Church of the Churchless

Our brains don't see reality as it is, but as it's predicted to be

My new favorite book talks about a fascinating subject that I've read about before, but never so clearly and in so much depth as Andy Clark's The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality.

Now, before New Age types get all excited about how the human mind creates its own reality, this definitely isn't what Clark, a professor of cognitive philosophy, is describing. But it is true that each of us fashions our view of reality to some extent in accord with our previous experiences.

Clark starts off by relating a story of how he woke up to the sound of bird noises. Except, he soon realized that his surroundings were perfectly quiet. What had happened was that his partner had gotten a smartphone app that plays a birdsong rather than a traditional alarm.

After hearing the birdsong app for several days, Clark's brain had played a trick on him. Here's how he describes the trick, followed by a summary of his book's thesis.

I now find that I quite often awake well in advance of the start of the actual alarm, already seeming to hear the faint onset of those prerecorded chirps. These are genuine auditory hallucinations, caused by my new, strong expectation of waking to the subtle sound of the birds.

There is probably nothing sinister about my proneness to this hallucination. It has long been known that hallucinations, both auditory and visual, can be quite easily induced by the right kind of training. 

But these, as well as a myriad of other intriguing phenomena, are lately falling into place of signs of something much larger -- something that lies at the very heart of all human experience. The idea (the main topic of this book) is that human brains are prediction machines.

They are evolved organs that build and rebuild experiences from shifting mixtures of expectation and actual sensory evidence. According to that picture, my own unconscious predictions about what I was likely to be hearing as I awoke pulled my perceptual experience briefly in that direction, creating a short-lived hallucination that was soon corrected as more information flowed in through my senses.

That new information (signifying the lack of birdsong) generated "prediction error signals" and these -- on this occasion at least -- were all it took to bring my experience back into line with reality. The hallucination gave way to a clear experience of a silent room.

But in other cases, as we'll see, mistaken predictions can become entrenched and contact with reality (itself a complex and vexed notion) harder to achieve. Even when there are no mistakes involved, and we are seeing things "as they are," our brain's predictions are still playing a central role.

Predictions and prediction errors are increasingly recognized as the core currency of the human brain, and it is in their shifting balances that all human experience takes shape.

This book is about those balances and an emerging science that turns much of what we thought we knew about perceiving our worlds upside down. According to that science, the brain is constantly trying to guess how things in the world (and our own body) are most likely to be, given what has been learned from previous encounters.

Everything that I see, hear, touch, and feel -- so this new science suggests -- reflects hidden wells of prediction. If the expectations are sufficiently strong, or (as in early chirps of the bird alarm) the sensory evidence sufficiently subtle, I may get things wrong, in effect overwriting parts of the real sensory information with my brain's best guess of how things ought to be.

This does not mean that successful sensing is simply a form of hallucination, though the mechanisms are related to those of hallucination. We should not downplay the importance of all that rich sensory information arriving at the eyes, ears, and other senses.

But it casts the process of seeing -- and of perceiving more generally -- in a new and different way. It casts it as a process led by our brain's best predictions: predictions that are then checked and corrected using the sensory inputs as a guide.

With the prediction machinery up and running, perception becomes a process structured not simply by incoming sensory information but by difference -- the difference between the actual sensory signals and the ones the brain was expecting to encounter. 

I'll be interested to see if this is reflected in the rest of the book -- I've only finished the first chapter -- but it makes sense to me: that religious or mystical experiences occurring entirely within one's own mind, not out there in the world, are especially prone to being hallucinations resulting from strong predictions, or expectations, of what should occur.

After all, as we've seen in the above excerpt from Clark's book, what keeps the brain in close touch with reality is sensory information that corrects erroneous predictions about what ought to be perceived. 

So if a religious believer is engaged in closed-eyes meditation with the expectation that their devotion will result in experiencing God, Jesus, the astral form of their guru, divine light/sound, or whatever, and their brain manifests such an experience, there's no way for that person to use error-correcting sensory information to bring "what appears to be" into closer correspondence with "what actually is."

I said closer correspondence because in one of the last pages I read this morning, Clark dispels the notion that there's any such thing as reality "as it is" -- a favorite saying of many spiritual writers that I'm pleased to see makes little sense. Here he's talking about pain and other sorts of medical symptoms, but his point applies generally.

Since all human experience is constructed from mixtures of expectation, attention, and sensory stimulation, it will never be possible to experience either the world or your own body "as it really is." Indeed, it rapidly becomes unclear what this could even mean. 

Instead, there exists a deep continuity between cases where expectation and attention create symptoms (as we saw earlier) "from whole cloth" and cases where they also reflect the operation of some more standard form of disease and injury. Functional disorders simply lie at one end of this spectrum.

If you want to experience how your brain uses prior experience to predict current reality, check out these examples of sine-wave speech.

First listen to the brief SWS (sine-wave speech) audio. Probably you can't make any sense of it. Then listen to the original audio. After you hear the original, listen again to the SWS audio. If you're like me, and probably you are, now the SWS audio will be quite clear, since your brain has the experience of the original audio to predict what the SWS audio is saying.

This is my favorite Rumi quotation

For several years, a few decades ago, I became obsessed with the great Sufi poet, Rumi. I devoured every English translation of his writings I could find, also buying books that weren't literal translations, but were written in the spirit of Rumi.

Eventually I donated most of my Rumi books when my obsession abated. But I kept a few, including William C. Chittick's translation of Rumi, The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi.

One reason I held on to that book was that it contained my favorite Rumi quotation, from his Masnavi. 

Fear the existence in which you are now!
Your imagination is nothing, and you are nothing,
A nothing has fallen in love with a nothing,
a nothing-at-all has waylaid a nothing-at-all.
When these images have departed,
your misunderstanding will be clear to you.

I've memorized this passage. I ponder it fairly frequently.

It's become sort of a koan for me -- an intriguing bit of spiritual poetry that defies easy explanation, though it also has a seemingly clear meaning that is compatible with Zen and Buddhism in general.

I readily admit that different people will view this quotation in markedly different ways. All I can say is how it speaks to me. 

Yes, there is reason to fear the existence in which I am now. However, this is the same existence that virtually everybody on this planet inhabits: an existence filled with imaginings of things that don't actually exist, of a past that is no more, of a future that is yet to be.

My imagination, though a wellspring of creativity and mental fascination, can lead me into dead ends, dark alleys, wasted cognition, detachment from the non-imaginary here and now.

Worse, I tend to believe that the being doing the imagining, me, possesses more inherent existence than is warranted. The self that I thought for much of my life was eternal, a soul drop of a divine ocean, actually is, as Rumi says, nothing. 

Nothing, at least, that is independent, freestanding, immutable. Whoever or whatever I am, my strong suspicion is that I'm as insubstantial as the imaginings I so frequently engage in.

Yet as Rumi's poem observes, my imagination and me are in love with each other, though neither of us possesses any enduring substance. We are two nothings engaged in dancing together in a wispy ballroom of frothy existence.

Still, Rumi holds out hope for me. And for everybody in a similar situation. Who, again, is almost all of the eight billion people who cling to the dual delusions of barely-existent imagination and selfhood. 

For if I were to be able to exist without imagining what isn't there, which includes the solid self that also is a nothing rather than a something, Rumi says that my current misunderstanding of what life is all about would be cleared up.

Is this a fantasy? Perhaps. Rumi's words just seem to me like they have a ring of truth, though I have no reason to assert that they are true. I simply am attracted to this bit of tantalizing Rumi poetry.

What if religions are wrong and there's nothing to find?

In my experience, the most difficult part of writing is the first sentence and the last sentence. With one, there's nothing that comes before. With the other, there's nothing that comes after. So those sentences are unique.

I struggled with the first sentence in my book, Return to the One. Until finally, a sentence popped into my head that seemed just right to me.

If something has been lost and you're not sure where to look for it, there's good reason to start searching right where you are rather than far afield.

Then I spoke about the familiar situation (familiar to me, at least) of looking for your car keys only to discover that they were sitting unnoticed in a pocket or purse the whole time.

But let's think about what's necessary for a search to make sense. To begin with, you really need to have lost something. Meaning, it was in your possession at one point, and now it isn't. Then there has to be a decent probability that you can find that thing you used to possess.

If you're on a cruise and drop your glasses into the ocean while leaning over a railing, you know what you've lost, but for all practical purposes you have a zero chance of finding that item.

In Return to the One I argued that we have a sense of loss, yet most of us don't understand what we're longing to recover: God, or the One. I feel like I did a pretty good job making that argument, yet in my current frame of mind I no longer find what I wrote to be persuasive.

I still like my first sentence in the book, though. But now I see it as pointing toward the desirability of living in the here and now, rather than a there and then. After all, where we are, where everyone is, without exception, is the present moment.

No searching required. Just be here now.

This, of course, is the essence of mindfulness. And of the non-religious aspect of Buddhism, which includes Zen. Such distinguishes these forms of spirituality from the seeking forms of spirituality and religion where there is much talk of a path to be followed, and signs of progress along the way.

Here's some illustrative passages from Jon Kabat-Zinn's book, Mindfulness for Beginners: reclaiming the present moment -- and your life.

Not only is it always now. The "curriculum" of this adventure we call living, where mindfulness can play such a pivotal role, is always what is unfolding in this moment, whether we like what is happening or not. 

Whatever is arising in this moment becomes the curriculum for liberating ourselves from the shackles of greed, hatred, and delusion. We do not need some ideal or romantic fairy tale of what would be best for us. What we most need is what is already given to us: the actuality of things as they are in the only moment we will ever have -- this one.

...So as we have already seen, the notion that in meditation practice there is no place to go, nothing to do, and nothing to attain can be quite strange and mysterious -- even foreign -- to our striving temperaments and our need to always be getting better.

...Non-striving is not trivial. It involves realizing that you are already here. There's no place to go, because the agenda is simply to be awake. 

It is not framed as some ideal that suggests that after forty years of sitting in a cave in the Himalayas, or by studying with august teachers, or doing ten thousand prostrations, or whatever it is, you will necessarily be any better than you are now.

It is likely that you will just be older. What happens now is what matters.

If you don't pay attention now, as Kabir, the great Indian poet of sixteenth-century India said, "You will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death."

...Awareness itself is what mindfulness is about. It is not about achieving an ideal, or a particularly desirable or longed-for special state.

If the mind is thinking: "If I meditate I'll always be compassionate. I'll be like the Dalai Lama. I'll be like Mother Teresa" or whoever your spiritual guru/hero of the moment is, it may help to remind yourself that you don't stand a snowball's chance in hell of being like the Dalai Lama or Mother Teresa or anybody else. Nor do you know what their interior experience is.

The only person that you have the remotest possibility of being like is yourself. And that, when it comes down to it, is the real challenge of mindfulness: the challenge to be yourself.

The irony, of course, is that you already are.

Here's a great Tina Turner song

I saw Tina Turner perform with her jerk husband Ike at either Winterland or Fillmore in San Francisco during my college days in 1968 or 1969. (Hey, like they say, if you can clearly remember the 60's, you weren't really there.)

I was high on something, naturally. Being close to the stage, absorbing her amazing energy -- that was an experience I'll never forget. So sorry that she died. Here's a song of hers that sends chills up my spine.

How we talk online is much different from how we talk in person

Next year I'll celebrate the 20th anniversary from when I started this blog in 2004. But, hey, I figure that  I might as well spread out the festivities by making some observations from time to time about this here Church of the Churchless.

Like, right now.

The most important thing I want to say is gratitude. Over the years I've learned a great deal from the people who visit this blog and leave comments. Typepad, my blogging service, says there have been 70,198 comments on 3,390 posts. 

So that's about 21 comments, on average, per post that I've written. I read most comments, though if I'm busy, I'll just take a glance at a comment, especially if it's a lengthy one. 

Those comments are my blog's way of having a conversation -- with me, and with other blog visitors. I wish Typepad allowed for editing of comments by the people who share them, and that it was possible to organize the comments in a different fashion than in a chronological fashion.

But wishes aren't reality. Anyway, I deeply appreciate the time and effort people put into their comments, though obviously the quality varies from a high quality essay to random observations that make little sense.

Which is no different from the conversations all of us have in everyday life. But otherwise, there's big differences between how people communicate online versus in person. 

Online, many choose to not use their real name. I can understand why in certain circumstances. For example, on this blog criticism of a religious leader, or the religion itself, can be problematic if someone uses their real name and is still involved with the organization they're criticizing. 

That's why most people who write to me with an interesting story about their faith ask that I share it anonymously. The downside of anonymity, though, is that it enables people to say things in cyberspace that they'd be reluctant to say to someone face-to-face.

I'm definitely guilty of this myself at times. So if I'm directing a blog post or a comment at a specific person, I need to do better at visualizing that person standing in front of me as I say what I want to say about them.

Another problem with online conversations is that in ordinary life communication doesn't just involve words. It also involves a tone of voice, facial expressions, body language. And of course, an ability to say things like "I don't quite understand; please elaborate on what you meant when you said _______"

So its easy to misunderstand those with whom we interact online.

I like to express strong opinions. Many commenters on my blog posts also like to express strong opinions. So we’re going to feel misunderstood by other people at times. That comes with the territory of expressing strong opinions in a setting where only written words can be shared, not the other ways we use to communicate with people.

In a way it's surprising that comment conversations on this blog are as friendly and productive as they usually are, given how many obstacles there are to understanding another person in cyberspace.

But sometimes feelings get hurt. This is unfortunate, though often unavoidable. Partly it's due to different ways of communicating between men and women. I don't want to overemphasize this. It just seems like a reality to me. 

I talked about this in a 2005 post on my HinesSight blog, "Why men don't share their feelings."

“How’re you doing?” says Dennis as I walk into the Pacific Martial Arts changing room. Instead of replying with my habitual robotic “Fine, how’re you?” I have a crazy impulse to actually tell him. I’ll share my feelings!

“Well, my feet have been tingling for about a week. I don’t know what’s going on. I’ve got an appointment to see a doctor tomorrow.” Without missing a beat (appropriately: Dennis is a drummer) I hear, “You’ve got a brain tumor. No doubt about it. You’re going to die.”

For the rest of our hour and a half training session, whenever I stop to check on how my feet are doing Dennis again says, “Oh yeah, you’ve got a brain tumor. Your time is up.”

Sensei Warren, our regular martial arts instructor, came in late. After telling him my tale of tingling feet I got a marginally better prognosis: “You’ve got diabetic neuropathy. No doubt about it. You’re going to lose your feet.” And I don’t even have diabetes.

Now, I know both Dennis and Warren care a lot about me. They demonstrated their manly concern by telling me that I’m either going to die or lose my feet. If one of them had given me a big hug and said “Don’t worry, everything is going to be all right,” I would have begun to worry that he had a brain tumor.

If I want sympathy, I’ll tell my troubles to my wife. From my marital arts buddies I get camaraderie and support that isn’t expressed in words. Dennis taught the class that evening. He started off by saying, “Let’s work on kicks tonight since your feet are giving you a problem.”

Which is what we did. For almost an hour. The unspoken message was, “Your feet are OK. Suck it up. This is no big deal.” That’s pretty much what the doctor said the next day: “Your feet look fine; I’ll do a blood test anyway; call me in a month if you’re not better.”

I'm sharing this anecdote because it points to a seeming fact: men are more comfortable with the rough-and-tumble of online communications because they're more used to joking around with each other in some rough ways.

This is fine.

But I worry when a woman shares something on this blog, then gets attacked in an intense fashion. Mostly or entirely by men. That's when I feel protective toward the woman, since I feel responsible for providing a safe space for people to share their ideas without feeling like they're in some sort of danger.

Well, those are my thoughts for tonight. Thanks for listening. I'll get back to a regular Church of the Churchless blog post soon.

Open Thread 46 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread.

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

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

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

Leave a comment on this post about anything you want to talk about. Personal attacks on someone are an exception, as is hate speech. Argue with ideas, not insults.

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

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

Mindfulness: whatever happens is the curriculum of that moment

One of the things that I like about the Buddhist notion of emptiness, where change is omnipresent because nothing possesses an inherent existence, is how much money it saves me on books.

For I've found that rather than buying a new book to get some fresh ideas, I can look over the books I already own and reread them. This gives me fresh ideas because I've changed from the last time I read the book, so much of it will seem new to me.

Case in point: a few days ago I was looking at the mindfulness section in my office bookcase and noticed Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness for Beginners: reclaiming the present moment -- and your life. 

Amazon tells me that I bought the hardcover version in 2011, twelve years ago.

Since, I've learned a lot abut mindfulness, but I still consider myself a beginner, so I decided to take another look at the book. Based on my highlighting and notes in the back part of the book, I can tell that what most appeals to me now is different from what I liked in my first reading. 

Here's some passages that resonated with me in the first part of the book, which I finished re-reading today.

(1) I'm not opposed to the idea of discipline. However, I also like to flow with life as much as possible. A mini-chapter on "The Beauty of Discipline" (they're all just a few pages long) had some good things to say on this subject.

The discipline I am referring to is really the willingness to bring the spaciousness and clarity of awareness back over and over again to whatever is going on -- even as we feel we are being pulled in a thousand different directions. 

Just taking this kind of of stance toward our own experience, without trying to fix or change anything at all, is an act of generosity toward oneself, an act of intelligence, an act of kindness.

The word discipline comes from disciple, someone who is in a position to learn. So when we bring a certain discipline to the cultivation of mindfulness and are aware of how challenging it is to bring a sustained attending to any aspect of our lives, we are actually creating the conditions for learning something fundamental from life itself.

Then life becomes the meditation practice and the meditation teacher, and whatever happens in any moment is simply the curriculum of that moment. 

(2) I've never understood why some people view thinking as negative, something opposed to a spiritual life, a mindful life. A "Befriending Our Thinking" chapter corrects this misconception.

It is very important as a beginner that you understand right from the start that meditation is about befriending your thinking, about holding it gently in awareness, no matter what is on your mind in a particular moment. It is not about shutting off your thoughts or changing them in any way.

Meditation is not suggesting that it would be better if you didn't think and were simply to suppress all those sometimes unruly, disturbing, and disquieting, sometimes uplifting and creative thoughts when they arise.

If you do try to suppress your thinking, you are just going to wind up with a gigantic headache. Such a pursuit is unwise, pure folly -- like trying to stop the ocean from waving. It is the very nature of the ocean for its surface to change as a result of changing atmospheric conditions.

...The mind is similar. The surface can be extremely labile, changing constantly with the changing "weather patterns" of our lives: our emotions, moods, thoughts, our experiences, everything, often with little or no awareness on our part.

We can feel victimized by our thoughts, or blinded by them. We can easily mistake them for the truth or for reality when in actuality they are just waves on its surface, however tumultuous they may be at times.

The entirety of our mind, on the other hand, is by its very nature deep, vast, intrinsically still and quiet, like the depths of the ocean.

(3) There's a me. But it's not mine. This teaching of Buddhism, and also of modern neuroscience, is both wonderfully appealing to me and also wonderfully confusing. Jon Kabat-Zinn explains things in a chapter called "Our Love Affair with Personal Pronouns -- Especially I, Me, and Mine."

The Buddha taught for forty-five years. He is said to have said that all of his teachings could be encapsulated in one sentence. If that is so, perhaps we might want to remember what it was, even if we don't necessarily understand it at first. Imagine forty-five years of profound teaching distilled into one sentence: "Nothing is to be clung to as 'I,' 'me,' or 'mine.'"

It might be helpful to reflect on what the Buddha might have meant when he used the verb "to cling." "Nothing is to be clung to as 'I,' 'me,' or 'mine'" does not mean there is no "you." It isn't suggesting that perhaps you will have to hire someone to put on your pants in the morning because there's no "you" to do it.

Nor does it mean that you should give away all the money in your bank account because it is not yours and there is no real bank anyway.

What it means is that clinging is optional, that we can recognize it when it arises and choose not to feed it. It means that the selfing habit is a major part of our default setting, that mode of mind that we revert to constantly when we go unconscious or drone on in the automatic pilot doing mode. 

It means that how we relate to all our moments, all our experiences, is a choice.

It means that we can make the choice, moment by moment, to recognize how much we do cling to "I," "me," and "mine," how self-oriented and self-preoccupied we can be, and then decide not to cling to them, or more reasonably, to catch ourselves when we do it.

It is saying that we don't have to automatically and with no awareness fall into the habits of self-identification, self-centeredness, and selfing. What is more, if we are open to looking at ourselves afresh, we can really see that these thought-habits actually distort reality, create illusions and delusions, and ultimately imprison us. 

RSSB guru makes light of wife-beating and sexual assault

It amuses me, along with disturbing me, when devotees of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an organization with headquarters in India, excuse Dhillon's bad behavior by saying "At least he hasn't been convicted of a crime."

Well, that's a pretty low bar for a guru who is considered by the RSSB teachings to be God in Human Form, possessing divine powers. One would expect that a guru who is supposedly so exalted would behave at least as well as a decent ordinary person would.

But as you can read below in a comment on a recent blog post by Simmi, the RSSB guru advised a woman complaining her husband beat her and sexually assaulted her daughter to "compromise" with him.

That's abhorrent. It's disgusting. Horrible advice. 

And this isn't the first time the RSSB guru has been accused of making light of sexual abuse. I wrote about another instance in Gurinder Singh Dhillon ignores sexual abuse of a child. Here's an excerpt from what the person who observed this instance said to me.

What BBJ [Baba Ji, Gurinder Singh Dhillon] did was not only heartless and ignorant. It was a crime and advice of the worst sort; as any mental health professional will tell you pedophiles do not quit. Pedophilia is a psychiatric compulsion with an almost non-existent rate of “cure”.

 

This is only one example of the many instances of disastrous advice BBJ is always anxious to espouse.

 

At least Huzur [Charan Singh, the previous RSSB guru] had the humility to preface the common sense advice he’d reluctantly give when asked, with the declaration that he himself was no expert in family matters and can be heard on audio tape admitting to be a poor example of a husband and parent.  

 

BBJ however fancies himself an expert in all things, above the law of man and blithely gives the most jaw-dropping and disastrous advice imaginable. The fact is BBJ's “advice” has caused satsangis I know personally the most painful consequences imaginable.

 

Here's the comment from Simmi. I fixed some typos and included definitions of a few words in brackets.

That is really funny thing about mix marriages. I got married with my husband. He was very much into this organisation. GSD [Gurinder Singh Dhillon] was like his God. I remember to support him.

l used to go with him to so called satsang [spiritual meeting] on Tuesday evening and Sundays morning, also so called Seva [volunteer service] regularly. All the preachers used to emphasise on how lucky we were that we got GSD and he is GIHF [God in Human Form].

I was very impressed initially and started believing in it...got initiated. Whenever GSD used to come, it was like OMG, l found the God. Many years l followed his meditation with my husband. Our life was just like around RSSB [Radha Soami Satsang Beas] people. No social and always talk about GSD and how lucky we were, and everything happening in our life because of GSD.

One day in his satsang, one lady asked him that her husband used to beat her up and did wrong with her daughter. Instead of telling her to go to police and leave him GSD said it is all karma. You should talk with your husband and make compromise. I was shocked. How can he give this advice to a mum whose daughter was sexually assaulted

After this l started to see my life more closely and took my RSSB glasses off. l realised RSSB is a big cult and my husband and l was this Cult member. We were cut off from a normal life and wasted many years. I spoke with my husband and said l don't mind if he wanted to continue but l refused to follow GSD any more.

After all this, many other GSD frauds came in the light and my husband also realised that how big cult RSSB is. He also gave up eventually. He was in depression for few years that he wasted best years of his life behind this organisation.

It's been 5 years now..we studied more our birth religion Sikhism and found Sikhism is a real and first Sant Mat [path of the saints] as Sri Guru Granth Sahib has teaching of many saints. We are not very religious but we do our meditation as per Sikhism teachings.

We are very happy now and living a normal life. Whoever is in RSSB, this is the time. Come out ASAP. It is a very big Cult and you are wasting your life. Smell the coffee.

If art is separate from an artist, is a guru separate from their message?

In a recent issue of TIME magazine (May 8/May 15, 2023) there was an interesting story by Stephanie Zacharek, "What Lies Beneath: Grappling with how to approach great works of art by bad men in the book Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma."

It got me to thinking about a roughly parallel question in the realm of religion and spirituality. Can the message of a guru be separated from how they behave as a person? Before I describe how I see this question, here's how the TIME story starts out.

You, me, and everyone we know: whether you're aware of it or not, you're in a relationship with a monster. 

There is surely some artist whose behavior, known to you or otherwise, is scurrilous, reprehensible, possibly worthy of life imprisonment -- and yet you continue to love the work of that artist, defiantly, secretly, or in ignorant bliss.

More often than not, it's brilliant men who get a pass when it comes to how they behave in everyday life. And so, when it comes to laying blame for these conflicts that roil inside us -- can I still watch Woody Allen's Annie Hall and not feel dirty? Is it wrong to feel a frisson of joy as I gaze at the aggressive angles of Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'Avignon? -- the bottom line is that it's men's fault. Why do they have to spoil everything?

And yet -- with her exhilarating book Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma, essayist and critic Claire Dederer holds a small lantern aloft in the darkness. Is it possible to ever separate the art from the artist? And if not, is it possible to find the sweet spot between our rage and our rapture?

Those are just some of the questions Dederer both raises and responds to in Monsters, though this isn't so much a book of solutions as it is an examination of how we approach the art we love. Because the more deeply we engage with art, the more troubled we're likely to be over the sins of the people who make it.

In my case, I find it easy to separate an artist from his art.

But I realize this may be more difficult for women, since often a male artist gets into trouble for sexual misbehaving. I can't recall what Kevin Spacey did (sex with an underage male?) that led him to be ostracized by Hollywood, but whatever it was, my enjoyment of him in the House of Cards series is undiminished. 

When we enter the realm of religion, though, it becomes much more difficult to separate the messenger from his message. If a priest is sexually abusing an altar boy, almost everybody would say that no matter how good a priest he is, he needs to be dismissed from the Catholic Church and criminally charged.

Because for 35 years I was a member of an India-based religious organization -- Radha Soami Satsang Beas -- headed up by a guru, I find the messenger vs. message thing most interesting when it comes to a guru who, according to the RSSB teachings, is viewed as God in Human Form.

The current RSSB guru is Gurinder Singh Dhillon. He's been accused of making death threats and is deeply embroiled in a large-scale financial fraud mess involving his relatives, Malvinder and Shivinder Singh. Dhillon also has done other things that are, at the least, questionable for anyone believed to be Godly, if not a manifestation of God.

Yet Dhillon is a charismatic speaker and a beloved spiritual guide to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of RSSB followers. So in this case, is it possible to separate Dhillon's religious artistry from his worldly behavior?

I think not. Here's why.

An actor is distinct from the roles he plays. A painter is distinct from the paintings he creates. But a guru who acts in a way that's contrary to the message of his teaching -- this strikes me as a different situation.

For while in Christianity it is accepted that all are sinners before God, clergy included, so failings are to be expected, in RSSB, as in other guru-centered faiths, the guru is considered to be the living embodiment of the teachings. Meaning, if the guru is deeply flawed, so is his message.

This helps explain why so many devotees of Radha Soami Satsang Beas go to great lengths to deny that the RSSB guru has done anything wrong, even though much evidence points in that direction. For if Gurinder Singh Dhillon isn't living in accord with the RSSB teachings, this strikes a serious blow at the validity of those teachings.

The appealing notion of "good enough"

Back in my religious-believing days, I would have viewed this as a sign from God. Now, I just see it as an interesting coincidence. But who knows? Maybe it is a sign from God!

Last week I'd scribbled on a large post-it note some of what Sam Harris had said in a guided meditation of his Waking Up app, then stuck the note next to books that I read every morning before meditating. It quoted Harris as saying:

The goal of meditation is to realize that consciousness as it is, is good enough. Not waiting for something to happen. 

I planned to write about "good enough" today in a churchless post. Since I'd been reading about Zen recently, this morning I picked up a book that I'd set aside during my Zen phase: Question Everything, a collection of brief essays from the New York Times philosophy series.

A bookmark I'd put in Question Everything led me to the next essay that I hadn't read yet. The title that leapt out at me was "The Good-Enough Life" by Avram Alpert. I'll share the passages that I highlighted.

Ideals of greatness cut across the American political spectrum... The desire for greatness also unites the diverse philosophical camps of Western ethics.

Aristotle called for practicing the highest virtue. Kant believed in an ethical rule so stringent not even he thought it was achievable by mortals. Bentham's utilitarianism is about maximizing happiness. Marx sought the great world for all. Modern-day libertarians will stop at nothing to increase personal freedom and profit.

These differences surely matter, but while the definition of greatness changes, greatness itself is sought by each in his own way.

Swimming against the tide of greatness is a counter-history of ethics embodied by schools of thought as diverse as Buddhism, Romanticism, and psychoanalysis. It is by borrowing from D.W. Winnicott, an important figure in the development of psychoanalysis, that we get perhaps the best name for this other ethics: "the good-enough life."

...To fully become good enough is to grow up into a world that is itself good enough, that is as full of care and love as it is suffering and frustration.

From Buddhism and Romanticism we can get a fuller picture of what such a good enough world could be like. Buddhism offers a criticism of the caste system and the idea that some people have to live lives of servitude in order to ensure the greatness of others.

It posits instead the idea of the "middle path," a life that is neither excessively materialistic nor too ascetic. And some Buddhist thinkers, such as the sixth century Persian-Chinese monk Jizang, even insist that this middle life, this good-enough life, is the birthright of not only all humans, but also all of nature as well.

...The Romantic poets and philosophers extend this vision of good-enoughness to embrace what they would call "the ordinary" or "the everyday." This does not refer to the everyday annoyances or anxieties we experience, but the fact that within what is most ordinary, most basic, and most familiar, we might find a delight unimaginable if we find meaning only in greatness.

...Being good enough is not easy. It takes a tremendous amount of work to smile purely while waiting, exhausted, in a grocery line. Or to be good enough to loved ones to both support them and allow them to experience frustration.

And it remains to be seen if we as a society can establish a good-enough relation to one another, where individuals and nations do not strive for their unique greatness, but rather work together to create the conditions of decency necessary for all.

Achieving this will also require us to develop a good-enough relation to the natural world, one in which we recognize both the abundance and the limitations of the planet we share with infinite other life-forms, each seeking its own path toward good-enoughness. 

If we do manage any of these things, it will not be because we have achieved greatness, but because we have recognized that none of them are achievable until greatness itself is forgotten.

I could say more about this subject, but I feel that this blog post is good enough as it is.

Do you agree with my Churchless Creed?

On November 23, 2004 I published my first posts on this Church of the Churchless blog.

Over the succeeding 18+ years those posts in the "Basics of our faithless faith" category still ring true to me, by and large.

I guess this shows that skepticism about dogmatic religious belief and being positive about open-minded spiritual inquiry rests on some pretty damn solid ground. But that's just my opinion.

So I thought it'd be interesting to share what I said in the Our Creedless Creed post and see if anyone has a good reason to challenge any of the points made there. I'll make some brief comments in red about how I currently view the points.

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Note: to make this Creed more readable, some qualifiers have been omitted. So "God" signifies God/ultimate reality/final truth, not just a personal divinity. And "religion" signifies religion/spiritual path/philosophy, not just a mainstream theology.

There is no objective proof that any religion knows the truth about God. If there were such proof, most people on Earth would have converted to that faith long ago and all scientists would be believers.
This seems as true today as when I said it in 2004. But I should have said, "...knows the truth about God, assuming God exists."

Spirituality thus is an individual affair. Proof of any metaphysical realities that exist will be subjective, not demonstrable to others.
Yes, provided that we realize individual proof is not only subjective, but also illusory if the subjective proof is flawed, mistaken, incomplete, or otherwise weak.

Every person has the right to pursue their own spiritual quest without interference, so long as he or she doesn't interfere with the rights of others.
Absolutely. I still heartily agree.

Since the veracity of each and every religion is unprovable, equally unprovable are the moral and ethical tenets derived from any and all religious teachings.
Still seems completely true from my atheist perspective.

Thus morality also is an individual affair. There are no absolute laws of right and wrong as there are absolute laws of physics. Subjectivity rules in ethics.
Wouldn't change a word.

Individual ethical decisions may be formed into a collective codification of societal norms, or laws. These are purely human, not divine.
I'm unclear what I meant by the initial part of the first sentence. Now I'd say "A collective codification of subjective societal norms, or laws, is purely human, not divine."

Science is the surest means of finding truth. Theory, experiment, analysis of data: such are the tools of science, whether directed toward knowing material or immaterial reality.
Basically sounds fine to me, though now I'd make the ending "...toward knowing material reality or any immaterial reality that might exist."

Religious teachings are hypotheses to be confirmed through individual research. As such, they must not be taken as gospel truth by adherents of a particular faith.
Yes.

Religious doubters, skeptics, and heretics should be honored for their efforts to assure that unproven assertions about God are not put forward as solid truth.
Absolutely, especially since I'm one of those doubters, skeptics, and heretics.

Every adherent of a particular religion should say to himself or herself,"I could be wrong." If he or she won't do this, other people can say it for them: "You could be wrong."
Yes. 

This creedless creed of the Church of the Churchless also could be wrong. It needs to be reexamined and revised regularly.
I don't want to change the original post. But maybe I should add a link to a mildly revised Creedless Creed.

Death provides the final answers (if only momentarily). The spiritual quest is to get answers ahead of time. But the big question is, "What are the questions?"
Now I'm not sure that death provides any sort of final answer, since if there is no life after death, that can't be known by dying, since knowledge belongs only to the living. This is a point that could be deleted from the Creedless Creed.

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As a final observation about this Creedless Creed, some might see a contradiction between my saying that (1) spirituality is an individual affair where evidence is subjective, and (2) unproven assertions about God shouldn't be put forward as solid truth.

I don't see any contradiction. What I was getting at here is that I have no problem with someone saying "This is what I personally experienced about... [God, the supernatural, heaven, angels, soul, divine light/sound, or whatever].

But I do have a big problem with someone claiming that their personal experience reflects an objective fact about the cosmos. To make that claim, solid demonstrable evidence would need to be provided. Which, to my knowledge, has never occurred at any time in human history. 

That's why I started off by saying, "There is no objective proof that any religion knows the truth about God."

How my mother lives on, though she died in 1985

I'm not very sentimental on Mother's Day (today) in part because my mother died in 1985, 38 years ago. But in 2021 I did write a blog post about how she lives on in the back of my books.

Emptiness is the key to understanding Buddha nature

A few days ago, in a blog post about Shunryu Suzuki's book, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, I said:

If you're unsure what Buddha nature consists of, join the club, because I feel the same way. But I have some ideas gained from re-reading Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. I'll share them in an upcoming post.

This is that post. Of course, before launching into what I consider Buddha nature is all about, it bears saying that like so many other subjects in Zen, Buddha nature supposedly is beyond words and concepts.

OK, no argument there.

But so is love, and we humans write and say copious amounts about love, which remains a subjective sensation, not anything that can be dissected or analyzed in an objective fashion. So I have no problem with trying to describe Buddha-nature. 

After all, while I embrace much of Buddhism, as long as it is stripped of its religious and supernatural aspects, I'm not a Buddhist. I'm just a guy who is trying to understand life and reality, and Buddhism has supplied some of the puzzle pieces that I've been able to put together so far in that quest.

After I'd published the post where I said I'd discuss Buddha nature in a succeeding post, I started to think about the most likely place Buddha nature would reside. It quickly dawned on me that an obvious place to look (really obvious) was in the core notion of Buddhism: emptiness. 

OK, some would say that emptiness isn't the core notion, but a core notion. They can make that argument, but since they're not writing this post, and I am, I'm sticking with the core notion. I say that because emptiness is what distinguishes Buddhism from religions that assume there's an unchanging essence at the root of reality: God, Brahman, Spirit, whatever you want to call it. Or of us, an enduring soul or self.

Buddhism says, no, there isn't. Everything is marked by emptiness. Which includes emptiness. (I once had a book called The Emptiness of Emptiness, which Amazon tells me I bought in 1998; I loved the title but must have given it away, since I can't find it.)

However, I do have a pleasingly readable book about emptiness by Guy Newland, Introduction to Emptiness: Tsong-Kha-Pa's great treatise on the stages of the path.

I just saw that in the Amazon description of the book, it's noted that "Readers are hard-pressed to find books that can help them understand the central concept in Mahayana Buddhism—the idea that ultimate reality is emptiness." So this buttresses my contention that emptiness is the core notion of Buddhism.

Here's how Newland talks about emptiness in the first few pages of his book.

We suffer unnecessarily because we do not know ourselves. Like addicts fiercely clinging to a drug, we cannot let go of the sense that we are substantial, solid, independent, and autonomous.

...Of course, we do exist. We are living beings. We make choices and our choices make a difference, for ourselves and others. But at some level, for all of us, we cannot leave it at that. To be real, to be alive, we feel that we must deep down somehow exist in a solid and independent way.

Death tells us a very different story, but for that very reason we find a million ways to avoid hearing the message of death. The message is that we are impermanent. Our bodies are disintegrating moment by moment, right now. 

And though we desperately want to believe otherwise, the truth is that beneath our ever-changing minds and aging bodies there is no eternal and essential self. We have no natural existence, no independent way of existing.

We exist contingently, interdependently. We exist, but only in dependence on our ancestors, our body parts, our food, air, and water, and the other members of our society. We could not and do not exist otherwise. Devoid of any independent or substantial nature, our existence is possible only because it is far less rigid, less concrete, than what we imagine it to be.

Rather than seeing things as they are, we superimpose upon ourselves -- and on things around us -- a false existence, a self-existence or essential reality that actually does not exist at all. In the Buddhist philosophy explained here, the ultimate truth is the sheer absence, the lack, of any such essence.

This is emptiness (stong pa nyid, shunyata). 

While this may sound bleak, disappointing, or frightening, it is the very nature of reality. And it is reality -- not fantasy -- that is our final hope and our refuge. The path to freedom from needless misery, for ourselves and others, is through profound realization of this fundamental reality.

Thus Buddhism teaches that every human without exception lacks inherent existence or self-existence. Ditto for every other living thing. Ditto for every other non-living thing. Ditto for the Buddha. Ditto for Buddhism. All is marked by emptiness -- interdependence, impermanence, reliance on causes and conditions. Including emptiness itself.

This means that whatever Buddha nature is, it isn't something separate from the universal principle of emptiness. In other words, Buddha nature is marked by the sheer nonexistence of intrinsic nature, which is how Newland pithily describes emptiness in his glossary. 

With this in mind, here's an excerpt from the "Nothing Special" chapter in Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.

If something exists, it has its own true nature, its Buddha nature. In the Pari-nirvana Sutra, Buddha says, "Everything has Buddha nature," but Dogen reads it this way: "Everything is Buddha nature." There is a difference.

If you say, "Everything has Buddha nature," it means Buddha nature is in each existence, so Buddha nature and each existence are different. But when you say, "Everything is Buddha nature," it means everything is Buddha nature itself.

When there is no Buddha nature, there is nothing at all. Something apart from Buddha nature is just a delusion. It may exist in your mind, but such things actually do not exist. So to be a human being is to be a Buddha. Buddha nature is just another name for human nature, our true human nature.

So Buddha nature is the same as true human nature. And we've seen that Buddhism teaches that this nature is emptiness. Meaning, an ever-changing nature, a nature that has no inherent existence, a nature that alters as the causes and conditions that cause us to act, think, and feel change.

Yet just as some people, or more accurately, most people, fail to understand that emptiness is the heart of reality, most people don't understand that Buddha nature is what they truly are. So something is preventing that realization. 

What that something is, that's a big question for Buddhists. Different schools of Buddhism, and different schools of Zen, have a varying approach on how to achieve a realization of Buddha nature. This is how Suzuki describes his Soto Zen approach in the "Limiting Your Activity" chapter.

In our practice we have no particular purpose or goal, or any special object of worship. In this respect our practice is somewhat different from the usual religious practices. Joshu, a great Chinese Zen master, said, "A clay Buddha cannot cross water; a bronze Buddha cannot get through a furnace; a wooden Buddha cannot get through fire."

Whatever it is, if your practice is directed toward some particular object, such as a clay, a bronze, or a wooden Buddha, it will not always work. So as long as you have some particular goal in your practice, that practice will not help you completely. It may help as long as you are directed towards that goal, but when you resume your everyday life, it will not work.

You may think that if there no purpose or no goal in our practice, we will not know what to do. But there is a way.

The way to practice without having any goal is to limit your activity, or to be concentrated on what you are doing in this moment. Instead of having some particular object in mind, you should limit your activity.

When your mind is wandering about elsewhere you have no chance to express yourself. But if you limit your activity to what you can do just now, in this moment, then you can express fully your true nature, which is the universal Buddha nature. This is our way.

When we practice zazen [meditation] we limit our activity to the smallest extent. Just keeping the right posture and being concentrated on sitting is how we express the universal nature. Then we become Buddha, and we express Buddha nature. So instead of having some object of worship, we just concentrate on the activity which we do in each moment.

When you bow, you should just bow; when you sit, you should just sit; when you eat, you should just eat. If you do this, the universal nature is there.

If what Suzuki said above about Buddha nature doesn't make a lot of sense to you, here's some possibly easier-to-grasp excerpts from what Barry Magid said in "What is Buddha nature," which echoes my perspective about emptiness and Buddha nature.

What exactly is Buddha Nature? While we can talk about it many ways, it's probably best to start by saying there's no such thing as Buddha Nature. And the important word in there, of course, is thing. Because we don't want to use the word Buddha Nature to intentionally or unintentionally denote some kind of subtle, mysterious, esoteric essence that lies behind or inside who or what we otherwise seem to be.

Buddha Nature is not a seed or potential or latent capacity that we uncover and develop. It's not a separate true self that we uncover. So what is it? What's a way to talk about Buddha Nature that doesn't lead us down one of these confusing byways?

...To say that all things have Buddha Nature is in a way to simply re-describe or re-perceive what we and things in the world are actually like, as opposed to the description that we or our language can fall into when we talk about selves or chairs or objects as fixed, unchanging things.

Buddha Nature is saying that everything, as it is, rather than being permanent and solid, is actually impermanent and changing. And any permanence is a permanence that we conceptually or linguistically ascribe to it, more or less for our functional or emotional convenience.

That everything by its nature is in a constant state of interdependent flux. Everything is subject to being in relationship to something else, everything is changing over time, and that it is all empty of some fixed essence that is immutable while things around it change.

So to say that something possesses Buddha Nature is not to identify any separate inner quality to that thing, it's just to describe the thing as it already is, from a particular point of view. Or to describe it maybe more strictly from the absence of a usual point of view, that ascribes a certain permanence to it.

And if you're totally confused by everything said in this post, a cartoon provides maybe the best understanding of all about emptiness and Buddha nature.

 

Shunryu Suzuki is a Soto Zen balance to Rinzai's D.T. Suzuki

Having written about D.T. Suzuki's take on Zen Buddhism in a couple of recent posts (here and here), I figured it would be good to balance my Zen scale by re-reading Shunryu Suzuki's wonderful little book, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. 

(The book is based on talks by Suzuki. I've written a couple of other blog posts about it here and here.)

They share a name, but D.T. Suzuki leaned strongly in the Rinzai Zen direction while Shunryu Suzuki belonged to the Soto Zen lineage.

Rinzai believes in instant enlightenment through koan study or some other means, like hearing a sound or a Zen master utterance. Soto believes in a gradual approach to enlightenment. I remember this difference by associated Soto with it'll take you so long to be enlightened. 

Of course, Rinzai is no walk in the park, since you've got to put your mind into a Great Doubt and hope that by banging your head against the wall of Zen for months, years, or decades, at some point the wall will instantly dissolve into a warm pool of comfortable enlightenment. 

Personally, I'm more attracted to the Soto way. It just seems to me that most things in life happen gradually, though I did have a Loony Labyrinth Rinzai'ish experience back when I was addicted for a while to playing this early pinball game for the Macintosh computer.

If anyone doubts my claim to instant enlightenment, computer game addiction variety, I offer this description of my satori that I included in a post, "End of spiritual questions is the final answer."

In the early 1990s I had an Apple computer on which I played a pinball game, Loony Labyrinth. I played it a lot. I was addicted to it.

My wife was almost driven crazy by the Loony Labyrinth theme music, especially after I became proficient at making my way through the levels of the game. I could easily play a single game for half an hour.

Eventually I became disturbed by how much time Loony Labyrinth was taking out of my day. I tried to stop playing. But I couldn't. I'd manage a day or two of going pinball cold turkey, but soon I'd be feeding my addiction again.

Until...

I entered the Loony Labyrinth sweet spot, the zone, pinball nirvana. The game began normally. Then I reached levels of Loony Labyrinth'ness never attained before. I couldn't make a mistake. Extra balls and higher levels kept popping up without end.

I think I reached a billion points before the last ball was lost and ecstatic congratulations appeared on my computer monitor. Along with "Play again?"

No thank you. I had zero interest in Loony Labyrinth. My addiction to the game had instantly dropped away without any effort on my part. I never played it again.

Reading U.G.'s "Mind is a Myth" reminded me of how I bounced back and forth between desiring to play Loony Labyrinth, and desiring not to play Loony Labyrinth, until that spontaneous unforced moment came when I simply wasn't interested in Loony Labyrinth.

So, yeah, I've had a profound personal experience of instant enlightenment -- if one defines enlightenment as no longer wanting to play an enticing computer game.

On the other hand, and I have no doubt that Shunryu Suzuki would give me that hand, perhaps via a slap to the side of my ignorant-of-enlightenment head, the short talk he gives near the end of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind in a "Buddha's Enlightenment" chapter argues that if anyone looks upon enlightenment the way I did just now, their Zen is useless.

I am very glad to be here on the day Buddha attained enlightenment under the Bo tree. When he attained enlightenment  under the Bo tree, he said, "It is wonderful to see Buddha nature in everything and in each individual!"

What he meant was that when we practice zazen [meditation] we have Buddha nature, and each of us is Buddha himself. By practice he did not mean just to sit under the Bo tree, or to sit in the cross-legged posture.

It is true that this posture is the basic one or original way for us, but actually what Buddha meant was that mountains, trees, flowing water, flowers and plants -- everything as it is -- is the way Buddha is. It means everything is taking Buddha's activity, each thing in its own way.

But the way each thing exists is not to be understood by itself in its own realm of consciousness. What we see or what we hear is just a part, or a limited idea, of what we actually are. But when we just are -- each just existing in his own way -- we are expressing Buddha himself.

In other words, when we practice something such as zazen, then there is Buddha's way or Buddha nature. When we ask what Buddha nature is, it vanishes; but when we just practice zazen, we have full understanding of it.

The only way to understand Buddha nature is just to practice zazen, just to be here as we are. So what Buddha meant by Buddha nature was to be there as he was, beyond the realm of consciousness. 

Buddha nature is our original nature; we have it before we practice zazen and before we acknowledge it in  terms of consciousness. So in this sense, whatever we do is Buddha's activity. If you want to understand it, you cannot understand it. When you give up trying to understand it, true understanding is always there.

Usually after zazen I give a talk, but the reason people come is not just to listen to my talk, but to practice zazen. We should never forget this point. The reason I talk is to encourage you to practice zazen in Buddha's way.

So we say that although you have Buddha nature, if you are under the idea of doing or not doing zazen, or if you cannot admit that you are Buddha, then you understand neither Buddha nature nor zazen. But when you practice zazen in the same way as Buddha did, you will understand what our way is.

We do not talk so much, but through our activity we communicate with each other, intentionally or unintentionally. We should always be alert enough to communicate with or without words. If this point is lost, we will lose the most important point of Buddhism.

Wherever we go, we should not lose this way of life. That is called "being Buddha," or "being the boss." Wherever you go you should be the master of your surroundings. This means you should not lose your way. So this is called Buddha, because if you exist in this way always, you are Buddha himself.

Without trying to be Buddha you are Buddha. This is how we attain enlightenment. To attain enlightenment is to be always with Buddha. By repeating the same thing over and over, we will acquire this kind of understanding. 

But if you lose this point and take pride in your attainment or become discouraged because of your idealistic effort, your practice will confine you by a thick wall. We should not confine ourselves by a self-built wall.

So when zazen time comes, just to get up, to go and sit with your teacher, and to talk to him and listen to him, and then go home again -- all these procedures are our practice. In this way, without any idea of attainment, you are always Buddha.

This is true practice of zazen. Then you may understand the true meaning of Buddha's first statement, "See Buddha nature in various beings, and in every one of us."

If you're unsure what Buddha nature consists of, join the club, because I feel the same way. But I have some ideas gained from re-reading Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. I'll share them in an upcoming post.

Caste survey in India makes me wonder why castes still exist

Here in the United States we have a lengthy history of discriminating against people based on the color of their skin: Blacks have fared much worse than Whites. 

But this sort of discrimination is easy to understand. Genetics explains the discrimination. 

I find it much more difficult to fathom why caste is still ever-present in India. I realize that caste is based on the Hindu religion. However, Buddhists, Muslims, Christians and other faiths are members of Indian castes.

This seems bizarre to me.

A story in the Washington Post got me thinking about this: "A caste survey in India could upend politics in world's largest democracy." Here's how the story starts out.

PATNA, India — The morning milk had yet to be delivered, but the April heat was already leaving stains on his shirt. Satyadeo Paswan’s brows furrowed as he flipped page after page of 250 caste categories, scanning for the correct code to enter in the crucial yet complicated form in front of him.

Paswan is one of the hundreds of thousands of surveyors tasked with an administratively and politically historic exercise: collecting caste data on every single one of the 126 million people in the state of Bihar.

This mammoth task has taken center stage in India’s politics. A census of caste — the rigid system of inherited social stratification sprouting from Hinduism — could transform the nation’s democratic politics. It puts the governing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in a tight spot: Increased caste identification could dent its electoral supremacy.

Several other states are expressing interest in conducting their own caste surveys and have sought the guidance of Bihar, according to officials here. Nearby Odisha state has begun a version, local reports say. On Thursday, however, Bihar’s high court ordered a temporary stay on releasing the results while it determines if the state government has the power to conduct the survey.

Critics of the current system say that not acknowledging and studying the role of caste in society ignores the pervasive discrimination that flows from it.

At India’s independence in 1947, the constitution outlawed “untouchability” — the most extreme form of marginalization against the lowest castes, known as Dalits. But India continued to witness caste discrimination and the maintenance of boundaries dictating who can marry whom, who can eat with whom and who can do which jobs.

The government has divided the thousands of different castes into three main categories: the Upper Castes; a middle level known as the Other Backward Castes, or OBCs; and the Scheduled Castes, or Dalits, the groups for which India’s first affirmative action programs were created, in an attempt to address their historic marginalization.

“The American society fought against racism, [but] such movements in India have been much rarer,” said Manoj Jha, a member of Parliament from the Rashtriya Janata Dal, a political party that is part of an alliance governing Bihar. “As a result, the structure is dominated by Upper Castes.”

I have no idea why India persists in allowing castes to be used to categorize people. It just seems like an exceedingly backward system rooted in Hindu dogma that has no place in a country that aspires to take its place as a modern 21st century society.

The BBC explained caste, but it still makes no sense to me.

Manusmriti, widely regarded to be the most important and authoritative book on Hindu law and dating back to at least 1,000 years before Christ was born, "acknowledges and justifies the caste system as the basis of order and regularity of society".

The caste system divides Hindus into four main categories - Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and the Shudras. Many believe that the groups originated from Brahma, the Hindu God of creation.

At the top of the hierarchy were the Brahmins who were mainly teachers and intellectuals and are believed to have come from Brahma's head. Then came the Kshatriyas, or the warriors and rulers, supposedly from his arms. The third slot went to the Vaishyas, or the traders, who were created from his thighs. At the bottom of the heap were the Shudras, who came from Brahma's feet and did all the menial jobs.

The main castes were further divided into about 3,000 castes and 25,000 sub-castes, each based on their specific occupation.

Outside of this Hindu caste system were the achhoots - the Dalits or the untouchables.

...Some say the caste system would have disappeared by now if the fires were not regularly fanned by politicians.

At elections, many caste groups still vote as a block and are wooed by politicians looking for electoral gains.

As a result, what was originally meant to be a temporary affirmative action plan to improve the lot of the unprivileged groups has now become a vote-grabbing exercise for many politicians.

The Pew Research Center reported on a survey of Indian attitudes toward caste. It was good to see that most Indians report that they aren't aware of caste discrimination, but attitudes toward marriages between different castes shows that India has a long way to go in this regard.

Caste segregation remains prevalent in India. For example, a substantial share of Brahmins say they would not be willing to accept a person who belongs to a Scheduled Caste as a neighbor. But most Indians do not feel there is a lot of caste discrimination in the country, and two-thirds of those who identify with Scheduled Castes or Tribes say there is not widespread discrimination against their respective groups. This feeling may reflect personal experience: 82% of Indians say they have not personally faced discrimination based on their caste in the year prior to taking the survey.

Still, Indians conduct their social lives largely within caste hierarchies. A majority of Indians say that their close friends are mostly members of their own caste, including roughly one-quarter (24%) who say all their close friends are from their caste. And most people say it is very important to stop both men and women in their community from marrying into other castes, although this view varies widely by region. For example, roughly eight-in-ten Indians in the Central region (82%) say it is very important to stop inter-caste marriages for men, compared with just 35% in the South who feel strongly about stopping such marriages.

A defense of D.T. Suzuki

I was planning to write about a subject other than Zen Buddhism today, but a comment by Appreciative Reader on one of my posts about D.T. Suzuki, a noted author and popularizer of Zen, stimulated me to compose this defense of Suzuki.

Which isn't going to be in my words. I've read three of Suzuki's books, each several times. I consider that this gives me a good feel for both the man and his work. But that's just my opinion. Appreciative Reader has its own, though he admits that he isn't very familiar with Zen, nor with Suzuki. 

What particularly caught my eye was Appreciative Reader's contention that Suzuki was a charlatan who came to the West to make money and a name for himself. That struck me as an odd thing to say, even if someone was deeply familiar with Suzuki and his writings. To just assert that without any evidence struck me as an insult to Suzuki and his legacy.

So I'm requesting that Appreciative Reader read some information about the life of D.T. Suzuki, and consider whether he may be mistaken about him. There's an informative biographical summary of Suzuki on the Association for Asian Studies web site. Here's info on the author:

ERIC CUNNINGHAM is a Professor of East Asian and World History at Gonzaga University. He complements his specialty areas of modern Japanese intellectual history with research in Zen Buddhism, Eastern and Western spirituality, film, and Japanese literature. He is the author of Hallucinating the End of History: Nishida, Zen, and the Psychedelic Eschaton (Academica Press, 2007); Zen Past and Present(AAS, 2011); and over a dozen articles.

The biography is very positive. This is the first (long) paragraph, which I've broken int0 several paragraphs to make it easier to read.

It would be difficult to name any world religious or cultural figure of the twentieth century who did more to transform modern civilization than Zen Buddhist scholar Daisetsu Teitaro (D. T.) Suzuki (1870–1966). While we might look to such luminaries as the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, or Mother Teresa and note the profound changes their lives brought to postwar global consciousness, the influence they exercised was of a different species than Suzuki’s.

D. T. Suzuki did not just hold up a “spiritual” mirror to the modern West to reveal its moral contradictions, nor did he engage in activism of any kind. He was, rather, in his unofficial capacity as Zen’s “apostle to the West,” a spirit-minded scholar who consciously wove his life’s work into the fabric of history, helping a modern global society reconsider its assumptions, aspirations, and mode of operating.

As a mentor to such international culture producers as Carl Jung, Alan Watts, Thomas Merton, Allen Ginsberg, Martin Heidegger, John Cage, and Gary Snyder—to name but a few—Suzuki worked effectively across cultural, social, and generational boundaries to help articulate a new historical consciousness whose full effects have yet to be realized. While he may not have occupied as strong a position in the hearts and minds of the masses as other modern spiritual leaders, Suzuki was indeed unique in his contributions to the world’s religious culture.

I also asked ChatGPT to give me a biography of Suzuki, since I was interested in what an artificial intelligence had to say about him.

Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, more commonly known as D.T. Suzuki, was a Japanese philosopher, author, and scholar who is best known for his pioneering work in bringing Zen Buddhism to the Western world. He was born on October 18, 1870, in Kanazawa, a city on the west coast of Japan.

Suzuki's father was a physician, and his mother came from a family of samurai. From an early age, Suzuki showed an interest in Buddhism and other Eastern religions, and he studied the writings of Confucius and Lao-Tzu as a teenager. He also learned English and began to read Western philosophy.

In 1890, Suzuki enrolled at Tokyo University, where he studied philosophy and Sanskrit. After graduating, he became a lecturer at the same university and began to specialize in the study of Buddhism. He later became a professor of Buddhist philosophy at Otani University in Kyoto, where he taught for many years.

In 1897, Suzuki met the Zen master Shaku Soen, who was then the head of Engakuji temple in Kamakura, Japan. Soen became Suzuki's mentor and introduced him to the practice of Zen meditation. Suzuki became deeply committed to Zen and began to write extensively on the subject, publishing numerous books and articles throughout his career.

Suzuki's work emphasized the practical, experiential nature of Zen, and he emphasized the importance of meditation and direct experience in understanding the teachings of Zen. His most famous book, "An Introduction to Zen Buddhism," was first published in 1934 and is still widely read today.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Suzuki began to travel to the United States and Europe to give lectures and seminars on Zen Buddhism. He became a popular speaker and was widely credited with introducing Zen to the Western world. His work influenced many leading Western philosophers, theologians, and writers, including Martin Heidegger, Thomas Merton, and Jack Kerouac.

Suzuki remained active in teaching and writing throughout his life, and he continued to be a leading figure in the Zen community until his death in 1966 at the age of 95. Today, he is widely regarded as one of the most important Zen masters of the 20th century, and his work continues to be influential in both Eastern and Western philosophy and religion.

Zen is Buddhism stripped down to the spirit

I'm continuing to enjoy re-reading D.T. Suzuki's collection of writings in the 1956 edition of Zen Buddhism, a book that I've had for over 50 years (yeah, I'm old) and wrote about a few days ago in D.T. Suzuki on the Zen Doctrine of No-Mind. 

Suzuki is a pleasingly clear author. He also doesn't mince words, as you'll see below where I share some passages about the difference he sees between Indian and Chinese ways of thinking. The chapter I'm writing about today is "Zen in Relation to Buddhism Generally."

It helped me better understand why Zen considers itself to be the genuine heir to what the Buddha taught. 

The claim of the Zen followers that they are transmitting the essence of Buddhism is based on their belief that Zen takes hold of the enlivening spirit of the Buddha, stripped of all its historical and doctrinal garments.

But Suzuki starts off the chapter with a recognition that Zen can be off-putting.

Superficially, indeed, there is something in Zen so bizarre and even irrational as to frighten the pious literary followers of the so-called primitive Buddhism and to make them declare that Zen is not Buddhism but a Chinese anomaly of it.

I mentioned the seventh century Zen adept, Hui-neng, in my previous post. Suzuki says that he was chosen as the sixth patriarch of Zen because the fifth patriarch observed that of his five hundred followers, four hundred and ninety-nine understand well what Buddhism is, except for Hui-neng. 

This marvelous anecdote shows how different Zen is from other spiritual traditions. Zen practitioners clearly are intelligent and logical, notably including D.T. Suzuki. However, they are after the experience Buddhism offers, not a description of it.

And Zen arose as a reaction to the deification of Buddha after his death. 

The process of deification thus constantly went on until, some centuries after the death of the Master, he became a direct manifestation of the Supreme Being himself -- in fact, he was the Highest One in the flesh, in him there was a divine humanity in perfect realization. He was Son of God or the Buddha and the Redeemer of the world.

...Indeed, the teaching is to be interpreted in the light of the teacher's divine personality. The later now predominates over the whole system; he is the centre whence radiate the rays of Enlightenment, salvation is only possible in believing in him as saviour. 

So Suzuki argues that the simple essence of the Buddha's teachings got covered up by a mass of supernaturalism, dogmatism, and theology. Zen seeks to recover the lost spirit of Buddhism.

When we wish to understand Buddhism thoroughly we must dive deep into its bottom where lies its living spirit. Those that are satisfied with a superficial view of its dogmatical aspect are apt to let go of the spirit which will truly explain the inner life of Buddhism.

This occurred in China, not India. Suzuki explains why.

To understand how the doctrine of Enlightenment or self-realization came to be translated in China as Zen Buddhism, we must first see where the Chinese mind varies from the Indian generally. When this is done, Zen will appear as a most natural product of the Chinese soil, where Buddhism has been successfully transplanted in spite of many adverse conditions. 

Roughly, then, the Chinese are above all a most practical people, while the Indians are visionary and highly speculative. We cannot perhaps judge the Chinese as unimaginative and lacking in the dramatic sense, but when they are compared with the inhabitants of the Buddha's native land they look so grey, so sombre.

Ouch! Guess I should have given a trigger warning to any Chinese readers of this blog post. Suzuki doesn't stop there. It gets worse.

The geographical features of each country are singularly reflected in the people. The tropical luxuriance of imagination so strikingly contrasts with the wintry dreariness of common practicalness. The Indians are subtle in analysis and dazzling in poetic flight; the Chinese are children of earthly life, they plod, they never soar away into the air.

Suzuki finds a lot to like in the Indian mentality, even though it isn't conducive to Zen.

The Indians found quite a novel way of illustrating philosophical truths that cannot be applied to analytical reasoning. They resorted to miracles or supernatural phenomena for their illustration. Thus they made the Buddha a great magician; not only the Buddha but almost all the chief characters appearing in the Mahayana scriptures became magicians.

And in my view this is one of the most charming features of the Mahayana texts -- this description of supernatural phenomena in connection with the teaching of abstruse doctrine.

...At all events the above references will suffice, I believe, to establish my thesis that the reason for the introduction of supernaturalism into the Mahayana literature of Buddhism was to demonstrate the intellectual impossibility of comprehending spiritual facts.

But the Chinese had a better way. 

The Chinese have no aptitude like Indians for hiding themselves in the clouds of mystery and supernaturalism. Chwang-tzu and Lieh-tzu were the nearest to the Indian type of mind in ancient China, but their mysticism does not begin to approach that of the Indian.

...The Chinese genius was to demonstrate itself in some other way. When they began inwardly to assimilate Buddhism as the doctrine of Enlightenment, the only course that opened to their concrete practical minds was to produce Zen.

When we come to Zen after seeing all the wonderful miracles displayed by the Indian Mahayana writers, and after the highly abstracted speculations of the Madhyamika thinkers, what a change of scenery do we have here?

No rays are issuing from the Buddha's forehead, no retinues of Boddhisattvas reveal themselves before you, there is indeed nothing that would particularly strike your senses as odd or extraordinary, or as beyond intelligence, beyond the ken of logical reasoning.

The people you associate with are all ordinary mortals like yourselves, no abstract ideas, no dialectical subtleties confront you.

Mountains tower high towards the sky, rivers all pour into the ocean. Plants sprout in the spring and flowers bloom in red. When the moon shines serenely , poets grow mildly drunk and sing a song of eternal peace.

How prosaic, how ordinary, we may say! But here was the Chinese soul, and Buddhism came to grow in it.

When a monk asks who is the Buddha, the master points at his image in the Buddha Hall; no explanations are given, no arguments are suggested. When the mind is the subject of discourse, asks a monk, "What is mind, anyway?" "Mind," says the master. "I do not understand, Sir." "Neither do I," quickly comes from the master.

As the chapter draws to a close, Suzuki restates some key points.

The truth has many avenues of approach through which it makes itself known to the human mind. But the choice it makes depends on certain limitations under which it works. The superabundance of Indian imagination issued in supernaturalism and wonderful symbolism, and the Chinese sense of practicalness and its love for the solid everyday facts of life, resulted in Zen Buddhism.

We may be able to understand, though only tentatively by most readers at present, the following definitions of Zen offered by its masters.

When Joshu was asked what Zen was, he answered, "It is cloudy today and I won't answer." 

To the same question, Ummon's reply was: "That's it." On another occasion the master was not at all affirmative, for he said, "Not a word to be predicated." 

These being some of the definitions given to Zen by the masters, in what relationship did they conceive of Zen as standing to the doctrine of Enlightenment taught in the Sutras? Did they conceive it after the manner of the Lankavatara or after that of the Prajna-paramita?

No, Zen had to have its own way; the Chinese mind refused blindly to follow the Indian models.

D.T. Suzuki on the Zen Doctrine of No-Mind

I've had this book for a long time, probably since my college years (1966-71) when I first dived into the deep waters of Zen Buddhism. The copyright date is 1956. The cost is 95 cents. Ah, the days when paperback books with 294 pages cost under a dollar.

I'm not sure what led me to pull the book out of a Buddhism shelf a few days ago. I guess I needed a hit of classic Zen, since D.T. Suzuki, the author, is described on the back cover as "Zen's chief exponent in English." Of course, since the book was published there's been an explosion of interest in Zen.

For good reason. I consider Zen to be the best inspiration for people like me who fall into the spiritual but not religious camp. (I was religious for 35 years, of an Eastern religion variety, but now am not.)

I love how Zen is so completely this-worldly rather than other-worldly. I love that Zen has no need for God or any other supernatural entity. I love the quirky Zen tales and anecdotes, even when I have trouble grasping them. I love how even though "Zen" typically is paired with "Buddhism," Zen Buddhism doesn't take itself as seriously, nor does it pay much attention to esoteric Buddhist notions like karma and rebirth.

And I love how Zen is thoroughly non-dualistic, having no patience for typical religious preoccupations with virtue and vice. Or purification. This separates Zen, and Buddhism in general, from Hindu philosophy where the Atman/Soul is considered to be hidden under layers of mire that prevents us from realizing its connection with Brahman/God.

Below I've shared excerpts from the book's chapter, The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind. They provide a wonderful background for comprehending the unique methods of Zen. I didn't include any excerpts dealing with the rather difficult concepts of Prajna, true understanding of the nature of phenomena.

You'll find a mention of Hui-neng in the initial excerpts. He was a Chinese dude of the seventh century who famously wrote a short poem that according to Suzuki, started Zen as an offshoot of Buddhism. I wrote about him in a 2012 post, "No-self" isn't a spiritual goal, it's what we already are.

I don't claim to fully grasp the following classic Buddhist verses. However, in the past I found the first much more reasonable. Now, the second resonates with me. Here's an excerpt from Mark Epstein's book, "Thoughts Without a Thinker," where he describes some Buddhist seventh-century happenings.

The foremost disciple, Shen-hsiu, who was expecting to assume the role of the master, presented the following.

The body is the Bodhi tree,
The mind is like a clear mirror standing.
Take care to wipe it all the time,
Allow no grain of dust to cling.

A perfectly acceptable resonse, Shen-hsiu's verse made a virtue of the empty and reflecting mind, a recurrent motif in Buddhist literature. But the clear mirror, like the true self, too easily becomes an object of veneration. Such a view merely replaces the concrete self with a more rarefied version that is then thought to be even more real than the original.

An illiterate kitchen boy, Hui-neng, grasped the imperfection of Shen-hsiu's response and presented the following alternative:

The Bodhi is not a tree,
The clear mirror is nowhere standing,
Fundamentally not one thing exists,
Where then is a grain of dust to cling? 

...Hui-neng avoided the common misconception of liberation as a mind emptied of its contents or a body emptied of its emotions. The mind, or self, that we conceive of does not exist in the way we imagine, said Hui-neng; if all things are empty, to what can we cling? If the mind itself is already empty, why should it have to be cleansed? If the emotions are empty, why do they have to be eliminated?

Again, spiritual seekers are faced with some clear (though not always easy to discern) alternatives. Having been a "wipe the mirror" meditation-guy for many, many years, I realize how difficult it is for people who've embraced a self-realization path to recognize the validity of another way.

I urge you, though, to open yourself to the notion that you are not a self. Nor a soul. Nor a drop of the divine ocean. You're as empty of intrinsic being as anything or anyone else in this vast, mysterious cosmos.

Here's some of the passages that I especially resonated with in D.T. Suzuki's The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind chapter. Dhyana basically means meditation.

The dominant idea prevailing up to the time of Hui-neng was that the Buddha-nature with which all beings are endowed is thoroughly pure and undefiled as to its self-being. The business of the Yogin is therefore to bring out his self-nature, which is the Buddha-nature, in its original purity.

But, as I said before, in practice this is apt to lead the Yogin to the conception of something separate which retains its purity behind all the darkness enveloping his individual mind... But serenely reflecting or contemplating on the purity of the Mind has a suicidal effect on life, and Hui-neng vehemently protested against this type of meditation. (p. 159)

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There are as many types of binding as there are types of clinging. When we cling to purity we thereby make a form of it, and we are purity-bound. For the same reason, when we cling to or abide with emptiness, we are emptiness-bound; when we abide with Dhyana or tranquilization, we are Dhyana-bound. 

However excellent are the merits of these spiritual exercises, they inevitably lead us to a state of bondage in one way or another. In this there is no emancipation. The whole system of Zen discipline may thus be said to be nothing but a series of attempts to set us absolutely free from all forms of bondage.

Even when we talk of "seeing into one's self-nature," this seeing has also a binding effect on us if it is construed as having something in it specifically set up; that is, if the seeing is a specific state of consciousness. For this is the "binding." (p. 161)

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That Dhyana has nothing to do with mere sitting cross-legged in meditation, as is generally supposed by outsiders, or as has been maintained by Shen-hsiu and his school ever since the days of Hui-neng, is here asserted in a most unmistakable manner.

Dhyana is not quietism, not is it tranquilization; it is rather acting, moving, performing deeds, seeing, hearing, thinking, remembering. Dhyana is attained where there is, so to speak, no Dhyana practiced. (p. 181)

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Hui-neng's school thus objects to Shen-hsiu's on the ground that those who spend their time in sitting cross-legged in meditation, trying to realize the state of tranquility, are seekers after some tangible attainment; they are upholders of the doctrine of original purity, which they consider to be something intellectually demonstrable; they are gazers at a special object which can be picked up among other relative objects and shown to others as one points at the moon; they cling to this special object as something most precious, forgetting that this clinging degrades the value of their cherished object because it is thereby brought down to the same order of being as themselves; because of this clinging and abiding in it, they cherish a certain definite state of consciousness as the ultimate point they should attain; therefore they are never truly emancipated, they have not cut the last string which keeps them still on this side of existence. (p.195)

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A monk asked Ching-t'sen, of Chang-sha: "What is meant by 'one's everyday thought is the Tao'?"
CHING-T'SEN: "When I feel sleepy, I sleep; when I want to sit, I sit."
MONK: "I fail to follow you."
CHING-T'SEN: "In summer we seek a cool place; when cold we sit by a fire." (p. 207)

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A Vinaya master called Yuan came to Tai-chu Hui-hai, and asked, "When disciplining oneself in the Tao, is there any special way of doing it?"
HUI-HAI: "Yes, there is."
YUAN: "What is that?"
HUI-HAI: "When hungry one eats; when tired, one sleeps."
YUAN: "That is what other people do; is their way the same as yours?"
HUI-HAI: "Not the same."
YUAN: "Why not?"
HUI-HAI: "When they eat, they do not just eat, they conjure up all kinds of imagination; when they sleep, they do not just sleep, they are given up to varieties of idle thoughts. That is why theirs is not my way." (p. 207)

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Both in Te-shan and Huang-po, Zen is taught to be something in direct contact with our daily life; there are no speculations soaring heavenward, no abstractions making one's head reel, and no sentimental sweetness which turns religion into a love-drama. Facts of daily experience are taken as they come to us, and from them a state of no-mind-ness is extracted. (p. 219)

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A monk asked Hsiang-nien: "What is your eye that does not deceive others?" This is a literal translation; the question really demands the expression of the master's genuine, undeceiving attitude of mind which controls all his experiences. 

Our eye is generally found covered with all kinds of dust, and the refraction of light thereby caused fails to give us the correct view of things. The master responded right away, saying: "Look, look, winter is approaching."

Probably this mondo took place in a mountain monastery surrounded with trees, now bare and trembling in the wind, and both were looking at the snow-bearing clouds. The approach of the winter was quite certain; there was no deception about it.

But the monk wondered if there was not something more than that and said: "What is the ultimate meaning of it?" The master was perfectly natural and his answer was: "And then we have the gentle spring breeze."

In this there is no allusion to deep metaphysical concepts, but a plain fact of observation is told in the most ordinary language. 

The monk's question may elicit in the hands of the philosopher or theologian quite a different form of treatment, but the Zen master's eye is always on facts of experience accessible to everybody, and verifiable by him whenever he wants.

Whatever mysticism enveloped the master was not on his side, but on the side of him who looks for it because of his own blindness. (p. 222)

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We always seek something beyond or behind our experience, and forget that this seeking is an endless regression either way, inward or outward, upward or downward. The Zen master is well aware of this, and avoids the complications. (p. 224)

Drugs as an avenue to exploring consciousness

First, I've made some progress in understanding what Sam Harris means when he says "Consciousness is not inside your head," a semi-perplexing statement that I wrote about recently. 

After writing that post, I've listened to a couple of other guided meditations by Harris on his Waking Up app. In one, he talked about how consciousness is akin to the familiar metaphor of waves and the ocean. The waves aren't separate from the ocean, just as consciousness isn't separate from the things that we're conscious of.

In the guided meditation I heard today, Harris made a similar point about being aware of our breathing. He said that we shouldn't feel that we're observing the breath from a conscious vantage point up in our head, since the breath isn't separate from consciousness. It's within consciousness.

Everything is, given that nothing exists for us if we're not conscious of it. So the way I see it (not sure if Harris agrees with this), it's a mistake to look upon consciousness as if it were a thing -- like water or air. Consciousness is better viewed as a process, the brain in action. 

Thus it makes sense to say consciousness is not inside the head, even though the brain is. Consciousness is an emergent process of the brain that allows us to be aware of the world inside and outside of us. When I see a tree, the seeing of leaves, trunk, branches, and such isn't separate from my consciousness that makes seeing possible.

It's all consciousness, just as waves that can appear very different are all ocean.

I also want to share some thoughts about an article in the April 24/May 1 issue of The New Yorker, The Forgotten Drug Trips of the Nineteenth Century: Long before the hippies, a group of thinkers used substances like cocaine, hashish, and nitrous oxide to uncover the secrets of the mind.
Download The Forgotten Drug Trips of the Nineteenth Century | The New Yorker

The technology of nineteenth-century drug exploration, in both professional scientific circles and amateur intellectual ones, was the self-experiment. Since the seventeenth century, scientists had considered this the best method to understand substances that affected moods and perceptions: trying them on other human subjects was a risk, and animal experiments could provide only external indications of mental changes.

By the end of the eighteenth century, when Davy inhaled his first dose of nitrous oxide, the self-experiment was an established practice, with its own protocols and reporting conventions. Its Achilles’ heel, for some, was the way it mixed competing kinds of observation. As the young Sigmund Freud, investigating cocaine as a medical student in the eighteen-eighties, realized, it involved a self-splitting, an impossible assertion of two types of truth at once—that of the researcher and that of the experimental subject.

This tension defined the psychonauts’ project.

Along with many others, I carried on in this spirit during some of my college years, 1966-1971, at San Jose State College in the San Francisco Bay area. Since San Jose wasn't nearly as cool a city as San Francisco or Berkeley, me and my hippie friends identified more with those locales, which we visited often in various states of drug-induced highness.

I'm not going to claim that we were dedicated to exploring the nature of psychedelic consciousness under the influence of LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin, or the non-psychedelic influence of marijuana (which I'm still engaged in "research" with here in Oregon). Often we were just out to have a good time.

But some of us combined Eastern philosophy with psychedelics. The Tibetan Book of the Dead was a particular favorite, since it described various levels of consciousness experienced by dying or dead people.

I ran into a young guy who was traveling around the country, hoping to be able to enter the light spoken of in the Tibetan Book of the Dead that he'd seen while on a psychedelic trip, yet was reluctant to move toward out of fear of the unknown.

This guy was the friend who accompanied me on a trip to the Santa Cruz mountains where, under the spell of mescaline, we simultaneously concluded that the universe is a paper bag turned inside out.

That experience points to the issue that is talked about in The New Yorker article about nineteenth century drug explorations. It's difficult, if not impossible, to be a dispassionate observer of your psychedelic trip while you're in the midst of doing the "psychonaut" traveling. 

He and I deeply felt the truth of the paper bag turned inside out nature of the universe while we were high. The next day, as now, that notion seems vacuous and meaningless. So which is true? The inspiration while under the influence of a drug, or the later sober assessment of the inspiration? 

I'd say that both are true, since set (one's mindset) and setting (where one is using a drug) combine to produce a certain experience. Here's a pertinent excerpt from The New Yorker article:

To a stubborn handful of psychonauts, though, the most “objective” data about drugs were precisely those culled from experience. Jay foregrounds Jacques-Joseph Moreau, a mid-nineteenth-century French psychiatrist who encountered hashish—the concentrated, hallucinogenic extract of the cannabis plant—while travelling in the Middle East.

Hashish was then known to Westerners mostly secondhand, its effects filtered through the lens of fictions such as “The Arabian Nights.” When Moreau took a strong dose in 1840, however, he found that it was uniquely educative in the psychiatric context.

Each of the effects he experienced could be read as a symptom of mental illness: the nervous excitement, the distortion of space and time, the hallucinatory perceptions. Hashish took him to a place that looked and felt like insanity, then led him, temporarily, inside it. It allowed him to understand his patients with greater nuance: he could now recognize what “the ravings of a madman” were like, having “raved himself.” “Personal experience,” he wrote, “is the criterion of truth here.”

Reading this, I was reminded of my first LSD trip. A college friend who had used LSD before took it with me. However, he wasn't able to handle the situation when I convinced him that the psychedelic experience we were having proved that we were insane.

We talked about what this meant. The best we could come up with was that yes, we now were insane, but being crazy wasn't all that bad. In fact, maybe it was good. We had no conception that our LSD trips were going to end soon and we'd be back to normal.

Oregon, where I live, has become the first state to legalize the therapeutic use of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. The initial class of facilitators graduated recently. Fairly soon it will be possible for people to pay for a supervised psilocybin trip under the guidance of a facilitator. 

Psilocybin offers benefits for those with PTSD, a fatal illness, serious depression, and other problems. I'm unsure if I'd want to use it, but I would seriously consider it. Especially since someone would be there to keep me from thinking that I was insane.