Church of the Churchless

Study finds that meditators are prone to "spiritual superiority"

I'm well acquainted with the notion of "spiritual superiority," since I fell prey to that myself back when I thought that being initiated by a guru who supposedly was God in Human Form meant that I was part of a relatively small group of chosen people who had a special relationship with God.

(Sorry Jews, there's a lot of competition in the chosen people contest.)

And it could be argued that I still feel spiritually superior now that I've become an atheist and consider that I'm aware of the drawbacks of being religious that religious believers are clueless about.

Below is a series of posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, relating to spiritual superiority that I came across today. This fits  with my personal experience -- both of observing myself, and of observing other religiously-minded people. Not everybody, for sure, but a good share.

A 2020 story in the Daily Mail has interesting details about the study summarized in the X posts. It's called "The path to enlightenment is an ego trip: Meditation and mindfulness linked to narcissism and feelings of 'spiritual superiority', study finds."

Forms of spiritual enlightenment can 'boost feelings of superiority' by stoking the ego, a new study has found. 

Dutch experts studying questionnaires of nearly 4,000 people found a link between practising spiritual training, like meditation, and feelings of 'spiritual superiority'. 

Thy found that those who were engaged in the more bizarre 'energetic' therapies, such as aura reading, were the most smug. 

Forms of spiritual training – including mindfulness, meditation, self healing and reading auras – are supposed to distance people from their ego and any feelings of self-worth.  

But spiritual training appears to actually have the opposite effect, by enhancing people's need to feel 'more successful, more respected or loved', the experts say.  

'Spiritual training is assumed to reduce self‐enhancement, but may have the paradoxical effect of boosting superiority feelings,' say the authors, from Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

'It can, thus, operate like other self‐enhancement tools and contribute to a contingent self‐worth that depends on one's spiritual accomplishments.

'Self‐enhancement motive is powerful and deeply ingrained so that it can hijack methods intended to transcend the ego and, instead, adopt them to its own service.' 

According to lead study author Professor Roos Vonk, spiritual practices were associated with, but not necessarily the cause of, superior feelings. 

'We find evidence for spiritual superiority among both mindfulness and energetic students, but more strongly in the latter group, and in the former group we can't say for certain that it's illusory,' she said. 

'In theory, through spiritual training we become wise people who rise above their private interests, feel connected with others, do not judge, but in actuality it often turns out quite differently. 

'People who educate themselves in, for example, healing and reading of auras and chakras, invariably discover that they have remarkable psychic abilities allowing them to "see" things that others do not see. That makes them feel very special.' 

An important part of getting 'spiritual' is seeking to 'transcend one's current locus of centricity', extending one's perspective beyond the self, according to the team. 

Ironically, however, spiritual training may 'evoke psychological motives and responses that are not enlightened at all'. 

Researchers performed three studies to measure what they called spiritual superiority – defined as a feeling of superiority over those who lack 'the spiritual wisdom they ascribe to themselves'. 

They conducted three questionnaires, the first involving 533 people, the second 2,223 people and the third 965 people.  

The questionnaires asked people to respond on a scale of 1 to 7 to a series of statements, to test their 'spiritual superiority'.  

Example statements include 'I am more in touch with my senses than most others,' 'I am more aware of what is between heaven and earth than most people,' and 'the world would be a better place if others too had the insights that I have now'. 

The authors also created scales that they expected would correlate with spiritual superiority.

For example, the 'spiritual guidance' scale noted aspects of spiritual superiority, such as talking about one's insights, trying to help others acquire the same wisdom and aspiring to be another's spiritual coach or guru. 

It included statements such as 'I help others whenever possible on their path to greater wisdom and insight' and 'I am patient with others because I understand it takes time to gain the insights that I gained in my life and my education'. 

Another scale, 'supernatural overconfidence', assessed belief in 'one's own paranormal powers' and included some highly far-fetched statements. 

Examples included 'I can send positive energy to others from a distance,' 'I can get in touch with people who are deceased,' 'I can influence the world around me with my thoughts' and 'when I randomly open a book on a page number that is meaningful to me, this is no coincidence'.  

Researchers looked at several forms of spiritual training, such as meditation, aura reading/healing, haptotherapy and reiki. 

Energetic therapy generally covers skills that are classified as paranormal, such as reading auras and regressing to previous lives. 

Participants completed the questionnaires and answered questions about their age, sex, education, religion and spiritual training. 

Some of the respondents in the 3,700-strong pool had never undergone any form of spiritual training at all. 

Researchers found that those who had taken part in forms of meditation scored higher in the questionnaires than those who had no spiritual training. 

Specifically, there was a gradual increase in 'spiritual superiority' from people with no spiritual training, to those with 'mindfulness training and those engaged with energetic therapy.  

People who believed that they had been taught to see auras and regress to past lives (types of energetic therapy) were the most spiritually smug. 

Energetic therapy participants scored around 67 per cent more than people with no training, while those who had undergone mindfulness sessions scored about 50 per cent higher than those with no spiritual training at all.  

'People may aim to become more successful, more respected or loved because of their spiritual development,' the researchers conclude.

'Even if these are not their initial motives, they may discover these benefits along the way. 

'They may get a sense of excitement, or wisdom and serenity, and embrace the ideology that brought them this delight, hence becoming less open-minded towards other schools of thought. 

'In sum, the road to spiritual enlightenment may yield the exact same mundane distortions that are all too familiar in social psychology, such as self-enhancement, illusory superiority, closed-mindedness, and hedonism (clinging to positive experiences) under the guise of alleged "higher" values.'  

Researchers had been inspired to apply insights from social psychology to the work of Chögyam Trungpa (1939-1987), a Tibetan Buddhist meditation master.  

According to Trungpa, ‘there are numerous sidetracks which lead to a distorted, ego-centred version of spirituality.

'We can deceive ourselves into thinking we are developing spiritually when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques,' he said.   

The study has been published in the European Journal of Social Psychology. 

Kate Cohen on why America needs more atheists

My wife, who is even more of an avid atheist than I am, gave me an article she'd torn out of American Atheist, the publication of (no big surprise) the American Atheists organization, which she belongs to. 

The article, "Why I Call Myself an Atheist," was by Kate Cohen, who wrote We of Little Faith, a book I've blogged about here and here. I liked the article, but couldn't find it online, probably because American Atheists doesn't want people to be able to read stuff in their publication without joining the organization.

But in searching for the article, I came across a piece in the Washington Post by Cohen, where she is a contributing columnist. It was great also. So here's some excerpts from "America doesn't need more God. It needs more atheists." That's a sentiment I heartily agree with.

I like to say that my kids made me an atheist. But really what they did was make me honest.

I was raised Jewish — with Sabbath prayers and religious school, a bat mitzvah and a Jewish wedding. But I don’t remember ever truly believing that God was out there listening to me sing songs of praise.

I thought of God as a human invention: a character, a concept, a carry-over from an ancient time.

I thought of him as a fiction.

Today I realize that means I’m an atheist. It’s not complicated. My (non)belief derives naturally from a few basic observations:

(1) The Greek myths are obviously stories. The Norse myths are obviously stories. L. Ron Hubbard obviously made that stuff up. Extrapolate.

(2) The holy books underpinning some of the bigger theistic religions are riddled with “facts” now disproved by science and “morality” now disavowed by modern adherents. Extrapolate.

(3) Life is confusing and death is scary. Naturally, humans want to believe that someone capable is in charge and that we continue to live after we die. But wanting doesn’t make it so.

(4) Child rape. War. Etc.

And yet, when I was younger, I would never have called myself an atheist — not on a survey, not to my family, not even to myself.

...Studies have shown that many, many Americans don’t trust atheists. They don’t want to vote for atheists, and they don’t want their children to marry atheists. Researchers have found that even atheists presume serial killers are more likely to be atheist than not.

Given all this, it’s not hard to see why atheists often prefer to keep quiet about it. Why I kept quiet. I wanted to be liked!

But when I had children — when it hit me that I was responsible for teaching my children everything — I wanted, above all, to tell them the truth.

...Religion offers ready-made answers to our most difficult questions. It gives people ways to mark time, celebrate and mourn. Once I vowed not to teach my children anything I did not personally believe, I had to come up with new answers. But I discovered as I went what most parents discover: You can figure it out as you go.

Establishing a habit of honesty did not sap the delight from my children’s lives or destroy their moral compass. I suspect it made my family closer than we would have been had my husband and I pretended to our children that we believed in things we did not. We sowed honesty and reaped trust — along with intellectual challenge, emotional sustenance and joy.

Those are all personal rewards. But there are political rewards as well.

My children know how to distinguish fact from fiction — which is harder for children raised religious. They don’t assume conventional wisdom is true and they do expect arguments to be based on evidence. Which means they have the skills to be engaged, informed and savvy citizens.

We need citizens like that.

Lies, lying and disinformation suffuse mainstream politics as never before. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 29 percent of Americans believe that President Biden was not legitimately elected, a total composed of those who think there is solid evidence of fraud (22 percent) and those who think there isn’t (7 percent). I don’t know which is worse: believing there to be evidence of fraud when even the Trump campaign can’t find any or asserting the election was stolen even though you know there’s no proof.

Meanwhile, we are just beginning to grasp that artificial intelligence could develop an almost limitless power to deceive — threatening the ability of even the most alert citizen to discern what’s real.

We need Americans who demand — as atheists do — that truth claims be tethered to fact. We need Americans who understand — as atheists do — that the future of the world is in our hands. And in this particular political moment, we need Americans to stand up to Christian nationalists who are using their growing political and judicial power to take away our rights. Atheists can do that.

Fortunately, there are a lot of atheists in the United States — probably far more than you think.

Some people say they believe in God, but not the kind favored by monotheistic religions — a conscious supreme being with powers of intercession or creation. When they say “God,” they mean cosmic oneness or astonishing coincidences. They mean that sense of smallness-within-largeness they’ve felt while standing on the shore of the ocean or holding a newborn baby or hearing the final measures of Chopin’s “Fantaisie-Impromptu.”

So, why do those people use the word “God” at all? The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett argues in “Breaking the Spell” that since we know we’re supposed to believe in God, when we don’t believe in a supernatural being we give the name instead to things we do believe in, such as transcendent moments of human connection.

Whatever the case, in 2022, Gallup found that 81 percent of Americans believe in God, the lowest percentage yet recorded. This year, when it gave respondents the option of saying they’re not sure, it found that only 74 percent believe in God, 14 percent weren’t sure, and 12 percent did not believe.

...Do you know what some of those atheists call themselves? Catholics. And Protestants, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists. General Social Survey data back this up: Among religious Americans, only 64 percent are certain about the existence of God. Hidden atheists can be found not just among the “nones,” as they’re called — the religiously unaffiliated — but also in America’s churches, mosques and synagogues.

“If you added up all the nominal Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. — those who are religious in name only,” Harvard humanist chaplain Greg M. Epstein writes in “Good Without God,” “you really might get the largest denomination in the world.”

Atheists are everywhere. And we are unusually disposed to getting stuff done.

...Atheists must accept that people are allowing — we are allowing — women to die in childbirth, children to go hungry, men to buy guns that can slaughter dozens of people in minutes. Atheists believe people organized the world as it is now, and only people can make it better.

No wonder we are “the most politically active group in American politics today,” according to political scientist Ryan Burge, interpreting data from the Cooperative Election Study.

That’s right: Atheists take more political action — donating to campaigns, protesting, attending meetings, working for politicians — than any other “religious” group. And we vote. In his study on this data, sociologist Evan Stewart noted that atheists were about 30 percent more likely to vote than religiously affiliated respondents.

We also vote far more than most religiously unaffiliated people. That’s what distinguishes atheists from the “nones” — and what I didn’t realize at first.

Atheists haven’t just checked out of organized religion. (Indeed, we may not have.) We haven’t just rejected belief in God. (Though, obviously, that’s the starting point.) Where atheism becomes a definite stance rather than a lack of direction, a positive belief and not just a negative one, is in our understanding that, without a higher power, we need human power to change the world.

I want to be clear: There are clergy members and congregations all across this country working to do good, not waiting for God to answer their prayers or assuming that God meant for the globe to get hotter. You don’t have to be an atheist to conduct yourself as if people are responsible for the world they live in — you just have to act like an atheist, by taking matters into your own hands.

...Peel back the layers of discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, though, and you find religion. Peel back the layers of control over women’s bodies — from dress codes that punish girls for male desire all the way to the Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade — and you find religion. Often, there isn’t much peeling to do. According to the bill itself, Missouri’s total abortion ban was created “in recognition that Almighty God is the author of life.” Say what, now?

Peel back the layers of abstinence-only or marriage-centered or anti-homosexual sex education and you find religion. “Don’t say gay” laws, laws denying trans kids medical care, school-library book bans and even efforts to suppress the teaching of inconvenient historical facts — motivated by religion.

And when religion loses a fight and progress wins instead? Religion then claims it’s not subject to the resulting laws. “Religious belief” is — more and more, at the state and federal levels — a way to sidestep advances the country makes in civil rights, human rights and public health.

...In fact, when certain believers wield enough political power to turn their God’s presumed preferences into law, I would say it’s dangerous to claim you believe in “God” when what you actually believe in is awe or wonder. (Your “God is love” only lends validity and power to their “God hates gays.”)

So ask yourself: Do I think a supernatural being is in charge of the universe?

If you answer “no,” you’re an atheist. That’s it — you’re done.

But if you go further: You’ll be doing something good for your country.

Why Christians believe in the resurrection is why other people believe in gurus

Recently I got an email from Gary Mason, a former evangelical Christian turned religious skeptic, who shared with me a marvelous approach to arguing against anyone who believes there is solid evidence for Jesus' resurrection.

The post is titled "Best Method to Defeat Evangelical Apologists: The Ghost Buster Counter-Apologetics Technique." 

Since I've never believed in the resurrection, though I dabbled with believing in the historical Jesus briefly during my college days when I got involved with a crazed Greek yoga teacher who blended West and East in his Christananda ashram (the 1960s were weird), at first I thought Mason's post didn't have much relevance for me.

But after reading it, I realized that the reason evangelical Christians believe in the resurrection -- because they feel the spirit of Jesus within them -- is the same reason members of the India-based organization I belonged to for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, believe that their guru is guiding them from within.

They feel the guru's spirit. More accurately, they imagine that a sensation within their consciousness is evidence for a massive metaphysical and supernatural assumption: a divine being is communicating with them.

So it's interesting that while Christianity and Sant Mat, the umbrella term for the religious philosophy of Radha Soami Satsang Beas and similar groups -- Sant Mat means "path of the saints" -- have very different core teachings, the basis for believing in those core beliefs is quite similar.

Mason argues that there are two main pillars supporting a belief that Jesus was resurrected, which obviously is very important, if not absolutely essential, to being a traditional Christian: the historical record and an inner communication with the spirit of Jesus.

He points out that the historical record is very weak as regards the resurrection. 

Yet with all this evidence, Saul did not believe in the Resurrection. Really? Dozens if not hundreds  of dead saints were “raised to life” out of their graves on that first Easter Sunday, but Saul still doubted? Was he an idiot? It took a “heavenly vision” three years later to finally convince him.

What about the rest of Jerusalem’s Jews? Thousands greeted Jesus on Palm Sunday as the new King of Israel, but according to the Book of Acts, only 120 of them were still followers of “The  Way” on the morning of Pentecost. So even the Christian Scriptures provide evidence that the overwhelming majority of the people of Jerusalem were not impressed by the evidence for the Resurrection. Why? Were most first century Jews idiots?

Many Christian apologists say there is  another, more sinister, reason why most Jews did not believe. They quote Paul in Acts 28: Jews are a calloused, hard-hearted people who have closed their eyes and ears to the truth. That is why most of them did not, and still do not today, believe the Resurrection evidence. (They are evil.) God has therefore turned his back on the Jews and offered salvation to the Gentiles. Gentiles will believe the (strong) evidence.  

Ok… But what about the fact that the overwhelming majority of Muslims, Hindus, and other non Christian theists do not believe the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus? No public university history textbook on planet earth lists the resurrection of Jesus as an historical fact. Is everyone calloused and hard-hearted against Christianity’s “strong evidence”? Is that why all non Christians, Jews and Gentiles, do not believe in the historicity of the Resurrection? 

This leaves the feeling Christians have that Jesus lives on within them. 

This is why skeptics should not debate evangelical Christians regarding the historical evidence for the Resurrection. It is a waste of everyone’s time. The real issue everyone should focus on is the evangelical belief: “The Testimony of the Holy Spirit”. All Christians believe that the spirit of Jesus  (“the Holy Spirit”) dwells (lives) inside each true Christian. However, evangelicals take it a step  further. Evangelicals believe that they can perceive Jesus’ presence within them and that Jesus’s spirit, living within them, communicates with them in a non-audible voice, giving them life guidance on a daily basis. Evangelicals believe they can feel the presence of Jesus inside their bodies!

Well, that's exactly what many fundamentalist devotees believe is true of the guru who initiated them into Sant Mat: the guru, who is viewed as God in Human Form, guides them just like Jesus on a daily basis, and they can feel his inner presence. 

Mason sums up his position at the end of the post:

Conclusion: Evangelical apologists claim that the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is very strong, as strong if not stronger than the evidence for any other major event in Antiquity. But no one who believes that Caesar crossed the Rubicon believes that the spirit of Caesar dwells within him, testifying to him of the historicity of the Rubicon crossing in a still, small voice!

For evangelicals to claim that they can objectively evaluate the historical evidence for Jesus’ alleged bodily  resurrection is ludicrous. They are hopelessly biased by the delusion that the ghost of the man in question lives within them.  

Belief that a spirit (ghost) lives inside you, dear Christian, is a delusion. It is nothing more than an ancient superstition. Superstitions are for children, not adults. 

Evangelicals for the most part are good, kind-hearted people but their delusion of a ghost living  inside them, a ghost who gives them life guidance on every facet of life, including politics and social issues, is dangerous for our society and the world.

We must do all we can to help our evangelical friends and neighbors see that their invisible best friend, whom they believe lives inside them and communicates with them, is no more real than the imaginary friend of a lonely child. Jesus is dead, friends. Ghosts are not real. 

Dear Evangelical apologist:

1. You believe the ghost of the man whose resurrection is in question lives inside you, communicating with you in a still, small voice.

2. You appeal to consensus expert opinion only when it supports your worldview (e.g., the historicity of Jesus) and reject it when it doesn’t (e.g., Darwinian evolution).

How can you expect us to believe that you are capable of objectively evaluating the historical evidence for the Resurrection when the perceived ghost inside of you is given more credence than consensus expert opinion? Don’t these two facts strongly indicate that you are hopelessly biased?

I am trying to help you see the folly of your superstitions, my friend.  You are indoctrinating little children and gullible adults to believe in capricious ghouls who punish people for what they believe.  Thought crimes!  You threaten children with eternal torture simply for what they believe.  How horrific.

Yet, the “evidence” for your belief system is the perceived presence of an invisible, inaudible ghost living inside of you.  You have no objective evidence that the spirit (ghost) of Jesus lives inside of you.  None. A small child who has invented an imaginary friend reports the same subjective feelings of comfort and security. Please see the light of reason and rational thinking.

Amen to that, Brother Mason. Read his entire post for a fuller understanding of his arguments. 

Anyone have opinions on the Soami Bagh line of gurus?

I've communicated via email with someone who had questions about Radha Soami Satsang Beas, the organization I was a member of for 35 years. Now this person is wondering if any visitors to this blog have an opinion about the Soami Bagh branch of Radha Soami.

Below is part of what they said to me. Leave a comment on this post if you have some experience with Soami Bagh.

I've become a Radha Soami skeptic, but for those who aren't, I just noticed that the Soami Bagh web site has some interesting books and other publications available online. Like, the Phelps Notes, which if I recall correctly, was viewed as sort of an underground, "forbidden fruit" book by Radha Soami Satsang Beas. Naturally I had a copy, but gave it away at some point.

Can you please put a post up on your blog asking others what sort of experiences that they have had with the Soami Bagh branch of Radha Soami, the so-called parent line?

 

As I have previously mentioned, I am still holding out some hope that there may be a real Sant Sat Guru someplace. But before I go trekking all the way to India, I was curious to hear from some others who may have already gone to Soami Bagh before me.

 

And just so that I am clear, I am asking specifically about the Soami Bagh line. And not the Dayal Bagh line. The Dayal Bagh line is much bigger, but I do not feel any draw towards them.

If you're trying to control your mind, who is the "you" doing the trying?

English has some confusing ways of putting things when it comes to the mind, consciousness, attention, and all that. 

For example, we may say, "I couldn't stop myself from eating a second piece of cake." Okay. But what's the difference between "I" and "myself"? Don't each of these words refer to the same entity? So isn't that sentence just a matter of grammar, not of reality? 

In other words, maybe what the sentence really means is "I ate two pieces of cake, but now I wish I'd only eaten one." Now we just have "I" without the extraneous "myself." 

This sort of issue, or problem, pops up frequently in Thomas Metzinger's book about pure awareness, The Elephant and the Blind. In a chapter I read today, "Ego dissolution," he talks about the epistemic agent model, which typically creates the notion of a knowing self.

I realize that epistemic agent is an unfamiliar term for most people. It certainly is for me. These examples help us understand what Metzinger means by this.

Let us consider a few examples of times when we have an epistemic agent model: the conscious experience of (1) being a thinking self, (2) being a self in the very act of attending, and (3) being a meditator attempting to "have an insight" (e.g., to recognize her true nature).

Let's begin with the first example. Whenever you try to to mentally calculate, to think logically, or to actively form a new concept, you experience yourself as an epistemic agent, as a thinking self that wants to understand something, as an entity that wants to create new knowledge. 

You have a goal, and you act to reach the goal. Mental calculation is effortful, as is forming a new concept or attempting to create a novel philosophical argument. When you do it, you feel like you must control your own mind, and -- if you're successful -- an inner experience of ownership and agency arises.

This experience results from a special form of deliberate, goal-directed mental action, which in turn leads to the transient combination of experiential qualities: a feeling of mental effort, plus a sense of ownership and agency. Perhaps falsely, this combination of experiential qualities can be described as a specific, nonbodily sense of self.

...What about the second example of a context in which we have an epistemic agent model? If you are not thinking at all, but instead carefully attending to the sensations in your feet as you slowly walk, to the sound of a bell vanishing into silence, or to the self-generated sound-shape of a mantra in your mind doing the same, then you have an epistemic agent model.

There is something that you want to perceive and experience as precisely as possible. Again, you try to gently control the dynamics of an inner process, but this time by optimizing for precision. There is also a quality of motivation, maybe even earnestness. In the carefulness of your attuning, there is a sense of effort, which may be more or less subtle.

A goal state has been selected, and the conscious self in the act of attending actively pursues this goal state -- this is our second example of what it means for the self to be an epistemic agent. The self is active, and it wants to know something. It wants to realize the goal state in its own mind. 

And here is the third example. If you are a meditator and have read about fancy theories involving recognition of the "true self" or the effortlessness of spacious awareness, if you're expecting to learn to see your own true nature and "let go" in some profound way, if you intellectually know the difference between dual mindfulness and nondual mindfulness, then you are in serious trouble.

You have become infected with a new kind of goal state, something that can apparently be known and realized. Now it is almost impossible to prevent the birth of a new and particularly clever epistemic agent model in your mind. This time, it purports to want to know pure, nondual awareness -- it is trying to touch the elephant as directly as possible while still cleverly sustaining the blind toucher's own existence.

I realize that the passages I've shared above aren't the easiest reading. But they're important reading. Because what Metzinger has done here -- he's both an experienced meditator and an academic philosopher -- is show that the sense of self or ego is present when thinking logically, when perceiving mindfully, and when seeking one's true nature in meditation.

During the 20 years since I started this Church of the Churchless blog, I've been told many times by commenters that I think too much and that's why I haven't succeeded in my meditation. This assumes, of course, that there's a big difference between thinking and meditating successfully.

Metzinger doesn't see that difference. He's focused on what is typically common to thinking, perceiving, and meditating: the presence of a self that seeks to know something.

The closed-eyed meditator sitting motionless in the lotus posture on a cushion may seem to be engaged in a very different activity from a wide-eyed mathematician scribbling equations on a blackboard, but what unites them is a self that seeks to know something. 

There's an alternative, says Metzinger on the chapter's last page. He says that sometimes the experience of pure awareness leads to a state of "ego dissolution."

In many cases, what dissolves is precisely the inner image of the knowing self, the earnest meditator, or the epistemic agent model in your brain. In almost all cases and for almost all human beings, this epistemic agent model functions as the unit of identification. 

Whenever we have one, we automatically experience ourselves as being this thinking self (just as Descartes did), as being the invisible entity that controls the focus of attention, as being the entity that is curious and longs for pleasant surprises, and as being an informavore who always wants to know more.

The phenomenal character of MPE [Minimal Phenomenal Experience], by contrast, lacks the craving for novelty and the two elements of dynamic knowingness and egoic identification. MPE's frequently seem to break their inner connection, weakening the process of identification with the fictitious knowing self.

If there is knowledge, it is no longer egoic knowledge.

Our mental experience isn't always in accord with the mental reality

Descartes famously wrote that even though we could be mistaken about everything else, since God could be a cosmic joker who hides the truth from us, the one thing we can't doubt is that we are a creature who doubts -- and thinks, and in general has conscious experiences. 

You know, the "I think, therefore I am" thing.

It's hard to argue with that. Sort of. Because we can imagine what Descartes could not, given when he lived: that, among other 21st century possibilities, we are creatures who are characters in a computer simulation crafted by an advanced alien civilization.

Part of the simulation includes the capacity to imbue certain characters, human beings in our case, with a conception that they are having conscious experiences. Also, that they are free to choose one thing -- a thought, action, whatever -- rather than another thing, even though the simulation is both doing the choosing and creatingnthe sensation of free will.

Which, in characters like Robert Sapolsky, Sam Harris, and other deniers of free will, is overridden by a sensation of not having free will, just to make the simulation more interesting.

But even if we don't believe that we're characters in a simulation (I consider this unlikely), there's still good reason to consider that much of what we mentally experience isn't actually what is happening in our deeper mental reality.

Thomas Metzinger explains this in the "Meditation and Nonmeditation" chapter in his provocative book, The Elephant and the Blind, which is about the experience of pure consciousness. 

According to the reports of about 500 people who described such an experience in sufficient detail to be included in Metzinger's book, pure consciousness or pure awareness (same thing) happens spontaneously. It can't be forced, since any forcing introduces a subject-object duality that destroys the possibility of experiencing pure awareness in its simple unified clarity.

In other words, we can be it, but we can't observe it. 

However this raises the question of where an experience of pure awareness comes from if it is uncaused, which is what's implied by the notion of spontaneity. Metzinger says:

On a physical or functional level of description, to call something "spontaneous" means to describe it as uncaused and lawless -- and therefore doing so without argument or evidence could be seen as a form of hand-waving or deliberate obscurantism. 

If we try to be intellectually honest, set all metaphysics aside, and stay as close as possible to contemplative experience itself, then the term "spontaneity" can only refer to a phenomenological kind of spontaneity.

There is an experience of spontaneity, and this is what has to be taken seriously. As always, jumping to strong metaphysical conclusions is a way of not taking your own experience seriously.

That last sentence is interesting. It deserves careful consideration.

I'm not capable of doing that right now. So I'll simply agree with Metzinger in an intuitive fashion that he does seem to be correct in saying that when we make more of our direct phenomenal experience than is contained within the experience itself ("I felt a great sense of peace. That must be the presence of God!") we're discounting our experience in favor of a metaphysical or conceptual conclusion.

Here's what Metzinger says in the following paragraphs. This fits with my understanding of why we believe we have free will, though there's no evidence of this other than the belief.

The phenomenological fact that nondual MPE [Minimal Phenomenal Experience] often appears spontaneously and effortlessly, that it has an "ahistoric" quality and cannot be fabricated by applying a mental technique, can be explained with reference to the fact that most of its enabling conditions in the brain are fully unconscious.

We do not experience them. Science may be able to find and isolate these causally enabling conditions, but the brain itself doesn't represent them in its conscious model of reality. There is a parallel case in the phenomenology of volition, of suddenly "willing" something.

Many people proceed from the phenomenological fact that, say, the consciously experienced intention to now move their right arm and reach for a beautiful flower seems to spontaneously occur in their mind, "out of the blue" as it were, and interpret this as proof of free will in a strong sense: as demonstrating the existence of what philosophers call "ultimate origination."

Ultimate origination would mean the capacity to start a new causal chain of events in your mind by an uncaused act of will, an act coming from outside the network of dependent origination. But for the experience of free will, as well as for the experience of spontaneously occurring pure awareness, the same principle holds: 

From the fact that you experience something as uncaused, it does not follow that it actually was uncaused.

...Some intelligent systems control their own behavior based on a model of themselves as agents in a strong sense. To successfully control their own behavior -- which may be bodily or mental -- they use a conscious image of themselves as an entity that possesses the capacity for goal selection and ultimate origination. 

Other intelligent systems don't do this. The difference is important. 

We can think of embodied systems intelligently moving through the world, automatically updating and constantly improving their inner portrait of reality, controlling what they will know and what they will not know.

But some of these systems -- for example, self-aware human beings -- sometimes may use a model of themselves as an epistemic agent, now achieving the same goal by using a special computational device. They would experience themselves as possessing free will, as being agents capable of initiating new causal chains out of the blue.

These systems would have an ego in a strong sense. 

Negative emotions are just fine. I'll be angry if you don't agree.

Proving (sort of) that the cosmos agrees with the theme of this blog post, about an hour ago I finished episode 8 of the fourth season of The Handmaid's Tale on Hulu, which I belatedly started watching after seeing Elisabeth Moss in another streaming series and wanting to see more of her acting.

The Handmaid's Tale, of course, is an adaptation of the dystopian book by the same name written by Margaret Atwood. Women are treated extremely badly in the nation of Gilead, which used to be the United States until religious zealots managed to take over the country, motivated by a precipitous decline in birthrates for a reason I'm unsure about.

Hopefully fertile Handmaids are raped by male Commanders while their wives assist, jusifying this horrendous act on a twisted interpretation of Biblical scripture that says, basically, that if a woman can't conceive a child, it's fine to bring in another woman for that purpose.

By episode 8 in the fourth season, some Handmaids have escaped Gilead and made it to Canada, a country that hasn't been infected with the same virus of religious fundamentalism. Some of these women are having a group therapy session headed up by Moira. June is a well-known Handmaid, the main character played by Moss, who has endured lots of atrocities in Gilead prior to reaching Canada.

Here's a bit of dialog after several women in the group talk about how much they hate the men who raped them, describing how they'd like to get back at them and their wives by, for example, cutting off the Commander's penis and sexually abusing his wife with a broomstick.

Moira: We've talked about this. Anger is a valid emotion. It's necessary, important even, to heal. But we can't live there.

June: Why not? Why does healing have to be the only goal? Why can't we be as furious as we feel? Don't we have that right?

This interchange struck me as being in line, pretty much, with an article I read this morning in the June 8, 2024 issue of New Scientist, titled in the print edition: "The happiness trap: The idea that we should always look on the bright side has gone too far and may now be damaging our well-being." I'll share a PDF file of the article. Here's some excerpts.
Download The happiness trap

Our tendency to eschew the darker aspects of human experience isn’t new, especially in Western societies. Longstanding rules about how we display our emotions have led people to develop strategies to avoid negative ones, says Susan David at Harvard Medical School, who calls this the “tyranny of positivity”.

...Social media and the positively curated images of ourselves we create online add to this pressure to be happy, says Brock Bastian at the University of Melbourne in Australia, who was part of the research team. “When we are not willing to accept negative emotions as a part of life, this can mean that we may see negative emotions as a sign there is something wrong with us,” he says. In other words, with an overemphasis on positivity, we are more likely to perceive normal emotions, such as sadness and anxiety, as signs of a mental health condition needing treatment.

Research by Maya Tamir at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem highlights another reason why excess positivity may be toxic. She and her colleagues studied more than 2300 people from eight countries to explore whether the secret of happiness lies in experiencing more pleasant emotions or, as Aristotle argued, in experiencing the emotions we want to experience.

They found that, regardless of culture, greater mental well-being is linked with feeling emotions that we believe are appropriate to our situation, rather than just having positive emotions regardless of context – “feeling right” as opposed to “feeling good”, is how they put it.

We should be concerned if we don’t feel angry when we witness someone being exploited, for example. Such emotional episodes, while experientially unpleasant, indicate that we are ready to behave in accordance with our values. For Tamir, emotions can be thought of as a toolbox that helps us attain those goals that are important to us.

For about three weeks, ever since President Biden had a horrible performance in his debate with Donald Trump, I've been obsessively anxious about Biden being able to defeat Trump in the November election. I'd pour over the latest polls. I'd pay attention to news about the pressure being put on Biden to withdraw from the race. It was just about all I could write about on my other two blogs. 

I was feeling a bunch of negative emotions: worry, anxiety, fear, plus others difficult to name.

The prospect of Trump getting another four years to wreak havoc on our democracy was hard, if not impossible, for me to deal with. Talking yesterday with friends who are members of the monthly discussion group my wife and I belong to made me feel a bit better, because all eleven of us agreed that Biden should withdraw, as I wrote about in a HinesSight blog post. 

Then the news broke this morning that Biden had withdrawn from the presidential race, shortly before endorsing his vice-president, Kamala Harris to replace him at the top of the ticket. I was so happy! Not totally, because I realized that Harris still faces an uphill battle to overcome the lead Trump has both in national polls and those of battleground states.

But I sure felt much better.

I'd done what I could to put pressure on Biden -- sending messages to the White House asking him to withdraw, contacting my congressional delegation (Oregon's two senators and our representative) asking them to tell Biden to do this, writing blog posts about the urgent need for Biden to withdraw and sharing them as widely as possible.

If I hadn't felt so anxious and fearful about Biden's chance of beating Trump, my motivation to do those things would have been much less. So, yes, negative emotions often have an important role to play. They alert us of wrongs that need righting, of problems that need fixing, of injustices that need overturning. 

You can't know your "true self," but you can be it

I readily admit that Thomas Metzinger's new book, The Elephant and the Blind, often isn't easy to read. This detailed examination of pure awareness involves a lot of philosophy, a lot of neuroscience, and a lot of sophisticated arguments.

All that is challenging. But every chapter rewards me with insights presented in simple language that make me pleased I bought this lengthy book -- which as I've noted before can be downloaded for free from the publisher, The MIT Press. (I prefer reading books on paper, not a screen.)

Metzinger does a great job separating precepts of Buddhist, Advaita, and other teachings that talk about pure awareness from the phenomenology, the actual experience, of people who report an acquaintance with this aspect of consciousness.

His thesis, which makes sense, is that we'll have a better chance of understanding the nature of consciousness if we can reduce consciousness to its barest, simplest form. That's pure awareness, where "pure" doesn't necessarily mean being without content, since pure awareness can be recognized as a backdrop to everyday sensory perceptions.

Metzinger likens this to how we may feel upon awakening from sleep. There's a moment just after our eyes open, or a bit before, when we're unsure who we are, where we are, or when we are. All there is, is the potential for knowing those things later: I'm Brian, in my Oregon bedroom, early in the morning on a July day. 

He writes:

Pure awareness knowing itself is an entirely nonconceptual affair. "Recognizing" pure awareness is not a form of active, conceptual thought, and it does not involve the quality of ownership. In and of itself, it is entirely silent, free of mental action.

...There is no accompanying thought like "Now it is aware of itself!" or "Now I actually am pure awareness that directly knows itself." The phenomenology of pure awareness knowing itself also never contains some knowing self quietly saying "I think this must be it!" to itself, or asking "Is this really it? This is too simple..."

So the beauty of pure awareness is that it involves zero effort to realize it. There is nothing to do. In fact, any effort at all during meditation or at any other time destroys the possibility of realizing pure awareness. It's like a bird that alights on your hand only if you do nothing to make this happen. 

This means that every attempt to willfully fix attention on the quality of awareness per se destroys its originally nondual nature, the baseline quality that William James called 'sciousness,' simply because it reintroduces subject/object structure.

Pure awareness recedes from attention.

We can now see more clearly why this must be the case, and how the underlying principle also holds for reflexive MPE [Minimal Phenomenal Experience]. Every effortful attempt to fixate attention on MPE, thereby turning it into a reified target of introspection, automatically creates a subtle hallucination, an inner image of a goal state to be reached -- and an epistemic agent model that is directed at this goal state. 

Imagining pure awareness knowing itself is not the same thing as pure awareness actually coming to rest in itself because the latter lacks any form of agency whatsoever. 

...But that which reports experiences, that which perhaps boasts about things that happened during meditation, that which may be slightly complacent when speaking about "stages" and "states" that it has known -- that entity is always something else.

It is an ego; it has personality traits, psychological conditioning, and emotional needs -- and it has had important insights that it feels an urge to share. Perhaps the urge and the complacency are parts of some last-ditch escape strategy?

Maybe there is even a new personality disorder to be discovered, "spiritual teacher personality disorder."

...Be that as it may, my main point is that because verbal communication is something that happens between egos, in a space that opens up between embodied selves in a social context, the nonegoic quality of "pure awareness that knows itself" would never find a place in it.

Makes sense. Consciousness obviously can't know itself, since consciousness is how we know everything else. If consciousness could know itself, actually it wouldn't be consciousness, but a separate object. Awareness and consciousness are the same thing.

So if the true self (Advaita) or true non-self (Buddhism) are considered to be pure awareness, then it isn't possible for us to know the self, but only to be the self. 

The quality of mental agency is really the one that leads to contraction; the sense of effort that comes from hallucinating a goal-state -- the specific experiential quality emerging from the process of quashing prediction error on the mental level -- is what counts.

Whenever you identify with pure awareness, none of this is the case: In a way, you are like a conscious organism running a new operating system. This organism is now employing a different kind of ontology for segmenting reality, navigating the world under a nonegoic unit of identification. If this is correct the remaining MPE [Minimal Phenomenal Experience] mode should be characterized by an all-pervading quality of effortlessness.

Using our new tools, we can also say that the phenomenology sometimes described as "true self" is one in which the experience of knowing is no longer contracted. It is one example of the shift from the first-person perspective of an active, information-hungry self to the zero-person perspective of knowingness itself -- that is, to an uncontracted version of the phenomenal signature of knowing.

The first-person perspective is the perspective that you take when you ascribe conscious experiences to yourself using the first-person pronoun: I myself am having this thought, I hear music from a distance, I am observing my breath, or I am trying to meditate.

...Your first-person perspective, on the other hand, is your very own, individual perspective on the world; it is what makes conscious experience subjective, what makes it seem to be intrinsically tied to a single, knowing self. 

...Pure awareness, whenever it has transformed into the all-encompassing nonegoic unit of identification, strongly resembles what Thomas Nagel called "the objective self" or the "true self," which he described as "the subject of a perspectiveless conception of reality."

...Thus, what was previously outside becomes a new inside. World and body gain a certain quality of virtuality and interiority, for they are no longer independent of consciousness.

An atheist had a near-death experience that challenged his spiritual skepticism

Near-death experiences fascinate me. Maybe a bit less now than they used to, as the older I get, the more accepting I am of the undeniable reality that I'm not going to live forever. 

But I used to devour books about near-death experiences with relish back when I really didn't like the thought of dying. 

Recently I read a review in the Washington Post of a book that I would have loved to read in the days I was more afraid of death than I am now, "Sebastian Junger was a skeptic of the afterlife. Then he nearly died."

That's a gift link from my digital subscription. Hopefully it will work for you. If not, this PDF file of the review is another way to read it.
Download Sebastian Junger’s ‘In My Time of Dying’ reviewed - The Washington Post

Here's some excerpts to whet your appetite for reading the entire review of In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife.

The eventual diagnosis: a ruptured aneurysm in a pancreatic artery that had caused a massive abdominal hemorrhage, with enough blood loss to bring Junger perilously close to death. As surgeons worked to save him, Junger experienced the presence of his late father, who invited his son to join him. “There’s nothing to be scared of,” he seemed to say. “Don’t fight it.”

Junger, a confirmed atheist and an adherent of the scientific method, had been raised by a physicist (his father) and a painter (his mother). His upbringing had left little room for a spiritual experience like this one, which turns out to be the central conundrum of this book and, I’d venture, his life. The meeting with his father was understandably unnerving. “He was dead, I was alive, and I wanted nothing to do with him.” But it’s hard to unsee what you’ve seen: His father had not only visited him but opened the door to the idea that an afterlife might actually exist.

Really? Show me the proof. Oh, you can’t. Well, how can something be true if you can’t prove it? Ted Kaptchuk, a well-regarded Harvard physician, once told a New Yorker writer that he’d always “believed there is an important component of medicine that involves suggestion, ritual and belief,” adding: “All ideas that make scientists scream.”

...Can we prove an afterlife exists? No. Might one exist? Junger gives us reason to believe in that possibility. In any case, how lucky we are that Junger survived and that we’re able to join him on another mind-blowing adventure — this time to a place all of us will one day visit.

I have no doubt that Junger truly did have the experiences he describes that followed a harrowing medical emergency.

The big question, of course, is what to make of his visions. That's an unsettled question, though there's reason to believe that near-death experiences are a product of a brain on the edge of dying. Who knows for sure, though?

No one, including Sebastian Junger.

God didn't save Trump from being killed. But Trump's devotees think so.

On Saturday a 20 year old man, Thomas Matthew Crooks, a registered Republican, tried to assassinate Donald Trump with an AR-15 rifle for a reason that likely never will be known, since Crooks was killed by Secret Service counter-snipers and left no indication why he fired numerous shots from a rooftop near the rally where Trump was speaking.

As I said in a post on my Salem Political Snark blog yesterday, "It's good Trump wasn't killed. Now let's defeat the S.O.B." 

There's no one in recent American politics who has been more toxic than Trump.

Trump never tires of attacking people who fail to kiss his ass with sufficient enthusiasm. In his first term he caused hundreds of thousands of needless Covid deaths by failing to endorse public health measures that would have saved those lives. His legal problems stem from him doing illegal things. He had sex with a porn star a few months after his wife gave birth to their son Barron, then tried to cover that up shortly before the 2016 election in a fashion that earned him 34 felony convictions. He encouraged the January 6 insurrection at the nation's capitol and did nothing to stop it.

This just scratches the surface of all the crap Trump has dumped upon our country in his boundless enthusiasm for destroying all that is admirable about our democracy. Republican politicians don't like it when us Democrats call Trump an existential threat to democracy.

But that's the truth, and it needs to be spoken even more loudly after the assassination attempt, because this likely will garner Trump some sympathy points in upcoming polls.

That's my political attitude. I've also got some theological issues to discuss with the Christian fundamentalists who comprise a large share of Trump's base of support. Also with Trump himself.

A bullet passed through the upper part of one of Trump's ears, leaving him bloodied but otherwise unhurt. 

This close call has led Christian faithful, along with Trump (who hasn't shown any sign of being genuinely religious), to claim that God saved Trump's life. A CNN story says:

“It was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. “We will FEAR NOT, but instead remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness.”

That sentiment is one Trump has truly internalized, according to some of those who have spoken to him in recent days, and one Trump, who is not an especially religious or spiritual man, has reiterated during the aftermath of Saturday’s traumatic event.

“I’m not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be dead,” Trump said during an interview with the New York Post Sunday. “By luck or by God, many people are saying it’s by God, I’m still here.”

It’s a conviction that will certainly reinforce the messianic imagery of Trump long promoted by his most ardent supporters and the evangelical communities that have stood by him for years. Indeed, outside the venue Saturday, as rallygoers were evacuated, they passed a truck emblazoned with images of Trump seated in front of Jesus, whose hands rested on the former president’s shoulders.

Obviously I don't think God saved Trump, since I don't believe God even exists. But let's assume for the sake of theological argument that there is a God who intervenes in human affairs, and that this is the God of the Ten Commandments. 

Trump has broken many of the commandments. He lies incessantly. He's committed adultery. He cheats  people. He puts himself first in almost every situation.

All in all, Trump is a despicable human being. There's very little good that can be said about him. Those closest to him know this, which is why so many of those he appointed to high positions during his presidency now refuse to endorse his bid for another term.

So why would God stop a bullet from seriously injuring Trump, while allowing a bullet to kill a valiant firefighter, Corey Comperatore, in the audience who died trying to protect his family? An AP story says:

The former fire chief who was killed at a Pennsylvania rally for Donald Trump spent his final moments diving down in front of his family, protecting them from the gunfire that rang out Saturday during an assassination attempt against the former president.

Corey Comperatore’s quick decision to use his body as a shield against the bullets flying toward his wife and daughter rang true to the close friends and neighbors who loved and respected the proud 50-year-old Trump supporter, noting that the Butler County resident was a “man of conviction.”

“He’s a literal hero. He shoved his family out of the way, and he got killed for them,” said Mike Morehouse, who lived next to Comperatore for the last eight years. “He’s a hero that I was happy to have as a neighbor.”

I haven't heard any Christian Republicans speak about the bravery of Comperatore. They're fixated on the bullet that passed through Trump's ear, not the bullet that killed Comperatore. Partly, I'm sure, this is because it is so difficult for a religious believer to explain why God would allow a horrible person to survive, while allowing a good person to die.

If God is that stupid, I'm proud to be an atheist. Well, I'm proud to be an atheist regardless, but idiotic displays of religiosity make me especially pleased that I no longer believe in supernatural nonsense. 

Oh, by the way, Trump hasn't called the family of Comperatore, though Biden tried to talk with them. This shows what an uncaring egotistical jerk he is. It's always all about him, not other people. Trump has the empathy of a rock. 

Narrative self-deception is one way we fool ourselves

Each of us is the hero or villain in a story of our own making. That's admittedly a simplistic summary of a psychological principle, but it isn't far from the truth.

I'm certainly aware of this in regard to myself. I have a way of looking upon my 75 years of living that, by and large, puts me in a positive light.

Which isn't surprising, since I prefer praise to blame, so why would I choose to view the events of my life in a fashion that draws attention to my weaknesses instead of my strengths? Of course, some people do this for their own psychological reasons.

Philosopher Thomas Metzinger addresses this subject in one of the longer chapters in his book, The Elephant and the Blind. It's titled "Emptiness and Fullness."

Emptiness, by the way, is defined by Metzinger in its usual sense of voidness, not in the Buddhist sense of things lacking inherent existence. He makes this clear early on in the chapter. So emptiness can mean an openness to knowing in the context of pure awareness, the subject of his book.

Many of the meditators who completed Metzinger's survey about their meditative experiences claimed that they were able to overcome past patterns of knowing and thinking, arriving at a state of "epistemic openness" or emptiness.

In this chapter, Metzinger talks at length about an obstacle to this, narrative self-deception. He notes that our search for meaning is a foundation for that sort of self-deception. For we imbue events with a flavor that doesn't exist in them as they are in themselves.

As we have seen, the first of these deep needs is to develop a successful and sustainable strategy of meaning-making -- to find a more permanent solution to the constant struggle to make sense of life events. This need is shared not only by meditators, but by all those who are not existentially indifferent.

...One simple conceptual point to make at the outset is that words and sentences have meaning, but events don't. Events just happen. Events as such, as well as whole chains of events connecting birth and death, are intrinsically meaningless  -- but not in the emotionally negative sense that we may attribute to the idea of life as a whole being meaningless. 

So we humans have to supply the meaning to events in our life. The basic way we do this is through telling stories to ourselves.

Human beings are storytellers, and they stabilize the fabric of their long-term self-model by creating a permanent inner monologue. They identify themselves with Harding's "little one" (chapter 8), the entity constantly chattering on about all its extremely interesting and important perceptions and thoughts and emotions to keep the long-term self alive. There is no better way to understand this fact, to observe its continuous fight for survival under the microscope of mindfulness, than to participate in a silent meditation retreat.

For many people, their spiritual or religious path becomes an important part of their life story.

A story encourages us to hallucinate cause-and-effect relationships between events in our narrative ("Nothing ever happens by chance!") and detect patterns in the way they affected us ("I have always been interested in this!"). 

Most of all, a life story offers a chance to insert a single, overarching theme that holds everything together, a normative metacontent that allows us to morally evaluate ourselves and others with the goal of enhancing and sustaining our sense of self-worth.

The romanticism of "being on a path" is a good example of this. Now we can judge, negotiate, plan for the future, and thereby continuously stabilize the long-term self model. There is a way of life, a general theme. The story has a beginning and a possible end; it has characters, episodes, a setting -- and like a dream that has become fully lucid, it even has a plot that can apparently be controlled.

Metzinger says that for spiritual seekers, all this gives rise to a sense of having found something.

Many of us try to find something: something that allows us to live in an insane world without going insane ourselves. Something that creates coherence.

...My first point is that, for many committed practitioners, the core motivation allowing them to sustain a regular practice over many years may consist to a considerable degree in the fact that they have found something, that they have adopted a certain belief system (or joined a group or spiritual movement, identified with a certain lineage or teacher, etc.), and not solely in the intrinsic force of the pure-awareness experience itself. This belief system, the sense of community, the acceptance of an authority, and the ongoing project of making-meaning may be among the major sources of motivation. 

All that is fine. It helps us to feel grounded in a world that often seems to lack any firm foundation. But there are some downsides, including narrative self-deception.

In meditation, as elsewhere in life, what we experience isn't some mythical "things as they actually are," but things as we conceive them to be in the context of the story that our mind fashions about the life we've lived, are living, and will live in the future.

The autobiographical self-model is not a thing, but rather a process. It is also not a little man in the head. This process is mostly subpersonal: to a large extent, it is not something that you do, but an automatic process taking place under the hood, in your unconscious brain. The process constantly tries to minimize surprise and to keep a certain layer in your self-model as coherent as possible (namely, the layer that portrays your life as a whole).

...The model expands into time, creating a past and a future. Whenever this layer is conscious, it can function as what we have termed the "unit of identification." You may think that you simply are your life story, which springs from the ongoing search for thematic stability. But you may also begin to hallucinate an observer, an active narrator, or a stable protagonist within the story itself -- an entity that reflects on and monitors the whole process.

...The good news is that there is probably no better tool than the practice of meditation itself to help us really understand the mechanisms of self-deception that continuously express themselves as the subtle workings of one's own mind.

...Classical insight meditation, for example, consists in nothing other than observing the actual process of narrative self-deception at work: Every single thought arising is an attempt to generate a new self-model, to become "temporally thick," to escape the wholeness of the present moment. 

...Life just happens -- and meditation practice is a perfect way to become aware of that fact.

 

Feeling you know isn't the same as knowing

One of the benefits of reading a book about pure awareness by a philosopher, instead of someone who identifies with a religion or spiritual practice, is that you get a more realistic perspective.

A good example is that Thomas Metzinger, the author of The Elephant and the Blind, speaks in an early chapter about the difference between a feeling of knowing and actual knowing.

This should be obvious to anyone, which really is everyone, who has confidently believed that something was true until they learned that it wasn't. 

Metzinger calls this the E-fallacy. His glossary defines it this way:

A logical error consisting in falsely concluding that a consciously experienced feeling of knowing is a reliable indicator of actually possessing knowledge. 

As such, verbal reports referring to a phenomenal signature of knowing or an intuitive sense of "just knowing" do not imply or license any theoretical claims about consciousness itself, the metaphysical nature of reality, the "true" self, and so on, because all such claims need an independent epistemic justification. 

A related error is the C-fallacy.

A logical error consisting in falsely concluding that just because something feels like the very essence of consciousness, it is also a reliable indicator of actually being in touch with consciousness per se. 

As such, verbal reports referring to having experienced an "essence" or "pure consciousness in and of itself" do not imply or license any claims as to the actual existence of such an essence because all such claims need an independent epistemic justification.

This is a theme I've harped on many times over the years, though not in the rather rigorous way Metzinger describes the fallacies. The simpler way I like to put it is along these lines.

Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, but not their own facts. If someone has an experience of God, spirit, soul, heaven, angels, higher consciousness, or whatever, wonderful. Tell us about it. Personal stories are interesting. But don't claim you've grasped an aspect of objective reality unless you can back up that claim with demonstrable evidence. 

A corollary is that you shouldn't get annoyed if someone else asks for that evidence after you've made an objective truth-claim that's based only on your subjective personal experience. 

Metzinger says this in a chapter on "Suchness," a familiar Buddhist concept of what is. 

Before we move on, please recall how the phenomenal experience of knowing does not entail that one really possesses knowledge. A strong and robust experience of knowing, even of absolute certainty, can occur during hallucinations, in dreams, and during psychiatric diseases or epileptic seizures. In chapter 7, we termed this the "E-fallacy."

Equally, the exerience of having "direct" or "immediate" knowledge of what is does not imply any kind of justification or directness from an epistemological perspective. Epistemologically, there is no certainty here. All we have is the phenomenal experience of immediacy, and "suchness" is being used here solely as a phenomenological concept. 

In connection with the experience of suchness, Rob Burbea also has made clear for contemplative practice itself that any remaining form of intuitive realism is an obstacle that must be overcome.

In interpreting all the reports in this chapter, therefore, we must be careful not to jump to overly naive and simplistic interpretations of "direct perception" and the reported phenomenology of nonconceptually seeing what is. The experiences themselves are simply much too interesting.

Experiences are real. For the person having them. For other people, there's no way to know either (1) what the experience really was like for the person having it, or (2) if the experience points to a fact about objective reality.

Someone who is a big fan of Taylor Swift likely will have a marvelous time at one of her concerts. Their experience has a strong chance of being highly memorable, something to be cherished for a lifetime. Someone who can't stand Taylor Swift likely will have a horrible time at one of her concerts. Their experience has a strong chance of being highly forgettable, something to be banished from memory as rapidly as possible. 

It would be crazy to argue that a Taylor Swift concert is either objectively pleasurable or painful. That depends on the experience of every attendee. Same applies to conclusions about the appeal of religions, mystical practices, or spiritual paths. That depends on the experience of every devotee. 

Consciousness is the cosmos awakening to itself

Though in the past I've dismissed sentiments such as the title of this blog post as being unduly New Age'y, today I changed my mind. I guess it depends on the context of sayings such as Consciousness is the cosmos awakening to itself. 

So here's the context for my newfound positive feeling toward those words.

A few days ago I saw a mention in the book I've been writing about recently, The Elephant and the Blind by Thomas Metzinger, of a book by David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry. Since I'm attracted both to Chinese philosophy (Taoism and Zen, mainly) and poetry in general, I decided to order the book from Amazon.

I started reading it today. The book starts out with:

Poetry is the Cosmos awakened to itself. Narrative, reportage, explanation, idea: language is the medium of self-identity, and we normally live within that clutch of identity, identity that seems to look out at and think about the Cosmos as if from some outside space.

But poetry pares language down to a bare minimum, thereby opening it to silence. And it is there in the margins of silence that poetry finds its deepest possibilities -- for there it can render dimensions of consciousness that are much more expansive that that identity-center, primal dimensions of consciousness as the Cosmos awakened to itself.

At least this is true for classical Chinese poetry, shaped as it is by Taoist and Ch'an (Zen) Buddhist thought into a form of spiritual practice. In its deepest possibilities, its inner wilds, poetry is the Cosmos awakened to itself -- and the history of that awakening begins where the Cosmos begins.

Hinton then spends a couple of pages describing that beginning, and what came after the beginning, in pleasingly scientific terms that struck me as almost completely accurate (maybe I'm wrong about the "almost"), given our current understanding of the Cosmos -- or at least that possibly limited corner of the Cosmos that is our universe. The multiverse is a distinct, though unproven, possibility.

In the beginning, there was neither light nor space -- and for consciousness, they are the essentials. During its first moments, the Cosmos was a primordial plasma of subatomic particles. The particles expanded and cooled until the particles could bond to form the lightest atoms, hydrogen and helium, whereupon the Cosmos became transparent to radiation such as light.

Eventually, hydrogen and helium began condensing into proto-galactic clouds under the gossamer influence of gravity, and chance fluctuations in the density of those clouds led some local areas to intensify their condensation until pressure and heat became so fierce that hydrogen atoms began fusing together. 

In that process, which can only be described as magical, stars were born. And with those stars came the elemental dimensions of consciousness: space and light and the visible.

Those dimensions began to evolve. The stars grew old, like anything else, and died. In the furnace of their old age and explosive deaths, they forged heavier elements and scattered them into space, forming nebular clouds that in turn condensed into new stars.

It is the heartbeat of the Cosmos, that steady pulse of stellar birth and death, gravity's long swell and rhythm of absence and presence, presence and absence. And in the third star generation, our planet was formed, rich in those heavy elements. It cooled and evolved until eventually water appeared: hydrogen, created during the original cosmic expansion, combining with oxygen, one of those heavier elements created in the cauldrons of dying stars.

Water formed mirrored pools in hollows on the planet's rocky surface, and in these pools the Cosmos turned toward itself for the first time here. It became "aware" of itself in those mirrored openings deep as all space and light, deep as the visible itself. 

Living organisms evolved and eventually developed receptors that allowed them to sense whether or not light was present. Those light receptors provided decisive selective advantages and so developed into more and more sophisticated forms. The lens evolved as a means to concentrate light on receptor cells, thereby making creatures more sensitive to weak light. 

This innovation eventually led to image-forming eyes, which combine a lens with highly specialized receptor cells. And with that, the Cosmos turned toward itself once again, eventually giving shape to consciousness, that spatiality the eye's mirrored transparency conjures inside animals.

It was a miraculous development: the material universe, which had been perfectly opaque, was now open to itself, awakened to itself!

Although ancient Chinese poets and philosophers didn't describe it in these scientific terms, this same sense of consciousness as the Cosmos open to itself was an operating assumption for them -- though perhaps here existence is a better word than Cosmos, as it suggests the sense of all reality as a single tissue.

...The abiding aspiration of spiritual and artistic practice in ancient China was to cultivate consciousness as that existence-tissue Cosmos open to itself, awakened to itself: looking at itself, hearing and touching itself, tasting and smelling itself, and also thinking itself, feeling itself -- all in the singular ways made possible by the individuality of each particular person.

This is consciousness in the open, wild and woven into the generative Cosmos: wholesale belonging. As we will see, it was recognized as our most essential nature in Taoist and Ch'an Buddhist thought, the foundational structure of consciousness for artist-intellectuals in ancient China: poets, painters, calligraphers, philosophers.

And it seems a beautiful, even essential alternative -- both philosophical and ecological -- to the disconnectedness that structures consciousness in the West.

Nobody is watching the movie of your life, or mine, or anybody's

Every morning I try to read one of the short chapters in Thomas Metzinger's fascinating book, The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness -- Philosophy, Science, and 500+ Experiential Reports.

I particularly enjoy passages that intuitively appeal to me, yet rationally challenge my ability to comprehend exactly what Metzinger is saying. Below I'll share an example from the "Nonidentification" chapter. 

First, though, this introductory mention in the chapter of the traditional movie theatre metaphor.

One classic metaphor for this process [of de-identification], found in many places in the popular literature on meditation, is the image of being fully immersed in a movie and then suddenly realizing that you are not the hero, disengaging from the perspective from which the story seems to be told.

Metzinger then says "we can also imagine another scenario," offering a possible variation on the classic metaphor.

Imagine the cinema is dark and completely empty. All the seats are empty. Running on the screen is a movie of someone watching a movie, a person who is deeply immersed in the plot of this movie-in-the-movie most of the time, but who sometimes has glimpses and vague intuitions that she might actually not be the protagonist, but might instead be a passive viewer in some sort of cinema.

Or that she might even be the whole cinema itself. Not seated in the middle, but somehow everywhere. From time to time, the viewer in the movie even has fleeting and slightly complacent philosophical fantasies that she might be some sort of empty space in which the movie becomes aware of itself, or that she might be the beam of light coming from the projector.

Suspended in the dark, as it were, this movie containing the movie-in-the-movie is the only thing that can be seen. But nobody is watching. Now, very slowly, the light is being turned on, in slow motion as it were. The cinema as a whole emerges out of the darkness, slowly fading in, empty seats and all. Now the lights are on. The movie is still running. Nobody sees it. 

I'm not sure if this additional passage from the "Nonidentification" chapter bears on the above modified metaphor, but it sure is provocative. Turns upside down some common assumptions meditators have.

Perhaps you have already discovered how, phenomenologically, it is not we who get identified or fused with some content (e.g., an arising thought)? In my own experience, I find that it is awareness that gets identified.

"We" -- as the agentive sense of self -- come into existence only after the fact, after awareness has already contracted into a specific content (like the mental image of a future goal state to be reached, a subtle feeling of mental effort, the ensuing sense of control, etc.) -- after, as it were, open awareness has already been lost to itself. 

The breakdown is not your fault. You are not the cause, but the effect. You are the way in which the brain explains away something that was slightly unexpected. That "something" is the surprise of suddenly being able to control a part of the world -- your body, your attention, your thoughts. 

Might as well throw in one more passage relating to this theme.

From a scientific perspective, "being conscious" or "appearing" is a property of a complex, internal model in the brain: What really is conscious is simply a certain part of an organism's model of the world, a specific processing layer in its internal model of reality -- which typically also includes the organism itself plus other agents in the world... At the very least, this is a rational and evidence-based theory, one possible view from the outside.

But from the organism's inner perspective, things are very different. The model is transparent; therefore, the representational medium is invisible. Yet this model is all the organism has. This means that what it experiences is experienced not as a world-model or some sort of inner image, but simply as the world itself.

Consciousness is the appearance of a world; there is full immersion, plus the phenomenology of direct realism. In addition, because the internal model is not being experienced as a model, it now is the organism that seems to be conscious, not the world as a whole or some complex image in the organism's head.

Phenomenologically, the property of "being aware" has been contracted. Now, consciousness is something personal. Now you are conscious.

Blind faith is dangerous: 120 devotees of India "godman" killed in stampede

India has a well-deserved reputation for being a hotbed of religious fervor. I'd call that fanaticism, but I'm trying to be fair to India, since that country also is responsible for some of the most sophisticated faiths in the world.

But when I heard about an estimated 120 devotees dying in a stampede after a popular Hindu preacher, Narayan Sakar Hari, had finished his talk ("satsang"), it was the negative side of religiosity that struck my atheist sensibility.

Sure, the story in our local newspaper said:

About 250,000 people gathered for Tuesday’s event in the Hathras district of Uttar Pradesh state, about 125 miles from the Indian capital, New Delhi, despite permission being granted only for 80,000, according to an initial police report.

So part of the problem was that way too many worshippers were crammed into the meeting location. However, several stories about this tragedy cited a decidedly bizarre reason for the stampede.

A NPR story says:

According to a police complaint filed on Tuesday night, the organizers had sought permission for 80,000 people to attend but around 250,000 turned up at the venue.

"As the preacher left in his car, many rushed to collect dust rising from the path of the vehicle," a religious practice among some Hindus. "Some of those bent over got crushed by the large crowd exiting the venue," the complaint said.

It adds that the event organizers tried to destroy evidence of the stampede by throwing victims' clothes and footwear into neighboring fields.

A Reuters story also mentions dust:

The preacher at the gathering, Suraj Pal Singh, also known as 'Bhole Baba', said in a statement that the stampede was caused by "some anti-social elements" after the event concluded, without elaborating.

 

Police said they were trying to ascertain the whereabouts of the preacher. A group of devotees had organised the event, according to a poster at the site.

 

The preacher's lawyer, A.P. Singh, said Baba had never asked anyone to touch his feet nor did he give anyone the dust touched by his feet, referring to reports in local media which cited these as reasons for the devotees running towards him.

Well, here's an even better suggestion for Baba, the preacher. Tell your devotees that there's nothing miraculous about the dust either stirred up by your car or by your feet. Of course, if you did that, likely your status as a goodman would take a hit. 

Another Reuters story about Baba says:

A massive gathering addressed by an Indian policeman-turned-preacher, considered an incarnation of God by his followers, turned horribly wrong on Tuesday, as at least 121 people, mostly women and children, died in a stampede.

 

"Bhole Baba", or the Innocent Elder, is the sobriquet of a self-styled godman who was a police constable before he turned to spirituality and became a preacher. Originally Suraj Pal Singh, he later changed his name to Narayan Sakar Hari. He is currently untraceable, and police in India's northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where Tuesday's tragedy occurred, said they were still trying to trace him.

A Washington Post story explains the meaning of the name the once-policeman changed his to.

The event was hosted by a local preacher named Narayan Sakar Hari, whose name translates to god incarnate. In videos from past congregations, he is seen on a thronelike seat wearing a suit and tie, explaining his ostensibly miraculous powers.

Well, his miraculous powers obviously didn't extend to saving the lives of 120 of his devotees. But I suspect this won't matter to those who believe he truly is god incarnate. The deaths of those people argue otherwise.

People mourn next to the bodies of victims of a stampede outside a hospital in Hathras district in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, India, on Tuesday. (Reuters)

 

Meditation is good, but non-meditation can be better

My previous post, "The Elephant and the Blind -- a provocative book about pure consciousness," was an introductory look at this book, which covers a lot of interesting ground in its 500 or so main pages.

It won't appeal to everybody.

But for those such as me, who like their spirituality founded in the natural world, common sense, and science (insofar as this is possible), Thomas Metzinger's discussion of how meditators in 57 countries look upon "pure awareness" is a breath of fresh air.

I say this because it is refreshing to have someone discuss meditation from the standpoint of lots of ordinary people who are meditating, as contrasted with the view of an organized religion such as Buddhism.

However, Metzinger acknowledges that some of the more than 500 experiential reports from meditators  likely were influenced by the belief systems of those who wrote the reports. But he stripped out mentions of where a meditator was from, or their faith, if they had one.

In addition to the 500 or so narrative reports, the book also is based on 1,403 completed questionnaires that asked about 90 questions, if I recall that number correctly. This is some demographic information of the respondents.

We had 1,403 usable questionnaires; our participants had a median age of fifty-two years (ranging from seventeen to eighty-eight), and were roughly evenly split between men and women (48.5% versus 50.0% stated their sex). 

The majority of meditators practiced regularly (77.3 percent), were free of diagnosed mental disorders (92.4 percent), and did not regularly use any psychoactive substances (84.0 percent). Vipassana (43.9 percent) and Zen (34.9 percent) were the most frequently practiced meditation techniques.

I'm skipping around in the book a bit, as Metzinger says in an introductory chapter that it isn't necessary to read it straight through. Today I read part of a chapter called "Meditation and Nonmeditation." 

I liked the passage below. The non-meditation mention (I prefer a hyphen in the word) reminded me of Zen, Advaita, and Joan Tollifson's writings, which I've become enamored of.

After meditating for most of my life in a manner that required concentration and the suppression of meandering thoughts, I now understand the value of non-meditation, which seems more productive and natural to me, as well as being more useful in everyday life.

I wasn't familiar with the term, "affordance." Here's a definition: the quality or property of an object that defines its possible uses or makes clear how it can or should be used. 

Metzinger writes:

Let us stay with actual meditation practice for a moment. Installing false beliefs may work for some people, but I think there is a better, more direct route to effortless pure awareness. When discussing the phenomenon of mind-wandering in chapter 25, we saw that mind-wandering creates an inner affordance landscape.

Every single thought can be seen as an action affordance. In one way or another, they all say "Think me!" or Pursue me, follow me into the future!" or "Can you remember this? Try it!"

However, there is one type of thought that is special: the thought of "noticing" that you, the meditator, have strayed; the thought that you, the meditator, have obviously just had an attentional lapse. If Schooler is right, this thought might be an illusion of control. But there is more to be seen.

That thought ("My mind just wandered!") is an inner affordance as well. It tells you to do something: Return to the breath; bring your attention back to the present moment.

If the system falls for it, that special thought swiftly creates yet another agency illusion, a hallucination of what in chapter 4 I called "attentional agency": the experience of deliberately and actively controlling the focus of attention in a goal-directed manner. 

It includes a subtle sense of effort and successful mental control: I, the meditator, must act with my attention now because I "have noticed" a stray thought, and as I have learned in the past, I must now bring "my own" focus of attention back to the present moment.

I think that not doing this is what is meant by "nonmeditation"; it means not falling for the very last affordance that happened to pop up. There is a deep, but very subtle phenomenological insight to be had: The silence, clarity, and epistemic openness are already there. You do not have to act.

The "special thought," the thought of "noticing," is actually sculpted of that silent clarity, if one looks very closely. This [is] what I mean by the better, more direct route to effortless pure awareness. Perhaps one could say that the noticing itself has already given the silence -- and the only thing that could ruin it would be an attempt to meditate. 

The Elephant and the Blind -- a provocative book about pure consciousness

Proving my dedication to the study of consciousness (or maybe my addiction to books), a few days ago my $80 copy of Thomas Metzinger's 600 page book, The Elephant and the Blind, arrived. 

I had to buy the paperback version because I can't read a nonfiction book without a pen and highlighter in hand. But the book can be read for free via a download from the publisher, the MIT press. Just click on the Open Access tab.

Metzinger is a philosopher who wrote a book about the mind, The Ego Tunnel, that I enjoyed. Here's some of the blog posts I wrote about the book (the last one has links to all the posts).

Stuck in "The Ego Tunnel" without a self 
Laying bare how the ego tunnel is dug
My review of "The Ego Tunnel" -- 5 stars

I've just started reading The Elephant and the Blind. It looks really interesting. This is the Amazon description of the book.

An engaging and insightful journey into human consciousness.

What if our goal had not been to land on Mars, but in pure consciousness? The experience of pure consciousness—what does it look like? What is the essence of human consciousness? In The Elephant and the Blind, influential philosopher Thomas Metzinger, one of the world's leading researchers on consciousness, brings together more than 500 experiential reports to offer the world's first comprehensive account of states of pure consciousness. Drawing on a large psychometric study of meditators in 57 countries, Metzinger focuses on “pure awareness” in meditation—the simplest form of experience there is—to illuminate the most fundamental aspects of how consciousness, the brain, and illusions of self all interact.

Starting with an exploration of existential ease and ending on Bewusstseinskultur, a culture of consciousness, Metzinger explores the increasingly non-egoic experiences of silence, wakefulness, and clarity, of bodiless body-experience, ego-dissolution, and nondual awareness. From there, he assembles a big picture—the elephant in the parable, from which the book’s title comes—of what it would take to arrive at a minimal model explanation for conscious experience and create a genuine culture of consciousness. Freeing pure awareness from new-age gurus and old religions, The Elephant and the Blind combines personal reports of pure consciousness with incisive analysis to address the whole consciousness community, from neuroscientists to artists, and its accessibility echoes the author’s career-long commitment to widening access to philosophy itself.

After reading the initial chapters, I decided to head to the final chapter, "The Elephant: What is Pure Awareness?" It turns out that it isn't exactly pure, so it'd be more accurate to say Purer Awareness. Here's five possible answers Metzinger gives. I've shortened some of the answers.

P1 Contentlessness MPE [Minimal Phenomenal Experience] can occur in full-absorption episodes as the only kind of phenomenal character that can later be reported; in these cases, pure awareness appears as a stand-alone, singular feature.

P2 No-thought The second less radical, but equally canonical reading of "purity" refers to the absence of all mental conflict, noise, and perturbation. In a simplified reading, it is the absence of all discursive thought, memory, planning, and "spontaneous-task unrelated thought" like daydreaming or mind-wandering.

P3 Clarity In this answer, pure awareness is the experience of a clear and unobstructed space of knowing... The clarity feature has been described for centuries and is simply the nonconceptual experience of one's own epistemic capacity per se, of an inner space that is pure in the sense of being wide open and lucid at the same time.

P4 Suchness This interpretation refers to the phenomenology of "pure perception"... Here, the conscious experience is of perceptual content spontaneously arising, but with a complete lack of conceptual overlay, including time experience and implicit judgments as to the "existence" or "nonexistence" of what is perceived. It is this lack that makes perceptual awareness pure.

P5 Nonduality In chapters 27 and 29, we saw that one way of defining "purity" is as conscious experience lacking subject/object structure. In this sense, pure awareness is a nondual mode of experience that lacks an epistemic agent model and any sort of egoic first-person perspective.