Church of the Churchless

We are the only animal that can deny our animal nature

In some regards we humans have capabilities beyond those of other species with whom we share our planet. But in this regard we are inferior to those creatures: we are the only animal that can deny our animal nature.

Not everybody does this, of course. I'm proudly animal, as is Maxim Loskutoff, who wrote "The Beast in Me" in The New York Times collection of philosophical essays published in the newspaper, Question Everything.

As you can read below, Loskutoff vividly recognized his animalness when a grizzly bear stalked him and his partner during their hike in Glacier National Park.

But it's strange that so many people are reluctant to admit that they are as much an animal as their dog or cat. Or the chicken they ate for dinner. What else could we be? We're made of flesh, blood, and bone, just like every other animal.

Sure, our brains have evolved to have the capacity to think thoughts like, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience." (So said Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.)

This doesn't make such other-worldly thoughts true, though.

It simply shows that we are able to deny the reality of our human animality, covering that inescapable fact with layers of religious and metaphysical fantasy about how our true nature is ethereal soul, or some other supernatural notion with no foundation in fact.

The world would be a much better place if every person recognized that they are an animal.

This wouldn't turn everybody into vegetarians, but it would go a long way toward diminishing the sense most people have that humans are special, separate and distinct from all those animals we use, and abuse, for our pleasure.

Here's excerpts from the essay.

Obviously Loskutoff and his partner survived their grizzly bear stalking. They (literally) ran into a park ranger armed with a big gun who told them that the female bear was being tracked because she was almost twelve and having difficulty finding enough food at that age, manifesting increasingly aggressive behavior. 

Missoula, Mont. -- In the summer of 2012, the same year that scientists fully decoded the genome of the bonobo, the last great ape, my partner and I were stalked by a female grizzly bear.

...Several things happened in my mind at once. I realized the bear was following us. I realized she wanted to eat us, and I realized that I was an animal.

It was a strange epiphany. To be human today is to deny our animal nature, though it's always there, as the earth remains round beneath our feet even when it feels flat. 

I had always been an animal, and would always be one, but it wasn't until I was prey, my own fur standing on end and certain base-level decisions being made in milliseconds (in a part of my mind that often takes ten minutes to choose toothpaste in the grocery store), that the meat-and-bone reality settled over me.

I was smaller and slower than the bear. My claws were no match for hers. And almost every part of me was edible.

...I had one concern: to get us away without being eaten.

Civilization itself is an attempt to protect us from this feeling. From its earliest iterations in fire-starting and cave-dwelling to its current zenith in the construction of megalopolises, as well as the careful documentation of every birth and the methodical laying bare of each strand in every helix, civilization is a way of setting ourselves apart from the prey we once were.

Building walls, both physical and informational, to keep out the bears.

Yet even atop the highest tower in the most prestigious university we remain animals, directed by the same base-level needs and emotions that motivate living creatures from bonobos to rats.

...Of course there are aspects of our communal society -- caring for the old, the domestication of livestock, the cultivation of crops -- that link us to only a few other species, and other aspects, such as the written word, that link us to none as yet discovered, but in no place but our own minds have we truly transcended our animal brethren.

...As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously said, "Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun."

Most days I remain fully entangled in this web, cursing at my smartphone while rolling across the earth in four thousand pounds of steel. Yet there is something of the experience with the bear that remains inside me, a gift from my moment of pure terror.

It's the knowledge of my animal self. That instinctive, frightened, clear-eyed creature beneath my clothes. And it brought with it the reassuring sense of being part of the natural world, rather than separated from it, as we so often feel ourselves to be.

My humanity, one cell in the great, breathing locomotion spreading from sunlight to leaves to root stems to bugs to birds to bears.

All of us fragile, all of us fleeting, all of us prey.

Mystical experiences need testing if they become a worldview

As I've noted before, and surely will do so again, one of the pleasures I get from this blog is reading intelligent comment conversations on posts that I've written. Or in this case, on an Open Thread where the comments are the substance of the post. 

Below is a comment that Appreciative Reader left on an Open Thread in response to a comment by manjit. If you want to read manjit's comment, click on that link and scroll up to the preceding comment.

Appreciative Reader has a knack for saying things in a way that I've never come across before. I'm not saying that his ideas are totally unique, just that how he expresses those ideas often is wonderfully clear and creative.

He's correct in noting that every personal experience is subjective, so not rational, logical, or scientific. The world's greatest physicist, along with everybody else, is engaged in a totally ineffable experience when eating a strawberry. 

So mystical experiences are simply a subset of all experiences.

They can't be put into words, or pictures, or numbers, or anything else, just as any other experience can't. I make this point frequently on this blog: nobody can question someone else's personal experience, because they aren't the person having the subjective experience.

However, once someone claims that their mystical experience has a meaning beyond the personal, that's when I tend to agree with Appreciative Reader that reason, logic, and science come into play. He just has a fresh way of saying this, as you can read below.

That said, I'm not totally convinced that his thesis is correct about a worldview needing confirmation by reason, rationality, logic, or science. I put raspberries on my cereal every morning. The taste of those berries is "mystical," in the sense that no one but me knows how they taste to me.

But it seems a stretch to say that the fact that I buy raspberries whenever I do our weekly grocery shopping makes raspberries part of my worldview, and so requires confirmation by reason, rationality, logic, or science. 

Anyway, Appreciative Reader and manjit have made me ponder things that I usually take for granted. So their comment conversation has benefitted me in that regard. I guess I tend to see a dividing line between symbolic and non-symbolic sorts of experiences, which is a bit different from how Appreciative Reader sees things.

Yet maybe we're seeing similarly. So long as I simply enjoy the taste of raspberries in a subjective, non-symbolic fashion, I'm in the realm of unquestionable personal experience. However, as soon as I try to describe their taste in some way, now I'm in the realm of questionable interpersonal experience.

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

Dear manjit,

As ever, pleasure to read your thought-provoking comment.

You think Brian’s approach pseudo-scientific. I’m afraid I don’t agree, at all. I’m kind of curious why you think *that*, but I’ll let it pass, because there’s way more meat in your comment, that I’d like to address, and that I’ll be glad if you’re able to answer, whenever you are able. (I’ll bookmark this thread, so that I don’t miss it, should you end up responding after awhile.)

I’ll resist the temptation of addressing much of your comment, in the interests of (relative!) brevity, and instead focus on just two things, on which your thoughts will be of great interest to me.

The first, and most important, of where we disagree is where you say this: “I think one of your incorrect understandings of mysticism is that there is anything rational, logical or scientific about it.” I’m very interested in how you can possibly have arrived at that conclusion, especially in context of how I see this, which is as follows:

I agree, the mystical experience itself is not rational or logical, in and of itself. Nothing subjective ever is. If we’re content to experience whatever mystical experience we have, and simply stop at that, then, agreed, there’s no reason for reason, rationality, logic, or science to intrude in there. But the moment we incorporate that experience into our worldview, immediately it is subject to all of these things.

And nor is this peculiar to mystical experience, I’d say this applies to any and every subjective experience. You see the sun rise in the morning. Or, say, you feel that kind-of-painful-yet-pleasant pump in your bicep after working out.

Both of those mundane, non-mystical experiences, if you’re content to register them, and simply let them be, then that’s the end of it; and there’s no call to bring in logic, reason, rationality, or science into it. However, the moment you incorporate these experiences into your worldview, even in the slightest bit, then your surest way to arriving at a worldview, a model, that comports best with reality, is by following logic, and reason, and science.

Likewise with mystical experiences, surely? If you’re content to simply have those experiences, and then leave them be, well then, sure, that’s the end to it.

But if you go worldviewing your way with those experiences, no matter how much or how little, no matter how concretely or how vaguely --- even if only negatively, in questioning the veracity or the completeness of what we know about the world --- well then, right then, right there, is when it becomes subject to rationality and to science.

(To be clear, I’m not saying mystical experiences might not occasion reason to question, maybe even revise, our worldview. They well may. My point is, the moment you do even that much, the moment you do anything other than simply register that experience, completely passively and completely without any thoughts about it at all; the moment you incorporate that experience into your worldview [no matter how much or how little, no matter how concretely or how vaguely], right then, right there, is where science becomes the surest way of ensuring that that worldview, that model, those thoughts, comport best with the actual reality.)

Which is why I cannot see how you can possibly state, as you did, that there’s nothing rational, logical or scientific about mysticism.

My other point of disagreement is where you say this (and I’ll quote that paragraph of yours in full here):

“One man's "loose-jawed goggle-eyed imbecelic dogma" is another's belief that the universe was created ex-nihilo, like a rabbit out of a hat, or that life & consciousness are the product of the random, purposeless, accidental bumping together of inert matter, as if putting some oil and pigment in a bag, giving it a good shake for 10 seconds, then throwing it at a canvas could create a perfect replica of the Mona Lisa, and assorted other credulous and magical beliefs. Humanity has a long history of conflating the cultural status quo with reality itself, and implying anyone who challenges it is a "loose-jawed goggle-eyed imbecelic" dogmatist. Very often they're more right than wrong. However, very often they're more wrong than right.”

Well said, that. I agree with much of what you’ve said there. But the essence of it, the actual point of it, that is what I disagree with completely; and, again, wonder whether you might not end up changing your mind about this on thinking a bit more about it.

Haha, agreed, things popping into existence out of nowhere does sound crazy. That goes for lots of things, and indeed most things QM [quantum mechanics], agreed, absolutely. But why do we imagine that reality must necessarily comport with our native intuition about what makes sense?

After all, our intuition itself is shaped by our evolution, and is no more than what we needed to deal to best survive while running around naked in the wilds of Africa. Whether something *sounds* reasonable to our intuition, can hardly be the touchstone for evaluating whether something is *real*.

So then, if not intuition, then how *do* we make sense of the world around us, and within us? By following the evidence. By using reason and logic. In short, science. Even if that, for the present, leads us to such apparently goggle-eyed and imbecilic --- read “counter-intutive” --- explanations, as well as non-explanations, like things popping in out of nowhere, and quantum superposition, and the rest of it.

That is, there is a huge huge huge difference between the “goggle-eyed imbecilities” that science reveals to us, and the other extravagant explanations we think up about the world by means other than scientific. And what's more, basis what I’ve said just now, perhaps you’ll agree that if there’s apparently a double standard at play here, then it’s entirely warranted, in fact it is the only thing that *is* warranted, in this context.

   -- Appreciative Reader

Purity vs. pollution is a bizarre aspect of caste

Since I'm reading, and enjoying, Isabel Wilkerson's great book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, I was especially interested to read a recent newspaper story about Seattle becoming the first city in the United States to ban caste discrimination.

Caste, in Wilkerson's view, is at the heart of American racism, Nazi Germany's horrors against Jews, and naturally India's longstanding caste divisions.

I noted in a previous post how Wilkerson discovered that even currently among Indian scholars studying caste, she was able to tell who was upper caste and who was lower caste by the way they carried themselves and how they acted toward other Indians.

That surprised me. But I guess it shouldn't have.

After all, while discrimination against African-Americans is illegal in my county, there's still plenty of discrimination happening. Same applies to caste discrimination in India.

And in Seattle also, according to a BBC story, "Seattle: Why US city's ban on caste discrimination is historic for South Asian Americans."

On Tuesday, Seattle became the first US city to ban caste-based discrimination after a vote by the local council. Ahead of the vote, several South Asians stood in line for hours to share their stories with council members.

Academic Prem Pariyar was one of them. He says he fled to the US from Nepal in 2015 after his family was brutally attacked by a group of upper caste people for speaking up against atrocities.

But that didn't stop the discrimination he faced because of his caste. Once, he says, he was invited to lunch at a friend's house in the San Francisco Bay Area in California.

"I was hesitant [to go] as caste dictates where you sit and eat, but I thought it will be different here as people are educated, in a country where human rights are valued," Mr Pariyar says.

But just as he was about to serve food for himself, he was asked not to touch anything. Instead, someone else handed him a plate of food.

...Mr Pariyar says the incident at his friend's house reminded him of something from his childhood in Nepal: his teacher spat out the water he gave her after finding out he belonged to a lower caste.

In her "Purity versus Pollution" chapter that I read today, Wilkerson describes similar examples of how caste discrimination has functioned in India and the United States. The chapter starts with these paragraphs.

The fourth pillar of caste rests upon the fundamental belief in the purity of the dominant caste and the fear of pollution from the castes deemed beneath it. Over the centuries, the dominant caste has taken extreme measures to protect its sanctity from the perceived taint of the lower castes.

Both India and the United States at the zenith of their respective caste systems, and the short-lived but heinous regime of the Nazis, raised the obsession with purity to a high, if absurdist, art.

In some parts of India, the lowest-caste people were to remain a certain number of paces from any dominant-caste person while walking out in public -- somewhere between twelve and ninety-six steps away, depending on the castes in question. They had to wear bells to alert those deemed above them so as not to pollute them with their presence.

A person in the lowest subcastes in the Maratha region had to "drag a thorny branch with him to wipe out his footprints" and prostrate himself on the ground if a Brahmin passed, so that his "foul shadow might not defile the holy Brahmin."

Likewise, Wilkerson describes how well into the twentieth-century, African-Americans couldn't use white beaches, lakes, and swimming pools because the dominant caste -- Whites -- were afraid of being polluted by the subordinate caste, Blacks.

This is bizarre. Fear of pollution isn't solely a religious preoccupation, but it requires a religious mindset, even if not expressed explicitly as a religious dogma.

For example, I recall with present-day amusement how frantic my fellow devotees of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based religious group that I belonged to for 35 years, would become in a restaurant after the RSSB guru decreed that animal rennet couldn't be eaten.

Rennet is used to make cheese. So if a group of us RSSB disciples wanted to order a pizza at a restaurant, the most fanatic (which excluded me) would quiz the poor waiter if the cheese was made with animal rennet or vegetable rennet.

He or she wouldn't know, not surprisingly. "Please go in the kitchen and check," someone would say.

I'd be embarrassed, since even though I've been a vegetarian for more than fifty years, I realized that the minuscule amount of animal rennet in a cheese pizza was meaningless to anyone but the people most obsessed with absolute vegetarian/karmic purity.

What's going on here, I'm pretty sure, is the doctrine of essences that I've read about in numerous books. This is the notion that things, or people, can possess an unseen essence that has certain magical powers even though there is no evidence for such.

So if someone is shown a sweater and asked whether they'd like to have it to wear, they typically say "yes." But if they're told that the sweater was worn by a murderer when he killed someone, they'll say "no," since now the sweater is viewed as possessing the essence of a murderer.

Wilkerson writes:

As the middle castes pressed for admittance to the rungs above them, what was consistent was the absolute exclusion of the "polluting" lowest caste. African-Americans were not just not citizens, they were, like their Dalit counterparts in India, forced outside the social contract.

They and the Dalits bore the daily brunt of the taint ascribed to their very beings. The Dalits were not permitted to drink from the same cups as the dominant castes in India, live in the villages of the upper-caste people, walk through the front doors of upper-caste homes, and neither were African-Americans in much of the United States for most of its history. 

...Their exclusion was used to justify their exclusion. Their degraded station justified their degradation. They were consigned to the lowliest, dirtiest jobs and thus were seen as lowly and dirty, and everyone in the caste system absorbed the message of their degradation.

Mindfulness helps bring body and mind into the same place

Inspiration can be found anywhere. When I started to read the current issue of TIME magazine, I was pleasantly surprised to turn a page and find "5 ways to be mindful without meditating." (The online version of the story has 8 ways.)

I liked what Angela Haupt had to say about how our body can be in one place while our mind is in a far distant place -- often not just geographically, but also in time, since almost everybody is prone to thoughts of the past and future even as our body is firmly in the present.

After reading Haupt's story, I've tried to pay more attention to bringing my mind into sync with what my body is doing. As she says in the excerpt below, my body can be in either a neutral or pleasant place while my mind is worrying about something that happened in the past, or about something that could happen in the future.

Of course, our ability to time travel is part of what makes us human. So it's fine to do this in moderation. But when our mind is habitually at odds with the state of our body, that's not conducive to our happiness and well-being.

Here's the first part of the TIME story. Click on the PDF file at the end of this excerpt to see the eight non-meditative ways to practice mindfulness. Or click here for the TIME story.

There’s a certain disconnect that plagues almost everyone nowadays: Your body is doing one thing—sitting in a meeting, eating dinner with the family—while your brain is miles away.

Some might call it multitasking, but mental-health experts say it’s more problematic. Corrie Goldberg, a clinical psychologist and founder of Shore Therapy Center for Wellness in the Chicago area, says that a lack of mindfulness can deprive us of a deep connection to our most meaningful experiences. “Our body moves through the motions of life, but our head isn’t in the game,” she says.

Not being grounded in the moment—instead allowing our thoughts to skip from place to place—is an open invitation to stress and unpleasant emotions. “Our minds tend to focus on worries about the future, or upsets from the past, even when our body may be in a neutral or pleasant place.”

Enter mindfulness. The now-ubiquitous concept, which is rooted in Buddhism, has surged in popularity in recent years and is generally defined as turning your attention inward and maintaining an awareness of your thoughts, bodily sensations, and environment. The benefits are vast. A mindfulness practice can help lower stress, reduce anxiety (as effectively as medication, in some cases), increase a person’s capacity to savor positive experiences, stop rumination, promote concentration, and more.

Mindfulness can also help cure the blahs. Three years into the pandemic, Kelly Neupert, a psychotherapist in Chicago, says that many of her clients feel like they’re languishing. Becoming more mindful has helped them get in touch with what they’re feeling and why, she says—and cultivated a greater capacity to handle life’s curveballs.

After adopting a mindfulness practice, “I typically see that they’re less reactive and more intentional,” Neupert says. “They can respond to other people rather than react. The things that used to set them off, like running late for work or getting cut off, feel more tolerable.”

Meditation is the best-known way to achieve mindfulness—but it isn’t appealing to and doesn’t work for everyone. Some find that it’s awkward, or that they have trouble sitting still. Fortunately, “a person can practice mindfulness while engaged in literally any activity,” Goldberg says, and with any available amount of time.

Here are eight ways to practice mindfulness if meditation isn’t your thing.
Download How to Be Mindful if You Hate Meditating | Time

Why I prefer Buddhism to Advaita Vedanta

On Sam Harris' Waking Up app, I noticed there was a lengthy (1 hr 37 m) discussion between Harris and Swami Sarvapriyananda, a Hindu monk and Minister of the Vedanta Society of New York.

So for the past few days I'd listen to 10-15 minutes or so of the discussion every morning. Today I finished listening to the whole exchange as I was driving around in my car.

It was really interesting.

Both Harris and Sarvapriyananda are highly knowledgeable about both Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. Of course, Harris embraces Buddhism and Sarvapriyananda Vedanta, so each of them is more expert in their favored philosophy.

While Harris and Sarvapriyananda had a lot in common, some core differences couldn't be bridged.

Buddhism is all about emptiness, the lack of anything in existence standing in isolation from other entities, while Vedanta assumes that humans possess an eternal soul, Atman, that is essentially one with God, Brahman.

I thought that Harris had the better arguments in this regard. The notion of no-self is solidly compatible with modern neuroscience, while Atman and Brahman are religious abstractions. 

I can't recall any instance where Harris relied on a Buddhist scripture to make a point (he favors the Tibetan Buddhism sect of Dzogchen), while Sarvapriyananda frequently cited Hindu or Vedanta writings, speaking them in an Indian language, then translating into English, which he speaks very well.

Consciousness is key in Vedanta.

For Harris, consciousness probably arises from the matter of the brain, though he acknowledges that many mysteries remain about the nature of consciousness. By contrast, for Sarvapriyananda, human consciousness partakes of the universal consciousness of Brahman, God.

However, Sarvapriyananda never explained what the evidence is for this. Apparently it is just supposed to be taken on faith, even though he would repeatedly say that Advaita Vedanta doesn't require religious faith, just a willingness to experience the truths of Vedanta.

At one point Harris invited Sarvapriyananda to take five minutes or so to lead Harris and listeners to the discussion in a Vedanta exercise, or meditation, that would show the approach of Vedanta.

But Sarvapriyananda used that time, and more, to describe a logical approach to Vedanta, which disappointed me.

Often I listen to Harris' guided meditations on the Waking Up app. He uses a variety of simple exercises to help the listener understand that there is no thinker inside our head in addition to thoughts, no hearer inside our head in addition to hearing, and so on.

So I came away feeling that Buddhism is on a much solider foundation when it comes to the doctrine of no-self than Advaita Vedanta is when it comes to the doctrine of Atman, or soul. Still, I found Sarvapriyananda to be appealingly humble and open-minded.

He just buys into the truth of Vedanta more strongly than I see Harris buying into the truth of Buddhism, perhaps because Harris' secular variety of Buddhism is much less dogmatic than Sarvapriyananda's religious brand of Advaita Vedanta. 

I got the impression that Sarvapriyananda embraces Vedanta because it tells such a compelling story within the Hindu tradition. Indeed, Harris admitted that he finds the notion of Atman and Brahman to be more appealing than Buddhist emptiness and no-self.

However, Harris considers Buddhism to be closer to the truth. I agree.

The profundity of "There are no black people in Africa"

As Alan Watts was fond of saying, echoing a basic tenet of Taoism, you can't have good without bad, virtue without vice, up without down -- or indeed any quality without its opposite. 

Everything becomes what it is in relation to something that it isn't. 

If everybody in the world had always believed in God, there would be no religious people. There would just be people. Ditto if everybody had always lived without any conception of God. Then there would be no atheists, just people.

Before sentient creatures who can conceive of abstractions arrived on our planet, the natural world didn't have the conceptual divisions that are so much a part of human existence. 

A hurricane or earthquake wasn't destructive until we humans evolved the ability to conceive of "destructive." 

Of course, I'm not suggesting that we'd be better off with a more limited brain. Conceptualization is entertaining, valuable, and a great survival tool. If concepts weren't favored by natural selection, we wouldn't have evolved the capacity for them.

But it's wise to keep in mind how arbitrary many of our customary ways of dividing up the world are. Here's another excerpt from the book by Isabel Wilkerson that I'm reading: "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents."

(My first blog post about Caste is here.)

A few years ago, a Nigerian-born playwright came to a talk that I gave at the British Library in London. She was intrigued by the lecture: the idea that 6 million African-Americans had had to seek political asylum within the borders of their own country during the Great Migration, a history that she had not known of.

She talked with me afterward and said something that I have never forgotten that startled me in its simplicity. 

"You know that there are no black people in Africa," she said. Most Americans, weaned on the myth of drawable lines between human beings, have to sit with that statement. It sounds nonsensical to our ears. Of course there are black people in Africa. There is a whole continent of black people in Africa. How could anyone not see that?

"Africans are not black," she said. "They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are."

What we take as gospel in American culture is alien to them, she said.

"They don't become black until they go to America or come to the U.K.," she said. "It is then that they become black."

It was in the making of the New World that Europeans became white, Africans black, and everybody else yellow, red, or brown. It was in the making of the New World that humans were set apart on the basis of what they looked like, identified solely in contrast to one another, and ranked to form a caste system based on a new concept called race. It was in the process of ranking that we were all cast into assigned roles to meet the needs of the larger production.

None of us are ourselves.

I think that's true. But wouldn't it be wonderful if it weren't true, if each of us actually were ourselves, and there was no societal pressure to put people into boxes that don't reflect who they truly are? Wilkerson speaks of containers.

Each of us is in a container of some kind. The label signals to the world what is presumed to be inside and what is to be done with it. The label tells you what shelf your container supposedly belongs on. In a caste system, the label is frequently out of sync with the contents, mistakenly put on the wrong shelf and this hurts people and institutions in ways we may not always know.

Caste is a powerful way of looking at prejudice in both India and America

Recently TIME magazine had a cover story about what's wrong with the United States (a big subject!) that featured a lengthy essay by Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize winning Black author and university instructor.

I was blown away by her emphasis on caste being at the core of our nation's social problems, rather than the more familiar racism. Wilkerson talked about her 2020 book, "Caste: The Origin of our Discontents," which focuses on caste in the United States, India, and Nazi Germany.

Somehow I hadn't heard about that book until now. But I made up for that oversight by immediately ordering it from Amazon. I've only read the first 35 pages so far. I'm liking the book a lot. Here's how Wilkerson describes caste early on in the book.

A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it.

A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.

Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States.

Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.

Here's an excerpt from Caste that I found fascinating. When Wilkerson spoke to some Indian scholars of caste, she found that she could tell who was upper-caste and lower-caste from their bearing and behavior. I'll have more to say about the book after I'm further along in it.

In embarking upon this work, I devoured books about caste in India and in the United States. Anything with the word caste in it lit up my neurons. I discovered kindred spirits from the past -- sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, writers --- whose work carried me through time and across generations.

Many had labored against the tide, and I felt that I was carrying on a tradition and was not walking alone.

In the midst of my research, word of my inquiries spread to some Indian scholars of caste, based here in America. They invited me to speak at an inaugural conference on caste and race at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, the town where W.E.B. Du Bois's papers are kept.

There, I told the audience that I had written a six-hundred-page book about the Jim Crow era in the American South, the time of naked white supremacy, but that the word racism did not appear anywhere in the narrative.

I told them that, after spending fifteen years studying the topic and hearing the testimony of the survivors of the era, I realized that the term was insufficient. Caste was the more accurate term, and I set out to them the reasons why.

They were both stunned and heartened. The plates of Indian food kindly set before me at the reception thereafter sat cold due to the press of questions and the sharing that went on into the night.

At a closing ceremony that I had not been aware of ahead of time, the hosts presented to me a bronze-colored bust of the patron saint of the low-born of India, Bhimrao Ambedkar, the Dalit leader who had written to Du Bois all those decades before.

It felt like an initiation into a caste to which I had somehow always belonged. Over and over, they shared scenarios of what they had endured, and I responded in personal recognition, as if even to anticipate some particular turn or outcome.

To their astonishment, I began to be able to tell who was high-born and who was low-born among the Indian people among us, not from what they looked like, as one might in the United States, but on the basis of the universal human response to hierarchy -- in the case of an upper-caste person, an inescapable certitude in bearing, demeanor, behavior, a visible expectation of centrality.

After one session, I went up to a woman presenter whose caste I had ascertained from observing her interactions. I noticed that she had reflexively stood over the Dalit speaker and had taken it upon herself to explain what the Dalit woman had just said or meant, to take a position of authority as if by second nature, perhaps without realizing it.

We chatted a bit, and then I said to her, "I believe you must be upper caste, are you not?" She looked crestfallen. "How did you know?" she said, "I try so hard."

We talked for what seemed an hour more, and I could see the effort it took to manage the unconscious signals of encoded superiority, the presence of mind necessary to counteract the programming of caste. I could see how hard it was even for someone committed to healing the caste divide, who was, as it turned out, married to a man from the subordinate caste and who was deeply invested in egalitarian ideals.

Why a guru shouldn't be worshipped

Recently someone sent me a link to "The Guru Has No Turban" by Greg Leveille.

It's well worth reading if you've ever believed that a guru should be worshipped as a divine being. Or worshipped for any other reason, like their supposed perfection.

The article is centered on the Sant Mat teachings that I followed for thirty-five years.

Leveille appears to believe in a basic truth of those teachings -- that it is possible to know a formless Celestial Awareness -- but rejects the Sant Mat notion that the guru is greater than God, because God isn't available to help us while the guru is.

So he manages to balance some justified skepticism about gurus while embracing a mystical approach to meditation.

I like this part of his article.

If you read about (or follow) five or more spiritual groups during your lifetime, there’s a good chance you will hear a high percentage of these common myths that Kabir and other advanced teachers have complained about.

“Only the guru can take you to Heaven.”

“Only the guru can save you.”

“Everything that the guru says is the absolute truth.”

“A true guru never has to think or use the mind.”

“Once you’re initiated, the true guru will always be inside of you.”

“The true guru is God in a human form.”

“A perfect master will always be there when you die.”

“Guru worship is essential.”

“The guru is greater than God.”

“You can’t see or feel God inside or outside of you”

“But you can always see your guru inside and outside of you.”

“My guru died, but he can still help me while I’m alive.”

“He died, but he can still perform miracles and take me to heaven.”

“The mantra won’t work unless it’s blessed by the guru.”

“Your life is wasted without initiation by a perfect guru.”

“A perfect living master (PLM) will help you clear all your karma.”

“A perfect master will take you to heaven within 1-to-4 lifetimes.”

“A PLM is responsible for all of the miracles that you experience.”

“Gurus never make mistakes.”

“Until you meet your perfect master/guru within you and talk with him, then you cannot go to heaven.”

“You have to serve, honor, love and worship your guru above and beyond everyone and everything else.”

I also enjoyed the short quote Leveille included from David Lane's 2011 book.

This is the description that Amazon used to introduce David’s Book, The Guru Has No Turban.

“One of the more celebrated, if inappropriate, honorifics we have bestowed on our chosen gurus is the term "Perfect Master." It may be one thing to call a teacher a master (he or she may know more than us in a certain subject), but it is quite another to call such mastery "perfect." The first and most troublesome problem is one of definition: what do we actually mean by "perfect"?

My sense is that we fundamentally misunderstand the honorific and we do not fully understand the implications involved when applying such terms to living human beings. My argument is a very simple one: The guru is not perfect, at least not in the ways that we may assume.

But despite the fact that we can easily demonstrate the limitations and fallibilities of our gurus, we somehow hold on to the naive concept that a guru can be an all-knowing and all-powerful being.”

So true. I'm not sure why guru-worship has such a hold on so many people.

In my case, I was attracted to the idea that it was possible to traverse supernatural regions of reality in the company of a Perfect Living Master who had been sent by God to collect certain souls whose destiny was to return to heaven, known as Sach Khand.

I went to high school and college in the 1960s. The Beatles were a big part of my musical life. The teachings of Sant Mat in the guise of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) seemed like the ultimate Magical Mystery Tour. 

And you didn't need LSD or any other psychedelic. Just a guru who could take you on that tour and a willingness to accept the vows required to be initiated by the guru, which included several hours of daily meditation.

But that was then, and this is now. I have a very different attitude toward Sant Mat and RSSB after spending most of those thirty-five years deeply devoted to the teachings, yet eventually realizing the truth of what Leveille says in his article about gurus.

He's much more positive about mysticism than I am. However, I resonate with much of what Leveille says at the end of his piece.

Not everyone is ready to tread the inward mystic path of divine awareness. If, as a spiritual seeker, you’re drawn to some other type of yoga, mindful awareness, or guru-bhakti path, then that is perfectly fine.

If you follow your heart, you can’t go wrong.

Divine awareness is a long and winding road that eventually causes everyone to choose and then to grow from different spiritual experiences along the way.

However, those souls who have begun to feel the inner pull of divine awareness are ready to follow this very precious path. It’s the secret path of many of the greatest ancient Taoists as well and most modern Sant Mat, Sufi, Celestial Awareness, and direct consciousness teachers. It’s the path that Lao Tzu, Kabir, Hafiz, Soami Ji, Shiv Brat Lal, Faqir, and Captain Ji followed as well.

These are teachers who don’t want to be worshiped. These are teachers who help you to discover and follow the divine awareness within you.

After I got Covid, science became my best friend

About two weeks ago, on Monday, January 30, I tested positive for Covid. A few days later I blogged about this on my HinesSight blog in I test positive for Covid. And feel positive about Paxlovid.

Well, it was a good run without ever getting Covid -- about three years since the nasty virus came to the United States in early 2020. 

After I had trouble sleeping last Saturday night, feeling on edge for no discernible reason, I took a rapid Covid test Sunday morning, which came back negative, even though my voice was a bit hoarse.

But Monday morning I had some nasal congestion and increased hoarseness, so I tested again. Yikes! A positive result. 

By Monday afternoon, thanks to quick work by my doctor's office and a Salem Health pharmacist, I'd started taking Paxlovid, a 5-day treatment that basically puts the brake on Covid replication to give your body a chance to fight it before the virus gets up a head of steam.

When the five days came to an end on Saturday morning, I wrote another blog post: My somewhat contrarian take on Paxlovid "rebound."

After getting some Covid symptoms and testing positive on a rapid test last Monday, this morning I completed the 5-day Paxlovid treatment regimen. 

My symptoms (nasal congestion and a cough) have been gone for a few days. The rapid test I took this afternoon was negative. So things are looking good. 

And I'm not all that worried about Paxlovid rebound, which doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

Paxlovid rebound happens when someone tests negative after completing the course of treatment, then a few days later, either tests positive for Covid again or has a recurrence of symptoms. I got a chance to confirm my "no big deal" attitude when, last Wednesday, February 8, a rapid Covid test came back positive, which it also did the next three days, including today.

Yesterday I wrote: I get Paxlovid "rebound," but I'm OK with being Covid positive again. 

I still feel it isn't a big deal, even though last Wednesday, four days after I finished the Paxlovid treatment, I was dismayed to find that a rapid test I took showed I was positive for Covid again. So far (this is Friday) I'm still testing positive.

That's irritating, since I enjoyed my few days of post-Covid normalcy -- having coffee with a friend, going back to exercising at my athletic club, attending my Tai Chi class. 

On the plus side, my symptoms are milder than before, and they were pretty mild the first Covid time around. I haven't had to take a decongestant at bedtime, which I did during the first bout of Covid. And I came across a recent Scientific American story about Paxlovid rebound which indicates that my "contrarian take" on this actually is scientifically mainstream. 

Meaning, whether or not someone has a Covid treatment, the virus can wax and wane in the body.

So it's important to recognize that Paxlovid rebound doesn't mean you've got a fresh case of Covid. It just means that some pockets of the virus remained after the 5-day course of treatment, popping up when the Paxlovid brake was released.

I've shared these details about my Covid experience as background for the title of this post. Science became my best friend after getting the initial positive test result. Of course, for my whole life I've felt close to science. But this health challenge has helped me realize even more strongly how important it is to cling to scientific facts.

Those facts, of course, continually change.

Science skeptics see scientists changing their minds and wrongly think that this shows that the scientific method is flawed. Actually, the opposite is true. Science, unlike religion, is happy to be proven wrong, because that allows for a more accurate picture of reality to emerge.

When I got the rebound positive test last Wednesday, one of the first things I did was Google what you're supposed to do after testing positive again following a negative test when the Paxlovid course of treatment was over.

The recommendation was to isolate for five days, as if you were getting Covid for the first time. I recall that in the early days of Covid in the United States, the isolation period was ten days. But that was then, and this is now. 

So my five day isolation period ends tomorrow. Then I'm going to start returning to public places with a mask on for another five days. This makes sense to me. I liked what a doctor had to say in an article about Paxlovid rebound. 

People who experience rebound still tend to have positive outcomes. Paxlovid is meant to help prevent severe disease, hospitalization, and death — and it continues to do so, even if rebound cases occur.

“From the data so far, Paxlovid rebound has not been dangerous,” says Dr. Klausner. “There are no reported, verified cases of hospitalization or death from rebound. Typically, people have a mild recurrence of symptoms or positive test results for a few days and then get better.”

Of course, since you are still infectious during this period, it’s important to isolate.

“The CDC advises five days of isolation from the onset of symptoms and an additional five days of mask use,” says Dr. Klausner. “While some experts advise continuing isolation until a rapid test is negative and remains negative, that is not practical for most people. The five-day rule is a good compromise balancing individual needs and public health risks.”

Note Klausner's words in the last paragraph: "While some experts advise," "Not practical for most people," "A good compromise."

Scientific research, especially in areas like medicine and public health, often isn't cut-and-dried, a matter of simply looking up the facts about something. Judgement is necessary.

I read numerous articles about what to do after Paxlovid rebound before concluding that a five-day isolation following by a five-day period of mask wearing when in a public space seems to be the way for me to go. It also essentially is the CDC guideline.

I could be wrong. But I'm much more likely to be right after reading reputable information from reliable sources than I would be if I just intuitively decided what to do. 

Some people who qualify for Paxlovid don't get this treatment because they haven't understood the real meaning of "rebound." Sadly, some doctors won't prescribe Paxlovid for the same reason. Science takes work. It requires effort, whether one is a producer of scientific research or a consumer of that research.

Science also can be confusing. But there's no doubt that science is humanity's best approach to understanding reality. As I said, the fact that science evolves, that scientific facts are constantly changing, is the key to its success.

Sure, medical doctors and public health personnel have gotten things wrong about Covid. However, they've gotten hugely more right than wrong, especially when compared to the conspiracy theories about Covid that have caused untold deaths and suffering. 

Vaccines work. Paxlovid works. Don't believe those who say otherwise. I'm much rather put my faith in science, even though it isn't perfect, than in religious belief or wacko conspiracy theories that have no grounding at all in reality.

We make our own purpose, not God, not the universe

Without a purpose, life is barely worth living. That's one sign of depression: when nothing seems to matter and our existence seems meaningless.

But where does purpose come from?

Religious people typically say "God." They believe that God has a plan for us and we just need to let it unfold, trusting in the Almighty. People who strongly embrace a particular culture or nationality may feel that their purpose is to live in accord with the tenets of their society.

And as Joseph Carter says in an essay I read today in Question Everything: Essays from the New York Times Philosophy Series, Aristotle considered that everything in the universe has its own inherent goal.

From cars, trees, animals, all the way to the cosmos itself, Aristotle argued, each thing has an inherent principle that guides the course of its existence.

But Carter argues that purpose arises from ourselves in "The Universe Doesn't Care About Your 'Purpose'." Here's the PDF file if you're unable to access the New York Times essay.
Download Opinion | The Universe Doesn’t Care About Your ‘Purpose’ - The New York Times

He basically sees that the stories we tell ourselves are what provide a sense of purpose. It's as if we're our own screenwriter who pens "The Story of My Life," along with being the lead actor in this drama. 

Naturally Carter puts things more philosophically than that crude summation.

Meaning begins and ends with how we talk about our own lives, such as our myths and stories.

...Purpose springs from our longing for permanence in an ever-changing universe. It is a reaction to the universe’s indifference to us. We create stories about the world and ourselves as contours, “phantom bodies,” of the inevitability of loss and change.

Myths appear timeless; they have what Blumenberg calls an iconic constancy. Stories pass through generations, often becoming traditions, customs, even laws and institutions that order and give meaning to our lives. Purpose grows out of the durability of human lore. Our stories serve as directives for the ways we need the world to exist.

An indifferent universe also offers us a powerful and compelling case for living justly and contentedly because it allows us to anchor our attention here. It teaches us that this life matters and that we alone are responsible for it.

Love, friendship and forgiveness are for our benefit. Oppression, war and conflict are self-inflicted. When we ask what’s the purpose of the recent gassing of Syrian children in the Idlib Province or the torture and killings of Chechnyan homosexual men, we ought not simply look to God or the universe for explanations but to ourselves, to the entrenched mythologies that drive such actions — then reject them when the institutions they inform amount to acts of horror.

The purposes and goals we create are phantom bodies — vestiges of and memorials to the people, places and things we stand to lose and strive to keep. Purpose indexes the world’s impermanence, namely our own.

...Purpose is about loss, or at least the circumvention of it. And there’s nothing wrong with that. We create purposes to establish happy endings in a universe where endings are simply that — endings.

...So, take a moment to think about the mythologies informing your purpose. I’ll reflect on mine, too. The universe, however, won’t. And that might be the most meaningful distinction of all.

Sometimes I've thought that we don't really need stories about our lives. Isn't simply living life enough? Is it necessary to fashion a narrative of My Life where I'm the starring character of my own theatrical production who, not surprisingly, usually comes across as an appealing hero or heroine?

Sure, one with flaws, because that makes my character more interesting. But essentially a good person who is doing their best to make their way through the myriad problems and opportunities that have arisen in My Life.

At times I've viewed this personal mythology as being out of touch with the lack of self that I've come to believe, via Buddhism and neuroscience, is likely to be true. However, when I examine how I actually live my life, I realize that just as Carter says, I need stories about myself that foster a sense of purpose.

Even materialists can’t deny the fact that purposes somehow exist to give us meaning and happiness.

Anthropologists like Dean Falk recently suggested that goal-directed behavior is also evolutionarily advantageous. This doesn’t imply that evolution itself has a purpose, of course. (Though some have argued otherwise.) What it does suggest is that as purposeless as human evolution is, we generally benefit as a species from a belief in it.

Every day I sit down at my laptop and write a post for one of my three blogs. No one forces me to do this. If I didn't do it, there wouldn't be any big problem. I don't view my writing as very important to the world at large.

I write because this gives me a sense of purpose. I write for myself, mainly. I feel a need to get thoughts and feelings out of my head and into cyberspace. When I finish a blog post, as I'm about to do, I have a feeling of satisfaction.

I've fashioned a story about myself that includes the plot element, you write blog posts, and some people read them. Everybody has such stories about themselves. It's how we create meaning in a world that lacks it.

The wonderful thing is how often our individual stories coalesce into a shared sense of meaning and purpose. Our friends typically share much of what we find meaningful. Same with larger groupings, whether they be work-related, religious, sports-related, political, artistic, or whatever. 

Though each of us is responsible for creating our own meaning, it's those shared meanings that give life a special pleasure. For example, a marriage that works well is when two people share a story of their togetherness that is mutually meaningful.

Gut-directed hypnotherapy: example of the mind-body connection

In one way, the whole idea of the mind-body connection doesn't make sense. After all, it isn't as if the mind is one thing and the body is a different thing.

The mind basically is the brain in action. The brain is part of the body. So obviously there's a connection between the mind and body, since they're different aspects of the same entity. 

But most people, me included, do view the mind as something more ethereal than the cruder body.

Our thoughts and emotions seem to be distinct from the flesh, blood, and bone of the body. Even though I know that thoughts and emotions are just as physical as my hands and feet, this is difficult to believe given the inherent subjectivity of mind.

Because I have a sensitive digestive system -- I've never been diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) though I have symptoms of this -- I found it interesting when my 52 year-old daughter, Celeste, told me last summer that she's been told she has IBS.

Celeste mentioned that she'd been advised to follow the FODMAP diet, though she's been reluctant to do this because she likes so many foods that aren't advised by FODMAP, such as avocados. 

I downloaded the FODMAP app and made some changes to my diet that have alleviated most of the irritating symptoms of my own IBS, assuming that's what it should be called. Then I came across a mention in a science magazine of the Nerva app that uses hypnotherapy to alleviate IBS symptoms.

I've tried hypnotism a few times and didn't find it very useful. But I found the theory behind the Nerva app to be intriguing, so I've been using it daily for the past four weeks in hopes that I could get back to eating some of the foods that I'd eliminated from my diet.

The basic idea is that Irritable Bowel Syndrome actually isn't caused by a problem with a person's digestive system, because almost always they have a normal digestive system. Instead, the problem lies is miscommunication between the brain and the gut.

Most of us have experienced the brain-gut connection. For example, if we're stressed about giving an important presentation at work, we may feel "butterflies in the stomach" as we get up to speak. This shows that the mind and digestive system are linked quite closely.

The web site for the Nerva app says:

The app includes daily short readings, along with a 15-17 minute hypnotherapy session. One of the goals is to disrupt a negative brain-gut/mind-body feedback loop. This pertains to problems other than IBS, clearly.

Say we feel stressed. One of the ways that stress may manifest is physically. In the case of IBS, maybe we feel some stomach pain. That gut pain then leads to more mental stress, because now we're not only stressed for the original reason, but also because of the stomach pain.

So the brain can affect the gut, and the gut then can affect the brain. Left unchecked, we can spiral into a negative feedback loop. The idea of hypnotherapy -- and this also seems to apply to some forms of meditation -- is to break that cycle by introducing positive thoughts and feelings into the brain as regards the gut problem.

This happens consciously, though the real benefit seems to occur as those positive thoughts and feelings wend their way into our unconscious, creating more beneficial patterns of thinking and feeling largely outside our conscious awareness.

Apparently it doesn't matter if someone isn't highly suggestible with hypnotherapy. That's good, because while I feel relaxed during a session, I never enter a state where I'm not completely aware of my surroundings and what's going on.

Nerva says:

How does hypnotherapy really work?

Hypnosis involves entering a state of absorbed attention where you become hyper-focused on specific stimuli (such as a feeling or a memory) led by suggestions from a hypnotherapist.

During hypnosis, suggestions bypass the critical mind allowing you to subconsciously 'fix' the miscommunication between your gut and brain (how your brain and gut send and receive nerve impulses). These suggestions teach you automatic skills that can help you self-manage IBS symptoms.

I'm told that the RSSB guru said I'm good, or am a good soul

Today I got this message from someone who, unlike me, still attends the satsang meetings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, the India-based religious organization that I belonged to for 35 years, before RSSB and me parted our ways.

Baba Ji refers to the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon.

I heard today from someone who said “Baba Ji said that Brian Hines is good (or a good soul).” I am not sure which or maybe both, because his English is a little hard for me to understand.

I told this person, Ah. That's nice.

I said that because it was indeed nice to hear this unsubstantiated rumor. For even though I've been critical of Gurinder Singh's business dealings while the RSSB guru, and I have problems with other aspects of his stint as guru, I don't feel any personal ill will toward him.

During the period I was writing three books on behalf of RSSB, I met with Gurinder Singh occasionally and found him a pleasant competent person to deal with. We also exchanged letters and I was pleased to perform security seva (volunteer work) during some of the guru's visits to the United States and British Columbia.

It isn't that I spend much time, or any time, really, wondering whether Gurinder Singh has a favorable opinion of me. I simply felt good when I heard that reportedly the RSSB guru thinks I"m good, or am a good soul.

I prefer the former, since I no longer believe that I have, or am, a soul. 

The broader issue here, I guess, is whether it ever makes sense to say that someone is bad. Or, I suppose, good. For it seems to me that most people, and this might even include all people, try to do the right thing insofar as it appears to them.

Of course, there's no doubt that some people do terrible things: murder, rape, torture, and so much else that's despicable. But we can harshly criticize the doing of those things without calling the person who does them "bad" or "evil." 

Good and bad are words that imply a choice in how we act. I'm deeply skeptical that free will actually exists. More likely is that we all are simply acting in accord with what complex and difficult-to-discern causes both inside of us and outside of us have determined that we must do.

So I don't look upon myself as being a good person, or a bad person. Sure, I feel that by and large I'm a decent human being, but I'm well aware of my defects and shortcomings, which are numerous.

At any rate, I'm pleased that the RSSB guru supposedly looks upon me positively. Though I don't mind being argumentative and confrontational, I prefer to get along with other people whenever possible, even when we disagree.

Beyond awe, beyond mystery, there's ultimate not-knowing

There's many levels lying on the other side of ordinary knowing. I've been pondering this after writing the recent post, What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine?

I hasten to point out that while I'd love to lay claim to such a marvelous title, it belongs to David Wolpert, who wrote an engrossing monograph about the limits of not only human knowledge, but the knowledge of any other species.

Wolpert lays out the foundation of his complex and subtle arguments in a single paragraph.

This question does not concern limitations on what we can know about what it is that we can never know. Many things can be conceived by us humans even if they can never be known by us. The set of what it is that we cannot even conceive of is a (strictly smaller) subset of what it is that we cannot know. The issue I am concerned with is what we can ever perceive concerning that smaller set, the set of all that we cannot conceive of.

As quoted in the first post about Wolpert's paper, he aptly observes:

A cynic might comment with heavy irony, “Gee, how lucky can you get? Humans have exactly the cognitive capabilities needed to capture all aspects of physical reality, and not a drop more!” This cynic might go on to wonder whether an ant, who is only capable of formulating the “rules of the universe” in terms of pheromone trails, would conclude that it is a great stroke of fortune that they happen to have the cognitive capability of doing precisely that; or whether a phototropic plant would conclude that it is a stroke of fortune that they happen to have the cognitive capability to track the sun, since that must mean that they can formulate the rules of the universe.

I think it is not only likely, but a near-certainty, that without exception, every human who has ever lived has been handicapped in knowing the nature of reality by the seemingly inescapable fact that there is much about the cosmos we can't even conceive of, must less know.

To be blunt about that "without exception," I include Jesus, Moses, Buddha, Lao Tau, Guru Nanak, and each and every mystic, saint, yogi, or whatever who has walked the earth. No one, repeat no one, is capable of knowing anything about what we can't even imagine.

Religion and mysticism embrace awe and mystery. So do I, as an atheist. But awe is what we feel when we are in the presence of something known, yet beyond our comprehension, like the vastness of the universe.

And mystery likewise requires a dividing line between what is known about something, and what lies in the darkness beyond the light of knowledge. Darkness isn't nothing. It can be conceived, as when we peer into an unlit room and say "I can't see what's there."

We don't know what's there. However, we can imagine something being there, even if it is nothing.

Obviously it's much more difficult to envision even the slightest sign of something beyond our capacity to conceive of. I'd say it's impossible, but Wolpert has been thinking about this stuff for many years, and he sees some possibilities for humans to conceive of what is now beyond our conception.

God, of course, is either fully or largely within the realm of human conception. Which is one reason why I firmly believe that God is a creation of humans. I used to resonate with the Via Negativa, negative way, where whatever could be said about God, isn't. 

(In contrast to the Via Positiva, where believers love to describe God's love, wisdom, power, goodness, and such.)

But even the Via Negativa requires the concept of "God." It's just a way of saying that whatever can be said about God, the reality is beyond those sayings. What would we be left with, though, if the very concept of God were beyond the ability of humans to imagine?

Well, it would be akin to how our dog looks upon politics or quantum mechanics. Less than nothing, since "nothing" implies the potential presence of something, and our dog just has no capacity to conceive of much that we humans take for granted.

Yet as every dog owner knows, canines inhabit a sensory world of scent and sound and sight that is impossible for we humans to conceive of in anything more than a crude sense.

Probably each of us has a favorite way of trying to grasp in even the slightest fashion the elusive concept of what is so far beyond our conception, it can't even be imagined. Mine is the classic "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

Or as I prefer to put it, "There is something rather than nothing," because I don't see any possibility of answering the "why?"

When my mind tries to conceive of this primal fact, There is something rather than nothing, I'm thrown into a realm of no beginning, no end, no creator, no creation. Just the stark reality of existence that to my human mind, must always have existed.

But that's a very human conception. It fills me with awe. It fills me with mystery.

However, I strongly suspect that if an alien being arrived on earth who, against all odds, did possess the capacity to know the nature of There is something rather than nothing, neither me nor anyone else would be able to conceive anything about that knowledge.

It would be as distant from us as the Theory of Relativity is from our dog's understanding of reality. I find this exciting. Also, humbling. Because it means that no matter how much anyone believes they know about the cosmos, what they're utterly incapable of knowing is what they cannot even imagine.

What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine?

I love the question that's the title of this blog post. The question didn't come from me, but from David Wolpert. I learned about a paper he wrote when it was mentioned in a recent issue of New Scientist.

But there is a deeper question here: can we be sure that logic, even a reformed kind, is enough to understand the universe in all its fullness?

It is a question that David Wolpert at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico has been thinking about for decades. In a recent monograph, he spelled out his argument that it is more likely than not that there is some higher mode of logic that could be used to understand the universe, but that human minds wouldn't be able to grasp.

Just think of that humble linguistic device, the question. Wolpert says there are creatures -- things like a single-celled paramecium -- that couldn't conceive of the idea of a question. In fact, according to our standards of intelligence, every other species on Earth is limited in some regard in the way it understands the world around it.

Why should we be any different? "We are the paramecia," says Wolpert. "What is beyond us?"

Wolpert thinks there are ways we could potentially get at higher systems of thought that go beyond logic  as we know it. Perhaps it will be a super Turing machine that can transcend the normal rules of computing or an intelligent form of extraterrestrial life that shares its wisdom with us.

Perhaps it will be something different altogether. And what will this new plane of understanding be like?  "I can't conceive of it," says Wolpert. "But that's the whole point."

Wolpert's essay is 22 pages long, 30 including footnotes. I read it fairly quickly tonight. It deserves another reading. Maybe several readings. Parts are fairly dense, but most of the essay is understandable to anyone willing to make their way through some sophisticated thinking about the limits of human knowledge. 

Here's a PDF file.
Download What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine?

lt's hard to disagree with Wolpert. Since every species on Earth is limited in its knowledge of what the world is all about, why would we humans be any different? 

Here's a passage from the essay that I especially liked. Note: if you're a religious believer, or an admirer of mysticism, the same limitations of the human mind apply to you also. Meaning, even if you don't embrace logic or language as a guide to reality, you embrace some other human capacity, which leaves Wolpert's argument untouched.

To gain some insight into these questions, note that the highly limited form of all of human mathematics — sequences of finite strings of symbols — just happens to be exactly the structure that we humans use to converse with one another: the structure of human language. Indeed, starting back with Wittgenstein, it has become commonplace to identify mathematics as a special case of human language, casting its structure explicitly as grammar in the same sense as grammars arise in human conversation.

Note as well that it is a poetic cliche that libraries, and in particular mathematics libraries, are places where we converse (!) with past minds. The implication is that the contents of all the mathematics textbooks in those libraries is part of a conversation; i.e., an exercise in human language. Indeed, historically, mathematics textbooks and papers developed from written correspondence, i.e., from exercises in human language.

So, the form of human mathematics, and of our SAM more generally, just happens to exactly coincide with the form of inter-human communication. Some writers have pointed this out before, that human language’s design matches that of formal logic and Turing machine theory [16]. They have taken this as a wonderful stroke of fortune, that we just so happen have a cognitive prosthesis — human language — that is capable of capturing formal logic. After all — they presume — this means we are capable of capturing all the laws of the physical universe.

A cynic might comment with heavy irony, “Gee, how lucky can you get? Humans have exactly the cognitive capabilities needed to capture all aspects of physical reality, and not a drop more!” This cynic might go on to wonder whether an ant, who is only capable of formulating the “rules of the universe” in terms of pheromone trails, would conclude that it is a great stroke of fortune that they happen to have the cognitive capability of doing precisely that; or whether a phototropic plant would conclude that it is a stroke of fortune that they happen to have the cognitive capability to track the sun, since that must mean that they can formulate the rules of the universe.

Sure, it’s possible that it is just a coincidence, that for some unknown reason the deepest nature of physical reality is expressible in terms of one of our cognitive prostheses. But it certainly seems as plausible that social computation is simply the most sophisticated cognitive prosthesis we have ever developed, and that even exploiting it to the hilt only allows us to capture a sliver of physical reality.

Yes, our science and mathematics — or more precisely, what they seem to be developing into — may be a complete description of what we understand physical reality to be. They might be developing into a complete description of what is experimentally accessible to us, even if only indirectly, both now and in the future [94, 95, 108, 109].

But in an exactly parallel manner, a putative ant- level theory of reality in terms of pheromone trails and environmental chemical signals could capture all that ants “understand physical reality to be”, of all that ants can “experimentally access”. And just as there is a huge expanse of physical reality lying beyond the charmed sliver that ants can conceive of, it may be that there is a huge expanse of physical reality beyond our ability to even conceive of.

After all, social computation — human language — was developed for communal sessions of shooting the shit around the campfire after a successful mastodon hunt (plus a few other purposes). There is no reason to believe that features well- suited for such exercises in nocturnal braggadocio can also be used to glean substantial insights into the shape of the hands of the Cosmic Baker, based solely on some crumbs we have discovered, scattered on their kitchen floor.