Church of the Churchless

Why "being at the eye center" isn't possible

In my preceding post, "Joan Tollifson on the Imaginary Vantage Point. Brilliant observations," I shared quotations from one of her books that clearly demonstrated why it makes no sense for a person at one of her talks to claim that they were able to concentrate their mind at a vantage point that enabled them to be aware of the world from a detached distance that they considered to be positive for them.

Just a bit of clear thinking illustrates why this couldn't actually be the case. Meaning, this person wasn't really concentrating their mind at a certain point in their consciousness. All they were doing was thinking or believing that this was happening, and that thought or belief provided them some comfort.

Awareness, or consciousness, is the only way we know anything about the world inside and outside of ourselves. Absent awareness, there's no world for us. And so far as anyone knows -- neuroscientists, mystics, meditators, anyone -- awareness is singular, not plural, for every individual. Meaning, you and I don't have several independent awarenesses or consciousnesses. 

Sure, split brain patients do have their awareness divided in a certain sense, because if the connection between the two halves of the brain is severed, each half has a somewhat different perception of the world. Since language is primarily in the left half of the brain, if a image is presented to the right half, the patient won't be able to describe that in words.

But my understanding is that the split-brain patient still has a single consciousness that enables them to live pretty much normally. Meaning, they have a split brain, but not split consciousness. So says a 2017 research study.

So Tollifson is on solid ground when she points out that any notion of being aware of awareness, or of being conscious of consciousness, or of having a mental vantage point to observe the mind, is just conceptual thinking, not anything real in the brain/mind. This makes a large share of religious and mystical teachings a bunch of bullshit.

For example, the religious group I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), taught that meditation should be practiced by concentrating at the eye center. You know, that supposedly sacred spot in the forehead between the eyes, often termed the Third Eye.

This is similar to the person Tollifson engaged with believing that they could focus their mind at a vantage point. The problem with this is the same problem with believing it's possible to concentrate at the eye center. Since awareness is singular, not plural, everything we experience is as that singular awareness. Repeat, everything. 

You can't focus your mind at the eye center. There's no such thing as the eye center. That's a concept within awareness. Again, you can believe you're focusing your mind at the eye center, or fantasize you're doing this. But that believing and fantasizing is occurring within awareness, as is everything else you experience. 

If it was possible to be aware of awareness, obviously there would have to be (1) awareness, and (2) another awareness that's aware of the first awareness. Of course, if we then wanted to be aware that we were aware of awareness, we'd need a third awareness that's aware of the awareness that's aware of the other awareness.

The problem with this is that it leads to a never-ending cascade of multiple awarenesses, something that doesn't exist, since I've just shown that awareness is singular, not plural. The same problem arises with believing that it is possible for the mind to be focused at the eye center. Who or what is doing the focusing? Another mind? 

Sam Harris, who has a Ph.D. in neuroscience and a wealth of experience with meditation, primarily of the Dzogchen variety, speaks on the guided meditations in his Waking Up app about this issue. He'll frequently ask if it seems that consciousness is inside the head, which is much the same as it seeming that consciousness is inside the eye center.

Harris points out that the sensation of consciousness being inside the head is part of the contents of consciousness. In other words, each of us is simply conscious. We're conscious, or aware, of many different things. One of those things is that consciousness appears to be inside the head, that we're looking out at the world from a vantage point that seems to be at the eye center or forehead.

But again, this sensation of a vantage point is part of the contents of consciousness. Thus Harris agrees with Tollifson that any sense of awareness or consciousness being localized, here rather than there, is within awareness or consciousness. Meaning, we can't look at our awareness or consciousness as an object that can be manipulated, like an apple or rock. 

Awareness or consciousness is how the world is experienced. There's no "we" or "me" outside of awareness. A simple true idea with profound implications. Tollifson writes:

We imagine "me trying to merge with the flow, or be in the flow, or understand the flow. But actually there is only flow. There's no way in or out and there's nothing separate to be in or out. But it doesn't seem that way because the very nature of thought is to divide up and freeze what is actually indivisible and fluid. 

Joan Tollifson on the Imaginary Vantage Point. Brilliant observations.

Joan Tollifson reminds me a lot of the best of Alan Watts.

Meaning, she communicates profound spiritual insights in a direct, down to earth, and often humorous fashion, but without the sometimes annoying tendency of Watts to make more of himself to an audience than he deserves. Tollifson has more humility.

I absolutely loved her chapter, "The Imaginary Vantage Point," in Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and Dialogues About Non-Duality. The best part was a dialog with someone at her talk who had some questions/opinions about it.

This was the central thesis in Tollifson's talk, the absence of a "me" as such is commonly visualized.

There is an idea and maybe a mental picture that there's "me" encapsulated inside the bodymind looking out at everything else through the windows of my senses and manipulating this outside world as best I can.

Relatively speaking, within the movie of waking life, this makes a certain amount of sense: "I' can apparently seek dinner outside myself and find it "over there" in the refrigerator. "I" can seemingly manipulate various ingredients and turn them into a cake. Relatively speaking, this makes sense.

But can I find enlightenment or love or happiness "out there" somewhere? Can I manipulate my thoughts or my desires in the same way I can manipulate the ingredients of a cake? Or has this way of thinking that seems to make sense for survival tasks (like food-gathering and shelter-building) suddenly become totally incoherent when the thinking mind tries to apply it to finding happiness or freedom "out there" somewhere?

And in fact, even with those survival tasks, is there actually a "me" who chooses to do them and who could have done something else instead? Or did everything in the whole universe come together at that moment as the baking of a cake or the building of a house?

Maybe if we get spiritually advanced and sophisticated enough, we think that the experiencer is "awareness" or "consciousness" or "the witness." But is there any such thing as "awareness" or "consciousness" or "the witness" that can be isolated out from everything else?

Tollifson answers no, appealing to the Buddhist notion of emptiness. This is decidedly different from nothingness or a void, even though that's often how people who don't understand what Buddhism means by emptiness misconstrue the term. She says:

Yes, the whole universe is involved in everything that happens. Everything is caused by, and everything affects, everything else. Everything is inseparable from everything else. In Buddhism they call it interdependent origination. That's what they mean by emptiness.

Everything is impermanent, constantly changing, and interconnected with everything else. There is no inherent, independent, autonomous existence. No "thing" actually ever forms to even be impermanent. There is only seamless wholeness.

However, a member of the group Tollifson was speaking with considered that they were capable of occupying a vantage point where they weren't caught up in the goings-on of the world. That feeling of detachment gave them a certain distance from happenings which they considered to be a positive thing.

The dialog between this person and Tollifson went on for quite a few pages. Here's my attempt to share the gist of what the dialog consisted of. I've focused on what Tollifson said, since she made the most sense in my opinion. 

(J is Joan Tollifson; P is the person)

J: What is the perspective?

P: Well, it's not a thing. It's an empty point -- a timeless, spaceless, dimensionless point.

J: Okay, we could call it awareness, right [participant nods] Is there an actual boundary between awareness and the content of awareness? We draw dividing lines with words, but is the separation really there? In your own experience right now, can you actually find this boundary?

P: Yes, there are two things.

J: Conceptually, there are two things. But when you actually investigate your own direct experience in this present moment, can you find a dividing line between awareness and what is being seen and heard right now? Is "awareness" actually a separate thing? Is there really this "empty point" apart from what is appearing?

P: It's not a thing; it's a vantage point.

...J: Right, I understand what you're pointing to. We might also call this vantage point "impersonal awareness" or "the witness," right? And I'm not denying the reality of awareness, but as soon as the mind turns it into some thing that is separate from everything else, something that must be remembered and maintained, then it has become a subtle mental object, a concept, an idea. Can you see that? As you say, you remember to think it. It's a thought. 

What is aware of the vantage point?

There is an awareness of both the imaginary vantage point and the objects within it. So there is something prior to any vantage point that you can imagine or conceptualize or perceive or experience or think about or remember or describe.

And actually, this awareness that is prior to everything is not separate from everything. It is everything. It is the common factor in every experience, the formlessness that is forming as every form. It is not something you can objectify and then have to keep remembering. Awareness cannot be separated out from everything else and made into a separate object. 

...P: It's like those pictures which can be seen two different ways. You know, where it can be either a picture of a lady or a vase and you can flip back and forth. It's like a painting in a frame. So there's that form of the rug appearing in a frame.

J: What sees the frame? What is aware of awareness? What is witnessing the witness? What is conscious of consciousness? Can you see that any answer that might arise, anything perceivable or conceivable, would be another appearance, another object? Is the seeing really divided up into seer and seen, or is your actual experience simply seeing?

...P: The frame is emptiness.

J: This is emptiness. The rug is emptiness. You are emptiness. Everything is emptiness. There is only emptiness. Form is emptiness. 

P: I don't see that.

J: Actually you do, but you're overlooking it. Thought is overlaying it with a conceptual story, and the focus is on the story. You're trying to see something special. You imagine that emptiness should look different than this present appearance. You think that if you were seeing emptiness, it wouldn't look like this. It wouldn't look like people and chairs and rugs.

P: True. When I really see it, it doesn't look like this. It's vibrant and it's a different experience.

J: Well, every second is a different experience. And every experience is emptiness, whether it's a vibrant experience or a dull experience, an expanded experience or a contracted experience. It's all emptiness. You can't not see emptiness. 

Emptiness is all there is. The seeing is emptiness. And everything you see is empty. But if you imagine that some particular experience is emptiness and not every other experience, then you've got an idea of emptiness that's only an idea. 

...J: I'm pointing out the difference between awareness itself, which is ever-present and all-inclusive, and a concept of awareness as something that must be remembered and maintained (some idea of "formless emptiness," "a dimensionless point," "the witness," whatever it is). Something that is separate from the supposedly unspiritual and dangerous world of form.

I'm pointing out the absurdity of working very hard at this spiritual task of remembering the vantage point and making sure that "me" is identified as emptiness and not as form.

Being aware is actually effortless. You can't not be aware, so it's always already the case. But instead, it gets turned into an imaginary project for the "me" to accomplish, an imaginary "thing" that must be remembered and maintained.

"When does it get better? It doesn't" Great line in Pachinko series.

Some streaming shows are easily forgettable for me. I enjoy watching an episode, but then it's out of my mind, pretty much. There's nothing truly meaningful that sticks with me.

Pachinko, on Apple TV, isn't like that. My wife and I find the series deeply meaningful. It's a tale of a Korean immigrant family that spans four generations. The depth of feeling in almost every scene is amazing.

Strong emotions seemingly would be difficult to take when they're so ubiquitous. Actually, I'm finding that the opposite is the case. The emotions displayed by the talented cast, who don't even appear to be acting, because the show is so realistic, make for marvelous TV watching, being so truthful.

Love. Hate. Fear. Hope. Despair. Joy. Warmth. Every episode is filled with a litany of feelings that capture my attention as I realize, "I've felt that way myself, even though otherwise I have little in common with these characters."

I can't stop thinking about a simple bit of dialog in an episode where Sunja, a young woman who has left Korea in the early 1930s to accompany her husband to Japan, is feeling homesick after a few weeks in an unfamiliar country where Koreans are looked down upon.

Sunja asks a female relative who has been in Japan for quite a while, "When does it get better?" Meaning, the feeling of not belonging. The response: "It doesn't." At least, that's my memory of the dialog, which I've gotten mostly correct, even if not perfectly remembered.

There's so much to digest in those seven simple words. When does it get better? It doesn't. 

The way I see it, this is what life is all about. Sure, for most of us there's much pleasure in life. But there's also much pain, much dissatisfaction, much suffering, as the Buddha famously taught. For most of my 75 years, I've been wondering when life gets better. 

It doesn't is my conclusion now also.

Sure, there's ups and downs, just as there is in Sunja's life. Yet an undercurrent of not-good lurks within every experience. Obviously, when an experience is unwelcome. Hidden, yet present, when an experience is welcome, since we come to learn that as good as things are now, it won't be long before that goodness is replaced with not-good.

During my religiously-minded days I felt there was something wrong with me when I was in the grip of a negative emotion such as anger, which the teaching I embraced back then viewed as a bad thing that needed replacing with positive emotions like love, peace of mind, forgiveness, and such.

It's refreshing to have realized that this sort of fundamentalism isn't realistic or desirable for most people, including me.

Now I enjoy watching shows like Pachinko where ordinary people are shown living their ordinary lives, experiencing their ordinary emotions truthfully and openly, no matter what the emotion may be. Sunja and other members of her family don't wallow in despair when they're feeling down.

They feel that feeling even as they're doing what needs to be done to make their imperfect lives as pleasant as possible.

I love how the characters in Pachinko find pleasure in small things. Since the Koreans in the early generations of the family had very little in the way of material possessions, a bowl of white rice (rather than another grain) was a great gift -- since the Japanese occupiers were keeping white rice for themselves.

A watch, or a single pearl, these were riches to those who were materially poor, though wealthy in regard to their family loyalty and closeness to each other.

Watching the show reminds me that an honest display of sadness is hugely preferable to an insincere display of happiness. Being genuine, whatever that entails, is better than being fake.

Quantum mechanics could be less mysterious after particles get smashed

Quantum theory, or quantum mechanics (same thing), is one of my favorite subjects. But it's difficult for me -- or anybody else, for that matter -- to wrap my mind around, because the quantum realm operates much differently than the world in which we live and breathe.

Still, whenever there's an article about quantum theory in New Scientist or Scientific American, the two science magazines I subscribe to, my interest is rekindled. This is the online title of an article in the April  27 issue of New Scientist. It's fascinating, though a bit challenging to read. Here's a PDF file.
Download A new kind of experiment at the Large Hadron Collider could unravel quantum reality | New Scientist

This is how the article starts out.

For Alan Barr, it started during the covid-19 lockdowns. “I had a bit more time. I could sit and think,” he says.

He had enjoyed being part of the success at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland — the particle collider that discovered the Higgs boson. But now, he wondered, were they missing a trick? “I had spent long hours screwing bits of it together. And I thought, ‘Well, we’ve built this beautiful piece of apparatus, but maybe we could be doing more with it,’ ” he says.

The LHC is typically seen as a machine for finding new particles. But now Barr and a slew of other physicists are asking if it can also be used to probe the underlying meaning of quantum theory and why it paints reality as being so deeply weird.

That’s exactly what Barr and his colleagues are now investigating in earnest. Last year, they published the results of an experiment in which they showed that pairs of fundamental particles called top quarks could be put into the quantum state known as entanglement.

This was just the first of many entanglement experiments at particle colliders that could open up a whole new way of studying the nature of the universe. We can now ask why reality in quantum mechanics is so hard to pin down and what this has to do with experimenters — or even particles — having free will. Doing so could reveal whether space-time is fundamental or perhaps unveil a deeper reality that is even stranger than quantum mechanics. “We can do really different things with this collider,” says Barr.

Entanglement gets New Age types all excited who know just enough about quantum theory to misinterpret it. Yes, it is a sort of cosmic oneness, since once two particles have interacted in some way, their states remain entangled even if the particles are separated by a vast distance. 

Entanglement works like this. First, get two quantum particles, such as photons of light, to interact in some way. It might be as simple as them colliding, or both being products of the same quantum event, such as the spontaneous decay of a Higgs boson.

The spookiness becomes apparent when you perform a measurement on one and then do the same on the other. In the right circumstances, this reveals that the properties of the two particles are correlated: action on one has an instantaneous, corresponding effect on the other.

Think of that correlation as like flipping two coins multiple times and finding that they always land as two heads or two tails. After a while, you would suspect that something suspicious was going on — maybe some hidden magnet was causing them to unfailingly land in the same orientation. If you can’t find a hidden magnet, you might just throw up your hands and declare that someone will eventually come up with a reasonable explanation.

The Bell test was how physicists proved that quantum entanglement, which Einstein derided as "spooky action at a distance," is a real thing. Being able to conduct Bell tests on particles whizzing around in the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest scientific instrument, opens up the possibility of casting fresh light on entanglement.

One intriguing possibility is that these collider experiments could overturn our assumptions about the nature of space, says Vlatko Vedral, a theorist at the University of Oxford. Traditional Bell tests examine entanglement over large distances, but correlations over tiny distances are equally interesting, he says.

These collider-based tests look at links that span just quadrillionths of a metre and might tell us whether there is no such thing as space — and thus locality — on that scale. Maybe, he suggests, spooky action at a distance is the norm and the world of particles is non-local by default. In which case, perhaps space isn’t fundamental but arises out of entanglement as an emergent phenomenon. “Could it be that we are making a mistake by assuming that things should be local there?” he asks.

I found this part of the article especially intriguing, because I've wondered why, traditionally, physicists believed that measurement of a particle was key to how the quantum realm moves from a probabilistic wave-like nature where the particle might possess various states, to a "collapse of the wave function" where a single state is manifested.

Often human consciousness is held to have a special role in this collapse, leading New Age types to conclude (wrongly) that we create our own reality. 

If all that isn’t enough, what about digging into the very depths of what it means to be a human doing a science experiment? At the LHC, human action has been completely removed from the Bell test.

Usually, an experimenter chooses a particular orientation for the detectors or uses a random number generator to determine the choice. This is part of the process of showing that the correlations between the particles don’t come from some pre-existing property in the particles themselves that is hidden from us.

But in a collider Bell test, the measurement of a particle’s quantum state occurs when it spontaneously decays into other, less massive particles. So these collider-based Bell tests just “happen”, with no human involvement, and before the particles interact with the collider’s detection apparatus, says Christopher Timpson, a philosopher also based at the University of Oxford.

All of which brings into question what a measurement actually is, he says, and whether particles have something akin to free will. “Does the particle get to choose the nature of the measurement that’s done to it?” he asks. “And if the choice of measurement direction is being selected by the particle, not by an independent process, is that the same as a random number generator?”

In other words, this all might have something to contribute to the long-standing “measurement problem”, the source of all the weird ideas in quantum theory about what reality is really like. A quantum particle can be set up so that it is in what looks like multiple different states at once.

This “superposition”, famously exemplified by Schrödinger’s dead-and-alive cat, lasts until a measurement is made on it. But no one has ever been able to agree on what actually constitutes a measurement, resulting in myriad interpretations of what happens when a measurement occurs.

...Barr is also interested in what the LHC might teach us about the validity of certain quantum interpretations. “I’m not going to say it will definitely favour one thing over another, but it does seem to bring the element of subjectivity into question,” he says. “That does tend to favour certain interpretations of quantum mechanics.”

Here's some passages from Dao De Jing, a Philosophical Translation

I have quite a few translations of the Tao Te Ching, the Taoist classic that I've enjoyed since my college days. A few days ago I felt a hunger to revisit this book. After examining several translations, I settled on Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation by Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall.

They do a great job of explaining how other translations have gone awry when they try to convert Chinese concepts into traditional Western notions of God, the cosmos, and such. Here's some passages from their "Philosophical Introduction" that resonated with me.

It would seem that the aim of the compilers of the Daodejing is to prescribe a regimen of self-cultivation  that will enable one to optimize one's experience in the world.

... It is important to note that this goal of self-transformation has nothing to do with death, judgment, and an afterlife, not has it anything to do with the "salvation of the soul" (the traditional concerns of Western eschatology). Instead, such personal growth and consummation is meliorative in the sense of producing the quality of character that makes this world itself a better place.

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The Daoist correlative cosmology begins from the assumption that the endless stream of always novel yet still continuous situations we encounter are real, and hence, that there is ontological parity among the things and events that constitute our lives.

As a parody on Parmenides, who claimed that "only Being is," we might say that for the Daoist, "only beings are," or taking one step further in underscoring the reality of the process of change itself, "only becomings are." 

That is, the Daoist does not posit the existence of some permanent reality behind appearances, some unchanging substratum, some essential defining aspect behind the accidents of change. Rather, there is just the ceaseless and usually cadenced flow of experience.

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With fluid and shifting boundaries among things, integrity of any particular thing does not mean being or staying whole, or even actualizing its own internal potential. Rather, integrity is something becoming whole in its co-creative relationships with other things. Integrity is consummatory relatedness. 

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What the Daodejing has to offer, on the other hand, is much simpler. It encourages the cultivation of a disposition that is captured in what we have chosen to call its wu-forms.

The wu-forms free up the energy required to sustain the abstract cognitive and moral sensibilities of technical philosophy, allowing this energy, not unmediated by concepts, theories, and contrived moral precepts, to be expressed as those concrete feelings that inspire the ordinary business of the day,

It is through these concrete feelings that one is able to know the world and to optimize the human experience.

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Said another way, if a person is not in fact constituted by some essential, partitioned "soul," but is rather seen as dynamic pattern of personal, social, and natural relationships, agitation must arise as a consequence of poor management of these constitutive roles and relationships.

Hence, agitation in the heart-and-mind is not narrowly "psychological," but is more accurately conceived of as of broad ethical concern: How should we act and what should we do?

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For the Daoist, there is an intoxicating bottomlessness to any particular event in our experience. The entire cosmos resides happily in the smile on the dirty face of this one little child. 

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The energy of transformation lies within the world itself as an integral characteristic of the events that constitute it. There is no appeal to some external efficient cause: no Creator God or primordial determinative principle.

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In fact, the sustained Grand Analogy that pervades the Daodejing is: dao is to the world as ruler ought to be to the people. Dao -- the discernible rhythm and regularity of the world as it unfolds around and through us -- is nonimpositional: "Way-making (dao) really does things noncoercively."

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There is no final truth either about the nature of things, or about the means whereby that nature is sought. The achievement of order and harmony in nature and society -- that is to say, the achievement of effective way-making or dao -- is a multifaceted effort that is dependent less upon uncovering true principles or right forms of conduct than on the exercise of imagination and creativity within the most deferential of contexts. 

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Using Western epistemological terms, the thoughts about the world expressed in both the Zhuangzi and the Daodejing represent what we might call a realist perspective. Beyond the mediating confusions introduced by language, and by layers of our own distorted perceptions and tendentious categorizations, there is nevertheless, with properly Daoist qualifications an "objectively" real world. Our task is to experience that world as "objectively" as possible.

From the Daoist perspective, the problem begins when we insist that the "objective world" is a world made up of objects -- namely, concrete, unchangeable things that we encounter as over against and independent of us; things which announce themselves to us by asserting "I object!"

For the Daoist, the objective world cannot be objective in this sense because it is a constant transforming flow of events or processes that belie the sorts of discriminations that would permit a final inventory of the furniture of the world.

Paradoxically, for the Daoist the objective world is objectless.

Consciousness is mysterious, but it's almost certainly not supernatural

Consciousness seemingly should be easy to understand.

After all, every living human with a normally functioning brain experiences consciousness from the inside, so to speak. Meaning, everything we know, including what we know about ourselves, has to be consciously experienced or it doesn't exist for us. 

That includes the entire universe, with hundreds of billions of galaxies, each containing on average about a hundred billion stars. If there was no consciousness in the universe, all that would be a big bunch of nothing.

Assuming it could even be called "nothing," given that it's impossible for conscious beings like us to understand what, if anything, the universe would be like if no consciousness was aware of it.

There's plenty of ideas about consciousness, but no consensus about either what it consists of or how it comes to be. This description by philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel in his book The Weirdness Of The World does a pretty good job of describing consciousness. 

To be conscious is to have a stream of experience of some sort or other -- some sensory experiences, maybe, or some affective experiences of pleasure or displeasure, relief or pain. Possibly not much more than this.

To be conscious is to have some form of "phenomenology," as that term is commonly used in twenty-first century anglophone philosophy. Using Thomas Nagel's famous phrasing, there's "something it's like" (most people think) to be a dog or a monkey and nothing it's like (most people think) to be a photon or a feather.

If garden snails are conscious, there's something it's like to be them in this sense. They have, maybe, simple tactile experiences of the stuff that they are sliming across, maybe some olfactory experiences of what they are smelling and nibbling, maybe some negative affective experiences when injured.

Garden snails are mentioned because this passage is in a chapter called "Is a garden snail conscious?" Schwitzgebel doesn't draw a firm conclusion, being content to describe the reasons for thinking Yes, No, or Who Knows?

There's a lot we don't know about consciousness, so it isn't surprising that it's difficult to decide whether a garden snail is conscious. It's easier to decide that dogs, cats, other mammals, and our fellow primates (monkeys, chimpanzees, etc.) are conscious.

However, Schwitzgebel raises the interesting question of whether self-awareness is necessary for consciousness. Or at least, for the awareness that one is conscious. He writes:

Whenever you are conscious, it seems that you are aware that you are conscious; consciousness seems to come along with some sort of grasp upon itself. This isn't a matter of reaching an explicit judgment in words or attending vividly to the fact of your consciousness; it's more like a secondary acquaintance with one's own experience as it is happening. 

But one thing that Schwitzgebel doesn't question, nor does virtually every other scientifically-minded writer about consciousness that I've come across, is whether consciousness is supernatural. 

It just seems obvious that consciousness is physical. I've noted this obviousness many times in blog posts, noting that if someone doesn't believe this, they can conduct a painful experiment: have someone hit you on the head with a strong blow of a baseball bat and see how that affects your consciousness. 

(Gentler approaches: have a surgery with anesthesia; imbibe some alcohol, marijuana, or any other psychoactive drug; drink caffeinated coffee.)

Physical causes alter consciousness. So this decidedly points toward consciousness being a physical phenomenon.

Those who believe that consciousness is supernatural -- I used to entertain this notion, in large part because I don't like the prospect of being dead and gone forever -- are unable to reconcile this hypothesis with the clear and convincing evidence that consciousness arises from goings-on in a brain or brain-like structure (I'm open to the idea that artificial intelligences could be conscious one day).

As difficult as it is to fathom how consciousness arises in humans from brain neurons connected in sufficient complexity, it's much more difficult to imagine how supernatural soul or spirit could (1) manifest consciousness, and (2) do so in a manner accessible to people who exist as physical beings with a physical brain. 

I've never seen a cogent explanation about how these things could be possible.

If anyone is able to share such an explanation, do so in a comment on this post. Like I said, I'd love it if consciousness existed after the physical body is no more, but I've come to the conclusion that this is wishful thinking, not reality.

If the universe is truly unified, there's no place for supernatural separateness

I'll be the first to admit that some of the stuff I write about on this blog isn't very understandable. Partly that's due to my limitations as a writer. Partly it's because of often esoteric subject matter. 

Whatever the reason, I sympathized with a comment sant64 left on my previous post, "Why we'll never agree about what is real, and what isn't." 

I have no idea what you're trying to say here. "Reality" is far too broad a term.

Well, I disagreed with the notion that reality is far too broad a term. Seems pretty simple to me: reality is what we humans consider to be real, whether that be a personal experience or a collective understanding.

But since my post sort of nibbled around the edges of what I was trying to get at, I took a stab at being more direct in my comment reply.

sant64, as I noted in this post, reality isn't something that is beamed directly into our mind/brain. It is a simulation of one sort or another, because the mind/brain is locked inside the dark confines of our head with no direct connection to the outside world that constitutes our shared reality.

Without our senses -- sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell -- there's no knowledge of the world for us, so no reality.

The Matrix provides an extreme thought experiment along this line. People's bodies are in a warehouse, while powerful computers manufacture reality for them that seems real, except it is a virtual simulation. So this is an example of living in an immersive spatial reality where experienced reality is disconnected from a separate aspect of reality that produces a simulated reality.

That disconnect, as noted in the post, makes it impossible to determine where that separate aspect of reality, in this case a warehouse with stored bodies, exists, or even if it exists. The reason is that reality isn't connected between all of its parts. The creators of the Matrix have the full picture, but the people experiencing the virtual reality don't, because the simulation doesn't contain knowledge of how the simulation is being produced.

Maybe I could have been clearer about this, but I tried to relate Ron's comment about not being attracted to the offerings in metaphysical sections of bookstores, where he said that the "final conclusion" about reality probably is simply our ordinary life -- that which we're experiencing now via our senses.

This is different from how most religions view reality, which supposedly has an extra unperceived dimension akin to the Matrix having a secret: experienced reality is being produced by a un-experienced reality that only a red pill can divulge.

Religions, mystical practices, spiritual paths... they all claim, pretty much, that they possess a red pill that, if taken through a certain discipline, will reveal the hidden truth about reality: God, heaven, spirit, soul, enlightenment, whatever. But they all differ in what the discipline consists of, and what supposedly will be revealed.

So since most people believe in some sort of hidden reality separate from what is perceived by the bodily senses, this creates a situation where humans are assuming different realities that can't be proven to be real, because part of the assumption is that the hidden reality can only be known by those who take the "red pill."

For example, abortion would be much easier to discuss and form policies about if everybody focused on the physical characteristics of an embryo or fetus. When does it have a nervous system that can feel pain? What sorts of congenital abnormalities make it impossible for the unborn child to survive after birth? Among other questions.

But assuming that a soul is part of the embryo at the moment of conception complicates matters. This introduces an unprovable assumption about reality, as does the assumption that God opposes abortion because only He/She can decide whether an embryo grows to maturity and is born alive.

Basically I tried to argue that it would be better if we all agreed that reality is what can be known via the senses (which naturally includes scientific observations that amplify what our senses can perceive), because then we'd just have to deal with the thorny, but more resolvable, problem of how different people "simulate" physical reality through their unique mind/brain.

Hope this further explanation helps to get across my point.

Put even more simply, but echoing what I said above, if the universe truly is one, a single spatial reality where there are connections between everything that exists within it (for example, physics says that quantum fields are present in every corner of the universe), then the sort of disconnectedness posited by the Matrix, or by religions that posit a supernatural realm separate from materiality, isn't an aspect of reality.

I find this inspiring. Also, reassuring. 

Because even though it may seem impossible that we can be affected by, or affect, galaxies billions of light years distant from us, or goings-on at the exceedingly miniscule level of the Planck scale, in principle both the extremely large and the extremely small are part of our human reality, because there is no division anywhere in the universe that inescapably walls some of it off.

(Black holes might seem to be an exception, but matter obviously is drawn into black holes, and Stephen Hawking demonstrated mathematically that black holes radiate matter/energy.)

If all this is still too abstract, or irrelevant, for you, here's an easier-to-read essay by Joan Tollifson that popped into my email inbox recently. I really like both her message and her style. One of her paragraphs is right in line with what I've been trying to say in my previous two posts.

For me, the most liberating realization has been that nothing can be other than how it is, that everything is one undivided and indivisible whole that can never be grasped, pinned down or pulled apart, and that each of us is a unique and unrepeatable movement of the whole.

I'll share her essay as a continuation to this post.

Why we'll never agree about what is real, and what isn't

Ooh. That's an ambitious title for a blog post.

But since it came to mind, and it fits with some thoughts that have been rambling through my mind today, might as well stick with it -- even if what I write here doesn't really fulfill the ambitious promise of the title.

I'll start with a brief letter to the editor in the April 10 issue of New Scientist magazine. 

From Wolf Kirchmeir
Blind River, Ontario, Canada
If we accept that our experience of reality is a simulation created by our brains, then the "self" must be part of the simulation. To ask whether we live "in" a simulation is a category error. We live as a simulation, not in one. 

This fits with both modern neuroscience and a lot of philosophy. Reality isn't something that is channeled directly into the human mind through our senses. Reality is fashioned by us through complex mental mechanisms that are almost entirely outside of our conscious awareness. 

A key part of this is prediction. The brain is constantly making predictions about what is expected to be experienced based on present sensory input and past experiences. So while it goes too far to say that we create our own reality, in some ways we certainly do. 

Eric Schwitzgebel speaks of this in his book, The Weirdness of the World. I'd put it aside for a while, but picked it up again this morning, reading more of the "Kant meets cyberpunk" chapter. This excerpt gives a feel for the rather sophisticated philosophy Schwitzgebel engages in. (Not surprising, since he's a philosophy professor.)

He refers to The Matrix. That movie featured people whose "bodies are stored in warehouses, and they are fed sensory input by high-tech computers." They can do things as they would in the ordinary world, including dancing.

Taking our cue from Kant, let's call the objects laid out around you in your immersive spatial environment empirical objects. In Neuromancer, the computer programs that the hackers see are the empirical objects.

In The Matrix, the dance floor that the people experience is an empirical object -- and the body-storage warehouse is not an empirical object, assuming that it's not accessible to them in their immersive environment.

For you, the reader, empirical objects are just the ordinary objects around you: your coffee mug, your desk, your computer. Our bodies as experienced in immersive spatial environments are also empirical objects.

In The Matrix, there's a crucial difference between one's empirical body and one's biological body. If you are experiencing yourself on a dance floor, your empirical body is dancing, while your biological body is resting motionless in the warehouse.

Only if you red-pill out of the Matrix will your empirical and biological bodies be doing the same things. Note that empirical is a relational concept. What counts as an empirical object will be different for different people. 

What is empirical for you depends on what environment you are spatially immersed in.

Guess I should share how immersive spatial environment is defined in the book:

Following David Chalmers, but adding "spatial" for explicitness, an immersive spatial environment is any environment (whether virtual or "real," interactive or static) "that generates perceptual experience of the environment from a perspective within it, giving the user the sense of 'being there.' "

As described in my previous blog post, a few days ago I ingested a gram of psilocybin (magic mushrooms) at The Psilocybin Center here in Oregon, where it is legal to use magic mushrooms in a regulated environment.

That fairly small dose modified my consciousness to some extent, but not by enough for me to have a full-blown psychedelic experience. Or even a partially-blown one. But regardless, a person under the influence of psilocybin is going to have a different experience of empirical reality than someone who isn't tripping on magic mushrooms.

As Schwitzgebel said above, "What is empirical for you depends on what environment you are spatially immersed in." I was reclining, listening to psychedelic music with my eyes closed, while the facilitator who had to be with me during the two-hour experience mostly sat across from me doing stuff on his laptop.

We were in the same room, but we were experiencing the room in different ways. Again, if I'd been having a full-blown psychedelic experience, my empirical reality would have been much more different from that of the facilitator. 

So even if we don't assume that there's a deeper reality producing the one we're experiencing now, as in the Matrix, it's still the case that the mind of every human being is simulating reality in a different fashion, as the New Scientist letter to the editor correctly noted.

Then there's the implications of a comment left by Ron E. today on my psilocybin post. I liked the comment for several reasons, including how it relates to the theme of this post.

Have been away – on and off – for a few weeks so just catching up with some of the latest blogs and comments. One of my trips was to London where I visited my one-time favourite bookshops specialising in philosophy, occult literature and a whole gamut of books featuring Advaita, Buddhism, Taoism, Zen, Sufism, Judaism etc.

All the usual suspects were featured there – Alan Watts, J. and U.G. Krishnamurti, Nisargadata, Ouspensky (and many more); writers who featured prominently in my early days of enquiry – and apparently, are still popular with today’s seekers. Also, in a curtained section of the shop was an Asian looking chap – long beard, eastern clothes etc., who was giving readings of some sort.

I only stayed for a few minutes, leaving with some nostalgia and realising that a huge part of my life and identity was well and truly over. The same goes for the various spiritual groups I was in and out of years ago.

I’d say that this ‘seeking’ activity is okay and perhaps inevitable when one is younger; it all seems to be mixed in with looking for meaning and identity – perhaps lingering on for many of us into middle and old age. Some settle for some kind of secure base, perhaps an established religious or spiritual organisation, others gravitate toward gratifying projects or perhaps charity work.

It seems to be a type of personal evolution, and one that doesn’t have a final conclusion, a final revelation. Except that is, if one can live with the knowledge that there probably is no conclusion apart from our everyday reality – whatever you are doing, whatever that may be.

I agree with Ron. In large part, the sorts of books and writers spoken of above deal with a supposed hidden reality that underlies or produces the ordinary empirical reality each of us experiences in everyday life. 

Meaning, they posit something akin to the Matrix: a dimension of reality that is separate from what we habitually perceive. Schwitzgebel writes:

We can think of a spatial manifold as an immersive spatial environment in which every part is spatially related to every other part. The dance floor of the ordinary people trapped in the Matrix is not part of the same spatial manifold as the body-storage warehouse.

Suppose you are dancing in the Matrix and someone tells you that you have a biological body in a warehouse. You might ask in which direction the warehouse lies -- north, south, east, west, up, down? You might point in various possible directions from the dance floor.

Your conversation partner ought to deny the presupposition of your question. The warehouse is not in any of those directions relative to the dance floor. 

You can't travel toward it or away from it using your empirical body. You can't shoot an empirical arrow toward it. In vain would you try to find the warehouse with your empirical body and kick down its doors. It's not part of the same spatial manifold.

Thus in addition to the difficulty of people agreeing about the nature of the empirical reality of the ordinary physical world where we all bodily live, there's the added complexity of billions of people, most of humanity, believing in a religious, mystical, or spiritual supernatural place akin to that in the Matrix: a realm spatially distinct from this world, so impossible to discern with ordinary perception.

Call it God, heaven, astral plane, or whatever, debates about the nature of a supposed realm outside of, well, nature, are a big part of what many commenters on this blog like to discuss, as well as the basis for the myriads of different religions, mystical paths, and such.

So the way I see it, to me the mystery isn't why people disagree about what reality consists of, but how it is that we're able to agree to such an extent about reality. (Perhaps the answer is that if we didn't, as a species we wouldn't survive for very long.)

Three takeaways from my not-so-trippy experience at Salem's Psilocybin Center

This afternoon I had my first psilocybin (magic mushroom) experience in about 56 years. So, yeah, a long time, since my college days. I'm 75 now, not 19, a big difference. 

Which helps explain why today's psilocybin experience was much less trippy than the psychedelics I used back when my hippie friends and I ingested LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin during some of the time I spent at San Jose State College in the Bay Area -- 1966-71.

As I said in a post last month on my HinesSight blog, "The Psilocybin Center is open in Salem for psychedelic experiences," I'm kind of wary of jumping into a really intense psychedelic experience right off the bat, since doing this at my age could be considerably different from doing it at 19 and 20.

So after I contacted The Psilocybin Center for, first, a fairly brief Discovery Call, and then an hour long call where I filled out a bunch of forms online to comply with Oregon's regulations for taking psilocybin in a licensed center, Sammy Kahuk, one of the owners, recommended that I start with a 1 gram dose which is billed in the Moderate-High Dose Guided Journey category as offering "self-exploration and emotional insights."

Well, maybe for some. All I can do is describe my two-hour experience today in the form of three takeaways.

(1) Dose matters. I was aware that 1 gram of magic mushrooms is just double the 500 milligrams that is typically viewed as being the upper end of a microdose, where you don't feel much of a conscious experience. But I was hoping for more than the relaxed decidedly non-psychedelic experience I had today.

After being given two half-gram containers of powdered mushroom, complete with an expiration date and such, I mixed the psilocybin into applesauce-in-a-pouch that I squeezed into a bowl. You have to do all that yourself, kind of like Oregon's death with dignity law, where you can have life-ending medication if you have six months or less to live, but no one other than you can assist with taking it.

I then reclined my lounge chair, put headphones on, and started listening to some psychedelic music that I'd added to my Apple Music library. I closed my eyes, though the ceiling of the room I was in had some pleasingly trippy lights that reminded me a bit of how my wife and I put stars on the ceiling of my daughter's room when she was little. 

I kept waiting for some sort of magic to manifest from the magic mushrooms. Never happened. I was in a positive frame of mind, the "set" aspect of the familiar "set and setting" that go a long way toward determining the quality of a psychedelic experience. 

But dose obviously matters. It turned out that 1 gram was, for me, not enough for me to have any recognizable "trippy" experience. And since I went on many trips back in those college days, I'm familiar with what a psychedelic trip consists of.

So while I have no problem with the 1 gram dose Sammy suggested, and which I concurred with, it turned out that I spent $500 on what basically was a two-hour supervised high microdose with no discernible insights, revelations, or whatnot produced by the psilocybin.

(2) The setting is confining. Us aging hippies remember how free we used to feel on psychedelics. I recall a bunch of us guys driving over the mountains to Santa Cruz late at night, dropping acid/LSD, then tripping on the beach while we waited for the sun to rise. Probably we ate breakfast at a waffle house. 

Well, due to Oregon's regulations, I chafed at what was required at today's psilocybin experience. Sammy had to be in the room with me the entire time, aside from a bathroom break he took, during which I snapped the photos of the room. I was in a recliner. Sammy was sitting on a dual recliner directly across from me.

I found this confining. Also, kind of weird. It felt much different from being with friends on a psychedelic trip. Sammy is a nice guy, but he isn't a friend, and he isn't a therapist. He just was there because the State of Oregon requires him to be there. And he was being paid to be there. 

After a bit over an hour, the sciatica in my right leg was making it uncomfortable for me to sit in the recliner. If I'd been at home, I would have gotten up, walked around, or done some Tai Chi. But that didn't feel right at The Psilocybin Center, where you can't go outside the building. I shifted around and got myself as comfortable as possible. 

However, I couldn't shake the realization during the entire two hours that another person who I didn't know was in the room with me. This aspect of the "setting" made it feel restrictive. Now, I realize that someone on a considerably higher dose might have an intense enough psychedelic experience to not be aware of the presence of a facilitator.

For me, though, it was a problem. So much so, when I finally glanced at my watch and saw that it was 1:50 pm, and my wife was scheduled to pick me up at 2:30 pm (you can't drive yourself after taking psilocybin), I actually was disappointed. I wanted the session to be over, because I wasn't having a truly enjoyable experience, just a mildly relaxing one, and I was eager to get back to my usual reality.

(3) Everyday reality is pretty damn good. This will sound strange, but the best part of my two hour psilocybin experience was when it was over. It felt good to have Sammy turn the lights on and for me to be able to stand up, put my shoes on, and get ready to go outside and meet my wife in the parking lot.

I didn't have much to tell her about the two hours I'd just spent. I said that I listened to music with my eyes closed, and it was relaxing. Laurel then told me about what she'd done, including taking our dog for a walk in a park. She actually had a more interesting two hours than I did.

Again, I'd not complaining about The Psilocybin Center. I got the dose of magic mushrooms that I'd signed up for; Sammy did a good job complying with the rules that he needed to follow; there's no guarantees that a psilocybin experience is going to be fulfilling or pleasant.

All I'm saying is that I'm pretty sure I don't want to try a higher dose of psilocybin, because that would mean spending more time indoors at The Psilocybin Center with a facilitator making sure that rules were followed, which includes not allowing a customer to leave before a certain time is up.

Bottom line: while psilocybin might still be in my future in one form or another, I doubt that I'll want to do this in a regulated setting. It was good to have a quality dose of magic mushrooms, but I came away from today feeling that I'm much rather have a psychedelic experience on my own terms, not in a tightly controlled setting where a stranger is my only companion -- not nature or friends. 

Letting go is key in both meditation and psychedelics. Here's why.

I decided to buy a book about magic mushrooms in anticipation of my mild/moderate 1 gram (totally legal) psilocybin experience this coming Thursday.

It was a good choice, as I've enjoyed reading Michelle Janikian's Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion: An Informative Easy-to-Use Guide to Understanding Magic Mushrooms. Well-written, practical, nicely researched.

Today I got to a chapter where Janikian talks about the relation between meditating and tripping on magic mushrooms. Since I've meditated every day for about 55 years, and used psychedelics (LSD, mescaline, psilocybin) quite a bit in college, I was struck by how "letting go" is a central aspect of both practices.

She writes about a psychedelic experience:

But according to researchers, the most important thing you can do is to approach the experience with an accepting attitude and open mind. Similarly, while you're actually under the influence of a psychedelic, the most important navigation skill is to relax.

It sounds simple -- too easy, even -- but relinquishing your control to the substance, to not resist its powers and just let go and see where it takes you, can be challenging.

...In one of the first trip manuals, The Psychedelic Experience, published in 1964, the main recommendation for tripping successfully still holds true: "Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream."

In fact, every psychedelic expert who has written on the subject has given this same advice in their own words.

Rick Strassman, author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule, and the first scientist to resume psychedelic research since prohibition, advises something very similar: "It is only through letting go that we find ourselves making the most progress... this surrender is the crux of a successful journey."

...Similarly, in The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide, James Fadmian gives more specifics on how to surrender: "Observe what is going on inside your mind and body, but do not try to control the flow of images and sensations. Allow your mind to take its natural course; relax and observe as your thoughts unfold without any effort. Affirm that all experiences are welcome."

Janikian then speaks about meditation:

This is where having a practice of meditation in your daily life can help you navigate the psychedelic space, because in meditation you learn how to relax your mind and let thoughts come and go without engaging them.

Our minds naturally rationalize and judge everything around us -- it's a safety mechanism to keep us alive, so it's completely unnatural for us to stop doing so, whether we're on mushrooms or not. While I'm terrible at meditating, I was still practicing before my latest psychedelic experience, and I was able to use that developing skill to stop resisting and rationalizing everything and, instead, relax and go deeper.

So if you find yourself being overly critical of your thoughts while you're tripping, try taking a deep breath, closing your eyes, and simply focus on your breathing.

For me, thinking "Teach me, I'm listening" helped me to stop rationalizing, judging, and planning everything, and just be in the moment. But sticking to the classic: "Trust, let go, be open," should do the trick, too. Before the trip begins, choose a mantra that encourages you to be calm, present, and accepting of the experience, no matter what it is.

So why is letting go so key in both meditation and tripping? The way I see it, in both cases there's a presumption, or at least a hypothesis, that our usual sense of living in a fractured reality is an illusion of sorts, since there is a wholeness lying largely unknown and unexamined outside of our habitual awareness.

An image comes to mind.

If reality is viewed as a vast, probably infinite, ocean, mostly we see ourselves as individual flecks of foam blown into the air from ocean waves by winds of cause and effect.

Though we do our best to unite with other flecks of foam through love, togetherness, mutuality, and such, there's always a feeling of "I am me, you are you, they are themselves."

But by letting go, by surrendering to a gravitational force that manifests when we stop being flecks of foam in constant motion, the resulting stillness can lead to a sense of being a wave thrown up by the ocean, yet in no way separate from the ocean.

That's the promise of meditation. That's the promise of psychedelics. To relax into a state of consciousness where me is seen as being not very different from thee -- meaning, everything that's usually viewed as being clearly other than me.

This sense of oceanic awareness can be very blissful. It also can be very scary, if the loss of individuality is experienced as something to be afraid of, rather than welcomed. 

Usually meditation brings about this sort of ego dissolution in a decidedly gradual manner. Psychedelics taken in high ("heroic") doses can produce ego loss rapidly. So the psychedelic explorer needs to prepare carefully, have a positive mindset, and ramp up doses to the heroic level in a series of experiences.

Jumping into a deep pool of water can be heavenly if you're a good swimmer. Or hellish if you're not. The good news is, each of us has the capacity to let go and swim in the unified ocean of reality. This may seem difficult, but more and more, I've come to believe that the difficulty lies within our belief that it isn't easy.

But maybe it is. After all, how tough is it to let go? Isn't holding on much more of a chore? After all, you're not trying to get somewhere. By giving up trying, the idea is to become what we always are, yet don't realize this because we're in ceaseless motion, always aiming to be somewhere else.

I share a fascinating message critical of Gurinder Singh, with praise of Flora Wood

Below is a message I received yesterday from someone who describes how Gurinder Singh, the current guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), created a highly negative atmosphere in the United Kingdom after he became the successor to Charan Singh, a much-beloved RSSB guru.

The message also is filled with praise for Flora Wood, a long-time RSSB initiate, or satsangi, who wrote a book for the organization and was a positive influence in the United Kingdom's RSSB membership.

It doesn't surprise me that Gurinder Singh comes in for such criticism in this message. There's plenty of other evidence that at best, Gurinder's ethics are at odds with how previous RSSB gurus have behaved, and at worst, Gurinder has engaged in financial fraud aimed at enriching himself and his family to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Here's the message. "Sewadars" means volunteers. "Sangat" refers to the RSSB community. "Radha Soami" is a greeting used by RSSB initiates. "Haynes Park" is a large RSSB center in the United Kingdom. The "Dera" refers to the RSSB headquarters in India. "Satsang" is a talk about the RSSB teachings.

Dear Brian, I submit this to you anonymously.

In 2005 Mrs Flora Wood was asked by the Dera to write a postscript to her 1965 book In 'Search Of The Way' in which she recalled her Indian experiences with The Great Master Baba Sawan Singh, as well as the history of the birth and development of the British Sangat.

When Mrs Wood's friend, a secretary to her commanding officer in the British Army in India, told her that the colonel had became a satsangi, she followed him in that respect, but only after she had persuaded him to brief her, over dinner, on the teachings and the Master.

Flora Wood, born in 1923, and an early disciple of Sawan Singh, had served as representative to three masters. No satsangi in the UK could deliver a discourse at her level of spirituality and knowledge both of Sant Mat and of the Persian mystics. Under her quiet seemingly hands-off rule the satsang was intimate, peaceful, happy and without dissent.

All this changed when Gurinder made his first visit to the UK, and when Mrs Wood had booked the large Birmingham Convention Center in order to accommodate what had by then, under the guruship of Charan Singh, as well as mass Indian immigration, become a large sangat.

We sewadars positioned at the door of the VIP entrance were in awe expecting that another Charan Singh, whose bearing was that of emperor of emperors, who bathed in divine light, whose aura was of sanctified purity and spiritual radiance, instead witnessed the entry of an angry young man in a turban, boiling with rage, accompanied by a hired security made up of East London gangster types of the kind seen in Guy Ritchie's movie "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels."

 

Gurinder glared past our Radha Soamis and into the main hall leaving behind a shocked air of surprise and disappointment.

 

The word quickly spread that he was furious with Mrs Wood for the expense of the venue. Mrs Wood was quickly replaced by a family relation of Gurinders who may or may not have been very familiar with the English language and who confined himself to the Indian group. It is said that he did give a few satsangs in Punjabi to them.

 

From then the British sangat was butchered and by the time of the purchase of Haynes Park and the changeover of once loving sewadars to a sort of unkind Stasi rule, western satsangis were detaching themselves  from RSSB in droves.

 

A political shift to republican thinking about Northern Ireland saw its very capable secretary fired and all power moved far away to Dublin down in the Irish Republic; a long journey to satsang. As it happened however all the western satsangis in northern Ireland, disciples of Charan Singh, no doubt sharing a feeling of many around the world for westerners that the behaviour of Gurinder and his lack of any of the qualities of mastership including his allergy to giving satsang were intolerable, abandoned the Radha Soami Satsang Beas anyway.

 

Mrs Wood passed away at 100 years of age in 2023.

 

As stated in the beginning of this piece Mrs Flora Wood was asked by the Dera in 2005 to write a postscript to her book In 'Search Of The Way.' It can only be surmised that the reason for the Dera's request for this further addition to the text was that she would note in her postscript the new incumbency of Gurinder Singh at the Dera.

 

However, Mrs Wood did no such thing, she did not even mention Gurinder's succession or anything about him. One can only surmise that this very learned and old satsangi saw the successorship in a different light than the general conclusion.

 

It is one of those fantasies of a Dera Baba Jaimal Singh cut off from the larger Sant Mat world outside its gates that a master will always appoint a perfect successor, what used to be called 'Dera gossips.' In the reality of history this is not always the case.

 

Given the vast size of a possibly multi-billion dollar world-wide institution like RSSB with all its housing dependents and even old sewadar pensioners and huge numbers of Satsangars and other properties (particularly all across India) the last Master cannot just throw in the turban and say "OK, there is no worthy successor, we are closing down the RSSB tomorrow!"

 

No, it is just then allowed to rot at the head, true seekers are no longer drawn to it, or leave it when they find it is no longer true and it deteriorated into another religion. That is the kindest way to go about it, a gradual shutdown.

 

All these years later the surviving satsangis of Charan Singh are still in a daze at what happened and have had no explanation from expert sources. There is an unhealed wound in many hearts, there are disciples of Charan Singh who lost their faith in the confusion some of whom want to find the way back to the path.

 

Today the RSSB to any outsider seems like some closed cult, hidden in plain sight from the world. To the spiritually minded internet seekers it is a black hole out of which no Bani comes. Anyone who goes to YouTube and looks up videos of Gurinder might be forgiven in thinking he is an apparatchic or politician of the Bhrata Janata Party or some sort of Raja.

 

He is ever seen surrounded by a posse of police officers or army men as he arrives in his private helicopter or jet somewhere for some reason. There is no teaching that an enquiring mind can grasp from this output, no satsangs of his to listen to (some say he does not give satsang).

 

Is Gurinder Singh a perfect master? Is there something numbers of people have missed? Or is he simply the manager of a large institution playing it by ear? Many would like to know.

To be real, consciousness must cause something. Sorry, supernatural believers.

People throw around strange conceptions about consciousness. On this blog, and elsewhere. Most of the strangeness comes from those religiously and supernaturally inclined, who put forward notions of consciousness that bear no resemblance to reality.

I'm familiar with this sort of w00-woo, because I used to engage in it myself.

I've finished reading neuroscientist Christof Koch's latest book, Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It.  Not surprisingly, he frequently views consciousness through the lens of integrated information theory, a theory that Koch has embraced and contributed to.

Here's passages from a concluding chapter where Koch describes what consciousness is, and isn't. This will challenge those who see consciousness as something supernatural, non-physical, or ethereal to describe why Koch is wrong and they are right.

Consciousness is not a clever algorithm. Its beating heart is intrinsic causal power, not computation. Causal power is not something intangible, ethereal, but something physical -- the extent to which the system's recent past specifies its present state (cause power) and the extent to which this current state specifies its immediate future (effect power).

And here's the rub: causal power, the ability to influence oneself, cannot be simulated. Not now or in the future. It must be built into the system, part of the physics of the system. 

To illustrate this intuitively, consider computer code that simulates the field equations of Albert Einstein's celebrated theory of general relativity, relating mass to spacetime curvature. The software accurately models the supermassive black hole, called Sagittarius A*, located at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way.

This black hole exerts such extensive gravitational effects on its surroundings that nothing, not even light, can escape its attraction. To absolutely no one's surprise, the astrophysicist simulating the black hole doesn't get sucked into their laptop by the simulated gravitational field. 

Of course they don't. Why should they? This seemingly absurd question emphasizes the difference between the real and the simulated. For if the simulation is faithful to reality, spacetime should warp around the laptop, creating a black hole that swallows everything around it. But it doesn't. Why not?

The answer is that gravity is not a computation. If it were, then the physics simulation engine should affect the gravitational field around the computer. Gravity has extrinsic causal powers, attracting anything with mass. Imitating a black hole's causal powers requires an actual superdense sphere about four million times the mass of our sun.

Causal power can't be simulated; it must be constituted. Aspects of gravity can be simulated but not its raw causal power.

The different between the real and the simulated is their respective causal powers. That's why it doesn't rain inside a computer simulating a rainstorm. The software is functionally identical to weather, yet lacks its causal powers to blow and to turn vapor into rain drops. Causal powers, the ability to make or take a difference, must be built into the system.

...A human brain simulation running on a digital computer can, in principle, do anything a human can do. However, it would not experience anything. It would be an intelligent zombie.

Once again, it is important to emphasize that the brain experiences life not by dint of a soul-like substance but by its massive intrinsic causal power.

I respond to a Sant Mat true believer who sent an email critical of me

Yesterday I got an email from someone who doesn't like that I've strayed from the path of Sant Mat, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) variety, that I followed for 35 years. 

That made me happy, since it had been a while since I've gotten emailed criticism of me. Gosh, I'd been feeling all neglected, so it was a pleasant surprise to get this person's message.

I saved my response for this blog post. No reason to waste the person's message and my reply as being just between us. I've interspersed my responses in italics following their statements in regular type.

It's quite obvious that your lack of true understanding of Sant Mat has led you to totally negate all the teachings.

Hey, not at all. I'm still a vegetarian. Of course, I was a vegetarian before I was initiated into Sant Mat, so it figures that I'd keep on being a vegetarian. I also still meditate every day, though not in the same way I did in my RSSB period. Regarding my "lack of true understanding of Sant Mat," I'll reply to that false assertion below.

Sounds to me from your writings that you basically gave up on the idea of an Oversoul/God, in favor of believing we just die and everything is over and we don't exist.

That's pretty much accurate. However, this wasn't so much a giving up on the idea of God, as of coming to the realization that God is an unnecessary concept for living a meaningful life. If you doubt this, talk to some Buddhists. Or Taoists. Or the large number of people who are agnostics or atheists when it comes to God. Likewise, it wasn't so much that I chose to believe that when we die, we're gone forever. It was more that I realized there was no convincing evidence for life after death. If it turns out that there is, and it's a good life, I'll be pleased to learn this after I die.

If you've ever experienced the sound current and heard it, even for a second, you would understand that this is the essence of consciousness and that this indeed, is what Sant Mat teaches is God.

Well, here's what I said in a 2009 blog post, "Q and A about me about Sant Mat." My experience of the sound current, in the form of a bell sound, lasted more than a second. Yet I didn't understand this as the essence of consciousness and of God. So looks like you're wrong about the even for a second thing.

A few days after I was initiated I heard loud bell sounds inside my head while I was meditating. These never came back. I've had other glimpses of inner light and hearings of inner sound, but these could be (and probably are) produced by the brain, not immaterial soul or spirit.

Not the Master, not following blindly the Master, not being dogmatic, and not following some religious rituals as other religions do.

Hmmmm. You sure sound dogmatic to me. Maybe you should take your own advice.

In fact, if you've read any Sant Mat books you'd see this same teaching about the dogmatic behaviors of religions and that practice of Sant Mat is very practical and scientific, unlike religious rituals which are just the opposite.

Not only did I read every RSSB book published in English up through 2005, when RSSB and I parted ways, I read most of them many times. More: I took copious notes on them in the course of writing three books on behalf of RSSB: God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder; Life is Fair; and Return to the One. So your implication that I don't have an in-depth understanding of the RSSB teachings/Sant Mat is completely wrong. For many years I was a speaker at our local RSSB meetings. I also spoke at regional meetings of RSSB, including one national meeting. Have you read my first book about the relation between the new physics and ancient mysticism? It talks about the scientific nature of meditation, something I still believe in, just not in the same way.

Sounds to me like you're bitter from lack of experience and dedication to the path, even tho you might actually understand it, and have decided to try to turn others against it.

Wrong again. I'm not bitter about my 35 years in the RSSB fold. Those were enjoyable years, by and large. In the same sense, I'm not bitter about my first marriage, which ended in divorce after 18 years -- also mostly enjoyable years. I was extremely dedicated to Sant Mat during those 35 years. Followed the teachings to the best of my ability; did a lot of volunteer service; meditated every day. I do try to convince other people to become spiritually independent, rather than following the dictates of a religion. RSSB is a religion, in my well-informed view, so I use it as an example of the drawbacks of religion because it's the religion I know best. I mostly write about other subjects these days, though for a while I did write many blog posts about RSSB.

That's true ego dominance and it's pretty sad. I hope you can turn from that and become more humble and meditate again if you've learned this.   

I'm always amazed when strangers like you write about me as if you know me better than I know myself. Regarding "ego dominance," it takes a healthy ego to criticize someone you've never met, drawing conclusions about them from very flimsy evidence, none of it direct. I could be wrong, but I don't sense a lot of humility in the message you sent me. Regarding meditation, like I said, I still meditate every day. It's just a Buddhist/mindfulness variety of meditation, not Sant Mat meditation.

God bless --👋

 

Well, I don't really know what that means. Isn't God capable of deciding who to bless, assuming God exists? But thanks for what I'll take to be a kind wish. Nice that you ended on a positive note, since the rest of your message was so negative.

Hey, turns out I'm enlightened! Just not all the time.

Enlightenment is a word that gets thrown around a lot in spiritual circles, even though it's rare that anyone can clearly say what makes someone enlightened, or how it's possible to tell a person is in this supposedly exalted state.

Often enlightenment is viewed as something ineffable that only another enlightened being can recognize. You know, an exclusive club where the members know each other but us ordinary people can only do our best to peek through the curtained windows in a vain attempt to see what's going on inside.

Another problem with the notion of enlightenment is that even when it's described somewhat specifically, there's a curious non-coincidence I've observed: enlightenment just happens to be a spiritual state that the person describing it says they've achieved. 

In other words, when someone has an experience, or transformation, that they consider spiritually significant, frequently they give it a name: enlightenment. Then they can market their accomplishment to others who desire to be enlightened. 

Now, this might be what's going on with Joan Tollifson's take on enlightenment. She's a spiritual rebel of sorts who has studied Zen Buddhism, nonduality, and other pursuits, yet has developed her own original manner of speaking about them in a way that I find appealing. 

While I readily agree that how Tollifson looks upon enlightenment flows out of her own personal experiences (but doesn't that apply to everyone?), what she says in her book Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks & Dialogues About Non-Duality makes sense to me -- in part because her definition of enlightenment applies to everyone at times, though not always. 

I've only read about half of the book. However, I've found enough references to enlightenment to make me confident that these passages accurately reflect Tollifson's perspective.

Enlightenment is the recognition that there is no "me" behind the mask of any persona, and that no person exists as a solid, continuous, separate, independent entity. Enlightenment is seeing that I am everyone and no one. I include everything and I am no-thing in particular. Enlightenment sees from the perspective of unicity. [defined as: the quality or state of being unique of its kind : ONENESS]

...Above all, awakening is seeing through the "me" who wonders if "I' have had an awakening or not. This waking up is very simple. It is not some fantastic, spectacular, one-time event with trumpets blaring and fireworks exploding. Nor is it a personal achievement. We miss it because we're looking for something extraordinary, something that will enhance "me."

...We often seek the experiences we have been led to expect, and then we often frame our experiences according to what we have learned. Christians see Jesus and get born again. Buddhists discover emptiness and the present moment. Satsang people have awakenings. Nondualists imagine a moment when "the self" drops away forever.

People who expect dramatic enlightenments often have them! When I hear some of the big bang enlightenment stories on offer, I sometimes wonder if the teachers in question haven't constructed the whole experience out of thin air, convinced themselves of its validity, and now they're using it to sell themselves or make themselves special.

...The whole notion of a final breakthrough, in which all sense of being an encapsulated individual permanently vanishes forever and ever, never to return, is a total myth. That encapsulated "me" is never really here, ever, and the idea or sense of encapsulation vanishes in any moment that's it's clearly seen for what it is. 

...Enlightenment is Now. It's not a possession or an achievement. There is no final enlightenment. And an enlightened person is a total oxymoron. Enlightenment is the popping of the bubble of separation. It leaves no person to be enlightened or unenlightened. 

As I've said, I think there is often a tendency to confuse unicity, which is all there is, with enlightenment, which is the absence of delusion. Unicity includes both enlightenment and delusion, both Ramana and Hitler. But Hitler was not enlightened. Enlightenment sees unicity. Delusion imagines separation. The very idea of permanently enlightened people is delusion. 

...There are characters running around in the movie of waking life claiming that they no longer experience fear or desire. Whenever I hear this now, it immediately activates my bullshit alarms. Maybe it's true, I don't know. 

But it seems to me that instead of seeing what is going on, many people who swallowed the "I Am Enlightened" story may now be busy denying delusion, even to themselves. This is like putting on blinders. It's all about a new and improved identity -- Me the Enlightened One -- an identity that needs to be defended. 

...Awakening is not a flashy experience. It's very ordinary. It's simply seeing through false ideas. What remains is the ever-present, ever-changing aliveness of Here/Now. And that is actually never not here. 

"Facts and the law" applies to religiosity as well as the justice system

I don't know much about how the justice system works in other countries, but here in the United States one of the most frequently heard phrases is "facts and the law." 

Those words were used a lot by commentators on the criminal trial of Donald Trump, which ended last Thursday with a 12 person jury deciding unanimously, as is required in criminal trials, that Trump was guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in order to disguise the fact that a $130,000 payment to a porn star was to keep her quiet just before the 2016 presidential election about a sexual affair with Trump that occurred four months after his wife, Melania gave birth to their son, Barron.

Prosecutors had to convince the jury that both the facts and the law merited a conviction, while the defense team tried to cast doubt on the facts presented by the prosecution. But here's an interesting thing: the defense couldn't argue that the law was wrong or doubtful, because the law is what it is, until it is changed.

There's something beautiful about this.

The justice system, when it works correctly (it has flaws, just as every social system does), is a marvelous way of resolving disputes in a reasonable, measured manner. Each side presents its case, the facts of the matter as they see them, before a judge or jury. Then the judge or jury decides the extent to which those facts are believable, and applies that assessment of the facts to the appropriate legal standard. 

To my mind much of the beauty here is akin to why sporting events are so pleasurable to watch. Every sport, such as baseball, has rules. Those are the "law." Umpires or referees observe what players are doing, the "facts." Then they rule on how the facts apply to the law. For example, if a pitcher misses the strike zone four times, the batter being pitched to is entitled to a walk, putting them on first base.

While players and coaches may disagree with a decision, usually they don't, or the disagreement is mild. By contrast, what drives me and others crazy about politics is how Donald Trump, an extremely poor loser, has complained about the 2020 election that he lost to Joe Biden being rigged against him, even though there's no evidence, no facts, that this is true. 

When it comes to religiosity, both the facts and the law typically are disputed. As I have noted many times on this blog, and will surely do so again many times in the future, there's a lack of demonstrable evidence that a supernatural realm even exists, much less that it has certain characteristics claimed by every religion -- all of which describe the supernatural in their own unique fashion. 

So both facts and the law are a matter of debate in religiosity. There's no way to adjudicate claims and counter-claims -- Jesus is the Son of God sent to absolve our sins; no he isn't! -- in such an amorphous situation. This leaves religions in the realm of personal belief, not impersonal facts. 

Complicating things even more, believers in the supernatural are unable to come up with a coherent explanation for how an immaterial entity, such as God, is able to interact or communicate with material entities, such as we humans. In my first book, I observed that this is akin to supposedly immaterial ghosts being able to show signs of their presence by turning on a light or knocking on a door.

As much as I'd like the supernatural to exist (reality would be a lot more interesting if it did), the laws of nature as they're currently understood by science fail to show any solid evidence, any facts, that this is the case. Thus both the facts and physical laws argue against believing in the innocence, so to speak, or religiosity.

Today I read this passage in neuroscientist Christof Koch's book, Then I am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It. This is from a section on near-death experiences.

There are persistent reports in the popular media that patients who undergo near-death experiences have "flat-lined," with their electroencephalograms (EEGs) showing no significant electrical activity. A completely inert brain would indicate a brain in a deep coma, a brain that had lost its causal powers and that certainly wouldn't feel anything.

Therefore, according to this narrative, "conventional medicine" (voiced with dripping sarcasm) fails to explain their visions. Instead, we just have to accept that these patients have been granted a vision of the Afterlife.

I am extremely skeptical, as I've never seen a patient with a flat, isoelectric EEG soon thereafter wake up and claim to have been conscious. A key difficulty is aligning the clock time of the near-death experience with the EEG record, given the patient's confused recollections hours later, often under sedatives.

Remember what I called the neuroscientist's dictum, "No brain, never mind"? Neuroscience operates under the hypothesis that all thoughts, memories, percepts, and experiences are an uneluctable consequence of the natural extrinsic and intrinsic causal powers of the brain -- not supernatural ones. 

Unless there is extraordinary compelling evidence to the contrary, I see no reason to abandon the principle that a silenced brain does not support consciousness. 

Note that Koch called this a hypothesis. That's the openness of science. If compelling fresh facts come along that argue for overturning our current understanding of the laws of nature, then some of those laws may need to be modified. 

That's how the justice system works also. It's fairly common to have a guilty verdict overturned when new evidence, such as a DNA test that wasn't available during the original trial, shows the innocence of someone who was convicted of a crime.

But simply saying so doesn't make it so. Not in the law, and not in religiosity. Facts matter. A lot.