Church of the Churchless

We surrender to a higher power when we no longer believe in free will

I like the idea of surrendering to a higher power. I just don't like the notion that this is God or some other supernatural entity, for I prefer my surrendering to be founded in reality, not illusion.

I'm not sure, though, if surrendering is the right word. Acceptance seems more accurate, but it lacks the imagery of surrendering -- which for me conjures up two generals negotiating the terms of the end of a war that one has won and one has lost.

In this case, what's being surrendered is a belief in free will, the subject I've been writing about recently. The idea of acceptance comes from an understanding that whatever is happening in my life, it is the result of a chain of causes and effects, not free will, so it makes sense to accept my life on those terms.

The main quibble I have with surrendering is that this really isn't a battle between two opposing forces. Actually there is no one to surrender to, and no one doing the surrendering. That's why I lean toward acceptance as a better term, except when I like the dramatic energy of surrendering. 

One thing that's being accepted by giving up a belief in free will is that nature is in charge, not us. Meaning, it is the entire universe that is guiding things, not a mythical free will that stands apart from the natural world.

Paul Breer says this in his book, "The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will."

According to [William] James, a surrendering of control to a higher power plays the key role in most conversion experiences, the specific object of that surrender being secondary. While in our culture it is God to whom we usually relinquish our power ("Not my but Thy will be done"), it could just as easily be Circumstance or Causal Necessity or Chance.

The secret, as Alcoholics Anonymous has long claimed, lies in "turning it over." For most individuals, what follows from that surrendering of will (or, more accurately, the illusion of will) is [as James says]:

the loss of all the worry, the sense that all is ultimately well with one, the peace, the harmony, the willingness to be, even though the outer conditions should remain the same... A passion of willingness, of acquiescence, of admiration, is the glowing centre of this state of mind.

At what James calls the "glowing centre" of the conversion experience is a kind of power, but it is a far cry from the power of which Nietzsche speaks, the power to overcome either oneself or others through the exercise of will. It is, if anything, the very opposite.

It is the power which comes from seeing oneself as the instrument of a higher will or, in less theistic terms, as a vessel through which the energy of the universe is passing. It is the power of powerlessness, the power that comes from giving up all pretense of authorship, all aspiration to divinity.

In ordinary circumstances, powerlessness implies impotence and frustration at not being able to control events. The powerlessness of which James is speaking, however, is that of someone who sees that no straining is necessary. It contains no "violent effort," no desire to dominate, no frustrated need to prove one's superiority.

The self that has been converted or reborn is emptied of all trace of will and stands ready to experience that transcendent power we usually identify as divine, but which can just as easily be conceptualized as the power of Circumstance.

However described, such power is never experienced as one's own; it belongs to the whole field of forces of which the experiencer is but a part. For that reason, it is not something in which one takes pride. It is simply that which is arising here, something for which one is more apt to feel grateful than proud.

...With the giving up of agency, speculating about either the past or future becomes less interesting. We are drawn more intimately into the present and all the things going on around us right now. In the process, our perspective of how we are related to the world changes.

Seeing ourselves as links in a chain of cause and effect has the effect of reconnecting us with the world. Of course, we have never been unconnected to that world. It has only seemed that way because of our identification with an entity standing off to the side looking at the world or listening to the world, but never entering into it.

When we give up straining either to bend the world to our will or to prevent it from taking away the things we love, we can experience what it is like to live in that world. Because our wishes are less urgent and our efforts less violent, we no longer feel pitted against the world. 

Every event, at least in hindsight, appears necessary. When those events involve us, we feel more accepting of whatever outcomes arise here. We not only feel more accepting of them, we find ourselves identifying more and more with them.

We being to see ourselves as a stream of outcomes arising here and that awareness, more than anything else, is what makes us feel connected to the rest of the world. 

As a stream of outcomes, we are at the effect of a million past and present events: our genes, our education, friends we have made along the way, the house we live in, our boss's mood, the mail we get, the weather, and even the food we eat.

At the same time, through our own mood, our ideas and perceptions, our looks, our personality, and our physical movements, we represent the causes to which other events must respond.

This feeling of connectedness, while more superficial than the Oneness of Buddhist enlightenment, has the power to dissolve the paranoia which arises from our view of the world as alien and resistant to our will.

Great speech on speaking the truth about ourselves

This evening I was all set to write about a different subject. Then while eating dinner, I watched an episode of a streaming series that I've become addicted to. I'm on season 4 of the seven seasons, having belatedly discovered this show.

Which is going to remain nameless, because I don't enjoy having plot twists revealed in a series that I'm watching, and I don't want to run the risk that I'll do the same to someone else. 

Good actors with good scripts can convey messages about life that are deeply moving. I was hoping to be able to share a video of the actor saying what I've transcribed below, but such doesn't seem to exist. So I replayed the scene with a pen and notepad in hand, getting his words down as best I could.

What follows is almost entirely accurate. To set the scene, the actor, who plays a well-known attorney seeking political office, was prepared to tell a press conference that he was going to withdraw from a race, because a shameful truth about him was going to be revealed by an opponent.

He has those remarks in hand. Then he puts them away. What came next captivated me. Reading his words won't be nearly as powerful as watching them acted on screen. Still, the message resonated with me big time: none of us should fear speaking the truth about ourselves.

Unless we have a very good reason not to. Even then, generally it is better to be open and transparent -- naturally with exceptions. Most of us feel that if other people knew who we really are, they wouldn't like some parts of us.

Maybe. However, it's also possible that because everybody is hiding something from other people, an act of radical honesty would be refreshing, not off-putting. I could say more, but I'll let my transcript of the scene where the attorney reveals his secret do the talking. 

Nope. Not going to read that one.

"A lie," the wise man Winston Churchill purportedly said, "goes halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants off."

But, uh, I have a feeling that this truth will find its way quick enough. It's high time for truth, for openness, for unburdening. 

I'm not here like most politicians might be to ask you to trust me. No, instead I'm asking if I may trust you. With my deepest fear. Which is that you might know me for who I really am.

The idea of a prosecutor is to expose that which is hidden away, the evil, the dirty, the crooked, and the untruthful, to shed light, to reveal what is under all that darkness.

And I've come to realize that to do it right, I must first shine light on my own dark parts. Which is why I've asked you all here today.

You know what, I'm just going to say it. I, uh, in my private life, in the confines of my happy marriage, with my consenting wife, practice sadomasochism.

Uh, yeah. Bondage. Dominance. All the rest. Masks. Binds. Ropes. Fire. Wow, even just saying it like that I can feel my shoulders loosen for the first time in decades.

I am a masochist. In order to achieve sexual gratification I need to be tied up, pinched, whipped, kicked, or otherwise tortured. By my loving wife.

And here's the bigger truth. All of us need something, right? I don't know what you do in your bedroom, with your loved one.

But I do know that you're probably a little embarrassed about it. You probably don't want the rest of us looking at you while you do it. Unless that's your thing. And if so, great.

But wouldn't we be better off if we didn't let shame win, if we didn't feel sheepish, like we need to hide what moves us?

There are those who believe I've just ended my legal and political careers. They don't think that you can handle what I've just told you. 

I know that you'll get it because, at the end of the day you want the truth. At worst, maybe it won't stop you from getting to the polls to support me.

But at best, maybe on the way you tell someone who you really are. And maybe they like it. And maybe you feel just a little more comfortable in your own skin. As I finally do in mine.

OK, having typed in the transcript, I decided that because I like what was said so much, Iwant to share a You Tube video of the last part of the politician's speech. It begins with a spoiler alert, but you're going to know the show I'm watching from the video. That's the price to be paid for seeing a great acting job where a powerful messge is conveyed.

Understand: the attorney, though invariably fascinating, is a complex mixture of good deeds and bad deeds. Revealing who he really is in the bedroom was both good and bad. It made him feel better and took away a threat to use his secret against him, and surely inspired others, but his wife wasn't at all pleased with him. Such is life, a mixture of good and bad.

Here's how to do away with blame, regret, and pride

If a religion, spiritual path, or mystical realization could promise a very good chance that you'd be able to do away with feelings of blame, regret, and pride -- along with other negative or good-to-let-go-of emotions -- would you want to pursue that opportunity? 

I sure would.

Especially if that opportunity didn't involve believing anything that couldn't be demonstrated to be true. And since I no longer believe in God or any other supernatural entities, I'd give the opportunity bonus points if it was thoroughly secular.

That's why I've been so enthused for quite a few years about seeing through the illusion of free will, with my enthusiasm intensified recently by a book I'm reading, Paul Breer's The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will.

As noted in previous posts, Breer is fairly unique among writers on the illusion of free will in his emphasis on the benefits of seeing through the illusion, along with tips on how to do this. On the benefits front, Breer persuasively argues that without a belief in free will, blame, regret, and pride naturally fall away.

Giving up the ghost of agency exposes guilt, remorse, and sin as demons whose power to torment us rests on an error in our thinking. In light of the pain those demons continue to inflict upon us, it seems reasonable to ask why we continue to tolerate the error. In part, the answer lies in what we stand to lose by changing our thinking.

We are attached to a view of ourselves as causal agents who are not at the effect of other causes. We enjoy seeing ourselves as islands of freedom in a sea of determinism. From this perspective, every time we act out of will we perform a small miracle. 

We are gods who move the world of experience and behavior without ourselves being moved. Once a god, it is hard to settle for less, hard to leave that island and join other creatures of the sea, hard to accept that we are bound by the same laws of motion, heredity, and conditioning as the rest of nature.

Giving up the illusion of agency implies rejoining the natural world, or more accurately, recognizing that, despite our dreams of divine status, we have never been parted from it.

If we give up our identity as soul-agents, we also stand to lose the satisfaction of pride and approval, which, some would argue, more than compensate for the pain of guilt and disapproval. The fear of losing credit for our accomplishments is certainly one of the reasons we have resisted attacks on free will.

Breer, though, makes clear that we gain much more than we lose by giving up the illusion of agency, of free will. 

After all, while the feeling of pride we get from being praised for something we did is real, it isn't necessary to demand that people stop saying, "You did a great job." We just need to remember that the you being referred to isn't an independent entity who is responsible for freely willing their actions, but a person whose actions are the result of deterministic causes and effects.

In other words, instead of thinking "I did that," we realize "That happened here, via this person." Thus giving up a belief in free will leads to the sort of humility that is difficult to attain from years or decades of ardent meditation.

(I speak as someone who engaged in decades of ardent meditation.)

The same applies to feelings of blame, whether directed at others or at ourself, and regret. In no way am I past feelings of blame, self-blame, and regret -- feelings that I've struggled with in the past and surely will continue to do so in the future.

All I'm saying is that the more I look upon the world through the lens of no-free-will, which I've been doing more strongly after I started reading Breer's book, I've been having some success with toning down feelings of blame, self-blame, and regret. Breer writes:

When we interpret blame as positional (aimed at our behavior) rather than moral (aimed at our agent) we both feel and respond differently. Being identified as the person in whom an offensive act has arisen, as opposed to the agent who has made that act happen, is less likely to make us defensive. 

As persons instead of agents, we have less to defend; while our value as body/minds remains open to judgment, our worthiness as creators of experience and behavior is no longer at stake. Once relieved of the fear of being proven unworthy agents, we are unlikely to develop feelings of rage or harbor thoughts of seeking revenge against our accuser.

If our behavior needs explaining, we need only point to our genes, our previous conditioning, and certain features of our present environment. Because the behavior has arisen here, however, we will still suffer the consequences. 

If those consequences are punitive, it behooves us to defend ourselves against false accusation. The choice may even arise to defend ourselves against a legitimate charge. Whatever the decision, our belief that we are positionally but not morally responsible makes it easier for us to be objective in weighing the evidence presented.

Yesterday Laurel, my wife, and I put this mirror up on a wall in our house. (Laurel likes blue, along with dog art.) I took the lead in putting it up, since I'm more familiar with our cordless drill and am more rigorous in measuring where a wall hanging should go than Laurel is.

But rigorous doesn't mean error-free. This was kind of a tricky installation, since the mirror needed to cover up some earlier work on our 1973-era home that occurred before we bought it in 1990. A previous mirror, not blue, of a different shape used to cover up those patches.

So I measured. I calculated. I put pencil marks on the wood wall where the screws should go to make for a mirror perfectly centered over the desk and vertically in just the right place to cover the patches. Everything was looking good. Until...

Laurel said as we were about to place the hangers on the back of the mirror over the screws, "The screws aren't even close to the fasteners." Absolutely correct. I was guilty as charged.

Interestingly, I didn't feel more than a slight twinge of regret or self-blame. I just started to remove the screws so they could be put in the correct location. I had no idea why my measuring and marking went amiss. That really didn't matter.

As Breer said, I had to deal with the consequences of my positional responsibility for the mistake. I was the person who caused the mistake. However, I didn't feel that I was an agent who freely willed whatever caused the mistake. It just happened. 

Five or ten minutes later. The mirror was solidly on the wall. Mistake corrected. Now, sure, this was a minor problem. It remains to be seen how I'll react when I make a bigger mistake and am tempted to blame myself for it. 

I'm simply saying that by deeply pondering the illusion of free will, I feel a bit less bound by my tendency to blame myself when something goes wrong or praise myself when something goes right. Increasingly, I'm seeing that things just happen, and I'm the person where they happen.

No entity inside us which is either free or not free

Here's more pearls of wisdom from Paul Breer that I'm harvesting from his book, The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will, that I've been blogging about recently. 

I'm finding Breer to be a clear thinker who is one of the few people writing about free will, or rather the lack thereof, who is out to show not only that free will is an illusion, but how that illusion can be dispelled.

The difficulty of letting go of the false notion that we humans possess free will, while the rest of the world doesn't, is that as discussed in my previous post, free will requires an independent agent. So along with free will, there goes the illusion of soul also, which is typically described as possessing some godlike qualities such as being the Unmoved Mover of our thoughts, emotions, and actions.

This doesn't mean that we aren't a person. Obviously we are.

Each of us is a unique mind and body who has experiences like no one else. Our personhood isn't in question. What's highly questionable is the presence of a Self within that mind and body which stands apart from the determinism, the cause and effect relationships, that fashion us as a person.

I've seen it argued in comments on my recent blog posts about free will that it is possible to enhance our freedom through meditation, introspection, and other ways of becoming acquainted with how our mind works.

Almost certainly this isn't true. Breer explains why in some passages that I admire for their subtlety. 

Our Occidental sense of what it means to be human rests heavily on our belief that we are morally responsible for what we do. To a great extent, our resistance to the idea of non-agency stems from our fear that, if the agent within us turns out to be an illusion, so will our image of ourselves as moral beings. 

Without that image, we shall lose our special place in the universe, in particular the status which comes from our unique ability to transcend the chain of cause and effect.

...Before going any further, it might be wise to remind ourselves that non-agency does not mean that the agent inside of us lacks the power to cause behavior; it means more simply that there is no such agent.

There is no entity inside of us which is either free or not free, no entity to play the role of either prime mover of subsequent events or hapless victim of previous events. It makes no more sense to interpret that lack of agency as a sign that there is nothing we as agents can do (and get depressed as a result) than to interpret it to mean that there is nothing we as agents have to do (and feel relieved).

Both interpretations are misleading in that they suggest the lingering presence of either an I pacing the corridors of the mind, frustrated by its ability to bend the world to its own image, or an I smugly observing the ebb and flow of a life in which it has no further responsibilities. 

If there is no inner agent either causing our experiences or serving as mediator between antecedent circumstances and experience, it seems safe to conclude that our behavior, thoughts, and feelings are caused by the circumstances themselves.

If you don't believe this, Breer invites you to try an experiment. Part of that experiment could involve meditation and mindfulness, in the sense of "witnessing."

To answer the question for yourself, check your experience the next time you act on a decision, e.g. the next time you get up from your chair to get a drink. Observe your mind carefully. Can you find any evidence of an agent that initiated the getting up?

Presumably you will be able to recall the decision to get up, perhaps even some of the thoughts leading up to that decision, but can you find the entity that caused your body to move? Was there a you that moved your body, or did your body simply move itself? Is it possible, in other words, that the physical act of getting up out of the chair was just as spontaneous as the decision which preceded it?

When I say that all thoughts, perceptions, feelings, decisions, and behavior are spontaneous, I am using the term in a special sense to indicate that there is no autonomous entity initiating them. 

Who, then, you might ask, is performing this present experiment? Who is viewing this experience and drawing conclusions about the presence or absence of an agent? Is there not, after all, a witness to these "spontaneous" events? And is not this witness the very I we have been seeking? 

The formal practice of "witnessing" or observing the flow of one's mind is encouraged in some spiritual traditions as a way of helping the adept to disengage from the contents of consciousness.

To anyone who stays with the practice long enough, however, witnessing proves to be simply another activity arising on its own -- just like the thoughts and feelings being witnessed. When we go looking for the agent "doing" the witnessing, we find nothing beyond the act of witnessing.

We can watch as witnessing presents itself to consciousness, but can never catch the "witness" independently of what it is witnessing. Sustained meditation, in fact, confirms the absence of a witness -- or, for that matter, any agent at all. We see this most clearly in the Buddhist practice of Vipassana or Insight meditation.

Our belief that we're freely acting agents causes pain and suffering

Want to feel better? Want to take steps toward genuine enlightenment? Want to embark on a journey toward truth and away from illusion?

All those wants can be achieved by giving up a sensation of being an independent agent, or soul, or ego, that stands apart from the laws of nature that govern everything else in existence. 

So argues Paul Breer in a persuasive fashion in his book, The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will. I'm enjoying the book a lot. Here's excerpts from the first chapter, "An Overview of the Agency Problem," that provide a good overview of what the book is all about.

What I mean by agent is what writers of a more spiritual age called the soul and what modern psychologists refer to as ego. Despite the difference in coloring, all three terms refer to a common animating principle or entity that stands at the center of our being, directing our thoughts, decisions and moral judgments.

More that any feature of personality or physical appearance, it is this soul-ego-agent that we conventionally think of as our real self. It is that which ultimately distinguishes us from each other. When we get right down to it, you are you and I am I because of a difference in agency. We may resemble each other in behavior or looks. We could even be identical twins, but because the animating force within us is unique, we as individuals are unique.

That, at any rate, is what most of us have been brought up to believe.

Starting early in childhood, we are taught that our true self resides not in our bodies or even in our minds, but in our souls. As soul-agents, we are not only unique but, unlike all other creatures on earth, endowed with the power and freedom to cause our own behavior. We are more than bodies, more than minds. In our essence, we are spiritual beings.

That conception of homo sapiens is rarely challenged even by those who profess a materialist philosophy. The broad acceptance of free will among the religious and non-religious alike obscures the fact that the concept of agency rests on the same dualistic assumptions as our belief in God, the Devil, heaven, hell, the Holy Ghost, salvation, and divine judgment.

What makes free agency a specifically spiritual concept is the assumption that the agent's choices are not caused by antecedent conditions. They are mysterious, inexplicable -- unconnected to the chain of cause and effect which links all events in the material world. The agent is free, in other words, because of its power to cause behavior without itself being the effect of other causes.

To the extent that we humans possess that power, we quality as Unmoved Movers. We are godlike, divine, and not fully of this material world. There is reason to suspect, however, that the little man or woman inside of us (the homunculus) is no more real that any of the other spiritual entities with which we have traditionally populated the unseen world.

...If it should turn out that we are not souls or agents after all, what else is there for us to be? The answer is almost too obvious.

If we are not the prime movers of our thoughts, feelings, and actions, must we not be the thoughts, feelings, and actions themselves -- as well as the physical bodies in which those experiences arise? This much is certain: if we are not free agents, we cannot be the authors of our own experience and behavior. Nor can we be the internal managers who organize and process that experience: the experience organizes and processes itself.

It is not even appropriate to say that we are subjects having the experience. We are the experience. We are that which is happening here in these bodies. We are constellations of experience and behavior arising spontaneously out of genetic and environmental circumstance. We are also the physical structures in which those events are taking place. 

...My own interest in non-agency has evolved out of a five-year immersion in the chilly waters of Rinzai Zen. While I have long since given up what Alan Watts called "aching-legs Zen" for the comforts of reading and thinking I have retained the Easterner's concern with integrating philosophy into everyday life.

It strikes me as little more than a game, fascinating perhaps, but still a game, to embrace the idea of non-agency without taking steps to incorporate that idea into the way one deals with work, love, pain, death and all the other dimensions of human existence. Because the idea is so central, taking it in deeply has the potential for transforming the way we feel about almost everything we do.

...The book is both an argument and a strategy for replacing the illusion of agency with a view of ourselves as constellations of experience and behavior arising spontaneously out of circumstance. If there is any originality here, it does not lie with the argument against free will. That argument has evolved in a variety of places and constitutes a major chapter in the history of both Eastern and Western philosophy.

What may be new is the spelling out of how the illusion of agency adds to the pain of life and, paradoxically, how much freer we would feel if we were to begin defining ourselves as that which is arising here. 

...Straining, blaming, craving, defending and protesting are all implicated in the agency syndrome. Their emotional counterparts -- anxiety, guilt, despair, pride, and anger -- can be expected to change as behavior itself changes. For anyone patient enough to see the process through, the end result is a transformation of personality.

The more thorough the uprooting of agency, the more radical will be that transformation.

Accepting free will means denying determinism

I keep writing blog posts about free will for a couple of reasons.

One, it's a fascinating subject that points to the heart of what religiosity is all about, and what atheism is all about. Two, some of the comments on my posts indicate that visitors to this blog have some mistaken notions about free will.

Regarding religiosity and atheism, the only way free will could exist is if the complex web of causes and effects that result in determinism and chance (the only two proven options in our universe) somehow isn't operative in us humans.

Meaning, some unknown supernatural force -- which proponents of free will have never persuasively identified -- must intervene in the human brain/mind to make possible actions that lie outside of the realm of determinism.

If this sounds a lot like soul, or God, that's because free will has a lot of commonality with religious belief. Both assume that some mysterious entity unknown to science is present in human consciousness that can do things that would be impossible otherwise.

So determinism is the key concept here. Accept determinism, and free will is denied. Deny determinism, and free will is accepted. Or at least has the door opened to it. Richard Oerton expresses this nicely in his book, The Nonsense of Free Will.

The essence of determinism is that the complex causal chains which bring a human being into existence run on so as to create, through the interaction of hereditary characteristics and environmental influences, his or her character, with all its motivations, its desires and constraints, and that they then run on through that character to cause or determine his or her behavior. 

But the belief that this is so cannot be reconciled with a belief in free will. Free will demands that the causal chains do not run through us to determine our actions. Our actions are instead the result of something called free will and they cannot be predicted even in principle. 

...Human beings, according to a believer in free will, manage somehow to stand outside the natural laws which govern the rest of the universe and, despite being inextricably a part of it, are somehow exempt from the inter-dependent causal relationships of its other elements.

Obviously there's much that isn't known about the mind. I'm entirely open to learning more about how behavior, emotions, thoughts, and such are generated by the mind, which is the brain in action and incorporates both conscious and non-conscious aspects. 

But as noted above, free will is a much simpler subject. All that needs to be decided is whether the human brain/mind operates in accord with the laws of nature, which involve two mechanisms: determinism and chance.

Determinism clearly isn't compatible with free will. Neither is chance, which rules out theories that some sort of probabilistic quantum phenomena operate in the brain/mind, since chance is incompatible with free will also.

(Deciding what to do based on a random outcome has nothing to do with being free, or willing.)

Today I read a comment that said if someone takes a driver training course, that increases their free will, since now they have an increased ability of being able to drive a car safely and getting where they want to go without an accident.

No, this is wrong. Learning more about how to drive a car simply changes the causes that operate on a driver. Determinism is still determining how they drive. The factors or causes that go into their driving ability have changed, that's all.

I also read a comment that spoke about how thoughts might directly lead to action, or thoughts might be only indirectly related to action, if the cause of an action is unconscious and thoughts merely reflect what the unconscious has decided to do. Coming along for the ride, so to speak, rather than doing the driving.

OK, that's interesting, but it also has nothing to do with free will.

Denying free will and accepting determinism doesn't mean that everything is known about how the brain/mind functions. The only necessary assumption is that whatever is happening in the brain/mind, that whatever is occurring in a deterministic fashion. Or with a smidgen of chance, if someone assumes quantum probabilities occur in the brain/mind. (A dubious assumption, but possible.)

I plan to move on in my next posts to sharing what I'm learning in Paul Breer's The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will. I'm enjoying the book. Well written, thoughtful, creative. Breer shows how a belief in self, or an inner agent, is intimately tied in with a belief in free will.

Which is why I like my short saying so much: No self. No free will. No problem.

Ideas about free will I'm compelled to share

A nice thing about writing on the subject of free will is that it's easy to explain why I'm doing it. I had no alternative. To put it in the words of a Doris Day song, "Whatever will be, will be."

I've been writing about free will recently, but mostly by quoting the words of knowledgeable authors on this subject. In this post I'm going to take a more eclectic approach, sharing a variety of ideas about free will that have been rummaging through my mind the past few days.

Trump's indictments. Here in the United States those of us who can't stand Donald Trump have been thrilled that last week he earned his fourth criminal indictment. Most of those cases, and maybe all of them, hinge in part on the prosecution proving that Trump knew what he was doing was wrong.

This is akin to the distinction between murder and manslaughter, the difference being the intent of the person who did the killing. I mentioned to my wife that if free will doesn't exist (my strong belief), it doesn't really matter what Trump thought about his allegedly criminal acts, since it is his actions that really matter. 

That's true to some extent. However, in his wonderful short book, Free Will, I found a passage where Sam Harris describes why the thoughts of an accused criminal do matter even though free will is illusory.

We need not have any illusions that a causal agent lives within the human mind to recognize that certain people are dangerous. What we condemn most in another person is the conscious intention to do harm. Degrees of guilt can still be judged by the facts of a case: the personality of the accused, his prior offenses, his patterns of association with others, his use of intoxicants, his confessed motives with regard to the victim, etc.

If a person's actions seem to have been entirely out of character, this might influence our view of the risk he now poses to others. If the accused appears unrepentant and eager to kill again [or to try to steal an election again], we need entertain no notions of free will to consider him a danger to society.

Why is the conscious decision to do another person harm particularly blameworthy? Because what we do subsequent to conscious planning tends to most fully reflect the global properties of our minds -- our beliefs, desires, goals, prejudices, etc.

If, after weeks of deliberation, library research, and debate with your friends, you still decide to kill the king -- well, then killing the king reflects the sort of person you really are. The point is not that you are the ultimate and independent cause of your actions, the point is that, for whatever reason, you have the mind of a regicide. 

No free will is a feature, not a bug. I came up with this little mantra of sorts that I've been enjoying saying to myself from time to time: "No self. No free will. No problem." A book just arrived from Amazon that I ordered because it seems to echo this, Paul Breer's The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will. I'll be writing about the book once I'm able to read it. 

Video by David Lane. Today David Lane, a.k.a. neuralsurfer, left a comment on this blog where he shared a link to a video he made called The Prisoner's Dilemma: Why Evolution Favors "Free Will." Those quotation marks around free will reflect the fact that in the video, free will is recognized as an illusion, but a generally beneficial illusion. The video is well worth watching.

Solitaire. Every day I play several games of Klondike, a solitaire game that I've argued in a blog post is a fine philosophy of life. My iPhone app has several options, including a random draw (you might be able to win the game, or you might not) and a Daily Challenge where the game is definitely winnable, but not always easy to win.

Over the years I've arrived at an approach to playing Klondike that usually is successful. I've never written down those guidelines. They're just part of how I play a game of Klondike. A few days ago my approach failed me with a Daily Challenge. When this happens, I realize that I have to step outside my usual approach, to do something different.

This is an interesting mental exercise. I have to stifle my intention to play the way I usually do, because what I usually do didn't let me win the Daily Challenge. Today, after several failed attempts to win the Daily Challenge of a few days ago, I went all in and consciously set out to play the game wrong.

Meaning, by and large, whatever seemed right to me to do, based on my lengthy experience with this solitaire game, I didn't do, and whatever seemed wrong to me to do, I did. The result: I finally won the Daily Challenge. 

My point in sharing this anecdote is that a lack of free will doesn't mean acting like a robot or an automaton. At no point did I believe that I was acting freely, not when I followed my usual approach to playing the game or when I upended that approach and did the opposite, pretty much.

My brain simply led me to do something different when doing the same thing didn't lead to the outcome I wanted.

Admitting to being stupid can be really satisfying. Yesterday I wrote a post for my HinesSight blog, "My guide to happiness: act stupid, then undo your stupidity." I didn't mention free will in this post, but the subject lurked below the surface of the Starlink router installation that I used as an example of my stupidity.

OK, stupidity is a harsh word. But apt, since that was how I felt after I read the installation instructions several times, paying special attention to where the ethernet cable was to be connected, then ended up doing the exact opposite.

When I did this, it felt entirely right. Until I realized my mistake, then it felt entirely wrong. Even worse than wrong, since at first I wasn't able to detach the misattached cable and I worried that our broadband speed was going to sink from reasonably fast to utterly zero.

I didn't freely choose to make the mistake. It just happened. I also didn't freely choose to undo the mistake. It too just happened. What was particularly interesting is how good I felt about publishing the post and sharing it on Facebook -- my personal account plus three pages that I manage.

There was something satisfying about telling the world, or at least the small slice of the world that will read that blog post, that I was in the grip of what sure looked like stupidity, but which to me was an example of how the human brain just does what it has been determined to do.

You know, whatever will be, will be.

Free will is an illusion. But it's a useful illusion.

As noted in my previous post about a book by Daniel Wegner that persuasively describes the illusion of free will, appropriately titled The Illusion of Conscious Will, in this post I'll share some of what Wegner says in a concluding chapter about why a belief in free will, though wrong, can be useful.

That chapter is called "The Mind's Compass." Conscious will is the mind's compass.

Like an actual compass, which does no actual steering of a ship, free will indicates what is happening with a person, even though it also doesn't do any actual "steering." Wegner writes, "Just as compass readings do not steer the boat, conscious experiences of will do not cause human actions."

Instead, conscious will is "a feeling that organizes and informs our understanding of our own agency." It indicates when we sense having authored an action. Here's a passage that describes why a sense of free will can be a good thing. Wegner also mentions spiritual traditions such as Zen that view it as an undesirable thing.

All in all, then, it might be better to err on the side of too much perceived control. And indeed, this seems to be what most people do. Shelley Taylor (1983; Taylor and Brown 1988; Taylor, Wayment, and Collins 1993) has explored the role of such a positive illusion in psychological and mental health, and has catalogued many instances in which it seems to be better to think you have control than not.

This sometimes seems to be true even if no real control exists at all. The belief that one has control can be beneficial even in the case of dire circumstances -- among people who have terminal illnesses that make their future uncontrollable, for example, or who have suffered serious trauma and so are left with memories of uncontrollable events in the past.

It could be unpleasant and potentially disheartening to be brought down from this cloud of fantasy to the reality of lack of actual control, but an inflated perception of control seems generally to be better even than an accurate view of control.

But there might be benefits, too, to losing one's illusions. Albert Einstein, the epitome of the good scientist, remarked on the mental peace that can come from relaxing the striving for control and accepting a philosophy of resignation to determinism: "The conviction that a law of necessity governs human activities introduces into our conception of man and life a mildness, a reverence and an excellence, such as would be unattainable without this conviction" (quoted in Home and Robinson 1995, 172).

Religious traditions such as Zen Buddhism teach a philosophy of relinquishing the pretense of control and view a break with the illusion of conscious will as the ultimate form of enlightenment (Breer 1989). One wonders, however, whether it is possible purposefully to renounce the illusion of purpose or whether one must only sit back and wait for the loss of the illusion to happen. 

And here's how Wegner concludes his book.

Sometimes how things seem is more important than what they are. This is true in theater, in art, in used car sales, in economics and -- it now turns out -- in the scientific analysis of conscious will. The fact is, it seems to each of us that we have conscious will. It seems we have selves. It seems we have minds. It seems we are agents. It seems we cause what we do.

Although it is sobering and ultimately accurate to call all this an illusion, it is a mistake to conclude that the illusion is trivial.

On the contrary, the illusions piled atop apparent mental causation are the building blocks of human psychology and social life. It is only with the feeling of conscious will that we can begin to solve the problems of knowing who we are as individuals, of discerning what we can and cannot do, and of judging ourselves morally right or wrong for what we have done.

The illusion is sometimes fragile. There are days when we wonder whether we're willing anything at all. In The Reader (1995), Bernard Schlink captures this feeling: "Often enough in my life I have done things I had not decided to do. Something -- whatever that may be -- goes into action; 'it' goes to the woman I don't want to see anymore; 'it' makes the remark to the boss that costs me my head; 'it' keeps on smoking although I have decided to quit, and then quits smoking just when I've accepted that I'm a smoker and always will be. I don't mean to say that the thinking and reaching decisions have no influence on behavior. But behavior does not merely enact whatever has already been thought through and decided. It has its own sources..." (20)

But usually we assume that how things seem is how they are. We experience willing a walk in the park, winding a clock, or smiling at someone, and the feeling keeps our notion of ourselves as persons intact. Our sense of being a conscious agent who does things comes at a cost of being technically wrong all the time.

The feeling of doing is how it seems, not what it is -- but that is as it should be. All is well because the illusion makes us human. Albert Einstein (quoted in Home and Robinson 1995, 172) had a few words on this that make a good conclusion:

If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord... So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man's illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.

 

How the brain creates the illusion of conscious will

As I said in my previous post about Sartre and how his view of freedom bugs me because I don't believe in free will, Sartre takes it for granted that because he feels like he is free to choose his actions, this is proof that free will actually exists.

This is wrong.

It goes against what is known about the human brain. So because I realize how entrenched a belief that they possess free will is in the minds of most people, including commenters on this blog, I dug out what I consider to be one of the best books debunking free will: Daniel M. Wegner's The Illusion of Conscious Will. 

Below is how Wegner summarizes his position in the book's first chapter, "The Illusion." (Wegner is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard.) But all isn't completely lost for believers in free will, because Wegner also discusses in his book why free will seems to be true. Meaning, evolution has given us a sense of free will because this illusion has benefits.

In my next post I'll share the benefits that Wegner describes in a concluding chapter, "The Mind's Compass." (Preview: a compass tells us what a ship is doing, but it doesn't control the action of the ship.)

Broadly speaking, what Wegner says below has implications for more than just how we view free will. Our inability to know what the brain is doing down in the engine room, so to speak, should make us cautious about drawing strong conclusions from our conscious experience insofar as we believe that what we're conscious of reflects what is going on in the brain.

Philosophers and psychologists have spent lifetimes thinking about how to reconcile conscious will with mechanistic causation... The solution explored in this book involves recognizing that the distinction between mental and mechanical explanations is something that concerns everyone, not only philosophers and psychologists.

The tendency to view the world in both ways, each as necessary, is what has created in us two largely incompatible ways of thinking. When we apply mental explanations to our own behavior-causation mechanisms, we fall prey to the impression that our conscious will causes our actions.

The fact is, we find it enormously addictive to think of ourselves as having minds, and so we are drawn into an intuitive appreciation of our own conscious will.

Think for a minute about the nature of illusions.

Any magician will tell you that the key to creating a successful illusion is to make "magic" the easiest, most immediate way to explain what is really a mundane event. Harold Kelly (1980) described this in his analysis of the underpinnings of magic in the perception of causality.

He observed that stage magic involves a perceived causal sequence -- the set of events that appears to have happened -- and a real causal sequence -- the set of events the magician has orchestrated behind the scenes.

Laws of nature are broken willy-nilly as people are sawed in half and birds, handkerchiefs, rabbits, and canes appear from nothing or turn into each other and back again.

The real sequence is often more complicated than the perceived sequence, but many of the real events are not perceived. The magician needs special pockets, props, and equipment, and develops wiles to misdirect audience attention from the real sequence. 

In the end, the audience observes something that seems to be simple, but in fact it may have been achieved with substantial thought, preparation, and effort on the magician's part. The lovely assistant in a gossamer gown apparently floating effortlessly on her back during the levitation illusion is in fact being held up by a 600-pound pneumatic lift hidden behind a specially rigged curtain.

It is the very simplicity of the illusory sequence, the shorthand summary that hides the magician's toil, that makes the trick so compelling. The lady levitates. The illusion of conscious will occurs in much the same way.

The real causal sequence underlying human behavior involves a massively complicated set of mechanisms. Everything that psychology studies can come into play to predict and explain even the most innocuous wink of an eye.

Each of our actions is really the culmination of an intricate set of physical and mental processes, including psychological mechanisms that correspond to the traditional concepts of will, in that they involve linkages between our thoughts and our actions. This is the empirical will.

However, we don't see this. Instead, we readily accept a far easier explanation of our behavior. We intended to do it, so we did it.

The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke (1973) remarked that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Clarke was referring to the fantastic inventions we might discover in the future or in our travels to advanced civilizations. However, the insight also applies to self-perception.

When we turn our attention to our own minds, we are faced with trying to understand an unimaginably advanced technology. We can't possibly know (let alone keep track of) the tremendous number of mechanical influences on our behavior because we inhabit an extraordinarily complicated machine.

So we develop a shorthand, a belief in the causal efficacy of our conscious thoughts. We believe in the magic of our own causal agency.

The mind is a system that produces appearances for its owner. Things appear silver, for example, or they appear to have little windows, or they appear to fly, as the result of how the mind produces experience. And if the mind can make us "experience" an airplane, why couldn't it produce an experience of itself that leads us to think that it causes its own actions?

The mind creates this continuous illusion; it really doesn't know what causes its own actions. Whatever empirical will there is rumbling along in the engine room -- an actual relation between thought and action -- might in fact be totally inscrutable to the driver of the machine (the mind).

The mind has a self-explanation mechanism that produces a roughly continuous sense that what is in consciousness is the cause of action -- the phenomenal will -- whereas in fact the mind can't even know itself well enough to say what the causes of its actions are.

To quote Spinoza in The Ethics (1677), "Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined. Their idea of freedom, therefore, is simply their ignorance of any cause for their actions."

In the more contemporary phrasing of Marvin Minsky (1985); "None of us enjoys the thought that what we do depends on processes we do not know; we prefer to attribute our choices to volition, will, or self-control.... Perhaps it would be more honest to say, 'My decision was determined by internal forces I do not understand.'"

In 2017 I wrote a blog post about Wegner's book: "Experience of conscious will is an illusion." In that post I shared an image from the book that illustrates what is spoken of in the passages above. I'll also include my commentary on the image.

Note that there is an "actual" and "apparent" causal path leading to an action. 

The actual causal path flows from an unconscious cause of the action. Meaning, the human brain is doing things below the surface of awareness that cause us to do something.

At the same time, there also is an unconscious cause of thought. This takes an actual causal path in the brain that leads to a thought. 

So the brain is unconsciously causing both an action and a thought.

These two things are actually happening. However, our experience of conscious will -- the feeling that our thought or intention is what causes an action to occur -- is an illusion. This is shown in the "Apparent Causal Path" arrow leading from thought to action. 

Here's a few passages from Wegner's book that explain what is going on here. (Wegner is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.)

The experience of will, then, is the way our minds portray their operations to us, not their actual operation. Because we have thoughts of what we will do, we can develop causal theories relating those thoughts to our actions on the basis of priority, consistency, and exclusivity.

We come to think of these prior thoughts as intentions, and we develop the sense that the intentions have causal force even though they are actually just previews of what we may do. 

Yet in an important sense, it must be the case that something in our minds plays a causal role in making our actions occur. That something is, in the theory of apparent mental causation, a set of unconscious mental processes that cause the action. At the same time, that something is very much like the thoughts we have prior to the action.

...We must remember that this analysis suggests that the real causal mechanisms underlying behavior are never present in consciousness. Rather, the engines of causation operate without revealing themselves to us and so may be unconscious mechanisms of mind.

...The unique human convenience of conscious thoughts that preview your actions gives us the privilege of feeling we willfully cause what we do. 

In fact, however, unconscious and inscrutable mechanisms create both conscious thought about action and the action, and also produce the sense of will we experience by perceiving the thought as cause of the action.

So while our thoughts may have deep, important, and unconscious causal connections to our actions, the experience of conscious will arises from a process that interprets these connections, not from the connections themselves.

This is brilliant. I'm only read about 1/4 of "The Illusion of Conscious Will," but I'm far enough into the book to have gotten a good feel for Wegner's thesis. He provides a lot of evidence to support it, both scientific and philosophical. 

Naturally spiritual (using that word broadly) implications of this illusion are easy to come by. For example, it can be argued that the so-called enlightenment of Zen, Taoism, and such simply is an intuitive seeing-through of the illusion of conscious will. 

Meaning, the illusion that "I" am determining what I do (and also by implication, what happens to me) is somehow experienced as the scientific falsity that it is. Of course, this is just a fact -- assuming Wegner's hypothesis is correct, as it seems to be -- not any sort of supernatural or mystical state of mind. 

It is just our actual state of mind, seen for what it is. It'll take another blog post to explain this more fully.

Freedom is what bugs me about Sartre. I don't believe in free will.

Message to those who visit this blog who aren't into Sartre's Being and Nothingness as much as I am (which includes almost everybody, I'm pretty sure):

Today I reached a point in my re-reading of the book where it dawned on me what my central problem with Sartre's existentialist philosophy is -- freedom. It's a big enough problem that I likely will put Being and Nothingness back on the shelf where I picked it up recently.

I enjoy trying to encapsulate complex philosophies and world views in a few words, as crazy as this would seem to an expert in them. 

"Humans are free" makes sense to me as a summary for Sartre. "Life is suffering" strikes me as appropriate for Buddhism. But Sartre also speaks a lot about anguish, which for him is the dilemma created by human freedom.

Here's how his translator defines anguish in her Key to Special Terminology, a handy thing to have around when it comes to reading Sartre, who often writes in a dense fashion.

The reflective apprehension of the Self as freedom, the realization that a nothingness slips in between my Self and my past and future so that nothing relieves me from the necessity of continually choosing myself and nothing guarantees the validity of the values which I choose. Fear is of something in the world, anguish is anguish before myself (as in Kierkegaard).

This obviously is different from suffering, but it's interesting that both Sartre and Buddhism find difficulty at the heart of the human condition.

For Sartre, the cause of this difficulty is our inherent freedom. For Buddhism, the cause of this difficulty is attachment, desire, craving -- which arises because we fail to understand that emptiness is the defining characteristic of everything in existence. Meaning, nothing possesses inherent existence but is part of an interconnected web of relationships and mutual dependencies.

I don't believe in freedom of the will, or free will. Most neuroscientists don't either, or at least lots don't.

Sartre, for some reason, doesn't accept the reality of the unconscious or subconscious. So he takes as self-evident the feeling that he has, which is common to the feeling everybody has, that it is possible to do something different from what we actually choose to do.

Sartre uses the example of a gambler who vows to stop gambling after this activity causes him problems. However, when he comes upon a gaming table, he decides to gamble. Sartre sees this as nothingness coming between his prior vow and his current decision to keep gambling. 

Hence, nothing guarantees that he will ever stop gambling, since he is always capable of exercising his inherent freedom to choose to act in a manner contrary to what his vow demands. That leads to anguish, given that he will always need to choose anew whether to gamble, in accord with his inescapable freedom.

This is pretty much exactly opposite to how I see things. I'm much more in the Buddhist camp. Which also is the neuroscientific camp. I find comfort in what I consider to be this fact: we humans don't have free will. Our beliefs, emotions, actions, and such are fully determined by the laws of nature.

As Sam Harris cogently points out, and I heartily agree with him on this, if we make a decision, and every atom in our brain and nervous system is in exactly the same state as it was when the decision was made, we would make the exact same decision again.

In other words, there is no mysterious nothingness or free-will-fairy in our consciousness that makes it possible for our thoughts, emotions, and actions to be outside of the realm of determinism, as Sartre believes is the case.

In my view of reality, the only psychological freedom we really have is the freedom to feel that we aren't making freely-chosen decisions. There's a tremendous benefit in trading a belief in illusory free will for the hugely more likely fact that we humans are as driven by deterministic forces as the planets in our solar system are.

Janis Joplin sang, "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose."

I love the idea that I've lost my free will because I never had it, though for much of my life I believed that I did. I find peace in the realization that everything that's happened in my past, everything that's happening now in my present, everything that will happen to me in the future -- my entire life is the result of deterministic causes and conditions (a thoroughly Buddhist concept) that extends from the moment of the big bang some 14 billion years ago to a possibly infinite future of the cosmos.

Sartre, of course, disagrees with this perspective. He's an exceedingly accomplished philosopher, so in Being and Nothingness he anticipated the objections of people like me to his assertion that freedom lies at the heart of human consciousness.

Psychological determinism, before being a theoretical conception, is first an attitude of excuse, or if you prefer, the basis of all attitudes of excuse. It is reflective conduct with respect to anguish; it asserts that there are within us antagonistic forces whose type of existence is comparable to that of things. 

It attempts to fill the void which encircles us, to re-establish the links between past and present, between present and future. It provides us with a nature productive of our acts, and these very acts it makes transcendent: it assigns to them a foundation in something other than themselves by endowing them with an inertia and externality eminently reassuring because they constitute a permanent game of excuses. 

Psychological determinism denies that transcendence of human reality which makes it emerge in anguish beyond its own essence. At the same time by reducing us to never being anything but what we are, it reintroduces in us the absolute positivity of being-in-itself and thereby reinstates us at the heart of being.

But this determinism, a reflective defense against anguish, is not given as a reflective intuition. It avails nothing against the evidence of freedom; hence it is given as a faith to take refuge in, as the ideal end toward which we can flee to escape anguish. 

That is made evident on the philosophical plane by the fact that deterministic psychologists do not claim to found their thesis on the pure givens of introspection. They present it as a satisfying hypothesis, the value of which comes from the fact that it accounts for the facts -- or as a necessary postulate for establishing all psychology.

Well, I would have loved to see a debate between Sartre and a modern neuroscientist. I suspect Sartre would be demolished in such a debate. 

I have no problem with links between my past and present, and between my present and future. I have no problem with a nature that produces my acts. I have no problem with never being anything but what I am. I have no problem with accepting a determinism that accounts for the facts.

But I do have a problem with Sartre calling introspection a "pure given." We all can be very wrong about what is in our minds. We can be led astray by unconscious influences. There are countless psychological experiments that demonstrate this. 

Sure, it seems like we have free will. It also seems that the sun sets. Both seemings are wrong. Almost certainly we don't have free will, and it is certain that the earth rotates while the sun remains at the center of our solar systems.

What seems to be true has to yield to facts. That's why I reject Sartre's view of freedom.

I enjoy reading Sartre's Being and Nothingness. (Yeah, I'm weird.)

OK, I lied. Or more accurately, I changed my mind.

After saying in my previous post about Sartre's Being and Nothingness that I didn't feel like re-reading (or re-re-reading) the 798 pages of dense philosophical prose, choosing to only read the 44 pages of the translator's introduction again, I've found myself plowing further into the book.

Because I'm enjoying it. 

I sort of figure that rather than attempting the New York Times crossword puzzle, I'd rather exercise my aging brain by reading passages that often simultaneously stretch my ability to comprehend them, while presenting me with fresh ways of looking upon reality.

What I admire about Sartre is how he is determined to view the world afresh from a bottom-up perspective founded on what he considers to be facts about how things are, the realm of ontology (and science), rather than why things are, the domain of metaphysics (and religion).

So in this post I want to try to convey in a broad-brush fashion what I find appealing and interesting about Being and Nothingness, which as noted in my other post about the book is Sartre's attempt to systematize the philosophy that he conveyed in previous works of fiction.

As mentioned before, consciousness is central to Sartre's project. It should be, since without consciousness, there is no world, and no us. It's impossible to consider the universe without consciousness, because all of our considering occurs within, or as, consciousness.

Sartre divides reality into two large clumps: unconscious Being-in-itself and conscious Being-for-itself. Mostly it's easy to distinguish the two. The chair I'm sitting on while I type these words is Being-in-itself. The person doing the typing, me, is Being-for-itself. 

Currently philosophy and neuroscience express Being-for-itself as having something it is like to be that entity. There is something it is like to be me or you. Also, to be our dog. Almost certainly there is nothing to be like to be a chair. It simply is.

That's the defining characteristic of Being-in-itself. It simply is. We who are Being-for-itself have a complicated relationship with Being-in-itself, which occupies a large part of Being and Nothingness. For while Being-in-itself simply is, we can imagine things that are not.

Unicorns. Fairies. God (in the opinion of Sartre, along with myself). The future. The past. 

Sartre uses as an example going to a coffeehouse to meet a friend, Pierre. As he enters the coffeehouse, he looks for Pierre. Failing to see him, Sartre thinks, "Pierre is not here." Out of all of the people and objects in the coffeehouse, he creates a bit of nothingness -- the non-presence of Pierre. 

Even though Sartre says that consciousness always is consciousness of something, we humans can make nothingness into something. A lack, an absence, becomes something noticed. I suspect our dog can do something similar, since she clearly notes the absence of a chew stick when I forget to give her one after her dinner.

But Sartre makes clear that Being and Nothingness are not equals. This points to the absurdity of the Christian notion of creatio ex nihilo, creation out of nothing. Obviously, says Sartre, Being has to exist in order for Nothingness to exist, since nothing is the negation of something, Being. 

We can't say, "there was nothing before God created the universe," since that assumes the Being of God. And if we say simply, "there was nothing before the universe came into being," this still confers upon nothing an illusory solidity, a substance, a being. 

So I'd guess that if Sartre could comment on modern theories of the big bang, he'd hold that matter/energy always have existed in some form -- which makes the most sense, since why assume that an unseen God always has existed instead of visible matter/energy?

Subjectivity is the nature of Being-for-itself, conscious entities such as we humans. This is why we find disasters such as the recent wildfires that devastated Lahaina, a town on Maui, so disturbing, a subject I wrote about yesterday on one of my other blogs. 

Sartre points out that in a disaster of that sort, the Being of the world is unchanged, which reflects the scientific fact that matter/energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It just changes form. All of Lahaina still exists in the form of rubble, smoke, ash, heat, and such.

However, that is no consolation to those who were in Lahaina when the wildfire struck, some of whom died. This creates a certain tension between our envy, if that's the right word, of Being-in-itself which always is, and those of us who are Being-for-itself, conscious entities who seek the permanence of Being but aren't able to find it.

Lastly, for this blog post, Sartre speaks of another tension embodied in the notion of the Other.

This arises because the only Being-for-itself that we know directly is our own self, our own consciousness. Everyone else is a Being-in-itself from our perspective -- a physical body that certainly appears to be conscious just as we are, yet which  lacks the subjectivity, the sense of something it is like to be, that we know directly.

In other words, we know ourself from the inside but everyone else only from the outside.

Thus another person is the Other to us, while we are the Other to them. The dream, or fantasy, of bridging this unbridgeable gap is what gives rise to love, poetry, conversation, dance, music, books, all the many and varied ways we humans try to make our subjectivity a reality for others who can really know us only as an object, not a subject.

Well, after spending almost a thousand words trying to explain why I enjoy reading Sartre so much, I feel like I've mostly failed. But that's the nature of life. No matter how hard we try to convey what it is like to be us, the divide between us and the Other remains.

This seems to explain the longing people have for mystical union, for the possibility that on some other plane of existence a sense of oneness dissolves our essential subjective isolation. I have a lot of sympathy for that longing, as it motivated me to embrace a strong pursuit of mysticism over fifty years ago.

I just have come to view that quest as doomed to failure, even as I understand why so many find it attractive. 

Sartre's view of consciousness makes a lot of sense

When I was at San Jose State College from 1966 to 1971, I enjoyed my reading in existentialism. That happened when I was a student in the Tutorials in Letters and Sciences program, which was a way-cool experimental approach to learning.

Instead of taking the usual required courses in my freshman and sophomore years, I had a single 12 unit Tutorials class each semester where a small number of us students, eight to ten or so, would meet with a professor and discuss from the perspective of four key periods in human history: Ancient Greece/Rome, the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, and Modern Times.

So we wrote a lot of papers, and did a lot of discussing. 

At least, that's how I remember the periods. The idea was that instead of studying literature, history, and science of a period in human history, we'd look at the period as a whole, attempting to link the tenor of the times into a cohesive picture.

Existentialist writings were assigned when we got to the 20th century. I recall Camus, Kierkegaard, Sartre. After I graduated from college, I must have bought Sartre's Being and Nothingness, since the copy I have has a printing date of 1975. 

A few days ago I dug out my copy. I don't feel like re-reading all of the 798 pages of fairly dense philosophizing.

But after coming across a mention of Sartre's distinction between reflective and non-reflective consciousness in an essay I wrote about recently, I wanted to remind myself how Sartre viewed the world -- being curious about how I'd view his brand of existentialism now, at the age of 74, in contrast to how I looked at Sartre when I read his fiction in college. 

Being and Nothingness, according to the translator, Hazel Barnes, is Jean-Paul Sartre's 1943 attempt to systematize the philosophy that he expressed earlier in his fictional writing. The translator's introduction, which runs for 44 thoughtful pages, is what I'll be quoting from here in reference to how Sartre viewed consciousness. 

What he says makes a lot of sense to me.

Which I guess isn't all that surprising, since like Sartre, I too am an atheist. Barnes points out that Sartre is concerned with ontology, what is real, in contrast to metaphysics, which she says focuses on the why of reality. For Sartre, there is no why, since we provide our own meaning, no god required. 

To begin with, and I'm following the translator's order in which she presents an overview of Sartre in her introduction, Sartre disagrees with Descartes.

Most important is Sartre's rejection of the primacy of the Cartesian cogito. He objects that in Descartes' formula -- "I think, therefore I am" -- the consciousness which says "I am," is not actually the consciousness which thinks.

...But Descartes' cogito has posited this consciousness itself as an object; the Cartesian cogito is not one with the doubting consciousness but has reflected upon it. In other words this cogito is not Descartes doubting; it is Descartes reflecting upon the doubting.

"I doubt, therefore I am" is really "I am aware that I doubt, therefore I am." The Cartesian cogito is reflective, and its object is not itself but the original consciousness of doubting... These conclusions led Sartre to establish the pre-reflective cogito as the primary consciousness, and in all of his later work he makes this his original point of departure.

In other words, when Descartes doubted that everything he knew could be mistaken because a Cosmic Joker could have misled him (sort of like what goes on in The Matrix movie, or the notion that we might be living in a computer simulation manufactured by alien beings), but he can't be mistaken that he exists, because he is able to think "I doubt," Descartes could have left out the "I" and simply focused on the blunt fact of his pre-reflective consciousness.

The very nature of consciousness is such, he [Sartre] says, that for it to be and to know itself are one and the same. Consciousness of an object is consciousness of being conscious of an object. Thus by nature all consciousness is self-consciousness, but by this Sartre does not mean that the self is necessarily posited as an object.

When I am aware of a chair, I am non-reflexively conscious of my awareness. But when I deliberately think of my awareness, this is a totally new act of consciousness; and here only am I explicitly positing my awareness of myself as an object of reflection.

Well, there's more that the translator says about how Sartre views consciousness, but this is enough for one blog post. 

In a way it's obvious that in any act of consciousness we are simultaneously aware of an object within consciousness and of consciousness itself, since it isn't possible to be aware of anything without being conscious.

However, we tend to overlook this when pondering the largely unexplained mystery of consciousness. For Sartre, and also for me, consciousness, albeit mostly unexplained as to how it arises, is quite simple -- at least in its raw non-reflective guise.

Again, when we're aware of something, consciousness isn't separate from the awareness. As noted above, Sartre says that all consciousness is self-consciousness, since there is no one who can be directly conscious but us.

I've never understood the notion that it is possible to be aware of awareness. I've read books about meditation that claim this is both possible and desirable, but it makes no sense to me. Awareness simply is awareness.

Sure, we can make an object out of our subjective awareness by thinking "I am aware," but it's much more accurate to simply say "there is awareness" or even better, say nothing at all, given that awareness is directly known to us just by being awareness.

In this regard, Sartre sometimes seems more like a Zen master than an existentialist philosopher.

Reflecting on life is different from directly experiencing life

As much as I've enjoyed exploring various approaches to religion, mysticism, philosophy, and spirituality during most of my 74 years of living (hey, I learned to read at a young age, and even comic books contain implicit philosophy), sometimes I feel that it's time to end my searching and simply attend to the life that's easy to find, because it's right in front of me.

Recently I got back to Question Everything, the book of essays from the New York Times philosophy series. The first essay I read was both philosophical and anti-philosophical, Phillip S. Garrity's "Gratitude: In Sickness and Health." Garrity starts by writing about dental work.

I remember staring up at the ceiling from the dentist's chair as a child and wondering with genuine perplexity, "How am I here again?" It seemed as if I had awakened there, wholly present to the undeniable reality of a cavity filling or tooth pulling. The days that had passed between dental visits were nothing more than a dreamlike filler.

Only in the chair did real life flare back into being, the drill keeping me relentlessly awake to the present moment. In the grip of pain, a tinge of anger would arise. How had I let all those carefree days slip past me in what felt like an instant?

I spent a great deal of mental energy in my adolescence tryin to capture that dreamlike filler, to perpetually feel what the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh calls the "non-toothache" that I unknowingly walked around with most days. It was an exercise in imaginatively conjuring pain in order to appreciate its absence.

That reminded me of the book about a modern take on Stoicism I've written about recently. The author encourages negative visualization, a Stoic practice where you imagine losing something you care about -- your job, your spouse, your child, your health -- to better appreciate what you do have. 

Setbacks, from this Stoic perspective, are to be viewed as tests sent by the Stoic gods, who don't have to be real in order to make this practice effective. All that's needed is an attitude that places an experience of a setback within the frame of a challenging test rather than a disturbing problem.

Garrity then talks about how, at twenty-four, he was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive bone cancer.

The ability to walk, to keep food down, to defecate without electric pain were no longer mundane givens, but miraculous gifts. In their absence, the vibrancy of illness burned brightly.... But as my health returned, the vibrancy did fade.

Now almost five years in remission, I notice myself falling back into that same pattern of trying to harness the vibrancy of illness, of forcing myself back into the dentist's chair to avoid my failure to feel the non-toothache. I am learning, however slowly, that maintaining that level of mental stamina, that fever pitch of experience, is less a recipe for enlightenment, and more for exhaustion.

Which gets me to the part of the essay that struck me most strongly. These passages echo how I'm coming to feel about taking spiritual pursuits too seriously, instead of living life more directly and simply.

The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre describes our experience as a perpetual transitioning between unreflective consciousness, "living-in-the-world," and reflective consciousness, "thinking-about-the-world." 

Gratitude seems to necessitate a certain abstraction away from that direct experience. Paradoxically, our capacity for gratitude is simultaneously enhanced and frustrated as we strive to attain it.

Perhaps, then, there is an important difference between reflecting on wellness and experiencing wellness. My habitual understanding of gratitude had me forcefully lodging myself into the realm of reflective consciousness, pulling me away from living-in-the-world. 

I was constantly making an inventory of my wellness, too busy counting the coins to ever spend them.

Gratitude, in the experiential sense, requires that we wade back into the current of unreflective consciousness, which, to the egocentric mind, can easily feel like an annihilation of consciousness altogether. Yet, Sartre says that action that is unreflective isn't necessarily unconscious.

There is something Zen about this, the actor disappearing into the action. It is the way of the artist in the act of creative expression, the musician in the flow of performance. But, in most of us, it is a loss of self -- and the sense of competency that comes with it.

...I am left with one thing: my ordinary, present self who is as empty-handed as he was the day before diagnosis -- no better equipped for the ensuing battles of life, no better shielded from pain he will yet face. And it is not just heroic pain.

It is the hurt of parking tickets, the ache of commuting, the grief of deadening routine -- small pains to which I was immune while they were eclipsed by cancer. But that moon has since passed.

And yet, that isn't reason for despair. It's strangely consoling to be reminded of my failure, to remember that my efforts to be prepared for epic loss were mostly in vain. I wasn't ready then, and yet, I got through it. I won't be ready next time, but I have reason (and experience) to believe that I will get through it again.

If there is any sage in me, he says I must accept the vulnerability of letting the pain fade, of allowing the wounds to heal. Even in the wake of grave illness -- or more unsettlingly, in anticipation of it -- we must risk falling back asleep in wellness.

Who knew? Dalai Lama could reincarnate in an adult rather than a newborn.

This is why I love Twitter. Oops, X, the name Elon Musk has given to a reincarnated Twitter, though I'll persist in calling X Twitter, and what you post on Twitter tweets rather than Xs.

Today I came across this tweet by Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist who ran for the governor of Oregon, the state where I live, until a court ruled that he didn't meet the residency requirement for that office.

Fascinating. Even though I don't believe in reincarnation, or rebirth, this notion is central to the mystique surrounding the Dalai Lama, since all of the leaders of Tibetan Buddhism supposedly are part of an unbroken string of incarnations of previous leaders.

Though I don't subscribe to The Economist, I'd registered with this publication, which entitles me to read three articles a month. Below I've copied in the lengthy article cited in Kristof's tweet. It's about 5,000 words, so I've boldfaced the parts that struck me as most interesting to Church of the Churchless readers.

Click on the continuation link to read the entire article. I wasn't aware of the intense struggle surrounding the choice of a successor to the current Dalai Lama between Chinese authorities and the Tibetan Buddhist community. The article does a good job of explaining this.

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

China wants to choose the next Dalai Lama. He has other plans

As rival candidates are lined up to succeed the Tibetan spiritual leader, Brook Larmer unpicks the politics of reincarnation

Jul 27th 2023

 

The boy’s existence had been little more than a rumour. When he appeared during a ceremony in March on a small throne below the Dalai Lama, the ageing leader of Tibetan Buddhism, the monks and nuns in the audience didn’t seem to recognise him. The boy, about eight years old with short black hair, wore a copper-tinted robe with oversized cuffs covering his hands and – as if to add to the mystery – a white mask over his face.

Midway through the ceremony, held in Dharamsala, the north Indian refuge for Tibetan exiles, the Dalai Lama paused and gestured nonchalantly toward the boy: “We have the reincarnation of Khalkha Jetsun Dhampa Rinpoché of Mongolia with us today.” This was, in the world of Tibetan Buddhism, a mic-drop moment. The last Jetsun Dhampa – one of the religion’s most important figures – died in 2012. But the significance of the announcement was not only religious. The Dalai Lama had managed to outmanoeuvre China in the geopolitical chess game of reincarnation.

Seven years ago, the Dalai Lama told a press conference in Mongolia that he was convinced Jetsun Dhampa’s reincarnation had been born in the country. “However, the boy is very young right now,” he said, “so there is no need for haste in making an announcement.” The Chinese government, which claims sole authority over all Tibetan Buddhist reincarnations, was incensed. It closed its main border crossing with Mongolia and delayed loan negotiations with the cash-strapped country.

Then there was silence. Under Chinese pressure, Mongolia, which along with Tibet is a centre of Tibetan Buddhism, banned the Dalai Lama from future visits. To stiffen the Mongolians’ resolve – and embolden the boy’s reluctant parents – the Dalai Lama sent in one of his most influential spiritual advisers: a monk named Thubten Ngodup. Thubten is the medium of the state oracle of Tibet, whose visions have guided the decisions of the Dalai Lama and his predecessors since the 16th century. He met in secret with the boy and his parents, offering reassurances and counselling patience. “The family was a little nervous, uncomfortable, but slowly, slowly, they came to accept their fate,” Thubten told me. “We still had to keep it secret because we didn’t want China coming up with their own fake Jetsun Dhampa.”

When the Dalai Lama introduced the boy in March, Tibetan Buddhists were thrilled at the audacity: not only had the Dalai Lama found the reincarnate lama beyond China’s grasp, he had managed to pull it off in secret. What’s more, the boy had been born in Florida, giving him the added protection of a passport from a government that has staunchly defended Tibet’s right to choose its spiritual leaders. With a single revelation, the Dalai Lama had created a possible template for an even more important reincarnation to come: his own.

Reincarnation might seem like an esoteric subject for 21st century geopolitics, especially for a secular state like the People’s Republic of China. But the Communist Party’s efforts to manage the transmigration of Buddhist souls are part of a contentious, decades-long campaign to absorb Tibet into China and control Tibetan Buddhism. In this existential contest, the reincarnations of the senior monks known as lamas have become a battleground for the future of Tibet. And no reincarnation is more consequential or volatile than that of the Dalai Lama himself.

At 88 years old, the Dalai Lama is frail enough that three monks assist him – one on each arm, one girding his waist – as he shuffles across the grounds of his monastery in Dharamsala. For more than six decades, ever since he escaped across the Himalayas from invading Chinese forces in 1959, the Dalai Lama has sustained and unified his people, elevating their struggle into a global cause. China claims sovereignty over Tibet, and insists that its forces liberated Tibetans from poverty and slavery. In response, the Dalai Lama has single-handedly spread a counter-narrative of his homeland as non-violent, noble and unjustly oppressed. It is almost impossible for Tibetans – and the world – to imagine a Tibet without him.

But the Dalai Lama is approaching his final years at a time when China has never seemed stronger – or Tibet more vulnerable. The 6m-7m Tibetans still inside Tibet live under increasingly harsh Chinese rule. Billions of dollars in Chinese investment have been accompanied by a systematic weakening of Tibetan religion and culture, along with tight restrictions on movement and communication. An estimated million Tibetan schoolchildren are now compelled to attend Chinese-language boarding schools away from their homes, raising fears that their own language will soon disappear. Meanwhile, the estimated 150,000 Tibetans in exile, scattered across the globe, are at risk of losing their identity and unity as another generation comes of age with no memory of their homeland. “Tibet is dying a slow death,” Penpa Tsering, the president of the government-in-exile in Dharamsala, told me. “China is slowly, slowly constricting us like a python.”

Many Tibetans have tethered their hopes to the Dalai Lama. He is the 14th human incarnation of the first Dalai Lama, who was born in 1391 and considered the reincarnation of one of the most enlightened beings in Tibetan Buddhism, Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. He has led his people through 15 American presidents and all 74 years of the People’s Republic. Through his reincarnated lineage, he connects Tibetans to the bedrock of their history.

But what will happen when the Dalai Lama leaves this world? As a spiritual adept who wishes to continue helping others achieve enlightenment, the Dalai Lama is believed by Tibetan Buddhists to have the ability to choose the body into which his soul transmigrates. The Chinese government, however, has other ideas. Tibetans are now bracing for the emergence of two Dalai Lamas – one chosen by China, the other by the Dalai Lama or Tibetans close to him. Faced with this bizarre scenario, the Dalai Lama has been playful and elusive about his intentions. He has suggested, at various times, that the next Dalai Lama could be a girl, an adult or nobody at all. He might opt for an “emanation” – choosing someone while he is still alive – rather than a “reincarnation” after his death. The only certainties the Dalai Lama offers are that his successor will be born in a “free” country – not Tibet – and that he alone has the power to decide. “This is a religious matter,” he says. “As far as my own rebirth is concerned, the final authority is myself…obviously, not Chinese Communists!”

I'm enjoying the Stoic test. Haven't gotten an A or A+ yet.

As noted in my previous post about a modern approach to Stoicism, "Stoicism advises being happy with what we already have," the idea is to be content (or at least as content as possible) with what life brings us.

That doesn't mean we don't try to deal with problems. But we'll be better able to deal with them if we're not in the grip of a strong negative emotion like anger, despair, self-pity, and such.

And in accord with the Buddhist notion of two arrows, it's preferable to just have a single arrow strike us -- such as an illness or losing our job -- rather than having another arrow strike us: the above-mentioned negative emotions that can cause more distress than whatever caused us to become upset in the first place.

My previous post talked about how William B. Irvine looks on framing in his book, The Stoic Challenge. This isn't about what you put around a painting or photograph, but what you put around your problems. Change your frame of reference, and a problem can appear quite different.

The main way Irvine advises to do this is to take up the challenge of Stoic tests -- which means looking upon a setback as an opportunity to grow and learn something about yourself by viewing the setback as a test sent to you by the Stoic Gods (which Irvine views as imaginary, yet a helpful illusion, akin to Santa Claus, who some parents invoke when they want a child to behave: "you won't get any presents if you don't stop teasing the cat").

By employing the Stoic test strategy, your conscious mind can likewise shape the behavior of your credulous and rather childlike subconscious mind. It sounds strange, I know, but it works.

I've been experimenting with the Stoic test for the past few days. Obviously I'm just a beginner at this, but I'm finding that it isn't really necessary to visualize the Stoic gods, or any other entity, as being responsible for a problem or setback that is the occasion for me being tested. 

Simply thinking something like, "Here's a test of my composure," appears to be enough for me to get the benefit of the Stoic test, as it creates a bit of distance between the problem and my habitual reaction to it.

For example, today I went to our bank to deposit a check and get some cash. (Yeah, I'm old enough to still use cash on occasion, along with those archaic things called postage stamps.) When I walked in I was first in line for a teller. But the two people being served by tellers ended up taking a long time with their transaction.

Usually this irritates me. But this time I said to myself, "Stoic test," and vowed to remain calmer than usual. Which, I succeeded in doing.

Though I'm a big fan of mindfulness, a downside of mindfulness is that it can simply make me more mindful of a negative state of mind, like irritation or anger, without doing a whole lot to reduce that negativity, though being aware of a negative emotion is better than being carried away by it in an uncontrolled fashion.

Here's how Irvine describes the grading process for a Stoic test.

The gods who administer Stoic tests do not grade them. You must therefore grade them yourself, and in coming up with a grade, you should take two things into account. 

The first is how you conducted your search for a workaround for the setback. Before committing to a course of action, did you consider your options? In doing so, did you engage in lateral thinking -- did you think "outside the box"? And was the workaround that you finally chose optimal?

An optimal workaround, by the way, won't necessarily be a pleasant workaround. To be optimal, it need only be less unpleasant than the other possible workarounds. Along these lines, getting a foot amputated won't be pleasant, but if the foot is severely gangrenous, amputation will be preferable to the next-best option -- death.

The second but more significant factor in grading your performance will be your emotional response to the setback. If you remain calm and collected, you will be worthy of, say, a B. 

If your goal is to get an A or even an A+ on the exam, though, you will have to do more than remain calm; you will have to welcome the setback and even perk up a bit on its appearance. In this respect, you need to resemble a fireman who, after years of training, is finally called on to put out a fire. At last, a chance to show his stuff!

Stoicism advises being happy with what we already have

A few weeks ago I wrote a philosophical post for my HinesSight blog: Stoic guide to happiness: want the things you already have. Here's an excerpt from the talk by William B. Irvine that I transcribed.

The ancient Stoics came up with a way to get off the hedonic treadmill. The trick, they said, is to want the things you already have, to love the life you happen to be living. 

To better understand this trick, let’s turn our attention back to the gap theory of happiness. The Stoics agreed that the presence of a gap between what you have and what you want will make you unhappy. Their insight was to realize there’s a second way to close the gap.

You can also close it by wanting what you already have. Let me restate that. Instead of working to get the thing you don’t have, spend your efforts learning to want the things you already do have. 

The Stoics would argue that the person who embraces the life that he happens to be living, even though the life is quite basic, is vastly better off than the millionaire who, despite living in a mansion, is convinced that he would be lastingly happy if only he replaced his Ferrari with a newer model.

Or perhaps replaced his wife of several decades with some young model. This millionaire, by the way, will likely be envied by many people. They will imagine that if only they were living his life, they would at last be happy. All their problems would disappear, and no new problems would arise to replace them.

These people are as deluded as the millionaire is. The primary difference between them and the millionaire is that the millionaire is on a more expensive and extravagant version of the hedonic treadmill than they are.

The Stoics said that one way to want what you already have is to practice negative visualization, where you imagine losing something in your life that means a lot to you. Even brief periods of negative visualization can lead you to value more highly what you already have, rather than longing for something more and better.

After writing that post, I bought a book by Irvine, The Stoic Challenge, that I've written one blog post about. I'm enjoying it.

Today I read a couple of chapters about anchoring and framing. These are psychological concepts that pertain to the Stoic approach to happiness. Anchors are notions that sink into the subconscious mind where they affect subsequent speculations about the world.

An example cited in the book is a store that has two options for selling shirts.

Plan A is to price the shirts at $32 each. Plan B is to price the shirts at $40, then have frequent 20% off sales. The benefit of Plan B is that the $40 price gets anchored in the minds of customers. Then when the shirts go on sale, customers think they're getting a good deal if they pay $32 for one.

Framing is related to a Stoic adage, "What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgements about the things." Meaning, we have a choice in how to frame or look upon a situation. Irvine gives the example of a doctor telling you that you have the choice between two medical procedures.

One has a one-month survival rate of 90%. The other has a 10% mortality rate in the first month. Obviously both are equally risky, but most people find a choice framed in terms of survival more attractive than a choice framed in terms of death.

Though I've got about half of Irvine's book left to read, it seems pretty clear that negative visualization, anchoring, and framing all point to the view that, as noted above, what keeps us dissatisfied with life isn't so much what is objectively happening with us but how we subjectively look upon our situation.

As you might expect, given my strong atheist leaning, I feel that most religions, mystical paths, and supernatural forms of spirituality are harmful to lasting happiness -- even though they admittedly can produce short-term satisfaction by making grandiose promises about returning to God, enjoying heaven, basking in unending bliss, and such.

The problem with putting such lofty goals in the minds of believers is that the goals serve to raise expectations about what is possible to achieve, even though there's no evidence for God, heaven, or unending bliss.

Once we view life through the frame of "this world sucks but a better one awaits," we're akin to someone with a decent middle-class income who falls prey to a huckster who promises much greater riches by following their illusory recipe for wealth.

From being happy with what they have, they now look upon their life as seriously lacking. This is similar to Christian missionaries who tell previously content members of a so-called "primitive" tribe that they are filled with sin that has to be washed clean by believing in the sacrifice of Jesus. 

Suddenly their contentment is reframed as ignorance of their fallen nature that must be redeemed by embracing Christianity. This same game is played by gurus who proclaim that they've been sent to save souls, leaving aside the not-insignificant fact that evidence for soul is lacking, much less the need to save this nonexistent entity.