Church of the Churchless

Likely we don't even know the questions to ask of the cosmos

We all have questions. About all kinds of stuff. What's wrong with my computer? Who will win the next presidential election? Is that lump on my chest anything to be concerned about?

Almost always, our questions are presumed to have answers. Maybe not right now, but eventually. The winner of the 2024 presidential election will be known after the votes are counted, not before. Until then all we can do is wait.

And hope. That's when I turn a bit religious, even though I'm an atheist: Dear God, please don't let Donald Trump win a second term!

But the questions I find most interesting, especially after imbibing some Oregon marijuana courtesy of my beloved PAX vaporizer, are the ones that we humans are clueless about. Meaning, not only don't we know the answers, we don't even know the questions to which we lack the answers.

It'd be good if I could give some examples, but of course I can't. No one can.

Because what I'm talking about is a fundamental inability of us humans to grasp the Deep Unknown well enough to even fathom the basic contours of what we don't know.

This isn't just a difference in degree of, say, our inability to know what sperm whales are saying with their clicking sounds. That was the subject of a fascinating story in The New Yorker, "Talk to Me: Can artificial intelligence allow us to speak to another species?"

Most of us have heard of the famous philosophical/neuroscientific question, What is it like to be a bat? In this case, researchers trying to decipher the meaning of sperm whale clicks, which travel great distances through the water, are faced with the problem of how the whales look upon the world.

Surely very differently than we do.

But through artificial intelligence, it is hoped that with a large enough database of whale click patterns, known as codas, "it [AI] could then -- once again in theory -- generate sequences of codas that a sperm whale would find convincing. The model wouldn't understand sperm whale-ese, but it could, in a manner of speaking, speak it. Call it ClickGPT."

OK. That'd be way cool.

However, the story says that it's possible that nothing in our human experience matches up with some, or even all, of sperm whale experience. Researchers are hopeful this isn't true, but it might be.

And this relates to a fellow mammal on our very own planet. Imagine how much more difficult -- I'd say impossible -- it would be to grasp the fundamental questions of the cosmos, leaving aside the answers. This presumes, of course, that such questions exist.

I suspect that they do, though naturally I'm clueless about what the questions might be. The best I can do is gesture in the direction of where my intuition causes me to believe that such questions might be lurking.

What boggles my mind above all other boggles is the notion that something always has been, is now, and always will be. That sounds like a religious notion, but it really isn't. 

Sure, religious believers consider that God is the everlasting entity. However, as I've pointed out many times on this blog, and surely will do so many times in the future, saying that God always has existed brings us no closer to fathoming the boggle than saying the cosmos always has existed.

Actually, less close, since we know the cosmos, in the form of our universe, exists, while there's no convincing evidence that God does.

Regardless, it seems to me that we humans are very limited in our ability to comprehend eternal existence. We don't even know whether, when it comes to the cosmos, "eternal" means endless time or outside of time.

And for sure we don't know what even farther out questions about the cosmos could be asked if the human brain had a capacity to ask them. Again, I'm not assuming that the questions could be answered.

What I'm saying is that we humans, no matter how wise, intelligent, or enlightened we might be, lack the ability to come up with those questions because all we're capable of is fathoming queries that relate to our human experience -- which lacks any experience of existence having always existed.

No free will is the secular version of karma

It had to be. During my religious days -- well, make that 35 years -- I wrote two books that addressed the subject of karma.

In God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder, karma was secondary to my main theme of spirit being the creative power of the cosmos. But in Life is Fair, the whole book was about this spiritual law of cause and effect.

Now, when I've become an atheist, I'm fascinated by the strong neuroscientific and philosophical arguments against free will. What's interesting is that no free will is almost exactly the same as karma.

Guess I was meant to not believe in free will. 

Of course, often karma is viewed as having supernatural elements, especially in its Eastern religious form. Karma is seen as extending over multiple lives, through reincarnation. But otherwise, no free will is the secular equivalent of karma.

To demonstrate this, below are some quotes from the literature of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the India-based religious organization headed up by a guru that I belonged to for those three and a half decades.

I assembled these quotes in the course of my research for my first book. I read, or rather re-read, every book in English published by RSSB and took notes on various subjects concerning how mysticism and the new physics could relate.

Here's some of what the RSSB books say about karma, which sounds just like the notion of no free will, leaving aside the references to God as being the overseer of karma and mentions of past lives. Every quote is from a book written by one of the RSSB gurus, such as Charan Singh and Sawan Singh.

The Karmic Law is supreme on the material and mind planes, and nothing happens of its own accord, spontaneously, so to say. The law governs the planes; therefore, no haphazard happening of events takes place anywhere, whether the events are of microscopic or astronomical dimensions. (Sawan Singh)

According to the layer of our Karmas that comes into action, our Lord makes people act towards us in that way. So we should never blame anybody. (Charan Singh)

Our present life was marked out in the minutest detail, even before we were born, and no change can be made in that now. (Charan Singh)

No person, dead or living, can influence the life of another person. That is settled strictly according to the law of Karma. You go where your attachments are and you reap what you sow. These are eternal laws which work in this creation and every soul is bound by them. (Charan Singh)

Everything in our life is predestined according to the karmas of our past life, but this does not preclude all effort on our part. The effort that we make is also part of our destiny. We, in fact, have no free will as we call it... our will is very limited and what we call free will is all circumscribed by our birth, the family we are born into, the country, the education, and so forth, over which we had no control. All these circumstances have moulded our thoughts and we act and think accordingly. (Charan Singh)

There is no necessity to worry because whatever is destined, whatever has to happen, has already happened, is already destined. (Charan Singh)

We cannot think why should we do anything if it is already written in our destiny and we will get it automatically anyway. If a thing is in your destiny, then your way of thinking will be to develop it. We are all just like puppets who are dancing, and the strings are being pulled by Him according to our karmas. The realized souls and the unrealized souls are all dancing in the same way. The only difference is that the realized souls know that He is pulling the string and the unrealized souls think that they are dancing by their own effort. (Charan Singh)

If we look at it on a grand scale, from the top down, we have hardly any free will at all...We may say that this is my decision, this is my free will, but we forget what has led us to make that decision, to think in that direction... So, on a broader scale, we have absolutely no free will at all. Everything was planned, so to say. But with our limited view, looking from here up, we have free will. (Charan Singh)

We cannot know what is our karma or what is in store for us... Karma will be taken care of automatically. We should not try to analyze what is our karma or what is not our karma, for that will take care of itself. (Charan Singh)

What destiny has planned for you will come to pass without any planning on your part. Your destiny will cause you to act and make effort according to its plan. Destiny and effort go hand in hand. One is as much a part of the other as the sun and its rays. (Jagat Singh)

A mindfulness lesson in the checkout lane

This afternoon I was in a south Salem Fred Meyer checkout lane. There was only one person ahead of me, so I decided to skip the self-checkout, which I usually prefer as the lines aren't as long.

When the person in front of me moved forward, I didn't immediately do the same with my grocery cart. I heard the man in back of me say something. Couldn't make it out exactly, but it sounded something like "you can move now."

Anyway, I ignored the comment, unloaded my groceries on the conveyor belt and soon was at the head of the line. As the female clerk rang up my items, I got out some coupons for certain items I was buying. I handed them to the woman after she had scanned all of my purchases.

Everything went smoothly until she said, "Oops. I pushed the wrong button. Got to ask for an override." She picked up a phone and dialed her manager. As we waited for him to show up, I told her that it'd be nice if she could punch in her own override. Why did a manager have to do it?

She said that her manager trusts her, but the corporate higher-ups don't. That led to a discussion between the clerk and me about how employees of a big business shouldn't be criticized for having to implement policies established by executives. 

We had time to talk because even though the clerk could see her manager down at the self-checkout section, he wasn't moving in her direction. I suggested she wave her arms, which she did, but that didn't help because the manager was facing away from her. 

Eventually she phoned him again and he indicated that he'd be doing the override soon.

At that exact moment, pretty much, I saw that the man in back of me in line, who had put all of his items on the conveyor belt, was picking them up and placing them back in his cart. I said to him, "We'll be done here in just a bit."

He angrily told me, "Thanks for holding up the line," as he continued to pick up his items. I replied, "Hey, this wasn't my fault, and it wasn't her fault either. It just was a glitch." The manager then appeared, held out his override tag or whatever it is for the clerk to scan, and said to me, "Sorry it took so long. I had something else to deal with."

So the irritated man in back of me, who looked to be somewhere around my age, in his 70s, put all of his stuff back in his cart and left the checkout line just as the clerk was finishing up my purchase. I said to her, "Bad timing on that guy's part. Now he's going to have to wait in another line."

Now, since I'm in a mindfulness frame of mind, having written a few days ago about my re-reading of Jon Kabat-Zinn's Wherever You Go, There You Are, I found this check-out line experience to be a great example of what goes wrong when mindfulness is forgotten.

Meaning, when we allow our negative thoughts and emotions to override the evidence of our senses. Believe me, I'm an expert on this, because frequently I've had feelings akin to the irritated man in the line behind me. 

It's easy to jump to conclusions based not on objective reality, but on what we believe is happening. I doubt that the man understood that the reason for my delay in checking out was an innocent error by the clerk in pushing a button on her touch screen.

Maybe he wasn't listening closely to what she said to me and to her manager on the phone. Maybe he was hard of hearing. Or maybe he knew what the problem was and still became irritated. He might have been having a bad day and this was the experience that sent him into a major irritation. 

Regardless, as noted in my previous post, there's a lot to like in Kabat-Zinn's observation:

Think of yourself as an eternal witness, as timeless. Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear?

The man behind me was seeing the checkout line through the lens of his impatience and irritation. Again, I've been there and done the same thing, so I can't judge the man for this. He was simply reacting from his own subjective perspective.

For me, on the other hand, the delay in checking out as we waited for the manager wasn't bothersome at all. The clerk and I were talking about what was happening. We shared a common view that big corporations like Kroger, which owns Fred Meyer, can have absurd employee policies. 

I knew that the clerk was doing her best. When the manager finally appeared, I had no doubt that he also was doing his best. This was just a minor problem caused by a simple mistake. When the clerk told me, "I pushed the wrong button," I said to her, "I do that all the time." 

Hopefully I've learned something from this episode.

Maybe the next time I start to get irritated at someone, I'll pause and remind myself that whatever is happening, it's what is happening. Almost certainly no one is trying to make me irritated. I'm doing that to myself by expecting something to occur which is different from what is actually occurring. 

That's why I'm attracted to mindfulness so much, which is defined by Kabat-Zinn as paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, nonjudgmentally.

UPDATE: After writing this post, this morning I woke up irritated at a fairly minor health problem that bothers me at times. I was going to tell my wife how I felt. Then I realized that my irritation wasn't very different, and maybe not different at all, from the man in my checkout lane story getting upset at having to wait a while in line behind me while the clerk dealt with a problem. 

The lesson for me is that it's a heck of a lot easier to observe when someone else is being unmindful and self-centered than when I am. But maybe I've learned something. By not complaining about my problem, which wouldn't have done anything to help the problem anyway, my wife had an open conversational window to talk about some things she was interested in. I ended up feeling better listening to her than I would have if I'd done my complaining.

Sure, sometimes it makes sense to let our negative feelings out. But sometimes it isn't. 

 

Mindfulness meditation is like briefly being dead

Whenever I need a heaping dose of reality shorn of unnecessary concepts, my eyes wander to a bottom shelf in my office where the mindfulness books hang out. 

This morning I was drawn to pick up a book by Jon Kabat-Zinn that I'd read before, Wherever You Go, There You Are. 

I've read other mindfulness books by Kabat-Zinn. As he says in the introduction, his previous book, Full Catastrophe Living, is largely aimed at people akin to those who use his stress reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center run by Kabat-Zinn.

That book had to be quite detailed and comprehensive. Also, thick. Wherever You Go, There You Are is aimed more at a general audience. It's clearly and simply written with many short chapters, several of which I re-read today.

I was struck by how much I agree with Kabat-Zinn's description of what meditation is all about. His take on meditation is pretty much how I've come to view it. When I meditate now, I follow my breath, not trying to change my breath, like by making it shallower or deeper, faster or slower, just being aware of the sensation of breathing.

But this sort of meditation is markedly different from the form of meditation I practiced during the 35 years I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru which taught that the purpose of meditation is to leave this world behind and enter a supernatural better world.

Meditation, according to Kabat-Zinn and Buddhism, is almost precisely the opposite of this. Today I read:

New Yorker cartoon: Two Zen monks in robes and shaved heads, one young, one old, sitting side by side cross-legged on the floor. The younger one is looking somewhat quizzically at the older one, who is turned toward him and saying: "Nothing happens next. This is it."

It's true. Ordinarily, when we undertake something, it is only natural to expect a desirable outcome for our efforts. We want to see results, even if it is only a pleasant feeling. The sole exception I can think of is meditation.

Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are. Perhaps its value lies precisely in this. Maybe we all need to do one thing in our lives simply for its own sake.

But it would not be accurate to call meditation a "doing." It is more accurately described as a "being." When we understand that "This is it," it allows us to let go of the past and future and wake up to what we are now, in this moment.

People usually don't get this right away. They want to meditate in order to relax, to experience a special state, to become a better person, to reduce some stress or pain, to break out of old habits and patterns, to become free or enlightened.

All valid reasons to take up meditation practice, but all equally fraught with problems if you expect those things to happen just because you are now meditating.

You'll be caught up in wanting to have a "special experience" or in looking for signs of progress, and if you don't feel something special pretty quickly, you may start to doubt the path you have chosen, or to wonder whether you are "doing it right."

In most domains of learning, this is only reasonable. Of course you have to see progress sooner or later to keep at something. But meditation is different. From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state, every moment a special moment.

When we let go of wanting something else to happen in this moment, we are taking a profound step toward being able to encounter what is here now.

Beautiful! So refreshing.

This demolishes the absurd notion that just because someone has a different experience in meditation than you do, that means one of you is more advanced spiritually or mystically. I love the simple wisdom in From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state, every moment a special moment.

There's no better or worse in meditation, no higher or lower. There's only "This is it." Doesn't matter at all what it is. 

I also enjoyed reading Kabat-Zinn's description of meditation as being akin to dying, except, of course, the actually being dead part. He writes:

People think of meditation as some kind of special activity, but this is not exactly correct. Meditation is simplicity itself. As a joke, we sometimes say: "Don't just do something, sit there." But meditation is not just about sitting, either.

It is about stopping and being present, that is all. Mostly we run around doing. Are you able to come to a stop in your life, even for one moment? Could it be this moment? What would happen if you did?

A good way to stop all the doing is to shift into the "being mode" for a moment. Think of yourself as an eternal witness, as timeless. Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear?

The funny thing about stopping is that as soon as you do it, here you are. Things get simpler. In some ways, it's as if you died and the world continued on.

If you did die, all your responsibilities and obligations would immediately evaporate. Their residue would somehow get worked out without you. No one else can take over your unique agenda. It would die or peter out with you just as it has for everyone else who has ever died. So you don't need to worry about it in any absolute way.

If this is true, maybe you don't need to make one more phone call right now, even if you think you do. Maybe you don't need to read something just now, to run one more errand.

By taking a few moments to "die on purpose" to the rush of time while you are still living, you free yourself to have time for the present. By "dying" now in this way, you actually become more alive now. That is what stopping can do.

And when you decide to go, it's a different kind of going because you stopped. The stopping actually makes the going more vivid, richer, more textured. It helps keep all the things we worry about and feel inadequate about in perspective. It gives us guidance.

Try: Stopping, sitting down, and becoming aware of your breathing once in a while throughout the day. It can be for five minutes, or even five seconds. Let go into full acceptance of the present moment including how you are feeling and what you perceive to be happening. 

For these moments, don't try to change anything at all, just breathe and let go. Breathe and let go. Die to having to have anything be different in this moment; in your mind and in your heart, give yourself permission to allow this moment to be exactly as it is, and allow yourself to be exactly as you are.

Then, when you're ready, move in the direction your heart tells you to go, mindfully and with resolution.

More wise advice.

I enjoy taking a few breaths, feeling the air passing into my nose, visualizing the air filling an empty cavity on the inhalation, then leaving the cavity empty on the exhalation. That emptiness is akin to the dying Kabat-Zinn speaks of.

It helps me look upon whatever I'm experiencing at the moment from a perspective of me being absent. What would the situation be like if there was no "me" aware of it? Well, then there would be the same thing happening, but not with a sense of like/dislike, pleasure/pain, good/bad, and the other pairs of opposites that aren't objectively there, but are part of my subjective response to what's going on.

Spirituality is simple without Self and free will

So why do I enjoy pondering the notion that we not only aren't an enduring separate Self (a central tenet of Buddhism), we also don't possess free will (a central tenet of neuroscience)?

Though I haven't heard anyone asking me this question, I heard the voice that speaks inside my head asking it, so I'm pleased to answer myself.

Note that the "self" in that second sentence isn't capitalized as the "Self" in the first sentence was. That's to distinguish between the metaphysical idea of Self -- often expressed as soul -- that somehow exists separate from the physical body/mind, and the common sense idea of self as being that physical body/mind.

In other words, there's no doubt that each of us is a distinct self. But there's a lot of doubt that residing within that self is a separate and distinct Self that enters the bodily self at birth, leaves it at death, and isn't affected by anything, being eternal.

I used to believe in such a Self during the 35 years I was an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a dualistic religion based in India and led by a guru who taught that our true nature is Soul, not body, and that the purpose of life is for the Soul to journey through higher regions of reality back to God.

This grandiose task involved many complications, because extricating the Soul from the grip of mind and matter supposedly wasn't easy, requiring arduous spiritual practice that included 2 1/2 hours of daily meditation that might extend over four lifetimes. (RSSB believed in reincarnation.)

RSSB initiates also vowed to be strict vegetarians, not drink alcohol or ingest recreational drugs, abstain from sex outside of marriage, and lead a "clean and moral" life -- whatever that means. 

Thus there were many things you had to do to save your Soul. These were different things, in large part, than believers in Christianity, Judaism, or Islam are expected to do.

But the common denominator between all dualistic religions that I'm familiar with is how difficult and complex it is to please God by doing what supposedly is required to break the bonds of this earthly life and return to "heaven," which goes by a variety of names but is considered to be much different from this world.

What a relief its been to leave all that supernatural superstition behind. I'm not saying that I'm completely cleansed of the religious beliefs that I used to embrace, but since 2005 I've become steadily more spiritually independent.

That has led me to an increasingly simple world view. Well, more than a world view, for I actually experience things differently now. For quite a few years I've read, and thought, and felt, and meditated in accord with the assumption that I am not a Self, nor do I possess free will. 

Those two assumptions are closely related, because the only way to possess a will that is free of the deterministic causes and effects that control everything other than, perhaps, the quantum realm where randomness appears prevalent, is to believe that an immaterial Self or Soul resides within us, or as us, that can act without being affected by those causes and effects.

Life is so much simpler and more satisfying without a Self or free will. Sure, problems still have to be dealt with. That comes with life. However, I feel like a large metaphysical load has been lifted from me now that I no longer believe that I have to make of life something larger than it naturally is.

Enlightenment. Satori. God-realization. Whatever we want to call it, that thing used to gnaw on me like an itch that wouldn't go away no matter how much I scratched it. In fact, the scratching, the quest for a supernatural transformation that would make me more than human, was producing the itch.

Now, lacking a Self, there's no Self to be saved, no Self needing God's or Guru's grace, no Self requiring assistance in being freed from the karmic wheel of reincarnation, no Self standing apart from the natural world. 

I still meditate. I still enjoy exploring ways to be happier, calmer, more energetic, loving, calm, and at peace with myself and other people. I was a vegetarian before I joined RSSB and I've continued to be a vegetarian after I left RSSB.

So I still consider myself a spiritual seeker. I'm just seeking what is attainable and real, rather what is  fantasy and illusion. And that feels oh-so-good.

Alan Watts on Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism

Though Alan Watts was an Anglican minister and served as chaplain at Northwestern University, in the book he wrote in 1940 when he was just 24, The Meaning of Happiness, three Eastern religions/philosophies garner the most attention and praise.

That's because Watts correctly sees Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism as being transformational, rather than metaphysical, as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are. Just picture Christianity without Jesus, or Judaism without the history of the Jewish people, or Islam without the revelation of the Koran via Mohammed.

Hard to do, if not impossible. But Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism do just fine without any history or personalities. Even Buddhism teaches "if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." Meaning, Buddha the person isn't at all necessary to understand Buddhism. Watts says:

For the wisdom of the East has a strictly practical aim which is not mere knowledge about the universe; it aims at a transformation of the individual and of his feeling for life through experience rather than belief.

This experience is psychological, not metaphysical, and except in certain specialized fields has no relation to occultism or to what we understand in the West as philosophy.

In an interesting chapter called "The One in the Many," Watts describes how the three Eastern practices aim to lead to a realization that the reality of this world partakes of the reality of all existence.

That, in a nutshell, is the open secret of happiness, according to Watts: accepting what is, here and now, for the smallest piece of the world where we live and breathe possesses the same reality as the vastest reaches of the cosmos.

The Upanishads are the foundation of what was subsequently known as Vedanta, which is to say the "end" of fulfillment of the Vedas, the Vedas being the earliest of all Hindu scriptures. With matchless economy and beauty of language the Upanishads speak in a number of different ways of Brahman, the One Reality which is expressed in all the manifold forms, objects, activities, and living beings of the universe.

...Therefore the phrase "That art thou" (tat tvam asi) is the first, fundamental principle of Vedanta arising from the second, that all things without exception are Brahman, not by participation, for Brahman is one and indivisible. Hence Vedanta is also known as the system of Advaita (literally, "not two") or nonduality, and nonduality in philosophy is the natural expression of total acceptance in psychology.

...In other words, if man has the experience of separateness, this experience also is Brahman since there is nothing other than Brahman. Maya is not illusion as against reality, for in the Vedantist conception there is nothing apart from Reality which may be set over against it. Thus we may say that while there is no actual separateness from Brahman, there is certainly an experience of separateness, and this experience is real even though it is incomplete and relative.

Buddhism sprang into being in India as a reaction to Vedanta losing its way. 

But invariably there came a time when the experience was obscured by the doctrine, when the psychology of religion became the philosophy of religion and the Brahmanic tradition degenerated into scholasticism, ceremonialism, and fantastic extremes of asceticism whose object was not to accept the opposites but to destroy them, so negatively was the doctrine interpreted.

I love how Watts describes the Buddhist scriptures, which fell into much the same trap as Vedanta did. 

Although we have in writing a prodigious number of words attributed to the Buddha, little is known of him.

...The earliest records of his teaching are found in the Pali Canon, three large groups of scriptures which read, for a great part, like a statistical report compiled on wet afternoons by monks who had nothing better to do. 

...As for the sections on psychology, never were there such ponderous lists of minutiae, the apparent aim of which is to analyze the human being down to the last detail and so prove that he does not really exist. 

On the plus side, as revealed in the Dhammapada: 

The Buddha's teaching is unique in its utter lack of theology; it concentrates wholly on the necessity of arriving at a personal immediate experience and dispenses with the doctrinal symbol of that experience. In this respect it is the only truly psychological religion. 

...In its most concrete form ordinary, everyday experience is just how you feel at this moment. In a certain sense Buddhism is very much a philosophy and a psychology of the moment, for if we are asked what life is, and if our answer is to be a practical demonstration and not a theory, we can do no better than point to the moment -- now!

It is in the moment that we find reality and freedom, for acceptance of life is acceptance of the present moment now and at all times.

...For this reason Mahayana Buddhism teaches that Nirvana or enlightenment cannot really be attained, because the moment we try to attain it by our own power we are using it as an escape from what is now, and we are also forgetting that Nirvana is unattainable in the sense that it already is. 

Lastly, there's Taoism.

All our reasoning is based on the law of cause and effect operating as a sequence. Something is happening now because something else happened then. But the Chinese do not reason so much along this horizontal line from past, through present, to future; they reason perpendicularly, from what is in one place now to what is in another place now.

In other words, they do not ask why, or from what past causes, a certain set of things is happening now; they ask, "What is the meaning of those things happening together at this moment?" The word "Tao" is the answer to this question. The present situation within and around oneself is Tao, for the present moment is life.

...This is another way of saying that there is a harmony called Tao which blends all events in each moment of the universe into a perfect chord. The whole situation in and around you at this instant is a harmony with which you have to find your own union if you are to be in accord with Tao.

When you have discovered your own union with it, you will be in the state of Te, sometimes rendered as "virtue" or "grace" or "power," but best understood as Tao realized in man. 

So it all comes down to accepting the reality of what is in the present moment. Pretty damn simple, when Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism are stripped down to their essence.

True acceptance is the way out of the vicious circle of duality

I like to read books by Alan Watts. Other people don't like Watts. Some of them visit this blog. So when I write about how I enjoy what Watts has to say, probably they find those blog posts irritating.

Such is the play of duality. It's how the world works, generally.

Love is inconceivable without hate. Up is inconceivable without down. Absent dualities, we're simply left with what is, reality without a second. But the moment we ascribe human qualities, such as likes and dislikes, to aspects of reality, duality appears.

(I'm not saying that reality is completely absent of duality. Light and dark, or positive and negative charge, seemingly would be present without people. This is a point in The Tao of Physics. However, there's no doubt that in large part we humans manufacture duality out of the way we conceive of things.)

In the book Watts wrote in 1940 when he was just 24, The Meaning of Happiness, he speaks of the vicious circle of duality. 

The problems of duality are clearly stated in the Christian faith, but they often pass unrecognized under the symbols in which they are contained. The story of the Fall, of the eating of the fruit of Good and Evil, describes man's involvement in the vicious circle -- a condition in which, of his own power, he is able to do nothing good that is not vitiated by evil.

In this condition it may be said that "all good deeds are done for the love of gain," that is, with a purely self-interested motive, because "honesty is the best policy." 

Every advance in morality is counterbalanced by the growth of repressed evil in the unconscious, for morality has to be imposed by law and whenever there is compulsion there is repression of instinctual urges. Indeed, the very formulation of the ideal of righteousness suggests and aggravates its opposite.

Thus St. Paul says, "I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet." So, too, Lao Tzu remarks in the Tao Te Ching, 

When the great Tao is lost, spring forth benevolence and righteousness.
When wisdom and sagacity arise, there are great hypocrites. 
When family relations are no longer harmonious, we have filial children and devoted parents.
When a nation is in confusion and disorder, patriots are recognized.
Where Tao is, equilibrium is. When Tao is lost, out come the differences of things.

I love the solution that Watts proposes. I also love the way Watts says it. He has a wonderful ability to describe subtle ideas in an easy to understand way. When I read his books, often I'm struck by a feeling of "Wow, so nicely said. I've thought along this line myself, but never in such a clear way." 

Here's what Watts says about how to avoid making acceptance of reality into a dualistic vicious circle.

The motivating power of the vicious circle is pride. In Christian terms we should say that man is not willing to be saved as he is; he feels that it is necessary for him to do something about it, to earn salvation by his own self-made spirituality and righteousness.

The Grace of God is offered freely to all, but through pride man will not accept it.

He cannot bear the thought that he is absolutely powerless to lift himself up and that the only chance of salvation is simply to accept something which is offered as freely to the saint as to the sinner. If nothing can be done to earn this Grace it seems to set all man's self-imposed ideals at naught; he has to confess himself impotent, and this is more than he can bear.

So the gift of Grace is tacitly ignored, and man goes on trying to manufacture it for himself.

When it is said that man will not let himself be saved as he is, this is another way of saying that he will not accept himself as he is; subtly he gets around this simple act by making a technique out of acceptance, setting it up as something which he should do in order to be a "good boy."

And as soon as acceptance is made a question of doing and technique we have the vicious circle.

True acceptance is not something to be attained; it is not an ideal to be sought after -- a state of soul which can be possessed and acquired, which we can add to ourselves in order to increase our spiritual stature.

If another paradox may be forgiven, true acceptance is accepting yourself as you are NOW, at this moment, before you have even begun to make yourself different by accepting yourself. 

In other words, as soon as we try to make the ideal state of mind called "acceptance" something different from the state of mind which we have at this moment, this is the pride which makes it so difficult to accept what we are now, the barrier that stands between man and that which we call God or Tao.

But when it is suggested that we should find union with God here and now at this very moment, everyone is outraged and begins to make excuses. "After all, how can we attain such sublime understanding at the moment? We are unprepared. We are not good enough. We shall have to do all kinds of things first. We must meditate and train ourselves in religious discipline, and then perhaps after many years we shall be fit and worthy to attain the greatest of all attainments."

But this is surely a peculiar form of blindness and false pride, masquerading as humility. We see God every time we open our eyes; we inhale Him at every breath; we use His strength in every movement of a finger; we think Him in every thought, although we may not think of Him, and we taste Him in every bite of food.

This is an old story to those who have studied the wisdom of the East, but still the search goes on, a search for something we have never lost, something which is staring us right in the face, a search which the Buddhists sometimes describe as "hiding loot in one's pocket and declaring oneself innocent."

It is difficult just because it is too easy, for man finds it so hard to climb down from his high horse and accept that which is, freely and unreservedly. 

Small wonder, then, that we are advised to become again as little children, who have an inconvenient way of drawing attention to obvious things which the adult mind cannot or will not see. For spiritual understanding is not a reward given to you for being a great person; you cannot acquire it any more than you can acquire the wind and the stars.

But you can open your eyes and see it.

That seeing, Watts says, doesn't require the embrace of any philosophy, religion, spiritual path, or mystical pursuit. However, it lies at the core of three nondualistic practices: Vedanta Advaita, Buddhism, and Taoism.

Watts describes these practices well in chapters that follow his vicious circle discussion, and how to escape it. That probably will be the subject of my next churchless blog post. Which will irritate some and please others. 

Why I embrace the dark side of me and the world

Looking back, I don't think I ever was a full-on dualist, just a half-hearted one.

This was during the 35 years I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a religious organization based in India whose core teaching was that this world in which we live and breathe isn't our true home but a temporary resting place -- since the purpose of life is to return to higher regions of reality and God through extensive meditation, devotion to a guru believed to be God in Human Form, a vegetarian diet, abstinence from alcohol and drugs, and morality, including no sex outside of marriage.

Thus the RSSB teaching was thoroughly dualistic. The guru would say things like, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience." Which I recall is a quote from Teilhard deChardin.

I never fully embraced this notion of the world as a place to be escaped from. I didn't like the judgmentalism of so many RSSB initiates. They considered themselves to be God's chosen people, even though that honor is claimed by many, if not most, dualistic religions. They were even proud of their humility.

When I gave talks about the RSSB teachings, which was frequent, I'd pay lip service to the oft-repeated adage that it was crucial to shun lust, anger, greed, attachment, and egotism. However, I never came across a single person during my 35 years of RSSB membership, including the guru, who didn't manifest these and other so-called "negative" emotions and qualities.

Which are better termed simply emotions and qualities. 

In my experience, the people who talked the most about having overcome negative emotions and qualities were seriously lacking in positive emotions and qualities. It was as if all the attention they paid to stifling their dark side left them with insufficient energy to manifest their bright side -- especially in a natural fashion rather than a stilted artificial fashion.

One reason I detested holier-than-thou attitudes back then, and still do, is that I grew up in a family with a lot of dysfunction. Not just my immediate family, which was very small. My mother was divorced and I had a half-sister ten years older than me who got married at 18, so wasn't around much. My father wasn't in the picture, a man who I only spent an hour with in my entire life, aside from my baby years.

And that hour was very weird, not satisfying at all. My mother didn't speak much about my father. She told me that they got a divorce after he refused to move to Texas, a drier climate than Massachusetts, on the advice of doctors following the birth of my sister Evie, who was born with a congenital heart condition. Supposedly my father's job as a General Electric efficiency expert was more important to him.

Just as alcohol was more important to my mother than sobriety for much of my childhood. That was her biggest dark side, I suppose, as my father's cold detached ambition was to him. In addition, I grew up listening to tales of my mother's relatives facing their own divorces, drinking problems, affairs, and such. 

There was a lot of financial and artistic success in my family. Also, a lot of dark side dysfunction. They were all good people. They were family. They were lovable. So early on in my life I learned an important truth: we all are driven by forces outside of our control. Genetic, psychological, cultural. Scratch the surface of a so-called saint and you'll find a sinner.

That's why I get irritated when some commenters on my recent blog posts take self-righteous shots at two authors I like a lot: Alan Watts and Paul Breer.

Both men make no claim to being saints. Breer was in prison for two years; Watts had a drinking problem and relationship problems. Their personal lives were completely in accord with the messages in their books. Breer was a passionate believer in the illusion of free will and an immaterial self. Watts was a fervent advocate for a spirituality founded on being and acting natural, which included embracing the dark side of life.

Here's how Watts described the dark side in a book he wrote in 1940 when he was only 24, The Meaning of Happiness. These are wise observations about life that narrow-minded religious moralists should seriously consider, rather than reject out of hand.

If you sit still for a while, completely relaxed, and let your thoughts run on, let your mind think of whatever it likes, without interfering, without making suggestions, and without raising any kind of obstacle to the free flow of thought, you will soon discover that mental processes have a life of their own.

They will call one another to the surface of consciousness by association, and if you raise no barriers, you will soon find yourself thinking all manner of things both fantastic and terrible which you ordinarily keep out of consciousness.

Over a period of time this exercise will show you that you have in yourself the potentiality of countless different beings -- the animal, the demon, the sartyr, the thief, the murderer -- so that in time you will be able to feel that no aspect of human life is strange to you -- humani nihilism a me alienum puto. ["I consider nothing human is alien to me."]

In the ordinary way consciousness is forever interfering with the waters of the mind, which are dark and turbulent, concealing the depths. But when, for a while, you let them take care of themselves, the mud settles and with growing clarity you see the foundations of life and all the denizens of the deep.

...For the unconscious is not, as some imagine, a mental refuse-pit; it is simply unfettered nature, demonic and divine, painful and pleasant, hideous and lovely, cruel and compassionate, destructive and creative. It is the source of heroism, love, and inspiration as well as of fear, hatred, and crime.

Indeed, it is as if we carried inside of us an exact duplicate of the world we see around us, for the world is a mirror of the soul, and the soul a mirror of the world. Therefore when you learn to feel the unconscious you begin to understand not only yourself but others as well, and when you look upon human crime and stupidity, you can say with real feeling, "There but for the Grace of God go I." 

 

The whole universe is at work in every thought and action

I'd thought that I'd read, or at least heard about, every book by Alan Watts -- one of my favorite authors. But then I saw a comment on this blog where someone recommended The Meaning of Happiness: The Quest for Freedom of the Spirit in Modern Psychology and the Wisdom of the East.

So I ordered it, as the commenter said that Watts had interesting observations about free will, one of my favorite subjects. Sweet! Favorite author plus favorite subject equals enjoyable reading.

Watts wrote The Meaning of Happiness in 1940, when he was just 24 years old. Though I'm just a few chapters into the book, it's clearly the product of an intellect wise beyond his years. In a preface written in 1952, Watts says that his ideas have gone far beyond the philosophy of the book.

I'm sure that's true. However, The Meaning of Happiness contains themes that continued on through the rest of Watts' life, such as the folly of viewing reality as being divided into material and supernatural spheres.

I haven't come across specific mentions of free will yet, but a section where Watts talks about the nature of spirituality implies rather strongly that what we call "our" will actually is the will of the entire universe, a view that I find both scientifically correct and emotionally inspiring.

Here's some excerpts that resonated with me.

In itself, spirituality is purely an inner experience; it has no necessary effect whatsoever on one's outward behavior judged from the standards of efficiency and worldly wisdom. This is not to say, however, that it is something absolutely private and personal, finding no expression that others can see.

For spirituality is a deep sense of inner freedom based on the realization that one's self is in complete union and harmony with life, with God, with the Self of the universe or whatever that principle may be called. It is the realization that that union has existed from all time, even though one did not know it, and that nothing in all the world nor anything that oneself can do is able to destroy it.

It is thus the sense that the whole might of the universe is at work in one's every thought and action, however trivial and small.

...In one sense you feel that your life is not lived by you at all; the power of the universe, fate and destiny, God Himself, are directing all your motions and all your responsibilities are blown to the winds. In another sense you feel free to move as you wish; you seem to be moving life with the same vast power with which life moves you, and your littlest acts become filled with gigantic possibilities. 

Indeed, physicists tell us that the stars are affected when we lift a single finger.

The result of these two feelings is that you no longer distinguish between what you do to life and what life does to you; it is as if two dancers moved in such perfect accord that the distinction between lead and response vanished, as if the two became one and the same motion.

By the whirling, ever-changing movement of this dance you are carried along without pause, but not like a drunken man in a torrent, for you as much as life are the source of the movement. And this is real freedom; it includes both freedom to move and to be moved; action and passivity are merged, and in spirituality as well as in marriage this is the fulfillment of love.

All this, however, does not take place in the ecstasy of trance, in some abstract state of consciousness where all shapes and substances have become merged into a single infinite essence.

The spiritual man does not perform his ordinary activities as one in a dream, letting his surface thoughts and deeds run on mechanically. He can become just as absorbed in the usual affairs of the world as anyone else, but in a certain way he sanctifies them for under his hands sharpening a pencil becomes as much a religious act as prayer or meditation.

Indeed, he can afford to become absorbed in everyday affairs almost more than others, and he can do so with a certain zest and abandon for to him ordinary human thoughts and activities are as much included in the dance of the spirit as is anything else.

This, indeed, is much of his secret, for he knows that spirituality does not consist in thinking always about the spiritual as such. His world is not divided into "watertight compartments" and his religion is not a special form of thought and activity, for the spiritual and the material are not separated. 

...Those who cannot feel that man's principal concern should lie outside this world, who feel that salvation has nothing to do with removal to another realm of experience or with mere obedience to a moral law -- such people can find little assistance from religion as usually taught, and today they constitute a very large proportion of intelligent men and women.

For the nineteenth-century conflict between religion and science was, for those whose eyes were open, a stripping off of nonessentials from religion, but unfortunately official religion seldom saw it in this way. It clung to supernaturalism, which, rightly or wrongly, rationalist science has discredited, and continued to make it the keystone of spirituality.

But that kind of religion does not encourage the type of love upon which spirituality is founded. We have seen that its technique is imitative and thus unlikely to produce genuine, firsthand religious experience; we have also seen that its contempt of this world and its concentration on the world hereafter has little to do with the essentials of religion.

...In this sense, religion is union with life; whether that life is this present life of physical form, of thought and feeling with brain and soul, or whether it is a life of purely psychic substance is beside the point.

These are only different grades of existence; they are not different grades of spirituality, for the same spiritual laws apply in every grade of existence, and when one has learned union with one of them, one has discovered the secret of union with any of them.

We have suggested that the secret of this union lies in a positive attitude toward the world in which we live. 

To repeat the question which religion has to answer, we want to discover how we can learn to be united with life in all its expressions, in living and dying, in love and fear, in the outer world of circumstance, and in the inner world of thought and feeling, so that in union with it we may find freedom and happiness. 

To be united with life in all its expressions may seem a large demand to make on oneself, for those expressions include disease, pain, death, madness, and all the horrors which man can devise, wittingly or unwittingly, for his fellow creatures. 

In fact the "nub" of the whole problem is the acceptance of the dark side of life, for this is the very occasion of our unhappiness. "Acceptance" may seem a weak word for a positive attitude of love, but it is used because the type of love in question is relaxed.

It is positive but not aggressive; it grows in its own way and is not forced. Therefore we may say that it is not enough to tolerate the dark side of life; acceptance in this sense is much more than a "let it be" with a resigned shrug of the shoulders.

Let us call it "creative acceptance," though because this phrase smacks overmuch of philosophical jargon we will write the noun and only remember its qualifying adjective. This is perhaps wise in another way, for a truth oddly comes out of a play on words: to be genuine, acceptance must be unqualified.

Here's some ways to free yourself of the free will illusion

As noted before, one reason, among many, why I enjoy Paul Breer's books about the illusion of free will and of independent selfhood is that in addition to persuasively arguing why we humans lack free will or an enduring Self he talks about how these illusions can be markedly reduced, if not outright eliminated.

His second book, Beyond Self-Realization: A Sectarian Path to Enlightenment, has the greatest focus on "how to." I'm only about a quarter of the way through it, but I've come across some tips that make sense to me.

Breer was a student of Zen Buddhism for five years. He observes that Zen, like most spiritual traditions which don't believe in an immaterial soul or self, basically has the attitude that enlightenment -- defined as a recognition of no-self (and by implication, no-free-will) -- is best attained by detouring around the notion of selfhood and free will that virtually everybody has.

Meaning, these traditions don't aim directly at demolishing that notion, which Breer views as being akin to a boulder in the road that usually is bypassed instead of blowing it up. Breer, though, favors a blow it up approach. Or at least, chipping away at the boulder until it is just a small rock.

However, some of his techniques for doing this that I've come across so far are mainstream approaches in Buddhism, which includes Zen. So I'm suspecting that later on in the book I'll learn about Breer's more explosive techniques.

An approach he talks about quite a bit is akin to the noticing or labeling technique of mindfulness. But rather than saying to ourself, "I'm angry" or "I'm sad" or whatever, Breer prefers leaving out the "I" and saying "Anger is arising here" or "Sadness is arising here," where here means the body/mind of the person experiencing those emotions.

Over time this diminishes our sense of being a freely willing agent, or a self to whom those feelings are happening. I agree, but I find the same benefit in simply saying to myself "anger" or "sadness," as some of the mindfulness teachers I've studied advise.

Breer writes:

The more you do it, the clearer it becomes that while the sensations [or emotions, in my examples] are real, there is no inner "I" producing or even having them. Each time you acknowledge that fact, the self shrinks. 

Repeated often enough, the practice will clear the mind of all self-referencing, leaving nothing but sensations (now more vivid than before), feelings (no longer possessed by an inner "I") and problem-solving thoughts (those not in service to the illusory self).

This is similar to what the Buddhists call mindfulness meditation; it goes deeper, however, in that it does more than keep your mind focused on what is happening; it serves as a constant reminder that the self-as-ego is an illusion, that all events involving the body-mind are arising on their own out of Circumstance.

It will gradually convince you, in other words, that there is no inner "I" doing anything at all, thus no inner agent for you to identify with. In turn, acknowledging that the entity you take yourself to be does not exist will clear the way for the discovery of who you really are.

Another mindfulness technique Breer likes is to lose yourself in sensations. I see this as being akin to the Zen adage of "chop wood, carry water." Well, maybe not just akin, but exactly the same.

Most of us tend to distance ourselves from our experience by either considering how the experience affects our (illusory) "I," or how other people may be viewing our experience from their own perspective ("Can the audience tell I have stage fright?").

Here's how Breer puts it:

Losing yourself in an experience means experiencing a feeling or sensation without being aware that you are having it. In the ordinary (samsaric) way of perceiving, you are usually aware that you're aware -- for example, that when looking at a tree, you are not only aware of the tree, but also aware that you're looking at it.

I remember hiking high in the Rocky Mountains years ago and stopping to take in the panorama before me. It bugged me that I couldn't simply look at the scenery without being simultaneously aware that I was doing the looking. 

It felt like I had a monkey on my back, a useless, unshakeable, mind-created burden that corrupted the influence of just plain looking. That monkey, I began to see later, was present in almost every experience I was having: that included eating ("I" am eating this meal), showering ("I" am taking a shower), reading  ("I" am reading this book) and so on.

In one form or another, the self (as either the inner "I" or the body-mind) was sticking its nose into everything I was doing, feeling or thinking. That's when I turned to sense-immersion for help.

With practice I found it possible to get rid of the monkey altogether, leaving nothing but the sensation of the moment. What I found was a new clarity -- accompanied by an unshakeable feeling of peace. Once I could look at a tree without the thought that "I" was doing the looking, the tree became more vivid, more present.

There was a new stillness to the experience, one cleansed of all judgment, evaluation, preference, and desire. In a word, the "I" monkey was gone -- and in its place stood a world seen for the first time in its pristine rawness -- a world no longer corrupted by the presence of a self obsessed with its own survival.

When meditation is carried further, something still more astonishing happens, namely the disappearance of whatever is being observed. When both observer and observed are gone, what remains is consciousness which is no longer tied to this or that -- just consciousness itself, or what we referred to earlier as Pure Consciousness.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Right now it is enough to see meditation as a way of eliminating thought while you remain alert. Since self-awareness is sustained with thinking, cleansing the mind of all unnecessary thought will shrink the self and bring more freedom and clarity into your life. 

...The freedom comes from a shrinking of the self, i.e., a shrinking of all those activities like worrying, regretting, desiring, resisting, complaining, etc. that are spawned by the self illusion.

Well, on this blog I've been skeptical of other writers who claim that Pure Consciousness exists and can be experienced. My view is that even if Pure Consciousness exists, it couldn't be experienced, or at least remembered, without an impure consciousness that can say "Pure Consciousness was just experienced."

But I remain open to whatever evidence or arguments Breer brings forth in the rest of his book about Pure Consciousness.

I do like his attitude toward experiencing the world without using the lens of our (illusory) self. Many years ago a friend shared a poem that, I'm pretty sure, contained this marvelous line:

"We should be able to look upon a mountain without considering it a commentary on our life." 

UPDATE: I got the idea right, but not the words:

I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment on my life

― David Ignatow

Paul Breer speaks of a selfless experience while in prison

A few commenters on a recent post about how Paul Breer describes the Cosmic View and Local View of enlightenment in his book, Beyond Self-Realization: A Sectarian Path to Enlightenment, have noted that Breer was indicted in 2012 on a felony charge of sexually abusing a relative.

I pointed out in my own comment that Breer speaks of being in prison for two years in both of his books about the dual illusion of free will and of an immaterial self or soul. In the first book I read, and liked a lot, he didn't mention what he was in prison for. And so far I haven't come across a mention of the charge in the book I'm reading now, just that he had a profound experience while in prison, which I'll share below.

Of course, whether or not Breer was convicted of sexual abuse has absolutely no bearing on the truth or falsehood of the message he conveys in his books.

I consider it much more likely than not that this message is true, since I've read quite a few books about the illusion of free will and an immaterial self or soul that contain the same message. So this is a good opportunity to emphasize that moral outrage, which is reflected in the comments about Breer being indicted, isn't called for if free will is indeed an illusion. 

Sure, it is entirely appropriate to decry someone's behavior. Virtually everybody agrees that sexually abusing a relative, or anyone else, is wrong. Those convicted of doing this deserve punishment.

But not because of moral outrage that they had the freedom to act differently than they did. Because punishment, such as prison time, serves to deter other people from doing the same thing, prevents the sexual abuser from harming more victims, and can lead to rehabilitation of the offender so they don't commit additional crimes.

These reasons are discussed in a chapter in the Beyond Self-Realization book that I read today, "Implications for Society" -- implications, that is, of giving up a belief in free will. Breer writes:

Incarcerating offenders achieves two things: it protects the community while punishing the offender. The more heinous the crime, the more severe the punishment. For the believer in free will, the system appears to work -- it keeps criminals off the street while providing an outlet for the public's wrath.

At least that's the way most people see it. But if the ideas we've been discussing here are valid, we have to consider the possibility that the whole criminal justice system is based on a serious error in thinking. There are actually two kinds of error involved. The first is theoretical -- why do criminals commit crimes; the second is programmatic -- how do we get them to stop doing it.

Let's start with the first: we commit the philosophical error of reification when we predicate our system of justice on the assumption that each of us houses a master controller that (within limits) is free to choose how we behave. There is no evidence, either scientific or personal, that such a controller exists.

Having committed that error, we then proceed (the second error) to erect a judicial system that punishes offenders for doing something they freely chose to do -- while paying scant attention to the real causes of their crime -- namely the genes they inherited from their parents and the culture in which they were raised.

...Let me put it this way: if our actions are ultimately caused by Circumstance, we cannot morally judge individuals for having made them happen. We can judge the appropriateness of the behavior without judging the individual as the originating cause of that behavior. From this perspective, the individual is simply the place where the offending behavior arose.

Since the offense has its roots in antecedent conditions (genes and environment), the appropriate way to change that behavior is to change the conditions that caused it, that is, through education, treatment, and the reinforcement of lawful behavior.

I heartily agree with what Breer says. It matches what other writers about the illusion of free will have said in their own books. For example, I quoted Sam Harris in this blog post: 

Few concepts have offered greater scope for human cruelty than the idea of an immortal soul that stands independent of all material influences, ranging from genes to economic systems. Within a religious framework, a belief in free will supports the notion of sin -- which seems to justify not only harsh punishment in this life but eternal punishment in the next.

As promised above, here's how Breer describes a no-self experience he had while in prison, along with some observations he made about prison life.

I recall vividly the day I first became aware that the self was gone. I was in prison, sitting down, talking to friends when this deep peace suddenly descended on me. I felt absolutely invulnerable, not because of some new-found confidence, but because there was no self left to be concerned about.

It took awhile for me to recognize the experience for what it was: all I could be sure of was the peace that had come over me, a peace deeper than any I had ever felt. The peace was so deep, in fact, that when I compared it to previous tranquil times in my life, I was aware that those earlier times were still laden with tension. In other words, I had never truly been at peace.

Later, after release, when friends asked me what prison had been like, I found it hard to answer. My attention was riveted to the present; I was happy to talk about what I could see (faces and flowers), hear (birds and traffic), and what I felt (sad for the inmates I left behind) -- but there was no longer any need to complain about injustice -- no one inside me to feel sorry for -- no self to pity.

....In the prison where I spent two years, of the 1400 inmates doing time there, no more than 300 were enrolled in a training program at any one time. The rest learned nothing -- other than how to "con" the system -- that is, avoid work, get extra food, fool the nurses, hide pornography, or steal from each other. A few did make good use of their time -- in some cases by getting their GED, in others by earning a college degree. But they were noteworthy for their rarity.

As a whole, aside from its deterrent value, time spent behind bars was a waste of life -- a boring, meaningless, sometimes frightening experience designed to punish wrongdoers without any interest in the social and psychological factors that caused their crimes in the first place.

...I feel frustrated by the refusal of the authorities to wake up to just how overwhelming a person's background can be in shaping the choices he makes as an adult. I met many inmates in prison who dropped out of school early so they could make money selling drugs -- or in some cases, by stealing cars or electronics. 

By the time they reached their 20's, they had no marketable skills -- and no realistic path for gaining them. So they remained uneducated and unemployed. The only way to survive at that point, at least in their eyes, was to engage in illegal trade -- selling or manufacturing drugs, robbing stores or assaulting and stealing from individuals.

In consequence by the time they finish their sentences they are no more capable of earning an honest living than when they entered prison. Not surprisingly, upon release they return to what they know best -- crime.

Enlightenment: the Cosmic View vs. the Local View (I go with local)

Whew. What a relief. So good to know that I was mistaken.

After reading Paul Breer's first book about the illusion of free will, The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will, I decided to dive even deeper into the Breer waters and bought his follow-up book, Beyond Self-Realization: A Non-Sectarian Path to Enlightenment. 

This second book has a different structure that I wondered about when I began reading it, but is turning out to be appealing. The book starts by saying that a local library has announced a course about -- no big surprise -- Beyond Self-Realization. 

Eight people sign up. The course is led by Richard, described as 88, tall, slender, receding white hair, steel-rimmed glasses, bears a resemblance to the author. Each chapter consists of a talk given by Richard on some subject relating to the illusion of free will and a non-sectarian path to enlightenment, and the resulting dialog between Richard and his students about that subject.

I was enjoying the book until some mentions of how the course was about "direct consciousness of our true nature -- that is, a consciousness unmediated by language" got me concerned that even though secular was in the title, maybe Breer had embraced some supernatural or religious notions after writing his first book.

Since the second book is 495 pages long, I didn't feel like reading all that and then getting to the end and having a what the fuck!? moment caused by Breer reaching a conclusion that didn't make any sense to me.

So I read one of the concluding chapters in hopes of reassuring myself. Which, I did. As you can read below, Breer holds a Local View of enlightenment rather than a Cosmic View. Since I agree with most of his Local View, I felt a sense of relief that the book wasn't going to lead into a supernatural dead end.

It just appears to lead to a conclusion about enlightenment which, while firmly within the bounds of modern neuroscience, isn't proven.

Namely, that a state of pure consciousness prior to being conscious of any internal or external entity is possible. Sam Harris, a noted atheist and neuroscientist, seems to believe in pure consciousness. I've argued on this blog that I'm skeptical about this, since consciousness always seems to have some content, something we're conscious of other than consciousness itself.

But compared to The Cosmic View, Breer's take on The Local View is hugely closer to how I see things. Have a read and see how you feel about the two views.

The Cosmic View
The majority of people who write about their enlightenment experience believe they have gained access to Reality. Pure Consciousness for them is a window into that realm of Being which constitutes the bedrock of All That Is.

It is that undifferentiated, unchanging state out of which the world of forms emerges, a state that transcends both space and time and has neither beginning nor end. As such, it precedes even the Big Bang. In Tolle's view, as you just pointed out, it is a "Presence that fills the cosmos."

Cohen is more precise: "Consciousness in this primordial state is the 'I' of the entire universe -- the subjectivity or interiority of everything that exists." Both are saying that the real you (the I AM of Pure Consciousness) is the "mother" (to borrow Lao Tzu's term) of every form we perceive -- every blade of grass, star, stone, or trash can.

Although the language varies according to the religious context in which it appears, we find similar statements among the Gnostics of Jesus's time, the medieval Christian mystics, the Sufi's of Islam and the Kabalists of Judaism. Even Zen Buddhists (known for their reluctance to theorize) subscribe to a similar view. 

...What these schools of thought have in common is a belief that in enlightenment we gain access to an indefinable THAT which constitutes the very foundation of reality. It is this unformed and undifferentiated THAT (read Pure Consciousness) which precedes the formation of the universe and everything in it. When we awaken from our ego-saturated dreams, we discover THAT is who we really are.

...We can agree when he [Deepak Chopra] says that "You are the light of awareness that gives rise to the experience of the universe." -- but must disagree when he concludes that consciousness and the universe are equivalent. When he makes that claim, he's conflating two different things -- as if he were arguing that the sensation of eating an apple is no different from the apple itself. 

...The way individuals have traditionally interpreted their personal enlightenment has a lot in common with the two cases (the geocentric theory and free-will) just described. I refer first to the fact that in both cases what appears to be true turns out on closer examination to be illusory; like those two previous beliefs, the belief that we are the universe or that in our role as the Absolute we created the material world out of nothing is unsupported by either common sense or logic.

...To see what I mean, let's take a look at an alternative interpretation of the enlightenment experience. 

The Local View
There is a minority of writers, even within Buddhism, who offer a more modest interpretation of what enlightenment means (the Local as opposed to the Cosmic view). They argue that in enlightenment we gain access not to an undifferentiated realm that pervades everything in the universe, but to one that exists solely within the consciousness of the individual observer.

They're saying, in other words, that enlightenment resides in the individual rather than the cosmos. The experience of Oneness may appear to have a universal character, but again this is deceiving. It only appears to exist in all things seen or heard (every stone, every blade of grass, etc.), when it actually resides in the brain of the perceiving individual -- not as awareness of discrete objects but as Consciousness Itself as it illuminates those objects from within. 

If all things appear to participate in a single Whole, it is because they are perceived through the lens of a Consciousness free of any differentiation. It follows, then, that the felt experience of Oneness originates in the individual observer, not in the objects being observed.

...The difference between the two interpretations is significant. While the first interprets the Pure Consciousness experience as a discovery of universal Reality, the second argues that it is a discovery not of Reality but of that which exists in the individual -- namely Consciousness before it becomes aware of something.

While the Local View says nothing about Reality, it says something important about individual consciousness. It says that embedded in our perception of things is a state of Awareness that is unlike anything we experience while orienting to our environment.

In contrast to the world of everyday life -- the world of sensations, objects, and thoughts which we grasp with our minds and five senses -- this inner world presents itself as an invisible Presence that has no form, no boundaries, never changes, and is neither spatially nor temporally divided, yet arises in a specific place -- the brain.

...In the Cosmic View enlightenment implies the discovery of THAT out of which the material world of things has emerged. In other words, it precedes the creation of matter -- e.g., of stars, moons, and planets. So, even if all material objects were destroyed, it would continue to Be.

Not so according to the Local View which argues that the experience of enlightenment depends on having a physical brain. If that brain, along with all other material things, were to be destroyed, enlightenment would be impossible.

"Losers rule" helps explain both the Old and NewTestaments

Being an atheist, it's difficult for me to decide which is the weirdest and most unbelievable religion, because they're all weird and unbelievable.

Since I don't know a lot about Judaism, I was drawn to a piece by Adam Gopnik in the August 28, 2023 issue of The New Yorker, How the Authors of the Bible Spun Triumph from Defeat. Based on a review of a book by Jacob Wright, "Why the Bible Began," the article aided my understanding of what makes Judaism so strange.

Gopnik says that the Jews were notable losers.

The Jews were the great sufferers of the ancient world—persecuted, exiled, catastrophically defeated—and yet the tale of their special selection, and of the demiurge who, from an unbeliever’s point of view, reneged on every promise and failed them at every turn, is the most admired, influential, and permanent of all written texts. Wright’s purpose is to explain, in a new way, how and why this happened.

The easiest explanation is that it happened this way because that’s the way God wanted it to happen. But this does not lessen the need to say how it happened.

If the primary cause of the Old Testament's triumph -- which I obviously don't believe -- is viewed as the will of God, Wright argues that the secondary cause is our love of losers.

The “secondary cause” for the Bible’s triumph, in Wright’s view, can be put simply: losers rule. More people remember the record-losing ’62 Mets than the pennant-winning ’62 Yankees. Division and defeat, Wright explains, made the Bible memorable.

Successive expulsions and exiles forced the Jewish poets and prophets, like Red Sox fans of yore, to imagine defeat as a virtue, dispossession as a gift, failure today as a promise of victory tomorrow. Defeat usually compelled other ancient peoples, as it does us, to invent rationalizations for what happened. (Yes, we failed to pacify Afghanistan, but nobody could have done so.)

In the face of regular defeat, however, the Jewish scribes had to ask whether defeat wasn’t God’s will in the first place, and so opened mankind unto a new contemplative possibility: that spiritual success and failure were not to be judged on worldly terms. Nice guys, or, anyway, pious guys, finish last and should be proud of their position.

Since Jesus was a Jew, we can see this principle continuing on into the New Testament. 

How much losing is there, really, in Christianity? At first glance, the Christian story appears to reverse the polarities and make a tale of universal triumph out of the old Jewish stories of particular defeat. But is this really so?

Debates still rage over whether the Jewish figure of the “suffering servant” presaged the Christian example. Whatever scholars conclude, though, the force of the Christian example surely lies in the extremity of the deity’s abasement, tortured to death in the most humiliatingly imaginable way and left to be buried as a criminal.

The Christian fable potently compresses the Jewish stories of suffering into a single story, unfolding over a single year. Indeed, doesn’t the emotional appeal of Christianity rest on its very Jewish ritualization of extreme suffering and humiliating defeat as a prelude to divine favor?

Consider the number of images of Crucifixion (Jesus dying) in Italian churches as opposed to those of the ascension (Christ rising). Christian art centers on a moment of anguish and defeat, and this is in essence a Jewish idea.

Donald Trump isn't at all religious. He just uses religion for his own selfish and authoritarian ends. One way he does this is by appropriating the Judeo-Christian notion of noble suffering. The more political and legal trouble he gets into, the more he hopes fundamentalists will view him as a martyr.

Before and after Donald Trump’s historic indictment and arraignment, countless MAGA Republican provocateurs have been noting the Holy Week timing and blasphemously comparing Trump to Jesus.

“As Christ was crucified, and then rose again on the 3rd day, so too will Donald Trump,” tweeted one right-wing lawyer known for representing Jan. 6 insurrectionists. Other influencers making the comparison include Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, TPUSA Faith founder Charlie Kirk, and even Trump’s own attorney. Trump, himself, framed his arrest as an attack on Christians in an “emergency prayer call” on Tuesday, April 4, with televangelist and longtime aide Paula White-Cain, attorney Rudy Giuliani, and MAGA worship leader Sean Feucht.

Well, you've got to give Judaism, Christianity, and yes, Donald Trump, credit for turning weakness into strength, defeat into victory, humiliation into triumph. I don't consider that either of these religions, and certainly not Trump, deserve to be embraced for those reasons.

But as a marketing ploy, hey, it does seem that "losers rule" is effective. Most of us like a comeback story of someone who overcame difficult obstacles more than a tale of a person whose path to success had no detours or roadblocks.

Free will is an illusion we're better off without

Well, at long last I've finished Paul Breer's book, The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will, which I've been writing about recently. 

I enjoyed it a lot. But then, I'm a big fan of the notion that free will is an illusion that we'd be better off not embracing. In the post I'll explain in my own words some of what struck me most strongly in the book. 

Spontaneity. Breer opened my eyes to a fact that other writers on free will don't emphasize much. If we look upon our thoughts, emotions, and actions as not being produced by our own unfettered free will, the alternative is to recognize that the whole universe, really, has generated the causes and effects which result in our doing or experiencing something.

That's beautiful. It substitutes the loneliness of the isolated free-willing self with the companionship of everything in the natural world, since that world is acting through the person that is us -- as contrasted with the illusion of a non-material soul or self that somehow is part of our being and does the deciding for our mind and body.

This is where Breer's spontaneity in his title comes from. There's no limit to the forces acting upon us. Everything in the cosmos is potentially at our disposal, forming who we are, what we do, and what we experience. Things happen in our life, but there's no one inside our head controlling the happenings. They spring up unbidden, often surprising us (sometimes in pleasant ways, sometimes in unpleasant ways).

Sense of free will remains. However, for most of us, the generally pleasing sense that we are freely willing agents will stay as it is. Or at least, much as it is. Sure, that sense may be diminished by contemplating the illusion of free will through books, videos, blog posts, meditation, and other means.

I agree with Breer, though, that evolution has instilled a sense of free will in us for good reasons (not that evolution uses reason), and that the culture in which we live typically fosters a sense of free will through explicit and implicit means. For example, the legal system in most countries assumes that a criminal of sound mind and body would have been able to not commit a crime if he or she had wanted to.

Free will seems so real because it's an obvious truism that we can only be conscious of conscious contents of consciousness.

Since neuroscience knows that unconscious influences drive most, if not all, of our thoughts, emotions, and actions, those deterministic factors will remain a mystery to us. So this produces a sense of freedom in us, whereas actually what's going on is that we're clueless about why we do or feel something -- even though we love to tell stories to ourselves and others about the motivation for our actions.

Empty rowboat. There's a story that I believe originated in Taoism via Chuang Tzu about a man in a rowboat on a foggy lake.

There is a Zen story about a man who repaints his boat. Once it’s done, he’s so pleased with how it looks that he decides to take it out on the lake, even though it’s a foggy day. As he steers through the fog, another boat slams into his, damaging the new paint job.

The man is furious. Why the hell didn’t the person in the other boat pay attention and watch where he was going? The man turns to yell at the person in the other boat, and finds that there is no other person. It’s just an empty boat, drifting on the lake.

If a man is crossing the river and an empty boat collides with his skiff, even though he is a bad-tempered man he will not become very angry. But if he sees a man in the other boat he will scream and shout and curse at the man to steer clear. If you can empty your own boat crossing the river of the world, no one will oppose you, no one will seek to harm you. Thus is the perfect man – his boat is empty. ~ Chuang-Tzu

I don't think Chuang Tzu is correct about no one opposing or seeking to harm a person with an empty boat, meaning, I assume, a realization that they lack a self or soul capable of free will. However, I like the notion that the person who got angry at a boat, before realizing that no one was controlling the boat, is just as empty of control as the boat drifting without anyone in it.

Happening here. Breer talks quite a bit in his book about how to make no-free-will and a lack of agency a lived experience rather than just an intellectual understanding. Of course, an intellectual understanding is part of our lived experience, so it's important in its own right.

Breer believes, with good reason, that language plays a key role in how both our sense of self and of having free will is created and maintained. After all, in English we say things like "I am writing this blog post," which obviously assumes that somebody referred to as "I" is doing something called "writing."

In other words, a subject -- me -- is considered to be different from the activity I'm engaging in, writing a blog post. So Breer recommends an alternative: "Writing a blog post is happening here," where here refers to the person, the body/mind, known as Brian Hines. 

Doing that all the time would be absurd. My brief conversations with a grocery store clerk wouldn't go so smoothly if, after they ask, "How is your day going?," I said "A fine day is happening here." I'd rather simply say "Fine," or "I'm doing well, how about you?"

It seems to me that the mindfulness exercise of labeling fits well here. If I find myself getting upset at something, a frequent occurrence when I watch a news program about politics, rather than telling myself "I'm irritated," I prefer to mentally say "Irritation" or "Irritation here." 

That serves to reduce my sense of selfhood and free will somewhat. But I have no interest in giving up the use of "I" in ordinary conversation or writing.

Is romantic love a product of Western culture?

I wasn't expecting to find the "Love and Sexuality" chapter in Paul Breer's book, The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will, to be very interesting. After all, he'd already made his arguments for why free will is an illusion, along with describing the benefits of giving up the illusion.

But his observations about how romantic love is largely a product of Western culture, and is at odds with Eastern philosophy, were thought-provoking. I'm not sure what to make of them, which is why the title of this blog post ends with a question mark.

What do you think? Here's excerpts from the chapter pertaining to this issue. Breer is a retired sociologist, so his views carry some academic weight.

Most of us growing up in a Western culture have either known romantic love directly or participated in the experience vicariously through literature and film. While being in [romantic] love tends to be a relatively brief experience, counted more often in months than years, our fascination with it rarely ceases altogether, even in old age.

It comes as something of a shock, therefore, to learn that the non-Western world of Asians, Indians, Africans, Polynesians, and Eskimos knows little of romantic love. A phenomenon we have always thought of as a human experience is limited primarily to Western and, to a lesser degree, Near Eastern culture.

Strange as it may seem to someone nurtured on Romeo and Juliet, Gone with the Wind, and Love Story, it appears that, before we can fall in love, we must be educated to the concept of romantic love... According to Denis de Rougemont, at the heart of Tristan's and Iseult's passion is a surrendering of self, not to the other, but to the experience of love itself.

...That which gives romantic love its intense, unreal, soaring quality is the very thing that dooms it to non-fulfillment. The lovers are not in love with each other but with love itself. The other person is simply an excuse for being in love, the passion being "tasted and savoured for its own sake, in a kind of indifference to its living and external object."

...As free agents we are not only separate from everyone else physically; we are separate spiritually, separate as souls, separate as centers of will and moral responsibility. The more highly a culture values this spiritual separateness, the greater will be the pain of differentiation and, thus, the greater the appeal of a kind of love that promises to overcome all separation through a merging of selves.

According to this alternative hypothesis, the widespread appeal of romantic love in Western culture draws much of its power from our view of ourselves as autonomous agents. Easterners, many of whom are inclined to look upon romance with disdain, are more apt to find their basic identity in the Tao, the Buddha-nature, the Brahman, or whatever it is that transcends subject and object, the ultimately nameless One.

They view free will and moral responsibility as expedient illusions, necessary for survival in the samsaric world, but meaningless in the nirvanic world of no-form. For the un-Westernized Easterner, all autonomy is ultimately illusory. The world is One and all seemingly separate objects and selves participate in that Oneness. If differentiation appears painful, it is because we do not yet see beyond the illusion of form.

Our Western belief that individual souls remain separate throughout eternity, in heaven as well as on earth, creates a sense of personal isolation unknown elsewhere in the world. This isolation heightens the appeal of returning to a less differentiated state through a surrender of the agent/self to passion. 

As Rougemont points out, romantic love is not a surrender of the self to another person, but to love itself. Surrendering to another person may ease the burden of individual responsibility, but it does not erase the boundaries of the agent/I. Romantic love goes further. By shutting out everyone else, it reduces the world to "me and thee" and then holds out the promise of further dissolution into oneness.

Interesting, though not completely convincing. Breer is saying that romantic love functions as a Western  alternative to Eastern oneness. Rather than merging with a cosmic entity, the Western lover seeks to merge with a physical beloved.

Well, maybe. Having been married for 33 years, I remember when my wife and I were very much into romantic love. But as Breer says, that sort of highly passionate love can't last for long. Now Laurel and I are into plain love, which is plenty good enough for us.

I've never thought that when we first met and were experiencing the passion of romantic love, this was a substitute for merging into Oneness. But who knows? Maybe that's what we were doing, unconsciously.

If you're an Easterner who reads this post, leave a comment about whether you agree that romantic love plays a smaller role in India, China, Japan, and other Asian countries. I've heard that this is true, which explains the historical popularity of arranged marriages, but am not sure it is true.