Church of the Churchless

Beautiful: the world is uncertain, unexplainable, and uncontrollable

This morning I finished reading Brian Klaas's book, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters.

My impressions: well-written, highly original, thought-provoking, factually sound. His bio on the book's cover says he "grew up in Minneapolis, earned his DPhil at Oxford, and is now a professor of global politics at University College, London."

No wonder his book seems so smart. This is a smart guy. 

Below I've shared some passages that I especially liked in his final chapter, "Why Everything We Do Matters." 

Our journey together, alas, nears its end. We have now glimpsed a world that is entirely unlike what our intuitions and perceptions try to tell us, reinforced by conventional wisdom, stuffed into straitjacket models.

The new world may bewilder us, but at least it's closer to the truth. Our storybook notions of why things happen are a lie. Our perceptions evolved to deceive us. Reality is entirely interconnected, constantly changing, ever swayed by the minuscule and the minute.

That means that our trajectories, as we wade through the rivers of our Heraclitean world, are contingent on a near-infinite number of factors. If we change anything, we change everything. These truths lead inexorably to a mystifying revelation: the world is uncertain, unexplainable, and uncontrollable. 

But what are we to do with that information? How are we to live?

As the essayist Maria Popover reminds us, "To live wonder-smitten with reality is the gladdest way to live." How many of us, trapped scurrying on the hamster wheel of modern life, have become unsmitten? It's time to let go of those false idols of mastery and control, and to marvel at the beauty that lies within uncertainty, if you only know how to look.

Perhaps our modern malaise is derived from an obsession with trying to control an uncontrollable world, an extension of a flawed worldview that traps us in an impossible quest for certainty. That quest always ends in disappointment.

The way we now live is entangled with the way we misunderstand the world, regarding the inevitable flukes of an interconnected world as mere curiosities and coincidences rather than the green shoots of an elegant, complex garden displaying its unknowable majesty.

...Life itself, in that futile longing for control, can morph into a solve-for-X slog, where we constantly feel that we are just one hidden factor -- one product or one promotion -- away from what we really want, which, when we buy it or achieve it, turns out to be yet another unsatisfying mirage.

...It's humbling to recognize that you're not the conductor of the symphony but are rather one vibrating string within it. That truth situates us within something vast and unknown. We can't know where we are going, or why we're here (if there is any reason). It leads to three of the most important words in existence: I don't know. 

...The good society is one in which we accept the uncertain and embrace the unknown. To do so, we must make sure that each of our daily lives is full of exploration, simple pleasures, and pleasant surprises -- flukes -- and moments where the anxious futures embedded in to-do-lists are obliterated in our minds, at least for a time, by a feeling of joy in the present moment.

...The truth of this fresh worldview provides a more potent message than any self-help book can imagine: we may control nothing, but we influence everything.

...How should we live within this world of potent influence? Humans, like all creatures, face a trade-off between two strategies for interacting with the world: explore versus exploit. To explore is, by definition, to wonder, to not know where you're going. To exploit is to race toward a known destination. 

...What happens when we give up a bit of control and let ourselves drift and explore a bit more without direction? We know -- with clear evidence -- that moments of diversion, in which idleness envelops us, and our minds linger away from directed action, are often moments of brilliance. 

...We are each hitched to one another, which yields a profound gift: that everything we do matters, including whatever you decide to do now, when you close this book, and go out to explore that wonderful, maddening, infinitely complex world that we call home. 

A Charan Singh initiate says that Gurinder Singh "is not who he is believed to be"

Yesterday Anise left a comment on a churchless blog post from 2022, "Description of Gurinder Singh Dhillon 'secret' video."

Since the comment contains criticism of the guru who heads up Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based religious organization, and we here at Church of the Churchless absolutely love heretics (more heretic'y, the better), I'm sharing the comment below in order to bring it to the attention of more people. 

Enjoy. I've added a few definitions [in brackets] of Indian words that won't be familiar to many people. 

Deeply grateful to have found this blog...

My beloved Guru, Maharaj Charan Singh Ji, initiated me in 1988 at the tender age of 20. A guru who had magnificent presence and radiated Love. What a smile…! I fell in love with him as a 2 year old and it stayed like that until the end. Wherever he went, he left behind only humility, grace and bliss.

In 1982 we went to see him in Durban, South Africa, as a family who lived 180 km away. At tea-time on one of the days, I was in the tent when he came in. My eyes were glued to him, mesmerized as he moved slowly among the people, looking rather shy. Brilliant, but shy. I could not love more than what I felt I loved at that time.

He radiated something.... unnameable. So soft spoken and always kind. Rarely did he have to talk seriously when answering questions on the tapes, and even then, he was always kind.

But that was then. Where am I now?

Broken hearted, disillusioned, self-examining till the cows don't want to come home anymore ...for the past 18 years. After discovering this blog today, I feel a ton lighter!

I went to see Babaji [Gurinder Singh Dhillon, successor to Charan Singh Grewal] in Spain in 2006. Hoping that someone else who also attended his long weekend in Malaga at that time, reads this and can share what they experienced. I need to know if anyone else saw what I saw.

For me, this is what happened: He arrived a good hour or two late, came in walking extremely fast, looking extremely angry. In fact, my biggest take away from the 3 days, is that the corners of his mouth turned down throughout the whole time he was on the dais. It was crazy-strange and it freaked me out badly.

(Excuse the down to earth language, but even as a language teacher, I cannot find a more formal synonym, that does it justice.) I found it deeply disconcerting, and I still do. His mouth was the opposite of a smile. Honestly, it was like that most of the time: he looked angry. It was disturbing. Did anyone else notice anything similar?

When he started talking, he was very upset. Controlled, but really angry. (My thoughts were: I grew up understanding that anger is one of the 5 big tools of the mind...?? Something is not right.) I don’t remember his exact words, but he told us very angrily that the sangat is unorganized and that they should have controlled the traffic from the airport better, because it caused him delay!

Good grief?! This is the guru? This was where the first chord struck false. It hurt.

The second was when I discovered (through considering putting in an application for work at the Dera’s school) that said school prides themselves in their special subject: AI.

You may call me a traditionalist/naturalist/old fashioned teacher, but my entire body experienced a shockwave when I read this fact. Of course, then my wonderfully creative mind indulged itself into turning the whole thing around which caused me to introspect myself into a state of near depression.

Yes, maybe there is wrong with me, but I must be true to who I was made to be with the mind I was given. Have to live truth from the heart, head and gut, and therefore I now accept that, not with all the willpower in the world, could I rejoice in the arrival of AI. I probably see differently than most here. I am not here to convince anyone of anything. It just feels very wrong to me. Off.

Then, in 2015, I saw him in Johannesburg. There was an incident that I would never forget and once again, I ask if anyone else attended and can remember it? There was a moment between a person who just finished getting his/her answer to a question and the next person being ready to ask theirs, when he broke the silence and said the strangest thing.

I do not remember his exact words, but it was something like: ''Doesn't anyone have a question about sex? We are so shy to ask about this normal bodily function but in this day and age....'' What followed was just this thick silence from the audience that hung in the air. It felt very inappropriate. Naturally, no sexual questions were asked even after his prompting.

Around 2017, one Sunday, a speaker sevadar [volunteer] clearly said that Babaji said: 'If you haven't gone within yet, you are wasting your time.' I was horrified. I am not taking it out of context. Those days we were still allowed to have tea after satsang [meeting] and this was discussed between myself and 3 or 4 others sitting at the same table.

The next time that Gordon, the country’s representative was available after satsang, I went to ask him if what the speaker said is true. If GSD said this. His answer was that the speaker is responsible for what they say and that is how we should take it. This was the fourth. It goes against everything that every Radha Soami master has ever said.

The fifth one came like a dagger with the pandemic. We all have our own views; please understand that this is not meant to upset or hurt anyone, and I deeply respect everyone's right to believe as they see fit, but to me, it honestly stank that he has/had ties with the pharmaceutical industry. The reader may have totally different health views, which I respect highly.

However, it went completely against my grain that he advocated for and mandated a therapy that was untested, for a disease with a 99% survival rate. Pregnant woman not excluded. In many countries, children too. I felt that he was more than bowing down to negative forces and that he should not be so deeply involved in these things. The double whammy was learning about his fortune and the court case against him. Something is very wrong.

My biggest struggle is the fact that I just cannot take to him. I have tried again and again. I strongly feel he is not who he is believed to be. Something went very wrong.

More arguments for determinism and against free will

It was akin to waiting to open a present until the actual day of my birthday arrived. I'd noticed that one of the final chapters in Brian Klaas' book, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters, was titled "Could It Be Otherwise?"

An apt title, since after taking a peek at the chapter, I saw that it was about free will, one of my favorite subjects. I was tempted to skip ahead and read that chapter, but for whatever reason (it sure wasn't free will), I decided to read the book straight through, as I'd been doing.

Today I finished most of that chapter. It was as good as I expected. Klaas doesn't mention Robert Sapolsky and his recent book about the illusion of free will, Determined. Since Fluke was published in 2024, and books take a while to be published after being written, I'm pretty sure Klaas' ideas are independent of Sapolsky's.

Great minds think alike, is the apt, albeit clichéd, notion that comes to mind. Here's some passages by Klaas about determinism.

But if the world is fully deterministic -- meaning that everything that happens is completely caused by what happened previously -- then where does it end? What happened this instant was determined by what happened an instant earlier. 

Today was determined by yesterday. What happened on May 7, 1642, was determined by what happened on May 6, 1642, and that was determined by what happened on May 5, 1642, on and on and on.

Eventually, the stunning logical conclusion of a deterministic universe is that everything that happens was fully determined by the initial conditions and the laws of physics all the way back to the very beginning of the universe. 

The exact state of particles in the instant after the big bang, 13.7 billion years ago, determined the state of the universe in the next instant, which determined what happened in the next instant, on and on, endlessly, until the present moment.

If causes and effects are fully determined in an unbroken chain of events, that means that if you brushed your teeth at 8:07 this morning or if your dog barked after seeing a squirrel in the yard, then that was fully and irrevocably determined by the initial conditions of the universe 13.7 billion years ago during the big bang.

Beautifully said. Klaas discusses objections to this deterministic viewpoint, showing how each objection fails to make sense. For example, he points out that in no way is determinism at odds with change. Determinism is what makes things change: you and me, ocean temperatures, dogs and cats, everything.

Determinism says that only one outcome is possible given the exact state of the world at the time of the attempt... but that doesn't negate the value in speculating as to what might have happened if the other world had come to pass.

For a determinist, then, examining that which is impossible is nonetheless valuable. We understand our world better when we do something that no other species can do so effectively -- explore that profound question "What if?"

...This is a common mistake people make when first encountering determinism, conflating the notion of things being casually determined with things being static. Determinism claims that the interlocking pattern of causes and effects is fixed and inevitable, but that doesn't mean that your nature or your behavior is fixed. 

If you, a smoker, watch a documentary that shows images of lungs riddled by cancer, you may decide to stop smoking. That fits perfectly with deterministic thinking, which would explain that the complex chain of causes and effects in the past led inexorably to the moment in which you watched that documentary.

Brian Klaas' arguments against free will are equally persuasive. Here's some passages that build on his discussion of determinism.

The experience of free will is universal. Humans can't escape certain sensations no matter how hard we try. But when you check those sensations a bit more carefully, the certainty begins to flake away. When I consider where "I" am -- in a metaphysical rather than a geographic sense -- it's logically clear to me that I am, quite clearly, somewhere inside my body.

But if my entire body is "me," then getting a haircut or cutting my fingernails would change something fundamental about who I am, and that seems like a strange way of viewing ourselves.

Instead, the sensation of existence, of navigating the world, makes me feel that the real "me" is lurking somewhere behind my eyes, as though everything from my limbs to my liver is simply a minion of Brian HQ, with the real "me" as a disembodied CEO perched somewhere within my brain toward the front of my skull.

...It reflects our desire to imagine an eternal executive -- a deciding soul -- within each of us, an irreducible essence who controls everything, freely thinking, freely choosing.

...Our feeling of possessing libertarian free will is central to the experience of being human. It leads to a common argument: we feel as if we have free will, therefore we must. This is terrible logic. Perceptions do not make reality. 

To us, the earth doesn't "feel" like a giant round ball hurtling through space around a burning ball of gas that allows us to live in its warmth, but it is. As we've seen with the Fitness Beats Truth theorem, our brains have repeatedly evolved to deceive us.

The magician produced by our minds is a master of illusions. What we feel is not what there is. The laws of physics don't care about your feelings.

The spiritual side of science

It seemed kind of obvious, but finally a study has shown that what I've always thought was true, seemingly is: scientific knowledge can produce the same feelings of awe at our place in the cosmos as spiritual experiences can.

So it isn't necessary to embrace religion in order to have a sense of being connected to something greater than ourselves. Exposing yourself to the truths of science can do this, a not-so-minor benefit being that instead of relying on religious fantasies, you're relying on scientific facts.

Below I've copied in an article in the March 2, 2024 issue of New Scientist, "The spiritual side of science" by David Robson. He points toward something that is often ignored or forgotten: gaining knowledge is an experience that changes the brain/mind, just as praying or meditating is an experience that changes the brain/mind.

Some religious people denigrate scientific learning as not being truly "spiritual" or transformative. Actually, it is. I find that the books about science that I read are just as inspiring as the books about spirituality that I read. There's just as much Wow! in what science has learned about reality as there is in tales of how someone achieved enlightenment. 

Here's what Robson wrote:

My personal “road to Damascus” moment came through my TV set. I was 9 years old, and only mildly interested in science, when I caught a repeat of David Attenborough’s Life on Earth, explaining the basics of evolutionary theory. Perhaps it was the sheer timescales involved, but I remember feeling physically dizzy as my mind slowly expanded to encompass these new ideas.

Should we describe these kinds of epiphanies – born from science, rather than religion – as spiritual experiences? That is the conclusion of a new paper from Jesse Preston at the University of Warwick, UK, and her colleagues.

The idea isn’t entirely new. “When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual,” wrote Carl Sagan. But there hadn’t been any experimental work exploring the idea until now.

Preston’s team was inspired by research linking religious belief to better psychological well-being. One potential mechanism for this is through the emotions that spiritual experiencescan inspire: awe, a sense of meaning and the feeling of connection to others, all of which can help to combat stress. It would be unfortunate if atheists and agnostics were excluded from these benefits. Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

The researchers’ first step was to develop a psychological scale that examines the emotions elicited by a greater understanding of the physical world. This was done by asking people to rate their agreement with statements such as “there is an order to science that transcends human thinking”. They also included a question on “peak” experiences, those characterised by a state of euphoria – like the rapture I felt while watching Life on Earth.

Testing the resulting scale on 500 people, the researchers showed “spirituality of science” scores to be distinct from related measures, like a general belief in science as a means of rational inquiry. This suggests that the scale could capture the specific emotions otherwise associated with religion.

In a further 526 participants, they then proved it could uniquely predict a range of well-being measures. People with higher scores had higher life satisfaction. This, the researchers argue, suggests that finding spirituality in science can provide the “existential support” typically experienced by religious believers.

I hope this work opens the door to many more investigations. Some studies have hinted that religiosity can lead to better physical health, and I would be interested to see if the spirituality of science can do the same. In the meantime, I would love to hear more about your own experiences – those moments when new knowledge of yourself or nature blew your mind. Drop me a line on X @d_a_robson.

The smallest things we do can have huge effects

I don't believe in God. I do believe in the universe. Because it is clearly objectively real, and there's no evidence that God exists as anything other than subjective ideas in human minds.

So I love it when the universe appears to have a message for me. I emphasized appears, since the message I got today from the universe is solely mine. Maybe it's just a coincidence that two authors I've read recently had similar things to say.

No matter. I'm merely sharing what each of them said, which makes a lot of sense to me.

First, I get regular emails from Joan Tollifson where she communicates a fresh essay in line with her particular view of Zen, Buddhism, and spirituality in general. I've become a big fan of Tollifson after reading her book, Nothing to Grasp. 

(I've written several blog posts about the book.)

I liked her newest essay, "The freedom to be exactly as you are," so much, I've included the whole thing as a continuation to this post. Just click on the continuation link and you can read it. Here's an excerpt that reminds me a lot of how Robert Sapolsky describes the illusion of free will in his book, Determined.

In the conceptual picture of cause and effect, it certainly appears that people make things happen. We can seemingly control some things, such as opening and closing our hand, but not other things, such as the functioning of our spleen. These relative differences cannot be denied. We are conditioned to believe in free will and in our responsibility to accomplish great things, be a good person, do our duty, and so on. We habitually judge ourselves and others, compare ourselves to others, and think that we (and others) should be better, stronger, smarter, wiser, more compassionate, more successful, more attractive, more something than we are.

But we don’t actually get to choose the role we are playing in the movie of waking life. No one can simply “decide” to be Martin Luther King or Ramana Maharshi, or to not be Adolph Hitler or Pol Pot if that is the part we’ve been given. Even if we seemingly “choose” to change such things as our name, gender, career, hairstyle, religious affiliation, or anything else, each of these “choices” is a choiceless movement of life itself. Every apparent individual is the result of infinite causes and conditions—the whole universe is moving as each one of us and as everything that happens, and no form ever actually persists for more than an instant. You are not the same as you were when you began reading this article—the whole universe has shifted.

Second, Brian Klaas has written a book, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters, that has nothing to do with Zen or Buddhism, from what I can tell after reading about half of it. Yet these excerpts are very much in line with what Tollifson had to say above. They just approach the subject differently.

(Here's a link about how different sperm from the same man differ a lot, if you don't believe what Klaas says about this.)

Motivational posters tell you that if you set your mind to it, you can change the world. I've got some good news for you: you already have. Congratulations! You're changing it right now because your brain is adjusting slightly just by reading the words I've written for you. If you hadn't read this sentence, the world would be different.

I mean that literally. Your neural networks have now been altered, and it will -- in the most imperceptible, minute way -- adjust your behavior slightly over the remainder of your lifetime. Who knows what the ripple effects will be. But in an intertwined system, nothing is meaningless. Everything matters. 

You may think this all sounds a bit trivial or abstract, but consider this: You might decide, or you have already decided, to bring some new humans into the world. Without getting into graphic detail, the precise moment that a baby is conceived is one of the most contingent aspects of our existence. On the day it happens, change any detail -- no matter how insignificant -- and you end up with a different child.

Suddenly, you have a daughter instead of a son, or vice versa -- or just a different son or daughter. Siblings often diverge in unexpected ways, so any change in who is born will radically change your life -- and the lives of countless others.

But it's not just the one day that a child is conceived that matters. Instead, amplify that contingency by every moment of your life. Each detail in the entire chain-link architecture of your lifetime had to be exactly as it was for the exact child who was born to be born. That's true for you, for me, for everyone.

Yet again, the motivational posters have sold you short. "You're one in a million!" they shout at you with uplifting glee. Try one in a hundred million, because that's how many competitors, on average, your single-celled predecessor outswam to successfully become half of yourself. 

You matter. That's not self-help advice. It's scientific truth. If someone else had been born instead of you -- the unborn ghost whom you outcompeted in the existence sweepstakes -- countless other people's lives would be profoundly different, so our world would be different, too. The ripples of life spread out, in unexpected ways, for eternity.

Click below for the entire Tollifson essay.

 

Dehabituation is my new spiritual goal (until another comes along)

At the age of 75, after about sixty years of trying to figure out the Meaning of It All (I started that quest around the age of 16, when I struggled to comprehend the lyrics of early Bob Dylan songs), when I find a fresh idea to explore, it feels great.

That feeling, by the way, is directly linked to the newest fresh idea: habituation, and its antidote, dehabituation. 

I've got an article in the March 2, 2024 issue of New Scientist to thank for cluing me in to those words. I'd been vaguely familiar with the notion of habituation, but I hadn't realized the implications of this for those of us engaged in the possibly quixotic quest to fathom the Meaning of It All.

The article, "How to see things in a new light," is an interview by Alison Flood of Tali Sharot, one of the authors of Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There. Naturally I've ordered the book.

That title conjures up visions of mindfulness for me, which is all about non-judgmental present moment awareness. One of the benefits of mindfulness is that it makes routine activities feel less routine by our attention being directed to what is actually happening, say, when we wash the dishes, as opposed to what appears to be happening when we're doing this as a matter of routine.

Sam Harris gets at that in his guided meditations on the Waking Up app when he asks the meditator to be aware of their body "as a cloud of sensations." Meaning, and this works best with eyes closed, feeling the tingling, itching, aching, heaviness, etc. of various parts of the body, rather than merely remembering that we're a body with a head, two arms, two legs, a trunk, and such.

By doing that, we're dehabituating our sense of ourselves as a body. Here's how the article describes habituation in the opening paragraphs. 

Imagine jumping into a swimming pool. It’s cold, right? But then, a few minutes later, you are used to the temperature. Or how about walking into a room filled with cigarette smoke. It stinks, but give it a while and you don’t notice it any more.

This is habituation – the brain’s ability to stop paying attention to certain things. It doesn’t only apply to sensory perceptions. It is also why new clothes or a new home lose their shine over time. And it doesn’t only apply to good things: it can explain why people stay in bad relationships, why we don’t raise an eyebrow at the fact that most CEOs are male and why we stop noticing the smog engulfing our cities.

Habituation is a fundamental neurological process vital to our evolution, helping us to quickly adapt to our environments so we are ready for the stuff that is new and potentially beneficial or the hazards that may be threatening. But there are benefits to seeing the things we are used to in a fresh light or – as Tali Sharot and Cass R. Sunstein put it in their book Look Again: The power of noticing what was always there – “dishabituating”.

Sharot, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London, tells New Scientist why learning how to dishabituate can improve our happiness, increase our awareness of misinformation and even help us fight climate change.

I've always wondered how it is that Donald Trump is so adept at getting a large share of the American people to believe his lies about the 2020 election being stolen from him, how his four criminal indictments are a plot to deny him reelection to the presidency, that he's a great businessman, and so many other falsehoods.

Sharot gives a persuasive answer.

There’s a well-known effect in psychology called the illusory truth effect, which is basically that when you hear something more than once, you’re more likely to believe it. One of the reasons for this is that when the brain encounters anything again, it responds to it less. The first time you hear a piece of information, you’re really processing it – say, “a shrimp’s heart is in its head”.

When you hear it for the first time, you’re really thinking about the sentence, you’re imagining the heart in the head. But the second time I say it, your brain doesn’t have to process it any more and so it’s not responding to it. It is familiar, and we are accustomed to the idea that if something is familiar, it is probably true.

We usually have a surprise signal in our brain that indicates something is not true. But if that surprise signal is reduced or eliminated, and it could be only because we’ve heard something more than once, then we are not attuned to look at things carefully and be suspicious of their validity.

Trump is skilled at repeating his lies over, and over, and over, and over. He knows, or at least intuits, that the more often a lie is heard, the more likely it will be believed. As Sharot says above, "we are accustomed to the idea that if something is familiar, it is probably true."

Religious speakers do the same thing. Often the same message is hammered home at every meeting of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, or other religions. It doesn't take long before most of those who hear the message will take it as gospel, literally. 

Any doubts about the truthfulness of their religion's teachings tend to be submerged beneath a sea of habituation. But there's an antidote. Sharot says:

You can dishabituate yourself by taking yourself out of an environment, because when you come back you’re going to see it with fresh eyes, whether it’s a few days away from home, making changes to your routine, trying a new skill.

I have begun taking courses in a field different from my own. I work on different projects in different industries and on different topics. By diversifying your life, you are more likely to dishabituate, which means learning new things, but also seeing the things that are already there in a new way. Basically, any breaks that we have from people, from environments, will cause us to dishabituate.

Some people only read things that they already agree with. In fundamentalist Islam, the Koran is the only book that needs to be deeply understood. It's no wonder that Islam produces so many dangerous fanatics. They are far removed from dishabituation.

I'm grateful that for a variety of reasons, I was able to look upon the guru-centered Eastern religion I embraced for thirty-five years in a new light.

Getting divorced and remarried to a woman who had different spiritual beliefs helped. So did writing several books that gave me fresh philosophical perspectives. And during those thirty-five years I studied other approaches to the Meaning of It All, such as Buddhism and Taoism, along with physics and neuroscience.

I guess the lesson is to always try to look outside the belief-boxes we find ourselves in. This can be difficult to do, since our beliefs can come to seem so comfortable, we don't want to give them up. That's the nature of habituation. Such is fine up to a point. After that, dehabituation is called for.

How Radha Soami Satsang Beas is similar to Christian dogmatism

I was almost going to skip the book review section in the March 11, 2024 issue of The New Yorker. I could see that it discussed books about Genesis, and I find the Bible about as interesting as hockey. Namely, not at all.

But after deciding to see what the review had to say about Marilynne Robinson's writings on Genesis and other parts of the Bible, which are prolific, I began to see parallels between Christian dogmatism and the India-based group headed up by a guru that I was a member of for 35 years -- Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

That made things more interesting for me. So here's some excerpts from "Had to Happen" (title in the print edition) by James Woods, along with how I see the RSSB connection.

Marked souls: Woods says...

Calvin (1509-64) was a French Protestant Reformer, who became a kind of theocratic boss of Geneva. Robinson has written powerfully in defense of Calvin and of the lively Puritanism that his movement birthed, not least in America.

She tends to pass over, as she does in that description of Lincoln’s theology, Calvin’s signature terror—that the divine intention of which Robinson speaks was, for Calvin, an ordained system of doom and election. Calvin believed that God had chosen for each of us, before our births, our ultimate fates.

A fortunate few (starting, of course, with Calvin’s own lucky congregation) will go upstairs, to reside with the Lord; a much larger number, the plebeian damned, will go downstairs, condemned to eternal Hell. And there is nothing any of us can do about it.

This is almost exactly what RSSB teaches. The guru is believed to come for "marked souls." These are people who supposedly did not want to enter the physical realm of creation when God created our universe and it needed to be populated with souls. 

So they are fated to return to heaven, which RSSB calls Sach Khand. Non-marked souls are out of luck. There's a video of the guru who initiated me, Charan Singh, nodding his head to either the left or right as a long line of would-be initiates passes in front of him. The guru is believed to be able to discern the marked souls, who get approved for initiation.

Too bad for the non-marked souls. They shouldn't have happily descended into this realm of reality, goes the RSSB dogma.

Sinful beings. Woods says...

Like many Christians, Robinson sees Genesis, and, by extension, the Bible, as a tale of protected errancy. We sinfully swerved away from God’s “first intention,” and the writers of Genesis are extremely interested in all our subsequent avarice, aggression, rebelliousness, and sexual deviancy.

In order to be free and autonomous beings, we had to be allowed by God to be capable of such errancy. But we are ultimately protected by “the faith that He has a greater, embracing intention that cannot fail.”

Again, very similar to the RSSB teachings, which inveigh against the Five Deadly Foes (if I recall the name correctly): lust, anger, greed, attachment, egotism. These weaknesses, along with our other missteps, are believed to keep us trapped in the physical realm through the inexorable law of karma.

Karma supposedly begins with a freely willed action. That action, or cause, produces various effects, each of which create more karma. And so it goes, karma piling up, until the pristine nature of the soul is buried under a big stinking pile of karmic causes and effects. 

Just as Jesus was sent by God to be a sacrificial lamb who takes upon himself the sins of humankind, RSSB teaches that the guru has the power to wash away our karmic burden -- in part by taking it upon his own being, in part by converting a karmic sword thrust into a pinprick, as the RSSB gurus are fond of saying.

Human fictions not God's truth. Woods says...

It is, in truth, very hard to remember, if one has been brought up in a religious tradition of any kind, that the God of the Hebrew Bible is not God himself but a collection of human approximations and reckonings and inspired fictions.

I have spent much of my life hating the God who replies to Job, the God who bullies and blusters out of the whirlwind, when calm rationality should remind me that this God speaks words written by a human or group of humans.

From a literary point of view, it makes no more sense to hate this God than to hate King Lear. In both cases, human beings, writing with an ardor and an inspiration that indeed seem sacred, went to the edge of the knowable.

And, in both cases, these writers use words and characters to bring back the great treasures of their literary pilgrimages. It is an extraordinary thing that a human being saw fit to describe the creation of the world from the point of view of God himself. I share Robinson’s reverence for the endeavor. But the tale is itself a creation.

In Christianity, as in RSSB, there are dogmatists who believe that the religion's writings come straight from God, and there are pragmatists who believe that the religion's holy books were written by fallible humans.

Having written a book published by RSSB myself (Life is Fair), I'm firmly in the pragmatist camp. After all, I know that I didn't take God's dictation. I researched and wrote the book on my own, which then benefitted from the suggestions of other people who read and commented on my drafts. 

Yet many, if not most, RSSB initiates believe that the books written by the organization's gurus are divinely inspired, since the RSSB guru is considered to be God in Human Form. I deeply doubt this is true.

However, just as Christian dogmatists view every word in the Bible as reflecting a message from God, RSSB dogmatists do the same thing, obsessing over language in books written by the gurus to be certain that they're correctly following the teachings and thus on their way back to God. 

Me, I no longer believe in any religion. And that's a huge relief. It enables me to simply live my life without worrying about whether I'm endangering my salvation by doing something wrong.

I can't stop seeing religious belief as a placebo

So, I'm reading along this morning in David Robson's book, The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change the World, enjoying the "Faster, Stronger, Fitter" chapter, which is about athletic performance, not anything spiritual, and I come to a passage about how a bicycle racer benefitted from an injection of sugar water, which got me to thinking about how religious belief also is a placebo.

(I've boldfaced the concluding sentence that struck me most strongly.)

This new theory of exhaustion, one that rightly places the brain as controller of what the body can do, helps us to understand the influences of placebo treatments in sport. If we consider Virenque's amazing time trial in the 1997 Tour de France, the injection of the "magic potion" increased his perception of what he could achieve.

His brain calculated that it could devote more of the body's resources to the race without risking injury, allowing his muscles to work harder on the track. The fact that it was only sugar water didn't matter: because of its effects on the prediction machine, the injection still increased the amount of energy that Virenque was able to expend.

We may describe the substance as "inert," but in terms of its effects on performance, it was anything but. Virenque's belief and the sense of ritual accompanying the injection imbued the substance with power. 

I only have direct experience of two religious systems, Catholicism (which I left behind as a child after First Communion) and Radha Soami Satsang Beas (an India-based faith headed up by a guru that I embraced for 35 years).

In my brief exposure to Catholicism, I learned that after you confess your sins to a priest -- I was so young, the only sin I could come up with was not going to church very often -- you're told how many Our  Father and Hail Mary prayers to recite, and bingo, your sin has been absolved. At least that's my understanding. 

Since I deeply doubt that prayers do anything for the person praying, given that God almost certainly doesn't exist, those prayers are a religious placebo. They make someone feel better without having any active ingredient in them. 

With Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a new disciple is given Five Holy Names to repeat in an initiation ceremony. Those names are to be kept secret, though they're the same for all initiates. They're believed to be imbued with the guru's power, a big deal, since the guru is considered to be God in Human Form.

In 1970, when I was going to RSSB meetings in preparation for applying for initiation, I recall a man in the Palo Alto group (his name might be Milton Monasch) telling a story about the power of the Five Holy Names.

He said that he was in a business meeting that wasn't going very well. Some sort of contract negotiation was being discussed, as I recall. The man said that he got up from the table, walked over to a window, and started to repeat the Five Holy Names, which serve as a mantra. 

As soon as he sat down again, the negotiation turned the way he wanted it to. Monasch, or whatever his name was, ascribed this to the Five Holy Names. 

Well, obviously there's no way to prove that. It could have been that his getting up caused a pause in the negotiation, and this allowed the side he was dealing with to reconsider the wisdom of their current position.

That's much more likely than the RSSB guru (God in Human Form) controlling the minds of the people Monasch was working out a contract with, making them decide to take a position more advantageous for Monasch because he repeated the Five Holy Names.

This would be as crazy as God determining the outcome of a football game, even though players on both sides prayed for victory. Just really hard for me to believe that God intervenes in sporting events. Or in contract negotiations. 

But people who believe in religious rituals feel a power within them, just as the Tour de France rider felt power in the sugar water he was given that improved his performance. Such is the power of placebos. It's all in the mind, but the mind is a powerful force.

Interesting theory of quantum weirdness (if you're into this sort of stuff)

I felt a need to add the parentheses in the title of this post, because I realize that I'm more interested in how the quantum realm works than most people are.  

So if you read on, be warned that while I find this theory tantalizing, because it deals with the "measurement problem" in quantum mechanics in a creative fashion, you might find this to be the most deadly boring blog post in the history of humankind.

(Hey, if so, at least I've accomplished something rare.)

In the February 3, 2024 issue of New Scientist, or as folks in Great Britain prefer to say, 3 February 2024, there's an article by physicist Tom Rivlin, "Where Quantum Weirdness Hides." The subtitle:

Our world emerges from clouds of quantum possibilities, but where do the other outcomes go? Maybe they are hiding in the cracks of reality.

Well, that encouraged me to read the article, much of which was difficult for me to understand. So I'm going to focus on the parts of the piece that were most interesting and comprehensible to me. And I hope, to you. Here's how Rivlin describes the measurement mystery.

At a fundamental level, the world lives by the rules of quantum mechanics. The theory was first developed in the early 1900s to explain why things like light and matter sometimes behave as waves and sometimes particles. Then, in 1926, Erwin Schrödinger devised a way to treat them as both, in a mathematical term called a wave function.

Quantum theory describes the microscopic world with unprecedented accuracy. But its laws are strange: they allow a particle to exist in multiple places at once, for instance. We never see these odd effects in the classical, everyday world. So, what is happening?

When physicists considered this question over the years, they often thought about measurements. No matter how many places an electron was in before being detected, once it is measured, we only ever see it in one place. Somehow, the act of measurement snaps the wave-like cloud of possibilities into a point-like reality with a defined position.

This has been shown time and again in experiments. The process seems to be random and instantaneous, but physicists like me aren’t completely satisfied with that, since nothing else acts this way.

One approach to resolving the measurement problem, or mystery, is that when a measurement is made, consciousness somehow collapses the many possibilities in the wave function into a single actuality. New Age types love this conception, since they construe it as "we humans create reality." 

That doesn't make sense, though. Following the big bang, there's no way any form of consciousness as we know it could have existed for a long time. Yet stars and galaxies formed in accord with the laws of physics, which are founded on quantum mechanics at the most elemental level. 

And if a machine measures a quantum phenomenon, is this really undetermined until a conscious being is aware of the measurement? That doesn't make sense either.

Another popular way of dealing with the measurement problem is that actually there isn't any collapse of the wave function when a quantum entity is measured. Instead, all possibilities exist in a rapidly expanding, near infinite collection of branching realities.

This is called the Many Worlds hypothesis, in which we are only aware of a single outcome, while each of the other possibilities exist in other realms of reality. Such is clean and simple, but it seems highly unlikely (unless you're a professional physicist who likes the elegance of the hypothesis).

Then there's the approach put forward by Rivlin and his colleagues. He observes:

To make things more complicated, it has been clear since experiments in the 1970s that measurements don’t just happen on lab benches. Even stray air molecules hitting electrons can “measure” them and destroy their quantumness.

We call this process decoherence, and it explains why we don’t see quantum effects at everyday scales: once something gets big enough, there are too many other objects flying around that can “measure” it and upset its delicate quantum properties. But the same question still applies: how precisely does this process happen?

Naturally Rivlin is going to answer his own question.  I like his approach. It doesn't elevate consciousness into some sort of quantum measurement Must Have, nor does it posit near-infinities of Many Worlds that come into being every time a measurement occurs. 

His theory is called MEH: the measurement equilibration hypothesis. As Rivlin says elsewhere in the article, "the mathematics behind this process is complicated." Thankfully, when described in words, MEH is quite understandable.

MEH describes measurement as a process where a quantum system interacts with a measuring device. A “device” could be anything that interacts with the quantum object, not just what we would typically think of as a measuring device.

This spreads information into the device, until an equilibrium of information is reached between the system and the device. The bigger the device, the more places there are for the quantum information to hide, making it harder to get that information back – but never impossible.

How would this work in practice? Let’s take the simple example of a particle in a cloud of many different locations at once. Before a detector measures that particle’s position, there is information about all of the potential places it could have been detected.

When the detector comes into contact with the particle, these pieces of information mix into the particles of the detector. We think this spreading process somehow “broadcasts” information from the system, making the information about its classical position available to read but its “two-places-at-once” information harder to spot.

Rivlin discusses some philosophical implications of the theory.

So far, we have remained agnostic about what this idea means for any of the philosophical interpretations of quantum mechanics. But our ideas do brush up against these concepts. For instance, MEH explains what happens to all the measurement outcomes you don’t see – the other “worlds” of the many-worlds idea.

They are all still here in our world; we just can’t control the quantum system finely enough to observe them. “If we could grab hold of every single electron and control them in whatever manner we wanted, we wouldn’t be asking ourselves why the particle went left or right,” says Lock. “The idea of measurement becomes moot.”

This would remove much of the supposed mystique from wave function collapse, since measurement only seems mysterious when we overlook just how difficult it is in practice. As Lock puts it, it is about asking: “How do I, an inaccurate, ape-sized lump-thing, try to access something as finely detailed as the spin of an electron?”

It would also rule out the idea that collapse is a physical process that deletes information, and that there is some harsh transition between classical and quantum realities. “Nobody forces you to make the classical world different from the quantum one,” says Schmiedmayer. “All you can say is that, in the classical world, the complexity is too big. I just can’t see the quantum part.”

Well, if you've read this blog post this far, to the end, at the least you've got some ideas to share next time you're at a party and someone you really don't want to talk to tries to engage you in conversation. Tell them, "I'm so glad you're here; I've been wanting to discuss a new theory of how quantum measurements occur." 

(This should get rid of them almost right away. Unless they turn out to be a physicist. Then you have a problem.)

Pain is a great teacher, though I'd prefer a more pleasant instructor

Back in 2020 was when my sciatica pain started. I don't know why. Often health problems appear mysteriously. Which would be fine if they disappeared just as mysteriously. 

But in my case, the extreme pain I had early on, where I'd shed tears uncontrollably while walking the dog or mowing the lawn if I was having an especially bad day, eventually abated. Maybe from time. Maybe from the physical therapy exercises I was given. Who knows?

For the next three years, 2021-23, my right leg always had some discomfort. It was manageable, though. I didn't need pain relievers. I was able to do whatever I wanted, albeit with some pain if it involved standing or moving for more than a few minutes. 

Then things changed last December. The locus of the pain shifted from my leg to my leg plus my hip area and part of my butt. It also got more intense. So my primary care provider referred me for more physical therapy. 

That helped for a while. Until it didn't. Last Saturday I finally got a lumbar MRI after I met the criteria for my MedAdvantage insurance: got an X-ray, tried physical therapy, pain won't go away with medication or other means.

Now I'm in an awkward waiting period. The MRI result, which had a lot of "extreme" words in the report (age-related spinal degeneration, basically), opened the door to me getting referrals to two Pain and Spine clinics here in Salem, Oregon.

They likely will be able to help me. Cortisone injections, maybe. Surgery as a last resort. I'm sure they have other options that are better than what I'd doing now. That's mainly alternating Tylenol and Advil every four hours throughout the day, exercising, and simply dealing with the pain as best I can.

This morning it was excruciating, because sleeping causes my nerves and muscles to tighten up, making it extremely difficult to get out of bed when I have to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, or upon waking up in the morning.

That gets me to the philosophical part of this blog post. 

I've tried thinking positively, visualizing myself as I'm getting ready for bed with manageable pain in the morning. That's better than thinking gloomingly, which creates more tension in me, something I don't need.

I've tried repeating a mantra, the Buddhist Namu Amida Butsu being a favorite. This also helps, yet it seems artificial to me, being a distraction or barrier from what my mind would be doing absent the mantra. 

Then there's simply being in the present moment. That's my go-to approach when the pain is so great, my attention narrows to doing Just One Thing. That's how I picture the situation: Just One Thing, followed by Just One Thing, followed by Just One Thing.

Last night I was sleeping soundly until I awoke around 5 am. I groggily realized that I didn't feel any pain. My semi-awake brain thought, "Great, your sciatica is better; you won't have much of a problem getting up to go to the bathroom."

Until I moved. A little. Which hurt a lot. So much so, I cried out in pain. Not enough to wake my wife, thankfully, who sleeps in another part of our house. That cry was repeated several more times as I struggled to move my right leg, which was locked in an excruciating sciatica death grip.

All I could do was Just One Thing. Eventually I was able to swing my legs over the side of the bed and stand up. Just One Thing. Then I got a crutch that I keep next to the bed for nights when it's extremely painful to walk into the bathroom. Just One Thing. I shuffled along, one crutch-assisted step at a time. Just One Thing.

I couldn't handle the entire situation, which seemed like a nightmare if I let my mind drift in that direction. However, I could do Just One Thing, followed by the next Just One Thing. It took quite a while, but eventually I was able to get back into bed and fall asleep again. Just One Thing.

There's a lesson here. Maybe just for me. Maybe for others also. 

When things are going well, or at least not too badly, it's easy to believe that we've got life figured out. Our coping mechanisms work for us. Existence is pleasant enough, and we can handle the rough spots that pop up. 

But when we're pushed to a limit, beyond what we're used to handling, that's when we might realize the limitation of our usual manner of going about things. Such was the case for me, for sure. 

When excruciating sciatica pain comes over me, it washes away my customary positivity, my mantras, my meditation, my life lessons, my knowledge -- just about everything. What's left isn't really me. At least, not the me I ordinarily consider myself to be. 

What's there is what my body is doing and feeling. What's there is my consciousness, my awareness engaged in Just One Thing. Taking a step. Swallowing a pill. Going to the bathroom. Washing my hands. Always, Just One Thing.

And that, actually, is what's happening every moment of every day whether I'm feeling such pain. I'm always doing Just One Thing. I just don't realize it, because my attention can flow in many different directions. Intense pain narrows that focus. Pain screams, "Only me, only me!" 

I can't help but obey. Yet in the midst of that pain, I can still do Just One Thing in addition to feeling the pain. That's my reality at that moment. As I said, maybe at every moment, if I could just realize it.

A passage in the Preface of Joan Tollifson's book, Nothing to Grasp, says what I feel in painful moments.

Liberation is finding freedom in limitation and perfection in imperfection. It is the freedom to be exactly as we are. But what are we? What is real Here/Now? What is life all about? Who is reading these words? 

Is reading these words an individual choice, or is it the only possible activity of the whole universe at this moment, and is there a difference? 

Each of us controls almost nothing, but influences almost everything

Having devoted myself to watching the lengthy Oscars show this evening, which sucked up much of my time, I'm going to take a shortcut by revisiting a theme introduced in a previous blog post about Brian Klaas' book, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters.

As I recall saying before, what Klaas says is very much in line with Buddhist notions of emptiness and interdependence. In that worldview, entities, including us, are empty of inherent existence because nothing stands alone, a part unaffected by other parts of the cosmos.

Yet this isn't how most people view themselves. I recall the uproar in this country when Hillary Clinton said "It takes a village to raise a child." Many, especially conservatives, were outraged. Hey, they said, parents are totally capable of raising a child; that's their responsibility.

Not true. Children are affected by all kinds of other influences: teachers, other children, neighbors, shopkeepers, relatives, television programs, books, pets, toys -- the list goes on and on. And each of us is an influence on people we both know, and don't know.

Such is the way of the world: a web of relationships. There are various ways to look upon this fact.

On the positive side, none of us leads a solitary existence, as we're an integral aspect of something much greater than us. On the negative side, none of us can fully control what happens to us, as we're an integral aspect of something much greater than us.

Klaas writes:

However, no single locust can direct the swarm. An insect can't decide to move the swarm east or west because the outcome of any individual movement is unpredictable. As Scott Page rightly points out, each individual controls almost nothing, but influences almost everything. The same is true of us. 

Swarms and sandpits are useful analogies that help us understand why we're so often lulled into a false sense of security. We delude ourselves into believing we're in control, until we are, yet again, thwacked by a devastating crisis, such as a financial crash, a disruptive new technology, a terrorist attack, or a pandemic.

But rather than understanding those inevitable avalanches as the normal functioning of the system -- a sandpile existence working exactly as it's designed -- we mistakenly think of them as "shocks."

...Modern society is a complex system, seemingly stable, teetering on the edge of chaos -- until everything falls apart due to a small change, from the accidental to the infinitesimal. 

...Over the past several chapters, we've seen how an intertwined world means that everything matters, as little ripples reshape lives and upend societies. These ripples give rise to a world that is far more random and accidental than we tend to believe, undercutting the mantra that "everything happens for a reason."

...It all leads to a single, seemingly unsettling conclusion: we live in a world that is far more unstable and uncertain than we'd like to imagine.

Since I'm only about a third of the through Fluke, I'm interested in seeing what lessons Klaas draws about how we can best handle this inherent instability and uncertainty. We all need someone or something to lean on when times are difficult.

For some people, this is religion. For others, this is family and friends. For others, a cause deserving of devotion. There are many ways of seeking firm ground on which to stand. But at some point, it is virtually inevitable that personal or societal earthquakes will shake our foundations. 

Knowing that this is coming seemingly helps us prepare for the inevitable ripples that Klaas speaks of in the quotation above. Flowing with them sometimes is the best we can do.

Mass hysteria isn't all that different from religious groupthink

During the 35 years that I was a member of an India-based religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), one of the things that I liked most about that experience was how I felt like I was part of a giant family.

A family not in the usual sense, but in the sense of a group of people who had much in common, who shared a similar view of reality, who trusted each other, who helped each other, who looked up to a father figure -- the RSSB guru, which made us sort of like brothers and sisters.

All that felt good at the time. In retrospect, though, there were some downsides.

If someone strayed from the RSSB tenets, such as drinking a glass of wine at a party, there would be gossipy talk about this "sin" behind the person's back. Likewise, questioning the validity of the RSSB teachings was frowned upon. That was supposed to happen before someone was initiated into the RSSB fold, not afterward, as initiation was viewed as an unbreakable bond between the guru and disciple.

(Since reincarnation was assumed, the guru supposedly took it upon himself to shepherd the disciple back to God in a maximum of four lifetimes, less if the disciple was cooperative.)

So the flip side of a communal sense of belonging was an intolerance of thinking and behavior that deviated from the RSSB norm. This is a familiar characteristic of groups, since there has to be some fairly firm boundaries between what the group is and isn't, or the "group" fails to live up to its name, being merely a collection of individuals.

I got to pondering this while reading a chapter in David Robson's book, The Expectation Effect, called "The Origins of Mass Hysteria."

The chapter starts off with a description of how in May 2006 "Portugal was beset by mysterious outbreaks of illness." Only in teenagers, who experienced dizziness, breathing difficulties, and skin rashes. Three hundred students across the country were affected within a few days. No cause could be found, until:

Inquiries eventually revealed that a popular teen soap, Morangos com Acucar (Strawberries with sugar), was to blame. In the days before the first reported cases, the main characters on the show had been infected by a life-threatening virus that had led to very similar symptoms.

Somehow the "virus" had jumped from the small screen to a handful of viewers, creating real physical symptoms -- despite the fact that the illness in the program was totally fictional. These children had then passed it on to their classmates, leading the cases to multiply. Portuguese adults were unlikely to have been dedicated viewers of the melodrama, so they were less likely to develop the disease.

Scientists call this kind of outbreak, with no physical vector, a "mass psychogenic illness." (Whereas "psychosomatic" can refer to our mental state exacerbating existing symptoms, "psychogenic" means that the origin is purely psychological.)

Robson goes on to explain that "mirror neurons" in the brain enable us humans to internalize the physical and mental states of other people. If we see someone smiling, we feel happier. If we see someone frowning, we feel sadder. This doesn't have to happen consciously. 

Without our even noticing it, the presence of another person can therefore change our body as well as our mind. And these bodily effects apparently have a purpose -- they increase our understanding of what the other person is feeling.

Of course, most religious groups use rituals to foster a strong sense of commonality and shared purpose. When I went to India in 1977 to see my guru, Charan Singh, in person for the first (and only) time, it didn't take long into my two-week stay for me to feel like I was part of a community of kindred spirits.

When we ate in the dining hall, we all had much in common. When we performed volunteer work (seva), such as carrying sand on our heads in baskets to fill in ravines for an expansion of the spiritual community, we felt like members of a family, not strangers. When many thousands of people would gather for a discourse by the guru, all eyes were focused on him, leading to a shared experience.

All this felt magical. Those two weeks I spent in India were like none I'd experienced before, or since. The atmosphere of the Dera (how the spiritual community was called) seemed to be permeated by the guru's love and tenderness. So how could this be likened to a mass hysteria event?

Well, because as soon as I arrived at the Dera, I was influenced by everybody I came into contact with, just as each visitor was. What they were feeling, I soon felt. What they were thinking, I soon thought. Not completely, obviously, since we still had our unique minds and inclinations. 

But since we'd all embraced the RSSB teachings, or we wouldn't have journeyed in India to spend time with the guru, there was a groupthink foundation that only became stronger under the influence of the ritualistic atmosphere of the Dera. It would have been very difficult to resist, not that I wanted to.

I'll end with a passage from Robson's book that illustrates the power of shared feelings. Fascinating stuff that's hard to believe, but it seems to be true.

As an illustration of how far someone's feelings can spread, imagine that you became friends with someone with an astonishingly positive attitude, who is incredibly satisfied with her life. You might feel a bit glad for her, but could her joy really bring lasting happiness to your life, too?

According to one detailed longitudinal survey -- the Framingham Heart Study -- the answer is yes. Because of your regular interactions with her, you would be 15 percent more likely to achieve a high score on the survey's measure of life satisfaction -- despite no direct change in your immediate circumstances.

How about your friend's friend? The same study found that their happiness will be passed on to your friend, who passes it on to you, increasing your chances of happiness by about 10 percent in the coming months. Your current satisfaction with life is even influenced by a friend of a friend of a friend, who can increase your chance of happiness by about 6 percent.

These are people you almost certainly have never even met, and you probably don't even know of their existence, but they are nevertheless influencing your well-being through a chain of interactions.

Placebos point to the amazing link between body and mind

After writing the title of this post, I just had a doubt about my use of the word "amazing."

It made sense when I wrote Placebos point to the amazing link between body and mind. But as soon as I'd typed those words, my mind said, in effect, "Hey, dude, is it really so amazing that one part of the body affects another part of the body?"

To which I replied to myself, "No, it isn't."

So why are placebos looked upon as an indication of the surprising connection between what the human mind does and what the human body does? It must be because almost everybody views their mind as something ethereal, while the body is thoroughly physical.

This can't be true, of course, since the mind is the brain in action, and the brain is thoroughly physical.

It's just that thoughts and emotions appear to be like wispy clouds floating in a sky of immaterial consciousness, while the goings-on of the body are made of crude blood, bone, nerves, flesh, and such. That this disconnect between mind and body is illusory is the subject of a book I bought after reading an article by the author regarding placebos in New Scientist.

I'm enjoying The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change Your World, by David Robson. It's a well-written, detailed examination of the placebo effect and methods that we can use to harness it to improve our life.

In the initial chapters, Robson focuses on the evidence for the placebo effect, emphasizing that the more we know about it -- which is why he wrote the book -- the more likely it is that we can use placebos in a positive fashion to help cure what ails us either mentally or physically.

So he repeatedly stresses how clear the evidence is for a strong mind-body connection. For example:

As a result of this continued skepticism, scientific understanding of the placebo effect has taken a long time to blossom, but we now know that positive expectations can bring much more than emotional comfort, producing real relief for many physical conditions, including asthma, Parkinson's, heart disease, and chronic pain.

Even more astoundingly, the cure often produces the same biological changes as the actual drugs prescribed to treat these ailments. The mind-body connection is real and potentially powerful.

...In an amazingly comprehensive way, the brain, working as a prediction machine, updates its simulations and coordinates the body's responses using any cue that might hone its expectations of recovery. There is now no doubt that expectations can -- and do -- shape our physical reality.

Here's some good news. Even if someone knows that a placebo has been given to them, it can still be effective.

The idea that the word "placebo" can itself evoke a placebo response may sound absurd. Since the eighteenth century, the whole concept of the placebo effect has centered on the premise that people must believe they are receiving a "real" treatment for there to be any foreseeable benefit. 

[Thomas] Jefferson wrote that the deception was a "pious fraud" because it was completely unavoidable. Beecher himself said that "it does not matter in the least what the placebo is made of or how much is used so long as it is not detected as a placebo by the subject." 

Yet various groundbreaking studies have shown that a large number of people do respond to a placebo even when they are fully aware that they are receiving an inert pill.

According to Bennett's hypothesis, this may be most common in regions where the placebo effect is already well known, but there is now plenty of evidence that "open-label placebos" can be equally potent elsewhere, provided scientists give participants a clear explanation of the brain as a prediction machine with the power to influence the body's responses.

This provides a fresh perspective on the whole idea of faith as an essential aspect of religion, and spiritual practice in general, including meditation.

Usually it's assumed that unless someone has a strong degree of faith that the tenets of a religion are true, or that the guru to whom they've sworn allegiance genuinely does have mystical powers, or that their meditation system is a proven means of achieving an altered state of consciousness, then embracing that religion, guru, or type of meditation isn't going to be productive.

But since placebo-related research shows that it is the expectation of benefit that leads to positive changes, it doesn't matter so much whether someone believes that their spiritual prescription is a sugar pill or an active substance. 

If you think it can help you, it probably will. 

For several years I've been a fan of the Buddhist mantra/phrase, Namu Amida Butsu. ("I take refuge in Amida Buddha.) I repeat it frequently, even though I don't believe in the supernatural aspects of Buddhism, which includes the Pure Land version of Buddhism that interprets Namu Amida Butsu in a much more flowery and esoteric way than I do.

I like how the words sound. I like how I'm saying something that other people also say. I like how it reminds me of central tenets of Buddhism: impermanence, emptiness, no-self. If I'm worried or distressed, repeating Namu Amida Butsu calms my mind.

It's my personal placebo. No active ingredients. Just an expectation that if I say those words, I'll get some benefit from the repetition. Usually I do. My mind is producing the benefit, not the Buddha or the words. 

Evolution has led fitness to be valued over truth

Most of us claim to want to know the truth. I sure do. But there's reason to wonder the extent to which this is -- I have to say the word -- true. 

A memory comes to mind.

As a child, most summers my mother would take me from our home in California to see relatives back in Massachusetts, where I was born and my mother grew up. Once I remember my uncle (mother's brother) greeting her with, "My god, Carolyn, you've gained so much weight!" 

That shocked me. Not because it wasn't true, because it was. Because that wasn't the sort of thing people would say to someone they hadn't seen for a long time.

We all shade the truth for one reason or another. The truth can be harsh. It can be painful. It can be unwelcome. Every husband learns that the best answer to your wife asking "Do you think this dress makes me look fat?" is an emphatic "No, absolutely not." 

In general, though, I've figured that truth is a positive thing. I still feel that way, but the more I read about modern neuroscience, the more I understand why one of my first posts on this blog, "Just have faith," was a bit off-base. 

Back in 2004, I wrote:

Here's how to tell the difference between true faith and false faith: Imagine that you are standing in the middle of a bare windowless room. Two doors lead out of the room. Both are closed, but can be opened with a turn of the doorknob. The doors are marked with signs that describe what awaits on the other side: (A) Reality, (B) Belief

After you open a door, you have to walk through it. The door then will shut and you never will be able to leave the place you have entered. Choose Reality and you will know things as they really are, from top to bottom of the cosmos. You will know whether or not God exists and, if so, the nature of this ultimate divinity. You will know whether death is the final end of your existence or if it is the beginning of another form of life. You will know whether there is a meaning to the universe beyond what human beings ascribe to it.

Or, choose Belief and you will know only what lies within the confines of your current suppositions about the nature of the cosmos. For the rest of your life you will be confident that what you believe to be true, really is. Any evidence to the contrary will not make an impact on your mind. You will remain doubt-free, faithful to the beliefs you now hold about God, creation, life, death, and the purpose of human existence.

Which door would you choose to walk through?

Before answering, consider carefully the potential ramifications of your choice. Reality is an unknown, a mystery. It could be frightening or fabulous, painful or pleasurable, warmly loving or coldly uncaring. Do you want to embrace absolutely real reality? Or would you rather hold on to your beliefs about what is real?

Someone with the type of faith extolled by the Church of the Churchless would unhesitatingly choose Door A and boldly stride into Reality. For their faith is not in anything particular, but is a faith that truth can be known, should be known, and, indeed, must be known.

Nice sentiment. However, in his book, Fluke, Brian Klaas says this in a chapter called "Why our brains distort reality."

Imagine two creatures: we might call them the Truth Creature and the Shortcut Creature. The Truth Creature sees everything exactly as it is...Nothing goes unnoticed.

...By contrast, the Shortcut Creature can't see any of that detail, but instead only perceives and processes that which is most useful to it. All else is either ignored or is invisible to that creature's perceptions. As a result, the Shortcut Creature cannot sense most of reality. 

Which creature would you rather be?

We are tempted to side with the truth. But that would be a fatal mistake. Shortcut Creatures always win. Thankfully, that's exactly what we are -- a species that has evolved to perceive reality in a stripped-down, simplified form, so we can make sense of it to survive.

That conjecture has been validated by something called the Fitness Beats Truth theorem, an idea proposed and tested by mathematicians and cognitive scientists -- and popularized by Donald D. Hoffman at the University of California, Irvine. 

What they've discovered inverts our commonplace ideas about how the world works.

Most of us assume that truth is, by definition, useful. But consider it a bit more carefully, and it becomes clear that's not the case. We do not see reality, but rather a "manifest image" of it, a useful illusion that helps us navigate the world.

...The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker put it like this: "We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness."

...Walking through the world is an information explosion. We couldn't possibly pay attention to everything. If we did, it would overload us, blinding us to what's important. To cope, our brain has a laser-like focus on detecting helpful patterns and potentially threatening abnormalities, while discarding that which is less useful.

This makes sense. But since I've only read a bit less than a third of Fluke, I'm pretty sure that Klaas will be talking about how what was useful for most of the time us Homo sapiens have been around may be quite different from what is useful now, in the 21st century. 

This is how Klass ends the "Why Our Brains Distort Reality" chapter. It comes after a discussion of how male jewel beetles search for the distinctive coloring, larger size, and dimpled shell pattern of the female. That worked well until an Australian beer company, "by complete chance, created a virtual replica of a female jewel beetle's traits in its bottle design."

As you might be able to guess, the male beetles began trying to mate with discarded bottles, not exactly an evolutionary plus. Klass goes on to say:

These mismatches from broken shortcuts are known as evolutionary traps. They arise when the old ways of survival become incompatible with a newer reality. Unfortunately, as we'll see, humans trying to navigate the unimaginable complexity of modern society are now facing an evolutionary trap of our own because our minds didn't evolve to cope with a hyperconnected world that relentlessly converges toward a knife's edge, in which one tiny fluke can change everything in an instant. The Shortcut Creature doesn't do quite so well when navigating a new, more complex world.

Life is precious. So why do we humans value it so cheaply?

Us members of Homo sapiens like to consider that we're the peak of the evolutionary mountain. We're proud of our big brains, our unique ability to use language and abstract thought, our technological accomplishments, and, yes, our supposed evolved morality.

Humanity has indeed made a lot of progress on the moral front. Slavery is condemned. So is racism. Women have equal rights in many, if not most countries. In democracies, everyone has an equal vote. Religious heresy doesn't lead to being burned at the stake.

And yet, life still is not valued as much as it should be. There are many examples of this, but what has captured my mind recently, and not in a positive way, is the horrific war between Israel and Hamas. 

I readily agree with anyone who argues that war is always hellish, and this conflict is just more of the same. Still, there's something about the Israel-Hamas war that is especially disturbing to me. One reason is that the combatants are divided neatly by religion: Jews versus Muslims.

Supposedly religiosity makes us better people. I don't believe that. It's just a common assumption. Tonight I watched an episode of Bill Maher's HBO show. He interviewed Dr. Phil, who, as Maher said, is so well known as a television psychologist (I think that's what he is) he only has one name.

Dr. Phil argued that faith and family are key to a well-functioning society. Maher, being a confirmed childless bachelor and an atheist, disagreed with that assumption. So do I. Israel and Hamas are overflowing with faith and family. Yet they're engaged in a nasty war with each other.

Neither side is covering itself with moral glory. Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 of last year in a brutal terrorist fashion, killing 1,200 people. In response, Israel has invaded Gaza, the home base of Hamas, killing about 30,000 people there, about 70% of whom are estimated to be women and children.

I wrote about this yesterday in a post on my Salem Political Snark blog: "Israel is killing lots of innocent people in Gaza. Biden is letting this happen." Here's how it started.

I'm fed up. I'm angry. I'm outraged.

More than 30,000 people have been killed in Gaza since October 7, when Hamas attacked Israel. The real number is almost certainly higher, since thousands are buried under rubble.

Note that I said "people."

That's who they are, people just like you and me. Yes, they're mostly Palestinians. Yes, many are Hamas fighters. But 70% of the dead people in Gaza are estimated to be women and children.

How could this be? Because Israel has been bombing Gaza relentlessly with little concern for deaths of innocent people.

It's Old Testament warfare. Hamas killed 1,200 people in Israel. So Israel feels justified in killing thirty times as many people in Gaza, because, you know. the life of an Israeli is so much more valuable than the life of a Palestinian. At least, that's how Israel has been behaving.

On cable news, if I have to hear one more spokesperson for the Israeli military or government blab on about how, yes, a two thousand pound bomb was dropped in Gaza that killed dozens of innocent people along with a few Hamas fighters, and that's okay because Hamas started the war and hides among civilians, my brain is going to explode with more pent up rage at Israel than it already is filled with.

That's exactly what I heard today on CNN. The CNN anchor kept asking the Israeli why they didn't work harder at minimizing civilian deaths, since so many women and children have been killed in Gaza. He never answered. Because Israel's extreme right-wing government feels entitled.

Entitled to destroy almost all of the buildings and homes in Gaza. Entitled to treat all Palestinians as if they are Hamas fighters, which obviously they're not. Entitled to control Gaza after the war in defiance of international law. Entitled to reject a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict, since Israel wants to permanently occupy the territory it has claimed since the 1967 war, also in defiance of international law.

People are starving in Gaza. People are being operated on with no anesthesia. People lack a safe place to shelter, given that Israel keeps on bombing locations that Gaza residents were told to relocate to.

There's plenty of food, medical supplies, water, generators, water purification equipment, and other things needed by people in Gaza just a few miles away in Egypt and elsewhere But Israel won't let most of those supplies in, claiming that they might be used by Hamas.

Well, so what? This is an imperfect world. To save lives of innocent people in Gaza, much more humanitarian aid needs to be entering the country. If a small amount goes to Hamas, so be it. That's the price of compassion toward the afflicted: sometimes unworthy people benefit from it.

What's baffling is that people in Israel and Gaza mourn the death of a loved one equally. I don't mean the customs they follow, but the pain in their heart when life is taken too soon, too cruelly, too unnecessarily. 

Life is precious to them. Individually, at least. If a Palestinian and an Israeli were both in London, and one had a heart attack and collapsed on the sidewalk, I have no doubt that either would eagerly jump to help the other.

Yet on a collective level, many Palestinians and Israelis are uncaring about what befalls people on the other side of the war. I've seen reports that Palestinians were dancing with joy after the October 7 attack by Hamas, and that Israelis have been partying at the Gaza border, celebrating how little humanitarian aid is making its way into Gaza while people suffer there.

Sure, it could be argued that other species do much the same thing.

I've watched nature shows on television where a male lion is tenderhearted toward its own offspring. However, if the cubs are the offspring of a different father, because the lioness strayed and had sex with a male from a different group of lions, the male lion will kill them.

I just don't find this very reassuring. It's one thing to act from instinct, as other species do. But we humans supposedly have the capacity to rise above our baser impulses and pursue a higher course of action.

War brings out the worst in us. It certainly is justified at times. Yet only as a last resort, and then it should be conducted with the greatest possible respect for civilian lives. Hamas started this war. Israel, though, is showing that respect for the lives of innocent people is lacking on both sides.

Hopefully one day war will become a distant memory, and humanity will truly value life. All lives.