Church of the Churchless

Joan Tollifson on the groundlessness of reality

Tai Chi, which I've practiced for nineteen years, speaks about being rooted.

Not in the sense of a plant being attached to the earth, but something similar. Being connected to the floor, or ground, in a way that is stable, secure, capable of being the foundation of productive movement (especially important in a martial or self-defense application).

But this root isn't a static thing, because we humans aren't oak trees. It's dynamic, ever-changing, adjusting to circumstances. 

Which fits with a recent essay by Joan Tollifson that arrived in my email inbox yesterday. I've shared the first part of it below, since I liked what she had to say. As noted before, Tollifson has become one of my favorite writers about "spiritual" subjects, though she doesn't use that word very often. 

I agree with her that the search for Ultimate Reality is doomed to failure. I used to believe otherwise. When I'd give talks to members of the guru-centered organization headquartered in India that I belonged to for 35 years, Ultimate Reality was a term that I used a lot, because I considered that the teachings of this organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, accurately pointed to the nature of such.

Not any more, though. Like Tollifson, I've become convinced that just as science is nowhere close to grasping the ultimate nature of reality, spirituality, religion, and mysticism are ever farther away. So no one knows what the ground of being is, or even if such a ground exists. Maybe groundlessness will turn out to be the closest approximation to how Ultimate Reality typically is viewed.

Which doesn't mean that awe, wonder, delight, and even a sense of sacredness can't be part of our everyday awareness.

As Tollifson says in her essay below, our experiencing of what is Here/Now is all that we know directly. This means that attention in the present moment is the highest form of worship, to repurpose a religious term for my secular purpose. Of course, we don't really have a choice in this, since past and future only exist for us as concepts, not direct experience.

But our attention can be scattered. When my wife is talking to me, I can be half-listening while checking the news on my iPhone. This is akin to daydreaming while attending to a religious service. While everything is happening Here/Now, that Here and Now can become diluted, spread out, by a lack of attention to what most deserves our awareness. 

This is why mindfulness has come to be my favorite "spiritual" exercise (I don't much like that term, but it's hard to come up with a better word). Since there almost certainly isn't any final ground or bottom to reality, the best we can do is be as fully aware as possible of the ever-changing phenomena that manifest the boundlessness of existence.

Here's the excerpt from Joan Tollifson's essay.

A multi-dimensional extravaganza

All we ever know directly is this here-now aware presence / present experiencing. We don’t really know what this is, why it’s here, where it came from or where it’s going. We have many ideas about all of this—scientific, metaphysical, psychological, political—but all of these ideas can be doubted, and all of them are subject to change, and when we look closely, the apparently real “things” to which they all refer can never actually be pinned down or pulled out of the whole.

Both science and spirituality have been obsessed, each in their own way, with getting to the bottom of things, finding the fundamental ground and nailing down exactly what it is, as if it were something that could be found and nailed down. But as an old Zen koan says in response to a monk searching for this fundamental ground, “It just moved!”

My sense is that this living actuality is bottomless, that there is no end to the unfolding revelations and discoveries, and that there is great freedom in not needing to land anywhere or grasp anything or nail down what this is. Maybe the security and certainty that we long for isn’t about getting hold of some unchanging Ultimate Reality, some final bottom to everything. Maybe it’s simply about being fully alive right here as this one bottomless moment, just as it is.

I’ve noticed, as you probably have too, that experience shows up in a multitude of different dimensions and can be seen from infinitely different perspectives or viewpoints. There is ordinary, everyday life with all its varied facets and dimensions. There are transcendental spiritual experiences of all kinds, psychic experiences, near death experiences, out of body experiences, drug experiences, psychotic experiences, experiences that come from brain injuries and neurological disorders and illnesses.

There is the sense of being a particular person with a history and a lifespan, and there is the sense of being the timeless, impersonal, boundless aware presence being and beholding it all. There is waking life, dreaming and deep sleep. There are all the billions of different human viewing points, and the viewing points of all the other living beings. All of these infinitely diverse viewing points are continuously popping in and out of existence, dying and being born. It’s definitely a shape-shifting multi-dimensional extravaganza that never stays the same while never departing from the ever-present immediacy of Here-Now.

This one bottomless moment includes the whole universe, and yet it’s always just this. This cup of coffee, this taste of tea, this cool breeze touching the skin, this news report on the latest war, this pain in our knee, this train of thought passing through. Each moment is absolutely unique and unrepeatable, and yet the whole is fully present at every point. The ocean contains all the waves, and every wave contains the whole ocean. Nothing is really separate from everything else. It all belongs. It can’t be pulled apart.

To survive, we need to map our experience out in manageable ways. So thought labels, divides, categorizes, interprets and seemingly concretizes this seamless, boundless, centerless, inconceivable, multidimensional, uncontrollable flow of experience, creating the illusion of an apparently separate autonomous controller self encapsulated inside a body and living in an apparently solid and substantial outside world made up of many separate, persisting, observer-independent forms. This phantom self is supposedly authoring our thoughts, making our choices and navigating our life. But none of this holds up to scrutiny.

Every form dissolves as soon as it appears. Exprerience doesn’t hold still. There is no boundary between inside and outside. A person is like a waving of the ocean—an ever-changing movement inseparable from the whole. Our attention moves rapidly and uncontrollably from one thing to another, and however hard we work at controlling and taming it, that endeavor never quite works. It slips away again and again.

Our urges, desires, impulses, intentions, interests, preferences, abilities, talents, thoughts and actions emerge unbidden. Nothing could be other than exactly how it is in this moment. Seeing this is the freedom to be exactly as we are and for everything to be just as it is. It is freedom from blame and guilt and from the belief that anything should or could be different in this moment from exactly how it is. That doesn’t mean we can’t discover ways of healing and transforming ourselves and the world—we can. But it’s all a movement of the whole.

There is no finish-line in life, no formula, no method, nowhere to go, only this ever-fresh aliveness, just as it is.

Here's manjit's informative, passionate comment in praise of psychedelics

Yesterday manjit left a marvelous comment on my post, "Psilocybin could be in my future, thanks to Oregon's legalization." It deserved more attention than most comments get, so I've copied it in below.

There's a lot to appreciate in the comment. For now I'll simply note that manjit correctly draws connections between mystical experiences arising from meditation (often or usually) and psychedelic experiences arising from ingestion of a substance such as psilocybin, LSD, DMT, or mescaline.

This is not at all a crackpot idea. The June 2024 issue of Scientific American has an article called "Beyond the Veil: What near-death experiences tell us about human consciousness." Here's an excerpt that pertains to what manjit says in his comment.

Roland Griffiths, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University who pioneered studies of psilocybin and who died last October, reported similar findings [to the similarities between people who have had near-death experiences, NDE, and people who have had a DMT experience] with his colleagues in 2022.

The authors compared 3,192 people who had undergone an NDE, a psychedelic drug trip or a non-drug-induced mystical experience. The team found "remarkably similar" long-term outcomes across subjects in all three groups, including a reduced fear of death and lasting positive effects of insights they had gained.

Of course, to have a NDE you have to almost die; to have a non-drug-induced mystical experiences you either have to trust it will happen unexpectedly sometime or try to induce it through intense meditation or some other spiritual practice; but to have a psychedelic drug trip you just need to ingest a psychedelic substance.

Here's manjit's comment. It's lengthy, but well worth reading. I've inserted an image that was linked to and broken up some long paragraphs into several shorter ones.

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

Congratulations on making one of the best decisions in your life! My upmost respect to you for having the courage to try new and potentially "scary" (it won't be, it will be amongst the most beautiful, loving & healing experiences you will ever have in your life, if not THE most!) things in the spirit of open-mindedness, curiosity and exploring the depths of mind, existence and reality itself. Bravo Sir, Bravo.

If I may take a few moments to round up a few of the usual suspects from the comments section and re-capitulate previous comments of mine on this blog before I return to your upcoming sojourn with the sublime.....

"Brian dives down one rabbit hole after another - all mind games. Brian received Nam........ My answer to all of you is to receive Nam and prove it for yourselves."
No Kool-Aid

The Gratuitous Grace of Nam?

Yes sir. Follow these lifelong vows, wherever your life may take you. Meditate on my form for 3 hours a day, every day, for the rest of your life. However dull and joyless that 12.5% of your day that may be. Do this for 30 years and you may, just perhaps, if you're very, very lucky, get a snippet of a lucid dream that lasts 1 minute which you can obsess and fetishize over for the few remaining years of your life!

But only if you're one of the lucky ones (I mean, check out the endless stream of initiates in RSSB Q&As, many of whom are in the later stages of life, who have achieved precisely nothing with their "gift" of "nam", truth be told)!

The author of this comment has not considered how absurd and disconnected from reality this comment must be, to call "Nam" a "gift" to somebody who has not only been initiated and meditating using the prescribed method for DECADES, but was also considered "knowing" enough to be both a satsang speaker and official book author, and for whom this so called "gift", for which he and every initiate has had to pay a very large and oppressive price, has done absolutely fuck all for in that time. Maybe DO consider that, before flinging around claims of non-existent "gifts".

The Sacred Mushrooms on the other hand? Come, come one and all.....this way, entrance is free, just partake of this REAL Gratuitous Grace, no sacrifice or vows to make, just eat! Success is assured, regardless of one's worthiness or preparation.

That is what a gift is, or at least should be. You just need to have the balls to accept it, like Brian courageously has.

Ingesting the sacred mushrooms is like a GENUINE initiation into the mysteries, the real deal which the initiations of the son of men is a mere shadow of a reflection of. The "connection" will be immediate and known with 100% certainty, unlike the drab soul-less "initiations" of the son of men, beturbaned cultural patriarchs, conmen and fraudsters, which even 40 years and thousands upon thousands of hours of meditation later has "connected" you with absolutely nothing of any note beyond feeling slightly relaxed and a partially recalled lucid dream.

Where Mushrooms are like a wild, raging ocean, the initiations of man are like a singular drop of water in a vast desert....pointless. I know of someone who was shabd this and shabd that, but their entire "naam" bhakti was torn away with a few swigfuls of Ayahuasca, it was nowhere to be found. Imagine that, the drop gets swallowed by the ocean! This is not allegorical or even exaggerated, it is literally a true story. Y'all can't even get through a psychedelic experience without losing "nam", and think you will be able to cope with death by clinging to it? Hehe. Ahhh, jokes.

Sant64 wrote:

"Shrooms are totally safe."

Yes, they absolutely are (with a reasonable degree of certainty, with the right precautions taken)! Here is a chart from a scientific study showing the social and personal dangers of a variety of drugs, including tobacco and alcohol. As you rightly state, mushrooms are extremely safe, the safest of all the substances listed, which is incredible:

https://images.app.goo.gl/KSPpPXMrRUGsT2nJ6

"Did we learn nothing from the 60s?"

Yes; Civil rights, women's rights, anti imperialist war sentiments, awareness of the corruption of our own governments, the explosion of colour in our culture, be it through music, movies, tv, writings or other art forms, all of which by extension has revolutionised and evolved the human consciousness across the globe.

You see, like most of us, the author of these comments does not appreciate how the cosmos (our physical reality) and psyche (mind, being) are intimately related, and co-evolve. It is no coincidence that LSD was discovered just 2 years before the atom bomb, or that colour TV was invented, or that there were vast cultural and existential upheavals in all areas of life from the scientific, social, political and individual level which totally radicalised and revolutionised the western mind and society. It was literally a black and white world, and LSD was clearly one of the chief sacraments which helped catalyze this change.

Some people may be sad to see black people and women get equal rights, for colour to implode into our culture, but I suspect history will see this as evolution in a participatory epistemology.

In regards the alleged lack of benefits on the individual level, in Lennon, Ram Dass et al....really? Who is anyone to judge the subjective lived experience of these people? The evidence, scientific and anecdotal, is in and it is clear, and it is everywhere; psychedelics can be and very often are extremely beneficial for the user on multiple levels, increasing their sense of connection with life, joy, happiness and love for months if not years from just one dose!

The benefits in my life have been persistent and I suspect permanent. The world, from the outside, like Sant64, may question the value of these things, but the experiencer themself will have a knowing, inner smile, born of contentment which far transcends such petty, close-minded, impoverished views. The fraudulent "Satgurus" get less criticism than those who don't pretend to be holy but have, nonetheless, truly kissed the Divine. We are all human. But to be human has oh so much untapped potential!

To Ron, I would just say consider open-mindedness, curiosity and courage are positive and healthy human traits. Living in a small box, don't conflate it for the cosmos at large. In regards your constant referral to the "brain" and "chemicals" generating or altering human consciousness, I referred earlier to the remarkable, psychedelically soaked 50s & 60s.

I would suggest those who abide within a materialist reductionist worldview, and think that saying things like "the brain creates consciousness" is a smart, full and complete "explanation" for reality, move beyond 17th century Newtonian physics, catch up on 18th century Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant, then make your way to the glorious 1960s, 1962 to be precise (again, it is no coincidence), and familiarise yourselves on Popper's Conjectures and Refutations & Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

The "brain creates consciousness" is just a word-prison. And a banal one at that, dress it up how you might.

Reality is Mystery. With a capital M. Mystery on all sides, infinite and vast, and if you think your simple human conceptions of "brain creates consciousness" explains a single thing, you are suffocating in your little human conceptual word-prison.

Perhaps a healthy dose of psilocybe mushrooms can help you break out of that tiny word-prison and face the real, vast, incomprehensible Mystery that is being, consciousness and cosmos? :)

If you are not experiencing perpetual awe, astonishment, joy and love....truly and absolutely.....then you have not understood reality.

As for psychedelics not being "natural", this is one of those dualistic, conceptual canards, a belief system grounded in conceptual confusion and ignorance. Our everyday "normal" waking state of consciousness is itself connected to, modulated, mediated or filtered by, a whole cascade of "chemicals". Plants and fungi have co-evolved with humanity, and it is no accident that some of them have the ability to so profoundly alter our consciousness that it can generate huge & rapid leaps in human evolution (Indian religions are grounded in the Vedas, which praise "soma" as the vehicle to God realisation, and Soma is clearly described as a psycho-active fungi or plant.

Greek philosophers, mystics and all other culturally significant persons participated in the Eleusinian Mysteries, or other Mystery schools, which consisted of ingesting a psychedelic sacrament. They considered this the most important aspect of their culture, and the ground of their knowledge and understanding of higher things. The ideas that emerged from these experiences has profoundly influenced and guided the entire course of human history, thought and reality to this very day with the whole of western philosophy being essentially a cyclical recapitulation & evolution of the Plato-Aristotle dialectic.).

Our "natural" body contains within it DMT, it has been found in both the brain and lungs of human subjects. The chemical structure of psilocybin is 4-phosphoryloxy-N,N-DMT. Yes, both the human being and the fungi have co-evolved with DMT running through their very breath and brains....a remarkable and "natural" connection!

So, whilst the yogi sits in a dark cave, squatting with his thumbs in his ears, following a strict diet and lifestyle restrictions, for hours upon hours, years on end, in the hope of releasing some endogenous (already existing within the body) DMT, the other fella falls upon some Gratuitous Grace and accidentally eats some psilocybe mushrooms, and finds themselves, even more reliably, in the same space of light and sound phantasmagoria. Nature provides.

For, isn't that, scientifically speaking, what is happening here? Isn't it clear with what we now know, that Soami Ji's Sach Khand and beyond were just intense internal cascades of endogenous DMT release enabled by the intense, "unnatural" practice or technologies of meditation? Is it a coincidence that DMT is found most heavily concentrated in the lungs, and that the original and most efficacious practices of shabd and most other yoga technologies involves breathwork or pranayama? God has given us a brain, so just as somebody evolved the shabd yoga practice, we have now evolved to understand what that technology is actually doing to our brain and bodies, so we can, nay, are obliged to evolve "shortcuts"......just when our society and culture requires them. Gratuitous Grace.

Having experienced an intense, completely "natural" kundalini and non-dual awakening some 25 odd years ago, I can from personal experience attest that the most intense aspects of that "kundalini awakening" were incredibly similar, if not entirely identical to, a very high dose of psilocybe mushrooms. Same same.

As for the cost, or people making money off it.....c'mon, what kind of BS idealist planet are people on! Are you expecting commercial enterprises to provide this service for free? In America? Isn't that a bit disingenuous? I've checked out the site Brian linked, and whilst I don't know anything about them or the price they charge, they seem perfectly respectable and I'm sure will provide a very decent and safe environment for Brian to have his first experience in.

Brilliant! It is SO about time decent human beings are able to explore their own consciousness and not be criminalised for it, and with such ease and security, especially for those who are a bit older. If he can afford it, why not? And besides, if money is a factor, mushrooms can of course be grown very easily and cheaply at home, especially for anyone with green fingers.....

In regards the above comments, there are an awful lot of experts around here who clearly disagree. Are they, however, "experts" who have absolutely no knowledge of the history & science, or personal experience of, psychedelics themselves, choosing instead to stick with their ignorant, small minded conceptual prejudice and biases? To each their own limiting reality.

To Brian - congratulations!

I had posted here in the past about taking large doses, 7g+, of good quality mushrooms to dive deeply into the nature of consciousness and reality...however, recent experiences in group Ayahuasca ceremonies with 20+ other people has shown me I may have been a bit reckless with my advice as I appear to have an abnormally high tolerance to these things. So it is not about the "correct" objective dosage amount per se, but rather the correct subjective dosage to get you where you want to go.

You are absolutely right to start low with 1.5-2g. There is a lot of machoism around dosages, and this is not the way to go, it's not about size of dose but the experience you have. That said, I don't want to lie or misrepresent truth. I have personally never taken less than 3.5g of good quality, regular cubensis mushrooms. At 3.5 to 5-6g, you can have exceptionally beautiful, moving, ecstatic experiences, experiences that far exceed anything most people ever experience in their entire lifetimes (I hesitate to say it, but it is true for me nonetheless, I feel a life lived without at least one genuinely powerful psychedelic experience in it is a tragic one, in today's world....:(....).

However, as I noted on the RSS forum years ago, I did not feel they were "spiritually significant", or comparable to the power of full on kundalini phenomena. However, when I got to 6-8,9 grams........that's when you enter the Holy of Holies.....Caveat Emptor: this is my personal experience, for someone else it may be 1.5g gives you the beautiful light and sound phantasmagoria, and 3.5g gets you fully immersed into the ocean of the divine, or even less!

Point is, Brian, be clear what it is you want. 1.5-2g will probably give you very joyous, beautiful experiences, experiences which will heal and soothe many of your mental and physical ailments, This is great, beautiful! Gratuitous Grace! However, if you feel comfortable with those experiences, don't be afraid to, perhaps 3 or 4 or even 24 months later, try again, but at a higher dose.....if you want, and feel up to, penetrating deeper into the heart of reality and consciousness. But also, nothing wrong with going again at the same dose, or even being happy with just that one experience! It's all good.

I'm sure they will provide a good set and setting for you, but you should know the effects peak between 1-4 hours after ingestion, this is best spent eyes closed, perhaps listening to music. Electronic music is perfect for me, but you may prefer something along the John Hopkins psychedelic playlist, which I believe is mostly classical music (I have listened to this on psychedelics, but I can't remember it at all :), which I'm sure your centre will have on their playlist as it's very well known.

When the effects start to transition from otherworldly to this-worldly, which can last from 5-12 hours after ingestion, you will be basking in a beautiful, warm afterglow. This is the time to enjoy yourself more "recreationally", ie. watch movies, listen to your favourite music in a more normal manner (during peak, music turns into multi-dimensional shape-shifting structures and is not music as you conventionally know it! :), hug a human or a pet, eat some fruit etc.

This is also an optimal time to smoke some cannabis, if you have been able to cope with the intensity of the main part or peak of the journey, smoking cannabis can re-intensify and vivify the experience in a most pleasant way (again, caution, ONLY if you have been entirely comfortable with your experience, some people find smoking with psychedelics too intense). Nature or science documentaries are great, but if you can get your hand on them, the films Samsara or Baraka are the perfect visual accompaniments to the mushroom afterglow.

I think mushrooms, when used in a responsible manner as you are preparing to do, are an incredibly safe tool to explore your consciousness, reality and the "Divine".

With all due respect to your conceptual and ideological beliefs, I suggest you go armed with open-mindedness, a humble attitude, an acknowledgment and respect for your/our puny human mind's limited ability to understand reality and consciousness, surrender, and most importantly, love....rather than scepticism and conceptually reductionist beliefs about reality. For, at least at higher dosages, mushrooms WILL confront you with the Divine. The only question is, does one take the difficult or the easy route. Do not struggle, surrender.

Love is key. It is the secret mantra that opens all locks, removes all barriers.....banishes all "bad" or difficult experiences. Seriously, remember this if nothing at all from this long winded post, LOVE! If you feel overwhelmed, or encounter negativity of any sort, just remember, and say it in your mind or even out loud, just like a mantra; ALL IS LOVE, ALL IS LOVE.

Watch, read and listen to positive, uplifting materials on the lead up to your journey. Go lightly on the atheist stuff, and lean more heavily on the "spiritual", even if neutral or non-religious like Daoism, or Goethe, Whitman or whatever. Basically lean into mystery, connection, love, nature to whatever degree you are comfortable. Perhaps read or reread Huxley's Doors of Perception, that kind of ennobling stuff.

Watch documentaries like

https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81183477

https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80229847

https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81409016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIVIfQaqVG4

Etc. There are several more great documentaries available on Amazon Prime.

Anyway, best of luck with your journey, I am sure it will be absolutely amazing. When are you planning on doing it? I will keep an eye out for your report.....and will ask the Mushroom Gods to go easy on you ;)

Blessings.

What if reality was much better than it seems to be? (Good news, it is!)

I've had a "what if?" blog post on my mind for quite a while. Might as well try to get it off my mind and into written form, though if this was easy for me to do, I'd have done it sooner. Anyway, here goes...

Most of us, me certainly included, are looking for ways to make reality more pleasant.

This quest goes in many different directions: family life, career, health, friendships, religion, hobbies, athletic pursuits, spirituality, art, romance, and all the other areas where we wish there wasn't such a large gap between what is and what we'd like to be.

Often these efforts require a lot of work. It may not be easy to alter the trajectory of life so that it better matches where we'd like to land our personal Flight to Happiness. 

Another complication is that both popular culture and religious teachings hold out the hope that it's possible to attain a state of consciousness, or being, where in one fell swoop, one major transformation, one overturning of old understandings, we look upon life in an entirely different fashion.

A better fashion, usually, though not always, because some people would prefer knowing how the world really is, even if that reality is disturbing.

So The Matrix presents a choice between taking the red or blue pill, with red leading to a life-changing truth, and blue to reality as it currently appears to be. Some forms of Zen Buddhism embrace the possibility of a sudden enlightenment or realization that overturns existing worldviews. Rumi and other mystical story-tellers speak of seekers looking for truth in far-off places, only to discover that what they longed for was right at home, so close it required no searching at all.

I've got my own "what if?" fantasy. Yet to me, it isn't a fantasy, though I recognize that it will appear that way to other people. 

What if, I wonder, it was possible to attain a state of consciousness where all of the apparent problems of life, all those things we wish were different from how they actually are, were seen to be just fine, unable to be anything other than their current state?

I also wonder, what if it was possible to attain a state of consciousness where all the things we have done, are doing, and will do were seen to be equally just fine, unable to be anything other that what actually occurred?

And lastly, I wonder what if it was possible to attain a state of consciousness where all efforts aimed at preserving our sense of identity as a separate, independent, enduring self were seen to be unnecessary, because who we are right now is just fine, as is whoever we might become in the future?

Wouldn't these three what if attainments be a huge relief? Wouldn't we feel a large weight lifted from our psychological shoulders? Wouldn't life be much more pleasant without the worries caused by viewing the past, present, and future as filled with problems that demand our attention?

I'd say so. 

I also say that for me, you, and everybody in the world, without exception, each of those what if's isn't something to be attained, but something to enjoy right now. 

Because there's good reason -- no, excellent reason -- to believe that (1) determinism controls what happens in the world, which includes us, so whatever has happened, is happening, and will happen necessarily had to be just as it was, is, or will be; (2) in line with this, free will is an illusion; and (3) the notion of a enduring self or soul also is an illusion, since we are a wave temporarily tossed up by the ocean of the world, not an entity separate from the ever-changing reality that surrounds us and indeed is us.

Too good to be true? Absolutely not. This is both scientific truth and spiritual truth, so long as "spiritual" is understood to mean a deep understanding of life, not anything supernatural. But it isn't easy to truly grasp this truth and experience it in everyday life.

I suspect the reason is that it is so simple and close at hand, we look in vain for something complex and distant.

The fallacy of believing psychedelics aren't "natural"

Just as I hoped, my previous blog post, "Psilocybin could be in my future, thanks to Oregon's legalization," elicited some thought-provoking comments. 

(Note: by legalization I meant that psilocybin is available through licensed service centers, where it has to be consumed. So it isn't legal in the same sense that marijuana is legal in Oregon, capable of being bought in licensed stores and then taken home to be used however you want.)

One commenter's point is easily dismissed. They said that because I was initiated by a Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) guru in 1971, 53 years ago, I should stick with the RSSB teachings for my entire life, not explore other possibilities such as psychedelics. 

That's ridiculous. I was devoted to RSSB for 35 years. That's plenty of time to determine whether a religion or spiritual practice is a good fit for me. I came to decide that it wasn't, just as I've changed in so many other ways over years and decades.

Different political views. Different jobs. Different wives. Different homes. Lots of differences, including my philosophy of life.

Another commenter made a reasonable point, but one which I also disagree with. They said:

But I find it strange that for the averagely healthy person with the ability to immerse themselves in the wonders of the world that we inhabit, why the need or desire to alter or escape the reality of just this.

Well, because there is no such thing as "just this," other than a subjective reality unique to each person. This is an obvious truth stressed by neuroscientist Christof Koch in his new book, Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It. He writes:

Brain scientists frequently refer to a mythical creature, the neurotypical. This individual of unspecified sex stands in for the typical member of Homo sapiens, born with a full complement of eyes, ears, and other sense organs and a "normal" brain.

The last chapter described the experiences of such a neurotypical person. However, in contrast to the "standard kilogram" -- a cylinder of platinum-iridium hidden away in a vacuum chamber in Paris that once defined a mass of one kilogram -- there is no "standard" human brain.

Instead, there is vast genetic and developmental diversity among the eight billion people living on planet Earth, reflected in the astonishing diversity of their brains and their ways of experiencing the world.

We humans are limited to knowing only how reality appears to members of our species. Other creatures know reality quite differently. And within humankind, each person has a different understanding of what "just this" (a Buddhist term) is for them. 

For example, the commenter spoke of enjoying a runner's high. When I used to jog, in the 1980s, I'd feel this occasionally. I feel it now to some extent when I lift weights. However, this form of "high" isn't any more or less natural than a psychedelic high.

And it certainly isn't more or less physical. Every experience we have, without exception, is present to our consciousness because of a certain brain state. Often serotonin is involved in pleasurable experiences. I'm guessing it is involved in a runner's high, just as I know that serotonin is involved in a psychedelic high.

Meditators are experiencing changes in the brain when they sit with closed or open eyes on a cushion or chair. Coffee drinkers are experiencing changes in the brain when they ingest caffeine. And people who enjoy psychedelics are experiencing changes in the brain when they take a dose of psilocybin. 

All of this is natural. In fact, it's hard for me to think of anything that isn't natural. To do that, I'd have to make an artificial divide that doesn't exist in reality. Is LSD unnatural because a scientist discovered it in a lab? What makes that unnatural? Aren't we humans part of nature, along with what we do and create?

But even if someone wants to divide our world into natural and unnatural, psilocybin, coming from a mushroom, would be decidedly in the natural camp. So would marijuana, a plant that grows wild. (The mother of a friend of mind would talk about how they had to keep their horses from eating "loco weed" that used to grow along the side of the road in Oklahoma. That was marijuana.)

Koch speaks about transforming the brain through psychedelics in several chapters. Here's excerpts from his "Transforming lives by transformative experiences" chapter. This helps explain why I want to use psilocybin again after a 55 year hiatus.

Best studied is psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, a large and diverse group of fungi. Psilocybin's effects can be remarkable -- one or two consecutive psilocybin-assisted therapy sessions in patients with serious depression improved their well-being and depression scores for months.

A single high dose of psilocybin in patients with life-threatening cancer triggers large decreases in depression, anxiety, and mood disturbances, with concomitant increases in quality of life and ability to find meaning in life and acceptance of death.

Furthermore, patients who have full-blown mystical experiences are more likely to enjoy these benefits that those who do not. Michael Pollan evocatively described, in a famous New Yorker essay, how even for those patients who did succumb to their cancer, the treatment had an extraordinarily positive outcome for their way of living and of dying.

This is astounding and defies belief: well-entrenched attitudes and beliefs are so difficult to modify that conventional psychotherapy, a.k.a. the talking cure, takes years of weekly sessions with uncertain outcomes. The results are equally astonishing next to the results of more conventional psychopharmacology.

One study directly compared two doses of psilocybin over six weeks to a daily pill of escitalopram, a common selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor treatment for depression. It found that patients taking the psychedelic had reduced rumination, "sticky" negative thoughts about their self and their situation, and thought suppression, compared to their peers given the standard treatment. 

...One study estimates thirty million people in the United States, about one tenth of the population, have used these [psychedelic] molecules at least once. Their physiological toxicity is low, and they do not damage organs or cause neuropsychological deficits.

The risk of lethal overdosing or fatal accidents is small. Importantly, psychedelics are nonaddictive (they do not target the dopamine system) and engender neither cravings nor compulsive drug seeking. There are no drug cartels trafficking in psychedelics.

Psilocybin could be in my future, thanks to Oregon's legalization

Psychedelics were a big part of my college life for a few years, 1968-69. I took quite a few trips via the travel agents of LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin (magic mushrooms).

So naturally in 2020 I voted to make psilocybin legal here in Oregon, under the auspices of licensed growers and providers of supervised psilocybin experiences. As I wrote about on my HinesSight blog a few days ago, "The Psilocybin Center is open in Salem for psychedelic transformation."

It's taken several years to get psilocybin centers up and running because rules and regulations had to be developed after the 2020 ballot measure was passed by voters, then prospective centers had to apply to a state agency, get approved, and finally open for business. 

I noted in the above-linked blog post what my motivation was for trying psilocybin again.

My primary motivation now is what Michael Pollan in his book How to Change Your Mind refers to as shaking up the snow globe. My mind has fallen into some senior citizen habits that I'd like aid in revising, which psychedelics are great at. In college, everything was fresh and new, so my psychedelic experiences just added fuel to that already flexible fire.

Yesterday I had a Zoom call with the owner of The Psilocybin Center, the first step. It was supposed to last just fifteen minutes, but Sammy and I ended up talking for almost 45 minutes. He thought that it made sense for me to start with the moderate-high dose guided journey. In fact, I believe the Hero Dose Sessions are off limits for new users until they've done the moderate dose.

That dose is about 1 gram and the journey lasts 2-4 hours, depending on the dosage. I'm leaning toward 1 gram and two hours. Might as well start low and ramp up later if I enjoy the experience. Sammy said that senior citizens like me make me a large share of their clientele, since many of us baby boomers used psychedelics in our younger years.

Here's a chart that shows various doses and usual effects. 

           Low Dose: 0.5 to 2 Grams

0.5 to 2  grams of mushrooms is considered a low dose.

Unlike microdosing, this dosage should offer some mild effects, likely a euphoric state and sensory experiences. Depending on the strain, you can expect to feel the effects for anywhere from 2 - 8 hours, so plan accordingly.

You can expect to feel light, euphoric, and may see visuals. This is often beautiful when in nature, and comes through bright, vivid colors, and smiling trees. 

Your judgment may be impaired, so it’s not recommended to take a low dose of magic mushrooms if you’re planning on driving, going to work, taking care of children, or hosting a board meeting. 

Sammy said that the "official" psilocybin used by his center is high quality, better than what is found on the black market. 

Here's some passages from Michael Pollan's book, How to Change Your Mind, a modern take on psychedelics. The image refers to the first passage.

In its normal state, shown on the left, the brain's various networks (here depicted lining the circle, each represented by a different color) talk mostly to themselves, with a relatively few heavily trafficked pathways among them.

But when the brain operates under the influence of psilocybin, as shown on the right, thousands of new connections form, linking far-flung brain regions that during normal waking consciousness don't exchange much information. 

In effect, traffic is rerouted from a relatively small number of interstate highways onto myriad smaller roads linking a great many more destinations. The brain appears to become less specialized and more globally interconnected, with considerably more intercourse, or "cross talk," among its various neighborhoods. 

...One way to think about this blooming of mental states is that it temporarily boosts the sheer amount of diversity in our mental life. If problem solving is anything like evolutionary adaptation, the more possibilities the mind has at its disposal, the more creative its solutions will be.

...A high-dose psychedelic experience has the power to "shake the snow globe," he says, disrupting unhealthy patterns of thought and creating a space of flexibility -- entropy -- in which more salubrious patterns and narratives have an opportunity to coalesce as the snow slowly resettles. 

...Reading Robin's paper helped me better understand what I was looking for when I decided to explore psychedelics: to give my own snow globe a vigorous shaking, see if I could renovate my everyday mental life by introducing a greater measure of entropy, and uncertainty, into it.

Getting older might render the world more predictable (in every sense), yet it also lightens the burden of responsibility, creating a new space for experiment. Mind had been to see if it wasn't too late to skip out of some of the deeper grooves of habit, that the been-there and done-thats of long experience had inscribed on my mind. 

Sounds good. Reminds me of a story about one of my college psychedelic experiences that I shared in 2007 in a post called "Loosening the bounds of 'I am...'"

I'm no Buddha, that's for sure. But with the aid of mescaline, or some other psychedelic, I have a distinct memory of a '60s experience that at least was in the ballpark of what Thurman is talking about.

I was with a group of fellow "stoners" who'd headed off to a San Jose-area park to be high with nature. The path we were on led around a hill.

I felt energetic and forged on ahead by myself. My feet were flying through the northern California landscape. Until I rounded a corner and saw a different sort of group on the left side of the trail a short ways ahead of me.

Bikers. Drinking beer. Next to their choppers. With their equally tough-looking old ladies. At the time San Jose was a headquarters for the Gypsy Jokers motorcycle gang, which had a reputation rivaling the Hells Angels.

I didn't know anything about the bikers I was walking toward. But my first reaction was that I was an isolated peaceful hippie dude stoned on mescaline with long hair, glasses, and a corduroy coat, and they were cultural near-opposites in almost every way. Not good.

However, something snapped in me the very next moment. As I walked nearer to them I didn't feel like there was any difference between us. I could see them looking at me. I looked at them. More, I became them.

"What's happening, man?" someone called out. "Hell if I know," I said with a smile. They laughed. I laughed. I felt like I could sit down with them, have a beer, and fit right in.

My fear vanished as soon as I stopped thinking "I am…" and "They are…" Sure, it was partly (or mostly) the mescaline talking, but I suddenly felt that I was them and they were me, and we were all in this park getting high together.

Not exactly akin to the Buddha's enlightened experience of selflessness under the Bodhi Tree. But, hey, I'll take a speck of understanding any way I can get it.

Passing the biker group I realized that "I am…" can be flexible and boundless, not rigid and restricted.

Some things we always are; some things we always aren't; but there's a huge store of being-possibilities available to us moment to moment.

If you become a religion of one, your worship will be effortless

Whenever I'm reading a spiritual or philosophical book and am generally enjoying its message, then come across a passage that I heartily disagree with, I remind myself of one of my early blog posts from 2005, "Become a religion of one." 

(I'll copy it in below, I like it so much.)

For the way I've come to view spirituality is as an intensely independent pursuit. After all, our search for meaning and purpose in life necessarily is personal, not collective. There's zero chance that any other person in the world is going to have exactly the same goals, values, and such as we do.

So while it can make sense to explore ready-made religions, philosophies, mystical teachings, and other approaches that promise to be a foundation for a satisfying life, my advice is to pick and choose what you most like about them and fashion your own unique "religion of one" from those pieces, along with what springs from your own imagination/intuition.

One advantage of this is that it enables you to more easily belong to a spiritual organization without feeling like it's stifling what you truly believe and care about. Accept the rules and dogmas that make sense to you while paying little or no attention to the rest. Don't expect the organization to perfectly meet your needs, because this is impossible.

This is akin to people eating at a restaurant with an extensive menu. Each person should order what they like to eat. Nobody should worry that their selections don't match those of anyone else in the restaurant. Spirituality is subjective. There's no objective truth here, unlike in science. 

Well, generally. My own personal philosophy of life includes a belief that free will is an illusion, along with the illusory notion of a separate unchanging self or soul. I consider that these are scientific truths, but I admit that there is room for debate with those who see things differently. 

Thus when I read a book by a scientist who I generally admire, yet who contends that free will is part of our human repertoire, something I'm doing now, I do my best to be open-minded about his arguments in favor of free will even though I'm virtually certain that he isn't going to markedly alter my basic perspective. But I might do this on my own.

Such is another benefit of a religion of one: it is exceedingly easy to modify the tenets of your unique belief system, just as it's equally easy to worship within that religion. Just be yourself.

Here's what I wrote in that 2005 blog post.

Most people belong to a religion with many members. There are about two billion Christians in the world, over a billion Muslims, and nearly a billion Hindus. Sure, company is nice, but here are some reasons to become a religion of one:

--You can hold a worship service whenever and wherever you want. Your church just needs to be as big as you are.

--No contentious arguments about leadership. Any jockeying for power in your religious organization will be between you and you.

--Doctrinal disputes are easily resolved. What you say, goes.

--If you’ve ever wanted to be known as “Most eminently enlightened great being” or “Her highly esteemed holiness,” within your own mind at least, this is your chance.

--Beer and tortilla chips can be your holy sacraments. Or, cake and chocolate.

--Sex between clergy and parishioners is absolutely fine. Encouraged even. It’s all in your own hands. Literally.

--Finding a name for your religion is easy: just look at your driver’s license. The hard part is deciding between “ism,” “ity,” or whatever. In my case, Hinesism sounds OK, Hinesity terrible. Hinesiosity, maybe. I need to schedule a meeting with myself on this.

--No worries about declining membership. You’re already as low as you can go (death will take your religion down to zero devotees, but that’ll be the least of your worries).

--Salvation is assured. All you need to do is write “salvation is assured” on a holy post-it note and then have faith in your divine revelation Heck, if it works for Christians, Jews, and Muslims, it’ll work for you.

--The next time someone says, “Who died and made you the pope?” you can reply with a straight face, “What do you mean? Nobody had to die, I’ve always held that office.”

But seriously…I’ve got shelves of books from each of the world’s great mystical traditions—Christian, Sufi, Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu—that support the contention, “Become a religion of one.”

Science seeks universal material truths through a collaborative process of rigorous investigation. Mysticism seeks universal spiritual truths through an individual process of rigorous investigation.

Don’t believe it when you hear, “When two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I” in reference to spiritual presence. In truth, that’s when God is not present—in a group.

Believe it: the best religion has a membership of one.

Jewish religious nationalism is behind Israel's horrible treatment of Palestinians

Anyone who wrongly believes that religiosity is a private affair of personal faith needs to educate themselves about the danger religious nationalism poses in many places around the world, including Israel.

I wrote a post about this yesterday for my Salem Political Snark blog, "Two well-researched stories show how badly Israel is treating Palestinians." 

One of those stories was a lengthy piece in the New York Times Magazine, with the title shown above. Since I'm a subscriber to the online New York Times and gifted that link, you should be able to click on it and read this disturbing investigative journalism.

Below I've shared some excerpts from the story that focus on how Jewish religious nationalism has been a major force in Israel's oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank territory occupied by Israel. I've boldfaced passages that pertain most directly to religious extremism. 

What deeply irks me is how conservatives in the United States, and also some Democrats, sadly, keep talking about how the students engaged in campus protests against the inhumane way Israel is conducing its war against Hamas in Gaza need to educate themselves about the history of Israel.

Well, I suspect that most of the students are well aware of how badly Israel has treated Palestinians since the founding of Israel in 1948, I believe it was. In part the reasons why this has happened are rooted in ordinary nationalism. But the Jewish faith has played an even greater role, as you can read below.

Politics is always messy. However, when religion becomes intertwined with a political cause, typically positions become hardened and more extreme, since God's will is imagined to be the basis for religious nationalism. Which is what is happening in Israel at the moment.

Here's the excerpts with my boldfacing. 

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

Some of these people now run Israel. In 2022, just 18 months after losing the prime ministership, Benjamin Netanyahu regained power by forming an alliance with ultraright leaders of both the Religious Zionism Party and the Jewish Power party. It was an act of political desperation on Netanyahu’s part, and it ushered into power some truly radical figures, people — like Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir — who had spent decades pledging to wrest the West Bank and Gaza from Arab hands. Just two months earlier, according to news reports at the time, Netanyahu refused to share a stage with Ben-Gvir, who had been convicted multiple times for supporting terrorist organizations and, in front of television cameras in 1995, vaguely threatened the life of Rabin, who was murdered weeks later by an Israeli student named Yigal Amir.

Now Ben-Gvir was Israel’s national security minister and Smotrich was Israel’s finance minister, charged additionally with overseeing much of the Israeli government’s activities in the West Bank. In December 2022, a day before the new government was sworn in, Netanyahu issued a list of goals and priorities for his new cabinet, including a clear statement that the nationalistic ideology of his new allies was now the government’s guiding star. “The Jewish people,” it said, “have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the land of Israel.”

...With its overwhelming victory in the Arab-​Israeli War of 1967, Israel more than doubled the amount of land it controlled, seizing new territory in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem. Now it faced a choice: Would the new land become part of Israel or be bargained away as part of a future Palestinian state? To a cadre of young Israelis imbued with messianic zeal, the answer was obvious. The acquisition of the territories animated a religious political movement — Gush Emunim, or “Bloc of the Faithful” — that was determined to settle the newly conquered lands.

Gush Emunim followers believed that the coming of the messiah would be hastened if, rather than studying holy books from morning to night, Jews settled the newly occupied territories. This was the land of “Greater Israel,” they believed, and there was a pioneer spirit among the early settlers. They saw themselves as direct descendants of the earliest Zionists, who built farms and kibbutzim near Palestinian villages during the first part of the 20th century, when the land was under British control. But while the Zionism of the earlier period was largely secular and socialist, the new settlers believed they were advancing God’s agenda.

...The Jewish Department found itself continually behind in its efforts to address the onslaught. In April 1984, it had a major breakthrough: Its agents foiled a Jewish Underground plan to blow up five buses full of Palestinians, and they arrested around two dozen Jewish Underground members who had also played roles in the Islamic College attack and the bombings of the Palestinian mayors in 1980. But only after weeks of interrogating the suspects did Shin Bet learn that the Jewish Underground had been developing a scheme to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque. The planning involved dozens of intelligence-gathering trips to the Temple Mount and an assessment of the exact amount of explosives that would be needed and where to place them. The goal was nothing less than to drag the entire Middle East into a war, which the Jewish Underground saw as a precondition for the coming of the messiah.

...That evening marked the beginning of Purim, the festive commemoration of the victory of the Jews over Haman the Agagite, a court official in the Persian Empire and the nemesis of the Jews in the Old Testament’s Book of Esther. Right-wing Israelis have often drawn parallels between Haman and Arabs — enemies who seek the annihilation of Jews. Goldstein woke early the next day and put on his I.D.F. uniform, and at 5:20 a.m. he entered the Cave of the Patriarchs, an ancient complex in Hebron that serves as a place of worship for both Jews and Muslims. Goldstein carried with him his I.D.F.-issued Galil rifle. It was also the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and on that morning hundreds of Muslims crowded the hall in prayer. Goldstein faced the worshipers and began shooting, firing 108 rounds before he was dragged down and beaten to death. The massacre killed 29 Muslim worshipers and injured more than 100.

...The killings shocked Israel, and the government responded with a crackdown on extremism. Kach and Kahane Chai, the two political organizations most closely affiliated with the Kahanist movement, were outlawed and labeled terrorist groups, as was any other party that called for “the establishment of a theocracy in the biblical Land of Israel and the violent expulsion of Arabs from that land.” Rabin, in an address to the Knesset, spoke directly to the followers of Goldstein and Kahane, who he said were the product of a malicious foreign influence on Israel. “You are not part of the community of Israel,” he said. “You are not partners in the Zionist enterprise. You are a foreign implant. You are an errant weed. Sensible Judaism spits you out. You placed yourself outside the wall of Jewish law.”

...The I.D.F. refused to allow Goldstein to be buried in the Jewish cemetery in Hebron. He was buried instead in the Kiryat Arba settlement, in a park named for Meir Kahane, and his gravesite has become an enduring place of pilgrimage for Jews who wanted to celebrate, as his epitaph reads, the “saint” who died for Israel with “clean hands and a pure heart.”

...The warnings noted that rabbis in West Bank settlements, along with some politicians on the right, were now openly advocating violence against Israeli public officials, especially Rabin. Extremist rabbis issued rulings of Jewish law against Rabin — imposing a curse of death, a Pulsa Dinura, and providing justification for killing him, a din rodef.

...The ascent of a far-right prime minister did little to prevent the virulent, anti-government strain inside the settler movement from spreading. A new generation of Kahanists was taking an even more radical turn, not only against Israeli politicians who might oppose or insufficiently abet them but against the very notion of a democratic Israeli state. A group calling itself Hilltop Youth advocated for the total destruction of the Zionist state. Meir Ettinger, named for his grandfather Meir Kahane, was one of the Hilltop Youth leaders, and he made his grandfather’s views seem moderate.

Their objective was to tear down Israel’s institutions and to establish “Jewish rule”: anointing a king, building a temple in place of the Jerusalem mosques sacred to Muslims worldwide, imposing a religious regime on all Jews. Ehud Olmert, who served as Israeli prime minister from 2006 to 2009, said in an interview that Hilltop Youth “genuinely, deeply, emotionally believe that this is the right thing to do for Israel. This is a salvation. This is the guarantee for Israel’s future.”

Religion should learn from science about overturning worldviews

After almost 20 years of regularly posting on this Church of the Churchless blog, I've learned a lot about how believers in the supernatural look at things. Which isn't a major surprise, since I used to be much more of a believer in supernatural stuff myself that I am now.

But I always had a healthy dose of uncertainty about this. I thought that a supernatural realm was a reasonable hypothesis. Or if not reasonable, at least a hypothesis that appealed to me, given that I really liked the notion that one day I could learn the secrets of the cosmos that lie beyond the physical.

What's surprised me, though, is how cavalier some mystically and religiously inclined people who visit this blog would talk in comments left on posts about supposed supernatural experiences that, if they were true, would upend much of modern science. 

Like, that consciousness isn't dependent on a brain but can float free of materiality via the soul or subtler astral/causal bodies. And that the origin of our universe exists in an immaterial divine realm. If anything like this could be proven, it would be an astounding revolution in the human worldview.

I've been reading a book by particle physicist Harry Cliff, Space Oddities, that discusses in a highly readable and entertaining fashion how science deals with roughly similar issues. The simplest way Cliff puts it is to quote Carl Sagan: "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." 

Meaning, if you want to overturn a worldview, you're better come armed with some damn persuasive reasons why this is justified. Just saying, "believe me," isn't going to cut it. 

In a series of fascinating chapters about anomalies that challenged a scientific understanding of reality, Cliff describes the nitty-gritty process of science that is used to assess whether an anomaly is something to be taken seriously, or lacks credence. It'd be great if would-be explorers of the supernatural would apply an equal amount of skepticism to their own investigations.

The "A Magnetic Mystery" chapter blew my mind about the extent to which scientists will go to study a phenomenon that could cast light on an important scientific question. In this case, it was how magnetic a muon particle is. 

A key reason why this is so important is that muons, being much more massive than electrons, should interact much more strongly with undiscovered quantum fields. Cliff says, "Put another way, there's more likely to be treasure hidden in the quantum froth that bubbles around the muon that there is around the lowly electron."

The anomaly in this instance was a minute difference between an experiment that measured the muon's magnetism and the predicted value: though just 2.9 parts per billion, the discrepancy "quickly became the most famous anomaly in particle physics."

To determine whether the standard model of particle physics truly needed to be modified, or if the discrepancy was due to chance or experimental error, an amazing amount of scientific labor went into a more refined measurement of the muon's magnetism. 

A gigantic magnet had to be repurposed for the experiment. This required transporting it thousands of miles through a circuitous route from where it initially resided to the new experimental setup. Freeways had to be closed to accommodate the movement of the magnet. 

I won't go into all of the details, which boggle the mind. All of this effort was to determine the experimentally observed strength of muon magnetism and compare it with two theoretical predictions. If there was a statistically valid discrepancy, then the possibility of revealing hitherto unknown laws of nature and quantum fields was strong. 

This passage inspired me, as it shows how scientists (unlike religious believers) are hyperaware of the danger that their own desire to discover something new could screw up an inquiry into the nature of reality.

Until that day, the analysis had been performed "blind," which meant that the value of the muon's magnetism had been kept hidden from everyone on the experimental team, Polly included. Blinding is a widespread practice in physics these days as a defense against conscious or unconscious biases creeping into a measurement.

The risks of being able to continually look at the answer while you are adjusting your analysis methods are self-evident. Even the most dispassionate scientist has their prejudices and preconceptions, their hopes and fears.

Imagine you had worked on both the Brookhaven and the Fermilab experiments; you might well hope that the new Fermilab measurement would confirm the result you got at Brookhaven, and so, when choosing how to analyze the data, you might be drawn toward techniques that move the new measurement closer to the old one. 

By blinding yourself, the temptation to nudge the result in your preferred direction is removed. 

But fervent believers in Jesus, or a guru, have no problem considering that they've seen something real when a vision of their beloved manifests in their consciousness. Wishful visioning doesn't enter their mind, though clearly it should. 

 

The mystery of consciousness actually isn't so mysterious

The history of science shows us that many inexplicable phenomena, which often were considered to have supernatural causes (Thor makes thunder!) actually have natural causes. 

I strongly suspect that the same will prove to be true of consciousness. While most scientists view consciousness to be a product of the brain, some, especially those with a philosophical bent, have a dualistic perspective where mind and body are separate entities.

This, of course, was how Descartes saw things way back in the 1600s, believing that the mind was nonphysical. Most religions share that opinion, though soul sometimes is substituted for mind, or added to it as another nonphysical entity.

I think it'd be great if the mind or soul was nonphysical, as that'd markedly increase the odds that when we die, we're not dead and gone forever. Our body is, but we'd live on. (Hopefully in a more pleasant state of existence, though that's not guaranteed by religions.)

Today I came across an interesting story on Neurosciencenews, "Rethinking the mystery of consciousness." Here's the summary that starts the story off.

Summary: A new study challenges traditional views on consciousness, arguing that our perceptions of mind-body separation are influenced by psychological biases.

The researchers used experiments involving the well-known thought exercise “Mary and the Zombie” to illustrate how our intuitions about consciousness are shaped by innate dualism. Participants’ responses suggest that while we often view consciousness as a mystical, separate entity, it significantly registers in physical brain activities.

Findings contend these biases mislead us into perceiving consciousness as more mysterious than it truly is, advocating for a reevaluation of its roots in simple brain functions.

Key Facts:

(1) Berent’s experiments reveal that people’s perceptions of consciousness can dramatically shift, suggesting that consciousness may not be the ethereal phenomenon we often consider it to be.

(2) She argues that evolutionary psychology and inherent dualistic tendencies shape our views on consciousness, making us believe it exists beyond the physical.

(3) The study highlights that even profound experiences, like Mary seeing color for the first time, have tangible effects on brain activity, reinforcing the physical nature of consciousness.

Source: Northeastern University

Now, to be clear, "Mary" and "Zombies" are actually two separate thought exercises. I find the case of Mary discussed in the story to be more interesting, but here's my take on Zombies.

These are (obviously) hypothetical creatures who outwardly are indistinguishable from humans. They talk like us, they act like us, they behave like us. In other words they're a lot like a highly advanced Artificial Intelligence in a human body. The only difference between them and us is that they lack consciousness. 

So some philosophers take this to mean that consciousness must be nonphysical, since it is an add-on that really isn't needed to do everything we conscious humans do. To my mind the main argument against this view is pretty damn simple: Zombies don't exist!

The Rationally Speaking blogger, a philosophy professor, expresses that sentiment more expansively in a post, "I just don't get it. More on Mary and the Zombies."

None of the above should be construed as a dismissal of thought experiments (which, incidentally, have a place also in science), but rather as a clarification of what thought experiments are about. Hypothetical scenarios simply do not have the power to discover new facts about the world. If that were the case, then we wouldn’t need empirical science, or at the very least the role of empirical science would be greatly diminished in comparison with what it actually is (I’m looking at you, string theorists...).

Rather, thought experiments are helpful to bring to the fore our assumptions about certain matters, as well as to unpack the logical entailments of those assumptions. When well done, they represent good philosophy (or good science, depending on the experiment). But when one uses them beyond their scope to reach grand conclusions about what practitioners of another field can and cannot do, one ends up just looking silly.

Regarding Mary, she's a neuroscientist who knows everything how we humans perceive color. However, she's colorblind, so Mary has never actually seen the color red. She just understands how red is seen. Then one day Mary is able to see a rose in all its vibrant redness. This makes some people believe that the consciousness of red lies outside physical explanation. 

The experimenter named in the summary is psychology professor Iris Berent. The story says:

Influential philosopher David Chalmers famously won a bet in 2023 for claiming consciousness exists beyond the merely physical, Berent says.

But she says the question of where consciousness exists is a false one—and she has a new paper that presents her position.

In an article published in the Neuroscience of Consciousness, she argues that the debate stems from the delusional—albeit natural—biases in the way humans think about the separation, or lack thereof, between body and mind.

“One of the biases is dualism, intuitive dualism—the fact that we perceive minds as separate from our bodies.”

“The extent to which we look at consciousness and think that it is this really mysterious thing could very well arise from how we see it rather from what consciousness really is,” Berent says.

“Consciousness isn’t hard. Psychology is,” she says.

Berent found that when people are asked to think about how Mary is able to see color for the first time, they realize that some physical changes must have occurred in her brain. Neuronal wiring must have shifted so that whereas before she just saw in black and white, now she can see in color. 

Not mysterious at all. At least, the mystery of how Mary could come to see red is purely physical.

Berent says she decided to challenge these conclusions with two additional questions.

“The first question is kind of a reality check question, which is do they think Mary’s case is significant? Is it transformative? And everybody said, ‘Sure, it’s super transformative,'” Berent says.

“We also asked how likely is it that this experience will actually show up in her brain? If we scan her brain, will it light up? And it turns out that that’s exactly what people said. It will significantly register in the brain.”

“The point being, in the condition of the zombie people say, ‘no,’ (consciousness) is not physical,” Berent says. “And in Mary’s condition, people say it’s physical.”

“If people change their mind in this way, it can’t possibly be that in reality consciousness has changed. It must be that there is something within the human psyche that colors how we see consciousness.”

“For me, this means that we need to be really careful before we assume that there is any real mystery going on.”

One theory about what that something within the human psyche is, apart from wishful thinking that our mind or soul will live on after we die, and the sensation we have that our consciousness feels ethereal while our body feels physical, is that evolution favored the survival of creatures who could understand that other creatures have intentions just like they do, leading to the capacity of a "theory of mind" where we not only can observe what another creature is doing, but can grasp with a decent amount of accuracy what is on their mind, and so the foundation of future action. This fosters mind-body dualism.

Which leads to the final sentence in the story.

Consciousness likely comes down to electrochemical functions in the brain, she says. “It’s hard for psychological reasons.”

"Perfect" never applies to a guru or other religious leader

In everyday life, I've never heard of anyone described as being perfect. Makes sense.

For one thing, how could "perfect" even be defined as regards a person? For another, assuming it could be defined, how would a person's perfection be assessed? 

In sports, perfect applies to something measurable. If a pitcher has a perfect game, no batter from the opposing team reached a base. A perfect game in bowling is 300 points, strikes in each of the first nine frames plus three in the tenth.

Otherwise, typically perfect means high quality. If a waiter asks a patron how they enjoyed their meal, a highly satisfied person might say, "It was perfect, absolutely perfect."

But in certain religious circles, a guru or other leader may be termed "perfect." Not for something they've done. For who they are.  And that, in my present skeptical atheist mental state, is utterly unbelievable. 

Not always for me, though. For 35 years I entertained the possibility that the guru who initiated me in 1971 into the Radha Soami Satsang Beas fold was a "perfect living master."

The guru's name was Charan Singh. After he died in 1990, and also while he was still living, I'd talk to him inside my head. Never got a discernible response, but the talking made me feel closer to him, especially when I needed a spiritual shoulder to lean on, even if it was imaginary.

If I was in an informal mood, I'd simply start off by saying, "Master.... ." If I was in a formal mood, wanting to address him with a lengthy honorific, I'd say, "Param Sant Satguru Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh Ji, Perfect Living Master of Beas, India... ."

Param Sant means highest saint. Satguru means true guru. Maharaj Ji is a title of deep respect, since in Sanskrit maharaja means great king.

However, all of those other titles pale in comparison to "Perfect Living Master."

That's how the gurus of Radha Soami Satsang Beas are regarded in the RSSB teachings. They are perfect. Not physically, obviously, but spiritually, for their soul consciousness supposedly has merged completely with the divine force that powers the cosmos, and may be called God. 

It's a great story. With a glaring problem. It isn't true.

At least, there's no demonstrable evidence that any guru or religious leader is perfect in a divine sense. Without exception, everyone who is claimed to be perfect has obvious imperfections: moral flaws, poor judgment, prone to mistakes -- in short, everything that other imperfect human beings demonstrate, "perfect" gurus do also.

You might be thinking, okay, I agree, but so what? Where's the harm in putting someone up on a pedestal and looking upon them as a perfect being, even though that's an illusion?

Well, based on my lengthy experience with belonging to a religious organization founded on the notion of a perfect living master, there's several harms. The claim that the RSSB guru is perfect leads to an extreme dogmatism among devoted followers. Since it's believed that the guru makes no mistakes, every utterance, every command, is unquestioned.

This sort of fanaticism is dangerous. It can lead to bad behavior by devotees who consider that even if the guru is asking them to do something wrong by worldly standards, a perfect living master operates by rules known only to other satgurus, not to ordinary people.

Also, the egos of the guru's devotees become inflated by proximity to a supposedly perfect being. They come to see themselves as special in the eye of God. Members of other religious groups have imperfect leaders. But us lucky souls, we have won the divine lottery by being initiated by a perfect living master who guarantees that God-realization will be ours through his grace and guidance.

Which again isn't true, in my well-informed opinion. So the best thing to do is to give up on viewing any guru or religious leader as being perfect. They aren't. And you'll be happier in the long run by realizing this.

Rather than rely on religion, here's what I consider both true and beneficial

Having been a religious believer for 35 years, Eastern religion variety, I'm deeply familiar with why people are attracted to a belief in God, heaven, supernatural realms, mystical powers, life after death, and such.

In short, it feels good. 

Religions provide a community of like-minded people. They offer a ready-made meaning to life. Their believers are drawn to view themselves as special, possessing knowledge and benefits (like eternal salvation) off-limits to those not within the religion's fold. 

I found all those things highly appealing and beneficial to me.

Until I didn't. For this primary reason: I came to conclude that most of what I believed wasn't true. So I was buying good feelings with a counterfeit coin. This was different than how I felt for a long time, which basically was "I don't know for sure what's true and false about my religion, but it has the ring of truth."

That shift didn't happen overnight. It occurred gradually, bit by bit, in much the same way my first wife, Sue, and I grew apart during the latter stage of our 18-year marriage. In both cases, the final breakup was preceded by a lengthy period of slowly growing disenchantment. 

I'm not claiming that I now have seen the light and know truths about reality that escaped me during my true believing days. Far from it. In some ways I'm more uncertain now about life and the cosmos than I was as a religious believer.

But I'm content with that, because I'd rather be close-to-certain about a few key things regarding this material world, rather than being close-to-certain about some supernatural propositions. 

That tradeoff makes sense to me because I've found that when something is likely both true and beneficial, embracing it is better than being attached to something that's probably false and beneficial. In other words, I'm still wanting peace of mind, happiness, and other good stuff. I just have come to prefer that those goodies come wrapped in truth rather than falsehood.

Again, I'm not saying that I have any unique insights into what is both True and Good. In fact, I'm attracted to these True and Good statements about reality in large part because I see them as founded in a broad scientific outlook, not some narrow perspective. 

If I had to pick two True and Good things that I've come to rely on, they would be:

(1) There's no enduring self. This is a tenet of both modern neuroscience and ancient Buddhism. What I am, what you are, what everybody is -- that's something ever-changing, ephemeral, and interconnected with the rest of existence. Knowing this takes the pressure off of me trying to find my true self, of saving my soul, and other notions based on an assumption that such is possible. 

(2) There's no free will. This also is a tenet of both modern neuroscience and ancient Buddhism. Whether termed determinism or karma, it seems highly likely, almost certain, that our actions, thoughts, emotions, and such arise from causes and conditions extending from the present moment to the big bang that brought our universe into being. Again, interconnectedness. 

Now, I realize that even if someone acknowledges these statements to be true, they may vehemently disagree that they are beneficial. And that's fine. For that person. I'm just expressing how I feel, not how everybody should feel. 

Which is a considerable change for me. I used to get defensive when my religious beliefs were challenged. I'd try to defend them by various sorts of arguments, none of them highly persuasive, in my current frame of mind. 

By no means have I lost all of my desire to have people agree with me, rather than disagree. I'm just less concerned about defending my views about no-self and no free will. (Not that I have a choice in the matter.)

The delusion of believing in gurus and other gems from Joan Tollifson

In my daily morning reading, I bounce back and forth between books about science and books about spirituality/philosophy, because consuming too much of either is less pleasant for me than a balanced diet.

I've been enjoying several of Joan Tollifson's books for my spiritual/philosophical reading. She's become my favorite contemporary writer on Zen, Buddhism, nonduality, meditation, and such. I don't agree with everything she says. Which isn't surprising, since I don't agree with everything I say. 

For example, Tollifson considers awareness to be the Key Thing. (The quotes in this post are from Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and Dialogues About Non-Duality.)

Awareness has no goals, no strategies. It seeks nothing and goes nowhere. It simply illuminates what is. Awareness is our True Nature -- the groundless ground that is always Here/Now.

I don't really disagree with this sentiment, but I wouldn't say awareness is our true nature. To me it is simply how we perceive reality. Without consciousness, reality doesn't exist for us. (I consider awareness and consciousness to be the same thing.)

I doubt that awareness is a thing, though, notwithstanding that last sentence. It's how we know things, without being a thing itself. So in that sense, I guess you could say it is indeed our true nature, since absent awareness, we'd have no nature at all. At least, to ourselves.

When she talks about dogmatic religiosity and gurus, on the other hand, I'm essentially 100% on board with what Tollifson says. Today I read this right-on passage about gurus.

There is a great deal of spiritual mythology about enlightened people who are imagined to be totally beyond ego.

I am not saying that there are not some remarkably clear, very awake people, but they all have poop chutes, as a friend of mind once astutely pointed out, and all too often these gurus who are supposedly so fully enlightened are also molesting young girls or embezzling money or drinking themselves to death or sending out hit men to kill or terrorize ex-devotees, and of course, the faithful devotees manage to convince themselves that all such behavior is either untrue or else it's some form of "crazy wisdom" that the guru is doing deliberately as some kind of teaching.

But really, what difference does it make who has more egoic moments or fewer egoic moments -- who cares about this? It's the phantom me again. All we can work with is what is actually arising right now. What good does it do to worry about how enlightened or deluded someone else is?

Given the title of my previous blog post, "Science says we are all vibrations in the same invisible oceans," a quote from a noted particle physicist, I was struck by this response Tollifson gave to someone who asked her if there really was a difference "between all of us and Ramana Maharshi, that we are all as deeply realized as he was."

I'm pointing out that this question is a form of suffering, rooted in delusion. It assumes that Ramana and you are separate, bounded entities, rather than different waves in a single fluid ocean. Both waves are equally water, equally ocean. It was to this wholeness, this emptiness, this nondual reality that Ramana was always pointing. No one owns wholeness. Wholeness appears as everything, including me and you and Ramana.

Lastly, I like Tollifson's expansive view of meditation. I used to narrowly define meditation as concentration upon a single object. But that's just one form of meditation. There are countless, according to Tollifsion, since awareness and meditation are synonymous to her.

True meditation as I mean it is simply awareness... Instead of our habitual attempt to get what we want or to get rid of what we don't like, meditation is an invitation to not move toward anything or away from anything, but simply to discover what actually is -- even if it's something we find unpleasant or painful or something we think is "not very spiritual."

Instead of trying to get away from it and get to something better, what if instead there is complete openness to what is? Openness is the heart of true meditation. This isn't some grueling task I'm talking about. It's the opposite of a task. It's not doing anything at all. It's not seeking a result. It's what Here/Now is -- the open space of awareness beholding everything just as it is.

So I would recommend sitting quietly if this invites you, if it interests you. You don't have to be sitting, you can be lying down -- sitting is not the essence of it. And you certainly don't need to in any special posture. You can be in a recliner or on a park bench or on an airplane or anywhere at all. You can move when you feel like it -- you don't need to be motionless, rigid, or bolt upright.

There is a natural stillness that occurs by itself, and a naturally open, relaxed and grounded posture that the body finds. There are no special hand positions. You don't have to close your eyes or open them or keep them half closed or anything in particular.

This isn't about forcing your mind to stop thinking and focus instead on your breathing. It isn't about visualizing deities or repeating a mantra. It's nothing more or less than being silently present, doing nothing other than being here.

And if this attracts you, as it does me, then I encourage you to take time and make space to be still, to do nothing, to simply be aware, to explore and enjoy the present moment, exactly as it is.

Science says we are all vibrations in the same invisible oceans

For 35 years I was a member of an India-based religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), that taught the essence of reality was shabd, all-pervading conscious energy, which could be heard as divine sound and seen as divine light.

In the early 1990s I wrote a book for RSSB, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder, that described my take on the links between the new physics and ancient mysticism, focusing on how the "all-pervading" and "energy" aspects of shabd were recognized by quantum mechanics, but not the "conscious" part.

That's still true, of course.

Naturally there have been advances in quantum mechanics over the past 30 years, but the basic tenets remain the same as when this field of the very small (which nonetheless has strong implications for the very large, since the universe started out as very small in the big bang) came to be in the first part of the twentieth century.

There's a difference in me, though. 

I no longer view all-pervading conscious energy (I liked the acronym ACE) as the foundation of ultimate reality. However, I still enjoy learning about how science views all-pervading energy, which in physics is known as quantum fields.

My new favorite book -- I'm serially promiscuous in a literary sense, finding intense delight in a book before casting it aside in favor of a fresh-faced attractive newcomer -- is Harry Cliff's Space Oddities: The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding  of the Universe. The back cover says:

Harry Cliff is a particle physicist based at the University of Cambridge and carries out research with the LHCb experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. He was a curator at the Science Museum, London, for seven years and regularly gives public lectures and makes TV and radio appearances. His 2015 TED talk "Have We Reached the End of Physics?" has been viewed nearly three million times.

So Cliff is both highly qualified to write about the current state of physics, and a skilled enough communicator to make what he says both understandable and entertaining. In short, he has a way with words that is unusually appealing for a scientist.

In a Prologue, Cliff summarizes the core theme of his book.

Meanwhile, in particle physics, a series of anomalies has also been growing ever more significant, leading many to believe that we are on the brink of something big. Particles with unbelievable energies have been spotted bursting from beneath the Antarctic ice while hidden forces seem to be tugging on the basic building blocks of matter.

From the vast subterranean caverns of the Large Hadron Collider to a balloon floating high above the frozen ice sheets of the South Pole, scientists are uncovering a catalog of weird phenomena that can't be explained by our long-established theories of the universe.

...These anomalies could be the answers to all our prayers, lifting the veil on nature's best-kept secrets and leading to a revolutionary new scientific age.

But they also bring danger. As Carl Sagan once said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and there are good reasons to question whether these results are really signs of something wondrous and new or mere statistical flukes, theoretical confusion, or, worst of all for us practitioners, a glitch in an experiment.

Could we be so desperate to see something new that we risk seeing effects where there are none? Could we be chasing ghosts? Or, after decades of fruitless searching, could we finally be catching glimpses of a profound new view of the fundamental nature of reality?

Before Cliff gets to the anomalies that stimulated those questions, he spends 18 pages on telling "The Cosmic Story" in a chapter with that title. This is background for the science to be discussed in later chapters. But there's some sparkly scientific gems to be admired in that introductory chapter.

However, rather strangely perhaps considering its name, the standard model of particle physics isn't really a theory of particles at all. Instead, it describes the world around us as being made of rather more mysterious and nebulous objects known as quantum fields. Particles are fairly easy to picture, conjuring images of little spheres whizzing around in space. Quantum fields are far harder to get our heads around.

...[Regarding the force felt with magnets, attraction and repulsion] The thing that's there is a quantum field, in this case the magnetic field. It may be invisible, and you may not be aware of it except when you're playing with magnets, but nevertheless it is ever present. And it is not simply the case that magnets generate a magnetic field close to their poles.

In truth, the magnetic field permeates the entire universe, connecting my little magnets to the magnetic dynamo of the Earth, the Sun, and even the most distant galaxy. There is only one magnetic field, and it's everywhere. 

The "quantum" bit of a quantum field comes into play when we try to understand what a particle is. If quantum fields are like invisible fluids filling all of space, particles can be thought of as little ripples in these fluids.

The reasons you are able to read these words is that a torrent of uncountable particles of light known as photons are bouncing off the page and smashing headlong into your retinas. Each photon is a tiny undulation in something called the electromagnetic field (of which the magnetic field is just one aspect).

What we think of as a particle, therefore, is simply the smallest possible amount of wobble that can travel through a quantum field.

It may seem counterintuitive to think that it is the invisible influence of fields that governs the universe. But in fact, it's even stranger than that. According to the standard model, fields explain not just light and photons but even the particles that make up the apparently solid world around us. 

Atoms are ultimately made of subatomic particles -- electrons and quarks -- which aren't tiny hard spheres, as we've been trained to imagine, but instead little ripples in underlying fields. Electrons are little ripples in something called the electron field, while quarks are tiny wobbles in the quark fields.

It is those fields, not particles, that are the ultimate constituents of our universe. Each of us is made of fields. Deep down, we are all vibrations in the same invisible oceans. 

Beautiful. No, more than beautiful. Awe-inspiring also.

This is the message of mysticism in the language of science, supported by solid facts rather than ethereal conjecture. It's why I've always loved science. Yes, for a long time I also loved mysticism. And I'm still open to the possibility that one day science will add "conscious" to the attributes of all-pervading energy known as quantum fields.

Until that day arrives, though, I much prefer science to mysticism. Because I prefer my reality to be real.

Take this survey to learn if you have a hierarchical or interconnected worldview

A short article in the June 2023 issue of Scientific American (I'm behind in my magazine reading) had a fascinating title that applies to religiosity just as much as to politics, in my view. If that link doesn't work for you, here's a PDF file of the article.
Download Many Differences between Liberals and Conservatives May Boil Down to One Belief | Scientific America

The article gives examples in the political realm.

In most of our studies, we also asked people to share their political party preference and to rate how liberal or conservative they consider themselves. In an early study focused on well-being, I noticed a surprising relation between people's beliefs and how they answered these two questions. Belief that the world was dangerous was not as linked to party or ideology as past research—including some of our own—said it should be.

We conducted nine more studies with nearly 5,000 participants, mostly Americans, to make sure we had it right. These studies pointed away from the “dangerous world” belief as the core difference between liberals and conservatives and toward a different primal called hierarchical world belief. That primal, we found, was 20 times more strongly related to political ideology than dangerous world belief.

People who score high in hierarchical world belief see the world as full of differences that matter because they usually reflect something real, inherent and significant. Such individuals often separate things of greater value from things of lesser value. You might imagine that to them the world looks full of big, bold black lines.

In the opposite view—held by people with lower scores for this belief—differences tend to be seen as superficial and even silly. For those with this perspective, the world is mostly dotted lines or shades of gray. (To reiterate, primals concern tendencies only. Even people with a strong hierarchical world belief see some lines as arbitrary.) In our work, this primal was high in conservatives and low in liberals.

Most types of hierarchical thinking that have been studied, such as social dominance orientation, concern preferences about how humans should be organized. But hierarchical world belief relates to how people think the world actually is—regardless of what they'd like to see. In addition, this primal applies not only to human groups but to everything, including plants, other animals and inanimate objects. For people high in this belief, the universe is the kind of place where lines matter.

One reason our discovery is exciting is that it hints at ways to work through specific political deadlocks. For example, consider debates around LGBTQ+ topics. Conservatives may feel that the line separating men and women is natural and innate—a big, bold line—whereas liberals may see that distinction as more superficial and culturally based. Welfare payments and policies, too, might be seen through a hierarchical lens, with some assuming that lines between rich and poor often reflect meaningful differences in people's work ethic, talent, morality or value to society.

The line relevant to the abortion debate is perhaps conception. Conservatives believe this line marks the beginning of human life and thus matters a great deal. A nonhierarchical perspective would be that life emerges incrementally across many thresholds.

I see hierarchy versus interconnectedness as applying to religion also. For example, Buddhism and Taoism are decidedly non-hierarchical, viewing reality as being inherently unified with interconnections among its seeming parts.

Fundamentalist Christianity, or any fundamentalist religion, sees reality as being headed up by the Big Man Upstairs, God, who delegates authority to entities lower in the cosmic organizational chart: incarnations like Jesus, godly saints, gurus, church leaders, and so on. 

Questioning authority in a hierarchical religion, or political organization, is strongly discouraged. And also punished. But Buddhism embraces the saying, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." Metaphorically, of course. 

The article says:

We find instead that the main difference between the left and the right is whether people believe the world is inherently hierarchical. Conservatives, our work shows, tend to believe more strongly than liberals in a hierarchical world, which is essentially the view that the universe is a place where the lines between categories or concepts matter. A clearer understanding of that difference could help society better bridge political divides.

We discovered this by accident. My team was undertaking an ambitious effort to map all the most basic beliefs that people hold about the world we share. We call these tenets “primal world beliefs,” or “primals” for short. Primals reflect what individuals think is typical about the world—for instance, that most things are beautiful or that life is usually full of pain and suffering. We suspect these beliefs hold important implications for people's mental health and well-being.

You can learn what your own primals are by heading to this web site. There's three surveys you can take: a 99 question one, a 18 question one, and a 6 question one. I took the 99 question survey, then the 18 question survey. The 99 question survey has more detail on the hierarchical front. Here's my overall result (the scores range from 0 to 5):

I got a very high score, 5.0, on the Interconnected primal. Not surprisingly, I got a correspondingly low score on the hierarchical primal, 1.2.

Regular readers of this blog also won't be surprised by my low score in the Alive section as to whether the world is Intentional, 0.8. However, I find the world highly Interesting, 4.5, Worth Exploring, 4.0, and Meaningful, 4.75. The meaning just comes from me, not a higher power or the universe. 

The 18 question survey is a bit easier to understand, having only four primals. Here's how my very low score on Alive was described in my result report. I'd be interested in how other people score on this primal. My guess is that the more supernaturally-inclined visitors to this blog are, the higher their score on Alive will be.

 

Becoming confused about illusionism, I shift to the simpler topic of many selves

So, I was happily reading along in Eric Schwitzgebel's book, The Weirdness of the World, getting to the last few pages of a chapter where he tries to define consciousness in a defensible fashion, when my attention was captured by a passage about illusionism -- though that term wasn't used by Schwitzgebel.

Some philosophers have argued that consciousness, or phenomenal consciousness, does not exist. Keith Frankish is the most visible recent advocate, but others include Paul Feyerabend, Jay Garfield, Francois Kammerer, and maybe early Patricia Churchland. The argument is always a version of the following: 

The ordinary concept of (phenomenal) consciousness ineliminably contains some dubious metaphysical or epistemic assumption at odds with the mainstream scientific or materialistic world conception. In this way, "consciousness" is like "ghost" or "Heavenly spirit" or "divine revelation." 

You can't remove the immaterial metaphysics from the concept of a ghost or spirit; you can't remove the religious epistemology from the concept of divine revelation. Therefore, all these terms must go; there is no such thing. 

Frankish in particular offers a lovely list of dubious commitments that consciousness enthusiasts sometimes adopt. Let me now disavow all such commitments. Conscious experiences need not be simple, nor ineffable, nor intrinsic, nor private, nor immediately apprehended. 

They need not have non-physical properties, or be inaccessible to "third-person" science, or be inexplicable in materialist vocabulary. My definition did not, I hope, commit me on any such questions (which was exactly Desideratum 1). My best guess -- though only a guess (see chapter 2) -- is that all such claims are false, if intended as universal generalizations about consciousness.

Okay, that wasn't crystal clear (philosophers usually aren't), but I got the basic point. Frankish and his fellow illusionists, as they're called, consider that the way consciousness typically is viewed contains unproven assumptions that have an other-worldly, non-physical leaning. 

I really hadn't thought that, based on the many neuroscience books I've read about consciousness and the brain, but I can understand how Frankish, et. al., consider that their illusionist perspective corrects for those, well, illusions. 

I then embarked on what I thought would be a brief quest to find a fairly short easy-to-understand of what illusionism is all about. I chose to ignore Wikipedia, though in retrospect, this description of illusionism on the Keith Frankish page is pleasingly understandable. 

Frankish is known for espousing the view that phenomenality is an introspective illusion. "We humans have learned a variety of subtle but powerful tricks — strategies of self-control, self-manipulation, and extended problem-solving — which vastly extend the power of our biological brains and give us the sense of having a unified, phenomenally conscious mind, self, or soul."^[1]

Early in his career he took a “robustly materialist stance” and attempted to rebut the zombie argument popularized by David Chalmers. In 2007, when he wrote the "Anti-Zombie Argument," he endorsed a weak form of realism about qualia.^[6] In later work, however, he rejected phenomenal realism altogether, arguing that “materialists should be thoroughgoing eliminativists about qualia.” He called this stance “illusionism.”

I tried to make sense of a piece Frankish wrote called "The consciousness illusion," but had trouble comprehending it. Which seemed strange, since usually I have a high tolerance for esoteric arguments. The first paragraph was about as clear as Frankish got in the piece, from my confused perspective.

In the movie The Matrix (1999), Morpheus offers Neo a red pill. If he takes it, he will discover that reality as he knows it is an illusion created by machine overlords to keep humans enslaved. I am going to offer you a different pill, which – if it works – will convince you that your own consciousness is a sort of illusion, a fiction created by your brain to help you keep track of its activities. This view – which I call illusionism­ – is widely considered absurd (it’s been described by Galen Strawson as ‘the silliest claim ever made’), but it has able defenders (pre-eminently Daniel Dennett), and I want to persuade you that it isn’t absurd and might well be true. Are you ready to see how deep the rabbit hole goes?

After some pondering about my confusion about illusionism, it dawned on me that a core precept (as noted in the Wikipedia article) of this approach to consciousness appears to be skepticism about we humans having, or being, a "unified, phenomenally conscious mind, self, or soul." I share that skepticism.

Otherwise, from what I could tell from my admittedly brief reading about illusionism, Frankish agrees with mainstream neuroscience that consciousness is produced by the physical brain. But he denies that there is "something to be like" you or me or a bat or a dog or any other conscious entity -- perhaps because there is no independent stand-alone enduring entity that is conscious.

So I'll end this post by sharing an excerpt from a June 2023 Scientific American story, "The community of Ella," about a woman who showed 12 different personalities ranging in age from two to 16. Her therapist took an anthropological perspective in treating her over a lengthy period of time, writing:

What, I wondered, might happen if we took the "is she or isn't she" [faking her multiple personalities] off the table and instead questioned our own assumptions about what makes a healthy self?

In the contemporary West, we generally think of the self as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated center of emotional awareness, judgment and action that is distinct from other selves and from the world around us. 

This self is singular, personal, intimate and private: it is not directly accessible to anyone but us. The self is the core of a person, the center of experience, the fundamental aspect of us that makes us who we are.

...But this understanding of the self is far from universal. Anthropologists have long documented very different ideas about the self in cultures around the world. Indeed, the possibility of more than one entity residing in a body at a time is a widespread human belief.

...Dramatic accounts aside, having multiple parts, whatever we call them -- entities, selves, souls -- is a more mundane state than most people might think. Neuroscientist David Eagleman has described how the brain's complex system operates as a collection of individual "minds" that together produce the illusion of unified consciousness.

Internal Family Systems therapy, a burgeoning evidence-based approach, posits that the mind is inherently multiple -- that what we experience as "self" is really an internal system of subjectivities that shift in response to inner and outer cues and that can be engaged and transformed through therapy.

In other words, we all have parts. We even regularly talk about them without marking it as odd. As I'm writing this article, part of me is excited to share what I've learned. Another part of me is overwhelmed by other work and is mindful of all the things not getting done while I write. Another part is nervous about how my ideas -- and Ella -- will be received. Yet another part is eager for the engagement.

That I have all these different parts of me operating at once probably doesn't raise any alarms: we are all familiar with these kinds of complexities. In this sense, I don't think Ella is that different from the rest of us, except that she has barriers between her parts that disrupt the sense of continuous consciousness most of us take for granted.

Buddhist humor about happiness

Just subscribed to Buddhist Humor 2.0 on Facebook after seeing this image in my feed. Wish happiness were this simple. But maybe it is.