Church of the Churchless

God, like money, is real only because of the human mind

As I noted in a previous post about Lisa Feldman Barrett's book, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, I'm enjoying the book more now that I'm past the introductory chapters.

One reason is that Barrett doesn't just describe how emotions are made. She embeds that description in larger issues. For example, her "Emotions As Social Reality" chapter starts off with the classic question, If a tree falls in the forest and no one is present to hear it, does it make a sound?

Even though I should know better, when I ponder this question my first intuitive reaction is to visualize a big tree falling in a forest with no one around, and it sure does make a sound. 

But that's my imagination talking, not reality. Meaning, I forget that the question says no one is present to hear it, and that includes me -- even though I'm just visualizing the tree falling, not experiencing it in physical reality.

It's easy to make this sort of mistake. After all, for each of us, the only way we know anything about the world and our surrounding universe is through the human brain. So for us, reality basically is synonymous with "how we experience reality."

This is true even on the cosmic level, though scientists likely are less prone to this thinking error. 

I wonder, how would the universe appear if there was no consciousness in it? I wrote about this back in 2007 in Consider a cosmos with no consciousness. 

I try to imagine a cosmos with no consciousness. No human awareness. No animal awareness. No plant awareness. No alien life form awareness. No angelic awareness. No awareness of any kind. None at all.

(Note: I consider “consciousness” and “awareness” to be terms pointing to the same mysterious phenomenon, as this Wikipedia article implies).

Now, this is where the thought experiment should end, because it’s already failed. For I’m aware. And awareness, or consciousness, obviously can’t envision a cosmos with no awareness, for the same reason I can’t picture what the world would be like without me in it.

Nevertheless, I keep forging ahead because the experiment is so intriguing, ignoring the impassible existential abyss that’s stopped me in my tracks.

I consider a universe with no life, no awareness, no sentience. It’s easy to do. I think: “What a marvelously simple thought experiment!” The universe appears to me just as it does now, planets, stars and galaxies filling the fabric of space, yet with nobody conscious of it.

Obvious questions then crash the party of my thought experiment: Who is doing the considering of this cosmos with no consciousness? From what perspective is this entity contemplating the universe?

It dawns on me that this entity, namely me, is equipped with eyes that translate a certain wavelength of electro-magnetic radiation into perceptions of which I’m aware. Photographs of distant galaxies, for example, from which I derive some of the raw imaginative material for my thought experiment.

Yet what if I had the body of a bat and sensed with sonar? Or that of a snake with heat-sensing capabilities? The world would look entirely different.

So my envisioning of the cosmos as illuminated by light is terribly anthropomorphic, a fact I’m reminded of every time I walk the dog and watch her spending enthralled minutes sniffing a bush that my smell-impaired brain considers to be nothing special.

So not surprisingly, Barrett's answer is:

A falling tree itself makes no sound. Its descent merely creates vibrations in the air and the ground. These vibrations become sound only if something special is present to receive and translate them: say, an ear connected to a brain...Even after the brain receives these electrical signals, its task is not complete. The wave must still be interpreted as the sound of a toppling tree. For this, the brain needs the concept of "Tree" and what trees can do, such as fall in a forest.

A tree is indisputably real, though. So is a forest. And so is the cosmos, or universe. While these things appear the way they do to us only because of how human consciousness operates, there's little or no doubt that something would be there whether or not humans or indeed any other form of awareness is.

This is similar to how Barrett views human emotions.

A third and final riddle is, "Are emotions real?" You might think this question is ridiculous, a classic example of academic indulgence. Of course emotions are real. Think about the last time you were thrilled or sad or furious. These were clearly real feelings.

But in fact, this third riddle is like the falling tree and the red apple: a dilemma about what exists in the world versus in the human brain. The riddle forces us to confront our assumptions about the nature of reality and our role in creating it. But here, the answer is a bit more complex, because it depends on what we mean by "real."

Barrett explains that some things fall in a perceiver-independent category, such as subatomic particles. If there were no humans, there would still be subatomic particles. (Such was the case for virtually every moment of the universe's 13.7 billion year existence, until very recently.)

She goes on to say that "Emotions are real, but real in the same manner of the sound of a tree falling, the experience of red, and the distinctions between flowers and weeds. They are all constructed in the mind of a perceiver."

So these are examples of social reality. Human civilization, Barrett says, is literally built with social reality. Money, to offer another example, only has value because we human give it value. Otherwise money is just a piece of paper or electronic digits.

Yet this doesn't make money less important to humans (though it is utterly meaningless to our dog and other animals, or to a person who lacked the concept of "money"). 

Likewise, I see the notion of God as akin to that of money. It has immense value to people who imbibe the concept of "God" with meaning. But for those of us who don't embrace that concept, "God" is just a word that, like "money," only has meaning to those who create that meaning in their own mind. 

Unlike a tree, there's no evidence that God exists outside of the human mind. Thus God has even less significance that a tree falling in a forest with no one present to hear it, since that tree possesses an independent reality while God doesn't.

The "magic" in magical moments comes from our own mind

After including a quote in a previous blog post about how we construct the environment in which we live, thanks to how the human brain functions, I got to thinking about the implications for magical moments.

We all have them, though it's difficult to say whether there's much agreement between people as to what constitutes a magical moment. Here's some examples from my life, using my own intuitive definition.

Birth of my daughter
Catching big waves on Maui with my boogie board
Marrying my wife
Seeing Janis Joplin perform in person 
Taking mescaline with a friend in the Sierra Nevada mountains
Spending two weeks in India with the guru who initiated me

Since I'm writing this post on my churchless blog, I'll use the last example as a focus of my discussion about what makes a moment seem magical.

For a long time -- I went to India in 1977 because I wanted to see Charan Singh, my guru, face-to-face, having been initiated by a proxy in 1971 -- I believed that what made those two weeks at Dera Baba Jaimal Singh in the Punjab so magical was the atmosphere emanating from the guru.

However, this doesn't make much sense. 

As I wrote about back in 2005 in "Did I see God in first class?", my wife didn't find seeing Gurinder Singh, Charan Singh's successor, to be at all magical, even though devotees of the guru undoubtedly did.

Psychedelic researchers speak of the importance of set and setting in determining the nature of a LSD (or similar drug) experience. “Set” includes the personality of the individual; “setting” includes cultural views about what is real. If someone with a devotional frame of mind joins a group like RSSB that affirms the divinity of a guru, then this person may very well see God sitting in first class. I, on the other hand, just saw an Indian man.

My wife, Laurel, joined me in Palm Springs a few days later. She was more interested in shopping and sunshine than attending the bhandara, but I did talk her into going to two RSSB meetings. At one of them she got to sit in the front row, just a few feet away from the stage where Gurinder Singh spoke and answered questions—a highly favored spot to devotionally-minded disciples.

Afterwards Laurel said to me, “He just seemed like a regular person.” I couldn’t argue with her. I believed then, and still do, that Master Gurinder Singh is uncommonly intelligent, insightful, well-spoken, charismatic, and inspiring. But I had no reason then, nor any now, to assert that he is God in human form. I’ve stopped being concerned with the level of divinity someone else possesses, and now am almost exclusively focused on getting in touch with my own hypothesized higher self.

So I now see magical moments as being akin to a happy moment, sad moment, exciting moment, boring moment, or any other kind of moment where someone's frame of mind generates the adjective before "moment."

Sure, there has to be a substantial outside reality in a moment. It's a mistake, though, to view external circumstances as producing the magical aspect of a moment, because different people will view those circumstances differently.

My wife saw an Indian man sitting on a stage. Many of his devotees saw a guru who is God in Human Form. Big difference. I highly enjoyed catching big waves that would scare someone who wasn't used to doing this. Big difference. I found Janis Joplin's singing and overall style really appealing. Others with a different musical taste wouldn't like her voice. Big difference.

Thus it's wonderful to experience a magical moment. But almost always the credit for the magic should go to the brain of the person having that experience, not to the external circumstance.

My daughter Celeste is a much better skier than I am, or my wife is. I remember us going with Celeste to ski on Mt. Hood here in Oregon many years ago. Celeste talked us into taking a lift up to the highest point on the mountain, where we'd never been before.

When we got off the lift, I instantly realized that the snow was much more akin to a sheet of ice. Celeste took off down the steep slope, turning with ease, giving every sign of having a magical moment up there on a sunny cold day with such a beautiful view.

Me, all I could think of was "I hope I don't break a leg" as I gingerly made my way down, snow-plowing in an inelegant fashion. My daughter and I shared the same external circumstance, but for her it was magical and for me it was terrifying. 

Feelings are an unreliable guide to reality

Thanks to a Church of the Churchless commenter who mentioned Lisa Feldman Barrett's book about how emotions are uniquely fashioned out of our experiences and environment, rather than appearing ready-made the same way in every human brain, I've been reading How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain with increasing enjoyment now that I'm past the initial introductory chapters.

Barrett, a psychologist and neuroscientist, makes a strong case for her admittedly out-of-the-mainstream view of what emotions are and how they come to be. She cites lots of research, both her own and that of others, as she systematically describes why the prevailing view of emotions is wrong.

So far, I'm finding a lot to like in her book. Her stance fits with other books I've read about how the human brain constructs reality, rather than being a mirror of reality. Of course, because most human brains are similar in many regards, we tend to agree on the more objective aspects of reality, such as whether a stop light we're approaching is green, yellow, or red. 

(That's a good thing for our traffic safety; not so good for auto body repair shops.)

I'm reading the book straight through, though I was tempted to skip to the "Mastering Your Emotions" chapter, since like most people I'd like more happiness/peace of mind and less sadness/anxiety. But when I started that chapter, I realized that it contained key concepts that I hadn't been exposed to yet, like the body budget, which should be in balance for optimum well-being.

So here's some excerpts from "The Origin of Feeling" chapter that I finished this morning. I found these passages to be interesting and accurate. It's easy to believe that how we feel about something is the way that thing truly is -- whereas actually we're simply looking upon it as our affect guides us to.

A definition: interoception "is your brain's representation of all sensations from your internal organs and tissues, the hormones in your blood, and your immune system."

Affect is the general sense of feeling that you experience throughout each day. It is not emotion but a much simpler feeling with two features.

The first is how pleasant or unpleasant you feel, which scientists call valence. The pleasantness of the sun on your skin, the deliciousness of your favorite food, and the discomfort of a stomachache or a pinch are all examples of affective valence.

The second feature of affect is how calm or agitated you feel, which is called arousal. The energized feeling of anticipating good news, the jittery feeling after drinking too much coffee, the fatigue after a long run, and weariness from lack of sleep are examples of high and low arousal. 

...When you experience affect without knowing the cause, you are more likely to treat affect as information about the world, rather than your experience of the world.

The psychologist Gerald L. Clore has spent decades performing clever experiences to better understand how people make decisions every day based on gut feelings. This phenomenon is called affective realism, because we experience supposed facts about the world that are created in part by our feelings.

For example, people report more happiness and life satisfaction on sunny days, but only when they are not explicitly asked about the weather.

...Affect leads us to believe that objects and people in the world are inherently negative or positive. Photographs of kittens are deemed pleasant. Photographs of rotting human corpses are deemed unpleasant. The phrase "an unpleasant image" is really shorthand for "an image that impacts my  body budget, producing sensations that I experience as unpleasant."

In these moments of affective realism, we experience affect as a property of an object or event in the outside world, rather than as our own experience. "I feel bad, therefore you must have done something bad. You are a bad person." 

...You might think that in everyday life, the things you see and hear influence what you feel, but it's mostly the other way around: that what you feel alters your sight and hearing. Interoception in the moment is more influential to perception, and how you act, than the outside world is. 

You might believe that you are a rational creature, weighing the pros and cons before deciding how to act, but the structure of your cortex makes this an implausible fiction. Your brain is wired to listen to your body budget. Affect is in the driver's seat and rationality is a passenger.

It doesn't matter whether you're choosing between two snacks, two job offers, two investments, or two heart surgeons -- your everyday decisions are driven by a loudmouthed, mostly deaf scientist who views the world through affect-colored glasses. [Meaning, your brain.]

...Affect is your brain's best guess about the state of your body budget. Interoception is also one of the most important ingredients in what you experience as reality. If you didn't have interoception, the physical world would be meaningless noise to you.

Consider this: your interoceptive predictions, which produce your feelings of affect, determine what you care about in the moment -- your affective niche. From the perspective of your brain, anything in your affective niche could potentially influence your body budget, and nothing else in the universe matters. 

That means, in effect, that you construct the environment in which you live. You might think about the environment as existing in the outside world, separate from yourself, but that's a myth.

You (and other creatures) do not simply find yourself in an environment and either adapt or die. You construct your environment -- your reality -- by virtue of what sensory input from the physical environment your brain selects; it admits some as information and ignores some as noise.

"Soul," the animated movie, has good lessons for living

Tonight my wife and I watched "Soul" while we ate our usual vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner: Trader Joe's Breaded Turkey-Less Stuffed Roast With Gravy, mashed potatoes, salad, homemade apple pie with wholewheat crust.

That's a soulful meal for us. No animals were harmed in its making. Well, our dog begged while we were eating, and she didn't get anything, so I guess we hurt Mooka's feelings. She'll recover.

Soul had arrived as a DVD from Netflix months ago.

We rarely watch DVDs now that we've escaped the clutches of oh-so-slow CenturyLink DSL and embraced Space X's Starlink satellite internet. But it seemed like Thanksgiving was an opportune time to watch an uplifting movie. 

I liked Soul a lot. Though animated, it's certainly not aimed at young children. I had trouble following some of the plot twists, and parts of Soul are disturbing while not exactly scary. 

Fortunately, I'd read part of a review of Soul by a Vox writer in December 2020, when the movie was released. The review's title is right-on: "Soul is Pixar's most visually inventive film, and one of its most poignant."

Since Alissa Wilkinson, the reviewer, clearly grasped Soul more fully than I did (she says she watched it twice, which explains part of her increased comprehension), I'll let excerpts from her review describe why I found Soul so inspiring and philosophically profound.

It just makes so much sense that our purpose in life isn't fated, predestined, meant to be, or a result of our strongest talents. The central message of Soul is to find the spark that kindles a joy in our living. Absent that spark, we're alive but not really living.

So if we've found that spark, this is something to be thankful for. Not just on Thanksgiving. Every day. Here's the most philosophical review excerpts. 

Midway through Soul, our hero, Joe — or, sort of Joe, but you’ll have to watch the movie to know what I mean — is sitting in a barbershop, in desperate need of a haircut before a big make-or-break gig that night. Joe (voiced by Jamie Foxx) is a jazz pianist whose performance career has never really gotten off the ground; to make ends meet, he’s been teaching middle school band. But he’s confident that he was put on this earth to play jazz, and tonight’s gig might finally be his chance.

Joe’s barber, Dez (voiced by Donnell Rawlings), is talking about his own life, something the pair have never really discussed before. Dez wanted to be a veterinarian when he was younger, following his discharge from the Navy. But his daughter got sick, and, as he says, “barber school is a lot cheaper than veterinarian school.”

Joe is surprised — wasn’t Dez born to be a barber? Isn’t that his purpose? He’s great at it, and he seems to love it so much. “That’s too bad. Now you’re stuck as a barber, and you’re unhappy,” Joe says to Dez.

But Dez tells him to slow his roll, because, as he says, he’s “happy as a clam” doing what he does. Sure, it wasn’t his dream to be a barber; he never felt like it was his “calling.” But he gets to talk to interesting people all day and make folks happy. Dez loves his life. And Joe leaves the shop with a lot to ponder.

That’s the philosophical thesis of Soul, the latest Pixar film from director Pete Docter (Inside Out) and first-time Pixar collaborator Kemp Powers (who also wrote the terrific upcoming drama One Night in Miami).

...The last little piece for all of the souls to acquire before they can head to earth is a “spark.” A soul can get this by working with a mentor, which is the soul of a dead person that’s volunteered to help out the new souls. (Think Mother Teresa, or Sir Isaac Newton.)

The spark is the focus of Soul, and — importantly — how a spark differs from a “purpose,” which one of the big beings that shepherds the souls around derides as one of those words the mentors use that don’t really mean anything. A spark is not your purpose. It is, instead, the thing that makes you feel like you’re living.

That’s such a compelling and imaginative concept for an animated children’s film that I had to rewatch the movie to make sure I got it right. Like Inside Out, which delved into “negative” and “positive” emotions in a more nuanced way than I’d seen in a film before, Soul teases out some distinctions that seem to run almost counter to our everyday way of talking about life.

We talk about some kids being obviously born to take up a certain profession; we ask high school and college students to take tests that determine their purpose or their “gift,” then cast those in terms of occupations. And if we had a dream of doing one job, but life or necessity led us in another direction, then we struggle with feeling like failures.

Surely some of the reason so many adults feel like they have to land their “dream job” or else they’ve failed in some way is as a result of movies — especially, I might add, the Disney variety — that relentlessly exhort children to pursue their dreams and not let anyone else tell them who they are. It’s not that the sentiment is wrong; it’s just that, according to Soul’s cosmology, it’s getting things a little backward.

In this world, you don’t have a predetermined purpose, which is to say that there’s no slot on earth into which you, specifically, are meant to fall. Instead, there’s something about living that, in turn, sparks life in you. And it may or may not overlap with how you make a living, or where you live, or myriad other things about you.

Which means that your worth as a person isn’t tied to the job you have, either. For generations, we’ve caught on to the idea that our value to society is based on what occupation we’ll have, and we’ve devalued some (blue-collar work, like plumbing, bartending, and working a cash register) while elevating others (white-collar jobs, like investment banker, lawyer, or professor).

We’re supposed to subscribe to the mantra of “do what you love.” And in a world where it’s harder and harder to make a living doing certain kinds of jobs, that’s especially dispiriting — a kind of utilitarianism that doesn’t capture the whole of a person. Soul tries to nudge the pendulum in the other direction, to say that a life lived in pursuit of the spark of joy, rather than some predetermined purpose, is the one to strive for.

Hope is the forward-looking side of thankfulness

Tomorrow is the Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States. So I feel like I should write something about being thankful.

Problem is, I've got doubts about the value of that. After all, for everything I can feel thankful for, there's a seemingly equally large bunch of things that I'm not thankful for. 

Yet we don't celebrate a Notthankful holiday, though maybe we should for the yin-yang balance.

Rather than thankfulness, I was leaning toward fashioning a blog post on the theme of hope -- which strikes me as being the forward-looking side of thankfulness. 

Meaning, we're thankful for good things that have happened to us in the past, and for good things present in our life in the present. 

But since we can't be thankful for something that hasn't occurred yet, hope is a placeholder for a future bit of thankfulness that we'll engage in if life turns out as we would like it to, yet can't be sure of.

Hope, of course, is a big part of every religion, though it often is termed "faith." Pretty much the same thing, though. We can have faith that we'll spend a pleasant eternity in heaven, or we can hope that this will occur. 

Like most people, I generally view hope positively. Well, except when I don't. 

I just used the search box in the right sidebar of this blog to look for previous posts I've written about hope. Google revealed six where hope was a primary theme. 

For relatives of MH370 passengers, hope is like religious faith
Abandon all hope...and be more active
Determinism and hope are good substitutes for karma and faith
Regret and hope are luxuries for the young
Maybe it's time to give up on hope
Hope is the secular equivalent of religious faith

Looking over them, it's clear that I've got decidedly mixed feelings about hope. It can help us through difficult times, but at a cost. Because when a hope is dashed, when we really want something to happen and it doesn't, we can feel worse than if we'd never hoped at all.

(Religions don't face this problem when it comes to hope in an afterlife, since obviously whether or not that hope happens is going to occur after this life, not during it.)

On the whole, I guess I favor a form of realistic hope.

Meaning, know what you're doing when you engage in hope. Keep in mind that hope will make you feel better as you contemplate a desired imagined future, yet isn't at all a guarantee that what's hoped for will occur, so be prepared for disappointment.

Here's some quotes from the blog posts listed above that provide an overview of how I look upon hope.

With belief in the existence of God, there also is essentially zero evidence that this is reality rather than wishful thinking. Nonetheless, billions of people cling to hope that after they die, they will land safely in heaven or some other supernatural realm.

Just as with the relatives of MH370 passengers, I understand why religious believers embrace their hopes. It feels good to envision a happy ending to a sad story, whether this be a plane that has disappeared or the end of one's precious life.

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

It's rare to view hope as something to be discarded rather than embraced. Don't we need hope? Isn't hope what keeps us going through tough times, with its power to present a vision of a better future?

Maybe not. I found Derrick Jensen's Orion column, "Beyond Hope," to be beautifully written and quite persuasive. 

Though his main focus is on the benefits of environmental activists giving up hope in favor of action, his piece has considerable general relevance.

For example, most religions put a lot of emphasis on hope, which is almost synonymous with faith. Supposedly we should trust that someone or something -- God, angels, Jesus, a guru, Brahman, Zeus -- will make everything all right in the end.

This weakens our own capacity to make life better for ourselves now. We imagine that the power to produce positive change lies somewhere else, not in our own hands. 

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

I much prefer hope in my current churchless frame of mind.

Hope is faith shorn of supernaturalism. Hope recognizes that almost always in everyday life the future can't be predicted with 100% accuracy. Yes, determinism rules. But often, if not usually, life is so complex some form of chaos theory comes into play, where small causes can have big effects.

Or, known causes can have unknown effects.

Either way, hope springs eternal, as the saying goes. Even when things look really dismal, and no way out seems apparent, there's the possibility of something unexpected happening.

Being found when you're lost in a wilderness. Recovering after a dismal diagnosis. Feeling better even though depression seems like it will be with you forever. Finding a true love after many years of loneliness. 

Hope is realistic. Faith isn't. Just as determinism is, and karmic theory isn't.

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

At my age, obviously there is much less in front of me than in back of me. The years I've already lived number far fewer than the years I have left to live -- unless I live until I'm 141.

Which isn't realistic to hope for. 

In fact, I'm becoming increasingly convinced that after a certain age, and I feel that I've passed it, both hope for the future and regret about the past are luxuries for the young. 

Why?

Because most young people have many more years to live. They have plenty of time to learn from their mistakes and to plan for a better future. So it makes sense for their psyche to do the sort of "ego feasting" Pollon speaks of.

What made this relationship fail? How did I end up in such a crappy job? Where do I want to live when I'm tired of this town? Should I have children, and if so, how many? Why doesn't my life seem truly meaningful? How can I make friends with people I really care about? How great will it be after I lose 20 pounds?

There's so many questions. Good questions. Great questions.

Our past and future are filled with them. As Pollon said, it is easy, and often fun, to time travel our way into regrets about the past and hopes for the future. Or other sorts of thoughts about what was and what may come to be. 

There's nothing wrong with doing this. But there's a cost. We can't be here and now when we're in there and then.

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

I'm conflicted about hope, the desire for something to happen. It certainly seems like a good thing, a shoulder to lean on in tough times, a positive compass heading when happenings in your life are going in the wrong direction.

I've relied on hope a lot, as have we all, most likely. I've dreamed of better times, of bouncing back from a disappointment, of finding a way to accomplish something difficult.

For most of us, it's difficult to imagine not living without hope. 

If we get sick, we hope we'll soon be well. If a romantic relationship falls apart, we hope that love will return to our life in a different guise. If we're fired from our job, we hope that our next employment opportunity will be better.

So hope appears to be a psychological drug with no negative side effects. It lifts us up when we're down, a mood elevator that doesn't require a doctor's prescription. 

However...

There's also something to be said for giving up on hope. It's unclear to me whether that saying, whatever it might consist of, outweighs the benefits of hope. I simply have a feeling, based on my own experience, that hope isn't always a good thing.

One drawback is that it contains the seed of disappointment. Whether that seed sprouts depends on the outcome of our hoping. If we fill our mind with a strong desire that X will occur, the appearance of Y with no sign of X is going to cause us to feel letdown. 

Now, would it be better if there was no hope for X? I don't know. Perhaps.

Ultimate reality doesn't exist, says physicist Carlo Rovelli

When I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based religious organization, for quite a few years I gave frequent talks to the RSSB faithful.

One of my favorite topics was ultimate reality. I loved those two words. Putting ultimate before the familiar reality produced a wonderful feeling of transcendent potential wisdom in me.

Not that I really knew what ultimate reality was. It was an aspiration, a goal to be pursued through daily meditation and the other aspects of the RSSB teachings.

Now, I hardly ever think about ultimate reality. Except when it comes up in a book or magazine. Like a story about physicist Carol Rovelli in the October 15 issue of New Scientist, "Do objects exist?"

...So I ask Rovelli whether we will live to see a full description of reality's core. He takes a dim view of the question.

"I don't think that it makes sense to think there is an ultimate reality," he says. "A forest seen from a distance is just a velvety green, but then you go closer, and you see the trees. They're real. Then you see the trunk is real, and you see the atoms in the trunks are real."

"Reality is the ensemble of all these things: they're all real, it's just about understanding things better and better and better. We should get out of this mindset that ultimate reality is matter or language or God or mind or spirit."

Beautiful.

Takes the pressure off of finding the tip-top branch of reality's tree. You can examine any branch, any twig, any leaf, and if that examination is conducted in the correct way, you're coming closer to knowing reality.

Last year I wrote about Rovelli's book, Helgoland, where he lays out his persuasive thesis that reality isn't comprised of things but of relations. Here's an excerpt from my "Each of us isn't a thing, but a web of connections."

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.

This fits with what I read this morning in a chapter in neuroscientist Patrick House's book, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness. The chapter is creatively titled, "The North African Rhino of Charismatic Megaquale."

(Quale, the singular of qualia, means a quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person.)

House starts off by talking about how those interested in animal conservation have a bias toward "charismatic megafauna" -- animals that are large, blunt, and beautiful. The blue whale, North African rhinoceros, and so on. Algae, viruses, beetles, and ants, he says, get short shrift.

This is akin to how I used to look upon "ultimate reality." I envisioned a megatruth at the top of the heap of lesser truths, a Truth so massive it made all those little truths appear insignificant, mere trifles. But this is a linear, dualistic, simplistic way of looking upon reality.

House then writes a paragraph where he argues a counter-perspective when it comes to consciousness.

So, too, do many theories about how a brain works focus on what could be called "charismatic megaquale" -- that is, those experiences that feel big and vibrant and can charm us into thinking that there is something it is like to be something: what it is like to be a bat, what it is like to be a North African rhino, what it is like to try to remember how many windows were on your childhood home, what it is like to remember looking through your eyes right now, and what it is like to experience large, generous emotions like fear, attraction, happiness, and sadness, which seem to take over the subjective world in one large brushstroke, coloring all its objects.

But so much more is happening to a brain in the process of acting on itself. Populating consciousness are more species of noncharismatic minor quale, which are often ignored and undetected, than any other kind. What is the point of theories of consciousness if they cannot just as easily explain the minor quale of human emotion as the megaquale?

Yes, agreed. This fits with how I've come to view mindfulness, as described in a recent post. One of my points was: 

The small things in life are just as important as the big things. One of my adages is I am a child of the present moment, who finds delight in small things. 

So I've discarded the notion of ultimate reality from my life's to-do list. Plain reality is plenty good enough for me.

Shabnam Dhillon's "usual address" belonged to RSSB insiders

Someone just sent me information regarding the house in England shown on Shabnam Dhillon's death certificate as her "usual address." 

She was the wife of the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), Gurinder Singh Dhillon. Since RSSB headquarters are in India, it was a surprise to me to see that an English house was shown as Shabnam's usual address. 

The person also sent along a Google description of when an inquest is performed after someone dies, which happened in this case.

A coroner must hold an inquest if:

• • the cause of death is still unknown
  • the person might have died a violent or unnatural death
  • the person might have died in prison or police custody

Here's the home ownership information. It appears that the Dhillon family didn't own the house that was Shabnam Dhillon's usual address. This shows the connection between the Dhillons and wealthy RSSB devotees.

A land registry search on the address quoted reveals it belongs to:

Rahendra (DOB Oct 1961) and Sunita Naidoo (DOB April 1965). Bought in May 2001 for £500,000.

Both are dental surgeons. Both are connected to RSSB (chairperson) of the charity.

https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-search/-/charity-details/1013061/trustees

Shows Sunita Naidoo as chairperson for RSSB charity.

Company RSSB Southall Limited  shows Sunita Naidoo as director since 2010 (address is Haynes Park, a RSSB center in England).

Company info is here: 

https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/03551429

This company is also related (RSSB is parent company). Sunita Naidoo is director

https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/06558863/officers

Doesn't lead to anything sinister - but it's always rich people involved with the guru. 

If the inquest knew that she was due to appear in court and that her appearance would be hugely detrimental to RSSB and the guru, I am sure the inquest would look at this in a different light.

Christian Nationalism defeated in Pennsylvania, but still scary

Politics is divisive and arouses strong emotions. Religions are divisive and arouse strong emotions. Mix politics with religion, and not surprisingly the worst qualities of each can combine in a toxic combination.

Such is evident in countries around the world where dogmatic religion fuses with narrow-minded nationalism. Iran. India. Saudi Arabia. Israel. There are others, including the United States.

This was personified in the recent midterm election here in the United States by Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania. 

Fortunately, Mastriano lost to Democrat Josh Shapiro by a large margin: 56% to 42%. But in the runup to the election, Mastriano often was described as the most dangerous Trump-backed far-right candidate running in a swing state.

A big reason for this was that in addition to the usual power of a Governor, in Pennsylvania the Governor appoints the Secretary of State, who oversees elections. And Mastriano thoroughly accepted Trump's Big Lie that the election was stolen from him in 2020.

So the reasonable fear was that if Mastriano was elected Governor of Pennsylvania, he would refuse to accept his state's choice for president in 2024 if Trump ran and lost to the Democrat nominee.

But the pre-election November 7 issue of The New Yorker contains a story about Mastriano that includes descriptions of his Christian Nationalism which makes Mastriano an even scarier candidate, since he not only embraced a political Big Lie but also a religious Big Lie.
Download How Election Subversion Went Mainstream in Pennsylvania | The New Yorker

Here's some excerpts related to his Christian Nationalism.

Mastriano, who is tall and bald, wore a black baseball hat. His wife, Rebbie, a chaplain, stood at his right hand, her jean jacket unzipped. Mastriano reminded the audience that he was running only because, a year earlier, in this very barn, a small group of followers had begged him to. “You urged us, even with tears in your eyes, ‘Please run for governor,’ ” he said. He had also received instructions from Heaven, Rebbie added: “God said go!”

...In the past year, grassroots groups, led by Faddis and others, have come to describe themselves as part of a statewide “patriot movement,” which Borick characterized as a “broadly defined populist and xenophobic movement.” 

The movement is fuelled in some quarters by what scholars call Christian Nationalism, which is centered on the notion that America is and should be a Christian country. Few people self-identify as Christian Nationalists; in 2021, Mastriano asked me, “Is this a term you fabricated?”

But social scientists describe it as a belief system characterized by Dominionism: the idea that God has ordained Christians to exercise control over political institutions in order to prepare for the Second Coming of Christ. “They don’t believe in one person, one vote,” Philip Gorski, a sociologist at Yale, told me. “They think they’re involved in a battle between good and evil.”

In 2020, this ideology helped drive the moral call to overturn the election. “Some of their most fanatical supernatural beliefs have been mainstreamed into the maga movement, such as the notions that Democrats are demonic or engaged in witchcraft,” Jennifer Cohn, an election-security advocate, told me.

In November, 2020, Abby Abildness, the state director of Pennsylvania’s Prayer Caucus and an “apostle” with the New Apostolic Reformation, a network of pastors, hosted a series of “Jericho marches”—religious precursors to the insurrection. Followers gathered in Harrisburg, likening it to the Biblical city of Jericho, where, according to Scripture, God knocked down the walls.

At similar marches in some states, people wore animal skins and blew rams’ horns, as they imagined the ancient Israelites did on their way into battle. Abildness declared her intent that, with God’s help, Pennsylvania’s electors would “go to the President” rather than to Biden. 

...Two years later, Mastriano won a special election for the State Senate. He pushed bills that would mandate prayer in schools and allow adoption agencies to turn away same-sex couples. “ ‘Separation of church and state’—anyone who says that, show me in the Constitution where it says it,” Mastriano has said. “It’s never been there.”

In the spring of 2020, when Governor Wolf called for places of worship to suspend in-person services, Mastriano appeared at protests alongside armed men who wore fatigues and Hawaiian shirts, a look associated with a militia called the Boogaloo Bois.

...In December, 2020, Mastriano took part in two Jericho marches. Later, on a conference call, he prayed that God would help protesters “seize the power” on January 6th. He continued, “Bless these letters that President Trump asked me this morning to send to Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy outlining the fraud in Pennsylvania, and this will embolden them to stand firm and disregard what has happened in Pennsylvania until we have an investigation.” 

...Mastriano, certainly, has remained steadfast. In September, he announced that, to win God’s favor, he would undertake a forty-day fast, to end on Election Day.

Mindfulness made simple, by my own mind

I like mindfulness a lot. It's become my favorite approach to meditation. But given how many books I've read about mindfulness, I'm struck by how overly complicated this activity can be described.

Which I think says more about the economics of the book business than about mindfulness.

After all, few people want to buy a book that's just a few pages long. So authors who write about this subject have to say a lot about something that appears to me to be quite simple.

Thus here's my exceedingly brief summary of how I've come to view mindfulness.

Naturally others likely will have a considerably different view of mindfulness. This is just what works best for me at the moment, though I readily admit that my perspective is continually changing.

When I can recall a blog post that dealt with an aspect of my approach to mindfulness, I'll share a link. (Turns out I could do this with all five.)

(1) As much as possible, I try to look without rather than within. The physical world grounds me when I pay attention to it. Often my mental world distracts me.

(2) Living in the present is better for me than living in a remembered past or imagined future, though often it is necessary to briefly sojourn in what was or might be.

(3) Emotions are to be embraced, not denied, whatever they are. What works for me is being happy when I'm happy and being sad when I'm sad. Ditto for every other emotion.

(4) The small things in life are just as important as the big things. One of my adages is I am a child of the present moment, who finds delight in small things. 

(5) Seeking perfection is an absurd quest. I realize that just as every other aspect of my life is imperfect, so are my attempts to be mindful. 

Once again, pure awareness strikes me as a meaningless notion

I don't expect people to be perfect. Everybody is flawed. To be human is to be imperfect. And since people write books, I don't expect the books I read to be perfect. I just hope for them to make sense.

Having finished The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness, I can say that this is a very good book about both mindfulness and meditation. 

But I came across a few things that made me go, Huh, that doesn't make sense. Notably, some mentions of pure awareness, since I don't see how such can exist, as noted in a post from a few months ago.

I doubt there is such a thing as pure awareness, or pure consciousness. Anyone who claims to have experienced such a state, including Sam Harris, almost certainly is mistaking a feeling or thought of pure awareness for the actual thing. 

So my attitude is that one part of my conscious brain is aware of other parts of my conscious brain, which could include a sensation of Wow, I'm experiencing pure awareness! My meditation rocks!

This leaves mindfulness as an activity, or ability, to be aware of the contents of consciousness, with mindfulness being part of those contents. Thus Harris is on the right track when he says that mindfulness practice leads us to see that the contents of consciousness are constantly shifting and changing within our mind.

Where I disagree with him is his assumption that somehow we are clear pure consciousness. This is at odds with modern neuroscience, as I wrote about in Brain's "dark energy" casts doubt on pure awareness. 

I wrote about my problem with Harris' claim of pure awareness in this post. What I said in 2016 still makes sense to me now.

The authors of The Mindful Way through Depression also elevate awareness into something that almost certainly it isn't. Sure, I like the metaphor of awareness being the clear sky and contents of consciousness being akin to clouds that appear and disappear in that sky.

Metaphors aren't reality, though. I see no solid evidence, or even semi-solid evidence, that awareness exists separate from what we're aware of in the same sense that the sky is there even when clouds aren't.  Here's some excerpts from the book about choiceless awareness, a notion I do think makes sense if it's viewed as being aware of everything within our experience, rather than focusing on certain things.

It's always possible to jump to choiceless awareness at any moment, simply by letting go of any and all objects of attention. This sounds easy, but it is in fact a very challenging practice because we have nothing specific to focus on.

We rest in awareness itself, without any attempt to direct our attention toward anything other than awareness itself. There is no need even to think that you are meditating or that there is even a "you" to meditate. Even these are seen and known as thoughts by awareness, and in the seeing, in the knowing, they are seen to dissipate, again, like touching soap bubbles.

OK, I don't have much of a problem with these paragraphs. Well, aside from the mention of "awareness itself." What the heck would that be? How is it possible to be aware, yet aware of nothing but awareness itself?

And even if this was possible, how could someone know they were aware only of awareness itself without a content of awareness that, at minimum, includes a thought, intuition, or sensation of "I'm now aware only of awareness itself" -- which obviously wouldn't be true, given that thought, intuition, or sensation being an object of awareness, not awareness itself.

The book then engages in some speculations that struck me as being at odds with the general theme of being mindful of what is actually present within one's consciousness.

As we engage in this practice, we may become increasingly aware of the distinction between the objects to which we can direct our attention, if we choose, and the space of awareness in which all experiences arise.

The objects could be thought of as celestial bodies hanging in space. In choiceless awareness, we become the space that holds whatever condenses momentarily within it. Awareness, like space, is boundless, having no edges or limits.

The invitation is to settle into this awareness, to be the knowing, the nonconceptual knowing that pure awareness actually is. Awareness is not itself subject to pain, although it bears profound and empathic witness to pain.

And so once we have become acquainted with it, we may find it easier simply to hold even the most difficult and painful of our experiences within it. We may even make the curious, but profound, discovery that awareness is already free, intrinsically whole, and deeply knowing.

I think this passage is wrong. There's no evidence that pure awareness exists. The authors make awareness, or consciousness, into a thing rather than an activity. I suspect they fell prey to echoing Buddhist/Hindu teachings here, rather than sticking with the science of secular mindfulness.

Yes, it's true that the human brain doesn't feel pain. That's why surgeons can operate on the brain while a patient is conscious. But that's much different from claiming that the awareness/consciousness created by the brain is not subject to pain.

Again, that claim assumes that awareness is a thing that somehow exists separately from what we humans are aware of. It's crazy for the authors to say that awareness bears "witness to pain." Everybody who has experienced pain, whether physical or psychological, knows that's bullshit. 

It is possible to endure pain. It is possible to deal with pain in a way that lessens its impact on us. But pain is a valuable signal that something is wrong. Evolution has given us pain because an inability to feel pain is exceedingly dangerous. People who don't feel pain typically don't live very long, since they're prone to ignore harmful situations, like a hot fire.

This pure awareness part of the book struck me as undercutting their main theme, as stated in this quote. Clinging to the notion of pure awareness is an attempt to make reality into something that it isn't.

As we said toward the end of the preceding chapter, mindfulness is the awareness that arises from paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally, to things as they are. It's a way of shifting from doing to being so that we take in all the information that an experience offers us before we act.

Being mindful means that we suspend judgment for a time, set aside our immediate goals for the future, and take in the present moment as it is rather than as we would like it to be.

Here's Shabnam Dhillon's death certificate (wife of RSSB guru)

Having been an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) for about 35 years, I follow goings-on with RSSB when they come to my attention. That includes news involving the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon.

On November 26, 2019 I wrote a blog post, "Shabnam Dhillon, wife of RSSB guru, has died." I included a Business Today story about her death which said in part:

Shabnam Dhillon, wife of Radha Soami Satsang Beas head Gurinder Singh Dhillion, has passed away in London. She was 57 years old.

According to a statement before Delhi High Court, Shabnam went to London on November 12 for treatment of gastric troubles. She and other members of the Dhillon family had been summoned to appear before the court in person in relation to the Daiichi Sankyo case.

As per the filing, Shabnam had undergone abdominal surgery in United Kingdom on November 20. She later developed some complications post surgery. She breathed her last at an England hospital at 3:00 am IST.

On October 14, 2022, last month, I wrote another blog post about her death, "Shabnam Dhillon's death leaves questions unanswered." Here's one question.

I'm pretty sure that there never has been any description of what the post-surgery complications were. So that's one question.

...Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that an autopsy was performed, and her body was cremated in early December of 2019. It'd be interesting to see Shabnam Dhillon's death certificate (if that's what they're called in Great Britain) to learn exactly what the complications were that caused her death.

If any reader of this blog lives in Great Britain and is willing to obtain a copy of the death certificate, please do so and email me a scan of it.

After I made that request, someone figured out how to get a copy of the death certificate and left a comment with that information. I managed to set up an account with the General Register Office and ordered a copy of Shabnam Dhillon's death certificate. 

It came yesterday. Here's a scan. My comments are below.

The death certificate says that she died at Luton and Dunstable University Hospital in Luton, Bedfordshire, England. It looks like Luton is close to London, so the Business Today story mentioned above had that more or less right.

It's a bit curious that her usual address is shown as 6 Church View, Clapham, Bedford, Bedfordshire. That's the most expensive property in the area (I want to say zip code, but that's a USA term). I thought the RSSB guru and his wife were usual residents of India. 

Her occupation is Housewife, Wife of G S Dhillon, Spiritual Master. 

The death certificate was registered by Emma Whiting, Senior Coroner for Befordshire and Luton. An inquest was held on April 23, 2020, about five months after Shabnam Dhillon died. According to Wikipedia, an inquest is held when a death is sudden or unexplained. 

Whiting's conclusion was that she died after developing septicaemia following a complicated medical procedure. 

It seems that she went to England for a revised bariatric surgery. Bariatric surgery makes changes to the digestive system in order to help someone lose weight. 

Naturally it's sad when a 57 year old woman dies. I find it especially sad that Shabnam Dhillon died because she wanted to lose weight via surgery. I'd envisioned her going to England for treatment of a medical condition.

Though I guess she did have a medical condition of sorts, since the 2019 bariatric surgery was "revisional," which I gather means necessary to fix a problem with the original surgery.

Lastly, all the time I spent as a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas taught me that the RSSB guru is viewed by devotees as having mystical knowledge akin to that of God -- since the guru traditionally is seen as God in Human Form.

There are many stories of previous RSSB gurus saving their disciples from harm by intervening in some way. That obviously didn't happen in this case, since the wife of the RSSB guru traveled to England for surgery and ended up dying from multiple organ failure.

I no longer believe that the RSSB guru is anyone special. So I just see this as an unfortunate death caused by a surgical mishap. But those RSSB members who believe the guru can save them from misfortune should remember that Gurinder Singh Dhillon wasn't able to save his own wife.

Meaning, in my view, he's just an ordinary human being like the rest of us. That makes his wife's death sad, not anything with spiritual significance beyond the usual meaning of an untimely death.

How the media and Republicans got the election so wrong

Being a political junkie -- someone who has loved to follow politics since my childhood -- I feel like my immersion in the United States midterm election that happened last Tuesday, and whose votes are still being counted, should enable me to draw some philosophical conclusions from what happened.

Well, at least I'll give that a try. 

The gist of what happened, for those who don't live in the United States and/or don't follow American politics closely, is that the widely predicted Republican "Red Wave" turned out to be a Red Ripple, if even that.

Both the mainstream media and Republican leaders thought that Biden's unpopularity, combined with the historic losses that have afflicted the party of power in a midterm election (meaning, two years after a presidential election, which happens every four years), likely would propel Republicans into a clear majority in both the House and Senate.

But currently, three days after the election, Democrats are poised to maintain control of the Senate (results from Nevada should confirm that tomorrow) and control of the House is still up for grabs. At best, Republicans now are predicted to only have a 5-10 seat majority in the House, not dozens of seats as was widely thought before last Tuesday.

So why did the election turn out so differently from what was forecasted? The polls turned out to be fairly accurate in most cases. And Democrats had done well in some special elections prior to the midterms.

Thus data and facts were available that should have enabled the media and Republicans to be more realistic about the election. Indeed, some Democratic analysts correctly surmised that the election would turn out quite well for their party, which proved to be the case.

One reason that predictions didn't mesh well with the eventual reality is the same reason religious belief doesn't mesh well with reality: a longing for a pleasing narrative is prioritized over understanding how things really are.

Jesus saves. God has a plan for you. Notions like those provide a foundation for religions to construct stories that make their believers say Amen! when they hear them. The religious believers are destined to have wonderful things happen to them because that's what the narrative they embrace says.

Pretty much the same thing happened prior to the election.

Both the mainstream media and Republican leaders embraced a narrative that Biden was unpopular, inflation was high, voters didn't really care about abortion restrictions all that much, history was on the side of the party not in power during a midterm election, so Democrats were going to have a horrible election as Republicans triumphed.

Facts that didn't support that narrative were ignored or downplayed. So now the blame game has started as to why Republicans did much worse than expected and Democrats did much better. 

The simple answer is that voters rejected the crazy conspiracy theories and right-wing extremism being pushed by many Republican candidates who won their primaries by spouting crazy conspiracy theories and right-wing extremism. 

Along the way the Republican Party forgot that almost always an election can't be won just by appealing to the Republican base, their core supporters. A candidate has to reach out to independent voters and Democrats also. But Republicans had so much faith in their crazy ideas, they assumed that other voters would also.

Which turned out, not surprisingly, to be an incorrect assumption. Faith only works when someone accepts the tenets that accompany that faith. Otherwise faith just seems like crazy talk. Not being a Christian, I have no interest in Jesus saves or God has a plan for you. 

Likewise, lots of American voters had no interest in the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, which became an article of faith for any Republican candidate who wanted Trump's endorsement -- as many did. So Trump became a sort of religious leader at the head of the Republican party. To disagree with Trump was to be an apostate, an infidel, an unbeliever, a skeptic.

And that meant political suicide in a Republican primary.

So many Republican candidates lost in the midterm election because they cozied up to Trump, their Dear Leader, instead of tuning in to what voters actually cared about: not that Trump lost the 202o election, but that American democracy was in danger by people who went along with the Big Lie that Biden won that election in a fraudulent fashion. 

Moderate Republican candidates did quite well in the election. This is reassuring. Most voters in the United States want democracy strengthened, extreme political positions weakened, and elected officials to be caring, compassionate, and competent.

Three words that definitely don't describe Donald Trump. So Republicans paid the price of putting Trump into an exalted position as the head of the Republican Party who can't be questioned, and of embracing a political narrative that felt good, yet wasn't founded in reality.

Meaning, they acted like religious believers. 

Feel more with the body, less with the mind

When someone asks "How are you feeling?" that familiar question contains within it a lot of profundity. Because how we answer it reveals quite a bit about ourselves.

Mostly I take a few moments to think about what I've been doing recently. You know, how well or poorly my day is going. Or week for a longer time span. I'd remember what's been bothering me and what's been pleasing me, then try to describe the net effect of my joys and sorrows.

There's nothing wrong with this. But reading "The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness" has led me to see that, like most people, I tend to look upon feelings in a mental fashion, not a bodily fashion.

Here's an excerpt from the chapter, "A Different Way of Knowing: Sidestepping the Ruminative Mind."

As we have seen, in doing mode we see the world only indirectly, through the veil of our thinking and labeling. If we think about our bodies in the usual way (from the perspective of our heads), then as soon as we feel listless on awaking, our mind fills with ideas about the body, what is going on in our lives, everything.

This way of paying attention will just make things worse. If, instead, we begin to focus on the body from the perspective of being mode, we open to a direct sensation of the body itself.

Moment by moment, we can become aware of body sensations but now in a new way, a way that does not keep us so stuck obsessing in our thoughts about how we are feeling in the body. This can help our feelings of sluggishness to dissipate or dissolve, like a fog lifting. We don't have to make them go away.

Sooner or later, they will inevitably fade on their own because we are no longer feeding them with incessant negative thinking, without even realizing it. In the process we shift from feeling powerless in their presence to having viable ways to be in relationship to them or anything else that arises.

The idea here is sound: we don't possess a body; we are our body.

When we look upon our body from on high, considering that we're an observer perched inside our head, we distance ourselves from the natural wisdom of the body as the varied experiences of life come and go. So if we want to know how we're feeling, being acutely aware of bodily sensations often, or usually, is the best approach. 

As we've said, doing mode and its thinking patterns tend to obscure the experiential quality of being mode. For this reason, mindfulness training involves extensive practice in getting in touch, moment by moment, with the direct experience of life unfolding.

The body is a great place to start cultivating this new way of being. The very physicality of raw bodily sensations provides an ideal base from which to develop a new, more direct, experiential, sensory way of knowing.

Anger. Joy. Sadness. Excitement. Calm. Love. Revulsion. Virtually every emotion and feeling manifests in bodily sensation. We say, "I had a sinking feeling," "My heart soared," "There were butterflies in my stomach when I got up to speak," "I was tingling with anticipation."

So instead of thinking about how we're feeling, or remembering how we've been feeling, becoming aware of bodily sensations is a more direct approach. Sure, after listening to what the body tells us, we may then want to put that knowledge into language that can be shared with others, since feelings are mostly private -- albeit often obvious to others, maybe more so than to ourself.

"You look upset," my wife may say to me. At times I deny this, but almost always my wife is right. I might be so used to that feeling of being upset that I don't recognize it in me. Dogs also are sensitive to human emotions. They don't need words to be aware of how we're feeling. 

Neither do we.

If, paradoxically, we can turn and face whatever it is that we are finding scary, difficult, or depressing rathe than perpetually distracting ourselves to no avail, we are actually still doing what the brain wants us to do: giving high-priority attention to the matter at hand.

It's just that we are no longer giving it attention in the old "doing" way. We are approaching the moment -- whatever it is, however it is -- not by reacting but rather by responding, by bringing an open, spacious, and affectionate attention to the feeling in the moment as it expresses itself in the body. 

Now we are in relationship to the alarm in a new way, one that provides us with a viable alternative to endlessly thinking about it. 

Why unhappiness with tomorrow's election will be universal

With today being midterm election day here in the United States, I may be too obsessed with following election results on TV tonight to write a post for this blog.

But a post I wrote yesterday for my political blog, "Everyone will be unhappy with tomorrow's election," has some philosophical undertones. Maybe even overtones. 

It ends with:

So soon I'll be looking on the bright side. And also on the dark side. Such is life. And politics.

Why I find mindfulness so appealing after 35 years of religion

Having given up on organized religion, an Eastern/Indian variety, after 35 years of embracing the lure of returning to God by traversing supernatural realms, I've become enamored of mindfulness.

(See here and here for some previous blog posts explaining why.)

Before making another attempt at this, this is how a book I'm reading, and enjoying, "The Mindful Way Through Depression," describes mindfulness.

As we said toward the end of the preceding chapter, mindfulness is the awareness that arises from paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally, to things as they are. It's a way of shifting from doing to being so that we take in all the information that an experience offers us before we act.

Being mindful means that we suspend judgment for a time, set aside our immediate goals for the future, and take in the present moment as it is rather than as we would like it to be.

It means we approach situations with openness, even if we notice that they bring up feelings such as fear. Being mindful means intentionally turning off the autopilot mode in which we operate so much of the time -- brooding about the past, for instance, or worrying about the future -- and instead tuning in to things as they are in the present with full awareness.

It means knowing that our thoughts are passing mental events, not reality itself, and that we are more in touch with life as it is when we allow ourselves to experience things through the body and our senses rather than mostly through our unexamined and habitual thoughts.

This is a wonderful balance to how religions typically view life, which definitely includes the religion I was a part of for those 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

The present moment isn't valued highly by religions. Neither are the body and senses. Nor is looking at things as they are rather than as they're hoped to be. Or giving up judgment.

For over three decades I accepted (with gradually increasing doubts, admittedly) that the purpose of life wasn't to be found in this physical world, but in leaving material existence and entering higher domains of reality beyond the physical.

So what RSSB taught basically was an anti-mindfulness: fill your mind with thoughts of God, the guru, and returning to the supernatural realm of Sach Khand; reject your weaknesses, often summarized as lust, anger, greed, attachment, and egotism; continually judge yourself to see if you're living up to the other-worldly standard of the RSSB teachings; look upon everyday life as an illusion not meant to be taken seriously, since your genuine divine form of existence lies elsewhere.

When I broke away from my religious dogmatism, it felt wonderfully refreshing to simply look upon myself as a human being having a human experience. Yeah, I realize that if you've never been religious, you're probably thinking, "Well, duh, why'd it take you so long to realize something so obvious?"

Good question. But not one that I spend a lot of time pondering.

The past is gone. I try to learn from my past mistakes. However, since they didn't seem like mistakes at the time, I do my mindful best to stay focused on the present rather than dwelling on what could have been if I'd done something differently in the past.

In no way do I claim to be proficient at mindfulness. I regret things that I've done. I worry about things that might happen to me in the future. I judge myself. I judge other people. Still, learning about mindfulness has helped me tone down all that.

I've learned that whatever I may think about reality, including the reality of my own life, the actuality of reality often turns out to be quite different.

So being open to surprises, to new information, to fresh insights, to being wrong -- that feels wonderful after so many years of erroneously believing that I knew what life was all about, including cosmic secrets that one day I would be privy to thanks to my initiation by a RSSB guru.

Now I look upon myself as an ordinary person living an ordinary life. After 35 years of religiosity, that feels absolutely extraordinary to me.

Instead of trying to fix ourselves, it's better to be just be ourselves

One of the joys of reading for me is finding connections between seemingly disparate books. As I wrote about a few days ago, I'm reading a book about depression and mindfulness.

I've also started a book by a neuroscientist, "Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness." Patrick House, the author, says that he doesn't agree with all of those ways, but in brief creatively-written chapters he makes the case for each way in accord with how proponents argue for it.

In his first of the nineteen ways, House puts us in the place of a sea creature.

It needs fast reflexes rather than slow contemplation because by the time either prey or a predator appears in the short distance things are visible in highly murky water there's no time for planning. By contrast, when creatures evolved to live on land, now they could see a lion, say, on the far-0ff horizon, and so had an opportunity to decide on the best course of action.

Thus there isn't much need for clock making beyond intervals of a few seconds [for the sea creature], which means that there is no need for the brain to whir up an emergency motor-response plan for the shark cresting over the horizon of the Adriatic shelf, because there is no way to sense the shark cresting over the horizon of the Adriatic shelf.

This usefully constrains the metabolism needed to keep track of the far outer reaches of the outside environment and means any need to plan movements is limited to the timing of events with a small, near-reflexive range.

Hiding in the center of these plans is the observer, the conscious creature, who is just an accumulation of movement preferences and plans trapped inside a sensorium, keeping track of what it thinks the objects around it are and what it might otherwise do with itself.

Then, in his third way, House speaks of a theory of consciousness focused on movement, on doing, which fits with the first way.

A body, too, is restless to get moving; in fact, the entire purpose of the brain is to make efficient movement from experience, and everything else, including consciousness, is downstream of those efforts. 

...Any act of thinking is just pretending to act out. Consciousness requires cells that want to move and that know roughly what will happen when they do, but are prevented from doing so.

...We are irritable animals that move well and think no faster than ten times per second; we are the product of the reduction of the one-trillion body problem [number of cells in the body, I believe] to the one-body problem; we are the product of a brain that is creating hypotheses the entire time about how best to act, knowing that all the outside world can do is irritate it and all it can do is learn, while alive, as much as possible from those irritations.

So we're hard-wired for doing, for action, for dealing with problems and opportunities in the world as conveyed to us by our senses and interpreted by the brain.

Which returns me to the depression and mindfulness book, "The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness,"

The authors persuasively argue that a central problem of being human is that we try to apply the same procedures that work well in dealing with problems outside of us to problems inside of us.

This is a big mistake, though one that makes sense to most of us, since it is how we've succeeded in figuring out why our car won't start, how to get a better job, and so many other things that pop up every day that need dealing with.

In short, we assume that doing will work as well for our internal problems as it does for our external problems, while actually what we need is being.

We're rightly proud of what we can do through critical analytical thinking. It's one of the highest achievements of our evolutionary history as human beings and does get us out of a whole slew of fixes in life.

So when we see things are not going well in our internal, emotional life, it's hardly surprising that the mind often quickly reacts by recruiting the mode of mind that functions so effectively in solving problems in our external world. 

This mode of careful analysis, problem solving, judgment, and comparison is aimed at closing the gap between the way things are and the way we think they should be -- at solving perceived problems. Therefore we call it the doing mode of mind. It's the mode by which we respond to what we hear as a call to action.

...Imagine a car trip during which, every time we check to see how close we are to our destination, we find that the car has instantly moved farther away from it. This is tantamount to what happens in the interior world of emotions and feeling states when we call in the doing mode of mind.

That's why we often find ourselves saying things like "I don't know why I feel so depressed; I've got nothing to be depressed about," and then discovering that we feel even more unhappy. We've checked our destination of feeling happy and found ourselves farther away from it. We can't seem to stop reminding ourselves how bad we feel.

No big surprise, given the title of the book, but the way out of this trap is mindfulness, which puts in a being mode of mind. A subject for another blog post.

I'm reading a good book about depression and mindfulness

Given how disturbing it's been for me to endure four days of non-functionality from Typepad, my blogging service, following a failed data migration to new servers (shared that post on Blogger since Typepad is so screwed up at the moment), I guess it was good timing that I got a book from Amazon about depression and mindfulness.

 Not that I'm actually clinically depressed, though I was at one point in my life, about five years ago.

What attracted me to "The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness," was a reader review on Amazon that said this was one of the best books about meditation, whether or not someone is depressed.

I've only read a few chapters, but so far I'm anticipating that the reviewer was correct. I'll share a section called "Get Me Out of Here!" that illustrates a central theme of the book: how our efforts to fix ourselves can make things worse, not better.

The fact is that when emotions are telling us that something is not as it should be, the feeling is distinctly uncomfortable. It's meant to be. The signals are exquisitely designed to push us to act, to do something to rectify the situation.

If the signal didn't feel uncomfortable, didn't create an urge to act, would we leap out of the path of a speeding truck, step in when we saw a child being bullied, turn away from something we found repugnant? It's only when the mind registers that the situation is resolved that the signal shuts itself off.

When the problem that our emotions signal needs to be solved is "out there" -- a charging bull or a roaring funnel cloud -- reacting in a way that will allow us to avoid it or escape from it makes sense. 

The brain mobilizes a whole pattern of mostly automatic reactions that help us deal with whatever is threatening our survival, helping us get rid of or avoid the threat. We call this initial pattern of reactions -- in which we feel negatively toward and want to avoid or eliminate something -- aversion. 

Aversion forces us to act in some appropriate way to the situation and thereby turn off the warning signal. In this regard, it can serve us well, can even save our lives. Sometimes.

But it's not hard to see that the same reactions are going to be counterproductive and even dangerous to our well-being when directed at what's going on "in here" -- toward our own thoughts, feelings, and sense of self. 

None of us can run fast enough to escape our own inner experience. Nor can we eliminate unpleasant, oppressive, and threatening thoughts and feelings by fighting with them and trying to annihilate them. 

When we react to our own negative thoughts and feelings with aversion, the brain circuitry involved in physical avoidance, submission, or defensive attack (the "avoidance system" of the brain) is activated. Once this mechanism is switched on, the body tenses as if it were either getting ready to run or bracing itself for an assault. 

We can also sense the effects of aversion in our minds. When we are preoccupied, dwelling on how to get rid of our feelings of sadness or disconnection, our whole experience is one of contraction. The mind, driven to focus on the compelling yet futile task of getting rid of these feelings, closes in on itself. And with it, our experience of life itself narrows.

Somehow we feel cramped, boxed in. The choices available to us seem to dwindle. We come to feel increasingly cut off from the wider space of possibilities that we long to connect with.

Over our lifetime, we may have come to dislike or even hate emotions such as fear, sadness or anger, in ourselves and in others. If we have, for example, been taught not to "be so emotional," we will have picked up the message that expression of emotion is somewhat unseemly and may have assumed it wasn't okay to feel emotion either. 

Or maybe we remember clearly the drawn-out feeling of an emotional experience like grief and now react with dread when a hint of similar feelings arises.

When we react negatively -- with aversion -- to our own negative emotions, treating them as enemies to be overcome, eradicated, and defeated, we get into trouble. So understanding aversion becomes fundamental to understanding what gets us stuck in persistent unhappiness.

We run into problems because the unhappiness we are feeling now triggers old, extraordinarily unhelpful patterns of thinking from the past.