly understand your POV — because any discussion of your Oneness is incomplete without a discussion of this mechanism, and because a clear understanding of your POV is simply impossible without a clear discussion of this mechanism.

And second, once you clearly describe that mechanism, then we can suss out to what degree we can rely on different portions of this mechanism. That is the only way to reasonably arrive at an opinion on how reliable is your realization.

(And forget me, even if I did not exist at all, even then I should think even for you this exercise would be essential, for you to clearly understand your Realization, and to then clearly evaluate if your Realization holds up to scrutiny. To simply gloss over those steps and to focus on the paradigm shift itself, while ignoring the underlying mechanism of that paradigm shift, and what is more to directly assume that that paradigm shift is bona fide, is clearly fallacious.)

(Mind you, I’m not saying here that your paradigm shift is fallacious. But I AM saying that your directly assuming that your paradigm shift is beyond examination, and your assuming without examination that it is bona fide, is what is fallacious. It is only after carrying out this examination, and this evaluation, that one can arrive at a reasonable conclusion as to whether that paradigm shift is bona fide or not. Because, as you can see, and as I can further elucidate at greater detail if you ask me to, each of those steps, in your particular example, can admit of error. Which is not to say there is necessarily any error there ; but absolutely, at every step there is the possibility of error.)

The point of clearly identifying this mechanism is twofold : first, it facilitates a clear understanding of your paradigm shift ; and second, it gives us a clear basis to evaluate how reliable is your paradigm shift.

I realize you might need to introspect, to go back to clearly recalling and visualizing that experience of yours, in order for you to clearly identify and to describe this mechanism of your realization of Oneness. Take your time, Osho Robbins. Identify the steps involved.

(Probably it will mirror the four steps that I myself identified in your example, but feel free to structure it out as you think might best capture the process.)

As and when you’re done with identifying this in your mind, and at such time as you’re comfortable doing this, let’s now, finally, have a clear description of the mechanism of your having arrived at your paradigm-shifting understanding of Oneness or Non-duality.

I love the natural concreteness of Daoism

Abstractions are fine. We humans have evolved to be able to conceive of abstract ideas such as love, justice, infinity, God, and so much else.

But it's possible to get lost in a maze of abstractions where each idea leads to another idea, and then another... no exit in sight. 

Daoism (or Taoism) is my favorite philosophy, along with non-religious Buddhism, because it's wonderfully concrete. I've practiced Tai Chi for seventeen years, which can be viewed as Daoism made physical. 

Yin and yang aren't abstractions in Tai Chi. They are directly experienced realities as a yin move flows into a yang move and a yang move flows into a yin move.

Now and then I turn to my bookshelf of Daoist titles and choose one to read before my morning meditation. Today it was Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation.

Here's some passages from the introductory section that I enjoyed re-reading.

The Daoist correlative cosmology begins from the assumption that the endless stream of always novel yet still continuous situations we encounter are real, and hence, that there is ontological parity among the things and events that constitute our lives.

As a parody on Parmenides, who claimed that "only Being is," we might say that for the Daoist, "only beings are," or taking one step further in underscoring the reality of the process of change itself, "only becomings are." 

That is, the Daoist does not posit the existence of some permanent reality behind appearances, some unchanging substratum, some essential defining aspect behind the accidents of change. Rather, there is just the ceaseless and usually cadenced flow of experience.

In fact, the absence of the "One behind the many" metaphysics makes our uncritical use of the philosophic term "cosmology" to characterize Daoism, at least in the familiar Greek sense of the word, highly problematic. 

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The Daoist understanding of "cosmos" as the "ten thousand things" means that, in effect, the Daoists have no concept of cosmos at all insofar as that notion entails a coherent, single-ordered world which is in any sense enclosed or defined. The Daoists are, therefore, primarily, "acosmotic" thinkers. 

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For ancient China, time pervades everything and is not to be denied. Time is not independent of things, but a fundamental aspect of them. Unlike traditions that devalue both time and change in pursuit of the timeless and eternal, in classical China things are always transforming.

In fact, in the absence of some claim to objectivity that "objectifies" and thus makes "objects" of phenomena, the Chinese tradition does not have the separation between time and entities that would allow for either time without entities, or entities without time -- there is no possibility of either an empty temporal corridor or an eternal anything (in the sense of being timeless).

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It is for this reason that things resist "definition" in the literal sense of finis -- a practice that delineates some ostensibly discrete boundary around them, and thus reduces all relations to external, extrinsic transactions. 

With fluid and shifting boundaries among things, integrity for any particular thing does not mean being or staying whole, or even actualizing its own internal potential. 

Rather, integrity is something becoming whole in its co-creative relationships with other things. Integrity is consummatory relatedness. 

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The field of experience is always construed from one perspective or another. There is no view from nowhere, no external perspective, no decontextualized vantage point. We are all in the soup. The intrinsic, constitutive relations that obtain among things make them reflexive and mutually implicating, residing together within the flux and flow.

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A corollary to this radical perspectivism is that each particular element in our experience is holographic in the sense that it has implicated within it the entire field of experience.

This single flower has leaves and roots that take their nourishment from the environing soil and air. And the soil contains the distilled nutrients of past growth and decay that constitute the living ecological system in which all of its participants are organically interdependent. 

The sun enables the flower to process these nutrients, while the atmosphere that caresses the flower also nourishes and protects it. 

By the time we have "cashed out" the complex of conditions that conspire to produce and conserve this particular flower, one ripple after another in an ever-extending series of radial circles, we have implicated the entire cosmos within it without remainder.

For the Daoist, there is an intoxicating bottomlessness to any particular event in our experience. The entire cosmos resides happily in the smile on the dirty face of this one little child.

No, communion isn't about the body and blood of Jesus

I speak from experience as a lapsed Catholic when I say that communion involves swallowing a wafer and some wine, not the body and blood of Jesus.

OK, that experience was brief, since after I had my first communion, thankfully my mother let me decide whether to continue on to be confirmed as a Catholic -- which I definitely didn't want to do, since the black-clad nuns were scary, the mass was in Latin, the wood we had to kneel on was damn hard, and my Presbyterian boyhood friends got to enjoy their more pleasant Sunday School while I was listening to a priest drone on in a language I couldn't understand.

The thing with religions is, they all seem really weird to anyone who isn't a believer in that particular faith, while to those who embrace a religion, mostly it makes great good sense to them.

So as difficult as it is for me to recall in my current atheist frame of mind, for 35 years I was a member of an India-based religion led by a guru who was considered to be God in Human Form. Yeah, that's weird.

Equally weird were the teachings that the guru planted his "radiant form" in the consciousness of the disciple at the time of initiation; that radiant form guided the disciple all the way back to God; the reason initiation was necessary was because the Eastern equivalent of the Devil had stood on one supernatural leg for like forever, earning him a gift from God to keep souls trapped in this physical world where he could control them until a God in Human Form rescued some of them; and a whole lot of other strange stuff besides.

Which means, I used to accept religious teachings that equaled or surpassed the dogmas of Catholicism when it came to difficult-to-believe'ness. (I didn't really believe in all of them, yet I overlooked the most bizarre teachings in order to embrace the more reasonable ones.)

But now I'm a critic of that Eastern religion, and so feel comfortable also being a critic of Catholicism. Which is why I read an opinion piece in USA Today, um, today, called "Catholic truth on Communion belongs in public square."
Download Catholic truth on Communion belongs in public square - USA TODAY

I could tell from the title that I wasn't going to agree with it. Prediction fulfilled!

The woman who wrote the piece, Katrina Trinko, says that it is perfectly fine that bishops are laying the doctrinal groundwork for President Biden, a devout Catholic, to be denied communion because he favors abortion rights.

For some reason the bishops aren't going after the many Catholic Republican politicians who favor capital punishment, which also is a Catholic no-no. 

Trinko is upset that so many Catholics don't accept everything that their religion says is true -- a quality that endears me to those independently-minded people.

But as a Catholic, I’ve been stupefied by the news coverage and punditry, which lacks awareness of what the Catholic Church teaches, what the Eucharist is and, yes, what it means to be a practicing Catholic.

In a way, I’m not surprised. Polls regularly show a gulf between the values of many American Catholics and the teachings of the Catholic Church. For instance, more than two-thirds of American Catholics support legalized samesex marriage, according to a 2020 Gallup survey. Fifty-six percent of American Catholics agree with Biden and Pelosi, backing abortion being legal in most or all cases, per a 2019 Pew Research Center survey.

And when it comes to the Eucharist, plenty of Catholics aren’t even aware what the Church teaches, namely that the Eucharist is truly the Body and Blood of Jesus. Only half of Catholics know what the Church teaches, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center poll, which also found that 69% of American Catholics don’t believe the Eucharist is the real presence of Jesus.

Well, duh, of course the Eucharist -- the supposed transformation of bread and wine into Jesus' body and blood -- isn't real. It's just bread and wine. In fact, there's no persuasive evidence that Jesus even existed, much less that he was a divine being. 

Yet the urge to believe in unbelievable stuff runs deep in the human mind. Thousands of years of cultural indoctrination in religious mumbo-jumbo has caused the brains of billions of people to embrace dogmas that make no sense and have no basis in fact.

Again, I've been there and done that. 

The guru who initiated me way back when in 1971 would bless food that then became sacred to his followers. Occasionally people would bring some of it back to this country after seeing the guru in India.

Then they might share it with other disciples. I recall the time I got a small bag of guru-blessed treats (could have been rice cereal; can't remember exactly). Before I meditated I'd carefully pick out two or three bits of whatever it was and savor it as the mystical treat I believed it to be.

If I dropped some on the floor, no problem. I still ate it.

This wasn't like believing that the blessed food was the body and blood of the guru, but it was close, since we initiates of the guru considered that somehow the food contained the guru's essence.

I'm glad to have given up that idea, along with the other crazy stuff I used to accept. Hopefully someday many more that 69% of American Catholics will stop believing that what's consumed at communion is the real presence of Jesus.

Open Thread 39 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread.

Remember, off-topic comments should go in an Open Thread. 

If you don't see a recent comment, or comments, posted, it's because you've failed to follow the above rule. Keep to the subject of a blog post if you leave a comment on it. And if you want to use this blog as a "chat room," do that in an open thread.

As noted before, it's good to have comments in a regular blog post related to its subject, and it's also good to have a place where almost anything goes in regard to sharing ideas, feelings, experiences, and such. That place is an Open Thread.

Leave a comment on this post about anything you want to talk about. Remember that I'm moderating comments, so it could take a while for your comment to be published. Almost every comment submitted to an Open Thread will be approved. Personal attacks on someone are an exception, as is hate speech. Argue with ideas, not insults.

Though I haven't been doing too well on this, I'll try to remember to always have an Open Thread showing in the Recent Posts section in the right sidebar. If one isn't showing, I've added an Open Threads category in, naturally, the Categories section. You can always find an Open Thread that way.

So if you're a believer in some form of religion, mysticism, or spirituality, this is where you can put your "praise God," "praise Guru," or "praise _______" comments.

Salem Gay Pride speaker has a lesson for atheists

Last Friday my wife and I went to a Pride gathering in Salem's Riverfront Park. I wrote about it in "Scott Hosner speaks at 2021 Salem Gay Pride event." 

The seven-minute video I made of Hosner can be viewed below. It's worth watching for several reasons.

One is that Hosner's description of what it was like to grow up queer in the last part of the previous century shows how much progress has been made in LGBTQ rights since that time. That's really encouraging given the many social problems we face now.

(My daughter graduated from South Salem high school in 1990, which could be about the time Hosner was a student there.)

Another reason is that Hosner calls on members of other minorities to "come out" as he is urging queer people to do. This is needed to show that those who are part of a minority group are regular people like everybody else.

And if enough minorities band together, they can form a majority.

Atheists like me are a decided minority. It appears that we comprise somewhere around 3% to 10% of the United States population. 

A monthly discussion group that I'm a part of is almost entirely made up of atheists. Last night we talked about the pros and cons of being open about our atheism.

A woman who lives in a fairly conservative nearby town said that she's reluctant to let people know she doesn't believe in God, since religious believers can be nasty to atheists. 

That's true, but I think there are strong reasons for doing what Hosner recommends: be proud of who you are and what you believe, and don't be shy about opening yourself up to others. 

Here's the video.

There is indeed a presumption of atheism

Yesterday someone  left this comment on my post, "Sorry. No winner in 'Tell me why you believe in God contest.'"

There are arguments for theism. There are arguments for atheism. The failure of arguments for one side, does not mean that the other position is true by default. There is no "presumption of atheism" or "presumption of theism."

The commenter is completely wrong. What they said lacks any foundation in logic, reason, or direct experience.

I talk about this a lot on this blog. Almost always there's no way to prove the non-existence of something. What we do in both science and everyday life is demand proof that something exists.

If you say, "There's an invisible pink elephant standing on the sidewalk," it's absurd to consider that this statement is as believable as "There's no invisible pink elephant standing on the sidewalk."

Why? Because once we assume that things unseen and unprovable possess as much reality as things seen and provable, we've lost touch with reality. 

That's another word for psychosis. 

Now, it's unlikely the commenter is psychotic. They just have a deficiency in clear thinking, which is very different from being mentally ill.

That's why I'm writing this post -- to help them, and others, understand where they are going wrong in their approach to reality.

Glad to help! That's what we do here at the Church of the Churchless, help bring people back into touch with reality after wandering in the desert of religious delusion.

Hey, I've been a wanderer myself before I understood in what direction truth lies.

Atheism is the presumptive truth because there is no demonstrable evidence that any of the thousands of gods theorized to exist actually does. Atheism simply means "no theism" or "no god."

Likewise, no invisible pink elephants is the presumptive truth because there is no demonstrable evidence that such creatures exist -- except in the minds of people who claim that they see them.

Shivinder Singh's bail revoked to uncover conspiracy hatched by him

It's been quite a while since there's been any news about the financial scandal involving the Singh brothers (Malvinder and Shivinder), their relative Gurinder Singh Dhillon (guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas), Sunil Godhwani (who used to be the guru's close advisor), and others.

But a few days ago this story appeared in The Economic Times. Similar stories ran in some other publications. 

It's good to see that the Delhi High Court revoked the bail that allowed Shivinder Singh to stay out of detention, a goal being to uncover the conspiracy hatched by Shivinder and to trace the funds that were siphoned off from Religare Finvest Ltd.

Previous news stories have indicated that Dhillon and his family received some of those funds, which naturally raises the question of whether the guru was part of the conspiracy. This case has been under investigation for a long time. It looks like it will continue to be investigated.

Here's screenshots of The Economic Times story.

Sorry. No winner in "Tell me why you believe in God" contest.

Well, the first entries are in, and I'm not impressed. 

Four days ago I invited visitors to this blog to leave a comment on my "Tell me why you believe in God" post. 

I said:

I'm defining "God" as a conscious supernatural being with miraculous powers. If you're a believer with a markedly different definition, include that definition in your comment.

The responses were decidedly underwhelming. Some were interesting, but none were directly related to what I wanted.

Why someone believes in God.

This is surprising, since it sure seems like quite a few regular readers of this blog do believe in God. And in many or most cases, the God they believe in sure seems to be along the lines of how I defined God.

So why the vague, meandering, disjointed responses?

Hard to say. 

Since I'm an atheist, my #1 hypothesis is that since God almost certainly doesn't exist, no one has a good reason to believe in God, for the same reason no one has a good reason to believe in Santa Claus.

If I asked Why do you believe in the moon?, a reasonable response would be "Because I can see it in the sky and there's solid evidence that humans have landed on the moon and brought back rock samples."

That's a simple declarative sentence.

Yet no one provided a similarly simple declarative sentence about why they believe in God. I expected that someone would say, "Because a holy book says God exists," or "Because a holy person says God exists."

That's pretty much the reasons I would have given during my believing days. They aren't bad reasons.  They're the reasons most Christians would give, I suspect.

Instead, the main theme of the comments on my blog post was "I'm open to the possibility that God exists and am searching for the answer to this." 

OK. But most atheists would say the same thing.

Take me. I'm open to the possibility that God exists and I'm searching for the answer to this. So far I've seen no demonstrable evidence for God, so I strongly lean in the direction that God is a fantasy.

Another theme was "Words can't capture God, so there's no point in talking about why someone believes in God." 

OK. But words can't capture anything else either.

The word "strawberry" certainly doesn't capture the nature of this red tasty fruit. Yet if I ask a store clerk where the strawberries are, they can point me in the right direction.

Words can't capture a dream. Yet if someone asks me if I dreamed last night, and I remember my dreams, I can describe them. Not perfectly. Not completely. But imperfectly and incompletely. 

I don't tell the person, "I can't say anything about my dreams because they can't be captured in words." I use words as well as I can, then add the caveat, "But what I just said isn't how the dream really seemed to me."

Nothing is. Eating a strawberry is way different from saying "strawberry." However, we can do our best to describe what eating a strawberry is like, because strawberries are real, as is eating them.

So the non-responses to my question about why people believe in God helps solidify my view that good reasons for believing are rare not because God is beyond description, but because no one has had an experience of an actually-existent God.

Bruce Lee's daughter writes about her father's philosophy

A fellow Tai Chi student and friend mentioned "Be Water, My Friend" a while back. This is a book by Shannon Lee, Bruce Lee's daughter.

I'm enjoying it. 

My favorite Tai Chi form is called in English, Water Boxing. It's very long, difficult to learn, not known by very many, and involves a lot of subtleties. 

I probably should call it a Tai Chi'ish form, because few of the hundreds of moves look like traditional Tai Chi.

But that's the way of water. It can take on an infinity of forms, because water is fluid, flexible, formless.

Which is the way Bruce Lee approached both martial arts and life as a whole. 

Here's some excerpts from the first few chapters, which is as far as I've gotten in the book. 

Emptying your mind does not mean forgetting everything you've ever learned or giving up everything you believe. 

What it means is that you should try to meet each conversation, each interaction, and each experience with a willingness to consider something new without the burden of your judgment in the process.

You must give up everything you think you know and believe, for just an instant, in order to fully experience that which you are encountering in the present moment.

Make room for the possibility that maybe you don't already know all of what you believe to be true -- that what you believe is, in fact, a work in progress, capable of changing and evolving as you learn and grow.

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For our purposes in this moment, meditation should be understood as a method of loosening the mind and letting it float a bit. It's a practice of creating space -- freeing yourself from all motives and helping you to make contact with your relaxed and serene nature.

You can think of it as the feeling you have when you daydream. You're awake, but your mind is untethered and moving easily from image to idea to thought and through states of nothingness, without getting hung up on any one thing -- like it's floating in a gentle and deep pool of water with inflatable water wings on. 

It doesn't need to do anything to stay afloat. It feels loose; it feels free. 

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There are many techniques for establishing this space of calm. Some people follow the breath in and out, directing the mind back to the breath when it starts to wander or judge the experience (which it invariably will).

Some people use mantras or visualizations. My father liked to meditate a little differently for the most part.

He often liked to untether his mind and let it float while he was moving, surprise, surprise. He used his morning jog as meditative time. He sometimes would also walk around our backyard while simultaneously meditating.

It's not about how you do it -- whether your eyes are open or closed, whether you are sitting or moving -- it's about that space of mental calm.

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I want us to consider this type of meditation as a potential tool in our tool belt for practicing the art of being like water. My father was very certain that meditation should not be about "striving" to be still and calm.

"Striving" is the antithesis of  being empty. When he was a young man, my father wrote about the cognitive dissonance we often experience in meditation. 

"I must relax." But then I had just thought something that contradicted my will at the precise moment I thought, "I must relax." The demand for effort in must was already inconsistent with the effortlessness in relax. 

In meditation, we should allow, surrender, loosen, let go. Just make space and embody space.

Tell me why you believe in God

I'm a curious guy. I enjoy learning how people view the Big Questions of Life, including one of the biggest, Does God exist?

I used to answer "Yes." Now I'm an atheist who says, "Almost certainly, no."

But I'm well aware that many of those who visit this blog and leave comments on the posts here are believers in God.

So I'm inviting you to leave a comment on this post that explains why you believe that God exists. Or, if you have some doubts about this, why you're almost certain that God exists.

I'm defining "God" as a conscious supernatural being with miraculous powers. If you're a believer with a markedly different definition, include that definition in your comment.

There's no prize for the most persuasive explanation of why someone believes in God.

However, I'll single the best explanations out for praise in another blog post. Pretty darn good prize! (Unless you were expecting $100.)

Each of us isn't a thing, but a web of connections

Before moving on to subjects other than quantum theory, which I've written about here and here recently, I want to talk in my own words regarding what I like about Carlo Rovelli's book, "Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution." 

The previous posts consisted mostly of excerpts from the book. So here's my attempt to describe what appealed to me the most about Helgoland. (That's an island in the North Sea where Heisenberg came up with his key concepts about the quantum world.)

Rovelli is an exceptionally clear writer. He also has a poetic sense that isn't unique among physicists, but is uncommonly well developed in Rovelli. This book deals with notions that never made much sense to me, yet I largely accepted given that the ideas are embraced by so many experts in quantum theory.

For example, the idea that an observation by human consciousness brings a certain quantum reality into being. As Rovelli notes, galaxies billions of light years away obey the laws of quantum physics, as does everything else in the universe.

Consciousness doesn't exist everywhere, unless we assume that everything in existence possesses at least a minute form of proto-consciousness. 

Ah, but if that is true, then there's no need to bring in human consciousness as the means by which the probabilistic nature of quantum equations, involving various possibilities, "collapse" down to a single outcome when an observation of an electron, photon, or whatever occurs.

The Many Worlds approach to quantum theory deals with the observation problem by positing that all possible outcomes of an observation occur, with reality splitting into an infinity of worlds at every instant, of which we inhabit only one of them.

The relational approach to quantum theory makes much more sense. Both the quantum world and the world familiar to us aren't made up of things, but of connections, of relationships. 

Not family relationships, of course. Something much more general.

As I stare at my computer screen, there's a dance going on between the photons striking my eye, the pixels of the screen, vision processing centers in my brain, and more besides. Our dog would see something different. As would a snake. Or a bat.

I like how Rovelli says that there is no such thing as an outside perspective on the world or universe. It's all 100% inside, in two senses. 

First, there's no way we can get outside of the universe, of everything that exists (some call this the cosmos). We humans, along with everything else, are part of the universe. We aren't experiencing the universe. One aspect of the universe is experiencing another aspect.

Or we can say, "The universe is experiencing itself." 

Most books about quantum physics don't include a mention of Nagarjuna, the Buddhist thinker. But Rovelli's book does.

It isn't that Nagarjuna had a mystical insight into the nature of quantum reality. Rather, Rovelli says that ancient texts should be read not from the perspective of what the author initially intended to say, but how the work speaks to us today.

Rovelli writes that the central thesis of Nagarjuna is there is nothing that exists in itself independently from something else. Thus Buddhism fits in nicely with the relational approach to quantum physics.

Buddhism evolved in part as a reaction to Hinduism, which assumes the existence of soul, Atman, that is an aspect of God, Brahman. Buddhism denies that anything is eternal or unchanging, including ourselves, or our self. 

So from the most minute subatomic particle to the grandest expanse of galaxies, with us humans occupying a middle ground, size-wise, relations are what reality is all about, not things. 

We're alive because of our relationships with air, water, food, sunlight, other people, bacteria, cells, neurons, and everything else that makes it possible for us to be born, live, and yes, die.

The good news is, from the relational view of Rovelli's take on quantum physics and Buddhism, we never exist as a separate and distinct entity, so when we die, it is the relations that cease to exist. In a very real sense, each of us has never existed as the "I" we generally take ourselves to be.

The bad news is, there's nothing that can live on after the relations which sustain life are broken. But this is just reality speaking, and I don't see reality as dealing in good news and bad news. It simply is what it is.

Over and over in his book, Rovelli says that we need to embrace the idea that reality may be very different from how we currently consider it to be. This is how science is so successful: scientists do their best to understand reality as it actually is, even if that understanding is uncomfortable or surprising. 

On his third page, in a section called Looking Into the Abyss, Rovelli writes:

But this is what science is all about: exploring new ways of conceptualizing the world. At times, radically new. It is the capacity to constantly call our concepts into question. The visionary force of a rebellious, critical spirit, capable of modifying its own conceptual basis, capable of redesigning our world from scratch.

I love those words.

I'm re-sharing my post about my sister's memorial service

Back in 2010 I wrote a blog post soon after my sister died, "Memorial service shows sad side of religion." 

I'm re-sharing that link for the reason I expressed on Facebook just now.

Carol Ann, my sister, died in December 2009. For ten years before her death, starting in 2000, her only daughter (Cathy) refused to let Carol Ann or her husband, Bob, have any contact with their two grandchildren. This hurt Carol Ann and Bob immensely. It was a source of great pain for them.

 

A primary reason for this sad estrangement was the fundamentalist religion embraced by Cathy and her husband. Carol Ann and Bob didn't believe in God. But they sure believed in loving their daughter and grandchildren. Yet Cathy felt they were a bad influence on their grandchildren.

 

Yesterday I heard from Cathy for the first time in many years. She wanted to reconnect with me, her uncle. Before I respond to her email, I wanted to re-read the blog post I wrote about my sister's memorial service, where I talked about the importance of reconciling with loved ones while they're alive.

 

Because after they're dead, it's too late. I liked what I said about this back in 2010, and I still like the post now. I'm sharing it in the hope that if anyone who comes across this Facebook post is in a similar situation, maybe reading what I wrote will spur them to reach out to a family member, or anyone else, they're estranged from.

 

Now. Not later. We can't count on later ever happening, no matter how long we believe we and the person we're distanced from will live. Carol Ann was just 72 when she died. Bob died soon after. Without having seen their grandchildren for over ten years.

Mind and consciousness through the eye of quantum physics

Here's additional excerpts from physicist Carlo Rovelli's wonderful new book, "Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution." (See here for my first post about the book.)

The passages below are from final chapters where Rovelli focuses on the nature of mind and consciousness in light of quantum physics. 

Rovelli's take on this subject is very much in line with a post I wrote in 2018, "Awareness is a process, not a thing." 

Consciousness isn't a thing. It is a process. Thinking of it as a thing makes us wonder what kind of a thing it is, whereas we should be asking, what sorts of processes and interactions give rise to consciousness?

Hope you enjoy these words from Rovelli as much as I do.

If the fine grain of the world is made of material particles that have just mass and motion, it seems difficult to reconstruct our perceiving and thinking complexity from this amorphous grain.

But if the fine grain of the world is better described in terms of relations, if nothing has intrinsic properties except in relation to other things, perhaps in this physics we can better find elements able to combine in a comprehensible way, to be the basis of those complex phenomena that we call our perceptions and our consciousness.

If the physical world is woven from the subtle interplay of images in mirrors reflected in other mirrors, without the metaphysical foundation of a material substance, perhaps it becomes easier to recognize ourselves as part of that whole.

...But there is no need to attribute photo-consciousness to elementary systems in order to get around a frozen "simple matter." It is enough to have observed how the world is better described by relative variables and their correlations.

This allows us to be released from the prison of a blunt opposition between the objectivity of matter and mental life. The rigid distinction between a mental world and a physical one fades. It is possible to think of both mental and physical phenomena as natural phenomena: both products of interactions between parts of the physical world.

...If the world consists of relations, then no description is from outside it. The descriptions of the world are, in the ultimate analysis, all from inside. They are all in the first person. 

Our perspective on the world, our point of view, being situated inside the world (our "situated self," as Jenann Ismael beautifully puts it), is not special: it rests on the same logic on which quantum physics, hence all of physics, is based.

If we imagine the totality of things, we are imagining being outside the universe, looking at it from out there. But there is no "outside" to the totality of things. The external point of view is a point of view that does not exist. Every description of the world is from inside it.

The externally observed world does not exist; what exists are only internal perspectives on the world which are partial and reflect one another. This world is this reciprocal reflection of perspectives. 

...I think that when we wonder about the relationship between the "I" and "matter," we are using two concepts that are both confused and misleading, and this is the origin of the confusion surrounding the questions about the nature of consciousness. 

Who is the "I" that has the sensation of feeling, if not the integrated set of our mental processes? We have an intuition of unity when we think about ourselves, but this is justified by the integration of our body and by the ways our mental processes work, of which the part we call conscious does one thing at a time.

The first term of the problem, the "I," is the residue of a metaphysical error: the result of the common mistake of mistaking a process for an entity.

...To ask what consciousness is, after having unraveled the neural processes, is like asking what a storm is after having understood its physics: it is a question that makes no sense. To add in a "possessor" of sensations is like adding Jove to the phenomenon of the thunderstorm.

It is like saying, after having understood the physics of the storm, that there still remains, as Chalmers would put it, the "hard problem" of connecting it with the anger of Jove.

It is true that we have the "intuition"of an independent entity that is the "I." But we also had the "intuition" that behind a storm there was Jove. And that the Earth was flat. It is not through uncritical "intuitions" that we construct an effective comprehension of reality.

Introspection is the worst instrument of inquiry if we are interested in the nature of mind: it is tantamount to looking for our own prejudices and wallowing in them.

Even worse is the the second term of the question, "matter." It is, as well, the residue of an incorrect metaphysics based on too naive a conception of matter as a universal substance defined only by mass and motion. This is erroneous metaphysics because it is contradicted by quantum physics. 

If we think in terms of processes, events, in terms of relative properties, of a world of relations, the hiatus between physical phenomena and mental phenomena is much less dramatic. It becomes possible to see both as natural phenomena generated by complex structures of interactions. 

...The best description of reality that we have found is in terms of events that weave a web of interactions. "Entities" are nothing other than ephemeral nodes in this web. Their properties are not determined until the moment of these interactions; they exist only in relation to something else. Everything is what it is only with respect to something else.

Every vision is partial. There is no way of seeing reality that is not dependent on a perspective -- no point of view that is absolute and universal. 

...Every time that something solid is put into doubt or dismantled, something else opens up and allows us to see further than we could before. Watching what appears to be as solid as rock melt into air makes lighter, it seems to me, the transitory and bittersweet flowing of our lives.

The interconnectedness of things, the reflection of one in another, shines with a clear light that the coldness of eighteenth-century mechanisms could not capture.

Even if it leaves us astonished. Even if it leaves us with a profound sense of mystery.

Relational view of quantum theory reeks of truth

If you're into quantum physics, prepare to have your mind blown. Well, whether or not you're into quantum physics, prepare to have your mind blown.

At least a little bit. Because below I've shared an excerpt from physicist Carlo Rovelli's amazing new book, "Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution." 

The excerpt doesn't do justice to the entire book, but it will give you a feel for Rovelli's relational take on quantum physics -- which makes so much sense, it's hard to understand how anyone could disagree with it (though I'm sure many do).

I'll have more to say about the book in additional blog posts. I wanted to share this lengthy excerpt to provide a foundation for those other posts, one of which will be about how Rovelli finds echoes of the Buddhist thinker Nagarjuna in quantum physics. 

I've read many books about quantum physics. Rovelli presents a way of looking at quantum phenomena that's so compellingly clear, those other books seem confusing by comparison. Every sentence of what follows has a lot of meaning, so read it slowly.

In a physics laboratory, where we study a small object such as an atom or a photon of Zeilinger's lasers, it is clear who the observer is: it is the scientist who prepares, observes, and measures the quantum object, who deploys their instruments of measurement, detecting the light emitted from the atom or the place where the photons arrive.

But the vast world is not made up of scientists in laboratories, or instruments of measurement. What is an observation, when there is no scientist observing? What does quantum theory tell us, where there is no one measuring? What does quantum theory tell us about what happens in another galaxy?

The key to the answer, I believe, and the keystone of the ideas in this book, is the simple observation that scientists, and their measuring instruments as well, are all part of nature. What quantum theory describes, then, is the way in which one part of nature manifests itself to any other single part of nature.

At the heart of the "relational" interpretation of quantum theory is the idea that the theory does not describe the way in which quantum objects manifest themselves to us (or to special entities that do something special denoted "observing"). It describes how every physical object manifests itself to any other physical object. How any physical entity acts on any other physical entity. 

We think of the world in terms of objects, things, entities (in physics, we call them "physical systems"): a photon, a cat, a stone, a tree, a boy, a village, a rainbow, a planet, a cluster of galaxies... These do not exist in splendid isolation. On the contrary, they do nothing but continuously act upon each other. To understand nature, we must focus on these interactions rather than on isolated objects.

A cat listens to the ticking of a clock; a boy throws a stone; the stone moves the air through which it flies, hits another stone and moves that, presses into the ground where it lands; a tree absorbs energy from the sun's rays, produces the oxygen that the villagers breathe while watching the stars, and the stars run through the galaxies, pulled by the gravity of other stars... The world that we observe is continually interacting. It is a dense web of interactions. 

Individual objects are the way in which they interact. If there was an object that had no interactions, no effect upon anything, emitted no light, attracted nothing and repelled nothing, was not touched and had no smell... it would be as good as nonexistent. To speak of objects that never interact is to speak of something -- even if it existed -- that could not concern us. It is not even clear what it would mean for us to say that such objects "exist."

The world that we know, that relates to us, that interests us, what we call "reality," is the vast web of interacting entities, of which we are a part, that manifest themselves by interacting with each other. It is with this web that we are dealing. 

...The discovery of quantum theory, I believe, is the discovery that the properties of any entity are nothing other than the way in which that entity influences others. It exists only through its interactions. Quantum theory is the theory of how things influence each other. And this is the best description of nature that we have.

It is a simple idea, but it has radical consequences that open the conceptual space required to understand quanta.

...The properties of an object are the way in which it acts upon other objects; reality is this web of interactions. Instead of seeing the physical world as a collection of objects with definite properties, quantum theory invites us to see the physical world as a net of relations. Objects are its nodes.

The first radical consequence is that to attribute properties to something when it does not interact is superfluous and may be misleading. It is talking about something that has no meaning, for there are no properties outside of interactions. 

This is the significance of Heisenberg's original intuition: to ask what the orbit of an election is when it is not interacting with anything is an empty question. The electron does not follow an orbit because its physical properties are only those that determine how it affects something else, for instance, the light that it emits when it is interacting. If the electron is not interacting, there are no properties.

This is a radical leap. It is equivalent to saying that everything consists solely of the way in which it affects something else. When the electron does not interact with anything, it has no physical properties. It has no position; it has no velocity. 

The second consequence is even more radical

Suppose that you are the cat in Schrodinger's thought experiment. You are shut in a box and a quantum mechanism has a one in two probability of releasing the sleeping drug. You perceive whether the drug has been released or not released. In the first case, you sleep; in the second, you remain awake. For you the drug was delivered or it was not delivered. There are no doubts. As far as you are concerned, you are asleep or you are awake. You are certainly not both at once. 

I, on the other hand, am outside the box and do not interact either with the bottle of sleeping draught or with you. Later on, I can observe interference phenomena between you-awake and you-asleep: phenomena that would not have been produced if I had seen you asleep, or if I had seen you awake. In this sense, for me you are neither asleep nor awake. This is what it means to say that you are "in a superposition of sleeping and waking."

For you, the soporific is released or not, and you are asleep or awake. For me, you are neither awake nor asleep. For me, "there is a quantum superposition." For you, there is the reality of being awake, or of not being so. The relational perspective allows both things to be true: each relates to interactions with respect to distinct observers -- you and me.

Is it possible that a fact might be real with respect to you and not real with respect to me? 

Quantum theory, I believe, is the discovery that the answer is yes. Facts that are real with respect to an object are not necessarily so with respect to another. A property may be real with respect to a stone, and not real with respect to another stone.