Church of the Churchless

I wish "evil" could be banished from political discourse

Here in the United States, our politicians love to spout venomous talk about evildoers, the necessity to combat evil, and how some conflict is a battle between good and evil.

Prime Minister Netanyahu and his allies have been doing the same thing in Israel after Hamas terrorists attacked that country on October 7. A Daily Mail story says:

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to 'completely eliminate' Hamas on Saturday night as he revealed IDF forces have been fighting within the Gaza Strip to get rid of 'evil' and 'bring back' hostages.

He told Israeli citizens that the ongoing ground operation is the second phase of the war against Hamas, which he said would see Israeli 'good' triumph over 'evil'.

I don't like that word, evil. When combined with good, it wrongly portrays people, and reality, as being divided into two mutually incompatible camps. That sort of dualism is not only inaccurate, it is dangerous.

Calling people evil dehumanizes them. It reduces complex human beings to a single abstraction, since as soon as we try to come to grips with what "evil" really means, that attempt is doomed to result in failure.

There's no need for the word. Let's use Hamas as an example. 

Hamas terrorists committed horrible atrocities. They killed innocent men, women, and children. That's an accurate way of describing Hamas, though naturally additional details could be given about what they did.

So what's the point in calling Hamas evil? Well, the point is to draw a sharp dividing line between Evil Hamas and Good Israel, just as politicians in the United States did after 9/11 with talk of Evil Al Qaeda and Good America. 

That way atrocities committed by the good guys can be excused as being a necessary side effect of the war against evil. Today Manjit, a commenter on this blog, shared a talk by the UNICEF Executive Director on the humanitarian situation in Gaza. An excerpt:

After little more than three weeks, the devastating tally is quickly adding up, with rampant grave violations being committed against children. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, more than 8,300 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, including over 3,400 children, with over 6,300 children injured. This means that more than 420 children are being killed or injured in Gaza every day – a number which should shake each of us to our core. 

Of course, the violence being perpetrated against children extends beyond the Gaza Strip. In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, at least 37 children have reportedly been killed. And of course more than 30 Israeli children have reportedly been killed, while at least 20 remain hostage in the Gaza Strip – their fates unknown. 

Thousands of Palestinian children have been killed by Israel in retaliation for the killing and hostage taking of about  50 Israeli children. So tell me: where is the firm line between good and evil here? Isn't it true that atrocities are being committed by both sides in the Hamas-Israel conflict?

Sure, we can debate endlessly over who is more good and who more evil. But I think a better approach is to cease using terms like "good" and "evil" and simply talk about the specifics of any given situation.

If it's wrong for Hamas to kill Israeli children, then it's wrong for Israel to kill Palestinian children. Each side can justify the wrongness by saying that the killing was necessary to achieve a desirable end, but that doesn't make killing children the right thing to do.

An Israeli historian, Gil Troy, had an opinion piece published in the Jerusalem Post back in August 2023. Here's an excerpt from "Israeli, American politics are theological good-versus-evil battles."

Clearly, epidemics of horrific leadership and atrocious behavior haunt two of the world’s greatest democracies. This rampage of recklessness left and right reflects three big, broad, bad trends.

First, all-enveloping partisanship made even a confusing, scientific dispute about mask-wearing during COVID, a partisan issue in America – and an identity-signifier. That zealousness reflects the spreading partisan blindness which has MAGA voters ignoring Trump’s alleged crimes and responsible Democrats ignoring Biden’s decline. 

Second, the all-or-nothingness surrounding most controversies has made politics theological, turning debates into good-versus-evil, rather than the better-of-two-evils whereby choices made are properly considered and balanced.

Such fanaticism riles Israelis daily with Channel 14’s pro-Bibi propagandizing as he destroys his legacy piece-by-piece, paralleled by a supposedly pro-democracy movement setting horrific precedents in unpatriotic protests that their opponents will mimic next time.

Finally, the pervasive, invasive, nature of social media freezes, weaponizes, and catastrophizes once-manageable differences of opinion into do-or-die fights between Team Good and Team Evil. 

Renunciative versus life-affirming types of meditation

I'm an easy sell when it comes to books about meditation. Especially when they have a title like Opening Awareness: A Guide to Finding Vividness in Spacious Clarity. 

Hey, give me some of that vividness, especially if it's found in spacious clarity, leaving aside the minor problem that I had no idea what those lofty words meant. So I sent $15 off to Amazon.

(When I just checked out the group that published the book, Evolving Ground, I noticed that portions of this little book are available online, but not the whole thing.) 

The basic meditation approach presented in the book is what I think of as open awareness. Not focusing or concentrating on anything specific, just being aware of thoughts, emotions, perceptions, breathing, whatever, without seizing on any of these contents of consciousness. 

Here's a description of the approach in the online version of the book.

The method is simple: sit and remain uninvolved with whatever arises.

Ordinarily, we remain involved with experience. For example, an itching sensation arises on the skin and we scratch it. We tend to cognitively elaborate what is occurring, with ideas, thought-stories, imagination, even the focusing of attention. Remaining uninvolved is to experience whatever is happening without engaging, elaborating, or acting in response.

Remaining uninvolved is not ignoring.

Imagine lying in a tent, hearing the sounds of the night outside. They take place in your field of experience: you are neither straining to hear them nor actively shutting them out. So long as you remain aware of experience as it arises, potential for involvement is available, even while it is suspended. While lying in your tent, if you heard an animal in distress, you could decide to become involved and help it. By contrast, ignoring experience eventually shuts it out of awareness completely, until there is no potential for involvement.

Without involvement, conceptual elaboration of experience tends to subside. As elaboration subsides and awareness remains, immediate, unelaborated experience becomes more apparent. This unelaborated awareness is sometimes called “direct experience” or “as it is.”

Remain uninvolved … with what? 

With anything, with everything.

Well, this makes sense. Sort of. Because the printed version of the book also says:

This may seem paradoxical at first. The overall aim of the path is passionate engagement with the fullness of life. That is the opposite of uninvolvement. However, opening awareness leads to spacious clarity, within which we perceive all of life with new, more vivid accuracy. 

We can find that spacious clarity in every other activity. Opening awareness trains us, through remaining temporarily uninvolved during practice sessions, to find clarity even when fully involved.

I've got some problems with this, because I've come to view meditation and everyday life as being pretty much the same thing, since mindfulness is my current way of meditating and I aspire to mindfulness during the rest of my day.

However, otherwise I'm enjoying the book. It takes a relaxed approach to meditation.

Whatever works for you is the basic advice. And in a section called "Scaffolding practices," familiar methods like remaining aware of the breath, or counting breaths, are recommended as adjuncts to the sit and remain uninvolved approach.

What I definitely resonated with in an early section was a discussion of two basic views of what meditation is all about: renunciative and life-affirming. For about 35 years I was a member of an India-based organization headed up by a guru whose teachings were definitely in the renunciative camp.

The goal was to leave this physical world behind and find a better one in higher realms of reality. To do that, it was necessary to beware of the Five Deadly Foes, lust, anger, greed, attachment, egotism. So really serious stuff. Vows were taken of no sex outside of marriage, no use of alcohol or recreational drugs, no meat, fish, or eggs. 

Nothing wrong with all that if that's what you want in life. But I observed many instances of fellow initiates becoming rigid, moralistic, judgmental, holier-than-thou, and generally not pleasant to be around. Stifle normal urges and emotions and you've got a textbook renunciative theology.

Here's what the book says on this subject.

A meditation system's view profoundly shapes its goals, and so its path, and so then its methods. "View" is a term for an overarching collection of assumptions about how the world is and what meditation is for.

Contemporary society has inherited many different, sometimes incompatible views from multiple eras and cultures. Ancient views may remain implicit in a meditation system, informing its attitudes and goals. Making views explicit draws attention to potential internal contradictions. It may reveal unexpected ways a path is incompatible with your own views and purposes.

In Evolving Ground we draw attention to two broad categories: renunciative views and life-affirming views.

Many religious systems are renunciative: they see everyday life as inherently impure, and so to be abandoned. Most meditation methods originally evolved for renunciative purposes in renunciative settings.

They were designed to help you sever human relationships, in combination with a life of celibacy and abstinence in a monastery. Meditation was meant to enable a metaphysical escape from a cycle of suffering and rebirth by withdrawing from all connection with the defiled and defiling world.

The aim was enlightenment: a state of eternal perfection, free from the emotional turbulence of ordinary life.

Opening awareness is not designed for cloistered, monastic life. It is accompanied by a life-affirming view, and is designed to help you experience aliveness and connection in relationships.

A life-affirming view regards emotions and self, suffering and enjoyment, relationship and involvement in practical affairs as natural and pervasive aspects of human experience. Opening awareness practice prepares you for spacious involvement with all life's circumstances -- work, family, and society. This spacious involvement is the basis for enjoyable, useful activity in the world.

The renunciative view accompanying a meditation method may sometimes go unnoticed. How do you know when a worldview is implicitly renunciative? If emotions, self, and suffering are seen as inherently problematic obstacles, and it aims to overcome them with meditation, that's a sign of a renunciative view.

Most widely-available meditation methods, ancient religious ones and modern secular ones, were devised to subdue emotions by detaching from them altogether. "Non-attachment" and "letting go" commonly describe such renunciative methods. The purpose may be to "calm the mind."

"It wasn't until I realized how lonely and frustrating it was for my wife being married to the equanimous, distant version of Jared that I started to wonder if there was a different way to approach my meditation practice." -- Jared James, Evolving Ground cofounder

By contrast with renunciative methods, opening awareness clarifies the mind so that the full range of physical and emotional experience is available without conceptual elaboration. With a life-affirming attitude any experience you encounter is welcome.

Spacious clarity includes everything that arises in experience, without ignoring, rejecting, or cutting it off. No sound is distracting, no thought is bad, no experience is wrong. Emotions and sensations come and go in awareness. Disturbing thought-stories and images gradually dissipate when they have space to do their own thing.

As your mind clears while maintaining awareness of everything you perceive, you feel more connected with the world, not less. In this experience of vivid connection, everything seems immediate and fresh.

Developing this friendly attitude towards everything that arises in your sitting practice will have positive repercussions in your relationships. Although opening awareness is most often a solitary practice, its aim is relational transformation, and beyond that social transformation.

This is a path of celebration, of down-to-earth realism, of uplifting courage, of gentle precision, and of open hearts.

Chaos theory is cool, but it can't save free will

As I make my way through Robert Sapolsky's lengthy (400 pages of text) book about the non-existence of free will, Determined, I become more and more impressed with both Sapolsky and what he has wrought.

He's a terrific writer and thinker. His talent is reflected in the fact that he's a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant." And his scientific expertise is evident by the approach he takes in Determined. 

Usually non-fiction authors are content to make a strong case for their subject. Sapolsky does that in arguing that free will is an illusion. But he goes beyond in identifying the arguments that free will believers make and then systematically dismantling those objections to his no-free-will thesis.

I'm into that section of his book now. After a chapter called "A Primer on Chaos," he moved into "Is your Free Will Chaotic?" 

Often the only thing people know about chaos theory is the well-known butterfly effect. You know, a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil and eventually that leads to a tornado in Texas. Chaotic systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions.

A MIT meteorologist, Edward Lorenz, discovered this when he found that when the values of variables in a weather model were rounded off to fewer digits, as in 0.506 instead of 0.506127, that made a big difference.

Lorenz finally spotted that slight rounding error introduced after lunch and realized that this made the system unpredictable, nonlinear, and non-additive... When you have a nonlinear system, tiny differences in a starting state from one time to the next can cause them to diverge from each other enormously, even exponentially, something since termed "sensitive dependence on initial conditions."

In his next chapter, Sapolsky says:

Part of the neglect [of Lorenz's 1963 paper] reflected the fact that chaos theory is a horrible name, insofar as it is about the opposite of nihilistic chaos and is instead about the patterns of structure hidden in seeming chaos.

The more fundamental reason for chaoticism getting off to a slow start was that if you have a reductive mindset, unsolvable, nonlinear interactions among a large number of variable is a total pain to study. Thus most researchers tried to study complicated things by limiting the number of variables considered so that things remained tame and tractable.

And this guarantees the incorrect conclusion that the world is mostly about linear, additive predictability and nonlinear chaoticism was a weird anomaly that could mostly be ignored.

Until it couldn't be anymore, as it became clear that chaoticism lurked behind the most interesting complicated things. A cell, a brain, a person, a society, was more like the chaoticism of a cloud than the reductionism of a watch.

...The growing interest in chaos theory generated the sound of a zillion butterfly wings flapping. Given that, it was inevitable that various thinkers began to proclaim that the unpredictable, chaotic cloud-ness of human behavior is where free will runs free. Hopefully the material already covered, showing what chaoticism is and isn't, will help show how this cannot be.

Sapolsky then describes two forms of the "giddy conclusion that chaoticism proves free will." Here's some key passages in Wrong Conclusion #1: The Freely Choosing Cloud.

But now to the critical mistake running through all this: determinism and predictability are very different things. Even if chaoticism is unpredictable, it is still deterministic. The difference can be framed a lot of ways.

One is that determinism allows you to explain why something happened, whereas predictability allows you to say what happens next. Another way is the woolly-haired contrast between ontology and epistemology; the former is about what is going on, an issue of determinism, while the latter is about what is knowable, an issue of predictability.

...We do something, carry out a behavior, and we feel like we've chosen, that there is a Me inside separate from all those neurons, that agency and volition dwell there. Our intuitions scream this, because we don't know about, can't imagine, the subterranean forces of our biological history that brought it about.

It is a huge challenge to overcome those intuitions when you still have to wait for science to be able to predict that behavior precisely. But the temptation to equate chaoticism with free will shows just how much harder it is to overcome those intuitions when science will never be able to predict precisely the outcomes of a deterministic system.

Sapolsky then moves to Wrong Conclusion #2: A Causeless Fire.

Go back to the figure at the top of page 141 with its demonstration with rule 22 that two different starting states can turn into the identical pattern and thus, it is not possible to know which of those two was the actual source.

This is the phenomenon of convergence. It's a term frequently used in evolutionary biology. In this instance, it's not so much that you can't tell which of two different possible ancestors a particular species arose from (e.g, "Was the ancestor of elephants three-legged or five-legged? Who can tell?"). 

It's more when two very different sorts of species have converged on the same solution to the same sort of selective challenge. Among analytical philosophers, the phenomenon is termed overdetermination -- when two different pathways could each separately determine the progression to the same outcome.

As one example of this, Sapolsky cites a fire starting in building A thanks to negligence. A separate unrelated nearby negligence led to a fire starting in building B. The two fires merge and converge, burning down building C between them. The owner of building C sues the other two owners, but each argues that if my fire hadn't happened, building C would still have burned down.

As another example, he cites a group of soldiers comprising a firing squad assigned to kill someone. A blank bullet is given to one of the soldiers at random, so it is impossible to tell who wasn't actually a killer. Sapolsky then says:

So you can't do radical eliminative reductionism and decide what single thing caused the fire, which button presser delivered the poison, or what prior state gave rise to a particular chaotic pattern. But that doesn't mean that the fire wasn't actually caused by anything, that no one shot the bullet-riddled prisoner, or that the chaotic state just popped up out of nowhere. Ruling out radical eliminative reductionism doesn't prove indeterminism. 

...Where have we gotten at this point? The crushing of knee-jerk reductionism, the demonstration that chaoticism shows just the opposite of chaos, the fact that there's less randomness than often assumed and, instead, unexpected structure and determinism -- all of this is wonderful.

Ditto for butterfly wings, the generation of patterns on sea shells, and Will Darling. But to get from there to free will required that you mistake a failure of reductionism that makes it impossible to precisely describe the past or predict the future as proof of indeterminism.

In the face of complicated things, our intuitions beg us to fill up what we don't understand, even can never understand, with mistaken attributions.

Nature's seamlessness leaves no room for free will

One of the joys for me of maintaining this blog in good working order is also one of the frustrations.

I enjoy seeing what people think of my posts via the comments they leave on them. But frequently I'll be amazed at how a fairly simple idea, which I view as essentially unarguable, is twisted into complex knots by commenters who are so eager to maintain a belief, they ignore the facts I've presented.

Or, if the facts are recognized, they are shape-shifted into something other than what they actually are.

Now, I readily admit that I'm guilty at times of doing the same thing. All of us can become so attached to our personal perception of reality we'll bend over backwards, as well as forwards and sideways, to avoid being confronted with a viewpoint that challenges that perception.

Understand: I'm not calling for gullibility here. Or accepting a claim without good reason.

But when a good reason has been presented, and commenters on one of my posts sidestep that reason without confronting it head on, then I get frustrated at the lack of productive dialoging on this blog. Which obviously pertains to communications on the entire Internet. 

Communicating via episodic messages is much more difficult than communicating face-to-face, which is hard enough.

But hope springs eternal, as the saying goes.

So here's another try at convincing some commenters that the determinism espoused by Robert Sapolsky in the Determinism book he wrote about the illusion of free will deserves to be taken seriously, not discounted through wordplay that ignores the scientific reality of what supports Sapolsky's book.

In my previous post, I included a quote from his "Where Does Intent Come From?" chapter that included the word seamlessness, which I've boldfaced.

Why did that moment just occur? "Because of what came before it." Then why did that moment just occur? "Because of what came before that," forever isn't absurd and is, instead, how the universe works. The absurdity amid this seamlessness is to think that we have free will and that it exists because at some point, the state of the world (or of the frontal cortex or neuron or molecule of serotonin...) that "came before that" happened out of thin air.

In order to prove there's free will, you have to show that some behavior just happened out of thin air in the sense of considering all these biological precursors. It may be possible to sidestep that with some subtle philosophical arguments, but you can't with anything known to science.

There's Sapolsky's challenge.

In his book he presents a vast amount of biological, psychological, sociological, anthropological, and neuroscientific research demonstrating how the human mind, and the behaviors emanating from those minds, are determined by chains of causes and effects.

If you disagree with Sapolsky, then you need to show, as he says, how some state of the world -- in this case the world of the human mind/behavior -- can happen out of thin air. Meaning, without a cause.

I see some commenters arguing that through meditation or other means of fostering greater self-awareness, people can become free of prior influences. Well, no, all that's happened is that other influences now are operating on the person's mind. 

I also see some commenters arguing that by carefully reasoning through some problem, an action can be taken that, though perhaps not worthy of being termed free will, is an act of agency. (Which is just a synonym for free will, in truth.) Well, no, all that's happened is that careful reasoning has become one of the deterministic causes of the action.

The problem is that pesky word, seamlessness. We humans love to imagine seams in the natural world. Miracles. God. Angels. The supernatural. Prophets. Mystical visions. ESP. Magic. And so on. And so on.

Even though there is no demonstrable evidence for any of these seams in the fabric of the natural world (maybe a zipper is a better image), for various reasons we love to conjure up realms that are free of the laws and constraints that govern our universe.

One of those realms is free will. It just feels so right, so correct, so true, that the self we envision residing inside our head can choose to do things, and to feel things, and to perceive things, that are beyond the determinism applying to everything else in the world.

That sensation of being someone special is intoxicating. Animals, plants, galaxies, molecules, all that other stuff is bound by natural laws, but we, me, I'm beyond this stuff, for I am free to will whatever I want.

Problem is, we aren't special. Not in reality. Just in our own minds. That's what Sapolsky means by seamlessness. The natural world contains no gaps, crevices, or openings where anything other than determinism (and quantum randomness) holds sway.

Again, if you don't agree, refute this contention by providing solid evidence of a seam.

I'll end with a quotation from the chapter in Sapolsky's book, "Willing Willpower: The Myth of Grit," that I finished reading this morning. Guess what (you have three guesses and the first two don't count) word I'm going to boldface.

We're pretty good at recognizing that we have no control over the attributes that life has gifted or cursed us with. But what we do with those attributes at right/wrong crossroads powerfully, toxically invites us to conclude, with the strongest of intuitions, that we are seeing free will in action.

But the reality is that whether you display admirable gumption, squander opportunity in a murk of self-indulgence, majestically stare down temptation or belly flop into it, these are all the outcome of the functioning of the PFC [prefrontal cortex] and the brain regions it connects to.

And that PFC functioning is the outcome of the second before, minutes before, millennia before. The same punch  line as in the previous chapter concerning the entire brain. And invoking the same critical word -- seamless. 

As we've seen, talk about the evolution of the PFC, and you're also talking about the genes that evolved, the proteins they code for in the brain, and how childhood altered the regulation of those genes and proteins.

A seamless arc of influences bringing your PFC to this moment, without a crevice for free will to lodge in.

OK, a final end, because this thought just came to mind. It strikes me as strange that some readers of this blog can be powerfully attracted to Oneness, a unity that underlies apparent differences, yet strongly object to the oneness espoused by Sapolsky where the universe is a seamless web of causes and effects that binds everything together into unity.

More on the illusion of free will, from Robert Sapolsky and me

I'm continuing to enjoy Robert Sapolsky's book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, which I first wrote about a few days ago. The book is getting a lot of publicity, way more than any other book on this subject so far as I can tell. 

Before I share what I said about the illusion of free will on my HinesSight blog yesterday, here's more from Sapolsky -- quotes from the end of his chapter "Where Does Intent Come From?"

In the first chapter, I wrote about what is needed to prove free will, and this chapter has added details to that demand: show me that the thing a neuron just did in someone's brain was unaffected by any of these preceding factors -- by the goings-on in the eighty billion neurons surrounding it, by any of the infinite number of combinations of hormone levels percolated that morning, by any of the countless types of childhoods and fetal environments were experienced, by any of the two to the four millionth power different genomes that neuron contains, multiplied by the nearly as large range of epigenetic orchestrations possible. Et cetera. All out of your control.

...Why did that moment just occur? "Because of what came before it." Then why did that moment just occur? "Because of what came before that," forever isn't absurd and is, instead, how the universe works. The absurdity amid this seamlessness is to think that we have free will and that it exists because at some point, the state of the world (or of the frontal cortex or neuron or molecule of serotonin...) that "came before that" happened out of thin air.

In order to prove there's free will, you have to show that some behavior just happened out of thin air in the sense of considering all these biological precursors. It may be possible to sidestep that with some subtle philosophical arguments, but you can't with anything known to science.

And here's what I said in my HinesSight post yesterday, I don't believe in free will. Here's why. I left out a quotation from Sapolsky's book that I included in my first post about it.

Today the monthly Salon discussion group that my wife and I are part of spent quite a bit of time talking about free will.

This is one of my favorite subjects, for after pondering quite a few books about free will, or the lack thereof, I'm highly confident that free will is an illusion.

I can't recall exactly how our group started conversing about it, but for sure I spurred our conversation by saying that I've started reading Robert M. Sapolsky's terrific book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will.

To give you a feel for his general view of free will, here's an eight-minute interview featuring Sapolsky, a Stanford University professor of biology, of neurology and neurological sciences, and of neurosurgery.

I was worried that my passion for this subject wouldn't be shared by other members of the discussion group. I was wrong. We had a really interesting discussion of free will in which some people agreed with me that we don't possess it, and others presented reasons why they think we do.

Since I'm writing this blog post, not them, I'm going to focus on briefly relating some of my arguments for why free will doesn't exist. These aren't original, obviously. They flow from the books I've read by people arguing that free will is an illusion.

(1) Humans are part of the natural world. We are animals. Animals with powerful brains, to be sure, but animals. If a grizzly bear attacks someone, we don't consider that the bear had the free will to do otherwise. We just say, it was doing what bears do. So what makes us think that we stand apart from the natural world by possessing some sort of free will magic in our brain?

(2) The core argument against free will is simple. Everything about us, and the rest of the world, is determined. That's why Sapolsky's book has that title, Determined. Sure, we make choices. So do bears. And sea slugs. Those choices, those intentions, don't spring out of nowhere. They arise out of the goings-on in our brain, which is amazingly complex, yet still determined by causes and effects that range from a few seconds ago, to the moment of our birth, and even beyond given cultural and genetic influences on us.

(3) Recall something you've done that you regret. That's easy for me. Probably is for you also. We all have regrets. Often, or usually, that regret is made more painful by believing that we could have acted differently. But consider this. If every atom in your brain and outside world were in exactly the same condition as it was when you acted the first time, you'd do exactly what you did again. No doubt about it. Free will assumes that we have a choice to act differently. That can't be true if nothing has changed from when we acted initially.

(4) But as Sapolsky says in the video above, change does happen. All the time. Life and our world as a whole is nothing but change. People change. Animals change. Rocks change. Plants change. Free will, since it doesn't exist, can't change anything. Yet circumstances change. Every thought we have, every feeling we have, every action we take, all that changes us. So there's no fatalism involved in giving up a belief in free will. In fact, not believing in free will opens us to the reality that change can occur for countless reasons. Life is a never-ending series of surprises caused by determinism.

(5) Believing in free will fosters judgmentalism. We see someone in an unfortunate situation and think, "It's their fault." Giving up a belief in free will leads to a realization that, as strange as this may sound, no one is deserving of praise or blame. They're just doing what was determined that they do. So are we. Everybody is. Sure, society is justified in imprisoning dangerous people. But not to punish them. To protect others. And to change the prisoner for the better, if this is possible.

(6) There's no reason to think that people would go wild and crazy if they didn't believe in free will. Animals don't believe in free will, yet a wolf pack, herd of deer, school of fish, or flock of birds do just fine without such a belief. Us human animals have a strong sense of community and social cohesion. We generally want to get along with our fellow humans, notwithstanding our political, religious, and other sorts of divisions. Morality flows from a much deeper source than free will. It is embedded in our being thanks to evolution.

This morning I emailed a link to my HinesSight post to the members of our discussion group. After sharing the link, I added some personal observations.

We discussed why not believing in free will makes a difference in someone’s life. Well, after our meeting I had some thoughts about my father that I’d never had before. I have no early memories of him as my mother and he divorced when I was just a few years old.

 

Then I had no contact with him until my 30s when he started to phone me after he learned he had a serious case of emphysema that, I believe, eventually caused his death, though I could be wrong about this. It turned out that I was able to see him for a single hour in a Boston hotel room, which I wrote about here.

My fresh insight today was visualizing what it might have been like for my father as a newborn in this country to German immigrants who, he told me, he had learned came to work on the railroads. His mother died giving birth to him. His father then deserted his child, my father, who was eventually adopted by a Hines family. Which is why I have that last name rather than Mueller. 

 

I got to thinking about how a newborn’s brain/mind could be affected by his mother dying in childbirth in the early 1900s, then being orphaned. How much love and closeness did he receive as that infant? Could this help explain why my father, by all accounts from what I’ve been able to learn, was an egotistical selfish asshole? Maybe? Probably? 

 

Regardless I felt more compassion for my father this morning than I ever have, because viewing him as the product of deterministic forces put him in a different light than how I’ve tended to see him: as someone who willfully abandoned my mother after she gave birth to a sister of mine who was born with a congenital heart defect and reportedly needed a warmer drier climate than Massachusetts had to offer. He refused to move, so my mother went to Texas where my sister, Evie, died before too long.

 

Not viewing my father as having free will cast him in a different light for me. I’d already been inching in that direction when I wrote a blog post in 2013 about thanking him, and even loving him, for who he was, even with all his flaws. 

Anti-science views of conservatives led to many more COVID deaths

I'm a strong believer in science. Everyone should be. Not just because science is our best means of knowing reality, and that's a very good thing. Also because ignoring science can be dangerous to your health.

Very dangerous, according to Peter Hotez, MD, Ph.D, who wrote a book that I'm about half through reading: The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist's Warning. Hotez is the founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, where he co-directs the Texas Children's Center for Vaccine Development.

His book, which I'm enjoying a lot despite the bleak theme, describes in persuasive detail how resistance to COVID-19 vaccines in the United States, mostly by conservatives, caused a massive amount of unnecessary deaths among people in red states.

(Note to readers in other countries: for an originally arbitrary reason, red came to be associated with conservative/Republican areas in the United States and blue with liberal/Democratic areas. Thankfully, I live in a blue state, Oregon.)

As you can read below in excerpts from Hotez' book that I've shared, there's solid evidence to support the conclusion that the United States suffered about 200,000 unnecessary COVID deaths due to vaccine resistance, chiefly in states that voted for Donald Trump in 2020. 

That's an astounding number. The 9/11 attack in my country killed about 3,000 people. That led to a major war against terror, as our politicians termed it. The recent attack by Hamas has killed about 1,400 Israelis so far. That caused Israel to declare war against Hamas.

Yet 200,000 unnecessary COVID deaths in the United States hasn't caused a massive war against anti-science, though it should. All we have to date are skirmishes by science-admiring people like Hotez and other devotees of facts rather than falsehoods.

Here's how Hotez describes the relation between conservative states and increased deaths from COVID-19.

In stark terms, the idea of "red COVID" points out that as the United States entered the last half of 2021, each blue, liberal state with a Democratic majority that had voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 election had achieved far higher vaccination rates than conservative, red states that had voted for Donald Trump. 

Leonhardt states plainly: "The political divide over vaccinations is so large that almost every reliably blue state now has a higher vaccination rate than almost every reliably red state."

Given the high rate of protection that vaccines confer against hospitalization and deaths, especially versus the original lineage of the virus and its Alpha and Delta variants, those low vaccination rates correlated with high death rates.

Therefore, it was no surprise (although still upsetting) that COVID-19 deaths also demonstrated a similar pattern of partisan split. Importantly, the differences in vaccination rates represent much more than an abstract concept; they directly translate into a partisan division in terms of lives lost.

By the summer and fall of 2021, as the highly transmissible Delta variant became dominant, overwhelmingly those losing their lives from COVID-19 were living in conservative counties with a majority that voted for Trump in 2020.

Here's an informative figure from Axios that illustrates the point Hotez makes in his book: living in a red state was bad for your health in the time of COVID.

Here's how Hotez describes the basis for a conclusion that 200,000 deaths could have been prevented if vaccination rates were as high in red areas of the country as in blue areas.

The estimate of 200,000 deaths is calculated by counting the 245,000 cumulative COVID-19 deaths in the United States between May 1 and December 31,2021, according to the University of Washington - Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation's "COVID-19 Projections," multiplied by a factor of 0.80.

The 0.80 number reflects the percentage of deaths constituted by unvaccinated Americans at the peak of the Delta wave in August 2021 (81%) and September 2021 (79%) according to a Peterson - KFF analysis of CDC information to account for 196,000 lives lost.

The CDC estimates a ratio of 16.3 to 1 of unvaccinated to fully vaccinated deaths during the period of Delta predominance (July to November 2021), equivalent to 230,000 deaths.

Another approximation reflects the percentage of deaths made up by the unvaccinated (85%) versus those partially or completely vaccinated for the state of Texas for the year 2021 according to the Department of Texas State Health Services, which works out to 208,000 lives lost.

The health analyst Charles Gaba estimates between 180,000 and 235,000 deaths. Peterson - KFF also provides an additional (and somewhat lower) estimate of 162,000. This lower estimate is based on the 91% effectiveness versus death caused by the Delta variant for the two mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, therefore even if all of the unvaccinated had accepted their vaccines, there would still be some deaths.

Peterson - KFF also find that vaccines would have prevented 234,000 deaths if we include the first three months of 2022.

I'm loving Determined, a great book about no free will

Thanks to a recent article in New Scientist, Is Free Will an Illusion?, I learned about two new books on this subject.

The one that appealed to me most was Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, by Robert M. Sapolsky -- a professor of biology, of neurology and neurological sciences, and of neurosurgery at Stanford.

It arrived yesterday. I had no problem holding it up to take this photo, but I wanted to show how thick it was, 403 pages plus some appendices. I was worried that a book of this size could be heavy reading if the author got into the complex details of how the brain works.

That worry vanished after I read the first chapter this morning. Sapolsky is a terrific writer with an engaging style. Informal. Creative. Easy to understand. I'd read parts of his earlier book, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: A Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping. It was interesting, but wasn't nearly as pleasant to read as Determined.

Here's how the first chapter ends. I was almost moved to tears when I read this. This passage not only makes great good sense, it has an emotionality that other books about no free will that I've read lack, which take a more cerebral approach to this subject.

Finally, any contemporary view of determinism must accommodate a profoundly important point, one that dominates the second half of the book -- despite the world being deterministic, things can change. Brains change, behaviors change. We change. And that doesn't counter this being a deterministic world without free will. In fact, the science of change strengthens this conclusion; this will come in chapter 12.

With those issues in mind, time to see the version of determinism that this book builds on. 

Imagine a university graduation ceremony. Almost always moving, despite the platitudes, the boilerplate, the kitsch. The happiness, the pride. The families whose sacrifices now all seem worth it. The graduates who were the first in their family to finish high school. The ones whose immigrant parents sit there glowing, their saris, dashikis, barongs broadcasting that their pride in the present isn't at the cost of pride in their past.

And then you notice someone. Amid the family clusters post ceremony, the new graduates posing for pictures with Grandma in her wheelchair, the bursts of hugs and laughter, you see the person way in the back, the person who is part of the grounds crew, collecting the garbage from the cans on the perimeter of the event.

Randomly pick any of the graduates. Do some magic so that this garbage collector started life with the graduate's genes. Likewise for getting the womb in which nine months were spent and the lifelong epigenetic consequences of that.

Get the graduate's childhood as well -- one filled with, say, piano lessons and family game nights, instead of, say, threats of going to bed hungry, becoming homeless, or being deported for lack of papers. Let's go all the way so that, in addition to the garbage collector having gotten all that of the graduate's past, the graduate would have gotten the garbage collector's past.

Trade every factor over which they had no control, and you will switch who would be in the graduation robe and who would be hauling garbage cans. This is what I mean by determinism. 

AND WHY DOES THIS MATTER?

Because we all know that the graduate and the garbage collector would switch places. And because, nevertheless, we rarely reflect on that sort of fact; we congratulate the graduate on all she's accomplished and move out of the way of the garbage guy without glancing at him.

This passage is a terrific way of getting across the point that there's no such thing as an inner Me who is separate and distinct from our body/brain/mind, which itself is the result of a vast network of causes extending all the way back to the big bang. 

In short, none of us is anything special. We're just the result of what the cosmos has fashioned into a form that goes by our name and has the characteristics that the circumstances of our birth, upbringing, and countless experiences have determined us to be.

Here's another passage from the initial chapter, "Turtles All the Way Down," that provides a good introduction to the no-free-will waters Sapolsky invites us to swim in via his book. Me, I'm ready to dive in.

We can all agree on that; however, we're heading into very different terrain, one that I suspect most readers will not agree with, which is deciding that we have no free will at all. Here would be some of the logical implications of that being the case:

That there can be no such thing as blame, and that punishment as retribution is indefensible -- sure, keep dangerous people from damaging others, but do so as straightforwardly and nonjudgmentally as keeping a car with faulty brakes off the road.

That it can be okay to praise someone or express gratitude toward them as an instrumental intervention, to make it likely that they will repeat that behavior in the future, or as an inspiration to others, but never because they deserve it. And that this applies to you when you've been smart or self-disciplined or kind.

Oh, as long as we're at it, that you recognize that the experience of love is made of the same building blocks that constitute wildebeests or asteroids. That no one has earned or is entitled to being treated better or worse than anyone else. 

And that it makes as little sense to hate someone as to hate a tornado because it supposedly decided to level your house, or to love a lilac because it supposedly decided to make a wonderful fragrance.

That's what it means to conclude that there is no free will. This is what I've concluded for a long, long time. And even I think that taking that seriously sounds absolutely nutty.  

Sam Harris speaks truth to Russell Brand's B.S.

I'm a big fan of Sam Harris, the noted atheist who richly deserves his reputation as a rational mystic. For Harris has a Ph.D. in neuroscience and also is deeply experienced in meditation, primarily the Dzogchen variety of Buddhism. 

Whenever I read Harris' books, listen to his guided meditations and conversations with other people, or view his videos, I come away impressed with his ability to clearly reason about difficult issues concerning all sorts of subjects -- notably including consciousness, religion, mindfulness, and social issues.

It takes me about 10 minutes to do my weekly watering of two bonsai plants that I bought at the Salem World Beat Festival about five years ago and have managed to keep alive even though I've never changed the potting soil and never trimmed them. I do fertilize them. So I've mastered the art of growing bonsai through benign neglect.

While I could mindfully do the watering without distraction, I've gotten into the habit of using that time to watch You Tube videos on my iPhone. Lately I've been looking at videos of Sam Harris. I was drawn to view an 86 minute video of Harris being interviewed by Russell Brand even though it took much more time to watch than a single watering session.

Brand is an English comedian and actor. While he occasionally makes sense in his interview with Harris, mostly I found his attitude irritating and his arguments faulty. Of course, my worldview is much closer to that of Harris than of Brand, so that helps explain why I think Harris came away the winner in their lengthy conversation.

Which I've shared below. I've made the video start about 11 minutes from the end. The final part of the interview, which begins a ways before when this video starts, is where Harris and Brand talk about consciousness, meditation, and religion. I really like what Harris says about the Abrahamic religions -- Christianity, Judaism, and Islam -- here.

He cogently argues that there's absolutely no doubt that the holy scriptures of these religions are human made, not divinely inspired. However, Harris neglected to give specific examples of how an omniscient God could have included knowledge in those scriptures that would provide proof of a godly being.

One example that has been cited by other religious skeptics would have been for God to direct a writer of some holy scripture several thousand years ago to include a mention of a scientific fact that would have made no sense to people of that time, yet would be proven true by modern science. Extra credit would go to God if the fact were expressed mathematically.

Anyway, here's the video. Harris's argument about why religions are clearly human made comes a few minutes after where I've made the video start. 

 

If the world is seen in a grain of sand, then enlightenment is in a football game

I like the title of this blog post. If I was reading it, rather than writing it, I'd look at that title and think, "Man, I've got to learn how enlightenment is in a football game."

Of course, learning how the world is seen in a grain of sand is something to be sought after also. But since I'm not William Blake, you'll have to ponder his poem on your own.

And I've got to admit that explaining how enlightenment is in a football game is more of an aspiration for me, than a given. Still, since I spent quite a bit of time today watching two entertaining football games, Oregon versus Washington and Oregon State versus UCLA, I figure that I should get some churchless blog post mileage out of that effort.

Since I live in Oregon, I watched both games not in a state of serene detachment but of anxious fandom. This distinguishes me from a friend who enjoys college football as much as I do, yet prefers to know the score before watching either a recorded game or You Tube highlights.

This, I suppose, is a reflection of differing approaches to enlightenment. 

I understand the appeal of not experiencing the ups and downs that accompany viewing a football game where the outcome is unknown. There's a lot to be said for harmony, calm, centeredness. However, there's also a strong argument to be made for passion, excitement, motion.

Some spiritual paths teach that enlightenment comes to those who make their mind into an empty mirror that dispassionately reflects whatever appears in it. A favorite team wins. A favorite team loses. Reflections, just reflections.

Other spiritual paths embrace the marvelous messiness of life. Enlightenment is viewed not as detachment from reality, but as an understanding that there is no enduring self to be enlightened nor any special state to be attained.

Me, I prefer that way of both spirituality and football watching. I'm incapable of not caring whether an Oregon team wins or loses. I enjoy the pleasure of victory, yet even the agony of defeat seems preferable to being a mere mirror that reflects what is without wishing for what could have been.

Today Oregon lost in a frustrating fashion to Washington. Since both were Top 10 teams, Oregon had a golden opportunity to take a big step toward a ranking that would guarantee a spot in the playoff for a national championship. 

But Coach Lanning chose to not kick short field goals twice on fourth down, which obviously was crucial in a game Oregon lost by three points. Those additional six points would have won the game. Lanning also went for it on fourth down near midfield in the closing minutes of the game when Oregon was leading by four points.

That fourth down attempt failed, which led to Washington scoring on the next two long pass plays. So I, along with other Oregon fans, understandably are critical of the coach's questionable decisions. 

Especially because Lanning acted in much the same way in two previous important games: taking risks when a more cautious approach would have produced a win rather than a loss. An Oregonian sports writer talked about this in "Dan Lanning loves taking risks, but it keeps costing the Ducks in their biggest moments."

Everybody enjoys a hand of high-stakes poker.

But there is always a sign hanging nearby that warns of the difference between enjoying gambling and having a gambling problem.

With Lanning, this is too much of a trend to ignore.

It was a similar situation last year against the Huskies in Eugene, when Lanning called for a run on fourth down from the Ducks’ own 34-yard line in a tie game with 90 seconds left, setting up the game-winning field goal for the surging Huskies.

And it happened two weeks later in Corvallis, when the Ducks were nursing a three-point lead in the fourth quarter and Lanning went for it on fourth and 1 from his own 28.

You can argue the merit of any of these decisions individually. But in Lanning’s scorebook of risk, regret is absolutely lapping reward.

But wait! Even though I agree with what is said above, didn't I just say that I look upon both enlightenment and football watching as lacking a special state to be attained. Like, not taking unnecessary risk.

Well, yes I did. 

So while I think Coach Lanning made some mistakes in his game management, I'm well aware of the many mistakes I've made in my life. Lanning is who he is. I am who I am. Neither of us can be anyone other than who we are. Just as no one else can either. 

Understanding that simple fact, really understanding it -- if that's not enlightenment, it's damn close to it. 

John Canzano is an independent sports columnist here in Oregon. I subscribe to his substack writing. Here's part of what Canzano said about Lanning's decisions today.

Should Lanning have taken three points and kicked a gimme field goal before halftime? Or maybe kicked one in the third quarter deep in the red zone?

Absolutely.

Put six points on the board there and the Ducks board their chartered buses and head to the airport in an entirely better mood on Saturday evening. But as Lanning accurately pointed out: “We’re probably not talking about it if we get a touchdown.”

I don’t think arrogance drove Lanning to go for it on fourth down. Not at all. I don’t think it was his youth, either. Nope. I think Lanning, 37, goes for broke in critical situations because it’s who he is. He believes deeply in his players, wants to have fun, and would rather lose throwing a punch vs. ducking one. And let’s face it — he’s not going to get caught dead laying up on a Par 5 with a bunch of recruits watching.

They were watching, be sure.

Lanning ended up kicking himself in the teeth on Saturday. Oregon could have easily won the game. But I suspect UO fans will live with the disappointment if Lanning’s gambles can turn a 5-1 record into 11-1 by the end of the football season. That’s the task now for the Ducks and as long as Nix stays healthy. And they’ll be a favorite in every game left on the regular-season schedule.

"Because it's who he is." Again, that's all any of us can be. We make decisions that go well. We make decisions that go badly. Such is life. It's a wild roller coaster ride, not a sedate stroll on level ground. This is what makes life enjoyable, the ups and downs, the joys and regrets, the happiness and despair.

And it's why watching sports is so popular. Sports, including football, are just like a grain of sand: the world is contained within each game.

Oh, almost forgot to mention that Oregon State beat UCLA. I didn't talk about that game because a win is less interesting than a loss.

Religion plays a large role in the horrible Hamas-Israel war

Though I'm an atheist, I recognize that wars often don't involve religion to a significant degree. But sometimes they do, which means that rather than being a force for good in the world, religion encourages death and destruction.

Politically, my goal is to be an open-minded progressive. So I embrace the notion being espoused by many liberals on social media that it is possible, and indeed desirable, to simultaneously hold three views about the current war between Hamas and Israel.

(1) Hamas engaged in unforgivable terrorism when its fighters attacked Israeli citizens, killing women and children, decapitating infants, slaughtering young people at a music festival, and taking an estimated 150 people hostage. Now Israel is justified in fighting back against Hamas.

(2) Israel has fanned the flames of Islamic resentment in the Middle East by treating Palestinians in the occupied territories badly and showing little to no recent interest in pursuing a two-state solution to the longstanding conflict. The current right-wing administration of Benjamin Netanyahu has made a bad situation in the West Bank even worse through its oppressive policies.

(3) Most of the two million people living in Gaza aren't Hamas fighters. Israel should do everything possible to protect them during its war against Hamas. This entails complying with generally accepted rules of war to the greatest extent possible. 

It's impossible to separate out the role of religion here because Israel is a Jewish nation and Hamas embraces a form of radical Islam. That said, many Israeli Jews are opposed to fundamentalist Judaism, just as many Muslims in Gaza reject fundamentalist Islam. 

If the reasonable Israelis and Palestinians could get together and discuss a viable two-state solution, likely this could happen. It wouldn't be easy, but absent religious dogmatism, it'd be much more feasible.

What deeply irritates my godless mind is how Jerusalem (and the Holy Land in general) is viewed by all three Abrahamic religions -- Christianity, Judaism, Islam -- as a holy city. That's absurd, that a city can be holy because it contains structures that deserve to be revered.

Get a fucking life, is what goes through my mind when I hear that Jews want to control Jerusalem because it supposedly was the site of the Temple Mount during the reign of King David, and that Muslims are worried that Jews are going to mess with the Al Aqsa Mosque.

How can anyone believe that God or Allah or Yahweh really gives a shit about what happens to some old buildings? Is God that petty, that obsessive, that egotistical, to care about the place where some religious believers did something or other long ago?

It'd be great if somehow only Jewish and Islamic fundamentalists could go to war with each other on some deserted battlefield where only these religious zealots would be harmed. Sadly, that isn't possible.

Unfortunately religious craziness is going to cause more deaths among innocent people in the coming days, weeks, and months as Israel retaliates against Hamas and, likely, that retaliation hardens the resolve of Islamic fundamentalists to battle against the Jewish nation.

Some final thoughts on Paul Breer's books

Whew. I did it.

Finished all 495 pages of Paul Breer's second book, Beyond Self-Realization: A Non-Sectarian Path to Enlightenment. It was interesting reading, though it repeated some of the themes in his first book, The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will. 

I admire authors like Breer who put a lot of time and effort into writing about a subject that, given its nature, isn't going to land their book(s) on best seller lists. It's a labor of love, not of money. I speak as someone who has put a lot of time and effort into writing books of the same sort.

Breer is on solid ground -- according to both Buddhism and neuroscience -- in his contention that we humans lack both an independent Self that stands apart from the physical mind/body as well as the free will that such a Self is widely considered to be capable of.

I found Breer's assertion in his second book to be more problematic: that it is possible to become enlightened by coming to an experience of Pure Consciousness.

This supposedly is consciousness before it becomes identified with things in the world, though in a Zen-like assumption (he practiced Zen for five years) Breer says that Pure Consciousness never stands alone, but always is experienced along with the sensing of material objects.

So this explains why a Zen practitioner can become enlightened upon hearing a bell rung or seeing a bird flying. At certain moments Pure Consciousness is manifested as the ground upon which impure consciousness operates.

OK, I can bring myself to believe that. However, I'm more skeptical that if Pure Consciousness becomes a permanent part of our experience, then we are no longer bothered by bad things happening to us, like disease, pain, disability, financial ruin, and such.

It'd be nice if this were true. And Sam Harris, along with others who embrace Buddhist precepts, seem to believe something similar.

They argue that when we wake up to the true nature of consciousness, it is seen as akin to the clear sky that remains unaltered even as hurricanes, tornadoes, and thunderstorms form and dissolve in the sky. If I ever achieve such a state, I guess I'll know I'm enlightened when I can hear Donald Trump talk without feeling repulsed by his constant lies, hatefulness, and fearmongering.

There are passages near the end of Breer's second book that describe Pure Consciousness and enlightenment in terms that seem unobjectionable to me, even if I can't buy into them entirely. For example:

The Undifferentiated realm you refer to lies hidden beneath all this orienting. "IT" is there in everything we experience -- every  image, every sound, every smell. As I said earlier, according to Trungpa's hypothesis, we get a glimpse of Pure Consciousness every time we see a bird, hear a truck, or smell somebody's dinner cooking. 

That glimpse happens at the very beginning of each experience -- prior to any kind of orienting. It is so brief, however, (he argued that it lasts less than a millisecond), that it rarely reaches awareness. Almost immediately we begin to sort inputs into sensations, combine sensations to form objects and then name and evaluate what we have constructed. 

And it works. It works so well that we never get to see (or hear, smell, etc) what is actually there. We pick and choose those aspects of the stimulus that are important for our survival -- and pay no attention to those that aren't.

...Becoming enlightened involves peeling off all three layers of orienting so that we can grasp the "IT" that precedes every image, sound, smell, taste or touch. From the perspective of that fundamental Ground, we get to see the phenomenal world objectively for the first time, that is, we see freed of all the self-related add-ons that distort what's really going on.

For example, it becomes possible to look at a weed without dismissing it as a violation of one's personal concept of beauty or to smell a rotten piece of meat without recoiling in horror. It's breathtaking to discover what a scene (and I mean any scene) looks like when it is no longer seen from the biased perspective of an observer whose primary mission in life in self-survival.

Makes sense. I could use some of that sort of enlightenment. 

Lastly, I wanted to share a passage in Breer's second book where he speaks about the sex abuse/incest charges that led to him spending two years in prison. I like how open Breer is about his prison experience. Several times he describes experiences he had during that time that related to themes in his book.

Here he says that he was wrongly accused. 

Throughout my own time in prison and on parole, I tried to use Hakuin's story as a model of acceptance. In the beginning I had no success at all; in time what made a modicum of success possible was the constant reminder that there was no master controller inside my accuser that chose to fabricate a story.

While that reminder kept me from becoming bitter, it was not until I awakened to my deeper nature that I truly accepted what happened. 

As that acceptance arose, my negative feelings vanished, leaving in their wake a heightened awareness of the pain I had caused that led my accuser to lie. In the process my concern gradually shifted from self to other -- taking with it the last vestige of resentment. 

Sam Harris praises reason as the only game in town for strangers to play

Near the end of Sam Harris' conversation with André Duqum, which I've written about here and here, Harris praised reason in a way that deeply resonated with me.

One reason I liked the praise of reason is that it's a vitally important human capacity that too often is taken for granted. It's the foundation of every well-functioning society and organization, from the smallest to the largest.

Yet too often we only notice the importance of reason when it's missing. As in religious dogma. As in political posturing. As in pronouncements of authoritarians. As in attempts to ban books and decry science.

At the moment Israel is embroiled in a war with Hamas, which attacked Israel from its base in Gaza. Reason isn't going to end the war, but it sure would have been nice if reason had been more in evidence during the lengthy disputes between Israel and the Palestinian people.

As you can read in the transcript I made of Harris' remarks about reason, he views reason as the only viable means of bringing enemies together who don't like each other. Reason can't guarantee a cooperative outcome of a dispute. 

But it's a heck of a lot better than killing each other.

Problem is, reason requires two or more reasonable people to function. This is obvious in recent Republican debates between presidential candidates. The moderators will ask a reasonable question, then the candidates generally toss reason aside and resort to emotional polemics instead.

The result: a lot of heat but little light. 

Harris starts off by referring to the project of improving human wellbeing, the overarching theme of his conversation with Duqum. In places I probably got some words wrong in this transcript, but overall it's accurate.

The only thing that is safeguarding this project, collectively, really, the only tool beyond just the goodwill  that wants that project to succeed -- the love, kindness, and gratitude that would release those fears -- is reason.

All we have is a disposition to talk about facts, to care about facts, to be consistent, to be self-aware of our own ignorance and our own capacity for self-deception and wishful thinking and cognitive bias, to meet other people. 

There are eight billion strangers. No matter how many people you know, virtually everyone is a stranger.  And all you can do is reason with them from a basic inclination to cooperate and find some future that is compatible with more and more of us, more of the time, leading better lives.

We need to recognize that we're all in principle on the same team, in the limit, and try to solve increasingly complex problems and build the tools to do that. Or we're going to fail spectacularly at the attempt to do that.

And our failure will be totally predictable. Our failure will be born of failures of rationality, failures of goodwill, failures of love, failures of kindness. Failures to act in what really is in our own best interest if we could only see it.

The idea that we could ever wind up in a condition that is permanently zero-sum is just a crazy illusion given the circumstance we're actually in.

How good life could be, if we just got our heads screwed on straight and cooperated without political division, and dogmatism, and all of these structures that reliably cause conversations to fail. It really doesn't seem wrong to expect something like a utopia if only we could get over our very basic political and apeish disinclinations to cooperate with one another.

Reason is the only tool for the job, because its the only algorithm you can run where even if people don't like each other and are emotionally unavailable -- they're resisting playing well with others -- because of its universal characteristics, with reason you can show your enemies how they're contradicting themselves. 

Reason has the capacity to force conversions and really drag people kicking and screaming across the finish line of cooperation, because at bottom reality has a certain structure and certain things are true and certain things are false.

Certain maps fit the territory better than other maps. And even if we are confused about the game we're playing, people tend not to like to bump into hard objects in the dark, right? They want to know where they're going, and insofar as there are right answers to any questions of importance, reason is the thing that will insure we're tracking that.

So apart from people who are completely psychotic or completely psychopathic, meaning they're fundamentally unavailable to any kind of cooperative effort, reason is the thing that, even in the absence  of appropriate love and good feelings, is going to align all of our interests.

Yeah, on some levels, it's the only game in town for strangers to play. 

If we're only happy when life has no problems, we'll never be happy

After recommending a conversation between Sam Harris and André Duqum after listening to only ten minutes of it, now I can really recommend the conversation after listening to two hours of the 2:20 talk between them.

Harris is in fine form here. Having been an avid user of his Waking Up app, I've heard quite a few talks between Harris and some other spiritually inclined person. He tells some of the same stories in the Duqum conversation but much of what Harris says is new to me.

I haven't been taking any notes, so will simply relate what I remember most about what I've heard in the two hours, figuring that since it stuck in my mind, that's what appealed to me, and maybe the same is true of others.

When Harris talks about finding happiness, I was blown away by how clear and eloquent he is. My description of what he said won't do justice to his words,  but this is the best I can do.

Harris is right on when he observes that for most of us -- certainly true of me -- life is a never-ending battle between problems that arise for us and our desire to make those problems go away. We feel satisfied when something is checked off our to-do list. That gives us a happiness boost.

Briefly. Until the next problem comes along. Now, "problem" doesn't quite capture what we're dealing with. Sometimes it's a gap between what we want and what is present now. Some sticky spots on my car's windshield have been bugging me (they might even be squished bugs).

When I notice them, right in my field of vision, I'm driving along and can't clean the windshield. When I get home, I forget to clean it. Today I did. That felt good. I'll feel even better next time I drive my car. Until new spots appear.

Harris' point is that if our happiness depends on having every problem or unmet goal dealt with successfully, we're never going to be able to experience lasting happiness, or satisfaction. Somehow we have to find a way to to be happy even though there's a gap between what we'd like to have happen, and what is actually happening. 

This is fairly easy to do with minor gaps. It's much tougher when the gap is larger, as when we're having to deal with a serious illness or the death of a loved one. In these cases basic Buddhist precepts can be of some help.con

We can embrace the notion of emptiness -- that all things are marked by interdependency, change, lack of inherent existence. We can feel whatever pain, distress, and suffering is present in our consciousness while recognizing that it will arise and pass away as all things do.

Well, unless death comes upon us before the passing away does, in which case the passing away will be complete, since almost certainly we won't exist anymore.

Harris stresses that our thinking plays a large role in our unhappiness. Much of the time, if not most of the time, the problems we're worried about don't exist in the  present moment. They're anticipated problems, potential problems, concerns about events that we imagine happening, yet haven't yet.

So even when things are going well for us, our mind is prone to envision things going badly in the future. Or we remember past problems and worry that they'll pop up again. 

Mindfulness of what's occurring in the present moment helps to tone down thoughts of past and future. Sure, thinking is a great tool. However, it needs to be used appropriately, not indiscriminately. Too much or too little thinking can both be unproductive, which is why the Middle Way of Buddhism makes a lot of sense. 

I also liked what Harris had to say about Advaita Vedanta. Nonduality, which is what Advaita is all about, is a wonderful perspective on reality. Who isn't attracted to oneness?

But Harris cogently criticizes teachers, or preachers, of Advaita who irritatingly blab on about how there is no one to be enlightened, since the Self doesn't exist, so every spiritual effort is misguided, because there's nothing to attain. Just be what you already are, blah, blah, blah. 

The Advaita Trap makes this annoyingly clear.

Regarding consciousness, I like how Harris discusses the Hard Problem, which basically is why there is something to be like a conscious being. Me, I'm more open to the notion that the Hard Problem will disappear when the nature of consciousness is better understood, while Harris seems to believe that it will always be with us.

His discussion of Artificial Intelligence was well-informed and thoughtful. I think he's right that soon we will be able to recognize an AI not because it lacks human mental capabilities, but because it surpasses them. 

Anyway, I look forward to hearing the last twenty minutes of the Harris-Duqum conversation. Harris does most of the talking in it, which is as it should be, since while Duqum asks good questions, Harris is an exceptional explainer of meditation and spirituality from his rational mystic perspective. 

Don't watch yourself. Be yourself. In meditation, and in everything.

I usually listen to a daily guided meditation on Sam Harris' Waking Up app. But sometimes I enjoy other offerings on the app, which includes a section called Theory. There's also Practice and Life.

Now and then Harris correctly says in his guided meditations that listening to a conversation in the Theory section can be just as valuable of meditating. After all, meditation is about paying attention to what's happening in the present moment.

If that thing is an interesting conversation between Harris and someone else, and I'm paying close attention to it, then, hey, that's a form of meditation.

As is everything else in life, since Harris and most other meditation teachers emphasize that there's no real distinction between formal meditation and what we do the rest of the day. It's all about attention and experiencing life as fully as possible in the present moment.

This morning I only had time to listen to about ten minutes of a several hour conversation between Harris and André Duqum. I liked what I heard. Duqum has a video of the conversation on his Know Thyself web site. It's in the middle on the bottom row, "Sam Harris: A Rational Mystics Guide to Consciousness and Awakening."

It's a YouTube video, which I'll share:

In what I heard today Harris speaks about the familiar theme of how our thoughts can prevent us from genuinely experiencing reality. Obviously there's nothing wrong with thinking. It's essential for much that we do. However, thinking interferes with experience when it isn't needed.

Though we can become fully absorbed in thinking, which makes it a form of meditation, typically thinking creates distance between us and the world. We're paying attention to thoughts inside our head rather than attending to the outside world.

For a long time, 35 years, I practiced a form of meditation that aimed at "going within." This wasn't only closed-eye meditation. It also was closed ear meditation for much of the meditation session. Since, I've learned that the best thing I can do to feel more in touch with both myself and the world is to go without, not within.

When I meditate now, which includes everyday activities, since mindfulness has become my meditation, I try to focus on the sensations of what I'm doing and what's around me rather than thoughts. One thing at a time. Look out, not in. Those are two of my basic principles.

Harris spoke about how there can even be a watcher in meditation/mindfulness. By "watcher," he means the feeling, or assumption, that there's a person inside our head who is viewing reality like an air traffic controller in a high tower.

The watcher is mistakenly considered to be our true self, not the body/brain. But actually the watcher is an illusion. For when we try to find that person inside our head, the Self who is in charge of things, we come up empty.

It's better to experience life directly, not through a made-up watcher. We all know how pleasant it is to lose ourself in dance, music, walking, conversation, sex, work, or any other activity marked by a minimal distinction between us and what we're doing. 

This is a flow state, which is much different from a thinking or watching state, for those are marked by duality.

I find that usually it makes sense to trust my deeper mind or consciousness. After all, I heartily agree with Harris that both free will and an independent self are fictions. We don't need to worry that if we stop thinking, worrying, and fretting about the past and future, nothing will get done.

In my experience, I get more done when I simply trust that whatever I need to do will appear as something that needs doing. Yeah, I realize that sentence doesn't make logical sense. But it resonates with me. 

I do use to-do lists. I find them helpful in lessening my need to think, since I'm outsourcing some of my thinking to a piece of paper, my iPhone, or laptop. Often, though, some task that I've forgotten to jot down yet needs doing will pop into my mind unbidden, which strengthens my faith that a part of me beyond thinking can handle things just fine much or most of the time.

Tomorrow I'll listen to more of the conversation between Harris and Duqum. I find Harris to be my kind of spiritual teacher. He truly is a rational mystic. Harris has a Ph.D. in neuroscience, yet also is well versed in Dzogchen and other forms of Buddhist meditation. 

Pure Consciousness isn't what its name implies

I don't like the term pure consciousness. Or its identical twin, pure awareness. I've written about this dislike in some blog posts: here, here, here, and here. 

Obviously I've got no problem with talking about consciousness or awareness, which in my view are the same thing. If we're conscious of something we're aware of that thing.

It's the pure that rubs me the wrong way.

That word conjures us an image of something absolutely clear and transparent, nothing in it except consciousness/awareness. (From now on I'll just speak of consciousness rather than wearing out my laptop's slash key.)

Sure, I get the idea that consciousness is akin to an empty sky in which clouds, birds, airplanes, and such are contained. I jotted down a couple of ways Sam Harris describes consciousness in this fashion in his Waking Up app's guided meditations.

Consciousness is the space in which everything is arising on its own; rest as that... You are the condition in which everything is appearing.

So this seems to presume that what is most real about us isn't what we're aware of, but a formless that composed of pure consciousness. 

Well, it's a nice idea. It just doesn't make sense, though. Where's the evidence that consciousness ever can be experienced in such a pure state, there's no content of consciousness? 

And if this somehow were possible, how would someone know they've experienced pure consciousness? After all, there can't be a sense of "This is pure consciousness," for that sense clearly isn't pure, it's a sensation of this is pure consciousness. 

Thus if consciousness truly was pure, there would be no way for that purity to contain an experience of purity, for experience always is of something. After all, what would pure experience be like?

Nothing, I guess, for the experience would be of nothing.

I got to thinking about pure consciousness because Paul Breer talks about it quite a bit in some chapters near the end of his book, Beyond Self-Realization: A Non-Sectarian Path to Enlightenment. I've enjoyed his right-on take on free will (it doesn't exist) and the ethereal Self (nobody has one).

However, his frequent use of "Pure Consciousness" rubbed me the wrong way, at least until I read enough about how Breer uses this term to realize that when he's referring to isn't really pure.

Breer's book consists of dialogues between a group of people taking an enlightenment course at a local library led by someone who, not surprisingly, bears a lot of resemblance to Paul Breer. Here's some passages describing Pure Consciousness.

What I "see" is Pure Consciousness in the background of my perception of you; just as in an enlightenment experience you would see Pure Consciousness in the background of your perception of me. 

At the same time I see both you and me in the conventional sense, that is, as separate individuals, you over "there," me over "here." In the foreground, I see the two of us as separate individuals; in the background I see (with my inner eye) Consciousness Itself which serves as the Source for the distinctions I make in the foreground. The same would be true for you if the roles were reversed.

...Whenever you gain access to Pure Consciousness, you will experience it as a background to whatever you see, hear, taste, touch, or smell -- and that includes your awareness of me. I'm not saying, as your books apparently suggest, that everything in the universe contains Pure Consciousness. 

When I say that the world is One, I'm referring to the sense of Wholeness created by THAT which serves as background for whatever I perceive in my foreground. The experience of wholeness takes place "here"; it's not something that exists in blades of grass, bluebirds, trash cans or any other objects of perception.

Oneness, in other words, is a feature not of the universe itself nor of the objects in that universe, but of our own perception of the world when viewed from a background of Pure Consciousness.

...Most fundamentally, you are Pure Consciousness. As such, you are THAT which enables an organism with a brain and nervous system to make distinctions and use those distinctions to construct a perceptual field composed of objects and a subject.

Even after you have discovered your deeper nature (Pure Consciousness), you retain a limited identification with the part (as body-mind) you are playing in a particular perceptual construction. In other words, you are both the "movie" (the construction) and the context (Pure Consciousness) in which the movie is playing.

So when I burrow down into the nitty-gritty of what Breer is saying here, it seems to be quite simple and uncontroversial. 

Consciousness is necessary for perceptions of the world. From birth until death, being conscious is how we perceive everything inside and outside of us -- the contents of consciousness. I'm not sure how this realization translates into enlightenment, since it seems to be a basic fact of life.

But maybe that's what Zen masters are getting at when they keep pointing the student searching for enlightenment back to everyday perceptions. Cooking rice. Running water. Ringing of bells. 

I don't disagree with how Breer views Pure Consciousness. Just seems to me that what he's talking about is merely consciousness being the foundation of all experience. Which is damn obvious.