Church of the Churchless

Metacognition is key to knowing yourself

I'm about halfway through reading Stephen Fleming's Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness. Basic concepts of the book are mind reading, in the sense of inferring what is in someone else's mind, and metacognition, literally thinking about our thinking, or more broadly, being aware of ourself. 

Since Fleming, a British neuroscientist, cites many research studies in his book, reading it can take some effort. However, Fleming is a good writer, and frequently uses examples from everyday life, so on the whole I'm liking it a lot. 

The title, Know Thyself, points toward a fact I've marveled at for a long time. We humans can turn our attention upon ourself in a way that other animals can't. Fleming's idea, which makes sense, is that this metacognition and mind reading (another term for the more usual "theory of mind") are closely related.

Meaning, many of the same brain processes are at work when we think "I feel bad that I got so angry" (metacognition) and "I believe that she thinks I'm mad at her" (mind reading). One is directed inward at our own mind; the other is directed outward at other minds.

And the same sorts of problems can arise in both metacognition and mind reading. We can be wrong about our own mind, and we can be wrong about other people's minds. Fleming writes:

First of all, it is important to distinguish between the capacity for metacognition and the accuracy of the self-awareness that results.

The capacity for metacognition becomes available to us after waking each morning. We can turn our thoughts inward and begin to think about ourselves. The accuracy of metacognition, on the other hand, refers to whether our reflective judgments tend to track our actual skills and abilities.

...In fact, metacognition is likely to be even more susceptible to illusions and distortions than perception. Our senses usually remain in touch with reality because we receive constant feedback from the environment.

If I misperceive my coffee cup as twice as large as it is, then I will likely knock it over when I reach over to pick it up, and such errors will serve to rapidly recalibrate my model of the world.  Because my body remains tightly coupled to the environment, there is only so much slack my senses can tolerate.

The machinery for self-awareness has a tougher job: it must perform mental alchemy, conjuring up a sense of whether we are right or wrong from a fairly loose and diffuse feedback loop. The consequences of illusions about ourselves are usually less obvious.

If we are lacking in self-awareness, we might get quizzical looks at committee meetings, but we won't tend to knock over coffee cups or fall down flights of stairs. Self-awareness is therefore less moored to reality and more prone to illusions. 

Those illusions basically involve us feeling that we know something that we actually don't know, or failing to feel that we know something which we actually do know.

There are lots of gradations, of course. The ideal is to feel uncertain about knowing things that our knowledge really is uncertain about, to feel confident about knowing things we really do know about, and to feel not at all confident in things that we don't know about.

That last "feel" is what makes us call a plumber when we know we don't know how to fix a leaky faucet. Lacking it makes us attempt a repair when we're not competent to do the job, something I have some familiarity with. 

(One sadly vivid memory is giving up on a faucet repair, calling a plumber, and have him simply reverse one of the parts I had backward. When I joked that this 30 second repair now was going to cost me $80, or whatever, he said "You're forgetting what it took me to learn how to do that 30 second repair," which was absolutely true.)

At an extreme, this sort of thing is called frontal lobe paradox.

The paradox is that people with frontal lobe damage may have significant difficulties with everyday tasks such as cooking or organizing their finances, but because their metacognition is impaired, they are unable to recognize that they need a helping hand. 

Without metacognition, we may lose the capacity to understand what we have lost. The connection between our self-impression and the reality of our behavior -- the reality seen by our family and friends -- becomes weakened.

A less extreme example is how most people believe they are an above-average driver, a statistical impossibility.

"Moon" movie points to shocking non-supernatural realization

A year or so ago I watched "Moon" via Netflix. I guess at this point I need to enter an obligatory spoiler alert, in case anyone hasn't seen this 2009 movie and thinks they might want to see it without knowing a crucial plot element.

This was an intriguing movie, though not super-entertaining. The acting was good, but not exceptional. What I distinctly remember was a shocking twist.

There Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell) is, at a base on the moon where a mining operation is taking place. He's looking forward to returning home after a three-year solitary tour of duty on the moon. 

Sam gets pleasure in recorded messages from his wife on Earth, who was pregnant when he left for the moon. Communication difficulties prevent live back-and-forth communication with his wife.

All this seems completely normal. However, through a series of events that I've mostly forgotten, Sam eventually discovers a shocking secret the mining company has been hiding.

Sam is a clone.

The memories he has of his wife and previous time on Earth were implanted in his brain. None of that is real. Sam isn't who he thinks he is, a human being like everybody else back on Earth. Though his body is human, his mind is artificial.

How Sam deals with this occupies the rest of the movie. 

What galvanized me as I watched "Moon" was that moment when Sam realizes that everything he relied upon to help  get him through his stint on the Moon was false. The foundation of his existence was shaken to the core.

Not only wasn't his Earth life what he'd thought it was, he himself wasn't who he thought he was. 

And this wasn't a shift in consciousness like, say, someone finding their more genuine self after psychotherapy, climbing Mt. Everest, or whatever. It was a total reversal of how Sam had looked upon the world. 

Well, even more than that, since a reversal implies that the thing being reversed is simply the flip side of what the reversal reveals -- like someone realizing they aren't heterosexual but homosexual. A big change, yet they're still sexual. 

Rather, Sam went from seeing himself as a normal human being to seeing himself as not at all human, but a manufactured clone, no different from hundreds or thousands of clones exactly like him that he discovers in a hidden section of the moon base.

What struck me about this aspect of the movie is how Sam's shocking realization could be viewed as a metaphor, or reflection, of another sort of shocking realization that could be possible for any of us. Not that we're a clone, but that we're not who we have always viewed ourselves as being.

Now, I don't know what that shocking realization might consist of. Or if it really would be shocking. Maybe it would feel entirely natural, as if we'd woken up from a dream that had been going on for our entire life.

I'm not talking about a religious realization, such as "God loves me" or "Jesus is my savior." These are additions to a mind that don't overturn a mind's  basic assumptions. Nor am I talking about something supernatural.

Rather, I see this realization as being along the line of "The world as I've known it is an illusion, but there is no world more real than this one." In other words, it is the perception of the everyday world that is turned upside down in some fashion, not the world itself, which remains just as it is.

My best bet as to what this sort of shocking realization could consist of -- which arguably is very much in line with Buddhist enlightenment or nirvana -- is an experience that the self we take ourselves to be actually doesn't exist. 

This is akin to what Sam experiences in "Moon," aside from the fact that Sam was distressed by the fact that he wasn't who he always thought he was, while the experience of selflessness would be much more pleasant, blissful even. Or at least no less pleasant or blissful than our previous existence as a self, just different in a difficult-to-describe way.

Along with this would be a realization that the free will we always thought we possessed also was an illusion.

I see this as a massive relief. I've had glimpses of such a state of being in which I see that who I am at any given moment is the result of causes and effects extending back to my birth -- and even far beyond that, to the moment of the big bang 14 billion years ago.

My view, which isn't at all original, is that evolution adapted us to an illusion of ego/self because this aided in our survival as early humans.

We continue to buy into this story of individual separateness because every human culture teaches it is true, even though some cultures (Chinese and Indigenous, for example) buy into it less than other cultures (American and European, for example).

Anyway, I like the idea that our view of ourselves could be upended in a dramatic fashion.

I'm not sure how this could come about. It simply seems like a real possibility that fits with experiences I had with psychedelics in my college days, and other experiences I've had with meditation/mindfulness since.

Mostly people we disagree with are well-meaning

Ooh, nice! I like it! 

That was the voice that speaks inside my head after I'd written the final two sentences in a Facebook message.

Mostly people we disagree with are well-meaning. They just find meaning in their lives in a different fashion than we do.

The woman I was communicating with responded with a pleasing "Well said!" My sentiment exactly. 

I said what I did in regard to a religious group, Salem Awakening, that's been having outdoor services in a public park on the riverfront. Some people distrust Salem Awakening because they have organized protests against Planned Parenthood in the guise of the Church at Planned Parenthood.

(That isn't an actual church. It's more like a franchise, since churches in various cities use that name when they protest outside a Planned Parenthood clinic.)

Even though members of the Proud Boys militia group, which took part in the January 6 insurrection at the nation's capitol, provide security for Salem Awakening when they're doing their Planned Parenthood protest thing, I'd told the woman that I didn't think Salem Awakening was up to anything nefarious.

Like I said, almost certainly the religious people doing the protesting are well-meaning. They just find meaning in a different fashion than a progressive atheist like me, who supports a woman's right to choose an abortion, does.

More and more I'm bothered by the tendency of many to demonize people who have different values than they do -- political, religious, whatever. As noted in a recent post about extreme political correctness, "I get cited by Salem's Woke Police," a sense of overzealous righteousness can lead to viewing those with different views as not just mistaken, but contemptible. 

I don't believe in God. But I used to, an Eastern religion variety. I'm a progressive. But I was raised by a highly conservative mother, and shared her Republicanism until I went to college. 

So I can completely understand why so many people find meaning in religion and right-wing politics. I no longer share those views. However, in no way do I perceive religious believers and conservatives as being bad people. They're just people who look upon certain aspects of the world in a different way than I do.

This used to be a non-controversial perspective.

Each to his or her own. We can agree to disagree. I disagree with what you're saying, but I defend your right to say it. Catch phrases like those reflected a culture where reasonable people could discuss controversial subjects in a courteous fashion. 

Things have gone downhill in this regard. Often way downhill. On the far reaches of both the political left and right, a substantial number of zealots look upon anyone who doesn't subscribe to their extreme views as unworthy of respect. This carries over into other areas, such as religion. 

Instead of being critical of someone else's perspective, there's an effort to cancel their right to express that perspective.

Instead of viewing them as well-meaning people with a different viewpoint, they're seen as dangerous promoters of a meaningless outlook on life.

Jonathan Rauch talks about this in his excellent book, "The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth." Here's an excerpt from his chapter  Cancelling: Despotism of the Few.

Criticism seeks to engage in conversations and identify error; canceling seeks to stigmatize conversations and punish the errant. Criticism cares whether statements are true; cancelling cares about their social effects. Criticism exploits viewpoint diversity; cancelling imposes viewpoint conformity. 

Criticism is a substitute for social punishment (we kill our hypotheses rather each other); cancelling is a form of social punishment (we kill your hypothesis by killing you socially). Criticism reflects the values of the Constitution of Knowledge, seeking to inquire and learn. Cancelling reflects the values of propaganda, seeking to manipulate the information environment. 

Now, most of us don't encounter cancel culture because we aren't part of a university, social media niche, or other place where views that dissent from What is Deemed Acceptable are met with derision from those who have placed a claim on the truth as only they can know it. 

As noted above, my eyes have been opened to this distressing cultural phenomenon after being vilified on Facebook as an old white man whose views are worth precisely nothing because I committed the heinous sin of deviating from wokeness orthodoxy. 

(In that post I didn't include all the insults directed at me, only a sampling.)

I'm grateful for the experience, which admittedly was much less intense than the cancelling meted out to professors, journalists, and others who got on the wrong side of extreme left-wing dogmatism. The far right has its own brand of closed-minded dogmatism, of course.

Stuck in the middle are the vast majority of Americans, who probably constitute at least two-thirds of the United States population, but a decided minority of the outrage.

What I hope for is an outpouring in support of reasonableness that will counter the irrational screaming from the fringes. My contribution to this is a sentiment that I like a lot. Again:

Mostly people we disagree with are well-meaning. They just find meaning in their lives in a different fashion than we do.

Excessive wokeness is akin to extreme religiosity

Yesterday I wrote a post on my Salem Political Snark blog, "I get cited by Salem's Woke Police." Here I'll explore the connection between wokeness and religiosity.

Since many people who visit this blog don't live in the United States, woke is a word that means "alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice." That sounds like a good thing, which usually it is.

But as the saying goes, you can have too much of a good thing.

About three weeks ago I helped start a new Facebook group here in Salem, Oregon. The instigator was a young woman who I've never met in person. She's young, very liberal, and seemed sincere about having a Facebook group that lived up to its name, Let's Discuss Salem. 

The woman told me that anybody in Salem could join the group: liberals, independents, conservatives, anybody. That appealed to me, since I mostly associate with fellow progressives, and I thought it'd be interesting to share ideas with people of a different political persuasion.

However, as you can read in the post I wrote about the Woke Police, it didn't take long for the administrators of the Facebook group to become so amazingly woke, sometimes I wasn't sure if they were being serious. 

For example, this is a new rule for the group that got added to other equally woke rules: "7) Telling members of marginalized communities how to think, feel, and act about their own oppression is prohibited."

So only Black people in the group (if there are any) can talk to other Black people about their issues. Ditto for Latino people. As a white person, I can't express an opinion about a Black issue. Only Blacks can do that.

As I said in my Salem Political Snark blog post:

I still believe that it is better to be overly concerned about racism, sexism, nationalism, and other nasty "ism's" than under concerned. 

However, a balance needs to be struck between awareness of social problems affecting minorities and other historically oppressed groups, and an overzealous righteousness where perceived affronts to social justice are criticized in an absurd fashion.

I emailed a link to my post to some Salem friends. One wrote back to me this morning with some wise observations. 

I have just read all of what appeared in the link below. To me, your most powerful statement included "shades of gray, political nuance...." Yes, precisely. Those beating the drums on both the right and the left, including the local "Woke Police," are sending overly simplified messages.

These are designed to capture minds and memories with catchy and easily remembered soundbites. and, in many cases, to quote Shakespeare in the speech by Marc Antony "to cry havoc, and let loose the dogs of war..." to serve their particular goals.

The higher level thinking skills of critical thinking and analysis do not work well in these arenas. You have worked to challenge a general audience to think critically. Of course, that is at best a steeply uphill struggle.

The full statement she referred to said:

This is the problem with having a black and white view of the world. Nuance, shades of gray, moral ambiguity, political compromise -- that doesn't appeal to people on either the left or right who believe that how they see things is how everybody should see things.

Same applies to religious people who have a black and white view of the cosmos. In other words, fundamentalists. They view any deviation from their rigid perspective on reality as a dangerous heresy. I just read that the Taliban in Afghanistan are decreeing that music is forbidden, apparently because some weird interpretation of Islam says so.

A tiny bit of critical thinking reveals the absurdity of fundamentalism. But for those in the grip of it, that rigidity makes sense. And even is appealing. 

I sort of shudder when I remember that back in my true believing days, when the guru of the religion I followed decreed that animal rennet couldn't be eaten, I was one of the fundamentalists who obsessively read cheese labels for evidence that the rennet was animal or vegetarian. 

The woke fundamentalists of the Let's Discuss Salem Facebook page are similarly caught in the grip of a mindset that abhors reason, common sense, flexibility. Since I try to manifest each of those qualities, the Woke Police have become increasingly irritated with me.

Which not only doesn't bother me, I'm learning to enjoy it. I find a special pleasure in speaking reasonably when they talk about the necessity to not let a single politically impure post or comment appear on Let's Discuss Salem.

I have the impression that this rigidity gives that woke crowd a reason for being, since they can feel superior to fellow progressives like me who are a lot looser in our speech and attitudes. At the end of my Salem Political Snark post, I include excerpts from a The Atlantic story about research concerning the different political tribes in the United States.

It turns out that about a third of Americans are on the fringes of the left and right, so far out there they aren't interested in ratcheting down the rancor and finding common ground.

But about two-thirds of Americans do want to find common ground with those who see things differently. That's good news. Problem is, the extremists tend to dominate the news, because they're the ones screaming about this or that outrage. Same seems to be true of religion.

Most religious believers aren't dogmatic. They wear their religion lightly. They don't take themselves too seriously. They accept that people with different views are entitled to those views, and may even have something to teach them.

"The Web of Meaning" -- great book about finding our place in the universe

I've finished The Web of Meaning, by Jeremy Lent, a book with the subtitle, "Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe."

It's a lengthy book, 382 pages, that I enjoyed. My first post about it was "Marvelous mystery lies in the complexity of the world."

Lent wrote a related previous book, The Patterning Instinct. Both books discuss Eastern and Western religions in a well-informed manner. In 2017 I talked about The Patterning Instinct in "Indian and Greek thought are both dualistic. Chinese thought isn't."

In these passages Lent explains how ancient India embraced a form of dualism that differed in some respects from that of the Greeks, but still was based on the same sorts of splits found in Christianity.

...So if someone is looking for oneness, it won't be found in either Greek or Indian thought, which are both thoroughly dualistic.

Pleasingly -- because I'm attracted to Chinese thought, especially in the guise of Taoism (and Tai Chi, basically Taoism expressed as movement, which I've been practicing for 13 years), Lent is big on the Chinese way of looking upon the world, which he admires as being in tune with modern scientific thought and a naturalistic approach to oneness.

In his new book, Lent is still big on Chinese philosophy. Along with Buddhism and indigenous traditions (Native American and others), this is what is meant by "traditional wisdom" in his subtitle.

What he's after is an integration of what divides us in science, religion, philosophy, and other areas of human life. I heartily agree with Lent that any belief system which finds meaning in some realm apart from our world and this universe -- which is what Indian religions and Christianity have in common -- isn't going to heal the splits that plague us. 

Taoism and Buddhism have a lot in common with modern systems thinking. Since I completed the course work for a doctorate in Systems Science back in the 1970's before I became a Ph.D. dropout, I resonated with the many examples of how systems concepts reflect the reality of how reality works.

Here's some quotes from The Web of Meaning along these lines. 

Reciprocal causality is a lot like the Buddhist notions of dependent origination and emptiness. Reality isn't top-down causation, as religions would have us believe, with God at the top. 

We've seen that reciprocal causality is a defining element of integrated, self-organizing systems -- the system as a whole affects the parts, while the parts affect the whole. The relationship between mind and body is similarly reciprocal. While the mind affects the body, different aspects of the body are simultaneously affecting the mind. 

...As we've seen, a hallmark of living systems is reciprocal causality: interacting parts create the system, while the system as a whole affects how the parts interact.

Purpose doesn't come from outside the universe or outside of life. Life is its own purpose.

When a bacterium in a tank senses sugar is more concentrated in a certain direction, it will turn around, rotate its flagella like a propeller and swim toward what it wants. It's driven by the same sense of purpose that has urged life forward in an unbroken flow from the days of the first protocells: a desire to resist the Second Law of Thermodynamics, to ingest nutrients, metabolize them, regenerate its parts and pass its particular form of negentropy on to the next generation.

We're back to Weber's First Law of Desire: 'Everything that lives wants more of life. Organisms are beings whose own existence means something to them.'

...As we've seen, life is a self-constructed process. There is no programmer writing a program, no architect drawing up a blueprint. The organism is the weaver of its own fabric. It sculpts itself according to its own inner sense of purpose, which it inherited ultimately -- like all of us -- from the first autocatylytic cells: the drive to resist the Second Law of Thermodynamics and generate a temporary vortex of self-created order in the universe.

Consciousness is material, but this doesn't make it any less sacred.

Some people, viewing consciousness as something sacred, might object to the idea that it could theoretically be measured through scientific instruments. My personal opinion is that, rather than diminishing the sacred quality of consciousness, it opens a pathway that bridges the sacred and the scientific. 

In modern gewu, as in Neo-Confucianism -- and in contrast to Western dualism -- there is no inherent distinction between the spiritual and the material. It's the miraculous ways in which the material world self-organizes that create the conditions for all that is sacred and meaningful in the universe. 

Emergent phenomena show that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, that at higher levels of organization newness emerges that can't be predicted by looking at more basic elements.

There is, as we've seen, a vast category of things -- life, mind, consciousness, music, cognition and rainbows, to mention just a few -- that are emergent phenomena, existing only as a result of complex, dynamic interactions between different entities. Meaning also belongs in this category.

In the same way that we can enact a rainbow by gazing into the rain, we enact meaning by the way in which we attune to the connective rhythms of the universe. Like music being played, like the refracted sunlight in the rain, the meaning potential is always there -- its just waiting for us to tune into the right wavelength and engage with it. 

...Just as music is an emergent phenomenon arising between a player and listener attuning through patterns of vibrations, so meaning is an emergent phenomenon enacted by a conscious entity as it relates an experience to other experiences. 

Death is a problem for us only insofar as we have a limited view of ourselves as an isolated being. 

At a deeper level, our identity as living beings can extend to embrace all of life. In the Western tradition, with personhood confined to conceptual consciousness, the existential fear of death has historically been alleviated by the belief in an eternal soul that remains intact after the demise of the body.

But much of this fear is the result of experiencing a self-identity separate from the rest of life. To the extent that we, as temporary eddies of consciousness, can recognize our unity with the entire stream of life of which we're a tiny part, there is less to fear from our own death.

As part of the unfolding cascade of negative entropy that has evolved in all its magnificence on Earth, we have never died for over three billion years. From this expanded perspective, as long as there is life, there is no such thing as death.

The Tao Te Ching hints at this deep insight when it proclaims, 'One who knows how to nourish life... has no place of death.'

"There is no path" -- poet Antonio Machado

For a long time I believed in a path. A path back to God.

The religious group I belonged to for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, taught there was such a path. One of their books was called "Path of the Masters."

Since I no longer accept that such a path exists, I like this poem by Antonio Machado. There are various translations from the Spanish. I've shared several.

Wanderer, your footprints are
the path, and nothing else;
wanderer, there is no path,
the path is made by walking.
Walking makes the path,
and on glancing back
one sees the path
that must never be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no path—
Just your wake in the sea.

Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
By walking one makes the road,
and upon glancing behind
one sees the path
that never will be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road–
Only wakes upon the sea.

Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
Walking makes the road,
and turning to look behind
you see the path that you
will never tread again.
Wanderer, there is no road,
only foam trails on the sea.

Walker, your footsteps
are the road, and nothing more.
Walker, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
Walking you make the road,
and turning to look behind
you see the path you never
again will step upon.
Walker, there is no road,
only foam trails on the sea.

Islamic Shariah law to be enforced by Taliban

The Taliban say they're going to rule Afghanistan under Shariah law, which is based on Islamic tradition and authority, such as the Koran. 

This doesn't bode well for Afghan women. 

So I'm curious. Many commenters on this blog are religious. They believe in God. They accept the authority of religious leaders.

The Taliban are religious. They believe in God. They accept the authority of religious leaders.

Explain then, religious commenters, why you likely reject the Taliban's religious beliefs, while you consider your own to be so worthy. 

The Taliban think they are acting in accord with the will of God. Other religious believers feel the same about their own faith. Yet how is it possible to say that this religion is a danger to humanity, and that religion is a benefit to humanity? 

Adherents of every religion think their religion brings benefits to humanity. The Taliban certainly believe this. 

Is anyone who comments here willing to defend the Taliban? If not, how is it that the Taliban's religious beliefs are considered to be bad, while other religious beliefs are considered to be good? 

Muslims believe the Koran reflects the message of God. Christians believe the Bible reflects the message of God. Sikhs believe the Adi Granth reflects the message of God. Mystical religions believe the utterances of a guru reflect the message of God.

Again, since every religion considers its teachings to be correct, how is it possible to criticize the Taliban's religious beliefs without criticizing all religious beliefs? 

Me, I choose the latter approach. I criticize all religious beliefs. 

Transcendence and immanence: two paths to attain oneness

It's important to not get one-sided in our approach to meditation and spirituality. After all, oneness is a laudable goal, even if it can't be attained perfectly.

(If there truly was only one, there would be no one else to know there was only one, so oneness would never be experienced.)

A one-sided coin doesn't exist. It takes two sides to make a coin. 

So we shouldn't get locked into a single way of looking upon oneness. Many commenters on this blog appear to be so enamored with transcendence -- leaving this world behind to find a better one -- they forget that a big chunk of humanity embraces Taoist and Buddhist approaches to oneness that are focused on immanence rather than transcendence.

Here's passages from Jeremy Lent's book, The Web of Meaning, where he discusses transcendence and immanence.

Later in his "Everything is Connected" chapter he investigates the question, "Could the sense of immanent oneness described in traditions such as Taoism, Buddhism, and many Indigenous cultures be commensurate with these insights of modern science?"

I'll share his answer to that question in another blog post.

A critical step is to recognize that even among those who describe a vision of oneness, different cultural assumptions generate important distinctions over what that oneness signifies. 

Some traditions -- such as Vedic, Neoplatonic, and Christian -- emphasize transcendence as the route to the realization of oneness. Transcendence, which means literally to 'climb over,' implies that the world as we see it, with all its messy details, must be left behind to achieve a state of unity.

The higher you go, the purer and more visionary you become, until ultimately you might reach a state of communion with divinity up in the heavens. 

...The underlying idea that 'higher is better' is so embedded in language and culture that it has shaped our patterns of thought. 

When we hear about a 'peak experience,' a 'higher purpose' or the 'high point' of a journey, we instantly know that the references to height denote something good. Is it any wonder that we conceive of spiritual knowledge as something reached by transcendence?

But transcendence is not the only path for attaining a state of oneness.

An entirely different way to conceive oneness is through immanence (coming from the Latin for 'remain in'). From this perspective, oneness is not found in the heavens but is right here, in this world with all its disorderly muddle.

The immanent view of oneness came naturally to the Chinese, who had no concept of a transcendent, omniscient God.

'One takes the mass of confused things,' said Zhuangzi, the Taoist sage, 'and unites it as one ... For him who can but realize his indissoluble unity with the whole ... death and life, end and beginning, are no more than the succession of day and night.'

The Tao, Zhuangzi explained, is to be found everywhere in the world, not just in a transcendent realm: it is in the ants, the grass, the earth -- even in the 'piss and shit.' Zen Buddhism, influenced strongly by Taoism, similarly taught that enlightenment was to be found within the mundane realities of everyday life.

Master Rinzai, founder of a major branch of Zen, declared, 'If you love the sacred and despise the ordinary, you are still bobbing in the ocean of delusion.' 

If "God" is all there is, science is the way to know God

The August 16, 2021 issue of The New Yorker has a fascinating article about the new James Webb Space Telescope that will be launched soon. It will be much more powerful than the Hubble space telescope. 

I liked the end of "The Youthful Universe." You can read it below.

Science truly is our best way of learning about "God" -- if by that word is meant everything that exists. That's how I've come to view God.

Sometimes during my day I'll say, "Thank you God." I'm not thanking a divine being. I don't believe in supernatural entities.

Rather, I use "God" as shorthand for the marvelous reality that is evident everywhere from the mysterious quantum realm of the very small to the unfathomable vastness of the universe that will be explored by the James Webb Space Telescope. 

So for me thanking God is simply an appreciation of the causes and effects inherent in the laws of nature that produced the thing I feel thankful for.

Once you get a taste of science, the offerings of religion seem horribly bland. Science, as the story excerpt below says, is about knowing. Religions are about believing, a much less appealing alternative.

The seventeenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler studied the physical world for the messages he felt that God had written into the Book of Nature. Galileo, in fact, had supporters inside and outside the Church.

Sometimes people in power have been reluctant to acknowledge the truths that science uncovers. Each time we look farther, our universe gets larger. Or, depending on your perspective, we get smaller.

Astonomers take the position -- an incidentally ethical one -- of being radically in favor of knowing. 

Bob Williams, the former head of the Space Telescope Science Institute, grew up in a Baptist family in Southern California, one of five children.

He'd wanted to be an astronomer since the seventh grade, when he received a pamphlet on astronomy in science class; he then saved his paper-route money to  buy a telescope.

He earned a scholarship to U.C. Berkeley and studied astronomy there. 

"My father didn't want me to go to college," he said. "He told me that if I went to get an education I would lose my faith. And he was right about that. We were raised to take every word in the Bible as literally true. But then I was learning about continental drift. About evolution."

Williams said that he is often asked about faith.

Many traditions use the term "God" to mean, basically, everything that is. In that view, the universe itself is the Book, and astronomers are reading it as it is.

It took a while for this person to give up on RSSB

Yesterday I got this message from someone who said it would be fine to share what they said, but not their name. I always feel good when I hear that someone has benefitted from my blog posts.

I've told this person that I don't know what has happened to tAo. His comments were indeed interesting. But change is inevitable, including who comments on this blog. 

Hello Brain , how u doing n hope u r doing great at ur end. I am ________, initiated by Baba Gurinder Singh G in 2003. I am 45 years old now. I born and brought up in Orthodox Rssb family , my great grand father initiated by baba sawan singh g in year 1922 , my grand father spent 26 years in sewa at dera after getting retirement from punjab police as an officer , he was dera resident and died in dera .

I have been reading ur blogs on site church for churchless since year 2010 . I didn't like ur views at first . But after a year or more I found some reality in ur writings . I read all of ur rssb blogs twice or may be thrice with all comments on that .

I gave up my faith on baba g and rssb in year 2019 with very heavy heart , I had my own reason's for living the rssb faith with no hard feeling's. Actually I never had a pure faith or belief on rssb I was just keep going with it as told by my family and being told or preach by in weekly satsangs . I am very emotional person and feel guilty deep inside me for living the path , my heart says guru is true but my brain says Big No . 

I like ur blogs . I enjoy to read the comments also specially by tAo , Spence , osho , Tuscon , jesse , Jen etc. 

I missing tAo , why is he not commenting any more ,is he okay ? He is much experienced person regarding cult , I would love to hear about him from you , that's the reason also I'm mailing you. 

 

I like ur blog , please keep going , my best wishes always with you.

 

Regards , ___________

History of Religion cartoon

Pretty much sums it up.

What makes a cult a cult?

The July 12 and 19 issue of The New Yorker has an interesting book review called "Beyond Belief: What makes a cult a cult?" Here's some excerpts:

If we accept that cult members have some degree of volition, the job of distinguishing cults from other belief-based organizations becomes a good deal more difficult. 

We may recoil from Keith Raniere's brand of malevolent claptrap, but, if he hadn't physically abused followers and committed crimes, would we be able to explain why NXIVM is inherently more coercive or exploitative than any of the "high demand" religions we tolerate?

For this reason, many scholars choose to avoid the term "cult" altogether. Raniere may have set himself up as an unerring source of wisdom and sought to shut his minions off from outside influence, but apparently so did Jesus of Nazareth. 

The Gospel of Luke records him saying, "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." 

Religion, as the old joke has it, is just "a cult plus time."

Acknowledging that joining a cult requires an element of voluntary self-surrender also obliges us to consider whether the very relinquishment of control isn't a significant part of the appeal. 

..."Not passive victims, they themselves actively sought to be controlled," Haruki Murakami wrote of the members of Aum Shinrikyo, the cult whose sarin-gas attack on the Tokyo subway, in 1995, killed thirteen people. 

In his book "Underground" (1997), Murakami describes most Aum members as having "deposited all their precious personal holdings of selfhood" in the "spiritual bank" of the cult's leader, Shoko Sahara. Submitting to a higher authority -- to someone else's account of reality -- was, he claims, their aim.

Robert Lifton suggests that people with certain kinds of personal history are more likely to experience such a longing: those with "an early sense of confusion and dislocation," or, at the opposite extreme, an early experience of unusually intense family milieu control." 

But he stresses that the capacity for totalist submission lurks in all of us and is probably rooted in childhood, the prolonged period of dependence during which we have no choice but to attribute to our parents "an exaggerated omnipotence." (This might help to explain why so many cult leaders choose to style themselves as the fathers or mothers of their cult "families.")

...Yet our sense that joining a cult requires some unusual degree of credulousness or gullibility persists. Few of us believe in our heart of hearts that Amy Carlson, the recently deceased leader of the Colorado-based Love Has Won cult, who claimed to have birthed the whole of creation and to have been, in a previous life, a daughter of Donald Trump, could put us under her spell.

Perhaps one way to attack our intellectual hubris on this matter is to remind ourselves that we all hold some beliefs for which there is no compelling evidence.

The convictions that Jesus was the son of God and that "everything happens for a reason" are older and more widespread than the belief in Amy Carlson's privileged access to the fifth dimension, but neither is, ultimately, more rational.

In recent decades, scholars have grown increasingly adamant that none of our beliefs, rational or otherwise, have much to do with logical reasoning. "People do not deploy the powerful human intellect to dispassionately analyze the world," William J. Bernstein writes in "The Delusion of Crowds" (Atlantic Monthly). 

Instead, "They rationalize how the facts conform to their emotionally derived preconceptions." 

...The process by which people are eventually freed from their cult delusions rarely seems to be accelerated by the interventions of well-meaning outsiders. Those who embed themselves in a group idea learn very quickly to dismiss the skepticism of others as the foolish cant of the uninitiated. 

If we accept the premise that our beliefs are rooted in emotional attachments rather than in cool assessments of evidence, there is little reason to imagine that rational debate will break the spell.

The good news is that rational objections to flaws in cult doctrine or to hypocrisies on the part of a cult leader do have a powerful impact if and when they occur to the cult members themselves. The analytical mind may be quietened by cult-think, but it is rarely deadened altogether. 

Especially if cult life is proving unpleasant, the capacity for critical thought can reassert itself. 

Our bad qualities also are our good qualities

Yesterday I finished a 2,500 word essay for the consideration of 180 Medical, the firm that supplies me with urinary catheters. After I got a message from 180 Medical saying that they welcome essays about how people experience using a catheter, I wrote back saying I'm interested in this, having written a bunch of blog posts about my life with a catheter.
Download 180 Medical essay PDF

(I've also copied in the essay below.)

A marketing specialist with 180 Medical read some of those posts and suggested I write about my catheter-related depression and anxiety. It took me quite a while to get around to this, since it required dredging up memories that I've tried to suppress as much as possible.

But what I realized when I finally felt the urge to write about my depression/anxiety, along with what led up to it, is the power of being real, of speaking honestly, of recognizing painful facts. I didn't plan out what to write. I didn't make an outline. I simply started writing from the heart, letting what was inside me manifest in words on a screen as directly as possible.

Almost all of us want to present a positive face to the world. We like to display our positive qualities and hide our negative qualities. That's one reason I waited almost six months before I wrote what I said in February of this year I'd send to 180 Medical. 

I doubt that anyone who reads this will take me up on this offer, but I'll make it regardless. Share the biggest mistake you've made in your life in a comment. Or one of the biggest. Ideally, post it using your real name. Put it out there for the world to see. Then be aware of what happens.

If you're like me, you'll feel a weight lifted from your mind. It takes energy to keep the Good Me and Bad Me separate, at least insofar as how we reveal ourselves to other people. We're in a never-ending quest to make the story of our life seen by others appear with us as the Good Guy/Gal rather than the Bad Guy/Gal.

Yet it seems to me that our good qualities also are our bad qualities. They really aren't separate and distinct. I got to thinking about this after writing the essay. I walked out of an urgent care center, even though I should have gotten medical attention, for much the same reason that I've been successful in other areas of my life.

For example, I'm optimistic. I like to challenge authority. I enjoy going my own way. 

Sometimes those qualities lead to positive outcomes. Sometimes they don't. However, I can't split myself into two halves. I'm one person, with a mixture of qualities, abilities, tendencies, habits, ways of being in the world. The same me who screws up is the same me who succeeds.

Here's the essay. 

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

My catheter-related depression and anxiety
by Brian Hines
[email protected]

I wish I didn’t have to use a catheter to urinate. I wish I hadn’t made mistakes that may have caused my bladder to become dysfunctional, leading me to need a catheter. I wish I hadn’t suffered from so much anxiety and depression during the four and a half years I’ve been a catheter user.

But wishes are one thing. Reality is another. I’m going to be real with you. 

If you’re looking for a feel-good story of how a 72 year-old man has been coping with his catheterizing, look somewhere else. Sure, now I’m doing pretty well with my catheterizing. This wasn’t always the case, though. So i’m not going to sugarcoat those hard times.

In a movie about the life of C.S. Lewis, Shadowlands, a student tells Lewis, “We read to know that we are not alone.” 

My hope is that some people who also have had problems with using a catheter will read this and realize that even though our struggles mostly are private, we share a determination to make the best of a difficult situation. 

Up until the age of 68, I had no significant health problems. My family doctor would tell me at my annual checkup, “You’re a poster child for growing old.” I’d earned a karate black belt at age 56. I’d take my boogie board on vacations to Maui and catch big waves with the locals. I took up senior citizen skateboarding when I was 64.

I figured, wrongly, that I had many more years of good health ahead of me.

Yes, I had a prostate problem. It didn’t seem like a big deal, though. I took several prostate medications. I needed to urinate more frequently, getting up several times a night. I always got an aisle seat on airplanes to ease a trip to the restroom. 

Looking back, I should have realized that I needed to see a urologist. It became more difficult for me to start peeing, a different problem than having to pee too often. Yet I didn’t mention this to my family doctor. I thought I was just having normal symptoms of an enlarged prostate. 

Then everything changed in May 2017. My wife and I went to visit an old friend who I hadn’t seen in over 40 years. We drove to the Bend area from a vacation cabin we owned with three other families in Camp Sherman, Oregon.

Before getting to his house, I thought about stopping to pee. But I didn’t need to go that bad, so I drove on. Once we got there, our conversation on a deck overlooking the beautiful Deschutes River was so pleasant, I didn’t want to interrupt it by going to the bathroom.

When I finally did, I couldn’t go. Since this had happened before, I figured I just needed to wait a while and try again. Except, I kept trying every half hour or so, until someone asked why I was visiting the bathroom so much. 

This went on until mid-afternoon. By then I really needed to pee, but still couldn’t. My friend and his girlfriend told me that this was serious and I needed to get medical help. Good advice, which I didn’t take.

Well, actually I did, sort of. We Googled the address of an urgent care center in Bend. Driving there, I peed in my pants involuntarily. Luckily, I’d brought along some extra clothes.

I changed in the urgent care restroom, then saw a male nurse who asked what my problem was. “I can’t urinate,” I said. “At least, not voluntarily.” For some reason he wanted a urine sample. “Um,” I told him, “I can’t pee, so that’s not going to happen.” 

He gave me a glass. “Drink three glasses of water,” he said. “Then try to urinate into this bottle.” I should have argued with him, but I didn’t. I sat in the room by myself and drank the water. Then went into a bathroom and couldn’t urinate.

By that time I was distraught. I wasn’t thinking straight. I couldn’t pee on my own but had wet my pants. I was frustrated, tired, fed up. Holding the empty collection bottle in my hand, I walked out and told a different nurse that I wanted to leave.

“Do you want a catheter,” she asked me. 

I didn’t know what a catheter was. I didn’t care what a catheter was. I just wanted to go back to our cabin, take our dog for a walk, and wait until I could pee on my own again. Yeah, none of that makes sense. But at the time it did, because I was so upset with how the day had gone.

“No,” I told her. “All right,” she said. “You’ll need to sign a release form absolving us of responsibility for letting you leave without treatment.” Big danger sign, in retrospect. Yet I scribbled my name on the form.

The memory of what happened in the urgent care center is as fresh today as it was four and a half years ago. I agonize over that single word that came out of my lips, “No.” What if I had said “Yes”? Why didn’t I say “Yes”? One word. One little word. Choosing one word over another may have changed my life for the worse, forever.

We drove back to the cabin. I involuntarily peed in my pants again. After all, I’d just drunk three glasses of water in the urgent care center, when I already had been unable to urinate for about ten hours.

That night I keep getting up to see if I could pee. I couldn’t. The pain was bad. As soon as the sun was up I told my wife, “I need to get medical help.” We packed up and drove two hours to Salem. I peed in my pants again. A Salem Health urgent care nurse sent me to the Emergency Room.

There I got an indwelling catheter. Several weeks later, still unable to urinate much on my own, I was told that I’d have to do intermittent catheterization. Which I still am.

Several months after my traumatic urinary retention episode, I asked my urologist if my atonic, nonfunctioning bladder would have gotten back to the way it was if I’d said “Yes” to the offer of a catheter in the Bend urgent care center.

He said, “Perhaps.” I held it together until I got into my car. Then I cried all the way home. 

Almost every day since, I’ve thought about how stupid it was of me to refuse the offer of a catheter. I should have asked what a catheter was. I should have asked what would happen if I didn’t get the massive amount of urine in my bladder out. But I didn’t. And I can’t stop blaming myself for that. 

My wife is a retired psychotherapist. She thinks I have PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. She’s probably right. However, it didn’t take long before I had an even worse mental problem: depression. 

(If you’re mildly depressed yourself reading this sorrowful tale, hang in there. It’s going to end on a positive note, once I get through the anxiety and depression stuff.)

I already wasn’t happy, to put it mildly, about facing a lifelong need to insert a plastic tube up up my urethra five times a day. When I started getting nighttime leg cramps, forcing me to wake up and walk around my bedroom until they went away, then doing this again a few hours later all night long, the lack of sleep helped push me into a full-blown depression. 

Not fun. At first I just thought I was tired. And sad about my non-functional bladder. Then my wife said, “No, you’re depressed.” She was right. 

I had no interest in doing things I used to enjoy, like write posts for my three blogs. From being afraid of dying, I started to think that, hey, death wouldn’t be so bad. At least I’d be free of feeling like I was in an emotional black hole with no exit sign.

My urologist’s office said there was no way the leg cramps could be related to my bladder problem. I pointed out that I’d never had leg cramps before, and now I did, shortly after starting to use a catheter. 

Fortunately, I was able to see a Sleep Clinic physician. After being prescribed gabapentin, the leg cramps went away. I also was fortunate that my primary care doctor’s office had a psychiatric nurse practitioner. She diagnosed me with Major Depression, Single Episode. 

So I now had a mental health diagnosis to add to my growing list of physical problems. I was prescribed an antidepressant, which over several months helped me climb out of the black hole I was in, along with counseling sessions with a social worker.

Depression was in my rear view mirror. Unfortunately, catheter-related anxiety was in the passenger seat right next to me, where it still sits. Worse, sometimes anxiety feels like it’s taken my place in the drivers’s seat — though gradually I’ve gotten better at keeping anxiety’s hands off of my mental steering wheel.

I don’t know whether the frequent trouble I have getting a catheter to pass into my bladder is typical for many men, or atypical. Regardless, this has been my biggest longstanding problem. 

In the early days I’d call my urology clinic and talk with the nurses who worked with my doctor. “I’m having trouble inserting the catheter,” I’d say. “Do you have any tips?” I’d be told to take a shower, go for a walk, or wait a while and then try again.

OK, but I wanted to get back to what I’d been doing before my bladder stopped working like it should. Eating out. Going to a movie. Visiting friends. If I went into a restroom at a restaurant to do my catheter thing, then found I couldn’t insert it, obviously taking a shower wasn’t an option.

And I didn’t want to interrupt a meal with friends by saying, “Sorry, I’ve got to go for a walk and then see if I can get a catheter into my bladder.” Not exactly a great dinner conversation topic.

Not being able to insert a catheter at bedtime was the worst. I was tired. I wanted to sleep. I needed to urinate. Yet sometimes I’d spend an hour or more lying on the bed, trying to relax with breathing exercises, so the damn catheter would pass into my bladder.

To make a long story short — and this story really is long — at times I got extremely frustrated and angry. My wife had to put up with quite a few outbursts where I’d either start crying or slam doors or both, because I was having such a difficult time inserting a catheter. 

I’d try catheters other than the Flex Coude Pro that I’d come to know and love. (Well, except when I couldn’t get it into my bladder.) But none of them were anywhere near as comfortable and easy to use as the Flex Coude Pro, so I stuck with it. 

Eventually I had the bright idea of trying a smaller size catheter, FR12 or FR10 rather than FR14. Often I could insert one of those when the FR14 wouldn’t go in.

Even so, I still am anxious about traveling or going anywhere where I might need to use a public restroom. I haven’t flown since I started using a catheter. I haven’t driven by car more than two hours from where I live. 

If I could be confident that popping in a catheter would go smoothly, I’d be hugely happier. That would allow me to view myself as simply differently-abled in how I pee. However, not knowing when I’ll have trouble inserting a catheter — I haven’t been able to predict when this happens — makes me anxious.

And when I have a particularly difficult time, my mind generates flashbacks to the traumatic day and a half back in May 2017 I’ve described. It must be similar to a war veteran hearing fireworks and feeling like it’s a roadside bomb. When I’m unable to insert a catheter, sometimes I feel panicked, like I did when I couldn’t pee at my friend’s house or in the urgent care center.

However, I don’t want to leave the impression that I’m a total catheter train wreck. I’ve learned a lot over the years. Most days now, things either go smoothly for me, or I’m able to handle occasional problems inserting a catheter with no freakout. 

I’ve accepted the fact that almost certainly I’ll have to use a catheter for the rest of my life. 

My bladder has recovered some function, but nowhere near enough, I strongly suspect, to ever justify prostate surgery. I got a second opinion from a medical school urologist who told me, bluntly, “You don’t have a prostate problem, you have a bladder problem.”

However, I always thought I had a prostate problem. It never occurred to me that my bladder might stop working one day, and my primary care doctor didn’t  bring up this possibility. 

I haven’t stopped regretting walking out of the urgent care center in Bend. However, I do my best to tone down that regret by focusing on a couple of things that allow me to fashion a story which doesn’t have me as the Bad Guy as regards my non-functional bladder.

First, my urologist said that not getting medical care sooner could have harmed my bladder’s ability to recover from the urinary retention episode. Could. This isn’t certain. So regardless of how I acted that day, I might well have still needed to use a catheter.

Second, during a cystoscopy (scoping of my bladder) by the second-opinion urologist, he said, “Look at that pocket in the bladder wall. That was caused by the bladder trying to push urine through your prostate for a long time.”

A long time. Those words imply that my bladder was gradually losing functionality for quite a few years, so slowly that I viewed this as a normal part of aging for a man with a prostate problem.

It’s difficult, but I’m learning to forgive myself. After all, there may not be much to forgive. 

I try to remember that life is difficult for everybody, and I’m more fortunate than many. As my wife frequently reminds me, I’m pretty damn healthy overall. I use a chainsaw on our ten rural acres. I put 40 pound bags of salt in our water softener. I can bicycle, lift weights, do Tai Chi.

Life isn’t over just because I have to use a catheter five times a day. As I’ve described, there were moments when I thought life wasn’t worth living. Now, though, I’m almost as happy as I was before. 

Almost. And that’s good enough for me, especially given the much darker days I went through with my catheter-related depression and anxiety. 

 

Thoughts are not facts -- great thing to keep in mind

Over on my other blog, HinesSight, yesterday I wrote "Covid reality: thoughts are not facts." It starts this way:

Driving into Salem today, listening to a news channel on satellite radio, I heard a public health expert say something that made me grab a piece of paper and write it down as soon as I came to a stop:

Thoughts are not facts. 

She was referring to wearing masks in schools as they reopen after a summer break. Like when a student or parent says, "But I thought that wasn't going to be necessary since Covid cases were declining so much a few months ago."

OK. You thought that. But thoughts aren't facts, they're just thoughts. The only way a thought can be a fact is -- no big surprise -- if the thought is factual.

This isn't an astounding new notion, that thoughts are not facts. I just hadn't heard those particular four words before. Now that I have, I really like them. 

I've started saying to myself, "Thoughts are not facts," when I catch myself worrying about something that might happen, but so far hasn't. Where's the facts that match up to my worry? Usually nowhere, because my worrying isn't connected to factual reality.

Often it isn't a big deal if people mistake a thought for a fact. But sometimes it is. 

Trump actually won the election, not Biden. 
Vaccines and mask-wearing aren't effective in preventing COVID-19.
Global warming isn't happening. 

These thoughts are in the heads of many millions of Americans. They aren't facts. They're false. Yet because those people mistake their thoughts for facts, tremendous harm is being done. 

So ask yourself: what thoughts do I have that are being mistaken for facts? Probably quite a few, if you're like me. I suspect that you'll be happier if you're able to do a better job of telling the difference between thoughts and facts. I'm finding that's true for me.

You might be thinking, "Aren't all facts expressed as thoughts?"

Yes, of course. But facts are grounded in our shared, observable, external reality. They refer to something objectively true that transcends the thought of any particular person. Other sorts of thoughts, by contrast, are subjective, even if they're shared by millions of people. 

Thus it is a fact that I enjoyed the taste of a bowl of popcorn I just shared with our dog -- a nightly human/canine ritual. However, this isn't a fact capable of being held by others, since I'm the only one able to experience how popcorn tastes to me.

If you want to believe that Brian Hines enjoys the taste of popcorn, great. But it isn't a fact that can be confirmed in any way other than believing the words I just wrote. Objective facts can be confirmed by others, which is why we can be so confident that Biden won the election, vaccines and mask-wearing are effective against Covid, and global warming is happening.

What could be better than contemplating the inner and outer worlds?

Today I finished physicist Anthony Aguirre's book, "Cosmological Koans: A Journey to the Heart of Physical Reality." Rather than describing how the book ends, you can read the ending yourself. I liked what Aguirre says here.

To me, one clarion message comes through: when you are tempted to think or say "the Universe is fundamentally like this," then go and sit and think some more.

So why do we like to divide things into opposing camps? Probably no small part of it is a rather strong drive, bestowed upon us by our evolution as surviving beings, to identify some certain things with ourselves, our group, our tribe.

The "selfing" process walls us off as individuals in an often hostile world and seeks to protect not just our bodies, but by extension, whatever we identify with. Our own beliefs tend to be converted into truth much more easily than is warranted. 

Even in the most abstract of questions, it's easy to see, in oneself or in others, a strength of belief that the world is a certain way -- material or ideal, free or fated, inherently good or evil -- all out of proportion to the actual evidence and even when confronted with many people believing quite different things for reasons they find just as persuasive. 

This is a tendency worth keeping a keen eye on.

But it isn't just tribalism. Convincing, opposing views persist because the questions are hard. The easy ones get settled and largely forgotten about. In a well-run government, only the hard questions come to the desk of the emperor (or president). So too with the structure we've built out of our hard-won understanding of the world, both individually and collectively.

Of course, sorting things into what has been settled and what is still unknown or open for debate is not always easy, or agreed upon. 

But overall, there is some sense of a cutting edge: the world really is not flat, but we can debate about the speed at which it is warming; lightning is caused by segregation of electric charges, not gods' whims; gravity is not a propensity to go down but rather a propensity for stuff to curve space-time in a particular way. 

Knowing exactly where this cutting edge lies can be something of an art. Sometimes it is obvious and surrounded by debate. Sometimes, as we've seen, it can be much more subtle, discoverable only through a careful skepticism of simple or familiar answers. But there it lies, still licking its chops.

Even knowledge of moral truths, which are perhaps harder to place on the subjective-objective axis of being, has progressed.

Slavery is wrong; discrimination is wrong; women are equal in worth to men; might does not make right. Even if they contain some invention as well, we must choose to see these as hard-earned discoveries that we cannot unknow.

We may then focus on how to to bring our reality in closer accord with these ideals, as well as tackle the still much more open questions: What makes a just society? How do we balance liberty and security? When does technology bring, or undermine, well-being? What does the future hold, with its quantum computers, artificial intelligences, genetic engineering, and interplanetary travel -- and how can we make that a future we really want?

The progress we've made so far comes from a long history of remarkable human effort and drive. Humans are agents of action. Minute to minute, hour to hour, week to week, we decide, decide, decide, and act, act, act. 

Our cognitive architecture is that of an astonishing prediction-and-decision engine, much of which runs with little notice. We dash across rocks, make coffee, and shuffle papers more or less on autopilot. But when the predictions or the decisions get hard, then suddenly they are at the center of our awareness. This can become very stressful, frightening even.

But it is also when we feel most alive, most interested, most awake. Who wants to read a novel or see a drama in which no character has to make a difficult decision, caught in a dilemma between conflicting desires and with only guesses as to what will come?

Yet humans don't just act and decide and feel. We have also learned to contemplate.

To think and ponder free-style on ideas and truths that may have elegance and beauty but near-zero utility. I'm often amazed that we can do this at all, let alone so well as to conjure an understanding of the metric structure of space-time, or the evolution of the quantum state, or the meaning and generation of entropy.

And we've learned to contemplate in other less intellectual ways. To very simply and purely be. To look ever more closely at our own minds and how they run. To see the minute gradations of our relations with others and with the world.

Like adventures in the physical world, this contemplation of the inner world and the world writ large can be exhilarating and even terrifying. As one's mental picture of the Universe and its operation shifts, reality can swing from being a comforting den to a windswept mountaintop to a dark forest and back again.

But you're made of that very, very special stuff, infinitesimal in the universe, that is able to appreciate this, and to take the adventure. The journey can be exhausting, true, painful, humbling, but I often feel: "What could be better?"

Who am I?
What is this?
Where, from here?

Here's an elusive cosmological koan to beguile you

When I saw a book called Cosmological Koans mentioned in another book I was reading, there was little doubt in my mind that it would be delivered to me by Amazon before too long. And so it came to pass.

Anthony Aguirre is a Professor of Physics at University of California - Santa Cruz. That is so perfect! I can't imagine a more appropriate place for a koan loving, Buddhism inspired, creative writing physicist than UC Santa Cruz. 

(I went to college at San Jose State in the 1960s; Santa Cruz beaches were a favorite spot for LSD trips, along with the mountains separating San Jose from the Pacific coast and Santa Cruz.)

For quite a while I could only read one cosmological koan chapter a day, because each koan stretched my mind so much. Aguirre mixes together science and philosophy in a wholly unique way. It's hard for me to describe this book, other than to say it is like no other.

But when I got to Part 5, "Who Am I? Don't Know!," I found myself in more familiar territory. So I've been reading several cosmological koans a day, eager to get to the final Part 6, "Form is Emptiness; Emptiness is Form."

Below is a passage from the Time and Free Will cosmological koan. You'll see that Aguirre skillfully keeps the reader off balance, as a physicist Zen master would. Just when you think his train of thought is heading in a certain direction, surprise!, it jumps onto another track. 

The two tracks are connected, yet also separate. This makes for provocative reading. Also, frustrating reading, since I have to attend closely to the subtleties of what Aguirre is saying, rather than letting his words wash over me in a free and easy fashion.

I like how Aguirre presents a fresh way of what being in the present is. Basically, there's no such thing. Although in a sense there is. "Now," he says, is the point where uncertainty in the history is the least. 

Brilliant. Along with perfectly obvious. Koan on...

Though the state-based and the history-based descriptions can be mathematically translated into each other, they give quite different feelings, and they relate to different aspects of how we experience the world. 

The state-based view accords with how we experience the present. The world is some way, which we infer from observations. The world's future is tightly connected to its present configuration in ways that are somewhat but not entirely predictable, and the future's unpredictability leads to feelings of both freedom and frustration.

But the past feels more history based: we look back at how things evolved through time, at full trajectories, at seemingly inescapable chains of cause and effect. We may have uncertainty about the past, but feel that the past itself is certain while our knowledge of it is partial.

We might also think of the future in terms of histories, playing our stories in our minds of how things could go. But we generally believe -- or at least act -- as if we are uncertain of the future because the future itself is uncertain, not just our knowledge of it.

The state-based and history-based perspectives also give very different senses of the uncertainties inherent in the "now." 

This uncertainty in the present state gives rise to a sense of "splitting" of the future into many different possibilities: from one uncertain present, many possible futures. Yet from the history-based view, no history starts now; each extends indefinitely forward and back in time. 

The uncertainty in the present is just a particular type of uncertainty in the history. "Now" is, in a sense, the point at which our uncertainty in the history is the least, and it is in the space-time locale at which the different possible histories say very similar things about our observable surroundings.

Our present knowledge thus allows us to select a subset of all possible histories that accord with our present view and knowledge of the world. We call this subset selection "learning about the world"; selecting a smaller and smaller subset means that the present state is more and more precisely specified, which in turn means that we attain greater and greater knowledge. 

Insofar as the two views can be mathematically related, there is no sense in which one is more "right" than the other. However, insofar as they are views of how the world works, we might be led more, or less, astray. 

In particular, we are quite used to thinking of "places" in space, so it is natural to think of "places" in time. And the mathematics of fundamental physics allows us to do this. Yet we also recognize that there are some "things" that have a wholeness that is rather at odds with divvying them up into parts that are here and there.

We recognize that we can't talk about the left-hand side of a thought, or the northern half of a computation, the east end of blueness, or the bottom of a smell.

We also understand that processes unfold in time, and by its very nature a process, which involves time, cannot be happening at an instant any more than an arrow can fly during a moment of zero duration.

Yet we are often tempted to think about things like "your mind now" or "the person up until some point in time." We slice time into past, present, and future as if we might really slice it this way without doing terrible violence; but we can't, any more than we can take a slice out of a person to study the operation of their heart.

If there is no "left side" of a thought, is there really a "beginning" of a thought, or an "end"?

If we don't slice up our minds, if we consider them as just part of a chain of events and outcomes, then look what happens: they become unfettered, extending over great distances in space and time and including books, relations, records, laws, statements, and arguments, as well as neurons.

Much more than they are extended in space, our minds are extended in time, as undivided processes playing out over many timescales. Our mental life is built largely of memory, and we function as intelligences and agents in the world largely through predicting, envisioning, and acting toward the future.

Any amount of introspection will reveal that we tend to spend most of our time in either what was or what might be.

Perhaps we should take this very seriously -- this idea that our very existence is contingent on being extended nonlocally in time. Many of the rather unsettling implications we've explored in Part 5 have hinged on an assumption that there is a state of a mind, a self, a consciousness, as it is right now. 

Could there be something fundamentally wrong with this notion that could extricate us from some of those disturbing directions of thought?

This view is slippery, elusive, and beguiling. 

A shattered rock teaches me something about a broken life

"Oh, no! Where did the rock go?" I looked out a window of our house and felt an impending sense of doom. 

Quite a few years ago someone we'd hired to do yard work had found an interestingly shaped angular rock about 18 inches tall (our landscaping has lots of rocks). He set up upright on a larger rock, then balanced a small rock on the tip of its decidedly sharp end.

Ever since, I'd carefully replaced the small rock when deer, our dog, strong wind, or some other force dislodged it. But I'd never worried about the larger angular rock.

Until it disappeared.

Well, not really. It was still there. Just in several pieces. The two guys who do our weekly yard maintenance had come on Monday. They'd focused on leaf/debris blowing, since our grass is barely growing in this unusually hot summer. 

(July was the hottest month ever in Salem, Oregon, going all the way back to the late 1800s when temperature records began to be kept. Which shows global warming is happening, and more intensely than expected.)

The guys must have knocked over the angular rock, shattering it on the large rock it was sitting on. When I saw the pieces I felt a strange sense of loss. Sure, it was just a shattered rock. But i really liked it!

Calming down a bit, I began to realize that all was not lost. The rock was still there. Just in pieces. I decided to see if the pieces could form a replacement balance rock. They could, even though the pieces were much smaller than the rock I'd come to love.

The new main rock was a piece of the old rock that shared its basic shape. The original balancing rock fit nicely on top of it. The rock piece below had a great shape, but I hadn't figured out to use it yet. 

Some additional reflecting turned my rock thoughts in a more philosophical direction. 

Life is full of breaking. Broken dreams. Broken relationships. Broken jobs. Broken health. Broken beliefs, religious, political, or otherwise. Broken all kinds of stuff. It's natural to feel bad when we see that part of our life has been shattered.

Hey, we liked our life as it was! Just as I liked the old balance rocks as they were. Thing is, though, we can always do our best to pick up the pieces of our broken life and refashion them into something new. 

Often this isn't easy. It takes time. But usually a new life comes into being that can be almost as satisfying as our old life. Maybe more satisfying. 

I had the bright idea of taking two shattered rock pieces into my office to see if they'd fit in a bonsai planting. I never trim the bonsai, but I water and fertilize it once a week. Amazingly, I've had the bonsai for about three years and haven't managed to kill it yet -- something I used to regularly do with house plants in my younger days.

The rocks sere a nice addition. The figurine of who I think of as a Taoist sage that came with the bonsai seems to approve, even though the balancing rock is poised to fall on his head.

This afternoon I wandered around our yard looking for a larger rock to replace the one that had shattered. I was OK with the smaller pieces, but they were much smaller than the rock I'd gotten used to looking at whenever I walked by.

I found one half buried in dirt. It's a pretty good replacement for Shattered Rock. When it starts raining again, the dirt should wash off.

So now I've got a balancing rock "sculpture" that is about as tall as Shattered Rock, with the bonus of three rocks being part of the sculpture, rather than just two.

And I found a way to use the interesting looking piece, along with two other pieces of Shattered Rock.

Yes, it's much easier to restore a broken balancing rock than to fix broken pieces of a life.

I'm just using Shattered Rock as a metaphor of sorts to remind me, and whoever reads this blog post, that even though it can be really disturbing to have some seemingly solid part of our life fall apart, frequently what replaces that broken part can turn out to be better than the original.

Or at least not much worse.

Marvelous mystery lies in the complexity of the world

Most of us want to believe in something greater than ourself. That's a worthy ambition. Problem is, religious believers head off in a misguided direction when they imagine that the something greater lies in a vertical direction.

Meaning, they fantasize that a heaven awaits above; or that higher supernatural regions of reality exist; or that their consciousness needs to be elevated beyond worldly concerns.

What these devotees of verticality fail to understand is this: the world right here and right now possesses all the majesty, mystery, and meaning that anyone could desire.

It just takes eyes to see, which, sadly, all too often religious believers lack -- because their attention is focused on mental concepts of a imagined vertical realm rather than the reality of what the world offers.

So what I'm encouraging people to do is extend their vision horizontally. Try to understand the marvelous nature of this world, all that extends in every direction from our own body/mind. 

Nature. Animals. Humans. Galaxies. Plants. Minerals. Science. Art. Culture. A limitless expanse that is partially known, yet mostly remains a mystery.

Not because it can't be known. Because it takes time and effort to unravel the mysteries of the cosmos, including the small portion we call Earth. 

It's a big mistake to think that scientists have a narrow, mechanistic perception of reality.

Sure, some do, but they're by far the exception. The prevailing view of modern science is strongly moving toward a systems approach that emphasizes complex interrelationships, not simple bits and pieces of matter/energy.

Jeremy Lent speaks of this in his book, "The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe." In the Introduction he says:

The Web of Meaning takes up where The Patterning Instinct [his previous book] left off, by laying out a framework for a worldview that could foster humanity's long-term flourishing on a healthy planet. It is a worldview of integration: one that identifies the unifying principles that flow through all things, while celebrating the differences that lead to the richness of our lived experience. 

It's a worldview that links together scientific findings in recent decades from such diverse fields as evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience and complexity theory, showing how they affirm profound insights from the world's great wisdom traditions, such as Buddhism, Taoism, and traditional knowledge from Indigenous peoples around the world.

This integrated worldview breaks down many of the barriers that tend to separate different forms of knowledge and activity in modern society. 

We're accustomed to thinking of science as existing in a different domain from spirituality. We generally view the intellect as distinct from emotion; the mind as separate from the body; humans as separate from nature; and spiritual insight as separate from political engagement.

In the integrated worldview laid out here, each one of these domains is intricately connected with the others in an extended web of meaning.

A complex web of meaning. But "complex" doesn't necessarily mean confusing, disturbing, undesirable. Complexity just is the way the world is. 

Yes, we humans like to imagine that the world is made of discrete entities. There is me, and there is you. Two things. I am me, you are you. Pretty damn simple. 

And yet... 

When I'm with my wife I'm a different person than when I'm by myself. Or with someone else. Every relationship is just that: a relation between two or more entities, in this case, people. That relationship is more than the sum of the parts of the entities. 

It is a process, give and take, a flowing dance that can't be understood by freezing motion into a static "me" and "you." In every relationship between two living beings, there is an astounding degree of mystery, of unpredictableness, of creativity.

We have no idea who our self is. Not really. Almost certainly the reason is that the self doesn't exist. At least not in the way most of us conceive of it.

We imagine an unchanging core at the center of our being. Consciousness. Soul. Ego. Self.

Whatever name it goes by, there's no evidence of it, even though it seems entirely real. So does a mirage, until we drive close to the shimmering pool of water in the middle of a road and realize that it only exists as ephemeral waves given off by a hot road. 

(When I was a child my mother lived in El Paso and drove to New Mexico regularly, so I became familiar with this sort of mirage.)

We have a lot of difficulty grasping that there's no enduring self -- just relationships between our body/mind and the world.

Zen masters are fond of asking their students to point to that supposed self, to their imagined Buddha-nature, to the "I" lurking in their cranium.

When all that pointing is shown to be illusory, they advise looking instead to eating a bowl of rice, or to sweeping the floor, or to carrying a pail of water. We find ourselves by losing ourselves in the greater world.

Jeremy Lent says in his book:

Along with other Buddhist schools, Zen recognizes that, of all the cognitive patterns blocking a deep realization of reality, the most insidious is the belief that "I" am an objective and fixed entity, rather than a mere abstraction. Philosopher Alan Watts illustrates this by comparing the "I" to the illusory circle of light created by a whirling torch or the flight path made by a bird in the sky.

It doesn't objectively exist, but we create the abstraction by weaving together a pattern of past and future.

The word for this Buddhist insight, anatman, which literally means 'no atman', is often confusingly translated as 'no-self', but it would be more accurate to translate it as 'no-fixed-I'. 

The meaning of the ancient Indian word atman correlates closely with the Greco-Christian idea of a fixed eternal soul that is freed from the body at death. When the Buddha renounced this core Vedic belief with the principle of anatman, it would have been as revolutionary as an early Christian claiming that the soul didn't exist.